The separate concepts in her mind flung connections at one another, like a web suddenly grown overnight. The formative background Jiang had been laying suddenly made total, utter sense.

She had an outline, but the picture hadn’t fully developed. Something didn’t square.

“Contained within my mind?” Rin repeated carefully.

Jiang glanced sideways at her. “Do you know what the word entheogen means?”

She shook her head.

“It means the generation of the god within,” he said. He reached out and tapped her forehead in that same place. “The merging of god and person.”

“But we aren’t gods,” she said. She had spent the past week in the library trying to trace Nikara theology to its roots. Nikara religious mythology was full of encounters between the mortal and divine, but nowhere in her research had anyone mentioned anything about god-creation. “Shamans communicate with gods. They don’t create gods.”

“What’s the difference between a god within and a god outside? What is the difference between the universe contained in your mind and the universe external?” Jiang tapped both of her temples. “Wasn’t that the basis of your criticism of Hesperia’s theological hierarchy? That the idea of a divine creator separate from us and ruling over us made no sense?”

“Yes, but . . .” She trailed off, trying to make sense of what she wanted to say. “I didn’t mean that we are gods, I meant that . . .” She wasn’t sure what she meant. She looked at Jiang in supplication.

For once, he gave her the easy answer. “You must conflate these concepts. The god outside you. The god within. Once you understand that these are one and the same, once you can hold both concepts in your head and know them to be true, you’ll be a shaman.”

“But it can’t be so simple,” Rin stammered. Her mind was still reeling. She struggled to formulate her thoughts. “If this is . . . then . . . then why doesn’t everyone do this? Why doesn’t anyone in the opium houses stumble upon the gods?”

“Because they don’t know what they’re looking for. The Nikara don’t believe in their deities, remember?”

“Fine,” Rin said, refusing to rise to the bait of having her own words thrown in her face. “But why not?” She had thought the Nikara religious skepticism was reasonable, but not when people like Jiang could do the things they did. “Why aren’t there more believers?”

“Once there were,” Jiang said, and she was surprised at how bitter he sounded. “Once there were monasteries upon monasteries. Then the Red Emperor in his quest for unification came and burned them down. Shamans lost their power. The monks—the ones with real power, anyhow—died or disappeared.”

“Where are they now?”

“Hidden,” he said. “Forgotten. In recent history, only the nomadic clans of the Hinterlands and the tribes of Speer had anyone who could commune with the gods. This is no coincidence. The national quest to modernize and mobilize entails a faith in one’s ability to control world order, and when that happens, you lose your connection with the gods. When man begins to think that he is responsible for writing the script of the world, he forgets the forces that dream up our reality. Once, this academy was a monastery. Now it is a military training ground. You’ll find this same pattern has repeated itself in all the great powers of this world that have entered a so-called civilized age. Mugen doesn’t have shamans. Hesperia doesn’t have shamans. They worship men whom they believe are gods, not gods themselves.”

“What about Nikara superstition?” Rin asked. “I mean—in Sinegard, obviously, where people are educated, religion’s defunct, but what about the little villages? What about folk religion?”

“The Nikara believe in icons, not gods,” said Jiang. “They don’t understand what they’re worshipping. They’ve prioritized ritual over theology. Sixty-four gods of equal standing? How convenient, and how absurd. Religion cannot be packaged so cleanly. The gods are not so neatly organized.”

“But I don’t understand,” she said. “Why have the shamans disappeared? Wouldn’t the Red Emperor be all the more powerful for having shamans in his army?”

“No. In fact, the opposite is true. The creation of empire requires conformity and uniform obedience. It requires teachings that can be mass-produced across the entire country. The Militia is a bureaucratic entity that is purely interested in results. What I teach is impossible to duplicate to a class of fifty, much less a division of thousands. The Militia is composed almost entirely of people like Jun, who think that things matter only if they are getting results immediately, results that can be duplicated and reused. But shamanism is and always has been an imprecise art. How could it be anything else? It is about the most fundamental truths about each and every one of us, how we relate to the phenomenon of existence. Of course it is imprecise. If we understood it completely, then we would be gods.”

Rin was unconvinced. “But surely some teachings could be spread.”

“You overestimate the Empire. Think of martial arts. Why were you able to defeat your classmates in the trial? Because they learned a version that is watered down, distilled and packaged for convenience. The same is true of their religion.”

“But they can’t have forgotten completely,” Rin said. “This class still exists.”

“This class is a joke,” said Jiang.

“I don’t think it’s a joke.”

“You, and no one else,” said Jiang. “Even Jima doubts the value of this course, but she can’t bring herself to abolish it. On some level, Nikara has never given up hope that it can find its shamans again.”

“But it has them,” she said. “I’ll bring shamanism back to this world.”

She glanced hopefully toward him, but Jiang sat frozen, staring over the edge of the cliff as if his mind were somewhere far away. He looked very sad then.

“The age of the gods is over,” he said finally. “The Nikara may speak of shamans in their legends, but they cannot abide the prospect of the supernatural. To them, we are madmen.” He swallowed. “We are not madmen. But how can we convince anyone of this, when the rest of the world believes it so? Once an empire has become convinced of its worldview, anything that evidences the contrary must be erased. The Hinterlanders were banished to the north, cursed and suspected of witchcraft. The Speerlies were marginalized, enslaved, thrown into battle like wild dogs, and ultimately sacrificed.”

“Then we’ll teach them,” she said. “We’ll make them remember.”

“No one else would have the patience to learn what I have taught you. It’s merely our job to remember. I have searched for years for an apprentice, and only you have ever understood the truth of the world.”

Rin felt a pang of disappointment at those words; not for herself but for the Empire. It was difficult to know that she lived in a world where humans had once freely spoken to the gods but no longer did.

How could an entire nation simply forget about gods that might grant unimaginable power?

Easily, that’s how.

The world was simpler when all that existed was what you could perceive in front of you. Easier to forget the underlying forces that constructed the dream. Easier to believe that reality existed only on one plane. Rin had believed that up until this very moment, and her mind still struggled to readjust.