Chapter 11 #3
Rin realized in retrospect she should have knelt as well, but she was too busy staring at Nezha’s brother.
Yin Jinzha. She had seen him once, briefly, three years back at her first Summer Festival in Sinegard.
Back then she’d thought that Jinzha and Nezha could have been twins, but upon closer inspection, their similarities were not really so pronounced.
Jinzha was taller, more thickly built, and he carried himself with the air of a firstborn—a son who knew he was heir to his father’s entire estate, while his younger siblings would be left to a fate of squabbling over the refuse.
“I heard you screwed up at the Autumn Palace.” Jinzha’s voice was deeper than Nezha’s. More arrogant, if that was possible. It sounded oddly familiar to Rin, but she couldn’t quite place it. “What happened?”
Nezha rose to his feet. “Hasn’t Captain Eriden briefed you?”
“Eriden didn’t see everything. Until Father recovers I’m the senior ranking general in Arlong, and I’d like to know the details.”
It’s Altan, Rin realized with a jolt. Jinzha spoke with a clipped, military precision that reminded her of Altan at his best. This was a man used to competence and immediate obedience.
“I don’t have anything to add,” Nezha said. “I was on the Seagrim.”
Jinzha’s lip curled. “Out of harm’s way. Typical.”
Rin expected Nezha to lash out at that, but he swallowed the barb with a nod. “How is Father?”
“Better now than last night. He’d been straining himself. Our physician didn’t understand how he was still alive at first.”
“But Father told me it was just a flesh wound.”
“Did you even get a good look at him? That blade went nearly all the way through his shoulder bone. He’s been lying to everyone. It’s a wonder he’s even conscious.”
“Has he asked for me?” Nezha asked.
“Why would he?” Jinzha gave his brother a patronizing look. “I’ll let you know when you’re needed.”
“Yes, sir.” Nezha dipped his head and nodded. Rin watched this exchange, fascinated. She’d never seen anyone who could bully Nezha the way Nezha tended to bully everyone else.
“You’re the Speerly.” Jinzha looked suddenly at Rin, as if he had just remembered she was there.
“Yes.” For some reason Rin’s voice came out strangled, girlish. She cleared her throat. “That’s me.”
“Go on, then,” Jinzha said. “Let’s see it.”
“What?”
“Show me what you can do,” Jinzha said very slowly, as if talking to a small child. “Make it big.”
Rin shot Nezha a confused look. “I don’t understand.”
“They say you can call fire,” Jinzha said.
“Well, yes—”
“How much? How hot? To what degree? Does it come from your body, or can you summon it from other places? What does it take for you to trigger a volcano?” Jinzha spoke at such a terribly fast clip that Rin had trouble deciphering his curt Sinegardian accent. She hadn’t struggled with that in years.
She blinked, feeling rather stupid, and when she spoke she stumbled over her words. “I mean, it just happens—”
“ ‘It just happens,’” he mimicked. “What, like a sneeze? What help is that? Explain to me how to use you.”
“I’m not someone for you to use.”
“Fancy that. The soldier won’t take orders.”
“Rin’s had a long journey,” Nezha cut in hastily. “I’m sure she’d be happy to demonstrate for you in the morning, when she’s had some rest . . .”
“Soldiers get tired, that’s part of the job,” Jinzha said. “Come on, Speerly. Show us what you’ve got.”
Nezha placed a placating hand on Rin’s arm. “Jinzha, really . . .”
Jinzha made a noise of disgust. “You should hear the way Father talks about them. Speerlies this, Speerlies that. I told him he’d be better off launching an invasion from Arlong, but no, he thought he could win a bloodless coup if he just had you. Look how that worked out.”
“Rin’s stronger than you can imagine,” Nezha said.
“You know, if the Speerlies were so strong, you’d think they’d be less dead.” Jinzha’s lip curled. “Spent my whole childhood hearing about what a marvel your precious Altan was. Turns out he was just another dirt-skinned idiot who blew himself up for nothing.”
Rin’s vision flashed red. When she looked at Jinzha she didn’t see flesh but a charred stump, ashes peeling off what used to be a man—she wanted him dying, dead, hurting. She wanted him to scream.
“You want to see what I can do?” she asked. Her voice sounded very distant, as if someone were speaking at her from very far away.
“Rin . . .” Nezha cautioned.
“No, fuck off.” She shrugged his hand off her arm. “He wants to see what I can do.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Get back.”
She turned her palms out toward Jinzha. It took nothing to summon the anger. It was already there, waiting, like water bursting forth from a dam—I hate, I hate, I hate—
Nothing happened.
Jinzha raised his eyebrows.
Rin felt a twinge of pain in her temples. She touched her finger to her eyes.
The twinge blossomed into a searing bolt of agony. She saw an explosion of colors branded behind her eyelids: reds and yellows, flames flickering over a burning village, the silhouettes of people writhing inside, a great mushroom cloud over the longbow island in miniature.
For a moment she saw a character she couldn’t recognize, swimming into shape like a nest of snakes, lingering just in front of her eyes before it disappeared. She drifted in a moment between the world in her mind and the material world. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see . . .
She sagged to her knees. She felt Nezha’s arms hoisting her up, heard him shouting for someone to help. She struggled to open her eyes. Jinzha stood above her, staring down with open contempt.
“Father was right,” he said. “We should have tried to save the other one.”
Chaghan slammed the door shut behind him. “What happened?”
“I don’t know.” Rin’s fingers clenched and unclenched around the bedsheets while Chaghan unpacked his satchel beside her.
Her voice trembled; she had spent the last half hour trying simply to breathe normally, but still her heart raced so furiously that she could barely hear her own thoughts.
“I got careless. I was going to call the fire—just a bit, I didn’t really want to hurt him, and then—”
Chaghan grabbed her wrists. “Why are you shaking?”
She hadn’t realized she was. She couldn’t stop her hands from trembling, but thinking about it only made her shake harder.
“He won’t want me anymore,” she whispered.
“Who?”
“Vaisra.”
She was terrified. If she couldn’t call the fire, then Vaisra had recruited a Speerly for nothing. Without the fire, she might be tossed away.
She’d been trying since she regained consciousness to call the fire, but the result was always the same—a searing pain in her temples, a burst of color, and flashes of visions she never wanted to see again.
She couldn’t tell what was wrong, only that the fire remained out of her reach, and without the fire she was nothing but useless.
Another tremor passed through her body.
“Just calm down,” Chaghan said. He set the satchel on the floor and knelt beside her. “Focus on me. Look in my eyes.”
She obeyed.
Chaghan’s eyes, pale and without pupils or irises, were normally unsettling. But up close they were strangely alluring, two shards of a snowy landscape embedded in his thin face that drew her in like some hypnotized prey.
“What is wrong with me?” she whispered.
“I don’t know. Why don’t we find out?” Chaghan rummaged in his satchel, closed his fist around something, and offered her a handful of bright blue powder.
She recognized the drug. It was the ground-up dust of some dried northern fungus. She’d ingested it once before with Chaghan in Khurdalain, when she’d taken him to the immaterial realm where Mai’rinnen Tearza was haunting her.
Chaghan wanted to accompany her to the inner recesses of her mind, the point where her soul ascended to the plane of the gods.
“Afraid?” he asked when she hesitated.
Not afraid. Ashamed. Rin didn’t want to bring Chaghan into her mind. She was scared of what he might see.
“Do you have to come?” she asked.
“You can’t do it alone. I’m all you’ve got. You have to trust me.”
“Will you promise to stop if I ask you to?”
Chaghan scoffed, reached for her hand, and pressed her finger into the powder. “We’ll stop when I say we can stop.”
“Chaghan.”
He gave her a frank look. “Do you really have another option?”
The drug began to act almost from the moment it hit her tongue.
Rin was surprised at how fast and clean the high was.
Poppy seeds were so frustratingly slow, a gradual crawl into the realm of spirit that worked only if she concentrated, but this drug was like a kick through the door between this world and the next.
Chaghan grabbed her hand just before the infirmary faded from her vision. They departed the mortal plane in a swirl of colors. Then it was just the two of them in an expanse of black. Drifting. Searching.
Rin knew what she had to do. She homed in on her anger and created the link to the Phoenix that pulled their souls from the chasm of nothing toward the Pantheon. She could almost feel the Phoenix, the scorching heat of its divinity washing over her, could almost hear its malicious cackle—
Then something dimmed its presence, cut her off.
Something massive materialized before them. There was no way to describe it other than a giant word, slashed into empty space. Twelve strokes hung in the air, a great pictogram the shimmering hue of green-blue snakeskin, glinting in the unnatural brightness like freshly spilled blood.
“That’s impossible,” Chaghan said. “She shouldn’t be able to do this.”
The pictogram looked both entirely familiar and entirely foreign. Rin couldn’t read it, though it had to be written in the Nikara script. It came close to resembling several characters she knew but deviated from all of them in significant ways.
This was something ancient, then. Something old; something that predated the Red Emperor. “What is this?”