AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“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.
