They’d turned a corner of the river onto a bizarre shoreline; the area where trees should have stood was burned and flattened, like some flaming giant had come trampling through on a mindless rampage.
“Same thing that happened last time,” Daji said. “They bring their bombers, and if they can’t find their enemy they attack indiscriminately. They flatten the terrain to make it harder for the rebels to hide.”
“But those aren’t bombing marks,” Rin said, still confused. “They’re not all in crater patterns.”
“No, that’s the jelly,” Jiang said.
“Jelly?”
“It’s what they used last time. Something the Gray Company invented in their towers. It catches fire when it hits any living things—plants, animals, people. We never figured out how to put it out—water and smothering don’t work. You have to wait for it to burn all the way through. And that takes a very long time.”
The implications terrified Rin. This meant the Hesperians didn’t just rule the skies; they also had flames that rivaled her own.
The destruction here was so much worse than the wreckage at Tikany. Boar Province must have fought so hard; that was the only thing that warranted retaliation on this scale. But they must have known they couldn’t win. How did it feel when the heavens rained down a fire that wouldn’t die? What was it like to fight the sky itself? She tried to imagine the moment when this forest turned into a chessboard of green, black, green, and black, when civilians running terrified through trees turned twitching and smoking into charcoal.
“The air campaigns are very clever, actually.” Daji trailed her fingers idly through the water. “You drop bombs over dense areas with no built-in defenses, so they think they’re entirely vulnerable. Then you fly your dirigibles over the widest possible area, so they know no one is safe no matter where they hide.”
She wasn’t speaking from conjecture, Rin realized. This was all from experience. Daji had fought this same war, decades before.
“You fly the airships at random schedules,” Daji continued. “Sometimes at day and night, until the locals are terrified even of going outside, even though they’re safer where their house won’t collapse on them. Then you’ve robbed them of everything. Sleep, food, comfort, security. No one dares move in the open, so you’ve cut off communications and industry, too.”
“Stop.” Rin didn’t want to hear any more. “I understand.”
Daji ignored her. “You drive them into total collapse. Fear turns into despair, despair to panic, and then panic into utter submission. It’s incredible, the power of psychological warfare. And all it takes is a couple of bombs.”
“Then what did you do?” Rin asked.
Daji blinked slowly at her as if the answer were obvious. “We went to the Pantheon, darling.”
“Things got a lot easier after that,” Jiang said. “I used to snatch them out of the sky like mosquitoes. Riga and I made it a game. Record time was four crafts in five seconds.”
He said this so casually that Rin couldn’t help but stare. Immediately, like a gnat had buzzed into his ear, he shook his head quickly and looked away.
Whoever had emerged from the Chuluu Korikh was not the man she’d known at Sinegard. The Master Jiang at Sinegard had no recollection of the Second Poppy War. But this Jiang made constant offhand references about it and then backpedaled quickly, as if he were dipping his toes in an ocean of memory just to see if he’d like it, then cringing away because the water was too cold.
The memory lapses weren’t the things about Jiang that bothered her. Ever since they’d left the Chuluu Korikh, she had been watching him, following his movements and vocal patterns to track the differences. He was refreshingly familiar and jarringly different all at once, often within the span of the same sentence. She couldn’t predict the switches in the timbre of his voice, the sudden sharpness of his gaze. Sometimes he was affable, eccentric. And other times he carried himself like a man who had fought and won wars.
Rin knew his Seal was eroding. But what did it mean? Did it happen gradually, one regained memory at a time, until he collected everything that he’d lost? Or would it be erratic and unpredictable, like the way Jiang approached everything else?
What confused her even more were the times when Jiang slipped almost fully back into his former skin, when he acted so much like the teacher she’d once known that every day, for brief pockets of time, she almost forgot that anything had changed.
He would tease her about her hair, which was shorn so messily near her temples that she looked like she’d been raised in the wild. He would tease her about her stump (“Kitay’s right, you should fix a blade on that”), about the Southern Coalition (“Losing a belt is one feat, losing an entire army is something else entirely”), about Altan (“You couldn’t even mention him without blushing, you hopeless child”), about Nezha (“Well, there’s no accounting for taste”). Those jokes would have prompted a slap if they’d come from anyone else, but when uttered in Jiang’s detached, deadpan delivery, they somehow made her laugh.
During long, boring afternoons floating down empty stretches of river, he would tilt his head back at the clear sky and belt out bawdy, ribald songs whose lyrics made Daji snort and Rin blush. Occasionally, he’d even spar with her, teetering back and forth on the uneven raft, teaching her mental tricks to fix her balance, and jabbing her in the side with his staff until she corrected her form.
At those times Rin felt like a student again, eager and happy, learning from a master she adored. But inevitably, his smile always slipped, his shoulders tensed, and the laughter went out of his eyes, as if the ghost of who he had been had abruptly fled.
Only once, nearly three weeks into their journey, when Daji had fallen asleep during Jiang’s watch rotation, did Rin work up the nerve to ask him about it.
“Get on with it,” Jiang said promptly as soon as she opened her mouth.
“Um—sorry, what?”
“You’ve been eyeing me like a lovestruck village girl since we left the mountain,” he said. “Go on. Proposition me.”
She wanted to both laugh and hit him. A pang of nostalgia hit her stomach like a club, and her questions scattered on her tongue. She couldn’t remember what she had wanted to ask him. She didn’t even know where to start.
His expression softened. “Are you trying to see if I remember you? Because I do, you know. You’re difficult to forget.”
“I know you do, but . . .” She felt tongue-tied and bewildered, the way she’d often felt during the years she’d spent as Jiang’s apprentice, groping at the truth about the gods before she even understood what she was looking for. She felt the absence of knowledge like a gap inside her. But she didn’t know how to phrase her questions, couldn’t trace the contours of what she lacked. “I suppose I wanted to know . . . well, the Seal, Daji said that—”
“You want to know what the Seal is doing to me.” Jiang’s voice took on a hard edge. “You’re wondering if I am the same man who trained you. I am not.”
Rin shuddered as memories rose unbidden to her mind: flashes of the vision the Sorqan Sira had once showed her, a nightmare of savaged corpses and manic laughter. “Then are you . . .”