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The question caught Rin by surprise. She hadn’t even considered trying to restore her lost hand. She blinked, not answering, caught between saying the obvious yes, please, try it now, and the fear of letting herself hope.
“I don’t know if I can,” Lianhua said quickly. “And I mean—if you don’t want to—”
“No—no, sorry,” Rin said hastily. “Of course I want to. Yes. Go ahead.”
Lianhua peeled the sleeve back from over her stump and rested her cool fingers where Rin’s wrist ended in a smooth mound. Several minutes passed. Lianhua sat still, her eyes squeezed tight in concentration, but Rin felt nothing—no heat, no prickle—except a phantom tingle where her hand ought to be. Minutes trickled by, but the tingle, if it was ever real, never intensified into anything else.
“Stop it,” she said at last. She couldn’t do this anymore. “That’s enough.”
Lianhua seemed to shrink in apology. “I guess, um, there are limits. But maybe I can try again, if . . .”
“Don’t worry.” Rin yanked the sleeve back over her wrist, hoping that Lianhua didn’t notice the catch in her voice. Why did her chest feel so tight? She’d known it wouldn’t work; it’d been stupid to imagine. “It’s fine. There are some things you can’t fix.”
In terms of sheer spectacle, Dulin trumped all of them. One week later, after so many failed attempts that Rin considered putting him out of his misery, he took an extra dose of poppy seeds with a look of stubborn determination on his face and promptly summoned the Great Tortoise.
In every myth Rin had ever been told, the Tortoise was a patient, protective, and benevolent creature. It was the dark guardian of the earth, representing longevity and cool, fertile soil. Villagers in Tikany wore jade pendants etched like tortoiseshells to bring good luck and stability. In Sinegard, great stone tortoises were often planted in front of tombs to safeguard the spirits of the dead.
Dulin evoked none of that. He opened a sinkhole in the ground.
It happened without warning. One moment the dirt was steady beneath their feet, and the next a circle with a diameter of about five feet appeared inside the hut, dropping down to pitch-black, uncertain depths. By some miracle none of them fell inside; shrieking, Pipaji and Lianhua scrambled away from the edge.
The sinkhole ended right at Dulin’s feet. It had stopped growing, but the soil and rocks at the edges were still crumbling into the hole, echoing into nowhere.
Rin spoke slowly, trying not to startle Dulin in case he accidentally buried them all. “Very good. Now do you think you might be able to close that thing back up?”
He looked dazed, gaping at the sinkhole as if trying to convince himself that not only did it exist, he was in fact the one who had created it. “I don’t know.”
He was trembling. Lightly, she placed a hand on his shoulder. “What are you feeling?”
“It’s—it’s hungry.” Dulin sounded confused. “I think—it wants more.”
“More what?”
“More . . . exposure. It wants to see the sunlight.” His voice caught. Rin could guess which memory he’d invoked when he reached the Pantheon. She knew he was remembering how it felt to be buried alive. “It wants to be free.”
“Fair enough,” Rin said. “But perhaps try that when you’re a good distance away from the rest of us.”
Dulin swallowed hard, then nodded. The pit stopped rumbling.
“General Fang?” Pipaji called from across the sinkhole. “I think we need a bigger hut.”
The next day Rin and her recruits set out before sunrise to trek out into the desert plateau, where nothing they summoned could hurt anyone at Cholang’s settlement.
“How far out are you going?” Kitay asked.
“Five miles,” she said.
“Not far enough. Go at least ten.”
“I’ll be out of your range!”
“Eight, then,” he said. “But get them as far away from here as you can. There’s no point wiping us out before Nezha does it for us.”
So Rin slung a satchel stuffed with four days’ worth of provisions and enough drugs to kill an elephant over her back, then led her recruits out toward the vast expanse of the Scarigon Plateau. They marched for the better part of the morning, and didn’t stop until the sun climbed high into the cloudless, intensely blue sky, baking the air into a scorching heat that even the winds couldn’t dissipate.
“Here is good,” Rin decided. Flat, arid steppe extended in every direction as far as her eye could see. They were nowhere near any trees, boulders, or hills that could serve as shelter, but that would be all right; they’d packed canvas for two tents, and the skies didn’t promise any precipitation for several days at least.
She pulled her satchel off and let it drop on the ground. “Everyone have a drink of water, then we’ll get to work.”
Pipaji was already suckling greedily from her canteen. She hiccuped and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “What exactly are we doing?”
Rin grinned. “Stand back.”
They took a few steps backward, watching her warily.
“Farther.”
She waited until they were at least twenty paces away. Then she stretched a hand into the sky and called down the fire.
It rippled through her like a bolt of lightning. It was delicious. She pulled forth more, reveling in the wanton release of power, the reckless indulgence that brought echoes of the sheer ecstasy she’d experienced on Mount Tianshan.
She saw their faces, wide-eyed with admiration and delight, and she laughed.
She lingered in the column of heat for just a few more delectable seconds, and then pulled the flames back into her body.
“Your turn,” she said.
For the next few hours Rin supervised as Pipaji and Lianhua pitted their skills against each other. Pipaji would kneel down and press her hands against the dirt. Seconds later all kinds of creatures—worms, snakes, long-legged steppe rats, burrowing birds—would bubble up to the surface, writhing and screeching, clawing desperately at the black veins that shot through their bulging forms.
“Stop,” Rin would say, and Lianhua would hastily begin the process of reversal, healing the creatures one by one until the rot had faded away.
The limits to Lianhua’s skills quickly became obvious. She could make superficial wounds disappear in under a minute, and she could heal broken bones and internal hemorrhaging if given a little more time, but she seemed only able to reverse injuries that were not life-threatening. Most of Pipaji’s targets were close to death within seconds, and even Lianhua’s best efforts could not bring them back.
Pipaji’s limits were less clear. At first Rin had thought she required skin-to-skin contact with her victims, but then it became clear her poison could seep through dirt, reaching organisms up to several feet away.
“Try the pond water,” Rin suggested. A horrible, exciting thought had just occurred to her, but she didn’t want to voice it aloud until she had confirmation. “See if that speeds up dissemination.”
“We need that water to drink,” Dulin protested. “The next pond’s a mile away.”
“So fill up your canteens now, and then we’ll move our camp to the other pond once Pipaji’s finished,” Rin said.
