The Dragon Republic

by R. F. Kuang

  It’s the Pantheon, she realized. If she squinted, she could make out the gods she had come to recognize: the Monkey God, mischievous and cruel; the Phoenix, imposing and ravenous. . . .

  That was odd. The Red Emperor had hated shamans. After he’d claimed his throne at Sinegard, he’d had the monks killed and their monasteries burned.

  But maybe he hadn’t hated the gods. Maybe he’d just hated that he couldn’t access their power for himself.

  The ninth gate led to the council room. The Empress’s personal guard, a row of soldiers in gold-lined armor, blocked their path.

  “No attendants,” said the guard captain. “The Empress has decided that she does not want to crowd the council room with bodyguards.”

  A flicker of irritation crossed Vaisra’s face. “The Empress might have told me this beforehand.”

  “The Empress sent a notice to everyone residing in the palace,” the guard captain said smugly. “You declined her invitation.”

  Rin thought Vaisra might protest, but he only turned to Eriden and told him to wait outside. Eriden bowed and departed, leaving them without guards or weapons in the heart of the Autumn Palace.

  But they were not entirely alone. At that moment the Cike were swimming through the underground waterways toward the city’s heart. Aratsha had constructed air bubbles around their heads so they could swim for miles without needing to come up for air.

  The Cike had used this as an infiltration method many times before. This time, they would deliver reinforcements if the coup went sour. Baji and Suni would take up posts directly outside the council room, poised to spring in and break Vaisra out if necessary. Qara would station herself at the highest pavilion outside the council room for ranged support. And Ramsa would squirrel himself away wherever he and his waterproof bag of combustible treasures could cause the most havoc.

  Rin found a small degree of comfort in that. If they couldn’t capture the Autumn Palace, at least they had a good chance of blowing it up.

  Silence fell over the council room when Rin and Vaisra walked in.

  The Warlords twisted in their seats to stare at her, their expressions ranging from surprise to curiosity to mild distaste. Their eyes roved over her body, lingered on her arms and legs, took stock of her height and build. They looked everywhere except at her eyes.

  Rin shifted uncomfortably. They were sizing her up like a cow at market.

  The Ox Warlord spoke first. Rin recognized him from Khurdalain; she was surprised that he was still alive. “This little girl held you up for weeks?”

  Vaisra chuckled. “The searching ate my time, not the extraction. I found her stranded in Ankhiluun. Moag got to her first.”

  The Ox Warlord looked surprised. “The Pirate Queen? How did you wrestle her away?”

  “I traded Moag for something she likes better,” Vaisra said.

  “Why would you bring her here alive?” demanded a man at the other end of the table.

  Rin swiveled her head around and nearly jumped in surprise. She hadn’t recognized Master Jun at first glance. His beard had grown much longer, and his hair was shot through with gray streaks that hadn’t been there before the war. But she could find the same arrogance etched into the lines of her old Combat master’s face, as well as his clear distaste for her.

  He glared at Vaisra. “Treason deserves the death penalty. And she’s far too dangerous to keep around.”

  “Don’t be hasty,” said the Horse Warlord. “She might be useful.”

  “Useful?” Jun echoed.

  “She’s the last of her kind. We’d be fools to throw a weapon like that away.”

  “Weapons are only useful if you can wield them,” said the Ox Warlord. “I think you’d have a little trouble taming this beast.”

  “Where do you think she went wrong?” The Rooster Warlord leaned forward to get a better look at her.

  Rin had privately been looking forward to meeting the Rooster Warlord, Gong Takha. They came from the same province. They spoke the same dialect, and his skin was nearly as dark as hers. Word on the Seagrim was that Takha was the closest to joining the Republic. But if provincial ties counted for anything, Takha didn’t show it. He stared at her with the same sort of fearful curiosity one displayed toward a caged tiger.

  “She’s got a wild look in her eyes,” he continued. “Do you think the Mugenese experiments did that to her?”

  I’m in the room, Rin wanted to snap. Stop talking about me like I’m not here.

  But Vaisra wanted her to be docile. Act stupid, he’d said. Don’t come off as too intelligent.

  “Nothing so complex,” said Vaisra. “She was a Speerly straining against her leash. You remember how the Speerlies were.”

  “When my dogs go mad, I put them down,” Jun said.

  The Empress spoke from the doorway. “But little girls aren’t dogs, Loran.”

  Rin froze.

  Su Daji had traded her ceremonial robes for a green soldier’s uniform. Her shoulder pads were inlaid with jade armor, and a longsword hung at her waist. It seemed like a message. She was not only the Empress, she was also grand marshal of the Nikara Imperial Militia. She’d conquered the Empire once by force. She’d do it again.

  Rin fought to keep her breathing steady as Daji reached out and traced her fingertips over her muzzle.

  “Careful,” Jun said. “She bites.”

  “Oh, I’m sure.” Daji’s voice sounded languid, almost disinterested. “Did she put up a fight?”

  “She tried,” Vaisra said.

  “I imagine there were casualties.”

  “Not as many as you would expect. She’s weak. The drug’s done her in.”

  “Of course.” Daji’s lip curled. “Speerlies have always had their predilections.”

  Her hand drifted upward to pat Rin gently on the head.

  Rin’s fingers curled into fists.

  Calm, she reminded herself. The opium hadn’t worn off yet. When she tried to call the fire, she felt only a numb, blocked sensation in the back of her mind.

  Daji’s eyes lingered on Rin for a long while. Rin froze, terrified that the Empress might take her aside now like Vaisra had warned. It was too early. If she were alone in a room with Daji, the best she could do was hurl some disoriented fists in her direction.

  But Daji only smiled, shook her head, and turned toward the table. “We’ve much to get through. Shall we proceed?”

  “What about the girl?” Jun asked. “She ought to be in a cell.”

  “I know.” Daji shot Rin a poisonous smile. “But I like to watch her sweat.”

  The next two hours were the slowest of Rin’s life.

  Once the Warlords had exhausted their curiosity over her, they turned their attention to an enormous roster of problems economic, agricultural, and political. The Third Poppy War had wrecked nearly every province. Federation soldiers had destroyed most of the infrastructure in every major city they’d occupied, set fire to huge swaths of grain fields, and wiped out entire villages. Mass refugee movements had reshaped the human density of the country. This was the kind of disaster that would have taken miraculous effort from a unified central leadership to ameliorate, and the council of the twelve Warlords was anything but.

  “Control your damn people,” said the Ox Warlord. “I have thousands streaming into my border as we speak and we don’t have a place for them.”

  “What are we supposed to do, create a border guard?” The Hare Warlord had a distinctly plaintive, grating voice that made Rin wince every time he spoke. “Half my province is flooded, we haven’t got food stores to last the winter—”

  “Neither do we,” said the Ox Warlord. “Send them elsewhere or we’ll all starve.”

  “We’d be willing to repatriate citizens from the Hare Province under a set quota,” said the Dog Warlord. “But they’d have to display provincial registration papers.”

  “Registration papers?” the Hare Warlord echoed. “These people had their villages sacked and you’re askin
g for registration papers? Right, like the first thing they grabbed when their village started going up in flames was—”

  “We can’t house everyone. My people are pressed for resources as is—”

  “Your province is a steppe wasteland, you’ve got more than enough space.”

  “We have space; we don’t have food. And who knows what your sort would bring in over the borders . . .”

  Rin had a difficult time believing that this council, if one could call it that, was really how the Empire functioned. She knew how often the Warlords went to arms over resources, trade routes, and—occasionally—over the best recruits graduating from Sinegard. And she knew that the fractures had been deepening, had gotten worse in the aftermath of the Third Poppy War.

  She just hadn’t known it was this bad.

  For hours the Warlords had bickered and squabbled over details so inane that Rin could not believe anyone could possibly care. And she had stood waiting in the corner, sweating through her chains, waiting for Daji to drop her front.

  But the Empress seemed content to wait. Eriden was right—she clearly relished playing with her food before she ate it. She sat at the head of the table with a vaguely amused expression on her face. Every once in a while, she met Rin’s eyes and winked.

  What was Daji’s endgame? Certainly she knew that the opium would wear off in Rin eventually. Why was she running out the clock?

  Did Daji want this fight?

  The sheer anxiety made Rin feel weak-kneed and light-headed. It took everything she had to remain standing.

  “What about Tiger Province?” someone asked.

  All eyes turned to the plump child sitting with his elbows up on the table. The young Tiger Warlord looked around with an expression equal parts bewildered and terrified, blinked twice, then peered over his shoulder for help.

  His father had died at Khurdalain and now his steward and generals ruled the province in his stead, which meant that the power in Tiger Province really lay with Jun.

  “We’ve done more than enough for this war,” Jun said. “We bled at Khurdalain for months. We’re thousands of men down. We need time to heal.”

  “Come on, Jun.” A tall man sitting at the far end of the room spat a wad of phlegm on the table. “Tiger Province is full of arable land. Spread some of the goodness around.”

  Rin grimaced. This had to be the new Horse Warlord—the Wolf Meat General Chang En. She’d been briefed extensively on this one. Chang En was a former divisional commander who had escaped from a Federation prison camp near the start of the Third Poppy War, taken up the life of a bandit, and assumed rapid control of the upper region of the Horse Province while the former Horse Warlord and his army were busy defending Khurdalain.

  They had eaten anything. Wolf meat. Corpses by the roadside. The rumor was that they had paid good money for live human babies.

  Now the former Horse Warlord was dead, skinned alive by Federation troops. His heirs had been too weak or too young to challenge Chang En, so the bandit ruler had assumed de facto control of the province.

  Chang En caught Rin’s eye, bared his teeth, and slowly licked his upper lip with a thick, mottled black tongue.

  She suppressed a shudder and looked away.

  “Most of our arable land near the coastline has been destroyed by tsunamis or ash fall.” Jun gave Rin a look of utter disgust. “The Speerly made sure of that.”

  Rin felt a twist of guilt. But it had been either that or extinction at Federation hands. She’d stopped debating that trade. She could function only if she believed that it had been worth it.

  “You can’t just keep foisting your refugees on me,” Chang En said. “They’re cramming the cities. We can’t get a moment’s rest without their whining in the streets, demanding free accommodations.”

  “Then put them to work,” Jun said coldly. “Have them rebuild your roads and buildings. They’ll earn their own keep.”

  “And how are we supposed to feed them? If they starve at the borders, that’s your fault.”

  Rin noticed it was the northern Warlords—the Ox, Ram, Horse, and Dog Warlords—who did most of the talking. Tsolin sat with his fingers steepled under his chin, saying nothing. The southern Warlords, clustered near the back of the room, largely remained silent. They were the ones who had suffered the most damage, lost the most troops, and thus had the least leverage.

  Throughout all of this Daji sat at the head of the table, observing, rarely speaking. She watched the others, one eyebrow arched just a bit higher than the other, as if she were supervising a group of children who had managed to continually disappoint her.

  Another hour passed and they had resolved nothing, except for a halfhearted gesture by Tiger Province to allocate six thousand catties of food aid to the landlocked Ram Province in exchange for a thousand pounds of salt. In the grander scheme of things, with thousands of refugees dying of starvation daily, this was hardly a drop in the bucket.

  “Why don’t we take a recess?” The Empress stood up from the table. “We’re not getting anywhere.”

  “We’ve barely resolved anything,” said Tsolin.

  “And the Empire won’t collapse if we break for a meal. Cool your heads, gentlemen. Dare I suggest you consider the radical option of compromising with each other?” Daji turned toward Rin. “Meanwhile, I shall retire for a moment to my gardens. Runin, it’s time for you to head off to your cell, don’t you think?”

  Rin stiffened. She couldn’t help but shoot a panicked glance at Vaisra.

  He stared forward without meeting her eyes, betraying nothing.

  This was it. Rin squared her shoulders. She dipped her head in submission, and the Empress smiled.

  Rin and the Empress exited not through the throne room but by a narrow corridor in the back. The servants’ exit. As they walked Rin could hear the gurgling of the irrigation pipes beneath the floors.

  Hours had passed since the council began. The Cike should be stationed within the palace by now, but that thought made her no less terrified. For now she was operating alone with the Empress.

  But she still didn’t have the fire.

  “Are you exhausted yet?” Daji asked.

  Rin didn’t respond.

  “I wanted you to watch the Warlords at their best. They’re such a troublesome bunch, aren’t they?”

  Rin continued pretending she hadn’t heard.

  “You don’t talk very much, do you?” Daji glanced over her shoulder at her. Her eyes slid down to the muzzle. “Oh, of course. Let’s get this off you.”

  She placed her slim fingers on either side of the contraption and gently pulled it off. “Better?”

  Rin kept her silence. Don’t engage her, Vaisra had warned her. Maintain constant vigilance and let her speak her piece.

  She only needed to buy herself a few more minutes. She could feel the opium wearing off. Her vision had gotten sharper, and her limbs responded without delay to her commands. She just needed Daji to keep talking until the Phoenix responded to her call. Then she could turn the Autumn Palace to ash.

  “Altan was the same,” Daji mused. “You know, the first three years he was with us, we thought he was a mute.”

  Rin nearly tripped over a cobblestone. Daji continued walking as if she had noticed nothing. Rin followed behind, fighting to keep her calm.

  “I was sorry to hear of his loss,” Daji said. “He was a good commander. One of our very best.”

  And you killed him, you old bitch. Rin rubbed her fingers together, hoping for a spark, but still the channel to the Phoenix remained blocked.

  Just a little longer.

  Daji led her behind the building toward a patch of empty space near the servants’ quarters.

  “The Red Emperor built a series of tunnels in the Autumn Palace so that he could escape to and from any room if need be. Ruler of an entire empire, and he didn’t feel safe in his own bed.” Daji stopped beside a well and pushed hard at the cover, bracing her feet against the stone floor. The cover
slid off with a loud screech. She straightened and brushed her hands on her uniform. “Follow me.”

  Rin crawled after Daji into the well, which had a set of narrow, spiraling steps built into its wall. Daji reached up and slid the stone closed over them, leaving them standing in pitch darkness. Icy fingers wrapped around Rin’s hand. She jumped, but Daji only tightened her grip.

  “It’s easy to get lost if you’ve never been here before.” Daji’s voice echoed around the chamber. “Stay close.”

  Rin tried to keep count of how many turns they had taken—fifteen, sixteen—but soon enough she lost track of where they were, even in her carefully memorized mental map. How far were they from the council room? Would she have to ignite in the tunnels?

  After several more minutes of walking, they resurfaced into a garden. The sudden burst of color was disorienting. Rin peered, blinking, at the resplendent array of lilies, chrysanthemums, and plum trees planted in clusters around rows upon rows of sculptures.

  This wasn’t the Imperial Garden—the layout of the walls didn’t match. The Imperial Garden was shaped in a circle; this garden was erected inside a hexagon. This was a private courtyard.

  This hadn’t been on the map. Rin had no clue where she was.

  Her eyes flickered frantically around her surroundings, seeking out possible exit routes, mapping out useful trajectories and planes of motion for the impending fight, making note of objects that could be weaponized if she couldn’t get the fire back in time. Those saplings looked fragile—she might break a branch off for a club if she got desperate. Best if she could back Daji up against the far wall. If nothing else, she could use those loose cobblestones to smash the Empress’s head in.

  “Magnificent, isn’t it?”

  Rin realized Daji was waiting for her to say something.

  If she engaged Daji in conversation, she’d be walking headfirst into a trap. Vaisra and Eriden had warned her many times how easily Daji would manipulate, could plant thoughts in her mind that weren’t her own.

  But Daji would grow bored of talking if Rin stayed silent. And Daji’s interest in playing with her food was the only thing buying Rin time. Rin needed to keep the conversation going until she had the fire back.