The Burning God, page 27
part #3 of The Poppy War Series
“I don’t get it,” Rin said. “You’d still think he’d be faring better with his advantages.”
“It’s not so simple. This remains a war on multiple fronts. The Republic’s pretty much conquered the north—Jun’s dead, by the way; they flayed him alive on a dais a few weeks ago—but there are still a few provinces holding out.”
“Really?” Rin perked up. That was the first piece of good news she’d heard in a long time. “Any provinces that are armed?”
“Ox Province is putting up the best resistance for now, but they’ll all be dead in a few weeks,” Kitay said. “They’ve got no organization. They’re split into three factions that aren’t communicating—which was their advantage for a while, actually, because Nezha never knew what the individual battalions were going to do next. But that’s not a sustainable defense strategy. Nezha just needs to take care of them one by one.
“And then there’s Dog Province, which has always been so peripheral to the Empire that no one’s thought to care much about them. But that’s made them value their autonomy. And they’re even less likely to bow to Vaisra now that the Hesperians want to go in and turn the whole region into coal mines.”
“How many men do they have?” Daji asked.
“They haven’t needed men yet. The Republic hasn’t even sent a delegate to negotiate. For now, they’re not on Nezha’s map.” Kitay sighed. “But once they are, they’re finished. They’re too sparsely populated; they won’t have nearly enough troops to survive the first wave of attacks.”
“Then we should join them!” Rin exclaimed. “That’s perfect—we break our troops out past the blockade, send a sentry ahead and then rendezvous with the Dog Warlord—”
“It’s a bad guest that shows up unannounced,” Daji said.
“Not if a third guest is holding a knife to the host’s throat,” Rin said.
“This analogy has lost me,” Jiang said.
“It’s not the worst idea,” Kitay said. “Nezha was convinced that Souji and Gurubai intended to send to Dog Province for help. So it’s the predictable option, but it’s also our only option left. We need allies where we can get them. Divided, we’re carrion.”
Rin frowned at him. Something sounded off about Kitay’s tone, though she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. He didn’t sound as sharp and engaged as he usually did at strategy councils. Instead, the words came out in a flat monotone, as if he were half-heartedly reciting a memorized test answer.
What had happened to him in Arabak? He hadn’t been physically tortured, but he’d been alone with Nezha for weeks. Had he turned against her? Was he only pretending to be their ally now? The possibility made her shudder.
But Kitay couldn’t conceal a lie like that. Their souls were bound. She’d feel it. At least, she hoped she’d feel it.
Why, then, was he speaking like a man who had already lost?
“Dog Province, then. Interesting.” Jiang turned to Daji. “What do you say? The route to their capital takes us close to the Tianshan range, and it’d be nice to have ground cover for at least part of it.”
“Fine.” Daji shrugged. “But I don’t see why we need the Southern Coalition for that.”
“It’s thousands of warm bodies.”
“Thousands we have to drag along through the mountains. What’s more, they sold her out.” Daji jerked her chin toward Rin. “They deserve to be left behind.”
“That’s the leadership’s fault. The masses are malleable, you know that.”
“It’ll be messy.”
“I’ve just escaped from the stone mountain. Let me stretch a little, dear. Get some exercise. It’s good for the mind.”
“Fair enough.” Daji sighed. “Dog Province it is.”
“I’m sorry.” Kitay looked between them. “Did I miss something?”
Rin shared his confusion. The exchange between Daji and Jiang had passed so quickly that she’d barely followed what was happening. The two often spoke in a shorthand peppered with allusions to their shared past, a code that had made Rin feel constantly like an outsider on their journey to Arabak. It was a regular reminder that no matter how much power she wielded, the Trifecta had decades of history behind them that she knew only as stories. They’d seen so much more. Done so much more.
“It’s decided,” Daji said. “We’ll go get your army and take them north. Agreed?”
Kitay looked baffled. “But—what about the blockade?”
Jiang stretched his arms over his head, yawning. “Oh, we’ll break them out.”
Kitay blinked at him. “But how are you going to do that?”
Daji chuckled. Jiang gave him a bemused look, as if surprised that Kitay had even asked.
“I’m the Gatekeeper,” he said simply, as if that fact were answer enough.
The night was comfortably warm, so they doused the campfire after they’d eaten and slept on the wagon in shifts. Kitay volunteered to take first watch. Rin hadn’t rested since sunrise—she was bone-tired, temples still throbbing from the sensory shock of the New City—but she put off sleep for several minutes so she could sit beside him. She wanted these few minutes with him alone.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she said. Shallow words and a shallow sentiment that didn’t come close to expressing how she felt.
But Kitay just nodded. He understood.
She felt a spark of warmth from every point of contact between them—her hand lying against his, his arm curved around her waist, her head nestled between his chin and shoulder. She craved the feeling of his skin against hers. Every touch was a reassurance that he was real, he was alive, and he was here.
She shifted against him. “What’s on your mind?”
“Nothing.” He still spoke in that flat, wan tone. “I’m just tired.”
“Don’t lie to me.” She wanted everything laid out in the open. She couldn’t stand another moment of Kitay’s strange resignation; she couldn’t bear thinking there was a part of him that she didn’t understand. “What’s bothering you?”
He was silent for a long moment before he spoke. “It’s just . . . I don’t know, Rin. Arabak was—”
“It’s awful.”
“It’s not necessarily awful, it’s just strange. And I was there for so long, and now I’m out, I still can’t stop thinking about the Hesperians.”
“What about them?”
“I don’t know, I just . . .” His fingers fidgeted in his lap; he was clearly struggling with how much he wanted to tell her. Nothing could have prepared her for what he said next. “Do you think they might just be better than us?”
“Kitay.” She twisted around to stare at him. “What the fuck does that mean?”
“When Nezha first brought me into Arabak, he spent the first two days giving me a tour of the city,” he said. “Showing me everything that they’d built in just a few weeks. Do you remember how insufferable he was when we first got to Arlong? Couldn’t stop jabbering about this naval innovation and that. But this time, everything I saw really was a marvel. Everywhere I looked I saw things that I never dreamed could exist.”
She folded her arms against her chest. “So what?”
“So how did they build them? How did they create objects that defy every known law of the natural world? Their knowledge of so many fields—mathematics, physics, mechanics, engineering—eclipses ours to a terrifying degree. Everything we’re discovering at Yuelu Mountain, they must have known already for centuries.” His fingers twisted in his lap. “Why? What do they have that we don’t have?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But it doesn’t mean they’re just naturally better, whatever the fuck that means—”
“But could it? Every member of the Gray Company I’ve met believes that they are just innately, biologically superior to us. And they don’t say this to be cruel or condescending. They see it as fact. A scientific fact, as simple as the fact that the ocean is salty and that the sun rises every morning.” His fingers wouldn’t stop twisting. Rin had the sudden impulse to slap them. “They see human evolution as a ladder, and they’re at its top, or at least as far as it can reach for now. And we—the Nikara—are clinging on to the lower rungs. Closer to animals than human.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“Is it? They built dirigibles. Not only can they fly, they’ve been flying for decades, and here we are with only a rudimentary knowledge of seafaring because we bombed our own navies to bits in civil wars over nothing. Why?”
Dread twisted Rin’s stomach. She didn’t want to hear these words from Kitay’s mouth. This felt worse than betrayal. This felt like discovering her best friend was an utter stranger.
She would be lying if she said she’d never asked these questions herself. Of course she had. She’d asked them during all those weeks she’d spent undergoing examinations in Sister Petra’s cabin, putting her naked, helpless body at the Hesperian’s disposal, letting her take measurements and write them down while explaining in a cold, matter-of-fact tone that Rin’s brain was smaller, her stature was shorter, and her eyes saw less because of her race.
Of course she’d wondered, often, whether the Hesperians were right. But she hated how Kitay spoke as if he’d already decided they were.
“They could be horribly wrong about us,” he said. “But they’re right about almost everything else; they couldn’t have built all that if they weren’t. Look at a city they threw up in weeks. Compare that to the finest cities in the Empire. Can’t you at least see where I’m coming from?”
Rin thought of the New City’s spotless streets, its neat grid-like layout, and its quick, efficient modes of transportation. The Nikara had never built something like that. Even in Sinegard, the Red Emperor’s capital and the crown jewel of the Empire, sewage had rushed freely down the streets like rainwater.
“Maybe it’s their Maker.” She tried to inject some levity into her voice. He was tired, she was tired; perhaps by morning, after they’d slept, this entire conversation would seem like a joke. “Maybe those prayers are working.”
He didn’t smile. “It’s not their religion. Perhaps that’s related—the Divine Architect is certainly more friendly to scientific research than any of our gods are. But I don’t think they need deities at all. They have machines, and that’s perhaps more powerful than anything they could summon. They rewrite the script of the world, just like you do. And they don’t need to sacrifice their sanity to do it.”
Rin had no rebuttal to that.
Jiang would have an answer. Jiang, who was so sure that the Pantheon lay at the center of the universe, had warned her once against treating the material world like a thing to be mechanized, dominated, and militarized. He’d believed firmly that the Hesperian and Mugenese societies had long ago forgotten their essential oneness with universal being, and were spiritually lost as a result.
But Rin had never been interested in cosmology or theology. She’d only been interested in the gods for what power they could give her, and she couldn’t formulate what little she remembered of Jiang’s ramblings into any sort of valid objection.
“So what?” she asked finally. “So what does that mean for us?”
She already knew Kitay’s conclusion. She just wanted to hear him say it out loud, to see if he would dare. Because the logical conclusion was terrifying. If they were so deeply separated by race, if the Hesperians were innately more intelligent, more capable, and more powerful—then what was the point of resistance? Why shouldn’t the world be theirs?
He hesitated. “Rin, I just think—”
“You think we should just surrender,” she accused. “That we’d be better off under their rule.”
“I don’t,” he said. “But I do think it might be inevitable.”
“It’s not inevitable. Nothing ever is.” Rin pointed toward the wagon, where Jiang and Daji lay asleep. “They were children in the occupied north. They didn’t have arquebuses or airships, and they expelled the Hesperians and united the Empire—”
“And they lost it just two decades later. Our odds aren’t looking much better the second time around.”
“We’ll be stronger this time.”
“You know that’s not true, Rin. As a country, as a people, we’re weaker than we’ve ever been. If we beat them, it will be due to a massive stroke of good fortune, and it will come at a great cost to human life. So don’t blame me for wondering whether it’s worth the struggle.”
“Do you know what Sinegard was like for me?” she asked suddenly.
He frowned. “Why does that—”
“No, listen. Do you know what it was like to be the country idiot who everyone thought was barely literate because my tongue was flat, my skin was dark, and I didn’t know that you’re supposed to bow to the master at the end of every class?”
“I’m not saying—”
“I thought there was something inherently wrong with me,” she said. “That I was just born uglier, weaker, and less intelligent than everyone around me. I thought that, because that’s what everyone told me. And you’re arguing that means I had no right to defy them.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“But it’s analogous. If the Hesperians are so innately better, then the next rung on the ladder is pale-skinned northerners like you, and the Speerlies are sitting on the bottom.” She was burning a handprint into the grass they were sitting on; smoke wafted around them. “And then, by your logic, it’s fine that the Empire turned us into slaves. It’s fine that they wiped us off the map, and that the official histories mention us only in footnotes. It’s only natural.”
“You know I’d never argue that,” Kitay said.
“That’s the implication of your logic,” she said. “And I won’t accept that. I can’t.”
“But that doesn’t matter.” He drew his knees up to his chest. He looked so small then, a much diminished version of the Kitay she’d always known. “Don’t you get it? There is still no foreseeable path that leads to our victory. What do you think is going to happen after we get to Dog Province? You can hide from the airships for a little bit, but how the fuck are you going to defeat it?”
“Simple,” she said. “We’ve got a plan.”
He gave a shaky, helpless laugh. “Let’s hear it, then.”
“We’ve got a problem of power asymmetry now,” she said. “Which means we only win if this war occurs in three phases. The first is a strategic retreat. That’s what is happening now, intentionally or not. Second is the long stalemate. Then, at last, the counteroffensive.”
He sighed. “And how are you going to launch this counteroffensive? You have maybe a tenth of their ranged capabilities.”
“That’s fine. We have gods.”
“You can’t win this war with just a handful of shamans.”
“I beat the Federation on my own, didn’t I?”
“Well, barring genocide—”
“We can beat them with shamanism constrained to armed combatants on the battlefield,” she insisted. “The same way we’ve been hunting down the Mugenese now.”
“Maybe. But it’s just you and Jiang and the Vipress, that’s not nearly—”
“Enough?” She lifted her chin. “What if there were more?”
“Don’t you dare open the Chuluu Korikh,” Kitay said.
“No.” She shuddered at the thought of that place. “We won’t go back to that mountain. But Jiang and Daji want to march north. Up to Mount Tianshan.”
“So I heard.” He eyed her skeptically. “What’s in Mount Tianshan?”
“Come on, Kitay. You can figure this out.”
His gaze wandered over toward the Trifecta. She saw his eyes widen as the pieces clicked in his mind.
“You’re crazy,” he said.
“Probably.”
His mouth worked for several seconds before he got the words out. “But—the stories—I mean, the Dragon Emperor’s dead.”
“The Dragon Emperor’s sleeping,” Rin said. “And he’s been asleep for a very long time. But the Seal is eroding. Jiang’s remembering who he was, what he once could do, which means Riga is about to wake up. And once he does, once we’ve reunited the Trifecta, then we’ll show Hesperia what true divinity looks like.”
Chapter 16
The battlefront under the Baolei Mountains was a conundrum.
The valleys were silent. Dirigibles weren’t buzzing, swords weren’t clashing, and the air wasn’t thick with the acrid burn of fire powder. Rin neither saw nor heard any signs of active combat, at least not for the seven days it took for their party to reach the front lines.
Only when they drew closer did she realize why. The Southern Coalition was trapped. The Republic had pinned them against the mountainside behind a series of makeshift forts, each planted half a mile within the other, surrounded by lines of cannons and mounted arquebuses prepared to mow down any who tried to break out of the impasse. The forts were temporary constructions but they looked brick solid, supported by piles of sandbags, their stone walls impenetrable save for tiny slits just large enough for the firing end of an arquebus. Archery was certainly futile against those forts, and Rin suspected that rudimentary cannons of the type the Southern Coalition possessed would barely make a dent, either.
But the Republic also couldn’t penetrate the mountainside. The ravines and caves along the southern Baolei range functioned as natural bomb shelters, which meant sustained dirigible attacks would only be a waste of ammunition. The underground terrain couldn’t be mapped from the air, which gave the southerners a significant defensive advantage. This, Rin assumed, was the only reason the Republic hadn’t yet mounted a ground assault.
The Southern Coalition didn’t have the manpower to break out. The Republic didn’t want to bleed the forces necessary to break in. For now, both sides remained holed up in their respective stations. But this standoff would end, as all sieges did, the moment the southerners finally ran out of food and water.
“Your old classmate is unfortunately very good at siege warfare,” Daji said. They had spent the morning circling the blockade perimeter in the laundry wagon, searching for a way to sneak past Republican lines unnoticed. “He’s got them fenced in at every critical juncture. No easy way to slip past those pillboxes unless we make a scene.”
