The Poppy War полностью

The general tried to force Jiang’s staff out of the way, and his arms trembled with a mighty pressure, but Jiang did not look like he was exerting any force at all. The air crackled unnaturally, like a prolonged rumble of thunder. The Federation soldiers fell back, as if they could sense an impending explosion.

“Jiang Ziya,” said the general. “So you live after all.”

“Do I know you?” Jiang asked.

The general responded with another massive swing of his halberd. Jiang waved his staff and blocked the blow as effortlessly as if he were swatting away a fly. He dispelled the force of the blow into the air and the ground below them. The paving stones shuddered from the impact, nearly knocking Rin and Nezha off their feet.

“Call off your men.”

Though Jiang spoke calmly, his voice echoed as if he had shouted. He appeared to have grown taller; not larger, but extended somehow, just as his shadow was extended against the wall behind them. No longer willowy and fidgety, Jiang seemed an entirely different person—someone younger, someone infinitely more powerful.

Rin stared at him in awe. The man before her was not the doddering, eccentric embarrassment of the Academy. This man was a soldier.

This man was a shaman.

When Jiang spoke again, his voice contained the echo of itself; he spoke in two pitches, one normal and one far lower, as if his shadow shouted back everything he said at double the volume. “Call off your men, or I will summon into existence things that should not be in this world.”

Nezha grabbed at Rin’s arm. His eyes were wide. “Look.”

The air behind Jiang was warping, shimmering, turning darker than the night itself. Jiang’s eyes had rolled up into the back of his head. He chanted loudly, singing in that unfamiliar language that Rin had heard him use only once before.

“You are Sealed!” the general bellowed. But he backed rapidly away from the void and clutched his halberd close.

“Am I now?” Jiang spread his arms.

Behind him sounded a keening wail, too high-pitched for any beast known to man.

Something was coming through the darkness.

Beyond the void, Rin saw silhouettes that should exist only in puppetry, outlines of beasts that belonged to story. A three-headed lion. A nine-tailed vixen. A mass of serpents tangled into one another, its multitude of heads snapping and biting in every direction.

“Rin. Nezha.” Jiang didn’t turn around to look at them. “Run.”

Then Rin understood. Whatever was being summoned, Jiang couldn’t control them. The gods will not be called willingly into battle. The gods will always demand something in return. He was doing precisely what he had forbidden her to do.

Nezha pulled Rin to her feet. Her left leg felt as if white-hot knives had been jammed into her kneecap. She cried out and staggered against him.

He steadied her. His eyes were wide with terror. There was no time to run.

Jiang convulsed in the air before them, and then lost control altogether. The void burst outward, ripping the fabric of the world, collapsing the gated wall around them. He slammed his staff into the air. A wave of force emitted from the site of contact and exploded outward in a visible ring. For a moment everything was still.

And then the east wall came down.

Rin moaned and rolled onto her side. She could barely see, barely feel. None of her senses worked; she was wrapped in a cocoon of darkness penetrated only by shards of pain. Her leg rubbed against something soft and human, and she reached for it. It was Nezha.

She groaned and forced her eyes open. Nezha lay slumped against her, bleeding profusely from a cut on his forehead. His eyes were closed.

Rin sat up, wincing, and shook his shoulder. “Nezha?”

He stirred faintly. Relief washed over her.

“We have to get up—Nezha, come on, we have to—”

A shower of debris erupted in the far corner by the gate.

Something was buried there under the rubble. Something was alive.

She clung to Nezha’s hand and watched the shifting rubble, hoping wildly it would be Jiang, that he would have survived whatever terror he had called and that he was all right, and he would be himself again, and he would save the—

The hand that clawed out from beneath the rubble was bloody, massive, and heavily armored.

Rin should have killed the general before he pulled himself out of the rubble. She should have taken Nezha and run. She should have done something.

But her limbs would not obey the commands that her brain sent; her nerves could not register anything but that same fear and despair. She lay paralyzed on the ground, heart slamming against her ribs.