The Dragon Republic

by R. F. Kuang

  No—she did, she just wouldn’t admit that she was wrong about it. The one time they’d fought about it, really fought about it, he’d slammed the door shut on her and hadn’t spoken to her until they reached dry land.

  She hadn’t let herself think about it since. It went into the chasm, just like every other memory that made her start craving her pipe.

  “How are you doing?” she asked.

  “I’m under house arrest. How do you think I’m doing?”

  She looked around at the papers splayed out across the table. They littered the floor, pinned down with inkwells.

  Her eyes landed on the ledger he’d been scribbling in. “She’s kept you busy, at least?”

  “‘Busy’ is a word for it.” He slammed the ledger shut. “I’m working for one of the Empire’s most wanted criminals, and she’s got me doing her taxes.”

  “Ankhiluun doesn’t pay taxes.”

  “Not taxes to the Empire. To Moag.” Kitay twirled the ink brush in his fingers. “Moag’s running a massive crime ring with a taxation scheme that’s just as complicated as any city bureaucracy’s. But the record-keeping system they’ve been using so far, it’s . . .” He waved his hands in the air. “Whoever designed this didn’t understand how numbers work.”

  What a brilliant move on Moag’s part, Rin thought. Kitay had the mental dexterity of twenty scholars combined. He could add impossibly large sums without blinking, and he had a mind for strategy that had rivaled Master Irjah’s. He might be grumpy under house arrest, but he couldn’t resist a puzzle when presented with one. The ledgers may as well have been a bucket of toys.

  “Are they treating you all right?” she asked.

  “Well enough. I get two meals a day. Sometimes more, if I’ve been good.”

  “You look thin.”

  “The food’s not very good.”

  He still wouldn’t look at her. She ventured to place a hand on his arm. “I’m sorry Moag’s kept you here.”

  He jerked away. “Wasn’t your decision. I’d do the same if I’d taken myself prisoner.”

  “Moag’s really not so bad. She treats her people well.”

  “And she uses violence and extortion to run a massively illegal city that has been lying to Sinegard for twenty years,” said Kitay. “I’m worried you’re starting to lose your sense of scale here, Rin.”

  She rankled at that. “Her people are still better off than the Empress’s subjects.”

  “The Empress’s subjects would be fine if her generals weren’t running around trying to commit treason.”

  “Why are you so loyal to Sinegard?” Rin demanded. “It’s not like the Empress has done anything for you.”

  “My family has served the crown at Sinegard for ten generations,” said Kitay. “And no, I’m not helping you with your personal vendetta just because you think the Empress got your stupid commander killed. So you can stop pretending to be my friend, Rin, because I know that’s all you came for.”

  “I don’t just think that,” she said. “I know it. And I know the Empress invited the Federation onto Nikara land. She wanted this war, she started the invasion, and everything you saw at Golyn Niis was Daji’s fault.”

  “False accusations.”

  “I heard it from Shiro’s mouth!”

  “And Shiro didn’t have any motivation to lie to you?”

  “Daji doesn’t have any motivation to lie to you?”

  “She’s the Empress,” Kitay said. “The Empress doesn’t betray her own. Do you understand how absurd this is? There’s literally no political advantage—”

  “You should want this!” she yelled. She wanted to shake him, hit him, do anything to make that maddening blankness in his face go away. “Why don’t you want this? Why aren’t you furious? Didn’t you see Golyn Niis?”

  He stiffened. “I want you to leave.”

  “Kitay, please—”

  “Now.”

  “I’m your friend!”

  “No, you’re not. Fang Runin was my friend. I’m not sure who you are, but I don’t want anything to do with you.”

  “Why do you keep saying that? What did I ever do to you?”

  “How about what you did to them?” He grabbed for her hand. She was so surprised that she let him. He slammed her palm over the lamp beside him, forced it down directly over the fire. She yelped from the sudden pain—a thousand tiny needles, pressing deeper and deeper into her palm.

  “Have you ever been burned before?” he whispered.

  For the first time Rin noticed little burn scars dotting his palms and forearms. Some were recent. Some looked inflicted yesterday.

  The pain intensified.

  “Shit!” She kicked out. She missed Kitay but hit the lamp. Oil spilled over the papers. The fire whooshed up. For a second she saw Kitay’s face illuminated in the flame, absolutely terrified, and then he yanked a blanket off the floor and threw it over the fire.

  The room went dark.

  “What the hell was that?” she screamed.

  She didn’t raise her fists, but Kitay flinched away as if she had—his shoulder hit the wall, and then he curled toward the ground with his head buried under his arms, raw sobs shaking his thin frame.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I don’t know what . . .”

  The throbbing pain in her hand made her breathless, almost light-headed. Almost as good as it felt when she got high. If she thought about it too hard she would start crying, and if she started crying it might tear her apart, so she tried laughing instead, and that turned into tortured hiccups that shook her entire frame.

  “Why?” she finally managed.

  “I was trying to see what it was like,” he said.

  “For who?”

  “How they felt. In the moment that it happened. In their very last seconds. I wanted to know how they felt when it ended.”

  “It doesn’t feel like anything,” she said. A wave of agony shot up her arm again, and she slammed her fist against the floor in an attempt to numb out the pain. She clenched her teeth until it passed.

  “Altan told me about it once,” she said. “After a bit you’re not able to breathe. And then you’re gasping so hard you can’t feel it hurt anymore. You don’t die from the burning, you die from lack of air. You choke, Kitay. That’s how it ends.”

  Chapter 5

  “Try some ginger rock,” Ramsa suggested.

  Rin gagged and spat until she was sure her stomach would expel nothing else, and then pulled her head back over the side of the ship. Remnants of her breakfast, a phlegmy, eggy mess, floated in the green waves below.

  She took the shards of candy from Ramsa’s palm and chewed while fighting the urge to dry-heave. For all their weeks at sea, she’d still never gotten used to the constant sensation that the ground was swirling beneath her feet.

  “Expect some choppier waves today,” Baji said. “Monsoon season is kicking up in the Omonod. We’ll want to avoid going upwind if this keeps up, but as long as we have the shore as a breakwater we should be all right.”

  He was the only one of them who had any real nautical experience—he’d worked on a transport ship as part of his labor sentence shortly before he’d been sent to Baghra—and he flaunted it obnoxiously.

  “Oh, shut up,” Ramsa said. “It’s not like you do any real steering.”

  “I’m the navigator!”

  “Aratsha’s the navigator. You just like the way you look standing at the helm.”

  Rin was grateful that they didn’t have to do much maneuvering themselves. It meant they didn’t have to bother with a crew of Moag’s hired help. They needed only the six of them to sail up and down South Nikan Sea, doing minimal ship maintenance while blessed Aratsha trailed alongside the hull, guiding the ship wherever they needed to go.

  Moag had lent them an opium skimmer named Caracel, a sleek and skinny vessel that somehow packed six cannons on each side. They didn’t have the numbers to man each cannon, but Ramsa had devised a clever workarou
nd. He’d connected all twelve fuses with the same strip of twine, which meant he could set them all off at once.

  But that was only the last resort. Rin didn’t intend to win this skirmish with cannons. If Moag didn’t want survivors, then Rin only had to get close enough to board.

  She folded her arms on the railing and rested her chin on them, staring down at the empty water. Sailing was far less interesting than staking out enemy camps. Battlefields were endlessly entertaining. The ocean was just lonely. She’d spent the morning watching the monotonous gray horizon, trying to keep her eyes open. Moag hadn’t been certain when her tax-evading captain would sail back to port. It could be any time from now to past midnight.

  Rin didn’t understand how the sailors could stand the terrible lack of orientation at sea. To her, every stretch of the ocean looked the same. Without the coast to anchor her, one horizon was indistinguishable from the next. She could read star charts if she tried, but to her naked eye, each patch of greenish blue meant the same thing.

  They could be anywhere in Omonod Bay. Somewhere out there lay the Isle of Speer. Somewhere out there was the Federation.

  Moag had once offered to take her back to Mugen to survey the damage, but Rin had refused. She knew what she would find there. Millions of bodies encased within hardened rock, charred skeletons frozen in their last living acts.

  How would they be positioned? Mothers reaching for their children? Husbands wrapping their arms around their wives? Maybe their hands would be stretched out toward the sea, as if they could escape the deadly thick sulfurous clouds rumbling down the mountainside if they could just get to the water.

  She had imagined this too many times, had painted a far more vivid image of it in her mind than reality was likely to be. When she closed her eyes she saw Mugen and she saw Speer; the two islands blurred together in her mind, because in all cases the narrative was the same: children going up in flames, the skin sloughing off their bodies in large black patches, revealing glistening bone underneath.

  They burned for someone else’s war, someone else’s wrongs; someone they had never met had made the decision they should die, so in their last moments they would have had no idea why their skin was scorching off.

  Rin blinked and shook her head to clear it. She kept slipping into daydreams. She’d taken a small dose of laudanum last night after her singed palm hurt so much she couldn’t sleep, which in retrospect was an awful idea because laudanum exhausted her more than opium did and wasn’t half as fun.

  She examined her hand. Her skin was puffy and furiously red, even though she’d soaked it in aloe for hours. She couldn’t make a fist without wincing. She was grateful she’d only burned her left hand, not her sword hand. She cringed at the thought of grasping a hilt against the tender skin.

  She moved her thumbnail over the center of her palm and dug it hard into the open wound. Pain lanced through her arm, bringing tears to her eyes. But it woke her up.

  “Shouldn’t have taken that laudanum,” said Chaghan.

  She jerked upright. “I’m awake.”

  He joined her by the railing. “Sure you are.”

  Rin shot him an irritated glare, wondering how much effort it would take to toss him overboard. Not very much, she guessed. Chaghan was so terribly frail. She could do it. They wouldn’t miss him. Probably.

  “You see those rock formations?” Baji, who must have sensed an impending screaming match, edged his way in between them. He pointed toward a series of cliffs on the distant Ankhiluuni shore. “What do they look like to you?”

  Rin squinted. “A man?”

  Baji nodded. “A drowned man. If you sail to shore during sunset, it looks like he’s swallowing the sun. That’s how you know you’ve found Ankhiluun.”

  “How many times have you been here?” Rin asked.

  “Plenty. Came down here with Altan once, two years ago.”

  “For what?”

  “Tyr wanted us to kill Moag.”

  Rin snorted. “Well, you failed.”

  “To be fair, it was the only time Altan ever failed.”

  “Oh, I’m sure,” she said. “Wonderful Altan. Perfect Altan. Best commander you’ve ever had. Did everything right.”

  “Excepting the Chuluu Korikh,” Ramsa piped up. “You could call that a disaster of monumental proportions.”

  “To be fair, Altan used to make some really good tactical decisions.” Baji rubbed his chin. “Before, you know, that string of really bad ones.”

  Ramsa whistled. “Lost his mind near the end, he did.”

  “Went a little crazy, yeah.”

  “Shut up about Altan,” said Chaghan.

  “It’s a pity how the best ones snap,” Baji continued, ignoring him. “Like Feylen. Huleinin, too. And you remember how Altan started sleepwalking at Khurdalain? I swear, one night I was walking back from taking a piss and he—”

  “I said shut up!” Chaghan slammed both hands against the railing.

  Rin felt a noticeable chill sweep over the deck; goose bumps were forming on her arms. There was a stillness in the air, like the space between lightning and thunder. Chaghan’s bone-white hair had begun to curl up at the edges.

  His face didn’t match his aura. He looked like he might cry.

  Baji lifted his palms up. “All right. Tiger’s tits. I’m sorry.”

  “You do not have the right,” Chaghan hissed. He pointed a finger at Rin. “Especially you.”

  She bristled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You’re the reason why—”

  “Why what?” she asked loudly. “Go on, say it.”

  “Guys. Guys.” Ramsa wedged his way between them. “Great Tortoise, lighten up. Altan’s dead. All right? Dead. And fighting about it won’t bring him back.”

  “Look at this.” Baji handed Rin his spyglass, directing her attention to a black point just visible on the horizon. “Does that look like a Red Junk ship to you?”

  Rin squinted into the eyepiece.

  Moag’s Red Junk fleet comprised distinctive opium skimmers, built narrow for enough speed to outrun other pirates and the Imperial Navy, possessing deep hulls to transport huge amounts of opium and distinctive battened sails that resembled carp fins. On the open seas they disguised all identifying marks, but when they docked in the South Nikan Sea, they flew the crimson flag of Ankhiluun.

  But this ship was a bulky creation, large and squat, much rounder than an opium skimmer. It had white sails instead of red, and no flag in sight. As Rin watched, the ship cut a ridiculously sharp turn in the water toward them that should have been impossible without a shaman’s help.

  “That’s not Moag’s,” she said.

  “That doesn’t make it an enemy ship,” said Ramsa. He peered out at the ship with a spyglass of his own. “Could be a friendly.”

  Baji snorted. “We’re fugitives working for a pirate lord. Do you think we have a lot of friends right now?”

  “Fair enough.” Ramsa slammed the spyglass shut and shoved it in his pocket.

  “Just open fire,” Chaghan suggested.

  Baji shot him an incredulous look. “Look, I don’t know how much time you’ve spent at sea, but when you see a foreign warship with no identifying marks and no indication of whether or not it’s brought a support fleet, the response is usually not to just open fire.”

  “Why not?” Chaghan asked. “You said it yourself. It can’t be a friendly.”

  “Doesn’t mean it’s looking for a fight.”

  Ramsa’s head swiveled back and forth between Chaghan and Baji as they spoke. He looked like a very confused baby bird.

  “Hold fire,” Rin told him hastily. “At least until we know who they are.”

  The ship was close enough now that she could just make out an etching of characters on the sides of the ship. Cormorant. She’d been over the list of Red Junk ships harbored at Ankhiluun. This wasn’t one of them.

  “Are you seeing this?” Ramsa was peering through his spyglass again. �
�What the hell is this?”

  “What?” Rin couldn’t tell what was bothering Ramsa. She couldn’t see any armored troops. Or crew of any uniform, for that matter.

  Then she realized that was precisely what was wrong.

  She couldn’t see anyone on board at all.

  No one stood at the helm. No one manned the oars. The Cormorant was close enough now that they could all see its empty decks.

  “That’s impossible,” said Ramsa. “How are they propelling it?”

  Rin leaned over the side of the ship and yelled. “Aratsha! Hard right turn.”

  Aratsha obeyed, reversing their direction faster than any oared ship would be able to. But the foreign ship veered about immediately to follow their course, cutting an absurdly precise turn. The ship was fast, too—even though the Caracel had Aratsha propelling it along, the Cormorant had no trouble following their pace.

  Seconds later it had almost caught up. It was pulling in parallel. Whoever was on it intended to board.

  “That’s a ghost ship,” Ramsa whimpered.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Baji said.

  “They’ve got a shaman, then. Chaghan’s right, we should fire.”

  They looked helplessly at Rin to confirm the order. She opened her mouth just as a boom split the air, and the Caracel shook under their feet.

  “You still think it’s not hostile?” Chaghan asked.

  “Fire,” she said.

  Ramsa ran belowdecks to light the fuse. Moments later a series of booms rocked the Caracel as their starboard-side cannons went off one by one. Blazing metal balls skimmed over the water, scorching bright orange trails behind them—but instead of blowing holes into the sides of the Cormorant, they only bounced off metal plating. The warship barely shook from the impact.

  Meanwhile the Caracel lurched alarmingly to starboard. Rin peeked over the edge—they’d taken damage to their hull, and though she knew nearly nothing about ships, that didn’t look survivable.

  She cursed under her breath. They’d have to row one of the lifeboats back to shore. If the Cormorant didn’t dispose of them first.

  She could hear Ramsa’s footsteps moving frantically around belowdecks, trying to reload. Arrows sailed over her head, courtesy of Qara, but they thudded ineffectively into the sides of the warship. Qara had no target—the warship had no crew on deck, no archers. Whoever it was didn’t need archers when they had a row of cannons so powerful they could likely blow the Caracel out of the water in minutes.