“Take them as well. It will be a good education for them, however it turns out.”
None of them were worried about the safety of the new disciples; there was a Jade along, after all. The matter was practically settled.
Whitehall would work with what he had. Kazan Ma Deret was appreciably strong, and a Forger. He had learned the Path of the Mountain’s Heart, so he would never walk the Path of Heaven’s Glory, but he could still benefit the school. He could build walls, which ought to help back the girl into a corner.
The Sword Sage’s disciple wouldn’t be short of weapons or secret techniques, but now she was out of options.
It was the middle of the night when Lindon shocked himself out of his cycling trance, and the light from Samara’s ring cast an eerie light over the interior of the Hall of Healing. He’d grown up with the ring overhead every night, but down in the valley, it didn’t actually provide much light. It was only an interesting feature of the skyline. Here, it acted like a full moon…but its light was thin, somehow stretched, giving the surroundings a pale and dreamy quality.
All the other patients had collapsed into an exhausted sleep, and even the healer on duty was slumped against the wall at the far end of the room. She had exhausted her spirit dealing with the wave of wounded.
Lindon wasn’t sure how he had managed to stay awake. His clothes and sheets were drenched in sweat, and while the thorns under his skin had lessened in intensity, his veins still itched. His madra was ebbing low, so that if he did too much more tonight, he’d overdraw his spirit and be trapped in bed for days. Even his head pounded after hours concentrating, stuck cycling.
But he hadn’t given up.
He opened his mouth wide, stretching his jaw. It was still tender, but not nearly as painful as when he’d come in. Even his ribs and his arm felt merely bruised, not shattered as they had at first. If his energy held out, he would be able to walk.
He wanted nothing more than to rest his wounds and his soul…but he knew now was the time. The previous group of Irons to go up against Yerin had come back defeated, and the next batch wouldn’t leave until the morning. He had tonight, and only tonight, to find her.
Lindon staggered onto unsteady legs, using the corner of his bed as a crutch. The air was even colder than he expected, so he snagged an outer robe from another sleeping patient; the disciple wouldn’t miss it.
He hobbled home as fast as he could, gaining strength slowly as he moved. The pale light cast everything in a strange hue, especially the rainstone buildings, which now looked as though they had been dipped in milk. Samara’s ring was as thick as his arm in the sky, stretching from horizon to horizon like a river of light. Being up here, under the ring, surrounded by constructs of gleaming white…he was once again struck by the majesty of the Heaven’s Glory School. It really was like living among a village in the heavens.
I wonder what they do to traitors in the heavens, Lindon thought as he reached his room, quickly ducking inside to grab his pack with the formation banners within. Cast them back down, probably. After a moment’s thought, he brought along his second set of disciple robes as well.
If they had the same punishment here, “casting him down” would likely involve tossing him off the mountain.
The easiest way to avoid that was to avoid getting caught, so Lindon tucked his wooden badge inside his clothes. He couldn’t leave it behind in case he had to prove his identity, but wearing it openly would be as good as painting his name on his clothes. There was only one Unsouled in the school.
With a last, longing glance back at his rigid bed, Lindon set out into the frigid night, hitching his pack up onto his shoulders.
The patches of snow became more frequent as he made his way up the mountain and to the north. The scraggly trees grew closer together, and he even caught glimpses of a few Remnants—a flash of glowing antlers, or a flicker of vivid green scales.
Most of the Remnants up here carried aspects of light, which was why they were attracted to Samara’s ring. His mother had taught him that when he was a child. They drank from it as humans did from a river, but as a result, the Heaven’s Glory territory wasn’t safe at night. Wild Remnants wouldn’t necessarily attack him…but it was impossible to predict what wild Remnants would do. They might shred him to pieces, ignore him, bite him once and run off, shine a light in his eyes, drag him back to a cave and imprison him, or swear eternal loyalty to him on sight. If you didn’t know a Remnant, you had to treat it as though it were capable of anything.
Lindon wished desperately for a drudge. There had been a low-grade drudge in the Lesser Treasure Hall, and he had passed it up only because he wasn’t a Soulsmith. But here, it would have made his entire journey simple. Not only could he have set the drudge to follow sword madra, it would have warned him away from especially dangerous Remnants and given him some options to defend himself if he were attacked.
As it was now, he had to risk it. The possibility kept him dancing on the edge of a knife, scanning every shadow and freezing at the sight of every spirit. If they looked even slightly aggressive, he would have to run for his life, dropping a crystal flask as a distraction.
As the night stretched on, his vigilance scraped his nerves clean, until his eyes felt frozen wide and his ears seemed to tremble at every sound. He didn’t know how many hours he’d spent out here alone in the cold and wind, but it felt like days, and as he staggered forward with every step he lost a little more feeling in his legs.
Finally, on the jagged slope overlooking a natural chasm, he stopped. He’d been wandering around on vague instructions the whole night, every once in a while calling out Yerin’s name and hoping she heard it before a Remnant did. He knew how unlikely it was to work, and had long since resigned himself to as many nights of this as he could physically survive.
But now, new breath filled his lungs as he realized: he recognized this place. This was where he’d seen Yerin in the first place, in Suriel’s vision. The chasm was only about twenty feet deep, with a flat bottom covered in snow. The girl in black and red had been backed up against the end of the chasm, defending herself from Heaven’s Glory disciples.
Looking around, he saw some evidence of the battle—a discarded sword, partially revealed beneath a pile of snow, gleaming where it had fallen. A bloody cloth wrapped around a tree’s branch. A mirror-smooth stretch of rock where a stone had been sliced clean through.
It felt strange to see this in person. He had never really doubted Suriel’s visions, but without confirmation they remained unreal, like particularly vivid dreams. Now he had proof in front of his own eyes.
The sight strengthened his flagging spirit, and he scanned for a way down. It wasn’t easy, unless he meant to backtrack almost a half a mile to check and see if there was a smoother entrance. He certainly wasn’t going to jump twenty feet down onto ground covered in snow; as far as he knew, there were jagged weapons coating the ground down there, and he would land right on a rusty spearhead.
He finally decided to climb down, but before he did, he called as loud as he dared into the chasm. “Yerin.”
No one answered him. There wasn’t any room down there for anyone to hide anyway, not unless she had buried herself in the snow, but he had to look. Maybe he would find…something. Just finding this place had been a major encouragement, so even a piece of her robe would be welcome.
He gripped cold stone in both hands and climbed down slowly and gingerly, favoring his ribs. When he finally reached the bottom, he discovered…nothing. The chasm was even smaller than it had looked from above, and he could see the whole thing in one glance. It did cut the wind nicely, and he spent a moment huddled in his own arms, enjoying the relative warmth.