Unsouled (Cradle Book 1) (17 page)

Anything this trespasser could do, she could undo.

He descended from a class six spatial rift, little more than a slit in the Way that was repaired immediately. She watched as he gathered some followers around him—he must have been communicating with this world for some time, which would add to his sentence—and decapitate a couple of observers. The spines were severed cleanly, but she would reverse causality rather than attempt a manual reattachment. No sense taking a risk.

As she reduced speed for her arrival, the trespasser fully unveiled his spirit, darkening the sky with storm aura and smashing nearby pillars to frighten the locals. He was going for full dramatic effect.

“Is this it, then?” the black-and-white striped trespasser taunted his enemies. The audio quality had improved now that she was within two dozen kilometers. “Don't hold back, come up. I won't begin until you are ready.”

Suriel prepared to descend when she noticed a detail that the winged man had overlooked. That boy, fifteen and clad in white, was sneaking around to the front of the trespasser. He gathered his meager madra together, terror and resolve and muted self-loathing radiating in a psychic wave.

With the same move he'd used on the children earlier, the boy drove his palm into the Gold practitioner's core.

Suriel winced even before the trespasser tore the boy in half, sending his torso flipping up and out of the arena. The boy had to have known it was useless.

[He knew,] her Presence confirmed.

And he tried anyway,
Suriel thought. This was the sort of person the Abidan were created to save: the weak who stood against the strong. The sort of person the Phoenix was meant to save. The sort of person who might, with a little outside help, even reach beyond their fate.

His life guttered out, visible to her eyes, but that meant nothing before Suriel. He was only dead.

She changed her plan. She had meant to freeze time, retrieve the trespasser, revert the damage he'd done, and leave. With a delicate adjustment of memory, the locals would never notice their day had been interrupted.

Now, she had a new goal. Makiel wouldn't be pleased, but this event now fell officially under her purview. She could handle it as she saw fit.

And she saw fit to make the trespasser sweat.

***

Death looked surprisingly like the last moments of his life, Lindon found.

His vision had fuzzed away for a second in a haze of gray, but now it returned, and he found that everything looked exactly the same. Markuth had his hands raised above his white-striped hair, madra gathered in balls of force and wings spread. The Jade experts of two clans ran at him with weapons and foxfire ready, resignation in their wrinkled faces. Blood splattered the arena, and his legs lay next to his mother's head.

When Lindon was a child, he had once nudged a table carrying a ceramic vase, an heirloom from previous generations of the Shi family. The table shook, and he looked up to see the vase teetering on the edge. That moment had seemed to stretch, a single image imprinted on time so that it seemed to last forever before the vase at last began to fall.

At first, he thought that was happening now. The world seemed frozen around him, as though time had stretched once again. He noticed it, and waited for the battle to resume.

But it didn't.

A few breaths of time later—though Lindon wasn't breathing, and felt no urge to—the tableau before him remained exactly the same. He wondered if this was what death was, a single instant lasting for eternity. He hoped not. Boredom seemed like a worse fate than otherworldly torment.

Then something changed. The sky, masked by the dark clouds summoned by the Li Clan's Grand Patriarch, began to glow blue. Azure light lit the underside of the clouds as though a blue sun rose, spilling its light over the entire arena.

And in that light, pieces of the world began to move.

Though Li Markuth remained locked in his pose of triumph, the Jade combatants still frozen before him, blood slithered along the floor around his feet. The severed heads tumbled across the arena, gathering blood as they rolled, bouncing off the stone and rolling away toward the forest.

His own legs slid across the stone, as though his blood had become a rope pulling his body together. Panic tightened his chest, and he tried to struggle, but he couldn't even widen his eyes. No part of him responded to his control, and he had to wait and watch as his flesh pulled itself together. It wasn't painful, but he
could
feel it, an uncomfortable squirming below his ribs as muscle and bone reassembled themselves.

All the while, the sky grew brighter and brighter.

Markuth slowly moved his head on his neck, thawing gradually, first looking around him at the frozen world and then at the brightening sky.

He stumbled backward in shock, flapping his wings like a panicked bird to keep from falling over.

“No!” he screamed, hurling the balls of his madra into the sky. “Wait,
please!
I belong here! This is my homeland!”

The clouds parted, revealing the source of the blue light. It blazed like a sapphire sun for an instant, sending a painful lance through Lindon's eyes and making him wish he could close them.

The light dimmed somewhat, revealing its source: two sweeps of blue fire, like a pair of wings formed from iridescent flames and big enough to cover a third of the sky. It gave the impression of a blue phoenix, or perhaps a phoenix Remnant, descending from the heavens in glory.

Markuth roared at the phoenix, drawing the sword from his belt. It was shaped like a straight, simple sword, but it fuzzed and flickered, buzzing oddly as though it weren't quite real.

The phoenix faded further as it descended, until its flames no longer hurt Lindon’s eyes. When he could see again, he made out a person at the phoenix’s heart: a woman, drifting down toward them and bearing flaming blue wings.

Beautiful she was, but it wasn't the word that occurred to Lindon first. The first thing he thought was,
Perfect
. It was as though someone had taken a real person and perfected her, smoothing every blemish in her pale skin, arranging her cloud of dark hair so that nothing was out of place. Neither too short nor too tall, too thick nor too thin, she looked like the template from which every other human being was wrought. She was so flawless that she couldn't be real, reminding Lindon forcibly that he was dead now. Maybe she was a messenger from the heavens, here to usher him into the netherworld. That would explain the burning wings.

Though, aside from her inhuman perfection, she didn't look like he would have imagined. Her body was sheathed in white, liquid armor that moved effortlessly with her. Gray ribbons of hazy smoke started at the fingertips of her right hand, winding up her arm and terminating in her neck. Her hair looked brown at first glance, but upon further reflection, he would call it a deep green. And her eyes, large and human, were undoubtedly purple.

The heavens must be a strange place to produce people like her. But with her here, he found that he could relax. Maybe when she brought him to the next life, he would be more than Unsouled.

Markuth stood with his chest heaving and a sword in his right hand, but he didn't attack. “I have not violated the Pact, nor upset the balance of this world, nor defied the Abidan. I demand a trial before—”

An invisible rope grabbed Li Markuth around one ankle, pulling him off-balance and dragging him to a point just behind the woman. He flapped his wings, kicking up a powerful wind, straining against his unseen bonds, but to no avail.

[Li Markuth,] said an impassive voice in Lindon's mind. [You have been sentenced to trial for spatial violation and attempted domination of local inhabitants. You will be imprisoned until the Court of Seven determine a date and location of your trial.]

A black spot appeared behind the green-haired woman, a point of absolute darkness. It widened so that Lindon could see a few spots of color within, like a distant cloud of rainbow-colored fireflies. Markuth continued being dragged backwards, as though that spot called him inexorably toward it.

As the Gold came closer to the woman, he roared and spread his wings wide, raising his strangely twisting sword. With both hands, he slammed the blade down on her unprotected head, and the force of his madra was such that it pressed against Lindon even across the arena. The stones beneath her cracked, and wind blew away from the impact. The air rang with a sound like steel on stone.

And the woman continued drifting over the ground, undisturbed. Not a single strand of her hair moved out of place, and she never looked in Markuth's direction.

He screamed like a child as the darkness swallowed him, slurping up the tip of his sword last. The black hole in the world closed.

The woman continued toward him, having never acknowledged the Grand Patriarch of the Li Clan for an instant. From the beginning of her descent, her eyes had remained locked on Lindon.

She reached the ground just before she reached him, her smooth white boots tapping down on the stone. The blue-fire wings vanished at the same moment. She regarded him first, then motioned for him to stand.

“Stand,” she said. “Do not be afraid.” The words sounded strange, as though she were trying a different accent with every syllable, but they were completely understandable. He was surprised enough that she'd spoken directly to him, instead of using the dispassionate impersonal voice that had sentenced Li Markuth. Her real voice sounded so different that he wondered if they had even come from the same person. Maybe the words earlier were straight from heaven.

When he realized he hadn't immediately obeyed this celestial messenger, he scrambled to his feet, only an instant later remembering that he should be in agony.

He wasn't. In fact, he felt better than he had before the tournament, his spirit restored to full capacity and his body clean and well-rested.

Lindon considered dropping to his knees, but she had just ordered him to stand, so he bent in half at the waist. “This one thanks you for the attention, honored immortal. Please, how may this one serve you?”

An afterlife in the service of a celestial immortal was infinitely better than his mortal existence. If there was any truth in the myths, he could still practice the sacred arts now that he'd left his physical body behind, so this might be an unimaginable opportunity.

Death could well be the best thing that had ever happened to him.

He couldn't see her face, but she considered for a few seconds before speaking again, her expression as pleasant and unyielding as a mask. “This one would not require so much of you.”

This one?
He wondered if she was mocking him, or if he had somehow offended her. “Please, honored immortal, do not speak to this one so humbly.”

“Humbly? Ah.”

She considered a moment longer before clearing her throat. This time, she sounded as though she’d spent her entire life in Sacred Valley. “Raise your head and speak freely. I have no patience for the manners of this world.”

He straightened, taking the chance to look her in the eyes. It was technically rude of him, but she said she didn't mind, and he was willing to take her at her word. Besides, this might be the only time he ever met her, and he was determined to commit her faultless face to memory.

But there was one answer he needed. “May I ask, if you don’t mind…am I dead?”

A smile tugged at one corner of her mouth, a crack in the mask. “Do you not feel alive?”

He thought he did, but then, who could say what death felt like?

“If you've brought me to life, then...” he hesitated, looking around at the frozen world. The Jade elders were stuck rushing forward to oppose an enemy that no longer existed.

Purple eyes surveyed the scene, her face pleasant and impassive once again. She might as well have been looking over a field of flowers. “Li Markuth was not permitted to return to this world. His attack was a deviation from fate, which I have reversed. When I depart, it will be as though your festival continued uninterrupted.”

“What about me?” Lindon asked immediately. “You restored me to life. Will I forget this kindness as well?”

“Yes.” This didn’t appear to disturb her in the least.

“You don’t think you could…leave my memory? So that I could be properly grateful?” He was the only one to receive special treatment from the heavens; he couldn’t allow himself to walk away as though nothing had happened.

She reached over with her left hand, stroking the lines of gray smoke on her right as though tenderly playing an instrument. “Temporal reversion is not memory modification. When I’m done here, nothing Li Markuth did will have happened. Your festival
will
have continued without cease. To spare you, I would have to temporarily withdraw you from the flow of fate.”

“Thank you for your consideration, honored messenger,” he said, as though her words were a promise. “I am ready.”

Her lips twitched, and he suspected she was using her neutral expression to suppress a smile. “It’s not a complex process for me. I can draw you out of fate with a thought.”

“Fate. So then, if you’re not offended by this one’s humble questions…can you see the future?”

“Fate is not the future. What is destined to occur does not always occur.”

He bowed before her three times. “That is enough for me, thank you. Would you tell me my destiny?”

This time she did laugh, and he was almost surprised that it sounded so human. “I’m pleased to have descended personally, Wei Shi Lindon.” A thrill rolled through him. The celestial messenger
knew his name.
“I can show you some limited details of your fate, if you are willing to see them.”

“This one would be honored.” He tried to hide the eagerness in his voice. Even the most trivial knowledge of the future could be used to great advantage.

The tips of two white-plated fingers met his forehead, like cool eggshells. “Then
see.
”

The frozen world was wiped out, replaced with another. He was still standing on the stone of the arena stage, but the clouds Li Markuth summoned had never appeared, and the sun beat down out of a clear sky. Wei Jin Amon faced him, and though he resisted longer than anyone expected, he still lost.