Dawn never really arrives over the Slump. The sky just turns from black to a dirty, exhausted gray, smoke hanging so thick it looks like the day itself decided not to bother.

  The safehouse shakes before anyone’s eyes even open.

  The first cannon shot is close enough that dust sifts from the beams. Notso’s head jerks up from Dukar’s boot, ears pricking, a low growl rumbling in his chest.

  The second shot hits somewhere down the hill. The floor jumps; a crack spiders along the plaster.

  Screams bloom an instant later—thin at first, then thickening, piling on one another like waves.

  Sen is already on her feet, hair half out of its tie, goggles around her neck. “That is not harbor practice fire,” she says.

  Another sound cuts through the cannon booms: a hungry, crackling roar.

  “Fire,” Ta croaks from his pallet. “Lots of it.”

  Puripal is up in a single, stiff motion. Sleep falls from him like a dropped cloak. “Sen,” he snaps. “Window.”

  Sen’s already there, shoving the warped shutter aside.

  The Slump outside is a maze of leaning shacks, sagging walkways, smoke-blackened stone. It’s also on fire.

  Flame crawls along rooftops, turning tarred beams into torch-lines. Between the burning lanes, ranks of Baekjeon militia advance in ugly, disciplined blocks: breastplates mismatched over Republic blue, muskets leveled, bayonets glinting. Behind them, hwachas—those Seop carts of death with their sheaves of fire arrows—are being cranked into position on a hill of rubble, their racks bristling.

  One hwacha lets loose.

  A shriek of fifty arrows rips the air. The rockets arc, tails spitting sparks, then slam down into a cluster of shacks two streets over. For a heartbeat there is silence.

  Then the world there erupts—wood, tar, trapped air. A whole alley becomes a lungful of flame. Tiny figures—people—stagger out burning, run three steps, fall and do not rise again.

  Sen’s breath leaves her. She forces it back. “They’re… running the lines,” she says, voice brittle. “Street by street.”

  Muskets crackle in ragged volleys. From somewhere closer, a cannon booms low: grapeshot, judging by the way cries rise in a sudden, circular chorus and then cut off.

  On a half-toppled warehouse near the main approach, a figure stands on a makeshift platform, framed by smoke.

  Baek Miju.

  She wears armor like a general and a judge: lamellar, lacquer cracked by heat, sash of Republic red. Her hair is bound up tight, jaw set. In one hand she holds a horn; in the other, raised high, a pole.

  Hanae’s head is lashed to the top.

  The hair is matted. The face is slack, mouth half-open as if still trying to warn someone. Flies already buzz around her neck stump, confusion in their tiny, greedy minds at so much feast in so little dawn.

  Miju lifts the horn to her lips.

  Her amplified voice tears across the burning quarter in Seop and Moukopl both.

  “Pirate Lizi!” she calls. “Show yourself! Bring out the boy-prince and the traitors, and I will make this quick. Hide, and I will drown your home in ash.”

  The militia cheer. Another hwacha hisses.

  Temej swears under his breath. “This is a purge.”

  Dukar is already buckling on armor over sleep-wrinkled clothes. His fingers are steady. Notso paces, whining, nails clicking on the floorboards.

  Puripal watches the hill.

  “Gear on,” he says to the Yohazatz warriors, voice cutting through panic like a thrown spear. “We prepare a break out. Straight line. We punch through, get out of the Slump, then circle to the harbor. We do not get bogged down.”

  “We’re not leaving through that,” Ta rasps, jabbing a thumb vaguely at the window. “That’s not a street, that’s a meat grinder.”

  “That’s why we go fast,” Puripal says. “The longer we stay, the worse it gets. For us and everyone else.”

  Temej steps into his path. He’s not armored—just shirt, knife, the quiet stubbornness of someone who has already decided he is not moving.

  “Everyone else,” Temej repeats. “You mean the people currently being shot, burned, and dismembered.”

  “We can’t save the Slump,” Puripal says. “We barely know if we can save ourselves. We thin our chances with civilians, we die with them in a pile, and nothing changes.”

  Sen spins from the window. Her cheeks are streaked with soot and furious tears. “They are not ‘civilians,’” she snarls. “They’re Slump folk. Half of them have stabbed someone before breakfast. They know every crack in this district.”

  “Right now they are running,” Puripal says. “Not in line. Not under command. That is not an army, that is chaos.”

  “You think armies appear fully formed with matching boots?” Sen snaps. “You make armies out of what you have. And what we have is a city full of people about to get shot in the back for being poor in the wrong place.”

  Temej nods once. “She is right,” he says. “Look outside again. Where are the militia’s flanks? Thin. The Slump is defended by conscripted shopkeepers with guns. If we arm the Slump, show them where to cut, we can gut her purge and open your path.”

  Puripal’s jaw muscles jump. “Or we arm them, they die first, we still lose, and I have lied to their faces.”

  “Then don’t lie,” Sen says. “Tell them exactly how bad it is. Give them a choice. Better than the government ever did.”

  Ta coughs a laugh that hurts his neck.

  Another boom. Plaster rains down on them. In the corner, one of the younger Yohazatz warriors makes a choking sound that might be a prayer.

  Puripal looks at them all: Temej standing stubborn and sure; Sen vibrating with anger; Dukar watching him with that awful, open gaze that says whatever you choose, I’ll follow; Ta pale but upright, eyes sharp even through pain.

  He looks past them, through the window, at the Slump.

  People are running—yes. But some are dragging small carts. Some clutch old swords or kitchen knives. Already there are tight knots of neighbors forming, backs to walls, eyes on the advancing militia.

  He exhales slowly. “Fine,” he says. “We make this worse.”

  Dukar snorts. “Leadership,” he says. “At last.”

  Puripal shoots him a quick, shaky smile, then raises his voice.

  “Open the door,” he says. “Sen, Temej—you’re with me. Ta, sit down before you fall down. You’re scary enough just existing, you don’t need to stand.”

  “I hate you,” Ta mutters, lowering himself onto a crate. “But I also hate falling. Fine.”

  The door is unbarred. Heat and smoke crowd in immediately, along with sound—a wall of it.

  Outside, the safehouse’s little courtyard is full.

  People have been pressing toward it for some time: neighbors, market sellers, runaway apprentices, teenage pickpockets, old women with hair in tight buns and knives up their sleeves. They cluster under the overhangs, faces streaked with soot, clutching whatever they managed to snatch when the guns started.

  When the door opens, every head snaps their way.

  Puripal steps out, the picture of a prince who has forgotten he’s supposed to look like one: hair messy, coat thrown on crooked, sword at his hip, eyes rimmed in smoke.

  Sen shadows him on one side, Temej on the other. Notso squeezes out around Dukar’s legs and then sits directly in front of Puripal, like a furry punctuation mark.

  The crowd murmurs. Some just see someone with soldiers behind him and assume either salvation or new trouble.

  Puripal lifts one hand, palm out.

  “People of the Slump,” he says.

  His voice carries better than it has any right to, cutting through the background roar.

  Sen mutters the Seop translation an instant behind him, loud enough to be heard, rough enough to be believed.

  “Listen.”

  The front ranks of the crowd huddle closer. A child clings to his mother’s leg, eyes huge. A man with one arm clutches a bamboo spear in the other. A girl not much older than Ta was when he first held a spear twists a ragged flag of some forgotten guild in nervous hands.

  “You hear the guns,” Puripal says. “You see the fire. You know what they mean to do.”

  Sen echoes, words coming out sharper in Seop: “You know this is not a warning shot. They are here to erase you.”

  “They call this a purge,” Puripal continues. “They say they are killing pirates, traitors, people who don’t belong in their clean Republic.”

  “They are cleaning,” Sen translates, voice dripping contempt. “They think we are dirt.”

  “But we know,” Puripal says, “that this is your home. Your streets. Your walls. Your filth.” His mouth flickers. “And your filth is older than their laws.”

  A rough laugh ripples through the crowd. Someone spits on the ground, viciously.

  “These soldiers know how to march,” Puripal says. “They know how to reload. They know how to burn a neighborhood that doesn’t shoot back.”

  He points toward the smoke-thick sky. Another hwacha launches, leaving a strip of hellfire in its wake.

  “What they do not know,” he says, “is how to walk these alleys in the dark. How the ground opens under fools. Where the roofs lean. Which ladders break. Which doors look weak but aren’t. You know that. It is the only advantage this place has left.”

  Sen throws his words into Seop.

  Temej steps forward, voice carrying over Puripal’s shoulder. “We are going to break through their line,” he says. “Make a hole toward the harbor. If some of you fight with us, we can hit them where they’re soft. Kill officers. Burn hwachas. The more chaos we make, the less they can do to your families.”

  Sen relays, hands sketching explosions in the air. “We cut them where they don’t expect.”

  Puripal looks at the faces turned toward him. Some are already hardening into fight. Some are crumpling. Some just look tired.

  He takes a breath.

  “I am not going to lie to you,” he says.

  That makes more heads lift than anything else.

  “You will not be heroes in songs,” he says. “No bard is going to stand on a pier in ten years and sing about ‘the nameless fish-gutter who suicidally tackled a cannon.’ The history books will not say ‘and then the Slump saved us all.’ They will say, if they say anything: ‘There was fighting. Many died.’”

  Sen translates, dryly.

  “You will be first in the line,” Puripal continues. “The first to shoot, the first to be shot. The first to charge a barricade that may already be packed with powder. You will be cannon fodder.”

  The word is ugly in any language. In Seop it comes out as “meat for guns.”

  A ripple of discomfort passes through the crowd. Someone swears. Someone else laughs, high and hysterical.

  “I can’t promise you victory,” Puripal says. “I can’t even promise you survival.”

  He pauses. His voice drops, but somehow feels bigger for it.

  “All I can promise is this: if you stand with us, you die on your feet, with a weapon in your hand, in your own streets, facing the people who came to erase you.”

  He gestures toward the deeper maze of the Slump.

  “If you run,” he says, “maybe you live. Maybe you starve in a ditch just outside the city where no one sees. Maybe you make it to another port that hates you a little less. Maybe you hide in a cellar and the fire misses you. I hope some of you do. Someone has to remember this place existed.”

  He swallows.

  “If you simply kneel,” he says, “they will shoot you anyway. They have brought too much powder to go home with any of it unused.”

  A bitter chuckle runs through. They know that truth in their bones.

  “So,” Puripal says. “No glory. No promises. No lies of ‘if you fight, you win.’ Only this choice.”

  He raises his chin.

  “Fight with us,” he says, “or don’t. No shame either way. Anyone who stays behind or runs, we do not call them cowards. We call them alive. Anyone who comes with us… we will try very hard to make sure your deaths mean something.”

  He lets the words hang there.

  Sen gives the Seop version with an engineer’s precision. She doesn’t soften it. If anything, she sharpens it.

  “He says,” she finishes, “you can fight and probably die loud, or not fight and maybe die quiet. Either way, the people killing you will say it was for order. The only thing we can change is what you think you died for.”

  Silence drops over the courtyard like a heavy cloth.

  In that silence: cannon booms, closer now. Miju’s horn-voice, faint with distance and rage. The crack and hiss of burning beams.

  A middle-aged woman with scarred arms and the posture of someone who used to carry too many buckets snorts.

  “Well,” she says in Seop. “Better loud.”

  She hefts her cleaver and steps forward to stand near Temej.

  A gang of street kids—barefoot, eyes bright with something too sharp to be called youth—exchange glances. One shrugs. Another grins, all teeth. They join her, clutching slings and stolen blades.

  An old man sits down heavily on a crate, shaking his head. “I’ve buried three sons,” he says. “I’m not marching into another bullet. I’ll see my grandchildren into the cellar.”

  A few others nod and stay with him, hands shaking as they gather the youngest, the sick, the ones who can’t swing anything heavier than a spoon.

  A seamstress wipes her eyes with her sleeve, then ties the sleeve up and picks up a spear that’s two heads taller than she is. “If I’m going to die, I’d rather hit someone first,” she mutters. “Maybe I get lucky and it’s an officer.”

  A boy no older than twelve shakes so hard his teeth chatter. He moves to step forward, stops, looks back at the toddler clinging to his leg. His face folds. He stays.

  Some resign themselves. Some move with grim eagerness. Some hover on the edge, torn in two.

  Puripal watches them choose, for once not pushing, not lying.

  Temej’s mouth is a tight line, but there’s pride there too. “Not an army,” he says softly. “But enough knives to make someone bleed.”

  Sen swipes at her face with the heel of her hand and pushes her goggles up onto her hair. “Congratulations, Khan Regent,” she says, voice thick and wry. “You just talked people into war by telling them not to.”

  Ta, from his crate, manages a crooked smile. “Honesty,” he says. “Terrible weapon. You should definitely use it more often.”

  ...

  The counterattack begins in a street that has no business being a battlefield. It’s a fish-gutter lane, usually. Today it’s a kill-corridor.

  Puripal sits his horse at the bend where three alleys meet, the Slump’s roofs leaning like drunks over his head. The animal snorts, uneasy in the smoke and tight walls. Puripal pats its neck once, absent, eyes on the crude map Sen scratched in charcoal on a door-panel.

  “Here,” he says, tapping points. “We cut that unit off. Hit. Vanish. Don’t hold. They march straight, we don’t. We move like water.”

  Yohazatz cavalry were never meant for alleys like this. But they grew up on ridges and ravines; a city is just cliffs.

  He splits his riders into knots of five and six, assigning each a Slump guide—barefoot kids, old men, a woman with arms like a dock crane.

  “What’s our signal?” one of the riders asks.

  Puripal looks toward the smoke-choked sky. “When you hear the hwacha scream,” he says, “you are too late. So don’t wait for signals. Hit where they aren’t looking and leave before they finish turning their heads.”

  He meets each man’s eyes. The princes’ softness is gone now; what’s left has too many edges. “No heroics,” he adds. “We are not here to stand in front of bullets.”

  They grin. “Yes, Khan.”

  The first knot rides off, ducking under laundry lines, hooves striking sparks off stone. A second follows, plunging into a side lane so narrow they have to fold their knees up against their saddles. From above, they must look like steel fish darting through a reef.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Puripal nudges his own mount forward. Dukar falls in beside him, spear resting easy in his hand, Notso pounding along at their stirrups, tongue lolling like this is the best walk ever.

  On the other side of the safehouse, Sen has set up her own kind of armory.

  “This is a bad idea,” she mutters, shoving a crate open with her foot. “Which means, historically, it might work.”

  Inside: spheres the size of plums, each with a fuse coiled around like a scorpion’s tail.

  “What are those?” a woman asks, eyeing them like fruit that might bite.

  “Equalizers,” Sen says. “Version three. Version one exploded too early. Version two disappeared somewhere under the harbor. These only explode when you light them.”

  She presses one into the woman’s calloused palm. “Pull the fuse-end out, light, count to three, then throw.”

  “What if I count too slow?” the woman asks.

  “Then you see your ancestors,” Sen says. “Don’t count too slow. Or don’t count at all.”

  Beside the crate of equalizers is another, shallower one filled with what look like caltrops bred with sea-urchins: twisted scrap-iron spikes smeared with something greasy and black.

  “Shin-biters,” Sen says. “You put them where they don’t expect to walk, which is everywhere they do walk. Pointy bits up. If you step on one, your foot rots. Don’t step on them.”

  A kid reaches for one. She slaps his hand away. “Especially you.”

  Up above, a handful of Slump teenagers string thin wire between upper windows, building invisible clotheslines at throat-height. Sen tosses them little bells.

  “If you hear these,” she calls, “duck. If you hear someone else hit them, laugh later.”

  In a side alley, three old fishermen are stuffing rag into earthenware jars as Sen supervises.

  “I call these ‘Bottle Dragons,’” she says.

  “They look like lantern oil,” Temej comments.

  “That too,” she says. “Light them and roll downhill. Fire goes where the liquid goes. Don’t stand where the liquid goes.”

  First contact comes at the bend near the gutted bathhouse.

  A militia line advances, shields up, muskets braced. They move like they’re on a parade ground instead of ankle-deep in trash and discarded gods. A sergeant yells something about order. His men respond by tripping over a fish crate someone left “accidentally” in the path.

  From a rooftop, a Slump girl whistles once.

  Equalizers arc down in clumsy but enthusiastic handfuls.

  The first explodes under a shield. The blast is small, but vicious, spraying splinters and bone. A man screams as metal bites into his thigh. Another shot goes off when a dropped musket discharges into a friend’s foot. The neat line hiccups.

  Then Puripal’s first knot hits.

  They burst from a side alley at a forty-five degree angle, horses almost sideways from the tight turn, riders leaning low. Spears punch into the gaps between shields, into backs, into thighs. One rider swings his horse’s flanks into a cluster of men like a battering ram.

  “Break and run!” Puripal roars.

  They’re gone before the militia properly turn, vanishing down another alley that looked too narrow for a cat.

  By the time Miju’s officers get the line reformed, half their front rank is bleeding, the other half limping, and there’s shouting on their flank where someone stepped on shin-biters in a dark doorway.

  All across the Slump, hwacha fire, shacks burn; riders slam militia officers out of their command; equalizers bloom in small, vindictive flowers; Slump folk drag wounded militiamen into alleys and educate them with clubs.

  It’s a thousand dirty tricks coordinated just enough not to get in each other’s way.

  Baek Miju stands on her collapsing warehouse, watching her lines fray.

  Her jaw clenches. She lifts Hanae’s head higher on its pole.

  “Pirate Lizi!” she bellows again.

  ...

  Lizi hears the horn before she sees the head.

  She comes in from the harbor side, boots slipping on ash-slick cobbles, portable cannon banging against her back. She’s run all the way from Hanae’s base, where the Blood Lotus firework burned itself into the sky like a guilty confession.

  She passes three equalizer craters, two dead militiamen, one old man laughing as he reloads a musket he clearly stole.

  The world narrows to smoke, to flashes of muzzle-fire, to the sting of sweat in her eyes. Somewhere on the edge of hearing, the sea pounds against the harbor wall. Somewhere above, an eagle screams.

  She finds Ta first.

  He’s propped against a half-collapsed wall, one hand pressed to the bandage at his neck, the other holding a pistol that looks more decorative than functional.

  “Took you long enough,” Ta croaks as she skids to a stop, almost falling.

  Lizi grabs his uninjured shoulder, half to steady herself, half to confirm he’s solid. “You are alive,” she says.

  He grins, teeth bloody. “You too. What’s new?”

  “Naci,” she pants. “Tepr fleet. Coming for the harbor. They’ll hit fast. If we’re not there—”

  “—they’ll assume we’re dead or stupid,” Ta finishes. “Possibly both.”

  “More stupid than dead,” Lizi says.

  Puripal appears a heartbeat later, horse lathered, Dukar at his side, Notso trying to lick all three of them simultaneously.

  “We saw her flare,” Puripal says, breathless but sharp. “But are they force-landing now?”

  Lizi nods. “She’s going to take the harbor while Miju is busy turning us into charcoal.”

  Puripal’s eyes flick toward the smoke blowing seaward, calculating. “Then we meet her at the harbor,” he says. “If we can hold one gate—”

  He breaks off.

  The street ahead empties like someone pulled a plug.

  Militia fall back to either side, shields rising, muskets shouldering, making a corridor without walls. At the far end of it, on broken stone, Baek Miju steps forward.

  Behind her, on the platform’s new, closer incarnation, Hanae’s head grins down over the lane.

  Lizi stops breathing for a second.

  Miju sees it. Her smile sharpens.

  “There you are,” she calls. Her voice carries easily over the crackle of flames, over the groans, over the distant shriek of a hwacha. “Pirate Lizi. I was beginning to think you’d drowned.”

  She lifts the pole a fraction. Hanae’s braid swings, stiff with dried blood.

  “Do you like what I’ve done with your friend?” Miju asks. “She talked very bravely. Sang for me, even. I preferred her quieter.”

  Lizi’s hand finds the hilt of her knife without asking her.

  “She was worth ten of you,” she says. Her voice is wrecked from smoke and grief; it still lands like a thrown stone. “You don’t get to say her name.”

  “Oh, I won’t,” Miju says. “Names are for citizens. Traitors get numbers. She was number seventy-two. Aram was number thirteen, did you know?”

  The street tilts under Lizi’s feet.

  For a moment, all she sees is a girl on a warehouse roof, laughing. A girl with a sawed-off spear, hair in her eyes, harmonizing badly on purpose. Three little shadows dancing on someone else’s roof so they could pretend it was theirs.

  “You are unforgivable,” Lizi says.

  Miju laughs once. “You pirates keep using that word,” she says. “As if I’m waiting for your forgiveness. Traitors must die!”

  She shifts her grip on the katana. In her other hand, without looking, she accepts a musket from a militia. The actions are smooth, practiced; she wears death like an old coat.

  Lizi bares her teeth. “Funny you should mention betrayal,” she says. “Because you’re down one admiral.”

  Something tightens at the corner of Miju’s mouth. “Tomoe is doing her duty,” she says.

  Ta laughs, short and sharp. “She’s right,” he says. “Your admiral met Shan Xi and then saved me from her own bullet.”

  Lizi jerks her chin toward the distant rumble of guns, the different cadence of naval cannon. “Your admiral is counting with the pirates now. And your precious prince? Yotaka? He’s with her.”

  Ta doesn’t correct her.

  She takes a step forward, knife low, portable cannon strap biting into her shoulder.

  “And you might want to look toward the water,” she adds. “While you’re burning your own city, the Khan of Tepr is about to dock in your nice, undefended harbor.”

  Miju’s fingers flex on the musket stock.

  For a heartbeat, doubt shadows her face. Not a lot. Just enough.

  She masks it with a smile. “More enemies is just more work,” she says. “I’m very industrious.”

  She levels the musket one-handed at Lizi and pulls the trigger.

  The shot cracks the air. Lizi throws herself sideways. The ball lances through the edge of her coat and carves a hot, burning line along her upper arm. She hits the cobbles, rolls, comes up swearing.

  “Rude!” she spits.

  “Advance,” Miju snaps to her line. “Kill everyone.”

  Militia surge forward, bayonets shining, shields up.

  Lizi unhooks the portable cannon in one movement. She braces it against her hip, hauls the short lever back, and lights the side-fuse.

  “Cover your ears,” she warns.

  Ta claps his hands to his head. Puripal and Dukar, still mounted behind, do not, which they regret a second later.

  The cannon vomits fire.

  The recoil nearly spins Lizi around. The shot tears down the lane, slamming into the shield wall. It punches through one shield, into the man behind it, and explodes in a shower of shards and burning powder.

  Three militiamen go down screaming, armor ringing, faces shredded.

  A sliver of metal kisses Miju’s cheek as it passes.

  She flinches, just barely. A thin, bright line opens along her face, from cheekbone to jaw. Blood wells, red against ash.

  The wound is small. Practically elegant.

  Lizi grins, wild and ugly. “There,” she pants. “Now you can remember me in the mirror.”

  Miju reaches up, touches the blood with two fingers, looks at it like it’s a puzzle piece that doesn’t quite fit.

  Then she moves.

  Katana forward, she carves through her own men, pushing the front line back, making space. Bayonets flash around her like teeth.

  Lizi steps to meet her—knife in one hand, cannon still smoking in the other.

  Ta tries to move with her and nearly falls. Pain lances his neck.

  Puripal sees Miju closing, sees Lizi about to throw herself into a duel with a professional executioner while half the Slump tries to hold off a regiment.

  “Enough,” he says.

  He heels his horse forward. Dukar does the same, their mounts shoulder to shoulder in the cramped lane. Notso darts ahead, barking like he’s personally going to bite the Republic.

  Puripal leans down, hand snaking out. He catches Lizi by the back of her collar just as she launches, hauling her bodily up against his saddle. She squawks, flailing.

  “Put me down!” she snarls, kicking. “I am going to cut her—”

  “You can cut her later,” Puripal says. “Preferably when she does not have an army.”

  Dukar reaches for Ta.

  Ta manages a lopsided smirk as he’s scooped up like a sack of grain. “This is undignified,” he complains, clinging to Dukar’s shoulders to avoid falling.

  “Good,” Dukar says. “Maybe you’ll rest for once.”

  Miju’s musket comes up again, smoke still curling from the barrel. She fires as they turn.

  The shot clips stone inches from Ta’s foot, spraying chips. Notso yelps, more offended than hurt.

  “This way!” Puripal bellows, voice cutting through the chaos.

  Temej’s whistle shrills from a cross-alley. Slump fighters peel back, throwing bottle dragons and insults as they go. Equalizers roll under advancing boots.

  The lane becomes a boiling, stumbling, smoke-thick mess.

  Puripal and Dukar drive their horses into it, using every ounce of steppe instinct to feel where the ground widens, where the alley bends.

  Behind them, Baek Miju wipes blood from her cheek with the back of her hand and screams for pursuit.

  Ahead, through the maze of fire and stone, the smell of salt grows stronger.

  ...

  Naci stands at the prow of Heaven’s Mandate, one hand wrapped around the rail, the other holding the spyglass Bimen keeps trying to take back. Wind claws at her braids, bringing the sour stink of smoke from the city and the cleaner bite of salt.

  Bo’anem’s harbor yawns ahead: stone jetties like broken fingers, the fort crouched over the entrance, the city’s roofs behind it all like crooked teeth. Fire still licks at a few of them. The sky is streaked with soot.

  It is, disturbingly, quiet.

  “Batteries should be awake by now,” Horohan says. She stands at Naci’s shoulder, cloak snapping, eyes narrowed into the haze.

  Bimen squints past Naci. “Range markers say we’re well inside their teeth.”

  Lang leans on the rail nearby, Seop blue sash tied over his Banner armor. “No gun smoke on the ramparts,” he says. “Either the fort is empty, or someone wants us to think it is.”

  “Both options are stupid,” Borak calls from the rigging above. “Which is comforting. I hate facing clever enemies.”

  Naci scans the water. The harbor mouth shows only a handful of hulls at anchor—small, patched ships with mismatched sails. Pirate craft, from the looks of them. They rock lazily, as if the world is not on fire.

  “Could be the Blood Lotus,” Bimen says. He doesn’t make it sound like reassurance.

  “She’s usually louder,” Naci replies.

  The second junk edges in, oars dipping in perfect rhythm. The third follows, banners snapping: Tepr colors, Moukopl dragon flags, the odd Slump-painted sail with obscene slogans.

  Still no boom of coastal cannon. No flare of muzzle-fire from the fort.

  “Maybe they’re empty,” Pomogr suggests. “Everyone ran to the palace for the executions. Or to loot. You’d be surprised how many professional soldiers will choose looting over duty.”

  Lang scratches his jaw. “If I were holding that fort,” he says slowly, “and saw a fleet like this coming, I would wait until the first rank committed fully. Let them taste safety. Then…”

  “Then what?” Borak shouts down. “Throw them a party?”

  “Shoot them in the kidneys,” Lang says.

  As if on cue, the quiet shifts.

  From behind the jetties and the shadow of the fort wall, hulls begin to slide out. Slender, low-slung ships with faded paint and patched sails; others barely more than rafts with teeth bolted on. Pirate craft fan across the harbor mouth like a shoal of sharks deciding whether to bite.

  They do not open fire.

  Instead they come on under oars and scrap-sails, closing.

  “Battle stations!” Bimen bellows, voice cracking from disuse. “Ready the ballistae! Muskets to the rails!”

  Men and women scramble. Banners shout in many languages. The old Moukopl guns swivel, iron squealing against iron.

  Naci lifts the spyglass again, searching the pirate decks for a familiar blood coat, for a metal fan, for a grin like a knife.

  “All I’m asking,” she mutters, “is one dramatic entrance. She lives for those.”

  She sees none. Only ragged crews, bare-chested sailors with scarves over their faces, a few shockingly young kids clutching boarding hooks with expressions of professional malice.

  “Maybe she’s hiding,” Borak says.

  “I don’t trust a pirate who hides,” Naci growls. “It’s against their religion.”

  The first pirate vessel bumps alongside the lead junk, grapnels flying, ropes snaking over the railing. Pirates swarm up and over, their shouts shredding the quiet. Steel rings. A man goes overboard with a scream cut short.

  “Hold formation!” Bimen yells, but the junks instinctively slow, trying not to ram each other as ships grab at their flanks like drowning men.

  On Heaven’s Mandate, a slimmer ship has peeled toward them from the fort side: a sloop by the look of it, sitting lower in the water than she should. Her sail is patched but tidy; at her mast flaps a crude flag—Blood Lotus’s flower, lopsided but unmistakable.

  “There,” Naci says. “That’s her, surely.”

  Bimen frowns. “Signal flags?”

  A Banner hoists a code: ALLIES? REQUEST PARLEY.

  The sloop answers with a ragged run of flags that could be interpreted as YES, or possibly FISH. Pirate semaphore leaves room for artistic interpretation.

  “She’s inviting us to talk,” Bimen says. “Or offering us seafood.”

  “Same thing,” Pomogr says. “Either way, it would be rude not to answer.”

  Naci’s jaw works. “If it is Shan Xi, I’d rather shout at her at a reasonable distance than chase her through half a burning city later.”

  Bimen exhales through his nose. “Fine. Small party. No more than ten. No one important.”

  Pomogr brightens. “So me.”

  “You’re expendable and competent,” Bimen says. “An admiral’s dream.”

  Pomogr sighs. “I am extremely offended.”

  He gathers nine Banners—Seop gunners, Tepr riders on foot, a Moukopl veteran who looks like he’s been in more brawls than meals. They drop a rope ladder and climb down into a waiting launch.

  The launch pulls toward the sloop, bumping over choppy water. From the Mandate’s deck, the pirate ship looks oddly undermanned—only a handful of figures on her rails, faces half-hidden.

  Lang’s brow furrows. “Too few,” he says.

  “Maybe the rest are below,” Bimen says. “Hiding their best hair.”

  Naci says nothing. Her neck prickles.

  Pomogr’s launch thuds against the sloop’s side. Grapnels secure it. A rope ladder drops.

  Pomogr goes up first, shield on his back, spear slung.

  He swings onto the pirate deck, straightens—

  —and stops.

  From the Mandate, they see his shoulders go stiff, his head tilt. He says something they can’t hear. One of the pirates answers, then steps aside.

  Naci focuses the spyglass.

  She doesn’t see Shan Xi. She sees barrels. Dozens of them, hastily netted down, sloshing gently with the ship’s movement. Powder barrels. Oil. A few crates stamped with Republic artillery marks.

  “Bimen,” she says quietly. “Recall him. Now.”

  Bimen is already shouting for a whistle. “Signal: RETURN, RETURN, RETURN!”

  On the sloop, Pomogr’s head snaps up. He opens his mouth.

  He shoves the nearest Banner back toward the rail.

  The pirate in front of him smiles, small and sorry, and reaches for something at her belt.

  A spark jumps.

  For a heartbeat, the world goes bright.

  The sloop erupts.

  Light and sound punch Heaven’s Mandate in the chest. The blast lifts the little ship out of the water, tears her apart from the inside. Deck planks, ribs, bodies, barrels, and fire leap upward in the same instant, turning into a grotesque flower. The shockwave slams into the nearest junk, ripping men from the rails, shredding sails.

  On the Mandate’s deck, Naci staggers. Her ears ring. Splinters of wood and iron rain down like vindictive hail. A burning scrap of sailcloth flutters onto the rail beside her; Horohan slaps it out before it can catch.

  The sea where the sloop was seethes, boiling with debris. A piece of mast the size of a man spears into the water and disappears. Something that might have been a hand bobs for a moment before vanishing under the spreading black stain.

  Pomogr is gone.

  “Mother of winds,” Borak breathes from above. “They lit their own ship.”

  “Powder boat,” Lang says, face gray. “They packed it for that.”

  Bimen stares, knuckles white on the rail. His mouth opens and closes twice, no sound.

  Naci’s stomach crawls. “Shan Xi,” she snarls. “That bitch.”

  “She sacrificed a whole crew to cripple us,” Horohan says.

  Before Naci can swear again, the harbor fort speaks.

  For a heartbeat, she thinks it’s thunder. Then the sound keeps going.

  The ramparts belch smoke and flame as cannons that had been so politely silent roar awake. The first volley is wild—too high—but the second walks down the line of junks with ugly discipline.

  One roundshot punches straight through the hull of the third ship in line, splinters exploding outward like a flock of wooden birds. Men vanish in the spray. Another ball smashes into a junk’s stern, turning the officer’s gallery into a shower of glass and charred scrolls.

  “Port-side rudder gone!” someone screams. “We’re spinning!”

  “Get us out of range!” Lang snaps. “Turn, turn—”

  “We can’t,” Bimen says hoarsely. “We’re already committed. Backing water under fire is suicide.”

  A third cannonball slams into a junk’s side amidships. For a moment it holds, the old Moukopl wood groaning. Then the whole flank peels open like an orange rind. Water floods in, dark and eager.

  The junk lists hard. Men slide across the deck, clawing for purchase. One horse screams as it loses footing and goes over the side, hooves churning uselessly before the sea swallows it.

  Naci watches it all, jaw clenched so tight her teeth ache.

  “She killed Pomogr.” She slams the spyglass shut. “I am going to tie her to a pole and burn it to ashes.”

  “You can do that later,” Horohan says. “If we live.”

  More pirate craft close in on the other junks, boarding hooks flashing. Muskets crack from both sides. The harbor is turning into a pot where too many ingredients boil.

  “Admiral!” a signal officer cries. “Orders?”

  Bimen drags his eyes from the wrecked water where Pomogr vanished. His gaze sweeps the chaos: the fort’s guns, the burning sloop-remnant, the panicking lines.

  “We can fall back,” Lang says quickly, low. “Use the headland to screen us, regroup, wait for—”

  “Wait for what?” Borak snaps. “For the fort to reload and turn this into target practice? We’re already in their bowl.”

  Horohan points with her sword toward the jut of stone that marks the inner harbor and the strip of shore beyond. Houses crouch there, and beyond them the streets that lead up into Bo’anem proper. Smoke purls behind them like a bad omen.

  “The land is there,” she says simply. “We are steppe people. The sea hates us. The land knows our names. Stop arguing with the water and put your feet on something honest.”

  Naci’s pulse jumps. It’s what she’s been thinking in words less poetic and more profane.

  “Can we get enough ships in to land a force before the fort chews us into kindling?” she demands.

  Bimen stares at his flagship’s deck. His hand goes to the rail, fingers stroking the carved dragon-head as if it were a living throat.

  “Heaven’s Mandate,” he murmurs under his breath. “You were built to carry emperors. You supported men who did not deserve your planks. I am sorry. You deserved better than all of us.” His voice roughens. “One last favor, old girl. Get us to the sand. It doesn’t have to be pretty.”

  He lifts his head. The Great Admiral is still there; grief just makes his lines sharper.

  “Signal all ships,” he says. “Full sail, full oars. Ignore enemy craft. Ignore the fort. Aim for the inner shore. Land at all costs.”

  The signal banner snaps up: ALL SPEED. RAM COAST.

  Lang stares. “You’re turning war junks into… wagons,” he says.

  “Better broken wagons on a beach than beautiful coffins at sea,” Bimen replies. “The fort can’t chase us onto dry stone. Their angles are bad for plunging fire. Once we’re under the guns, we’re ghosts to them.”

  “And you’re just… accepting that your fleet dies here,” Lang says softly.

  Bimen bares his teeth. “It’s a good harbor to die in. And a better one to conquer.”

  Naci grins, savage. “That’s the mood,” she says. “Horohan, tell our riders to be ready the second we kiss sand. Borak, if any of your birds are still sober, have them watch the fort for muzzle flashes.”

  “My birds are always sober on duty,” Borak says indignantly. “It’s me you should worry about.”

  The helmsman wrenches the wheel. Heaven’s Mandate groans as she turns her blunt nose toward the shallows.

  Around her, other junks do the same, pivoting under fire. Some don’t make the turn cleanly; one clips the shattered sloop’s dying wake and slews sideways, presenting her fat flank to the fort.

  A cannonball punishes the mistake, punching through low. The junk shudders, stops moving forward, starts moving down.

  “Hold,” Bimen whispers. “Hold, hold—”

  He yells, voice cracking, “Rowers! Everything you have! I will personally haunt your grandchildren if you slack!”

  Belowdeck drums pound. Oars bite. Sails snap full as riggers haul lines until their palms bleed. Heaven’s Mandate surges forward, spray foaming from her bow.

  The fort’s guns speak again.

  Roundshot howl overhead, close enough that the air itself seems to flinch. One ball smashes into the foremast of a nearby junk; the mast shears off like a snapped bone, toppling into the sea along with three screaming sailors.

  Another shot hits the water short, throwing up a pillar of spray that slaps Heaven’s Mandate like an angry hand. Men are flung flat; Naci’s boots skid, but Horohan’s grip on her elbow is iron.

  “Closer!” Naci shouts. “Come on, you ancient cow, I’ve ridden goats faster than this!”

  The shoreline rears up, suddenly too near: stone quay, a line of bollards, a low harbor wall already cracked from the city’s fires. Beyond, she catches flashes of movement—figures on the quay, banners she can’t quite make out.

  “Brace!” Bimen bellows. “BRACE FOR IMPACT!”

  Naci plants her feet, grabs the rail with both hands.

  The Mandate hits Bo’anem.

  The sound is indescribable: a tearing, splintering, grinding shriek as tons of timber and iron and stubborn human intent meet unyielding stone. The hull leaps, then slams down. The bow bites into the quay, climbing half onto it before the laws of physics remember themselves.

  People who weren’t holding on go flying. One Banner does a perfect, accidental somersault over the rail into waist-deep surf and comes up swearing and laughing, which makes Naci irrationally like him.

  Behind them, another junk is not so lucky. It hits a submerged rock, her keel cracking audibly. The bow snaps, folding, hurling men and horses into the churning water. For a heartbeat, a horse’s head rises, eyes rolling white, then disappears under a tangle of wreckage.

  “Drop the ramps!” Horohan roars.

  Carpenter-teams, already waiting, kick free the planks lashed to the sides. Heavy boards slam down onto the quay and into the shallows, forming crooked paths.

  Tepr riders don’t wait. They drive their horses down the ramps, hooves skidding on wet wood, splashing into the surf. War cries rip from their throats, raw and wild: for Tepr, for Naci, for every uncle who ever died under someone else’s flag.

  Banners follow—Moukopl marines, Seop gunners hauling light cannons, volunteers who somehow ended up on ships and now discover they’re amphibious.

  Lang hits the quay with a sword in one hand and a musket in the other, cursing in Seop about the smell of salt ruining his boots as he shoots a Republic marine who pops up looking surprised.

  Borak comes down last, cradling a confused eagle against his chest. “You are not getting your feathers wet,” he tells it firmly. “You have rank.”

  Naci pauses only long enough to kiss Heaven’s Mandate’s rail with two fingers. “You did well,” she whispers to the ship, then vaults the last meter to land on Bo’anem’s stone.

  The ground under her feet is solid, blessedly not moving. It is also sticky with old blood and fresh tar.

  Cannon smoke drifts low over the quay, mixing with the tang of seaweed and the sweet-sick smell of burnt wood. From the city proper, the roar of fighting rolls down, a distant animal.

  On the harbor wall ahead, a line of figures stands amid the chaos.

  Pirates: ragged coats, mismatched armor, familiar cocky slouch. Some wave Blood Lotus colors; others have tied stolen Republic sashes around their arms. They lounge like they own the place.

  Marines: Baekjeon-kai armor scorched and dented, ranks tighter, muskets held well, discipline clinging even after betrayal.

  Shan Xi stands at their center, white coat soot-streaked, sabre at her hip, broken fan tucked into her belt like a trophy. She raises a hand in greeting, grinning like the harbor is throwing her a surprise party.

  At her side, Kagawa Tomoe rests the butt of her naginata on the stones, Baekjeon armor sitting on her like it was made for the occasion. Her face is expressionless, but her eyes are sharp, accounting for every gun and blade on the quay.

  “Welcome to Bo’anem, Khan of Tepr” Shan Xi calls. “We cleaned up for you.”