The Burning God (The Poppy War Book 3)

The next morning, Rin stepped out of Cholang’s hut to discover a crowd of people so vast she couldn’t see where it ended.

Kitay had sent out a call summoning volunteers the night before, specifying soldiers older than fifteen but younger than twenty-five. Rin wanted recruits around her age. She needed their rage to be all-consuming and untempered; she needed soldiers who would throw their souls into the void without the cautious timidity she’d grown to associate with men twice and thrice her age.

But it was clear no one had heeded the age limit. The people in the crowd ranged from civilians over sixty to children as young as seven.

Rin stood before the crowd and let herself imagine, just for a moment, what might happen if she made shamans of them all. It wasn’t a true option, just an awful, indulgent fantasy. She pictured deserts shifting like whirlpools. Oceans towering like mountains. She saw the whole world turned upside down, frothing with primordial chaos, and it tickled her something awful to know that if she wanted to make that happen, she could.

You would have been so proud, Altan. This is what you always wanted.

“The parameters were fifteen to twenty-five,” she told the crowd. “When I come back I don’t want to see anyone who doesn’t qualify.”

She turned and walked back into the hut.

“What now?” Kitay asked, amused. “A written exam?”

“Make them wait,” she said. “We’ll see who really wants it.”

She let them sit for hours. As the day stretched on, more and more trickled away, disabused by the blinding sun and relentless wind. Most of them—the ones that Rin suspected had volunteered out of a temporary, unsustainable bravado—left within the first hour. She was glad to see them go. She was also relieved when the youngest volunteers finally stood and left, either on their own or dragged along by their mothers.

But that still left a crowd of nearly fifty. Still far too many.

Late in the afternoon, after the sun had cut its scorching arc through the sky, Rin came back out to address them.

“Dig a blade under the nail of your fourth finger from the tip to the bed,” she commanded. It was a good test of pain tolerance. She’d learned from Altan that that sort of wound healed easily and wasn’t prone to infection, but it hurt. “If you want this, show me your blood.”

Murmurs of hesitation rippled through the crowd. For a moment no one moved, as if they were all trying to decide whether or not she was joking.

“I’m not joking,” Rin said. “I have knives if you need them.”

Eight volunteers dug their knives into their nail beds as she’d asked. Dark red droplets splattered the dirt. Two screamed; the other six suppressed their cries with clenched jaws.

Rin dismissed everyone else and brought the silent six into the hut.

She recognized only two of them. There was Dulin—the boy she’d found buried alive in Tikany. She was glad to see he had survived the march. Then, to her surprise, there was Pipaji.

“Where’s your sister?” Rin asked.

“She’s fine,” Pipaji said, and didn’t elaborate.

Rin regarded her for a moment, then shrugged and surveyed the others. “Did any of you make the march with your families?”

Two of them, both boy soldiers with the faintest hint of whiskers, nodded.

“Do you love them?”

They nodded again.

“If you do this you’ll never see them again,” Rin said. It wasn’t quite the truth, but she had to test their resolve. “It’s too dangerous. Your power will be volatile, and I don’t have the experience to help you rein it in around civilians, which means you’ll only be permitted to spend time around other people in this squadron. Think carefully.”

After a long, uneasy silence, both boys stood up and left. Four remained.

“Understand the sacrifice you’re making,” Rin told them. She felt by now she was belaboring the point. But she owed it to them to reiterate this warning as many times as she could. She didn’t need all four shamans. She needed troops who wouldn’t lose their nerve halfway through training or scare the others off. “I’m asking you to gamble with your sanity. If you go into the void you’ll find monsters on the other side. And you might not be strong enough to claw your way back. My masters died before they could teach me everything they knew. I’ll only be a halfway decent guide.”

No one said a word. Were they too terrified to speak, or did they just not care?

“You could lose control of your body and mind,” she said. “And if that happens, I’ll have to kill you.”

Again, no reaction.

Dulin raised his hand.

She nodded to him. “Yes?”

“Will we be able to do what you do?” he asked.

“Not so well,” she said. “And not so easily. I’m used to it. It will be painful for you.”

“How painful?”

“It will be the worst thing you’ve ever known.” She had to be honest; she could not ensnare them in something they didn’t understand. “If you fail, then you will lose your mind forever. If you succeed, you’ll still never have your mind to yourself again. You’ll live on the precipice of insanity. You’ll be constantly afraid. Drinking laudanum might become the only way you can get a good night’s sleep. You might kill innocent people around you because you don’t know what you’re doing. You might kill yourself.”

Her words were met with blank stares. Rin waited, fully prepared for all of them to stand up and leave.

“General?” Again Dulin raised his hand. “With all due respect, could we stop fucking around and get started?”

So Rin set about the task of creating shamans.

They spent the first evening sitting in a circle on the floor of the hut, resembling village schoolchildren about to learn to write their first characters. First Rin asked for their names. Lianhua was a willowy, wide-eyed girl from Dog Province who bore a series of terrible scars on both arms, her collarbones, and down her back as far as Rin could see. She did not explain them, and nobody was bold enough to ask.

Rin wasn’t sure about her. She seemed so terribly frail—she even spoke in a tremulous, barely audible whisper. But Rin knew very well by now that delicate veneers could conceal steel. Either Lianhua would prove her worth, or she’d break down in two days and stop wasting her time.

Merchi, a tall and rangy man a few years older than Rin, was the only experienced soldier among their ranks. He’d been serving in the Fourth Division of the Imperial Militia when the Mugenese invaded; he’d been part of the liberation force on the eastern coast after the longbow island fell, and he’d witnessed the aftermath of Golyn Niis. He’d first seen combat at the Battle of Sinegard.

“I was in the city when you burned half of it down,” he told Rin. “They were whispering about a Speerly then. Never thought I’d be here now.”

The one thing that bound them all was unspeakable horror. They had all seen the worst the world had to offer, and they had all come out of the experience alive.

That was important. If you didn’t have an anchor, you needed something to help you return from the world of spirit—something thoroughly mortal and human. Altan had his hatred. Rin had her vengeance. And these four recruits had the ferocious, undaunted will to survive under impossible odds.

“What happens now?” Pipaji asked once introductions were finished.

“Now I’m going to give you religion,” Rin said.

She and Kitay had struggled all day to come up with a way to introduce the Pantheon to novices. At Sinegard, it had taken Rin nearly an entire year to prepare her mind to process the gods. Under Jiang’s instruction she’d solved riddles, meditated for hours, and read dozens of texts on theology and philosophy, all so that she could accept that her presumptions about the natural world were founded on illusions.

Her recruits didn’t have that luxury. They’d have to claw their way into heaven.

The necessary, fundamental change lay in their paradigms of the natural world. The Hesperians and the majority of the Nikara both saw the universe as cleanly divided between body and mind. They saw the material world as something separate, immutable, and permanent. But calling the gods required the basic understanding that the world was fluid—that existence itself was fluid—and that the waking world was nothing more than a script that could be written if they could find the right brush, a pattern they could weave in completely different colors if they just knew how to work the loom.

The hardest part of Rin’s training had been belief. But it was so easy to believe when the evidence of supernatural power was right in front of you.

“We trust that the sun will rise every morning even if we don’t know what moves it,” Kitay had said. “So just show them the sun.”

Rin opened her palm toward the recruits. A little string of fire danced between her fingers, weaving in and out like a carp among reeds.

“What am I doing right now?” she asked.

She didn’t expect any of them to know the answer, but she needed to be clear on their preconceptions.

“Magic,” Dulin said.

“Not helpful. ‘Magic’ is a word for effects with causes we can’t explain. How am I causing this?”

They exchanged hesitant glances.

“You called the gods for help?” Pipaji ventured.

Rin closed her fist. “And what are the gods?”

More hesitation. Rin sensed a budding annoyance among the recruits. She decided to skip over the next line of questioning. All she’d ever wanted from Jiang were direct answers, but he’d withheld them from her for months. She didn’t need to repeat that frustration. “The first thing you must accept is that the gods exist. They are real and tangible, as present and visible as any of us are. Perhaps even more so. Can you believe that?”

“Of course,” Dulin said.

The others nodded in agreement.

“Good. The gods reside in a plane beyond this one. You can think of it as the heavens. Our task as shamans is to call them down to affect the matter around us. We act as the conduit—the gateway to divine power.”

“What kind of place is the heavens?” Pipaji asked.

Rin paused, wondering how best to explain. How had Jiang once described it? “The only place that’s real. The place where nothing is decided. The place you visit when you dream.”

This met with puzzled stares. Rin realized she wasn’t getting anywhere. She decided to start over, trying to think of the right words to explain concepts that by now were as familiar to her as breathing.

“You’ve got to stop thinking of our world as the one true domain,” she said. “This world isn’t permanent. It does not objectively exist, whatever that means. The great sage Zhuangzi once said that he didn’t know whether he dreamed of transforming into a butterfly at night, or whether he was always living in a butterfly’s dream. This world is a butterfly’s dream. This world is the gods’ dream. And when we dream of the gods, that just means we’ve woken up. Does that make sense?”

The recruits looked bewildered.

“Not in the least,” Merchi said.

Fair enough. Rin could hear how much her own words sounded like gibberish, even though she also fully believed them to be true.

Small wonder she’d once thought Jiang mad. How on earth did you explain the cosmos while appearing sane?

She tried a different approach. “Don’t overthink it. Just conceive of it like this. Our world is a puppet show, and the things we think of as objectively material are only shadows. Everything is constantly changing, constantly in flux. And the gods lurk behind the scenes, wielding the puppets.”

“But you want us to seize the puppets,” Pipaji said.

“Right!” Rin said. “Good. That’s all shamanism is. It’s recasting reality.”

“Then why would they let us?” Pipaji asked. “If I were a god I wouldn’t want to just lend someone my power.”

“The gods don’t care about things like that. They don’t think like people; they’re not selfish actors. They’re . . . they’re instincts. They have a single, focusing drive. In the Pantheon, they’re kept in balance by all the rest. But when you open the gate, you let them inflict their will on the world.”

“What is the will of your god?” Pipaji asked.

“To burn,” Rin said easily. “To devour and cleanse. But every god is different. The Monkey God wants chaos. The Dragon wants to possess.”

“And how many gods are there?” Pipaji pressed.

“Sixty-four,” Rin said. “Sixty-four gods of the Pantheon, all opposing forces that make up this world.”

“Opposing forces,” Pipaji repeated slowly. “So they are all different instincts. And they all want different things.”

“Yes! Excellent.”

“So then how do we choose?” Pipaji asked. “Or do they choose us? Did the god of fire choose you because you’re a Speerly, or—”

“Hold on,” Merchi interrupted. “Can we bring this down from the level of abstraction? The gods, the Pantheon—great, fine, whatever. How do we call them?”

“One thing at a time,” Rin told him. “We’ve just got to get through basic theory—”

“The drugs are the key, right?” Merchi asked. “That’s what I’ve heard.”

“We’ll get there. The drugs give you access, yes, but first you have to understand what you’re accessing—”

“So the drugs give you abilities?” Merchi interrupted again. “Which drugs? Laughing mushrooms? Poppy seeds?”

“That’s not—we’re not—no. Have you even been listening?” Rin had the sudden urge to smack him on the temple, like Jiang used to whenever he thought she was getting too impatient. She was starting to understand, now, what an insufferable student she must have been. “The drugs don’t bestow abilities. They don’t do anything except allow you to see the world as it really is. The gods bear the power. They are the power. All we can do is let them through.”

“Why don’t you ever need to take drugs?” Pipaji asked.

That caught Rin off guard. “How do you know that?”

“I was watching you during the march,” Pipaji said. “You had a fire in your hand from day to night, but you always seemed so lucid. You can’t have been swallowing poppy seeds the entire time. You would have walked straight off the side of the mountain.”

The other recruits giggled nervously. But Pipaji stared expectantly at Rin with an intensity that made her uncomfortable.

“I’m past that point,” Rin said.

Pipaji looked unconvinced. “Sounds like you’re at the point where we need to be.”

“Absolutely not. You don’t want that. You never want that.”

“But why—”

“Because then the god is always in your head,” Rin snapped. “They’re always screaming at you, trying to get you to bend to their will. Trying to erase you. Then there’s no escape. Your body isn’t mortal anymore, so you can’t die, but you can’t take back control, so the only way to keep the world safe from you is to lock you up in a stone mountain with the other hundreds of shamans who have made that mistake.” Rin gazed around the room, staring levelly into each of their eyes in turn. “And I’ll put a fist through your hearts before it comes to that. It’s kinder that way.”

They stopped giggling.

Late that evening, after several more hours of describing precisely how it felt to enter the Pantheon, Rin gave her recruits their first doses of poppy seeds.

Nothing much happened. All of them became stupidly, giddily high. They rolled around on the floor, tracing patterns through the air with their fingers and droning on and on about inane profundities that made Rin want to put her eyes out with her thumb. Lianhua was overcome with a fit of high-pitched giggles every time someone spoke a word in her direction. Merchi kept stroking the ground and murmuring about how soft it was. Pipaji and Dulin sat absolutely still, eyes pressed shut with something Rin hoped might be concentration, until Dulin began to snore.

Then they all came down and vomited.

“It didn’t work,” Pipaji groaned, rubbing at her bloodshot eyes.

“It’s because you weren’t trying to see,” Rin said. She hadn’t expected any of them to succeed on the first try, but she had been hoping for something. The faintest hint of a divine encounter. Not just four hours of idiocy.

“There’s nothing to see,” Merchi complained. “Whenever I tried to tilt back, or whatever you said it felt like, all I saw was darkness.”

“That’s because you wouldn’t concentrate.”

“I was trying.”

“Well, you weren’t trying hard enough,” Rin said testily. Supervising a group of tripping idiots was hardly fun when she was the only sober person in the room. “You might have at least thought about the Pantheon, instead of trying to do unspeakable things to a mound of dirt.”

“I thought plenty about it,” Merchi snapped. “You might have given us clearer instructions than get high and summon a god.”

Rin knew he was right. The fault lay with her teaching. She just didn’t know how to explain things more clearly than she had. She wished she still had Chaghan with her, who knew the cosmos and its mysteries so well that he could easily break it into concepts they could understand. She wished she had Daji or even the Sorqan Sira, who could implant a vision in their minds that would shatter their conceptions of real or not real. She needed some way to break the logic in their brains like Jiang had done to her, but she had no idea how to replicate his yearlong syllabus, much less condense it down to two weeks.

She stretched her arms over her head. She’d been sitting in a hunched position for hours, and her shoulders felt terribly sore.

“Head back to your tents and go to sleep,” she told them. “We’ll try again in the morning.”

“Maybe this was a stupid idea,” she admitted to Kitay after the third night of getting her recruits high with no results. “Their minds are like rocks. I can’t get anything in, and they think everything I say is stupid.”

He rubbed her shoulder in sympathy. “Look at it from their perspective. You thought everything was stupid when you first pledged Lore. You thought Jiang was clearly off his rocker.”

“But that was because I didn’t know what the fuck we were doing!”

“You must have had some idea.”

He had a point. Back in her second year, she hadn’t known Jiang’s true identity, but she had known he could do things that he shouldn’t be able to. She’d seen him call shadows without moving. She’d felt the wind blow and the water stir at his command. She’d known he had power, and she’d been so hungry to acquire that power, she hadn’t cared what sort of mental hurdles he made her jump. And it had still taken her nearly a year.

But most of that year had been taken up by Jiang’s endless series of precautions to prevent her from becoming precisely what she ultimately became. Rin didn’t need to bother with safety or long-term stability. She just needed troops from whom she could squeeze, at maximum, several months’ utility.

“Take your mind off it for a bit,” Kitay suggested. “No point bashing your head against the wall. Come see what I’ve been working on.”

She followed him out of the tent. Kitay had set up an outdoor work station a ten-minute walk from the camp, which consisted of tools strewn across the ground, diagrams held down with rocks to keep them from flying away in the relentless plateau winds, and one massive structure covered with a heavy canvas tarp. He reached up and pulled the tarp away with both hands, revealing a dirigible flipped on its side and split in two, its inner workings on display like a gutted animal’s intestines.

“You’re not the only one leveling out the power asymmetry,” he said.

Rin moved in closer to inspect the airship engine’s interior, running her fingers over the hull’s outer lining. It wasn’t made of any material she could recognize—not wood, not bamboo, and certainly not heavy metal. The power mechanisms appeared even more foreign, a complicated, interlocking set of gears and screws that brought to mind Sister Petra’s round, fist-size clock, that perfectly intricate machine that the Hesperians believed to be irrefutable proof that the world was designed by some grand architect.

“It’s the only craft that remained relatively intact,” Kitay said. “The rest were burned, shattered wreckage. But this one must have only lost power when it was fairly close to the ground. Its gears are all still working.”

“Hold on,” Rin said sharply. She’d thought Kitay had only been studying how they worked, not how to operate them. “You’re telling me we can fly this?”

“Maybe. I’m still a few days from attempting a test flight. But yes, once we get the basket fitted together, I theoretically should be able to get it up . . .”

“Tiger’s tits.” Rin’s pulse quickened just thinking about what this could mean. All kinds of tactical maneuvers opened up if they had a working dirigible. They still couldn’t go toe-to-toe with the Hesperian fleet in the open air—they’d simply be outnumbered—but they could use air travel for so many other purposes. “This solves so much. Bulk transportation. Quick supply movements. River crossings—”

“Not so fast.” Kitay tapped a winding copper cylinder at the center of the intestinal mess. “I’ve finally figured out its fuel source. It burns coal, but very inefficiently. These things are built with material that is as lightweight as possible, but they’re still awfully heavy. They can’t remain afloat for more than a day, and they can’t carry enough coal to lengthen their journey otherwise they’ll sink.”

“I see,” she said, disappointed.

So that partly solved the central mystery of why Nezha had used the fleet with such restraint during the march over the Baolei Mountains. Dirigibles were a decent quick show of force. But they did not give the Hesperians full reign over the sky. They still depended on ground support for fuel.

“It’s still better than nothing,” Kitay said. “I’ll try to have it flying within the next week.”

“You’re incredible,” Rin murmured. Kitay had always been so wonderfully clever—really, she should have stopped feeling surprised by his inventions after he’d found a way to make her fly—but learning to work a dirigible was an achievement on an entirely different scale. This was alien technology, technology supposedly centuries ahead of Nikara achievements, and somehow he’d pieced together its workings in mere days. “Did you figure this out just by looking at it?”

“I took apart the pieces that seemed removable, and spent a long time staring at the pieces that didn’t.” He pushed his fingers through his bangs, surveying the engine. “The basic principles were easy enough. There’s still a lot I don’t know.”

“But then—then how.” She blinked at the complex metal gears. They looked dauntingly sophisticated. She wouldn’t have known where to start. “I mean, how did you figure out the science?”

“I didn’t.” He shrugged. “I can’t. I don’t know what half these things are or what they do. They’re a mystery to me and will remain so until I’m versed in the fundamentals of this technology, which I won’t be until I’ve studied in their Gray Towers.”

“But if you didn’t even have the fundamentals, then how—”

“I didn’t need them, see? It doesn’t matter. We’re not building any dirigibles of our own, we just have to learn how to fly this one. I’ve only got to poke around until I re-create the original working circumstances.”

She froze. “What did you say?”

“I said, I’ve only got to poke around until—” He broke off and gave her an odd look. “You all right?”

“Yes,” she said, dazed. Kitay’s words echoed in her mind like ringing gongs. The original working circumstances.

Great Tortoise, was it that easy?

“Fuck,” she said. “Kitay, I’ve got it.”

At last, Rin dragged her recruits to the Pantheon by force.

It was such a simple solution. Why hadn’t she seen it before? She should have started here, by re-creating the original working circumstances of her own encounter with divinity.

She had first called the Phoenix a full year before Jiang took her to the Pantheon. She hadn’t known what she was doing. All she remembered was that she’d beaten Nezha in a combat ring, had pummeled him within an inch of his life because he had slapped her and she couldn’t bear the indignation, and then she’d rushed out of the building into the cool air outside because she couldn’t contain the wave of power surging inside her.

She hadn’t summoned fire that day. But she had touched the Pantheon. And that was the catalyst for everything that had happened thereafter—once she’d met the gods, it ripped a hole in her world that nothing but repeated encounters with divinity could fill.

What had driven her to the gods before she ever knew their names?

Anger. Burning, resentful anger.

And fear.

“What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?” Rin asked her recruits.

As usual, they responded with puzzled hesitation.

“You don’t . . .” Pipaji hesitated. “You don’t actually want us to say, do—”

“I do,” Rin said. “Tell me. Describe the very worst thing you’ve ever been through. Something you never want to happen again.”

Pipaji flinched. “I’m not fucking—”

“I know it’s hard to relive,” Rin said. “But pain is the quickest way to the Pantheon. Find your scars. Drag a knife through them. Push yourself. What memory just surfaced in your mind?”

Two high spots of color rose up in Pipaji’s face. She began blinking very rapidly.

“Fine. Take a moment to think about it.” Rin turned to Dulin. “How long did you spend in that burial pit?”

He balked. “I . . .”

“Two days? Three? You looked close to decomposing when we found you.”

Dulin’s voice was strangled. “I don’t want to think about that.”

“You have to,” Rin insisted. “This is the only way this works. Let’s try a different question. What do you see when you see the face of the Mugenese?”

“Easy,” Merchi said. “I see a fucking bug.”

“Good,” Rin said, though she knew that was bravado, not the corrosive resentment she needed from them. “And what would you do to them if you could? How would you crush them?”

When this elicited awkward stares, she hardened her voice. “Don’t act so shocked. You’re here to learn to kill, that’s why you signed up. Not for self-defense, and not out of nobility. Every one of you wants blood. What would you do to them?”

“I want them helpless like I was,” Pipaji burst out. “I want to stand over their faces and spit venom into their eyes. I want them to wither at my touch.”

“Why?”

“Because they touched me,” Pipaji said. “And it made me want to die.”

“Good.” Rin held the bowl of poppy seeds out toward her. “Now let’s try this again.”

Pipaji succeeded first.

The last few times Pipaji had gotten high she’d rocked back and forth on the ground, giggling to herself at jokes that only she could hear. But this time she sat perfectly still for several minutes before suddenly falling backward like a puppet with cut strings. Her eyes remained open but were terrifyingly white; her pupils had rolled entirely into the back of her head.

“Help!” Lianhua gripped Pipaji’s shoulders. “Help, I think she’s—”

But Pipaji’s hand shot up into the air, fingers splayed outward in a firm and unquestionable gesture. Stop.

“Let her lie,” Rin said sharply. “Don’t touch her.”

Pipaji’s fingers curled like claws against the ground, digging long grooves into the dirt. Low, guttural moans emitted from her throat.

“She’s in pain,” Merchi insisted. He scooped her up from the floor and pulled her into his lap, patting her cheeks frantically. “Hey. Hey. Can you hear me?”

Pipaji’s lips moved very quickly, uttering a stream of syllables that formed no language Rin could recognize. The tips of her fingers had turned a rotted purple beneath the dirt. When her eyes fluttered open, all Rin saw beneath her lashes were dark pools, black all the way through.

Finally. Rin felt a pulse of fierce, vicious pride, accompanied by the faintest pang of fear. What kind of deity had Pipaji called back from across the void? Was it stronger than she was?

Merchi’s voice faltered. “Pipaji?”

Pipaji lifted a trembling hand to his face. “I . . .”

Her face spasmed and stretched into a wide smile with tortured eyes, like something inside her, something that didn’t understand human expressions, was wearing her skin like a mask.

“Get back,” Rin whispered.

The other recruits had already retreated to the opposite end of the hut. Merchi looked down, and his face went slack with confusion. Black streaks covered his arms everywhere his skin had touched Pipaji’s.

Pipaji blinked and sat up, peering around as if she’d just awoken from a deeply absorbing dream. Her eyes were still the same unsettling obsidian. “Where are we?”

“Merchi, get back,” Rin shouted.

Merchi pushed Pipaji away. She collapsed into a pile on the floor, limbs shaking. He shrank away, wiping furiously at his forearms as if he could rub his skin clean. But the black didn’t stop spreading. It looked as if every vein in Merchi’s body had risen to the surface of his skin, thickening like creeks transforming into rivers.

I have to help him, Rin thought. I did this, this is my fault—

But she couldn’t bring herself to move. She didn’t know what she would do if she could.

Merchi’s eyes bulged wide. He opened his mouth to retch, then toppled sideways, writhing.

Pipaji shuffled backward, fingers clenched over her mouth. Sharp, hiccuping breaths escaped from behind her fingers.

“Oh, gods,” she whispered, over and over. “Oh, gods. What did I do?”

Dulin and Lianhua were backed up against the opposite wall. Lianhua kept eyeing the door, as if considering bolting away. Pipaji’s whimpers rose to a screaming wail. She crawled over to Merchi and shook his shoulders, trying to revive him, but all she did was dig craters into desiccated flesh wherever her fingers met his skin.

Finally Rin came to her senses.

“Get in the corner,” she ordered Pipaji. “Sit on your hands. Touch no one.”

To her great relief, Pipaji obeyed. Rin turned her attention to Merchi. His thrashing had subsided to a faint twitching, and black and purple blotches now covered every visible inch of skin, under which his veins bulged like they had crystallized into stone.

She had no idea what Cholang’s physicians could possibly do for him, but she owed it to him to try.

“Someone help me lift him,” she ordered. But neither Dulin nor Lianhua moved; they were frozen with shock.

She’d have to drag Merchi out herself, then. He was too tall for her to hoist up onto her shoulder; her only choice was to drag him by a leg. She bent and grasped his shin, careful not to brush against his exposed skin. Her shoulder throbbed from his weight as she pulled, but her adrenaline kicked in, counteracting the pain, and somehow she found the energy to drag him out of the hut and toward the infirmary.

“Hang in there,” she told him. “Just breathe. We’ll fix this.”

She might as well have been talking to a rock. When she glanced back moments later to check how he was doing, his eyes had gone glassy, and his flesh had deteriorated so much he looked like a three-day-old corpse. He didn’t respond when she shook him. His pulse was gone. She didn’t know when he’d stopped breathing.

She kept limping forward. But she knew, long before she reached the infirmary, that she didn’t need a physician now but a gravedigger.

Pipaji was gone when Rin returned to the hut.

“Where is she?” she demanded.

Dulin and Lianhua were sitting shell-shocked against the wall where she’d left them. They’d clearly been crying; Dulin’s eyes were bloodshot and unfocused, while Lianhua sat trembling with her fists balled up against her eyes.

“She ran,” Dulin said. “Said she couldn’t be here anymore.”

“And you let her?” Rin wanted to slap him, just to wipe that dull, dazed expression off his face. “Do you know where she went?”

“I think up toward the hill, maybe, she said—”

Rin set out at a run.

Pipaji was thankfully easy to track; her slender footprints were stamped fresh in the snow. Rin caught up to her at a ledge twenty feet up the hill. She was doubled over, coughing, exhausted by the sprint.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Rin called.

Pipaji didn’t respond. She straightened up and faced the ledge, stretching out one slim ankle as if testing out the empty space before she hurtled forward.

“Pipaji, get away from there.” Rin measured the distance between them, calculating. If she took a running leap she might seize Pipaji by the legs before she jumped, but only if Pipaji hesitated. The girl looked ready to spring—any sudden movements could startle her off the edge.

“You’re confused.” Rin kept her tone low and gentle, hand stretched out as if approaching a wild animal. “You’re overwhelmed, I understand, but this is normal . . .”

“It’s horrible.” Pipaji didn’t turn around. “This is—I didn’t—I can’t . . .”

She was dawdling. She wasn’t sure yet whether she wanted to die. Good.

Her fingers, Rin noticed, were no longer purple. She’d wrested some control back over herself. That made her safe to touch.

Rin lunged forward and tackled her by the waist. They landed sprawled together in the snow. Rin clambered up, jerked the unresisting Pipaji back from the ledge by her shirt, then pinned her down with a knee against her stomach so that she couldn’t flee.

“Are you going to jump?” Rin asked.

Pipaji’s narrow chest heaved. “No.”

“Then get up.” Rin stood and extended Pipaji her hand.

But Pipaji remained on the ground, shoulders shaking violently, her face contorted again into sobs.

“Stop crying. Look at me.” Rin leaned down and grabbed Pipaji by the chin. She didn’t know what compelled her to do it. She’d never acted like this before. But Vaisra had done this to her once, and it had worked to command her attention, if only by shocking the fear into the back of her mind. “Do you want to quit?”

Pipaji stared mutely at her, tears streaking her face. She seemed stunned into silence.

“Because you can quit,” Rin said. “I’ll let you go right now, if that’s what you want. No one’s forcing you to be a shaman. You don’t ever have to go to the Pantheon again. You can quit this army, too, if you’d prefer. You can go back to your sister and find somewhere to live in Dog Province. Is that what you want?”

“But I don’t . . .” Pipaji’s sobs subsided. She looked bewildered. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I . . .”

“I know,” Rin said. “I know you don’t want to quit. Because that felt good, didn’t it? When you brought down the god? That rush of power was the best thing you’ve ever felt and you know it. How good is it to realize what you can do? Unfortunate that your first victim was an ally, but imagine laying your hands on enemy troops. Imagine felling armies with just a single touch.”

“She told me . . .” Pipaji took a deep, rattling breath. “The goddess, I mean . . . she told me I’ll never be afraid again.”

“That’s power,” Rin said. “And you’re not giving that up. I know you. You’re me.”

Pipaji stared, not quite at Rin, but at the blank space behind her. She seemed lost in her own mind.

Rin sat down beside Pipaji so that they were side by side, looking out over the ledge together. “What did you see when you swallowed the seeds?”

Pipaji bit her lip and glanced away.

“Tell me.”

“I can’t, it’s . . .”

“Look at me.” Rin lifted her shirt. Her upper torso was wrapped tight in bandages, ribs still cracked from where Riga had kicked her. But Altan’s black handprint, etched just as clearly as the day he’d left it, was visible just below her sternum. Rin let Pipaji stare long enough to understand its shape, and then twisted to the side to show her the raised, bumpy ridges where Nezha had once slid a blade in her lower back.

Pipaji’s face went white at the sight. “How . . . ?”

“I received both these scars from men I thought I loved,” Rin said. “One is dead now. One will be. I understand how humiliation feels. Keep your secrets if you want. But there’s nothing you can say that will make me think any less of you.”

Pipaji stared for a long time at Altan’s handprint. When she spoke at last, it was in such a low whisper that Rin had to lean in close to hear her over the wind.

“We were in the whorehouse when they came. They started marching up the stairs, and I told Jiuto to hide. She—” Pipaji’s voice caught. She took a shaky breath, then continued. “She didn’t have time to get out the door, so she hid under the blankets. I piled them on her. Piles and piles of winter coats. And I told her not to move, not to make a single sound, no matter what happened, no matter what she heard. Then they came in, and they found me, and they—they—” Pipaji swallowed. “And Jiuto didn’t move.”

“You protected her,” Rin said gently.

“No.” Pipaji gave her head a violent shake. “I didn’t. Because—because after they’d gone, I opened the cabinet. And I took the blankets off. And Jiuto wasn’t moving.” Her face crumpled. “She hadn’t moved. She was suffocating, she couldn’t fucking breathe under there, and still she hadn’t moved because that’s what I told her. I thought I’d killed her. And I didn’t, because she started breathing again, but I’m the reason why . . .”

She gave a little wail and pressed her face into her hands. She didn’t continue. She didn’t need to; Rin could piece the rest of this story together herself.

That explained why Jiuto followed her sister everywhere. Why Pipaji had never left her alone until now. Why Jiuto didn’t—couldn’t—speak. Why she responded to everyone who spoke to her with a dead, haunted stare.

Rin wanted to put an arm around Pipaji’s shaking shoulders, hold her tight, and tell her she had nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to repent for. That she’d survived, and survival was enough. She wanted to tell her to go to her sister and run far away from this place and to never think about the Pantheon again. She wanted to tell Pipaji it was over.

Instead, she said in the hardest voice she could imagine, “Stop crying.”

Pipaji lifted her head, startled.

“You’re living in a country at war,” Rin said. “Did you think you’re special? You think you’re the only one who’s suffered? Look around. At least you’re alive. There are thousands of others who weren’t nearly as lucky. And there are thousands more who will meet the same fate if you can’t accept the power you could have.”

She heard a steely, ruthless timbre in her own voice that she had never used before. It was a stranger’s voice. But she knew exactly where it came from, for everything she said was an echo of things Vaisra had once told her, the only true gift he’d ever given her.

When you hear screaming, run toward it.

“Everything you just told me? That’s your key to the gods. Hold that in your mind and never forget the way you’re feeling right now. That’s what gives you power. And that’s what is going to keep you human.”

Rin seized Pipaji’s fingers. They were slender fingers, dirty and scarred. Nothing like how a pretty young girl’s fingers were supposed to look. They were fingers that had broken bodies. Fingers just like hers.

“You have the power to poison anyone you touch,” she said. “You can make sure no one ever suffers like you and your sister again. Use it.”

The other breakthroughs came much faster after Pipaji’s success. Two days later, Lianhua gave a little whimper and slumped over on her side. At first Rin was afraid she’d overdosed and fainted, but then she noticed that the scars across Lianhua’s arms and collarbones were disappearing—smooth new skin knitted over areas that had previously been cruelly crosshatched by a blade.

“What did you see?” Rin asked when Lianhua awoke.

“A beautiful woman,” Lianhua murmured. “She held a lotus flower in one hand, and a set of reed pipes in the other. She smiled at me and said she could fix me.”

“Do you think she could help you fix others?” Rin asked.

“I think so,” Lianhua said. “She put something in my hands. It was white and hot, and I saw it shining through my fingers, like—like I was holding the sun itself.”

Great Tortoise. Rin’s heart leaped at the implications. We can use this.

When Lianhua managed to call her goddess while retaining consciousness, Rin had her test her abilities on a succession of injured animals—squirrels with shattered legs, birds with broken wings, and rabbits burned half to death. Lianhua had the good sense not to ask where the animals were coming from. When she restored all the creatures to full health without any apparent side effects, Rin let Lianhua experiment on her own body.

“It’s these two ribs that are giving me trouble,” she said, lifting her shirt up. “Do you need the bandages off, too?”

“I don’t think so.” Lianhua trailed her fingers over the linen strips so lightly they tickled. Then Rin felt a searing heat at an intensity straddling the line between relief and torment. Seconds later, the pain in her ribs was gone. For the first time since ascending Mount Tianshan, she could breathe without wincing.

“Great Tortoise.” Rin marveled as she twisted her upper body back and forth. “Thank you.”

“Do you . . .” Lianhua’s fingers hovered in the air over Rin’s right arm, as if awaiting permission. She was staring at the stump. “Um, do you want me to try?”

The question caught Rin by surprise. She hadn’t even considered trying to restore her lost hand. She blinked, not answering, caught between saying the obvious yes, please, try it now, and the fear of letting herself hope.

“I don’t know if I can,” Lianhua said quickly. “And I mean—if you don’t want to—”

“No—no, sorry,” Rin said hastily. “Of course I want to. Yes. Go ahead.”

Lianhua peeled the sleeve back from over her stump and rested her cool fingers where Rin’s wrist ended in a smooth mound. Several minutes passed. Lianhua sat still, her eyes squeezed tight in concentration, but Rin felt nothing—no heat, no prickle—except a phantom tingle where her hand ought to be. Minutes trickled by, but the tingle, if it was ever real, never intensified into anything else.

“Stop it,” she said at last. She couldn’t do this anymore. “That’s enough.”

Lianhua seemed to shrink in apology. “I guess, um, there are limits. But maybe I can try again, if . . .”

“Don’t worry.” Rin yanked the sleeve back over her wrist, hoping that Lianhua didn’t notice the catch in her voice. Why did her chest feel so tight? She’d known it wouldn’t work; it’d been stupid to imagine. “It’s fine. There are some things you can’t fix.”

In terms of sheer spectacle, Dulin trumped all of them. One week later, after so many failed attempts that Rin considered putting him out of his misery, he took an extra dose of poppy seeds with a look of stubborn determination on his face and promptly summoned the Great Tortoise.

In every myth Rin had ever been told, the Tortoise was a patient, protective, and benevolent creature. It was the dark guardian of the earth, representing longevity and cool, fertile soil. Villagers in Tikany wore jade pendants etched like tortoiseshells to bring good luck and stability. In Sinegard, great stone tortoises were often planted in front of tombs to safeguard the spirits of the dead.

Dulin evoked none of that. He opened a sinkhole in the ground.

It happened without warning. One moment the dirt was steady beneath their feet, and the next a circle with a diameter of about five feet appeared inside the hut, dropping down to pitch-black, uncertain depths. By some miracle none of them fell inside; shrieking, Pipaji and Lianhua scrambled away from the edge.

The sinkhole ended right at Dulin’s feet. It had stopped growing, but the soil and rocks at the edges were still crumbling into the hole, echoing into nowhere.

Rin spoke slowly, trying not to startle Dulin in case he accidentally buried them all. “Very good. Now do you think you might be able to close that thing back up?”

He looked dazed, gaping at the sinkhole as if trying to convince himself that not only did it exist, he was in fact the one who had created it. “I don’t know.”

He was trembling. Lightly, she placed a hand on his shoulder. “What are you feeling?”

“It’s—it’s hungry.” Dulin sounded confused. “I think—it wants more.”

“More what?”

“More . . . exposure. It wants to see the sunlight.” His voice caught. Rin could guess which memory he’d invoked when he reached the Pantheon. She knew he was remembering how it felt to be buried alive. “It wants to be free.”

“Fair enough,” Rin said. “But perhaps try that when you’re a good distance away from the rest of us.”

Dulin swallowed hard, then nodded. The pit stopped rumbling.

“General Fang?” Pipaji called from across the sinkhole. “I think we need a bigger hut.”

The next day Rin and her recruits set out before sunrise to trek out into the desert plateau, where nothing they summoned could hurt anyone at Cholang’s settlement.

“How far out are you going?” Kitay asked.

“Five miles,” she said.

“Not far enough. Go at least ten.”

“I’ll be out of your range!”

“Eight, then,” he said. “But get them as far away from here as you can. There’s no point wiping us out before Nezha does it for us.”

So Rin slung a satchel stuffed with four days’ worth of provisions and enough drugs to kill an elephant over her back, then led her recruits out toward the vast expanse of the Scarigon Plateau. They marched for the better part of the morning, and didn’t stop until the sun climbed high into the cloudless, intensely blue sky, baking the air into a scorching heat that even the winds couldn’t dissipate.

“Here is good,” Rin decided. Flat, arid steppe extended in every direction as far as her eye could see. They were nowhere near any trees, boulders, or hills that could serve as shelter, but that would be all right; they’d packed canvas for two tents, and the skies didn’t promise any precipitation for several days at least.

She pulled her satchel off and let it drop on the ground. “Everyone have a drink of water, then we’ll get to work.”

Pipaji was already suckling greedily from her canteen. She hiccuped and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “What exactly are we doing?”

Rin grinned. “Stand back.”

They took a few steps backward, watching her warily.

“Farther.”

She waited until they were at least twenty paces away. Then she stretched a hand into the sky and called down the fire.

It rippled through her like a bolt of lightning. It was delicious. She pulled forth more, reveling in the wanton release of power, the reckless indulgence that brought echoes of the sheer ecstasy she’d experienced on Mount Tianshan.

She saw their faces, wide-eyed with admiration and delight, and she laughed.

She lingered in the column of heat for just a few more delectable seconds, and then pulled the flames back into her body.

“Your turn,” she said.

For the next few hours Rin supervised as Pipaji and Lianhua pitted their skills against each other. Pipaji would kneel down and press her hands against the dirt. Seconds later all kinds of creatures—worms, snakes, long-legged steppe rats, burrowing birds—would bubble up to the surface, writhing and screeching, clawing desperately at the black veins that shot through their bulging forms.

“Stop,” Rin would say, and Lianhua would hastily begin the process of reversal, healing the creatures one by one until the rot had faded away.

The limits to Lianhua’s skills quickly became obvious. She could make superficial wounds disappear in under a minute, and she could heal broken bones and internal hemorrhaging if given a little more time, but she seemed only able to reverse injuries that were not life-threatening. Most of Pipaji’s targets were close to death within seconds, and even Lianhua’s best efforts could not bring them back.

Pipaji’s limits were less clear. At first Rin had thought she required skin-to-skin contact with her victims, but then it became clear her poison could seep through dirt, reaching organisms up to several feet away.

“Try the pond water,” Rin suggested. A horrible, exciting thought had just occurred to her, but she didn’t want to voice it aloud until she had confirmation. “See if that speeds up dissemination.”

“We need that water to drink,” Dulin protested. “The next pond’s a mile away.”

“So fill up your canteens now, and then we’ll move our camp to the other pond once Pipaji’s finished,” Rin said.

They obeyed. Once all the canteens were full, Pipaji crouched over the pond, frowning in concentration as she dipped her fingertips into the water. Nothing happened. Rin was hoping to see black streaks shooting through the pond, but the water remained a murky greenish-brown. Then fish began floating belly-up to the surface, bloated and discolored.

“Gross,” Dulin said. “I guess we’re catching dinner somewhere else.”

Rin didn’t comment. She was clenching her fist so hard her knuckles had turned white.

This was it. This was how she beat Nezha.

Nezha couldn’t be killed because the Dragon was always protecting him, stitching his wounds back together seconds after they opened. But Chaghan had told her that the source of his power was the river running through the grottoes of Arlong.

What if she attacked the river itself?

“Can I stop?” Pipaji asked. Fish, toads, tadpoles, and insects were still bubbling up dead in the water around her. “This feels, um, excessive.”

“Fine,” Rin murmured. “Stop.”

Pipaji stood up, looking disgusted, and quickly wiped her fingers on her trousers.

Rin couldn’t stop staring at the pond. The water was pitch-black now, an inkwell of corpses.

Nezha had never met Pipaji before. He would have no idea who she was or what she could do. All he would see was a thin, pretty girl with long-lashed doe’s eyes, looking utterly out of place on the battlefield, right before she turned his veins to sludge.

Next Rin focused her attentions on Dulin. He had a penchant for sinkholes—by the first day, he could easily summon one on command of any shape or size within a diameter of ten feet. But the sinkholes had to open up right next to where he stood; his feet had to be at the edge of the crevice.

This posed a problem. Certainly the sinkholes had great potential for tactical disruption, but only if Dulin was standing directly in the line of fire.

“Can you do anything more with the earth?” Rin asked him. “If you can move it down, can you move it up? Sideways? Vibrate in place?”

She wasn’t sure what she had in mind. She had some vague picture of great pillars of dirt thrashing through the air like vipers. Or perhaps earthquakes—those could disorient and scatter defensive lines without excessive civilian casualties.

“I’ll try.” He lowered his chin, brows furrowed in concentration.

Rin felt tremors under her feet, so faint at first that she was unsure whether she was imagining them. They grew stronger. The thought that perhaps she should get back briefly crossed her mind before she went flying.

Her back slammed against the ground. Her head followed with a snap. She stared at the sky, mouth open like a fish, trying to breathe. She couldn’t feel her fingertips. Or her toes.

She heard screaming. Dulin’s and Lianhua’s faces appeared above her. Pipaji was shouting something, but her voice was muffled and muted. Rin felt Lianhua’s hands moving under her shirt, pushing up to rest on her ribs, and then a wonderful, scorching heat spread through her torso and head until Dulin’s shouting sharpened into intelligible words.

“Are you all right?”

“Fine,” she gasped. “I’m fine.”

When Lianhua took her hands away, Rin curled onto her side and laughed. She couldn’t help herself; it spilled out of her like a waterfall, urgent and exhilarating.

Lianhua looked deeply concerned. “General, are you . . . ?”

“We’re going to win,” Rin said hoarsely. She couldn’t understand why she was the only one laughing. Why weren’t they laughing? Why weren’t they beside themselves with delight? “Oh, my gods. Holy fucking shit. This is it. We’re going to win.”

They spent the last two days fine-tuning their response times, limitations, and necessary dosages. They determined how long it took after ingesting seeds for their highs to kick in—twenty minutes for Pipaji and Lianhua, ten for Dulin. They learned how long they were useful on their high—no more than an hour for any of them—and how long it took for them to come down from their useless, drooling state.

Their skills remained an imperfect art—they couldn’t possibly achieve in two weeks the military efficiency of the original Cike. But they’d become sufficiently accustomed to reaching for their gods that they could replicate their results on the battlefield. That was as good as they were going to get.

Rin told them to return to the base camp without her. She wanted to journey out a bit farther before she turned back. They didn’t ask where she was going, and she didn’t tell them.

Alone, she walked until she found a secluded area at the base of a hill, in full view of the distant Mount Tianshan.

She picked up the largest rocks she could find and arranged them in a circular pile facing the setting sun. It was a shabby memorial, but it would stay in place. Barely anyone visited this mountain. In time, the wind, snow, and storms would eradicate every trace of these rocks, but for now, this was good enough.

Jiang didn’t deserve much. But he deserved something.

She’d seen the look on his face before she escaped the temple. He knew full well what he’d done. In that moment he was complete and aware, reconciled with his past, and fully in control. And he’d chosen to save her.

“Thank you,” she said. Her voice sounded reedy and insufficient against the chilly, dense air. Her chest felt very tight.

She’d loved him like a father once.

He’d taught her everything he’d known. He’d led her to the Pantheon. Then he’d abandoned her, returned to her, betrayed her, and saved her.

He’d let so many others die—he’d let her people die—but he had saved her.

What the fuck was she supposed to do with a legacy like that?

Hot tears welled up in her eyes. Irritated, she wiped them away. She wasn’t here to cry. Jiang didn’t deserve her tears. This wasn’t about grief, this was about paying respects.

“Goodbye,” she muttered.

She didn’t know what else to say.

No, that wasn’t true. Something else weighed on her mind, something she couldn’t leave unsaid. She’d never dared to say it to his face when he was alive, though she’d thought it many times. She couldn’t keep silent now. She kicked at the rocks and swallowed again, but the lump in her throat wouldn’t go away. She cleared her throat, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“You were always such a fucking coward.”

“We’re marching out,” she told Kitay when she returned. She bustled around the hut, flinging things into her travel bag—two shirts, a pair of trousers, knives, pouches of poppy seeds. She’d been walking for six hours straight, but somehow felt bursting with energy. “I’ll tell Cholang to have his men ready to march in the morning. Is the dirigible ready to go?”

“Sure, but—hold on, slow down, Rin.” Kitay looked concerned. “So soon? Really?”

“It has to be now,” Rin said. She couldn’t stay in Cholang’s settlement, the capital of bum-fuck nowhere in the Scarigon Plateau, any longer. Her mind spun with possibilities for the campaign ahead. Never before had the cards lain so clearly in her favor. The Republic had one shaman in Nezha against Rin’s four, and their best defense mechanism was opium bombs, which incapacitated troops on both sides without discrimination.

Of course Rin’s recruits could have used another week of training. Of course it would have been ideal if they’d had time to fine-tune their abilities, to learn consistently to force the gods back out of their minds when the voices became too loud. But Rin also knew that every day they waited to move out east was another day Nezha had to prepare.

Nezha was licking his wounds now. She had to acquire as much territory as possible before he was ready to strike back. Armies were marching one way or another, and she wanted to be the first.

“For once, time’s on our side,” she said. “We won’t get this chance again.”

“You’re sure they’re ready?”

She shrugged. “About as ready as I was.”

He sighed. “I’m sure you know that thought gives me no comfort at all.”