Page 7 of Vilest Things
Inevitably, each time she forces herself out ofthatthought sequence, her mind wanders back to the Hollow Temple. She should have tried harder to get those others out. The nameless faces, the wrong-place-wrong-time kidnappings. She counted her job done the moment Yilas was safe. But there had been so many other bodies there. Some were still breathing, still alive. She never went back for them.
Calla exhales, scanning inside the barrack walls. She takes in the swathes of grass, the water troughs at the far end, the climbing ropes trailing from the watchtower rising higher above the perimeter.
And the bodies. Countless bodies clad in the uniform of palace soldiers, splayed dead.
Slowly, Calla makes her way over to the nearest corpse. He’s slumped at the waist, his sword still sheathed. She hardly dares to breathe as she leans down, pushing his shoulder carefully so that his head lolls back to face the rapidly darkening sky.
But he has no wounds. Calla frowns and lifts his eyelids, finds his gaze dulled but with color remaining. She pats his chest. Rummages around his uniform. His skin is clean, his organs appear intact, and there’s no blood on the ground around him.
The soldier has merely fallen dead, without any indication as tohowhe died.
Calla stands. There’s more than a thirty-strong force at these barracks. How could all of them go down without any sign of a struggle?
“Whathappened?” she mutters. “Did a god come down for vengeance?”
A rustle echoes from the water troughs.
Calla stiffens, drawing her knife again in one motion. There’s another sound—a suppressed human sniffle—and Calla flips the blade so that she can secure a better grip on the handle.
Just as she’s about to throw her weapon at the first sight of motion, two children poke their heads out from behind the trough.
“Shit.” Calla barely reins in the knife, snatching it out of the air and shoving it back into her boot. “Hey! You there!”
The children disappear back behind the trough.
Calla hurries forward. It’s not like there’s anywhere they can run, but she doesn’t want to startle them. She’s making her nicest face when she peers over the trough, slowing her movements.
“Hello,” Calla says. “Are you all right?”
The children start to scream.
“Shhh, shhh!” she urges. She tried her best. Clearly, her nicest face isn’t as nice as she thought. “You’re okay. You’re safe!” She throws her hands up, palms outward. “See? I’m good, I promise. I won’t hurt you.”
The boy on the left takes a ragged breath. He calms, wrapping his arms around himself. It takes a bit longer for the girl on the right to quiet, but she does so in stuttered bursts, each sound coming softer and softer until she stops.
“There we go. Nothing bad is going to happen to you.” Calla crouches to their eye level, hovering on the other side of the trough. “Can you tell me what happened? Why are you here?”
No response. For a brief moment, Calla wonders if the children speak Talinese at all, but the thought is swiped aside as soon as it registers. There’s no world where children would be raised without speaking Talinese. Someone would have reported the family otherwise, knocking on the yamen wanting to be rewarded, and then the punishment would come down swiftly from the mayor.
Still…
“You can tell me,” she whispers. The past hums in her ears, lands a strangetaste on her tongue. Before she fully registers where the word has come from, she’s saying it out loud—please, she’s just said the word forplease, here she was thinking she forgot every bit of Rincun’s dialect—and the two children perk up, a new glint in their eyes.
“You speak our secret,” the boy says.
“I do.” Calla looks over her shoulder. The yamen officials are going to make their way around shortly. She’s made her point: she switches back into Talinese. “I’m just like you. I can help. Tell me what happened.”
The children exchange a glance. An air of deliberation passes between them, making them feel older, far more sensible than should be expected of their age. Whatever they decide, Calla catches the girl nod before she shifts forward to lean on the trough, only her two gray eyes peeking out above the wood.
“They let us play in here and eat the rice if there’s left over from the meals,” she mumbles carefully. “We’re not soldiers.”
Calla holds back the flicker of a smile. “Yes, I figured. Did an attacker come in?”
“No one came in.” The boy, bravely, decides to stand then. “The barracks turned really cold. Mother says that we should run when we feel the air turn cold. Cold means qi is being stolen. Great-Grandfather died that way.”
Stolen?Calla glances to the side, to the dead bodies littered across the grounds. In her mind’s eye, again she sees the Hollow Temple, the bodies that had been carved open. Stealing qi. Such a claim would normally be considered provincial superstition, just as some people here believe that being too nosy allows the gods to invade one’s body and suck out their qi.
“Is that…” She doesn’t know how to phrase this, not without sounding like a dubious city dweller who believes all the old gods are dead. “Is thatcommonhere?”
