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.