Lindon erased all evidence of the night’s work in minutes, packing his gear up in his worn brown pack. The jar of Remnants went in last of all, carefully secured.
It was most of two hour’s hike back to the clan, but he hardly noticed the time. His chances had just doubled.
He walked past the street that led to his rooms, instead heading back to the arena. The guards allowed him back in without further questions, leaving no one to watch him. They were his family, if only distantly; they knew him. So no one saw as Lindon took a shovel to the soft earth, digging straight down until he bared the sides of the stone blocks that made up the stage floor.
When he got beneath them, he adjusted his angle, hollowing out a space under the block. A space just big enough for a sealed clay jar.
He was sliding the jar into the opened earth when his mother’s voice sounded from behind him.
“Still practicing?”
Chapter 8
Lindon turned to face his mother, hiding the hole and the sealed jar behind him. “Your son is honored to see you here, Mother. But why...I mean, if I may ask why you...”
Seisha saved him the effort of explaining by walking forward and leaning over the hole he'd dug. Her drudge gurgled as it floated over her shoulder, no doubt detecting the Remnant sealed within.
“While the arena is under construction, the staff answer to me,” Seisha said, kneeling to run a finger along his scripted jar. “I asked them to report anyone entering tonight, but I never thought it would be you.”
Lindon was afraid to move, lest it somehow push his mother over the edge from calm to furious. “I'm sorry to have disturbed you, then.”
Seisha stood, flipping brown hair over one shoulder. “You can think of nothing else you've done that might warrant an apology?”
Despite the cool of the night, he broke out in a sudden sweat. He had thought of cover stories depending on who caught him, but none of them would pass his mother.
She looked into the hole with brown eyes, lighter than anyone else in the clan. “Back home, we had a saying. 'The disciple follows the master, but the genius blazes their own trail.' You should cover this up before someone else sees it.”
Lindon wasted a second on astonishment before grabbing his shovel and setting to work. He piled the dirt back in hastily, hoping she wouldn't change her mind. “Mother, are you calling me a genius?”
“Obviously not. It's just a saying.” He couldn't deny a moment of disappointment before his mother continued. “Nonetheless, I’m proud of you.”
The shovel felt light in his hands as his mother's words danced through his mind, so it wasn't until he'd worked in silence for minutes more that he thought to ask a question. “Who were you expecting?”
She gave him a wry glance. Because he knew her, he knew what it meant: she had hoped he wouldn't ask that question. But Wei Shi Seisha would answer it anyway, because she believed that curiosity should always be rewarded. “Have you heard any rumors about the Li clan recently?”
The First Elder had said they were too quiet, suspiciously so, but Lindon suspected he wasn't supposed to have that information. He shook his head.
“Three months ago, they purchased an unusual item from an auction. A fragment of a stone tablet dating back thousands of years, supposedly found at the base of the Nethergate. It was covered in runes that may have had some...unique properties. But no one could ever prove it.”
“What sort of properties?” Lindon asked, leaning on his shovel.
“It looked like half of a script intended for direct spatial transportation. The stuff of myths. Walk into one circle and emerge in another one a world away, stories like that. I examined the tablet myself, before the Li clan bought it, and I could not confirm it.”
Still, Lindon's imagination burned with the possibilities. That really was the stuff of legends.
“Since they bought the tablet, we haven't heard much from them at all, but we've started to receive reports that they've been hunting specific Remnants. A rabbit that crosses yards in the blink of an eye. A bat that can vanish into nothing. A mole that burrows through thin air. We believe they're trying to condense spatial madra.”
Spatial madra. It sounded ridiculous. “Apologies, Mother, but how could that be? How could madra take on the form of space?”
She pointed at him, and he knew he'd struck the heart of the matter. “It can't. Madra can imitate anything from fire to dreams, and we call those forms ‘aspects.’ Obviously, to speak of space having a form is absurd. They are actually seeking to pierce and control space using madra, which should be impossible.”
But there had to be more to the story, or his mother wouldn't be so uneasy. “Then the Li clan is wasting their time. And their money.”
“I've worked with some of the Li Soulsmiths, who would be leading any project involving Remnants. They're underhanded and some of their theories are suspect, but they wouldn't commit clan resources to a project unless they had reason to believe it could succeed. That is what scares me. Everything I've heard leads me to believe that they're investing everything into a fool's dream, so they've either gone insane...or they know something we don't.”
Lindon shivered even as he finished filling in the whole he'd dug beneath the stage, patting the soil down so that it fell flush with the stone block. If the Li clan did try something during the Festival, it reassured him that he at least had one hidden weapon.
Seisha held a glowing blue stick of Forged madra up for her drudge's inspection, and it ran segmented legs over the stick before whistling in response. She noted something down on her notepad. After only a few minutes, she'd already moved on to her next project. “If you've finished, we should leave the arena. It won't be long before someone asks what we've been doing here, and the shovel will be hard to explain.”
On their way out, Lindon asked a question that had unnerved him as soon as he'd thought of it. “Will the Li clan try something during the Festival?”
“Undoubtedly they will,” she said, deep in her notebook. When he responded with uneasy silence, she elaborated. “The clans always try something during the Seven-Year Festival, because it's the best time to strive against one another. They'll propose 'sure' bets, or try to rig trading agreements. Nothing unusual. As for our earlier discussion—” They were walking past a guard, who nodded to them as they left. “—I suspect it will take them years before they have anything functional. Real research takes generations to perfect.”
“Then why were you expecting them tonight?”
She gave him a wry smile. “Because I try to expect the worst.”
Information requested: the Seven-Year Festival.
Beginning report…
Every seven years, the clans of Sacred Valley hold a festival.
While the original purpose of this gathering was to promote unity, it has become the primary stage on which they compete. The children of the clan are taught to identify the others by their clothes—armor and a red sash for the Kazan, with their banners bearing three stone dogs; a white fox with five tails for the Wei, who always match white with purple; and the Li, who wear too much jewelry and carry banners bearing the Snake and the Tree.
These are your enemies, the children are told. One day, our clan will be strong, and we will crush the other two under our heels.
It has been this way for a hundred generations.
The Wei clan hosts the Festival this year, so outside craftsmen have inhabited clan grounds for months. They build booths of orus wood, dig trenches, paint houses, smooth roads, and generally prepare the clan for an influx of rivals. The Wei are never so clean, organized, and well-presented as in the days leading up to the Seven-Year Festival.