by R. F. Kuang
“I read the bestiaries, too,” Nezha said after he had caught up to her. “Nothing about a chimei.”
“You didn’t read the old texts. Archive basement,” she said. “Red Emperor’s era. It only gets a few mentions, but it’s there. Sometimes it’s depicted as a child with red eyes. Sometimes as a black shadow. It tears the faces off its victims but leaves the rest of the corpse intact.”
“Creepy,” Nezha said. “What’s its deal with faces?”
“I’m not sure,” Rin admitted. She searched her memory for anything else she could remember about chimeis. “The bestiaries didn’t say. I think it collects them. The books claim that the chimei can imitate just about anyone—people you care about, people you could never hurt.”
“Even people it hasn’t killed?”
“Probably,” she guessed. “It’s been collecting faces for thousands of years. With that many facial features, you could approximate anyone.”
“So what? How does that make it dangerous?”
She shot him a glance over her shoulder. “You’d be fine stabbing something with your mother’s face?”
“I’d know it wasn’t real.”
“You’d know in the back of your mind it wasn’t real. But could you do it in the moment? Look in your mother’s eyes, listen to her begging, and put your knife to her throat?”
“If I knew there was no way it could be my mother,” Nezha said. “The chimei sounds scary only if it catches you by surprise. But not if you know.”
“I don’t think it’s that simple,” said Rin. “This thing didn’t just frighten one or two people. It scared off half the city. What’s more, the bestiaries don’t tell us how to kill it. There isn’t a defeat of a chimei on record in history. We’re fighting this one blind.”
The streets in the middle of town were still—doors closed, wagons parked. What should have been a bustling marketplace was dusty and quiet.
But not empty.
Bodies were littered around the streets in various states.
Rin knelt down by the closest one and turned it over. The corpse was unmarked except for the head. The face had been chewed off in the most grotesque manner. The eye sockets were empty, the nose missing, lips torn clean off.
“You weren’t kidding,” Nezha said. He covered his mouth with a hand. “Tiger’s tits. What happens when we find it?”
“Probably I’ll kill it,” she said. “You can help.”
“You are obnoxiously overconfident in your combat abilities,” said Nezha.
“I thrashed you at school. I’m frank about my combat abilities,” she said. It helped if she talked big. It made the fear go away.
Several feet away, Nezha kicked another body over. It wore the dark blue uniform of the Federation Armed Forces. A five-pointed yellow star on his right breast identified him as an officer of rank.
“Poor guy,” he said. “Someone didn’t get the message.”
Rin walked past Nezha and held her torch out over the bloody walkway. An entire squadron of slain Federation forces was littered across the cobblestones.
“I don’t think the Federation sent it,” she said slowly.
“Maybe they’ve kept it locked up all this time,” Nezha suggested. “Maybe they didn’t know what it could do.”
“The Federation doesn’t take chances like that,” she said. “You saw how cautious they were with the trebuchets at Sinegard. They wouldn’t unleash a beast they couldn’t control.”
“So it just came on its own? A monster that no one’s seen in centuries decides to reappear in the one city under siege?”
Rin had a sinking suspicion of where the chimei had come from. She’d seen the monster before. She’d seen it in the illustrations of the Jade Emperor’s menagerie.
I will summon into existence beings that should not be in this world.
When Jiang had opened that void at Sinegard, he had ripped a hole in the fabric between their world and the next. And now, with the Gatekeeper gone, demons were climbing through at will.
There is a price. There is always a price.
Now she could see what he meant.
She pushed the thoughts from her mind and knelt down to examine the corpses more closely. None of the soldiers had drawn their weapons. This made no sense. Surely they couldn’t all have been caught off guard. If they’d been fighting a monstrous beast, they should have died with their swords drawn. There should be signs of a struggle.
“Where do you think—” she began to ask, but Nezha clamped a cold hand over her mouth.
“Listen,” he whispered.
She could hear nothing. But then, across the market square from where they stood, a faint noise came from within an overturned wagon, the sound of something shaking. Then the shaking stilled, giving way to what sounded like high-pitched sobbing.
Rin walked closer with her torch held out to investigate.
“Are you mad?” Nezha grabbed her arm. “That could be the beast itself.”
“So what are we going to do, run from it?” She shook him off and continued at a brisk pace toward the wagon.
Nezha hesitated, but she heard him following. When they reached the wagon, he met her eyes over the torchlight, and she nodded. She drew her sword, and together they yanked the cover off the wagon.
“Go away!”
The thing under the cover wasn’t a beast. It was a tiny girl, no taller than Nezha’s waist, curled up in the back end of the wagon. She wore a flimsy blood-covered dress. She shrieked when she saw them and buried her head in her knees. Her entire body convulsed with violent, terrified sobs. “Get away! Get away from me!”
“Put your sword down, you’re scaring her!” Nezha stepped in front of Rin, blocking her from the little girl’s view. He shifted his torch to his other hand and put a hand softly on the girl’s shoulder. “Hey. Hey, it’s okay. We’re here to help you.”
The girl sniffled. “Horrible monster . . .”
“I know. The monster isn’t here. We’ve, uh, we’ve scared it away. We’re not here to hurt you, I promise. Can you look at me?”
Slowly, the girl lifted her head and met Nezha’s gaze. Her eyes were enormous, wide and scared, in her tear-streaked face.
As Rin looked over Nezha’s shoulder into those eyes, she was struck with the oddest sensation, a fierce desire to protect the little girl at all costs. She felt it like a physical urge, a foreign maternal desire. She would die before letting any harm come to this innocent child.
“You’re not a monster?” the girl whimpered.
Nezha stretched his arms out to her. “We’re humans through and through,” he said gently.
The girl leaned into his arms, and her sobs subsided.
Rin watched Nezha in amazement. He seemed to know exactly how to act around the child, adjusting his tone and his body language to be as comforting as possible.
Nezha handed Rin his torch with one arm and patted the girl on the head with the other. “Will you let me help you out of this thing?”
She nodded hesitantly and rose to her feet. Nezha grasped her waist, lifted her out of the broken wagon, and set her gently on the ground.
“There. You’re all right. Can you walk?”
She nodded again and reached shakily for his hand. Nezha grasped it firmly, wrapped his slender fingers around her tiny hand. “Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere. Do you have a name?”
“Khudali,” she whispered.
“Khudali. You’re safe now,” Nezha promised. “You’re with us. And we’re monster killers. But we need your help. Can you be brave for me?”
Khudali swallowed and nodded.
“Good girl. Now can you tell me what happened? Anything you remember.”
Khudali took a deep breath and began to speak in a halting, trembling voice. “I was with my parents and my sister. We were just riding the wagon back home. The Militia told us not to be out too late so we wanted to get back in time, and then . . .” Khudali began to sob again.
“It�
��s okay,” Nezha said quickly. “We know the beast came. I just need you to give me any details you can. Anything that comes to mind.”
Khudali nodded. “Everyone was screaming, but none of the soldiers did anything. And when it came near us, the Federation just watched. I hid inside the wagon. I didn’t see its face.”
“Did you see where it went?” Rin asked sharply.
Khudali flinched and shrank back behind Nezha.
“You’re scaring her,” Nezha said in a low voice, gesturing again for Rin to stand back. He turned back to Khudali. “Can you show me what direction it ran in?” he asked softly. “Where did it go?”
“I . . . I can’t tell you how to get there. But I can take you,” she said. “I remember what I saw.”
She led them a few steps toward a corner of the alley, then paused.
“That’s where it ate my brother,” she said. “But then it disappeared.”
“Hold on,” said Nezha. “You said you came here with your sister.”
Khudali looked up at Nezha, again with those wide, imploring eyes.
“I suppose I did,” she said.
Then she smiled.
In one instant she was a tiny girl; the next, a long-limbed beast. Except for its face, it was entirely covered in coarse pitch-black fur. Its loping arms could have reached the ground, like Suni’s, a monkey’s arms. Its head was very small, still the head of Khudali, which made it all the more grotesque. It reached for Nezha with thick fingers and lifted him into the air by his collar.
Rin drew her sword and hacked at its legs, its arms, its torso. But the chimei’s bristly fur was like a coat of iron needles, repelling her sword better than any shield could.
“Its face,” she yelled. “Aim for the face!”
But Nezha wasn’t moving. His hands dangled uselessly at his sides. He gazed into the chimei’s tiny face, Khudali’s face, entranced.
“What are you doing?” Rin screamed.
Slowly, the chimei turned its head to look down at her. It found her eyes.
Rin reeled and stumbled backward, choking.
When she gazed into those eyes, its entrancing eyes, the chimei’s monstrous body melted away in her vision. She couldn’t see the black hair, the beast’s body, the rough torso matted with blood. Only the face.
It wasn’t the face of a beast. It was the face of something beautiful. It was blurry for a moment, like it couldn’t decide what it wanted to be, and then it turned into a face she hadn’t seen in years.
Soft, mud-colored cheeks. Rumpled black hair. One baby tooth slightly larger than the rest, one baby tooth missing.
“Kesegi?” Rin uttered.
She dropped her torch. Kesegi smiled uncertainly.
“Do you recognize me?” he asked in his sweet little voice. “After all this time?”
Her heart broke. “Of course I recognize you.”
Kesegi looked at her hopefully. Then he opened his mouth and screeched, and the screech wasn’t anything human. The chimei rushed at her—Rin flung her hands up before her face—but something stopped it.
Nezha had broken free of its grasp; now he held on to its back, where he couldn’t see its face. Nezha stabbed inward, but his knife clattered uselessly against the chimei’s collarbone. He tried again, aiming for its face. Kesegi’s face.
“No!” Rin screamed. “Kesegi, no—”
Nezha missed—his blade ricocheted off iron fur. He raised his weapon for a second blow, but Rin dashed forward and shoved her sword between Nezha’s blade and the chimei.
She had to protect Kesegi, couldn’t let Nezha kill him, not Kesegi . . . he was just a kid, so helpless, so little . . .
It had been three years since she’d left him. She had abandoned him with a pair of opium smugglers, while she left for Sinegard without sending so much as a letter for three years, three impossibly long years.
It seemed like so long ago. An entire lifetime.
So why was Kesegi still so small?
She reeled, mind fuzzy. Answering the question was like trying to see through a dense mist. She knew there was some reason why this didn’t make sense, but she couldn’t quite piece together what it was . . . only that there was something wrong with this Kesegi in front of her.
It wasn’t her Kesegi.
It wasn’t Kesegi at all.
She struggled to come to her senses, blinking rapidly like she was trying to clear away a fog. It’s the chimei, you idiot, she told herself. It’s playing off your emotions. This is what it does. This is how it kills.
And now that she remembered, she saw there was something wrong with Kesegi’s face . . . his eyes were not soft and brown, but bright red, two glaring lanterns that demanded her gaze . . .
Howling, the chimei finally succeeded in flinging Nezha off its back. Nezha jerked through the air and crashed against the alley wall. His head thudded against the stone. He slid to the ground and did not stir.
The chimei bolted into the shadows and disappeared.
Rin ran toward Nezha’s prone form.
“Shit, shit . . .” She pressed her hand to the back of his head. It came away sticky. She probed around, feeling for the contours of the cut, and was relieved to find it was fairly shallow—even light head wounds bled heavily. Nezha might be fine.
But where had the chimei gone . . . ?
She heard a rustling noise above her. She turned, too slowly.
The chimei jumped straight down to land on her back, seizing her shoulders with a horrifically strong grip. She wriggled ferociously, stabbing backward with her sword. But she attacked in vain; the chimei’s fur was still an impenetrable shield, against which her blade could only scrape uselessly.
With one massive hand the chimei seized the blade and broke it. It made a disdainful noise and flung the pieces into the darkness. Then it encircled Rin’s neck with its arms, clinging to her back like a child—a giant, monstrous child. Its arms pressed against her windpipe. Rin’s eyes bulged. She couldn’t breathe. She fell to her knees and clambered desperately over the dirt toward the dropped torch.
She felt the chimei’s breath hot on her neck. It scratched at her face, pulled at her lips and nostrils the way a child might.
“Play with me,” it insisted in Kesegi’s voice. “Why won’t you play with me?”
Can’t breathe . . .
Rin’s fingers found the torch. She seized it and jabbed it blindly upward.
The burning end smashed into the chimei’s exposed face with a loud sizzle. The beast screeched and flung itself off Rin. It writhed in the dirt, limbs twitching at bizarre angles as it keened loudly in pain.
Rin screamed, too—her hair had caught fire. She pulled up her hood and rubbed the cloth over her head to smother the flames.
“Sister, please,” the chimei gasped. In its agony it somehow managed to sound even more like Kesegi.
She crawled doggedly toward it, pointedly looking away from its eyes. She clutched the torch tightly in her right hand. She had to burn it again. Burning it seemed to be the only way to hurt it.
“Rin.”
This time it spoke in Altan’s voice.
This time she couldn’t stop herself from looking.
At first it only had Altan’s face, and then it was Altan, lying sprawled on the ground, blood dripping from his temple. It had Altan’s eyes. It had Altan’s scar.
Raw, smoking, he snarled at her.
Staving off the chimei’s attempts to claw off her face, she pinned it against the ground, jamming down its arms with her knees.
She had to burn its face off. The faces were the source of its power. The chimei had collected a mass of likenesses from every person it had killed, every face it had torn off. It sustained itself on human likenesses, and now it tried to obtain hers.
She forced the torch into its face.
The chimei screamed again. Altan screamed again.
She had never heard Altan scream, not in reality, but she was certain that it would have sounded like this.
“Please,” sobbed Altan, his voice raw. “Please, don’t.”
Rin clenched her teeth and tightened her grip on the torch, pressed it harder against the chimei’s head. The smell of burning flesh filled her nostrils. She choked; the smoke made her tear up but she did not stop. She tried to rip her gaze away, but the chimei’s eyes were arresting. It held her eyes. It forced her to look.
“You can’t kill me,” Altan hissed. “You love me.”
“I don’t love you,” Rin said. “And I can kill anything.”
It was a terrifying power of the chimei’s that the more it burned, the more it looked like Altan. Rin’s heart slammed against her rib cage. Close your mind. Block out your thoughts. Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t . . .
But she couldn’t detach Altan’s likeness from the chimei. They were one and the same. She loved it, she loved him, and he was going to kill her. Unless she killed him first.
But no, that didn’t make sense . . .
She tried to focus again, to still her terror and regain her rationality, but this time what she concentrated on was not detaching Altan from the chimei but resolving to kill it no matter who she thought it was.
She was killing the chimei. She was killing Altan. Both were true. Both were necessary.
She didn’t have the poppy seed, but she didn’t need to call the Phoenix in this moment. She had the torch and she had the pain, and that was enough.
She smashed the blunt end of the torch into Altan’s face. She smashed again, with a greater force than she knew she was capable of. Bone gave way to wood. His cheek caved in, creating a cavernous hole where flesh and bone should be.
“You’re hurting me.” Altan sounded shocked.
No, I’m killing you. She smashed it again and again and again. Once her arm started going, she couldn’t stop. Altan’s face became a mottled mess of fragmented bone and flesh. Brown skin turned bright red. His face lost shape altogether. She beat out those eyes, beat them bloody so she wouldn’t have to look into them anymore. When he struggled, she turned the torch around and burned him in the wounds. Then he screamed.
Finally the chimei ceased its struggles beneath her. Its muscles stopped tensing, its legs stopped kicking. Rin lurched forward over its head, breathing heavily. She had burned through its face to the bone. Underneath the charred, smoking skin lay a tiny, pristine white skull.