The Wall of Storms

^{CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN} A PLAGUE

Almost a year had passed since the invasion of Dasu and Rui by the Lyucu.

Small fishing boats made their way back to the harbor at Kriphi one by one, their crews looking tired and worn.

Pékyu Tenryo did not like the news they brought.

“You couldn’t find a single source of tolyusa in all the Islands of Dara?” he roared in the tent. The other Lyucu thanes held their tongues. “Yesterday, yet another one of the yearlings died. The garinafin mothers are restless with child-hunger, and we won’t get reinforcements until next year! How will we control the adults until then?”

“There’s still no sign that the Empress of Dara intends to surrender?”

“None whatsoever. All the spies say that she’s preparing for war. The woman is power-hungry and will not yield, even if we have her husband and son.”

Tanvanaki followed the pacing Tenryo with her eyes. “We can still achieve victory before next year.”

“Speak!”

“While our garinafins are still firmly under control, if we invade the Big Island and seize the capital, we have a chance of bringing all of Dara under heel.” She put her hand on her belly. “Besides, we have a new weapon. Legitimacy matters a great deal to these people.”

Tenryo looked back at her, and after a while, he nodded.

“I thought you would be happy for me,” said Timu.

“Happy for you?” said Kuni Garu. He looked at the defiant face of Timu, and pain racked his heart. He had to steady himself with a hand against the wall of his prison cell.

“The start of a new life and a new family is a joyous occasion.”

“But not like this, Timu. Not like this.”

“This paves the way for a solution that avoids bloodshed,” said Timu. “Hasn’t Kon Fiji always said that war should be a last resort? The Lyucu and our people are now one family, and brother should not take up arms against brother.”

“Oh, you foolish child,” whispered Kuni. “You have read so many books and yet have learned so little.” He gritted his teeth to prevent himself from saying something that he would regret.

The Lyucu had been pursuing a policy of deliberately impregnating as many native women as possible, Kuni knew. Almost all of these pregnancies were the result of rape. The terror, violence, and brutality of the policy were designed not only to break the spirit of the native population, but also to affirm the Lyucu claim to this land, to put down roots in it. The women warriors of the Lyucu had generally avoided becoming pregnant to preserve their own fighting readiness, and it was obvious that the Lyucu princess’s bond with Timu had been coerced.

But Timu’s face flushed at his restrained words. “I daresay my command of the Ano Classics is better than someone who spent more time arguing with his teacher than reading his assignments.”

“You are a prince of the House of Dandelion! How could you have so little understanding of the reality of the situation? The Lyucu are using you as a pawn in their bid to—”

“You’re simply angry because I have found a way to save Dara that you did not think of. The union between Tanvanaki and me will begin the healing that will ultimately bring the Lyucu together with the people of Dara. I ask you to step aside so that I can do what you cannot.”

Kuni was beyond rage now. He laughed. “I can’t even dignify that with a response.”

“All you have to do is to write to Mother and convince her to surrender.”

“Do you really wish to see all the people of Dara turned into slaves, to see all the Islands devastated like this one?”

“This is but a temporary state of affairs necessitated by Dara resistance,” said Timu. “Once Dara is pacified, Pékyu Tenryo will moderate his policies. And if he will not, Tanvanaki and I will. We’re the future, while you and Tenryo are the past.”

“Have you learned nothing of what I’ve tried to teach you about the flow of power—”

“Of course I have! Just as you once seized power in order to wield it more justly, I now submit to power so that I can ameliorate its harsh bite. You and I are not so different after all, Father.”

“But the Lyucu are wolves, Toto-tika—”

“Do not address me by that name!” Timu interrupted. “I’m no longer a child.”

Kuni stared at him, as though finally seeing him for the first time.

Timu felt a twinge of regret, but words gushed from his heart like a torrent that could not be stopped. “I have learned from you, Father. But I learned from your actions, not your pretty words. You speak of caring for the people, yet you can’t even take care of your own children. You speak of the responsibilities of power, yet all you’ve ever achieved is more power for yourself. You speak of the depredations of the Lyucu, yet you were responsible for many more deaths.”

“This is unfair—”

But Timu would not be interrupted. “I’m going to be a father now, too, and I will never do to my child what you did to me. When the Hegemon was about to capture you in Zudi, you were willing to abandon me and Rata-tika just so you could escape! I remember that day as though it were yesterday.”

Kuni flinched as though he had been slapped. This is divine justice. The sins of my past have caught up to me.

“And then you abandoned Mother to the Hegemon and allowed her to live as a prisoner for years while you used her sacrifice to build your power. At least I will never do that to the woman I love. Princess Vadyu and I will build a new Dara together on the wings of the garinafins, a world in which our child will not live in fear, doubt, or hatred rooted in ambition.”

“Oh, my son,” muttered Kuni. “My son.”

“I have striven all my life to please you,” said Timu. “And you’ve never been happy with me. I’m tired of waiting for your approval, Father, tired of living as your shadow.

“What is your answer to my request? Will you step aside?”

Kuni Garu shook his head and looked away from his son. Hot tears flowed down his face.

Timu left, and the door of the cell slammed shut behind him.

The messages, packed in bottles dropped near the shores of the core islands by Lyucu boats, were read by many and immediately caused a crisis in Pan.

“Oh, my Toto-tika, how could you?” muttered Jia. “I should have paid more attention to your character instead of leaving you to your teacher. You’ve broken your father’s heart. This is a betrayal that will be impossible to undo.”

“Timu has always been a bit impractical in his thinking,” said Théra. “Certainly he was deceived.”

“I’m sure the prince had his reasons,” said Consort Risana, ever hopeful. “Not everyone who collaborates with the Lyucu is necessarily a traitor; sometimes it’s difficult to tell what people are really thinking based on their public performance.”

At this, Jia gave a wry smile.

“The question is: Why have they decided to invade now?” asked Théra.

“Didn’t we always expect them to invade after the fall harvest?” said Zomi.

“If they’ve made Timu into a puppet, it means they want more than military conquest,” said Théra.

“So they’re trying to—” Zomi started to talk but then stopped as Théra gave her a warning look.

“They’re trying to destabilize Dara by inciting rebellions against me,” said Empress Jia. “It’s all right. There’s nothing wrong with stating what’s plainly in their message.”

“But that plan works best if they give it more time,” said Théra as she pondered the situation. “It would be more sensible for them to build up Timu’s legitimacy—possibly by waiting until the child is born—and wait for reinforcements from beyond the sea when the Wall of Storms opens in spring.”

“Have they suddenly grown confident in their strength?” asked Zomi. She and Théra shared a worried but also warm glance with each other.

“That’s what they want us to think,” said Cogo Yelu. “But I think the truth is likely the exact opposite. This might be an act of desperation.”

“We have no choice but to fight,” said Gin Mazoti.

“Are we ready?” asked Jia.

“The odds of victory or defeat are about even,” said the marshal. “We’ve been preparing all summer, and I now no longer think resistance a hopeless act. But all commanders wish for more time.”

“Maybe that’s why they’re attacking,” said Jia. “They don’t want to give us any more time to prepare.”

“The best-made plans in the world must ultimately be put to the test of reality,” said the marshal. “We’ve done all that we can. All the rest is chance.”

But then she paused and looked at Risana. “However, Your Highness’s comments on the mysterious hearts of collaborators have given me an idea.”

The Lyucu secured the shores of Rui and Dasu with constant airship patrols, and they caught the sudden influx of farseers from Dara. Lyucu guards brought the secret messages carried by the executed spies to Pékyu Tenryo.

Written in ornate language full of allusions to the Ano Classics and pompous quotations from Moralist treatises, the messages promised amnesty and leniency for all collaborationist Dara ministers and commanders who defected now to the cause of the empress and called for them to assassinate important Lyucu thanes and leaders, especially Pékyu Tenryo himself. Whoever succeeded would be granted dukedoms or even kingdoms.

The pékyu laughed as he read these messages and shared them with the surrendered Dara ministers and military commanders.

“Nothing confirms their desperation more than this,” said the pékyu. “You all know very well how Jia treats those who served her family with loyalty. After what happened to Théca Kimo, Rin Coda, and Gin Mazoti, why would anyone believe her empty promises?”

The ministers and commanders laughed along with their new lord. Indeed, Jia’s obsession with weakening the enfeoffed nobles was still fresh in their minds.

Ra Olu returned to his mansion in Kriphi—a gift from the pékyu for his service to the Lyucu—and shared the message with Lady Lon, who had been released from having to attend to the pékyu after he tired of her looks.

“This seems a very clumsy attempt,” said Lady Lon. “I would have thought the marshal too clever to try something so transparent.”

“The key is not the text,” said Ra Olu, “but the subtext. There is a quote from a poem by Lurusén at the end of the message:

“That’s from his ‘Ode to the Sea,’ isn’t it? What’s the point of quoting that poem?”

“I’m not sure,” said Ra Olu. “But I can’t help but think it’s the key to what the empress and the marshal have in mind.”

“Could it be a gesture of defiance? Emperor Ragin once achieved his most famous victory by riding on the back of a cruben, so the reference to the sovereign of the seas may be suggesting that victory belongs to Dara ultimately.”

Ra Olu shook his head. “It doesn’t seem a very apt allusion. The Lyucu do not farm, and they’ve been destroying the agricultural base of the islands in their preparation for an invasion of the Big Island and converting the land to pasture use.”

“That’s true. Lurusén is the empress’s favorite poet, and she wouldn’t quote him without great care.”

“The marshal and the empress had to know that these messages would be intercepted. So this must be a code…. You’ve always been more literary than I. What do you know about this poem?”

“Let me think…. Lurusén wrote it after the King of Cocru signed a treaty of nonaggression with the King of Xana, which he opposed. My father explained to me that it was a veiled political pamphlet in which Lurusén criticized the King of Cocru’s shortsightedness. Though Cocru at the time was at peace and prosperous, he hinted at the oncoming storm from overseas.”

“From Xana’s ambition?” asked Ra Olu. “But Xana was dominating through airpower.”

“True, but the political climate made it impossible to speak too openly, so he used ‘sovereign of the seas’ as a veiled reference to the Xana threat.”

“I’m still not sure how that applies here.” Ra Olu was disappointed.

“There are more layers to the poem.” Lady Lon paced as she tried to recall the details of literary lessons from long ago. “I remember researching the poem in detail because I liked it, and coming upon a bit of ancient history that Lurusén also likely had in mind. Centuries ago, before the stability of the Seven States, there were many more Tiro states in Dara all fighting against each other. One of these states, Keos, was locked in a cycle of warfare with a state named Diyo. Keos was the stronger, and managed to breach the capital of Diyo, taking the King of Diyo prisoner. Only after the King of Diyo pledged fealty to the King of Keos was he allowed to go home.

“But the King of Diyo was not content to live out his days as a vassal of Keos. Secretly, he initiated a program of vengeance. He let it be known that the court of Diyo coveted a kind of oyster that grew only near the shores of Keos, and was willing to pay a high price for it. The people of Keos soon realized that they could make far more profit by diving for oysters and selling them to Diyo than by working the fields, and many in Keos abandoned their farms and headed for the sea to dive for gold.

“At the same time, the King of Diyo encouraged his own population to reclaim more land for farming and to plant varieties of rice, wheat, and sorghum with high yields. Claiming that Diyo was poor, he paid the tribute he owed Keos in kind, in the form of grain shipments. As a result, the King of Keos wasn’t concerned that so much of the farmland of his domain was wasted because the tribute grain from Diyo kept everyone fed. Indeed, his subjects were growing rich from the exorbitant sums paid by Diyo for those silly oysters.

“Five years later, Diyo suddenly stopped paying tribute. The granaries of Keos were empty because the people of Keos had not been farming for several years. While the population of Keos starved, the army of Diyo swept across the border and conquered it easily. The King of Keos hung himself in shame before the army of Diyo breached the capital.”

“This is a tale of the dangers of pride and arrogance, of dependence on a source of food you do not control,” mused Ra Olu.

“I think Lurusén was using the tale to argue that the King of Cocru had been lured into a sense of complacency while Xana plotted Cocru’s downfall,” said Lady Lon. “That last line is also a veiled dig at Xana, for it was popular among the core islands at the time to describe Xana peasants, who often suffered famine, as plagues of locusts.”

“Keep your silos filled and sealed… plagues the wind may bring…,” Ra Olu muttered to himself as he pondered the poem’s many layers. A vague idea was starting to form in his head. “Lon, did you ever share your interpretation with anyone in the Imperial household?”

“Now that you mention it, I do remember discussing the poem with both the emperor and the empress when we visited Pan years ago. Both of them were enthusiasts for Lurusén’s work and seemed to delight in novel interpretations.”

Ra Olu nodded. “I think I know what the empress really meant.”

He explained his theory to her.

Lady Lon looked at him. “Do you mean to do as she asks?”

Ra Olu locked gazes with her. “You and I have both done what we could not just to survive, but to live up to the ideals of the Moralist scholar who, even when captured by the enemy, never stops serving his true lord.”

Lady Lon sighed. “And the empress obviously intended this message for you, as only you and I could have understood it. It’s good to know that all our efforts to sneak coded intelligence to the empress through the pékyu’s letters and other means have not gone unrecognized. If we survive, I’m certain the empress will be grateful.”

Ra Olu shook his head. “Lon, I don’t wish to give you false hope. There is a duty placed on those who have been elevated above the base crowd by studying the words of the Ano sages. Lurusén was willing to die not for the king, but for the people of Cocru.”

“And you mean to emulate him.”

Ra Olu nodded resolutely. “If you renounce me now and seek a Lyucu thane who desires your beauty, it might still be possible for you to save yourself. Love makes us do strange things, Lon, but you need not die for my decision.”

Lady Lon stood still, a frown on her face. “Our love has weathered torture and degradation, but my choice now isn’t guided by blind romance. Lady Zy stood by her husband Lurusén and dove into the Liru River with him not for love, but for a shared ideal. I may not be her equal in talent, yet I do not think I lack her courage. I have read the same Moralist treatises as you, and there is no monopoly on virtue by those who wear the robe as opposed to the dress.”

The two embraced and said no more.

With the cooling weather came the time for the High-Autumn Festival.

As the Lyucu invasion of the Big Island was imminent, security in Rui and Dasu was even tighter than usual. Local families were told to stay indoors after dark, after completing chores assigned by the Lyucu foremen, and even the traditional celebrations and banquets were canceled.

Ra Olu went to Pékyu Tenryo and asked for an exemption. “It’s not a good idea to press the people too hard. If you allow some private celebrations, the people will be thankful for your generosity, and later, when many of the Lyucu warriors must leave with you to conquer the Big Island, they’ll be less likely to make trouble.”

“Large gatherings in public are always dangerous. They’ll whisper to each other, and troublemakers will spread rumors. Besides, such celebrations take time away from their work for us.”

“We can prevent that while still giving the people something to celebrate. It’s our custom for families and neighbors to share a banquet of moonbread on the night of the High-Autumn Festival. If we gather a small number of people to prepare the bread ahead of time under your watch, the rest of the people can keep on working for your benefit. We can then have the bread distributed to each family so that they can celebrate privately on the night of the festival. This will prevent the spread of rumors, avoid wasteful sloth, and still mark the occasion as festive.”

Pékyu Tenryo thought about the proposal and granted it. Ra Olu was always so good at coming up ways to guide these Dara sheep.

And so, as Lyucu warriors watched over the proceedings, Ra Olu and Lady Lon gathered the deci-chiefs of the various families of Rui and Dasu into Kriphi and turned them into a moonbread factory. The dough biscuits were packed with different flavored fillings—lotus seeds, taro paste, candied monkeyberries, chopped seaweed, diced bamboo shoots, and many others—as well as small slips of paper bearing simple phrases spelled out in zyndari letters. The Lyucu guards examined the slips of paper and had multiple collaborating scholars translate them to be sure they contained nothing suspicious.

All the slips contained only stock phrases wishing for good luck or clumsy attempts at praising the Great Pékyu. The Lyucu warriors laughed and shook their heads—these people truly were silly and natural-born slaves.

After the biscuits were done baking, the deci-chiefs took them back to their villages to distribute to the families under their charge. The Lyucu guards, curious about the taste of the moonbread, wanted to save some for themselves. But Ra Olu presented them with a special batch.

“Honorable Masters, these are for you to enjoy. My wife and I personally oversaw their preparation to be sure that no brazen peasant dared to spit in them or to spoil them in some other way,” Ra Olu said.

“And I took out the slips of paper,” said Lady Lon. “If you aren’t used to eating moonbread, you might get them stuck in your throat.”

“If all the savages were as thoughtful and obedient as you,” one of the Lyucu thanes said, spitting bits of bread and filling in Ra Olu’s face as he munched and talked, “we’d have many fewer problems.”

Ra Olu didn’t even bother to wipe away the spittle as he kept on smiling. “Your Honor is absolutely correct.”

When the village families broke open the biscuits on the night of the High-Autumn Festival, they saw to their surprise that in addition to the inked messages on the front of the slips of paper, some of the blank backs of the paper slips were also filled with brown letters. Lady Lon had painstakingly written these messages using an eyebrow brush and fruit juice ink, which remained invisible until the heat of baking caramelized the sugar in the juices.

Families gathered around these slips of paper to read silently, and then they swallowed the slips.

The promised invasion of the Big Island was going to commence in another six days. Airships intensified their patrolling of the sea lanes south of Rui and Dasu to prevent another sneak attack by underwater boats like the one that had allowed Than Carucono’s forces to gain a foothold on Rui back in the spring.

No one was watching the sea north of Rui and Dasu. After all, the captured Dara soldiers had, after much torture, confessed that they had never heard of any underwater volcano routes north of the islands.

But to the north of the islands, a small flotilla stealthily crept closer. These ships had set out from Wolf’s Paw a month earlier, heading straight north until they were far out of sight of the usual shipping lanes. Then they had turned west until they were north of Rui and Dasu. The flotilla consisted of modified merchant vessels with large holds and carried little weaponry.

Their mission might be war, but they weren’t warships.

Puma Yemu, master of sneak attacks and stealthy raids, had organized this mission. With funds from the marshal, he had gone to Wolf’s Paw to buy merchant vessels and recruit desperadoes willing to do anything for hard cash. The cargo the ships carried would make anyone blanch.

Because Puma needed absolute secrecy, only when the ships were at sea did he reveal to his crew what they were carrying, and more than a dozen had thrown up immediately, and a few had even dived into the sea to avoid having to live with the ship’s cargo for a month.

“Get dressed,” Puma Yemu ordered. The moment of truth had arrived.

He lowered the fine wire mesh from on top of his helmet to drape around his face. Like a beekeeper’s veil, the mesh protected his face and neck. His hands and feet were wrapped in strips of linen to prevent the exposure of any skin. A heavy canvas smock and thick leggings covered the rest of his body. The crew of the rest of the fleet were similarly dressed and lowered their protective veils as well.

“Release!”

The instruction was passed to the other ships by flag signal. Sailors held their breath as they pried open the heavy cargo doors with long bamboo poles. Then they dove to the deck and lay with their bodies curled up to make themselves as unexposed as possible.

Dark clouds emerged from the cargo holds, buzzing like an angry swarm of bees. However, the insects that made up the swarms were not bees, but locusts, each twice the size of a grown man’s finger.

For weeks, they had been swarming inside the hold, feasting on the grain that the crew dumped into the hold via sieved openings daily as well as the bodies of their dead insectile comrades. They bred and multiplied in the darkness, shoving against each other, crawling over each other, making the ships hum as though they were alive.

Prime Minister Cogo Yelu had carefully bred those locusts from the eggs left behind by the destroyed swarms in Géfica. These were the largest, strongest locusts Dara had to offer, and they were hungry, very hungry.

The locusts, freed from their hold, scented the air and detected the presence of land nearby. Land, and vegetation. The swarms rose from the ships, joined together, and, like a dark thundercloud, headed south toward the fields of Rui and Dasu.

The plague of locusts descended upon Rui and Dasu like a typhoon.

Chittering, rasping, rustling, rumbling, the locusts devoured everything in their path. They swarmed over the fields—red, green, gold—and drained them of all color and shape save the tan of bare soil and skeletal, bare branches stripped of all leaves. Rice, wheat, sorghum, taro, sugarcane, grass, weed—everything was ground up by millions of mandibles and then disappeared into millions of winged stomachs.

The Lyucu warriors tried to fight the locusts at first, but what could war clubs and axes do against a beast with innumerable heads? The garinafins tried to make a stand against the storm with fire breath, but even with thousands of locusts fried in each flame wave, more kept coming. Trying to fight the locusts was like trying to fight the sea itself.

Eventually, skin blistered and blood oozing, the Lyucu warriors had to retreat into their tents and seal the flaps while the Dara peasants cowered in basements. The two islands became the domain of insects, as long-haired cattle stampeded and garinafins took off.

Overhead, flocks of birds circled in wide, placid circles as if observing a surging sea that had nothing to do with them.

On the third day, after the locusts had swept over the entire island and denuded it of all vegetation, after they had turned on each other to fill their insatiable appetites, only then did the birds finally dive down and begin the process of cleansing the islands of the insectoid plague.

Afterward, as the dazed Lyucu warriors and Dara peasants emerged from their hiding places, they saw a wasted world in which all the crop fields and grazing pastures had turned into a lifeless desert.

For some reason, while the granaries in many of the villages had been sealed tightly ahead of time and preserved their contents against the plague, the haylofts and sheds where feed for the long-haired cattle and garinafin were stored had been left open, and the locusts had mercilessly devoured the entire supply of feed for Lyucu beasts of war.

The villagers nodded at each other, finally understanding the message that had come to them in the moonbread: Seal up your granaries with wax and clay.

A few deci-chiefs, terrified of the consequences, revealed the truth to Pékyu Tenryo. Soon, the heads of Lady Lon and Minister Ra Olu hung from the gates of Kriphi, a warning for any who dared to engage in sabotage against the Lyucu.

“They think they would starve us with this trick,” said Pékyu Tenryo, his hands shaking from anger. “I will show them what starvation truly means.”

The order was given that the granaries would be opened so that the stored rice, sorghum, and wheat would be given to the garinafins and long-haired cattle as feed.

“What will we eat?” asked one of the village elders.

“You are skilled at digging food out of dirt,” said Pékyu Tenryo. “So dig harder.”

“You’re sentencing us to death then,” said the elder. “There’s no time for planting another crop before the winter.”

“In that case, I see plenty of pigs with two legs walking around,” said Pékyu Tenryo. “I think they make excellent food. You could learn to diversify your diet.”

The villagers, once they understood what the pékyu had in mind, howled with rage and despair and rushed at the guards who had come to seize the granaries. But a few more swipes of the flaming breath of the garinafins soon quelled the nascent rebellion. The villagers stood by and watched mutely as the granaries were emptied and the garinafins and long-haired cattle feasted upon the food that was meant to supply the villages over the winter.

The invasion schedule would be kept. The Lyucu would not back down from a promise made.

But then, something odd happened. The long-haired cattle fell upon the ground, groaning and foaming at the mouth, their legs twitching wildly. Many of the garinafins fell down as well, and their excrement was a thick slush and smelled foul.

“How have they been poisoned?” demanded the pékyu. Since no deci-chief would admit to the plot, the pékyu forced them to eat the grain that had been fed to the garinafins. But nothing happened to them.

“I’ve heard that to get the juiciest beef, you need to feed the cattle grains,” said Théra.

The other ranch hands on her grandmother’s estate had accepted the new girl as one of them, and they shared bitter chicory root brew around the fire as Théra sought to understand more about their business.

“That is true. Grain-fed cattle fatten faster.”

“Why aren’t we feeding our cattle grains then?” asked Théra.

“Lady Lu is a shrewd businesswoman,” said one of the ranch hands, an old man everyone respectfully called Old Maza. “Grass-fed cattle has a different taste. When everyone feeds their cattle grain, the unique taste of her cattle commands a better price.”

“Oh.” Théra nodded. She wasn’t surprised that her grandmother liked to do things differently—after all, her mother’s stubbornness had to come from somewhere. “Sometimes I see the cattle looking at the granary hungrily. Is it a big deal to feed them some grain once in a while, especially on rainy days? Surely grains taste much better than hay.”

The ranch hands laughed uproariously, leaving Théra confused as to the source of their mirth. Eventually, Old Maza managed to hold back his laughter and tried to explain. “Girl, a cow’s stomach is a delicate thing. Do you know why they chew cud?”

Théra shook her head.

“It’s because grass is tough to digest. The cow has to let that sit in her stomach and ferment a bit, and then regurgitate and chew it some more. The inside of a cow’s stomach is a complicated world, and even ranchers who have been doing this for generations can’t explain how everything works. We do know that if you want to feed a cow grains, you’ve got to start to do it when they’re young. If you wait till their stomachs have grown used to grass and then switch to grain all of a sudden, the cattle will get sick and can even die.”

Théra nodded, thinking about the distant invaders from the north. They didn’t tend the fields and had no knowledge of grains. To them, surely the grains seemed like just another kind of vegetation, and if grass weren’t available, wouldn’t they turn to grains meant for people as a substitute?

Pékyu Tenryo ordered work gangs composed of the peasantry of Rui and Dasu into the mountains to cut down any vegetation that had survived the locust swarm due to their elevation. Given this tougher food that more resembled their natural diet, some of the garinafins who hadn’t eaten too many grains recovered relatively quickly. However, it would take longer for the others. Pékyu Tenryo gathered the sick garinafins into one place so that they could be tended to and guarded from further sabotage by the villagers.

“Should we postpone the invasion until they recover?” asked Tanvanaki.

“No,” said Pékyu Tenryo. “Our warriors already think the crafty barbarians of Dara have succeeded in their plot. The longer we delay, the lower our morale.”

“It seems risky to attack without our full strength,” said Tanvanaki.

“Considering the empress has no air force to speak of, we have more than enough healthy garinafins to attack the Big Island on schedule and overcome whatever resistance she can muster. And we can always send the rest later as reinforcements when they recover.”

“Thank Péa-Kiji then that the thanes had the presence of mind to seal the underground cellars where the younglings are kept when the locusts struck, and we still have control over the garinafins.”

Emperor Ragin paced in his prison cell.

The announcement of Pékyu Tenryo’s invasion plan had jolted him, though not shocked him. He realized that he had been hoping for a miracle, even though he had not admitted it to himself.

He had been fighting for decades for an ideal, an ideal of a Dara that was more just, more fair to the common people, that balanced conflicting interests and allowed more men and women of talent to succeed. But in the end, what had he accomplished? More blood was being spilled, more people were dying because he had not planned for everything, had not foreseen everything that could go wrong.

Timu’s betrayal had shocked him, but he could not fully blame the child for his error. How could Timu understand the full extent to which he was being taken advantage of by the Lyucu? Stuffed full of bookish ideals and rebellious anger, the young prince believed in a vision where justice could be achieved by sleeping with the enemy, where the wolf would lie down with the lamb.

He should have been more of a father to the child, but it was too late now.

He could imagine the confusion on the Big Island, now that Timu had become the puppet emperor of the pékyu—all those unsatisfied with the existing distribution of power in Dara would seize upon the occasion as an opportunity for rearrangement, for shuffling the deck to gain a better hand. He did not envy the difficult task Jia faced.

As long as he was alive, they could use his “abdication” as a way to legitimate Timu’s claim. Yet if he died now, in obscurity, the Lyucu would be able to continue to lie, with his ghost as a rallying flag. He had to try to give Jia and the others a chance.

The pékyu was a calculating man, Kuni knew, not too different from himself. He tried to imagine himself in the pékyu’s place. What would I do?

Timu is too valuable a prop to be risked, yet the fleet also needs another high-profile hostage for some battlefield theater.

He recalled a talk he had had with Jia over the dangers of battlefield injuries and what could be done to save the wounded. He closed his eyes. It was time to put that knowledge into use.

He looked and found a rusty nail in one of the window frames. He took off his left shoe and sock, and scraped the skin against the rusty nail until he had made a deep gash. He grimaced against the pain and replaced the sock and shoe.

Now he had to wait, and hope that he would be given a chance.

Twenty garinafins were deemed healthy enough to go to war. Pékyu Tenryo packed them onto eight city-ships along with three thousand Lyucu warriors. The rest would stay behind to guard Rui and Dasu with the help of surrendered Dara soldiers. Timu, or “Emperor Thaké,” was nominally left in charge, but everyone, perhaps even Timu himself, understood that he was a mere figurehead.

A few of the airships captured from Emperor Ragin would accompany the fleet to act as scouts against surprise attacks by mechanical crubens while the rest would be left behind to defend Rui and Dasu.

On the morning of the day specified in the ultimatum, the fleet of city-ships and smaller escort vessels left Kriphi and sailed for the Big Island. The elders of Rui and Dasu recalled the launches of similar invasion fleets from the Xana home islands decades ago as Emperor Mapidéré and then Emperor Ragin had sailed this same course to the Throne of Dara. Pékyu Tenryo and Emperor Thaké would follow the success of their illustrious predecessors.

The invasion of the Big Island had begun.

^{CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT} DREAM OF THE DANDELION

The few airships that accompanied the Lyucu fleet sailed ahead and to the side of the ships, and lookouts intently gazed at the surface below, trying to spot the approach of any mechanical crubens. The fleet took a course that avoided the known underwater volcanoes, but Pékyu Tenryo wasn’t going to take any chances.

As further insurance against a sneak attack, the flagship of the pékyu, Pride of Ukyu, displayed a bright red banner charged with the figure of a leaping blue cruben. This was the Imperial standard, and Pékyu Tenryo wanted to make sure that any Dara ship that dared to attack knew that they endangered the Emperor of Dara.

Empress Jia ordered Prince Phyro to stay in Pan with Consort Risana over his strenuous objections.

“I should be at the front, fighting!”

“You’re your father’s only heir after Timu’s error. Your safety is paramount because you must preserve the Imperial line, and, should the marshal and I fail, become the hope of an occupied Dara.”

“And avenge you.”

“No! Never let your love for your family become a hindrance to your duty to the well-being of the people. Vengeance should never be your goal, only freedom.”

She turned to Consort Risana and Prime Minister Cogo Yelu. “If… the gods decide that I should not return, the House of Dandelion is in your hands.”

Risana and Cogo both bowed.

“I am your loyal servant.”

“Be well, Big Sister.”

Near Ginpen, on the shore of the Zathin Gulf, Empress Jia had constructed an observation platform. This was a dais about two hundred feet on each side and about a hundred feet tall. Jia sat on top in a throne carved with leaping dyrans. Around her, the top of the dais was piled with firewood soaked in oil.

Should their stand here today fail, she intended to immolate herself in a final gesture of defiance.

Jia turned to Gin Mazoti, who stood at her side. “How do you like your new sword, Marshal?”

With some effort, Gin unsheathed Na-aroénna, the Doubt-Ender, and held it aloft with both hands. “Still getting used to it.”

“As your soldiers are still getting used to our new weapons?”

Gin nodded. “Their courage is admirable. But untested weapons can’t be trusted.”

“I will stay here and pray for your success. Do you have any doubt?”

“I always have doubt,” said Gin. “And courage, as the Hegemon proved, is not all.”

“That’s an improvement from before, then,” said Jia. “You once told me you had no doubt that we had to yield.”

Gin grinned at this. “May this sword live up to its name.”

“What happened to that confident general who once told my husband that she could conquer Rui with only a thousand men?”

The marshal smiled wistfully. “Experience humbles.”

Jia nodded and looked solemnly at her. “I love my husband with all my heart. I know he would be willing to die for Dara, and the same is true of my son. Do you understand?”

“In the case of Prince Timu,” said Gin, “I’m not sure you’re right.”

Jia looked away. “Sometimes the weak need help to be strong, to do what they should do.”

Gin felt a chill down her spine.

“I love my son,” the empress continued. “But evil must be confronted.”

The marshal gazed at the empress and, after a while, nodded.

As the Lyucu fleet approached the shore of the Big Island, Pékyu Tenryo was growing more confident by the moment.

He was going to land his army at Ginpen, sweep over land like a bolt of lightning on the backs of the garinafins, and bring Pan to her knees in a single, swift strike. Without any kind of effective airpower, the walled cities of Dara could not withstand the might of the garinafins. After all, could the marshal plant her flamethrowers everywhere?

Gazing out over the last mile or so of water that divided his fleet from land, Pékyu Tenryo let out a held breath. No Dara navy sailed from the port of Ginpen to meet his fleet; no army of Dara was lined up onshore to meet his invasion force; and there were no signs of the fabled giant war machines that Ginpen had once been famous for, like the Curved Mirrors that could set ships aflame from a distance. Likely the barbarians of Dara realized that such outdated defenses could not survive a garinafin assault.

The walls of Ginpen were bereft of defenders, and lookouts on the airships reported that the city was surprisingly quiet, with all the civilians apparently huddled in their homes. All signs pointed to the conclusion that Empress Jia’s court had completely given up, and the dream of a new Lyucu homeland was at hand. Cudyu would eventually dispatch another fleet and bring more of the Lyucu to come and live in this paradise. Tenryo envisioned the Lyucu warriors living like kings, each supported by a docile herd of Dara farmers.

“I pity you, old man,” said Tenryo to the supine figure of Kuni Garu. “It must be hard to see your victories come to naught, to see your accomplishments swept away by the vicissitudes of fate and the inconstancy of the gods.”

Kuni remained oblivious in his slumber, turning and muttering inaudibly.

“What’s that?” asked Tanvanaki, standing next to the pékyu. The other Lyucu warriors standing on deck began to point and whisper as well.

Pékyu Tenryo followed where his daughter was pointing, and at first, he wasn’t sure what he was looking at: Mounds covered by bushes and beach grass seemed to be expanding, growing, rising, as though some large animals were wriggling underneath, seeking to emerge from their burrows.

“Prepare the garinafin riders,” ordered the pékyu. Perhaps these farmers of Dara had not yet been completely subdued. Even a cornered rabbit would dare to kick and bite at wolves, and he wasn’t going to let victory be snatched from his jaws by overconfidence.

Soldiers dressed in the finest armor of Dara surged onto the beach from hidden caves; ships carrying the bravest sailors of Dara rowed out of the port of Ginpen.

The ballooning mounds erupted, and with a sharp intake of breath, Pékyu Tenryo saw an impossible sight: six brand-new Imperial airships, larger than any they had ever seen, rising into the air.

Where did they get the lift gas?

Once Atharo Ye and Princess Théra discovered that the garinafins were powered by the same lift gas as the gas from manure fermentation used in the marshal’s flamethrowers, Zomi Kidosu came up with a bold plan for creating new airships in secret.

The fermentation gas wasn’t as light as the lift gas from Lake Dako on Mount Kiji, which necessitated design changes. The ships had to be made bigger to achieve the same lift capacities, and the materials used had to be lighter and the crew reduced. In underground caverns and basement workshops, the dedicated warriors and builders of Marshal Mazoti’s volunteer corps toiled to bend and shape bamboo into hoops, struts, and girders, and to sew gasbags from varnished silk.

To reduce weight, the shipwrights reduced the number of internal supports for the bamboo frame, leaving as much space for the gasbags as possible. Some of the bamboo hoops and struts were reinforced with steel as the combination of materials provided more strength than either alone.

To make the most of the weaker lift gas, Atharo Ye designed the airships to have a flattened profile so that they resembled two saucers stacked face-to-face, or the body of a manta ray, rather than the traditional egg-shaped oblong. Although the new hull design was bulkier and less maneuverable, it also generated lift with forward motion, which helped the airships to stay aloft. As rowers sitting at the rim of the flattened hull wielded their massive feathered oars, the semirigid airships pulsated forward like jellyfish swimming through an empyrean sea.

The new Imperial ships were thus structurally weaker than their predecessors and could not weather the unpredictable conditions of long cruises as well; the marshal compensated by disguising the airships under a light covering of sand on the beach, as close to the scene of combat as possible.

The gondolas of the new airships were also shaped oddly. Instead of the sleek, sailing-ship-like profiles of the past, the new gondolas were oval in shape and far bigger, taking up almost a quarter of the bottom surface of the billowing hull and embedding a sizable portion inside the hull as well. Weight reduction was achieved by constructing most of the gondola, except the structural elements, with wicker. The crews had to be as light as possible, too, which meant once again that they were almost all women, mainly veterans of Dara’s old air force and women’s auxiliaries.

But as the gondolas were so light in comparison to the rest of the hull, the flight characteristics of the airships were somewhat unstable. To compensate for this, each of the airships was also equipped with a heavy ballast ball just aft of the gondolas, a large ceramic sphere suspended below the hull like a gigantic, dangling dewdrop hanging from the belly of a grasshopper.

The design seemed strangely inefficient to the shipbuilders—many of them former engineers who had retired to the Big Island to enjoy their golden years after a lifetime of service at Mount Kiji Air Base—but they reasoned that this was perhaps the best Atharo Ye could do given the constrained time frame for modifying the traditional airship design to work with a new lift gas.

The greatest weakness of the fermentation-gas-powered airships, of course, was the flammability of their lift gas. If any of the gasbags sprang a leak, even a spark would cause the entire ship to turn into a fiery bubble. There was not much the marshal could do to reduce the risk, however, as any additional armor for the ship would have increased its weight beyond the power of the weak lift gas. She had to rely on the fortunate happenstance that the Lyucu had not adopted the use of archers, especially not with fire arrows.

For the same reason, the marshal had to eschew equipping the airships with flamethrowers; instead, Mazoti would have to rely on other surprises.

Though the song that the crew of the marshal’s flagship, Silkmotic Arrow, chanted in unison began in the efforts of silk makers to relieve the tedium of long days in the workshops, the wheels the women now spun in the airship generated not threads or yarn, but power, power that would be stored until it was needed.

Hinged doors at the front of the gondolas dropped open as the airships readied themselves in battle configuration.

Oddly, the six airships were not all flying at the same height. Rather, four of the airships—Spirit of Kiji, Heart of Tututika, Resolve of Fithowéo, and Vigor of the Twins, all commanded by trusted captains from the old all-women Dasu air force under Gin Mazoti—hovered in the same plane to form a diamond parallel to the ground. Silkmotic Arrow flew above the diamond while Moji’s Vengeance, commanded by Zomi Kidosu, flew below it.

Silk screens inside the gondolas hid most of the crews of the airships as well as the machinery they operated. Only about six women on each ship were visible from the open door at the front, holding longbows with nocked arrows.

The airships approached the Lyucu fleet as garinafins took off from the city-ships, rising to meet this unexpected challenge. Below them, Lyucu warriors scrambled around a golden canopy on the deck of the pékyu’s flagship, Pride of Ukyu.

“That canopy must be where the pékyu is seated,” said Marshal Mazoti. “Target it.” In truth, she doubted that the crafty Pékyu Tenryo would be so foolish as to make himself such an obvious target. But striking the golden canopy, whatever it was hiding, would certainly enhance the morale of the Dara forces.

Dafiro Miro, who was serving as the marshal’s executive officer, gave a series of quick orders to the rowers to maneuver Silkmotic Arrow slightly forward of the formation, and the archers at the front of the airship pointed the tips of their arrows at the distant golden canopy below.

The Lyucu warriors on the decks below jeered as they saw the few archers crouched at the opening at the front of the airship gondolas. Did the barbarians of Dara really think they would defeat the garinafins and city-ships with a few archers?

“Men of Dara,” the pékyu’s voice boomed from a bone trumpet installed at the top of the main mast. He was speaking from somewhere deep in the ship’s hold, safely hidden from the surface. “Stand down! This is the order of your old emperor!”

As a stunned Marshal Mazoti and the rest of her crew watched, the golden canopy was whipped away to reveal a bed on which lay Kuni Garu, the Emperor of Dara.

Kuni wasn’t moving.

Two of the Lyucu warriors stepped forward and lifted him from the bed, and he groaned as he twisted his face away from the light. The crews of the Imperial airships gasped.

Kuni had kept the injury in his toe hidden from the guards until it had become infected. By the time his rotting wound was finally discovered, the only option was an amputation of his gangrenous foot. But even after severing the limb, his condition did not seem to improve. The doctors the pékyu sent for declared Kuni to be on the verge of death.

Pékyu Tenryo had wanted to use Kuni as his secret weapon. He had suspected that Empress Jia might stage some last act of resistance, and he had planned to bring out his prized prisoner at the right moment as a way to grind down the morale of Dara’s defenders.

Given the condition of the crippled and dying Kuni, the pékyu thought it was no longer necessary to keep him in a bone cage; rather, he left him lying on a bed under a canopy watched over by a few guards.

Even held up, Kuni appeared to remain in a deep and feverish slumber; he didn’t react to the commotion around him.

Confused whispers passed through the crews of Silkmotic Arrow and the other airships. They were glad to see that their emperor was still alive, and most suspected that the pékyu was lying about the emperor’s abdication and his orders to stand down. Nonetheless, the archers lowered their weapons.

“Target the emperor,” Gin Mazoti said, her voice calm and steady.

Dafiro repeated her order and glanced at her. Though the marshal’s voice betrayed no emotion, he could only imagine the turmoil that raged in her heart. Kuni Garu was the man who had lifted her out of obscurity and made her into the greatest general of Dara, but he had also stood by as she was accused of treason and stripped of her title and dignity.

She had once been willing to die for him, and now she was forced to kill him to preserve the fruits of his revolution.

Mazoti took a deep breath. This was a sacrifice that she could not avoid. As long as Kuni remained alive, her forces would not be able to fight freely. There would always be doubt among the soldiers that they were thwarting the emperor’s will. Yet once she gave the order to kill Kuni, she would never be able to free herself from suspicion that she had, indeed, intended to betray him.

It was a price she had to pay to secure victory. To win, she had to give up her name and endure the judgment of history.

Mazoti steeled herself to give the order to fire.

Kuni looked around him, confused.

He was in Pan, the Harmonious City, standing in the middle of the broad expanse of Cruben Square in front of the palace. (How can I be standing, when I’ve lost my foot?) Normally the square was empty, save for children who flew kites in spring and summer and built ice statues in winter. Occasionally an Imperial airship landed in it, and nearby citizens would gather to watch.

But today the square was not empty. He was surrounded by colossal statues of the gods of Dara. The statues, each as tall as the Grand Examination Hall, were made with bronze and iron and painted with bright, lifelike colors.

Kuni remembered that Emperor Mapidéré was said to have wanted to confiscate all the weapons of Dara, all the swords and spears, all the knives and arrows, and melt them down into their constituent metals so that they could be turned into statues honoring the gods. Without weapons, there would be eternal peace in the world.

That vision had never been realized, just like Kuni’s dream of a more just Dara, a Dara where a woman had as much power as a man, where a poor peasant’s daughter from Dasu had as much chance to succeed as a wealthy merchant’s son from Wolf’s Paw, where anyone who had talent would be found and given a place to shine.

The emperor examined the statues more closely. There was something strange about them; they weren’t depicting the gods in their traditional form.

Over Kiji’s shoulders sat both a Mingén falcon and a garinafin; above Kana’s head, her black raven hovered inside a golden globe as bright as the rays of the sun; above Rapa’s head, her white raven floated inside a silver halo like the glow of the moon; Tututika’s carp was swimming next to her in a maze of a thousand streams; Rufizo’s white dove watched over a flock of long-haired cattle and sheep.

But the statues of Fithowéo, Lutho, and Tazu were the strangest of all. The left half of Fithowéo was male while the right half was female. The god of war carried a long, obsidian-tipped spear in the left hand and a bone-handled war club in the right. The statues of Lutho and Tazu, on the other hand, were fused together, as though the gods of calculation and of chance were but two aspects of the same deity.

What has happened? Kuni asked himself. Who has committed such sacrilege?

The statues of the gods and goddesses shifted and came to life.

The emperor was too stunned to move or speak.

“You don’t have much time, Ragin,” said Tututika, her voice at once familiar and strange. Kuni thought he could hear echoes of both the gentle streams of her homeland, the Beautiful Island, as well as something wilder and less predictable, like the flash floods of a distant plain full of scrubs and shrubs.

“Am I about to cross over the River-on-Which-Nothing-Floats?” he asked.

“Yes,” replied Rapa simply, her voice as cold as the icy moon.

“I still have so much to do. Dara is under threat, Lady Rapa!”

“Everyone pleads for more time,” said Kana, her voice as hot as the blazing sun, as impatient as an exploding volcano. “Mapidéré was the same way.”

“The tasks of great heroes are never done,” said Rufizo, the kind shepherd and healer of wounds. He waved his hand and Kuni felt some of his anxiety soothed away.

Kuni felt both pride and sorrow at this. The gods of Dara had declared him a great hero, but he was never going to complete his dream. This was the way of the world, wasn’t it? No matter how carefully you planned things, fate intruded.

“Have I made the right choices?” asked Kuni Garu. “Have I been a grace of kings?” His heart pounded as he waited for the answer from the gods.

“You have lived an interesting life,” said Kiji, whose voice sounded like the beating of wings, both feathered and leather. “You’ve soared as high as a dandelion seed riding the wind above the clouds; you’ve dived as deep as a cruben cruising the currents far beneath the waves.”

“You betrayed reluctantly; you loved passionately; you sacrificed the affections of your children and wives; you were also a good father and husband; you defeated a tyrant; you brought peace to Dara; thousands died because of you; millions more were saved because of you; you tried to balance and accommodate competing interests; you strove to speak for those without a voice and wield power for those without influence,” said Fithowéo, the blind god of war as well as the club maiden for the All-Father. “You know the world isn’t perfect, but you’ve never ceased to believe that it could be perfected.”

“Yet Dara is changing,” said Lutho-Tazu, the trickster duo, wise and cunning, calculating and uncertain. “For all of us, mortal and immortal, change is the only constant. A new era requires new heroes; new pilots must guide Dara through the Wall of Storms.”

Kuni knelt down before the gods. “I submit myself to the judgment of history.”

“Go not gentle into the eternal storm,” all the gods said together.

Kuni opened his eyes.

He had waited for this opportunity since the moment he had scraped that rusty nail into his flesh. He had planned to make himself so ill that the Lyucu would not place him in a cage, so that he would retain the element of surprise. He had wanted to free himself from being used as a bargaining chip by the Lyucu, to be near his loved ones one more time, to deliver a message.

With a sudden surge of power, Kuni pushed away the Lyucu guards holding him up and rolled along the deck until he was right on the edge. He scrambled onto the gunwale and barely stopped himself from tumbling overboard as he swayed on the narrow ledge.

The Lyucu guards shouted but none dared to approach lest Kuni let go and kill himself right in front of their eyes.

The warriors of Dara held their breath, in the air, on the ground, at sea.

It was so quiet. Even the waves seemed to lower their incessant murmur for a moment.

“People of Dara,” Kuni cried out. He was using every ounce of his strength to project, and the speaking tube at the side of the ship, intended to allow the pékyu to issue orders to the rest of the fleet and connected through a system of tubes to the bone trumpet at the top of the main mast, magnified his voice, which the winds carried far and wide.

“I have sinned in my time. I have stood by as innocent men and women died for nonexistent crimes, and I have watched the helpless suffer while I saved my strength for another day. I betrayed a man as dear as my brother in the service of what I believed was a greater good, and I took petty vengeance on those who treated me ill in the past. Too often have I made decisions based on the long view, thinking that immediate sacrifices were acceptable for some ideal on the horizon.”

A wave of vertigo surged through him and he had to pause. He wasn’t sure if he was again standing on top of the wall of Zudi, facing down the Xana army led by Tanno Namen, or perhaps it was later, when he stood against the might of the Hegemon, struggling to see a path to a world beyond slaughter and darkness.

“Though all life is an experiment, there are moments of purity of purpose that demand no justification. Today, Dara is under threat of a dark storm that has no comparison. There is no long view that can justify enslavement and capitulation. When the only alternative is death and servitude, I believe all of us know what must be the right choice.”

It wasn’t possible for fathers to fight all the wars for their children. It was time for the next wave to come to shore, for the next generation to stand up and be counted.

“I name Princess Théra my successor, and Empress Jia shall be her regent until she is ready to take the reins of power. I order all of Dara to resist to the utmost until the invaders have been driven into the sea!”

Kuni was very dizzy now. The exertion had drained the last of his energy. He looked down and seemed to see the figure of Mata Zyndu smiling and waving to him from under the sea, as though he approved of his speech.

“Thank you, brother,” he whispered.

Then he let go; his body plunged into the waves and did not emerge again.

Watching from a hidden observation post located in one of the shoreside caves, Théra, surrounded by a small detachment of palace guards, heard the speech and witnessed the death of her father as the surprised cry of sailors rippled from the pékyu’s flagship.

She stuffed her long sleeves into her mouth and bit down hard to prevent herself from crying out in shock and grief. But she was now the Empress Regnant of Dara, and empresses did not cry.

She wished she had been allowed to ride up in one of the airships. She would wield the new weapons she and Zomi had devised and kill Pékyu Tenryo herself.

^{CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE} BATTLE OF ZATHIN GULF, PART I

The calm before the storm broke.

The Lyucu warriors on the decks of the city-ships banged their clubs and axes against each other, creating thunderous waves of noise. The garinafins reared and dove at the airships as their riders ululated their war cries.

“Archers, fire at will!” Dafiro gave the order, and it was passed to the other airships by flag signal.

Archers crouching at the openings of the airship gondolas let fly their arrows. Most of them fell far short of the target. A few bounced harmlessly off the tough skin of the garinafins.

The garinafin riders laughed. Flamethrowers might have posed a real challenge—though Tanvanaki had taught them some tricks for how to guide the garinafins to deal with them—but it appeared that the only weapons these ships carried were puny arrows. The massive, saucer-shaped airships, gently flexing in the wind, were in reality just soft jellyfish without the ability to sting.

As he watched the arrogant faces on the approaching garinafin riders, Dafiro Miro smiled bitterly. Just as Pékyu Tenryo had repeatedly accomplished his objectives by disguising his true strength, the marshal was now doing the same thing.

On each of the airships, behind the obscuring silk screens, soldiers charged with targeting guided their secret weapons to point at the closing beasts, but none of the captains gave the order to fire. Breaths held, everyone waited for the flag signal to come from Silkmotic Arrow.

“Hold it…,” Gin Mazoti muttered. “Hold it….”

Abruptly, Tanvanaki tapped hard at the back of Korva’s neck, and the great garinafin swept her wings forward and hovered in place. Pékyu Tenryo had suggested that, given her pregnancy, perhaps she could direct the battle from the safety of the deck of one of the city-ships, but Tanvanaki had scoffed at the notion. Her pregnancy wasn’t nearly so advanced as to hinder her freedom of movement, and she did not trust anyone else to lead the garinafins to victory against these wily opponents.

The other garinafins also pulled up and hovered a few body lengths away from the airships. The Imperial airships appeared to be so underarmed that she sensed a trap.

Better test them first.

She waved her hand, and one of the other garinafins approached the formation of Imperial airships cautiously.

“Hold it…,” Gin Mazoti muttered. “Hold it….”

Dafiro Miro’s fists were squeezed so tight that his fingernails cut into the skin of his palms.

The garinafin was within a body length of Silkmotic Arrow now and opened its jaws. The crew behind the silk screens tensed, ready to fire.

But no order came from the marshal.

The crew watched as the open maw of the beast loomed larger, filling the entirety of the view from the opening of the gondola. Death-dealing fire breath would issue forth at any moment.

Still, Gin Mazoti said nothing and made no gesture.

In the secret observation post, Théra pressed her hands against her mouth to prevent herself from screaming as the garinafin almost kissed the airship before swerving away at the last minute without unleashing a tongue of flames.

A volley of arrows shot out as the garinafin raced away.

Tanvanaki let out a held breath. Evidently, the Imperial airships’ anemic armament could be explained by a plan to target the riders rather than the beasts with nigh-impenetrable skin.

However, having observed the Dara proficiency with projectile weapons, the riders were ready for this tactic. All of them now wore armor made from thick layers of hide. Most of the arrows flew wide of the mark due to the powerful swirling currents of air generated by the beast’s massive wings. The few that did strike the riders fell off harmlessly.

The Lyucu riders watching from the other garinafins hovering at a safe distance cheered, and their celebration was joined by the warriors massed below them on the decks of the city-ships. Though the vaunted Marshal of Dara had somehow managed to find another source of lift gas, she still couldn’t come up with an effective tactic against the garinafins. A Lyucu victory was assured.

“What is the marshal thinking?” muttered an anxious Théra.

Above her, in Moji’s Vengeance, the anxious crew whispered to each other.

“Why aren’t we firing?”

“What is the marshal doing?”

Zomi Kidosu, the captain, stayed calm and assured them, “The element of surprise will be with the Imperial airships but briefly. The marshal has to make sure that as many of the garinafins are within range as possible before she reveals her weapon. She’s willing to sacrifice her ship if that’s what it takes to maintain that fleeting advantage.

“We must wait for her orders.”

In truth, Zomi Kidosu was only half right. As she looked into the open jaws of the garinafin, Gin Mazoti gambled.

After Dafiro Miro returned from Tan Adü and showed Zomi Kidosu and the other scholars the fire rod of the Adüans, they finally understood a mysterious anatomical feature of the garinafin.

The dentition of the garinafin was generally in line with what one would expect of an herbivore. The six incisors were long and shaped like cleavers to break and chop tough grass and shrubs, and the thirty-two premolars and molars were ridged, flat, and clearly designed for grinding down the fibrous diet.

Even the ferocious upper canines were not too surprising to the anatomists. Many herbivores, such as the sludge-horse of Crescent Island, which grazed on aquatic plants, had fearsome, oversized canines for defense and territorial combat. It was conceivable the garinafin canines served similar purposes, given that the garinafins could not always summon fire breath, especially when they didn’t have enough fermented gas stored up in internal sacs.

But it was the lower canines that truly baffled Zomi, Çami, Mécodé, and other scholars. If the upper canines of the garinafin reminded observers of giant daggers, then the lower canines most closely resembled scabbards. Shaped as hollow tubes, each was perfectly fitted to its upper mate, and a slit at the bottom of the tooth, near where it emerged from the gum, allowed liquid accumulated within the tooth to drain. This seemed a design destined to trap food particles and lead to tooth decay.

Indeed, the problem seemed evident to everyone who noticed that each of the upper canines showed small holes near the tip. If the beasts slept with their upper canines sheathed within the lower teeth, and bits of food and saliva were trapped at the bottom, decay would naturally start at the tips of the canines and create the pattern of honeycombed holes the scholars observed.

But with the model provided by the Tan Adü fire rods, the scholars finally realized that the unique garinafin canine teeth were actually fire starters.

Bits of dried grass became stuck in the holes in the upper canines and acted as kindling. When a garinafin wished to breathe fire, it pushed its tongue forward to plug up the drainage slit in the bottom canines, forming an airtight seal. As the garinafin snapped its jaws shut, the force and speed of the upper canines plunging into the lower canines compressed the air trapped inside the hollowed teeth, just as the fire rods of the Adüans crushed the air trapped inside their bamboo tubes.

The result was extreme heat that set fire to the tinder in the tips of the canines. When the garinafin opened its mouth and expelled a mixture of exhalation from its lungs and the flammable fermented gas from its internal sacs, the stream was lit, and that was the secret of the garinafin’s fire breath. This explained why, as Zomi Kidosu and the others had often noted, the garinafins always snapped their jaws shut right before breathing fire.

Onboard Silkmotic Arrow, as the probing garinafin dove at the airship, Gin Mazoti had noticed that the nostrils of the approaching garinafin weren’t flared, indicating that it wasn’t taking a deep breath in preparation for fire breathing. What’s more, while the garinafin had its jaws open, they weren’t opened as wide as they’d be if it was planning to snap them shut with maximum force to generate a big spark.

In other words, all signs indicated that it was only bluffing. A test.

The marshal had certainly been gambling, but it was a calculated risk, the kind that Luan Zya and Kuni Garu both would have approved of. After all, as she wrote in her strategy book, knowing the enemy was more than half the battle.

Having ascertained that the Imperial airships really were as inept as they appeared, the garinafins moved in for the kill, confident that they could dispatch these impressive-looking but useless giants with ease. The Lyucu warriors whipped the Dara peasants who manned the city-ships’ oars to urge them to work harder so that they could get to the shore faster for the storming of Ginpen.

The Dara navy that had emerged from the port of Ginpen moved to intercept. The marshal’s plan was to hold the garinafins back with her airships and to prevent the Lyucu fleet from landing, giving the nimble Dara navy a chance to do as much damage to the massive city-ships as possible. The success of the plan, of course, depended entirely on the air battle overhead.

Twenty jaws opened wide as the garinafins approached the airships, their wings beating slowly and deliberately to conserve strength.

“Hold it….”

Gin Mazoti’s eyes were cold and steady. She put her hands on the handle of Na-aroénna, which was so heavy that it had to be held in a dedicated harness in the gondola. She missed her old sword, with which Kuni Garu had once slain a giant white python.

Could I repeat the feat of the emperor today and slay the great beasts?

She could feel the power of the machinery hidden out of sight behind her, a force that tingled her spine and made her hair stand on end.

With a grunt, she drew the Doubt-Ender from its scabbard and raised it overhead. “Box Formation, now!”

Dafiro Miro leapt to a nearby gong and struck it loudly three times to transmit the order to the rest of the crew throughout the gondola and the hull overhead, and signaling officers passed the same order to the other ships by flag signal.

Women and men aboard all the airships scrambled over the complicated internal skeleton of the massive hull, ducking beneath billowing lift gasbags to adjust rigging, turn levers, spin wheels, and perform the intricate choreography needed to operate the hidden machinery that revealed the true design of the airships.

Coordinated by a fresh round of spinning shanties, soldiers strained and pushed against the spokes of giant winches to wind thick silk cords. Slowly, the giant ceramic ballast balls hanging right aft the gondolas started to shift, changing the center of gravity of each of the airships, pitching and rolling them in midair.

Spirit of Kiji, Heart of Tututika, Resolve of Fithowéo, and Vigor of the Twins—the four airships flying in diamond formation in the middle—shifted their ballast balls aft, tilting up the prows of the ships until they were standing on their ends. Rowers on the four ships worked their feathered oars furiously until the four airships backed into each other to form a box, presenting their now-vertical gondolas to the outside like miniature castles built halfway up sheer, floating cliffs of billowing silk.

Moji’s Vengeance, flying below them, rose higher until its top touched the bottom edges of the floating walls to form the floor of the box.

Silkmotic Arrow, up at the top, went through an even more amazing transformation. The ballast ball was shifted until the ship had completely rolled over so that the ballast ball dangled from what used to be the upper surface of the ship, and the gondola was perched at the top. As the ship rolled, Marshal Mazoti and all the other members of the crew in the gondola moved with the tilting floor and walls until they were standing on what used to be the ceiling. Then Silkmotic Arrow slowly descended until its billowing hull joined the other ships to form the top of the box.

Rowers in all the airships retracted their feathered oars, which were foldable and collapsible to facilitate storage. More crew members at the rims of the saucer-shaped hulls tossed rigging across gaps to lash the ships together.

The six airships now formed a floating fortress with six gondolas pointing in every direction. This structure remedied one of the greatest weaknesses of the airships: their vulnerability to attacks from above and below, which had been taken advantage of by the highly maneuverable garinafin riders during Kuni Garu’s invasion of Rui.

Then the floors of the gondolas popped off.

The Lyucu warriors on the city-ships below expected the crew of the airships to tumble out of the gondolas. However, they were disappointed because the gondolas on these airships were never designed to be anything more than decorative. Their sole function had been to conceal.

In place of the unassuming gondolas and their puny human archers, massive crossbows that spanned the width of the entire gondola now pointed at the oncoming garinafins. The crossbows were made from a composite of layers of wood, horn, and sinew, and the strings were thick strands of twisted silk. The bows were so strong that they could only be drawn with a system of wheels, gears, and pulleys, and this was the mechanism the crews had been operating as they spun the wheels earlier while chanting.

The bolts the crossbows fired were each fifty feet long, made from the massive bamboo canes found in the cloud-fed groves of Mount Fithowéo. The foot-wide arrowheads were fashioned from thousand-hammered steel, and they glinted in the bright sunlight like the scales of a cruben. These were the airships’ true teeth and claws, not the feeble arrows they had shot earlier as a distraction.

The crossbows were mounted on a mechanism that allowed them to be aimed in any direction.

Each of the gondolas had disguised a single large, circular platform suspended from an arched beam attached to the endpoints of a horizontal pole running through the center of the platform so that the platform was free to tilt up and down. A clever system of pulleys and ropes ensured that the platform always remained parallel to the ground no matter how the airships rolled or pitched.

Upon each circular platform rested a giant horizontal spoked wheel free to rotate about the central axis, and it was on this wheel that the crossbows were mounted. Some of the crew stood on the wheel to load the bolts and draw the string; others stood at the rim, ready to rotate the spoked wheel so that the crossbow could be pointed in any direction in the plane; still others stood inside the hull, ready to operate the pulleys to tilt the platform and alter the crossbow’s elevation.

The garinafin riders, seeing this floating fortress reveal its secret, felt a momentary chill in their hearts.

However, Tanvanaki hesitated only a second before deciding against calling off the assault. To be sure, the bolts looked powerful, but even if they penetrated the leather and muscle of the garinafins, they would hardly be fatal unless they managed to strike the heart of the beasts—no easy feat given their speed in flight and the toughness of the animals’ rib cages. Considering that the airships had time for only one volley before the garinafins were in range with their fire breath, and that the garinafins outnumbered the airships by more than three to one, the odds were decidedly against the Imperials.

However, she did tap the back of Korva’s neck lightly, telling her to slow down. Placing her bone speaking tube against the spine of the garinafin, she issued a series of commands, which Korva related to the other garinafins via a series of moans and bellows.

As the garinafins approached, they divided into separate squads and swerved, heading for positions to the left, right, above and below the floating fortress. Tanvanaki was hoping that this aerial dance by the nimble garinafins would confuse and distract the crew members in charge of targeting the gigantic bolts.

But Mazoti was prepared for this. She gave the order, “Firing pattern one!” Dafiro Miro struck the gong twice in quick succession to pass the order to the other ships.

Platforms tilted, wheels spun, and every airship was now targeting a garinafin to the left of the target spotter: This minimized the chances of multiple bolts being wasted on a single garinafin and decreased the possibility of friendly fire.

With a loud twang, five long bamboo bolts blasted from the airships, heading for five garinafins. Only Vigor of the Twins, which was facing south, did not acquire a target as the garinafins did not completely surround the floating fortress.

Though the garinafin riders expected the bolts to do some damage, the ease with which they plunged into the tough garinafin hide and tore through thick bundles of muscle was shocking. This was the result of yet another small refinement in the construction of the arrowheads: They were diamond-tipped. Empress Jia had emptied the Imperial Treasury in Pan to supply the marshal’s workshops with enough diamonds to construct these bolts, each as expensive as a baron’s castle.

Time seemed to slow down.

As the bolts ripped through the bodies of the garinafins, they quickly lost energy and decelerated. The garinafins howled in pain and shuddered, their motions jerky and the riders on their backs hanging on for dear life.

But as Tanvanaki had gambled, though the bolts injured the garinafins, none of them managed to pierce the heart of a garinafin, and the wounds would not be fatal. The struck garinafins just had to curl their long serpentine necks around to pull the bolts out with their teeth.

The bolts, having now lost most of their momentum, stopped penetrating any farther into the massive beasts. The bamboo shafts flexed and something seemed to break inside them.

At that moment, the struck garinafins felt a deep, powerful jolt inside their bodies, as though some giant hand had reached in, seized their innards, and given a forceful tug. It left them with a strange sensation: not quite cold, not quite pain, but a sort of spreading numbness.

Muffled explosions.

Each of the struck garinafins seemed to bulge just slightly. The garinafins looked at their companions helplessly, their wings slowing down.

“What’s wrong?” shouted Tanvanaki. But the riders on the struck garinafins looked confused. Their mounts were no longer obeying their orders, but flapped their wings laboriously and convulsively, panic evident in their dark, pupilless eyes.

And then, just like that, the five struck garinafins exploded, turning into five burning, bloody clouds—flesh, bone, leather, viscera, gore rained down upon the stunned Lyucu warriors gazing up at this fantastical display.

Théra was the first of the observers to jump up in joy as the sky turned red with the fire of the dying garinafins, and a faint mist of blood rained down around them.

“Your Highness, stay down!” one of the palace guards warned. “We don’t want them to pay attention to you, especially not now, given your—”

Before he could finish or Théra could answer, the deafening cheers of the defenders on the beach washed over them like a wave.

The great bamboo bolts were the creation of Miza Crun, the street magician and itinerant healer of Boama.

Each of the hollow bamboo shafts held an Ogé jar inside, just behind the diamond-enhanced tip. Made of the thinnest glass coated with silver inside and out, the jars were intended to present the largest possible channeling surfaces to hold silkmotic power.

To imbue the embedded Ogé jars with as much silkmotic force as possible, Miza Crun designed a massive silkmotic generator whose centerpiece was a disk of glass about ten feet across—this was probably the largest piece of glass ever created in the history of Dara, and the best glassworkers of the Islands had to make multiple attempts and deal with many cracked and broken prototypes before succeeding. The disk was fixed upon an axis of ironwood and spun by a system of belts and gears powered by windmills. Rubbers made of thick layers of silk wound tightly were then pressed against the glass to generate the silkmotic force, which was channeled by thick silver chains into the Ogé jars.

Once the bolts penetrated the thick bodies of the garinafins, the bamboo bolts flexed and bent until the Ogé jars broke, causing the silkmotic force to discharge.

Tests done by Miza Crun showed that the jolt from the discharge of one of these large Ogé jars was sufficient to stop the heart of a small animal. However, unless the bolt managed to embed itself in the heart of the great garinafin, killing by silkmotic arrow alone was at best a low-probability event. Not the sort of gamble that the marshal would take.

But Zomi Kidosu, with the help of Miza Crun, had come up with an enhancement to the silkmotic arrows.

Right behind the Ogé jar in each bolt, the hollow cane of the bamboo was packed with firework powder. One of the most visually impressive effects of a silkmotic discharge was the lightning-like spark it generated. This spark, the two engineers realized, could be used to set off an explosion.

The use of firework powder bombs wasn’t unknown in the annals of Dara warfare. Torulu Pering, for example, had devised floating lanterns packed with explosives and coated with tar that would stick to the hulls of airships, where they were set off by a slow-burning fuse. Other scholars had proposed adopting the design against the garinafins, but multiple difficulties aborted this plan. A tar-based attachment bomb was useless as explosions on the skin of the beasts would only cause superficial damage. A slow-burning fuse attached to a deep-penetrating bolt, on the other hand, would give the garinafin enough time to pull the shaft out.

But the silkmotic spark was the perfect trigger. Not only would the discharge shock the garinafin, temporarily paralyzing it, but it happened at the precise moment when the bomb was deeply embedded inside the garinafin.

Even so, it was hard to imagine a bamboo cane could be packed with enough firework powder to cause fatal injury. However, Atharo Ye, by now one of Dara’s foremost authorities on garinafin anatomy, devised yet another way to enhance the destructive power of the silkmotic bolts.

The garinafins, he pointed out, were simply thick layers of flesh wrapped around flammable bags of fermented gas. If the explosion caused by the discharge of the Ogé jar could be channeled to the gas sacs…

That was why the silkmotic arrows were also made with hollow tips and packed with thin nails that, upon the explosion of the firework powder, would burrow hundreds of channels into the viscera of the struck garinafin, maximizing the chance that one of the internal gas sacs would be breached to begin a chain reaction of fiery explosions inside their bodies.

The marshal had expressed great admiration for the ingenuity of Théra’s engineering team.

“Zomi deserves most of the credit,” the princess said.

“How did you come up with such inventive weapons in such a short time?” asked the marshal.

“Necessity,” said Zomi. Then she added, by way of explanation, “Engineering is a lot like the evolution of Ano logograms. We put existing components together to achieve a new purpose, recycle old ideas to express something new.”

“That sounds like the sentiments of an old friend,” said Gin.

Zomi nodded as they both thought about Luan Zyaji, who had taught Zomi to see the beauty of both engineering and Classical Ano in these terms.

“I know he would be very proud of you,” said Gin.

“And he would admire what you’ve done,” said Zomi. “Just as we’ve assembled a collection of odds and ends into a new weapon system, you’ve assembled a collection of individuals who no one thought belonged together—street magician, princess, failed rebel, renowned scholar, disgraced official, just to name a few—into a real team.”

Tanvanaki watched in disbelief as five garinafins were destroyed in an instant. She immediately placed her speaking trumpet against the back of the neck of Korva and started to order a retreat.

But a long, piercing bone trumpet blast blared from the deck of Pride of Ukyu, far below her on the surface of the sea: It was the call for the garinafin riders to press their assault, regardless of cost.

Tanvanaki looked down, and even in the crowd milling about on the ship, she easily picked out the eyes of her father: cold, determined, and relentless.

Wherever I point, you must attack.

Tanvanaki sighed, pressed her speaking tube into Korva’s neck, and ordered another assault. But once again, she told Korva to hang back.

Even the cheering crew on the airships had to admire the courage of the garinafin riders. Despite the death of so many of their comrades, they didn’t even hesitate as they rallied their stunned mounts, swooped around, and rushed to attack the airships a second time. The airship crews had expected the Lyucu would at least be temporarily demoralized by the shocking power of the silkmotic bolts.

Only Marshal Mazoti did not find the response surprising. An immediate follow-up assault was actually very sound tactics. The machinery for launching the silkmotic bolts was so cumbersome that reloading the giant crossbow would take some time. The lull right after a volley of bolts was the perfect time to attack, when the airships would be defenseless.

But the marshal had one more trick up her sleeves.

“Gaggers, get in position!” she ordered.

Dafiro Miro banged on the gong to pass the order on to the other ships.

Crew members scrambled over the sheer, billowing cliffs of the floating fortress, climbing into arrow slits placed in strategic locations in the hulls. They waited, ready for the assault.

The garinafins were within range.

The crossbows remained empty.

The jaws of the garinafins gaped wide, ready to snap shut for the sparks that would start the fire breath.

And a barrage of arrows—shot from regular longbows—streaked at them from the arrow slits, aiming for the wide-open mouths of the garinafins.

The garinafins ignored them. From experience, the beasts knew that ordinary arrows had no effect on them. Even the inner lining of the mouths of the garinafins, who were used to a diet of thorny, tough scrubland vegetation, was practically immune to most Dara weaponry. They beat their wings even faster, the gap between them and the airships rapidly closing.

Many of the arrows struck the thick hide of the garinafins and fell off harmlessly; others struck the insides of their open maws. As the beasts had expected, they felt nothing.

But then they realized that something was wrong.

As soon as the arrows struck the hard inner lining of the garinafin oral cavity, they began to unfold and expand. Like a stick insect unfurling itself to take on the appearance of a branch with many twigs, the arrows split into segments and struts that braced against each other, securely lodged behind the teeth of the yawning garinafins.

These collapsible bamboo caltrops were designed using the same principles that lay behind Luan Zyaji’s collapsible balloon and the folding framework for the ghost airships launched from the mechanical crubens during the Imperial invasion of Rui. Once fully expanded, they made it impossible for the garinafins to close their jaws, and those who tried to bite down hard suffered such pain that their pitiable howls filled the air.

Dara soldiers and sailors observing the aerial combat cheered again as the garinafins swooped away, unable to launch their fire breaths. The bamboo caltrops were such simple devices; yet, when coupled with detailed knowledge about the garinafins, they disarmed the beasts.

Some of the garinafin riders started to climb up the long necks of their mounts in bold attempts to dislodge the caltrops manually, but the devious contraptions were designed to resist such efforts, and as the riders tried to smash through the caltrops with war clubs, the pained garinafins shook their heads angrily, and the riders were tossed off and fell to their deaths screaming.

Tanvanaki decided that she could not afford to wait. Even if the riders succeeded in removing the caltrops, which seemed unlikely and would take time, the airships would take advantage of the delay to rearm themselves. She could see that airship crews were already hurrying to winch back their gigantic crossbows and reload them.

She pressed her bone speaking tube against the back of Korva’s neck and spoke an order that she thought she would never have to give:

Talons.

Korva repeated the order to the other garinafins with mournful bellows.

In traditional garinafin warfare, this was an order given only in desperation. Only a pilot whose mount had exhausted almost all supply of fermented gas and could not maintain flight or fire breath would resort to fighting with the last weapons possessed by her mount: teeth and talons—and the garinafins right now lacked even teeth.

Yet Princess Vadyu’s order wasn’t completely insensible. The airships, after all, were fragile constructions of silk and bamboo, lacking the tough leather and flesh that armored the garinafins. They could hardly withstand a direct strike from the powerful beasts.

Most of the garinafins were still too pain-addled to respond, but a massive brown garinafin now approached Spirit of Kiji, one of the airships forming a wall of the box formation, her talons leading the way as she folded her wings in a killing dive.

The airship crew tried to work even faster at winching back the crossbow. The pilot of the garinafin whistled sharply, and the other riders on the garinafin’s back let loose a barrage of hard, round stones with their slingshots. Several of the crossbowers fell down, their skulls crushed by the missiles. Another screamed as her left arm hung uselessly, broken.

A few women emerged from the hull to take the place of their fallen and injured comrades, and more arrows flew from the arrow slits, but most bounced harmlessly off the riders’ tough leather armor.

“Now!” the pilot shouted into the speaking tube pressed against her mount’s neck.

She and the rest of her crew braced themselves against the harnesses and atop the saddles as the garinafin reared up, her powerful wings generating a wild, turbulent storm, and reached out with her left claw, slashing the sharp talons across the billowing hull of Spirit of Kiji.

Instantly, a massive gash appeared in the silk-and-bamboo hull. Bamboo girders snapped like toothpicks, and lift gasbags lay exposed like the swim bladders of a great fish.

“Compensate for Kiji’s loss of lift,” Mazoti shouted from within Silkmotic Arrow. All the airships were connected together in this formation, and Kiji threatened to drag the whole formation down. “Rescue survivors if you can, but get those crossbows loaded!”

The brown garinafin continued to tear and rip at the hull of Spirit of Kiji. Gasbags popped like the soap bubbles blown by children in summer. Crew tumbled from the widening gash like pearls spilling out of a ripped pouch; screaming, they fell to their deaths in the raging waves below.

As the crews of the other airships scrambled to help the crew of Spirit of Kiji escape their dying craft and adjusted the gasbags in their own ships to maintain the stability of the overall formation, everyone held their collective breath. If a spark appeared now, all the Imperial airships would be doomed.

The garinafin ripped away the last of the gasbags on this side of the ship, and, with a triumphant series of bellows, flapped her wings and backed away. What was left of the billowing, bulky frame of Spirit of Kiji was now too heavy to be supported by the other ships. Slowly, the box formation began to sink toward the sea.

“We have to detach!” shouted Dafiro Miro.

Gin Mazoti nodded, her face grim. Not all the crew of Spirit of Kiji had been rescued, but loss of altitude was fatal to the rest of the fleet. Dafiro gave the order by banging a pattern on the gongs.

Crew members at the rims of the hulls of the other ships climbed to the very edges and cut the cables that kept Spirit of Kiji attached to her sister ships.

Slowly but inexorably, Spirit of Kiji separated from the box formation and fell toward the ocean, taking with it about a dozen crew members who had refused to abandon their places at the massive crossbow, including the captain. The desperate crews of the other airships tossed out silken ropes to the sinking hulk, hoping to rescue as many of their comrades as possible. But the crossbowers shook their heads, refusing to reach for the lines.

“Ready to fire!” Mota Kiphi, the targeting officer, reported to Captain Mué Atamu of Spirit of Kiji. He was one of the few men who served aboard the airship, as his extraordinary strength compensated for his relatively heavier weight.

The platform jerked wildly as the ship swung from side to side, trying to balance itself. The crossbow crew stumbled and several fell.

Captain Atamu, an old veteran of the Chrysanthemum-Dandelion War, held on to a spoke for the crossbow wheel and nodded. “Let’s make this count!”

Because the few crossbowers who remained were far fewer than a full complement, turning the wheel was a slow and laborious process made possible only by Mota Kiphi’s extraordinary strength. He guided and rallied his comrades until the massive crossbow was pointing at a tan garinafin with light green stripes gliding away from them.

“Stop!” shouted Mota. Then he swallowed nervously and asked, “Captain, do you think they’ll remember us in the future like they remember the Hegemon?”

Captain Atamu looked at him. Mota was so young, so hopelessly in love with the idea of history. She looked at the other crossbowers, all of them looking expectantly back. The yearning in their eyes broke the old captain’s heart.

She kept her voice gentle as she said to them, “Probably not. Most soldiers who die are quickly forgotten. But we don’t fight to leave a name; we fight because it’s the right thing to do.”

“Oh,” said Mota, disappointment making him slump at the wheel. “I was hoping for a song.”

“Not all heroes need songs composed about them,” said Captain Atamu. “It is enough that we know who we are.”

Then she gave the order to fire.

The bolt leapt from the crossbow and traced a gentle arc through the air that ended in the body of the tan-and-green-striped garinafin. A loud moan. Then the sky was lit up with another fiery explosion.

The crossbowers cheered and embraced each other.

As the doomed wreckage of Spirit of Kiji continued to sink, the rest of the garinafins, now recovered somewhat from the pain of the caltrops stuck in their mouths, approached and took out their anger by swiping their sharp talons at individual crew members, ripping some cleanly in half and crushing others into bloody meat pies before tossing them to the ocean. Not a single crew member pled for mercy, and all died with their short swords in their hands, though they were useless against the garinafins.

The empty wreck of Spirit of Kiji crashed into the sea, and the small ships of the Dara navy had to scramble to get out of the way.

Heart of Tututika, Resolve of Fithowéo, and Vigor of the Twins shifted their positions to fill in the gap left by Spirit of Kiji. The airships, having reloaded their crossbows, fired again, and two more garinafins were struck by the bolts and disintegrated in the air.

But it was undeniable that the formation was now less formidable than before, and there were more blind angles that couldn’t be covered by the silkmotic bolts.

Tanvanaki didn’t hesitate to take advantage of this newly discovered weakness of the Imperial airships. She ordered the remaining garinafins, who had been focused on massacring the crew of Spirit of Kiji, to return to the airship cluster and attack it with their claws before the crews could reload again.

This was the moment for the marshal’s last surprise.

“Plum Formation! Expose the sight lines,” Mazoti shouted. “Shockers, prepare for action.”

The crews of the airships carried out her orders. The great ballast balls shifted and the airships altered their positions.

Silkmotic Arrow and Moji’s Vengeance now also stood up on their tails and moved into the same plane as Heart of Tututika, Resolve of Fithowéo, and Vigor of the Twins. All five ships rotated until they were standing in the air, back to back, like five swordsmen preparing to meet enemies coming from every direction, their ballast balls dangling below them.

As the garinafins approached, the thin silk skin of the airships split, ripped, and fell away from the bamboo skeleton to trail underneath the airships like the tails of kites. Deprived of the structural support of the silk skin, the frameworks wobbled and flexed even more, as though about to come apart at any moment.

What are they playing at? Tanvanaki wondered. Again she held Korva back and watched as the other garinafins approached the rippling skeletal airships, which now looked like birdcages holding clusters of eggs. Flaps of garinafin hide taken from the dissected carcasses cradled the vulnerable gasbags, apparently an attempt at some shielding against garinafin fire breath.

Incredibly, the soldiers aboard the airships stopped winching their giant crossbows. Instead, they retreated into the interior of the cagelike hull, where, working in small teams, they assembled segments of bamboo into long lances fifty feet in length tipped with bronze. Then, dividing into two columns, they raised the lances into the air and braced themselves inside the cage, along two major structural members of the hulls like two walkways. Two lances pointed forward, and two lances pointed at the back.

They were preparing to meet the onslaught of the garinafins like foot soldiers bracing with pikes against a cavalry charge, except that the riders they faced had mounts many times the size of elephants. A brutal, desperate measure that had no hope of succeeding.

The garinafins flapped their wings and dove in, their sharp talons extended.

The soldiers on the airships braced with their long lances, their expressions grim.

The battle was about to descend into a primitive mêlée contest in the air, like the ancient duels of heroes sung in the sagas.

Mazoti glanced at the thin silvery wires attached to the bronze tips of the long lances and seemed to hear deep in her heart the humming of the power beneath her feet.

The first of the garinafins loomed up against the front of the ship, its claws poised to rip the fragile frame of Silkmotic Arrow asunder.

“Forward Kana team, attack!” Mazoti ordered.

With a collective grunt, the lance team on the left side of the ship dashed forward, thrusting the lance through the open lattice of the hull toward the chest of the hovering garinafin.

The garinafin was prepared for this. Easily and gracefully, it grabbed the tip of the lance and shoved it to the side. Though its jaws were still blocked by the lodged bamboo caltrop, its eyes seemed to curve into a cruel smile. The giant lance wielded by the puny humans was no match for its reflexes and strength.

“Forward Rapa team, now!” Mazoti cried out.

And the column on the right side of the ship dashed forward, thrusting their lance through the open lattice of the hull at the garinafin.

Contemptuously, the garinafin reached out with its other claw. This attack would be deflected as easily as the first. Once it had grabbed the two lances, it intended to drag the humans out from their gondola like ants crawling along some branch and toss them to the roiling ocean below.

The claw closed on the lance.

The garinafin shuddered. Some unseen force coursed through its limbs, and the entire hovering body convulsed in the air. The riders on the garinafin felt the same jolt: It was an indescribable sensation, as though some giant skewer had pierced their bodies in an instant and frozen all their muscles.

Time once again slowed down.

The garinafin tried to let go of the lances and found that it could not. The muscles in the claws no longer obeyed its will. The force coursing through its body seemed to grow stronger, as though a million red-hot iron lances had bored into its torso and were now twisting inside.

Lines of crackling silkmotic force crisscrossed the body of the garinafin, catching it inside a web of lightning sparks. The glow from the lines of power was so bright that the soldiers closed their eyes as they hung on, willing the power they wielded to hold and destroy the massive beast in front of them.

Burning patches appeared on the garinafin’s body, first on its feet, and then all over its torso. Dark columns of smoke rose. The garinafin convulsed and spasmed in midair along with its riders, puppets seized by a power that they could not understand.

With a loud pop, the garinafin’s claws finally freed themselves from the lances. The lifeless body hung in the air for a second before falling, plunging straight down to the ocean below. Lines of silkmotic force still raced and crackled over its body as it splashed into the water, raising up a large wave that drenched and rocked the stunned crew observing from Pride of Ukyu.

^{CHAPTER SIXTY} BATTLE OF ZATHIN GULF, PART II

The ascent grew steeper, and Zomi Kidosu stopped by the side of the trail, leaning against her walking stick.

“Do you want to rest for a little while?” Princess Théra asked, concern suffusing her voice. She reached out to support Zomi under her arm.

Zomi tried to catch her breath. “I’m just not used to hiking this far without my harness. I’ll be fine.” She squeezed Théra’s hand and gave her a quick kiss.

After weeks of silkmotic therapy, Zomi was now able to walk for the most part without her harness, relying on a walking stick only for strenuous hikes. She could feel her leg growing stronger every day with practice.

Princess Théra looked at the sky: The roiling, dark clouds in the east were fast approaching. She was worried.

“Maybe we can try this another day.”

Zomi shook her head. “We need to get to the open field before the rain starts. Don’t be distressed about me.”

The two had been climbing the mountain for hours. Traveling without an entourage so as to draw less attention, they each carried a large canvas bag stuffed full of experimental equipment.

The mountainside was deserted. Hunters and firewood gatherers had long descended from the mountains to avoid the approaching storm. The Damu Mountains were famous for sudden thunderstorms during the summer, and it was not a laughing matter to be caught on the mountains during one: The detritus trails left by flash floods and the split trunks of trees struck by lightning provided plenty of warnings.

But the lure of lightning was precisely why they were here.

Research into weaponizing the silkmotic force had been going on for months, and everyone was growing frustrated. Despite the best efforts of Miza Crun and Atharo Ye, exploding arrows that relied on the silkmotic spark as the firing agent was the best that the engineers could do.

Several other avenues of research had not panned out. An attempt to devise a more powerful flamethrower was ruled out early on as it was simply too dangerous given the flammability of the new Imperial airships, which relied on fermented manure gas for lift. Intrigued by the Adüan fire rod, Atharo tried to see if it could be weaponized along the same lines as the silkmotic arrows. However, the resulting bolts, which relied on the fire rod instead of an Ogé jar as the detonator for firework powder, were devoid of any obvious performance benefits over the silkmotic arrows—in fact, they were worse, as the fire-rod arrows lacked the paralyzing jolt that the silkmotic arrows delivered.

“Silkmotic force, silkmotic force…,” Miza Crun muttered. “I’m certain that this is the proper direction.”

The fact that a small Ogé jar charged fully by the massive silkmotic generator could let out a jolt powerful enough to kill a chicken was tantalizing. Working day and night, Miza Crun tried to squeeze more power out of his instruments of healing and entertainment so that they could become machines that killed.

The first, obvious thing to try was to create larger Ogé jars to hold more silkmotic charge. A great deal of experimentation revealed that the capacity of an Ogé jar could be increased by making the jar itself as thin as possible while making the surface area for the channeling coatings as large as possible. However, making large, thin-walled jars out of glass or porcelain proved impractical: They were too fragile to handle and transport.

The mathematician-administrator Kita Thu gave Miza Crun an idea: “While it’s hard to build one large hall with a spanning dome, it is easy to make many small interconnected rooms with small domes. The total capacity of each is the same. Can the same principle not be applied to Ogé jars for the storage of silkmotic power?”

Miza Crun cursed himself for not thinking of this path earlier. Connecting multiple Ogé jars together to combine the silkmotic force stored inside each was a trick he already had some experience with. When he connected the jars end to end in a series, the intensity of the spark on discharge increased—that is, the spark could stretch across a longer gap between the two channeling rods attached to the inner and outer walls of the Ogé jars. But when he connected the jars side by side—for instance, by placing all the jars on a silver plate and then tying wires attached to the inner surfaces into a single bundle—the reservoir formed by the collection of jars generated a thicker spark, though it could not leap across as wide a gap. In other words, with the jars connected in parallel, the silkmotic force seemed to have more quantity, though it wasn’t as intense.

A large reservoir of Ogé jars generated a shock powerful enough to kill a sheep or calf, though the channeling rods had to be held in such a way that the silkmotic current flowed right through the heart of the animal. It was conceivable that with enough Ogé jars, a reservoir could become powerful enough to kill a garinafin.

But calculations by Kita and Zomi revealed that such a collection of Ogé jars would be much too massive to even fit inside the hull of an Imperial airship. Besides, even if such a collection could be constructed, charging them using the single silkmotic generator would take forever. As it was, the generator had to operate continuously to create a usable supply of silkmotic arrows.

What they needed was a source of silkmotic power that would be strong enough to kill a garinafin in a single jolt and a reservoir to hold such power that wasn’t so bulky or fragile as glass or porcelain Ogé jars.

Just as the scholars were about to give up, a chance experiment with Zomi Kidosu opened an unexpected path. Miza Crun suggested that Zomi try out a silkmotic bath on her left leg to see if perhaps the vitality of silkmotic force could rejuvenate it. Just as Miza had used the power of the silkmotic generator to relieve some Faça veterans of the Chrysanthemum-Dandelion War of the pain of phantom limbs, it had also done wonders for cases of paralysis and damaged nerves. If the force could even cause the legs of dead frogs to kick and swim, could it not bring life back to Zomi’s disobedient left leg?

Zomi consented to the treatment. Sitting in a sitting board elevated upon blocks of resin—an excellent silkmotic dam—Zomi allowed Miza to run a silver rod attached by wire to banks of charged Ogé jars over the skin of her leg, bathing muscles and nerves long deprived of feeling in currents of silkmotic force in an effort to bring life back into them.

This was the first time Zomi had directly experienced the power of silkmotic force, and she could feel her hair stand up and the invisible force pouring into herself. Bits of paper and dust in the air swarmed around her, attracted by the power the machine poured into her body.

“Hold on to the armrests,” said Miza Crun. “This will sting a bit.”

Another silver channeling rod was attached to the other surface of the Ogé jars. Miza brought it over with jade gloves, and, as he touched the rod to her leg, Zomi experienced her first shock.

An invisible current coursed through her body, numbing, burning, quaking her to the very core.

The sensation of being shocked by the silkmotic force, Zomi discovered, was like a faint echo of what she had experienced twenty years ago, when the thunderbolt had struck her and left her leg partially paralyzed.

The similarity between the appearance of the sparks generated by the silkmotic machines and lightning had long been remarked on, but until now, no one could say that the two were the same. However, as one of the few survivors of a lightning strike, Zomi knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the power of the lightning was silkmotic force wielded by the gods.

Heavy, dark clouds loomed overhead, so oppressive and close that it seemed possible to reach out and touch them. Zomi and Théra busied themselves in the open field high up the slope of the mountain.

On the ground they had erected two winches, connected to each other by a silk belt. The first winch was connected to a large kite made of silk over a strong bamboo frame, as well as a thin iron rim around the edge for collecting charge. The string of the kite was made of silk strands twisted with silver wire. At the bottom of the string, an iron chain dangled into a large Ogé jar.

Zomi and Théra stood some distance away at the second winch, from where they could control the ascent and descent of the kite. Eyes intent on the clouds above them, they let out more of the string, causing the kite to rise higher.

“Lord Kiji,” Théra fervently prayed, “please allow us to borrow your power.”

As though in answer, lights flashed deep inside the clouds, but it was impossible to tell if Kiji was saying yes or no to their request.

The sky darkened as though someone had banked the fire of the sun. The world seemed to grow smaller while heaven and earth pressed closer to each other. The very air was charged with invisible lines of power.

Heavy drops of rain fell. Théra and Zomi huddled under a flat, low canopy set up next to the second winch. The sound of rain striking the roof was like the explosion of oil inside a frying pan. The kite string, laden with water, sagged.

More flashes in the clouds above.

The iron chain dangling from the kite string began to crackle, and faint sparks could be seen streaming from it into the Ogé jar.

Théra and Zomi looked at each other.

“It’s true!”

“Look!”

A large stag emerged from the woods, leaping gracefully through the rain as though not bothered by it at all.

It looked at the two women with a majestic, arrogant expression. Then it walked toward the Ogé jar, still crackling with the power of the lightning.

The two women knew they were witnessing something extraordinary and did not speak.

The stag stopped by the side of the Ogé jar, placed one foot against the outside, and then bent down as though to give the still crackling chain a kiss.

And a giant spark almost two feet long leapt from the top of the jar, striking the stag in the head. The long spark was like a flower made of fire, a spiderweb woven from luminous ether, a river with tributaries filled with star matter. Zomi and Théra closed their eyes. The light was brighter than the glow of a thousand suns, and they could not gaze upon the power of the gods without being blinded.

When they opened their eyes again, the stag was gone, and only a smoking patch of ashes in the grass next to the Ogé jar in the shape of the stag convinced them that it had not been a dream.

“Thank you, Lord Fithowéo,” the women whispered, knowing that they had seen a sign.

They had succeeded in bottling lightning, in capturing the power of the gods.

Théra and Zomi embraced each other, laughing, kissing, babbling incoherently. Though they were drenched and cold, the joyous heat of discovery coursed through them, irrepressible. They fell to the ground, entwining their limbs and pressing their bodies against each other as they undressed in the rain; the power that had lit up the heavens a moment ago seemed to burn through the lovers as flames of passion.

Between the heavens and the earth, there was no more fitting altar to love than that mountainside in the rain.

Now that they had a source of power that was adequate to the purpose, they still needed a reservoir large enough to store the power yet compact enough to be carried in the airships.

The scholars of Ginpen and Pan worked night and day, arguing, debating, sketching plans and experimenting with novel materials. Fantastic ideas and suggestions flowed to the marshal from every laboratory, but most were too outlandish to be practical.

The answer, in the end, came from the highest and lowest places at once.

With Empress Jia practically making the entire Imperial Treasury available to support the work of the researchers, instances of graft and corruption were inevitable. Two of the palace servants were caught smuggling jewels out of the palace for private benefit.

Their method of theft was both ingenious and ancient. To reduce theft, servants who entered the Imperial Treasury had to change into special formfitting clothing without the benefit of voluminous sleeves and folds that could conceal valuable jewels. They used specially made wooden trays that were too thin to contain hidden compartments. The idea was to reduce the chances of anyone who, when faced with mountains of pearls and towers of gold nuggets, could not resist the temptation to grab and keep a few things for himself.

But wherever money was involved, theft was inevitable. Datralu gacruca ça crunpén ki fithéücadipu ki lodü ingro ça néficaü, or “No fish could live in perfectly clear water,” as the Classical Ano saying went.

Two of the servants realized that while the clothing they wore had no pockets, there was one natural pocket with a sealable opening that was still available to them. The two servants had worked as butchers before entering the palace and were quite familiar with the capacity of the animal intestine to stretch and hold material.

And so, by practicing with marbles and coins and even chicken eggs, the two learned the art of inserting objects through the fundament and holding them within the colon for hours until they could be safely retrieved. In this manner, they stole many pearls and gold nuggets and even intricate pieces of jade from the empress.

They were finally caught, as most thieves are, because they overreached. One of the men simply stuffed too much into himself, and after the unwise choice of a large meal of stewed cabbage the night before, he gave up the secret in an explosive confession before he could get to the toilet.

The scandal, however, provided Miza Crun and the mathematical Kita Thu an inspiration.

An Ogé jar, when reduced to its essence, was nothing more than two surfaces made of channeling material separated by a thin layer of damming material. It could be in the shape of a jar, a plate, a bulb, or anything else.

Such as a long, flexible tube that could be twisted and coiled to take up as little space as possible.

The scholars turned their attention to the garinafin carcasses still being dissected inside their shoreside cave laboratory: Each garinafin’s abdominal cavity contained miles of intestines, coiled and wound up into a relatively small space by volume. The inner and outer surfaces of the intestines, by Kita Thu’s calculation, formed a reservoir large enough to store the silkmotic force to kill a garinafin.

But how could they coat miles of garinafin intestines with the appropriate channeling material, preferably gold?

The answer, once again, came from the world of crime. Rin Coda’s farseers had many connections to the underworld economy, and the best forgers of Dara were soon brought to Ginpen to collaborate with the researchers.

The two groups made quite a sight. On one side were the renowned scholars in silk robes, their minds filled with obscure mathematical symbols and laws of nature, their spines curved after years of poring over scrolls and tablets and codices, their speech peppered with high-minded aphorisms from ancient scholars. On the other side were the forgers in their workshop smocks, their minds filled with thoughts of profit and wealth and techniques for deceit, their hands and arms scarred from years of working with heat and acid and paint in the quest of giving base materials the appearance of something far more precious, their speech spiced with thieves’ cant and the grease of commerce.

Normally, these two groups would never have even shared a pot of tea, much less have much to say to each other.

But in a time of war, knowledge made interesting friendships. Soon, the scholars and the thieves were… well, thick as thieves. Both groups discovered that they were kindred souls interested in the pursuit of knowledge, albeit knowledge of different spheres. They complemented each other, like the Kana and Rapa varieties of the silkmotic force complemented each other, and, when put together, generated brilliance.

“I am certain that had each of you been born to scholarly families, you would have all achieved the rank of firoa,” said Atharo Ye as raised his cup to toast the thieves at an evening banquet.

A few of the thieves flushed with fury, but Gozogi Çadé, the leader of the thieves, gestured for them to be calm. She was well respected in the community as the inventor of the technique for marking the patina of bronze replicas of ancient antiques with the warp and weft of silk wrappings that had rotted away to give them the appearance of authenticity—a very valuable and widely imitated forging technique. “I am certain that had you been born to one of our families, Master Ye,” said Gozogi as she raised her cup in return, “you would have been an inventive and adroit forger.”

“Do you really think so?” asked Atharo Ye, and he blushed with pleasure. “There are so many interesting engineering problems in your field! I was thinking of an idea for how to make soapstone appear as jade that I wanted to get your opinion on.”

The thieves relaxed, knowing now that Atharo’s compliment was genuine, though they were speaking of forgeries. “Someday I will tell my grandchildren that I once consulted for the greatest engineer in all of Dara,” said Gozogi. After a pause, she added, “I’m glad, however, that you have a job and aren’t my competitor.”

The thieves and scholars laughed together.

The forgers in Dara were, as one might expect, skilled at gilding base materials. They could turn a crude wooden carving into a simulacrum of the most precious artifacts made by ancient goldsmiths of Rima, and now they were charged with helping the marshal devise a way to coat the garinafin intestines with gold without destroying the thin membranes.

The scholars and the thieves together came up with the following solution. First, quicksilver was used to wash the inside and outside of the intestines to coat the surfaces with a thin layer of mercury. Next, an amalgam of gold and mercury was made by heating mercury and stirring in flakes of gold to saturation. The resulting amalgam, like molasses, was squeezed through the interior of the intestines and used to soak the outside until a layer coated the surfaces evenly, and then the intestines were brought to a gentle heat to boil away the mercury, leaving a thin, smooth surface of gold to coat the inside and outside walls.

The intestines were then cut into six long segments and coiled up: long Ogé jars with the capacity of arrays of innumerable regular Ogé jars connected in parallel, but small enough to be stored inside ceramic spheres dangling from the airships as ballast.

After they were charged in thunderstorms with the power of lightning, the coiled-up intestines were then coated in a layer of wax to further help isolate and preserve the dammed-up silkmotic force. Wires could be poked through to connect the inner and outer surfaces and draw out the Rapa or Kana variety of the force without a disastrous discharge until the moment it was needed.

The scene that had played out before Silkmotic Arrow repeated itself in front of the other airships. Garinafin after garinafin fell from the sky, struck to death by the bottled-up power of lightning.

“Separate from Plum Formation and give general chase,” ordered Gin Mazoti.

The airships separated from their defensive posture and leveled off into cruising configuration. The oars were extended, and the prey now became the predator. They went after the remaining terrified garinafins, who could not understand how their opponent had suddenly gained this fearsome new power.

Another long, mournful bone-trumpet blast sounded from the deck of Pride of Ukyu.

Tanvanaki angrily clenched her jaws. With only six garinafins left under her command, the two sides appeared to be evenly matched. The garinafins, however, had lost their fire breath to the bamboo caltrops and were near exhaustion, and their riders were losing faith in the wisdom of this war. On the other hand, the crews of the Imperial airships were cheering wildly at the successes of their new weapons. It was obvious who had the advantage.

But it was her duty to carry out the orders of the pékyu, to fight for the future of her people. She had to find a way to squeeze out an advantage.

Tanvanaki placed her speaking tube against the back of Korva’s neck and issued a rapid series of orders that the garinafin transmitted to the others with a series of loud moans and bellows.

Five garinafins seemed to lose their will and retreated from the battle, escaping in different directions, and the Imperial airships gave chase, one after each. The garinafins appeared tired, their movements sluggish. The crews of the Imperial airships cheered and redoubled their rowing, and as they closed in on their prey, let loose silkmotic bolts at the lumbering beasts.

But the garinafins somehow always managed to dodge out of the way, and numerous silkmotic bolts were wasted.

Aboard Silkmotic Arrow, Gin Mazoti pondered the tactical situation. The naval fleets were almost close enough to engage each other, and some of the Dara ships were already lobbing stones from catapults at the city-ships. The Lyucu fleet, unfamiliar with such machinery, relied on their bulk to press ahead. The city-ships dwarfed the Dara ships much as elephants dwarfed packs of wolves, or crubens dwarfed schools of sharks, and even direct strikes by the catapults caused little damage.

The Dara navy needed air support. But the Imperial airships were having trouble chasing down the garinafins, and now the five airships were far from each other.

“This is a trap!” Gin Mazoti slammed her hands to the handle of Na-aroénna. “Pull back!”

Tanvanaki’s mount, Korva, bellowed some more. Tanvanaki had kept her back from the air battle to survey the tactical situation from far above. She smiled. Her plan was working out perfectly.

All of a sudden, the five escaping garinafins sped up and swerved away from the pursuing airships. They looped up and around, and all five converged upon Heart of Tututika.

Tanvanaki had realized that the Imperial airships, when clustered together, could support each other with their silkmotic lances. By pretending to retreat, she managed to pull them apart from each other, and now she could concentrate her forces on a single Imperial airship and regain the advantage of numbers.

Soldiers aboard Heart of Tututika hesitated as five garinafins attacked at once, uncertain where to point their silkmotic lances. The frame of the airship twisted and crumbled under the simultaneous assault. Many of the crew tumbled from the airship and fell into the merciless ocean below, their piteous screams lingering in the air.

The garinafins had ripped open enough gasbags that Heart of Tututika began losing altitude. Tanvanaki called for them to pull back and focus on a different airship. As the panicked crew on the sinking Heart of Tututika scrambled to save their doomed ship, the silkmotic lances were brought close to each other and a long spark arced across their tips.

There was a massive explosion as the leaking gasbags caught fire. The fiery wreckage of the airship slowly drifted down to the sea, all hands lost.

“Charge the frame!” shouted Gin Mazoti as the surviving four airships once again clustered together. Her heart ached with rage and regret. No matter how often soldiers prepared in drills, the chaotic conditions of the battlefield and their lack of experience with the weapons meant that they didn’t always respond appropriately to threats.

Since many of the structural elements of the frame were made from bamboo reinforced with steel, it was actually possible to charge the entire frame of the airships. As soon as a garinafin seized one of the airships’ support hoops, the crew touched the silkmotic lances to the ship’s frame. The garinafin grabbing on to the hoop received a massive lightning jolt that killed it on the spot.

Tanvanaki issued yet more orders, and the garinafins now dove below the airships. With the gondola floors gone and the crew standing on platforms housing the giant crossbows, Tanvanaki gambled that the platforms would be free of the deadly force that was killing her garinafins and become the vulnerable underbellies of the airships.

But the airships tossed out long chains of iron that dangled far beneath them. Like the tentacles of some aerial jellyfish, whenever pairs of charged chains touched some hovering garinafin or rider, long, massive sparks flew between them, accompanied by a boom as loud as thunder. Just like the deadly drifting jellyfish caught and disabled their fishy prey, the airships now caught and killed the straggling garinafins with their deadly chains and crackling lances.

Two surviving garinafins finally lost their will to fight, and, ignoring the orders of their pilots, fled from the battle and tried to land on the city-ships. As the pékyu cursed and shouted in anger, Lyucu warriors scrambled out of the way on the open decks as the massive, winged beasts crashed down, killing many and damaging the ships in the process.

Princess Vadyu, Flash-of-the-Garinafin, looked at the sight around her in disbelief. The sea bobbed with the carcasses of garinafins who had died from lightning strikes and the smoking remains of those who had exploded from silkmotic arrows. Of the twenty garinafins who had accompanied the invasion force, only Korva was left in the air.

Four more Imperial airships remained, and now they descended toward the fleet of city-ships, intent on dealing death to the Lyucu crew with their silkmotic tentacles.

“The gods of Dara are with us today!” they shouted in unison.

The Lyucu warriors arrayed on the wide-open decks banged their clubs against each other, fearless, but it was clear that the tide of battle had turned against the Lyucu.

“What should we do?” Korva’s crew asked her. Tanvanaki had never heard their voices filled with such despair.

Tanvanaki considered the question. Korva still had fire breath, but it was impossible for one garinafin to take on four Imperial airships, especially not when they had the aid of such powerful weapons.

With a howl of rage, she kicked hard at Korva’s neck and turned her to the distant ramparts of Ginpen.

“We’ll burn this city to the ground and show them that the Lyucu are not afraid to die!”

Doru Solofi and Noda Mi stood alone in the pilothouse of Whirlpool Runner, the largest of the ragtag fleet of merchantmen that had been converted into auxiliary warships for the nonce.

Though the two failed rebels had pledged their lives to the cause of Dara, swearing that they wanted to redeem their stained names, the marshal had been suspicious and refused to put them in positions of power near the front, assigning them only low-level support tasks where they would be closely supervised.

Somewhat surprisingly, Doru and Noda proved themselves quite capable in their assigned roles. Noda drew upon his experience as the Hegemon’s quartermaster and made sure that supplies flowed smoothly to the marshal’s navy and army, and Doru blustered and intimidated the merchants into “volunteering” their ships to the Imperial war effort—Gin suspected that both also managed to skim some profit for themselves in the process, but such peccadilloes were unavoidable in a time of war.

Just before the battle, the two came to Admiral Than Carucono, asking to be put in charge of the support vessels.

“You need someone to command the civilians,” said Noda Mi. “To make sure they don’t panic.”

“We want to do what we can for Dara!” said Doru Solofi.

“Haven’t we proven ourselves?” said Noda Mi. “Emperor Ragin always said that loyalty is bred from trust.”

“All the others who once took up arms against the emperor have been pardoned and given new commissions; we’ll never be able to face them if we don’t get our own command,” said Doru Solofi.

“All we ask for is a chance,” said Noda Mi. “The same way Emperor Ragin once gave us a chance.”

Admiral Than Carucono pondered the question. He was perfectly aware that Doru and Noda were more interested in getting credit than in actually doing anything that risked their lives—but all the others with some command experience had demanded fighting commissions against the Lyucu, and he did need someone to corral the merchantmen and make sure they didn’t get in the way of the warships. He assented to their proposal.

The main fleet of real warships had sailed out of Ginpen harbor at the start of the battle, and the auxiliary support ships were supposed to follow behind to rescue survivors and support the main fleet in whatever way that was useful.

According to the marshal’s plan, if the air battle had not gone well, all vessels in the Dara fleet were supposed to engage in a suicidal, last-ditch effort against the Lyucu by ramming the city-ships. Doru Solofi had not liked that part of the plan at all, and he had tried to position as many other ships before Whirlpool Runner as possible, justifying the decision by arguing that in this rearguard position, he and Noda Mi could enforce discipline by catching any ships that tried to desert the scene of battle. The other merchant captains appeared to accept this explanation, proving once again to Doru Solofi that there was no shortage of gullible fools in this world.

Doru heaved a sigh of relief that events had played out otherwise. Now that the garinafins had been chased from the skies, the marshal’s air force would deal a devastating strike upon the Lyucu fleet, and the ships of Than Carucono’s navy would be able to mop up any final resistance. The auxiliary ships might be able to earn a share of glory just by sailing along and dispatching a few survivors (claiming that they were spies or resisting, of course). This was an easy victory, the sort he liked the most.

“Maybe we should try to sail ahead of the other ships?” Doru suggested. “If we can kill even a single Lyucu survivor, we’ll have some evidence to back up our exaggerations later and maybe get our fiefs enlarged.”

But Noda Mi’s expression was strangely tense. “Are you content to forever remain a minor noble at the Court of Dandelion? What happened to your dream of being restored to the position of a Tiro king?”

Shocked, Doru Solofi answered tentatively, “We don’t have many choices. The Court of Dandelion is strong. Our rebellion failed.”

“The Lyucu are here,” said Noda. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Doru sucked in a breath. “You are… truly bold. But they won’t be here for long. All the garinafins are dead except one, and the marshal will make short work of the fleet.”

“You’re shortsighted. By my count, there should still be many more garinafins on Rui. And you know more are on their way to Dara.”

“But the pékyu will never make it back to Rui alive today.”

“Not unless he gets some help. He doesn’t know how to fight the marshal’s airships, but we do.”

Doru Solofi felt his blood turn cold as he stared at his former coconspirator. “What are you suggesting?”

“Life is all about gambles.” Noda Mi’s face broke into a sharklike grin. “If the Court of Dandelion wins here today, we’ll be nothing more than minor foot soldiers in a war in which we did little. But if the Lyucu win because of our help, can you imagine the gratitude we’ll receive?”

Doru Solofi pondered this for some time and shook his head resolutely. “I think I’m done with plots and rebellions, Noda. Kuni was generous not to hang us after all that we did, and this just seems… too much. I’m pretty content to be a minor noble with my head attached to my shoulders, to be honest.”

“Not for long,” said Noda Mi. Before Doru Solofi could react, Noda had unsheathed his short sword and plunged it into Doru’s heart.

As Doru’s body slumped to the floor of the pilot house, Noda wiped the sword clean and added in a low voice, “Kuni Garu always said to do the most interesting thing. On that point at least, he was right.”

The Imperial airships, their feathered wings beating rhythmically, swooped down toward the Lyucu fleet of city-ships.

Below the airships, Than Carucono’s fleet headed for the Lyucu fleet at a slower pace, content to let the airships strike the first blow before going in for the kill.

Noda Mi signaled for his fleet of auxiliary ships to speed up and intermingle with the warships, sometimes even overtaking them. The warship captains glanced at these merchantmen sailing next to them with frowns on their faces—clearly the move was an opportunistic attempt to grab more share of the honor of battle from the Imperial navy.

Small pinnaces were dispatched from Whirlpool Runner to the other ships, and messengers brought important new orders from Noda Mi to the captains. Soon, battle kites took off from the merchantmen and rose into the sky.

This was rather unusual. Battle kites were most useful for lookout duty; since the Lyucu fleet was right there in front of their eyes, such additional reconnaissance hardly seemed necessary. Still, none of the naval captains paid them much mind.

The crews of the airships waved at the lookouts riding battle kites in the air near them. The lookouts waved back. Morale was high in the sky and over the sea for the fighting men and women of Dara, while the Lyucu sailors appeared to be grimly awaiting their fate.

The lookouts hanging from the kites even held lit torches, a truly strange choice. Were they going to signal with them?

Korva swept over the buildings and streets of Ginpen, spewing fire at the windmills, multistory wooden towers, ancient lecture halls, and dome-topped laboratories. The inhabitants of the city, hiding deep in basements, remained unharmed, but the city was going to suffer a great deal of damage.

The riders on Korva’s back had been poised to strike at the civilians of the city with their slingshots, and the fact that the city presented them with almost no targets left them howling and cursing.

Tanvanaki cursed repeatedly. She felt helpless. She had thought she could at least find out where the empress and her advisers were concealed and threaten them—perhaps that should have been her strategy from the start, instead of lingering to engage with the airships.

But now it appeared that even such a strategy wouldn’t have helped if the leaders of Dara were hiding like turtles in their shells.

What was she going to do? Korva could not remain aloft forever, and if the Lyucu fleet were destroyed, she would have no way to get Korva back to Rui. Every choice seemed bad.

Shocked voices came from behind her; the other riders had seen something astonishing.

She glanced back at the sea, and her heart almost leapt out of her throat as she saw the Imperial airships explode, one after the other.

The crews of the airships were absorbed with the approaching Lyucu fleet and adjusting their dangling shock chains to inflict maximum damage. After the discharges needed to kill the garinafins, the power left in the ballast spheres was weaker. But it still should be sufficient to deal death by lightning to the exposed Lyucu on the decks of the city-ships.

Lookouts on the kites behind them pulled arrows from their quivers, lit them with their torches, and shot the flaming missiles at the undulating, exposed gasbags of the Imperial airships.

For her strategy, Gin Mazoti had counted on the tendency of all militaries to overgeneralize from their own experience and to rely on their known strengths. Believing the garinafins to be invincible, the Lyucu had not adopted the fighting techniques of Dara and did not add archers to the ranks of garinafin riders.

After disabling the fire-breathing ability of the garinafins, the airships had discarded the silk skin over the hulls so that the crew could wield their silkmotic lances to shock the garinafins. The exposure of the vulnerable gasbags was deemed an acceptable risk because the Lyucu did not use fire arrows, which would have made short work of the Imperial airships.

The marshal had not counted on betrayal among her own ranks.

The flaming arrows crossed the short distance between the lookouts and the airships, plunging with a hiss into the gasbags.

Within moments, the airships burst into flames and started to sink.

Soldiers screamed as their bodies were lit on fire, and many dove from the wreckage. On the decks of the city-ships, the Lyucu warriors cheered wildly, and Pékyu Tenryo laughed with joy.

The gods were indeed with them.

“Zomi! Marshal!” Princess Théra screamed from the secret observation post as she saw the distant explosions. The palace guards had to hold her back lest she run onto the beach and into the sea.

In the distance, Empress Jia sighed and asked her attendants to prepare to set the firewood piled over the dais alight as soon as the Lyucu fleet began the final push toward the undefended city of Ginpen.

“All is lost,” she muttered.

Onboard Silkmotic Arrow, Gin Mazoti howled with rage as victory slipped from her hands.

The Imperial airships were designed with multiple clusters of lift gasbags divided by baffles made from garinafin hide to provide some measure of protection against fires. Because the lookouts had shot at them from behind, only the aft clusters were set aflame. The ships were losing altitude and pitching wildly, but they hadn’t completely lost control.

“Drop the ballast ball,” Mazoti ordered as she lost her footing over the tilting floor and fell down.

The ceramic ballast ball was dropped, and the ship wobbled and flexed in the wind. It was sinking much more slowly now, but still sinking. What’s more, it had lost the power source for its silkmotic weapons.

The other airships followed the example of Silkmotic Arrow.

“We have to abandon ship,” Dafiro Miro said, clinging on to a girder.

“If we abandon ship, there will be no stopping the Lyucu,” said Gin Mazoti. She looked behind her and saw the confusion among the Dara fleet.

Taking advantage of his role in wrangling supplies for the navy, Noda Mi had managed to have his followers infiltrate many ships in the auxiliary fleet as well as the Imperial navy during the last few months. By now, they had established control over a significant portion of the vessels, executing confused officers, sailors, and marines who couldn’t understand why their own ships were firing on the marshal.

To be sure, Noda Mi’s people weren’t able to control all the support ships or the warships of the Imperial navy, and Than Carucono tried to rally those still loyal to the marshal to respond. But he was hampered by the fact that he couldn’t tell which ships he could trust. Deprived of central leadership, ships still loyal to the marshal milled about in confusion, and Noda’s ships began to systematically surround them, breaking their oars, ramming them, and demanding their surrender.

“There’s nothing we can do now,” said Dafiro. “But if we survive today, we can still raise up an army in the mountains of Dara and continue to raid the Lyucu.”

“The chances of victory for such a strategy are slim,” said Gin. “The war might go on for years, and many more people will die. No, we must make our stand here, today.”

She struggled to stand up, and as the ship burned around her, smoke cracking her voice and heated air distorting her vision, she called out to her crew.

“Soldiers of Dara, we are close enough to the surface now that if we abandon ship, many of us will survive. But Dara will be lost if the Lyucu king survives, and so I intend to crash the ship into the pékyu’s flagship. You’ve followed me far enough. None of you need to come with me.”

Nobody moved to dive off the ship; they stayed by their posts.

Gin Mazoti smiled. “I never had any doubt. Our lives are but brief respites between stormy veils cast over the eternal unknown, and we must be guided in our deeds by the inner compass of our will, not what others may think of us. Yet now that death has come to us, we shall make this a day that will live on in song and story.”

The crew moved to the oars, including Gin and Dafiro. Putting their backs into the work, they started to sing as they propelled their sinking, flaming airship toward Pékyu Tenryo’s flagship, Pride of Ukyu.

Following the example of the marshal, each of the other sinking airships picked a city-ship, and the crew struggled to steer toward their targets.

The fire singed the hair of the crew, and blisters and boils appeared on their skin as the bamboo-and-steel frame popped and broke apart around them.

Their chants grew more somber and louder.

As the flaming Silkmotic Arrow crashed toward the pékyu’s flagship, the heat from the airship washed over the deck like a tsunami wave.

Many of the Lyucu warriors dove over the sides, certain that staying meant death. But Pékyu Tenryo, wearing a helmet made from the skull of a yearling garinafin, stood steadfast on the deck, Langiaboto lifted high overhead with both hands. It was as though he was going to face down this fiery falling star all by himself.

Silkmotic Arrow crashed into Pride of Ukyu. The frame of the airship buckled, bent, and broke apart. Fire spread to the other clusters of gasbags, and more explosions followed, immolating most of the crew of Silkmotic Arrow and rocking the deck of the city-ship like an earthquake. Flaming bits of wreckage rained down around Pékyu Tenryo, and even the few Lyucu warriors still remaining by the side of their lord now dove off the sides.

Gin Mazoti and a few other crew members were fortunate to be in a section of the ship that survived the crash long enough for them to tumble from their rowing benches onto the burning deck. They rolled around on the deck to put out the fire on their bodies. As they struggled to stand up, the chief of the Lyucu attacked.

Pékyu Tenryo tore through them like a wolf through a flock of sheep. He wielded the massive war axe without any concern for his own safety. While the ship burned around him, he seemed to not feel the rising heat or the thickening smoke. With each swing of Langiaboto, he managed to crush a head or break through a rib cage.

Gin Mazoti ran back to the burning wreckage of Silkmotic Arrow and pulled Na-aroénna out, careless of the pain as the hot handle sizzled against her hands. Dafiro Miro took off his war club, Biter, and the sword he had inherited from his brother, Simplicity. Casting a grim look at each other, they rushed at Pékyu Tenryo.

With a few more swings of his club, Pékyu Tenryo dispatched the last of the Dara soldiers, and he turned around to face Gin Mazoti and Dafiro Miro. Fire burned around the three like a funeral pyre.

Pékyu Tenryo held Langiaboto aloft and smashed it down against the deck. The entire ship seemed to tremble.

Gin Mazoti and Dafiro Miro looked at each other and smiled.

“It is an honor to fight with you, Marshal of Dara,” said Dafiro.

“The honor is entirely mine.”

And they fell against each other like three crubens contesting for power in a sea of flames.

Zomi Kidosu swam hard and kicked her way to the surface. Around her, the sea was filled with burning wreckage from the airships and sinking city-ships. The Lyucu warriors, some of them badly burnt, howled with pain as they grabbed onto floating spars.

Just before Moji’s Vengeance crashed into one of the city-ships, Zomi had ordered her crew to leap off the ship. As Moji’s Vengeance had been heading for a cluster of ships, Zomi decided that there was no need to keep the crew aboard to steer until the very last minute. She didn’t believe in dying unnecessarily to become a part of history.

The Dara airship crew now bobbed in the sea, seeking their own places of refuge. The confusion among the Dara fleet meant that no one could be sure who was friend or foe, but everyone, Lyucu and Dara alike, was trying to avoid Pride of Ukyu, which was now very low in the water and could sink at any moment.

Zomi glanced on deck and saw through the fire and smoke three figures leaping and fighting. Seen through the distorting effects of the heated air, the sight seemed a scene from the tales of wandering bards come to life:

With Dafiro Miro blocking and taking most of Pékyu Tenryo’s forceful strikes and the marshal leaping about and swinging her heavy sword through every opening, the two sides were, for the moment, evenly matched. But it was clear that the pékyu’s strength was the greater, and Na-aroénna was far too heavy for the marshal to wield effectively. Dafiro Miro stumbled a few times under the heavy blows as sparks flew from Simplicity and Biter. How much longer could the marshal and the captain last?

Zomi Kidosu gritted her teeth and swam toward Pride of Ukyu.

Dafiro’s movements became sluggish and slow. Each strike from Langiaboto felt heavier, harder to deflect. The marshal was in even worse shape, and she seemed barely able to even lift the Doubt-Ender. In contrast, Pékyu Tenryo’s movements seemed to grow only stronger and more fluid with each swing, as though he was absorbing strength from the burning air around him.

“Do you remember how we overcame Kindo Marana?” asked Gin Mazoti. She struggled to catch her breath.

Dafiro recalled the surprise attack on Rui at the beginning of the Chrysanthemum-Dandelion War, when the marshal had assigned him a most dangerous mission.

He smiled at Gin. “Of course.”

Pékyu Tenryo lurched forward, and with a loud yawp, swung Langiaboto down directly at Dafiro’s head. Dafiro crossed his sword and war club and blocked the strike, and sparks flew everywhere. Dafiro stumbled back.

Instead of coming to Dafiro’s aid, Gin Mazoti remained where she was, her breathing labored. The tip of Na-aroénna rested against the deck; she had run out of strength.

“Your marshal is a coward,” said a grinning Pékyu Tenryo. “She dares not fight me. You have wasted your life to save someone who runs away from a battle.”

Dafiro said nothing. He continued to block each of Pékyu Tenryo’s strikes, backing up with each strike. His arms were losing feeling; blood seeped from his palms and made the handles of his weapons slick as the power of each blow from the pékyu’s war axe burst the blood vessels under the skin of his hands.

As he backed off one more step, Dafiro’s back leg buckled, and with two mighty swings of Langiaboto, Tenryo knocked Dafiro’s weapons out of his hands. Biter and Simplicity tumbled end over end, tracing two long arcs in the air before splashing into the sea.

The pékyu raised the axe again, bloodlust curling his lips into a wild grin.

Dafiro cried out and leapt at Pékyu Tenryo, meeting the oncoming blow of the war axe with his chest. The stone blade of the axe smashed through Dafiro’s rib cage and became lodged within, and Dafiro let out a blood-choked scream and wrapped his arms and legs about Pékyu Tenryo’s body. Blood erupted from his mouth and drenched Pékyu Tenryo. The two collapsed to the deck in a heap with Dafiro on top.

Gin Mazoti dashed forward, and with a mighty roar, plunged Na-aroénna through the back of Dafiro Miro and into the chest of Pékyu Tenryo.

Even with Dafiro blocking his vision, Tenryo sensed the coming thrust and managed to shift slightly to the side. The sword tip sank into his breast but did not pierce his heart.

Pékyu Tenryo laughed. “So that was your trick all along. You asked him to die to give you this chance.”

“Every cüpa stone can be sacrificed, as long as the game is won,” said Gin.

Back when she had first become the Marshal of Dasu, Gin Mazoti had whipped Dafiro Miro so that he could gain the trust of Kindo Marana. By bringing up that shared past, Gin and Dafiro were able to agree on a plan to defeat the pékyu.

“Too bad his sacrifice is worthless.” Pékyu Tenryo lifted up the dead body of Dafiro Miro until he had enough room to bend his legs and brace his feet against Dafiro’s chest. Gin watched with a sinking heart as she braced herself against the sword, trying to pin the pékyu to the deck, but Dafiro’s body slid inexorably up the sword.

He was going to kick him off along with the marshal. Gin Mazoti would have no chance against him one-on-one.

Gin looked up, and through the smoke and fire, saw the figure of Zomi Kidosu. She was holding the broken shaft of a silkmotic arrow, still attached to the diamond-tipped head like a short spear. The firework powder in the shaft had leaked out.

Zomi and Gin locked gazes. Dafiro’s body shielded the pékyu completely, and in another moment, the pékyu would be able to free himself.

The Ogé jar within the arrow required some force to break, force that could be supplied only if Zomi got a running start and struck a target head on. Dafiro’s body was too close to the deck.

Gin nodded at Zomi, her face calm. Every cüpa stone can be sacrificed.

Zomi rushed forward, aiming the arrowhead like a spear.

Gin held onto Na-aroénna even tighter, and a smile appeared on her placid face.

The diamond-tipped bolt plunged right into Gin’s exposed belly; her grunt was followed by the faint sound of glass smashing deep inside her body. The Ogé jar discharged.

The Marshal of Dara, the dead Captain of the Palace Guards, and the Great Pékyu froze. Bright sparkling arcs crisscrossed the three bodies connected by the Doubt-Ender.

The jolt, carried by the tip of the sword, stopped the pékyu’s heart instantly, and coursed through the body of the marshal. She held on to the sword as her body went rigid until finally she was thrown off and fell backward against the deck.

Zomi scrambled over the heaving deck until she was next to the body of the marshal. She cradled the dying woman in her lap. “Marshal!”

Gin Mazoti’s eyes were open, but they seemed to be looking somewhere far beyond Zomi Kidosu. “Is he… is he…”

“Yes, he’s dead,” said Zomi Kidosu.

“Good,” said the marshal. Then she closed her eyes.

“Marshal!” Zomi gently patted her face.

Her eyes still closed, Gin muttered, “Stop, Gray Weasel, stop!”

Her voice faded, her face relaxed, and her limbs went limp.

“Marshal, Marshal!”

The Marshal of Dara was no more.

This was a woman whose body deserved to lie in state and to be given the most solemn rites of burial.

Zomi looked up through blurry eyes. All around her she could see the ships of Dara and Lyucu milling about in confusion. Leaderless, the fleets of both sides were fighting on their own, uncertain as to the tide of the battle. Billowing smoke obscured the deck of Pride of Ukyu from their view.

The marshal’s spirit might have departed her body, but she still had to fight.

Zomi whispered an apology to Gin Mazoti and dragged her lifeless body to the prow of the ship. Half of the ship was under water now, and the prow was now the highest point. She propped Gin Mazoti up against the bowsprit, which was almost vertical, and lashed her to it securely.

She went back to the tattered canopy that had once held the sleeping figure of Emperor Ragin and retrieved the banner of Dara. She tied it to a bamboo arrow shaft, wrapped the marshal’s lifeless fingers around it, and secured the shaft to her hands with a length of silk.

The cruben-on-the-sea flag flapped in the shimmery air over the burning ship.

Crawling over the debris-strewn deck, she found pieces of bamboo and sinew from slingshots that she fashioned into harnesses for the marshal’s arms that would constrain and guide their movement.

She also retrieved several lengths of channeling wire from one of the broken silkmotic lances, and wrapped them around the marshal’s arms. She searched for and recovered more Ogé jars from broken silkmotic arrows and connected them together in parallel.

Then, ducking down out of sight, she picked up the wires with a pair of bamboo arrow shafts as though she was wielding a giant pair of eating sticks. Two sticks for noodles and rice, she seemed to hear the warm voice of her tutor once more.

Wires are like noodles, right?

She whispered a prayer for her teacher to watch over her; then she touched the wires to the exposed surfaces of the array of Ogé jars.

Just like the limbs of the frogs in the laboratories that moved through the water and swam with the power of silkmotic force, the marshal’s lifeless arms began to jerk and move, and, guided by the flexing harnesses, they waved the banner of Dara proudly through the air.

Again and again, Zomi touched the wires to the jars. The act felt like a violation, a desecration of the body. The smell of burning flesh filled her nostrils. She had to hold back her own nausea and continue, knowing that it was the right thing to do, that the marshal would have understood.

A breeze dissipated the smoke around the bowsprit, revealing the figure of the flag-wielding Gin Mazoti.

A lone cry rose from the deck of one of the Dara ships.

“The marshal is alive!”

“The pékyu is dead!”

Several voices joined the first, and then several more, until the wave of voices thundered from one end of the sea to the other.

Gin Mazoti, Marshal of Dara, was once again commanding the forces of Dara, even as her body began to char and smoke from the powerful currents of silkmotic force.

As the tattered banner of Dara waved through the air in the hands of Marshal Gin Mazoti, the fleet of Dara rallied. There was no doubt in the hearts of the sailors. They were being led by a god of war who had descended from a fiery ship from the heavens and killed the leader of the once-invincible Lyucu.

Neither was there doubt in the hearts of the Lyucu warriors that this was true.

Working in small squadrons of two or three, Dara ships rammed into the city-ships and support ships of the Lyucu and the traitorous ships under the command of Noda Mi.

The tide of battle was turning.

As Tanvanaki guided her mount back toward the Lyucu fleet in disarray, she noticed the observation dais on the shore of the gulf like a man-made hill. On top of it sat a solitary figure dressed in courtly finery, bedecked in glittering jewels and wrapped in flowing folds of bright red silk: Could it be Empress Jia of Dara?

Korva was tired and almost out of lift gas, but this was an opportunity that could not be missed. Tanvanaki gritted her teeth and gave the order for her mount to alter course and approach the dais. Either she was going to turn the empress into a pillar of ash, or she was going to force the woman to capitulate. The battle was not yet lost.

Korva reared up right before the dais, her wings thumping the air around the empress into wild turbulence, whipping the woman’s long, fiery hair every which way. The woman had more than a touch of insanity about her.

“Are you Empress Jia, the usurper of the Throne of Dara?” Tanvanaki shouted from Korva’s back.

“I am indeed Jia, Empress Regent of Dara.”

“Yield!” said Tanvanaki.

“Or what?” asked Jia. She laughed—and it sounded like the raving cackle of a woman who had been entirely freed from reason. “My husband is dead; my son has been enslaved. But I will never yield to you because I am already dead.”

Tanvanaki now noticed the smoke swirling all around the dais and the flames leaping up the sides of the towering structure. The entire dais had been prepared like a funeral pyre, and Korva had not even breathed any flames.

This is another trick, Tanvanaki realized. It made no sense that the leader of Dara, the power behind the throne of the young emperor, would sit here defenseless outside of Ginpen. It made no sense that the Empress Regent of Dara would set herself aflame. The only logical explanation was that this was not Jia at all, but some decoy madwoman intended as a lure to get her to approach the dais, which must be a trap of some sort.

“Retreat, retreat!” she shouted into the speaking tube plunged into the base of Korva’s neck, and for good measure, dug her spurred heels deep into the thick hide.

Korva moaned and turned away, her wings beating with strenuous exertion as she carried Tanvanaki and her crew away from whatever crafty mechanism the wily people of Dara had hidden inside the dais.

As Empress Jia continued to laugh at the retreating Lyucu princess, attendants rushed out from their hiding spots in the bushes at the foot of the dais and desperately tried to put out the fire devouring the dais. In the end, they had to persuade Jia to leap from the top and catch her in a tarp, an escape mechanism once devised for Emperor Mapidéré.

Korva crash-landed on the deck of one of the last remaining city-ships.

Noda Mi cowered at the foot of the giant beast as Korva struggled to catch her breath, her chest heaving like a living mountain. The garinafin had exhausted almost all her supply of lift gas during the attempt to burn down the city of Ginpen. She had barely managed to make it back in one piece. The Lyucu chieftains rushed over to check that Princess Vadyu was all right and to update her with the latest news. Imperiously, she waved them to silence as soon as they pointed to Noda Mi.

“Princess,” said Noda Mi, kneeling and touching his forehead to the deck.

“Why have you done this?” asked Tanvanaki from the back of Korva.

“Water flows from high places to low,” replied Noda Mi, “but people are always seeking to climb from low places to high.”

Tanvanaki nodded. “What you’ve done for the Lyucu today will not be forgotten.”

Then she turned to the thanes who had come to greet her. “Rescue as many survivors as you can and prepare for retreat.”

“But the Imperial airships are gone!” Noda Mi protested. “And our ships outnumber theirs.”

Tanvanaki shook her head. “Even if we manage to get through their fleet, we’ll have to fight them on land without any air support.”

“But their army number no more than a few hundred, and Ginpen itself is undefended!”

“That is surely a trick,” said Tanvanaki. “I flew over Ginpen and assaulted it with Korva, but not a single fire brigade even emerged to stop the spreading fire. This can only mean that they are laying another trap for us. I won’t repeat the mistake of my father’s arrogance.”

The somber song from the bone trumpet announced the retreat, and Lyucu thanes and warriors on the city-ships, terrified beyond measure by the deeds of the immortal Marshal Gin Mazoti, obeyed the princess’s orders without question.

If Gin Mazoti could see the retreating Lyucu fleet from beyond the River-on-Which-Nothing-Floats, she would surely smile with joy. Even in death, her reputation had protected Dara.

Ginpen was burning, and it truly was undefended. Yet the empty city had frightened away the fearless Lyucu princess.

- Since both sides have invoked us, shall we come clean about who has been interfering?

As always, the mocking voice belonged to Tazu, or perhaps more accurately now, Péten-Lutho-Tazu.

None of the other gods said anything.

- I won’t waste any time on the disgusting locusts, but giving mortals the gift of the silkmotic force was a bold move. Again, not strictly against the rules, but very close.

- The mortals figured out the secret for themselves. Rufizo and Kiji didn’t do anything more than teach and guide. In fact, you may be said to have given them a hand yourself years ago when you struck Zomi. I do question, however, the decision to encourage Noda Mi’s worst tendencies.

- If we’re going to accept Lyucu sacrifices, then… I still can’t believe that they’ve made us two sides of the same coin so that I have to argue with myself.

- Believe me, you can’t possibly be more distressed by this than I, even though it sort of makes sense. Chance and Choice are not always so easy to distinguish.

- The people of Dara are changing, brothers and sisters. The Lyucu are not going away.

- The mortals have to figure out how to deal with this, and so do we.

- I hate it when we agree.

- I can’t say I would dispute you on that point.

^{CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE} MESSENGER FROM AFAR

Two small messenger airships hovered next to each other, the doors of their gondolas wide open.

In one sat Pékyu Vadyu, also known as Tanvanaki, Ruler of Rui and Dasu, Protector of Dara, Consort of Emperor Thaké.

In the other sat Empress Jia, Regent of Dara.

The summit here in the air had been Tanvanaki’s idea. Up above the surface of the sea, she was free from the worry that the crafty people of Dara might try to attack her with a mechanical cruben. Besides, both sides would be able to see far and assure themselves that no massive fleet was being readied just out of sight, ready to seize either of the leaders as a hostage.

“You’re demanding tribute,” said Empress Jia. Her tone was calm; the Lyucu gambit wasn’t a surprise to her. After the mess Pékyu Tenryo had made of Rui and Dasu, they were without adequate supplies to feed the population through the winter.

“Think of it as trade, if that makes you feel better,” said Pékyu Vadyu. “You’re paying us food and clothing in exchange for us not vanquishing you immediately like the locusts that you are.”

“That’s a rather empty boast, considering how poorly you did the last time you tried to carry out your threats,” said the empress.

“We still have more than twenty garinafins,” said Pékyu Vadyu. “And our fleet has been strengthened by Noda Mi, who’s probably the only wise man who once served you. We were merciful the last time and stopped at the moment of our victory. Do you really want to press your luck?”

Jia sighed inwardly. Superficially, the Battle of Zathin Gulf was a great Dara victory, and that was how it was being spun by Prime Minister Cogo Yelu and Consort Risana. But everyone who had a full picture of the strategic situation knew that it wasn’t so clear who was the winner.

Prince Phyro was agitating for war and vengeance for his father, but both Jia and Théra—now Empress Üna—understood that peace was the only realistic option for Dara at the moment. True, the Lyucu were running out of supplies, but Dara was in even worse shape: They had lost all the Imperial airships; the treasury was all but empty; nobles and merchants were grumbling about the long, drawn-out war harming their business interests; the College of Advocates was criticizing the war as not being within the core interests of the intellectually elevated classes; scholars seemed more interested in censuring Emperor Ragin’s unorthodox choice of a woman as heir, which broke all their treasured traditions and beliefs, than the Lyucu threat; and worst of all, Marshal Gin Mazoti was dead, and there was no tactical mind in Dara capable of replacing her.

In addition, Kuni Garu’s final decree was not witnessed by all, and there were whispers that Empress Jia was holding on to power as regent illegitimately. Empress Üna’s and Emperor Thaké’s competing claims to the throne generated heated arguments and debates among the literati and the noble families, and Jia knew that the apparently intellectual arguments were really disguised attempts to pressure her and Théra to grant more concessions to certain factions.

It’s hard to get a free people to go to war, Jia reflected. Too many interests to balance. Too many selfish desires to satisfy.

“We accept your terms”—Empress Jia said—“only if you pledge not to wage war against Dara for ten years.”

“Only if you continue our ‘trade,’ ” said Pékyu Vadyu. “And the amount of grains, feed, gold, and silk shipped to us shall increase by a tenth every year.”

“That’s robbery!”

Pékyu Vadyu grinned. “Our reinforcements will arrive in a few more months. I can promise you that these are the best terms you’ll ever get. Do not try our patience.”

Next to Jia, Zomi Kidosu, now the new Imperial Farsight Secretary, whispered into Jia’s ear, “The people of Rui and Dasu will starve if we don’t send them the tribute the Lyucu require of us. For their sake, we have to accede.”

Jia sighed in her mind. There was truth to Zomi’s words. The Dara war locusts, after all, were partly responsible for the lack of provisions on Rui and Dasu.

Empress Üna had recommended Zomi for Rin Coda’s old post and suggested that its responsibilities be expanded. Not only was Zomi in charge of intelligence gathering, but she was also responsible for coordinating research in the useful arts with the Imperial laboratories in Ginpen and analyzing economic and political trends so as to advise the court on looming threats. A true “farseer,” as Théra put it.

Jia nodded reluctantly. She was sure that the Lyucu couldn’t be trusted to keep a nonaggression treaty for ten years, but she really had little choice. “We agree to your terms,” the empress declared.

“Your adviser is clearly very wise,” said a smiling Pékyu Vadyu. Zomi, startled at being acknowledged, pulled back into the shadows of the gondola.

“I believe our business here is concluded,” said Jia stiffly.

“Just one more thing,” said Pékyu Vadyu. “As a token of your good faith, I would like you to leave behind all the jewelry you are wearing on your persons.”

Jia’s eyes flashed with anger. “What kind of nonsense is this?”

“Consider it an advance payment,” said Tanvanaki, her tone insouciant. “I still need to convince my thanes that this peace is in our interest; a gift from you would greatly enhance my rhetoric.”

Zomi and Empress Jia stared at each other.

Interesting, Zomi mouthed. Perhaps Tanvanaki’s position among her people isn’t quite as secure as we thought.

Jia nodded. This demand for jewelry might be some kind of ritual humiliation of an opponent that will serve to shore up her support among the unruly thanes. We can play along—and find out more later with spies.

“I will accede to this outrageous request,” said the empress. “But do not view it as a gesture of submission.”

“Of course not,” said Tanvanaki. “I’ll think of it as… a gift from my mother-in-law.”

Gritting her teeth, the empress took off the coral pins in her bun, letting her long curly tresses fall around her face; she removed her jade earrings and cowrie shell necklace; she even took off the dandelion pins on her robe. All these she placed in a tea platter and handed over to the Lyucu pékyu on the end of a long bamboo stick that bridged the gap between their ships.

“Tell me, as a good friend should,” said the pékyu, “where each piece comes from. After all, I would like to describe them accurately.”

The empress complied, explaining the origin and meaning behind each item.

“And your adviser, too,” said Tanvanaki. “I want everything she’s wearing as well.”

Startled, Zomi’s hand flew to the string of zomi berries around her neck. “I wear this in memory of my teacher, Luan Zyaji—who you murdered.”

“What are those beads made from?” asked Tanvanaki. “Are they corals?”

“No, these berries were discovered by him on Crescent Island, and he named them after me. Please, these have no value except sentiment. I beg of you to let me keep them.”

Pékyu Vadyu laughed and shook her head. “Luan could have been a valued member of my staff. It’s too bad he couldn’t understand the shifting winds of power, despite his learning. Are you really willing to jeopardize a peace because you can’t let go of a few berries? You’ll always have your memories.”

Numbly, Zomi released the string of berries from around her neck and watched as the empress handed them over to the pékyu through the air.

“My son is a foolish child, but gentle-hearted.” The empress could not stop herself from saying one last thing. “Whatever political games you wish to play, please be kind to him.”

“Farewell, Empress of Dara.”

The doors of the gondolas closed, and the two airships departed for their respective homes.

In the gondola of the Lyucu ship, Pékyu Vadyu almost collapsed to the floor. It had taken every ounce of self-control for her not to leap across the gap between the two gondolas to seize the string of tolyusa hanging around Zomi Kidosu’s neck. And the baby was kicking inside her, possibly in reaction to her stress and adding to her discomfort.

The tolyusa was a plant native to Ukyu and Gondé, and critical to the life of both the people of the scrublands and the garinafins. A spicy plant whose fragrance and flavor resembled fire, the berries were a powerful hallucinogen used in the religious ceremonies honoring the All-Father, Every-Mother, and their many children.

Even more important, the tolyusa was critical to the reproductive cycle of the garinafins. Females had to consume large quantities of tolyusa berries to give birth to healthy young. Because the berries had such powerful hallucinogenic effects and the Lyucu did not want the garinafins to give birth to many babies during the long voyage from Ukyu to Dara, Pékyu Tenryo had kept the supply of tolyusa all on his ship in a secured storeroom. That was the room that Luan Zya had burned down.

Throughout the negotiations with Empress Jia, the pékyu had struggled to present a false image of confidence and power. Because they were cut off from the tolyusa, the garinafins had not been able to give birth to new hatchlings since their arrival in Dara. The adults were growing increasingly unruly, and if a new supply couldn’t be found soon, Pékyu Vadyu was going to be forced to execute some of the garinafins for safety reasons.

But now, the gods had smiled upon the Lyucu. There was tolyusa in Dara.

The hamlet at the foot of the towering cliff was slumbering in deep winter.

Képulu and Séji were outside stuffing snow into a bucket to be boiled into water. From time to time they stopped to take in the winter landscape around them. The branches of the towering trees at the edge of the clearing were laden with snow and sagged slightly. They could see almost no signs of the fire that had devastated the land a dozen years ago.

Nature healed fast.

The sound of beating wings drew their attention. As they looked up, a great winged beast burst from the clouds—serpentine neck, leathery wings, antlered head, and cold, pupilless eyes—and headed for the cliff behind the hamlet. To their amazement, they saw tiny figures—people—riding on the back of the strange creature.

The beast swept over their heads and disappeared over the top of the cliff. The two women looked at each other and ran through the snow to report what they had seen to Elder Comi, the bucket forgotten in the snow behind them.

Taking off daily from the deck of a city-ship that hugged the northern coast of Crescent Island, the Lyucu expedition had been scouring the island for tolyusa for weeks. The riders and their mount were both growing impatient due to the lack of success. Usually they limited their flights to dawn or dusk, but with the spring hunting season just around the corner, they took risks to search for the tolyusa during broad daylight. They needed to find what they came for before the minor nobles of Dara arrived on the island in search of boar tusk trophies and interpreted their incursions into Crescent Island as an act of war.

The garinafin jerked and dove suddenly. The pilot tapped the neck of the garinafin to ask it to slow down, but the garinafin responded only by diving even faster. The riders and the pilot had no choice but to hang on tight to their harnesses as they descended at a dizzying speed.

The garinafin landed in a clearing in the woods on top of the cliff and bellowed triumphantly.

The Lyucu riders looked around them, dazed.

The garinafin was standing in the middle of what appeared to be a fresh lava flow that cut through the pure white, snow-covered clearing. The strong smell of fire and smoke only added to the impression. But a closer examination revealed that the “lava” was made from a carpet of plants whose leaves, stems, and flowers were all bright red. The tolyusa was a hardy plant that flowered in winter, and berries would come in the spring.

The Lyucu warriors climbed down from the garinafin, fell down to their knees, and wept tears of joy. In the heart of winter, they had found the hope for renewal.

“The All-Father protects us!”

“Praise be to the gods of this new land!”

Years ago, when Pékyu Tenryo had sent his exploratory expeditions to Dara, one of his ships had tried to pass through the Wall of Storms. The ship had been wrecked, but the supply of tolyusa they carried as a way to speak to the gods on the long journey had survived, washed ashore, passed through the guts of birds and animals until the seeds took root here, in the most inhospitable volcanic rock of the Islands of Dara.

A fleet of small boats from the Itanti Peninsula closed in on the dome-headed whale to the east of Nokida.

This was the Year of the Whale, and winter was the season for whale hunting.

The whales, fat with blubber, migrated to the southern oceans to breed. Along the way, pods of whales passed by Wolf’s Paw, the southeastern corner of the Big Island, and the Tunoa Isles. Fishermen who were brave enough to take up the harpoon and join one of the hunting fleets could look forward to a share of the rich profits to be made from blubber, meat, and whalebone, all of which fetched good prices in Dara.

The rowers on the small, slender boats, each about twenty feet long, strained in synchrony and propelled the boat to glide over the choppy sea as fast as a flying dyran. A young man stood at the prow of the boat, holding up a harpoon like a vision of Tazu.

The boat was closing in on the bobbing black figure of the whale glimpsed through the waves.

“I got it!” the young man cried, and with a grunt, heaved the harpoon. The weapon plunged into the back of the whale and the line trailing from it began to unspool at a rapid pace.

“A strike! A strike!” the crew of the whaleboat called out to the other boats. While the line continued to unspool, they reversed themselves in the boat and began to row the other way as the other boats closed in.

The largest and most desired whale to hunt was the dome-headed whale, so named for its large, bulbous forehead, which contained a large melon of wax that had been prized since ancient times as a lubricant and the base ingredient in many cosmetics. It was said that the whale was able to melt and freeze the wax in the melon as a way to adjust its buoyancy in water—a kind of watery equivalent to the gas sacs of the garinafin, perhaps.

The specimen the fleet was chasing today was a male of average size, about fifty feet in length.

When the other boats were close enough, the crews tossed over cables with hooks, which the harpoon boat’s crew used to secure the boats together. Soon, the five boats in the hunting pack were strung together like a line of fish, and the cable attached to the harpoon was about to run out.

“Get ready!” the young man shouted, and sat down inside the boat to brace himself as the line ran out and the force of the whale jerked the entire line of boats almost out of the water. “Brace!” he shouted again.

The rowers in all five boats dipped their oars into the water and held on, letting the blades of the oars act as brakes. This was a contest of strength. The rowers had to place as much strain as possible on the whale while preventing it from diving and escaping.

Their goal was to tire the whale, not to kill it.

This was because the most precious material in a dome-headed whale was not the head wax, but the living amber—a soft, waxy material secreted by the whale’s gut. The amber had a sweet smell that was unearthly, and it was highly prized as an ingredient in perfume, incense, medicine, and industry.

Living amber was best harvested by having the whale vomit it up. Since the living amber was far more valuable than the rest of the whale put together, the best whalers learned to tire the whales out with a long chase until they vomited up the precious material before letting them go so that they could grow more living amber for the next season. The whalers were like farmers who picked up after the goose laying the jeweled egg rather than killing it, thereby cutting off future profit.

The dome-headed whale was heading straight for the coast of the Big Island. This was rather unusual—whales typically headed for the deep sea when struck by a harpoon—but not unheard of.

But it was very unusual to have the whale continue to swim with such vigor half an hour after being struck. The crews on the whaleboats were rather pleased. The closer the whale came to land before vomiting from exhaustion, the less distance the crews had to row to get back to land. It was like getting a free ride.

As the whale approached the shore, it didn’t even slow down.

“Is it going to beach itself?” asked one of the men.

“Just our luck to get a whale that doesn’t want to live,” said another, regret in his voice. The whalers who hunted the dome-headed whale tended to bond with the majestic creatures over time. Since their task was not slaughter but the extraction of a valuable resource from creatures they intended to keep alive, a suicidal whale was a cause for sorrow.

“Hold on tight!” the young man who had thrown the harpoon shouted.

Plunging through the surf, the whale slid right onto the beach, opened its toothed maw, and vomited.

Great globs of gray-black living amber cascaded onto the beach, having the consistency and appearance of lava that was just beginning to congeal. Children playing on the beach screamed in delight, knowing that this was a good haul for the whalers. They went up to the still-heaving body of the whale to examine the bounty and to see if they could perhaps help the whale by pushing it back into the sea.

The children gathered and stared at the mass of living amber. The smell was pungent, strong, a complex combination of musk, earth, camphor, and herbs.

The mess was moving.

The children screamed.

The figure of a man emerged, crawling on his hands and knees, covered in the waxy substance. He spat and coughed and retched.

“Kill the whale,” he rasped.

Then he collapsed and stopped moving.

The man from the belly of the whale stood before the Dandelion Throne, and as Empress Üna and Empress Jia watched, began his hesitant, halting speech.

“I am called Takval Aragoz, the son of Souliyan Aragoz, the daughter of Nobo Aragoz, last Pékyu of Agon….”

He relied on simple words accompanied by many gestures, but the import of what he was saying was clear enough.

After the conquest of Gondé by Pékyu Tenryo, the Agon were scattered to the ends of the scrublands, enslaved to the tribes of the Lyucu.

Away from the fresh lakes, away from the flowing rivers, away from the meltwaters from the distant snowy mountain peaks, the Agon struggled to eke out an existence in the deserts of the south, in the harsh ice fields of the north, in the barren mountains of the east.

Such was the fate of those who lost. By the laws of the scrublands, the weak submitted to the strong.

In the year that Takval turned twelve, messengers from Pékyu Tenryo’s Great Tent in Taten came to every Agon settlement and announced that each family had to supply a child to the pékyu as tribute.

Takval’s mother, Souliyan, was actually the youngest daughter of Nobo Aragoz, the last Agon pékyu. She and her brother, Volyu Aragoz, had been spared in the slaughter of the Aragoz family because their mothers were slaves and Nobo had never formally acknowledged his paternity. Still, Souliyan and Volyu were treated by the surviving Agon as their only connections to their ancient glory.

But even the former First Family was not spared by Tenryo’s order, and Takval Aragoz, descendant of the last pékyu, went to the capital.

There he became one of the pékyu’s grooms. He cared for the garinafins, fed them, watched over the hatchlings, and shoveled their dung. He also got to know the other slaves well.

Several of the slaves were survivors of Admiral Krita’s expedition. From them he learned the language of Dara and heard the tales of the wonders of that distant land. He heard about windmills and water mills, about weapons of bronze and steel, about airships that could stay aloft for weeks, and clever men who could imagine and build ships that were as large as mountains.

For most of the other slaves, these stories served as nothing more than idle entertainment in the evenings, but for Takval, they were something more. They spoke of hope.

Then, in the year he turned nineteen, Pékyu Tenryo announced that he was sending an army to conquer the glorious paradise to be found in the distant land of Dara.

Like the other slaves and Lyucu warriors and thanes who would stay behind, he stood at the shore and watched the fleet of city-ships depart. While he went through the motions of cheering with the others, in his heart he yearned to go with them. But his goal wasn’t to witness Pékyu Tenryo’s triumph.

Two years later, his opportunity came.

Prince Cudyu announced a second expedition to Dara to help secure the fruits of Pékyu Tenryo’s conquest—there had been no news of the first expedition, but how could anyone doubt that the pékyu had succeeded?

Takval volunteered to be a rower in this second fleet. Though few Agon slaves were trusted, Takval had distinguished himself with his extraordinary devotion to the care of the pékyu’s garinafins, and Prince Cudyu approved his request.

The second fleet launched on a summer morning. This time, besides warriors, garinafins, and cattle, the city-ships were also laden with families—grandmothers, grandfathers, young boys and girls and nursing babies, trusted family slaves—the Lyucu were not just going to conquer; they were also going to settle.

One morning, six months into their voyage, Takval overheard the captain talking late at night with his senior officers. Without the assistance of the clever Dara barbarian Luan Zya, the calculations for the second expedition had been off. They were running out of supplies, and the proposed solution was to toss some of the slaves overboard, starting with the Agon.

And so Takval Aragoz came up with a daring plan. Late one night, he overcame the guards of the watch on deck, stole one of the coracles carried by the city-ships, and filled it with the goods that he would use to bargain for the future of his people. Before they had discovered his treachery, he was in the water and rowing away.

By the time the morning sun rose, the fleet was out of sight. He had no idea how he was going to go through the legendary Wall of Storms, only that he had to get away, that he had to try. He drifted with the current, dreaming of the fantastic land of Dara.

Then a great dome-headed whale breached near his coracle, capsizing it. The whale swallowed him and his goods, and the rest was a long dream.

“What do you seek from us, Prince of Agon?” asked Empress Jia.

“An alliance between our peoples against our common enemy,” said Takval. “A bond as tight as that between the garinafin and its pilot against the horrid wolf or the tusked tiger.”

“We can fight the Lyucu on our own,” said the empress. “We have triumphed over them and we will again.”

“Can you triumph over another wave of garinafins, numbering in the hundreds? The Lyucu are coming, and they will bring more of the flying beasts.”

“What do you offer in return?”

Takval pointed to the dozens of ovoid bodies at his feet, each about the size of a man’s head. These had been found when the whalers cut open the carcass of the dome-headed whale. “These.”

“What are they?”

“Garinafin eggs.”

Prince Cudyu had decided that the best way to transport a large number of garinafins to Dara was to carry them in the form of eggs. Once in Dara, they could be incubated in batches and slowly incorporated into the army. This was safer and more efficient than carrying only adults and younglings.

Théra and Jia looked at each other.

Empress Üna pleaded with her eyes. Please, Mother. Garinafins of our own will change the fortune of Dara.

Jia leaned forward. “What is to prevent us from simply seizing them from you? After all, you have nothing more to offer.”

“It took me years to learn how to care for the garinafins. Without my knowledge, the hatchlings will die and you’ll never make them do your bidding.”

Empress Jia narrowed her eyes. “What sort of assistance do you want from us?”

“The Wall of Storms is about to open—that’s why Prince Cudyu’s new fleet is coming. When it does open, I ask that Dara send a fleet to Ukyu and Gondé to help my people free themselves.”

The two empresses looked at each other again.

We can’t afford to start a new war, much less a war thousands of miles away on the other side of the ocean.

“And as a gesture of goodwill, we ask for a royal marriage with an Imperial princess of the House of Dandelion.”

The Grand Audience Hall fell completely silent.

Théra barely stopped herself from gasping at the bold request. She looked at the young man. He was earnest and determined, his chiseled features and fair complexion and hair not unhandsome. But marriage?

She looked over at Zomi Kidosu, and the two spoke volumes in a single glance.

“We will get the secrets out of him, Daughter. I will feed him herbs to dissolve his will until he babbles like an idiot. Risana will trap him in smoke until he obeys every order we give him. And if neither works, we will torture him until he gladly gives us everything we ask for. There is no need for you to be troubled.”

“No, Mother. If you so much as try any of these tricks, I will strip you of all power. We have seen what costs your methods impose. I, for one, am not willing to pay them.”

“You are indeed stronger than your brothers,” Jia muttered.

“Were you disappointed when Father named me as heir instead of Phyro? You didn’t plan for that, did you?”

“No, I’m not disappointed, not exactly. Your father believed in picking the right heir to avoid the fall of Mapidéré’s empire, but I have always wanted a Dara where it mattered not who was the emperor. Your strength simply makes it more complicated.”

“My strength may be exactly what Dara needs.”

“I am still the regent.”

“Only until I am ready. I know you want the best for Dara, but there are lines I will not cross. I will solve this, my way.”

The sea threshed as though at war with itself.

- Lutho, my meddling brother, I must applaud you. Keeping a mortal alive in the belly of a whale is no simple feat!

- Would you please not shout into my ear? Our heads are connected to the same torso.

- How do you justify this bit of interference?

- Saving lives from the merciless sea is something I’ve done since time immemorial; it’s part of my charge.

- What I can’t figure out is how you got the whale to swallow him in the first place. Have you figured out a way to pass through the Wall of Storms?

- Being swallowed by the whale was a matter of chance. It was only when the whale entered Dara that I could practice my art.

- “Chance.” I like the sound of that. Though I can’t pass through the Wall, it delights me to know the larger world follows my rules.

- Or perhaps what looks like chance to us is calculation in the eyes of Moäno, the King of All Deities.

- You just can’t let me win, even once, can you?

And the sea roiled on, an eternal argument with itself.

Inside the Three-Legged Jug, the wood-burning stove warmed the air and bathed everything in a soft, hazy light. A snowstorm raged outside and ice-flowers bloomed against the glass windows.

“I don’t like this storyteller,” Fara seethed.

“What don’t you like about him, Ada-tika?” asked Théra.

“He makes Auntie Gin sound like a man who reluctantly put on a dress,” said Fara. “But she was proud to be who she was.”

“Maybe you can tell better stories about her when you’re older,” said Théra. “You like to write, don’t you? Maybe you’ll be like Nakipo of old, whose words enthralled kings and peasants alike. I bet you can also ask Aya to help you.”

After the elaborate state funeral for the marshal, Empress Jia had given Aya the title of Imperial Princess, with the same ceremonial rank as a daughter of Emperor Ragin himself, and moved her into the Imperial palace to live with Fara. However, the cynical noted that this nominal honor actually deprived her of her inheritance, as Empress Jia did not restore to her the kingdom of Géjira, her mother’s old fief. One might have thought that her mother’s sacrifice at the Battle of Zathin Gulf had washed away the dishonor of her betrayal, but the empress was implacable in her continuing program to reduce the power of independent fiefs.

Fara nodded resolutely, and, despite her criticism, soon became entranced by the tale of the storyteller again. He was enacting the episode of Gin Mazoti’s killing of Gray Weasel, who had maimed children for profit.

“How’s Takval’s teaching?” Théra asked in a low voice, turning to the other woman sitting at the small table with her and Fara.

“Not bad,” said Zomi. “I’ve taken detailed notes, but the real learning won’t start until the hatchlings arrive.”

The three of them were dressed in plain hempen clothes as though they were maids from some merchant’s household. Fara loved hearing stories, and Théra was willing to indulge her as much as she could, while she still had the opportunity.

Around them, many of the other patrons nursing a flask of cheap wine or mug of foamy beer were in fact disguised palace guards. Indulging the young princess didn’t mean that the Empress Regnant of Dara could take chances with her safety.

“Is raising garinafins really hard?” asked Théra.

“It sounds complicated,” said Zomi. “The hatchlings need a lot of contact with humans, and the tolyusa—the zomi berries—help the hatchlings imprint on pilots, who are treated as part of the garinafin’s family. Since we won’t have adult garinafins to help train the hatchlings, the bond between pilot and mount will be especially delicate and difficult to cultivate.”

The Imperial expedition to Crescent Island had returned with the news that the Lyucu had apparently gotten there first and destroyed the natural colony of zomi berries—presumably after taking enough specimens to be able to grow them back on Dasu and Rui. But the seeds brought by Takval were enough to start a new colony, and the empress was helping with their cultivation. Zomi still blamed herself for not seeing through Tanvanaki’s trick, but everyone else assured her that she could not have known why the pékyu was so interested in the jewelry she and the empress wore.

“Pilots are never involved in the caging and lashing of the younglings to get the adults to behave,” Zomi continued. “It would confuse the garinafins. The individuals who threaten the garinafins are always different from those who bond with them.”

“A combination of force and kindness,” said Théra. “Sounds like a great deal of politics.”

Zomi nodded and said nothing.

They both knew that the conversation was going nowhere because both were circling around the real topic, the topic that they both wanted to and didn’t want to broach.

Zomi bit her lip and decided to take the plunge.

“You’re really going?”

Théra held still for a second, and then turned to Fara. “Will you be all right by yourself for a bit? Zomi and I have some things to discuss.”

Fara nodded absentmindedly, far too absorbed in the storyteller.

Nodding at the disguised guards around them, Théra rose and took Zomi to the tavern keepers’ private residence upstairs, where they could converse just by themselves.

She turned to Zomi and said, simply, “Yes.”

“Why?”

“There is no one else. Fara is far too young, and none of Uncle Kado’s daughters are of marriageable age either.”

“Plenty of political marriages have been arranged with young brides—and not even real princesses, either. You could have asked Empress Jia to adopt another noblewoman and make her into an Imperial princess like Aya Mazoti.”

“This isn’t a political marriage where the bride is just a figurehead. Whoever marries the Agon prince must lead his people with him and stop the Lyucu threat at the root. This alliance is vital for us. The Lyucu now know how to counter our airships, and the only way to defeat them, in the long term, is to possess our own garinafin force—”

“I don’t mean those kinds of reasons!” Zomi’s face flushed. “Do you only think in terms of politics and diplomacy? Do you really think of yourself as only a bargaining chip?”

Théra reached out and grabbed Zomi’s hand. Zomi made as if to pull it out of her grasp before relenting. The two held hands and sat quietly for a while, though their hearts were hardly tranquil.

“Then come with me,” said Théra.

“And watch you wed another?” asked Zomi in disbelief.

“Arrangements can be made,” said Théra. “My own household dealt with such complications—conventions are just that, conventions.”

For a moment, Zomi was tempted, but her rational nature would not allow her to give in: To give up the chance to change Dara as one of the most powerful officials of the Dandelion Court? To give up the chance to seek vengeance for her parents and teacher? To give up the chance to realize her dream of a more fair, more just Dara?

“I can’t,” she said. “No matter how much I want to, I can’t. But why must you give up the throne to pursue a life in some barbaric land?”

“To hand the throne to me was my father’s idea,” said Théra. “But I have never liked to have my life planned out for me. As much as you wish to change the world, so much do I wish the same, but on my own terms with power obtained by my own wits, not handed to me on a platter. You ought to understand that.”

“Perhaps we’re both too ambitious,” said Zomi wistfully, “like Luan Zyaji and the marshal.”

“What we share is special,” said Théra. “There will never be another like you. You hear the voice in my heart when I hum a hesitant tune. You’re the mirror of my soul, Zomi, my wakeful weakness.”

Zomi squeezed her hand in response, too overcome by emotion to speak.

“But our lives should be large enough to contain multitudes of loves,” said Théra. “I have never liked those tales that define an entire life by a romance. Remember Luan Zyaji’s poem?

“Zyaji spoke of many loves in his life, only one of which was romance. He spoke of friendship, of filial devotion, of amour, of grandness of soul, of loving your work—we’re defined by the web of our loves, not one grand romance.”

“But Dara needs you,” said Zomi. “I need you! Don’t go.”

“Dara will be fine with Mother and Phyro in charge, and you and Cogo Yelu to assist them. Father has done much to prepare the soil of Dara to accept a woman as ruler, and his work, though meant for me, will serve Mother well.

“I am a daughter of the House of Dandelion, and it’s my destiny to seek out new lands, to see new sights, to fill my heart with the rhythm and cadence of another people’s hopes and dreams. A wise lady once told me that my flower is the current-riding lotus, just as yours is the fiery Pearl of Fire. You are meant to change the landscape, to pioneer new paths, to challenge what exists with what may be envisioned. And I’m meant to seek a new home far from home, where I may bloom and create a new world. Riding the whale’s way, I will go farther than any dandelion seed; I will lead a revolution.”

“I have never had much patience with the passive mysticism of the Fluxists—”

“Zomi, my love, discerning and accepting the Flow of life is not passivity. I strive to dissolve the sorrows of two peoples.”

After a while, Zomi nodded, but she couldn’t help the tears streaming down her face. “You speak of destiny, yet what is destiny but accumulated chance made into a story in retrospect?”

“Perhaps you’re right. But this is the way I want to tell my story. I love you, Zomi, but this is what I want. Respect that.”

“So this is the end, then?”

Théra shook her head. “Just because we’ll be apart doesn’t mean that our love ends. You and I will both have many other loves, many grand romances and devotions and enlargements of the soul. But this is our first, and it will always be special. No matter how much time passes or how far apart we are, our love will remain true. We’re dyrans streaking past each other in the vast deep, but our shared lightning-flash will illuminate the darkness ahead until we are embraced by the eternal storm.”

Zomi wiped her eyes. “You would have done well in the Grand Examination. You composed beautifully.”

“I’m named the Dissolver of Sorrows for a good reason,” Théra said, her lips curling into a grin. “You look lovely even with tears, like an orchid blossoming after the rain.”

Zomi’s face bloomed and flushed, and she pulled Théra into a passionate, lingering kiss.

“I did pay the tavern owners to be away for the whole evening,” said a panting Théra when she had a chance to catch her breath. “We have this room all to ourselves.”

“You planned this?”

“Maybe.”

And as the storyteller went on with his tale downstairs and the storm raged outside, the brightest thing inside the Three-Legged Jug was the incandescent glow between two bodies and two hearts.

Empress Üna’s decision to depart from Dara was unprecedented, and there were no protocols to guide how it should be handled. In the end, Théra declared that she would designate Phyro as her heir and name him emperor during her absence from Dara. Until she returned to these shores, she would once again be known as Princess Théra.

After the coronation of Emperor Monadétu, formerly known as Prince Phyro, Empress Jia would remain regent, and she announced that the reign name would remain Season of Storms in recognition of the challenges still facing the empire and the fact that Empress Üna was handing over power only temporarily, at least in theory.

An empire-wide celebration was declared. Some of the most joyous celebrants were scholars who had long grumbled about the improprieties of a woman on the Dandelion Throne. For them, all was right again with the world, despite the fact that Rui and Dasu remained occupied, and another Lyucu invasion loomed on the horizon.

Empress Jia invited Consort Risana, the emperor’s mother, to tea.

The empress wiped the porcelain cup, scooped powdered tea into it with a bamboo scoop, and waited until the water was just boiling in the brazier, the bubbles covering the surface like the foam blown out by fish over a quiet corner of the pond. Then she lifted the kettle off the brazier and poured the scalding water into the teacup, flexing her wrist so that the stream of hot water shot out like a concentrated beam of light.

But there was only one cup.

Risana quaked like a leaf in the wind.

“Why?” she asked.

Jia knelt up in formal mipa rari. “The emperor is young and brash, and he lacks Théra’s political acumen. He yearns for martial glory and vengeance against the Lyucu, but the garinafin force will not be ready for another decade. We must not go to war until we can be assured of victory. He needs a firm and steady hand to restrain his impulses.”

“You are that hand. I will never challenge your position as regent, Big Sister. I have not once attended formal court since the death of Kuni, and I will continue to refrain from all politics.”

Jia shook her head, her face sad but resolute. “Then you’re asking me to drink from this cup.”

“I’m doing no such thing!”

“There cannot be two behind the throne who are perceived as the source of authority. Though Phyro has always respected me, I can’t compete with a mother’s love.

“Even if you do as you promise, there will be those tempted to use your name as a rallying flag. Dara has a turbulent voyage ahead of her—to keep the peace with the Lyucu until we’re ready to go to war again, I will have to implement policies that may be deeply unpopular and offend the powerful. They’ll come to you with tearful pleas and sweet enticements to soften your heart; they’ll whisper in the emperor’s ears that I am hungry for power and that he is his own man; they’ll beguile you into supporting his need for independence and seduce him into looking at you for guidance instead of me.

“If you won’t drink this, then it will be better for the people of Dara that I do. There will be less strife if there is only a single voice behind the throne, even if that voice isn’t mine.”

“You speak of hypotheticals,” muttered Risana. “You speak of dangers that may come instead of the love and faith that are.”

“I cannot count on love and faith,” said Jia. “Those are luxuries not permitted to those responsible for the fate of millions. What we need are systems and rules to channel the flow of power, but until they’re built, I must wield power myself.”

“Perhaps you’re simply in love with the idea of power,” said Risana. “And it is Power that wields you.”

“That is no doubt what some will say. They’ll claim that I’m jealous of the way Kuni favored you in his later years; they’ll claim that I want to arrogate to myself the authority that belongs to others; they’ll call me shrill and ambitious and paint me as a harpy. But what is my reputation compared to the lives of the people of Dara? I’m content to do what is right and let others think what they will.”

Risana sat still and shook her head.

Jia sighed and nodded. “I ask only that you remember what I said and do all you can to help Phyro do the right thing for the people instead of for his vanity.”

She picked up the cup and placed the rim against her opened lips; she tilted the cup—

Risana slapped it out of her hand; the tea spilled across the floor.

“You were really going to do it,” Risana said, incredulous.

Jia composed herself and gave her a bitter smile. “For the good of Dara, I was willing to watch my lover executed for my plots; I was willing to order my husband killed to achieve victory; and I’m willing to go to war against my son regardless of his safety. Love makes people do strange things, and I love these islands and the people who live in them. What is my life compared to the lives of all the people of Dara? Could you have made any of these decisions?”

Risana shook her head, trembling even more.

“The grace of kings does not glitter like precious gold or shine like gentle jade,” said Jia. “It’s forged from iron and blood.”

Gradually, Risana stopped shaking. She sat up in mipa rari. “Big Sister, not until now have I understood you. You’re a worthy Empress of Dara.”

She bowed in jiri, and Jia returned in kind.

“Poison will require too many lies,” said Risana. “It will also taint the trust Phyro has for you—though you do not care about trust, he does.”

Jia nodded in acknowledgment.

“I will climb the Moon-Gazing Tower at midnight and leap from it,” continued Risana, her voice steady and calm. “It will look like an accident.”

Knee-walking, she retrieved the fallen teacup from the floor and wiped up the spilled tea with her sleeves before returning to the table, carefully setting the cup down next to the brazier. She smiled wryly at Jia. “We should take care to make the staging perfect—a broken support for the balustrade, a pool of spilled water near where I stand—such details are important in a performance.”

Jia bowed to her again. “You will be given the title Empress of Dara posthumously. I will ensure that the court historians honor your name in the annals of Dara.”

“Do spend more time with Phyro when I’m gone,” said Risana. “He may have grown up fast, but every boy misses his mother. Your presence will be a comfort to him.”

“I promise,” said Jia.

In her private bedchamber, Risana dismissed all her servants and maids, locked the door, and sat down on the sitting mat in the middle of the room.

She undressed and cut out the tea-soaked section of her sleeve from her dress. Slowly, meticulously, she cut the fabric into tiny strips, and then cut the strips into even smaller squares.

Her hands trembled so much that she was afraid of cutting herself.

Jia’s arguments had been powerful. Risana could not imagine herself ordering soldiers to fire at the enemy when her husband was held up as a shield. She could not imagine going to war against her own son. It was true that Dara needed a firm hand to resist the tide of the Lyucu, and her quaking hands would never be enough to help Phyro, the Pearl in the Palm.

A rabbit cowered in a cage next to her. She dropped the squares of fabric into a cup, mixed it with fresh fruit slices, and slid the cup into the cage. The rabbit sniffed the food suspiciously, but then began to eat.

Risana watched the rabbit carefully. Soon, the cup was empty, and the rabbit moved away from the feeding cup and hopped around the cage, its whiskers twitching.

She could not imagine leaving Phyro behind. The boy might swagger and strut, but he was kind-hearted and gentle. Love made one do strange things, it was true. But was it strange to not want to die, to not want to leave your child behind?

The rabbit hopped around the cage, showing no signs of discomfort or pain.

The tea had not been poisoned.

Risana closed her eyes. It had all been theater. Jia was willing to drink the tea because she knew there was no danger. She had been performing to gain Risana’s admiration, to gain her trust, to make her offer to remove herself from life at the court, from life altogether.

She shook even harder. She could not leave Phyro with such a woman, who thought only in terms of iron and blood. She would go to Phyro and leave the palace with him. They would disguise themselves as commoners and live in some forgotten corner of Dara, much as she had lived with her mother before she met Kuni. Jia wanted to guide Dara through the season of storms, and she and Phyro would not stand in the way.

“Mocü! Cawi!” she called out to her maids. “I need my traveling case.”

“They won’t be coming,” a voice said behind her.

Risana whipped around and saw the figure of Empress Jia in the door.

“Your servants and maids have all been called away to receive a special bonus from the palace treasury,” said Jia.

Risana opened her mouth to scream, but Jia went on, “The palace guards have blocked off all entrances to the private quarters. No one will hear you and no one is coming.”

Risana stared at her, a bitter smile on her face. “I was going to leave with my son. We would hide in the most obscure valley and never emerge to bother you. I would have used smokecraft to disguise ourselves.”

Jia shook her head. “You weave a romantic vision that will fool only yourself. No matter how much smoke you wrap around yourselves, the ambitious will find you and turn you into a symbol of rebellion. Phyro would never be content to live and die in obscurity when he knows he is the rightful heir to the throne. He may listen to you today, but will you be able to stop him from coming to challenge me in ten years? Meanwhile, you will have denied him the opportunity to learn how to wield power responsibly from the only one who can teach him. You will have prevented him from growing into a man who can face down Timu and Vadyu and save Dara from the looming darkness.”

Risana lowered her head. “I am not like you. I cannot think as you do.”

“I know. I wanted you to see the path for yourself, and you came so close to transcending your fears, so close.” There was pity and compassion in Jia’s voice. “That is why I have come to steel your resolve and make sure you fulfill the role that you’re meant to take on, to weave a masterpiece of smokecraft that will save your son and Dara.

“The moon is particularly lovely tonight. Shall we go to the tower?”

Flickering light from a single candle; two women kneeling across from each other in a room away from prying ears.

“Let them call me a villain, so long as the lives of the people are better with me than without.”

“You have a flair for grand gestures, Jia, believing that they will redeem all the messy, bloody ruins left in your path. But redemption is but a mirage so long as you persist in your methods.”

“Have I finally lost you, Soto? Will you plunge Dara into civil strife?”

“For the sake of the people, I will keep your secret for now. But if you do not give up the reins of power when Phyro is ready, I swear by the Twins that I will proclaim the truth to every corner of Dara.”

^{CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO} PARTING OF THE LOTUS SEED

Tanvanaki had come to him and asked him to choose a new reign name for himself. After all, he was supposed to be the Emperor of Dara.

It was one of the few things on which she bothered to ask for his opinion.

In truth, he knew he shouldn’t be resentful. Tanvanaki had her hands full. The death of Pékyu Tenryo had created a temporary power vacuum, and several prominent thanes had made moves to challenge Tanvanaki’s leadership. With a combination of guile and murder, she had barely managed to hold them off, and the other thanes had finally acquiesced to her claim as the successor to Pékyu Tenryo only after the tribute paid by Dara and the discovery of tolyusa in Dara. These were not matters in which his knowledge of the Ano Classics could help her.

And now, as he held his newborn son, he felt lost. At twenty years of age, he was barely more than a child himself. The idea that this new life depended on him, much like the fragile new union between the Lyucu and Dara, overwhelmed him.

Tanvanaki had named the boy Todyu Roatan—she did not care for the Dara custom of waiting until the age of reason to formally name a child—but Timu had taken to calling him Dyu-tika, and the servants, most of them Dara slaves, had followed his lead. He was pleased. It was a way in which he could feel himself making a difference, small though it was.

But with the peace now in place between Lyucu-occupied Dara and the rest of the islands, there was a chance for him to do more. His skills had always been more useful in peace than war. Tanvanaki would need his help to set up a system in which the natives of Rui and Dasu could live in harmony with their conquerors, and he would do his utmost to show his dead father that he had been right.

Dyu-tika mewed in his arms, and Timu soothed him with gentle cooing noises. As the baby balled his tiny fists next to his delicate chin, a powerful surge of love suffused Timu’s body. Dyu-tika was but one of the many babies like him born during the last year and this on the islands of Rui and Dasu, products of the union between the Lyucu and the natives—however painful and violent and terrible the origins of their lives, the babies were innocent. They belonged to these islands and had a claim to these shores.

Freedom required treading new paths, required audacious leaps of faith. He was going to cast his shadow down the pages of history.

“Come,” he said, summoning the scribes of his tiny court. “I have decided on a new reign name: Audacious Freedom.”

Emperor Monadétu came to the docks of Ginpen to say farewell in person.

“Big Sister—” The young emperor was so overcome with emotion that he couldn’t continue.

“Hudo-tika,” Théra had embraced him and whispered into his ear, “don’t mar this happy occasion by contradicting my name. You’re acting like I’m about to be sacrificed when in fact I’m going off to be a bride and the queen of a new people.”

“I’ve lost my mother, and now I’m going to lose you. My sorrow is undissolvable.”

“You’re the emperor now, Rénga. The people look to you and expect to see hope. They need you to assure them that this alliance is the answer to the Lyucu threat. There is no moment when you’re not onstage; you must not let your heart show on your face.”

“I’m not like Father! I’m not like you! I was angry at first when he picked you instead of me, but now I know he was right. Timu doesn’t know how to do this, and neither do I.”

“Do not let what Father or I did confine your choices. I know you will plot your own course. Did you know that Father designed his crown with dangling cowrie strands so that he could veil his face as he struggled with doubt? None of us is born knowing how to wear a mask; we grow into them.”

As the auspicious hour for the departure of the fleet approached, the musicians on the dock began to play: sweet silk-stringed coconut lutes, effervescent bamboo flutes, upbeat wooden rhythm sticks, lively stone echo bowls, buoyant clay ocarinas, perky gourd maracas, cheerful leather singing bellows, and—by Princess Théra’s request—the majestic ringing of bronze moaphya. All the instrument families were represented, as though all the gods were here to celebrate with the mortals.

Théra pulled her brother into a warm embrace and whispered again. The loud music made it impossible for anyone else to overhear. “Mother has a vision for Dara that is seductive and perhaps even right, but she has a tendency to resort to methods that poison the results. You must learn from her, but when the time comes, you must also be ready to confront her.”

“Know when to do the most interesting thing, is that it?” the emperor asked.

“Exactly.”

Emperor Monadétu gave his sister a last powerful squeeze with his arms before stepping back, his face now impassive. “May the gods speed your journey and bring you success in a new land, Princess of Dara.”

Princess Théra turned around and walked up the gangplank to join Prince Takval, having taken her last step on the soil of Dara. She did not look back lest her tears give the lie to her name.

Back in Pan, the garinafin hatchlings had survived, and now, armed with the knowledge Prince Takval had imparted to them, the people of Dara would embark on a grand adventure to gain the trust of new allies in their war—not unlike the gingerly dance to come between the Agon and their new princess.

Princess Théra and Prince Takval Aragoz stood on the deck of Dissolver of Sorrows and watched the Wall of Storms.

Nine other ships rode the waves behind Dissolver of Sorrows. The fleet carried Dara craftsmen, soldiers, scholars, books, seeds, tools—whatever Théra had decided would be of use in that distant land to help a people intent on achieving freedom.

“I guess we know we came on the right day,” said Takval, pointing at the silhouette of the Lyucu city-ship bobbing in the distance.

“A welcoming party,” said Théra.

This was the day Luan Zyaji had predicted when the Wall of Storms would open again, and the Lyucu reinforcement fleet was expected to come to Dara. The Lyucu observers on the city-ship likely did not include Pékyu Vadyu, Théra realized. She and Zomi had calculated that the pékyu would be giving birth just about now, and she wondered how Timu—“Emperor Thaké”—was handling the change of becoming a father.

“They’re not coming closer to us,” said Takval.

“As long as we don’t make any moves toward the new fleet, they should respect the peace,” said Théra. “They can’t deny that we have a right to observe here in the open sea.”

They were conversing in a combination of the language of Dara and of the scrublands. Théra was a quick study, and Takval was a patient teacher. As yet, there was no love between them, only the beginning of a tentative friendship that, in time, might dissolve sorrows and enlarge souls.

She was willing to open her heart and let it be filled with the story she wanted to tell about herself, and that was the most interesting thing of all, she decided.

“It’s starting!” she shouted, and pointed.

The cyclones making up the breathtaking curtain began to part. Like a well-trained army going through exercises on the parade grounds, the cyclones drifted to each side, revealing a calm passage in the middle like a valley between towering mountains of water and clouds. Lightning flashed from deep within the cyclones, a fireworks show for a new era.

In the distance, they could see the small silhouettes of city-ships sailing into the passage from the other side of the curtain. Prince Cudyu’s reinforcements had arrived.

“Launch the signal kites!” the princess called out.

Massive kites rose into the air from the decks of the ships in the Dara fleet. Other Dara ships below the horizon to the south would pass the signal on. Than Carucono had dispatched a flotilla of signal ships to be anchored between the Wall of Storms and the Big Island like a string of pearls so that Pan would receive the news as quickly as possible.

Emperor Monadétu, still in mourning over the loss of both his parents within the span of a few months, urged for a secret mission conducted by mechanical crubens against the second Lyucu fleet.

“They might be able to sink one or more of the city-ships at night and leave no evidence for the Lyucu to claim that we broke the treaty,” the emperor insisted.

“No,” Empress Jia said.

“I am the emperor!” shouted Phyro. “Not you.”

“You have the title,” said Jia. “But the Seal of Dara is in my hand. The debate is over.”

As the assembled ministers and generals watched, the young emperor got up from the throne and flipped over the table on which documents were piled. He ran from the Grand Audience Hall.

“Let us continue,” said Empress Jia to the stunned officials in the hall. “The business of governance waits for no one.”

For three days, the emperor locked himself in the mourning hall for Empress Risana and refused to see anyone. Courtiers could hear him cry and mumble inside. Eventually, he emerged and asked to see the empress.

“I am not ready,” he said to Jia.

“Not yet,” Jia said. “But do not let that fire in you burn out. Learn to govern it.”

She then opened her arms and embraced the young man, who cried inconsolably.

All the ministers and generals whispered amongst themselves that Dara was indeed fortunate to have Jia as the incontestable voice behind the throne.

The city-ships were now in the middle of the valley between towering cyclones, coming closer by the minute.

“Should we get out of the way?” asked Takval.

Taking a page from the mechanical crubens, the Dara ships were designed to be able to dive underwater for brief periods to conceal themselves. Realizing that they would have to use the same passage through the Wall of Storms as the Lyucu fleet, Dissolver of Sorrows and her sister ships were meant to submerge as the Lyucu approached and to resurface later so that they could continue on their way. The ships weren’t designed to be able to propel themselves underwater, but that wasn’t necessary.

“No,” said Théra. “It’s already closing! Zomi was right.”

Indeed, the cyclones that made up the Wall of Storms were already reversing their course. The mountains of cloud and water on either side of the passage were closing in with the Lyucu ships still trapped between them.

Zomi Kidosu was very busy. Not only was she in charge of preparing for the princess’s voyage to Ukyu and Gondé, but she also had to evaluate many proposals for new machinery and new policies that Empress Jia declared were within the bailiwick of the Imperial Farsight Secretary.

In truth, Zomi understood that some of these duties were traditionally within the purview of the prime minister. However, Empress Jia preferred to distribute the duties between her and Cogo Yelu. It was either a way to punish Cogo for the way he had zealously prosecuted Otho Krin after the unveiling of the empress’s plot or a way to ensure that Cogo Yelu didn’t grow complacent without someone to challenge his opinions.

“I trust systems,” the empress had said to Zomi, “not individuals. You’re skilled at engineering machinery; I want to see if you’re as skilled at engineering the system of governance. Perhaps we will give your proposals regarding the examination system a try.”

Zomi sighed. The exercise of power was a heavy responsibility. She had to learn to make a home for herself in this new role, to balance her impulses for radical changes with the wisdom of cautious gradualism. On top of it all, Théra had also asked her to remain vigilant and to assist in the shift of power from Théra’s mother to her brother over time.

“Both of them will need and want your loyalty,” said Théra. “You’ll have to be careful.”

“You know I’m no good at politics,” said Zomi. “Never had any talent for it.”

“Let your conscience be your guide,” said Théra. “And trust in your love of the common people—they always come first. On that point, at least, everyone in the House of Dandelion is in agreement.”

As the day for Théra’s departure approached, Zomi tried to spend as much time with Théra as she could. Yet something about Théra’s quoting of Luan Zyaji’s poem gnawed at her. She returned to the poem and read it again.

She stared at the poem, nonplussed. She had not paid enough attention to the form of the poem at the time she first read it due to the freshness of her grief, but now, in a calmer frame of mind, the strangeness of the poem struck her.

Her teacher had a genuine love for Classical Ano forms and was an accomplished writer and poet in that ancient language. But this poem followed no Classical Ano form that she knew of. The ancient Ano prized visual symmetry, and poems composed in Classical Ano always followed fixed patterns dictating the number of logograms per line. The poems were meant to be recited aloud as well as silently admired as visual compositions.

But each line of this poem had a different number of logograms: seven, six, four, three, two, five, zero (the blank line), eight, nine, one. Why would her teacher be so careless?

True, her teacher had written this on his deathbed, and it was possible that he had lost the ability to compose with care for visual appeal. But Zomi knew instinctively that couldn’t be the real explanation.

The poem has ten lines, each line being a different numeral.

Her teacher had always instructed her on the importance of engineering as the art of assembling existing machinery to achieve a new purpose. Was he using the form of the poem to send her a message, a different message than the words of the poem indicated?

Zomi went back to the calculations in Gitré Üthu concerning the opening of passages in the Wall of Storms. There were too many skipped steps in his derivations for her to be able to reconstruct his work fully, but all the steps that she could follow made sense.

Her eyes were drawn to a doodle in the margin of one of the pages: rows of dots arranged in numerical order—blank space, one, two, three, four…

And she finally understood what her teacher had intended with the poem: It was a code. The number of logograms in each line indicated the “real number” while the position of the line in the poem was the cipher. Thus, zero mapped to seven, one mapped to six, two mapped to four, and so on.

Luan Zyaji had done what he could to obscure his method of calculation and presented false results to the Lyucu. But he had also left a key to Zomi for deciphering the false results to get at the real numbers. At the time of his death, however, he couldn’t be sure that whatever information he gave to Zomi wouldn’t fall into the hands of the Lyucu, and so he had embedded the key in the poem.

As Théra and Takval watched, the Wall of Storms closed in on the city-ships.

The cipher text in Gitré Üthu had predicted a false opening; the real opening, according to Zomi, wouldn’t happen for another ten years. It was a testament to his skill that even the false calculations pointed to a temporary opening in the Wall, completing a trap that must have taken him days to work out.

Théra imagined the terror the thousands aboard those ships must be feeling as towering mountains of water and clouds loomed over them, bolts of lightning flashing within—hopeless, numbing terror, knowing that there was no escape, that death was just seconds away. In a single moment, nature would kill more people than had died at the Battle of Zathin Gulf. Pity overwhelmed her heart, and she turned her face away.

Luan Zyaji would have his vengeance after death.

Pékyu Vadyu’s forces on Rui and Dasu would still be a threat to Dara, but without Cudyu’s reinforcements, there was a much better chance that Phyro and Jia would be able to deal with them.

She shook her head; she had to change the subject of her thoughts.

“I’m sorry,” said Théra to Takval. “Looks like Zomi was right. There will be no path through the Wall of Storms today.”

Takval was distraught. “But we can’t afford to wait! In ten more years, who knows how many more of my people will die in winter storms and summer droughts?”

“We may not have to wait that long,” said a smiling Théra. “Zomi gave us another way just in case this passage didn’t work out.”

As if in response, the sea around them roiled and exploded. Ten crubens, the majestic sovereigns of the sea, surfaced and bobbed next to the ships, dwarfing the vessels with their bulk.

Théra laughed. “Looks like the old friends of the House of Dandelion have decided to help us again.”

The ability of Dissolver of Sorrows and her sister ships to dive beneath the sea wasn’t just a means of concealment; it was a way to bypass the Wall of Storms.

Inspired by the way Prince Takval himself had come to Dara, Zomi had come up with a bold new idea. Since whales were clearly able to swim under the Wall of Storms safely, then it made sense that underwater boats could as well. Although the mechanical crubens were limited to sailing along underwater volcano ranges, a ship that could sail underwater could also take a page from the whalers and be propelled by cetaceans.

Dissolver of Sorrows and the rest of the fleet were equipped with harpoons and strong cables. The idea was to take advantage of migrating whale pods who were headed in the right direction and hitch a ride underwater. The whales would pull the boats under the Wall of Storms, at which point the lines could be disengaged and the boats resurface.

Only now, instead of having to harpoon whales, the crubens were offering to give them a hand.

Strong cables were attached to the tails of the great crubens. The ships were ready to dive.

“Incoming!” one of the lookouts shouted.

In the distance, the Wall of Storms was almost completely closed. As the city-ships of the Lyucu foundered, a single garinafin had taken off without a pilot in an attempt to escape the doomed fleet. It saw the Dara fleet and winged its way directly at them.

Observers on the city-ship sent by Pékyu Vadyu, after suffering the shock of witnessing the destruction of the Lyucu fleet, now also steered their ship toward the Dara fleet.

“Dive! Dive!”

Théra and Takval and the rest of the crew scrambled belowdecks. Hatches were closed and oar ports closed and sealed. The ballast tanks began to fill with water. The ships began to slowly sink under the waves.

“We forgot to cast off the signaling kites!” Théra said. She gazed through the underwater portholes at the turbulent water in the wake of the massive cruben flukes. “And we never got a chance to let Pan know that the second Lyucu fleet is destroyed.”

“Too late to worry about that now,” said Takval. “They’ll figure out what happened soon enough.”

Above them, the garinafin circled. The cyclones of the Wall of Storms had destroyed the city-ships, depriving it of a place to land. The garinafin—riderless, terrified, and enraged—ignored the safe haven of the approaching Lyucu city-ship, despite the bone trumpets blaring from its deck. The beast would have its vengeance on these barbarian ships.

“We have to do something,” Théra said. “It takes time for the ships to dive, and the crubens are vulnerable as long as they are near the surface.”

Théra and Takval climbed back up onto the deck of Dissolver of Sorrows.

The garinafin dove at the cruben hauling their ship. Both of them more than a hundred feet in length, the king of flying beasts was going to challenge the sovereign of the seas.

The garinafin opened its maw wide, and just as it passed above the cruben, it snapped its jaws shut and opened them again to shoot out a scorching tongue of flames.

The cruben opened its blowhole and a spray of water shot into the air, meeting the tongue of fire halfway. Fire and water contended in midair and hissing steam drifted over the sea.

The cruben escaped unscathed. The garinafin swerved away, circling around for another strafing run.

The other Dara ships were almost all underwater. But if the garinafin avoided the blowhole, it could still severely injure the cruben before Dissolver of Sorrows was underwater.

“We have to distract it,” Théra said. “Come with me!”

How she wished they had silkmotic arrows or lances.

She and Takval took up positions next to the winch for the signaling kite. “Battle kites are from an older time, but sometimes you have to fight with whatever is at hand.”

Grabbing onto the cable, they directed the kite to swerve at the garinafin. It was just like in the old sagas, where heroes vaulted into the heavens on battle kites to duel, and their loyal retainers directed the kites to dive, swerve, and chase, creating intricate patterns in the sky as though writing in air.

The kite line cut into Théra’s and Takval’s palms. They gritted their teeth and held on even as blood coated the line and made it even harder to grab on. Théra tore strips from her dress so that she and Takval could wrap them around their palms and continue the fight.

The pilotless garinafin snarled at the kite and rushed at it.

Théra and Takval just barely managed to direct the kite to dive out of the way.

The enraged garinafin hovered in air and opened its maw to breath fire, the fleet below it having been forgotten.

All the other ships had disappeared safely beneath the seas.

Théra and Takval jerked the line hard, and the fire tongue from the garinafin missed the kite by inches.

Finally realizing its error, the hovering garinafin now stared at the two humans on the deck of the ship responsible for the nettlesome kite and opened its maw.

“Pull hard!” Théra screamed. And she and Takval winched the kite line hard and dragged it toward them.

The jaws of the garinafin snapped shut. When they opened again, a tongue of fire would shoot out at Théra and Takval, incinerating them where they stood.

The kite dove at the garinafin and the line caught the thin, serpentine neck as the kite made a loud buzzing noise and zoomed rapidly in tightening circles around the head of the garinafin, finally entangling itself in the antlers after tying the mouth of the garinafin shut with the trailing cable.

The garinafin struggled mightily at the end of the line, now a living kite. The winch unspooled rapidly as the cable let out.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Théra. The two dove back under the hatch, sealing it behind them. Dissolver of Sorrows continued to take on water and began to sink under the waves.

The cruben dove as well and began to pull the ship deeper under the sea for a safe traversal of the Wall of Storms. The gigantic flukes undulated gracefully in the darkening water.

The kite line jerked straight. The strong strands of silk refused to yield as the garinafin was slowly, inexorably pulled down, despite the slowing beating of its massive wings.

With a thunderous splash, the garinafin crashed into the water, its air supply choked off by the kite line.

The crew of Dissolver of Sorrows felt a light jerk as the kite line finally broke, leaving the death-dealing beast bobbing at the surface of the sea.

By the time the Lyucu city-ship finally arrived on the scene, all the crew could do was to butcher the garinafin carcass and retrieve useful supplies. Not a single man or beast had survived from the second Lyucu fleet. The thanes onboard mourned their comrades and did not relish the thought of reporting the news to Pékyu Vadyu back home on Rui.

Théra gazed into the murky depths of the porthole as they headed for the Wall of Storms, for the unknown, for the future.

The questioning voice was mellifluous and gentle, like a cool spring after a march through the desert.

- You’ve really decided to leave in this form?

The replying voice cracked with the weight of age and wisdom, like the back of a turtle shell.

- I have. It’s not possible to pass through the Wall of Storms as long as I remain an immortal.

- Giving up your divinity is a drastic step.

- Tazu once lived an entire lifetime as a mortal, a long time ago.

- That was a punishment. You’re doing this voluntarily.

- You have to admit, it’s getting a bit uncomfortable here with the Lyucu insisting that Tazu and I share the same body.

- That’s just a temporary phase. It will be sorted out.

- Maybe, but the desire to see other shores is hardly unique among the mortals. I want to gaze upon new lands, and Dissolver of Sorrows, led by your protégée, is as good an opportunity as any. I’ll be just another member of the crew on this grand adventure.

- We’ll miss you. No god of Dara has ever done what you’re about to do.

- There’s always a first time for everything.