The Poppy War

by R. F. Kuang

  The Cike needed to force the fleet to the left.

  Altan lifted an arm and flicked his hand out as if releasing a whip. Tendrils of flame licked out from his hands, streaking in either direction like glowing snakes. Rin heard a short sizzling noise as the flame raced through the reeds.

  Then, with a high-pitched whistling noise, the first of Ramsa’s rockets erupted into the night sky.

  Ramsa had rigged the marsh so that each rocket’s ignition would light the next sequentially, granting several seconds of delay between explosions. They set the marsh ablaze with a horrifically pungent stink that overwhelmed even the sulfurous odor of the peat.

  “Tiger’s tits,” Altan muttered. “He wasn’t joking about the feces.”

  The explosions continued, a chain reaction of fire powder to simulate the noise and devastation of an army that didn’t exist. Bamboo bombs at the far end of the river erupted with what sounded like thunderclaps. A succession of smaller fire rockets exploded with resonant booms and enormous pillars of smoke; these did not catch fire, but served to confuse the Federation soldiers and obstruct their vision, so their boats could not see where they were going.

  The explosions goaded the Federation soldiers directly into the dead zone created by Aratsha. When the first flare went up, the Federation boats swerved rapidly away from the source of the explosions. The boats collided with one another, snarled together and crammed in the narrow creek as the fleet moved clumsily forward. The tall rice fields, unharvested since the siege had begun, forced the boats to clump together.

  Realizing his mistake, the Federation captain ordered his men to reverse direction, but panicked shouts echoed across the boats as the ships realized they could not move.

  The Federation was locked in.

  Time for the real attack.

  As fire rockets continued to shoot toward the Federation fleet, a series of flaming arrows screamed through the night sky and thudded into the cargo trunks. The volley of arrows came so rapidly that it seemed as if an entire squadron were concealed in the marshes, firing from different directions, but Rin knew that it was only Qara, safely ensconced on the opposite bank, firing with the blinding speed of a trained huntress from the Hinterlands.

  Next Qara took out the engineers. She punctured the forehead of every other man, tidily collapsing the man-made bridge with a surreal neatness.

  Assaulted from all sides by enemy fire, the Federation fleet began to burn.

  The Federation soldiers abandoned their flaming boats in a panic. They leaped for the bank, only to be bogged down in the muddy marsh. Men slipped and fell in paddy water that came up to their waists, filling up their heavy armor. Then, at a whisper from Altan, the reeds along the shore also burst into flame, surrounding the Federation like a death trap.

  Even so, some made it to the opposite bank. A throng of soldiers—ten, twenty—clambered onto dry land—only to run into Suni and Baji.

  Rin wondered how Suni and Baji intended to hold the entire strip of peat alone. They were only two, and from what she knew of their shamanic abilities, they couldn’t control a far-ranging element the way Altan or Aratsha could. Surely they were outnumbered.

  She shouldn’t have worried.

  They barreled through the soldiers like boulders crashing through a wheat field.

  In the dim light of Ramsa’s flares, Suni and Baji were a flurry of motion that evoked the flashing combat of a shadow puppetry show.

  They were so much the opposite of Altan. Altan fought with the practiced grace of a martial artist. Altan moved like a ribbon of smoke, like a dancer. But Baji and Suni were a study in brutality, paragons of sheer and untempered force. They utilized none of the economical forms of Seejin. Their only guiding principle was to smash everything in their vicinity—which they did with abandon, knocking men back off the shore as quickly as they clambered on.

  A Sinegard-trained martial artist was worth four Militia men. But Suni and Baji were each worth at least ten.

  Baji cut through bodies like a canteen cook chopping through vegetables. His absurd nine-pointed rake, unwieldy in the hands of any other soldier, became a death machine in Baji’s grip. He snagged sword blades between the nine prongs, locking three or four blades together before wrenching them out of his opponents’ grasps.

  His god had given him no apparent transformations, but he fought with a berserker’s rage, truly a wild boar in a bloodthirsty frenzy.

  Suni fought with no weapon at all. Already massive, he seemed to have grown to the size of a small giant, stretching up to well over ten feet. It shouldn’t have been possible for Suni to disarm men with steel swords as he did, but he was simply so terribly strong that his opponents were like children in comparison.

  As Rin watched, Suni grasped the heads of the two closest soldiers and smashed them against each other. They burst like ripe cantaloupes. Blood and brain matter splashed out, drenching Suni’s entire torso, but he hardly paused to wipe the gore from his face as he turned to smash his fist into another soldier’s head.

  Fur had sprouted from his arms and back that seemed to serve as an organic shield, repelling metal. A soldier jammed his spear into Suni’s back from behind, but the blade simply clattered off to the side. Suni turned around and bent slightly, placed his arms around the soldier’s head, and tore it clean off his body with such ease that he might have been twisting the lid off a jar.

  When he turned back to the marsh, Rin caught a glimpse of his eyes in the firelight. They were black all the way through.

  She shuddered. Those were the eyes of a beast. Whatever was fighting on the shore, that wasn’t Suni. That was some ancient entity, malevolent and gleeful, ecstatic to be given free rein to break men’s bodies like toys.

  “The other bank! Get to the other bank!”

  A clump of soldiers broke off from the jammed fleet and approached Altan and Rin’s shore in a desperate swarm.

  “We’re up, kiddo,” Altan said, and emerged from the reeds, trident spinning in his grasp.

  Rin scampered to her feet, then swayed when the effects of the poppy hit her like a club to the side of the head. She stumbled. She knew she was in a dangerous place. Unless she called the god, the poppy would only make her useless in battle, high and disoriented. But when she reached inside herself for the fire, she grasped nothing.

  She tried chanting in the old Speerly language. Altan had taught her the incantation. She didn’t understand the words; Altan barely understood them himself, but that didn’t matter. What mattered were the harsh sounds, the repetition of incantations that sounded like spitting. The language of Speer was primal, guttural, and savage. It sounded like a curse. It sounded like a condemnation.

  Still, it slowed her mind, brought her to the center of her swirling thoughts, and established a direct connection to the Pantheon above.

  But she didn’t feel herself tipping forward into the void. She heard no whooshing sound in her ears. She was not journeying upward. She reached inside herself, searching for the link to the Phoenix and . . . nothing. She felt nothing.

  Something soared through the air and embedded itself in the mud by Rin’s feet. She examined it with great difficulty, as if she were looking through a hazy fog. Finally, her drugged mind identified it as an arrow.

  The Federation was shooting back.

  She was faintly aware of Baji shouting at her from across the channel. She tried to shake away the distractions and direct her mind inward, but panic bubbled up in her chest. She couldn’t concentrate. She focused on everything at once: Qara’s birds, the incoming soldiers, the bodies getting closer and closer to the shore.

  Across the bay she heard an unearthly scream. Suni emitted a series of high-pitched shrieks like a deranged monkey, beat his fists against his chest, and howled up at the night sky.

  Beside him Baji threw his head back and boomed out a laugh, and that, too, sounded unnatural. He was too gleeful, more delighted than anyone in the midst of such carnage had the right to be. And Rin reali
zed that this wasn’t Baji laughing, this was the god in him that read spilled blood as worship.

  Baji lifted his foot and shoved the soldiers squarely into the water, toppling them over like dominoes; he sent them sprawling into the river, where they flailed and struggled against the soggy marsh.

  Who controlled whom? Was it the soldier who had called the god, or the god in the body of the soldier?

  She didn’t want to be possessed. She wanted to remain free.

  But the cognitive dissonance clashed in her head. Three sets of countervailing orders competed for priority in her mind—Jiang’s mandate to empty her mind, Altan’s insistence that she hone her anger as a razor blade, and her own fear of letting the fire rip through her again, because once it began she didn’t know how to stop it.

  But she couldn’t just stand there.

  Come on, come on . . . She reached for the flames and grasped nothing. She was stuck halfway to the Pantheon and halfway in the material world, unable to fully grasp either. She had lost all sense of balance; she was disoriented, navigating her body as if remotely from very far away.

  Something cold and clammy grasped at her ankles. Rin jumped back just as a soldier hauled himself out of the water. He sucked in air with hoarse gasps; he must have held his breath the entire length of the channel.

  He saw her, yelled, and fell backward.

  All she could register was how young he looked. He was not a hardened, trained soldier. This might have been his first combat engagement. He hadn’t even thought to draw his weapon.

  She advanced on him slowly, walking as if in a dream. Her sword hand felt foreign to her; it was someone else’s arm that brought the blade down, it was someone else’s foot that kicked the soldier down by his shoulder—

  He was faster than she thought; he swept out and kicked her kneecap, knocking her into the mud. Before she could react, he climbed over her, pinning her down with both knees.

  She looked up. Their eyes met.

  Naked fear was written across his face, round and soft like a child’s. He was barely taller than her. He couldn’t have been older than Ramsa.

  He fumbled with his knife, had to adjust it against his stomach to get a proper grip before he brought it down—

  Three metal prongs sprouted from above his collarbone, puncturing the place where his windpipe met his lungs. Blood bubbled from the corners of the soldier’s mouth. He splashed backward into the marsh.

  “Are you all right?” Altan asked.

  Before them the soldier flailed and gurgled pitifully. Altan had aimed two inches above his heart, robbed him of the mercy of an instant death and sentenced him to drown in his own blood.

  Rin nodded mutely, scrabbling in the mud for her sword.

  “Stay down,” he said. “And get back.”

  He pushed her behind him with more force than necessary. She stumbled against the reeds, then looked up just in time to see Altan light up like a torch.

  The effect was like a match struck to oil. Flames burst out of his chest, poured off his bare shoulders and back in streaming rivulets; surrounding him, protecting him. He was a living torch. His fire took the shape of a pair of massive wings that unfurled magnificently about him. Steam rose from the water in a five-foot radius from where Altan stood.

  She had to shield her eyes from him.

  This was a fully grown Speerly. This was a god in a man.

  Altan repelled the soldiers like a wave. They scrambled backward, preferring to take their chances on their burning boats rather than take on this terrifying apparition.

  Altan advanced on them, and the flesh sloughed off their bodies.

  She could not bear the sight of him and yet she could not tear her eyes away.

  Rin wondered if this was how she had burned at Sinegard.

  But surely in that moment, with the flames ripping out of every orifice, she had not been so wonderfully graceful. When Altan moved, his fiery wings swirled and dipped as a reflection of him, sweeping indiscriminately across the flotilla and setting things freshly aflame.

  It made sense, she thought wildly, that the Cike became living manifestations of their gods.

  When Jiang had taught her to access the Pantheon, he had only ever taught her to kneel before the deities.

  But the Cike pulled them down with them back into the world of mortals, and when they did, they were destructive and chaotic and terrible. When the shamans of the Cike prayed, they were not requesting that the gods do things for them so much as they were begging the gods to act through them; when they opened their minds to the heavens they became vessels for their chosen deities to inhabit.

  The more Altan moved, the brighter he burned, as if the Phoenix itself were slowly burning through him to breach the divide between the world of dreaming and the material world. Any arrows that flew in his direction were rendered useless by roiling flames, flung to the side to sizzle dully in the marshy waters.

  Rin was half-afraid that Altan would burn away altogether, until there was nothing but the fire.

  In that moment she found it impossible to believe that the Speerlies could have been massacred. What a marvel the Speerly army must have been. A full regiment of warriors who burned with the same glory as Altan . . . how had anyone ever killed that race off? One Speerly was a terror; a thousand should have been unstoppable. They should have been able to burn down the world.

  Whatever weaponry they had used then, the Federation soldiers were not so powerful now. Their fleet was at every possible disadvantage: trapped on all sides, with fire to their backs, a muddy marsh under their feet, and veritable gods guarding the only strips of solid land in sight.

  The jammed boats had begun to burn in earnest; the crates of uniforms, blankets, and medicine smoldered and crackled, emitting thick streams of smoke that cloaked the marsh in an impenetrable shroud. The soldiers on the boats doubled over, choking, and the ones who huddled uncertainly in the shallow water began to scream, for the water had begun to boil under the heat of the blazing inferno.

  It was utter carnage. It was beautiful.

  Altan’s plan had been brilliant in conception. Under normal circumstances, a squad of eight could not hope to stand a chance against such massive odds. But Altan had chosen a battlefield where every single one of the Federation advantages was negated by their surroundings, and the Cike’s advantages were amplified.

  What it came down to was that the smallest division of the Militia had brought down an entire fleet.

  Altan didn’t break balance when he strode onto the boat at the fore. He adjusted to the tilting floor so gracefully he might have been walking on solid ground. While the Federation soldiers flailed and reeled away, he flashed his trident out and out again, eliciting blood and silencing cries each time.

  They clambered and fell before him like worshippers. He cut them down like reeds.

  They splashed into the water, and the screams became louder. Rin saw them boil to death before her very eyes, skin scalded bubbling red like crab shells, and then bursting; cooked inside and out, eyes bulging in their death throes.

  She had fought at Sinegard; she had incinerated a general with her own flames, but in that moment she could barely comprehend the casual destruction that Altan wrought. He fought on a scale that should not be human.

  Only the captain of the fleet did not scream, did not jump into the water to escape him, but stood as erect and proud as if he were back on his ship, not in the burning wreckage of his fleet.

  The captain withdrew his sword slowly and held it out before him.

  He could not possibly defeat Altan in combat, but Rin found it strangely honorable that he was going to try.

  The captain’s lips moved rapidly, as if he was muttering an incantation to the darkness. Rin half wondered whether the captain was a shaman himself, but when she parsed out his frantic Mugini she realized he was praying.

  “I am nothing to the glory that is the Emperor. By his favor I am made clean. By his grace I am given purpose. I
t is an honor to serve. It is an honor to live. It is an honor to die. For Ryohai. For Ryohai. For—”

  Altan stepped lightly across the charred helm. Flames licked around his legs, engulfed him, but they could not hurt him.

  The captain lifted his sword to his neck.

  Altan lunged forward at the last moment, suddenly aware of what the captain meant to do, but he was too far to reach.

  The captain drew the blade to the side in a sharp sawing motion. His eyes met Altan’s, and a moment before the life dimmed from them, Rin thought she saw a glimmer of victory. Then his corpse slumped into the bog.

  When Aratsha’s power gave out, the wreckage that drifted back out into the Nariin Sea was a smoldering mess of charred boats, useless supplies, and broken men.

  Altan called for a retreat before the Federation soldiers could regroup. Far more soldiers had escaped than they had killed, but their aim had never been to destroy the army. Sinking the supplies was enough.

  Not all of the supplies, though. In the confusion of the melee, Unegen and Qara had detached two boats from the rear and hidden them in an inland canal. They boarded these now, and Aratsha spirited them through the narrow canals of Khurdalain into a downtown nook not far from the wharf.

  Ramsa ran up to them when they returned.

  “Did it work?” he demanded. “Did the flares work?”

  “Lit up like a charm. Nice work, kid,” Altan said.

  Ramsa gave a hoot of victory. Altan clapped him on the shoulder, and Ramsa beamed widely. Rin could read it clearly on Ramsa’s face: he adored Altan like an older brother.

  It was hard not to feel the same. Altan was so solemnly competent, so casually brilliant, that all she wanted was to please him. He was strict in his command, sparing with his praise, but when he gave it, it felt wonderful. She wanted it, craved it like something tangible.

  Next time. Next time she wouldn’t be deadweight. She would learn to channel that anger at will, even if she risked losing herself to it.