The Dragon Republic

by R. F. Kuang

  “So what, Vaisra’s selling me for their aid?”

  “It’s not like that. My mother . . .” Nezha continued talking, but Rin wasn’t listening. She scrutinized him, considering.

  She had to get out of here. She had to rally the Cike and get them out of Arlong. Nezha was taller, heavier, and stronger than she was, but she could still take him—she’d go after his eyes and scars, gouge her fingernails into his skin and knee his balls repeatedly until he dropped his guard.

  But she might still be trapped. The doors could be locked from the outside. And if she broke the door down, there could be—no, there certainly were guards outside. What about the window? She could tell from a glance they were on the second, maybe third story, but maybe she could scale down somehow, if she could manage to knock Nezha unconscious. She just needed a weapon—the chair legs might do, or a shard of porcelain.

  She lunged for the flower vase.

  “Don’t.” Nezha’s hand shot out and gripped her wrist. She struggled to break free. He twisted her arm painfully behind her back, forced her to her knees, and pressed a knee against the small of her back. “Come on, Rin. Don’t be stupid.”

  “Don’t do this,” she gasped. “Nezha, please, I can’t stay here—”

  “You’re not allowed to leave the room.”

  “So now I’m a prisoner?”

  “Rin, please—”

  “Let me go!”

  She tried to break free. His grip tightened. “You’re not in any danger.”

  “So let me go!”

  “You’ll derail negotiations that have been years in the making—”

  “Negotiations?” she screeched. “You think I give a fuck about negotiations? They want to dissect me!”

  “And Father won’t let that happen! You think he’s about to give you up? You think I’d let that happen? I’d die before I let anyone hurt you, Rin, calm down—”

  That did nothing to calm her down. Every second she was still felt like a vise tightening around her neck.

  “My family has been planning this war for over a decade,” Nezha said. “My mother has been pursuing this diplomatic mission for years. She was educated in Hesperia; she has strong ties to the west. As soon as the third war was over, Father sent her overseas to solidify Hesperian military support.”

  Rin barked out a laugh. “Well, then she cut a shitty deal.”

  “We won’t take it. The Hesperians are greedy and malleable. They want resources only the Empire can offer. Father can talk them down. But we must not anger them. We need their weapons.” Nezha let go of her arms when it was clear she’d stopped struggling. “You’ve been in the councils. We won’t win this war without them.”

  Rin twisted around to face him. “You want whatever those barrel things are.”

  “They’re called arquebuses. They’re like hand cannons, except they’re lighter than crossbows, they can penetrate wooden panels, and they shoot for longer distance.”

  “Oh, I’m sure Vaisra just wants crates and crates of them.”

  He gave her a frank look. “We need anything we can get our hands on.”

  “But suppose you win this war, and the Hesperians don’t want to leave,” she said. “Suppose it’s the First Poppy War all over again.”

  “They have no interest in staying,” he said dismissively. “They’re done with that now. They’ve found their colonies too difficult to defend, and the war’s weakened them too much to commit the kind of ground resources they could before. All they want is trade rights and permission to dump missionaries wherever they want. At the end of this war we’ll make them leave our shores quickly enough.”

  “And if they don’t want to go?”

  “I expect we’ll find a way,” Nezha said. “Just as we have before. But at present, Father’s going to choose the lesser of two evils. And so should you.”

  The doors opened. Captain Eriden walked inside.

  “They’re ready for you,” he said.

  “‘They’?” Rin echoed.

  “The Dragon Warlord is entertaining the Hesperian delegates in the great hall. They’d like to speak to you.”

  “No,” Rin said.

  “You’ll be fine,” Nezha said. “Just don’t do anything stupid.”

  “We have very different ideas of what defines ‘stupid,’” she said.

  “The Dragon Warlord would prefer not to be kept waiting.” Eriden motioned with a hand. Two of his guards strode forward and seized Rin by the arms. She managed a last, panicked glance over her shoulder at Nezha before they escorted her out the door.

  The guards deposited Rin in the short walkway that led to the palace’s great hall and shut the doors behind her.

  She stepped hesitantly forward. She saw the Hesperians sitting in gilded chairs around the center table. Jinzha sat at his father’s right hand. The southern Warlords had been relegated to the far end of the table, looking flustered and uncomfortable.

  Rin could tell she’d walked into the middle of a heated argument. A thick tension crackled in the air, and all parties looked flustered, red-faced, and furious, as if they were about to come to blows.

  She hung back in the hallway for a moment, concealed by the corner wall, and listened.

  “The Consortium is still recovering from its own war,” the Hesperian general was saying. Rin struggled to make sense of his speech at first, but gradually the language returned to her. She felt like a student again, sitting in the back of Jima’s classroom, memorizing verb tenses. “We’re in no mood to speculate.”

  “This isn’t speculation,” Vaisra said urgently. He spoke Hesperian like it was his native tongue. “We could take back this country in days, if you just—”

  “Then do it yourselves,” the general said. “We’re here to do business, not alchemy. We are not interested in transforming frauds into kings.”

  Vaisra sat back. “So you’re going to run my country like an experiment before you choose to intervene.”

  “A necessary experiment. We didn’t come here to lend ships at your will, Vaisra. This is an investigation.”

  “Into what?”

  “Whether the Nikara are ready for civilization. We do not distribute Hesperian aid lightly. We made that mistake before. The Mugenese seemed even more ready for advancement than you are. They had no factional infighting, and their governance was more sophisticated by far. Look how that turned out.”

  “If we’re underdeveloped, it’s because of years of foreign occupation,” Vaisra said. “That’s your fault, not ours.”

  The general shrugged, indifferent. “Even so.”

  Vaisra sounded exasperated. “Then what are you looking for?”

  “Well, it would be cheating if we told you, wouldn’t it?” The Hesperian general gave a thin smile. “But all of this is a moot point. Our primary objective here is the Speerly. She has purportedly leveled an entire country. We’d like to know how she did it.”

  “You can’t have the Speerly,” Vaisra said.

  “Oh, I don’t think you get to decide.”

  Rin strode into the room. “I’m right here.”

  “Runin.” If Vaisra looked surprised, he quickly recovered. He stood up and gestured to the Hesperian general. “Please meet General Josephus Tarcquet.”

  Stupid name, Rin thought. A garbled collection of syllables that she could hardly pronounce.

  Tarcquet rose to his feet. “I believe we owe you an apology. Lady Saikhara had us rather convinced that we were dealing with something like a wild animal. We didn’t realize that you would be so . . . human.”

  Rin blinked at him. Was that really supposed to be an apology?

  “Does she understand what I’m saying?” Tarcquet asked Vaisra in choppy, ugly Nikara.

  “I understand Hesperian,” Rin snapped. She deeply wished that she’d learned Hesperian curse words at Sinegard. She didn’t have the full vocabulary range to express what she wanted to say, but she had enough. “I’m just not keen on dialoguing with fools who
want me dead.”

  “Why are we even speaking to her?” Lady Saikhara burst out.

  Her voice was high and brittle, as if she had just been crying. The pure venom in her glare startled Rin. This was more than contempt. This was a vicious, murderous hatred.

  “She is an unholy abomination,” Saikhara snarled. “She is a mark against the Maker, and she ought to be dragged off to the Gray Towers as soon as possible.”

  “We’re not dragging anyone off.” Vaisra sounded exasperated. “Runin, please, sit—”

  “But you promised,” Saikhara hissed at him. “You said they’d find a way to fix him—”

  Vaisra grabbed at his wife’s wrist. “Now is not the time.”

  Saikhara jerked her hand free and slammed a fist down on the table. Her cup toppled over, spilling hot tea across the embroidered cloth. “You swore to me. You said you’d make this right, that if I brought them back they’d find a way to fix him, you promised—”

  “Silence, woman.” Vaisra pointed to the door. “If you cannot calm yourself, then you will leave.”

  Saikhara shot Rin a tight-lipped look of fury, muttered something under her breath, and stormed out of the room.

  A long silence hung over her absence. Tarcquet looked somewhat amused. Vaisra leaned back in his chair, took a draught of tea, then sighed. “You’ll have to excuse my wife. She tends to be ill-tempered after travel.”

  “She’s desperate for answers.” A woman in a gray cassock, the one who had stood over Rin at the dock, laid her hand on Vaisra’s. “We understand. We’d like to find a cure, too.”

  Rin shot her a curious look. The woman’s Nikara sounded remarkably good—she could have been a native speaker if her tones weren’t so oddly flat. Her hair was the color of wheat, straight and slick, braided into a serpent-like coil that rested just over her shoulder. Gray eyes like castle walls. Pale skin like paper, so thin that blue veins were visible beneath. Rin had the oddest urge to touch it, just to see if it felt human.

  “She’s a fascinating creature,” said the woman. “It is rare you meet someone possessed by Chaos who yet remains so lucid. None of our Hesperian madmen have been so good at fooling their observers.”

  “I’m standing right in front of you,” Rin said.

  “I’d like to get her in an isolation chamber,” the woman continued, as if Rin hadn’t spoken. “We’re close to developing instruments that can detect raw Chaos in sterile environments. If we could bring her back to the Gray Towers—”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you,” Rin said.

  General Tarcquet stroked the arquebus that lay in front of him. “You wouldn’t really have a choice, dear.”

  The woman lifted a hand. “Wait, Josephus. The Divine Architect values free thought. Voluntary cooperation is a sign that reason and order yet prevail in the mind. Will the girl come willingly?”

  Rin stared at the two of them in disbelief. Did Vaisra possibly believe that she would say yes?

  “You could even keep her on campaign for the time being,” the woman said to Vaisra, as if they were discussing something no more pressing than dinner arrangements. “I would only require regular meetings, perhaps once a week. They would be minimally invasive.”

  “Define ‘minimally,’” Vaisra said.

  “I would only observe her, for the most part. I’d perhaps conduct a few experiments. Nothing that will affect her permanently, and certainly nothing that would affect her fighting ability. I’d just like to see how she reacts to various stimuli—”

  A ringing noise grew louder and louder in Rin’s ears. Everyone’s voices became both slurred and magnified. The conversation proceeded, but she could decipher only fragments.

  “—fascinating creature—”

  “—prized soldier—”

  “—tip the balance—”

  She found herself swaying on her feet.

  She saw in her mind’s eye a face she hadn’t let herself imagine for a long time. Dark, clever eyes. Narrow nose. Thin lips and a cruel, excited smile.

  She saw Dr. Shiro.

  She felt his hands moving over her, checking her restraints, making sure she couldn’t move an inch from the bed he’d strapped her down on. She felt his fingers feeling around in her mouth, counting her teeth, moving down past her jaw to her neck to locate her artery.

  She felt his hands holding her down as he pushed a needle into her vein.

  She felt panic, fear, and rage all at once and she wanted to burn but she couldn’t, and the heat and fire just bubbled up in her chest and built up inside her because the fucking Seal had gotten in the way, but the heat just kept building and Rin thought she might implode—

  “Runin.” Vaisra’s voice cut through the fog.

  She focused with difficulty on his face. “No,” she whispered. “No, I can’t—”

  He got up from his seat. “This isn’t the same as the Mugenese lab.”

  She backed away from him. “I don’t care, I can’t do this—”

  “What are you debating?” demanded the Boar Warlord. “Hand her to them and be done with it.”

  “Quiet, Charouk.” Vaisra drew Rin hastily into the corner of the room, far from where the Hesperians could hear. He lowered his voice. “They will force you either way. If you cooperate you will garner us sympathy.”

  “You’re trading me for ships,” she said.

  “No one is trading you,” he said. “I am asking you for a favor. Please, will you do this for me? You’re in no danger. You’re no monster, and they’ll discover that soon enough.”

  And then she understood. The Hesperians wouldn’t find anything. They couldn’t, because Rin couldn’t call the fire anymore. They could run all the experiments they liked, but they wouldn’t find anything. Daji had ensured that there was nothing left to find.

  “Runin, please,” Vaisra murmured. “We don’t have a choice.”

  He was right about that. The Hesperians had made it clear that they would study her by force if necessary. She could try to fight, but she wouldn’t get very far.

  Part of her wanted desperately to say no. To say fuck it, to take her chances and try her best to escape and run. Of course, they’d hunt her down, but she had the smallest chance of making it out alive.

  But hers wasn’t the only life at stake.

  The fate of the Empire hung in the balance. If she truly wanted the Empress dead, then Hesperian airships and arquebuses were the best way to get it done. The only way she could generate their goodwill was if she went willingly into their arms.

  When you hear screaming, Vaisra had told her, run toward it.

  She’d failed at Lusan. She couldn’t call the fire anymore. This might be the only way to atone for the colossal wrongs she’d committed. Her only chance to put things right.

  Altan had died for liberation. She knew what he would say to her now.

  Stop being so fucking selfish.

  Rin steeled herself, took a breath, and nodded. “I’ll do it.”

  “Thank you.” Relief washed over Vaisra’s face. He turned to the table. “She agrees.”

  “One hour,” Rin said in her best Hesperian. “Once a week. No more. I’m free to go if I feel uncomfortable, and you don’t touch me without my express permission.”

  General Tarcquet removed his hand from his arquebus. “Fair enough.”

  The Hesperians looked far too pleased. Rin’s stomach twisted.

  Oh, gods. What had she agreed to?

  “Excellent.” The gray-eyed woman rose from her chair. “Come with me. We’ll begin now.”

  The Hesperians had already occupied the entire block of buildings just west of the palace, furnished residences that Rin suspected Vaisra must have prepared long ago. Blue flags bearing an insignia that looked like the gears of a clock hung from the windows. The gray-eyed woman motioned for Rin to follow her into a small, windowless square room on the first floor of the center building.

  “What do you call yourself?” asked the woman. “Fang
Runin, they said?”

  “Just Rin,” Rin muttered, glancing around the room. It was bare except for two long, narrow stone tables that had recently been dragged there, judging from the skid marks on the stone floor. One table was empty. The other was covered with an array of instruments, some made of steel and some of wood, few of which Rin recognized or could guess the function of.

  The Hesperians had been preparing this room since they got here.

  A Hesperian soldier stood in the corner, arquebus slung over his shoulder. His eyes tracked Rin every time she moved. She made a face at him. He didn’t react.

  “You may call me Sister Petra,” said the woman. “Why don’t you come over here?”

  She spoke truly excellent Nikara. Rin would have been impressed, but something felt off. Petra’s sentences were perfectly smooth and fluent, perhaps more grammatically perfect than those of most native speakers, but her words came out sounding all wrong. The tones were just the slightest bit off, and she inflected everything with the same flat clip that made her sound utterly inhuman.

  Petra picked a cup off the edge of the table and offered it to her. “Laudanum?”

  Rin recoiled, surprised. “For what?”

  “It might calm you down. I’ve been told you react badly to lab environments.” Petra pursed her lips. “I know opiates dampen the phenomena you manifest, but for a first observation that won’t matter. Today I’m interested only in baseline measurements.”

  Rin eyed the cup, considering. The last thing she wanted was to be off her guard for a full hour with the Hesperians. But she knew she had no choice but to comply with whatever Petra asked of her. She could reasonably expect that they wouldn’t kill her. She had no control over the rest. The only thing she could control was her own discomfort.

  She took the cup and emptied it.

  “Excellent.” Petra gestured to the bed. “Up there, please.

  Rin took a deep breath and sat down at the edge.