The Burning God (The Poppy War Book 3)

They hit the ground together, Souji’s elbows digging painfully into Rin’s ribs. There was the briefest moment of silence, then an eerie ringing in her ears. She peered up from beneath Souji’s splayed body, groaning, just as Tikany lit up in a flash of orange light.

Then the bombing resumed, a roll of thunder that just kept going.

Souji rolled off of Rin. She scrambled unsteadily to her feet.

Kitay. Her vision was half-gone, along with her balance; as she stumbled toward the general’s complex she kept lurching to the side like a drunkard. I have to find Kitay.

A high, tortured keen sounded behind her. She turned around. By firelight she could just make out a young officer’s face, one of Zhuden’s men whose name she’d never learned. He lay on the ground several yards away. She stared at him for a moment, utterly confused. She and Souji had been alone in the street until now; all the other officers had remained at the bonfire, a good five minutes’ walk from here.

Was it the blast? Could the force of the explosion have hurled him this far?

But the officer looked fine—his head, shoulders, and torso were all intact, unbloodied. Unburned, even. Why was he—

The black smudges cleared slowly from Rin’s vision, and she saw what had at first been hidden by smoke and darkness. The officer’s legs had been blown away from the upper thigh.

He was looking at her. Gods, he was still conscious. He lifted a trembling hand toward her. His mouth moved. No sound came out, at least none that she could hear, but she understood.

Please.

She reached for the knife at her belt, but her fingers fumbled clumsily against the sheath.

“I’ll do it.” Souji’s voice rang as loud as a gong against her ears. He seemed to have sobered completely, his alcohol-drenched sluggishness evaporated by the same adrenaline pounding through her veins. He seemed far more in command of himself than she felt. With a brisk efficiency, he pulled the knife out of her hand and bent down to slit the officer’s throat.

She stared, swaying on her feet.

We weren’t ready.

She’d thought she had more time. When she’d destroyed Kesegi’s message she’d known Nezha had her in his sights, but she’d thought she might have the chance to train her newly won Southern Army while the Republic finished their campaign in the north. She’d thought, after the Beehive fell, that they could take a moment to breathe.

She hadn’t known Nezha was on their fucking doorstep.

Air cannons boomed continuously in harmony with the drone of dirigible engines. A celestial orchestra, Rin thought, dazed. The gods were playing a dirge to their demise.

She heard screaming from the town center. She knew that there was no mounted ground defense, no chance of fending the airships off. Her troops were flush with victory and drunk from revels. They’d only posted a skeleton guard at the township gates because they’d thought, for once, they were safe.

And the fucking bonfires—gods, the bonfires must have been like beacons, screaming out their location from the ground.

The shouts grew louder. Panicked, scattered crowds were flooding through the streets, away from the bonfires. A little girl ran screaming in Rin’s direction, and Rin didn’t have time to yell, No, stop, get down, before a blast rocked the air and flames shrouded the tiny body.

The same explosion knocked Rin off her feet. She rolled onto her back and moaned, her good hand pressed against her left ear. The bombing was so frequent that she could no longer hear any pause between drops, only an incessant rumble while fiery orange flares went off everywhere she looked.

She pushed her hand against the ground and forced herself to stand.

“We need to get out of here.” Souji yanked her up by the wrist and dragged her toward the forest. Explosions went off so close that she felt the heat sear her face, but the dirigibles weren’t firing over the forests.

They were only aiming at the campfires—at open, vulnerable civilians.

“Hold on,” she said. “Kitay—”

Souji wouldn’t let go of her arm. “We’ll move farther into the trees. They haven’t got visibility near the forest. We’ll take the mountain routes, get as far as we can before—”

She struggled against his grip. “We have to get Kitay!”

“He’ll make his own way out,” Souji said. “But you’ll be dead in seconds if you—”

“I’ll manage.” She didn’t know how she’d fend off the dirigibles—they didn’t seem to have weak points she could easily burn—but she might aim fire at the steering mechanisms, the ammunition basket, something. But she couldn’t leave without Kitay.

Was he still in the general’s complex, or had he gone to the center square? The complex up the hill was still untouched, hidden under the cover of darkness, but the square was now an inferno. He couldn’t be critically injured—if he were, she would feel it, and right now she didn’t feel anything, which meant—

“Hold on.” Souji’s fingers tightened around her wrist. “It’s stopped.”

The sky had turned silent. The buzzing had died away.

They’re landing, Rin realized. This was a ground assault. The dirigibles didn’t want to eradicate all Tikany by air. They wanted prisoners.

But didn’t they understand the dangers of a ground assault? They might have their arquebuses, but she had a god, and she would smite them down the moment they approached. They only bore a fighting chance against her if they hovered out of her range. They had to understand that sending down troops was suicide.

Unless—

Unless.

An icy chill crept through her veins.

She saw it now. The Hesperians didn’t want her bombed. She was their favorite test subject; they didn’t want her blown to pieces. They wanted her captured alive, delivered whole and writhing to the Gray Company’s laboratories, so they’d brought the only person in the world who could face her in hand-to-hand combat and win.

Nezha, whose wounds stitched themselves back together as quickly as they opened.

Nezha, whose powers flowed from the sea.

“Run,” she told Souji, just as another round of missiles tore them apart.

For a moment the world was silent.

All was darkness, and then colors began to return—only red at first, red everywhere she looked, and then muddled clumps of red and green. Rin didn’t know how she managed to stand, only that one moment she was lying on the ground and the next she was staggering through the forest, lurching from tree to tree because her balance was broken and she couldn’t stand up straight. She tasted blood on her lip, but she couldn’t tell where she’d been hurt; the pain was like a shroud, pulsing uniformly across her body with every step she took.

“Souji?”

No response. She wasn’t sure if she’d gotten the sounds out—she couldn’t hear her own voice, except for an odd muffle deep inside her skull.

“Souji?”

Still nothing.

She stumbled forward, rubbing at her eyes, trying to gain some better grasp on the world and her senses other than it hurt, it hurt . . .

A familiar smell suffused the air. Something nauseatingly, sickly sweet, something that made her stomach roil and her veins ache with longing.

The Republicans had set off opium bombs.

They knew her weakness. They intended to incapacitate her.

Rin took a deep breath and pulled a ball of flame into her hand. She had a higher opium tolerance than most, a gift of months and months of opium addiction and failed rehabilitation. All those nights spent high out of her mind, conversing with hallucinations of Altan, might buy her a few extra minutes before she was cut off from the Phoenix.

That meant she had to find Nezha now.

“Come on,” she murmured. She sent the flame into the air above and around her. Nezha wouldn’t be able to resist the flare; it’d function like a beacon. He was searching for her. He’d come.

“Where are you?” she shouted.

Lightning split the air in response. Then a sheet of rain abruptly hammered down so hard that Rin nearly fell.

This wasn’t natural rain. The sky had been clear just a moment ago, there hadn’t even been a whisper of clouds, and even if a storm had been brewing it couldn’t have moved in so quickly, so coincidentally . . .

But since when could Nezha summon the rain?

In some awful way it made sense. Dragons controlled the rain, so said the myths. Even in Tikany, a place where religion had long been diminished to children’s bedtime stories, the magistrates lit incense offerings to the dragon lords of the river during drought years to induce heavy showers.

But that meant Nezha’s domain wasn’t just the river but all the water around him. And if he could summon it, control it . . .

If this rain was his doing, he’d become so much more powerful than she’d feared.

“General?”

Rin turned. A band of troops had clustered around her. New recruits, she didn’t recognize them—they’d survived, bless them; they were rallying toward her, even when they’d just seen their comrades ripped apart.

Their loyalty amazed her. But their deaths would accomplish nothing.

“Get away,” she ordered.

They didn’t move. The one in the front spoke. “We’ll fight with you, General.”

“Don’t even try,” she said. “He will kill you all.”

She’d seen Nezha at the height of his abilities once before. He’d raised an entire lake to protect his fleet. If he’d perfected his skills since, then not a single one of them would survive for more than a few seconds.

This wasn’t a war of men anymore. This was a war of gods. This had to end between her and Nezha, shaman to shaman.

All she could do before then was minimize the fallout.

“Go help the villagers,” she told them. “Get them away from here, as many as you can. Seek cover under darkness and don’t stop running until you’re out of range of the rain. Hurry.”

They obeyed, leaving her alone in the storm. The rainfall was deafening. She couldn’t see a single Republican soldier, Nikara or Hesperian, around her, which meant Nezha, too, had sent away his reinforcements.

He would have done it out of nobility. Typical. He was always the righteous ruler, the noble aristocrat. She could just imagine Nezha giving the order in his arrogant, assured voice. Leave her to me.

Fire flickered around her body, winking in and out as sheets of rain kept crushing it away. The water was now coming down so hard it felt like repeated smacks from the flat side of a sword. She struggled to stand up straight. Her fingers trembled on the hilt of her blade.

Then at last she saw him, striding through rain that parted cleanly around him whenever he moved.

Pain arced through the knotted scar in her lower back. Memories stabbed her mind like daggers. A touch, a whisper, a kiss. She clenched her jaw tight to keep from trembling.

He looked older, though only several months had passed since she last saw him. Taller. He moved differently; his stride was more assertive, imbued with a new sense of authority. With Jinzha dead, Nezha was the crown prince of Arlong, the Young Marshal of his father’s army, and the heir apparent to the Nikara Republic. Nezha was about to own the entire country, and only Rin stood in his way.

They regarded each other for a moment in a silence that seemed to stretch on for an eternity, the weight of their shared past hanging heavy between them. Rin felt a sudden pang of nostalgia, that complicated mix of longing and regret, and couldn’t make it go away. She’d spent so long fighting by his side, she had to make herself remember how to hate him.

He stood close enough that she could see his grotesque smile, the tortured ripple that pulled at the scar lines drawn into the left half of his face. His cheeks and jaw, once angular perfection, were shattered porcelain. Cracked tiles. A map of the country falling apart.

Venka had claimed he was ill. He looked the furthest thing from ill—Rin couldn’t detect a shred of weakness in the way he carried himself. He was primed for battle, lethal.

“Hello, Rin,” he called. His voice seemed deeper, crueler. He sounded a near match to his father. “What happened to your hand?”

She opened her palm. Flame roared at his face. Dismissively he waved a hand, and a gust of rain extinguished the fire long before it reached him.

Fuck. Rin could feel her fingers going numb. She was running out of time.

“This doesn’t have to be hard,” he said. “Come quietly and no one else has to die.”

She braced her heels against the dirt. “You’re going home in a coffin.”

He shrugged. The rain began to pound even harder, pummeling so vigorously that her knees buckled.

She gritted her teeth, fighting to stay upright.

She would not kneel to him.

She had to get past that rain; it was functioning too well as a shield. But the solution was so simple. She’d learned it long ago at Sinegard. Years later, the basic pattern of their fights remained the same. Nezha was stronger than she was. His limbs were longer. Then and now, she only stood a chance when she got in close, where his reach didn’t matter.

She lunged. Nezha crouched, whipping his sword out. But she’d aimed lower than he’d anticipated. She wasn’t going for his head—she wanted his center of gravity. He came down easier than she’d expected. She scrambled for control as they fell. She was so much lighter than he was, she’d only pin him down if she caught him at just the right angle—but he slashed upward, and she lost her balance as she ducked.

He landed heavily atop her. She thrashed. He jabbed his sword down, twice missing her face for mud.

She opened her mouth and spat fire.

It engulfed his face for one glorious moment. She saw skin crinkling and peeling back. She caught a glimpse of bone. Then a wall of water crashed over both of them, extinguishing her flame, leaving them both sputtering for breath.

She recovered first. She got her knee up in his solar plexus. He flailed backward. She wriggled out from under him and settled into a crouch.

The rain’s stopped, she realized. The pressure was gone; the forest fell silent.

At the same time she felt a woozy tilt in her limbs, a heady rush in her temples.

So this was it. The opium had seeped too deep into her bloodstream. She didn’t have the fire, and her only advantage was that he’d lost the water. This was now a matter of blades and fists and teeth.

She unsheathed her knife. They dueled for only a moment. It was no contest. He disarmed her first, and easily, sent her blade spinning far away into the dark.

No matter. She knew she couldn’t match him with blades. The moment the hilt left her palm, she aimed a savage kick at Nezha’s wrist.

It worked. He dropped his sword. Now they had only their fists. That was a relief. This was so much easier, more direct, more brutal. She clawed at his eyes. He slapped her hand away. She bit at his elbow. He shoved it at her mouth. Her head jerked back.

Blood stung her eyes and clouded her vision. She punched without looking. Nezha was doing the same. His blows came at her too fast for her to dodge or block but she gave as good as she got, landed just as many as he did, until she forgot she didn’t have a right hand to punch with. She lashed out with her stump. He blocked it with his elbow. Awful, blinding pain ripped through the right half of her torso. For a moment she forgot how to breathe.

Nezha broke free of her grasp, jumped to his feet, and kicked down at her ribs. She curled into a ball, too winded to scream. He stomped on her stump. Her vision flashed white.

He kicked her in the side, again and again until she was lying on her back, too stunned to do anything but gasp like a fish out of water. He stumbled back, chest heaving. Then he dropped to his knees, straddled her chest, and pinned her arms down with his hands.

“I told you,” he panted, “to come quietly.”

She spat blood in his face.

He slammed his knuckles into her right eye. Her head thudded against the wet dirt. He wiped the back of his hand against his shirt, then drew it back to deliver a second punch to her left eye. She took the beating like a limp doll, without sound, without response. He punched her five, six, seven times. She lost count. She was dazed with pain and opium; the blows felt like raindrops.

But the fact that he was beating her meant something—the fact that she wasn’t dead meant something. She should be dead right now. He should have just stabbed her in the heart or slashed her throat; it would have been easier. And Nezha wasn’t sadistic, wasn’t prone to torture over efficiency.

He’s not aiming to kill, she realized. Nezha wanted her alive. He wanted to incapacitate. And right now, he just wanted to hurt.

That was the difference between them. His loss.

“You should have killed me at Arlong,” she hissed.

The punches stopped.

Nezha reached down for her neck and began to squeeze.

She scrabbled frantically at his hands. Altan had taught her to escape chokeholds—hands were strong, single fingers weren’t so much, so all you had to do was separate them. One at a time. She dug her fingers under his middle finger and detached it from the others, then pulled backward hard, harder—

He wasn’t letting go.

Alternate means, then. She jammed her thumb toward his eyes. He twisted his face away. Her nails dug into his cheek instead, and she compensated by digging in so hard she drew blood. Three neat crimson streaks sliced down his right jaw.

His grip loosened, just the slightest bit, for a brief moment. That was all she needed.

She reached behind her, scrabbling to find his blade. She’d seen him drop it, it had to be within reach . . . but the first thing her fingers closed around was not the hilt but a stone, heavy and jagged, just about the size of her palm.

That would do.

She swung the stone up against Nezha’s temple. It connected with bone with a satisfying crunch. His grip loosened. She summoned every remaining ounce of her strength into her left arm and struck his head again. Blood gathered inside a gash by his right eye, as if hesitating, then started pouring out in thick rivulets.

He slumped to the side.

She wriggled out from beneath him. He toppled to the ground.

Was that it? Had she knocked him unconscious? Could this have been so easy? She leaned cautiously over him, hefting the rock in her hand for a third and final blow.

Then she paused, startled.

The blood flow had stopped. Nezha’s skin was stitching itself together, pale skin growing back over red pulp as if time had simply reversed.

She watched in disbelief. Nezha could recover from blows with terrifying speed, she knew that, but the process had taken hours before. Now his body was erasing wounds in mere seconds.

She’d burned him earlier. Badly. There was no evidence of that, either.

What if she ripped his heart from his chest? Would a new one sprout? If she buried his sword between his ribs, would his heart grow around it?

Only one way to find out. She picked the sword up off the ground and knelt above him, straddling his torso with her knees.

Nezha made a soft moaning noise. His eyelids fluttered.

Rin raised her left hand high, blade pointed straight down. Her arm trembled; her fingers felt awkward around the hilt. But she couldn’t miss, not from this angle. She had an immobile victim and a clear, open target; she couldn’t possibly fuck this up.

One hard blow to the chest. That was all it would take. One blow, perhaps a twist for good measure, and all this would be over.

But she couldn’t bring her arm down. Something stayed her hand. Her arm was like some foreign object, moving of its own will. She clenched her teeth and tried again. The blade remained suspended in the air.

She screamed in frustration, lunging forward over Nezha’s limp form, yet she still couldn’t bring the blade anywhere near his flesh.

Nezha’s eyes shot open just as a droning noise buzzed over their heads.

Rin glanced up. A dirigible approached, swooping low toward the clearing at a frightening speed. She dropped the sword and scrambled off Nezha’s chest.

The dirigible landed only ten yards away. The basket had barely hit the ground before soldiers jumped out, shouting words that Rin couldn’t understand.

She dove for the trees. For the next several moments she crawled desperately through the bushes, ignoring the thorns and branches scratching at her eyes, lacerating her skin. Elbow, knee, elbow, knee. She didn’t dare look back. She just had to get away, quickly as she could. If they caught her now she was nothing; she had no sword, no fire, no army. If they caught her now, she was dead. Pain screamed for her to stop and fear propelled her forward.

She kept waiting for the shouts to catch up to her. For the cold steel at the back of her neck.

They never came.

At last, when her lungs burned red-hot and her heart felt like it would explode out of her chest, she stopped and peered behind her.

The dirigible rose slowly into the air. She watched, heart pounding, as it ascended above the trees. It teetered for a moment, as if unsure of where it was going, and then it veered sharply to the left and retreated.

They hadn’t found her. They hadn’t even tried.

Rin attempted to stand and failed. Her muscles wouldn’t obey. She couldn’t even sit up. The pummeling she’d just taken hit her all at once, a million different pains and bruises that kept her on the ground like firm hands pushing her down.

She lay curled on her side, helpless and immobile, shrieking in frustration. She’d squandered her chance. She wouldn’t get it back. Nezha was gone, and she was alone in the mud, the dark, and the smoke.