Tomb of the Khan

  Grace nodded.

  “But then he brought you back.”

  Obviously.

  “I wonder what changed his mind?” Isaiah sounded genuinely curious. “He never really told me, and I didn’t ask. But I doubt it was the money.”

  “No,” Grace said. “It wasn’t the money.”

  “Then what was it?”

  Grace hesitated. The chair she sat in had a little bit of flex to it, such that whenever she shifted her weight, she bounced a little, so she tried to hold still. “He wants what’s best for us.”

  “And what is best for you and your brother?”

  “Education. Opportunity. A place we’ll be safe and stay out of trouble.”

  “And you don’t want to disappoint him?”

  It was much more complicated than that, because it wasn’t just about her dad, not really. It was also about her, and the expectations she placed on herself. But she just nodded her answer.

  “Let me reassure you, Grace, that you are doing something very important. You may feel that if you don’t find a prong of the Trident then you aren’t valuable to us. But that isn’t true. If you stay with us, things will happen, I promise you.”

  “What things?”

  “Great things, and you will one day be at the center of it. You are intelligent, confident, and resourceful.”

  “Thank you.” Grace appreciated hearing that, even if she couldn’t tell if Isaiah really meant it.

  “Abstergo is full of people like you. People who are driven. People who push themselves. Those are the people who change the world, Grace. I’m pleased that you would take Natalya’s place if you could, but I wouldn’t want that for you. You have your own place, and only you can fill it.”

  “Thank you,” she said again, feeling more convinced of his sincerity. But he hadn’t mentioned David. “What about my brother?”

  “That is up to him,” Isaiah said. “Now, off you go.”

  Grace rose from her chair, and with a nod she left the office, closing the door behind her. From there, she went to the lounge, where David and Sean were sitting and drinking sodas. Victoria often stressed that they should all drink something after the Animus, preferably something with sugar or fructose.

  “Where you been?” David asked.

  She pulled an orange juice from the refrigerator. “Isaiah wanted to see me.”

  “He wanted to see me, too,” Sean said.

  David pretend-sulked. “He didn’t want to see me.”

  Grace tried not to worry about what that might mean. “What did he talk to you about?”

  “My simulation.”

  She gulped some of her juice, realizing that she really was thirsty. “What about it?”

  Sean looked out the windows, into the trees, but his gaze felt a lot more distant than that. “Injustice, I guess. Anarchy versus order.” He looked back at Grace. “What’d he talk to you about?”

  She downed the rest of the juice and went to grab a bottle of water. “Just making sure I’m happy here.”

  “Well, I’m happy here,” David said. “We got in a dogfight over Italy today. It was—”

  “We?” Grace said.

  David looked at her. “Yes, we. Or they, or whatever. The point is, it was incredible. I’m telling you, best flight simulator ever—”

  “It’s not a game,” Grace said. “How many times do I have to tell you?”

  “It may not be a game but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun,” David said.

  Grace shook her head at this too-familiar argument. If David didn’t start taking the mission more seriously, would Isaiah continue to keep him at the Aerie? Grace didn’t want to think about what could happen to David back in their neighborhood if she wasn’t there to watch out for him. She turned to Sean. “Do you have a little brother?”

  “I have a younger sister.”

  “And does she make your life a lot harder than it has to be?”

  “What’s wrong with having fun while we’re here?” David asked. “Nobody else gets to do what we’re doing.”

  Sean shrugged. “He’s right about that.”

  Grace sat back and folded her arms. “And what would Dad say to you right now?”

  David’s expression changed. He dropped his defensiveness and his mouth opened as if something had just occurred to him. “Do you guys wonder what else is going on here?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?” Sean said.

  “We’ve only been in two of the buildings.” David pointed out the window. “There’s three more buildings out there. What do you think they’re for?”

  “Why don’t you just ask?” Grace said, still feeling irritated with him.

  “Maybe I don’t need to,” David said, pushing up his glasses.

  Kang was nothing like Zhi’s father. She had already known that, but as her training progressed, the differences became more apparent. Kang forgave no mistakes and tolerated no shortcoming. Owen felt sorry for her, watching the memory unfold, feeling the weight of her grief on his mind. Not only had her father just died, the ashes from his funeral fire still warm, but the man now training her only reminded her of what she had lost. That was how it had been with Owen’s grandparents right after his dad died, especially his grandpa.

  “Again!” Kang said.

  Zhi executed the maneuver she’d been training, racing through the forest, dodging, flipping, climbing, stabbing her targets with her hidden blade, shooting her targets with the crossbow on her other wrist.

  Above her on the stony bluff, Kang watched, thumping away the seconds with his staff, tracking her time. When she finished the course, Kang shook his head.

  “Again! You must be faster!”

  She stood there breathing hard, her muscles quivering, staring up at him. It did not seem possible to complete the maneuver any faster.

  Kang pointed at the trees behind her. “I can see three places where you could have shaved a second off your time. You must seek new routes, use new techniques.”

  “Forgive me, Mentor,” she said.

  “You can ask the Khan for forgiveness for disturbing his sleep. Right before he tortures and executes you.”

  Zhi bowed her head.

  “Would that honor the memory of your father?” Kang asked.

  “No,” she whispered.

  “So,” he said. “Again. Faster.”

  Zhi dug her fingernails into her palms, and stalked back to the starting point of the course. Along the way, she recovered the bolts of her crossbow, and focused all the anger she felt at Kang into the training exercise.

  From the starting point, she leapt forward again, taking in the rocks and roots and branches and tree trunks in the space between her breaths, seeking the best, fastest course. Her blade flashed and the bolts from her crossbow sang, finding their marks, and through it all Kang’s staff tolled her failure.

  “You were only one second faster!” he shouted. “Again!”

  Zhi wanted to shout back at him that she was trying, but she restrained herself, simply glaring at him instead.

  “You hate me.” Kang wore a thin smile, as if he enjoyed what he was putting her through. “But I am not the enemy. Möngke Khan is the enemy. Don’t forget that.”

  It was an easy mistake to make.

  “I would like you to come out of this alive,” he said. “I would like for you to take your father’s place in the Brotherhood.”

  “That is what I want as well.”

  “Then you must be worthy of it. You must prove your usefulness as an Assassin.” He pointed the end of his staff at the course. “Again!”

  Zhi ran the exercise several more times before she reached the level of proficiency Kang expected. He acknowledged it with a simple nod. The achievement took so much out of her, she experienced no satisfaction from it, and wanted only to collapse. Fortunately, Kang offered her a rare chance to rest.

  So they sat on the Fishing Terrace together, eating cold fish and rice in silence. Zhi could see the confluence of
the three rivers below them, the surrounding hills dyed orange by the setting of the summer sun. The warmth of it brought sweat to her forehead, with no breeze to carry it away.

  “Does it not strike you?” Kang said.

  “What?”

  “That the survival of our empire depends on this piece of earth we sit upon.” He knocked on the rock of the terrace. “One hill. One fortress.”

  “One man,” Zhi added.

  “Yes,” he said. “But I wonder, are we just throwing pebbles at the river?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do we truly alter its course? Do any of us have that power? Or are we just causing ripples and telling ourselves we have made a difference to the current?”

  “You will not discourage me,” Zhi said.

  “I don’t mean to. Inevitability is not an excuse for inaction.” He turned to her. “When will you take your action?”

  “I’m waiting for you to tell me I am ready.”

  He laughed at her.

  In spite of her exhaustion, she grew angry again. “You find that amusing?”

  He shook his head. “I think you mistake me. I laugh at the both of us.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I have been waiting for you. To show me you are ready.” He laughed again. “It would seem we will both be kept waiting.”

  She didn’t know how he expected her to show him she was ready, but she wasn’t in the mood to play his games. She was tired, and it had been a very long day. She got up to leave.

  “It is simpler than you think,” Kang said behind her.

  She stopped, about to respond, and then shook her head against it. Perhaps tomorrow she would feel like arguing with him.

  “Good night,” she said, walking away.

  “Tomorrow at sunrise!” he called. “Don’t be late!”

  She kept going, past the workshops and the lake, into town toward her father’s house. When she arrived she went to her father’s room and pulled his gauntlet from beneath the floorboard, just as she had done every night since he had gone to the wall.

  She cradled the gauntlet in her lap, smelling the leather and the oiled metal of its blade, and spoke to her father’s spirit. She told him about her training, and about how much she hated Kang. She told her father how much she missed him, and she promised to honor him by killing the Great Khan and becoming an Assassin. Then she went to sleep, and as soon as her eyes closed they opened again, and somehow it had become morning, and she got up to repeat the day.

  Owen experienced all of this with empathy for her. He had been there. But he admired her, too. For all Kang’s criticisms, Zhi was strong, and capable, and skilled. Owen even hoped that the Bleeding Effect might carry some of her abilities across the boundary of the Animus into him. He had already acquired some skills from the time he had spent carrying the weight of Varius’s mind, but he wanted more.

  It was another hot morning as Zhi walked through town. She stopped to buy some breakfast and learned that the Mongols hadn’t attempted another attack since that night, and many thanked her father, crediting him with the victory, though none knew of his true nature.

  When she reached Kang’s hut, she found him sitting outside, waiting. As she approached, he looked up at the sun. “You’re late. The sun has risen.”

  “I needed rest.”

  “Not to worry. The Khan will give you plenty of time to rest when he wraps you in fresh buffalo fat, stakes you to the ground, and leaves you to the flies and maggots—”

  “Enough,” she said.

  “Enough? Do you think the Khan—”

  “Enough!” she shouted. “Do you think I don’t know what the Khan will do? Do you think I haven’t heard the stories? Do you think it matters to me?”

  “What does matter, then?”

  Zhi narrowed her eyes, furious and disgusted. “Do not mock me, old man.”

  “I do not mock you.” He got to his feet and lumbered over to her. “What matters to you?”

  She took a step toward him, close enough to smell the fish. “The memory of my father.”

  “And?”

  “And? Right now, that is all I need.”

  Kang shook his head. “That is your failing. When you are able to put your own desire for vengeance aside. When you are as loyal to the Brotherhood as you were to your father. When you honor the Creed as much as you honor his memory … then you will be ready.”

  “It isn’t for you to decide,” she said.

  “Oh, but it is. It most surely is.” He returned to where he had been sitting before and lowered himself to the ground. “Your father was like you. He also put his honor before the Creed. He chose not to hide. He went to the wall that night even though I told him it was not his place, and look what happened. His death accomplished little.”

  Owen felt Zhi’s rage erupt. She lunged at the old man, but before she could strike him, his staff caught her on the side of the head and knocked her to the ground. She tasted dust, and balls of lightning scorched her vision.

  “You are more impulsive than he ever was,” Kang said. It seemed he had barely moved. “That is another thing you will master before I am done with you.”

  Zhi squinted and shook her head, then touched the spot where he’d hit her. A lump had already begun to swell, but through the pain, she knew Kang was wrong. “His death was not in vain,” she said, nearly gasping.

  “I suppose that’s true. He may have won that battle, as everyone says he did. But he could have won the war.”

  Zhi would not stay there and listen to the memory of her father so diminished, especially not by a man he had trusted. She labored to her feet, her head still reeling in a way that disoriented Owen. Her honor was hers, not the Brotherhood’s. They would never deserve a greater loyalty than what she gave her father. Her revenge was more important than any Creed. Kang couldn’t stop her, and she realized she didn’t need his permission. She turned to leave.

  “Think on what I’ve told you,” the old man said.

  She ignored him.

  “Sunrise tomorrow!” he called. “Do not be late!”

  But she had no intention of returning.

  Later that night, after the besieged town had gone to its restless sleep, Zhi dressed in her black lamellar armor, her cowl, and armed her wrist with her crossbow and bolts. Then she went into her father’s room, and she sat with his gauntlet for some time.

  When the night had fully left behind the day before and entered the hours of the empty black desert before dawn, she pulled her father’s gauntlet over her wrist and cinched it tight. It fit her, just barely. Then she left the house and made her way to the Feiyan Cave. The bats for which it was named had long since left their lair on their nightly hunt, even as she entered their grotto pursuing her own prey.

  A staircase had been carved into the rock at the entrance. It spiraled down the sides of a shaft of earth, while a stream from the lake followed its own, parallel course below, filling the cavern with sounds. Once Zhi had descended into total darkness, she awoke a lantern, and its light scattered the shadows of rocks and insects in all directions. She smelled clay, and damp, and the air felt cooler.

  The cave had always been forbidden to her and other children of the town growing up, and it was claimed that a giant serpent lived inside it. Zhi saw no serpent now as she climbed downward, and eventually, the staircase became a level path. Someone had long ago opened this natural passage wider, to allow for soldiers and messengers to make secret entrances and exits from the fortress. She followed this path as it found its way down through the mountain, and when she reached the warning signs carved in the rock for the exit ahead, she extinguished her lantern and crept the rest of the way forward.

  Her boots gently disturbed the bubbling stream at her feet before the water fell into a separate channel, diverted there so as not to give away the location of the cave. She felt along the slick walls with her hands until a sliver of night opened ahead, only slightly brighter than the darkness of the
cave, and when she reached it, she paused.

  Beyond that point, her purpose would truly begin. She hadn’t fully left the fortress yet, but she was about to. She looked down at her father’s gauntlet, and then she stepped through.

  Outside, she smelled the ash of an old fire, and heard the forest alive around her. Behind her, through a trick in the shadows of the rocks, the crevice became nearly invisible, and she actually worried that she wouldn’t be able to find it again on her way back.

  If she made it back.

  She certainly hoped to, but that was not required for her mission.

  The mosquitoes, heat, and humidity were even worse down in the valleys and ravines, which if anything demonstrated the tenacity of the Mongols. Zhi passed the charred remains of the trees from the previous battle, but it seemed the steppe people had claimed their dead.

  Zhi headed southeast, keeping to the shadows, free-running through the forest. She could almost hear Kang’s staff thumping away the time at her from the fortress overhead, but she did her best to push that from her mind and focus on her silent movement toward the Mongol encampment.

  She covered the miles quickly, and soon reached the first of the round tents the Mongols used for shelter. There were guards posted, but they were easily avoided, which was better than killing them. It would do her no good to risk alerting the camp until it was absolutely unavoidable.

  She pressed inward, pausing, listening, watching. The patrols were regular and disciplined, which meant she only had to be patient, and she could get past them. The tents had been built in regular formations, their felt skins wrapped around wooden bones, and everywhere there were horses. Zhi had heard about the Mongol love for their herds, but she doubted the horses loved their riders for bringing them here in the summer with all the flies.

  The size of the camp at first impressed her, and then shocked her, as did the grandeur of some of the tents. Hundreds and hundreds of trees had been cut to make room for thousands of tents, and it seemed the Khan and his noblemen had brought small palaces with them from the north. That vanity made it easy for Zhi to determine which tent belonged to Möngke. She simply had to find the largest and richest of them, which she soon did.