Reaper (Cradle Book 10) Read online

  Orthos scurried up to the skeleton, pulling out a scrap of paper that had been tucked away in the would-be tomb robber’s clothes.

  Lindon focused his perception on the rest of the body, trying to sense anything with even a trace of power, but either the years or other explorers had taken everything of value.

  Meanwhile, Orthos was reading the paper.

  “He was writing a warning to a team coming after him,” Orthos rumbled. “He warns against a guardian. He says it has powers beyond his understanding, and calls it…a baby Dreadgod. The Tomb Hydra.”

  Unwilling to rely solely on his spiritual sense, Lindon had been flipping through the dead man’s pockets with his hand. After he flipped open the front of the man’s robes, his fingers stopped.

  The skeleton was wearing a badge. A white badge.

  Unlike Lindon’s, this one was carved with the symbol of a cloud, but quick inspection revealed this to be wintersteel-plated bronze. If Lindon understood Eithan’s history lesson correctly, that meant this man had been a Sage.

  Orthos snorted smoke over the document. “His power was weighed down by the field. We won’t be as weak as he was.”

  Lindon hesitated, halfway between pocketing this badge. Had Orthos not seen it? Did he not realize how advanced this sacred artist had been?

  “Orthos…”

  “I saw it,” the turtle said.

  Lindon nodded and slipped the badge into his pocket. There was no need to ask if Eithan had seen it; indeed, the Archlord was already calling out to the rest of the room.

  “It seems we’re about to reach a guardian known as the Tomb Hydra, powerful enough to cause a Sage to tremble in fear, and likened to a Dreadgod. Probably not without cause, given that somewhere in here is the birthplace of the Dreadgods. Who’s frightened?”

  Lindon wished he had his right arm at full capacity, but he wasn’t frightened.

  Mercy shrugged.

  Yerin brightened, her crimson eyes sparkling. “You’re thinking we get a real fight?”

  “The suppression field worked on everything,” Ziel pointed out. “It shouldn’t be able to take us at full power unless it’s a real Dreadgod. Then we’re dead.”

  Dross materialized in front of Lindon again, his color still too pale and washed-out. [It is good to be optimistic. You will perform better if your spirits are up. But defeat here is not the greatest risk. We should consider the fact that any madra or soulfire we expend in this battle will be difficult, if not impossible, to replace. Our power is finite.]

  Everyone grew more grim, except Eithan, who beamed at Dross. “Thank you for reintroducing some tension to the situation, Dross!”

  [You’re welcome. Ha ha.]

  The fake laugh told Lindon that Dross thought he’d told a joke, but Lindon wasn’t sure which part the joke was supposed to be.

  Space shifted again, and suddenly there was an opening in front of Yerin. She shot to her feet as deadly green-black aura blew out of the tunnel like a toxic wind.

  It battered at her lifeline, but Lindon wasn’t concerned about her. She was a Herald now; aura of this level wouldn’t be able to touch her unless she lived in it for years. He was more concerned for Mercy, and he moved to stand in front of her. He reinforced his protection of Orthos and Little Blue as he did so.

  Mercy gave him a grateful smile. “Thanks! I can handle it for a while, but I’d rather be in combat shape.”

  Lindon nodded back and headed into a tunnel marked with a pair of crossed swords. And toward the monster that waited there.

  “Good thing it hasn’t attacked us yet!” Eithan shouted.

  It immediately attacked.

  11

  From deep in the tunnel that crawled with death aura, a beam of pale, sickly green light blasted toward Lindon and the others. It tore through the air, filled with malevolent willpower, pressing heavy against Lindon’s Sage senses like one of the Wandering Titan’s casual attacks.

  Everyone had techniques ready to defend themselves, but Yerin met the attack first. She stood in front, her scarlet sword-arms extended, the black sword Netherclaw in both hands. It shone with a silver-red light as she used the weapon Enforcer technique of her Path: the Flowing Sword.

  The beam of condensed death madra crashed into the tip of her sword and splintered, smaller beams breaking off and scouring the walls. Any living thing would be annihilated by that Striker technique, but the stones were not only enforced with authority, but they were also stones. The death madra was harmless.

  Yerin’s lock of red hair whipped in the wind caused by the clash between their techniques, but she didn’t take a step backwards. She pushed forward a step, shoving against the enemy technique.

  When the beam of death faded, Yerin pulled her sword back.

  “See how you like it,” she muttered.

  And she responded in kind.

  A gleaming beam of red-white light shot down the tunnel, lighting everything crimson. Her focused will to destroy pushed against Lindon’s mind, and he suspected Orthos and Little Blue wouldn’t have even been able to stand this close to the technique without his protection.

  From the other end of the tunnel, they heard a monstrous scream.

  “Wonder what that was,” Eithan said brightly.

  It took them two seconds to clear the long tunnel.

  The Tomb Hydra waited at the end of the hall, in a room that reminded Lindon of a honeycomb. It was spherical, like many of the other rooms they had encountered so far, but this time virtually every stretch of wall was filled with tunnel after tunnel. You could barely see any wall between all the doors, heading in every direction.

  And many of those were hidden behind the Hydra’s massive body.

  It was a wall of gray-green scales that wrapped around the entire room, dwarfing them many times over. Its eyes blazed like lanterns of pale, deadly green…all six of them.

  One of the Tomb Hydra’s three heads roared at Yerin, clearly enraged by the bloody cut her technique had gouged in its jaw. The other two spread out, leaning their necks around to get a better vantage point on the rest of the party.

  But no one was waiting around for that to happen.

  Blackflame roared from Lindon’s hand, empowered with soulfire. A hail of violet arrows erupted from Mercy’s bow. Orthos breathed flame, Eithan called stars down on each of the Hydra’s heads, and Ziel’s body began to shine bright emerald as he picked up his hammer.

  The Hydra sent out a wave of death madra, but it still screamed from three throats as the barrage of techniques tore its body apart.

  Not as much as it should have been torn apart, though.

  Lindon’s Blackflame didn’t carve the Hydra down to the bone or melt through its scales, but rather scorched it like a superficial burn. Yerin’s Endless Sword left deep grooves spraying blood, but didn’t sever a head. Mercy’s arrows stuck in the scales and did nothing. Eithan’s stars passed into the Hydra’s spirit but didn’t come out the other side, indicating they hadn’t speared through it.

  And in the same instant, its body uncoiled. It whipped at them, a wall of scales and muscle, forcing them all to take to the air.

  One head shot toward Lindon and Mercy, one snapped at Ziel and Yerin, and the third lunged at Eithan.

  At the same time, and at the worst possible moment, webs of hunger madra shot out of the tunnels from every direction. There was a distinct will behind these attacks, and Lindon knew they had finally caught Subject One’s attention.

  Suspended in midair, with no aura to push against, Lindon felt the pangs of panic. If he had been drawing from his pure core, he would have had a better defense, but he was already channeling Blackflame to attack the Hydra. The Burning Cloak appeared around him, and he dodged most of the threads. One landed against his hip with a burning sensation, and he lost a little energy to it before he twisted to break it.

  Then Little Blue screamed in his ear like a shattering bell. One of the strands had touched her.

  And that was the
moment when Lindon took the enemy seriously.

  He dropped Blackflame and switched to the Path of Twin Stars. Little Blue cleansed her own channels at the same time, snapping the thread, but she was already weaker.

  He surrounded himself with the Hollow Armor, letting the death madra wash over him, and landed on the body of the snake.

  Then he slammed his palm down on its scales.

  An instant later, a Forged hand bigger than his body followed the motion of his own palm.

  Pure madra coursed into the Hydra, and the light in its six eyes flickered. The others exploded with their own techniques, and Lindon switched back to Blackflame.

  He drove a beam of black dragon’s breath up through one of the snake’s heads.

  Yerin sliced off a second as Ziel crushed a third, and then the room was filled with the hiss of rising essence and a tide of death aura.

  Lindon grabbed Little Blue, checking with his eyes and spirit to make sure she was all right. She didn’t protest in his grip, instead sagging into his hand and whistling relief.

  She had been weakened. Substantially. But her contact with his madra was restoring her strength.

  “Eithan, you and I handle the Remnant,” Lindon called. His pure madra cycled faster.

  Eithan was peering in the direction of the Hydra’s body. “No need. It’s a dreadbeast.”

  Lindon looked at the creature, unconvinced. “Pardon, but it doesn’t look like one.”

  Even the Dreadgods—at least, the ones he’d seen—didn’t look like sacred beasts that could occur in the real world. The Phoenix was made up of liquid blood madra, and the Titan looked to be made of stone.

  The lesser dreadbeasts, even those with the power of Lords, had all looked like creatures from a horror story. They were twisted and mutated bodies, broken from the inside out.

  “Look for yourself!” Eithan suggested. He gestured to the oozing neck stump.

  Lindon placed his foot on the edge of the snake’s head, which was bigger than he was, and shoved it aside. Sure enough, lines burned with the pale, spectral green of death madra, running in veins all through the Hydra’s flesh.

  “This is…” Lindon had dissected his share of dreadbeasts, and it was hard to put into words how shocked he was by this sight. “…it’s so organized. This looks like a real set of madra channels. And how can death madra, of all things, possibly exist alongside real, living flesh?”

  Yerin was peering into the severed neck as well. He suspected that she was doing the same thing he was, and blocking off her sense of smell.

  “You think this is what the Dreadgods look like inside?” Yerin asked.

  Lindon remembered a vision Suriel had shown him, not so long ago. A white tiger the size of a house, strung up and splayed open so that he could separate its spirit from its body surgically. Its spirit had been every bit as intricate as its flesh, with the two layered over and into one another so it was difficult to tell where one ended and the other began.

  “We need to find out.” Before Mercy could protest, he continued. “I know we don’t have as much time as we’d like, but this could end up being the most valuable thing we find down here. It’s a chance to study a small Dreadgod! If we come out with nothing else, this could be invaluable.”

  [I agree,] Dross said. [Master Northstrider’s subordinates gathered and studied many dreadbeasts to better understand the relationship between the body and the spirit. They would have been grateful for this opportunity.]

  Mercy leaned on her staff, shifting her weight anxiously. She glanced at the ceiling as though she might see her mother’s hand descending on them at any second. “I understand, I really do. But please hurry.”

  Lindon triggered his void key.

  It didn’t open.

  He frowned at it, pulling the bronze key from the thread around his neck and sensing the script. It seemed to be fully intact.

  He triggered it again. This time, light slowly zipped open, revealing the entrance to his void space.

  “Eithan,” Lindon said.

  “I saw it. Clearly spatial manipulation is restricted here. I suppose it’s to keep certain beings from escaping. Well, that prevents us from easily hiding in a void key.”

  Lindon glanced to Little Blue. He had considered sending her and Orthos back into the Dawn Sky Palace to avoid the dangers here, now that it was clear that he couldn’t fully protect them. If there was a chance for them to get trapped inside, that option was no longer available.

  But they were still on a time limit, and Lindon had work to do. He climbed into his void key, fishing around for his Soulsmithing tools.

  He withdrew a pair of goldsteel-plated tongs and a knife, though after a moment of thought, he pocketed the knife. He blanketed the Tomb Hydra’s body in his spiritual perception, tracing the madra system that nested parasitically within its body.

  “Dross, would you locate the binding for me?”

  [Of course.]

  “Yerin, can you open up the body? From here to about there, and I would be grateful if you could leave the madra intact.”

  Yerin tapped the hilt of her sword with a finger, and the flesh slid away from the dreadbeast’s body. It released a cloud of steam and most likely a putrid stench. Lindon didn’t know because his nose was still sealed off.

  The shining veins of spectral green madra began to release essence, but they were clear and unbroken. Lindon readied his tongs only a moment before Dross said [Binding located.]

  A purple light shone about a foot deep in the center of the Hydra’s body. Lindon resonated his soulfire and reached out to the blood aura, which hadn’t yet been sipped away by the labyrinth’s hunger.

  With the blood aura, he pulled the flesh apart and revealed the binding. It grew from the meat around it, reminding him at the same time of a ripe fruit and a pulsing heart. It was condensed from the power of death, a pale green fire that pumped power into the rest of the body instead of blood.

  He seized it with the goldsteel tongs, pointing out to Yerin where he needed incisions, but his instincts said the binding was somewhat strange. It looked more like an Enforcer binding, though the dreadbeast’s breath must have been a Striker technique. Striker techniques were usually elongated, with a clear input and output. Striker bindings this round were rare.

  Still, he withdrew it and quickly placed it into a script-sealed box. Valuable materials were not to be wasted.

  “Any more bindings, Dross?”

  [None.]

  That was also odd. Sometimes bindings didn’t survive the transformation into a Remnant, so you couldn’t always recover every technique the sacred artist had engraved into their spirit in life, but the dreadbeast’s spirit hadn’t become a Remnant. Surely it had more than one technique.

  Lindon peeled away some veins of death madra as well—he wasn’t about to pass up free dead matter—but that wasn’t nearly as valuable as the binding. He only spent a few minutes stripping those lines out and coiling them into the box with the binding before he slammed it shut and slid it back into his void key.

  “That’s an advanced binding,” Ziel observed. “What are you going to make with it?”

  “I’ll have to see what it does first,” Lindon responded, but it was always going to become some kind of weapon. There weren’t too many other uses for death madra.

  He supposed it should have a hunger aspect, too. He hadn’t sensed it, but then again, he hadn’t activated the binding. And sensing hunger madra here was like trying to sense water aura in the depths of the ocean.

  Now that he’d gotten what he was going to get out of the dreadbeast’s corpse, it was safe to use the hand again.

  He struggled with the awareness of the labyrinth the hand’s authority granted him, trying to unravel it into a map in his mind as the hand itself struggled against him. It shook his concentration and fought against him physically, practically dragging him down a tunnel before he figured out where they needed to go.

  And then he wrestled it to a
stop, because the hand was trying to pull him in two directions at once. It sprang to his left, but when he approached the tunnel on his left, it would suddenly lunge to the opening on his right.

  It repeated that several times until some hungry ghouls clawed their way through the stone, and the others eradicated them. He had to tuck the hand away so it didn’t keep calling hostile attention.

  “It looks like we have a choice,” Lindon said.

  On the left, the tunnel was marked with a hammer. The Forger symbol from the Sacred Valley badges. On the right, it bore the scythe symbol. The crest of the Arelius founder. Of Ozriel.

  The map had given him the layout, and a sense into the structure and pattern of the labyrinth itself, but very little into what the rooms contained. That was what the symbols were for, and given the choice between an ordinary Soulsmith room and one left behind by Ozriel, the conclusion was clear.

  “Easy decision,” Lindon said as he led the way into the tunnel. Eithan followed him immediately, but Yerin was stopped by a thrown hand from Ziel.

  “Hang on,” he said. “The script is diff—”

  The tunnel entrance vanished.

  Leaving Lindon and Eithan locked inside.

  The scripted lights on the ceiling still cast dim illumination over them, but Lindon added to it with his black dragon’s breath. It did absolutely nothing, which he had expected.

  He could sense the authority hanging over this whole place. It was inviolable.

  Lindon drew up his will and prepared to challenge that.

  Eithan rested a hand on his shoulder, but he wasn’t watching Lindon. He was looking up and around him, tracing his bloodline power. “I can’t see through the walls here,” he said, “but there’s a way around. They’ll stay in place. We can loop around and find them.”

  “Hurry,” Lindon said, setting off down the tunnel. “I don’t like our odds in here with just us.”

  Little Blue burbled a reminder in his ear.

  “I was counting you,” he protested.

  [You weren’t counting me,] Dross said.