The Burning God

She pinched it by the neck and gingerly dropped it into her front pocket. “Did you extract this yourself?”

“Yep. Can’t say I enjoyed it.”

She patted her pocket. “Thank you.”

“Are you going now?” he asked.

“Tonight,” she said. “I’m due to meet with Gurubai right now. I’ll try one last time to convince him.”

They both knew that meeting would come to nothing. She’d been having the same argument with the Monkey Warlord for weeks. She wanted to march out of Ruijin. He wanted to remain in the mountains, and his allies in the leadership of the Southern Coalition agreed. They outnumbered her three votes to one.

Rin was about to flip those numbers.

But not just yet. No need to act in haste; she’d show her hand too early. One thing at a time. She’d give the Monkey Warlord one last chance first, make him think she’d come back cooperative and complacent. She had learned, since her days at Sinegard, to rein in her impulses. The best plans were a secret until their execution. The hidden knife cut the deepest.

“Welcome back,” said the Monkey Warlord.

Liu Gurubai had set up his headquarters in one of the few old architectural beauties in Ruijin that still stood, a square stone temple with three walls eaten over by moss. He’d chosen it for security, not comfort. The insides were sparsely furnished, with only a stove dug into the corner wall, two rugs, and a simple council table in the center of the cold, drafty room.

Rin and Kitay sat down across him, resembling two students arriving at their tutor’s home for a lesson.

“I brought presents,” said Rin.

“Oh, I saw,” Gurubai said. “Couldn’t help but leave a little mark, could you?”

“I thought they should know who’s commanding them.”

“Well, I assumed Souji would.” Gurubai raised an eyebrow. “Unless you were planning on decapitating him?”

Rin gave him a thin smile and wished fervently she could force a flaming fist down his throat.

When she’d hurtled out of Arlong on a Black Lily ship with her hand a bloody mess, she’d thought that the Monkey Warlord might be different from the series of horrible men she’d hitherto thrown in her lot with. That he’d keep his promises. That he’d treat her not as a weapon but as an ally. That he’d put her in charge.

She’d been so wrong.

She’d underestimated Gurubai. He was brilliant; he’d been the sole survivor of Vaisra’s violent purge at Arlong for a reason. He understood power politics in a way she never would, because he’d spent his entire life practicing it. Gurubai understood what made men pledge their support, what won him trust and love. He was used now, after two decades, to calling all the shots. And he did not relinquish power.

“I thought we had agreed,” she said lightly, “if the Khudla experiment worked out—”

“Oh, it worked out. You can keep that contingent. Officers Shen and Lin were quite happy with your performance.”

“I don’t want a single contingent, I want the army.”

“Let’s not pretend you could handle that.”

“I just liberated an entire village with minimal casualties—”

“Your supreme talent for burning things down does not qualify you to be a commander.” Gurubai drew out the last syllable of each word as if she wouldn’t have understood him otherwise. “You’re still learning to manage communication and logistics. Don’t rush it, child. Give yourself the space to learn. This isn’t Sinegard, where we throw children into war with no preparation. We’ll find you something better to do in time.”

The condescension in his voice made her fist curl. Her eyes focused on the veins in his neck. They protruded so visibly; it would be so easy to slice them open.

If only. Speerly or no, if she hurt Liu Gurubai, she wouldn’t make it out of Ruijin alive.

Kitay kicked her lightly under the table. Don’t.

She grimaced at him. I know.

If Rin was a Speerly outsider and Kitay a Sinegardian elite, then the Monkey Warlord was the true product of the south, a rough-hewn man with shoulders broadened from years of labor, whose gleaming, intelligent eyes were set deep in a face lined like the forest.

Rin had left the south at the first chance she got. The Monkey Warlord had fought and suffered in the south his entire life. He’d watched his grandmother begging for rice in the streets during the Lunar New Year. He’d walked miles to tend water buffalo for a single copper a day. He’d fought in the ragged provincial brigades that rallied to the Trifecta’s cause during the Second Poppy War. He hadn’t become a warlord through inheritance or sheer ambition; he’d simply moved slowly up through the line of succession as the soldiers around him died. He’d been drafted into an army at thirteen years old for the promise of a single silver coin a month, and he’d stayed in the army for the rest of his life.

His younger brothers had both died fighting the Federation. His clan, once a sprawling village family, had withered away from opium addiction. He’d survived the worst of the past century, and so survival became his greatest skill. He’d become a soldier out of necessity, and that made him a leader whose legitimacy was nigh unquestionable.

Most importantly, he belonged. These mountains were part of his blood. Anyone could see it in the tired way he carried his shoulders, the hard glint in his eyes.

Rin may have been a figurehead of power, but Liu Gurubai symbolized the very identity of the south. If she hurt him, Monkey Province would tear her to pieces.

So for now, she compromised.

“I hear there have been developments in the north.” She changed the subject, forcing her tone to stay neutral. “Anything you want to show me?”

“Several updates.” If Gurubai was surprised by her sudden acquiescence, he didn’t show it. He slid a sheaf of letters across the table. “Your friend wrote back. These arrived yesterday.”

Rin snatched up the first page and started poring hungrily down the lines, passing the pages to Kitay once she was done. News from the north always trickled in by little bursts—weeks passed with nothing, and then they received sudden gluts of information. The Southern Coalition had only a handful of spies in the Republic, and most of them were Moag’s girls; the few pale-skinned Black Lilies who had been shipped to Arlong with carefully disguised accents to work in teahouses and gambling dens.

Venka had gone north, too. With her pale, pretty face and flawless Sinegardian diction, she blended in perfectly among the aristocrats of the formal capital. At first Rin had been worried she’d be recognized—she was the missing daughter of the former finance minister; she couldn’t be more high-profile—but based on Venka’s reports, she’d completely transformed with only a wig and several gobs of cosmetics.

No one pays much attention to my face, Venka had written shortly after she arrived. The dolls of Sinegard, it turns out, are shockingly interchangeable.

Her report now contained nothing surprising. Vaisra’s still battling it out in the north. Warlords and their successors dropping dead like flies. They can’t hold out for long, they’re overstretched. Vaisra’s turned the siege cities into death zones. It’ll all be over soon.

That wasn’t news, only a slow intensification of what they’d known for weeks. Vaisra’s Hesperians were ravaging the countryside in their dirigibles, leaving craters and bombed-out hellscapes in their wake.

“Any mention of a southern turn?” Rin asked Gurubai.

“None yet. What you’re holding is everything we have.”

“Then we’re being ignored,” she said.

“We’re getting lucky,” Kitay amended. “It’s only a matter of time.”

The Dragon Warlord Yin Vaisra’s great democracy, the one he’d sacked cities and turned the Murui crimson for, had never come into existence. He’d never meant it to. Days after he defeated the Imperial Navy at Arlong, he’d assassinated the Boar Warlord and Rooster Warlord, and then declared himself the sole President of the Nikara Republic.

But he didn’t yet have a country to rule. Many former Militia officers, not least of whom included the Empress’s former favorite soldier, General Jun Loran, had escaped the purge at Arlong and fled north to Tiger Province. Now the combined forces of the Militia’s remnants were almost proving to be a challenge for the Hesperians.

Almost. With each new report that reached Ruijin, the Republic appeared to have extended its reach farther and farther north. That meant Rin was sitting on borrowed time. The Southern Coalition was only one rebellion among many. For the time being Vaisra had his hands tied up with Jun’s insurgency, not to mention a country chock-full of bandit gangs that had sprung up in local power vacuums immediately after the war’s end. But he wouldn’t stay busy for long. Jun couldn’t hope to beat Vaisra’s forces, not with Hesperian dirigibles at Vaisra’s back. Not when thousands of Hesperian soldiers with arquebuses were pumping bullets into Jun’s armies.

Rin was grateful that Jun had bought them such a long reprieve. But sooner or later, Vaisra would turn his attention to the south. He’d have to, so long as Rin was alive. A reckoning was inevitable. And when it came, she wanted to be on the offensive.

“You know my feelings on this,” she told Gurubai.

“Yes, Runin, I do.” He regarded her like an exhausted parent might a troublesome child. “And again, I’m telling you—”

“We’re dying up here. If we don’t take the offensive now, then Nezha will. We need to catch him by surprise, and right now is—”

“I’m not the only one you have to convince. None of the Southern Coalition want to overextend themselves. These mountains are their home. And when the wolves come, you protect what’s behind your walls.”

“It’s only home for some of you.”

He shrugged. “You’re free to leave whenever you like.”

He could make that bluff. He knew she had nowhere else to turn.

Her nostrils flared. “We need to at least discuss this, Gurubai—”

“Then we’ll discuss it at council.” His tone made it very clear that their audience was finished. “You can make your case again to the others, if you’re so inclined. Although to be quite honest, it’s become a bit repetitive.”

“I’m going to keep saying it until someone listens,” Rin snapped.

“Whatever you like,” Gurubai said. “You do so love to be difficult.”

Kitay kicked her beneath the table again just as they stood up to leave.

“I know,” Rin muttered. “I know.”

Some little part of her heart sank as she walked out the door. She wished Gurubai had said yes. She was trying to cooperate. She hated to be the lone contrarian; she did want to work with the coalition. This all would have been so much easier if he’d said yes.

But if he wasn’t going to budge, then she’d have to force his hand.

Dinner was a rapid affair. Rin and Kitay emptied their bowls in seconds. Not because they were hungry—it was just easier to ignore the mold sprouting on the greens and the tiny maggots squirming around the rice if they wolfed it down without thinking. The fare in the mess halls became worse and worse every time she returned to Ruijin, and the cooks had gone from keeping insects out of the vats to encouraging them on the grounds that the carcasses contained badly needed nutrients. Ant porridge was now a dish Rin ate regularly, though she always had to suppress her gag reflex before she could take the first bite.

The only staple that hadn’t started to rot was shanyu root—the starchy white yam that stuck like glue in her throat every time she swallowed. Shanyu tubers, having proved remarkably resistant to frost, grew everywhere on the mountainside. For a time Rin had been quite fond of them; they were filling, easy to steam, and had the slightly sweet taste of fresh-baked bread.

That was months ago. She’d since grown so sick of the taste of raw shanyu, dried shanyu, steamed shanyu, and mashed shanyu that the smell was enough to induce nausea. Still, it was the only fresh food with nutrients she could get her hands on. She forced it down as well.

When she was finished, she stood up and prepared to go pay a visit to the bandit chief Ma Lien.

Kitay moved to follow, but she shook her head. “I can do this alone. You don’t need to see this.”

He didn’t argue the point. She knew he didn’t want to come. “Fine. You’ve got the medicine?”

“In my front pocket.”

“And you’re sure that—”

“Please don’t.” She cut him off. “We’ve had this debate a thousand times. Can you think of a better option?”

He sighed. “Just do it quickly. Don’t linger.”

“Why on earth would I linger?”

“Rin.”

“All right.” She clapped him on the shoulder and strode toward the forest.

Ma Lien’s quarters were built into the cave wall near Ruijin’s northern perimeter. It should have been near impossible for Rin to get this close to his private residence without at least three blades at her neck, but in recent days Ma Lien’s guards had reevaluated their loyalties. When they saw Rin approach, they nodded silently and let her pass through. None of them would meet her eyes.

Ma Lien’s wife and daughter sat outside the cave entrance. They stood up when they saw her, their eyes wide with fear and desperation.

They already know, Rin thought. They’d heard the whispers. Or someone in the ranks—perhaps even Zhuden—had already told them what was about to happen in an effort to save their lives.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said.

Ma Lien’s wife seized Rin’s wrist just as she entered the cave.

“Please,” she begged. “Don’t.”

“Necessity calls.” Rin shrugged her hand away. “Don’t try to stop me.”

“You can spare him, he’ll do what you say, you don’t have to—”

“He won’t,” Rin said. “And I do. I hope you’ve said goodbye.”

They knew what would happen next. Ma Lien’s men knew. And Rin suspected that, on some level, the Monkey Warlord had to know, too. He might even sanction it. She would, if she were in his position. What did you do when one of your generals kept agitating to fight a war you knew you couldn’t win?

You cut your losses.

The cave smelled like sick, a stomach-turning mix of fumes from bitter herbal medicines and the odor of stale vomit. Ma Lien had been suffering from the bloody lung fever since before she’d left for Khudla. The timing was perfect. She’d struck a deal with Zhuden the morning she marched out—if Ma Lien was still ill by the time she returned, and the odds of his recovery seemed slim, then they would seize their chance.

Still, she hadn’t expected Ma Lien to disintegrate so quickly. He lay shriveled and desiccated against his sheets. He seemed to have shrunk to half his body weight. Crusted blood lined the edges of his lips. Every time he breathed, an awful rattle echoed through the cave.

Ma Lien was already half-gone. From the looks of it, what Rin was about to do couldn’t even properly be called murder. She was only hastening the inevitable.

“Hello, General.” She perched herself by the edge of his bed.

His eyes cracked open at the sound of her voice.

She’d been told the illness had taken his vocal cords. He bleeds when he tries to speak, Zhuden had said. And if he gets agitated, he starts choking on it. She felt a little thrill at the thought. He couldn’t mock her, couldn’t curse at her, couldn’t scream for help. She could taunt him as much as she liked. And all he could do was lie there and listen.

She should have just done the job and left. The smarter, pragmatic part of her was screaming at her to go—it was a risk to stay for so long, to speak where Gurubai’s spies might hear her.

But this encounter had been a long time coming. She wanted him to know every reason why he had to die. She wanted to relish this moment. She’d earned this.

She recalled vividly the way he’d shouted her down when she first suggested deploying troops to Rooster Province. He’d called her a savage, sentimental, dirt-skinned, warmongering bitch. He’d railed at Gurubai for letting a little girl into the war council in the first place. He’d suggested she’d be better off dead with the rest of her kind.

He probably didn’t remember saying that. Ma Lien was one of those loud, garrulous types. Always tossing insults out like the wind. Always assuming that his bodily strength and the loyalty of his men would insulate him from resentment.

“Do you remember what you said when I first asked for command?” Rin asked.

Spit bubbled by the side of Ma Lien’s mouth. She picked a bloodstained bed rag up from the floor and gently rubbed it away.

“You said I was a dumb bitch with no command experience and a genetic lack of rationality.” She chuckled. “Your words. You said I was an empty-headed little fool with more power than I knew what to do with. You said I should know my place. You said Speerlies weren’t meant to make decisions but to obey.”

Ma Lien mouthed something incoherent. She smoothed tendrils of his hair back from his mouth. He was sweating so hard he looked like he’d been drenched in oil. Poor man.

“I didn’t come south to be someone’s pet again,” she said. “You should have understood that about me.”

She’d laid her loyalty at the feet of two masters before. Each had betrayed her in turn. She’d trusted first Daji and then Vaisra, and they’d both sold her away without blinking. From now on Rin took charge of her own fate.

She reached into her pocket and pulled out the vial.

Fat yellow scorpions infested the forests around Ruijin. The soldiers had learned to ward them away from the camp by burning lavender and setting traps, but they couldn’t wander ten feet into the trees without stumbling upon a nest. And a single nest was all it took to extract a vial’s worth of venom.

“I’m not sorry for this,” she said. “You shouldn’t have gotten in my way.”

She tipped the vial toward Ma Lien’s mouth. He thrashed, trying to cough the poison out, but she seized his jaw and forced it shut, pinching his nose between her fingers until the liquid seeped down into his throat. After a minute he stopped resisting. She let go.

“You’re not going to die immediately,” she said. “Scorpion venom paralyzes. Locks up all your muscles.”

She dabbed saliva and venom off his chin with the bed rag. “In a while, it’ll feel a little hard to breathe. You’ll try to call for help, but you’ll find your jaw won’t move. I’m sure your wife will come in to check on you, but she knows there’s nothing she can do. She knows what I’m doing right now. She’s probably imagining it all in her head. But maybe she’ll love you enough to see you through to the end. Or, if she really loves you, she’ll slit your throat.”

She stood up. An odd thrill rushed through her head. Her knees shook. She felt giddy, shot through with a bizarre and unexpected energy.

This wasn’t her first kill. But this was her first deliberate, premeditated murder. This was the first person she’d killed not out of desperation but with cool, malicious intent.

It felt—

It felt good.

She didn’t need her pipe to show this to Altan; she heard his laughter as loudly as if he were standing right next to her. She felt divine. She felt like she could leap across mountains if she wanted to. Her hand couldn’t stop shaking. The vial dropped from her fingers and shattered against the floor.

Heart pounding, blood pumping with a euphoria that confused her, she left the cave.

“I want to lead two contingents into Rooster Province,” Rin said. “Souji says they’ve clustered there because the flat terrain is easier to navigate. We’ve been shoring up for a fight on the wrong front. They’re not going to push up into the mountains here because they don’t need to. They’re just going to expand farther south.”

The leadership of the Southern Coalition sat assembled around a table in the Monkey Warlord’s headquarters. Gurubai, the natural leader, sat at the front. Liu Dai, a former county official and Gurubai’s longtime ally, sat on his right. Zhuden was seated to Liu Dai’s right as Ma Lien’s substitute, but an empty chair remained at the table out of respect. Souji sat in the back left corner, arms crossed, smirking, as if he’d already called this charade for what it was.

“If we strike quickly,” Rin continued, “that is, if we take the main nodes before they’ve gotten the chance to regroup, we could end this whole thing in one drive.”

“Just this morning you wanted to turn north to face Vaisra,” Gurubai said. “Now you want to drive south. You can’t fight a war on two fronts, Rin. Which is it?”

“We’ve got to go south just so we can get the strength to muster a defense against the Hesperians,” Rin said. “If we win the south, we get warm bodies. Food stores. Access to river routes, armories, and who knows what else we’ve been relinquishing to the Mugenese. Our armies will swell by thousands, and we’ll have the supply lines to support them. But if we don’t clear out the Mugenese first, then we’ll be trapped inside the mountains—”

“We’re safe inside the mountains,” Liu Dai interrupted. “No one has invaded Ruijin in centuries, the terrain is too hostile—”

“There’s no food here,” Rin said. “The wells are drying up. This won’t last forever.”

“We understand that,” Gurubai said. “But you’re asking too much of this army. Half these boys only picked up a sword for the first time two months ago. You need to give them time.”

“Vaisra won’t give them time,” Rin snapped. “The moment he’s done with Jun, he will bury us.”

She’d already lost them. She could tell from their bored, skeptical expressions. She knew this was pointless; this was just another iteration of the same argument they’d rehashed a dozen times now. They were at a stalemate—she had the fire, but they had everything else. And they were seasoned, war-hardened men who, despite everything they publicly proclaimed, couldn’t be less happy about sharing power with a girl half their age.

Rin knew that. She was just constitutionally unable to keep silent.

“Rooster Province is finished,” Gurubai said. “The Mugenese have overrun the place like ants. Our strategy now should be survival. We can keep the Monkey Province. They cannot survive in the mountains. Don’t throw this away, Rin.”

He spoke like he’d come to this conclusion long ago. A sudden suspicion struck Rin.

“You knew,” she said. “You knew they’d taken Rooster Province.”

Gurubai exchanged a glance with Liu Dai. “Runin …”

“You’ve known that all along.” Her voice rose in pitch. Her cheeks were burning. This wasn’t just his standard patronization, this was appalling condescension. The fucking nerve. “You knew this entire time and you didn’t tell me.”

“It wouldn’t have made a difference—”

“Did they all know?” She gestured around the room. Little sparks of flame burst forth from her fingers; she couldn’t help it. The coalition members cringed back, but that gave her no pleasure. She was far too embarrassed.

What else hadn’t they told her?

Gurubai cleared his throat. “Given your impulses, we didn’t think it prudent—”

“Fuck you!” she exclaimed. “I’m a member of this council, I’ve been winning your battles for you, I deserve to—”

“The fact remains that you are impulsive and reckless, as evidenced by your repeated demands for command—”

“I deserve full command! That’s what I was promised!”

Gurubai sighed. “We are not discussing this again.”

“Look.” She slammed her hand on the table. “If none of you are willing to make the first move, then just send me. Give me two thousand troops. Just twice the number I took to Khudla. That’ll be enough.”

“You and I both know why that’s not possible.”

“But that’s our only chance at staying alive—”

“Is it?” Gurubai asked. “Do you really believe that we can’t survive in the mountains? Or do you just want your chance to go after Yin Nezha?”