The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,189

unrelenting sheets that turned the ground beneath their feet to such slippery mud that they had to prop their carts up on boulders so their wheels wouldn’t get stuck overnight. Rin hoped the heavy downpour might drain the clouds empty by morning, but the pattering only intensified as the hours drew on. At dawn, the gray shroud over Xuzhou showed no sign of thinning.

Rin tried to snatch a bit of sleep, but the rain battering against her tent made it impossible. She gave up and waited out the night sitting outside, keeping watch over the graveyard beneath Tearza’s statue.

Nezha had been right to attack in monsoon season. Her fire would do very little today aside from keeping her warm. She’d tested it throughout the night, sending arcs of flame across the night sky. They all fizzled away in seconds. She could still incinerate anyone within her immediate proximity, but that didn’t help in a ranged battle. Cannons and arquebuses wouldn’t be half as effective in this weather; the fuses would take forever to light. Both sides had been largely reduced to brutal, primitive, and familiar weapons—swords, arrows, and spears.

The winner today would be determined by sheer tactical proficiency. And Rin, despite herself, couldn’t wait to see what Nezha had come up with.

The sun crept higher in the sky. Rin’s troops were awake, armed, and ready, but there was still no word from the sentries. They waited another hour in tense anticipation. Then, suddenly, the rain intensified from a loud patter to a violent roar.

It might have been an accident of nature, but Rin doubted it. The timing was too abrupt. Someone was hauling that rain down from the heavens.

“He’s here.” She stood up and waved to her officers. “Ready the columns.”

Seconds later, her sentries caught on to what she already knew, and a series of horns resounded across the tombstones.

The Republican Army appeared at the other end of the ravine, fanning out beneath the Red Emperor’s feet.

Rin scanned the front lines with her spyglass until she spotted Nezha marching at the fore. He was dressed in a strange hybrid fashion; his chest was clad in the familiar blue cloth and lamellar plating of the Dragon Army, but his arms and legs were wrapped in some armor made of overlapping metal plates. It looked obstructively heavy. His shoulders, usually so arrogantly squared, seemed to sag.

“What’s that around his wrists?” Kitay asked.

Rin squinted into her spyglass. She could just barely make out golden circlets around both of Nezha’s wrists. They served no function she could discern—they didn’t seem a part of his armor, and she couldn’t imagine how they might be used as weapons.

She shifted the spyglass down. Another pair of golden circlets was visible over his boots. “Did he have those in Arabak?”

“Not that I remember,” Kitay said. “But I remember seeing these odd scars once, right around—”

“He’s seen us,” Rin said abruptly.

Nezha had taken out a spyglass, too. He was looking right back at them.

She was struck by the symmetry of the scene. They could have been a painting—two opposing factions lined under statues that may as well have been their patron gods. Tearza and the Red Emperor, Speerly against conqueror, the newest participants in a centuries-old conflict that had never died, but had only continued to reverberate through history.

Until now. Until one of them ended it, for better or for worse.

Nezha raised a hand.

Rin tensed. Blood roared in her ears; the familiar, addictive rush of adrenaline thrummed through her body.

So this was how it began. No pleasantries, no obligatory attempt at negotiation; just battle. Nezha brought his hand down and his troops began charging down the ravine, feet thundering against the mud.

Rin turned to Commander Miragha. “Send in the turtles.”

Throughout Nikara history, the traditional way to deal with arrow fire had been sending in shielded front lines to absorb the blow. Dozens of guaranteed fatalities bought time for melee combatants to breach the enemy lines. But Rin didn’t have the dozens of warm bodies to spare.

Enter the turtles. These were one of Kitay’s recent inventions. Inspired by the thickly armored turtle boats in the Republican Fleet, he’d designed small cart-mounted vehicles that could survive heavy fire of almost any kind. He hadn’t had the time nor resources to construct anything sophisticated, so he’d cobbled the turtles together from wooden tables, water-soaked cotton quilts, and scavenged plates of Hesperian armor that, combined, kept out most flying projectiles.

One by one they rolled out from behind the tombstones into the ravine. As