She didn’t join in. She didn’t have to.

“This is chaos.” Kitay’s face had turned a sickly gray. “This is dangerous.”

“Not to us,” Rin said.

This was violence, but it wasn’t chaos. This anger was utterly controlled, fine-tuned, directed, a massive swell of power that only she could control.

And it wasn’t just fueled by resentment toward Souji. In a sense, this massacre wasn’t about Souji at all. This was about demonstrating a change in loyalty, a gruesome apology by anyone who had ever spoken against her before. This was a blood sacrifice to a new figurehead.

And if anyone still doubted her leadership, then the screaming would at least strike fear deep into their hearts. Anyone on the fringes now understood the cost of opposition. Through love or hate, adoration or fear, she would have them one way or another.

Daji, standing at the far end of the crowd, caught Rin’s eye and smiled.

Rin’s heart was pounding so hard she could barely hear.

She understood what Daji had meant now. She could achieve so much with a simple show of strength. All she had to do was become the symbolic embodiment of power and liberation, and she could kill a man by pointing. She could make these people do anything.

You’ve got a god on your side. You want this nation? You take it.

Gradually the frenzy ceased. The crowd dispersed from the center of the cavern like a pack of wolves retreating when the meat was gone and the bones picked clean.

Souji was long dead. Not just dead—mutilated, his corpse so thoroughly desecrated that not a single part remained that looked recognizably human. The crowd had destroyed his body and in doing so demonstrated their rejection of everything he’d stood for—a wily mix of guerrilla resistance and clever politicking that, in different circumstances, might have succeeded. In different circumstances, Yang Souji might have liberated the south.

But so fell the whims of fate. Souji was dead, his officers were converted, and the takeover was complete.

Chapter 18

The soil inside the cavern was too stiff to dig a grave, so Rin and Kitay piled Gurubai’s and Souji’s remains together onto a messy pyramid in the center of the caverns, soaked them with oil, and stood back to watch them burn.

It took nearly half an hour for the corpses to disintegrate. Rin wanted to speed the process with her own flames, but Kitay wouldn’t let her; he demanded they sit vigil before the pyre while the southerners marched on without them. Rin found this a colossal waste of time, but Kitay couldn’t be dissuaded. He thought they owed this to their victims, that otherwise Rin would come off like a callous murderer instead of a proper leader.

Twenty minutes in, he clearly regretted it. His cheeks had gone ashen; he looked like he wanted to vomit.

“You know what I’ll never get over?” he asked.

“What?” she asked.

“It smells so much like pork. It makes me hungry. I mean—I couldn’t eat now if I tried to, but I can’t stop my mouth from watering. Is that disgusting?”

“It’s not disgusting,” Rin said, privately relieved. “I thought it was just me.”

But she could eat right now, even sitting before the corpses. She hadn’t eaten since the previous afternoon, and she was starving. She had a ration of dried shanyu roots in her pocket, but it felt wrong to chew on it while the air still crackled with the scent of roasted meat. Only when the corpses had shriveled into pitch-black lumps and the air smelled of charcoal instead of flesh did she feel comfortable enough to pull the rations out. She chewed slowly on the coin-shaped root slivers, working her tongue around the starchy chunks until her saliva softened them enough to swallow, while the last remains of Souji and Gurubai puttered into bones and ash.

Then she rose and joined her army in their march.

After they emerged out the other side of the mining tunnels, they continued along the forest with the mountain to their rear. She told the southerners they were moving north to rendezvous with the Dog Warlord and his rebels to form the last organized holdout against the Republic left in the Empire. They would fare better with their numbers combined. She wasn’t lying. She did intend to seek the Dog Warlord’s aid. If the rumors were true that he had swords and bodies, she’d be a fool to ignore them.

But she didn’t tell anyone but Kitay about their plan to climb Mount Tianshan. She’d learned now that she always had to assume someone in her ranks was spying for the Republic. The Monkey Warlord’s coup had proved that point. The last thing she wanted was for the Hesperians to raid Mount Tianshan before she reached it.

She also withheld the truth for a more fundamental reason. She needed her soldiers to believe that they mattered. That their blood and sweat were the only things that could turn the wheels of history. She intended to win this war with shamans, yes, but she couldn’t keep her hold on the country without the people’s hearts. For that she needed them to believe that they wrote the script of the universe. Not the gods.

The skies above were clear and silent. Nezha and his airships had held off for now, and perhaps indefinitely. Rin didn’t know how long their grace period would last, but she wasn’t going to sit and wait it out.

Her nerves were on edge as they moved along the foothills. Her troops were too exposed and vulnerable, and they moved at a frustratingly slow pace. It wasn’t due to poor discipline. Her soldiers, already weakened by months under siege, were weighed down with wagons carrying weapons arsenals, medical equipment, and their scant remaining food supplies. And the relentless rain, which had started that afternoon as a drizzle and quickly turned into thick, heavy sheets, turned their roads into nothing but mud for miles.

“We won’t make ten miles today at this rate,” Kitay said. “We’ve got to offload.”

So Rin gave the order to dump as many supplies as they could bear to lose. Food and medicine were invaluable, but almost everything else had to go. Everyone chose two changes of clothes and discarded the rest, largely light summer tunics that would offer no shelter from the mountain snow. They also got rid of many of their weapons and ammunition—they simply didn’t have the men to keep lugging along the mounted crossbows, chests of fire powder, and spare armor that they’d dragged all this way from Ruijin.

Rin hated this. They all hated it. The sight of so much sheer waste was unbearable; it hurt to watch the weapons piled up in stacks ready to be burned just so that the Republic couldn’t find and repurpose them.

“When the final battles commence, it won’t come down to swords and halberds,” Daji told Rin. “The fate of this nation depends on how quickly we get to Mount Tianshan. The rest is inconsequential.”

Their marching rate sped up considerably after they had shed their supplies. But shortly thereafter, the rain shifted from a heavy shower into a violent and torrential downpour that showed no signs of ceasing throughout the afternoon. The mud became a nightmare. On parts of the road, they waded through black sludge up to their ankles. Their flimsy cotton and straw shoes couldn’t keep it out; none of them were dressed for such a wet climate.

Rin’s mind spiraled into panic as she considered the consequences. Mud like this wasn’t just a nuisance, it was a serious threat to her army’s health. Few of them had boots; likely they were all going to get infections. Then their toes would rot and fall off, and they’d have to sit down by the roadside to die because they couldn’t keep walking. And if they escaped foot infections, they might still contract gangrene from wounds they’d sustained when the blockade broke, because there weren’t near enough medical supplies to go around. Or they might simply starve, because she had no idea how they were going to forage at such high altitudes, or—