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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.
