Altan appeared to tense. “Like what?”
“Like . . . you.” She gestured vaguely at him. “You’re—you’re not like the other students. Other soldiers. Could you always summon the fire? Could you always fight like you do?”
Altan’s expression was unreadable. “I trained at Sinegard for a long time.”
“But so did I!”
“You weren’t trained like a Speerly. But you’re a warrior, too. It’s in your blood. I’ll beat your heritage into you soon enough.” Altan gestured to her with his trident. “Weapons up.”
“Why a trident?” she asked when he finally let her take a break. “Why not a sword?” She hadn’t seen any other soldier who didn’t wield the standard Militia halberd and sword.
“Longer reach,” he said. “Opponents don’t come in close quarters when you’re fighting inside a silo of fire.”
She touched the prongs. The ends had been sharpened many times over; they were not shiny or smooth, but etched with the evidence of multiple battles. “Is that Speerly-made?”
It had to be. The trident was metal all the way through, not like Nikara weapons, which had wooden hilts. The trident was heavier, true, but Altan needed a weapon that wouldn’t burn through when he touched it.
“It came from the island,” he said. He poked her with the blunt end and gestured for her to pick up her sword. “Stop stalling. Come on, get up. Again.”
She threw her arms down in exhaustion. “Can’t we just get high?” she asked. She didn’t see how relentless physical training got her any closer to calling the Phoenix at all.
“No, we can’t just get high,” Altan said. He poked her again. “Lazy. That kind of thinking is a rookie mistake. Anyone can swallow some seeds and reach the Pantheon. That part’s easy. But forming a link with the god, channeling its power to your will and calling it back down—that takes discipline. Unless you’ve had practice honing your mind, it’s too easy for you to lose control. Think of it as a dam. The gods are sources of potential energy, like water flowing downhill. The drug is like the gate—it opens the way to let the gods through. But if your gate is too large, or flimsily constructed, then power rushes through unobstructed. The god ignores your will. Chaos ensues. Unless you want to burn down your own allies, you have to remember why you called the Phoenix. You’ve got to direct its power.”
“It’s like a prayer,” she said.
Altan nodded. “It’s exactly like a prayer. All prayer is simply repetition—a imposition of your demands upon the gods. The difference between shamans and everyone else is that our prayers actually work. Didn’t Jiang teach you this?”
Jiang had taught her the opposite of that. Jiang had asked her to clear her mind in meditation, to forget her own ego; to forget that she was a being separate from the universe. Jiang had taught her to erase her own will. Altan was asking her to impose her will on the gods.
“He only ever taught me to access the gods. Not to pull them back to our world.”
Altan looked amazed. “Then how did you call the Phoenix at Sinegard?”
“I wasn’t supposed to,” she said. “Jiang warned me not to. He said the gods weren’t meant to be weaponized. Only consulted. He was teaching me to calm myself, to find my connection to the larger cosmos and correct my imbalance, or . . . or whatever,” she finished lamely.
It was becoming apparent how little Jiang had really taught her. He hadn’t prepared her for this war at all. He had only tried to restrain her from wielding the power that she now knew she could access.
“That’s useless.” Altan looked disdainful. “Jiang was a scholar. I am a soldier. He was concerned with theology; I am concerned with how to destroy.” He opened his fist, turned it outward, and a small ring of fire danced over the lines of his palm. With his other hand he extended his trident. The flame raced from the ends of his fingers, danced across his shoulders, and licked all the way out to the trident’s three prongs.
She marveled at the utter command Altan held over the fire, the way he shaped it like a sculptor might shape clay, how he bent it to his will with the slightest movement of his fingers. When she had summoned the Phoenix, the fire had poured out of her in an uncontrolled flood. But Altan controlled it like an extension of his own self.
“Jiang was right to be cautious,” he said. “The gods are unpredictable. The gods are dangerous. And there’s no one who understands them, not fully. But we at the Night Castle have practiced the weaponization of the gods to an art. We have come closer to understanding the gods than the old monks ever did. We have developed the power to rewrite the fabric of this world. If we don’t use it, then what’s the point?”
After two weeks of hard marching, four days of sailing, and another three days’ march, they reached Khurdalain’s city gates shortly before nightfall. When they emerged from the tree line toward the main road, Rin glimpsed the ocean for the first time.
She stopped walking.
Sinegard and Tikany were both landlocked regions. Rin had seen rivers and lakes, but never such a large body of water as this. She gaped openmouthed at that great expanse of blue, stretching on farther than she could see, farther than she could imagine.
Altan halted beside her. He glanced down at her dumbfounded expression, and he smiled. “Never seen the ocean before?”
She couldn’t look away. She felt like she had the first day she had glimpsed Sinegard in all of its splendor, like she had been dropped into a fantastical world where the stories she’d heard were somehow true.
“I saw paintings,” she said. “I read descriptions. In Tikany the merchants would ride up from the coast and tell us about their adventures at sea. But this—I never dreamed anything could look like this.”
Altan took her hand and pointed it out toward the ocean. “The Federation of Mugen lies just across the narrow strait. If you climb the Kukhoni range, you can just glimpse it. And if you take a ship south of there, down close by Golyn Niis and into Snake Province, you’ll get to Speer.”
She couldn’t possibly see it from where they stood, but still she stared out over the shimmering water, imagining a small, lonely island in the South Nikan Sea. Speer had spent decades in isolation before the great continental powers tore the island apart in the struggle between them.
“What’s it like?”
“Speer? Speer was beautiful.” Altan’s voice was soft, wistful. “They call it the Dead Island now, but all I can remember of it is green. On one side of the island you could see the shore of the Nikara Empire; on the other was boundless water, a limitless horizon. We would take boats out and sail into that ocean without knowing what we would find; journeys into the endless dark to seek out the other side of the world. The Speerlies divided the night sky into sixty-four houses of constellations, one for each god. And as long as you could find the southern star of the Phoenix, you could always find your way back to Speer.”
Rin wondered what the Dead Island was like now. When Mugen destroyed Speer, had they destroyed the villages as well? Or did the huts and lodges still stand, ghost towns waiting for inhabitants who would never return?
“Why did you leave?” she asked.
She realized then that she knew very little about Altan. His survival was a mystery to her, just as her very existence was a mystery to everyone else.
He must have been very young when he came to Nikan, a refugee of the war that killed his people. He couldn’t have been older than four or five. Who had spirited him off that island? Why only him?
And why her?
But Altan didn’t answer. He stared silently at the darkening sky for a long moment and then turned back toward the path.
“Come on,” he said, and reached for her arm. “We’re going to fall behind.”