Dreadgod (Cradle Book 11) (20)
Pride crushed his gatestone and vanished in a shimmer of blue light.
Lindon stared at the shimmering light where he disappeared, idly feeling the warp in space that had taken him away. Even while he tried to focus on what he’d learned about the Book of Seven Pages, their earlier conversation about Mercy drifted through the back of his mind.
[And so he casts confusion into your thoughts. Raises more questions than he answers. Was he here to help, or to sink you into the mire of uncertainty?]
Dross floated next to Lindon’s ear, whispering doubt. Lindon waved him away.
“I don’t understand your new sense of humor.”
Dross popped up by the other ear. [You didn’t understand my old one either.]
Lindon ran pure madra through a device hanging around his neck, and a doorway opened in the air almost exactly where Pride had used his gatestone. This gate led onto a rune-covered stone platform floating in an empty ocean of stars. A waist-high column of dull gray metal stood in the middle, an opening in its center holding a blue flame.
“Whatever Pride thinks, it doesn’t matter,” Lindon said. “We have work to do.”
The Silent King had threatened to attack Lindon’s friends and family. That threat hung over him; when would that attack come? What resources did a Dreadgod have? Could he have already attacked? Did he have agents all over the world?
But worries didn’t solve problems.
Preparation did.
Lindon strode through the door in the Ancestor’s Tomb, past the hallway of cabinets that was the upper entrance, and into the labyrinth proper.
Here, his awareness expanded as he claimed his authority over the labyrinth.
Its tendrils spread like a spiderweb beneath Sacred Valley and for a thousand miles in every direction. Strands and other, smaller webs branched out all over the world. To him, they now felt close enough to reach out and touch.
What this awareness did not grant him was a comprehensive understanding of the labyrinth’s contents. In spite of the direction Ozmanthus’ echo had given him, there were still depths here he hadn’t explored, buried secrets he hadn’t uncovered, and even places he hadn’t found.
He ran his spirit over the dark spots he found here and there. The places that had been usurped by others, over the centuries, or chambers so ancient he only had access and not control. His authority wasn’t absolute.
Even accounting only for the pieces of the maze he did control, he could spend a lifetime without exhausting all its contents and functions.
And most importantly of all, every inch of its walls was worked against intrusion. Down here, even a Monarch couldn’t spy on him without his permission.
Lindon focused his authority on the room around him and commanded it to “Move.” The entrances blurred until he and Dross were standing in another of Ozmanthus’ workshops.
Like the other workshops and foundries Lindon had found marked with Ozriel’s scythe, this one had largely been stripped bare over the years. Either by a previous owner of the labyrinth, by its wild inhabitants, by time, or by Ozmanthus himself.
Racks carved into the stone stood empty of the weapons they once held, and clockwork machines—designed to be operated by constructs—sat silent. Arms of scripted bronze and steel stretched out from the walls, motionless.
Lindon didn’t summon Ozmanthus this time. It was too time-consuming to do every time, though Eithan’s ancient reflection was a valuable resource. Instead, he consulted the man’s memories.
As Lindon entered, he ran his perception through a dream tablet on the wall. It contained memories he’d viewed before: Ozmanthus creating a network of launcher constructs synced together to protect an entire city, commentating the process.
And then, later, coldly confronting a king that had used that network of launchers to assault a rival instead of to protect himself. The king protested that it had merely been a preemptive military action, and that he had been acting in defense of his people.
Ozmanthus suggested that if he enjoyed preemptive strikes so much, he should appreciate this one, and had erased the man from the neck up.
There was Soulsmithing knowledge Lindon could glean from the creation of those weapons, and he had been diligently doing so. Ozmanthus had also left behind a wealth of sacred arts experience, including a natural sense for madra manipulation unlike anything Lindon had ever seen. Between that and his insight, no wonder he had been called a genius.
But Lindon was having a harder and harder time seeing Ozmanthus and Eithan Arelius as the same person.
He knew they were. Eithan had said so himself, and had proven his identity in the most dramatic fashion possible. Even Ozmanthus’ echo had confirmed it.
It wasn’t that Lindon doubted, but that it was hard to see how time had turned Ozmanthus into Eithan. There was some lesson to be learned from that, even if Lindon wasn’t sure exactly what it was.
In the meantime, he would take every advantage he had.
“What do we have left, Dross?” Lindon asked, when Eithan’s memory had faded.
Dross drifted into existence, choosing to appear so that it looked like he had floated out of the shadows. [Our enemies have centuries if not millennia of experience we don’t, and they have spent that time building up resources. Any of them could crush us, either personally or with a command to their organizations. This is the fragility of advancing so quickly.]