by Will Wight
She didn't look at Lindon or excuse herself, dropping to the floor right there and beginning to cycle. Her cheeks and throat were flushed with anger, her scars standing out in stark contrast to her red skin.
Lindon was already walking to a box in the corner, which was filled with replacement heads. They'd picked up some extra wood on one of their landings, and every time Fisher Gesha said he needed practical experience, he hollowed one out and filled it with the simple scripts and basic constructs the dummies needed to function.
The outer scripts and core constructs of each dummy were all unique, but the heads were the same, which fortunately made them easy to replace.
He screwed it on—the original wood was lighter than the replacement, and he would need to carve a target circle onto it. He pulled out a short-bladed knife to start, but Eithan threw open the door.
“Twenty-one seconds is fairly good,” Eithan said with a broad smile. “Now, if you'd gotten below twenty seconds, then you'd have done something.”
Lindon bowed, accepting what little compliment there was. After weeks of working with Eithan, he'd started to realize exactly how high the Underlord's standards were. If he used a technique to blow a hole in the moon, Eithan would ask why he hadn't taken care of the sun, too.
“As for you, Yerin...” She didn't open her eyes at Eithan's words, apparently still cycling, but Lindon was sure she was listening. He'd gotten to know her better over the last few weeks too.
“...you're still trying to get your Remnant to guide you. You’re making things harder for yourself.”
“He’s talking to me,” Yerin said stubbornly, eyes still closed. “If I could hear him clear, I’d be two stages stronger by now.”
Eithan’s smile was filled with pity, as though he looked down on a dying old woman. “No will of your master remains in the Remnant. You’re hearing impressions that echo from his remaining memories.”
“It’s him, so I’m listening.”
“The easiest way to reach Highgold is to break down your Remnant for power. You are staring at a feast from afar while wondering why you’re so hungry. All other paths to Highgold are—”
She bounded to her feet, cutting him off. “I’m not going to bury his voice. You know how much of his teaching I’d be giving up? You think you can make up for that? Are you a Sage?”
“If only I were,” Eithan said calmly. “It would solve many of my problems.”
She stepped forward, glaring up at his chin. “A Sage’s Remnant can do things you can’t imagine. I’m telling you, he’s in there, and he’ll get me to Highgold in a snap.”
Eithan placed two fingers on her forehead and slowly pushed her back until she was standing an arm’s length away. “The path from Lowgold to Highgold is learning to use more than the excess energy your Remnant provides you. You normally break down the Remnant itself for power, digesting its skills and its madra. There are other ways past Lowgold, certainly, but this is the most direct path.”
Her face reddened even further, her Goldsign drew back as though to strike, but Eithan continued with his tone and smile still friendly. “We have time. Perhaps you’ll choose to feed on your master’s Remnant, or perhaps you’ll find another way. Or you could do neither, and Lindon and I will leave you behind.”
Lindon flinched. He had been perfectly happy to stay out of that conversation. For the past four weeks, Yerin had ranted about Eithan’s instruction and how he didn’t understand her master like she did.
Eithan clapped his hands together. “All right! Let's leave your failures and inadequacies aside for the moment. Even now, we are arriving at our destination. You should clean yourselves and join me in the sitting-room, because I suspect you'll want to see this.”
Eithan left Lindon and Yerin behind, which suspended them in silence as they toweled off and packed up.
“It's less than easy to keep a Remnant under control,” Yerin said after two minutes of quiet.
“I can't even imagine,” Lindon said honestly. Someday he would, though. He looked forward to it.
“I am trying. My master knows how to reach Highgold without cracking into his Remnant, I just need to hear what he’s telling me.”
Sometimes Yerin spoke like this when she needed to bounce ideas off Lindon, even when he had no clue what she was talking about. He usually nodded and let her work it out aloud.
But he could tell the difference between needing a sounding board and needing encouragement.
“You're pushing against Highgold, and you're complaining that it's too slow?” Lindon asked, exaggerating his surprise. “You're disappointed because you're not a Highgold by...sixteen summers? Seventeen?”
She shrugged. “Thereabouts. The count gets a little thrown off for a while.”
“And you’re not just a Gold! You were hand-selected by the Sword Sage himself! Compared to Eithan…” He hesitated, because he wasn’t sure how powerful the Sword Sage was. He’d never heard of the man until Suriel had mentioned him as Yerin’s master.
“He was much stronger than an Underlord,” she said quietly.
“Underlords and Sages are fighting over you. It wasn’t until this year that I could push an eight-year-old Copper off his feet, while you could carve your way through a mountain with a dull spoon.”
“I have more than one reason why I can’t just drift merrily along,” she said, but a smile had started to creep onto her face. “You don't have to polish me up, you know. I'm just venting smoke.”
Lindon tucked the parasite ring into his pack, making sure all the pockets were closed and fastened before he hoisted it onto his shoulder. “I'm not ‘polishing’ anything. The heavens opened up and showed me visions of all the greatest people on the planet, people who can wrestle dragons and strike down armies. Then they brought me to you. You’re all so far above me you might as well be stars.”
The words hung in the air for a moment before he heard them, and then some heat rose into his cheeks. He didn't look away, though.
Yerin gave him a lopsided smile, and this one sunk into his memory: her smile, the thin scars standing out against her skin, her black hair mussed from training so it didn’t look straight anymore.
“That has a sweet sound to it, now you've said it,” she said at last. The instant passed, and she turned to open the door onto the screaming wind. “Heavens never came down to show me anything, and that's the truth.”
***
Eithan stopped in his tracks even as the front windows filled with crags of black stone: Shiryu Mountain, the peak where the last of the dragons had gone to die. He'd intended to leave the children to their little moment—they would need to trust each other even more than they trusted him, and trust was always built on small, personal moments—but a phrase caught his ear, carried to him on threads of power.
The heavens opened up and showed me...
He tended to smile by default, but now his grin stretched his lips to the breaking point. He'd wondered. From the first glimpse of that little glass ball in Lindon's pocket, the one with the steady blue flame, he'd wondered. Some of the boy's comments, some of his actions, had made him more and more certain.
And now...now he knew.
The heavens opened up...
Very interesting indeed.
Chapter 8
With Cassias actively working at the control panel and Eithan standing proudly in front of the windows, Lindon and Yerin looked down over the city of Serpent's Grave.
“This,” Eithan announced, “is the birthplace of the Blackflame Empire. The imperial capital has moved over time, and moved again, but here is where it all began: where the last of the dragons who once ruled this land were finally brought down.”
“Dragons?” Yerin asked, unsettled.
“That's where the empire got its name. After the dragons were destroyed, a certain family found a source of their power, ruling for centuries like dragons themselves. That source lies beneath us, although of course it's been all but tapped out over the genera
tions.”
Lindon had been raised to believe dragons were myths—or if they did exist, only in the heavens. But Suriel had shown him a dragon beneath the sea.
And besides, something had left all those bones.
The black mountain beneath them rose from a desert like the crest of a dark, frozen wave. A vast spine, yellowed with age, twisted and curled around the rock, with a serpentine skull resting at the mountain's foot.
It was the most complete skeleton in Serpent's Grave, but far from the only one. A claw here, a pile of sharpened fangs there. And Sky's Mercy had yet to begin its descent—if he could see them from here, what would they look like on the ground?
“Serpent's Grave,” Lindon said aloud, and Eithan pointed to him.
“Well named, isn't it? I have to applaud the empire’s straightforward naming sense.”
The floor fell out from Lindon’s feet.
He caught himself on the edge of a table, which was bolted to the floor, and sank into one of the chairs. He'd discovered over the course of the journey that it was best to take a descent sitting down.
Yerin joined him, and Cassias was braced against the control panel with eyes locked on his landing, but Eithan stood with his hands in the pockets of his red-and-gold outer robe. His head was almost pressed against the glass, which reflected his smile.
As they fell lower, Lindon started to make out details among the bones. Dark spots in the bones resolved into holes—windows and doors, through which people streamed. The streets wound around the biggest bones but cut through others, which had been hollowed out or stacked together to make buildings.
Lindon leaned forward in his seat. Over the years, these people had carved a city into a dragon's graveyard. A long, straight bone, sticking out of the earth, was covered in windows and ringed with stairs. A fractured skull had a huge gong mounted in the eye socket. Four claws reached out of the ground with man-sized lanterns dangling from their tips.
The city had even crawled up the mountain, so that the black stone bristled with towers. More bones rose like a thorny crown from the mountain’s peak, with palaces nestled between its spikes.
Lindon was overwhelmed at the sight of it all. Sacred Valley had what they called towns and cities, but this city dwarfed his imagination. Even leaving aside the size, he had never heard so much as a legend about a city of dragon’s bone.
This was the world Suriel had opened for him. His myths didn’t even come close.
Sky's Mercy was circling one location: a rib cage, with the gaps between each rib closed by pale stone and mortar. A pair of banners—blue and black and white—flew from the highest peaks, proudly displaying the Arelius crest. Cassias descended until they were almost on top of the bones, then drifted to the end closest to the mountain.
Massive greenhouses stretched in rows behind the buildings, their glass roofs letting in sunlight and allowing Lindon to see the fields of crops growing inside. Scripts shone along the outside walls, and rain fell from one of the ceilings.
The sacred artists here had advanced beyond the need to live off the land. They had bottled up their farmland and taken it with them.
One plot with enough space to hold another enclosed farm had been left empty, little more than a wide square of reddish dirt. Cassias steered them until they floated over that square, and slowly edged down the last few feet.
Eithan turned from the window and walked to the door, hair streaming behind him. “I don't know about you,” he said, “but I'm ready to get to work.”
Cassias left the controls, running a hand through his yellow curls. He had worn his best today, and he smoothed every crease in his shirt as though worried about leaving the slightest imperfection.
Lindon was wearing a sacred artist’s robe in the Arelius colors, but it was weathered from the trip. He wondered if he should have asked for something more presentable, but Yerin was wearing the same tattered black she always did, and she didn’t seem concerned.
Eithan threw open the door, revealing a hundred people arranged in ten rows of ten, all clad in blue with the black crescent on their backs. Lindon had a very good view of their backs, as they had all prostrated themselves on the ground with their heads pressed against the reddish dirt.
“The Arelius family greets the Patriarch,” they shouted, in a unified voice that shook the ground.
Yerin winced and knuckled her ear. “Wouldn’t have turned down a warning.”
“Patriarch?” Lindon repeated. Eithan heard him and turned.
“Oh, yes, I’m the head of the family. I expected you to have guessed that by now.”
Cassias stepped in front of Eithan, his steel bracer Goldsign gleaming in the sun. “Number one, step forward and report.”
The leftmost servant in the front row, a heavyset woman in her middle years, stepped up and bowed to the Patriarch.
Even she was dressed for a festival. Polished blue-and-silver combs held back her gray-streaked hair, her servant’s uniform looked perfectly new, and rings glistened on her fingers.
Lindon first thought that even the servants lived like royalty here, but he supposed the Underlord’s arrival was a big day. Perhaps this was like an audience with a king.
She didn’t make her report in front of everyone, as Lindon had expected. Instead, she moved to whisper in Cassias’ ear. After a moment, Cassias turned to address Eithan in a normal tone.
“Since I have been gone, our misfortune has multiplied. Our fourth-ranked crew of lamplighters working on the mountain have returned with severe burns. They refuse to implicate anyone, but they were working on the peak, just outside the palaces of the Jai clan.”
Eithan dipped his head, and the servant woman continued whispering in Cassias’ ear.
Lindon exchanged glances with Yerin. The whispering was pointless. Eithan could hear everything, and could probably read a list of issues pinned against a wall halfway across the city. The Underlord gave no indication that this bothered him, or was in any way unusual.
He nodded through a few more reports before Cassias said, “We’ve recently received reports indicating a natural spirit has formed in the sewer.”
Eithan looked over in surprise, though he must have heard the story at the same time Cassias did. “Have we let the sewers back up so badly, then?”
“It’s a life spirit. Apparently the Jai clan had a mishap some weeks back, when their refiners dumped failed elixirs into the same chamber where the Soulsmiths disposed of their dead matter. It was an…unexpected reaction.”
Cassias’ tone told Lindon exactly how ‘unexpected’ it had been, but Eithan only nodded again. “Two and a half miles east,” the Underlord said. “Just south of the Sandstorm Quarter, directly beneath the fountain shaped like a three-headed dragon.”
Cassias turned to the rows of kneeling servants. “Ninety-nine and one hundred,” he said. The two people in the back rose to their feet, bowed, and then scurried off.
The woman whispered again. “The paint was beginning to chip outside the Jai clan’s second-ranked auction house,” Cassias reported. “We repainted overnight, but the new coat was scraped and marred in the morning. The Jai clan reported our painters, but it was our top-ranked crew.”
Someone tugged on Lindon’s sleeve, and he leaned down to hear what Fisher Gesha had to say. Yerin leaned in next to them, listening.
“You’ve noticed the ranks, hm? Everything here in the proper Blackflame Empire has its place, numbered and categorized. You always know which restaurant is the best, which public lavatory is the worst, which servant is more useful than another. Everything they do here is about climbing one number higher, you see?”
Yerin huddled closer. “That’s a twisty way of doing it.”
Gesha hit Lindon on the side of the head. “The opposite of twisty, isn’t it? Everything’s clearly laid out. Higher-ranked businesses can charge more, the highest-ranked disciples get the best resources, and the top families get more support from the empire.”
“What did
you mean the proper Blackflame Empire?” Lindon asked. “And why did you hit me?”
Gesha hit him again. “Blackflame Empire covers more land than you think. The Emperor holds the title to the Desolate Wilds, only there’s nothing he wants out there, so he leaves us to ourselves. The empire stretches past the mountain range to the west of us, but I couldn’t tell you just how far, could I?”
Lindon had grown up in the mountain range to the west of the Desolate Wilds, and he could say with confidence that no one there had heard of the Blackflame Empire. It was widely accepted that the land outside Sacred Valley was untamed and barbaric.
Eithan joined their conversation, speaking out one side of his mouth. “The Emperor hasn’t been able to hold on to the full scope of its territory for two generations now, though don’t let the imperial clan hear you spreading that around. As for the ranking, I’m proud to say that we are the first of the major servant families, subject only to the great clans of the empire. I myself am considered the eleventh strongest of the Underlords.” He flashed a smile. “But I’m first in charm!”
Lindon wondered if charm was actually ranked.
Cassias discreetly elbowed Eithan, concluding his report with, “Due to a series of anonymous reports, the Skysworn are currently investigating us for negligence. The Jai clan have publicly proposed that the Redflower family supervise sanitation, with our employees given to their authority. The Redflowers have repeatedly declined.”
Eithan straightened himself up and looked over the servants. “I have witnessed the business of the family, and let it be known that I am more than satisfied with our performance. The inner and outer members of the family have honored our name, and our employees have behaved with dedication and loyalty. I could not be more pleased with how this family has conducted itself in my absence.”
Cassias stared wide-eyed at Eithan as though he’d never seen him before. The servants all reacted differently: some bowed lower, some raised their heads to gaze on the Underlord, and others shouted loyalty to the Arelius family or insults to the Jai clan.