The Poppy War

by R. F. Kuang

  “You’ve got a Sinegardian accent,” she noticed.

  Ramsa nodded. “Lived there for a while. My family were alchemists for the Militia base in the capital. Oversaw fire powder production.”

  “So what are you doing here?”

  “You mean with the Cike?” Ramsa shrugged. “Long story. Father got wrapped up in some political stuff, ended up turning on the Empress. Extremists, you know. Could have been the Opera, but I’ll never be sure. Anyways, he tried to detonate a rocket over the palace and ended up blowing up our factory instead.” He pointed to his eyepatch. “Burned my eyeball right out. Daji’s guards lopped the heads off everyone remotely involved. Public execution and everything.”

  Rin blinked, mostly stunned by Ramsa’s breezy delivery. “Then what about you?”

  “I got off easy. Father never told me much about his plans, so after they realized I didn’t know anything, they just tossed me into Baghra. I think they thought killing a kid might make them look bad.”

  “Baghra?”

  Ramsa nodded cheerfully. “Worst two years of my life. Near the tail end, the Empress paid me a visit and said she’d let me out if I worked on munitions for the Cike.”

  “And you just said yes?”

  “Do you know what Baghra is like? By then, I was just about ready to do anything,” said Ramsa. “Baji was in Baghra, too. Just ask him.”

  “What was he there for?”

  Ramsa shrugged. “Who knows? He won’t say. He was only there for a few months, though. But let’s face it—even Khurdalain is so much better than a cell in Baghra. And the work here is awesome.”

  Rin gave him a sideways look. Ramsa sounded disturbingly chipper about his situation.

  She decided to change the subject. “What was that about in the mess hall?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The—uh . . .” She flailed her arms around. “The monkey man.”

  “Huh? Oh, that’s just Suni. Does that maybe every other day. I think he just likes the attention. Altan’s pretty good with him; Tyr used to just lock him up for hours until he’d calmed down.” Ramsa handed her another bag. “Don’t let Suni scare you. He’s really pretty nice when he’s not being a terror. It’s just that god fucking with his head.”

  “So you’re not a shaman?” she asked.

  Ramsa shook his head quickly. “I don’t mess with that shit. It screws you up. You saw Suni in there. My only god is science. Combine six parts sulfur, six parts saltpeter, and one part birthwort herb, and you’ve got fire powder. Formulaic. Dependable. Doesn’t change. I understand the appeal, I really do, but I like having my mind to myself.”

  Three days passed before Rin spoke with Altan again. He spent a good deal of his time tied up in meetings with the Warlords, trying to patch up relations with the military leadership before they deteriorated any further. She would see him darting back to his office in between meetings, looking haggard and pissed. Finally, he sent Qara to summon her.

  “Hey. I’m about to call a meeting. Wanted to check in on you first.” Altan didn’t look at her as he spoke; he was busy scrawling something on a map covering his desk. “I’m sorry it couldn’t be earlier, I’ve been dealing with bureaucratic bullshit.”

  “That’s all right.” She fidgeted with her hands. He looked exhausted. “What are the Warlords like?”

  “They’re nearly useless.” Altan made a disgusted noise. “The Ox Warlord’s a slimy politician, and the Ram Warlord is an insecure fool who’ll bend whichever way the wind blows. Jun’s got them both by the ear, and the only thing they all agree on is that they hate the Cike. Means we don’t get supplies, reinforcements, or intelligence, and they wouldn’t let us into the mess hall if they had their way. It’s a stupid way to fight a war.”

  “I’m sorry you have to put up with that.”

  “It’s not your problem.” He looked up from his map. “So what do you think of your division?”

  “They’re weird,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “None of them seem to realize we’re in a war zone,” she rephrased. Every regular division soldier she’d encountered was grim-faced, exhausted, but the way the Cike spoke and behaved made them seem like fidgety children—bored rather than scared, off-kilter and out of touch.

  “They’re killers by profession,” Altan said. “They’re desensitized to danger—everyone but Unegen, anyway; he’s skittish about everything. But the rest can act like they don’t understand what everyone’s so freaked out about.”

  “Is that why the Militia hates them?”

  “The Militia hates us because we have unlimited access to psychedelics, we can do what they can’t, and they don’t understand why. It is very difficult to justify how the Cike behave to people who don’t believe in shamans,” Altan said.

  Rin could sympathize with the Militia. Suni’s fits of rage were frequent and public. Qara mumbled to her birds in full view of the other soldiers. And once word had gotten out about Enki’s veritable apothecary of hallucinogens, it spread like wildfire; the division soldiers couldn’t understand why only the Cike should have access to morphine.

  “So why don’t you just try to tell them?” she asked. “How shamanism works, I mean.”

  “Because that’s such an easy conversation to have? But trust me. They’ll see soon enough.” Altan tapped his map. “They’re treating you all right, though? Made any friends?”

  “I like Ramsa,” she offered.

  “He’s a charmer. Like a new puppy. You think he’s adorable until he pisses on the furniture.”

  “Did he?”

  “No. But he did take a shit in Baji’s pillow once. Don’t get on his bad side.” Altan grimaced.

  “How old is he?” Rin had to ask.

  “At least twelve. Probably no older than fifteen.” Altan shrugged. “Baji’s got this theory that he’s actually a forty-year-old who doesn’t age, because we’ve never seen him get any taller, but he’s not nearly mature enough.”

  “And you put him into war zones?”

  “Ramsa puts himself into war zones,” Altan said. “You just try to stop him. Have you met the rest? No problems?”

  “No problems,” she said hastily. “Everything’s fine, it’s just . . .”

  “They’re not Sinegard graduates,” he finished for her. “There’s no routine. No discipline. Nothing you’re used to. Am I right?”

  She nodded.

  “You can’t think of them as just the Thirteenth Division. You can’t command them like ground troops. They’re like chess pieces, right? Only they’re mismatched and overpowered. Baji’s the most competent, and probably should be the commander, but he gets distracted by anything with legs. Unegen’s good for intelligence gathering, but he’s scared of his own shadow. Bad in open combat. Aratsha’s useless unless you’re right beside a body of water. You always want Suni in a firefight, but he’s got no subtlety, so you can’t assign him to anything else. Qara’s the best archer I’ve seen and probably the most useful of the lot, but she’s mediocre in hand-to-hand. And Chaghan’s a walking psychospiritual bomb, but only when he’s here.” Altan threw his hands up. “Put that all together and try to formulate a strategy.”

  Rin glanced down at the markings on his map. “But you’ve thought of something?”

  “I think so.” A grin quirked over his face. “Why don’t we go call the rest of them?”

  Ramsa arrived first. He smelled suspiciously of fire powder, though Rin couldn’t imagine where he’d gotten more. Baji and Unegen showed up minutes later, hoisting Aratsha’s barrel between them. Qara appeared with Enki, heatedly discussing something in Qara’s language. When they saw the others, they quickly fell silent. Suni came in last, and Rin was privately relieved when he took a seat at the opposite end of the room.

  Altan’s office had only the one chair, so they sat on the floor in a circle like a ring of schoolchildren. Aratsha bobbed conspicuously in the corner, towering over them like some grotesque watery plant.


  “Gang’s together again,” Ramsa said happily.

  “Sans Chaghan,” said Baji. “When’s he back? Qara? Estimated location?”

  Qara glowered at him.

  “Never mind,” said Baji.

  “We’re all here? Good.” Altan walked into the office carrying a rolled-up map in one hand. He unfurled it over his desk, then pinned it up against the far wall. The crucial landmarks of the city had been marked in red and black ink, dotted over with circles of varying size.

  “Here’s our position in Khurdalain,” he said. He pointed to the black circles. “This is us.” Then to the red ones. “This is Mugen.”

  The maps reminded Rin of a game of wikki, the chess variation Irjah had taught them to play in their third-year Strategy class. Wikki play did not involve direct confrontation, but rather dominance through strategic encirclement. Both the Nikara and the Federation had as of yet avoided direct clash, instead filling empty spaces on the complicated network of canals that was Khurdalain to establish a relative advantage. The opposing forces held each other in a fragile equilibrium, gradually raising the stakes as reinforcements flocked to the city from both sides.

  “The wharf now stands as the main line of defense. We insulate the civilian quarters against Federation encampments on the beach. They haven’t attempted a press farther inland because all three divisions are concentrated right on the mouth of the Sharhap River. But that balance only holds so long as they’re uncertain about our numbers. We’re not sure how good their intelligence is, but we’re guessing they’re aware that we’d be pretty evenly matched in an open field. After Sinegard, the Federation forces don’t want to risk direct confrontation. They don’t want to bleed forces before their inland campaign. They’ll only attack when they have the sure numbers advantage.”

  Altan indicated on the map where he had circled an area to the north of where they were stationed.

  “In three days, the Federation will bring in a fleet to supplement the troops at the Sharhap River. Their warship will unload twelve sampans bearing men, supplies, and fire powder off the coast. Qara’s birds have seen them sailing over the narrow strait. At their current speed, we predict they will land after sunset of the third day,” Altan announced. “I want to sink them.”

  “And I want to sleep with the Empress.” Baji looked around. “Sorry, I thought we were voicing our fantasies.”

  Altan looked unamused.

  “Look at your own map,” Baji insisted. “The Sharhap is swarming with Jun’s men. You can’t attack the Federation without escalation. This forces their hand. And the Warlords won’t get on board—they’re not ready, they want to wait for the Seventh to get here.”

  “They’re not landing at the Sharhap,” Altan responded. “They’re docking at the Murui. Far away from the fishing wharf. The civilians stay away from Murui; the flat shore means that there’s a broad intertidal zone and a fast-running tide. Which means there’s no fixed coastline. They’ll have difficulty unloading. And the terrain beyond the beaches is nonideal for them; it’s crisscrossed by rivers and creeks, and there are hardly any good roads.”

  Baji looked confused. “Then why the hell are they docking there?”

  Altan looked smug. “For precisely the same reasons that the First and Eighth are amassing troops by Sharhap. Sharhap’s the obvious landing spot. The Federation don’t think anyone will be guarding Murui. But they weren’t counting on, you know, talking birds.”

  “Nice one,” Unegen said.

  “Thank you.” Qara looked smug.

  “The coast at Murui leads into a tight latticework of irrigation channels by a rice paddy. We will draw the boats as far as possible inland, and Aratsha will ground them by reversing the currents to cut off an escape route.”

  They looked to Aratsha.

  “You can do that?” Baji asked.

  The watery blob that was Aratsha’s head bobbed from side to side. “A fleet that size? Not easily. I can give you thirty minutes. One hour, tops.”

  “That’s more than enough,” said Altan. “If we can get them bunched together, they’ll catch fire in seconds. But we need to corral them into the narrow strait. Ramsa. Can you create a diversion?”

  Ramsa tossed something round in a sack across the table to Altan.

  Altan caught it, opened it, and made a face. “What is this?”

  “It’s the Bone-Burning Fire Oil Magic Bomb,” Ramsa said. “New model.”

  “Cool.” Suni leaned toward the bag. “What’s in it?”

  “Tung oil, sal ammoniac, scallion juice, and feces.” Ramsa rattled off the ingredients with relish.

  Altan looked faintly alarmed. “Whose feces?”

  “That’s not important,” Ramsa said hastily. “This can knock birds out of the sky from fifty feet away. I can plant some bamboo rockets for you, too, but you’ll have trouble igniting in this humidity.”

  Altan raised an eyebrow.

  “Right.” Ramsa chuckled. “I love Speerlies.”

  “Aratsha will reverse the currents to trap them,” Altan continued. “Suni, Baji, Rin, and I will defend from the shore. They’ll have reduced visibility from the combination of smoke and fog, so they’ll think we’re a larger squad than we are.”

  “What happens if they try to storm the shore?” Unegen asked.

  “They can’t,” said Altan. “It’s marshland. They’ll sink into the bog. At nighttime it’ll be impossible for them to find solid land. We will defend those crucial points in teams of two. Qara and Unegen will detach supply boats from the back of the van and drag them back to the main channel. Whatever we can’t take, we’ll burn.”

  “One problem,” Ramsa said. “I’m out of fire powder. The Warlords aren’t sharing.”

  “I’ll deal with the Warlords,” Altan said. “You just keep making those shit bombs.”

  The great military strategist Sunzi wrote that fire should be used on a dry night, when flames might spread with the smallest provocation. Fire should be used when one was upwind, so that the wind would carry its brother element, smoke, into the enemy encampment. Fire should be used on a clear night, when there was no chance for rainfall to quench the flames.

  Fire should not be used on a night like this, when the humid winds from the beach would prevent it from spreading, when stealth was of utmost importance but any torchlight would give them away.

  But tonight they were not using regular fire. They needed nothing so rudimentary as kindling and oil. They didn’t need torches. They had Speerlies.

  Rin crouched among the reeds beside Altan, eyes fixed on the darkening sky as she awaited Qara’s signal. They pressed flat against the mud bank, stomachs on the ground. Water seeped through her thin tunic from the moist mud, and the peat emitted such a rank odor of rotten eggs that breathing through her mouth only made her want to gag.

  On the opposite bank she could just see Suni and Baji crawl up against the river and drop down among the reeds. Between them, they held the only two strips of solid land in the paddy; two slender pieces of dry peat that reached into the marsh like fingers.

  The thick fog that might have dampened regular kindling now gave them the advantage. It would be a boon to the Federation as they made their amphibious landing, but it would also serve to conceal the Cike and to exaggerate their numbers.

  “How did you know there would be a fog?” she whispered to Altan.

  “There’s a fog every time it rains. This is the wet cycle for the rice paddies. Qara’s birds have been keeping track of cloud movements for the past week,” Altan said. “We know the marsh inside out.”

  Altan’s attention to detail was remarkable. The Cike operated with a system of signals and cues that Rin would never have been able to decipher had she not been drilled relentlessly the day before. When Qara’s falcon flew overhead, that had been the signal for Aratsha to begin his subtle manipulation of the river currents. Half an hour before that, an owl had flown low over the river, signaling Baji and Suni to ingest a han
dful of colorful fungi. The drug’s reaction time was timed precisely to the estimated arrival of the fleet.

  Amateurs obsess over strategy, Irjah had once told their class. Professionals obsess over logistics.

  Rin had choked down a bagful of poppy seeds when she saw Qara’s first signal; they stuck thickly to her throat, settled lightly in her stomach. She felt the effects when she stood; she was just high enough that her head felt light but not so woozy that she couldn’t wield a sword.

  Altan had ingested nothing. Altan, for some reason, did not seem to need any drugs to summon the Phoenix. He called the fire as casually as one might whistle. It was an extension of him that he could manipulate with no concentration at all.

  A faint rustle overhead. Rin could barely make out the silhouette of Qara’s eagle, passing over for the second time to alert them to the arrival of the Federation. She heard a gentle sloshing noise coming from the channel.

  Rin squinted at the river and saw not a fleet of boats but a line of Federation soldiers, implausibly walking in the river that reached up to their shoulders. They carried wooden planks high over their heads.

  She realized that they were engineers. They were going to use those planks to create bridges for the incoming fleet to roll supplies onto dry land. Smart, she thought. The engineers each held a waterproof lamp high over the murky channel, casting an eerie glow over the canal.

  Altan motioned for Suni and Baji to crouch deeper to the ground so they wouldn’t be visible over the reeds. The long grass tickled Rin’s earlobes, but she didn’t move.

  Then, far down by the mouth of the channel, Rin saw the dim flicker of a lantern signal. At first she could see only the boat at the fore.

  Then the full fleet emerged from the mist.

  Rin counted under her breath. The fleet was twelve boats—sleek, well-constructed river sampans—packed with eight men each, sitting in a straight line with trunks of equipment stacked in high piles at the center of each boat.

  The fleet paused at a fork in the river. The Federation had two choices; one channel took them to a wide bay where they could unload with relative ease, and the other took them on a detour into the salt marsh labyrinth where the Cike lay in waiting.