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This is how we win the south, she thought as her surroundings dissolved into a blurry wave of heat. That made it easier to keep going. She couldn’t see faces, couldn’t see the pain. All she saw were shapes. Not with our blades, but our bodies.
They would take back the south with sheer numbers. The Mugenese and the Republic were strong, but the south was many. And if southerners were dirt like all the legends said, then they would crush their enemies with the overwhelming force of the earth until they could only dream of breathing. They would bury them with their bodies. They would drown them in their blood.
Chapter 6
After that, it was just cleanup.
Rin walked dazedly through the sorghum fields, razed now to a level sheet of dark gray ash. Smoke curled out of her clothes in lazy, indolent spirals. She hadn’t touched opium since they’d set out on this march. But she was high now on a familiar euphoria, an exhilarating buzz that started in her fingertips and thrummed through her chest to her heart.
In Tikany, summer season was always overrun with ants. The vicious red creatures were driven into a frenzy by the dry heat, attacking whatever small children and animals crossed their paths. One bite alone raised a welt; a dozen could be fatal. The villagers retaliated with acid, using long poles to tip jars onto the anthills from a distance. Rin remembered how as a child she would crouch by the ground with empty jars in hand, squinting as destroyed civilizations frothed and burned under the sunlight.
She’d always lingered too long. She liked to listen to the acid hissing as it burrowed into the ants’ deepest tunnels. Liked to see the ants pouring frantically out the top, fleeing straight into the pools of acid she’d laid carefully in a ring around the nest. Liked to watch their little legs wiggle as they frothed and dissolved.
She felt a similar kind of pleasure now, the sadistic glee of watching lives evaporate and knowing she’d done it. Of knowing she had that power.
What is wrong with me?
She felt the same bizarre, confused elation that’d come over her when she’d poisoned Ma Lien. This time she didn’t push it away. She drank it in. Her power was derived from rage, and what she felt now was the other side of the coin—vengeance fulfilled.
Leiyang hadn’t been completely lost. When Rin’s soldiers searched the ruins for any civilians with breath left in their lungs, they found that the rate of survival was surprisingly high. The Mugenese attackers had been careless, acting from a frenzied panic rather than a calculated cruelty. They’d slammed steel haphazardly into any exposed flesh they saw instead of aiming for vital organs as they should have.
Leiyang the township was dead. Chief Lien’s people couldn’t live here any longer. Their numbers were too few; their homes and belongings were destroyed. They’d have to march south with Rin’s army to seek new homes, would have to see their numbers cannibalized into whatever villages would take them.
But Leiyang’s survivors were free. That, at least, was worth it.
Qinen, by some miracle, had made it out alive. Rin went to see him the moment she heard he was conscious.
The Southern Coalition’s handful of physicians had set up a triage center in a butchery, one of the few structures in Leiyang’s city center that hadn’t burned to the ground. They’d sanitized the structurally intact interior to the best of their ability, but couldn’t scourge the taint of burned pig intestines. By the end of the day the air was thick with the hot, tangy smell of blood, human and animal alike.
Rin found Qinen lying on a sheet outdoors, where the physicians had sent every patient not under immediate surgery. He looked awful. The burns that covered the right side of his body had twisted the skin on his face so badly that he could only speak in a hoarse, garbled whisper. His eyes were open but swollen, his right eye covered by a filmy white layer. Rin wasn’t sure that he could see her until his face broke into an awful, painful smile.
“I’m sorry—” she started, but he reached out and seized her wrist with a force that surprised her.
“I told you,” he rasped. “I told you we’d fight.”
Qinen’s band of resistance fighters hadn’t been acting alone. Similar organizations had existed all throughout the Beehive. This Rin discovered when, one by one, the villages clustered around Leiyang began to liberate themselves with startling speed.
Without the central leadership at Leiyang, the remaining ranks of Mugenese soldiers were isolated, cut off from all communications, resources, or reinforcements. Villagers armed with knives and plows now stood a fighting chance. Reports began flooding in about the villagers all throughout Rooster Province rising up, taking up arms, and purging their villages of their former rulers.
After Rin sent squadrons of Zhuden’s troops throughout the Beehive to speed up the process, the battle for the surrounding area took no more than two weeks. Some Mugenese troops put up a fight and went down in explosions of fire, yellow gas, steel, and blood. Others took their chances and surrendered, begging for exile or leniency, and were invariably executed by village committees.
When Rin toured the Beehive, she found herself witness to a wave of violence sweeping across the province.
In some hamlets, the civilians had already decapitated their Mugenese guards and strung their heads upside down along the town gates like a welcoming display of holiday lanterns. In other villages, Rin arrived while the executions were ongoing. These were drawn out over a period of days, a twisted parade whose centerpiece entertainment was an orgy of violence.
The sheer creativity astounded her. The liberated southerners marched the Mugenese naked in chains along the streets while onlookers reached out with knives to slice their flesh. They forced the Mugenese to kneel for hours on broken bricks with millstones hung around their necks. They buried the Mugenese alive, dismembered them, shot them, throttled them, and threw their bodies into dirty, rotting piles.
The victims were not limited to Mugenese troops. The victorious liberators’ harshest punishments fell on the collaborators—the magistrates, merchants, and delegates who had succumbed to Federation rule. In one village three miles south of Leiyang, Rin stumbled upon a public ceremony where three men were tied to posts, naked and gagged with rags to muffle their screams. In the corner, two women held long knives over a barrel fire. The blades glowed a vicious orange.
Rin could guess this would end in castration.
She turned to Souji. “Do you know what those men did?”
“Sure,” he said. “Traded girls.”
“They—what?”
He spelled it out for her. “They struck a deal to stop the Mugenese from grabbing women off the street. Every day they’d take a few women—usually the poor ones, or the orphans, who had no one to fight for them—and deliver them to the Mugenese general headquarters. Then they’d go back at sunrise, retrieve the girls, clean them up best they could, and send them home. It kept the younger girls and the pregnant women safe, though I don’t think the women they picked were too happy.” He watched, unflinching, as a girl who couldn’t have been more than fourteen ascended the stage and poured a vat of boiling oil over the men’s heads. “They said it was for the good of the village. Guess not everyone agreed.”
Loud sizzles mixed with the screams. Rin’s stomach grumbled, tricked into thinking she’d smelled freshly cooked meat. She hugged her arms over her chest and looked away, suppressing the urge to vomit.
