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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?”
