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“He must be confident about something,” Kitay mused. “Otherwise the only possible explanation for all this is that he’s gone batshit crazy. He’s got to have something up his sleeve.”
Rin frowned. “More dirigibles, you think?” But that didn’t seem likely. If Nezha had increased Hesperian aid, he would have subjected them to air raids already, while they were still on open, distant terrain, instead of near his prized capital. “Is he wagering everything on the Dragon? Some new military technology that’s more lethal than shamanism?”
“Or some military technology that can counteract shamanism,” Kitay said.
Rin shot him a sharp look. He’d said it too quickly—it wasn’t a guess. “Do you know something?”
“I, ah, I’m not sure.”
“Did Nezha say something?” she demanded. “In the New City, when Petra was—I mean—did he—”
“He didn’t know.” Kitay tugged uncomfortably at a lock of hair. “Petra never told him anything. He went through her—her tests. The Hesperians lent him weapons. That was the deal they offered him, and he took it. They didn’t think he had the right to know what they were researching.”
“He could have been lying.”
“Maybe. But I’ve seen Nezha lying. That wasn’t it. That was just despair.”
“But there’s nothing Petra could invent,” Rin insisted. “They’ve got nothing. Their theology is wrong. Their Maker doesn’t exist. If they had some anti-shamanic tool, they would have used it to protect their fleet, but they didn’t. All they have is conventional weapons—fire powder and opium—and we know how to counteract those. Right?”
Kitay looked unconvinced. “As far as we know.”
She crossed her arms, frustrated. “Pick a side, Kitay. You just said there’s no proof—”
“There’s no proof either way. I’m just floating the possibility, because we have to consider it. You know that unless Nezha has something like this up his sleeve, his strategy so far has been utterly irrational. And we can’t proceed assuming the worst of him.”
“Then what? You want to divert from Arlong?”
Kitay mulled that over for a moment. “No. I don’t think we change our overall strategy. We keep gaining ground. We keep bolstering our resources. Based on the information we have, we take Arlong on schedule. But I’m saying we need to be cautious.”
“We’re always cautious.”
He gave her a tired look. “You know what I mean.”
They left it at that. There was nothing else to discuss; without further proof, there was nothing they could do.
Privately, Rin thought Kitay was being paranoid.
What if Nezha didn’t have some secret weapon? What if Nezha was just destined to lose? She couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe, just maybe, the end to this story was a foregone conclusion. After all, the last several months had made it clear that she couldn’t be defeated. Battle by battle, victory by victory, she became more and more convinced of the fact that she’d been chosen by fate to rule the Empire. What else explained her streak of incredible, implausible victories and escapes? She had survived Speer. Golyn Niis. Shiro’s laboratory. She’d taken an army through the long march. She’d emerged victorious from Mount Tianshan. She’d outwitted and outlasted the Mugenese, the Trifecta, and Vaisra. And now she was about to conquer Nezha.
Of course, she couldn’t leave everything to the fates. She couldn’t stop meticulously preparing for every battle just because she hadn’t yet lost a single one. Nikara history was crammed with fools who imagined themselves kings. When their luck bled out, they died like anyone else.
That was why she never voiced this feeling out loud to Kitay. She knew what he would say. Come on, Rin. You’re losing your grip on reality. The gods don’t choose their champions. That’s not how this works.
And while she understood that in the rational part of her mind, she still knew something had changed when she’d come back down from Mount Tianshan, when she’d survived an explosion that killed the greatest figures in Nikara history and nearly wiped out the Hesperian fleet. The tides of history had shifted. She had never before believed in fate, but this she came to know with more and more certainty as each day passed: the script of the world was now wholly, inalterably colored by a brilliant crimson streak.
Rin’s favorite part by far of the southeastern campaign was the Southern Army’s slow acquisition and mastery of Hesperian military technology. She made a game of it—the standing rule was double portions of dinner to the squadron that returned from active engagement with the largest haul of functioning Hesperian equipment.
Most of the pieces they retrieved were minor improvements on equipment they already had—more accurate compasses, sturdier splints for the physicians, more durable axles for their wagons. Often they found contraptions they had no idea what to do with—little lamps without wicks that they didn’t know how to light, ticking orbs that resembled clocks but whose arms corresponded to inexplicable letters and numbers, and whirring mini-dirigibles that Rin assumed were messenger crafts, which she couldn’t fly. She felt stupid, turning the devices over and over in her fingers, unable to find the controls to make them start. Kitay fared slightly better—he finally determined that the lamps were activated with a series of taps—but even he grew frustrated with machines that seemed to run purely on magic.
Three miles out from Bobai, a recently abandoned Republican holdout, they found under a thin layer of soil a hastily buried crate of functioning arquebuses.
“Fuck me,” Kitay murmured when they pried the lid off the crate. “These are almost brand-new.”
Rin lifted an arquebus from the top of the pile and weighed it in her hand. She’d never held one before; she hadn’t dared. The steel was icy cool to the touch. It was heavier than she imagined—she found a new respect for Hesperian soldiers who lugged these running into battle.
She glanced at Kitay, whose jaw hung open as he knelt down to examine the weapons. She knew what he was thinking.
These changed everything.
They’d made it this far with minimal ranged capabilities. There were only several dozen archers in the Southern Army, and their ranks weren’t growing. It took weeks for a novice soldier to learn to properly fire an arrow, and months if not years for them to fire with decent accuracy. Archery required tremendous arm strength, particularly if arrows were meant to pierce armor.
The next best thing they had to arrows were fire lances, a recent Republican invention Kitay had heard about during his stay in the New City, then reverse engineered. Those were tubes made of sixteen layers of thin wrapped paper, a little longer than two feet, stuffed with willow charcoal, sulfur, saltpeter, and shards of iron. The lances could shoot flames nearly ten feet when lit, but they still required a ready fire source to activate, and they backfired easily, often exploding in the hands of their wielders.
But arquebuses required less arm strength than bows, and they were more reliable than fire lances. How long would it take to train troops to shoot? Weeks? Days, perhaps, if they devoted their time to nothing else? If she could get just twenty to thirty soldiers who were halfway proficient with the arquebus, that would open up a host of new strategies they’d only dreamed of.
