“Yeah, fine.” The warrior shrugged and returned to his post. “Do what you need to.”
Darrus turned to her. “Get me one of the flatter ones—I don’t want one of the beaked ones,” he instructed slowly. “I’ll need a larger one. They keep that style on the top shelf of the storeroom to the right.”
Storeroom to the right.
“Flat one, got it,” Vi mumbled. Her voice was utterly unrecognizable when muffled by the long beak of Darrus’s mask and all the filters it contained, no magic required.
Trying to seem as though she’d entered the clinic a hundred times, Vi pushed open the doors. Neither of the warriors so much as glanced at her as she slipped into the building.
The immediate entry was a wide room with absolutely nothing in it. Stone walls, stone ceiling, no windows. Only a few flame bulbs positioned in the corners illuminated the ominously dark room. The rock was so thick that the sounds of wailing had vanished and a heavy silence settled on her.
“To the right…” There were two doors on the right wall. Vi walked over to the closer one first. She had a fifty-fifty shot.
Opening the heavy door, Vi was greeted by a room filled with various tools. Shackles and chains hung on the wall at her left. A wide, flat, disturbingly stained table sat in the center. A wall of shelves contained jars with all manner of grotesquely severed parts suspended in a clear liquid.
What was this place?
She stepped into the room, uncomfortably curious. It was a question she didn’t think she wanted the answer to, yet wondered all the same. Scalpels and saws were hung along the back wall. A table underneath had all manner of wickedly gleaming instruments.
Vi turned away from them, to the second door at her right. Behind that heavy door was a small closet-like room. Shelves lined every wall, filled with heavy gloves, thick coats, and masks. Luckily, she was tall and only had to step up using the bottom shelf. If she’d been shorter like Ellene, she would’ve had to scale half the shelves to reach what Darrus needed.
Quickly closing the doors behind her, Vi returned to the main entrance.
“Thanks,” Darrus said, stepping forward to take the mask. Without another word from the warriors on either side, he followed her within.
“What are these rooms?” Vi whispered, though she didn’t know why. There was no one around and the guard certainly couldn’t hear them through the heavy doors.
“Triage… more or less,” Darrus answered grimly. “We keep it empty so the diseased have nothing to attack us with.”
“Do they attack you?”
“Often… either they don’t have their wits about them any longer, they’re more animal than human.” As he spoke, Vi remembered the crazed man from the winter solstice, and the man in the cage from her vision of her father on Meru. “Or… they are still in denial. Some, I think, truly want to fight for their freedom. They see this for the death sentence that it is. Others are hoping that maybe one of us will make a mistake and kill them as we try to subdue them.”
“Have you killed anyone?” Vi whispered.
“Not personally.” He took a step forward, pointing at the doors as he walked. There was a mechanical quality to him now. Vi couldn’t tell if it was a wall, guarding the more tender man she’d seen with Ellene, or a complete switch in personality—a new side of him born of necessity. She wished she could see his face, the mask only further added to the unnerving quality of his current nature.
“That door—” he pointed to the one she’d found the storeroom through “—is for those already dead, or one breath away, when they’re brought here. The master clerics dissect them, trying to find out a root cause for the disease.” He pointed to the left. “That one is for those still in the early stages. Ahead is for those who are far along, but not quite dead yet.”
“And this one?” she asked as his hand landed on the second door to the right.
“Clerics only,” he answered as they stepped into a small sitting area.
There were two tables, some low benches in a corner, what could only be described as a small kitchen on either side of a hearth—though Vi couldn’t imagine who found their appetite in a place like this. Two clerics lifted their masked faces toward them. They raised a hand by way of greeting, and Darrus did the same—but that was all the attention they paid them, as they quickly returned to their hushed conversation.
Vi strained to listen as she followed Darrus behind them. But the words were impossible to make out underneath the heavy mask that covered her head. Neither of the clerics said anything as her and Darrus slipped out a back door and into a narrow hall.
“We’re going up to the walk,” he said softly, glancing over his shoulder. “Mentally ready yourself.”
Vi didn’t dare ask what he meant. Her heart inched up her throat with every beat, a rising apprehension at the sheer unknown she’d find at the top of the stairwell. There was a landing, another door, and then on the other side, death.
They stepped onto a narrow walkway, guarded by stone bars on their left, that overlooked a great pit to their right. It was then that Vi figured out the layout of the clinic. The front third were the rooms Darrus had talked about—the ones she’d walked through. The back two thirds were split like two rectangles set long-ways against each other. The far rectangle was covered—Vi could only assume more rooms and better accommodations for those less progressed. The final third that she now laid eyes on was open to the sky, and packed to the brim with people.
This was where the wailing she’d heard originated from.
Vi watched as men and women in tattered clothing, some completely naked, drifted from place to place. Some howled and wailed. Some had enough sense to weep white, sticky tears across bulging red veins from milky eyes. Vi watched in horror as one man ran into the wall, head first, again and again. She didn’t know how long she watched… but it was long enough that he fell a final time and did not get up.
“Vi.” Darrus rested his hand lightly on her arm and her head jerked toward his. How she wished she could see his face in that moment—see another human’s face, not diseased. It was the first time he had referred to her without the title of “princess” and Vi didn’t even remark on it. In fact, it was welcome.
