Ahmadi was like a surgeon with her tools. She drew arrow after arrow without moving anything except for her right arm, even at a gallop, lining them up for each next unlucky Red without her eye ever leaving the center aim of that long, glittering arc. The fiberglass bent gracefully, and almost as soon as she’d notched an arrow, it would whiz out in a deadly, hissing blur. Another Red would huff like the wind had been knocked out of him. And then fall.
Horses trampled limbs, bodies were torn up as they rolled under motorcycles. Shots rang out. Behind him, Zhang heard one of their soldiers wail, and then something hit the ground and was left in their dusty wake. He struggled to aim the gun his driver had given him. Ahmadi rode by, a stream of blood coming down one side of her face, still firing. She had Malik’s quiver strapped over her other shoulder now, and Malik had an axe. He raised it up, sharp edge glinting. His arm was a braid of veins and sweat. Zhang looked away as the screams erupted.
“General!” Zhang’s driver grabbed his arm. “What is that?”
Zhang turned to look ahead, where the land sloped upward on the left in a long hill. Something covered the whole crest, row after row, fluttering in hundreds of pieces. Everything was white.
“Are those people?” Zhang asked him.
“They are!” he cried. They both leaned forward, straining to see across the distance. They were looking for the same thing. If they were people—were they shadowed or shadowless?
“Shadows!” Zhang yelled, to alert the others. His heart swelled. “They have shadows!” He waved desperately from the top of his carriage as they thundered closer and closer. The wind sent ripples through their strange ivory robes. “Faster!” he shouted to his driver. The Reds pursued, relentless, uncaring, but Zhang’s soldiers began to cheer. There was a whole army of shadowed people, standing there as if they’d heard the Iowan army’s cries and were waiting for their carriages to sweep past, to cut the Reds off and save them. Zhang just had to reach them.
But then they started to move. Long before the Iowans’ first carriage was anywhere near their lines. They poured down the hillside slowly, sweeping out in front like a large white fan, simple weapons pointed outward. It was a strange position—far more difficult for the carriages to navigate through. At first Zhang didn’t understand. Then he did.
“Ambush!” he screamed. A cry of horror went up all around him as everyone else realized at the same time that the strangers weren’t there to help them at all. They were there to do exactly the opposite.
“What do we do?” Zhang’s driver asked hysterically.
“Don’t stop!” he yelled as loud as he could, so the rest could hear over the screams of the Reds. “Keep your head down and push through!”
Zhang and his driver both ducked as low as possible behind the wooden windbreak in front of their seat as the horses charged. They were close enough now to see the ones in white clearly—men and women wrapped in layers and layers of billowing, pristine fabric. Their front line dug itself in and prepared to receive Zhang’s army like a wall of death.
In front, Holmes screamed like a falcon diving for a kill. “Don’t stop!” Zhang ordered one more time when the first carriage was almost there. Then his own thrashed wildly as they hit too, and he heard the sound of humans howling as bones broke beneath hooves and wheels. Iowan guns boomed, lightning flashing against the bright day.
“But they have shadows!” Zhang’s driver said breathlessly as they turned to make sure the rest of their line had made it through. “I don’t understand—they have shadows!”
All around, the ones in white behind their front line started closing on the carriages as they crashed through the crowd. The Reds flew into a fury, attacking whatever was closest, Iowan and strange people in white. Still the robed ones came, unstoppable, like some kind of unfeeling, nightmarish hive mind.
Vienna pulled Zhang from the stupor of his terror. “Fire!” she was screaming at him from her horse. “General—the ones in white—they lit one on fire!” She pointed backward as her mare pushed to match Holmes’s sprint. Zhang jerked around, clutching the top of his carriage. The ones in white were howling now, shrieking almost triumphantly.
He saw. Flames licked off the roof of the last carriage in their galloping procession. Dark smoke began to fill the air. What had these strange newcomers done? Why? Around them, the Reds wavered, half resolved to just kill everyone, Iowan or white ghost, the other half mesmerized by the familiar roar of the flames and the ones who had created it. “Malik, the books!” Zhang yelled at him as he rode by again. His entire right half was covered in glistening red syrup from other bodies. The axe shone. He almost looked like the Red King.
Ahmadi was there suddenly as well, eyes wild with terror. “The carriage is on fire!” she cried.
“We can’t stop!” Malik said as his horse strained to keep pace with Zhang. “If we stop, we’ll lose them all!”
Zhang turned around again. The soldier driving the burning cart was yelling frantically at the rest of them, calling for rescue. Zhang started waving him forward, then kicked a white-robed warrior climbing up his seat ladder. A flying knife barely missed his forehead as the man fell to his death. “How many?” Zhang shouted to Malik.
“With these—whoever the fuck they are, ten to one, at least,” he said.