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“Wait. This is it.”
Rin froze in her steps, teeth chattering madly. She glanced around. She could see no marker, no indication that this was the special entrance. But Altan sounded certain.
He backtracked several steps and then began scrubbing at the mountainside, wiping off snow to get at the smooth stone face underneath. He grumbled with exasperation and pressed a flaming hand against the rock. The fire gradually melted a clean circle in the ice with Altan’s hand at its center.
Rin could now see a crevice carved into the rock. It had been barely visible under a thick coat of snow and ice. A traveler could have walked past it twenty times and never seen it.
“Tyr said to stop when we reached the crag that looked like an eagle’s beak,” Altan said. He gestured toward the precipice they stood upon. It did, in fact, look like the profile of one of Qara’s birds. “I almost forgot.”
Rin dug two strips of dry cloth out of her travel sack, dribbled a vial of oil over them, and busied herself with wrapping the heads of a couple of wooden sticks. “You’ve never been inside?”
“Tyr had me wait outside,” said Altan. He stood back from the entrance. He had cleanly melted the ice away from the stone face, revealing a circular door embedded in the side of the mountain. “The only person alive who’s ever been inside is Chaghan. I’ve no idea how he got this door open. You ready?”
Rin yanked the last cloth knot tight with her teeth and nodded.
Altan turned around, braced his back against the stone door, bent his legs, and pushed. His face strained with the effort.
For a second nothing happened. Then, with a ponderous screech, the rock slid at an angle into its stone bed.
When the rock ground to a halt, Rin and Altan stood before the great maw of darkness. The tunnel was so black inside it seemed to swallow the sunlight whole. Glancing into the dark interior, Rin felt a sense of dread that had nothing to do with the darkness. Inside this mountain, there was no calling the Phoenix. They would have no access to the Pantheon. No way to call the power.
“Last chance to turn back,” said Altan.
She scoffed, handed him a torch, and strode forward.
Rin had barely made it ten feet in when she took one step too wide. The dark passageway turned out to be perilously narrow. She felt something crumble under her foot, and scrambled back against the wall. She held her torch out over the precipice and was immediately overcome with a horrible sense of vertigo. There was no visible bottom to the abyss; it dropped away into nothing.
“It’s hollow all the way down,” said Altan, standing close behind her. He put a hand on her shoulder. “Stick to me. Watch your feet. Chaghan said we’d reach a wider platform in about twenty paces.”
She pressed herself against the cliff wall and let Altan squeeze past her, following him gingerly down the steps.
“What else did Chaghan say?”
“That we would find this.” Altan held out his torch.
A lone pulley lift hung in the middle of the mountain. Rin held her torch out as far as it would go, and the light illuminated something black and shiny on the platform surface.
“That’s oil. This is a lamp,” Rin realized. She drew her arm back.
“Careful,” Altan hissed just as Rin flung her torch out onto the lift.
The ancient oil blazed immediately to life. Fire snaked through the darkness across predetermined oil patterns in a hypnotizing sequence, revealing several similar pulley lamps hanging at various heights. Only after several long minutes was the entire mountain illuminated, revealing an intricate architecture to the stone prison. Below the passageway where they stood, Rin could see circles upon circles of plinths, extending down as far as the light reached. Around and around the inside of the mountain went a spiraling pathway that led to countless stone tombs.
The pattern was oddly familiar. Rin had seen this before.
It was a stone version of the Pantheon in miniature, multiplied in a spiraling helix. It was a perverse Pantheon, for the gods were not alive here but arrested in suspended animation.
Rin felt a sudden burst of panic. She took a deep breath, trying to dispel the feeling, but the overwhelming sense of suffocation only grew.
“I feel it, too,” Altan said quietly. “It’s the mountain. We’ve been sealed off.”
Back in Tikany, Rin had once fallen out of a tree and hit her head so hard against the ground that she lost her hearing temporarily. She’d seen Kesegi shouting at her, gesturing at his throat, but nothing had come through. It was the same here. Something was missing. She had been denied access to something.
She could not imagine what it was like to be trapped here for years, decades upon decades, unable to die but unable to leave the material world. This was a place that did not allow dreaming. This was a place of never-ending nightmares.
What a horrible fate to be entombed here.
Rin’s fingers brushed against something round. Under the pressure of her touch, it shifted and began to turn. She shone her torch on it and signaled for Altan’s attention.
“Look.”
It was a stone cylinder. Rin was reminded of the prayer wheels in front of the pagoda at the Academy. But this cylinder was much larger, rising up to her shoulder. Rin held the torch up to the stone and examined it closely. Deep grooves had been cut into its sides. She placed a hand on one side and dug her heels into the dirt, pushed hard.
With a screech that sounded like a scream, the wheel began to turn.
The grooves were words. No—names. Names upon names, each one followed by a string of numbers. It was a record. A registry of every soul that had been sealed inside the Chuluu Korikh.
There must have been a hundred names carved into that wheel.
Altan held the torch up to her right. “It’s not the only one.”
She looked up and saw that the fire illuminated another record wheel.
Then another. Then another.
They stretched through the entire first tier of the Stone Mountain.
Thousands and thousands of names. Names dating past the reign of the Dragon Emperor. Names dating past the Red Emperor himself.
Rin almost staggered at the significance.
There were people here who had not been conscious since the birth of the Nikara Empire.
“The investiture of the gods,” said Altan. He was trembling. “The sheer power in this mountain . . . no one could stop them, not even the Federation . . .”
And not even us, Rin thought.
If they woke the Chuluu Korikh, they would have an army of madmen, of primordial spigots of psychic energy. This was an army they would not be able to control. This was an army that could raze the world.
Rin traced her fingers against the first record wheel, the one closest to the entrance.
At the top, in very careful, deliberate writing, was the most recent entry.
She recognized that handwriting.
“I found him,” she said.
“Who, the Gatekeeper?” Altan looked confused.
“It’s him,” she said. “Of course it’s him.”
She ran her fingers over the engraved stone, and a deep flood of relief shot through her.
Jiang Ziya.
She had found him, finally found him. Her master was sealed inside one of these plinths. She grabbed the torch back from Altan and started at a run down the steps. Whispers echoed past her as she ran. She thought she could sense things coming through from the other side, the things that had been whispering through the void Jiang summoned at Sinegard.
