by R. F. Kuang
Nezha’s strikes came nowhere close to landing. Chang En disarmed him with ease and kicked his sword across the deck. Nezha scrambled for the hilt. Chang En swept a leg behind his knees, kicking him to the ground, and placed a boot on his chest.
Hello, little one, said the Phoenix.
Flames burst out of every part of her. The fire was no longer localized to her control points—her hands and mouth—but blazed around her entire body like a suit of armor, glowing and untouchable.
She pointed a finger at Chang En. A thick stream of fire slammed into his face. He dropped his sword and buried his head in his hands, trying to smother the flames, but the blaze only extended across his entire body, burning brighter and brighter as he screamed.
Rin stopped just short of killing him. She didn’t want to make this easy for him.
Chang En had stopped moving. He lay flat on his back, covered in grotesque burns. His face and arms had turned black, shot through with cracks that revealed blistered, bubbling skin.
Rin stood over him and opened her palms downward.
Nezha grabbed her shoulder. “Don’t.”
She shot him an exasperated look. “Don’t tell me you want to take him prisoner, too.”
“No,” he said. “I want to do it.”
She stepped back and gestured to Chang En’s limp form. “All yours.”
“I’ll need a sword,” he said.
Wordlessly, she handed hers over.
Nezha traced the tip of the blade over Chang En’s face, jabbing it into the blistered skin between his crackled cheekbones. “Hey. Wake up.”
Chang En’s eyes opened.
Nezha forced the sword point straight down into Chang En’s left eye.
Chang En grabbed at empty air, trying to wrench the blade from Nezha’s grasp, but Nezha gave him a savage kick to the ribs, then several more to the face.
Nezha wanted to watch Chang En bleed. Rin didn’t try to stop him. She wanted to watch, too.
Nezha pressed the sword point to Chang En’s neck. “Stop moving.”
Whimpering, Chang En lay still. His gouged eye dangled grotesquely on the side of his face, still connected by lumpy strings. The other eye blinked furiously, drenched in blood.
Nezha grasped the hilt with both hands and brought it down hard. Blood splashed across both of their faces.
Nezha let the sword drop and backed away slowly. His chest heaved. Rin put her hand on his back.
He leaned into her, shaking. “It’s over.”
“No, it’s not,” she whispered.
It had barely just begun. Because the air had suddenly gone still—so still that every flag in the channel dropped, and the sound of every shout and clash of steel was amplified in the absence of wind.
She reached out and grabbed Nezha’s fingers in hers, just as the ship ripped out from beneath them.
Chapter 32
The force of the gale tore them apart.
For a moment Rin hung weightless in the air, watching driftwood and bodies floating absurdly beside her, and then she dropped into the water with the rest of what used to be the ship’s upper deck.
She couldn’t see Nezha. She couldn’t see anything. She sank fast, weighted down by the wreckage. She flailed desperately around in the black water, trying to find some path to the surface.
And there it was—a glimmer of light through the mass of bodies. Her lungs burned. She had to get up there. She kicked, but something tugged at her legs. She’d gotten tangled in the flag, and wet cloth underwater was strong as iron steel. Panic fogged her mind. The flag only ensnared her more the harder she kicked, dragging her down to the riverbed.
Calm. She forced herself to empty her mind. Calm down. No anger, no panic, just nothingness. She found that silent place of clarity that allowed her to think.
She wasn’t drowned yet. She still had the strength to kick her way to the surface. And the cloth wasn’t tied in such a hopeless knot, it was simply looped twice around her leg. She reached forward. A few quick movements and she broke free. Relieved, she swam upward, forcing herself not to panic, focusing on the simple act of pushing herself through the water until her head broke the surface.
She didn’t see Nezha as she dragged herself to shore. She scanned the wreckage, but she couldn’t find him. Had he surfaced at all? Was he dead? Crushed, impaled, drowned—
No. She had to trust that he was fine. He could control the water itself; it couldn’t possibly kill him.
Could it?
The howl of unnatural wind pierced the channel and lingered, punctuated only by the sound of splintering wood.
Oh, gods.
Rin looked up.
Feylen hung suspended in the air above her, slamming ships against the cliff wall with mere sweeps of his arm. Driftwood and debris swirled in a hazardous circle around him. With winds as fast as these, any one of those pieces might kill her.
Rin’s mouth had gone dry. Her knees buckled. All she wanted was to find a hole and hide. She stood paralyzed by fear and despair. Feylen was going to batter their fleet around the channel until there was nothing left. Why fight? Death would be easier if she didn’t resist . . .
She ground her fingernails into her palm until the pain brought her to her senses.
She couldn’t run.
Who else was going to fight him? Who else possibly could?
She’d lost her sword in the water, but she spied a javelin on the ground. Fat lot of good it would do against Feylen, but it felt better to hold a weapon. She scooped it up, opened her wings, and summoned a flame around her arms and shoulders. Steam fizzled around her, a choking cloud of mist. Rin waved it away, hoping desperately her wings were waterproof.
She focused on generating a steady, concentrated stream of flame around her sides, so searingly hot that the air around her blurred, and the grass at her feet wilted and shriveled into gray ash.
Slowly she rose up toward the Wind God.
Up close, Feylen looked miserable. His skin was pallid, pockmarked, overgrown with sores. They hadn’t given him new clothes—his black Cike uniform was ripped and dirty. Face-to-face he was no fearsome deity. Just a man with tattered garb and broken eyes.
Her fear faded away, replaced by pity. Feylen should have died a long time ago. Now he was a prisoner in his own body, sentenced to watch and suffer while the god he detested manipulated him as a gateway to the material world.
Without the Seal, without Kitay, Rin might have turned into something just like him.
The man is gone, she reminded herself. Defeat the god.
“Hey, asshole!” she shouted. “Over here!”
Feylen turned. The winds calmed.
She tensed, anticipating a sudden blast. She had only Kitay’s guarantee that she could correct course with her wings if Feylen sent her spinning, but that was a better chance than anyone else had.
But Feylen only hung still in the air, head cocked to the side, watching her rise to meet him like a child curiously observing the antics of a little bug.
“Cute trick,” he said.
A piece of driftwood shot past her left arm. She wobbled and righted herself.
Feylen’s cerulean eyes met hers. She shuddered. She was acutely aware of how fragile she was. She was fighting the Wind God in his own domain, and she was a little thing held in the air by nothing more than two sheets of leather and a cage of metal. He could tear her apart and dash her against those cliffs so easily.
But she didn’t just have her wings. She had a javelin. And she had the fire.
She opened her mouth and palms and shot every bit of flame she had at him—three lines of fire roaring from her body all at once. Feylen disappeared behind a wall of red and orange. The winds around him stilled. Debris began dropping out of the air, a rain of wreckage that dotted the waters below.
His retaliatory blow caught her off guard. A gust of force hit her so hard and fast that she hadn’t braced herself, hadn’t even tensed. She hurtled backward, tumbling through the
air in circles until the cliff wall appeared perilously close before her eyes. Her nose scraped the rock before she managed to redirect her momentum and pull herself right-side up.
She drifted back toward Feylen, heart hammering.
She hadn’t burned him to death, but she’d come close. Feylen’s face and hair had turned black. Smoke wafted out from his scorched robes.
He looked shocked.
“Try again,” she called.
His next attack was a series of unrelenting winds blasting her from different, unpredictable directions so she couldn’t just ride out the current. One moment he forced her toward the ground, and the next he buoyed her upward, just to let her drop again.
She maneuvered the winds as well as she could, but it was like swimming against a waterfall. She was a little bird caught in a storm. Her wings were nothing against his overwhelming force. All she could do was keep from plummeting to the ground.
She suspected the only reason Feylen hadn’t yet flung her against the rocks was because he was toying with her.
But he hadn’t finished her off at Boyang, either. We’re not going to kill you, he’d said. She told us not to do that. We’re just supposed to hurt you.
The Empress had commanded him to bring her in alive. That gave her an advantage.
“Careful,” she shouted. “Daji won’t be happy with broken goods.”
Feylen’s entire demeanor changed when she spoke Daji’s name. His shoulders hunched; he seemed to shrink into himself. His eyes darted around, as if petrified that Daji could see him even so high in the air.
Rin stared at him, amazed. What had Daji done to him?
How was Daji so powerful that she could terrify a god?
Rin took the chance to fly in closer. She didn’t know how Daji had subdued Feylen, but she was now sure that Feylen couldn’t kill her.
Daji still wanted her alive, and that gave her her only advantage.
How did one kill a god? She and Kitay had puzzled over the dilemma for hours. She’d wished they could bring him into the Chuluu Korikh. Kitay had wished they could just bring the Chuluu Korikh to him.
In the end, they’d compromised.
Rin eyed the web of fuses lining the opposite cliff wall. If she couldn’t kill Feylen with fire, then she’d bury him under the mountain.
She only had to get him close enough to the rocks.
“I know you’re still in there.” She drifted closer to Feylen. She needed to distract him, if only for a few seconds’ reprieve. “I know you can hear me.”
He took the bait. The winds calmed.
“I don’t care how powerful your god is. You still own this body, Feylen, and you can take it back.”
Feylen stared wordlessly at her, unmoving, but she saw no dimming of the blue, no twitch of recognition in his eyes. His expression was an inscrutable wall, behind which she had no idea if the real Feylen was still alive.
She still had to try.
“I saw Altan in the afterlife,” she said. A lie, but one shrouded in the truth, or at least her version of it. “He wanted me to pass something on to you. Do you want to know what he said?”
Cerulean flickered to black. Rin saw it—she hadn’t imagined it, it wasn’t a trick of the light, she knew she’d seen it. She continued to fly forward. Feylen was afraid now; she could read it all over his face. He drifted backward every time she drew closer.
They were so close to the cliff wall.
She was mere feet away from him. “He wanted me to tell you he’s sorry.”
The winds ceased entirely. A silence descended over the channel. In the still air Rin could hear everything—every haggard breath Feylen took, every round of cannon fire from the ships, every wretched scream from below.
Then Feylen laughed. He laughed so hard that corresponding pulses of wind shot through the air, alternating blasts so fierce that she had to flap frantically to stay afloat.
“This was your plan?” he screeched. “You thought he would care?”
“You do care.” Rin kept her voice calm, level. Feylen was in there. She’d seen him. “I saw you, you remember us. You’re Cike.”
“You mean nothing to us.” Feylen sneered. “We could destroy your world—”
“Then you would have done it. But you’re still bound, aren’t you? She’s bound you. You gods have no power except what we give you. You came through that gate to take your orders. And I’m ordering you to go back.”
Feylen roared. “Who are you to presume?”
“I’m your commander,” she said. “I cull.”
She shot her fire not at him, but the cliff wall. Feylen shrieked with laughter as the flames streamed harmlessly past him.
He hadn’t seen the fuses. He didn’t know.
Rin flapped frantically backward, trying to put as much distance between herself and the cliff as she could.
For a long, torturous instant, nothing happened.
And then the mountain moved.
Mountains weren’t supposed to shift like that. The natural world wasn’t supposed to reshape itself so completely in seconds. But this was real; this was an act of men, not gods. This was Kitay and Ramsa’s handiwork come to fruition. Rin could only stare as the entire top ledge of the cliff slipped down like roofing tiles cascading to the ground.
A shrieking howl pierced through the cascade of tumbling rock. Feylen was whipping up a tornado. But even those last, desperate gusts of wind could not stop thousands of tons of exploded rock jerked downward with the inevitable force of gravity.
When their rumbling stopped, nothing moved beneath them.
Rin sagged in the air, chest heaving. The fire still burned through her arms, but she couldn’t sustain it for long, she was so exhausted. She was struggling just to breathe.
The blood-soaked channel beneath her could have been a meadow of flowers. She imagined that the crimson waves were fields of poppy blossoms, and the moving bodies were just little ants scurrying pointlessly about.
She thought it looked so beautiful.
Could they be winning? If winning meant killing as many people as they could, then yes. She couldn’t tell which side had control over the river, only that it was awash with blood, and that broken ships were dashed against the cliff sides. Feylen had been killing indiscriminately, destroying Republican and Imperial ships alike. She wondered how high the casualty rate had climbed.
She turned toward the valley.
The destruction there was enormous. The palace was on fire, which meant the Militia troops had long ago slashed their way through the refugee camps. The troops would have cut the southerners down like reeds.
Drown in the channel, or burn in the city. Rin had the hysterical urge to laugh, but breathing hurt too much.
She realized suddenly she was losing altitude.
Her fire had gone out. She’d been falling without noticing. She forced flames back into the wings and beat frantically even as her arms screamed in protest.
Her descent halted—she was close enough to the cliffs that she could see Kitay and Venka waving at her.
“I did it!” she screamed to them.
She saw Kitay’s mouth moving, but couldn’t hear him. He pointed.
Too late she turned around. A javelin shot past her midriff, passed harmlessly under her wing. Fuck. Her stomach lurched. She wobbled but righted herself.
The next javelin struck her shoulder.
For a moment, she simply felt confused. Where was the pain? Why was she still hanging in the air? Her own blood floated around her face in great fat drops that for some reason hadn’t fallen, little bulbous things that she couldn’t believe had come from her.
Then her flames receded into her body. Gravity resumed its pull. Her wings creaked and folded against her back. Then she was just deadweight plummeting headfirst into the river.
Her senses shut down upon impact. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t hear, and couldn’t see. She tried to swim, kick herself to the surface, but her arms and legs wo
uldn’t obey her, and besides, she didn’t know which way was up. She choked involuntarily. A torrent of water flooded her mouth.
I’m going to die, she thought. I’m really going to die.
But was this so bad? It was wonderfully, peacefully silent under the surface. She couldn’t feel any pain in her shoulder—her whole body had gone numb. She relaxed her limbs and drifted helplessly toward the river bottom. Easier to give up control, easier to stop struggling. Even her burning lungs didn’t bother her so much. In a moment she would open her mouth, and water would rush in, and that would be the end.
This wasn’t such a bad way to go. At least it was quiet.
Someone seized her hard. Her eyes shot open.
Nezha pulled her head toward his and kissed her hard, his lips forming a seal around hers. A bubble of air passed into her mouth. It wasn’t much, but her vision cleared, her lungs stopped burning, and her limbs began to respond to her commands. Adrenaline kicked in. She needed more air. She grabbed at Nezha’s face.
He pushed her away, shaking his head. She started to panic. He seized her wrists and held her until she stopped flailing madly in the water. Then he wrapped his arms around her torso and pulled them both toward the surface.
He didn’t kick his legs. He didn’t have to swim at all. He only held her against him while a warm current bore them gently upward.
Something shrieked in the air above them just as they broke the surface. A javelin slammed into the water several feet away. Nezha yanked them back down into the depths, but Rin kicked and struggled. All she wanted to do was get to the surface, she was so desperate to breathe . . .
Nezha grasped her face with his hands.
Too exposed, he mouthed.
She understood. They needed to come up somewhere near a broken ship, something that would give them cover. She stopped thrashing. Nezha guided them several yards farther downriver. Then the current buoyed them up and deposited them safely onto the shore.
Her first breath above the surface was the best thing she’d ever tasted. She doubled over, coughing and vomiting river water, but she didn’t care because she was breathing.
Once her lungs were empty of water, she lay back and summoned the fire. Little flames lit up her wrists, danced across her entire body, and bathed her in delicious warmth. Steam hissed as her clothes dried.