Ken Liu - Broken Stars

“Fuck, what happened?” Wang Lu yelled, trying to twist free. His hands and feet had been soundly tied; movement made the coarse fibers slice agonizingly into his flesh. The prince let loose a string of curses, panting roughly, afraid to struggle further. At this time, a cavalry troop shot down the street, their armor and uniform marking them as Song. The riders didn’t even glance at Wang Lu as their steeds galloped toward the East City Gate, trampling the corpses. A few snatches of conversation lingered in the air.

“We’re too late! What do we do if our arrows can’t hit it?”

“It’s not a south wind, but a north wind. It’ll never reach Liao. It’ll only be blown southward—”

“Will we be blamed?”

“Otherwise we’d be too late!”

“Hey! What are you doing! Don’t leave me here!” Wang Lu yelled wildly. “Tell your master I know physics and chemistry and mechanical engineering! I can build you a steampunk Song Empire! Hey, wait! Don’t go! Don’t go….”

The hoofbeats faded. Wang Lu looked up despairingly. The hot air balloon was now a small dot high in the sky, drifting southward with the north wind. Bang. He saw the puff of white smoke rise a moment before the sound reached him. The cannon had fired.

Wang Lu’s eyes filled with the light of his last hope. He wrenched his head down, bit his clothing, and tore it aside, revealing the skin of his chest. A line of light glowed beneath his left collarbone: the fuel gauge for the observational platform. At the moment, it displayed red to indicate low power. The wave function engine required at least thirty percent to carry him back; snow in July would create a universe split that would fill his tank to at least fifty. “Come on.” He was crying, bleeding, talking to himself with gritted teeth. “Come on come on come on and give me a big fat blizzard!”

Each gram of silver iodide powder could generate more than ten trillion particles; five kilograms was enough to create all the ice crystals for a blizzard. It seemed ridiculous, that someone could artificially create snow in an era of such low technology, but perhaps the time traveler’s crazed prayer had been fulfilled: the clouds began to gather in the sky, roiling, pitch-black and restless, reducing the setting sun behind them to a thread of golden light.

“Come on come on come on!” Wang Lu roared toward the sky.

A rumble of thunder resonated to the horizons. First, rain fell, cold rain mixed with ice crystals. But as the ground temperature continued to drop, the rain became snow. A single snowflake drifted down, landed on the tip of Wang Lu’s nose, and instantly melted from his body heat. But right after it came a second, then a third, heralding their quadrillions of compatriots.

The drenched time traveler laughed heavenward. It was a proper blizzard in July, the snow coming down in clumps; he couldn’t wait to see the palaces, buildings, willows, and walls painted powder white. Wang Lu looked down and saw the gauge on his chest glowing green. The engine’s energy forecast had crossed the baseline; the moment this universe split into two, the observational platform would collect the energy and automatically activate. In a moment too brief to be assigned a unit, it would send him home to his warm 900-square-foot apartment near the Beiyuan neighborhood roundabout, Tongzhou District, Beijing.

“This will be legendary,” Wang Lu said to himself, shivering. “I’m going to go home, find a less dangerous job, find a wife, squeeze my way onto the subway every day to go to work, and do nothing but play video games when I get home. I’ve had enough adventure for a lifetime, truly…”

At the rate the snow was accumulating, it would have taken less than an hour to bury Jinyang under a yard of white. But right at that moment, twenty dragons of fire rose from the four directions.

From the dozen gates of West, Central, and East City, the fire-dragon chassis were spraying pillars of flame, accompanied by countless pig bladder catapults hurling fireballs. They were weapons of city defense he’d built with his own hands, weapons the Song army had feared more than any other.

“Wait a…” The light went out of Wang Lu’s eyes. “No, are they burning Jinyang down anyway? At least they could wait a little, until this snow’s done…. Wait, wait —”

Thick, viscous fire-oil sprayed everywhere; flames roared heavenward. The fires spread with a speed beyond anyone’s imagination. Jinyang had been long under drought, and the precipitation called by the time traveler hadn’t the chance to soak into tinder-dry timbers.

The fire in West City began in Jinyang Palace, engulfing Xiqing Ward, Guande Ward, Fumin Ward, Faxiang Ward, and Lixin Ward in turn in a sea of flames. The fire in Central City set the great waterwheel alight first, then burned west toward Xuanguang Hall, Renshou Hall, Daming Hall, Feiyun House, Deyang Hall. The East City Institute soon transformed into a brilliant torch. The snowflakes whirling above vaporized without a trace before they had a chance to land. The green light on the time traveler’s chest faded. He howled his grief and agony, “Motherfucker, I was so close, so close!”

Bathed in fire, Jinyang lit dusk into daytime. The air boiled in the inferno; a scarlet dragon of flame wheeled upward, dispersing the clouds in an eyeblink. No one saw the fallen snow; they only saw flames that touched the heavens. The ancient city, first built in the Spring and Autumn Era, more than one thousand four hundred years before this moment, wailed distantly in the flames.

Jinyang’s fortunate survivors were being driven northeast by the Song army, looking back with every step, their weeping loud enough to shake heaven. The Song ruler Zhao Guangyi sat astride his warhorse, gazing at the flames of distant Jinyang and the figures kneeling before him.

He said, “When you’ve captured the pretend-emperor Liu Jiyuan, come and see me. Do not harm him. Guo Wanchao, I confer upon you the title of Militia Commander of Ci Prefecture. Ma Feng, I name you Supervisor of Imperial Construction. You two have done me service, and I hope you will turn all your ingenuity and wisdom to my Great Song from today onward. Liu Jiye, why do you refuse to surrender when all the others have? Do you not know the parable of the praying mantis who attempted to block the passage of a chariot?”

Liu Jiye, his hands bound, turned to kneel northward. “The ruler of Han has yet to surrender,” he said stubbornly. “How can I surrender first?”

Zhao Guangyi laughed. “I’ve long heard of Liu Jiye of the East Bank. You live up to your reputation. You can surrender once I capture the little emperor. You should revert to your original name of Yang. Why should a Han try to protect a Hu? If you want to fight, you should turn and fight the Khitan, don’t you think?”

Having finished talking to these men, Zhao Guangyi rode forward a few steps. He bent down. “What do you have to say?”

Zhu Dagun knelt on the ground, afraid to raise his head. From the corners of his eyes, he could see the raging flames on the horizon. “I claim no accomplishment,” he said, shaking. “I only ask that I be judged to have done no trespass.”

“Very well.” Zhao Guangyi waved his whip. “Posthumously grant him the title Duke of Tancheng, with a fiefdom of thirty miles square. Chop off his head.”

“Your Imperial Majesty! What wrong did I commit?” Zhu Dagun stood up in shock, flinging aside the two soldiers next to him. Four or five more tackled him. The executioner raised his sword.

“You did nothing wrong. I did nothing wrong. No one did anything wrong. Who knows whose fault it is?” said the Song ruler indifferently.

The head rolled to a stop; the large frame thudded to the ground. The copy of Analects fell from Zhu Dagun’s sleeve pocket and into the puddle of blood, soaking through, until not a single character could be distinguished.