Chapter 21 #2
A few dropped their weapons and moved aside without hesitation.
The others charged forward and met swift ends.
The Gold Guard were quick with blades, and Shiro felled a beanstalk of a man who collapsed, gutted, against the stuck storeroom door.
Nova thought to use their assembled strength to try the door again, but the turret blasts overhead continued to shake the world. Every round could mean Yemi’s death.
She stared at the door as Cutter led the others to the stairwell that would take them to the turrets.
Yemi would come back. She had to come back.
· YEMI ·
Yemaya was at sea. She stood on the dark, slime-slick deck of a ghost ship, staring forward into the night. The ocean had calmed its chaos for her and the fleet of a hundred ships in her wake, but she could still hear its roaring churn and spy the edges of its whirlpools just beyond her reach.
When she raised her hand to view Chairre’s cliffs through a spyglass, the limb was not her own. Bare, archless feet sank in the muck and algae and held tightly to the worn wood.
She could turn her head to see the dozens of other captive ghost warriors in their tattered rags, most staring forward into the maw of the mission, others marveling at the return to their corporeal form, however gaunt and cursed they appeared.
With a whisper of her will, Yemi could climb into any of their heads, see through their eyes.
She could dream any order and watch their bodies move, puppetlike, to do her bidding before returning to her own body sheltered in the posh, if waterlogged, cabin of the lead ship.
This was control. She reveled in how natural it all felt. Her heart pounded not from anxiety but from excitement. Her breathing came as easily as her smile in the dark. Was this what it meant to stand in her power? Was this the divinity she was always meant to feel?
She could see the city lights now. Chairre was in the hours between dinner and dreams, doors to flourishing businesses locked in peace until dawn, bellies full, limbs ready for comfortable rest. The picture of a prosperous nation enjoying the fruits of her shunned mother’s leadership.
How, with everything, had they decided they’d been given nothing?
Never mind, she thought. This wouldn’t be a good night for sleep anyway.
Angling the spyglass toward Chairre’s docks, Yemaya spotted a black barrier of Ixia’s warships, formed to bar an attack from the coast. They were still being tossed violently by the sea’s unrest, but heavy anchors in shallow water kept them in their places.
With what amounted to a whisper, she commanded the tattered sails of her ghost fleet collapsed.
The centermost vessel of traitors—her father’s ship—was the first to fire.
Warning shots. Intermittent, booming bursts launched cannonballs at the front of her line but they fell short by a frustrating matter of yards.
No one knew the reach of her father’s cannon like she did.
Yemaya turned her head just slightly, signaling a segment of her forces to climb overboard.
Half the ghosts on her decks lowered themselves into the water.
They would sneak onto the Ixian ships and liberate them from her traitors, opening her path to the docks.
She waited patiently, letting the enemy’s confusion mount.
The ghost ships were relics. There would be no radioing for identification or demands.
The hulls were wood, held together more by magic than matter.
Their armaments were few. There would be no firing on Ixia.
What they lacked in advanced weapons, they made up for in sheer numbers and haunted immortality.
The spyglass revealed dark shadows climbing through portholes and onto crowded decks.
What followed was a chaos of panic. War cries and clashes of metal sounded out over the rushing waters.
Small fires and larger explosions backlit the tossing of bodies overboard.
In a matter of minutes, the firing stopped and the flags were lowered.
The ships gave up their broadsides to make way for her to land. Yemi smiled as she signaled forward.
“Clear the streets,” she commanded her legions. “Slay those who take up arms against you. The others, ask the name of their queen. Take to the basilica anyone who answers ‘Harpy.’ ”
By and large, the citizens of the Green Zone fled at the sight of her legions. The ghosts went building to building and home to home, kicking in doors and demanding an answer to the question “Who is your queen?”
The taller buildings of the Green Zone, with their manicured stoops and green-tiled rooftops, tapered as Yemi led her legions to its outer edge and approached the city sprawl in the body of a giantess.
The entrance, it seemed, had been violently abandoned—tall wrought iron gates and stone pillars singed with ash, the small gatehouse barely more than a shadow on the building behind it after having been burned down.
Beyond it lay Broad Street. A narrow drainage canal ran down its cobbled center, intended to funnel rainwater back to the ocean. Tonight, it was a battle line.
On the other side of it, the contingent of Chairre’s citizens who intended to play the role of opposition gathered between and on top of terra-cotta buildings, scowling and looking her in the eye before they spat in the street at her feet.
Yemaya scoffed as she stopped before the gates, her own army at her back.
She recognized their leader it seemed from a past life, one where he’d been mostly wrapped in shadows in a cage beneath her palace.
Beside him, an equally familiar tongueless heathen brandished a hooked blade and vicious sneer.
“Mr. Caphree,” she called in two voices: the one of the ghost she inhabited, and her own. She wanted to be familiar to him. She’d regarded him as reasonable, once.
Mr. Caphree took a moment to register her, then shook his head as if the entire matter couldn’t be helped. He stood before a roaring mob with a flare gun in his hand.
“No masters!” he barked, and the city echoed after him. The squadron of ghosts remained eerily silent.
“No tyrants!” Caphree raised the flare gun and fired into the air. It showered them all in eerie green light and set off a chain of flare lights spaced out along the canal.
“Ever forward!”
In a gesture of so be it, Yemi calmly raised her arms, and the whole of her forces pressed forward, a sea around the rock of her. Waves of ghosts clashed with furious citizens along Broad Street. Explosions rumbled as they scaled walls to eliminate grenadiers on rooftops.
Yemaya did not have to move through the crowd herself to enact her violence.
She stood in the street and cast her mind into the bodies of ghosts sent before her, watching from behind their eyes as they slaughtered her enemies.
She ensured that she held the blade when it finally went through the tongueless heathen’s jugular, though by now he bored her.
Truthfully, she had little interest in the faithful now.
She was searching for familiar faces: senators, leaders who would answer the One Question correctly and be left in peace or dragged past her to the basilica with the other traitors.
There was no one left to tell her which she should prefer.
The blood and smoke and ember felt like music in her blood.
All the parts of her that knew war was not something to be enjoyed had been removed, replaced by a promise of victory—the fulfillment of a dream she’d held quietly in her heart since the day her father was murdered.
She was now the part of her mother glorified in battle stories, more god than creature.
Mr. Caphree had not been felled yet. She was looking for him when he appeared in her periphery, much too close.
He held a calm fierceness in his eyes as he dodged a ghost and came dangerously close to her face with a hatchet, when a ghost appeared before her as a towering shield.
In one swift move, the ghost disarmed Caphree by breaking his arm at the elbow.
He screamed, and the hatchet clattered to the ground.
Caphree reached for it, but the ghost got to it first, wielding it in one hand and the back of Caphree’s head in the other. The two would meet in mere moments.
“Stop,” Yemaya commanded, and the ghost halted with what appeared to be some reluctance, instead pushing Caphree to his knees and holding him there by his hair. She stepped closer and waited for Caphree to look her in the eye.
“Bring this one to the basilica. He’s special.”
It was Lirik who had given her the idea: A siren’s power might be able to change their minds. She was inclined to test it, and if it didn’t take… Well.
The ghost brought Caphree to his feet and helped him follow her back toward the Rock. Others were being led from throughout the city in pairs or small groups, all terrified, all regarding her with some trepidation or regret. Even the faithful seemed fearful.
The Gold Guard had the basilica and its grounds secured with a contingent of ghosts.
Nearly two hundred people knelt in neat lines across the ornate brick promenade, organized according to how they’d answered the question and the voluntary or involuntary manner of their capture.
Lips moved in silent, rapid prayer. Eyes gazed out over the shaken city, the plumes of red dust and smoke drifting upward into what had been a beautiful night sky.
The ghost pushed Caphree to his knees just before the entrance, not far from where the Bear King had met his end.
“Is this how you command loyalty?” Caphree winced. “You’d burn the capital to the ground? For what?”