Soulsmith (Cradle Book 2)

by Wight,Will

  He didn't know how—undoubtedly it was some function of its madra, or some kind of script—but the spider was using an invisible force to pull him closer.

  The halfsilver dagger was in his hand, burning to be used, but he kept it gripped in a tight fist. He'd need that option available, but he had something else to try first.

  With a good deal of writhing, he squirmed forward enough to get his left hand onto the spider's back.

  Then, adjusting his breathing from panic to a measured cycling technique, he fed pure madra into the construct.

  Something like the Thousand-Mile Cloud was relatively simple in its construction. It was made of densely packed cloud madra, which floated. You could activate a single script-circle buried at its core in order to get it to move. It followed the direction of the operator's spirit, not any directions in its actual script, so it was a flexible but simple tool. It would never be able to fly off without active guidance.

  The spider, by contrast, was an intricate clockwork of branching scripts, interlocking plates of madra, and delicate organs that must have been extracted from Remnants. His madra flowed through it, giving him a vague picture of its functions, and of the scripts that had to remain active to keep it following orders.

  A spark of madra came from a crystal chalice, a tiny speck of a vessel that must power this construct's operation. Using his own madra, Lindon forced the flow from that chalice aside.

  It didn't take much power to do so; there was no will behind that madra, so it was easily directed. He simply blocked the flow into the script, keeping it bound inside the crystal.

  The spider shivered once, then collapsed. The invisible force on him vanished, leaving him panting in gulps of air.

  Irregular, spiky footsteps scraped along the dirt as Gesha slid closer on her drudge, and she would arrive to find him limply hanging on her deactivated construct. He pushed himself up, running shaking fingers along the edge of the spider's leg.

  He might have noticed a defect before, a place where the construct was in need of maintenance. If that was the case...

  One plate of the leg made a harsh noise as his hand moved over it, crackling like thin ice. He pushed madra into it desperately, fueling it with all the force his rapidly cycling spirit could churn out.

  The best way to maintain a construct's parts was to infuse it with madra of the same Path, which would keep that part fresh and new for as long as you wanted. The second best way was to purify madra through a device like a crystal chalice or a specially designed script and use that instead. It took much longer, was less efficient, and resulted in less accuracy for some cases that required delicate craftsmanship. But it worked.

  In fact, Lindon had only recently understood that the purity of his madra was why his mother let him work with her on her projects at all.

  The leg-plate strengthened a little. Enough that it wouldn't collapse under the construct's own weight, at least, which should demonstrate his value somewhat.

  He looked up to see Fisher Gesha an inch away from him, her gray bun even with his head, peering into the construct. After a second, she slapped his hand away, feeling the spider with her own fingers.

  “Did you steal the Path of the Fisherman? Hm?”

  “No, honored elder,” he said, though it was just a formality. If the Path of the Fisherman was what the Fishers followed—and he had a good feeling that it was—she would be able to sense that power on him if he had it. She'd only asked out of irritation.

  “Then come here.” She grabbed him by the back of the neck, and he remained perfectly still. In his experience, those with Iron bodies tended to forget the fragility of those without.

  She pushed him back a second later, eyes wide. The expression looked comical in her heavily wrinkled face. “You have no training?”

  “No, elder.”

  “No Path at all?”

  “No, elder.”

  “You're Copper, but you've never taken a taste of aura?”

  “I was never given a Path, honored elder. I don't know how.”

  Something like pity sparked in her eyes, and she patted him roughly on the back of the head. “You come from a clan of fools.”

  He hesitated before protesting. “They are my family, honored elder...”

  “Bah.” She made a spitting noise at that. “No family of yours. But you can make scales for me, so I'll take you.”

  He searched her quickly for signs of mockery, disappointment, irritation. Anything that might indicate she was lying. “You'll teach me?”

  She slapped him in the back of the head. “I'll work you until your bones are nubs, that's what I'll do for you. You won't get the secrets of the sect until you've brought enough value to us, which you'll do slowly and obediently. Is that clear enough?”

  Lindon dropped to his knees, pushing his head into the dirt, blinking back sudden tears. “The disciple greets his master.”

  “Stop that. I'm not your master.”

  “Your disciple understands.”

  “I'm going to make you do what my servants can't do, because they've advanced too far. You understand? Hm? You're lower than my servants.” She waved a hand aside, and the barn door rumbled open.

  He understood that he was going to be working inside a Soulsmith's foundry. Even if he did nothing but sweep the floors, it was an opportunity for him. He'd take it. He'd take anything.

  “Get in there,” she said. “Maintenance on all constructs by dawn, and don't think you'll get any sleep. If you look like you're going to finish early, I'll make another one.”

  “Yes, master,” Lindon said, hurrying inside.

  At last, he was going to be a Soulsmith.

  ***

  As dawn's first light filtered through the blackened trees surrounding the Five Factions Alliance, Yerin returned, dragging a bright blue corpse behind her. It looked something like a crab painted onto the world in the colors of the sky, and it leaked azure light as she trudged through the outer gates and down the main street.

  At her peak condition, she should have been able to run carrying something as light as this, but she felt like her bones had been filled with lead. Now that she settled down and thought, she hadn't had a real rest in...months, probably.

  Even now that she'd crossed the threshold to Gold, gaining a shiny metal arm with a sword stuck on it, her body had limits. She was starting to feel them.

  Didn't help that every rotten set of eyes on the way in was looking at her like she was dragging a bloody sack of dead dogs behind her. This was a camp of sacred artists, wasn't it? Couldn't be that unusual, seeing someone dragging in a Remnant's corpse.

  Or maybe it was the cargo she'd slung over her shoulder that they were staring at.

  It took her a handful of wrong turns to find the Fisher section of camp again, by which time she wondered if she could learn to sleepwalk on the fly. The crowd could just wash around her like a river around a boulder, and rot take them all.

  Finally, she passed down a street she recognized, dragging the blue-leaking Remnant under trees that had been decorated with spider constructs the night before. It looked different in the light, like it had been dyed a different color.

  She grabbed some Fisher pup about ten years old, demanding directions to Fisher Gesha. He looked like she'd popped out an extra eye—worse than that, to be true, since there were more than a few Goldsigns that gave you an extra eyeball—but he gave her rough directions.

  When she followed them to a huge barn that had been slapped down in the middle of camp, she almost turned back to show the kid the flat edge of her sword. Soulsmiths required a lot of space for their work, that was true, but it was her observation that they liked to do their business in as flashy a place as possible. Last Soulsmith she visited had built a glowing palace out of shining pillars and sat on a throne of burning inhuman skulls.

  But the Desolate Wilds were the back-end of nowhere, where even Sacred Valley looked civilized. Weak, but civilized. Maybe working in a barn was showing off
.

  She could have rapped on the door, but that would have taken energy. Instead, she simply hauled the door open.

  It slid on a track, spilling sunlight into the barn.

  The floor was actually covered in hay, but this was clearly the foundry of an active Soulsmith. A rainbow of severed limbs hung from hooks in the ceiling, drizzling colored sparks. Spiders hung from the rafters like bats in a cave, and stalls that should have held animals instead contained massive constructs—duller than Remnants and mysterious in construction. She didn't want to think what constructs that size had been built to do, so she didn't bother.

  Lindon was sitting at a long workbench arranged down the center of the room like a feeding trough, broad shoulders bent over a half-assembled spider. He looked older than he was, until she happened to reach out and scan his spirit. Then she’d sense the pathetic strength of a Copper, which she always associated with children. It gave her a queasy feeling, like seeing a grown man with a baby’s head on his shoulders.

  It was a relief to see him, though she still hadn't fully shaken her irritation. He’d insisted on joining a faction, like he knew up from down out here without her. He did need some real training, and she couldn’t give it to him, but this was still an inconvenience.

  Now that she had eyes on him, her previous worries seemed simpleminded. Foolish. Of course he wasn't going to run off, leaving her alone in a sea of strangers without a single friendly soul. No reason he should.

  Fisher Gesha hopped down from an upper floor that Yerin hadn't noticed, caught by the legs of the spider-construct that jutted out from under her robes. She held her hands behind her back, wrinkled face stuck in a mask of irritation. “What is this? Hm? You think we take customers now?”

  “Rumor says you take in strangers for a price,” Yerin said. She hauled on the rope binding the Remnant, bringing the blue crab forward. “This is supposed to be worth something.” She'd found it by following a team of Fishers who had skirted around this Remnant as too dangerous. Not so dangerous when she dismembered it from two hundred feet away, it turned out. Now its limbs were bundled up on its carapace, and she pulled it along on its belly.

  Fisher Gesha rubbed her chin with two fingers. “What do you want?”

  “Shelter in the Fishers for me,” Yerin said. Then she pointed to Lindon. “Training for him. Real stuff, not this sweep-and-gather rot.”

  Lindon raised one sheepish hand. “Gratitude, Yerin. I will repay you for this, but she already agreed—”

  The Fisher cut him off with a gesture, eyeing the pack on Yerin's shoulder. “You have something else for me, don't you?”

  Yerin slapped the bundle down on the floor, unrolling it with one foot. It was a trio of blood-spattered furs that, until a few hours ago, had been worn by Sandvipers.

  “Dead?” Gesha asked, eyes sharp.

  “Not quite,” Yerin said, because she had known better than to unleash three hostile Remnants in the middle of a crowd. “But I can tell you they're not happy.”

  A smile creased Gesha's face. “I think we can find a space for you.”

  Chapter 10

  The space they'd found for Yerin was among the main sect, in rooms reserved for honored guests of the Fishers. The space they'd found for Lindon was up among the rafters, in a pile of hay only accessible by a creaking ladder. He had to sleep motionless on his back for fear of rolling off the edge, which meant he spent his nights staring up at the spider constructs dangling over his head.

  But he wasn't concerned about sleep. Not when there was so much to learn.

  The first day, Gesha had her drudge run over the blue crab Remnant that Yerin had brought, the construct's eight legs moving at blurring speeds to dismantle the spirit and separate it into usable parts. She handed him first a claw bigger than his whole upper body, then a pile of tubes that looked something like intestines, then a Forged blue beak. The whole mess didn't act quite right; it smelled of lightning storms and salty water rather than rotten guts, and it felt more like oiled glass than anything natural.

  After he'd separated the parts into buckets, a task he'd often performed for his mother, he sealed them with scripts to prevent them from decaying and 'sent them to storage.' Which meant that he shoved the boxes into the giant closet at the back of the barn, labeled only with a code that he hoped Fisher Gesha could read.

  Most of the crab would go back there, to serve as what Gesha called 'dead matter.' These would be the most mundane parts of a construct—maybe the shell of a spider, maybe the hilt of a sword—and were needed only for their physical properties.

  The parts she didn't send into storage, the parts she kept out on her workbench, those were more interesting.

  Lindon's mother had never allowed him to help with this part, though he'd caught glimpses through cracked doors and around corners. This was the part of being a Soulsmith that required delicacy and skill, but Fisher Gesha hacked away at these treasures like a butcher working on a slab of meat.

  She started with a cluster of blue rocky madra about the size of a fist, but after a few strokes of her bladed goldsteel hook, she was left with a...

  He wanted to call it a 'heart,' because that was the nearest analogy in a living being, but it didn't look like that mass of muscle that was left over after his father cleaned a deer. It was a tightly wound tangle of tubes, so that Lindon thought it might actually be one tube, so folded and looped in so many different directions that it became a knotted mass.

  Gesha held it up in one hand. “We call this a binding, you see? We work with these like a blacksmith works with iron.”

  “And the rest of the material? Do you still use it for constructs?” he asked, gesturing back toward the closet door. Even the dead matter of an unusual Remnant would have supplied his mother for months.

  She snorted. “We fold it into different shapes, use it to build the skeletons, but the heart and soul of every construct is a binding. If we could work with bindings completely, we would. You think the rest of the Remnant is expensive? No. This is the gemstone inside the mountain.”

  She tossed it to him, and he caught it in both his hands. It smelled like a rainy day.

  “Put your hand over the tube at the top,” she said. “Point the other end—no, not at me! You want me to toss you out? At the floor! Now, funnel a trickle of madra into it. Just a little, do you hear me?”

  Lindon did, careful not to put in too much. The binding made a tiny whining sound.

  “Well, more than that,” she said.

  He took deeper breaths in rhythm, cycling his madra and forcing more power into the binding. It squealed louder.

  Gesha muttered to herself.

  He forced all the madra he could into the twisted organ, and finally it spurted out a spray of water.

  “Finally,” she said, snatching it back. She shook the binding in her hand, drawing his attention to it. “This was a Purelake Remnant, you hear me? Primary aspect of water. When this sacred artist was alive, she made water from the aura in the air, you see? This was a technique she’d mastered, and it becomes part of her spirit. Her Remnant uses this binding, does the same thing.”

  Lindon's jaw almost cracked under the force of his questions.

  “Her technique becomes a part of the Remnant? How? Why?”

  “Patterns,” Gesha said shortly, tucking the binding away in a drawer. “You've seen scripts, haven't you? What are they, if not shapes that guide madra? What is a technique, if not weaving madra in a certain pattern?” She held out a hand. “You move the right madra, in the right way, with the right rhythm, and you get...” A pair of pliers smacked into her open hand, drawn by some technique she'd used. “You move it any other way, and you get...” She waved her hand. “...nothing. Hm? You see?”

  “I believe I do, but please forgive another question. A binding is like a script inside your soul?”

  “You think it's that simple? No. A script is a drawing, a binding is a statue. Bindings are pearls, and Remnants are the clams around
them. You see?”

  On some level, he did. Bindings had weight, depth. A script-circle was nothing but a carved circle of letters. But they seemed to do the same things, so he wasn't entirely sure what advantages a binding had.

  He pointed to the drawer containing the binding. “How did you know which end took madra in, and which end spat water out?”

  “Experience,” she replied, prying at the shell of what he guessed was another concealed binding.

  “How did you know it would create water, instead of something else?”

  “Drudge told me.” She ran a hand down the smooth carapace of her large spider-construct, which rested on the desk next to her. “It tastes the aspects of madra for me, you see? It tells me which madra touches on water, which touches on ice, and which is simply blue.”

  “And now that you have the binding, you can use it in a construct? One that will automatically produce water? Is that all you can use it for, or can you do something else with it?”

  She pointed at him with the pliers. “That is the question worthy of a Soulsmith.” He tried to restrain his smile to polite levels, but he couldn't hold it back. She glowered at him.

  “Don't smile. A smile doesn't go with those eyes. You look like you want to eat me for breakfast.” She smacked herself in the forehead with the back of her hand. “Tsst. What am I doing? You are not my student. Sweep! Sweep the floors!”

  During the days of sweeping, he watched customers come and go. They usually met Gesha or other Fishers elsewhere, and only the most determined tracked her to her foundry. That was when Lindon found the answer to his question.

  More than once, Gesha would take a binding and encase it in dead matter, using her drudge to seal it up so that it looked like a sword, or a shield, a shovel, or whatever the customer ordered. Once, when she'd encased a crystalline binding into a hammer that looked like it was hacked from glacial ice, a burly man in thick furs came to pick it up only seconds after she'd finished.

  He had no sandviper Remnant on his arm, and he was dressed in much thicker clothing. The dark furs of his outfit were even dusted with snow, though autumn was only beginning and the days were still warm.