The Burning God
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“I’m good,” she muttered.
“You’re from the south. Thought you could eat anything.”
“We never ate bugs in Tikany.”
He laughed. “Tikany’s hardly the poorest village in the south. Makes sense that you’ve never known famine.”
She had to admit that was true. She’d gone hungry on plenty of nights, both in Tikany and at the Academy in Sinegard, but that was because of food withheld and not the sheer lack of it. Even after the Third Poppy War kicked off in earnest, when villagers across the Empire grew so desperate they resorted to eating wood bark, Rin had been able to rely on at least two square meals from army rations every day.
Of course. When things got bad, soldiers were fed first, and everyone else was left to die. Rin had been living so long on the extractive capabilities of the empire she fought for, she’d never learned to forage for herself.
“That wasn’t an insult. Just being frank.” Souji held the bowl of bees out toward her. “Want to try?”
They smelled terribly good. Rin’s stomach let loose an embarrassingly loud growl.
“Eat up.” Souji chuckled. “We’ve got rations to spare.”
They continued their march at dawn, trailing by the edge of the road, always ready to bolt back into the trees at the first signal from the scouts ahead. They quickened their pace slightly from the day before. Rin had wanted to make straight for the Beehive, but Souji had drawn a zigzag pattern on her map instead, creating a circuitous route that took them all around local power bases but avoided the center until the very end.
“But then they’ll know we’re coming,” Rin said. “Isn’t the whole point to keep the element of surprise until Leiyang?”
Souji shook his head. “No, they’ll know we’re out here in five days at most. We can’t keep our approach a secret for that much longer, so we may as well get some good hits in when we can.”
“Then what is the point of all these measures?”
“Think, Princess. They know we’re coming. That’s all they know. They don’t know how many we are. We could be a band of ten. We could be an army of a million. They’ve got absolutely no clue what to be on the guard for, and the threat of the unknown hamstrings defense preparations. Preserve that.”
Of course Rin had learned at Sinegard to strategize accounting for the enemy’s state of mind. But she’d always thought of it as a matter of dominant strategies. What, given the circumstances, was their best option? And how should she prepare for their best option? The issues Souji obsessed over—fear, apprehension, anxiety, irrationality—were details she’d never much considered. But now, in this war of uncertainty and unbalanced forces, they seemed paramount.
So whenever the Southern Coalition encountered Mugenese soldiers, they either hid in the trees and watched them march past if they appeared not to have noticed anything, or pulled the same kind of lure tactic the Iron Wolves had used the first day. And whenever they came past occupied hamlets, they employed much the same sort of strategy—cautious baiting accompanied by strikes of limited force, just enough to achieve limited tactical objectives without ever escalating into a real battle.
Over eight days and numerous engagements, Rin witnessed the full range of Souji’s favorite tactics. They revolved almost entirely around deception, and they were brilliant. The Iron Wolves were fond of waylaying small groups of Mugenese soldiers, always at night and never twice in the same spot. When the Mugenese returned with larger bands, the guerrillas were long gone. They feigned beggars, farmers, and village drunkards to draw Mugenese attacks. They deliberately created false campsites to agitate Mugenese patrols. Souji’s favorite ploy was to send a group of Iron Wolves, all young women, out to fields near Mugenese encampments wearing the most brightly colored, provocative clothing that village women had access to. They were, without fail, assaulted. But girls with fire rockets and knives were harder to take down than the Mugenese soldiers’ usual prey.
“You’re fond of pretending to be weaklings,” Rin observed. “Does that always work?”
“Almost every time. The Mugenese are terribly attracted to easy targets.”
“And they never catch on?”
“Not as far as I’ve noticed. See, they’re bullies. Weakness is what they want to see. They’re so convinced that we’re just base, cowardly animals, they won’t stop to question it. They don’t want to believe we can fight back, so they won’t.”
“But we’re not really fighting back,” Rin said. “We’re only annoying them.”
Souji knew that she wasn’t thrilled with this tentative campaign—this sort of half fighting, of provoking from the shadows instead of facing the enemy head-on. It defied every strategic principle she’d ever been taught. She’d been taught to win, and to win conclusively to preempt a later counterattack. Souji, on the other hand, flirted with victory but never took the spoils. He left chess pieces open all over the board, like a dog might bury bones to savor later.
But Souji insisted she was still thinking about war the wrong way.
“You don’t have a conventional army,” he said. “You can’t move into Leiyang and mow them down like you did when you fought for the Republic.”
“Yes, I could,” she said.
“You’re good nine times out of ten, Princess. Then a stray arrow or javelin finds its way into your temple, and your luck’s run out. Don’t take chances. Err on the side of caution.”
“But I hate this constant running—”
“It’s not running. That’s what you don’t get. This is disruption. Think about how your calculations change if you’re on the receiving end. You change your patrol pattern to keep up with the random attacks, but you can’t anticipate when they’ll happen. Your nerves get frayed. You can’t rest or sleep because you’re not sure what’s coming next.”
“So your plan is to annoy them to death,” Kitay said.
“Bad morale is a big weapon,” Souji said. “Don’t underestimate it.”
“I’m not,” Rin said. “But it feels like we’re just constantly retreating.”
“The entire point is that only you have the ability to retreat. They don’t; they’re stuck in the places they’ve occupied because they can’t give them up. Try to wrap your head around this, you two. Your default model of warfare won’t work for you anymore. At Sinegard you’re taught to lead large forces into major battles. But you don’t have that anymore. What you can do is strike against isolated forces, multiple times, and delay their reinforcements. You have to deploy small operational units who have the latitude to make their own calls. And you want to delay head-on battles on the open field for as long as you possibly can.”
“This is all bonkers.” Kitay had the wide-eyed, slightly panicked look on his face he got when his mind was chewing frantically through new concepts. Rin could almost hear the whirring in his brain. “This cuts against everything the Classics ever said about warfare.”
“Not really,” Souji said. “What did Sunzi say was the fundamental theorem of war?”
“Subjugate the enemy without fighting,” Kitay said automatically. “But that doesn’t apply to—”
Souji cut him off. “And what does that mean?”
“It means you pacify an enemy with sheer, overwhelming superiority,” Rin said impatiently. “If not in numbers, then in technology or position. You make him realize his inferiority so he surrenders without fighting. Saves your troops a battle, and keeps the battlefields clean. The only problem is that they aren’t inferior on any plane. So that’s not going to work.”
“But that’s not what Sunzi means.” Souji looked frustratingly smug, like a teacher waiting for a very slow student to arrive at the right answer.
Kitay had lost his patience. “What, was half the text written in invisible ink?”
Souji raised his hands. “Look, I went to Sinegard, too. I know the way your minds work. But they trained you for conventional warfare, and this is not that.”
“Then kindly explain what this is,” Kitay said.
“You can’t concentrate superior force all at once, so you need to do it in little parts. Mobile operations. Night movements. Deception, surprise, all that fun stuff—the stuff we’ve been doing—that’s how you focus your optimal alignment, or whatever bogus word Sunzi calls it.” Souji made a pincer motion with his hands. “You’re like ants swarming an injured rat. You whittle it down with little bites. You never engage in a full-fledged battlefield encounter, you just fucking exhaust them.
“Sinegard’s problem was that it was teaching you to fight an ancient enemy. They saw everything through the Red Emperor’s eyes. But that method of warfare doesn’t work anymore. It didn’t even work against the Mugenese when you had the armies. And what’s more, Sinegard assumed that the enemy would be a conquering force from the outside.” Souji grinned. “They weren’t in the business of teaching rebels.”
Despite her initial skepticism, Rin had to admit that Souji’s tactics worked. And they kept working. The closer they got to Leiyang, the more supplies and intelligence they acquired, all without evidence that the Mugenese at Leiyang knew what was coming. Souji planned his attacks so that even Mugenese survivors wouldn’t be able to report more than ten or twenty sighted troops at once; the full size of their army remained well concealed. And if Rin ever called the fire, she made sure she left no witnesses.
But their luck had to be running out. Souji’s small-scale tactics worked for tiny targets—hamlets where the Mugenese guard numbered no more than fifty men. But Leiyang was one of the largest townships in the province. More and more reports corroborated the fact that their numbers were in the thousands.
You couldn’t fool an army of thousands with skirts and firecrackers. Sooner or later, they’d have to stand face-to-face with their enemy and fight.
CHAPTER 5
On the twelfth day of their march, after an eternity of navigating winding, treacherous forest footpaths, they reached a vast plain filled with red stalks of sorghum. Against the otherwise overgrown wilderness, the sparse and dying trees that littered the roadside, those neatly cultivated fields stood out like a red flag of warning.
Armies only maintained fields once they’d settled down for permanent occupation. They’d reached the edge of the Beehive.
Rin’s men wanted to move on Leiyang that night. They’d marched at a leisurely pace for the last two days; the forest routes didn’t permit them to go any faster. They had energy, pent up and raging. They wanted blood.
Souji was the only holdout. “You’ve got to contact the local leadership first.”
Rin humored him. “Fine. Where are they?”
“Well.” Souji scratched his ear. “On the inside.”
“Are you mad?”
“The civilians suffer the most from your little liberations,” Souji said. “Or did you not count the casualties at Khudla?”
“Listen, we freed Khudla—”
“And burned a temple full of civilians to death,” Souji said. “Don’t think I didn’t know about that. We need to give them advance warning.”
“That’s too risky,” Kitay said. “We don’t know how many collaborators they have. If the wrong person sees you, they’ll crack down on the civilians regardless.”
“No one’s going to report us,” Souji said. “I know these people. Their loyalty runs thicker than blood.”
Rin gave him a skeptical look. “You’d be willing to stake the lives of everyone in this army on that?”
“I’m staking the lives of everyone in that township on it,” Souji said. “I’ve gotten you this far, Speerly. Trust me just a little longer.”
So Rin found herself walking with Souji into the center of the Beehive, dressed in peasant rags, without her sword and without reinforcements. Souji had identified a lapse in the northern patrol, a thirty-second pocket of time between revolving guards that allowed them to sneak past the fields and over the city gates unnoticed.
What Rin saw inside Leiyang astonished her.
She’d never before encountered a Mugenese-occupied township where corpses weren’t stacked in rotting, haphazard piles around every corner. Where the residents weren’t utterly, uniformly, brutally crushed into submission.
But here in Leiyang, the Mugenese had embarked on something more like occupational state-building. And this, somehow, was scarier.
The civilians here were thin, haggard, clearly downtrodden, but alive—and not just alive, but free. They weren’t locked up in holding pens, nor were they crouching inside their homes in fear. Civilians—visibly Nikara civilians—strode around the township so casually that if Rin didn’t know better she wouldn’t have guessed there was a Mugenese presence at all. As they snuck deeper into the township, Rin saw a band of men—laborers with farming implements that could easily be used as weapons—walking toward the fields without so much as a single armed guard. Closer to the town center, there were long queues looping around an unbelievable sight—a rationing station, where Mugenese troops doled out daily portions of barley grain to civilians waiting patiently with copper bowls.
She could barely form the question. “How—?”
“Collaboration,” Souji said. “It’s how most of us have been getting along. The Mugenese figured out pretty quickly that their original depopulation policy was only going to work if they were getting supplies from the island. Island’s gone, and there’s no point to clearing out space anymore. What’s more, they need someone to do their cooking and cleaning.”
So the soldiers without a home had formed a sick symbiosis with their intended victims. The Mugenese had merged with the Nikara into a society that, if not necessarily nonviolent, at least looked stable and sustainable.
Rin found evidence of wary coexistence everywhere she looked. She saw Mugenese soldiers eating at Nikara food stands. She saw Mugenese patrolmen escorting a group of Nikara farmers back through the city gates. No blades were drawn; no hands were bound. This looked routine. She even saw a Mugenese soldier fondly stroke the head of a Nikara child as they passed each other on the street.
Her stomach churned.
She didn’t know what to do with this. She was so used to absolute destruction, a complete binary of the extremities of war, that she couldn’t work her mind around this bizarre middle ground. How did it feel to live with a sword hanging over your head? How did it feel to look these men in the eyes, day by day, knowing full well what they were capable of?
Rin followed closely behind Souji as they moved through the streets, her eyes darting nervously about with every turn. No one had reported, or even seemed to care about, their presence. Occasionally someone narrowed their eyes at Souji in questioning recognition, but no one so much as breathed a word.
Souji didn’t stop walking until they’d reached the far edge of the township, where he pointed to a small, thatched-roof hut half-hidden behind a cluster of trees. “The chief of Leiyang is a man named Lien Wen. His daughter-in-law came from the same village as my mother. He’s expecting us.”
Rin frowned. “How?”
“I told you.” Souji shrugged. “I know these people.”
A skinny, plain-faced girl about seven years old sat outside the door, hand-grinding sorghum grain in a small stone bowl. She scrambled to her feet when they approached and, without a word, gestured for them to follow her inside the hut.
Souji nudged Rin forward. “Go on.”
For the home of a township chief, Lien Wen’s was not particularly luxurious. The interior would barely have fit ten men standing shoulder to shoulder. A square tea table occupied the center, surrounded by three-legged stools. Rin squatted down on the nearest stool. The uneven, scratched-up legs wobbled every time she shifted position. That was oddly calming—this kind of poverty felt familiar.
“Weapons over there. Father’s orders.” The girl pointed at a cracked vase in the corner.
Rin’s fingers twitched toward the knives hidden inside her shirt. “But—”
“Of course.” Souji shot Rin a stern look. “Whatever Chief Lien asks.”
Rin reluctantly dropped the blades into the vase.
The girl disappeared for several seconds, returned with a plate of coarse-grain steamed buns, and set it down on the tea table.
“Dinner,” she said, then retreated to the corner.
The starchy grain smelled terribly good. Rin hadn’t seen proper steamed buns in ages; in Ruijin, they’d long ago run out of yeast. She reached out for a bun, but Souji slapped her hand away.
“Don’t,” he muttered. “That’s more than she eats in a week.”
“Then why—”
“Leave it. They’ll save it for later if you don’t touch it, but if you touch it and put it down then they’ll insist you take it with you when you leave.”
Stomach growling, Rin returned her hand to her lap.
“I didn’t think you’d come back.”
A tall, broad-shouldered man filled the doorframe. Rin found his age impossible to place—his lined eyes and white whiskers could have made him as old as her grandfather, but he carried himself with his back straight and chin up, a warrior with decades of fight left in his body.
“Chief Lien.” Souji stood up, cupped his hands, and bowed deeply at the waist. Rin hastily followed suit.
“Sit,” Chief Lien grumbled. “This hut isn’t big enough for all this commotion.”
Rin and Souji returned to their stools. Chief Lien merely shoved his out of the way and sat down cross-legged on the dirt floor, which made Rin feel suddenly very childish, squatting as she was.
Chief Lien folded his arms across his chest. “So you’re the ones who’ve been causing trouble up north.”
“Guilty.” Souji beamed. “Next up is—”
“Stop it,” Chief Lien said. “I don’t care what’s next. Take your army, leave here, and don’t come back.”
Souji trailed off, looking hurt. Rin would have found that funny if she weren’t also confused.
“They think our men are doing it,” Chief Lien said. “They made the elders line up in the square the morning after the first patrolmen went missing and said they’d shoot them one by one until the culprits confessed. No one stepped forward, so they beat my mother within an inch of her life. That was over a week ago. She’s not recovered. She’ll be lucky if she makes it through tonight.”
“We have a physician,” Souji said. “We’ll bring him to you, or we can just carry her out to our camps. We’ve got men in those fields, we can move on the crickets tonight—”
“No,” Chief Lien said firmly. “You will turn around and disappear. We know how this story ends, and we can’t suffer the consequences. Compliance is the only thing keeping us alive—”
“Compliance?” Souji had warned Rin to keep quiet and let him do the talking, but she couldn’t help but interject. “That’s your word for slavery? You like walking the streets with your head down, cringing when they approach you, licking their boots to win their goodwill?”
“Our township still has all our men,” said Chief Lien.
“Then you have soldiers,” Rin said. “And you should be fighting.”
Chief Lien merely regarded her through his lined, tired eyes.
In the passing silence, Rin noticed for the first time a series of ropy scars etched across his arms. Others snaked up the side of his neck. Those weren’t the kind of scars you got from a whip. Those were from knives.
His gaze made her feel so tiny.
Finally he asked, “Did you know that they take young girls with the darkest skin they can find and burn them alive?”
She flinched. “What?”
But then the explanation rose to her mind, slow and dreadful, just as Chief Lien spelled it out aloud. “The Mugenese tell stories about you. They know what happened to the longbow island. They know it was a dark-skinned girl with red eyes. And they know you’re near.”
Of course they know. They’d massacred the Speerlies twenty years ago; surely the myth of the dark-skinned, red-eyed race who called fire still circulated in their younger generations. And certainly they’d heard whispers in the south. The Mugenese troops who could understand Nikara would have picked up on whispered stories of the goddess incarnate, the reason why they could never go home. They would have tortured to discover the details. They would have learned very quickly who they needed to target.
But they couldn’t find her, so they’d targeted anyone who might possibly look like her instead.
Guilt twisted in her stomach like a knife.
She heard the sudden noise of steel scraping against steel. She jumped and turned. The little girl, still sitting in the corner of the hut, had started fiddling with their weapons.
Chief Lien turned to look over his shoulder. “Don’t touch that.”
“She’s all right,” Souji said easily. “She ought to learn how to handle steel. You like that knife?”
“Yes,” said the girl, testing the blade’s balance on one finger.
“Keep it. You’ll need it.”
The girl peered up at them. “Are you soldiers?”
“Yes,” Souji said.
“Then why don’t you have uniforms?”
“Because we don’t have any money.” Souji gave her a toothy smile. “Would you like to sew us some uniforms?”
The girl ignored this question. “The Mugenese have uniforms.”
“That’s true.”
“So do they have more money than you?”
“Not if we and your baba have anything to do with it.” Souji turned back to Chief Lien. “Please, Chief. Just hear us out.”
Chief Lien shook his head. “I won’t risk the reprisals.”
“There won’t be reprisals—”
“How can you guarantee that?”
“Because everything they say about me is true,” Rin interrupted. Little arcs of flame danced around her arms and shoulders, just enough to cast long shadows across her face. To make her look utterly inhuman.
She saw a faint look of surprise flicker across Chief Lien’s face. She knew, despite the rumors, that until now he hadn’t really believed what she was. She could understand that. It was hard to believe in the gods, to truly believe, until they stared you in the face.
She’d made believers of the Mugenese. She’d make him believe, too.
“They’re killing those girls because they’re afraid,” she said. “They should be. I sank the longbow island. I can destroy everything around me in a fifty-yard radius. When we attack it won’t be like the previous attempts. There will be no chance of defeat and no reprisals, because I cannot lose. I have a god. I only need you to bring the civilians out of range. We’ll do the rest.”
Chief Lien’s jaw had lost its stubborn set. She’d won him over, she knew. She saw it in his eyes—for the first time, he was considering something other than compliance. He was thinking about how freedom might taste.
“You can ambush them at the northern border,” he said at last. “Not many civilians live up there, and we can evacuate the ones who do. The reeds would be tall enough to conceal you—you could fit about five hundred men in those fields alone. They won’t know you’re here until you choose to reveal yourselves.”
“Understood,” Souji said. “Thank you.”
“You’ll only have a bit of time to get in position. They send troops with dogs and staves every few hours to track anyone who might be hiding in the fields.”
“Combing their hair for lice,” said the girl. “That’s what they call it.”
“We’ll have to be clever lice, then,” Souji said. Relief shone clear on his face. This wasn’t a negotiation anymore; now it was just about logistics. “And do you know how many men they have?”
“About three thousand,” Chief Lien said.
“That’s very precise,” Rin said. “How do you know?”