The Burning God (The Poppy War Book 3)

Rin’s first major metropolitan target in Republican territory was Jinzhou—the Golden City, the opulent pearl of the Nikara mideast. After three weeks’ march it rose out of the treetops, all high walls and thin, reaching pagodas. Its blue, dragon-emblazoned flags streamed from atop sentry towers like a glaring invitation to attack.

Jinzhou’s other, less savory moniker was the Whore. It sat square on the intersection of three provinces and, thanks to its proximity to thriving mulberry farms that provided wagonfuls of silkworm cocoons and some of the largest coal deposits in the Empire, could afford to pay taxes to all three. In return, Jinzhou had received thrice the military aid throughout the Poppy Wars. Not once in recent history had it been sacked; it had only ever been passed from ruler to ruler, trading compliance and riches for protection.

Rin intended to end that streak.

The military strategist Sunzi once wrote that it was best to take enemy cities intact. Prolonged, destructive campaigns benefited no one. Jinzhou, which offered a potential taxation base and was positioned well against multiple transport routes, would have served better as a sustained resource base than as a ruined city left in the Southern Army’s wake.

Once again, Rin rejected Sunzi’s advice.

In the south she’d been fighting to claim territory back from the Federation. That was a war of liberation. But now her army was homeless, fighting in territory where they’d never lived, and they could never return to their home provinces in peace while the Republic was still angling for control. The problem with trying to hold on to territory was that she would bleed troops expending them to maintain conquered areas. That was the same reason why Nezha was bound to lose—he’d been forced to split his troops across both the northern and southern fronts.

The upshot of all this was that Jinzhou was expendable.

Rin didn’t care about preserving it. She didn’t want Jinzhou’s economy, she wanted to cut Nezha off from its riches.

What I can’t have, he can’t have.

Jinzhou was a flagrant display of power. Jinzhou was a message.

As her troops approached the city’s thick stone gates, Rin didn’t feel the same nervous flutter she always had before a fight. She wasn’t anxious about the outcome, because this was not a contest of strategy, numbers, or timing. This wasn’t a battle of chance.

This time the victor was guaranteed. She had seen what her shamans could do and knew, no matter how good the city’s defenses, they had nothing that could defy an army that could move the earth itself.

Jinzhou’s fate was already a foregone conclusion. Rin was just curious to see how badly they could break it.

But first, they had to settle the question of battlefield etiquette. Prudence prevailed, because Kitay prevailed. Rin couldn’t feed and clothe her army if she didn’t amass resources as they went, and those were harder to obtain from burned, sacked cities.

“I know you want a fight out of this,” Kitay said. “But if you start tearing walls down without giving them the chance to surrender, then you’re just being stupid.”

“Negotiations give them time to prepare defenses,” she objected.

He rolled his eyes at that. “What defenses could they possibly mount against you?”

The first messenger they sent returned almost immediately. “No surrender,” he reported. “They, ah, laughed in my face.”

“That’s it, then.” Rin stood up. “We’ll head out in five. Someone get Dulin and Pipaji—”

“Hold on,” Kitay said. “We haven’t given them fair warning.”

“Fair warning? We just offered them surrender!”

“They think you’re a scruffy peasant army with rusty swords and no artillery to speak of.” Kitay gave her a stern look. “They don’t know what they’re sentencing themselves to. And you’re not being fair.”

“Sunzi said—”

“I think we both agree Sunzi’s playbook stopped being relevant a long time ago. And when Sunzi wrote about preserving information asymmetries so that your enemy would underestimate you, he was talking about troop numbers and supplies. Not earth-shattering, godlike powers.” Kitay smoothed a piece of parchment over the table. He didn’t even wait for her response before he began penning another missive. “We give them another chance.”

She made a noise of protest. “What, you’re just going to reveal our new weapons before they’ve even seen their first battle?”

“I’m a bit concerned that you’re referring to people as weapons. And no, Rin, I’m only telling them that they ought to consider the many innocent lives at risk. I won’t include details.” Kitay scribbled for a bit longer, glanced up, and reached toward his forehead to tug at a hank of hair. “This confirms one thing, though. Nezha’s not in the city.”

Rin frowned. “How do you figure?”

They’d decided there was perhaps a fifty-fifty chance that Nezha would remain at the front to defend Jinzhou in person. On one hand, Jinzhou was such a massive treasure trove it was hard to imagine the Republic would relinquish it so easily—the coal stockpiles alone could have kept the airships flying indefinitely. On the other hand, every report they received indicated that Nezha had fled east as far as he could. And Jinzhou, though rich, did not have the strongest defense structures—it was a city founded on trade, and trading cities were designed to invite the outside world in, not to keep it out. This would have been a stupid place for Nezha to make his last stand.

“We know he’s not here because the magistrate would have invoked his name if he was,” Kitay said. “Or he would have shown up to negotiate himself. The whole country knows what he can do now. They know he’d be a better deterrent than anything else they could muster.”

“He could be trying to ambush us,” Rin said.

“Maybe. But Nezha sticks even harder to Sunzi’s principles than you do. Don’t push where there’s already resistance; don’t bleed troops where you’re already at a disadvantage.” Kitay shook his head. “I suppose we can’t be certain. But if I were Nezha, I wouldn’t try to kill you here. Not enough water access. No, I think he’s going to give you this one.”

“How romantic,” she sneered. “Then let’s make him regret it.”

They camped outside Jinzhou’s walls for a while, passing the spyglass back and forth as they waited for their delegation to return. Minutes passed, then hours. After a while Rin got bored and went back inside her tent, where her recruits sat in a circle on the floor, waiting for the summons.

“They’re not going to surrender,” she told them. “Everyone ready?”

Lianhua chewed her bottom lip. Dulin was shaking; he kept rubbing his elbows as if he were freezing. They looked so much like nervous Sinegard students about to take an exam that Rin couldn’t help but feel a small flicker of amusement. Only Pipaji looked completely and utterly calm, sitting back against the wall with her arms crossed as if she were a patron at a teahouse waiting to be served.

“Remember, it’s different when there are bodies,” Rin said. They’d discussed many times by now how everything changed in the heat of battle, how the safe predictability of practice in no way resembled actual warfare, but she wanted to drill it into their skulls again. She wanted it to be the last thing on their minds before they saw combat. “The blood will startle you. And it gets much harder when you hear the screams. The gods get excited. They’re like wild dogs sniffing for fear—once they get a whiff of chaos, they’ll try much harder to take over.”

“We’ve all seen bodies,” Pipaji said.

“It’s different when you’re the one who broke them,” Rin said.

Dulin blanched.

“I’m not trying to scare you,” Rin said quickly. “I just want you on guard. But you can do this. You’ve practiced this, you know what to expect, and you’ll stay in control. What do you do if you feel the god taking over?”

They chanted in unison like schoolchildren. “Chew the nuggets.”

Each of them carried enough opium for a fatal overdose in their pockets. They knew precisely how much to swallow to knock themselves unconscious.

“And what do you do if your comrades are out of control?”

Pipaji flexed her fingers. “Deal with them before they deal with us.”

“Good girl,” Rin said.

The door swung open. All of them jumped.

It was a scout. “Jinzhou’s sent word, General. No surrender.”

“More’s their loss.” Rin motioned for them to stand. “Let’s go show them what you can do.”

At Sinegard, Strategy Master Irjah had once taught Rin’s second-year class how to play an ancient game called shaqqi. He’d made them play plenty of common strategy games before—wikki for foresight and decisiveness, mahjong for diplomacy and exploiting information asymmetry. But shaqqi wasn’t a game Rin had ever encountered before. Its list of basic rules went on for three booklets, and that didn’t include the many supplemental scrolls that dictated standard opening maneuvers.

Kitay was the only one in the class who had even played shaqqi, so Master Irjah chose him to help demonstrate. They spent the first twenty minutes drawing random tiles determining their share of pieces representing troops, equipment, weaponry, and terrain allocations. When all the pieces were finally on the map, Master Irjah and Kitay had sat opposite each other with their eyes trained on the board. Neither of them spoke. The rest of the class watched, increasingly bored and irritated as the face-off stretched on for nearly an hour.

At long last, Kitay had sighed, tipped his emperor piece over with one finger, and shook his head.

“What’s going on?” Nezha had demanded. “You didn’t even play.”

But they had played. Rin had only realized that near the last five minutes of the game. The entire match had taken place through silent mental calculations, both sides considering the balance of power created by their randomly assigned lots. Kitay had eventually come to the conclusion that he couldn’t possibly win.

“Warfare rarely works this way,” Irjah had lectured as he scooped up the pieces. “In real battle, the fog of war—friction, that is—overrides everything else. Even the best-laid plans fall victim to accident and chance. Only idiots think warfare is a simple matter of clever stratagems.”

“Then what’s the point of this game?” Venka had complained.

“That asymmetries do matter,” Irjah said. “Underdogs can often find a way out, but not always. Particularly not if the side with the upper hand has anticipated, as well as is possible given the information at hand, everything that could go wrong. Because then it becomes an issue of winning in the most elegant, confident way possible. You learn to close off every possible exit. You foresee all the ways they could try to upset your advantage, and you must do it all ahead of time. On the flip side, sometimes you have no possible path to victory. Sometimes engaging in battle means suicide. It’s important to know when. That’s the purpose of this game. The gameplay doesn’t matter half so much as the thinking exercise.”

“But what if the players don’t agree who has the advantage?” Nezha had asked. “If no one surrenders?”

“Then you play it out until someone does,” Irjah said. “But then it’s doubly embarrassing for the loser, who should have conceded from the outset. The point is to train your mind to see all the strategic possibilities at once so that you learn when you can’t win.”

Shaqqi, it turned out, had been the only strategy game that Rin never managed to grasp. They played many times in class throughout the year, but never could she bring herself to surrender. She’d played the role of the underdog since she could remember. It seemed so ludicrous to ever give up, to simply acknowledge defeat as if the future might not offer some chance, however slim, to reverse her fortunes. She’d been relying on those slim chances for her entire life.

But now, standing with her army outside Jinzhou’s city gates, she was on the other side of the table. Now she possessed the overwhelming advantage, and her puzzle was how one should leverage three people who could rewrite reality in a conventional battle without killing everyone around them.

Victory was already assured. Right now she only had to worry about the loose ends.

This was the sort of puzzle that Altan had been constantly trying to solve when he’d commanded the Cike. How did you win a game of chess when your pieces were the most freakishly powerful things on the board, and the opponent was only equipped with pawns? When the objective is no longer victory, but victory with the lowest casualty rates possible?

Rin and Kitay had agreed early on that the battle hinged on Dulin. Lianhua’s involvement was out of the question—they would keep her busy in the infirmary for days on end after the battle concluded, but she had no place on the battlefield. Pipaji was more lethal in close quarters, but Dulin had the wider range of impact. He could set off earthquakes and sinkholes in a ten-yard radius around him, whereas Pipaji had to enter deep into the fray to inflict her poison. That posed too great a risk—Rin needed Pipaji out of harm’s way until she reached Arlong.

But Rin was quite sure she could shatter Jinzhou’s resistance with Dulin alone.

“You get two major hits,” Rin told him. “Both right at the start of the fighting. Our opening salvos. They’ll think the first was a freak act of nature, or some very powerful conventional weapon. After the second, they’ll know we have a shaman. Beyond that point, our forces will have mixed too much for you to get in a discriminate hit.”

“I don’t have to be in the melee, though,” Dulin said. “I mean, couldn’t I just target the city?”

“And then what?” Kitay asked sharply. “You’ll massacre all the innocent civilians inside?”

Dulin’s cheeks colored. The thought had clearly never even crossed his mind. “I hadn’t—”

“I know you haven’t thought it through,” Kitay said. “But you’ve got to put your head back on straight. Just because you can alter the world on a ridiculous scale doesn’t mean the normal calculations no longer apply. If anything, you must now be doubly careful. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.” Dulin looked duly chastened. “Where do you want your sinkholes, then?”

“Jinzhou’s got six walls,” Kitay said. “Take your pick.”

One hour later, a squadron of fewer than fifty soldiers charged out from the forest toward Jinzhou’s western gate. Rin and Kitay waited in the trees with the rest of their army, watching through spyglasses as their troops rushed the high stone walls.

This first assault was a decoy. Jinzhou’s leadership had to understand what Rin could do. After the Battle of the Red Cliffs, her abilities were no longer a frightful rumor but a well-known fact. So if Jinzhou’s magistrate had rebuffed her offer of lenience for surrender, then he had to be very confident in his defenses against her fire. Rin wasn’t stupid enough to enter the fray until she knew what Jinzhou had up its sleeve.

It had been so easy to design a dummy probe. Shamanic fire was the simplest weapon to simulate. It only took seconds for fifty soldiers wielding torches, gunpowder, and oil-soaked flags to create a scorching wave of flame that, when caught by the wind, towered close to the heights that Rin could summon herself.

Jinzhou’s defenders responded seconds later. First came the standard volley of arrows. Then followed a thicker round of missiles—bombs that did not burst into balls of flame, but rather leaked a slow, greenish smoke as they hit the ground.

“Opium bombs,” Kitay observed. “Is that all they had?”

He looked disappointed. Rin, too, couldn’t help a fleeting sense of dismay. Jinzhou had refused negotiations with such confidence that Rin had seriously wondered, even hoped, that they could display some secret, innovative defense to back it up.

But instead, they’d merely signed their own death warrants.

The decoy squadron was breaking up. They were allowed to fall back—they’d only been charged with drawing out the artillery, not breaking Jinzhou’s defenses. The wave of fire disintegrated into dozens of individual torches, snuffed out as fleeing soldiers dropped them on the dirt.

The retreat looked messy, but those troops would be fine. They’d gone in prepared with cloth masks soaked in water. It wouldn’t keep the opium out for long, but it bought them sufficient time to scatter and retreat.

Rin turned to Dulin. He held his spyglass very still to his face. His right hand was curled in a fist, beating out an erratic pattern against his knee.

Battle nerves, Rin thought. Adorable. And she wished, just briefly, she were not so accustomed to war so that she could still feel that lurching, electrifying thrill of sheer nervous distress.

“Your turn,” she told him. “Let’s go.”

They broke out of the trees to meet with a hail of arrows. Jinzhou’s defenders hadn’t been foolish enough to imagine the probe constituted Rin’s entire attack. They’d fortified all six of their walls with artillerymen, and more rushed toward the eastern wall when Rin’s troops began pouring out the forest.

The southerners locked shields over their heads as they surged toward the gates in a clustered formation. Rin’s arm shook as arrow after arrow slammed into the inch of wood separating iron from skin. Then it went numb. She gritted her teeth and pushed forward, eyes locked on the great stone walls ahead. In training, she’d determined that Dulin could open a sinkhole from a distance of ten yards. Ninety yards to go.

A boom echoed ahead to her left. Blood and bone splattered the air; bodies hit the ground. Rin kept moving, stepping over the gore. Seventy yards.

“Holy shit,” Dulin whispered. “Holy shit, I can’t . . .”

“Shut up and move,” Rin said.

Fifty yards. Something shrieked overhead. They both ducked but kept running. The missile exploded behind them, accompanied by screams. Ten yards.

Rin halted. “Close enough for you?”

Troops locked their shields in a protective shell over Dulin as he stood still, eyes tightly shut. Rin watched his twitching face, waiting.

The seconds that followed felt like an eternity.

He’s too scared. She was suddenly anxious. He can’t focus, it’s too much . . . The missiles and arrows landing around them suddenly seemed so close. They’d been wildly fortunate, really, to have lasted so long without being hit. But now they were open, unmoving targets, and one of those volleys had to land eventually . . .

Then the ground shook, rippling in a way that soil was not supposed to move. The stone walls vibrated, which looked so absurd that Rin thought surely she must be the one shaking and not that massive structure, but then dust and pebbles poured down the walls in trickles that turned to torrents.

The wall came down.

It didn’t collapse. Didn’t implode. There was no messy, cascading collision of faults in stone shattering in a chain reaction, then crumbling under its own weight, the way a broken wall was supposed to fall. Instead, the ground beneath opened into a gaping maw. And the wall simply disappeared, taking the artillery line with it, exposing the city inside like a layer of flesh peeled away from pulsing organs.

The air was still. The firing had stopped.

Dulin sank dazed to his knees.

“Well done,” Rin told him.

He looked like he was about to vomit.

He’ll be fine, she thought. Break a few more cities, and it’ll feel routine. She didn’t have time to play wet nurse now; she had a city to conquer. She raised her left arm in the air in a signal to charge, and the Southern Army burst over the rubble through the missing wall.

Squadrons split off to the north and south to drive through Jinzhou’s defenses, while Rin alone took the center quadrant. She heard panicked shouting as she approached. As flames licked up her shoulders, she heard her targets screaming for reinforcements—high-pitched voices called over and over again for opium bombs—but it was too late. Far too late. They’d directed their opium missiles to the western wall, and by the time they brought them anywhere near her this battle would be finished.

All Jinzhou’s soldiers had now were their conventional weapons, and those were so miserably insufficient. Their sword hilts burned white-hot in their hands. Everything they hurled at her—arrows, spears, javelins—turned to ash in midair. No one could come within a ten-foot distance of her, for she was ensconced inside a searing, impenetrable column of flame.

They tumbled before her like sticks.

She tilted her head back, opened her mouth, and let fire rip forth through her throat.

Gods, this release felt good. She hadn’t realized how much she missed this. She’d reached such a delirious thrill on Mount Tianshan and then on the training grounds on the plateau, when she’d let the flames roar unrestrained through her body. Every waking moment since then had felt muted and muzzled. But now she got what she wanted—mindless, careless, untrammeled destruction.

But something felt off. A niggling sensation chewed at her gut, a guilty compunction that only grew as the screams intensified and the bodies around her crumpled, blackened, and folded in on themselves.

She felt no rage. This had nothing to do with vengeance. These troops hadn’t done anything to her. She had no reason to hate them. This didn’t feel righteous, this just felt cruel.

Her flames sagged, then shrank back inside her.

What was wrong with her? It was usually so easy to sink into that rhapsodic space where rage met purpose. She’d never had to struggle to find anger before; she carried it around with her like a warm coal, forever burning.

She’d turned her fire on her fellow Nikara before. She’d done it easily at the Red Cliffs; she’d set entire ships aflame without thinking twice. But this was the first time she’d ever burned an enemy that hadn’t attacked her first.

This wasn’t self-defense or vengeance. This was plain, simple aggression.

But they chose this, she reminded herself. We gave them two chances to surrender, and they refused. They knew what I am. They dug their graves.

She reached deep into a dark pit inside her, and her column of fire burst forth anew, blazing this time with a wicked kind of energy.

She wielded now a different fire; a fiercer, hungrier fire; one that wanted to burn not as a reaction to fear and pain, but with a rage that sprang from power. The fury of being disrespected, of being defied.

This fire felt hotter. Darker.

Rin realized with a shudder that she rather liked this feeling.

She was as close to invincible as humans could get, and Jinzhou was about to fall into her lap.

Never grow cocky, Irjah had been so fond of repeating. True warfare never goes according to plan.

Oh, but it did, when the powers at play were this unbalanced, for even the inevitability of chance could not undo the infinite disparity between gods and men. She watched the battle unfold, mapping perfectly onto the chessboard in her mind’s eye. Pieces toppled with the push of a finger, all because she’d willed them to. Cities shattered.

It took her a long moment to notice that the clang of steel had long since died down, that no one was shooting at her, that no one was charging forward. Only when she called the flames away did she see the white flags, now blackened at the edges, waving from every door of every building. The city had surrendered to the Southern Army long ago. The only one still fighting was her.

The battle had ended barely an hour after it had begun. Rin accepted Jinzhou’s surrender, and her soldiers switched from the frenzied rush of battle to the somber business of occupation. Yet even as order was restored to the city, the ground continued to shake, rocked by a series of faraway booms that reverberated so strongly that Rin’s teeth shook in her skull.

Dulin had lost control.

But she had expected this. This was the worst, and likeliest, outcome. She’d prepared for it. If Dulin couldn’t summon the awareness to calm his mind with opium, she’d force it into him.

She turned on her heel and dashed back through the charred city toward the open wall. Her flames flickered and disappeared—she was too panicked to focus on rage now—but no one bothered attacking her. Civilians and soldiers on both sides were all fleeing the shuddering city, dodging and weaving as great chunks of stone tore from the sides of buildings and smashed into the dirt.

The booms grew louder. Great crevices started ripping through the earth like gaping wounds left by some invisible beast. Rin saw two men in front of her disappear, screaming, as the ground opened up beneath them. For the first time on this campaign, a dagger of fear broke through her calm. The Great Tortoise had gotten a taste of freedom. It wanted more. If this continued, Dulin would put the entire city into the earth.

But miraculously, the ground seemed calmer the closer Rin got to the eastern wall. She realized the tremors were spreading out in a circular pattern, and the damage rippled out inversely, gaining destruction rather than fading at larger diameters. But the epicenter—the ground under Dulin’s feet—was calm.

Of course. The Great Tortoise wanted liberation. It wanted to see the sky. It might bury everything in its vicinity, but it would not bury its mortal host.

Dulin was bent over where she’d left him, hands clutching at his head as he screamed. Rin spied Pipaji crouched several yards away, half kneeling like she couldn’t decide whether or not to spring at him. Her eyes widened when she saw Rin. “Should I—”

“Not yet.” Rin pushed her out of the way. “Get back.”

Dulin’s thrashing meant that he was still fighting. The Great Tortoise hadn’t yet won; she could still bring him back. She fleetingly considered trying to shout him down, the way Altan had done for Suni so many times.

But Jinzhou was crumbling. She didn’t have the time.

She ran forward, lowered her head, and tackled him at the waist.

He hit the ground with no resistance. Rin had forgotten how weak he really was, a spindly adolescent who’d been chronically malnourished over many months. He flailed beneath her, but to no avail; she held him still using only her knees.

The rumbling grew louder. She heard another ear-splitting crash from within the city boundaries. Another building had just gone down. She fumbled hastily in her back pocket for the opium pouch, ripped it open with her teeth, and shook its contents out onto the dirt.

Dulin arched his back, twisting beneath her. Dreadful gargling sounds escaped his throat. His eyes flitted back and forth, alternating brown and shiny black every time he blinked.

“Hold still,” she hissed.

His eyes fixed on hers. She felt a flutter of fear as something ancient and alien bore into her soul. Dulin’s features contorted in an expression of absolute terror, and he began rasping out guttural words in no language she could recognize.

Rin snatched the nuggets off the dirt and shoved them all in his mouth.

His eyes bulged. She lurched forward and clamped her hand tight over his mouth, clenching his jaw shut as best she could. Dulin struggled but Rin squeezed harder, pressing her stump against his neck for leverage, until at last she saw his throat bob. Several minutes later, once the opium had seeped into his bloodstream, the earth at last fell silent.

Rin let go of Dulin’s jaw and reached under his neck to feel for his pulse. Faint, but insistent. His chest was still rising and falling. Good—she hadn’t choked him to death.

“Get Lianhua,” she called to a cowering Pipaji. Foam bubbled out the sides of Dulin’s clammy lips, and Rin wondered vaguely how quickly opium poisoning could kill a person. “Be quick.”

As Jinzhou was falling, its city magistrate had realized that defeat likely meant death, so he’d fled out the back gates concealed under pig carcasses in a livestock cart. He left his pregnant wife and three children behind, barricaded in the inner chamber of their mansion, where several hours later they were found suffocated under collapsed rubble.

Rin learned all this as her troops took swift, efficient command of the city.

“Everyone we’ve interrogated confirms he’s heading east,” said Commander Miragha. She was a brutally efficient young woman, one of Cholang’s subordinates from Dog Province, and she’d rapidly become one of Rin’s most capable officers. “He’s got allies in the next province over. What do you want to do?”

“Pursue him,” Rin ordered. “Pursue anyone who’s fled the city, and don’t let up until you’ve dragged them back into the jails. I don’t want anyone outside Jinzhou to know what happened here today.”

Of all Souji’s lessons, the one that had struck the hardest was that in campaigns of resistance, information asymmetry mattered more than anything. The playing field had leveled somewhat now, but Rin still didn’t want Nezha to know her army had new shamans until Dulin and Pipaji became impossible to conceal. She knew she couldn’t keep this secret for long, but there was no point giving Nezha extra time to prepare.

“Kill or capture?” Miragha pressed.

Rin paused, considering.

That question had bearing on the larger issue of how to handle Jinzhou’s occupation. Most civil wars, like Vaisra’s campaign, were fought by redefining territorial borders. Enemy land was hard to maintain, so grafting onto local power structures had historically been the easiest way to seamlessly take control of a city without breakdown of civil functions. If Rin had wanted Jinzhou to resume normal functions, then she’d try to keep as many fleeing officials alive as she could. But she was focused on obtaining resources, not territory—she didn’t have the troops to station in every city that stood between her and Arlong.

Of course, that wasn’t a strategy for sustained long-term rule. But Rin wasn’t concerned with long-term rule right now. She wanted Nezha dead, the Republic collapsed, the south freed, and the Hesperians banished. She didn’t care much what happened to the Nikara heartland in the interim.

This region would likely fall into a temporary chaos while local powers either reestablished themselves or became victim to opportunistic coups. Small-scale wars were bound to break out. Bandits would run rampant.

She had to bracket all that as a problem for later. It couldn’t be hard to reassert control after she’d defeated the Republic. She’d be the only alternative left. Who could possibly challenge her?

“Capture them if you can,” she told Miragha. “But no need to go out of your way.”

For the rest of the afternoon, Rin’s troops plundered Jinzhou for its riches.

They did it as politely as possible, with minimal brutality. Rin gave strict orders for her soldiers to leave the terrified civilians and their households alone. Even accounting for the buildings shattered by Dulin’s earthquake, Jinzhou wallowed in so much wealth that the destruction had barely made a dent; the warehouses, granaries, and shops that remained standing still burst with enough goods to sustain the army for weeks. Rin’s troops loaded their wagons with sacks of rice, grain, salt, and dried meat; restocked their stores of bandages and tinctures; and replaced their rusty, broken-down carts with new vehicles with wheels and axles that glinted silver in the sunlight.

By far their best discovery was bolts and bolts of cotton linen and silk stacked up in massive piles inside a textile warehouse. Now they could make bandages. Now they could repair their shoes, which were in such tatters after the march over Baolei that many of Rin’s soldiers had fought the battle of Jinzhou barefoot. And now, for the first time in its short history, the Southern Army would have a uniform.

Up until now they’d been fighting in the same rags they’d worn out of the Southern Province. In battle they distinguished themselves with streaks of mud like Souji had suggested back when they’d broken the Beehive, or by putting on anything that wasn’t blue and hoping they weren’t killed by friendly fire. But now Rin had cloth, dyes, and a terrified guild of skilled Jinzhou seamstresses who were eager to comply with her every request.

The seamstresses asked her to pick a color. She chose brown, largely because brown dyes were the cheapest, made with tannins easily found in tree bark, shells, and acorn cups. But brown was also fitting. The Southern Army’s first uniforms had been dirt from a riverbed. When the Snail Goddess Nüwa had created the first humans, she had lovingly crafted the aristocracy from the finest red clay, lost patience, and hastily shaped the rest from mud. At Sinegard, they’d called her a mud-skinned commoner so often the insult felt now like a familiar call to arms.

Let them think of us as dirt, Rin thought. She was dirt. Her army was dirt. But dirt was common, ubiquitous, patient, and necessary. The soil gave life to the country. And the earth always reclaimed what it was owed.

“Great Tortoise,” Kitay said. “You’d think this was a Warlord’s palace.”

They stood in the main council room of Jinzhou’s city hall, a vast chamber with high ceilings, elaborately carved stone walls, and ten-foot-long calligraphic tapestries hanging at every corner. Long shelves gilded each wall, displaying an array of antique vases, swords, medals, and armor dating back as far as the Red Emperor. Miraculously, it had all survived the earthquakes.

Rin felt deliciously guilty as she perused the room and its treasures. She felt like a naughty child rummaging through her parents’ wardrobe. She couldn’t shake the sense that she shouldn’t be in here, that none of this belonged to her.

It does, she reminded herself. You conquered them. You razed this place. You won.

They’d sell it all, of course. They’d come here to find treasures they could turn to silver through Moag’s trading routes. As she ran her fingers over a silk fan, Rin fleetingly imagined herself wielding it, dressed in ornate silks of the kind Daji used to wear, carried through adoring crowds on a gilded palanquin.

She pushed the image away. Empresses carried fans. Generals carried swords.

“Look,” Kitay said. “Someone certainly thought highly of themselves.”

The magistrate’s chair at the end of the room was laughably ornate, a throne better fit for an emperor than a city official.

“I wonder how he made it through any meetings,” Rin said. The chair was nailed to a raised dais about half a foot off the floor. “You’d have to crane your neck just to look at anyone.”

Kitay snorted. “Perhaps he was just very short.”

Curious, Rin climbed up and settled into the chair. Contrary to expectations, the seat had actually been built for someone much taller than her. Her feet swung childishly from the edge, nowhere close to scraping the floor. Still, she couldn’t help feeling a small thrill of excitement as she looked out over the gilded chamber and the long council table at whose head she sat. She imagined the seats filled with people: soldiers, advisers, and city officials all listening attentively to her bidding.

Was this how it felt, day by day, to rule? Was this how Nezha felt seated within Arlong’s cerulean halls, halfway across the country?

She knew very well how total, dominating power tasted. But as she sat on the conquered throne, gazing down at the empty seats below, she understood for the first time the delicious authority that went with it. This was not a taste she had inherited from Altan, because Altan had only ever concerned himself with destructive retribution. Altan had never dreamed of seizing a throne.

But Rin could burn, was burning, much more brightly than Altan ever had.

Small wonder Nezha had chosen his Republic over her. She’d have done the same in a heartbeat.

Enjoy your Republic, she thought, fingers curling against the cold armrest. Enjoy it while it lasts, Young Marshal. Take a good look at your splendor, and remember well how it feels. Because I am coming to burn it all down beneath you.