“Don’t be vulgar,” Kitay said.

Venka grinned.

They could hear a faint series of booms echoing from beyond the mouth of the channel. In truth, the battle had already begun—a flimsy handful of riverside forts that constituted Arlong’s first line of defense had already engaged the Militia, but they were manned with only enough soldiers to keep the cannons firing.

Kitay had estimated those would buy them all of ten minutes.

“There,” Venka said sharply. “I see them.”

They stood up.

The Imperial Navy sailed directly into their line of sight. Rin caught her breath, trying not to panic at the sheer size of Daji’s fleet combined with Tsolin’s.

“What’s Chang En doing?” Kitay demanded.

The Wolf Meat General had lashed his boats together, tied them stern to stern into a single, immobile structure. The fleet had become a single, massive battering ram, with the floating fortress at the very center.

“To fight the seasickness, you think?” Venka asked.

Rin frowned. “Has to be.”

That seemed like a clever move. The Imperial troops weren’t used to fighting over moving water, so they might do better on a locked platform. But a static formation was also particularly dangerous where battling Rin was concerned. If one ship went up in flames, so did the rest of them.

Had Daji not discovered that Rin had figured a way around the Seal?

“It’s not seasickness,” Kitay said. “It’s so Feylen won’t blow them out of the water. And it gives them the advantage if we try to board. They get troop mobility between ships.”

“We’re not going to board,” said Rin. “We’re going to torch that thing.”

“That’s the spirit,” Venka said with an optimism that nobody felt.

The locked fleet crawled toward the cliffs at a maddeningly slow pace. War drums echoed around the channel as the fortress moved inexorably forward.

“I wonder how many men it takes to propel that thing,” Venka mused.

“They don’t need much paddling force,” Rin said. “They’re sailing downstream.”

“Okay, but what about lateral movement—”

“Please stop talking,” Kitay snapped.

Rin knew their chattering was idiotic, but she couldn’t help it. She and Venka had the same problem. They had to keep running their mouths, because the wait would drive them crazy otherwise.

“The gates aren’t going to hold,” Rin said despite Kitay’s glare. “It’ll be like kicking down a sandcastle.”

“You’re giving it five minutes, then?” Venka asked.

“More like two. Get ready to fire that thing.”

Venka patted Kitay’s shoulder. “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

He rolled his eyes. “The gate wasn’t my idea.”

In a last-ditch effort, Vaisra had ordered his troops to chain the gates of the channel shut with every spare link of iron in the city. It might have deterred a pirate ship, but against this fleet, it was little more than a symbolic gesture. From the sounds of it, the Militia intended to simply knock the gates over with a battering ram.

Boom. Rin felt stone vibrating beneath her feet.

“How old are those gates?” she wondered out loud.

Boom.

“Older than this province,” said Venka. “Maybe as old as the Red Emperor. Lot of architectural value.”

“That’s a pity.”

“Isn’t it?”

Boom. Rin heard the sharp crack of fracturing wood, and then a noise like fabric ripping.

Arlong’s gates were down.

The Imperial Navy poured through. The channel lit up with pyrotechnics. Massive twenty-foot cannons embedded into Arlong’s cliff walls went off one by one, sending scorching, boulder-sized balls shrieking into the sides of Chang En’s ships. Each one of Kitay’s carefully planted water mines went off in lovely, timed succession to the sound of firecrackers magnified by a thousand.

For a moment the Imperial Fleet was hidden behind a massive cloud of smoke.

“Nice,” Venka marveled.

Kitay shook his head. “That’s nothing. They can absorb the losses.”

He was right. When the smoke cleared, Rin saw that there had been more noise than damage. The fleet pressed on through the explosions. The floating fortress remained untouched.

Rin paced toward the cliff edge, sword in hand.

“Patience,” Kitay muttered. “Now’s not the time.”

“We should be down there,” she said. She felt like a coward waiting up on the cliff, hiding out of sight while soldiers burned below.

“We’re only three people,” Kitay said. “We’d be cannon fodder. You dive in now, you’ll just get shot full of iron.”

Rin hated that he was right.

The cliffs shook continuously under their feet. The Imperial Navy was returning fire. Loaded missiles shot out of the siege towers, showering tiny rockets onto the cliffside artillery stations. Shielded Militia archers returned two crossbow bolts for every one that reached their decks.

Rin’s stomach twisted with horror as she watched. The Militia was using precisely the same siege-breaking strategy that Jinzha had employed on the northern campaign—eviscerate the archers first, then barrel through land resistance.

The Republican warships took the worst damage. One had already been blown so thoroughly out of the water that its fragmented remains were blocking the paths of its sister ships.

The Imperial cannons fired low to aim at the paddle wheels. The Republican ships tried to rotate in the water to keep their back paddles out of the line of fire, but they were rapidly losing mobility. At this rate, Nezha’s ships would be reduced to sitting ducks.

Rin still saw no sign of Feylen.

“Where is he?” Kitay muttered. “You’d think they would bring him out right away.”

“Maybe he’s bad with orders,” Rin said. Feylen had seemed so terrified of Daji, she didn’t want to think about the kind of torture it took to persuade him to fight.

But at this rate, the Militia didn’t even need to bring Feylen out. Two artillery stations had gone down. The other five were running out of ammunition and had slowed their rate of fire. Most of Nezha’s warships were dead in the water, while the core of the Imperial Navy had sustained very little fire damage.

Time to rectify that. Rin stood up. “I’m going in.”

“Now’s the time,” Kitay agreed. He handed her a jug of oil from a tidy pile stocked next to the crossbow, and then pointed down at the channel. “I’m thinking center left of that tower ship. You want to split that formation apart. Get the ropes going and the rest will catch fire.”

“And don’t look down,” Venka said helpfully.

“Shut up.” Rin stepped backward, dug her feet against the ground, and broke into a run. The wind whipped against her face. Her wings rippled against the drag. Then the cliff disappeared under her feet, her head pitched downward, and there was no fear, no sound, only the thrilling and sickening lurch of the drop.

She let herself dive for a moment before she opened her wings. When she spread her arms the resistance hit her like a punch. Her arms felt like they were being torn from their sockets. She gasped—not from the pain, but from the sheer exhilaration. The river was a blur, ships and armies dissolving into solid streaks of browns and blues and greens.