The Burning God (The Poppy War Book 3)

“If I counted right, the explosions on Mount Tianshan destroyed almost two-thirds of the Hesperian fleet in Nikan,” Kitay said. “That’s . . . that’s a lot.”

“Just two-thirds?” Cholang asked. “Not all?”

“Nezha didn’t send the entire fleet west,” Kitay said. “The last I heard, the Consortium had lent him forty-eight aircraft. We brought down six at the Anvil. I saw about thirty at the mountain. And we know that two escaped back west.”

“With any luck, Nezha wasn’t on them,” Venka muttered.

Rin rubbed at her aching eyes, too exhausted to laugh. The four of them—herself, Cholang, Kitay, and Venka—stood around the table in Cholang’s hut. They were all wan and twitchy with fatigue, yet their conference felt suffused with an urgent, burning energy. A quiet, astonished confidence; a taste of hope that none of them had felt for months.

This was the difference between fleeing for their lives and planning an assault. They all understood the magnitude of what might be in reach. It was madness. It was thrilling.

“How quickly do you think the Hesperians will send replacements?” Rin asked.

“I’m not sure,” Kitay said. “They’re probably vacillating. When I was in Arabak, I kept hearing rumors that the Consortium was reconsidering their investments. The longer Nezha took to solidify the south, the touchier they got about military aid. The Consortium’s a tricky entity—they need a unanimous vote from all member countries to commit troops in any foreign location. And their constituents are getting less comfortable losing lives—and the costs of airships, which are considerable—to a power they can’t understand.”

“So they’re cowards,” Cholang said. “Paper tigers. They came in ready to win our wars for us, but the moment they get scared, they’re all going to back off?”

“It won’t end this easily,” Rin said. “They’ve had designs on this continent for too long. We won’t scare them away with mere threats. We have to make it real.” She swallowed and lifted her chin. “If we want to finish this for good, we’ll have to occupy Arlong.”

No one laughed.

It was amazing how that simple sentence, which a week ago would have just sounded like a cruel joke, now seemed completely feasible. Defeating the Republic wasn’t a daydream anymore. It was a question of time frame.

Rin had survived the long march with only the barest fragments of an army. The numbers Kitay had collected were depressing. Half the soldiers who had left the Anvil were now dead or missing. The casualty rate for civilians reached two-thirds.

But Rin still commanded the survivors. And right now, she held the biggest military advantage she’d possessed since this war began.

The Hesperians were rattled. Nezha had just suffered a defeat of epic proportions. Instead of bombing her to pieces under open skies, he’d followed Rin to Mount Tianshan and lost most of his fleet. This disaster fell on his shoulders, and the Consortium surely knew it. For once, the southerners had a fighting chance at defeating the Republic. But to capitalize on their momentum, they had to move out as quickly as they could.

“We should attack on two fronts.” Rin made a pincer movement with her hand. “A double-pronged strategy from the north and south, like the one the Mugenese tried during the Third Poppy War.”

“Didn’t work so well for them,” Venka said.

“Save for me, it would have,” Rin said. “They had the right idea—they forced the Empire to split reinforcements along two vulnerable fronts. What’s more, Nezha knows he’s running low on manpower. He’ll throw everything he has at us if we’re concentrated in a single front. I don’t want to take that gamble. I’d rather bleed him dry.”

“Then we hit him from the northwest and the northeast.” Seamlessly, Kitay picked up Rin’s thoughts and spun them out loud into an articulable plan. “We send a first column through Ram, Rat, and Tiger Provinces. Then the main force will strike in the heartland, right when he’s spread his forces thin trying to maintain territory that he’s just gotten his hands on. If we act fast, we could have this wrapped up within six months.”

“Hold on,” said Cholang. “You’ll accomplish all this with what army?”

“Well,” Kitay said, “yours.”

“I lost eighty soldiers at Mount Tianshan,” Cholang said. “I’m not about to send more to their deaths.”

“You’ll die if you stay here,” Rin said. “Did you think Nezha would leave you alone now that you’ve cast your lot? You’re already dead men walking. It’s a question of when and how.”

“You might buy a few extra months while he’s occupied with us,” Kitay added. “But if the Republic can finish us off, then you certainly have no chance. Ask yourself if it’s worth several more months living in tents on the plains.”

Cholang said nothing.

“You won’t think of a rejoinder,” Venka informed him. “He’s thought about five arguments ahead.”

Cholang scowled. “Go on, then.”

“The northeastern front will obviously be a feint—it doesn’t determine the endgame—but we still gain a hard material advantage from striking there early,” Kitay said. “It’s got bases of wartime industry—armories, shipyards, all that good stuff. So even if Nezha doesn’t take us seriously up north, it’s a win either way.” He nodded to Venka. “You go with Cholang. Take a couple hundred men from the Southern Army; you pick.”

“Not that I’m refusing this assignment,” Venka said, “but suppose you’ve miscalculated, and we head straight into a bloodbath?”

“That won’t happen,” Kitay assured her. “Nezha doesn’t have a loyal local base in the north. They’ve only recently bowed to the Republic, and the civilians couldn’t care less who wins this fight. They’ve lost their Empress, they’ve lost Jun Loran, and they’re rankling under Arlong’s rule just as much as we are. They don’t have an ideological stake in this.”

“They’re the north, though,” Venka said. “Part of their ideology is hating you lot. They won’t bow to peasants.”

“Then it’s a good thing we’re sending Sring Venka,” Kitay said. “You porcelain-faced Sinegardian princess, you.”

Venka snickered. “Fine.”

“But what are you doing on the southeastern front?” Cholang asked. “We’d be leaving you with shards of an army.”

“That’s fine,” Rin said. “We’ve got shamans.”

“What shamans?” Cholang asked. “You’re the only one left.”

“I don’t have to be.”

It was as if she’d placed a lit fuse on the center of the table. The room fell silent. Kitay stiffened. Venka and Cholang stared at her, openmouthed.

Rin refused to let that faze her. She wouldn’t get defensive; that would only justify their incredulity. She had been wondering how to introduce this proposal since she descended from the mountain. And then it became obvious—to make madness seem normal, she merely had to discuss it as if it were common sense. She just had to distort their idea of normal.

“Su Daji had the right idea,” she continued calmly. “The only way we have a chance against the Hesperians is to match their Maker with our own gods. The Trifecta could have managed it. They might even have seized the Empire by now, if I’d let Riga have his way. But they were despots. Over time, they would have done more harm than good.”

Now for the crucial leap of logic. “But if we haven’t got them, we need our own shamans. We’ve got hundreds of soldiers who would be willing to do it. We just need to train them. We’ve set a campaign schedule of six months. I can get recruits in fighting form in two weeks.”

She looked around the table, waiting for someone to object.

Everything hinged on what happened next. Rin was testing the boundaries of her authority in the aftermath of a tectonic shift in power. This felt so different from the first time she’d vaulted herself into leadership, mere months ago when she’d addressed Ma Lien’s men with a dry mouth and quivering knees. Back then she’d been scared, grasping for straws, and disguising her utter lack of a strategy with feigned bravado.

Now she knew exactly what she needed to do. She just needed to force everyone onto the same page. She had a vision for the future—something horrifying, something grand. Could she speak it into reality?

“But back when . . .” Venka opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again. “Rin, I’m just—you told me once that—”

“I understand the risks,” Rin said. “Back then I didn’t think they were worth it. But you saw what happened on that mountain. It’s clear now that they are. The Hesperians still have at least fourteen airships, and that gives them an advantage we can’t counter. Not without more of—well, me.”

There was another silence.

Then Cholang shook his head and sighed. “Look. If any of my men want to volunteer, I won’t stop them.”

“Thank you,” Rin said.

Good enough—that was as much of an endorsement as she was going to get. So long as Cholang didn’t try to stop her, she didn’t care how uncomfortable he looked.

She glanced to her right. “Kitay?”

She needed to hear him speak before she could continue. She wasn’t waiting for his permission—she’d never needed his permission for anything—but she wanted to hear his confirmation. She wanted someone else, someone whose mind worked far faster than hers ever would, to assess the forces at play and the lives at stake and say, Yes, these calculations are valid. This sacrifice is necessary. You aren’t mad. The world is.

For a long time Kitay stood still, staring at the table, fingers tapping erratically against the wooden surface. Then he looked up at her. No, he looked right through her. His mind was already somewhere else. He was already thinking past this conversation. “No more than several—”

“We won’t need more than a handful,” she assured him. “Three at most—just enough that we can spread an attack around multiple planes.”

“One for every cardinal direction,” he murmured. “Because the impact is exponential if . . .”

“Right,” she said. “I get a lot done. I’m not enough. But even one other shaman throws off defense formations like we couldn’t dream.”

“Fucking hell,” Venka said. “How long have you been thinking about this?”

Rin didn’t miss a beat. “Since Tikany.”

She still hadn’t fully won them over. She saw doubt lingering in their eyes—they might not have raised objections, but they still didn’t like it.

She felt a pulse of frustration. How could she make them see? They had long surpassed wars of steel and bodies clashing on mortal fields. War happened on the divine plane now—her gods versus the Hesperians’ Maker. What she’d seen on Mount Tianshan was a vision of the future, of how this would inevitably end. They couldn’t flinch away from that future. They had to fight the kind of war that moved mountains.

“The west does not conceive of this war as a material struggle,” she said. “This is about contesting interpretations of divinity. They imagine that because they obey the Divine Architect, they can crush us like ants. We’ve just proven them wrong. We’ll do it again.”

She leaned forward, pressing her palm against the table. “We have one chance right now—probably the only chance we’ll ever get—to seize this country back. The Republic is reeling, but they’re going to recover. We’ve got to hit them hard before then. And when we do, it can’t be a half-hearted assault. We need overkill. We need to scare Nezha’s allies so badly that they’ll scuttle back to their hemisphere and never dare to come back here again.”

No one objected. She knew they wouldn’t. The objections didn’t exist.

“What’s your plan for when they lose control?” Kitay asked quietly.

He’d said when. Not if. This wasn’t a hypothetical. They’d moved into the realm of logistics now, which meant she’d already won.

“They won’t,” she said. The next words she spoke felt like reopened scars, familiar and painful, words that bore the weight of all the guilt that she’d tried so long to suppress. Words belonging to a legacy that now, she knew, she had no choice but to face. “Because we’ll be Cike. And the first rule of the Cike is that we cull.”

The world looked different when Rin walked out of Cholang’s hut.

She saw the same haphazard army camp that she’d encountered walking in. She passed the same flimsy fires flickering under harsh steppe winds; the same clusters of underweight soldiers and civilians with too little to eat, drink, or wear; the same thin, worn, and hungry eyes.

But Rin didn’t see weakness here.

She saw an army rebuilding. A nation in the making. Gods, it excited her. Did they understand what they were about to become?

“Look,” Kitay said. “They’re telling myths about you already.”

Rin followed his gaze. A handful of younger soldiers had erected a stage in the center of the camp by pushing two tables together. A white sheet stretched taut between two poles, behind which a small lamp burned, throwing distorted silhouettes onto the blank canvas.

She paused to watch.

The sight of the canvas brought back memories so sweet they hurt: four days of summer among the hot, sticky crowds of Sinegard; the cool relief of the marble flooring in Kitay’s family’s estate; five-course banquet meals of rich foods she’d never tasted before and hadn’t touched since. This puppet show wasn’t a fraction as professional as the performance she’d seen during the Summer Festival in Sinegard, which had involved puppets that moved so smoothly, their rods and strings so invisible that Rin almost believed there were little creatures dancing on the other side. These puppeteers were quite visible behind the stage, wearing shabby, hastily stitched props on their hands that vaguely resembled people.

Rin didn’t realize that the formless blue figure in front was Nezha until the play began.

“I am the Young Marshal!” The puppeteer adopted the nasal, reedy voice of a petulant child. “My father said we were supposed to win this war!”

“You’ve led our fleet to disaster!” The other actor spoke in guttural, broken Nikara, signifying a Hesperian soldier. “You idiot boy! Why would you fire on the Trifecta?”

“I didn’t know they could fire back!”

The following scenes were equally bad, line after line of crude, stupid humor. But in the aftermath of Tianshan, crude humor was what the southerners wanted. They reveled in Nezha’s humiliation. It made their impending fight seem winnable.

“Come on.” Kitay resumed walking. “It’s just more of the same.”

“What else are they saying?” Rin asked.

“Who cares?”

“I don’t care what they say about Nezha. What are they saying about me?”

“Ah.”

He knew what she was really asking. What do they know?

“No one knows you turned on the Trifecta,” he said after a pause. “They know you went to Mount Tianshan to seek help, and that the shamans inside sacrificed themselves to save us from the dirigible fleet. That’s all they know.”

“So they think the Trifecta died heroes.”

“Wouldn’t you assume the same?” Kitay raised an eyebrow at her. “Are you going to correct them?”

She considered that for a moment, and found herself in the curious position of determining a nation’s historical narrative.

Did she let the Trifecta’s legacy survive?

She could ruin them. She ought to ruin them, for what they had done to her.

But the hero narrative was halfway true. One of the Trifecta had died for honor. One, at least, deserved to be remembered as a good man. And that made a lovely myth—the shamans of a previous era of Nikara greatness had given up their lives to ensure a dawn of a new one.

Rin had ended the Trifecta. She could afford them dignity in death, if that was what she chose. She loved that she had the power to choose.

“No,” she decided. “Let them linger on in legend.”

She could be generous to the Trifecta’s ghosts. They could become legends—legends were all they would ever be. For all of Riga, Jiang, and Daji’s dreams of glory, their story had ended in the Heavenly Temple. She could allow them to occupy this little prelude in history. She had the far more delightful task of shaping the future. And when she was finished, no one would even remember the Trifecta’s names.

Rin had another audience that night before she slept.

She set out alone to meet Chaghan in his camp. The Ketreyids were packing up. Their campfires were stamped out and the evidence buried; their yurts and blankets were rolled up and lashed onto their horses.

“You’re not sticking around?” she asked.

“I did what I came here to do.” Chaghan didn’t ask her what had happened on the mountain. He clearly already knew; he’d greeted her with an impressed grin and a shake of his head. “Well done, Speerly. That was clever.”

“Thank you,” she said, pleased in spite of herself. Chaghan had never paid her a compliment before. For nearly the entirety of their relationship, since the day they’d first met at Khurdalain, he had treated her like some wayward child incapable of rational decisions.

Now, for the first time, he acted as if he truly respected her.

“Do you think they’re dead?” she asked him. “I mean, there’s no chance they—”

“Absolutely,” he said. “They were powerful, but their anchor bond kept them in command of their own bodies, which means they were always mortal. They’ve passed on. I’ve felt it. And good riddance.”

She nodded, relieved. “It’s what you’re owed. For Tseveri.”

His lip curled. “Let’s not pretend you did that for a blood debt.”

“It was a blood debt,” she said. “Just not yours. And now you must know what I have to do next.”

He exhaled slowly. “I can guess.”

“You’re not going to try to stop me?”

“You confuse me with my aunt, Rin.”

“The Sorqan Sira would have killed me on the spot.”

“Oh, she would have assassinated you long ago.” Chaghan ran his hand gently across the length of his horse’s neck. Rin realized that she knew the creature—it was the same black warhorse that Chaghan had ridden out of the forests by Lake Boyang the last time she’d seen him. He adjusted his saddle as he spoke, tightening every knot with practiced care. “The Sorqan Sira was petrified of the resurgence of Nikara shamanism. She thought it would spell the end of the world.”

“And you don’t?”

“The world is already ending. You see, the Hundred Clans know that time moves in a circle. There are never any new stories, just old ones told again and again as this universe moves through its cycles of civilization and crumbles into despair. We are on the brink of an age of chaos again, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. I just prefer to back certain horses in the race.”

“But you’re going to watch the rest from a safe distance,” Rin said.

She was being facetious. She knew better than to ask Chaghan to stay and help. She wasn’t that selfish—the Nikara had exploited Chaghan’s people enough.

If she had to be honest, she would have liked Chaghan to come south with her. She’d never been able to stand him before, but the sight of him brought back memories of the Cike. Of Suni, Baji, Ramsa, and Qara. Of Altan. Of all the Bizarre Children, they were the only ones left, both tasked independently with bringing order to their fracturing nations. Chaghan, somehow, had already succeeded. Rin desperately wished he might lend her his power.

But she’d taken so much from him already. She couldn’t demand more.

“With you, I’ve learned it’s best to keep a safe distance from the fallout.” Chaghan yanked tight the last knot and patted the horse behind its ears. “Good luck, Speerly. You’re mad as they come, but you’re not quite as mad as Trengsin.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“It’s the only reason I think you might win.”

“Thank you,” Rin said, surprised. “For everything.”

He acknowledged that with a thin-lipped smile. “There’s one last thing before you go. I didn’t just want to say goodbye. We need to talk about Nezha.”

She tensed. “Yes?”

The horse, as if sensing her unease, whinnied in agitation and stamped its front hooves against the dirt. Chaghan hastily handed its reins off to the nearest rider.

“Sit down,” he told her.

She obeyed. Her heart was pounding very hard. “What do you know?”

He sat cross-legged across from her. “I started looking into the Yins after I heard what happened at the Red Cliffs. It was difficult to parse truth from legend—the House of Yin is shrouded in rumors, and they’re good at protecting their secrets. But I think I’ve gotten a better idea of what happened to Nezha. Why he is the way he is.” He tilted his head at her. “What do you know about where Nezha derived his abilities?”

“He told me a story once,” she said. “It’s . . . it’s odd. It’s not how I thought shamanism worked.”

“How so?” Chaghan pressed.

Why did it suddenly feel like her head was swimming? Rin pressed her nails into her palm, trying to slow down her breathing. It shouldn’t be this hard to talk about Nezha. She’d been discussing how to kill him with Kitay for months now.

But Chaghan’s question brought back memories of Arlong, of rare moments of vulnerability and harsh words she regretted. They made her feel. And she didn’t want to feel.

She forced her voice to keep level. “When we need our gods, we call them. But Nezha never sought the dragon. He told me he encountered one when he was young, but when he spoke about it, he made it sound . . . real.”

“All gods are real.”

“Real on this plane,” she clarified. “In the material world. He said that when he was a child, he wandered into an underwater grotto and met a dragon, which killed his brother and claimed him—whatever that means. He made it sound like his god walks this earth.”

“I see.” Chaghan rubbed his chin. “Yes. That’s what I thought.”

“But—that’s—can they do that?”

“It’s not inconceivable. There are pockets of this world where the boundary between our world and the world of spirit is thinner.” Chaghan pressed his palms together to demonstrate. “Mount Tianshan is one. The Speerly Temple is another. The Nine Curves Grotto is a third. That cave is the source of all Nezha’s power.

“The Yins have been linked to the Dragon for a long time. The waters of Arlong are old, and those cliffs are powerful with their history of the dead. Magic flows smoothly through those waters. Have you ever wondered how Arlong is so rich, so lush, even when its surrounding provinces are barren? A divine power has protected the region for centuries.”

“But how—”

“You’ve been to the Dead Island. You see how nothing grows there. Have you ever wondered why?”

“I thought—I mean, wasn’t that just Mugenese chemical warfare? Didn’t they just poison it?”

Chaghan shook his head. “That’s not all. The Phoenix’s aura pulses through the island, just like water pulses through Arlong.”

“So then the Dragon . . .”

“The Dragon. If you can call it that.” Chaghan made a disgusted face. “More like a poor enchanted creature that might have once been a lobster, starfish, or dolphin. It must have swum in the web of the true Dragon’s magic and unwittingly become a physical manifestation of the ocean, whose desire is to—”

“To destroy?”

“No. The Phoenix’s impulse is to destroy. The ocean wishes to drown, to possess. The treasures of all great civilizations have inevitably fallen into its dark depths, and the Dragon yearns to possess them all. It likes to collect beautiful things.”

The way he said it made Rin cringe. “And it’s collecting Nezha.”

“That’s a nice euphemism for it. But the word is too tame. The Dragon doesn’t just want to collect Nezha like he’s some priceless vase or painting. It wants to own him, body and soul.”

Bile rose up in Rin’s throat as she recalled the way Nezha had shuddered when he spoke of the Dragon.

What did I do to him?

For the first time, she felt a twinge of guilt for pushing Nezha to the edge, for calling him a coward for refusing to invoke the power that might have saved them.

Back then she’d thought Nezha was just acting spoiled and selfish. She’d never understood how he could loathe his gifts so much when they were so clearly useful. She’d hated him for calling them both abominations.

She’d never taken a moment to consider that unlike her, he hadn’t chosen his pain as tribute. He couldn’t derive satisfaction from it like she could, because for him, it wasn’t the necessary price of a way out. For him, it was only torture.

“He’s drawn to that creature,” Chaghan said. “And he’s drawn to that place. He’s physically anchored. It is the source of all his power.”

Rin took a deep breath. Focus on what matters. “That doesn’t tell me how to kill him.”

“But it tells you where to strike,” Chaghan said. “If you want to end Nezha, you’ll have to go to the source.”

She understood. “I have to take Arlong.”

“You must destroy Arlong,” he agreed. “Otherwise the water will keep healing him. It’ll keep protecting him. And you should know by now that when you leave your enemies alive, wars don’t end.”