War of storms, p.8
War of Storms, page 8
“Defeat them.” Gentoni grimaces. “Our ancestors tried. Their only option was exile.”
“Maybe,” I agree. “But it’s not your only option now.”
“What are you talking about?” Yonishi demands.
“You found a way to hurt the bobasu, didn’t you?” For the first time, there’s more interest than fear on Jintisu’s face.
“Better. We can kill them.” I take no small amount of pleasure in the shock shining clear in three wide pairs of eyes. “You were on the right path and using the right materials, but you fear power too much to make anything strong enough.” I look at Miari and order, “Show them.”
She takes the pack off her back and unlatches the flap securing the main pouch. She pulls out a piece of black rock the size of her fist. Zonna looks away, an all-too-familiar bleak pain back in his eyes, and Sanii and I both step backward, keeping several feet between us and the terrifyingly deadly stone.
A torrent of emotions skitters across my skin at the sight of that rock. I didn’t know it was possible to respect something I also loathed this deeply.
It’s death—the weapon that took Tsua and Chio away. It’s liberation—the tool we’ll use to free Shiara from Varan’s reign.
“It’s the same rock,” Yonishi insists.
I almost laugh. “Not even close. We poured far more power into this than your mages would ever be willing to touch.”
Questions burn in Gentoni’s and Yonishi’s eyes, but Jintisu speaks before they can ask any. “But how do you know it’ll work?”
“Because we tested it.” Zonna’s tone bleeds bitterness and loss. “My parents have been working to stop Varan since before their exile from Ryogo, and they willingly sacrificed themselves to test this, to make sure it worked so we—we…”
“We have no doubt a weapon made with this will work,” I say when Zonna’s words fail. I want to comfort him, but I can’t now. “We might have time to set a trap for the bobasu, but what’s more important now is getting everyone in the city somewhere safe.”
“Safer than Jushoyen?” Gentoni asks uncertainly. My stomach sinks. If this is the safest place in Ryogo, its citizens are in so much trouble.
“Yes.” Scenes from Rido’iti rise before my eyes, and as much as I hate them, I wish Gentoni had seen the massacre for himself. “The army crushed Rido’iti in hours. Your wall will barely slow them down. It’ll give you another hour. Or two. If you’re lucky.”
The Ryogans share a glance, seeming to read each other impressively well. They remind me of some trios in Itagami, people who’d been partners for years. Soanashalo’a has implied Ryogans don’t accept anything other than two-person partnerships, but maybe it happens even if it isn’t allowed. I suppose it doesn’t matter what they mean to one another, but I do hope they have enough sense between them to see we’re the only way to save even a small piece of the life they know.
Someone pounds on the door, rattling it in its frame.
I slowly push my wards back, imagining the magic sinking into and merging with the walls and the door. I’ve only done this a few times, joining my protections to something solid, but this feels easy compared to the first time I tried—which makes sense; I don’t have to hold out the weight of an ocean now, just keep back a handful of determined soldiers.
The magic settles. Someone slams against the door again. This time they scream. Tessen flinches in empathy; he knows from experience how much a shock from my wards hurts.
Gentoni, Yonishi, and Jintisu are wide-eyed, fear once more filling them.
“They won’t be able to get in, but they also won’t be hurt,” I assure them. “I know this is a difficult decision, but time is limited. You have to know how far north the army has come.”
“They’ll be here in less than two days.” Gentoni’s chin drops, and his voice sounds hoarse.
I look back at Wehli, remembering too well all the nyshin and ahdo with the same speed as him. “There’s a chance the advance guard will be here tonight.”
“There’s no way they—”
“Yes there is, Yonishi. I promise you.” Irritation tingles under my skin like sparks. Those sparks flare hotter when a mage joins the soldiers in the hallway and shoots a sharp spell at my ward. Temper shortening, I gesture toward the sky. Just as thunder crashes. The timing would’ve made Yorri laugh if he were here, even in a moment as tense as this. “Neither storms nor a raging ocean stopped them. If Varan orders it, his fastest soldiers will be here tonight.”
But, bellows and blood, I really hope they’re not. There must be at least twenty thousand citizens in Jushoyen. Even with my wards on the walls to give them protection, there’s little chance we can get thousands of people to safety in a few hours.
They hesitate, and it seems like they’re having another silent conversation. I clench my hands and roll my lips between my teeth to keep my frustrated impatience inside my own head. A decision had better be reached soon, though, or I might scream.
“You’re wasting time!” Zonna snaps before I do. “These mages can do things you’ve never seen. They decimated Rido’iti, and nothing you’ve thrown at them since has slowed them down! If we don’t act soon, you’ll lose everything.”
“What is it you want from us?” Yonishi faces us head-on, shoulders pulled back and long face set, but he seems to be forcing the words past his lips. He gestures to the rock Miari’s holding. “You want us to turn the stone into a weapon?”
“No, you’ve done enough experiments with it already.” Zonna’s tone is harsh. Unnecessarily so, even with what we’d inferred from everything we saw in Mushokeiji. I glance at him, shaking my head minutely and hoping he shuts his mouth.
“We will help you protect Ryogo as long as we can, hopefully giving you enough time to evacuate Jushoyen.” I infuse my words with as much calm as I can, hoping to counteract Zonna’s flare of temper. “You need to save as many people as possible, which means spreading warnings however you can. I’m nearly certain the entire army is on its way to Jushoyen, so the coast is the safest place for your people. Tell citizens to stop heading here. Order them to the edges of Ryogo instead, and have ships there to carry them away if possible. They might need to leave Ryogo entirely.” I take a breath, watching their faces carefully. “In return for our help against the army, we want you to free Osshi and give us a crewed ship to carry us back to Shiara as soon as possible.”
If they don’t listen, I’ll have to find a way to send out warnings on my own. There are people in Atokoredo I made a promise to. Osota and Shideso, who helped us even after we broke into their home, need time to get out before Varan hits their city, too. I don’t want to let down two of the few Ryogans who have actually helped us instead of hunted us.
But I can’t do anything to help them now, so I force myself to refocus. “I’m sorry we didn’t listen when Osshi wanted to warn you. I’m also sorry we couldn’t save Rido’iti. It’s too late to change either of those things, but it’s not too late to protect the rest of Ryogo.”
“The councils are already meeting,” Yonishi murmurs after another pause.
Gentoni raises his thin eyebrows. “You think we should talk to the councils? I only see that ending one way.”
Jintisu puts her hand on Gentoni’s arm, but her eyes are on Yonishi. “You’ve always trusted his instincts before. Now would be a bad time to stop.”
Sighing, Yonishi pinches the bridge of his nose and then spreads his fingers, running them along his thick, black eyebrows. His chin dips, and one of his shoulders lifts. Smiling grimly, Jindaini Gentoni faces me, his dark eyes glinting behind the glass in his circular frames. “What exactly are you planning to do to help us? And why do you need the ship?”
I exhale a long, shaky breath. This is far from the end of our journey, but it’s a step toward it.
Carefully, I explain my plans and make my requests. I hope I’ll one day be able to meet with Jindaini Gentoni again and point to this moment in which I offered help and worked to save his homeland. On that day, once his people are safe, I’ll be asking him to pardon mine.
Chapter Seven
Hammering out a tentative agreement between us and the Ryogan leaders takes about an hour, and tyatsu mages spend the first half of it trying to break down the door. Each blast makes me flinch. I’m glad when, after Gentoni and Yonishi have several tense conversations through garakyus, the situation outside the room begins to settle and the weak attacks stop entirely.
When we’ve come as close as we can get to agreeing on what to do from here, Gentoni and Yonishi issue orders for every non-coastal city to begin evacuation. They also ask for food and other items to be brought to the room. Since I can hear both sides of their conversations, and Tessen can hear the murmured ones out in the hall, I only hesitate a moment when they ask me to release the ward on the room.
A few minutes later, two people wearing beige robes with red waistbands bring us both the food and new clothes—tyatsu uniforms. These are slightly different than the ones I’ve seen before. A series of stripes in red seems to be a marker of rank, and these also have thick gray cloaks with wide hoods and golden pins to hold the cloaks shut. These large clasps bear insignia Jintisu explains mark us as high-ranking officers who serve directly under the Jindaini.
“It will be hard for anyone to see your faces with these hoods raised, but your accents mark you as outsiders, so you’ll only be able to hide in sight if you don’t talk,” Gentoni says as he and Yonishi show us how to wear the uniforms. “This is our best option, though. It’ll take too long to talk the fools on the council into saving their own heads.”
I don’t fully understand the impact the clothes will have until Tessen, Miari, Natani, and I are out in Jushoyen proper. Many citizens are too scared to notice us at all as they frantically fill small wagons with boxes and bags, the first ripples of Gentoni’s evacuation orders. Others stare, though, watching us pass with varying levels of fear, desperation, and anger. Despite their awareness of us, we’re able to move quickly through the city. Though citizens stop other tyatsu with questions or pleas for help, no one approaches us. Without any signal from my squad, people in the streets move aside as soon as they see our borrowed clothes.
There’s an edge of barely contained panic in the air, and I’m not sure I want to see how bad this gets if Gentoni’s people can’t control the evacuation out of the city. Or what might happen to the people who are only now arriving here, exhausted and frightened. What if orders don’t disseminate through Ryogo, or even just through the city? Terror makes people react instinctively, and if they flee without any real destination, the casualties will pile up. There will be injuries from running through dark woods, starvation from insufficient planning, or deaths when groups run straight into a slaughter. Hundreds of hazards wait out there, but the city could become even more dangerous if a petrified populace is trapped inside Jushoyen’s walls while death tries to break in and devour them.
Which is why my squad split up. While Tessen, Miari, Natani, and I are working on the city’s walls, the others will be helping to speed up the evacuation. Gentoni didn’t know about the tunnel connecting the Kaisubeh Tower to the palace, but our story sparked a memory of other rumors about secrets hidden underneath Jushoyen. I’m hoping they’ll find another passage, maybe one leading outside the city.
Everyone in the squad is supposed to be scouting for a way to trap or ambush the bobasu, too, but I don’t have hope anyone will succeed. There’s not enough time. Even if someone devised the perfect trap, we don’t have an effective way to use our stones against the bobasu. As much as it burns to miss a chance to carve Varan’s heart out with a black stone blade, I’m probably going to have to let this opportunity go.
As we walk through the city, I try to watch everything. Tessen, though, only seems to be watching me. For a second it feels so familiar, like the times we’d walk through Itagami. Then he sighs. “You keep agreeing to the impossible, Khya, and it’s getting hard to keep up.”
Miari smiles and ducks her head, slowing her pace to fall back and give us a little space. Natani slows to stay even with her a second later.
“No one said you had to, Tessen.” Although maybe it’s one reason why I’ve always felt so bound to him, even when I couldn’t stand the sight of him—he was one of the few who kept up with me and who sometimes surpassed me. We’ve grown past the need for constant challenge, though, or I have, and I’d want him close even if he couldn’t keep up anymore.
“Seriously, I just…” Pursing his lips, he shakes his head. “This will not be easy, Khya.”
“Is anything anymore?”
“No.” He meets my eyes, resolve clear. “But we’re with you, whatever happens.”
“I never doubted it.” When his hand brushes mine, I hold on. I wish I could stop walking, press him against the wall, and kiss him until he was out of breath and aching with it. I want to quit worrying for a moment about what’s coming and what the Ryogans will think once I start working magic on their wall. If I could, I’d narrow my focus for a few hours to Tessen, to his reactions and his skin and those overpowered senses of his. To finding out exactly what he can take, how far I can push him before those senses are on the point of overloading.
Tessen’s hold tightens. His eyes are wide, and he swallows convulsively. I smile at him with far more teeth than usual, and he shivers.
“Oh, save it for later, you two.” Miari brushes past us, grinning.
I smirk. “You’re just jealous your partners aren’t here to look at you like that.”
“Exactly,” she admits. “So the last thing I need is you two rubbing it in.”
Natani laughs as we reach the stairs leading up to the wall and begin to climb. The steps are enclosed, and the passage is wide enough for all four of us to walk side by side, but we stay to the right in single file to keep out of the way of the tyatsu sprinting up and down the steps. Thankfully, although many glance our way, our faces are lost in the shadows of the cloaks’ hoods, and it seems like the tyatsu’s eyes catch on the Jindaini’s golden insignias and ignore everything else. It probably helps that everyone is too busy looking for a threat from the forest to bother searching for strangers inside Jushoyen. They nod to us respectfully and keep moving.
Despite our limited time, when we reach the top of the wall, I find myself watching the tyatsu and trying to imagine being in their position. It’s difficult to do. Physically, Itagami always felt impenetrable, safe in ways nothing on Shiara ever was. Some part of me seems to have held on to the same naive confidence I had as a child, the faith that had me thinking I was ready to lead. A moon ago, every person on this wall must’ve thought Ryogo was safe. Varan’s destroyed their sense of security already even if he hasn’t touched a single stone of the city. My chest aches when I think about what I might realize he’s destroyed when I see Itagami again.
Out in the open and high above the city, I’m extraordinarily grateful for the thick, oiled cloaks Gentoni and Yonishi gave us. They keep most of the water off us, which is good since I can’t use my wards as a rain shield here. The tyatsu might not look too closely at our faces, but they’d definitely pay attention to four inexplicably dry officers in the middle of a raging storm. What’s better than the oil in the cloth, though, are the spells Yonishi laid into the cloak as soon as he noticed how badly I was shivering. The fabric instantly began emanating gentle heat like Sanii sometimes emanates light. It doesn’t eliminate my chills, but Kaisubeh bless it, it certainly helps.
“We’ll put the first one here. Are you ready?” I ask Miari. She’s carrying a large pack holding most of our wardstones. I started this journey with only a few dozen, but I’ve made more in Ryogo, not all of them from crystal. Soanashalo’a gave me the idea for using other natural elements—in this case regular stone—and I’m extremely grateful now; I wouldn’t have near enough wardstones for this plan otherwise. When we’re done here, though, the only wardstones we’ll have left are the ones my squad are wearing.
Miari places her foot where I pointed—directly in the center of the wide wall—and closes her eyes. When she moves her foot, there’s a circular hole in the stone, maybe six inches wide and six deep. I use the voluminous folds of my cloak as a shield, gently drop a wardstone in, and move aside so Miari can close the hole. Then, I reach for the familiar energy of the wardstone, grip one slender thread of its power, and draw the energy with me when we leave. Several hundred feet or so away, Miari creates another hole. I drop another wardstone and latch the thread of energy I pulled from the first point to this one.
It’s the first link in what will be a very long chain.
We slowly walk the five-mile wall, repeating the process. It pains me to essentially discard this many wardstones, but the cause is worthwhile. I can make more. The lives here can’t be replaced so easily. Neither can the city.
Initially, I’d assumed he wanted to rule Ryogo, not destroy it. If I was right, there’s a chance—a small one—he’ll leave Jushoyen standing if no one is here to fight him for it. Then, when all of this is over, the people of Jushoyen will at least have a home to return to.
It’s unlikely, though; the evacuation would have to move at speeds only mages like Wehli and Yorri are capable of to finish before Varan arrives. We’ll probably be here to meet him, which means holding the city against him, which means goading him into a stronger and more violent reaction simply by resisting. Would it be better to leave the walls as they are and concentrate my efforts on the actual exodus? I don’t want my decisions to cause any more deaths. I don’t want people to die because I didn’t act, either. Tessen and Zonna might believe I’m capable of leading and trust the choices I make, but I don’t know if I can handle failing here.
And there are so many ways we could fail. So long as most of these people survive, though, I’ll happily call this day a success.
