The Dragon Republic (The Poppy War Trilogy #2)

“Try some ginger rock,” Ramsa suggested.

Rin gagged and spat until she was sure her stomach would expel nothing else, and then pulled her head back over the side of the ship. Remnants of her breakfast, a phlegmy, eggy mess, floated in the green waves below.

She took the shards of candy from Ramsa’s palm and chewed while fighting the urge to dry-heave. For all their weeks at sea, she’d still never gotten used to the constant sensation that the ground was swirling beneath her feet.

“Expect some choppier waves today,” Baji said. “Monsoon season is kicking up in the Omonod. We’ll want to avoid going upwind if this keeps up, but as long as we have the shore as a breakwater we should be all right.”

He was the only one of them who had any real nautical experience—he’d worked on a transport ship as part of his labor sentence shortly before he’d been sent to Baghra—and he flaunted it obnoxiously.

“Oh, shut up,” Ramsa said. “It’s not like you do any real steering.”

“I’m the navigator!”

“Aratsha’s the navigator. You just like the way you look standing at the helm.”

Rin was grateful that they didn’t have to do much maneuvering themselves. It meant they didn’t have to bother with a crew of Moag’s hired help. They needed only the six of them to sail up and down South Nikan Sea, doing minimal ship maintenance while blessed Aratsha trailed alongside the hull, guiding the ship wherever they needed to go.

Moag had lent them an opium skimmer named Caracel, a sleek and skinny vessel that somehow packed six cannons on each side. They didn’t have the numbers to man each cannon, but Ramsa had devised a clever workaround. He’d connected all twelve fuses with the same strip of twine, which meant he could set them all off at once.

But that was only the last resort. Rin didn’t intend to win this skirmish with cannons. If Moag didn’t want survivors, then Rin only had to get close enough to board.

She folded her arms on the railing and rested her chin on them, staring down at the empty water. Sailing was far less interesting than staking out enemy camps. Battlefields were endlessly entertaining. The ocean was just lonely. She’d spent the morning watching the monotonous gray horizon, trying to keep her eyes open. Moag hadn’t been certain when her tax-evading captain would sail back to port. It could be any time from now to past midnight.

Rin didn’t understand how the sailors could stand the terrible lack of orientation at sea. To her, every stretch of the ocean looked the same. Without the coast to anchor her, one horizon was indistinguishable from the next. She could read star charts if she tried, but to her naked eye, each patch of greenish blue meant the same thing.

They could be anywhere in Omonod Bay. Somewhere out there lay the Isle of Speer. Somewhere out there was the Federation.

Moag had once offered to take her back to Mugen to survey the damage, but Rin had refused. She knew what she would find there. Millions of bodies encased within hardened rock, charred skeletons frozen in their last living acts.

How would they be positioned? Mothers reaching for their children? Husbands wrapping their arms around their wives? Maybe their hands would be stretched out toward the sea, as if they could escape the deadly thick sulfurous clouds rumbling down the mountainside if they could just get to the water.

She had imagined this too many times, had painted a far more vivid image of it in her mind than reality was likely to be. When she closed her eyes she saw Mugen and she saw Speer; the two islands blurred together in her mind, because in all cases the narrative was the same: children going up in flames, the skin sloughing off their bodies in large black patches, revealing glistening bone underneath.

They burned for someone else’s war, someone else’s wrongs; someone they had never met had made the decision they should die, so in their last moments they would have had no idea why their skin was scorching off.

Rin blinked and shook her head to clear it. She kept slipping into daydreams. She’d taken a small dose of laudanum last night after her singed palm hurt so much she couldn’t sleep, which in retrospect was an awful idea because laudanum exhausted her more than opium did and wasn’t half as fun.

She examined her hand. Her skin was puffy and furiously red, even though she’d soaked it in aloe for hours. She couldn’t make a fist without wincing. She was grateful she’d only burned her left hand, not her sword hand. She cringed at the thought of grasping a hilt against the tender skin.

She moved her thumbnail over the center of her palm and dug it hard into the open wound. Pain lanced through her arm, bringing tears to her eyes. But it woke her up.

“Shouldn’t have taken that laudanum,” said Chaghan.

She jerked upright. “I’m awake.”

He joined her by the railing. “Sure you are.”

Rin shot him an irritated glare, wondering how much effort it would take to toss him overboard. Not very much, she guessed. Chaghan was so terribly frail. She could do it. They wouldn’t miss him. Probably.

“You see those rock formations?” Baji, who must have sensed an impending screaming match, edged his way in between them. He pointed toward a series of cliffs on the distant Ankhiluuni shore. “What do they look like to you?”

Rin squinted. “A man?”

Baji nodded. “A drowned man. If you sail to shore during sunset, it looks like he’s swallowing the sun. That’s how you know you’ve found Ankhiluun.”

“How many times have you been here?” Rin asked.

“Plenty. Came down here with Altan once, two years ago.”

“For what?”

“Tyr wanted us to kill Moag.”

Rin snorted. “Well, you failed.”

“To be fair, it was the only time Altan ever failed.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” she said. “Wonderful Altan. Perfect Altan. Best commander you’ve ever had. Did everything right.”

“Excepting the Chuluu Korikh,” Ramsa piped up. “You could call that a disaster of monumental proportions.”

“To be fair, Altan used to make some really good tactical decisions.” Baji rubbed his chin. “Before, you know, that string of really bad ones.”

Ramsa whistled. “Lost his mind near the end, he did.”

“Went a little crazy, yeah.”

“Shut up about Altan,” said Chaghan.

“It’s a pity how the best ones snap,” Baji continued, ignoring him. “Like Feylen. Huleinin, too. And you remember how Altan started sleepwalking at Khurdalain? I swear, one night I was walking back from taking a piss and he—”

“I said shut up!” Chaghan slammed both hands against the railing.

Rin felt a noticeable chill sweep over the deck; goose bumps were forming on her arms. There was a stillness in the air, like the space between lightning and thunder. Chaghan’s bone-white hair had begun to curl up at the edges.

His face didn’t match his aura. He looked like he might cry.

Baji lifted his palms up. “All right. Tiger’s tits. I’m sorry.”

“You do not have the right,” Chaghan hissed. He pointed a finger at Rin. “Especially you.”

She bristled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re the reason why—”

“Why what?” she asked loudly. “Go on, say it.”

“Guys. Guys.” Ramsa wedged his way between them. “Great Tortoise, lighten up. Altan’s dead. All right? Dead. And fighting about it won’t bring him back.”

“Look at this.” Baji handed Rin his spyglass, directing her attention to a black point just visible on the horizon. “Does that look like a Red Junk ship to you?”

Rin squinted into the eyepiece.

Moag’s Red Junk fleet comprised distinctive opium skimmers, built narrow for enough speed to outrun other pirates and the Imperial Navy, possessing deep hulls to transport huge amounts of opium and distinctive battened sails that resembled carp fins. On the open seas they disguised all identifying marks, but when they docked in the South Nikan Sea, they flew the crimson flag of Ankhiluun.

But this ship was a bulky creation, large and squat, much rounder than an opium skimmer. It had white sails instead of red, and no flag in sight. As Rin watched, the ship cut a ridiculously sharp turn in the water toward them that should have been impossible without a shaman’s help.

“That’s not Moag’s,” she said.

“That doesn’t make it an enemy ship,” said Ramsa. He peered out at the ship with a spyglass of his own. “Could be a friendly.”

Baji snorted. “We’re fugitives working for a pirate lord. Do you think we have a lot of friends right now?”

“Fair enough.” Ramsa slammed the spyglass shut and shoved it in his pocket.

“Just open fire,” Chaghan suggested.

Baji shot him an incredulous look. “Look, I don’t know how much time you’ve spent at sea, but when you see a foreign warship with no identifying marks and no indication of whether or not it’s brought a support fleet, the response is usually not to just open fire.”

“Why not?” Chaghan asked. “You said it yourself. It can’t be a friendly.”

“Doesn’t mean it’s looking for a fight.”

Ramsa’s head swiveled back and forth between Chaghan and Baji as they spoke. He looked like a very confused baby bird.

“Hold fire,” Rin told him hastily. “At least until we know who they are.”

The ship was close enough now that she could just make out an etching of characters on the sides of the ship. Cormorant. She’d been over the list of Red Junk ships harbored at Ankhiluun. This wasn’t one of them.

“Are you seeing this?” Ramsa was peering through his spyglass again. “What the hell is this?”

“What?” Rin couldn’t tell what was bothering Ramsa. She couldn’t see any armored troops. Or crew of any uniform, for that matter.

Then she realized that was precisely what was wrong.

She couldn’t see anyone on board at all.

No one stood at the helm. No one manned the oars. The Cormorant was close enough now that they could all see its empty decks.

“That’s impossible,” said Ramsa. “How are they propelling it?”

Rin leaned over the side of the ship and yelled. “Aratsha! Hard right turn.”

Aratsha obeyed, reversing their direction faster than any oared ship would be able to. But the foreign ship veered about immediately to follow their course, cutting an absurdly precise turn. The ship was fast, too—even though the Caracel had Aratsha propelling it along, the Cormorant had no trouble following their pace.

Seconds later it had almost caught up. It was pulling in parallel. Whoever was on it intended to board.

“That’s a ghost ship,” Ramsa whimpered.

“Don’t be stupid,” Baji said.

“They’ve got a shaman, then. Chaghan’s right, we should fire.”

They looked helplessly at Rin to confirm the order. She opened her mouth just as a boom split the air, and the Caracel shook under their feet.

“You still think it’s not hostile?” Chaghan asked.

“Fire,” she said.

Ramsa ran belowdecks to light the fuse. Moments later a series of booms rocked the Caracel as their starboard-side cannons went off one by one. Blazing metal balls skimmed over the water, scorching bright orange trails behind them—but instead of blowing holes into the sides of the Cormorant, they only bounced off metal plating. The warship barely shook from the impact.

Meanwhile the Caracel lurched alarmingly to starboard. Rin peeked over the edge—they’d taken damage to their hull, and though she knew nearly nothing about ships, that didn’t look survivable.

She cursed under her breath. They’d have to row one of the lifeboats back to shore. If the Cormorant didn’t dispose of them first.

She could hear Ramsa’s footsteps moving frantically around belowdecks, trying to reload. Arrows sailed over her head, courtesy of Qara, but they thudded ineffectively into the sides of the warship. Qara had no target—the warship had no crew on deck, no archers. Whoever it was didn’t need archers when they had a row of cannons so powerful they could likely blow the Caracel out of the water in minutes.

“Get closer!” Rin shouted. They were outgunned, outmaneuvered. The only chance they had at winning was to board that ship and smoke it out. “Aratsha! Put me on that ship!”

But they weren’t moving. The Caracel bobbed listlessly in the water.

“Aratsha!”

No response. Rin climbed on the railing and bent to look overboard. She saw an odd stream of black, like a smoke cloud unfurling underwater. Blood? But Aratsha didn’t bleed, not when he was in his watery form. And the cloud looked too dark to be blood.

No. It looked like ink.

A projectile shrieked overhead. She ducked. The salvo landed in the water in front of her. Another burst of black emanated from the site of impact.

It was ink.

They were firing the pellets into the water. This was intentional. Their attackers knew the Cike had a water shaman, and they had blinded Aratsha on purpose because they knew what he was.

Rin’s chest tightened. This was no random attack. The warship had targeted them, had prepared for what they could do. This was a calculated ambush planned well in advance.

Moag had sold them out.

Another series of missiles whistled through the air, this time headed for the deck. Rin crouched down, braced for the explosion, but the impact didn’t come. She opened her eyes. A delayed explosive?

But no fiery explosion rocked the boat. Instead a cloud of black smoke shot out of the projectiles, unfurling outward with a terrifying rapidity. Rin didn’t bother trying to run. The smoke covered the entire deck within seconds.

It wasn’t just a smokescreen, it was an asphyxiate—she tried to suck in air but nothing went through; it was like her throat had closed up, as if someone had pinned her to the wall by the neck. She staggered back, gagging. She could taste something in the air—something sickly sweet and terribly familiar.

Opium.

They know what we are. They know what makes us weak.

Suni and Baji dropped to their knees, utterly subdued. Wherever Qara was, she’d stopped shooting. Rin could just make out Ramsa’s and Chaghan’s limp forms through the smoke. Only she remained standing, coughing violently, clutching feebly at her throat.

She had smoked opium so many times, the phases of the high were familiar to her by now. It was only a matter of time.

First there was the dizzying sensation of floating, accompanied by an irrational euphoria.

Then the numbness that felt almost as good.

Then nothing.

Rin’s arms stung like she’d plunged them inside a beehive. Her mouth tasted like charcoal. She tried to conjure up enough spit to wet her throat and barely managed a repellent lump of phlegm. She forced her eyes open. The sudden attack of light made them water; she had to blink several times before she could look up.

She was tied to a mast, her arms stretched above her. She wiggled her fingers. She couldn’t feel them. Her legs were also bound, tied so tightly that she couldn’t even bend them.

“She awakens.” Baji’s voice.

She strained her neck but couldn’t see him. When she swiveled her head around she suffered a sudden attack of vertigo. Even tied down, she felt like she was floating. Looking up or down gave her the terrible sensation of falling. She squeezed her eyes shut. “Baji? Where are you?”

“Behind you,” he said. “Other side of the . . . the mast.”

His words came out in a barely intelligible drawl.

“The others?” she asked.

“All here,” Ramsa piped up from her other side. “Aratsha’s in that barrel.”

Rin sat up straight. “Wait, could he—”

“No go. They sealed the lid. Good thing he doesn’t need to breathe.” Ramsa must have been wiggling his arms, straining the rope, because she felt her bindings tighten painfully around her own wrists.

“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.

“You’re dead,” she said. “I saw you die.”

Nezha looked amused. “And you were always supposed to be the clever one.”