The Winds of Tepr

The Hluay move like weather—unpredictable in detail, utterly predictable in direction.

Town after town folds. Some burn, some kneel, some simply empty, their people spilling out ahead of the sun banners like a shadow trying to outrun its source. Garrison commanders who misjudge Linh's sermons as bluff end up nailed to their own gatehouses. Villages that throw grain and sons into his path find themselves declared "purified" instead of "eradicated," which is an improvement in the same way drowning is better than being flayed.

The Shag'hal-Tyn ride as the windbreak before this storm. Their horses eat distance. Their scouts slip into valleys and reappear behind Moukopl forts, whispering in local ears: The empire is falling. The fire is coming. Choose where you stand when the ash settles.

South of Pezijil, on the coast, a harbor city dozes between two headlands. Its walls are old, its piers cramped with fishing boats and one bored customs cutter. The garrison is underpaid and mostly drunk. When the Shag'hal-Tyn arrive at its gates, the guards look down, look at the thin pay box, look back at the riders, and decide that loyalty is an expensive luxury.

By the time Linh's main column crests the last hill, the city's gates are open. Hluay banners march in over cobbles that have seen more fish guts than blood. There is no desperate last stand, no flaming pitch, no heroic, doomed charge—just a few half-hearted arrows that go nowhere and a lot of people suddenly very interested in scrubbing their doorsteps.

Linh pauses under the gate arch, eagle-skull staff in hand, brow furrowing.

"No battle," he says.

Li Song, at his shoulder, grunts. "Don't complain," he says. "The White Mother doesn't hand you a harbor every day. Take the gift before someone remembers courage."

"Gifts have strings," Linh murmurs. "Heaven doesn't like to be predictable."

"Neither does an exhausted army," Li Song says. "If you want to argue theology, do it after we've stolen their boats."

He barks orders. Hluay troops spill toward the waterfront with the glee of men who have been promised both plunder and a chance not to walk anymore. Sailors are rounded up, harbor masters bullied, hulls inspected. Linh and Li Song wade into arguments over tonnage and draft, a prophet and an old general haggling over planks like fishwives.

While they do, Meice and Amar are very happily not anywhere near boats.

They sit in a harbor tavern with a morbidly optimistic name—The Safe Anchorage—which smells of spilled ale, fried sardines, and long-term bad decisions. The place buzzes with Shag'hal-Tyn riders celebrating an easy conquest. Among them, tonight, are ten men in Behani robes: rust-red wool, beadwork at the hems, the distinctive braided belts of the mountain monasteries.

When Meice first saw them in the square, her heart jerked in an odd, painful way. A decade away from home, and suddenly the familiar cut of a robe in a foreign city is enough to make her fingers twitch for prayer beads she no longer carries.

Now she sits opposite three of them at a sticky table, a cup of harsh rice liquor in hand, Amar wedged in at her side. The Behani-robed men are older than Meice by a handful of winters, with shaved heads and the calm, steady gazes of men who've seen a lot and reacted to none of it.

Their Behani is… off.

They smile when she greets them in her mother tongue, but their replies have a stiffness to them, like men reciting phrases learned from a book. Their accents flatten vowels in the wrong places. They call the wind by the wrong honorifics. Meice's hackles lift, then smooth; it has been ten years. Maybe her ear is out of practice. Maybe the south monasteries have different cadences.

Still, every time one of them says ahsha instead of asha for "breath," a tiny nerve twitches somewhere behind Meice's right eye.

She ignores it. For now.

They talk.

"Brother," says the one directly across from her, in Behani that would make her old teachers wince, "we did not expect to find a Falling Star so far from the red plateau."

His Behani name for her—Seryn-tal, Falling Star—is crisp and correct. It lands between them like a coin.

Meice snorts, rolling the cup between her palms. "I did not expect to find anyone from home here," she replies. "Least of all warrior monks slumming in a sea-town."

Beside her, Amar shifts. The Behani is a river going over stones to her; she catches only tones. Meice glances at her and switches, briskly.

"They're from Behani," she explains in Moukopl tongue. "Or say they are. From the south monasteries."

"Ask them which monastery," Amar says at once.

Meice's mouth quirks. "The north does not trust the south," she translates back into Behani, amused.

"Nor should it," says the monk on the left dryly. "We are from Khar Vesh."

Meice blinks. "Khar Vesh?" she repeats. "That's… high."

"Austere," the monk says. "Snow, discipline, and very bad tea."

That much tracks. Khar Vesh is the monastery people invoke when they want to brag about being miserable on purpose.

"We heard of a Behani fighter in the service of the Sun God's madman," the first monk says. "We came to see if the rumor was true."

"It is," says Meice.

They laugh. It sounds right, mostly. Maybe they've been away from home as long as she has. Maybe everyone's Behani goes strange with distance.

She translates for Amar, who listens keenly.

"They say they came because they heard about how annoying I am," Meice sums up.

"Wise of them," Amar says. "How do Behani monks feel about Yohazatz?"

Meice asks. There is a little tension in her belly while she waits for the answer.

The monk shrugs. "We feel about them as we feel about all loud, horse-obsessed northerners," he replies. "Fine in small doses. Tedious in large numbers. But they die the same as anyone else when the empire decides their land is useful."

Meice turns that into something less cutting. "They say Linh has been cruel to your people," she tells Amar. "They've seen the purifications. They don't approve."

Amar's jaw tightens. "They've seen?" she repeats.

"Yes," Meice says. "They've traveled. Their accent is… odd. But their eyes aren't blind."

One of the monks leans over, peering at Amar with interest. "And you, fire-eye," he says in rough Moukopl tongue. "You follow the Sun Regent willingly? He kills your kin by the village."

"My kin were dying in chains before he came," Amar answers. Her voice is level, the words hard. "The empire calls it 'war.' He calls it 'purification.' They are all very fond of fire. At least with him, the flames are not aimed only north."

The monk snorts. "Fire is fire," he says. "It does not care whose house it eats."

"True," Amar says. "But some houses were full of people who sharpened knives on Yohazatz bones. If fire has to pick a direction, I did not hate seeing it travel south."

She drains her cup. Meice stares at her, impressed and a little worried by the steel in that.

The monks trade glances over their bowls.

Conversation drifts. They ask Meice about Behani; she tells them stories. The mountain winds that cut your lungs into cleaner versions of themselves. The training yards where they learned to fall on stone until stone got bored. The teacher who caught Meice's fist before Meice knew she intended to throw it and said, calmly, A falling star is just a stone. You should better learn the Moon faces, like your sisters.

"Is it true," one monk asks, "that in the palace of the Talanzury, they ring the bells at dawn with bare knuckles, to toughen the hands for prayer?"

Meice laughs. "We don't have bells in the palace," she says. "We have horns.'"

There is a beat. A very small, very quiet beat.

The monk smiles. "Ah," he says. "Of course. Horns. I miss that sound."

Meice's gaze sharpens.

Her teacher once smacked her upside the head for saying bells in a poem about Khar Vesh. We are not city-people, she'd said. We have wind and bone and horns. Bells are for gardens with fences. Her eyes were fiery amber.

And this man, who claims Khar Vesh as his home, just spoke of missing bell-sounds that never existed.

A cold line of clarity runs down Meice's spine.

She shifts slowly, setting her cup down. Her shoulders loosen, deliberately. Her weight settles just a hair forward on the balls of her feet.

In Behani, she says lightly, "Tell me, brother. Finish the proverb. 'When the wind blows from the red ravine…'"

It is the proverb every Behani child knows. When the wind blows from the red ravine, lash your roof and sharpen your blade.

The monk smiles. "Surely you don't need to test us on that."

Meice's grin is small and sharp. "You should've said the roof thing," she says in Moukopl tongue.

Amar glances at her. "What?"

"They're not monks," Meice murmurs. "They're tourists with good tailors."

She flicks her gaze across the tavern. The other Behani-robed men at other tables have gone very, very still. Ten in total. Their hands rest casually near belts, near sleeves, near the places a knife might sleep.

The air in The Safe Anchorage shifts.

Shag'hal-Tyn riders sense it and begin edging toward the door with the nonchalant speed of men who have seen too many arguments end in corpses. The tavern owner, reading the room correctly, vanishes under the counter.

The monk across from Meice drops his smile. His posture changes—not much, just enough that his center of gravity settles in a way Meice recognizes from a lifetime of people about to do something stupid.

"In truth," he says, switching to the Moukopl tongue so Amar hears every word, "we are here for the Sun Regent. Not you."

Amar's fingers slide toward the knife at her waist.

"You're assassins," she says.

"'Assassin' is such an ugly word," the monk replies. "We are problem-solvers. The Northern Bureau believes that if one thorn is plucked, the foot will stop bleeding." His eyes flick briefly toward the harbor, where the masts of confiscated ships cut the sky. "Your Linh is young. His dynasty is a sapling. No heirs. No entrenched clans. A clean cut now, and this… holy horde… disbands. The Hluay go back to whatever hole they crawled from. The Moukopl rebuild. The north stops burning."

Meice's mouth twists. "And the Yohazatz?"

He spreads his hands. "The empire may be persuaded to be… more surgical. The Bureau can be convinced that annihilation is wasteful. Some seeds of that idea already exist."

"The Bureau," Amar says flatly, "burned many villages because someone told them a Siza prophet looked at the sky in the wrong tone of voice."

"That was before," the assassin says.

"Before what?" Amar asks. "Before we all started walking next to the god-killer? Before you realized you can't kill us all fast enough with bows?"

He sighs. "Fire-eye," he says, almost gently, "you know what Linh is doing to your people. Even now. Every town he takes, some of your kin die under his 'purifications.' You're smart. You see it. And you—" he looks to Meice "—you are a mercenary. You want coin and passage back west. You owe this man nothing. Let us do our work. Step aside. When he's gone, you can bargain with Ji. There will be chaos, yes, but no more god in the middle of it. Just men. Men we understand."

Amar laughs. It is not a pleasant sound. "You want me to trust the Moukopl more than the madman killing for his god?" she says. "At least Linh told me to my face that he intended to slaughter my people."

Meice nods slowly. "You're right about one thing," she tells the assassin. "I am a mercenary. I go where the coin flows and the odds amuse me. Linh is a lunatic. His god is a pyromaniac. His methods make my old teachers roll in their graves."

She leans forward. Her eyes are very bright.

"But I've seen what you people do when you're scared," she says softly. "You may not believe me, but I used to work in your empire's court. I know your habit of solving crises by killing anyone who looks at a throne for too long. Linh is a hammer. You? You're acid. You don't just smash things. You dissolve them."

The assassin's jaw tightens. "We maintain order," he says.

"You maintain nothing," Meice snaps. "Killing us is just your job." She jerks a thumb at Amar. "My job is to keep her breathing, in whatever catastrophe she chooses to stand in. Right now she's chosen this one. Which means, lucky you, you're between me and my paycheck."

Amar gives her a look that is half gratitude, half exasperation. "You are terrible at speeches," she mutters.

"I know," Meice says. "I hit things. You do the poetry. You should write the speeches for me."

The assassin sits back, expression smoothing over. "That is a pity," he says. "I had hoped we might be reasonable."

He puts his palm flat on the table. There is a tiny, sharp tack sound as a spring-blade flicks out of his sleeve and into his hand.

"Please," Meice says. "If you insult my language and then try to kill me with a sleeve-knife, I'm obligated to make you regret at least one of those choices."

Then everything explodes.

The first assassin lunges, blade darting for Meice's throat. She moves sideways, fast, the bench screeching under her. The knife grazes her collarbone instead of opening her jugular. It hurts. It also puts his wrist exactly where she wants it.

She slams her forearm down, trapping his knife-hand against the table, then drives her elbow into his face. Cartilage cracks. Blood spurts. His head snaps back, eyes going glassy.

Amar is already moving. The assassin to Meice's right goes for her, expecting hesitation from the "civilian" with the pretty eyes. She ducks under his reach and drives her knife up into his armpit, where armor isn't. The blade slices through flesh, into a lung. His breath goes wet. He collapses sideways, clawing at the hilt jutting from his own ribs.

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Around them, the remaining eight come in a coordinated rush—robes flaring, hands full of steel.

Meice flips the first assassin's half-unconscious body into the path of the next, using him like an unwilling shield. A short blade meant for her guts bites into his spine instead. She lets his weight drag the second man off balance and steps in, heel hammering down on the side of his knee. The joint buckles with a sound like a snapped branch. He screams and drops; her fist meets his throat on the way down, a compact punch that silences him mid-yell.

Someone grabs Amar's braid from behind. She spins with the pull, going with it instead of resisting, turning her body into a pivot. Her knife traces an arc low and fast across the man's thigh. Hamstring severs. He howls and collapses, dragging her down with him. She lands hard, ribs jarring, but she's already rolling, already stabbing. The knife goes in under his jaw this time, a quick, ugly stab that ends his noise.

"Three," Meice grunts.

"Work faster," Amar pants.

A chair explodes against Meice's shoulder, courtesy of assassin number four. Pain flares. She drops to one knee, vision sparking. He follows through with a downward stab. She gets her forearm up, catching his wrist. The blade stops inches from her eye.

"You're good," he hisses, sweating.

"I had an excellent teacher," she says.

She twists, using the momentum of his own weight, wrenching his arm. The knife slips. Her other fist pistons up, catching him under the ribs. Breath whooshes out. She slams his head into the edge of the table on the way down. Something in his skull makes a damp, decisive noise.

A fifth assassin tries to be clever, coming in low with twin blades, aiming to scissor her Achilles tendons. She hops back; one knife grazes her shin. The other hits the table leg. She stamps down on his hand while it's trapped, feeling bones crunch under her heel. He shrieks; she grabs his ear and the back of his neck and bounces his face off the floorboards.

"Five," she says.

Across the table, Amar finds herself facing two at once—one with a short sword, one with a hook-blade. Her heart is pounding, but her hands feel oddly steady. Meice's drills echo in her muscles: don't look at the weapons, look at their hips.

Short Sword feints high. Hook-Blade darts in low for her belly. She sidesteps left, barely, feeling the hook brush her tunic. Her knife answers, a quick dart, carving a line across Hook-Blade's forearm. He flinches; his grip loosens. She kicks his knee sideways. He goes down. Short Sword lunges to cover him, thrust aimed at her chest.

She slaps his blade aside with the flat of her own, sparks jumping, then steps in, too close for his sword. Her forehead slams into his nose. The impact sends stars across her vision, but it does worse things to his. He staggers, off-balance. Her knife finds his kidney, once, twice. He spasms, dropping his weapon, and sinks to his knees.

Hook-Blade, half up again, opens his mouth to shout something—prayer, curse, warning, it hardly matters. Amar's knife catches him in the throat before the words arrive.

"Seven," she gasps, wiping blood from her eyes with her wrist.

"Show-off," Meice mutters, breathing hard.

The tavern is a chaos of overturned tables and fleeing bodies. Only three assassins still stand. They have regrouped near the door, realizing belatedly that this was not going to be the clean, surgical snip Old Ji promised them. One has blood in his eyes; another cradles a broken wrist; the third—leader, by the set of his shoulders—still holds a blade steady.

"This doesn't change anything," the leader says coldly. "Kill or no kill. Linh dies eventually. Your rebellion eats itself. The Moukopl endures."

Meice spits blood onto the floor. "If I get through tonight without hearing another imperial slogan, I'll consider that a victory."

She glances at Amar. The girl's chest is heaving, but there is a bright, almost feverish light in her gaze.

"Left two are yours," Meice says. "I want the one with the opinions."

"You always take the talkative ones," Amar says.

"It's because you hate small talk," Meice points out.

Then they move.

Amar charges first this time, which surprises the two on the left enough to give her half a heartbeat. She feints toward the nearer one, then darts past him, cutting at his calf as she goes. He yelps, stumbling. The second swings at her head. She drops to a slide, the blade whistling over her hair, and slashes his ankle as she passes. Both go down in a tangle of swearing and limbs. She rolls to her feet behind them and does what Meice taught her: no hesitation. Two quick, efficient stabs, one to each back of the neck. Bodies jerk, then still.

The leader meets Meice in the center of the wrecked room like it's a dueling floor. His stance is solid. His eyes are calm. The knife in his hand is short, matte, made for work, not display.

"You could have walked away," he says.

"So could you," she replies.

He comes in fast, a flurry of precise thrusts aimed at joints and arteries. She gives ground, parrying with nothing but forearms and the occasional grabbed chair-back, the blade slicing lines through her sleeves, nicking skin. Pain blooms along her arm, hot, bright. She lets it exist and keeps moving.

He overextends on a lunge toward her ribs. She twists, the blade grazing her side instead of entering it. Her hand snaps up, catching his wrist. He tries to wrench free. She holds. Their faces are inches apart, breath mingling.

"Who taught you Behani?" she asks softly. "You're very bad at it."

He bares his teeth. "A dead man."

"Then this is karma," she says.

She headbutts him, hard. His nose explodes; blood sprays. His grip falters. She rips the knife from his hand and flips it, hilt toward her, blade toward him.

"For Khar Vesh," she says, and buries it under his chin, driving up until the point scrapes the palate.

His eyes go wide with sudden, startled comprehension. His body stiffens, then slackens. She lets him slide off the blade onto the floor.

The tenth assassin dies with a wet gurgle, the sound swallowed by the hush that falls as his blood joins the others' on the tavern boards.

...

Linh stands on the warped planks of the main pier, eagle-skull staff planted beside him like a standard. The burned side of his face glistens faintly with ointment in the late afternoon light, his ruined hand tucked inside his sleeve. Beyond him, the Hluay and their Shag'hal-Tyn allies swarm over the waterfront like ants on a fallen fruit.

Fisher-boats are being bullied into military shapes. Masts are measured with rough rope. Hulls are prodded, cursed at, and condemned. Sailors protest in three languages and get overruled in one: Linh's.

"This one?" he asks, nodding at a squat coaster with a hull like a fat gourd.

Li Song squints at it, sun glancing off the silver in his hair. The old general has rolled his sleeves up, revealing forearms corded with hard, ropey muscle and old scar-lines.

"This one," he decides, "might make it as far as the next sandbar before falling apart from shame. We need deep keels, not floating onions."

"You are very picky for a man who confessed he hated boats," Linh says mildly.

"I hate being on boats," Li Song corrects. "I am quite fond of having them pointing at my enemies."

He gestures with his hand. "We strip the harbor bare and we still don't have enough hull to carry a decent army to the islands. We'd need war junks. Proper ones. Old Ji and Little Bimen chained most of those to arsenals after my retirement."

"Perhaps we borrow them," Linh says.

"From arsenals guarded by people who want you dead," Li Song replies. "You do love a challenge."

A clatter of boots on plank interrupts them. A small knot of riders approaches from the landward side—five men in patched leathers, steppe-bows slung, their braids tied back in the Yohazatz way.

They dismount as they reach the pier head, dropping to one knee as if the boards are palace stone.

"Sun Regent," their leader says. "We bring news from the west road, as ordered."

Linh looks them over. Dust on their boots, yes—but the dust is thin, as if they took the road at a trot, not a hard gallop. Their hands, ostensibly those of riders, have faint oar-calluses along the palms. Their braids are tied correctly, but the bone beads are carved in Moukopl motifs. A hundred small wrongnesses.

Luck, he thinks distantly, has a sense of humor.

"Speak," he says aloud.

"The imperial outposts between here and Pezijil are emptied," the man reports. "Some fled, some were… persuaded to defect. The name of Hluay burns ahead of your banners. The Bureau spreads stories of your 'divine madness' to frighten peasants." A small smile. "It works in the wrong direction."

The others chuckle dutifully.

"More important," the leader continues, "there is talk among the fishermen of a Moukopl naval yard not far from here. War junks, patrol cutters, stored for 'emergency redeployment.' If you strike it, you could seize ships enough to frighten even the Seop."

Li Song's head comes up. "That's not what we intend to do. But where?"

"A day's march south along the coast," the man says. "A cove behind a red headland, with a carved lion's head in the stone. They call it Lion's Throat."

Li Song and Linh exchange a look. Old Ji, cautious as a rat, would absolutely tuck a fleet there.

"You've done well," Linh says. "You have earned your rest. The Yohazatz who ride with me have lost enough. Take your men. Go home. Guard your families."

It is not pure kindness. A prophet who sends people away looks generous in stories. But something in him does tighten when he says lost enough—an old anger that has nothing to do with tactics.

The riders bow their heads, all humility.

"Sun Regent," the leader says slowly. "There is… one thing more we would ask, before we go."

Li Song huffs. "Of course there is," he mutters, already turning away toward the waterfront. "When someone says 'we have one more thing,' it is never a basket of oranges." He claps a nearby Hluay officer on the shoulder. "Come. Show me that north pier. If we lash these toy boats together, we might yet frighten a gull."

He strides off, barking orders, half on purpose. Linh feels the moment stretch: his old general moving further down the pier, his own guards lingering a little too far back, distracted by a burst of shouting at a fish-stall. The sea slaps against the piles, a lazy, indifferent heartbeat.

The five "Yohazatz" remain kneeling before him like a small, pious triangle of trouble.

"Speak," Linh invites. "My time is thinner than my patience today."

The leader lifts his head. His eyes are a shade too dark for the north.

"We wished," he says, "to ask what happens to us when the war is done. To the Yohazatz. To the ones who aren't burned to ashes."

He says it with just enough bitterness to be convincing. Almost.

Linh's burned lips twitch. "You are asking about policy?" he says. "While standing on a pier we are about to rob, in a city we stole, in a world on fire? Your kin are hated by the rest of humankind, don't you know? I am just offering them what they want to see."

"It is easier to believe in sacrifice," the man says, "if you know it leads somewhere."

Linh inclines his head. "Fair. I will tell you, then. When the war is done, there will be no more 'Yohazatz' or 'Moukopl' or 'Siza' or anything like that. Only 'alive' and 'dead.' We will count by justice, not tribes."

It is a beautiful line. It is also, he knows, impossible to guarantee. He says it anyway. The Sun God likes confidence.

Something behind the leader's eyes loosens. He smiles. "Then let us help you reach that just world," he says.

He moves.

The kneeling posture was a coil. He explodes out of it, hand flashing from inside his coat with a knife meant for the space under Linh's ribs. The other four surge with him, a flower of steel and feigned loyalty turning all its petals inward.

Linh does not have time to think. That is perhaps why he survives.

His burned leg chooses that instant to betray him; the scar tissue tightens, sending a familiar, treacherous spasm through his thigh. His knee buckles. He stumbles sideways—not away from the blade, not toward it—just badly, embarrassingly off balance.

The assassin's knife, aimed precisely where Linh's torso had been, scrapes along his ribs instead of entering them, carving a hot line of pain that is shallow compared to what it meant to be. The force of the missed thrust carries the man forward, overshooting.

Linh drops with the fall. His eagle-skull staff becomes leverage. He jams its iron-shod butt between planks, uses it to pivot, to roll, to shove himself under the arc of a second knife.

Steel whistles above his head. A lock of singed hair drifts down, severed neatly.

"Divine luck," one assassin snarls in Moukopl with no accent.

"I've been warning the world about it." Linh replies.

A foot swings for his head. He brings the staff up. The eagle's skull cracks against bone. The man's toes shatter; he howls and goes down, clutching his ruined foot. A third attacker tries to slash at Linh's exposed neck. Linh turns his falling body into motion, twisting, letting the cut glance off his shoulder instead of taking his throat.

He is weak. His burned muscles scream protest. But he knows how to fight.

The leader comes in again, knife low now, aiming for the soft of the belly. Linh jabs the staff's butt at his wrist. The man twists, avoiding the direct hit, but the blow clips his hand enough that the knife's line falters. Instead of gutting Linh, it rips across his side, hot and wet.

Pain spikes white. For a moment, all he can taste is salt and copper.

They crowd him. One slams into his back, another hits his legs. Together, they drive him toward the edge of the pier, toward the churning green-black mouth of the sea.

"Hold him," someone grunts. "Under—"

His heel slips on fish-slick wood. The world tilts. Cold water punches the breath from his lungs as he goes over the side.

He hits the shallows hard enough to see stars, the shock tearing a ragged inhalation out of him that is mostly brine. Hands follow, grabbing his shoulders, his arms, trying to pin him against the piling. A boot presses between his shoulder blades, shoving down. Fingers find his hair, pushing his face toward the sandy bottom.

The sea closes over his head.

It is not like fire. It fills his nose, his mouth, his vision, a cold, heavy insistence that does not care about gods or destinies.

He thrashes, more from instinct than strategy. The weight on his back increases. Someone's knee digs into his neck. His chest burns. Bubbles escape his clenched teeth, traitorous.

He lets go.

Not of life. Of fighting in the way they expect.

He stops struggling and relaxes instead, making himself heavy and limp as shrine stone. The sudden lack of resistance throws the balance of the men on him. One loses his footing in the sucking sand; another overcommits, leaning too far. The pressure on his neck eases for a heartbeat.

That is enough.

Linh twists, pushing off the piling with his shoulder, rolling to his side under the water. The boot that had been on his back skids off; its owner staggers. Linh's staff, miraculously still in his grip, swings in a blind underwater arc. The iron cap connects with a shin. Bone gives. A muffled scream vibrates through the water.

He breaks the surface, coughing, retching seawater. A hand grabs his jaw, shoving him back under. He jams the staff up, feeling it ram into soft belly. The body above him jackknifes. He comes up again, choking.

The sky is a dazzling, uncaring blue. The pier-edge looms near, barnacles sharp on the piles. He sees boots on the planks—Hluay boots, running this way at last—and farther down, a familiar silhouette changing direction at an impossible speed.

Li Song.

The old general's eyes take in the scene in one sweep: Linh half-submerged, a cluster of "Yohazatz" waist-deep in the shallows, knives flashing, Hluay guards still too far, too tangled in each other to be of use.

"Well, that's new," he grunts. He throws himself off the pier without slowing, hitting the water in a flat, ugly dive that is all function.

He surfaces beside one assassin who is raising a blade for Linh's throat. A hand like a gnarled root closes around the man's wrist, stopping the knife mid-descent. Li Song's other hand grabs the back of his neck.

"This is why you barbarians should all die," Li Song says, voice oddly conversational. "Even being used for simple tasks is beyond your ability."

He shoves the man's head under the water and holds it there. The assassin thrashes, kicks, claws at Li Song's arm. The old general's grip doesn't even tighten; it simply stays, inexorable as tide.

Another assassin lunges at him from the side. Li Song releases the drowning man just long enough to pivot, catch the lunger's belt, and yank him forward. He slams the man's face into the barnacled piling. There is a sickening scrape, then a spray of red in the water.

Linh, sucking air like a bellows, jabs his staff sideways. The eagle skull crunches into another assassin's ribs. Something pops. The man wheezes, folding around the blow. Linh brings the staff down on his collarbone, breaking it. The knife in the man's hand drops into the sand.

Two assassins remain alive in the water. One manages to wrench free and bolts for the shore, stumbling. A Hluay spear from the pier above turns him into a pinned insect before he gets three steps.

The last one, the leader, realizes belatedly that this has gone badly.

He tries to back away, hands raised as if hoping to salvage something from this massacre.

"Wait," he gasps. "We can—"

Li Song reaches him in three strides, water foaming around his thighs. He grabs the man's braid and hauls him bodily off his feet.

"You had your chance to talk," Li Song says. "Now I'm in a simpler mood."

He drags the assassin to the shallows and slams him onto the wet sand. Linh wades out beside him, staff used as a cane. His burned leg shakes. Salt stings the cut across his side.

Hluay guards drop down from the pier like crows, splashing toward them, blades drawn.

"Alive," Linh croaks, pointing at the coughing, sputtering assassin and one more half-conscious man who still floats face-up nearby. "If the Bureau sent them, they know where Ji keeps his toys. They probably weren't lying about the junks' location."

"You truly are merciful." Li Song says.

"Kill the others if it comforts your retirement," Linh says. "I am more interested in their secrets than their apologies."

Li Song grunts. He plants a boot on the chest of the would-be drowner he'd held under and pushes. The body sinks, limp. Bubbles rise once, then stop.

"Come on then," he says, grabbing the leader again by the braid and dragging him toward the stone quay. "Tell me about the parked ships."

The leader is stripped to his waist, wrists chained high to an iron ring bolted into a load-bearing beam. His skin is mottled with bruises and the frigid slap of seawater.

He bares his teeth. "You think they fear your petty reprisals?" he rasps. "You are a fever. We are the body. Fever burns out. The body endures."

Linh smiles very slightly. "Bodies die of fevers," he says. "Frequently."

He braces a boot against the assassin's shin and yanks the rope. The captive's knees wrench downward while his wrists remain fixed above. Ligaments scream before the man does. Then the scream arrives, raw and high.

"Lion's Throat," Li Song says calmly over it. "How many ships. What sort. How many men. How many guns."

"You cannot sail them," he spits. "You have peasants and fire-worshippers, not sailors. They will die at anchor, like everything else you touch."

"We have options," Linh says. He taps the man lightly in the sternum with the eagle skull. "You can help us choose a less wasteful one."

The leader's howl becomes a harsh, stuttering pant. Sweat beads on his forehead. Li Song eases the tension a fraction.

"Lion's Throat," he repeats.

The assassin sucks in breath. Blood trickles down his shin, where something in the knee has given. "Three… squadrons," he grinds out. "War junks. Patrol cutters. Two fire-ships half finished. Crew numbers are—" He laughs abruptly, a breathless, broken sound. "I don't know. Enough to drown you all."

"You're not very good at this," Li Song says. "Ji should ask for his tuition back."

It takes more violence before the assassin speaks again.

"There is a depot above the cove," he says quickly. "Powder. Shot. Spare masts. The war junks are moored behind nets with submerged stakes. Only one approach safe for deep hulls; the rest—" He jerks his head in a small, bitter gesture. "—rocks and ghosts."

Linh and Li Song share another look. Nets, stakes, prepared ground. Annoying. Doable.

"Good," Linh says. "Thank you. You have contributed more to the Sun God's plan alive than you did as a Bureau puppet."

The assassin wheezes a laugh. "Your god… will not save you from the sea."

"I'm not asking him to," Linh replies. "We have Bimen's debt for that."

He lets the rope go. The assassin's knees stay bent at an ugly angle. He doesn't scream this time; he just shakes.

"The sea tried to take me today," he says softly. "It failed. It can have its consolation prize."

He signals to the Shag'hal-Tyn guards at the door.

They drag the assassin out to the quarantine yard by the dock—a bare strip of packed earth between stone wall and sea. At low tide, it smells of exposed weed. A stack of empty fish-barrels sits nearby, still greasy.

They lash the man to stout posts driven into the ground. Someone produces oil—pitch-thinned, meant for caulking boats. The reek of it curls through the salt air.

The assassin finally drops his facade. "Mercy," he gasps, as the first splash of oil hits his legs. "If you are so divine, show mercy."

"I am divine," Linh says. The wind catches his hair, tugging at the thin strips of scar. "But I do not show mercy."

He steps closer, eagle-skull staff in his hand, the bone catching the last red smear of sunset. The whole harbor seems to hold its breath: the boats, the gulls, the gathered soldiers. Even the sea hushes for half a heartbeat.

"You came into a stolen city to kill a man you do not understand, to preserve an empire that ground your own cousins under its wheels. You tried to drown me like a cat. There is no mercy for that."

He dips the skull's beak into the oil, then taps it against a waiting torch. Flame licks up, orange and eager.

Li Song stands at his shoulder, a solid, unmoved presence. He holds the burning torch out. The nearest Shag'hal-Tyn takes it and steps forward, expression blank but eyes hard. He touches the flame to the oil-soaked rags at the assassin's feet.

Fire blooms—first a drunk lurch, then a hungry climb. It races up the posts, seizes the man, wraps him in orange. His screams tear at the air, high and ugly, then crack, then falter. The smell is thick, greasy, unforgettable.

Linh watches, eyes reflecting the blaze, until the body stops moving and the ropes burn through, dropping blackened shapes into the sand.

Only then does he turn away, the eagle skull still smoking faintly, and look back out toward the southern horizon where Lion's Throat waits.