Page 95 of Vilest Things
Calla’s eyes fly open. She registers that in an instant: she can move. Whatever the limits were on the freeze, they’ve broken past it.
“Anton?” she whispers. The plain gray sky unfurls above her, pressing close enough to the earth that she might believe she could stretch her hand up and touch its folds.
“You can kiss me if you’re unsure,” his voice replies. Doubtlessly, although he possesses a higher pitch, it is Anton Makusa and not an imposter.
Calla turns. She barely stifles her gasp.
“I know,” Anton says. “And we thought the Hollow Temple was bad.”
Bodies upon bodies upon bodies. Anton has taken one that lies farther down the row from her—feminine, with hair falling in soft waves around his pinched, cold face. Calla counts ten bodies between them. On Anton’s other side, the line of bodies continues as far as her eye can see, curving upward to make a semi-circle of endless sleeping faces.
Calla looks down at herself quickly, finds gloved hands and a padded jacket. She feels hair curling around the nape of her neck, tucked behind her ears.
She exhales, a puff of visible breath dancing into view. Her eyes flit up, searching the mountain incline alongside the mounds of white. There’s an entrance jutting out midway, gaping an open mouth into a structure built into the mountain. At first, the structure isn’t visible, blending in with the snow and mountain face. Then Calla picks herself up and slowly trudges a few steps higher along the incline, craning her neck to look from a different angle. Its smooth exterior and round turrets wrap around the entire mountaintop, poking farther into the clouds. This is a palace.
“Junndi,” Calla whispers under her breath. That’s what it means.
Across the top of the palace entrance lies a plaque written in archaic Talinese. Though Calla can faintly sound out the characters, she can’t understand what it says. Except for a name that has remained the same in today’s Talinese.
TUOLEIMI
“These are all vessels,” Anton reports, startling Calla’s attention back to him. He’s prying at the body next to him, opening its eyes. Blank. Better to be vessels, because there is no suffering.
It is quiet on the mountain. She doesn’t want to be present at the site when that next flare of light comes. Heavens knows what that might do to them.
“Leave them be,” she says, dusting her hands off. She gestures to the palace entrance. “We’re needed up there.”
CHAPTER 33
After all that frantic movement on horseback and all that frenzied jumping to cross an infamously impenetrable mountain range, Calla isn’t accustomed to the silence that greets them in the palace atrium. Sound caves inward here, a quiet created by deliberate muffle rather than true tranquility.
“It’s dark,” Anton comments, stopping a few paces in. The light outside doesn’t strike the windows at the right angle to illuminate the interior.
“Your eyes will adjust,” Calla replies.
Though they are moving fine, it is still deathly cold. The climate in the borderlands isn’t gentle, and Calla folds her arms tightly to preserve warmth, peering into the reflection of a vase at the entrance. There are no flowers inside, understandably. Her borrowed face blinks back at her, a long nose and teal eyes. Meanwhile, Anton’s jump brought his black eyes over with him. Her lack of moving color isn’t an effect of the sigil. Calla is just weird.
“Maybe Otta isn’t here.” Anton sniffs, craning his head to peer down the vestibule. There’s a stale smell, or a rotting one. Nothing about the low ceilings and cement floors is particularly remarkable. The design is entirely different from the palaces in San-Er: no resemblance to the velvet-green wallpapers or the intricate banisters decorated with creatures of legend. Only beiges and whites, letting the site blend with the mountains.
“I’m sure the hundred sacrificed bodies are out in the snow just for fun,” Calla replies.
“We don’t know how long they’ve been there as vessels. It could be from before Otta.”
Calla doubts it. She doesn’t say it aloud, though, opting to save her breath.
When Calla walks to the end of the vestibule—carefully, in case she triggers some sort of trap—she finds herself in a wide hall with the ceiling almost brushing her head, as if it were some underground exhibit instead of the entrance into a grand palace. Whatisthis place? The original Palace of Heavens was destroyed in the war, but it was located somewhere near the Jinzi River anyway.
Beyond the hall, an entranceway leads to a spiral staircase. She tilts her head at Anton, a signal to hurry it up.
“Wait,” he calls. He’s remained at the front of the hall, staring up at the decorative mural covering the shorter wall. “Look at this.”
“Anton, we don’t have time—”
“We do. What does this look like to you?”
For fuck’s sake. Calla strides over, squinting up into the dark. Her eyes adjust on painted panels and dim colors, flowing from right to left. The borders bleed and intersect, drawing her attention across a coronation, then a battle, followed by a turret at the top of a mountain. It resembles the very palace they’re standing within.
“It’s like any historical mural,” she says plainly. “Birth, war, death. All hail the throne, so on and so forth.”
