Not if Rin got her way. Not if they sent every soldier in their army south.
“That’s about to change.” She jammed her hiking pole into the rocky path and hauled herself up a steep incline. “You’ll see.”
“You’re lost,” Souji accused.
“I’m not lost.”
She was helplessly lost. She knew they were close, but she had no idea where to go from here. Three months and dozens of expeditions later, Rin still couldn’t find the precise entrance to Ruijin. It was a hideout designed to stay invisible. She had to send an intricate flare spiraling high into the air and wait until two sentries emerged from the undergrowth to guide them onto a path that, previously invisible, now seemed obvious. Rin followed along, ignoring Souji’s smirk.
Half an hour’s hike later, the camp emerged from the trees like an optical illusion; everything was camouflaged so artfully that Rin sometimes thought if she blinked, it might all disappear.
Just past the wall of bamboo stakes surrounding the camp, an excited crowd had gathered around something on the ground.
“What’s this about?” Rin asked the closest sentry.
“They finally killed that tiger,” he told her.
“Really?”
“Found the corpse this morning. We’re going to skin it, but nobody can agree on who gets the pelt.”
The tiger had been plaguing the camp since before Rin’s troops had left for Khudla. Its growling haunted the soldiers on patrol duty. Dried fish kept disappearing nightly from the food stores. After the tiger dragged an infant out of its tent and left its mauled, half-eaten body by the creek, the Monkey Warlord had ordered a hunting expedition. But the hunters came back empty-handed and exhausted, limbs scratched up by thorns.
“How’d they manage it?” Kitay asked.
“We poisoned a horse,” said the sentry. “It was already dying from a peptic ulcer, else we wouldn’t have spared the animal. Injected opium and strychnine into the carcass and left it out for the tiger to find. We found the bastard this morning. Stiff as a board.”
“You see,” Rin told Kitay. “It’s a good plan.”
“This has nothing to do with your plan.”
“Opium kills tigers. Literal and metaphorical.”
“It’s lost this country two wars,” he said. “I don’t mean to call you stupid, because I love you, but that plan is so stupid.”
“We have the arable land! Moag’s happy to buy it up; if we just planted it in a few regions we’d get all the silver we need—”
“And an army full of addicts. Let’s not kid ourselves, Rin. Is that what you want?”
Rin opened her mouth to respond, but something over Kitay’s shoulder caught her eye.
A tall man stood a little way off from the crowd, arms crossed as he watched her. Waiting. He was Du Zhuden—the right-hand man of the bandit leader Ma Lien. He raised an eyebrow when he saw her glancing his way, and she nodded in response. He jerked his head toward the forest, turned, and disappeared into the trees.
Rin touched Kitay on the arm. “I’ll be back.”
He’d seen Zhuden, too. He sighed. “You’re still going through with this?”
“I don’t see any other option.”
He was quiet for a moment. “Me neither,” he said at last. “But be careful. The monkey’s men are watching.”
Rin met Zhuden at their usual spot—a crooked rowan tree a mile outside the camp, at the juncture of a small creek burbling just loudly enough to conceal their voices from eavesdroppers.
“You found Yang Souji?” Zhuden’s eyes darted warily around as he spoke. The Monkey Warlord had spies everywhere in Ruijin; Rin would not have been surprised if someone had followed her out of camp.
She nodded. “Took a little convincing, but he’s here.”
“What’s he like?”
“Arrogant. Annoying.” She grimaced, thinking of Souji’s smug, leering grin.
“So he’s just like you?”
“Very funny,” she drawled. “He’s competent, though. Knows the terrain well. Has strong local contacts—he might be better keyed into the intelligence network here than we are. And he comes with five hundred experienced soldiers. They’d die for him.”
“Well done,” Zhuden said. “We’ll just have to make sure they start dying for you.”
Rin shot him a grin.
Zhuden wasn’t native to Monkey Province. He was a war orphan from Rat Province who had wound up in Ma Lien’s band from the usual combination of homelessness, desperation, and a callous willingness to do whatever it took to get ahead. Most importantly, unlike the rest of the southern leadership, he wasn’t a mere survivalist.
He, too, thought they were dying slowly in Ruijin. He wanted to expand farther south. And, like Rin, he’d decided on drastic measures to shake things up.
“How’s Ma Lien doing?” Rin asked.
“Getting worse,” Zhuden said. “Honestly, he might just croak on his own, given time, but we still don’t want to risk the off chance that he gets better. You’ll want to act soon.” He passed her a single vial filled with a viscous piss-yellow fluid. “Careful you don’t break that.”
She pinched it by the neck and gingerly dropped it into her front pocket. “Did you extract this yourself?”
“Yep. Can’t say I enjoyed it.”
She patted her pocket. “Thank you.”
“Are you going now?” he asked.
“Tonight,” she said. “I’m due to meet with Gurubai right now. I’ll try one last time to convince him.”
They both knew that meeting would come to nothing. She’d been having the same argument with the Monkey Warlord for weeks. She wanted to march out of Ruijin. He wanted to remain in the mountains, and his allies in the leadership of the Southern Coalition agreed. They outnumbered her three votes to one.
Rin was about to flip those numbers.
But not just yet. No need to act in haste; she’d show her hand too early. One thing at a time. She’d give the Monkey Warlord one last chance first, make him think she’d come back cooperative and complacent. She had learned, since her days at Sinegard, to rein in her impulses. The best plans were a secret until their execution. The hidden knife cut the deepest.
“Welcome back,” said the Monkey Warlord.
Liu Gurubai had set up his headquarters in one of the few old architectural beauties in Ruijin that still stood, a square stone temple with three walls eaten over by moss. He’d chosen it for security, not comfort. The insides were sparsely furnished, with only a stove dug into the corner wall, two rugs, and a simple council table in the center of the cold, drafty room.
Rin and Kitay sat down across him, resembling two students arriving at their tutor’s home for a lesson.
“I brought presents,” said Rin.
“Oh, I saw,” Gurubai said. “Couldn’t help but leave a little mark, could you?”
“I thought they should know who’s commanding them.”
“Well, I assumed Souji would.” Gurubai raised an eyebrow. “Unless you were planning on decapitating him?”