The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,209

the glimmering light of dawn.

They’d won their war. Now they had a country to rule.

Chapter 31

Arlong had fallen immediately upon Nezha’s retreat. That morning, the Southern Army swept through the city streets just as the Hesperians and the Republic finished their final evacuations. They found a confused, uneven city—half its districts were still populated with Nikara civilians with nowhere else to go, and the other half had become hollow ghost towns. The barracks and residential complexes that once housed Hesperian soldiers had been abandoned. Inside the wrecked shipyards, large hangars that must have been used to house dirigibles now stood empty, their floors littered with spare tools and leftover parts.

“I’ll permit plunder to a reasonable extent,” Rin told her officers. “Take whatever you want. But be civilized—no brawling over spoils, and keep to the affluent neighborhoods. Leave the poorest districts alone. Target the Hesperian quarters first—they won’t have been able to take everything. Weapons, trinkets, and clothes are fair game. But food supplies come back to the palace for central redistribution.”

“How should we deal with armed resistance?” asked Commander Miragha.

“Avoid bloodshed if possible,” Kitay said. “Capture over kill—we want their intelligence. Bring all soldiers to the dungeons and keep the Hesperians and Republican soldiers apart.”

The Republican soldiers who hadn’t managed to escape on the ships were desperately trying to pass themselves off as civilians. The streets were strewn with discarded uniforms; an hour into the occupation, Rin received a report of an entire squadron of naked men begging for secondhand civilian clothes so that they might disguise their identities. She laughed for a good five minutes, then ordered the men to be rounded up in chains and made to stand naked on the dais outside the palace for the rest of the day.

“Good for morale,” she told Kitay when he protested.

“It’s excessive,” he said.

“It’s exactly the right amount of public humiliation. A secret underground resistance might have credibility with the civilians.” She pointed at the shivering men. “They certainly won’t.”

He didn’t have a rebuttal.

While her troops continued their takeover of the streets, Rin made her way to the Red Cliffs to watch the last of the evacuation ships hurrying out of the narrow channel.

She remembered the day, nearly a year ago now, when she first saw the Hesperian fleet arrive on Nikara shores. How relieved she’d been then. How grateful. The white sails had represented hope and survival. Divine intervention.

But they hadn’t come until the Republic had nearly bled itself out. They could have ended the whole civil war in minutes from the very beginning. They could have saved the entire country months of starvation and bloodshed. But they’d waited out the unnecessary tragedy until the very end, when they could simply step in and call themselves the heroes.

They were nowhere near so pompous in their departure.

“Bloody cowards,” Venka said. “You’re just going to let them go?”

“Dunno,” Rin said. “Could be fun to sink all those ships in the harbor.”

Kitay sighed. “Rin.”

“I’m serious,” she said.

“Occupying a city is one thing,” he said. “Setting civilians on fire is quite another.”

“But it’d be so funny.” She was only half joking. She felt a thrill of dark, vindictive glee as she watched the mangled, escaping fleet. If she wanted to, she could turn every ship in that channel to ash. She had that power.

“Please, Rin.” Kitay shot her a wary look. “Don’t be an idiot. Right now the Hesperians are retreating because they’re exhausted, they’ve expended everything on a war on a continent that they don’t care for. They gambled on the wrong faction and lost. Right now, they’re just licking their wounds. But if you send flames after fleeing women and children, they really just might reconsider.”

“Spoilsport,” said Venka.

Rin sighed. “I so hate when you’re right.”

So she let the ships sail undisturbed out of the harbor. She’d let the Hesperians think, for now, that her new regime bore them no ill will. That her priorities lay within Nikan’s boundaries. She’d let them think they were safe.

And then, when they’d been lulled into complacency, when they’d become convinced that perhaps those dirty, stupid, inferior Nikara didn’t pose such a great threat after all—that was when she would strike.

Rin’s next task was to occupy the palace.

The place was in shambles. The grand painted doors had been left hanging ajar, hallways strewn with shattered vases that had fallen out of hastily packed wagons. The vast hall in the palace center had been stripped of almost all its furnishings; only the wall tapestries remained, too heavy