Cradle: Foundation (Cradle Collected Book 1)

by Will Wight

  “Oh, so even a Copper has eyes. Bulky device and all, that's all it is. Just a way to cycle.”

  He was missing something important here, he was sure. “I'm sorry. Why? Doesn’t everyone cycle on their own?”

  The scale flew from the pail back into her hands, and she held it up between two fingers. “You don't think this looks familiar? Hm?”

  He squinted at it. “I’m untrained, I know, but it only looks like madra to me.”

  “Close. It looks like your madra. It's clean, it's pure. You see? Anyone can use pure madra.” She inhaled sharply, and the scale dissolved into what looked like liquid light and streamed straight into her core. She slapped her belly afterward. “For anybody on a Path, cycling pure madra is like adding water to wine. You add a little, and there's more wine, you see? Doesn't affect the flavor much. Add too much, and it's nothing but watery.”

  She waved a hand. “Mostly you don't absorb them, it's a waste. You use them on your weapons, or on constructs, or you give a handful to young children. Get them to Copper quicker,” she said, poking him in the ribs. “Everybody can use scales, and nobody can make them directly, so we use them as coins. Works for everyone that way.”

  “Nobody can make them...” he began, but she finished for him.

  “But you can. You start to see, hm? Mining is dangerous work. When you run the equipment, you're helpless, and places with enough vital aura are very dangerous. The aura in the Ruins is so thick you can practically pinch scales from the air, so Remnants and dreadbeasts will be thick as grass down there. If three miners out of ten comes back alive, I'll shave my head.”

  “Then, if you'll forgive another question, why are you doing it?”

  She gestured with her curved sword, which Lindon had come to realize was called a Fisher's hook. “We are not. We're trading with those who are. When the Arelius family Underlord comes to visit, he'll take the Ruins and everything inside. Until he does, we're all scrambling to make as much money as we can.”

  “Underlord?” he asked, but she clicked her tongue.

  “Questions? More questions? You're nothing but a little mine.” She jabbed him with the dull back of her hook. “When a sacred artist reaches the realm beyond Truegold, we call them Underlord. Or Underlady. If you ever see one in your lifetime, you can thank the good fortune of your ancestors. Now, you want questions? You want more questions? Then give me some scales.”

  She left him sitting at the bench, figuring out how to Forge madra.

  He'd tried before, sneaking tips from his mother as he tried to move his madra in just the right way that meant he was secretly a Forger and not a reject. He'd never had any success, and his failures had always left his spirit exhausted and his body sweating.

  This time, he was a Copper.

  He started by slipping on his parasite ring and cycling for a while, running his madra through the burden of the ring until it was as strong and pure as he could make it without exhausting himself. Then he held his palms a few inches apart, focusing on the space between.

  He gathered all his madra into that space, packing it thicker and thicker. At first, he could only visualize the flow of madra in the same half-imaginary way he saw when he was cycling. But after his third attempt, he was sure he saw something; a flash of blue against the rough wooden tabletop.

  Then he stopped, panting, wiping sweat from his forehead. He had to cycle again, pumping his spirit, generating every scrap of madra he could.

  He didn’t sleep for most of the night, trying again and again to condense madra into reality. When his spirit failed him, he cycled until he had enough strength to try again.

  Just before dawn, he finally collapsed as exhaustion overtook him.

  Gesha was disappointed in his failure, but she took it in stride. She couldn’t expect much from a Copper, she said. He maintained constructs during the day, but then he was too tired to try Forging at night.

  So he used less power.

  Instead of spilling his madra into the whole construct and letting it repair itself, he began directing his power where it was needed. If there was a crack, he focused a line of madra and sealed the crack. If it was simply fading away, becoming weak, he fed power directly into it drop by drop until the part was whole again.

  After three days, he finally got the knack. He used so much less energy on his chores that he could try Forging again, allowing him more attempts each day. He stayed up that night alternating between forcing his madra out and cycling to recover, over and over until he finally collapsed.

  A single scale, round and crystalline blue, gleamed on his lap.

  Chapter 11

  Information requested: the role of a Soulsmith.

  Beginning report…

  Soulsmiths are craftsmen who work with the stuff of spirits. They form constructs, steal bindings from Remnants and transplant them into sacred artists, and forge weapons. The art of a Soulsmith is honored and distinguished, and it requires no qualities more highly than a sharp memory and a dedication to experimentation.

  Every aspect of Forged madra and dead matter—the severed body parts of a destroyed Remnant—must be handled differently. Some can only be manipulated by goldsteel tools, others must be chilled, others wrapped. Some types of madra shatter under the least pressure, only to re-form when unobserved. Others dissolve in daylight, or turn to liquid when pierced.

  It is the job of a Soulsmith to know which is which. To know what part of a Remnant can be removed and used, and what part is useless.

  Experience is the most useful tool in this process, but a drudge is indispensible.

  A drudge is a Soulsmith's most valued construct. It is their assistant, their toolbox, their encyclopedia of information. Even two Remnants from the same Path can look identical but be subtly different on the inside—maybe one holds the most valuable binding in the left side of its chest, while the other carries it on the right. A careless Soulsmith may ruin the work by making assumptions, but drudges are designed to scan the structure of a dead Remnant and look for concentrations of power: bindings.

  Drudges have many functions, some unique to the Soulsmiths that created them, but most of their abilities are analytical in nature. The more precisely a Soulsmith can determine the structure of a Remnant, the lower the chance of a ruined product.

  Before creating their own drudge, would-be Soulsmiths are expected to practice certain core skills. They must familiarize themselves with a Soulsmith's foundry, practice their own Forging—in order to fill in the gaps of dead matter and create a functional shell around valuable bindings—memorize a set of basic scripts, and test dozens of different madra aspects to prove that they can spot the difference.

  A Soulsmith's training takes years of dedication, and is sometimes underestimated because the skills acquired do not translate directly to combat. But a sacred artist with some ability in Soulsmithing is a valuable commodity for any clan or sect, and Soulsmiths can often earn the bulk of a family's income.

  Suggested topic: Soulsmith life expectancy. Continue?

  Denied, report complete.

  ***

  It had been almost two weeks since Lindon had begun working for Fisher Gesha, and in that time, he'd continued every night until his body refused to continue any longer. Even when he finished his work early, he’d spend hours taking notes on what he’d learned, keeping careful records for the Path of Twin Stars, until he eventually passed out on the page.

  As a result, it took more and more drastic methods to wake him. One morning, the Soulsmith had coated his entire hay-strewn nook with uncomfortably warm slime from a binding. Noise didn't work; he'd slept straight through a thunderstorm that rattled the rafters and sent the spider-constructs overhead swinging like chimes in the wind.

  So when he woke facedown with some man's shoulder digging into his stomach, he wasn't entirely surprised. Even in his groggy, sleep-wrapped state, he recognized one of Gesha's attempts to wake him.

  When the bright green lizard-spirit attached t
o the man's arm turned and hissed at him, that was when he knew something was wrong.

  He scrambled for details. The man's boots were crunching on grass, not dirt, so they'd gone off the path. Smoke in the air. Torchlight flickered against the furs the man wore, and a biting chill lingered in the air.

  So a Sandviper had taken him in the middle of the night, and had left Fisher territory to bring him somewhere else.

  Still drifting as he was, he initially wondered if he could somehow turn this to his advantage. The Sandviper was an enemy, and therefore an honorable target for robbery. Would he have anything on him? Was there some way Lindon could talk his way out of this? Would the Empty Palm disable him, or just make him angry?

  As clarity returned, his thoughts changed. Was he headed back to the Sandviper camp? Was this some sort of revenge against Fisher Gesha, or against Yerin? He hadn't personally done anything against the Sandvipers, but now he was going to be treated to a full, painful taste of their powers. Their insidious, venomous powers, which could dissolve flesh like an acid.

  He'd dismantled a Sandviper Remnant under Gesha just two days before, and even its dead matter was enough to slowly burn through living flesh. She'd demonstrated on a dead rat.

  Worse, she said, the aura they gathered did not kill so quickly. Their Ruler techniques produced a sort of gas that caused seizures, paralysis, and other, less pleasant symptoms. She'd spoken with a shadow in her voice that suggested she'd seen that state entirely too many times.

  Now Lindon started to struggle. He'd tried not to, in order to avoid giving away that he'd regained consciousness, but it had become too much. He kept seeing the corpse of the rat, its hair hissing and sizzling away as the flake of Sandviper madra had steadily drilled its way through.

  That same madra, in the form of a legged serpent, stared at him from a few inches away. It hissed again, but the sacred artist gave no indication that he cared what Lindon was doing. He trundled along with the consistency of an ox, though with considerably more speed.

  It would have been more interesting to Lindon under other circumstances, but while the Sandviper man gave the impression of moving slowly, ground passed beneath him with alarming speed.

  He started slowing when sounds of laughter and chatter cut through the night. It had to be the Sandviper camp, though even craning his neck, Lindon couldn't see much more of it than a few temporary buildings and some torch-smoke.

  The man walked passed the laughing crowd, taking him to one of the only buildings Lindon had seen in the entire Five Factions Alliance that wasn't made of rough, freshly cut wood. Instead, it was entirely constructed from iron bars, with rings of script spiraling up the length of the bars like creepers on tree trunks.

  Hinges squealed as the door opened, and Lindon hit the ground hard and rolled before he came to a stop on his back.

  Even the ceiling was made from bars, which must get unpleasant when it rained. If Lindon were left here, where Fisher Gesha and Yerin couldn't find him, he'd have to survive those rainstorms huddling in the corner and bunched up against the cold.

  Before the Sandviper closed the door, Lindon scrambled for it. He kicked at the dirt, launching himself forward.

  The Gold still didn't say a word. He grabbed Lindon with one hand like scooping up a squirming puppy, then tossed him back inside. The door shut faster this time.

  None of the other prisoners made a break for it.

  There were only five others inside this cage, though there were other cages on the left and right. He couldn't begin to guess how many total, which he imagined might be useful information if he ever got out of here.

  As he rose to shaky feet, trying to get a better look at his surroundings, one of his cellmates raised her head to look at him. She was filthy, shrouded in a ragged blanket, and she stared with one eye. The other was a half-healed mess, shredded by what seemed to be claw marks.

  Lindon couldn't meet her good eye. He was too busy staring at her missing one as though it had shown him his own future.

  The next one in the cage was a man that revealed a missing arm and, when he turned in his sleep, several missing toes.

  The third, a boy about Lindon's age. Half his hair had been seared off, and he stared into the distance with a glassy look.

  The fourth and fifth clung to one another so that he couldn't make out the details of one against another, but blood clung to the bars behind them and the floor beneath him.

  Wounds surrounded him, a tale of misery and pain etched in flesh. All of these were Golds, he was sure—a weak cloud drifted over the one-eyed woman's head, and one of the couple in the corner seemed to have a tail—and they had suffered like this. What had wounded them would crush a Copper to paste.

  He took a breath, calming his disordered thoughts, though it felt like trying to spit water onto a forest fire. He knelt and examined the door, studying the latch and the script together, but so many of the symbols were unfamiliar to him. He recognized something similar to the circle he'd used to ward off Remnants, but with ten times the complexity.

  That was it. There wasn't much else to examine. No other tools to use, no threads to pull, just idle time to pass before whatever had shredded the other prisoners' bodies was used on him.

  Though when he spent some time thinking about it, he thought he might know what had happened. These must be miners.

  When he looked up, the blocky silhouette of the Transcendent Ruins blocked out the moon and a good half of the stars. They were camped right at the base of it—so maybe this wasn't Sandviper territory at all, because all of the five allied factions would want to share access to the Ruins.

  The Sandvipers he'd met before had mentioned miners, and Fisher Gesha had told him the story of how dangerous it was to go inside the Ruins to draw scales from the air. She'd suggested a survival rate of less than thirty percent.

  Lindon took another look around him as he imagined what had happened to the rest.

  Laughter echoed around the camp until it sounded almost like screams...no, those were screams, along with some shouts and the ringing of metal.

  He craned his neck, trying to stick his head between the bars—though they were too closely set for that—in order to see down the row of cages and storage buildings.

  Another cage, just like the one in which he found himself, was rattling back and forth as its inhabitants threw themselves against the sides. It looked as though it would actually tip over, but a couple of Sandvipers appeared out of nowhere at the final instant. One of them sent two bright green lights flickering into the cage—he couldn't see the details, but it was obviously a technique of some kind—and the other grabbed the cage in both hands.

  He heaved, lifting the entire cage off the ground, and then slammed it back down.

  The screams had redoubled in intensity, but now other cages were rattling, and more guards were pouring out of nearby shelters.

  When the commotion spread closer to him, with Sandviper guards running past him to help, Lindon stepped back. He was getting too detailed of a look at what the Sandviper techniques were doing to prisoner flesh.

  And his cage seemed least likely to join in. Not a one of his fellow inmates even looked up.

  He sat himself with his back against the bars, trying to think. What did he have on him? He didn't have his pack, of course, but even his pockets had been emptied. Except...

  A smooth, round ball slightly bigger than his thumbnail sat at the bottom of his pocket, forgotten. He reached in, pulling out the glass marble from Suriel. A single blue candle-flame flickered in the center, pointing straight up no matter how he turned the outside.

  The marble had no use, unless he could throw it like a pebble to distract a guard, but it was a comfort. A concrete reminder that the heavens hadn't given up on him.

  He rolled it between his fingers as he took further stock.

  He was in reasonably good physical condition, and he'd recovered most of the energy in his cores that he'd spent earlier that night. Not tha
t either of those things would help him against the Sandvipers.

  Other than the marble, he had nothing but his clothes and the familiar presence of wood against his chest. So they'd left him his Unsouled badge. How considerate.

  The badge itself was tied to a ribbon of blue shadesilk, which was bright as day in direct light and absolutely black in the slightest shadow. The interesting reflective properties of shadesilk had allowed Sacred Valley to keep trading with the outside world, but now Lindon found himself considering more about the fabric's strength. Could he strangle someone with it?

  Not anyone who mattered, not with a Copper's strength. Maybe he could take a toddler hostage, assuming a toddler passed within arm's length of this cage in a prison camp, but that would be as cowardly of an act as he could imagine.

  But if he stayed, he'd face the Ruins.

  The sky began to lighten before he'd come to any conclusion on a strategy, and in the distance, he saw an enormous block sink back into the wall of the Ruins. A small army filed out, the Sandvipers in the front carrying weapons, and the collection of people in the middle carrying iron barrels speckled on the bottom with crystal chalices.

  They passed close enough for Lindon to make out the wounds on the prisoners—missing limbs, fingers, chunks of flesh. The procession turned to a building that looked like a big, painted wagon...

  And Lindon gained his first truly interesting piece of information. The back of the wagon lifted open, and the first prisoner—prodded by a knife—dumped his barrel into the back.

  Scales clattered out. They fell into a box specially prepared for the purpose, and then the second miner stepped up, also emptying her barrel. It took twenty or thirty people before the box was filled up and pushed to the back.

  To join dozens of boxes just like it.

  Lindon's eyes were glued to the stack of boxes, the blue-lit marble spinning in his fingers. Fisher Gesha had said that scales could be used for advancement, but doing so was like watering down your madra. Well, his madra was essentially all water.