The Winds of Tepr

From the south, Ryogo looks almost harmless.

The city spills down a low hillside toward the sea, whitewashed walls and tiled roofs stacked like playing pieces, speared through by pagoda spires and dark, blocky warehouses. The harbor on the western side gleams with anchored masts. Inland, terraced fields step up toward low hills, pale stubble showing where rice has already been cut and carted.

Closer, the teeth show.

Outlying forts squat on the ridgelines like clenched knuckles: bastions of stone and packed earth, gunports squared toward land and sea. Their banners—the white gull of Seop on blue—hang limp in the damp air, but the muzzles that poke from their embrasures are very much awake.

On the southern rise opposite one such fort, Naci sits her horse and watches the day sharpen.

Her armor is half-shrouded in a cloak against the sea wind, but the Dragon-Tiger plates still catch the light when she shifts. Around her, a long, dark line of Tepr riders waits on the slope, horses stamping, breath fogging. Behind them, Moukopl infantry are dots of lacquered armor and disciplined boredom, arranging carts and munitions in neat rows like someone tidying a battlefield before it starts.

Below, in the low ground between hills, Borak's newest toys crouch like squat metal beasts.

"Your 'novel engines,'" Admiral Bimen mutters, lowering his spyglass. "Do you know how to use them?"

"Yes, of course," Borak lies cheerfully. "Who do you think I am?"

Pomogr stands on a cart nearby, wrapped in his coat like a disgruntled flag. "I miss when siege meant 'we sit outside, they cry inside, and eventually everyone gets scurvy.'"

Naci keeps her eyes on the fort. Its southern wall sits on a low spur, a fat, tempting bulge. Smoke curls from the chimneys within; men move along the parapet, silhouettes against the sky.

"They will have never seen anything like this," Bimen says, more to himself than to her. "Their coastal guns are built to trade insults with ships, not shrapnel from steppes barbarians."

Naci doesn't reply. She nudges her mare forward to the edge of the slope, cloak snapping once in the breeze. A runner trots up immediately, hand to heart.

"Khan?"

"Signal Borak," she says.

The runner bows and sprints downhill, shouting. Borak cups his hands around his mouth, barking orders mixed with insults. Moukopl crewmen heave at winches, muscles cording. The first jar—squat, clay, banded in pitch-soaked rope—disappears into the gaping mouth of the cannon.

It looks absurd. Homemade. Harmless.

Then someone jams in a wad of oiled rag, lights it, and rams it down with a pole.

The fuse hisses.

"Distance?" Naci asks.

"Paces measured by three companies," Bimen says. "Angle corrected for this cursed Seop humidity. Borak swears it will clear the wall." The admiral's tone suggests Borak has also sworn other, less encouraging things.

Naci squints at the fort. "I trust him."

Borak raises an arm. The crew brace.

"Fire!" he roars.

The cannon belches with a sound like a god coughing. The recoil shoves the frame back on its whale-bone wheels; men dig heels into mud, catching it on ropes. Smoke explodes from the muzzle, acrid and thick, rolling in a grey wave.

The jar leaves the barrel in a wobbling arc, fuse sparkling. For a moment it seems to hang, a stupid clay bird against the pale sky.

Then it drops neatly inside the fort.

From Naci's vantage point, the explosion is a bloom of dirty light, almost modest. A puff of dust and debris kicks up above the southern wall. A second's pause. Then sound reaches them: a dull, heavy crack, followed by a thinner chorus of screams.

On the parapet, silhouettes stagger. One topples backward, arms flailing; another pinwheels forward and vanishes. A third remains standing for a heartbeat longer than he should, then folds at the waist, something sharp sprouting from his chest.

"Nails," Borak says with satisfaction. "The jar's full of them."

Pomogr gags theatrically. "Remind me never to borrow your teapots."

Down in the fort, chaos spreads like spilled dye. Men run; some drop flat; smoke plumes from an inner courtyard where the jar landed. A wooden tower on one corner begins to burn, the pitch in its joints catching like dry brush.

Bimen exhales slowly. "Again," he says.

"Wait," Naci replies.

He glances at her, mildly irritated. "General—"

"They need to see it," she says. "Not just one hit. Several. Enough that the city walls hear it."

Her gaze flicks past the fort, up to Ryogo itself. The main walls are still quiet, but she imagines the watchmen there, leaning out, frowning at the distant plume. She wants them to count the blasts. To think each one might be theirs next.

Borak reloads. The second jar roars skyward, fuse spitting fury, and drops just short of the parapet. It shatters against the inner face of the wall, showering the slope with shrapnel. A man scrambling for the stairs jerks as if yanked by an invisible hook, then disappears under a cloud of red mist.

"Better," Borak mutters. "Third will kiss the courtyard, I promise."

"Your promises worry me," Pomogr says.

The third shot lands deeper. This time, the explosion punches up a column of black smoke. A gunport goes dark; a small roof lifts, shivers, then collapses inward. Naci can hear panic even over the boom: a higher, thinner note under the bass.

"Signal the cavalry," she says. "Prepare to cut anyone who runs east."

"What about north?" Bimen asks. "If they flee toward the city, we could let them. They will carry stories."

"And warn them that sorties toward us are useless," Naci says. "Yes. Let that gate stay open."

Borak is grinning like a child at festival. "One more," he pleads.

Naci considers the fort. The southern section is a bleeding ruin now, but the northern parapet still bristles with muskets. A few brave or foolish men try to drag a cannon into position, its wheels catching on rubble.

"One more," she agrees.

The fourth jar turns the northern gun into splinters.

When the smoke clears enough that you can see shapes again, the fort is listing. The Seop banner sags on its pole, rope cut. The gull looks like it has been shot mid-flight.

Naci raises her hand. A horn sounds behind her, long and low. Tepr riders nudge their horses downslope, moving in a widening crescent to catch fugitives.

"Admiral," she says. "Your marines may have whatever is left that surrenders intact. We prefer our prisoners useful."

"And the ones that do not surrender?" Bimen asks.

Naci shrugs. "Waste not."

He grimaces; he is not a squeamish man, but there is a difference between killing ship-to-ship and scooping what is left of men out of walls. Still, he raises his own hand, and Moukopl infantry surge forward at a trot, shields up, spears angled.

By the time they reach the fort's outer ditch, the defenders' resolve has broken.

A side gate bursts open. A ragged trickle of soldiers spills out, some dragging wounded, some dropping their weapons as they run. A musket ball cracks past Naci's cheek, a belated shot from the parapet; she feels the wind of it, the close, invisible hand. Somewhere behind her, a horse squeals and goes down.

Tepr riders sweep in on the fugitives like a scythe into fallen straw. They are not in full gallop—this is work, not glory—but the sound of hooves and the thud of bodies is still frightening.

"Spare the ones who throw their guns," Naci calls down in Tepr. "They can be of use."

The riders adapt with predator efficiency. One leans from his saddle to smash a fleeing man on the neck with the butt of his spear instead of the blade. Another uses his lasso, catching an officer around the chest and dragging him choking through the mud until he goes limp.

A few defenders still on the wall fire a volley. One Banner boy near Naci's flank jerks and falls, a neat hole burned through his collarbone. His friend swears and drags him backward, hands coming away slick.

Borak's cannon crew cheer as a Moukopl squad raises their banner over the ruined parapet. Someone starts to hoot a Tepr war-song, but Pomogr cuts him off with a look.

"Save your voices," he says. "You'll need them later for screaming about how much you hate carrying sandbags."

A handful of Seop soldiers come out last, hands up, faces ash-grey, eyes full of something that is not quite understanding yet. They stare at the cannon on the hill with the wary hatred of men who have just seen the future of war and don't like it.

Naci nudges her mare forward, down the slope. The mare picks her way delicately through churned earth, ears flicking.

One of the prisoners spits in Naci's direction as she approaches. The gob falls short, mixing with mud and other things.

"You're barbarians," he rasps, in accented Moukopl. "You were slaves. You now bring imperial steel to our doors?"

Naci looks at him for a long heartbeat. His uniform is stained but well-kept, rank pins still clinging stubbornly to his breast. His hands shake.

"We bring our own steel," she says, in Seop this time. His eyes widen at the sound of his language from her mouth. "Whose door it stands at depends on who pays for the hinges."

Pomogr coughs. "That sounds almost poetic, but I didn't understand anything."

"I have been spending terrible amounts of time with officials," Naci says dryly. "It is contagious."

She gestures to a Tepr rider. "Tie them. Give the officer water. I want a decent map of these southern defenses by sunset."

The officer hesitates, as if pride might still outweigh thirst. Then his cracked lips part. "You won't take the city," he mutters. "Ryogo isn't a fort."

"We shall see," Naci replies.

She turns her horse and rides back up the hill, cloak flapping, leaving Borak and Bimen to arrange the broken knuckle of the fort into something that points at the city instead of away from it.

By afternoon, the siege ring starts to draw itself on the land.

From the southern ridge line, earthworks bloom like ugly flowers. Tepr and Moukopl soldiers dig parallel trenches across former rice fields, turning neat terraces into scarred lines. Stakes go in, sharpened and angled outward. Wicker mantlets roll up like portable walls, dragged by grunting men. The lob-cannons are trundled forward on sledges, their wheels leaving deep grooves.

Borak stands on one of the new embankments, hands on hips, surveying the work with the smugness of a man whose terrible ideas have officially become doctrine.

"Look at that," he says to Pomogr. "Straight lines. Right angles. I'm so proud I could weep."

Pomogr eyes the trenches dubiously. "They dig their graves for free"

Down the slope, the Banners are lining up for their first true test.

They stand in three ranks in the shallow water of a flooded paddy, boots sucked by mud, muskets resting on shoulders. Their faces are a mix of determination, fear, and the kind of excitement you only see on people who have been told they are the future and haven't yet lived long enough to disagree.

On the far side of the paddy, along a low dyke, the Seop gunline assembles. Blue jackets, white sashes, hats pulled low. Their muskets are older but well-maintained. A drummer beats a slow, steadiness-into-bone rhythm. Officers walk behind them with drawn swords, like shepherds with very sharp dogs.

"Remember," Naci says, riding behind her Banners. "You are not horsemen today. You are thunder. The horses graze and laugh at you from the hill. If you break and run, they will tell stories and never let you hear the end of it."

A nervous chuckle ripples down the line.

"Front rank kneel," Pomogr calls, voice surprisingly crisp when he uses it for command instead of complaints. "Second rank half-step right, third rank half-step left."

They shift, muskets angling, barrels pointing at the Seop line.

Seop officers shout. Their men raise muskets as one. It is an orderly, practiced motion that makes Naci's teeth ache with respect she doesn't want to admit.

"Careful," Bimen says, standing beside her horse, boots squelching. "Seop men have fought Winged Tigers. They've drilled in volley fire since before you were born."

The Seop drummer picks up the pace. Sticks pound: doom-doom-doom-doom.

"Ready!" a Seop officer yells.

Muskets come down into aim. A shiver goes along the Tepr ranks.

"Don't shoot first," Naci murmurs.

Banners shift weight, fingers tight on triggers. Someone mutters a prayer to a steppe god. Someone else whispers the names of siblings back home.

"Present!" Seop voices cry.

The gunline steadies.

Naci lifts her hand.

The world holds its breath.

"Fire!"

The Seop volley cracks like a single, enormous branch snapping. Smoke blasts outward, white and thick. The air between the lines fills with supersonic things.

Men drop.

In the Tepr front rank, three Banners jerk backward as if punched by giants. One spins, water splashing, jaw hanging open in stupid surprise before he vanishes under the paddy's surface. Another clutches his thigh, dark spreading fast through soaked trousers. A third simply… folds, a hole appearing in the middle of his chest.

"Hold!" Pomogr bellows, as the instinct to duck, run, scream ripples along the line. "You did not die, so do not act like it!"

The smoke thins enough to see the Seop line reloading with practiced speed.

"Now," Naci says. "Show them what hills and cheap powder taught you."

"Banners!" Pomogr roars. "Make the sky flinch! Fire by ranks—front!"

The kneeling Banners fire.

Their volley is not as neat as the Seop's. Shots stagger, some high, some low. One musket fizzles, spitting powder in the pan; its owner swears and drops to reload, fingers clumsy. But enough balls fly true.

On the dyke, men jerk and go down. One's arm spins away from him in a wet loop, splashing into the irrigation ditch with a noise that makes the nearest Banner turn away and retch. Another takes a ball in the face; his head snaps back, and he disappears, leaving a spray that patters on his comrades.

"Second rank!" Pomogr yells.

The second rank steps forward into the smoke-wet air and fires. More Seop troops stagger. Someone's hat explodes off their head like a small, tragic bird. Gaps appear in the once-clean line.

The drums keep beating.

"Third!" Pomogr.

The third rank's volley is ragged, some shooters flinching, others overcompensating, but the effect is cumulative. The dyke is slick now, the ground under Seop boots treacherous for a new reason.

On the ridge, Borak whoops. "Look at that! They're learning!"

Bimen shields his eyes, watching the exchange with a professional appraisal that has nothing to do with affection. "Their reload times are slow," he says. "They fumble cartridges. But their bravery is… adequate."

"They will improve or die," Naci says. "Those are the only two things war teaches."

On the dyke, the Seop officer screams for order. "Close the ranks! Aim low, curse you, aim low!"

The next Seop volley is less perfect; smoke and fear have their own gravity. Gunfire continues in a brutal rhythm: load, raise, fire, reload, while the space between lines becomes a mangled, wet argument about which side's nerves will break first.

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A Banner near the center line starts laughing—high, frantic—every time she pulls the trigger, as if the recoil tickles something in her brain. Her friend beside her finally elbows her in the ribs hard enough to shut her up.

"I can smell my eyebrows burning," one mutters between shots.

"Good," another pants. "Means you still have a face."

A ball plucks Naci's sleeve, smearing it with someone else's blood where it must have passed through a man first. She glances down at the tear, then back at the lines.

"Step back half a body," she calls.

The Banners adjust, water sucking at their boots. The small movement gives their fumes just enough room to billow forward instead of back into their eyes. The next volley comes with less coughing and more aim.

On the dyke, the Seop line start to waver. Not break—these are trained troops—but shift, like a rope being pulled from both ends. They did not expect men from the north, men whose grandfathers hunted antelope with bows, to stand in a swamp and trade lead like civilized monsters.

"Good," Bimen says, almost grudging. "Your people can be taught."

"They are not my people," Naci says. "They are Tepr's. I'm just the one currently shouting at them."

"In my culture," Bimen says dryly, "that is what being 'your people' means."

A Seop trumpeter on the far side lifts his instrument and blasts a shrill, retreating pattern. The sound skirls across the paddies like a distressed bird.

The gunline begins to fall back, step by step, covering its own withdrawal with staggered fire. Officers swear and shove; one has to physically kick a soldier who has frozen, musket slack in his hands.

"Do we pursue?" Pomogr asks.

"Let them run," Naci says. "They're going back to the city. I want their sergeants to hear every detail. How we stood. How many guns we had. How we didn't break." Her gaze is fierce, distant. "Fear makes walls taller inside heads than outside them."

Pomogr nods, breathing hard, sweat and powder streaking his face. He watches his Banners as they reload, hands slower now, arms trembling with effort and adrenaline.

"How many did we lose?" he calls to a nearby corporal.

The woman checks quickly, counting bodies and gaps. "Ten dead," she says. "Seventeen hurt bad. A lot of ears ringing."

"That's more than half," Pomogr says, voice suddenly gentle. "We will never get to Bo'anem like this."

Meanwhile, Borak strides along the line, clapping shoulders, kicking slumped backs upright. "You did well," he says. "Do not let it go to your heads."

One Banner looks up at Naci as she rides past, eyes wide, face spattered. "Khan," he says. "Is this… what war is now?"

Naci meets his gaze. "This is one way," she says. "We still have horses. We still have knives. We will use all of it. But yes. The world has changed."

"Cowardly," the Banner mutters.

"Efficient," Naci replies. "Save your courage for when we have to climb walls."

She turns her horse toward the ridge.

By evening, from Ryogo's main gate, the southern horizon has changed.

Where once there were only fields and distant hills, now there are trenches, embankment, and the dark mass of encamped troops and supply wagons. Fires begin to dot the slopes as cookpots come out and wounded are laid down. The lob-cannons sit in their new nests, squat silhouettes against the reddening sky.

In the harbor, Bimen's ships tighten their chain. Junk hulls form a crescent beyond the breakwater, sails furled, flags snapping.

On Ryogo's walls, bells toll. Orders are shouted. Torches flare along the parapets, following the line of stone like a necklace hastily lit.

On the southern ridge, Naci stands with one boot on an earthwork, watching the city with the focus of a hunter studying a trapped animal.

Borak comes up, hands black with powder. "Ring's almost closed," he says. "East and south, at least. The west's your admiral's problem."

"Harbors are my natural habitat," Bimen grunts, joining them. "I will make sure no one leaves without paying the toll."

Naci nods. "Good. We starve them and scare them. Then we choose whether we want Ryogo as an example or a prize."

...

Night settles over the southern camp like a lid.

The fires that dot the slopes are small, careful things. Above them, Ryogo's wall looms dark, its torches a broken necklace of light. Between the two, the strip of killed fields where the Banners stood at noon has turned into a damp, uneasy no-man's-land, fog crawling low over the flooded paddies.

At the edge of those fields, the dead wait.

They lie in a shallow trench hastily cut along a low rise, laid out in a row like men dozing after a long ride. Someone has straightened their limbs, closed their eyes. Jackets buttoned as far as the bullet holes allow. Hands folded on chests. A few have bits of cloth laid over their faces: a sleeve, a scrap of banner, a strip of someone else's shirt.

Naci stands at the foot of the trench.

Her cloak brushes the churned earth; her boots sink slightly with each slow step. A lantern burns on a crate nearby, its light yellow and stingy. It paints the dead in alternating pools of shadow and gloss: cheekbones, jawlines, the faint sheen of drying blood.

Pomogr waits at her shoulder, bare-headed, hair plastered to his skull with sweat and humidity. He looks smaller without his coat, more like the scrawny boy who once got into a fight with a cart axle and lost. His hands are dirty to the wrists, soil and blood ground into the lines.

"They wanted to send them to the Sky Father at once," he says quietly. "I told them to wait."

Naci nods once. "Names?"

He holds up a slate. Chalk letters march across it, some smudged by his thumb.

She steps along the trench, reading each in turn. She does not hurry. At each body, she pauses, looks at the face if it isn't covered. Some are boys and girls. Some are older than her. All of them look strangely surprised that this is where walking ended.

"Borsai," she says, touching two fingers to a freckled forehead. "You shot straight." A wry curve at her mouth. "Mostly."

"Tegün," at the next. The man is broad-shouldered even in stillness, his beard caked with mud. "Your mother warned me you were stubborn. I should have believed her."

Her voice is level, almost conversational. She could be checking horses, making notes about which ones need new shoes. But Pomogr sees the tightness at the corners of her eyes, the way her jaw works between names.

Halfway down the row, she stops without prompting.

This one has a bit of cloth over her chest instead of her face: a strip torn from a banner, folded into a crude triangle and pinned by a knife. The hole under it must be bad.

Naci plucks the cloth up long enough to see, then lays it back down. Her fingers linger an extra heartbeat.

"Who?" she asks.

"Yuren," Pomogr says. "From Haikam stock. She was the one who kept laughing after every shot."

"Of course she was," Naci mutters. "She died laughing?"

"She died mid-curse," Pomogr says. "She was correcting the musket on its choice of target."

Naci lets out a breath that is between a laugh and a sigh. "That's something," she says.

She walks the rest. Ten bodies. Ten names spoken. When she reaches the end, she stands for a long moment with her back to the trench, looking toward the city. From here, the wall is just a darker line against dark, but she stares at it anyway like a face that needs memorizing.

Behind her, the Banners who can still stand are gathered in a loose, silent knot. They have mud to their knees and powder burned into their pores. Bandages. Bruises. Their eyes cling to her like burrs.

Naci turns back, spreads her hands slightly so the lantern light catches her armor, her braid, her presence.

"They died as warriors," she says, voice carrying without effort. "Not as tribute. Not as fodder for someone else's ledger. They stood in the open and told Seop guns: here we are. We do not run. We do not flinch."

She tips her chin toward the trench. "You don't apologize for standing. You do not apologize for being alive when they are not. You take what they bought and you spend it well."

A murmur ripples through the Banners. Some straighten. One boy wipes his nose on his sleeve, embarrassed by his own tears.

Pomogr clears his throat. "We'll send them before dawn," he says.

"Make sure they're high enough to see the city," Naci says. "They earned the view." She turns around. "Come," she says to Pomogr. "We have wounded who aren't lying still. Yet."

...

The field hospital is a long, low row of tents stitched from whatever canvas could be stolen or bought fast: Moukopl sailcloth, Tepr yurtskins, Seop warehouse tarps. Lanterns hang from makeshift poles, painting the area in uneven, jaundiced light. The air smells of boiled linen, sour sweat, and the thick metallic tang of opened bodies.

Inside the main tent, chaos is organized into rows.

Men and women lie on pallets or directly on the ground, stripped to the waist. Some groan. Some stare at the canvas roof with empty focus. A few snore, exhaustion finally beating pain. Medics and apprentices move between them like ants, their hands red, their sleeves rolled, their eyes somewhere between too sharp and too dull.

Horohan is in the middle of it all.

Her coat is off, tossed across a crate. She has a leather apron over her armor now, tied crooked, splashed in a pattern that might have once been someone's circulation. Her hair is tied back in a rough knot. There is blood on her cheekbone, a smear across her jaw where she must have wiped her face with the back of a dirty hand. She holds a wounded Banner's arm steady while a surgeon stitches a long gash, fingers firm, grip unshaking.

"Stop squirming," she tells the Banner, who is trying to watch the needle go in. "If you twist like that I'll assume you want extra scars. I can arrange that."

"It hurts," he grits out.

She leans down, her breath warm in his ear. "You stood in front of a city that wants you dead," she says. "And now you're crying about thread? I thought I trained you better."

The boy snorts despite himself, then yelps as the surgeon tugs.

"Hold still," the surgeon mutters. "Or I'll sew your sleeve to your skin."

Naci steps into the tent. Conversation dips, then resumes at a lower volume. Men and women lift their heads; someone moves to stand, and Naci flicks two fingers at him.

"Lie down," she says. "If you fall trying to salute me I'll be offended."

Horohan glances up. For a heartbeat, the hard mask she's been wearing cracks just enough to show something softer underneath.

"You're late," she says. "We're running out of hands, and I refuse to let Moukopl butchers be nicer than us."

"I had appointments with the dead," Naci replies. "They complain less than you."

A medic nearby—old, with hair more grey than black—barks a laugh. "Give her a bowl," he tells Horohan. "If she's here she works."

Horohan tosses Naci a rolled bandage without looking. Naci catches it one-handed.

"As you command, surgeon," she says with mock solemnity. "Where do you want the Khan?"

"Anywhere she'll do as she's told," the old man says. "Which is to say nowhere, but we'll try."

They make a space for Naci at a pallet where a Banner lies pale-faced, hands clamped over his own belly. Blood oozes between his fingers.

"Bullet graze," the attending medic says. "Went in, decided it didn't like his insides, went out again. Needs pressure and someone to explain that he is not dying from a scratch."

"I am dying," the Banner insists faintly.

"You're not," Naci says, kneeling beside him. "You're just leaking a bit."

He squints up at her. "Khan. I—I tried not to fall. My legs… they disagreed."

"Your legs are cowards," Naci says. "We will retrain them."

He huffs a weak laugh. She takes his hands, moves them aside, presses her own palms over the wound. He gasps, then breathes through his teeth.

"I saw you," he says. "On the hill. Standing. Bullets… ignored you."

"They're afraid of paperwork," Naci says. "If they hit me, everyone has to fill out forms to the Emperor."

A murmur of amusement ripples through the nearest pallets.

At another cot, Horohan is changing a bandage that has stuck. The Banner there is older, a veteran with scars that predate this war. He flinches as she peels the linen away, hissing.

"Do you want me to sing you a lullaby?" she asks dryly.

"Yes," he says through gritted teeth. "If you sing, I'll go unconscious faster."

She snorts. "Ungrateful."

Naci lifts her head. "I hear her sing everyday," she calls. "He has a point."

Laughter bubbles up, thin but real. Even the surgeon's mouth twitches.

Horohan glowers at Naci over the top of the patient. "You're supposed to back me up," she says. "Not join the mutiny."

"You did well," Naci laughs. "All of you. You stood in thunder and shouted back. Tomorrow, the city will still hear your voices."

"Will we… stand there again?" the boy asks, nervous and eager.

"Not you," Naci says. "You will enjoy the rare luxury of being horizontal until that hole in you closes. Others will take your place. That's how armies work. We share the misery."

"Very generous," Horohan mutters.

Naci glances at her. Something unspoken passes between them. She pushes herself to her feet, wiping her hands on a rag. Blood smears, dark on dark.

Naci jerks her chin toward the tent flap. "Horo," she says. "Come."

...

The prisoners are penned at the edge of the captured fort, in what used to be an exercise yard. A low stone wall rings the space, topped with hastily-added stakes and stretched rope. Lanterns hang from the corners, making the shadows deeper in the middle.

There are perhaps fifty men in there. Seop uniforms torn, jackets gone, belts taken. Their hands are bound behind their backs with rough cord. Some sit slumped against the wall, heads down. Some huddle in small groups, muttering. A few stand apart, staring at the ground between their boots like it holds answers.

Several are wounded: bandaged arms, bloody heads, a man whose leg is splinted with a piece of broken spear. They have received only the minimal attention needed to keep them from dying without permission.

As Naci and Horohan approach, a Tepr guard snaps to attention, spear butt thudding.

"Khan, Khatun," he says. "They've been quiet since we took their captain away."

"Good," Naci says. "Quiet men listen."

She steps up onto a broken stone block so the prisoners can see her over the guard line. Horohan takes her place just behind and to the side, close enough that her shadow falls alongside Naci's.

"Soldiers of Ryogo," Naci calls, in Seop. Her accent is rough but comprehensible. That alone makes some heads snap up. "Listen closely. My translators get bored repeating themselves."

A ripple goes through the yard. One man spits in the dirt. Another hisses something that sounds like "barbarian."

Naci pretends not to hear either.

"You fought well," she says. "Your fort took four jars and still tried to bite. I respect that. You've done your duty."

She lets the compliment hang, surprising them. Horohan does not look impressed; she rolls a pebble under her heel, grinding it.

"But your duty to this fort is finished," Naci goes on. "It is burnt and broken. Your duty to that city—" she jerks her chin toward Ryogo "—is a question. And I am offering you an answer."

A young prisoner near the front, blood crusted along his hairline, scowls. "We need no answers from invaders," he says. "Your empire will drown in our harbors."

"I'm not Moukopl," Naci says. "They are my… colleagues." She smiles slightly. "We are equal opportunity conquerors."

A few of the prisoners blink, thrown by the joke. The young one scowls harder.

"You want to live?" Horohan cuts in, voice low and cold. "Then stop reciting proclamations and start listening."

All eyes go to her. There is something about Horohan that makes people's instincts sit up: the combination of scars and stillness, the way her hand rests idly on the knife at her belt.

Naci gestures between them. "This is my wife," she says. "She is very good with blades. Also with animals. She knows how to hurt things and how to keep them alive. Sometimes both at once."

Horohan's mouth twists. "You're not helping my reputation," she mutters.

"I am exactly helping it," Naci says.

One of the older prisoners—a sergeant by his bearing if not his missing stripes—narrows his eyes. "What do you want?"

"I want fewer dead Tepr," Naci says. "And fewer dead Seop who don't need to be. I'm here to solve a problem. The problem is stubborn stone and men behind it who think dying for nobles is noble."

"We killed our king," another prisoner growls. "We are a republic. You want to put him back!"

"I want to put whoever is useful on whatever chair gets me what I want," Naci says calmly. "I'm not here to untangle your politics. I'm here to make sure Ryogo yields without us having to climb every inch of its walls with knives in our teeth."

Horohan drops into a crouch on the block, eyes level with the nearest row of prisoners.

"Here is the choice," she says, all softness gone. "You're soldiers. You understand choices. Fight on for a city that sees you as expendable, die slowly in our pens, scream long enough that your families mistake your voice for thunder… or switch." She tips her head. "You know these streets. These walls. These commanders. You join us, you guide us, you get fed and healed. You stand in our lines instead of rotting out here."

A murmur. Outrage, disbelief, temptation. They move through the prisoners like wind through grass.

"You're asking us to betray Seop," the sergeant says.

"I'm asking you to pick Seop," Naci says. "The Seop that survives this war versus the one that feeds you to it. Ask yourself whether Bo'anem cares if Ryogo starves. I have read your leaflets. 'Necessary sacrifice.'" She spits the phrase like gristle. "We're simply offering you a different outcome."

Horohan straightens. "Understand something," she adds. "This is not an empty threat. We don't need you alive. You're useful meat, that's all. If you die screaming, you're still useful." She points toward the fort's inner yard, where, in the middle distance, a handful of Tepr are arranging something—iron braziers, stacked wood, chains.

One prisoner follows the gesture and goes visibly pale.

"What are those for?" he whispers.

Horohan smiles. It is a small, harmless-looking thing that makes several men flinch.

"Morning songs," she says.

...

They start before dawn.

The first man is chosen carefully: not the young firebrand, not the old sergeant, but one of the middle ones. Someone with enough rank that the others know his name, but not enough that his absence would collapse the group.

He is dragged from the pen at daybreak, bound hand and foot, gagged until he reaches the yard. Naci stands there, cloak over her sleep tunic, hair braided, expression mild. Horohan leans against the wall, arms folded.

The braziers are big, flat-iron dishes on waist-high stands. They were originally meant for heating pitch and metal. Now they are heaped with charcoal and chopped wood, arranged in a ring on a raised platform just inside catapult range of the walls.

As the man is chained to the tallest post in the center, the fort's horns sound a low, mournful note. It is not for him; it is a routine dawn call. The timing is simply convenient.

"Last chance," Naci says, stepping close enough that he can see her clearly. She has removed his gag. "Switch sides. Tell us what we need. Tactical maps. Weak points. Commander habits. You talk, you join the ones in the warm tent. The ones with stew."

His eyes dart to the side, where a handful of former prisoners already sit—bandages fresh, bowls in hand, guarded but undeniably alive. One of them raises his cup in a taunting little salute, as if to say: we chose.

The chained man swallows. His jaw works.

"My family is inside," he croaks. "My boy. If they see me fighting you, perhaps they live ashamed. If they see me scream…" His gaze flicks to the walls, where tiny figures are just starting to appear. "They will know I did not bend." He spits at her feet. "Burn."

Horohan steps up, fingers tightening on the torch she's holding. She looks to Naci.

Naci nods once.

The torch kisses the nearest brazier. Flame takes eagerly—charcoal catching with a greedy crackle. Horohan walks the ring, touching each pile in turn, until orange tongues lick up around the iron, heat swelling. Soon the morning air smells of smoke and pitch and fear.

When she thrusts the last torch into the central pile, just beneath the prisoner's dangling feet, he can't help it. He screams.

The sound rides the cold air like a thrown spear, clear and high. It bounces off the stone of the fort, off the slopes, curls up and over the walls of Ryogo like a warning.

On the parapet, defenders freeze. Some shade their eyes, squinting toward the noise. Others pretend not to look. The sound makes that pretense hard.

The Banners watch from a distance, faces set, eyes hard. Some look queasy. One mutters, "He'd have done the same to us."

Borak stands with them, arms folded, expression sour. "He'd have watched someone else do it to us," he corrects. "Don't be generous with the enemy."

Bimen appears at Naci's elbow, jaw tight. "This is… unnecessary," he says in Moukopl. "We could display bodies without cooking them like festival pigs."

"Your Emperor burned villages to make Hluav Linh reconsider," Naci replies, low. "You were not there, but I know someone who was close enough to smell the smoke. This is cleaner. Faster. And I'm only burning soldiers."

"They are still men," Bimen says.

"We are sparing our men," she says. "Each one we frighten into surrender is one fewer Banner in that trench."

He doesn't like it. He doesn't stop it.

On the walls, the archers do not fire. They are in range. The braziers are deliberately placed within shot but behind enough cover that any attempt to hit them would be suicidal. No one wants to be the one ordered to die for a chance to end a single man's suffering.

When the screaming stops, Naci has the body cut down, charred and twisted, and hung from a high frame facing the city. It spins slowly in a wind that hasn't decided whether to be kind.

At noon, she releases three prisoners who agreed to talk. They are bandaged, fed, given cloaks. She marches them up to the slope in full view of the walls, has them shout toward the city:

"Ryogo, listen!" the sergeant roars, voice hoarse. "They offer terms. Surrender your guns. Keep your lives. Keep your homes. Or watch us burn, one by one."

Arrows hiss down in response. One catches him in the shoulder. He stumbles, laughs bitterly, and lets the Banners drag him back.

The second day, the prisoners watch as a man is nailed upright to a tall stake set in the no-man's-land facing the gate. The nails are big, hammered through palm and calf into green wood. The process is quick—Tepr have done this before—but there is nothing clinical about the way the victim sags, gasping, blood dripping down the grain.

They leave him there as the sun climbs. His cries start strong, then fade to ragged whimpers, then to silence. All morning, the city has a clear view of him: a dark, twitching punctuation mark against the sky, a question they are refusing to answer.

"Next time, use rope," Borak suggests. "Nails are wasteful. Rope you can reuse."

Horohan raises a brow. "Worried about supplies?"

"Always," he replies.

By afternoon, a white cloth flutters up on a short lance over a secondary wall gate. It's not a flag of surrender—too small, too cautious—but it's something.

Naci has it shot down.

"Not yet," she says. "They want to talk just enough to buy time. We've seen that game."

The third day, prisoners are tied to frames and hoisted just high enough that their toes scrape a brazier's edge. The fires below them are kept low, coals glowing, heat licking, never quite enough to kill. Their voices become part of a rhythm: moans, shrieks, the occasional hoarse, defiant song that fractures into screams again.

Tepr drummers stand behind them, beating a slow, inexorable pattern: boom… boom… boom. Between beats, a crier shouts terms up at the walls, offers, threats. The effect is obscene and oddly ritual, like a festival inverted.

Inside the city, mothers stuff cloth into children's ears. Men argue more loudly at market. Priests try to drown the noise with chants. None of it works perfectly.

On the fourth day, they line up fifteen prisoners along a shallow trench facing the gate, kneel them, and execute ten with a single volley from the Banners' muskets. The remaining five are dragged back to camp, sprayed with the blood of their comrades, and offered the choice again.

Four switch.

The fifth stares Naci in the eye and says, "If we surrender because we fear you, we are already dead."

Horohan takes him personally the next morning. She doesn't bother with braziers. She simply walks him up to the edge of the trench where the Banners fell and cuts his throat, slow and deliberate, in full view of the walls.

His blood steams in the cold air. The stain spreads over Tepr graves.

"Look," she calls toward the city, voice carrying. "This is what your courage buys."

Banners behind her beat their shields and howl, the sound rising like wind over the paddies.

By the sixth day, the braziers stand cold and black, but the memory of them burns enough. The prisoners are quieter. More of them volunteer names unprompted. The deserter camp in the Tepr rear swells by twos and threes: Seop soldiers who slipped through drains, who swam the moat at night, who chose the unknown cruelty outside over the known hunger within.

"They're cracking," Bimen says, watching the trickle with a professional eye. "Rations must be thin. Morale thinner."

"They're smart," Naci says. "The ones who come. They know a losing ledger when they see it."

"What we're doing," he says, watching a new arrival vomit in the mud from nerves, "this will be remembered."

"Good," Naci replies. "Sieges are less bloody when people remember the last one was not worth dying in."

On the eighth morning, the bells on the walls ring a different pattern.

White hangs from the main tower over Ryogo's chief gate: a broad, clean banner, rippling tiredly in the sea wind.

The gull on the city standard is lowered. Slowly. As if it hurts.

In the Tepr lines, a cheer rises, ragged and disbelieving at first, then gathering strength. Banners lift muskets. Riders wave caps. Borak whoops so loudly he nearly falls off the embankment.

Horohan stands beside Naci on the ridge, watching the city's gates creak open.