The Dragon Republic

by R. F. Kuang

  One hour. That was it. All she had to do was survive the next sixty minutes.

  Petra began by taking an endless series of measurements. With a notched string she recorded Rin’s height, wingspan, and the length of her feet. She measured the circumference around Rin’s waist, wrists, ankles, and thighs. Then with a smaller string she took a series of smaller measurements that seemed utterly pointless. The width of Rin’s eyes. Their distance from her nose. The length of each one of her fingernails.

  This went on forever. Rin managed not to flinch too hard from Petra’s touch. The laudanum was working well; a lead weight had settled comfortably in her bloodstream and kept her numb, torpid, and docile.

  Petra wrapped the string around the base of Rin’s thumb. “Tell me about the first time you communed with, ah, this entity you claim to be your god. How would you describe the experience?”

  Rin said nothing. She had to present her body for examination. That didn’t mean she had to entertain small talk.

  Petra repeated her question. Again Rin kept silent.

  “You should know,” Petra said as she put the tape measure away, “that verbal cooperation is a condition of our agreement.”

  Rin gave her a wary look. “What do you want from me?”

  “Only your honest responses. I am not solely interested in the stock of your body. I’m curious about the possibilities for the redemption of your soul.”

  If Rin’s mind had been working any faster she would have managed some clever retort. Instead she rolled her eyes.

  “You seem confident our religion is false,” Petra said.

  “I know it’s false.” The laudanum had loosened Rin’s tongue, and she found herself spilling the first thoughts that came to her mind. “I’ve seen evidence of my gods.”

  “Have you?”

  “Yes, and I know that the universe is not the doing of a single man.”

  “A single man? Is that what you think we believe?” Petra tilted her head. “What do you know about our theology?”

  “That it’s stupid,” Rin said, which was the extent of what she’d ever been taught.

  They’d studied Hesperian religion—Makerism, they called it—briefly at Sinegard, back when none of them thought the Hesperians would return to the Empire’s shores during their lifetime. None of them had taken their studies of Hesperian culture seriously, not even the instructors. Makerism was only ever a footnote. A joke. Those foolish westerners.

  Rin remembered idyllic walks down the mountainside with Jiang during the first year of her apprenticeship, when he’d made her research differences between eastern and western religions and hypothesize the reasons they existed. She remembered sinking hours into this question at the library. She’d discovered that the vast and varied religions of the Empire tended to be polytheistic, disordered, and irregular, lacking consistency even across villages. But the Hesperians liked to invest their worship in a single entity, typically represented as a man.

  “Why do you think that is?” Rin had asked Jiang.

  “Hubris,” he’d said. “They already like to think they are lords of the world. They’d like to think something in their own image created the universe.”

  The question that Rin had never entertained, of course, was how the Hesperians had become so vastly technologically advanced if their approach to religion was so laughably wrong. Until now, it had never been relevant.

  Petra plucked a round metal device about the size of her palm off the table and held it in front of Rin. She clicked a button at the side, and its lid popped off. “Do you know what this is?”

  It was a clock of some sort. She recognized Hesperian numbers, twelve in a circle, with two needles moving slowly in rotation. But Nikara clocks, powered by dripping water, were installations that took up entire corners of rooms. This thing was so small it could have fit in her pocket.

  “Is it a timepiece?”

  “Very good,” Petra said. “Appreciate this design. See the intricate gears, perfectly shaped to form, that keep it ticking on its own. Now imagine that you found this on the ground. You don’t know what it is. You don’t know who put it there. What is your conclusion? Does it have a designer, or is it an accident of nature, like a rock?”

  Rin’s mind moved sluggishly around Petra’s questions, but she knew the conclusion Petra wanted her to reach.

  “There exists a creator,” she said after a pause.

  “Very good,” Petra said again. “Now imagine the world as a clock. Consider the sea, the clouds, the skies, the stars, all working in perfect harmony to keep our world turning and breathing as it does. Think of the life cycles of forests and the animals that live in them. This is no accident. This could not have been forged through primordial chaos, as your theology tends to argue. This was deliberate creation by a greater entity, perfectly benevolent and rational.

  “We call him our Divine Architect, or the Maker, as you know him. He seeks to create order and beauty. This isn’t mad reasoning. It is the simplest possible explanation for the beauty and intricacy of the natural world.”

  Rin sat quietly, running those thoughts through her tired mind.

  It did sound terribly attractive. She liked the thought that the natural world was fundamentally knowable and reducible to a set of objective principles imposed by a benevolent and rational deity. That was much neater and cleaner than what she knew of the sixty-four gods—chaotic creatures dreaming up an endless whirlpool of forces that created the subjective universe, where everything was constantly in flux and nothing was ever written. Easier to think that the natural world was a neat, objective, and static gift wrapped and delivered by an all-powerful architect.

  There was only one gaping oversight.

  “So why do things go badly?” Rin asked. “If this Maker set everything in motion, then—”

  “Then why couldn’t the Maker prevent death?” Petra supplied. “Why do things go wrong if they were designed according to plan?”

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  Petra gave her a small smile. “Don’t look so surprised. That is the most common question of every new convert. Your answer is Chaos.”

  “Chaos,” Rin repeated slowly. She’d heard Petra use this word at the council earlier. It was a Hesperian term; it had no Nikara equivalent. Despite herself, she asked, “What is Chaos?”

  “It is the root of evil,” Petra said. “Our Divine Architect is not omnipotent. He is powerful, yes, but he leads a constant struggle to fashion order out of a universe tending inevitably toward a state of dissolution and disorder. We call that force Chaos. Chaos is the antithesis of order, the cruel force trying constantly to undo the Architect’s creations. Chaos is old age, disease, death, and war. Chaos manifests in the worst of mankind—evil, jealousy, greed, and treachery. It is our task to keep it at bay.”

  Petra closed the timepiece and placed it back on the table. Her fingers hovered over the instruments, deliberating, and then selected a device with what looked like two earpieces and a flat circle attached to a metal cord.

  “We don’t know how or when Chaos manifests,” she said. “But it tends to pop up more often in places like yours—undeveloped, uncivilized, and barbaric. And cases like yours are the worst outbreaks of individual Chaos that the Company has ever seen.”

  “You mean shamanism,” Rin said.

  Petra turned back to face her. “You understand why the Gray Company must investigate. Creatures like you pose a terrible threat to earthly order.”

  She raised the flat circle up under Rin’s shirt to her chest. It was icy cold. Rin couldn’t help but flinch.

  “Don’t be scared,” Petra said. “Don’t you realize I’m trying to help you?”

  “I don’t understand,” Rin murmured, “why you would even keep me alive.”

  “Fair question. Some think it would be easier simply to kill you. But then we would come no closer to understanding Chaos’s evil. And it would only find another avatar to wreak its destruction. So against the Gray
Company’s better judgment, I am keeping you alive so that at last we may learn to fix it.”

  “Fix it,” Rin repeated. “You think you can fix me.”

  “I know I can fix you.”

  There was a fanatic intensity to Petra’s expression that made Rin deeply uncomfortable. Her gray eyes gleamed a metallic silver when she spoke. “I’m the smartest scholar of the Gray Company in generations. I’ve been lobbying to come study the Nikara for decades. I’m going to figure out what is plaguing your country.”

  She pressed the metal disc hard between Rin’s breasts. “And then I’m going to drive it out of you.”

  At last the hour was over. Petra put her instruments back on the table and dismissed Rin from the examination room.

  The last of the laudanum wore off just as Rin returned to the barracks. Every feeling that the drug had kept at bay—discomfort, anxiety, disgust, and utter terror—came flooding back to her all at once, a sickening rush so abrupt that it wrenched her to her knees.

  She tried to get to the lavatory. She didn’t make it two steps before she lurched over and vomited.

  She couldn’t help it. She hunched over the puddle of her sick and sobbed.

  Petra’s touch, which had seemed so light, so noninvasive under the effect of laudanum, now felt like a dark stain, like insects burrowing their way under Rin’s skin no matter how hard she tried to claw them out. Her memories mixed together; confusing, indistinguishable. Petra’s hands became Shiro’s hands. Petra’s room became Shiro’s laboratory.

  Worst of all was the violation, the fucking violation, and the sheer helplessness of knowing that her body was not hers and she had to sit still and take it, this time not because of any restraints, but due to the simple fact that she’d chosen to be there.

  That was the only thing that kept her from packing her belongings and immediately leaving Arlong.

  She needed to do this because she deserved this. This was, in some horrible way that made complete sense, atonement. She knew she was monstrous. She couldn’t keep denying that. This was self-flagellation for what she’d become.

  It should have been you, Altan had said.

  She should have been the one who died.

  This came close.

  After she had cried so hard that the pain in her chest had faded to a dull ebb, she pulled herself to her feet and wiped the tears and mucus off her face. She stood in front of a mirror in the lavatory and waited to come out until the redness had faded from her eyes.

  When the others asked her what had happened, she said nothing at all.

  Chapter 14

  War came in the water.

  Rin awoke to shouting outside the barracks. She threw her uniform on in a panicked frenzy; blindly attempted to force her right foot into her left shoe before she gave up and ran out the door barefoot, trident in hand.

  Outside, half-dressed soldiers ran around and into one another in a confused swarm of activity while commanders shouted contradicting orders. But nobody had weapons drawn, projectiles weren’t flying through the air, and Rin couldn’t hear the sound of cannon fire.

  Finally she noticed that most of the troops were running toward the beachfront. She followed them.

  At first she didn’t understand what she was looking at. The water was dusted over with spots of white, as if a giant had blown dandelion puffs over the surface. Then she reached the edge of the pier and saw in closer detail the silver crescents hanging just beneath the surface. Those spots of white were the bloated underbellies of fish.

  Not just fish. When she knelt by the water she saw puffy, discolored corpses of frogs, salamanders, and turtles. Something had killed every living thing in the water.

  It had to be poison. Nothing else could kill so many animals so quickly. And that meant the poison had to be in the water—and all the canals in Arlong were interconnected—which meant that perhaps every drinking source in Arlong was now tainted . . .

  But why would anyone from Dragon Province poison the water? For a minute Rin stood there stupidly, thinking, assuming that it must have been someone from within the province itself. She didn’t want to consider the alternative, which was that the poison came from upriver, because that would mean . . .

  “Rin! Fuck—Rin!”

  Ramsa tugged at her arm. “You need to see this.”

  She ran with him to the end of the pier, where the Cike were huddled around a dark mass on the planks. A massive fish? A bundle of clothes? No—a man, she saw that now, but the figure was hardly human.

  It stretched a pale, skeletal hand toward her. “Altan . . .”

  Her breath caught in her throat. “Aratsha?”

  She had never before seen him in his human form. He was an emaciated man, covered from head to toe in barnacles embedded in blue-white skin. The lower half of his face was concealed by a scraggly beard so littered with sea worms and small fish that it was difficult to parse out the human bits of him.

  She tried to slide her arms beneath him to help him up, but pieces of him kept coming away in her hands. A clump of shells, a stick of bone, and then something crackly and powdery that crumbled to nothing in her fingers. She tried not to push him away in disgust. “Can you speak?”

  Aratsha made a strangled noise. At first she thought he was choking on his own spit, but then frothy liquid the color of curdled milk bubbled out the sides of his mouth.

  “Altan,” he repeated.

  “I’m not Altan.” She reached for Aratsha’s hand. Was that something she should do? It felt like something she should do. Something comforting and kind. Something a commander would do.

  But Aratsha didn’t seem to even notice. His skin had gone from bluish white to a horrible violet color in seconds. She could see his veins pulsing beneath, a sludgy, inky black.

  “Ahh, Altan,” said Aratsha. “I should have told you.”

  He smelled of seawater and rot. Rin wanted to vomit.

  “What?” she whispered.

  He peered up at her through milky eyes. They were filmy like the eyes of a fish at market, oddly unfocused, staring out at two sides like he’d spent so long in the water that he didn’t know what to make of the things on land.

  He murmured something under his breath, something too quiet and garbled for her to decipher. She thought she heard a whisper that sounded like “misery.” Then Aratsha disintegrated in her hands, flesh bubbling into water, until all that was left was sand, shells, and a pearl necklace.

  “Fuck,” Ramsa said. “That’s gross.”

  “Shut up,” Baji said.

  Suni wailed loudly and buried his head in his hands. No one comforted him.

  Rin stared numbly at the necklace.

  We should bury him, she thought. That was proper, wasn’t it?

  Should she be grieving? She couldn’t feel grief. She kept waiting to feel something, but it never hit, and it never would. This was not an acute loss, not the kind that had left her catatonic after Altan’s death. She had barely known Aratsha; she’d just given him orders and he had obeyed, without question, loyal to the Cike until the day he died.

  No, what sickened her was that she felt disappointed, irritated that now that Aratsha was gone they didn’t have a shaman who could control the river. All he’d ever been to her was an immensely useful chess piece, and now she couldn’t use him anymore.

  “What’s going on?” Nezha asked, panting. He’d just arrived.

  Rin stood up and brushed the sand off her hands. “We lost a man.”

  He looked down at the mess on the pier, visibly confused. “Who?”

  “One of the Cike. Aratsha. He’s always in the water. Whatever hit the fish must have hit him, too.”

  “Fuck,” Nezha said. “Were they targeting him?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said slowly. “That’s a lot of trouble for one shaman.”

  This couldn’t be about just one man. Fish were floating dead across the entire harbor. Whoever had poisoned Aratsha had meant to poison the entire river.
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  The Cike were not the target. The Dragon Province was.

  Because yes, Su Daji was that crazy. Daji was a woman who had welcomed the Federation into her territory to keep her throne. She would easily poison the southern provinces, would readily sentence millions to starvation, to keep the rest of her empire intact.

  “How many troops?” Vaisra demanded.

  All of them were crammed into the office—Captain Eriden, the Warlords, the Hesperians, and a smattering of whatever ranked officers were available. Decorum did not matter. The room had turned into a din of frantic shouting. Everyone spoke at once.

  “We haven’t counted the men who haven’t made it to the infirmary—”

  “Is it in the aquifers?”

  “We have to shut down the fish markets—”

  Vaisra shouted over the noise. “How many?”

  “Almost the entire First Brigade has been hospitalized,” said one of the physicians. “The poison was meant to affect the wildlife. It’s weaker on men.”

  “It’s not fatal?”

  “We don’t think so. We’re hoping to see full recovery in a few days.”

  “Is Daji insane?” General Hu asked. “This is suicide. This doesn’t just affect us, it kills everything that the Murui touches.”

  “The north doesn’t care,” Vaisra said. “They’re upstream.”

  “But that means they’d need a constant source of poison,” said Eriden. “They’d have to introduce the agent to the stream daily. And it can’t be as far as the Autumn Palace, or they screw over their own allies.”

  “Hare Province?” Nezha suggested.

  “That’s impossible,” Jinzha said. “Their army is pathetic; they barely have defense capabilities. They’d never strike first.”

  “If they’re pathetic, then they’d do whatever Daji told them.”

  “Are we sure it’s Daji?” Takha asked.

  “Who else would it be?” Tsolin demanded. He turned to Vaisra. “This is the answer to your blockade. Daji’s weakening you before she strikes. I wouldn’t wait around to see what she does next.”