by R. F. Kuang
“Get closer!” Rin shouted. They were outgunned, outmaneuvered. The only chance they had at winning was to board that ship and smoke it out. “Aratsha! Put me on that ship!”
But they weren’t moving. The Caracel bobbed listlessly in the water.
“Aratsha!”
No response. Rin climbed on the railing and bent to look overboard. She saw an odd stream of black, like a smoke cloud unfurling underwater. Blood? But Aratsha didn’t bleed, not when he was in his watery form. And the cloud looked too dark to be blood.
No. It looked like ink.
A projectile shrieked overhead. She ducked. The salvo landed in the water in front of her. Another burst of black emanated from the site of impact.
It was ink.
They were firing the pellets into the water. This was intentional. Their attackers knew the Cike had a water shaman, and they had blinded Aratsha on purpose because they knew what he was.
Rin’s chest tightened. This was no random attack. The warship had targeted them, had prepared for what they could do. This was a calculated ambush planned well in advance.
Moag had sold them out.
Another series of missiles whistled through the air, this time headed for the deck. Rin crouched down, braced for the explosion, but the impact didn’t come. She opened her eyes. A delayed explosive?
But no fiery explosion rocked the boat. Instead a cloud of black smoke shot out of the projectiles, unfurling outward with a terrifying rapidity. Rin didn’t bother trying to run. The smoke covered the entire deck within seconds.
It wasn’t just a smokescreen, it was an asphyxiate—she tried to suck in air but nothing went through; it was like her throat had closed up, as if someone had pinned her to the wall by the neck. She staggered back, gagging. She could taste something in the air—something sickly sweet and terribly familiar.
Opium.
They know what we are. They know what makes us weak.
Suni and Baji dropped to their knees, utterly subdued. Wherever Qara was, she’d stopped shooting. Rin could just make out Ramsa’s and Chaghan’s limp forms through the smoke. Only she remained standing, coughing violently, clutching feebly at her throat.
She had smoked opium so many times, the phases of the high were familiar to her by now. It was only a matter of time.
First there was the dizzying sensation of floating, accompanied by an irrational euphoria.
Then the numbness that felt almost as good.
Then nothing.
Rin’s arms stung like she’d plunged them inside a beehive. Her mouth tasted like charcoal. She tried to conjure up enough spit to wet her throat and barely managed a repellent lump of phlegm. She forced her eyes open. The sudden attack of light made them water; she had to blink several times before she could look up.
She was tied to a mast, her arms stretched above her. She wiggled her fingers. She couldn’t feel them. Her legs were also bound, tied so tightly that she couldn’t even bend them.
“She awakens.” Baji’s voice.
She strained her neck but couldn’t see him. When she swiveled her head around she suffered a sudden attack of vertigo. Even tied down, she felt like she was floating. Looking up or down gave her the terrible sensation of falling. She squeezed her eyes shut. “Baji? Where are you?”
“Behind you,” he said. “Other side of the . . . the mast.”
His words came out in a barely intelligible drawl.
“The others?” she asked.
“All here,” Ramsa piped up from her other side. “Aratsha’s in that barrel.”
Rin sat up straight. “Wait, could he—”
“No go. They sealed the lid. Good thing he doesn’t need to breathe.” Ramsa must have been wiggling his arms, straining the rope, because she felt her bindings tighten painfully around her own wrists.
“Stop that,” she said.
“Sorry.”
“Whose ship is this?” she asked.
“They won’t tell us,” Baji said.
“They? Who are they?”
“We don’t know. Nikara, I’m assuming, but they won’t talk to us.” Baji raised his voice to shout at a guard who must have been standing behind her, because Rin couldn’t see anyone. “Hey, you! You Nikara?”
No response.
“Told you,” said Baji.
“Maybe they’re mutes,” Ramsa said. “All of them.”
“Don’t be a fucking idiot,” Baji said.
“They could be! You don’t know!”
That wasn’t remotely funny, but Ramsa devolved into a fit of giggles, leaning forward so that the ropes strained painfully against all of their arms.
“Can you all shut up?” Chaghan’s voice. It came from several feet away.
Rin peeked her eyes open for a split second, just long enough to take in the sight of Chaghan, Qara, and Suni bound to the mast opposite her.
Chaghan was slumped against his sister. Suni was still unconscious, head drooped forward. A thick pool of saliva had collected beneath his open mouth.
“Why, hello,” said Ramsa. “Good to see you, too.”
“Shut your damn mouth,” Chaghan grumbled, before he devolved into a string of curses that ended with “Damned Nikara swine.”
“Are you high?” Ramsa let out a shrill cackle. “Tiger’s tits, Chaghan’s high—”
“I’m . . . not . . .”
“Quick, someone ask him if he’s always constipated or his face just looks that way.”
“At least I’ve got both eyes,” Chaghan snapped.
“Oh, ‘I’ve got both eyes.’ Nice one. At least I’m not so skinny a pigeon could knock me over—”
“Shut up,” Rin hissed. She opened her eyes again, trying to take stock of their surroundings. All she could see was the ocean receding behind them. “Ramsa. What do you see?”
“Just the ship’s side. Little bit of ocean.”
“Baji?”
Silence. Had he fallen asleep again?
“Baji!” she shouted.
“Hmm? What?”
“What can you see?”
“Uh. My feet. A bulkhead. The sky.”
“No, you idiot—where are we headed?”
“How the fuck should I know—wait. There’s a dot. Yeah, that’s a dot. An island, I think?”
Rin’s heartbeat quickened. Speer? Mugen? But both were a several-weeks journey away; they couldn’t be anywhere close. And she didn’t remember any islands near Ankhiluun. The old Hesperian naval bases, maybe? But those were long abandoned. If the Hesperians had come back, Nikara foreign relations had changed drastically since she’d last checked.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“Not really. Hold on.” Baji was silent for a moment. “Great Tortoise. That’s a nice ship.”
“What do you mean, that’s a nice ship?”
“I mean, if that ship were a person, I would fuck that ship,” said Baji.
Rin suspected Baji wouldn’t be much help until the opium wore off. But then their vessel took a sharp turn to port, putting Rin in full view of what turned out to be, indeed, a very nice ship. They had sailed into the shadow of the largest war vessel she had ever seen: a monstrous, multidecked war junk, with several layers of catapults and portholes, and a massive trebuchet mounted on top of a deck tower.
Rin had studied naval warfare at Sinegard, though never in depth. The Imperial Navy’s own fleet had fallen into disrepair, and the only people sent to naval posts were the bottom-feeders of each class. Still, they’d learned enough about naval crafts that Rin knew this was no Imperial ship.
The Nikara couldn’t build vessels like this. It had to be a foreign battleship.
Her mind pored sluggishly over possibilities. The Hesperians hadn’t taken sides in the Third Poppy War—but if they had, then they would have allied with the Empire, which meant . . .
But then she heard the crew shouting commands to each other, and they were in fluent Nikara. “Halt. Ready to board.”
What N
ikara general had access to a Hesperian ship?
Rin heard shouting, the sound of groaning wood, and heavy footsteps moving about the deck. She strained harder against the ropes, but all that did was chafe at her wrists; her skin stung like it had been scraped raw.
“What’s happening?” she screamed. “Who are you?”
She heard someone order a salute formation, which meant they were being boarded by someone of higher rank. A Warlord? A Hesperian?
“I think we’re about to be handed off,” Baji said. “It was nice knowing you all. Except you, Chaghan. You’re weird.”
“Fuck you,” Chaghan said.
“Wait, I’ve still got a whale bone in my back pocket,” said Ramsa. “Rin, you could try igniting just a little bit, burn through the ropes and then I’ll get it out—”
Ramsa droned on, but Rin barely heard what he was saying.
A man had just walked into her field of vision. A general, judging from his uniform. He wore a half mask over his face—a Sinegardian opera mask of cerulean-blue ceramic. But it was his tall, lean build that caught her gaze, and his gait: confident, arrogant, like he expected everyone around him to bow before him.
She knew that stride.
“Suni can handle the main guard, and I’ll commandeer the cannons, implode the ship or something—”
“Ramsa,” Rin said in a strangled voice. “Shut. Up.”
The general crossed the deck and paused in front of them.
“Why are they bound?” he asked.
Rin stiffened. She knew that voice.
One of the crew hastened over. “Sir, we were warned not to let their hands out of sight.”
“These are our people. Not prisoners. Unbind them.”
“Sir, but they—”
“I don’t enjoy repeating myself.”
It had to be him. She’d only ever met one person who could convey so much disdain in so few words.
“You’ve bound them so tight their limbs will suffer blood loss,” the general said. “If you deliver them damaged to my father, he will be very, very angry.”
“Sir, I don’t think you understand the nature of the threat—”
“Oh, I understand. We were classmates. Weren’t we, Rin?” The general knelt down before her and pulled off his mask.
Rin flinched.
The boy she remembered was so beautiful. Skin like porcelain, features finer than any sculptor could carve, delicately arched eyebrows that conveyed precisely that mixture of condescension and vulnerability that Nikara poets had been trying to describe for centuries.
Nezha wasn’t beautiful anymore.
The left side of his face was still perfect, somehow; still smooth like the glaze on fine ceramic. But the right side . . . the right side was mottled with scars, crisscrossing over his cheek like the plates of a tortoise shell.
Those were not natural scars. They looked nothing like the burn scars Rin had seen on bodies destroyed by gas. Nezha’s face should have been twisted and deformed, if not utterly blackened. But his skin remained as pale as ever. His porcelain face had not darkened, but rather looked like glass that had been shattered and glued back together. Those oddly geometric scars could have been drawn over his skin with a fine brush.
His mouth was pulled into a permanent sneer toward the left side of his face, revealing teeth, a mask of condescension that he couldn’t ever take off.
When Rin looked into his eyes, she saw noxious yellow fumes rolling over withering grass. She heard shrieks that dwindled into chokes. And she heard someone screaming her name, over and over and over.
She found it harder and harder to breathe. A buzzing noise filled her ears, and black spots clouded the sides of her vision like ink drops on wet parchment.
“You’re dead,” she said. “I saw you die.”
Nezha looked amused. “And you were always supposed to be the clever one.”
Chapter 6
“What the fuck?” she screamed.
“Hello to you, too,” said Nezha. “I thought you’d be happy to see me.”
She couldn’t do anything but stare at him. It seemed impossible, unthinkable, that he was really alive, standing before her, speaking, breathing.
“Captain,” Nezha called. “The ropes.”
Rin felt the pressure around her wrists tighten briefly, then disappear. Her arms dropped to her sides. Blood rushed back into her extremities, sending a million shocks of lightning through her fingers. She rubbed her wrists and winced when skin came off in her hands.
“Can you stand?” Nezha asked.
She managed a nod. He pulled her to her feet. She took a step forward, and a dizzying spell of vertigo slammed into her like a wave.
“Steady.” Nezha caught her arm just as she lurched toward him.
She righted herself. “Don’t touch me.”
“I know you’re confused. But it’ll—”
“I said don’t touch me.”
He backed away, hands out. “It’ll all make sense in a minute. You’re safe. Just trust me.”
“Trust you?” she repeated. “You bombed my ship!”
“Well, it’s not technically your ship.”
“You could have killed us!” she shrieked. Her brain still felt terribly sluggish, but this fact struck her as very, very important. “You fired opium onto my ship!”
“Would you rather we fired real missiles? We were trying not to hurt you.”
“Your men bound us to the mast for hours!”
“Because they didn’t want to die!” Nezha lowered his voice. “Look, I’m sorry it came to that. We needed to get you out of Ankhiluun. We weren’t trying to hurt you.”
His placating tone only made her angrier. She wasn’t a fucking child; he couldn’t calm her with soothing whispers. “You let me think you were dead.”
“What did you want, a letter? It’s not like it was terribly easy to track you down, either.”
“A letter would have been better than bombing my ship!”
“Are you ever going to let that go?”
“It’s a rather large thing to let go!”
“I will explain everything if you come with me,” he said. “Can you walk? Please? My father’s waiting for us.”
“Your father?” she repeated dumbly.
“Come on, Rin. You know who my father is.”
She blinked at him. Then it hit her.
Oh.
Either she’d been hit by a massive stroke of fortune, or she was about to die.
“Just me?” she asked.
Nezha’s eyes flickered toward the Cike, lingering briefly on Chaghan. “I was told you’re the commander now?”
She hesitated. She hadn’t been acting much like a commander. But the title was hers, even if in name only. “Yes.”
“Then just you.”
“I’m not going without my men.”
“I’m afraid I can’t allow that.”
She stuck her chin out. “Sucks, then.”
“Do you seriously think any of them are in a state for an audience with a Warlord?” Nezha gestured toward the Cike. Suni was still asleep, the puddle of drool widening under his mouth. Chaghan stared open-mouthed at the sky, fascinated, and Ramsa had his eyes squeezed shut, giggling at nothing in particular.
It was the first time Rin had ever been glad she’d developed such a high tolerance for opium.
“I need your word you won’t hurt them,” she said.
Nezha looked offended. “Please. You’re not prisoners.”
“Then what are we?”
“Mercenaries,” he said delicately. “Think of it that way. You’re mercenaries out of a job, and my father has a very generous offer for your consideration.”
“What if we don’t like it?”
“I really think you will.” Nezha motioned for Rin to follow him down the deck, but she remained where she stood.
“Feed my men while we’re gone, then. A hot meal, not leftovers.”
“Rin, come on—”
<
br /> “Give them baths, too. And then take them to their own quarters. Not the brig. Those are my terms. Also, Ramsa doesn’t like fish.”
“He’s been operating out of the coast and he doesn’t like fish?”
“He’s picky.”
Nezha muttered something to the captain, who adopted a face like he’d been forced to sniff curdled milk.
“Done,” Nezha said. “Now will you come?”
She took a step and stumbled. Nezha extended his arm toward her. She let him help her to the edge of the ship.
“Thanks, Commander,” Ramsa called behind them. “Try not to die.”
The Hesperian warship Seagrim loomed huge over their rowboat, swallowing them completely in its shadow. Rin couldn’t help but stare in awe at its sheer scale. She could have fit half of Tikany on that warship, temple included.
How did a monstrosity like that stay afloat? And how did it move? She couldn’t see any oars. The Seagrim appeared to be just like the Cormorant, a ghost vessel with no visible crew.
“Don’t tell me you’ve got a shaman powering that thing,” she said.
“If only. No, that’s a paddle-wheel boat.”
“What’s that?”
He grinned. “Have you heard the legend of the Old Sage of Arlong?”
She rolled her eyes. “Who’s that, your grandfather?”
“Great-grandfather. The legend goes, the old sage was staring at a water wheel watering the fields and thought about reversing the circumstances; if he moved the wheel, then the water must move. Fairly obvious principle, isn’t it? Incredible how long it took for someone to apply it to ships.
“See, the old Imperial ships were idiotically designed. Propelled by sculls from the top deck. Problem with that is if your rowers get shot out, you’re dead in the water. But the paddle-wheel pushers are on the bottom deck. Entirely enclosed by the hull, totally protected from enemy artillery. A bit of an improvement from old models, eh?”
Nezha seemed to enjoy talking about ships. Rin heard a distinct note of pride in his voice as he pointed out the ridges at the bottom of the warship. “You see those? They’re concealing the paddle wheels.”