Chapter 42 Sonam
It can’t end like this.
Silver moonlight. A cool breeze. The soft orange glow of paper lanterns. All normally gentle, unassuming things I would have taken for granted, but after so much time spent in the expansive dark with nothing but the eerie green glow of Hell’s Jade Palace, it’s almost too much.
I’m on my hands and knees upon the polished tiles of the palace courtyard, sucking in long, deep breaths.
Sooah and Wen are on either side of me, just as winded.
We were running for our lives not a moment ago.
I’m on edge, my mind still racing. I never thought peace and tranquility could be so unsettling.
“Sonam?” calls a gruff voice.
Shakily, I look up, confused to find my father looking down at me, a notch between his brows.
He’s still dressed in his flowing golden robes.
My elder brothers are also here, staring at me with matching confusion.
The palace shamans stand just to my right, bowls of ritualistic burnings still in hand from when we banished Yue to Hell.
It’s as though we never left the mortal realm in the first place.
“How—how long were we gone?” I rasp. My throat is shredded. I’ve screamed myself raw.
It’s the king who speaks. “But a blink of an eye. One moment you were falling, and the next, you reappeared here.”
My heart rails against my rib cage. Overwhelmed. Disoriented. What were we running from, again? What urgent news sits so heavily on my tongue? My thoughts are scrambled, nearly impossible to decipher.
“Demons,” I mutter. And then, in a breathless whisper, “Yue.”
“What’s he blathering about?” one of my brothers, Zhong, says, raising an eyebrow from above his large silk fan.
I struggle to my feet, desperate to have my father hear me. “You must prepare your soldiers. There’s an army of demons coming from Hell. They’ll eat everyone in their path if we don’t stop them here and now.”
“He’s lost his mind,” one of the palace advisors scoffs loudly.
“You dare make demands of His Majesty?” snaps Han, my second-eldest brother. With Jun gone, he’s the one who now holds the title of Crown Prince, destined for the throne.
“Listen to me!” I hiss. “I was down there. I saw them with my very eyes. They’re coming in the thousands. Sooah and Wen know it to be true!”
They both nod furiously, just as eager as I to get the message across.
What starts as unnerved chuckling in the courtyard erupts into incredulous laughter.
“He’s gone completely mad!”
“Has Hell scrambled your brains, little brother?”
“An army of demons? Do you intend to return to the Jade Palace as court jester?”
“There isn’t any time for this!” I shout. “Yue won’t be able to hold them off for much longer.”
“Yue?” my father says. “Who is this Yue you keep speaking of?”
I can’t breathe. Every time I try to inhale, the air is so cold it slices its way through my lungs. “The nine-tailed fox,” I wheeze. “She’s the one who—”
Who sacrificed herself for us.
For me.
This is as cruel as it is unfair. They’re not only laughing at my efforts, but Yue’s, as well. If it weren’t for her, we might never have made it out of Hell. They don’t understand that she’s the only one who’s given humanity a fighting chance—a chance I won’t allow them to squander.
“We need archers at every post,” I say. “And we must evacuate the city. The demons will wear masks to appear human. If they manage to escape into the population, it will be impossible to tell friend from foe.”
“Someone call the palace doctor,” my brother Sìzi chides with a grating over-importance. “The captain needs his head checked.”
My frustration gets the better of me. I charge at him, punching my brother with such force that I feel the pain lance through my knuckles and up my arm. It feels good to finally shut him up. If I can force him and all the rest into silence, perhaps then they will finally take heed.
But then guards surround us, dragging me off my sniveling brother. He spits out a few of his teeth, the gaping holes in his grimace bringing me only a sliver of satisfaction.
“Throw them in the dungeons,” the king commands. “Their time in Hell has clearly driven them mad.”
“You have to listen to me!” I scream at the top of my lungs. “They’re coming! They’re coming!”
If they expected this jailing to go smoothly, they should have done the smart thing and knocked me out beforehand.
It takes five of them to hold me down, face pressed against the damp floor of the palace dungeons, as one of them hastily pries my weapons off my person. They even take my hunting log and my paintbrush, removing any possibility of me having an object to beat them senseless with.
I get a good punch in at one point, and certainly a well-placed kick, but before I know it, the palace guards shove me into a cell made of thick iron bars and slam the door in my face. Sooah and Wen are similarly thrown into their own cells on the other side of the room.
There’s a ringing in my ears. My muscles are so tight they threaten to snap. I pace around my cell, not that there’s much room to begin with. I reach the back of it in little more than four steps.
“You know,” Wen mumbles, “yelling our heads off about the demon army probably wasn’t a good idea.”
Sooah sighs heavily, as if to say, Shut up.
“They don’t understand what we saw,” I grumble. “What we know is coming.”
Yue can’t hold the Maskmaker and his army off forever—I try not to think about what will happen when they overtake her. If the king and the rest of the Jade Palace won’t listen, then we’ll have to do this on our own. But how?
If Yue were here, she would doubtlessly have chewed or slammed her way through the bars and barreled through the palace by now. But she isn’t, and I can’t rely on her strength to see us out of this. If only I were smaller, I could slip through the bars…
I notice our confiscated items piled high on a rickety wooden table to the right of my cell. It’s well out of reach, but I have to try.
I lean against the bars and squeeze my arm through the narrow gap, desperately stretching my fingers in the hopes of grasping on to something.
Anything. I can see the Maskmaker’s paintbrush sitting near the edge of the table, but it sits at an angle, pinned down by the weight of our weapons and my hunting log.
Sweat drips from my brow. Every muscle in my body strains, burning with the effort.
The tips of my fingers just barely graze the end of the brush’s handle when the ground suddenly shakes. All around us, the walls and the ceiling of the palace prison tremble violently.
An earthquake?
No. The frantic, bloodcurdling screams that follow can only mean one thing: the Gates of Hell are open.
My stomach twists.
Yue.
But there’s no time to mourn.
The tremors are so vicious that the table of supplies ends up tipping—in the wrong direction.
I just manage to grab hold of the paintbrush, gripping its bamboo handle tight.
I watch in dismay as my hunting log falls, open-faced, my life’s work scattering across the floor.
All the knowledge I’ve collected over the years, sentenced to lie in a crumpled, disheveled heap.
Above, the screams grow louder. The loud clang of the watchtower gongs ring loudly into the night.
Gritting my teeth, I snatch up the first piece of paper I can get my hands on and bring the tip of the brush down to paint.
I don’t need a reference. I can do this by memory alone.
My work is messy and rushed, but this mask doesn’t need to be perfect.
I hurriedly smash the paper to my face and feel the magic rush over me like wildfire on drought-ridden land.
Wiry whiskers, tiny pink claws and feet, and ugly, matted black fur.
A rat demon in all its horrendous glory.
It feels strange, but not wrong, necessarily.
Like putting on a borrowed cloak. A part of me is surprised.
I thought the brush might not be able to recreate anything other than human faces, but now that I know what’s possible, I realize the endless miracles of this tool.
I jump through the gap between the cell bars with plenty of room to spare, ripping the mask off the moment I’m free.
“The keys?” I snap, picking up the paintbrush.
“I think the guards have them,” Wen answers.
No time! Sooah signs.
She’s right. I take a step back and kick, slamming the heel of my boot against the lock of Wen’s cell. I strike with such force that it falls apart, bits and pieces of metal clattering to the floor. As Wen emerges from his cell, I do the same for Sooah, freeing them both.
“I have to find my family,” Wen says.
I nod, already scooping up three fresh pieces of paper. I paint hastily, doing my best not to let my hands shake. “Find them. Evacuate any civilians you come across. Once they’re out of harm’s way, put these on and come find me.”
They take their masks without question. We leave through the prison’s main doors to find the halls empty. The guards have abandoned their posts. With one final nod to one another, they make for the city, while I race to find the Maskmaker with my weapon held tight in my hand.
Our chances of succeeding are slim, but we know what must be done.