The Burning God (The Poppy War Book 3)

She awoke choking on mud. She’d rolled into it while unconscious, and it had caked over the lower half of her face. She couldn’t breathe and couldn’t see; she clawed agitatedly at her eyes, nose, and mouth, terrified a rocket had blown them off. The mud came away in sharp, sticky tiles that left her skin raw and stinging, and her panic subsided.

She lay still for a moment, breathing deep, and then rose slowly to her feet.

She could stand without swaying. The opium high was fading. She knew this stage of the comedown—was familiar with the numb dryness of her tongue and the faint, disorienting buzzing in her temples. She needed hours still before her mind fully cleared, but at least she could walk.

Everything hurt. She didn’t want to stop and take stock of her wounds. She didn’t want to know the full list of what was wrong with her, not now. She could move all four limbs. She could see, breathe, hear, and walk. That was good enough. The rest had to wait.

She staggered back toward the village, wincing with every step.

The sun was just starting to rise. The attack had occurred just after midnight. That meant she’d been lying out there for five hours at least. That boded ill—if her army was still intact then their very first task would have been to search for her—their general, their Speerly.

But no one had come.

She knew they’d lost. That was a foregone conclusion; they’d never had a ground-based air defense to begin with. But how bad was the damage?

Silence met her in the town square. Small fires still crackled around every corner, smoldering inside bomb craters. A handful of soldiers moved through the streets, combing through the ruins and pulling bodies from the wreckage. So few of those bodies were moving. So few of those bodies were whole. Rin saw scattered parts wherever she looked: an arm here, a headless torso there, a pair of little feet on the dirt path right in front of her.

She couldn’t even muster the strength to vomit. Still dazed, she focused on just breathing, on staying calm and figuring out what to do next.

Should they hide? Should she round up the survivors and send them fleeing to the nearest caves? Or were they temporarily safe, now that the dirigibles had gone? Kitay would know what to do—

Kitay.

Where was Kitay?

When she reached for the Phoenix, all she met was a wall of silence. She tried to suppress a rising wave of panic. If the back door wasn’t working, then it only meant that Kitay was asleep or unconscious. It didn’t mean he was gone. He couldn’t be gone.

“Where is Kitay?”

She asked every person she saw. She shook exhausted soldiers and half-conscious survivors alike and screamed the question into their faces. But no one had any answers; they returned her pleas with stricken, glassy-eyed silence.

For hours she shouted his name around Tikany, limping through the lanes of wounded bodies, scanning the wreckage for any sign of his wiry, overgrown hair and his slender freckled limbs. When she found Venka, miraculously unhurt, they searched together, checking every street, alley, and dead end, even in the districts that had been far removed from the center of the bombing. They checked twice. Thrice.

He had to be here. He had to be fine. She had searched for him like this once before, in Golyn Niis, where his odds of survival had been far worse. Yet still he had answered then, and she hoped that he might again, that she would hear his thin voice carrying once more through the still air.

She knew he was alive. She knew he wasn’t too badly wounded, not more than she was, because she would have felt it. He has to be here. She didn’t dare consider the alternatives because the alternatives were too awful, because without Kitay she was just—

She was just—

Her whole body trembled.

Oh, gods.

“He’s gone.” Finally Venka said out loud what they both knew, wrapping her arms tight around Rin’s waist as if she were afraid Rin might hurt herself if she moved. “They took him. He’s not lost, he’s gone.”

Rin shook her head. “We have to keep looking—”

“We’ve walked twice through every square foot in a mile’s radius,” Venka said. “He’s not here. We’ve got other things to worry about, Rin.”

“But Kitay—we can’t—”

“He might still be all right.” Venka’s voice was inordinately gentle; she was making a valiant effort to comfort. “There’s no body.”

Of course there was no body. If Kitay were dead then Rin wouldn’t be standing—which left only one conclusion.

Nezha had taken him prisoner.

And what a valuable prisoner he was, a hostage worth his weight in gold. He was so smart, he was too fucking smart, and that made him vulnerable to anyone who had the faintest idea of who he was and what his mind could do. The Pirate Queen Moag had once locked Kitay in a safe house and assigned him to balance Ankhiluun’s books. Yin Vaisra had made him a senior strategist.

What would Nezha use him for? How cruel would he be?

This was her fault. She should have killed him, she couldn’t kill him, and now he had Kitay.

“Calm down.” Venka gripped her by the shoulders. “You have to calm down, you’re shaking. Let’s get you to a physician—”

Rin jerked out of her grasp, more violently than she’d intended. “Don’t touch me.”

Venka recoiled, startled. Rin staggered away. She would have run off, but her left ankle screamed in protest every time she moved. She hobbled resolutely forward, trying to breathe, trying not to cry. It didn’t matter where she was going, she just had to get away from these bodies—the smoke, the embers, the dying, and the dead.

Venka didn’t follow.

Then Rin was halfway to the killing fields, alone on the dusty plain. No soldiers in sight, no spies or witnesses.

She tilted her head to the sky, shut her eyes, and reached for the fire.

Come on. Come on . . .

Of course the fire didn’t come. She knew it wouldn’t; she was trying only because she needed to confirm it, like the way one prodded the sore gap left by a wrenched tooth to examine the extent of the loss. When she groped for the void, tried to tilt backward into the Pantheon like she had done so many times before with ease, she came away with nothing.

Nothing but the Seal—always lurking, taunting, Altan’s laughter echoing louder and louder to match her despair.

Kitay? She tried sending her thoughts out to him. That wasn’t how the anchor bond worked; they couldn’t communicate telepathically, they could only feel each other’s pain. But regardless of distance, their souls were still linked—didn’t that count for something?

Please. She threw her thoughts against the barrier in her mind, praying they might somehow reach him. Please, I need you. Where are you?

She was met with deafening silence.

She clutched her head, shaking, breathing in short and frantic bursts. Then came the sheer and utter terror as she realized what this meant.

She didn’t have the fire.

She didn’t have the fire.

Kitay was gone, truly gone, and without him she was vulnerable. Powerless. A girl who didn’t have a fighting arm or the shamanic ability that justified her inability to wield a blade. Not a Speerly, not a soldier, not a goddess.

What army would follow her now?

Desperate, she gripped her knife and carved a shaky question mark into her upper thigh, deep enough to leave scars that might reappear as thin white lines on Kitay’s skin. They’d communicated this way once before; it had to work again. She carved another mark. Then another. She sliced her thigh bloody. But Kitay never answered.

Tikany was shrouded in terrified silence when she returned from the fields. No one seemed to know what to do. Here and there Rin saw desultory efforts at rescue and reconstruction. A triage center was set up on the bonfire grounds, where the bombs had hit hardest, but Rin saw only two physicians and one assistant, hardly enough to deal with the lines of the wounded stretching around the square. Here and there she saw soldiers clearing away rubble or making futile attempts to create temporary shelters from the hollowed pits where once had stood buildings. But most of the survivors, civilians and soldiers both, just stood around looking dazed, as if they still couldn’t quite believe what had just happened.

No one was giving orders.

Rin supposed she should have been the one giving the orders.

But she, too, walked about in a helpless fugue. She didn’t know what to say. Every order, every action she could possibly take seemed utterly pointless. How could they come back from this?

She couldn’t turn back time. She couldn’t bring back the dead.

Don’t be pathetic, Altan would have said. She could hear his voice loud and clear, as if he were standing right beside her. Stop being such a little brat. So you lost. You’re still alive. Pick up the pieces and figure out how to start over.

She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and tried to at least act like she knew what she was doing.

Back to the basics. She had to know what assets she still had, and what she had lost. She needed to determine what her fighting capabilities were. She had to gather her officers.

She seized the arm of the first Iron Wolf she saw. “Where’s Souji?”

She wouldn’t have been surprised if he said he didn’t know. Most of the Iron Wolves were milling about, looking just as confused and disoriented as the rest. But she wasn’t prepared for the look of terror that came over his face.

He looked as if she’d just threatened to kill him.

He paused before he answered. “Ah, not here, ma’am—”

“I can see that,” she snapped. “Find him for me. Tell him I want to see him. Right now.”

The Iron Wolf seemed to be trying to decide something. He had a strange look in his eye that Rin couldn’t quite read. Defiance? Mere disorientation? She opened her mouth to ask again, but he gave her a curt nod and headed off toward the wreckage.

She returned to the general’s complex, one of the few buildings left intact thanks to its solid stone foundations. She sat behind the desk, pulled out a sheaf of planning documents from a drawer, and spread them on her desk. Then she started to think.

The opium was nearly gone from her bloodstream. Her mental clarity had returned. Her mind went back to the cool, logical plane where strategy existed outside the friction of war. It felt familiar, calming. She could do this. She’d been trained for this.

For a moment she forgot the trauma of what she’d just seen, forgot the million hurts lacerating her body, and busied herself with next steps. She’d start with the tasks that she didn’t need Souji for. First things first: She gathered a handful of reliable runners and ordered them to make assessments as quickly as possible. She took stock of how many men she had left based on triage reports and corpse counts. She wrote down a list of basic necessities the army would need to recover, find, or build within the next twenty-four hours—means of transportation, food stores, and shelter. She reread spy reports on the Republic’s last known troop positions. That intelligence was clearly outdated, but it helped to know where the gaps in their knowledge were.

Then she tried to work out a way to destroy those damned dirigibles.

She could deal with arquebuses—they were more or less just faster, more lethal crossbows. But the fucking airships changed the landscape of battle, added an extra dimension on which she couldn’t compete. She needed a way to bring them down.

She started by sketching out her best recollection of their build. She wished they’d managed to ground even one of those dirigibles for study, but memory would have to do for now. The images in her mind’s eye were fuzzy; she had to focus through visions of smoke and thunder to recall where the cannons were positioned, how the passenger cradles were affixed to the balloons.

She knew one thing—the airships were frustratingly well-designed. They were heavily armored from below, with no visible chinks at which to aim, and they floated too high in the air for arrows or cannons to reach. The balloons that kept the dirigibles afloat made more promising targets. If she could puncture them she could send the whole ship crashing down. But they seemed to have been plated with some kind of light metal just strong enough to deflect arrowheads, and she’d never gotten a cannonball high enough to see what happened when they collided.

Rockets, then? Could they get the trajectory right? How much explosive force would those rockets need? And how would she organize those ground artillery forces?

She crumpled her diagram in frustration. These sorts of problems were Kitay’s domain. He was her engineer, her problem solver. She devised grand schemes, but Kitay figured out the details. He would have cracked this already, would have already begun crafting together some idiotic invention that still somehow worked.

A pain that had nothing to do with her injuries stabbed at her chest and spread like blades splintering into daggers, gouging at her heart like grappling hooks. She gasped, then clenched her mouth with her hand.

Tears dripped down her fingers. She couldn’t do this alone. Gods, she missed him so much.

Stop that, Altan admonished. Stop being such a fucking baby.

Kitay was gone. Bitching and moaning wouldn’t change that. All she could do now was focus on getting him back.

She set her drawings aside. She wouldn’t be able to solve this now. She had to think about basic survival, had to get what was left of the army through the night. For that she needed Souji, but he still hadn’t appeared.

She frowned. Why hadn’t he appeared? It had been over an hour. She hadn’t seen him since the attack, but surely he wasn’t dead or captured—she would have known by now. She stood up and strode to the door. She jumped, startled, when she saw the same Iron Wolf from earlier standing on the other side, hand raised as if he’d been about to knock. Souji was nowhere in sight.

“Where is he?” she demanded.

The Iron Wolf cleared his throat. “Souji requests that you meet him in his tent.”

That immediately struck Rin as suspicious. Souji had made his quarters in the general’s complex like the rest of the army leadership. What the hell was he doing in his tent? “Is he joking? I’ve been waiting for over an hour now, and he thinks he can just summon me?”

The Iron Wolf’s expression remained studiedly blank. “That’s all he said. I can take you if you like.”

For a moment Rin considered refusing the summons. Who did Souji think he was? She outranked him. He wore the collar of authority around his neck. How dare he make her wait, how dare—

She bit her tongue before she said something rash.

Don’t be an idiot. She couldn’t afford a display of power now. Kitay was gone and the fire was gone. She had no leverage. This wasn’t the time to bluff. For once, she’d have to be diplomatic.

“Fine,” she said tightly, and followed the Iron Wolf out the door.

Souji wasn’t waiting in his tent.

Rin stopped short at the entrance. “You.”

The Monkey Warlord rose from his seat. “Hello, Runin.”

“What are you—” She inhaled sharply, then composed herself. “Get out.”

“Why don’t you sit down?” He gestured to the table. “We’ve much to discuss.”

“Get out,” she said again. Anger superseded her confusion. She didn’t know why Gurubai was here, but she didn’t care—she wanted him gone. He didn’t deserve to be here. This wasn’t his victory, his troops hadn’t bled at Leiyang, and the very sight of him standing here in Rooster Province, where her people had died while he cowered in Ruijin, was almost too much to bear. If she still had the fire, she would have incinerated him where he stood.

“You should be glad we arrived when we did,” he said. “My troops have been leading the rescue efforts, have you not noticed? Without us, hundreds more of you would be dead.”

She barked out a laugh. “So that was your plan? Hide out in your mountains until I’d won your battles, follow us, and then claim our victory?”

Gurubai sighed. “I would hardly call this a victory.”

The tent flaps parted before she could retort. Souji strode in, followed by three Iron Wolves and several of Zhuden’s junior officers.

Rin looked at them in surprise. She’d been waiting for those officers just as long as she’d been waiting for Souji. Was this why no one had responded? Had they spent all this time together? Doing what?

“Oh, good,” Souji said. “We’re all here.”

“Where the hell have you all been?” Rin demanded. “I’ve been sending for you since noon.”

He sighed and shook his head. “Oh, Rin.”

“What?” she demanded. “What’s going on?”

None of Zhuden’s officers would meet her eye.

Souji shot her an apologetic smile. His fingers played at the hilt of his sword. “You still haven’t figured this out?”

Too late Rin realized she was alone.

Alone, and without her fire.

Her hand flew to her knife. Souji charged her. She unsheathed her blade, parried clumsily, and didn’t last three seconds. He twisted her knife from her grip with a move used by novice swordsmen, then kicked it far out of her reach.

“Where’s your fire?” he taunted.

She threw herself at his waist. Again, he overpowered her with ease. At the peak of her training she could have put up a good fight, could have scratched out his eyeballs or gotten a good, vicious grip on his crotch. But he was bigger and heavier, and he had both his hands. In two moves, he had her pinned to the ground.

“So it’s true,” he observed. “You’ve lost it.”

She thrashed, shrieking.

“Shhh.” Souji’s fingers closed around her throat and squeezed. “Not so loud. Hurts my ears.”

“What are you doing?” she gasped. “What the fuck are you—”

Gurubai raised his voice. “‘He said to tell you I walk free if you’ll come to the New City yourself.’”

He was reading from a scroll. Rin stared at him, bemused. Her mind was so fogged with panic it took her a moment to recognize those words. Where had she read those—

Oh.

Oh, no.

“‘He says that this doesn’t have to end in bloodshed,’” Gurubai continued, “‘and that he only wants to speak. He says he doesn’t want a war. He’s prepared to grant clemency to every one of your allies. He only wants you.’” Gurubai set the scroll down. “Rather cold, I think, to sacrifice your only family.”

“You snake,” she hissed.

He had to have learned this from his spies—his fucking ubiquitous spies, eavesdropping on her wherever she went, even after they were leagues away from Ruijin. Who was it? The sentries? The guard outside her tent? Had he opened and copied the scroll before she’d ever seen it?

She thought she’d outplayed him, had finally gotten the upper hand. But he’d been playing the long game this entire time.

“When were you going to tell us there was a peace offer on the table?” Gurubai inquired. “Before or after you sacrificed us to an unnecessary war?”

“Nezha’s a lying bastard,” she choked. “He doesn’t want to negotiate—”

“On the contrary,” Gurubai said. “He seemed quite keen on our proposal. You see, we don’t want to die. And we’ve no qualms about sacrificing you, particularly since you seemed so ready to do the same to us.”

“Are you deluded? You need me—”

“We needed you in the south,” Gurubai said. “We have the south. Now you’re just a liability, and the only obstacle to a cease-fire with the Republic.”

“If you think you’re getting a truce, you’re so stupid you deserve to die,” she spat. “The Yins don’t keep their word. I swear to the gods, if you deliver me then you’re dead.”

“And we’re dead if we don’t,” Gurubai said. “We’ll take our chances. Souji?”

Souji’s grip tightened around her neck. “Sorry, Princess.”

Rin writhed, just hard enough to force Souji to lean forward and use his weight to press her back against the dirt. That brought his wrist close enough to her mouth. She bared her teeth and bit down. She broke skin; she tasted copper and salt on her tongue. Souji shrieked. The pressure on her neck disappeared. Something slammed into the side of her head.

She fell back, temples ringing, blood dribbling onto her chin.

She saw two Soujis looming over her, and both looked so outraged that she couldn’t help but laugh.

“You taste good,” she said.

He responded with a slap to her face. Then another. The blows stung like lightning; head swimming, ears ringing, she could do nothing but lie still and absorb them like a corpse.

“Not so chatty now, are you?”

She gurgled something incomprehensible. He pulled his fist back, and that was the last thing she saw.

She was lying on the same floor when she awoke. Everything hurt. When she twitched, she felt the stretch of bruises along her back, bruises from blows she didn’t remember taking. Souji had kept kicking long after she’d passed out.

Breathing was agony. She had to learn to take small, suffocatingly insufficient breaths, expanding her lungs just enough not to crack her likely broken ribs.

After a few seconds, her fear gave way to confusion.

She ought to be dead.

Why wasn’t she dead yet?

“There you go.” Souji’s voice. She saw his boots standing several feet away. “I’m assuming we don’t have to verify her identity.”

Who was he talking to? Rin tried to crane her neck to see, but her puffy eyes limited her view, and she couldn’t tilt her head up any farther than thirty degrees. She lay curled on her side; her field of vision was restricted to the dirt floor and the wall of the tent.

Footsteps sounded close to her head. Someone put the heel of their boot on her neck.

“The Young Marshal wants her alive,” spoke an unfamiliar voice.

Rin stiffened. The Young Marshal. This man was Nezha’s envoy.

“His orders were to take her alive if we can manage, and dead if she puts up a fight,” said the envoy. “I say we preempt a resistance. I’ve seen what she can do when she’s awake.”

“We can keep her dosed,” spoke another voice across the room. “We brought enough opium for the journey. That keeps her harmless.”

“You’re going to stake your lives on that?” Souji asked. “Go on, press a little harder. None of us will tattle.”

Rin winced, bracing herself for the impact. But it never came—suddenly the boot lifted from her neck, and footsteps sounded away from her head. She heard the tent flaps rustle.

“You can’t kill her.”

Her eyes widened. Daji?

“Who’s this hag?” Souji asked. “Someone toss her out.”

There was a flurry of movement, a clash of steel, then a loud clatter as weapons dropped to the floor.

“Don’t touch me,” Daji said, very slowly, very calmly. “Now step away.”

The tent fell silent.

“She’s a chosen manifestation of the gods.” Daji’s voice grew louder as she crossed the tent toward Rin. “Her body is a bridge between this world and the Pantheon. If you hurt her, then her god will come flooding through in full force to our realm. Have you ever encountered the Phoenix? You will be ash before you can blink.”

That’s not true, Rin thought, befuddled. That’s not how it works. If they hurt her now, without Kitay, the Phoenix could do nothing to help her.

But none of them knew that. No one objected. The men were utterly silent, hanging on Daji’s every word.

Rin could imagine what was happening. She’d suffered the Vipress’s hypnosis before. Daji’s eyes induced paralysis—those bright, yellow serpent’s eyes that enticed and beckoned; those pupils that engorged to become gates into dark and lovely visions of butterfly wings and wretched nostalgia. The Vipress made her prey desire. Yearn. Hurt.

When Souji at last spoke, his voice sounded different—dazed, hesitant. “Then what do we do?”

“There is a mountain in Snake Province,” Daji said. “Not far from here. It will be quite a march, but—”

“We have a dirigible,” said one of Nezha’s envoys. He spoke eagerly, like he was trying to impress. If Rin weren’t so terrified, she would have laughed. “We have the fuel. We could fly there in less than a day.”

“Very good, officer,” Daji cooed.

No one objected. Daji had these men well and truly trapped. Good, Rin thought. Now gut them.

But Daji didn’t move.

“I’ve heard of this mountain,” Souji said after a pause. “It’s impossible to find.”

“Only for those who don’t know where they’re going,” Daji said. “But I have been there many times.”

“And who are you?” Souji asked. The question didn’t sound like a challenge. He sounded confused, rather, like a man who had just awoken from a deep slumber to find himself in unfamiliar forest. Souji was groping through the mist, trying desperately to catch hold of clarity.

Daji gave a low chuckle. “Only an old woman who has seen a fair bit of the world.”

“But you don’t . . .” Souji trailed off. His question dissipated into nothing. Rin wished she could see his face.

“The Young Marshal will want to see her first,” said the first of Nezha’s envoys, the one who had put his boot on Rin’s neck. “He’ll want to know that she—”

“Your Young Marshal will be content with your report,” Daji said smoothly. “You are his loyal lieutenants. He’ll trust your word. Wait any longer and you risk that she wakes.”

“But we were tasked to—”

“Yin Nezha is weak and ailing,” Daji said. “He cannot face the Speerly right now. What do you think he will do if she strikes? She will burn him in his bed, and you will be known as the men who brought this monster to his lair. Would you murder your own general?”

“But he said she’d lost the fire,” said the soldier.

“And you trust this man?” Daji pressed. “You’ll wager the Young Marshal’s life on the words of a guerrilla commander?”

“No,” the soldier murmured. “But we—”

“Don’t think,” Daji whispered. Her voice was like gossamer silk. “Why think? Don’t trouble yourself with such thoughts. It’s much easier to obey, remember? You only have to do as I say, and you’ll be at peace.”

Another meek silence descended over the room.

“Good,” Daji cooed. “Good boys.”

Rin couldn’t see Daji’s eyes, not from this angle, but even she felt drowsy, lured into the soft, comforting undulations of Daji’s voice.

Daji bent over Rin and smoothed the hair away from her face. Her fingers lingered over Rin’s exposed neck. “Now, you’ll want to sedate her for the trip.”

The trip.

This wasn’t all just a ploy, then. They really were taking her to the Chuluu Korikh. The stone prison, the hell inside the mountain, the place where shamans who had gone mad were taken to be locked in stone, trapped forever, unable to call their gods and unable to die.

Gods, no. Not there.

Rin had been to the Chuluu Korikh once. The very thought of returning made her feel as if she were drowning.

She tried to lift her head. Tried to say something, to do anything. But Daji’s whispers washed over her thoughts like a cool, cleansing stream.

“Don’t think.” Rin barely heard distinct words anymore, just music, just tinkling notes that soothed her mind like a lullaby.

“Give up, darling. Trust me, this is easier. This is so much easier.”