Reaper (Cradle Book 10) Page 6

  That was hardly fair. It turned out that Ziel had more than just a drop of pity left, because now some guilt was seeping out of his long-dry heart.

  Lindon stood to leave, but before Ziel could say anything, Lindon spoke again.

  “I know you have far more experience than I do, so I apologize if I’m overstepping my bounds. But I think you’ve seen what you can do on your own. We’re going farther. And I want you to join us.”

  Finally, Ziel realized where that chill was coming from. He wasn’t talking to Lindon anymore.

  That was the Void Sage.

  The door shut before Ziel found his voice again, and then he took a deep breath. The pressure he’d felt in that moment was difficult for him to even process.

  Ziel flopped back down on his bed.

  “I knew I shouldn’t have opened the door,” he muttered.

  4

  Only days after Eithan had predicted it, a fleet of cloudships arrived from the Blackflame Empire. Lindon sensed them coming before he saw them, and he flew as high as he could on his own personal cloud to get a better vantage point.

  Past the rolling hills and blighted forests of the Desolate Wilds, Lindon could see in the distance the desert that took up most of the western Blackflame Empire. Patches of the sand were red for miles, and Lindon wondered if that was some natural phenomenon created by aura or if those were marks left by the Bleeding Phoenix.

  Above that sand, dozens of ships traveled on clouds of every color, growing closer by the moment.

  Lindon’s perception met another Overlord’s extended toward him, one on a Path he recognized. That gave him a shock.

  Naru Huan, Emperor of the Blackflame Empire, had come in person.

  His relatives, Naru Gwei and Naru Saeya, were aboard the same cloudship. They stood out as presences of powerful wind madra among the mostly Gold crew.

  The aura here was thin, and their cloudships were relatively weak, so Lindon estimated they were about a day out. He considered spreading the word, but Eithan had certainly felt them coming and taken action before Lindon.

  So Lindon focused on preparing his own household.

  There was plenty of room on Windfall for his family, so he set them up in a wing of his own house. His mother spent most of the day out with the people of Refuge, his sister trained with Jai Long or Jai Chen, and his father…well, his father was the problem.

  Lindon sat across a table from Wei Shi Jaran and, for at least the fifth time, tried to explain the procedure.

  “I’m not replacing your eyes,” Lindon said.

  He could do that, but that would be as much a surgical procedure as a spiritual one, so he would need to find an accomplished healer.

  “I am going to layer a pair of construct eyes over your own. These will allow you to see as Remnants do, but I selected the Remnants carefully. It will be very similar to ordinary sight. You will rarely notice a difference.”

  Jaran folded his arms. “I’ve known warriors with Remnant eyes. It’s even odds that you go mad, and the others are little better than blind.”

  “That’s because they did it wrong,” Lindon explained again.

  “Your mother performed some of those procedures herself.”

  “I’m…sure she did the best she could. She was working under very difficult conditions.”

  “So you think you could do better?”

  “Yes!”

  “Just get me to Jade, if you can do so much. That’ll fix my eyes.”

  “It will, but you’ll never see as well as you would if we addressed the problem first.”

  “My spiritual senses will make up for it.”

  Lindon immediately suppressed his desire to tie Jaran with constructs and perform the procedure anyway. They had run this topic around in circles, and they couldn’t get over one fundamental problem: Lindon’s father didn’t trust him.

  “Perception is very useful,” Lindon allowed, “but you can’t sense anything that doesn’t have spiritual power.”

  “It’s better than I could do now.” Jaran gestured with his cane as though he’d just scored a winning point, though Lindon couldn’t see how that was a victory from any perspective.

  Lindon brought out a scripted wooden box and a small pair of goldsteel tongs. “I have the tools in front of me. Your Path made the compatibility issue easy to solve. With your cooperation, we could be done in an hour, and it will be completely painless.”

  “Painless?”

  Lindon had been away from home too long. He only realized he had made a mistake when he saw the stubborn clench of his father’s jaw.

  “You think I’m afraid of a little pain?” Jaran rolled up his sleeve and pointed to a scar that ran the length of his forearm. “This is where a Kazan spearman ran me through, and I didn’t make a sound.” He pulled his collar down and showed a small burn scar. “Acid burn from the Li clan.” He gestured to his leg. “I’m in agony with every step. I know you’ve seen the world now, and you think you know everything, but enduring pain? That’s real experience.”

  Lindon’s fist slammed down on the table.

  The table didn’t break so much as it disintegrated. A deafening explosion filled the room as splinters sprayed across the floor. Jaran yelped and leaped backwards, toppling over in his chair.

  He would have fallen—and with his Iron body, he would have been entirely unharmed—but Lindon caught him with a cushion of wind aura anyway.

  Lindon squeezed his fury down, trying not to even think of Blackflame. The prosthetic eyes he had worked on for days now rolled across the floor, motes of essence slowly drifting up from them.

  “Do what you want.” He summoned another box out of his void key and shoved it into his father’s chest. “There’s a pill in there that’ll take you to Jade in ten minutes.”

  Jaran gripped the box harder. “What was that sound? Did you break something?”

  “I can sponsor you through Truegold. That’s as far as you’ll go. I’ll come back when you’ve finished with the pill.”

  “Did your sect leader give you this?” Jaran opened the box and smelled the pill inside. “Is this what they used on you?”

  “No,” Lindon said. “I found this on an Underlord after I killed him and devoured his spirit. He was planning on throwing it away because it was defective.”

  “You want me to take a defective pill?”

  “Any pill that only advances you to Jade is a defect. If you don’t want it, throw it away. Now, pardon me, but the Emperor is coming to see me and I have to prepare.”

  Outside his house, as Lindon was taking deep breaths to steady his spirit, he was unsurprised to sense his mother approach.

  She had a bag over one shoulder, which was filled with Forged toys and tools that must have been the work of Gold Soulsmiths in town. Her brown hair was tied behind her, and for once she wasn’t followed by the floating fish drudge that she had used since he was a child. It must have run out of energy when she used it while shopping.

  Wei Shi Seisha came up behind her son, but he turned to greet her before she called out to him. “Apologies,” he said. “I was…catching my breath for a moment.”

  “Hmm. It was my understanding that Overlord bodies didn’t have such weaknesses.”

  “It’s not a physical weakness so much as a mental one.”

  She slipped the bag from her shoulder and leaned it against the wall of the house; lights of every color shone from inside. “Your father can be a demanding opponent.”

  Lindon gave her a brief version of the conversation, and she listened without a word until he finished.

  “He won’t take that pill now,” she said with certainty. “You’ve wounded his pride. I’ll be impressed if he hasn’t thrown it away already.”

  Lindon sighed. “That’s all right. It’s not expensive.”

  “Don’t be wasteful. I’ll use it myself, once I’m ready.”

  Seisha had decided to correct her study of the Path of the White Fox before she advanced any f
urther, to prevent any possibility of problems later. Technically she was right to do so, Lindon knew, but it wouldn’t matter much so long as she fixed her Path before Lowgold.

  “Pardon,” Lindon said, “but one scale from me could hire a refiner to make these pills for the next ten years.”

  That might have been an exaggeration, but not by much.

  “Oh.” For a moment Seisha wilted, overwhelmed by the scope. Lindon had seen her react that way many times over the last several days, and at last she shook it off and smiled again. “Amazing. I still have much more to learn.”

  “Can you talk him into taking the eyes?”

  “I’ll do what I can, but he’s…” She hesitated. “If you’re right, then he’s been living a lie his entire life. It’s hard for him. For both of us.”

  Lindon thought he understood, but at the same time, he wasn’t sure he did.

  When he found out there was more to the world, he had been astonished, but he had also been delighted. He had been glad to learn that the ceiling he’d lived under his entire life was only an illusion.

  “I dropped the eyes on the floor, if you could take care of them. I really do have to go prepare. The Emperor’s coming.”

  “The Emperor of the…Blackflame Empire? And where is he?”

  Lindon pointed to the east.

  His mother squinted in that direction. “You can sense him from here?”

  “I can see him,” Lindon said quietly.

  That was a slight overstatement. He could see the cloudship, and knew Naru Huan was aboard, but the Emperor was actually below deck.

  Dross would have corrected him.

  Seisha missed a breath. “I…I see.” She braced herself. “I’ll talk to him, but this is a new world for us. Please be patient.”

  Lindon promised to try.

  Lindon paced on the edge of Windfall, wearing the best clothes he owned: the black-and-red sacred artist’s robes that Eithan had prepared for him long ago. A red turtle emblem blazed on his back, and he had hoped the real Orthos would be with him as well, but the turtle’s spirit was still weak.

  “You really are too worked up,” Eithan pointed out. The Archlord was lounging on the corner of Lindon’s roof, a book in one hand and a drink in the other. “It’s not like you haven’t met Huan before. You should take Yerin’s example.”

  Yerin wore her normal black robes and was playing a game of darts with sharpened blades of grass. She kept reinforcing them with a spark of soulfire and then hurling the blades far off the side of the cloud.

  “He’s the one who ought to shake meeting me,” Yerin said, closing one eye to take aim. She let the grass loose.

  “What are you aiming at?” Lindon asked. He had looked down into the forest, but he couldn’t even tell where her makeshift darts were landing.

  “I’m trying to draw a little face with knocked-over trees. Hard to do, though. The grass drives right through ‘em.”

  She put more power into the next throw, and Lindon saw this one land. It exploded as it hit the trunk and sent half a tree flying into the air.

  For the tenth time that minute, Lindon glanced east at the Emperor’s approaching fleet. He could hear the musicians playing a march as they approached, and madra filled the skies like a rainbow-colored sunrise to herald the Emperor’s approach.

  “Best thank the heavens they don’t pull the Titan back with that much noise,” Yerin muttered.

  Eithan waved his drink dismissively. “If this much would attract the attention of the Dreadgods, we’d all be dead. And they are, of course, taking the current location of the Titan and the Phoenix into account.”

  “Do you not like this?” Lindon asked Yerin. He had grown up in the Wei clan, and he respected the showmanship.

  Yerin brushed her hands clean and stood next to him. “Don’t like it when they break their spines to impress me. The flashier the right hand is, the more I look for a dagger in the left.”

  “I’m surprised you’re entertained, Lindon,” Eithan said. “They can’t hold a candle to the Ninecloud Court.”

  Yes, even the most casual display of the Ninecloud Court was brighter and more impressive than the best the Blackflame Empire could do. Lindon had been honored in front of the entire Akura clan as well, and the scale there was a thousand times greater than this. By comparison, it was almost like watching children imitate their parents.

  Lindon still found himself drawn in as waves of color and sound emanated from the Emperor’s cloudship. “That’s what I enjoy about it. It was easy for the Ninecloud Court, but the Empire has to do this with Golds.”

  Yerin drummed her fingers on the hilt of her sword, Netherclaw. Lindon could see an idea dawning on her face.

  “Could be I was going too easy about this. Now I think of it, he is an Emperor. Shouldn’t we welcome him ourselves?”

  “Well well well, that’s what I like to hear.” Eithan snapped his book shut and made it vanish, then drained the rest of his glass. He snapped his sleeves in the air. “You’re absolutely right, Yerin. In many cultures it would be considered rude to host an Emperor without a welcoming ceremony of our own.”

  Eithan and Yerin began cycling their madra.

  Lindon’s gut tightened. “Wait a minute. This is going to look like we’re trying to outdo him. Or scare him off.”

  He was also concerned that a display of their overwhelming madra might come across as an attack.

  “Don’t worry, I know Naru Huan well. He will appreciate this.”

  Something in Eithan’s tone made Lindon look closer at his face. “Will he really?”

  “The word ‘appreciate’ can have so many definitions, don’t you think?”

  Wei Shi Jaran shaded his new eyes as he watched the flying ships approach from the east. Only long years of practice allowed him to keep up his stoic front.

  He could see again. Even the pattern on the bark of a tree was fascinating to him now, and this display…he couldn’t believe he had almost missed half the sky changing colors, like a dozen different flavors of sunset.

  He almost regretted not taking his son up on the offer of new eyes immediately. Almost. But in the end, he had been right to avoid the risk.

  Whatever advancement Lindon had achieved, he was still an amateur. Jaran had been reluctant enough to allow his own wife to attach the Remnant’s eyes to his, and he had only allowed that because advancing to Jade would fix any problems the eyes caused.

  Not that he had noticed any problems so far. Lindon, it seemed, had been right that these Remnant eyes worked roughly the same as human ones. They glowed a soft white-pink and didn’t look natural, but Jaran had never cared what others thought about his appearance.

  All in all, he had been correct to wait. He was glad to have eyes now, but his son was too impatient. Endurance and fortitude were the way. Lindon would learn that when he realized he’d ruined his own future advancement with his impatience.

  Ribbons of green wind madra spiraled around the entire fleet of these foreigners, and Jaran leaned on his cane to get closer to his wife’s ear. “The Blackflame Empire, you said?”

  She nodded absently. Her drudge bristled with sensors, and she checked some flashing scripts on its back, writing down some readings. Analyzing the patterns of the madra used for the display, no doubt.

  “That’s supposed to be the Emperor and his entourage. Seeing this, I can believe it.”

  “And how big is this Blackflame Empire?”

  “Very,” Seisha said quietly.

  Jaran didn’t give any external sign of how much that thought disturbed him. He wasn’t stupid. He had picked up Orthos’ stories, and heard others talking since leaving Sacred Valley. Even if you took out the parts that were obviously exaggeration, the Empire dwarfed Sacred Valley and the surrounding lands many times over.

  “How advanced is he?” Jaran asked.

  “Overlord.”

  He frowned. “Overlord. That’s…”

  “Yes, like Lindon,” she said, i
n a long-suffering tone that put him on edge. “I told you.”

  “Can’t be that impressive,” he grumbled. Lindon was an Overlord, and he wasn’t even twenty yet. Either this Blackflame Emperor was only a child, or Lindon’s advancement was inflated.

  Probably the second one. There was no way to advance…what was it, six stages? Six stages or so in only three or four years, without harming your own spirit. He had seen young warriors push up to Jade too quickly, before they were ready, and they were always weaker than their peers.

  Suddenly a thousand golden stars burst from a cloud over their heads, and Jaran looked straight up in shock. A large, dark blue cloud hung over them, and he hadn’t given it much notice. It seemed everyone outside the Valley used Thousand-Mile Clouds for transportation, and there was nothing to attract his attention to this one compared to the Emperor’s fleet.

  Nothing except, now, the golden stars that burst out and flew around the cloud in a complex web. It shone like a firework that never ended, like one of the festival displays that required all the Wei clan’s Jades to coordinate, and that was only the beginning.

  Red light burst from the top of the cloud in a column that stretched toward the sky, a flash of crimson that outshone even the Empire’s celebration. After a few seconds, the vibrant beam burst, and a shower of crimson lights fell like needles down to the earth below.

  Jaran’s body felt great pressure, as though this technique pushed on his muscles directly. He may not have been a Jade, but his hand still clenched on his cane as he sensed this attack.

  The needles burst into harmless essence at once before they struck the treetops, red sparks fading into the sky.

  A low whistle came from Seisha’s drudge, and she stared around her in shock. “That level of control…”

  “They must have scripted it,” Jaran said, but without certainty. If Seisha was impressed, she had reason to be.

  “That was controlled directly,” Seisha said. “And it was one person.”

  Jaran stared at her, looking for signs of a joke. That technique had covered the sky and dwarfed the entire spectacle coming from the Blackflame Empire, and theirs was clearly the work of many sacred artists.