“Would you mind telling me about that?” I asked, finally hopeful that I could get some sort of information from these people.
The man looked at me for a minute before nodding his head. “Jus’ not in front of the children. They’ve seen and heard too much as it is.” He thrust the bag behind him at the largest child. “Tal, take your sisters and Ms. Faylinn’s bag. Go sit and watch over her until she wakes.”
Tal grabbed the bag from his father while prying his little sisters from their father’s legs.
“Tal, would you like some help? I know a few games we could play while we wait.” Sasori’s voice had taken on a soft quality I had never heard from her before.
Tal glanced nervously between Sasori and his father before nodding once.
Sasori turned to me, and I raised my eyebrows at her as if to say,“see this is why I needed a woman.”I wouldn’t know the first thing to do with kids. She simply rolled her eyes at me before taking the hand of each of the girls.
“Why are you all bloody?” I heard one of them ask as Sasori led them into the inn.
The man watched them go for a minute, before closing the door and gesturing for me to follow him.
“The Corner”—he gestured to a bar on the corner of the street—“held a bunch of us at the beginning, when your people first showed up. But we quickly evacuated and fled to the safety of the inn when the rebels appeared later. Not all of us made the trip across and a few got stuck in the building. Your Mages were some of them.”
I stared at the building, some of it was burned, but it was mostly intact.
“How did it avoid destruction?” I wondered.
“The rebels needed a place to sleep and regroup. They used the bar since they couldn’t get into The Curious.”
I looked at the building next to The Corner and noticed that the entire shop was in pristine condition, as if the rest of the street and village hadn’t been reduced to rubble.
“No one can go near it. There’s wards and it repels everyone. Even us,” he said in answer to my unasked question.
“Are my Mages still inside The Corner?” The man shrugged. “My guess is prolly not. If the rebels used this, then they prolly killed everything inside, but it’s worth a look.”
He pushed open the door to The Corner and I was immediately hit with the smell of rot and decaying flesh. I paused at the door for a minute, covering my nose with my elbow, breathing deeply through my mouth to control the excess of saliva that pooled under my tongue. I turned to the side and spit, trying not to retch.
“Welp, I think we found your Mages, General,” the man said, acting as if the smell wasn’t overwhelming.
After a minute, I got my breathing under control and wiped my watering eyes with my hands, to only wish I hadn’t.
There, nailed to the walls, were the heads of the Mages and Vessels Isent here earlier in the month, looking like a sick version of the hunting trophies that also adorned the walls. Their blood, now dried into a deep brown, slipped down the walls like a macabre painting. Their tongues lolled from their mouths, swollen and rotting, their eyes staring unseeing ahead, looks of horror and pain forever plastered on their faces.
Under the heads was a message presumably written in their blood, though it looked fresher, like it was meant for us to find today.
Death to the Warlord.
I set my mouth in a grim line, taking in each of the faces before me.
Fuck. Alois wasn’t going to like this.I debated even telling him when we got back, knowing it would only stoke his anger into an inferno.Shehad evaded us for fifteen years now, hiding somewhere in the South with her sympathizers and Allied defectors. My mouth curled into an involuntary sneer at the thought.
How could you defect to someone who sanctioned that?
She had grown bolder recently, and this was her most aggressive act yet.
My mind drifted to the Earth Mage commander we left incapacitated outside.
I need to question him sooner rather than later.
The list of things I needed to do while here was growing ever longer, and I sighed in frustration.
“Help me get them down, please. I’d like to bury them with the other bodies.”
The man just looked at me strangely. “You think I’m going to help you? No, I’m not. Not afteryourpeople came here and disruptedourlives, bringing the rebels intoourtown.” He punctuated each statement with a jab of his finger in my direction. “If you hadn’t sent them here, looking for godsdamn Keepers, the rebels would never have shown, and my wife and babies would still be alive. This”—he gestured to the heads on the wall and the destruction outside—“is on you, General. This isyourmess.Youclean it up.”
