The Burning God, page 21
part #3 of The Poppy War Series
“Finally,” Daji said. “I was starting to worry.”
Rin sat up and glanced around. Up close, the dirigible carriage was much larger than she’d always imagined. They sat alone in a room the size of a ship’s cabin, which had to be one of many, for none of the Republican soldiers were in sight. “Get away from me.”
“Oh, shush.” Daji rolled her eyes as she continued scrubbing grime from Rin’s cheeks. The washcloth had turned rust brown from dried blood. “I’ve just saved your life.”
“I’m not going . . .” Rin struggled to make sense of her thoughts, trying to remember why she was afraid. “The mountain. The mountain. I’m not going—”
“Eat.” Daji pressed a hard, stale bun into her hand. “You need your strength. You won’t survive immurement otherwise.”
Rin stared helplessly at her. She didn’t lift the bun; her fingers hardly had the strength to close around it. “Why are you doing this?”
“I am saving us both,” Daji said. “Maybe your incipient southern empire, too, if you’ll stop with the hysterics and listen.”
“The army—”
“Your army has abandoned you. Your loyal officers are in no position to help. You’ve been ousted by the Southern Coalition, and you can’t call the fire.” Daji smoothed Rin’s hair back behind her ears. “I am guaranteeing us safe passage to the Chuluu Korikh.”
“But why—”
“Because my strength now is not enough. We need an ally. A mutual friend, who to the best of my knowledge is currently whiling away eternity in a mountain.”
Rin blinked. She understood Daji’s words, but she didn’t understand what she meant; it took a moment of thoughts churning sluggishly through her mind before the pieces fell together.
Then she balked.
She hadn’t thought about Jiang for nearly a year. She hadn’t let herself; the memories hurt too much. He’d been not just her teacher but her master. She’d trusted him; he’d promised to keep her safe. And then, the moment her world descended into war, he’d simply abandoned her. He’d left her to seal himself in a fucking rock.
“He won’t come out,” Rin said hoarsely. “He’s too scared.”
Daji’s lip curled. “Is that what you think?”
“He wants to hide. He won’t leave. He’s—there’s something wrong—”
“His Seal is eroding,” Daji said fiercely. Her good eye glimmered. “I know. I’ve felt it, too. He’s getting stronger—he’s coming back to himself. I didn’t know what I was doing when I Sealed the three of us, but I’d always suspected—hoped—I hadn’t done it right. And I didn’t. The Seal was a broken, imperfect thing, and now it’s fading. Now I—we—get a second chance.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Rin shook her head weakly. “He won’t leave.”
“Oh, he’ll have to.” Daji resumed dabbing at Rin’s temples. “I need him.”
“But I needed him,” Rin said. She felt a sharp pang in her chest, a wrenching mix of frustration and despair that until now she’d been so good at suppressing. She wanted to kick something; she wanted to cry. How, after so much time, could old hurts sting so sharp?
“Perhaps you did.” Daji gave Rin a pitying look. “But Ziya’s not your anchor. He’s mine.”
The rest of the journey could have taken minutes or hours. Rin didn’t know; she passed it in a painful daze, slipping in and out of consciousness as her body ached from its myriad contusions. Daji lapsed into silence, cautious of eavesdroppers. At last the engine roar slowed to a whine, then stopped. Rin jolted fully awake as the carriage thudded against the ground at an angle and screeched as it dragged several feet to a halt. Then Republican soldiers came into her compartment, loaded her bound form onto a wooden stretcher, and carried her out into the icy mountain air.
She didn’t resist. Daji wanted her to play helpless.
She knew they had reached Snake Province. She recognized the shape of these mountains; she’d traveled this way before. But some part of her mind could not accept that they were really, truly, in the Kukhonin Mountains.
Less than a day had passed since Souji betrayed her in Tikany. They’d crossed half the country in the time since. But that couldn’t be right—this journey should have taken weeks. Rin had seen dirigibles fly, she knew how fast they moved, but this was absurd. This took her ingrained conceptions of time, space, and distance, and ripped them to shreds.
Was this how the Hesperians regularly traveled? She tried to imagine spatiality from their perspective. What would society be like if one could traverse the continent in mere days? If she could wake up one morning in Sinegard, and go to bed in Arlong that evening?
No wonder they acted as if they owned the world. To them it must seem so small.
“Which way?” asked a soldier.
“Up,” Daji said. “The entrance lies near the summit. There won’t be space up there to land a craft. We’ll have to climb.”
Rin was strapped down so tightly to the stretcher she could barely lift her head. She couldn’t see how much farther they had to march, but she suspected it would take hours. The only walking path to the entrance of the Chuluu Korikh grew treacherously narrow with altitude. There wouldn’t have been space to land anything as large as a dirigible more than a third of the way up.
At least she didn’t have to climb. As the soldiers hoisted her up the mountain, the rocking stretcher lulled her into a kind of half sleep. Her head felt light and fuzzy. She wasn’t sure if they had sedated her, or if her body was breaking down from wounds sustained earlier. She passed the march in a barely conscious fugue, just dazed enough that the bruises from Souji’s boot produced no more than a dull, nearly pleasant ache.
She didn’t realize they’d reached the Chuluu Korikh until she heard the scrape of the stone door sliding open.
“We need a light,” Daji said.
Rin heard a crackle as someone lit a torch.
Now, she thought. This was when Daji would turn on the soldiers, surely. She’d gotten what she wanted; she’d secured safe passage to the Chuluu Korikh, and now she only had to hypnotize them, lure them to the precipice, and push.
“Go on,” Daji said. “There’s nothing to fear here. Just statues.”
The soldiers bore Rin into the looming dark. An immense pressure slammed over her, like an invisible hand clamped over her nose and mouth.
Rin gasped, arching her back against the stretcher. She gulped down huge mouthfuls of air, but it was thin and insufficient, and did nothing to stop the black spots creeping in at the edges of her vision. She could breathe so hard she ruptured her lungs and it still wouldn’t be enough. The inside of the Chuluu Korikh was so grounded, so firmly material, a solid place with no possible crossover into the plane of spirit.
It felt worse than drowning.
Rin had barely tolerated the pressure the first time she’d come here with Altan. It was far worse now that she had lived and breathed for years with divinity just a glancing thought away. The Phoenix had become a part of her, a constant and reassuring presence in her mind. Even in Kitay’s absence, she’d still felt the barest thread of a connection to her god, but now even that was gone. Now she felt as if the weight of the mountain might shatter her from inside.
The soldier at the front rapped his knuckles against her forehead. “Ah, shut up.”
Rin hadn’t even realized she was screaming.
Someone stuffed a rag in her mouth. That made the suffocation worse. Rational thought fled. She forgot that this was all a feint, all part of Daji’s plan. How could Daji—Su Daji, who had lived with the voice of her god longer than Rin had been alive—withstand this? How could she walk calmly forward without screaming while Rin writhed, arrested in the last moment of drowning before death?
“All these were shamans?” The soldier bearing her legs whistled, a low sound that echoed through the mountain. “Great Tortoise. How long have they been here?”
“As long as this Empire has been alive,” Daji said. “And they’ll be here long after we’re dead.”
“They can’t die?”
“No. Their bodies are no longer mortal. They have become open conduits to the gods, and so they are trapped here so they don’t destroy the world.”
“Fucking hell.” The soldier clicked his tongue. “That’s rough.”
The soldiers halted and lowered Rin’s stretcher to the floor. The one at her head leaned above her; his teeth gleamed yellow in the torchlight. “This is your stop, Speerly.”
She stared past him at rows and rows of empty plinths, stretching farther into the mountain than Rin could see. Her mind was half-gone with fear. She flailed, helpless, as the soldiers unstrapped her from the stretcher and hauled her up toward the nearest pedestal.
Her eyes flashed to Daji, begging silently to no avail. Why isn’t she doing anything? Hadn’t this charade gone on long enough? Daji didn’t need Rin immured. She only needed safe passage to the Chuluu Korikh. She had no use for the Republican soldiers anymore; she should have already disposed of them.
But Daji was just standing there, eyes lidded, face calm, watching as the soldiers positioned Rin on the center of the plinth.
A horrible thought crossed Rin’s mind.
Daji hadn’t just been bluffing.
Daji needed safe passage to the Chuluu Korikh. She needed Master Jiang. But nothing about her plan required Rin.
Oh, gods.
She had to get out of here. She wouldn’t escape this—there was no way she could make it to the door and down the mountain ahead of them in her state, not with her legs bound so tightly. But she could get to the edge of the corridor. She could jump.
Anything was better than an eternity in the rock.
She stopped struggling and slouched against the soldiers’ arms, pretending she’d fainted. It worked. Their grip loosened, just barely enough for her to wrench her torso free. She ducked beneath their hands and lunged toward the ledge. Her legs were tied so tightly she could only manage a lurching shuffle, but she was so close—it was only mere feet, she could evade them just two paces—
But then she reached the edge and saw the yawning abyss, and her limbs turned to lead.
Jump.
She couldn’t.
It didn’t matter that she knew eternity in the Chuluu Korikh was worse than death. She still couldn’t do it. She didn’t want to die.
“Come on.” Strong arms wrapped around her midriff and dragged her back from the edge. “You’re not getting off that easy.”
The soldiers pulled her legs up so that between them they carried her like a sack of rice. Together, they flipped her up into a standing position and arranged her on the pedestal.
“Stop,” Rin shrieked, but her words came muffled and meaningless behind her gag. “Stop, please don’t—Daji! Daji! Tell them!”
Daji didn’t meet her eyes.
“Make sure her feet are in the center,” she said calmly, as if instructing servants on where to move a table. “Prop her up so that she’s standing straight. The stone will do the rest.”
Rin tried everything to escape—kicking, thrashing, writhing, and going limp. They didn’t let go. They were too strong and she was too weak—famished, injured, dehydrated.
She had no more outs. She was trapped, and she couldn’t even die.
“Now what?” one of them asked.
“Now the mountain does its work.” Daji began to chant in Ketreyid, and the rocks came alive.
Rin watched the base of the pedestal in horror. At first its movement seemed a trick of the torchlight, but then she felt the icy touch of stone around her ankles as the plinth crept up and consumed her, solidifying into an immobile coat over the surface of her skin. She had no time to struggle; in seconds, it was up to her knees. The soldier holding her upright let go of her arms and sprang away when the rock reached her waist. Her upper body was now free but it made no difference; much as she flailed she couldn’t break the stone’s hold against her legs. Moments later it reached her chest, arrested her elbows where she’d bent them, and crept up her neck. She tilted her head up, desperate to get her nose away from the rock. It didn’t matter. The stone crawled over her face. Closed over her eyes.
Then she saw nothing. Heard nothing. She did not feel the stone against her; it had become a part of her, a natural outer coating that rendered her completely still.
She couldn’t move.
She couldn’t move.
She strained against the rock but nothing budged even a fragment, and all that did was flood her nerves with such anxiety that she strained harder and harder while panic exploded inside her, intensifying second by second with no possible release.
She couldn’t breathe. And at first she was at least grateful for that—without air, surely she’d soon lose consciousness, and then this torture would end. She could feel her lungs bursting, burning. Soon she’d black out. Soon it’d be over.
But nothing happened.
She was drowning, forever drowning, but she couldn’t die.
She needed to scream and couldn’t. She wanted so badly to writhe and flail that her heart almost burst out of her chest and even that would have been better because then she would at least be dead, but instead she hung still in a never-ending moment stretching on into a definite eternity.
The knowledge that this could and would continue, for days upon seasons upon years, was torture beyond belief.
I should have jumped, she thought. I wish I were dead.
The thought repeated in her mind over and over, the only salve against her new and terrifying reality.
I wish I were dead.
I wish I were dead.
I wish—
The mere thought of oblivion became a fantasy. She imagined she really had jumped, imagined the short, euphoric fall and the satisfying crunch of her bones against the bottom of the pit, followed by a blissful nothing. She repeated the sequence so many times in her mind that for brief seconds at a time she fooled herself into thinking she’d really done it.
She could not sustain her panic forever. Eventually it ebbed away, replaced by a dull, empty helplessness. Her body at last resigned itself to the truth—she would not escape. She would not die. She would remain standing here, half-dead and half-alive, conscious and thinking for eternity.
She had nothing now except for her own mind.
Once upon a time Jiang had taught her to meditate, to empty her mind for hours at a time while her body settled into the peaceful daze of an empty vessel. That was, no doubt, how he had survived in here all this time, why he had ever entered this place willingly. Rin wished she had that skill. But she had never once achieved that inner stillness. Her mind rebelled against boredom. Her thoughts had to wander.
She had nothing else to do but probe through memories for entertainment. She pored over them, picked them apart and stretched them out and relished them, prolonging every last detail. She remembered Tikany. Remembered those delicious warm afternoons she spent in Tutor Feyrik’s room discussing every detail of the books he’d just lent her, stretching her arms to receive more. Remembered playing games with baby Kesegi in the yard, pretending to be every known beast in the Emperor’s Menagerie, roaring and hissing just to get him to laugh. Remembered quiet, stolen minutes in the dark, brief interludes when she was all alone, free of the shop and of Auntie Fang, able to breathe without fear.
When Tikany failed to satisfy she turned her mind to Sinegard—that harsh, intimidating place that, paradoxically, now contained her happiest memories. She remembered studying in the cool basement chambers of the Academy library with Kitay, watching him pushing spindly fingers through his worried hairline as he riffled through scroll after scroll. Remembered sparring in the early mornings with Jiang in the Lore garden, parrying his blows with a blindfold tied around her head.
She got very good at exploring the crevices of her mind, excavating memories that she didn’t know she still had. Memories she hadn’t let herself acknowledge until now for fear they would break her.
She remembered the first time she’d ever laid eyes on Nezha, and then all the times thereafter.
It hurt to see him. It hurt so much.
They’d been so innocent once. It was agony to recall the face he wore just a year ago: pretty and cocky and unbearable at once, alternately grinning with delight or wearing the absurd snarl of an agitated puppy. But she was trapped here for an eternity. Those memories were the only things she had now, and the pain was the only way she’d feel anything ever again.
She retraced their entire history from the moment she met him first at Sinegard to the moment she felt his blade sliding into the muscles of her back. She remembered how childishly handsome he used to be, how she’d been both drawn to and repulsed by that haughty, sculpted face. She remembered how Sinegard had transformed him from a spoiled, petty princeling to a hardened soldier in training. She remembered the first time they’d sparred against each other and the first time they’d fought side by side in battle—how their animosity and partnership had both felt like such a natural fit, like slipping on a lost glove, like finding her other half.
She remembered how much taller than her he’d grown, how when they embraced, her head fit neatly under his chin. She remembered how dark his eyes had looked under the moonlight that night by the docks. Right when she thought he’d kiss her. Right before he’d pressed a blade into her back.
It hurt so much to riffle through those memories. It was humiliating to remember how readily she’d believed his lies. She felt like such a fool, for trusting him, for loving him, for thinking any of those thousands of tiny moments they’d shared during her brief time in Vaisra’s army meant that he really, truly cared for her, when in truth Nezha had been manipulating her just like his father had.
She relived those interactions so many times that they began to lose all meaning. Their sting faded to a dull burn, and then nothing at all. She’d numbed herself to their significance. She’d grown bored of her own pain.
So she turned to the last thing that could still hurt her. She went looking for the Seal and found that it was still there, ready and waiting in the back of her mind, daring her to enter.
