The army didn't set off right away, and in fact it was several weeks before we saw any real action. The good thing from my perspective as quartermaster was that we received regular shipments of food and other supplies. The downside was that many of the delivery boys and girls were racist pricks who enjoyed having power over humans. They got to be officious, callous, irritating busybodies, and as long as we still got the supplies in the end, we had no official cause for complaint.

To that end, I started honing my ability to use my godly insight to find just the right insults. Sometimes they were simple things, like complimenting their ability to read and write basic things; sometimes they were borderline racial slurs, which I knew was close to getting in trouble, but I didn't care much as long as it was defensive. Most of the time, though, it was making barbs against their Clans.

To do that, I needed to understand Belma better, and one of the cooks was willing to fill me in during the long hours when he wasn't needed cooking and all I really had to do was watch the supplies and those who stood guard on them.

The cook was Jexon, and he was very impolite but did his best to be fair. He had more than a few things to say about my being ignorant of the state of the nation, and many of them stung, but I let it be, because I had no way to be defensive without giving away more than I wanted to. Still, he tended to come back to it over and over.

"Truth be," he said (when he finally got back around to the topic of Belma), "this nation wouldn't survive if it weren't at war. Weavers could do their work anywhere, 'course, but backstabbing bastards that they are, they'd split into ten factions if they took a step outside their ancestral grounds. Each would seek a different Clan among the Traders or Warriors, get protection, then try an' burn out the others' supplies of silk, 'cos that's all they really have, now, ain't it?"

"What exactly do they make?" I had never really gotten an answer to that, but I hadn't really been all that curious.

"Never seen it? Starsilk. Cute stuff." Jexon leaned all the way back so he was facing the sky, and I think closed his eyes, but I wasn't looking. "In the brighest day, starsilk's still black as the darkest night, 'cept that some parts of the thread shine. Weavers, when they make a real master's work, they can make cloth that shows any picture, clear as a painter's work, but they're shining images on pure black. Thin as you please, but hard to cut it with a knife, I hear, an' it's not like common silk, there's no seein' through it, not even if that's all a lady's wearin, y'know?" He laughed, but I thought his thoughts were far away, and he stopped for a long minute.

"Starsilk, that stuff pays for everything. Weapons, towns, war, all of it. Don't like to mine or farm, our crafters ain't keen to do much. They say nobody else can make the stuff, an' the Clans make sure of that. Traders won't let one bit of the secret out, or their whole clan, an' probably whole family beyond the clan too, all their lives are forfeit. Bastards'd deserve it too, 'cos if people didn't come here for that, we'd lose the war and get split up real fast. Anyway, Warrior clans, they stop invaders a'course, but most of em are more interested in fightin' than money. Yer stunt with the bastard cat that first day, that must'a burned him a good one, 'cos he's a Warrior Clan kid, no question. Too young to understand, maybe, but the way he moved with that sword, he was raised with it." Jexon sat up and gave me a look. "Didn't take you for a fighter, but you did good with that one. Anyway, you insult their ability to fight, and that's all they have, so they get real mad."

"Anyway, look, nobody wants to live here in Belma," he said, suddenly stopping to spit, loudly. "But Belma takes in anyone from anywhere. Only clan here that don't is the weavers, and that's mostly to keep sneak-types away from their secrets, 'cos without that, we'd have nothing. The weavers, those are old clans, centuries old, an' they don't mix blood much. Makes em dumb, but it keeps us safe. Long as they do that, an' keep their secrets, anyone from any place in the world can come here, when they got nothing else, an' find a home. Even you." He grinned.

"Gee, thanks," was all I could say to that.

"Nah, don't take it bad. But you don't talk about your past, and well, lots of people here don't. That's why warriors have to be known as the best, why traders have to make it rich. Freedom, yeah, we got that, but you find out real quick, sittin' alone in empty hills, that you need people or you go crazy. Lots of people that come here go hide in the forest 'till they go mad and kill their families, neighbors, whatever. Warriors find 'em and rip 'em up good, but they never prevent it. Some say there are crazy men an' women in the woods of Belma, murderers what got away with it only 'cos they never went home. Y'hear legends of someone finding a house in the wilderness, full of body parts, and some are missing--like no torsos, no heads, no arms, things like that. Not done by animals, no sign of feeding. But they hunt the ones that did it and don't find em." Jexon shivered. "Freedom we got, but crazy, we got that too. Lots of crazy."

I didn't want to hear more, but I also had to focus very hard on not doing anything weird. It was probably only godly power that kept me from being too awkward when I changed the topic, quickly, because my mind was on a shed in the middle of the woods--on walking in and being repelled but not knowing why, on a god telling me if I stayed I would be killed by ...someone.

Stolen novel; please report.

My mind was on a body whose original owner a god had seen fit to kill, just so that I could enter into this world.

"Yeah, okay, that's creepy," was all I said, then quickly, "So is that why Mert, our ironsmith, was so terrible? Nobody around here can teach him things?"

"Who, Mert? Yeah, he never apprenticed to anyone or anything. Like you, I think, he showed up outta somewhere and found a place. He's awful at it." Jexon paused and looked out over our poor army. "Feel bad for the people wearing our armor, but he didn't make most of it anyway, just repaired it. Talked to him a bit before we left, and he said he used to be a farmer. Did some forging just to repair tools, but that's not much for war..."

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The other nice thing about staying in camp for a long period of time was that there were public lessons on martial arts. It was, regrettably, restricted to officers--at least squad leaders. Bard, when I showed interest, immediately declared me the leader of the Auxilliary squad and slapped something on my uniform to prove it, which was apparently all it took.

The leaders of the exercises were either not racist or didn't pay attention to who they were teaching, and the students were generally too busy focusing on the material to haze the humans who attended. So, I got introduced to a third martial art style, which was Chaos, one half of the Fire Style martial arts. They didn't get deep into philosophy, and pretty much just insisted on doing as much damage with a strike as you possibly could. The actual instruction started pretty standard, with strength and endurance training, but they did get pretty quickly to actual, essence-using Arts, although they warned us all that if you used them before you were ready, you'd hurt yourself, and badly.

As part of that, though, there was a section during our warm-up every day where everyone did an exercise for absorbing Red Essence. It was clear as day that it wasn't any kind of mumbo-jumbo or fake mysticism, because when the whole group did it, the air got very cold very quickly--in a way, we were all competing to absorb heat out of the air and ground nearby, and people in the middle probably didn't get much from it.

The Arts that we were taught, though, were pretty simple. We were presented with a dummy target and told to try to add essence to our attacks. The guidance they gave en masse wasn't great, but the instructors walked through the group and gave smaller lessons to anyone who could hear, and that helped.

The woman who offered me instruction might have been some kind of half-fish, or maybe lizard--it would be hard for me to tell in general, but she also had a massive scar across her face that had paralyzed many of her facial muscles, giving her an unpleasant droopy appearance that made it difficult to focus on anything else. Still, when she corrected the men in front of me, described the flow of energy through her body, and demonstrated the motions, she made incredible sense; although it was always hard to not see her scar, she always gave you something else to think about, and that helped.

When she got around to me specifically, she shook her head and growled at me. "You're being too gentle. No love taps here, the point of this art is to insert violence itself into the body of your enemy. Chaos arts are nasty--that's why we don't have you spar with each other, just beat down wooden logs. Using Chaos is like fighting with a real, wicked-sharp blade: you don't use it on anything you don't want to kill. You need to make every strike like that: don't try to use energy on the wood. Destroy it. Like this..."

And then... well, she barely set a stance, so I didn't have a lot of warning, but I flipped on my ability to see magic just in time to watch her throw a punch at my dummy target log. What I saw was perhaps the most instructive thing I had ever seen: a wave of silver poured out of the depths of her soul, reaching every part of her body, and then every muscle seemed to release red essence, essence that flowed through channels burned into her body, collecting not only in her fist, but in all the muscles of her arm, shoulder, and torso, everything that she was using to put power into the strike. Only at the moment of impact did all the red essence flash forward into the skin of her fist, creating a wave of ...destruction is the best word for it, destruction that annihilated the wooden post.

After that, she moved on, but I sat there dumbfounded, thinking about what I had seen. That wave of silver... I had thought before that Silver Essence came from light, but whichever magic that was, its role here was crystal clear: she had used it to coordinate the art across the rest of her body, setting up the technique. It, unlike the red essence, seemed like it had come from her Sparks, and I knew I had none of that essence collected.

Rather than trying to collect essence I'd never been taught anything about, though, I eventually ended up trying to recreate what I saw her do but on a "feelings" basis. The problem was... I could tell instantly that my feelings were wrong. Because I wanted to destroy the post, but I had watched the essence collect in her muscles, and there was no way she was packing raw destruction into her body. Was Red Essence more complicated than that? It was supposed to be fire, heat, destruction... so why focus it inside you? If it was more complicated than that, why was focusing it on the target enough to obliterate it?

I ended the lesson on a downer, feeling like I'd just seen how far I was from even a basic understanding of the martial arts. Maybe if I hadn't seen it, I would have understood it on an intuitive basis, but right now, everything was wrong. I wished I still had the book on fire magic, but I had returned it to Lucile before leaving. I also wished I had a book on Light Magic, but the Goddess of Light and Knowledge had declined to offer Knowledge about Light to me.

Naturally, as soon as I thought of her like that, I had to smile to myself. There was an obvious answer to my problems, but if I was going to pray to Alanna for help, I would want to offer her soulflame in payment--and before I did that, I really ought to have some to spare.

It was time to talk to the Company about the God of Eyes.