wasn’t sure whether that was an effect of the unnamed weapons or a problem with the tapestries. Had ten seconds passed yet? She couldn’t tell, and the clock of her pulse was unreliable.
Desperate to escape before the tanks spat forth the killing rounds, Lisse raked her hand sideways to dismiss the glyphs. They dispersed in unsettling fragmented shapes resembling half-chewed leaves and corroded handprints. She repeated the gesture for fly.
Lisse choked back a cry as the kite lofted. The tapestry views changed to sky on all sides except the ravens on their tree—birds no longer, but skeletons, price paid in coin of bone.
Only once they had gained some altitude did she instruct the kite to show her what had befallen her hunters. It responded by continuing to accelerate.
The problem was not the tapestries. Rather, the kite’s wolf-strike had ripped all the shadows free of their owners, killing them. Below, across a great swathe of the continent once called Ishuel’s Bridge, was a devastation of light, a hard, glittering splash against the surrounding snow-capped mountains and forests and winding rivers.
Lisse had been an excellent student, not out of academic conscientiousness but because it gave her an opportunity to study her enemy. One of her best subjects had been geography. She and the ghost had spent hours drawing maps in the air or shaping topographies in her blankets; paper would betray them, it had said. As she memorized the streets of the City of Fountains, it had sung her the ballads of its founding. It had told her about the feuding poets and philosophers that the thoroughfares of the City of Prisms had been named after. She knew which mines supplied which bases and how the roads spidered across Ishuel’s Bridge. While the population figures of the bases and settlement camps weren’t exactly announced to cadets, especially those recruited from the reeducation facilities, it didn’t take much to make an educated guess.
The Imperium had built 114 bases on Ishuel’s Bridge. Base complements averaged twenty thousand people. Even allowing for the imprecision of her eye, the wolf-strike had taken out—
She shivered as she listed the affected bases, approximately sixty of them.
The settlement camps’ populations were more difficult. The Imperium did not like to release those figures. Imperfectly, she based her estimate on the zone around Base 87, remembering the rows of identical shelters. The only reason they did not outnumber the bases’ personnel was that the mercenaries had been coldly efficient on Jerengjen Day.
Needle Stratagem, Lisse thought blankly. The smallest sliver. She hadn’t expected its manifestation to be quite so literal.
The ghost was looking at her, its dark eyes unusually distinct. “There’s nothing to be done for it now,” it said at last. “Tell the kite where to go before it decides for itself.”
“Ashway 514,” Lisse said, as they had decided before she fled base: scenario after scenario whispered to each other like bedtime stories. She was shaking. The straps did nothing to steady her.
She had one last glimpse of the dead region before they curved into the void: her handprint upon her own birthworld. She had only meant to destroy her hunters.
In her dreams, later, the blast pattern took on the outline of a running wolf.
In the mercenaries’ dominant language, jerengjen originally referred to the art of folding paper. For her part, when Lisse first saw it, she thought of it as snow. She was four years old. It was a fair spring afternoon in the City of Tapestries, slightly humid. She was watching a bird try to catch a bright butterfly when improbable paper shapes began drifting from the sky, foxes and snakes and stormbirds.
Lisse called to her parents, laughing. Her parents knew better. Over her shrieks, they dragged her into the basement and switched off the lights. She tried to bite one of her fathers when he clamped his hand over her mouth. Jerengjen tracked primarily by shadows, not by sound, but you couldn’t be too careful where the mercenaries’ weapons were concerned.
In the streets, jerengjen unfolded prettily, expanding into artillery with dragon-shaped shadows and sleek four-legged assault robots with wolf-shaped shadows. In the skies, jerengjen unfolded into bombers with kestrel-shaped shadows.
This was not the only Rhaioni city where this happened. People crumpled like paper cutouts once their shadows were cut away by the onslaught. Approximately one-third of the world’s population perished in the weeks that followed.
Of the casualty figures, the Imperium said, It is regrettable. And later, The stalled negotiations made the consolidation necessary.