The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,21
single silver coin a month, and he’d stayed in the army for the rest of his life.
His younger brothers had both died fighting the Federation. His clan, once a sprawling village family, had withered away from opium addiction. He’d survived the worst of the past century, and so survival became his greatest skill. He’d become a soldier out of necessity, and that made him a leader whose legitimacy was nigh unquestionable.
Most importantly, he belonged. These mountains were part of his blood. Anyone could see it in the tired way he carried his shoulders, the hard glint in his eyes.
Rin may have been a figurehead of power, but Liu Gurubai symbolized the very identity of the south. If she hurt him, Monkey Province would tear her to pieces.
So for now, she compromised.
“I hear there have been developments in the north.” She changed the subject, forcing her tone to stay neutral. “Anything you want to show me?”
“Several updates.” If Gurubai was surprised by her sudden acquiescence, he didn’t show it. He slid a sheaf of letters across the table. “Your friend wrote back. These arrived yesterday.”
Rin snatched up the first page and started poring hungrily down the lines, passing the pages to Kitay once she was done. News from the north always trickled in by little bursts—weeks passed with nothing, and then they received sudden gluts of information. The Southern Coalition had only a handful of spies in the Republic, and most of them were Moag’s girls; the few pale-skinned Black Lilies who had been shipped to Arlong with carefully disguised accents to work in teahouses and gambling dens.
Venka had gone north, too. With her pale, pretty face and flawless Sinegardian diction, she blended in perfectly among the aristocrats of the formal capital. At first Rin had been worried she’d be recognized—she was the missing daughter of the former finance minister; she couldn’t be more high-profile—but based on Venka’s reports, she’d completely transformed with only a wig and several gobs of cosmetics.
No one pays much attention to my face, Venka had written shortly after she arrived. The dolls of Sinegard, it turns out, are shockingly interchangeable.
Her report now contained nothing surprising. Vaisra’s still battling it out in the north. Warlords and their successors dropping dead like flies. They can’t hold out for long, they’re overstretched. Vaisra’s turned the siege cities into death zones. It’ll all be over soon.
That wasn’t news, only a slow intensification of what they’d known for weeks. Vaisra’s Hesperians were ravaging the countryside in their dirigibles, leaving craters and bombed-out hellscapes in their wake.
“Any mention of a southern turn?” Rin asked Gurubai.
“None yet. What you’re holding is everything we have.”
“Then we’re being ignored,” she said.
“We’re getting lucky,” Kitay amended. “It’s only a matter of time.”
The Dragon Warlord Yin Vaisra’s great democracy, the one he’d sacked cities and turned the Murui crimson for, had never come into existence. He’d never meant it to. Days after he defeated the Imperial Navy at Arlong, he’d assassinated the Boar Warlord and Rooster Warlord, and then declared himself the sole President of the Nikara Republic.
But he didn’t yet have a country to rule. Many former Militia officers, not least of whom included the Empress’s former favorite soldier, General Jun Loran, had escaped the purge at Arlong and fled north to Tiger Province. Now the combined forces of the Militia’s remnants were almost proving to be a challenge for the Hesperians.
Almost. With each new report that reached Ruijin, the Republic appeared to have extended its reach farther and farther north. That meant Rin was sitting on borrowed time. The Southern Coalition was only one rebellion among many. For the time being Vaisra had his hands tied up with Jun’s insurgency, not to mention a country chock-full of bandit gangs that had sprung up in local power vacuums immediately after the war’s end. But he wouldn’t stay busy for long. Jun couldn’t hope to beat Vaisra’s forces, not with Hesperian dirigibles at Vaisra’s back. Not when thousands of Hesperian soldiers with arquebuses were pumping bullets into Jun’s armies.
Rin was grateful that Jun had bought them such a long reprieve. But sooner or later, Vaisra would turn his attention to the south. He’d have to, so long as Rin was alive. A reckoning was inevitable. And when it came, she wanted to be on the offensive.
“You know my feelings on this,” she told Gurubai.
“Yes, Runin, I do.” He regarded her like an exhausted parent might a troublesome child. “And again, I’m telling you—”