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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Given the choice, Lanthe would not have returned to the road without first confirming the numbers and position of the enemy. But now that Yelhwa’s confidence was back, Lanthe didn’t know that it was wise to push back against the princess’s conviction.

“Any Yao who survived the night will return to the road with the light,” Yelhwa said as Lanthe knelt to wake Ingna. “The sun cresting the hills will be their signal to head for the Spearshaft Ravine en masse.”

Ingna started when Lanthe touched her shoulder and woke, gasping in fear.

“It’s just me, Lady Ingna,” Lanthe said and was treated to a fresh scream as Ingna’s rapidly blinking eyes registered her face. Right. “And that’s just blood,” Lanthe added, remembering that her face must be smeared with it after Yelhwa had dispatched a man directly on top of her. “Medyan blood. Not mine.” Mostly the truth; only a bit of it was Lanthe’s.

“I-I… fell asleep…” Ingna scooted herself up into a sitting position wincing in discomfort as she found ridges of rock and root beneath her. “I wasn’t supposed to fall asleep…”

“Better that you did, sweet,” Yelhwa said, her gaze fixed on the climbing sun as though the brilliance didn’t hurt her eyes. “You didn’t miss much. Up, now.” The order was more for Lanthe than Ingna, given that the girl couldn’t walk. “We’re moving out.”

“Come, my Lady,” Lanthe said gently. “Put your arm across my shoulders.”

Ingna groaned pitifully as Lanthe pulled her to her feet.

“Easy,” Lanthe sighed. “Keep hold of my shoulders.” She slid an arm under Ingna’s knees and lifted her.

“What happened after I fell asleep?” Ingna said groggily, her eyes still squinted against the light. Her breath was quite bad, and Lanthe was both relieved and amused to realize that that wasn’t just her; it happened to noblewomen as well.

“Later, Ingna.” Yelhwa had started east, nimbly picking her way over the uneven ground without a care for Lanthe’s extra burden.

“You’re hurt, Captain!” Ingna’s wide eyes had landed on the cut across Lanthe’s cheek. “I can try to walk.”

“It’s my face, not my leg, Lady Ingna,” Lanthe said as she hurried to catch up with the princess.

“Not just your face…” The hand resting on Lanthe’s chest had found the standing collar of her Yao tunic. Somewhere in the night’s struggles, the cloth button at the throat had torn open, and Ingna’s fingers tentatively pulled the collar wider, exposing what were likely hideous bruises on Lanthe’s neck. “You–”

“Leave that,” Lanthe said roughly and hitched Ingna up in her arms so sharply that the little lady cried out in surprise. “It’s nothing to worry about.” When Ingna’s weight settled again, it was with her head further up on Lanthe’s shoulder, where she would have no more occasion to study the embarrassing bruising—or worse, the conspicuous flatness of Lanthe’s windpipe.

“Where are we going?” Ingna asked.

“The road, for some reason,” Lanthe said and was annoyed to find that both the strain of Ingna’s weight into her arms and the results of the strangulation were making themselves audible in her voice. She cleared her throat. “Her Excellency says we will meet the remaining Yao there and head for the Spearshaft Ravine—though she hasn’t explained how the plan is supposed to work beyond that.”

“You told me to conceptualize the terrain beyond a Sen board, Luyang. I’m considering it.”

“How, your Excellency?” Lanthe failed to see how putting themselves out in the open and then into a confining ravine was supposed to benefit them when their enemies had firearms.

“The Spearshaft Ravine is the work of Wedu, one of Sunsai’s generals and greatest pupils,” Yelhwa said without slowing. “He and a few of his men were trapped in these hills. Their enemies had them hemmed in and meant to starve them out. Instead of giving himself over to the enemy, Wedu called on the powers of Heaven with all his eloquence. Heaven answered and split the western cliffs asunder as cleanly as the stroke of a longsword.”

This was a mythology lesson, not geography—and not relevant, as far as Lanthe was concerned. “Even if this ravine we’re heading for was magic-made, Your Excellency, what does that have to do with our course of action?”

“Everything, Luyang,” Yelhwa said with a coy smile. “Everything. Ravines carved by rivers wind, yes? Even when the river runs mostly straight, they wind a little.”

“Yes, your Excellency.”

“The Spearshaft was made by spellwork, so it does not wind.”

“So…” Lanthe shook her head, uncomprehending. “You want to ride into a narrow, perfectly straight ravine pursued by men with guns. You know how bullets fly, right, your Excellency? They fly straight. And about falling rocks? Surely, those pose a significant threat in a narrow canyon?”

“The Spearshaft walls are singularly stable,” Yelhwa said. “That’s how they have stood unchanged for all these centuries without collapsing or filling in with debris.”

“Alright, but has anyone ever fired a cannon inside those walls?” Plenty of land formations in Ro had stood unchanged for centuries until they met cannons.

“They won’t have a chance to fire any cannons, I assure you.”

“That’s not something you can reliably control, your Excellency. Even if no shots are fired deliberately—”

“Captain Luyang.” Yelhwa turned to face Lanthe—not quite aggressive, but sharply enough that Lanthe came to a stop. “You told me to find my confidence in this field, did you not?”

“I… did say that, your Excellency.”

“Well, I have done as you said,” Yelhwa said. “I have calmed, considered the terrain, and come to a decision. Now, kindly do as I say. Follow.”

By this time, they had reached the last incline toward the road. Every fiber of Lanthe resisted stepping out into the open in the growing light, but she followed the princess up the gradual slope anyway.

“Is it safe up there?” Ingna voiced Lanthe’s main concern.

“Her Excellency seems to think so,” Lanthe said as she joined Yelhwa at the roadside, “so I suppose we’ll see.”

Yelhwa just turned to Lanthe with a self-satisfied smile. That was when Lanthe heard the rumble from around the bend. Not a rockslide. Hoofbeats. A wave of horses swept into view, and Lanthe let out a breath of relief when she saw the red of Yao military silks.

They were being pursued. Not that Lanthe couldn’t see any Medyan soldiers, but there was no other reason for the Yao to be in full gallop. Instead of calling her people to halt or slow down, Yelhwa stepped into the middle of the road to face the oncoming thunder.

“What are you doing!” Lanthe demanded in alarm.

Yelhwa just gestured for Lanthe to follow her into the open.

“What!?”

A hand pressed to Lanthe’s chest, and she looked down to find Ingna as calm as the princess.

“Go on, Captain,” the girl said with her sweet smile and her morning breath. “It’s safe.”

Ingna so rarely seemed unworried. It was her reassurance that ultimately got Lanthe to smother all her instincts and step onto the road. By this time, the Yao riders were nearly on them.

Riding at the head of the party, General Runkai shouted a Yao command that Lanthe didn’t understand—a piercing musical cry, more tone than articulation—of the kind southern barbarians used to communicate while riding. At the sound, the horses shifted, parting.

The princess let out a high whistle, and a riderless horse—her horse—surged out of the break at a gallop. And Lady Mina must have been serious about how much the princess trained with horses. Because Yelhwa caught the creature by its tack as it reached her and swung effortlessly into the saddle. Like all Yao riders, Yelhwa moved like she and her horse were a single animal.

As the bone-shaking thunder of hooves closed on Lanthe, she stiffened, terrifyingly aware that a collision would break every bone in her body. But the riders flowed around her like water around a rock. General Runkai shouted a command to another soldier, who leaned from his saddle at what seemed like an impossible angle and swept Ingna from Lanthe’s arms onto his horse.

“Captain Luyang!” a voice called in Ro, and Tairo’s hand extended out of the tumult of hooves and red silks.

Lanthe might not have much experience astride a horse, but she had ample experience killing and unseating mounted warriors. With a rider bearing down on her as Tairo did now, she knew how to gauge her distance and time at the moment of contact. As Cloud galloped past, Lanthe had no trouble catching Tairo’s arm so that his sword hand locked around her forearm. And instead of hauling him from the saddle onto her blade, she pushed from the ground with both feet and let him swing her onto Cloud’s back behind him. The momentum was almost too much, and Lanthe had to grab hard to Tairo to keep from pitching off the far side of the horse.

“Sorry!” Tairo said over the thunder and snort of horses. “You’re light without your armor.”

“I take it the Medyan are behind us?” Lanthe asked, wrapping her arms around Tairo as best she could with his glaive in the way.

“Not very close,” Tairo said. “Well out of shooting range, but yes. For some reason, Lady Suzu insists that we reach the Spearshaft Ravine as far ahead of them as we can.”

Looking around them, Lanthe tried to gauge how many Yao were left, but it was hard to tell. Many riderless horses had stayed with the herd, like wild horses on the plains, making any sort of count difficult.

“Are you alright?” Lanthe asked, knowing she was audible only because her mouth was so near Tairo’s ear.

“Yes.” He turned his head so she could hear his response. “I was near the front with General Runkai when the attack started. A dozen of us were able to stay together as a unit and fend off the Medyan through the night. The rest here are other survivors we picked up after we began moving toward the Spearshaft. What about you, Luyang? Eventful night?”

“You have no idea.”

“How far to the ravine, General?” Yelhwa’s voice said from somewhere several horses up.

“Ahead, your Excellency,” the general boomed. “We’re there!”

That was when Lanthe saw the cliffs rising above the rest of the hills that formed the horizon, solid gray but for a single slit of light straight down the center, as though a god had split the rock with a meat cleaver. The Spearshaft Ravine. The air chilled as the group of riders passed from the morning sunlight into the shadow of those cliffs.

So many myths described the graphemancers of Old Yao using their Heavenly powers to shape the land itself. Standing on the border hills Sunsai had supposedly raised against Ro, Lanthe had been skeptical. This ravine was something that could not possibly have occurred naturally. It was as Yelhwa had described: too straight, its walls too smooth to have been shaped by anything but the hand of the divine. There was no natural ravine a mile long and scarcely two horses wide where you could stand on the one side and see light through the other.

“Nuiye! Anang!” Yelhwa called to two of her ladies. “To the front of the line with General Runkai! There will probably be more Medyan waiting on the other side. You know what to do.”

“Yes, Your Excellency!”

The ladies, who had been riding near the middle of the party, sped ahead on their slender horses to join General Runkai.

“Single file into the pass!” Yelhwa commanded, dropping back as Runkai and his riders forged ahead.

And Lanthe noticed that even the seasoned general didn’t question the princess’s orders for a moment. Was he simply better at hiding his misgivings than Lanthe? Or did he, with all his experience, genuinely have that much faith in the princess?

Yelhwa had dropped to the back of the group just in front of Cloud as the gray mare’s hooves brought Lanthe and Tairo to the mouth of the ravine.

“That’s a death trap,” Lanthe whispered as her eyes tracked the narrow walls to their high peaks on either side.

“It does look that way,” Tairo said grimly.

For a normal group of travelers pursued by normal aggressors, the canyon would have been a treacherous choice; a group could be easily chased down in the tight space and slaughtered one at a time. With this particular group of travelers and pursuers—with cannons and Yelhwa’s reckless use of fire at play—the risks were considerably worse. One cannonball or gunpowder explosion—even a loud noise—could unseat the supposedly stable cliff face, and there would be no place to run.

Lanthe’s arms tightened slightly around Tairo’s middle, and she was glad he had the reins. She would have hauled back, unwilling to press forward into the narrow slit. “She’s killed us all.”

“Suzu, Mina, Chang Tairo, at the back with me!” Yelhwa commanded from behind them.

Wait, Lanthe thought. Had the princess just said Mina?

As Tairo reined Cloud in to let the last few Yao soldiers ride ahead into the ravine, Lanthe turned to look back at the other two riders who had hung back.

“You!” she exclaimed when she saw Lady Mina—battered from the fall, a bandage wrapped around her head but very much alive. “You were dead!”

“I was unconscious.” Lady Mina was riding a pale horse with no saddle—the missing horse from the carriage, Lanthe realized. Mina must have found the animal in the woods and somehow calmed and mounted it without any riding gear.

Lanthe twisted around to look back at Mina as the lady fell into single file behind Cloud in the narrow ravine. “You looked dead.” Lathe had been so sure. “Like your body was broken.”

“Oh, my joints will do that.” Mina demonstratively popped her shoulder out of place and then back in.

“Oh, Heaven…” One of Lanthe’s girl cousins had been double-jointed like that as a child, but robust men’s bodies generally didn’t do that. Having served on battlefields exclusively with men, Lanthe saw a body bent that way and assumed death.

“I think I was unconscious—or partly—when those first shots went off and you fled with Ingna,” Mina said. “It’s all a little foggy. I just remember hearing the sounds of battle and knowing I’d better lie still and look dead since I was far too dizzy to defend myself. When the commotion had passed and I was back to myself, I got up and found this good girl wandering the area.” Mina leaned forward with a hand in her mount’s mane and petted the horse’s neck. “With a horse and my shielding spells, I managed to keep myself safe through the night. I connected with General Runkai and the others around dawn.”

“I see,” Lanthe said as though this was a normal thing Mina was describing.

For her part, Lanthe wouldn’t attempt to mount any horse—even one she knew very well—without a saddle and reins. It seemed that while Lanthe had been harshly judging the late Lady Seng’s performance in the field, she had entirely missed Mina’s. Mediocre Sen player she might be, but Lady Mina had exercised good judgment when it mattered.

Perhaps Lanthe had judged these women incompetent prematurely—she certainly hoped so as Cloud followed Yelhwa’s horse deeper into the ravine. They weren’t idiots; they just had some fundamental misunderstandings about the way firearms worked.

The ravine was cold—like a sliver of premature autumn here at the end of summer. Lanthe guessed that sunlight only touched this ground for a few moments each day. For the rest, it seemed to retain the chill of a subterranean cave. But it wasn’t the temperature that made Lanthe’s skin crawl; she had weathered an entire campaign in the knee-deep snows of northern Ro. It was the terrible closeness of the walls—near enough on each side that Lanthe could have reached out and touched them. She kept waiting for her glaive or Tairo’s to scrape terribly against the rock. But Cloud, excellent horse that she was, seemed to have an almost proprioceptive awareness of her riders and their weapons and managed to trot along without anything bumping against the walls.

Feeling the constriction in her chest, Lanthe wished Tairo could kick Cloud into a gallop again, just to get them to the other side faster. But running a horse full-speed wasn’t safe hemmed in like this. Supposing Yelhwa was right about more Medyan waiting at the far side of the ravine, the riders at the front would probably slow to face them even if they weren’t shot dead. And running straight into the back of them at full tilt wouldn’t be ideal.

“Stop here,” Yelhwa ordered over her shoulder, and the four horses slowed, letting the other Yao ride onward. “Mina, dismount. The rest of you, stay in the saddle.” Yelhwa took a leg over the back of her horse and slid to the ground in the cramped space. “Excuse me, sweetheart.” She touched Cloud’s flank gently as she slipped past the horse to join Mina, who had just dismounted.

“What are we doing, your Excellency?” Lanthe asked, wondering how far behind the Medyan were. Because the moment they entered the ravine and started firing, it was over.

“You are not here to question the princess, Captain Luyang,” Lady Suzu snapped, charming as always. “You are here to answer her questions and follow orders.”

“You left the Medyan approximately a mile back, yes, Suzu?” Yelhwa said as she and Mina sidled past Suzu’s horse to face the direction from which their pursuers would be coming.

“That’s correct, your Excellency.”

“And question for you two.” Yelhwa leaned past Suzu’s horse to look at Lanthe and Tairo. “What’s the range on those stupid little shoulder cannons the Medyan are using?”

“A quarter-mile,” Lanthe answered as Tairo gave a different answer:

“Maybe a half-mile, your Excellency.”

Lanthe turned to him in confusion.

“They’re more powerful than the ones we trained with,” Tairo explained. “I saw one go straight through a tree and then a horse at a ridiculous distance. My guess is a half-mile.”

“Very good.” Yelhwa motioned Mina close and slid two arrows from her quiver. “Straight shot at head height.” She placed the arrow to her spellwork, igniting the shaft just behind the head, and handed it to Mina.

The head injury had done nothing to affect Mina’s poise. Nocking the arrow, she drew back with the grace of a hunting nymph and loosed. The flaming arrow streaked like a shooting star down the ravine to a skid to a stop in the dust, still burning, a little pinprick of light near the ravine’s entrance.

“We’re too close.” Yelhwa ignited the fletching of the other arrow in her hand and drove it into the ground as a marker. “Mount up.”

After their party of four had ridden further up the canyon, Yelhwa had Mina turn and fire another flaming arrow after the first. It landed almost exactly where Yelhwa had placed the marker arrow, just a pace or two short, as far as Lanthe could see.

Yelhwa smiled. “Good. Once more.”

“That far, your Excellency?” Lady Suzu said as she kicked her beautiful brown horse back into motion. “Lady Mina’s shooting range is three hundred meters. So, if she’s hit the mark this second time, that should surely place the cannons in the ravine with us.”

“I want more than just their cannons in the ravine,” Yelhwa said. “I want all of them in.”

“Your Excellency,” Lanthe said, increasingly sick with dread, “you understand that if the ravine collapses, we’re as likely to die as any of the Medyan?”

“Incorrect,” Yelhwa said mildly, “and it’s not going to collapse because we’re not going to let them fire those cannons.”

“You can’t control whether the cannons go off,” Lanthe protested. “Those things misfire by accident all the time.”

“Pipe down, Luyang,” Yelhwa said. “I know. Dismount.”

The Medyan were in the ravine now. They had begun to file in, barely visible in the light filtering into the ravine from above but still well out of shooting range—for a cannon, much less an arrow.

“Mina, shield,” Yelhwa said as the Medyan at the head of their single-file line approached the arrow marker.

Mina’s hands flashed elegantly in the dim light, nearly as fast and bright as Yelhwa’s in a shielding spell.

“Suzu, you know what to do.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Suzu said and began to sketch her own spell in the air before her in glowing white.

“Your Excellency,” Lanthe started anxiously, “what—”

“Your concerns about the gunpowder have been noted, Captain Luyang,” Yelhwa said. “We will be employing neither fire nor lightning.”

“What does it say?” Lanthe whispered to Tairo.

“Five-hundredfold acceleration,” he said.

Pink godmarks luminous in the low light, Yelhwa began a third spell—similar to Lady Suzu’s. Lanthe may not have been able to read meaning in graphemes as Tairo did, but with her eyes flicking between the two sets of characters, she confirmed that they were indeed two copies of the same spell… though, interestingly, Lanthe thought she could have told someone which calligrapher had written which copy had she seen the characters in isolation. Suzu’s strokes were shorter and stood a little straighter than Yelhwa’s—businesslike in the way of the Ro script Lanthe had seen in Captain Arza’s letters. Yelhwa’s stroke was the wild river to Suzu’s manmade channel. In the confident, brutally elegant sweep of those lines, Lanthe felt what it had been to taste Yelhwa’s knife and was very glad she had not let the princess draw her sword in her moment of rage. In the movement of that hand, Lanthe suddenly found a suspicion that she would not have won a swordfight with the princess of Yao.

“Arrows, Suzu.” Yelhwa extended her writing hand to position the spell directly before her at shoulder height and flexed her fingers to stick it there. “Quickly.”

With her own spell fixed two paces in front of Yelhwa’s and significantly lower, Suzu went to her horse and unfastened a backup longbow, as comically large as the one across her own back. Handing the extra bow to Yelhwa, Suzu drew two of the spear-like bronze arrows from her back. One, she passed to Yelhwa. The other, she nocked to the string of her longbow as she went to one knee before her low-hanging spellwork.

“Mina, are you steady enough?” Yelhwa asked.

“Yes, Your Excellency,” Mina said and stepped into position facing Yelhwa’s spellwork with her back to the princess.

Nocking her spear-like arrow to the bowstring, Yelhwa pointed the weapon skyward and pulled the string smoothly back as she brought the arrow down to point forward. With the longbow fully drawn, the projectile still extended a forearm’s length beyond the grip. That extra length of shaft came to rest on Mina’s shoulder, taking the burden of stability off Yelhwa’s willowy upper body. The bronze tip of the arrow just touched the center of Yelhwa’s spellwork where it hovered before Mina.

“Be ready as soon as I loose, Suzu,” Yelhwa breathed.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Opposite the three women, the Medyan had reached a firing range that they liked. Two men at the front took a knee to load their shoulder cannons.

“One!” Yelhwa loosed her arrow through glowing characters—five-hundredfold acceleration. The bronze projectile burst forward with such force that it blew the women’s hair back and sent up a cloud of dust in its wake.

The distinctive scream of mortally wounded horses pierced the ravine. But the screams—horse and human—were chillingly short, cutting off as soon as they began. That was how fast death came, Lanthe realized, when a spear punched through a body at several times the speed of a bullet.

“God in Heaven!” Tairo breathed at Lanthe’s shoulder as, before them, the Medyan line crumpled, horses collapsing in succession beneath their riders.

Lady Suzu drew her massive arrow back, its tip just touching the glowing set of characters hovering in the air before her. She held beautiful form under the heavy weapon, her arrow perfectly parallel to the ground and the straight walls on either side, but Lanthe could see that it put a strain on her. It would put a strain on anyone to hold such a heavy arrow steady with no shoulder for support.

Yelhwa only made Suzu hold for a second. Just long enough for the last dead horse to fall, bringing its rider into Suzu’s line of fire.

“Two!” Yelhwa called, and Suzu let the string go.

Another burst of godly force and the second arrow shot through the Medyan ranks—this one at the solar plexus level.

The Medyan cries were short and choked. This time, the dust cleared to total stillness. No Medyan moved. That second bronze arrow had gone through them all, one at a time, single file. And Lanthe finally understood. This was why Yelhwa had wanted all the Medyan inside the ravine: to use the unique terrain against them.

Yelhwa turned to smile at Lanthe, and, for a brief moment, Lanthe saw what King Kaisin, General Runkai, and all Yelhwa’s ladies saw in her. Pure brilliance. For a moment, Lanthe caught on that light like a fly in the bright threads of a spider’s web. But the tactician in Lanthe tore her out of those threads with a sobering truth: there was no way a projectile moving five hundred times the speed of an arrow didn’t make sparks. And sparks, somewhere along that line, would meet gunpowder.

In the end, even the genius of Sunsai couldn’t make up for a total lack of experience.

The earth-shaking BOOM made Lanthe flinch, even though she had been expecting it. Even though it was inevitable. Damn everything, if Lanthe had just pressed the princess on her plan a little harder, she could have warned her to follow the arrows with rain and frost, then—

Rock cracked overhead.

“Damn.” Yelhwa seemed to understand her mistake—now that it was too late. Her eyes met Lanthe’s. “Sparks?”

“Sparks,” said Lanthe.

And the ravine began to collapse.

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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.