by R. F. Kuang
“So what, he trusts you instead?”
“I’m the only one who knows what I’m doing.”
“And you basically only joined up yesterday, so can you not act so startled that my father trusts you less than men who have served him for decades?”
Kitay stormed off, muttering under his breath. Rin suspected they wouldn’t see him emerge from the library for days.
“Asshole,” Nezha grumbled once Kitay was out of earshot.
“Don’t look at me,” Rin said. “I’m on his side.”
She didn’t care so much about the blockade. If the northern provinces were holding out, then starvation served them right. But she couldn’t bear the idea that they were about to kick a hornet’s nest—because then their only strategy would be to wait, hide, and hope the hornets didn’t sting first.
She couldn’t stand the uncertainty. She wanted to be on the attack.
“Innocent people aren’t going to die,” Nezha insisted, though he sounded more like he was trying to convince himself. “They’ll surrender before it gets that bad. They’ll have to.”
“And if they don’t?” she asked. “Then we attack?”
“We attack, or they starve,” Nezha said. “Win-win.”
Arlong’s military operations turned inward. The army stopped preparing ships to sail out and focused on building up defense structures to make Arlong completely invulnerable to a Militia invasion.
A defensive war was starting to seem more and more likely. If the Republic didn’t launch their northern assault now, then they’d be stuck at home until the next spring. They were more than halfway into autumn, and Rin remembered how vicious the Sinegardian winters were. As the days became colder, it would get harder to boil water and prepare hot food. Disease and frostbite would spread quickly through the camps. The troops would be miserable.
But the south would remain warm, hospitable, and ripe for the picking. The longer they waited, the more likely it was the Militia would sail downriver toward Arlong.
Rin didn’t want to fight a defensive battle. Every great treatise on military strategy agreed that defensive battles were a nightmare. And Arlong, impenetrable as it was, would still take a heavy beating from the combined forces of the north. Surely Vaisra knew that, too; he was too competent to believe otherwise. But in meeting after meeting, he chastised Kitay for speaking up, appeased the Warlords, and did nothing close to inciting the alliance to action.
Rin was beginning to think that even independent action by Dragon Province would be better than nothing. But the orders did not come.
“Father’s hands are tied,” said Nezha, again and again.
Kitay remained holed up in the library, drawing up war plans that would never be used with increasing frustration.
“I knew joining up with you would be treason,” he raged at Nezha. “I didn’t think it would be suicide.”
“The Warlords will come around,” Nezha said.
“Fat chance. Charouk’s a lazy pig who wants to hide behind Republican swords, Takha doesn’t have the spine to do anything but hide behind Charouk, and Gurubai might be the smartest of the lot, but he’s not sticking his neck out if the other two won’t.”
There has to be something else, Rin thought. Something we don’t know about. There was no way Vaisra would just sit back and let winter come without taking the initiative. What was he waiting for?
For lack of better options, she put her blind faith in Vaisra. She sucked it up when her men asked her about the delay. She closed her ears to the rumors that Vaisra was considering a peace agreement with the Empress. She realized she couldn’t influence policy, so she poured her focus into the only things she could control.
She sparred more bouts with Nezha. She stopped wielding her trident like a staff. She became familiar with the generals and lieutenants of the Republican Army. She did her best to integrate the Cike into the Dragon Province’s military ecosystem, though both Baji and Ramsa rankled at the strict ban on alcohol. She learned the Republican Army’s command codes, communications channels, and amphibious attack formations. She prepared herself for war, whenever it came.
Until the day came when gongs sounded frantically across the harbor, and messengers ran up the docks, and all of Arlong was alight with the news that ships were sailing into the Dragon Province. Great white ships from the west.
Then Rin understood what the stalling had been about.
Vaisra hadn’t been pulling back from the northern expedition after all.
He’d been waiting for backup.
Chapter 13
Rin squeezed through the crowd behind Nezha, who made liberal use of elbows to get them to the front of the harbor. The dock was already thronged with curious civilians and soldiers alike, all angling to get a good look at the Hesperian ship. But no one was looking out at the harbor. All heads were tilted to the sky.
Three whale-sized crafts sailed through the clouds above. Each had a long, rectangular basket strapped to its underbelly, with cerulean flags sewn along the sides. Rin blinked several times as she stared.
How could structures so massive possibly stay aloft?
They looked absurd and utterly unnatural, as if some god were moving them through the sky at will. But it couldn’t be the work of the gods. The Hesperians didn’t believe in the Pantheon.
Was this the work of their Maker? The possibility made Rin shiver. She’d always been taught that the Hesperians’ Holy Maker was a construct, a fiction to control an anxious population. The singular, anthropomorphized, all-powerful deity that the Hesperians believed in could not possibly explain the complexity of the universe. But if the Maker was real, then everything she knew about the sixty-four deities, about the Pantheon, was wrong.
What if her gods weren’t the only ones in the universe? What if a higher power did exist—one that only the Hesperians had access to? Was that why they were so infinitely more advanced?
The sky filled with a sound like the drone of a million bees, amplified a hundred times over as the flying crafts drew closer.
Rin saw people standing at the edges of the hanging baskets. They looked like little toys from the ground. The flying whales began approaching the harbor to land, looming larger and larger in the sky until their shadows enveloped everyone who stood below. The people inside the baskets waved their arms over their heads. Their mouths opened wide—they were shouting something, but no one could hear them over the noise.
Nezha dragged Rin backward by the wrist.
“Back away,” he shouted into her ear.
There followed a brief period of chaos while the city guard wrangled the crowd back from the landing area. One by one the flying crafts thudded to the ground. The entire harbor shook from the impact.
At last, the droning noise died away. The metal whales shriveled and slumped to the side as they deflated over the baskets. The air was silent.
Rin watched, waiting.
“Don’t let your eyes pop out of your head,” said Nezha. “They’re just foreigners.”
“Just foreigners to you. Exotic creatures to me.”
“They didn’t have missionaries down in Rooster Province?”
“Only on the coastlines.” Hesperian missionaries had been banned from the Empire after the Second Poppy War. Several dared to continue visiting cities peripheral to Sinegard’s control, but most kept their distance from rural places like Tikany. “All I’ve ever heard are stories.”
“Like what?”
“The Hesperians are giants. They’re covered in red fur. They boil infants and eat them in soup.”
“You know that never happened, right?”
“They’re pretty convinced of it where I come from.”
Nezha chuckled. “Let’s let bygones be bygones. They’re coming now as friends.”
The Empire had a troubled history with the Republic of Hesperia. During the First Poppy War, the Hesperians had offered military and economic aid to the Federation of Mugen. Once the Mugenese had obliterate
d any notion of Nikara sovereignty, the Hesperians had populated the coastal regions with missionaries and religious schools, intent on wiping out the local superstitious religions.
For a short time, the Hesperian missionaries had even outlawed temple visits. If any shamanic cults still existed after the Red Emperor’s war on religion, the Hesperians drove them even further underground.
During the Second Poppy War, the Hesperians became the liberators. The Federation had committed too many atrocities for the Hesperians, who had always claimed that their occupation benefited the natives, to pretend neutrality was morally defensible. After Speer burned, the Hesperians sent their fleets to the Nariin Sea, joined forces with the Trifecta’s troops, pushed the Federation all the way back to their longbow island, and orchestrated a peace agreement with the newly reformed Nikara Empire in Sinegard.
Then the Trifecta seized dictatorial control of the country and threw the foreigners out by the ship. Whatever Hesperians remained were smugglers and missionaries, hiding in international ports like Ankhiluun and Khurdalain, preaching their word to anyone who bothered to entertain them.
When the Third Poppy War began, those last Hesperians had sailed away on rescue ships so fast that by the time Rin’s contingent had reached Khurdalain they might never have been there. As the war progressed, the Hesperians had been willful bystanders, watching aloof from across the great sea while Nikara citizens burned in their homes.
“They might have come a little earlier,” Rin quipped.
“There’s been a war ravishing the entire western continent for the past two decades,” said Nezha. “They’ve been a bit distracted.”
This was news to her. Until now, news of the western continent had been so utterly irrelevant to her it might not have existed. “Did they win?”
“You could say that. Millions are dead. Millions more are without home or country. But the Consortium states came out in power, so they consider that a victory. Although I don’t—”
Rin grabbed his arm. “They’re coming out.”
Doors had opened at the sides of each basket. One by one the Hesperians filed out onto the dock.
Rin recoiled at the sight of them.
Their skin was terribly pale—not the flawless porcelain-white shade that Sinegardians prized, but more like the tint of a freshly gutted fish. And their hair looked all the wrong colors—garish shades of copper, gold, and bronze, nothing like the rich black of Nikara hair. Everything about them—their coloring, their features, their proportions—simply seemed off.
They didn’t look like people; they looked like things out of horror stories. They might have been demon-possessed monsters conjured up for Nikara folk heroes to fight. And though Rin was too old for folktales, everything about these light-eyed creatures made her want to run.
“How’s your Hesperian?” Nezha asked.
“Rusty,” she admitted. “I hate that language.”
They had all been forced to study several years of diplomatic Hesperian at Sinegard. Rules of pronunciation were haphazard at best and its grammar system was so riddled with exceptions it might not exist at all.
None of Rin’s classmates had paid much attention to their Hesperian grammar lessons. They had all assumed that as the Federation was the primary threat, Mugini was more important to learn.
Rin supposed things would be very different now.
A column of Hesperian sailors, identical in their close-cropped hair and dark gray uniforms, walked out of the baskets and formed two neat lines in front of the crowd. Rin counted twenty of them.
She examined their faces but couldn’t tell one apart from the next. They all seemed to have the same lightly colored eyes, broad noses, and strong jaws. They were all men, and each held a strange-looking weapon across his chest. Rin couldn’t determine the weapon’s purpose. It looked like a series of tubes of different lengths, joined together near the back with something like a handle.
A final soldier emerged from the basket door. Rin assumed he was their general by his uniform, which bore multicolored ribbons on the left chest where the others’ were bare. He struck Rin immediately as dangerous. He stood at least half a head taller than Vaisra, he sported a chest as wide as Baji’s, and his weathered face was lined and intelligent.
Behind the general walked a row of hooded Hesperians clothed in gray cassocks.
“Who are they?” Rin asked Nezha. They couldn’t be soldiers; they wore no armor and held no weapons.
“The Gray Company,” he said. “Representatives of the Church of the Divine Architect.”
“They’re missionaries?”
“Missionaries who can speak for the central church. They’re highly trained and educated. Think of them like graduates from the Sinegard Academy of religion.”
“What, they went to priest school?”
“Sort of. They’re scientists, too. In their religion, the scientists and priests are one and the same.”
Rin was about to ask what that meant when a last figure emerged from the center basket. She was a woman, slender and petite, wearing a buttoned black coat with a high collar that covered her neck. She looked severe, alien, and elegant all at once. Her attire was certainly not Nikara, but her face was not Hesperian. She seemed oddly familiar.
“Hello.” Baji whistled behind Rin. “Who is that?”
“It’s Lady Yin Saikhara,” said Nezha.
“Is she married?” Baji asked.
Nezha shot him a disgusted look. “That’s my mother.”
That was why Rin recognized the woman’s face. She had met the Lady of Dragon Province once, years ago, on her first day at Sinegard. Lady Saikhara had taken Rin’s guardian Tutor Feyrik for a porter, and she had dismissed Rin entirely as southerner trash.
Perhaps the past four years had done wonders for Lady Saikhara’s attitude, but Rin was strongly inclined to dislike her.
Lady Saikhara paused before the crowd, eyes roving the harbor as if surveying her kingdom. Her gaze landed on Rin. Her eyes narrowed—in recognition, Rin thought; perhaps Saikhara remembered Rin as well—but then she grasped the Hesperian general’s arm and pointed, her face contorted into what looked like fear.
The general nodded and spoke an order. At once, all twenty Hesperian soldiers pointed their barrel tube weapons at Rin.
A hush fell over the crowd as the civilians hastily backed away.
Several cracks split the air. Rin dove to the ground by instinct. Eight holes dotted the dirt in front of her. She looked up.
The air smelled like smoke. Gray flumes unfurled from the tips of the barrel tubes.
“Oh, fuck,” Nezha muttered under his breath.
The general shouted something that Rin couldn’t understand, but she didn’t have to translate what he’d said. There was no way to interpret this as anything but a threat.
She had two default responses to threats. And she couldn’t run away, not in this crowd, so her only choice was to fight.
Two of the Hesperian soldiers came running toward her. She slammed her trident against the closest one’s shins. He doubled over, just briefly. She jammed an elbow into the side of his head, grabbed him by the shoulders, and barreled forward, using him as a human shield to deter further fire.
It worked until something landed over Rin’s shoulders. A fishing net. She flailed, trying to wriggle out, but it only tightened around her arms. Whoever held it yanked hard, knocking her off balance.
The Hesperian general loomed above her, his weapon pointed straight down at her face. Rin looked up the barrel. The smell of fire powder was so thick she nearly choked on it.
“Vaisra!” she shouted. “Help—”
Soldiers swarmed around her. Strong arms pinned her arms over her head; others grabbed her ankles, rendering her immobile. She heard the clank of steel next to her head. She twisted around and saw a wooden tray on the ground beside her, upon which lay a vast assortment of thin devices that looked like torture instruments.
She’d seen devices like th
at before.
Someone pulled her head back and jerked her mouth open. One of the Gray Company, a woman with skin like alabaster, knelt over her. She pressed something hard and metallic against Rin’s tongue.
Rin bit at her fingers.
The woman snatched her hand away.
Rin struggled harder. Miraculously, the grips on her shoulders loosened. She flailed out and upturned the tray, scattering the instruments across the ground. For a single, desperate moment, she thought she might break free.
Then the general slammed the butt of his weapon into her head and Rin’s vision exploded into stars that winked out into nothing.
“Oh, good,” said Nezha. “You’re awake.”
Rin found herself lying on a stone floor. She scrambled to her feet. She was unbound. Good. Her hand jumped for a weapon that wasn’t there, and when she couldn’t find her trident she curled her hands into fists. “What—”
“That was a misunderstanding.” Nezha grabbed her by the shoulders. “You’re safe, we’re alone. What happened out there was a mistake.”
“A mistake?”
“They thought you were a threat. My mother told them to attack as soon as they reached land.”
Rin’s forehead throbbed. She touched her fingers to where she knew a massive bruise was forming. “Your mother is a real bitch, then.”
“She often is, yes. But you’re in no danger. Father is talking them down.”
“And if he can’t?”
“He will. They’re not idiots.” Nezha grabbed her hand. “Will you stop that?”
Rin had begun pacing back and forth in the small chamber like a caged animal, teeth chattering, rubbing her hands agitatedly up and down her arms. But she couldn’t stand still; her mind was racing in panic, if she stopped moving she would start to shake uncontrollably.
“Why would they think I was a threat?” she demanded.
“It’s, ah, a little complicated.” Nezha paused. “I guess the simplest way to put it is that they want to study you.”
“Study?”
“They know what you did to the longbow island. They know what you can do, and as the most powerful country on earth of course they’re going to investigate it. Their proposed treaty terms, I think, were that they’d get to examine you in exchange for military aid. Mother put it in their heads that you weren’t going to come quietly.”