Cradle: Foundation (Cradle Collected Book 1) Read online

  The Remnant of an expert beyond Gold, the spirit that they had assumed was sealed inside the ancient tomb, had cut through its restraints like an axe through a spiderweb. It hadn’t been sealed.

  It had been waiting.

  He pushed his battered body to his feet, taking quick stock to make sure nothing was broken or bleeding. Then he saw the Remnant of the Sword Sage.

  It was a mass of rippling liquid steel in the shape of a human, as though someone had poured a mirror over a man. Its face was featureless, blank, polished to a flawless reflection. It had no arms or legs, merely an uninterrupted sheet of metal, and it flowed over the ground like a snail.

  The Remnant was far more solid, more real, than any Forged construction Lindon had ever seen. The only parts he recognized as madra at all were three hoops criss-crossing its chest: one a loop of vivid white color, one scarlet, and one inky black. The circles spun in rapid orbit around the sword-Remnant’s chest as it surveyed the scene mirrored in its smooth face.

  It reflected the two bodies and Lindon slowly edging backward before its gaze rested on Yerin. There it stopped.

  The disciple faced her master’s ghost with sword bare. She was a mundane echo of the Remnant; its red ring was her belt, its black ring her tattered robes, its white ring her pale scars, and its chrome her shining blade.

  “Disciple greets her master,” she said quietly. A student in her place would normally have saluted respectfully, but she kept her eyes on the spirit.

  For a long breath, the Remnant remained quiet. Powerful enough spirits could speak, and there was no doubt that this was the most potent he’d ever seen. It would talk soon, and the reunion of master and disciple would give him time to set the boundary. The Remnant had crashed through the door before he could lay seals, but he’d watch for a chance to hit it directly with one.

  Six limbs of liquid metal sprouted from the Remnant’s back, flattening and sharpening until it stood under a halo of blades. It still didn’t speak.

  Without a word, it attacked.

  The Remnant’s main body stood like a statue, but its blades were invisible as they whispered forward. Yerin moved in response, and weapons crashed in an explosion that sent sharp ripples in every direction. The stairs under them cracked, shards of stone blasting into the air, and gashes appeared in the thick pillars. Snow split as though invisible giants hacked away at the ground with hatchets, and a nearby boulder slid into two pieces.

  Lindon hopped onto the Thousand-Mile Cloud and fed it all the madra he could. He hadn’t seen a single meeting of blades, but he heard them all, filling the mountainside in one seemingly constant note. Whatever Yerin might believe, he would never be able to approach the Remnant like this. He’d never see the cut that killed him. He could only hope that she would wound it badly enough that it would lose some of its substance. Without a supply of external energy, it wouldn’t recover, so it should get weaker as the fight progressed. But then, so would Yerin.

  A spray of blood told him that the unconscious Heaven’s Glory guards hadn’t made it after all. Two Remnants rose from the corpses, one a string-puppet of burning gold lines, and one a skeleton of yellow-tinged glass. They hadn’t even straightened to their full height when more invisible blades minced them to chunks.

  We don’t have time for this, Lindon thought, as he fled as fast as his cloud would carry him. They needed to end this fight before Heaven’s Glory showed themselves, but he couldn’t get close enough to set up his barrier. She had already demonstrated her Endless Sword technique; with two experts using it, they might have been surrounded by hundreds of whirling invisible blades. To pass close enough to plant a flag would be to risk death, and if he reached the Remnant with a seal, he’d be shredded.

  He glanced behind, in case the battle might have crept closer to him, and from farther back he could see something he hadn’t noticed before. There was a small wooden hut sheltered in the shadow of the Tomb, and a child in white robes was peeking around the corner at the battle.

  The child raised his arm, and golden light lanced toward the fight. Lindon’s heart stopped.

  Elder Whitehall.

  Something deflected the beam, sending it arcing into the sky, but neither girl nor Remnant could spare the attention to deal with the intruder. He was the vulture, waiting for the wolf and the tiger to kill each other so it could feast on both corpses. He would never let Lindon approach with the seals.

  The freezing mountaintop wind felt very close. Whitehall hadn’t noticed him yet. He had a chance here, a chance to at least stall the elder and give Yerin a chance.

  But he had no time. Whitehall could notice him any second. He had to act now.

  He removed the glass ball with its azure flame, rolling it in his hand. If Suriel looked, what would she see in his fate now?

  Before he could think himself away, Lindon leaped onto the red cloud and sped out in a wide arc. He couldn’t move nearly as fast as Yerin could, but it was enough. He circled behind Elder Whitehall.

  Then, still scraping the back of his brain for ideas, he charged.

  ***

  In the eyes of a Jade, the fight between the girl and the Remnant was nothing short of spectacular. An ocean of silver sword-aura gathered around them, rolling like a sea in storm. Even to Whitehall, their blows moved at a speed that he could barely catch. The disciple in black gathered aura with every motion, which condensed around her blade in a steadily increasing silver glow. She leaped, ducked, slid, and dodged, her weapon never pausing, meeting every strike from the six-bladed Remnant with her own sword or a blast of razor-edged madra.

  Whitehall knew some peers in the Golden Sword School that would have sacrificed three fingers for a glimpse at this fight. This was a sword-aspect Path taken beyond anything in Sacred Valley, beyond what anyone could conceive.

  He drew Heaven’s Glory energy from his core, focusing it according to the Heaven’s Lance technique. The energy struck out in a line of light and heat, scoring the floor between the two fighters. The girl faltered, taking a narrow slash across the cheek as the glow around her sword flickered. Even the Remnant slid slightly to the left. Whitehall might not have been able to kill either of them on his own, but sparrows didn’t bring down hawks by attacking head-on. They nipped and circled until the larger bird collapsed from exhaustion and fell from the sky.

  Then the treasures of the Sword Sage, relics of a world beyond this valley, would be his. Not only might he restore his body, he could become the first Gold since the founding of the Heaven’s Glory School.

  He’d leveled another golden lance when something slammed into him from behind.

  A thorn of pain blossomed in his shoulder as he pitched forward, and the lance of light flew wild, scorching the surface of the Ancestor’s Tomb. But it didn’t last as long as it should have, guttering out like a candle as the madra in Whitehall’s body went wild.

  He landed face-first in the snow, his insides twisting as though his intestines had tried to coil up and escape through his mouth. His spirit burned and writhed in chaos, searing him from the inside out, and he coughed a mouthful of blood onto the ground.

  With one hand, he reached up and pulled the spike out of his shoulder. It glittered in the morning sunlight: a halfsilver dagger.

  Whitehall turned in a fury, bloody dagger in his hand. His body was still Iron and his spirit Jade; he would recover in minutes. His attacker had done nothing but earn a quick death.

  Wei Shi Lindon loomed overhead, and though his spirit made him weak, he had the body of a strong man. Even the huge pack on his back lent an intimidating cast to his silhouette. Whitehall hesitated for a mere instant of purely instinctive fear, the gut reaction of a child facing down an angry adult. His mind was still that of an expert, but there was something primal about looking up to a human being twice his size.

  During that half-second of vulnerability, Lindon pivoted and planted a fist in Whitehall’s gut.

  The impact didn’t do much—despite his advantage
in weight, Lindon still hadn’t reached Iron, so Whitehall had the absolute lead in strength—but pure madra leaked into Whitehall’s core from outside.

  His training took over, and he cycled madra defensively, but he might as well have saved his effort. Nothing happened.

  Whitehall couldn’t deny a small measure of relief. The Unsouled might as well have tried to put out a forest fire with a splash of water. He grabbed the young man’s wrist in an iron grip, locking him in place, and took a moment to savor the sudden look of fear on Lindon’s face.

  Then he struck back.

  ***

  Lindon was actually grateful for his experience at the Seven-Year Festival. Without all that practice fighting eight-year-olds, he would never have been able to accurately strike Whitehall’s core.

  Not that it mattered, in the end.

  He’d counted on the disruption from the halfsilver dagger lasting long enough to let him land an Empty Palm, which would have bought him enough time to run. Whitehall would have recovered in seconds and chased him, but he’d planned for that.

  He hadn’t planned for the elder grabbing him by the wrist. He tried to resist, but it was as though his arm had been planted in stone. Panic bloomed in his chest, and he had time for only one panicked thought. Too fast. He’d shaken off the halfsilver in an instant. Lindon had never had a chance.

  Whitehall smiled, his lips bloody, and the expression looked demonic in a child’s face. Then he turned around without releasing his grip.

  At the last second, when Lindon realized what was about to happen, he slipped his free hand inside his outer robes and gripped the stack of spirit-seals. He didn’t even have time for fear before he was launched into the air.

  The elder hurled Lindon toward the fight.

  As he tumbled forward, time came into absolute focus. Though the flight must have taken a second, it felt like minutes. The Remnant’s six bladed limbs flashed, Yerin’s sword wove a defensive tapestry, and around them stone was sliced to pieces.

  With one clumsy effort, he flung the entire packet of spirit-seals into the Remnant’s general direction. They would most likely be cut to pieces in midair, and even if they landed, they had a better chance of slapping harmlessly into the ground than touching the Remnant. He needed something else.

  He could still feel his spirit’s connection to the Thousand-Mile Cloud, so he poured madra into it desperately, clutching at anything that might save him. It would never reach him before he plunged into that deadly whirlwind, but he had to try.

  When Yerin saw him, her eyes widened, then narrowed on the falling seals. She didn’t hesitate. Her defensive stance collapsed, and blood instantly sprayed up from her body in five lines as she took the Remnant’s attacks. Her sword gathered force like a heat haze, and as she sliced from bottom to top, a wave of colorless power tore out from her weapon. The madra struck the Remnant head-on, slashing a vertical gash in its pristine surface and knocking it back a few paces, into the falling seals. It shuddered as the scripted papers sank into its body, causing the Forged madra that made up its form to ripple like a slapped puddle.

  The rest of Yerin’s slash whipped through the open door of the Tomb, dragging a line of destruction across the tiles and blasting a man-sized tear in the interior wall. Stone crumbled away from the triangular hole the size of a doorway, and he caught a glimpse of the mountains behind the Tomb before his thoughts caught up.

  They had won.

  He fell anyway.

  Instead of slamming into the edge of a sword or the ragged corner of torn stone, he fell into a red cloud hovering three feet above the ground. It caught him on the right side of his body, flipping him over, and yet again Lindon landed hard on his back. The impact to his skull sent stars shooting through darkness, and he was sure something in his pack must have broken this time.

  But he lived.

  The battle resumed overhead, blades of invisible force whistling as they sliced through the air over his face. Covered in blood, Yerin forced the Remnant back step by step. It was leaking silvery motes of essence now, and the battle slid steadily away from the door.

  As it did, Lindon maintained his spirit’s grip on the Thousand-Mile Cloud. Weakened or not, the Remnant’s attacks were still enough to kill him, and he wanted to put as much space between them as he could. With one hand on the construct for support, he half-crawled, half-limped into the Ancestor’s Tomb. There, he would be safe from the fight. There, he could think.

  He’d just pulled his feet in past the doorway when a line of gold heat blasted after him, missing him by inches.

  Part of his mind was still moving, taking stock of his options, but the rest of him was shivering terror. When Whitehall appeared in the doorway, a child in bloodstained white robes, Lindon whimpered.

  The elder took a step inside, glancing from side to side as though checking to see what other trick Lindon had prepared. That sight was like dawn rising before Lindon’s eyes.

  Elder Whitehall, a Jade leader of the esteemed Heaven’s Glory School, was wary of him.

  Lindon straightened and rose to his feet, though he needed to lean on the Thousand-Mile Cloud to do so. Wind whistled between the open door and the gash in the side, whipping against his skin like ice, but he ostentatiously ignored Elder Whitehall and looked to the walls and ceiling as though checking on his traps.

  The inside of the Ancestor’s Tomb was vast and empty, set with as many pillars on the inside as there were on the outside, and the ceiling was covered in another mural of four beasts: a blue serpentine dragon on a thunderstorm, a crowned white tiger, a stone warrior with the shell of a tortoise, and a blazing red phoenix. In the back of the room was an ornate door, presumably leading to the actual tomb, because there were no bodies here. Or perhaps that was the entrance to the labyrinth Yerin had mentioned.

  Whitehall brandished the halfsilver dagger in one hand. “I’m not a fool, never think that I am. I’ve caught on to you. You’re no Unsouled.”

  Lindon focused on catching his breath, and tried not to betray himself.

  “Unsouled don’t have the madra to use a Thousand-Mile Cloud.”

  Without the ancestral orus fruit, he would never have been able to activate the cloud. Or the White Fox boundary. Now that he thought of it, that fruit had saved his life more than once.

  “Unsouled don’t win tournaments, not even among children.”

  Without the Empty Palm, he never would have.

  “Unsouled don’t beat Irons, with or without tricks.”

  Whitehall had actually seen the hornet Remnants defeat Amon. All Lindon had needed was the strength to open a scripted jar, and the elder had to know that.

  The Jade in the boy’s body toyed with the halfsilver dagger, studying him. “I believed you must have cheated to pass the Trial of Glorious Ascension, but now I understand. Anyone can put on a wooden badge. What are you really? Iron? You’re not Copper, a Copper body would have died by now. And a Jade wouldn’t throw away his pride.”

  “Apologies, elder,” Lindon said respectfully. “This one is honored by the attention, but the elder surely has bigger problems than this humble disciple.”

  Whitehall nodded slowly. “I will soon. Dropping seals on a Remnant in midair while calling a cloud? Those are not the reflexes of a Copper.”

  This time, Lindon did allow himself a small smile. He was proud of that one.

  “Whoever you are, you’re traveling a fool’s path.” Then Whitehall did something that Lindon hadn’t predicted: he flipped the halfsilver dagger around, offering Lindon the hilt. “Work with me.”

  Chapter 20

  “I have no grudge against you,” Whitehall said, the expression on his face far colder than anything a child should have produced. “I don’t even need the girl dead. I want the treasures of the Sword Sage, and nothing more. Here and now, with the heavens as my witness, I’ll swear an oath on my soul to leave you both alive. Furthermore, I will take you as my personal disciple. Whatever you are, you’re not
a Jade yet, and in my care you will be.” He held the dagger out in a steady hand, waiting for Lindon to take the hilt.

  To win, all Lindon had to do was delay while Yerin harvested her master’s Remnant. “Forgiveness, elder, but it seems as though…” He considered saying ‘this one,’ but it didn’t seem like time for humble speech. “…I have no reason to accept. If the Remnant is sealed, and I mean no disrespect, but Yerin will destroy you.”

  “She’s more powerful than any Jade in Sacred Valley,” Whitehall said frankly. “But the battle has weakened her. I give myself even odds of defeating her, but whether I do or not, I hereby swear on my soul that I will first destroy your core. Unsouled or not, you will be truly crippled then.”

  Lindon shivered, though he covered it by adjusting his robe against the cold. Unsouled were considered cripples, but they could still use basic madra. With his core destroyed, it would be as though he truly had no spirit—he couldn’t work with scripts or Remnants, and no elixir would save him. Some sacred artists spoke of losing their core as worse than death.

  He still needed time.

  “Yerin promised to take me beyond the valley,” he said slowly. “I’ve been weak for too long, and I won’t settle for the mediocre strength we have here.”

  Whitehall’s eyes lit up, and his grip on the dagger tightened. “Exactly right. That is the heart a sacred artist should have.” He waved his hand around them. “Even this place is built on foundations deeper than we’ve ever explored. Our elders stay Jade because they’re too afraid to risk what they have and dig deeper. I am not.”

  From outside, there came a crash, and the sound of metal bent past breaking. Whitehall’s expression hardened. “Choose now. Join me and rise, we’ll leave together, or else I’ll cripple you and take my chances against the Sword Disciple.”

  Lindon prided himself on thinking through his options. He had sworn an oath to Yerin, but he wasn’t even Copper. Whatever oath the heavens extracted, it wouldn’t destroy his core.

  But though he remained at the Foundation stage, there was some iron in him that would not bend.