Free The Secrets of Jin-Shei by Alma Alexander

had been suffering from a lethargy and a lack of energy lately, what with the oppressive heat of the summer. Khailin was privately of the opinion that her mother might have done better to have stayed in the Second Circle and asked succor of the Spirit of Rain instead of beseeching a God of the Early Heavens for the energy which the hot dry weather sapped from her, but she held her tongue. When her mother was immersed deeply enough in her devotions not to notice that Khailin was absent, she slipped away unobtrusively and went seeking her own enlightenment.
    In the gardens of the Third Circle Khailin found an acolyte drawing a finely detailed sand painting mandala in an oiled wooden frame. He was seated in front of her favorite shrine, that of Sin, Lord of the East, the deity who was ascendant in her own birth sign and to whom she had a special devotion. Khailin stood watching him for a while, her hands tucked decorously into the wide sleeves of her red silk tunic. She knew better than tointerrupt, but when he took a break, sitting back and reaching for a flask of rice wine left at hand, she knelt down next to him.
    “What is it for?” she asked.
    “It is for a lady wishing for a favor from the Lord Sin,” the acolyte said courteously. “This will be placed in his alcove with a lamp filled with holy oil, until such time as the lady tells us that her wish has been granted, or that she has withdrawn the petition.”
    “Do they work?” Khailin asked. She had seen them before, the sand paintings, placed in shrines beside more prosaic offerings, beautiful and cryptic and mysterious. She had never seen one being prepared at such close quarters before, and inspected it with some curiosity. “What do you use to dye the sand?”
    “Are you wishing to join the Temple some day, young
sai’an
?” the acolyte asked, smiling. “These are Temple secrets. We do the Gods’ work. As for whether these are successful, that is not something we are in charge of. We facilitate the contact. The wish and the granting of it are between the one who prays and the God who listens to the prayer.”
    “I have heard the saying that the Gods help those who put themselves in their path,” Khailin said. “But this sand painting … this is so passive. It’s like there’s too much
cha’ia
energy here, and not nearly enough
chao.
”
    The acolyte raised an eyebrow. “You are learned, young
sai’an.
”
    “Is it not better,” Khailin said, “to know the prayer and to make something that answers it? If a sickness, then an elixir, or a medicine. If a child, then a way of conceiving, or a way of adopting. If a lover—”
    “That is too much for the Gods’ acolytes to aspire to,” said the acolyte hastily, cutting her off. “And much of that, people do get. But not from here.” He made his disapproval obvious, but did not explain it further.
    Khailin, however, had already read enough to know of the dichotomy of alchemies in the Way of the Cha in which the Gods and Spirits of the Great Temple were enshrined. That had been in one of the earliest scrolls she’d taken from her father’s library. She had practically learned the thing by heart:
    Cha is the path of the spirit and energy and power. Cha is part of every thing and every creature in the world. Pure cha is what the highest Heaven is made of a perfect place where the male and the female, the chao and the cha’ia, meet and meld inflawless balance and equilibirum, where the Seeker loses the self but becomes the whole world …
     
    That was the ultimate goal of the internal alchemies of the Way of the Cha, anyway—seeking ways to meld the adept’s spirit with the Unknowable, become one with the Gods. The internal alchemy, the
zhao-cha,
was all about ethereal realms which could only be gained by the incorporeal, the spiritual.
    The external alchemy,
yang-cha,
was more concerned with understanding the here and now. The empirical science. The part of the Way which drew Khailin’s