Unsouled (Cradle Book 1) (12 page)

Then he threw a rock at the hornet’s nest.

Hornets buzzed out an instant later, furious and seeking vengeance…but not
living
hornets. Remnants. They were made of bright emerald color, as though some artist had dipped her brush in a jar of green ink and painted them onto the world. But not in full detail. Rather than accurate depictions of the hornets they’d been in life, these Remnants were mere sketches. Outlines, swirls of lines and shape that somehow
suggested
hornets.

The swarm flitted around Lindon’s circle, stingers at the ready. Script wasn’t some magic language of the heavens, as old mythology suggested. Each rune was a shape that guided vital aura in the air, reshaping it to a new purpose. This particular circle was the reverse of the one he’d used on the Remnant of the ancestral tree; it would catch and eject any madra that attempted to cross the line.

And Remnants, while strange and powerful, were made entirely of madra.

The hornets could fly high enough that the script circle would lose its effect, but they didn’t. They stayed, either unaware that they could fly over, or intrigued enough to hear what the human had to say.

Lindon hoped it was the latter. For one thing, that suggested that these Remnants were intelligent enough to hear him out. Which meant they’d be less likely to flock through and sting him to death as soon as the circle dropped.

The only way to judge a Remnant’s intelligence was through experience. The tree-Remnant, the newborn spirit of a plant, had displayed little intelligence at all. If this swarm was smart enough to wait on him, he could take a little risk.

Lindon held up the other object he’d brought inside the circle with him: a clay jar with a wide mouth and a tight-fitting lid. He opened the lid, showing the hornet Remnants the shining blue crystal—barely the size of a child’s fingernail—that lay within.

At the sight of the crystal flask, the hornets buzzing increased to a frantic pace.

“Honored sacred beasts, this one comes to you in humility,” Lindon began. They weren’t sacred beasts any longer, but more respect was always better than less when it came to Remnants. Or people, he supposed. “In exchange for this offering of spirit, this one begs you to wait inside this vessel for only three days’ time.”

Sacred artists typically filled flasks this size by the handful, but this one had taken him almost a week. It was the best he could do, considering how little strength he started with, and how exhausted his spirit was after a day of training with Kelsa.

The bright hornets buzzed frantically, pushing as close to the circle as they dared, hungering for the bare human power they sensed within. A few of the green-sketched shapes got a little too close, and their own energy activated the script. Runes shone weakly, and an invisible force pushed them backwards.

This circle could be overwhelmed, and would do precisely nothing against Remnants with bodies bigger or more solid than these insects, but tonight it held.

Can they understand me?
Lindon wondered. He cleared his throat and tried again.

“Honorable…cousins of the hive, this one wonders if you would agree to rest inside this jar. In return, this one gives you an offering of his spirit. In only three days—”

A buzzing interrupted him, forming a voice, harsh and monotone. “WHY?”

Lindon’s breath caught. He had hoped they were intelligent enough to accept a crude barter. It had never occurred to him that they might
speak.

He bowed forward so deeply that his forehead pressed against dirt, just shy of the script. He almost shivered, knowing that their emerald stingers were only inches from his scalp, but it would be disrespectful to show fear in front of this strange Remnant. Not to mention unwise.

“This one wishes to call upon your might before the sun sets three days hence. This one will break the jar, whereupon you will attack another human of my direction. Not this one, if it pleases you. One other.”

The buzzing dipped and rose, as though the hive were trying to find the right pitch for the words. “WE…TAKE. SPIRIT. ROCK.”

The flask.
“Of course, sacred ones! Take it. Drain it dry. It is yours.”

The hornets spun around in a dance, conferring with one another. Human madra was more than mere food and water to Remnants; they could advance with it. Evolve. Gain in wisdom, power, and concentration.

He didn’t care if they ascended to the heavens, so long as they helped him.

“AGREE,” the hive responded.

Lindon hastily scuffed the nearest symbol with the heel of his foot, but fear punched him in the gut as soon as he did. In his eagerness to close, he hadn’t specified anything about his current safety. They had agreed not to attack him once he released them, but nothing stopped them from plunging their stingers into him
tonight.

Abandoning dignity, he curled up into a ball as they swarmed past him and into the jar. He held arms over his face for a full minute or two, sweating, before he realized that the buzzing had quieted.

He glanced into the jar. A cluster of hornet Remnants, like sketches of green paint, climbed all over each other at the bottom. The tiny flask was only visible as a faint twinkling of light, and as he watched, that light dimmed. A few of the closest Remnants brightened visibly, gaining new details: here a new joint on a leg, there a segment of carapace, as though they somehow grew more real before his eyes.

He bowed once more to the open jar before carefully placing the lid on. As soon as they couldn’t see him, he wiped sweat from his brow and sagged down in relief.

Remnants weren’t likely to kill him, not as long as he dealt with them in good faith, but they could very well have taught him a painful lesson. This had been a gamble—not a huge one, but one with a potentially uncomfortable downside.
 

The wise gambler bets on the fastest horse
. The Wei clan had taught him well. Eagerly, he wrapped a line of weighted shadesilk around the jar. When tied, this held the lid, ensuring that an awkward misstep on his part wouldn’t spill hornets everywhere.

The Remnants could fly straight through the jar, if they wished. A ring of script around the sides discouraged that, but it was even weaker than the circle he’d used to protect himself earlier. They could push through as easily as a man pushing through a screen. What really held them was their word.

It wasn’t as though Remnants couldn’t lie, but rather that they acted exactly according to their nature. For most, they simply wouldn’t accept an unfavorable deal. It would never occur to them to accept and then break it.

Lindon erased all evidence of the night’s work in minutes, packing his gear up in his worn brown pack. The jar of Remnants went in last of all, carefully secured.

It was most of two hour’s hike back to the clan, but he hardly noticed the time. His chances had just doubled.

He walked past the street that led to his rooms, instead heading back to the arena. The guards allowed him back in without further questions, leaving no one to watch him. They were his family, if only distantly; they knew him. So no one saw as Lindon took a shovel to the soft earth, digging straight down until he bared the sides of the stone blocks that made up the stage floor.

When he got beneath them, he adjusted his angle, hollowing out a space under the block. A space just big enough for a sealed clay jar.

He was sliding the jar into the opened earth when his mother’s voice sounded from behind him.

“Still practicing?”

Chapter 8

Lindon turned to face his mother, hiding the hole and the sealed jar behind him. “Your son is honored to see you here, Mother. But why...I mean, if I may ask why you...”

Seisha saved him the effort of explaining by walking forward and leaning over the hole he'd dug. Her drudge gurgled as it floated over her shoulder, no doubt detecting the Remnant sealed within.

“While the arena is under construction, the staff answer to me,” Seisha said, kneeling to run a finger along his scripted jar. “I asked them to report anyone entering tonight, but I never thought it would be you.”

Lindon was afraid to move, lest it somehow push his mother over the edge from calm to furious. “I'm sorry to have disturbed you, then.”

Seisha stood, flipping brown hair over one shoulder. “You can think of nothing else you've done that might warrant an apology?”

Despite the cool of the night, he broke out in a sudden sweat. He had thought of cover stories depending on who caught him, but none of them would pass his mother.

She looked into the hole with brown eyes, lighter than anyone else in the clan. “Back home, we had a saying. 'The disciple follows the master, but the genius blazes their own trail.' You should cover this up before someone else sees it.”

Lindon wasted a second on astonishment before grabbing his shovel and setting to work. He piled the dirt back in hastily, hoping she wouldn't change her mind. “Mother, are you calling me a genius?”

“Obviously not. It's just a saying.” He couldn't deny a moment of disappointment before his mother continued. “Nonetheless, I’m proud of you.”

The shovel felt light in his hands as his mother's words danced through his mind, so it wasn't until he'd worked in silence for minutes more that he thought to ask a question. “Who were you expecting?”

She gave him a wry glance. Because he knew her, he knew what it meant: she had hoped he wouldn't ask that question. But Wei Shi Seisha would answer it anyway, because she believed that curiosity should always be rewarded. “Have you heard any rumors about the Li clan recently?”

The First Elder had said they were too quiet, suspiciously so, but Lindon suspected he wasn't supposed to have that information. He shook his head.

“Three months ago, they purchased an unusual item from an auction. A fragment of a stone tablet dating back thousands of years, supposedly found at the base of the Nethergate. It was covered in runes that may have had some...unique properties. But no one could ever prove it.”

“What sort of properties?” Lindon asked, leaning on his shovel.

“It looked like half of a script intended for direct spatial transportation. The stuff of myths. Walk into one circle and emerge in another one a world away, stories like that. I examined the tablet myself, before the Li clan bought it, and I could not confirm it.”

Still, Lindon's imagination burned with the possibilities. That really was the stuff of legends.

“Since they bought the tablet, we haven't heard much from them at all, but we've started to receive reports that they've been hunting specific Remnants. A rabbit that crosses yards in the blink of an eye. A bat that can vanish into nothing. A mole that burrows through thin air. We believe they're trying to condense spatial madra.”

Spatial
madra. It sounded ridiculous. “Apologies, Mother, but how could that be? How could madra take on the form of
space
?”

She pointed at him, and he knew he'd struck the heart of the matter. “It can't. Madra can imitate anything from fire to dreams, and we call those forms ‘aspects.’ Obviously, to speak of space having a form is absurd. They are actually seeking to pierce and control space
using
madra, which should be impossible.”

But there had to be more to the story, or his mother wouldn't be so uneasy. “Then the Li clan is wasting their time. And their money.”

“I've worked with some of the Li Soulsmiths, who would be leading any project involving Remnants. They're underhanded and some of their theories are suspect, but they wouldn't commit clan resources to a project unless they had reason to believe it could succeed.
That
is what scares me. Everything I've heard leads me to believe that they're investing everything into a fool's dream, so they've either gone insane...or they know something we don't.”

Lindon shivered even as he finished filling in the whole he'd dug beneath the stage, patting the soil down so that it fell flush with the stone block. If the Li clan did try something during the Festival, it reassured him that he at least had one hidden weapon.

Seisha held a glowing blue stick of Forged madra up for her drudge's inspection, and it ran segmented legs over the stick before whistling in response. She noted something down on her notepad. After only a few minutes, she'd already moved on to her next project. “If you've finished, we should leave the arena. It won't be long before someone asks what we've been doing here, and the shovel will be hard to explain.”

On their way out, Lindon asked a question that had unnerved him as soon as he'd thought of it. “Will the Li clan try something during the Festival?”

“Undoubtedly they will,” she said, deep in her notebook. When he responded with uneasy silence, she elaborated. “The clans always try something during the Seven-Year Festival, because it's the best time to strive against one another. They'll propose 'sure' bets, or try to rig trading agreements. Nothing unusual. As for our earlier discussion—” They were walking past a guard, who nodded to them as they left. “—I suspect it will take them years before they have anything functional. Real research takes generations to perfect.”

“Then why were you expecting them tonight?”

She gave him a wry smile. “Because I try to expect the worst.”

***

Information requested: the Seven-Year Festival.

Beginning report…

Every seven years, the clans of Sacred Valley hold a festival.

While the original purpose of this gathering was to promote unity, it has become the primary stage on which they compete. The children of the clan are taught to identify the others by their clothes—armor and a red sash for the Kazan, with their banners bearing three stone dogs; a white fox with five tails for the Wei, who always match white with purple; and the Li, who wear too much jewelry and carry banners bearing the Snake and the Tree.

These are your enemies,
the children are told.
One day, our clan will be strong, and we will crush the other two under our heels.

It has been this way for a hundred generations.

The Wei clan hosts the Festival this year, so outside craftsmen have inhabited clan grounds for months. They build booths of orus wood, dig trenches, paint houses, smooth roads, and generally prepare the clan for an influx of rivals. The Wei are never so clean, organized, and well-presented as in the days leading up to the Seven-Year Festival.