“Where is she?” Mercy asked, and Lindon’s attention sharpened.
“She’s not with…never mind. Find her and stay with her. I’ll hold the Dragon here.” Lindon’s thoughts drifted down to the labyrinth, and he let his weary mind seep into the ancient mechanisms. The will of a primeval monster began to crash against the protections around Sacred Valley.
The Weeping Dragon’s assault on the invisible wall generated by the script sounded louder than its thunder.
“We should get behind the script,” Lindon said.
Ziel gave Lindon a doubtful look. “You drove off the Monarchs, and now’s your time for a final stand? Come with us.”
The Weeping Dragon wouldn’t let Lindon leave. Even if it did, it would follow him until he was cornered.
“As long as I’m here, I have another card to play.” Once they passed the border, Lindon focused his attention on the two of them. “Thank you for coming, and good-bye. Move.”
Ziel and Mercy both resisted, and for a second, he couldn’t move them. Their spirits shone with power and resolve.
Until Lindon leaned on them with the full strength of his will.
Then they vanished.
He transferred them to a distant branch of the labyrinth on the Rosegold continent. They could help there; he had sensed a distant clash between House Shen and the Arelius family, as well as a power that might have been Yerin. He hoped. Someone with similar powers was calling his name, at least.
Maybe they could win somewhere else while he tried to survive.
[I don’t like it when you cut me off like that,] Dross complained. [How will other people hear how clever I am?]
“How much time left until the bindings are ready?” Lindon asked.
Dross shrugged. [They’re ready now. The more time we give them, the better.]
Far below Lindon, pieces of the Slumbering Wraith were burning away. They dissolved, flesh and madra as one, converting into energy to fuel ancient scripts and hunger bindings. This was the same technique he’d leaned on earlier—the hunger echoes—but far, far larger in scope. Enough that it took a hundred bindings and miles of scripts to support.
If Lindon had to provide power for this himself, it would empty his pure core and his hunger arm ten times over. He’d told Dross to move the labyrinth, to gradually feed the bindings with pieces of Subject One’s body.
The more fuel they gave this echo, the more power it would have.
“Then how much time do we have before we have to drop the barrier?” Lindon asked.
[I’ll give you a countdown when we’re ten seconds out. Which is right now. Ten…nine…]
Lindon braced himself. He steadied his mind and sharpened his will. Suriel’s marble rolled between the fingertips of his left hand. He had inherited the labyrinth from the Abidan, from Eithan, from his ancestors in Sacred Valley. Now, he had the chance to pay them back.
[…three…two…]
“Rise,” Lindon commanded.
A hundred echo bindings activated at once.
The labyrinth remembered everyone its hunger aura had ever fed on. There were certain restrictions on the technique, but in general, the more power he funneled to the echo, the closer it could come to its original form.
And this was the birthplace of the Dreadgods.
Ghostly gray-white feet large enough to crush cities appeared to Lindon’s left and right. It was like someone filling in a charcoal sketch. A skeleton appeared from the feet up to the head, then a broad shell. Skin like dark stone, and a lashing tail that could slice through mountains.
As the protective script around Sacred Valley fell, a ghost of the Wandering Titan rose.
The Weeping Dragon’s head jerked back in an exaggerated expression of surprise, and—to Lindon’s own shock—the wind aura echoed for miles with a voice like thunder.
“What have you done to my brother?” the Weeping Dragon asked, and it was as though the sky itself spoke.
The Wandering Titan roared in its face and punched the Dragon in the jaw.
When the Weeping Dragon reeled back from the blow, the Titan leaped over the mountain to the north and kept after it. Serpents of liquid lightning streamed down from the storm clouds, but the stone warrior’s tail was a lashing blur that reduced them to shining clouds of essence.
The Titan linked hands around the Dragon’s neck and dragged it down, roaring as it slammed its brother to earth.
Quaking ground shook Lindon, and though it was not enough to harm him anymore, it wasn’t comfortable. Dross summoned a cloud and slipped it underneath him, so Lindon sank into its soft surface.
[That’s all you had left,] Dross said anxiously. [You’re out. Don’t go trying to spend more than you have, okay?]
Lindon tried to respond, but even thinking was too much for him. He sank into the softness of the cloud and drifted off.
Ziel appeared over some ruins surrounded by a blackened forest that looked like it had been the victim of a recent wildfire.
It was still more intact than the land outside Sacred Valley.
Mercy’s scream of protest was still in the air when she reappeared, but it tapered off as she realized Lindon had banished them. Her shoulders slumped, and she looked on the verge of tears.
“We can help,” she said, and Ziel was sure she was still talking to the long-distant Lindon.
Ziel fixed his spiritual sense on the distance. There was likely a reason Lindon had sent them here, and he could feel a great battle in that direction.
“We still can,” Ziel said. He began Forging runes in a circle around himself.
Whether Lindon intended them to be here or not, they could at least see what was happening over there.
Mercy swiped at her eyes angrily, but she looked in the same direction Ziel indicated. She stepped closer to him to share the script-circle, but both their spirits shook as they felt something at the same time.
An angry flare of blood and sword madra, all blended together with an aspect of hunger. He knew Mercy would recognize it just as he did.
Neither of them needed to say Yerin’s name, but Ziel wondered how Lindon had transported them so close. He’d suggested he didn’t know where Yerin was, but now he was sending them within a day’s travel of Yerin.
Maybe it was a function of the labyrinth, or maybe it was an ability Lindon had gained when he merged with a Dreadgod. Who knew what kind of senses he had access to now?
“Can you protect yourself?” Ziel asked. “We’ll have to go fast.”
He could expand his own protection to cover them both, but doing so would mean power he wasn’t spending on acceleration. They needed to cover a day’s worth of flight on a cloudship as soon as possible, which meant they needed lots of force.
Mercy covered herself completely in armor. “Let’s go.”
That was all the discussion Ziel needed.
The Path of the Dawn Oath surrounded them in script, manipulating force aura and lifting them into the sky. When they were far enough off the ground, he Forged another script in front of them. Beyond that, another. Then a third.
Each circle would grab them and hurl them forward. As any force artist knew, it was easier to maintain momentum than to create it.
But before he activated the script to send them hurtling forward, he hesitated and sent his awareness out to the silver runes floating around him. His control of the Grand Oath Array had grown day by day until he was quite comfortable with it now, and it should help here.
Though if he made a mistake, he might send them hurtling into the earth fast enough to annihilate both their bodies in one strike.
He should get Mercy’s opinion on this. He didn’t want to risk her unfairly. “I have something that could get us there faster, but it might be a little…”
‘Risky’ didn’t seem quite enough, but before he could find the right word, Mercy flicked him between the horns with her armored finger.