The Burning God

She needed someone who could still scare her.

“There you are.” He reached a hand out to stroke her cheek. “Did you miss me?”

“Get back,” she said. “Sit down.”

He held his hands up and obeyed, crossing his legs on the dark floor. “Whatever you say, darling.”

She sat down across from him. “I killed dozens of people last night. Probably some of them innocent.”

Altan tilted his head to the side. “And how did that make you feel?” His tone was perfectly neutral, without judgment.

Even so, she felt a swell in her chest, a familiar toxic squeeze, like her lungs were eroding under the sheer weight of her guilt. She exhaled, fighting to remain calm. Altan stayed under her control only so long as she was calm. “You would have done it.”

“And why would I have done it, kiddo?”

“Because you were ruthless,” she said. “You did strategy by the numbers. You would have known you had to do it. You couldn’t risk your troops. Soldiers are worth more than civilians, it’s just math.”

“So there it is.” He gave her a patronizing smile. “You did what you needed to. You’re a hero. Did you enjoy it?”

She didn’t lie. Why would she? Altan was her secret, her conjuration, and no one would ever know what she said here. Not even Kitay.

“Yes.”

“Show it to me,” Altan said. Hunger was etched across his face. “Show me everything.”

She let him see. Relived it all, second by second, in vivid, lurid detail. She showed him the bodies doubling over. The babble of terrified voices pleading for mercy—No, no, please, no. The temple transforming into a pillar of flame.

“Good,” said Altan. “That’s very good. Show me more.”

She brought out the memories of ashes, of pristine white bone poking out from charred black piles. She could never burn the bones away entirely, no matter how hard she tried. Some fragment always remained.

She stayed for another minute to let herself feel it—feel all of it, the guilt, the remorse, the horror. She could only feel them in this space, where they wouldn’t be debilitating, where they wouldn’t make her want to crawl across the floor and scratch long streaks of blood into her forearms and thighs.

Then she left the memories alone. Interred here, they wouldn’t haunt her again.

She always felt so clean afterward. Like the world was covered in stains and with every enemy she reduced to ash, it became just a little bit more pure.

This was both her absolution and her penance. Once she self-flagellated in her mind, once she replayed the atrocities over and over so much the images lost meaning, then she’d given the dead their due respect. She owed them nothing more.

She opened her eyes. The memory of Altan threatened to resurge in her thoughts, but she forced it back down. He appeared only when she allowed it, only when she wanted to see him.

Once, her memories of Altan had nearly driven her mad. Now his company was one of the only things keeping her sane.

She was finding it easier and easier to cut him off. She’d learned now to divide her mind into clean, convenient compartments. Thoughts could be blocked. Memories suppressed. Life was so much easier when she blockaded off the part of her that agonized over what she’d done. And as long as she kept those parts of her mind separate—the part that felt pain and the part that fought wars—then she would be all right.

“You think they’re going to join up?” Kitay asked.

“I’m not sure,” Rin said. “They’ve been a bit surly about everything so far. Ingrates.”

They watched, arms crossed, as the men who called themselves the Iron Wolves carried salvageable wreckage out of the village center.

The Iron Wolves were Souji’s troops. More of them had survived Khudla’s occupation than Rin had feared—their numbers ranked at least five hundred. That was a relief. The Southern Army desperately needed new troops, but suitable recruits were difficult to find in Mugenese-occupied villages. Most young men with any inclination to fight were already buried in the killing fields. The lucky survivors were either too young or too old—or too frightened—to make good soldiers.

But Souji’s Iron Wolves were strong, healthy men with plenty of combat experience. Until now, they had been roving protectors of the Monkey Province’s backwaters. Many had fled into the forests when Khudla fell. Now they’d returned in hordes. They would make excellent soldiers—but the question was whether they could be convinced to join the Coalition.

Rin wasn’t sure. So far the Iron Wolves had been less than grateful to their liberators. In fact the rescue operations had taken a heated turn; Souji’s men were terribly territorial and reluctant to take commands that didn’t come from Souji himself. They were irked, it seemed, that someone else had swooped in to claim the title of savior. Already Kitay had mediated three quarrels over resource allocation between Iron Wolves and soldiers of the Southern Coalition.

“What’s going on there?” Rin asked suddenly.

She pointed. Two of Souji’s yellow-banded troops were marching toward their camp, both lugging sacks of rice behind them.

“Ah, fuck.” Kitay looked exasperated. “Not this again.”

“Hey!” Rin stood up and cupped her hand around her mouth. “You! Stop there.”

They kept walking as if they hadn’t heard her. She had to run at them, shouting, before they finally stopped.

“Where are you taking that?” she demanded.

They exchanged looks of obvious irritation. The taller one spoke. “Souji told us to bring some rice out to the tents.”

“We’ve set up a communal kitchen.” Rin pointed. “You can eat there. That’s where all the salvaged food goes. All the scavenging teams were ordered to—”

The shorter one cut her off. “Well, see, we don’t take orders from you.”

She blinked at him. “I liberated this place.”

“And that’s very kind of you, miss. But we’ve got this village under control now.”

Rin was amazed when, without so much as a final look of disdain, they slung the rice sacks up onto their shoulders and stalked insolently off.

I’ll teach you to listen. Her palm sang with heat. She raised her fist, pointed it toward their retreating backs—

“Don’t.” Kitay caught her by the wrist. “Now isn’t the time to start a fight.”

“They should be terrified of me,” she snarled. “The sheer nerve—”

“You can’t be mad about stupidity. Just let them go. If we want them on our side, you can’t go around burning their balls off.”

“What the hell is Souji telling his men?” she hissed. “He knows I’m in command!”

“I doubt he’s passed that on.”

“They’re in for a rude awakening, then.”

“And while that’s true, you don’t have to convince the soldiers,” Kitay said. “You’ve got to convince Souji. He’s the problem.”

“Should have just left him in the cellar,” Rin grumbled. “Or we could kill him now.”

“Too hard to pull off,” Kitay said, unfazed. Rin suggested casual murder on such a regular basis that he’d learned to brush it off. “The timing would be too suspicious. We’d certainly lose his men. You could try to make it look like an accident, but even then it’d be difficult to spin. Souji’s not the type to go around tripping off cliffs.”

“Then we have to undercut him,” Rin said. “Knock him off his pedestal.”

But how? She pondered this for a moment. Discrediting him would be too hard. Those men loved Souji. She couldn’t sever those bonds overnight.

“That’s not necessary,” Kitay said. “Don’t cut the head off the snake if you can tame it. You’ve just got to convince him where his interests lie.”

“But how?”

He shot her a droll look. “Oh, I think you’re good enough at that.”

She rubbed her wrist stump into the palm of her good fist. “I’ll go have a nice long chat with him then, shall I?”

He sighed. “Be nice.”

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” Souji asked. He was crouched over a campfire, digging into a bowl of steaming white rice that smelled much better than the vats of barley porridge in the communal kitchen.

“Get up,” Rin said. “We’re going for a walk.”

“Why?”

“For privacy.”

Souji’s eyes narrowed. He must have known what was coming, because he gave a nearly imperceptible shake of his head to the closest Iron Wolves. Leave us, it said. I’m fine.

The men turned and left. Souji stood up. “All right, Princess. I’ll walk with you.”

Rin wrinkled her nose. “Princess?”

“Sinegard educated? Former Militia elite? That’s royalty in my book.”

He didn’t make it sound like a compliment. Rin chose not to retort; she held her tongue until they’d walked deep into the forest, out of earshot from camp. She might as well let Souji keep his dignity with his men. He’d be less grumpy about taking orders if she did.

She tried a diplomatic opening. “I’m sure you’ve realized by now we have men and resources that you don’t.”

“Stop.” He held up a hand. “I know what you want. We’re not joining any coalitions. Your war isn’t my problem.”

She scoffed. “You were happy enough about taking our aid yesterday.”

“The Mugenese are my problem. But don’t pretend that this is all about the Federation. Your Southern Coalition is baiting the Republic and you’re an idiot if you think I’m getting involved with that.”

“Soon enough you won’t have a choice. Yin Vaisra—”

Souji rolled his eyes. “Vaisra doesn’t care about us.”

“He will,” she insisted. “You think Vaisra’s going to stop after he’s conquered the north? I’ve met the Hesperians, I know their intentions. They won’t stop until they’ve put a church in each of our villages—”

Souji picked at his teeth with the nail of his little finger. “Churches never killed anyone.”

“They prop up regime ideologies that do.”

“Come on, you’re grasping at straws—”

“Am I? You’ve dealt with them before, have you? No, you’ll regret saying that when you’re all under Hesperian rule. I’ve spoken to them. I know how they look at us. None of this—our villages, our people, our freedom—will survive under their intended world order.”

“Don’t talk to me about survival,” Souji snapped. “I’ve been keeping our people alive for months while you’ve been playing the hunting dog over at Vaisra’s court. What did that get you?”

“I was a fool,” Rin said bluntly. “I know that. I was stupid then and I should have seen the signs. But I’m back in the south now, and we can build this army, if you bring your Iron Wolves—”

He cut her off with a laugh. “That’s a no, Princess.”

“I don’t think you understand,” she said. “That was an order. Not a request.”

He reached out and flicked her on the nose. “And you don’t understand: we are not, and never will be, under your command.”

Rin blinked, stunned that he would even dare.

So this was how things were going to go.

“Oh, Souji.” She pulled a flame into her palm. “You don’t understand how this works.”

She darted toward him just as he reached for his sword. She’d anticipated that. As he swung, she dodged his blade and jammed a foot hard into his left kneecap. He buckled. She swept the other leg out from under him and jumped down onto his chest as he fell, fingers grasping for his neck. She squeezed.

“You don’t know who you’re dealing with.” She leaned down close until her lips brushed his skin, until her breath scorched the side of his face. “I’m not Sinegardian elite. I’m that savage, mud-skinned Speerly bitch that wiped a country off the map. And sometimes when I get a little too angry, I snap.”

She let just the faintest trickle of fire seep from under her fingers. Souji’s eyes bulged. She dug her fingertips farther into his skin.

“You’re coming back with me to Ruijin. The Iron Wolves now fight under my command. You’ll keep your position as their leader, but you’ll make the hierarchy clear to your men. And if you try to mutiny, I’ll pick this up where I left off. Understand?”

Souji’s throat bobbed. He pawed feebly at her arm.

She tightened her grip. “You’re my bitch now, Souji. You do anything I ask without complaint. You’ll lick the dirt off my boots if I want. Is that clear?”

He nodded, patting frantically at her wrist.

She didn’t budge. Blisters formed and popped under his chin. “I didn’t hear an answer.”

“Yes,” he croaked.

“Yes, what?” She relaxed her grip just enough to let him speak.

“Yes, I’m your bitch. I’ll do what you want. Anything. Just—please—”

She released him and let him stand. Little tendrils of smoke wafted out from his neck. Visible beneath his collar was a first-degree burn, a pale red imprint of her skinny fingers.

It would heal quickly, but that scar would never disappear. Souji might cover it with his collar and hide it from his men, but it would be clear as day to him every time he so much as glanced at his reflection.

“Why don’t you go put a poultice on that?” she asked. “Wouldn’t want it infected.”

He backed away from her. “You’re insane.”

“Everyone vying for this country is insane,” she said. “But none of them have skin as dark as ours. I’m the least terrible option you’ve got.”

Souji stared at her for a long time. Rin couldn’t read his expression, couldn’t tell if his eyes glinted with rage or humiliation. She curled her fist and tensed, ready for another round.

To her surprise, he began to laugh. “All right. You win, you fucking bitch.”

“Don’t call me a bitch.”

“You win, General.” He held his hands up in a gesture of mock surrender. “I’ll march back with you. Where are we going? Dalian? Heirjiang?”

“I told you,” she said. “Ruijin.”

He raised a brow. “Why Ruijin?”

“It’s built into the mountains. Keeps us safe from almost everything. Why not?”

“I just assumed you’d be somewhere farther south. Near Rooster Province, if your goal is liberation.”

“What are you talking about? The occupied areas are clustered at the Monkey border.”

“No, they aren’t. Most of them are bunched down south in Rooster Province.”

“Where, the capital?” Rin frowned. None of this tracked with her intelligence.

“No, somewhere farther down south,” Souji said. “A few weeks’ march from the ocean. A cluster of tiny villages, you won’t know it.”

“Tikany,” she said automatically.

A little township no one had ever heard of. A dusty, arid place with no riches and no special culture; nothing except a docile population still addicted to opium from the second invasion. A place where Rin had once hoped she would never in her life return.

“Yeah.” Souji arched an eyebrow. “That’s one of them. Why, do you know the place?”

He said something else after that, but she didn’t hear it.

Tikany. The Mugenese were still in Tikany.

We’re fools, she thought. We’ve been fighting on the wrong front this entire time.

“Tell your men to pack up,” she said. “We head out for Ruijin in two hours.”

CHAPTER 3

That evening they began their march back to the base camp of the Southern Coalition. Ruijin lay within the backwoods of the Monkey Province, a poor and calcified land racked by years of banditry, warlord campaigns, famines, and epidemics. It had been the capital of the Monkey Province in antiquity, a lush city famed for its stone shrines built elegantly into the topiary of surrounding bamboo groves. Now it comprised ruins of its former splendor, half eroded by rain and half devoured by the forest.

That made it an excellent place to hide. For centuries, the people of Monkey Province prided themselves on their ability to blend into the mountains during troubled times. They built houses on stilts or up in the trees to keep safe from tigers. They paved winding paths through the dark forest invisible to the untrained eye. In all the stories of old, the Monkeys were stereotyped as backward mountain people—cowards who hid away in trees and caves while the wars of the world passed them by. But those were the same traits that kept them alive.

“Where are we going?” Souji grumbled a week into a continuously uphill hike, during which they’d encountered nothing but endless bumpy paths through hilly forest. “There’s nothing up here.”

“That’s what you think.” Rin bent low to check the scores against the base of a poplar tree—a clue that they were still on the right path—and motioned for the column to follow.

The way up the pass was easier than she had remembered it. The sheen had melted off the edges of the ice. She could see plenty of green beneath sheets of snow that hadn’t been visible when she’d set out two weeks ago. Against all odds, the Southern Coalition had made it to spring.

Winter in the Monkey Province had been a frigid, arid ordeal for the Southern Coalition. It didn’t snow, it hailed. The cold, dry air robbed their breaths from under their noses. The ground turned into a hard, brittle thing. Nothing grew. They’d come so close to starving, and likely would have if an ambushed Mugenese enclave ten miles away hadn’t turned out to possess a shocking amount of food stores.

The soldiers hadn’t distributed their spoils. Rin couldn’t forget the faces of the villagers who’d come out from hiding, thin and exhausted, their relief quickly turning to horror when they realized their liberators were here simply to cart their grain away.

She pushed the memory from her mind. That was a necessary sacrifice. The future of the entire country hinged on the Southern Coalition. What difference did a few lives make?

“Well, this clarifies some things,” Souji muttered as he pushed through the undergrowth.

“What are you talking about?”

“You don’t hide in the mountains if you’re a liberating force.”

“No?”

“If you’re trying to take back territory, you inhabit the villages you’ve freed. You expand your base. You set up defenses to make sure the Mugenese don’t come back again. But you’re just predatory extractors. You’ll liberate places, but only for the tribute.”

“I didn’t hear you complaining when I freed you from that cellar.”

“Whatever you say, Princess.” Souji’s voice took on a judging, mocking tone. “You aren’t the salvation of the south. You’re just hiding out here until the whole thing blows over.”

Several scathing responses leaped to mind. Rin bit them back.

The trouble was that he was right. The Southern Coalition had been too passive, too slow to initiate the wider campaign the rest of the country clearly needed, and she hated it.

The coalition leadership’s priority at Ruijin was still sheer survival, which meant ensconcing themselves in the mountains and biding their time while Vaisra’s Republic battled for control of the north. But they were barely even surviving. This wouldn’t last forever. Ruijin kept them safe for now, for the same reasons it was slowly becoming their tomb.

Not if Rin got her way. Not if they sent every soldier in their army south.

“That’s about to change.” She jammed her hiking pole into the rocky path and hauled herself up a steep incline. “You’ll see.”

“You’re lost,” Souji accused.

“I’m not lost.”

She was helplessly lost. She knew they were close, but she had no idea where to go from here. Three months and dozens of expeditions later, Rin still couldn’t find the precise entrance to Ruijin. It was a hideout designed to stay invisible. She had to send an intricate flare spiraling high into the air and wait until two sentries emerged from the undergrowth to guide them onto a path that, previously invisible, now seemed obvious. Rin followed along, ignoring Souji’s smirk.

Half an hour’s hike later, the camp emerged from the trees like an optical illusion; everything was camouflaged so artfully that Rin sometimes thought if she blinked, it might all disappear.

Just past the wall of bamboo stakes surrounding the camp, an excited crowd had gathered around something on the ground.

“What’s this about?” Rin asked the closest sentry.

“They finally killed that tiger,” he told her.

“Really?”

“Found the corpse this morning. We’re going to skin it, but nobody can agree on who gets the pelt.”

The tiger had been plaguing the camp since before Rin’s troops had left for Khudla. Its growling haunted the soldiers on patrol duty. Dried fish kept disappearing nightly from the food stores. After the tiger dragged an infant out of its tent and left its mauled, half-eaten body by the creek, the Monkey Warlord had ordered a hunting expedition. But the hunters came back empty-handed and exhausted, limbs scratched up by thorns.

“How’d they manage it?” Kitay asked.

“We poisoned a horse,” said the sentry. “It was already dying from a peptic ulcer, else we wouldn’t have spared the animal. Injected opium and strychnine into the carcass and left it out for the tiger to find. We found the bastard this morning. Stiff as a board.”

“You see,” Rin told Kitay. “It’s a good plan.”

“This has nothing to do with your plan.”

“Opium kills tigers. Literal and metaphorical.”

“It’s lost this country two wars,” he said. “I don’t mean to call you stupid, because I love you, but that plan is so stupid.”

“We have the arable land! Moag’s happy to buy it up; if we just planted it in a few regions we’d get all the silver we need—”

“And an army full of addicts. Let’s not kid ourselves, Rin. Is that what you want?”

Rin opened her mouth to respond, but something over Kitay’s shoulder caught her eye.

A tall man stood a little way off from the crowd, arms crossed as he watched her. Waiting. He was Du Zhuden—the right-hand man of the bandit leader Ma Lien. He raised an eyebrow when he saw her glancing his way, and she nodded in response. He jerked his head toward the forest, turned, and disappeared into the trees.

Rin touched Kitay on the arm. “I’ll be back.”

He’d seen Zhuden, too. He sighed. “You’re still going through with this?”

“I don’t see any other option.”

He was quiet for a moment. “Me neither,” he said at last. “But be careful. The monkey’s men are watching.”

Rin met Zhuden at their usual spot—a crooked rowan tree a mile outside the camp, at the juncture of a small creek burbling just loudly enough to conceal their voices from eavesdroppers.

“You found Yang Souji?” Zhuden’s eyes darted warily around as he spoke. The Monkey Warlord had spies everywhere in Ruijin; Rin would not have been surprised if someone had followed her out of camp.

She nodded. “Took a little convincing, but he’s here.”

“What’s he like?”

“Arrogant. Annoying.” She grimaced, thinking of Souji’s smug, leering grin.

“So he’s just like you?”

“Very funny,” she drawled. “He’s competent, though. Knows the terrain well. Has strong local contacts—he might be better keyed into the intelligence network here than we are. And he comes with five hundred experienced soldiers. They’d die for him.”

“Well done,” Zhuden said. “We’ll just have to make sure they start dying for you.”

Rin shot him a grin.

Zhuden wasn’t native to Monkey Province. He was a war orphan from Rat Province who had wound up in Ma Lien’s band from the usual combination of homelessness, desperation, and a callous willingness to do whatever it took to get ahead. Most importantly, unlike the rest of the southern leadership, he wasn’t a mere survivalist.

He, too, thought they were dying slowly in Ruijin. He wanted to expand farther south. And, like Rin, he’d decided on drastic measures to shake things up.

“How’s Ma Lien doing?” Rin asked.

“Getting worse,” Zhuden said. “Honestly, he might just croak on his own, given time, but we still don’t want to risk the off chance that he gets better. You’ll want to act soon.” He passed her a single vial filled with a viscous piss-yellow fluid. “Careful you don’t break that.”