Cradle: Foundation (Cradle Collected Book 1)

by Will Wight

  A tall woman stepped up as the representative of the Fishers. Unlike the others, she carried two of those bladed hooks, one in her hand and the other on her back. A sneer gave her a twisted, malicious cast. “While you're waiting here, maybe I'll go back home. I made some new friends today, and they have all sorts of interesting stories to tell us about you.”

  The lead Sandviper's face contorted until it looked like hers, and he stepped forward himself. In a flicker of motion so fast that Lindon almost didn't catch it, a pair of long knives appeared in each of his hand. Vivid green madra coiled around each blade. “Give me my miners back, and we can let this go here.”

  “If you want to give me my brother's eye back, then we can—”

  A new voice, quiet and even, sliced through the argument like a razor. “What is this?”

  The Sandvipers parted like a crowd of puppies before a wolf. The first detail Lindon could see of this new figure was a spearhead, which gleamed bright even in the light from the smoky torches. The shaft was red, worked with detail that looked like it may have been script, but the weapon hardly attracted attention compared to the man who carried it.

  He was roughly as tall as Lindon, but thinner, so that his build matched that of his spear. He wore ordinary dark robes, like more than half the sacred artists Lindon had seen that day, but he wore something they did not: long strips of red cloth, wrapped tightly around his head. It looked as though he'd tried to bandage himself for grievous injuries to the skull, but his wounds had bled through.

  Every one of the strips of cloth was covered, without exception, in what was unmistakably script. Even if Lindon had been close enough to make out the script in detail, he likely still wouldn't have been able to tell what it did.

  Perhaps it had some intimidating effect on onlookers, because everyone grew quiet at the masked stranger's approach. The Sandvipers shut their mouths like children before a parent, and the Fishers had all reached for their weapons. Even the few handful of bystanders who had stuck by to watch the confrontation, like Lindon, did not dare to utter a word.

  Except Yerin. “He's strong,” she said to Lindon, though even she kept her comment to barely above a whisper.

  The stranger stopped at the lead Sandviper, who drew himself and saluted over his fists. “Brother Jai Long,” the Sandviper said, “these Fishers captured some of our miners on their return from the Ruins. We wanted to at least recover the scales, in order to save face for the Sandviper sect.”

  Another member of the Jai clan, Lindon noted. And once again in the company of Sandvipers. Those men and women at the gate hadn't just been Jai Sen's friends, then; their factions were close allies. He wasn't sure if that fact would be worth anything, but he tucked it away nonetheless.

  “For the Sandviper sect,” Jai Long repeated softly. “Who was responsible for the missing mining team?”

  “Ah, that is...I was responsible for guarding them, but the Fishers sent too many for me to handle on my own.”

  “Then you were both careless and weak. You have lost respect for yourself and for the sect, and the young chief will punish you accordingly.”

  The Sandviper man's hands curled into fists. He straightened his back, glaring. “Then I will hear as much from Kral's own mouth. He does not need an outsider speaking for him.”

  Despite Lindon's expectations, Jai Long did not grow angry. He tilted his head back, looking up at thick, black branch hanging over the street. “I suppose he doesn't.”

  A man jumped from the branch, landing with knees slightly bent as though he'd hopped off of a curb. It looked so easy. So natural.

  The Sandvipers backed away at the sudden appearance of this man, who wore fine black furs and held his chin so high it looked as though he were about to issue a royal decree. He stared at the lead Sandviper like a emperor looking down upon a criminal.

  Here was yet another sacred artist who could casually do the impossible, whose very presence overwhelmed lesser Golds.

  “Young chief Kral,” the Sandviper greeted him, stuttering a little and bowing even more deeply than he had for Jai Long. “I intended no disrespect to you.”

  “When you disrespect my friend, Jai Long, you dirty my honor,” Kral pronounced. Like Jai Long, he seemed to have no need to raise his voice to transfix the whole street. “How will you make amends?”

  The Sandviper man dropped to his knees before Jai Long, bowing until his head hit the dirt. “My eyes were blind, honored Jai Long. I will never—”

  Jai Long kicked him in the shoulder. The sound rang out in the night, even louder than the wood-on-wood impacts earlier, but the man wasn't visibly affected. He raised his head, confused.

  “My pride is not worth our time,” Jai Long said. “Stand up.”

  The man staggered to his feet, and abruptly Kral grinned. The smile transformed him, turning him from a haughty prince into a mischievous boy. He threw one arm around the man's shoulders.

  “He says all's well, so it's well,” Kral said, patting the man on the back. “Now, what exactly are our friends the Fishers doing out here?”

  He looked to the other camp as he said that, friendly grin still in place, but the green serpent on his arm hissed loudly.

  The woman in charge of the Fishers held a hook in each hand now. She took an aggressive step forward, brandishing a weapon, but neither Jai Long nor Kral reacted. “This is our territory. What's strange is your presence.”

  “Territory?” Without removing his arm from the Sandviper man's shoulders, Kral turned to Jai Long. “Is the camp divided into territories?”

  “Not officially.”

  “See?” Kral said to the woman. “Nothing official. So what I choose to believe is that my subordinates were walking back to the mines, tired after a hard day's work, and they were ambushed by some thieves looking for easy pickings.”

  The Fisher woman turned red. “You dare to—”

  “And these thieves,” Kral continued, riding over her words, “were courageously captured by you Fishers, who are now eager to return our stolen property to us. Like the young heroes that you are.”

  The woman stopped, uncertain.

  “How many scales did they take?” Kral asked the man under his arm.

  “Sixty-two, young chief,” the man said nervously.

  Kral leaned a little closer. “How many?”

  “...sixty-two?”

  Kral sighed. “How many stolen scales are these Fishers going to return to you?”

  At last, the young man caught the point. “At least one hundred scales, young chief.”

  Releasing him, Kral spread both hands. “See what an opportunity for goodwill we have here? Return the stolen one hundred scales to us now, and we'll trust your honor that the miners will be back in our camp come dawn.”

  The Fisher woman gave a crooked smile that had no humor in it. “It’s the law of the Wilds, Sandviper. You take whatever you can keep. If you were too weak to keep it…”

  Kral's smiled faded as though it had never been, and he drew an awl from beneath his furs with each hand. The heavy spikes gleamed with green light. “I have a sudden urge for some exercise. Will you oblige me, sister Fisher?”

  Jai Long clapped a hand on his shoulder. “We've spent too long on this, young chief. Sister Fisher, we have other work to be about, as do you. Let our stolen property serve as a down payment for you to deliver this message, because our other messengers have yet to reach your sect: the Arelius family is coming. In no more than a month, their Underlord will take all prizes from us, and we will be left with only scraps.”

  The Fisher turned, exchanging glances with someone in the crowd behind her. “We'd heard rumors,” she said.

  “They are more than rumors,” Jai Long said. He produced a blue-and-white banner, which unfurled as he held it out in front of him. In the center loomed a single black crescent moon. “A Cloud Hammer sect long-runner returned bearing this, only a day gone. If Arelius hurries, they could be here in two weeks. At most, a month. Sen
d word to your Fisher Ragahn that if we do not share the meal now, none of us will see a crumb.”

  The man turned, red-wrapped face expressionless, though Lindon did catch a glimpse of gleaming eyes between the strips of cloth. At least he didn't have the power to see through his mask; that would have been too inhuman.

  The Fisher woman's next words were less welcome than a stone through a pane of glass. “Carry the message of a Sandviper worm?” She spat on the ground. “I'd rather cut out my own tongue.”

  Jai Long froze with his back to her. Slowly, he lifted his spear from his shoulder and grasped it in both hands. Beside him, Kral took a step to one side, chuckling.

  “Is this your official response as a representative of the Fisher sect?” Jai Long asked, voice colder than steel in winter.

  “This is my response,” she said with a sneer, and whipped her hook forward.

  Lindon didn't see how it happened, but the blade detached from the hilt as she swung, but it didn't fly out wildly. The curved blade flew in a wide arc as though it were on the end of a whip—or a fisherman's line—but there was nothing visible connecting the handle to the blade. It descended toward Jai Long's neck like a headsman's axe.

  The red spear spun in a blurring circle, the spearhead tracing a bright line like the tail of a falling star. His move caught the Fisher's hook, taking it out of the air and sweeping it to the ground.

  When the curved blade started flying back toward the Fisher woman as though she were retracting it, Jai Long turned. He kept both hands on the haft of his spear, but now his whole air had changed. He crouched like a tiger about to pounce, and his shining spearhead was a deadly claw.

  “If the Fishers will not listen to reason,” he said, “then they are not needed.”

  Chapter 8

  As Jai Long tensed and readied his spear to attack, shadows slid like dark water down the surface of the nearby buildings. Lindon wondered for an instant what technique Jai Long had used to summon them—maybe he had cultivated shadow madra, which sounded exciting to watch—but the shadows unfolded into eight-legged silhouettes.

  A dozen spiders the size of small dogs sunk from the branches above. They hung from threads that were all but invisible in the darkness, and with each fraction of a second they were closer to landing on the back of the spearman's head.

  Jai Long must have sensed something wrong, because he leaped back instead of forward, his gleaming spearhead held at high guard.

  The spiders stopped about head-height, dangling from their delicate strings. Yerin kept her hand on the hilt of her sword, but they were far enough away that she didn't draw it.

  All of the sacred artists in the street reacted differently to the sudden appearance of the creatures, but Lindon's eyes were stuck on the spiders themselves. They were made of dim color, a gray-purple that was the next best thing to black, so at first he'd taken them for Remnants. But he could see through the joints on each of their legs, like they were puppets assembled from Remnant pieces.

  More people had gathered along the roadside by this point, and now Lindon scanned from face to face, looking for a drudge. A Soulsmith might have sold this many constructs to someone else, but controlling so many at once took skill and practice. The spiders' creator was probably here, among the crowd.

  Most of the witnesses looked disgusted, confused, or alarmed, save for the man with the long yellow hair that Lindon had seen before. At least, he assumed it was the same man; in a camp this size, perhaps there were many disciples of this strange Path that lightened hair color. He was wearing intricate robes of blue and white, so that the cape on his shoulders was raised and separated to resemble wings. It looked as though he'd prepared for a parade.

  He met Lindon's glance with eyes of pale blue, no doubt another consequence of his Goldsign. He gave a cheery wave.

  Lindon focused on him as the only individual that stood out, but he didn't see a drudge. In fact, the yellow-haired man casually scanned the crowd himself, as though waiting for the one responsible for the spiders to come out.

  Only a breath or two had passed since the constructs had descended from overhead, but Lindon had already started to push his way through the crowd to look for the Soulsmith.

  He stopped when an old woman drifted down the road from behind the Fishers, her body remaining perfectly still as though she rolled on wheels. He craned his neck to see why, and saw eight legs moving beneath her sacred artist's robes.

  What kind of mad experiments were they up to in this Five Factions Alliance? Did Soulsmiths graft construct legs onto human beings? His mother would have called it a horrifying violation of conscience, and she would have hunted down anyone who dared to break such a taboo.

  This woman was old, perhaps older than anyone he'd ever seen in his life, with gray hair tied up into a tight bun. Her face was little more than a mass of wrinkles, her body so shrunken that he might have been able to tuck her comfortably into his pack. She held her hands behind the small of her back as she drifted forward on spider's legs, and never reached for the huge bladed goldsteel hook that gleamed on her back.

  When she reached the fight, she hopped down and continued on her own two feet, leaving a spider construct behind. Of course she hadn't grafted a spider's legs onto her own, that would have been crazy. That much, at least, was the same here as in Sacred Valley.

  The spider she'd left behind was different than the others. It was bigger than the others, its main body lower to the ground, its legs proportionately longer. It was duller than the others, a flat gray, and it didn't seem to have a head; it looked almost like a mechanical disk with spider's legs attached to it.

  This one wasn't floating, but Lindon had seen variations of his mother's own segmented brown fish often enough. Drudges didn't look like other constructs—they were duller, usually, more mechanical looking, as though they were made out of real physical parts rather than manifest madra.

  This tiny woman wasn't wearing the hammer badge of a Forger, nor the crossed hammers of a Soulsmith, but even so...she was everything that Lindon had ever wanted to be. And no matter how powerful those sacred artists were, she had stopped them with nothing more than the presence of her constructs.

  She scurried up to Jai Long, peering at him through eyes almost fused shut with wrinkles. “What is this? Hm? You think Fishers are your mining slaves, that you can beat us whenever you like?”

  The young Fisher woman stepped forward, a hook in each hand. “Fisher Gesha, this—”

  That was as far as she got before the Soulsmith, Fisher Gesha, turned and made a beckoning gesture. The young woman jerked forward as though pulled on an invisible string, pulled forward into Gesha's waiting slap.

  “If I want the words of a silly girl, I will reach back a hundred years and ask myself.”

  “Can she really do that?” Lindon asked Yerin, voice low. She gave him such a look that he swallowed the question.

  The old woman had turned back to Jai Long, hands clasped behind her back again. “The silly girl called me for help. And I come here, expecting to see dreadbeasts by the thousand, and instead here is a boy with a bag on his head threatening my sect. Do you think that I am not needed? Hm? Do you wish to test yourself against Fisher Gesha?”

  Jai Long loomed over the tiny Fisher, but Lindon was impressed when the man didn't take a fearful step back. Instead, he ground his red spear. “I was trying to send a message to the leadership of your sect. It appears I have succeeded.”

  Fisher Gesha growled and gave the young man's shins a kick. She might as well have kicked a tree, for all the reaction that provoked. “Prattle prattle prattle. You have a message, tell me the message! Do I have to pull it out of your throat? Hm?”

  “The Arelius family is on their way,” Jai Long said.

  The Fisher froze, the statue of a thoughtful grandmother. “You have confirmed this?”

  “To our satisfaction. I can have the evidence delivered to you tomorrow.”

  Fisher Gesha thought for a moment lo
nger, then turned to the tall young woman again. She was still rubbing her cheek, but Gesha leaped two feet into the air and slapped her on the other side. Then once more.

  “Stupid girl! Selfish girl! Your pride is more important than the sect, is it? You think that your honor will matter when Arelius gets here? You think the Underlord will let your eyes touch his spear?”

  Underlord, Lindon thought. Was that a title of respect, like ‘Patriarch’? Or was that the rank beyond Truegold?

  The young Fisher woman looked as though she were teetering on the edge of tears, but her voice was clear. “I assumed their words were Sandviper lies.”

  “How can a blind girl see the difference between truth and lies? You pass the words on to me, and I will tell you whether or not they are speaking wind.”

  Shakily, the young woman buckled her bladed hooks onto straps on her back, then bowed over a salute to Fisher Gesha. “Your unworthy servant understands.”

  “Hmph.” Gesha turned back to Jai Long. “The young are stupid. This was nothing more than an argument between children.”

  Kral stepped forward before the spearman could respond. His expression was grave again, a prince negotiating with a respected enemy. “One moment, Fisher Gesha. The young woman and her friends have disrespected us gravely. They have a mining team that belongs to us, along with all the hundred scales they harvested from the Ruins today. If we do not recover our property, it will be a slap delivered to all Sandvipers.”

  The young Fisher woman started to speak up, her voice indignant, but the old Soulsmith cut her off. “Was I wrong? Was this a battle between our great sects, hm? Not a childish spat? If that is so...”

  From overhead, all of the spiders hissed in chorus, working their legs furiously on their strings.

  “...then this old woman will keep you all company for a while.” Her face molded itself into a sketch of a smile.