but hide behind Charouk, and Gurubai might be the smartest of the lot, but he’s not sticking his neck out if the other two won’t.”
There has to be something else, Rin thought. Something we don’t know about. There was no way Vaisra would just sit back and let winter come without taking the initiative. What was he waiting for?
For lack of better options, she put her blind faith in Vaisra. She sucked it up when her men asked her about the delay. She closed her ears to the rumors that Vaisra was considering a peace agreement with the Empress. She realized she couldn’t influence policy, so she poured her focus into the only things she could control.
She sparred more bouts with Nezha. She stopped wielding her trident like a staff. She became familiar with the generals and lieutenants of the Republican Army. She did her best to integrate the Cike into the Dragon Province’s military ecosystem, though both Baji and Ramsa rankled at the strict ban on alcohol. She learned the Republican Army’s command codes, communications channels, and amphibious attack formations. She prepared herself for war, whenever it came.
Until the day came when gongs sounded frantically across the harbor, and messengers ran up the docks, and all of Arlong was alight with the news that ships were sailing into the Dragon Province. Great white ships from the west.
Then Rin understood what the stalling had been about.
Vaisra hadn’t been pulling back from the northern expedition after all.
He’d been waiting for backup.
Chapter 13
Rin squeezed through the crowd behind Nezha, who made liberal use of elbows to get them to the front of the harbor. The dock was already thronged with curious civilians and soldiers alike, all angling to get a good look at the Hesperian ship. But no one was looking out at the harbor. All heads were tilted to the sky.
Three whale-sized crafts sailed through the clouds above. Each had a long, rectangular basket strapped to its underbelly, with cerulean flags sewn along the sides. Rin blinked several times as she stared.
How could structures so massive possibly stay aloft?
They looked absurd and utterly unnatural, as if some god were moving them through the sky at will. But it couldn’t be the work of the gods. The Hesperians didn’t believe in the Pantheon.
Was this the work of their Maker? The possibility made Rin shiver. She’d always been taught that the Hesperians’ Holy Maker was a construct, a fiction to control an anxious population. The singular, anthropomorphized, all-powerful deity that the Hesperians believed in could not possibly explain the complexity of the universe. But if the Maker was real, then everything she knew about the sixty-four deities, about the Pantheon, was wrong.
What if her gods weren’t the only ones in the universe? What if a higher power did exist—one that only the Hesperians had access to? Was that why they were so infinitely more advanced?
The sky filled with a sound like the drone of a million bees, amplified a hundred times over as the flying crafts drew closer.
Rin saw people standing at the edges of the hanging baskets. They looked like little toys from the ground. The flying whales began approaching the harbor to land, looming larger and larger in the sky until their shadows enveloped everyone who stood below. The people inside the baskets waved their arms over their heads. Their mouths opened wide—they were shouting something, but no one could hear them over the noise.
Nezha dragged Rin backward by the wrist.
“Back away,” he shouted into her ear.
There followed a brief period of chaos while the city guard wrangled the crowd back from the landing area. One by one the flying crafts thudded to the ground. The entire harbor shook from the impact.
At last, the droning noise died away. The metal whales shriveled and slumped to the side as they deflated over the baskets. The air was silent.
Rin watched, waiting.
“Don’t let your eyes pop out of your head,” said Nezha. “They’re just foreigners.”
“Just foreigners to you. Exotic creatures to me.”
“They didn’t have missionaries down in Rooster Province?”
“Only on the coastlines.” Hesperian missionaries had been banned from the Empire after the Second Poppy War. Several dared to continue visiting cities peripheral to Sinegard’s control, but most kept their distance from rural places like Tikany. “All I’ve ever heard are stories.”
“Like what?”
“The Hesperians are giants. They’re covered in red fur. They boil infants and eat them in soup.”
“You know that never happened, right?”
“They’re pretty convinced of it where I come from.”