Little Blue sat down on the jar and gave him an impatient peep.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he said, and closed the void key.
Outside, Orthos gave the hatch a sideways glance. “This is not wise. I’ve changed my mind. The courage of a dragon is valuable, but it must be balanced by the wisdom of a dragon.”
Reaching into his pocket, Lindon withdrew the gatestone. The chalky ball shimmered in the light as though it were made of crushed blue glass. “Then you’ll be relieved to know that I have decided to use the gatestone.”
Orthos brightened. “Really?”
“Yes.” Lindon lobbed the stone so that it landed a few feet away from the hatch. Before Orthos could ask what he was doing, Lindon extended a finger. A quick beam of dragon’s breath struck the gatestone dead center.
The device let out a blue orb big enough to swallow a person, then disappeared. The stone was unharmed, a man-sized web of cracks hovering in the air.
Orthos rounded on him in a fury. “What have you done?”
“The scripts around the Spirit Well were disabled, and I thought about why. The cracks must have sliced through the runes and interrupted the script.” Lindon pointed to the ground, where many of the silk-thin cracks ran into the stone. “Even if that’s not what happened before, I’m fairly certain it would work that way now. Look.”
He extended a palm, and a much thicker bar of dragon’s breath punched through the hatch.
There was no flaring script to defend it. This time, it blasted through the metal, and Lindon moved it from one side to the other to obliterate the hatch. The edges of the tunnel now glowed white-hot, but there wasn’t as much melting metal as he’d expected. That would be the destruction aspect of Blackflame at work.
He walked over to the edge and prepared to hop in. Orthos peered over the edge.
“That’s a long way down,” he said.
“Look at it this way: the entrance is plenty big enough. You’ll fit just fine.”
“What if it gets narrower as you fall? My shell is not meant for tight spaces.”
Lindon looked down into the darkness, swept it with his spiritual perception, and then took a deep breath. “I’ll let you know,” he said as he jumped.
There was a rush of air and darkness, then he hit the ground. Even without an Enforcer technique active, he absorbed the impact lightly: the benefit of the meat from the Silverfangs and Diamondscales.
He would probably look back on this month in Ghostwater as one of the most profitable of his life...assuming they made it out.
“Nothing down here,” Lindon called up. “You can jump.”
“Are you certain?” Orthos shouted back.
“I’m going to start exploring. If you don’t think you can join me, you can leave it to me, and I’ll let you know what I find.”
A moment later, a dull red meteor crashed into the ground as Orthos hit shell-first. He swung from side to side to right himself, marching over to Lindon.
“A dragon doesn’t hesitate.”
Orthos had hesitated for quite a long time, but Lindon said, “I’m glad for that. I think we should head this way.”
The room at the bottom of the shaft was nothing more than an open space with three dark tunnels leading in different directions. Since advancing to Truegold, Lindon’s spiritual senses had immediately expanded, so he headed through the entrance where he most clearly sensed Harmony’s shadow madra.
They walked through a dark hallway with rooms on either side. The hall reminded him of the Dream Well facility, except it was lit only by the subtle glow from Orthos’ shell.
The sense of Harmony’s madra pulled them straight down the hall, and Lindon started to pick up speed.
Until a man appeared next to them.
He was a hulking figure a head taller than Lindon, packed with muscle, his golden eyes vertically slitted like a reptile’s. Black scales covered his arms up to the elbow, and he loomed like an executioner.
Lindon had ignited the Burning Cloak and gathered up a handful of dragon’s breath when he recognized the figure.
Northstrider, the Monarch on the Path of the Hungry Deep. Creator of Ghostwater.
He was shocked for a moment, but hurriedly dropped to his knees.
“What are you doing?” Orthos growled. “Get up.”
“Don’t you see...”
“No, I see it. It’s a projection.”
Lindon swept the image of Northstrider with his spirit. It reminded him of the White Fox madra his family had always used; a blend of light and dreams.
Northstrider’s projection surveyed them both, or seemed to, and then spoke. “For you who travel here after my departure, I have left this message.”
“Let’s hurry,” Orthos said, and trotted off. Lindon followed him, with Northstrider’s image floating along next to them.
“I poured years of effort into this world and its research projects,” he went on, undisturbed by their jog down the hall. “None of them delivered what I wanted: a mind, subordinate to my own, that could manage a small portion of my powers. The messengers of the heavens use such constructs, so perhaps they can only be created beyond this one small world. But I still left behind the greatest mind a man could create.”
Some of the doors had small windows, and the shining lights or shifting movement he saw inside made him want to look inside. But a new sensation from up above had drowned out the trail of Harmony’s madra: it was a surge of power that felt like the Eye of the Deep, only many times more powerful.
They picked up the pace.
“I dismissed the researchers, but scattered keys all over the world. Over four thousand memory storage constructs, each gathering knowledge on their way back here. When they return, they contribute to a greater whole. Eyes of the Deep record and gather knowledge, all with the purpose of returning here. To add their information to the collective.”
Now the world was crumbling. This would be the last delivery Ghostwater ever received. It only had a few weeks left, at most.
Lindon extended his perception behind him, sensing a disruption in space that felt like cracks in existence. The spatial cracks were crawling after him, down from where he’d crushed the gatestone.
Maybe they had less time than he’d thought.
“I will allow a few beggars into this world to fight over the other scraps, but you who bring an Eye of the Deep, you will receive the true prize. A drop of ghostwater. If you have tasted of the other wells, you should know they were only prototypes. By-products of our attempts to create this one power. It no longer benefits me, but what is trash to a Monarch may still be treasure to all others.”
The hallway opened up onto a huge chamber, like an artificial cave. A metal tree filled the far wall, with cages instead of leaves and Eyes of the Deep hanging like glowing fruit. Two-thirds of the cages were empty, but it was still bright.
To the right of the tree, there was a jade doorframe. Identical to the one Lindon had destroyed in the first habitat.
And in front of the tree, Harmony stood in front of what looked like a stone birdbath. His Goldsign hovered behind his head, so all Lindon saw was a circle of darkness on his shoulders.
“Return the Eye of the Deep to the tree,” Northstrider instructed, golden eyes turning to the massive scripted device. “You may ask one question and receive one drop of ghostwater. And for the rest of your life, know that you are in my debt.”
Then the Monarch vanished, and Harmony turned to meet them.
Chapter 16
The dark green madra of the tent flickered and fuzzed like it was losing reality. For Forged madra, it had lasted a long time.