The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,32

on any plane. So that’s not going to work.”

“But that’s not what Sunzi means.” Souji looked frustratingly smug, like a teacher waiting for a very slow student to arrive at the right answer.

Kitay had lost his patience. “What, was half the text written in invisible ink?”

Souji raised his hands. “Look, I went to Sinegard, too. I know the way your minds work. But they trained you for conventional warfare, and this is not that.”

“Then kindly explain what this is,” Kitay said.

“You can’t concentrate superior force all at once, so you need to do it in little parts. Mobile operations. Night movements. Deception, surprise, all that fun stuff—the stuff we’ve been doing—that’s how you focus your optimal alignment, or whatever bogus word Sunzi calls it.” Souji made a pincer motion with his hands. “You’re like ants swarming an injured rat. You whittle it down with little bites. You never engage in a full-fledged battlefield encounter, you just fucking exhaust them.

“Sinegard’s problem was that it was teaching you to fight an ancient enemy. They saw everything through the Red Emperor’s eyes. But that method of warfare doesn’t work anymore. It didn’t even work against the Mugenese when you had the armies. And what’s more, Sinegard assumed that the enemy would be a conquering force from the outside.” Souji grinned. “They weren’t in the business of teaching rebels.”

Despite her initial skepticism, Rin had to admit that Souji’s tactics worked. And they kept working. The closer they got to Leiyang, the more supplies and intelligence they acquired, all without evidence that the Mugenese at Leiyang knew what was coming. Souji planned his attacks so that even Mugenese survivors wouldn’t be able to report more than ten or twenty sighted troops at once; the full size of their army remained well concealed. And if Rin ever called the fire, she made sure she left no witnesses.

But their luck had to be running out. Souji’s small-scale tactics worked for tiny targets—hamlets where the Mugenese guard numbered no more than fifty men. But Leiyang was one of the largest townships in the province. More and more reports corroborated the fact that their numbers were in the thousands.

You couldn’t fool an army of thousands with skirts and firecrackers. Sooner or later, they’d have to stand face-to-face with their enemy and fight.

Chapter 5

On the twelfth day of their march, after an eternity of navigating winding, treacherous forest footpaths, they reached a vast plain filled with red stalks of sorghum. Against the otherwise overgrown wilderness, the sparse and dying trees that littered the roadside, those neatly cultivated fields stood out like a red flag of warning.

Armies only maintained fields once they’d settled down for permanent occupation. They’d reached the edge of the Beehive.

Rin’s men wanted to move on Leiyang that night. They’d marched at a leisurely pace for the last two days; the forest routes didn’t permit them to go any faster. They had energy, pent up and raging. They wanted blood.

Souji was the only holdout. “You’ve got to contact the local leadership first.”

Rin humored him. “Fine. Where are they?”

“Well.” Souji scratched his ear. “On the inside.”

“Are you mad?”

“The civilians suffer the most from your little liberations,” Souji said. “Or did you not count the casualties at Khudla?”

“Listen, we freed Khudla—”

“And burned a temple full of civilians to death,” Souji said. “Don’t think I didn’t know about that. We need to give them advance warning.”

“That’s too risky,” Kitay said. “We don’t know how many collaborators they have. If the wrong person sees you, they’ll crack down on the civilians regardless.”

“No one’s going to report us,” Souji said. “I know these people. Their loyalty runs thicker than blood.”

Rin gave him a skeptical look. “You’d be willing to stake the lives of everyone in this army on that?”

“I’m staking the lives of everyone in that township on it,” Souji said. “I’ve gotten you this far, Speerly. Trust me just a little longer.”

So Rin found herself walking with Souji into the center of the Beehive, dressed in peasant rags, without her sword and without reinforcements. Souji had identified a lapse in the northern patrol, a thirty-second pocket of time between revolving guards that allowed them to sneak past the fields and over the city gates unnoticed.

What Rin saw inside Leiyang astonished her.

She’d never before encountered a Mugenese-occupied township where corpses weren’t stacked in rotting, haphazard piles around every corner. Where the residents weren’t utterly, uniformly, brutally crushed into submission.

But here in Leiyang, the Mugenese had embarked on something more like occupational state-building. And