The Burning God, page 42
part #3 of The Poppy War Series
Nothing much happened. All of them became stupidly, giddily high. They rolled around on the floor, tracing patterns through the air with their fingers and droning on and on about inane profundities that made Rin want to put her eyes out with her thumb. Lianhua was overcome with a fit of high-pitched giggles every time someone spoke a word in her direction. Merchi kept stroking the ground and murmuring about how soft it was. Pipaji and Dulin sat absolutely still, eyes pressed shut with something Rin hoped might be concentration, until Dulin began to snore.
Then they all came down and vomited.
“It didn’t work,” Pipaji groaned, rubbing at her bloodshot eyes.
“It’s because you weren’t trying to see,” Rin said. She hadn’t expected any of them to succeed on the first try, but she had been hoping for something. The faintest hint of a divine encounter. Not just four hours of idiocy.
“There’s nothing to see,” Merchi complained. “Whenever I tried to tilt back, or whatever you said it felt like, all I saw was darkness.”
“That’s because you wouldn’t concentrate.”
“I was trying.”
“Well, you weren’t trying hard enough,” Rin said testily. Supervising a group of tripping idiots was hardly fun when she was the only sober person in the room. “You might have at least thought about the Pantheon, instead of trying to do unspeakable things to a mound of dirt.”
“I thought plenty about it,” Merchi snapped. “You might have given us clearer instructions than get high and summon a god.”
Rin knew he was right. The fault lay with her teaching. She just didn’t know how to explain things more clearly than she had. She wished she still had Chaghan with her, who knew the cosmos and its mysteries so well that he could easily break it into concepts they could understand. She wished she had Daji or even the Sorqan Sira, who could implant a vision in their minds that would shatter their conceptions of real or not real. She needed some way to break the logic in their brains like Jiang had done to her, but she had no idea how to replicate his yearlong syllabus, much less condense it down to two weeks.
She stretched her arms over her head. She’d been sitting in a hunched position for hours, and her shoulders felt terribly sore.
“Head back to your tents and go to sleep,” she told them. “We’ll try again in the morning.”
“Maybe this was a stupid idea,” she admitted to Kitay after the third night of getting her recruits high with no results. “Their minds are like rocks. I can’t get anything in, and they think everything I say is stupid.”
He rubbed her shoulder in sympathy. “Look at it from their perspective. You thought everything was stupid when you first pledged Lore. You thought Jiang was clearly off his rocker.”
“But that was because I didn’t know what the fuck we were doing!”
“You must have had some idea.”
He had a point. Back in her second year, she hadn’t known Jiang’s true identity, but she had known he could do things that he shouldn’t be able to. She’d seen him call shadows without moving. She’d felt the wind blow and the water stir at his command. She’d known he had power, and she’d been so hungry to acquire that power, she hadn’t cared what sort of mental hurdles he made her jump. And it had still taken her nearly a year.
But most of that year had been taken up by Jiang’s endless series of precautions to prevent her from becoming precisely what she ultimately became. Rin didn’t need to bother with safety or long-term stability. She just needed troops from whom she could squeeze, at maximum, several months’ utility.
“Take your mind off it for a bit,” Kitay suggested. “No point bashing your head against the wall. Come see what I’ve been working on.”
She followed him out of the tent. Kitay had set up an outdoor work station a ten-minute walk from the camp, which consisted of tools strewn across the ground, diagrams held down with rocks to keep them from flying away in the relentless plateau winds, and one massive structure covered with a heavy canvas tarp. He reached up and pulled the tarp away with both hands, revealing a dirigible flipped on its side and split in two, its inner workings on display like a gutted animal’s intestines.
“You’re not the only one leveling out the power asymmetry,” he said.
Rin moved in closer to inspect the airship engine’s interior, running her fingers over the hull’s outer lining. It wasn’t made of any material she could recognize—not wood, not bamboo, and certainly not heavy metal. The power mechanisms appeared even more foreign, a complicated, interlocking set of gears and screws that brought to mind Sister Petra’s round, fist-size clock, that perfectly intricate machine that the Hesperians believed to be irrefutable proof that the world was designed by some grand architect.
“It’s the only craft that remained relatively intact,” Kitay said. “The rest were burned, shattered wreckage. But this one must have only lost power when it was fairly close to the ground. Its gears are all still working.”
“Hold on,” Rin said sharply. She’d thought Kitay had only been studying how they worked, not how to operate them. “You’re telling me we can fly this?”
“Maybe. I’m still a few days from attempting a test flight. But yes, once we get the basket fitted together, I theoretically should be able to get it up . . .”
“Tiger’s tits.” Rin’s pulse quickened just thinking about what this could mean. All kinds of tactical maneuvers opened up if they had a working dirigible. They still couldn’t go toe-to-toe with the Hesperian fleet in the open air—they’d simply be outnumbered—but they could use air travel for so many other purposes. “This solves so much. Bulk transportation. Quick supply movements. River crossings—”
“Not so fast.” Kitay tapped a winding copper cylinder at the center of the intestinal mess. “I’ve finally figured out its fuel source. It burns coal, but very inefficiently. These things are built with material that is as lightweight as possible, but they’re still awfully heavy. They can’t remain afloat for more than a day, and they can’t carry enough coal to lengthen their journey otherwise they’ll sink.”
“I see,” she said, disappointed.
So that partly solved the central mystery of why Nezha had used the fleet with such restraint during the march over the Baolei Mountains. Dirigibles were a decent quick show of force. But they did not give the Hesperians full reign over the sky. They still depended on ground support for fuel.
“It’s still better than nothing,” Kitay said. “I’ll try to have it flying within the next week.”
“You’re incredible,” Rin murmured. Kitay had always been so wonderfully clever—really, she should have stopped feeling surprised by his inventions after he’d found a way to make her fly—but learning to work a dirigible was an achievement on an entirely different scale. This was alien technology, technology supposedly centuries ahead of Nikara achievements, and somehow he’d pieced together its workings in mere days. “Did you figure this out just by looking at it?”
“I took apart the pieces that seemed removable, and spent a long time staring at the pieces that didn’t.” He pushed his fingers through his bangs, surveying the engine. “The basic principles were easy enough. There’s still a lot I don’t know.”
“But then—then how.” She blinked at the complex metal gears. They looked dauntingly sophisticated. She wouldn’t have known where to start. “I mean, how did you figure out the science?”
“I didn’t.” He shrugged. “I can’t. I don’t know what half these things are or what they do. They’re a mystery to me and will remain so until I’m versed in the fundamentals of this technology, which I won’t be until I’ve studied in their Gray Towers.”
“But if you didn’t even have the fundamentals, then how—”
“I didn’t need them, see? It doesn’t matter. We’re not building any dirigibles of our own, we just have to learn how to fly this one. I’ve only got to poke around until I re-create the original working circumstances.”
She froze. “What did you say?”
“I said, I’ve only got to poke around until—” He broke off and gave her an odd look. “You all right?”
“Yes,” she said, dazed. Kitay’s words echoed in her mind like ringing gongs. The original working circumstances.
Great Tortoise, was it that easy?
“Fuck,” she said. “Kitay, I’ve got it.”
At last, Rin dragged her recruits to the Pantheon by force.
It was such a simple solution. Why hadn’t she seen it before? She should have started here, by re-creating the original working circumstances of her own encounter with divinity.
She had first called the Phoenix a full year before Jiang took her to the Pantheon. She hadn’t known what she was doing. All she remembered was that she’d beaten Nezha in a combat ring, had pummeled him within an inch of his life because he had slapped her and she couldn’t bear the indignation, and then she’d rushed out of the building into the cool air outside because she couldn’t contain the wave of power surging inside her.
She hadn’t summoned fire that day. But she had touched the Pantheon. And that was the catalyst for everything that had happened thereafter—once she’d met the gods, it ripped a hole in her world that nothing but repeated encounters with divinity could fill.
What had driven her to the gods before she ever knew their names?
Anger. Burning, resentful anger.
And fear.
“What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?” Rin asked her recruits.
As usual, they responded with puzzled hesitation.
“You don’t . . .” Pipaji hesitated. “You don’t actually want us to say, do—”
“I do,” Rin said. “Tell me. Describe the very worst thing you’ve ever been through. Something you never want to happen again.”
Pipaji flinched. “I’m not fucking—”
“I know it’s hard to relive,” Rin said. “But pain is the quickest way to the Pantheon. Find your scars. Drag a knife through them. Push yourself. What memory just surfaced in your mind?”
Two high spots of color rose up in Pipaji’s face. She began blinking very rapidly.
“Fine. Take a moment to think about it.” Rin turned to Dulin. “How long did you spend in that burial pit?”
He balked. “I . . .”
“Two days? Three? You looked close to decomposing when we found you.”
Dulin’s voice was strangled. “I don’t want to think about that.”
“You have to,” Rin insisted. “This is the only way this works. Let’s try a different question. What do you see when you see the face of the Mugenese?”
“Easy,” Merchi said. “I see a fucking bug.”
“Good,” Rin said, though she knew that was bravado, not the corrosive resentment she needed from them. “And what would you do to them if you could? How would you crush them?”
When this elicited awkward stares, she hardened her voice. “Don’t act so shocked. You’re here to learn to kill, that’s why you signed up. Not for self-defense, and not out of nobility. Every one of you wants blood. What would you do to them?”
“I want them helpless like I was,” Pipaji burst out. “I want to stand over their faces and spit venom into their eyes. I want them to wither at my touch.”
“Why?”
“Because they touched me,” Pipaji said. “And it made me want to die.”
“Good.” Rin held the bowl of poppy seeds out toward her. “Now let’s try this again.”
Pipaji succeeded first.
The last few times Pipaji had gotten high she’d rocked back and forth on the ground, giggling to herself at jokes that only she could hear. But this time she sat perfectly still for several minutes before suddenly falling backward like a puppet with cut strings. Her eyes remained open but were terrifyingly white; her pupils had rolled entirely into the back of her head.
“Help!” Lianhua gripped Pipaji’s shoulders. “Help, I think she’s—”
But Pipaji’s hand shot up into the air, fingers splayed outward in a firm and unquestionable gesture. Stop.
“Let her lie,” Rin said sharply. “Don’t touch her.”
Pipaji’s fingers curled like claws against the ground, digging long grooves into the dirt. Low, guttural moans emitted from her throat.
“She’s in pain,” Merchi insisted. He scooped her up from the floor and pulled her into his lap, patting her cheeks frantically. “Hey. Hey. Can you hear me?”
Pipaji’s lips moved very quickly, uttering a stream of syllables that formed no language Rin could recognize. The tips of her fingers had turned a rotted purple beneath the dirt. When her eyes fluttered open, all Rin saw beneath her lashes were dark pools, black all the way through.
Finally. Rin felt a pulse of fierce, vicious pride, accompanied by the faintest pang of fear. What kind of deity had Pipaji called back from across the void? Was it stronger than she was?
Merchi’s voice faltered. “Pipaji?”
Pipaji lifted a trembling hand to his face. “I . . .”
Her face spasmed and stretched into a wide smile with tortured eyes, like something inside her, something that didn’t understand human expressions, was wearing her skin like a mask.
“Get back,” Rin whispered.
The other recruits had already retreated to the opposite end of the hut. Merchi looked down, and his face went slack with confusion. Black streaks covered his arms everywhere his skin had touched Pipaji’s.
Pipaji blinked and sat up, peering around as if she’d just awoken from a deeply absorbing dream. Her eyes were still the same unsettling obsidian. “Where are we?”
“Merchi, get back,” Rin shouted.
Merchi pushed Pipaji away. She collapsed into a pile on the floor, limbs shaking. He shrank away, wiping furiously at his forearms as if he could rub his skin clean. But the black didn’t stop spreading. It looked as if every vein in Merchi’s body had risen to the surface of his skin, thickening like creeks transforming into rivers.
I have to help him, Rin thought. I did this, this is my fault—
But she couldn’t bring herself to move. She didn’t know what she would do if she could.
Merchi’s eyes bulged wide. He opened his mouth to retch, then toppled sideways, writhing.
Pipaji shuffled backward, fingers clenched over her mouth. Sharp, hiccuping breaths escaped from behind her fingers.
“Oh, gods,” she whispered, over and over. “Oh, gods. What did I do?”
Dulin and Lianhua were backed up against the opposite wall. Lianhua kept eyeing the door, as if considering bolting away. Pipaji’s whimpers rose to a screaming wail. She crawled over to Merchi and shook his shoulders, trying to revive him, but all she did was dig craters into desiccated flesh wherever her fingers met his skin.
Finally Rin came to her senses.
“Get in the corner,” she ordered Pipaji. “Sit on your hands. Touch no one.”
To her great relief, Pipaji obeyed. Rin turned her attention to Merchi. His thrashing had subsided to a faint twitching, and black and purple blotches now covered every visible inch of skin, under which his veins bulged like they had crystallized into stone.
She had no idea what Cholang’s physicians could possibly do for him, but she owed it to him to try.
“Someone help me lift him,” she ordered. But neither Dulin nor Lianhua moved; they were frozen with shock.
She’d have to drag Merchi out herself, then. He was too tall for her to hoist up onto her shoulder; her only choice was to drag him by a leg. She bent and grasped his shin, careful not to brush against his exposed skin. Her shoulder throbbed from his weight as she pulled, but her adrenaline kicked in, counteracting the pain, and somehow she found the energy to drag him out of the hut and toward the infirmary.
“Hang in there,” she told him. “Just breathe. We’ll fix this.”
She might as well have been talking to a rock. When she glanced back moments later to check how he was doing, his eyes had gone glassy, and his flesh had deteriorated so much he looked like a three-day-old corpse. He didn’t respond when she shook him. His pulse was gone. She didn’t know when he’d stopped breathing.
She kept limping forward. But she knew, long before she reached the infirmary, that she didn’t need a physician now but a gravedigger.
Pipaji was gone when Rin returned to the hut.
“Where is she?” she demanded.
Dulin and Lianhua were sitting shell-shocked against the wall where she’d left them. They’d clearly been crying; Dulin’s eyes were bloodshot and unfocused, while Lianhua sat trembling with her fists balled up against her eyes.
“She ran,” Dulin said. “Said she couldn’t be here anymore.”
“And you let her?” Rin wanted to slap him, just to wipe that dull, dazed expression off his face. “Do you know where she went?”
“I think up toward the hill, maybe, she said—”
Rin set out at a run.
Pipaji was thankfully easy to track; her slender footprints were stamped fresh in the snow. Rin caught up to her at a ledge twenty feet up the hill. She was doubled over, coughing, exhausted by the sprint.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Rin called.
Pipaji didn’t respond. She straightened up and faced the ledge, stretching out one slim ankle as if testing out the empty space before she hurtled forward.
“Pipaji, get away from there.” Rin measured the distance between them, calculating. If she took a running leap she might seize Pipaji by the legs before she jumped, but only if Pipaji hesitated. The girl looked ready to spring—any sudden movements could startle her off the edge.
“You’re confused.” Rin kept her tone low and gentle, hand stretched out as if approaching a wild animal. “You’re overwhelmed, I understand, but this is normal . . .”
“It’s horrible.” Pipaji didn’t turn around. “This is—I didn’t—I can’t . . .”
She was dawdling. She wasn’t sure yet whether she wanted to die. Good.
