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They camped outside Jinzhou’s walls for a while, passing the spyglass back and forth as they waited for their delegation to return. Minutes passed, then hours. After a while Rin got bored and went back inside her tent, where her recruits sat in a circle on the floor, waiting for the summons.
“They’re not going to surrender,” she told them. “Everyone ready?”
Lianhua chewed her bottom lip. Dulin was shaking; he kept rubbing his elbows as if he were freezing. They looked so much like nervous Sinegard students about to take an exam that Rin couldn’t help but feel a small flicker of amusement. Only Pipaji looked completely and utterly calm, sitting back against the wall with her arms crossed as if she were a patron at a teahouse waiting to be served.
“Remember, it’s different when there are bodies,” Rin said. They’d discussed many times by now how everything changed in the heat of battle, how the safe predictability of practice in no way resembled actual warfare, but she wanted to drill it into their skulls again. She wanted it to be the last thing on their minds before they saw combat. “The blood will startle you. And it gets much harder when you hear the screams. The gods get excited. They’re like wild dogs sniffing for fear—once they get a whiff of chaos, they’ll try much harder to take over.”
“We’ve all seen bodies,” Pipaji said.
“It’s different when you’re the one who broke them,” Rin said.
Dulin blanched.
“I’m not trying to scare you,” Rin said quickly. “I just want you on guard. But you can do this. You’ve practiced this, you know what to expect, and you’ll stay in control. What do you do if you feel the god taking over?”
They chanted in unison like schoolchildren. “Chew the nuggets.”
Each of them carried enough opium for a fatal overdose in their pockets. They knew precisely how much to swallow to knock themselves unconscious.
“And what do you do if your comrades are out of control?”
Pipaji flexed her fingers. “Deal with them before they deal with us.”
“Good girl,” Rin said.
The door swung open. All of them jumped.
It was a scout. “Jinzhou’s sent word, General. No surrender.”
“More’s their loss.” Rin motioned for them to stand. “Let’s go show them what you can do.”
At Sinegard, Strategy Master Irjah had once taught Rin’s second-year class how to play an ancient game called shaqqi. He’d made them play plenty of common strategy games before—wikki for foresight and decisiveness, mahjong for diplomacy and exploiting information asymmetry. But shaqqi wasn’t a game Rin had ever encountered before. Its list of basic rules went on for three booklets, and that didn’t include the many supplemental scrolls that dictated standard opening maneuvers.
Kitay was the only one in the class who had even played shaqqi, so Master Irjah chose him to help demonstrate. They spent the first twenty minutes drawing random tiles determining their share of pieces representing troops, equipment, weaponry, and terrain allocations. When all the pieces were finally on the map, Master Irjah and Kitay had sat opposite each other with their eyes trained on the board. Neither of them spoke. The rest of the class watched, increasingly bored and irritated as the face-off stretched on for nearly an hour.
At long last, Kitay had sighed, tipped his emperor piece over with one finger, and shook his head.
“What’s going on?” Nezha had demanded. “You didn’t even play.”
But they had played. Rin had only realized that near the last five minutes of the game. The entire match had taken place through silent mental calculations, both sides considering the balance of power created by their randomly assigned lots. Kitay had eventually come to the conclusion that he couldn’t possibly win.
“Warfare rarely works this way,” Irjah had lectured as he scooped up the pieces. “In real battle, the fog of war—friction, that is—overrides everything else. Even the best-laid plans fall victim to accident and chance. Only idiots think warfare is a simple matter of clever stratagems.”
“Then what’s the point of this game?” Venka had complained.
“That asymmetries do matter,” Irjah said. “Underdogs can often find a way out, but not always. Particularly not if the side with the upper hand has anticipated, as well as is possible given the information at hand, everything that could go wrong. Because then it becomes an issue of winning in the most elegant, confident way possible. You learn to close off every possible exit. You foresee all the ways they could try to upset your advantage, and you must do it all ahead of time. On the flip side, sometimes you have no possible path to victory. Sometimes engaging in battle means suicide. It’s important to know when. That’s the purpose of this game. The gameplay doesn’t matter half so much as the thinking exercise.”
“But what if the players don’t agree who has the advantage?” Nezha had asked. “If no one surrenders?”
“Then you play it out until someone does,” Irjah said. “But then it’s doubly embarrassing for the loser, who should have conceded from the outset. The point is to train your mind to see all the strategic possibilities at once so that you learn when you can’t win.”
Shaqqi, it turned out, had been the only strategy game that Rin never managed to grasp. They played many times in class throughout the year, but never could she bring herself to surrender. She’d played the role of the underdog since she could remember. It seemed so ludicrous to ever give up, to simply acknowledge defeat as if the future might not offer some chance, however slim, to reverse her fortunes. She’d been relying on those slim chances for her entire life.
But now, standing with her army outside Jinzhou’s city gates, she was on the other side of the table. Now she possessed the overwhelming advantage, and her puzzle was how one should leverage three people who could rewrite reality in a conventional battle without killing everyone around them.
Victory was already assured. Right now she only had to worry about the loose ends.
This was the sort of puzzle that Altan had been constantly trying to solve when he’d commanded the Cike. How did you win a game of chess when your pieces were the most freakishly powerful things on the board, and the opponent was only equipped with pawns? When the objective is no longer victory, but victory with the lowest casualty rates possible?
Rin and Kitay had agreed early on that the battle hinged on Dulin. Lianhua’s involvement was out of the question—they would keep her busy in the infirmary for days on end after the battle concluded, but she had no place on the battlefield. Pipaji was more lethal in close quarters, but Dulin had the wider range of impact. He could set off earthquakes and sinkholes in a ten-yard radius around him, whereas Pipaji had to enter deep into the fray to inflict her poison. That posed too great a risk—Rin needed Pipaji out of harm’s way until she reached Arlong.
But Rin was quite sure she could shatter Jinzhou’s resistance with Dulin alone.
“You get two major hits,” Rin told him. “Both right at the start of the fighting. Our opening salvos. They’ll think the first was a freak act of nature, or some very powerful conventional weapon. After the second, they’ll know we have a shaman. Beyond that point, our forces will have mixed too much for you to get in a discriminate hit.”
