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“Rin! Fuck—Rin!”
Ramsa tugged at her arm. “You need to see this.”
She ran with him to the end of the pier, where the Cike were huddled around a dark mass on the planks. A massive fish? A bundle of clothes? No—a man, she saw that now, but the figure was hardly human.
It stretched a pale, skeletal hand toward her. “Altan . . .”
Her breath caught in her throat. “Aratsha?”
She had never before seen him in his human form. He was an emaciated man, covered from head to toe in barnacles embedded in blue-white skin. The lower half of his face was concealed by a scraggly beard so littered with sea worms and small fish that it was difficult to parse out the human bits of him.
She tried to slide her arms beneath him to help him up, but pieces of him kept coming away in her hands. A clump of shells, a stick of bone, and then something crackly and powdery that crumbled to nothing in her fingers. She tried not to push him away in disgust. “Can you speak?”
Aratsha made a strangled noise. At first she thought he was choking on his own spit, but then frothy liquid the color of curdled milk bubbled out the sides of his mouth.
“Altan,” he repeated.
“I’m not Altan.” She reached for Aratsha’s hand. Was that something she should do? It felt like something she should do. Something comforting and kind. Something a commander would do.
But Aratsha didn’t seem to even notice. His skin had gone from bluish white to a horrible violet color in seconds. She could see his veins pulsing beneath, a sludgy, inky black.
“Ahh, Altan,” said Aratsha. “I should have told you.”
He smelled of seawater and rot. Rin wanted to vomit.
“What?” she whispered.
He peered up at her through milky eyes. They were filmy like the eyes of a fish at market, oddly unfocused, staring out at two sides like he’d spent so long in the water that he didn’t know what to make of the things on land.
He murmured something under his breath, something too quiet and garbled for her to decipher. She thought she heard a whisper that sounded like “misery.” Then Aratsha disintegrated in her hands, flesh bubbling into water, until all that was left was sand, shells, and a pearl necklace.
“Fuck,” Ramsa said. “That’s gross.”
“Shut up,” Baji said.
Suni wailed loudly and buried his head in his hands. No one comforted him.
Rin stared numbly at the necklace.
We should bury him, she thought. That was proper, wasn’t it?
Should she be grieving? She couldn’t feel grief. She kept waiting to feel something, but it never hit, and it never would. This was not an acute loss, not the kind that had left her catatonic after Altan’s death. She had barely known Aratsha; she’d just given him orders and he had obeyed, without question, loyal to the Cike until the day he died.
No, what sickened her was that she felt disappointed, irritated that now that Aratsha was gone they didn’t have a shaman who could control the river. All he’d ever been to her was an immensely useful chess piece, and now she couldn’t use him anymore.
“What’s going on?” Nezha asked, panting. He’d just arrived.
Rin stood up and brushed the sand off her hands. “We lost a man.”
He looked down at the mess on the pier, visibly confused. “Who?”
“One of the Cike. Aratsha. He’s always in the water. Whatever hit the fish must have hit him, too.”
“Fuck,” Nezha said. “Were they targeting him?”
“I don’t think so,” she said slowly. “That’s a lot of trouble for one shaman.”
This couldn’t be about just one man. Fish were floating dead across the entire harbor. Whoever had poisoned Aratsha had meant to poison the entire river.
The Cike were not the target. The Dragon Province was.
Because yes, Su Daji was that crazy. Daji was a woman who had welcomed the Federation into her territory to keep her throne. She would easily poison the southern provinces, would readily sentence millions to starvation, to keep the rest of her empire intact.
“How many troops?” Vaisra demanded.
All of them were crammed into the office—Captain Eriden, the Warlords, the Hesperians, and a smattering of whatever ranked officers were available. Decorum did not matter. The room had turned into a din of frantic shouting. Everyone spoke at once.
“We haven’t counted the men who haven’t made it to the infirmary—”
“Is it in the aquifers?”
“We have to shut down the fish markets—”
Vaisra shouted over the noise. “How many?”
“Almost the entire First Brigade has been hospitalized,” said one of the physicians. “The poison was meant to affect the wildlife. It’s weaker on men.”
“It’s not fatal?”
“We don’t think so. We’re hoping to see full recovery in a few days.”
“Is Daji insane?” General Hu asked. “This is suicide. This doesn’t just affect us, it kills everything that the Murui touches.”
“The north doesn’t care,” Vaisra said. “They’re upstream.”
“But that means they’d need a constant source of poison,” said Eriden. “They’d have to introduce the agent to the stream daily. And it can’t be as far as the Autumn Palace, or they screw over their own allies.”
“Hare Province?” Nezha suggested.
“That’s impossible,” Jinzha said. “Their army is pathetic; they barely have defense capabilities. They’d never strike first.”
“If they’re pathetic, then they’d do whatever Daji told them.”
“Are we sure it’s Daji?” Takha asked.
“Who else would it be?” Tsolin demanded. He turned to Vaisra. “This is the answer to your blockade. Daji’s weakening you before she strikes. I wouldn’t wait around to see what she does next.”
Jinzha banged a fist on the table. “I told you, we should have sailed up a week ago.”
“With whose troops?” Vaisra asked coolly.
Jinzha’s cheeks turned a bright red. But Vaisra wasn’t looking at his son. Rin realized his remarks were meant for General Tarcquet.
The Hesperians had been watching silently at the back of the room, expressions impassive, standing with their arms crossed and lips pursed like teachers observing a classroom of unruly students. Every so often Sister Petra would scratch something into the writing pad she carried around everywhere, her lips curled in amusement. Rin wanted to hit her.
“This neutralizes our blockade,” Tsolin said. “We can’t wait any longer.”
“But water moves steadily out to sea,” said Lady Saikhara. “You never step in the same stream twice. In a matter of days the poisonous agent should have washed out into Omonod Bay, and we’ll be fine.” She looked imploringly around the table for someone to agree. “Shouldn’t it?”
“But it’s not just the fish.” Kitay’s voice was a strangled whisper. He said it again, and this time the room fell quiet when he spoke. “It’s not just the fish. It’s the entire country. The Murui supplies tributaries to all of the major southern regions. We’re talking about all agricultural irrigation channels. Rice paddies. The water doesn’t stop flowing there; it stays, it lingers. We are talking about massive crop failure.”
