The Poppy War (The Poppy War #1) - R. F. Kuang Page 0,175
this before.
It was a stone version of the Pantheon in miniature, multiplied in a spiraling helix. It was a perverse Pantheon, for the gods were not alive here but arrested in suspended animation.
Rin felt a sudden burst of panic. She took a deep breath, trying to dispel the feeling, but the overwhelming sense of suffocation only grew.
“I feel it, too,” Altan said quietly. “It’s the mountain. We’ve been sealed off.”
Back in Tikany, Rin had once fallen out of a tree and hit her head so hard against the ground that she lost her hearing temporarily. She’d seen Kesegi shouting at her, gesturing at his throat, but nothing had come through. It was the same here. Something was missing. She had been denied access to something.
She could not imagine what it was like to be trapped here for years, decades upon decades, unable to die but unable to leave the material world. This was a place that did not allow dreaming. This was a place of never-ending nightmares.
What a horrible fate to be entombed here.
Rin’s fingers brushed against something round. Under the pressure of her touch, it shifted and began to turn. She shone her torch on it and signaled for Altan’s attention.
“Look.”
It was a stone cylinder. Rin was reminded of the prayer wheels in front of the pagoda at the Academy. But this cylinder was much larger, rising up to her shoulder. Rin held the torch up to the stone and examined it closely. Deep grooves had been cut into its sides. She placed a hand on one side and dug her heels into the dirt, pushed hard.
With a screech that sounded like a scream, the wheel began to turn.
The grooves were words. No—names. Names upon names, each one followed by a string of numbers. It was a record. A registry of every soul that had been sealed inside the Chuluu Korikh.
There must have been a hundred names carved into that wheel.
Altan held the torch up to her right. “It’s not the only one.”
She looked up and saw that the fire illuminated another record wheel.
Then another. Then another.
They stretched through the entire first tier of the Stone Mountain.
Thousands and thousands of names. Names dating past the reign of the Dragon Emperor. Names dating past the Red Emperor himself.
Rin almost staggered at the significance.
There were people here who had not been conscious since the birth of the Nikara Empire.
“The investiture of the gods,” said Altan. He was trembling. “The sheer power in this mountain . . . no one could stop them, not even the Federation . . .”
And not even us, Rin thought.
If they woke the Chuluu Korikh, they would have an army of madmen, of primordial spigots of psychic energy. This was an army they would not be able to control. This was an army that could raze the world.
Rin traced her fingers against the first record wheel, the one closest to the entrance.
At the top, in very careful, deliberate writing, was the most recent entry.
She recognized that handwriting.
“I found him,” she said.
“Who, the Gatekeeper?” Altan looked confused.
“It’s him,” she said. “Of course it’s him.”
She ran her fingers over the engraved stone, and a deep flood of relief shot through her.
Jiang Ziya.
She had found him, finally found him. Her master was sealed inside one of these plinths. She grabbed the torch back from Altan and started at a run down the steps. Whispers echoed past her as she ran. She thought she could sense things coming through from the other side, the things that had been whispering through the void Jiang summoned at Sinegard.
She felt in the air an overwhelming want.
They must have immured the shamans starting at the bottom of the prison. Jiang could not be far from where they stood. Rin ran faster, felt the stone scrape under her feet. Up before her, her torch illuminated a plinth carved in the image of a stooped gatekeeper. She came to a sudden halt.
This had to be Jiang.
Altan caught up to her. “Don’t just take off like that.”
“He’s here,” she said, shining her torch up at the plinth. “He’s in there.”
“Move,” said Altan.
She had barely stepped out of the way when Altan slammed the end of his trident into the plinth.
When the rubble cleared, Jiang’s serene form was revealed under a layer of crumbling dust. He lay perfectly still against the rock, the sides of his mouth curved faintly upward as if he found something deeply amusing. He might have been sleeping.