by R. F. Kuang
She didn’t push the point further.
Aside from the matches, which Rin attended regularly, she rarely saw her roommates; Niang was always working overtime with Enro, and Venka spent her waking hours either on patrol with the City Guard or training with Nezha.
Kitay began studying with her in the women’s dormitory, but only because it was the one place on campus always guaranteed to be empty. The newest class of first-years had no women, and Kureel and Arda had left the Academy at the end of Rin’s first year. Both had been offered prestigious positions as junior officers, in the Third and Eighth Divisions respectively.
Altan, too, was gone. But no one knew which division he had joined. Rin had expected it to be the talk of campus. But Altan had vanished as if he’d never been at Sinegard. The legend of Altan Trengsin had already begun to fade within their class, and when the next group of first-years came to Sinegard, none of them even knew who Altan was.
As the months passed, Rin found that one unexpected benefit of being the only apprentice who had pledged Lore was that she was no longer in direct competition with the rest of her classmates.
By no means did they become friendly. But Rin stopped hearing jokes about her accent, Venka stopped wrinkling her nose every time they were both in the women’s dormitory, and one by one the other Sinegardians grew accustomed to, if not enthusiastic about, her presence.
Nezha was the sole exception.
They shared every class except Combat and Lore. They each did their best to utterly ignore the other’s existence. Many of their advanced classes were so small that this often became incredibly awkward, but Rin supposed cold disengagement was better than active bullying.
Still, she paid attention to Nezha. How could she not? He was clearly the star of the class—inferior to Kitay perhaps in only Strategy and Linguistics, but otherwise Nezha had essentially become the new Altan of the school. The masters adored him; the incoming class of pupils thought he was a god.
“He’s not that special,” she grumbled to Kitay. “He didn’t even win his year’s Tournament. Do any of them know that?”
“Sure they do.” Kitay, not looking up from his language homework, spoke with the patient exasperation of someone who’d had this conversation many times before.
“Then why don’t they worship me?” Rin complained.
“Because you don’t fight in the ring.” Kitay filled in a final blank on his chart of Hesperian verb conjugations. “And also because you’re weird and not as pretty.”
In general, however, the childish infighting within their class had disappeared. It was partly because they were simply getting older, partly because the stress of the Trials had disappeared—apprentices were secure in their enrollment so long as they kept their grades up—and partly because their coursework had gotten so difficult they couldn’t be bothered with petty rivalries.
But near the end of their second year, the class began to split again—this time along provincial and political lines.
The proximate cause was a diplomatic crisis with Federation troops on the border of Horse Province. An outpost brawl between Mugenese traders and Nikara laborers had turned deadly. The Mugenese had sent in armed policemen to kill the instigators. The border patrol of the Horse Province responded in kind.
Master Irjah was summoned immediately to the Empress’s diplomatic party, which meant Strategy was canceled for two weeks. The students didn’t know that, though, until they found the hastily scrawled note Irjah had left behind.
“‘Don’t know when I’ll be back. Open fire from both sides. Four civilians dead.’” Niang read Irjah’s note aloud. “Gods. That’s war, isn’t it?”
“Not necessarily.” Kitay was the only one who seemed utterly calm. “There are skirmishes all the time.”
“But there were casualties—”
“There are always casualties,” said Kitay. “This has been going on for nearly two decades. We hate them, they hate us, a handful of people die because of it.”
“Nikara citizens are dead!” Niang exclaimed.
“Sure, but the Empress isn’t going to do anything about it.”
“There’s nothing she can do,” Han interrupted. “Horse Province doesn’t have enough troops to hold a front—our population’s too small, there’s no one to recruit from. The real problem is that some Warlords don’t know how to put national interest first.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Nezha said.
“What I know is that my father’s men are dying on the border,” said Han. The sudden venom in his voice surprised Rin. “Meanwhile, your father’s sitting pretty in his little palace, turning a blind eye because he’s kept nice and safe between two buffer provinces.”
Before anyone could move, Nezha’s hand shot toward the back of Han’s neck and slammed his face into the desk.
The classroom fell silent.
Han looked up, too stunned to retaliate. His nose had broken with an audible crack; blood streamed freely down his chin.
Nezha released Han’s neck. “Shut up about my father.”
Han spat out something that looked like a fragment of a tooth. “Your father’s a fucking coward.”
“I said shut up—”
“You have the biggest surplus of troops in the Empire and you won’t deploy them,” Han said. “Why, Nezha? Planning to use them for something else?”
Nezha’s eyes flashed. “You want me to break your neck?”
“The Mugenese aren’t going to invade,” Kitay interrupted quickly. “They’ll make noise on the Horse Province border, sure, but they won’t commit ground troops. They don’t want to make Hesperia angry—”
“The Hesperians don’t give a shit,” said Han. “They haven’t bothered with the eastern hemisphere for years. No ambassadors, no diplomats—”
“Because of the armistice,” Kitay said. “They think they don’t need to. But if the Federation tips the balance, they’ll have to intervene. And Mugen’s leadership knows that.”
“They also know we have no coordinated frontier defense and no navy,” Han snapped. “Don’t be delusional.”
“A ground invasion is not rational for them,” Kitay insisted. “The armistice benefits them. They don’t want to bleed thousands of men in the Empire’s heartland. There will be no war.”
“Sure.” Han crossed his arms. “What are we training for, then?”
The second crisis came two months later. Several border cities in Horse Province had begun to boycott Mugenese goods. The Mugenese governor-generals responded by methodically closing, looting, then burning down any Nikara businesses located on the Mugenese side of the border.
When the news broke, Han abruptly departed the Academy to join his father’s battalion. Jima threatened permanent expulsion if he left without permission; Han responded by tossing his armband onto her desk.
The third crisis was the death of the Federation’s emperor. Nikara spies reported that the crown prince Ryohai was lined up to succeed to the throne, news that deeply unsettled every master at the academy. Prince Ryohai—young, hotheaded, and violently nationalist—was a leading member of Mugen’s war party.
“He’s been calling for a ground invasion for years,” Irjah explained to the class. “Now he has his chance to actually do it.”
The next six weeks were terribly tense. Even Kitay had stopped arguing that Mugen would do nothing. Several students, most from the outer north, put in requests for a home leave. They were denied without exception. A few left regardless, but most obeyed Jima’s command—if it came down to a war, then some affiliation with Sinegard was better than none.
The new Emperor Ryohai did not declare a ground invasion. The Empress sent a diplomatic party to the longbow island, and by all accounts was politely received by Mugen’s new administration. The crisis passed. But a cloud of anxiety hung over the academy still—and nothing could not erase the growing fear that their class might be the first to graduate into a war.
The on
e person seemingly uninterested in news of Federation politics was Jiang. If asked about Mugen, he grimaced and waved the subject away; if pressed, he squeezed his eyes shut, shook his head, and sang out loud like a little child.
“But you fought the Federation!” Rin exclaimed. “How can you not care?”
“I don’t remember that,” Jiang said.
“How can you not remember that?” she demanded. “You were in the Second Poppy War—all of you were!”
“That’s what they tell me,” Jiang said.
“So then—”
“So I don’t remember,” Jiang said loudly, and his voice took on a fragile, tremulous tone that made Rin realize she had better drop the subject or risk sending him on a weeklong spell of absence or erratic behavior.
But as long as she didn’t bring up the Federation, Jiang continued to conduct their lessons in the same meandering, lackadaisical manner. It had taken Rin until the end of her first year of apprenticeship to learn to meditate for an hour without moving; once she could do that, Jiang had demanded that she meditate for five. This took her nearly another year. When she finally managed it, Jiang gave her a small opaque flask, the kind used to store sorghum wine, and instructed her to take it to the top of the mountain.
“There’s a cave near the peak. You’ll know it when you see it. Drink down that flask, then start meditating.”
“What’s in it?”
Jiang examined his fingernails. “Bits and things.”
“For how long?”
“As long as it takes. Days. Weeks. Months. I can’t tell you before you start.”
Rin told her other masters that she would be absent from class for an indefinite period of time. By now they had resigned themselves to Jiang’s nonsense; they waved her off and told her to try not to be gone for more than a year. She hoped they were joking.
Jiang did not accompany her to the top. He bade her farewell from the highest tier of the campus. “Here’s a cloak in case you get cold. There’s not much up there in terms of rain shelter. I’ll see you on the other side.”
It rained the entire morning. Rin hiked miserably, wiping mud off her shoes every few steps. When she reached the cave, she was shivering so hard that she almost dropped the flask.
She glanced around the muddy interior. She wanted to build a fire to warm herself, but couldn’t find any material for kindling that wasn’t soaked through. She huddled into the far end of the cave, as far away from the rain as she could get, and assumed a cross-legged stance. Then she closed her eyes.
She thought of the warrior Bodhidharma, meditating for years while listening to the ants scream. She suspected that the ants wouldn’t be the only ones screaming when she was done.
The contents of the flask turned out to be a slightly bitter tea. She thought it might be a hallucinogen distilled in liquid, but hours passed and her mind was as clear as ever.
Night fell. She meditated in darkness.
At first it was horribly difficult.
She couldn’t sit still. She was hungry after six hours. All she thought about was her stomach. But after a while the hunger was so overwhelming that she couldn’t think about it anymore, because she couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t been this hungry.
On the second day she felt dizzy. She was woozy with hunger, so starved that she couldn’t feel her stomach. Did she even have a stomach? What was a stomach?
On the third day her head was delightfully light. She was just air, just breath, just a breathing organ. A fan. A flute. In, out, in, out, and on and on.
On the fifth day things moved too fast, too slow, or not at all. She felt infuriated by the slow passage of time. Her brain was racing in a way that wouldn’t calm; she felt as if her heartbeat must now be faster than a hummingbird’s. How had she not dissolved? How had she not vibrated into nothingness?
On the seventh day she tipped into the void. Her body became very still; so still that she forgot she had one. Her left finger itched and she was amazed at the sensation. She didn’t scratch it, but observed the itch as if from the outside and marveled that after a very long time, it went away by itself.
She learned how breath moved through her body as if through an empty house. Learned how to stack her vertebrae one by one on top of each other so her spine formed a perfectly straight line, an unobstructed channel.
But her still body became heavy, and as it became heavy it became easier and easier to discard it, and to drift upward, weightless, into that place she could glimpse only from behind closed eyelids.
On the ninth day she suffered a geometric assault of lines and shapes without form or color, without regard to any aesthetic value except randomness.
You stupid shapes, she thought over and over again like a mantra. You stupid fucking shapes.
On the thirteenth day she had a horrible sensation of being trapped, as if buried within stone, as if covered in mud. She was so light, so weightless, but she had nowhere to go; she rebounded around inside this bizarre vessel called a body like a caught firefly.
On the fifteenth day she became convinced that her consciousness had expanded to encompass the totality of life on the planet—the germination of the smallest flower to the eventual death of the largest tree. She saw an endless process of energy transfer, growing and dying, and she was part of every stage of it.
She saw bursts of color and animals that probably didn’t exist. She did not see visions, precisely, because visions would have been far more vivid and concrete. But nor were the apparitions merely thoughts. They were like dreams, an uncertain plane of realness somewhere in between, and it was only by washing out every other thought from her mind that she could perceive them clearly.
She stopped counting the days. She had traveled somewhere beyond time; a place where a year and a minute felt the same. What was the difference between finite and infinite? There was being and nonbeing and that was it. Time was not real.
The apparitions became solid. Either she was dreaming, or she had transcended somewhere, but when she took a step forward, her foot touched cold stone. She looked around and saw that she stood in a tiled room no larger than a washroom. There were no doors.
A form appeared before her, dressed in strange garb. At first she thought it was Altan, but the figure’s face was softer, its crimson eyes rounder and kinder.
“They said you’d come,” said the figure. The voice was a woman’s, deep and sad. “The gods have known you’d come.”
Rin was at a loss for words. Something about the Woman was deeply familiar, and it wasn’t just her resemblance to Altan. The shape of her face, the clothes she wore . . . they sparked memories Rin didn’t know she had, of sands and water and open skies.
“You will be asked to do what I refused to do,” said the Woman. “You will be offered power beyond your imagination. But I warn you, little warrior. The price of power is pain. The Pantheon controls the fabric of the universe. To deviate from their premeditated order you must give them something in return. And for the gifts of the Phoenix, you will pay the most. The Phoenix wants suffering. The Phoenix wants blood.”
“I have blood in abundance,” Rin answered. She had no idea what possessed her to say it, but she continued. “I can give the Phoenix what it desires, if the Phoenix gives me power.”
The Woman’s tone grew agitated. “The Phoenix doesn’t give. Not permanently. The Phoenix takes, and takes, and takes . . . Fire is insatiable, alone among the elements . . . it will devour you until you are nothing . . .”
“I’m not afraid of fire,” said Rin.
“You should be,” hissed the Woman. She glided slowly toward Rin; she didn’t move her legs, didn’t quite walk, but simply appeared larger and closer with every passing moment—
Rin couldn’t breathe. She didn’t feel the least bit calm; this was nothing like the peace she was supposed to have achieved, this was terrible . . . She suddenly heard a cacophony of screams echoing around her ears, and then the Woman was screaming and shrieking, wri
thing in the air like a tortured dancer, even as she reached out and seized Rin’s arm . . .
. . . Images spun around Rin, brown-skinned bodies dancing around a campfire, mouths open in grotesque leers, shouting words in a language that sounded like something she’d heard in a dream she no longer remembered . . . The campfire flared and the bodies fell back, burned, charred, disintegrating to nothing but glistening white bones, and Rin thought that was the end of it—death ended things—but the bones jumped back up and continued to dance . . . One of the skeletons looked at her with its bare, toothy smile, and beckoned with a fleshless hand:
“From ashes we came and to ashes we return . . .”
The Woman’s grip around Rin’s shoulders tightened; she leaned forward and whispered fiercely in Rin’s ear: “Go back.”
But Rin was enticed by the fire . . . she looked past the bones into the flames, which were furling upward like something alive, taking the shape of a living god, an animal, a bird . . .
The bird lowered its head at them.
The Woman burst into flame.
Then Rin was floating upward again, flying like an arrow at the sky to the realm of the gods.
When she opened her eyes, Jiang was crouched in front of her, watching her intently with his pale eyes. “What did you see?”
She took a deep breath. Tried to orient herself to possessing a body again. She felt so clumsy and heavy, like a puppet formed badly out of wet clay.
“A great circular room,” she said hesitantly, squinting to remember her final vision. She did not know if she was having trouble finding the words, or if it was simply her mouth that refused to obey. Every order she gave her body seemed to happen only after a delay. “It was arranged like a set of trigrams, but with thirty-two points splitting into sixty-four. And creatures on pedestals all around the circle.”
“Plinths,” Jiang corrected.
“You’re right. Plinths.”
“You saw the Pantheon,” he said. “You found the gods.”
“I suppose.” Her voice trailed off. She felt somewhat confused. Had she found the gods? Or had she only imagined those sixty-four deities, spinning about her like glass beads?