The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,176

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?”

“Pursue him,” Rin ordered. “Pursue anyone who’s fled the city, and don’t let up until you’ve dragged them back into the jails. I don’t want anyone outside Jinzhou to know what happened here today.”

Of all Souji’s lessons, the one that had struck the hardest was that in campaigns of resistance, information asymmetry mattered more than anything. The playing field had leveled somewhat now, but Rin still didn’t want Nezha to know her army had new shamans until Dulin and Pipaji became impossible to conceal. She knew she couldn’t keep this secret for long, but there was no point giving Nezha extra time to prepare.

“Kill or capture?” Miragha pressed.

Rin paused, considering.

That question had bearing on the larger issue of how to handle Jinzhou’s occupation. Most civil wars, like Vaisra’s campaign, were fought by redefining territorial borders. Enemy land was hard to maintain, so grafting onto local power structures had historically been the easiest way to seamlessly take control of a city without breakdown of civil functions. If Rin had wanted Jinzhou to resume normal functions, then she’d try to keep as many fleeing officials alive as she could. But she was focused on obtaining resources, not territory—she didn’t have the troops to station in every city that stood between her and Arlong.

Of course, that wasn’t a strategy for sustained long-term rule. But Rin wasn’t concerned with long-term rule right now. She wanted Nezha dead, the Republic collapsed, the