People begin to return the Arsenal. It’s a trickle at first, handfuls of officers and sailors, second sons and daughters and the second sons and daughters of their tenants coming back from the fields. They arrive in sampans marked with the colors of various clans, touching down in the grass in front of the headquarters. They’re unsure how to deal with Chaemshar in the beginning, keeping a wide berth from the door on the second floor and giving her polite bows while maintaining a respectable distance in the halls and outside.

It’s not that they have any particular aversion to her, Khrotyan explains, just that these petty nobility from the rural extremities are all unsure of how to approach an artist from the city.

“You don’t seem to have a problem with it.” Chaemshar says, looking at him sidelong from the sample canvas she’s just started to daub test colors onto.

“A habit I developed a few years ago. A long story.”

The first time one of the other officers comes up to her is when she’s starting work on the first of the grand paintings in the main hall. She hears the hard soles clicking against the floor behind her.

“I think I know this one.” They point at the canvas. Chaemshar’s only filled out a fourth of it with color, but the underlying sketch is laid out.

“Ah, you were at the Battle of the Three Nagas?”

But that’s impossible. The officer looks about the same age as Chaemshar. “Oh, they’ve given it a name?”

It was the name she’d been given in the notes and errata collected by the historian, a reedy scholar who hadn’t feigned much interest when Chaemshar mentioned that she had graduated from the same university in the Imperial capital. She comes down from the ladder. “That’s what they told me at least.” She wipes her hands on the rag tied to her waist and bows. Before she can introduce herself the officer speaks again.

“Oh, I thought you must have heard the story from your father. You’re Sirihanok, correct?” She points at one of the unpainted sections of the canvas. In the background rushing through a web of rocky sky islands, a squadron of sharp-beaked ramming ships. “My grandfather, Prahon, was on the right flank next to your clan’s squadron.”

Khadi Somankar is the granddaughter of the oldest hands in the Akshauhini. She’s already captained a ship for several years and accumulated accolades. Her grandmother, like Chaemshar’s father, had campaigned with the old phraya, even in the years before the red ships came and changed everything. The Somankar clan, one of the oldest and most prestigious in the south of the Empire, had been quick to accept an allotment of the red ships and supplant all of its squadrons with them in short order. They’ve been known for airship prowess back to olden times.

“Your father. And those beautiful old ramming ships. How are they faring these days?”

More officers begin to introduce themselves to Chaemshar after that. A constellation of all the retainer clans around the Aruchavi fills out before her, generations’ worth of intermarriage, fealties sworn, and ancient favors performed. Khadi, who seems to be fascinated with her art and the craft as a whole, appears to be the catalyst to the thaw. If a Somankar is fine associating with her then it must be perfectly fine for us.

Most sailors don’t linger in the headquarters. They spend most hours of the day in the towers along the water maintaining their ships or deploying for complex practice maneuvers over the Arsenal. Dozens of narrow shadows spill and swing across the grass. They run obstacle courses and shoot rifles at distant targets. The first time they open up a volley Chaemshar almost drops her brush and palette to the floor five feet below. She’s more accustomed to the noises the officers make. Loud, assertive voices speaking in clipped but elegant Chela Imperial, taking bets on their wrestling matches and practice duels. The sharp clapping of wooden dha swords parrying each other, punctuated with the smack of flesh and roars of approval.

Chaemshar captures this too. She sits on a folding stool and refuses any offer for a sailor to prop an umbrella over her, bringing instead a wide-brimmed hat of woven palm straw the sculptor gave to her as a birthday gift years ago. She renders bodies and swords in motion, the way sweat glimmers down the side of the jaw and dirt plumes up where a fencer’s sandal twists against the earth in preparation for a strike.

Khrotyan is among the best with the dha, rivaled only by Khadi. He organizes most of the training personally, orienting the newest, youngest arrivals before sending these second and third sons and daughters careening across the square. In the hottest part of the year they remove their uniform beskaps, and Chaemshar recalls her days of anatomy drawing in the university.

“You draw him well,” Khadi says one afternoon on one of their customary visits to Chaemshar’s office. She’s seated and looking through the sketchbook she’d recently finished and replaced with another.

“Who?”

She points at a sketch of several officers sparring with spears. Khrotyan is in the foreground, the V of his back facing the viewer.

“Well, no better than anyone else,” she says. Khadi just snickers.

One day Chameshar is outside the headquarters watching a ship inch into a gap in one of the rhombuses in the sky.

“It’s best that you don’t render those,” someone says from behind her.

A glow emanates from inside as the tail of the ship disappears behind the black threshold. Chaemshar is entranced. “Why is that?” She turns around. “They’re the Five Factories, correct? Where the red ships are made.”

Khrotyan nods. “And where new components are manufactured. That’s all I’m at liberty to say, at least without the permission of the phraya and both the administrators.”

On the day before her twenty-second birthday Khadi takes her aside to where a group of officers and sailors wait. She presents her with a red lacquer box tied with fine brocade. Inside is a pair of half-length trousers and a beskap. It lacks any rank, but the Sirihanok crest is embroidered on the breast next to insignia of the Akshauhini. “For our little artist,” they say, using the name they’ve taken to calling her. The fit isn’t perfect, since the tailor had to guess at her measurements, but everyone laughs and cheers when she tries it on. She’s filled with a dumb sort of mirth, not dissimilar from when artists from the Quarter would come to her exhibitions and give her praise.

It’s only on the ride back home that she remembers herself. She tells the helmsman to take a detour to her studio. It looks like a shack framed in the sampan’s spotlight. There, she changes quickly before hurrying to the house, panting in the humid dark.

Weeks later there’s a recital of one of the composer’s new compositions in the park. He’s able to secure three seats in the front row. The quartet is segueing into a second movement when they’re drowned out by a blaring chorus of horns. Leaves rain onto the audience. The airships that fly over the city aren’t red, and the insignia they project between them is that of the Chakravartin.

******

All the wars Chaemshar can remember had been family affairs. The phrayas have always gone on adventures across the Akash to pick away at the innumerable islands and atolls that fill up the Akash to the north and east of the Empire, with the understanding that they pass on appropriate tribute to the Chakravartin. These tendrils are how the clans can still increase their revenues even when all the land on the continent is already claimed, diverting pressures that caused internecine fighting in olden times.

This one is different. Under the codes of the Chakchelam Empire, phrayas’ right to launch their own little conquests was in exchange for the right of the Chakravartin to call up the Akshauhini when need arose. The details trickle out through the newsrolls stamped out on bamboo strips every morning: The two largest rajanates to the north form an alliance and declare war against the Empire, hurling their naval ships and privateers at dozens of Imperial island territories and closing off the major trade lanes north to Dhamenthao and beyond to Gadristang. Rumors fly through the city that Dhamenthao put them up to it, that trade outposts are being razed, the Imperials stationed there being spirited away for ransom or hurled into the Akash — no one’s quite sure which. The point, according to the newsrolls, is that a response from the entire Empire is required.

Chaemshar’s job is put on hold. She’s there for the day and a half it takes for the Akshauhini to mobilize, capturing the whirl of ships undocking and floating into formations, weapons and armor and crates of provisions stacked onto sampans and ascending away, sailors running in every direction as if the enemy is right there on the shores of Chela.

“Your stipend will continue of course,” Khrotyan tells her in one of the last few moments he’s able to spare in between coordinating everything on the ground and in the air. His face is flushed and his uniform weighed down with the dha slung under his left arm and the pistol holstered across his breast. His hair is made lupine from the crosswinds of all the airships in motion.

“That wasn’t what I was going to ask about, though.” Chaemshar rubs the top button of the beskap, which she’s taken to wearing like a cloak around her shoulders against the wind. “I was going to ask if I should keep coming here. I don’t see any reason why I can’t continue working on the murals at least. They’re almost complete.”

“No.” He glances aside as a team of sailors yell at something in the distance. “That is, I don’t think it would be safe.”

It’s the first time she’s seen something like apprehension on his face. “You think a crate is going to fall on top of me?” It’s meant to be a joke. She can easily continue work on everything except the murals at home.

“If you were sufficiently distracted, yes… That was a joke.”

Her father is imbued with newfound prana. He and Chaemshar’s brothers thunder about the house, unlocking the storage where their weapons and armor have been gathering dust for years. No summon came from the phraya, but a general call was issued direct from the Imperial capital. Posters covered the walls in New Chelor and recordings played in the street. Protect the Empire! Let’s all help the Chakravartin. They aren’t entirely clear about how one would provide that help other than continuing to pay the war taxes.

Her father says that they’ll need all the military ships they can get, however, that all the Akshauhini won’t be enough. Light and noise pours through the bedroom windows at night. Old retainers, some barely able to hold their coffee cups without the help of a younger relation, fill the rooms like pieces of inherited furniture put down any which way for lack of anywhere they’d actually fit. Eventually the Sirihanok airships are taken away to an Imperial shipyard.

In New Chelor everyone has work, even the artists. The composer is commissioned for a piece based on a poem about a legendary Chela warrior from the ancient times before airships. The sculptor is given a commission from the temple of Kan-Akan for a series of busts of the god of law and justice.

It’s Chaemshar who lacks something to do. Most of the time she finds herself in the sculptor’s studio going over old sketches or reading newsrolls from the capital. The urge to sketch is strangely absent.

“So do you only paint when you’re paid to now?” The sculptor says over her shoulder. She’s been working on the bust in front of her for weeks.

“That’s typically how it works.” She hasn’t told anyone about the continuance of her stipend.

Eventually they move to the corner closest to the industrial window, sitting on the thick rug and take turns blowing pinches of kesara petals into each other’s faces. They study each other in between bouts of snickers.

“You should go back to your old work.”

Chaemshar tilts her head to one side. “That doesn’t narrow it down.”

The sculptor rolls her eyes. “You know the one. Taheng the Cyan.”

A painting Chameshar had worked on without any commission or assignment. The legendary witch of Chela, a figure who’d terrified and fascinated her as a child. She’d put away the canvas not long before being approached by Khrotyan.

“Nirmana! I don’t even know where that thing is now.”

Even through the haze, the sculptor looks shocked. “And you were so obsessed with it too. Before… this thing of yours.”

The Sirihanok ships return from the shipyards with rams shorn, replaced with featureless gray doors. Their innards are hollowed out to accommodate the cargo they’ve been retrofitted to carry. It’s a brief layover, as they’re meant to sail north as soon as possible. Chaemshar’s father speaks only about timetables and routes, says nothing about the ships, a hollow look in his eyes. By dawn they’re purplish shapes on the horizon.

After a week, Chaemshar doesn’t want to be stuck in the house with only her mother and her comments any longer. The Quarter isn’t an option; everyone is busy working on or exhibiting their new commissions. She thinks about the sculptor’s comment about the Taheng composition, realizes it might have gone to the Arsenal in one of the batches of spare canvasses she’d shipped over early on. Against her better judgment but driven by impulse she puts on the Akshauhini uniform and goes into town to summon a sampan. The driver looks skeptical, but he sees the crimson slashes on her shoulders and sleeves and decides not to argue.

The Akash around the Arsenal is devoid of airships. Flocks of birds cover the empty docking stations. The silhouettes of animals flicker through the waist-high grass. After hovering long enough for the driver to be confident there aren’t any tigers, the sampan sets down.

Chaemshar tips the driver to wait for her. No one comes out to greet her, or stop her. She hurries anyways. The five rhombuses seem to watch her from overhead. A wild thread of fear tickles the back of her neck — she briefly imagines a bright orange blur from the grass tackling her to the dirt and biting her throat open.

The headquarters is empty and unlit. She hadn’t bothered to lock the door to her office when she left. It only takes her a moment of sifting through the loose canvasses. Taheng the Cyan’s yellow agate eyes gleam, her hair a counterclockwise whirl. A rain of ballista arrows fill the space around her. Between her arms lies Gata, the first and most beloved of her maranhig. The undead woman’s eyes, yellowish like Taheng’s but milkier, are wide and bulged. The back of her head rests on Taheng’s breast, blackish blood trickling from her expressionless mouth down mouldering flesh. Two arrows protrude from her chest and extend out her back, pressing indentations into her master’s knee. Her master’s hand fingers the shaft of the closest arrow.

Something big and black zips by the windows and strikes the hills in the distance. By the time Chaemshar hears the explosion dozens more are stitching across the landscape. The windows rattle and then shatter. She throws herself to the floor, pulling the canvasses down with her. Broken glass crunches underneath her. Through the broken windows she sees the rented sampan speeding away. There should be an alarm, the one she’d heard during defense drills, but there’s no one to activate it.

The headquarters is struck directly as she leaves the office and she almost stumbles over the railing and falls. Behind the Perilla a portion of the far wall is gone, replaced with a gaping hole through which flame plunges like the face of an enraged aswang. One of the murals is already burning, going to black, already gone. Unthinking, she runs downstairs. The rosewood frames are too heavy to lift. She pulls a dha from a weapon rack and unsheathes it clumsily. As sharp as the blade is it’s hard to make even cuts, and she winces every time it slips and hacks out a chunk of one of the paintings. She can feel the heat grow against her back, the air becoming dark and acrid. The last unburned mural she cuts in half down the center to yank out of the frame faster.

Chaemshar can barely move with all the thick canvas rolled up under her arm. A segment of the overhead walkways collapses a few feet in front of her, blocking the way to the exit. She’s starting to feel delirious. The steel steps up to the Perilla are hot enough that she can hear the soles of her shoes sizzling. The ship recognizes her prana and the door slides open, a rush of cool air hitting her. She hurls the canvasses onto the bridge.

If she seals the ship now she’d be safe even if the building burned down. Instead she steps back outside and seals the door behind her. The run up to the office singes the sleeves of her beskap. She snatches Taheng and a blind handful of other canvasses. She can’t stop coughing. She regrets not being able to tune her prana as well as her brothers can; they would’ve been able to separate the smoke from the air around them, push it away from themselves.

More of the walkway falls as she goes down. She feels the floor come up to meet her, paintings tucked under her left arm where it breaks just above the elbow. Something falls on top of her, and she loses consciousness.