The Poppy War
Page 22
“You seem skeptical,” he said.
“I was tired,” she answered. “I don’t know if it was real, or . . . I mean, I could have just been dreaming.” How were her visions any different from her imagination? Had she seen those things only because she wanted to?
“Dreaming?” Jiang tilted his head. “Have you ever seen anything like the Pantheon before? In a diagram? Or a painting?”
She frowned. “No, but—”
“The plinths. Were you expecting those?”
“No,” she said, “but I’ve seen plinths before, and the Pantheon wouldn’t have been too difficult to conjure from my imagination.”
“But why that particular dream? Why would your sleeping mind have chosen to extract those images from your memory compared to any other images? Why not a horse, or a field of jasmine flowers, or Master Jun riding buck naked on the back of a tiger?”
Rin blinked. “Is that something you dream about?”
“Answer the question,” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said, frustrated. “Why do people dream what they dream?”
But he was smiling, as if that was precisely what he’d wanted to hear. “Why indeed?”
She had no response to that. She stared blankly out at the mouth of the cave, mulling these thoughts in her mind, and realized that she had awoken in more ways than one.
Her map of the world, her understanding of reality, had shifted. She could see the outlines, even if she didn’t know how to fill in the blanks. She knew the gods existed and that they spoke, and that was enough.
It had taken a long time, but she finally had a vocabulary for what they were learning now. Shamans: those who communed with the gods. The gods: forces of nature, entities as real and yet ephemeral as wind and fire themselves, things inherent to the existence of the universe.
When Hesperians wrote of “God,” they wrote of the supernatural.
When Jiang talked of “gods,” he talked of the eminently natural.
To commune with the gods was to walk the dream world, the world of spirit. It was to relinquish that which she was and become one with the fundamental state of things. The space in limbo where matter and actions were not yet determined, the fluctuating darkness where the physical world had not yet been dreamed into existence.
The gods were simply those beings that inhabited that space, forces of creation and destruction, love and hatred, nurturing and neglect, light and dark, cold and warm . . . they opposed one another and complemented one another; they were fundamental truths.
They were the elements that constituted the universe itself.
She saw now that reality was a facade; a dream conjured by the undulating forces beneath a thin surface. And by meditating, by ingesting the hallucinogen, by forgetting her connection to the material world, she was able to wake up.
“I understand the truth of things,” she murmured. “I know what it means to exist.”
He smiled. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it?”
She understood, then, that Jiang was very far from mad.
He might, in fact, be the sanest person she had ever met.
A thought occurred to her. “So what happens when we die?”
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.
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.
Tyr crouched behind the masthead, spyglass trained on the schooner’s deck.
When he stepped out of the darkness, he experienced a sudden vertigo. This happened more and more often now, whenever he had waited in shadows for too long. It became harder to walk in the world of the material, to detach himself from his goddess.
Careful, he warned himself, or you won’t be able to come back.
He knew what would happen then. He would become a spouting, unstoppable conduit for the gods, a gate to the spirit realm without a lock. He would be a foaming, useless, seizing vessel, and someone would cart him off to the Chuluu Korikh, where he couldn’t do any harm. Someone would register his name in the Wheels and watch him sink into the stone prison the way he’d imprisoned so many of his own subordinates.
He remembered his first visit to the Chuluu Korikh, when he had immured his own master in the mountain. Stood before him, face-to-face, as the stone walls closed around his master’s mien: Eyes closed. Sleeping but not dead.
The day would come soon when he would go mad if he left, and madder still if he didn’t. But that was the fate that awaited the men and women of the Cike. To be an Empress’s assassin meant early death or madness, or both.
Tyr had thought he might still have one or two more decades, as his master had before he’d relinquished the goddess to Tyr. He thought he still had a solid period of time to train an initiate and teach them to walk the void. But he was following his goddess’s timeline, and he had no say in when she would ultimately call him back.
I should have chosen an apprentice. I should have chosen one of my people.
Five years ago he’d thought he might choose the Seer of the Cike, that thin child from the Hinterlands. But Chaghan was so frail and bizarre, even for his people. Chaghan would have commanded like a demon. He would have achieved utter obedience from his underlings, but only because he would have taken away their free will. Chaghan would have shattered minds.
Tyr’s new lieutenant, the boy sent to him from the Academy, made a far better candidate. The boy was already slated to command the Cike when the time came that Tyr was no longer fit to lead.
But the boy already had a god of his own. And the gods were selfish.
The schooner halted under the Ryohai’s shadow. A solitary cloaked figure climbed into a rowboat and crossed the narrow distance between the two ships.
The Ryohai’s captain ordered ropes to be lowered. He and half the crew stood on the main deck, waiting for the Nikara contingent to come aboard.
Two deckhands helped the cloaked figure onto the deck.
She pulled the dark hood off her head and shook out a mass of long, shimmering hair. Hair like obsidian. Skin of a mineral whiteness that shone like the moon itself. Lips like freshly spilled blood.
The Empress Su Daji was on this ship.
Tyr was so surprised he nearly stumbled out of the shadows.
Why was she here? His first thought was absurdly petty—did she not trust him to take care of this on his own?
Something had to have gone wrong. Was she here of her own volition? Had the Federation compelled her to come?
Or had his own orders changed?
Tyr’s mind raced frantically, wondering how to react. He could act now, kill the soldiers before they could hurt the Empress. But Daji knew he was here—she would have signaled him if she wanted the Federation men dead.
He was to wait, then—wait and watch what Daji’s play was.
“Your Highness.” General Gin Seiryu was a massive soldier, a giant among men. He towered over the Empress. “You have been long in coming. The Emperor Ryohai grows impatient with you.”
“I am not Ryohai’s dog to command.” Daji’s voice resounded across the ship—cool and clear as ice, sharp as knives.
A circle of soldiers formed around Daji, closing her in with the general. But Daji stood tall, chin raised, betraying no fear.
“But you will be summoned,” the general said harshly. “The Emperor Ryohai grows irritated with your dallying. Your advantages are dwindling. You hold precious few cards, and this you know. You should be glad the Emperor has deigned to speak to you at all.”
Daji’s lip curled. “His Excellency is certainly gracious.”
“Enough of this banter. Speak your piece.”
“All in due time,” Daji said calmly. “But first, another matter to attend to.”
And she looked directly into the shadows where Tyr stood. “Good. You’re here.”
Tyr took that for his signal.
Knives raised, he rushed from the shadows—only to stumble to his knees as Daji arrested him with her gaze.
He choked, unable to speak. His limbs were numb, frozen; it was all he could do to remain upright. Daji had the power of hypnosis, he knew, but never had she used it on him.
All thoughts were pushed from his mind. A
ll he could think about were her eyes. They were at first large, luminous and black; and then they were yellow like a snake’s, with narrow pupils that drew him in like a mother grasping at her baby, like a cruel imitation of his own goddess.
And like his goddess, she was so beautiful. So very beautiful.
Transfixed, Tyr lowered his knives.
Visions danced before him. Her great yellow eyes pulsed in his gaze; suddenly gigantic, they filled his entire field of sight to the periphery, drew him into her world.
He saw shapes without names. He saw colors beyond description. He saw faceless women dancing through vermilion and cobalt, bodies curved like the silk ribbons they spun in their hands. Then, as her prey was entranced, the Vipress slammed down into him with her fangs and flooded him with poison.
The psychospiritual assault was devastating and immediate.
She shattered Tyr’s world like glass, like he existed in a mirror and she had dashed it against a sharp corner, and he was arrested in the moment of breaking so that it was not over in seconds but took place over eons. Somewhere a shriek began and grew higher and higher in pitch, and did not stop. The Vipress’s eyes turned a colorless white that bored into his vision and turned everything into pain. Tyr sought refuge in the shadows, but his goddess was nowhere, and those hypnotic eyes were everywhere. Everywhere he turned, the eyes looked upon him; the great Snake hissed, her gaze trained on him, boring into him, paralyzing him—
Tyr called out for his goddess again, but still she was silent, she had been driven away by a power that was infinitely stronger than darkness itself.
Su Daji had channeled something older than the Empire. Something as old as time.
Tyr’s world ceased to spin. He and the Empress drifted alone together in the eye of the hurricane of colors, stabilized only by her generosity. He took a form again, and so did she; no longer a viper but a goddess in the shape of Su Daji, the woman.
“Do not resent me for this. There are forces at play you could not possibly understand, against which your life is irrelevant.” Although she appeared mortal, her voice came from everywhere, originated within him, vibrated in his bones. It was the only thing that existed, until she relented and let him speak.