The Dragon Republic

by R. F. Kuang

Rin didn’t have the chance to look behind her to see what was happening. The wave of steel was too blinding. Something sliced open her left cheek. Blood splattered across her face. It was in her eyes—she wiped at them with her sleeve, but that only made them sting worse.

  She lashed blindly out with her trident. Steel crunched into bone, and her attacker dropped to the ground. Lucky blow. Rin fell back behind the Republican line and blinked furiously until her vision cleared.

  She heard a screeching grind from the suspension wheels. She hazarded a glance over her shoulder. With a massive groan, the gates of Xiashang swung open.

  Behind them was the fleet.

  The tide had turned. Republican soldiers flooded the square, a deluge of so many blue uniforms that for a moment Rin lost sight of the Ram defenders entirely. Somewhere a horn blew, followed by a series of gong strikes that rang so loudly they drowned out any other sound.

  Distress signals. But signals to whom? Rin clambered up onto a crate, trying to see above the melee.

  She spotted movement in the southwest corridor. She squinted. A new platoon of soldiers, armed and battle-fresh, ran toward the square. The local backup militia? No—they were wearing blue uniforms, not green.

  But that wasn’t the ocean blue of the Republican uniforms.

  Rin almost dropped her trident. Those weren’t Nikara soldiers.

  Those were Federation troops.

  For a moment she thought, panicking, that the Federation was still at large, that they had taken this chance to launch a simultaneous invasion on Xiashang. But that made no sense. The Federation had already been behind the city gates. And they weren’t attacking the Xiashang city guard, they were only attacking troops clearly marked in Republican uniforms.

  Realization hit like a punch to the gut.

  The Ram Warlord had allied with the Federation.

  The ground tilted beneath her feet. She saw smoke and fire. She saw bodies eaten by gas. She saw Altan, walking backward away from her on a pier—

  “Get down!” Baji shouted.

  Rin flung herself to the ground just as a spear hit the wall where her head had been.

  She struggled to her feet. She couldn’t see an end to the column of Federation soldiers. How many were there? Did they equal Republican numbers?

  What had seemed like an easy victory was about to turn into a bloodbath.

  She raced up the stairway to get a better look at the city’s layout. Just past the town square she saw a three-story residence embedded in a massive, sculpture-dotted garden. That had to be the Ram Warlord’s private quarters. It was the largest building in Xiashang.

  She knew the best way to end this.

  “Baji!” She waved her trident to get his attention. When he looked up, she pointed toward the Ram Warlord’s mansion. “Cover me.”

  He understood immediately. Together they forced their bloody way through the throng until they broke out on the other side of the square. Then they ran for the gardens.

  The mansion was guarded by two stone lions, mouths open in wide, greedy caverns. The doors were bolted shut.

  Good. That meant someone was hiding inside.

  Rin aimed a savage kick at the handle, but the doors didn’t budge.

  “Please,” said Baji. She got out of his way. He took three steps back and slammed his shoulder into the doors. Wood splintered. The doors crashed open.

  Baji picked himself up off the ground and pointed behind her. “We’ve got trouble.”

  Rin turned around to see a fresh wave of Federation soldiers running toward the mansion. Baji planted himself in the doorway, rake raised.

  “You good?” Rin asked.

  “You go. I’ve got this.”

  She ran indoors. The halls were brightly lit but appeared entirely empty—which would have been the worst of outcomes, because that would mean the Ram Warlord’s family had already evacuated to somewhere safe. Rin stood still in the center of the hall, heart pounding, straining to listen for any sound of inhabitants.

  Seconds later she heard a baby’s shrill wail.

  Yes. She concentrated, trying to track the noise. She heard it again. This time the baby’s cry was stifled, like someone had clamped a sleeve over its mouth, but in the empty house it rang clear as a bell.

  The sound came from the chambers to her left. Rin crept forward, shoes moving silently across the marble floor. At the end of the hall she saw a single silkscreen door. The baby’s cries were getting louder. She placed a hand on the door and pulled. Locked. She took a step back and kicked it down. The flimsy bamboo frame gave way with no trouble.

  A crowd of at least fifteen women stared up at her, tears of terror streaming down their fat and puffy cheeks, clumped together like flightless birds fattened for the slaughter.

  They were the Warlord’s wives, Rin guessed. His daughters. Their servant girls and nursemaids.

  “Where is Tsung Ho?” she demanded.

  They huddled closer together, mute and trembling.

  Rin’s eyes fell on the baby. An old woman at the back of the room had it clutched in her hands. It was swaddled in red cloth. That meant it was a baby boy. A potential heir.

  The Ram Warlord would not let that child die.

  “Give him to me,” Rin said.

  The woman frantically shook her head and pressed the child closer to her chest.

  Rin leveled her trident at her. “This is not worth dying for.”

  One of the girls dashed forward, flailing at her with a curtain pole. Rin ducked down and kicked out. Her foot connected with the girl’s midriff with a satisfying whumph. The girl collapsed on the ground, wailing in pain.

  Rin put a foot on the girl’s sternum and pressed down, hard. The girl’s agonized whimpers gave her a savage, amused satisfaction. She felt a distinct lack of sympathy toward the women. They chose to be here. They were Federation allies, they knew what was happening, this was their fault, they should all be dead . . .

  No. Stop. She took a deep breath. The red cleared from her eyes.

  “Any of you try that again and I’ll gut you,” she said. “The baby. Now.”

  Whimpering, the old woman relinquished the baby into her hands.

  He immediately started to scream. Rin’s hands moved automatically to cup around his rear and the back of his head. Leftover instincts from days she’d spent carrying around her infant foster brother.

  She had a sudden urge to coo to the baby and rock him until his sobbing ceased. She shut it down. She needed the baby to scream, and to scream loudly.

  She backed out of the women’s quarters, waving her trident in front of her.

  “You lot stay here,” she warned the women. “If any of you move, I will kill this child.”

  The women nodded silently, tears streaking their powdered faces.

  Rin backed out of the chamber and returned to the center of the main hall.

  “Tsung Ho!” she shouted. “Where are you?”

  Silence.

  The baby quivered in her arms. His cries had diminished to distressed whimpers. Rin briefly considered pinching his arms to make him scream.

  There was no need. The sight of her bloody trident was enough. He caught one glimpse of it, opened his mouth, and shrieked.

  Rin shouted over the baby, “Tsung Ho! I’ll murder your son if you don’t come out.”

  She heard him approaching long before he attacked.

  Too slow. Too fucking slow. She spun around, dodged his blade, and slammed the butt of her trident into his stomach. He doubled over. She caught his blade inside the trident’s prongs and twisted it out of his hand. He dropped to all fours, scrambling for his weapon. She kicked it out of the way and jammed the hilt of her trident into the back of his head. He dropped to the floor.

  “You traitor.” She aimed a savage strike at his kneecaps. He howled in pain. She hit them again. Then again.

  The baby wailed louder. She walked to a corner, placed him delicately on the floor, then resumed her assault on his fathe
r. The Ram Warlord’s kneecaps were visibly broken. She moved on to his ribs.

  “Please, mercy, please . . .” He curled into a pathetic bundle, arms wrapped over his head.

  “When did you let the Mugenese into your gates?” she asked. “Before they burned Golyn Niis, or after?”

  “We didn’t have a choice,” he whispered. He made a high keening noise as he drew his shattered knees to his chest. “They were lined up at our gates, we didn’t have any options—”

  “You could have fought.”

  “We would have died,” he gasped.

  “Then you should have died.”

  Rin slammed her trident butt against his head. He fell silent.

  The baby continued to scream.

  Jinzha was so pleased by their victory that he temporarily relaxed the army prohibition on alcohol. Jugs of fine sorghum wine, all plundered from the Ram Warlord’s mansion, were passed through the ranks. The soldiers camped out on the beach that night in an unusually good mood.

  Jinzha and his council met by the shore to decide what to do with their prisoners. In addition to the captured Federation soldiers there were also the men of the Eighth Division—a larger Militia force than any conquered town they had dealt with so far. They were too big of a threat to let loose. Short of a mass execution, their options were to take an unwieldy number of prisoners—far too many to feed—or to let them go.

  “Execute them,” Rin said immediately.

  “More than a thousand men?” Jinzha shook his head. “We’re not monsters.”

  “But they deserve it,” she said. “The Mugenese, at least. You know if the tables were turned, if the Federation had taken our men prisoners, they’d be dead already.”

  She was so sure that it was a moot debate. But nobody nodded in agreement. She glanced around the circle, confused. Was the conclusion not clear? Why did they all look so uncomfortable?

  “They’d be good at the wheels,” Admiral Molkoi said. “It’d give our men a break.”

  “You’re joking,” Rin said. “You’d have to feed them, for starters—”

  “So we’ll give them a subsistence diet,” said Molkoi.

  “Our troops need that food!”

  “Our troops have survived on less,” Molkoi said. “And it is best they don’t get used to the excess.”

  Rin gawked at him. “You’ll put our troops on stricter rations so men who have committed treason can live?”

  He shrugged. “They’re Nikara men. We won’t execute our own kind.”

  “They stopped being Nikara the moment they let the Federation stroll into their homes,” she snapped. “They should be rounded up. And beheaded.”

  None of the others would meet her eye.

  “Nezha?” she asked.

  He wouldn’t look at her. All he did was shake his head.

  She flushed with anger. “These soldiers were collaborating with the Federation. Feeding them. Housing them. That’s treason. That should be punishable by death. Forget the soldiers—you should have the whole city punished!”

  “Perhaps under Daji’s reign,” said Jinzha. “Not under the Republic. We can’t garner a reputation for brutality—”

  “Because they helped them!” She was shouting now, and they were all staring at her, but she didn’t care. “The Federation! You don’t know what they did—just because you spent the war hiding in Arlong, you didn’t see what—”

  Jinzha turned to Nezha. “Brother, put a muzzle on your Speerly, or—”

  “I am not a dog!” Rin shrieked.

  Sheer rage took over. She launched herself at Jinzha—and didn’t manage two steps before Admiral Molkoi tackled her to the ground so hard that for a moment the night stars blinked out of the sky, and it was all she could do to simply breathe.

  “That’s enough,” Nezha said quietly. “She’s calmed down. Let her go.”

  The pressure on her chest disappeared. Rin curled into a ball, choking miserably.

  “Someone take her outside of camp,” Jinzha said. “Bind her, gag her, I don’t care. We’ll deal with this in the morning.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Molkoi.

  “She hasn’t eaten,” Nezha said.

  “Then have someone bring her food or water if she asks,” Jinzha said. “Just get her out of my sight.”

  Rin screamed.

  No one could hear her—they’d banished her to a stretch of forest outside the camp perimeter—so she screamed louder, again and again, bashing her fists against a tree until blood ran down her knuckles while rage built up hotter and hotter in her chest. And for a moment she thought—hoped—that the crimson fury sparking in her vision might explode into flames, real flames, finally—

  But nothing. No sparks lit her fingers; no divine laughter rippled through her thoughts. She could feel the Seal at the back of her mind, a pulsing, sickly thing, blurring and softening her anger every time it reached a peak. And that only doubled her rage, made her shriek louder in frustration, but it was a pointless tantrum because the fire remained out of her grasp; dancing, taunting her behind the barrier in her head.

  Please, she thought. I need you, I need the fire, I need to burn . . .

  The Phoenix remained silent.

  She sank to her knees.

  She could hear Altan laughing. That wasn’t the Seal, that was her own imagination, but she heard it as clearly as if he were standing right beside her.

  “Look at you,” he said.

  “Pathetic,” he said.

  “It’s not coming back,” he said. “You’re lost, you’re done, you’re not a Speerly, you’re just a stupid little girl throwing a temper tantrum in the forest.”

  Finally her voice and strength gave out and the anger ebbed pathetically, ineffectually, away. Then she was alone with the indifferent silence of the trees, with no company except for her own mind.

  And Rin couldn’t stand that, so she decided to get as drunk as she possibly could.

  She’d picked up a small jug of sorghum wine back at camp. She chugged it down in under a minute.

  She wasn’t used to drinking. The masters at Sinegard had been strict—the smallest whiff of alcohol was grounds for expulsion. She still preferred the sickly sweetness of opium smoke to the burn of sorghum wine, but she liked how it seared her delightfully from the inside. It didn’t make the anger go away, but it reduced it to a dull throb, an aching pain rather than a sharp, fresh wound.

  By the time Nezha came out for her she was utterly soused, and she wouldn’t have heard him approach if he hadn’t shouted for her every step he took.

  “Rin? Are you there?”

  She heard his voice around the other side of a tree. She blinked for a few seconds before she remembered how to push words out of her mouth. “Yes. Don’t come around.”

  “What are you doing?”

  He circled the tree. She hastily yanked her trousers back up with one hand. A dripping jug dangled from the other.

  “Are you pissing in a jug?”

  “I’m preparing a gift for your brother,” she said. “Think he’ll like it?”

  “You can’t give the grand marshal of the Republican Army a jug of urine.”

  “But it’s warm,” she mumbled. She shook it at him. Piss sloshed out the side.

  Nezha hastily stepped away. “Please put that down.”

  “You sure Jinzha doesn’t want it?”

  “Rin.”

  She sighed dramatically and complied.

  He took her clean hand and led her to a patch of grass by the river, far away from the soiled jug. “You know you can’t lash out like that.”

  She squared her shoulders. “And I have been appropriately disciplined.”

  “It’s not about discipline. They’ll think you’re mad.”

  “They already think I’m mad,” she retorted. “Savage, dumb little Speerly. Right? It’s in my nature.”

  “That’s not what I . . . Come on, Rin.” Nezha shook his head. “Anyhow. I’ve, uh, got bad news.”
/>   She yawned. “Did we lose the war? That was quick.”

  “No. Jinzha’s demoted you.”

  She blinked several times, uncomprehending. “What?”

  “You’re unranked. You’re to serve as a foot soldier now. And you’re not in command of the Cike anymore.”

  “So who is?”

  “No one. There is no Cike. They’ve all been reassigned to other ships.”

  He watched her carefully to gauge her reaction, but Rin just hiccupped.

  “That’s all right. They hardly listened to me anyway.” She derived a kind of bitter satisfaction from saying this out loud. Her position as commander had always been a sham. To be fair, the Cike did listen to her when she had a plan, but she usually didn’t. Really, they’d effectively been running themselves.

  “You know what your problem is?” Nezha asked. “You have no impulse control. Absolutely zero. None.”

  “It’s terrible,” she agreed, and started to giggle. “Good thing I can’t call the fire, huh?”

  He responded to that with such a long silence that eventually it began to embarrass her. She wished now that she hadn’t drunk so much. She couldn’t think properly through her helplessly muddled mind. She felt terribly foolish, crude, and ashamed.

  She had to practice whispering her words before she could voice them out loud. “So what’s happening now?”

  “Same thing as usual. They’re gathering up the civilians. The men will cast their votes tonight.”

  She sat up. “They should not get a vote.”

  “They’re Nikara. All Nikara get the option to join the Republic.”

  “They helped the Federation!”

  “Because they didn’t have a choice,” Nezha said. “Think about it. Put yourself in their position. You really think you would have done any better?”

  “Yes,” she snapped. “I did. I was in their position. I was in worse—they had me strapped down to a bed, they were torturing me and torturing Altan in front of me and I was terrified, I wanted to die—”

  “They were scared, too,” he said softly.

  “Then they should have fought back.”

  “Maybe they didn’t have the choice. They weren’t trained soldiers. They weren’t shamans. How else were they going to survive?”