Altan lifted an arm and flicked his hand out as if releasing a whip. Tendrils of flame licked out from his hands, streaking in either direction like glowing snakes. Rin heard a short sizzling noise as the flame raced through the reeds.
Then, with a high-pitched whistling noise, the first of Ramsa’s rockets erupted into the night sky.
Ramsa had rigged the marsh so that each rocket’s ignition would light the next sequentially, granting several seconds of delay between explosions. They set the marsh ablaze with a horrifically pungent stink that overwhelmed even the sulfurous odor of the peat.
“Tiger’s tits,” Altan muttered. “He wasn’t joking about the feces.”
The explosions continued, a chain reaction of fire powder to simulate the noise and devastation of an army that didn’t exist. Bamboo bombs at the far end of the river erupted with what sounded like thunderclaps. A succession of smaller fire rockets exploded with resonant booms and enormous pillars of smoke; these did not catch fire, but served to confuse the Federation soldiers and obstruct their vision, so their boats could not see where they were going.
The explosions goaded the Federation soldiers directly into the dead zone created by Aratsha. When the first flare went up, the Federation boats swerved rapidly away from the source of the explosions. The boats collided with one another, snarled together and crammed in the narrow creek as the fleet moved clumsily forward. The tall rice fields, unharvested since the siege had begun, forced the boats to clump together.
Realizing his mistake, the Federation captain ordered his men to reverse direction, but panicked shouts echoed across the boats as the ships realized they could not move.
The Federation was locked in.
Time for the real attack.
As fire rockets continued to shoot toward the Federation fleet, a series of flaming arrows screamed through the night sky and thudded into the cargo trunks. The volley of arrows came so rapidly that it seemed as if an entire squadron were concealed in the marshes, firing from different directions, but Rin knew that it was only Qara, safely ensconced on the opposite bank, firing with the blinding speed of a trained huntress from the Hinterlands.
Next Qara took out the engineers. She punctured the forehead of every other man, tidily collapsing the man-made bridge with a surreal neatness.
Assaulted from all sides by enemy fire, the Federation fleet began to burn.
The Federation soldiers abandoned their flaming boats in a panic. They leaped for the bank, only to be bogged down in the muddy marsh. Men slipped and fell in paddy water that came up to their waists, filling up their heavy armor. Then, at a whisper from Altan, the reeds along the shore also burst into flame, surrounding the Federation like a death trap.
Even so, some made it to the opposite bank. A throng of soldiers—ten, twenty—clambered onto dry land—only to run into Suni and Baji.
Rin wondered how Suni and Baji intended to hold the entire strip of peat alone. They were only two, and from what she knew of their shamanic abilities, they couldn’t control a far-ranging element the way Altan or Aratsha could. Surely they were outnumbered.
She shouldn’t have worried.
They barreled through the soldiers like boulders crashing through a wheat field.
In the dim light of Ramsa’s flares, Suni and Baji were a flurry of motion that evoked the flashing combat of a shadow puppetry show.
They were so much the opposite of Altan. Altan fought with the practiced grace of a martial artist. Altan moved like a ribbon of smoke, like a dancer. But Baji and Suni were a study in brutality, paragons of sheer and untempered force. They utilized none of the economical forms of Seejin. Their only guiding principle was to smash everything in their vicinity—which they did with abandon, knocking men back off the shore as quickly as they clambered on.
A Sinegard-trained martial artist was worth four Militia men. But Suni and Baji were each worth at least ten.
Baji cut through bodies like a canteen cook chopping through vegetables. His absurd nine-pointed rake, unwieldy in the hands of any other soldier, became a death machine in Baji’s grip. He snagged sword blades between the nine prongs, locking three or four blades together before wrenching them out of his opponents’ grasps.
His god had given him no apparent transformations, but he fought with a berserker’s rage, truly a wild boar in a bloodthirsty frenzy.
