“Get down,” Rin ordered. That was redundant—everyone had already dropped to the carriage floor, arms over their heads as bullets whizzed above them.
Rin crawled to the far edge of the basket and pressed her eye against a slit in the carriage. She saw a mass of blue uniforms racing toward the riverbanks, arquebuses pointed to the sky.
Fuck. Nezha must have deployed troops along every stretch of the river once he’d realized the Southern Army had split into parts. And their aircraft was now visible from miles off, a clear target hanging plump in the air.
Another round of fire rocked the basket. Someone screamed in pain. Rin glanced over her shoulder to see one of her soldiers clutching his leg, his foot a bloody mess below the ankle.
“Use the cannons!” Kitay shouted, wrestling at the levers. He was managing to steer, but badly—the dirigible veered sharply east, wrenching them closer to both the opposite shore and the ambush. “They’re loaded!”
“I don’t know how!” Rin screamed back. But she ducked down beside him and fumbled at the cannons regardless. Ingenious, she thought, dazed. The handles let her swerve the gun mouths nearly 360 degrees, aiming at anything except herself.
Squinting, she aimed one cannon as best she could toward the ground platoon and funneled a stream of fire into the barrel.
The blowback flung her against the wall of the carriage. She scrambled to her knees, clambered forth, and grabbed the handle of the second cannon. Same process. This time she knew to drop down before the blowback could hit her. She couldn’t see the fallout, not from where she was crouched, but the ensuing crash and screams promised good results.
The carriage lurched to the left. Rin careened into Kitay’s side.
“The balloon,” Kitay gasped. He’d given up with the levers. “They’ve pierced it, we’re falling—”
She opened her mouth to respond just as they tilted again, veering hard in the other direction.
“Get out,” Kitay said sharply.
She understood. Together they scrambled out of the steering chamber into the main carriage. They had no hope of flying this thing anymore; they just had to hold steady until they got near enough to the ground. Closer, closer—
Rin jumped from the basket, landing knees bent, hoping to distribute the impact across her body. It didn’t work. Pain shocked through both her ankles, so intense that she doubled over for several seconds, screaming wordlessly, before she caught a grip on herself. “Kitay—”
“Right here.” He clambered to his knees, coughing. Scorch marks streaked through his wiry hair. He pointed at something behind her. “Take care of—”
Rin reached out with her palm. Fire exploded out, arced around them in a parabola, and pushed forth twenty, then thirty yards. Rin forced as much fury as she could into that inferno, made it wickedly, devastatingly hot. If anyone in the Republican ambush had survived the airship cannons, they were ashes now.
“Enough.” Kitay put a hand on her arm. “That’s enough.”
Rin called the flame back in.
Pipaji and Dulin climbed out of the basket, coughing. Pipaji moved with a limp, hopping along with her arm slung over Dulin’s shoulder, but neither looked seriously wounded. A handful of soldiers filtered out of the dirigible behind them,
Rin loosed a sigh of relief. They hadn’t been too high up before they’d crashed. This could have been so much worse.
“General?” Pipaji pointed at the wreck behind her. “There—there’s someone . . .”
Only one of the soldiers hadn’t made it out. He lay pinned under the side of the engine. He was still conscious—he groaned, face twisting in anguish. His legs were a ruin under the mass of warped steel.
Rin recognized him. He was one of Qinen’s friends, one of the young, stubble-chinned men who had unhesitatingly followed her all the way from Leiyang to Mount Tianshan.
Ashamed, she realized she couldn’t remember his name.
Together the soldiers strained against the side of the carriage, but nobody could move it. And what was the point? It had crushed more than half of the soldier’s body. Rin could see fragments of his hip bone littered across the scorched earth. They couldn’t possibly get him to Lianhua in time. There was no recovery from this.
“Please,” said the soldier.
“I understand,” Rin said, and knelt down to slit his throat.
Once she would have hesitated; now she didn’t even blink. His agony was so obvious, and death so necessary. She jerked her knife through his jugular, waited several seconds for the blood to run its course, then pulled the soldier’s eyes shut.
She stood up. Dulin’s eyes were huge. Pipaji had a hand clamped over her mouth.
“Let’s go,” Rin said curtly. “Time to kill a dragon.”
Chapter 29
From the wreckage of the dirigible, it was a quick three-mile march through the mountainside to the edge of the cliffs that sealed in Arlong like an oyster shell. When at last they pushed through the wall of thick forest, the great, wide Murui river lay on their horizon, stretching on without end as if it were the ocean. Before them lay Arlong’s famous Red Cliffs, glinting in the noon sun like freshly spilled blood.
Rin halted at the ledge, searching the opposite wall until she found a string of characters, carved at a slant into the rock face so that they were only visible when the light caught them just so.
Nothing lasts.
Those were the famous words, written in near-indecipherable Old Nikara, carved into the Red Cliffs by the last minister loyal to the Red Emperor just before his enemies stormed the capital and hung his flayed body above the palace doors.
Nothing lasts. The world does not exist. Nezha and Kitay had come up with those conflicting translations. They were both wrong, and they were both right. Their translations were two sides of the same truth—that the universe was a waking dream, a fragile and mutable thing, a blur of colors shaped by the unpredictable whims of divinity.
The last time Rin had been here, a year that felt like a lifetime ago, she’d been blinded by loyalty and love. She’d been soaring between these cliffs on wings borne by fire, fighting on Yin Vaisra’s behalf for a Republic founded on a lie. She’d been fighting to save Nezha’s life.
Past the narrow channel, she could just barely make out the silhouette of the capital city. She fished her spyglass from her pocket and examined the city perimeter for a moment, until she glimpsed movement near each of its gates—her squadrons, moving in like chess pieces falling neatly into formation. From what she could see, at least four of the decoys had made it past the Murui. Venka’s column, to her relief, was among them—as Rin watched, they marched steadily down the slopes from the northeast. She saw no sign of the last two squadrons, but she couldn’t worry about that now. In minutes, the ground invasion of Arlong would commence.
That part of the assault was just noise. The four columns encircling Arlong were armed with the flashiest projectiles in their arsenal—double-mounted missiles, massive short-range cannons, and repurposed firecrackers stuffed with shrapnel. These were meant to capture Nezha’s attention, to fool him into thinking the overground assault was a more significant effort than it was. Rin knew, based purely on the numbers, that she couldn’t win a sustained ground battle, nor a protracted siege. Not when Nezha had been laying his defenses for weeks; not when all the Republic’s last tricks and weapons lay hidden behind those walls.