AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“We’ll get there. The drugs give you access, yes, but first you have to understand what you’re accessing—”
“So the drugs give you abilities?” Merchi interrupted again. “Which drugs? Laughing mushrooms? Poppy seeds?”
“That’s not—we’re not—no. Have you even been listening?” Rin had the sudden urge to smack him on the temple, like Jiang used to whenever he thought she was getting too impatient. She was starting to understand, now, what an insufferable student she must have been. “The drugs don’t bestow abilities. They don’t do anything except allow you to see the world as it really is. The gods bear the power. They are the power. All we can do is let them through.”
“Why don’t you ever need to take drugs?” Pipaji asked.
That caught Rin off guard. “How do you know that?”
“I was watching you during the march,” Pipaji said. “You had a fire in your hand from day to night, but you always seemed so lucid. You can’t have been swallowing poppy seeds the entire time. You would have walked straight off the side of the mountain.”
The other recruits giggled nervously. But Pipaji stared expectantly at Rin with an intensity that made her uncomfortable.
“I’m past that point,” Rin said.
Pipaji looked unconvinced. “Sounds like you’re at the point where we need to be.”
“Absolutely not. You don’t want that. You never want that.”
“But why—”
“Because then the god is always in your head,” Rin snapped. “They’re always screaming at you, trying to get you to bend to their will. Trying to erase you. Then there’s no escape. Your body isn’t mortal anymore, so you can’t die, but you can’t take back control, so the only way to keep the world safe from you is to lock you up in a stone mountain with the other hundreds of shamans who have made that mistake.” Rin gazed around the room, staring levelly into each of their eyes in turn. “And I’ll put a fist through your hearts before it comes to that. It’s kinder that way.”
They stopped giggling.
Late that evening, after several more hours of describing precisely how it felt to enter the Pantheon, Rin gave her recruits their first doses of poppy seeds.
Nothing much happened. All of them became stupidly, giddily high. They rolled around on the floor, tracing patterns through the air with their fingers and droning on and on about inane profundities that made Rin want to put her eyes out with her thumb. Lianhua was overcome with a fit of high-pitched giggles every time someone spoke a word in her direction. Merchi kept stroking the ground and murmuring about how soft it was. Pipaji and Dulin sat absolutely still, eyes pressed shut with something Rin hoped might be concentration, until Dulin began to snore.
Then they all came down and vomited.
“It didn’t work,” Pipaji groaned, rubbing at her bloodshot eyes.
“It’s because you weren’t trying to see,” Rin said. She hadn’t expected any of them to succeed on the first try, but she had been hoping for something. The faintest hint of a divine encounter. Not just four hours of idiocy.
“There’s nothing to see,” Merchi complained. “Whenever I tried to tilt back, or whatever you said it felt like, all I saw was darkness.”
“That’s because you wouldn’t concentrate.”
“I was trying.”
“Well, you weren’t trying hard enough,” Rin said testily. Supervising a group of tripping idiots was hardly fun when she was the only sober person in the room. “You might have at least thought about the Pantheon, instead of trying to do unspeakable things to a mound of dirt.”
“I thought plenty about it,” Merchi snapped. “You might have given us clearer instructions than get high and summon a god.”
Rin knew he was right. The fault lay with her teaching. She just didn’t know how to explain things more clearly than she had. She wished she still had Chaghan with her, who knew the cosmos and its mysteries so well that he could easily break it into concepts they could understand. She wished she had Daji or even the Sorqan Sira, who could implant a vision in their minds that would shatter their conceptions of real or not real. She needed some way to break the logic in their brains like Jiang had done to her, but she had no idea how to replicate his yearlong syllabus, much less condense it down to two weeks.
She stretched her arms over her head. She’d been sitting in a hunched position for hours, and her shoulders felt terribly sore.
“Head back to your tents and go to sleep,” she told them. “We’ll try again in the morning.”
“Maybe this was a stupid idea,” she admitted to Kitay after the third night of getting her recruits high with no results. “Their minds are like rocks. I can’t get anything in, and they think everything I say is stupid.”
He rubbed her shoulder in sympathy. “Look at it from their perspective. You thought everything was stupid when you first pledged Lore. You thought Jiang was clearly off his rocker.”
“But that was because I didn’t know what the fuck we were doing!”
“You must have had some idea.”
He had a point. Back in her second year, she hadn’t known Jiang’s true identity, but she had known he could do things that he shouldn’t be able to. She’d seen him call shadows without moving. She’d felt the wind blow and the water stir at his command. She’d known he had power, and she’d been so hungry to acquire that power, she hadn’t cared what sort of mental hurdles he made her jump. And it had still taken her nearly a year.
But most of that year had been taken up by Jiang’s endless series of precautions to prevent her from becoming precisely what she ultimately became. Rin didn’t need to bother with safety or long-term stability. She just needed troops from whom she could squeeze, at maximum, several months’ utility.
“Take your mind off it for a bit,” Kitay suggested. “No point bashing your head against the wall. Come see what I’ve been working on.”
She followed him out of the tent. Kitay had set up an outdoor work station a ten-minute walk from the camp, which consisted of tools strewn across the ground, diagrams held down with rocks to keep them from flying away in the relentless plateau winds, and one massive structure covered with a heavy canvas tarp. He reached up and pulled the tarp away with both hands, revealing a dirigible flipped on its side and split in two, its inner workings on display like a gutted animal’s intestines.
“You’re not the only one leveling out the power asymmetry,” he said.
Rin moved in closer to inspect the airship engine’s interior, running her fingers over the hull’s outer lining. It wasn’t made of any material she could recognize—not wood, not bamboo, and certainly not heavy metal. The power mechanisms appeared even more foreign, a complicated, interlocking set of gears and screws that brought to mind Sister Petra’s round, fist-size clock, that perfectly intricate machine that the Hesperians believed to be irrefutable proof that the world was designed by some grand architect.
“It’s the only craft that remained relatively intact,” Kitay said. “The rest were burned, shattered wreckage. But this one must have only lost power when it was fairly close to the ground. Its gears are all still working.”
