Chapter Nine
“I have something I need to confess,” Cora said as she pulled Solana to a stop.
Cora had shown Solana where the kitchens, library, training room, and gardens were.
They skipped the infirmary, since Solana had only just been there that morning, and they had walked back in through a side door, one that Solana had gone in and out of on the way to the gardens more times than she could count.
They now stood in the hall that led to the main receiving room and the throne room beyond.
Full night had fallen, and Solana felt dead on her feet.
She hoped their next stop was her rooms.
“What’s that?” Solana asked, glancing longingly at the flight of stairs that would carry her toward sleep.
“I helped capture you and your friend.”
Solana’s head whipped back toward her. That sense of familiarity she had felt before suddenly made sense. “You were in the room with us,” she whispered, memories of murmured words and firm commands being tossed over her agonized body flooding in. “You knew what was going to happen, and you let it.”
Cora grabbed Solana’s hand in both of hers and squeezed. “I can’t take back my part in it, but I am sorry. I wish it hadn’t happened that way, and I understand if you want to hold it against me forever.”
Solana shifted, her gaze darting back to the stairs. When was the last time someone had apologized to her, had taken responsibility for their actions, or lack thereof?
It wasn’t something she was accustomed to receiving.
Or doing, for that matter. If she sat down and thought about each of her actions and how they indirectly affected others, there were plenty of people she owed apologies to.
It was foolish to expect something from a stranger that she didn’t want expected of her.
“It’s nothing,” Solana lied. “It likely would have happened eventually, regardless of your part in it.”
“If it makes you feel any better, Reyes also feels badly about the whole thing.” Cora pushed her hair behind an ear and looked off to the side, toward a window where night had fallen and the lights on the castle gates twinkled like stars.
Solana snorted. “I don’t think he’s capable of that emotion.”
Cora laughed, the sound like bells chiming. “You might be surprised.”
The lack of pity he felt was clearly visible in the slack of his face while carving her up. Even in the way he tossed her into the dungeons without batting an eye. He had tortured her for answers to questions she didn’t have. It was more likely he had enjoyed it than felt badly about it.
He would have left her to die among the muki, if not for the king.
“The muki,” Solana whispered. That was one rumor she hadn’t been able to confirm. Moans from the muki held underneath the castle. “Where are they kept?”
For a moment, Solana considered that it was all a lie. That King Killian was only telling the people of Supay that he was mercifully rounding them up and instead massacring them in secret, and that Solana’s hunting was a threat to his facade of benevolence and control.
But then Cora offered to show her, and Solana eagerly followed her past the stairs that led to her rooms. They went down a hall where the carpet ended, down a dim set of stairs that narrowed concerningly, around a corner that led to another set of cold, narrow stairs.
Cora and Solana descended single file for what felt like an impossible length, until they came to a door barred with several locks. Cora grabbed a light from the wall and pressed her hand against the metal.
Under her touch, the locks sprang open one at a time until the whole thing popped open with a clank and a hiss.
The room beyond was pitch-black, the light in Cora’s hand illuminating a wide circle around them.
A blast of cold, frigid air rushed out at the same time Solana’s dagger sent a burst of heat at her hip.
Water dripped somewhere far-off, giving the room an eerie rhythm, as if the space were keeping time.
Solana paused next to Cora and waited for her eyes to adjust. When they did, she stumbled back with a gasp.
The air was pulsing with the breaths of thousands of muki lined shoulder to shoulder, chest to back as far as her eyes could see, the metal bars of cages delineating a narrow path straight down the middle.
It was too dark to see specific features, if they were awake or asleep or even alive.
She imagined that none would fall over on their respective sides of the room, even if they were dead.
Their bodies were pressed so tightly together that they were unintentionally supporting each other’s weight.
It was a sea of the haunted dead. The very epitome of Supay’s curse.
The god had wanted more than he was given and had tried to take it despite the cost. Their curse was one of eternal greed, eternal want, eternal misery, and it was so thick in the room that Solana nearly gagged on it.
None moved, save for the slight rising of their shoulders or shifting of their elongated feet.
“How?” Solana whispered. The lone word echoed against the bars and disrupted the synchronized breathing and dripping.
It was one thing to receive the king’s edict, the one that forbade them from killing any more demons, and it was entirely another thing to see them held, trapped in this cruel state of undead torment.
“They’re subdued upon capture, with an elixir that Reyes created, and once they’re put in with the rest, they just kind of …
go dormant. Nobody knows why.” Cora’s words were a whisper that floated away after several heartbeats.
Solana’s mind raced, but she didn’t say the words on the tip of her tongue.
How could she describe the thickness of suffering or the desperation for release that she felt in the air?
They were trapped. Physically and mentally. Prisoners to the curse and man.
“If the curse can be reversed, then all of these demons might be able to return to their families and lives.”
And that was the ultimate reason why what Solana did was so heinous and unforgivable to the people who had the privilege of possessing hope.
The Masters patrolled Sonqo and Iques, perhaps even the outskirts of Qhilli, where the borders of the inner cities touched and the docks were busy with trade.
But deep within Qhilli, in the callejon she called home, her people possessed no hope. They could not afford it.
So Solana hunted, and she killed, and she protected herself and her people to the best of her ability. It mattered little that it was done mostly out of guilt and as recompense for the actions of her father.
Masimu had been working with King Killian on a solution for the curse, not just to end it, but to reverse it. A way to give people back their loved ones, to rescue them from the eternal fate of a monstrous existence with no chance of ascending to Hanan Pacha.
It was a story they were told from the day they were born.
A fate they all knew would come for them.
The Uku Pacha was a realm that was meant as a holding place, an in-between while souls acclimated and ascended, but for the blood of Supay, it was perverted.
Their souls became trapped, their bodies vessels of their god’s punishment.
The space before her looked like exactly that. An in-between. A fate worse than death.
After King Killian’s first attempt to reverse the curse was thwarted by Solana’s father and demons poured into the mortal realm unlike anything they had seen before, officially confirming their damnation, the king created a whole system dedicated to defending his work.
The Academy began training those with gifts for the more serious work of hunting and containing demons, and everyone else learned to exist in their respective roles of society.
The wealthy hired private retinues of Masters to keep their neighborhoods clean. The middle class relied on their proximity to the wealthy, and the lowest of low class relied on Solana and their own common sense to keep themselves alive.
Then there were those who hired Solana because they would rather see their loved ones released than rescued. The ones who could not wait for a possibility.
This was her father’s legacy. A dungeon full of monsters and a daughter with the almost intolerable itch to swipe her dagger across their necks, to sever their spinal cords and end their torment.
Regret simmered in her belly. She wished she hadn’t asked to see the dungeon.
She wished she could continue to claim ignorance of this.
She wished she hadn’t agreed to do the king’s bidding.
Six months, she reminded herself.
Without another word, Cora turned to the stairwell and led Solana back up into the castle proper, through carpeted halls full of signs of the living, where warmth flooded her veins and soothed the disquiet in her soul.
By the time she was back in her rooms, the sea of demons was just a flash with every blink.
An inconvenient reminder of mistakes made and sidestepped fates.
A tray of dinner awaited her return, and Cora showed her an armoire full of nightclothes, luxurious dresses, and several sets of a richly made uniform, including a cloak and a Masters badge that glittered in the low light.
The cloak was billowing and black, just like Reyes’s.
Perfect for hiding her face from the people sure to recognize her.
Solana ate, but her belly was unsettled, her nerves frayed from the constant state of fight-or-flight she’d been in since waking in the infirmary. By the time she lay in the giant, overplush bed in the middle of the room, exhaustion pulled her under faster than her thoughts could keep her captive.