by R. F. Kuang
How could the Empress be alive? The sheer contradiction infuriated her, the fact that Altan and Master Irjah and so many others were dead and Daji looked like she’d never even been wounded. She was the head of a nation that had bled millions to a senseless invasion—an invasion she’d invited—and she looked like she’d just arrived for a banquet.
Rin barged forward.
Unegen immediately dragged her back. “What are you doing?”
“What do you think?” Rin wrenched her arms out of his grip. “I’m going to get her. Go rally the others, I’ll need backup—”
“Are you crazy?”
“She’s right there! We’ll never get a shot this good again!”
“Then let Qara do it.”
“Qara doesn’t have a clear shot,” Rin hissed. Qara’s station in the ruined bell towers was too high up. She couldn’t get an arrow through—not past the carriage windows, not past this crowd. Inside the palanquin Daji was shielded on all sides; shots from the front would be blocked by the guards standing right before her.
And Rin was more concerned that Qara wouldn’t shoot. She’d certainly seen the Empress by now, but she might be afraid to fire into a crowd of civilians, or to give away the Cike’s location before any of them had a clear shot. Qara might have decided to be prudent.
Rin didn’t care for prudence. The universe had delivered her this chance. She could end this all in minutes.
The Phoenix strained at her consciousness, eager and impatient. Come now, child . . . Let me . . .
She dug her fingernails into her palms. Not yet.
Too much distance separated her from the Empress. If she lit up now, everyone in the square was dead.
She wished desperately that she had better control over the fire. Or any control at all. But the Phoenix was antithetical to control. The Phoenix wanted a roaring, chaotic blaze, consuming everything around her as far as the eye could see.
And when she called the god she couldn’t tell her own desire apart from the Phoenix’s; its desire, and her desire, was a death drive that demanded more to feed its fire.
She tried to think of something else, anything other than rage and revenge. But when she looked at the Empress, all she saw were flames.
Daji looked up. Her eyes locked on to Rin’s. She lifted a hand and waved.
Rin froze. She couldn’t look away. Daji’s eyes became windows became memories became smoke, fire, corpses, and bones, and Rin felt herself falling, falling into a black ocean where all she could see was Altan as a human beacon igniting himself on a pier.
Daji’s lips curved into a cruel smile.
Then the firecrackers set off behind Rin without warning—pop-pop-pop—and Rin’s heart almost burst out of her chest.
Suddenly she was shrieking, hands pressed to her ears while her entire body shook.
“It’s fireworks!” Unegen hissed. He dragged her wrists away from her head. “Just fireworks.”
But that didn’t mean anything—she knew they were fireworks, but that was a rational thought, and rational thoughts didn’t matter when she shut her eyes and saw with every blast of sound explosions bursting behind her eyelids, flailing limbs, screaming children—
She saw a man dangling from the floorboards of a building that had been rent apart, trying to hold on with slippery fingers to slanting wooden planks to not fall into the flaming spears of timber below. She saw men and women plastered to the walls, dusted over with faint white powder so she might have thought they were statues if she couldn’t see the dark shadow of blood in an outline all around them—
Too many people. She was trapped by too many people. She sank to her knees, face buried in her hands. The last time she’d been inside a crowd of people like this they’d been stampeding away from the horror of the inner city of Khurdalain—her eyes shot up and darted around, searching for escape routes, and found none, just unending walls of bodies packed together.
Too much. Too many sights, the information—her mind collapsed in on itself; bursts and flickers of fire emitted from her shoulders and exploded in the air above her, which just made her tremble harder.
And there were still so many people—they were crammed together, a teeming mass of outstretched arms, a nameless and faceless entity that wanted to tear her apart—
Thousands, hundreds of thousands—and you wiped them out of existence, you burned them in their beds—
“Rin, stop!” Unegen shouted.
It didn’t matter, though. The crowd had formed a wide berth around her. Mothers dragged their children back. Veterans pointed and exclaimed.
She looked down. Smoke furled out from every part of her.
Daji’s litter had disappeared. She’d been spirited to safety, no doubt; Rin’s presence had been a glaring warning beacon. A line of Imperial guards pushed through the crowded street toward them, shields raised, spears pointed directly at Rin.
“Oh, fuck,” Unegen said.
Rin backed away unsteadily, palms held out before her as if they belonged to a stranger. Someone else’s fingers sparking with fire. Someone else’s will dragging the Phoenix into this world.
Burn them.
Fire pulsed inside her. She could feel the veins straining behind her eyes. The pressure shot little stabs of pain behind her head, made her vision burst and pop.
Kill them.
The guard captain shouted an order. The Militia stormed her. Then her defensive instincts kicked in, and she lost all self-control. She heard a deafening silence in her mind, then a high, keening noise, the victorious cackle of a god that knew it had won.
When she finally looked at Unegen she didn’t see a man, she saw a charred corpse, a white skeleton glistening over flesh sloughing away; she saw him decompose to ash within seconds and she was struck by how clean that ash was; so infinitely preferable to the complicated mess of bones and flesh that made him up now . . .
“Stop it!”
She heard not a scream, but a whimpering beg. For a split second Unegen’s face flickered through the ash.
She was killing him. She knew she was killing him, and she couldn’t stop.
She couldn’t even move her own limbs. She stood immobile, fire roaring out of her extremities, holding her still like she’d been encased in stone.
Burn him, said the Phoenix.
“No, stop—”
This is what you want.
It wasn’t what she wanted. But it wouldn’t stop. Why would the Phoenix’s gift include any inkling of control? It was an appetite that only strengthened; the fire consumed and wanted to consume more, and Mai’rinnen Tearza had warned her about this once but she hadn’t listened and now Unegen was going to die. . . .
Something heavy clamped over her mouth. She tasted laudanum. Thick, sweet, and cloying. Panic and relief warred in her head as she choked and struggled, but Chaghan just squeezed the soaked cloth harder over her face as her chest heaved.
The ground swooped under her feet. She loosed a muffled shriek.
“Breathe,” Chaghan ordered. “Shut up. Just breathe.”
She choked against the sick and familiar smell; Enki had made this for her so many times. She fought not to struggle; pushed down her natural instincts—she had ordered them to do this, this was supposed to happen.
That didn’t make it any easier to take.
Her legs buckled beneath her. Her shoulders sagged. She swooned into Chaghan’s side.
He dragged her upright, slung her arm over his shoulder, and helped her toward the stairs. Smoke billowed in their path; the heat didn’t affect Rin, but she could see Chaghan’s hair curling, crinkling black at the edges.
“Fuck,” he muttered under his breath.
“Where’s Unegen?” she mumbled.
“He’s fine, he’ll be fine. . . .”
She wanted to insist on seeing him, but her tongue felt too heavy to form words. Her knees gave way entirely, but she didn’t feel herself fall. The sedative worked its way through her bloodstream, and the
world was a light and airy place, a fairy’s domain. She heard someone yell. She felt someone lift her and place her on the bottom of the sampan.
She managed a last look over her shoulder.
On the horizon, the entire port town was lit up like a beacon—lamps illuminated on every deck, bells and smoke signals going up in the glowing air.
Every Imperial sentry could see that warning.
Rin had learned the standard Militia codes. She knew what those signals meant. They’d announced a manhunt for traitors to the throne.
“Congratulations,” Chaghan said. “You’ve brought the entire Militia down on our backs.”
“What are we going to—” Her tongue lolled heavy in her mouth. She’d lost the capacity to form words.
He put a hand on her shoulder and shoved. “Get down.”
She tumbled gracelessly into the space under the seats. She opened her eyes wide to see the wooden base of the boat inches from her nose, so close she could count the grains. The lines along the wood swirled into ink images, which she tilted into, and then the ink assumed colors and became a world of red and black and orange.
The chasm opened. That was the only time it could—when she was high out of her mind, too out of control to stay away from the one thing she refused to let herself think about.
She was flying over the longbow island, she was watching the fire mountain erupt, streams of molten lava pouring over the peak, rushing in rivulets toward the cities below.
She saw the lives crushed out, burned and flattened and transformed to smoke in an instant. And it was so easy, like blowing out a candle, like crushing a moth under her finger; she wanted it and it happened; she had willed it like a god.
As long as she remembered it from that detached, bird’s-eye view, she felt no guilt. She felt rather remotely curious, as if she had set an anthill on fire, as if she had impaled a beetle on a knife tip.
There was no guilt in killing insects, only the lovely, childish curiosity of seeing them writhe in their dying throes.
This wasn’t a memory or a vision; this was an illusion she had conjured for herself, the illusion she returned to every time she lost control and they sedated her.
She wanted to see it—she needed to dance at the edge of this memory that she did not have, skirting between the godlike cold indifference of a murderer and the crippling guilt of the deed. She played with her guilt the way a child holds his palm to a candle flame, daring to venture just close enough to feel the stabbing licks of pain.
It was mental self-flagellation, the equivalent of digging a nail into an open sore. She knew the answer, of course, she just couldn’t admit it to anyone—that at the moment she sank the island, the moment she became a murderer, she had wanted it.
“Is she all right?” Ramsa’s voice. “Why is she laughing?”
Chaghan’s voice. “She’ll be fine.”
Yes, Rin wanted to shout, yes, she was fine; just dreaming, just caught between this world and the next, just enraptured by the illusions of what she had done. She rolled around on the bottom of the sampan and giggled until the laughter turned to loud, harsh sobs, and then she cried until she couldn’t see anymore.
Chapter 3
“Wake up.”
Someone pinched her arm, hard. Rin bolted upright. Her right hand reached to a belt that wasn’t there for a knife that was in the other room, and her left hand slammed blindly sideways into—
“Fuck!” Chaghan shouted.
She focused with difficulty on his face. He backed up, hands held out before her to show that he held no weapons, just a washcloth.
Rin’s fingers moved frantically over her neck and wrists. She knew she wasn’t tied down, she knew, but still she had to check.
Chaghan rubbed ruefully at his rapidly bruising cheek.
Rin didn’t apologize for hitting him. He knew better than that. All of them knew better than that. They knew not to touch her without asking. Not to approach her from behind. Not to make sudden movements or sounds around her unless they wanted to end up a stick of charcoal floating to the bottom of Omonod Bay.
“How long have I been out?” She gagged. Her mouth tasted like something had died in it; her tongue was as dry as if she had spent hours licking at a wooden board.
“Couple of days,” Chaghan said. “Good job getting out of bed.”
“Days?”
He shrugged. “Messed up the dosage, I think. At least it didn’t kill you.”
Rin rubbed at dry eyes. Bits of hardened mucus came off the sides of her eyes in clumps. She caught a glimpse of her face in her bedside mirror. Her pupils weren’t red—they took a while to adjust back every time she’d been on any kind of opiates—but the whites of her eyes were bloodshot, full of angry veins thick and sprawling like cobwebs.
Memories seeped slowly into the forefront of her mind, fighting through the fog of laudanum to sort themselves out. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to separate what had happened from what she’d dreamed. A sick feeling pooled in her gut as slowly, her thoughts formed into questions. “Where’s Unegen . . . ?”
“You burned over half his body. Nearly killed him.” Chaghan’s clipped tone spared her no sympathy. “We couldn’t bring him with us, so Enki stayed behind to look after him. And they’re, ah, not coming back.”
Rin blinked several times, trying to make the world around her less blurry. Her head swam, disorienting her terribly every time she moved. “What? Why?”
“Because they’ve left the Cike.”
That took several seconds to sink in.
“But—but they can’t.” Panic rose in her chest, thick and constricting. Enki was their only physician, and Unegen their best spy. Without them the Cike were reduced to six.
She couldn’t kill the Empress with six people.
“You really can’t blame them,” Chaghan said.
“But they’re sworn!”
“They swore to Tyr. They were sworn to Altan. They have no obligation to an incompetent like you.” Chaghan cocked his head. “I suppose I don’t have to tell you that Daji got away.”
Rin glared at him. “I thought you were on my side.”
“I said I’d help you kill Su Daji,” he said. “I didn’t say I’d hold your hand while you threatened the lives of everyone on this ship.”
“But the others—” A sudden fear seized her. “They’re still with me, aren’t they? They’re loyal?”
“It’s nothing to do with loyalty,” he said. “They are terrified.”
“Of me?”
“You really can’t see past yourself, can you?” Chaghan’s lip curled. “They’re terrified of themselves. It’s very lonely to be a shaman in this Empire, especially when you don’t know when you’re going to lose your mind.”
“I know. I understand that.”
“You don’t understand anything. They aren’t afraid of going mad. They know they will. They know that soon they will become like Feylen. Prisoners inside their own bodies. And when that day comes, they want to be around the only other people who could put an end to it. That’s why they’re still here.”
The Cike culls the Cike, Altan had once told her. The Cike takes care of its own.
That meant they defended one another. It also meant they protected the world from one another. The Cike were like children playing at acrobatics, perched precariously against one another, relying on the rest to stop them from hurtling into the abyss.
“Your duty as commander is to protect them,” Chaghan said. “They are with you because they are scared, and they don’t know where else they can go. But you’re endangering them with every stupid decision you make and your utter lack of control.”
Rin moaned, clutching her head between her hands. Every word was like a knife to her eardrums. She knew she’d fucked up, but Chaghan seemed to take inordinate delight in rubbing it in. “Just leave me alone.”
“No. Get out of bed and stop being such a brat.”
“Chaghan, please—”
“You’re a fucking mess.”
“I know that.”
“Yes, you’ve known that since Speer, but you’re not getting better, you’re getting worse. You’re trying to fix everything with opium and it’s destroying you.”
“I know,” she whispered. “I just—it’s always there, it’s screaming in my mind—”
“Then control it.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?” He made a noise of disgust. “Altan did.”
“But I’m not Altan.” She couldn’t hold back her tears. “Is that what you wanted to tell me? I’m not as strong as him, I’m not as smart as him, I can’t do what he could do—”
He laughed harshly. “Oh, that much is clear.”
“You take command then. You act like you’re in charge already, why don’t you just take the post? I don’t fucking care.”
“Because Altan named you commander,” he said simply. “And between us, at least I know how to respect his legacy.”
That shut her up.
He leaned forward. “That burden’s on you. So you will learn to control yourself, and you will start protecting them.”
“But what if that’s not possible?” she asked.
His pale eyes didn’t blink. “Frankly? Then you should kill yourself.”
Rin had no idea how to respond to that.
“If you think you can’t beat it, then you should die,” Chaghan said. “Because it will corrode you. It will turn your body into a conduit, and it will burn down everything until it’s not just civilians, not just Unegen, but everyone around you, everything you’ve ever loved or cared about.
“And once you’ve turned your world to ash, you’ll wish you could die.”
She found the others in the mess once she finally recovered the physical coordination to make her way down the passageway without tripping.
“What is this?” Ramsa spat something onto the table. “Bird droppings?”
“Goji berries,” Baji said. “You don’t like them in porridge?”
“They’ve got mold on them.”