The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,216

“They have no intent. They have no agenda, and they do not tend toward order. They want nothing more than to be what they are. And they don’t care.”

Petra uttered something low and fearful, some repetitive chant in a language that sounded almost like Hesperian but not quite. A curse? A prayer? Whatever it was, the Pantheon did not care, because the Pantheon, unlike the Maker, was real.

“Take me back,” pleaded Petra. She’d lost all dignity; she’d lost all faith. Without her Maker she was stripped to a lost and terrified core, flailing wildly for something to cling to. “Take me—”

The gods pressed in.

Sound did not quite exist in the plane of spirit. What Rin perceived as words were transmitted thoughts, all equal in volume despite distance or intensity. She knew this in abstract. She knew that here, one could not really scream.

But the sheer intensity of Petra’s desperation came close.

“Bring me back down,” Rin told the Phoenix. “I’m finished here.”

She landed back in her body with a jolt. She opened her eyes.

Sister Petra lay still on the table. Her eyes were wide open. Her pupils darted fretfully about, tracking nothing. Rin watched her for a long while, wondering if she might find her way back to her body, but the only movement she made was the occasional tremor in her shoulders. A choked murmur escaped her throat.

Rin prodded Petra’s shoulder. “What was that?”

Drool trickled from the side of her mouth. Petra gurgled something incomprehensible, then fell silent.

“Congratulations.” Rin patted her head. “You’ve finally found religion.”

Chapter 32

Safely ensconced in a heavily guarded house behind the barracks, Rin slept better that night than any night she could remember in years. She didn’t need laudanum to knock herself unconscious. She didn’t wake up multiple times in the night, sweaty and shivering, straining to hear a dirigible attack she’d only imagined. She didn’t see Altan, didn’t see the Cike, didn’t see Speer. The moment she lay down she slid into a deep, dreamless sleep, and didn’t awake until warm rays of sunlight crept over her face.

She was twenty-one years old and it was the first night she could remember that she could close her eyes without fearing for her life.

In the morning she stood up, combed the tangles out of her hair with her fingers, and stared at herself in front of the mirror. She worked at the muscles in her face until she looked composed. Assured. Ready. Leaders couldn’t display doubt. When she walked out that door, she was their general.

And then what? asked Altan’s voice. Their Empress? Their President? Their Queen? Rin didn’t know. She and Kitay had never discussed what kind of regime they might replace the Republic with. This whole time, they had—rather naively, she now realized—assumed that once they won, life in the Empire could go back to normal.

But there was no normal. In the span of a year they had smashed apart everything that was normal. Now there were no Warlords, no Empresses, and no Presidents. Just a great, big, beautiful, and shattered country, held together by common awe of a single god.

She was just General Fang for now, she decided. She didn’t have a kingdom to rule yet. Not until the Hesperians had been decisively defeated.

She walked out of the house. Five guards stood waiting outside her door, ready to escort her across the city. When they reached the palace, she had to stop and remind herself that she wasn’t dreaming. Ever since the start of the campaign from Ruijin, she’d spent so long thinking about what would happen if she were in charge that it seemed unreal that she was truly standing here, about to seize the levers of power.

Never mind that she had been in here only yesterday, pulling artifacts off the walls like she owned the place—because she did own the place. Yesterday was about a takeover, about eradicating the last traces of Republican authority. Today was the first day of the rest of Nikara history.

“You good?” Kitay asked.

“Yeah,” she breathed. “Just—trying not to forget this.”

She stepped over the threshold. Blood rushed to her head. She felt buoyant, weightless. The scales of everything had shifted. The decrees she wrote in that palace would ripple across the country. The rules she conceived would become law.

Overnight, she had become as close to a god as a mortal could be.

I’ve reached behind the canvas, she thought. And now I hold the brush.

Rin ran her administration not from the grand, empty great hall—that room was too cavernous,