by R. F. Kuang
Moag wanted Yang Yuanfu dead. The Cike specialized in assassination. They were a matchmaker’s dream.
Three months. Twenty-nine heads. Just one more job and they’d have silver, ships, and enough soldiers to distract the Imperial Guard long enough for Rin to march up to Daji and wrap flaming fingers around her throat.
If port security was lax, wall defense was nonexistent. The Cike passed through Adlaga’s walls with no interference—which wasn’t hard to do, considering the Federation had blown great holes all across the boundary and none of them were guarded.
Unegen met them behind the gates.
“We picked a good day for murder,” he said as he guided them into the alleyway. “Yuanfu’s due in the city square at noon for a war commemoration ceremony. He’ll be out in broad daylight, and we can pick him off from the alleys without showing our faces.”
Unlike Aratsha, Unegen preferred his human form when he wasn’t calling down the shape-shifting powers of the fox spirit. But Rin had always sensed something distinctly vulpine in the way he carried himself. Unegen was both crafty and easily startled; his narrow eyes were always darting from side to side, tracking all of his possible escape routes.
“So we’ve got what, two hours?” Rin asked.
“A little over. There’s a warehouse a few blocks down from here that’s fairly empty,” he said. “We can hunker down to wait in there. Then, ah, we split pretty easily if things go south.”
Rin turned toward the Cike, considering.
“We’ll take the corners of the square when Yuanfu shows up,” she decided. “Suni in the southwest. Baji northwest, and I’ll take the northeast.”
“Diversions?” Baji asked.
“No.” Normally diversions were a fantastic idea, and Rin loved assigning Suni to wreak as much havoc as possible while she or Baji darted in to slit their target’s throat, but during a public ceremony the risk to civilians was too great. “We’ll let Qara take the first shot. The rest of us clear a path back to the ship if they put up resistance.”
“Are we still trying to pretend we’re normal mercenaries?” Suni asked.
“Might as well,” Rin said. They’d done a decent job so far of concealing the extent of their abilities, or at least silencing anyone who would spread rumors. Daji didn’t know the Cike were coming for her. The longer she believed them dead, the better. “We’re dealing with a better opponent than usual, though, so do what you need to. At the end of the day, we want a head in a bag.”
She took a breath and ran the plan once more through her mind, considering.
This would work. This was going to be fine.
Strategizing with the Cike was like playing a chess game in which she had several massively overpowered, unpredictable, and bizarre pieces. Aratsha commanded the waters. Suni and Baji were berserkers, capable of leveling entire squadrons without breaking a sweat. Unegen could transform into a fox. Qara not only communed with birds, she could shoot out a peacock’s eye from a hundred meters away. And Chaghan . . . she wasn’t quite sure what Chaghan did, other than irritate her at every possible turn, but he seemed capable of making people lose their minds.
All of them combined against a single township official and his guards seemed like overkill.
But Yang Yuanfu was used to assassination attempts. You had to be, if you were one of the few uncorrupt officials left in the Empire. He shielded himself with a squadron of the most battle-hardy men in the province wherever he went.
Rin knew, based on Moag’s reports, that Yang Yuanfu had survived at least thirteen assassination attempts over the past fifteen years. His guards were well accustomed to treachery. To get past them, you’d need fighters of unnatural ability. You needed overkill.
Once inside the warehouse, the Cike had nothing to do but wait. Unegen kept watch by the slats in the wall, twitching continuously. Chaghan and Qara sat with their backs against the wall, silent. Suni and Baji stood slouched, arms crossed casually as if simply waiting for their dinners.
Rin paced the room, focusing on her breathing and trying to ignore the twinges of pain in her temples.
She counted thirty hours since she’d ingested any opium. That was longer than she’d gone for weeks. She twisted her hands together as she walked, trying to force the twitching to go away.
It didn’t help. It didn’t stop the headache, either.
Fuck.
At first she’d thought she only needed the opium for the grief. She thought she would smoke it for the relief, until the memories of Speer and Altan dulled to a faint ache, until she could function without the suffocating guilt of what she’d done.
She thought guilt must be the word for it. The irrational feeling, not the moral concept. Because she’d told herself she wasn’t sorry, that the Mugenese deserved what they got and that she was never looking back. Except the memory loomed like a gaping chasm in her mind where she’d tossed in every human feeling that threatened her.
But the abyss kept calling for her to look in. To fall inside.
And the Phoenix didn’t want to let her forget. The Phoenix wanted her to gloat about it. The Phoenix lived on rage, and rage was intricately tied to the past. So the Phoenix needed to claw apart the open wounds in her mind and set fire to them, day after day, because that gave her memories and those memories fueled the rage.
Without opium the visions flashed constantly through Rin’s mind’s eye, often more vivid than her surrounding reality.
Sometimes they were of Altan. More times they weren’t. The Phoenix was a conduit to generations of memories. Thousands upon thousands of Speerlies had prayed to the god in their grief and desperation. And the god had collected their suffering, stored it, and turned it into flames.
The memories could also be deceptively calm. Sometimes Rin saw brown-skinned children running up and down a pristine white beach. She saw flames burning higher on the shore—not funeral pyres, not flames of destruction, but campfires. Bonfires. Hearth fires, warm and sustaining.
And sometimes she saw the Speerlies, enough of them to fill a thriving village. She was always amazed by how many of them there were, an entire race of people that sometimes she feared she’d only dreamed up. If the Phoenix lingered, then Rin could even catch fragments of conversations in a language she almost understood, could see glimpses of faces that she almost recognized.
They weren’t the ferocious beasts of Nikara lore. They weren’t the mindless warriors the Red Emperor had needed them to be and every subsequent regime had forced them to be. They loved and laughed and cried around their fires. They were people.
But every time, before Rin could sink into the memory of a heritage she didn’t have, she saw on the fading horizon boats sailing in from the Federation naval base on the mainland.
What happened next was a haze of colors, accumulated perspectives that shifted too fast for Rin to follow. Shouts, screams, movement. Rows and rows of Speerlies lined up on the beach, weapons in hand.
But it was never enough. To the Federation, they must have seemed savages, using sticks to fight gods, and the booms of cannon fire lit up the village as quickly as if someone had held a light to kindling.
Gas pellets launched from the tower ships with terribly innocent popping noises. Where they hit the ground they expelled huge, thick clouds of acrid yellow smoke.
Women fell. Children twitched. The warrior ranks broke. The gas did not kill immediately; its inventors were not so kind.
Then the butchering began. The Federation fired continuously and indiscriminately. Mugenese crossbows could shoot three bolts at a time, unleashing an unceasing barrage of metal that ripped open necks, skulls, limbs, hearts.
Spilled blood traced marble patterns into white sand. Bodies lay still where they fell. At dawn, the Federation generals marched to the shore, boots treading indifferently over crushed bodies, advancing to slam their flag into the bloodstained sand.
“We’ve got a problem,” Baji said.
Rin snapped back to attention. “W
hat?”
“Take a look.”
She heard the sudden sound of jangling bells—a happy sound, utterly out of place in this ruined city. She pressed her face to a gap in the warehouse slats. A cloth dragon bobbed up and down through the crowd, held up on tent poles by dancers below. Dancers waving streamers and ribbons followed behind, accompanied by musicians and government officials lifted on bright red sedan chairs. Behind them was the crowd.
“You said it was a small ceremony,” Rin said. “Not a fucking parade.”
“It was quiet just an hour ago,” Unegen insisted.
“And now the whole township’s clustering in that square.” Baji squinted through the slats. “Are we still going by that ‘no civilian casualties’ rule?”
“Yes,” Chaghan said before Rin could answer.
“You’re no fun,” Baji said.
“Crowds make targeted assassinations easier,” Chaghan said. “It’s a better opportunity to get in close. Make your hit without being spotted, then filter out before his guards have time to react.”
Rin opened her mouth to say That’s still a lot of witnesses, but the withdrawal cramps hit her first. A wave of pain tore through her muscles; it started in her gut and flared out, so sudden that for a moment the world turned black, and all she could do was clutch her chest, gasping.
“Are you all right?” Baji asked.
A wave of bile rose up in her throat before she could respond. She heaved. A second swell of nausea racked her gut. Then a third.
Baji put a hand on her shoulder. “Rin?”
“I’m fine,” she insisted for what seemed like the thousandth time.
She wasn’t fine. Her head was throbbing again, and this time the pain was accompanied by a nausea that seized her rib cage and didn’t let go until she was doubled over on her knees, whimpering.
Vomit splattered the floor.
“Change of plans,” Chaghan said. “Rin, get back to the ship.”
She wiped her mouth. “No.”
“I’m telling you you’re not in any state to be useful.”
“And I’m your commander,” she said. “So shut up and do as I say.”
Chaghan’s eyes narrowed. The warehouse fell silent.
Rin had been wrestling Chaghan for control over the Cike for months. He questioned her decisions at every turn; he took every chance he could to make it very clear that he thought Altan had made a stupid decision naming her commander.
And Rin knew, in all fairness, he was right.
She was dreadful at leadership. Most of her attack plans over the past three months had boiled down to “everyone attack at once and see if we come out all right on the other side.”
But command ability aside, she had to be here. Had to see Adlaga through. Since they’d left Speer her withdrawals had only been getting worse and worse. She’d been mostly functional during their first few missions for Moag. Then the endless killings, the screams, and the flashbacks to the battlefield kept setting her anger off again and again until she was spending more hours of the day high than she did sober, and even when she was sober she felt like she was still teetering on the brink of madness because the fucking Phoenix never shut up.
She needed to pull herself back from the precipice. If she couldn’t do this basic, simple task; couldn’t kill some township official who wasn’t even a shaman, then she would hardly be able to stand up to the Empress.
And she couldn’t lose her chance at revenge. Revenge was the only thing she had.
“Don’t you jeopardize this,” Chaghan said.
“Don’t you patronize me,” she retorted.
Chaghan sighed and turned to Unegen. “Can you watch her? I’ll give you laudanum.”
“I thought I was supposed to return to the ship,” Unegen said.
“Change of plans.”
“Fine.” Unegen twitched out a shrug. “If I have to.”
“Come on,” Rin said. “I don’t need a wet nurse.”
“You’ll wait in the corner of the crowd,” Chaghan ordered, ignoring her. “You won’t leave Unegen’s side. You’ll both act as reinforcements, and barring that, you will be the last resort.”
She scowled. “Chaghan—”
“The last resort,” he repeated. “You’ve killed enough innocents.”
The hour came. The Cike dissipated, darting out of the warehouse to join the moving crowd one by one.
Rin and Unegen blended into Adlaga’s masses easily enough. The main streets were packed with civilians, all caught up in their own miseries, and so many noises and sights came from all directions that Rin, unsure of where to look, couldn’t help but feel a constant state of mild panic.
A wildly discordant mash of gongs and war drums drowned out the lute music from the front of the parade. Merchants hawked their wares every time they turned a corner, screaming prices with the sort of urgency that she associated with evacuation warnings. Celebratory red confetti littered the streets, tossed out in handfuls by children and entertainers, a snowfall of red paper flecks that covered every surface.
“How do they have the funds for this?” Rin muttered. “The Federation left them starving.”
“Aid from Sinegard,” Unegen guessed. “End-of-war celebration funds. Keeps them happy, keeps them loyal.”
Rin saw food everywhere she looked. Huge cubes of watermelon on sticks. Red bean buns. Stalls selling soup dumplings dripping with soy sauce and lotus seed tarts lined the streets. Merchants flipped egg cakes with deft movements, and the crackle of oil under any other circumstances would make her hungry, but now the pungent smells only made her stomach turn.
It seemed both unfair and impossible that there could be such an abundance of food. Just days ago they had sailed past people who were drowning their babies in river mud because that was a quicker and more merciful death than letting them slowly starve.
If all this came from Sinegard, then that meant the Imperial bureaucracy had possessed food stores like this the entire time. Why had they withheld it during the war?
If the people of Adlaga were asking that same question, they didn’t show it. Everyone looked so happy. Faces relaxed in simple relief because the war was over, the Empire was victorious, and they were safe.
And that made Rin furious.
She’d always had trouble with anger, she knew that. At Sinegard she’d constantly acted in furious, impulsive bursts and dealt with the consequences later. But now the anger was permanent, an unspeakable fury imposed upon her that she could neither contain nor control.
But she also didn’t want to make it stop. The anger was a shield. The anger helped her to keep from remembering what she’d done. Because as long as she was angry, then it was okay—she’d acted within reason. She was afraid that if she stopped being angry, she might crack apart.
She tried to distract herself by scanning the crowd for Yang Yuanfu and his guards. Tried to focus on the task at hand.
Her god wouldn’t let her.
Kill them, encouraged the Phoenix. They don’t deserve their happiness. They didn’t fight.
She had a sudden vision of the marketplace on fire. She shook her head frantically, trying to tune out the Phoenix’s voice. “No, stop . . .”
Make them burn.
Heat flared up in her palms. Her gut twisted. No—not here, not now. She squeezed her eyes shut.
Turn them to ash.
Her heartbeat began to quicken; her vision narrowed to a pinprick and expanded again. She felt feverish. The crowd suddenly seemed full of enemies. In one instant everyone was a blue-uniformed Federation soldier, bearing weapons; and in another they were civilians once again. She took a deep, choking breath, trying to force air into her lungs, eyes squeezed shut while she willed the red haze to go away once more.
This time it wouldn’t.
The laughter, the music, the smiling faces standing around her all made her want to scream.
How dare they live when Altan was dead? It seemed horrifically unfair that life co
uld keep on going and these people could be celebrating a war that they hadn’t won for themselves, when they hadn’t suffered for it . . .
The heat in her hands intensified.
Unegen seized her by the shoulder. “I thought you had your shit under control.”
She jumped and spun around. “I do!” she hissed. Too loud. The people around her backed away from her.
Unegen pulled her toward the edge of the crowd, into the safety of the shadows under Adlaga’s ruins. “You’re drawing attention.”
“I’m fine, Unegen, just let go—”
He didn’t. “You need to calm down.”
“I know—”
“No. I mean right now.” He nodded over her shoulder. “She’s here.”
Rin turned.
And there sat the Empress, borne like a bride on a palanquin of red silk.
Chapter 2
The last time Rin had encountered the Empress Su Daji, she had been burning with fever, too delirious to see anything but Daji’s face—lovely, hypnotic, with skin like porcelain and eyes like moth’s wings.
The Empress was just as arresting as ever. Everyone Rin knew had emerged from the Mugenese invasion looking a decade older, jaded and scarred, but the Empress was as pale, ageless, and unmarked as ever, as if she existed on some transcendent plane untouchable by mortals.
Rin’s breath quickened.
Daji wasn’t supposed to be here.
It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.
Images of Daji’s body flashed through her mind. Head cracked against white marble. Pale neck sliced open. Body charred to nothing—but she wouldn’t have burned immediately. Rin wanted to do it slowly, wanted to relish it.
A slow cheer went up through the crowd.
The Empress leaned out through the curtains and raised a hand so white it nearly glimmered in the sunlight. She smiled.
“We are victorious,” she called out. “We have survived.”
Anger flared inside Rin, so thick she almost choked on it. She felt like her body was covered with ant bites that she couldn’t scratch at—a kind of frustration bubbling inside her, just begging her to let it explode.