Rin dug her nails into her palm.
She couldn’t breathe.
This was it. She’d wagered the lives of everyone in the Southern Coalition on what happened next. The fate of the south hung on one man, one clearly unstable man, and Rin could not truthfully say whether she believed in Jiang or not.
The dirigibles dipped down slightly toward him, like predators stalking their prey. Miraculously, they had not yet begun to fire.
Did they intend to be merciful? Did they want to spare the Southern Coalition so that they could take them alive, to be tortured and interrogated later? Or were they so confused and amazed by this solitary, suicidal fool that they wanted to draw in closer for a better look?
Did they have any idea what he was?
Someone on the Republican front must have shouted an order, because the entire artillery swiveled their barrels around to aim at Jiang.
Something invisible pulsed through the air.
Jiang hadn’t moved, but something about the world had shifted, had knocked its sounds and colors slightly off-kilter. The hairs stood up on Rin’s arm. She felt intensely, deliciously light-headed. A strange, exhilarating energy thrummed just beneath her skin, an incredible sense of potential. She felt like a cotton ball suffused in oil, just waiting for the smallest spark to ignite.
Jiang raised one hand into the air. His fingers splayed out. The air around him shimmered and distorted. Then the sky exploded into shadow like an ink bottle shattered on parchment.
Rin saw the effects before the cause. Bodies fell. The entire archery line collapsed. The dirigible closest to Jiang careened to the side and struck its neighbor, sending both crashing to the ground in a ball of fire.
Only after the wave of smoke cleared did Rin see the source of the destruction—black, mist-like wraiths snaked through the air, shooting through bodies, weapons, and shields with uniform ease. At times they hung still and, ever so briefly, she could just barely make out their shapes—a lion, a dragon, a kirin—before they disappeared back into formless shadow. They followed no known laws of the physical world. Metal passed through them as if they were immaterial, but their fangs ripped through flesh just as easily as the sharpest of swords.
Jiang had called down every beast of the Emperor’s Menagerie, and they were tearing through the material world like steel through paper.
The other four dirigibles never managed to fire. A fleet of black birdlike shadows ripped through the balloons that kept them afloat, puncturing the centers and flying out the other side in neat, straight lines. The balloons popped into nothing. The dirigible baskets plummeted with startling velocity, where Jiang’s beasts continued wreaking havoc on the ground forces. The Republican soldiers struggled valiantly against the wraiths, swinging their blades desperately against the onslaught, but they might as well have been fighting the wind.
“Holy shit.” Venka stood gaping, arms hanging by her side. She should have been leading the charge toward the mines, but neither she nor any of the Southern Coalition had moved an inch. All that any of them seemed able to do was watch.
“Told you,” Rin murmured. “He’s a shaman.”
“I didn’t think shamans were that powerful.”
Rin shot her an indignant look. “You’ve seen me call flame!”
Venka pointed to Jiang. He was still alone in the dead zone. He was so open, so vulnerable. But no bullets seemed able to pierce his skin, and every arrow aimed his way dropped harmlessly onto the ground long before it reached him. Everywhere he pointed, explosions followed.
“You,” Venka said reverently, “cannot do that.”
She was right. Rin felt a pang of jealousy as she watched Jiang conducting his wraiths like a musician, each sweep of his arm prompting another charge of shadowy havoc.
She’d thought she understood the limits of shamanic destruction. She’d leveled a field of bodies before. She’d leveled a country.
But what she’d done to the longbow island had been a singular episode of divine intervention. It could never—should never be repeated. In conventional combat, on a battlefield where discriminating between ally and enemy actually mattered, she couldn’t compete with Jiang. She could burn a handful of soldiers at once, dozens if she had a clear, clustered target. But Jiang was blowing through entire squadrons with mere waves of his hand.
No wonder he’d acted so cavalier before. This wasn’t a fight for him, this was child’s play.
Rin wanted power like that.
She could see now how the Trifecta had become legend. This was how they had massacred the Ketreyids. This was how they had reunited a country, declared themselves its rulers, and yanked it back from both Hesperia and the Federation.
So how had they ever lost it?
At last the Southern Coalition came to their senses. Under Venka and Kitay’s direction they began a frenzied drive toward the scattered blockade. Jiang’s shadow wraiths parted to let them through unscathed. His control was astonishing—there must have been more than a hundred beasts on the field, each weaving autonomously through the mass of bodies, all distinguishing perfectly between southerners and Republicans.
Rin and Jiang alone remained behind the front lines.
This wasn’t over. A second fleet of dirigibles was approaching fast from the east. Deafening booms split the sky. The air was suddenly thick with missiles. Rin threw herself to the ground, wincing as explosions thundered above her.
The Republican troops had realized their only viable strategy. They’d noticed Jiang’s limits—his beasts might be able to knock missiles out of the air, but their numbers were constrained to a pack the size of a small field. He couldn’t tear through the ground troops and defend against the dirigibles at the same time. He couldn’t summon an unending horde.
Rin lifted her head just as three airships peeled away from the fleet and veered toward the mines. She understood their plan in an instant—they couldn’t count on taking Jiang out, so they were going to take out the Southern Coalition instead.
They were going to fire on Kitay.
Oh, fuck no.
Your turn, Rin told the Phoenix. Show them everything we’ve got.
The god responded with glee.
Her world burst into orange. Rin had never called flames so great into battle before. She had always kept the fire reined in within a twenty-yard radius; any farther than that and she risked collateral damage to allies and civilians. But now she had clear targets across an empty field. Now she could send great roaring columns fifty yards high into the sky, could shroud the dirigible baskets in flame, could scorch the troops inside, could char the balloons until they imploded.
One by one the dirigibles dropped.
This felt deliriously good. It wasn’t just the freedom of range, the permission to destroy without constraint. Everything felt so easy. She wasn’t calling the flame, she was the flame; those great columns were natural extensions of her body, as simple to command as her fingers and toes. She felt the Phoenix’s presence so closely she might have been in the world of spirit. She might have been on Speer.
This was Jiang’s doing. He’d opened the gate to the void to let the beasts in, and now the gap between worlds had thinned just a little more. Such small shreds of reality separated them from a churning cosmos of infinite possibility, and that made the material world so very malleable. It made her feel divine.