The Burning God (The Poppy War Book 3)

In the Principles of War, the strategist Sunzi wrote at length about a concept he named shi, which from Old Nikara translated vaguely into “energy,” “influence,” or “strategic advantage.” Shi was water rushing so quickly downstream it could dislodge stones from riverbeds. Shi was the devastation of boulders tumbling down a steep mountain slope. Shi dictated that energy, when present, accumulated and amplified itself.

Rin’s victory at Jinzhou was the push that sent the first rock rolling.

Things became so easy after that. Nezha didn’t have the troops to defend his outlying territories, so he rapidly retreated southeast, back behind the Qinling and Daba Mountains that served as Arlong’s natural defenses. Assaulted on two fronts, he made the only strategic decision he could—to center his defenses in Dragon Province, leaving the rest of the Republic to fend for itself.

On their way through Ram Province, Rin’s troops came across nothing but scorched fields and abandoned villages—evidence of civilians ordered to pack their things overnight and retreat into the mountains or back behind Republican lines. Anything the refugees couldn’t take, they had left out in the sun to spoil. On many occasions, the Southern Army stumbled upon piles and piles of animal carcasses, flies buzzing over split-open pigs whose meat might have been good just two or three days ago.

There was a classic principle of Nikara warfare: when facing enemy invasion, clear the countryside and erect high walls. When things looked dire, Nikara leaders destroyed rural settlements and moved food, people, and supplies behind walled cities to prevent them from becoming enemy assets. What couldn’t be moved was burned, poisoned, or buried. It was the oldest practice of Nikara military tradition, and amplified the suffering of innocents. Someone wants to conquer you, someone else wants to prevent you from turning into an asset, and you get fucked from both sides.

From the Mugenese, such extravagant waste would have been an act of spiteful defiance. But from Nezha, who had provinces to rule and subjects to protect, this was the ultimate sign of weakness. It meant his Hesperian allies were abandoning him. It meant he knew he couldn’t stop the southerners from marching on Dragon Province; he could only try to slow them down.

But the Southern Army had shi. It could not be slowed. Rin’s troops were running high on victory. They had sharper swords now, better armor, and more food than they could eat. They were fighting with more skill and energy than they ever had before. They carved through the countryside like a knife through tofu. More often than not, villages surrendered without their having to lift a finger; some villagers even readily enlisted, happy for the chance at steady coin and two square meals a day.

The reversal of fortunes was astonishing. Months ago, Rin had led a desperate march into mountains, had gambled the lives of thousands on the barest chance of survival. Now she marched on the offensive, and Nezha had lost almost everything that made her fear him. He was a boy king, limping by with the support of a recalcitrant ally that, judging from the quiet skies, had strongly reconsidered its commitments. Meanwhile, Rin had an army swelling in confidence, experience, and supplies. Above all, she had shamans.

And they were performing marvelously. After Dulin’s near breakdown at Jinzhou, Rin hadn’t expected them to last so long. She’d thought she might get a few weeks’ use from them at most before they inevitably died in battle or she had to kill them. She’d been particularly concerned about Lianhua, who regularly sank into daylong catatonic trances after her shifts on triage duty. This frightened Pipaji so much that she soon grew terrified of calling her own god, and had to be coaxed into participating in the next few battles.

But all three were getting more stable over time. Aside from a brief episode when Dulin was struck in the shoulder by an arrow and accidentally prompted an earthquake that split the battlefield with a ten-foot ravine, he never lost control again. Lianhua’s trances decreased to once a week, and then ceased completely. Pipaji managed to overcome her nerves; three weeks after Jinzhou, she infiltrated a village posing as a refugee and took out its entire defensive line that night by slipping through their ranks, brushing her fingers against every patch of exposed skin.

They all learned to cope in their own ways. Dulin started meditating at night, sitting cross-legged on the dirt for hours on end. Lianhua sang to herself while she worked to keep herself grounded, going through a wide array of folk ballads and ditties in an impressively lovely soprano. Pipaji began disappearing from camp every evening shortly after dinner, and rarely came back until after dusk.

One night Rin, slightly worried, followed her out of camp. She was relieved to discover that all Pipaji did was stand still in the forest, surrounded by trees with no other human beings in sight, and breathe.

“You’re not very good at hiding,” Pipaji said after a while.

Rin stepped into the clearing. “I didn’t want to disturb you.”

“It’s all right.” Pipaji looked somewhat embarrassed. “I don’t ever stay out here for very long. I just like to go where it’s quiet. Where there’s nobody I can hurt. It’s, um, relaxing.”

Rin felt an odd twinge in her chest. “That’s prudent.”

“You can stay if you want.”

Rin lifted her eyebrows, somewhat touched. “Thank you.”

For a moment they stood side by side, listening to the katydids shriek. It was, Rin agreed, oddly relaxing.

“You don’t get to go back to normal,” Pipaji said abruptly.

“Hmm?”

“I noticed your eyes. They’re always red. Our eyes go back to normal. Yours don’t. Why?”

“Because I’m too far gone,” Rin said. She was only partly lying. “I can’t shut it out anymore.”

“Then what brings you back?” Pipaji demanded. “Why haven’t you lost it like—like the rest of them?”

Rin considered telling her about the anchor bond. But what was the point? That option would never be possible for Pipaji—revealing it would only be cruel. And the fewer people who knew about Kitay, the better.

She liked Pipaji, but she wasn’t going to trust the girl with her life.

“I’ve struck a deal with my god,” she said after a pause. “And it’s learned to stay put.”

“You didn’t tell us about that.”

“Because it’s the least likely outcome,” Rin said. “You knew how this would end. There’s no point giving you hope.”

Her words came out flat and cold. She couldn’t think of anything reassuring to say, and she suspected Pipaji didn’t want to hear it. All her recruits had known this could only end two ways for them: death, or the Chuluu Korikh. She’d warned them many times over; she’d made sure they understood that volunteering was a death sentence.

“I’m not going to survive this war,” Pipaji said after a long silence.

“You don’t know that,” Rin said.

Pipaji shook her head. “I’m not strong enough. You’ll kill me. You’ll need to kill me.”

Rin gave her a pitying look. What good would lying do?

“Do you want me to say I’m sorry?”

“No.” Pipaji snorted. “We knew what we signed up for.”

And that was all it took to assuage Rin’s conscience. She hadn’t done anything wrong if they’d chosen this themselves. Dulin, Lianhua, and Pipaji were still here because they’d decided it was worth it. They’d foreseen and accepted their deaths. She’d offered them weapons, the only weapons strong enough to alter their miserable world, and they’d taken them. These were the choices war produced.

Several weeks later they occupied a small port town on the Western Murui at the border between Ram and Hare province, and made camp as they awaited an old friend.

“Well, look at you.” Chiang Moag, Pirate Queen of Ankhiluun, stepped off the gangplank and strode down the pier with a broad smile on her face. “Look what you’ve made of yourself.”

“Hello, Moag,” Rin said. They regarded each other for a moment. Then, because Moag hadn’t yet tried to stick a knife in her back, Rin waved down the twenty hidden archers who had been waiting to put an arrow through her head.

“Cute,” Moag said when she saw them disperse.

“Learned that from you,” Rin said. “I’m never quite sure what side you’re on.”

Moag snorted. “Oh, let’s call this what it is. The Republic is done for. That pretty little boy they’ve got on Arlong’s throne couldn’t manage even a village without his father’s help. I know where to throw in my lot.”

She sounded convincing, but Rin knew better than to take her words at face value. Moag was, and always would be, a liability. True, she’d granted Rin safe haven in Ankhiluun after her escape from Arlong, but she hadn’t lifted a finger to help since Rin left for the south. This entire war Moag had remained hidden in Ankhiluun, bolstering her fleets against an anticipated Hesperian attack. Moag was hedging her bets, waiting to see if she’d be better off resisting the Republic or playing by its rules.

Momentum was on Rin’s side right now. But should anything go wrong, Moag was just as likely to sell her out to Arlong. She’d done it before.

For now, Rin was willing to swallow that risk. She needed ammunition—all the fire powder, cannons, and missiles that she hadn’t been able to loot. Mobile warfare tactics worked well enough on underdefended cities from which Nezha’s troops had been hastily recalled. But she needed proper artillery to breach the dragon’s lair.

“It’s nice to see you in charge.” Moag clapped a broad hand on Rin’s shoulder. “What did I tell you? You were never meant to serve, much less beneath snakes like Vaisra. Women like us have no business putting our services for sale.”

Rin laughed. “It’s good to see you.”

She meant it. She’d always respected the Pirate Queen’s blunt, naked self-interest. Moag had risen from an escort to the ruler of Nikan’s only free city through ruthless, brilliant pragmatism, and though Rin knew very well this meant Moag was loyal to no one, she still admired her for it.

“What do you have for me?” she asked.

“See for yourself.” Moag stuck two fingers in her mouth and whistled to her crew. “Some old toys, some new ones. I think you’ll like them.”

Over the next hour, Moag’s crew and Rin’s troops together unloaded dozens of crates onto the riverbank. Moag unlocked one and kicked open the hatch, revealing coffins stacked in neat rows of four.

“Does this trick really work?” Rin asked.

“It does if you claim they’re plague victims.” Moag motioned to one of her crew. He pulled the nearest coffin out of the crate, jammed a crowbar under the lid, and pushed down until the lid popped open. A thick pile of fire powder glinted in the sunlight, fine and shiny. Rin had the absurd impulse to bathe in it.

“It’s an old smuggler’s trick,” Moag said. “Shockingly effective. Everyone’s prudent, but no one wants to die.”

“Smart,” Rin said, impressed.

“Save the coffins,” Moag suggested. “They’re good for firewood.”

For the rest of the afternoon they traded coffins crammed with swords, shields, missiles, and fire powder for the riches Rin’s troops had accumulated throughout Ram Province. All this happened outside on the riverbank. Rin didn’t want to let Moag near her camp—the less intelligence Moag gleaned about her forces the better—and Moag didn’t want to wander too far from her ships. The riverbank was a buffer that assuaged their mutual distrust.

Moag was thorough. She inspected every item in every trunk of jewelry, rubbing the larger pieces between her fingers to determine their value before nodding her permission for her soldiers to lug it back on board.

Rin watched the two lines walking in parallel, trading. There was a lovely symbolism to it. All the treasures of one bloated city, in exchange for enough cold steel and fire powder to bring down the rest.

“Now, then.” Moag stood back as the final crate was unloaded from her skimmers. “There’s the issue of payment.”

Rin balked. “What are you talking about?”

Moag showed her the figures she’d been marking in a ledger. “I’ve just unloaded twice as much weaponry as this pays for.”

“By what standards?” Rin asked. “Those prices are made up. Your whole pricing system is shot; we’re the only ones buying right now. You’d hardly be able to cut a deal in Arlong.”

“True,” Moag said. “But city magistrates are always buying. And I’m sure there are plenty of local platoons looking to improve their defenses now that they all know what’s coming their way.”

“If you try that shit,” Rin said very calmly, “I will kill you.”

There followed a long pause. Rin couldn’t read Moag’s expression. Was she afraid? Furious? Deliberating whether to strike first?

Rin’s eyes darted around the beach, mapping out the possible fallout. Her first move would be to incinerate Moag where she stood, but she had to hedge against the Black Lilies, any one of whom could take her out with a well-aimed poisonous hairpin. If she expanded her radius she could take the Lilies out, too, but they were intermingled with southern troops, almost certainly on purpose. If she killed Moag, then she’d have to suffer at least a dozen casualties.

Her fingers curled into a fist. She could absorb those losses; no one would fault her for it. But she had to strike first.

Then Moag burst out laughing, a full-throated, booming laugh that startled Rin.

“Tiger’s tits.” Moag clapped a hand on her shoulder, grinning. “When did you grow such a massive pair of balls?”

Rin, wildly relieved, forced her grimace into a smile.

“But I will be coming to collect,” Moag continued. “Not immediately,” she amended quickly, noticing Rin’s scowl. “I want to see you succeed, little Speerly. I won’t get in your way. But you’d best start thinking about how to scrounge up some profits from your empire.”

“Profits?” Rin wrinkled her nose. “I’m not running a business here—”

“Correct. You’re about to run a nation.” A familiar look of patronizing pity crossed Moag’s face, the look she’d always put on when she thought Rin was being particularly naive. “And nations need silver, girlie. War is costly. You’ve got to pay your soldiers somehow. Then you’ve got to pay back the masses whose homelands you’ve just wrecked. Where are they supposed to live? What are they going to eat? You need lumber to rebuild village settlements. You need grain to ward off the famine you’re facing down, since I guarantee your crop yields this year will be shit. No one plows when there’s a war going on. They’re too busy being, you know, refugees.”

“I . . .” Rin didn’t know what to say. She had to admit those were real problems, problems she had to deal with eventually, but they seemed so far off that she’d never given them any thought. Those seemed like good problems to have, because by the time they became relevant, it would mean that she’d won. But what was the point of daydreaming about an empire when Nezha still ruled the southeast? “I haven’t—”

“Ah, don’t look so scared.” Moag gave her shoulder a condescending pat. “You’ll be sitting on a throne of riches soon enough. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. The Consortium wants to be here for a reason. All those silks? Porcelains? Tungsten deposits? Antique vases? They want that shit, and they’ll pay good money for it.”

“But they’re not going to trade with us,” Rin said. “Are they? I mean, if we win, won’t they just blockade us?”

“They will, on paper, refuse to trade with the Nikara Empire.” Moag spread her hands in a magnanimous gesture. “But I’ve got ships aplenty, and I know a million ways to disguise the trade channels so it’s not coming directly from you. You can always find a way to make a sale when there’s demand. I’ll take a cut, of course.”

Rin was still confused. “But if it’s Nikara goods they’re buying, won’t they know—”

“Of course they’ll know,” Moag said. She shook her head, casting again that pitying smile. “Everyone knows. But that’s the business of statecraft. Nations rise and fall, but appetites remain the same. Trust me, Speerly—you’ll be carting in Hesperian grain weeks after you boot them from your shores, so long as you’re willing to send back some of Arlong’s treasures in return. The world runs on trade. Send an envoy when you’re ready to start.”

The battles got harder as the Southern Army moved farther east. Rin had expected this. She was essentially knocking on Nezha’s door now; they were only several months’ march from Arlong. Now well-trained Republican troops occupied every major city in their path. Now Rin regularly encountered artillery formations armed with opium missiles, which forced her to get more and more creative with how and when she deployed shamans. In half her battles she didn’t send in Pipaji or Dulin at all, relying instead on conventional military means to break the opposition. More often than not she was the only shaman in action, since she had a higher opium tolerance than the rest; she could withstand close to twenty minutes of smoke, during which she could do incalculable damage before she was forced to retreat.

The fighting turned vicious. The defenders weren’t so quick to surrender anymore; more often they fought to the death, taking as many southerners with them as they could. Her casualty rates, once in the dozens, climbed to triple digits.

But Rin was also blessed by the fact that Nezha’s troops were so fucking slow. They weren’t mobile in the least. They were stationary defenders—they stuck behind city walls and protected them as best they could, but never did they attempt the roving strikes that might have put the Southern Army in real trouble.

“It’s likely because they’re weighed down by tons of Hesperian equipment,” Kitay guessed. “Mounted arquebuses, multiple fire cannons, all that heavy stuff. They haven’t got the transportation support to take it on the road, so they’re always tethered to one place.”

That turned Nezha’s troops into sitting targets and offset the technology imbalance somewhat—Nezha’s troops were committed to their trenches with their heavy machinery, while Rin’s squadrons were quick and agile, always on the offensive. They were fighting like a turtle and a wolf—one retreating into its ever-shrinking shell, while the other paced its boundaries, waiting for the slightest weakness to strike.

That suited Rin just fine. After all, she, Kitay, and Nezha had all been taught since their first year at Sinegard that it was always, always better to be on the offensive.

Despite the increased resistance, week by week they continued to gain ground, while Nezha’s territory crumbled.

Rin knew Nezha’s losses weren’t entirely his fault. He had inherited a Republic fractured and riddled with resentment toward his father, as well as a massive, unwieldy army that was tired of fighting a civil war they’d been promised would end quickly. His inner circle was getting smaller and smaller, reduced now to a Hesperian attaché who did little more than make snide comments about how Nezha was on his way to losing a country, and a handful of Vaisra’s old advisers who resented that he wasn’t his father. She heard rumors that since Mount Tianshan, he’d already had to quash two attempted coups, and although he’d swiftly jailed the perpetrators, his dissenters had only increased.

Most importantly, he was losing the support of the countryside.

Most of the Nikara elite—aristocrats, provincial officials, and city bureaucrats—remained loyal to Arlong. But the villagers had no entrenched interests in the Republic. They hadn’t benefited financially from Nezha’s new trade policies, and now that they’d tasted life under Hesperian occupation, they threw their support behind the only other alternative.

The upshot of this was that as Rin moved south, she stumbled into a remarkable intelligence network. In the countryside, everyone was tangentially connected to everyone else. Market gossip became a hub for crucial information. It didn’t matter that none of her new sources were privy to high-level conversations, or that none of them had ever seen a map of troop placements. They saw its evidence with their own eyes.

Three columns crossed this river two nights ago, they told her.

We saw wagons of fire powder moving east this morning.

They are building temporary bridges across the river at these two junctions.

Much of this ground-level, eyewitness intelligence was useless. The villagers weren’t trained spies, they didn’t draw accurate maps, and they often embellished their stories for dramatic effect. But the sheer volume of information made up for it; once Rin had reports from at least three different sources, she and Kitay could piece them together into a mostly accurate composite image of where Nezha had arranged his defenses, and where he intended to strike next.

And that, again, confirmed what Rin had believed since the start of her campaign—that Nikan’s southerners were weak but many, and that united, they could topple empires.

“Nezha can’t be doing this on purpose,” Kitay said one evening after yet another city in Hare Province had tumbled into southern hands with barely so much as a whimper. “It’s like he’s not even trying.”

Rin yawned. “Maybe it’s the best he can do.”

He shot her a wary look. “Don’t get cocky.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She knew she couldn’t really take credit for their victory. They both knew that their ongoing streak of wins was in large part because Nezha simply had not committed as many troops or resources as they had.

But why?

They had to assume at this point that Nezha’s dominant strategy was to hole up in Arlong and concentrate his defenses there. But surely he knew better than to put all his eggs in one basket. Arlong was blessed with a bevy of natural defenses, but defaulting to a siege mentality this early screamed of either desperation or insanity.

“He must be confident about something,” Kitay mused. “Otherwise the only possible explanation for all this is that he’s gone batshit crazy. He’s got to have something up his sleeve.”

Rin frowned. “More dirigibles, you think?” But that didn’t seem likely. If Nezha had increased Hesperian aid, he would have subjected them to air raids already, while they were still on open, distant terrain, instead of near his prized capital. “Is he wagering everything on the Dragon? Some new military technology that’s more lethal than shamanism?”

“Or some military technology that can counteract shamanism,” Kitay said.

Rin shot him a sharp look. He’d said it too quickly—it wasn’t a guess. “Do you know something?”

“I, ah, I’m not sure.”

“Did Nezha say something?” she demanded. “In the New City, when Petra was—I mean—did he—”

“He didn’t know.” Kitay tugged uncomfortably at a lock of hair. “Petra never told him anything. He went through her—her tests. The Hesperians lent him weapons. That was the deal they offered him, and he took it. They didn’t think he had the right to know what they were researching.”

“He could have been lying.”

“Maybe. But I’ve seen Nezha lying. That wasn’t it. That was just despair.”

“But there’s nothing Petra could invent,” Rin insisted. “They’ve got nothing. Their theology is wrong. Their Maker doesn’t exist. If they had some anti-shamanic tool, they would have used it to protect their fleet, but they didn’t. All they have is conventional weapons—fire powder and opium—and we know how to counteract those. Right?”

Kitay looked unconvinced. “As far as we know.”

She crossed her arms, frustrated. “Pick a side, Kitay. You just said there’s no proof—”

“There’s no proof either way. I’m just floating the possibility, because we have to consider it. You know that unless Nezha has something like this up his sleeve, his strategy so far has been utterly irrational. And we can’t proceed assuming the worst of him.”

“Then what? You want to divert from Arlong?”

Kitay mulled that over for a moment. “No. I don’t think we change our overall strategy. We keep gaining ground. We keep bolstering our resources. Based on the information we have, we take Arlong on schedule. But I’m saying we need to be cautious.”

“We’re always cautious.”

He gave her a tired look. “You know what I mean.”

They left it at that. There was nothing else to discuss; without further proof, there was nothing they could do.

Privately, Rin thought Kitay was being paranoid.

What if Nezha didn’t have some secret weapon? What if Nezha was just destined to lose? She couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe, just maybe, the end to this story was a foregone conclusion. After all, the last several months had made it clear that she couldn’t be defeated. Battle by battle, victory by victory, she became more and more convinced of the fact that she’d been chosen by fate to rule the Empire. What else explained her streak of incredible, implausible victories and escapes? She had survived Speer. Golyn Niis. Shiro’s laboratory. She’d taken an army through the long march. She’d emerged victorious from Mount Tianshan. She’d outwitted and outlasted the Mugenese, the Trifecta, and Vaisra. And now she was about to conquer Nezha.

Of course, she couldn’t leave everything to the fates. She couldn’t stop meticulously preparing for every battle just because she hadn’t yet lost a single one. Nikara history was crammed with fools who imagined themselves kings. When their luck bled out, they died like anyone else.

That was why she never voiced this feeling out loud to Kitay. She knew what he would say. Come on, Rin. You’re losing your grip on reality. The gods don’t choose their champions. That’s not how this works.

And while she understood that in the rational part of her mind, she still knew something had changed when she’d come back down from Mount Tianshan, when she’d survived an explosion that killed the greatest figures in Nikara history and nearly wiped out the Hesperian fleet. The tides of history had shifted. She had never before believed in fate, but this she came to know with more and more certainty as each day passed: the script of the world was now wholly, inalterably colored by a brilliant crimson streak.

Rin’s favorite part by far of the southeastern campaign was the Southern Army’s slow acquisition and mastery of Hesperian military technology. She made a game of it—the standing rule was double portions of dinner to the squadron that returned from active engagement with the largest haul of functioning Hesperian equipment.

Most of the pieces they retrieved were minor improvements on equipment they already had—more accurate compasses, sturdier splints for the physicians, more durable axles for their wagons. Often they found contraptions they had no idea what to do with—little lamps without wicks that they didn’t know how to light, ticking orbs that resembled clocks but whose arms corresponded to inexplicable letters and numbers, and whirring mini-dirigibles that Rin assumed were messenger crafts, which she couldn’t fly. She felt stupid, turning the devices over and over in her fingers, unable to find the controls to make them start. Kitay fared slightly better—he finally determined that the lamps were activated with a series of taps—but even he grew frustrated with machines that seemed to run purely on magic.

Three miles out from Bobai, a recently abandoned Republican holdout, they found under a thin layer of soil a hastily buried crate of functioning arquebuses.

“Fuck me,” Kitay murmured when they pried the lid off the crate. “These are almost brand-new.”

Rin lifted an arquebus from the top of the pile and weighed it in her hand. She’d never held one before; she hadn’t dared. The steel was icy cool to the touch. It was heavier than she imagined—she found a new respect for Hesperian soldiers who lugged these running into battle.

She glanced at Kitay, whose jaw hung open as he knelt down to examine the weapons. She knew what he was thinking.

These changed everything.

They’d made it this far with minimal ranged capabilities. There were only several dozen archers in the Southern Army, and their ranks weren’t growing. It took weeks for a novice soldier to learn to properly fire an arrow, and months if not years for them to fire with decent accuracy. Archery required tremendous arm strength, particularly if arrows were meant to pierce armor.

The next best thing they had to arrows were fire lances, a recent Republican invention Kitay had heard about during his stay in the New City, then reverse engineered. Those were tubes made of sixteen layers of thin wrapped paper, a little longer than two feet, stuffed with willow charcoal, sulfur, saltpeter, and shards of iron. The lances could shoot flames nearly ten feet when lit, but they still required a ready fire source to activate, and they backfired easily, often exploding in the hands of their wielders.

But arquebuses required less arm strength than bows, and they were more reliable than fire lances. How long would it take to train troops to shoot? Weeks? Days, perhaps, if they devoted their time to nothing else? If she could get just twenty to thirty soldiers who were halfway proficient with the arquebus, that would open up a host of new strategies they’d only dreamed of.

“Think you can figure out how to use these?” she asked Kitay.

He chuckled, brushing his fingers over the metal tubes. “Give me until sunset.”

Kitay took only the afternoon before he called her over into a clearing, empty except for the dozen dissembled arquebuses scattered around the grass. Pale little notches dotted the trunks of every tree in sight.

“It’s actually quite simple.” He pointed at various parts of the arquebus as he spoke. “I thought I was going to have to interrogate some Hesperian prisoners, but the design really revealed its own function. Very clever invention. It’s basically a cannon in miniature—you set off some fire powder inside the barrel, and the force of the explosion sends the lead ball ricocheting out.”

“How does the firing mechanism work?” Rin asked. “Do they have to light a spark every time?”

This seemed inconvenient to her, as well as implausible; the Hesperians seemed to fire at will without fumbling for flint.

“No, they don’t,” said Kitay. “They’ve done something clever with the match. It’s already a burning fuse—you can light it before you’re out on the field. Then when you’re ready to shoot, you squeeze this lever here, and it brings the match down into the powder. Click, boom.” He reached for an intact arquebus. “Here, I’ve loaded that one. Want to give it a try?”

She waved her stump at him. “Not sure if I can.”

“I’ll aim for you.” He stood behind her and wrapped his arms around her torso, pointing the barrel at a thick tree across the clearing. “Ready when you are.”

She curled her fingers around metal latch. “I just squeeze this?”

“Yup. Make sure you plant your feet, there’ll be a kickback against your shoulder. Remember, it’s a miniature cannon explosion. And give it a hard yank, it’s quite resistant—prevents accidental firing.”

She bent her knees as he demonstrated, took a deep breath, and pulled the trigger.

A bang split the clearing. The gun jerked backward at her chest and she flinched, but Kitay’s firm grip kept it from slamming into her ribs. Smoke poured out of the muzzle. She turned her head away, coughing.

“That’s one disadvantage,” Kitay said after the smoke had cleared. “Takes a while to see whether you’ve actually hit anything.”

Rin strode toward a tree on the opposite end of the clearing, where smoke unfurled into the air like little dragons. The pellet had struck true, burrowing deep into the center of the trunk. She stuck her finger into the groove. It sank into wood up to her third knuckle, until she couldn’t dig her finger in any farther, and even then she couldn’t feel the pellet.

“Holy fucking shit,” she said.

“I know,” Kitay said. “I’ve tried firing on armor, too. We’ve seen what they do to flesh, but these things penetrate steel.”

“Fuck. How long does that take to reload?”

“It’s taking me about half a minute now,” he said. “It’ll be faster with training.”

So that meant three, perhaps four, shots per minute. That was nothing near what an archer like Venka could manage in the same time span, but the arquebus’s superior lethality more than compensated.

“How many of your shots end up anywhere close to the target?” she asked.

He gave a sheepish shrug. “Eh. One in six hit the trunk. That should improve.”

“And how many of those bullets did we find?”

“Three boxes. About two hundred bullets in each.”

She frowned. “Kitay.”

He sighed. “I know. We’re going to run out.”

She took a moment to do the math in her head. Thirty soldiers on arquebuses firing at an ambitious rate of three shots per minute would run out of ammunition in less than—

“Six to seven minutes,” said Kitay. “We’re out in six to seven minutes.”

“I was getting there.”

“Course you were, I just figured I’d speed things up. Yes, that is the problem.” He rubbed his chin. “There were armories in that town we passed through last week. We could make some casts, melt some scrap metal down . . .”

“What scrap metal?” Rin asked. They were short on swords as it was, and they both knew it was folly to trade swords for bullets when most of their troops were far better in close-range combat.

“Then we’ve got to obtain it somehow,” Kitay said. “Or steal ammunition. But that’ll be tough—they’ve been pretty good about guarding their weapons so far, and those arquebuses were a rare find—”

“Hold on.” An idea had just struck her. “Master Irjah gave us a puzzle like this once. Almost exactly like this.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t you remember? What do you do when you need your enemy’s ammunition?” She nudged his elbow. “Come on.”

He shook his head. “Rin, that worked for arrows.”

“So what? Same principle.”

“Steel pellets are different,” he insisted. “They distort upon impact; you can’t just collect them and shove them right back into the barrel.”

“So we’ll melt them down,” she countered. “Why is this so implausible? The Hesperians love firing on things. It’ll be easy enough to bait them, we just need to give them any reason to shoot. And we’re about to hit a tributary, which means—”

“It won’t work,” he interrupted. “Come on. They’ve got better spyglasses than we do. Straw targets will be too obvious, they’ll know they’re decoys.”

“That’s easy,” she said. “We’ll just use the real thing.”

And so, three days later, they found themselves fastening corpses to the mast and railings of an opium skimmer. The key, Rin learned, was a combination of nails and twine. Ropes would have been ideal, but they were too visible to the naked eye. Nails she could pound through bare flesh, and easily conceal the protrusions under layers of clothing. Anyone who stared long enough through a spyglass could see these were clearly corpses, but Rin hoped the Republican artillerymen would be too trigger-happy for that to matter.

When they’d populated the upper deck with enough corpses to make it look manned, they sent it floating down the river with a sole helmsman whose job was to keep it from crashing onto the bank. They’d chosen a wide, fast-moving stretch of water, with a current quick enough to pull the skimmer out of Republican range before anyone tried to board it.

“Gross.” Rin wiped her hand on her tunic as she watched the skimmer drift out of view. “This smell isn’t coming out for days, is it?”

“Just as well,” Kitay said. “We still have to cut the bullets out.”

When at last they neared the southern border of Hare Province, they found a messenger waiting with a letter from Venka. She and Cholang had been sending regular updates throughout the campaign. They’d swept through the north easily enough, as predicted. They hadn’t had much to do; Nezha seemed to have pulled his troops in from the east and north alike, concentrating them in a last stand in Dragon Province. So far Venka’s missives had involved happy updates of townships captured, shipments of historical artifacts she’d looted in magistrates’ estates, and the occasional crate of armor from Tiger Province’s famed blacksmiths.

As both divisions of the Southern Army moved closer to the center, Venka’s correspondence had come back faster and faster. Now Venka and Cholang were merely a week’s ride away—close enough to converge on Arlong in a joint attack.

“This is from six days ago.” The messenger handed Rin the scroll. “She wants a quick response.”

“Understood,” Rin said. “Wait outside.”

The messenger gave a curt nod and left the command tent. Rin checked that he was out of hearing range, then ripped the scroll open with her teeth.

Change of plans. Don’t move yet on Arlong—my scouts say he’s taking forces north to meet us between the mountains. Rendezvous at Dragab? Please confirm as soon you can; we’d rather not walk alone into a massacre.

“Dragab?” Rin asked. “Where’s that?”

“Little outpost south of Xuzhou.” Kitay had been reading over her shoulder. “And Xuzhou is, I assume, where the Republic intends to meet us.”

“But that’s . . .” Rin trailed off, trying to work through her mental map of Southern and Republican troop placements. This didn’t track. All this time they had assumed Nezha would keep his forces in Arlong city proper, where the Red Cliffs and canals offered him the clearest advantage. “Why would he push north?”

“I can guess three reasons,” Kitay said. “One, Xuzhou’s situated over a narrow mountain channel, which restricts the fighting terrain to the opposite cliffsides and the wide ravine beneath. Two, it’s monsoon season, and the water locks into the pass when the rains get heavy. And three, it’s on our only route to Arlong.”

“That’s not true,” she said. “We could cut around it, there are forest passes—”

“Yes, with roads so bumpy we won’t be able to move any of our heavy artillery, and then we’ll still have to scale down mountain faces that leave us wide open for their archers. Nezha knows we’re coming through for him. He intends to choke us off in the mountains, where your shamans can’t strike with discrimination, which forces the battle into a conventional bloodbath.”

“So this isn’t some last, desperate feint,” Rin said. “It’s an invitation.”

Then why on earth should the Southern Army accept?

Even as the question rose to her lips, the answer became obvious. They should take Xuzhou as their next battleground, purely because it wasn’t Arlong.

Nezha’s power amplified the closer he was to sources of water. Under the Red Cliffs, where the Murui filtered into canals that surrounded every inch of Arlong, he’d be nearly unstoppable. He’d be right on top of the Dragon’s grotto. Xuzhou was their last, and best, chance to fight him while separating him from his god.

Rin saw the grim press of Kitay’s mouth, and knew that he’d realized the same. Xuzhou might be Nezha’s dominant strategy, but it was theirs, too.

He nodded to the scroll. “Shall we give him what he wants?”

Rin hated that phrasing. This choice was frustrating. Unanticipated. She didn’t like meeting their opponent on a terrain of his choosing, under the least favorable strategic conditions possible.

And yet, deep in her gut, she felt a hot coil of excitement.

Until now, this had not been a true war, only a series of skirmishes against cowards in retreat. Every win so far had meant nothing except as instrumental fuel for this moment, when at last they’d meet true resistance. This was the final test. Rin wanted to go up against Nezha’s best-prepared strategy and see who came out on top.

“Why not?” she said at last. “Nezha’s finally putting his pieces on the board. So let’s play.”

She stepped outside the tent to summon the messenger. He extended his hand, expecting a written reply, but she shook her head. “I’ll be brief. Tell Venka to route to Dragab quick as she can. We’ll be waiting.”