by Will Wight
Seisha pushed him aside, drudge still floating over her shoulder. “Keep your eyes open. Learn what you can. However it turns out today, it's not the end of your path.”
Behind her mother, Kelsa nodded. “Don't push yourself too hard. If they shame you too badly, I'll pay them back in the Iron trials.”
Lindon looked at his family. Each of them had shown up for a word before the matches, which was more than he expected or deserved. He was warmed by the mere fact that they had tried, and he dipped his head to show his gratitude.
But the warmth was balanced by cold knowledge: none of them expected him to succeed. Even his mother, who knew he planned to cheat. Even his sister, who had helped him train. Even his father, who led him to speak with the First Elder and leverage an additional reward. None of them actually believed he could do it.
In the end, he could only rely on himself.
There was an elaborate welcome ceremony involving the booming voice of the Patriarch, the blessing of each of the four Schools, and a parade of illusory snowfoxes from the Wei clan elders on the sidelines. Lindon watched none of it. His attention was inside, following the blue-white energy of his madra as it traveled through the complex network of lines inside his body. He guided it, matching it to his breathing, purifying the energy. Cycling it.
When the other children on his bench stood, he was ready.
There were hundreds of Foundation children participating, and he was fortunate—or unfortunate—enough to be in the first batch. He and fifteen others walked onto the stone stage, as directed by an elder of the Wei clan. He walked into a square, an eighth of the stage, against a boy with the jewelry of the Li clan. The boy looked no more than ten, and his eyes were wide as he took in the size of his opponent.
A few laughs drifted Lindon's way from the Li and Kazan sections, and he imagined them noticing the fifteen-year-old with the wooden badge. It didn't hurt as much as he'd expected.
He and the boy bowed to one another even as the other seven pairs did the same. A purple star flared in the air above them, created by a White Fox technique, and the elder's voice filled the arena. “Begin!”
Lindon stepped forward, bending to get low enough, and drove an Empty Palm into the boy's stomach.
The boy fell to his knees, his spirit failing him, and cupped both hands to his gut with a look of astonishment. Lindon shoved him over the lines marking the boundary of his square.
“Winner!” the elder announced, powerful Iron lungs carrying his voice into the distance. A second after the match had started, Lindon walked away. Bands loosened on his lungs, and he felt as though he could breathe again for the first time that morning.
He wasn't doomed after all. His trump card had worked. It had worked.
When the jeers sprouted up among the audience, even among the Wei, he only smiled.
“Cheater!” someone shouted.
“Coward!”
“Trash!”
His smile became a laugh, and he walked back to the bench chuckling. Their insults couldn’t touch his sheer delight. Words were nothing, less than nothing, compared to the facts: he had used the sacred arts to overthrow another sacred artist in battle. He was winning like a Copper.
Not like an Unsouled.
He tripped a girl after an Empty Palm, and she stumbled to her hands and knees. When she started to cry, the crowd's shouting redoubled. He grinned all the way back to his seat.
In the weeks leading up to the Seven-Year Festival, he’d trained every day to deal with possible threats. What if an opponent could resist the Empty Palm? What if they had a technique they could land on him first? What if his madra was exhausted before the later rounds?
But as the sun crept past noon and Lindon defeated his fifth opponent, he realized there was one scenario he’d never prepared for: easy victory. None of these children had a countermeasure for the Empty Palm, and once their sacred arts were disabled, superior size and strength made their loss trivial.
His hidden weapon, sealed in a jar and buried beneath the stage, would stay hidden.
He hoisted a Kazan boy by the red sash, tossing him out of bounds. The Kazan section rose up in a furious sea of red and gray, but he just waved at them as he walked away from the stage.
Joy burned in his chest like a torch.
***
Wei Shi Seisha stopped watching the exhibition matches as soon as it was clear her son would win. She had expected he would; he was older than all of his opponents, and had finally found a technique he could use in spite of his deficiency. She had every confidence that he would grow into a productive member of the clan now, though once she had doubted.
She began to pace the arena, checking scripts on the conductive pillars that held the illusory images of Elder Whisper. Sometimes visitors would deface scripts like this, but the mere presence of an inspector would reduce such occurrences significantly. She had almost an hour before Lindon would have to fight an opponent at the Copper level, which was plenty of time to make at least one lap around the arena.
The first anomaly appeared when she was passing the Li clan entrance. She happened to glance between the seating sections and noticed a Li clan elder—his jewelry all gold and jade, befitting his status as a Jade-stage practitioner—slipping out the door. She paused, curious, and another Li elder followed a moment later.
Seisha reached up and tapped the side of her drudge, carrying a drop from her spirit. The construct whistled an affirmative.
Drudges were all the tools a Soulsmith required rolled into one. They could measure madra output, determine its aspects, analyze the parts of a Remnant, and even help separate that Remnant into its components with minimal loss. Soulsmithing primarily revolved around deconstructing and reconstructing Remnants to take advantage of their unique properties, and without a drudge, it was almost impossible to do so accurately. Like a surgeon operating with her hands taped together and one eye shut.
In this case, Seisha had anticipated trouble from the Li clan, and so had gone to great lengths to acquire samples from Remnants similar to the ones they'd recently captured: the teleporting rabbit, vanishing bat, and space-warping mole. Her drudge could track a Remnant based on a sample like a hound taking a scent, and while trying to track three 'scents' at once would be complex, it was worth attempting.
With a specific pattern of madra pulses, she activated the drudge's tracking feature. It complied with a burble, unfolding tiny antennae as it executed the search. Those antennae were always the first thing to decay on any drudge, so she tried to use them sparingly, as they were expensive to replace. But this was a worthy cause. If the Li clan was attempting some kind of coup on the first day of the Seven-Year Festival, she had to clip this bud before it flowered.
Her drudge honked only seconds after the search had begun, startling her. The range on such detection was incredibly limited, and even more so when she'd packed three samples at once. There was always the chance of a false positive, but with such a quick response...
The Remnants, or something that reminded her construct of their power, was here. Possibly inside the arena.
She signaled the two closest of her assistants, young men with iron hammers on their badges. She had trained them for years, even if neither of them made promising Soulsmiths, and they had volunteered to help her secure the arena. Both came running.
“Li clan elders are slipping away,” she said. “One of you report to the First Elder, and the other can follow me.” She turned toward the Li entrance, leaving it to them to decide which would take on which task.
The arena had been constructed on the edge of Wei land, so it was enveloped on three sides by a forest: a sea of green dotted with the occasional purple island as an orus tree was mixed in with its more mundane counterparts. Aside from the gravel path leading away from the exit and back toward the main property, she saw nothing.
But her quarry was more advanced in the sacred arts, and she had to respect that. With a whisper of White Fox madra and an effort o
f focused will, she Forged a disguise.
The Wei clan Forgers trained in the Fox Mirror technique for years, learning to create illusionary copies with a dizzying degree of detail. Her peers specialized in creating copied faces, full-body duplicates, or even camouflaged walls that would render the user invisible. There were imperfections in each of these techniques, specifics that violated reality in ways that could be noticed.
She specialized in clothing. Layered robes of white and purple turned to green in an instant, jewelry glinting on each finger and both ears. Illusory necklaces hung down to her chest, and even her iron badge dangled from a gold chain. Her face would remain the same, but it wasn't as though the Li clan knew her on sight. Her hair could be a slight problem—brown hair was more common in the Kazan clan, but not the Li. She would have to risk it. In the shadow of the trees, her hair looked more black than brown anyway.
As her escort Forged his own disguise, a clumsy green cloak that he threw over himself, she followed the direction of her drudge into the forest. It clicked or whistled to her occasionally, changing her direction, but the chase took much less time than she'd expected.
Less than five minutes after leaving the arena, she spotted a flash of pink light through the trees, along with a man's raised voice. She silenced her drudge, cradling it in her arms like an infant, and signaled her guard to quiet. Carefully, she crept forward.
The Li clan disguise would stop them from attacking her outright, but it wouldn't save her from a thorough questioning...which she would prefer to avoid. Ideally, she wouldn't be caught at all.
Her skin tingled as she slid quietly closer, heart pounding, her well-practiced breathing technique strained by excitement. She hadn't worked against other clans since she reached Iron in her twenty-second year, but she'd missed it. She felt a rare pang of empathy for Jaran; he'd fought far more than she had, in his youth, and the lack of that thrill must add to his bitterness.
Seisha stopped when she was close enough to see the Li. They weren't all Jade, but a mix of Jades and Irons. The youngest was older than she was. Nine in total, though she was staring through a flowering cloudbell bush, so she could have missed one or two in the back. They were gathered around a circle in the forest floor, a circle made of tiles. A script.
They'd brought tiles the size of an open hand, each etched with a rune or sigil. When connected properly, they would function as well as a full-size script circle. It was a technique she’d seen before, mostly in cases where the circle might have to be redesigned quickly.
The three Remnants had been caged and placed at three distinct points around the circle. The blue rabbit chewed frantically at its prison, clutching at the bars with hands that looked almost human A pink series of swirls that might generously be called a bat flapped in place, fading in and out of existence but still unable to shift through the scripted cage. Finally, a brown-and-black mass with huge silver shovels for claws sat motionless, watching its captors with beady eyes.
All of the Remnants here, and all whole. No wonder her drudge had located their signatures so quickly; she hadn't expected them intact and so close.
The Jade man at the head of their party continued speaking, dictating to them as though repeating a lesson taught many times before. “...first the anchor, and then the call. If he doesn't answer, we have to be fresh enough to try again as soon as the next window opens. Shao, have you confirmed our location?”
Seisha didn't know the speaker, but she knew Shao, one of the Li clan's most accomplished Forgers. He was bald and tiny, with an appearance closer to a fresh disciple than an expert at tracking and locating Remnants.
His own drudge, like a gleaming steel sword too fat and dull to be of any use to anyone, sprouted antennae like a pincushion. He listened to its whistles, checked something on a scroll, made a note with chalk and slate, and then consulted a map. Finally, he nodded. “We are, honored elder. He should emerge at exactly this spot, if we time the doorway correctly.”
“If we fail again, he will punish all of us,” the highest-ranking elder said, voice grim. A palpable shudder moved through Shao, as well as a few of the others. “Let us see that doesn’t happen. Are we ready to begin?”
Shao checked a few more notes, his bald head bobbing up and down, before he shot up abruptly. “It's now!” he screamed. “Ignite the script now, now, now!”
The Li elders scrambled for their tiles on the ground, injecting madra into them with a novice's haste. The script glowed white, irregularly at first, but within seconds it had settled into a smooth pulse.
The three Remnants, inside the circle, obviously sensed something was wrong. One and all, they began to screech in the peculiar way of their kind—the mole sounded like an avalanche, the bat like wind whistling through high peaks, the rabbit like the swift beat of a heart.
This is it, Seisha thought, but she hadn't been prepared. From her discovery to the activation of the script had only taken a minute, maybe two. Should she disrupt the script and face the consequences, or run back and tell the First Elder? The Li elders technically hadn't done anything yet. But if she watched, it would soon be too late.
Ultimately, the decision was taken out of her hands.
Only a breath after the script's first light, the Remnants popped and bubbled, as though the ink that painted them on the world had begun to boil. Their complaints grew louder and louder until their bodies fizzed away into motes of light.
That in itself was not so unusual. As they expended power, Remnants dissolved back into the madra that formed them. But she'd never seen it happen so fast, and never to such an effect.
The spots of color, pink and blue and dark brown, swirled around inside the script like snakes in water. They spun closer and closer, getting tighter and tighter, before gathering into a single form that looked like nothing so much as a muddy inkblot.
Only a blink after the process had begun, it was finished. A tiny blue spark flared to life in the center of the ink-stain, glowing brighter every second.
“It worked,” Shao breathed, before the light shot into a single line the height of a man. It looked like the edge of light down one side of a doorway, and as she watched, that doorway slid open.
She never saw anything but a rectangle of deep, textured blue light before the whole construction collapsed, the energy of the Remnants dispersing, the power that had animated the script fizzling out. For a breath she believed they had failed, that whatever summoning they were attempting had fizzled and died. Then the light cleared.
A man stood in the center of the circle.
His clothes were an oddity for Sacred Valley: he dressed in fine black furs, with a broad belt holding various tools. A sword hung from that belt, straight-bladed and unsheathed. Diamonds glistened in each ear, silver chains held diamonds on his chest, and yet more silver and diamonds on his fingers, as though he'd chosen to bedeck himself in imitations of ice. He wore his black hair short, but streaks of white ran through it like a tiger's stripes.
Those were his ordinary features, though, the facts about him that her panicked mind couldn't help but catalogue. They were not what she noticed first.
When he appeared in the circle, he stretched his wings.
They unfolded at least thirty feet from tip to tip, and the structure of bones and tendons were coal-black. But the skin that stretched between them was pale and colorless, as though he'd stripped the wings from some giant arctic bat.
He grinned, flashing fangs. “There is nothing so grand as a second chance.”
The Li clansmen all but collapsed to their knees, grinding foreheads against the dirt. Seisha was tempted to do the same.
“This one is humbled by your mercy, Grand Patriarch.” The elder who had spoken earlier still spoke for the group, even when he was too terrified to raise his face. “Thank you for allowing this modest group the chance to atone for our failure to serve you the first time.”
Grand Patriarch. Sickness rolled through her gut. He was a previous-generation Patria
rch of the Li clan, but she'd never heard of one surviving. Which left only one terrifying possibility: an ancient immortal had come home.
The Grand Patriarch grunted, rolling his shoulder in its socket. “I have not returned to this realm in some time. Tell me, have the Four Beasts come home?”
The elder hesitated, but the Grand Patriarch laughed in response to his own question. “No need to answer. You still live, so they remain abroad. I should like to test myself against them, once the Valley is united.”
“Yes, Grand Patriarch. Ah, forgive this one your lowly servant, but this one has prepared something for you.” Without raising his head, the elder lifted an object in both his hands.
It was something as mythical as the wings on a human being; something Seisha had never expected to see.
A gold badge, etched with a scepter.
The Grand Patriarch took it, chuckling. “I had forgotten this custom. Are there any other sacred artists of the Gold stage currently in Sacred Valley?”
“Not to this one's poor knowledge, Grand Patriarch.”
“Then it will do.” The Grand Patriarch slipped the shadesilk ribbon over his own neck, then lifted the badge so he could examine it. “If there were, I would have had you craft something more valuable. Gold is entirely deficient to describe the current state of my advancement.”
Judging by the gasps and whispers that traveled through the gathered Li experts, they found that statement as shocking as she did.
The Gold folded his wings, ran a hand through his black-and-white hair, and started off through the woods without another word. The Li hurried after him, clearly startled.
Fortunately for Seisha and her guard, the Li party passed far enough by her that they remained undetected. Unfortunately, the Gold was headed straight for the arena.
As they marched through the woods, the elder hesitantly spoke up. “Forgiveness, Grand Patriarch, but the Festival has only recently begun. The children of the Foundation stage are fighting. Were you to appear now, it would only be an insult to your grand status. This one had planned an event to display your glory, wherein those from other clans could approach—”