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.
He found the passing days irksome only due to boredom, but he had maintained longer vigils than this one. He had waited a week in the bedroom closet of the Dragon Warlord. He had spent an entire month ensconced under the floorboards beneath the feet of the leaders of the Republic of Hesperia.
Now he waited for the men aboard the Ryohai to reveal their purpose.
Tyr had been surprised when he received orders from Sinegard to infiltrate a Federation ship. For years the Cike had operated only within the Empire, killing off dissidents the Empress found particularly troublesome. The Empress did not send the Cike overseas—not since her disastrous attempt to assassinate the young Emperor Ryohai, which had ended with two dead operatives and another driven so mad he had to be carted off, screaming, to a plinth in the stone prison.
But Tyr’s duty was not to question but to obey. He crouched inside the shadow, unperceived by all. He waited.
It was a still, windless night. It was a night heavy with secrets.
It had been a night like this one, so many decades ago, when the moon was full and resplendent in the sky, that Tyr’s master had first taken him deep into the underground tunnels where light would never touch. His master had guided him around one winding turn after another, spinning him about in the darkness so that he could not keep a map in his head of the underground labyrinth.
When they’d reached the heart of the spider’s web, Tyr’s master had abandoned him within. Find your way out, he had ordered Tyr. If the goddess takes you, she will guide you. If she does not, you will perish.
Tyr had never resented his master for leaving him in the darkness. Such was how things must be. Still, his fear had been real and urgent. He had lingered in the airless tunnels for days in a panic. First had come the thirst. Then the hunger. When he tripped over objects in the darkness, objects that clattered and echoed about him, he knew they were bones.
How many apprentices had been sent into the same underground maze? How many had emerged?
Only one in Tyr’s generation. Tyr’s shamanic line remained pure and strong through the proven ability of its successors, and only a survivor could be instilled with the gifts of the goddess to pass down to the next generation. The fact that Tyr was given this chance meant that every apprentice before him had tried and failed, and died.
Tyr had been so scared then.
He was not scared now.
Now, aboard the ship, the darkness took him once more, just as it had thirty years ago. Tyr was swathed in it, an unborn infant in his mother’s womb. To pray to his goddess was to regress to that primordial state before infancy, when the world was quiet. Nothing could see him. Nothing could harm him.
The schooner made its way across the midnight sea, sailing skittishly, like a little child doing something that it shouldn’t. The tiny boat wasn’t a part of the Nikara fleet. All identifying marks had been clumsily chipped off its hull.
But it sailed from the direction of the Nikara shore. Either the schooner had taken a very long and convoluted route to meet with the Ryohai in order to fool an assassin that the Ryohai didn’t know it had on board, or it was a Nikara vessel.