“This is very smart,” he said. “You’ve got to give Nezha credit, really. He’s reduced the number of factors at play until the only vectors that matter are the ones where he holds the advantage. He’s swept almost all the chess players off the board.”
“But?” Rin pressed.
“But he’s forgotten one thing.” He tapped his forehead. “I’ve always thrashed him at chess.”
Xuzhou was a city of tombs. The Red Emperor had designed it to be an imperial graveyard, the final resting place for his most beloved generals, advisers, wives, and concubines. He’d commissioned the most skilled sculptors, architects, and gardeners across his territories to build grand monuments to his regime, and over the decades, what had begun as a single cemetery sprawled into a memorial the size of a city. Xuzhou became a place with the sole economy of death—its inhabitants were artisans employed to sweep the tombs, light incense, play ritual concerts to tame vengeful ghosts, and craft intricate mansions, clothes, and furniture out of paper to be burned as offerings so that the deceased might receive them in the afterlife. Even after the Red Emperor’s regime collapsed, the caretakers remained employed, their salaries paid by one ruler or another out of reverence to the dead.
“Can you imagine such an old civilization built all this?” Kitay ran his hands across remarkably well-preserved limestone as they walked through the central cemetery, staking out vantage points for their artillery units. “They didn’t have anything like modern tools. I mean, they barely even had math.”
“Then how’d they manage it?” Venka asked.
“Sheer human labor. When you can’t figure something out, you just throw bodies at it.” Kitay pointed to the far end of the graveyard, where a forty-foot sculpture of the Red Emperor loomed over the ravine. “There are bones in that statue. Actually, there are probably bones in all these statues. The Red Emperor believed that human souls kept buildings structurally sound forever, so when the laborers were done chiseling his face into stone, he had them bound up and hurled into the hollow centers.”
Rin shuddered. “I thought he wasn’t religious.”
“He wasn’t a shaman. Still superstitious as fuck.” Kitay gestured to the monuments surrounding them. “Imagine you’re living in a land of beasts and Speerlies. Why wouldn’t you believe in spells?”
Rin craned her head up at the Red Emperor. His face had been weathered by time, but had retained its structural integrity well enough that she could still make out his features. He looked the same way he did on all the replicas she’d ever seen of his official portrait—a severe, humorless man whose expression displayed no kindness. Rin supposed he’d had to be cruel. A man who intended to stitch the disparate, warring factions of Nikan into a united empire had to have a ruthless, iron will. He couldn’t bend or break. He couldn’t compromise; he had to mold the world to his vision.
His first wife stood at the opposite end of the graveyard. The Winter Empress was famously beautiful and famously sad. She’d been born with such impossible, heavenly beauty that the Red Emperor had kidnapped her as a mere child and deposited her in his court. There, her constant weeping only heightened her beauty because it made her eyebrows arch and her lips purse in such an enticing manner that the Red Emperor would watch as she cried, fascinated and aroused.
According to the stories, she looked so beautiful when she was in pain that no one realized she was wasting away from a heart disease until one day she collapsed in the garden, fingers clawing futilely at her snow-white chest. In the old stories, that counted as romance.
But Rin recognized the stone face across the graveyard. And that wasn’t, couldn’t be, the Winter Empress.
“That’s Tearza,” she murmured, amazed.
“The Speerly queen?” Venka wrinkled her nose. “What are you talking about?”
Rin pointed. “Look around her neck. See that necklace? That’s a Speerly necklace.”
She’d seen that crescent moon pendant before in her dreams. She’d seen it hanging on Altan’s neck. She knew she couldn’t have imagined it; those visions were branded into her mind.
Why would the Red Emperor cast Tearza as his Empress?
Was it true, then, that they’d been lovers?
But all the tales said he’d tried to kill her. He’d sent assassins after her since the moment they met. He’d tried many times on the battlefield to take her head. He had been so afraid of her that he ensconced himself in an island hideout surrounded by water. When she’d died, he’d made her island his colony and her people his slaves.
Yet, Rin supposed, lovers could still inflict that kind of violence on each other. Hadn’t Riga loved Daji? Hadn’t Jiang loved Tseveri?
Hadn’t Nezha once loved her?
“If that’s Mai’rinnen Tearza,” Kitay said, “that’s a history no one’s ever written.”
“Only because the Red Emperor wrote her out of history,” Rin said. “Wrote her out so cleanly that no one even recognized her face.”
She had to respect the man. When you conquered as totally and completely as he had, you could alter the course of everything. You could determine the stories that people told about you for generations.
When they sing about me, she decided, Nezha won’t warrant even a mention.
Under her direction, the Southern Army finished preparing the city for Nezha’s arrival. They hid cannons behind every statue. They dug trenches and tunnels. They placed their sandbags around their forts. They staked out target points for Dulin, identifying weak points in the stone that could bring entire structures down on the Republican Army.
Then they hunkered down to wait.
Rainfall started that evening and continued steadily through the night, fat droplets hammering down in unrelenting sheets that turned the ground beneath their feet to such slippery mud that they had to prop their carts up on boulders so their wheels wouldn’t get stuck overnight. Rin hoped the heavy downpour might drain the clouds empty by morning, but the pattering only intensified as the hours drew on. At dawn, the gray shroud over Xuzhou showed no sign of thinning.
Rin tried to snatch a bit of sleep, but the rain battering against her tent made it impossible. She gave up and waited out the night sitting outside, keeping watch over the graveyard beneath Tearza’s statue.
Nezha had been right to attack in monsoon season. Her fire would do very little today aside from keeping her warm. She’d tested it throughout the night, sending arcs of flame across the night sky. They all fizzled away in seconds. She could still incinerate anyone within her immediate proximity, but that didn’t help in a ranged battle. Cannons and arquebuses wouldn’t be half as effective in this weather; the fuses would take forever to light. Both sides had been largely reduced to brutal, primitive, and familiar weapons—swords, arrows, and spears.
The winner today would be determined by sheer tactical proficiency. And Rin, despite herself, couldn’t wait to see what Nezha had come up with.
The sun crept higher in the sky. Rin’s troops were awake, armed, and ready, but there was still no word from the sentries. They waited another hour in tense anticipation. Then, suddenly, the rain intensified from a loud patter to a violent roar.