The Dragon Republic. R.F. Kuang

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      “When my dogs go mad, I put them down,” Jun said.

      The Empress spoke from the doorway. “But little girls aren’t dogs, Loran.”

      Rin froze.

      Su Daji had traded her ceremonial robes for a green soldier’s uniform. Her shoulder pads were inlaid with jade armor, and a longsword hung at her waist. It seemed like a message. She was not only the Empress, she was also grand marshal of the Nikara Imperial Militia. She’d conquered the Empire once by force. She’d do it again.

      Rin fought to keep her breathing steady as Daji reached out and traced her fingertips over her muzzle.

      “Careful,” Jun said. “She bites.”

      “Oh, I’m sure.” Daji’s voice sounded languid, almost disinterested. “Did she put up a fight?”

      “She tried,” Vaisra said.

      “I imagine there were casualties.”

      “Not as many as you would expect. She’s weak. The drug’s done her in.”

      “Of course.” Daji’s lip curled. “Speerlies have always had their predilections.”

      Her hand drifted upward to pat Rin gently on the head.

      Rin’s fingers curled into fists.

      Calm, she reminded herself. The opium hadn’t worn off yet. When she tried to call the fire, she felt only a numb, blocked sensation in the back of her mind.

      Daji’s eyes lingered on Rin for a long while. Rin froze, terrified that the Empress might take her aside now like Vaisra had warned. It was too early. If she were alone in a room with Daji, the best she could do was hurl some disoriented fists in her direction.

      But Daji only smiled, shook her head, and turned toward the table. “We’ve much to get through. Shall we proceed?”

      “What about the girl?” Jun asked. “She ought to be in a cell.”

      “I know.” Daji shot Rin a poisonous smile. “But I like to watch her sweat.”

      The next two hours were the slowest of Rin’s life.

      Once the Warlords had exhausted their curiosity over her, they turned their attention to an enormous roster of problems economic, agricultural, and political. The Third Poppy War had wrecked nearly every province. Federation soldiers had destroyed most of the infrastructure in every major city they’d occupied, set fire to huge swaths of grain fields, and wiped out entire villages. Mass refugee movements had reshaped the human density of the country. This was the kind of disaster that would have taken miraculous effort from a unified central leadership to ameliorate, and the council of the twelve Warlords was anything but.

      “Control your damn people,” said the Ox Warlord. “I have thousands streaming into my border as we speak and we don’t have a place for them.”

      “What are we supposed to do, create a border guard?” The Hare Warlord had a distinctly plaintive, grating voice that made Rin wince every time he spoke. “Half my province is flooded, we haven’t got food stores to last the winter—”

      “Neither do we,” said the Ox Warlord. “Send them elsewhere or we’ll all starve.”

      “We’d be willing to repatriate citizens from the Hare Province under a set quota,” said the Dog Warlord. “But they’d have to display provincial registration papers.”

      “Registration papers?” the Hare Warlord echoed. “These people had their villages sacked and you’re asking for registration papers? Right, like the first thing they grabbed when their village started going up in flames was—”

      “We can’t house everyone. My people are pressed for resources as is—”

      “Your province is a steppe wasteland, you’ve got more than enough space.”

      “We have space; we don’t have food. And who knows what your sort would bring in over the borders …”

      Rin had a difficult time believing that this council, if one could call it that, was really how the Empire functioned. She knew how often the Warlords went to arms over resources, trade routes, and—occasionally—over the best recruits graduating from Sinegard. And she knew that the fractures had been deepening, had gotten worse in the aftermath of the Third Poppy War.

      She just hadn’t known it was this bad.

      For hours the Warlords had bickered and squabbled over details so inane that Rin could not believe anyone could possibly care. And she had stood waiting in the corner, sweating through her chains, waiting for Daji to drop her front.

      But the Empress seemed content to wait. Eriden was right—she clearly relished playing with her food before she ate it. She sat at the head of the table with a vaguely amused expression on her face. Every once in a while, she met Rin’s eyes and winked.

      What was Daji’s endgame? Certainly she knew that the opium would wear off in Rin eventually. Why was she running out the clock?

      Did Daji want this fight?

      The sheer anxiety made Rin feel weak-kneed and light-headed. It took everything she had to remain standing.

      “What about Tiger Province?” someone asked.

      All eyes turned to the plump child sitting with his elbows up on the table. The young Tiger Warlord looked around with an expression equal parts bewildered and terrified, blinked twice, then peered over his shoulder for help.

      His father had died at Khurdalain and now his steward and generals ruled the province in his stead, which meant that the power in Tiger Province really lay with Jun.

      “We’ve done more than enough for this war,” Jun said. “We bled at Khurdalain for months. We’re thousands of men down. We need time to heal.”

      “Come on, Jun.” A tall man sitting at the far end of the room spat a wad of phlegm on the table. “Tiger Province is full of arable land. Spread some of the goodness around.”

      Rin grimaced. This had to be the new Horse Warlord—the Wolf Meat General Chang En. She’d been briefed extensively on this one. Chang En was a former divisional commander who had escaped from a Federation prison camp near the start of the Third Poppy War, taken up the life of a bandit, and assumed rapid control of the upper region of the Horse Province while the former Horse Warlord and his army were busy defending Khurdalain.

      They had eaten anything. Wolf meat. Corpses by the roadside. The rumor was that they had paid good money for live human babies.

      Now the former Horse Warlord was dead, skinned alive by Federation troops. His heirs had been too weak or too young to challenge Chang En, so the bandit ruler had assumed de facto control of the province.

      Chang En caught Rin’s eye, bared his teeth, and slowly licked his upper lip with a thick, mottled black tongue.

      She suppressed a shudder and looked away.

      “Most СКАЧАТЬ