The Poppy War (The Poppy War Trilogy #1)
The Poppy War: Part 2 – Chapter 16

Hours later Rin finally received permission to leave the triage center. She stumbled back toward the Cike’s quarters, hollow-eyed and light-headed from sleep deprivation. Once she checked in with Altan, she intended to collapse in her bunk and sleep until someone forced her out to report for duty.

“Enki finally let you off?”

She glanced over her shoulder.

Unegen and Baji rounded the corner, coming back from patrol. They joined her as she walked down the eerily empty streets. The Warlords had imposed martial law on the city; civilians had a strict curfew now, no longer allowed to venture beyond their block without Militia permission.

“I’m to be back in six hours,” she said. “You?”

“Nonstop patrol until something more interesting happens,” said Unegen. “Did Enki get the casualty count?”

“Six hundred dead,” she said. “A thousand wounded. Fifty division soldiers. The rest civilians.”

“Shit,” Unegen muttered.

“Yeah,” she said listlessly.

“The Warlords are just sitting on their hands,” Baji complained. “The bombs scared the wits out of them. Fucking useless. Don’t they see? We can’t just absorb the attack. We’ve got to strike back.”

“Strike back?” Rin repeated. The very idea sounded halfhearted, disrespectful, and pointless. All she wanted to do was curl up in a ball and hold her hands over her ears and pretend nothing was happening. Leave this war to someone else.

“What are we supposed to do?” Unegen was saying. “The Warlords won’t attack, and we’ll get slaughtered on the open field ourselves.”

“We can’t just wait for the Seventh, they’ll take weeks—”

They approached headquarters just as Qara stepped out of Altan’s office. She closed the door delicately behind her, noticed them, and her face froze.

Baji and Unegen stopped walking. The heavy silence that transpired seemed to contain some unspoken message that everyone but Rin understood.

“It’s like that, huh?” Unegen asked.

“It’s worse,” said Qara.

“What’s going on?” Rin asked. “Is he in there?”

Qara looked warily at her. For some reason she smelled overwhelmingly of smoke. Her expression was unreadable. Rin might have seen tear tracks glistening on her cheek, or it might have been a trick of the lamplight.

“He’s indisposed,” Qara said.

The Federation’s retaliation did not end with the bombing.

Two days after the downtown explosions, the Federation sent bilingual agents to negotiate with starving fishermen in the town of Zhabei, just south of Khurdalain, and told them the Mugenese would clear their boats from the dock if the fishermen collected all the stray cats and dogs in the town for them.

Only starving civilians would have obeyed such a bizarre order. The fishermen were desperate, and they handed over every last stray animal they could replace without question.

The Federation soldiers tied kindling to the animals’ tails and lit them on fire. Then they set them loose in Zhabei.

The ensuing flames burned for three days before rainfall finally extinguished them. When the smoke cleared, nothing remained of Zhabei but ashes.

Thousands of civilians were left homeless overnight, and the refugee problem in Khurdalain became unmanageable. The men, women, and children of Zhabei crammed into the shrinking parts of the city that were not yet under Federation occupation. Poor hygiene, lack of clean water, and an outbreak of cholera made the civilian districts a nightmare.

Popular sentiment turned against the Militia. The First, Fifth, and Eighth Divisions attempted to maintain martial rule, only to meet open defiance and riots.

The Warlords, desperately needing a scapegoat, publicly blamed their reversals of fortune on Altan. It helped them that the bombing shattered his credibility as a commander. He had won his first combat victory, only to have it ripped from him and turned into a tragic defeat, an example of the consequences of acting without thinking.

When Altan finally emerged from his office, he seemed to take it in stride. No one made mention of his absence; the Cike seemed to collectively pretend that nothing had happened at all. He showed no signs of insecurity—if anything, his behavior become almost manic.

“So we’re back where we started,” he said, pacing rapidly about his office. “Fine. We’ll fight back. Next time we’ll be thorough. Next time we’ll win.”

He planned far more operations than they could ever feasibly carry out. But the Cike were not historically soldiers, they were assassins. The battle at the marsh had been an unprecedented feat of teamwork for them; they were trained to take out crucial targets, not entire battalions. Yet assassinations did not go far in winning wars. The Federation was not like a snake, to be vanquished by cutting off the head. If a general was killed in his camp, a colonel was immediately promoted in his place. For the Cike to go about their business as usual, conducting one assassination after another, would have been a slow and inefficient way of waging a war.

So Altan used his soldiers like a guerrilla strike force instead. They stole supplies, waged hit-and-run attacks, and caused as much disruption as they could in enemy camps.

“I want the entire intersection sealed off,” Altan declared, drawing a large circle on the map. “Sandbags. Barbed wire. We need to minimize all points of entry within the next twenty-four hours. I want this warehouse back.”

“We can’t do that,” Baji said uneasily.

“Why not?” Altan snapped. A vein pulsed in his neck; dark circles ringed his eyes. Rin didn’t think he had slept in days.

“Because they’ve got a thousand men right in that circle. It’s impossible.”

Altan examined the map. “For normal soldiers, maybe. But we have gods. They can’t defeat us on an open field.”

“They can if there are a thousand of them.” Baji stood up, pushing his chair back with a screech. “The confidence is touching, Trengsin, but this is a suicide mission.”

“I’m not being—”

“We have eight soldiers. Qara and Unegen haven’t slept in days, Suni is one bad trip away from the Stone Mountain, and Ramsa still hasn’t gotten his wits back from that explosion. Maybe we could do this with Chaghan, but I suppose wherever you’ve sent him matters more—”

The brush snapped in Altan’s hand. “Are you contradicting me?”

“I’m pointing out your delusions.” Baji pushed his chair to the side and slung his rake over his back. “You’re a good commander, Trengsin, and I’ll take the risks I’m asked to take, but I’ll only obey commands that make some fucking sense. This doesn’t even come close.”

He stormed out of the office.

Even the operations that they did execute had a fatalistic, desperate air to them. For every bomb they planted, for every camp they set fire to, Rin suspected they were only annoying disturbances to the Federation. Though Qara and Unegen delivered valuable intelligence, the Fifth refused to act on it. And all the disruption Suni, Baji, and Ramsa together could create was only a drop in a bucket compared to the massive encampment that grew steadily larger as more and more ships unloaded troops on the coast.

The Cike were stretched to their limit, especially Rin. Each moment not spent on an operation was spent on patrol. And when she was off duty, she trained with Altan.

But those sessions had come to a standstill. She made rapid progress with her sword, disarming Altan almost as often as he disarmed her, but she came no closer to calling the Phoenix than she had on the marsh.

“I don’t understand,” Altan said. “You’ve done this before. You did this at Sinegard. What’s stopping you?”

Rin knew what the problem was, though she couldn’t admit it.

She was afraid.

Afraid that the power would consume her. Afraid she might rip a hole into the void, like Jiang had, and that she would disappear into the very power that she had called. Despite what Altan had told her, she could not just ignore two years of Jiang’s teachings.

And as if she could sense her fear, the Speerly Woman became more and more vivid each time Rin meditated. Rin could see details now she hadn’t seen before; cracks in her skin like she had been smashed apart and then put back together, burn scars where piece met piece.

“Don’t give in,” the Woman said. “You’ve been so brave . . . but it takes more bravery to resist the power. That boy couldn’t do it, and you are so close to giving in . . . but that’s what it wants, that’s precisely what it’s planned.”

“Gods don’t want anything,” said Rin. “They’re just forces. Powers to be tapped. How can it be wrong to use what exists in nature?”

“Not this god,” said the Woman. “The nature of this god is to destroy. The nature of this god is to be greedy, to never be satisfied with what he has consumed. Be careful . . .”

Light streamed through the cracks in the Speerly Woman, as if she were being illuminated from within. Her face twisted in pain and then she disappeared, shattering the space in the void.

As downtown warfare took a greater toll on civilian life, the city was permeated with an atmosphere of intense suspicion. Two weeks after the saltpeter explosion, six Nikara farmers were sentenced to death by Jun’s men for spying on behalf of the Federation. Likely they had been promised safe passage out of the besieged city if they provided valuable snippets of information. That, or they simply needed to feed themselves. Either way, thousands of fishermen, women, and children watched with a mixture of glee and disgust as Jun took their heads off in public, spiked them on poles, and placed them on display along the tall outer walls.

The vigilante justice the civilians inflicted on one another was greater—and more vicious—than anything the Militia could enforce. When rumors abounded that the Federation was planning to poison the central city water supply, armed bands of men with clubs stalked the streets, stopping and searching individuals at random. Anyone with a powdery substance was beaten severely. In the end, division soldiers had to intervene to save a group of merchants delivering herbs to the hospital from being torn apart by a crowd.

As the weeks dragged on, Altan’s shoulders became stooped, his face lined and haggard. His eyes were now permanently ringed with shadows. He hardly slept; he stopped working far later than any of them and was up earlier. He took his rest in short, fretful shifts, if at all.

He spent many hours frantically pacing the walled fortifications himself, watching the horizon for any sign of Federation movement, as if willing the next assault to happen so that he could fight the entire Federation army by himself.

Once when Rin walked into his office to submit an intelligence report, she found him asleep on his desk. His cheek had ink on it; it was pressed against war plans that he had been deliberating over for hours. His shoulders were slumped on the wooden surface. In sleep, the tense lines that normally arrested his face were gone, bringing his age down at least five years.

She always forgot how young he was.

He looked so vulnerable.

He smelled like smoke.

She couldn’t help herself. She stretched out a hand and touched him tentatively on the shoulder.

He sat up immediately. One hand flew instinctively to a dagger at his waist, the other shot out in front of him, igniting instantaneously. Rin took a quick step backward.

Altan took several panicked breaths before he saw Rin.

“It’s just me,” she said.

His chest rose and fell, and then his breathing slowed. She thought she had seen fear in his eyes, but then he swallowed and an impassive mask slid over his face.

His pupils were oddly constricted.

“I don’t know,” he said after a long moment. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Nobody does, she wanted to say, but she was interrupted by the loud ringing of a signal gong.

Someone was at the gates.

Qara was already standing sentry over the west wall when they climbed the stairs.

“They’re here,” she said simply before Altan could ask.

Rin leaned over the wall to see an army riding slowly up to the gates. It had to be a force of no less than two thousand. She was anxious at first, until she saw that they were clad in Nikara armor. At the front of the column flew a Nikara banner, the symbol of the Red Emperor above the emblems of the Twelve Warlords.

Reinforcements.

Rin refused to allow herself to hope. It couldn’t be.

“Possibly it’s a trap,” said Altan.

But Rin was looking past the flag at a face in the ranks—a boy, a beautiful boy with the palest skin and lovely almond eyes, walking on his own two legs as if his spine had never been severed. As if he had never been impaled on a general’s halberd.

As if he could sense her gaze, Nezha looked up.

Their eyes met under the moonlight. Rin’s heart leaped.

The Dragon Warlord had responded to the call. The Seventh Division was here.

“That’s not a trap,” she said.