Bloodline (Cradle Book 9) Read online

  Ziel drifted along on a borrowed Thousand-Mile Cloud, letting the Truegold woman in charge of his retinue drag him after them.

  The Kazan clan had a solid series of walls around their territory, large bricks mortared by layers of old scripts. Their gates were hammered bronze, lined here and there with halfsilver or goldsteel to disperse attacks.

  Ziel’s Golds declared themselves to the sentries, negotiated their way inside, and arranged a meeting with the leaders of the Kazan clan while Ziel laid back on his cloud, half-asleep.

  The people here seemed…sturdy. That was the best way to put it. They were generally stocky, looked as though they were no strangers to a hard day’s work, and the badges on their chests were almost the size of breastplates.

  Most of the homes here were made of stone and rough-hewn logs, and were built to last. He got the impression of a clan of people who valued diligence and practicality, with few frills or decorations to speak of. He approved. Sacred artists should be hard workers.

  He was fully aware of his own position, lying on a cloud and drinking elixir straight from a bottle that he’d stored in his void key.

  But his spirit hadn’t settled yet. Eithan had completed the Pure Storm Baptism before leaving—otherwise, Ziel wouldn’t have come along.

  It would be some time before his madra system stabilized fully. Until then, he wasn’t supposed to strain himself.

  While he was reduced to the strength of a Jade, there wasn’t much he could do to strain his madra channels. Jade madra shouldn’t hurt him even if he tried to attack himself from the inside out.

  Even so, it would be best to take it easy.

  Ziel took another swig from the bottle. Technically it was an elixir, as it had beneficial effects on the spirit, but you could also accurately call it wine.

  He laid back and threw his arm over his eyes to block out the sun.

  They drifted through the Kazan clan for a while, his assistant explaining several times that they were Golds from outside of the valley, they represented the Akura clan and the Sage of Twin Stars, and they were here to warn the clan leaders of incoming danger.

  At some point, they passed inside, and Ziel could stop protecting his eyes. It was cooler out of the sun, and a brief glimpse showed him that they were drifting through polished stone hallways with decorations of worked metal. He felt earth aura all around him, which would ordinarily feel soothing.

  Now, it felt like he was inside a nervously beating heart.

  The Dreadgod’s influence was powerful here. The veins of aura throughout the stone quivered with chaos as the Wandering Titan grew closer.

  They entered a bright room, and the murmur of people grew quiet. Ziel’s cloud came to a halt.

  “Patriarch of the Kazan clan,” the Truegold woman announced, “I present to you Ziel of the Wastelands, chosen of Northstrider, Uncrowned of the Uncrowned King tournament, former leader of the Dawnwing Sect, and representative of the Akura clan and the Sage of Twin Stars. Let his words be as the voice of heaven to you.”

  Ziel groaned as he realized she was going to make him speak. He was not needed for this. She could tell them all about the Dreadgod, and only if they resisted would he need to strongarm them into listening.

  But he was here now. He might as well do what he could.

  Slowly, Ziel sat up and opened his eyes to see what he was dealing with.

  The Kazan Patriarch was a stocky, black-bearded man clad in chainmail. His jade badge was roughly carved with a shield, and he wore a bear’s pelt across his shoulders. He sat not at a desk, but on a log bench at the far end of a long table.

  Ziel was certain there had been more people in the room before, as this seemed to be some kind of dining hall filled with empty tables, but apparently they had filtered out while his eyes were shut. He swept his spiritual perception out and found them clustered on the other sides of the oaken doors.

  The only people in the large room with him were his Truegold assistant, the Patriarch, and a woman he assumed to be the Patriarch’s wife. She stood behind him with a worried expression and a hand on his shoulder.

  Her badge was made of iron, and she wore it literally as a breastplate, strapped to her as armor. There was no way this Patriarch would allow people he assumed to be Jade or higher to be alone with him and his Iron wife without some level of protection.

  Instead of saying anything, Ziel leaned down to peer under the table, where he saw a dimly lit script around the two of them. He traced that script back to constructs all around the room.

  With enough attention, he could figure out what they did, but that would take more attention than he was willing to spare.

  By this point, he had been silent for a long time. He tapped the right side of his own breast.

  “You have something in your pocket,” Ziel said. “Take it out.”

  The Patriarch’s wife frowned more deeply, but the Jade himself only reached with two fingers into a breast pocket behind his badge and pulled out a pair of halfsilver bracelets. He placed them down on the table without explanation.

  Ziel held out both his wrists. “Go ahead.”

  The Akura Truegold threw out her hand to stop him. “I can’t allow that, sir. We can’t guarantee your safety with your spirit restricted.”

  “Your job isn’t to protect me,” Ziel said. “It’s to protect them.” He kept his arms out.

  The Patriarch must have been confused, but he kept his expression blank as he slid the halfsilver rings over Ziel’s wrists.

  Ziel grunted in discomfort as the scripts in the rings activated, restricting his madra.

  They weren’t cuffs. He could throw them off if he wanted. They were surely designed to be tied in place somehow, but the gesture was what was important, not the actual effect on his spirit.

  “This is not necessary,” the Kazan Patriarch said. “I intend to hear you out in good faith.”

  “Yeah, well, I skipped a step. We’re not here to hurt you or take anything. I’m going to lay out the situation for you, and if you don’t like what I have to say, we’ll turn around and leave.”

  The Patriarch’s eyes flicked to the Akura Truegold, who looked like she was having trouble keeping her hand away from the long knife at her belt. “Your people said you came to warn us.”

  Ziel jerked his head toward the stone wall. “You can feel it yourself. There’s a monster coming.” These people were earth artists; they would have sensed the Titan coming, even if they didn’t know what caused it.

  “It’s called a Dreadgod, and we expect it to arrive in a matter of days. When it gets here, everybody in the valley is dead. We have cloudships to take you all to safety, but if you want to take your chances, that’s up to you.”

  Ziel stopped to take another swig from his bottle. “That’s it. If you don’t trust us, you should still leave on your own.”

  He sensed another presence coming closer, creeping along the edges of the wall. It was only at the Foundation stage, so he ignored it.

  “Our defenses are strong,” the Kazan Patriarch said, and he didn’t sound overly proud. He was simply stating a fact. “We had planned to retreat into our strongholds and withstand the coming storm.”

  “These strongholds. They’re underground, aren’t they?”

  The Patriarch didn’t say anything, but his wife twitched.

  “This Dreadgod can eat entire mountains,” Ziel said. “Hope you’ve got some good scripts.”

  With that, he looked down to his side, where the Foundation presence had reappeared. Dark, glittering eyes regarded his cloud in awe.

  It was a child. A little boy.

  The Patriarch’s wife took in a breath. “Maret! Forgiveness, please, I’ll take him!”

  She rushed over as the boy grabbed onto Ziel’s Thousand-Mile Cloud, pulling his tiny body up. Ziel dismissed him.

  “He’s fine. He won’t hurt himself.”

  The boy’s mother froze. She seemed to be holding herself back from snatching up her son. Zi
el understood that; you never knew what would set off strange, possibly hostile sacred artists. If she expressed a lack of trust in him, then as far as she knew, he might become enraged at the disrespect and attack.

  He let out a sigh. “I would never lower myself to harm a child. But if it would put you at ease, by all means take him.”

  The cloud bobbed beneath him as Maret jumped up and down, giggling at the springy cloud madra.

  She looked somewhat relieved and bowed. “This one is…certain that he can come to no harm under your watch, so long as he is not giving offense.”

  Ziel had actually been hoping she would take the child back, but it was too much effort to clarify. He just pretended not to notice the boy jumping up and down behind him.

  The Patriarch cleared his throat. “Pardon us. Our littlest one is a…curious child. I should have scanned for him when the others left the room.”

  Judging by the clumsiness Ziel had seen from the Jades here, his scan would have been slightly less useful than just glancing around with his eyes.

  Tiny fists grabbed handfuls of Ziel’s hair, but it would take hundreds of pounds more weight to free even one of Ziel’s hairs. He pushed the boy to the back of his mind and continued.

  “If you come with us, we can help you evacuate. We hope that you will be able to return soon, and that your homes will be intact. But if not…well, there is no replacing human lives.”

  “Forgiveness, but if you don’t know how much destruction this Dreadgod will cause, then how much danger are we in?”

  That slipped in through the cracks in Ziel’s heart, finding an unexpectedly tender place.

  He had spoken those words, or ones very similar, years ago upon finding out that the Weeping Dragon was approaching. He’d known all about the Dreadgods, of course, but their sect was ancient. Well-defended. Protected by scripts and constructs.

  How much danger could they be in?

  As it turned out, they had survived the Dreadgod itself. But not the scavengers that fed in its wake.

  When Ziel spoke, his voice was dead. “I used to lead a sect of my own. We decided that we could survive a Dreadgod. I decided. First, we felt the aura tremble, like footsteps shaking the ground. What you’re feeling now.”

  He nodded to the walls. “Next, the sky changed color. It’s a change that accompanies each of the Dreadgods, as their power overwhelms all aspects of vital aura. We hunkered down inside defenses, layers of scripts that had stood for centuries.”

  Ziel trailed off for a moment as he remembered the sky, raining lightning.

  No one else spoke.

  “One by one, it stripped away our defenses. Tore off the roof. Toppled buildings. Our techniques were only food for it. And the Dreadgod never stopped, it never saw us, it simply flew on by. We were stripped to the bone by its footsteps, by the wind from its passage. To it, we were only ants.”

  Silence still reigned in the room.

  Until Ziel felt a child giggle.

  He realized that there was a weight on his head, and craned his eyes upward. While he’d been speaking, Maret had climbed up his hair and come to rest on top of his skull, and was now holding onto his horns, rocking back and forth as though riding a bull.

  The horrified looks on the faces of the boy’s parents now took on a whole new dimension.

  The Patriarch tore his gaze down and cleared his throat. “My sympathies. If your home was destroyed by this Dreadgod as well, then you above all have reason to warn us.”

  “Not this Dreadgod,” Ziel said. He reached up and peeled away the child from his head, holding him out to his mother.

  She was only too glad to take him.

  “There are three others,” Ziel continued. “And what we survived was merely its passing. In front of an attack, there is no survival. There is escape, or there is death.”

  Slowly, with no sudden movements that might signal an attack, Ziel pulled off the halfsilver rings restricting his madra and placed them onto the table.

  “It is your decision to make. But I wish I had taken this chance myself.”

  He turned and urged his Thousand-Mile Cloud to slide toward the door.

  “We need time,” the Patriarch called.

  “You don’t have it,” Ziel responded.

  “It will take at least a day for the clan to respond to our emergency beacon!” the Patriarch’s wife protested.

  Ziel stopped and slowly turned around. “You’re going to call your clan to evacuate?”

  The Patriarch nodded. “As soon as we leave this room. But our territory is large. One day is already the fastest we can gather, and that’s if we use all our alarms of war and our swiftest riders.”

  “I thought you needed time to decide,” Ziel said.

  “Everything you’ve said lines up with the reports of our scouts and scholars. And I believe you.” The Kazan Patriarch inclined his head. “We entrust ourselves to your honor.”

  “Oh. Well…good.”

  Ziel became acutely aware of the weight of command settling onto his shoulders. He realized he had just taken responsibility for another clan of people.

  What a stupid decision.

  He should have let the Golds handle it.

  The wall surrounding the Li clan was a work of art, a smooth expanse of pale, polished wood decorated by a functional script in a way that evoked the image of a slithering serpent. Treetops rose from behind it, and the sky was filled with birds of every description.

  Mercy was impressed. Their commitment to aesthetics was all the more commendable considering their lack of resources. She could only imagine the effort it would take to build something so expansive and delicate with a workforce of Irons.

  She only wished she had seen more of the Li clan than the outside.

  “The Matriarch has arrived,” one of the guards announced from the top of the wall, and Mercy let out a relieved breath. She had spent most of the afternoon negotiating with underlings, trying to get a word with the clan leader.

  Her Golds were behind her. She didn’t want to overwhelm the Jades.

  Now, at last, she’d finally gotten somewhere.

  A gray-haired woman stepped up to the edge of the wall. She was tall, thin, and dignified, with an emerald-set silver tiara in her hair and rings on each finger. A snake rested on her shoulders, and even it was decorated with gold and jewels.

  Mercy dipped her head. “Humble greetings, honored Matriarch. I am Akura Mercy, and I have come to offer the assistance of the Akura clan in the face of the incoming threat.”

  The Matriarch lifted one eyebrow. “And what threat is that?”

  They knew exactly what the threat was. Even if they were blind to the increasing earthquakes and the bizarre behavior of the aura all around them, Mercy had explained the situation half a dozen times already.

  But she gave no hint of impatience as she responded, “The Dreadgod, honored Matriarch. You can feel its footsteps in the earth. My mother is the guardian of the lands all around Sacred Valley, and I come as her representative to shelter you until the danger is passed.”

  “And what proof do you bring that this danger is real?”

  “I would be happy to leave a dream tablet for you, or to swear an oath on my soul, if that would convince you.”

  The Matriarch waved a hand. “That isn’t necessary yet. Assuming I believe you, what would you have us do?”

  “We have a fleet of cloudships ready to evacuate your clan outside the eastern passage to the valley. I urge you to let us help evacuate you and your families, so that we can fly you to safety.”

  “Hmmm. Well, thank you for bringing this to my attention. I will consult with the clan elders and let you know our decision soon.”

  She began to turn away, but Mercy cut in desperately. “I apologize for pressing you for details, but how soon?”

  “Soon.”

  “We expect the Wandering Titan to arrive in only a week, honored Matriarch. Once it begins its attack, it will be too late to escape.�
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  “I’m beginning to find your insistence rude, Akura Mercy,” the Matriarch said. She folded her arms and looked down on Mercy sternly. “If you really were the daughter of a ruler, you would know better than to show such…desperation. It is enough to make me wonder what you have to gain by rushing us into a decision. Perhaps you hope we will make ourselves vulnerable in our haste.”

  Frustration tightened its grip on Mercy’s heart, but she threw herself to her knees. “I swear on my soul that every word I have said is true to the best of my knowledge,” she called.

  Her spirit tightened slightly. A one-sided oath wasn’t as binding as an agreement with another soul, but it was still foolish to break.

  “Then you are a very earnest messenger,” the Matriarch said, “but still perhaps an enemy. Enough. I have heard everything I need to hear, and I will make my own decision.”

  With that, the leader of the Li clan strode away.

  Mercy knelt in the dirt, frustration and helplessness twisting inside her.

  She felt a building tide of madra, and looked to the side to see Kashi, the Truegold commander of her Akura troops. He was a conscript from Akura lands, not a member of the clan, and he was ganglier and more awkward than a stork.

  He had drawn a pair of swords, which crackled with silver madra, and there was deadly ice in his eyes as he looked on the enemy wall.

  “With your permission, Overlady, I can have her on her knees before you in ten breaths or less.”

  “No, that would send entirely the wrong message. We’re here to help them.”

  “Then let’s help them,” Kashi said. “Whether they want us to or not.”

  Mercy pushed herself to her feet, brushing off her knees. “They’ve seen the signs of the Dreadgod’s coming. They’ll leave.”

  “Forgive me, Overlady, but we can’t wait for them to come to a decision. If we can’t start evacuating them now, then we won’t have enough time to get them out.”

  “But she was right that we can’t push her into a decision. We can afford to wait until tomorrow.”

  Tomorrow the Matriarch would see reason, Mercy told herself. Rushing would only ruin negotiations. The Titan was more than a day away; they would see it coming long before they ran out of time.