Chapter 6

The Sandvipers had their own corner of the Five Factions Alliance territory. The space wasn't assigned to them according to some plan or design, as would have been rational, but instead consisted of all the ground they could seize and hold. Typical of sacred artists, in Jai Long's opinion: so consumed with gaining strength that they never considered how they should use it.

Most of the Sandviper territory was taken up by a single, garishly red tent of many peaks. While the lesser minions settled for huts made of twigs and scavenged boards, their future chief reveled in luxury. Sounds floated out of the tent on a warm wind—mingled laughter, the clink of glasses, splashing of water.

Jai Long could have joined them. He had the status, and he'd contributed more merits than the Sandviper heir. But if he was honest with himself, he preferred it out in the cold night.

He sat at a rough table arranged on the mud, a stretch of fabric above him guarding from rain and providing shade. It was hot here when the sun was high, and cold when it wasn't, but his personal comfort was secondary. This position allowed him to focus on his duties, placed him in the way of any attack on the tent, and kept him close enough to respond to any of Kral's whims.

No sooner had Jai Long thought of the name when his master stuck his head out from the tent. Kral was twenty-two years old, and fit from years of martial training. He always gave the impression of an imposing leader, standing tall and confident as though to inspire those around him, gaze fixed on some distant vision of victory...until he smiled. Then, he looked like a rogue trying to charm his way out of trouble.

He was smiling now.

Water ran down his body, and black hair plastered to his face and neck. Even the towel wrapped around his waist was soaked.

“Send for some more water, would you?” Kral asked. The Sandvipers called Kral the young chief, though he hadn't ascended to his father's title yet, because of the great influence he had among the sect. He was issuing a command, but he respected Jai Long enough to at least pretend it was a request. “Somehow we keep losing it.” A chorus of laughter followed that statement from within the tent, and his grin broadened.

Jai Long nodded to a pair of nearby servants, young boys born into the Sandviper sect, and they ran off at his signal to find the jars of water he'd ordered filled earlier. There were constructs in the tent to heat what water they brought, but if there existed any constructs that could create water out of madra, only the Purelake might have Soulsmiths skilled enough to build them. Maybe the Fishers, but he couldn't have any dealings with the Sandvipers' ancestral enemy. Not openly, anyway.

Request fulfilled, Jai Long turned back to his work, expecting that Kral would leave. Instead, the heir sighed.

“You're not a slave,” he said.

Jai Long turned back, somewhat surprised at the statement. “If I thought I was, I wouldn't stay.” He and Kral had reached the same stage of advancement in the sacred arts, but the future chief wouldn't be able to stop him by force. Jai Long wasn't arrogant enough to assume that he was the strongest Highgold in the Five Factions Alliance, but he was certainly the best among the Sandvipers.

If he'd thought the sect was treating him unfairly, he would have cut his way through them, and Kral knew it. The only one that could have overpowered him was the current chief, a Truegold, and Kral's father was out hunting.

Kral nodded to the paperwork. “Then why are you working like one? Come join us.” He peeled the tent flap back a little, and another humid gust bloomed in the night air.

No laughter accompanied this statement from inside the tent, but none of them argued. Kral's friends were afraid of seeming too displeased, but they certainly weren't eager to have Jai Long join them.

He resisted lifting a hand to feel the strips of cloth wrapped around his head. The cloth was red, wrapped so tightly around him that not a hair or scrap of skin was visible from the neck up. Only his eyes peeked out of the middle, and if he could have covered those up without losing his vision, he would have.

“Let's not inflict my company upon them,” Jai Long said dryly. “They're having fun.”

If Kral's companions could have cheered that statement without losing face, Jai Long was sure they would have.

Kral's smile sharpened. “They won't say a word about it, that I can promise you. They know the hand that feeds them.”

They wouldn't need words to express their displeasure, Jai Long knew. No one did, really. When he'd returned to his family with his sister's bloody and broken body in his arms, his parents were more horrified by his face than by the fate of their daughter. What have you done to yourself? they didn't ask him. Was it worth it? they didn't say.

When the Jai Patriarch banished him to the Wilds, the words were hollow and empty, forms without substance. The old man's disappointment oozed across the room, so tangible that it might as well have been vital aura taken form. The star that would have guided the clan into the future had stepped off the Path, ruining his future advancement. And he was hideous...how could he represent the Jai like that?

Nothing truly important needed to be said. When he returned to the clan, unseated the Patriarch, and forced the rest of the family to bow before him, he wouldn't need any speeches either. Above all else, sacred artists respected strength.

Jai Long intended to use his.

“Can you imagine me saying yes?” he asked Kral, and the young chief gave a bitter laugh.

“In truth, no. But what sort of host would I be if I didn't ask?”

Kral had his faults. He pursued sacred arts with admirable dedication, but at every other sort of work he balked. He was lazy, irritable, quick to anger, slow to apologize, arrogant, and even occasionally cruel.

But he'd treated Jai Long well, and it would not be forgotten.

Jai Long said none of this, because he didn't need to. He waved his hand. “You're letting out the heat. Call for me when you need more wine.”

Kral sighed again, but headed back inside. The laughs started up again almost immediately.

Jai Long looked down at the papers beneath him, conjuring a tiny star on the tip of one finger so that he had enough light to see. Four piles of papers sat on the desk, divided roughly into quadrants. Each page was a map. The maps were rough, sketched by many different hands, and incomplete. Jai Long was making notes of his own on the many blank spaces, filling in from other maps and from his own inferences, slowly and steadily building a complete diagram.

There were still many riddles to solve, but he could feel the information gathering into a whole. In another week, maybe two, he'd have an advantage beyond any of the other Five Factions: a map of the Transcendent Ruins.

The stories passed down about the ancient Jai spear were more myth than fact, but two things remained true to a reasonable degree of certainty. For one thing, it was almost absolutely true that the spear remained somewhere in the Ruins. There were hundreds of eyewitnesses to the Jai Matriarch's entrance, and while popular stories said she'd died within, her closest advisors recorded that she emerged from the Ruins weak and battered. She told those advisors that she'd left the spear within, and died days afterward.

He had enough information to consider that story true. But there was a second fact he'd verified, and it was equally important: the spear really had devoured the strength of Remnants and added their strength to that of the Matriarch's. One of her advisors had observed the process, even noting down possible methods and some runes on the spear's shaft that might have been some form of script. The early Jai clan had tried to reproduce the spear, but had ultimately failed.

No one else had considered the nature of that ability, except that it was a powerful way to advance quickly. The others, he was sure, sought the spear for one reason alone: with it, they might be able to break through the bonds of Truegold. There was only one Underlord in the Desolate Wilds, and only a handful in the Blackflame Empire. Advancing past Truegold meant advancing beyond the realms of common sense, to rise from the earth to the heavens in one leap.

They all thought so small.

More accurately, their vision was narrow. Jai Long's competitors, including the Sandviper sect, were so focused on advancement that they neglected to consider what it meant to consume someone else's power.

No one could gather madra that was too different from their own. That was a fundamental law, and one that Jai Long had no reason to believe the spear could break. If he, whose madra carried aspects of light and the sword, tried to absorb a Sandviper Remnant, the spear might allow him to do it. His madra would gain a toxic aspect, and he would have a harder time finding the right aura to cycle, but he should be able to do it.

But then, if he took a Fisher's Remnant, what would happen?

There was a point beyond which the absorption would fail. Even if it didn't, the different types of madra could mix in violent or chaotic ways. It might even damage his core, or the madra could rebound on him and tear his body apart.

No, though everyone envisioned taking the spear and gathering the powers of their enemies into one body, that was just a childish fantasy. It would never work.

The spear would be at its best when devouring compatible madra. In other words, madra from sacred artists on the same Path.

If Jai Long held the spear, he could advance by doing nothing more than cutting down others on the Path of the Stellar Spear—blood members of the Jai clan—and gutting their Remnants.

The spear's nature aligned so closely with his own desires that he almost considered it the will of the heavens.

Even better, the other Factions were considering this a contest of strength. Which was how they considered most things, now that he thought of it. They pushed into the Ruins, fighting the dreadbeasts sealed within as well as the other competitors, with the understanding that the most powerful would come out on top.

Jai Long didn't think of himself as an arrogant man, but sometimes it seemed that he was the only one with eyes in a crowd of the blind.

Couldn't they see that the strongest weren't always the victors?

So he worked on his map even as the young servants returned, carrying jars of water bigger than their whole bodies. As they ran back out, one of them stopped at Jai Long's table and bowed with fists pressed together.

He stayed that way until Jai Long noticed and raised his head. “What is it?”

“I ran into Grenn on the way back,” the boy said. “His mother called him in to cycle, so he couldn't deliver messages to you tonight, so he passed them on to me.”

Jai Long held back a sigh. He'd wondered what was taking his usual messenger so long, and once again he lamented the lack of discipline among the Sandvipers. There was so much he despised about the Jai family, but there was a reason they were a first-class clan in the Blackflame Empire while the Sandvipers remained nothing more than a second-rate sect in the Wilds. Without organization and control, strength meant nothing.

He gestured impatiently, and the boy’s spine straightened like a broomstick. “Sir. Grenn said that the foreman said that the miners can’t go into the southwest corner of the fourth floor. Too many beasts.”

Jai Long scribbled a note. In the four floors closest to the entrance of the Transcendent Ruins, he had accurate maps of virtually the entire area. Only a few spots remained blank, so he’d ordered the mining crews to move their operations.

“Tell the foreman he can expect three more Lowgold guards by sundown tomorrow,” Jai Long said. A single guard would be a great help in protecting the mining crew from dreadbeasts; three was perhaps too many. But this was a race, and he intended to win.

Kral might balk and committing so many of his Sandvipers to what he saw as a slave duty, but Jai Long would talk him around.

The messenger boy stood there mouthing words, awkwardly committing Jai Long’s message to memory. When he’d finished, he straightened again.

“There was a message from the Jai clan too, sir. A Lowgold stranger showed up at the gates today, and she had a Copper with her.”

“Her son?”

The boy shook his head, and his smile had a bit of a sneer to it. “Grenn saw the Copper himself. Said he looked even older than the Lowgold.”

That happened sometimes—a child was born with a tragically weak spirit, or had it crippled in some accident before he could advance further. Those unfortunates deserved pity, not ridicule.

But whatever they deserved, this one had earned not a whit of Jai Long’s attention. “If you deliver me a message every time an outsider shows up at the gates, you’ll walk your feet off.”

“No, that’s not…the Copper’s just strange, sir. Not important. The important thing is that she beat Sandviper Resh in the middle of her squad, and then walked away with one of the Jai clan.”

“Ah.” Now Jai Long understood why the message had mentioned the Copper. If he, as a representative of the Sandviper sect, wanted to avenge Resh’s humiliation, he couldn’t punish a Lowgold under Jai protection. He’d have to target the Copper instead.

“Where are they now?” Jai Long asked, dipping his brush to write a letter to his former clan.

“Uh, they were taken to a Jai clan inn, but it looks like they snuck out. Grenn said he was supposed to tell you that nobody could find them.”

Jai Long’s suffering had begun when he first advanced to Gold. In the heat of battle, he’d been forced to adopt a strange Remnant instead of the one his family had planned for him. Instead of the Goldsign borne by most on the Path of the Stellar Spear—hair as sturdy as a helmet, and rigid as iron—he was cursed with a face that…a face that he didn’t like to think about.

There had been a few other consequences of that Goldsign. His voice hadn’t changed, but his laugh…

It rang out of him, wild and crazy, like the cackling of a deranged murderer. His usual voice was cool and composed, but when he laughed, he sounded like a blood-drunk killer. The messenger boy paled and took a step backwards.

Jai Long swallowed the last chuckles, but a smile still stretched the edges of his cloth mask. “They lost her. The Jai clan can’t find their new recruit, so they turn to me.”

Technically they had turned to the Sandvipers to help, but there was no real difference. He handled most of the day-to-day workings of the sect, and whichever of his relatives had sent this message must have known where it would end up.

Surely, that knowledge had burned them.

“I think so, sir…” the boy said hesitantly.

“I’m amending my previous message. Tell the foreman he will have to wait for his three Lowgold guards. Then go to Sandviper Tern, get three of his best, and tell him the story you just told me. They’re to retrieve the Copper for the mines. Do not kill his protector, but don’t retrieve her for the Jai clan either.”

His clan had handed him a razor-sharp opportunity. In one move, he could regain the standing the Sandvipers had lost at the hands of this stranger, show her that she couldn’t treat their sect lightly, and reinforce to the clan that Jai Long was their servant no longer. And he would gain a miner. Only a Copper, but enough single scales could eventually pile up into a fortune.

The messenger boy was standing in place with brows furrowed, repeating words silently to himself.

“What will you say to the foreman?” Jai Long snapped, and he forced the boy to repeat each message until they were all perfect. One day, he was going to have to train better messengers. Maybe he could purchase a few speaking constructs from the Fishers. Through a proxy, of course.

When the boy finally finished, Jai Long picked his brush back up and dipped it into the inkwell. “Is there anything else?” he asked, by way of dismissal.

“Nothing special,” the boy said, fidgeting in place. Clearly there was something he wanted to say, but not an official message.

“Did you hear something?” Jai Long asked, his attention on the paper in front of him.

“It’s just a rumor. Some of the Cloud Hammers were talking about it, and I only heard them because I was sitting behind a fence and they didn’t know I was there, because one of them asked the other one if he was sure, and then he said…”

Jai Long let the boy ramble on excitedly as he worked. Eventually, a point would emerge.

“…after he’d stopped, he said—I mean not him, the first one—said they’d have to speed up, because Arelius would take everything when he got here. So the second one kind of laughed, but not a funny laugh—”

When the boy’s words registered, Jai Long stood up so quickly that he upended his inkwell, sending it splattering off the edge of the table. Part of his mind noticed with relief that it hadn’t ruined any of his maps, but the majority of his consciousness was taken up by sheer panic. He seized the boy by the shoulders, and it was only a last-minute awareness that prevented him from accidentally ripping the boy’s arms off.

“The Arelius family is coming here?”

The boy’s eyes were so wide that they seemed to take up most of his head, and he looked too scared even to struggle. “I don’t know, brother Jai Long. Please, brother, they just said Arelius. I don’t know what it means, I don’t know…”

That same calm part of his mind noted that the Sandvipers only called him “brother” when they wanted something from him.

Meanwhile, his panic was quickly transforming into fury. After all his work, all his meticulous effort, now a faction from the Empire was just going to step in and take the rewards.

Jai Long didn’t tend to raise his voice. It showed a lack of discipline. Instead, he lowered his tone until he was very quiet indeed. Quiet like the slow rasp of a drawn blade.

“Why,” he said, “didn’t you tell me this earlier?”

Tears had come to the boy’s eyes, and he blubbered incoherently. Jai Long released him, disgusted with himself. He wasn’t the sort of weakling who took his frustrations out on children. This boy couldn’t be older than twelve; he was even younger than Jai Long’s own sister.

Jai Long bowed deeply to the messenger, fists pressed together, as he would bow to a superior. “My deepest regrets,” he said, and the fear on the boy’s face almost instantly transformed to shock. “Now. Deliver your messages as instructed, but on your way, grab every messenger the Sandvipers have. Send them all to me.”

The boy bowed and bolted.

Within the tent, the splashing and laughter had stopped. “Kral,” Jai Long said, and the young chief’s head poked out.

“I didn’t hear much of that, but I will die if you don’t tell me the details,” Kral said.

“The Arelius family may be coming here.”

It took the future Sandviper chief a moment before the gravity of that statement sunk in. “From the empire?”

Jai Long didn’t nod. His silence would be answer enough.

“When?”

“That’s what we need to know.”

Kral vanished for a moment, and when he reappeared, he was tying a loose emerald robe around his waist. He shouted orders, every inch the commanding chief, and Sandvipers boiled out of the camp in droves.

Jai Long snatched up his spear from beside the table, marching off into the darkness. He had his own tasks to perform. He’d already forgotten about the other orders he’d sent tonight; compared to confirming this rumor, other matters were unimportant.

The second the Arelius family showed up, his part in this game was over.

***

Information requested: Jai Long.

Beginning report…

The Jai clan began as one of many barbaric factions in the stretch of blighted wilderness known as the Desolate Wilds. The light-aspected combat techniques on their Path of the Stellar Spear made them the most formidable family of sacred artists in the area, and they unified the region more than once over the centuries. Each time, their rule proved violent and brief.

It wasn't until they produced an Underlord that their family rose to prominence, moving their main branch from the Desolate Wilds to the civilization of the Blackflame Empire. They have flourished under the guidance of that Underlord for over a century, never forgetting that their good fortune is held together by a single linchpin.

If their Patriarch is ever unseated, the clan will crumble. And now, despite his great advancement along his Path, he is starting to age. Within one more decade, maybe two, age will claim the leader of the Jai clan.

As such, they train their disciples with unusual rigor. The safety of the next generation will only be secure if they can produce a second Underlord, an heir to their Patriarch's glory.

Thus far, they have failed. No genius of the clan has climbed past the peak of Gold and reached the heights of the Underlords.

But one showed promise.

Jai Long's affinity with the Path of the Stellar Spear was second only to the Patriarch's. At twelve years old, he sparred with disciples five years his senior. By thirteen, he had reached the peak of Jade, and could have broken through to Lowgold if not for the decree of the clan's elders.

To advance from Jade to Gold, one must take on the power of a Remnant. Sacred artists always prefer to receive Remnants from the same Path, to ensure compatibility and prevent deviation, so the elders waited for a Remnant worthy of Jai Long. They waited for a clan elder to die.

When Jai Long turned fourteen, he still had not been granted permission to advance to Lowgold, for the elders remained stubbornly attached to life.

It was during this time that a group of rebels, a disenfranchised branch family of the Jai clan, staged an uprising against the head family.

They practiced their own warped version of the Path of the Stellar Spear, and had been exiled for it. Marginalized and mistreated, as they saw it, their frustration finally boiled over in an attack on the main branch of the clan. Among their targets was the famous golden child of the head family: Jai Long.

As Jai Long was still stuck at Jade, he should have been easy pickings for older warriors. One Lowgold boy of seventeen, seeking to make a name for himself, isolated and challenged his rival in a duel to the death.

Jai Long pinned him to the wall with his spear.

This was a mistake that an older sacred artist would not have made. Killing his rival released a Remnant, a twisted twin to the normal spirit of the Stellar Spear. If the Remnant had attacked, Jai Long—depleted as he was from the fight—would have died.

But Remnants are unpredictable, and this one crawled through the house in search of easier prey.

It found Jai Long's sister, six years old, still asleep. It dragged her from her bed, away from the home, to consume her madra in private.

Jai Long raced after it, catching the spirit in minutes. But the damage was already done: her core was cracked and damage, her madra channels ravaged, the Remnant stronger than ever. And his Jade senses told him that the rebels were closing in.

He had no chance of escaping safely with his sister. Not unless he grew stronger.

Jai Long trapped the Remnant with a simple script and began the process of drawing it into his core. He had long since reached the limits of Jade and prepared for this step, so he reached Lowgold easily.

Though not as smoothly as he'd hoped.

Though compatible with his madra, this spirit was not quite from the Path of the Stellar Spear. It left him with a Goldsign unlike that of his family: a face scarred and twisted, disgusting to look upon.

When he fought his way free of the rebels and returned to his home, carrying his sister, he did not find the welcome he'd expected. They provided shelter and medical care, but nothing further. Even his parents began to distance themselves from Jai Long, as they found their future in the family jeopardized by his presence.

The next Patriarch of the Jai clan could not have deviated from the Path of the Stellar Spear. His face could not be monstrous.

Even his sister, though cared for out of pity, had nothing for her in the clan any longer. The elixirs and training resources she had once received to bolster her sacred arts were withdrawn, for the family could not place all their bets on a lame horse. She was tucked away to fade, forgotten.

And Jai Long, once the bright star guiding the clan to glory, was quietly shipped away to the Desolate Wilds. His talent could not be ignored, so he was given the task of supporting one of the Jai clan's oldest allies: the Sandviper sect. There, he could benefit his family without bringing them shame.

Here in the Wilds, he has languished all this time. Training. And waiting.

Suggested topic: the fated future of Jai Long. Continue?

Denied, report complete.