Morning swells into the Red Cliff Survivor like a tide that has learned manners. Steam purls from the galley hatch; the smell is a stubborn marriage of fish bones, tar, singed rope, and someone's heroic insistence on star-anise. The deck—scarred, sanded, stained with old colors of battle—has been swept to a baffled shine. It is the boy's fault. The boy sweeps like a monk pays debts.

"Stop polishing the ship," Na'er complains from a yard she shouldn't be perched on. "She'll get ideas."

Yotaka pauses mid-stroke, bows to the broom like it outranks him, and smiles a careful, domesticated smile. "Apologies," he says in precise Moukopl, then in salt-rinsed Seop for the old women who prefer curses aged in their own tongue. "I'll leave her proud, not vain."

"You hear that?" Auntie Fang mutters at the hull. "We're proud now. Pretend not to leak."

"Leaking is just aggressive breathing," Lizi offers, emerging from a coil of line with under-eye smudges and ambition. "Captain says it adds character."

"Captain says," Pei the Drummer corrects, passing with a bundle of patched sail, "that if you make another joke before breakfast, she'll nail your tongue to the capstan so the wind can finally play you in key."

Lizi beams. "At least I'll be useful for once."

Soup arrives, wrestled up by Pragya and Pragati in the same ruthless cooperation with which they have in the past stitched whores and sails and enemies. The surface blisters like reptiles waking. A severed fish head bobs, staring, pearl-eyed.

"Eat," Pragya orders, ladling. "It's food if we say it is."

Yotaka steps forward, accepting his bowl with both hands, bow precise enough to hush the planks. "Thank you," he says. He does not flinch when a sardine spine kisses his lip; he plucks it free and sets it by the rim, careful as a jeweler. He blows on the broth, not theatrically, but as if breath itself were a debt to be accounted.

He turns to where Auntie Fang's scarred paw hovers empty. "Elder," he says, offering his bowl.

She squints, taken aback, then snorts. "You think I need charity, silklet?"

"I think you need to taste first," he replies, voice clear with polite treason. "If the witches used the bitter weed again, I want to admire your courage."

Pragati flicks her ladle at him, dotting his cheek with boiling drops like constellations. "We hear that, small monarchy."

He laughs—a sound so unbegrudged it startles three gulls off the rail. He takes his first mouthful and blinks. "It tastes like if the sea held a grudge against me personally," he says. "I don't hate it."

Laughter, the kind that announces nothing is forgiven but some things can be shared, ripples around the mast. Pei taps her sticks twice against a barrel—tock, tock—the ship's heartbeat answering with its own timbered thrum.

He has already bent the ship around himself like an unexpected limb. The witches let him fold bandages; he does so with ceremonial cruelty, edges aligned as if that were all that held the world together. Na'er shows him how to spit to leeward with grace; he adopts the technique with the solemnity of a state oath. He tries to swear and cannot do it with any artistry; the crew corrects his diction until his profanity flowers properly. He listens when they talk of fish like family; he speaks, sometimes, of courtyards, of a cypress that made its own weather, of the way a polished floor shows the sky more honestly than water ever did.

"Show me a knot," he asks Auntie Fang. She shows him the bowline; he learns it at once and ties it again, one-handed, backwards, with his eyes closed, then unties it with his teeth. "Sailor," she declares, unwilling to look pleased. "Half, at least."

Lizi teaches him dice and regrets it. He is incapable of cheating and therefore impossible to predict. "What do you call bones that refuse to lie?" she demands.

"A history," he says. "And a problem."

They teach him a shanty, something obscene about a magistrate and a fish market; he sings sweet and wrong, turning filth into a lullaby. Shan Xi watches from the ladder, iron fan closed and wedged at her spine, waiting to be wrong about him. She sees how he walks ignoring splinters, how he talks to the ship under his breath in a tongue the boards have forgotten but appreciate, how he says "please" to the pump and it yields an extra cup because it is flattered.

Domesticity tries to take root like a weed between paving stones. It grows pretty.

"Stop smiling," Pragya warns Shan Xi, catching her in the act.

"I am baring my teeth," Shan Xi says. "At fate."

"Your teeth are soft today," Pragati notes.

"Soft teeth are for sharks," Lizi chirps. "They grow new ones! What do you call—"

"Silence," Pei says, without raising her voice. Lizi's mouth shuts by shipboard reflex.

On the middeck, Na'er and Yotaka argue about the moral character of gulls; Na'er insists they are priests in disguise, living on offerings; Yotaka insists they are magistrates, living on fines.

He has picked up a chipped cup and appointed it a bell; at each turn of the sandglass he strikes it with a spoon—ting, ting—so the crew can see the day move.

"We'll throw you over when it gets annoying," Na'er promises.

"Bring the bell," Yotaka says serenely. "The sea should know the hour."

He is not soft. When Auntie Fang opens a tuna with a blade, blood spurts like surprised wine. Yotaka does not blanch. He takes the butcher's twine and sews a split in the sail while Pragati shows him how to knot off. He cleans the deck where sharks left their punctuation last night, lifting intestine with two fingers like a scholar correcting a line. "Better out than in," he says to the ship. It agrees with a groan.

Sun leans up the sky; the wind forgets itself for a while and then remembers harder. The Survivor noses along the black-toothed coast where cliffs keep secrets and echoes earn their wage. The crew settles into the pulse of work, scrambled by the new, improbable rhythm of politeness. Pei drills a cadence into the pump—thock-CHUK, thock-CHUK; Na'er gossips with the mainsail and convinces it to forgive them one more time; Auntie Fang teaches Yotaka the art of swearing at rope in terms it understands.

Lizi skulks up with a scrap of red cloth and tries to tie it around Yotaka's bicep. "There," she declares. "Now you are ours. We mark our belongings."

"Lizi," Shan Xi says. "We do not mark princes as cargo."

"First," Lizi replies, feeding her grin to the wind, "I never said he was a prince. He's an heir. It's different. Second, I didn't say cargo. I said ours."

Yotaka lifts his arm, admires the rag like it's a sash at a ceremony invented for him. "Thank you," he says. "I'll return it when I perish doing something brave and badly thought out."

"See?" Lizi crows. "He understands us."

"Do you, little tide?" Shan Xi asks, descending the ladder at last, fan snapping open with a sound like a verdict. She regards the red rag on his arm as if measuring it for a noose or a ribbon-cutting. "Do you know there is no safe shore in your story?"

He meets her gaze with the honesty of someone who has nothing left to hide. "I know," he says. "But I can still learn where the rocks are."

Before Shan Xi can answer with cruelty or mercy—she keeps both in her sleeve—the air sharpens. It is not the wind. It is a note above the range of metal, the kind of cry that nails the sky to itself:

Heads tilt as one. Silence skids across the deck, catches, holds. Even the pump forgets to breathe. Pei's sticks lift and do not fall.

Another pass—high, slicing.

Shan Xi's face changes by millimeters, which is the same in her as panic in anyone else. Her eyes go to the west, to the torn-lace horizon where cliff meets mist. She does not squint. She does not need to. Her mind's compass has long loved bad news.

There: a wrinkled line of smoke at cliff height; below it, ants become men. Dust plumes in disciplined shapes. Sun catches on metal in rows. The steppe has learned to march.

At the point of the spear: Borak rides. His riders keep the pace he sets; it is not fast; it is inexorable. Above the column, the eagle writes permission in loops of gold and shadow.

Behind that blunt miracle of a man, Naci Khan. Even at this distance she is a decision. Around her: the banners. Eighty young spines. Muskets slant across them. Powder flasks thump their hips. The smell of saltpeter and intent blows ahead of them, a weather you cannot deny. In the gaps between their ranks, the old Tepr rides: bows.

"Captain?" Na'er breathes, voice gone small under the eagle's orbit.

Shan Xi closes the fan. The iron slats kiss each other, a quiet metallic prayer. Her gaze never leaves the moving geometry on the shore; she tastes the calculus of it—gifts offered to emperors, debts set on fire, a country hidden behind the eyes of a boy who now stands on her deck with a red rag on his arm.

She looks down at Yotaka; then out to the west; then back. The ship tilts infinitesimally, choosing a side.

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"Lizi," Shan Xi says, voice flat as a blade laid on a neck, "dock."

...

The Red Cliff Survivor kisses the shingle with a groan, ropes hissing through callused hands, iron hooks biting stone like wolves denied meat. Spray comes in lace; smoke from the camp's fires goes out in lines. Above, an eagle trims the world with its wing.

Shan Xi watches from the quarterdeck, fan shut at her spine. She takes the ladder as if scolding it. Her boots find the beach with a contemptuous finality, tar-and-ginger wind snatching at her red-dyed spill of hair.

"Khan," she says. Her gaze flicks over dragon fangs, tiger ribs, powder-flasks, then returns to Naci's eyes. "So. Is the wind finally turning in your favor? Or are you beginning to turn it against the empire?"

Naci's grin is quick and wolfish inside the iron skull. "I haven't stopped moving in eight years," she answers, voice calm as a loaded trigger. Then: "But yes."

"What plan?" Shan Xi asks, and it is not a challenge so much as a weighing of the blade she intends to take between her teeth. "Spare me poetry and give me angles."

"Sen," Naci says, not turning.

Sen is already rummaging elbow-deep in a bag stitched from sail and audacity. She produces a compass whose needle twitches, then a cloth map inked so densely the rivers look like veins under a winter wrist. She squats and spreads it on a flat stone, dusting away sand with the edge of her sleeve.

"Here," she says, stabbing the northeast of Seop with a nail bitten to invention. "Bo'anem's slump. The capital pretends it is clean; its gutters know better. I grew up where the palace drains lose their memory." Her finger drags along a jagged shoreline that seems to bite the map back. "This coast forgets manners. In summer the cold east ocean and the warm west sea argue until the water boils with no heat. Whirlpools big as gods' tempers. The smart stay home; the stupid drown. In winter ice makes promises to the moon—beautiful, exact, impossible. No sane navy patrols where the charts laugh at them."

She flips the compass—clack—and it settles pointing to an inevitability only she can see. "We slip in here and here," she rattles, tapping narrow inlets that look like knife-cuts. "We harvest currents like other people harvest grain. We cruise under the Serpent's Tooth because we've measured its echo. Also, I left… some things." A blink of excitement breaches. "Prototypes. Devices with good hearts and bad timing. I would like them back. They were failures then, but I have improved. I have a list."

Shan Xi lifts a hand. The fan doesn't open; the gesture itself is a blade. "We are invading Seop?"

Sen opens her mouth, ready to ooze logistics. Naci's gauntlet touches her sleeve: hush.

"Invading?" Shan Xi repeats, softer. "Explain to me why I should ferry your banners into streets where half my girls were born and the other half were chased."

Naci looks at her as if measuring a cliff for purchase. "Eight years ago," she says, "We promised: when the empire's hand came for our throats, we would bite through the fingers together."

Shan Xi's mouth angles, not a smile. "Seop is not the empire. Not cleanly. It is its own disease."

"Teeth," Naci says. "The empire's. They took your names in docks and back rooms. They stamped tariffs across your bodies. They taught magistrates to weigh a woman's scream against a ledger and find coin heavier. Seop learned the lesson. Their kings taught their sons to practice mercy like a hobby and cruelty like arithmetic."

Naci steps closer; the dragon helm throws a hooked shadow over Shan Xi's cheek. Her voice lowers. "Your crew is a litany of the empire's mistakes. The girl with the drum whose father 'fell' under a tax cart. The twins who stitched soldiers for pay and then learned what soldiers do when paid enough. The ones you bought back, the ones you stole back, the ones you dug up from under law."

She turns, so the banners can hear the words flinting off iron. "I am going to take a bite out of the mouth that bit you. The empire smiles with many lips. Seop is one. We will break the teeth that fit it."

Shan Xi's eyes go flat as harbor slate. Wind tugs her red behind her like a fresh wound remembering itself. "Justice?" she says, tasting the old, bitter word. "You will give my girls justice?"

Naci's laugh has no humor in it; it is sharper than steel. "I will give them a harbor that answers to someone who has bled like they have. I will give them streets that forget how to price women. I will give them the chance to stop choosing between law and hunger. And I will salt whatever we cannot fix."

Shan Xi thinks about the boy. The little king that asks the pump politely for water. He is a banner for a thousand throats. He is also a throat. She cocks her head. "What do you do with flags when they become people?"

"Use them carefully," Naci says. "Or burn them clean."

Silence inhales. The sea tries a gull-cry and thinks better of it.

Shan Xi closes her eyes as if listening to two songs and choosing the more dangerous melody. When she opens them, they are lantern-calm again. "Very well," she says. "Bring your currents and your devices with bad timing. Bring your men too. Come aboard, Wind-Khan. We will write a story where the tide reads it."

Naci shakes her head. "I'm not coming."

Shan Xi smiles the way a cat smiles at furniture. "You invented a new insult. You invite me into a war and stay on the beach to comb your tiger."

"My war is wider than your deck," Naci says, gentle as a trap. "Bo'anem is your water. The camps, the borders, the men who think thunder is theirs—that is mine. I have to split the sky. If I climb your ladder, the north will eat itself out of jealousy."

"You send your children into the mouth and keep your teeth?" Shan Xi asks, voice silk over wire.

Naci draws breath to answer—then the earth develops a heartbeat.

It comes first as a suggestion underfoot, a pressure in the ankles, dust making up its mind. Then sound grows ribs—hooves, many, disciplined, grinding the beach's indifference into a cadence.

Horses crest the dune in a rush of leather and flag—a broken wave that refuses to break. At their glide's core: Temej, calm, green eyes counting distances; an eagle takes air above him and repents of shadow. Horohan rides a half-length behind, stillness weaponized, a blade's patience wrapped in fur. Kuan arrives laughing as if the wind just told him a secret and he promised to misuse it; his hair bells tattletale; his grin is a note struck loud enough to confuse fear. Pomogr limps where men who have survived many wars learn to walk best; his spear looks tired and still unwilling to forgive.

Behind them, the Yohazatz cavalry comes like a memory taught to step in time—salt-scars on skin, fresh shame under the eyes, a new caution in the way they measure an open space.

Then the shore remembers spectacle. A carriage crests behind the riders—a flamboyance on wheels, lacquer bleeding red into black, gilt throwing sunlight like coins at the poor. Drapes coil back on their own arrogance; bronze finials curve into tigers that decided against sleeping. On its velvet, framed as if by a theater, sits Puripal—no crown, as always, the idea of one lounging at his heel. The desert has smoothed him down to necessary; the small crack of kindness at his mouth waits for Dukar's voice to widen it. Dukar rides to the right, braid a black commandment, amber eyes banked like coals; to the left, Ta, lean and wired.

...

The world is reduced to salt, spray, and fire. The South Sea heaves like a sick beast, its green flesh churned to white foam by the passage of a hundred imperial junks. Their crimson sails are torn by the wind, their serpentine prows rising and falling as they vomit ballista bolts and pots of flaming pitch. Against them, the nimble, desperate craft of the Seop revolutionaries swarm like hornets, their hulls black and low to the water, cutting through their home waters with an intimate, deadly grace.

On the command deck of the flagship Heaven's Mandate, Grand Admiral Bimen is a man transformed. On land, he is a small, soft creature, his body a lump of anxiety swaddled in silks, his fingers stained with ink, not blood. He frets over decimal points and the subtle insults in tributary scrolls. But here, on the shifting deck, his feet planted wide against the roll of the sea, he is a demon given human form.

His high-pitched voice, a source of secret shame in the palace corridors, now cuts through the gale and the screams with the piercing authority of a bosun's whistle. His plump face, usually slick with nervous sweat, is set in a mask of terrifying calm, his eyes narrowed to slits that miss nothing.

"Signal the port squadron to envelop! I want their escape route choked with splinters!" he shrieks, pointing a finger that seems to command the very waves. A flaming Seop raft smashes against the Mandate's hull, the fire clinging to the treated wood like a disease. Sailors scramble, beating at the flames with soaked blankets. Bimen doesn't flinch. "Pour boiling oil on those who try to board! Let the sea cook them!"

A ballista bolt the size of a man screams past his head, tearing through the silk canopy above him and vanishing into the churning water beyond. The courtiers and accountants he was forced to bring tremble, clutching vomit-soaked rags to their faces. Bimen smiles, a thin, cruel slash in his round face. This is his element. This is where columns of numbers become columns of smoke, where balance sheets are written in enemy blood.

The battle is a sprawling, chaotic melee. A nearby imperial junk, its oars shattered, is swarmed by Seop boarders. Screams echo as curved blades flash in the sunlight, hacking through armor. The sea around it turns pink, and the bodies tossed overboard are immediately set upon by the dark, triangular shadows of sharks drawn by the frenzy.

Bimen watches, calculating. He sees a Seop command ship, larger than the rest, trying to rally its fleet. "Bring us about! All forward ballistae, target their mast! I want their leader watching his flag fall before he dies!"

The Mandate is a floating fortress, and its crew moves with the precision Bimen's land-bound clerks could only dream of. The great ship turns, its armored side presenting a wall of wood and steel. With a series of deep-throated thumps, the heavy ballistae launch their barbed shafts. One misses, plunging into the waves. Another shears through a mass of rigging. The third finds its mark, punching through the base of the Seop ship's mainmast. For a heart-stopping moment, nothing happens. Then, with a groan of protesting timber, the great spar teeters and crashes down, dragging sails and screaming men into the sea. A ragged cheer goes up from the imperial sailors.

As the broken Seop fleet begins to scatter, Bimen's senior admirals and captains gather on the command deck. They are hardened men, their faces leathered by sun and salt, and they look upon their fat, effeminate commander not with contempt, but with a kind of superstitious awe. The sea demon has delivered them again.

"Grand Admiral," one of them barks, bowing. "The rout is complete. The remnants flee northeast, towards Ri Island."

Another captain, a grizzled veteran with a salt-and-pepper beard, spits over the railing. "The pirate haven. Where the Blood Lotus nests."

A ripple of unease passes through the men. The Blood Lotus is more than a pirate; she is a legend, a ghost who has humiliated the imperial navy for a decade, her red-sailed junk appearing and vanishing like a phantom.

Bimen's eyes gleam. He claps his soft hands together, a sound like wet meat slapping. "Excellent! The heavens gift us an opportunity! We will hit two birds with one stone. The Emperor's focus is on this rebellion. The Northern Bureau is obsessed with the steppe. The sea is ours, and while the fire is hot, we shall forge a new era!" His voice rises to a shriek of ambition. "We will crush the last of these Seop rats, and we will burn the Ri Island haven to its waterline! We will drag the Blood Lotus from her throne of wreckage and hang her guts from our bowsprit as a trophy!"

The captains roar their approval, their fear of the pirate replaced by the fervor of their admiral's bloodlust.

It is at this moment of triumphant planning that a young, trembling clerk, his robes still pristine, dares to approach. He holds a sealed tube of lacquered bamboo, its ends capped with the wax seal of the Tepr ambassador.

"G-Grand Admiral… a… a message. From the courier sloop. Marked most urgent. From Ambassador Shi Min."

Bimen's triumphant expression sours into annoyance. He snatches the tube, breaks the seal with his thumbnail, and unrolls the parchment within. His eyes, so sharp moments before, scan the elegant characters. The noise of the dying battle, the cheers of his men, seem to fade away. His plump face, for the first time since setting sail, loses its demonic cast. It becomes unreadable.

He looks up, his gaze passing over his victorious fleet, over the burning wrecks of the Seop navy, towards the distant, hazy silhouette of the Ri Archipelago.

"It seems," he says, his voice once again the dry, precise instrument of the bureaucrat, "the Emperor has answered our petitions regarding the lack of ground invasion forces." He allows a long, pregnant silence to draw out, making every captain lean in. "The Khan of Tepr… has been… invited. She will ride with us to Seop."

A stunned silence greets this. The steppe nomads, on their ships? It is an unnatural, unsettling concept.

Bimen crushes the letter in his fist. "The rendezvous is Zenyu's Harbor. We are to meet them there." He turns his back on the Ri Archipelago, on the Blood Lotus, on his grand ambition of a dual victory. A new, more complicated game has just begun. "Set a new course. The cleansing of Ri Island will have to wait. We have… guests to collect."

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