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“I don’t have to be in the melee, though,” Dulin said. “I mean, couldn’t I just target the city?”
“And then what?” Kitay asked sharply. “You’ll massacre all the innocent civilians inside?”
Dulin’s cheeks colored. The thought had clearly never even crossed his mind. “I hadn’t—”
“I know you haven’t thought it through,” Kitay said. “But you’ve got to put your head back on straight. Just because you can alter the world on a ridiculous scale doesn’t mean the normal calculations no longer apply. If anything, you must now be doubly careful. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.” Dulin looked duly chastened. “Where do you want your sinkholes, then?”
“Jinzhou’s got six walls,” Kitay said. “Take your pick.”
One hour later, a squadron of fewer than fifty soldiers charged out from the forest toward Jinzhou’s western gate. Rin and Kitay waited in the trees with the rest of their army, watching through spyglasses as their troops rushed the high stone walls.
This first assault was a decoy. Jinzhou’s leadership had to understand what Rin could do. After the Battle of the Red Cliffs, her abilities were no longer a frightful rumor but a well-known fact. So if Jinzhou’s magistrate had rebuffed her offer of lenience for surrender, then he had to be very confident in his defenses against her fire. Rin wasn’t stupid enough to enter the fray until she knew what Jinzhou had up its sleeve.
It had been so easy to design a dummy probe. Shamanic fire was the simplest weapon to simulate. It only took seconds for fifty soldiers wielding torches, gunpowder, and oil-soaked flags to create a scorching wave of flame that, when caught by the wind, towered close to the heights that Rin could summon herself.
Jinzhou’s defenders responded seconds later. First came the standard volley of arrows. Then followed a thicker round of missiles—bombs that did not burst into balls of flame, but rather leaked a slow, greenish smoke as they hit the ground.
“Opium bombs,” Kitay observed. “Is that all they had?”
He looked disappointed. Rin, too, couldn’t help a fleeting sense of dismay. Jinzhou had refused negotiations with such confidence that Rin had seriously wondered, even hoped, that they could display some secret, innovative defense to back it up.
But instead, they’d merely signed their own death warrants.
The decoy squadron was breaking up. They were allowed to fall back—they’d only been charged with drawing out the artillery, not breaking Jinzhou’s defenses. The wave of fire disintegrated into dozens of individual torches, snuffed out as fleeing soldiers dropped them on the dirt.
The retreat looked messy, but those troops would be fine. They’d gone in prepared with cloth masks soaked in water. It wouldn’t keep the opium out for long, but it bought them sufficient time to scatter and retreat.
Rin turned to Dulin. He held his spyglass very still to his face. His right hand was curled in a fist, beating out an erratic pattern against his knee.
Battle nerves, Rin thought. Adorable. And she wished, just briefly, she were not so accustomed to war so that she could still feel that lurching, electrifying thrill of sheer nervous distress.
“Your turn,” she told him. “Let’s go.”
They broke out of the trees to meet with a hail of arrows. Jinzhou’s defenders hadn’t been foolish enough to imagine the probe constituted Rin’s entire attack. They’d fortified all six of their walls with artillerymen, and more rushed toward the eastern wall when Rin’s troops began pouring out the forest.
The southerners locked shields over their heads as they surged toward the gates in a clustered formation. Rin’s arm shook as arrow after arrow slammed into the inch of wood separating iron from skin. Then it went numb. She gritted her teeth and pushed forward, eyes locked on the great stone walls ahead. In training, she’d determined that Dulin could open a sinkhole from a distance of ten yards. Ninety yards to go.
A boom echoed ahead to her left. Blood and bone splattered the air; bodies hit the ground. Rin kept moving, stepping over the gore. Seventy yards.
“Holy shit,” Dulin whispered. “Holy shit, I can’t . . .”
“Shut up and move,” Rin said.
Fifty yards. Something shrieked overhead. They both ducked but kept running. The missile exploded behind them, accompanied by screams. Ten yards.
Rin halted. “Close enough for you?”
Troops locked their shields in a protective shell over Dulin as he stood still, eyes tightly shut. Rin watched his twitching face, waiting.
The seconds that followed felt like an eternity.
He’s too scared. She was suddenly anxious. He can’t focus, it’s too much . . . The missiles and arrows landing around them suddenly seemed so close. They’d been wildly fortunate, really, to have lasted so long without being hit. But now they were open, unmoving targets, and one of those volleys had to land eventually . . .
Then the ground shook, rippling in a way that soil was not supposed to move. The stone walls vibrated, which looked so absurd that Rin thought surely she must be the one shaking and not that massive structure, but then dust and pebbles poured down the walls in trickles that turned to torrents.
The wall came down.
It didn’t collapse. Didn’t implode. There was no messy, cascading collision of faults in stone shattering in a chain reaction, then crumbling under its own weight, the way a broken wall was supposed to fall. Instead, the ground beneath opened into a gaping maw. And the wall simply disappeared, taking the artillery line with it, exposing the city inside like a layer of flesh peeled away from pulsing organs.
The air was still. The firing had stopped.
Dulin sank dazed to his knees.
“Well done,” Rin told him.
He looked like he was about to vomit.
He’ll be fine, she thought. Break a few more cities, and it’ll feel routine. She didn’t have time to play wet nurse now; she had a city to conquer. She raised her left arm in the air in a signal to charge, and the Southern Army burst over the rubble through the missing wall.
Squadrons split off to the north and south to drive through Jinzhou’s defenses, while Rin alone took the center quadrant. She heard panicked shouting as she approached. As flames licked up her shoulders, she heard her targets screaming for reinforcements—high-pitched voices called over and over again for opium bombs—but it was too late. Far too late. They’d directed their opium missiles to the western wall, and by the time they brought them anywhere near her this battle would be finished.
All Jinzhou’s soldiers had now were their conventional weapons, and those were so miserably insufficient. Their sword hilts burned white-hot in their hands. Everything they hurled at her—arrows, spears, javelins—turned to ash in midair. No one could come within a ten-foot distance of her, for she was ensconced inside a searing, impenetrable column of flame.
They tumbled before her like sticks.
She tilted her head back, opened her mouth, and let fire rip forth through her throat.
Gods, this release felt good. She hadn’t realized how much she missed this. She’d reached such a delirious thrill on Mount Tianshan and then on the training grounds on the plateau, when she’d let the flames roar unrestrained through her body. Every waking moment since then had felt muted and muzzled. But now she got what she wanted—mindless, careless, untrammeled destruction.
