Chapter 23 #2
“They’re psychedelics,” Chaghan said. “They’re all poisonous. The whole point is to deliver you right to the doorstep of the afterworld.”
Rin popped the mushrooms in her mouth and chewed.
They were tough and tasteless, and she had to work her teeth for several minutes before they were tender enough to go down.
She had the unpleasant sensation that she was chewing through a lump of flesh every time her teeth cut into the fibrous chunks.
Chaghan passed Kitay a wooden cup. “If you don’t want to eat the mushroom you can drink the agaric instead.”
Kitay sniffed it, took a sip, and gagged. “What’s in this?”
“Horse urine,” Chaghan said cheerfully. “We feed the mushrooms to the horses, and you get the drug after it passes. Goes down easier.”
“Your people are disgusting,” Kitay muttered. He pinched his nose, tossed the contents of the cup back into his throat, and gagged.
Rin swallowed. Dry lumps of mushroom pushed painfully down her throat.
“What happens to you when your anchor dies?” she asked.
“You die,” Chaghan said. “Your souls are bound, which means they depart this earth together. One pulls the other along.”
“That’s not strictly true,” Qara said. “It’s a choice. You can choose to depart this earth together. Or you may break the bond.”
“You can?” Rin asked. “How?”
Qara exchanged a look with Chaghan. “With your last word. If both partners are willing.”
Kitay frowned. “I don’t understand. Why is this a liability, then?”
“Because once you have an anchor, they become a part of your soul. Your very existence. They know your thoughts. They feel what you feel. They are the only ones who completely and fully understand you. Most would die rather than give that up.”
“And you’d both have to be in the same place when one of you died,” said Chaghan. “Most people aren’t.”
“But you can break it,” Rin said.
“You could,” Chaghan said. “Though I doubt the Sorqan Sira will teach you how.”
Of course not. Rin knew the Sorqan Sira would want Kitay as insurance—not only to ensure that her weapon against Daji kept working, but as a failsafe in case she ever decided to put Rin down.
“Did Altan have an anchor?” she asked. Altan had possessed an eerie amount of control for a Speerly.
“No. The Speerlies didn’t know how to do it. Altan was . . . whatever Altan was doing, that was inhuman. Near the end, he was staying sane off of sheer willpower alone.” Chaghan swallowed. “I offered many times. He always said no.”
“But you already have an anchor,” said Rin. “You can have more than one?”
“Not at the same time. A pairwise bond is optimal. A triangular bond is deeply unstable, because unpredictability in reciprocation means that any defection on one end affects the other two in ways that you cannot protect against.”
“But?” Kitay pressed.
“But it can also amplify your abilities. Make you stronger than any shaman has the right to be.”
“Like the Trifecta,” Rin realized. “They’re bonded to each other. That’s why they’re so powerful.”
It made so much sense now—why Daji had not killed Jiang if they were enemies. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t, without killing herself.
She sat up with a start. “So that means . . .”
“Yes,” said Chaghan. “As long as Daji is alive, the Dragon Emperor and the Gatekeeper are both still alive. It’s possible their bond was dissolved, but I doubt it.
Daji’s power is far too stable. The other two are out there, somewhere.
But my guess is that they can’t be doing too well, because the rest of the country thinks they’re dead. ”
You will destroy one another. One will die, one will rule, and one will sleep for eternity.
Kitay voiced the question on Rin’s mind. “Then what happened to them? Why did they go missing?”
Chaghan shrugged. “You’d have to ask the other two. Have you finished drinking?”
Kitay drained the cup and winced. “Ugh. Yes.”
“Good. Now eat the mushrooms.”
Kitay blinked. “What?”
“There’s no agaric in that cup,” Chaghan said.
“Oh, you asshole,” Rin said.
“I don’t understand,” Kitay said.
Chaghan gave him a thin smile. “I just wanted to see if you’d drink horse piss.”
The Sorqan Sira waited outside before a roaring fire.
The flames seemed alive to Rin; the tendrils jumped too high, reached too far, like little hands trying to pull her into the blaze.
If she let her gaze linger, the smoke, turned purple by the Sorqan Sira’s powders, started taking on the faces of the dead.
Master Irjah. Aratsha. Captain Salkhi. Altan.
“Are you ready?” asked the Sorqan Sira.
Rin blinked the faces away.
She knelt across from Kitay on the frigid dirt. Despite the cold, they were permitted to wear only trousers and undershirts that exposed their bare arms. The inky characters trailing down their skin shone in the firelight.
She was terrified. He didn’t look afraid at all.
“I’m ready,” he said. His voice was steady.
“Ready,” she echoed.
Between them lay two long, serrated knives and a sacrifice.
Rin didn’t know how the Ketreyids had managed to trap an adult deer, massive and healthy, without any visible wounds, in just a matter of hours.
Its legs were bound tightly together. Rin suspected that the animal had been sedated, because it lay quite still on the dirt, eyes half-open as if it were resigned to its fate.
The effect of the agaric had begun to set in. Everything seemed terribly bright. When objects moved in her field of vision, they left behind trails like streaks of paint that sparked and swirled before they faded away.
She focused with difficulty on the deer’s neck.
She and Kitay were to make two cuts, one on either side of the animal, so that neither could bear full responsibility for its death.
Alone, each wound would be insufficient to kill.
The deer might drag itself away, cover the cut in mud and somehow survive.
But wounds on both sides meant certain death.
Rin picked her knife off the ground and gripped it tightly in her hands.
“Repeat after me,” said the Sorqan Sira, and uttered a slow stream of Ketreyid words. The foreign syllables sounded clunky and awkward in Rin’s mouth. She knew their meaning only because the twins had explained them to her.
We will live as one. We will fight as one.
And we will kill as one.
“The sacrifice,” said the Sorqan Sira.
They brought their knives down.
Rin found it harder than she’d expected. Not because she was unused to killing—cutting through flesh was as easy to her now as breathing. It was the fur that offered resistance. She clenched her teeth and pushed harder. The knife sank into the deer’s side.
The deer arched its neck and screamed.
Rin’s knife hadn’t gone in deep enough. She had to widen the cut. Her hands shook madly; the handle was loose between her fingers.
But Kitay dragged his knife across the deer’s side with one clean, steady stroke.
Blood pooled, fast and dark, around their knees. The deer stopped writhing. Its head drooped to the ground.
Through the haze of the agaric, Rin saw the moment the deer’s life left its body—a golden, shimmering aura that lingered over the corpse like an ethereal copy of its physical form before drifting upward like smoke. She tilted her head up, watched it floating higher and higher toward the heavens.
“Follow it,” said the Sorqan Sira.
She did. It seemed such a simple matter. Under the agaric’s influence her soul was lighter than air itself. Her mind ascended, her material body became a distant memory, and she flew up into the vast and dark void that was the cosmos.
She found herself standing on the periphery of a great circle, its circumference etched with glowing Hexagrams—characters that together spelled the nature of the universe, the sixty-four deities that constituted all that was and would ever be.
The circle tilted and became a pool, inside which swam two massive carp, one white, one black, each with a large dot of the opposite color on its flank. They drifted lazily, chasing each other in a slow-moving, eternal circle.
She saw Kitay on the other side of the circle. He was naked. It was not a physical nakedness; he was made more of light than he was of body—but every thought, every memory, and every feeling he’d ever had shone out toward her. Nothing was hidden.
She was similarly naked before him. All of her secrets, her insecurities, her guilt, and her rage had been laid bare.
He saw her cruelest, most brutal desires.
He saw parts of her that she didn’t even understand herself.
The part that was terrified of being alone and terrified of being the last. The part that realized it loved pain, adored it, could find release only in pain.
And she could see him. She saw the way that concepts were stored in his mind, great repositories of knowledge linked together to be called up at a moment’s notice.
She saw the anxiety that came with being the only person he knew who was this smart.
She saw how scared he was, trapped and isolated in his own mind, watching his world break down around him because of irrationalities that he could not fix.
And she understood his sadness. The grief; the loss of a father, but more than just that—the loss of an empire, the loss of loyalty, of duty, his sole meaning for existence—
She saw his fury.
How had it taken her this long to understand? She wasn’t the only one fueled by anger. But where her rage was explosive, immediate and devastating, Kitay’s burned with a silent determination; it festered and rotted and lingered, and the strength of his hate stunned her.
We’re the same.
Kitay wanted vengeance and blood. Under that frail veneer of control was an ongoing scream of rage that originated in confusion and culminated in an overwhelming urge for destruction, if only so he could tear the world down and rebuild it in a way that made sense.