The Poppy War

by R. F. Kuang

  “Why isn’t Chaghan commander?” she asked.

  Baji looked confused. “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t understand why Chaghan obeys Altan,” she said. Against the Woman, he had proclaimed himself the most powerful shaman in existence. She believed it. Chaghan navigated the spirit world like he belonged there, as if he were a god himself. The Cike didn’t hesitate to talk back to Altan, but she had never seen any of them dare to so much as contradict Chaghan. Altan commanded their loyalty, but Chaghan enjoyed their fear.

  “He was slated to be commander after Tyr,” said Baji. “Got shunted to the side after Altan showed up, though.”

  “And he was fine with that?” Rin couldn’t imagine someone like Chaghan relinquishing authority peacefully.

  “Of course not. Nearly spit fire when Tyr started favoring the golden boy from Sinegard over him.”

  “So then why—”

  “Why’s he happy serving under Altan? He wasn’t, at first. He bitched about it for a straight week, until Altan finally got fed up. He asked Tyr for permission for a duel and got it. He took Chaghan out into the valleys for three days.”

  “What happened?”

  Baji snorted. “What happens when anyone fights Trengsin? When Chaghan got back, all that pretty white hair was singed black and he was obeying Altan like a whipped dog. Our friend from the Hinterlands might shatter minds, but he couldn’t touch Trengsin. No one can.”

  Rin dropped her head back onto her knees and closed her eyes against the light from the rising sun. She hadn’t slept—hadn’t truly rested—since they’d left Khurdalain. But her body couldn’t sustain itself any longer. She was so tired . . .

  Their boat jolted in the water. Rin snapped up to a sitting position. They had bumped straight into the boat in front of them.

  “Something’s in the water,” Ramsa shouted from the fore.

  Rin looked over the side and squinted at the river. The water was the same muddy brown, until she glanced upstream.

  At first she thought it was a trick of the light, an illusion of the sun’s rays. And then her boat reached an odd patch of colored water, and she draped her fingers over the edge. Then she yanked it back in horror.

  They were riding through a river of blood.

  Altan and Chaghan both jumped up with startled exclamations. Behind them, Unegen uttered a long, inhuman shriek.

  “Oh gods,” Baji said, over and over. “Oh gods, oh gods, oh gods.”

  Then the bodies began to float toward them.

  Rin was paralyzed, stricken with an irrational fear that the bodies might be the enemy, that they would rise out of the water and attack them.

  Their boat stopped moving completely. They were surrounded by corpses. Soldiers. Civilians. Men. Women. Children. They were uniformly bloated and discolored. Some of their faces were disfigured, slashed apart. Others were simply blank, resigned, bobbing listlessly in the crimson water as if they had never been living, breathing bodies.

  Chaghan reached out to examine a young girl’s blue lips. His own mouth was pursed dispassionately as if he were tracking a footprint, not touching a rubbery carcass. “These bodies have been in the river for days. Why haven’t they drifted out to sea yet?

  “It’s the Golyn Niis Dam,” Unegen suggested. “It’s blocking them up.”

  “But we’re still miles out from the city . . .” Rin trailed off.

  They fell silent.

  Altan stood up at the head of his boat. “Get out. Start running.”

  The road to Golyn Niis was empty. Qara and Unegen scouted ahead but reported no sign of enemy combatants. Yet evidence of Federation presence was obvious everywhere they looked—trampled grass, abandoned campfires, rectangular patches in the dirt where tents had been erected. Rin felt sure that Federation soldiers were lying in wait for them, setting an ambush, but as they drew closer to the city, she realized that made no sense; the Federation wouldn’t have known they were coming, and they wouldn’t have set such an elaborate trap for such a small squadron.

  She would have preferred an ambush. The silence was worse.

  If Golyn Niis were still under siege, the Federation would be on guard. They would be prepared for skirmishes. They would have posted guards to make sure no reinforcements could reach the resistance inside.

  There would be a resistance.

  But the Federation seemed to have simply packed up and walked away. They hadn’t even bothered to leave behind a skeleton patrol. Which meant that the Federation didn’t care who came into Golyn Niis.

  Which meant that whatever lay behind those city walls, it wasn’t worth guarding.

  When the Cike finally succeeded in dragging open the heavy gates, an appalling stink assaulted them like a slap to the face. Rin knew the smell. She had experienced it at Sinegard and Khurdalain. She knew what to expect now. It had been a fool’s hope to expect anything different, but still she could not fully register the sight that awaited them when they passed through the barrier.

  All of them stood still at the gates, unwilling to take one step farther inside.

  For a long time none of them could speak.

  Then Ramsa fell to his knees and began to cackle with laughter.

  “Khurdalain,” he gasped. “We were all so obsessed with holding Khurdalain.”

  He doubled over, sides shaking with mirth, and beat his fists against the dirt.

  Rin envied him.

  Golyn Niis was a city of corpses.

  The bodies had been arranged deliberately, as if the Federation had wanted to leave a greeting message for the next people to walk into the city. The destruction possessed a strange artfulness, a sadistic symmetry. Corpses were piled in neat, even rows, forming pyramids of ten, then nine, then eight. Corpses were stacked against the wall. Corpses were placed across the street in tidy lines. Corpses were arranged as far as the eye could see.

  Nothing human moved. The only sounds in the city were wind rustling through debris, the buzzing of flies, and the squawking of carrion birds.

  Rin’s eyes watered. The stench was overwhelming. She looked to Altan, but his face was a mask. He marched them stoically down the main street into the city center, as if he was determined to witness the full extent of the destruction.

  They marched in silence.

  The Federation handiwork became more elaborate the deeper they traveled into the city. Close to the city square, the Federation had arrayed the corpses in states of incredible desecration, grotesque positions that defied human imagination. Corpses nailed to boards. Corpses hung by their tongues from hooks. Corpses dismembered in every possible way; headless, limbless, displaying mutilations that must have been performed while the victim was still alive. Fingers removed, then stacked in a small pile beside stubby hands. An entire line of castrated men, severed penises placed delicately on their slack-jawed mouths.

  One sees great joy in decapitating enemies.

  There were so many beheadings. Heads stacked up in neat little piles, not yet so rotted that they had become skulls, but no longer resembling human faces. Whatever heads retained enough flesh to form expressions wore identical looks of terrible dullness, as if they had never been alive.

  As though burning; as though dying.

  Perhaps due to some initial desire for sanitation, or mere curiosity, the Federation had tried to ignite several corpse pyramids. But they had given up before the job was finished. Perhaps they did not want to waste the oil. Perhaps the stink became unbearable. The bodies were grotesque, half-charred spectacles; hair had turned to ash, and the top layers of skin had turned a crinkling black, but the worst part was that there was something beneath the ashes that looked identifiably human.

  The subject is with tears flowing in torrents, groaning in sorrow.

  In the square they found bizarrely short skeletons—not corpses, but skeletons gleaming pristine white. They looked at first like children’s bones, but upon closer examination, Enki identified them as adult torsos. He bent down and to
uched the dirt where one skeleton was fixed to the ground. The top half of the body had been stripped clean so the bones glistened in the sunlight, while the lower half remained intact in the dirt.

  “They were buried,” he said, disgusted. “They were buried up to the waist and set upon by dogs.”

  Rin could not understand how the Federation had found so many different ways to inflict suffering. But each corner they turned revealed another instance in the string of horrors, barbarian savagery matched only by inventiveness. A family, arms still around each other, impaled upon the same spear. Babies lying at the bottoms of vats, their skin a horrible shade of crimson, floating in the water in which they’d boiled to death.

  In the hours that had passed, the only living creatures they encountered were dogs unnaturally fattened by feeding on corpses. Dogs, and vultures.

  “Orders?” Unegen finally asked Altan.

  They looked to their commander.

  Altan hadn’t spoken since they had walked through the city gates. His skin had turned a ghostly shade of gray. He might have been ill. He was sweating profusely, his left arm trembling. When they reached another pile of charred corpses, he convulsed, sank to his knees, and could not keep walking.

  This was not Altan’s first genocide.

  This is Speer again, Rin thought. Altan must have been imagining the massacre of Speer in his mind, imagining the way his people were slaughtered overnight like cattle.

  After a long time Chaghan extended his hand to Altan.

  Altan grasped it and rose to his feet. He swallowed, closed his eyes. A mask of detachment spread across his expression once more with a curious ripple, like a facade of indifference had formed a seal over the surface of his face, locking any vulnerabilities within.

  “Spread out,” Altan ordered. His voice was impossibly level. “Find any survivors.”

  Surrounded by death, spreading out was the last thing any of them wanted to do.

  Suni opened his mouth to protest. “But the Federation—”

  “The Federation isn’t here. They’ve been marching inland for a steady week. Our people are dead. Find me survivors.”

  They found evidence of a last desperate battle near the southern gate. The victors were clear. The Militia corpses had been given the same deliberate treatment as the carcasses of the civilians. Corpses had been stacked in the middle of the square, neat little piles with bodies arranged carefully on top of one another.

  Rin saw the broken flag of the Militia lying on the ground, burned and smeared with blood. The flag bearer’s hand was detached at the wrist; the rest of his body lay several feet away, eyes blank and unseeing.

  The flag bore the dragon crest of the Red Emperor, the symbol of the Nikara Empire. In the lower left corner was stitched the number two in Old Nikara calligraphy. It was the insignia of the Second Division.

  Rin’s heart skipped a beat.

  Kitay’s division.

  Rin dropped to her knees and touched the flag. A barking noise sounded from behind a pile of corpses. She looked up just as a dark, flea-matted mongrel came running at her. It was the size of a small wolf. Its gut was grotesquely round, like it had been gorging for days.

  It dashed past Rin toward the flag bearer’s corpse, sniffing hopefully.

  Rin watched it rooting around, salivating eagerly, and something inside her snapped.

  “Get away!” she shrieked, kicking out at the dog.

  Any Sinegardian animal would have slunk away in fear. But this dog had lost all fear of human beings. This dog had lived amid a juicy feast of carnage for too long. Perhaps it assumed that she, too, was close to death. Perhaps it thought fresh meat would taste better than rotting flesh.

  It snarled and lunged at her.

  Rin was caught off guard by the dog’s tremendous weight; it knocked her to the ground. It slobbered from open jaws as it lunged for her artery, but she raised her arms in defense and it sank its teeth into her left forearm instead. She screamed out loud, but the dog did not let go; with her right arm she reached for her sword, unsheathed it, and shoved it upward.

  Her sword found its way through the dog’s ribs. The dog’s jaws went slack.

  She stabbed again. The dog fell off her.

  She jumped to her feet and jammed her sword down, piercing the dog’s side. It was in its death throes now. She stabbed it again, this time in the neck. A spray of blood exploded outward, coating her face with its warm wetness. She was using her sword like a dagger now, bringing her arm down again and again just to feel bones and muscle give way to metal, just to hurt and break something . . .

  “Rin!”

  Someone grabbed her sword arm. She whirled on him, but Suni pulled her arms behind her back and held her tightly, so that she could not move until her sobbing had subsided.

  “You’re lucky it didn’t get your sword arm,” said Enki. “Keep this on for a week. See me if it starts to smell.”

  Rin flexed her arm. Enki had bound the dog bite tightly with a poultice that stung like she had stuck her arm in a hornet’s nest.

  “It’s good for you,” he said when she grimaced. “It’ll prevent infection. We don’t need you to go frothing mad.”

  “I think I’d like to go frothing mad,” said Rin. “I’d like to lose my head. I think I’d be happier.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” Enki said sternly. “You have work to do.”

  But was it really work, what they were doing? Or were they deluding themselves that by finding the survivors, they could atone for the simple truth that they were too late?

  She continued her miserable work of combing through the empty streets, upending debris, searching homes whose doors had been smashed in. After hours of looking she stopped hoping to find Kitay alive, and started to hope she wouldn’t find his corpse during her patrols, because the sight of him flayed, dismembered, jammed into a wheelbarrow with a pile of other corpses, half-burned, would be worse than never finding him at all.

  She walked Golyn Niis alone in a daze, trying to both see and not see. In time she found herself inured to the smell, and eventually the sight of bodies was not a shock, just another array of faces to be scanned for someone she knew.

  All the while she called Kitay’s name. She screamed it every time she saw a hint of motion, anything that could be alive: a cat disappearing into an alley, a pack of crows taking off suddenly, startled by the return of humans who weren’t dead or dying. She screamed it for days.

  And then from the ruins, so faintly she thought it was an echo, she heard her name in response.

  “Remember that time I said the Trials were as bad as Speer?” Kitay asked. “I was wrong. This is as bad as Speer. This is worse than Speer.”

  It wasn’t remotely funny, and neither of them laughed.

  Rin’s eyes and throat were sore from weeping. She had been clutching Kitay’s hand for hours, fingers wound tightly around his, and she never wanted to let go. They sat side by side in a hastily constructed shelter half a mile outside the city, the only place they could escape the stench of death that permeated Golyn Niis. Kitay’s survival was nothing short of a miracle. He and a small band of soldiers from the Second Division had hidden for days under the bodies of their slain comrades, too afraid to venture out in case the Federation patrols should return.

  When it looked like they could sneak away from the killing fields, they hid in the demolished slums of the eastern side of the city. They had pulled a cellar door away and filled the open space with bricks, so from the outside it just looked like a wall. That was why the Cike hadn’t seen them on their first pass through the city.

  Only a handful of Kitay’s squadron was still alive. He didn’t know if the city contained any more survivors.

  “Have you seen Nezha?” Kitay finally asked. “I heard he was being shipped to Khurdalain.”

  Rin opened her mouth to respond, but a horrible prickling feeling spread from the bridge of her nose to under her eyes, and then she was choking under wild, heaving sob
s, and she couldn’t form any words at all.

  Kitay said nothing, just held his arms out in wordless sympathy. She collapsed into them. It was absurd that he should be comforting her, that she should be the one crying, after all that Kitay had survived. But Kitay was numb; for Kitay the suffering had been normalized, and he couldn’t grieve any more than he already had. He was still holding her when Qara ducked into the tent.

  “You’re Chen Kitay?” She wasn’t really asking, she just needed to say something to break the silence.

  “Yes.”

  “You were with the Second Division when . . . ?” Qara trailed off.

  Kitay nodded.

  “We need you to brief us. Can you walk?”

  Under the open sky, in front of a silent audience of Altan and the twins, Kitay recounted in a halting voice the massacre at Golyn Niis.

  “The city’s defense was doomed from the start,” Kitay said. “We thought we still had weeks. But you could have given us months, and the same thing would have happened.”

  Golyn Niis had been defended by an amalgamation of the Second, Ninth, and Eleventh Divisions. In this case, greater numbers did not mean greater strength. Perhaps even worse than in Khurdalain, the soldiers of the different provinces felt little sense of cohesion or purpose. The commanding officers were rivals, paranoid with distrust, unwilling to share intelligence.

  “Irjah begged the Warlords over and over again to put aside their differences. He couldn’t make them see reason.” Kitay swallowed. “The first two skirmishes went badly. They took us by surprise. They surrounded the city from the southeast. We hadn’t been expecting them so early. We didn’t think they had found the mountain pass. But they came at night, and they . . . they captured Irjah. They flayed him alive over the city wall so that everyone could see. That broke our resistance. Most of the soldiers wanted to flee after that.

  “After Irjah was dead, the Ninth and Eleventh surrendered en masse. I don’t blame them. They were outnumbered, and they thought they’d get off easier if they didn’t resist. Thought maybe it’d be better to become prisoners than to die.” Kitay shuddered violently. “They were so wrong. The Federation general took their surrender with all the usual etiquette. Confiscated their arms, corralled the soldiers into prison camps. The next morning they were marched up the mountain and beheaded. There were a lot of deserters from the Second after that. A couple of us stayed to fight. It was pointless, but . . . it was better than surrendering. We couldn’t dishonor Irjah. Not like that.”