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Rin wasn’t sure about her. She seemed so terribly frail—she even spoke in a tremulous, barely audible whisper. But Rin knew very well by now that delicate veneers could conceal steel. Either Lianhua would prove her worth, or she’d break down in two days and stop wasting her time.
Merchi, a tall and rangy man a few years older than Rin, was the only experienced soldier among their ranks. He’d been serving in the Fourth Division of the Imperial Militia when the Mugenese invaded; he’d been part of the liberation force on the eastern coast after the longbow island fell, and he’d witnessed the aftermath of Golyn Niis. He’d first seen combat at the Battle of Sinegard.
“I was in the city when you burned half of it down,” he told Rin. “They were whispering about a Speerly then. Never thought I’d be here now.”
The one thing that bound them all was unspeakable horror. They had all seen the worst the world had to offer, and they had all come out of the experience alive.
That was important. If you didn’t have an anchor, you needed something to help you return from the world of spirit—something thoroughly mortal and human. Altan had his hatred. Rin had her vengeance. And these four recruits had the ferocious, undaunted will to survive under impossible odds.
“What happens now?” Pipaji asked once introductions were finished.
“Now I’m going to give you religion,” Rin said.
She and Kitay had struggled all day to come up with a way to introduce the Pantheon to novices. At Sinegard, it had taken Rin nearly an entire year to prepare her mind to process the gods. Under Jiang’s instruction she’d solved riddles, meditated for hours, and read dozens of texts on theology and philosophy, all so that she could accept that her presumptions about the natural world were founded on illusions.
Her recruits didn’t have that luxury. They’d have to claw their way into heaven.
The necessary, fundamental change lay in their paradigms of the natural world. The Hesperians and the majority of the Nikara both saw the universe as cleanly divided between body and mind. They saw the material world as something separate, immutable, and permanent. But calling the gods required the basic understanding that the world was fluid—that existence itself was fluid—and that the waking world was nothing more than a script that could be written if they could find the right brush, a pattern they could weave in completely different colors if they just knew how to work the loom.
The hardest part of Rin’s training had been belief. But it was so easy to believe when the evidence of supernatural power was right in front of you.
“We trust that the sun will rise every morning even if we don’t know what moves it,” Kitay had said. “So just show them the sun.”
Rin opened her palm toward the recruits. A little string of fire danced between her fingers, weaving in and out like a carp among reeds.
“What am I doing right now?” she asked.
She didn’t expect any of them to know the answer, but she needed to be clear on their preconceptions.
“Magic,” Dulin said.
“Not helpful. ‘Magic’ is a word for effects with causes we can’t explain. How am I causing this?”
They exchanged hesitant glances.
“You called the gods for help?” Pipaji ventured.
Rin closed her fist. “And what are the gods?”
More hesitation. Rin sensed a budding annoyance among the recruits. She decided to skip over the next line of questioning. All she’d ever wanted from Jiang were direct answers, but he’d withheld them from her for months. She didn’t need to repeat that frustration. “The first thing you must accept is that the gods exist. They are real and tangible, as present and visible as any of us are. Perhaps even more so. Can you believe that?”
“Of course,” Dulin said.
The others nodded in agreement.
“Good. The gods reside in a plane beyond this one. You can think of it as the heavens. Our task as shamans is to call them down to affect the matter around us. We act as the conduit—the gateway to divine power.”
“What kind of place is the heavens?” Pipaji asked.
Rin paused, wondering how best to explain. How had Jiang once described it? “The only place that’s real. The place where nothing is decided. The place you visit when you dream.”
This met with puzzled stares. Rin realized she wasn’t getting anywhere. She decided to start over, trying to think of the right words to explain concepts that by now were as familiar to her as breathing.
“You’ve got to stop thinking of our world as the one true domain,” she said. “This world isn’t permanent. It does not objectively exist, whatever that means. The great sage Zhuangzi once said that he didn’t know whether he dreamed of transforming into a butterfly at night, or whether he was always living in a butterfly’s dream. This world is a butterfly’s dream. This world is the gods’ dream. And when we dream of the gods, that just means we’ve woken up. Does that make sense?”
The recruits looked bewildered.
“Not in the least,” Merchi said.
Fair enough. Rin could hear how much her own words sounded like gibberish, even though she also fully believed them to be true.
Small wonder she’d once thought Jiang mad. How on earth did you explain the cosmos while appearing sane?
She tried a different approach. “Don’t overthink it. Just conceive of it like this. Our world is a puppet show, and the things we think of as objectively material are only shadows. Everything is constantly changing, constantly in flux. And the gods lurk behind the scenes, wielding the puppets.”
“But you want us to seize the puppets,” Pipaji said.
“Right!” Rin said. “Good. That’s all shamanism is. It’s recasting reality.”
“Then why would they let us?” Pipaji asked. “If I were a god I wouldn’t want to just lend someone my power.”
“The gods don’t care about things like that. They don’t think like people; they’re not selfish actors. They’re . . . they’re instincts. They have a single, focusing drive. In the Pantheon, they’re kept in balance by all the rest. But when you open the gate, you let them inflict their will on the world.”
“What is the will of your god?” Pipaji asked.
“To burn,” Rin said easily. “To devour and cleanse. But every god is different. The Monkey God wants chaos. The Dragon wants to possess.”
“And how many gods are there?” Pipaji pressed.
“Sixty-four,” Rin said. “Sixty-four gods of the Pantheon, all opposing forces that make up this world.”
“Opposing forces,” Pipaji repeated slowly. “So they are all different instincts. And they all want different things.”
“Yes! Excellent.”
“So then how do we choose?” Pipaji asked. “Or do they choose us? Did the god of fire choose you because you’re a Speerly, or—”
“Hold on,” Merchi interrupted. “Can we bring this down from the level of abstraction? The gods, the Pantheon—great, fine, whatever. How do we call them?”
“One thing at a time,” Rin told him. “We’ve just got to get through basic theory—”
“The drugs are the key, right?” Merchi asked. “That’s what I’ve heard.”
