The Burning God, page 47
part #3 of The Poppy War Series
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.
