The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,173

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.”

“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