by R. F. Kuang
“Everything’s got mold on them.”
“But I thought we were getting new supplies,” Ramsa whined.
“With what money?” Suni asked.
“We are the Cike!” Ramsa exclaimed. “We could have stolen something!”
“Well, it’s not like—” Baji broke off as he saw Rin standing in the doorway. Ramsa and Suni followed his gaze. They fell silent.
She stared back at them, utterly lost for words. She’d thought she knew what she was going to say to them. Now she only wanted to cry.
“Rise and shine,” Ramsa said finally. He kicked a chair out for her. “Hungry? You look horrific.”
She blinked at him. Her words came out in a hoarse whisper. “I just wanted to say . . .”
“Don’t,” said Baji.
“But I just—”
“Don’t,” Baji said. “I know it’s hard. You’ll get it eventually. Altan did.”
Suni nodded in silent agreement.
Rin’s urge to cry grew stronger.
“Have a seat,” Ramsa said gently. “Eat something.”
She shuffled to the counter and tried clumsily to fill a bowl. Porridge slopped out of the ladle onto the deck. She walked toward the table, but the floor kept shifting under her feet. She collapsed into the chair, breathing hard.
No one commented.
She glanced out the porthole. They were moving startlingly fast over choppy waters. The shoreline was nowhere in sight. A wave rolled under the planks, and she stifled the attendant swell of nausea.
“Did we at least get Yang Yuanfu?” she asked after a pause.
Baji nodded. “Suni took him out during the commotion. Bashed his head against the wall and flung his body into the ocean while his guards were too busy with Daji to fend us off. I guess the diversion tactic worked after all. We were going to tell you, but you were, ah, incapacitated.”
“High out of your mind,” Ramsa supplied. “Giggling at the floor.”
“I get it,” Rin said. “And we’re heading back to Ankhiluun now?”
“As fast as we can. We’ve got the entire Imperial Guard chasing us, but I doubt they’ll follow us into Moag’s territory.”
“Makes sense,” Rin murmured. She worked her spoon through the porridge. Ramsa was right about the mold. The greenish-black blotches were so large that they almost rendered the entire thing inedible. Her stomach roiled. She pushed the bowl away.
The others sat around the table, fidgeting, blinking, and making eye contact with everything except her.
“I heard Enki and Unegen left,” she said.
The statement was met with blank stares and shrugs.
She took a deep breath. “So I suppose—what I wanted to say was—”
Baji interrupted before she could continue. “We’re not going anywhere.”
“But you—”
“I don’t like being lied to. And I especially hate being sold. Daji has what’s coming for her. I’m seeing this through to the end, little Speerly. You don’t have to worry about desertion from me.”
Rin glanced around the table. “Then what about the rest of you?”
“Altan deserved better than he got,” Suni said simply, as if that much sufficed.
“But you don’t have to stay here.” Rin turned to Ramsa. Young, innocent, tiny, brilliant, and dangerous Ramsa. She wanted to make sure he’d remain with her, and knew it’d be selfish to ask. “I mean, you shouldn’t.”
Ramsa scraped at the bottom of his bowl. He seemed thoroughly disinterested in the conversation. “I think going anywhere else would get a little boring.”
“But you’re just a kid.”
“Fuck off.” He dug around his mouth with his little finger, picking at something stuck behind his back molars. “You’ve got to understand that we’re killers. You spend your life doing one thing, it’s very hard to stop.”
“That, and our only other option is the prison at Baghra,” Baji said.
Ramsa nodded. “I hated Baghra.”
Rin remembered that none of the Cike had good track records with Nikara law enforcement. Or with civilized society, for that matter.
Aratsha hailed from a tiny village in Snake Province where the villagers worshipped a local river god that purportedly protected them from floods. Aratsha, a novice initiate to the river god’s cult, became the first shaman in generations who succeeded in doing what his predecessors had claimed. He drowned two little girls by accident in the process. He was about to be stoned to death by the same villagers who praised his fraudulent teachers when Tyr, the Cike’s former commander, recruited him to the Night Castle.
Ramsa came from a family of alchemists who’d produced fire powder for the Militia until an accidental explosion near the palace had killed his parents, cost him an eye, and landed him in the notorious prison at Baghra for alleged conspiracy to assassinate the Empress, until Tyr pulled him out of his cell to engineer weapons for the Cike instead.
Rin didn’t know much about Baji or Suni. She knew they had both been students at Sinegard once, members of Lore classes of years past. She knew they’d been expelled when things went terribly wrong. She knew they’d both spent time at Baghra. Neither of them would volunteer much else.
The twins Chaghan and Qara were equally mysterious. They weren’t from the Empire. They spoke Nikara with a lilting Hinterlander accent. But when asked about home, they offered only the vaguest utterances. Home is very far away. Home is at the Night Castle.
Rin understood what they were trying to say. They, like the others, simply had no other place to go.
“What’s the matter?” Baji asked. “Sounds like you want us gone.”
“It’s not that,” Rin said. “I just—I can’t make it go away. I’m scared.”
“Of what?”
“I’m scared I’ll hurt you. Adlaga won’t be the end. I can’t make the Phoenix go away and I can’t make it stop and—”
“Because you’re new to this,” Baji interrupted. He sounded so kind. How could he be so kind? “We’ve all been there. They want to use your body all the time. And you think you’re on the brink of madness, you think that this moment is going to be when you finally snap, but it’s not.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because it gets easier every time. Eventually you learn to exist on the precipice of insanity.”
“But I can’t promise I won’t—”
“You won’t. And we’ll go after Daji again. And we’ll keep doing it, over and over, as many times as it takes, until she’s dead. Tyr didn’t give up on us. We’re not giving up on you. This is why the Cike exists.”
She stared at him, stricken. She didn’t deserve this, whatever this was. It wasn’t friendship. She didn’t deserve that. It wasn’t loyalty, either. She deserved that even less. But it was camaraderie, a bond formed by a common betrayal. The Empress had sold them to the Federation for a silver and a song, and none of them could rest until the rivers ran red with Daji’s blood.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Then just shut up and stop being a little bitch about it.” Ramsa pushed her bowl back in front of her. “Eat your porridge. Mold is nutritious.”
Night fell over Omonod Bay. The Petrel spirited down the coast under the cover of darkness, buoyed by a shamanic force so powerful that within hours it had lost its Imperial pursuers. The Cike spread out—Qara and Chaghan to their cabin, where they spent almost all of their time, secluded from the others; Suni and Ramsa onto the front deck for night watch, and Baji to his hammock in the main sleeping quarters.
Rin locked herself inside her cabin to wage a mental battle with a god.
She didn’t have much time. The laudanum had nearly worn off. She wedged a chair under the doorknob, sat down on the floor, squeezed her head between her knees, and waited to hear the voice of a god.
She waited to return to the state in which the Phoenix wanted utter command and shouted down her thoughts until she obeyed.
This tim
e she would shout back.
She placed a small hunting knife beside her knee. She pressed her eyes shut. She felt the last of the laudanum pass through her bloodstream, and the numb, foggy cloud left her mind. She felt the curdling clench in her stomach and gut that never disappeared. She felt, along with the terrifying possibility of sobriety, awareness.
She always came back to the same moment, months ago, when she’d been on her hands and knees in that temple on the Isle of Speer. The Phoenix relished that moment because to the god it was the height of destructive power. And it kept bringing her back because it wanted her to believe that the only way to reconcile herself with that horror was to finish the job.
It wanted her to burn up this ship. To kill everyone around her. Then to find her way to land, and start burning that down, too; like a small flame igniting the corner of a sheet of paper, she was to make her way inland and burn down everything in her path until nothing was left except a blank slate of ash.
And then she would be clean.
She heard a symphony of screams, voices both collective and individual, Speerly or Mugini voices—it never mattered because wordless agony didn’t have a language.
She could not bear how they were numbers and not numbers all at once, and the line kept blurring and it was awful because as long as they were numbers it wasn’t so bad but if they were lives, then the multiplication was unbearable—
Then the screaming solidified into Altan.
His face splintered apart along cracks of skin turned charcoal, eyes burning orange, black tears opening streaks across his face, fire tearing him open from the inside—and she couldn’t do anything about it.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I tried . . .”
“It should have been you,” he said. His lips blistered, crackled, fell away to reveal bone. “You should have died. You should have gone up in flames.” His face became ash became a skull, pressed against hers; bony fingers around her neck. “It should have been you.”
Then she couldn’t tell if her thoughts were his or her own, only that they were so loud they drowned out everything in her mind.
I want you to hurt.
I want you to die.
I want you to burn.
“No!” She slammed her blade into her thigh. The pain was only a temporary respite, a blinding whiteness that drove out everything in her mind, and then the fire would be back.
She’d failed.
And she’d failed last time, too, and the time before that. She’d failed every time she tried. At this point she didn’t know why she did it, except to torture herself with the knowledge that she could not control the fire raging in her mind.
The cut joined a line of open wounds on her arms and legs that she’d sliced open weeks before—and kept sliced open—because even though it was only temporary, pain was still the only option other than opium that she could think of.
And then she couldn’t think anymore.
The motions were automatic now, and it all came so easily—rolling the opium nugget between her palms, the spark of the first flicker of flame, and then the smell of crystallized candy concealing something rotten.
The nice thing about opium was that once she’d inhaled it, everything stopped mattering; and for hours at a time, carved out into her world, she could stop dealing with the responsibility of existence.
She sucked in.
The flames receded. The memories disappeared. The world stopped hurting her, and even the frustration of surrender faded to a dull nothing. And the only thing that remained was the sweet, sweet smoke.
Chapter 4
“Did you know that Ankhiluun has a special government office dedicated to figuring out how much weight the city can sustain?” Ramsa asked brightly.
He was the only one of them who could navigate the Floating City with ease. He hopped ahead, effortlessly navigating the narrow footbridges that lined the sludgy canals, while the rest inched warily along the wobbly planks.
“And how much weight is that?” Baji asked, humoring him.
“I think they’re approaching maximum capacity,” Ramsa said. “Someone’s got to do something about the population, or Ankhiluun’s going to start sinking.”
“You could send them inland,” Baji said. “Bet we’ve lost a couple hundred thousand people in the last few months.”
“Or just have them fight another war. Good way to kill people off.” Ramsa skipped off toward the next bridge.
Rin followed clumsily behind, blinking blearily under the unforgiving southern sun.
She hadn’t left her cabin on the ship for days. She’d taken the smallest possible daily dose of opium that worked to keep her mind quiet while leaving her functional. But even that amount fucked so badly with her sense of balance that she had to cling to Baji’s arm as they walked inland.
Rin hated Ankhiluun. She hated the salty, tangy ocean odor that followed her wherever she went; she hated the city’s sheer loudness, the pirates and merchants screaming at each other in Ankhiluuni pidgin, an unintelligible mix of Nikara and western languages. She hated that the Floating City teetered over open water, roiling back and forth with each incoming wave, so that even standing still, she felt like she was about to fall.
She wouldn’t have come here except out of utter necessity. Ankhiluun was the single place in the Empire where she was close to safe. And it was home to the only people who would sell her weapons.
And opium.
At the end of the First Poppy War, the Republic of Hesperia sat down with delegates from the Federation of Mugen to sign a treaty that established two neutral zones on the Nikara coastline. The first was at the international port of Khurdalain. The second was at the floating city of Ankhiluun.
Back then Ankhiluun had been a humble port—just a smattering of nondescript one-story buildings without basements because the flimsy coastal sands couldn’t support any larger architecture.
Then the Trifecta won the Second Poppy War, and the Dragon Emperor bombed half the Hesperian fleet to smithereens in the South Nikan Sea.
In the absence of foreigners, Ankhiluun flourished. The locals occupied the half-destroyed ships like ocean parasites, linking them together to form the Floating City. Now Ankhiluun extended precariously from the coastline like an overreaching spider, a series of wooden planks that formed a web of walkways between the myriad ships anchored to shore.
Ankhiluun was the juncture through which poppy in all its forms entered the Empire. Moag’s opium clippers sailed in from the western hemisphere and deposited their cargo in giant, empty husks of ships that served as repositories, from which long, thin smuggling boats picked it up and poured through branches of tributaries spreading out from the Murui River, steadily infusing the Empire’s bloodstream like seeping poison.
Ankhiluun meant cheap, abundant opium, and that meant glorious, peaceful oblivion—hours upon hours when she didn’t have to think about or remember anything at all.
And that, above all, was why Rin hated Ankhiluun. It made her so terribly afraid. The more time she spent here, locked alone in her cabin while she drifted on Moag’s drugs, the less she felt able to leave.
“Odd,” said Baji. “You’d think we’d get more of a welcome.”
To get to the city center, they’d passed floating markets, garbage piles strewn along the canals, and rows of distinctive Ankhiluuni bars that had no benches or chairs—only ropes strung across walls where patrons could hang drunk by their armpits.
But they had been walking for more than half an hour now. They were well within the heart of the city, in full view of its residents, and no one had intercepted them.
Moag had to know they were back. Moag knew everything that happened in the Floating City.
“That’s just how Moag likes to play power politics.” Rin stopped walking to catch her breath. The shifting planks made her want to vomit. “She doesn’t seek us out. We have to go to her.”
Getting an audience with Chiang Moag
was no easy affair. The Pirate Queen surrounded herself with so many layers of security that no one knew where she was at any given time. Only the Black Lilies, her cohort of spies and assistants, could be counted upon to get word directly to her, and the Lilies could only be found at a gaudy pleasure barge floating in the center of the city’s main canal.
Rin looked up, shielding her eyes from the sun. “There.”
The Black Orchid wasn’t so much a ship as it was a floating three-story mansion. Garishly colorful lanterns hung from its sloped pagoda roofs, and bawdy, energetic music drifted constantly from its papered windows. Each day starting at noon, the Black Orchid crawled up and down the still canal, picking up patrons who rowed out to its decks in bright red sampans.
Rin dug around in her pockets. “Anyone got a copper?”
“I do.” Baji tossed a coin toward the sampan boatman, who guided his vessel toward the shore to ferry the Cike onto the pleasure barge.
A handful of Lilies, perched lightly on the second-story railing, waved insouciantly at them as they approached. Baji whistled back.
“Stop that,” Rin muttered.
“Why?” Baji asked. “It makes them happy. Look, they’re smiling.”
“No, it makes them think you’re an easy target.”
The Lilies were Moag’s private army of terribly attractive women, all with breasts the size of pears and waists so narrow they looked in danger of snapping in half. They were trained martial artists, linguists, and uniformly the most obnoxious group of women Rin had ever met.
A Lily stopped them at the top of the gangplank, her tiny hand stretched out as if she could physically stop them from boarding. “You don’t have an appointment.”
She was clearly a new girl. She couldn’t have been older than fifteen. Her face bore only small dabs of lipstick, her breasts were just little buds poking through her shirt, and she didn’t seem to realize she was standing in front of a handful of the most dangerous people in the Empire.
“I’m Fang Runin,” said Rin.
The girl blinked. “Who?”
Rin heard Ramsa turn his snicker into a cough.