The Burning God Page 2

  Her throbbing wrist wasn’t the problem, just the symptom. She was searching for something, anything to go wrong. Their position could have been compromised. The Mugenese could know they were coming.

  Or they might simply lose.

  She hadn’t dealt with defenses this good before. The Mugenese at Khudla knew Rin’s troops were coming; their guard had been up for days. And they were primed to fear nighttime attacks now, even though most ambushing forces wouldn’t dare launch such a tricky operation without adequate light. This would be no easy, devastating raid.

  But Rin couldn’t fail today.

  Khudla was a test. She’d been begging the Monkey Warlord for a command position ever since they’d escaped Arlong, only to be told over and over that she couldn’t lead entire columns into battle until she had the experience. Today, at last, he’d put her in charge.

  Liberating Khudla was her mission, and hers alone. Until now she’d been fighting like a unit of one, a juggernaut of fire that the Southern Coalition threw into battles like a wide-range missile. Now she was leading a brigade of hundreds.

  These soldiers fought under her command. That terrified her. What if they died under her command?

  “We have this down like clockwork. The guard changes every thirty minutes,” Kitay said. They’d been over this a dozen times before, but he was repeating it to calm her down. “You’ll know when the voices change. Get as close as you can before sunset, and then hit during the transition. Do you know the signals?”

  She took a deep breath. “Yes.”

  “Then you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  If only saying it made it so.

  The minutes crawled past. Rin watched the sun dipping toward the mountains, dropping reluctantly, as if dragged downward by some creature in the valley below.

  After Rin had raised the Phoenix on the Isle of Speer and ended the Third Poppy War, there was no formal surrender by the Federation of Mugen. Emperor Ryohai and his progeny were turned instantly into charcoal statues under mountains of ash. No one in the Mugenese imperial family survived to negotiate for peace.

  So there had been no armistice, no treaty. No Mugenese generals provided a map of their troop placements and turned their weapons over to the Nikara leadership. Instead, all remaining Federation soldiers on the mainland became rogue threats—highly skilled roving soldiers without mission or nation. Yin Vaisra, the former Dragon Warlord and newly elected President of the Nikara Republic, could have dealt conclusively with them months ago, but he’d let them roam free to undercut his own allies in a long-term ploy to strengthen his grasp on the crumbling Nikara Empire. Now those scattered platoons had organized into several large independent bands terrorizing the south. For all intents and purposes, the Nikara and the Mugenese remained at war. Even without support from the longbow island, the Mugenese had essentially colonized the south in a matter of months. And Rin had let them, obsessed as she’d been with Vaisra’s insurrection while the real war was being fought at home.

  She’d failed the south once. She wouldn’t do it again.

  “Kazuo says the ships are still coming,” spoke a voice in Mugini. It was a boy’s voice, thin and reedy.

  “Kazuo is a fucking idiot,” said his companion.

  Rin and Kitay crouched hidden behind the tall grass. They’d crept close enough to the Mugenese camp that they could hear patrolmen gossiping idly, their hushed voices traveling far over still night air. Still, Rin’s Mugini was rusty from more than a year of disuse, and she had to strain her ears to understand what they were saying.

  “This language is like insect chitter,” Nezha had once complained, back when they’d been stupid young children crammed into a classroom at Sinegard, when they had yet to realize that the war they were training to fight wasn’t hypothetical.

  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 star-gazing. 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.