Footsteps sounded close to her head. Someone put the heel of their boot on her neck.
“The Young Marshal wants her alive,” spoke an unfamiliar voice.
Rin stiffened. The Young Marshal. This man was Nezha’s envoy.
“His orders were to take her alive if we can manage, and dead if she puts up a fight,” said the envoy. “I say we preempt a resistance. I’ve seen what she can do when she’s awake.”
“We can keep her dosed,” spoke another voice across the room. “We brought enough opium for the journey. That keeps her harmless.”
“You’re going to stake your lives on that?” Souji asked. “Go on, press a little harder. None of us will tattle.”
Rin winced, bracing herself for the impact. But it never came—suddenly the boot lifted from her neck, and footsteps sounded away from her head. She heard the tent flaps rustle.
“You can’t kill her.”
Her eyes widened. Daji?
“Who’s this hag?” Souji asked. “Someone toss her out.”
There was a flurry of movement, a clash of steel, then a loud clatter as weapons dropped to the floor.
“Don’t touch me,” Daji said, very slowly, very calmly. “Now step away.”
The tent fell silent.
“She’s a chosen manifestation of the gods.” Daji’s voice grew louder as she crossed the tent toward Rin. “Her body is a bridge between this world and the Pantheon. If you hurt her, then her god will come flooding through in full force to our realm. Have you ever encountered the Phoenix? You will be ash before you can blink.”
That’s not true, Rin thought, befuddled. That’s not how it works. If they hurt her now, without Kitay, the Phoenix could do nothing to help her.
But none of them knew that. No one objected. The men were utterly silent, hanging on Daji’s every word.
Rin could imagine what was happening. She’d suffered the Vipress’s hypnosis before. Daji’s eyes induced paralysis—those bright, yellow serpent’s eyes that enticed and beckoned; those pupils that engorged to become gates into dark and lovely visions of butterfly wings and wretched nostalgia. The Vipress made her prey desire. Yearn. Hurt.
When Souji at last spoke, his voice sounded different—dazed, hesitant. “Then what do we do?”
“There is a mountain in Snake Province,” Daji said. “Not far from here. It will be quite a march, but—”
“We have a dirigible,” said one of Nezha’s envoys. He spoke eagerly, like he was trying to impress. If Rin weren’t so terrified, she would have laughed. “We have the fuel. We could fly there in less than a day.”
“Very good, officer,” Daji cooed.
No one objected. Daji had these men well and truly trapped. Good, Rin thought. Now gut them.
But Daji didn’t move.
“I’ve heard of this mountain,” Souji said after a pause. “It’s impossible to find.”
“Only for those who don’t know where they’re going,” Daji said. “But I have been there many times.”
“And who are you?” Souji asked. The question didn’t sound like a challenge. He sounded confused, rather, like a man who had just awoken from a deep slumber to find himself in unfamiliar forest. Souji was groping through the mist, trying desperately to catch hold of clarity.
Daji gave a low chuckle. “Only an old woman who has seen a fair bit of the world.”
“But you don’t . . .” Souji trailed off. His question dissipated into nothing. Rin wished she could see his face.
“The Young Marshal will want to see her first,” said the first of Nezha’s envoys, the one who had put his boot on Rin’s neck. “He’ll want to know that she—”
“Your Young Marshal will be content with your report,” Daji said smoothly. “You are his loyal lieutenants. He’ll trust your word. Wait any longer and you risk that she wakes.”
“But we were tasked to—”
“Yin Nezha is weak and ailing,” Daji said. “He cannot face the Speerly right now. What do you think he will do if she strikes? She will burn him in his bed, and you will be known as the men who brought this monster to his lair. Would you murder your own general?”
“But he said she’d lost the fire,” said the soldier.
“And you trust this man?” Daji pressed. “You’ll wager the Young Marshal’s life on the words of a guerrilla commander?”
“No,” the soldier murmured. “But we—”
“Don’t think,” Daji whispered. Her voice was like gossamer silk. “Why think? Don’t trouble yourself with such thoughts. It’s much easier to obey, remember? You only have to do as I say, and you’ll be at peace.”
Another meek silence descended over the room.
“Good,” Daji cooed. “Good boys.”
Rin couldn’t see Daji’s eyes, not from this angle, but even she felt drowsy, lured into the soft, comforting undulations of Daji’s voice.
Daji bent over Rin and smoothed the hair away from her face. Her fingers lingered over Rin’s exposed neck. “Now, you’ll want to sedate her for the trip.”
The trip.
This wasn’t all just a ploy, then. They really were taking her to the Chuluu Korikh. The stone prison, the hell inside the mountain, the place where shamans who had gone mad were taken to be locked in stone, trapped forever, unable to call their gods and unable to die.
Gods, no. Not there.
Rin had been to the Chuluu Korikh once. The very thought of returning made her feel as if she were drowning.
She tried to lift her head. Tried to say something, to do anything. But Daji’s whispers washed over her thoughts like a cool, cleansing stream.
“Don’t think.” Rin barely heard distinct words anymore, just music, just tinkling notes that soothed her mind like a lullaby.
“Give up, darling. Trust me, this is easier. This is so much easier.”
Part II
Chapter 11
“Before humans lived on this earth, the god of water and the god of fire quarreled and split the sky apart,” Riga said. “All that shiny blue ceramic cracked and fell to Earth, and the Earth in its greenery was exposed to the darkness like yolk inside a shattered egg. That’s a nice image, isn’t it?”
Daji moved cautiously toward him, fingers outstretched as if she were approaching a wild animal. She didn’t know what to expect from him. Nothing Riga did was predictable anymore; these days she couldn’t tell from second to second whether he was about to kiss her or hit her.
She would have been less surprised if he were shouting, slamming things and people against the walls because things had gone wrong, had been going wrong for weeks.
But Riga was reading. Everything they had built over the past few years, every rock of their castle, was falling apart around them, and he was standing by the window with a book of children’s myths, flipping idly through its pages, fucking reading out loud like he thought she needed a bedtime story.
She kept her voice low so as not to startle him. “Riga, what’s happening out there?”
He ignored her question. “You know, I think I’ve figured out where you get all that self-righteousness.” He flipped the book around to show her the painted illustrations. “Nüwa mends the sky. You’ve heard this myth, haven’t you? The men wreck the world, and the woman has to piece it back together. The goddess Nüwa patched up that rift they’d made in the sky, rock by rock, and the world was right again.”