The Dragon Republic

by R. F. Kuang

  “I know.” His sweaty fingers slipped and fumbled as he worked the needle around the lock. “Stop moving.”

  The footsteps grew louder.

  Kitay yanked at the bolt, but the chains held firm.

  “Fuck!” He dropped the needle. “Fuck, fuck—”

  Panic squeezed at Rin’s chest. “They’re coming.”

  “I know.” He glared at the iron cuff for a moment, breathing heavily. Then he yanked his shirt over his head, twisted it into a thick knot, and pressed it at her face. “Open your mouth.”

  “What?”

  “So you don’t bite off your tongue.”

  She blinked. Oh.

  She didn’t argue. There was no time to think about it, no time to come up with a better plan. This was it. She let Kitay wedge the cloth into her mouth as far back as it would go until it was pressed down on her tongue, holding her teeth immobile.

  “Should I tell you when?” he asked.

  She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head.

  “Fine.” Several seconds passed. Then he stomped down on her hand.

  Her mind flashed white. Her body jerked. She arched her back, legs kicking uncontrollably at nothing. She heard herself screaming through the cloth, but it seemed to come from very far away. For a few seconds she was detached from herself; it was someone else’s scream, someone else’s hand in pieces. Then her mind reconciled with her body and she began bashing her other hand against the floor, desperate for some secondary pain to mask the intensity of the first.

  “Stop that— Rin, stop!” Kitay grabbed her shoulder and held her still.

  Tears leaked out the sides of her eyes. She couldn’t speak; she could barely breathe.

  “Did you hear that?” The voices from the hallway sounded terribly close. “I’m going in.”

  “Suit yourself, but I’m not coming with you.”

  “She’s sedated—”

  “Does she sound sedated? Go get the captain.”

  Footsteps echoed down the hallway.

  “We have to do this fast,” Kitay hissed. He’d turned a ghastly pale. He was feeling this, too; he had to be in agony, and Rin had no idea how he’d suppressed it.

  She nodded and shut her eyes again, gasping while he yanked at her hands. Fresh stabs of pain lanced up her arm.

  She made the mistake of looking and saw white bone piercing through her flesh. Her vision pulsed black.

  “Try wriggling free,” Kitay said.

  She gave her arm a tentative pull and nearly screamed in frustration. She was still stuck.

  “Put that rag back in,” he said.

  She obeyed. He stomped down again.

  This time the hand broke clean through. She felt it, a clean crack that reverberated through the rest of her body. Kitay clenched her wrist firmly and extricated her hand with one vicious pull.

  Somehow all the pieces came through still attached to her arm. He wrapped her mangled fingers in his shirt. “Tuck this into your elbow. Press down when you can, it’ll stanch the bleeding.”

  She was so dizzy from the pain that she couldn’t stand. Kitay hoisted her up by the armpits to a standing position. “Come on.”

  She leaned against him, unresponsive. Kitay lightly slapped the sides of her face until her eyes blinked open.

  “Can you climb?” he asked. “Please, Rin, we’ve got to go.”

  She groaned. “I have one arm and I’m still high.”

  He dragged her toward the window. “I know. I feel it, too.”

  She looked at him and realized his hand was hanging limp by his side. That his face was drawn, pale, and slick with sweat. They were tied together. Her pain was his pain. But he was fighting through it.

  Then she could, too. She owed him that.

  “I can climb,” she said.

  “It’ll be easy,” he said. Relief shone clear on his face. “We learned this at Sinegard. Twist the rope around your foot to make a little platform. You’ll be standing on about an inch of it. Slide down a little bit at a time.” He ripped a square off of the shirt and pressed it into her good hand. “That’s for the rope burn. Wait until I’m all the way down so I can catch you.”

  He patted her cheeks several times to drag her back to alertness and then hauled himself out the window.

  Rin had no idea how she made it down the wall. Her limbs moved with dreamlike slowness, and the stones kept swimming before her eyes. Several times the rope threatened to come free from her leg and she spun terrifyingly in the air until Kitay yanked it taut. When she couldn’t hold on any longer, she jumped the last six feet and crashed into Kitay. Pain shot up her ankles.

  “Quiet.” Kitay clamped a hand over her mouth before she could gasp. He pointed out into the darkness. “There’s a boat waiting that way, but you’ve got to get across the dais unnoticed.”

  She realized then that they were standing on the execution stage. She glanced behind her. She saw two bodies. They hadn’t bothered to remove them.

  “Don’t look,” Kitay whispered.

  But she couldn’t not look, not when they were standing so close. Suni and Baji lay bent and broken in browning piles of their own blood. The last two shamans of the Cike, victims of her stupidity.

  She glanced around the courtyard. She couldn’t see the night patrol, but surely they would be circling back around the palace any moment. “Won’t they see us?”

  “We have a distraction,” Kitay said.

  Before she could ask, he stuck his fingers into his mouth and whistled.

  A figure appeared at the other end of the courtyard on cue. He stepped into the moonlight, and his profile came into sharp relief. Ramsa.

  Rin started toward him, but Kitay yanked her back by the arm. Ramsa met her eyes, shook his head, and pointed to a line of guards emerging from the far corner.

  Rin froze. They were three against twenty guards, half of whom were Hesperians armed with arquebuses, and she couldn’t call the fire.

  Ramsa calmly pulled two bombs out of his pocket.

  “What’s he doing?” Rin strained against Kitay’s grip. “He’s going to get himself killed.”

  Kitay didn’t budge. “I know.”

  “Let me go, I have to help him—”

  “You can’t.”

  A shout rang through the night. One of the guards had seen Ramsa. The patrol group broke into a run, swords drawn.

  Ramsa knelt on the ground. His fingers worked desperately at the fuse. Sparks flew all around him, but the bombs didn’t light.

  Rin tugged at Kitay’s hands. “Kitay, please—”

  He dragged her farther back into the shadow. “He’s not the one we’re trying to save.”

  She saw a flash of fire powder. The Hesperian guards had fired.

  Ramsa stood up. Somehow the first round of shots had missed him. He’d managed to get the fuse to light. He laughed in delight, holding his bombs over his head.

  The second round of fire tore him apart.

  Time dilated terribly. Rin saw everything happen in slow, deliberate, and intricate detail. One bullet smashed through Ramsa’s jaw and came out the other side in a spray of red. One burrowed through his neck. One embedded itself in his chest. Ramsa stumbled back. The bombs fell out of his hands and hit the ground.

  Rin thought she could see the barest hint of a flame at the point of ignition. Then a ball of fire expanded out like a blooming flower, and then the blast radius consumed the courtyard.

  “Ramsa . . .” She sagged against Kitay’s shoulder, arms stretched toward the blast site. Her mouth worked and she pushed air through her throat, but she didn’t hear her own voice until a long moment after she spoke. “Ramsa, no—”

  Kitay jerked her upright. “He’s bought us an escape window. Let’s go.”

  The sampan that awaited them behind the canal bend was hidden so well in the shadows that Rin thought for a few terrifying seconds that it wasn’t there at all. Then the boatman steered the craft out from under the willow leaves, stopped befo
re them, and extended his hand. He wore a Hesperian military uniform, but his face was hidden under a Nikara archer’s helmet.

  “Sorry we couldn’t get to you earlier.” The boatman was a her. Venka lifted up her helmet for a brief moment and winked. “Get in.”

  Rin, too exhausted to feel bewildered, stumbled hastily into the sampan. Kitay jumped in after her and tossed the side rope overboard.

  “Where’d you get that uniform?” he asked. “Nice touch.”

  “Went corpse-hunting.” Venka kicked the boat away from shore and steered them swiftly down the canal.

  Rin collapsed onto a seat, but Venka nudged her with her foot. “Down on the floor. Cover yourself with that tarp.”

  She crouched down in the space between seats. Kitay helped drag the tarp over her head.

  “How did you know to find us?” Rin asked.

  “Father tipped me off,” Venka said. “I knew something weird was happening on the tower, I just wasn’t able to place what. The moment I caught the gist of what was going on I ran and found Kitay before Vaisra’s men could, but we couldn’t figure out where they were keeping you until Kitay tried that thing with his skin. Neat trick, by the way.”

  “You realize you’ve just declared treason on your country,” Rin said.

  “Seems like the least of our concerns,” Venka said.

  “You can still go back,” Kitay said. “I’m serious, Venka. Your whole family is here, you’ve got no business running away with us. I can take the sampan from here, you can hop off—”

  “No,” she said curtly.

  “Think hard about this,” he insisted. “You’ve still got plausible deniability. You can leave now; no one knows you’re on this boat. But you come with us and you can never go back.”

  “Pity,” Venka said dismissively. She turned to Rin. Her voice took on a hard edge. “I heard what you did to that Hesperian soldier.”

  “Yeah,” Rin said. “So?”

  “So well done. I hope it hurt.”

  “It looked like it did.”

  Venka nodded in silence. Neither of them had anything else to say about it.

  “Any luck with the others?” Venka asked Kitay after a pause.

  He shook his head. “Wasn’t time. The only one I could reach was Gurubai. He should be with the ship now if he got past the guards—”

  “Gurubai?” Rin repeated. “What are you talking about?”

  “Vaisra’s going after the southern Warlords,” Kitay explained. “He’s won his Empire. Now he’s consolidating his power. He started with you, and now he’s just cleaning up the others. I tried to give them some warning, but couldn’t reach them in time.”

  “They’re dead?”

  “Not all of them. They’ve got Charouk in the cells. Don’t know if they’ll execute him or let him languish, but they’ll certainly never set him free. The Rooster Warlord put up a fight, so they shot him when the riots started—”

  “Riots? What the hell is going on?”

  “The camps have turned into a war zone,” Venka said. “They’d doubled the guard all around the refugee district—said it was for safety, but the moment the troops came in for the Warlords they all knew what was happening. The southern troops started the revolt. We’ve been hearing fire powder going off all night—I think Vaisra set the Hesperians loose on them.”

  Rin struggled to take all of this in. The world, it seemed, had turned upside down in the span of several hours. “They’re just killing them? Civilians too?”

  “That’s likely.”

  “Then what about Kesegi?” Rin asked. “Did he get out?”

  Venka frowned. “Who?”

  “I—no one.” Rin swallowed. “Never mind.”

  “Think about it this way,” Venka said brightly. “At least it’s bought you a distraction.”

  Rin retreated back under the tarp and lay still, counting her breaths to distract herself from the mess that was her hand. She wanted to look at it, survey the damage in her mangled fingers, but she couldn’t bring herself to unwrap the bloody cloth. She knew there would be no salvaging that hand. She’d seen the cracked bones.

  “Venka?” Kitay’s voice, urgent.

  “What?”

  “I thought you covered your bases.”

  “I did.”

  Rin sat up. They’d moved faster than she thought—the palace was a distant sight, and they were already sailing past the shipyard. She twisted around to see what Venka and Kitay were staring at.

  Nezha stood alone at the end of the pier.

  Rin scrambled upright, her good hand flung outward. She was still reeling from the laudanum, but she could just elicit the smallest whispers of flame in her palm, could probably jerk out a larger torrent if she focused—

  Kitay tackled her back down under the tarp. “Get down!”

  “I’ll kill him.” Fire burst out from her palm and her lips. “I’ll kill him—”

  “No, you won’t.” He moved to pin her wrists down.

  Without thinking she pummeled at Kitay with both fists, trying to break free. Then her injured hand whacked against the side of the boat, and the pain was so horrendous that for a moment everything went white. Kitay clamped a hand over her mouth before she could scream. She collapsed into his arms. He held her against him and rocked her back and forth while she muffled her shrieks into his shoulder.

  Venka fired two arrows in rapid succession across the harbor. They both missed by a yard. Nezha jerked his head to the side when they whistled past him, but otherwise stood his ground. He didn’t move the entire time the sampan crossed the shipyard toward the dark cover of cliff shadows on the other side of the channel.

  “He’s letting us go,” said Kitay. “Hasn’t even sounded the alarm.”

  “You think he’s on our side?” Venka asked.

  “He’s not,” Rin said flatly. “I know he’s not.”

  She knew with certainty that she’d lost Nezha forever. With Jinzha killed and Mingzha long dead, Nezha was the last male heir to the House of Yin. He stood to inherit the most powerful nation this side of the Great Ocean and become the ruler he’d prepared his entire life to be.

  Why would he throw that away for a friend? She wouldn’t.

  “This is my fault,” she said.

  “It’s not your fault,” Kitay said. “We all thought we could trust that bastard.”

  “But I think he tried to warn me.”

  “What are you talking about? He stabbed you.”

  “The night before the fleet came.” She took a deep breath. “He came to find me. He said I had more enemies than I thought I did. I think he was trying to warn me.”

  Venka pursed her lips. “Then he didn’t try very hard.”

  Two ships with deep builds and slender sides awaited them outside the channel. Both bore the flag of Dragon Province.

  “Those are opium skimmers,” Rin said, confused. “Why are they—”

  “Those are fake flags. They’re Red Junk ships.” Kitay helped her to her feet as the sampan bumped up against the closest skimmer’s hull. Kitay whistled up at the deck. Several seconds later, four ropes dropped into the water around them.

  Venka fastened them to hooks on the four sides of the sampan. Kitay whistled again, and slowly they began to rise.

  “Moag sends her regards.” Sarana winked at Rin as she helped her aboard. “We got your message. Figured you’d want a ride farther south. Just didn’t think things would get this bad.”

  Rin was both deeply relieved and frankly amazed that the Lilies had come for her at all. She couldn’t remember why she’d ever hated Sarana; right now she only wanted to kiss her. “So you decided to pick a fight with a giant?”

  “You know how Moag is. Always wants to snatch up trump cards, especially when they’ve been tossed out.”

  “Did Gurubai make it?” Kitay asked.

  “The Monkey Warlord? Yes, he’s belowdecks. Little bit bloodied up, but he’ll be fine.” Sarana’s gaze landed on Rin’s wrappe
d hand. “Tiger’s tits. What’s under there?”

  “You don’t want to see,” Rin said.

  “Do you have a physician on board?” Kitay asked. “I have triage training otherwise, but I’ll need equipment—boiling water, bandages—”

  “Downstairs. I’ll take her.” Sarana put her arm around Rin and helped her across the deck.

  Rin glanced over her shoulder as they walked, peering at the receding cliffs. It seemed incredible that they had not been followed out of the channel. Vaisra certainly knew she’d escaped by now. Troops should be pouring out of the barracks. She’d be surprised if the entire city weren’t put under lockdown. The Hesperians would scour the city, the cliffs, and the waters until they had her back in custody.

  But the Red Junk skimmers were so clearly visible under the moonlight. They hadn’t bothered to hide. Hadn’t even turned their lamps off.

  She stumbled over a bump in the floor panels.

  “All right there?” Sarana asked.

  “They’re going to catch us,” Rin said. Everything felt so idiotically meaningless—her escape, Ramsa’s death, the river rendezvous. The Hesperians were going to board them in an hour. What was the point?

  “Don’t underestimate an opium skimmer,” said Sarana.

  “Your fastest skimmer couldn’t outrun a Hesperian warship,” Rin said.

  “Probably not. But we have a little time. Command miscommunications always happen when you have two armies and leaders who aren’t familiar with each other. The Hesperians don’t know it’s not a Republican ship and the Republicans won’t know if the Hesperians have given permission to fire, or if they even need it. Everyone assumes that someone else is taking care of it.”

  Sarana’s plan was to escape through command chain inefficiency. Rin didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “That doesn’t buy you escape, it buys you maybe half an hour.”

  “Sure.” Sarana pointed to the other skimmer. “Thus the second ship.”

  “What is that, a decoy?”

  “Pretty much. We stole the idea from Vaisra,” Sarana said cheerfully. “In a second we’re going to cloak all of our abovedeck lights, but that ship’s going to posture like it’s ready for a fight. It’s rigged up with twice the firepower of a usual skimmer. They won’t get close enough to board, so they’ll be forced to blow it out of the water.”