Cradle: Foundation (Cradle Collected Book 1) Page 13

  The world took on a feeling of unreality, as though he'd been struck by Kelsa's Empty Palm. It was too absurd. Just this morning he'd been preparing to fight a bunch of children and now...now Golds were descending from the sky? His mother was dead?

  It was stupid, that was what it was. Idiotic and ridiculous. The world didn't work like this; the world made sense. Only dreams operated without rules or reason, and even his insane dreams of singing flowers and dancing clouds held more logic than this.

  Jades began to gather at one end of the stage, old men and women from Kazan and Wei gathering together, mingling under both banners. They argued fiercely, none daring to walk up onstage, but they did gather. In ones and twos they hurried together, banding together to fight and die with pride.

  Not all the Jades joined them. Some stayed in the stands, on their knees.

  Markuth laughed, shaking droplets of blood from his fingers. “Is this it, then? Don't hold back, come up. I won't begin until you are ready.”

  Hatred boiled up in Lindon, and he found himself wishing he could join the Jade elders. Even a Gold wasn't immortal. In fact...

  The idea illuminated his soul like a sunrise. Li Markuth might be even more dependent on his madra than an ordinary person. If the legends were true, Gold bodies were partially made of madra, like a Remnant's.

  What would an Empty Palm do against such a being?

  Lindon would die landing that blow, but that wasn't worth consideration. He'd grown up with stories of mythical heroes who were killed trading strikes with a blood rival. If he succeeded here, he would live on forever in the myths of the Wei clan. It would be a good death. An honorable death. The death of a sacred artist.

  If even the Empty Palm wasn't enough, Lindon had one more card to play. The hornet Remnants were still sealed in their jar beneath the stage, waiting for him to release them. If they could distract the Gold for even a breath, even the fragment of an instant, Lindon's life would be well spent.

  The sense of unreality crashed in on Lindon once again, shattering his beautiful delusion. What was he thinking? Here he was, Wei Shi Lindon the Unsouled, considering throwing his life away in a battle against a Gold. It was a bad joke, or the fanciful poem of someone with too much ego. He couldn’t do anything. He would only die, with no plan or purpose whatsoever.

  He stared at the Li Clan monster, and his hopeful idea died. The truth settled on him like the fall of night: there was nothing he could do. No reason to try. He was too weak.

  Li Markuth spread his arms and his wings, and the sky darkened even further, until night fell over Sacred Valley. The whole arena shook as he called on the vital aura of the world, the four White Fox pillars crumbling to rubble. Only Markuth shone in the darkness, his body outlined by white power. “The world is wide outside your narrow Paths,” he said, even as the crowd of Jades prepared their techniques. “Let me guide you.”

  The Jade elders of the Wei and Kazan clans walked onstage in a solemn procession, summoning foxfire or Forging bright red blades. They spread out in front of Markuth, some forty or fifty of them, and from their faces Lindon knew they were each prepared to die.

  And in that moment, Lindon decided to die with them.

  Maybe he was too weak, and his death would accomplish nothing. But it was better to bet on the tiny chance that he was wrong than to wait for death without even trying.

  When Lindon stood up, Markuth didn't so much as move his eyes. It was as though anyone less than Jade didn't even exist to him. When the first ranks of Wei elders moved toward him with madra readied, the Grand Patriarch condensed wind and shadow around each of his fists.

  Lindon crept in front of him, still unnoticed. He didn't even glance down, paying Lindon no more attention than he did the stones beneath his feet. The sky overhead flashed white.

  And Lindon, ignored by the Grand Patriarch, landed an Empty Palm on Markuth's core.

  It was as though he’d splashed water on a boulder.

  Even legends never suggested that a Foundation-stage child could harm a Gold. It was like a fly attacking a tiger…no, attacking a mountain. If everyone at the Foundation stage in all of Sacred Valley joined hands and pooled their madra, they couldn’t do so much as ruffle the clothes of the Grand Patriarch of the Li Clan. Lindon should have known better.

  He should have remembered his place.

  His force vanished uselessly, and Markuth backhanded him in the midsection. Even in the end, he didn’t give Lindon a single glance.

  The casual slap of a Gold struck hard enough to knock him backwards off the stage, but somehow it didn’t hurt. He landed in the dirt, but the air had already vanished from his lungs. His mouth flapped open, trying to grab a breath, but it was as though the air had disappeared.

  He tried to sit up, but nothing happened. He remained on his back, his head shaking from side to side. Lindon strained his eyes, looking down, to see how bad his injuries were.

  I’m still dreaming, he realized, when he didn’t see his legs. That was the only explanation. He’d been a fool to consider any of it real. Golds didn’t descend from the sky, the Patriarch couldn’t bow, his mother didn’t die for no reason, and his legs were supposed to be at the end of his body.

  It was comforting to know that he was dreaming. Soon he would wake up, and then everything would make sense again. In fact, he could feel exhaustion pressing down on him like a blanket. Maybe that was what waking up felt like, in a dream.

  His head flopped to the left, and he caught a glimpse of his father and sister. Kneeling, like the rest. Kelsa’s eyes were fixed on his, glistening with tears, her face pale. Why was she so sad? This was just a dream, she shouldn’t worry so much.

  Jaran wasn’t looking at him at all, but was fixed on the battle between Markuth and the Jades. He had to admit that hurt, even if it wasn’t real.

  He let his eyes slide shut to hide the sight of his kneeling father. When he woke up, everything would be all right again.

  That was Lindon’s last thought before he died.

  Chapter 11

  With the assistance of her Presence, Suriel watched her target location from a thousand kilometers away. The fated arrival point was an empty stretch of forest in the territory of a local clan, one marked by images of a white five-tailed fox. [The Wei clan,] her Presence informed her, spooling out lines of explanatory text in her vision. She willed the explanations away, scanning the area.

  There was some sort of festival nearby, where children from various clans engaged in combat games. She watched the matches idly for a while, waiting for the spatial violation destined to occur nearby.

  One boy in particular caught her attention—tall, broad-shouldered, with a wooden badge and a rough face. He was the oldest of the group, and he won as easily as someone of his size should defeat younger children. The crowd treated him with disdain, but he seemed to carry himself with pride, as though pushing nine-year-olds out of bounds was an achievement.

  She looked a little deeper, examining his soul.

  She spotted his flaw immediately. He'd been born with a madra deficiency; that could be corrected, given time, but primitive clans like these often ostracized or marginalized the weak. Only the strong could contribute to the greater good.

  She ordered her Presence to pull up the boy’s story, digesting it in an instant. It was as she’d expected. He was born with nothing, less than nothing, and others increased his burden because of it. Yet today, he still fought. She could admire that.

  His fate unspooled in front of her, a series of images stringing from one to another. She would have seen clearer images, even branching paths, had she left her eyes functional, but in her current disguised state this was the best she could do.

  The boy fights against a relative of his, a young man with long black hair and an iron badge. The boy cheats, releases emerald hornets, ekes out a technical victory.

  With a bulky brown pack on his back, he bends his head over a scroll, studying a Path by candlelight in someone else�
��s home.

  The same boy, years later, weeping as he earns his copper badge.

  As a man with gray in his hair, he and his wife and their children gather around before a ceremony that sees him promoted to Iron.

  He dies in a Dreadgod attack that claims a quarter of the valley, decades hence.

  Suriel willed the fate away, wiping aside the pathetic collection of images. These would be his dominant fate, the most likely path for the boy's life, and a thousand little things could change it. But left to his own devices, he would overcome his handicap to live a happy and satisfying life, dying a little early.

  That was all.

  Her interest waned, shifting as the Presence chirped in her mind. [Spatial violation imminent]. The spot in the empty forest flared red, glowing brighter and brighter.

  Suriel launched herself from the ledge on which she'd been standing, shattering the air in an explosion as she moved faster than sound. She was late.

  Predicting events based on fate was an art more than a science, and not her specialty. She had chosen to stay a few thousand kilometers away for safety, to avoid undue interference. She'd known it was a risk, but now the event was upon her, and she couldn't arrive in time without tearing the atmosphere apart. She could bend space to transport directly in, but her target might sense the distortion and flee to another world. Even so, she wasn't unduly concerned.

  Anything this trespasser could do, she could undo.

  He descended from a class six spatial rift, little more than a slit in the Way that was repaired immediately. She watched as he gathered some followers around him—he must have been communicating with this world for some time, which would add to his sentence—and decapitate a couple of observers. The spines were severed cleanly, but she would reverse causality rather than attempt a manual reattachment. No sense taking a risk.

  As she reduced speed for her arrival, the trespasser fully unveiled his spirit, darkening the sky with storm aura and smashing nearby pillars to frighten the locals. He was going for full dramatic effect.

  “Is this it, then?” the black-and-white striped trespasser taunted his enemies. The audio quality had improved now that she was within two dozen kilometers. “Don't hold back, come up. I won't begin until you are ready.”

  Suriel prepared to descend when she noticed a detail that the winged man had overlooked. That boy, fifteen and clad in white, was sneaking around to the front of the trespasser. He gathered his meager madra together, terror and resolve and muted self-loathing radiating in a psychic wave.

  With the same move he'd used on the children earlier, the boy drove his palm into the Gold practitioner's core.

  Suriel winced even before the trespasser tore the boy in half, sending his torso flipping up and out of the arena. The boy had to have known it was useless.

  [He knew,] her Presence confirmed.

  And he tried anyway, Suriel thought. This was the sort of person the Abidan were created to save: the weak who stood against the strong. The sort of person the Phoenix was meant to save. The sort of person who might, with a little outside help, even reach beyond their fate.

  His life guttered out, visible to her eyes, but that meant nothing before Suriel. He was only dead.

  She changed her plan. She had meant to freeze time, retrieve the trespasser, revert the damage he'd done, and leave. With a delicate adjustment of memory, the locals would never notice their day had been interrupted.

  Now, she had a new goal. Makiel wouldn't be pleased, but this event now fell officially under her purview. She could handle it as she saw fit.

  And she saw fit to make the trespasser sweat.

  ***

  Death looked surprisingly like the last moments of his life, Lindon found.

  His vision had fuzzed away for a second in a haze of gray, but now it returned, and he found that everything looked exactly the same. Markuth had his hands raised above his white-striped hair, madra gathered in balls of force and wings spread. The Jade experts of two clans ran at him with weapons and foxfire ready, resignation in their wrinkled faces. Blood splattered the arena, and his legs lay next to his mother's head.

  When Lindon was a child, he had once nudged a table carrying a ceramic vase, an heirloom from previous generations of the Shi family. The table shook, and he looked up to see the vase teetering on the edge. That moment had seemed to stretch, a single image imprinted on time so that it seemed to last forever before the vase at last began to fall.

  At first, he thought that was happening now. The world seemed frozen around him, as though time had stretched once again. He noticed it, and waited for the battle to resume.

  But it didn't.

  A few breaths of time later—though Lindon wasn't breathing, and felt no urge to—the tableau before him remained exactly the same. He wondered if this was what death was, a single instant lasting for eternity. He hoped not. Boredom seemed like a worse fate than otherworldly torment.

  Then something changed. The sky, masked by the dark clouds summoned by the Li Clan's Grand Patriarch, began to glow blue. Azure light lit the underside of the clouds as though a blue sun rose, spilling its light over the entire arena.

  And in that light, pieces of the world began to move.

  Though Li Markuth remained locked in his pose of triumph, the Jade combatants still frozen before him, blood slithered along the floor around his feet. The severed heads tumbled across the arena, gathering blood as they rolled, bouncing off the stone and rolling away toward the forest.

  His own legs slid across the stone, as though his blood had become a rope pulling his body together. Panic tightened his chest, and he tried to struggle, but he couldn't even widen his eyes. No part of him responded to his control, and he had to wait and watch as his flesh pulled itself together. It wasn't painful, but he could feel it, an uncomfortable squirming below his ribs as muscle and bone reassembled themselves.

  All the while, the sky grew brighter and brighter.

  Markuth slowly moved his head on his neck, thawing gradually, first looking around him at the frozen world and then at the brightening sky.

  He stumbled backward in shock, flapping his wings like a panicked bird to keep from falling over.

  “No!” he screamed, hurling the balls of his madra into the sky. “Wait, please! I belong here! This is my homeland!”

  The clouds parted, revealing the source of the blue light. It blazed like a sapphire sun for an instant, sending a painful lance through Lindon's eyes and making him wish he could close them.

  The light dimmed somewhat, revealing its source: two sweeps of blue fire, like a pair of wings formed from iridescent flames and big enough to cover a third of the sky. It gave the impression of a blue phoenix, or perhaps a phoenix Remnant, descending from the heavens in glory.

  Markuth roared at the phoenix, drawing the sword from his belt. It was shaped like a straight, simple sword, but it fuzzed and flickered, buzzing oddly as though it weren't quite real.

  The phoenix faded further as it descended, until its flames no longer hurt Lindon’s eyes. When he could see again, he made out a person at the phoenix’s heart: a woman, drifting down toward them and bearing flaming blue wings.

  Beautiful she was, but it wasn't the word that occurred to Lindon first. The first thing he thought was, Perfect. It was as though someone had taken a real person and perfected her, smoothing every blemish in her pale skin, arranging her cloud of dark hair so that nothing was out of place. Neither too short nor too tall, too thick nor too thin, she looked like the template from which every other human being was wrought. She was so flawless that she couldn't be real, reminding Lindon forcibly that he was dead now. Maybe she was a messenger from the heavens, here to usher him into the netherworld. That would explain the burning wings.

  Though, aside from her inhuman perfection, she didn't look like he would have imagined. Her body was sheathed in white, liquid armor that moved effortlessly with her. Gray ribbons of hazy smoke started at the fingertips of her right hand, wi
nding up her arm and terminating in her neck. Her hair looked brown at first glance, but upon further reflection, he would call it a deep green. And her eyes, large and human, were undoubtedly purple.

  The heavens must be a strange place to produce people like her. But with her here, he found that he could relax. Maybe when she brought him to the next life, he would be more than Unsouled.

  Markuth stood with his chest heaving and a sword in his right hand, but he didn't attack. “I have not violated the Pact, nor upset the balance of this world, nor defied the Abidan. I demand a trial before—”

  An invisible rope grabbed Li Markuth around one ankle, pulling him off-balance and dragging him to a point just behind the woman. He flapped his wings, kicking up a powerful wind, straining against his unseen bonds, but to no avail.

  [Li Markuth,] said an impassive voice in Lindon's mind. [You have been sentenced to trial for spatial violation and attempted domination of local inhabitants. You will be imprisoned until the Court of Seven determine a date and location of your trial.]

  A black spot appeared behind the green-haired woman, a point of absolute darkness. It widened so that Lindon could see a few spots of color within, like a distant cloud of rainbow-colored fireflies. Markuth continued being dragged backwards, as though that spot called him inexorably toward it.

  As the Gold came closer to the woman, he roared and spread his wings wide, raising his strangely twisting sword. With both hands, he slammed the blade down on her unprotected head, and the force of his madra was such that it pressed against Lindon even across the arena. The stones beneath her cracked, and wind blew away from the impact. The air rang with a sound like steel on stone.

  And the woman continued drifting over the ground, undisturbed. Not a single strand of her hair moved out of place, and she never looked in Markuth's direction.

  He screamed like a child as the darkness swallowed him, slurping up the tip of his sword last. The black hole in the world closed.

  The woman continued toward him, having never acknowledged the Grand Patriarch of the Li Clan for an instant. From the beginning of her descent, her eyes had remained locked on Lindon.