by R. F. Kuang
“She’ll want to talk,” Eriden said. “She always does, she thinks it’s funny to watch her prey squirm before she kills it. Don’t wait for her to say her piece. You’ll be deathly curious because she’ll make you, but you must attack before your chance is gone.”
“I’m not an idiot,” Rin panted.
Eriden directed another flurry of blows at her torso. Rin managed to block about half of them. The rest wrecked her.
He withdrew his spear, signaling a temporary reprieve. “You don’t understand. The Vipress is no mere mortal. You’ve heard the stories. Her face is so dazzling that when she walks outside, the birds fall out of the sky and the fish swim up to the surface.”
“It’s just a face,” she said.
“It is not just a face. I’ve seen Daji beguile and bewitch some of the most powerful and rational men I know. She brings them to their knees with just a few words. More often with just a look.”
“Did she ever charm you?” Rin asked.
“She charmed everyone,” Eriden said, but didn’t elaborate. Rin could never get anything but blunt, literal answers from Eriden, who had the dour visage and personality of a corpse. “Be careful. And keep your gaze down.”
Rin knew that. He’d been saying it for days. Daji’s preferred weapon was her eyes—those snake’s eyes that could ensnare a soul with a simple look, could trap the viewer into a vision of Daji’s own choosing.
The solution was to never look her in the face. Eriden was training Rin to fight solely by watching her opponent’s lower body.
This turned out to be particularly difficult when it came to hand-to-hand combat. So much depended on where the eyes darted, where the torso was pointed. All motion on oblique planes came from the upper body, but Eriden chided Rin every time her eyes strayed too far upward.
Eriden lunged forward without warning. Rin fared slightly better blocking the next sequence of attacks. She’d learned to watch not just the feet but the hip—often that pivoted first, set into motion the legs and feet. She parried a series of blows before a strong hit got through to her shoulder. It wasn’t painful, but the shock nearly made her drop her trident.
Eriden signaled another pause.
While Rin doubled over to catch her breath, he drew a set of long needles out of his pocket. “The Empress is also partial to these.”
He flung three of them toward her. Rin hopped hastily to the side and managed to get out of the needles’ trajectory but landed badly on her ankle.
She winced. The needles kept coming.
She waved her trident madly in a circle, trying to knock them out of the air. It almost worked. Five clattered against the ground. One struck her on the upper thigh. She yanked it out. Eriden hadn’t bothered to blunt the tips. Asshole.
“Daji likes her poison,” Eriden said. “You’re dead now.”
“Thanks, I got that,” Rin snapped.
She let the trident drop and bent over her knees, sucking in deep draughts of air. Her lungs were on fire. Where had her stamina gone? At Sinegard, she could have sparred for hours.
Right—up in a puff of opium smoke.
Eriden hadn’t even broken a sweat. She didn’t want to look weak by asking for another break, so she tried distracting him with questions. “How do you know so much about the Empress?”
“We fought by her side. The Dragon Province had some of the best-trained troops during the Second Poppy War. We were almost always with the Trifecta on the front lines.”
“What were the Trifecta like?”
“Brutal. Dangerous.” Eriden pointed his spear toward her. “Enough talk. You should—”
“But I have to know,” she insisted. “Did Daji fight on the battlefield? Did you see her? What was she like?”
“Daji’s not a warrior. She’s a competent martial artist, they all were, but she’s never relied on blunt force. Her powers are more subtle than the Gatekeeper’s or the Dragon Emperor’s were. She understands desire. She knows what drives men, and she takes their deepest desire and makes them believe that she is the only thing that can give it to them.”
“But I’m a woman.”
“All the same.”
“But that can’t make so much of a difference,” Rin said, more to convince herself than anything. “That’s just—that’s desire. What is that next to hard power?”
“You think fire and steel can trump desire? Daji was always the strongest of the Trifecta.”
“Stronger than the Dragon Emperor?” A memory resurfaced of a white-haired man floating above the ground, beastly shadows circling around him. “Stronger than the Gatekeeper?”
“Of course she was,” Eriden said softly. “Why do you think she’s the only one left?”
That gave Rin pause.
How had Daji become the sole ruler of Nikan? Everyone she’d asked told a different story. All that anyone in the Empire seemed to know for sure was that one day the Dragon Emperor died, the Gatekeeper disappeared, and Daji alone remained on the throne.
“Do you know what she did to them?” she asked.
“I’d give my arms to find out.” Eriden tossed his spear to the side and drew his sword. “Let’s see how you do with this.”
His blade moved blindingly fast. Rin staggered backward, trying desperately to keep up. Several times her trident nearly slipped out of her hands. She gritted her teeth, frustrated.
It wasn’t just that Altan’s trident was too long, too unbalanced, clearly designed for a taller stature than hers. If that were the problem, she would have just swallowed her pride and swapped it for a sword.
It was her body. She knew the right motions and patterns, but her muscles simply could not keep up. Her limbs seemed to obey her mind only after a two-second lag.
Simply put, she didn’t work. Months of lying prone in her room, breathing smoke in and out, had whittled her muscles away. Only now had she become aware of how weak, how painfully thin and easily tired she’d become.
“Focus.” Eriden closed in. Rin’s movements became increasingly desperate. She wasn’t even trying to get a blow in herself; it took all her concentration to keep his blade away from her face.
She couldn’t win a weapons match at this rate.
But she didn’t have to use her trident for the kill. The trident was only useful as a ranged weapon—it kept her opponents at a far enough distance to protect her.
But she need only to get close enough to use the fire.
She narrowed her eyes, waiting.
There it was. Eriden struck for her hilt—a low, reaching blow. She let him flip the weapon out of her hands. Then she took advantage of the opening, darted into the space created by their interlocking weapons, and jammed her knee into Eriden’s sternum.
He doubled over. She kicked in his knees, dropped down onto his chest, and splayed her palms out before his face.
She emitted the smallest hint of flame—just enough to make him feel the heat on his skin.
“Boom,” she said. “You’re dead now.”
Eriden’s mouth pressed into something that almost resembled a smile.
“How’s she doing?”
Rin twisted to look over her shoulder.
Vaisra and Nezha emerged on the deck. Eriden pulled himself to a sitting position.
“She’ll be ready,” he said.
“She’ll be ready?” Vaisra repeated.
“Give me a few days,” Rin said, panting. “Still figuring this out. But I’ll get there.”
“Good,” Vaisra said.
“You’re bleeding.” Nezha pointed to her thigh.
But she barely heard him. She was still looking at Vaisra, who was smiling more widely than she’d ever seen him. He looked pleased. Proud. And somehow, the jolt of satisfaction that gave her felt better than anything she’d smoked in months.
“You’ll accompany the Dragon Warlord into the Autumn Palace for the noon summit,” Eriden said. “Remember, you’ll be presented as a war criminal. Do not act like he is your ally. Mak
e sure to look afraid.”
A dozen of Vaisra’s generals and advisers were in the stateroom, seated around an array of detailed maps of the palace. Rin sat on Vaisra’s right, sweating slightly from the constant attention. The entire plan centered on her, and she had no room to fail.
Eriden held up a pair of iron handcuffs. “You’ll be bound and muzzled. I’d get used to the feel of these.”
“That’s no good,” Rin said. “I can’t burn through metal.”
“They’re not completely metal.” Eriden slid the handcuffs across the table so that Rin could take a closer look. “The link in the middle is twine. It will burn through with minimal heat.”
She fiddled with the handcuffs. “And Daji won’t just have me killed? I mean—she’ll know what I’m there to do; she saw me try at Adlaga.”
“Oh, she’ll likely suspect us of treachery the moment we dock in Lusan. We’re not trying to ambush her. Daji likes to play with her food before she eats it. And she especially won’t want to get rid of you. You’re too interesting.”
“Daji never strikes first,” Vaisra said. “She’ll want to milk you for as much information as she can, so she’ll try to take you somewhere private to talk. Feign surprise at that. Then she’ll likely make an offer nearly as tempting as mine.”
“Which will be what?” Rin asked.
“Use your imagination. A place in her Imperial Guard. Free rein to scour the Empire of any remaining Federation troops. More glory and riches than you could possibly dream of. It’ll all be a lie, of course. Daji has kept her throne for two decades by eliminating people before they become problems. Should you take a position in her court, you will simply be the latest on her long list of political assassinations.”
“Or they’ll find your body in the sewers minutes after you say yes,” said Eriden.
Rin looked around the table. “Does no one else see the gaping flaw in this plan?”
“Pray tell,” Vaisra said.
“Why don’t I just kill her on sight? Before she opens her mouth? Why even take the risk of letting her talk?”
Vaisra and Eriden exchanged a glance. Eriden hesitated a moment, then spoke. “You, ah, won’t be able to.”
Rin blanched. “What does that mean?”
“We just went over this,” Vaisra said. “Once Daji sees you, she’ll know you’re there to kill her. And she’ll very strongly suspect my own intentions. The only way to get you into the Autumn Palace and close enough to attack without putting the rest of us in danger is if you’re sedated first.”
“Sedated,” Rin repeated.
“We’ll have to give you a dose of opium while Daji’s guards are watching,” Vaisra said. “Enough to pacify you for an hour or two. But Daji doesn’t know about your increased tolerance, which helps us. It’ll wear off sooner than she expects.”
Rin hated this plan. They were asking her to enter the Autumn Palace unarmed, high out of her mind, and completely unable to call the fire. But no matter how she turned it over in her mind, she couldn’t find a loophole in the logic. She had to be defanged if she was to get close enough to get a hit.
She tried not to let her fear show as she spoke. “So am I—I mean, will I be alone?”
“We cannot bring a larger guard to the Autumn Palace without arousing Daji’s suspicion. You will have hidden but minimal reinforcements. We can get soldiers in here, here, and here.” Vaisra tapped at three points on a map of the palace. “But remember, our objective here is very limited. If we wanted an all-out war, we would have brought the armada up the Murui. We are only here to cut the head off the snake. The battles come after.”
“So I’m the only one at risk,” Rin said. “Nice.”
“We will not abandon you. We will extract you if it goes badly, I promise. Successful or not, you’ll use one of these escape routes to get out of the palace. Captain Eriden will have the Seagrim ready to depart Lusan in seconds if escape is necessary.”
Rin peered down at the map. The Autumn Palace was hopelessly large, arranged like a maze within a conch shell, a spiraling complex of narrow corridors and dead ends, with twisting hallways and tunnels constructed in every direction.
The escape routes were marked with green lines. She narrowed her eyes, muttering to herself. A few more minutes and she’d have them memorized. She’d always been good at memorizing things, and now that she was off opium she was finding it easier and easier to focus on mental tasks.
She cringed at the thought of giving that up, even for an hour.
“You make this sound so easy,” she said. “Why hasn’t anyone tried to kill Daji before?”
“She’s the Empress,” said Vaisra, as if that were explanation enough.
“She’s one woman whose sole talent is being very pretty,” Rin said. “I don’t understand.”
“Because you’re too young,” Eriden said. “You weren’t alive when the Trifecta were at the peak of their power. You don’t know the fear. You couldn’t trust anyone around you, even your own family. If you whispered a word of treason against Emperor Riga, then the Vipress and the Gatekeeper would be sure to have you destroyed. Not just imprisoned—obliterated.”
Vaisra nodded. “In those years, entire families were ruined, executed, or exiled, and their lineages wiped from history. Daji oversaw this all without blinking an eye. There is a reason why the Warlords still bow down before her, and it’s not just because she is pretty.”
Something about Vaisra’s expression gave Rin pause. Then she realized it was the first time she had ever seen him look scared.
She wondered what Daji had done to him.
Someone knocked on the door just then. She jumped in her seat.
“Come in,” Vaisra called.
A junior officer poked his head in. “Nezha sent me to alert you. We’ve arrived.”
Near the end of his reign, the Red Emperor built the Autumn Palace in the northern city of Lusan. It was never meant to be a capital or an administrative center; it was too far removed from the central provinces to properly govern. It served merely as a resort for his favorite concubines and their children, an escape for the days when Sinegard became so scorching hot that their skin threatened to darken within seconds of stepping outside.
Under the Empress Su Daji’s regime, Lusan had been a place for court officials to harbor their wives and families safely away from the dangers at court, until it turned into the interim capital after Sinegard and then Golyn Niis were razed to the ground.
As the Seagrim sailed toward the city, the Murui narrowed to a thinner and thinner stream, which forced them to move at a slower and slower pace until they weren’t sailing so much as crawling toward the Autumn Palace.
Rin could see the city walls from miles off. Lusan seemed to be lit from within by some unearthly afternoon glow. Everything was somehow golden; it was like the rest of the Empire had dulled to shades of black, white, and bloody red during the war, and Lusan had soaked up all the surrounding color, shining brighter than anything she had seen in months.
Close to the city walls Rin saw a woman walking down the riverbank with buckets of dye and heavy rolls of cloth strapped to her back. Rin knew the cloth was silk from the way it glimmered when it was unrolled, so soft that she could almost imagine the butterfly-wing texture on the backs of her fingers.
How could Lusan have silk? The rest of the country was garbed in unwashed, threadbare scraps. All along the Murui, Rin had seen naked children and babies wrapped in lily pads in some effort to preserve their dignity.
Farther downriver, fishing sampans glided up and down the winding waterways. Each boat carried several large birds—white creatures with massive beaks—hooked to the boats on strings.
Nezha had to explain to Rin what the birds were for. “They’ve got a string around their necks, see? The bird swallows the fish; the farmer pulls the fish out of the bird’s neck. The bird goes in again, always hungry, always too dumb to realize that everything it catches goes into the fish basket and that all
it’ll ever get are slops.”
Rin made a face. “That seems inefficient. Why not just use a net?”
“It is inefficient,” Nezha agreed. “But they’re not fishing for staples, they’re hunting for delicacies. Sweetfish.”
“Why?”
He shrugged.
Rin already knew the answer. Why not hunt for delicacies? Lusan was clearly untouched by the refugee crisis that had swept the rest of the country; it could afford to focus on luxury.
Perhaps it was the heat, or perhaps because Rin’s nerves were already always on edge, but she felt angrier and angrier as they made for port. She hated this city, this land of pale and pampered women, men who were not soldiers but bureaucrats, and children who didn’t know what fear felt like.
She simmered not with resentment so much as with a nameless fury at the idea that outside the confines of warfare, life could go on and did go on, that somehow, still, in pockets scattered throughout the Empire there were cities and cities of people who were dyeing silk and fishing for gourmet dinners, unaffected by the single issue that plagued a soldier’s mind: when and where the next attack would come.
“I thought I wasn’t a prisoner,” said Kitay.
“You’re not,” said Nezha. “You’re a guest.”
“A guest who isn’t allowed off the ship?”
“A guest whom we’d like to keep with us a little longer,” Nezha said delicately. “Can you stop glaring at me like that?”
When the captain announced that they had anchored in Lusan, Kitay had ventured abovedeck for the first time in weeks. Rin had hoped he’d come up for some fresh air, but he was just following Nezha around the deck, intent on antagonizing him in any way possible.
Rin had tried several times to intercede. Kitay, however, seemed determined to pretend she didn’t exist by ignoring her every time she spoke, so she turned her attention to the sights on the riverbank instead.
A mild crowd had gathered around the base of the Seagrim, made up mostly of Imperial officials, Lusani merchants, and messengers from other Warlords. Rin surmised from what snatches of conversation she could hear from the top deck that they were all trying to get an audience with Vaisra. But Eriden and his men were stationed at the bottom of the gangplank, turning everyone away.