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But something felt off. A niggling sensation chewed at her gut, a guilty compunction that only grew as the screams intensified and the bodies around her crumpled, blackened, and folded in on themselves.
She felt no rage. This had nothing to do with vengeance. These troops hadn’t done anything to her. She had no reason to hate them. This didn’t feel righteous, this just felt cruel.
Her flames sagged, then shrank back inside her.
What was wrong with her? It was usually so easy to sink into that rhapsodic space where rage met purpose. She’d never had to struggle to find anger before; she carried it around with her like a warm coal, forever burning.
She’d turned her fire on her fellow Nikara before. She’d done it easily at the Red Cliffs; she’d set entire ships aflame without thinking twice. But this was the first time she’d ever burned an enemy that hadn’t attacked her first.
This wasn’t self-defense or vengeance. This was plain, simple aggression.
But they chose this, she reminded herself. We gave them two chances to surrender, and they refused. They knew what I am. They dug their graves.
She reached deep into a dark pit inside her, and her column of fire burst forth anew, blazing this time with a wicked kind of energy.
She wielded now a different fire; a fiercer, hungrier fire; one that wanted to burn not as a reaction to fear and pain, but with a rage that sprang from power. The fury of being disrespected, of being defied.
This fire felt hotter. Darker.
Rin realized with a shudder that she rather liked this feeling.
She was as close to invincible as humans could get, and Jinzhou was about to fall into her lap.
Never grow cocky, Irjah had been so fond of repeating. True warfare never goes according to plan.
Oh, but it did, when the powers at play were this unbalanced, for even the inevitability of chance could not undo the infinite disparity between gods and men. She watched the battle unfold, mapping perfectly onto the chessboard in her mind’s eye. Pieces toppled with the push of a finger, all because she’d willed them to. Cities shattered.
It took her a long moment to notice that the clang of steel had long since died down, that no one was shooting at her, that no one was charging forward. Only when she called the flames away did she see the white flags, now blackened at the edges, waving from every door of every building. The city had surrendered to the Southern Army long ago. The only one still fighting was her.
The battle had ended barely an hour after it had begun. Rin accepted Jinzhou’s surrender, and her soldiers switched from the frenzied rush of battle to the somber business of occupation. Yet even as order was restored to the city, the ground continued to shake, rocked by a series of faraway booms that reverberated so strongly that Rin’s teeth shook in her skull.
Dulin had lost control.
But she had expected this. This was the worst, and likeliest, outcome. She’d prepared for it. If Dulin couldn’t summon the awareness to calm his mind with opium, she’d force it into him.
She turned on her heel and dashed back through the charred city toward the open wall. Her flames flickered and disappeared—she was too panicked to focus on rage now—but no one bothered attacking her. Civilians and soldiers on both sides were all fleeing the shuddering city, dodging and weaving as great chunks of stone tore from the sides of buildings and smashed into the dirt.
The booms grew louder. Great crevices started ripping through the earth like gaping wounds left by some invisible beast. Rin saw two men in front of her disappear, screaming, as the ground opened up beneath them. For the first time on this campaign, a dagger of fear broke through her calm. The Great Tortoise had gotten a taste of freedom. It wanted more. If this continued, Dulin would put the entire city into the earth.
But miraculously, the ground seemed calmer the closer Rin got to the eastern wall. She realized the tremors were spreading out in a circular pattern, and the damage rippled out inversely, gaining destruction rather than fading at larger diameters. But the epicenter—the ground under Dulin’s feet—was calm.
Of course. The Great Tortoise wanted liberation. It wanted to see the sky. It might bury everything in its vicinity, but it would not bury its mortal host.
Dulin was bent over where she’d left him, hands clutching at his head as he screamed. Rin spied Pipaji crouched several yards away, half kneeling like she couldn’t decide whether or not to spring at him. Her eyes widened when she saw Rin. “Should I—”
“Not yet.” Rin pushed her out of the way. “Get back.”
Dulin’s thrashing meant that he was still fighting. The Great Tortoise hadn’t yet won; she could still bring him back. She fleetingly considered trying to shout him down, the way Altan had done for Suni so many times.
But Jinzhou was crumbling. She didn’t have the time.
She ran forward, lowered her head, and tackled him at the waist.
He hit the ground with no resistance. Rin had forgotten how weak he really was, a spindly adolescent who’d been chronically malnourished over many months. He flailed beneath her, but to no avail; she held him still using only her knees.
The rumbling grew louder. She heard another ear-splitting crash from within the city boundaries. Another building had just gone down. She fumbled hastily in her back pocket for the opium pouch, ripped it open with her teeth, and shook its contents out onto the dirt.
Dulin arched his back, twisting beneath her. Dreadful gargling sounds escaped his throat. His eyes flitted back and forth, alternating brown and shiny black every time he blinked.
“Hold still,” she hissed.
His eyes fixed on hers. She felt a flutter of fear as something ancient and alien bore into her soul. Dulin’s features contorted in an expression of absolute terror, and he began rasping out guttural words in no language she could recognize.
Rin snatched the nuggets off the dirt and shoved them all in his mouth.
His eyes bulged. She lurched forward and clamped her hand tight over his mouth, clenching his jaw shut as best she could. Dulin struggled but Rin squeezed harder, pressing her stump against his neck for leverage, until at last she saw his throat bob. Several minutes later, once the opium had seeped into his bloodstream, the earth at last fell silent.
Rin let go of Dulin’s jaw and reached under his neck to feel for his pulse. Faint, but insistent. His chest was still rising and falling. Good—she hadn’t choked him to death.
“Get Lianhua,” she called to a cowering Pipaji. Foam bubbled out the sides of Dulin’s clammy lips, and Rin wondered vaguely how quickly opium poisoning could kill a person. “Be quick.”
As Jinzhou was falling, its city magistrate had realized that defeat likely meant death, so he’d fled out the back gates concealed under pig carcasses in a livestock cart. He left his pregnant wife and three children behind, barricaded in the inner chamber of their mansion, where several hours later they were found suffocated under collapsed rubble.
Rin learned all this as her troops took swift, efficient command of the city.
“Everyone we’ve interrogated confirms he’s heading east,” said Commander Miragha. She was a brutally efficient young woman, one of Cholang’s subordinates from Dog Province, and she’d rapidly become one of Rin’s most capable officers. “He’s got allies in the next province over. What do you want to do?”
