Page 41 of Between Ghosts and Gods

“It’s a puzzle,” Kasu murmured. There was probably a right way and a wrong way to go. A door that would lead to Lady Camellia’s private chambers and others that would… Actually, she didn’t want to think about where the others would lead. All she had to do was figure out the solution. The dots and symbols on the doors had to mean something.

“I’ll choose one!” Ruo used their double tails to nudge open the nearest paper door.

“Wait!”

It was too late. Kasu rushed to close it, but the door blew wide open, slamming against the wall.

The floor tilted. Like a rotating puzzle piece, the walls moved as well and suddenly the doors were above and beneath her.

“Kasu!” Arun leapt for her as she and Ruo plummeted through the open doorway.

The tips of their fingers brushed against one another.

Kasu fell anyway.

Chapter Twenty-One Kasu

The moment she hit the ground, the door above her slammed shut. She pushed herself to her feet and stared up at it, but it was fixed to the ceiling, far too high to reach.

Beside her, Ruo groaned and shook themself down. “Well, that was unexpected.”

Kasu pursed her lips. Patience. She would have patience.

They were in some sort of storeroom, though the rows of dark shelves only seemed to hold one thing. Glass bottles filled with greenish smoke stood in neat lines, each one tagged with a paper label written in an elegant but unreadable script.

“This has to be Lady Camellia’s private chambers.” Kasu stepped towards one of the shelves, ignoring the chill from the stone tiles bleeding through her thin shoes.

The elixir will be in a small bottle, dark red in colour. Lady Camellia likely keeps it somewhere in her private chambers, the Pale Lady had said, yet no matter how hard Kasu searched, the bottles were all filled with the same jade-green smoke. She frowned. Had the Pale Lady been wrong about the elixir’s appearance? Or perhaps it wasn’t here at all.

Her gaze landed on a painting at the very back. A framed portrait almost hidden behind the rows of shelves and glass bottles. It was so old that the canvas was yellowing and covered in a thin layer of dust. Kasu had to squint to make out the subject.

“Is that … General Shusa?”

She almost did not recognize him. Most pictures of Shusa depicted the guardian god in his military uniform, just as he had looked the day he set out for war and earned the heavens’ praise for defeating a thousand demons. In the under-realm, his portraits came with unflattering facial hair and a variety of exaggerated features, but they portrayed him in his soldier’s gear too. Here, he was dressed as a cowherd. Kasu only knew it was Shusa because of the wooden token around his neck, carved into a winter iris.

“Are you done looking at these?” Ruo jumped onto one of the shelves. The green bottles rattled under the cat’s weight.

The moment their eyes met, Kasu knew what Ruo intended to do.

“No! Don’t!” She rushed over as Ruo batted a paw against one of the bottles, knocking it to the very edge of the shelf. “Ruo, don’t you dare!”

Maintaining eye contact, Ruo slowly nudged the bottle closer to the edge.

Kasu was already running towards the shelf ready to catch the falling bottle when Ruo suddenly leapt down with a hiss.

“Someone’s here!”

Kasu froze.

In the corner of her eye, she noticed an iron pole swinging towards her. Kasu ducked just in time and the pole hit the shelf above her with a clang that echoed over the walls.

“Ghosts!” Ruo growled.

There were three of them. Tall and broad and dressed in loose, ragged shirts and hemp trousers.

“Who are you? What are you doing here?”

They were not servants from Camellia House. Kasu knew everyone who worked for Lady Camellia, from the guards to the kitchen staff. She did not recognize any of these men.