“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.
Suni fought with no weapon at all. Already massive, he seemed to have grown to the size of a small giant, stretching up to well over ten feet. It shouldn’t have been possible for Suni to disarm men with steel swords as he did, but he was simply so terribly strong that his opponents were like children in comparison.
As Rin watched, Suni grasped the heads of the two closest soldiers and smashed them against each other. They burst like ripe cantaloupes. Blood and brain matter splashed out, drenching Suni’s entire torso, but he hardly paused to wipe the gore from his face as he turned to smash his fist into another soldier’s head.
Fur had sprouted from his arms and back that seemed to serve as an organic shield, repelling metal. A soldier jammed his spear into Suni’s back from behind, but the blade simply clattered off to the side. Suni turned around and bent slightly, placed his arms around the soldier’s head, and tore it clean off his body with such ease that he might have been twisting the lid off a jar.
When he turned back to the marsh, Rin caught a glimpse of his eyes in the firelight. They were black all the way through.
She shuddered. Those were the eyes of a beast. Whatever was fighting on the shore, that wasn’t Suni. That was some ancient entity, malevolent and gleeful, ecstatic to be given free rein to break men’s bodies like toys.
“The other bank! Get to the other bank!”
A clump of soldiers broke off from the jammed fleet and approached Altan and Rin’s shore in a desperate swarm.
“We’re up, kiddo,” Altan said, and emerged from the reeds, trident spinning in his grasp.
Rin scampered to her feet, then swayed when the effects of the poppy hit her like a club to the side of the head. She stumbled. She knew she was in a dangerous place. Unless she called the god, the poppy would only make her useless in battle, high and disoriented. But when she reached inside herself for the fire, she grasped nothing.
She tried chanting in the old Speerly language. Altan had taught her the incantation. She didn’t understand the words; Altan barely understood them himself, but that didn’t matter. What mattered were the harsh sounds, the repetition of incantations that sounded like spitting. The language of Speer was primal, guttural, and savage. It sounded like a curse. It sounded like a condemnation.
Still, it slowed her mind, brought her to the center of her swirling thoughts, and established a direct connection to the Pantheon above.
But she didn’t feel herself tipping forward into the void. She heard no whooshing sound in her ears. She was not journeying upward. She reached inside herself, searching for the link to the Phoenix and . . . nothing. She felt nothing.
Something soared through the air and embedded itself in the mud by Rin’s feet. She examined it with great difficulty, as if she were looking through a hazy fog. Finally, her drugged mind identified it as an arrow.
The Federation was shooting back.
She was faintly aware of Baji shouting at her from across the channel. She tried to shake away the distractions and direct her mind inward, but panic bubbled up in her chest. She couldn’t concentrate. She focused on everything at once: Qara’s birds, the incoming soldiers, the bodies getting closer and closer to the shore.
Across the bay she heard an unearthly scream. Suni emitted a series of high-pitched shrieks like a deranged monkey, beat his fists against his chest, and howled up at the night sky.
Beside him Baji threw his head back and boomed out a laugh, and that, too, sounded unnatural. He was too gleeful, more delighted than anyone in the midst of such carnage had the right to be. And Rin realized that this wasn’t Baji laughing, this was the god in him that read spilled blood as worship.
Baji lifted his foot and shoved the soldiers squarely into the water, toppling them over like dominoes; he sent them sprawling into the river, where they flailed and struggled against the soggy marsh.
Who controlled whom? Was it the soldier who had called the god, or the god in the body of the soldier?