She snorted. “We fold it into different shapes, use it to build the skeletons, but the heart and soul of every construct is a binding. If we could work with bindings completely, we would. You think the rest of the Remnant is expensive? No. This is the gemstone inside the mountain.”
She tossed it to him, and he caught it in both his hands. It smelled like a rainy day.
“Put your hand over the tube at the top,” she said. “Point the other end—no, not at me! You want me to toss you out? At the floor! Now, funnel a trickle of madra into it. Just a little, do you hear me?”
Lindon did, careful not to put in too much. The binding made a tiny whining sound.
“Well, more than that,” she said.
He took deeper breaths in rhythm, cycling his madra and forcing more power into the binding. It squealed louder.
Gesha muttered to herself.
He forced all the madra he could into the twisted organ, and finally it spurted out a spray of water.
“Finally,” she said, snatching it back. She shook the binding in her hand, drawing his attention to it. “This was a Purelake Remnant, you hear me? Primary aspect of water. When this sacred artist was alive, she made water from the aura in the air, you see? This was a technique she’d mastered, and it becomes part of her spirit. Her Remnant uses this binding, does the same thing.”
Lindon's jaw almost cracked under the force of his questions.
“Her technique becomes a part of the Remnant? How? Why?”
“Patterns,” Gesha said shortly, tucking the binding away in a drawer. “You've seen scripts, haven't you? What are they, if not shapes that guide madra? What is a technique, if not weaving madra in a certain pattern?” She held out a hand. “You move the right madra, in the right way, with the right rhythm, and you get...” A pair of pliers smacked into her open hand, drawn by some technique she'd used. “You move it any other way, and you get...” She waved her hand. “...nothing. Hm? You see?”
“I believe I do, but please forgive another question. A binding is like a script inside your soul?”
“You think it's that simple? No. A script is a drawing, a binding is a statue. Bindings are pearls, and Remnants are the clams around them. You see?”
On some level, he did. Bindings had weight, depth. A script-circle was nothing but a carved circle of letters. But they seemed to do the same things, so he wasn't entirely sure what advantages a binding had.
He pointed to the drawer containing the binding. “How did you know which end took madra in, and which end spat water out?”
“Experience,” she replied, prying at the shell of what he guessed was another concealed binding.
“How did you know it would create water, instead of something else?”
“Drudge told me.” She ran a hand down the smooth carapace of her large spider-construct, which rested on the desk next to her. “It tastes the aspects of madra for me, you see? It tells me which madra touches on water, which touches on ice, and which is simply blue.”
“And now that you have the binding, you can use it in a construct? One that will automatically produce water? Is that all you can use it for, or can you do something else with it?”
She pointed at him with the pliers. “That is the question worthy of a Soulsmith.” He tried to restrain his smile to polite levels, but he couldn't hold it back. She glowered at him.
“Don't smile. A smile doesn't go with those eyes. You look like you want to eat me for breakfast.” She smacked herself in the forehead with the back of her hand. “Tsst. What am I doing? You are not my student. Sweep! Sweep the floors!”
During the days of sweeping, he watched customers come and go. They usually met Gesha or other Fishers elsewhere, and only the most determined tracked her to her foundry. That was when Lindon found the answer to his question.
More than once, Gesha would take a binding and encase it in dead matter, using her drudge to seal it up so that it looked like a sword, or a shield, a shovel, or whatever the customer ordered. Once, when she'd encased a crystalline binding into a hammer that looked like it was hacked from glacial ice, a burly man in thick furs came to pick it up only seconds after she'd finished.
He had no sandviper Remnant on his arm, and he was dressed in much thicker clothing. The dark furs of his outfit were even dusted with snow, though autumn was only beginning and the days were still warm.
He took the hammer from her without a word, caressing it in gloved hands. Before Gesha could say a word, without warning, he turned and slammed the icy head into the planks of the barn.
Ice bloomed from the center of the impact, blasting away like waves that froze instantly. Lindon jumped at the sound, but a moment later he stopped in awe. A flower of ice had bloomed in the barn.
It could have been the man's own sacred arts that had created the ice, but he suspected that wasn't the case. The man could have tested his own technique anywhere, without the hammer. No, he was trying out this weapon...with the binding inside. He'd seen one produce water, so why not ice?
The sword Yerin had inherited from her master was white and unnaturally cold, and her techniques seemed more deadly with it than without it. Did it have a binding in it too?
Gesha beat the stranger around the shoulders for ruining her barn floor, and made him pay extra scales to fix it. Lindon had heard of other transactions before, but this was the first time he'd seen one, and therefore the first time he'd actually seen a scale.
It was a little disappointing. It was nothing more than a coin, though one Forged of madra to be sure, translucent and threaded with blue. Fifty scales for the hammer, twenty more for her floor, and five because he'd made her get up early. He paid gladly, whistling as he carried his new weapon out over his shoulder.
When Gesha noticed Lindon's interest in the scales, she nodded to him. “You're curious? Hm? Good, because this will be your job now. Once you clean up that ice.”
Sandviper Tern was a thin man, not tall, with a tendency to avoid Jai Long's gaze. He shifted his weight nervously with every word, and even the serpent Goldsign on his arm was smaller than usual. He gave the impression of a frightened child even when he was perfectly confident.
Which, today, he was not.
“The Copper is with one of the Fisher Soulsmiths,” Tern said to Jai Long's boots. “We had him observed in shifts, but he didn't leave her foundry. She must have taken him in.”
Jai Long looked over Tern's head to the cages full of captured miners. There were two rows of scripted cages, framing a strip of grass that led directly into the cavernous entrance of the Transcendent Ruins. He didn't open his spiritual senses, but the signs of gathered vital aura were everywhere: each blade of grass blew in different directions, a patch of frost clustered like mold onto the edge of one cage while the inhabitants of another sweated, and the clouds over the Ruins churned like they were being stirred by a giant hand.
The heavens and the earth overflowed with power. And here were his miners, shaking the bars of their cages in fear and anger.
Not mining.
“She likely wants him to sweep the foundry, clean up after botched constructs, sort boxes, that kind of thing,” Tern continued, raising his voice to be heard over the racket behind him and shifting his gaze to Jai Long's shoulder. “If she throws him out in the next few days, we'll see it. No need to worry about that. His companion might be more of a problem, considering she—”
“What is happening here?”
Tern straightened and very nearly looked Jai Long in the eyes. “Just a bit of trouble, nothing to concern you, Highgold. A little dissent in the ranks, that's all.”