The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,12
with remarkable dexterity, she couldn’t help but feel a flicker of jealousy. It still stung, how the simplest things—picking locks, getting dressed, filling her canteen—had become so damnably difficult overnight.
She’d lost her hand to such a stupid turn of events. If they’d only had a key back then. If they’d just been able to steal a motherfucking key.
Her stump itched. She clenched her teeth and willed herself not to scratch it.
Souji undid the lock in less than a minute. He shook his hands free and sighed, cradling his wrists. He bent over toward the chains around his ankles. “That’s better. Can you give me some more light?”
She moved the flame closer to the lock, careful not to singe his skin.
She noticed the middle finger on his right hand was missing its top joint. It didn’t look like an accident—the middle finger on his left hand was missing a joint as well.
“What’s wrong with your hands?” she asked.
“My mother’s first two children died in infancy,” he explained. “She thought that the gods were stealing them because they were so lovely. So when I entered the world she gnawed the first joint off both my middle fingers.” He wiggled his left hand at her. “Made me a bit less attractive.”
Rin snorted. “The gods don’t want fingers.”
“So what do they want?”
“Pain,” she said. “Pain, and your sanity.”
Souji popped the lock, shook the chains away, and clambered to his feet. “I suppose you would know.”
After all likely survivors had been rescued from the wreckage, Rin’s troops fell on the battlefield like vultures.
The first time the newly minted soldiers of the Southern Coalition had scavenged for supplies in the wake of a battle, they’d been reluctant to touch the corpses. They’d been superstitious, scared of angering vengeful ghosts of the unburied dead who couldn’t return home. Now they raided bodies with hardened disregard, stripping them of anything of value. They looked for weapons, leather, clean linens—Mugenese uniforms were blue, but could be easily dyed—and, prized above all, shoes.
The Southern Coalition’s troops suffered terribly from shoddy footwear. They fought in straw sandals, and cotton if they could obtain it, but those cotton shoes were more like slippers, sewn weeks before the battle by wives, mothers, and sisters. Most were fighting in footwear of plaited straw that broke midmarch, fell apart in sticky mud, and offered no protection against the cold.
The Mugenese, however, had sailed over the Nariin Sea wearing leather boots—fine, solid, warm, and waterproof. Rin’s soldiers had become very adept at untying the laces, yanking boots off stiffening feet, and tossing them into wheelbarrows to be redistributed later according to size.
While Rin’s soldiers combed through the fields, Souji led her toward the former village headman’s office, which the Mugenese had repurposed into a headquarters. He provided running commentary on the ruins as they walked, like a disgruntled host apologetic that his home had been found in such a mess.
“It looked loads better than this months ago. Khudla’s a nice village—had some lovely historic architecture, until they tore down everything for firewood. And we made those barricades,” he said somewhat sulkily, pointing to the sandbags around the headquarters. “They just stole them.”
For a simple village’s defenses, Souji’s barricades had been surprisingly well constructed. He’d organized pillboxes the way she would have done it—wooden stakes driven into the ground to provide a lattice framework for layers of sandbags. She’d been taught that method at Sinegard. These defenses, Rin realized, had been built according to Militia guidelines.
“Then how did they get through in the end?” she asked.
Souji blinked at her as if she were an idiot. “They had gas.”
So Officer Shen was right. Rin stifled a shudder, imagining the impact of the noxious yellow fumes on unsuspecting civilians. “How much?”
“Just one canister,” Souji said. “I think they’d been hoarding it, because they didn’t use it when they first came. Waited until the third day of fighting, when they had us all barricaded into one place, and then they popped it over the wall. We fell apart pretty quickly after that.”
They reached the headquarters. Souji tried the door. It swung open without trouble; no one was left to lock it from the inside.
Food littered the table of the central conference room. Souji picked a wheat bun off its place, tore off a bite, then spat it back out. “Disgusting.”
“What, too stale for you?”
“No. It’s got too much salt. Gross.” Souji tossed the wheat bun back onto the table. “Salt doesn’t belong in buns.”