Altan exhaled slowly. He felt a tremendous sense of both grief and relief. He had no commander. No. He
Tyr’s death was felt by the Gatekeeper himself, who had lingered all these years, not quite dead but not quite alive, ensconced in the shell of a mortal but not mortal himself.
The Gatekeeper was broken and confused, and he had forgotten much of who he was, but one thing he would never forget was the stain of the Vipress’s venom.
The Gatekeeper felt her ancient power dissipate into the void that both separated them and brought them together. And he raised his head to the sky and knew that an enemy had returned.
It was felt by the young apprentice at Sinegard who meditated alone when her classmates slept. Who frowned at the disturbance she felt acutely but did not understand.
Who wondered, as she constantly did, what would happen if she disobeyed her master, swallowed the poppy seed, and traversed to commune again with the gods.
If she did more than commune. If she pulled one back down with her.
For although she was forbidden from calling the Phoenix, that did not stop the Phoenix from calling upon her.
She tried to resist.
She tried to empty her mind, like Jiang had taught her; she tried to clear the anger and the fire from her head.
She found that she couldn’t.
She found that she didn’t want to.
On the first day of the seventh month, another border skirmish erupted, between the Eighteenth Battalion of the Federation Armed Forces and the Nikara patrol in Horse Province bordering the Hinterlands to the north. After six hours of combat, the parties reached a cease-fire. They passed the night in an uneasy truce.
On the second day, a Federation soldier did not report for morning patrol. After a thorough search of the camp, the Federation general at the border city of Muriden demanded the Nikara general open the gates of his camp to be searched.
The Nikara general refused.
On the third day, Emperor Ryohai of the Federation of Mugen issued by courier pigeon a formal demand to the Empress Su Daji for the return of his soldier at Muriden.
The Empress called the Twelve Warlords to her throne at Sinegard and deliberated for seventy-two hours.
On the sixth day, the Empress formally replied that Ryohai could go fuck himself.
On the seventh day, the Federation of Mugen declared war on the Empire of Nikan. Across the longbow island, women wept tears of joy and purchased likenesses of Emperor Ryohai to hang in their homes, men enlisted to serve in the reserve forces, and children ran in the streets screaming with the celebratory bloodlust of a nation at war.
On the eighth day, a battalion of Federation soldiers landed at the port of Muriden and decimated the city. When resisted by province Militia, they ordered that all the males in Muriden, children and babies included, be rounded up and shot.
The women were spared only by the Federation army’s haste to move inland. The battalion looted the villages as it went, seized grain and transport animals for their own. What they could not take with them, they killed. They needed no supply lines. They took from the land as they traveled. They marched across the heartland on a warpath to the capital.
On the thirteenth day, a courier eagle reached the office of Jima Lain at the Academy. It read simply:
“It’s sort of exciting, really,” Kitay said.
“Yes,” said Rin. “We’re about to be invaded by our centuries-old enemy after they breached a peace treaty that has maintained a fragile geopolitical stability for two decades. So very exciting.”
“At least now we know we have job security,” said Kitay. “Everyone wants more soldiers.”
“Could you be a little less glib about this?”
“Could you be less depressing?”
“Could we move a bit faster?” asked the magistrate.
Rin and Kitay glanced at each other.
Both of them would rather have been doing anything other than aiding the civilian evacuation effort. Since Sinegard was too far north for comfort, the Empire’s bureaucracy was moving to a wartime capital in the city of Golyn Niis to the south.
