The Poppy War

by R. F. Kuang

  And in time, she bore the hunter a child.

  From his throne in the heavens, Erlang Shen watched, and grew enraged.

  When Sanshengmu’s son reached his first birthday, Erlang Shen journeyed down to the world of man. He set fire to the banquet tent, driving out the guests in a panicked terror. He impaled the hunter with his great three-pronged spear and killed him. He took Sanshengmu’s son and hurled him off the side of a mountain. Then he grasped his horrified sister by the neck and lifted her in the air.

  “You cannot kill me,” choked Sanshengmu. “You are bound to me. We are two halves of one whole. You cannot survive my death.”

  “No,” acknowledged Erlang Shen. “But I can imprison you. Since you love the world of men so much, I will build for you an earthly prison, where you will pass an eternity. This will be your punishment for daring to love a mortal.”

  As he spoke, a great mountain formed in the air. He flung his twin sister away from him, and the mountain sank on top of her, an unbreakable prison of stone. Sanshengmu tried and tried to escape, but inside her prison, she could not access her magic.

  She languished in that stone prison for years. And every moment was torture to the goddess, who had once flown free through the heavens.

  There are many stories about Sanshengmu. There are stories of her son, the Lotus Warrior, and how he was the first shaman to walk Nikan, a liaison between gods and men. There are stories of his war against his uncle, Erlang Shen, in order to free his mother.

  There are stories, too, about the Chuluu Korikh. There are stories of the monkey king, the arrogant shaman who was locked for five thousand years within by the Jade Emperor as punishment for his impudence. One could say that this was the beginning of the age of stories, because that was the beginning of the age of shamans.

  Much is true. Much more is not.

  But one thing can be said to be fact. To this day, of all the places on this Earth, only the Chuluu Korikh may contain a god.

  “Are you finally going to tell me where you’re headed?” Kitay asked. “Or did you call me here just to say goodbye?”

  Rin was packing her equipment into traveling bags, deliberately avoiding eye contact with Kitay. She had avoided him the past week while she and Altan planned their journey.

  Altan had forbidden her to speak of it to anyone outside the Cike. He and Rin would travel to the Chuluu Korikh alone. But if they succeeded, Rin wanted Kitay to know what was coming. She wanted him to know when to flee.

  “We’re leaving as soon as the gelding is ready,” she said. Chaghan and Qara had departed Golyn Niis on the only halfway decent horse that the Federation hadn’t taken with them. It had taken days to find another gelding that wasn’t diseased or dying, and days more to nurture it back to a state fit for travel.

  “Can I ask where to?” Kitay asked. He tried not to display his annoyance, but she knew him too well to overlook it; irritation was written across his face. Kitay was not used to missing information; she knew he resented her for it.

  She hesitated, and then said, “The Kukhonin range.”

  “Kukhonin?” Kitay repeated.

  “Two days’ ride south from here.” She rummaged around in her bag to avoid looking at him. She had packed an enormous amount of poppy seed, everything from Enki’s stores that she could hold. Of course, none of it would be useful inside the Chuluu Korikh itself, but once they left the mountain, once they had freed every shaman inside . . .

  “I know where the Kukhonin range is,” Kitay said impatiently. “I want to know why you’re riding in the opposite direction from Mugen’s main column.”

  You have to tell him. Rin could not see a way of warning Kitay without divulging part of Altan’s plan. Otherwise he would insist on finding out for himself, and his curiosity would spell the death of him. She set the bag down, straightened up, and met Kitay’s eyes.

  “Altan wants to raise an army.”

  Kitay made a noise of disbelief. “Come again?”

  “It’s . . . they’re . . . You wouldn’t understand if I told you.” How was she to explain this to him? Kitay had never studied Lore. Kitay had never truly believed in the gods, not even after the battle at Sinegard. Kitay thought that shamanism was a metaphor for arcane martial arts, that Rin and Altan’s abilities were sleights of hand and parlor tricks. Kitay did not know what lay in the Pantheon. Kitay did not understand the danger they were about to unleash.

  “Just—look, I’m trying to warn you—”

  “No, you’re trying to deceive me. You don’t get to deceive me,” Kitay said very loudly. “I have seen cities burning. I have seen you do what mortals should not be able to do. I have seen you raise fire. I think I have the right to know. Try me.”

  “Fine.”

  She told him.

  Amazingly, he believed her.

  “This sounds like a plan where many things could go wrong,” said Kitay when she finished. “How does Altan even know this army will fight for him?”

  “They’re Nikara,” said Rin. “They have to. They’ve fought for the Empire before.”

  “The same Empire that had them buried alive in the first place?”

  “Not buried alive,” she said. “Immured.”

  “Oh, sorry,” Kitay amended, “immured. Enclosed in stone in some magic mountain, because they became so powerful that a fucking mountain was the only thing that could stop them tearing apart entire villages. This is the army you’re just going to set loose on the country. This is what you think is going to save Nikan. Who came up with this, you or your opium-addled commander? Because this sure as hell isn’t the kind of plan you come up with sober, I can tell you that.”

  Rin crossed her arms tightly against her chest. Kitay wasn’t saying anything she hadn’t already considered. What could anyone predict about maddened souls who had been entombed for years? The shamans of the Chuluu Korikh might do nothing. They might destroy half the country out of spite.

  But Altan was certain they would fight for him.

  They have no right to begrudge the Empress, Altan had said. All shamans know the risks when they journey to the gods. Everyone in the Cike knows that at the end of the line, they are destined for the Stone Mountain.

  And the alternative was the extermination of every Nikara alive. The massacre of Golyn Niis made it obvious that the Federation did not want to take any prisoners. They wanted the massive piece of land that was the Nikara Empire. They were not interested in cohabitation with its former occupants. She knew the risks, and she had weighed them and concluded that she didn’t care. She had thrown her lot in with Altan, for better or worse.

  “You can’t change my mind,” she said. “I’m telling you this as a favor. When we come out of that mountain, I don’t know how much control we’ll have, only that we’ll be powerful. Do not try to stop us. Do not try to join us. When we come, you should flee.”

  “The rendezvous point will be at the base of the Kukhonin Mountains,” Altan told the assembled Cike. “If we don’t meet you there in seven days’ time, assume we were killed. Do not go inside the mountain yourselves. Wait for a bird from Qara and do as the message commands. Chaghan is commander in my stead.”

  “Where is Chaghan?” Unegen ventured to ask.

  “With Qara.” Altan’s face betrayed nothing. “They’ve gone north on my orders. You’ll know when they’re back.”

  “When will that be?”

  “When they’ve done their job.”

  Rin waited by their horse, watched Altan speaking with a self-assured aura that she had not seen since Sinegard. Altan, as he presented himself now, was not that broken boy with the opium pipe. He was not the despairing Speerly reliving the genocide of his people. He was not a victim. Altan was different now than he had been even in Khurdalain. He was no longer frustrated, pacing around his office like a cornered animal, no longer constrained under Jun’s thumb. Altan had orders now, a mission, a singular purpose. He didn’t have to hold back anymore. He had been let off his leas
h. Altan was going to take his anger to a final, terrible conclusion.

  She had no doubts they would succeed. She just didn’t know if the country would survive his plan.

  “Good luck,” said Enki. “Say hi to Feylen for us.”

  “Great guy,” Unegen said wistfully. “Until, you know, he tried to flatten everything in a twenty-mile radius.”

  “Don’t exaggerate,” said Ramsa. “It was only ten.”

  They rode as fast as the old gelding would allow. At midday they passed a boulder with two lines etched into its side. She would have missed it if Altan had not pointed it out.

  “Chaghan’s work,” said Altan. “Proof that the way is safe.”

  “You sent Chaghan here?”

  “Yes. Before we left the Night Castle for Khurdalain.”

  “Why?”

  “Chaghan and I . . . Chaghan had a theory,” said Altan. “About the Trifecta. Before Sinegard, when he realized Tyr had died, he’d seen something on the spirit horizon. He thought he’d seen the Gatekeeper. He saw the same disturbance a week later, and then it disappeared. He thought the Gatekeeper must have intentionally closed himself in the Chuluu Korikh. We thought we might extract him, find out the truth—maybe discover the truth behind the Trifecta, see what’s happened to the Gatekeeper and the Emperor, find out what the Empress did to them. Chaghan didn’t know I wanted to free anyone else.”

  “You lied to him.”

  Altan shrugged. “Chaghan believes what he wants to believe.”

  “Chaghan also . . . He said . . .” She trailed off, unsure of how to phrase her question.

  “What?” Altan demanded.

  “He said they trained you like a dog. At Sinegard.”

  Altan laughed drily. “He phrased it like that, did he?”

  “He said they fed you opium.”

  Altan stiffened.

  “They trained soldiers at Sinegard,” he said. “With me, they did their job.”

  They might have done their job too well, Rin thought. Like the Cike, the masters at Sinegard had conjured a more frightening power than they were equipped to handle. They’d done more than train a Speerly. They’d created an avenger.

  Altan was a commander who would burn down the world to destroy his enemy.

  This should have bothered her. Three years ago, if she had known what she knew about Altan now, she would have run in the opposite direction.

  But now, she had seen and suffered too much. The Empire didn’t need someone reasonable. It needed someone mad enough to try to save it.

  They stopped riding when it became too dark to see the path in front of them. They had ventured onto a trail so lightly trodden it could hardly be called a road, and their horse could have easily cut its hooves on a jagged rock or sent them tumbling into a ravine. Their gelding staggered when they dismounted. Altan poured out a pan of water for it, but only after Rin’s prodding did it begin to halfheartedly drink.

  “He’ll die if we ride him any harder,” Rin said. She knew very little about horses, but she could tell when an animal was on the verge of collapse. One of the military steeds at Khurdalain, perhaps, could have easily made the trip, but this horse was a miserable pack animal—an old beast so thin its ribs showed through its matted coat.

  “We just need him for one more day,” said Altan. “He can die after.”

  Rin fed the gelding a handful of oats from their pack. Meanwhile Altan built their camp with austere, methodical efficiency. He collected fallen pine needles and dry leaves to insulate against the cold. He formed a frame out of broken tree limbs and draped a spare cloak over it to shield against overnight snowfall. He pulled from his pack dry kindling and oil, quickly dug a pit, and arranged the flammables inside. He extended his hand. A flare caught immediately. Casually, as if he were doing nothing harder than waving a fan, Altan increased the volume of the flame until they were sitting before a roaring bonfire.

  Rin held her hands out, let the heat seep through into her bones. She hadn’t noticed how cold she’d become over the day; she realized she hadn’t been able to feel her toes until now.

  “Are you warm?” Altan asked.

  She nodded quickly. “Thanks.”

  He watched her in silence for a moment. She felt the heat of his gaze on her, and tried not to flush. She was not used to receiving Altan’s full attention; he had been distracted with Chaghan ever since Khurdalain, ever since their falling-out. But things were reversed now. Chaghan had abandoned Altan, and Rin stood by his side. She felt a thrill of vindictive joy when she considered this. Suddenly guilty, she tried to quash it down.

  “You’ve been to the mountain before?”

  “Only once,” Altan said. “A year ago. I helped Tyr bring Feylen in.”

  “Feylen’s the one who went crazy?”

  “They all go crazy, in the end,” he said. “The Cike die in battle, or they get immured. Most commanders assume their title when they’ve disposed of their old master. If Tyr hadn’t died, I probably would have locked him in myself. It’s always a pain when it happens.”

  “Why aren’t they just killed?” she asked.

  “You can’t kill a shaman who’s been fully possessed,” said Altan. “When that happens, the shaman isn’t human anymore. They’re not mortal. They’re vessels of the divine. You can behead them, stab them, hang them, but the body will keep moving. You dismember the body, and still the pieces will skitter to rejoin the others. The best you can do is bind them, incapacitate them, and overpower them until you get them into the mountain.”

  Rin imagined herself bound and blindfolded, dragged involuntarily along this same mountain path into an eternal stone prison. She shuddered. She could understand this sort of cruelty from the Federation, but from her own commander?

  “And you’re all right with that?”

  “Of course I’m not all right with that,” he snapped. “But it’s the job. It’s my job. I’m supposed to bring the Cike to the mountain when they’ve become unfit to serve. The Cike controls itself. The Cike is the Empire’s way of eliminating the threat of rogue shamans.”

  Altan twisted his fingers together. “Every Cike commander is charged with two things: to obey the will of the Empress, and to cull the force when it’s time. Jun was right. There’s no place for the Cike in modern warfare. We’re too small. We can’t achieve anything a well-trained Militia force couldn’t. Fire powder, cannons, and steel—these things win wars, not a handful of shamans. The only unique role of the Cike is to do what no other military force can do. We can subdue ourselves, which is the only reason why we’re allowed to exist.”

  Rin thought of Suni—poor, gentle, and horrifically strong Suni, who was so clearly unstable. How long before he would meet the same fate that had befallen Feylen? When would Suni’s madness outweigh his usefulness to the Empire?

  “But I won’t be like the commanders of before,” Altan said. His fingers clenched to form fists. “I won’t turn from my people because they’ve drawn more power than they should have. How is that fair? Suni and Baji were sent to the Baghra desert because Jiang got scared of them. That’s what he does—erases his mistakes, runs from them. But Tyr trained them instead, gave them back a shred of rationality. So there must be a way of taming the gods. The Feylen that I knew would not kill his own people. There must be a way to bring him back from madness. There has to be.”

  He spoke with such conviction. He looked so sure, so absolutely sure that he could control this sleeping army the same way he had calmed Suni in that mess hall, had brought him back to the world of mortals with nothing more than whispers and words.

  She forced herself to believe him, because the alternative was too terrible to comprehend.

  They reached the Chuluu Korikh on the afternoon of the second day, hours earlier than they had planned. Altan was pleased at this; he was pleased at everything today, forging ahead with an ecstatic, giddy energy. He acted as if he had waited years for this day. For all Rin knew, he had.

  When the
terrain became too treacherous to keep riding, they dismounted and let the animal go. The gelding strode away with a grievous air to find somewhere to die.

  They hiked for the better part of the afternoon. The ice and snow thickened the higher up they climbed. Rin was reminded of the treacherously icy stairs at Sinegard, how one misstep could mean a shattered spine. But here, no first-years had scattered salt across the ice to make the ground safe. If they slipped now, they were guaranteed a quick, icy death.

  Altan used his trident as a staff, stabbing at the ground in front of him before he stepped forward. Rin followed gingerly in the path he had marked as safe. She suggested that they simply melt the ice with Speerly fire. Altan tried it. It took too long.

  The sky had just begun to darken when Altan paused before a stretch of wall.

  “Wait. This is it.”

  Rin froze in her steps, teeth chattering madly. She glanced around. She could see no marker, no indication that this was the special entrance. But Altan sounded certain.

  He backtracked several steps and then began scrubbing at the mountainside, wiping off snow to get at the smooth stone face underneath. He grumbled with exasperation and pressed a flaming hand against the rock. The fire gradually melted a clean circle in the ice with Altan’s hand at its center.

  Rin could now see a crevice carved into the rock. It had been barely visible under a thick coat of snow and ice. A traveler could have walked past it twenty times and never seen it.

  “Tyr said to stop when we reached the crag that looked like an eagle’s beak,” Altan said. He gestured toward the precipice they stood upon. It did, in fact, look like the profile of one of Qara’s birds. “I almost forgot.”

  Rin dug two strips of dry cloth out of her travel sack, dribbled a vial of oil over them, and busied herself with wrapping the heads of a couple of wooden sticks. “You’ve never been inside?”

  “Tyr had me wait outside,” said Altan. He stood back from the entrance. He had cleanly melted the ice away from the stone face, revealing a circular door embedded in the side of the mountain. “The only person alive who’s ever been inside is Chaghan. I’ve no idea how he got this door open. You ready?”