by R. F. Kuang
Someone with a bad sense of humor had carved the head to look like a fish with a droopy expression. Ramsa ran his fingers along the fins. “What kind of range do you get on these?”
“That depends,” said Sola. “On a clear day, sixty miles. Rainy days, as far as you can get them.”
Ramsa weighed the missile in his hands, looking so delighted that Rin suspected he might have gotten an erection. “Oh, we are going to have fun with these.”
“Are you hungry?” Nezha knocked on the door frame.
Rin glanced up. She was alone in the barracks. Kitay had left to find the Dragon Province’s archives, and the other Cike members’ first priority had been finding the mess hall.
“Not very,” she said.
“Good. Do you want to see something cool?”
“Is it another ship?” she asked.
“Yes. But you’ll really like this one. Nice uniform, by the way.”
She smacked his arm. “Eyes up, General.”
“I’m just saying the colors look good on you. You make a good Dragon.”
Rin heard the shipyard long before they reached it. Over the cacophonous din of screeches and hammering, they had to yell to hear each other. She had assumed what she saw in the harbor was a completed fleet, but apparently several more vessels were still under construction.
Her eyes landed immediately on the ship at the far end. It was still in its initial stages—only a skeleton thus far. But if she imagined the structure to be built around it, it was titanic. It seemed impossible that a thing like that could ever stay afloat, let alone get past the channel through the Red Cliffs.
“We’re going to board that to the capital?” she asked.
“That one isn’t ready. It keeps getting updated with plans from the west. It’s Jinzha’s pet project; he’s a perfectionist about stuff like this.”
“A pet project,” she repeated. “Your siblings just build massive boats for their pet projects.”
Nezha shook his head. “It was supposed to be finished in time for the northern campaign, whenever that gets off the ground. Now it’ll be much longer. They’ve changed the design to a defensive warship. It’s meant to guard Arlong now, not to lead the fleet.”
“Why is it behind schedule?”
“Fire broke out in the shipyard overnight. Some idiot on watch kicked his lamp over. Set construction back by months. They had to import the timber from the Dog Province. Father had to get pretty creative with that—it’s hard to ship in massive amounts of lumber and hide the fact that you’re building a fleet. Took a few weeks of dealing with Moag’s smugglers.”
Rin could see blackened edges on some of the skeleton’s outer boards. But the rest had been replaced with new timber, smoothed to a shine.
“The whole thing made a big stir in the city,” Nezha said. “Some people kept saying it was a sign from the gods that the rebellion would fail.”
“And Vaisra?”
“Father took it as a sign that he should go out and get himself a Speerly.”
Instead of taking a river sampan back to the military barracks, Nezha led her down the stairs to the base of the pier, where Rin could still hear the noise of the shipyard over the water rushing gently against the posts that kept the pier up. At first she thought they had walked into a dead end, until Nezha stepped from the glassy sand and right onto the river.
“What the hell?”
After a second she realized he was standing not on the water, but rather on a large circular flap that almost matched the river’s greenish-blue hue.
“Lily pads,” Nezha said before she could ask. Arms spread for balance, he shifted his weight just so as the waves lifted the lily pad under his feet.
“Show-off,” Rin said.
“You’ve never seen these before?”
“Yes, but only in wall scrolls.” She grimaced at the pads. Her balance wasn’t half as good as Nezha’s, and she wasn’t keen to fall into the river. “I didn’t know they grew so large.”
“They don’t usually. These will only last a month or two before they sink. They grow naturally in the freshwater ponds up the mountain, but our botanists found a way to militarize them. You’ll find them up and down the harbor. The better sailors don’t need rowboats to get to their ships; they can just run across the lily pads.”
“Calm down,” she said. “They’re just stepping stones.”
“They’re militarized lily pads. Isn’t that great?”
“I think you just like using the word ‘militarized.’”
Nezha opened his mouth to respond, but a voice from atop the pier cut him off.
“Had enough of playing tour guide?”
A man descended the steps toward them. He wore a blue soldier’s uniform, and the black stripes on his left arm marked him as a general.
Nezha hastily hopped off the lily pads onto the wet sand and sank to one knee. “Brother. Good to see you again.”
Rin realized in retrospect she should have knelt as well, but she was too busy staring at Nezha’s brother. Yin Jinzha. She had seen him once, briefly, three years back at her first Summer Festival in Sinegard. Back then she’d thought that Jinzha and Nezha could have been twins, but upon closer inspection, their similarities were not really so pronounced. Jinzha was taller, more thickly built, and he carried himself with the air of a firstborn—a son who knew he was heir to his father’s entire estate, while his younger siblings would be left to a fate of squabbling over the refuse.
“I heard you screwed up at the Autumn Palace.” Jinzha’s voice was deeper than Nezha’s. More arrogant, if that was possible. It sounded oddly familiar to Rin, but she couldn’t quite place it. “What happened?”
Nezha rose to his feet. “Hasn’t Captain Eriden briefed you?”
“Eriden didn’t see everything. Until Father recovers I’m the senior ranking general in Arlong, and I’d like to know the details.”
It’s Altan, Rin realized with a jolt. Jinzha spoke with a clipped, military precision that reminded her of Altan at his best. This was a man used to competence and immediate obedience.
“I don’t have anything to add,” Nezha said. “I was on the Seagrim.”
Jinzha’s lip curled. “Out of harm’s way. Typical.”
Rin expected Nezha to lash out at that, but he swallowed the barb with a nod. “How is Father?”
“Better now than last night. He’d been straining himself. Our physician didn’t understand how he was still alive at first.”
“But Father told me it was just a flesh wound.”
“Did you even get a good look at him? That blade went nearly all the way through his shoulder bone. He’s been lying to everyone. It’s a wonder he’s even conscious.”
“Has he asked for me?” Nezha asked.
“Why would he?” Jinzha gave his brother a patronizing look. “I’ll let you know when you’re needed.”
“Yes, sir.” Nezha dipped his head and nodded. Rin watched this exchange, fascinated. She’d never seen anyone who could bully Nezha the way Nezha tended to bully everyone else.
“You’re the Speerly.” Jinzha looked suddenly at Rin, as if he had just remembered she was there.
“Yes.” For some reason Rin’s voice came out strangled, girlish. She cleared her throat. “That’s me.”
“Go on, then,” Jinzha said. “Let’s see it.”
“What?”
“Show me what you can do,” Jinzha said very slowly, as if talking to a small child. “Make it big.”
Rin shot Nezha a confused look. “I don’t understand.”
“They say you can call fire,” Jinzha said.
“Well, yes—”
“How much? How hot? To what degree? Does it come from your body, or can you summon it from other places? What does it take for you to trigger a volcano?” Jinzha spoke at such a terribly fast clip that Rin had trouble deciphering his curt Sinegardian accent. She hadn’t struggled with that in years.
She blinked, feeling rather stupid, a
nd when she spoke she stumbled over her words. “I mean, it just happens—”
“‘It just happens,’” he mimicked. “What, like a sneeze? What help is that? Explain to me how to use you.”
“I’m not someone for you to use.”
“Fancy that. The soldier won’t take orders.”
“Rin’s had a long journey,” Nezha cut in hastily. “I’m sure she’d be happy to demonstrate for you in the morning, when she’s had some rest . . .”
“Soldiers get tired, that’s part of the job,” Jinzha said. “Come on, Speerly. Show us what you’ve got.”
Nezha placed a placating hand on Rin’s arm. “Jinzha, really . . .”
Jinzha made a noise of disgust. “You should hear the way Father talks about them. Speerlies this, Speerlies that. I told him he’d be better off launching an invasion from Arlong, but no, he thought he could win a bloodless coup if he just had you. Look how that worked out.”
“Rin’s stronger than you can imagine,” Nezha said.
“You know, if the Speerlies were so strong, you’d think they’d be less dead.” Jinzha’s lip curled. “Spent my whole childhood hearing about what a marvel your precious Altan was. Turns out he was just another dirt-skinned idiot who blew himself up for nothing.”
Rin’s vision flashed red. When she looked at Jinzha she didn’t see flesh but a charred stump, ashes peeling off what used to be a man—she wanted him dying, dead, hurting. She wanted him to scream.
“You want to see what I can do?” she asked. Her voice sounded very distant, as if someone were speaking at her from very far away.
“Rin . . .” Nezha cautioned.
“No, fuck off.” She shrugged his hand off her arm. “He wants to see what I can do.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Get back.”
She turned her palms out toward Jinzha. It took nothing to summon the anger. It was already there, waiting, like water bursting forth from a dam—I hate, I hate, I hate—
Nothing happened.
Jinzha raised his eyebrows.
Rin felt a twinge of pain in her temples. She touched her finger to her eyes.
The twinge blossomed into a searing bolt of agony. She saw an explosion of colors branded behind her eyelids: reds and yellows, flames flickering over a burning village, the silhouettes of people writhing inside, a great mushroom cloud over the longbow island in miniature.
For a moment she saw a character she couldn’t recognize, swimming into shape like a nest of snakes, lingering just in front of her eyes before it disappeared. She drifted in a moment between the world in her mind and the material world. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see . . .
She sagged to her knees. She felt Nezha’s arms hoisting her up, heard him shouting for someone to help. She struggled to open her eyes. Jinzha stood above her, staring down with open contempt.
“Father was right,” he said. “We should have tried to save the other one.”
Chaghan slammed the door shut behind him. “What happened?”
“I don’t know.” Rin’s fingers clenched and unclenched around the bedsheets while Chaghan unpacked his satchel beside her. Her voice trembled; she had spent the last half hour trying simply to breathe normally, but still her heart raced so furiously that she could barely hear her own thoughts. “I got careless. I was going to call the fire—just a bit, I didn’t really want to hurt him, and then—”
Chaghan grabbed her wrists. “Why are you shaking?”
She hadn’t realized she was. She couldn’t stop her hands from trembling, but thinking about it only made her shake harder.
“He won’t want me anymore,” she whispered.
“Who?”
“Vaisra.”
She was terrified. If she couldn’t call the fire, then Vaisra had recruited a Speerly for nothing. Without the fire, she might be tossed away.
She’d been trying since she regained consciousness to call the fire, but the result was always the same—a searing pain in her temples, a burst of color, and flashes of visions she never wanted to see again. She couldn’t tell what was wrong, only that the fire remained out of her reach, and without the fire she was nothing but useless.
Another tremor passed through her body.
“Just calm down,” Chaghan said. He set the satchel on the floor and knelt beside her. “Focus on me. Look in my eyes.”
She obeyed.
Chaghan’s eyes, pale and without pupils or irises, were normally unsettling. But up close they were strangely alluring, two shards of a snowy landscape embedded in his thin face that drew her in like some hypnotized prey.
“What is wrong with me?” she whispered.
“I don’t know. Why don’t we find out?” Chaghan rummaged in his satchel, closed his fist around something, and offered her a handful of bright blue powder.
She recognized the drug. It was the ground-up dust of some dried northern fungus. She’d ingested it once before with Chaghan in Khurdalain, when she’d taken him to the immaterial realm where Mai’rinnen Tearza was haunting her.
Chaghan wanted to accompany her to the inner recesses of her mind, the point where her soul ascended to the plane of the gods.
“Afraid?” he asked when she hesitated.
Not afraid. Ashamed. Rin didn’t want to bring Chaghan into her mind. She was scared of what he might see.
“Do you have to come?” she asked.
“You can’t do it alone. I’m all you’ve got. You have to trust me.”
“Will you promise to stop if I ask you to?”
Chaghan scoffed, reached for her hand, and pressed her finger into the powder. “We’ll stop when I say we can stop.”
“Chaghan.”
He gave her a frank look. “Do you really have another option?”
The drug began to act almost from the moment it hit her tongue. Rin was surprised at how fast and clean the high was. Poppy seeds were so frustratingly slow, a gradual crawl into the realm of spirit that worked only if she concentrated, but this drug was like a kick through the door between this world and the next.
Chaghan grabbed her hand just before the infirmary faded from her vision. They departed the mortal plane in a swirl of colors. Then it was just the two of them in an expanse of black. Drifting. Searching.
Rin knew what she had to do. She homed in on her anger and created the link to the Phoenix that pulled their souls from the chasm of nothing toward the Pantheon. She could almost feel the Phoenix, the scorching heat of its divinity washing over her, could almost hear its malicious cackle—
Then something dimmed its presence, cut her off.
Something massive materialized before them. There was no way to describe it other than a giant word, slashed into empty space. Twelve strokes hung in the air, a great pictogram the shimmering hue of green-blue snakeskin, glinting in the unnatural brightness like freshly spilled blood.
“That’s impossible,” Chaghan said. “She shouldn’t be able to do this.”
The pictogram looked both entirely familiar and entirely foreign. Rin couldn’t read it, though it had to be written in the Nikara script. It came close to resembling several characters she knew but deviated from all of them in significant ways.
This was something ancient, then. Something old; something that predated the Red Emperor. “What is this?”
“What does it look like?” Chaghan reached out an incorporeal hand as if to touch it, then hastily drew it back. “This is a Seal.”
A Seal? The term sounded oddly familiar. Rin remembered fragments of a battle. A white-haired man floating in the air, lightning swirling around the tip of his staff, opening a void to a realm of things not mortal, things that didn’t belong in their world.
You’re Sealed.
Not anymore.
“Like the Gatekeeper?” she asked.
“The Gatekeeper was Sealed?” Chaghan sounded astonished. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I had no idea!”
; “But that would explain so much! That’s why he’s been lost, why he doesn’t remember—”
“What are you talking about?”
“The Seal blocks your access to the world of spirit,” Chaghan explained. “The Vipress left her venom inside you. That’s what it’s made of. It will keep you from accessing the Pantheon. And over time it will grow stronger and stronger, eating away at your mind until you lose even your memories associated with the Phoenix. It’ll make you a shell of yourself.”
“Please tell me you can get rid of it.”
“I can try. You’ll have to take me inside.”
“Inside?”
“The Seal is also a gateway. Look.” Chaghan pointed into the heart of the character, where the glimmering snake blood formed a swirling circle. When Rin focused on it, it did indeed seem to call to her, drawing her into some unknown dimension beyond. “Go inside. I’m betting that’s where Daji’s left the venom. It exists here in the form of memory. Daji’s power dwells in desire; she’s conjured the things that you want the most to prevent you from calling the fire.”
“Venom. Memory. Desire.” Very little of this was making sense to Rin. “Look—just tell me whatever the fuck I’m supposed to do with it.”
“You destroy it however you can.”
“Destroy what?”
“I think you’ll know when you see it.”
Rin didn’t have to ask how to pass the gate. It pulled her in as soon as she approached it. The Seal seemed to fold in over them, growing larger and larger until it enveloped them. Swirls of blood drifted around her, undulating, as if trying to decide what shape to take, what illusion to create.
“She’ll show you the future you want,” Chaghan said.
But Rin didn’t see how that could possibly work for her, because her greatest desires didn’t exist in the future. They were all in the past. She wanted the last five years back. She wanted lazy days on the Academy campus. She wanted lackadaisical strolls in Jiang’s garden, she wanted summer vacations at Kitay’s estate, she wanted, she wanted . . .
She was on the sands of the Isle of Speer again—vibrant, beautiful Speer, lush and vivid like she had never seen it before. And there Altan was, healthy and whole, smiling like she had never really seen him smile.