But Altan was certain they would fight for him.
They have no right to begrudge the Empress, Altan had said. All shamans know the risks when they journey to the gods. Everyone in the Cike knows that at the end of the line, they are destined for the Stone Mountain.
And the alternative was the extermination of every Nikara alive. The massacre of Golyn Niis made it obvious that the Federation did not want to take any prisoners. They wanted the massive piece of land that was the Nikara Empire. They were not interested in cohabitation with its former occupants. She knew the risks, and she had weighed them and concluded that she didn’t care. She had thrown her lot in with Altan, for better or worse.
“You can’t change my mind,” she said. “I’m telling you this as a favor. When we come out of that mountain, I don’t know how much control we’ll have, only that we’ll be powerful. Do not try to stop us. Do not try to join us. When we come, you should flee.”
“The rendezvous point will be at the base of the Kukhonin Mountains,” Altan told the assembled Cike. “If we don’t meet you there in seven days’ time, assume we were killed. Do not go inside the mountain yourselves. Wait for a bird from Qara and do as the message commands. Chaghan is commander in my stead.”
“Where is Chaghan?” Unegen ventured to ask.
“With Qara.” Altan’s face betrayed nothing. “They’ve gone north on my orders. You’ll know when they’re back.”
“When will that be?”
“When they’ve done their job.”
Rin waited by their horse, watched Altan speaking with a self-assured aura that she had not seen since Sinegard. Altan, as he presented himself now, was not that broken boy with the opium pipe. He was not the despairing Speerly reliving the genocide of his people. He was not a victim. Altan was different now than he had been even in Khurdalain. He was no longer frustrated, pacing around his office like a cornered animal, no longer constrained under Jun’s thumb. Altan had orders now, a mission, a singular purpose. He didn’t have to hold back anymore. He had been let off his leash. Altan was going to take his anger to a final, terrible conclusion.
She had no doubts they would succeed. She just didn’t know if the country would survive his plan.
“Good luck,” said Enki. “Say hi to Feylen for us.”
“Great guy,” Unegen said wistfully. “Until, you know, he tried to flatten everything in a twenty-mile radius.”
“Don’t exaggerate,” said Ramsa. “It was only ten.”
They rode as fast as the old gelding would allow. At midday they passed a boulder with two lines etched into its side. She would have missed it if Altan had not pointed it out.
“Chaghan’s work,” said Altan. “Proof that the way is safe.”
“You sent Chaghan here?”
“Yes. Before we left the Night Castle for Khurdalain.”
“Why?”
“Chaghan and I . . . Chaghan had a theory,” said Altan. “About the Trifecta. Before Sinegard, when he realized Tyr had died, he’d seen something on the spirit horizon. He thought he’d seen the Gatekeeper. He saw the same disturbance a week later, and then it disappeared. He thought the Gatekeeper must have intentionally closed himself in the Chuluu Korikh. We thought we might extract him, find out the truth—maybe discover the truth behind the Trifecta, see what’s happened to the Gatekeeper and the Emperor, find out what the Empress did to them. Chaghan didn’t know I wanted to free anyone else.”
“You lied to him.”
Altan shrugged. “Chaghan believes what he wants to believe.”
“Chaghan also . . . He said . . .” She trailed off, unsure of how to phrase her question.
“What?” Altan demanded.
“He said they trained you like a dog. At Sinegard.”
Altan laughed drily. “He phrased it like that, did he?”
“He said they fed you opium.”
Altan stiffened.
“They trained soldiers at Sinegard,” he said. “With me, they did their job.”
They might have done their job too well, Rin thought. Like the Cike, the masters at Sinegard had conjured a more frightening power than they were equipped to handle. They’d done more than train a Speerly. They’d created an avenger.
Altan was a commander who would burn down the world to destroy his enemy.
This should have bothered her. Three years ago, if she had known what she knew about Altan now, she would have run in the opposite direction.
But now, she had seen and suffered too much. The Empire didn’t need someone reasonable. It needed someone mad enough to try to save it.
They stopped riding when it became too dark to see the path in front of them. They had ventured onto a trail so lightly trodden it could hardly be called a road, and their horse could have easily cut its hooves on a jagged rock or sent them tumbling into a ravine. Their gelding staggered when they dismounted. Altan poured out a pan of water for it, but only after Rin’s prodding did it begin to halfheartedly drink.
“He’ll die if we ride him any harder,” Rin said. She knew very little about horses, but she could tell when an animal was on the verge of collapse. One of the military steeds at Khurdalain, perhaps, could have easily made the trip, but this horse was a miserable pack animal—an old beast so thin its ribs showed through its matted coat.
“We just need him for one more day,” said Altan. “He can die after.”
Rin fed the gelding a handful of oats from their pack. Meanwhile Altan built their camp with austere, methodical efficiency. He collected fallen pine needles and dry leaves to insulate against the cold. He formed a frame out of broken tree limbs and draped a spare cloak over it to shield against overnight snowfall. He pulled from his pack dry kindling and oil, quickly dug a pit, and arranged the flammables inside. He extended his hand. A flare caught immediately. Casually, as if he were doing nothing harder than waving a fan, Altan increased the volume of the flame until they were sitting before a roaring bonfire.
Rin held her hands out, let the heat seep through into her bones. She hadn’t noticed how cold she’d become over the day; she realized she hadn’t been able to feel her toes until now.
“Are you warm?” Altan asked.
She nodded quickly. “Thanks.”
He watched her in silence for a moment. She felt the heat of his gaze on her, and tried not to flush. She was not used to receiving Altan’s full attention; he had been distracted with Chaghan ever since Khurdalain, ever since their falling-out. But things were reversed now. Chaghan had abandoned Altan, and Rin stood by his side. She felt a thrill of vindictive joy when she considered this. Suddenly guilty, she tried to quash it down.
“You’ve been to the mountain before?”
“Only once,” Altan said. “A year ago. I helped Tyr bring Feylen in.”
“Feylen’s the one who went crazy?”
“They all go crazy, in the end,” he said. “The Cike die in battle, or they get immured. Most commanders assume their title when they’ve disposed of their old master. If Tyr hadn’t died, I probably would have locked him in myself. It’s always a pain when it happens.”
“Why aren’t they just killed?” she asked.
“You can’t kill a shaman who’s been fully possessed,” said Altan. “When that happens, the shaman isn’t human anymore. They’re not mortal. They’re vessels of the divine. You can behead them, stab them, hang them, but the body will keep moving. You dismember the body, and still the pieces will skitter to rejoin the others. The best you can do is bind them, incapacitate them, and overpower them until you get them into the mountain.”
Rin imagined herself bound and blindfolded, dragged involuntarily along this same mountain path into an eternal stone prison. She shuddered. She could understand this sort of cruelty from the Federation, but from her own commander?
“And you’re all right with that?”