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“I doubt it.” Jiang sneered. “I’ve had enough of playing philosopher with a people so timid they shrink from the Pantheon. I need hard power. Military might. The Horse Warlord can give us that. What can you give me? Endless conversations about the cosmos?”
“You’ve no idea how ignorant you still are.” Tseveri gave him a pitying look. “I see you’ve anchored yourselves. Did it hurt?”
Rin had no idea what that meant, but she saw Daji flinch.
“Don’t be surprised,” Tseveri said. “You’re so obviously bound. I can see it shining out of you. You think it makes you strong, but it’s going to destroy you.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jiang said.
“No?” Tseveri tilted her head. “Then here’s a prophecy for you. Your bond will shatter. You will destroy one another. One will die, one will rule, and one will sleep for eternity.”
“That’s impossible,” Daji scoffed. “None of us can die. Not while the others live.”
“That’s what you think,” said Tseveri.
“Enough of this,” Riga said. Rin was stricken by how much he even sounded like Nezha. “This isn’t what we came for.”
“You came to start a war you don’t need to fight. And you ignore me at your peril.” Tseveri reached for Jiang’s hand. “Ziya. Please. Don’t do this to me.”
Jiang refused to meet her eye.
Daji yawned, making a desultory attempt to cover her mouth with the back of a dainty pale hand. “We can do this the easy way. Nobody needs to get hurt. Or we could just start fighting.”
Kalagan leveled her spear at her. “Don’t presume, little girl.”
A crackling energy charged the air. Even through the distance of memory Rin could sense how the fabric of the desert had changed. The boundaries of the material world were thinning, threatening to warp and give way to the world of spirit.
Something was happening to Jiang.
His shadow writhed madly against the bright sand. The shape was not Jiang’s own, but something terrible—a myriad of beasts, so many in size and form, shifting faster and faster, with a growing desperation, as if frantic to break free.
The beasts were in Jiang, too. Rin could see them, shadows rippling under his skin, horrible patches of black straining to get out.
Tseveri cried something in her own language—a plea or an incantation, Rin didn’t know, but it sounded like despair.
Daji laughed.
“No!” Rin shouted, but Jiang didn’t hear her—couldn’t hear her, because all of this had already come to pass. All she could do was watch helplessly as Jiang forced his hand into Tseveri’s rib cage and ripped out her still-beating heart.
Kalagan screamed.
“That’s enough,” said the present Sorqan Sira, and the last things Rin saw were Daji whipping her needles toward the Ketreyids, Jiang and his beasts pinning down the Sorqan Sira, and Riga, standing impassively, watching the carnage with that wise and caring face, arms raised beatifically as if he blessed the slaughter with his presence.
“We gave the Nikara the keys to the heavens, and they stole our land and murdered my daughter.” The Sorqan Sira’s voice was flat, emotionless, as if she were merely recounting an interesting anecdote, as if her pain had already been processed so many times she could not feel it anymore.
Rin bent over on her hands and knees, gasping. She couldn’t scrub the image of Jiang from her mind. Jiang, her master, cackling with his hands covered with blood.
“Surprised?” asked the Sorqan Sira.
“But I knew him,” Rin whispered. “I know what he’s like, he’s not like that . . .”
“How would you know what the Gatekeeper is like?” The Sorqan Sira sneered. “Have you ever asked him about his past? Did you have any idea?”
The worst part was that it all made sense—the truth had dawned on Rin, awful and bitter, and the mystery of Jiang was clear to her now; she knew why he’d fled, why he’d hidden in the Chuluu Korikh.
He must have been starting to remember.
The man she had met at Sinegard had been no more than a shade of a person; a pathetic, affable shade of a personality suppressed. He had not been pretending. She was certain of that. No one could pretend that well.
He had simply not known. The Seal had stolen his memories, just like it would one day steal hers, and hidden them behind a wall in his mind.
Was it better now that he remained in his stone prison, suspended halfway between amnesia and sanity?
“You see now. You’ll understand if we’d rather put an end to you.” The Sorqan Sira nodded to Bekter.
Her unspoken command rang clear in Rin’s mind. Kill them.
“Wait!” Rin struggled to her feet. “Please—you don’t have to—”
“I don’t entertain begging, girl.”
“I’m not begging, I’m bartering,” Rin said quickly. “We have the same enemy. You want Daji dead. You want revenge. Yes? So do I. Kill us, and you’ve lost an ally.”
The Sorqan Sira scoffed. “We can kill the Vipress easily enough ourselves.”
“No, you can’t. If you could, she’d be dead already. You’re scared of her.” Rin thought frantically as she spoke, spinning an argument together from thin air. “In twenty years you haven’t even ventured south, haven’t attempted to take back your lands. Why? Because you know the Vipress will destroy you. You’ve lost to her before. You don’t dare to face her again.”
The Sorqan Sira’s eyes narrowed, but she said nothing. Rin felt a desperate stab of hope. If her words angered the Ketreyids, that meant she had touched on a fragment of the truth. It meant she still had a chance of convincing them.
“But you’ve seen what I can do,” she continued. “You know that I could fight her, because you know what Speerlies are capable of. I’ve faced the Empress before. Set me free, and I’ll fight your battles for you.”
The Sorqan Sira shot Chaghan a question in her own language. They conversed for a moment. Chaghan’s words sounded hesitant and deferential; the Sorqan Sira’s harsh and angry. Their eyes darted once in a while to Kitay, who shifted uncomfortably, confused.
“She will do it,” Chaghan said finally in Nikara. “She won’t have a choice.”
“I’ll do what?” Rin asked.
They ignored her to keep arguing.
“This is not worth the risk,” Bekter interrupted. “Mother, you know this. Speerlies go mad faster than the rest.”
Chaghan shook his head. “Not this one. She’s stable.”
“No Speerlies are stable,” said Bekter.
“She fought it,” Chaghan insisted. “She’s off opium. She hasn’t touched it in months.”
“An adult Speerly who doesn’t smoke?” The Sorqan Sira cocked her head. “That’d be a first.”
“It makes no difference,” Bekter said. “The Phoenix will take her. It always does. Better to kill her now—”
Chaghan spoke over him, appealing directly to his aunt. “I have seen her at her worst. If the Phoenix could, then it would have already.”
