Bloodline (Cradle Book 9)

by Will Wight

  They had survived, though the other three fled. Northstrider knew from experience that it was hard to fully destroy such an ancient organization, even if they didn’t have a Monarch backing them. Which they did.

  But at the same time, unless one of them was carrying Reigan Shen in their pocket, there was nothing they could do to push past Northstrider.

  So he had stayed here for days in a stalemate as they waited for him to leave. That was their miscalculation. He didn’t hold many lands, as the other Monarchs did, so he had few vulnerabilities that could be exploited in his absence.

  His research could be completed here almost as well as anywhere.

  With a thought and a quick twist of aura, he drew streams of blood from the hundreds of dreadbeast corpses surrounding him. The liquid separated themselves into vials, which returned to his void key. At the same time, their hunger bindings ripped themselves free of flesh and separated into cases.

  He had no use for such worthless power personally, but all dreadbeasts experienced changes in the presence of the Dreadgods. He understood the nature of hunger madra better than anyone else alive, but it was still valuable to study its effects on flesh, which could hopefully one day be controlled. Since he would never risk the inside of the labyrinth again, the wild dreadbeasts were the best source of information and materials.

  This was just a side project for him, but side projects could sometimes lead to unexpected benefits.

  At the same time, he kept his spiritual perception on the Titan. The main reason he had personally intervened with the Dreadgods this time was their strange behavior the past few years, starting with the early awakening of the Phoenix. Now, the Titan had fixated on one particular labyrinth entrance.

  Were they learning?

  It hardly took any concentration to feel the Titan. It was only a few hundred miles away, and Dreadgods were spiritually…loud.

  It was impossible to miss one, but precisely because of that, they tended to deafen you to anything else happening around them.

  The Bleeding Phoenix, for instance, had been scattered over miles of wilderness for two years, so it was a constant noise. It had been stirring all day, most likely in response to the proximity of its sibling.

  He kept his attention primarily focused on the Titan, sparing only a thought for the Phoenix. Malice was steering her opponent away from the labyrinth entrance without fully engaging it, which was perfect. Northstrider stood in reserve, but he would prefer not to engage the Dreadgods himself. It was best to let them rampage for a while, tire themselves out, and then return to their rest.

  His oracle codex shouted into his mind: [Warning! Threat approaching!]

  It redirected his attention north, to the Phoenix.

  Northstrider clenched his fists tight, and before he realized it, he was drifting upward. Abyssal Palace engaged its propulsion constructs and began to flee, but he had no attention to spare for them.

  The Phoenix was moving. Fast.

  It was heading for the Titan.

  With a tight focus of will, Northstrider pushed through the Way. He was swallowed up in blue flows for a moment, taking him to his destination, but he had them spit him back into reality a few miles from his destination.

  He needed to be close, but not too close. The Dreadgods had powerful wills, and he would be vulnerable coming out of the portal.

  When he emerged again, he was hovering in the clouds over a mountain whose peak had been broken off long ago. It was covered in streams, one in particular forming a river that stretched down into a valley.

  He looked to the east, where he heard a searing cry. The Phoenix swooped in, spraying condensed blood madra over the ground. From this distance, he couldn’t tell if it was striking at a target or just expressing its wrath, but its deadly breath scorched the ground for miles.

  If the beam of red light had been any aspect other than blood, it would have left the terrain devastated, but blood madra disproportionately affected flesh. Any animal in the path of that Striker technique was now dead.

  And Malice was on the other side of the valley.

  His codex sped up his thoughts, so it seemed time slowed down. Malice, with her armor the size of the Titan itself, was on the west side of the suppression field. The Titan had just emerged from the field itself, and it too was distracted by the arrival of its brother.

  On the east side, the Phoenix was turning toward the valley. Refugees fled beneath it, but they were so weak as to be invisible to the Dreadgod. That didn’t make them safe—on the contrary, they would be torn apart by the bloodspawn, not to mention the collateral damage from the Phoenix itself—but no one down there could attract the attention of a hungry Dreadgod.

  Until his oracle codex drew his attention to his own spiritual perception, and he realized who he was feeling down there.

  Then his irritation flared into true anger.

  The most valuable young sacred artists on the continent were all down there, clustered together. With Dross, a powerful tool deserving of further study. They had deliberately placed themselves in the path of a Dreadgod.

  And Malice had allowed this…idiocy.

  Including a pseudo-Herald who had merged with her Blood Shadow. The power of the Phoenix itself.

  The Dreadgod’s scarlet eye swiveled to focus on a particular cloudship down there, and Northstrider unleashed his spirit.

  Malice was going to owe him for this.

  Ziel and the Kazan clan reached the base of Mount Samara, and the huge river of people pushing to get out.

  It had been hard enough to march across the landscape with it constantly shaking under the footsteps of two giants. The most vulnerable members of the clan, and the families with small children—including the Patriarch’s wife and children—had flown off long before, but the Kazan had no abundance of flying mounts or constructs.

  Therefore, they had to make their painful way across a ground that tossed like a sea in storm as the Monarch clashed with the Dreadgod. Each arrow that crashed into the Titan’s skin sounded like a collapsing tower, though Ziel recognized that the Monarch’s might was suppressed by the field around Sacred Valley just like everyone else’s.

  Every step the clan took was shrouded in fear, because the very earth could betray them. A tree might fall, crushing someone, or a wagon would be swallowed up by a chasm.

  Even Ziel cheered her on. In his own way. He nodded approvingly and grunted once or twice, at least.

  He would rather lose someone here and there to accidents than everyone to a Dreadgod. At least in this scenario, when he was quick enough, he could save some.

  And Akura Malice was pushing the Titan away. In only a few more steps, it would be drawn away from Sacred Valley entirely.

  So when he and the Kazan clan did finally reach the mass of humanity pushing to leave through Heaven’s Glory, Ziel’s heart flooded with relief. He made the mistake of thinking, We made it.

  Then the crystal song of a giant bird filled the air. Rather than peaceful, it sounded like a war cry, and the sky began to swirl with red.

  Ziel had never heard that song before, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out what it was.

  He called his hammer from his soulspace. Not that he thought he could fight; he clutched it to stop his hands from trembling.

  Around him, Kazan men and women mounted on their craghounds shifted and muttered uneasily. The Patriarch and several elders looked to Ziel. “Pardon, but what was that?”

  Ziel’s gaze was nailed to the east.

  He remembered the storm rolling in, flashing blue and gold as living lightning slipped in and out like fish in the sea. The majestic roar, as the Weeping Dragon approached. He had watched the horizon then, awed by its majesty.

  His mouth was too dry for the first word. He swallowed, cleared his throat, and tried again. “Run,” Ziel whispered.

  Around them, some of the other Kazan began to scream. They had traveled overland during a fight between the Wandering Titan and a Monarch;
not one of them was free of scratches and bruises, even discounting the greater wounds.

  Wherever blood dripped from the ground, separating itself from the body of the host, bloodspawn began to rise.

  They were slow here. Weak. The blood aura was thin.

  The Patriarch seized Ziel by the front of the outer robe. “What is happening?” he demanded.

  “Go to the north,” Ziel said. “Or the south. Anywhere…anywhere else.”

  A Dreadgod to the west, and a Dreadgod to the east.

  What had he been thinking, staying with these people and taking his chances with the Titan? Then again, how could he have known they were only moving toward the Phoenix?

  Effortlessly, he broke the Patriarch’s hold on him and returned to the one remaining flying transport in the clan: his own Thousand-Mile Cloud.

  He rose into the air even as the Bleeding Phoenix itself flew past Samara’s ring. It seemed as big as a mountain, and it looked exactly as he’d always heard: smooth as a liquid, pure red, and somehow…revolting. Twisted. Wrong.

  The Dreadgod gave another resonant, echoing cry, and spewed red light down on the land outside the valley.

  Ziel flew resolutely away.

  His hammer weighed down the Thousand-Mile Cloud, so he sucked the weapon back into his soulspace, but without anything to hold onto, his fingers kept shaking. He had to clasp them together.

  He paid no attention to the screams from beneath him, because they were drowned out by other screams. Older screams.

  The Weeping Dragon had brought with it lesser dragons, spirits of Stormcaller madra, which had been repelled by the Dawnwing sect’s defenses. Until the Stormcallers themselves had torn those defenses down.

  Then he’d seen hungry lightning tear men apart.

  Ziel intentionally fixed his eyes on the sky so as not to see the bloodspawn, so it was with a strange sense of separation that he realized he was actually staring at the ground.

  Bloodspawn, like little parodies of men constructed from blood madra and the will of the Phoenix. They were red puppets, some of them shifting to take on crude shapes of the madra of those they fed on. When they rose from the Kazan clan, they were mostly blocky clay men.

  Here, a Kazan woman pushed her copy back and smashed its head open with a club. Some of his followers had resisted the dragons too.

  There, a young man was beaten down by the hammer-like fists of a bloodspawn. He was lucky. The dragons had been even more brutal.

  Directly beneath Ziel, a bloodspawn’s head opened wide to feast on a fallen man. This was the one common aspect between all the Dreadgods: hunger. Those of them that Forged these spirits did so to feed.

  So he had seen this before. Over and over again. As the Sage of Calling Storms bound him in place and propped him up so he could see the rest of the sect being devoured.

  At first, he had strained, trembling in helpless fury. Wishing he could tear free, his hammer in hand, and splatter the dragons into a red spray.

  Wait.

  The dragons were spirits of lightning madra. They had no blood. When they were destroyed, they splattered into blue essence and gold sparks.

  So why was he covered in slowly dissolving blood madra?

  The fallen man at his feet stirred, but Ziel had already swung into another of the spawn nearby. The feeling of it splattering was viscerally satisfying.

  He focused on that with such intensity that he forgot his fear of the Dreadgods. Their situation faded into the back of his mind.

  It was all about breaking bloodspawn.

  He crushed a few more, but others already rose. If he really wanted to win this game, he would need his Path.

  He poured himself into Forging a green rune, bigger than his chest, complex and intricate. He threw it hundreds of yards away, but it would only hover as long as he didn’t quite complete the Forging. So he had to hold the technique as he Forged more and more.

  As he did, the Kazan clan gathered around him. They fought the spawn of the Bleeding Phoenix, covering Ziel, apparently realizing that whatever he was doing, it would win them the day.

  But the bloodspawn realized something too, pushing against the human barrier around Ziel. One of their necks stretched, carrying its featureless head close to Ziel. A mouth stretched across its blank crimson face, cracking into a maw full of teeth so it could take a bite out of Ziel’s flesh. His body was stronger than the others here, richer in blood aura, so it was the most tempting treat.

  Ziel didn’t care.

  He was solely focused on breaking as many of these spawn as possible. It was the only thought he still had room for.

  The bloodspawn’s jaws snapped down on him, its upper teeth scraping his horns.

  Then he triggered his boundary field.

  Every one of the bloodspawn exploded.

  They sprayed liquid blood madra—and in some cases, actual blood—over everyone around. Ziel stood in the center of seven orbiting green runes, and the circle was perhaps three or four hundred yards wide. He had caught hundreds of spawn.

  Or so his spiritual sense told him.

  His face was covered in blood.

  He wiped his eyes clean with his fingers and glanced around, finding the Kazan clan packing in close around him. A cheer rose from among them as though of its own accord.

  The Patriarch slapped Ziel on the back. “Gratitude! But you should warn us next time. We thought you were leaving us.”

  The state of unnatural focus passed, but it didn’t leave the fear in its wake. Instead, Ziel felt like himself again.

  He sighed.

  “What would be the point of that?” Ziel said. “Not like I have anywhere to go.”

  That wasn’t true, and he knew it. Akura Malice was here, and she wouldn’t let her daughter face down a Dreadgod without giving her a way out. If he could get to Mercy, he could still escape from this mess.

  But that would mean leaving these people behind.

  The one good thing about the arrival of the Bleeding Phoenix was that it had scared off the people trying to leave through Heaven’s Glory. The crowd pushing their way up the side of Mount Samara had scattered, fleeing in every other direction.

  Ziel pointed. “Hey, look at that. Line’s shorter.”

  Lindon felt his eyes change to blue as pure madra flowed through him.

  He grabbed Yerin’s wrist, pulling her off-balance while he dropped low to drive his left palm at her core.

  A Forged blue-white imprint of his palm covered her midsection as his Empty Palm landed, driving madra from her core.

  But he didn’t know how the Empty Palm would affect a Herald.

  Combat report! Lindon called desperately.

  [Call me naïve, but I think we should save that for an actual enemy.]

  Yerin grunted when the technique landed, but she gave him a reproachful look afterwards. “Still me. Phoenix doesn’t hold my leash.”

  “Apologies. I wasn’t certain.”

  Yerin waved a hand casually behind her, and a pulse of blood and sword aura tore the half-formed bloodspawn to pieces as it tried to emerge from the girl’s bandage.

  The girl shrieked and tore off her wrappings, crawling as far away from them as possible. Lindon admired her appropriate reaction.

  “More spawn rising,” Yerin reported. “I’ll take care of them. Just get us away.”

  Another cry came from the north, and this time Lindon could see something slowly flapping great wings. Something that covered the northern horizon like a bank of clouds.

  Kelsa walked up behind him, her mouth open in horror. “Is that…”

  “A second one,” Lindon confirmed. His stomach churned.

  “…what about the people who haven’t made it out?”

  That was what he wanted to know too.

  “We’ve done everything we can,” he said, voice tight. “We just have to hope the Phoenix leaves them alone.”

  [And doesn’t follow us,] Dross put in.

  Kelsa’s face twiste
d in pain and concern, but she nodded. As Yerin made her way out the door to deal with bloodspawn, he focused entirely on pouring his spirit into the control console. There was no such thing as running too fast.

  While he did, he glanced back at the projection that showed what was behind him. Shadow crawled over Malice, and she started to melt into the ground…only for the Wandering Titan to stomp its foot.

  From miles away, Lindon felt her portal break.

  The darkness shattered, and Malice stood exactly where she’d started, but she didn’t hesitate. She hurled a glob of sticky shadow madra with one hand, and it exploded into a web. The Strings of Shadow tied the Titan down, while at the same time, heavy darkness rippled through the depths of her violet armor like a wave.

  Her full-body Enforcer technique made her sink deeper into the ground, but Lindon could feel the weight as she speared the Titan in the chest with the butt of her bow.

  A column of wind blasted over Sacred Valley, tearing up yet more trees. Mount Samara should be far enough away that the Irons and Coppers down there wouldn’t be in too much danger, but Lindon worried for anyone left down in the valley itself.

  The Titan staggered back a step, but its tail whipped up and struck Malice in the side. She was knocked off her feet, and Lindon thought she might stumble through a mountain…but, gracefully, she turned that fall into flight.

  Wind aura cushioned her before she hit the ground, and in another great hurricane burst, she shot away.

  Heading south.

  Lindon was certain the Monarch was about to circle around the outside of the suppression field to meet the Phoenix, but he didn’t see it happen. His attention was called away by a bright red light filtering through the windows.

  The Phoenix’s head swiveled to look at them.

  Lindon was growing used to feeling the willpower of others. He had Consumed thoughts from the Titan itself, had withstood Fury’s test of will, and he’d been sensing the weight of will behind Malice’s attacks.

  Only when he felt the Bleeding Phoenix focus on his cloudship did he realize how far he still had to go.