The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,8

he wasn’t using it. He didn’t even try to fight, only stumbled back with his arms raised, begging for her mercy.

“Please don’t,” he kept saying.

He might have been the patrolman from before; he spoke in that same reedy, wobbly voice. “Please.”

She stayed her hand only because she realized he was speaking Nikara.

She considered him for a moment. Was he Nikara? Was he a prisoner of war? He wasn’t wearing a Mugenese uniform, he might have been an innocent . . .

“Please,” he said again. “Don’t—”

His accent sealed his fate. His tones were too clipped. He wasn’t Nikara after all, just a clever Mugenese soldier who thought he might fool her into taking mercy.

“Burn,” she said.

The boy fell backward. She saw his mouth open, saw his face curdle into a piteous scream just as it blackened and solidified, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.

In the end, it was always so easy to kill her heart. It didn’t matter that they looked like boys. That they were nothing, nothing like the monsters she had once known. In this war of racial totality, none of that mattered. If they were Mugenese, that meant they were crickets and that meant when she crushed them under her heel, the universe hardly registered their loss.

Once, Altan had made her watch him burn a squirrel alive.

He’d caught it for their breakfast with a simple netted trap. It was still alive when he retrieved it from the trees, wriggling in his grasp. But instead of snapping its neck, he’d decided to teach her a lesson.

“Do you know how exactly fire kills a person?” he’d asked.

She’d shaken her head. She’d watched, entranced, as he conjured fire into his palms.

Altan had such remarkable control over the shape of fire. He was a puppeteer, casually twisting flames into the loveliest shapes: now a flying bird, now a twisting dragon, now a human figure, flailing inside the cage he made with his fingers until he clamped his palms shut.

She’d been captivated, watching his fingers dance through the air. His question had caught her off guard, and when she spoke, her words were clumsy and stupid. “Through heat? I mean, um . . .”

His lip had curled. “Fire is such an inefficient way to kill. Did you know the moment of death is actually quite painless? The fire eats up all the breathable air around the victim, and they choke to death.”

She blinked at him. “You don’t want that?”

“Why would you want that? If you want a quick death, you use a sword. Or an arrow.” He’d twirled a stream of flame around his fingers. “You don’t throw Speerlies into battle unless you want to terrorize. We want our victims to suffer first. We want them to burn, and slowly.”

He’d picked up the bound squirrel and wrapped his fingers around its middle. The squirrel couldn’t scream, but Rin had imagined the sound, quivering little gasps that corresponded to its twitching limbs.

“Watch the skin,” he’d said.

Once the fur burned off, she’d been able to glimpse the pink underneath, bubbling, crackling, hardening to black. “First it boils. Then it starts to slough off. Watch the color. Once you’ve turned it black, and once that black spreads, there’s nothing that can bring them back.”

He had held the squirrel out toward her. “Hungry?”

She had glanced down at its little black eyes, bulging and glassy, and her stomach roiled. And she hadn’t known what was worse, the way the animal’s legs twitched in its death throes, or the fact that the roasted flesh smelled so terribly good.

By the time she’d finished in the southern quarter, the rest of her soldiers had corralled the last Mugenese holdouts into a corner in Khudla’s eastern district. They parted to let her through to the front.

“Took you a while,” Officer Shen said.

“Got held up,” Rin said. “Having too much fun.”

“The southern quarter—”

“Finished.” Rin rubbed her fingers together, and crackled blood burned black fell to the ground. “Why aren’t we attacking?”

“They’ve taken hostages inside the temple,” Shen said.

That was smart. Rin regarded the structure. It was one of the nicer village temples she’d seen in a while, made from stone and not wood. It wouldn’t burn easily, and the Mugenese artillery inside had good vantage points from the upper floors.

“They’re going to shoot us out,” Shen said.

As if to prove her point, a fire rocket shrieked overhead and exploded against the tree ten paces from where they crouched.

“So storm them,” Rin said.

“We’re afraid they might have gas.”

“They would have used it by