The Dragon Republic

by R. F. Kuang

  “What, just because of some lanterns?”

  “It’s what the lanterns mean. Whoever set them up is waiting for us in there. And I doubt they have the firepower to match the fleet, but they’re still fighting on their own territory, and they know that river. They’ve staked it out for who knows how long.” Kitay motioned to the closest soldier. “Can you shoot?”

  “As well as anyone else,” said the soldier.

  “Good. You see that?” Kitay pointed to a lantern drifting a little farther out from the others. “Can you hit it? I just want to see what happens.”

  The soldier looked confused, but obeyed. His first shot missed. His second arrow flew true. The lantern exploded into flames, sending a shower of sparks and coal tumbling toward the river.

  Rin hit the ground. The explosion seemed impossibly loud for such a small, harmless-looking lantern. It just kept going, too—the lantern must have been loaded with multiple smaller bombs that went off in succession at various points in the air like intricate fireworks. She watched, holding her breath, hoping that none of the sparks would set off the other lanterns. That might spark a chain reaction that turned the entire cliffside into a column of fire.

  But the other lanterns didn’t go off—the first had exploded too far from the rest of the pack—and at last, the explosions started to fizzle out.

  “Told you,” Kitay said once they’d ceased completely. He picked himself off the ground. “We’d better go tell Jinzha we need a change in route.”

  The fleet crept down a secondary channel of the tributary, a narrow pass between jagged cliffs. This would add a week to their travel time, but it was better than certain incineration.

  Rin scanned the gray rocks with her spyglass and found crevices, cliff ledges that could easily conceal enemies, but saw no movement. No lanterns. The pass looked abandoned.

  “We’re not in the clear yet,” Kitay said.

  “You think they booby-trapped both rivers?”

  “They could have,” Kitay said. “I would.”

  “But there’s nothing here.”

  A boom shook the air. They exchanged a look and ran out to the prow.

  The skimmer at the head of the fleet was in full blaze.

  Another boom echoed through the pass. A second ship exploded, sending blast fragments up so high that they crashed across the Kingfisher’s deck. Jinzha threw himself to the ground just before a piece of the Lapwing could skewer his head to the mast.

  “Get down!” he roared. “Everybody down!”

  But he didn’t have to tell them—even from a hundred yards away the burst impacts shook the Kingfisher like an earthquake, knocking everyone on deck off their feet.

  Rin crawled as close as she could to the edge of the deck, spyglass in hand. She popped up from the railing and glanced frantically about the mountains, but all she saw were rocks. “There’s no one up there.”

  “Those aren’t missiles,” Kitay said. “You’d see the heat glow in the air.”

  He was right—the source of the explosions wasn’t from the air; they weren’t detonating on the decks. The very water itself was erupting around the fleet.

  Chaos took over the Kingfisher. Archers scrambled to the top deck to open fire on enemies who weren’t there. Jinzha screamed himself hoarse ordering the ships to reverse direction. The Kingfisher’s paddle wheels spun frantically backward, pushing the turtle boat out of the tributary, only to bump into the Crake. Only after a frantic exchange of signal flags did the fleet begin backtracking sluggishly downriver.

  They weren’t moving fast enough. Whatever was in the water must have been laced together by some chain reaction mechanism, because a minute later another skimmer went up in flames, and then another. Rin could see the explosions starting below the water, each one detonating the next like a vicious streak, getting closer and closer to the Kingfisher.

  A massive gust of water shot out of the river. At first Rin thought it was just the force of the explosions, but the water spiraled, higher and higher, like a whirlpool in reverse, expanding to surround the warships, forming a protective ring that centered around the Griffon.

  “What the fuck,” Kitay said.

  Rin dashed to the prow.

  Nezha stood beneath the Griffon’s mast, arms stretched out to the tower of water as if reaching for something.

  He met Rin’s gaze, and her heart skipped a beat.

  His eyes were shot through with streaks of ocean blue—not the eerie cerulean gleam of Feylen’s glare, but a darker cobalt, the color of old gems.

  “You too?” she whispered.

  Through the protective wave of water she saw explosions, splashes of orange and red and yellow. Warped by the water, they almost seemed pretty, a painting of angry bursts. Shrapnel seemed frozen in place, arrested by the wall. The water hung in the air for an impossibly long time, steady while the explosives went off one by one in a series of deafening booms that echoed around the fleet. Nezha collapsed on the deck.

  The wave dropped, slammed inward, and drenched the wretched remains of the Republican Fleet.

  Rin needed to get to the Griffon.

  The great wave had knocked Nezha’s ship and the Kingfisher together into a dismal wreck. Their decks were separated by only a narrow gap. Rin took a running start, jumped, skidded onto the Griffon’s deck, and ran toward Nezha’s limp form.

  All the color had drained from his face. He was already porcelain pale, but now his skin looked transparent, his scars cracks in shattered glass over bright blue veins.

  She pulled him up into a sitting position. He was breathing, his chest heaving, but his eyes were squeezed shut, and he only shook his head when she tried to ask him questions.

  “It hurts.” Finally, intelligible words—he twisted in her arms, scrabbling at something on his back. “It hurts . . .”

  “Here?” She put her hand on the small of his back.

  He managed a nod. Then a sudden, wordless scream.

  She tried to help him pull his shirt off, but he kept thrashing in her arms, so she had to slice it apart with a knife and yank the pieces away. Her fingers splayed over his exposed back. Her breath caught in her throat.

  A massive dragon tattoo, silver and cerulean in the colors of the House of Yin, covered his skin from shoulder to shoulder. Rin couldn’t remember seeing it before—but then, she couldn’t remember seeing Nezha shirtless before. This tattoo had to be old. She could see a rippled scar arcing down the left side where Nezha had once been pierced by a Mugenese general’s halberd. But now the scar glistened an angry red, as if freshly branded into his skin. She couldn’t tell if she was imagining things in her panic, but the dragon seemed to undulate under her fingers, coiling and thrashing against his skin.

  “It’s in my mind.” Nezha let out another strangled cry of pain. “It’s telling me—fuck, Rin . . .”

  Pity washed over her, a dark wave that sent bile rising up in her throat.

  Nezha gave a low moan. “It’s in my head . . .”

  She had an idea of what that was like.

  He grabbed her wrists with a strength that startled her. “Kill me.”

  “I can’t do that,” she whispered.

  She wanted to kill him. All she wanted was to put him out of his pain. She couldn’t bear to look at him like this, screaming like it was never going to end.

  But she’d never forgive herself for that.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Jinzha had arrived. He was looking down at Nezha with a genuine concern that Rin had never seen on his face.

  “It’s a god,” she told him. She was certain. She knew exactly what was going through Nezha’s head, because she’d suffered it before. “He called a god and it won’t go away.”

  She had a good idea of what had happened. Nezha, watching the fleet exploding around him, had tried to protect the Griffon. He might not have been aware of what he was doing. He might only remember wishing that the waters would rise, would protect them from the fires. But some god had an
swered and done exactly what he’d wished, and now he couldn’t get it to give him his mind back.

  “What are you talking about?” Jinzha knelt down and tried to pull Nezha out of her grasp, but she wouldn’t let go.

  “Get back.”

  “Don’t you touch him,” he snarled.

  She smacked his hand away. “I know what this is, I’m the only one who can help him, so if you want him to live, then get back.”

  She was astounded when Jinzha complied.

  Nezha thrashed in her arms, moaning.

  “So help him,” Jinzha begged.

  I’m fucking trying, Rin thought. She forced herself to calm. She could think of only one thing that might work. If this was a god—and she was almost certain that this was a god—then the only way to silence its voice was to shut off Nezha’s mind, close off his connection to the world of spirit.

  “Send a man to my bunk,” she told Jinzha. “Cabin three. Have him pull up the second floorboard in the right corner and bring me what’s hidden under there. Do you understand?”

  He nodded.

  “Then hurry.”

  He stood up and started to bark out orders.

  “Get out.” Nezha was curling in on himself, muttering. He scrabbled at his shoulder blades, digging his nails deep into his skin, drawing blood. “Get out—get out!”

  Rin grabbed his wrists and forced them away from his back. He wrenched them, flailing, out of her grip. A stray hand hit her across the chin. Her head whipped to the side. For a moment she saw black.

  Nezha looked horrified. “I’m sorry.” He clutched at his shoulders like he was trying to shrink. “I’m so sorry.”

  Rin heard a groaning noise. It came from the deck—the ship was moving, ever so slowly. Something was pushing at it from below. She looked up, and her stomach twisted with dread. The waves were swelling, rising around the Griffon like a hand preparing to clench its fingers in a fist. They had grown higher than the mast.

  Nezha might lose control entirely. He might drown them all.

  “Nezha.” She grasped his face between her palms. “Look at me. Please, look at me. Nezha.”

  But he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, listen to her—his seconds of lucidity had passed, and it was all she could do to hold him tight so that he wouldn’t shred his own skin while he moaned and screamed.

  An eternity later she heard footsteps.

  “Here,” Jinzha said, pressing the packet into her hand. Rin crawled onto Nezha’s chest, pinning down his arms with her knees, and tore the packet open with her teeth. Nuggets of opium tumbled out onto the deck.

  “What are you doing?” Jinzha demanded.

  “Shut up.” Rin scraped up two nuggets and held them tightly in her fist.

  What now? She didn’t have a pipe on hand. She couldn’t call the fire to just light up the opium nuggets and make him inhale, and making a fire would take an eternity—everything on deck was drenched.

  She had to get the opium into him somehow.

  She couldn’t think of any other way. She balled the nuggets up in her hand and forced them into his mouth. Nezha thrashed harder, choking. She pinched his jaw shut, then wrenched it open and pushed the nuggets farther into his mouth until he swallowed.

  She held his arms down and leaned over him, waiting. A minute passed. Then two. Nezha stopped moving. His eyes rolled up into the back of his head. Then he stopped breathing.

  “You could have killed him,” said the ship’s physician.

  Rin recognized Dr. Sien from the Cormorant. He was the physician who had tended to Vaisra after Lusan, and appeared to be the only man permitted to treat the members of the House of Yin.

  “I just assumed you’d have something for that,” she said.

  She stood slouched against the wall, exhausted. She was amazed she’d been allowed into Nezha’s cabin, but Jinzha had only given her a tight nod on his way out.

  Nezha lay still on the bed between them. He looked awful, paler than death, but he was breathing steadily. Every rise and fall of his chest gave Rin a small jolt of relief.

  “Lucky we had the drug on hand,” said Dr. Sien. “How did you know?”

  “Know what?” Rin asked cautiously. Did Dr. Sien know that Nezha was a shaman? Did anyone? Jinzha had seemed utterly confused. Was Nezha’s secret his alone?

  “To give him opium,” Dr. Sien said.

  That told her nothing. She hazarded a half truth in response. “I’ve seen this illness before.”

  “Where?” he asked curiously.

  “Um.” Rin shrugged. “You know. Down in the south. Opium’s a common remedy for it there.”

  Doctor Sien looked somewhat disappointed. “I have treated the sons of the Dragon Warlord since they were babies. They have never told me anything about Nezha’s particular ailment, only that he often feels pain, and that opium is the only way to calm him. I don’t know if Vaisra and Saikhara know the cause themselves.”

  Rin looked down at Nezha’s sleeping face. He looked so peaceful. She had the oddest urge to brush the hair back from his forehead. “How long has he been sick?”

  “He began having seizures when he was twelve. They’ve become less frequent as he’s gotten older, but this one was the worst I’ve seen in years.”

  Has Nezha been a shaman since he was a child? Rin wondered. How had he never told her? Did he not trust her?

  “He’s in the clear now,” said Dr. Sien. “The only thing he’ll need is sleep. You don’t have to stay.”

  “It’s all right. I’ll wait.”

  He looked uncomfortable. “I don’t think General Jinzha—”

  “Jinzha knows I just saved his brother’s life. He’ll permit it, and he’s an ass if he doesn’t.”

  Dr. Sien didn’t argue. After he closed the door behind him, Rin curled up on the floor next to Nezha’s bed and closed her eyes.

  Hours later she heard him stirring. She sat up, rubbed the grime from her eyes, and knelt next to him. “Nezha?”

  “Hmm.” He blinked at the ceiling, trying to make sense of his surroundings.

  She touched the back of her finger to his left cheek. His skin was much softer than she had thought it would be. His scars were not raised bumps like she’d expected, but rather smooth lines running across his skin like tattoos.

  His eyes had returned to their normal, lovely brown. Rin couldn’t help noticing how long his lashes were; they were so dark and heavy, thicker even than Venka’s. It’s not fair, she thought. He’d always been much prettier than anyone had the right to be.

  “How are you doing?” she asked.

  Nezha blinked several times and slurred something that didn’t sound like words.

  She tried again. “Do you know what’s going on?”

  His eyes darted around the room for a while, and then focused on her face with some difficulty. “Yes.”

  She couldn’t hold back her questions any longer. “Do you understand what just happened? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  All Nezha did was blink.

  She leaned forward, heart pounding. “I could have helped you. Or—or you could have helped me. You should have told me.”

  His breathing started to quicken.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked again.

  He mumbled something unintelligible. His eyelids fluttered shut.

  She nearly shook him by the collar, she was so desperate for answers.

  She took a deep breath. Stop it. Nezha was in no state to be interrogated now.

  She could force him to talk. If she pressed harder, if she yelled at him to give her the truth, then he might tell her everything.

  That would be a secret revealed under opium, however, and she would have coerced him when he was in no state to refuse.

  Would he hate her for it?

  He was only half-conscious. He might not even remember.

  She swallowed down a sudden wave of revulsion. No—no, she wouldn’t do that to him. She couldn’t. She’d have to get her answers another
way. Now was not the time. She stood up.

  His eyes opened again. “Where are you going?”

  “I should let you rest,” she said.

  He shifted in his bed. “No . . . don’t go . . .”

  She paused at the door.

  “Please,” he said. “Stay.”

  “All right,” she said, and returned to his side. She took his hand in hers. “I’m right here.”

  “What’s happening to me?” he murmured.

  She squeezed his fingers. “Just close your eyes, Nezha. Go back to sleep.”

  The remains of the fleet sat stuck in a cove for the next three days. Half the troops had to be treated for burn wounds, and the repulsive smell of rotting flesh became so pervasive that the men took to wrapping cloth around their faces, covering everything except their eyes. Eventually Jinzha had made the decision to administer morphine and medicine only to the men who had a decent chance of survival. The rest were rolled into the mud, facedown, until they stopped moving.

  They didn’t have time to bury their dead so they dragged them into piles interlaced with parts of irreparable ships to form funeral pyres and set them on fire.

  “How strategic,” Kitay said. “Don’t need the Empire getting hold of good ship wood.”

  “Do you have to be like this?” Rin asked.

  “Just complimenting Jinzha.”

  Sister Petra stood before the burning corpses and gave an entire funeral benediction in her fluent, toneless Nikara while soldiers stood around her in a curious circle.

  “In life you suffered in a world wreaked by Chaos, but you have offered your souls to a beautiful cause,” she said. “You died creating order in a land bereft of it. Now you rest. I pray your Maker will take mercy on your souls. I pray that you will come to know the depths of his love, all-encompassing and unconditional.”

  She then began chanting in a language that Rin didn’t recognize. It seemed similar to Hesperian—she could almost recognize the roots of words before they took on an entirely different shape—but this seemed something more ancient, something weighted down with centuries of history and religious purpose.

  “Where do your people think souls go when they die?” Rin murmured quietly to Augus.