27. Evil (1)

“This way.”

Beron pushed through the darkness with sure, confident steps. We threaded a zigzag of staircases and, by sheer luck, never crossed paths with a single patrol. By the time we reached the last door, the din of the banquet hall had faded out behind us. When I eased the door open again, soldiers who’d clearly drunk themselves stupid lay sprawled everywhere. From here on we couldn’t risk a word, so we kept everything to eye contact and hand signals.

“Haaa, of all nights, why do I have to pull night-watch duty on this one.”

We used whatever cover the terrain gave us, or flattened ourselves on the floor like the passed-out soldiers, slipping past the sentries’ sightlines. Before long we were clear of the banquet hall, and then out of the building entirely.

She wasn’t wrong. Outside was pitch black, and even the moonlight had mercilessly tucked itself behind the clouds, refusing to light our way. The one saving grace was that none of it slowed Beron’s stride.

We walked a long stretch before something finally pulled us up short. Of all things, it was a smell, sharp enough to knit my brow.

“Is this a hospital?”
“Looks like it.”

A sharp, acrid stink that stung the nose. The reek of alcohol off disinfectant was soaking into the air from every direction.

This was wildly different from what I’d pictured. I’d come expecting scenes of horrific torture, in conditions even more wretched and squalid than the dungeon.

“This is just where they bring prisoners for treatment, isn’t it?”

A small wash of disappointment ran through me. A place like this wasn’t going to turn up any clue about the Saintess’s disappearance, which was the real objective of the Trial of Wisdom.

But Beron’s face was the gravest I’d ever seen.

“War may be the repeated act of mutually wounding each other, but not every prisoner is wounded. Comrades who were captured limbs-intact were dragged in here too.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“At times like this, I envy what it is to be human. You don’t smell this hideous, thick stench of blood.”

The instant the words left him, the smell of blood punched through the alcohol and slammed into my nose. Only then did the gravity of it hit me, and I took another slow, careful look around the outside of the hospital. But however hard I looked, nothing stood out. In the end there was nothing for it but to go inside.

“Seeing is believing. Let’s go in.”

Creeeak.

The hospital door, surprisingly, opened without resistance. Inside was so quiet, not a single guard anywhere, that I half-wondered whether we were really allowed to just walk in. As I strolled down the corridor and glanced into the wards, I could make out patients lying in bed here and there. Nothing especially strange jumped out at me.

“Over here!”

Beron’s voice reached me right then. The room he’d found looked like it held more patients than any other ward in the place.

“…Are they dead?”

I’d hurried over the moment he called, feet pounding loud and rough, thud-thud-thud. And that was exactly why I’d taken these people for corpses. No matter how much noise I made announcing myself, not one of them so much as stirred.

“They’re not dead — but for some reason they’re unconscious.”

Beron stepped up to the nearest bed and checked the patient over.

“Have they been put under anesthesia or something?”

I furrowed my brow and looked around. But nothing caught my eye anywhere. The place was clean.

Clean?

And that was when the wrongness settled in. This place was far too tidy for that to be possible.

Apparently she’d caught the same nameless wrongness, because she was quietly pointing at something. I drifted slowly toward the spot her fingertip marked.

“…Beron.”
“What?”
“Is there any way to make use of prisoners’ blood?”
“…What are you talking about.”
“Take a look at this.”

I stepped aside to give him room. Beron studied the tube with a grim expression, and a moment later his face went pale. I kept my voice flat and even.

“Looks like you were right — they weren’t brought here for treatment.”

A clear tube ran into the patient’s arm. An ordinary IV line would run upward, to a drip bag hanging overhead.

“They’re drawing blood and sending it somewhere.”

These tubes ran downward, toward the underside of the mattress.

We went on to check every other patient. When he was done, Beron spoke, his face drained of color.

“So this was it. The reason they kept dragging prisoners off.”

Every last one of them had a tube in the arm, running off to somewhere. Beron’s eyes turned murderous. It told me how hard he was fighting to keep his fury down.

I turned to follow the direction the tubes ran. They all converged on an empty bed shoved into the most walled-off corner of the room. I kicked it aside. As the bed slid away, it uncovered an underground passage hidden beneath it, and along that passage hundreds of tubes were ferrying the prisoners’ blood in real time.

“Disgusting.”

The instant the bed moved, a wave of stifling heat and a faint, raw, fishy smell hit us full in the face. Below, a spiral staircase wound down to greet us.

Beron, taking in the horror of it, looked truly awful.

Can’t blame him.

Watching people bled dry while they lay there unconscious, who could keep their sanity through that?

“I’m going on ahead.”

Beron had done plenty just guiding us this far. I had no intention of dragging him any further. As I started down the stairs, his voice drifted after me, faint.

“…Aren’t you afraid of what might be down there?”

There was a fear in his voice I hadn’t heard from him before. I could guess, roughly, what he was afraid of, the thing that had pushed the question out of him. But even so, I didn’t try to comfort him, or stir him up with talk of digging out the truth together.

Instead I stared into the darkness and answered, level.

“What I’m afraid of is not finding out anything. Walking right past the answer sitting in front of me, like an idiot. To me, that’s more horrifying than whatever monster might be down there.”

No reply came back. Answer or no answer, I added one more thing.

“You don’t have to follow me — just please don’t shut the door. I think we’ll need to air this place out.”

At the foot of the spiral staircase, my feet finally met flat ground. Timid Eve was already pressed up against my back. She had to have hated being dragged along, bound as she was to follow whether she liked it or not, but she was holding up well enough in her own way.

It was the mood of someone too scared to look and too hooked to stop watching the horror movie, and as far as I could tell, that was exactly where Eve was. Which was precisely why curiosity was such a fearsome thing. Either way, I followed the tubes wherever they led.

“…Whoa.”

Sheer madness unfurled in front of my eyes. A gasp had slipped out of me before I even knew it.

A vast, circular underground chamber opened up around us. The ceiling overhead looked overrun by a spider’s web. Hundreds of clear tubes, the same ones that had fed every bed in the ward above, dropped through holes in that ceiling and bundled and snarled here into a single mass that stretched toward the center.

Eve’s voice was trembling. A river of fresh red blood gurgled and flowed on every side, hundreds of branches all converging on a single point: the dead center of the chamber. There, a man sat bound to a grotesquely twisted chair of black iron.

It was hard to believe what I was seeing. Hundreds of people’s worth of fresh blood poured down the tubes and was being forced into the man through needles driven all over his body. Neck, collarbone, chest, even the thighs. Tubes crammed in without a gap coiled around him like a net.

I approached him carefully. The man was so wasted away that his ribs jutted out, stark and skeletal. His skin had gone past pale into outright transparent, without a trace of blood-color left in it, and through it I could see dark, purple-black vessels writhing plain as day.

Not human.

For an ordinary human, taking in that much blood would mean death by shock, or vessels bursting until they killed him. But he was soaking up all of it.

Like a living sponge.

And out of his back ran a thick black hose, fat as a forearm. What it drew off was nothing like the bright crimson going in: a thick, sticky, black-red liquid, refined and siphoned away.

At Eve’s question, I checked the man’s face. His head hung limp. The eyes I could glimpse between strands of matted hair were open wide and hollow, with no focus in them at all. There was no plea in them to be killed, none to be saved. He wasn’t writhing in pain either. He was barely breathing, a meat puppet that mechanically swallowed the blood coming in and brought it back up transformed.

Then the man’s chest swelled in a great heave.

Thump.

I could see his heart beating beneath those skeletal ribs. No. It wasn’t just one.

Thump. Thump.

His left chest, and his right. Two hearts beating out of sync, propping up some grotesque parody of life.

“You’d do well not to touch him.”

A low, cool voice came from behind me. In the darkness, the click of heeled shoes rang out.

Tap. Tap.

I spoke to the owner of the footsteps.

“This scene doesn’t really suit a Saintess, does it?”

Astraea snorted and fired back.

“I am a General of the Arne domain. Not a Saintess.”
“General or Saintess, I doubt anyone would call this scene normal.”

She kept coming closer, but I didn’t give ground. As she advanced, I spoke to her again.

“They say the Arne army doesn’t die when you stab their hearts. The only way to kill them is to take their heads… Is this the secret behind that curse?”
“Curse, you say? The soldiers call it the Saintess’s Miracle.”

I gripped my one and only weapon, the club, in both hands. But Astraea showed no sign of wanting a fight; she just kept walking, completely unguarded.

“Do you believe in angels?”
“I’m not the religious type.”
“Hmm. I was uncertain, but I suppose you really weren’t from the Imperial army after all. They say in the Empire, the first words a child learns the moment they take their first step are Long live the Empire.”

“…”

She had a sharp nose for things; she’d clearly been suspicious of me from the moment she invited me into her chamber.

In the space of a blink, Astraea closed the distance and was on me. In one motion she drew the sword at her waist and sheared clean through the club in my hands.

“I had been aiming for your wrist.”

I’d only just escaped the blade with a backward roll. Her swordsmanship was as fast as Seraphina’s.

If I’d been even a beat slower, like she said, my wrist would’ve gone flying.

I rolled my wrist around and around. That was how close it had been.

“Not bad skill.”

I couldn’t take the compliment with anything like clean pleasure. Just like that, the only weapon I’d had was snapped in two, and I’d been forced into a bare-handed fight.

But for some reason, Astraea slid her sword back into its sheath.

“In the beginning, God created man, and sent down two emissaries. One was an angel. One was a demon.”

She was suddenly spouting some bullshit, which threw me off. And yet…

Oh wow, seriously?

I’d forgotten something. House Arne was a house of chivalry, and striking an unarmed opponent broke the knightly code.

Either way, still spinning her story, she stepped closer to the man riddled with hundreds of tubes.

“The angel was good. Whatever humans wished for, he granted. Bread to the hungry. Rain to the thirsty. But what was the result of that unconditional love?”

Astraea stroked the bound man’s cheek with the back of her hand. He didn’t so much as twitch at her touch.

“Humans grew selfish and arrogant. They were not content with what they had — they wanted more. The size of their wishes grew larger and larger. The hungry man who had once wished for bread now wished, I want the house of the man next door.”

What in the world was she getting at, out of nowhere? For now, though, I listened to her story without cutting in.

“The angel granted even that wish. It was his very reason for existing. But the man whose house had been taken — he didn’t stay quiet either. He, too, made a single wish to the angel.”

Astraea stared straight at me. Her gaze carried a clear go on, guess the answer challenge, so I reluctantly opened my mouth.

“He asked for the man who took his house to be killed?”

Astraea shook her head. It meant wrong. And then she handed me the answer to her riddle.

“No. He wished that the lover most precious to the man who took his house be killed.”