Chapter 26: Poisoned Silence

But soon, His Majesty’s face flashed through my mind.

With his personality, he would never simply leave his younger brother after he had been kidnapped outside the palace.

He would surely form a search party to find Hyeopbyeol and waste military forces.

Once that thought reached me, my arm raised the bow on its own.

“Let’s catch them.”

In the silence, the bowstring holding the arrow was drawn taut.

The heavy curved bow did not tremble.

I aimed at the suspicious man pulling the cart from the front.

Hitting a moving target was easy.

Hitting a target that was fleeing was difficult.

My eyes, accustomed to darkness, had no hesitation in targeting the enemy.

An arrow cutting through the wind needed only an instant to end a person’s breath.

“Argh!”

The suspicious man cried out once and collapsed.

He could not rise again.

Hwangbo Min whistled and shook his head.

“Whew. Your skill is still the same. The war ended long ago, yet you have not rusted at all.”

The other suspicious man, who had been pushing the cart from behind, saw his companion collapse with an arrow lodged in his head.

He abandoned the cart and began running away in panic.

As expected, it was difficult to hit a target deliberately fleeing through darkness without even a single torch.

Rather than attempting something impossible, it was wiser to make someone capable do it.

I nodded toward the fleeing man and spoke to the demon.

“Keep that one alive.”

“Why did you not keep him alive yourself?”

The demon’s complaint was so absurd that I scoffed.

What an exaggeration.

“Because it is difficult. That is why I am asking you.”

Without another word, the demon threw his sword.

Before I could even be astonished by the crude boldness of throwing a sword like a spear, the flying blade struck the fleeing shadow.

The figure collapsed flat onto the ground.

He did not rise.

Nor did he show any sign of struggling to escape.

“Hm?”

It was suspicious that he lay face-down without moving.

He should have tried to rise and limp away.

He should have crawled across the ground.

He should have at least twitched and struggled.

The absence of any such attempt made him seem dead.

But the demon could not have killed him by mistake.

When I approached, puzzled, I found the suspicious man collapsed with a sword embedded in his thigh.

Striking someone from that distance with a sword was remarkable enough.

Seeing that it had lodged there made it difficult to decide whether I should call the demon impressive or monstrous.

I clicked my tongue at the demon, who had struck the man in the thigh after being told not to kill him, and pulled the sword from the body.

The wound did not bleed much.

The suspicious man had died before the sword struck him.

I returned the sword to the demon and said:

“He is dead.”

There were many things we needed to question him about.

His death was troublesome, but corpses often spoke more than expected.

I settled down properly and turned the body over.

The clouds covering the full moon passed, and when the colors became visible beneath the moonlight, the corpse’s bluish-black complexion suggested the cause of death.

Hwangbo Min had crouched beside me without my noticing.

Using a hand wrapped in his sleeve, he held the corpse’s jaw and turned its head from side to side.

“He killed himself.”

Hwangbo Min opened the man’s mouth.

A black, sticky liquid flowed out mixed with saliva.

Careful not to let it touch his hand, Hwangbo Min released the jaw and stood up.

“He had poison hidden in his molar. It looks like he bit down on it and killed himself before General Jeok’s sword hit him.”

I looked at the corpse lying in front of the cart—the one I had killed with an arrow through the head.

That man likely had the same poison hidden in his molar.

All that remained was the cart.

Even though the men who had been moving it were dead, the rolled straw mat had not moved at all.

When we pulled it open, there was, as expected, another corpse inside.

Its face had been severely mutilated.

It wore expensive sleeping clothes and had the build of a small adult man.

Its face had been cut into strips with a blade.

If the palace had been set on fire, the half-burned body could easily have been mistaken for Hyeopbyeol.

It seemed I had interfered with the plan for Hyeopbyeol to leave the palace that night.

“Isn’t catching these men enough?”

“They are only links in the chain. This cannot be the end.”

I covered the body with the straw mat again.

The corpses of black birds that had filled the court hall.

That strange phenomenon could not be explained by only two men trying to smuggle Hyeopbyeol out of the palace.

“The imperial guards on patrol will collect the bodies. Let’s check somewhere else.”

Since they had silenced the men through suicide, no one would come merely to collect the bodies.

I turned the cart toward Wolseong Palace and left the area.

I believed the imperial guards who found the bodies would understand the situation.

“What? Imperial guards are on patrol? Soldiers who are not even patrol guards? What exactly is happening in the imperial palace tonight?”

We needed to move quickly.

But Hwangbo Min, who had followed us only for amusement, seemed overwhelmed by the situation.

He was startled by every word and action.

He was beginning to become irritating.

Suppressing the pain in my temples, I spoke quietly.

“I will ask you.”

I stepped on the head of the corpse lying on the ground.

It was the man I had killed.

The corpse’s wide-open eyes, frozen from the sudden attack, rubbed against the dirt.

The imperial palace was a battlefield when it came to pitying the dead.

It had never been anything else.

In a place where failing to kill the enemy meant being killed yourself, there was nothing more foolish than sympathy.

I pressed down with my heel, crushing the corpse’s jaw joint.

Black poison flowed from its mouth.

Watching the sight without emotion, I said:

“Did Family Head Hwangbo truly sneak into the imperial palace only to steal alcohol?”

“Only alcohol? Do you know how precious this liquor—”

“Family Head, since you continue trying to evade the matter poorly, I will speak plainly.”

Holding the arrow shaft firmly in the head I had pinned down with my foot, I pulled it out in one motion.

Blood surged out and soaked my leather shoe.

I shook off the brain matter caught on the triangular arrowhead without expression.

Then I dragged the sharp tip through the poison that had spilled onto the dirt.

The arrowhead glowed blue.

It was red with blood.

It was black with poison.

The arrow aimed at Hwangbo Min was quite vivid.

“I am speaking of rebellion.”

My long hair fluttered in the night wind.

The bow and string stretched in opposite directions, pulled tight with tension, and the arrow lay between them.

The steady arrow looked ready to fly at any moment.

Hwangbo Min faced the arrowhead pointed at him and smiled awkwardly.

“…Rebellion? Do not say such frightening things. Who in this imperial capital does not know that I am mad for liquor, women, and gambling?”

“…”

“If I say that, you will release the bowstring at once.”

My two fingers held the bowstring precariously, as if the arrow could fly at any moment.

Hwangbo Min quickly raised both palms.

“Ha ha, calm down. If you shoot me, you will find yourself in trouble beyond what you can handle. It is not rebellion, so lower the bow and let us talk.”

Even then, I did not move.

Hwangbo Min shrugged.

He was still smiling, but it was different now.

It was no longer the foolish, carefree smile of a man delighted to have stolen precious alcohol.

“It is an order from His Majesty the Emperor. It seems poison stolen from the Sichuan Tang Clan has entered the imperial palace, so I was told to find it. If one is to obey an order, one must create an excuse of one’s own, mustn’t one?”

Hwangbo Min lifted the liquor bottle and shook it.

It appeared he had found signs that suspicious items had been mixed among the tribute goods recently brought into the palace.

Yes.

The most splendid things were often the most dangerous.

Beneath my expressionless face as I held the bowstring, my thoughts moved rapidly.

The Sichuan Tang Clan, one of the Five Great Families, had handled poison for generations.

Poison had been stolen from a family that handled poison.

I could guess why His Majesty had kept it hidden even from me and ordered Hwangbo Min to identify the culprit.

He could not assign the task to the family that had been robbed.

Since it involved one of the Five Great Families, it could not be allowed to leak outside.

So he had to choose someone within their circle whom he could trust, at least somewhat.

But why Hwangbo Min instead of the Zhuge Clan?

Why this shameless man, who appeared smooth and untrustworthy on the outside but seemed to have a cunning snake coiled within him?

The shameless man asked me with a seriousness he showed only a few times a year.

“Could the poison stolen from the Sichuan Tang Clan be connected to the rebellion?”

I did not know.

In the dream, His Majesty had not told me that poison had been stolen from the Sichuan Tang Clan.

“What kind of poison was stolen?”

Hwangbo Min could not tell me either.

He kept the secret behind a smile.

Since I could not explain the rebellion in detail, I stopped questioning him.

As we tried to guess each other’s secrets, our gazes tangled tightly.

Hwangbo Min’s smile deepened.

As though tired of the drawn-out contest of wills, his voice carried a rare note of emptiness.

“Strategist, do not stake everything on loyalty to His Majesty. Your devotion may one day return as a blade at your throat.”

“I know.”

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