Eternal Core (School of Swords and Serpents Book 6)

by Gage Lee

  Her eyes were grave as she folded her legs up into the chair opposite the one I’d chosen. Maps leaned forward like a little kid with a secret, her hands folded under her chin. The youthful gesture was at odds with her ageless stare.

  My sister’s fingers folded and unfolded like a flower blossoming at dawn and then closing against the coming of night. The movements were strange and jerky, like watching a time-lapse farcaster broadcast that had dropped some frames. Finally, she went still and whispered, “Our time together is almost up. Soon you will not need me.”

  Tears splashed from her cheeks onto her hands, then ran down her arms. “I want you to remember that I did my best. I served for the time I had. And, if you can, that I was your sister, and always will be.”

  Her smile didn’t falter as she spoke, but her tears flowed more freely with every syllable. When she’d finished, her hands and wrists glistened with the sorrow Maps had shed.

  My serpents lifted her gently from the chair and pulled her into my lap. I ran my fingers through her long hair until her eyes closed, and she leaned her head against my shoulder. She was so much smaller than I remembered, so much more of a child. And yet, without Maps, none of this would’ve been possible. I kissed her forehead and added a few of my tears to hers.

  There was no time for this. I knew my enemies would search for me again, soon. I didn’t care. My sister needed me, and I wouldn’t fail her after all the times she’d risked herself to help me. The world owed everything to Maps.

  I could spare her a few minutes.

  “I’ll never forget you,” I vowed. “But you better not forget me, either.”

  She smiled, a drowsy little grin, and clutched my hand tighter. “Time’s up, big brother,” she whispered.

  She slipped out of my lap and pulled me to my feet with an exaggerated groan. “So heavy,” she said. “When did you get so fat?”

  I pulled my robes aside to reveal bands of stone stitched into my chest. “I’m half rock now.”

  Maps laughed and tapped the book in my hand. “There’s knowledge in there,” she said. “But I want you to remember one very important fact.”

  She stepped back before I could say anything and gave me a sad little wave. Then she bowed low at the waist, her hair brushing the floor. When she straightened, her smile had vanished. She tapped one finger against her forehead and said, “Remember. The key lies in the beginning.”

  And then, with a sound like the first falling autumn leaf skittering across dry grass, my sister disappeared.

  Somehow, I knew I wouldn’t see her again.

  I opened the book and read page after page. The symbols flowed like water through my thoughts, depositing nuggets of knowledge like flakes of gold. A new awareness blossomed inside me. It burned like nothing I’d ever experienced before, but I still embraced it.

  Because I understood what I had to do, and I knew the price I’d pay to finish the Flame’s quest.

  I closed the book and hid it deep in the Stacks. I didn’t need it anymore, and no one who found it would ever understand it like I had. I left it behind like the shed scales of a snake and headed off to meet my destiny.

  The Rescue

  I’D BEEN IN THE STACKS for less than thirty minutes, but it had almost been too long. A few steps after I left the Manual of the New Moon behind, another brush of attention across my aura sent shivers down my spine. I’d reached one of the School’s many courtyards by then, so my spy buddy couldn’t pin my location to the Stacks. I wasn’t sure that mattered, though. Whoever was onto me was getting faster.

  That was frustrating. My Thread didn’t connect to the Grand Design, which should have made scrying on me very difficult. That I’d been found at all told me the searcher had some connection to me.

  Blood connections were the most powerful, but my parents were dead and tracking Maps would be harder than finding me. My friends had the next strongest ties to me, but Eric was too busy training for his new life to look for me, and both Clem and Abi felt safer with me at a distance. Tycho and I had been at each other’s throats long enough to form a bond, of sorts, but these probing searches didn’t feel like him. He’d have come at me with everything in his arsenal if he wanted to find me.

  So who was it?

  It didn’t matter. I had to keep moving no matter who was trying to find me.

  Because although the Manual of the New Moon had revealed how to create Maps, I wasn’t ready to face the challenge. The process wasn’t difficult, in theory, but it was complex and would definitely attract the attention of my spying friend and their allies. I’d have to complete it in a hurry, and if I made a single mistake, there’d be no time for a do-over.

  If I failed, Maps wouldn’t exist. And without her to poke and prod my path along the Grand Design at the appropriate times, I’d never complete the Empyrean Flame’s quest.

  My best bet was to put off her creation until I’d finished everything else. That would, hopefully, leave me with fewer enemies and in a better position to defend myself against their attacks. Maybe I’d even have some help by then.

  While I tried to decide what to do next, I zipped around the School at full speed. I wanted to prevent my enemies from tracking me down. As long as I kept moving, even the talented scryer wouldn’t be able to pin me to one location.

  During my speed run around the grounds, I replayed Dusalia’s message in my thoughts over and over. There was something about the message that bothered me, some hidden clue that I’d missed.

  When the answer finally came to me, I stopped dead in my tracks and smacked my forehead. Initial capitalization. I dug the note I’d scribbled out of my pocket and read the first letters from every word in the first sentence. D R A C O N I C.

  Draconic.

  The rest of her message suddenly made sense. The dragons knew what I was doing, and they were prepared to react.

  That was why Dusalia warned me to move on an aggressive timetable.

  The dragons were searching for me. They had two of my friends, Niddhogg and Tru. No matter how loyal that pair was, the First Scepter would squeeze them until they worked with the scrying teams.

  I snatched one of the talismans from my robes, clenched it in my fist, and channeled jinsei into it. The scrivenings snapped and popped like a string of New Year’s firecrackers and whisked me back to my dorm room.

  Where I found a group of Guardians digging through my things.

  “Oh, my,” I said. “You picked the wrong suite to burgle, buddies.”

  My serpents lashed out in the blink of an eye. Their blunt edges slammed into the Guardians and sent them sailing across the common room. Two of the soldiers hit the wall next to the door and collapsed in boneless heaps. The third slammed into the ceiling, then fell to the floor with a groan. Numbers four, five, and six were behind me, and caught the brunt of my supernatural appendages’ attacks. The blows hurled them in every direction, smashing my kitchen table to splinters, destroying the cabinets, and knocking my coffee maker through the wall and into the bedroom.

  “Great,” I snapped, “now I don’t even get coffee.”

  I scanned the scene and took in the information I needed in the blink of an eye. The Guardians had turned my apartment inside out. They’d found all of the talismans I’d created and stuffed them into a bag one of the unconscious guards had landed on. I grabbed the bag and shook my head at the Guardians. “Look at this mess you made. Good luck explaining this to Headmaster Reyes. I hope he takes the cleaning bill out of your paychecks.”

  I had no idea who’d put those Guardians on my tail, and no longer cared. It could’ve been Tycho, or one of the other sages, or someone else entirely. It didn’t really matter at this point.

  I tied the bag’s neck around my belt to keep it safe, then took off for my next destination as another sweep passed over my aura. Fantastic.

  Getting anything done with that spy peeking in every few minutes would be impossible. I needed some way to throw them off my track. There was no way to
entirely stop seers, at least none that I knew of. But I knew their searches centered on the target’s core, and that gave me a devious idea.

  I raced to the largest courtyard in the School. It was the site of the Grand Melee, where one of my clan members had nearly killed me on Bishop Grayson’s orders. Dark memories of that day surfaced as I stepped out onto the smooth, grassy field, but I pushed them away. There was no time to worry about the past.

  My spiritual senses identified a handful of rats curled up in their courtyard nests and scampering through the bushes that lined the open area. I reached out and found hundreds more spread throughout the ancient campus, hidden in nooks and crannies or scurrying between the floorboards. I reached out to them with the Borrowed Core technique, my advanced sage core making it a simple task to latch onto every one of them. A dozen, three dozen, a hundred, a thousand.

  I paused for a moment to bask in the power I’d gained since advancing to sage. Holding connections to even a fraction of these rats would have once left me exhausted and burned out for days. But it took me no effort to maintain the Borrowed Core as a sage.

  Tycho and the other sages could have done so much good for the world if they weren’t such selfish monsters. Instead, they’d hoarded their power and used their wiles in a mad scheme to enslave the mortals they were meant to protect.

  “You’ll pay for this,” I whispered a promise to Tycho. “Again.”

  The rats on the other end of the Borrowed Core picked up on my agitation and yearned to help me. Instead, I soothed my thoughts and willed them to go back to doing rat things. Then I channeled streams of jinsei into their cores, giving each of the rodents a tiny portion of my essence. I wasn’t sure if my plan would work, but it seemed solid.

  With my anti-spy defenses set, I made my next move. Ishigara’s scriptorium door was locked, but that was no barrier to me. It took only a tiny fraction of my strength to shatter the lock the maintenance team had replaced after my fight with Nexignus. Sorry, Professor.

  I wrenched the door open and made my way to the back of the room where the storage closets were and appropriated the supplies I thought I’d need. I dumped those into the bag along with the talismans I’d already inscribed. With my loot in tow, I willed the School to take me to the one place I doubted my enemies would dare to look.

  Mama Weaver was not pleased when I pushed open the red lacquered door to her domain.

  “You are not welcome here,” she called, her voice faintly trembling like an out-of-tune violin. “Leave me in peace.”

  “I don’t think I will,” I said. “But if you don’t bother me, I promise to leave when I finish my work.”

  The spider woman emerged from the darkness, peering down at me from the shadows overhead. “There is something wrong about you. You should not exist.”

  “I get that a lot,” I said. “You’re not exactly normal, are you?”

  The spider’s jaws clattered together for a moment, and the lenses that covered her eyes zoomed in and out as if trying to focus on me. The weight of her attention slipped off me like beads of water from a duck’s back.

  “Rats?” Mama Weaver said. “Why are there so many rats within you?”

  I was pleased that had worked even on an ancient spirit so well-versed in the Grand Design’s tricks and traps. “Precautions,” I said. And then, because my curiosity demanded satisfaction, “What are you, anyway?”

  Mama Weaver’s laughter was like the clatter of an unoiled engine. “We are the weavers of webs and singers of strands.”

  Of all the creatures I’d ever met, Mama Weaver and her gargantuan twin near the Umbral Forge were among the most bizarre. “You work for the Empyrean Flame?”

  The spider woman tilted her head back and forth, lenses ratcheting out and then back before she spoke.

  “We are of the Flame. It did not make us, but its work made us inevitable.”

  “That’s helpful,” I said. “Don’t mind me. I’ll be out of your hair in no time.”

  I went to work, eager to finish as many talismans as I could before my spies tracked me down. As complex as the scrivenings were, it didn’t take all of my attention, or even most of it. The understanding I’d gained when advancing to sage made this work almost trivial. That left part of me free to question the spider woman while I worked.

  “You work with the Grand Design,” I said. “Or if not with it, on it?”

  The spider woman descended further until her front arms were close enough to touch me. She didn’t, but I kept a wary eye on them just the same. This strange creature had her own motives, and until I understood them better, I wasn’t about to trust her.

  “We are the great web’s prisoners. It traps us within its geometries, to bear witness to what is coming, and to protect what has been.”

  An idea popped into my head. “And what were you before the Grand Design?”

  “You ask too many questions,” she said in her sewing machine voice. “And you stink of the elemental. I will watch you work and learn your secrets, but I will speak no more.”

  She stayed true to her word and left me to work in silence. I scrivened a dozen talismans, then another dozen, and another. I would have liked to create a few more, but I didn’t want to press my luck. The spy’s search had driven the rats into a frenzy, and he or she had picked up the pace. Their attention drifted over my connections like a bug caught in a spider’s web. They hadn’t tripped over my trick yet, but they would.

  It was time to go.

  “Thank you for your hospitality,” I said to the spider woman. “I appreciate what you have told me and hope I have not troubled you too much.”

  “All mortals are troubling,” she said. “You perhaps most of all. There’s something wrong about you, Jace Warin, something that I fear will be the end of me and my sisters.”

  “I hope not,” I said. “But if I am, that wasn’t my intent.”

  “Very well,” Mama Weaver whispered, and scrambled back up into the shadowed webs far above me.

  I clutched one of the talismans I’d fashioned and fed it a thread of jinsei. The world twisted around me, and I arrived in a corner office overlooking Kyoto’s neon-striped skyline. It was late, but my target was right where all good little workers were. Still at work, still slaving away to make someone else richer.

  “Hey there,” I said to the man sitting behind the desk. He jerked around to face me as if a ghost had run an icy finger down his spine.

  “What are you doing here?” he shouted.

  “I’ve got a job for you,” I said, a faint grin twisting my lips.

  Rafael glared at me for a moment, then leaned back in his chair. “What makes you think I won’t call security right now?”

  “For starters,” I said, “you know I’ll reach you before help arrives. You’re also smart enough to know that if I’d come here to kill you, you’d already be dead.”

  He clenched his hands on the desk in front of him. “Then what are you here for?”

  “Your sister,” I said. “You’re going to rescue her.”

  The Alliance

  RAFAEL DIDN’T LIKE my plan, but he was in no position to cross swords with a sage. In the time since I’d last seen him, Rachel’s brother had settled into the salaryman’s grind. He’d put aside his dreams of advancement and now counted his successes in dollars and cents. A picture of a beautiful young woman on his desk told the other half of the story.

  “I just have to use this talisman, grab Rach, and then use the other talisman?” He looked at me with the expression of a condemned man being led to his execution. “Where does the second one take us?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” I asked in my spookiest Mysterious Black-Eyed Stranger voice. “Wait five minutes, then make your move. Don’t hesitate.”

  “What if I don’t do it?” Rafael asked me. There was a hint of the upperclassman I’d once known in his voice, but just a hint. He’d accepted a different life, and he no longer had the fire in his belly.

 
“Rachel will die,” I said. That part was entirely true. In five minutes, Tycho would know exactly what I was up to, and he’d keep his promise to kill Rachel. The next part was a lie, but Raf didn’t need to know that. “And then I’ll come here and end you. Clear?”

  My onetime enemy and former friend looked at me with wide, wet eyes. Fear aspects dripped from his aura like clots of rotted milk. “I can’t do it. Going against Tycho—”

  “I didn’t mention Tycho’s name,” I said.

  “You didn’t have to,” Raf murmured. “I know Rachel’s part of his experiments. And I know you and he have never been friendly. Stands to reason he’s the one holding her hostage.”

  “Then you know he’ll kill her,” I said with a sigh. “Rafael, you’re better than this.”

  “I’m not,” he insisted. He leaned back in his nice office chair and looked out over the city. “I’m done fighting, Jace. If you have to kill me—”

  I surged across the desk and flipped over Rafael. My serpents snatched him out of his chair as I turned through the air above him, bringing him to my eye level when I landed. Our faces were only inches apart, and I smelled the foul terror on his breath.

  “Summon your fusion blade,” I rasped, my voice rough with emotion. “Now.”

  “Just do it—”

  I rattled Rafael until his teeth chattered. “Do it.”

  “You won’t—”

  “Now,” I snapped, putting enough force behind my voice to make his eyes bug out.

  His blade appeared in his left hand, fitful and flickering like a neon tube about to burn out. The weapon’s form wavered, and it nearly vanished.

  “Raf,” I breathed, lowering him to the ground. “I want you to remember how much you hated me. Feel it in your bones. Dredge up the darkness out of the black place until you can taste it.”