The Poppy War

Chapter 10

The Emperor Ryohai had now patrolled the eastern Nikara border in the Nariin Sea for twelve nights. The Ryohai was a lightly built ship, an elegant Federation model designed for slicing quickly through choppy waters. It carried few soldiers; its deck wasn’t large enough to hold a battalion. It wasn’t doing reconnaissance. No courier birds circled the flagless masthead; no spies left the ship under the cover of the ocean mist.

The only thing the Ryohai did was flit fretfully around the shoreline, pacing back and forth over still waters like an anxious housewife. Waiting for something. Someone.

The crew spent their days in silence. The Ryohai carried only a skeleton crew: the captain, a few deckhands, and a small contingent from the Federation Armed Forces. It bore one esteemed guest: General Gin Seiryu, grand marshal of the Armed Forces and esteemed adviser to Emperor Ryohai himself. And it bore one visitor, one Nikara who had lurked in the shadows of the hold since the Ryohai had crossed into the waters of the Nariin Sea.

Cike commander Tyr was good at being invisible. In this state, he did not need to eat or sleep. Absorbed in the shadow, shrouded in darkness, he hardly needed to breathe.

He found the passing days irksome only due to boredom, but he had maintained longer vigils than this one. He had waited a week in the bedroom closet of the Dragon Warlord. He had spent an entire month ensconced under the floorboards beneath the feet of the leaders of the Republic of Hesperia.

Now he waited for the men aboard the Ryohai to reveal their purpose.

Tyr had been surprised when he received orders from Sinegard to infiltrate a Federation ship. For years the Cike had operated only within the Empire, killing off dissidents the Empress found particularly troublesome. The Empress did not send the Cike overseas—not since her disastrous attempt to assassinate the young Emperor Ryohai, which had ended with two dead operatives and another driven so mad he had to be carted off, screaming, to a plinth in the stone prison.

But Tyr’s duty was not to question but to obey. He crouched inside the shadow, unperceived by all. He waited.

It was a still, windless night. It was a night heavy with secrets.

It had been a night like this one, so many decades ago, when the moon was full and resplendent in the sky, that Tyr’s master had first taken him deep into the underground tunnels where light would never touch. His master had guided him around one winding turn after another, spinning him about in the darkness so that he could not keep a map in his head of the underground labyrinth.

When they’d reached the heart of the spider’s web, Tyr’s master had abandoned him within. Find your way out, he had ordered Tyr. If the goddess takes you, she will guide you. If she does not, you will perish.

Tyr had never resented his master for leaving him in the darkness. Such was how things must be. Still, his fear had been real and urgent. He had lingered in the airless tunnels for days in a panic. First had come the thirst. Then the hunger. When he tripped over objects in the darkness, objects that clattered and echoed about him, he knew they were bones.

How many apprentices had been sent into the same underground maze? How many had emerged?

Only one in Tyr’s generation. Tyr’s shamanic line remained pure and strong through the proven ability of its successors, and only a survivor could be instilled with the gifts of the goddess to pass down to the next generation. The fact that Tyr was given this chance meant that every apprentice before him had tried and failed, and died.

Tyr had been so scared then.

He was not scared now.

Now, aboard the ship, the darkness took him once more, just as it had thirty years ago. Tyr was swathed in it, an unborn infant in his mother’s womb. To pray to his goddess was to regress to that primordial state before infancy, when the world was quiet. Nothing could see him. Nothing could harm him.

The schooner made its way across the midnight sea, sailing skittishly, like a little child doing something that it shouldn’t. The tiny boat wasn’t a part of the Nikara fleet. All identifying marks had been clumsily chipped off its hull.

But it sailed from the direction of the Nikara shore. Either the schooner had taken a very long and convoluted route to meet with the Ryohai in order to fool an assassin that the Ryohai didn’t know it had on board, or it was a Nikara vessel.

Tyr crouched behind the masthead, spyglass trained on the schooner’s deck.

When he stepped out of the darkness, he experienced a sudden vertigo. This happened more and more often now, whenever he had waited in shadows for too long. It became harder to walk in the world of the material, to detach himself from his goddess.

Careful, he warned himself, or you won’t be able to come back.

He knew what would happen then. He would become a spouting, unstoppable conduit for the gods, a gate to the spirit realm without a lock. He would be a foaming, useless, seizing vessel, and someone would cart him off to the Chuluu Korikh, where he couldn’t do any harm. Someone would register his name in the Wheels and watch him sink into the stone prison the way he’d imprisoned so many of his own subordinates.

He remembered his first visit to the Chuluu Korikh, when he had immured his own master in the mountain. Stood before him, face-to-face, as the stone walls closed around his master’s mien: Eyes closed. Sleeping but not dead.

The day would come soon when he would go mad if he left, and madder still if he didn’t. But that was the fate that awaited the men and women of the Cike. To be an Empress’s assassin meant early death or madness, or both.

Tyr had thought he might still have one or two more decades, as his master had before he’d relinquished the goddess to Tyr. He thought he still had a solid period of time to train an initiate and teach them to walk the void. But he was following his goddess’s timeline, and he had no say in when she would ultimately call him back.

I should have chosen an apprentice. I should have chosen one of my people.

Five years ago he’d thought he might choose the Seer of the Cike, that thin child from the Hinterlands. But Chaghan was so frail and bizarre, even for his people. Chaghan would have commanded like a demon. He would have achieved utter obedience from his underlings, but only because he would have taken away their free will. Chaghan would have shattered minds.

Tyr’s new lieutenant, the boy sent to him from the Academy, made a far better candidate. The boy was already slated to command the Cike when the time came that Tyr was no longer fit to lead.

But the boy already had a god of his own. And the gods were selfish.

The schooner halted under the Ryohai’s shadow. A solitary cloaked figure climbed into a rowboat and crossed the narrow distance between the two ships.

The Ryohai’s captain ordered ropes to be lowered. He and half the crew stood on the main deck, waiting for the Nikara contingent to come aboard.

Two deckhands helped the cloaked figure onto the deck.

She pulled the dark hood off her head and shook out a mass of long, shimmering hair. Hair like obsidian. Skin of a mineral whiteness that shone like the moon itself. Lips like freshly spilled blood.

The Empress Su Daji was on this ship.

Tyr was so surprised he nearly stumbled out of the shadows.

Why was she here? His first thought was absurdly petty—did she not trust him to take care of this on his own?

Something had to have gone wrong. Was she here of her own volition? Had the Federation compelled her to come?

Or had his own orders changed?

Tyr’s mind raced frantically, wondering how to react. He could act now, kill the soldiers before they could hurt the Empress. But Daji knew he was here—she would have signaled him if she wanted the Federation men dead.

He was to wait, then—wait and watch what Daji’s play was.

“Your Highness.” General Gin Seiryu was a massive soldier, a giant among men. He towered over the Empress. “You have been long in coming. The Emperor Ryohai grows impatient with you.”

“I am not Ryohai’s dog to command.” Daji’s voice resounded across the ship—cool and clear as ice, sharp as knives.

A circle of soldiers formed around Daji, closing her in with the general. But Daji stood tall, chin raised, betraying no fear.

“But you will be summoned,” the general said harshly. “The Emperor Ryohai grows irritated with your dallying. Your advantages are dwindling. You hold precious few cards, and this you know. You should be glad the Emperor has deigned to speak to you at all.”

Daji’s lip curled. “His Excellency is certainly gracious.”

“Enough of this banter. Speak your piece.”

“All in due time,” Daji said calmly. “But first, another matter to attend to.”

And she looked directly into the shadows where Tyr stood. “Good. You’re here.”

Tyr took that for his signal.

Knives raised, he rushed from the shadows—only to stumble to his knees as Daji arrested him with her gaze.

He choked, unable to speak. His limbs were numb, frozen; it was all he could do to remain upright. Daji had the power of hypnosis, he knew, but never had she used it on him.

All thoughts were pushed from his mind. All he could think about were her eyes. They were at first large, luminous and black; and then they were yellow like a snake’s, with narrow pupils that drew him in like a mother grasping at her baby, like a cruel imitation of his own goddess.

And like his goddess, she was so beautiful. So very beautiful.

Transfixed, Tyr lowered his knives.

Visions danced before him. Her great yellow eyes pulsed in his gaze; suddenly gigantic, they filled his entire field of sight to the periphery, drew him into her world.

He saw shapes without names. He saw colors beyond description. He saw faceless women dancing through vermilion and cobalt, bodies curved like the silk ribbons they spun in their hands. Then, as her prey was entranced, the Vipress slammed down into him with her fangs and flooded him with poison.

The psychospiritual assault was devastating and immediate.

She shattered Tyr’s world like glass, like he existed in a mirror and she had dashed it against a sharp corner, and he was arrested in the moment of breaking so that it was not over in seconds but took place over eons. Somewhere a shriek began and grew higher and higher in pitch, and did not stop. The Vipress’s eyes turned a colorless white that bored into his vision and turned everything into pain. Tyr sought refuge in the shadows, but his goddess was nowhere, and those hypnotic eyes were everywhere. Everywhere he turned, the eyes looked upon him; the great Snake hissed, her gaze trained on him, boring into him, paralyzing him—

Tyr called out for his goddess again, but still she was silent, she had been driven away by a power that was infinitely stronger than darkness itself.

Su Daji had channeled something older than the Empire. Something as old as time.

Tyr’s world ceased to spin. He and the Empress drifted alone together in the eye of the hurricane of colors, stabilized only by her generosity. He took a form again, and so did she; no longer a viper but a goddess in the shape of Su Daji, the woman.

“Do not resent me for this. There are forces at play you could not possibly understand, against which your life is irrelevant.” Although she appeared mortal, her voice came from everywhere, originated within him, vibrated in his bones. It was the only thing that existed, until she relented and let him speak.

“Why are you doing this?” Tyr whispered.

“Prey do not question the motives of the predator,” hissed the thing that was not Su Daji. “The dead do not question the living. Mortals do not challenge the gods.”

“I killed for you,” Tyr said. “I would have done anything for you.”

“I know,” she said, and stroked his face. She spoke with a casual sorrow, and for an instant she sounded like the Empress again. The colors dimmed. “You were fools.”

She pushed him off the ship.

The pain of drowning, Tyr realized, came in the struggle. But he could not struggle. He was every part of him paralyzed, unable to blink even to shut his eyes against the stinging assault of salt water.

Tyr could do nothing then but die.

He sank back into the darkness. Back into the deep, where sounds could not be heard, sights could not be seen, where nothing could be felt, where nothing lived.

Back into the soft stillness of the womb.

Back to his mother. Back to his goddess.

The death of a shaman did not go unnoticed in the world of spirit. The shattering of Tyr sent a psychospiritual shock wave across the realm of things unknown.

It was felt far away in the peaks of the Wudang Mountains, where the Night Castle stood hidden from the world. It was felt by the Seer of the Bizarre Children, the lost son of the last true khan of the Hinterlands.

The pale Seer traversed the spirit plane as easily as passing through a door, and when he looked for his commander he saw only darkness and the shattered outline of what had once been human. He saw, on the horizon of things yet to come, a land covered in smoke and fire. He saw a battalion of ships crossing the narrow strait. He saw the beginning of a war.

“What do you see?” asked Altan Trengsin.

The white-haired Seer tilted his head to the sky, exposing long, jagged scars running down the sides of his pale neck. He uttered a harsh, cackling laugh.

“He’s gone,” he said. “He’s really gone.”

Altan’s fingers tightened on the Seer’s shoulder.

The Seer’s eyes flew open. Behind thin eyelids there was nothing but white. No pupils, no irises, no spot of color. Only a pale mountain landscape, like freshly fallen snow, like nothingness itself. “There has been a Hexagram.”

“Tell me,” Altan said.

The Seer turned to face him. “I see the truth of three things. One: we stand on the verge of war.”

“This we’ve known,” Altan said, but the Seer cut him off.

“Two: we have an enemy whom we love.”

Altan stiffened.

“Three: Tyr is lost.”

Altan swallowed hard. “What does that mean?”

The Seer took his hand. Brought it to his lips and kissed it.

“I have seen the end of things,” he said. “The shape of the world has changed. The gods now walk in men as they have not for a long, long time. Tyr will not return. The Bizarre Children answer to you now, and you alone.”

Altan exhaled slowly. He felt a tremendous sense of both grief and relief. He had no commander. No. He was the commander.

Tyr cannot stop me now, he thought.

Tyr’s death was felt by the Gatekeeper himself, who had lingered all these years, not quite dead but not quite alive, ensconced in the shell of a mortal but not mortal himself.

The Gatekeeper was broken and confused, and he had forgotten much of who he was, but one thing he would never forget was the stain of the Vipress’s venom.

The Gatekeeper felt her ancient power dissipate into the void that both separated them and brought them together. And he raised his head to the sky and knew that an enemy had returned.

It was felt by the young apprentice at Sinegard who meditated alone when her classmates slept. Who frowned at the disturbance she felt acutely but did not understand.

Who wondered, as she constantly did, what would happen if she disobeyed her master, swallowed the poppy seed, and traversed to commune again with the gods.

If she did more than commune. If she pulled one back down with her.

For although she was forbidden from calling the Phoenix, that did not stop the Phoenix from calling upon her.

Soon, whispered the Phoenix in her sleep. Soon you will call on me for my power, and when the time comes, you will not be able to resist. Soon you will ignore the warnings of the Woman and the Gatekeeper and fall into my fiery embrace.

I can make you great. I can make you a legend.

She tried to resist.

She tried to empty her mind, like Jiang had taught her; she tried to clear the anger and the fire from her head.

She found that she couldn’t.

She found that she didn’t want to.

On the first day of the seventh month, another border skirmish erupted, between the Eighteenth Battalion of the Federation Armed Forces and the Nikara patrol in Horse Province bordering the Hinterlands to the north. After six hours of combat, the parties reached a cease-fire. They passed the night in an uneasy truce.

On the second day, a Federation soldier did not report for morning patrol. After a thorough search of the camp, the Federation general at the border city of Muriden demanded the Nikara general open the gates of his camp to be searched.

The Nikara general refused.

On the third day, Emperor Ryohai of the Federation of Mugen issued by courier pigeon a formal demand to the Empress Su Daji for the return of his soldier at Muriden.

The Empress called the Twelve Warlords to her throne at Sinegard and deliberated for seventy-two hours.

On the sixth day, the Empress formally replied that Ryohai could go fuck himself.

On the seventh day, the Federation of Mugen declared war on the Empire of Nikan. Across the longbow island, women wept tears of joy and purchased likenesses of Emperor Ryohai to hang in their homes, men enlisted to serve in the reserve forces, and children ran in the streets screaming with the celebratory bloodlust of a nation at war.

On the eighth day, a battalion of Federation soldiers landed at the port of Muriden and decimated the city. When resisted by province Militia, they ordered that all the males in Muriden, children and babies included, be rounded up and shot.

The women were spared only by the Federation army’s haste to move inland. The battalion looted the villages as it went, seized grain and transport animals for their own. What they could not take with them, they killed. They needed no supply lines. They took from the land as they traveled. They marched across the heartland on a warpath to the capital.

On the thirteenth day, a courier eagle reached the office of Jima Lain at the Academy. It read simply:

Horse Province has fallen. Mugen comes for Sinegard.

“It’s sort of exciting, really,” Kitay said.

“Yes,” said Rin. “We’re about to be invaded by our centuries-old enemy after they breached a peace treaty that has maintained a fragile geopolitical stability for two decades. So very exciting.”

“At least now we know we have job security,” said Kitay. “Everyone wants more soldiers.”

“Could you be a little less glib about this?”

“Could you be less depressing?”

“Could we move a bit faster?” asked the magistrate.

Rin and Kitay glanced at each other.

Both of them would rather have been doing anything other than aiding the civilian evacuation effort. Since Sinegard was too far north for comfort, the Empire’s bureaucracy was moving to a wartime capital in the city of Golyn Niis to the south.

By the time the Federation battalion arrived, Sinegard would be nothing but a ghost city. A city of soldiers. In theory, this meant that Rin and Kitay had the incredibly important job of ensuring that the central leadership of the Empire survived even if the capital didn’t.

In practice, this meant dealing with very fat, very annoying city bureaucrats.

Kitay tried to hoist the last crate up into the wagon and promptly staggered under the weight. “What’s in this?” he demanded, wobbling as he tried to balance the crate on his hip.

Rin hastily reached down and helped Kitay ease the crate up onto the wagon, which was already teetering from the weight of the magistrate’s many possessions.

“My teapots,” said the magistrate. “See how I marked the side? Careful not to let it tilt.”

“Your teapots,” Kitay repeated incredulously. “Your teapots are a priority right now.”

“They were a gift to my father from the Dragon Emperor, may his soul rest in peace.” The magistrate surveyed the top-heavy wagon. “Oh, that reminds me—don’t forget the vase on the patio.”

He looked imploringly at Rin.

She was dazed from the afternoon heat, exhausted from hours of packing the magistrate’s entire estate into several ill-prepared moving vehicles. She noticed in her stupor that the magistrate’s jowls quivered hilariously when he spoke. Under different circumstances she might have pointed that out to Kitay. Under different circumstances, Kitay might have laughed.

The magistrate gestured again to the vase. “Be careful with that, will you? It’s as old as the Red Emperor. You might want to strap it down to the back of the wagon.”

Rin stared at him in disbelief.

“Sir?” Kitay asked.

The magistrate turned to look at him. “What?”

With a grunt, Kitay raised the crate over his head and flung it to the ground. It landed on the dirt with a hard thud, not the tremendous crash Rin had rather been hoping for. The wooden lid of the crate popped off. Out rolled several very nice porcelain teapots, glazed with a lovely flower pattern. Despite their tumble, they looked unbroken.

Then Kitay took to them with a slab of wood.

When he was done smashing them, he pushed his wiry curls out of his face and whirled on the sweating magistrate, who cringed in his seat as if afraid Kitay might start smashing at him, too.

“We are at war,” Kitay said. “And you are being evacuated because for gods know what reason, you’ve been deemed important to this country’s survival. So do your job. Reassure your people. Help us maintain order. Do not pack your fucking teapots.”

Within days, the Academy was transformed from a campus to a military encampment. The grounds were overrun with green-clad soldiers from the Eighth Division of the nearby Ram Province, and the students were absorbed into their number.

The Militia soldiers were a stoic, curt crowd. They took on the Academy students begrudgingly, all the while making it very clear that they thought the students had no place in the war.

“It’s a superiority issue,” Kitay speculated later. “Most of the soldiers were never at Sinegard. It’s like being told to work with someone who in three years would have been your superior officer, even though you have a decade of combat experience on them.”

“They don’t have combat experience, either,” said Rin. “We’ve fought no wars in the last two decades. They know less of what they’re doing than we do.”

Kitay couldn’t argue with that.

At least the arrival of the Eighth Division meant the return of Raban, who was tasked with evacuating the first-year students out of the city, along with the civilians.

“But I want to fight!” protested a student who barely came up to Rin’s shoulder.

“Fat lot of good you’ll do,” Raban answered.

The first-year stuck out his chin. “Sinegard is my home. I’ll defend it. I’m not a little kid, I don’t have to be herded out like all those terrified women and children.”

“You are defending Sinegard. You’re protecting its inhabitants. All those women and children? You’re in charge of their safety. Your job is to make sure they get to the mountain pass. That’s quite a serious task.” Raban caught Rin’s eye as he shepherded the first-years out of the main gate.

“I’m scared some of the younger ones are going to sneak back in,” he told her quietly.

“You’ve got to admire them,” said Rin. “Their city’s about to be invaded and their first thought is to defend it.”

“They’re being stupid,” said Raban. He spoke with none of his usual patience. He looked exhausted. “This is not the time for heroism. This is war. If they stay, they’re dead.”

Escape plans were made for the students. In case the city fell, they were to flee down the little-known ravine on the other side of the valley to join the rest of the civilians in a mountain hideout where they couldn’t be reached by the Federation battalions. This plan did not include the masters.

“Jima doesn’t think we can win,” said Kitay. “She and the faculty are going to go down with the school.”

“Jima’s just being cautious,” said Raban, trying to lift their spirits. “Sunzi said to plan for every contingency, right?”

“Sunzi also said that when you cross a river, you should burn the bridges so that your army can’t entertain thoughts of retreating,” said Kitay. “This sounds a lot like retreating to me.”

“Prudence is different from cowardice,” said Raban. “And besides, Sunzi also wrote that you should never attack a cornered foe. They’ll fight harder than any man thinks possible. Because a cornered enemy has nothing to lose.”

The days seemed to both stretch for an eternity and disappear before anything could get done. Rin had the uncomfortable sense that they were just waiting around for the enemy to land on their front porch. At the same time she felt frantically underprepared, as if battle preparations were not being done quickly enough.

“I wonder what a Federation soldier looks like,” Kitay said as they descended the mountain to pick up sharpened weapons from the armory.

“They have arms and legs, I’m guessing. Maybe even a head.”

“No, I mean, what do they look like?” Kitay asked. “Like Nikara? All of the Federation came from the eastern continent. They’re not like Hesperians, so they must look somewhat normal.”

Rin couldn’t see why this was relevant. “Does it matter?”

“Don’t you want to see the face of the enemy?” Kitay asked.

“No, I don’t,” she said. “Because then I might think they’re human. And they’re not human. We’re talking about the people who gave opium to toddlers the last time they invaded. The people who massacred Speer.”

“Maybe they’re more human than we realize,” said Kitay. “Has anyone ever stopped to ask what the Federation want? Why is it that they must fight us?”

“Because they’re crammed on that tiny island and they think Nikan should be theirs. Because they fought us before and they almost won,” Rin said curtly. “What does it matter? They’re coming, and we’re staying, and at the end of the day whoever is alive is the side that wins. War doesn’t determine who’s right. War determines who remains.”

All classes at Sinegard ceased to meet. The masters resumed positions they had retired from decades ago. Irjah took over strategic command of the Sinegardian Reserve Forces. Enro and her apprentices returned to the city’s central hospital to set up a triage center. Jima assumed martial command over the city, a position she shared with the Ram Warlord. This involved, in parts, shouting at city officials and at obstinate squadron leaders.

The outlook was grim. The Eighth Division was three thousand men strong, hardly enough to take on the reported invading force of ten thousand. The Ram Warlord had sent for reinforcements from the Third Division, which was returning from patrol up north by the Hinterlands, but the Third was unlikely to arrive before the Federation did.

Jiang was rarely available. He was always either in Jima’s office going over contingency plans with Irjah, or not on campus at all. When Rin finally managed to track him down, he seemed harried and impatient. She had to run to keep up with him on his way down the steps.

“We’re putting lessons on hiatus,” he said. “I’m sure you’ve noticed there’s no time for that now. I can’t devote the time to train you properly.”

He made to brush past her, but she grabbed his sleeve. “Master, I wanted to ask—what if we called the gods? I mean, against the Federation?”

“What are you talking about?” He seemed faintly aghast. “Now is hardly the time for this.”

“Surely there are battle applications to what we’ve been studying,” she pressed.

“We’ve been studying how to consult the gods,” he said. “Not how to bring them back down to earth.”

“But they could help us fight!”

“What? No. No.” He flapped his hands, growing visibly agitated as he spoke. “Have you not listened to a word I’ve said these past two years? I told you, the gods are not weapons you can just dust off and use. The gods won’t be summoned into battle.”

“That’s not true,” she said. “I’ve read the reports from the Red Emperor’s crusades. I know the monks summoned gods against him. And the tribes of the Hinterlands—”

“The Hinterlanders consult the gods for healing. They seek guidance and enlightenment,” Jiang interrupted. “They do not call the gods down onto earth, because they know better. Every war we’ve fought with the aid of the gods, we’ve won at a terrible consequence. There is a price. There is always a price.”

“Then what’s the point?” she snapped. “Why learn Lore at all?”

His expression then was terrible. He looked as he had that day Sunzi the pig was slaughtered, when she told him she wanted to pledge Strategy. He looked wounded. Betrayed.

“The point of every lesson does not have to be to destroy,” he said. “I taught you Lore to help you find balance. I taught you so that you would understand how the universe is more than what we perceive. I didn’t teach you so that you could weaponize it.”

“The gods—”

“The gods will not be used at our beck and call. The gods are so far out of our realm of understanding that any attempt to weaponize them can only end in disaster.”

“What about the Phoenix?”

Jiang stopped walking. “Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no.”

“The god of the Speerlies,” said Rin. “Each time it has been called, it has answered. If we could just . . .”

Jiang looked pained. “You know what happened to the Speerlies.”

“But they were channeling fire long before the Second Poppy War! They practiced shamanism for centuries! The power—”

“The power would consume you,” Jiang said harshly. “That’s what fire does. Why do you think the Speerlies never won back their freedom? You’d think a race like that wouldn’t have remained subordinate for long. They would have conquered all of Nikan, if their power were sustainable. How come they never revolted against the Empire? The fire killed them, Rin, just as it empowered them. It drove them mad, it robbed them of their ability to think for themselves, until all they knew to do was fight and destroy as they had been ordered. The Speerlies were obsessed with their own power, and as long as the Emperor gave them free license to run rampant with their bloodlust, there was very little they cared about. The Speerlies were collectively deluded. They called the fire, yes, but they are hardly worth emulating. The Red Emperor was cruel and ruthless, but even he had the good sense never to train shamans in his Militia, outside of the Speerlies. Treating the gods as weapons only ever spells death.”

“We’re at war! We might die anyway. So maybe calling the gods gives us a fighting chance. What’s the worst that could happen?”

“You’re so young,” he said softly. “You have no idea.”

After that, Rin saw neither hide nor hair of Jiang on campus at all. Rin knew he was deliberately avoiding her, as he had before her Trials, as he did whenever he didn’t want to have a conversation. She found this incredibly frustrating.

You’re so young.

That was even more frustrating.

She wasn’t so young that she didn’t know her country was at war. Not so young that she hadn’t been tasked to defend it.

Children ceased to be children when you put a sword in their hands. When you taught them to fight a war, then you armed them and put them on the front lines, they were not children anymore. They were soldiers.

Sinegard’s time was running out. Scouts reported daily that the Federation force was almost on their doorstep.

Rin couldn’t sleep, though she desperately needed to. Each time she closed her eyes, anxiety crushed her like an avalanche. During the day her head swam with exhaustion and her eyes burned, yet she could not calm herself enough to rest. She tried meditating, but terror plagued her mind; her heart raced and her breath contracted with fear.

At night, when she lay alone in the darkness, she heard over and over the call of the Phoenix. It plagued her dreams, whispered seductively to her from the other realm. The temptation was so great that it nearly drove her mad.

I will keep you sane, Jiang had promised.

But he had not kept her sane. He had shown her a great power, a tantalizingly wonderful power strong enough to protect her city and country, and then he had forbidden her from accessing it.

Rin obeyed, because he was her master, and the allegiance between master and apprentice still meant something, even in times of war.

But that didn’t stop her from going into his garden when she knew he was not on campus, and shoving several handfuls of poppy seeds in her front pocket.

Chapter 11

When the main column of the Federation Armed Forces marched on Sinegard, they did not attempt to conceal their arrival. They did not need to. Sinegard knew already that they were coming, and the terror the Federation inflicted gave them a far greater strategic advantage than the element of surprise. They advanced in three columns, marching from every direction but the west, where Sinegard was backed by the Wudang Mountains. They forged forward with massive crimson banners flying overhead, illuminated by raised torches.

For Ryohai, the banners read. For the Emperor.

In his Principles of War, the great military theorist Sunzi had warned against attacking an enemy that occupied the higher ground. The target above held the advantage of surveillance and would not need to tire out their troops by climbing uphill.

The Federation invasion strategy was a giant fuck you to Sunzi.

To storm Sinegard from higher ground would have required a detour up the Wudang Mountains, which would have delayed the Federation assault by almost an entire week. The Federation would not give Sinegard a week. The Federation had the weapons and the numbers to take Sinegard from below.

From her vantage point high on the southern city wall, Rin watched the Federation force approach like a great fiery snake winding its way through the valley, encircling Sinegard to crush and swallow it. She saw it coming, and she trembled.

I want to hide. I want someone to tell me I’m going to be safe, that this is just a joke, a bad dream.

In that moment she realized that all this time she had been playing at being a soldier, playing at bravery.

But now, on the eve of the battle, she could not pretend anymore.

Fear bubbled in the back of her throat, so thick and tangible that she almost choked on it. Fear made her fingers tremble violently so that she almost dropped her sword. Fear made her forget how to breathe. She had to force air into her lungs, close her eyes, and count to herself as she inhaled and exhaled. Fear made her dizzy and nauseated, made her want to vomit over the side of the wall.

It’s just a physiological reaction, she told herself. It’s just in your mind. You can control it. You can make it go away.

They had gone over this in training. They had been warned about this feeling. They were taught to control their fear, turn it to their advantage; use their adrenaline to remain alert, to ward off fatigue.

But a few days of training could not negate what her body instinctively felt, which was the imminent truth that she was going to bleed, she was going to hurt, and she was most likely going to die.

When had she last been this scared? Had she felt this paralysis, this numbing dread before she stepped into the ring with Nezha two years ago? No, she had been angry then, and proud. She had thought she was invincible. She had been looking forward to the fight, anticipating the bloodlust.

That felt stupid now. So, so stupid. War was not a game, where one fought for honor and admiration, where masters would keep her from sustaining any real harm.

War was a nightmare.

She wanted to cry. She wanted to scream and hide behind someone, behind one of the soldiers, wanted to whimper, I am scared, I want to wake up from this dream, please save me.

But no one was coming for her. No one was going to save her. There was no waking up.

“Are you all right?” Kitay asked.

“No,” she said, trembling. Her voice was a frightened squeak. “I’m scared. Kitay, we’re going to die.”

“No, we’re not,” Kitay said fiercely. “We’re going to win, and we are going to live.”

“You’ve done the math, too.” They were outnumbered three to one. “Victory is not possible.”

“You have to believe it is.” Kitay’s fingers were clenched so tightly around his sword hilt that they had turned white. “The Third will get here in time. You have to tell yourself that’s true.”

Rin swallowed hard and nodded. You were not trained to snivel and cower, she told herself. The girl from Tikany, the escaped bride who had never seen a city, would have been scared. The girl from Tikany was gone. She was a third-year apprentice of the Academy at Sinegard, she was a soldier of the Eighth Division, and she was trained to fight.

And she was not alone. She had poppy seeds in her pocket. She had a god on her side.

“Tell me when,” Kitay said. He was poised with his sword over the rope that constrained a booby trap they had set to defend the outer perimeter. Kitay had designed this trap; he would unleash it just as soon as the enemy was within range.

They were so close she could see the firelight flickering over their faces.

Kitay’s hand trembled.

“Not yet,” she whispered.

The first of the Federation battalion crossed the boundary.

“Now.”

Kitay slashed at the rope.

A rolling avalanche of logs was freed from its breaking point, pulled down by gravity to bowl straight through the main advancing force. The logs rolled chaotically, shattered limbs and crushed bone with a noise like thunder that went on and on. For a moment the rumbling of carnage was so great Rin thought they might have won the battle before it started, might have seriously crippled the advancing force. Kitay whooped hysterically over the clamor, clutching Rin to keep from falling over as the gates themselves shook.

But when the roar of the logs died down, the invaders continued to advance into Sinegard to the steady beat of war drums.

A tier above Rin and Kitay, standing at the highest precipices of the South Gate, the archers loosed a round of arrows. Most clattered uselessly against raised shields. Some found their way through the cracks, embedded their heads in the unguarded fleshy parts of soldiers’ necks. But the heavily armored Federation soldiers simply marched over the bodies of their fallen comrades, continuing their relentless assault toward the city gates.

The squadron leader shouted for another round of arrows.

It was close to pointless. There were far more soldiers than there were arrows. Sinegard’s outer defense was flimsy at best. Each of Kitay’s booby traps had been sprung, and though all but one went off beautifully, they were not enough to even dent the enemy ranks.

There was nothing to do but wait. Wait until the gate was broken, until there was a tremendous crash. Then the signal gongs were ringing, screaming to all who didn’t already know that the Federation had breached the walls. The Federation was in Sinegard.

They marched to the cacophony of cannon fire and rockets, bombarding Sinegard’s outer defenses with their siege breakers.

The gate buckled and broke under the strain.

They poured through like a swarm of ants, like a cloud of hornets; unstoppable and infinite, overwhelming in number.

We can’t win. Rin stood in a daze of despair, sword hanging by her side. What difference would it make if she fought back? It might stay her death sentence by a few seconds, maybe minutes, but at the end of the night she would be dead, her body broken and bloody on the ground, and nothing would matter . . .

This battle wasn’t like the ones in the legends, where numbers didn’t matter, where a handful of warriors like the Trifecta could flatten an entire legion. It didn’t matter how good their techniques were, it mattered how the numbers balanced.

And the Sinegardians were so badly outnumbered.

Rin’s heart sank as she watched the armored troops advance into the city, rows and columns stretching into infinity.

I’m going to die here, she realized. They’re going to slaughter all of us.

“Rin!”

Kitay shoved her hard; she stumbled against stones as an axe embedded itself in the wall where her head had been.

Its wielder jerked the axe out of the wall and swung it again toward them, but this time Rin blocked it with her sword. The impact sent adrenaline coursing through her blood.

Fear was impossible to eradicate. But so was the will to survive.

Rin ducked under the soldier’s arm and jammed her sword up through the soft groove beneath his chin, unprotected by the helmet. She cut through fat and sinew, felt the tip of her sword pierce directly through his tongue and move up past his nose to where his brain was. His carotid artery exploded over the length of steel. Blood wet her hand to the elbow. He jerked a little and fell toward her.

He’s dead, she thought numbly. I’ve killed him.

For all her combat training, Rin had never thought about what it would be like to actually take someone’s life. To sever an artery, not just feign doing so. To break a body so badly that all functions ceased, that the animation was stilled forever.

They were taught to incapacitate at the Academy. They were trained to fight against their friends. They operated within the masters’ strict rules, monitored closely to avoid injury. For all their talk and theory, they had not been trained to truly kill.

Rin thought she might feel the life leave her victim’s body. She thought she might register his death with thoughts more significant than One down, ten thousand to go. She thought she’d feel something.

She registered nothing. Just a temporary shock, then the grim realization that she needed do this again, and again, and again.

She extricated her weapon from the soldier’s jaw just as another swung a sword over her head. She rammed her sword up, blocked the blow. And parried. And thrust. And spilled blood again.

It wasn’t any easier the second time.

It seemed as if the world were filled with Federation soldiers. They all looked the same—identical helmets, identical armor. Cut one down and here comes another.

Within the melee Rin didn’t have time to think. She fought by reflex. Every action demanded a reaction. She couldn’t see Kitay anymore; he had disappeared into the sea of bodies, an ocean of clashing metal and torches.

Fighting the Federation was wholly different from fighting in the ring. She didn’t have melee practice. The enemy came from every angle, not just one, and defeating one opponent didn’t bring you any closer to winning the battle.

The Federation did not have martial arts. Their movements were blocky, studied. Their patterns were predictable. But they had practice with formations, with group combat. They moved as if they had a hive mind; coordinated actions produced by years of drilling. They were better trained. They were better equipped.

The Federation didn’t fight a graceful fight. They fought a brutal one. And they didn’t fear death. If they were hurt, they fell, and their comrades advanced over their dead bodies. They were relentless. There were so many of them.

I am going to die.

Unless. Unless.

The poppy seeds in her pocket screamed for her to swallow them. She could take them now. She could go to the Pantheon and call a god down. What did Jiang’s warnings matter, when they were all going to die regardless?

She had seen the face of the Phoenix. She knew what power was at her fingertips, if only she asked.

I can make you fearless. I can make you a legend.

She did not want to be a legend, but she wanted to stay alive. She wanted more than anything to live, consequences be damned, and if calling the Phoenix would do that for her, then so be it. Jiang’s warning meant nothing to her now, not while her countrymen and classmates were hacked to pieces beside her, not while she didn’t know if each second was going to be her last. If she was going to die, she would not die like this—small, weak, and helpless.

She had a link to a god.

She would die a shaman.

Heart hammering, she ducked behind a gated corner; for the few seconds in which nobody saw her, she jammed her hand into her pocket and dug the seeds out. She brought them to her mouth.

She hesitated.

If she swallowed the seeds but it didn’t work, she would certainly die. She could not fight drugged, dazed, and hallucinating.

A horn blasted through the air. She jerked her head up. It was a distress signal, coming from the East Gate.

But the South Gate had no troops to spare. Everywhere was a crisis zone. They were outnumbered three to one; if they lost half their troops to the East Gate, then they may as well let the Federation stroll into the city unchecked.

But Rin’s squadron had been ordered to rally if they heard the distress call. She froze, uncertain, seeds uneaten in her palm. Well, she couldn’t swallow them now—the drug needed time to take effect, and then she would be in limbo indefinitely while she probed her way to the Pantheon. And even if she could still her thoughts long enough to call the gods, she didn’t know that they would answer.

Should she stay here, hidden, and try to call a god, or should she go to the aid of her comrades?

“Go!” Her squadron leader shouted to her over the din of battle. “Go to the gate!”

She ran.

The South Gate had been a melee. But the East Gate was a slaughter zone.

The Nikara soldiers were down. Rin raced toward their posts, but her hope died the closer she got. She couldn’t see anyone in Nikara armor still fighting. The Federation soldiers were just pouring through the gate, completely unopposed.

It was obvious now that the Federation forces had made the East Gate their main target. They had stationed three times as many troops there, had set up sophisticated siege weaponry outside the city walls. Trebuchets launched flaming pieces of debris into the unresponsive sentry towers.

She saw Niang slumped in a corner, crouched over a limp body in a Militia uniform. As Rin passed, Niang lifted her face, streaked with tears and blood. The body was Raban’s.

Rin felt as if she’d been stabbed in the gut. No—not Raban, no . . .

Something slammed against her back. She whipped around. Two Federation soldiers had crept up behind her. The first raised his sword again and slashed down. She ducked around the path of his blade and lashed out with her sword.

Metal met sinew. She was blinded by the blood streaming into her eyes; she couldn’t see what she was cutting, only felt a great tension and then release, and then the Federation soldier was at her knees howling in pain.

She stabbed downward without thinking. The howling stopped.

Then his comrade slammed his shield into her sword arm. Rin cried out and dropped her sword. The soldier kicked it away and smashed his shield at Rin’s rib cage, then pulled his sword back to deliver the finishing blow while she was down.

His sword arm faltered, then dropped. The soldier made a startled gurgling noise as he stared in disbelief at the blade protruding from his stomach.

He fell forward and lay still.

Nezha met Rin’s eyes, and then wrenched his sword out of the soldier’s back. With his other hand he flung a spare weapon at her.

She pulled it from the air. Her fingers closed with familiarity around the hilt. A wave of relief shot through her. She had a weapon.

“Thanks,” she said.

“On your left,” he responded.

Without thinking they sank into a formation; back to back, fighting while covering each other’s blind spots. They made a startlingly good team. Rin covered for Nezha’s overstretched attacks; Nezha guarded Rin’s lower corners. They were each intimately familiar with the other’s weaknesses: Rin knew Nezha was slow to bring his guard back up after missed blows; Nezha parried from above while Rin ducked in low for close-quarters attacks.

It wasn’t as if she could read his mind. She had simply spent so much time observing him that she knew exactly how he was going to attack. They were like a well-oiled machine. They were a spontaneously coordinated dance. They weren’t two parts of a whole, not quite, but they came close.

If they hadn’t spent so much time hating each other, Rin thought, they might have trained together.

Backs to each other, swords at the enemy, they fought with savage desperation. They fought better than men twice their age. They drew on each other’s strengths; as long as Nezha was fighting, wasn’t flagging, Rin didn’t feel fatigued, either. Because she wasn’t just fighting to keep herself alive now, she was fighting with a partner. They fought so well that they half-convinced themselves they might emerge intact. The onslaught was, in fact, thinning.

“They’re retreating,” Nezha said in disbelief.

Rin’s chest flooded with hope for one short, blissful moment, until she realized that Nezha was wrong. The soldiers weren’t backing away from them. They were making way for their general.

The general stood a head taller than the tallest man Rin had ever seen. His limbs were like tree trunks, his armor made of enough metal to coat three smaller men. He sat astride a warhorse as massive as he was; a monstrous creature, decked in steel. His face was hidden behind a metal helmet that covered all but his eyes.

“What is this?” His voice sounded with an unnatural reverberation, as if the very ground shook when he spoke. “Why have you stopped? ”

He brought his warhorse to a halt before Rin and Nezha.

“Two puppies,” he said, his voice low in amusement. “Two Nikara puppies, holding an entire gate by themselves. Has Sinegard fallen so low that the city must be defended by children?”

Nezha was trembling. Rin was too scared to tremble.

“Watch closely,” the general said to his soldiers. “This is how we deal with Nikara scum.”

Rin reached out and grasped Nezha’s wrist.

Nezha nodded curtly in response to her unspoken question.

Together?

Together.

The general reared his monstrous horse back and charged them.

There was nothing they could do now. In that moment, Rin could only squeeze her eyes shut and wait for the end.

It didn’t come.

A deafening clang shattered the air—the sound of metal against metal. The air itself shook with the unnatural vibration of a great force stopped in its tracks.

When Rin realized she hadn’t been cut in half or trampled to death, she opened her eyes.

“What the fuck,” Nezha said.

Jiang stood before them, his white hair hanging still in the air as if he had been struck by lightning. His feet did not touch the ground. Both his arms were flung out, blocking the tremendous force of the general’s halberd with his own iron staff.

The general tried to force Jiang’s staff out of the way, and his arms trembled with a mighty pressure, but Jiang did not look like he was exerting any force at all. The air crackled unnaturally, like a prolonged rumble of thunder. The Federation soldiers fell back, as if they could sense an impending explosion.

“Jiang Ziya,” said the general. “So you live after all.”

“Do I know you?” Jiang asked.

The general responded with another massive swing of his halberd. Jiang waved his staff and blocked the blow as effortlessly as if he were swatting away a fly. He dispelled the force of the blow into the air and the ground below them. The paving stones shuddered from the impact, nearly knocking Rin and Nezha off their feet.

“Call off your men.”

Though Jiang spoke calmly, his voice echoed as if he had shouted. He appeared to have grown taller; not larger, but extended somehow, just as his shadow was extended against the wall behind them. No longer willowy and fidgety, Jiang seemed an entirely different person—someone younger, someone infinitely more powerful.

Rin stared at him in awe. The man before her was not the doddering, eccentric embarrassment of the Academy. This man was a soldier.

This man was a shaman.

When Jiang spoke again, his voice contained the echo of itself; he spoke in two pitches, one normal and one far lower, as if his shadow shouted back everything he said at double the volume. “Call off your men, or I will summon into existence things that should not be in this world.”

Nezha grabbed at Rin’s arm. His eyes were wide. “Look.”

The air behind Jiang was warping, shimmering, turning darker than the night itself. Jiang’s eyes had rolled up into the back of his head. He chanted loudly, singing in that unfamiliar language that Rin had heard him use only once before.

“You are Sealed!” the general bellowed. But he backed rapidly away from the void and clutched his halberd close.

“Am I now?” Jiang spread his arms.

Behind him sounded a keening wail, too high-pitched for any beast known to man.

Something was coming through the darkness.

Beyond the void, Rin saw silhouettes that should exist only in puppetry, outlines of beasts that belonged to story. A three-headed lion. A nine-tailed vixen. A mass of serpents tangled into one another, its multitude of heads snapping and biting in every direction.

“Rin. Nezha.” Jiang didn’t turn around to look at them. “Run.”

Then Rin understood. Whatever was being summoned, Jiang couldn’t control them. The gods will not be called willingly into battle. The gods will always demand something in return. He was doing precisely what he had forbidden her to do.

Nezha pulled Rin to her feet. Her left leg felt as if white-hot knives had been jammed into her kneecap. She cried out and staggered against him.

He steadied her. His eyes were wide with terror. There was no time to run.

Jiang convulsed in the air before them, and then lost control altogether. The void burst outward, ripping the fabric of the world, collapsing the gated wall around them. He slammed his staff into the air. A wave of force emitted from the site of contact and exploded outward in a visible ring. For a moment everything was still.

And then the east wall came down.

Rin moaned and rolled onto her side. She could barely see, barely feel. None of her senses worked; she was wrapped in a cocoon of darkness penetrated only by shards of pain. Her leg rubbed against something soft and human, and she reached for it. It was Nezha.

She groaned and forced her eyes open. Nezha lay slumped against her, bleeding profusely from a cut on his forehead. His eyes were closed.

Rin sat up, wincing, and shook his shoulder. “Nezha?”

He stirred faintly. Relief washed over her.

“We have to get up—Nezha, come on, we have to—”

A shower of debris erupted in the far corner by the gate.

Something was buried there under the rubble. Something was alive.

She clung to Nezha’s hand and watched the shifting rubble, hoping wildly it would be Jiang, that he would have survived whatever terror he had called and that he was all right, and he would be himself again, and he would save the—

The hand that clawed out from beneath the rubble was bloody, massive, and heavily armored.

Rin should have killed the general before he pulled himself out of the rubble. She should have taken Nezha and run. She should have done something.

But her limbs would not obey the commands that her brain sent; her nerves could not register anything but that same fear and despair. She lay paralyzed on the ground, heart slamming against her ribs.

The general staggered to his feet, took one lopsided step forward and then another. His helmet was gone. When he turned toward them, Rin’s breath caught. Half of his face had been scraped away in the explosion, revealing an awful skeletal smile underneath peeling skin.

“Nikara scum,” he snarled as he advanced. His foot caught against the limp form of one of his own soldiers. Without looking, he kicked it aside in disgust. His furious gaze remained fixed on Rin and Nezha. “I will bury you.”

Nezha gave a low moan of terror.

Rin’s arms were finally responding to her commands. She tried to haul Nezha up, but her own legs were weak with fear and she could not stand.

The general loomed over them. He raised his halberd.

Half-crazed with panic, Rin swung her sword upward in a great, wild arc. Her blade clattered uselessly against the general’s armored torso.

The general closed his gauntleted fingers around her thin blade and wrenched it out of her hands. His fingers bent grooves into the steel.

Trembling, she let go of her sword. He dragged her up by the collar and flung her at what was left of the wall. Her head cracked against stone; her vision erupted in black, then spots of light, then a fuzzy nothing. She blinked slowly, and whatever vision was restored showed the general raising his halberd slowly over Nezha’s limp form.

Rin opened her mouth to scream just as the general jammed the bladed tip into Nezha’s stomach. Nezha made a high, keening noise. A second thrust silenced him.

Sobbing with fear, Rin scrabbled in her pocket for the poppy seeds. She seized a handful and brought them to her mouth, choked them down just as the general noticed she was still moving.

“No, you don’t,” he snarled, hauling her back up by the front of her robes. He dragged her close to his face, leering down at her with his horrific half-smile. “No more of that Nikara witchcraft. Even the gods won’t inhabit dead vessels.”

Rin shook madly in his grasp, tears leaking down her face as she choked for air. Her head throbbed where he’d slammed it against the stone. She felt as if she were floating, swimming in darkness, whether from the poppy seeds or her head injury, she didn’t know. She was either dying or going to see the gods. Maybe both.

Please, she prayed. Please come to me. I’ll do anything.

Then she tipped forward into the void; she was in that tunnel to the heavens again, spirited upward, hurtling at a tremendous speed to a place unknown. The edges of her vision turned black and then a familiar red, a sheet of crimson that spread across her entire field of vision like a glass lens.

In her mind’s eye she saw the Woman appear before her. The Woman reached a hand toward her, but—

“Get out of my way!” Rin screamed. She didn’t have time for a guardian, she didn’t have time for warnings—she needed the gods, she needed her god.

To her shock, the Woman obeyed.

And then she was through the barrier, she was hurtling upward again, and she was in the throne room of the gods, the Pantheon.

All the plinths were empty except one.

She saw it then in all of its glorious fire. A great and terrible voice echoed in her mind. It echoed throughout the universe.

I can give you the power you seek.

She struggled wildly to breathe, but the general’s grip only tightened around her neck.

I can give you the strength to topple empires. To burn your enemies until their bones are nothing but ash. All this I will give you and more. You know the trade. You know the terms.

“Anything,” Rin whispered. “Anything at all.”

Everything.

Something like a gust of wind blew through the chamber. She thought she heard something cackling.

Rin opened her eyes. She was not light-headed anymore. She reached up and clasped the general’s wrists. She was deathly weak; her grasp should have been like a feather’s touch. But the general howled. He dropped her, and when he raised his arms to strike her, she saw that both his wrists were a mottled, bubbling red.

She crouched, raised her elbows over her head to form a pathetic shield.

And a great sheet of flame erupted before her. The heat of it hit her in the face. The general stumbled backward.

“No . . .” His mouth opened wide in disbelief. He looked at her like he was seeing someone else. “Not you.”

Rin struggled to her feet. Flames continued to pour out before her, flames she had no control over.

“You’re dead!” the general shouted. “I killed you!”

She rose slowly, flames streaming from her hands, rivulets that ensconced them, gave no escape. The general howled in pain as the fire licked at his open wounds, the gaping holes on his face, all across his body.

“I watched you burn! I watched you all burn!”

“Not me,” she whispered, and opened her hands toward him.

The fire billowed outward with a vengeance. She felt a tearing sensation, as if it were being ripped from her gut, from somewhere inside her. It coursed through her, not harming her but immobilizing her. It used her as a conduit. She controlled the flame no more than the wick of a candle might; it rallied to her and enveloped her.

In her mind’s eye she saw the Phoenix, undulating from its plinth in the Pantheon. Watching. Laughing.

She couldn’t see the general through the flame, only a silhouette, an outline of armor collapsing and folding in on itself, a kneeling pile of something that was less a man than it was a chunk of charred flesh, carbon, and metal.

“Stop,” she whispered. Please, make it stop.

But the fire kept burning. The lump that had been the general staggered back and crumpled, a ball of flame that grew smaller and smaller and then was extinguished.

Her lips were dry, cracked; when she moved them, they bled. “Please, stop.”

The fire roared louder and louder. She couldn’t hear; she couldn’t breathe through the heat. She sank to her knees, eyes squeezed shut, grabbing her face with her hands.

I’m begging you.

In her mind’s eye she saw the Phoenix recoil, as if irritated. It opened its wings in a huge, fiery expanse and then folded them.

The way to the Pantheon shut.

Rin swayed and fell.

Time ceased to hold meaning. There was a battle around her and then there wasn’t. Rin was enveloped in a silo of nothing, insulated from anything that happened around her. Nothing else existed, until it did.

“She’s burning,” she heard Niang say. “Feverish . . . I checked for poison in her wounds, but there’s nothing.”

It’s not a fever, Rin wanted to say, it’s a god. The water that Niang dripped on her forehead did nothing to quench the flames still coursing inside her.

She tried to ask for Jiang, but her mouth would not obey. She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t move.

She thought she could see, but she didn’t know if she was dreaming, because when she opened her eyes next she saw a face so lovely she almost cried.

Arched eyebrows, a porcelain smoothness. Lips like blood.

The Empress?

But the Empress was far away, with the Third Division, still marching in from the north. They could not have arrived so soon, before daybreak.

Was it daybreak already? She thought she could see the first rays of the rising sun, the break of dawn on this long, horrible night.

“What do they call her?” the Empress demanded.

“Her”? Is the Empress talking about me?

“Runin.” Irjah’s voice. “Fang Runin.”

“Runin,” the Empress repeated. Her voice was like a plucked string on a table harp, sharp and penetrating and beautiful all at once. “Runin, look at me.”

Rin felt the Empress’s fingers on her cheeks. They were cool, like snow, like a winter breeze. She opened her eyes to the Empress, looked into those lovely eyes. How could anyone possess such beautiful eyes? They were nothing like a viper’s eyes. They were not the eyes of a snake; they were wild and dark and strange, but beautiful, like a deer’s.

And the visions . . . she saw a cloud of butterflies, silk sheets of ribbon fluttering in the wind. She saw a world that consisted only of beauty and color and rhythm. She would have done anything to stay trapped within that gaze.

The Empress inhaled sharply, and the visions fell away.

Her grasp on Rin’s face tightened.

“I watched you burn,” she said. “I thought I watched you die.”

“I’m not dead,” Rin tried to say, but her tongue was too heavy in her mouth and all she made was a gagging noise.

“Shhh.” The Empress held an icy finger against her lips. “Don’t speak. It’s all right. I know what you are.”

Then there was a cool press of lips against her forehead, the same coolness that Jiang had forced into her during her Trials, and the fire inside her died.

Chapter 12

When Rin was released from Enro’s supervision, she was moved to the basement of the main hall, where the matches used to be held. She should have found this odd, but she was too dazed to think much about anything. She slept an inordinate amount. There was no clock in the basement, but often she dozed off to find that the sun had gone down. She had trouble staying awake for more than a few minutes. Food was brought to her, and each time she ate, she fell asleep again almost immediately.

Once, as she slept, she heard voices above her.

“This is inelegant,” said the Empress.

“This is inhumane,” said Irjah. “You’re treating her like a common criminal. This girl might have won the battle for us.”

“And she might yet burn down this city,” said Jun. “We don’t know what she’s capable of.”

“She’s just a girl,” said Irjah. “She’ll be scared. Someone needs to tell her what’s happening to her.”

“We don’t know what’s happening to her,” said Jun.

“It’s obvious,” the Empress said. “She’s another Altan.”

“So we’ll let Tyr deal with her when he’s here,” said Jun.

“Tyr’s coming all the way from the Night Castle,” said Irjah. “You’re going to keep her sedated for an entire week?”

“I’m certainly not going to let her wander the city,” Jun answered. “You saw what the Gatekeeper did to the east wall. His Seal is breaking, Daji. He’s a bigger threat than the Federation.”

“Not anymore,” the Empress said coolly. “The Gatekeeper’s been dealt with.”

When Rin ventured to open her eyes, she saw no one standing over her, and she only half remembered what had been said. After another indefinite spell of dreamless sleep she wasn’t sure whether she had imagined the entire thing.

Eventually she came to her senses. But when she tried to leave the basement, she was forcibly restrained by three Third Division soldiers stationed outside the door.

“What’s happening?” she demanded. She was still a bit dazed, but conscious enough to know this wasn’t normal. “Why can’t I go?”

“It’s for your safety,” one of them responded.

“What are you talking about? Who authorized this?”

“Our orders are to keep you here,” the soldier said tersely. “If you try to force your way out, we will have to hurt you.”

The soldier nearest her was already reaching for his weapon. Rin backed up. She understood there was no arguing her way out of this.

So she reverted to the most primitive of methods. She opened her mouth and screamed. She writhed on the floor. She beat at the soldiers with her fists and spat in their faces. She threatened to urinate in front of them. She shouted obscenities about their mothers. She shouted obscenities about their grandmothers.

This continued for hours.

Finally they acquiesced to her demand to see someone in charge.

Unfortunately, they sent Master Jun.

“This isn’t necessary,” she said sulkily when he arrived. She had hastily rearranged her clothes so that it didn’t look like she had just been rolling around in the dirt. “I’m not going to harm anyone.”

Jun looked like the last thing he would do was believe her. “You’ve just demonstrated an ability to spontaneously combust. You set fire to the eastern half of the city. Do you understand why we might not want you running around camp?”

Rin thought the combustion had been more deliberate than spontaneous, but she didn’t think explaining how she’d done it would make her seem like any less of a threat.

“I want to see Jiang,” she said.

Jun’s expression was unreadable. He left without replying.

Once Rin got over the indignation of being locked up, she decided the best thing to do was wait. She was loyal to the Empress. She was a good soldier. The other masters at Sinegard would vouch for her, even if Jun wouldn’t. So long as she kept her head, she had nothing to fear. She mused, absurdly, that if she was going to get in trouble for anything, it might be opium possession.

At least she wasn’t being kept in isolation. Rin discovered that visitors could enter the basement freely. She just couldn’t leave.

Niang visited often, but she wasn’t much for conversation. When Niang smiled, it was forced. She moved listlessly. She didn’t laugh when Rin tried to cheer her up. They passed hours sitting beside each other in silence, listening to each other breathe. Niang was stunned with grief, and Rin didn’t know how to comfort her.

“I miss Raban too,” she tried once, but that only made Niang tear up and leave.

Kitay, on the other hand, she grilled mercilessly for news. He visited as often as he could, but was constantly being called away for relief operations.

In bits and pieces, she learned what had happened in the aftermath of the battle.

The Federation had been on the verge of taking Sinegard when she had killed their general. That, combined with the timely arrival of the Empress and the Third Division, had turned the battle in their favor. The Federation had retreated in the interim. Kitay doubted they would soon return.

“Things ended pretty quick once the Third got here,” he said. He cradled his arm in a sling, but assured Rin that it was only a minor sprain. “It had a lot to do with . . . well, you know. The Federation was spooked. I think they were afraid that we had more than one Speerly.”

She sat up. “What?”

Kitay looked confused. “Well, isn’t that what you are?”

A Speerly? Her?

“That’s what they’ve been saying all over the city,” said Kitay. Rin could sense his discomfort. Kitay’s mind worked at twice the speed of a normal person’s; his curiosity was insatiable. He needed to know what she had done, what she was, and why she hadn’t told him.

But she didn’t know what to tell him. She didn’t know herself.

“What are they saying?” she asked.

“That you fell into a frenzied bloodlust. That you fought like you’d been possessed by a horde of demons. That the general cut you down over and over and stabbed you eighteen times and still you kept moving.”

She held out her arms. “No stab wounds. That was just Nezha.”

Kitay didn’t laugh. “Is it true? You’re locked down here, so it must be.”

So Kitay didn’t know about the fire. Rin considered telling him, but hesitated.

How would she explain shamanism to Kitay, who was so convinced of his own rationality? Kitay was the paragon of the modernist thought that Jiang despised. Kitay was an atheist, a skeptic, who couldn’t accept challenges to his worldview. He would think her mad. And she was too exhausted to argue.

“I don’t know what happened,” she said. “It was all just a blur. And I don’t know what I am. I was a war orphan. I could be from anywhere. I could be anyone.”

Kitay looked unsatisfied. “Jun’s convinced you’re a Speerly.”

But how could that be? Rin would have been an infant when Speer was attacked, and there was no way she would have survived if no one else had.

“But the Federation massacred the Speerlies,” she said. “They left no survivors.”

“Altan survived,” Kitay said. “You survived.”

The Academy students had suffered a far higher proportion of casualties than the soldiers of the Eighth Division. Barely half of their class had made it through, most of them with minor injuries. Fifteen of their classmates were dead. Five more were in critical condition in Enro’s triage center, their lives hanging perilously in balance.

Nezha was among them.

“He’s going through a third round of operations today,” said Kitay. “They don’t know if he’s going to live. Even if he does, he might never fight again. They say the halberd pierced his torso all the way through. They say his spine is severed.”

Rin had simply been relieved that Nezha wasn’t dead. She hadn’t considered that the alternative might be worse.

“I hope he dies,” Kitay said suddenly.

She whirled on him, shocked, but Kitay continued, “If it’s death or a lifetime as a cripple, I hope he gets off easy. Nezha couldn’t live with himself if he couldn’t fight.”

Rin didn’t know how to respond to that.

The Nikara’s victory had bought them time, but it had not guaranteed them the city. Intelligence from the Second Division reported that Federation reinforcements were being sent across the narrow sea while the main invading forces waited for their rendezvous.

When the Federation attacked for a second time, the Nikara wouldn’t be able to hold the city. Sinegard was being fully evacuated. The Imperial bureaucracy had been moved completely to the wartime capital of Golyn Niis, which meant Sinegard’s security had been deprioritized.

“They’re liquidating the Academy,” Kitay said. “We’ve all been drafted into the Divisions. Niang’s been sent to the Eleventh, Venka to the Sixth in Golyn Niis. They’re not sending Nezha anywhere until he . . . well, you know.” He paused. “I got my orders for the Second yesterday. Junior officer.”

It was the division Kitay had always dreamed of joining. Under different circumstances congratulations would have been in order. But now, celebration simply felt wrong. Rin tried anyway. “That’s great. That’s what you wanted, right?”

He shrugged. “They’re desperate for soldiers. It’s not a matter of prestige anymore; they’ve started drafting people right out of the countryside. But it’ll be good to serve under Irjah. I’m shipping out tomorrow.”

She placed a hand on his shoulder. “Take care of yourself.”

“You too.” Kitay sat back on his hands. “Any idea when they’re going to let you out of here?”

“You know more than I do.”

“No one’s come in to talk to you?”

She shook her head. “Not since Jun. Have they found Jiang yet?”

Kitay gave her a sympathetic look, and she knew the answer before he spoke. It was the same answer he had given her for days.

Jiang was gone. Not dead—disappeared. No one had heard or seen anything since the end of the battle. The rubble of the east wall had been thoroughly searched for survivors, yet there was no sign of the Lore Master. There was no proof that he was dead, but nothing that gave hope that he was alive. He seemed to have vanished into the very void that he had called into being.

Once Kitay left with the Second Division for Golyn Niis, there was no one to keep Rin company. She passed her time sleeping. She wanted to sleep all the time now, especially after meals, and when she did it was a heavy and dreamless sleep. She wondered if her food and drink were drugged. Somehow, she was almost grateful for this. It was worse to be alone with her thoughts.

She wasn’t safe, now that she had succeeded in calling a god. She didn’t feel powerful. She was locked in a basement. Her own commanders didn’t trust her. Half her friends were dying or dead, her master was lost to the void, and she was being contained for her own safety and the safety of everyone around her.

If this was what it meant to be a Speerly—if she even was a Speerly—Rin didn’t know if it was worth it.

She slept, and when she couldn’t force herself to sleep anymore, she curled into the corner and cried.

On the sixth day of her containment, Rin had just awoken when the door to the main hall opened. Irjah looked inside, checked to see that she was awake, and then quickly shut the door behind him.

“Master Irjah.” Rin smoothed her rumpled tunic and stood.

“I’m General Irjah now,” he said. He didn’t seem particularly happy about it. “Casualties lead to promotions.”

“General,” she amended. “Apologies.”

He shrugged and motioned for her to sit back down. “It hardly matters at this point. How are you doing?”

“Tired, sir,” she said. She assumed a cross-legged position on the floor, because there were no stools in the basement.

After a moment’s hesitation, Irjah sat on the floor as well.

“So.” He placed his hands on his knees. “They’re saying you’re a Speerly.”

“How much do you know?” she asked in a small voice. Did Irjah know she had called the fire? Did Irjah know what Jiang had taught her?

“I raised Altan after the Second War,” said Irjah. “I know.”

Rin felt a deep sense of relief. If Irjah knew what Altan was like, what Speerlies were capable of, then surely he could vouch for her, persuade the Militia that she wasn’t dangerous—at least not to them.

“They’ve come to a decision about you,” Irjah said.

“I didn’t know I was up for debate,” she answered, just to be difficult.

Irjah gave her a tired smile that did not reach his eyes. “You’re going to get your transfer orders soon.”

“Really?” She straightened up, suddenly excited. They were letting her out. Finally. “Sir, I was hoping I could join the Second with Kitay—”

Irjah cut her off. “You’re not joining the Second. You’re not joining any of the Twelve Divisions.”

Her elation was replaced immediately by dread. She was suddenly aware of a faint buzzing noise in the air. “What do you mean?”

Irjah fiddled uncomfortably with his thumbs, and then said: “The Warlords have decided it best to send you to join the Cike.”

For a moment she sat there looking dumbly at him.

The Cike? That infamous thirteenth division, the Empress’s squad of assassins? The killers with no honor, no reputation, and no glory? The fighting force so vile, so nefarious, that the Militia preferred to pretend it didn’t exist?

“Rin? Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“The Cike?” Rin repeated.

“Yes.”

“You’re sending me to the freak squad?” Her voice cracked. She had a sudden urge to burst into tears. “The Bizarre Children?”

“The Cike is a division of the Militia just like the others,” Irjah said hastily. His tone was artificially soothing. “They are a perfectly respectable contingent.”

“They are losers and rejects! They—”

“They serve the Empress just as the army does.”

“But I—” Rin swallowed hard. “I thought I was a good soldier.”

Irjah’s expression softened. “Oh, Rin. You are. You are an incredible soldier.”

“So why can’t I be in a real division?” She was acutely aware of how childish she sounded. But under the circumstances, she thought she deserved to act like a child.

“You know why,” Irjah said quietly. “Speerlies have not fought with the Twelve Provinces since the last Poppy War. And before that, when they did, the cooperation was always . . . difficult.”

Rin knew her history. She knew what Irjah alluded to. The last time the Speerlies had fought alongside the Militia, they had been regarded as barbaric oddities, much as the Cike was regarded now. The Speerlies raged and fought in their own camps; they were a walking hazard to everyone in their vicinity, friends and foe alike. They followed orders, but only vaguely; they were given targets and objectives, but good luck to the officer who tried any sophisticated maneuvers. “The Militia hates Speerlies.”

“The Militia is afraid of Speerlies,” Irjah corrected. “The Nikara have never been good at dealing with what they don’t understand, and Speer has always made the Nikara uncomfortable. I expect you now know why.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I recommended you to the Cike. And I did it for you, child.” Irjah fixed her with a level gaze. “The rivalry between the Warlords has never completely disappeared, even since their alliance under the Dragon Emperor. Though their soldiers might hate you, the Twelve Warlords would be very eager to get their hands on a Speerly. Whatever division you joined would gain an unfair advantage. And whatever division you didn’t join might not like the shift in the balance of power. If I sent you to any one of the twelve divisions, you would be in very grave danger from the other eleven.”

“I . . .” She hadn’t considered this. “But there’s already a Speerly in the Militia,” she said. “What about Altan?”

Irjah’s beard twitched. “Would you like to meet your commander?”

“What?” She blinked, not comprehending.

Irjah turned and called to someone behind the door, “Well, come on in.”

The door opened. The man who walked through was tall and lithe; he did not wear a Militia uniform but a black tunic without any insignia. He carried a silver trident strapped across his back.

Rin swallowed, fighting a ridiculous urge to sweep her hair behind her ears. She felt a familiar flush, a heat starting at the tops of her ears.

He had gained several scars since she’d last seen him, including two on his forearm and one that ran ragged across his face, from the lower right corner of his left eye down to his right jaw. His hair was no longer cropped tidily as it had been at school, but had grown unruly and wild, like he hadn’t bothered with it in months.

“Hi,” said Altan Trengsin. “What was that about losers and rejects?”

“How on earth did you survive the firebombs?”

Rin opened her mouth, but no words came out.

Altan. Altan Trengsin. She tried to form a coherent response, but all she could process was that her childhood hero was standing before her.

He knelt down in front of her.

“How do you exist?” he asked quietly. “I thought I was the only one left.”

She finally found her voice. “I don’t know. They never told me what happened to my parents. My foster parents didn’t know.”

“And you never suspected what you were?”

She shook her head. “Not until I . . . I mean, when I . . .”

She choked suddenly. The memories she had been suppressing flooded up in front of her: the shrieking Woman, the cackling Phoenix, the terrible heat ripping through her body, the way the general’s armor bent and liquefied under the heat of the fire . . .

She lifted her hands to her face and found that they were trembling.

She hadn’t been able to control it. She hadn’t been able to turn it off. The flames had just kept pouring out of her without end; she might have burned Nezha, she might have burned Kitay, she might have turned all of Sinegard to ashes if the Phoenix hadn’t heeded her prayer. And even when the flames did stop, the fire coursing inside her hadn’t, not until the Empress kissed her forehead and made them die away.

I’m going crazy, she thought. I have become everything that Jiang warned me against.

“Hey. Hey.”

Cool fingers wrapped around her wrists. Gently, Altan pulled her hands away from her face.

She looked up and met his eyes. They were a shade of crimson brighter than poppy petals.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I know. I know what it’s like. I’m going to help you.”

“The Cike aren’t so bad once you get to know them,” he said as he led her out of the basement. “I mean, we kill people on orders, but on the whole we’re quite nice.”

“Are you all shamans?” she asked. She felt dizzy.

Altan shook his head. “Not all. We’ve got two who don’t mess with the gods—a munitions expert and a physician. But the rest are. Tyr had the most training out of all of us before he came to the Cike—he grew up with a sect of monks that worshipped a goddess of darkness. The others were like you: dripping in power and shamanic potential, but confused. We take them to the Night Castle, train them, and set them loose on the Empress’s enemies. Everybody wins.”

Rin tried to find this reassuring. “Where do they come from?”

“All over. You’d be surprised how many places the old religions are still alive,” said Altan. “Lots of hidden cults from across the provinces. Some contribute an initiate to the Cike every year in exchange for the Empress leaving them alone. It’s not easy to find shamans in this country, not in this age, but the Empress procures them wherever she can. A lot of them come from the prison at Baghra—the Cike is their second chance.”

“But you’re not really Militia.”

“No. We’re assassins. In wartime, though, we function as the Thirteenth Division.”

Rin wondered how many people Altan had killed. Whom he had killed. “What do you do in peacetime?”

“Peacetime?” He gave her a wry look. “There’s no peacetime for the Cike. There’s never a shortage of people the Empress wants dead.”

Altan instructed her to pack her things and meet him at the gate. They were scheduled to march out that afternoon with the squadron of Officer Yenjen of the Fifth Division to the war front, where the rest of the Cike had gone a week prior.

All of Rin’s belongings had been confiscated after the battle. She barely had time to pick up a new set of weapons from the armory before making her way across the city. The Fifth Division soldiers bore light traveling packs and two sets of weapons each. Rin had only a sword with a slightly dull blade and its accompanying sheath. She looked and felt woefully unprepared. She did not even have a second set of clothing. She suspected she would begin to smell very bad very soon.

“Where are we headed?” she asked as they began descending the mountain path.

“Khurdalain,” Altan said. “Tiger Province. It’ll be two weeks’ march south until we get to the Western Murui River, and then we’ll catch a ride down to the port.”

Despite everything, Rin felt a thrill of excitement. Khurdalain was a coastal port city by the eastern Nariin Sea, a thriving center of international trade. It was the only city in the Empire that regularly dealt with foreigners; the Hesperians and Bolonians had established embassies there centuries ago. Even Federation merchants had once occupied the docks, until Khurdalain became a central theater of the Poppy Wars.

Khurdalain was a city that had seen two decades of warfare and survived. And now the Empress had established a front in Khurdalain once again to draw the Federation invaders into eastern and central Nikan.

Altan relayed the Empress’s defense strategy to Rin as they marched.

Khurdalain was an ideal location to establish the initial front. The Federation armored columns would have enjoyed a crushing advantage in the wide-open plains of northern Nikan, but Khurdalain abounded in rivers and creeks, which favored defensive operations.

Routing the Federation into Khurdalain would force them onto their weakest ground. The attack on Sinegard had been a bold attempt to separate the northern provinces from the southern. If the Federation generals could choose, they would almost certainly have cut directly into the Nikara heartland by marching directly south. But if Khurdalain was well defended, the Federation would be forced to change the north-to-south direction of their offensive to east-to-west. And Nikan would have room in the southwest to retreat and regroup should Khurdalain fall.

Ideally, the Militia would have attempted a pincer maneuver to squeeze the Federation from both sides, cutting them off from both their escape routes and supply lines. But the Militia was nowhere near competent or large enough for such an attempt. The Twelve Warlords had barely coordinated in time to rally to Sinegard’s defense; now each was too preoccupied defending his own province independently to genuinely attempt joint military action.

“Why can’t they just unite like they did during the Second War?” Rin asked.

“Because the Dragon Emperor is dead,” said Altan. “He can’t rally the Warlords to him this time, and the Empress can’t command the same allegiance that he did. Oh, the Warlords will kowtow to Sinegard and swear vows of loyalty to the Empress’s face, but when it comes to it, they’ll put their own provinces first.”

Holding Khurdalain would not be easy. The recent offensive at Sinegard had proven the Federation had clear military superiority in terms of mobility and weaponry. And Mugen held the advantage on the northern coastline; their troops were easily reinforced over the narrow sea; fresh troops and supplies were just a ship’s journey away.

Khurdalain had little advantage in the way of defense structures. It was an open port city, designed as an enclave for foreigners prior to the Poppy Wars. Nikan’s best defense structures had been built along the lower river delta of the Western Murui, far south of Khurdalain. Compared to the heavily garrisoned wartime capital at Golyn Niis, Khurdalain was a sitting duck, arms flung open to welcome invaders.

But Khurdalain had to be defended. If Mugen advanced down the heartland and managed to take Golyn Niis, they could then easily turn east, chasing whatever remnants of the Militia were left onto the coast. And if they were trapped by the sea, the pitifully small Nikara fleet could not save them. So Khurdalain was the vital crux on which the fate of the rest of the country lay.

“We’re the final front,” said Altan. “If we fail, this country’s lost.” He clapped her on the shoulder. “Excited?”

Chapter 13

Clang.

Rin barely got her sword up in time to stop Altan’s trident from slicing her face in half. She did her best to ground herself, to dispel the ki of the blow evenly across her body and into the dirt, but even so, her legs trembled from the impact.

She and Altan had been at this for hours, it seemed. Her arms ached; her lungs seized for air.

But Altan wasn’t done. He shifted the trident, caught the blade of her sword between two prongs, and twisted hard. The pressure wrenched the sword out of Rin’s hands and sent it clattering against the ground. Altan pressed the tip of his trident to her throat. She raised her arms hastily in surrender.

“You’re reacting based on fear,” Altan said. “You’re not controlling this fight. You need to clear your mind and concentrate. Concentrate on me. Not my weapon.”

“It’s a bit hard when you’re trying to jab my eyes out,” she muttered, pushing his trident away from her face.

Altan lowered his weapon. “You’re still hedging. You’re resisting. You’ve got to let the Phoenix in. When you’ve called the god, when the god is walking in you, that’s a state of ecstasy. It’s a ki amplifier. You don’t get tired. You’re capable of extraordinary exertion. You don’t feel pain. You have to sink into that state.”

Rin could recall vividly the state of mind he wanted her to embrace. The burning feeling in her veins, the red lenses that shielded her vision. How other people became not people but targets. How she didn’t need rest, only pain, pain to fuel the fire.

The only times Rin had consciously been in this state were during the Trials, and then again at Sinegard. Both times she had been furious, desperate.

She hadn’t been able to rekindle the same state of mind since. She hadn’t been that angry since. She had only been confused, agitated, and, like right now, exhausted.

“Learn to tame it,” Altan said. “Learn to sink in and out of it. If you’re focused only on your enemy’s weapon, you’ll always be on the defensive. Look past the weapon to your target. Focus on what you want to kill.”

Altan was a much better teacher than Jiang. Jiang was frustratingly vague, absentminded, and deliberately obtuse. Jiang liked to dance around the answers, liked to make her circle around the truth like a starving vulture before he would give her a gratifying morsel of understanding.

But Altan wasted no time. He cut straight to the chase, gave her precisely the answers that she wanted. He understood her fears, and he knew what she was capable of.

Training with Altan was like training with an older brother. It was so bizarre for someone to tell her that they were the same—that his joints hyperextended like hers did, so she should turn out her foot in such a way. To have similarities with someone else, similarities that lay deep in their genes, was an overwhelmingly wonderful sensation.

With Altan she felt as if she belonged—not just to the same division or army, but to something deeper and older. She felt situated within an ancient web of lineage. She had a place. She was not a nameless war orphan; she was a Speerly.

At least, everyone seemed to think so. But despite everything, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something was amiss. She couldn’t call the god as easily as Altan could. Couldn’t move with the same grace as he could. Was that heritage, or training?

“Were you always like this?” she asked.

Altan appeared to tense. “Like what?”

“Like . . . you.” She gestured vaguely at him. “You’re—you’re not like the other students. Other soldiers. Could you always summon the fire? Could you always fight like you do?”

Altan’s expression was unreadable. “I trained at Sinegard for a long time.”

“But so did I!”

“You weren’t trained like a Speerly. But you’re a warrior, too. It’s in your blood. I’ll beat your heritage into you soon enough.” Altan gestured to her with his trident. “Weapons up.”

“Why a trident?” she asked when he finally let her take a break. “Why not a sword?” She hadn’t seen any other soldier who didn’t wield the standard Militia halberd and sword.

“Longer reach,” he said. “Opponents don’t come in close quarters when you’re fighting inside a silo of fire.”

She touched the prongs. The ends had been sharpened many times over; they were not shiny or smooth, but etched with the evidence of multiple battles. “Is that Speerly-made?”

It had to be. The trident was metal all the way through, not like Nikara weapons, which had wooden hilts. The trident was heavier, true, but Altan needed a weapon that wouldn’t burn through when he touched it.

“It came from the island,” he said. He poked her with the blunt end and gestured for her to pick up her sword. “Stop stalling. Come on, get up. Again.”

She threw her arms down in exhaustion. “Can’t we just get high?” she asked. She didn’t see how relentless physical training got her any closer to calling the Phoenix at all.

“No, we can’t just get high,” Altan said. He poked her again. “Lazy. That kind of thinking is a rookie mistake. Anyone can swallow some seeds and reach the Pantheon. That part’s easy. But forming a link with the god, channeling its power to your will and calling it back down—that takes discipline. Unless you’ve had practice honing your mind, it’s too easy for you to lose control. Think of it as a dam. The gods are sources of potential energy, like water flowing downhill. The drug is like the gate—it opens the way to let the gods through. But if your gate is too large, or flimsily constructed, then power rushes through unobstructed. The god ignores your will. Chaos ensues. Unless you want to burn down your own allies, you have to remember why you called the Phoenix. You’ve got to direct its power.”

“It’s like a prayer,” she said.

Altan nodded. “It’s exactly like a prayer. All prayer is simply repetition—a imposition of your demands upon the gods. The difference between shamans and everyone else is that our prayers actually work. Didn’t Jiang teach you this?”

Jiang had taught her the opposite of that. Jiang had asked her to clear her mind in meditation, to forget her own ego; to forget that she was a being separate from the universe. Jiang had taught her to erase her own will. Altan was asking her to impose her will on the gods.

“He only ever taught me to access the gods. Not to pull them back to our world.”

Altan looked amazed. “Then how did you call the Phoenix at Sinegard?”

“I wasn’t supposed to,” she said. “Jiang warned me not to. He said the gods weren’t meant to be weaponized. Only consulted. He was teaching me to calm myself, to find my connection to the larger cosmos and correct my imbalance, or . . . or whatever,” she finished lamely.

It was becoming apparent how little Jiang had really taught her. He hadn’t prepared her for this war at all. He had only tried to restrain her from wielding the power that she now knew she could access.

“That’s useless.” Altan looked disdainful. “Jiang was a scholar. I am a soldier. He was concerned with theology; I am concerned with how to destroy.” He opened his fist, turned it outward, and a small ring of fire danced over the lines of his palm. With his other hand he extended his trident. The flame raced from the ends of his fingers, danced across his shoulders, and licked all the way out to the trident’s three prongs.

She marveled at the utter command Altan held over the fire, the way he shaped it like a sculptor might shape clay, how he bent it to his will with the slightest movement of his fingers. When she had summoned the Phoenix, the fire had poured out of her in an uncontrolled flood. But Altan controlled it like an extension of his own self.

“Jiang was right to be cautious,” he said. “The gods are unpredictable. The gods are dangerous. And there’s no one who understands them, not fully. But we at the Night Castle have practiced the weaponization of the gods to an art. We have come closer to understanding the gods than the old monks ever did. We have developed the power to rewrite the fabric of this world. If we don’t use it, then what’s the point?”

After two weeks of hard marching, four days of sailing, and another three days’ march, they reached Khurdalain’s city gates shortly before nightfall. When they emerged from the tree line toward the main road, Rin glimpsed the ocean for the first time.

She stopped walking.

Sinegard and Tikany were both landlocked regions. Rin had seen rivers and lakes, but never such a large body of water as this. She gaped openmouthed at that great expanse of blue, stretching on farther than she could see, farther than she could imagine.

Altan halted beside her. He glanced down at her dumbfounded expression, and he smiled. “Never seen the ocean before?”

She couldn’t look away. She felt like she had the first day she had glimpsed Sinegard in all of its splendor, like she had been dropped into a fantastical world where the stories she’d heard were somehow true.

“I saw paintings,” she said. “I read descriptions. In Tikany the merchants would ride up from the coast and tell us about their adventures at sea. But this—I never dreamed anything could look like this.”

Altan took her hand and pointed it out toward the ocean. “The Federation of Mugen lies just across the narrow strait. If you climb the Kukhoni range, you can just glimpse it. And if you take a ship south of there, down close by Golyn Niis and into Snake Province, you’ll get to Speer.”

She couldn’t possibly see it from where they stood, but still she stared out over the shimmering water, imagining a small, lonely island in the South Nikan Sea. Speer had spent decades in isolation before the great continental powers tore the island apart in the struggle between them.

“What’s it like?”

“Speer? Speer was beautiful.” Altan’s voice was soft, wistful. “They call it the Dead Island now, but all I can remember of it is green. On one side of the island you could see the shore of the Nikara Empire; on the other was boundless water, a limitless horizon. We would take boats out and sail into that ocean without knowing what we would find; journeys into the endless dark to seek out the other side of the world. The Speerlies divided the night sky into sixty-four houses of constellations, one for each god. And as long as you could find the southern star of the Phoenix, you could always find your way back to Speer.”

Rin wondered what the Dead Island was like now. When Mugen destroyed Speer, had they destroyed the villages as well? Or did the huts and lodges still stand, ghost towns waiting for inhabitants who would never return?

“Why did you leave?” she asked.

She realized then that she knew very little about Altan. His survival was a mystery to her, just as her very existence was a mystery to everyone else.

He must have been very young when he came to Nikan, a refugee of the war that killed his people. He couldn’t have been older than four or five. Who had spirited him off that island? Why only him?

And why her?

But Altan didn’t answer. He stared silently at the darkening sky for a long moment and then turned back toward the path.

“Come on,” he said, and reached for her arm. “We’re going to fall behind.”

Officer Yenjen raised a Nikara flag outside the city walls, and then ordered his squadron to take cover behind the trees until they received a response. After a half hour’s wait, a slight girl, dressed head to toe in black, peeked out from the city gate. She motioned frantically for the party to hurry up and get inside, then quickly shut the gate once they were through.

“Your division is waiting in the old fishing district. That’s north of here. Follow the main road,” she instructed Officer Yenjen. Then she turned and saluted her commander. “Trengsin.”

“Qara.”

“That’s our Speerly?”

“That’s her.”

Qara tilted her head as she sized Rin up. She was a tiny woman—girl, really—reaching only to Rin’s shoulder. Her hair hung past her waist in a thick, dark braid. Her features were oddly elongated, not quite Nikara but not quite anything that Rin could put her finger on.

A massive hunting falcon sat perched on her left shoulder, tilting its head at Rin with a disdainful expression. Its eyes and Qara’s were an identical shade of gold.

“How are our people?”

“Fine,” said Qara. “Well. Mostly fine.”

“When’s your brother back?”

Qara’s falcon stretched its head up and then hunched back down, feathers raised as if unsettled. Qara reached up and stroked the bird’s neck.

“When he’s back,” she said.

Yenjen and his squadron had already disappeared down the winding alleys of the city. Qara motioned for Rin and Altan to follow her up a set of stairs adjacent to the city walls.

“Where is she from?” Rin muttered to Altan.

“She’s a Hinterlander,” Altan said, and grabbed her arm just as she stumbled against the rickety stairs. “Don’t trip.”

Qara led them up a high walkway that spanned over the first few blocks of Khurdalain. Once at the top, Rin turned and got her first good look at the port city.

Khurdalain could have been a foreign city uprooted at the foundations and dropped straight onto the other side of the world. It was a chimera of multiple architectural styles, a bizarre amalgamation of building types from different countries spanning continents. Rin saw churches of the kind she’d seen only sketches of in history textbooks, the proof of former Bolonian occupation. She saw buildings with spiraling columns, buildings with elegant monochrome towers with deep grooves etched in their sides instead of the sloping pagodas native to Sinegard. Sinegard was the beacon of the Nikara Empire, but Khurdalain was Nikan’s window to the rest of the world.

Qara led them across the walkway and onto a flat rooftop. They covered another block by running over the level-topped houses, built in the style of old Hesperia, and then dropped down to walk on the street when the buildings became too far apart. Between the gaps of the buildings, Rin could see the dying sun reflected in the ocean.

“This used to be a Hesperian settlement,” said Qara, pointing out over the wharf. The long strip was a waterfront boulevard, ringed with blocky storefronts. The walkway was built of thick wooden planks soggy from seawater. Everything in Khurdalain smelled faintly of the sea; the breeze itself was laced with a salty ocean tang. “That ring of buildings over there—the ones with those terraced roofs—those used to be the Bolonian consulates.”

“What happened?” Rin asked.

“The Dragon Emperor happened,” said Qara. “Don’t you know your history?”

The Dragon Emperor had expelled the foreigners from Nikan in the days of turmoil following the Second Poppy War, but Rin knew that a scattering of Hesperians still remained—missionaries intent on spreading the word of their Holy Maker.

“Are there still any Hesperians in the city?” she asked hopefully. She had never seen a Hesperian. Foreigners in Nikan were not permitted to travel as far north as Sinegard; they were restricted to trading at a handful of port cities, of which Khurdalain was the largest. She wondered if Hesperians were really pale-skinned and covered with fur, if their hair was really carrot red.

“A couple hundred,” Altan said, but Qara shook her head.

“Not anymore. They’ve cleared out since the attack on Sinegard. Their government sent a ship for them. Nearly tipped over, they were trying to cram so many people in. There are one or two of their missionaries left, and a few foreign ministers. They’re documenting what they see, sending it to their governments back at home. But that’s it.”

Rin remembered what Kitay had said about calling on Hesperia for aid, and snorted. “They think that’s helping?”

“They’re Hesperians,” said Qara. “They always think they’re helping.”

The old section of Khurdalain—the Nikara quarter—was set in low-rise buildings embedded inside a grid of alleyways, intersected by a webbed system of canals, so narrow that even a cart would have a hard time getting through. It made sense that the Nikara army had set up base in this part of the city. Even if the Federation knew vaguely where they were, their overwhelming numbers would be no advantage in these crooked, tunneling streets.

Architecture aside, Rin imagined that under normal circumstances, Khurdalain might be a louder, dirtier version of Sinegard. Before occupation, this place must have been a bustling hub of exchange, more exciting even than the Sinegardian downtown markets. But Khurdalain under siege was quiet and muted, almost sullenly so. She saw no civilians as they walked; they either had already evacuated or were heeding the warnings of the Militia, keeping their heads down and staying away from where Federation soldiers might see them.

Qara briefed them on the combat situation as they walked. “We’ve been under siege for almost a month now. We’ve got Federation encampments on three sides, all except the one you came from. Worst is that they’ve been steadily encroaching into urban areas. Khurdalain has high walls, but they have trebuchets.”

“How much of the city have they taken?” Altan asked.

“Only a narrow strip of beach by the sea, and half of the foreign quarter. We could take back the Bolonian embassies, but the Fifth Division won’t cooperate.”

“Won’t cooperate?”

Qara scowled. “We’re having some, ah, difficulties with integration. That new general of theirs doesn’t help. Jun Loran.”

Altan looked as dismayed as Rin felt. “Jun’s here?”

“Shipped in three days ago.”

Rin shuddered. At least she wasn’t serving directly under him. “Isn’t the Fifth from Tiger Province? Why isn’t the Tiger Warlord in command?”

“The Tiger Warlord is a three-year-old kid whose steward is a politician with no military experience. Jun has resumed command of his province’s army. The Ram and Ox Warlords are here too, with their provincial divisions, but they’ve been squabbling with each other over supplies more than they’ve been fighting the Federation. And no one can figure out an attack plan that doesn’t put civilian areas in the line of fire.”

“What are the civilians still doing here?” Rin asked. It seemed to her that the Militia’s job would be a lot easier if civilian protection were not a priority. “Why haven’t they evacuated, like the Sinegardians?”

“Because Khurdalain is not a city that you can easily leave,” said Qara. “Most of the people here make their living from fishing or in the factories. There’s no agriculture out here. If they move further inland, they have nothing. Most of the peasants moved here to escape rural squalor in the first place. If we ask them to leave, they’ll starve. The people are determined to stay, and we’ll just have to make sure they stay alive.”

Qara’s falcon cocked its head suddenly, as if it heard something. When she walked forward several paces Rin could hear it, too: raised voices coming from behind the general’s compound.

“Cike!”

Rin cringed. She would recognize that voice anywhere.

General Jun Loran stormed down the alley toward them, purple-faced with fury.

“Ow-ow!”

By his side, Jun dragged a scrawny boy by the ear, jerking him along with brutal tugs. The boy wore an eyepatch over his left eye, and his right eye watered in pain as he tottered along behind Jun.

Altan stopped short. “Tiger’s tits.”

“Ramsa,” Qara swore under her breath. Rin couldn’t tell if it was a name or a curse in Qara’s language.

“You.” Jun stopped in front of Qara. “Where is your commander?”

Altan stepped forward. “That’d be me.”

“Trengsin?” Jun regarded Altan with open disbelief. “You’re joking. Where’s Tyr?”

A spasm of irritation flickered across Altan’s face. “Tyr is dead.”

“What?”

Altan crossed his arms. “No one bothered to tell you?”

Jun ignored the jibe. “He’s dead? How?”

“Occupational hazard,” Altan said, which Rin suspected meant that he didn’t have a clue.

“So they put the Cike in the hands of a child,” Jun muttered. “Incredible.”

Altan looked between Jun and the boy, who was still bent over by Jun’s side, whimpering in pain. “What’s this about?”

“My men caught him elbows-deep in their munitions stores,” Jun said. “Third time this week.”

“I thought it was our munitions wagon!” the boy protested.

“You don’t have a munitions wagon,” Jun snapped. “We established that the first two times.”

Qara sighed and rubbed her forehead with the palm of her hand.

“I wouldn’t have to steal if they’d just share,” the boy said plaintively, appealing to Altan. His voice was thin and reedy, and his good eye was huge in his thin face. “I can’t do my job if I don’t have fire powder.”

“If your men are lacking equipment, you might have thought to bring it from the Night Castle.”

“We used up all ours at the embassy,” the boy grumbled. “Remember?”

Jun jerked the boy’s ear downward, and the boy howled in pain.

Altan reached behind his back for his trident. “Let go, Jun.”

Jun glanced at the trident, and the side of his mouth quirked up. “Are you threatening me?”

Altan did not extend his weapon—to point his blade at a commander of another division would be the highest treason—but he didn’t take his hand off the shaft. Rin thought she saw fire flicker momentarily across his fingertips. “I’m making a request.”

Jun took one step back, but did not let go of the boy. “Your men do not have access to Fifth Division supplies.”

“And disciplining him is my prerogative, not yours,” said Altan. “Unhand him. Now, Jun.”

Jun made a disgusted noise and let go of the boy, who skirted away quickly and scampered over to Altan’s side, rubbing the side of his head with a rueful expression.

“Last time they hung me up by my ankles in the town square,” the boy complained. He sounded like a child tattling on a classmate to a teacher.

Altan looked outraged.

“Would you treat the First or Eighth like this?” he demanded.

“The First and Eighth have better sense than to root around in the Fifth’s equipment,” Jun snapped. “Your men have been causing nothing but trouble since they got here.”

“We’ve been doing our damn job!” the boy burst out. “You’re the ones hiding behind walls like bloody cowards.”

“Quiet, Ramsa,” Altan snapped.

Jun barked out a short, derisive laugh. “You are a squad of ten. Do not overestimate your value to this Militia.”

“Be that as it may, we serve the Empress just as you do,” Altan said. “We left the Night Castle to be your reinforcements. So you’ll treat my men with respect, or the Empress will hear of it.”

“Of course. You’re the Empress’s special brats,” Jun drawled. “Reinforcements. What a joke.”

He shot a last disdainful look at Altan and stalked off. He pretended not to see Rin.

“So that’s been the last week,” Qara said with a sigh.

“I thought you said everything was fine,” Altan said.

“I exaggerated.”

Ramsa peered up at his commander. “Hi, Trengsin,” he said cheerfully. “Glad you’re back.”

Altan pressed his hands against his face and then tilted his head up, inhaling deeply. His arms dropped. He sighed. “Where’s my office?”

“Down that alley to the left,” said Ramsa. “Cleared out the old customs office. You’ll like it. We brought your maps.”

“Thanks,” Altan said. “Where are the Warlords stationed?”

“The old government complex around the corner. They’ve been holding councils on the regular. They don’t really invite us, on account of, well. You know.” Ramsa trailed off, suddenly looking very guilty.

Altan shot Qara a questioning look.

“Ramsa blew up half the foreign quarter at the docks,” she reported. “Didn’t give the Warlords advance warning.”

“I blew up one building.”

“It was a big building,” Qara said flatly. “The Fifth still had two men inside.”

“Well, did they survive?” Altan asked.

Qara stared at him in disbelief. “Ramsa detonated a building on them.”

“I take it you lot have done nothing useful while I’ve been gone, then,” Altan said.

“We set up fortifications!” Ramsa said.

“Of the defense line?” Altan asked hopefully.

“No, just around your office. And our barracks. Warlords won’t let us near the defense line anymore.”

Altan looked deeply aggravated. “I need to go get that squared up. The government complex is down that way?”

“Yeah.”

“Fine.” Altan cast a distracted look at Rin. “Qara, she’ll need equipment. Get her geared up and moved in. Ramsa, come with me.”

“Are you Altan’s lieutenant?” Rin asked as Qara led her down another winding set of alleyways.

“Not me. My brother,” Qara said. She quickened her pace, ducked under a round gate embedded in a wall, and waited for Rin to follow her through. “I’m filling in until he’s back. You’ll stay here with me.”

She pulled Rin down yet another stairwell that led to a damp underground room. It was a tiny chamber, barely the size of the Academy outhouse. A draft blew in from the cellar opening. Rin rubbed her arms and shivered.

“We get the women’s barracks all to ourselves,” Qara said. “Lucky us.”

Rin glanced about the room. The walls were packed dirt, not brick, which meant no insulation. A single mat had been unfurled in the corner, surrounded by a bundle of Qara’s things. Rin supposed she’d have to get her own blanket unless she wanted to sleep among the cockroaches. “There aren’t any women in the divisions?”

“We don’t share barracks with the divisions.” Qara fumbled in a bag near her mat, pulled out a bundle of clothing, and tossed it at Rin. “You should probably change out of that Academy uniform. I’ll take your old things. Enki wants old linens for bandages.”

Rin quickly wriggled out of her travel-worn Academy tunic, pulled on the uniform, then handed her old clothes to Qara. Her new uniform was a nondescript black tunic. Unlike the Militia uniforms, it bore no insignia of the Red Emperor over her left breast. The Cike uniforms were designed to have no identifying marks at all.

“Armband, too.” Qara’s hand was outstretched, expectant.

Rin touched her white armband, feeling self-conscious. She hadn’t taken it off since the battle, even though she was no longer officially Jiang’s apprentice. “Do I have to?” She’d seen plenty of academy armbands among the soldiers in Yenjen’s squadron, even though they looked well past academy age. Officers from Sinegard often wore those armbands for years after they graduated as a mark of pride.

Qara folded her arms. “This isn’t the Academy. Your apprentice affiliation doesn’t matter here.”

“I know that—” Rin began to say, but Qara cut her off.

“You don’t understand. This is not the Militia, this is the Cike. We were all sent here because we were deemed fit to kill, but unfit for a division. Most of us didn’t go to Sinegard, and the ones who did don’t have great memories of the place. Nobody here cares who your master was, and advertising it won’t earn you any goodwill. Forget about approval or rankings or glory, or whatever bullshit you were angling for at Sinegard. You are Cike. By default, you don’t get a good reputation.”

“I don’t care about my reputation—” Rin protested, but again Qara cut her off.

“No, you listen to me. You’re not at school anymore. You aren’t competing with anyone; you’re not trying to get good marks. You live with us, you fight with us, you die with us. From now on, your utmost loyalty is to the Cike and the Empire. You want an illustrious career, you should have joined the divisions. But you didn’t, which means something’s wrong with you, which means you’re stuck with us. Understand?”

“I didn’t ask to come here,” Rin snapped defensively. “I didn’t have a choice.”

“None of us did,” Qara said curtly. “Try to keep up.”

Rin tried to keep a map of the base in her head as they walked, a mental picture of the labyrinth that was Khurdalain, but she gave up after the fifteenth turn. She half suspected Qara was taking a deliberately convoluted route to wherever they were going.

“How do you guys get anywhere?” she asked.

“Memorize the routes,” Qara responded. “The harder we are to find, the better. And if you want to find Enki, just follow the whining.”

Rin was about to ask what this meant when she heard another set of raised voices from around the corner.

“Please,” begged a male voice. “Please, it hurts so much.”

“Look, I sympathize, I really do,” said a second, much deeper voice. “But frankly it’s not my problem, so I don’t care.”

“It’s just a few seeds!”

Rin and Qara rounded the corner. The voices belonged to a slight, dark-skinned man and a hapless-looking soldier with an insignia that marked him as a private of the Fifth. The soldier’s right arm ended in a bloody stub at the elbow.

Rin cringed at the sight; she could almost see the gangrene through the poor bandaging. No wonder he was begging for poppy.

“It’s just a few seeds to you, and the next poor chap who asks, and the next after that,” said Enki. “Eventually I’m all out of seeds, and my division hasn’t got anything to fight with. Then the next time your division’s backed up in a corner, my division can’t do their jobs and save your sorry asses. They are a priority. You are not. Understand?”

The soldier spat on Enki’s doorstep. “Freaks.”

He brushed past Enki and backed out into the alleyway, casting dark glances at Rin and Qara as he passed them.

“I need to move shop,” Enki complained to Qara as she shut the door behind her. Inside was a small, crowded room filled with the bitter smell of medicinal herbs. “This is no condition to store materials in. I need somewhere dry.”

“Move closer to the division barracks and you’ll have a thousand soldiers on your doorstep demanding a quick fix,” said Qara.

“Hm. You think Altan would let me move into the back closet?”

“I think Altan likes having his closet to himself.”

“You’re probably right. Who’s this?” Enki examined Rin from head to toe, as if looking for signs of injury. His voice was truly lovely, rich and velvety. Simply listening to him made Rin feel sleepy. “What’s ailing you?”

“She’s the Speerly, Enki.”

“Oh! I’d forgotten.” Enki rubbed the back of his shaved head. “How did you slip through Mugen’s fingers?”

“I don’t know,” said Rin. “I only just found out myself.”

Enki nodded slowly, still studying Rin as if she were a particularly fascinating specimen. He wore a carefully neutral expression that gave nothing away. “But of course. You had no idea.”

“She’ll need equipment,” said Qara.

“Sure, no problem.” Enki disappeared into a closet built into the back of the room. They listened to him bustling around for a moment, and then he reappeared with a tray of dried plants. “Any of these work for you?”

Rin had never seen so many different kinds of psychedelics in one place. There were more drug varieties here than in Jiang’s entire garden. Jiang would have been delighted.

She brushed her fingers along the opium pods, the shriveled mushrooms, and the muddy white powders.

“What difference does it make?” she asked.

“It’s really a matter of preference,” said Enki. “These drugs will all get you nice and tripped up, but the key is to find a mixture that lets you summon the gods without getting so stoned that you can’t wield your weapon. The stronger hallucinogens will shoot you right up to the Pantheon, but you’ll lose all perception of the material world. Fat lot of good summoning a god will do you if you can’t see an arrow right in front of your face. The weaker drugs require a bit more focus to get in the right mind state, but they leave you with more of your bodily faculties. If you’ve had meditation training, then I’d stick with more moderate strains if you can.”

Rin didn’t think that a siege was a great time to experiment, so she decided to settle for the familiar. She found the poppy seed variety that she had stolen from Jiang’s garden among Enki’s collection. She reached out to grab a handful, but Enki pulled the tray back out of her reach.

“No you don’t.” Enki brought a scale out from under the counter and began measuring precise amounts into little pouches. “You come to me for doses, which I will document. The amount you receive is calibrated to your body weight. You’re not big; you definitely won’t need as much as the others. Use it sparingly, and only when ordered. A shaman who’s addicted is better off dead.”

Rin hadn’t considered that. “Does that happen often?”

“In this line of work?” Enki said. “It’s almost inevitable.”

The Militia’s food rations made the Academy canteen look like a veritable restaurant in comparison. Rin stood in line for half an hour and received a measly bowl of rice gruel. She swirled her spoon around the gray, watery soup, and several uncooked lumps drifted up to the surface.

She looked around the mess hall for black uniforms, and found a few of her contingent clustered at one long table at the end of the hall. They sat far away from the other soldiers. The two tables closest to them were empty.

“This is our Speerly,” Qara announced when Rin sat down.

The Cike looked up at Rin with a mixture of apprehension and wary interest. Qara, Ramsa, and Enki sat with a man she didn’t recognize, all four of them garbed in pitch-black uniforms without any insignia or armband. Rin was struck by how young they all were. None looked older than Enki, and even he didn’t look like he’d seen a full four zodiac cycles. Most appeared to be in their late twenties. Ramsa barely looked fifteen.

It was no surprise that they had no problem with a commander of Altan’s age, or that they were called the Bizarre Children. Rin wondered if they were recruited young, or if they simply died before they had the chance to grow older.

“Welcome to the freak squad,” said the man next to her. “I’m Baji.”

Baji was a thickly built mercenary type with a loud booming voice. Despite his considerable girth he was somewhat handsome, in a coarse, dark sort of way. He looked like one of the Fangs’ opium smugglers. Strapped to his back was a huge nine-pointed rake. It looked amazingly heavy. Rin wondered at the strength it took to wield it.

“Admiring this?” Baji patted the rake. The pointed ends were crusted over with something suspiciously brown. “Nine prongs. One of a kind. You won’t find its make anywhere else.”

Because no smithy would create a weapon so outlandish, Rin thought. And because farmers have no use for lethally sharp rakes. “Seems impractical.”

“That’s what I said,” Ramsa butted in. “What are you, a potato farmer?”

Baji directed his spoon at the boy. “Shut your mouth or I swear to heaven I will put nine perfectly spaced holes in the side of your head.”

Rin lifted a spoonful of rice gruel to her mouth and tried not to picture what Baji had just described. Her eyes landed on a barrel placed right behind Baji’s seat. The water inside was oddly clouded, and the surface erupted in occasional ripples, as if a fish were swimming around inside.

“What’s that in the barrel?” she asked.

“That’s the Friar.” Baji twisted around in his seat and rapped his knuckles against the wooden rim. “Hey, Aratsha! Come say hello to the Speerly!”

For a second the barrel did nothing. Rin wondered whether Baji was entirely in his right mind. She had heard rumors that Cike operatives were crazy, that they had been sent to the Night Castle when they lost their sanity.

Then the water began rising out of the barrel, as if falling in reverse, and solidified into a shape that looked vaguely like a man. Two bulbous orbs that might have been eyes widened as they swiveled in Rin’s direction. Something that looked vaguely like a mouth moved. “Oh! You cut your hair.”

Rin was too busy gaping to respond.

Baji made an impatient noise. “No, you dolt, this is the new one. From Sinegard,” he emphasized.

“Oh, really?” The water blob made a gesture that seemed like a bow. Vibrations rippled through his entire form when he spoke. “Well, you should have said so. Careful, you’ll catch a moth in your mouth.”

Rin’s jaw shut with a click. “What happened to you?” she finally managed.

“What are you talking about?” The watery figure sounded alarmed. He dipped his head, as if examining his torso.

“No, I mean—” Rin stammered. “What—why do you—”

“Aratsha prefers to spend his time in this guise if he can help it,” Baji interjected. “You don’t want to see his human form. Very grisly.”

“Like you’re such a visual delight.” Aratsha snorted.

“Sometimes we let him out into the river when we need a drinking source poisoned,” Baji said.

“I am quite handy with poisons,” Aratsha acknowledged.

“Are you? I thought you just fouled things up with your general presence.”

“Don’t be rude, Baji. You’re the one who can’t be bothered to clean his weapon.”

Baji dipped his rake threateningly over the barrel. “Shall I clean it off in you? What part of you is this, anyway? Your leg? Your—”

Aratsha yelped and collapsed back into the barrel. Within seconds the water was very still. It could have been a barrel of rainwater.

“He’s a weird one,” Baji said cheerfully, turning back to Rin. “He’s an initiate of a minor river god. Far more committed to his religion than the rest of us.”

“Which god do you summon?”

“The god of pigs.”

“What?”

“I summon the fighting spirit of a very angry boar. Come off it. Not all gods are as glorious as yours, sweetheart. I picked the first one I saw. The masters were disappointed.”

The masters? Had Baji gone to Sinegard? Rin remembered Jiang had told her there had been Lore students before her, students who had gone mad, but they were supposed to be in mental asylums or Baghra. They were too unstable, they had been locked up for their own good. “So that means—”

“It means I smash things very well, sweetheart.” Baji drained his bowl, tilted his head back, and belched. His expression made it clear he didn’t want to discuss it further.

“Will you slide down?” A very slight young man with a whispery goatee walked over to their table with a heaping bowl of lotus root and slid into the seat on the other side of Rin.

“Unegen can turn into a fox,” Baji said by way of introduction.

“Turn into—?”

“My god lets me shift shapes,” Unegen said. “And yours lets you spit fire. Not a big deal.” He spooned a heap of steamed lotus into his mouth, swallowed, grimaced, and then belched. “I don’t think the cook’s even trying anymore. How are we low on salt? We’re next to an ocean.”

“You can’t just pour seawater on food,” interjected Ramsa. “There’s a sanitation process.”

“How hard can it be? We’re soldiers, not barbarians.” Unegen leaned down the table, tapping to get Qara’s attention. “Where’s your other half?”

Qara looked irritated. “Out.”

“Well, when’s he back?”

“When he’s back,” Qara said testily. “Chaghan comes and goes on his own schedule. You know that.”

“As long as his schedule accommodates the fact that we’re, you know, fighting a war,” said Baji. “He could at least hurry.”

Qara snorted. “You two don’t even like Chaghan. What do you want him back for?”

“We’ve been eating rice gruel for days. It’s about time we had some dessert up here.” Baji smiled, displaying sharp incisors. “I’m talking sugar.”

“I thought Chaghan was getting something for Altan,” Rin said, confused.

“Sure,” said Unegen. “Doesn’t mean he can’t stop at a bakery on the way back.”

“Is he at least close?” Baji asked.

“I’m not my brother’s homing pigeon,” Qara grumbled. “We’ll know where he is when he’s back.”

“Can’t you two just, you know, do that thing?” Unegen tapped his temples.

Qara made a face. “We’re anchor twins, not mirror-wells.”

“Oh, you can’t do mirror-wells?”

“Nobody can do mirror-wells,” Qara snapped. “Not anymore.”

Unegen looked at Rin over the table and winked, as if winding Qara up was something he and Baji regularly did for fun.

“Oh, leave Qara alone.”

Rin twisted around in her seat to see Altan. He walked up to them, looking over her head. “Someone needs to patrol the outer perimeter. Baji, it’s your turn.”

“Oh, I can’t,” Baji said.

“Why not?”

“I’m eating.”

Altan rolled his eyes. “Baji.”

“Send Ramsa,” Baji whined. “He hasn’t been out since—”

Bang. The door to the mess hall slammed open. All heads whipped toward the far end of the room, where a figure garbed in the black robes of the Cike was staggering through the doorway. The division soldiers standing by the exit hastily skirted away, clearing a path for the massive stranger.

Only the Cike were unfazed.

“Suni’s back,” Unegen said. “Took him long enough.”

Suni was a giant man with a boyish face. A thick golden dusting of hair covered his arms and legs, more hair than Rin had ever seen on a man. He walked with an odd lope, like an ape’s walk, like he’d rather be swinging through a tree instead of moving ponderously over land. His arms were almost thicker than Rin’s entire torso; he looked as if he could crush her head in like a walnut if he wanted to.

He made a beeline toward the Cike.

“Great Tortoise,” Rin muttered under her breath. “What is he?”

“Suni’s mom fucked a monkey,” Ramsa said happily.

“Shut up, Ramsa. Suni channels the Monkey God,” Unegen reported. “Makes you glad he’s on our side, doesn’t it?”

Rin wasn’t sure that made her any less scared of him, but Suni was already at their table.

“How’d it go?” Unegen asked cheerfully. “Did they see you?”

Suni didn’t seem to hear Unegen. He cocked his head, as if sniffing at them. His temples were caked with dried blood. His tousled hair and vacant stare made him appear more animal than human, like some wild beast that couldn’t decide whether to attack or flee.

Rin tensed. Something was wrong.

“It’s so loud,” Suni said. His voice was a low growl, gritty and guttural.

The smile slid off Unegen’s face. “What?”

“They keep shouting.”

“Who keeps shouting?”

Suni’s eyes darted around the table. They were wild and unfocused. Rin tensed a split second before Suni leaped over the table at them. He slammed his arm into Unegen’s neck, pinning him to the floor. Unegen choked, batted frantically at Suni’s hulking torso.

Rin jumped to the side, lifting up her chair as a weapon just as Qara grabbed for her longbow.

Suni was grappling furiously with Unegen on the floor. There was a popping noise and then a little red fox was where Unegen had been before. It almost slithered out of Suni’s grip, but Suni tightened his hold and seized the fox by the throat.

“Altan!” Qara shouted.

Altan hurtled over the fallen table, pushing Rin out of the way. He jumped onto Suni just before Suni could wrench Unegen’s neck. Startled, Suni lashed out with his left arm, catching Altan in the shoulder. Altan ignored the blow and slapped Suni hard across the face.

Suni roared and let go of Unegen. The fox wriggled away and scampered toward Qara’s feet, where he collapsed, sides heaving for air.

Suni and Altan were now wrestling on the floor, each trying to pin the other. Altan looked tiny against the massive Suni, who had to be twice his weight. Suni got a hold around Altan’s shoulders, but Altan gripped Suni’s face and squeezed his fingers toward his eyes.

Suni howled and flung Altan away from him. For a moment Altan looked like a limp puppet, tossed in the air, but he landed upright, tensed like a cat, just as Suni charged him again.

The Cike had formed a ring around Suni. Qara held an arrow fitted to her bow, ready to pierce Suni through the forehead. Baji held his rake at the ready, but Suni and Altan were rolling around so wildly he couldn’t get a clean blow in. Rin’s fingers closed tightly around the hilt of her sword.

Altan landed a solid kick to Suni’s sternum. A crack echoed through the room. Suni tottered back, stunned. Altan rose to a low crouch, standing between Suni and the rest of the Cike.

“Get back,” Altan said softly.

“They’re so loud,” Suni said. He didn’t sound angry. He sounded scared. “They’re so loud!”

“I said get back!”

Baji and Unegen retreated reluctantly. But Qara remained where she was, keeping her arrow trained at Suni’s head.

“They’re being so loud,” said Suni. “I can’t understand what they’re saying.”

“I can tell you everything you need to know,” Altan said quietly. “Just put your arms down, Suni, can you do that for me?”

“I’m scared,” Suni whimpered.

“We don’t point arrows at our friends,” Altan snapped without moving his head.

Qara lowered her longbow. Her arms shook visibly.

Altan walked slowly toward Suni, arms spread out in supplication. “It’s me. It’s just me.”

“Are you going to help me?” Suni asked. His voice didn’t match his demeanor. He sounded like a little child—terrified, helpless.

“Only if you let me,” Altan answered.

Suni dropped his arms.

Rin’s sword trembled in her hands. She was certain that Suni would snap Altan’s neck.

“They’re so loud,” Suni said. “They keep telling me to do things, I don’t know who to listen to . . .”

“Listen to me,” said Altan. “Just me.”

With brisk, short steps, he closed the gap between himself and Suni.

Suni tensed. Qara’s hands flew to her longbow again; Rin crouched to spring forward.

Suni’s massive hand closed around Altan’s. He took a deep breath. Altan touched his forehead gently and brought Suni’s forehead down to his own.

“It’s okay,” he whispered. “You’re fine. You’re Suni and you belong to the Cike. You don’t have to listen to any voices. You just have to listen to me.”

Eyes closed, Suni nodded. His heavy breathing subsided. A lopsided grin broke out over his face. When he opened his eyes, the wildness had left them.

“Hi, Trengsin,” he said. “Good to have you back.”

Altan exhaled slowly, then nodded and clapped Suni on the shoulder.

Chapter 14

“So much of a siege is sitting around on your ass,” Ramsa complained. “You know how much actual fighting there’s been since the Federation started landing on the beach in droves? None. We’re just scouting each other out, testing the limits, playing chicken.”

Ramsa had recruited Rin to help him fortify the back alleys of the intersection by the wharf.

They were slowly transforming the streets of Khurdalain into defense lines. Each evacuated house became a fort; each intersection became a trap of barbed wire. They had spent the morning methodically knocking holes through walls to link the labyrinth of lanes into a navigable transportation system to which only the Nikara had the map. Now they were filling bags with sand to pad the gaps in the walls against Federation bombardments.

“I thought you blew up an embassy building,” said Rin.

“That was one time,” Ramsa snapped. “More action than anyone’s attempted since we got here, anyhow.”

“You mean the Federation hasn’t attacked yet?”

“They’ve launched exploratory parties to sniff out the borders. No major troop movements yet.”

“And they’ve been at it this long? Why?”

“Because Khurdalain’s better fortified than Sinegard. Khurdalain withstood the first two Poppy Wars, and it sure as hell is going to make it through a third.” Ramsa bent down. “Pass me that bag.”

She hauled it up, and he hoisted it to the top of the fortification with a grunt.

Rin couldn’t help liking the scrawny urchin, who reminded her of a younger Kitay, if Kitay had been a one-eyed pyromaniac with an unfortunate adoration for explosions. She wondered how long he’d had been with the Cike. He looked impossibly young. How did a child end up on the front lines of a war?

“You’ve got a Sinegardian accent,” she noticed.

Ramsa nodded. “Lived there for a while. My family were alchemists for the Militia base in the capital. Oversaw fire powder production.”

“So what are you doing here?”

“You mean with the Cike?” Ramsa shrugged. “Long story. Father got wrapped up in some political stuff, ended up turning on the Empress. Extremists, you know. Could have been the Opera, but I’ll never be sure. Anyways, he tried to detonate a rocket over the palace and ended up blowing up our factory instead.” He pointed to his eyepatch. “Burned my eyeball right out. Daji’s guards lopped the heads off everyone remotely involved. Public execution and everything.”

Rin blinked, mostly stunned by Ramsa’s breezy delivery. “Then what about you?”

“I got off easy. Father never told me much about his plans, so after they realized I didn’t know anything, they just tossed me into Baghra. I think they thought killing a kid might make them look bad.”

“Baghra?”

Ramsa nodded cheerfully. “Worst two years of my life. Near the tail end, the Empress paid me a visit and said she’d let me out if I worked on munitions for the Cike.”

“And you just said yes?”

“Do you know what Baghra is like? By then, I was just about ready to do anything,” said Ramsa. “Baji was in Baghra, too. Just ask him.”

“What was he there for?”

Ramsa shrugged. “Who knows? He won’t say. He was only there for a few months, though. But let’s face it—even Khurdalain is so much better than a cell in Baghra. And the work here is awesome.”

Rin gave him a sideways look. Ramsa sounded disturbingly chipper about his situation.

She decided to change the subject. “What was that about in the mess hall?”

“What do you mean?”

“The—uh . . .” She flailed her arms around. “The monkey man.”

“Huh? Oh, that’s just Suni. Does that maybe every other day. I think he just likes the attention. Altan’s pretty good with him; Tyr used to just lock him up for hours until he’d calmed down.” Ramsa handed her another bag. “Don’t let Suni scare you. He’s really pretty nice when he’s not being a terror. It’s just that god fucking with his head.”

“So you’re not a shaman?” she asked.

Ramsa shook his head quickly. “I don’t mess with that shit. It screws you up. You saw Suni in there. My only god is science. Combine six parts sulfur, six parts saltpeter, and one part birthwort herb, and you’ve got fire powder. Formulaic. Dependable. Doesn’t change. I understand the appeal, I really do, but I like having my mind to myself.”

Three days passed before Rin spoke with Altan again. He spent a good deal of his time tied up in meetings with the Warlords, trying to patch up relations with the military leadership before they deteriorated any further. She would see him darting back to his office in between meetings, looking haggard and pissed. Finally, he sent Qara to summon her.

“Hey. I’m about to call a meeting. Wanted to check in on you first.” Altan didn’t look at her as he spoke; he was busy scrawling something on a map covering his desk. “I’m sorry it couldn’t be earlier, I’ve been dealing with bureaucratic bullshit.”

“That’s all right.” She fidgeted with her hands. He looked exhausted. “What are the Warlords like?”

“They’re nearly useless.” Altan made a disgusted noise. “The Ox Warlord’s a slimy politician, and the Ram Warlord is an insecure fool who’ll bend whichever way the wind blows. Jun’s got them both by the ear, and the only thing they all agree on is that they hate the Cike. Means we don’t get supplies, reinforcements, or intelligence, and they wouldn’t let us into the mess hall if they had their way. It’s a stupid way to fight a war.”

“I’m sorry you have to put up with that.”

“It’s not your problem.” He looked up from his map. “So what do you think of your division?”

“They’re weird,” she said.

“Oh?”

“None of them seem to realize we’re in a war zone,” she rephrased. Every regular division soldier she’d encountered was grim-faced, exhausted, but the way the Cike spoke and behaved made them seem like fidgety children—bored rather than scared, off-kilter and out of touch.

“They’re killers by profession,” Altan said. “They’re desensitized to danger—everyone but Unegen, anyway; he’s skittish about everything. But the rest can act like they don’t understand what everyone’s so freaked out about.”

“Is that why the Militia hates them?”

“The Militia hates us because we have unlimited access to psychedelics, we can do what they can’t, and they don’t understand why. It is very difficult to justify how the Cike behave to people who don’t believe in shamans,” Altan said.

Rin could sympathize with the Militia. Suni’s fits of rage were frequent and public. Qara mumbled to her birds in full view of the other soldiers. And once word had gotten out about Enki’s veritable apothecary of hallucinogens, it spread like wildfire; the division soldiers couldn’t understand why only the Cike should have access to morphine.

“So why don’t you just try to tell them?” she asked. “How shamanism works, I mean.”

“Because that’s such an easy conversation to have? But trust me. They’ll see soon enough.” Altan tapped his map. “They’re treating you all right, though? Made any friends?”

“I like Ramsa,” she offered.

“He’s a charmer. Like a new puppy. You think he’s adorable until he pisses on the furniture.”

“Did he?”

“No. But he did take a shit in Baji’s pillow once. Don’t get on his bad side.” Altan grimaced.

“How old is he?” Rin had to ask.

“At least twelve. Probably no older than fifteen.” Altan shrugged. “Baji’s got this theory that he’s actually a forty-year-old who doesn’t age, because we’ve never seen him get any taller, but he’s not nearly mature enough.”

“And you put him into war zones?”

“Ramsa puts himself into war zones,” Altan said. “You just try to stop him. Have you met the rest? No problems?”

“No problems,” she said hastily. “Everything’s fine, it’s just . . .”

“They’re not Sinegard graduates,” he finished for her. “There’s no routine. No discipline. Nothing you’re used to. Am I right?”

She nodded.

“You can’t think of them as just the Thirteenth Division. You can’t command them like ground troops. They’re like chess pieces, right? Only they’re mismatched and overpowered. Baji’s the most competent, and probably should be the commander, but he gets distracted by anything with legs. Unegen’s good for intelligence gathering, but he’s scared of his own shadow. Bad in open combat. Aratsha’s useless unless you’re right beside a body of water. You always want Suni in a firefight, but he’s got no subtlety, so you can’t assign him to anything else. Qara’s the best archer I’ve seen and probably the most useful of the lot, but she’s mediocre in hand-to-hand. And Chaghan’s a walking psychospiritual bomb, but only when he’s here.” Altan threw his hands up. “Put that all together and try to formulate a strategy.”

Rin glanced down at the markings on his map. “But you’ve thought of something?”

“I think so.” A grin quirked over his face. “Why don’t we go call the rest of them?”

Ramsa arrived first. He smelled suspiciously of fire powder, though Rin couldn’t imagine where he’d gotten more. Baji and Unegen showed up minutes later, hoisting Aratsha’s barrel between them. Qara appeared with Enki, heatedly discussing something in Qara’s language. When they saw the others, they quickly fell silent. Suni came in last, and Rin was privately relieved when he took a seat at the opposite end of the room.

Altan’s office had only the one chair, so they sat on the floor in a circle like a ring of schoolchildren. Aratsha bobbed conspicuously in the corner, towering over them like some grotesque watery plant.

“Gang’s together again,” Ramsa said happily.

“Sans Chaghan,” said Baji. “When’s he back? Qara? Estimated location?”

Qara glowered at him.

“Never mind,” said Baji.

“We’re all here? Good.” Altan walked into the office carrying a rolled-up map in one hand. He unfurled it over his desk, then pinned it up against the far wall. The crucial landmarks of the city had been marked in red and black ink, dotted over with circles of varying size.

“Here’s our position in Khurdalain,” he said. He pointed to the black circles. “This is us.” Then to the red ones. “This is Mugen.”

The maps reminded Rin of a game of wikki, the chess variation Irjah had taught them to play in their third-year Strategy class. Wikki play did not involve direct confrontation, but rather dominance through strategic encirclement. Both the Nikara and the Federation had as of yet avoided direct clash, instead filling empty spaces on the complicated network of canals that was Khurdalain to establish a relative advantage. The opposing forces held each other in a fragile equilibrium, gradually raising the stakes as reinforcements flocked to the city from both sides.

“The wharf now stands as the main line of defense. We insulate the civilian quarters against Federation encampments on the beach. They haven’t attempted a press farther inland because all three divisions are concentrated right on the mouth of the Sharhap River. But that balance only holds so long as they’re uncertain about our numbers. We’re not sure how good their intelligence is, but we’re guessing they’re aware that we’d be pretty evenly matched in an open field. After Sinegard, the Federation forces don’t want to risk direct confrontation. They don’t want to bleed forces before their inland campaign. They’ll only attack when they have the sure numbers advantage.”

Altan indicated on the map where he had circled an area to the north of where they were stationed.

“In three days, the Federation will bring in a fleet to supplement the troops at the Sharhap River. Their warship will unload twelve sampans bearing men, supplies, and fire powder off the coast. Qara’s birds have seen them sailing over the narrow strait. At their current speed, we predict they will land after sunset of the third day,” Altan announced. “I want to sink them.”

“And I want to sleep with the Empress.” Baji looked around. “Sorry, I thought we were voicing our fantasies.”

Altan looked unamused.

“Look at your own map,” Baji insisted. “The Sharhap is swarming with Jun’s men. You can’t attack the Federation without escalation. This forces their hand. And the Warlords won’t get on board—they’re not ready, they want to wait for the Seventh to get here.”

“They’re not landing at the Sharhap,” Altan responded. “They’re docking at the Murui. Far away from the fishing wharf. The civilians stay away from Murui; the flat shore means that there’s a broad intertidal zone and a fast-running tide. Which means there’s no fixed coastline. They’ll have difficulty unloading. And the terrain beyond the beaches is nonideal for them; it’s crisscrossed by rivers and creeks, and there are hardly any good roads.”

Baji looked confused. “Then why the hell are they docking there?”

Altan looked smug. “For precisely the same reasons that the First and Eighth are amassing troops by Sharhap. Sharhap’s the obvious landing spot. The Federation don’t think anyone will be guarding Murui. But they weren’t counting on, you know, talking birds.”

“Nice one,” Unegen said.

“Thank you.” Qara looked smug.

“The coast at Murui leads into a tight latticework of irrigation channels by a rice paddy. We will draw the boats as far as possible inland, and Aratsha will ground them by reversing the currents to cut off an escape route.”

They looked to Aratsha.

“You can do that?” Baji asked.

The watery blob that was Aratsha’s head bobbed from side to side. “A fleet that size? Not easily. I can give you thirty minutes. One hour, tops.”

“That’s more than enough,” said Altan. “If we can get them bunched together, they’ll catch fire in seconds. But we need to corral them into the narrow strait. Ramsa. Can you create a diversion?”

Ramsa tossed something round in a sack across the table to Altan.

Altan caught it, opened it, and made a face. “What is this?”

“It’s the Bone-Burning Fire Oil Magic Bomb,” Ramsa said. “New model.”

“Cool.” Suni leaned toward the bag. “What’s in it?”

“Tung oil, sal ammoniac, scallion juice, and feces.” Ramsa rattled off the ingredients with relish.

Altan looked faintly alarmed. “Whose feces?”

“That’s not important,” Ramsa said hastily. “This can knock birds out of the sky from fifty feet away. I can plant some bamboo rockets for you, too, but you’ll have trouble igniting in this humidity.”

Altan raised an eyebrow.

“Right.” Ramsa chuckled. “I love Speerlies.”

“Aratsha will reverse the currents to trap them,” Altan continued. “Suni, Baji, Rin, and I will defend from the shore. They’ll have reduced visibility from the combination of smoke and fog, so they’ll think we’re a larger squad than we are.”

“What happens if they try to storm the shore?” Unegen asked.

“They can’t,” said Altan. “It’s marshland. They’ll sink into the bog. At nighttime it’ll be impossible for them to find solid land. We will defend those crucial points in teams of two. Qara and Unegen will detach supply boats from the back of the van and drag them back to the main channel. Whatever we can’t take, we’ll burn.”

“One problem,” Ramsa said. “I’m out of fire powder. The Warlords aren’t sharing.”

“I’ll deal with the Warlords,” Altan said. “You just keep making those shit bombs.”

The great military strategist Sunzi wrote that fire should be used on a dry night, when flames might spread with the smallest provocation. Fire should be used when one was upwind, so that the wind would carry its brother element, smoke, into the enemy encampment. Fire should be used on a clear night, when there was no chance for rainfall to quench the flames.

Fire should not be used on a night like this, when the humid winds from the beach would prevent it from spreading, when stealth was of utmost importance but any torchlight would give them away.

But tonight they were not using regular fire. They needed nothing so rudimentary as kindling and oil. They didn’t need torches. They had Speerlies.

Rin crouched among the reeds beside Altan, eyes fixed on the darkening sky as she awaited Qara’s signal. They pressed flat against the mud bank, stomachs on the ground. Water seeped through her thin tunic from the moist mud, and the peat emitted such a rank odor of rotten eggs that breathing through her mouth only made her want to gag.

On the opposite bank she could just see Suni and Baji crawl up against the river and drop down among the reeds. Between them, they held the only two strips of solid land in the paddy; two slender pieces of dry peat that reached into the marsh like fingers.

The thick fog that might have dampened regular kindling now gave them the advantage. It would be a boon to the Federation as they made their amphibious landing, but it would also serve to conceal the Cike and to exaggerate their numbers.

“How did you know there would be a fog?” she whispered to Altan.

“There’s a fog every time it rains. This is the wet cycle for the rice paddies. Qara’s birds have been keeping track of cloud movements for the past week,” Altan said. “We know the marsh inside out.”

Altan’s attention to detail was remarkable. The Cike operated with a system of signals and cues that Rin would never have been able to decipher had she not been drilled relentlessly the day before. When Qara’s falcon flew overhead, that had been the signal for Aratsha to begin his subtle manipulation of the river currents. Half an hour before that, an owl had flown low over the river, signaling Baji and Suni to ingest a handful of colorful fungi. The drug’s reaction time was timed precisely to the estimated arrival of the fleet.

Amateurs obsess over strategy, Irjah had once told their class. Professionals obsess over logistics.

Rin had choked down a bagful of poppy seeds when she saw Qara’s first signal; they stuck thickly to her throat, settled lightly in her stomach. She felt the effects when she stood; she was just high enough that her head felt light but not so woozy that she couldn’t wield a sword.

Altan had ingested nothing. Altan, for some reason, did not seem to need any drugs to summon the Phoenix. He called the fire as casually as one might whistle. It was an extension of him that he could manipulate with no concentration at all.

A faint rustle overhead. Rin could barely make out the silhouette of Qara’s eagle, passing over for the second time to alert them to the arrival of the Federation. She heard a gentle sloshing noise coming from the channel.

Rin squinted at the river and saw not a fleet of boats but a line of Federation soldiers, implausibly walking in the river that reached up to their shoulders. They carried wooden planks high over their heads.

She realized that they were engineers. They were going to use those planks to create bridges for the incoming fleet to roll supplies onto dry land. Smart, she thought. The engineers each held a waterproof lamp high over the murky channel, casting an eerie glow over the canal.

Altan motioned for Suni and Baji to crouch deeper to the ground so they wouldn’t be visible over the reeds. The long grass tickled Rin’s earlobes, but she didn’t move.

Then, far down by the mouth of the channel, Rin saw the dim flicker of a lantern signal. At first she could see only the boat at the fore.

Then the full fleet emerged from the mist.

Rin counted under her breath. The fleet was twelve boats—sleek, well-constructed river sampans—packed with eight men each, sitting in a straight line with trunks of equipment stacked in high piles at the center of each boat.

The fleet paused at a fork in the river. The Federation had two choices; one channel took them to a wide bay where they could unload with relative ease, and the other took them on a detour into the salt marsh labyrinth where the Cike lay in waiting.

The Cike needed to force the fleet to the left.

Altan lifted an arm and flicked his hand out as if releasing a whip. Tendrils of flame licked out from his hands, streaking in either direction like glowing snakes. Rin heard a short sizzling noise as the flame raced through the reeds.

Then, with a high-pitched whistling noise, the first of Ramsa’s rockets erupted into the night sky.

Ramsa had rigged the marsh so that each rocket’s ignition would light the next sequentially, granting several seconds of delay between explosions. They set the marsh ablaze with a horrifically pungent stink that overwhelmed even the sulfurous odor of the peat.

“Tiger’s tits,” Altan muttered. “He wasn’t joking about the feces.”

The explosions continued, a chain reaction of fire powder to simulate the noise and devastation of an army that didn’t exist. Bamboo bombs at the far end of the river erupted with what sounded like thunderclaps. A succession of smaller fire rockets exploded with resonant booms and enormous pillars of smoke; these did not catch fire, but served to confuse the Federation soldiers and obstruct their vision, so their boats could not see where they were going.

The explosions goaded the Federation soldiers directly into the dead zone created by Aratsha. When the first flare went up, the Federation boats swerved rapidly away from the source of the explosions. The boats collided with one another, snarled together and crammed in the narrow creek as the fleet moved clumsily forward. The tall rice fields, unharvested since the siege had begun, forced the boats to clump together.

Realizing his mistake, the Federation captain ordered his men to reverse direction, but panicked shouts echoed across the boats as the ships realized they could not move.

The Federation was locked in.

Time for the real attack.

As fire rockets continued to shoot toward the Federation fleet, a series of flaming arrows screamed through the night sky and thudded into the cargo trunks. The volley of arrows came so rapidly that it seemed as if an entire squadron were concealed in the marshes, firing from different directions, but Rin knew that it was only Qara, safely ensconced on the opposite bank, firing with the blinding speed of a trained huntress from the Hinterlands.

Next Qara took out the engineers. She punctured the forehead of every other man, tidily collapsing the man-made bridge with a surreal neatness.

Assaulted from all sides by enemy fire, the Federation fleet began to burn.

The Federation soldiers abandoned their flaming boats in a panic. They leaped for the bank, only to be bogged down in the muddy marsh. Men slipped and fell in paddy water that came up to their waists, filling up their heavy armor. Then, at a whisper from Altan, the reeds along the shore also burst into flame, surrounding the Federation like a death trap.

Even so, some made it to the opposite bank. A throng of soldiers—ten, twenty—clambered onto dry land—only to run into Suni and Baji.

Rin wondered how Suni and Baji intended to hold the entire strip of peat alone. They were only two, and from what she knew of their shamanic abilities, they couldn’t control a far-ranging element the way Altan or Aratsha could. Surely they were outnumbered.

She shouldn’t have worried.

They barreled through the soldiers like boulders crashing through a wheat field.

In the dim light of Ramsa’s flares, Suni and Baji were a flurry of motion that evoked the flashing combat of a shadow puppetry show.

They were so much the opposite of Altan. Altan fought with the practiced grace of a martial artist. Altan moved like a ribbon of smoke, like a dancer. But Baji and Suni were a study in brutality, paragons of sheer and untempered force. They utilized none of the economical forms of Seejin. Their only guiding principle was to smash everything in their vicinity—which they did with abandon, knocking men back off the shore as quickly as they clambered on.

A Sinegard-trained martial artist was worth four Militia men. But Suni and Baji were each worth at least ten.

Baji cut through bodies like a canteen cook chopping through vegetables. His absurd nine-pointed rake, unwieldy in the hands of any other soldier, became a death machine in Baji’s grip. He snagged sword blades between the nine prongs, locking three or four blades together before wrenching them out of his opponents’ grasps.

His god had given him no apparent transformations, but he fought with a berserker’s rage, truly a wild boar in a bloodthirsty frenzy.

Suni fought with no weapon at all. Already massive, he seemed to have grown to the size of a small giant, stretching up to well over ten feet. It shouldn’t have been possible for Suni to disarm men with steel swords as he did, but he was simply so terribly strong that his opponents were like children in comparison.

As Rin watched, Suni grasped the heads of the two closest soldiers and smashed them against each other. They burst like ripe cantaloupes. Blood and brain matter splashed out, drenching Suni’s entire torso, but he hardly paused to wipe the gore from his face as he turned to smash his fist into another soldier’s head.

Fur had sprouted from his arms and back that seemed to serve as an organic shield, repelling metal. A soldier jammed his spear into Suni’s back from behind, but the blade simply clattered off to the side. Suni turned around and bent slightly, placed his arms around the soldier’s head, and tore it clean off his body with such ease that he might have been twisting the lid off a jar.

When he turned back to the marsh, Rin caught a glimpse of his eyes in the firelight. They were black all the way through.

She shuddered. Those were the eyes of a beast. Whatever was fighting on the shore, that wasn’t Suni. That was some ancient entity, malevolent and gleeful, ecstatic to be given free rein to break men’s bodies like toys.

“The other bank! Get to the other bank!”

A clump of soldiers broke off from the jammed fleet and approached Altan and Rin’s shore in a desperate swarm.

“We’re up, kiddo,” Altan said, and emerged from the reeds, trident spinning in his grasp.

Rin scampered to her feet, then swayed when the effects of the poppy hit her like a club to the side of the head. She stumbled. She knew she was in a dangerous place. Unless she called the god, the poppy would only make her useless in battle, high and disoriented. But when she reached inside herself for the fire, she grasped nothing.

She tried chanting in the old Speerly language. Altan had taught her the incantation. She didn’t understand the words; Altan barely understood them himself, but that didn’t matter. What mattered were the harsh sounds, the repetition of incantations that sounded like spitting. The language of Speer was primal, guttural, and savage. It sounded like a curse. It sounded like a condemnation.

Still, it slowed her mind, brought her to the center of her swirling thoughts, and established a direct connection to the Pantheon above.

But she didn’t feel herself tipping forward into the void. She heard no whooshing sound in her ears. She was not journeying upward. She reached inside herself, searching for the link to the Phoenix and . . . nothing. She felt nothing.

Something soared through the air and embedded itself in the mud by Rin’s feet. She examined it with great difficulty, as if she were looking through a hazy fog. Finally, her drugged mind identified it as an arrow.

The Federation was shooting back.

She was faintly aware of Baji shouting at her from across the channel. She tried to shake away the distractions and direct her mind inward, but panic bubbled up in her chest. She couldn’t concentrate. She focused on everything at once: Qara’s birds, the incoming soldiers, the bodies getting closer and closer to the shore.

Across the bay she heard an unearthly scream. Suni emitted a series of high-pitched shrieks like a deranged monkey, beat his fists against his chest, and howled up at the night sky.

Beside him Baji threw his head back and boomed out a laugh, and that, too, sounded unnatural. He was too gleeful, more delighted than anyone in the midst of such carnage had the right to be. And Rin realized that this wasn’t Baji laughing, this was the god in him that read spilled blood as worship.

Baji lifted his foot and shoved the soldiers squarely into the water, toppling them over like dominoes; he sent them sprawling into the river, where they flailed and struggled against the soggy marsh.

Who controlled whom? Was it the soldier who had called the god, or the god in the body of the soldier?

She didn’t want to be possessed. She wanted to remain free.

But the cognitive dissonance clashed in her head. Three sets of countervailing orders competed for priority in her mind—Jiang’s mandate to empty her mind, Altan’s insistence that she hone her anger as a razor blade, and her own fear of letting the fire rip through her again, because once it began she didn’t know how to stop it.

But she couldn’t just stand there.

Come on, come on . . . She reached for the flames and grasped nothing. She was stuck halfway to the Pantheon and halfway in the material world, unable to fully grasp either. She had lost all sense of balance; she was disoriented, navigating her body as if remotely from very far away.

Something cold and clammy grasped at her ankles. Rin jumped back just as a soldier hauled himself out of the water. He sucked in air with hoarse gasps; he must have held his breath the entire length of the channel.

He saw her, yelled, and fell backward.

All she could register was how young he looked. He was not a hardened, trained soldier. This might have been his first combat engagement. He hadn’t even thought to draw his weapon.

She advanced on him slowly, walking as if in a dream. Her sword hand felt foreign to her; it was someone else’s arm that brought the blade down, it was someone else’s foot that kicked the soldier down by his shoulder—

He was faster than she thought; he swept out and kicked her kneecap, knocking her into the mud. Before she could react, he climbed over her, pinning her down with both knees.

She looked up. Their eyes met.

Naked fear was written across his face, round and soft like a child’s. He was barely taller than her. He couldn’t have been older than Ramsa.

He fumbled with his knife, had to adjust it against his stomach to get a proper grip before he brought it down—

Three metal prongs sprouted from above his collarbone, puncturing the place where his windpipe met his lungs. Blood bubbled from the corners of the soldier’s mouth. He splashed backward into the marsh.

“Are you all right?” Altan asked.

Before them the soldier flailed and gurgled pitifully. Altan had aimed two inches above his heart, robbed him of the mercy of an instant death and sentenced him to drown in his own blood.

Rin nodded mutely, scrabbling in the mud for her sword.

“Stay down,” he said. “And get back.”

He pushed her behind him with more force than necessary. She stumbled against the reeds, then looked up just in time to see Altan light up like a torch.

The effect was like a match struck to oil. Flames burst out of his chest, poured off his bare shoulders and back in streaming rivulets; surrounding him, protecting him. He was a living torch. His fire took the shape of a pair of massive wings that unfurled magnificently about him. Steam rose from the water in a five-foot radius from where Altan stood.

She had to shield her eyes from him.

This was a fully grown Speerly. This was a god in a man.

Altan repelled the soldiers like a wave. They scrambled backward, preferring to take their chances on their burning boats rather than take on this terrifying apparition.

Altan advanced on them, and the flesh sloughed off their bodies.

She could not bear the sight of him and yet she could not tear her eyes away.

Rin wondered if this was how she had burned at Sinegard.

But surely in that moment, with the flames ripping out of every orifice, she had not been so wonderfully graceful. When Altan moved, his fiery wings swirled and dipped as a reflection of him, sweeping indiscriminately across the flotilla and setting things freshly aflame.

It made sense, she thought wildly, that the Cike became living manifestations of their gods.

When Jiang had taught her to access the Pantheon, he had only ever taught her to kneel before the deities.

But the Cike pulled them down with them back into the world of mortals, and when they did, they were destructive and chaotic and terrible. When the shamans of the Cike prayed, they were not requesting that the gods do things for them so much as they were begging the gods to act through them; when they opened their minds to the heavens they became vessels for their chosen deities to inhabit.

The more Altan moved, the brighter he burned, as if the Phoenix itself were slowly burning through him to breach the divide between the world of dreaming and the material world. Any arrows that flew in his direction were rendered useless by roiling flames, flung to the side to sizzle dully in the marshy waters.

Rin was half-afraid that Altan would burn away altogether, until there was nothing but the fire.

In that moment she found it impossible to believe that the Speerlies could have been massacred. What a marvel the Speerly army must have been. A full regiment of warriors who burned with the same glory as Altan . . . how had anyone ever killed that race off? One Speerly was a terror; a thousand should have been unstoppable. They should have been able to burn down the world.

Whatever weaponry they had used then, the Federation soldiers were not so powerful now. Their fleet was at every possible disadvantage: trapped on all sides, with fire to their backs, a muddy marsh under their feet, and veritable gods guarding the only strips of solid land in sight.

The jammed boats had begun to burn in earnest; the crates of uniforms, blankets, and medicine smoldered and crackled, emitting thick streams of smoke that cloaked the marsh in an impenetrable shroud. The soldiers on the boats doubled over, choking, and the ones who huddled uncertainly in the shallow water began to scream, for the water had begun to boil under the heat of the blazing inferno.

It was utter carnage. It was beautiful.

Altan’s plan had been brilliant in conception. Under normal circumstances, a squad of eight could not hope to stand a chance against such massive odds. But Altan had chosen a battlefield where every single one of the Federation advantages was negated by their surroundings, and the Cike’s advantages were amplified.

What it came down to was that the smallest division of the Militia had brought down an entire fleet.

Altan didn’t break balance when he strode onto the boat at the fore. He adjusted to the tilting floor so gracefully he might have been walking on solid ground. While the Federation soldiers flailed and reeled away, he flashed his trident out and out again, eliciting blood and silencing cries each time.

They clambered and fell before him like worshippers. He cut them down like reeds.

They splashed into the water, and the screams became louder. Rin saw them boil to death before her very eyes, skin scalded bubbling red like crab shells, and then bursting; cooked inside and out, eyes bulging in their death throes.

She had fought at Sinegard; she had incinerated a general with her own flames, but in that moment she could barely comprehend the casual destruction that Altan wrought. He fought on a scale that should not be human.

Only the captain of the fleet did not scream, did not jump into the water to escape him, but stood as erect and proud as if he were back on his ship, not in the burning wreckage of his fleet.

The captain withdrew his sword slowly and held it out before him.

He could not possibly defeat Altan in combat, but Rin found it strangely honorable that he was going to try.

The captain’s lips moved rapidly, as if he was muttering an incantation to the darkness. Rin half wondered whether the captain was a shaman himself, but when she parsed out his frantic Mugini she realized he was praying.

“I am nothing to the glory that is the Emperor. By his favor I am made clean. By his grace I am given purpose. It is an honor to serve. It is an honor to live. It is an honor to die. For Ryohai. For Ryohai. For—”

Altan stepped lightly across the charred helm. Flames licked around his legs, engulfed him, but they could not hurt him.

The captain lifted his sword to his neck.

Altan lunged forward at the last moment, suddenly aware of what the captain meant to do, but he was too far to reach.

The captain drew the blade to the side in a sharp sawing motion. His eyes met Altan’s, and a moment before the life dimmed from them, Rin thought she saw a glimmer of victory. Then his corpse slumped into the bog.

When Aratsha’s power gave out, the wreckage that drifted back out into the Nariin Sea was a smoldering mess of charred boats, useless supplies, and broken men.

Altan called for a retreat before the Federation soldiers could regroup. Far more soldiers had escaped than they had killed, but their aim had never been to destroy the army. Sinking the supplies was enough.

Not all of the supplies, though. In the confusion of the melee, Unegen and Qara had detached two boats from the rear and hidden them in an inland canal. They boarded these now, and Aratsha spirited them through the narrow canals of Khurdalain into a downtown nook not far from the wharf.

Ramsa ran up to them when they returned.

“Did it work?” he demanded. “Did the flares work?”

“Lit up like a charm. Nice work, kid,” Altan said.

Ramsa gave a hoot of victory. Altan clapped him on the shoulder, and Ramsa beamed widely. Rin could read it clearly on Ramsa’s face: he adored Altan like an older brother.

It was hard not to feel the same. Altan was so solemnly competent, so casually brilliant, that all she wanted was to please him. He was strict in his command, sparing with his praise, but when he gave it, it felt wonderful. She wanted it, craved it like something tangible.

Next time. Next time she wouldn’t be deadweight. She would learn to channel that anger at will, even if she risked losing herself to it.

They celebrated that night with a sack of sugar pillaged from one of the stolen boats. The mess hall was locked and they had nothing to sprinkle the sugar on, so they ate it straight by the spoonful. Once Rin would have found this disgusting; now she shoved great heaps of it into her mouth when the spoon and sack came around to her place in the circle.

Upon Ramsa’s insistence, Altan acquiesced to lighting a roaring bonfire for them out in an empty field.

“We’re not worried about being seen?” Rin asked.

“We’re well behind Nikara lines. It’s fine. Just don’t throw anything on it,” he said. “You can’t experiment with pyrotechnics so close to civilians.”

Ramsa blew air out of his cheeks. “Whatever you say, Trengsin.”

Altan gave him an exasperated look. “I mean it this time.”

“You suck the fun out of everything,” Ramsa grumbled as Altan stepped away from the fire.

“You’re not staying?” Baji asked.

Altan shook his head. “Need to brief the Warlords. I’ll be back in a few hours. You go on and celebrate. I’m very pleased with your performance today.”

“‘I’m very pleased with your performance today,’” Baji mimicked when Altan had left. “Someone tell him to get that stick out of his butt.”

Ramsa leaned back on his elbows and nudged Rin with his foot. “Was he this insufferable at the Academy?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t know him well at Sinegard.”

“I bet he’s always been like this. Old man in a young man’s body. You think he ever smiles?”

“Only once a year,” said Baji. “Accidentally, in his sleep.”

“Come on,” Unegen said, though he was also smiling. “He’s a good commander.”

“He is a good commander,” Suni agreed. “Better than Tyr.”

Suni’s gentle voice surprised Rin. When he was free of his god, Suni was remarkably quiet, almost timid, and he spoke only after ponderous deliberation.

Rin watched him sitting calmly before the fire. His broad features were relaxed and placid; he seemed utterly at ease with himself. She wondered when he would next lose control and fall prey to that screaming voice in his mind. He was so terrifyingly strong—he had broken men apart in his hands like eggs. He killed so well and so efficiently.

He could have killed Altan. Three nights ago in the mess hall Suni could have broken Altan’s neck as easily as he would wring a chicken’s. The thought made her dry-mouthed with fear.

And she wondered at how Altan had known this and had crossed the distance to Suni anyway, had placed his life completely in the hands of his subordinate.

Baji had somehow extracted a bottle of sorghum spirits from one of the many warehouses of Khurdalain. They passed it around the circle. They had just scored a major combat victory; they could afford to be off guard for just one night.

“Hey, Rin.” Ramsa rolled onto his stomach and propped his chin up on his hands.

“Yeah?”

“Does this mean the Speerlies aren’t extinct after all?” he inquired. “Are you and Altan going to make babies and repopulate the Speerly race?”

Qara snorted loudly. Unegen spat out a mouthful of sorghum wine.

Rin turned bright red. “Not likely,” she said.

“Why not? You don’t like Altan?”

The cheeky little shit. “No, I mean I can’t,” she said. “I can’t have children.”

“Why not?” Ramsa pressed.

“I had my womb destroyed at the Academy,” she said. She hugged her knees up to her chest. “It was, um, interfering with my training.”

Ramsa looked so bewildered then that Rin burst out laughing. Qara snickered into her canteen.

“What?” Ramsa asked, indignant.

“I’ll tell you one day,” Baji promised. He’d imbibed twice as much wine as the rest of them; he was already slurring his words together. “When your balls have dropped.”

“My balls have dropped.”

“When your voice drops, then.”

They passed the bottle around in silence for a moment. Now that the frenzy at the marsh was over, the Cike seemed diminished somehow, like they had been animated only by the presence of their gods, and now in the gods’ absence they were empty, shells that lacked vitality.

They seemed eminently human—vulnerable and breakable.

“So you’re the last of your kind,” said Suni after a short silence. “That’s sad.”

“I guess.” Rin poked a stick at the fire. She still didn’t feel quite acclimated to her new identity. She had no memories of Speer, no real attachments to it. The only time she felt like being a Speerly meant something was when she was with Altan. “Everything about Speer is sad.”

“It’s that idiot queen’s fault,” said Unegen. “They never would have died off if Tearza hadn’t stabbed herself.”

“She didn’t stab herself,” said Ramsa. “She burned to death. Imploded from inside. Boom.” He spread his fingers in the air.

“Why did she kill herself?” Rin asked. “I never understood that story.”

“In the version I heard, she was in love with the Red Emperor,” said Baji. “He comes to her island, and she’s immediately besotted with him. He turns around and threatens to invade the island if Speer doesn’t become a tributary state. And she’s so distraught at his betrayal that she flees to her temple and kills herself.”

Rin wrinkled her nose. Every version she heard of the myth made Tearza seem more and more stupid.

“It is not a love story.” Qara spoke up from her corner for the first time. Their eyes flickered toward her with mild surprise.

“That myth is Nikara propaganda,” she continued flatly. “The story of Tearza was modeled on the myth of Han Ping, because the story makes for a better telling than the truth.”

“And what is the truth?” asked Rin.

“You don’t know?” Qara fixed Rin with a somber gaze. “Speerlies especially ought to know.”

“Obviously I don’t. So how would you tell it?”

“I would tell it not as a love story, but as a story of gods and humans.” Qara’s voice dropped to such a low volume that the Cike had to lean in to hear her. “They say Tearza could have called the Phoenix and saved the isle. They say that if Tearza had summoned the flames, Nikan never would have been able to annex Speer. They say that if she wanted to, Tearza could have summoned such a power that the Red Emperor and his armies would not have dared set foot on Speer, not for a thousand years.”

Qara paused. She did not take her eyes off Rin.

“And then?” Rin pressed.

“Tearza refused,” Qara said. “She said the independence of Speer did not warrant the sacrifice the Phoenix demanded. The Phoenix declared that Tearza had broken her vows as the ruler of Speer, and so it punished her for it.”

Rin was quiet for a moment. Then she asked, “Do you think she was right?”

Qara shrugged. “I think Tearza was wise. And I think that she was a bad ruler. Shamans should know when to resist the power of the gods. That is wisdom. But rulers should do everything in their power to save their country. That is responsibility. If you hold the fate of the country in your hands, if you have accepted your obligation to your people, then your life ceases to be your own. Once you accept the title of ruler, your choices are made for you. In those days, to rule Speer meant serving the Phoenix. Speer used to be a proud race. A free people. When Tearza killed herself, the Speerlies became little more than the Emperor’s mad dogs. Tearza has the blood of Speer on her hands. Tearza deserved what she got.”

When Altan returned from reporting to the Warlords, most of the Cike had drifted off to sleep. Rin remained awake, staring at the flickering bonfire.

“Hey,” he said, and sat down next to her. He smelled of smoke.

She drew her knees up to her chest and tilted her head sideways to look at him. “How’d they take it?”

Altan smiled. It was the first time she’d seen him smile since they came to Khurdalain. “They couldn’t believe it. How are you doing?”

“Embarrassed,” she said frankly, “and still a little high.”

He leaned back and crossed his arms. His smile disappeared. “What happened?”

“Couldn’t concentrate,” she said. Got scared. Held off. Did everything you told me not to do.

Altan looked faintly puzzled, and more than a little disappointed.

“I’m sorry,” she said in a small voice.

“No, it’s my fault.” His voice was carefully neutral. “I threw you into combat before you were ready. At the Night Castle, you would have trained for months before we put you in the field.”

This was meant to make her feel better, but Rin only felt ashamed.

“I couldn’t clear my mind,” she said.

“Then don’t,” Altan said. “Open-minded meditation is for monks. It only gets you to the Pantheon, it doesn’t bring the god back down with you. You don’t need to open your mind to all sixty-four deities. You only need our god. You only need the fire.”

“But Jiang said that was dangerous.”

Though Rin thought she saw a spasm of impatience flicker across Altan’s face, his tone remained carefully neutral. “Because Jiang feared, and so he held you back. Were you acting under his orders when you called the Phoenix at Sinegard?”

“No,” she admitted, “but—”

“Have you ever successfully called a god under Jiang’s instruction? Did Jiang even teach you how? I’ll bet he did the opposite. I’ll bet he wanted you to shut them out.”

“He was trying to protect me,” she protested, though she wasn’t sure why. After all, it was precisely what had frustrated her about Jiang. But somehow, after what she’d done at Sinegard, Jiang’s caution made more sense. “He warned that I might . . . that the consequences . . .”

“Great danger is always associated with great power. The difference between the great and the mediocre is that the great are willing to take that risk.” Altan’s face twisted into a scowl. “Jiang was a coward, scared of what he had unlocked. Jiang was a doddering fool who didn’t realize what talents he had. What talents you have.”

“He was still my master,” she said, feeling an instinctive urge to defend him.

“He’s not your master anymore. You don’t have a master. You have a commander.” Altan put a hand on her shoulder. “The easiest shortcut to the state is anger. Build on your anger. Don’t ever let go of that anger. Rage gives you power. Caution does not.”

Rin wanted to believe him. She was in awe of the extent of Altan’s power. And she knew that, if she allowed it, the same power could be her own.

And yet, Jiang’s warnings echoed in the back of her mind.

I have met spirits unable to find their bodies again. I have met men who are only halfway to the spirit realm, caught between our world and the next.

Was that the price of power? For her mind to shatter, like Suni’s clearly had? Would she become neurotically paranoid, like Unegen?

But Altan’s mind hadn’t shattered. Among the Cike, Altan used his abilities most recklessly. Baji and Suni needed hallucinogens to call their gods, but the fire was never more than a whisper away for Altan. He seemed to always be in that state of rage he wanted Rin to cultivate. And yet he never lost control. He gave an incredible illusion of sanity and stability, whatever was going on below his dispassionate mask.

Who is imprisoned in the Chuluu Korikh?

Unnatural criminals, who have committed unnatural crimes.

She suspected she knew now what Jiang’s question had meant.

She didn’t want to admit that she was scared. Scared of being in a state where she had little control of herself, less still of the fires pouring out of her. Scared of being consumed by the fire, becoming a conduit that demanded more and more sacrifice for her god.

“The last time I did it, I couldn’t stop,” she said. “I had to beg it. I don’t—I don’t know how to control myself when I’ve called the Phoenix.”

“Think of it like a candle,” he said. “Difficult to light. Only this is even more difficult to extinguish, and if you’re not careful, you’ll burn yourself.”

But that didn’t help at all—she’d tried lighting the candle, yet nothing had happened. So what would happen if she finally figured that out, only to be unable to extinguish the flames? “Then how do you do it? How do you make it stop?”

Altan leaned back away from the flames.

“I don’t,” he said.

Chapter 15

The Ram and Ox Warlords quickly realigned to Altan’s side once they realized the Cike had accomplished what the First, Fifth, and Eighth Divisions together had not even attempted. They disseminated the news through the ranks in a way that made it seem that they were jointly responsible for the feat.

Khurdalain’s citizens threw a victory parade to raise morale and collect supplies for the soldiers. Civilians donated food and clothing to the barracks. When the Warlords paraded through the streets, they were met with wide applause that they were only too happy to accept.

The civilians assumed the marsh victory had been achieved through a massive joint assault. Altan did nothing to correct them.

“Lying fart-bags,” Ramsa complained. “They’re stealing your credit.”

“Let them,” said Altan. “If it means they’ll work with me, let them say anything they want.”

Altan had needed that victory. In a cohort of generals who had survived the Poppy Wars, Altan was the youngest commander by decades. The battle at the marsh had given him much-needed credibility in the eyes of the Militia, and more important, in the eyes of the Warlords. They treated him now with deference instead of condescension, consulted him in their war councils, and not only listened to Cike intelligence but acted on it.

Only Jun offered no congratulations.

“You’ve left a thousand starving enemy soldiers in the wetlands with no supplies and no food,” Jun said slowly.

“Yes,” Altan said. “Isn’t that a good thing?”

“You idiot,” said Jun. He paced about the office, circled back, then slammed his hands on Altan’s desk. “You idiot. Do you realize what you’ve done?”

“Secured a victory,” Altan said, “which is more than you’ve managed in the weeks you’ve been here. Their supply ship has turned all the way back to the longbow island to restock. We’ve set their plans back at least two weeks.”

“You’ve invited retaliation,” Jun snapped. “Those soldiers are cold, wet, and hungry. Maybe they didn’t care much about this war when they crossed the narrow strait, but now they’re angry. They’re pissed, they’re humiliated, and more than anything they desperately need supplies. You’ve raised the stakes for them.”

“The stakes were already high,” Altan said.

“Yes, and now you’ve dragged pride into it. Do you know how much reputation matters to Federation commanders? We needed time for fortifications, but you’ve doubled their timetables. What, did you think they would just turn tail and go home? You want to know what they’ll do next? They’re going to come for us.”

But when the Federation did come, it was with a white flag and a plea for a cease-fire.

When Qara’s birds spotted the incoming Federation delegation, she sent Rin to alert Altan with the news. Thrilled, Rin barged past Jun’s aides to force her way into the office of the Ram Warlord.

“Three Federation delegates,” she reported. “They brought a wagon.”

“Shoot them,” Jun suggested immediately.

“They’re carrying a white flag,” Rin said.

“A strategic gambit. Shoot them,” Jun repeated, and his junior officers nodded their assent.

The Ox Warlord held up a hand. He was a tremendously large man, two heads taller than Jun and thrice again his girth. His weapon of choice was a double-bladed battle-axe that was the size of Rin’s torso, which he kept on the table in front of him, stroking the blade obsessively. “They could be coming under peace.”

“Or they could be coming to poison our water supply, or to assassinate any one of us,” Jun snapped. “Do you really think we’ve won this war so easily?”

“They’re bearing a white flag,” the Ox Warlord said slowly, as if speaking to a child.

The Ram Warlord said nothing. His wide-set eyes darted nervously between Jun and the Ox Warlord. Rin could see what Ramsa had meant; the Ram Warlord seemed like a child waiting to be told what to do.

“A white flag doesn’t mean anything to them,” Jun insisted. “This is a ruse. How many false treaties did they sign during the Poppy Wars?”

“Would you take a gamble on peace?” the Ox Warlord challenged.

“I wouldn’t gamble with any of these citizens’ lives.”

“It’s not your cease-fire to refuse,” the Ram Warlord pointed out.

Jun and the Ox Warlord both glared at him, and the Ram Warlord stammered in his haste to explain. “I mean, we ought to let the boy handle it. The marsh victory was his doing. They’re surrendering to him.”

All eyes turned to Altan.

Rin was amazed at the subtle interdivisional politics at play. The Ram Warlord was shrewder than she’d guessed. His suggestion was a clever way of absolving responsibility. If negotiations went sour, then blame would fall on Altan’s shoulders. And if they went well, then the Ram Warlord still came out on top for his magnanimity.

Altan hesitated, clearly torn between his better judgment and desire to see the full extent of his victory at Khurdalain. Rin could see the hope reflected clearly on his face. If the Federation surrender was genuine, then he would be single-handedly responsible for winning this war. He would be the youngest commander ever to have achieved a military victory on this scale.

“Shoot them,” Jun repeated. “We don’t need a peace negotiation. Our forces are tied now; if the assault on the wharf goes well, we can push them back indefinitely until the Seventh gets here.”

But Altan shook his head. “If we reject their surrender, then this war goes on until one party has decimated the other. Khurdalain can’t hold out that long. If there’s a chance we can end this war now, we need to take it.”

The Federation delegates who met them in the town square bore no weapons and wore no armor. They dressed in light, form-fitting blue uniforms designed to make it clear that they concealed no weapons in their sleeves.

The head delegate, whose uniform stripes indicated his higher rank, stepped forward when he saw them.

“Do you speak our language?” He spoke in a halting and outdated Nikara dialect, complete with a bad approximation of a Sinegardian accent.

The Warlords hesitated, but Altan cut in, “I do.”

“Good,” the delegate responded in Mugini. “Then we may proceed without misunderstanding.”

It was the first time Rin had gotten a good look at the Mugenese outside the chaos of a melee, and she was disappointed by how very similar they looked to the Nikara. The slant of their eyes and the shape of their mouths were nowhere near as pronounced as the textbooks reported. Their hair was the same pitch-black as Nezha’s, their skin as pale as any northerner’s.

In fact, they looked more like Sinegardians than Rin and Altan did.

Aside from their language, which was more clipped and rapid than Sinegardian Nikara, they were virtually indistinguishable from the Nikara themselves.

It disturbed her that the Federation soldiers so closely resembled her own people. She would have preferred a faceless, monstrous enemy, or one that was entirely foreign, like the pale-haired Hesperians across the sea.

“What are your terms?” Jun asked.

“Our general requests a cease-fire for the next forty-eight hours while we meet to negotiate conditions of surrender,” said the head delegate. He indicated the wagon. “We know your city has been unable to import spices since the fighting began. We bring an offering of salt and sugar. A gesture of our goodwill.” The delegate placed his hand on the lid of the closest chest. “May I?”

Altan gave a nod of permission. The delegates pulled up the lids, displaying heaps of white and caramel crystals that glistened in the afternoon sun.

“Eat it,” suggested Jun.

The delegate cocked his head. “Pardon?”

“Taste the sugar,” Jun said. “So we know you’re not trying to poison us.”

“That would be a terribly inefficient way of conducting warfare,” said the delegate.

“Even so.”

Shrugging, the delegate obliged Jun’s request. His throat bobbed as he swallowed. “Not poison.”

Jun licked his finger, stuck it in the chest of sugar, and tipped it into his mouth. He swilled it around in his mouth, and seemed disappointed when he couldn’t detect traces of any other material.

“Only sugar,” said the delegate.

“Excellent,” the Ox Warlord said. “Bring these to the mess hall.”

“No,” said Altan quickly. “Leave it out here. We’ll distribute this in the town square. A small amount for every household.”

He met the Ox Warlord’s eyes with a level gaze, and Rin realized why he’d said it. If the rations were brought to the mess hall, the divisions would immediately fight over distribution of resources. Altan had tied the Warlords’ hands by designating the rations for the people.

In any case, a trickle of Khurdalaini civilians had already begun to gather around the wagon in curiosity. Salt and sugar had been sorely missed since the siege began. Rin suspected that if the Warlords confiscated the trunks for military use, the people would riot.

The Ox Warlord shrugged. “Whatever you say, kid.”

Altan looked warily about the square. Given the ranks of Militia soldiers present, a large crowd of civilians had deemed it safe to form around the three delegates. Rin saw such open hostility in their eyes that she didn’t doubt they would tear the Mugenese apart if the Militia didn’t intervene.

“We will continue this negotiation in a private office,” Altan suggested. “Away from the people.”

The delegate inclined his head. “As you like.”

“The Emperor Ryohai is impressed with the resistance at Khurdalain,” said the delegate. His tone was clipped and courteous, despite his words. “Your people have fought well. The Emperor Ryohai would like to extend his compliments to the people of Khurdalain, who have proven themselves a stronger breed than the rest of this land of sniveling cowards.”

Jun translated to the Warlords. The Ox Warlord rolled his eyes.

“Let’s skip ahead to the part where you surrender,” said Altan.

The delegate raised an eyebrow. “Alas, the Emperor Ryohai has no intentions of abandoning his designs on the Nikara continent. Expansion onto the continent is the divine right of the glorious Federation of Mugen. Your provincial government is weak and fragile. Your technology is centuries behind that of the west. Your isolation has set you behind while the rest of the world develops. Your demise was only a matter of time. This landmass belongs to a country that can propel it into the next century.”

“Did you come here just to insult us?” Jun demanded. “Not a wise way to surrender.”

The delegate’s lip curled. “We came only to discuss surrender. The Emperor Ryohai has no desire to punish the people of Khurdalain. He admires their fighting spirit. He says that your resilience has proven worthy of the Federation. He adds also that the people of Khurdalain would make excellent subjects to the Federation crown.”

“Ah,” said Jun. “This is that kind of negotiation.”

“We do not want to destroy this town,” said the delegate. “This is an important port. A hub of international trade. If Khurdalain lays down its arms, then the Emperor Ryohai will consider this city a territory of the Federation, and we will not lay a finger on a single man, woman, or child. All citizens will be pardoned, on the condition that they swear allegiance to the Emperor Ryohai.”

“Pause,” said Altan. “You’re asking us to surrender to you?”

The delegate inclined his head. “These are generous terms. We know how Khurdalain struggles under occupation. Your people are starving. Your supplies will only last you a few more months. When we break the siege, we will take the open battle to the streets, and then your people will die in droves. You can avoid that. Let the Federation fleet through, and the Emperor will reward you. We shall permit you to live.”

“Incredible,” muttered Jun. “Absolutely incredible.”

Altan crossed his arms. “Tell your generals that if you turn your fleets back and evacuate the shore now, we will let you live.”

The delegate merely regarded him with an idle curiosity. “You must be the Speerly from the marsh.”

“I am.” Altan said. “And I’ll be the one who accepts your surrender.”

The corners of the head delegate’s mouth turned up. “But of course,” he said smoothly. “Only a child would assume a war could end so quickly, or so bloodlessly.”

“That child speaks for all of us,” Jun cut in, voice steely. He spoke in Nikara. “Take your conditions and tell the Emperor Ryohai that Khurdalain will never bow to the longbow island.”

“In that case,” said the delegate, “every last man, woman, and child in Khurdalain shall die.”

“Tall words from a man who’s just had his fleet burned to bits,” Jun sneered.

The delegate answered in flat, emotionless Nikara. “The marsh defeat has set us back several weeks. But we have been preparing for this war for two decades. Our training schools far outstrip your pathetic Sinegard Academy. We have studied the western techniques of warfare while you have spent these twenty years indulging in your isolation. The Nikara Empire belongs to the past. We will raze your country to the ground.”

The Ox Warlord reached for his axe. “Or I can take your head off right now.”

The delegate looked supremely unconcerned. “Kill me if you like. On the longbow island, we are taught that our lives are meaningless. I am only one in a horde of millions. I will die, and I will be reincarnated again in the Emperor Ryohai’s service. But for you, heretics who do not bow to the divine throne, death will be final.”

Altan stood up. His face had turned pale with fury. “You are trapped on a narrow strip of land. You are outnumbered. We took your supplies. We burned your boats. We sank your munitions. Your men have met the wrath of a Speerly, and they burned.”

“Oh, Speerlies are not so difficult to kill,” the delegate said. “We managed it once. We’ll do it again.”

The office doors burst open. Ramsa ran inside, wild-eyed.

“That’s saltpeter!” he shrieked. “That’s not salt, it’s saltpeter.”

The office fell silent.

The Warlords looked at Ramsa as if they couldn’t comprehend what he was saying. Altan’s mouth opened in confusion.

Then the delegate threw his head back and laughed with the abandon of a man who knew he was about to die.

“Remember,” he said. “You could have saved Khurdalain.”

Rin and Altan stood up at the same time.

She had barely reached for her sword when a blast split the air like a thunderbolt.

One moment she was standing behind Altan and the next she was on the floor, dazed, with such a ferocious ringing in her ears that it drowned out any other sound.

She lifted her hand to her face and it came away bloody.

As if to compensate for her hearing, her vision became exceedingly bright; the blurred sights were like images on a shadow puppet screen, occurring both too fast and too slow for her to comprehend. She perceived movements as if from inside a drug-induced fever dream, but this was no dream; her senses simply refused to comply with the perception of what had happened.

She saw the walls of the office shudder and then lean so far to the side she was sure that the building would collapse with them in it, and then right themselves.

She saw Ramsa tackle Altan to the ground.

She saw Altan stagger to his feet, reaching for his trident.

She saw the Ox Warlord swing his axe through the air.

She saw Altan shouting “No, no!”—before the Ox Warlord decapitated the delegate.

The delegate’s head rolled to a stop by the doorway, eyes open and glassy, and Rin thought she saw it smile.

Strong arms grasped her by the shoulders and hauled her to her feet. Altan spun her around to face him, eyes darting around her form as if checking for injuries.

His mouth moved, but no sound came through. She shook her head frantically and pointed to her ears.

He mouthed the words. “Are you all right?”

She examined her body. Somehow all four limbs were working, and she couldn’t even feel the pain where she bled from a head wound. She nodded.

Altan let her go and knelt down before Ramsa, who was curled in a ball on the ground, pale and trembling.

On the other side of the room General Jun and the Ram Warlord hauled themselves to their feet. They were both unharmed; the blast had blown them over but had not injured them. The Warlords’ quarters were far enough from the center of the town that the explosion only shook them.

Even Ramsa seemed like he would be fine. His eyes were glassy and he wobbled when Altan pulled him to his feet, but he was nodding and talking, and looked otherwise uninjured.

Rin exhaled in relief.

They were all right. It hadn’t worked. They were all right.

And then she remembered the civilians.

Odd how the rest of her senses were amplified when she couldn’t hear.

Khurdalain looked like the Academy in the first days of winter. She squinted; at first she thought her eyesight had blurred as well, and then she realized that a fine powder hung in the air. It clouded everything like some bizarre mix of fog and snowfall, a blanket of innocence that mixed in with the blood, that obscured the full extent of the explosion.

The square had been flattened, shop fronts and residential complexes collapsed, debris strewn out in oddly symmetrical lines from the radius of the blast, as if they stood inside a giant’s footprint.

Farther out from the blast site, the buildings were not flattened but blown open; they tilted at bizarre angles, entire walls torn away. There was a strangely intimate perversity to how their insides were revealed, displaying private bedrooms and washrooms to the outside.

Men and women had been thrown against the walls of buildings. They remained frozen there with a kind of ghastly adhesion, pinned like preserved butterflies. The intense pressure from the bombs had torn off their clothes; they hung naked like a grotesque display of the human form.

The stench of charcoal, blood, and burned flesh was so heavy that Rin could taste it on her tongue. Even worse was the sickening sweet undercurrent of caramelized sugar wafting through the air.

She did not know how long she stood there staring. She was incited to movement only when jostled by a pair of soldiers rushing past her with a stretcher, reminding her that she had a job to do.

Find the survivors. Help the survivors.

She made her way down the street, but her sense of balance seemed to have disappeared completely along with her hearing. She lurched from side to side when she tried to walk, and so she traversed the street by clinging to furniture like a drunkard.

To her left she saw a group of soldiers hauling a pair of children out from a pile of debris. She couldn’t believe they had survived, it seemed impossible so close to the blast epicenter—but the little boy they lifted from the wreckage was moving, wailing and struggling but moving nonetheless. His sister was not so fortunate; her leg was mangled, crushed by the foundations of the house. She clung to the soldier’s arms, white-faced, too racked with pain to cry.

“Help me! Help me!”

A tinny voice made it through the roaring in her ears, like someone shouting from across a great field, but it was the only sound she could hear.

She looked up and saw a man clinging desperately to the remains of a wall with one hand.

The floor of the building had been blown out right beneath him. It was a five-story inn; without its fourth wall it looked like one of the porcelain dollhouses that Rin had seen in the market, the kind that swung wide open to reveal its contents.

The floors tilted down toward the gap; the inn’s furniture and its other occupants had already slid out, forming a grotesque pile of shattered chairs and bodies.

A small crowd had gathered under the teetering inn to watch the man.

“Help,” he moaned. “Someone, help . . .”

Rin felt like a spectator, like this was a show, like the man was the only thing in the world that mattered, yet she couldn’t think of anything to do; the building had been blown apart; it looked minutes from collapsing in on itself, and the man was too high up to reach from the rooftops of any surrounding buildings.

All she could do was stand there in awe with her mouth hanging slackly open, watching as the man struggled in vain to hoist himself up.

She felt so utterly, entirely useless. Even if she could call the Phoenix then, summoning fire now would not save this man from dying.

Because all the Cike knew how to do was destroy. For all their powers, for all their gods, they couldn’t protect their people. Couldn’t reverse time. Couldn’t bring back the dead.

They had won that battle on the marsh, but they were powerless in the face of the consequences.

Altan shouted something, and he might have been calling for a sheet to break the man’s fall, because moments later Rin saw several soldiers come running back down into the square with a cloth.

But before they could reach the end of the street, the inn teetered perilously. Rin thought it might crash all the way to the ground, flattening the man underneath it, but the wooden planks dipped downward and came to a jarring halt.

The man was now only four floors up. He flung his other hand up at the roof in an attempt to secure a better hold. Perhaps he was emboldened by his closeness to the ground. For a moment Rin thought he might make it—but then his hand slipped against the shattered glass and he fell back, the downward rebound pulling him off the roof entirely.

He seemed to hang in the air for a moment before he fell.

The crowd scrambled backward.

Rin turned away, grateful that she could not hear his body break on the ground.

The city settled into a tense silence.

Every soldier was dispatched to Khurdalain’s defenses in anticipation of a ground assault. Rin held her post on the outer wall for hours, eyes trained on the perimeter. If the Federation was going to attempt to breach the walls, certainly it would be now.

But evening fell, and no attack came.

“They can’t possibly be afraid,” Rin murmured, then winced. Her hearing had finally come back, though a high-pitched ringing still sounded constantly in her ears.

Ramsa shook his head. “They’re playing the long game. They’ll keep trying to weaken us. Get us scared, hungry, and tired.”

Eventually the defensive line relaxed. If the Federation launched a midnight invasion, the city alarm system would bring the troops back to the walls; in the meantime, there was more pressing work to do.

It felt brutally ironic that civilians had been dancing on this street only hours ago, celebrating what they’d thought would be a Federation surrender. Khurdalain had expected to win this war. Khurdalain had thought that things were going back to normal.

But Khurdalain was resilient. Khurdalain had survived two Poppy Wars. Khurdalain knew how to deal with devastation.

The civilians quietly combed through the wreckage for their loved ones, and when so many hours had passed that the only bodies that were recovered were those of the dead, they built them a funeral bier, lit it on fire, and pushed it out to the sea. They did this with a sad, practiced efficiency.

The medical squads of all three divisions jointly created a triage center in the city center. For the rest of the day civilians straggled in, amateur tourniquets tied clumsily around severed limbs—crushed ankles, hands shattered to the stump.

Rin had a year’s worth of instruction in field medicine under Enro, so Enki put her to work tying off new tourniquets for those bleeding in line as they waited for medical attention.

Her first patient was a young woman, not much older than Rin was. She held out her arm, wrapped in what looked like an old dress.

Rin unwrapped the blood-soaked bundle and hissed involuntarily at the damage. She could see bone all the way up to the elbow. That entire hand would have to go.

The girl waited patiently as Rin assessed the damage, eyes glassy, as if she’d long ago resigned herself to her new disability.

Rin pulled a strip of linen out of a pot of boiling water and wrapped it around the upper arm, looped one end around a stick, and twisted to tighten the binding. The girl moaned with pain, but gritted her teeth and glared straight forward.

“They’ll probably take the hand off. This will keep you from losing any more blood, and it’ll make it easier for them to amputate.” Rin fastened the knot and stepped back. “I’m sorry.”

“I knew we should have left,” the girl said. The way she spoke, Rin wasn’t sure that she was talking to her. “I knew we should have left the moment those ships landed on the shore.”

“Why didn’t you?” Rin asked.

The girl glared at her. Her eyes were hollow, accusatory. “You think we had anywhere to go?”

Rin fixed her eyes on the ground and moved on to the next patient.

Chapter 16

Hours later Rin finally received permission to leave the triage center. She stumbled back toward the Cike’s quarters, hollow-eyed and light-headed from sleep deprivation. Once she checked in with Altan, she intended to collapse in her bunk and sleep until someone forced her out to report for duty.

“Enki finally let you off?”

She glanced over her shoulder.

Unegen and Baji rounded the corner, coming back from patrol. They joined her as she walked down the eerily empty streets. The Warlords had imposed martial law on the city; civilians had a strict curfew now, no longer allowed to venture beyond their block without Militia permission.

“I’m to be back in six hours,” she said. “You?”

“Nonstop patrol until something more interesting happens,” said Unegen. “Did Enki get the casualty count?”

“Six hundred dead,” she said. “A thousand wounded. Fifty division soldiers. The rest civilians.”

“Shit,” Unegen muttered.

“Yeah,” she said listlessly.

“The Warlords are just sitting on their hands,” Baji complained. “The bombs scared the wits out of them. Fucking useless. Don’t they see? We can’t just absorb the attack. We’ve got to strike back.”

“Strike back?” Rin repeated. The very idea sounded halfhearted, disrespectful, and pointless. All she wanted to do was curl up in a ball and hold her hands over her ears and pretend nothing was happening. Leave this war to someone else.

“What are we supposed to do?” Unegen was saying. “The Warlords won’t attack, and we’ll get slaughtered on the open field ourselves.”

“We can’t just wait for the Seventh, they’ll take weeks—”

They approached headquarters just as Qara stepped out of Altan’s office. She closed the door delicately behind her, noticed them, and her face froze.

Baji and Unegen stopped walking. The heavy silence that transpired seemed to contain some unspoken message that everyone but Rin understood.

“It’s like that, huh?” Unegen asked.

“It’s worse,” said Qara.

“What’s going on?” Rin asked. “Is he in there?”

Qara looked warily at her. For some reason she smelled overwhelmingly of smoke. Her expression was unreadable. Rin might have seen tear tracks glistening on her cheek, or it might have been a trick of the lamplight.

“He’s indisposed,” Qara said.

The Federation’s retaliation did not end with the bombing.

Two days after the downtown explosions, the Federation sent bilingual agents to negotiate with starving fishermen in the town of Zhabei, just south of Khurdalain, and told them the Mugenese would clear their boats from the dock if the fishermen collected all the stray cats and dogs in the town for them.

Only starving civilians would have obeyed such a bizarre order. The fishermen were desperate, and they handed over every last stray animal they could find without question.

The Federation soldiers tied kindling to the animals’ tails and lit them on fire. Then they set them loose in Zhabei.

The ensuing flames burned for three days before rainfall finally extinguished them. When the smoke cleared, nothing remained of Zhabei but ashes.

Thousands of civilians were left homeless overnight, and the refugee problem in Khurdalain became unmanageable. The men, women, and children of Zhabei crammed into the shrinking parts of the city that were not yet under Federation occupation. Poor hygiene, lack of clean water, and an outbreak of cholera made the civilian districts a nightmare.

Popular sentiment turned against the Militia. The First, Fifth, and Eighth Divisions attempted to maintain martial rule, only to meet open defiance and riots.

The Warlords, desperately needing a scapegoat, publicly blamed their reversals of fortune on Altan. It helped them that the bombing shattered his credibility as a commander. He had won his first combat victory, only to have it ripped from him and turned into a tragic defeat, an example of the consequences of acting without thinking.

When Altan finally emerged from his office, he seemed to take it in stride. No one made mention of his absence; the Cike seemed to collectively pretend that nothing had happened at all. He showed no signs of insecurity—if anything, his behavior become almost manic.

“So we’re back where we started,” he said, pacing rapidly about his office. “Fine. We’ll fight back. Next time we’ll be thorough. Next time we’ll win.”

He planned far more operations than they could ever feasibly carry out. But the Cike were not historically soldiers, they were assassins. The battle at the marsh had been an unprecedented feat of teamwork for them; they were trained to take out crucial targets, not entire battalions. Yet assassinations did not go far in winning wars. The Federation was not like a snake, to be vanquished by cutting off the head. If a general was killed in his camp, a colonel was immediately promoted in his place. For the Cike to go about their business as usual, conducting one assassination after another, would have been a slow and inefficient way of waging a war.

So Altan used his soldiers like a guerrilla strike force instead. They stole supplies, waged hit-and-run attacks, and caused as much disruption as they could in enemy camps.

“I want the entire intersection sealed off,” Altan declared, drawing a large circle on the map. “Sandbags. Barbed wire. We need to minimize all points of entry within the next twenty-four hours. I want this warehouse back.”

“We can’t do that,” Baji said uneasily.

“Why not?” Altan snapped. A vein pulsed in his neck; dark circles ringed his eyes. Rin didn’t think he had slept in days.

“Because they’ve got a thousand men right in that circle. It’s impossible.”

Altan examined the map. “For normal soldiers, maybe. But we have gods. They can’t defeat us on an open field.”

“They can if there are a thousand of them.” Baji stood up, pushing his chair back with a screech. “The confidence is touching, Trengsin, but this is a suicide mission.”

“I’m not being—”

“We have eight soldiers. Qara and Unegen haven’t slept in days, Suni is one bad trip away from the Stone Mountain, and Ramsa still hasn’t gotten his wits back from that explosion. Maybe we could do this with Chaghan, but I suppose wherever you’ve sent him matters more—”

The brush snapped in Altan’s hand. “Are you contradicting me?”

“I’m pointing out your delusions.” Baji pushed his chair to the side and slung his rake over his back. “You’re a good commander, Trengsin, and I’ll take the risks I’m asked to take, but I’ll only obey commands that make some fucking sense. This doesn’t even come close.”

He stormed out of the office.

Even the operations that they did execute had a fatalistic, desperate air to them. For every bomb they planted, for every camp they set fire to, Rin suspected they were only annoying disturbances to the Federation. Though Qara and Unegen delivered valuable intelligence, the Fifth refused to act on it. And all the disruption Suni, Baji, and Ramsa together could create was only a drop in a bucket compared to the massive encampment that grew steadily larger as more and more ships unloaded troops on the coast.

The Cike were stretched to their limit, especially Rin. Each moment not spent on an operation was spent on patrol. And when she was off duty, she trained with Altan.

But those sessions had come to a standstill. She made rapid progress with her sword, disarming Altan almost as often as he disarmed her, but she came no closer to calling the Phoenix than she had on the marsh.

“I don’t understand,” Altan said. “You’ve done this before. You did this at Sinegard. What’s stopping you?”

Rin knew what the problem was, though she couldn’t admit it.

She was afraid.

Afraid that the power would consume her. Afraid she might rip a hole into the void, like Jiang had, and that she would disappear into the very power that she had called. Despite what Altan had told her, she could not just ignore two years of Jiang’s teachings.

And as if she could sense her fear, the Speerly Woman became more and more vivid each time Rin meditated. Rin could see details now she hadn’t seen before; cracks in her skin like she had been smashed apart and then put back together, burn scars where piece met piece.

“Don’t give in,” the Woman said. “You’ve been so brave . . . but it takes more bravery to resist the power. That boy couldn’t do it, and you are so close to giving in . . . but that’s what it wants, that’s precisely what it’s planned.”

“Gods don’t want anything,” said Rin. “They’re just forces. Powers to be tapped. How can it be wrong to use what exists in nature?”

“Not this god,” said the Woman. “The nature of this god is to destroy. The nature of this god is to be greedy, to never be satisfied with what he has consumed. Be careful . . .”

Light streamed through the cracks in the Speerly Woman, as if she were being illuminated from within. Her face twisted in pain and then she disappeared, shattering the space in the void.

As downtown warfare took a greater toll on civilian life, the city was permeated with an atmosphere of intense suspicion. Two weeks after the saltpeter explosion, six Nikara farmers were sentenced to death by Jun’s men for spying on behalf of the Federation. Likely they had been promised safe passage out of the besieged city if they provided valuable snippets of information. That, or they simply needed to feed themselves. Either way, thousands of fishermen, women, and children watched with a mixture of glee and disgust as Jun took their heads off in public, spiked them on poles, and placed them on display along the tall outer walls.

The vigilante justice the civilians inflicted on one another was greater—and more vicious—than anything the Militia could enforce. When rumors abounded that the Federation was planning to poison the central city water supply, armed bands of men with clubs stalked the streets, stopping and searching individuals at random. Anyone with a powdery substance was beaten severely. In the end, division soldiers had to intervene to save a group of merchants delivering herbs to the hospital from being torn apart by a crowd.

As the weeks dragged on, Altan’s shoulders became stooped, his face lined and haggard. His eyes were now permanently ringed with shadows. He hardly slept; he stopped working far later than any of them and was up earlier. He took his rest in short, fretful shifts, if at all.

He spent many hours frantically pacing the walled fortifications himself, watching the horizon for any sign of Federation movement, as if willing the next assault to happen so that he could fight the entire Federation army by himself.

Once when Rin walked into his office to submit an intelligence report, she found him asleep on his desk. His cheek had ink on it; it was pressed against war plans that he had been deliberating over for hours. His shoulders were slumped on the wooden surface. In sleep, the tense lines that normally arrested his face were gone, bringing his age down at least five years.

She always forgot how young he was.

He looked so vulnerable.

He smelled like smoke.

She couldn’t help herself. She stretched out a hand and touched him tentatively on the shoulder.

He sat up immediately. One hand flew instinctively to a dagger at his waist, the other shot out in front of him, igniting instantaneously. Rin took a quick step backward.

Altan took several panicked breaths before he saw Rin.

“It’s just me,” she said.

His chest rose and fell, and then his breathing slowed. She thought she had seen fear in his eyes, but then he swallowed and an impassive mask slid over his face.

His pupils were oddly constricted.

“I don’t know,” he said after a long moment. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Nobody does, she wanted to say, but she was interrupted by the loud ringing of a signal gong.

Someone was at the gates.

Qara was already standing sentry over the west wall when they climbed the stairs.

“They’re here,” she said simply before Altan could ask.

Rin leaned over the wall to see an army riding slowly up to the gates. It had to be a force of no less than two thousand. She was anxious at first, until she saw that they were clad in Nikara armor. At the front of the column flew a Nikara banner, the symbol of the Red Emperor above the emblems of the Twelve Warlords.

Reinforcements.

Rin refused to allow herself to hope. It couldn’t be.

“Possibly it’s a trap,” said Altan.

But Rin was looking past the flag at a face in the ranks—a boy, a beautiful boy with the palest skin and lovely almond eyes, walking on his own two legs as if his spine had never been severed. As if he had never been impaled on a general’s halberd.

As if he could sense her gaze, Nezha looked up.

Their eyes met under the moonlight. Rin’s heart leaped.

The Dragon Warlord had responded to the call. The Seventh Division was here.

“That’s not a trap,” she said.

Chapter 17

“You’re really all better?”

“Near enough,” said Nezha. “They sent me down with the next shipment of soldiers as soon as I could walk.”

The Seventh Division had brought with them three thousand fresh troops and wagons of badly needed supplies from farther inland—bandages, medicine, sacks of rice and spices. It was the best thing to happen at Khurdalain in weeks.

“Three months,” she marveled. “And Kitay said you were never going to walk again.”

“He exaggerated,” he said. “I got lucky. The blade went right in between my stomach and my kidney. Didn’t puncture anything on its way out. Hurt like hell, but it healed cleanly. Scar’s ugly, though. Do you want to see?”

“Keep your shirt on,” she said hastily. “Still, three months? That’s amazing.”

Nezha looked away, gazing over the quiet stretch of city under the wall that they’d been assigned to patrol. He hesitated, as if trying to decide whether or not to say something, but then abruptly changed the subject. “So. Screaming at rocks. Is that, like, normal behavior here?”

“That’s just Suni.” Rin broke a wheat bun in half and offered a piece to Nezha. They had increased bread rations to twice a week, and it was worth savoring. “Ignore him.”

He took it, chewed, and made a face. Even in wartime, Nezha had a way of acting as if he’d expected better luxuries. “It’s a little hard to ignore when he’s yelling right outside your tent.”

“I’ll ask Suni to avoid your particular tent.”

“Would you?”

Snideness aside, Rin was deeply grateful for Nezha’s presence. As much as they had hated each other at the Academy, Rin found comfort in having someone else from her class here on the other side of the country, so far away from Sinegard. It was good to have someone who could sympathize, in some way, with what she was going through.

It helped that Nezha had stopped acting like he had a stick up his ass. War brought out the worst in some people; with Nezha, though, it had transformed him, stripping away his snobby pretensions. It seemed petty now to maintain her old grudge. It was difficult to dislike someone who had saved her life.

And she didn’t want to admit it, but Nezha was a welcome relief from Altan, who had taken lately to hurling objects across the room at the slightest hint of disobedience. Rin found herself wondering why they hadn’t become friends sooner.

“You know they think your contingent is a freak show, right?” Nezha said.

But then, of course, he would say things like that. Rin bristled. They were freaks. But they were her freaks. Only the Cike got to speak about the Cike like that. “They’re the best damn soldiers in this army.”

Nezha raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t one of you blow up the foreign embassy?”

“That was an accident.”

“And didn’t that big hairy one choke out your commander in the mess hall?”

“All right, Suni’s pretty weird—but the rest of us are perfectly—”

“Perfectly normal?” Nezha laughed out loud. “Really? Your people just casually ingest drugs, mumble to animals, and scream through the night?”

“Side effect of battle prowess,” she said, forcing levity into her voice.

Nezha looked unconvinced. “Sounds like battle prowess is the side effect of the madness.”

Rin didn’t want to think about that. It was a horrifying prospect, and she knew it was more than just a rumor. But the more terrified she became, the less likely she’d be able to summon the Phoenix, and the angrier Altan would become.

“Why aren’t your eyes red?” Nezha asked abruptly.

“What?”

He reached out and touched a spot on her temple, beside her left eye. “Altan’s irises are red. I thought Speerly eyes were red.”

“I don’t know,” she said, suddenly confused. She had never once considered it—Altan had never brought it up. “My eyes have always been brown.”

“Maybe you’re not a Speerly.”

“Maybe.”

“But they were red before.” Nezha looked puzzled. “At Sinegard. When you killed the general.”

“You weren’t even conscious,” she said. “You had a spear in your stomach.”

Nezha arched an eyebrow. “I know what I saw.”

Footsteps sounded behind them. Rin jumped, although she had no reason to feel guilty. She was only keeping watch; she wasn’t barred from idle small talk.

“There you are,” said Enki.

Nezha swiftly stood. “I’ll go.”

She glanced up at him, confused. “No, you don’t have to—”

“He should go,” said Enki.

Nezha gave Enki a stiff nod and disappeared briskly around the corner of the wall.

Enki waited a few moments until the sound of Nezha’s footsteps pattering down the stairs died away. Then he glanced down at Rin, mouth pressed in a solemn line. “You didn’t tell me the Dragon Warlord’s brat was a shaman.”

Rin frowned. “What are you talking about?”

“The insignia.” Enki gestured around to his upper back, where Nezha wore his family crest across his uniform. “That’s a dragon mark.”

“That’s just his crest,” said Rin.

“Wasn’t he injured at Sinegard?” Enki inquired.

“Yes.” Rin wondered how Enki had known. Then again, Nezha was the son of the Dragon Warlord; his personal life was public knowledge among the Militia.

“How badly was he hurt?”

“I don’t know,” Rin said. “I was half-unconscious myself when it happened. The general stabbed him—twice, stomach wounds, probably—why does that matter?” She was confused by Nezha’s rapid recovery herself, but she didn’t see why Enki was interrogating her about it. “They missed his vitals,” she added, though that sounded implausible as soon as the words left her mouth.

“Two stomach wounds,” Enki repeated. “Two wounds from a highly experienced Federation general who was not likely to miss. And he’s up and walking in months?”

“You know, considering that one of us literally lives in a barrel, Nezha getting lucky is not that absurd.”

Enki looked unconvinced. “Your friend is hiding something.”

“Ask him yourself, then,” Rin said irritably. “Did you need something?”

Enki was frowning, contemplative, but he nodded. “Altan wants to see you. His office. Now.”

Altan’s office was a mess.

Books and brushes littered the floor. Maps were strewn haphazardly across his desk, city plans tacked up over every inch of wall. They were covered in Altan’s jagged, messy scrawl, outlining diagrams of strategies that made no sense to anyone but Altan. He had circled some critical regions so hard that they looked like he had etched them into the wall with a knifepoint.

Altan was sitting alone at his desk when Rin entered. His eyes were ringed with such a prominent indigo that they looked like bruises.

“You summoned me?” she asked.

Altan set his pen down. “You’re spending too much time with the Dragon Warlord’s brat.”

Rin bristled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I won’t allow it,” said Altan. “Nezha’s one of Jun’s people. You know better than to trust him.”

Rin opened her mouth and then closed it, trying to figure out whether Altan was being serious. Finally she said, “Nezha’s not in the Fifth. Jun can’t give him orders.”

“Jun was his master,” Altan said. “I’ve seen his armband. He pledged Combat. He’s loyal to Jun; he’ll tell him anything . . .”

Rin stared at him in disbelief. “Nezha’s just my friend.”

“No one is ever your friend. Not when you’re Cike. He’s spying on us.”

“Spying on us?” Rin repeated. “Altan, we’re in the same army.”

Altan stood up and slammed his hands down on the table.

Rin flinched back.

“We are not in the same army. We are the Cike. We’re the Bizarre Children. We’re the force that shouldn’t exist, and Jun wants us to fail. He wants me to fail,” he said. “They all do.”

“The other divisions aren’t our enemy,” Rin said quietly.

Altan paced around the room, arms twitching involuntarily, glaring at his maps as if he could will into formation armies that didn’t exist. He looked quite deranged.

“Everyone is our enemy,” he said. He seemed to be talking to himself more than he was talking to her. “Everyone wants us dead, gone . . . but I won’t go out like this . . .”

Rin swallowed. “Altan—”

He jerked his head toward her. “Can you call the fire yet?”

Rin felt a twinge of guilt. Try as she might, she still couldn’t access the god, could not call it back like she had in Sinegard.

Before she could respond, though, Altan made a noise of disgust. “Never mind. Of course you can’t. You still think you’re playing a game. You think you’re still at school.”

“I do not.”

He crossed the room toward her, grasped her shoulders, and shook her so hard that she gasped out loud. But he only pulled her closer until they were face-to-face, eye to eye. His irises were a furious crimson.

“How hard could it be?” he demanded. His grip tightened, fingers digging painfully into her collarbone. “Tell me, why is this so hard for you? It’s not like this is new to you; you’ve done it before, why can’t you do it now?”

“Altan, you’re hurting me.”

His grip only tightened. “You could at least fucking try—”

“I’ve tried!” she exploded. “It’s not easy, all right? I can’t just . . . I’m not you.”

“Are you a toddler?” Altan said, as if curious. He didn’t shout, but his voice took on a strangled monotone, carefully controlled and deadly quiet. That was how she knew he was furious. “Or are you, perhaps, an idiot masquerading as a soldier? You said you needed time. I have allotted you months. On Speer, you would have been disowned by now. Your family would have hurled you into the ocean for the sheer embarrassment.”

“I’m sorry,” Rin whispered, then immediately regretted it. Altan didn’t want her apology. He wanted her humiliation. He wanted her to burn in shame, to feel so miserable with herself that she couldn’t bear it.

And she did. How was it that he could make her feel so small? She felt more useless than she had at Sinegard when Jun had humiliated her before everyone. This was worse. This was a thousand times worse, because unlike Jun, Altan mattered to her. Altan was a Speerly, Altan was her commander. She needed his approval like she needed air.

He pushed her violently away from him.

Rin fought the urge to touch her collarbone, where she knew she would soon have two bruises left by Altan’s thumbs, perfectly formed dents like teardrops. She swallowed hard, averted her eyes, and said nothing.

“You call yourself a Sinegard-trained soldier?” Altan’s voice had sunk to barely more than a whisper, and it was worse than if he were shouting. She wished he were shouting. Anything would be better than this cold evisceration. “You’re no soldier. You’re deadweight. Until you can call the fire, you’re fucking useless to me. You’re here because you’re purportedly a Speerly. So far I have seen no proof that you are. Fix this. Prove your worth. Do your fucking job or get out.”

She saved her tears for after she was out of the office. Her eyes were still red when she entered the mess hall.

“Have you been crying?” Nezha demanded as he sat down across from her.

“Go away,” she mumbled.

He didn’t go away. “Tell me what happened.”

Rin bit her lower lip. She wasn’t supposed to speak to Nezha. It would have been a double betrayal to complain to him about Altan.

“Was it Altan? Did he say something?”

She looked away pointedly.

“Wait. What’s that?” Nezha reached for her collarbone.

She slapped his hand away and yanked at her uniform.

“You’re just going to sit there and take it?” Nezha asked in disbelief. “I remember a girl who punched me in the face for uttering an ill word about her teacher.”

“Altan’s different,” Rin said.

“Not so different that he gets to talk to you like that,” Nezha said. His eyes slid over her collarbone. “It was Altan. Tiger’s tits. They’re saying he’s gone mad in the Fifth, but I never thought he’d actually resort to this.”

“You don’t get to talk,” Rin snapped. Why did Nezha think he could now take on the role of confidant? “You made fun of me for years at Sinegard. You didn’t say a kind word to me until Mugen was at our doorstep.”

To his credit, Nezha actually looked guilty. “Rin, I’m—”

She cut him off before he could get a word in. “I was the war orphan from the south, and you were the rich kid from Sinegard, and you tormented me. You made Sinegard a living hell, Nezha.”

It felt good to say it out loud. It felt good to see Nezha’s stricken expression. They had skirted around this since Nezha had arrived, had acted as if they had always been friends at the Academy, because theirs had been such a childish feud compared to the very real battles they were fighting now. But if he wanted to malign her commander, then she would remind him exactly whom he was talking to.

Nezha slammed a hand on the table, just as Altan had, but this time she didn’t flinch.

“You weren’t the only victim!” he said. “The first day we met you punched me. Then you kicked me in the balls. Then you tackled me in class. In front of Jun. In front of everyone. How do you think that felt? How fucking embarrassing do you think that was? Look, I’m sorry, all right? I’m really sorry.” The remorse in Nezha’s voice sounded genuine. “But I saved your life. Doesn’t that make us at least a little square?”

Square? Square? She had to laugh. “You almost got me expelled!”

“And you almost killed me,” he said.

That shut her up.

“I was scared of you,” Nezha continued. “And I lashed out. I was stupid. I was a spoiled brat. I was a real pain in the ass. I thought I was better than you, and I’m not. I’m sorry.”

Rin was too stunned to come up with a response, so she turned away. “I’m not supposed to be talking to you,” she said stiffly to the wall.

“Fine,” Nezha snapped. “Sorry I tried. I’ll leave you alone, then.”

He grabbed his plate, stood up, and walked briskly away. She let him.

Night watch was lonely and boring without Nezha. All of the Cike had watch duty on rotation, but at that moment Rin was convinced Altan had placed her there as punishment. What was the point of staring down at a coastline where nothing ever happened? If another fleet did show up, Qara’s birds would see it days in advance.

Rin twisted her fingers irritably together as she huddled against the wall, trying to warm herself. Stupid, she thought, glaring at her hands. Probably she wouldn’t feel so cold if she could just summon a bit of flame.

Everything felt awful. The mere thought of both Altan and Nezha made her cringe. She knew vaguely that she’d fucked up, that she’d probably done something that she shouldn’t have, but she couldn’t reason a way out of this dilemma. She wasn’t even sure precisely what the matter was, only that both were furious with her.

She heard then a droning noise; so faint at first she thought she was imagining it. But then it increased quickly in volume, like a fast-approaching swarm of bees. The noise reached a peak and clarified into human shouts. She squinted; the commotion wasn’t coming from the coastline but from the downtown districts behind her. She jumped down from her perch and ran to look down the other side. A flood of civilians streamed into the alleyways, a frantic stampede of bodies. She searched the crowd and saw Qara and Unegen emerging from their barracks. She scaled down the wall and wove through the flood of bodies, pushing against the crowd to reach them.

“What’s going on?” She grabbed Unegen’s arm. “Why are they running?”

“No clue,” Unegen said. “Find the others.”

A civilian—an old woman—tried to push past Rin but stumbled. Rin knelt to help her, but the woman had already picked herself up, scurrying along faster than Rin had ever seen an old person move. Men, women, and children streamed around her, some barefoot, some only half-dressed, wearing identical expressions of terror in their frenzy to flee out the city gates.

“What the hell is going on?” Baji, bleary-eyed and shirtless, pushed through the crowd toward them. “Great Tortoise. Are we evacuating now?”

Something bumped into Rin’s knee. She looked down and saw a small child—tiny, half Kesegi’s age. He wasn’t wearing any pants. He groped blindly at her shin, bawling loudly. He must have lost his parents in the confusion. She reached down and picked him up, the same way she used to hold Kesegi when he cried.

As she searched through the mob for anyone who looked like they were missing a child, she saw three great spouts of flame appear in the air, in the shape of three small dragons flying upward at the sky. It had to be Altan’s signal.

Through the noise Rin heard his hoarse yell, “Cike, to me!”

She placed the child in the arms the first civilian she saw and fought her way through the masses to where Altan stood. Jun was there, too, surrounded by about ten of his men. Nezha stood among them. He didn’t meet her eyes.

Altan looked more openly furious than she had ever seen him. “I warned you not to evacuate without giving notice.”

“This isn’t me,” said Jun. “They’re running from something.”

“From what?”

“Damned if I know,” Jun snapped.

Altan heaved a great sigh of impatience, reached into the horde of bodies, and pulled someone out at random. It was a young woman, a little older than Rin, wearing nothing but a nightgown. She screeched loudly in protest, then clamped her jaw shut when she saw their Militia uniforms.

“What’s going on?” Altan demanded. “What are you all running from?”

“A chimei,” she said, out of breath and terrified. “There’s a chimei downtown, near the town square . . .”

A chimei? The name was vaguely familiar. Rin thought back to where she had last seen it—somewhere in the library, perhaps, in one of the absurd tomes Jiang had made her read when conducting a thorough investigation on every piece of arcane knowledge known to mankind. She thought it might be a beast, some mythological creature with bizarre abilities.

“Really,” Jun said skeptically. “How do you know it’s a chimei?”

The girl looked him straight in the eyes. “Because it’s tearing the faces off corpses,” she said in a wavering voice. “I saw the bodies, I saw . . .” She broke off.

“What does it look like?” Altan asked.

The woman shivered. “I didn’t get a close look, but I think . . . it looked like a great four-legged beast. Large as a horse, arms like a monkey’s.”

“A beast,” Altan repeated. “Anything else?”

“Its fur was black, and its eyes . . .” She swallowed.

“Its eyes were what?” Jun pressed.

The woman flinched. “Like his,” she said, and pointed to Altan. “Red like blood. Bright as flame.”

Altan released the young woman back into the crowd, and she immediately disappeared into the fleeing mass.

The two commanders faced each other.

“We need to send someone in,” Altan said. “Someone has to kill that beast.”

“Yes,” Jun agreed immediately. “My people are tied up with crowd control, but I can gather a squadron.”

“We don’t need a squadron. One of my people should be fine. We can’t dispatch everyone. Mugen could use this chance to attack our base. This could be a diversion.”

“I’ll go,” Rin volunteered immediately.

Altan frowned at her. “You know how to handle a chimei?”

She didn’t know. She’d only just remembered what a chimei was—and that was only from Academy readings that she barely remembered. But she was sure that was more than anyone else in the divisions or the Cike knew, because no one else had been forced to read arcane bestiaries at Sinegard. And she wasn’t about to admit incompetence to Altan in front of Jun. She could handle this task. She had to.

“As well as anyone else does, sir. I’ve read the bestiaries.”

Altan considered for a short moment, then nodded curtly. “Go against the grain of the crowd. Keep to the alleys.”

“I’ll go, too,” Nezha volunteered.

“That’s not necessary,” Altan said immediately.

But Jun said, “She should take a Militia man. Just in case.”

Altan glared at Jun, and she realized what this was about. Jun wanted someone to accompany her, just in case she saw something that Altan didn’t report to Jun.

Rin couldn’t believe that division politics were at play even now.

Altan looked like he wanted to argue. But there was no time. He shoved past Nezha toward the crowd and seized a torch from a passing civilian.

“Hey! I need that!”

“Shut up,” Altan said, and pushed the civilian away. He handed the torch to Rin and pulled her into a side alley where she could avoid the traffic. “Go.”

Rin and Nezha couldn’t reach downtown by fighting the stampede of bodies. But the buildings in their district had low, flat roofs that were easy to climb onto. Rin and Nezha ran across them, their torches bobbing in the light. When they reached the end of the block, they dropped down into an alley and crossed another block in silence.

Finally Nezha asked, “What’s a chimei?”

“You heard the woman,” Rin said curtly. “Great beast. Red eyes.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“Probably shouldn’t have come along, then.” She turned a corner.

“I read the bestiaries, too,” Nezha said after he had caught up to her. “Nothing about a chimei.”

“You didn’t read the old texts. Archive basement,” she said. “Red Emperor’s era. It only gets a few mentions, but it’s there. Sometimes it’s depicted as a child with red eyes. Sometimes as a black shadow. It tears the faces off its victims but leaves the rest of the corpse intact.”

“Creepy,” Nezha said. “What’s its deal with faces?”

“I’m not sure,” Rin admitted. She searched her memory for anything else she could remember about chimeis. “The bestiaries didn’t say. I think it collects them. The books claim that the chimei can imitate just about anyone—people you care about, people you could never hurt.”

“Even people it hasn’t killed?”

“Probably,” she guessed. “It’s been collecting faces for thousands of years. With that many facial features, you could approximate anyone.”

“So what? How does that make it dangerous?”

She shot him a glance over her shoulder. “You’d be fine stabbing something with your mother’s face?”

“I’d know it wasn’t real.”

“You’d know in the back of your mind it wasn’t real. But could you do it in the moment? Look in your mother’s eyes, listen to her begging, and put your knife to her throat?”

“If I knew there was no way it could be my mother,” Nezha said. “The chimei sounds scary only if it catches you by surprise. But not if you know.”

“I don’t think it’s that simple,” said Rin. “This thing didn’t just frighten one or two people. It scared off half the city. What’s more, the bestiaries don’t tell us how to kill it. There isn’t a defeat of a chimei on record in history. We’re fighting this one blind.”

The streets in the middle of town were still—doors closed, wagons parked. What should have been a bustling marketplace was dusty and quiet.

But not empty.

Bodies were littered around the streets in various states.

Rin knelt down by the closest one and turned it over. The corpse was unmarked except for the head. The face had been chewed off in the most grotesque manner. The eye sockets were empty, the nose missing, lips torn clean off.

“You weren’t kidding,” Nezha said. He covered his mouth with a hand. “Tiger’s tits. What happens when we find it?”

“Probably I’ll kill it,” she said. “You can help.”

“You are obnoxiously overconfident in your combat abilities,” said Nezha.

“I thrashed you at school. I’m frank about my combat abilities,” she said. It helped if she talked big. It made the fear go away.

Several feet away, Nezha kicked another body over. It wore the dark blue uniform of the Federation Armed Forces. A five-pointed yellow star on his right breast identified him as an officer of rank.

“Poor guy,” he said. “Someone didn’t get the message.”

Rin walked past Nezha and held her torch out over the bloody walkway. An entire squadron of slain Federation forces was littered across the cobblestones.

“I don’t think the Federation sent it,” she said slowly.

“Maybe they’ve kept it locked up all this time,” Nezha suggested. “Maybe they didn’t know what it could do.”

“The Federation doesn’t take chances like that,” she said. “You saw how cautious they were with the trebuchets at Sinegard. They wouldn’t unleash a beast they couldn’t control.”

“So it just came on its own? A monster that no one’s seen in centuries decides to reappear in the one city under siege?”

Rin had a sinking suspicion of where the chimei had come from. She’d seen the monster before. She’d seen it in the illustrations of the Jade Emperor’s menagerie.

I will summon into existence beings that should not be in this world.

When Jiang had opened that void at Sinegard, he had ripped a hole in the fabric between their world and the next. And now, with the Gatekeeper gone, demons were climbing through at will.

There is a price. There is always a price.

Now she could see what he meant.

She pushed the thoughts from her mind and knelt down to examine the corpses more closely. None of the soldiers had drawn their weapons. This made no sense. Surely they couldn’t all have been caught off guard. If they’d been fighting a monstrous beast, they should have died with their swords drawn. There should be signs of a struggle.

“Where do you think—” she began to ask, but Nezha clamped a cold hand over her mouth.

“Listen,” he whispered.

She could hear nothing. But then, across the market square from where they stood, a faint noise came from within an overturned wagon, the sound of something shaking. Then the shaking stilled, giving way to what sounded like high-pitched sobbing.

Rin walked closer with her torch held out to investigate.

“Are you mad?” Nezha grabbed her arm. “That could be the beast itself.”

“So what are we going to do, run from it?” She shook him off and continued at a brisk pace toward the wagon.

Nezha hesitated, but she heard him following. When they reached the wagon, he met her eyes over the torchlight, and she nodded. She drew her sword, and together they yanked the cover off the wagon.

“Go away!”

The thing under the cover wasn’t a beast. It was a tiny girl, no taller than Nezha’s waist, curled up in the back end of the wagon. She wore a flimsy blood-covered dress. She shrieked when she saw them and buried her head in her knees. Her entire body convulsed with violent, terrified sobs. “Get away! Get away from me!”

“Put your sword down, you’re scaring her!” Nezha stepped in front of Rin, blocking her from the little girl’s view. He shifted his torch to his other hand and put a hand softly on the girl’s shoulder. “Hey. Hey, it’s okay. We’re here to help you.”

The girl sniffled. “Horrible monster . . .”

“I know. The monster isn’t here. We’ve, uh, we’ve scared it away. We’re not here to hurt you, I promise. Can you look at me?”

Slowly, the girl lifted her head and met Nezha’s gaze. Her eyes were enormous, wide and scared, in her tear-streaked face.

As Rin looked over Nezha’s shoulder into those eyes, she was struck with the oddest sensation, a fierce desire to protect the little girl at all costs. She felt it like a physical urge, a foreign maternal desire. She would die before letting any harm come to this innocent child.

“You’re not a monster?” the girl whimpered.

Nezha stretched his arms out to her. “We’re humans through and through,” he said gently.

The girl leaned into his arms, and her sobs subsided.

Rin watched Nezha in amazement. He seemed to know exactly how to act around the child, adjusting his tone and his body language to be as comforting as possible.

Nezha handed Rin his torch with one arm and patted the girl on the head with the other. “Will you let me help you out of this thing?”

She nodded hesitantly and rose to her feet. Nezha grasped her waist, lifted her out of the broken wagon, and set her gently on the ground.

“There. You’re all right. Can you walk?”

She nodded again and reached shakily for his hand. Nezha grasped it firmly, wrapped his slender fingers around her tiny hand. “Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere. Do you have a name?”

“Khudali,” she whispered.

“Khudali. You’re safe now,” Nezha promised. “You’re with us. And we’re monster killers. But we need your help. Can you be brave for me?”

Khudali swallowed and nodded.

“Good girl. Now can you tell me what happened? Anything you remember.”

Khudali took a deep breath and began to speak in a halting, trembling voice. “I was with my parents and my sister. We were just riding the wagon back home. The Militia told us not to be out too late so we wanted to get back in time, and then . . .” Khudali began to sob again.

“It’s okay,” Nezha said quickly. “We know the beast came. I just need you to give me any details you can. Anything that comes to mind.”

Khudali nodded. “Everyone was screaming, but none of the soldiers did anything. And when it came near us, the Federation just watched. I hid inside the wagon. I didn’t see its face.”

“Did you see where it went?” Rin asked sharply.

Khudali flinched and shrank back behind Nezha.

“You’re scaring her,” Nezha said in a low voice, gesturing again for Rin to stand back. He turned back to Khudali. “Can you show me what direction it ran in?” he asked softly. “Where did it go?”

“I . . . I can’t tell you how to get there. But I can take you,” she said. “I remember what I saw.”

She led them a few steps toward a corner of the alley, then paused.

“That’s where it ate my brother,” she said. “But then it disappeared.”

“Hold on,” said Nezha. “You said you came here with your sister.”

Khudali looked up at Nezha, again with those wide, imploring eyes.

“I suppose I did,” she said.

Then she smiled.

In one instant she was a tiny girl; the next, a long-limbed beast. Except for its face, it was entirely covered in coarse pitch-black fur. Its loping arms could have reached the ground, like Suni’s, a monkey’s arms. Its head was very small, still the head of Khudali, which made it all the more grotesque. It reached for Nezha with thick fingers and lifted him into the air by his collar.

Rin drew her sword and hacked at its legs, its arms, its torso. But the chimei’s bristly fur was like a coat of iron needles, repelling her sword better than any shield could.

“Its face,” she yelled. “Aim for the face!”

But Nezha wasn’t moving. His hands dangled uselessly at his sides. He gazed into the chimei’s tiny face, Khudali’s face, entranced.

“What are you doing?” Rin screamed.

Slowly, the chimei turned its head to look down at her. It found her eyes.

Rin reeled and stumbled backward, choking.

When she gazed into those eyes, its entrancing eyes, the chimei’s monstrous body melted away in her vision. She couldn’t see the black hair, the beast’s body, the rough torso matted with blood. Only the face.

It wasn’t the face of a beast. It was the face of something beautiful. It was blurry for a moment, like it couldn’t decide what it wanted to be, and then it turned into a face she hadn’t seen in years.

Soft, mud-colored cheeks. Rumpled black hair. One baby tooth slightly larger than the rest, one baby tooth missing.

“Kesegi?” Rin uttered.

She dropped her torch. Kesegi smiled uncertainly.

“Do you recognize me?” he asked in his sweet little voice. “After all this time?”

Her heart broke. “Of course I recognize you.”

Kesegi looked at her hopefully. Then he opened his mouth and screeched, and the screech wasn’t anything human. The chimei rushed at her—Rin flung her hands up before her face—but something stopped it.

Nezha had broken free of its grasp; now he held on to its back, where he couldn’t see its face. Nezha stabbed inward, but his knife clattered uselessly against the chimei’s collarbone. He tried again, aiming for its face. Kesegi’s face.

“No!” Rin screamed. “Kesegi, no—”

Nezha missed—his blade ricocheted off iron fur. He raised his weapon for a second blow, but Rin dashed forward and shoved her sword between Nezha’s blade and the chimei.

She had to protect Kesegi, couldn’t let Nezha kill him, not Kesegi . . . he was just a kid, so helpless, so little . . .

It had been three years since she’d left him. She had abandoned him with a pair of opium smugglers, while she left for Sinegard without sending so much as a letter for three years, three impossibly long years.

It seemed like so long ago. An entire lifetime.

So why was Kesegi still so small?

She reeled, mind fuzzy. Answering the question was like trying to see through a dense mist. She knew there was some reason why this didn’t make sense, but she couldn’t quite piece together what it was . . . only that there was something wrong with this Kesegi in front of her.

It wasn’t her Kesegi.

It wasn’t Kesegi at all.

She struggled to come to her senses, blinking rapidly like she was trying to clear away a fog. It’s the chimei, you idiot, she told herself. It’s playing off your emotions. This is what it does. This is how it kills.

And now that she remembered, she saw there was something wrong with Kesegi’s face . . . his eyes were not soft and brown, but bright red, two glaring lanterns that demanded her gaze . . .

Howling, the chimei finally succeeded in flinging Nezha off its back. Nezha jerked through the air and crashed against the alley wall. His head thudded against the stone. He slid to the ground and did not stir.

The chimei bolted into the shadows and disappeared.

Rin ran toward Nezha’s prone form.

“Shit, shit . . .” She pressed her hand to the back of his head. It came away sticky. She probed around, feeling for the contours of the cut, and was relieved to find it was fairly shallow—even light head wounds bled heavily. Nezha might be fine.

But where had the chimei gone . . . ?

She heard a rustling noise above her. She turned, too slowly.

The chimei jumped straight down to land on her back, seizing her shoulders with a horrifically strong grip. She wriggled ferociously, stabbing backward with her sword. But she attacked in vain; the chimei’s fur was still an impenetrable shield, against which her blade could only scrape uselessly.

With one massive hand the chimei seized the blade and broke it. It made a disdainful noise and flung the pieces into the darkness. Then it encircled Rin’s neck with its arms, clinging to her back like a child—a giant, monstrous child. Its arms pressed against her windpipe. Rin’s eyes bulged. She couldn’t breathe. She fell to her knees and clambered desperately over the dirt toward the dropped torch.

She felt the chimei’s breath hot on her neck. It scratched at her face, pulled at her lips and nostrils the way a child might.

“Play with me,” it insisted in Kesegi’s voice. “Why won’t you play with me?”

Can’t breathe . . .

Rin’s fingers found the torch. She seized it and jabbed it blindly upward.

The burning end smashed into the chimei’s exposed face with a loud sizzle. The beast screeched and flung itself off Rin. It writhed in the dirt, limbs twitching at bizarre angles as it keened loudly in pain.

Rin screamed, too—her hair had caught fire. She pulled up her hood and rubbed the cloth over her head to smother the flames.

“Sister, please,” the chimei gasped. In its agony it somehow managed to sound even more like Kesegi.

She crawled doggedly toward it, pointedly looking away from its eyes. She clutched the torch tightly in her right hand. She had to burn it again. Burning it seemed to be the only way to hurt it.

“Rin.”

This time it spoke in Altan’s voice.

This time she couldn’t stop herself from looking.

At first it only had Altan’s face, and then it was Altan, lying sprawled on the ground, blood dripping from his temple. It had Altan’s eyes. It had Altan’s scar.

Raw, smoking, he snarled at her.

Staving off the chimei’s attempts to claw off her face, she pinned it against the ground, jamming down its arms with her knees.

She had to burn its face off. The faces were the source of its power. The chimei had collected a mass of likenesses from every person it had killed, every face it had torn off. It sustained itself on human likenesses, and now it tried to obtain hers.

She forced the torch into its face.

The chimei screamed again. Altan screamed again.

She had never heard Altan scream, not in reality, but she was certain that it would have sounded like this.

“Please,” sobbed Altan, his voice raw. “Please, don’t.”

Rin clenched her teeth and tightened her grip on the torch, pressed it harder against the chimei’s head. The smell of burning flesh filled her nostrils. She choked; the smoke made her tear up but she did not stop. She tried to rip her gaze away, but the chimei’s eyes were arresting. It held her eyes. It forced her to look.

“You can’t kill me,” Altan hissed. “You love me.”

“I don’t love you,” Rin said. “And I can kill anything.”

It was a terrifying power of the chimei’s that the more it burned, the more it looked like Altan. Rin’s heart slammed against her rib cage. Close your mind. Block out your thoughts. Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t . . .

But she couldn’t detach Altan’s likeness from the chimei. They were one and the same. She loved it, she loved him, and he was going to kill her. Unless she killed him first.

But no, that didn’t make sense . . .

She tried to focus again, to still her terror and regain her rationality, but this time what she concentrated on was not detaching Altan from the chimei but resolving to kill it no matter who she thought it was.

She was killing the chimei. She was killing Altan. Both were true. Both were necessary.

She didn’t have the poppy seed, but she didn’t need to call the Phoenix in this moment. She had the torch and she had the pain, and that was enough.

She smashed the blunt end of the torch into Altan’s face. She smashed again, with a greater force than she knew she was capable of. Bone gave way to wood. His cheek caved in, creating a cavernous hole where flesh and bone should be.

“You’re hurting me.” Altan sounded shocked.

No, I’m killing you. She smashed it again and again and again. Once her arm started going, she couldn’t stop. Altan’s face became a mottled mess of fragmented bone and flesh. Brown skin turned bright red. His face lost shape altogether. She beat out those eyes, beat them bloody so she wouldn’t have to look into them anymore. When he struggled, she turned the torch around and burned him in the wounds. Then he screamed.

Finally the chimei ceased its struggles beneath her. Its muscles stopped tensing, its legs stopped kicking. Rin lurched forward over its head, breathing heavily. She had burned through its face to the bone. Underneath the charred, smoking skin lay a tiny, pristine white skull.

Rin climbed off the corpse and sucked in a great, heaving breath. Then she vomited.

“I’m sorry,” said Nezha when he awoke.

“Don’t be,” Rin said. She lay slumped against the wall beside him. The entire contents of her stomach were splattered on the sidewalk. “It’s not your fault.”

“It is my fault. You didn’t freeze when you saw it.”

“I did freeze. An entire squadron froze.” Rin jerked her thumb back toward the Federation carcasses in the market square. “And you helped me snap out of it. Don’t blame yourself.”

“I was stupid. I should have known that little girl—”

“Neither of us knew,” Rin said curtly.

Nezha said nothing.

“Do you have a sister?” she asked after a while.

“I used to have a brother,” Nezha said. “A little brother. He died when we were young.”

“Oh.” Rin didn’t know what to say to that. “Sorry.”

Nezha pulled himself to a sitting position. “When the chimei was screaming at me it felt like—like it was my fault again.”

Rin swallowed hard. “When I killed it, it felt like murder.”

Nezha gave her a long look. “Who was it for you?”

Rin didn’t answer that.

They limped back to the base together in silence, occasionally ducking around a dark corner to make sure they weren’t being followed. They did so more out of habit than necessity. Rin guessed there wouldn’t be any Federation soldiers in that part of the city for a while.

When they reached the junction that split the Cike headquarters and the Seventh Division’s base, Nezha stopped and turned to face her.

Her heart skipped a beat.

He was so beautiful then, standing right in the space of the road where a beam of moonlight fell across his face, illuminating one side and casting long shadows on the other.

He looked like glazed porcelain, preserved glass. He was a sculptor’s approximation of a person, not human himself. He can’t be real, she thought. A boy made of flesh and bone could not be so painfully lovely, so free of any blemish or flaw.

“So. About earlier,” he said.

Rin folded her arms tightly across her chest. “Not a good time.”

Nezha laughed humorlessly. “We’re fighting a war. There’s never going to be a good time.”

“Nezha . . .”

He put his hand on her arm. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to—”

“Yes, I do. I’ve been a real dick to you. And I had no right to talk about your commander like that. I’m sorry.”

“I forgive you,” she said cautiously, and found that she meant it.

Altan was waiting in his office when she returned to base. He opened the door even before she knocked.

“It’s gone?”

“It’s gone,” Rin confirmed. She swallowed; her heart was still racing. “Sir.”

He nodded curtly. “Good.”

They regarded each other in silence for a moment. He was hidden in the shadow of the door. Rin couldn’t see the expression on his face. She was glad of that. She couldn’t face him right now. She couldn’t look at him without seeing his face burning, breaking under her hands, dissolving into a pulpy mess of flesh and gore and sinew.

All thoughts of Nezha had been pushed out of her mind. How could that possibly matter right now?

She had just killed Altan.

What was that supposed to mean? What did it say that the chimei had thought she wouldn’t be able to kill Altan, and that she had killed him anyway?

If she could do this, what couldn’t she do?

Who couldn’t she kill?

Maybe that was the kind of anger it took to call the Phoenix easily and regularly the way Altan did. Not just rage, not just fear, but a deep, burning resentment, fanned by a particularly cruel kind of abuse.

Maybe she’d learned something after all.

“Anything else?” Altan asked.

He took a step toward her. She flinched. He must have noticed it, and still he moved closer. “Something you want to tell me?”

“No, sir,” she whispered. “There’s nothing.”

Chapter 18

“The riverbanks are clear,” Rin said. “Small signs of activity on the northwestern corner, but nothing we haven’t seen before. Probably just transporting more supplies to the far end of camp. I doubt they’ll try today.”

“Good,” said Altan. He marked a point on his map, then set the brush down. He rubbed at his temples and paused like he’d forgotten what he was going to say.

Rin fidgeted with her sleeve.

They hadn’t trained together in weeks. It was just as well. There was no time for training now. Months into the siege, the Nikara position in Khurdalain was dire. Even with the added reinforcements of the Seventh Division, the port city was perilously close to falling under Federation occupation. Three days before, the Fifth Division had lost a major town in the suburbs of Khurdalain that had served as a transportation center, exposing much of the eastern part of the city to the Federation.

Beyond that, they’d also lost a good deal of their imported supplies, which forced the army onto even poorer rations than they’d been subsisting on. They were surviving on rice gruel and yams now, two things that Baji declared he would never touch again after this war was over. As it was, they were more likely to chew down handfuls of raw rice than receive fully cooked meals from the mess hall.

Jun’s frontline units were inching backward, and suffering heavy casualties while doing so. The Federation took stronghold after stronghold on the riverbank. The water of the creek had been red for days, forcing Jun to send out men to bring back barrels of water not contaminated by putrefied corpses.

Apart from downtown Khurdalain, the Nikara still occupied three crucial buildings on the wharf—two warehouses and a former Hesperian trading office—but their increasingly limited manpower was spread too thin to hold the buildings indefinitely.

At least they had shattered fantasies of an early Federation victory. They knew from intercepted missives that Mugen had expected to take Khurdalain within a week. But the siege had now stretched on for months. Rin realized in the abstract that the longer they fended Mugen off at Khurdalain, the more time Golyn Niis had to assemble defenses. They had already bought more time than they could have hoped for.

But that didn’t make Khurdalain feel like any less of an utter defeat.

“One more thing,” she said.

Altan nodded jerkily for her to continue.

She spoke quickly. “The Fifth wanted a meeting about the beach offensive. They want to move it up before they lose any more troops at the warehouse. The day after tomorrow at the latest.”

Altan raised an eyebrow. “Why is the Fifth conveying a request through you?”

The request had actually been conveyed through Nezha, speaking on behalf of his father, the Dragon Warlord, whom Jun had approached because he didn’t want to give Altan legitimacy by going to his headquarters. Rin found the interdivisional politics incredibly annoying, but could do nothing about it.

“Because at least one of them likes me. Sir.”

Altan blinked. Rin immediately regretted speaking.

Before he could answer, a scream shattered the morning air.

Altan reached the top of the sentry tower first, but Rin was right behind him, her heart pounding furiously. Had there been an attack? But she saw no Federation soldiers in the vicinity, no arrows flying overhead . . .

Qara lay collapsed on the floor of the tower. She was alone. As they watched, she writhed against the stone floor, making low, tortured moans in the back of her throat. Her eyes had rolled back in her head. Her limbs seized uncontrollably.

Rin had never seen anyone react to a wound like this. Had Qara been poisoned? But why would the Federation target a sentry, and no one else? Rin and Altan instinctively crouched low, out of the line of potential fire, but there were no subsequent arrows, if there had even been a first. Except for Qara’s twitching, they saw no disturbances at all.

Altan dropped to his knees. He grasped Qara by her shoulders, dragging her to a sitting position. “What’s wrong? What’s happened?”

“It hurts . . .”

Altan shook her hard. “Answer me.”

Qara just moaned again. Rin was stunned by how roughly Altan treated her, despite her obvious agony. But, she realized belatedly, Qara had no visible injuries. There was no blood on the ground, or on her clothes.

Altan smacked Qara’s face lightly to get her attention. “Is he back?”

Rin looked between them in confusion. Who was he talking about? Qara’s brother?

Qara’s face twisted in agony, but she managed to nod.

Altan cursed under his breath. “Is he hurt? Where is he?”

Chest heaving, Qara clenched the front of Altan’s tunic. Her eyes were squeezed shut, as if she was concentrating on something.

“The east gate,” she managed. “He’s here.”

By the time Rin had helped Qara down the stairs, Altan had disappeared from sight.

She looked up and saw archers of the Fifth Division standing frozen at the top of the wall, arrows fitted to their bows. Rin could hear clashing steel on the other side, but none of the soldiers were shooting.

Altan had to be on the other side. Were they afraid they might hit him? Or were they just unwilling to help?

She helped Qara to a sitting position by the nearest wall and made a mad dash up to the wall overlooking the east gate.

On the other side of the gate, an entire squadron of Federation soldiers clustered around Altan. He fought astride a horse, slashing his way through in a frenzied effort to get back to the gate. His arms moved faster than Rin’s eyes could follow. His trident flashed once, twice in the noon sun, glistening with blood. Each time he wrenched it back out, a Federation soldier collapsed.

The crowd of soldiers thinned as soldier after soldier dropped, and finally Rin saw the reason why Altan had not summoned his flames. A young man was seated in front of him on the horse, sagging back against his arms. His face and chest were covered with blood. His skin had turned the same pallid white as his hair. For a moment Rin thought—hoped—that he was Jiang, but this man was shorter, visibly younger, and much thinner.

Altan was taking on the Federation soldiers as best he could, but they had backed him up against the gate.

Down below, Rin saw the Cike had gathered on the other side.

“Open the doors!” Baji shouted. “Let them back through!”

The soldiers exchanged reluctant looks and did nothing.

“What are you waiting for?” Qara shrieked.

“Jun’s orders,” one of them stammered. “We’re not to open it at any cost—”

Rin looked back over the wall and saw another squadron of Federation reinforcements rapidly approaching. She leaned over the wall and waved her hands to get Baji’s attention. “There are more coming!”

“Fuck it.” Baji kicked one of the soldiers out of his way, jammed the butt of his rake into the stomach of another, and began cranking the gate open himself while Suni fended off the guards behind him.

The heavy doors inched ponderously open.

Standing directly behind the opening crack, Qara whipped arrow after arrow out of her quiver, firing them rapidly one after the next into the crowd of Federation soldiers. Under a hail of arrow fire, the Mugenese fell back long enough for Altan to squeeze through the blockade.

Baji cranked the gates the other way until they slammed shut.

Altan yanked on the reins, forcing his horse to a sudden stop.

Qara ran up to him, shouting in a language Rin didn’t understand. Her tirade was interspersed with a variety of colorful Nikara invectives.

Altan held up a hand to silence her. He dismounted in one fluid movement, and then helped the young man down. The man staggered as his legs touched the ground; he slumped against the horse for support. Altan offered him a shoulder, but the man shook him off.

“Is he there?” Altan demanded. “Did you see him?”

Chest heaving, the man nodded.

“Do you have schematics?” Altan asked.

The man nodded again.

What were they talking about? Rin shot Unegen a questioning glance, but Unegen was equally nonplussed.

“Okay,” Altan said. “Okay. So. You’re an idiot.”

Then he and Qara both began yelling at him.

“Are you stupid—”

“—could have been killed—”

“—sheer recklessness—”

“—don’t care how powerful you think you are, how dare you—”

“Look,” said the man, whose cheeks had gone as white as snow. He had begun to tremble. “I’m happy to discuss this, really, but I’m currently leaking life out three different wounds and I think I may pass out. Would you give me a moment?”

Altan, Qara, and the newcomer did not come out of Altan’s office for the rest of that afternoon. Rin was sent to fetch Enki for medical attention, but was then told by Altan in no uncertain terms to get lost. She milled around the city, bored and unsettled and without orders. She wanted to ask one of the other operatives for some explanation of what had just happened, but Unegen and Baji were gone on a reconnaissance assignment and did not return until dinner.

“Who was that?” Rin asked as soon as they appeared in the mess hall.

“The man of dramatic entrance? He’s Altan’s lieutenant,” said Unegen. He sat down on the bench across from her. He adopted a contemptuous, proud affectation. “The one and only Chaghan Suren of the Hinterlands.”

“Took him long enough,” Baji grumbled. “Where’s he been, on vacation?”

“That was Qara’s brother? Is that why . . .” Rin didn’t know how to ask politely about Qara’s seizure, but Baji read the puzzled look on her face.

“They’re anchor twins. Some sort of . . . ah, some kind of spiritual link,” said Baji. “Qara explained it to us once, but I forget the details. Long story short, they’re bound together. Cut Chaghan and Qara bleeds. Kill Qara and Chaghan dies. Something like that.”

This concept was not wholly new to Rin. She recalled that Jiang had discussed this kind of dependency before. She had read that shamans of the Hinterlands would sometimes anchor themselves to each other to enhance their abilities. But after seeing Qara on the floor like that, Rin didn’t think it was an advantage but rather an awful vulnerability.

“Where’s he been?”

“All over the place.” Baji shrugged. “Altan sent him out of Khurdalain months ago, right around the time we got word they’d invaded Sinegard.”

“But why? What was he doing?”

“He didn’t tell us. Why don’t you ask him yourself?” Baji nodded, his eyes fixed over her shoulder.

She turned around and jumped. Chaghan stood directly behind her; she hadn’t even heard him approach.

For someone who had been bleeding out that morning, Chaghan looked remarkably well. His left arm was carefully bandaged up to his torso, but otherwise he seemed unhurt. Rin wondered exactly what Enki had done to heal him so quickly.

Up close, Chaghan’s resemblance to Qara was obvious. He was taller than his sister, but they possessed the same slight, birdlike frame. His cheeks were high and hollow; his eyes embedded within deep sockets that cast a shadow over his pale gaze.

“May I join you?” he asked. The way he spoke made it sound like an order, not a question.

Unegen immediately shifted to make space. Chaghan circled the table and sat directly opposite Rin. He placed his elbows delicately on the surface, steepled his fingers together, and rested his chin on his fingertips.

“So you’re the new Speerly,” he said.

He reminded Rin very much of Jiang. It wasn’t simply his white hair or his slender frame, but the way he looked at her, as if he saw straight through her, not looking at her at all but a place behind her. When he looked at her, Rin felt the unsettling sensation of being searched, as if he could see straight through her clothing.

She had never seen eyes like his. They were abnormally huge, dominating his otherwise narrow face. He had no pupils or irises.

She forced a facade of calm and picked up her spoon. “That’s me.”

The corner of his mouth twitched upward. “Altan said you were having performance issues.”

Baji choked and coughed into his food.

Rin felt the heat rising in her cheeks. “Excuse me?”

Was that what Altan and Chaghan had spent the afternoon discussing? The idea of Altan talking about her shortcomings to this newcomer was deeply humiliating.

“Have you managed to call the Phoenix once since Sinegard?” Chaghan inquired.

I bet I could call it on you right now, you twit. Her fingers tightened around her spoon. “I’ve been working on it.”

“Altan seems to think you’re stuck in a rut.”

Unegen looked like he dearly wished he were sitting anywhere else.

Rin gritted her teeth. “Well, he thought wrong.”

Chaghan shot her a patronizing smile. “I can help, you know. I’m his Seer. This is what I’m good at. I traverse the world of spirit. I speak to the gods. I don’t summon deities, but I know my way around the Pantheon better than anyone else. And if you’re having issues, I can help you find your way back to your god.”

“I’m not having issues,” she snapped. “I was scared at the marsh. I am not now.”

And that was the truth. She suspected she could call the Phoenix now, right in this mess hall, if Altan asked her to. If Altan would deign to talk to her beyond giving her orders. If Altan trusted her enough to give her an assignment above patrolling stretches of the city where nothing ever happened.

Chaghan raised an eyebrow. “Altan isn’t so sure.”

“Well, maybe Altan should get his head out of his ass,” she snapped, then immediately regretted speaking. Disappointing Altan was one thing; complaining about it to his lieutenant was another.

No one at the table was bothering to pretend to eat anymore; Baji and Unegen both fidgeted like they couldn’t wait to leave, looking around at everything except Rin and Chaghan.

But Chaghan only looked amused. “Oh, you think he’s an asshole?”

Anger flared inside her. Her last remaining shreds of caution fled. “He’s impatient, overdemanding, paranoid, and—”

“Look, everyone’s on edge,” Baji interrupted hastily. “We shouldn’t complain. Chaghan, there’s no need to tell—I mean, look . . .”

Chaghan tapped his fingers against the table. “Baji. Unegen. I want a word with Rin.”

He spoke so imperiously, so arrogantly, that Rin thought that surely Baji would tell Chaghan where he could shove it, but he and Unegen simply picked up their bowls and left the table. Amazed, she watched them walk to the other end of the room without so much as a word. Not even Altan commanded that kind of unquestioning subordination.

When the others were out of earshot, Chaghan leaned forward. “If you ever speak about Altan like that again,” he said pleasantly, “I will have you killed.”

Chaghan might have cowed Baji and Unegen, but Rin was too angry to be afraid of him. “Go ahead and try,” she snapped. “It’s not like we have soldiers to spare.”

Chaghan’s mouth quirked into a grin. “Altan did say you were difficult.”

She gave him a wary look. “Altan’s not wrong.”

“So you don’t respect him.”

“I respect him,” she said. “I just—he’s been . . .” Different. Paranoid. Not the commander I thought I knew.

What she didn’t want to admit was that Altan was scaring her.

But Chaghan looked surprisingly sympathetic. “You must understand. Altan is new to command. He’s trying to figure out what he’s doing just as much as you are. He’s scared.”

He was scared? Rin almost laughed. Altan’s attempted operations had grown so much in scale over the past two weeks that it felt as if he were trying to take on the entire Federation by himself. “Altan doesn’t know what scared means.”

“Altan is perhaps the most powerful martial artist in Nikan right now. Maybe the world,” said Chaghan. “But for all that, most of his life he was just good at following orders. Tyr’s death was a shock to us. Altan wasn’t ready to take over. Command is difficult for him. He doesn’t know how to make peace with the Warlords. He’s overextended. He’s trying to fight an entire war with a squad of ten. And he’s going to lose.”

“You don’t think we can hold Khurdalain?”

“I think we were never meant to hold Khurdalain,” said Chaghan. “I think Khurdalain was a sacrifice for time paid in blood. Altan is going to lose because Khurdalain is not winnable, and when he does, it’s going to break him.”

“Altan won’t break,” she said. Altan was the strongest fighter she’d ever seen. Altan couldn’t break.

“Altan is more fragile than you think,” said Chaghan. “He’s cracking under the weight of command, can’t you see? This is new territory for him, and he’s flailing, because he’s utterly dependent on victory.”

Rin rolled her eyes. “The entire country’s dependent on our victory.”

Chaghan shook his head. “That’s not what I mean. Altan is used to winning. His entire life he’s been put on a pedestal. He was the last Speerly, a national rarity. Best student at the Academy. Tyr’s favorite in the Cike. He’s been fed a steady stream of constant affirmation for being very good at destroying things, but he won’t get any praise here, especially not when his own soldiers are openly insubordinate.”

“I’m not being—”

“Oh, come now, Rin. You’re being a little bitch, is what you’re doing, all because Altan won’t pet you on the head and say you’re doing a great job.”

She stood up and slammed her hands on the table. “Look, asshole, I don’t need you to tell me what to do.”

“And yet, as your lieutenant, that is precisely my job.” Chaghan glanced lazily up at her, and his expression was so smug that Rin trembled from the effort of not smashing his face into the table. “Your duty is to obey. My duty is to see that you stop fucking up. So I would suggest you get your shit together, learn to call the damn fire, and give Altan one less thing to worry about. Am I clear?”

Chapter 19

“So who’s the newcomer?” Nezha asked casually.

Rin wasn’t sure if she could discuss Chaghan without kicking something, which would be bad, especially since they were supposed to be hiding. But they had been staking out the barricade for what seemed like hours, and she was getting bored.

“He’s Altan’s lieutenant.”

“How come I’ve never seen him before?”

“He’s been away,” she said.

A hail of arrows whizzed above them. Nezha ducked back below the barricade.

The Seventh Division had launched a joint assault with the Cike against the embassies by the wharf in an attempt to cut the main Federation encampment in two. In theory if they could hold the old Hesperian quarters, they could then divide the enemy forces and cut off their access to the docks. They had sent two regiments: one attacking perpendicular to the river and the other snaking around to the wharf from the direction of the canals.

But they had to move past five heavily defended intersections to get to the wharf, and those had turned into five separate bloodbaths. The Federation hadn’t met them out on the open field because they didn’t need to; safely ensconced behind the walls of the buildings they held on the wharf, they responded to the Nikara onslaught by embedding themselves on rooftops and shooting from windows on the upper floors of the embassy buildings.

The Seventh Division’s only option was to throw their infantry en masse against the Federation’s fortified position. They had to gamble that the press of Nikara bodies would be enough to force the Federation out. It had turned into a contest of flesh against steel, and the Militia was determined to break the Federation upon their bodies.

“You mean, you have no clue,” Nezha said as a fire rocket exploded over his head.

“I mean, you have no business asking.”

She didn’t know if Nezha was fishing for information for his father, or if he was just trying to make small talk. She supposed it didn’t matter. Chaghan’s presence was hardly a secret, especially after Altan’s dramatic rescue outside the east gate. Perhaps because of that, though, the Militia seemed even more spooked by him than they were by the rest of the Cike combined.

Several paces down, Suni lit one of Ramsa’s specialty bombs and hurled it over the barricade.

They ducked back down and plugged up their ears until a now-familiar acrid, sulfuric smell filled their nostrils.

The arrow fire stopped.

“Is that shit?” Nezha demanded.

“Don’t ask,” Rin said. In the temporary lull granted by Ramsa’s dung bomb they moved past the barricade and stormed down the street to reach the next of the five intersections.

“I heard he’s creepy,” Nezha continued. “I heard he’s from the Hinterlands.”

“Qara’s from the Hinterlands, too. So what?”

“So I’ve heard he’s unnatural,” Nezha said.

Rin snorted. “It’s the Cike. We’re all unnatural.”

A massive explosion rolled through the air in front of them, followed by a series of bursts of fire.

Altan.

He was leading the charge. His roiling flames, combined with Ramsa’s many fire powder spectacles, created a number of large fires that drastically improved their nighttime visibility.

Altan had broken through to the next intersection. The Nikara continued their surge forward.

“But he can do things that Speerlies can’t,” Nezha said as they pressed on. “They say he can read the future. Shatter minds. My father says that even the Warlords know of him, did you know that? It makes you wonder. If Altan’s got a lieutenant who’s so powerful that he scares the Warlords, why is he sending him away from Khurdalain? What are they planning?”

“I’m not spying on my own division for you,” Rin said.

“I didn’t ask you to,” Nezha said delicately. “I’m just saying you might want to keep an open mind.”

“And you might want to keep your nose out of my division’s matters.”

But Nezha had stopped listening; he stared over Rin’s shoulder at something farther along the wharf, where the first line of Nikara soldiers was pressing. “What is that?”

Rin craned her neck to see what he was looking at. Then she squinted in confusion.

An odd greenish-yellow fog had begun wending its way over the blockade toward the two division squadrons in front of them.

As if in a dream, the fighting stopped. The foremost squadron ceased moving, lowering their weapons with an almost hypnotic fascination as the cloud reached the wall, paused, gathered itself like a wave, and then ponderously lapped over into the dugouts.

Then the screaming began.

“Retreat,” shouted a squadron officer. “Retreat!”

The Militia reversed direction immediately, commencing a disorganized stampede away from the gas. They abandoned their hard-won stations along the wharf in a frenzy to get away from the gas.

Rin coughed and glanced over her shoulder as she ran. Most of the soldiers who hadn’t escaped the gas lay gasping and twitching on the ground, clawing at their faces as if their own throats were attacking them. Others lay quite still.

An arrowhead lashed across her cheek and embedded itself in the ground before her. The side of her mouth exploded in pain; she cupped a hand against it and continued running. The Federation soldiers were firing from behind the poisonous fog, they were going to pick them off one by one . . .

The forest line loomed up before her. She would be fine once she could take cover behind the foliage. Rin ducked her head and sprinted for the trees. Only a hundred yards . . . fifty . . . twenty . . .

Behind her she heard a strangled cry. She twisted her head to look and tripped over a rock, just as another arrow whistled over her head. Blood streamed from her cheek into her eyes. Rin wiped it furiously off and rolled over flat against the ground.

The source of the cry was Nezha. He was crawling furiously forward, but the gas had caught up to him. He met her eyes through the fog. He might have lifted one hand toward her.

She watched in horror, mouth open in a silent scream, as the gas enveloped him.

Through the gas, she saw forms advancing. Federation soldiers. They wore bulky contraptions over their heads, masks that concealed their necks and faces. They seemed unaffected by the gas.

One of them lifted a bulky gloved hand and pointed where Nezha lay.

Without thinking, Rin took a deep breath of air and rushed into the fog.

It burned her skin as soon as she touched it.

She clenched her teeth and forged ahead through the pain—but she’d hardly gone ten paces when someone grabbed her by the shoulder and yanked her back out of the gas zone. She struggled furiously to escape their grip.

Altan didn’t let go.

“Back off!” She elbowed him in the face. Altan stumbled and grabbed at his nose. Rin tried to duck past him, but Altan wrenched her backward by her wrist.

“What are you doing?” he demanded.

“They’ve got Nezha!” she screamed.

“I don’t care.” He pushed her in the direction of the tree line. “Retreat.”

“You’re leaving one of our men to die!”

“He’s not one of our men, he’s one of the Seventh’s men. Go.”

“I won’t leave my friend behind!”

“You will do as I command.”

“But Nezha—”

“I’m not sorry about this,” Altan said, and jammed a fist into her solar plexus.

Stunned, paralyzed, she sank to her knees.

She heard Altan shout out an order, and then someone picked her up and slung her over their shoulders as if she were a child. She beat and screamed as the soldier began jogging in the direction of the barracks. From the soldier’s back, she thought she could see the masked Federation soldiers dragging Nezha away.

The gas attack created the precisely the effect that the Federation intended. The sugar bomb had been devastating—the gas attack was monstrous. Khurdalain erupted into a state of terror. Though the gas itself dissipated within an hour, rumors of it spread quickly. The fog was an invisible enemy, one that killed indiscriminately. There was no hiding from the fumes. Civilians began fleeing the city en masse, no longer confident in the Militia’s ability to protect them. Panic enveloped the streets.

Jun’s soldiers had shouted themselves hoarse in the alleys, trying to convince civilians they would be safer behind city walls. But the people weren’t listening. They felt trapped. The narrow, winding roads of Khurdalain meant certain death in case of another gas attack.

While the city collapsed into chaos, the commanders commenced an emergency meeting in the nearest headquarters. The Cike crammed into the Ram Warlord’s office along with the Warlords and their junior officers. Rin leaned against the corner of the wall, listening dully as the commanders argued over their immediate strategy.

Only one of Jun’s soldiers on the beach had survived the attack. He had been posted in the back, and had dropped his weapon and run as soon as he saw his comrades choking.

“It was like breathing fire,” he reported. “Like red-hot needles were piercing my lungs. I thought I was being strangled by some invisible demon . . . my throat closed up, I couldn’t breathe . . .” He shuddered.

Rin listened, and resented him for not being Nezha.

It was only fifty yards. I could have saved him. I could have dragged us both out.

“We need to evacuate downtown right now,” Jun said. He was remarkably calm for a man who had just lost more than a hundred men to a poisonous fog. “My men will—”

“Your men will do crowd control. The civilians are going to trample themselves trying to get out of the city, and it’ll be easy for Mugen to pick them off if they’re not corralled out in an orderly fashion,” Altan said.

Amazingly, Jun didn’t argue.

“We’ll pack up headquarters and move it farther back into the Sihang warehouse,” Altan continued. “We can dump the prisoner in the basement.”

Rin jerked her head up. “What prisoner?”

She was faintly aware that she should not be talking, that as an unranked soldier of the Cike she was not technically a part of this meeting and was certainly acting out of line. But she was too grief-stricken and exhausted to care.

Unegen leaned down and murmured into her ear, “One of the Federation soldiers got caught in their own gas. Altan took his mask and pulled him out.”

Rin blinked in disbelief.

“You went back in?” she asked. Her voice rang very loudly in her ears. “You had a mask?”

Altan shot her an irritated look. “This is not the time,” he said.

She clambered to her feet. “You let one of our people die?”

“You and I can discuss this later.”

She understood, in the abstract, the strategic boon of taking a Federation prisoner; the last Federation soldiers who had been captured spying across the bank had promptly been torn apart by furious civilians. And yet . . .

“You are unbelievable,” Rin said.

“We will see to headquarters evacuation,” Altan said loudly over her. “We’ll regroup in the warehouse.”

Jun nodded curtly, then muttered something to his officers. They saluted him and left the headquarters at a run.

At the same time, Altan issued orders to the Cike.

“Qara, Unegen, Ramsa: secure us a safe route to the warehouse and guide Jun’s officers there. Baji and Suni, help Enki pack up shop. The rest of you resume positions in case of another gas attack.” He paused at the door. “Rin. You stay.”

She hung back as the rest of them exited the office. Unegen cast her a nervous look on his way out.

Altan waited until they were alone, and then he closed the door. He crossed the room and stood so that there was very little distance between them.

“You do not contradict me,” he said quietly.

Rin crossed her arms. “Ever, or just in front of Jun?”

Altan didn’t rise to the bait. “You will answer to me as a soldier to her commander.”

“Or what? You’ll have Suni drag me out of your office?”

“You’re out of line.” Altan’s voice dropped to a dangerously low volume.

“And you let my friend die,” Rin answered. “He was lying there and you left him there.”

“You couldn’t have extracted him.”

“Yes, I could have,” she seethed. “And even if I couldn’t have—you might have, you might have saved my friend instead of dragging out some Federation soldier who deserved to die in there—”

“Prisoners of war have greater strategic importance than individual soldiers,” Altan said calmly.

“That is such bullshit,” she snarled.

Altan didn’t answer. He took two steps forward and struck her across the face.

None of her guards were up. She took the full force of his hit with no preparation. His blow was so powerful that her head snapped to the side. The sudden impact made her knees buckle, jerked her to the ground. She raised a hand to her cheek, stunned. Her fingers came away bloody; he’d reopened her arrow wound.

Slowly she looked up at Altan. Her ears rang.

Altan’s scarlet gaze met hers, and the naked rage on his face stunned her.

“How dare you,” he said. His voice was overly loud, distorted through her thundering ears. “You misunderstand the nature of our relationship. I am not your friend. I am not your brother, though kin we may be. I am your commander. You do not argue with my orders. You follow them without question. You obey me, or you leave this Militia.”

His voice held the same double timbre that Jiang’s voice had held when he opened the void at Sinegard. Altan’s eyes burned red—no, they were not red, they were the color of fire itself. Flames blazed behind him, flames whiter and hotter than any fire she’d ever been able to summon. She was immune to her own fire, but not his; it burned in her face, choking her, forcing her backward.

The ringing in her ears reached a crescendo.

He doesn’t get to do this to you, said a voice in Rin’s head. He doesn’t get to terrorize you. She had not come this far to crouch like this in fear. Not to Altan. Not to anyone.

She stood up, even as she reached somewhere inside herself—somewhere spiteful and dark and horrible—and opened the channel to the entity she already knew was waiting for her summons. The room pitched forward as if viewed through a long scarlet prism. The familiar burn was back in her veins, the burn that demanded blood and ashes.

Through the red haze she thought she saw Altan’s eyes widen in surprise. She squared her shoulders. Flames flared from her shoulders and back, flames that mirrored Altan’s.

She took a step toward him.

A loud crackling noise filled the room. She felt an immense pressure. She trembled under the weight of it. She heard a bird’s laughter. She heard a god’s amused sigh.

You children, murmured the Phoenix. You absurd, ridiculous children. My children.

Altan looked stunned.

But just as her flames resisted his, she began to feel uncomfortably hot again, felt his fire begin to burn her. Rin’s fire was an incendiary flash, an impulsive flare of anger. Altan’s fire drew as its source an unending hate. It was a deep, slow burn. She could almost taste it, the venomous intent, the ancient misery, and it horrified her.

How could one person hate so much?

What had happened to him?

She could not maintain her fire anymore. Altan’s flames burned hotter than hers. They had fought a contest of wills and she had lost.

She struggled for another moment and then her flames shrank back into her as quickly as they’d sprung out. Altan’s fire dimmed a moment after hers did.

This is it, Rin thought. I’ve crossed the line. This is the end.

But Altan didn’t look furious. He didn’t look like he was about to execute her.

No—he looked pleased.

“So that’s what it takes,” he said.

She felt drained, as if the fire had burned up something inside her. She couldn’t even feel anger. She could barely stand.

“Fuck you,” she said. “Fuck you.”

“Get to your post, soldier,” said Altan.

She left his office, slamming the door shut behind her.

Fuck me.

Chapter 20

“There you are.”

She found Chaghan over the north wall. He stood with his arms crossed, watching as civilians poured out of Khurdalain’s dense streets like ants fleeing a collapsed hill. They straggled through the city gates with their worldly possessions packed onto wagons, strapped to the sides of oxen or horses, slung across their shoulders on poles meant for carrying water, or simply dragged along in sacks. They had chosen to take their chances in the open country rather than to stay another day in the doomed city.

The Militia was remaining in Khurdalain—it was still a strategic base that needed to be held—but they would be protecting nothing but empty buildings from here on out.

“Khurdalain’s done for,” Chaghan said, leaning against the wall. “Militia included. There’ll be no supplies after this. No hospital. No food. Soldiers fight battles, but civilians keep armies alive. Lose the resource well, and you’ve lost the war.”

“I need to talk to you,” she said.

He turned to face her, and she suppressed a shudder at the sight of those eyes without pupils. His gaze seemed to rest on the scarlet palm print on her cheek. His lips pressed together in a thin line, as if he knew exactly how the mark had gotten there.

“Lovers’ spat?” he drawled.

“Difference of opinion.”

“Shouldn’t have harped on about that boy,” he tutted. “Altan doesn’t tolerate shit like that. He’s not very patient.”

“He’s not human,” she said, recalling the horrible anger behind Altan’s power. She’d thought she understood Altan. She’d thought she had reached the man behind the command title. But she realized now that she didn’t know him at all. The Altan she’d known—at least, the Altan in her mind—would have done anything for his troops. He wouldn’t have left someone in the gas to die. “He—I don’t know what he is.”

“But Altan was never allowed to be human,” Chaghan said, and his voice was uncharacteristically gentle. “Since childhood, he’s been regarded as a Militia asset. Your masters at the Academy fed him opium for attacking his classmates and trained him like a dog for this war. Now he’s been shouldered with the most difficult command position that exists in the Militia, and you wonder why he’s not going to trouble himself with your little boy toy?”

Rin almost hit Chaghan for that, but she restrained herself with a twitch and set her jaw. “I’m not here to talk about Altan.”

“Then why, pray tell, are you here?”

“I need you to show me what you can do,” she said.

“I do a lot of things, sweetheart.”

She bristled. “I need you to take me to the gods.”

Chaghan looked smug. “I thought you didn’t have a problem calling the gods.”

“I can’t do it as easily as Altan can.”

“But you can do it.”

Her fingers curled into fists by her sides. “I want to do what Altan can do.”

Chaghan raised an eyebrow.

She took a deep breath. Chaghan didn’t need to know what had happened in the office. “I’ve been trying for months now. I think I’ve got it, I’m not sure, but there’s something . . . someone that’s blocking me.”

Chaghan assumed a mildly curious expression, tilting his head in a manner painfully reminiscent of Jiang. “You’re being haunted?”

“It’s a woman.”

“Really.”

“Come with me,” she said. “I’ll show you.”

“Why now?” He crossed his arms over his chest. “What happened?”

She didn’t answer his question. “I need to do what he can do,” she said flatly. “I need to call the same power that he can.”

“And you didn’t bother with me before because . . .”

“You weren’t fucking here!”

“And when I returned?”

“I was obeying the warnings of my master.”

Chaghan sounded like he was gloating. “Those warnings no longer apply?”

She set her jaw. “I’ve realized that masters inevitably let you down.”

He nodded slowly, though his expression gave nothing away. “And if I can’t get rid of this . . . ghost?”

“Then at least you’ll understand.” She held out her hands. “Please.”

That supplication was enough. Chaghan gave a slight nod, and then beckoned her to sit down beside him. While she watched, he unpacked his knapsack and spread it out on the stone floor. An impressive supply of psychedelics was packed inside, tucked neatly into more than twenty little pockets.

“This is not derived from the poppy plant,” he said as he mixed powders into a glass vial. “This drug is something far more potent. A small overdose will cause blindness. More than that and you will be dead in minutes. Do you trust me?”

“No. But that’s irrelevant.”

Chuckling softly, Chaghan gave the vial a shake. He dumped the mixture into his palm, licked his index finger, and dipped it lightly in the drug so that the tip of his finger was covered by a light smattering of fine blue dust.

“Open your mouth,” he said.

She pushed down a swell of hesitation and obliged.

Chaghan pressed the tip of his finger against her tongue.

She closed her eyes. Felt the psychedelics seep into her saliva.

The onset was immediate and crushing, like a dark wave of ocean water had suddenly slammed on top of her. Her nervous system broke down completely; she lost the ability to sit up and crumpled at Chaghan’s feet.

She was at his mercy now, completely and utterly vulnerable before him. He could kill me right now, she thought dully. She didn’t know why it was the first thought that sprang to her mind. He could get rid of me now, if he wanted to.

But Chaghan only knelt down beside her, grasped her face by her cheeks, and pressed his forehead against hers. His eyes were open very, very wide. She stared into them, fascinated; they were a pale expanse, a window into a snowy landscape, and she was traversing through them . . .

And then they were hurtling upward.

She hadn’t known what she had expected. Not once in two years of training had Jiang guided her into the spirit realm. It had always been her mind alone, her soul alone in the void, journeying up toward the gods.

With Chaghan, she felt as if a piece of her had been ripped away, was clutched in the palm of his hand, being taken somewhere of his choosing. She was immaterial, without body or form, but Chaghan was not; Chaghan remained as solid and real as before, perhaps even more so. In the material world, he was gaunt and emaciated, but in the realm of spirit he was solid and present . . .

She understood, now, why Chaghan and Qara had to be two halves of a whole. Qara was grounded, material, fully made of earth. To call them anchor twins was a misnomer—she alone was the anchor to her ethereal brother, who belonged more in the realm of spirit than he did in a world of flesh and blood.

The route to the Pantheon was familiar by now, and so was the gate. Once again the Woman materialized in front of her. But something was different this time; this time the Woman was less like a ghost and more like a corpse; half her face was torn away, revealing bone underneath, and her warrior’s garb had burned away from her body.

The Woman stretched a hand out toward Rin in supplication.

“It’ll eat you alive,” she said. “The fire will consume you. To find our god is to find hell on earth, little warrior. You will burn and burn and never find peace.”

“How curious,” said Chaghan. “Who are you?”

The Woman whirled on him.

“You know who I am,” she said. “I am the guardian. I am the Traitor and the Damned. I am redemption. I am the girl’s last chance for salvation.”

“I see,” Chaghan murmured. “So this is where you’ve been hiding.”

“What are you talking about?” Rin demanded. “Who is she?”

But Chaghan spoke past her, directly to the woman. “You should have been immured in the Chuluu Korikh.”

“The Chuluu Korikh can’t hold me,” hissed the Woman. “I am a Speerly. My ashes are free.” She reached out and stroked Rin’s damaged cheek like a mother caressing her child. “You don’t want me gone. You need me.”

Rin shuddered at her touch. “I need my god. I need power, and I need fire.”

“If you call it now, you will bring down hell on earth,” the Woman warned.

“Khurdalain is hell on earth,” said Rin. She saw Nezha screaming in the fog, and her voice wavered.

“You don’t know what true suffering is,” the Woman insisted angrily.

Rin curled her fingers into fists at her sides, suddenly pissed off. True suffering? She had seen her friends stabbed with halberds, shot full of arrows, cut down with swords, burned to death in poisonous fog. She had seen Sinegard go up in flames. She had seen Khurdalain occupied by Federation invaders almost overnight.

“I have seen more than my fair share of suffering,” she hissed.

“I’m trying to save you, little one. Why can’t you see that?”

“What about Altan?” Rin challenged. “Why haven’t you ever tried to stop him?”

The Woman tilted her head. “Is that what this is about? Are you jealous of what he can do?”

Rin opened her mouth, but nothing came out. No. Yes. Did it matter? If she had been as strong as Altan, he wouldn’t have been able to restrain her.

If she were as strong as Altan, she could have saved Nezha.

“That boy is beyond redemption,” said the Woman. “That boy is broken like the rest. But you, you are still pure. You can still be saved.”

“I don’t want to be saved!” Rin shrieked. “I want power! I want Altan’s power! I want to be the most powerful shaman there ever was, so that there is no one I can’t save!”

“That power can burn down the world,” the Woman said sadly. “That power will destroy everything you’ve ever loved. You will defeat your enemy, and the victory will turn to ashes in your mouth.”

Chaghan had finally regained his composure.

“You have no right to remain here,” he said. His voice trembled slightly as he spoke, but he raised one thin hand toward the Woman in a banishing gesture. “You belong to the realm of the dead. Return to the dead.”

“Do not try,” sneered the Woman. “You cannot banish me. In my time I have bested shamans far more powerful than you.”

“There are no shamans more powerful than me,” said Chaghan, and he began to chant in his own language, the harshly guttural language Jiang had once spoken, the language Rin recognized now as the speech of the Hinterlands.

His eyes glowed golden.

The Woman started to shake, as if standing over an earthquake, and then suddenly she burst into flames. The fire lit her face from within, like a glowing coal, like an ember about to explode.

She shattered.

Chaghan took Rin’s wrist and tugged. She became immaterial again, rushing headlong into the space where things were not real. She did not choose where they went; she could only concentrate on staying whole, staying herself, until Chaghan stopped and she could regain her bearings without losing herself entirely.

This was not the Pantheon.

She glanced around, confused. They were in a dimly lit room the size of Altan’s office, with a low, curved ceiling that forced them to crouch where they stood. Everywhere she looked, small tiles had been arranged in mosaics, depicting scenes she did not recognize or understand. A fisherman bearing a net full of armored warriors. A young boy encircled by a dragon. A woman with long hair weeping over a broken sword and two bodies. In the room’s center stood a great hexagonal altar, engraved with sixty-four intricate characters of Old Nikara calligraphy.

“Where are we?” Rin asked.

“A safe place of my choosing,” Chaghan said. He looked visibly rattled. “She was much stronger than I expected. I took us to the first place I thought of. This is a Divinatory. Here we can ask questions about your Woman. Come to the altar.”

She looked about in wonder as she followed him, running her fingers over the carefully designed tiles. “Is this part of the Pantheon?”

“No.”

“Then is this place real?”

“It’s real in your mind,” said Chaghan. “That’s as real as anything gets.”

“Jiang never taught me about this.”

“That’s because you Nikara are so primitive,” said Chaghan. “You still think there’s a strict binary between the material world and the Pantheon. You think calling the gods is like summoning a dog from the yard into the house. But you can’t conceive of the dream world as a physical place. The gods are painters. Your material world is a canvas. And this Divinatory is an angle from which we can see the colors on the palette. This isn’t really a place, it’s a perspective. But you’re interpreting it as a room because your human mind can’t process anything else.”

“What about this altar? The mosaics? Who built them?”

“No one did. You still don’t understand. They’re mental constructions so that you can comprehend concepts that are already written. To the Talwu, this room looks completely different.”

“The Talwu?”

Chaghan tilted his chin toward something in front of them.

“You’re back so soon,” spoke a cool, alien voice.

In the dim light, Rin had not noticed the creature standing behind the hexagonal altar. It walked around the circle at a steady pace and sank into a deep bow before Chaghan. It looked like nothing Rin had ever seen; it was similar to a tiger, but its hair grew two feet long. It had a woman’s face, a lion’s feet, a pig’s teeth, and a very long tail that might have belonged to a monkey.

“She is a goddess. Guardian of the Hexagrams,” Chaghan said to Rin as he sank into an equally deep bow. He pulled her down to the floor with him.

The Talwu dipped her head toward Chaghan. “The time of asking has expired for you. But you . . .” She looked at Rin. “You have never asked a question of me. You may proceed.”

“What is this place?” Rin asked Chaghan. “What can it—she—tell me?”

“The Divinatory keeps the Hexagrams,” he answered. “The Hexagrams are sixty-four different combinations of lines broken and unbroken.” He indicated the calligraphy at the sides of the altar, and Rin saw that each character indeed was made up of six lines. “Ask the Talwu your question, cast a Hexagram, and it will read the lines for you.”

“It can tell me the future?”

“No one can divine the future,” said Chaghan. “It is always shifting, always dependent on individual choices. But the Talwu can tell you the forces at play. The underlying shape of things. The color of events to pass. The future is a pattern dependent on the movements of the present, but the Talwu can read the currents for you, just as a seasoned sailor can read the ocean. You need only present a question.”

Rin was beginning to see the reason why Chaghan commanded the fear that he did. He was just like Jiang—unthreatening and eccentric, until one understood what deep power lay behind his frail facade.

How would Jiang pose a question? She contemplated the wording of her inquiry for a moment. Then she stepped toward the Talwu.

“What does the Phoenix want me to know?”

The Talwu almost smiled.

“Cast the coins six times.”

Three coins suddenly appeared, stacked on the hexagonal altar. They were not coins of the Nikara Empire; they were too large, cut into a hexagonal shape rather than the round taels and ingots Rin was familiar with. She picked them up and weighed them in her palm. They were heavier than they looked. On the front side of each was etched the unmistakable profile of the Red Emperor; on the back were inscribed characters of Old Nikara that she could not decipher.

“Each throw of the coins will determine one line in the Hexagram,” said Chaghan. “These lines are patterns written into the universe. They are ancient combinations, descriptions of shapes that were long before either of us was born. They will not make sense to you. But the Talwu will read them, and I will interpret.”

“Why must you interpret?”

“Because I am a Seer. This is what I’m trained to do,” said Chaghan. “We Hinterlanders do not call the gods down as you do. We go to them. Our shamans spend hours in trances, learning the secrets of the cosmos. I have spent more time in the Pantheon than I have in your world. I have deciphered enough Hexagrams now to know how they describe the shape of our world. And if you try to interpret for yourself, you’ll just get confused. Let me help you.”

“Fine.” Rin flung the three coins out onto the hexagonal altar.

All three coins landed tails up.

“The first line, undivided,” read the Talwu. “One is ready to move, but his footprints run crisscross.”

“What does that mean?” Rin asked.

Chaghan shook his head. “Any number of things. The lines each assume shades of meaning depending on the others. Finish the Hexagram.”

She tossed the coins again. All heads.

“The second line, divided,” read the Talwu. “The subject ascends to his place in the sun. There will be supreme good fortune.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?” Rin asked.

“Depends on whose fortune it is,” said Chaghan. “The subject is not necessarily you.”

Her third toss saw one head, two tails.

“The third line, divided. The end of the day has come. The net has been cast on the setting sun. This spells misfortune.”

Rin felt a sudden chill. The end of an era, the setting sun on a country . . . she hardly needed Chaghan to interpret that for her.

“We’re not going to win this war, are we?” she asked the Talwu.

“I only read the Hexagrams,” said the Talwu. “I confirm and deny nothing.”

“It’s the net I’m concerned about. It’s a trap,” said Chaghan. “We’ve missed something. Something’s been laid out for us, but we can’t see it.”

Chaghan’s words confused Rin as much as the line itself did, but Chaghan commanded her to throw the coins again. Two tails, one head.

“The fourth line, undivided,” read the Talwu. “The subject comes, abrupt with fire, with death, to be rejected by all. As if an exit; as if an entry. As though burning; as though dying; as though discarded.”

“That one is quite clear,” said Chaghan, although Rin had more questions about that line than the others. She opened her mouth, but he shook his head. “Throw the coins again.”

The Talwu looked down. “The fifth line, divided. The subject is with tears flowing in torrents, groaning in sorrow.”

Chaghan looked stricken. “Truly?”

“The Hexagrams do not lie,” the Talwu said. Her voice was devoid of emotion. “The only lies are in the interpretation.”

Chaghan’s hand shook suddenly. The wooden beads of his bracelet clattered, echoing in the silent room. Rin shot him a concerned look, but he only shook his head and motioned for her to finish. Arms heavy with dread, Rin cast the coins a sixth and final time.

“A leader abandons their people,” read the Talwu. “A ruler begins a campaign. One sees great joy in decapitating enemies. This signifies evil.”

Chaghan’s pale eyes were open very, very wide.

“You have cast the Twenty-Sixth Hexagram. The Net,” announced the Talwu. “There is a clinging, and a conflict. Things will come to pass that exist only side by side. Misfortune and victory. Liberation and death.”

“But the Phoenix . . . the Woman . . .” Rin had not received any of the answers she wanted. The Talwu hadn’t helped her at all; it had only warned of even worse things to come, things she didn’t have the power to prevent.

The Talwu lifted a clawed hand. “Your time of asking is up. Return in a lunar month, and you may cast another Hexagram.”

Before Rin could speak, Chaghan knelt forward hastily and dragged Rin down beside him.

“Thank you, Enlightened One,” he said, and to Rin he murmured, “Say nothing.”

The room dissolved as she sank to her knees, and with an icy jolt, like she had been doused in cold water, Rin found herself shoved back into her material body.

She took a deep breath. She opened her eyes.

Beside her, Chaghan drew himself up to a sitting position. His pale eyes were huge, deep in their shadowed sockets. His gaze seemed to be focused still on something very far away, something entirely not in this world. Slowly, he returned to himself, and when he finally registered Rin’s presence, his expression became one of deep anxiety.

“We must get Altan,” he said.

If Altan was surprised when Chaghan barged into the Sihang warehouse with Rin in tow, he didn’t show it. He looked too exhausted for anything to faze him at all.

“Summon the Cike,” said Chaghan. “We need to leave this city.”

“On what information?” Altan asked.

“There was a Hexagram.”

“I thought you didn’t get another question for a month.”

“It wasn’t mine,” said Chaghan. “It was hers.”

Altan didn’t even glance at Rin. “We can’t leave Khurdalain. They need us now more than ever. We’re about to lose the city. If the Federation gets through us, they enter the heartland. We are the final front.”

“You are fighting a battle the Federation does not need to win,” said Chaghan. “The Hexagrams spoke of a great victory, and great destruction. Khurdalain has only been a frustration for both sides. There is one other city that Mugen wants right now.”

“That’s impossible,” said Altan. “They cannot march to Golyn Niis so soon from the coast. The Golyn River route is too narrow to move troop columns. They would have to find the mountain pass.”

Chaghan raised his eyebrows. “I’ll bet you they’ve found it.”

“All right. Fine.” Altan stood up. “I believe you. Let’s go.”

“Just like that?” Rin asked. “No due diligence?”

Altan walked out of the room and headed down the hallway at a brisk stride. They scurried to keep up with him. He descended the steps of the warehouse until he stood before the basement cellar where the Federation prisoner was kept.

“What are you doing?” Rin asked.

“Due diligence,” Altan said, and yanked the door open.

The cellar smelled strongly of defecation.

The prisoner had been shackled to a post in the corner of the room, hands and feet bound, a cloth jammed into his mouth. He was unconscious when they entered the room; he didn’t stir when Altan slammed the door shut, or when Altan crossed the room to kneel down beside him.

He had been beaten; one eye was swollen a violent shade of purple, and blood was crusted around a broken nose. But the worst damage had been inflicted by the gas: what skin was not purple had blistered into an angry red rash, so that his face did not look human at all but rather like a frightening combobulation of colors. Rin found a savage satisfaction in seeing the prisoners’ features as burned and disfigured as they were.

Altan touched two fingers to an open wound on the prisoner’s cheek and gave a small, sharp jab.

“Wake up,” he said in fluent Mugini. “How are you feeling?”

With a groan, the prisoner slowly opened his swollen eyes. When he saw Altan, he hacked and spat out a gob of spit at Altan’s feet.

“Wrong answer,” said Altan, and dug his nail into the cut.

The prisoner screamed loudly. Altan let go.

“What do you want?” the prisoner demanded. His Mugini was coarse and slurred, a far cry from the polished accent Rin had studied at Sinegard. It took her a moment to decipher his dialect.

“It occurs to me that Khurdalain was never the main target,” Altan said casually, resting back on his haunches. “Perhaps you would like to tell us what is.”

The prisoner smiled an awful, bloody-faced smile that twisted his burn scars. “Khurdalain,” he repeated, rolling the Nikara word through his mouth like a wad of phlegm. “Who would want to capture this shit hole?”

“Never mind,” said Altan. “Where is the main offensive going?”

The prisoner glowered up at him and snorted.

Altan raised a hand and slapped the prisoner on the blistered side of his face. Rin winced. By targeting the prisoner’s sore, open wounds, Altan was making him hurt worse and more acutely than any heavy-handed blows could.

“Where is the other offensive?” Altan repeated.

The prisoner spat blood at Altan’s feet.

“Answer me!” Altan shouted.

Rin jumped.

The prisoner raised his head. “Nikara swine,” he sneered.

Altan grabbed the prisoner by a fistful of hair in the back of his head. He slammed his other fist into the prisoner’s already bruised eye. Again. And again. Blood flew across the room, splashed against the dirt floor.

“Stop,” Rin squeaked.

Altan turned around.

“Leave the room or shut up,” he said.

“At this rate he’ll pass out,” she responded, her heart hammering. “And we don’t have time to revive him.”

Altan stared at her for a wild-eyed moment. Then he nodded curtly and turned back to the prisoner.

“Sit up.”

The prisoner muttered something none of them could understand.

Altan kicked him in the ribs. “Sit up!”

The prisoner spat another gob of blood on Altan’s boots. His head lolled to the side. Altan wiped his toe on the ground with deliberate slowness, then knelt down in front of the prisoner. He stuck two fingers under the prisoner’s chin and tilted his face up to his own in a gesture that was almost intimate.

“Hey, I’m talking to you,” he said. “Hey. Wake up.”

He slapped the prisoner’s cheeks until the prisoner’s eyes fluttered back open.

“I have nothing to say to you,” the prisoner sneered.

“You will,” Altan said. His voice dropped in pitch, a sharp contrast from his previous shouts. “Do you know what a Speerly is?”

The prisoner’s eyes furrowed together in confusion. “What?”

“Surely you know,” Altan said softly. His voice became a low, velvety purr. “Surely you’ve heard tales of us. Surely the island hasn’t forgotten. You must have been a child when your people massacred Speer, no? Did you know they did it overnight? Killed every single man, woman, and child.”

Sweat beaded at the prisoner’s temples, dripping down to mingle with fresh rivulets of blood. Altan snapped his fingers before the prisoner’s eyes. “Can you see this? Can you see my fingers? Yes or no.”

“Yes,” the prisoner said hoarsely.

Altan tilted his head. “They say your people were terrified of the Speerlies. That the generals gave orders that not one single Speerly child should survive, because they were so terrified of what we might become. Do you know why?”

The prisoner stared blankly forward.

Altan snapped again. His thumb and index finger burst into flames.

“This is why,” he said.

The prisoner’s eyes bulged with terror.

Altan brought his hand close to the prisoner’s face, so that the edge of the flame licked threateningly at the gas blisters.

“I will burn you piece by piece,” said Altan. His tone was so soft that he could have been speaking to a lover. “I will start with the bottoms of your feet. I will feed you one bit of pain at a time, so you will never lose consciousness. Your wounds will cauterize as soon as they manifest, so you won’t die from blood loss. When your feet are charred, coated entirely in black, I’ll move on to your fingers. I’ll make them drop off one by one. I will line up the charcoal stubs in a string to hang around your neck. When I’ve finished with your extremities, I’ll move on to your testicles. I will singe them so slowly you will go insane from the agony. Then you’ll sing.”

The prisoner’s eyes twitched madly, but still he shook his head.

Altan’s tone softened even further. “It doesn’t have to be like this. Your division let us take you. You don’t owe them anything.” His voice became soothing and hypnotic, almost gentle. “The others wanted to have you put to death, you know. Publicly executed before the civilians. They would have had you torn apart. An eye for an eye.” Altan’s voice was so lovely. He could be so beautiful, so charismatic, when he wanted to be. “But I’m not like the others. I’m reasonable. I don’t want to hurt you. I just want your cooperation.”

The soldier’s throat bobbed. His eyes darted across Altan’s face; he was hopelessly confused, trying to get a read and concluding nothing. Altan wore two masks at the same time, feigned two contrasting entities, and the prisoner did not know which to expect or pander to.

“Tell me, and I can have you released,” Altan said gently. “Tell me, and I’ll let you go.”

The prisoner maintained his silence.

“No?” Altan searched the prisoner’s face. “All right.” His flames doubled in intensity, shooting sparks through the air.

The prisoner shrieked. “Golyn Niis!”

Altan kept the flames held perilously close to the prisoner’s eyes. “Elaborate.”

“We never needed to take Khurdalain,” spat the prisoner. “The goal was always Golyn Niis. All your best divisions came flocking to the coast as soon as this war started. Idiots. We never even wanted this beach town.”

“But the fleet,” said Altan. “Khurdalain has been your point of entry for every offensive. You can’t get to Golyn Niis without going through Khurdalain.”

“There was another fleet,” hissed the prisoner. “There have been many fleets, sailing south of this pathetic city. They found the mountain pass. You poor idiots, did you think you could keep that a secret? They’re cutting straight toward Golyn Niis itself. Your war capital will burn, our Armed Forces are cutting directly across your heartland, and you’re still holed up here in this pathetic excuse for a city.”

Altan drew his hand back.

Rin flinched instinctively, expecting him to lash out again.

But Altan only extinguished his flame and patted the prisoner condescendingly on the head. “Good boy,” he said in a low whisper. “Thank you.”

He nodded to Rin and Chaghan, indicating they were about to leave.

“Wait,” the prisoner said hastily. “You said you’d let me go.”

Altan tilted his face up to the ceiling and sighed. A thin trickle of sweat ran from the bone under his ear down his neck.

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll let you go.”

He whipped his hand across the prisoner’s neck. A spray of blood flew outward.

The prisoner bore an astonished expression. He made a last startled, choked noise. Then his eyes drooped closed and his head slumped forward. The smell of cooked meat and burned blood filled the air.

Rin tasted bile in the back of her throat. It was a long while before she remembered how to breathe.

Altan rose to his feet. The veins at his neck protruded in the dim light. He took a deep breath and then exhaled slowly, like an opium smoker, like a man who had just filled his lungs with a drug. He turned toward them. His eyes glowed bright red in the darkness. His eyes were nothing human.

“Fine,” he said to his lieutenant. “You were right.”

Chaghan hadn’t moved throughout the entire interrogation.

“I’m rarely wrong,” said Chaghan.