“We would not lightly disturb the Ancestor’s rest,” the Grand Elder said. The Grand Elder served a role in the school not unlike that of a Patriarch or Matriarch of a clan, and the Grand Elder of the Heaven’s Glory School was perhaps the most powerful Jade he’d ever personally seen in action. Even the Sword Sage, that strange wanderer from outside, had expressed admiration for their Grand Elder’s accomplishments.
“Is the Ancestor’s rest not disturbed by the presence of another corpse? Or the wild Remnant accompanying it?” Whitehall countered. “I do not understand why you haven’t cleared the tomb already!”
“You were not here,” Elder Rahm said, sounding as though his voice might crumble to dust. “We acted against the Sage for the good of the school, but he was far more powerful than we expected. I still have not recovered from the injury he left to my spirit, and I was luckier than some of our brothers and sisters.”
Whitehall had not missed that. There were three or four gaps around the room, places where Jades had not survived their ambush of the Sword Sage. And as Whitehall understood it, they had attacked full-force while the man slept. Even so, the Sage had left a number of casualties.
Their tragedy could be Whitehall’s great fortune, if he placed his pieces just right. “I wasn’t there, and that’s why I am all the more eager to do my part. If only a few of you accompany me, or even allow me to bring a group of Irons, I will survey the tomb and return. Together, we can devise a way to retrieve the stranger’s treasures. And his sword.”
Whitehall was far more interested in the rare sacred herbs the Sword Sage always carried on his person, but he knew that many of the other elders coveted the man’s sword. The Sage had performed miracles with that blade, and they believed that an artifact of such power could form the cornerstone of their entire school.
So it baffled Whitehall that they had simply left the weapon where it lay.
Elder Anses rubbed a hand along his short beard, as though to emphasize that Whitehall could no longer grow one. “That’s more complicated than you perhaps think. The Remnant has the sword.”
Whitehall stared at him, searching for any signs of a joke. Remnants did not use weapons. Even the Remnant of such a powerful warrior, made up entirely of sword-aspect madra, would grow its own blade rather than picking one up. Remnants could advance over time, just like humans and sacred beasts, but it was a joke to think that one could advance so far, so fast.
“It’s that stable?” he asked, looking to the Grand Elder for confirmation.
The Grand Elder was at least as old as Elder Rahm, but age had not diminished him. He was a mountain of a man, a huge slab of muscle that took up twice the space of anyone else. “We tried to lay a boundary formation to force it out,” the Grand Elder said. “It used the sword to destroy the first banner. Every time we tried to lay a script, it either broke the script…or broke the one laying it.”
Remnants could speak and reason and make deals, but they were very narrow in scope. They had only fragments of their memories from life, and could understand nothing outside of those memories. They were shadows, nothing more, even if they did gain more detail over time.
But this one had proven itself capable of understanding script, planning action against it, and striking its enemy’s weak points. It was thinking strategically.
“Is it even a Remnant?” Whitehall asked.
“It is,” one of the other elders responded. “Its appearance is very clear, but we had a Soulsmith scan it anyway, in case the Sword Sage had simply used a technique to somehow imitate a Remnant. We’re confident this isn’t the case. It has simply left a Remnant that is far, far beyond anything we’ve ever seen.”
Whitehall’s mind staggered at the thought. To leave such a Remnant…the Sword Sage might actually have reached the Gold stage. His desire for those sacred herbs redoubled. Anything a Gold carried on his person would be a priceless treasure.
“I now understand,” Whitehall said, and he did. A Gold’s Remnant was the stuff of legends and nightmares. The elders would have to tread cautiously, in case the spirit had the ability to destroy their entire school. “You were wise to treat the situation with such care, and I spoke from ignorance.” He bowed to the Grand Elder in apology. “But what about that girl, his disciple? If the Remnant remembers her, we might lure it away from the corpse.”
He had very little impression of the Sword Sage’s disciple. She had always followed him around, but at the time, Whitehall had thought of the Sage as nothing more than a wandering Jade. As such, his disciple wouldn’t be anything special. But if he was a Gold expert, the picture changed.
Another elder, an old woman with a completely shaven head, sighed. “We have sent practically every combat-capable Iron in the school against her for weeks now. She sends them back dead or wounded. We planned on exhausting her spirit, pressuring her until she broke, but our disciples might be the ones to break first. Now that we know how powerful the Sword Sage was, it makes some sense; a Gold’s disciple must be extraordinary.”
Whitehall had just apologized, so it would be unbecoming of his dignity to make a scene, but it was hard to hold himself back when he heard this stupidity. “The Irons failed to capture her, so you…sent more Irons?”
The Grand Elder rumbled deep in his chest. “The enemy is only a disciple, and a young girl. Which elder from the Heaven’s Glory School would throw away their face to deal personally with a child?”
Elder Whitehall very carefully stopped himself from exploding. This was a good thing for him, he reminded himself, and their foolishness was to his advantage. He still felt like strangling every one of them. “This elder does. The Sword Sage’s treasures could make us the strongest power in the valley, or his Remnant could ruin us. This concerns the survival of our school. How could I value my pride over that?”
“It is not our pride that concerns us,” Elder Rahm said, “but the honor of Heaven’s Glory. Without its reputation, a school is nothing. The clans will send their young geniuses to the Fallen Leaf or the Holy Wind, and we will be forced to harvest all our sacred herbs in our own gardens. Even the outsider nomads might not deal with us if they did not trust in our honor.”
Whitehall waved a hand at himself. “Then let a child deal with a child. The pride of the school is untarnished, yes?”
The other elders shifted, uncomfortable, but none of them spoke out. He knew how their minds worked. Elder Whitehall’s condition was not common knowledge outside this room; they allowed all outside parties to assume that he was really a precocious genius that had managed to achieve Jade at a preposterously young age. His plan wasn’t honorable, because it meant propping their reputation up on a misconception. Therefore, none of them wanted to be the first to agree.
But it would work, so none of them tore it down either. They each waited for someone else to give in first.
“You may do as you see fit,” the Grand Elder said, which was the least enthusiastic approval Whitehall had ever received. But it didn’t matter, so long as he was allowed to do as he liked.
“I’ll need Irons that have fought the girl in the past,” he said. “As well as some fresh ones.”
“A group of five will be released from the Hall of Healing tomorrow morning. I’ll have them report to you. As for your fresh fighters, didn’t you bring in a pair yourself only yesterday?”
Whitehall almost hated to admit that Lindon had been one of his, but since the elders already knew, there was no sense in denying it. “Yes, Grand Elder.”