Gunpowder Magnolia

Please note that the chapter below is an early draft. Names and world-building details subject to change. Early chapters are available on my Patreon.

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Lanthe was awake—she was Lanthe—for the first time in weeks. Sprinting through those woods alive with gunfire was like bursting free of a dense and sickly fog. Here, finally, were enemies who acted the damn part. Here, Lanthe knew who she was and what she had to do.

Putting a hand to Ingna’s back, she guided the terrified girl along as they ran. Ingna wasn’t a great runner, and why should she be? Even Yelhwa’s experienced guardswomen, it seemed, had not adequately trained for a situation like this.

“Captain!” Ingna half-gasped, half-sobbed as they ran. “I don’t want to die!”

“You won’t,” Lanthe said, even as the girl palpably tired, dragging on Lanthe’s hand. “You’re with me.”

Heavier footsteps than Lanthe’s and Lady Ingna’s were closing in behind them, crunching the leaf litter between the shots echoing from the path above. It seemed that the three gunmen had opted to give chase instead of reloading. Smart—reloading would have meant losing their quarry in the trees; but not that smart—closing the gap meant facing a Ro in close combat.

“Stop.” Lanthe caught Ingna by her elbow and spun her to a halt, facing their pursuers.

“What?” Ingna squeaked as she took in the three dark shapes bearing down on them.

“We’re not fast enough to outrun them.” Lanthe was being nice; Ingna wasn’t fast enough to outrun them. But even with the advantage of speed, fleeing blind into the deeper darkness of denser trees was asking for trouble. “Hold my glaive”—Lanthe shoved the long weapon into Ingna’s hands—“and back me up if I fumble this.”

“What? No!” Ingna pushed the glaive back at Lanthe. “I can’t!”

“Can’t what? Kill a swordsman with a polearm? Sure, you can. It’s the easiest thing in the world.”

Judging by the wink of moonlight on metal, their three pursuers were each wielding a curved cutlass—not a weapon that would stand up to the reach of a polearm, even a polearm in truly incompetent hands. Ingna accepted the glaive, seemingly more out of panic than anything else, just as the first assassin reached them and Lanthe turned to meet him.

General Chang said there were two types of questions in battle: the extraneous, not to be indulged with urgency, and the necessary, which must be resolved immediately. Questions grew out of confusion, confusion created pause, and every pause in battle was expensive. So, General Chang made sure that all his men knew the difference between the extraneous and the necessary pause. Lanthe had taken in the critical information about her opponents—their intent to kill, how many, how fast, what weapons they had on their person. Who they were and where they came from were extraneous questions to be answered later.

As Lanthe drew her sword, her attacker’s eyes locked on the blade in extraneous confusion. Clearly, he had been expecting a Yao longsword. On seeing the distinctly Ro weapon, he slowed, foundering on extraneous questions: what was a soldier of Ro doing so far from home? Why was he aligned with the Yao? Weren’t their two countries on the brink of open war? His opening swing came slow and telegraphed.

Lanthe parried the attack easily, knocking the man’s cutlass and both his arms upward, exposing the gut and leather armor plated with rectangles of metal. Lanthe’s blade swept a circle from the upward parry around into the man’s middle. The stroke caught him in the weak leather line between rows of steel plating and sank into his stomach.

Lanthe turned at the hips, sliding her sword smoothly through the remainder of the stroke, deepening the cut to slice through internal organs. Her blade slipped free at an upward angle just as the second assassin came at her with a thrust. Lanthe sidestepped and brought her sword circling down on the cutlass, jolting blood droplets into the dark. The defensive strike brought her opponent’s leading hand down and his upper body with it.

As the assassin pitched forward, Lanthe switched directions, bringing her sword up the line of the man’s arm into his throat. She would have brought her blade around in another circle onto the back of the neck, but she had noted that these assassins wore helmets with a steel-plated leather flap on the back, and you really didn’t want to risk a non-fatal blow in a fight with multiple opponents. Every blow had to count. But Lanthe had made a trade-off for the fatality: changing directions, mid-step, was harder than maintaining circular movement from one stroke to the next. It took that fraction of a second longer.

The third assassin was on her before she could free her blade from the second’s neck.

Lanthe knew she was too tight for time as soon as the blade connected and let go of her sword with her left hand. The last assassin was already swinging for her neck—no time to reach for her dagger to block—so she struck out with her left hand, wrist cocked to a right angle, fingers pinched into a crane’s beak to harden her forearm.

The back of her forearm struck the inside of her assailant’s wrist with bruising force, knocking it wide before the cutlass could take her head off. Ideally, the sharp blow to the joint would have forcibly opened the fingers, making her opponent drop his sword. Lanthe must have missed the perfect point of contact because the man kept hold of his cutlass.

As the man’s momentum threw his body into hers, Lanthe brought her left arm over his sword arm and then around in a joint lock so that, if he was going to keep hold of his sword, at least he wouldn’t be able to use it. At the same time, her own sword finally slid free of the second man’s throat. At this range—bodies clamped together—the only viable sword attack was a stab, but Lanthe didn’t get a chance to draw her arm back to deliver one. As soon as her blade came free, her opponent caught her wrist in a crushing grip.

It was a stalemate—the kind Lanthe generally tried to avoid due to her size, but she had still survived her fair share of grapples to the death. She planted her feet, set into her low center of gravity, and tightened her stomach against the larger man. She could throw him, but it would be dangerous. Any disturbance to the joint lock she had on his right arm could drag his cutlass right through her ineffectual Yao silks into her torso.

The man let out a growl, seemingly frustrated that his larger body didn’t immediately overcome Lanthe’s, and jerked forward in a clumsy attempt at a headbutt. Lanthe might have bet on her thick Ro skull and taken the blow, but he had that helmet, so she shifted her head alongside his where he wouldn’t muster any kind of satisfying impact. With her cheek sticky against the leather of his helmet, she inhaled the tang of man sweat and another smell… horse? Had the hostiles come on horseback, then? Extraneous, General Chang’s voice said, and Lanthe jerked back to the task at hand.

“Ready position, my Lady!”

Shoving her nose into the juncture between the man’s leather armor and the flap of his helmet, Lanthe opened her jaws. Ideally, for these purposes, she’d have liked to get at an ear, but with her face crushed between hard pieces of leather, she did the next best thing and sank her teeth into a neck muscle.

Shock jolted the man’s body, unsteadying his stance, which was all Lanthe needed. She shoved her foot behind his, causing his boot to slide in the dirt. It wasn’t enough to throw him but it was enough to force him back.

“Brace!” Lanthe roared through a mouthful of blood—and shoved her opponent onto the glaive.

Ingna had the good sense to hold the weapon with the spear-end forward, so it breached the man’s armor to pierce his body. The only problem was Ingna’s weak form. She stumbled back with the force of a body against the weapon and didn’t achieve the fatal injury Lanthe was looking for.

“Again, Hyonang Ingna!” Lanthe spat out blood and sweat so she could better instruct over the victim's shoulder as he roared and convulsed against her. “Mirror me, back foot planted, knee bent.” Lanthe set her own stance. “Back hand at your hip.” As the wounded man lost his grip on his cutlass and Lanthe’s wrist, Lanthe shifted her hold on his body—left forearm across his clavicle, her right hand clutching the front of his weapons belt for maximum leverage. “Brace! Very good, my Lady. And push!”

This time Lanthe and Ingna shoved into each other at the same time, and the glaive crunched through ribs deep into the man’s body.

“Excellent!” Lanthe breathed a sigh of relief and cast the assassin to the ground.

He wasn’t quite dead yet, and he crashed to the leaves writhing and howling in agony. The hideous barely-human sound of a man whose lungs had begun to fill with blood. Poor, pale Ingna sobbed, choked, then began vomiting uncontrollably.

“Shh.” Lanthe put a hand on Ingna’s back and found her silks sticky with sweat. The noise was reverberating around the darkened hillsides, potentially drawing the attention of more attackers.

“I—” Ingna started, then retched again. “Sorry!” she gagged as Lanthe sidestepped the sick.

“Don’t be,” Lanthe said. “It happens to everyone.”

Well, not everyone. Lanthe had been sliding reflexively into her battle trance since she was fourteen. If she was going to fully feel fear, pain, or nausea, it wasn’t until after the danger had passed. Most soldiers weren’t like that. You had to let them scream and retch their way through their first encounter with carnage and hope they survived to fare better next time.

Lanthe moved from Ingna to put the mortally wounded assassin out of his misery but paused when she realized that the wailing had turned to words. It wasn’t a language Lanthe recognized, but it pulled at deep memories… wrapped her in the smell of salt, the shriek of seagulls, and the crash of waves on the coast. She knew this language from the bustle of the markets at Kailong Bay.

Drawn in pain, the man’s face had gone pale against the darkest godmarks Lanthe had seen on any person. In the dim light, they looked black. Black godmarks meant one thing… but very dark blue godmarks or very dark red godmarks could look black in low light, especially against such pallor. Gently, Lanthe put the edge of her sword to the man’s cheek and drew a smear of blood beneath one of his godmarks for comparison. The deep red was far brighter under the moonlight than these godmarks, and Lanthe’s suspicion was confirmed: she did recognize that language.

“You came here from Medyan.”

Yao’s western neighbor, the trade giant of the Ten Kingdoms, the birthplace of the firearm. None of this explained how a force this size had penetrated deep into Yao with a bunch of cannons, but at least one of Lanthe’s extraneous questions was answered.

“Thank you,” she said and buried her sword in the man’s eye socket.

His body made a last pitiful sound, then shuddered and went still.

Ingna was still retching, though it seemed there was little left in her stomach.

“Half a minute, my Lady,” Lanthe called to the girl, “then I need you composed and ready to move.”

Taking a knee beside the corpse, Lanthe used the flap of his uniform to clean her sword before returning it to its scabbard. The glaive came out next and received only a cursory cleaning; since it didn’t live in a scabbard, there wasn’t an immediate danger of rust. Last, Lanthe unclipped the man’s holster from his belt, pulled his pistol out, and turned it over in her hands. Clipping the holster to her own belt, she heaved the man’s body onto its side to get at his ammunition pouch. The gun loaded much like a Ro pistol. Fifteen seconds even.

By the time Lanthe finished, the sounds of battle from the road had bled down the slopes into the forests. At least, that was what it sounded like through the confusing echo of gunfire and voices.

“Up, Lady Ingna,” Lanthe said, holstering the gun and securing the ammunition pouch to her belt. “We need to find better cover.”

Ingna was still slumped against a tree, nearly as pale as the dead men on the ground around them. Lanthe suspected she would still be vomiting if there was anything left in her stomach.

“I-I can’t—” she gulped.

“You can.” Lanthe took Ingna by the arms and pulled her upright. “You’ve done well so far. Your father would be proud of you.”

“Y-you think so?”

“I’m sure of it.” Lanthe wasn’t sure. In fact, she’d have bet money that Hyonang Yinzo would be horrified to see his daughter in this state. “I need you to get your feet back under you—if not for me, for your father, alright?”

“Alright.”

“Let’s move.”

As Lanthe and Ingna pressed deeper into the trees, they lost the moonlight. In the pitch darkness, Lanthe slowed and began moving by feel. Keeping one hand on Ingna’s arm, she extended her glaive forward, moving it from side to side to make sure they didn’t run into any trees while she placed each foot slowly to avoid tripping or twisting an ankle.

“I can’t see,” Ingna said.

“I know. But that means our enemies can’t see either.”

A little further, and Lanthe would have them stop. Once she found a good hiding place, she would tuck Ingna away and stand guard until morning. If Lanthe had been alone, she might have tried to find her way back to the road and to Tairo. With Ingna in tow, it made more sense to wait out the night until they heard Yao voices and knew they were safe.

“Wait.” Lanthe paused as moonlight peeped through the trees ahead. Her glaive tapped against a tree trunk directly before them, and the clunk was different from the sound the weapon had made against the preceding trees. Stiffer. Drier.

“What is it, Captain?”

“The growth here isn’t as healthy,” Lanthe said. “That means worse cover and looser ground. We’re heading back the way we came.”

As the two shuffled to reorient in the dark, Ingna’s foot slipped on a smooth rock or root, and she stumbled into Lanthe’s chest.

“Sorry!” Ingna gasped as a dry root cracked beneath Lanthe’s boot. “I didn’t mean to—”

“Shh!” Lanthe hissed as a sound made her heart drop: the hissing trickle of falling dirt down from the cracked root—and down, and down, and down a long way into the echoing dark. There was a sharp drop at Lanthe’s back, obscured by the darkness, and the root bearing most of their combined weight had just cracked.

“Don’t move, my Lady,” Lanthe whispered with Ingna pressed to her chest. “I’m going to count to three. On three, you’re going to throw all your weight backwards. Understood?”

“Yes, Captain,” Ingna said shakily.

If Ingna hauled back and Lanthe pitched forward, they might make it back to stable ground.

“One,” Lanthe started—

And the ground dropped from under their feet.

As Ingna shrieked, Lanthe clutched the girl close with one arm and cast her glaive away with the other; it was lucky the weapon hadn’t impaled anyone as the carriage tumbled from the road, but Lanthe wasn’t going to take her chances a second time. With her dominant hand free, she grabbed for purchase on the slope. Her heels dug into whatever they could find. There was only crumbling rocky dirt, burning as it slid through Lanthe’s fingers, but dirt was better than nothing. It meant that the pair weren’t freefalling to the rocks below. The incline might be too steep to stop their descent, but it was slight enough that the pair skidded to a stop on lower ground in a cloud of dust, bruised by rocks, covered in dirt but alive.

“Sorry about that.” Lanthe set a trembling Ingna on her feet, shook the dirt from her throbbing right hand, and surveyed their surroundings.

The drop had brought them into the full moonlight, which illuminated everything.

“Shit,” Lanthe muttered.

They were at the bottom of a ravine where a river had probably run years ago—or no… Lanthe thought, noting the spongy give beneath her boots and the way sandy soil snaked between rocks in ribbons of tan and brown, mocking water. Not years ago. A river had carved this ground as recently as the last rainfall. Eyes turning skyward, Lanthe scanned the night for clouds and found none. Good. Flash flooding wouldn’t be a danger unless these highlands were miles wider than they appeared on the map.

The side of the ravine from which they had fallen was all loose dirt, too unstable to climb. The other side was sheer rock, stretching nearly vertically over them as high as two houses. Lanthe might have tried her luck climbing either side on her own, but there was no way she would get Ingna out of this trap. And it was a trap. They were in the open without cover, fully visible under the full moon, with only two directions to run. A gunman couldn’t ask for easier targets. Whether the Medyan approached from either end of the ravine or fired on them from above, they were in serious danger.

Lanthe looked from one end of the ravine to the other, trying to judge which way might lead to a shallower riverbed and an easier way out. Both paths looked equally unpromising, but they couldn’t stay where they were. Lanthe retrieved her glaive from where it had fallen and returned to Ingna.

“Come, my Lady. We need to move.” As Lanthe pulled the girl into motion, however, something was wrong. Ingna sagged against her, clutching her sleeve with shaking hands.

“I hurt my ankle.”

“Is it broken?”

“I-I don’t know.” Ingna tried to take a step and buckled again with a wince. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s alright.” Lanthe handed Ingna the glaive. “Hold onto this.”

“No—I-I can’t—”

“Not to kill anyone,” Lanthe said. “This time, I really mean just hold it.”

With the glaive in Ingna’s hands, Lanthe slung the girl across her shoulders, straightened up, and laughed.

“What is it?” Ingna asked.

“Thank Heaven you don’t have any muscle on you, my Lady.” Lanthe rolled her shoulders under Ingna’s negligible weight. “This isn’t going to be as miserable as I thought.”

Lanthe proceeded as quickly as she dared. Under her own weight, she was unlikely to roll an ankle; the few times she had hurt her ankle had occurred during training with a man’s weight in rice, sand, or rocks across her shoulders.

“I don’t suppose you have any idea how so many Medyan got into Yao with big clunky cannons in tow?” Lanthe asked as she searched for steady footing across the uneven ravine floor.

“Sorry, Captain, I don’t.”

Lanthe hadn’t expected any other answer. Talking through her extraneous questions was just preferable to walking in silence.

“What about the conflict between Yao and Medyan? Have you heard any chatter about that among Princess Yelhwa’s ladies?”

“They don’t chat much about that sort of thing with juniors like me. At least… they didn’t.” Ingna took a shaky breath, and Lanthe realized that the girl’s mind had raced back up the darkened slopes to Mina, Pinan, and Seng lying broken and dead in the leaves.

“Grief later, my Lady,” Lanthe said firmly. “Weakness later. If we survive the night, there will be time for all of that later.”

“But—”

“Think of seeing your father again,” Lanthe said, “and your brother.”

Ingna lifted her head slightly. “Will I? Could I?”

“Certainly not if we both die here,” Lanthe said.

“I didn’t know my own father had been deployed to Ro,” Ingna said. “I didn’t know anyone had been deployed to Ro.”

“Your father doesn’t think much of Princess Yelhwa, does he?” Lanthe said and felt Ingna’s soft body tense slightly across her shoulders.

“I don’t think he understands, Captain.”

“Understands what?”

“It’s hard to explain…” Ingna faltered. “You have to have read her letters… or have trained under her.”

“Trained what?” Lanthe couldn’t help a laugh. “How to get your people ambushed, run off the road, and shot in the head?”

“She always plans carefully!” Ingna protested. “She wasn’t—there must have been no way to see this coming.”

“Oh, she clearly saw something coming.” Otherwise, why change routes twice? “Knowing ambush was a possibility, she could have not led us into a death trap. Does she just not understand the realities of the field? Or perhaps the geography of her own country?”

Sunsai come again, my ass.

“You shouldn’t say that of Her Excellency!” Ingna said. “As sitting ruler, she is the supreme commander of Yao’s military.”

“And this is why random nobles shouldn’t inherit their military titles,” Lanthe grumbled, belatedly realizing how very insubordinate and very Tenro she sounded.

“What did you just say, Captain?” Ingna asked as though sure she had heard wrong.

“Look,” Lanthe sighed, “when my first battle ended in disaster, I was young like you. Lying among the corpses of my friends, waiting to join them in death, I didn’t blame my commanding officer. But that was because I didn’t know any better. The thing is…” Lanthe had never let herself voice—or even solidly think—these thoughts before. But here she was in Yao, with a girl who was unlikely to even recognize the names in the story. “General Fen rose through the ranks on the back of his father’s and grandfather’s achievements. He bypassed half the systems meant to weed out the weak-willed and weak-minded. He was known to be a drunk even before his son was killed…”

Lanthe had never let herself put these facts next to the memory of arrows bristling like a dead forest out of her fellow soldiers. A part of her still couldn’t do it. General Fen had been a commanding officer and a countryman… a father in grief. But Yelhwa was the enemy. It was easy to put Yelhwa’s confident smirk beside Lady Seng’s shattered skull. Easy to think about the trust Lady Mina had put in her princess moments before she lay dead from cannon fire.

“I… don’t know who General Fen is,” Ingna said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Lanthe said. “He was just… someone who probably shouldn’t have held the position he did. And his soldiers paid the price. Because we assumed a little bit of this belief you hold so dear in Yao: that divine intelligence comes with nobility.”

“Does it not, Captain?”

“I don’t know,” Lanthe said, “but look around you, my Lady. Does this situation look like the product of divine intelligence?”

“I’m… sure her Excellency has a plan,” Ingna said.

“Well then, let’s thank Heaven that I’m not Yao, and I don’t answer to your supreme commander, my Lady. You may be the only one of your people to survive the night.”

As Lanthe had hoped, the ravine was getting shallower as she plodded onward. Had Ingna not injured her ankle, they both would have been able to climb easily up the northern slope. But if Lanthe was going to carry Ingna to higher ground without slipping, she needed a more gradual incline.

Something warm and wet seeped into Lanthe’s sleeve. Suddenly worried that she had started bleeding from an injury she hadn’t noticed, Lanthe touched her arm. It wasn’t blood. Ingna was crying.

“I didn’t mean it, my Lady,” Lanthe said. “About you being the only survivor. I’m sure someone else is out there.”

The shouts and gunshots had dissipated into the stray bang of a cannon or crack of a gunshot in the distance. This meant one of two things: either the Medyan had handily slaughtered the Yao on the road and were now searching these adjacent woods for survivors, or the Yao had had the good sense to scatter into the trees of their own accord, forcing the Medyan to separate in pursuit. Lanthe hoped it was the latter. If the Yao had turned to form a line of archers against guns and cannons, then they were all dead—at least by the rules of combat that Lanthe understood. But there were Yao’s graphemancers to consider…

Of course, within a court full of educated lords and ladies, it was impossible to tell who was a graphemancer and who was just literate. Lanthe got the feeling Yelhwa liked it that way; if it was so easy for a commander to keep her “big guns” secret, why not take advantage of that? The secrecy just left Lanthe annoyingly unable to calculate Yao’s chances against their Medyan attackers. Assuming there were ten graphemancers among Yelhwa’s ladies and soldiers—and assuming all of them had similar abilities to the mage at Yansey—the Yao actually stood a good chance under gunfire. But if there was just the one… Yelhwa had been riding near the front of the party, far from where the attack had begun. Even if her speed, power, and range were all superior to Lord Peilen’s, she still needed to be able to see her enemies, didn’t she? Gunfire could have easily eaten up half the party before she got in position to create a shield or return fire.

Perhaps, if Lanthe hadn’t gotten quite so lost in her projections of the battle on the road, she would have noticed the clatter of small rocks from further up the ravine and paused to consider her own surroundings more carefully. A line of trees clinging to the cliff on their left shadowed the way ahead. And by the time Lanthe saw a figure emerging from the darkness, it was too late to run or cover.

“Fuck!” In a single motion, Lanthe slung Ingna to the ground and drew her stolen pistol.

She had the hammer pulled back in the next fraction of a second, but by that time, there were already too many targets emerging from the shadows alongside the first. Five… six… seven, eight, nine.

“Captain?” Ingna whispered, up on her elbows, shaking like a cornered rabbit as she took in the advancing Medyan.

“Close your eyes and think of home, Hyonang Ingna,” Lanthe said in a low voice. “And when your father gets to Heaven, tell him I’m sorry.”

As the Medyan stepped closer, moonlight fell on their black godmarks and nine gleaming guns… and they had yet to fire. Lanthe lowered her pistol and wondered if her voice would serve her better than the gun.

When you cannot overcome, confuse.

If she could see that their godmarks were black, they could see that hers were blue—which was perhaps why they hadn’t filled her with bullets, despite being within the perfect range to do so. Or maybe it was the way she held her pistol at rest, in military form that no Yao would be able to replicate. They weren’t sure what to make of her yet.

With her gun still, the gears of Lanthe’s mind spun one into the next. Maybe there was a diplomatic way to defer those nine bullets. If Lanthe spoke to these men in her own language, like a friend, maybe she could convince them that she was a spy for King Josan of Ro. Lady Ingna was a hostage with information on the princess of Yao. If she played this deftly, she might even get invaluable information from these men. And even if her claims didn’t hold up under scrutiny, the lie would still draw the Medyan close enough for Lanthe to make use of her glaive. She was no Tenro; she couldn’t casually slice through ten swordsmen without breaking a sweat—even if they did refrain from using their guns in the melee. But it was worth a try.

Lanthe had just taken a breath to call “friends” in Ro—when boots skidded in the gravel at her back, and a feminine voice called, “Drop!”

All attention turned to the newcomer stumbling into something like a fighting stance on the shadowy riverbed: a skinny lady in Yao riding gear. What did she mean “drop”? For what? Lanthe didn’t see so much as a longbow on the woman, nor did she appear to have any backup. Then Yao characters crackled to life at pale fingertips. Heavenly fire illuminated a nymph’s face, twisted into a demon’s snarl.

“Now, Luyang!” Yelhwa roared.

Lanthe fell flat over Ingna—just in time for fire to fill the ravine as suddenly and ferociously as any flash flood. Heat seared the back of Lanthe’s neck as flames leapt over her like a cavalry over a shield wall and plunged onto the nine Medyan.

So much for diplomacy.

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I hope you enjoyed this chapter of Gunpowder Magnolia! You can get early chapters + more serialized content from the world of Altima on my Patreon.