“On my command,” he said.
“This is a terrible idea,” moped Adrik.
“I have a surplus of bad ideas,” said Nikolai. “I have to spend them somewhere.”
Tamar touched her hands to her axes. When her bullets were spent, those would have to suffice. She signaled to her Heartrenders. Nadia signaled to her Squallers.
“Forward!” Nikolai shouted.
Then they were moving ahead, plunging into the fray. The Squallers drove back the Fjerdan tanks as the Heartrenders gave them cover. A squad of Inferni used the burning remnants of the tanks to create a wall of flame, another barrier the Fjerdan troops would have to breach.
All of the Ravkan forces wore gas masks specially crafted by Fabrikators to prevent the inhalation of jurda parem. The drug had changed everything, made the Grisha vulnerable in ways they had never been, but they refused to wear those masks as emblems of weakness or fragility. They’d painted them with fangs and curling tongues, gaping mouths. They looked like gargoyles descending onto the field in their combat kefta.
Nikolai stayed low, the rattle of gunfire filling his ears. He squeezed off a shot, another, saw bodies fall. The demon in him sensed the chaos and leaned toward it, hungry for violence. But even if the obisbaya hadn’t purged Nikolai of the thing, it had given him better control. He needed cool strategy now, not a monster with a taste for blood.
Tolya’s hands shot out, his fists closing, and Fjerdan soldiers dropped, their hearts bursting in their chests.
Nikolai almost let himself hope. If tanks and infantry were all the fight Fjerda had to offer, Ravka might stand a chance. But as soon as he saw the hulking machine lumbering onto the field, he knew Fjerda had more horrors in store. This wasn’t a tank. It was a transport. Its huge treads kicked up dirt and mud, the roar of its engine shaking the air as it disgorged smoke into the gray sky. A mine went off beneath one of its huge treads, but the thing just kept coming.
Nikolai looked to the west. Had Zoya succeeded on her mission? Would rescue come?
This is the crossroads. This day would decide if Ravka had a chance or if Fjerda would blow through the border like a cold northern wind. If they failed this test, their enemy would know just how precarious Ravka’s position was, just how strapped for cash, just how weakened. A victory, even a wobbly one, would buy his country some desperately needed time. But that would require reinforcements.
“They’re not coming,” said Tolya.
“They’ll come,” said Nikolai. They have to.
“We gave them everything they needed. Why would they?”
“Because an agreement must mean something, otherwise what are we all doing here?”
A high metal shriek sounded as the transport drew to a halt and its gigantic metal doors opened like the jaws of an ancient monster.
The dust cleared and a line of soldiers advanced from inside the transport. But they wore no uniforms, only ragged clothes, some of them barefoot. Nikolai knew instantly what they were—Grisha, addicted to parem. Their bodies were emaciated and their heads hung like wilted flowers on narrow stalks. But none of that would matter once they were dosed with the drug. He saw the cloud of orange gas puff toward them from spigots somewhere inside the transport. Instantly, they snapped to attention.
This was the moment Nikolai had been dreading, one he had hoped he could prevent.
Three of the dosed Grisha charged forward.
“Get down!” Nikolai yelled. The land before the enemy Grisha rose up in a rippling wave, mines exploded, tanks overturned. Ravkan soldiers were thrown over and buried beneath mountains of mud and rock.
“Squallers!” Nadia called to her troops, and she and Adrik were back on their feet, combining their strength to push rubble and earth aside, freeing their compatriots.
Then Nadia stumbled.
“Amelia!” she cried. The wind she’d summoned faltered. She was staring at one of the dosed Grisha, a slender girl with chestnut hair, dressed in little more than a faded smock, her sticklike legs jammed into heavy boots.
“Saints,” Tamar said on a breath. “She’s a Fabrikator. She vanished from a mission near Chernast.”
Nikolai remembered. Nadia had worked side by side with her in the labs before her capture.
Tamar seized Nadia by the shoulder, pulling her back. “You can’t help her now.”
“I have to try!”
But Tamar didn’t let go. “She’s as good as dead. I’ll put an axe in her heart before I let you fall into this trap.”
Amelia and the other dosed Fabrikators raised their hands, about to cause another earthquake.
“I have a clear shot,” said Tolya, his rifle raised.
“Hold,” said Nikolai. Again he looked to the west, hoping—because hope was all they had left.
“Take the damned shot!” Adrik said.
Nadia struck him with a gust of air. “They can’t make us kill our friends, our own kind! We’re doing the Fjerdans’ work for them.”
“Those aren’t our friends,” Adrik snapped. “They’re ghosts, sent back from the next life, haunted and hopeless and looking for blood.”
Nikolai signaled for the second wave of fighters to engage as their flyers tried to get close enough to the Fjerdan lines to fire on the transport without being blown from the sky themselves.
And then he heard it, a sound that echoed with a steady whump whump whump like a beating heart, too even and unyielding to be thunder.
Every head turned to the west, to the skies, where three vast airships—larger than anything Nikolai had ever seen airborne—emerged from the clouds. Their hulls weren’t emblazoned with Kerch’s flying fish. They bore the orange stars of the Zemeni naval flag.
“They came,” said Nikolai. “I think you owe me an apology.”
Tolya grunted. “Just admit you weren’t sure either.”
“I was hopeful. That’s not the same as unsure.”
Nikolai had known Zoya’s diplomatic mission to speak to the Kerch had been doomed from the start, as had she. The Kerch had always been led by one goal alone: profit, and they would remain neutral. But Ravka had needed to maintain the pretense of asking—quite desperately—for aid. They had needed Fjerda’s and Kerch’s spies to believe they were without allies.
Months before, Nikolai had given the Kerch exactly what they’d demanded: plans for how to build and arm izmars’ya, underwater ships that could be used to disrupt Zemeni trade routes and blow up Zemeni ships. And the Kerch had gone about doing just that. But what the Kerch didn’t know was that those ships they’d so successfully destroyed had been empty of men and cargo. They were phantom ships, decoys sent out to sea to give the Kerch the illusion of success, while the Zemeni had moved their trade routes up into the clouds with Ravkan airship technology.
The Kerch could have the ocean. The Zemeni would take the sky. Ravka had kept its word and delivered exactly what the Kerch wanted, but not what they needed. That was a lesson Nikolai had learned from his demon.
“The Kerch are going to be furious when they find out,” said Tamar.
“Making people happy isn’t the province of kings,” Nikolai noted. “Perhaps if I’d been born a baker or a puppeteer.”
As they watched, doors at the base of the airships opened and a froth of fine powder gusted downward in a gray-green cloud.