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“Rin!”
Someone grabbed her sword arm. She whirled on him, but Suni pulled her arms behind her back and held her tightly, so that she could not move until her sobbing had subsided.
“You’re lucky it didn’t get your sword arm,” said Enki. “Keep this on for a week. See me if it starts to smell.”
Rin flexed her arm. Enki had bound the dog bite tightly with a poultice that stung like she had stuck her arm in a hornet’s nest.
“It’s good for you,” he said when she grimaced. “It’ll prevent infection. We don’t need you to go frothing mad.”
“I think I’d like to go frothing mad,” said Rin. “I’d like to lose my head. I think I’d be happier.”
“Don’t talk like that,” Enki said sternly. “You have work to do.”
But was it really work, what they were doing? Or were they deluding themselves that by finding the survivors, they could atone for the simple truth that they were too late?
She continued her miserable work of combing through the empty streets, upending debris, searching homes whose doors had been smashed in. After hours of looking she stopped hoping to find Kitay alive, and started to hope she wouldn’t find his corpse during her patrols, because the sight of him flayed, dismembered, jammed into a wheelbarrow with a pile of other corpses, half-burned, would be worse than never finding him at all.
She walked Golyn Niis alone in a daze, trying to both see and not see. In time she found herself inured to the smell, and eventually the sight of bodies was not a shock, just another array of faces to be scanned for someone she knew.
All the while she called Kitay’s name. She screamed it every time she saw a hint of motion, anything that could be alive: a cat disappearing into an alley, a pack of crows taking off suddenly, startled by the return of humans who weren’t dead or dying. She screamed it for days.
And then from the ruins, so faintly she thought it was an echo, she heard her name in response.
“Remember that time I said the Trials were as bad as Speer?” Kitay asked. “I was wrong. This is as bad as Speer. This is worse than Speer.”
It wasn’t remotely funny, and neither of them laughed.
Rin’s eyes and throat were sore from weeping. She had been clutching Kitay’s hand for hours, fingers wound tightly around his, and she never wanted to let go. They sat side by side in a hastily constructed shelter half a mile outside the city, the only place they could escape the stench of death that permeated Golyn Niis. Kitay’s survival was nothing short of a miracle. He and a small band of soldiers from the Second Division had hidden for days under the bodies of their slain comrades, too afraid to venture out in case the Federation patrols should return.
When it looked like they could sneak away from the killing fields, they hid in the demolished slums of the eastern side of the city. They had pulled a cellar door away and filled the open space with bricks, so from the outside it just looked like a wall. That was why the Cike hadn’t seen them on their first pass through the city.
Only a handful of Kitay’s squadron was still alive. He didn’t know if the city contained any more survivors.
“Have you seen Nezha?” Kitay finally asked. “I heard he was being shipped to Khurdalain.”
Rin opened her mouth to respond, but a horrible prickling feeling spread from the bridge of her nose to under her eyes, and then she was choking under wild, heaving sobs, and she couldn’t form any words at all.
Kitay said nothing, just held his arms out in wordless sympathy. She collapsed into them. It was absurd that he should be comforting her, that she should be the one crying, after all that Kitay had survived. But Kitay was numb; for Kitay the suffering had been normalized, and he couldn’t grieve any more than he already had. He was still holding her when Qara ducked into the tent.
“You’re Chen Kitay?” She wasn’t really asking, she just needed to say something to break the silence.
“Yes.”
“You were with the Second Division when . . . ?” Qara trailed off.
Kitay nodded.
“We need you to brief us. Can you walk?”
Under the open sky, in front of a silent audience of Altan and the twins, Kitay recounted in a halting voice the massacre at Golyn Niis.
“The city’s defense was doomed from the start,” Kitay said. “We thought we still had weeks. But you could have given us months, and the same thing would have happened.”
Golyn Niis had been defended by an amalgamation of the Second, Ninth, and Eleventh Divisions. In this case, greater numbers did not mean greater strength. Perhaps even worse than in Khurdalain, the soldiers of the different provinces felt little sense of cohesion or purpose. The commanding officers were rivals, paranoid with distrust, unwilling to share intelligence.
“Irjah begged the Warlords over and over again to put aside their differences. He couldn’t make them see reason.” Kitay swallowed. “The first two skirmishes went badly. They took us by surprise. They surrounded the city from the southeast. We hadn’t been expecting them so early. We didn’t think they had found the mountain pass. But they came at night, and they . . . they captured Irjah. They flayed him alive over the city wall so that everyone could see. That broke our resistance. Most of the soldiers wanted to flee after that.
“After Irjah was dead, the Ninth and Eleventh surrendered en masse. I don’t blame them. They were outnumbered, and they thought they’d get off easier if they didn’t resist. Thought maybe it’d be better to become prisoners than to die.” Kitay shuddered violently. “They were so wrong. The Federation general took their surrender with all the usual etiquette. Confiscated their arms, corralled the soldiers into prison camps. The next morning they were marched up the mountain and beheaded. There were a lot of deserters from the Second after that. A couple of us stayed to fight. It was pointless, but . . . it was better than surrendering. We couldn’t dishonor Irjah. Not like that.”
“Wait,” Chaghan interrupted. “Did they take the Empress?”
“The Empress fled,” Kitay said. “She took twenty of her guards and stole out of the city the night after Irjah died.”
Qara and Chaghan made synchronous noises of disbelief, but Kitay shook his head warily. “Who can blame her? It was that or let those monsters get their hands on her, and who knows what they would have done to her . . .”
Chaghan did not look convinced.
“Pathetic,” he spat, and Rin agreed with him. The idea that the Empress had fled from a city while her people were burned, killed, murdered, raped went against everything Rin had been taught about warfare. A general did not abandon his soldiers. An Empress did not abandon her people.
Again, the Talwu’s words rang true.
A leader abandons their people. A ruler begins a campaign. . . . Joy in decapitating enemies. This signifies evil.
Was there any other way to interpret the Hexagram, in the face of the evidence of destruction before them? Rin had been torturing herself with the Talwu’s words, trying to construe them in any way that didn’t point to the massacre at Golyn Niis, but she had been deluding herself. The Talwu had told them exactly what to expect.
She should have known that when the Empress had abandoned the Nikara, then all truly was lost.
