by Daniel Fox
If they don’t see us in the water, if they don’t have a watch on that end of the island; and we’ll still only be three, and what if …
Arguing with the emperor, once he’d made up his mind? Pointless, even if Chung had any way to measure how very much it was forbidden.
BACK INTO the water, then, briefly and anxiously aware of more flames, more shouting on the riverbank; anxious too about what lay ahead, how he might possibly help.
For now he was a hindrance, but at least not an awkward one. Yu Shan and the emperor could both apparently swim one-armed and underwater, utterly untroubled by towing Chung against a current that would have swallowed him and never spat him out again.
They could hold their breath too, far longer than he could. They ran him to the ragged edge of his control again and again, and still clearly came up each time sooner than they needed to.
Once, they came up under the bank and he could see across the water to the island. He saw no rebel watching the water, no alarm, no men running for weapons. What he did see was order, regularity, the discipline of soldiers. They hauled down the arms of their flinging machines, loaded a projectile—carefully!—into the basket, lit the fuse and heaved on ropes that caused the basket to hurl upward, the projectile to fly away. They watched how it flew, where it landed; perhaps they made an adjustment to the line of the machine; and then they did it again.
And there were four machines and many men, and every one of those projectiles meant a fresh blaze falling on or around the imperial troops. Chung couldn’t see what harm his friends were taking; there was smoke and flame and no time, the emperor wouldn’t let them linger with their heads out of water.
The last time they rose, they were in mid-river and there was no island where he looked for it, to the side, where it had been. The emperor and Yu Shan hung in the water, motionless except for hands and feet, as though this was the sea at the slack of the tide; Chung still needed to cling to Yu Shan’s body as he turned around, as the current sucked at him. There was the island: a strip of rock that stood proud of the water, just wide enough and flat enough to take the footings of two bridges, just long and wide and flat enough to hold four machines and their busy crews. And a stack of projectiles, Chung could see that now too, built up like barrels at this near peak of the island where the rock narrowed like a jade ship’s cutwater, where it slit the river like a blade slits a run of silk.
No watch, no guards: who could come this way, except by boat? And there was nowhere here for a boat to tie up, only blade-sharp rock rising sheer and slick from the river’s swirl.
Barely anywhere for a swimmer to clamber out, unless that swimmer had jade in his blood, in his bone.
The emperor approached the black wall of rock, reached up and found a handhold, another …
Once he’d pulled himself up out of the water, he paused and stretched down an arm. Chung found himself lifted bodily by Yu Shan, passed into the emperor’s grip.
Looking at that dark rock face as he was raised past it, he could see no handholds, nothing his numbed fingers might have gripped. He watched from above as Yu Shan scrambled up after, and it looked as though he simply smeared his skin to the rock. Perhaps the stone in his blood reached to the stone outside and clung …?
They had come up into the shadow of that stack of containers. Briefly, even the emperor let them crouch and rest there, let the weight of water drain out of their clothes, let them peer around the wall of pots to see just how many men they had to face.
They couldn’t wait long, though, while those machines still hurled fiery death at their friends, his troops. Nor could they stay undiscovered long, while men came to the pot stack again and again …
Soon, then, a man came and lifted one more canister from the heap, and found himself abruptly facing the emperor he had rebelled against, whose troops he was raining fire on, whose own body perhaps he would have liked to set aflame.
He never got to do that.
He might have had a moment to realize, to understand that this was indeed the emperor and that there was a long list now of things he never would get to do.
Then the emperor’s blade pierced him, and he fell.
In falling, of course he let the canister fall too.
If it was fused, at least it wasn’t lit; but who knew what sorceries were in that black stuff that the pottery sealed? Perhaps it would flame in sunlight and the fuse was only a precaution. Perhaps it would ignite every one of these gathered canisters, and they would all erupt at once. Not even the emperor would be proof against such a fire …
Chung had time to picture that, all of it, in the moments that the canister took to topple out of the toppling man’s hands: the terrible slow flickering start, the creep of black, the eruption.
He had time to picture its aftermath, the end of empire and his own less significant end, in the little singular moment that the toppling canister needed to crash onto that brutal rock beneath.
Except that what he could picture, so could another man.
Yu Shan, in this case.
Whose hands caught the canister a perilous finger’s-breadth above the rock as he dived forward, as he rolled and held it somehow safely all the way, as he rose to his feet again in the same moment still with his arms full of unexploded death …
… AND IN full view of all those rebels manning the flinging-machines, who reacted with a roar of discovery, an abandonment of their ropes and pulleys, a snatching-up of swords and dagger-axes …
NO POINT staying crouched now in the shadows, nothing to hide from.
Chung and the emperor stood up, blades in hand: the emperor with his long broad-bladed tao, Chung with no more than the knife he’d taken under the bridge. It didn’t seem to matter much. In standing up he’d seen beyond the machine crews, to the footings of the bridge.
To the squad of men who had been crouching there, ready for whatever troops came across the bridge if it didn’t fall beneath them.
Who were standing now, turning from that to this, from the fight that hadn’t come yet to the one that was here now.
Who were—well, too many to fight. The emperor might be fireproof, but he was not invincible. He’d been wounded once already in battle, in his first battle, against assassins in the forest; and had survived it because his jade-hard bones wouldn’t let steel cut through them. This many men could overwhelm him; and then they could hack him apart, cut him into many pieces, and even the jade-magic couldn’t draw him back together.
At least, Chung thought not.
Hoped not, truly, although that might be treason or heresy or some such. A piecemeal emperor, surviving disarticulation … No. Please, no.
But he didn’t see how the emperor could survive this forest of blades, unless he dived back into the river. Which Chung just knew he would not do.
Chung tried to move, to stand in front of the emperor, a little proper gesture of you shall not pass.
There was an impossible, an imperial chuckle in his ear; an irresistible hand on his shoulder, nudging him gently aside.
“Thank you, Chung, but you should probably take shelter behind me.”
That would be sensible, but not actually possible. He couldn’t survive where the emperor didn’t; they would kill Chung in relief, in celebration, just in passing. And he couldn’t dive into the river and hope to survive that. He’d be drowned and dead before ever he reached calm waters.
So he shook his head and said no to majesty, moving to take a position at the emperor’s side.
Yu Shan looked back, rolled his eyes at them both, turned to face the onrush of rebels—
—AND HURLED the canister he held. The man he’d caught it from, the man the emperor killed, he’d been using both arms just to lift it; Yu Shan lobbed it one-handed, high and looping.
HIGH OVER the heads of the advancing rebels, who were perhaps amazed that he could do that, knowing as they did just how heavy it was; and then perhaps relieved and contemptuous, just for that little moment when they
realized it had missed them entirely.
UNTIL THEY heard it land behind them, among their abandoned machines, between them and their friends at the bridgehead.
THEIR FACES, some of them: their faces were terrible, in that moment before they turned to see the truth of it.
How that canister shattered on the rock, right there between one machine and another.
How the black liquid it contained splashed out between the two; and how it was hard to tell whether it caught fire from the one side or the other, because both machines had an open flame there to light their fuses, and it really might have been either one. Or the sun, of course, or some kind of sorcery.
There was surely a sorcery in the fire that leaped up. Chung knew about oil, all manner of oils. None of them would yield a flame this furious, a heat this vicious. It seemed to seize whatever fuel it could find, clinging to wood and flesh with equal greed; where it found nothing but stone—on the bare rock of the island here, on the emperor’s back before the river doused it—it only sat and waited, burning nothing but air, seeming not to burn itself out, not to drip or drain away.
The machines were largely bamboo and twisted rope, with leather slings. They blazed mightily, going up like grass.
The men were lucky, on both sides. The squad from the bridge hadn’t reached quite so far yet; the teams working the machines had all rushed forward to face these invaders from the river. There was no one left to get caught in that sudden conflagration, no monstrous death to watch or listen to.
And no way for the bridge squad to reach their colleagues through the flame; no way for their colleagues to retreat, unless they went into the water. The fire bisected the island entirely, trapping them at the peak here with these impossible saboteurs …
There were still many of them, all against three. Chung might have felt dangerously outnumbered if his two companions hadn’t been the men they were, men of jade, immeasurable.
He still worried for them all, because a blade could still kill any man or all of them together. He worried most for the emperor, who refused to understand that, who thought he was fireproof. Who was jumping onto that great stack of projectiles right now, balancing on a liquid hell if any one of the rebels had a spark of fire on him. Or if the wind carried a spark from the inferno at their backs, or …
The emperor held his arms up, and bizarrely, unaccountably, the rebels stopped their charge. A few short paces separated them from where Yu Shan and Chung stood, at the foot of the heap now, blades drawn to make some show of guarding the emperor above their heads.
Perhaps the rebels were glad of that sudden excuse to halt. Chung saw more fear than fury in them. Not fear of the blades they faced, that would be ridiculous, but perhaps of the men who bore them. At least of Yu Shan, who could pick up and hurl one of their projectiles one-handed.
More, though, they were afraid of that fire. Nervous glances measured how far it was behind them, how the sparks carried, what it could find to burn from there to here …
This must be why they had not destroyed the second bridge till now: not to maroon themselves with a stack of these volatile weapons, not till they must, hoping to leave themselves the chance of an escape.
They should have brought a boat, he thought; they should have thought that little bit farther ahead. Tunghai Wang should have thought it for them, when he was planning this, when he was ordering machines built here to guard the river roads. For certain sure he had not arranged it all in an hour this morning, caught up in a great retreat …
But they were here now and so was Chung, with his friend Yu Shan and the emperor also; and there was no boat, and there was an engulfing fire between them—between them all—and the bridge away.
Perhaps that was why the rebels were prepared to listen to the emperor. Who looked down at them as if they were his own people—which they were, of course, even though they had sold themselves to Tunghai Wang—and said, “Put up your blades. There is no point in dying here now.”
Not a man did what he was told, but more looked back or looked sideways, looked at one another. Now that they’d stopped, it seemed there wasn’t one ready to hurtle forward again. Likely it looked very bad to be first, even with a crowd behind you.
The emperor waited just a little time, then said, “Yu Shan, one of those machines isn’t burning yet.”
Indeed, it was the one nearest to the rebels—nearest to us! Chung thought, and tried not to let his face so much as twitch—that was only smoldering along the side that faced the fire, that was still waiting to burst into full flame.
Yu Shan laughed, and slipped his tao into its scabbard. The relaxed way he did that was almost threatening in itself, so dismissive of the men he faced.
Then he picked another of those canisters from the top of the heap, reaching for the very one the emperor was standing on, making him dance to the side, laughing in his turn; and he looked at the machine that wasn’t burning, and the gathered crew of rebels that stood nervously between him and it—
—AND THEY backed abruptly, silently, without any discussion to one side and the other, to leave him a clear passage through.
They thought perhaps that he would carry it toward the fire, if he was entirely mad; or else that he would throw it as before. Either way, all too clearly, they did think him mad. There were fire and sparks all around, and he had seen directly how these pots would burst and flame, and yet he still lifted one and stood ready to hurl it, and they wanted nothing except distance, more distance than they could find on this little rock.
In fact, he rolled it. There was a natural crack in the rock of the island that made a gutter all along its spine, whose two edges gripped the pot and steered it just where Yu Shan clearly meant it to go, the smoldering side of that nearest machine. Where it bumped and jostled against a leg of the machine, and sat and smoked a little; and they waited, watching, the rebels edging back and farther back, and Chung wondered if the pot’s seal would give way before its contents were hot enough to burn, and if not then what would happen, and—
—AND THEN it did happen, and it was an explosion beyond anything Chung had ever seen or imagined. Not even the rebels could have expected this, surely. A flung pot broke on impact, before the fire caught. If they had seen this before they would have been screaming at Yu Shan, ducking for whatever shelter they could find behind one another, not just that nervous sidle out of range.
If they’d seen this before, they would have known they were not out of range, nothing on this island was out of range.
The flask exploded and fire gouted up, flame enveloped the machine in a moment, but that wasn’t the worst of it.
The worst was how the air was suddenly lethal, a blast of heat and wind with a vicious whiplash sting to it.
Chung saw a man’s eye gone, just gone into a hole, and he could have sworn that smoke came out before the welling darkness.
He saw a man’s throat opened, but not from a sword cut, nothing like that, it didn’t seem to bleed, not soon enough; at first it only gaped like a second mouth while he gasped for air and couldn’t find it.
Chung himself felt a whip-cut across his face and ignored it while he could, while he was occupied with gaping at the fire, at the rebels so strangely injured out of nowhere. At the emperor, who was gazing down at his own chest—his jademail shirt, rather—with an expression of puzzled wonder, reaching to pluck something from between two scales.
He looked to Yu Shan at his side, and found him unharmed but also staring, but not at himself. At Chung.
“You’re hurt. Did you know?”
He did know; it did hurt. Like a burn now, more than a whip. He reached a hand up—and snatched his fingers away again, biting back a yelp. No fire, but the flesh burned to the touch none the less, flamed like a brand where he touched it.
“What happened? Why doesn’t it bleed …?”
“It is, it’s starting now.”
So was the man with the open throat, starting to choke on his own blood. Twice d
oomed, Chung thought, no hope for him.
The emperor jumped down, and showed them something on the palm of his hand: small and sharp and blackened, vicious as a wasp but inert, clay, a piece of pot.
“I felt them bouncing off the shirt,” he said, “but this one caught between the scales and stuck. The pot shattered when it exploded, and all its little pieces …”
All its little pieces had flown like sparks in all directions, and struck like flecks of steel. Chung would be marked for life—not so pretty now, Shen, will you still love me? when I carry this mark that says I was here, where you were not?—and could count himself lucky; others would be blind or dead.
Others would be thinking they had found a new weapon.
Not the emperor, not yet, but he would talk about this, of course, and some of his generals would see what he did not.
Now, though, he looked at Chung, and then at Yu Shan; and nodded, and turned to the rebels and said, “We need to go now, we still have a war to fight. If you wait here and do no more harm, you will suffer none from us. But my people will be coming over that bridge soon. They will want revenge, because of what you have done to our people ashore, and you have nowhere to go. You need someone of ours, to speak for you once these fires burn out. Which is why we will be leaving Chung here—”
“Majesty, no!”
It should properly be death to interrupt the emperor, but everyone was doing it today.
This time, the emperor overrode him. “Yes, Chung. Yu Shan and I could carry you ashore—and what then? Shall we carry you all day? You’re hurt, twice hurt, and you can’t keep up with us. Here, you can be useful. Protect these men. Will you do that?”
In truth, he had no choice. They all knew that. His emperor ordered him to it; besides which, his emperor could jump into the river and be away, Yu Shan with him, and what could Chung do then? Jump after them, splashing loud enough—sinking loud enough—to be sure they noticed?