The Dragon Republic

by R. F. Kuang

  She stepped out into the middle of the clearing, arms raised stiffly over her sides. She felt both exceedingly scared and stupid.

  “Well, go on.” Kitay backed up several paces. “Give it a try.”

  She gave the wings an awkward flap. “So I just . . . light up?”

  “I think so. Try to keep it localized to your arms. You want the heat trapped in the air pockets under the wings, not dispersed in the air.”

  “All right.” She willed the flame to dance up her palms and into her neck and shoulders. Her upper body felt deliciously warm, but almost immediately her wings began to smoke and sizzle.

  “Kitay?” she called, alarmed.

  “That’s just the binding agent,” said Kitay. “It’ll be fine, it’ll just burn off—”

  Her voice rose several pitches. “It’s fine if the binding agent burns off?”

  “That’s just the excess substance. The rest should hold—I think.” He didn’t sound convincing in the least. “I mean, we tested the solvent at the forge, so in theory . . .”

  “Right,” she said slowly. Her knees were shaking. Her head felt terribly light. “Why do I let you do this?”

  “Because if you die, I die,” he said. “Can you make those flames a little larger?”

  She closed her eyes. Her leather wings lifted at her sides, expanding from the hot air.

  Then she felt it—a heavy pressure yanking on her upper body, like a giant had reached down and jerked her up by the arms.

  “Shit,” she breathed. She looked down. Her feet had risen off the ground. “Shit. Shit!”

  “Go higher!” Kitay called.

  Great Tortoise. She was rising higher, without even trying—no, she was practically shooting upward. She kicked her legs, wobbling in the air. She had no lateral directional control, and she couldn’t figure out how to slow her ascent, but holy gods, she was flying.

  Kitay shouted something at her, but she couldn’t hear him over the rush of the flames surrounding her.

  “What?” she yelled back.

  Kitay flapped his arms and ran in a zigzag motion.

  Did he want her to fly sideways? She puzzled over the mechanics of it. She could decrease the heat on one side. As soon as she tried it she nearly flipped over and ended up hanging awkwardly in midair with her hip level with her head. She hastily righted herself.

  She couldn’t drift laterally, then. But how did birds change direction? She tried to remember. They didn’t move straight to one side, they tilted their wings. They didn’t drift, they swooped.

  She beat her wings down several times and rose several feet into the air. Then she adjusted the curve of her arms so that the wings beat to the side, not downward, and tried again.

  Immediately she careened to the left. The swift change in direction was terribly disorienting. Her stomach heaved; her flames flickered madly. For a moment she lost sight of the ground, and didn’t right herself until she was mere feet away from the dirt.

  She jerked herself out of the dive, gasping. This was going to take some practice.

  She flapped her wings to regain altitude. She shot up faster than she’d anticipated. She flapped them again. Then again.

  How far could she go? Kitay was still shouting something from the ground, but she was too far up to understand him. She rose higher and higher with each steady beat of her wings. The ground became dizzyingly far away, but she had eyes only for the great expanse of sky above her.

  How far could the fire take her?

  She couldn’t help but laugh as she soared, a high, desperate, frantic laugh of relief. She rose so high that she could no longer make out Kitay’s face, until Arlong turned into little splotches of green and blue, until she had even passed through a layer of clouds.

  Then she stopped.

  She hung alone in an expanse of blue.

  A calm washed over her then, a calm that she couldn’t ever remember feeling. There was nothing up here she could kill. Nothing she could hurt. She had her mind to herself. She had the world to herself.

  She floated in the air, suspended at the point between heaven and earth.

  The Red Cliffs looked so beautiful from up here.

  Her mind wandered to the last minister of the Red Emperor, who had etched those ancient words into the cliffside. He’d written a scream to the heavens, an open plea to future generations, a message for the Hesperians who would one day sail into that harbor and bomb it.

  What had he wanted to tell them?

  Nothing lasts.

  Nezha and Kitay had both been wrong. There was another way to interpret those carvings. If nothing lasted and the world did not exist, all that meant was that reality was not fixed. The illusion she lived in was fluid and mutable, and could be easily altered by someone willing to rewrite the script of reality.

  Nothing lasts.

  This was not a world of men. It was a world of gods, a time of great powers. It was the era of divinity walking in man, of wind and water and fire. And in warfare, she who held the power asymmetry was the inevitable victor.

  She, the Last Speerly, called the greatest power of all.

  And the Hesperians, no matter how hard they tried, could never take this from her.

  Landing was the tricky part.

  Her first instinct was to simply extinguish the fire. But then she dropped like a rock, plummeting at a breakneck speed for several heart-stopping moments until she managed to get her wings spread and a fire lit beneath them. That made her come to a lurching halt so rough she was shocked the wings didn’t rip right off her arms.

  She drifted back up, heart hammering.

  She’d have to glide down somehow. She thought through the movements in her head—she’d decrease the heat, little by little, until she was close enough to the ground.

  It almost worked. She hadn’t counted on how fast her velocity would increase. Suddenly she was thirty feet from the ground and hurtling far too quickly toward Kitay.

  “Move!” she shouted, but he didn’t budge. He just reached his hands out, grabbed her wrists, and swung her about until they collapsed in a tangled, laughing heap of leather and silk and limbs.

  “I was right,” he said. “I’m always right.”

  “Well, don’t be so smug about it.”

  He groaned happily and rubbed his arms. “So how was it?”

  “Incredible.” She flung her arms around him and hugged him tight. “You genius. You wonderful, wonderful genius.”

  Kitay leaned back, arms raised. “Careful, you’ll break the wings.”

  She twisted her head around to check them and marveled at the thin, careful craftsmanship that held the apparatus together. “I can’t believe you did this in a week.”

  “I had some time on my hands,” said Kitay. “Wasn’t out there trying to stop a fleet or anything.”

  “I love you,” she said.

  Kitay gave her a tired smile. “I know.”

  “We still don’t know what we’re going to do after—” she started, but he shook his head.

  “I know,” he said. “I don’t know what to do about the Hesperians. For once, I haven’t the faintest idea, and I hate it. But we’ll figure our way out of it. We’ve figured our way out of this, we’re going to survive the Red Cliffs, we’re going to survive Vaisra, and we’ll keep surviving until we’re safe and the world can’t touch us. One enemy at a time. Agreed?”

  “Agreed,” she said.

  Once her legs had stopped shaking, he helped her strip out of her gear. Then they climbed back down the cliff, still light-headed and giddy with victory, laughing so hard that their sides hurt.

  Because yes, the fleet was still coming, and yes, they might very well die the next morning, but in that instant it didn’t matter, because fuck it, she could fly.

  “You’ll need some air support,” Kitay said after a while.

  “Air support?”

  “You’ll be a very conspicuous, very obvious target. You’ll want someone fending off the people sh
ooting at you. They throw rocks, we throw them back. A line of archers would be nice.”

  Rin snorted. Arlong’s defenses were spread thin as things were. “They’re not going to give us a line of archers.”

  “Yeah, probably not.” He shot her a sideways look, considering. “Should we try Eriden before the last council starts? See if he’ll lend us at least one of his men?”

  “No,” she said. “I have a better idea.”

  Rin found Venka the first place she looked—training in the archery yard, furiously decimating straw targets. Rin stood in the corner for a moment, watching her from behind a post.

  Venka hadn’t fully learned yet to compensate for her stiff arms, which seemed to spasm uncontrollably and to bend only with effort. They must have hurt badly—her face tightened every time she reached for her quiver.

  She hadn’t taken her left arm brace off. She’d just locked her upper wrist into place instead. She was shooting while overcorrecting for a hyperextended arm, Rin realized. But for the amount of control she had left, Venka had a stunning degree of accuracy. Her speed was also absurd. By Rin’s count she could shoot twenty arrows a minute, maybe more.

  Venka was no Qara, but she’d do.

  “Nice go,” Rin called at the end of a fifteen-arrow streak.

  Venka doubled over, panting. “Don’t you have anything better to do?”

  In response, Rin crossed the archery range and handed Venka a silk-wrapped parcel.

  Venka glared at it suspiciously, then placed her bow on the ground so she could accept. “What’s this?”

  “A present.”

  Venka’s lip curled. “Is it someone’s head?”

  Rin laughed. “Just open it.”

  Venka unwrapped the silk. After a moment she looked up, eyes hard, flinty and suspicious. “Where did you get this?”

  “Picked it up in the north,” Rin said. “It’s Ketreyid-made. You like it?”

  Before they’d returned to Arlong, she and Kitay had bundled all the weapons they could scavenge onto the raft. Most of them had been short knives and hunting bows that neither of them could use.

  “This is a silkworm thorn bow,” Venka declared. “Do you know how rare this is?”

  Rin wouldn’t have known silkworm thorn from driftwood, but she took that as a good sign. “I thought you’d like it better than those bamboo creations.”

  Venka turned the bow over in her hands, then held it up to her eyes to examine the bowstring. Her arms shook. She glanced down at her trembling elbows, openly disgusted. “You don’t want to waste a silkworm thorn bow on me.”

  “It’s not a waste. I saw you shoot.”

  “That?” Venka snorted. “That’s nowhere close to before.”

  “The bow will help. Silkworm thorn’s lighter, I think. But we can also get you a crossbow, if it’ll help with distance.”

  Venka squinted at her. “What exactly are you saying?”

  “I need air support.”

  “Air . . . ?”

  “Kitay’s built a contraption to help me fly,” Rin said bluntly.

  “Oh, gods.” Venka laughed. “Of course he has.”

  “He’s Chen Kitay.”

  “Indeed he is. Does it work?”

  “Shockingly, yes. But I need backup. I need someone with very good aim.”

  She was absolutely sure Venka would say yes. She could read longing all over Venka’s face. She was looking at the bow the way some might a lover.

  “They won’t let me fight,” she said finally. “Not even from the parapets.”

  “So fight for me,” Rin said. “The Cike’s not in the army and the Republic can’t tell me who I can recruit. And we’re down a few men.”

  “I heard.” A smile cracked across Venka’s face. Rin hadn’t seen her look so genuinely happy in a long, long time. Venka held the bow tight to her chest, caressing the carved grip. “Well, then. I’m at your service, Commander.”

  Chapter 30

  At dawn, Arlong’s civilians began clearing out of the city. The evacuation proceeded with impressive efficiency. The civilians had been packed and prepared for this for weeks. All families were ready to go with two bags each of clothing, medical supplies, and several days’ worth of food.

  By midafternoon the city center had been hollowed out. Arlong became a shell of a city. The Republican Army quickly transformed the larger residences into defense bases with sandbags and hidden explosives.

  Soldiers accompanied the civilians to the base of the cliffs, where they began a long, winding climb up to the caves inside the rock face. The pass was narrow and treacherous, and some heights could not be scaled except by using several stringy rope ladders embedded into the rock with nails.

  “That’s a rough climb,” Rin said, looking doubtfully up the rock wall. The ladders were so narrow the evacuees would have to go up one by one, with no one to aid them. “Can everyone make it?”

  “They’ll get over it.” Venka walked up behind her with two small, sniffling children in tow, a brother and sister who’d been separated from their parents in the crowd. “Our people have been using those hills as hideouts for years. We hid there during the Era of Warring States. We hid there when the Federation came. We’ll survive this, too.” She hoisted the girl up onto her hip and jerked her brother along. “Come on, hurry up.”

  Rin glanced backward over her shoulder at the masses of people moving below.

  Maybe the caves would keep the Dragons safe. But the southern refugees had been ordered to occupy the valley lowlands, and that was just open space.

  The official word was that the caves were too small to accommodate everyone, and so the refugees would have to make do. But the valley provided no shelter at all. Exposed to the elements, with no natural or military barriers to hide behind, the refugees would have no protection from the weather or the Militia—and certainly not from Feylen.

  But where else were they going to go? They wouldn’t have fled to Arlong if home were safe.

  “I’m hungry,” complained the boy.

  “I don’t care.” Venka tugged at his skinny wrist. “Stop crying. Walk faster.”

  “This battle will take place primarily in three stages,” said Vaisra. “One, we will fend them off at the outer channel between the Red Cliffs. Two, we win the ground battle in the city. Three, they will try to retreat along the coast, and we will pick them off. We’ll get to that stage if we are miraculously lucky.”

  His officers nodded grimly.

  Rin glanced around the council room, amazed by how many faces she’d never seen before. A good half of the officers were newly promoted. They wore the stripes of senior leadership, but they looked five years older than Rin at most.

  So many young, scared faces. The military command had been killed off at the top. This was rapidly becoming a war fought by the children.

  “Can that warship even get through the cliffs?” asked Captain Dalain.

  “Daji’s familiar with the channel,” said Admiral Kulau, the young navy officer who had replaced Molkoi. He sounded as if he were deepening his voice to seem older. “She’ll have designed it so it can.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Eriden said. “If their warship even starts depositing troops outside the channel, then we’re in trouble.” He leaned over the map. “That’s why we have archers stationed here and here—”

  “Why aren’t there any back-end fortifications?” Kitay interrupted.

  “The invasion will come from the channel,” Vaisra said. “Not the valley.”

  “But the channel’s the obvious avenue of attack,” Kitay said. “They know you’re expecting them. If I’m Daji, and I have a numerical advantage that large, then I split my troops and send a third column round the back while everyone’s distracted.”

  “No one’s ever attacked Arlong from land routes,” Kulau said. “They’d be eviscerated on the mountaintops.”

  “Not if they’re unguarded,” Kitay insisted.

  Kulau cleared his throat. “
They’re not unguarded. They’ve got fifty men guarding them.”

  “Fifty men can’t beat a column!”

  “Chang En’s not going to send a full column of his crack troops round the back. You have a fleet that big, you man it.”

  No one spoke the more obvious answer, which was that the Republican Army simply didn’t have the troops for better fortifications. And if any part of Arlong warranted a defense, then it was the palace and military barracks. Not the valley lowlands. Not the southerners.

  “Of course, Chang En will want this to turn into a land battle,” Vaisra continued smoothly. “There they have the sheer advantage in numbers. But this fight remains winnable as long as we keep it amphibious.”

  The channel had already been blocked up with so many iron chains and underwater obstacles that it almost functioned as a dam. The Republic was banking on mobility over numbers—their armed skimmers could dart between the Imperial ships, breaking up formations while the munitions crews shot bombs down from their cliffside stations.

  “What’s the makeup of their fleet?” asked a young officer Rin didn’t recognize. He sounded terribly nervous. “Which ships do we target?”

  “Aim for the warships, not the skimmers,” Kulau said. “Anything that has a trebuchet should be a target. But the bulk of their troops are on that floating fortress. If you can sink any ships, sink that first.”

  “You want us in a fan formation at the cliffs?” Captain Dalain asked.

  “No,” said Kulau. “If we spread out then they’ll just obliterate us. Stay in a narrow line and plug up the channel.”

  “We’re not worried about their shaman?” Dalain asked. “If we clump our ships together, he’s just going to blast our fleet against the cliffs.”

  “I’ll take care of Feylen,” Rin said.

  The generals blinked at her. She looked around the table, eyes wide open. “What?”

  “Last time you ended up stranded for a month,” said Captain Eriden. “We’ll be fine against Feylen—we have fifteen squadrons of archers positioned across the cliff walls.”

  “And he’ll just fling them off the cliffs,” said Rin. “They won’t be more than an annoyance.”