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“Think you can figure out how to use these?” she asked Kitay.
He chuckled, brushing his fingers over the metal tubes. “Give me until sunset.”
Kitay took only the afternoon before he called her over into a clearing, empty except for the dozen dissembled arquebuses scattered around the grass. Pale little notches dotted the trunks of every tree in sight.
“It’s actually quite simple.” He pointed at various parts of the arquebus as he spoke. “I thought I was going to have to interrogate some Hesperian prisoners, but the design really revealed its own function. Very clever invention. It’s basically a cannon in miniature—you set off some fire powder inside the barrel, and the force of the explosion sends the lead ball ricocheting out.”
“How does the firing mechanism work?” Rin asked. “Do they have to light a spark every time?”
This seemed inconvenient to her, as well as implausible; the Hesperians seemed to fire at will without fumbling for flint.
“No, they don’t,” said Kitay. “They’ve done something clever with the match. It’s already a burning fuse—you can light it before you’re out on the field. Then when you’re ready to shoot, you squeeze this lever here, and it brings the match down into the powder. Click, boom.” He reached for an intact arquebus. “Here, I’ve loaded that one. Want to give it a try?”
She waved her stump at him. “Not sure if I can.”
“I’ll aim for you.” He stood behind her and wrapped his arms around her torso, pointing the barrel at a thick tree across the clearing. “Ready when you are.”
She curled her fingers around metal latch. “I just squeeze this?”
“Yup. Make sure you plant your feet, there’ll be a kickback against your shoulder. Remember, it’s a miniature cannon explosion. And give it a hard yank, it’s quite resistant—prevents accidental firing.”
She bent her knees as he demonstrated, took a deep breath, and pulled the trigger.
A bang split the clearing. The gun jerked backward at her chest and she flinched, but Kitay’s firm grip kept it from slamming into her ribs. Smoke poured out of the muzzle. She turned her head away, coughing.
“That’s one disadvantage,” Kitay said after the smoke had cleared. “Takes a while to see whether you’ve actually hit anything.”
Rin strode toward a tree on the opposite end of the clearing, where smoke unfurled into the air like little dragons. The pellet had struck true, burrowing deep into the center of the trunk. She stuck her finger into the groove. It sank into wood up to her third knuckle, until she couldn’t dig her finger in any farther, and even then she couldn’t feel the pellet.
“Holy fucking shit,” she said.
“I know,” Kitay said. “I’ve tried firing on armor, too. We’ve seen what they do to flesh, but these things penetrate steel.”
“Fuck. How long does that take to reload?”
“It’s taking me about half a minute now,” he said. “It’ll be faster with training.”
So that meant three, perhaps four, shots per minute. That was nothing near what an archer like Venka could manage in the same time span, but the arquebus’s superior lethality more than compensated.
“How many of your shots end up anywhere close to the target?” she asked.
He gave a sheepish shrug. “Eh. One in six hit the trunk. That should improve.”
“And how many of those bullets did we find?”
“Three boxes. About two hundred bullets in each.”
She frowned. “Kitay.”
He sighed. “I know. We’re going to run out.”
She took a moment to do the math in her head. Thirty soldiers on arquebuses firing at an ambitious rate of three shots per minute would run out of ammunition in less than—
“Six to seven minutes,” said Kitay. “We’re out in six to seven minutes.”
“I was getting there.”
“Course you were, I just figured I’d speed things up. Yes, that is the problem.” He rubbed his chin. “There were armories in that town we passed through last week. We could make some casts, melt some scrap metal down . . .”
“What scrap metal?” Rin asked. They were short on swords as it was, and they both knew it was folly to trade swords for bullets when most of their troops were far better in close-range combat.
“Then we’ve got to obtain it somehow,” Kitay said. “Or steal ammunition. But that’ll be tough—they’ve been pretty good about guarding their weapons so far, and those arquebuses were a rare find—”
“Hold on.” An idea had just struck her. “Master Irjah gave us a puzzle like this once. Almost exactly like this.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Don’t you remember? What do you do when you need your enemy’s ammunition?” She nudged his elbow. “Come on.”
He shook his head. “Rin, that worked for arrows.”
“So what? Same principle.”
“Steel pellets are different,” he insisted. “They distort upon impact; you can’t just collect them and shove them right back into the barrel.”
“So we’ll melt them down,” she countered. “Why is this so implausible? The Hesperians love firing on things. It’ll be easy enough to bait them, we just need to give them any reason to shoot. And we’re about to hit a tributary, which means—”
“It won’t work,” he interrupted. “Come on. They’ve got better spyglasses than we do. Straw targets will be too obvious, they’ll know they’re decoys.”
“That’s easy,” she said. “We’ll just use the real thing.”
And so, three days later, they found themselves fastening corpses to the mast and railings of an opium skimmer. The key, Rin learned, was a combination of nails and twine. Ropes would have been ideal, but they were too visible to the naked eye. Nails she could pound through bare flesh, and easily conceal the protrusions under layers of clothing. Anyone who stared long enough through a spyglass could see these were clearly corpses, but Rin hoped the Republican artillerymen would be too trigger-happy for that to matter.
When they’d populated the upper deck with enough corpses to make it look manned, they sent it floating down the river with a sole helmsman whose job was to keep it from crashing onto the bank. They’d chosen a wide, fast-moving stretch of water, with a current quick enough to pull the skimmer out of Republican range before anyone tried to board it.
“Gross.” Rin wiped her hand on her tunic as she watched the skimmer drift out of view. “This smell isn’t coming out for days, is it?”
“Just as well,” Kitay said. “We still have to cut the bullets out.”
When at last they neared the southern border of Hare Province, they found a messenger waiting with a letter from Venka. She and Cholang had been sending regular updates throughout the campaign. They’d swept through the north easily enough, as predicted. They hadn’t had much to do; Nezha seemed to have pulled his troops in from the east and north alike, concentrating them in a last stand in Dragon Province. So far Venka’s missives had involved happy updates of townships captured, shipments of historical artifacts she’d looted in magistrates’ estates, and the occasional crate of armor from Tiger Province’s famed blacksmiths.
