Soulsmith (Cradle Book 2)

by Wight,Will

  Yerin bowed to him in response. “I'm sure I'll have a mouthful of questions once I've wet my throat a little more.”

  Jai Sen laughed. “More water for the thirsty travelers!” he said to his aunt. “And a bath, if I may be so indelicate as to suggest it.” The woman nodded firmly and scribbled some words on a tablet.

  “Then I'm off!” Jai Sen announced, spinning on his heel—almost catching Lindon in the head with the shaft of the spear—and walking out the door.

  As Lindon had expected, a room in the inn was a hollowed-out stone block the size of a closet. A bed stood against one wall and a pile of blankets against the other—Lindon assumed that was for him—with a tiny table crammed into the corner balancing an unlit lamp, a paper covering what he guessed was a bowl of food, and four bottles of water beaded with condensation. As soon as they opened the door, Lindon and Yerin didn't even bother dropping their belongings before they darted for the water. The Thousand-Mile Cloud hovered in the hallway like a lonely puppy.

  The woman at the entrance had told them baths would be heated within the hour, so once Lindon had finally slaked his thirst and devoured a bowl of rice, he started flipping through his pack for a clean change of clothing. The ones he was wearing were more appropriate for the fireplace than the wardrobe, after so many days in the wilderness, and in the tight confines of the room he was starting to notice the smell. His longing for the bath sharpened, until it was almost as powerful as his thirst had been earlier.

  Yerin, meanwhile, was looking at the square hole in the wall that served as their window. “Think you could squeeze through this?” she asked.

  Lindon looked up with his hands full of clean clothes. “The window?”

  “If we get caught because your shoulders are stuck and you're dangling half out of the wall, I can tell you I won't be smiling.”

  “You want to leave?”

  She lifted her sheathed sword, placing it across his shoulders as though taking a measurement. “I'm not staying here, you can take that for true.”

  Just when he'd been looking forward to a bath and a bed, even curled up on a stone floor. “May I ask why?”

  “If Jai Sen mistook us for Remnant, he's dumber than a sack full of hammers. He wanted to know if I had a sharp enough edge on me to take his attack, and if I didn't, he planned on looting our corpses clean.”

  Slowly, Lindon replaced his clothes into the pack. “How do you know?”

  “See something enough times, and you start looking for it. Unspoken rule of the world: you kill the last person to own something, it’s yours, and nobody asks too many questions. That's not where it ends, either. He insulted you to see if I'd take it, because the farther I'll bend, the farther he can push me. Those Sandvipers at the gate were supposed to be his friends, his allies, however you want to say it. But he didn't stop them when they were going to make trouble, or stop me from beating on them. That sound friendly to you?”

  Lindon had noticed that, but he'd taken it in stride. That was how many in the Wei clan had treated an Unsouled, after all.

  “Now he's taken us to a place where we're stoppered up like flies in a wine bottle. Don't know if he still wants to rob us, or kill us, or maybe just what he said: get us working for the Jai clan. But I'll dance to his tune when he makes a puppet out of my corpse, and not a second before. We're leaving.”

  She held up her sword to the window horizontally, considered a moment, then nodded. “You first. I’ll push.”

  Chapter 6

  The Sandvipers had their own corner of the Five Factions Alliance territory. The space wasn't assigned to them according to some plan or design, as would have been rational, but instead consisted of all the ground they could seize and hold. Typical of sacred artists, in Jai Long's opinion: so consumed with gaining strength that they never considered how they should use it.

  Most of the Sandviper territory was taken up by a single, garishly red tent of many peaks. While the lesser minions settled for huts made of twigs and scavenged boards, their future chief reveled in luxury. Sounds floated out of the tent on a warm wind—mingled laughter, the clink of glasses, splashing of water.

  Jai Long could have joined them. He had the status, and he'd contributed more merits than the Sandviper heir. But if he was honest with himself, he preferred it out in the cold night.

  He sat at a rough table arranged on the mud, a stretch of fabric above him guarding from rain and providing shade. It was hot here when the sun was high, and cold when it wasn't, but his personal comfort was secondary. This position allowed him to focus on his duties, placed him in the way of any attack on the tent, and kept him close enough to respond to any of Kral's whims.

  No sooner had Jai Long thought of the name when his master stuck his head out from the tent. Kral was twenty-two years old, and fit from years of martial training. He always gave the impression of an imposing leader, standing tall and confident as though to inspire those around him, gaze fixed on some distant vision of victory...until he smiled. Then, he looked like a rogue trying to charm his way out of trouble.

  He was smiling now.

  Water ran down his body, and black hair plastered to his face and neck. Even the towel wrapped around his waist was soaked.

  “Send for some more water, would you?” Kral asked. The Sandvipers called Kral the young chief, though he hadn't ascended to his father's title yet, because of the great influence he had among the sect. He was issuing a command, but he respected Jai Long enough to at least pretend it was a request. “Somehow we keep losing it.” A chorus of laughter followed that statement from within the tent, and his grin broadened.

  Jai Long nodded to a pair of nearby servants, young boys born into the Sandviper sect, and they ran off at his signal to find the jars of water he'd ordered filled earlier. There were constructs in the tent to heat what water they brought, but if there existed any constructs that could create water out of madra, only the Purelake might have Soulsmiths skilled enough to build them. Maybe the Fishers, but he couldn't have any dealings with the Sandvipers' ancestral enemy. Not openly, anyway.

  Request fulfilled, Jai Long turned back to his work, expecting that Kral would leave. Instead, the heir sighed.

  “You're not a slave,” he said.

  Jai Long turned back, somewhat surprised at the statement. “If I thought I was, I wouldn't stay.” He and Kral had reached the same stage of advancement in the sacred arts, but the future chief wouldn't be able to stop him by force. Jai Long wasn't arrogant enough to assume that he was the strongest Highgold in the Five Factions Alliance, but he was certainly the best among the Sandvipers.

  If he'd thought the sect was treating him unfairly, he would have cut his way through them, and Kral knew it. The only one that could have overpowered him was the current chief, a Truegold, and Kral's father was out hunting.

  Kral nodded to the paperwork. “Then why are you working like one? Come join us.” He peeled the tent flap back a little, and another humid gust bloomed in the night air.

  No laughter accompanied this statement from inside the tent, but none of them argued. Kral's friends were afraid of seeming too displeased, but they certainly weren't eager to have Jai Long join them.

  He resisted lifting a hand to feel the strips of cloth wrapped around his head. The cloth was red, wrapped so tightly around him that not a hair or scrap of skin was visible from the neck up. Only his eyes peeked out of the middle, and if he could have covered those up without losing his vision, he would have.

  “Let's not inflict my company upon them,” Jai Long said dryly. “They're having fun.”

  If Kral's companions could have cheered that statement without losing face, Jai Long was sure they would have.

  Kral's smile sharpened. “They won't say a word about it, that I can promise you. They know the hand that feeds them.”

  They wouldn't need words to express their displeasure, Jai Long knew. No one did, really. When he'd returned to his family with his sister's bloody and broken body in h
is arms, his parents were more horrified by his face than by the fate of their daughter. What have you done to yourself? they didn't ask him. Was it worth it? they didn't say.

  When the Jai Patriarch banished him to the Wilds, the words were hollow and empty, forms without substance. The old man's disappointment oozed across the room, so tangible that it might as well have been vital aura taken form. The star that would have guided the clan into the future had stepped off the Path, ruining his future advancement. And he was hideous...how could he represent the Jai like that?

  Nothing truly important needed to be said. When he returned to the clan, unseated the Patriarch, and forced the rest of the family to bow before him, he wouldn't need any speeches either. Above all else, sacred artists respected strength.

  Jai Long intended to use his.

  “Can you imagine me saying yes?” he asked Kral, and the young chief gave a bitter laugh.

  “In truth, no. But what sort of host would I be if I didn't ask?”

  Kral had his faults. He pursued sacred arts with admirable dedication, but at every other sort of work he balked. He was lazy, irritable, quick to anger, slow to apologize, arrogant, and even occasionally cruel.

  But he'd treated Jai Long well, and it would not be forgotten.

  Jai Long said none of this, because he didn't need to. He waved his hand. “You're letting out the heat. Call for me when you need more wine.”

  Kral sighed again, but headed back inside. The laughs started up again almost immediately.

  Jai Long looked down at the papers beneath him, conjuring a tiny star on the tip of one finger so that he had enough light to see. Four piles of papers sat on the desk, divided roughly into quadrants. Each page was a map. The maps were rough, sketched by many different hands, and incomplete. Jai Long was making notes of his own on the many blank spaces, filling in from other maps and from his own inferences, slowly and steadily building a complete diagram.

  There were still many riddles to solve, but he could feel the information gathering into a whole. In another week, maybe two, he'd have an advantage beyond any of the other Five Factions: a map of the Transcendent Ruins.

  The stories passed down about the ancient Jai spear were more myth than fact, but two things remained true to a reasonable degree of certainty. For one thing, it was almost absolutely true that the spear remained somewhere in the Ruins. There were hundreds of eyewitnesses to the Jai Matriarch's entrance, and while popular stories said she'd died within, her closest advisors recorded that she emerged from the Ruins weak and battered. She told those advisors that she'd left the spear within, and died days afterward.

  He had enough information to consider that story true. But there was a second fact he'd verified, and it was equally important: the spear really had devoured the strength of Remnants and added their strength to that of the Matriarch's. One of her advisors had observed the process, even noting down possible methods and some runes on the spear's shaft that might have been some form of script. The early Jai clan had tried to reproduce the spear, but had ultimately failed.

  No one else had considered the nature of that ability, except that it was a powerful way to advance quickly. The others, he was sure, sought the spear for one reason alone: with it, they might be able to break through the bonds of Truegold. There was only one Underlord in the Desolate Wilds, and only a handful in the Blackflame Empire. Advancing past Truegold meant advancing beyond the realms of common sense, to rise from the earth to the heavens in one leap.

  They all thought so small.

  More accurately, their vision was narrow. Jai Long's competitors, including the Sandviper sect, were so focused on advancement that they neglected to consider what it meant to consume someone else's power.

  No one could gather madra that was too different from their own. That was a fundamental law, and one that Jai Long had no reason to believe the spear could break. If he, whose madra carried aspects of light and the sword, tried to absorb a Sandviper Remnant, the spear might allow him to do it. His madra would gain a toxic aspect, and he would have a harder time finding the right aura to cycle, but he should be able to do it.

  But then, if he took a Fisher's Remnant, what would happen?

  There was a point beyond which the absorption would fail. Even if it didn't, the different types of madra could mix in violent or chaotic ways. It might even damage his core, or the madra could rebound on him and tear his body apart.

  No, though everyone envisioned taking the spear and gathering the powers of their enemies into one body, that was just a childish fantasy. It would never work.

  The spear would be at its best when devouring compatible madra. In other words, madra from sacred artists on the same Path.

  If Jai Long held the spear, he could advance by doing nothing more than cutting down others on the Path of the Stellar Spear—blood members of the Jai clan—and gutting their Remnants.

  The spear's nature aligned so closely with his own desires that he almost considered it the will of the heavens.

  Even better, the other Factions were considering this a contest of strength. Which was how they considered most things, now that he thought of it. They pushed into the Ruins, fighting the dreadbeasts sealed within as well as the other competitors, with the understanding that the most powerful would come out on top.

  Jai Long didn't think of himself as an arrogant man, but sometimes it seemed that he was the only one with eyes in a crowd of the blind.

  Couldn't they see that the strongest weren't always the victors?

  So he worked on his map even as the young servants returned, carrying jars of water bigger than their whole bodies. As they ran back out, one of them stopped at Jai Long's table and bowed with fists pressed together.

  He stayed that way until Jai Long noticed and raised his head. “What is it?”

  “I ran into Grenn on the way back,” the boy said. “His mother called him in to cycle, so he couldn't deliver messages to you tonight, so he passed them on to me.”

  Jai Long held back a sigh. He'd wondered what was taking his usual messenger so long, and once again he lamented the lack of discipline among the Sandvipers. There was so much he despised about the Jai family, but there was a reason they were a first-class clan in the Blackflame Empire while the Sandvipers remained nothing more than a second-rate sect in the Wilds. Without organization and control, strength meant nothing.

  He gestured impatiently, and the boy’s spine straightened like a broomstick. “Sir. Grenn said that the foreman said that the miners can’t go into the southwest corner of the fourth floor. Too many beasts.”

  Jai Long scribbled a note. In the four floors closest to the entrance of the Transcendent Ruins, he had accurate maps of virtually the entire area. Only a few spots remained blank, so he’d ordered the mining crews to move their operations.

  “Tell the foreman he can expect three more Lowgold guards by sundown tomorrow,” Jai Long said. A single guard would be a great help in protecting the mining crew from dreadbeasts; three was perhaps too many. But this was a race, and he intended to win.

  Kral might balk and committing so many of his Sandvipers to what he saw as a slave duty, but Jai Long would talk him around.

  The messenger boy stood there mouthing words, awkwardly committing Jai Long’s message to memory. When he’d finished, he straightened again.

  “There was a message from the Jai clan too, sir. A Lowgold stranger showed up at the gates today, and she had a Copper with her.”

  “Her son?”

  The boy shook his head, and his smile had a bit of a sneer to it. “Grenn saw the Copper himself. Said he looked even older than the Lowgold.”

  That happened sometimes—a child was born with a tragically weak spirit, or had it crippled in some accident before he could advance further. Those unfortunates deserved pity, not ridicule.

  But whatever they deserved, this one had earned not a whit of Jai Long’s attention. “If you deliver me a message every time an outsider shows up at t
he gates, you’ll walk your feet off.”

  “No, that’s not…the Copper’s just strange, sir. Not important. The important thing is that she beat Sandviper Resh in the middle of her squad, and then walked away with one of the Jai clan.”

  “Ah.” Now Jai Long understood why the message had mentioned the Copper. If he, as a representative of the Sandviper sect, wanted to avenge Resh’s humiliation, he couldn’t punish a Lowgold under Jai protection. He’d have to target the Copper instead.

  “Where are they now?” Jai Long asked, dipping his brush to write a letter to his former clan.

  “Uh, they were taken to a Jai clan inn, but it looks like they snuck out. Grenn said he was supposed to tell you that nobody could find them.”

  Jai Long’s suffering had begun when he first advanced to Gold. In the heat of battle, he’d been forced to adopt a strange Remnant instead of the one his family had planned for him. Instead of the Goldsign borne by most on the Path of the Stellar Spear—hair as sturdy as a helmet, and rigid as iron—he was cursed with a face that…a face that he didn’t like to think about.

  There had been a few other consequences of that Goldsign. His voice hadn’t changed, but his laugh…

  It rang out of him, wild and crazy, like the cackling of a deranged murderer. His usual voice was cool and composed, but when he laughed, he sounded like a blood-drunk killer. The messenger boy paled and took a step backwards.

  Jai Long swallowed the last chuckles, but a smile still stretched the edges of his cloth mask. “They lost her. The Jai clan can’t find their new recruit, so they turn to me.”

  Technically they had turned to the Sandvipers to help, but there was no real difference. He handled most of the day-to-day workings of the sect, and whichever of his relatives had sent this message must have known where it would end up.