He sat at a rough table arranged on the mud, a stretch of fabric above him guarding from rain and providing shade. It was hot here when the sun was high, and cold when it wasn't, but his personal comfort was secondary. This position allowed him to focus on his duties, placed him in the way of any attack on the tent, and kept him close enough to respond to any of Kral's whims.
No sooner had Jai Long thought of the name when his master stuck his head out from the tent. Kral was twenty-two years old, and fit from years of martial training. He always gave the impression of an imposing leader, standing tall and confident as though to inspire those around him, gaze fixed on some distant vision of victory...until he smiled. Then, he looked like a rogue trying to charm his way out of trouble.
He was smiling now.
Water ran down his body, and black hair plastered to his face and neck. Even the towel wrapped around his waist was soaked.
“Send for some more water, would you?” Kral asked. The Sandvipers called Kral the young chief, though he hadn't ascended to his father's title yet, because of the great influence he had among the sect. He was issuing a command, but he respected Jai Long enough to at least pretend it was a request. “Somehow we keep losing it.” A chorus of laughter followed that statement from within the tent, and his grin broadened.
Jai Long nodded to a pair of nearby servants, young boys born into the Sandviper sect, and they ran off at his signal to find the jars of water he'd ordered filled earlier. There were constructs in the tent to heat what water they brought, but if there existed any constructs that could create water out of madra, only the Purelake might have Soulsmiths skilled enough to build them. Maybe the Fishers, but he couldn't have any dealings with the Sandvipers' ancestral enemy. Not openly, anyway.
Request fulfilled, Jai Long turned back to his work, expecting that Kral would leave. Instead, the heir sighed.
“You're not a slave,” he said.
Jai Long turned back, somewhat surprised at the statement. “If I thought I was, I wouldn't stay.” He and Kral had reached the same stage of advancement in the sacred arts, but the future chief wouldn't be able to stop him by force. Jai Long wasn't arrogant enough to assume that he was the strongest Highgold in the Five Factions Alliance, but he was certainly the best among the Sandvipers.
If he'd thought the sect was treating him unfairly, he would have cut his way through them, and Kral knew it. The only one that could have overpowered him was the current chief, a Truegold, and Kral's father was out hunting.
Kral nodded to the paperwork. “Then why are you working like one? Come join us.” He peeled the tent flap back a little, and another humid gust bloomed in the night air.
No laughter accompanied this statement from inside the tent, but none of them argued. Kral's friends were afraid of seeming too displeased, but they certainly weren't eager to have Jai Long join them.
He resisted lifting a hand to feel the strips of cloth wrapped around his head. The cloth was red, wrapped so tightly around him that not a hair or scrap of skin was visible from the neck up. Only his eyes peeked out of the middle, and if he could have covered those up without losing his vision, he would have.
“Let's not inflict my company upon them,” Jai Long said dryly. “They're having fun.”
If Kral's companions could have cheered that statement without losing face, Jai Long was sure they would have.
Kral's smile sharpened. “They won't say a word about it, that I can promise you. They know the hand that feeds them.”
They wouldn't need words to express their displeasure, Jai Long knew. No one did, really. When he'd returned to his family with his sister's bloody and broken body in his arms, his parents were more horrified by his face than by the fate of their daughter. What have you done to yourself? they didn't ask him. Was it worth it? they didn't say.
When the Jai Patriarch banished him to the Wilds, the words were hollow and empty, forms without substance. The old man's disappointment oozed across the room, so tangible that it might as well have been vital aura taken form. The star that would have guided the clan into the future had stepped off the Path, ruining his future advancement. And he was hideous...how could he represent the Jai like that?
Nothing truly important needed to be said. When he returned to the clan, unseated the Patriarch, and forced the rest of the family to bow before him, he wouldn't need any speeches either. Above all else, sacred artists respected strength.
Jai Long intended to use his.
“Can you imagine me saying yes?” he asked Kral, and the young chief gave a bitter laugh.
“In truth, no. But what sort of host would I be if I didn't ask?”
Kral had his faults. He pursued sacred arts with admirable dedication, but at every other sort of work he balked. He was lazy, irritable, quick to anger, slow to apologize, arrogant, and even occasionally cruel.
But he'd treated Jai Long well, and it would not be forgotten.
Jai Long said none of this, because he didn't need to. He waved his hand. “You're letting out the heat. Call for me when you need more wine.”
Kral sighed again, but headed back inside. The laughs started up again almost immediately.
Jai Long looked down at the papers beneath him, conjuring a tiny star on the tip of one finger so that he had enough light to see. Four piles of papers sat on the desk, divided roughly into quadrants. Each page was a map. The maps were rough, sketched by many different hands, and incomplete. Jai Long was making notes of his own on the many blank spaces, filling in from other maps and from his own inferences, slowly and steadily building a complete diagram.
There were still many riddles to solve, but he could feel the information gathering into a whole. In another week, maybe two, he'd have an advantage beyond any of the other Five Factions: a map of the Transcendent Ruins.
The stories passed down about the ancient Jai spear were more myth than fact, but two things remained true to a reasonable degree of certainty. For one thing, it was almost absolutely true that the spear remained somewhere in the Ruins. There were hundreds of eyewitnesses to the Jai Matriarch's entrance, and while popular stories said she'd died within, her closest advisors recorded that she emerged from the Ruins weak and battered. She told those advisors that she'd left the spear within, and died days afterward.
He had enough information to consider that story true. But there was a second fact he'd verified, and it was equally important: the spear really had devoured the strength of Remnants and added their strength to that of the Matriarch's. One of her advisors had observed the process, even noting down possible methods and some runes on the spear's shaft that might have been some form of script. The early Jai clan had tried to reproduce the spear, but had ultimately failed.
No one else had considered the nature of that ability, except that it was a powerful way to advance quickly. The others, he was sure, sought the spear for one reason alone: with it, they might be able to break through the bonds of Truegold. There was only one Underlord in the Desolate Wilds, and only a handful in the Blackflame Empire. Advancing past Truegold meant advancing beyond the realms of common sense, to rise from the earth to the heavens in one leap.
They all thought so small.
More accurately, their vision was narrow. Jai Long's competitors, including the Sandviper sect, were so focused on advancement that they neglected to consider what it meant to consume someone else's power.
No one could gather madra that was too different from their own. That was a fundamental law, and one that Jai Long had no reason to believe the spear could break. If he, whose madra carried aspects of light and the sword, tried to absorb a Sandviper Remnant, the spear might allow him to do it. His madra would gain a toxic aspect, and he would have a harder time finding the right aura to cycle, but he should be able to do it.