“Venka, I can’t . . .”
“I know you can.” Venka’s voice climbed in pitch. “I heard what they said about you. You have to burn them. Whatever it takes. Swear it on your life. Swear it. Swear it for me.”
Her eyes were like shattered glass.
It took all of Rin’s courage to meet her gaze.
“I swear.”
Rin left Venka’s room and set off at a run.
She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t speak.
She needed Altan.
She didn’t know why she thought that he would offer the relief she was looking for, but among them only Altan had gone through this once before. Altan had been on Speer when it burned, Altan had seen his people killed . . . Altan, surely, could tell her that the Earth might keep on turning, that the sun would continue to rise and set, that the existence of such abominable evil, such disregard for human life did not mean the entire world was shrouded in darkness. Altan, surely, could tell her they still had something worth fighting for.
“In the library,” Suni told her, pointing to an ancient-looking tower two blocks past the city gates.
The door to the library was closed, and nobody responded when she knocked.
Rin turned the handle slowly and peered within.
The great inner chamber was filled with lamps, yet none were lit. The only light came from the moonbeams shining in through tall glass windows. The room was filled with a sickly sweet smoke that tugged at her memory, so thick and cloying that Rin nearly choked.
In a corner among stacks of books, Altan was sprawled, legs out and head tilted listlessly. His shirt was off.
Her breath hitched in her throat.
His chest was a crisscross of scars. Many were jagged battle wounds. Others were startlingly neat, symmetrical and clean as if carved deliberately into his skin.
A pipe lay in his hand. As she watched, he brought it to his lips and inhaled deeply, crimson eyes rolling upward as he did so. He let the smoke fill his lungs and then exhaled slowly with a low, satisfied sigh.
“Altan?” she said quietly.
He didn’t seem to hear her at first. Rin crossed the room and slowly knelt down next to him. The smell was nauseatingly familiar: opium nuggets, sweet like rotted fruit. It gave her memories of Tikany, of living corpses wasting away in drug dens.
Finally, Altan looked in her direction. His face twisted into a droll, uninterested smile, and even in the ruins of Golyn Niis, even in this city of corpses, Rin thought that the sight of Altan then was the most terrible thing she’d ever seen.
Chapter 22
“You knew?” Rin asked.
“We all did,” Ramsa murmured. He touched her shoulder tentatively, attempting a comforting gesture, but it didn’t help. “He tries to hide it. Doesn’t do a very good job.”
Rin moaned and pressed her forehead into her knees. She could hardly see through her tears. It hurt to inhale now; it felt like her rib cage was being crushed, like the despair was pressing against her chest, weighing her down so that she could barely breathe.
This had to be the end. Their wartime capital had fallen, her friends were dead or broken, and Altan . . .
“Why?” she wailed. “Doesn’t he know what it does to you?”
“He knows.” Ramsa let his hand drop. He twisted his fingers in his lap. “I don’t think he can help it.”
Rin knew that was true, but she couldn’t accept it.
She knew the horrors of opium addiction. She’d seen the Fangs’ clientele—promising young scholars, well-to-do merchants, talented men—whose lives had been ruined by opium nuggets. She’d seen proud government officials reduced in the span of months to shriveled, penniless men begging in the streets to fund their next fix.
But she couldn’t reconcile those images with her commander.
Altan was invincible. Altan was the best martial artist in the country. Altan wasn’t—Altan couldn’t be—
“He’s supposed to be our commander,” she said hoarsely. “How can he fight when he—when he’s like that?”
“We cover for him,” Ramsa said quietly. “He never used to do it more than once a month.”
All those times he’d smelled like smoke. All those times he’d been missing when she tried to find him.
He’d just been sprawled in his office, sucking in and out, glassy and empty and gone.
“It’s disgusting,” she said. “It’s—it’s pathetic.”
“Don’t say that,” Ramsa said sharply. He curled his fingers into a fist. “Take that back.”
“He’s our commander! He has a duty to us! How could he—”
But Ramsa cut her off. “I don’t know how Altan survived that island. But I do know whatever happened to him is unimaginable. You didn’t know you were a Speerly until months ago. But Altan lost everyone in his life overnight. You don’t get over that kind of pain. So it’s what he needs. So it’s a vulnerability. I won’t judge him. I don’t dare, because I don’t have the right. And neither do you.”
After two weeks of sifting through rubble, breaking into locked basements, and relocating corpses, the Cike found fewer than a thousand survivors in the city that had once been home to half a million. Too many days had passed. They gave up hope of finding any more.
For the first time since the start of the war, the Cike had no operations planned.
“What are we waiting around for?” Baji asked several times a day.
“Orders,” Qara always answered.
But no commands were forthcoming. Altan was usually absent, sometimes disappearing for entire days. When he was present, he was in no state to give orders. Chaghan took over smoothly, assigned the Cike routine duties in the interim. Most of them were told to keep watch. They all knew that the enemy was already moving inland to finish what they had started, and that there was nothing in Golyn Niis to guard but ruins, but still they obeyed.
Rin sat over the gate, clutching a spear to keep herself upright as she watched the path leading to the city. She had the twilight watch, which was just as well, because she could not sleep if she tried. Each time she closed her eyes she saw blood. Dried blood in the streets. Blood in the Golyn River. Corpses on hooks. Infants in barrels.
She couldn’t eat, either. The blandest foods still tasted like carcasses. Only once did they have meat; Baji caught two rabbits in the woods, flayed them, and staked them on a narrow piece of wood to roast. When Rin smelled them, she dry-heaved for several long minutes. She could not dissociate the rabbits’ flesh from the charred flesh of bodies in the square. She could not walk Golyn Niis without imagining the deaths in the moment of the execution. She could not see the hundreds of decapitated heads on poles without seeing the soldier who had walked down the row of kneeling prisoners, methodically bringing his sword down again and again as if reaping corn. She could not pass the babies in their barrel graves without hearing their uncomprehending screams.
The entire time, her own mind screamed the unanswerable question: Why?
The cruelty could not register for her. Bloodlust, she understood. Bloodlust, she was guilty of. She had lost herself in battle, too; she had gone further than she should have, she had hurt others when she should have stopped.
But this—viciousness on this scale, wanton slaughter of this magnitude, against innocents who hadn’t even lifted a finger in self-defense, this she could not imagine doing.
They surrendered, she wanted to scream at her disappeared enemy. They dropped their weapons. They posed no threat to you. Why did you have to do this?
A rational explanation eluded her.