He sighed. “And how are you going to launch this counteroffensive? You have maybe a tenth of their ranged capabilities.”

“That’s fine. We have gods.”

“You can’t win this war with just a handful of shamans.”

“I beat the Federation on my own, didn’t I?”

“Well, barring genocide—”

“We can beat them with shamanism constrained to armed combatants on the battlefield,” she insisted. “The same way we’ve been hunting down the Mugenese now.”

“Maybe. But it’s just you and Jiang and the Vipress, that’s not nearly—”

“Enough?” She lifted her chin. “What if there were more?”

“Don’t you dare open the Chuluu Korikh,” Kitay said.

“No.” She shuddered at the thought of that place. “We won’t go back to that mountain. But Jiang and Daji want to march north. Up to Mount Tianshan.”

“So I heard.” He eyed her skeptically. “What’s in Mount Tianshan?”

“Come on, Kitay. You can figure this out.”

His gaze wandered over toward the Trifecta. She saw his eyes widen as the pieces clicked in his mind.

“You’re crazy,” he said.

“Probably.”

His mouth worked for several seconds before he got the words out. “But—the stories—I mean, the Dragon Emperor’s dead.”

“The Dragon Emperor’s sleeping,” Rin said. “And he’s been asleep for a very long time. But the Seal is eroding. Jiang’s remembering who he was, what he once could do, which means Riga is about to wake up. And once he does, once we’ve reunited the Trifecta, then we’ll show Hesperia what true divinity looks like.”

Chapter 16

The battlefront under the Baolei Mountains was a conundrum.

The valleys were silent. Dirigibles weren’t buzzing, swords weren’t clashing, and the air wasn’t thick with the acrid burn of fire powder. Rin neither saw nor heard any signs of active combat, at least not for the seven days it took for their party to reach the front lines.

Only when they drew closer did she realize why. The Southern Coalition was trapped. The Republic had pinned them against the mountainside behind a series of makeshift forts, each planted half a mile within the other, surrounded by lines of cannons and mounted arquebuses prepared to mow down any who tried to break out of the impasse. The forts were temporary constructions but they looked brick solid, supported by piles of sandbags, their stone walls impenetrable save for tiny slits just large enough for the firing end of an arquebus. Archery was certainly futile against those forts, and Rin suspected that rudimentary cannons of the type the Southern Coalition possessed would barely make a dent, either.

But the Republic also couldn’t penetrate the mountainside. The ravines and caves along the southern Baolei range functioned as natural bomb shelters, which meant sustained dirigible attacks would only be a waste of ammunition. The underground terrain couldn’t be mapped from the air, which gave the southerners a significant defensive advantage. This, Rin assumed, was the only reason the Republic hadn’t yet mounted a ground assault.

The Southern Coalition didn’t have the manpower to break out. The Republic didn’t want to bleed the forces necessary to break in. For now, both sides remained holed up in their respective stations. But this standoff would end, as all sieges did, the moment the southerners finally ran out of food and water.

“Your old classmate is unfortunately very good at siege warfare,” Daji said. They had spent the morning circling the blockade perimeter in the laundry wagon, searching for a way to sneak past Republican lines unnoticed. “He’s got them fenced in at every critical juncture. No easy way to slip past those pillboxes unless we make a scene.”

“I think a scene is exactly what we want,” Rin said.

“No, that’s what you want when you break out,” Kitay pointed out. “But we’ve got to get inside and rally the forces first. We don’t know what condition they’re in. Making a scene puts a hard time limit on how long it takes the southerners to mobilize.”

So the question remained: How did one sneak past the greatest assembly of military power ever seen on the continent?

“We could swim in,” Kitay suggested after a pause. “I think I saw a stream a mile back.”

“They’d shoot us in the water,” Rin said.

“They’re guarding the river flows leading out,” Kitay pointed out. “They don’t care so much about people sneaking in. We get some bamboo reeds, swim down in the bottom layers where it’s muddy—best to do it when it’s raining, too; that’ll maximize our water cover.”

He glanced around the wagon. Daji shrugged, silent.

“So we’ll swim,” Rin said, since it didn’t appear anyone had a better plan. “What next?”

“You need to go through the old mining tunnels.” Rin was startled when Jiang spoke up. He’d been silent all morning, gazing placidly around the battlefront like he was touring a botanical garden. Now suddenly his gaze was focused, his voice firm and assured. “You won’t be underground for long. Just until you emerge on the other side into the forests. It’s not a perfect exit route—those tunnels aren’t well lit, and quite a few people are probably going to fall down the pits and break their necks. But there’s no other route that keeps you safe from the dirigibles.”

Once again, his switch in demeanor was so abrupt that Rin couldn’t help but stare. Jiang was acting like a seasoned general, casually spinning together pieces of a strategy like someone who’d planned ambushes like this a hundred times before. This wasn’t him. This was a stranger.

“The real challenge is getting the southerners to follow you out,” he continued. “You’ll have to be discreet about it. If Souji tried selling you to Vaisra once, he might do so again. Is there anyone in the coalition you still trust?”

“Venka,” Rin said immediately. “Qinen, too, probably, if he’s still alive. We could try to swing Zhuden’s officers, but they’ll take convincing.”

“Can Venka mobilize at least half the army?” Daji asked.

Rin considered that for a moment. She didn’t know how much sway Venka held. Venka wasn’t terribly popular among the southerners; she was by nature curt and abrasive, a pale-skinned northerner with a harsh Sinegardian accent who clearly didn’t belong. But she could be charming when she wanted to be. She might have managed to talk her way out of any suspected ties to Rin. Or Souji might have had her killed long ago.

Rin decided to be optimistic. “Probably. We can get her to scare up a crowd, and once the battle’s started, the rest should follow.”

“I suppose we can’t do better than that.” Jiang pointed to Rin and Kitay. “You two go in first and find your people. Round up as many of them as you can within the next twenty-four hours, and tell them to press hard to the west-facing mines when we break through the front lines. If you have to break cover before then, just send up a flare and we’ll break the front early.”

“There are at least two thousand Republican troops on the front,” Kitay said.