by R. F. Kuang
Their class was silent. They had grown up hearing stories about the destruction of Speer, a tiny island that punctuated the ocean between the Nariin Sea and Omonod Bay like a teardrop, lying just beside Snake Province. It had been the Empire’s only remaining tributary state, conquered and annexed at the height of the Red Emperor’s reign. It held a fraught place in Nikan’s history, a glaring example of the massive failure of the disunited army under the Warlords’ regime.
Rin had always wondered whether the loss of Speer was purely an accident. If any other province had been destroyed the way Speer had, the Nikara Empire wouldn’t have stopped with a peace treaty. They would have fought until the Federation of Mugen was in pieces.
But the Speerlies weren’t really Nikara at all. Tall and brown-skinned, they were an island people who had always been ethnically separate from the Nikara mainlanders. They spoke their own language, wrote in their own script, and practiced their own religion. They had joined the Imperial Militia only at the Red Emperor’s sword point.
This all pointed to strained relations between the Nikara and the Speerlies all the way up through the Second Poppy War. So, Rin thought, if any Nikara territory had to be sacrificed, Speer was the obvious choice.
“We have survived the last century through nothing more than sheer luck and the charity of the west,” said Yim. “But even with Hesperia’s help, Nikan only barely managed to drive out the Federation invaders. Under pressure from Hesperia, the Federation signed the Non-Aggression Pact at the end of the Second Poppy War, and Nikan has retained its independence since. The Federation has been relegated to trading outposts on the edge of the Horse Province, and for the past nearly two decades, they’ve more or less behaved.
“But the Mugenese grow restless, and Hesperia has never been good about keeping its promises. The heroes of the Trifecta have been reduced to one; the Emperor is dead, the Gatekeeper is lost, and only the Empress remains on the throne. Perhaps worse, we have no Speerly soldiers.” Yim paused. “Our best fighting force is gone. Nikan no longer possesses the assets that helped us survive the Second Poppy War. Hesperia cannot be relied upon to save us again. If the past centuries have taught us anything, it is that Nikan’s enemies never rest. But this time when they come, we intend to be ready.”
The noontime bell marked lunch.
Food was served from giant cauldrons lined up by the far wall—congee, fish stew, and loaves of rice flour buns—distributed by cooks who seemed wholly indifferent to their jobs.
The students were given portions just large enough to sate their growling stomachs, but not so much that they felt fully satisfied. Students who tried to pass through the line again were sent back to their tables empty-handed.
To Rin, the prospect of regular meals was more than generous—she’d frequently gone without dinner in the Fang household. But her classmates complained to Raban about the single portions.
“Jima’s philosophy is that hunger is good. It’ll keep you light, focused,” explained Raban.
“It’ll keep us miserable,” Nezha grumbled.
Rin rolled her eyes but kept her mouth shut. They sat crammed in two rows of twenty-five along the wooden table near the end of the mess hall. The other tables were occupied by the apprentices, but not even Nezha had the nerve to attempt to sit among them.
Rin found herself crammed between Niang and the wiry-haired boy who had spoken up in History class.
“I’m Kitay,” he introduced himself, once he’d finished inhaling his stew.
He was one year her junior and looked it—scrawny, freckled, with enormous ears. He also happened to have achieved the highest Keju score in Sinegard Municipality, by far the most competitive testing region, which was especially impressive for someone who had taken it a year early. He had a photographic memory, he wanted to study Strategy under Master Irjah once he got past the Trials, and didn’t she think Jun was kind of an asshole?
“Yes. And I’m Runin. Rin,” she said, once he let her get a word in.
“Oh, you’re the one Nezha hates.”
Rin supposed there were worse reputations to have. In any case, Kitay didn’t seem to hold it against her. “What’s his problem, anyway?” she asked.
“His father is the Dragon Warlord and his aunts have been concubines to the throne for generations. You’d be a prick too if your family was both rich and attractive.”
“Do you know him?” Rin asked.
“We grew up together. Me, Nezha, and Venka. Shared the same tutor. I thought they’d be nicer to me once we were all at the Academy.” Kitay shrugged, glancing at the far end of the table, where Nezha and Venka appeared to be holding court. “Guess I thought wrong.”
Rin wasn’t surprised that Nezha had cut Kitay out of his social circle. There was no way Nezha would have stuck around anyone half as witty as Kitay—there were too many opportunities for Kitay to upstage him. “What’d you do to offend him?”
Kitay pulled a face. “Nothing, except beat him on the exam. Nezha’s prickly about his ego. Why, what did you do?”
“I gave him that black eye,” she admitted.
Kitay raised an eyebrow. “Nice.”
Lore was scheduled for after lunch, and then Linguistics. Rin had been looking forward to Lore all day. But the apprentices who led them to the class looked like they were trying not to laugh. They climbed the winding steps to the fifth tier, higher up than any of their other classes. Finally they stopped at an enclosed garden.
“What are we doing here?” Nezha asked.
“This is your classroom,” said one of the apprentices. They glanced at each other, grinned, and then left. After five minutes, the cause of their amusement became clear. The Lore Master didn’t show. Ten minutes passed. Then twenty.
The class milled around the garden awkwardly, trying to figure out what they were supposed to do.
“We’ve been pranked,” suggested Han. “They led us to the wrong place.”
“What do they grow in here, anyway?” Nezha pulled a flower down to his nose and sniffed it. “Gross.”
Rin took a closer look at the flowers, then her eyes widened. She’d seen those petals before.
Nezha recognized it at the same moment that she did.
“Shit,” he said. “That’s a poppy plant.”
Their class reacted like a startled nest of dormice. They scurried hastily away from the poppy plant as if mere proximity would get them high.
Rin fought the absurd urge to burst out laughing. Here on the other side of the country was at least one thing she was familiar with.
“We’re going to be expelled,” Venka wailed.
“Don’t be stupid, it’s not our poppy plant,” Kitay said.
Venka flapped her hands around her face. “But Jima said if we were even within ten paces of—”
“It’s not like they can expel the entire class,” Kitay said. “I bet he’s testing us. Seeing if we really want to learn.”
“Or testing us to see how we’ll react around illegal drugs!” Venka shrilled.
“Oh, calm down,” Rin said. “You can’t get high just by touching it.”
Venka did not calm down. “But Jima didn’t say she had to catch us high, she said—”
“I don’t think it’s a real class,” Nezha interrupted. “I bet the apprentices are just having their bit of fun.”
Kitay looked doubtful. “It’s on our schedule. And we saw the Lore Master, he was at orientation.”
“Then where were his apprentices?” Nezha shot back. “What color was his belt? Why don’t you see anyone walking around with Lore stitched into their armbands? This is stupid.”
Nezha stalked out through the gates. Encouraged, the rest of the class followed him out, one by one. Finally Rin and Kitay were the only ones left in the garden.
Rin sat down and leaned back on her elbows, admiring the variety of plants in the garden. Aside from the blood-red poppy flowers, there were tiny cacti with pink and yellow blossoms, fluorescent mushrooms glow
ing faintly in the dark corners under shelves, and leafy green bushes that emitted a tealike odor.
“This isn’t a garden,” she said. “This is a drug farm.”
Now she really wanted to meet the Lore Master.
Kitay sat down next to her. “You know, the great shamans of legend used to ingest drugs before battle. Gave them magical powers, so the stories say.” He smiled. “You think that’s what the Lore Master teaches?”
“Honestly?” Rin picked at the grass. “I think he just comes in here to get high.”
Chapter 4
Classes only escalated in difficulty as the weeks progressed. Their mornings were devoted to Combat, Medicine, History, and Strategy. On most days Rin’s head was reeling by noon, crammed with names of theorems she’d never heard and titles of books she needed to finish by the end of the week.
Combat class kept their bodies exhausted along with their minds. Jun put them through a torturous series of calisthenics—they regularly ran up the Academy stairs and back down, did handstands in the courtyard for hours on end, and cycled through basic martial arts forms with bags of bricks hanging from their arms. Every week Jun took them to a lake at the bottom of the mountain and had them swim the entire length.
Rin and a handful of other students had never been taught to swim. Jun demonstrated the proper form exactly once. After that, it was up to them not to drown.
Their homework was heavy and clearly meant to push the first-years right up against their limits. So when the Weapons Master, Sonnen, taught them the correct proportions of saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal necessary to mix the incendiary fire powder that powered war rockets, he also had them create their own impromptu missiles. And when the Medicine Master, Enro, assigned them to learn the names of all the bones in the human body, she also expected them to know the most common patterns of breakage and how to identify them.
It was Strategy, though, taught by Master Irjah, that was their hardest course. Their first day of class he distributed a thick tome—Sunzi’s Principles of War—and announced that they were to have it memorized by the end of the week.
“This thing is massive!” Han complained. “How are we supposed to do the rest of our homework?”
“Altan Trengsin learned it in a night,” said Irjah.
The class exchanged exasperated looks. The masters had been singing the praises of Altan Trengsin since the start of the term. Rin gathered he was some kind of genius, apparently the most brilliant student to come through Sinegard in decades.
Han looked as irritated as she felt. “Okay, but we’re not Altan.”
“Then try to be,” said Irjah. “Class dismissed.”
Rin settled into a routine of constant study and very little sleep; their course schedules left the first-years with no time to do anything else.
Autumn had just started to bite at Sinegard. A cold gust of wind accompanied them as they raced up the steps one morning. It rustled through the trees in a thunderous crescendo. The pupils had not yet received their thicker winter robes, and their teeth chattered in unison as they huddled together under a large mimosa tree at the far end of the second-tier courtyard.
Despite the cold, Jun refused to move Combat class indoors before the snowfall made it impossible to hold outside. He was a brutal teacher who seemed to delight in their discomfort.
“Pain is good for you,” he said as he forced them to crouch in low, torturous endurance stances. “The martial artists of old used to hold this position for an hour straight before training.”
“The martial artists of old must have had amazing thighs,” Kitay gasped.
Their morning calisthenics were still miserable, but at least they had finally moved past fundamentals to their first weapon-based arts: staff techniques.
Jun had just assumed his position at the fore of the courtyard when a loud shuffle sounded above his head. A smattering of leaves fell down right over where he stood.
Everyone glanced up.
Perched high up on a thick branch of the mimosa tree stood their long-absent Lore Master.
He wielded a large pair of gardening shears, cheerfully clipping leaves at random while singing an off-key melody loudly to himself.
After hearing a few words of the song, Rin recognized it as “The Gatekeeper’s Touches.” Rin knew it from her many trips delivering opium to Tikany’s whorehouses—it was an obscene ditty bordering on erotica. The Lore Master butchered the tune, but he sang it aloud with wild abandon.
“I can’t touch you there, miss / else you’ll perish from the bliss . . .”
Niang shook with suppressed giggles. Kitay’s jaw hung wide open as he stared at the tree.
“Jiang, I’ve got a class,” Jun snapped.
“So teach your class,” said Master Jiang. “Leave me alone.”
“We need the courtyard.”
“You don’t need all of the courtyard. You don’t need this tree,” Jiang said petulantly.
Jun whipped his iron staff through the air several times and slammed it against the base of the tree. The trunk actually shook from the impact. There was the crackling noise of deadweight dropping through several layers of dry mimosa leaves.
Master Jiang landed in a crumpled heap on the stone floor.
Rin’s first thought was that he wasn’t wearing a shirt. Her second thought was that he must be dead.
But Jiang simply rolled to a sitting position, shook out his left leg, and brushed his white hair back past his shoulders. “That was rude,” he said dreamily as blood trickled down his left temple.
“Must you bumble around like a lackwit?” Jun snapped.
“Must you interrupt my morning gardening session?” Jiang responded.
“You’re not doing any gardening,” Jun said. “You are here purely to annoy me.”
“I think you’re flattering yourself.”
Jun slammed his staff on the ground, making Jiang jump in surprise. “Out!”
Jiang adopted a dramatically wounded expression and hauled himself up to his feet. He flounced out of the garden, swaying his hips like a whorehouse dancer. “If for me your heart aches / I’ll lick you like a mooncake . . .”
“You’re right,” Kitay whispered to Rin. “He has been getting high.”
“Attention!” Jun shouted at the gawking class. He still had a mimosa leaf stuck in his hair. It quivered every time he spoke.
The class hastily lined up in two rows before him, staves at the ready.
“When I give the signal, you will repeat the following sequence.” He demonstrated with his staff as he spoke. “Forward. Back. Upper left parry. Return. Upper right parry. Return. Lower left parry. Return. Lower right parry. Return. Spin, pass through the back, return. Understood?”
They nodded mutely. No one dared admit that they had missed nearly the entire sequence. Jun’s demonstrations were usually rapid, but he had moved faster just now than any of them could follow.
“Well then.” Jun slammed his staff against the floor. “Begin.”
It was a fiasco. They moved with no rhythm or purpose. Nezha blazed through the sequence at twice the speed of the rest of the class, but he was one of the only students who was able to do it at all. The rest of them either omitted half the sequence or badly mangled the directions.
“Ow!”
Kitay, parrying where he should have turned, hit Rin in the back. She jerked forward, knocking Venka in the head by accident.
“Stop!” Jun shouted.
Their flailing subsided.
“I’m going to tell you a story about the great strategist Sunzi.” Jun paced along their ranks, breathing heavily. “When Sunzi finished writing his great treatise, Principles of War, he submitted the chapters to the Red Emperor. The Emperor decided to test Sunzi’s wisdom by having him train a group of people with no military experience: the Emperor’s concubines. Sunzi agreed and assembled the women outside the palace gates. He told them: ‘When I say, “Eyes front,” you will look straight ahead. When I say, “Left tur
n,” you will face your left. When I say, “Right turn,” you must face your right. When I say, “About turn,” you must turn one hundred and eighty degrees. Is that clear?’ The women nodded. Sunzi then gave the signal, ‘Right turn.’ But the women only burst out laughing.”
Jun paused in front of Niang, whose face was pinched in trepidation.
“Sunzi told the Emperor, ‘If words of command are not clear and distinct, if orders are not thoroughly understood, then the general is to blame.’ So he turned to the concubines and repeated his instructions. ‘Right turn,’ he commanded. Again, the women fell about laughing.”
Jun swiveled his head slowly, making eye contact with each one of them. “This time, Sunzi told the Emperor, ‘If words of command are not clear, then the general is to blame. But if words of command are clear, but orders are not executed, then the troop leaders are to blame.’ Then he selected the two most senior concubines in the group and had them beheaded.”
Niang’s eyes looked like they were going to pop out of her head.
Jun stalked back to the front of the courtyard and raised his staff. While they watched, terrified, Jun repeated the sequence, slowly this time, calling out the moves as he performed them. “Was that clear?”
They nodded.
He slammed his staff against the floor. “Then begin.”
They drilled. They were flawless.
Combat was a soul-sucking, spirit-crushing ordeal, but there was at least the fun of nightly practice sessions. These were guided drill periods supervised by two of Jun’s apprentices, Kureel and Jeeha. The apprentices were somewhat lazy teachers, and disproportionately enthused at the prospect of inflicting as much pain as possible on imagined opponents. As such, drill periods usually bordered on disaster, with Jeeha and Kureel milling around, shouting bits of advice while the pupils sparred against one another.