The Poppy War (The Poppy War #1) - R. F. Kuang Page 0,120
jammed fleet and approached Altan and Rin’s shore in a desperate swarm.
“We’re up, kiddo,” Altan said, and emerged from the reeds, trident spinning in his grasp.
Rin scampered to her feet, then swayed when the effects of the poppy hit her like a club to the side of the head. She stumbled. She knew she was in a dangerous place. Unless she called the god, the poppy would only make her useless in battle, high and disoriented. But when she reached inside herself for the fire, she grasped nothing.
She tried chanting in the old Speerly language. Altan had taught her the incantation. She didn’t understand the words; Altan barely understood them himself, but that didn’t matter. What mattered were the harsh sounds, the repetition of incantations that sounded like spitting. The language of Speer was primal, guttural, and savage. It sounded like a curse. It sounded like a condemnation.
Still, it slowed her mind, brought her to the center of her swirling thoughts, and established a direct connection to the Pantheon above.
But she didn’t feel herself tipping forward into the void. She heard no whooshing sound in her ears. She was not journeying upward. She reached inside herself, searching for the link to the Phoenix and . . . nothing. She felt nothing.
Something soared through the air and embedded itself in the mud by Rin’s feet. She examined it with great difficulty, as if she were looking through a hazy fog. Finally, her drugged mind identified it as an arrow.
The Federation was shooting back.
She was faintly aware of Baji shouting at her from across the channel. She tried to shake away the distractions and direct her mind inward, but panic bubbled up in her chest. She couldn’t concentrate. She focused on everything at once: Qara’s birds, the incoming soldiers, the bodies getting closer and closer to the shore.
Across the bay she heard an unearthly scream. Suni emitted a series of high-pitched shrieks like a deranged monkey, beat his fists against his chest, and howled up at the night sky.
Beside him Baji threw his head back and boomed out a laugh, and that, too, sounded unnatural. He was too gleeful, more delighted than anyone in the midst of such carnage had the right to be. And Rin realized that this wasn’t Baji laughing, this was the god in him that read spilled blood as worship.
Baji lifted his foot and shoved the soldiers squarely into the water, toppling them over like dominoes; he sent them sprawling into the river, where they flailed and struggled against the soggy marsh.
Who controlled whom? Was it the soldier who had called the god, or the god in the body of the soldier?
She didn’t want to be possessed. She wanted to remain free.
But the cognitive dissonance clashed in her head. Three sets of countervailing orders competed for priority in her mind—Jiang’s mandate to empty her mind, Altan’s insistence that she hone her anger as a razor blade, and her own fear of letting the fire rip through her again, because once it began she didn’t know how to stop it.
But she couldn’t just stand there.
Come on, come on . . . She reached for the flames and grasped nothing. She was stuck halfway to the Pantheon and halfway in the material world, unable to fully grasp either. She had lost all sense of balance; she was disoriented, navigating her body as if remotely from very far away.
Something cold and clammy grasped at her ankles. Rin jumped back just as a soldier hauled himself out of the water. He sucked in air with hoarse gasps; he must have held his breath the entire length of the channel.
He saw her, yelled, and fell backward.
All she could register was how young he looked. He was not a hardened, trained soldier. This might have been his first combat engagement. He hadn’t even thought to draw his weapon.
She advanced on him slowly, walking as if in a dream. Her sword hand felt foreign to her; it was someone else’s arm that brought the blade down, it was someone else’s foot that kicked the soldier down by his shoulder—
He was faster than she thought; he swept out and kicked her kneecap, knocking her into the mud. Before she could react, he climbed over her, pinning her down with both knees.
She looked up. Their eyes met.
Naked fear was written across his face, round and soft like a child’s. He was barely taller than her. He couldn’t have been older than Ramsa.