The Poppy War

by R. F. Kuang

  Rin was going to have to teach herself.

  A month and a half in, she finally found a gold mine of information in the texts of Ha Seejin, quartermaster under the Red Emperor. Seejin’s manuals were wonderfully illustrated, filled with detailed descriptions and clearly labeled diagrams.

  Rin perused the pages gleefully. This was it. This was what she needed.

  “You can’t take this one out,” said the apprentice at the front desk.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s from the restricted shelves,” said the apprentice, as if this were obvious. “First-years don’t get access to those.”

  “Oh. Sorry. I’ll take it back.”

  Rin walked to the back end of the library. She glanced furtively about to make sure no one was watching. She stuffed the tome down her shirt. Then she turned around and walked back out.

  Alone in the courtyard, book in hand, Rin learned. She learned to shape the air with her fists, to imagine a great spinning ball in her arms to guide the shape of her movements. She learned to root her legs against the ground so she couldn’t be tipped over, not even by opponents twice her weight. She learned to form fists with her thumb on the outside, to always keep her guard up around her face, and to shift her balance quickly and smoothly.

  She became very good at punching stationary objects.

  She attended the matches at the rings regularly. She arrived in the basement early and secured a place by the railing so that she didn’t miss a single kick or throw. She hoped that by watching the apprentices fight, she could absorb their techniques.

  This actually helped—to some extent. By closely examining the apprentices’ movements, Rin learned to identify the right place and time for various techniques. When to kick, when to dodge, when to roll madly on the floor to avoid—wait, no, that was an accident, Jeeha had simply tripped. Rin didn’t have muscle memory of sparring against another person, so she had to hold these contingencies in her head. But vicarious sparring was better than nothing.

  She also attended the matches to watch Altan.

  She would have been lying to herself if she didn’t admit that she derived great aesthetic pleasure from staring at him. With his lithe, muscled form and chiseled jawline, Altan was undeniably handsome.

  But he was also the paragon of good technique. Altan did everything that the Seejin text recommended. He never let his guard down, never allowed an opening, never let his attention slip. He never telegraphed his next move, didn’t bounce erratically or go flat on his heels to advertise to his opponent when he was going to kick. He always attacked from angles, never from the front.

  Rin had initially conceived of Altan as simply a good, strong fighter. Now she could see that he was, in every sense, a genius. His fighting technique was a study in trigonometry, a beautiful composition of trajectories and rebounded forces. He won consistently because he had perfect control of distance and torque. He had the mathematics of fighting down to a science.

  He fought more often than not. Throughout the semester his challengers only grew in number—it seemed every single one of Jun’s apprentices wanted to have a go at him.

  Rin watched Altan fight twenty-three matches before the end of the fall. He never lost.

  Chapter 6

  Winter descended on Sinegard with a vengeance. The students enjoyed one last pleasant day of autumn sun, and woke the next morning to find that a cold sheet of snow had fallen over the Academy. The snow was lovely to observe for all of two serene minutes. Then it became nothing but a pain in the ass.

  The entire campus turned into a risk zone for broken limbs—the streams froze over; the stairways became slushy and treacherous. Outdoor classes moved indoors. The first-years were assigned to scatter salt across the stone walkways at regular intervals to melt the snow, but the slippery paths sent a regular stream of students to the infirmary regardless.

  As far as Lore went, the icy weather was the last straw for most of the class, who had been intermittently frequenting the garden in hopes that Jiang might make an appearance. But waiting around in a drug garden for a never-present teacher was one thing; waiting in freezing cold temperatures was another.

  In the months since the semester began, Jiang hadn’t shown up once to class. Students occasionally spotted him around campus doing inexcusably rude things. He had in turn flipped Nezha’s lunch tray out of his hands and walked away whistling, petted Kitay on the head while making a pigeon-like cooing noise, and tried to snip Venka’s hair off with garden shears.

  Whenever a student managed to pin him down to ask about his course, Jiang made a loud farting noise with his mouth and elbow and skirted away.

  Rin alone continued to frequent the Lore garden, but only because it was a convenient place to train. Now that first-years avoided the garden out of spite, it was the one place where she was guaranteed to be alone.

  She was grateful that no one could see her fumbling through the Seejin text. She had picked up the fundamentals with little trouble, but discovered that even just the second form was devilishly hard to put together.

  Seejin was fond of rapidly twisting footwork. Here the diagrams failed her. The models’ feet in the drawings were positioned in completely different angles from picture to picture. Seejin wrote that if a fighter could extricate himself from any awkward placement, no matter how close he was to falling, he would have achieved perfect balance and therefore the advantage in most combat positions.

  It sounded good in theory. In practice, it meant a lot of falling over.

  Seejin recommended pupils practice the first form on an elevated surface, preferably a thick tree branch or the top of a wall. Against her better judgment, Rin climbed to the middle of the large willow tree overhanging the garden and positioned her feet hesitantly against the bark.

  Despite Jiang’s absence throughout the semester, the garden remained impeccably well kept. It was a kaleidoscope of garishly bright colors, similar in color scheme to the decorations outside Tikany’s whorehouses. Despite the cold, the violet and scarlet poppy flowers had remained in full blossom, their leaves trimmed in tidy rows. The cacti, which were twice the size they had been at the start of term, had been moved into a new set of clay pots painted in eerie patterns of black and burnt orange. Underneath the shelves, the luminescent mushrooms still pulsed with a faintly disturbing glow, like tiny fairy lamps.

  Rin imagined that an opium addict could pass entire days in here. She wondered if that was what Jiang did.

  Poised precariously on the willow tree, struggling to stand up straight against the harsh wind, Rin held the book in one hand, mumbling instructions out loud while she positioned her feet accordingly.

  “Right foot out, pointing straight forward. Left foot back, perpendicular to the straight line of the right foot. Shift weight forward, lift left foot . . .”

  She could see why Seejin thought this might be good balance practice. She also saw why Seejin strongly recommended against attempting the exercise alone. She wobbled perilously several times, and regained her balance only after a few heart-stopping seconds of frantic windmilling. Calm down. Focus. Right foot up, bring it around . . .

  Master Jiang walked around the corner, loudly whistling “The Gatekeeper’s Touches.”

  Rin’s right foot slid out from beneath her. She teetered off the edge of the branch, dropped the book, and would have plummeted to the stone floor if her left ankle hadn’t snagged in the crook of two dividing branches.

  She jolted to a halt with her face inches from the ground and gasped out loud in relief.

  Jiang stared down silently at her. She gazed back, head thundering while the blood rushed down into her temples. The last notes of his song dwindled and faded away in the howling wind.

  “Hello there,” he said finally. His voice matched his demeanor: placid, disengaged, and idyllically curious. In any other context, it might have been soothing.

  Rin struggled ungracefully to haul herself upward.

  “Are you all right?” he
asked.

  “I’m stuck,” she mumbled.

  “Mmm. Appears so.”

  He clearly wasn’t going to help her down. Rin wriggled her ankle out of the branch, tumbled to the floor, and landed in a painful heap at Jiang’s feet. Cheeks burning, she clambered to her feet and brushed the snow off her uniform.

  “Elegant,” Jiang remarked.

  He tilted his head very far to the left, studying her intently as if she were a particularly fascinating specimen. Up close, Jiang looked even more bizarre than Rin had first thought. His face was a riddle; it was neither lined with age nor flushed with youth but rather invulnerable to time, like a smooth stone. His eyes were a pale blue color she had never seen on anyone in the Empire.

  “Bit daring, aren’t you?” He sounded like he was suppressing laughter. “Do you often dangle from trees?”

  “You startled me, sir.”

  “Hmmph.” He puffed air through his cheeks like a little child. “You’re Irjah’s pet pupil, aren’t you?”

  Her cheeks flushed. “I—I mean, I don’t . . .”

  “You are.” He scratched his chin and scooped her book off the ground, riffling through its pages with a mild curiosity. “Dusky little peasant prodigy, you. He can’t stop raving about you.”

  She shuffled her feet, wondering where this was going. Had that been a compliment? Was she supposed to thank him? She tucked a lock of hair back behind her ear. “Um.”

  “Oh, don’t pretend to be bashful. You love it.” Jiang glanced casually down at the book and gazed back up at her. “What are you doing with a Seejin text?”

  “I found it in the archives.”

  “Oh. I take that back. You’re not daring. You’re just stupid.”

  When Rin looked confused, Jiang explained: “Jun explicitly forbade Seejin until at least your second year.”

  She hadn’t heard this rule. No wonder the apprentice hadn’t let her sign the book out of the archives. “Jun expelled me from his class. I wasn’t informed.”

  “Jun expelled you,” Jiang repeated slowly. She couldn’t tell if he was amused or not. “What on earth did you do to him?”

  “Um. Tackled another student during sparring, sort of. He started it,” she added quickly. “The other student, I mean.”

  Jiang looked impressed. “Stupid and hotheaded.”

  His eyes wandered over to the plants on the shelf behind her. He walked around her, lifted a poppy flower up to his nose, and sniffed experimentally. He made a face. He dug around in the deep pockets of his robes, fished out a pair of shears, then clipped the stem and tossed the broken end into a pile in the corner of a garden.

  Rin began to inch toward the gate. Perhaps if she left now, Jiang would forget about the book. “I’m sorry if I shouldn’t be in here—”

  “Oh, you’re not sorry. You’re just annoyed I interrupted your training session, and you’re hoping I’ll leave without mentioning your stolen book.” Jiang snipped another stem off the poppy plant. “You’re a plucky one, you know that? Got banned from Jun’s class, so you thought you’d teach yourself Seejin.”

  He made several syncopated wheezing noises. It took Rin a moment to realize he was laughing.

  “What’s so funny?” she demanded. “Sir, if you’re going to report me, I just want to say—”

  “Oh, I’m not going to report you. What fun would that be?” He was still chuckling. “Were you really trying to learn Seejin from a book? Do you have a death wish?”

  “It’s not that hard,” she said defensively. “I just followed the pictures.”

  He turned back toward her; his expression was one of amused disbelief. He opened the book, riffled through the pages with a practiced hand, and then stopped on the page detailing the first form. He brandished the book at her. “That one. Do that.”

  Rin obliged.

  It was a tricky form, full of shifting movements and ball change steps. She squeezed her eyes shut as she moved. She couldn’t concentrate in full sight of those luminous mushrooms, those bizarrely pulsing cacti.

  When she opened her eyes, Jiang had stopped laughing.

  “You’re nowhere near ready for Seejin,” he said. He slammed the book shut with one hand. “Jun was right. At your level you shouldn’t even be touching this text.”

  Rin fought a wave of panic. If she couldn’t even use the Seejin text, she might as well leave for Tikany right now. She had found no other books that were half as useful or as clear.

  “You might benefit from some animal-based fundamentals,” Jiang continued. “Yinmen’s work. He was Seejin’s predecessor. Have you heard of him?”

  She glanced up at him in confusion. “I’ve looked for those. Those scrolls are incomplete.”

  “Of course you won’t be learning from scrolls,” Jiang said impatiently. “We’ll discuss this in class tomorrow.”

  “Class? You haven’t been here all semester!”

  Jiang shrugged. “I find it difficult to bother myself with first-years I don’t find particularly interesting.”

  Rin thought this was just irresponsible teaching, but she wanted to keep Jiang talking. Here he was in a rare moment of lucidity, offering to teach her martial arts that she couldn’t learn by herself. She was half-afraid that if she said the wrong thing, she would send him running off like a startled hare.

  “So am I interesting?” she asked slowly.

  “You’re a walking disaster,” Jiang said bluntly. “You’re training with arcane techniques at a rate that will lead to inevitable injury, and not the kind you recover from. You’ve misinterpreted Seejin’s texts so badly that I believe you’ve come up with a new art form all by yourself.”

  Rin scowled. “Then why are you helping me?”

  “To spite Jun, mostly.” Jiang scratched his chin. “I hate the man. Did you know he petitioned to have me fired last week?”

  Rin was mostly surprised that Jun hadn’t tried that sooner.

  “Also, anyone this obstinate deserves some attention, if only to make sure you don’t become a walking hazard to everyone around you,” Jiang continued. “You know, your footwork is remarkable.”

  She flushed. “Really?”

  “Placement is perfect. Beautiful angles.” He cocked his head. “Of course, everything you’re doing is useless.”

  She scowled. “Well, if you’re not going to teach me, then—”

  “I didn’t say that. You’ve done a good job working only with the text,” Jiang acknowledged. “A better job than many apprentices would have done. It’s your upper body strength that’s the problem. Namely, you have none.” He grabbed for her wrist and pulled her arm up as if he were examining a mannequin. “So skinny. Weren’t you a farmhand or something?”

  “Not everyone from the south is a farmer,” she snapped. “I was a shopgirl.”

  “Hm. No heavy labor, then. Pampered. You’re useless.”

  She crossed her arms against her chest. “I wasn’t pampered—”

  “Yeah, yeah.” He held up a hand to cut her off. “It doesn’t matter. Here’s the thing: all the technique in the world won’t do you any good if you don’t have the strength to back it up. You don’t need Seejin, kid. You need ki. You need muscle.”

  “So what do you want me to do? Calisthenics?”

  He stood still, contemplative, for a long moment. Then he beamed. “No. I have a better idea. Be at the campus gates for class tomorrow.”

  Before she could respond, he strolled out of the garden.

  “Wow.” Raban set down his chopsticks. “He must really like you.”

  “He called me stupid and hotheaded,” Rin said. “And then he told me to be on time for class.”

  “He definitely likes you,” Raban said. “Jiang’s never uttered anything nice to anyone in my year. He mostly yells at us to stay away from his daffodils. He told Kureel that her braids made her look like snakes were growing out the back of her head.”

  “I heard he got drunk on rice wine last week and pissed into Jun’s wind
ow,” Kitay chipped in. “He sounds awesome.”

  “How long has Jiang been here?” Rin asked. The Lore Master seemed amazingly young, at most half of Jun’s age. She couldn’t believe the other masters would put up with such aggravating behavior from someone who was clearly their junior.

  “Not sure. He was here when I was a first-year, but that doesn’t mean much. I heard he came from the Night Castle twenty years ago.”

  “Jiang was Cike?”

  Among the divisions of the Militia, only the Cike bore an ill reputation. They were a division of soldiers holed up in the Night Castle, far up the Wudang mountain range, whose sole task was to carry out assassinations for the Empress. The Cike fought without honor. They respected no rules of combat, and they were notorious for their brutality. They operated in the darkness; they did the Empress’s dirty work and received no recognition afterward. Most apprentices would have quit the service rather than join the Cike.

  Rin had a hard time reconciling her image of the whimsical Lore Master with that of a hardened assassin.

  “Well, that’s just the rumor. None of the masters will say anything about him. I get the feeling that Jiang’s considered a bit of an embarrassment to the school.” Raban rubbed the back of his head. “The apprentices love to gossip, though. Every class plays the ‘Who is Jiang?’ guessing game. My class was convinced that he was the founder of the Red Junk Opera. The truth’s been stretched so many times that the only thing certain is that we know absolutely nothing about him.”

  “Surely he’s had apprentices before,” said Rin.

  “Jiang is the Lore Master,” Raban said slowly, as if talking to a child. “Nobody pledges Lore.”

  “Because Jiang won’t take any students?”

  “Because Lore is a bloody joke,” said Raban. “Every other track at Sinegard prepares you for a government position or for command in the Militia. But Lore is . . . I don’t know, Lore’s odd. I think it was originally meant to be a study of the Hinterlanders, to see if there’s any substance to their witch-magic rituals, but everyone lost interest pretty quickly. I know Yim and Sonnen have both petitioned Jima to have the class canceled, but it’s still offered every year. I’m not sure why.”