*
“All right!” shouts Mulaghesh. “Listen up!” Another building collapses several blocks away; the Saypuri soldiers glance at one another uneasily, but Mulaghesh continues: “Ever since you were kiddos you all wanted to be the Kaj, didn’t you? You wanted to fight those wars, to win those victories, to feel that glory? Well, I will remind you, boys and girls, of a history lesson. …” Something explodes beside the Solda; a fireball twenty feet across rises into the air between two tall white skyscrapers. “Do you remember how the Night of the Red Sands got its name? It’s because when the Kaj brought his scrawny army of about a hundred freed slaves to the desert of Hadesh, they wound up facing not only the Divinity Voortya, but also five thousand armored Continental warriors. Warriors a hells of a lot like those.” She points down the street, where silver shapes hack and slash at crowds and wagons and cars and buildings—anything. “They were outnumbered ten to one, on flat terrain, with absolutely no strategic advantage! Any decent strategist would have decided they were done for! Hells, I would have decided they were done for! But they weren’t, because the Kaj brought up a cannon, loaded it with a special shot, and fired it directly through Voortya’s damned face!” She taps the center of her forehead. “And the second Voortya died, all the armor those Continentals were wearing—which was so thick, so heavy, so impenetrable, and so miraculously light—suddenly became as heavy as it would normally be. And the army collapsed underneath it. These terrifying soldiers, without their Divinity, were helpless, trapped beneath hundreds and hundreds of pounds of iron and steel! And the Kaj’s army, a bunch of untrained slaves and farmers who had lived their whole lives being punished and abused by those soldiers, waded among them and used knives, and rocks, and fucking gardening tools to finish them off!” One of the cranes working on the New Solda Bridge tips back and forth like a metronome, then topples into the icy water. Flocks of brown starlings wheel above the city, shrieking and cheeping. “They slaughtered five thousand men in one night! They slaughtered them as a winemaker prunes grapes from the vine! The blood was so deep it went up to their ankles! And that, boys and girls, is why they call it the Night of the Red Sands!”
Shara is standing in the middle of the courtyard, counting out pills and guessing the right dosage. Will I go mad? Will Kolkan swoop into my mind and destroy me? Will I simply topple over, dead, and leave my soldiers and my people here to die? Or perhaps it will just be like having too much tea. …
“Now let me remind you of our current predicament!” says Mulaghesh. “We face ridiculous odds, yes! Absurd odds! But we are trained soldiers! And we have on our side the great-granddaughter of the Kaj, who just a month ago brought down a Divine horror that was ravaging this very city! You wish to relive history? Are your standards so low? You will make it this day! You are heroes that will be sung about for centuries to come! You are legends! And you will be victorious!”
To Shara’s utter surprise, a bloodthirsty cheer rises up among the soldiers. They begin to chant: Komayd! Komayd! Komayd!
Shara turns a furious beet red and mutters, “Ohmygoodness.”
“Now man these fortifications,” says Mulaghesh, “and I want you to aim for those things’ fucking eyes, do you hear me? They might be armored, but they’re not perfect!”
The soldiers cheer and rush to the fortifications behind the embassy walls. Mulaghesh saunters over to where Shara stands. “How’d I do?”
“Very good,” says Shara. “You ought to do this for a living.”
“Funny,” says Mulaghesh. She peers through the gates. “Those things know we’re here. It looks like they break off about a dozen for each building, and we’re about to get our fair share. Are you ready?”
Shara hesitates. “This is five times the dosage I gave the boy in the jail.”
“And?”
“So I have absolutely no idea if potency correlates with quantity.”
“And?”
“So I mean that even if this does work, there is a very good chance I may overdose, and die.”
Mulaghesh shrugs. “Yeah, probably. Welcome to war. Let’s see if you can do something before you actually die, though, okay?”
“How can you … ? How can you be so calm about this?”
Mulaghesh watches the advancing armored soldiers. “It’s like swimming,” she says. “You think you’ve forgotten how to do it, but then you jump in, and suddenly it’s like you never stopped doing it at all. If you’re going to do it, Chief Diplomat”—she points at the pills in Shara’s hand—“do it. Because we’re about to find out if our guns are worth a damn against those things.”