The Burning God, page 33
part #3 of The Poppy War Series
Once Rin might have fought. She could have forced Daji into submission; she’d done it before. But she was so exhausted, stretched thin from day after day of pulling the Phoenix through Kitay’s aching mind. She couldn’t summon rage after what she’d just seen. She felt like a thin shard of frost, one touch from shattering apart.
Rin pulled her flame back into her hand.
Daji’s pupils turned back to their normal, lovely black. Rin sagged, released from their grip.
“If I were you, I would stop worrying.” Daji had stopped crying; the red around her eyes had faded away. Gone, too, was the fragile hitch in her voice, replaced by a cool, detached confidence. “Jiang’s episodes will get worse. But he will not die. He cannot die—you can trust me on that. But the more you try to prod into his mind, try to retrieve whatever you think you’ve lost, the more you’ll torture yourself. Let go of the man you remember. You’re never going to get him back.”
They returned together to Jiang’s tent. Rin sat down next to where Jiang lay and watched him, her heart twisting with pity. He looked so miserable, even in dreamless, morphine-induced sleep. His features were pressed into a worried frown, his fingers clenching his blankets as if he were hanging on to the edge of a cliff.
This wasn’t the last time she’d see him suffer like this, she realized. He was going to get worse and worse the closer they got to the mountain. He’d deteriorate until he finally snapped, and a victor emerged between the personalities battling in his mind.
Could she do this to him?
It would be easier if the Jiang who had been Sealed were truly derivative, if he were truly a pale shade of the other, genuine personality. But the Jiang she’d known at Sinegard was a full person in his own right, a person with wants and memories and desires.
That Jiang was so scared of who he used to be—who he was about to become. He’d found a refuge in his partitioned mind. How could she take that from him?
She tried to imagine how Jiang’s Seal must have felt all those years he’d lived at Sinegard. What if she were blocked not only from the Pantheon but from her own memories? What if she were held captive behind a wall in her mind, screeching in silent anguish as a bumbling idiot took control of her limbs and tongue?
If she were him, of course she’d want to be free.
But what if someone could erase all memories of what she’d done?
No more guilt. No more nightmares. She wouldn’t have flaring pockets in her memory like gaping wounds that hurt to touch. She wouldn’t hear screams when she tried to sleep. She wouldn’t see bodies burning every time she closed her eyes.
Maybe that was the coward’s asylum. But she’d want it, too.
The next morning, Jiang had regained some degree of lucidity. Sleep, however forced, had helped—the shadows disappeared from under his eyes, and his face lost its rictus of dread, settling back into a placid calm.
“Hello, Master,” she said when he awoke. “How are you feeling?”
He yawned. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”
She decided to push her luck. “You had a bad night.”
“Did I?”
His amused indifference annoyed her. “You called me Altan.”
“Oh, really?” He scratched the back of his head. “I’m sorry, that was terribly rude. I know you used to follow him around with those shining puppy eyes.”
She brushed that off. Shut up, spoke a little voice in her mind. Stop talking, walk away. But she wasn’t done. She wanted to push him, to see how much he remembered. “And you asked me to kill you.”
She couldn’t tell if his laugh sounded nervous, or if that was the way Jiang had always laughed—high, unsettling, and foolish.
“My goodness, Runin.” He reached out to pat her on the shoulder. “Surely I taught you better than to fret over the little things.”
Jiang’s advice had been flippant. But as their altitude increased and the air grew thinner, Rin lost the mental energy to think about anything except the daily exigencies of the march. Her flames barely made the mountain pathways tolerable; the ice refroze almost as quickly as she melted it. At night, when the temperatures dropped dangerously low, the soldiers started sleeping only in one-hour shifts to prevent anyone from succumbing to the numb, beckoning dark.
At least the environment, not the Republic, formed the bulk of their problems. The first few days on the march Rin had kept her eyes trained on the pale gray sky, expecting dark shapes to materialize from the clouds any moment. But the fleet never came. Kitay floated a number of theories for why they weren’t being pursued—the Hesperians were low on fuel, the misty mountain terrain made blind flying dangerous, or the fleet had been so badly damaged at the Anvil that the Hesperians wouldn’t sanction sending out the remaining ships in pursuit of an enemy that could summon shadows from nothing.
“They’ve just seen what we can do,” he told the officers, his tone so obviously full of artificial confidence. “They know it’s suicide to come after us. They might be tracing where we are. But they won’t risk an attack.”
Rin hoped to the gods he was right.
Another week passed and the skies remained empty, but that didn’t come close to putting her at ease. So what if Nezha chose to let them live for another day? He might change his mind tomorrow. He might cave under internal pressure for a quick victory. They couldn’t be hard to pick out against the terrain—he might decide that following them through the mountains wasn’t worth it, that the drain on fuel and resources was too great a cost to justify ferreting out whatever hotbed of shamanism he might find.
She was well aware that with every step she took, she moved under the threat of immediate extermination. The Republic was capable of inflicting mass death in seconds. They could end this at any time. But all she could do was forge ahead and hope that it would be far too late by the time Nezha realized he should have killed her long ago.
Chapter 19
Rin’s journey by airship to the Chuluu Korikh had made the world seem so small. But their trek through the Baolei range felt infinite, and the mountains, which before now she had only ever known as little marks on a map, seemed to encompass a territory greater than the Empire itself. Exhausting weeks stretched into grueling, monotonous months and somehow, when the march had gone on for so long it seemed there had never been a time when they weren’t climbing, the daily horrors they faced became routine.
They learned to scale tricky, narrow passages with rope and knives in lieu of ice picks. They learned to pour warm water over their genitals when they relieved themselves because otherwise the freezing temperatures would give them frostbite. They learned to drink boiled chili water constantly because that was the only thing that would keep them warm, which meant they spent half their nights crouching to relieve their diarrhea.
They learned how frightening snow blindness could be when their eyes grew red and itchy and their vision blinked out for hours at a time. They learned to focus on the dull gray of the paths beneath their feet instead of the snow that surrounded them. At noon, when the sun glinted so glaringly off the white peaks that it gave them headaches, they stopped and sat in their shaded tents until the brightness had dimmed.
They adapted in these ways and more. They had decided that if the best of Hesperian technology couldn’t kill them, then the mountains certainly wouldn’t, so they learned dozens of ways to stay alive in a terrain intent on burying them.
Jiang didn’t recover, but his condition didn’t become noticeably worse. Most days he sat obediently on the wagon, whittling sculptures of deformed animals out of half-frozen bark with a dull, worn knife because Rin and Daji didn’t trust him with sharper objects.
His ramblings continued. They had spiraled past his usual nonsensical babbles. Every time Rin visited him, he launched into invectives involving people and events she had never heard of. Over and over, he addressed her as either Altan or Hanelai. Rarely did he call her by her name. Even more rarely did he look at her at all; more often he spoke to the snow, muttering with a hushed urgency, as if she were a chronicler present to record a history quickly slipping away from his grasp.
Daji remained tight-lipped when Rin pressed her about anything regarding the circumstances that led to Jiang’s Seal. But, as if in exchange, she acquiesced to answering questions about Jiang’s other utterances. Each night when they made camp, she sat with Rin and Kitay, recounting histories that Rin could never have found in the libraries of Sinegard. These discussions took the form of direct interrogations. Rin fired questions at Daji, one after the other, and Daji responded to everything that she could, often in great detail, as if by jabbering on about minor anecdotes, she could distract Rin from the important questions.
Rin knew what Daji was doing. She knew she was being deceived about something. But she took what she could get. Access to Daji was like an open scroll containing all the hidden secrets of Nikara history. She would be foolish not to play along.
“Why does Riga look so much like the House of Yin?” she asked.
“Because he’s one of them,” Daji said. “That should have been obvious. His father was Yin Zexu, the younger brother to the Dragon Warlord.”
“Vaisra’s brother?”
“No, Vaisra’s uncle. The Dragon Warlord back then was Yin Vara. Vaisra’s father.”
So Nezha was Riga’s nephew. Rin wondered if their power was passed through blood, like the Speerly affinity for the Phoenix. But the Yins had such different relationships to the Dragon. Riga was a true shaman, one who had been to the Pantheon and become imbued with a power freely given and freely received. Nezha was a slave to some perverted, corrupted thing, a creature that should never have existed in the material world.
“Zexu should have been the Warlord all along,” Daji said. “He was a born leader. Decisive, ruthless, and capable. Vara was the eldest, but he was a child. Meek, terrified of confrontation. Always bowing to the men he feared, bending because he was so afraid to break. A few years into the occupation, the Hesperians decided they wanted to transport shipments of Mugenese opium into the harbor at the Red Cliffs. Vara agreed, and sent his younger brother out to guide the Hesperian cargo ships through the channel. Instead Zexu rigged the harbor with explosives and sank the Mugenese fleet.”
“I like Zexu,” Rin said.
“He was dead by the time I first heard his name,” Daji said. “But Riga told me so much about him. He always admired his father. He was terribly hotheaded and impulsive. Never could stand an insult. You’d have gotten along splendidly, but only if you didn’t kill each other first.”
“I’m guessing the Hesperians had him shot,” Rin said.
“They very much would have liked to,” Daji said. “But open war hadn’t broken out yet, and they didn’t want to provoke it by killing a member of an elite family. Vara had Zexu exiled to the occupied zone in northern Horse Province instead. Sent his whole family away and cut him out of the lineage records. That’s why you’ll never find a portrait of him in the palace at Arlong. Riga was an orphan by the time we met. The Mugenese had worked his father to death in a labor camp, and the gods know what happened to his poor mother. When I first saw him, Riga was a pathetic thing, just skin and bones, scraping to tomorrow by stealing food out of trash heaps.”
“So you met as children,” Kitay said.
“We all grew up in the occupied north. Jiang and I might have been natives. Or children of refugees.” Daji shrugged. “Now it’s impossible to remember. We all lost our parents early on, before they could tell us what provinces we were from. Perhaps that’s why we were so bent on unification. We were from nowhere, so we wanted to rule everywhere.”
It felt bizarre to picture the Trifecta as young children. In Rin’s mind, they had sprung fully formed into the world, powerful and godly. She’d rarely considered that there was a time when they were mere mortals just like she had once been. Young. Terrified. Weak.
They’d grown up during the bleakest period of Nikara history. Rin had known a country at relative peace before the third war, but the Trifecta had been born into misery. They’d grown up knowing nothing but oppression, humiliation, and suffering.
Small wonder they’d committed the atrocities they did. Small wonder they’d found them completely justified.
“How did you get out?” Rin asked.
“The Mugenese cared about grown soldiers, not children. No one noticed us. The hardest part, in fact, was getting me past the mistresses at the whorehouse.” Some unrecognizable emotion flickered across Daji’s face, a twist of her lip and a quirk of her eyebrow that quickly disappeared. “We didn’t know where we were going, only that we wanted to get out. Once we crossed the border, we wandered for days on the steppe and nearly starved to death before the Ketreyids found us. They took us in. They trained us.”
“And then you killed them,” Rin said.
“Yes.” Daji sighed. “That was unfortunate.”
“They still hate you for it,” Rin said, just to see how Daji might react. “They want you dead. You know that, right? They’re just figuring out a way to get it done.”
“Let them hate.” Daji shrugged. “Back then our entire strategy was founded on crushing dissent. Wherever we could find it. In times like that, you couldn’t let sleeping threats lie. I’m sorry Tseveri died. I know Jiang loved her. But I don’t regret a thing.”
Daji, it turned out, had done a terrible number of things worth regretting. Rin pried for details about all of them. She made her talk about the lies she had told. The rivals she had killed. The innocents she had sacrificed in the bloody calculus of strategy. Over talks that spanned days, and then weeks, Daji colored in a picture of a Trifecta who were so much more ruthless and capable than Rin had ever imagined.
But it wasn’t enough. Daji always spoke only of the amusing stories, the minor details. She never spoke of the day she had Sealed her anchors. And unless prompted, she never spoke of Riga himself. She would answer any of Rin’s questions about his past, but she only ever gave the barest, vaguest details about his abilities or his character.
“What was he like?” Rin asked.
“Glorious. Beautiful.”
Rin made a noise of exasperation. “You’re talking about a painting, not a man.”
“There is no other way to describe him. He was magnificent. Everything you could want from a leader and more.”
Rin found that deeply unsatisfying, but knew that line of questioning would only yield the same answers. “Then why did you put him to sleep?”
“You know why.”
Rin tried to catch her off guard. “Then why are you afraid of him?”
Daji’s voice retained its careful, icy calm. “I’m not afraid of him.”
“That’s bullshit. Both of you are.”
“I am not—”
“Jiang is, at least. He screams Riga’s name in his sleep. He flinches every time I mention him. And he seems convinced we’re dragging him up the mountain to his death. Why?”
“We loved Riga,” Daji said, unfazed. “And if we ever feared him, it was because he was great, and great rulers always inspire fear in the hearts of the weak.”
Frustrated, Rin changed tack once again. “Who is Hanelai?”
For once, Daji looked startled. “Where did you hear that name?”
“Answer the question.”
Daji arched an eyebrow, betraying nothing. “You first.”
“The Sorqan Sira said once that I resembled Hanelai. Did you know her?”
Something shifted in Daji’s expression. Rin couldn’t quite read it—amusement? Relief? She seemed less on edge than she’d been just a moment ago, but Rin didn’t know what had changed. “Hanelai doesn’t matter to you. Hanelai’s dead.”
“Who was she?” Rin pressed. “A Speerly? Did you know her?”
“Yes,” Daji said. “I knew her. And yes, she was a Speerly. A general, in fact. She fought alongside us in the Second Poppy War. She was an admirable woman. Very brave, and very stupid.”
“Stupid? Why—”
“Because she defied Riga.” Daji stood up, clearly finished. “Nobody defied Riga if they were smart.”
The conversation stopped there. Rin tried many times again to broach the subject, but Daji refused to reveal anything more. She never spoke a word about what, precisely, Riga could do. Never a word about what Riga had done to Jiang, or the night that Jiang lost his mind, or how someone so supposedly great and powerful could possibly have missed the attack on Speer. Those gaps alone were enough for Rin to piece together the vaguest of theories, though she hated where it went.
She didn’t want it to be true. The implications hurt too much.
She knew Daji was lying to her about something, but part of her didn’t want to know. She wanted to just keep marching in a state of suspended disbelief, to keep assuming this war would be ended once they woke the Dragon Emperor. But the past kept prodding her mind like a tongue at an open sore, and the agony of not knowing, of being kept in the dark, grew too great to bear.
Finally, Rin decided to get her answers from Jiang instead.
That would be tricky. She’d have to get him alone. Daji was constantly at Jiang’s side, day and night. They slept, marched, and ate together. In camp, they often sat with their heads pressed together, murmuring things that Rin could only guess at. Every time Rin attempted to speak to Jiang, Daji was present, hovering just within earshot.
She had to incapacitate Daji, if only for several hours.
“Can you get me a strong dose of laudanum?” she asked Kitay. “Discreetly?”
He gave her a concerned look. “Why?”
“Not for me,” she said hastily. “For the Vipress.”
Understanding dawned on his face. “You’re playing a dangerous game there.”
“I don’t care,” she said. “I have to know.”
Daji proved shockingly easy to drug. She may have been vigilant as a hawk, but the demands of the march exhausted her just as much as they did everyone else. She still had to sleep. Rin only had to creep into Daji’s tent and clamp a laudanum-soaked towel over her mouth for half a minute until her face went utterly slack. She snapped her fingers next to Daji’s ears several times to check that she was fully unconscious. Daji didn’t budge.
