Chapter 9

The Fishers led Lindon back to a tall building that looked like more of a permanent structure than anything around it. He thought of it as a barn, wide and tall with broad doors, and Gesha's spiders scuttled up its walls and inside through holes in the roof.

“I'll deal with you tomorrow, girl,” she said to the young woman as they reached the barn doors. “Be here at dawn, or I'll come root you out with my hook.” The razor edge of her curved goldsteel blade gleamed. The tall woman paled and babbled something, then took the slightest excuse to hurry off. Her friends joined her, casting fearful glances back at the Soulsmith.

Gesha stood there, hands behind her back, like a pocket-sized elder. The spider legs of her drudge worked impatiently against the dirt, but she didn't so much as shift.

Lindon glanced around, looking for some reason why she was just staring at the barn doors. Did she expect them to open themselves? Was she waiting for her spiders to open them for her? Or was she waiting for someone?

With his height, the pack on his back, and the rust-red cloud following him around, Lindon knew he cut a recognizable figure in the darkness. He backed up a step, though he was far enough away that he shouldn't have bothered the Soulsmith. He watched, waiting for some clue, as five minutes turned into ten.

Finally, the old woman barked out, “Do you know what happened to the last man who kept me waiting? Hm? I married him. That's a threat.”

Lindon kept looking around, waiting for someone else to step out of the darkness, before she turned and speared him with a glare over one shoulder. “Well? Do they only teach manners to short Coppers, and not tall ones?”

He rushed a bow over fists pressed together. “This one apologizes for his lack of manners, honored elder. This one was ignorant, and did not realize he was being observed.”

A snort ripped out of the tiny woman. “'This one,' is it? Hurry up, get closer. I may have eyes everywhere, but this pair doesn't work like they used to.”

Lindon hurried over, steadying his pack as he ran. He'd planned on doing something drastic to attract the Fisher's attention, but she was inviting him over on her own. She'd noticed him, and that could only be a good thing.

He bowed again when he reached her, both to show respect and to give him an excuse to lean down so she could get a close look at his face. She squinted at him for a moment through a mask of wrinkles, then patted her bun.

“Are you the tallest five-year-old in the world?” she asked suddenly.

“No, honored elder. This one's training was somewhat delayed.”

“This one, that one. If you say that again, I'll spin your Copper head around on your neck. Now, tell me your name.”

“Wei Shi Lindon, honored elder.”

She grunted. “Does the Wei clan teach you to skulk around as you make requests of an elder? Hm? Are you from a clan of skulkers, Shi Lindon?”

Honestly, he was. The Wei specialized in illusions, and as a result typically hid and waited until they could take advantage of the battle. They fought like snowfoxes, not like tigers, but he doubted that answer would satisfy her.

“Apologies, honored elder. This...I would like to offer my humble services to you, in any way I can.”

She glared at him, her spider's legs clacking against stones hidden in the dirt. “Humble? Humble is an apprentice who can't make a levitation plate out of cloud madra. If a Copper could offer me humble services, he'd be a genius. Are you a genius, Copper?”

He wished she would stop calling him that, but he wasn't about to say so. “My mother was a Soulsmith, and I worked as her assistant since the day I learned to cycle. I know my knowledge is deficient and paltry, but I know many of the basic scripts, I can dissect a Remnant into its functional components, I can perform basic maintenance—”

Gesha made a 'tsst' sound and threw up her hands. “You don't think I have enough to worry about? Go. Go! If you bother me again, I'll set the spiders on you.”

Lindon bowed to her, projecting compliance. “Of course, honored elder. You're tired, and I'm keeping you from your rest.”

In an uncanny display of mind-reading, Gesha said, “I'd best not see you here in the morning, waiting for me to wake up!”

That had been his plan, in fact. A bead of sweat rolled across his forehead. “I would not disrespect the honored elder's wishes that way. But if I may be so rude as to offer one last explanation—”

She flicked fingers at him, and a spider ran down the barn door toward him. Not her drudge, on which she still stood, but an ordinary construct that was probably intended to do nothing but observe and report as commanded.

It was made of jointed purple madra, and it ran on the door as easily as on the ground. Its head was featureless except for a couple of mandibles, which opened as it chirped at him. It sounded more like a bird than a snake, which he hadn't expected. Hadn't it hissed earlier, or was that his imagination?

He dropped his pack to free his shoulders and drew the halfsilver dagger. The constructs back in Sacred Valley had been deadly if directed, but predictable enough if unguarded. But this was the product of a Gold Soulsmith at the head of a sect full of Golds. It might drill its legs through his flesh, leaving little spurting holes, or tear into him with its mandibles, or leave him spun up into a cocoon to decorate the ceiling of the nearby barn...

One of its legs hitched and it almost stumbled, its gait uneven, before it righted itself and continued on. A stumble meant a defect. It must be old, in need of maintenance. That was a weakness he could exploit.

But it was close now, so close that he could hear its sharp feet pricking into the dirt, and that one stumble no longer looked like a weakness at all. Sometimes constructs didn't perform as they should. Maybe the ground had been more treacherous than it looked. It was a slim chance to gamble on.

Then it had reached his feet, and Lindon moved.

He seized the pack from the ground beside him with one hand, holding it like a shield as he flopped belly-first on top of the spider-construct.

The spider tried to scuttle out of the way, but he caught it on the edge, imprisoning it beneath his pack. Its legs flailed, and it gave an angry chirp, but it was pinned. He had it.

His body surged down suddenly, as though he'd grown twice as heavy or someone was standing on his back. His head was pulled down until his nose was all but pressed against its slick gray-purple back, and he realized the truth: the spider was pulling him in.

He didn't know how—undoubtedly it was some function of its madra, or some kind of script—but the spider was using an invisible force to pull him closer.

The halfsilver dagger was in his hand, burning to be used, but he kept it gripped in a tight fist. He'd need that option available, but he had something else to try first.

With a good deal of writhing, he squirmed forward enough to get his left hand onto the spider's back.

Then, adjusting his breathing from panic to a measured cycling technique, he fed pure madra into the construct.

Something like the Thousand-Mile Cloud was relatively simple in its construction. It was made of densely packed cloud madra, which floated. You could activate a single script-circle buried at its core in order to get it to move. It followed the direction of the operator's spirit, not any directions in its actual script, so it was a flexible but simple tool. It would never be able to fly off without active guidance.

The spider, by contrast, was an intricate clockwork of branching scripts, interlocking plates of madra, and delicate organs that must have been extracted from Remnants. His madra flowed through it, giving him a vague picture of its functions, and of the scripts that had to remain active to keep it following orders.

A spark of madra came from a crystal chalice, a tiny speck of a vessel that must power this construct's operation. Using his own madra, Lindon forced the flow from that chalice aside.

It didn't take much power to do so; there was no will behind that madra, so it was easily directed. He simply blocked the flow into the script, keeping it bound inside the crystal.

The spider shivered once, then collapsed. The invisible force on him vanished, leaving him panting in gulps of air.

Irregular, spiky footsteps scraped along the dirt as Gesha slid closer on her drudge, and she would arrive to find him limply hanging on her deactivated construct. He pushed himself up, running shaking fingers along the edge of the spider's leg.

He might have noticed a defect before, a place where the construct was in need of maintenance. If that was the case...

One plate of the leg made a harsh noise as his hand moved over it, crackling like thin ice. He pushed madra into it desperately, fueling it with all the force his rapidly cycling spirit could churn out.

The best way to maintain a construct's parts was to infuse it with madra of the same Path, which would keep that part fresh and new for as long as you wanted. The second best way was to purify madra through a device like a crystal chalice or a specially designed script and use that instead. It took much longer, was less efficient, and resulted in less accuracy for some cases that required delicate craftsmanship. But it worked.

In fact, Lindon had only recently understood that the purity of his madra was why his mother let him work with her on her projects at all.

The leg-plate strengthened a little. Enough that it wouldn't collapse under the construct's own weight, at least, which should demonstrate his value somewhat.

He looked up to see Fisher Gesha an inch away from him, her gray bun even with his head, peering into the construct. After a second, she slapped his hand away, feeling the spider with her own fingers.

“Did you steal the Path of the Fisherman? Hm?”

“No, honored elder,” he said, though it was just a formality. If the Path of the Fisherman was what the Fishers followed—and he had a good feeling that it was—she would be able to sense that power on him if he had it. She'd only asked out of irritation.

“Then come here.” She grabbed him by the back of the neck, and he remained perfectly still. In his experience, those with Iron bodies tended to forget the fragility of those without.

She pushed him back a second later, eyes wide. The expression looked comical in her heavily wrinkled face. “You have no training?”

“No, elder.”

“No Path at all?”

“No, elder.”

“You're Copper, but you've never taken a taste of aura?”

“I was never given a Path, honored elder. I don't know how.”

Something like pity sparked in her eyes, and she patted him roughly on the back of the head. “You come from a clan of fools.”

He hesitated before protesting. “They are my family, honored elder...”

“Bah.” She made a spitting noise at that. “No family of yours. But you can make scales for me, so I'll take you.”

He searched her quickly for signs of mockery, disappointment, irritation. Anything that might indicate she was lying. “You'll teach me?”

She slapped him in the back of the head. “I'll work you until your bones are nubs, that's what I'll do for you. You won't get the secrets of the sect until you've brought enough value to us, which you'll do slowly and obediently. Is that clear enough?”

Lindon dropped to his knees, pushing his head into the dirt, blinking back sudden tears. “The disciple greets his master.”

“Stop that. I'm not your master.”

“Your disciple understands.”

“I'm going to make you do what my servants can't do, because they've advanced too far. You understand? Hm? You're lower than my servants.” She waved a hand aside, and the barn door rumbled open.

He understood that he was going to be working inside a Soulsmith's foundry. Even if he did nothing but sweep the floors, it was an opportunity for him. He'd take it. He'd take anything.

“Get in there,” she said. “Maintenance on all constructs by dawn, and don't think you'll get any sleep. If you look like you're going to finish early, I'll make another one.”

“Yes, master,” Lindon said, hurrying inside.

At last, he was going to be a Soulsmith.

***

As dawn's first light filtered through the blackened trees surrounding the Five Factions Alliance, Yerin returned, dragging a bright blue corpse behind her. It looked something like a crab painted onto the world in the colors of the sky, and it leaked azure light as she trudged through the outer gates and down the main street.

At her peak condition, she should have been able to run carrying something as light as this, but she felt like her bones had been filled with lead. Now that she settled down and thought, she hadn't had a real rest in...months, probably.

Even now that she'd crossed the threshold to Gold, gaining a shiny metal arm with a sword stuck on it, her body had limits. She was starting to feel them.

Didn't help that every rotten set of eyes on the way in was looking at her like she was dragging a bloody sack of dead dogs behind her. This was a camp of sacred artists, wasn't it? Couldn't be that unusual, seeing someone dragging in a Remnant's corpse.

Or maybe it was the cargo she'd slung over her shoulder that they were staring at.

It took her a handful of wrong turns to find the Fisher section of camp again, by which time she wondered if she could learn to sleepwalk on the fly. The crowd could just wash around her like a river around a boulder, and rot take them all.

Finally, she passed down a street she recognized, dragging the blue-leaking Remnant under trees that had been decorated with spider constructs the night before. It looked different in the light, like it had been dyed a different color.

She grabbed some Fisher pup about ten years old, demanding directions to Fisher Gesha. He looked like she'd popped out an extra eye—worse than that, to be true, since there were more than a few Goldsigns that gave you an extra eyeball—but he gave her rough directions.

When she followed them to a huge barn that had been slapped down in the middle of camp, she almost turned back to show the kid the flat edge of her sword. Soulsmiths required a lot of space for their work, that was true, but it was her observation that they liked to do their business in as flashy a place as possible. Last Soulsmith she visited had built a glowing palace out of shining pillars and sat on a throne of burning inhuman skulls.

But the Desolate Wilds were the back-end of nowhere, where even Sacred Valley looked civilized. Weak, but civilized. Maybe working in a barn was showing off.

She could have rapped on the door, but that would have taken energy. Instead, she simply hauled the door open.

It slid on a track, spilling sunlight into the barn.

The floor was actually covered in hay, but this was clearly the foundry of an active Soulsmith. A rainbow of severed limbs hung from hooks in the ceiling, drizzling colored sparks. Spiders hung from the rafters like bats in a cave, and stalls that should have held animals instead contained massive constructs—duller than Remnants and mysterious in construction. She didn't want to think what constructs that size had been built to do, so she didn't bother.

Lindon was sitting at a long workbench arranged down the center of the room like a feeding trough, broad shoulders bent over a half-assembled spider. He looked older than he was, until she happened to reach out and scan his spirit. Then she’d sense the pathetic strength of a Copper, which she always associated with children. It gave her a queasy feeling, like seeing a grown man with a baby’s head on his shoulders.

It was a relief to see him, though she still hadn't fully shaken her irritation. He’d insisted on joining a faction, like he knew up from down out here without her. He did need some real training, and she couldn’t give it to him, but this was still an inconvenience.

Now that she had eyes on him, her previous worries seemed simpleminded. Foolish. Of course he wasn't going to run off, leaving her alone in a sea of strangers without a single friendly soul. No reason he should.

Fisher Gesha hopped down from an upper floor that Yerin hadn't noticed, caught by the legs of the spider-construct that jutted out from under her robes. She held her hands behind her back, wrinkled face stuck in a mask of irritation. “What is this? Hm? You think we take customers now?”

“Rumor says you take in strangers for a price,” Yerin said. She hauled on the rope binding the Remnant, bringing the blue crab forward. “This is supposed to be worth something.” She'd found it by following a team of Fishers who had skirted around this Remnant as too dangerous. Not so dangerous when she dismembered it from two hundred feet away, it turned out. Now its limbs were bundled up on its carapace, and she pulled it along on its belly.

Fisher Gesha rubbed her chin with two fingers. “What do you want?”

“Shelter in the Fishers for me,” Yerin said. Then she pointed to Lindon. “Training for him. Real stuff, not this sweep-and-gather rot.”

Lindon raised one sheepish hand. “Gratitude, Yerin. I will repay you for this, but she already agreed—”

The Fisher cut him off with a gesture, eyeing the pack on Yerin's shoulder. “You have something else for me, don't you?”

Yerin slapped the bundle down on the floor, unrolling it with one foot. It was a trio of blood-spattered furs that, until a few hours ago, had been worn by Sandvipers.

“Dead?” Gesha asked, eyes sharp.

“Not quite,” Yerin said, because she had known better than to unleash three hostile Remnants in the middle of a crowd. “But I can tell you they're not happy.”

A smile creased Gesha's face. “I think we can find a space for you.”