by R. F. Kuang
“Wait,” Chaghan interrupted. “Did they take the Empress?”
“The Empress fled,” Kitay said. “She took twenty of her guards and stole out of the city the night after Irjah died.”
Qara and Chaghan made synchronous noises of disbelief, but Kitay shook his head warily. “Who can blame her? It was that or let those monsters get their hands on her, and who knows what they would have done to her . . .”
Chaghan did not look convinced.
“Pathetic,” he spat, and Rin agreed with him. The idea that the Empress had fled from a city while her people were burned, killed, murdered, raped went against everything Rin had been taught about warfare. A general did not abandon his soldiers. An Empress did not abandon her people.
Again, the Talwu’s words rang true.
A leader abandons their people. A ruler begins a campaign. . . . Joy in decapitating enemies. This signifies evil.
Was there any other way to interpret the Hexagram, in the face of the evidence of destruction before them? Rin had been torturing herself with the Talwu’s words, trying to construe them in any way that didn’t point to the massacre at Golyn Niis, but she had been deluding herself. The Talwu had told them exactly what to expect.
She should have known that when the Empress had abandoned the Nikara, then all truly was lost.
But the Empress was not the only one who had abandoned Golyn Niis. The entire army had surrendered the city. Within a week Golyn Niis had more or less been delivered to the Federation on the platter, and the entirety of its half million people subjected to the whims of the invading forces.
Those whims turned out to have little to do with the city itself. Instead, the Federation simply wanted to squeeze Golyn Niis for whatever resources they could find in preparation for a deeper march inland. They sacked the marketplace, rounded up the livestock, and demanded that families bring out their stores of rice and grain. Whatever couldn’t be loaded up on their supply wagons, they burned or left out to spoil.
Then they disposed of the people.
“They decided that beheadings took too long, so they started doing things more efficiently,” said Kitay. “They started with gas. You should probably know this, actually; they’ve got this thing, this weapon that emits yellow-green fog—”
“I know,” Altan said. “We saw the same thing in Khurdalain.”
“They took out practically the entire Second Division in one night,” said Kitay. “Some of us put up a last stand near the south gate. When the gas cleared, nothing was alive. I went there afterward to find survivors. At first I didn’t know what I was looking at. All over the ground, you could see animals. Mice, rats, rodents of every kind. So many of them. They’d crawled out of their holes to die. When the Militia was gone, nothing stood between the soldiers and our people. The Federation had fun. They made it a sport. They threw babies in the air to see if they could cleave them in half before they hit the ground. They had contests to see how many civilians they could round up and decapitate in an hour. They raced to see who could stack bodies the fastest.” Kitay’s voice cracked. “Could I have some water?”
Qara wordlessly handed him her canteen.
“How did Mugen become like this?” Chaghan asked wonderingly. “What did you ever do to make them hate you so much?”
“It’s not anything we did,” said Altan. His left hand, Rin noticed, was shaking again. “It’s how the Federation soldiers were trained. When you believe your life means nothing except for your usefulness to your Emperor, the lives of your enemies mean even less.”
“The Federation soldiers don’t feel anything.” Kitay nodded in agreement. “They don’t think of themselves as people. They are parts of a machine. They do as they are commanded, and the only time they feel joy is when reveling in another person’s suffering. There is no reasoning with them. There is no attempting to understand them. They are accustomed to propagating such grotesque evil that they cannot properly be called human.” Kitay’s voice trembled.
“When they were cutting my squadron down, I looked into the eyes of one of them. I thought I could make him recognize me as a fellow man. As a person, not just an opponent. And he stared back at me, and I realized I couldn’t connect with him at all. There was nothing human in those eyes.”
Once the survivors began to realize that the Militia had arrived, they emerged from their hiding holes in miserable, straggling groups.
The few survivors of Golyn Niis had been driven deep into the city, hiding in disguised shelters like Kitay or locked up in makeshift prisons and then forgotten when the Federation soldiers decided to continue their march inland. After discovering two or three such holding rooms, Altan ordered them—Cike and civilians alike—to carefully search the city.
No one disagreed with the order. They all knew, Rin suspected, that it would be horrible to die alone, chained to walls when their captors had long since departed.
“I guess we’re saving people for once,” Baji said. “Feels nice.”
Altan himself led a squad to take on the nearly impossible task of clearing away the bodies. He claimed it was to ward against rot and disease, but Rin suspected it was because he wanted to give them a proper funeral—and because there was so little else that he could do for the city.
They had no time to dig mass graves on the scale necessary before the stench of rotting bodies became unbearable. So they stacked the corpses into large pyres, great bonfires of bodies that burned constantly. Golyn Niis turned from a city of corpses to a city of ash.
But the sheer number of the dead was staggering. The corpses Altan burned barely made a dent in the piles of rotting bodies inside the city walls. Rin didn’t think it was possible to truly cleanse Golyn Niis unless they burned the entire city to the ground.
Eventually they might have to. But not while there could still be survivors.
Rin was outside the city walls trying to find a fresh source of water that wasn’t spoiled with blood when Kitay pulled her aside and reported that they had found Venka. She had been kept in a “relaxation house,” which was likely the only reason why the Federation had let a division soldier live. Kitay did not elaborate on what a “relaxation house” was, but he didn’t need to.
Rin could hardly recognize Venka when she went to see her that night. Her lovely hair was shorn short, as if someone had hacked at it with a knife. Her lively eyes were now dull and glassy. Both her arms had been broken at the wrist. She wore them in slings. Rin saw the angle at which Venka’s arms had been twisted, and knew there was only one way they could have gotten like that.
Venka hardly stirred when Rin entered her room. Only when Rin closed the door did she flinch.
“Hi,” Rin said in a small voice.
Venka looked up dully and said nothing.
“I thought you’d want someone to talk to,” said Rin, though the words sounded hollow and insufficient even as they left her mouth.
Venka glared at her.
Rin struggled for words. She could think of no questions that were not inane. Are you all right? Of course Venka was not all right. How did you survive? By having the body of a woman. What happened to you? But she already knew.
“Did you know they called us public toilets?” Venka asked suddenly.
Rin stopped two paces from the door. Comprehension dawned on her, and her blood turned to ice. “What?”
“They thought I couldn’t understand Mugini,” Venka said with a horrifying attempt at a chuckle. “That’s what they called me, when they were in me.”
“Venka . . .”
“Do you know how badly it hurt? They were in me, they were in me for hours and they wouldn’t stop. I blacked out over and over but every time I awoke they were still going, a different man would be on top of me, or maybe the same man . . . they were all the same after a while. It was a nightmare, and I couldn’t wake up.”
Rin’s mouth filled with the taste of bile. “I’m so sorry—” she tried, but Venka didn’t seem to hear her.
&
nbsp; “I’m not the worst,” Venka said. “I fought back. I was trouble. So they saved me for last. They wanted to break me first. They made me watch. I saw women disemboweled. I saw the soldiers slice off their breasts. I saw them nail women alive to walls. I saw them mutilate young girls, when they had tired of their mothers. If their vaginas were too small, they cut them open to make it easier to rape them.” Venka’s voice rose in pitch. “There was a pregnant woman in the house with us. She was seven months to term. Eight. At first the soldiers let her live so she’d take care of us. Wash us. Feed us. She was the only kind face in that house. They didn’t touch her because she was pregnant, not at first. Then one day the general decided he’d had enough of the other girls. He came for her. You’d think she’d have learned by then, after watching what the soldiers did to us. You’d think she would know there wasn’t any point in resisting.”
Rin didn’t want to hear any more. She wanted to bury her head under her arms and block everything out. But Venka continued, as if now that she had started her testimony she couldn’t stop. “She kicked and dragged. And then she slapped him. The general howled and grabbed at her stomach. Not with his knife. With his fingers. His nails. He knocked her down and he tore and tore.” Venka turned her head away. “And he pulled out her stomach, and her intestines, and then finally the baby . . . and the baby was still moving. We saw everything from the hallway.”
Rin stopped breathing.
“I was glad,” Venka said. “Glad that she was dead, before the general ripped her baby in half the way you’d split an orange.” Underneath her slings, Venka’s fingers clenched and spasmed. “He made me mop it up.”
“Gods. Venka.” Rin couldn’t look her in the eye. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t pity me!” Venka shrieked suddenly. She made a movement as if trying to reach for Rin’s arm, as if she had forgotten that her arms were broken. She stood up and walked toward Rin so that they were face-to-face, nose to nose.
Her expression was as unhinged as it had been that day when they fought in the ring.
“I don’t need your pity. I need you to kill them for me. You have to kill them for me,” Venka hissed. “Swear it. Swear on your blood that you will burn them.”
“Venka, I can’t . . .”
“I know you can.” Venka’s voice climbed in pitch. “I heard what they said about you. You have to burn them. Whatever it takes. Swear it on your life. Swear it. Swear it for me.”
Her eyes were like shattered glass.
It took all of Rin’s courage to meet her gaze.
“I swear.”
Rin left Venka’s room and set off at a run.
She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t speak.
She needed Altan.
She didn’t know why she thought that he would offer the relief she was looking for, but among them only Altan had gone through this once before. Altan had been on Speer when it burned, Altan had seen his people killed . . . Altan, surely, could tell her that the Earth might keep on turning, that the sun would continue to rise and set, that the existence of such abominable evil, such disregard for human life did not mean the entire world was shrouded in darkness. Altan, surely, could tell her they still had something worth fighting for.
“In the library,” Suni told her, pointing to an ancient-looking tower two blocks past the city gates.
The door to the library was closed, and nobody responded when she knocked.
Rin turned the handle slowly and peered within.
The great inner chamber was filled with lamps, yet none were lit. The only light came from the moonbeams shining in through tall glass windows. The room was filled with a sickly sweet smoke that tugged at her memory, so thick and cloying that Rin nearly choked.
In a corner among stacks of books, Altan was sprawled, legs out and head tilted listlessly. His shirt was off.
Her breath hitched in her throat.
His chest was a crisscross of scars. Many were jagged battle wounds. Others were startlingly neat, symmetrical and clean as if carved deliberately into his skin.
A pipe lay in his hand. As she watched, he brought it to his lips and inhaled deeply, crimson eyes rolling upward as he did so. He let the smoke fill his lungs and then exhaled slowly with a low, satisfied sigh.
“Altan?” she said quietly.
He didn’t seem to hear her at first. Rin crossed the room and slowly knelt down next to him. The smell was nauseatingly familiar: opium nuggets, sweet like rotted fruit. It gave her memories of Tikany, of living corpses wasting away in drug dens.
Finally, Altan looked in her direction. His face twisted into a droll, uninterested smile, and even in the ruins of Golyn Niis, even in this city of corpses, Rin thought that the sight of Altan then was the most terrible thing she’d ever seen.
Chapter 22
“You knew?” Rin asked.
“We all did,” Ramsa murmured. He touched her shoulder tentatively, attempting a comforting gesture, but it didn’t help. “He tries to hide it. Doesn’t do a very good job.”
Rin moaned and pressed her forehead into her knees. She could hardly see through her tears. It hurt to inhale now; it felt like her rib cage was being crushed, like the despair was pressing against her chest, weighing her down so that she could barely breathe.
This had to be the end. Their wartime capital had fallen, her friends were dead or broken, and Altan . . .
“Why?” she wailed. “Doesn’t he know what it does to you?”
“He knows.” Ramsa let his hand drop. He twisted his fingers in his lap. “I don’t think he can help it.”
Rin knew that was true, but she couldn’t accept it.
She knew the horrors of opium addiction. She’d seen the Fangs’ clientele—promising young scholars, well-to-do merchants, talented men—whose lives had been ruined by opium nuggets. She’d seen proud government officials reduced in the span of months to shriveled, penniless men begging in the streets to fund their next fix.
But she couldn’t reconcile those images with her commander.
Altan was invincible. Altan was the best martial artist in the country. Altan wasn’t—Altan couldn’t be—
“He’s supposed to be our commander,” she said hoarsely. “How can he fight when he—when he’s like that?”
“We cover for him,” Ramsa said quietly. “He never used to do it more than once a month.”
All those times he’d smelled like smoke. All those times he’d been missing when she tried to find him.
He’d just been sprawled in his office, sucking in and out, glassy and empty and gone.
“It’s disgusting,” she said. “It’s—it’s pathetic.”
“Don’t say that,” Ramsa said sharply. He curled his fingers into a fist. “Take that back.”
“He’s our commander! He has a duty to us! How could he—”
But Ramsa cut her off. “I don’t know how Altan survived that island. But I do know whatever happened to him is unimaginable. You didn’t know you were a Speerly until months ago. But Altan lost everyone in his life overnight. You don’t get over that kind of pain. So it’s what he needs. So it’s a vulnerability. I won’t judge him. I don’t dare, because I don’t have the right. And neither do you.”
After two weeks of sifting through rubble, breaking into locked basements, and relocating corpses, the Cike found fewer than a thousand survivors in the city that had once been home to half a million. Too many days had passed. They gave up hope of finding any more.
For the first time since the start of the war, the Cike had no operations planned.
“What are we waiting around for?” Baji asked several times a day.
“Orders,” Qara always answered.
But no commands were forthcoming. Altan was usually absent, sometimes disappearing for entire days. When he was present, he was in no state to give orders. Chaghan took over smoothly, assigned the Cike routine duties in the interim. Most of them were told to keep watch. They all knew that the enemy was already
moving inland to finish what they had started, and that there was nothing in Golyn Niis to guard but ruins, but still they obeyed.
Rin sat over the gate, clutching a spear to keep herself upright as she watched the path leading to the city. She had the twilight watch, which was just as well, because she could not sleep if she tried. Each time she closed her eyes she saw blood. Dried blood in the streets. Blood in the Golyn River. Corpses on hooks. Infants in barrels.
She couldn’t eat, either. The blandest foods still tasted like carcasses. Only once did they have meat; Baji caught two rabbits in the woods, flayed them, and staked them on a narrow piece of wood to roast. When Rin smelled them, she dry-heaved for several long minutes. She could not dissociate the rabbits’ flesh from the charred flesh of bodies in the square. She could not walk Golyn Niis without imagining the deaths in the moment of the execution. She could not see the hundreds of decapitated heads on poles without seeing the soldier who had walked down the row of kneeling prisoners, methodically bringing his sword down again and again as if reaping corn. She could not pass the babies in their barrel graves without hearing their uncomprehending screams.
The entire time, her own mind screamed the unanswerable question: Why?
The cruelty could not register for her. Bloodlust, she understood. Bloodlust, she was guilty of. She had lost herself in battle, too; she had gone further than she should have, she had hurt others when she should have stopped.
But this—viciousness on this scale, wanton slaughter of this magnitude, against innocents who hadn’t even lifted a finger in self-defense, this she could not imagine doing.