He dropped to his knees even as the smoky ghost said, [The Ninecloud Court.]
Suriel flicked her fingers, and he found himself gently pulled to his feet though nothing touched him. “They cannot see us unless I allow them to.” She herself stood with hands clasped at her waist, gazing straight ahead as though none of the opulence could attract her interest for a second.
Lindon glanced around, prepared to fall back to his knees at any second. Indeed, none of the crowd so much as glanced at them.
This is the power of an immortal. With even a small piece of that power, he could do anything.
A hatch in the ceiling opened up, and a rainbow-glistening cloud descended. As it drifted down toward the floor, he saw that someone was riding on the cloud: a girl perhaps ten or eleven years old, wrapped entirely in glistening peacock feathers. Her hair was an impossible, fiery red, and she surveyed her elders as though looking down on her subjects.
[Luminous Queen Sha Miara,] the ghost said. [Path of Celestial Radiance.]
The girl reached out a hand and Forged a sword of blinding rainbow light. “Kneel,” she said, and the sea of people knelt. Lindon had to focus to keep standing. The blade radiated power and authority, such that it seemed to affect his soul directly.
Suriel nodded to the girl. “Sha Miara inherited her madra from a noble lineage stretching back to the birth of this world. In three days, she will use that sword to sink a fleet of cloudships, saving her capital city from attack by air. If you had her power, you could save Sacred Valley.”
Lindon stared at the redheaded girl and her rainbow sword. He’d never heard of this “Ninecloud Court,” and of course no one had left Sacred Valley for a hundred generations. It was a desolate landscape beyond the mountains, a nightmare from the lowest hells. All the books said so.
“Where is she?” Lindon asked. He might be able to recruit her, or beg her for help, if he couldn’t learn the secrets of her training.
Suriel gave him a sidelong glance around the curtain of her dark green hair. “If you walked the length of Sacred Valley end-to-end, you’d have to do it more than a hundred times—”
[One hundred and fourteen times,] the ghost said.
“—one hundred and fourteen times to reach the outer border of her country. The Ninecloud Court is in the Ninecloud Country, for which it was named, and that country is four hundred times—”
[Three hundred and ninety-four times,] the ghost said.
“Verbal response not required for calculation corrections. Three hundred and ninety-four times bigger than Sacred Valley. You would never get there. Here, your fate is an absolute certainty. If you tried one million times to go to the Ninecloud Court from where you are at this moment, you would die before you reached her one million times.”
He started to ask for advice when the blue flash came again, and then they were standing in midair over an endless ocean. When Lindon saw the slate-gray waves tossing under his feet, his breath left him. He hurled himself onto Suriel’s armored shoulders before he fell.
She stood with perfect equanimity, every hair in place, as an invisible force peeled him off her shoulders and placed him next to her. His feet were firmly planted on air. On air. He couldn’t trust it. His gut was certain that he would be dropped at any second.
“Do not be afraid,” she reminded him for a third time.
[The Trackless Sea,] the ghost announced.
And then they dropped.
Stomach lurched, and he plummeted into the ocean. He panicked as water closed over him, flailing his arms even as he squeezed his eyes shut, holding his breath. He’d learned to swim in the Dragon River, as any Wei child did, but it rarely ran deeper than his shoulders.
“Breathe,” Suriel commanded, and he realized he was still dry. He cracked his eyes open, but almost shut them again. Aside from a bubble of air surrounding him, the immortal, and her pet ghost, water stretched infinitely in every direction. Light glimmered above them, increasingly distant, but they plunged lower and lower. Into the darkness.
He finally caught his balance, forcing himself to breathe normally and not to cling to the white-armored woman as though to a raft. She seemed to be treating this as nothing out of the ordinary, so he took his queue from her. But he did stand very, very close. Not only was he trusting her to save him, she was the only other person in this world of black water.
As they fell, Lindon saw that they weren’t alone after all. Someone else dropped alongside them, a man sinking through the water like his bones were weighted with lead. The stranger was a mass of muscle, his eyes glowed golden, and he had his arms folded as though impatiently waiting to reach the ocean floor. As they fell into darkness together, the ghost spoke again. [Northstrider. Path of the Hungry Deep.]
The absolute black beneath them shifted, and Lindon slid closer to Suriel. A dragon’s head emerged from the dark, followed by a serpent’s body that coiled endlessly. It must have been miles long, and its jaws gaped open into a pink tunnel lined with teeth.
Northstrider unfolded his arms, revealing hands gloved in pitch-black scales. With one hand he seized a fang longer than he was tall, but the monster’s momentum carried him past Lindon. A wall of scales rushed past him, blocking out everything else.
“Northstrider consumes sacred beasts in the deepest places of the world,” Suriel said. “He takes their power with him to the surface. He could level Sacred Valley on his own…and you could save it, if you had skills and powers like his.”
She’d said that already, but she had withheld the most important part. “Honored immortal, how? I am Unsouled. Where could I possibly learn his skills?” He hoped she would answer him, but feared she would call it impossible.
She smiled at him as though she knew his thoughts, and another blue flash took them away.
Inside an ordinary inn hewn from rough logs, eight people in intricate golden armor laughed and clinked glasses together. A woman tossed a gold shield down, saying something with raised eyebrows. A man pulled his helmet off, revealing a red eye in the center of his forehead.
[Western Chi Ning City. The Eight-Man Empire. Path of the Eightfold Spear.]
“These eight call themselves an empire because they conquer wherever they roam,” Suriel said, striding through the room. She let her hand drift behind her, as though she meant to run white-plated fingers over the local men and women, but she never touched a thing. “So far, they have not been defeated. They could easily save Sacred Valley, as could you, if you earned a place with them. Their armor is a cross between a Remnant and a construct, and when one of them dies, they pass it on to a successor.”
“Are they all Gold?” Lindon asked. He hadn’t seen anyone outside the valley wearing badges, but he supposed the armor might serve a similar purpose.
Suriel stopped with her palm hovering over one member of the Eight-Man Empire, a woman with yellow hair who lay facedown on a table, snoring. “Larian was raised in a noble household. Her father wouldn’t let her play with the other children until she reached the level you know as Gold. When she was six years old, she did. Today, an army of ten thousand Gold-ranked sacred artists couldn’t scratch her armor.”
Larian grunted in her sleep.
The blue blanket fell again, but this time it lingered. He and Suriel drifted in a blinding sapphire void. She stood in the same position as in the inn—arm outstretched as though to deliver a blessing, her visage all the more inhuman for her green hair and seamless white armor. Without turning around, she spoke. “You have twenty, maybe thirty years before disaster strikes.”