The Burning God (The Poppy War Book 3)

“I see you found some seamstresses.” Venka’s eyes roved over the Southern Army’s neat brown uniforms as she dismounted from her horse to clasp Rin’s hand in greeting. “Do I get one?”

“Of course,” Rin said. “It’s waiting in the tent.”

“General’s stripe and everything?”

“Is this your way of asking for a promotion?” Kitay asked.

“I’ve just handed you the north,” said Venka. “That’s half a fucking country, mind you. I think the title General Sring is a little overdue, don’t you?”

“Honestly,” said Rin, “I thought you’d just take the title for yourself.”

“Honestly,” said Venka, “I did.”

They grinned at each other.

Venka and Cholang’s troops filed into the southern camp at Dragab, falling eagerly on the prepared meals by the campfires. They’d emerged from their northern expedition with close to their original numbers—an impressive achievement, given that the Dog Province’s militia had historically only waged battle against underequipped raiders from the Hinterlands. They also came bearing gifts—wagon upon wagon of spare armor, swords, and shields carted down from the forges in Tiger Province.

After Venka and Cholang had eaten, they joined Rin and Kitay on the floor of the command tent with a map spread between them to piece together their joint intelligence.

“It’s an odd play.” Venka marked Republican columns in blue ink along the eastern end of the Xuzhou ravine. “I really don’t know why he’s not just committing all his defenses to Arlong, especially if he can control the fucking river.”

“Agreed,” Kitay said. “But we think that’s the point. He wants to take the Phoenix out of the equation.”

“Why, just because we’ll be fighting in close quarters?” Cholang asked.

“And because of the rain,” Rin said. “He can call the rain, can make it fall as hard or as thick as he likes. Bit hard to sustain a flame when the sky keeps putting it out.”

They all regarded the map for a few seconds in silence.

The battle for Xuzhou had become a game of warring tactics, a puzzle that Rin had to admit was highly entertaining. It felt like the sort of exam question she might receive from Master Irjah. Xuzhou was the field of engagement. The limiting conditions were known: The rain disadvantaged them both by damping down fire and fire powder alike. Nezha had superior numbers, better artillery capabilities, and fresher troops due to a shorter march. Nezha had the rain. But Rin had shamans Nezha didn’t know about, and she could get to Xuzhou first.

Given the circumstances, piece together a winning strategy.

After a moment, Venka sighed. “What’s this coming down to, then? Pure attrition? Are we just going to slug it out in the mud?”

None of them wanted that. No good commander ever left an outcome to the chances that sheer, mindless friction produced. The brunt of the fighting might very well come down to swords, spears, and shields, but they had to find some gambit, some hidden advantage that Nezha hadn’t thought of.

Suddenly Kitay began to chuckle.

“What?” Rin asked. She didn’t follow; she didn’t know what he’d seen that she hadn’t. But that didn’t matter. Kitay had solved it, and that was all she needed.

“This is very smart,” he said. “You’ve got to give Nezha credit, really. He’s reduced the number of factors at play until the only vectors that matter are the ones where he holds the advantage. He’s swept almost all the chess players off the board.”

“But?” Rin pressed.

“But he’s forgotten one thing.” He tapped his forehead. “I’ve always thrashed him at chess.”

Xuzhou was a city of tombs. The Red Emperor had designed it to be an imperial graveyard, the final resting place for his most beloved generals, advisers, wives, and concubines. He’d commissioned the most skilled sculptors, architects, and gardeners across his territories to build grand monuments to his regime, and over the decades, what had begun as a single cemetery sprawled into a memorial the size of a city. Xuzhou became a place with the sole economy of death—its inhabitants were artisans employed to sweep the tombs, light incense, play ritual concerts to tame vengeful ghosts, and craft intricate mansions, clothes, and furniture out of paper to be burned as offerings so that the deceased might receive them in the afterlife. Even after the Red Emperor’s regime collapsed, the caretakers remained employed, their salaries paid by one ruler or another out of reverence to the dead.

“Can you imagine such an old civilization built all this?” Kitay ran his hands across remarkably well-preserved limestone as they walked through the central cemetery, staking out vantage points for their artillery units. “They didn’t have anything like modern tools. I mean, they barely even had math.”

“Then how’d they manage it?” Venka asked.

“Sheer human labor. When you can’t figure something out, you just throw bodies at it.” Kitay pointed to the far end of the graveyard, where a forty-foot sculpture of the Red Emperor loomed over the ravine. “There are bones in that statue. Actually, there are probably bones in all these statues. The Red Emperor believed that human souls kept buildings structurally sound forever, so when the laborers were done chiseling his face into stone, he had them bound up and hurled into the hollow centers.”

Rin shuddered. “I thought he wasn’t religious.”

“He wasn’t a shaman. Still superstitious as fuck.” Kitay gestured to the monuments surrounding them. “Imagine you’re living in a land of beasts and Speerlies. Why wouldn’t you believe in spells?”

Rin craned her head up at the Red Emperor. His face had been weathered by time, but had retained its structural integrity well enough that she could still make out his features. He looked the same way he did on all the replicas she’d ever seen of his official portrait—a severe, humorless man whose expression displayed no kindness. Rin supposed he’d had to be cruel. A man who intended to stitch the disparate, warring factions of Nikan into a united empire had to have a ruthless, iron will. He couldn’t bend or break. He couldn’t compromise; he had to mold the world to his vision.

His first wife stood at the opposite end of the graveyard. The Winter Empress was famously beautiful and famously sad. She’d been born with such impossible, heavenly beauty that the Red Emperor had kidnapped her as a mere child and deposited her in his court. There, her constant weeping only heightened her beauty because it made her eyebrows arch and her lips purse in such an enticing manner that the Red Emperor would watch as she cried, fascinated and aroused.

According to the stories, she looked so beautiful when she was in pain that no one realized she was wasting away from a heart disease until one day she collapsed in the garden, fingers clawing futilely at her snow-white chest. In the old stories, that counted as romance.

But Rin recognized the stone face across the graveyard. And that wasn’t, couldn’t be, the Winter Empress.

“That’s Tearza,” she murmured, amazed.

“The Speerly queen?” Venka wrinkled her nose. “What are you talking about?”

Rin pointed. “Look around her neck. See that necklace? That’s a Speerly necklace.”

She’d seen that crescent moon pendant before in her dreams. She’d seen it hanging on Altan’s neck. She knew she couldn’t have imagined it; those visions were branded into her mind.

Why would the Red Emperor cast Tearza as his Empress?

Was it true, then, that they’d been lovers?

But all the tales said he’d tried to kill her. He’d sent assassins after her since the moment they met. He’d tried many times on the battlefield to take her head. He had been so afraid of her that he ensconced himself in an island hideout surrounded by water. When she’d died, he’d made her island his colony and her people his slaves.

Yet, Rin supposed, lovers could still inflict that kind of violence on each other. Hadn’t Riga loved Daji? Hadn’t Jiang loved Tseveri?

Hadn’t Nezha once loved her?

“If that’s Mai’rinnen Tearza,” Kitay said, “that’s a history no one’s ever written.”

“Only because the Red Emperor wrote her out of history,” Rin said. “Wrote her out so cleanly that no one even recognized her face.”

She had to respect the man. When you conquered as totally and completely as he had, you could alter the course of everything. You could determine the stories that people told about you for generations.

When they sing about me, she decided, Nezha won’t warrant even a mention.

Under her direction, the Southern Army finished preparing the city for Nezha’s arrival. They hid cannons behind every statue. They dug trenches and tunnels. They placed their sandbags around their forts. They staked out target points for Dulin, identifying weak points in the stone that could bring entire structures down on the Republican Army.

Then they hunkered down to wait.

Rainfall started that evening and continued steadily through the night, fat droplets hammering down in unrelenting sheets that turned the ground beneath their feet to such slippery mud that they had to prop their carts up on boulders so their wheels wouldn’t get stuck overnight. Rin hoped the heavy downpour might drain the clouds empty by morning, but the pattering only intensified as the hours drew on. At dawn, the gray shroud over Xuzhou showed no sign of thinning.

Rin tried to snatch a bit of sleep, but the rain battering against her tent made it impossible. She gave up and waited out the night sitting outside, keeping watch over the graveyard beneath Tearza’s statue.

Nezha had been right to attack in monsoon season. Her fire would do very little today aside from keeping her warm. She’d tested it throughout the night, sending arcs of flame across the night sky. They all fizzled away in seconds. She could still incinerate anyone within her immediate proximity, but that didn’t help in a ranged battle. Cannons and arquebuses wouldn’t be half as effective in this weather; the fuses would take forever to light. Both sides had been largely reduced to brutal, primitive, and familiar weapons—swords, arrows, and spears.

The winner today would be determined by sheer tactical proficiency. And Rin, despite herself, couldn’t wait to see what Nezha had come up with.

The sun crept higher in the sky. Rin’s troops were awake, armed, and ready, but there was still no word from the sentries. They waited another hour in tense anticipation. Then, suddenly, the rain intensified from a loud patter to a violent roar.

It might have been an accident of nature, but Rin doubted it. The timing was too abrupt. Someone was hauling that rain down from the heavens.

“He’s here.” She stood up and waved to her officers. “Ready the columns.”

Seconds later, her sentries caught on to what she already knew, and a series of horns resounded across the tombstones.

The Republican Army appeared at the other end of the ravine, fanning out beneath the Red Emperor’s feet.

Rin scanned the front lines with her spyglass until she spotted Nezha marching at the fore. He was dressed in a strange hybrid fashion; his chest was clad in the familiar blue cloth and lamellar plating of the Dragon Army, but his arms and legs were wrapped in some armor made of overlapping metal plates. It looked obstructively heavy. His shoulders, usually so arrogantly squared, seemed to sag.

“What’s that around his wrists?” Kitay asked.

Rin squinted into her spyglass. She could just barely make out golden circlets around both of Nezha’s wrists. They served no function she could discern—they didn’t seem a part of his armor, and she couldn’t imagine how they might be used as weapons.

She shifted the spyglass down. Another pair of golden circlets was visible over his boots. “Did he have those in Arabak?”

“Not that I remember,” Kitay said. “But I remember seeing these odd scars once, right around—”

“He’s seen us,” Rin said abruptly.

Nezha had taken out a spyglass, too. He was looking right back at them.

She was struck by the symmetry of the scene. They could have been a painting—two opposing factions lined under statues that may as well have been their patron gods. Tearza and the Red Emperor, Speerly against conqueror, the newest participants in a centuries-old conflict that had never died, but had only continued to reverberate through history.

Until now. Until one of them ended it, for better or for worse.

Nezha raised a hand.

Rin tensed. Blood roared in her ears; the familiar, addictive rush of adrenaline thrummed through her body.

So this was how it began. No pleasantries, no obligatory attempt at negotiation; just battle. Nezha brought his hand down and his troops began charging down the ravine, feet thundering against the mud.

Rin turned to Commander Miragha. “Send in the turtles.”

Throughout Nikara history, the traditional way to deal with arrow fire had been sending in shielded front lines to absorb the blow. Dozens of guaranteed fatalities bought time for melee combatants to breach the enemy lines. But Rin didn’t have the dozens of warm bodies to spare.

Enter the turtles. These were one of Kitay’s recent inventions. Inspired by the thickly armored turtle boats in the Republican Fleet, he’d designed small cart-mounted vehicles that could survive heavy fire of almost any kind. He hadn’t had the time nor resources to construct anything sophisticated, so he’d cobbled the turtles together from wooden tables, water-soaked cotton quilts, and scavenged plates of Hesperian armor that, combined, kept out most flying projectiles.

One by one they rolled out from behind the tombstones into the ravine. As if on cue, Nezha’s archers launched their opening volleys, and arrows dotted the surfaces of the turtles until they looked like roving hedgehogs.

“They look so stupid,” Rin muttered.

“Shut up,” Kitay said. “They’re working.”

Republican missiles landed two lucky hits, launching turtles into the air like spinning balls of fire. Undaunted, the other armored vehicles barreled forward. A symphony of whistling sounds filled the air as the Southern Army returned the Republic’s fire. This was largely for show—most of their projectiles skidded ineffectively off the Republic’s metal shields—but the volleys forced the Republican artillery to duck, creating a reprieve for the advancing turtles. Venka’s contingent, stationed with long-distance crossbows on a protruding ledge near the middle of the ravine, landed the most hits, picking off Nezha’s cannon operators with well-placed bolts.

Over the din of the rain, Rin could just barely make out a distinct, low rumble echoing across the ravine. She bent low, placed her hand to the shuddering ground, and smiled.

Dulin was right on time.

They’d determined during training that he couldn’t summon earthquakes outside a ten-yard radius, which meant he couldn’t meaningfully affect fighting conditions inside the ravine unless they threw him into the melee. Rin couldn’t keep him there for long. The turtles weren’t invincible—half had been reduced to smoldering wrecks, obliterated by a concentrated round of missiles.

But Dulin didn’t need to last the entire battle. He only needed to take out the Republic’s upper-level artillery stations. He was so close now, even as his marked turtle vehicle stuttered to a halt, barraged by bolts and arrows.

Come on.

The cliffs began to vibrate. Rin tilted her spyglass up at the artillery stations. Stones slid like powder off the cliffside, cascading over one line of crossbows. The ledge shifted and collapsed, sending Republican troops tumbling dozens of feet into the ravine.

Nearly there, just finish it . . .

A rocket exploded right in front of Dulin’s turtle, flipping the vehicle backward into the air.

Rin let out a wordless screech.

Kitay seized her arm. “It’s fine, he’s fine, look—”

He was right. The cliffs were still quaking, the artillery stations buried in rubble beneath. Dulin was still alive, still channeling the Tortoise. Three armored vehicles clustered protectively around the wreck of Dulin’s turtle, shielding it from the next barrage of bullets. Through her spyglass, Rin saw Dulin climb out from beneath the overturned craft and limp toward the nearest turtle. Soldiers popped out of the hatch to drag him into the armored belly. Then the cart reversed course and started retreating back behind Rin’s waiting infantry.

Nezha’s troops didn’t pursue him. Like everyone else, Nezha was preoccupied with the melee inside the ravine, which—as predicted—had now turned into an utter clusterfuck. No one could aim properly under the rain. Arrows forced off course by the weather buried themselves uselessly in the dirt or ricocheted off the ravine walls. Occasionally someone managed to keep a flame alight long enough to light a fuse, but the battlefield was now too muddled to land a clear hit. Cannonballs, mortar shells, and fire rockets hurtled haphazardly into allies and enemies alike. The silver lining was that Nezha’s wheeled arquebuses had become useless, bogged down in thick mud, their range limited only to the midsection of the ravine.

The remaining four turtles continued their advance toward him, followed by a press of the Southern Army’s infantry. They wouldn’t get far. Nezha’s front line was armed with halberds, extended straight outward in an impaling welcome.

But the turtles weren’t intended to breach the lines. They only needed to get close enough to toss their pipe bombs. Each squadron had set out with a lit coal shielded inside an iron tin. Ten feet from Nezha’s front lines, they lit the bomb fuses and tossed them out the carts’ top hatches.

Several seconds passed. Rin tensed. Then Nezha’s front lines blew apart like ripped paper, and Rin’s infantry surged through.

The battle had now turned into a conventional bloodbath. Swords, halberds, and shields clashed in a frenetic crush of bodies. It should have been a massacre—Nezha’s troops were better trained and better armed—but the rain and mud had made it impossible for anyone to see, which allowed Rin’s peasant infantry to last much longer than they should have.

But they didn’t need to last forever. Just long enough.

Rin felt a sudden, bizarre sense of detachment as she watched the carnage playing out from the far side of the ravine. None of this seems real. Yes, she knew the costs were real—she knew that below her feet, real bodies were bleeding and breaking as a consequence of orders she’d given, that real lives were being snuffed out in the rain while she waited out the timetable of her plan.

But the adrenaline, that mad rush of energy that accompanied the irrepressible fear of death, was missing. Here she stood, watching from an angle so safe that Kitay was standing right next to her. None of those missiles could reach her. None of those swords could touch her. Her only true opponent was Nezha, and he hadn’t entered the fray, either. Like her, he waited from his vantage point, calmly observing the chaos playing out below.

This wasn’t really a fight. This wasn’t one of those bare-knuckled, bruising scuffles they’d been so fond of at school. This battle was, at its core, a contest of their ideas. Nezha had gambled on the environment—the rain and ravine. Rin had placed her hopes on wild, distracting gambits.

They’d learn soon who had placed the better bet.

An arrow thudded into the ground ten feet away. Rin glanced down, jerked from her reverie. The arrow shaft was wrapped with red ribbon—Venka’s signal: Your turn.

Kitay noticed it, too.

“Turtle’s ready behind the third column,” he said, lowering his spyglass. “Quickly, before he notices.”

Rin sprinted down into the ravine. A last turtle cart awaited her near the front lines, already manned by waiting troops. They grasped her by the arms and hauled her into the center of the cart, where she crouched down, arms folded over her knees. Two soldiers set off at a run, pushing the cart downhill until it gained momentum.

Rin braced herself in the cramped, dark interior, jolting from side to side as the cart careened over bumpy terrain. She heard loud thuds as arrows assailed the sides of the cart. The tip of a spear slammed through the wall in front of her, wedged between a chink in the armor plating.

She hugged her knees tighter. Almost there.

Everything up until now—Dulin’s avalanches, the initial charge of turtle carts, the pipe bombs, and the infantry rush—had been a distraction. Rin knew she couldn’t win a battle of attrition against Nezha’s ranks; she’d just put up the front of trying.

Nezha had chosen this graveyard, in this weather, to neutralize the Phoenix. The bloodbath happening below only mattered because the rain kept Rin from igniting everyone in a blue uniform.

But what did you do when nature presented your greatest disadvantage?

How did you shut out nature itself?

The turtle cart jerked to a halt. Rin peeked out through the top hatch. When she squinted, she could just make out thin black ropes stretched taut over the top of the ravine, and a massive tarp meant for a battleship slowly unfurling from one side of the cliffs to the other.

Her troops, who knew to watch for the tarp’s unfolding, were already retreating, shields locked behind them. The Republican soldiers seemed confused. Some half-heartedly gave chase, and some fell back, as if sensing some impending disaster.

Within seconds, the tarp reached the other end of the pass, secured from both sides by Venka’s squadrons. Rain hammered hard against the canvas, but nothing penetrated the pass. Suddenly the middle patch of the ravine was gloriously, miraculously dry.

Rin climbed out of the turtle and reached into her mind for the waiting god. Your turn.

The Phoenix surged forth, warm and familiar. Finally.

She flung her arms up. Flames burst into the pass, a crescent arc roaring outward at Nezha’s forces.

His front lines charred instantly. She advanced unobstructed, picking her way over bodies sizzling black under glowing armor. Her flames shimmered around her, forming a shield of unimaginable heat. Arrows disintegrated in the air before they reached her. Nezha’s mounted arquebuses and cannons glowed bright, twisting and crumpling beyond use. The Southern Army advanced behind her, bowstrings taut, cannons loaded, fire lances aimed forward and ready to launch.

She only had minutes. She kept her fire concentrated low inside the ravine, but at this heat, the tarp would burn from sheer proximity, which meant she had to end this fast.

She could make out Nezha’s figure through the wall of orange—alone and unguarded, shouting orders to his men as they fled. He had not retreated ahead of his troops; he was waiting until the last of his ranks reached safe ground. He’d refused to abandon his army.

Always so noble. Always so stupid.

She had him. She’d won this game of ideas, she had him in sight and in range, and this time she would not falter.

“Nezha!” she screamed.

She wanted to see his face.

He turned around. They stood close enough now that she could make out every detail on his lovely, wretched, cracked-porcelain face. His expression twisted as he met her eyes—not in fear, but in a wary, exhausted sorrow.

Did he realize he was about to die?

In her daydreams, whenever she’d fantasized about the moment that she would truly, finally kill him, he had always burned. But he stood just out of range of the tarp, so iron and steel would have to do. And if his body still kept stitching itself together, then she would take him apart piece by piece and burn them down to ash until not even the Dragon could put him back together.

She nodded to her waiting army, signaled with a hand. “Fire.”

She pulled her flames back inside her and knelt. A great rip echoed through the ravine as projectiles of every type surged over her head.

Nezha raised his arms. The air rippled around him, then appeared to coalesce. Time diluted; arrows, missiles, and cannonballs hung arrested in midair, unable to budge forward. It took Rin a moment to realize that the projectiles had been trapped inside a barrier—a wall of clear water.

Again, she slashed a hand through the air. “Fire!”

Another volley of arrows shrieked over the ravine, but she knew before she even gave the command that it would make no difference. Nezha’s shield held firm. Her troops shot another round, then another, but everything they hurled at Nezha was swallowed into the barrier.

Fuck. Rin wanted to scream. We’re just dumping weapons into the river.

She’d known he could control the rain. She’d watched him do it at Tikany—had felt it pummeling against her like a thousand fists as he called it down harder and harder. But she hadn’t known he could manipulate it at such a massive scale, that he could pull all the water out of the sky to construct barriers more impenetrable than steel.

She hadn’t imagined his link to his god might now rival her own.

Nezha used to fear the Dragon more than he feared his enemies. He used to call his god only when forced to with his back against the wall, and every time he’d done so, it had looked like torture.

But now, he and the water moved like one.

This means nothing, she thought. Nezha could erect all the shields he wanted. She’d simply evaporate them.

“Get back,” she ordered her troops. Once they’d retreated ten yards she pulled another parabola of flame into the ravine and brought its heat to the highest possible intensity, sinking deeper and deeper into the Phoenix’s reverie until her world turned red. Heat baked the air. Above, the tarp sizzled and dissipated to ash.

Rin pushed the parabola forward. Two walls met at the center of the pass—blue and red, Phoenix and Dragon. Any normal body of water should have long since dissipated. This divine heat could have evaporated a lake.

Still the barrier held firm.

Burn, Rin prayed frantically. What are you doing, burn—

The Phoenix stunned her with a reply. The Dragon is too strong. We can’t.

Her flames shrank back into her body. Rin glared at Nezha through the water. He grinned back, smug. His army had completed their retreat. Her troops could still pursue them overland, but how would they get past Nezha?

Then it all struck Rin with devastating clarity.

Nezha had never intended to make a stand at Xuzhou. Sending his men to the ravine had been a ploy, an opportunity to find out the extent of Rin’s new capabilities, both shamanic and conventional, with minimal loss of his own forces. He hadn’t come to fight, he’d come to embarrass her.

He’d pitted his god against hers. And he’d won.

Nezha lowered his arms. The barrier crashed down, splashing hard against the rocks. The clouds resumed their heavy downpour. Rin spat out a mouthful of water, face burning.

Nezha gave her a small, taunting wave.

He was alone, but Rin knew better than to pursue. She knew the threat on his mind, could predict exactly what he would do if her troops surged forward.

Just try. See what the rain does then.

Though it felt like ripping her heart out to say it, she turned back to the Southern Army and gave the only order she could. “Fall back.”

They hesitated, their eyes darting confusedly to the clearly vulnerable Nezha.

“Fall back,” she snapped.

This time they obeyed. Sparks of humiliated rage poured off her shoulders as she followed them in retreat, steaming the water from her armor in a thick, choking mist. Fuck.

She’d had him.

She’d had him.

She hadn’t felt this sort of petty rage, this sheer indignation, since Sinegard. This wasn’t about troops, this was about pride. In that moment they were schoolchildren again, pummeling each other in the ring, and he’d just laughed in her face.