“You don’t understand. This is not the Militia, this is the Cike. We were all sent here because we were deemed fit to kill, but unfit for a division. Most of us didn’t go to Sinegard, and the ones who did don’t have great memories of the place. Nobody here cares who your master was, and advertising it won’t earn you any goodwill. Forget about approval or rankings or glory, or whatever bullshit you were angling for at Sinegard. You are Cike. By default, you don’t get a good reputation.”
“I don’t care about my reputation—” Rin protested, but again Qara cut her off.
“No, you listen to me. You’re not at school anymore. You aren’t competing with anyone; you’re not trying to get good marks. You live with us, you fight with us, you die with us. From now on, your utmost loyalty is to the Cike and the Empire. You want an illustrious career, you should have joined the divisions. But you didn’t, which means something’s wrong with you, which means you’re stuck with us. Understand?”
“I didn’t ask to come here,” Rin snapped defensively. “I didn’t have a choice.”
“None of us did,” Qara said curtly. “Try to keep up.”
Rin tried to keep a map of the base in her head as they walked, a mental picture of the labyrinth that was Khurdalain, but she gave up after the fifteenth turn. She half suspected Qara was taking a deliberately convoluted route to wherever they were going.
“How do you guys get anywhere?” she asked.
“Memorize the routes,” Qara responded. “The harder we are to find, the better. And if you want to find Enki, just follow the whining.”
Rin was about to ask what this meant when she heard another set of raised voices from around the corner.
“Please,” begged a male voice. “Please, it hurts so much.”
“Look, I sympathize, I really do,” said a second, much deeper voice. “But frankly it’s not my problem, so I don’t care.”
“It’s just a few seeds!”
Rin and Qara rounded the corner. The voices belonged to a slight, dark-skinned man and a hapless-looking soldier with an insignia that marked him as a private of the Fifth. The soldier’s right arm ended in a bloody stub at the elbow.
Rin cringed at the sight; she could almost see the gangrene through the poor bandaging. No wonder he was begging for poppy.
“It’s just a few seeds to you, and the next poor chap who asks, and the next after that,” said Enki. “Eventually I’m all out of seeds, and my division hasn’t got anything to fight with. Then the next time your division’s backed up in a corner, my division can’t do their jobs and save your sorry asses. They are a priority. You are not. Understand?”
The soldier spat on Enki’s doorstep. “Freaks.”
He brushed past Enki and backed out into the alleyway, casting dark glances at Rin and Qara as he passed them.
“I need to move shop,” Enki complained to Qara as she shut the door behind her. Inside was a small, crowded room filled with the bitter smell of medicinal herbs. “This is no condition to store materials in. I need somewhere dry.”
“Move closer to the division barracks and you’ll have a thousand soldiers on your doorstep demanding a quick fix,” said Qara.
“Hm. You think Altan would let me move into the back closet?”
“I think Altan likes having his closet to himself.”
“You’re probably right. Who’s this?” Enki examined Rin from head to toe, as if looking for signs of injury. His voice was truly lovely, rich and velvety. Simply listening to him made Rin feel sleepy. “What’s ailing you?”
“She’s the Speerly, Enki.”
“Oh! I’d forgotten.” Enki rubbed the back of his shaved head. “How did you slip through Mugen’s fingers?”
“I don’t know,” said Rin. “I only just found out myself.”
Enki nodded slowly, still studying Rin as if she were a particularly fascinating specimen. He wore a carefully neutral expression that gave nothing away. “But of course. You had no idea.”
“She’ll need equipment,” said Qara.
“Sure, no problem.” Enki disappeared into a closet built into the back of the room. They listened to him bustling around for a moment, and then he reappeared with a tray of dried plants. “Any of these work for you?”
Rin had never seen so many different kinds of psychedelics in one place. There were more drug varieties here than in Jiang’s entire garden. Jiang would have been delighted.
She brushed her fingers along the opium pods, the shriveled mushrooms, and the muddy white powders.
“What difference does it make?” she asked.
“It’s really a matter of preference,” said Enki. “These drugs will all get you nice and tripped up, but the key is to find a mixture that lets you summon the gods without getting so stoned that you can’t wield your weapon. The stronger hallucinogens will shoot you right up to the Pantheon, but you’ll lose all perception of the material world. Fat lot of good summoning a god will do you if you can’t see an arrow right in front of your face. The weaker drugs require a bit more focus to get in the right mind state, but they leave you with more of your bodily faculties. If you’ve had meditation training, then I’d stick with more moderate strains if you can.”
Rin didn’t think that a siege was a great time to experiment, so she decided to settle for the familiar. She found the poppy seed variety that she had stolen from Jiang’s garden among Enki’s collection. She reached out to grab a handful, but Enki pulled the tray back out of her reach.
“No you don’t.” Enki brought a scale out from under the counter and began measuring precise amounts into little pouches. “You come to me for doses, which I will document. The amount you receive is calibrated to your body weight. You’re not big; you definitely won’t need as much as the others. Use it sparingly, and only when ordered. A shaman who’s addicted is better off dead.”
Rin hadn’t considered that. “Does that happen often?”
“In this line of work?” Enki said. “It’s almost inevitable.”
The Militia’s food rations made the Academy canteen look like a veritable restaurant in comparison. Rin stood in line for half an hour and received a measly bowl of rice gruel. She swirled her spoon around the gray, watery soup, and several uncooked lumps drifted up to the surface.
She looked around the mess hall for black uniforms, and found a few of her contingent clustered at one long table at the end of the hall. They sat far away from the other soldiers. The two tables closest to them were empty.
“This is our Speerly,” Qara announced when Rin sat down.
The Cike looked up at Rin with a mixture of apprehension and wary interest. Qara, Ramsa, and Enki sat with a man she didn’t recognize, all four of them garbed in pitch-black uniforms without any insignia or armband. Rin was struck by how young they all were. None looked older than Enki, and even he didn’t look like he’d seen a full four zodiac cycles. Most appeared to be in their late twenties. Ramsa barely looked fifteen.
It was no surprise that they had no problem with a commander of Altan’s age, or that they were called the Bizarre Children. Rin wondered if they were recruited young, or if they simply died before they had the chance to grow older.
“Welcome to the freak squad,” said the man next to her. “I’m Baji.”
Baji was a thickly built mercenary type with a loud booming voice. Despite his considerable girth he was somewhat handsome, in a coarse, dark sort of way. He looked like one of the Fangs’ opium smugglers. Strapped to his back was a huge nine-pointed rake. It looked amazingly heavy. Rin wondered at the strength it took to wield it.
“Admiring this?” Baji patted the rake. The pointed ends were crusted over with something suspiciously brown. “Nine prongs. One of a kind. You won’t find its make anywhere else.”
Because no smithy would create a weapon so outlandish, Rin thought. And because farmers have no use for lethally sharp rakes. “Seems impractical.”
“That’s what I said,” Ramsa butted in. “What are you, a potato farmer?”
Baji directed his spoon at the boy. “Shut your mouth or I swear to heaven I will put nine perfectly spaced holes in the side of your head.”
Rin lifted a spoonful of rice gruel to her mouth and tried not to picture what Baji had just described. Her eyes landed on a barrel placed right behind Baji’s seat. The water inside was oddly clouded, and the surface erupted in occasional ripples, as if a fish were swimming around inside.