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Chapter Forty-Four: The Emperor’s Mausoleum
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
THE EMPEROR’S MAUSOLEUM
With some qi gleaned into my armor from the White Tiger, I fly off under cover of the ruthless inferno, alone. I push myself past the gnawing, all-consuming grief chasing at the back of my mind. The moment I slow down or hesitate, it will catch up, and it will rip me apart.
It doesn’t prove hard to find another nomad. They’ve been waiting for this for two centuries—of course they’d do anything to get our attention. Once I fly high enough to glance beyond the pillar peaks, I spot their columns of signal smoke.
It shouldn’t matter which one I approach if they have a unanimous message to deliver regarding Qin Zheng. I go for the nearest one and flap down into the Hundun hole he—she’s in. Awe cuts through the blank white in my mind at the sight of this elderly woman on a buff stallion, her silver hair braided behind her, no softness or submission in her gaze.
Breathing hard, I show her the syringe and vial in the antiviral kit. She almost leaps off her horse with a cry of utter elation.
We can’t understand each other’s words well, but my urgency must be bleeding through my tone. She gestures for me to follow her, then rides off into the forest. Luckily, the trees are very spaced out on a human scale, enough to accommodate common Hunduns, and definitely enough for me to fly through them.
A short journey takes us to a trapdoor that she hauls open from beneath leaves and mud. It leads into a dark labyrinth of underground tunnels. These aren’t wide enough for flight, so I get on the horse with her, doing my best to lift myself with my wings so my armored weight doesn’t crush it. She rides through the tunnels after lighting a whooshing and fluttering torch. Every minute or so, she cups her free hand around her mouth and makes a signaling cry.
The shimmering blaze of other torches and the galloping of other hooves dash out of the shadows. Other nomads join us, speaking ecstatically in their incomprehensible dialect. Firelight dances in their wide eyes.
The tunnels angle lower and lower, the air chilling steadily. I hold on to the nomad woman’s solid waist, pressing against her furs for warmth. It’s mind-boggling to think that she and my grandmother descended from the same people, that beliefs and culture can diverge so drastically. Not for the first time, I question if being born inside Huaxia was as lucky as everyone claimed it was. If I’d been born to these left-behind Zhou folk instead, I could’ve been raised by this stunning, unbound woman. How different would I be as a person?
When we stop at last in a cavernous chamber, it’s so cold that my tongue might crack in two if I opened my mouth.
Rows upon rows of unnerving clay statues stand guard, facing us. They look like the guardian figurines that would go into the mausoleum of someone rich and powerful, except they’re life-sized. Even the Sages don’t get life-sized ones. Their clay features look uncannily realistic. Dusty furs and cloth drape over their bodies.
Just when I’m trying to imagine how they were made, a dull glimmer behind them catches my eye.
The entire back wall is golden.
Is that…part of the Yellow Dragon?
My teeth chatter, and I hyperventilate as this begins to feel a little more real, a little more possible. Is the rest of the Dragon buried beneath our feet? I imagine it coiled deep underground, ready to spring out at any moment.
Please. Let it be true.
The nomads dismount from their horses. They weave through the ranks of statues with a respectful shuffling motion, backs bent and heads bowed. Despite the terror-laced astonishment weighing down my legs, I make myself follow their example.
Once we get closer to the golden wall, I notice that it’s slightly curved, like a forehead. There’s a thick wool quilt hanging on it. The silver-haired woman parts it by a slit in the middle.
A tide of even colder air gushes out.
I blink in surprise, then fall stunned yet again.
The vast chamber inside is completely golden. Shadows seem to crawl through the dimly glittering innards. It might have broken my sanity for good, but I spot the dual-chair system in the middle.
This is a cockpit. The Yellow Dragon’s cockpit.
A boy is sitting in the yang seat, dressed in full golden armor built like hundreds of little squares linked together. A crown with a long flat top and bead veils in the front and back rests on his head, shading half his face. Dragon antlers shoot out from the crown’s sides like mighty, gilded branches. The yin seat awaits in front of him, empty.
For a good few seconds, I can’t do anything but stare through the quilt slit.
The nomads file in with utmost reverence, each kneeling to the ground and kowtowing before stepping past the quilt. I stagger after them, disbelief ballooning in my chest. I flare my spirit sense to be sure of what—no, who I’m looking at, and get a confirmation as overpowering as the Emperor-class pressure earlier.
This really is Qin Fucking Zheng in the flesh.
And he really is still alive. Black meridians of Water qi sprawl through the cadaver-pale skin of his face.
But so does flowerpox. The telltale blossom-like infection marks riddle his skin between the meridians.
I flash back to my conversation with Yang Guang, how he suggested Qin Zheng could have pulled this off by drawing on qi from the magma under Mount Zhurong. Is that where the other end of the Dragon is?
A hand lands on my shoulder, making me jump. The silver-haired woman gestures to where I’m keeping the antiviral kit. Getting the message, I open the kit and draw the contents of the vial into the syringe.
At once, the nomads begin chanting something I don’t understand. They gather in a semicircle around Qin Zheng, dragging me along. One of them calls something out while waving a small torch. She lights it by touching it to a bigger one held by someone else. Then, with a cresting cry, she shoves the fire into her mouth.
To my amazement, the torch simply extinguishes. She passes it to someone else, then rips off one of her fur gloves and presses her bare hand against Qin Zheng’s, which are lying, palms up, on his armrests. At the last second, I catch that his golden gauntlets are covered in thin needles.
I can help her.
Clutching the syringe, I dash toward Qin Zheng. I morph my gauntlet to expose one hand, then press it down on the needles of his other palm.
Water qi shocks into me, chilling me down to the marrow, blackening my meridians as well. But my training has given me some experience wrenching my secondary qi from Water to Fire. Screaming, I seize hold of my qi flow and force it to heat from yin to yang. My Metal qi lights up on a second circuit from the sheer effort.
Gradually, like trails of coal dust set ablaze, my blackened meridians beam red. Through our joined palms, the change travels into Qin Zheng.
A breath rasps into him, like a fresh wind scraping into a long-abandoned, dust-cluttered room. His eyes peel open in the striped shadows of his crown’s bead veil and flit around at us, widening.
“Where’s the cure?” he wheezes.
Shockingly, though his pronunciation is strange, I can understand him.
Or—no, it’s not shocking. Not when my dialect and the nomads’ diverged from this same ancestral one.
It rattles me all over again. I’m looking at—I’m speaking to—someone who should’ve died two hundred and twenty-one years ago.
“Where’s the cure?” he repeats, breathing faster and harder.
Frantic shouts rise among the nomads. I snap out of it and direct the syringe toward his wrist. But his armor stops me from finding a vein.
“Open up!” I raise my head.
Half his face is melting.
I shriek, and so does he. With no more time to dally, I plunge the syringe straight into his neck. He shakes his hand free of the fire-swallowing nomad’s, then clasps his blood-coated gauntlet over his slumping features. The spirit metal oozes and shifts onto his face, spreading like mercury, a speed and fluidity I’ve never seen in Earth-type spirit metal.
But a lot of impossibilities have been shattered today.
“Can you pilot?” I ask the dire question while yanking the emptied syringe from his neck. I press down on the needle mark to stop his blood from leaking. I have no idea if the medicine will work, but the rage and grief I’m barely keeping down pulse against my skin, driving me mad with the need for vengeance. “I need your power, your Chrysalis. Now.”
To my surprise, though he keeps breathing laboredly, a chuckle chafes out of him. He drops his hand.
The melted half of his face has been covered with spirit metal, looking like a partial golden skull.
I shudder.
His Water qi returns on a second circuit of meridians, black beside red. Then Earth yellow comes in on a third. Metal white on a fourth. Wood green on a fifth.
From behind the shimmering golden veil of his crown, he sweeps a taunting gaze over me, eyes and skin patterned with all five qi types. “You…wouldn’t last…five minutes…with me.”
He is absolutely right.
He’s on a whole different level. Not only is his spirit pressure unrivaled, he can freely wield any qi type he wants. Even if he can pilot again right away, I have no idea how I’m supposed to survive—
No. Actually, I do have an idea.
I stare down at the yin and yang seats. They don’t look too different from modern ones. If the basic setup hasn’t changed…if the army’s lies have been sustained all this time…
My deep-rooted notion of the pilot system rises to resist the idea—boys go in the yang seat, girls go in the yin seat—but why does that have to be the way things work? Why would the army have felt compelled to install an artificial difference to the seats if there were any inherent ones?
It’s all an illusion. Another arbitrary, made-up illusion.
A deathly calm flattens through me.
Before I slipped out of the White Tiger’s cockpit, Yizhi gave me his antiviral kit as well. I take it out of my conduction suit and flick it open to reveal the vial and syringe. Qin Zheng will need some incentive to do what I say.
“Your pox can only be controlled, not cured,” I say, which isn’t a lie. “If you want to keep getting this medication, move to the yin seat.”
Qin Zheng’s brows pull together. “Excuse…me?”
“I know you can understand me,” I enunciate. I point down at the yin seat with the medicine kit. “Switch seats. Now.”
His chest heaves. “I’m…not getting…into the woman’s—”
“Do you want to live or die?” I yell, rattling his arm by our joined hands. “It’s a simple question!”
He grits his teeth. “You wouldn’t let me—”
“Qin Zheng, I know two hundred and twenty-one more years of what’s going on than you do, and I have no time to explain!” I roar in his face. “Do you know Zhou fell because you weren’t there to protect it? Do you know your precious Yellow Dragon has been buried near a Hundun nest, and this is the first time anyone from Huaxia has seen it in over two centuries? Get in the yin seat, or you will have survived this long for nothing!”
“Two hundred—” Utter shock and dread bloom over his face.
I don’t think he expected to wait this long for salvation.
His mouth snaps shut. Shakily, he rises from the yang seat, the bead veils of his crown clinking crisply.
In another astonishing move, the suit of armor on the yin seat melts into the ground, then re-emerges from the yang seat. I detach my hand from his gauntlet needles and help him switch over.
After the quilt flaps closed behind them, I loosen my Vermilion Bird armor from my body.
“Wait for me,” I whisper, clutching a red gauntlet to my chest. Tears patter over it.
Even though my crown, the beautiful winged crown that Shimin made, is nothing but dead weight without a connection to my spine, I keep it on. I place the rest of the armor pieces in a neat pile before climbing into the yang seat.
As I do, Qin Zheng speaks up again. “Zhou…fell?”
“Yes.” My voice wobbles. “It was where my ancestors were from. They were counting on you. You don’t have to be sorry, it wasn’t your fault you got sick, but the Hunduns who took it are still here. You need to kill them.”
He stiffens under my arms, then slowly relaxes. “Always.”
I free a shivering breath between his crown antlers, then place my hands over his. A surreal feeling washes over me as I do.
It’s just a change of seat, yet everything feels different. For a moment, I feel distinctly male, or what it’s supposed to mean to be male. But it doesn’t matter. Male, female, it doesn’t matter when piloting. There’s still no guarantee that I’ll survive this, but I’ve come too far to let fear stop me.
I lean back.
The moment the needles pierce my spine, an onslaught descends on my senses. I scream. Resisting is like trying to hold a door shut against a gale-force wind.
A flash of gold is the last thing I see with my flesh-and-blood eyes.
