Cradle: Foundation (Cradle Collected Book 1)

by Will Wight

  “Is the Ancestor’s rest not disturbed by the presence of another corpse? Or the wild Remnant accompanying it?” Whitehall countered. “I do not understand why you haven’t cleared the tomb already!”

  “You were not here,” Elder Rahm said, sounding as though his voice might crumble to dust. “We acted against the Sage for the good of the school, but he was far more powerful than we expected. I still have not recovered from the injury he left to my spirit, and I was luckier than some of our brothers and sisters.”

  Whitehall had not missed that. There were three or four gaps around the room, places where Jades had not survived their ambush of the Sword Sage. And as Whitehall understood it, they had attacked full-force while the man slept. Even so, the Sage had left a number of casualties.

  Their tragedy could be Whitehall’s great fortune, if he placed his pieces just right. “I wasn’t there, and that’s why I am all the more eager to do my part. If only a few of you accompany me, or even allow me to bring a group of Irons, I will survey the tomb and return. Together, we can devise a way to retrieve the stranger’s treasures. And his sword.”

  Whitehall was far more interested in the rare sacred herbs the Sword Sage always carried on his person, but he knew that many of the other elders coveted the man’s sword. The Sage had performed miracles with that blade, and they believed that an artifact of such power could form the cornerstone of their entire school.

  So it baffled Whitehall that they had simply left the weapon where it lay.

  Elder Anses rubbed a hand along his short beard, as though to emphasize that Whitehall could no longer grow one. “That’s more complicated than you perhaps think. The Remnant has the sword.”

  Whitehall stared at him, searching for any signs of a joke. Remnants did not use weapons. Even the Remnant of such a powerful warrior, made up entirely of sword-aspect madra, would grow its own blade rather than picking one up. Remnants could advance over time, just like humans and sacred beasts, but it was a joke to think that one could advance so far, so fast.

  “It’s that stable?” he asked, looking to the Grand Elder for confirmation.

  The Grand Elder was at least as old as Elder Rahm, but age had not diminished him. He was a mountain of a man, a huge slab of muscle that took up twice the space of anyone else. “We tried to lay a boundary formation to force it out,” the Grand Elder said. “It used the sword to destroy the first banner. Every time we tried to lay a script, it either broke the script…or broke the one laying it.”

  Remnants could speak and reason and make deals, but they were very narrow in scope. They had only fragments of their memories from life, and could understand nothing outside of those memories. They were shadows, nothing more, even if they did gain more detail over time.

  But this one had proven itself capable of understanding script, planning action against it, and striking its enemy’s weak points. It was thinking strategically.

  “Is it even a Remnant?” Whitehall asked.

  “It is,” one of the other elders responded. “Its appearance is very clear, but we had a Soulsmith scan it anyway, in case the Sword Sage had simply used a technique to somehow imitate a Remnant. We’re confident this isn’t the case. It has simply left a Remnant that is far, far beyond anything we’ve ever seen.”

  Whitehall’s mind staggered at the thought. To leave such a Remnant…the Sword Sage might actually have reached the Gold stage. His desire for those sacred herbs redoubled. Anything a Gold carried on his person would be a priceless treasure.

  “I now understand,” Whitehall said, and he did. A Gold’s Remnant was the stuff of legends and nightmares. The elders would have to tread cautiously, in case the spirit had the ability to destroy their entire school. “You were wise to treat the situation with such care, and I spoke from ignorance.” He bowed to the Grand Elder in apology. “But what about that girl, his disciple? If the Remnant remembers her, we might lure it away from the corpse.”

  He had very little impression of the Sword Sage’s disciple. She had always followed him around, but at the time, Whitehall had thought of the Sage as nothing more than a wandering Jade. As such, his disciple wouldn’t be anything special. But if he was a Gold expert, the picture changed.

  Another elder, an old woman with a completely shaven head, sighed. “We have sent practically every combat-capable Iron in the school against her for weeks now. She sends them back dead or wounded. We planned on exhausting her spirit, pressuring her until she broke, but our disciples might be the ones to break first. Now that we know how powerful the Sword Sage was, it makes some sense; a Gold’s disciple must be extraordinary.”

  Whitehall had just apologized, so it would be unbecoming of his dignity to make a scene, but it was hard to hold himself back when he heard this stupidity. “The Irons failed to capture her, so you…sent more Irons?”

  The Grand Elder rumbled deep in his chest. “The enemy is only a disciple, and a young girl. Which elder from the Heaven’s Glory School would throw away their face to deal personally with a child?”

  Elder Whitehall very carefully stopped himself from exploding. This was a good thing for him, he reminded himself, and their foolishness was to his advantage. He still felt like strangling every one of them. “This elder does. The Sword Sage’s treasures could make us the strongest power in the valley, or his Remnant could ruin us. This concerns the survival of our school. How could I value my pride over that?”

  “It is not our pride that concerns us,” Elder Rahm said, “but the honor of Heaven’s Glory. Without its reputation, a school is nothing. The clans will send their young geniuses to the Fallen Leaf or the Holy Wind, and we will be forced to harvest all our sacred herbs in our own gardens. Even the outsider nomads might not deal with us if they did not trust in our honor.”

  Whitehall waved a hand at himself. “Then let a child deal with a child. The pride of the school is untarnished, yes?”

  The other elders shifted, uncomfortable, but none of them spoke out. He knew how their minds worked. Elder Whitehall’s condition was not common knowledge outside this room; they allowed all outside parties to assume that he was really a precocious genius that had managed to achieve Jade at a preposterously young age. His plan wasn’t honorable, because it meant propping their reputation up on a misconception. Therefore, none of them wanted to be the first to agree.

  But it would work, so none of them tore it down either. They each waited for someone else to give in first.

  “You may do as you see fit,” the Grand Elder said, which was the least enthusiastic approval Whitehall had ever received. But it didn’t matter, so long as he was allowed to do as he liked.

  “I’ll need Irons that have fought the girl in the past,” he said. “As well as some fresh ones.”

  “A group of five will be released from the Hall of Healing tomorrow morning. I’ll have them report to you. As for your fresh fighters, didn’t you bring in a pair yourself only yesterday?”

  Whitehall almost hated to admit that Lindon had been one of his, but since the elders already knew, there was no sense in denying it. “Yes, Grand Elder.”

  “Take them as well. It will be a good education for them, however it turns out.”

  None of them were worried about the safety of the new disciples; there was a Jade along, after all. The matter was practically settled.

  Whitehall would work with what he had. Kazan Ma Deret was appreciably strong, and a Forger. He had learned the Path of the Mountain’s Heart, so he would never walk the Path of Heaven’s Glory, but he could still benefit the school. He could build walls, which ought to help back the girl into a corner.

  The Sword Sage’s disciple wouldn’t be short of weapons or secret techniques, but now she was out of options.

  ***

  It was the middle of the night when Lindon shocked himself out of his cycling trance, and the light from Samara’s ring cast an eerie light over the interior of the Hall of Healing. He’d grown up with the ring overhead every night, but do
wn in the valley, it didn’t actually provide much light. It was only an interesting feature of the skyline. Here, it acted like a full moon…but its light was thin, somehow stretched, giving the surroundings a pale and dreamy quality.

  All the other patients had collapsed into an exhausted sleep, and even the healer on duty was slumped against the wall at the far end of the room. She had exhausted her spirit dealing with the wave of wounded.

  Lindon wasn’t sure how he had managed to stay awake. His clothes and sheets were drenched in sweat, and while the thorns under his skin had lessened in intensity, his veins still itched. His madra was ebbing low, so that if he did too much more tonight, he’d overdraw his spirit and be trapped in bed for days. Even his head pounded after hours concentrating, stuck cycling.

  But he hadn’t given up.

  He opened his mouth wide, stretching his jaw. It was still tender, but not nearly as painful as when he’d come in. Even his ribs and his arm felt merely bruised, not shattered as they had at first. If his energy held out, he would be able to walk.

  He wanted nothing more than to rest his wounds and his soul…but he knew now was the time. The previous group of Irons to go up against Yerin had come back defeated, and the next batch wouldn’t leave until the morning. He had tonight, and only tonight, to find her.

  Lindon staggered onto unsteady legs, using the corner of his bed as a crutch. The air was even colder than he expected, so he snagged an outer robe from another sleeping patient; the disciple wouldn’t miss it.

  He hobbled home as fast as he could, gaining strength slowly as he moved. The pale light cast everything in a strange hue, especially the rainstone buildings, which now looked as though they had been dipped in milk. Samara’s ring was as thick as his arm in the sky, stretching from horizon to horizon like a river of light. Being up here, under the ring, surrounded by constructs of gleaming white…he was once again struck by the majesty of the Heaven’s Glory School. It really was like living among a village in the heavens.

  I wonder what they do to traitors in the heavens, Lindon thought as he reached his room, quickly ducking inside to grab his pack with the formation banners within. Cast them back down, probably. After a moment’s thought, he brought along his second set of disciple robes as well.

  If they had the same punishment here, “casting him down” would likely involve tossing him off the mountain.

  The easiest way to avoid that was to avoid getting caught, so Lindon tucked his wooden badge inside his clothes. He couldn’t leave it behind in case he had to prove his identity, but wearing it openly would be as good as painting his name on his clothes. There was only one Unsouled in the school.

  With a last, longing glance back at his rigid bed, Lindon set out into the frigid night, hitching his pack up onto his shoulders.

  The patches of snow became more frequent as he made his way up the mountain and to the north. The scraggly trees grew closer together, and he even caught glimpses of a few Remnants—a flash of glowing antlers, or a flicker of vivid green scales.

  Most of the Remnants up here carried aspects of light, which was why they were attracted to Samara’s ring. His mother had taught him that when he was a child. They drank from it as humans did from a river, but as a result, the Heaven’s Glory territory wasn’t safe at night. Wild Remnants wouldn’t necessarily attack him…but it was impossible to predict what wild Remnants would do. They might shred him to pieces, ignore him, bite him once and run off, shine a light in his eyes, drag him back to a cave and imprison him, or swear eternal loyalty to him on sight. If you didn’t know a Remnant, you had to treat it as though it were capable of anything.

  Lindon wished desperately for a drudge. There had been a low-grade drudge in the Lesser Treasure Hall, and he had passed it up only because he wasn’t a Soulsmith. But here, it would have made his entire journey simple. Not only could he have set the drudge to follow sword madra, it would have warned him away from especially dangerous Remnants and given him some options to defend himself if he were attacked.

  As it was now, he had to risk it. The possibility kept him dancing on the edge of a knife, scanning every shadow and freezing at the sight of every spirit. If they looked even slightly aggressive, he would have to run for his life, dropping a crystal flask as a distraction.

  As the night stretched on, his vigilance scraped his nerves clean, until his eyes felt frozen wide and his ears seemed to tremble at every sound. He didn’t know how many hours he’d spent out here alone in the cold and wind, but it felt like days, and as he staggered forward with every step he lost a little more feeling in his legs.

  Finally, on the jagged slope overlooking a natural chasm, he stopped. He’d been wandering around on vague instructions the whole night, every once in a while calling out Yerin’s name and hoping she heard it before a Remnant did. He knew how unlikely it was to work, and had long since resigned himself to as many nights of this as he could physically survive.

  But now, new breath filled his lungs as he realized: he recognized this place. This was where he’d seen Yerin in the first place, in Suriel’s vision. The chasm was only about twenty feet deep, with a flat bottom covered in snow. The girl in black and red had been backed up against the end of the chasm, defending herself from Heaven’s Glory disciples.

  Looking around, he saw some evidence of the battle—a discarded sword, partially revealed beneath a pile of snow, gleaming where it had fallen. A bloody cloth wrapped around a tree’s branch. A mirror-smooth stretch of rock where a stone had been sliced clean through.

  It felt strange to see this in person. He had never really doubted Suriel’s visions, but without confirmation they remained unreal, like particularly vivid dreams. Now he had proof in front of his own eyes.

  The sight strengthened his flagging spirit, and he scanned for a way down. It wasn’t easy, unless he meant to backtrack almost a half a mile to check and see if there was a smoother entrance. He certainly wasn’t going to jump twenty feet down onto ground covered in snow; as far as he knew, there were jagged weapons coating the ground down there, and he would land right on a rusty spearhead.

  He finally decided to climb down, but before he did, he called as loud as he dared into the chasm. “Yerin.”

  No one answered him. There wasn’t any room down there for anyone to hide anyway, not unless she had buried herself in the snow, but he had to look. Maybe he would find…something. Just finding this place had been a major encouragement, so even a piece of her robe would be welcome.

  He gripped cold stone in both hands and climbed down slowly and gingerly, favoring his ribs. When he finally reached the bottom, he discovered…nothing. The chasm was even smaller than it had looked from above, and he could see the whole thing in one glance. It did cut the wind nicely, and he spent a moment huddled in his own arms, enjoying the relative warmth.

  Yerin clearly wasn’t here, and he had wasted most of the night already. On top of which, he was now faced with a twenty-foot climb back up.

  Well, although Suriel had promised him great opportunities outside of Sacred Valley, she had never said they would be easy. A great sacred artist wouldn’t complain about something like this, he reminded himself, and steeled his body for the climb.

  A cold point pressed against the underside of his chin, and he dropped his pack onto the snow. “I’d bet my soul against a rat’s tail that I never told you my name,” a girl said.

  He’d never heard an accent like hers before, which was further proof that she was really from beyond Sacred Valley. Though he had a sword at his throat, Lindon still felt relief. He’d actually found her. “Yerin?”

  “Your elders never asked my name, and I’d contend that you and I never crossed eyes before now. How do you know me?”

  Lindon had considered several lies on the way here, but he needed Yerin to guide him voluntarily. He needed her on his side. Which meant he had to rely on the truth, such as it was.

  “The heavens showed me,” he said.

  The wind
whistled over the chasm until the quiet became painful. Finally, she leaned around to get a peek at his face, though he couldn’t see much of an expression through her black hair.

  “…you chipped in the head?”

  “It sounds like I’m spinning you a story, I understand that. We don’t know each other, you’ve never met me. You don’t trust me, and that’s wise. Why should you?”

  He took a risk and started to turn, but stopped when the point stuck deeper into his skin. Lindon swallowed. Nothing like a sword to the neck to keep a man honest. “Let me tell you why you should. How else did I know you? How did I know you were here? If I were trying to kill you, would I come out here shouting your name? A name the school elders don’t even know, so how would I get it? It’s impossible.”

  She didn’t say anything and she didn’t kill him, so he took that as encouragement. “An immortal descended from heaven and told me your name, showed me this place. You were backed up against the wall, fighting a group of Heaven’s Glory Irons.”

  Yerin’s sword ran lightly down his throat to the silk around his neck. It tugged upwards, drawing his badge out of his clothes. “So you were with the last bunch that tracked me down. That’s a pill I can swallow. They never made it to this place, but there was a group of Strikers in the back that I never…”

  The badge emerged, but instead of an iron arrow, it displayed a single character carved in wood.

  “Unsouled?”

  “See? Not a Striker.” Lindon took a moment to slide away from the sword, which was now pointed at his chest.

  “Did you whittle a fake badge just to pull this trick on me?” She didn’t sound convinced, and Lindon took the risk of letting out a small laugh.

  “I tried to carve a fake badge once. It’s harder than you think. I cut my thumb so deep they had to stitch it closed.”

  The sword moved away from his chest, and Lindon slowly turned around. For the second time that night, he was hit with the cold-water shock of coming face-to-face with something that Suriel had shown him.