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“But why that particular dream? Why would your sleeping mind have chosen to extract those images from your memory compared to any other images? Why not a horse, or a field of jasmine flowers, or Master Jun riding buck naked on the back of a tiger?”
Rin blinked. “Is that something you dream about?”
“Answer the question,” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said, frustrated. “Why do people dream what they dream?”
But he was smiling, as if that was precisely what he’d wanted to hear. “Why indeed?”
She had no response to that. She stared blankly out at the mouth of the cave, mulling these thoughts in her mind, and realized that she had awoken in more ways than one.
Her map of the world, her understanding of reality, had shifted. She could see the outlines, even if she didn’t know how to fill in the blanks. She knew the gods existed and that they spoke, and that was enough.
It had taken a long time, but she finally had a vocabulary for what they were learning now. Shamans: those who communed with the gods. The gods: forces of nature, entities as real and yet ephemeral as wind and fire themselves, things inherent to the existence of the universe.
When Hesperians wrote of “God,” they wrote of the supernatural.
When Jiang talked of “gods,” he talked of the eminently natural.
To commune with the gods was to walk the dream world, the world of spirit. It was to relinquish that which she was and become one with the fundamental state of things. The space in limbo where matter and actions were not yet determined, the fluctuating darkness where the physical world had not yet been dreamed into existence.
The gods were simply those beings that inhabited that space, forces of creation and destruction, love and hatred, nurturing and neglect, light and dark, cold and warm . . . they opposed one another and complemented one another; they were fundamental truths.
They were the elements that constituted the universe itself.
She saw now that reality was a facade; a dream conjured by the undulating forces beneath a thin surface. And by meditating, by ingesting the hallucinogen, by forgetting her connection to the material world, she was able to wake up.
“I understand the truth of things,” she murmured. “I know what it means to exist.”
He smiled. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it?”
She understood, then, that Jiang was very far from mad.
He might, in fact, be the sanest person she had ever met.
A thought occurred to her. “So what happens when we die?”
Jiang raised an eyebrow. “I think you can answer that.”
She mulled over this for a moment. “We go back to the world of spirit. We—we leave the illusion. We wake up.”
Jiang nodded. “We don’t die so much as we return to the void. We dissolve. We lose our ego. We change from being just one thing to becoming everything. Most of us, at least.”
She opened her mouth to ask what he meant by that, but Jiang reached out and poked her in the forehead. “How do you feel?”
“Incredible,” she said. She felt more clearheaded than she had in months, as if all this time she’d been trying to peer through a fog and it had suddenly disappeared. She was ecstatic; she’d solved the puzzle, she knew the source of her power, and now all that remained was to learn to siphon it out at will. “So what now?”
“Now we’ve solved your problem,” said Jiang. “Now you know how you are connected to a greater web of cosmological forces. Sometimes martial artists who are particularly attuned to the world will find themselves overwhelmed by one of those forces. They suffer an imbalance—an affinity to one god over the others. This happened to you in the ring. But now you know where that flame came from, and when it happens to you again, you can journey to the Pantheon to find its balance. Now you’re cured.”
Rin jerked her head toward her master.
Cured?
Cured?
Jiang looked pleased, relieved, and serene, but Rin only felt confused. She hadn’t studied Lore so that she could still the flames. Yes, the fire had felt awful, but it had also felt powerful. She had felt powerful.
She wanted to learn to channel it, not to suppress it.
“Problem?” Jiang asked.
“I . . . I don’t . . .” She bit down on her lip before the words tumbled out of her mouth. Jiang was violently averse to any discussion of warfare; if she kept asking about military use, then he might drop her again the way he had before the Trials. He already thought she was too impulsive, too reckless and impatient; she knew how easily she might scare him off.
Never mind. If Jiang wasn’t going to teach her to call the power, then she’d figure it out for herself.
“So what’s the point of this?” she asked. “Just to feel good?”
“The point? What point? You’re enlightened. You have a better understanding of the cosmos than most theologians alive!” Jiang waved his hands around his head. “Do you have any idea what you can do with this knowledge? The Hinterlanders have been interpreting the future for years, reading the cracks in a tortoise shell to divine events to come. They can fix illnesses of the body by healing the spirit. They can speak to plants, cure diseases of the mind . . .”
Rin wondered why the Hinterlanders would achieve all of this and not militarize their abilities, but she held her tongue. “So how long will that take?”
“It makes no sense to speak of this in measurements of years,” said Jiang. “The Hinterlanders don’t allow interpretation of divinations until one has been training for at least five. Shamanic training is a process that lasts across your lifetime.”
She couldn’t accept that, though. She wanted power, and she wanted it now—especially if they were on the verge of a war with the Mugenese.
Jiang was watching her curiously.
Be careful, she reminded herself. She still had too much to learn from Jiang. She’d have to play along.
“Anything else?” he asked after a while.
She thought of the Speerly Woman’s admonitions. She thought of the Phoenix, and of fire and pain.
“No,” she said. “Nothing else.”
Part II
Chapter 10
The Emperor Ryohai had now patrolled the eastern Nikara border in the Nariin Sea for twelve nights. The Ryohai was a lightly built ship, an elegant Federation model designed for slicing quickly through choppy waters. It carried few soldiers; its deck wasn’t large enough to hold a battalion. It wasn’t doing reconnaissance. No courier birds circled the flagless masthead; no spies left the ship under the cover of the ocean mist.
The only thing the Ryohai did was flit fretfully around the shoreline, pacing back and forth over still waters like an anxious housewife. Waiting for something. Someone.
The crew spent their days in silence. The Ryohai carried only a skeleton crew: the captain, a few deckhands, and a small contingent from the Federation Armed Forces. It bore one esteemed guest: General Gin Seiryu, grand marshal of the Armed Forces and esteemed adviser to Emperor Ryohai himself. And it bore one visitor, one Nikara who had lurked in the shadows of the hold since the Ryohai had crossed into the waters of the Nariin Sea.
Cike commander Tyr was good at being invisible. In this state, he did not need to eat or sleep. Absorbed in the shadow, shrouded in darkness, he hardly needed to breathe.
