Ghostwater

Chapter 7

There were any number of reasonable objections that Dross could have made to the Soulsmith operation, but since the construct seemed happy enough going along with it, Lindon certainly wasn’t going to say anything.

First, he moved the bucket of Dream Well water in front of Orthos. Then he forced the turtle’s mouth open and poured a vial of the purple water down his throat.

It didn’t quite wake him, but Lindon could feel his consciousness smooth out. His sleep went from rough and fearful to soft and deep. When he woke, he’d need some water, so hopefully the bucket would be enough. He’d always had trouble wrestling his thoughts, too; maybe the Dream Well could help him.

With Orthos settled, Lindon sat Little Blue on the turtle’s head. She gave a chirp, and he patted her with one finger. “When I’m done here, I’ll have some food for you.”

Then he got to work.

Binding a spiritual construct to a physical vessel was one of the basic skills of the Soulsmith. Essentially, he had to hold the construct into the exact shape of the vessel, then merge the two while using his own madra to tie them together. To stuff a ghost back into a body, both ghost and body had to match.

There was only one complication that mattered: the sapphire already had a construct in it. So he was trying to meld two constructs and fix them both to the gem.

Fisher Gesha would tell him to extract both Dross and the Eye of the Deep construct, then break them down piece by piece until he could rebuild them into one construct with the functions of both. Then he could bind that single construct to the gem or, preferably, another suitable vessel without a hole in it.

Then she would have hit him for trying to do this without guidance.

But Lindon had neither the time, nor the experience, nor the equipment to do it that way. He wasn’t sure that a living construct like Dross could even be safely deconstructed. He’d have to roll the dice.

Not that he would put it to Dross that way.

He extracted a pair of gold-plated tongs from the roll of tools, holding them up to show Dross. “I’ll be using these to remove you from your vessel,” he explained. “Then—”

Dross zipped out of his rusted container.

He hovered in the air, a purple cloud filled with violet sparks. Within the cloud, Lindon could see patterns of crossing lines, like Dross was made of a structure of ghostly timbers.

“Done!” the construct said cheerily. “Now what?”

Lindon put the tongs down. “Now…try not to resist.”

He put his left hand on the Eye, pouring pure madra into the construct. It was already filling most of the vessel, so he only had to focus on holding it still. That was easier said than done; it felt like trying to keep hold of a living heart that tried to escape his hand with every beat. Essence drifted out of the crack more quickly.

Lindon reached out with his inhuman right hand, then hesitated. He needed his hands free to project the madra, which meant he couldn’t hold the tongs.

Of course, strictly speaking, he didn’t need the tongs.

After a moment of hesitation, he reached out for Dross with his white grip. “Please don’t move.”

As Lindon seized Dross, he actually felt the construct in his Remnant hand. It felt like gripping a handful of cotton. A pang of hunger ran up the arm into Lindon’s soul, but he kept the limb under control. An instant of lost focus, and the arm would devour Dross.

“That gave me a tingle. Is everything all right?”

Sweat rolled down Lindon’s face, but he forced a smile. “Hold still, please.”

Now came the hard part. He had to project more pure madra around Dross to hold him in place. And it had to be exactly the right shape of the sapphire.

Well, one step at a time.

His madra still hadn’t recovered much, so he needed to do this quickly. With a rough grip of madra, Lindon contained Dross’ cloud-like form into a jagged form roughly the shape of a cut gem.

“It occurs to me,” the construct said, “to wonder about my identity. You know what I mean? Was I me before I could think freely? Now, when you merge me with this key, I’ll be taking on…who knows what memories and functions.”

In order to get this part of the process exactly right, Lindon should have made a mold of the sapphire. It was too late now, so he Forged Dross to match the cut sapphire. As closely as he could, he tried to get every ridge and facet in exactly the right place.

His spiritual grip was slipping, and he was essentially bleeding madra. Even with the added focus from the Dream Well, he was having trouble holding both constructs in the right shape at the same time. Dross kept shifting gradually.

“Will I think of myself differently? How will I see the world? Will I even be able to think anymore, or will I be like I was before?”

Heavens help me, Lindon thought to himself. Then he shoved the constructs together, hoping they would match.

“Will I be myself? What if I hate being a key, but it’s too late?”

There was resistance. Lindon had to push the last of his madra into the effort and shove them together until he forced them to click.

It was a good thing Dross didn’t have a physical body, or this would have been excruciatingly painful.

“On second thought, I’m not sure I…” Dross’ voice froze halfway through the sentence.

The light in the gem flickered and rippled. Lindon’s spiritual grip tightened; had he failed?

Motion passed through the light, as though something were swimming inside the sapphire. The light started to change, staining the vessel purple.

“…want to do this,” Dross continued. “It’s too risky, isn’t it? Who would gamble their very self on a game of chance?”

Lindon fell back, leaning against the wooden chest, holding up the gem that now shone purple.

“We’re done,” he said, swiping sweat from his brow.

“We are? Oh, that’s good then. Now you mention it…” Dross flew out of the crack in the sapphire, leaving the jewel dull and dark. He looked very different than before: his nebulous cloud-form was more of a defined orb, and instead of simple lines, now he was a complex interlocking mechanism of what looked like gears. The sparkling lights whirled in a deliberate, complex cyclone.

“I feel good. I feel great, actually. It’s like I’ve had one eye closed all my life, and now I’ve opened the other five.” The drifting matrix of phantom machinery drifted around Lindon’s head. “You’ve got quite a complicated soul, don’t you? Two cores, I feel like that’s an unusual number. And I can see your face so much more clearly now! It’s…well, at least you have a wonderful spirit. Yes, indeed. That spirit of yours, wow.”

That was a little alarming. After this one operation, Dross had gained senses like a Jade’s. Had the Eye of the Deep always sensed what was going on around it?

Lindon folded his legs into a cycling position and fixed his gaze on Dross. “Now, maybe you can help us. We need to find a way out of here.”

“That’s right in my wheelhouse. A guide and a key, that’s me. Everything you need to find your way, all in one convenient bundle. Are we talking out of the Ghostwater world entirely, or out of this room?”

“Both.”

“Ah, okay, right. Hmmm…there’s a portal outside, which—”

“Apologies, but that’s no longer an option.”

Dross drifted slowly in a circle, like a man pacing. “There’s another portal just like that one, but I won’t lie to you: it’s a little deeper in the facility. It’s located in…Northstrider’s…personal quarters.” He said the Monarch’s name in a hushed whisper.

A stone sunk into Lindon’s gut. “Can you open a Monarch’s door?”

“I am the Eye of the Deep now,” Dross said confidently. “No problem at all. And this Monarch was of the opinion that the best security was his presence. I can open his door, don’t you worry, but getting there is the trick.”

Lindon’s tension eased slightly. “And how about out of this room?”

“Even easier.” He bobbed over to the keyhole and flashed brightly. “Here it is! I’m astonished you didn’t notice this before, actually.”

“I’m afraid there may be someone out there waiting for me. I admit, I was hoping for another exit.”

Dross whirled in the air and then swooped over to the keyhole. Half of him dipped into the wall. His insides shone, a mass of phantom gears, and the clouds of sparks within him flickered and rolled.

“Ekerinatoth of the gold dragons,” he announced as he emerged. “She goes by Ekeri, which is good, because that’s faster to say. She is waiting just outside for her prey to surface. That’s you, by the way. You’re the prey.”

Lindon looked from the construct to the keyhole. “How did you know that?”

“This whole place is a network of constructs. Just lousy with ’em. I popped in, sampled their memories for the last few hours, then popped out. Turns out there’s all kind of records in there; the same factions have been coming back every ten years for over fifty years now, so we’ve piled up quite the hoard of juicy gossip.”

Lindon’s interest spiked. This was something he could use.

“What can you tell me about her?”

“Well, she’s close enough to Underlord that she can take on a humanoid form, can’t she? By the time she reaches Archlord, she’ll look even more human than you do. And there’s every reason to suspect she will. She’s the heir to the richest family on the continent, and they didn’t get that way by not stealing everything that isn’t nailed down, if you understand me. She practices the Path of the Flowing Flame, which involves dragon-fire behaving like a liquid. I imagine that’s what she sprayed onto the door for about an hour after you vanished. Didn’t do any good, of course. Those are high-quality rocks.”

The thought of fighting another Truegold made him feel like he was backed into a corner again, but he set that feeling aside. This was an opportunity to push himself forward.

“Can you help me figure out how she fights?”

“I don’t know everything, do I? What do I look like, a...know-everything construct? That’s a terrible name, I’m sorry, I’ll try again. What do I look like, an omni-codex?” He brightened. “That sounds pretty good, actually. Omni-codex. Call me that from now on.”

“The only way we’re getting out of here,” Lindon said, “is through her.”

A deep, gravelly voice rumbled from behind him. “Now that is the path of a dragon.”

Orthos’ eyes were dim, but they still smoldered with orange-red light. The black turtle shifted his bulk, and he let out a cough. On his head, Little Blue jumped up and down in excitement.

Tension he hadn’t even noticed melted from Lindon’s shoulders. He’d been so concerned that Orthos would never wake up.

The turtle nodded to the bucket. “That’s some good water. But I’ll need more than that if I’m going to walk out of here. I need meat.”

“Then I need a way to get past Ekeri.”

Orthos laid his head on the ground, eyes sliding shut again, but his mouth crooked open in a smile. “Here’s a lesson for you: dragons can be sneaky too.”

Ekeri rested in her portable shelter only ten yards from the hidden entrance in the stone. The device could make a home out of nothing in only an hour, but it was designed for convenience, not comfort. The rooms in the shelter were bare Forged madra, and she had to carry around all her furnishings herself. She pulled a chair out of her void key and had set it up so she could watch out the second-story window.

She had tried everything she could to force her way into the stone, but it was either dense with earth aura or protected by formidable scripts. Or both. The rock wasn’t even scorched after her...perfectly calm and controlled assault.

When that hadn’t worked, she had vented her considerable irritation on the nearby vegetation. Now the sea-stalks around the shelter had been burned away, leaving nothing but sand. There was nothing blocking her view of the entrance.

For the first hour, she watched with perfect patience. In the second hour, she began running her claws down the wall. By the third hour, she had clawed her window significantly wider.

“Where are they?” she demanded of her attendants, and there was more dragon than human in her voice. She calmed herself an instant later—her Monarch lived in human form, and she strove to imitate him in all ways. She couldn’t wait until her soulfire was strong enough to change her body completely.

“Replying to the noble lady: they could stay inside until their supplies run out. Surely there would be greater prizes of more interest to milady in another section of the facility. Our maps indicate there is a sacred garden full of natural treasures only a short swim from here.”

Ekeri stopped herself when she realized she was growling. Her attendant was a bland man, younger than twenty, whose expressionless face was almost identical to his counterpart’s. Or maybe she was just bad at telling them apart.

“There are secrets in there,” she said, chewing on her claw. “A Lowgold doesn’t come in here with a black dragon-spawn for nothing. They have secrets on them, and I want them.”

The two attendants exchanged glances, but their faces were so blank she could read nothing in them.

“Allow me to make a proposal, if it pleases the noble lady. Let us scout out the nearby habitats, and we can report back to you whatever we find. Perhaps we might find something even more valuable than this black dragon-spawn’s secrets.”

Ekeri kept gnawing on her claw for a moment as she thought. She didn’t like the implication that she was pursuing the wrong prize, but at the same time, she didn’t want to give up the other treasures of Ghostwater by focusing on one. Especially if the world was really collapsing soon.

“One of you stay with me,” she said. “I can’t allow them to escape, and I won’t watch this window on my own all day.”

“It would be my pleasure to stay,” one of them said, voice empty of anything that resembled pleasure, “but surely they cannot escape your perception.”

That was true. There was virtually no chance that a black dragon-spawn or the human borrowing his draconic power could evade her, especially in this area full of water aura. Their madra would stand out like a bonfire in the snow.

Irritably, she waved her hand to dismiss them. It was hard to give in when they were right. Plus, this place scraped her scales the wrong way; she couldn’t even cycle aura here, as the power of water drowned out everything else.

“Watch out for the wildlife,” she called back to them as they left. The fish had been a handful for her, a Truegold, and her attendants were much weaker.

Ekeri curled up on a couch, which she also produced from her void key, and tried to feel like she wasn’t wasting her time by staying here.

Several hours later, she had almost drifted off when she felt something pressing against the edge of her spiritual perception. It felt warm and welcoming. Like a roaring fire.

She leaped up and dashed out of the house.

At first, it had gone so well.

Lindon had already known the basics of veiling his spirit; essentially, he just kept the movement of his spirit slow and quiet, so there was little for an enemy to sense unless they scanned him directly. It was one of the simplest principles in the sacred arts, but as it turned out, Lindon had never had much cause to perfect the technique. He was always so much weaker than everyone else that he was difficult to sense anyway, and pure madra was perhaps the ‘quietest’ form of power he could practice.

As a result, his veils were sloppy. For eight hours straight, Orthos forced him to practice veiling his power over and over until Orthos could feel the difference from only a yard away in the cave. Lindon pointed out that if Ekeri was nose-to-nose with him, she would be able to see him, which only earned him a lecture about how useful veils were. Especially for him, with his two cores; he needed to be able to hide anything unusual about his spirit at a moment’s notice.

On the bright side, the water from the Dream Well made the training practically paradise by Lindon’s usual standards. Anytime his concentration wavered from its peak, or exhaustion started weighing him down, he took another vial of purple water and it was like starting over fresh. Lindon was starting to think he’d get addicted.

Dross told him that he was the only sacred artist in the history of the facility to be able to use the Dream Well so lavishly, but as Lindon saw it, the water had been left to pile up for the past fifty-six years. It was about time someone used it.

When Orthos was confident enough in Lindon’s veil, Lindon made Dross check the situation outside. He contacted the security constructs and found that Ekeri had blanketed the area in her spiritual perception...but she wasn’t physically watching his entrance anymore.

So he’d snuck out quietly to go fishing.

Orthos had declared his veil exceptional; not because of his hasty practice, but because pure madra was difficult to detect by nature. Any veil he made was twice as effective. Which brought up another problem: Lindon couldn’t switch cores.

He wasn’t skilled enough to veil Blackflame, and that Path was hard to hide anyway. As a fellow dragon, Ekeri would be able to discover Blackflame anywhere within this habitat—which was what Dross called the pockets of air within the giant bubbles.

Which meant Lindon had to catch one of these Highgold-level fish, kill it, and bring it back without using Blackflame. He had a plan for that too, but not one he liked.

He felt like he saw eyes on him with every crunch of his shoes on sand, but a golden dragon-girl didn’t leap out of her two-story fortress of Forged madra and burn him to death, so he had to assume he was still hidden. After creeping around, it had only taken him a few minutes to locate one of the drifting fish.

The bear-sized creature slid lazily over Lindon’s head, silver scales glinting in the dim yellow light. Its fangs clashed like spears, but it didn’t seem to notice him at all. As Dross had said, they seemed to hunt by spiritual perception alone.

Dross, tucked away in the now-purple gem stuffed into the pocket of his outer robes, started to say something. Lindon slapped him. He muttered to himself, but stayed quiet.

Now it was time to execute Orthos’ plan, which—in its entirety—consisted of one step: “Hit it with your arm.”

Lindon couldn’t help but feel a little nervous about that advice.

Without a full-body Enforcer technique, Lindon had to use basic Enforcement on his entire body. The spirit had a strengthening effect on the body, with or without the guidance of a technique, and all he was doing was pouring effort into that. It was horribly inefficient, and it would exhaust his madra more quickly and provide worse results compared to a real Enforcer technique.

However, it did make him stronger.

Lindon jumped ten feet straight up, seizing the fish’s tail in his left hand. He dragged it down to the ground, though the fish fluttered and strained to stay in the air. As it fell, it gave off a deafening shriek.

Now he had a deadline.

According to Dross, the fish screamed to one another every once in a while under natural conditions, so its cry shouldn’t alert Ekeri, even if she heard it. However, the other fish would start coming immediately.

He didn’t sense any other sacred beasts within a hundred yards, so even in the worst-case scenario, he had a few seconds.

Lindon threw his whole body over the creature to pin it to the ground, though it was still strong. Its flailing and flopping nearly bucked him off. But in a moment, he had locked his legs around it.

Now it was time to execute Orthos’ plan.

He pulled back his white arm, filling it with the power of his pure core, and began slamming it into the fish’s head.

The sacred beast screamed and screamed. Dross assured him they weren’t any more intelligent than normal fish, just more powerful, but the shrieks bothered him anyway. Lindon hammered until the silver scales began to crack, and dark blood splattered his face.

This is why I need a weapon, he thought. Of course, there was every chance he would have lost a weapon at the same time he had lost his pack.

When the fish’s spasms began to weaken, he gripped the sharp tips of his white fingers into its newly exposed flesh.

Then he triggered the binding in his arm.

Gladly, the limb started gulping down the creature’s madra. The arm seemed to grow more dense as it fed, more real, though strangely enough it seemed to get a shade darker as well. Like it was shading to gray instead of its normal, pristine white.

When Lindon had gotten the arm, he’d hoped that the hunger binding would allow him to steal madra from other sacred artists. That, he reasoned, would help him to learn more Paths.

But other than the obvious practical downsides to such a plan, he’d since learned that the hunger binding was not as simple to use as the Ancestor’s Spear had been. Maybe there would be a day when he could use the arm to pull madra into his core.

Until then, he had at least learned one trick.

When the arm had absorbed so much water madra from the fish that it started to tint blue-green, Lindon vented the excess power. Aquatic madra sprayed from his forearm, splattering like rain on the sand before it dissolved into essence.

The arm could swallow some madra of any aspect to strengthen itself, but anything more than that amount would start changing the aspects of the limb’s madra. Unless Lindon wanted the limb of a water-Remnant, he had to vent the extra madra before it corrupted the arm too much.

The Ancestor’s Spear had a similar feature, and Jai Long had used it in his battle against Lindon. Based on that principle, Lindon had a few ideas for using it in combat, but he had yet to test any of them.

Without its madra, the fish had lost the will to resist. It flopped once or twice more as Lindon drove his fist into its skull until he heard something crack.

Then, at last, the creature was still.

Without missing a breath, Lindon grabbed the creature in both hands and started dragging it across the sand. It wasn’t quite as heavy as Orthos, but it still wasn’t light.

And silver-blue light bloomed as a Remnant began to rise from the body.

The Remnant looked like a wire model of the same fish, and it pulled itself free of the body as Lindon continued marching. He kept an eye behind him, hoping to lose it, and let out a breath of relief as he passed around a clump of tree-sized stalks. The Remnants didn’t seem as dangerous as their living forms.

When he turned back to the front, he was standing face-to-face with a wall of fangs.

This new fish gave a shriek that stabbed his ears, and Lindon ducked just in time. Even so, the fish’s scales scraped against his scalp as it swam past his head.

Lindon turned, following the fish...only to see the shining form of the Remnant drift straight through a stalk.

There was no time to think. Without considering it another instant, he changed the pattern of his breathing and drew from the Path of Black Flame.

Blackflame madra surged through his veins, filling him with heat. His channels still burned, despite Little Blue’s healing touch, and he hadn’t cycled aura to refill his core. There were only a few dim sparks of madra left in his core.

Though it was enough for a few seconds of Burning Cloak.

Lindon leaped at the Remnant first, kicking off in an explosive burst fueled by the Enforcer technique. He swept his Remnant hand down on the wiry spirit, clawing through its structure. His white fingers seized the pale blue wires that made up the Remnant’s outer layer, and he dragged the Remnant down by its strings.

Then he tore away a chunk of madra.

The Remnant’s scream sounded like a crashing wave, but Lindon didn’t have time to waste. A Cloak-powered fist punched through its head like a spear, then he turned to catch the living fish that was darting at him.

He caught a lower fang in one hand and an upper fang in the other. The force of the creature’s charge pushed him backward through the sand, and its breath stunk like dead fish and rotting vegetation. Nearby shrieks told him more of its school was coming.

Orthos was always telling him that he needed to think more like a dragon. Eithan seemed to agree with him, considering his talk about tiger-chasing.

That was always easier to do with Blackflame raging through him.

Even as his madra started to die, Lindon met eyes with the sacred beast. A dragon could not be defeated by a fish. He was the predator here. He had the power.

The last of the Burning Cloak surged through his limbs, and his arms burned. He roared as he pushed power through both hands.

In a massive rush of strength, he tore the fish apart.

He stood with its body in his left hand and its lower jaw in his right, panting, blood coating the sand. As his Blackflame core winked out, he threw his head back and let out a shout of victory.

Then he switched back to his pure core and instantly broke into a cold sweat. What had he been thinking?

“See,” Dross said from his outer robe, “you’re not being stealthy at all. What you’re doing there is being loud. You see? You see the difference?”

Before the Remnant could rise from the new body, Lindon grabbed the old one and started running through the trees. Even his pure core was almost out of madra, and he silently thanked Eithan for the Heaven and Earth Purification Wheel; if he hadn’t been practicing that technique for the last year, he would have run out of madra long before.

By the time he could see the door, he knew he wasn’t going to make it.