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At last the sound of splintering wood echoed through the still air as the support beams collapsed one by one. The middle mast disappeared suddenly, as if the ship had folded in on itself, devouring its own insides. Then with a creaking groan, the warship turned on its side and sank into the black water.
They made camp that night to the sound of more explosions, though these were coming from at least seven miles away. The Imperial Navy had reached the border town at Shayang. The noise was impossible to escape. The bombing went on through the night. Rin heard so many rounds of cannon fire that she could not imagine anything still remained of Shayang except for smoke and rubble.
“Are you all right?” Baji asked.
The crew was supposed to be grabbing a few hours’ sleep before their journey downriver, but Rin could barely even close her eyes. She sat upright, hugging her knees, unable to look away from the flashing lights in the night sky.
“Hey. Calm down.” Baji put a hand on her shoulder. “You’re shaking. What’s wrong?”
She nodded in Shayang’s direction. “Nezha’s over there.”
“And you’re afraid for him?”
She whispered without thinking. “I’m always afraid for him.”
“Ah. I get it.” Baji gave her a curious look. “You’re in love.”
“Don’t be disgusting. Just because you think the whole world is tits and—”
“No need to get defensive, kiddo. He’s a good-looking fellow.”
“We’re done talking.”
Baji snickered. “Fine. Don’t engage. Just answer this. Would you be here without him?”
“What, camping out by the Murui?”
“Fighting this war,” he clarified. “Serving under his father.”
“I serve the Republic,” she said.
“Whatever you say,” he said, but she could see from the look in his eyes that he hardly believed her.
“Why are you still here, then?” she asked. “If you’re so skeptical. I mean—you’ve got no allegiance to the Republic, and gods know the Cike barely still exists. Why haven’t you just run?”
Baji looked somber for a moment. He never looked this serious; he always had such an outsize personality, an endless series of dirty jokes and lewd comments. Rin had never bothered to consider that that might be a front.
“I did think about that for a minute,” he said after a pause. “Suni and I both. Before you got back we thought seriously about splitting.”
“But?”
“But then we’d have nothing to do. I’m sure you can understand, Rin. Our gods want blood. That’s all we can think about. And it doesn’t matter that when we’re not high, we’ve nominally got our minds back. You know that’s not how it works. To anyone else a peaceful life would be heaven right now, but for us it’d just be torture.”
“I understand,” she said quietly.
She knew it would never end for Baji, either; that constant urge to destroy. If he didn’t kill enemy combatants then he would start taking it out on civilians and do whatever he’d done to get himself into Baghra in the first place. That was the contract the Cike had signed with their gods. It ended only in madness or death.
“I have to be on a battlefield,” Baji said. He swallowed. “Wherever I can find one. There’s nothing else to it.”
Another explosion rocked the night so hard that even from seven miles away they could feel the ground shake beneath them. Rin drew her knees closer to her chest and trembled.
“You can’t do anything about that,” Baji told her after it had passed. “You’ll just have to trust that Nezha knows how to do his job.”
“Tiger’s fucking tits,” Ramsa shouted. He was standing farther uphill, squinting through his spyglass. “Are you guys seeing this?”
Rin stood up. “What is it?”
Ramsa motioned frantically for them to join him at the top of the hill. He handed Rin his spyglass and pointed. “Look there. Right between those two trees.”
Rin squinted through the lens. Her gut dropped. “That’s not possible.”
“Well, it’s not a fucking illusion,” Ramsa said.
“What isn’t?” Baji demanded.
Wordlessly, Rin handed him the spyglass. She didn’t need it. Now that she knew what to look for, even her naked eye could see the outline of the Imperial Navy winding slowly through the trees.
She felt like she was watching a mountain range move.
“That thing’s not a ship,” Baji said.
“No,” Ramsa said, awed. “That’s a fortress.”
The centerpiece of the Imperial Navy was a monstrous structure: a square, three-decked fortress that looked as if the entire siege barrier at Xiashang had come detached from the ground to slowly float down the river.
How many troops could that fortress hold? Thousands? Tens of thousands?
“How does that thing stay afloat?” Baji demanded. “It can’t have any mobility.”
“They don’t need mobility,” Rin said. “The rest of the fleet exists to guard it. They just need to get that fortress close enough to the city. Then they’ll swarm it.”
Ramsa said what they were all thinking. “We’re going to die, aren’t we?”
“Cheer up,” said Baji. “Maybe they’ll take prisoners.”
We can’t fight them. Rin’s chest constricted with sharp and suffocating dread. Their entire mission seemed so pointless now. Logs and dams might stall the Militia for a few hours, but a fleet that powerful could eventually barrel its way through anything.
“Question,” Ramsa said. He was peering through his spyglass again. “What do Tsolin’s flags look like?”
“What?”
“Have they got green snakes on them?”
“Yes—”
A terrible suspicion hit her. She seized the spyglass from him, but she already knew what she would see. The ships trailing at the rearguard bore the unmistakable coiled insignia of the Snake Province.
“What’s going on?” Baji asked.
Rin couldn’t speak.
It wasn’t just a handful of ships that belonged to Tsolin. She’d seen six by her count now. Which meant one of two things—either Tsolin had skirmished and lost early to the Imperial Navy, and his ships had been repurposed for Imperial use, or Tsolin had defected.
“I will take your silence to mean the worst,” Baji said.
Captain Dalain ordered an immediate retreat back to Arlong. The soldiers dismantled their camp in minutes. Paddling downstream, they could be back to warn Arlong within a day, but Rin didn’t know if advance warning would even make a difference. The addition of Tsolin’s ships meant the Imperial Navy had nearly doubled in size. It didn’t matter how good Arlong’s defenses were. They couldn’t possibly fight off a fleet that big.
Cannon fire from Shayang continued throughout the night, then stopped abruptly just before dawn. At sunrise they saw a series of smoke signals from Nezha’s soldiers unfurling in the distant sky.
“Shayang’s gone,” Dalain interpreted. “The Harrier’s grounded, but the survivors are falling back to Arlong.”
