spine. But here, no first-years had scattered salt across the ice to make the ground safe. If they slipped now, they were guaranteed a quick, icy death.
Altan used his trident as a staff, stabbing at the ground in front of him before he stepped forward. Rin followed gingerly in the path he had marked as safe. She suggested that they simply melt the ice with Speerly fire. Altan tried it. It took too long.
The sky had just begun to darken when Altan paused before a stretch of wall.
“Wait. This is it.”
Rin froze in her steps, teeth chattering madly. She glanced around. She could see no marker, no indication that this was the special entrance. But Altan sounded certain.
He backtracked several steps and then began scrubbing at the mountainside, wiping off snow to get at the smooth stone face underneath. He grumbled with exasperation and pressed a flaming hand against the rock. The fire gradually melted a clean circle in the ice with Altan’s hand at its center.
Rin could now see a crevice carved into the rock. It had been barely visible under a thick coat of snow and ice. A traveler could have walked past it twenty times and never seen it.
“Tyr said to stop when we reached the crag that looked like an eagle’s beak,” Altan said. He gestured toward the precipice they stood upon. It did, in fact, look like the profile of one of Qara’s birds. “I almost forgot.”
Rin dug two strips of dry cloth out of her travel sack, dribbled a vial of oil over them, and busied herself with wrapping the heads of a couple of wooden sticks. “You’ve never been inside?”
“Tyr had me wait outside,” said Altan. He stood back from the entrance. He had cleanly melted the ice away from the stone face, revealing a circular door embedded in the side of the mountain. “The only person alive who’s ever been inside is Chaghan. I’ve no idea how he got this door open. You ready?”
Rin yanked the last cloth knot tight with her teeth and nodded.
Altan turned around, braced his back against the stone door, bent his legs, and pushed. His face strained with the effort.
For a second nothing happened. Then, with a ponderous screech, the rock slid at an angle into its stone bed.
When the rock ground to a halt, Rin and Altan stood before the great maw of darkness. The tunnel was so black inside it seemed to swallow the sunlight whole. Glancing into the dark interior, Rin felt a sense of dread that had nothing to do with the darkness. Inside this mountain, there was no calling the Phoenix. They would have no access to the Pantheon. No way to call the power.
“Last chance to turn back,” said Altan.
She scoffed, handed him a torch, and strode forward.
Rin had barely made it ten feet in when she took one step too wide. The dark passageway turned out to be perilously narrow. She felt something crumble under her foot, and scrambled back against the wall. She held her torch out over the precipice and was immediately overcome with a horrible sense of vertigo. There was no visible bottom to the abyss; it dropped away into nothing.
“It’s hollow all the way down,” said Altan, standing close behind her. He put a hand on her shoulder. “Stick to me. Watch your feet. Chaghan said we’d reach a wider platform in about twenty paces.”
She pressed herself against the cliff wall and let Altan squeeze past her, following him gingerly down the steps.
“What else did Chaghan say?”
“That we would find this.” Altan held out his torch.
A lone pulley lift hung in the middle of the mountain. Rin held her torch out as far as it would go, and the light illuminated something black and shiny on the platform surface.
“That’s oil. This is a lamp,” Rin realized. She drew her arm back.
“Careful,” Altan hissed just as Rin flung her torch out onto the lift.
The ancient oil blazed immediately to life. Fire snaked through the darkness across predetermined oil patterns in a hypnotizing sequence, revealing several similar pulley lamps hanging at various heights. Only after several long minutes was the entire mountain illuminated, revealing an intricate architecture to the stone prison. Below the passageway where they stood, Rin could see circles upon circles of plinths, extending down as far as the light reached. Around and around the inside of the mountain went a spiraling pathway that led to countless stone tombs.
The pattern was oddly familiar. Rin had seen