by R. F. Kuang
“It’s not enough just to survive,” she hissed. “You have to fight for something, you can’t just—just live your life like a fucking coward.”
“Some people are just cowards. Some people just aren’t that strong.”
“Then they shouldn’t have votes,” she snarled.
The more she thought about it, the more ludicrous Vaisra’s proposed democracy seemed. How were the Nikara supposed to rule themselves? They hadn’t run their own country since before the days of the Red Emperor, and even drunk, she could figure out why—the Nikara were simply far too stupid, too selfish, and too cowardly.
“Democracy’s not going to work. Look at them.” She was gesturing at trees, not people, but it hardly made a difference to her. “They’re cows. Fools. They’re voting for the Republic because they’re scared—I’m sure they’d vote just as quickly to join the Federation.”
“Don’t be unfair,” Nezha said. “They’re just people: they’ve never studied warcraft.”
“So then they shouldn’t rule!” she shouted. “They need someone to tell them what to do, what to think—”
“And who’s that going to be? Daji?”
“Not Daji. But someone educated. Someone who’s passed the Keju, who’s graduated from Sinegard. Someone who’s been in the military. Someone who knows the value of a human life.”
“You’re describing yourself,” said Nezha.
“I’m not saying it would be me,” Rin said. “I’m just saying it shouldn’t be the people. Vaisra shouldn’t let them elect anyone. He should just rule.”
Nezha tilted his head to the side. “You want my father to make himself Emperor?”
A wave of nausea rocked her stomach before she could respond. There was no time to get up; she lurched forward onto her knees and heaved the contents of her stomach against the tree. Her face was too close to the ground. A good deal of vomit splashed back onto her cheek. She rubbed clumsily at it with her sleeve.
“You all right?” Nezha asked when she’d stopped dry-heaving.
“Yes.”
He rubbed his hand in circles on her back. “Good.”
She spat a gob of regurgitated wine onto the dirt. “Fuck off.”
Nezha lifted a clump of mud up from the riverbank. “Have you ever heard the story of how the goddess Nüwa created humanity?”
“No.”
“I’ll tell it to you.” Nezha molded the mud into a ball with his palms. “Once upon a time, after the birth of the world, Nüwa was lonely.”
“What about her husband, Fuxi?” Rin only knew the myths about Nüwa and Fuxi both.
“Absent spouse, I guess. Myth doesn’t mention him.”
“Of course.”
“Of course. Anyway, Nüwa gets lonely, decides to create some humans to populate the world to keep her company.” Nezha pressed his fingernails into the ball of mud. “The first few people she makes are incredibly detailed. Fine features, lovely clothes.”
Rin could see where this was going. “Those are the aristocrats.”
“Yes. The nobles, the emperors, the warriors, everyone who matters. Then she gets bored. It’s taking too long. So she takes a rope and starts flinging mud in all directions. Those become the hundred clans of Nikan.”
Rin swallowed. Her throat tasted like acid. “They don’t tell that story in the south.”
“And why do you think that is?” Nezha asked.
She turned that over in her mind for a moment. Then she laughed.
“My people are mud,” she said. “And you’re still going to let them run a country.”
“I don’t think they’re mud,” Nezha said. “I think they’re still unformed. Uneducated and uncultured. They don’t know better because they haven’t been given the chance. But the Republic will shape and refine them. Develop them into what they were meant to be.”
“That’s not how it works.” Rin took the clump of mud from Nezha’s hand. “They’re never going to become more than what they are. The north won’t let them.”
“That’s not true.”
“You think that. But I’ve seen how power works.” Rin crushed the clump in her fingers. “It’s not about who you are, it’s about how they see you. And once you’re mud in this country, you’re always mud.”
Chapter 18
“You’re joking,” Ramsa said.
Rin shook her head, and her temples throbbed at the sudden movement. Under the harsh light of dawn, she’d come to deeply regret ever touching alcohol, which made the task of informing the Cike they’d been disbanded very distasteful. “I’m unranked. Jinzha’s orders.”
“Then what about us?” Ramsa demanded.
She gave him a blank look. “What about you?”
“Where are we supposed to go?”
“Oh.” She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to remember. “You’re being reassigned. You’re on the Griffon, I think, and Suni and Baji are on the tower ships—”
“We’re not together?” Ramsa asked. “Fuck that. Can’t we just refuse?”
“No.” She pressed a palm into her aching forehead. “You’re still Republic soldiers. You have to follow orders.”
He stared at her in disbelief. “That’s all you’ve got?”
“What else am I supposed to say?”
“Something!” he shouted. “Anything! We’re not the Cike anymore, and you’re just going to take that lying down?”
She wanted to cover her ears with her hands. She was so exhausted. She wished Ramsa would just go away and break the news to the others for her so that she could lie down and go to sleep and stop thinking about anything.
“Who cares? The Cike’s not that important. The Cike is dead.”
Ramsa grabbed at her collar. But he was so scrawny, shorter even than she, that it only made him look ridiculous.
“What is wrong with you?” he demanded.
“Ramsa, stop.”
“We joined this war for you,” he said. “Out of loyalty to you.”
“Don’t be dramatic. You entered this war because you wanted Dragon silver, you like blowing shit up, and you’re a wanted criminal everywhere else in the Empire.”
“I stuck with you because we thought we’d stay together.” Ramsa sounded like he was about to cry, which was so absurd that Rin almost laughed. “We’re always supposed to be together.”
“You’re not even a shaman. You’ve got nothing to be afraid of. Why do you care?”
“Why don’t you care? Altan named you commander. Protecting the Cike is your duty.”
“I didn’t ask to be commander,” she snapped. Altan’s invocation brought up feelings of obligation, duty, that she didn’t want to think about. “All right? I don’t want to be your Altan. I can’t.”
What had she done since she’d been put in charge? She’d hurt Unegen, driven Enki away, seen Aratsha killed, and gotten her ass kicked so badly by Daji that she couldn’t even properly be called a shaman anymore. She hadn’t led the Cike so much as encouraged them to make a series of awful decisions. They were better off without her. It infuriated her that they couldn’t see that.
“Aren’t you angry?” Ramsa asked. “Doesn’t this piss you off?”
“No,” she said. “I take orders.”
She could have been angry. Could have resisted Jinzha, could have lashed out like she’d always done. But anger had only ever helped her when it manifested in flames, and she couldn’t call on that anymore. Without the fire she wasn’t a shaman, wasn’t a proper Speerly, and certainly wasn’t a military asset. Jinzha had no reason to listen to or respect her.
And she knew by now that the fire was never coming back.
“You could at least try,” Ramsa said. “Please.”
There was no fight left in his voice, either.
“Just grab your things,” she said. “And tell the others. They want you to report in ten.”
In a matter of weeks the last strongholds of Hare and Ram Provinces capitulated to the Republic. Their Warlords were s
ent back to Arlong in chains to grovel before Vaisra for their lives. Their cities, townships, and villages were all subjected to plebiscites.
When the civilians elected to join the Republic—and they invariably voted to join, for the alternative was that all men over the age of fifteen would be put to death—they became a part of Vaisra’s sprawling war machine. The women were put to work sewing Republican uniforms and spinning linens for the infirmaries. The men were either recruited as infantry or sent south to work in Arlong’s shipyards. A seventh of their food stores were confiscated to contribute to the northern campaign’s swelling supply lines, and Republican patrols stayed behind to ensure regular shipments of grain upriver.
Nezha bragged constantly that this was perhaps the most successful military campaign in Nikara history. Kitay told him to stop getting high on his own hubris, but Rin could not deny their astonishing string of victories.
The daily demands of the campaign were so grueling, however, that she rarely got the chance to revel in their wins. The cities, townships, and villages began to blur together in her mind. Rin stopped thinking in terms of night and day, and started thinking in battle timetables. The days bled into one another, a string of extraordinarily demanding predawn combat assignments and snatched hours of deep and dreamless sleep.
The only benefit was that she managed to temporarily lose herself in the sheer physical activity. Her demotion didn’t affect her as much as she’d thought it would. Most days she was too tired to even remember it had happened.
But she was also secretly relieved that she did not have to think anymore about what to do with her men. That the burden of leadership, which she’d never adequately met, had been lifted entirely from her shoulders. All she had to do was worry about carrying out her own orders, and that she did splendidly.
Her orders were doubling, too. Jinzha might have begun to appreciate her ability, or he might have simply disliked her so much he wanted her dead without having to take the blame, but he began to put her on the front lines of every ground operation. This was typically not a coveted position, but she relished it.
After all, she was terribly good at war. She had trained for this. Maybe she couldn’t call the fire anymore, but she could still fight, and landing her trident into the right joint of flesh felt just as good as incinerating everything around her.
She gained a reputation on the Kingfisher as an eminently capable soldier, and despite herself she started to bask in it. It awakened an old streak of competitiveness that she had not felt since Sinegard, when the only thing getting her through months of grueling and miserable study had been the sheer delight of having her talents recognized by someone.
Was this how Altan had felt? The Nikara had honed him as a weapon, had put him to military uses since he was a small child, but still they’d lauded him. Had that kept him happy?
Of course she wasn’t happy, not quite. But she had found some sort of contentment, the satisfaction that came from being a tool that served its purpose quite well.
The campaigns were like drugs in their own right. Rin felt wonderful when she fought. In the heat of battle, human life could be reduced to the barest mechanics of existence—arms and legs, mobility and vulnerability, vital points to be identified, isolated, and destroyed. She found an odd pleasure in that. Her body knew what to do, which meant she could turn her mind off.
If the Cike were unhappy, she didn’t know. She didn’t speak to them anymore. She barely saw them after they were reassigned. But she found it harder and harder to care because she was losing the capacity to think about much at all.
In time, sooner than she’d expected, she even stopped longing for the fire that she’d lost. Sometimes the urge crept up on her on the eve of battle and she rubbed her fingers together, wishing that she could make them spark, fantasizing about how quickly her troops could win battles if she could call down a column of fire to scorch out the defensive line.
She still felt the Phoenix’s absence like a hole carved out of her chest. The ache never quite went away. But the desperation and frustration ebbed. She stopped waking up in the morning and wanting to scream when she remembered what had been taken from her.
She’d long since stopped trying to break down the Seal. Its dark, pulsing presence no longer pained her daily like a festering wound. In the small moments when she did permit herself to linger on it, she wondered if it had begun to take her memories.
Master Jiang had seemed to know absolutely nothing about who he had been twenty years ago. Would the same happen to her?
Already some of her earlier memories were starting to feel fuzzy. She used to remember intricately the faces of every member of her foster family in Tikany. Now they seemed like blurs. But she couldn’t tell if the Seal had eaten those memories away, or if they had simply corroded over time.
That didn’t worry her as much as it should have. She couldn’t pretend that if the Seal stole her past from her little by little—if she forgot Altan, forgot what she’d done on Speer, and let her guilt wash away into a white nothingness until, like Jiang, she was just an affable, absentminded fool—some part of her wouldn’t be relieved.
When Rin wasn’t sleeping or fighting, she was sitting with Kitay in his cramped office. She was no longer invited to Jinzha’s councils, but she learned everything from Kitay secondhand. He, in turn, enjoyed bouncing his ideas off of her. Talking through the multitudes of possibilities out loud gave relief to the frantic activity inside his mind.
He alone didn’t share the Republic’s delight over their incredible series of victories.
“I’m concerned,” he admitted. “And confused. Hasn’t this whole campaign felt too easy to you? It’s like they’re not even trying.”
“They are trying. They’re just not very good at it.” Rin was still buzzing from the high of battle. It felt very good to excel, even if excellence meant cutting down poorly trained local soldiers, and Kitay’s moodiness irritated her.
“You know the battles you’re fighting are too easy.”
She made a face. “You could give us a little bit of credit.”
“Do you want praise for beating up untrained, unarmed villagers? Good job, then. Very well done. The superiorly armed navy crushes a pathetic peasant resistance. What a shocking turn of events. That doesn’t mean you’re taking this Empire on a silver platter.”
“It could just mean that our navy is superior,” she said. “What, you think Daji’s giving up the north on purpose? That doesn’t get her anything.”
“She’s not giving it up. They’re building a shipyard, we’ve known that since the beginning—”
“And if their navy were any use, we would have seen it. Maybe we’re actually just winning this war. It wouldn’t kill you to admit it.”
But Kitay shook his head. “You’re talking about Su Daji. This is the woman who managed to unite all twelve provinces for the first time since the death of the Red Emperor.”
“She had help.”
“But she’s had no help since. If the Empire were going to fracture, you’d think it would have already. Don’t get cocky, Rin. We’re playing a game of wikki against a woman who’s had decades of practice against far more fearsome opponents. I’ve said this to Jinzha, too. There’s a counteroffensive coming soon, and the longer we wait for it, the worse it’s going to be.”
Kitay was obsessed with the problem of whether the fleet ought to curtail its campaign for the winter or to sail directly to Tiger Province, rendezvous with Tsolin’s fleet, and take on Jun and his army. On the one hand, if they could solidify their hold on the coastline through Tiger Province, then they would have a back channel to run supplies and reinforce land columns to eventually encircle the Autumn Palace.
On the other, taking the coastline would involve a massive military commitment from troops that the Republic didn’t yet have. Until the Hesperians decided to lend aid, they would have to settle for conquering the inland regions first. But that could take another couple of months—whi
ch required time that they also didn’t have.
They were racing against time. Nobody wanted to be stuck in an invasion when winter hit the north. Their task was to solidify a revolutionary base and corner the Empire inside its three northernmost provinces before the Murui’s tributaries froze over and the fleet was stuck in place.
“We’re cutting it close, but we should be up to the Edu pass within a month,” Kitay told her. “Jinzha has to make his decision by then.”
Rin did the calculations in her head. “Upriver sailing should take us a month and a half.”
“You’re forgetting about the Four Gorges Dam,” Kitay said. “Up through Rat Province the Murui’s blocked up, so the current won’t be as strong as it should be.”
“A month, then. What do you think happens when we get there?”
“We pray to the heavens that the rivers and lakes haven’t frozen yet,” Kitay said. “Then we see what our options are. At this point, though, Jinzha’s wagered this war on the weather.”
Rin’s weekly meetings with Sister Petra remained the thorn in her side that progressively stung worse. Petra’s examinations had become increasingly invasive, but she had also started withholding the laudanum. She was finished with taking baseline measurements. Now she wanted to see evidence of Chaos.
When week after week Rin failed to call the fire, Petra grew impatient.
“You are hiding it from me,” she accused. “You refuse to cooperate.”
“Or maybe I’m cured,” Rin said. “Maybe Chaos went away. Maybe your holy presence scared it off.”
“You lie.” Petra wrenched Rin’s mouth open with more force than she needed and began tapping around her teeth with what felt like a two-pronged instrument. The cold metal tips dug painfully into Rin’s enamel. “I know how Chaos works. It never disappears. It disguises itself in the face of the Maker but always it returns.”
Rin wished that were the case. If she had the fire back she’d incinerate Petra where she stood, and fuck the consequences. If she had the fire, then she wouldn’t be so terribly helpless, bowing down to Jinzha’s commands and cooperating with the Hesperians because she was only a lowly foot soldier.