The Burning God

Nezha had hated Mugini lessons, Rin remembered. He hadn’t been able to comprehend the language when spoken at its standard rapid clip, so he’d spent class each day mocking it, making his fellow students laugh with gibberish that sounded so much like real sentences.

“Click click click,” he’d said, and made scuttling noises between his teeth. “Like little bugs.”

Like crickets, Rin thought. They’d started calling the Mugenese that in the countryside. Rin didn’t know if it was a new slur or an old insult recycled from a time before her birth. She wouldn’t have been surprised by the latter. History moved in circles—she’d learned that very well by now.

“Kazuo said that ships have started coming into the ports in Tiger Province,” said the first voice she’d heard, the boy’s voice. “They’re docking in the shadows, ferrying us back handful by handful—”

The second patrolman snorted. “That’s bullshit. We’d know by now if they had.”

There was a brief silence. Someone stirred in the grass. The patrolmen were lying down, Rin realized. Perhaps they were stargazing. That was stupid of them, wildly irresponsible. But they sounded so very young; they sounded not like soldiers but like children. Did they simply not know any better?

“The moon is different here,” the first patrolman said wistfully.

Rin recognized that phrase. She’d learned it at Sinegard—it was an old Mugini expression, some aphorism derived from a myth about a ferryman who loved a woman who lived on a distant star, who built her a bridge between two worlds so that they could finally embrace.

The moon is different here. He meant he wanted to go home.

The Mugenese were always talking about going home. She heard about it every time she eavesdropped on them. They spoke about home like it still existed, like the longbow island was some beautiful paradise where they could easily return if only the ships would come to harbor. They spoke about their mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers who awaited them on their shores, spared somehow from the scorching pyroclastic flows.

“You’d better get used to this moon,” said the second patrolman.

The more they spoke, the younger they sounded. Rin pictured their faces in her head; their voices brought to mind gangly limbs and fuzzy upper lips. They couldn’t be older than her—they had to be just over twenty, possibly younger.

She remembered fighting a boy her age during the siege at Khurdalain, what seemed like an eternity ago. Remembered his wide moonlike face and soft hands. Remembered how his eyes bulged when she ran her blade through his stomach.

He must have been so scared. He might have been as scared as she was.

She felt Kitay stiffen beside her.

“They don’t want to be here, either.” He’d told her this weeks ago. He’d been interrogating some of their Mugenese prisoners, and he’d come away far more sympathetic to them than she was comfortable with. “They’re just kids. A quarter of them are younger than we are, and they didn’t sign up for this war. Most of them were pulled from their homes and thrown into vicious training camps so that their families wouldn’t go to prison or starve. They don’t want to kill, they just want to go home.”

But their home didn’t exist anymore. Those boys had nowhere to escape to. If the gates of reconciliation had ever been open, if there’d ever been the option of repatriating enemy combatants and building slowly toward peace, Rin had slammed them shut long ago.

A wide chasm of guilt, her ever-faithful friend, yawned in the back of her mind.

She pushed it away.

She’d done such a good job of burying her memories; that was the only way she could keep herself sane.

Children can be murderers, she reminded herself. Little boys can be monsters.

The lines of war had become far too blurred. Every Mugenese soldier who’d ever put on a uniform was complicit, and Rin didn’t have the patience to separate the guilty from the innocent. Speerly justice was absolute. Her retribution was conclusive. She didn’t have time to dawdle on what could have been; she had a homeland to liberate.

Her wrist had started to throb again. She exhaled slowly, closed her eyes, and repeated their plan of attack over and over in her mind in an attempt to shake off her nerves.

She traced her fingers across the scars on her stomach. Let them linger on the spot where Altan’s handprint was burned into her like a brand. She envisioned those boy patrolmen and transformed them into targets.

I’ve killed millions of you before, she thought. This is routine now. This is nothing.

The sun was a little crimson dot now, the top of it barely visible over the mountaintops. The patrolmen had rotated from their post. The fields, for now, were empty.

“It’s time,” Kitay murmured.

Rin stood up. They faced each other, hands clasped between them.

“At dawn,” she said.

“At dawn,” he agreed. He put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her forehead.

This was their standard way of parting, the way they said everything they never spoke out loud. Fight well. Keep us safe. I love you.

Every goodbye had to be so much harder for Kitay, who wagered his life on hers every time she set foot on the battlefield.

Rin wished she didn’t have that vulnerability. If she could cut out the part of the soul that endangered Kitay—that was endangered by Kitay—then she would.

But the fact that his life was at stake lent an edge to her fighting. It made her sharper, warier, less likely to take risks and more likely to strike hard and fast when she could. She no longer fought from pure rage. She fought to protect him—and that, she had discovered, changed everything.

Kitay gave her one last nod, then disappeared behind the ranks.

“Does he always stay behind?” Officer Shen asked.

Rin liked Officer Shen. A Monkey Province native and veteran of the last two Poppy Wars, Shen Sainang was brusque, efficient, and pragmatic. She despised factional politics, which perhaps explained why she was one of the few officers who had volunteered to follow Rin into her first battle as commander. Rin was grateful for that.

But Shen was too observant. Always asking too many questions.

“Kitay doesn’t fight,” Rin said.

“Why not?” Shen asked. “He’s Sinegard-trained, isn’t he?”

Because Kitay was Rin’s single link to the heavens. Because Kitay needed to be in a safe and quiet place so that his mind could function as a channel between her and the Phoenix. Because every time Kitay was exposed and vulnerable it doubled Rin’s chances of dying.

That was Rin’s greatest secret. If the Monkey Warlord knew Kitay was her anchor, he’d know the only way to kill her. And Rin didn’t trust him or the Southern Coalition enough to give them that chance.

“He’s a Sinegard-trained strategist,” Rin said. “Not a foot soldier.”

Shen looked unconvinced. “He carries a sword like one.”

“Yes, and his mind’s more valuable than the sword,” Rin said curtly, shutting down the discussion. She nodded toward Khudla. “It’s time.”

Adrenaline rushed her veins then. Her heartbeat began pounding in her ears, an internal countdown to the slaughter. Across the village perimeter, eight pairs of eyes were trained on Rin—eight squadron leaders, waiting at their vantage points, watching for the flame.

At last, Rin saw a line of Mugenese troops moving down the field. There it was—the patrol switch.

She raised her left hand and gave the signal—a thin stream of fire, burning the air ten feet over her head before it winked away.

The fields moved. Soldiers poured in from the northern and eastern fronts. They flooded out of hiding points in riverbanks, ravines, and forests like ants storming out of an anthill. Rin watched with satisfaction. So what if her columns were thinner than the defense? The Mugenese wouldn’t know the first place to look.

She heard a series of signal whistles, clear indications that every squadron had moved successfully into position. Officer Shen’s troops took the east. Officer Lin’s troops took the north.

Rin stormed the southern quarter alone.

The Mugenese weren’t ready. Most had been asleep or preparing to go to sleep. They staggered out of their tents and barracks, rubbing at their eyes. Rin almost laughed at the way their faces morphed into uniform expressions of horror when they saw what had turned the night air so very warm.

She lifted her arms. Wings shot out of her shoulders, glowing ten feet high.

Kitay had once accused her of being too flamboyant, of sacrificing efficiency for attention.

What did it matter? There was no point to subtlety when everyone knew what she was. And Rin wanted this image burned into their eyelids, the last thing they saw before they died—a Speerly and her god.

Men scattered before her like startled hens. One or two had the sense to hurl swords in her direction. Their movements were panicked, their aim poor. Rin advanced, hand splayed outward, fire ensconcing everything she saw.

Then the screaming started, and the ecstasy set in.

Rin had spent so long hating how she felt when she burned, hating her fire and her god. Not anymore. She could admit to herself now that she liked it. She liked letting her basest instincts take over. She reveled in it.

She didn’t have to think hard to summon the rage. She only had to remember the corpses at Golyn Niis. The corpses in the research laboratory. Altan burning on the pier, a miserable end to the miserable life they’d given him.

Hate was a funny thing. It gnawed at her insides like poison. It made every muscle in her body tense, made her veins boil so hot she thought her head might split in half, and yet it fueled everything she did. Hate was its own kind of fire and if you had nothing else, it kept you warm.

Once, Rin had wielded fire like a blunt instrument, letting the Phoenix’s will control her as if she were the weapon and not the other way around. Once, she’d only known how to act as a gateway for a torrent of divine fire. But such unrestrained explosions were only useful when one intended genocide. Campaigns for liberation demanded precision.

She had spent weeks with Kitay practicing the intricacies of calling the flame. She’d learned to shape it like a sword. To lash it out in tendrils like a whip. She’d learned to mold it into moving, dancing entities—lions, tigers, phoenixes.

She’d learned so many ways to kill with fire. She liked going for the eyes the best. Burning limbs to ash took too long. The human body could sustain a burn for a surprisingly long time, and she wanted her fights over quickly. Really, the entire face presented an excellent target—hair would keep burning, and light head wounds fazed combatants more than other minor wounds could. But if she aimed for the eyes, she could scorch retinas, seal eyelids shut, or blister the surrounding skin, all of which would blind her opponents in seconds.

She saw a flash of movement to her right. Someone was trying to charge her.

The Phoenix cackled. The audacity.

Half a second before he reached her, she opened her palm toward his face.

His eyes popped one by one. Viscous fluid dribbled down his cheeks. He opened his mouth to scream, and Rin sent flames pouring down his throat.

This was only grotesque if she saw her opponents as human. But she didn’t see humans, because Sinegard and Altan had taught her to compartmentalize and detach. Learn to look and see not a man but a body. The soul is not there. The body is simply a composite of different targets, and all of them burn so bright.

“Do you know where the Mugenese come from?” Altan had asked her once. “Do you know what kind of race they are?”

They had been sailing down the Murui toward Khurdalain then. The Third Poppy War had just begun. She’d been fresh out of Sinegard, stupid and naive, a student who was struggling with the fact that she was now a soldier. Altan had just become her commander and she had hung on his every word, so in awe of him she could barely string together a sentence.

She’d realized he was waiting for her to answer, so she’d said the first thing that came to mind. “They’re. Um. Related to us?”

“Do you know how?”

She could have repeated any textbook answer to him. Migration induced by droughts or flooding. Exiled aristocracy. Clan warfare dating back to the days of the Red Emperor. No one was really certain. She’d been taught many theories that were all equally plausible. But she’d suspected that Altan wasn’t really interested in her answer, so she had shaken her head instead.

She’d guessed right. He’d wanted to tell a story.

“A long time ago the Red Emperor had a pet,” he’d said. “It was a beastly thing, some very intelligent ape he’d found in the mountains. One ugly, vicious fucker. Do you know this tale?”

“I don’t,” she’d whispered. “Tell me.”

“The Red Emperor kept it in a cage in his palace,” he continued. “Occasionally he brought it out for guests to see. They liked to watch it kill things. They’d release pigs or roosters into its cage to watch it dismember them. I imagine they had great fun. Until one day the beast sprang free of its cage, killed a minister with its bare hands, kidnapped the Red Emperor’s daughter, and escaped back to the mountains.”

“I didn’t know the Red Emperor had a daughter,” Rin had said, stupidly. For some reason, she’d found this the most striking detail. History only remembered the princes—the Red Emperor’s sons.

“No one does. He would have erased her from the record, after what happened. She became pregnant by the beast but couldn’t find any means of expelling the fetus from her womb, not while she was its prisoner, so she gave birth to a little brood of half-men and raised them in the mountains. Years later the Red Emperor sent his generals to chase them out of the Empire, and they fled to the longbow island.”

Rin had never heard that iteration of the story, but it made sense. The Nikara did like to compare the Mugenese to monkeys. Half-men, they called them; short and little—even though when she had finally seen a Federation soldier with her own eyes she wouldn’t have been able to tell him apart from a Nikara villager.

Altan had paused then, watching her, waiting for her response.

But she’d only had one question, which she hadn’t wanted to ask, because she’d known Altan wouldn’t have an answer.

If they were beasts, how did they kill us?

Who decided who counted as human? The Nikara thought the Speerlies were beasts, too, and they’d made them warrior slaves for centuries. The enemy was not human—fine. But if they were animals, then they must be inferior. If the Mugenese were inferior, though, then how could they have been the victors? Did that mean that, in this world, one had to be a beast to survive?

Maybe no one was truly a beast. Maybe that was just how murder became possible. You took away someone’s humanity, and then you killed them. At Sinegard, Strategy Master Irjah had taught them once that during the heat of battle, they should regard their opponents as objects, abstract and disparate parts and not the sum, because that would make it easier to plunge a blade into a pumping heart. But maybe if you looked at someone as not an object but an animal, you could not only commit the murder without flinching, you could let yourself take some pleasure in it. Then it felt good, the same way kicking down anthills felt good.

“Monkeys raping humans. Half-breed brats. Beastly freaks. Stupid savages.” Altan had said the last words with bitter relish, and Rin had thought that perhaps it was because those were the same words so many others used to describe him. “That’s where the Mugenese come from.”

Rin carved her way through the camp in minutes. The Mugenese presented almost no resistance. The soldiers she’d faced at Sinegard and Khurdalain had been well trained and lethally armed, with lines of glinting swords and an endless supply of chemical weapons they hurled into civilian centers at will. But these soldiers ran instead of fighting, and they died with an ease that astounded her.

This was all too simple, so simple that it made Rin slow down. She wanted to savor this power differential. Once I was your screaming victim, begging for your mercy. And now you cower before me.

She shouldn’t have slowed.

Because once she slowed, she noticed how unprepared they were. How utterly unlike soldiers they seemed. How young they looked.

The boy before her had a sword, but he wasn’t using it. He didn’t even try to fight, only stumbled back with his arms raised, begging for her mercy.

“Please don’t,” he kept saying.

He might have been the patrolman from before; he spoke in that same reedy, wobbly voice. “Please.”

She stayed her hand only because she realized he was speaking Nikara.

She considered him for a moment. Was he Nikara? Was he a prisoner of war? He wasn’t wearing a Mugenese uniform, he might have been an innocent …

“Please,” he said again. “Don’t—”

His accent sealed his fate. His tones were too clipped. He wasn’t Nikara after all, just a clever Mugenese soldier who thought he might fool her into taking mercy.

“Burn,” she said.

The boy fell backward. She saw his mouth open, saw his face curdle into a piteous scream just as it blackened and solidified, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.

In the end, it was always so easy to kill her heart. It didn’t matter that they looked like boys. That they were nothing, nothing like the monsters she had once known. In this war of racial totality, none of that mattered. If they were Mugenese, that meant they were crickets and that meant when she crushed them under her heel, the universe hardly registered their loss.

Once, Altan had made her watch him burn a squirrel alive.

He’d caught it for their breakfast with a simple netted trap. It was still alive when he retrieved it from the trees, wriggling in his grasp. But instead of snapping its neck, he’d decided to teach her a lesson.

“Do you know how exactly fire kills a person?” he’d asked. She’d shaken her head.

She’d watched, entranced, as he conjured fire into his palms.

Altan had such remarkable control over the shape of fire. He was a puppeteer, casually twisting flames into the loveliest shapes: now a flying bird, now a twisting dragon, now a human figure, flailing inside the cage he made with his fingers until he clamped his palms shut.

She’d been captivated, watching his fingers dance through the air. His question had caught her off guard, and when she spoke, her words were clumsy and stupid. “Through heat? I mean, um …”

His lip had curled. “Fire is such an inefficient way to kill. Did you know the moment of death is actually quite painless? The fire eats up all the breathable air around the victim, and they choke to death.”

She blinked at him. “You don’t want that?”

“Why would you want that? If you want a quick death, you use a sword. Or an arrow.” He’d twirled a stream of flame around his fingers. “You don’t throw Speerlies into battle unless you want to terrorize. We want our victims to suffer first. We want them to burn, and slowly.”

He’d picked up the bound squirrel and wrapped his fingers around its middle. The squirrel couldn’t scream, but Rin had imagined the sound, quivering little gasps that corresponded to its twitching limbs.

“Watch the skin,” he’d said.

Once the fur burned off, she’d been able to glimpse the pink underneath, bubbling, crackling, hardening to black. “First it boils. Then it starts to slough off. Watch the color. Once you’ve turned it black, and once that black spreads, there’s nothing that can bring them back.”

He had held the squirrel out toward her. “Hungry?”

She had glanced down at its little black eyes, bulging and glassy, and her stomach roiled. And she hadn’t known what was worse, the way the animal’s legs twitched in its death throes, or the fact that the roasted flesh smelled so terribly good.

By the time she’d finished in the southern quarter, the rest of her soldiers had corralled the last Mugenese holdouts into a corner in Khudla’s eastern district. They parted to let her through to the front.

“Took you a while,” Officer Shen said.

“Got held up,” Rin said. “Having too much fun.”

“The southern quarter—”

“Finished.” Rin rubbed her fingers together, and crackled blood burned black fell to the ground. “Why aren’t we attacking?”

“They’ve taken hostages inside the temple,” Shen said.

That was smart. Rin regarded the structure. It was one of the nicer village temples she’d seen in a while, made from stone and not wood. It wouldn’t burn easily, and the Mugenese artillery inside had good vantage points from the upper floors.

“They’re going to shoot us out,” Shen said.

As if to prove her point, a fire rocket shrieked overhead and exploded against the tree ten paces from where they crouched.

“So storm them,” Rin said.

“We’re afraid they might have gas.”

“They would have used it by now.”

“They could be waiting for you,” Shen pointed out.

That was fair logic. “Then we’ll burn it.”

“We can’t get past the stone—”

“You can’t get past stone.” Rin wiggled her fingers in the air. A fiery dragon danced around her palm. She squinted at the temple, considering. It fell easily within her range; she could extend her flames to a radius of fifty yards. She only needed to sneak a flame through a window. Once past stone, her fire would find plenty of things to burn.

“How many hostages?” Rin asked.

“Does it matter?” Shen asked.

“It does to me.”

Shen paused for a long moment, and then nodded. “Maybe five, six. No more than eight.”

“Are they important?” Women and children could die without many ramifications. Local leadership likely couldn’t.

“Not as far as I can tell. Souji’s people are on the other side of town. And he doesn’t have family.”

Rin mulled over her options one last time.

She could still have her troops storm the temple, but she’d suffer casualties, especially if the Mugenese really did have gas canisters. The Southern Army couldn’t afford casualties; their numbers were low enough already.

And her margin of victory mattered. This was her great test. If she came home from this not just victorious but with minimal losses, the Monkey Warlord would give her an army. The decision, then, was clear; she wasn’t slinking back with only half her troops.

“Who else knows about the hostages?” she asked Shen.

“Just the men here.”

“What about the villagers?”

“We’ve evacuated everyone we could find,” Shen said, which was code for No one will speak of what you did.

Rin nodded. “Get your men out of here. At least a hundred paces. I don’t want them to inhale any smoke.”

Shen looked pale. “General—”

Rin raised her voice. “I wasn’t asking.”

Shen nodded and broke into a run. The field cleared in seconds. Rin stood alone in the yard, rubbing her fingers against her palm.

Can you feel this, Kitay? Can you tell what I’m doing?

No time for hesitation. She had to do this before the Mugenese ventured out to investigate the silence.

She turned her palm out. Fire roared. She directed the core of the flame toward the locks on the temple doors. She saw the metal warping, twisting into an unbreakable shape.

Then the Mugenese must have caught on, because someone inside started to scream.

Rin increased the heat to a roar loud enough to drown it out, yet somehow it pierced the wall of sound. It was a high squeal of pain. Maybe a woman’s, maybe a child’s. It almost sounded like a baby. But that didn’t mean anything—she knew how shrilly a grown man could scream.

She increased the force of her flame, made it roar so loudly that she couldn’t hear herself think. But still the scream penetrated the wall of fire.