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.”
Chapter 10
The space they'd found for Yerin was among the main sect, in rooms reserved for honored guests of the Fishers. The space they'd found for Lindon was up among the rafters, in a pile of hay only accessible by a creaking ladder. He had to sleep motionless on his back for fear of rolling off the edge, which meant he spent his nights staring up at the spider constructs dangling over his head.
But he wasn't concerned about sleep. Not when there was so much to learn.
The first day, Gesha had her drudge run over the blue crab Remnant that Yerin had brought, the construct's eight legs moving at blurring speeds to dismantle the spirit and separate it into usable parts. She handed him first a claw bigger than his whole upper body, then a pile of tubes that looked something like intestines, then a Forged blue beak. The whole mess didn't act quite right; it smelled of lightning storms and salty water rather than rotten guts, and it felt more like oiled glass than anything natural.
After he'd separated the parts into buckets, a task he'd often performed for his mother, he sealed them with scripts to prevent them from decaying and 'sent them to storage.' Which meant that he shoved the boxes into the giant closet at the back of the barn, labeled only with a code that he hoped Fisher Gesha could read.
Most of the crab would go back there, to serve as what Gesha called 'dead matter.' These would be the most mundane parts of a construct—maybe the shell of a spider, maybe the hilt of a sword—and were needed only for their physical properties.
The parts she didn't send into storage, the parts she kept out on her workbench, those were more interesting.
Lindon's mother had never allowed him to help with this part, though he'd caught glimpses through cracked doors and around corners. This was the part of being a Soulsmith that required delicacy and skill, but Fisher Gesha hacked away at these treasures like a butcher working on a slab of meat.
She started with a cluster of blue rocky madra about the size of a fist, but after a few strokes of her bladed goldsteel hook, she was left with a...
He wanted to call it a 'heart,' because that was the nearest analogy in a living being, but it didn't look like that mass of muscle that was left over after his father cleaned a deer. It was a tightly wound tangle of tubes, so that Lindon thought it might actually be one tube, so folded and looped in so many different directions that it became a knotted mass.
Gesha held it up in one hand. “We call this a binding, you see? We work with these like a blacksmith works with iron.”
“And the rest of the material? Do you still use it for constructs?” he asked, gesturing back toward the closet door. Even the dead matter of an unusual Remnant would have supplied his mother for months.