Line of Battle
Eastern Markets, the City of Kye-Min
White-armored soldiers braced ahead of him, their spears thrust forward, impaling the red-armored soldiers as they charged.
Howls and grunts sounded, and Tigai watched, ten paces back, as men rushed to plug the gaps where red spears and poleaxes had cut bodies down trying to break through. Arquebusiers worked in a fury on the sloping hills behind the line, ramming balls down their barrels, pouring powder into their pans, locking burning rope in place to aim and fire.
Yuli stood beside him, scanning the enemy lines unflinching as they crashed together. Captain Ugirin’s orders had been clear: Stay back, watch for enemy magi, and kill them. The rest, the captain had claimed, would fall to the White Tigers. So far the captain’s bravado had proven itself in full. Daybreak had found the enemy army attacking from six sides at once, though if there was a plan to do more than bleed them for every inch of ground, the captain hadn’t shared it with him.
“No magi here,” he shouted for Yuli’s benefit. It took saying it twice over the roar of the guns before she nodded. He extended a hand, and Yuli grasped it firmly. A blink revealed the five other anchor points he’d set the night before, and he tethered them to the strands, shifting from the din of heavy fighting to a muted quiet, five hundred paces down the line.
Here the soldiers were arrayed in the same lines—pikes, spears, maces, swords, pistols, arquebuses—but with no enemy in sight.
“Lord Tigai!” a heavy voice boomed. “How goes the fighting? Have you any trophies to show me yet?”
Captain Ugirin could have been Remarin’s twin, from a distance. A hulking man, who eschewed heavy lamellar plate for the boiled leathers of an Ujibari horseman, with a shortbow on his shoulder and quiver on his belt, and never mind that his place was as a general, not a soldier.
“None yet, Captain,” he said. “If the enemy has magi on the field, they’re waiting to see where you deploy.”
Ugirin’s manner turned from boisterous to sober in an instant. “Be sure of it,” Ugirin said. “We faced two yesterday. But White Tigers do not die easily.” With that the captain placed a thumb behind his belt, showing off a fresh ear that had been sewn in place alongside a dozen more in varying stages of decay.
“Your flank, there, is under heavy pressure,” Tigai said, inclining his head back toward where they’d been moments before.
“A feint, Lord Tigai,” Ugirin said, smiling. “If there are no magi, it is not the main attack.”
He nodded, extending his hand again for Yuli.
“Good hunting, magi,” Ugirin said, and Tigai bowed before blinking to find the next anchor point on the line.
According to the captain the battle had been going for two days already, but for all Ugirin’s bluster, Tigai couldn’t see how it would last to see another sunset. Isaru Mattai had promised them magi, and those magi weren’t coming. He didn’t care at all in the abstract; Isaru had dug the grave for anyone fool enough to support him, so far as he could see. But Master Indra and the magi who had taken him had been Isaru’s enemies, and that meant Remarin, Mei, and Dao were being held by the soldiers in red, or whoever pulled their strings. Finding his family started with taking one of their puppeteers alive, someone who might know where prisoners would be held. A flimsy beginning, but it was all he had.
This time they shifted into smoke and chaos.
Powder stung his nose, and a man lunged around him, stumbling sideways as another man grappled the first to the ground.
Tigai drew a pistol from his belt, and ducked as another pair came crashing past. A quick thumb set the match and he pulled the trigger, belching smoke into the swordsman’s gut and knocking him into another mêlée, five paces down the line. A cloud of fog rolled through the street, obscuring most of the fighting and filling his nose with the tang of powder and ash. Thunder boomed overhead where guns were firing, but he saw no shells exploding here—at least, not yet.
“We have to get back,” he shouted for Yuli’s benefit. “Back toward the guns.”
A gamble, since he couldn’t see enough to tell one rank of troops from another. He had to hope those were Ugirin’s guns, situated behind the line of battle, where the White Tigers had fallen back behind his anchor.
He spun, looking for Yuli to be sure she’d heard, and tried to duck as a spearman came screaming for him, thrusting a metal point into his leg. A ripping pain shot through his body, and he blinked to set himself back to where he’d first appeared, a few paces to the left. The spearman held his weapon steady for a moment, recoiling in a momentary confusion before Yuli sheared the man’s head and shoulder from his spine. Blood sprayed in a wide arc where her claws sent the man and his spear clattering to the street, and she sprang toward where he was standing. A yelp escaped his throat, and he almost tethered himself to a different anchor before it became clear she was bounding for a target behind him. He spun to see three swordsmen cut to ribbons under her claws, slicing through steel, armor, and skin as though they were shields of paper.
She was at her full height now, as he’d seen her when they’d first arrived in Kye-Min, head and shoulders taller than any soldier in the line. With the smoke clouds spilling over her she appeared as a feral silhouette, her limbs long and thin, her face narrowed almost to a muzzle, with fingers sharpened to claws that raked the soldiers in red in a rain of blood and gore.
“Yuli!” he shouted, trying again. “Back!”
This time she snapped around, meeting his eyes for a brief fraction before she turned back the way she’d been headed, bounding in the opposite direction, into the red soldiers’ lines.
“Oh for the koryu’s sake …” he said, and charged after her.
This time there was an empty path through the chaos, carved by streaks of blood and mangled limbs lying across the street. He rushed after her, enjoying the momentary panic in the red soldiers’ eyes. The smoke and powder cleared enough to see glimpses of the enemy’s ranks, extending well past the edge of the market, and he chased Yuli, calling after her to turn back, wishing he’d asked after a few more of the details of her Natarii magic. If she had some sort of blood-craze beyond her morphing into some fucking horror from a children’s tale, he’d as soon have known about it before he chased her into oblivion.
Yuli stood hunched forward in a clearing when he caught up to her, her claws stained a dark red where she held them out, as though she were brandishing ten knives at once. A hulking figure of polished glass stood facing them. Thick crystal armor encased the enemy magi from head to toe, making for a creature of equal height and a hundred times the girth of Yuli’s long, thin limbs.
“Wait,” he said. “Fucking wait. I’ve seen this sort before; they can—”
His words were swallowed in a rush of cracking glass as Yuli charged. The soldiers on both streets backed away in awe, no few chanting and calling for blood, while just as many scrambled away from the spectacle. At the center, Yuli rained her claws on the magi’s armor, shattering fragments of glass into the crowd. The magi shoved off, pivoting to throw her down with a jarring crunch as her body impacted the stone street.
Tigai had freed his second pistol, taking aim for a quick shot at the magi’s head. The ball struck home, spiderweb breaks appearing in the armor as the magi’s neck snapped to the side. Just as quickly a salvo of glass peppered Tigai’s hand as he raised it to block his face, searing pain shooting up and down the side of his body. He blinked to return to his anchor, shifting his body back to the mouth of the junction. He drew his pistol again and fired, the same ball he’d used before, reset by the anchor. This time he missed, sending a shot into the crowd of soldiers with accompanying howls of pain from whomever he’d hit. He blinked and fired again, this time moving to make new anchors in case the magi pursued toward the first he’d set.
“Yanjin Tigai,” the glass-magi said, snarling it through the layers of her glass. Still, no mistaking the voice. Lin Qishan. Of all the aryu-twisted coincidences …
Yuli had rolled back to her feet, though her body showed signs of a limp, and cuts from where salvos of glass must have stricken her when she was down.
Lin seemed to balance her attention between him and Yuli. No time to think, if he wanted to prevent Yuli from taking another volley of shards. Tigai charged, howling as he loosed a final shot toward Lin’s glass-covered torso. It served to put her off-balance, and he connected, laying a hand on Lin’s forearm. In an eyeblink he tethered them both to the strands, sending them somewhere far to the south, past the point of any stars with any connection to dry land.
Water splashed around him, a light spray where he impacted the surface and a powerful gulp where the ocean swallowed the glass-armored magi at his side.
For a moment the surface of the water was clear, the brief interruption of their arrival forgotten as waves rose and fell around him. A soft breeze blew over the crests, and he treaded water to stay where he was, at the center of a horizon filled end to end with ocean, as far as he could see.
The water broke as Lin Qishan swam to the surface, her familiar features having replaced her now-discarded glass.
“You fucking madman,” she said. “Where have you taken us?”
“Where does it bloody well look like?” he said. “We’re in the middle of the ocean, and you know if you try a damned thing here, I’ll leave you to drown.”
She stayed in place, all the chaos of the fighting left behind in quiet paddling to keep her head above the surface.
“What do you want, Yanjin Tigai?” she asked.
“Answers,” he said. The water was calm enough they could speak, though his words were chopped, alternating between treading water and gasping for air. “Make me believe you know exactly where Mei, Remarin, and Dao are being held. Make me understand why any of this has happened. Do it and maybe I’ll take you with me when I go back.”
“I’m only a mercenary,” she said between waves lapping around them.
“Not good enough,” he said. “If you don’t know where they are, then you’re useless to me.” He closed his eyes, preparing a tether to take him back to Kye-Min.
“Wait,” she said.
He opened his eyes.
“I know where your master-at-arms is,” she said. “He might have the girl with him; I can’t be sure.”
Remarin. Tigai’s heart skipped at the prospect, and if Mei was there, too …
“Go on,” he said.
“He’s being held at the Tower of the Heron, in Kye-Min,” Lin Qishan said. “Bavda Khon believes Remarin is Master Fei Zan, of the Great and Noble House of the Fox.”
“Who? And … who?”
“Is he?” she asked. “But then, you likely wouldn’t know.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Take us back to the city,” she said. “I swear I will explain in full.”
“Like fucking hells,” he said, spitting a gulp of water before it could wash down his throat.
“If you don’t believe me,” Lin said, “then I’m doomed no matter what I say.”
More than a little truth to that. He watched as she kept her head above the water, her usual calm confidence fraying. She believed he would leave her; it was the only leverage he could hope for.
“Tell me exactly what I’m up against,” he said.
“Please,” she said. A surge of water almost swallowed her head, and she fought back to the surface. “This isn’t … take us back to the city. I swear on my House, I will be your prisoner.”
He shook his head, or tried to, between the rise and fall of the spray. She was right. In her place, he would have told any lie he could think of to get back to freedom. It made it impossible to believe her—even the prospect of Remarin being alive, and in Kye-Min no less … all too convenient, for the sake of her release.
“I know you put no stock in honor,” Lin said. She gasped for another breath, this time with real panic in her movements. If she was going to try an attack, it would come soon. “But please believe me: My honor means more to me than my life. Take us back, and I am yours.”
He wouldn’t get any more here. Without a sign that he might trust her, she had no incentive to say anything more. It fell to him, then. Either trust, or leave her to die. For all he hated her—and he did, for her smugness as much as the nightmare she had put him through in service to the Dragons—he loved Remarin, Mei, and Dao more. If she betrayed him, he wouldn’t be any closer to finding them than he was now.
He held out a hand through the waves, and she took it in a firm grasp.
The strands took them back to Kye-Min, to his second anchor, with Captain Ugirin’s line.
Once more they were surrounded by soldiers. This time the spearmen had uprooted from their lines, marching in a flurry around where he and Lin Qishan now stood at the base of the hill.
“Thank you,” Lin said, offering him a bow, surprisingly with no hint of mocking. “I am in your debt.”
“Forward, Tigers!” Ugirin shouted. “Move! Leftward wheel to the line, go!”
The command bellowed above the chaos of the spearmen and reserve redeploying their line. No sign of any soldiers in red, but the men around him moved as though they had enemies on their heels, those nearest him and Lin Qishan giving them looks of surprise at finding two people unmoving in their way.
“Let’s go,” he said, reaching to grab her by the arm again. “If you meant what you said about being in my service, then we move with these men.”
She went along with him, thank the wind spirits, and doubly thank them she’d worn ordinary clothes beneath her glass armor, rather than the red uniform of the Imperial army. They cut through the ranks together, aiming for the mounted figure bellowing orders at the mouth of the westward street.
“Captain!” he shouted as they approached. “Captain Ugirin!”
The mercenary commander pivoted in his saddle, his eyes brightening as he focused on Tigai.
“My magi,” Captain Ugirin said, grinning. “Have you taken a prisoner? One of theirs?”
“What’s the situation here, Captain?” he asked.
“We’re marching out to meet the enemy,” Ugirin bellowed, making it half an answer, half a rallying cry for troops near enough to hear. “Hashiro’s Golden Sun have lived up to their name. The enemy’s line is breaking, and we have reinforcements coming from the west, with magi at the head. Magi! Isaru Mattai may well be a dog-faced bastard, but I’ll be damned if he didn’t keep his word.”