R.F. Kuang - The Dragon Republic

“Stop that,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“Whose ship is this?” she asked.

“They won’t tell us,” Baji said.

“They? Who are they ?”

“We don’t know. Nikara, I’m assuming, but they won’t talk to us.” Baji raised his voice to shout at a guard who must have been standing behind her, because Rin couldn’t see anyone. “Hey, you! You Nikara?”

No response.

“Told you,” said Baji.

“Maybe they’re mutes,” Ramsa said. “All of them.”

“Don’t be a fucking idiot,” Baji said.

“They could be! You don’t know!”

That wasn’t remotely funny, but Ramsa devolved into a fit of giggles, leaning forward so that the ropes strained painfully against all of their arms.

“Can you all shut up?” Chaghan’s voice. It came from several feet away.

Rin peeked her eyes open for a split second, just long enough to take in the sight of Chaghan, Qara, and Suni bound to the mast opposite her.

Chaghan was slumped against his sister. Suni was still unconscious, head drooped forward. A thick pool of saliva had collected beneath his open mouth.

“Why, hello,” said Ramsa. “Good to see you, too.”

“Shut your damn mouth,” Chaghan grumbled, before he devolved into a string of curses that ended with “Damned Nikara swine.”

“Are you high?” Ramsa let out a shrill cackle. “Tiger’s tits, Chaghan’s high—”

“I’m … not …”

“Quick, someone ask him if he’s always constipated or his face just looks that way.”

“At least I’ve got both eyes,” Chaghan snapped.

“Oh, ‘ I’ve got both eyes .’ Nice one. At least I’m not so skinny a pigeon could knock me over—”

“Shut up,” Rin hissed. She opened her eyes again, trying to take stock of their surroundings. All she could see was the ocean receding behind them. “Ramsa. What do you see?”

“Just the ship’s side. Little bit of ocean.”

“Baji?”

Silence. Had he fallen asleep again?

“ Baji! ” she shouted.

“Hmm? What?”

“What can you see?”

“Uh. My feet. A bulkhead. The sky.”

“No, you idiot—where are we headed?”

“How the fuck should I know—wait. There’s a dot. Yeah, that’s a dot. An island, I think?”

Rin’s heartbeat quickened. Speer? Mugen? But both were a several-weeks journey away; they couldn’t be anywhere close. And she didn’t remember any islands near Ankhiluun. The old Hesperian naval bases, maybe? But those were long abandoned. If the Hesperians had come back, Nikara foreign relations had changed drastically since she’d last checked.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“Not really. Hold on.” Baji was silent for a moment. “Great Tortoise. That’s a nice ship.”

“What do you mean, that’s a nice ship ?”

“I mean, if that ship were a person, I would fuck that ship,” said Baji.

Rin suspected Baji wouldn’t be much help until the opium wore off. But then their vessel took a sharp turn to port, putting Rin in full view of what turned out to be, indeed, a very nice ship. They had sailed into the shadow of the largest war vessel she had ever seen: a monstrous, multidecked war junk, with several layers of catapults and portholes, and a massive trebuchet mounted on top of a deck tower.

Rin had studied naval warfare at Sinegard, though never in depth. The Imperial Navy’s own fleet had fallen into disrepair, and the only people sent to naval posts were the bottom-feeders of each class. Still, they’d learned enough about naval crafts that Rin knew this was no Imperial ship.

The Nikara couldn’t build vessels like this. It had to be a foreign battleship.

Her mind pored sluggishly over possibilities. The Hesperians hadn’t taken sides in the Third Poppy War—but if they had, then they would have allied with the Empire, which meant …

But then she heard the crew shouting commands to each other, and they were in fluent Nikara. “ Halt. Ready to board .”

What Nikara general had access to a Hesperian ship?

Rin heard shouting, the sound of groaning wood, and heavy footsteps moving about the deck. She strained harder against the ropes, but all that did was chafe at her wrists; her skin stung like it had been scraped raw.

“What’s happening?” she screamed. “Who are you?”

She heard someone order a salute formation, which meant they were being boarded by someone of higher rank. A Warlord? A Hesperian ?

“I think we’re about to be handed off,” Baji said. “It was nice knowing you all. Except you, Chaghan. You’re weird.”

“Fuck you,” Chaghan said.

“Wait, I’ve still got a whale bone in my back pocket,” said Ramsa. “Rin, you could try igniting just a little bit, burn through the ropes and then I’ll get it out—”

Ramsa droned on, but Rin barely heard what he was saying.

A man had just walked into her field of vision. A general, judging from his uniform. He wore a half mask over his face—a Sinegardian opera mask of cerulean-blue ceramic. But it was his tall, lean build that caught her gaze, and his gait: confident, arrogant, like he expected everyone around him to bow before him.

She knew that stride.

“Suni can handle the main guard, and I’ll commandeer the cannons, implode the ship or something—”

“Ramsa,” Rin said in a strangled voice. “ Shut. Up .”

The general crossed the deck and paused in front of them.

“Why are they bound?” he asked.

Rin stiffened. She knew that voice.

One of the crew hastened over. “Sir, we were warned not to let their hands out of sight.”

“These are our people. Not prisoners. Unbind them.”

“Sir, but they—”

“I don’t enjoy repeating myself.”

It had to be him. She’d only ever met one person who could convey so much disdain in so few words.

“You’ve bound them so tight their limbs will suffer blood loss,” the general said. “If you deliver them damaged to my father, he will be very, very angry.”

“Sir, I don’t think you understand the nature of the threat—”

“Oh, I understand. We were classmates. Weren’t we, Rin?” The general knelt down before her and pulled off his mask.

Rin flinched.

The boy she remembered was so beautiful. Skin like porcelain, features finer than any sculptor could carve, delicately arched eyebrows that conveyed precisely that mixture of condescension and vulnerability that Nikara poets had been trying to describe for centuries.

Nezha wasn’t beautiful anymore.

The left side of his face was still perfect, somehow; still smooth like the glaze on fine ceramic. But the right side … the right side was mottled with scars, crisscrossing over his cheek like the plates of a tortoise shell.

Those were not natural scars. They looked nothing like the burn scars Rin had seen on bodies destroyed by gas. Nezha’s face should have been twisted and deformed, if not utterly blackened. But his skin remained as pale as ever. His porcelain face had not darkened, but rather looked like glass that had been shattered and glued back together. Those oddly geometric scars could have been drawn over his skin with a fine brush.

His mouth was pulled into a permanent sneer toward the left side of his face, revealing teeth, a mask of condescension that he couldn’t ever take off.

When Rin looked into his eyes, she saw noxious yellow fumes rolling over withering grass. She heard shrieks that dwindled into chokes. And she heard someone screaming her name, over and over and over.

She found it harder and harder to breathe. A buzzing noise filled her ears, and black spots clouded the sides of her vision like ink drops on wet parchment.