Dreadgod (Cradle Book 11) (80)

Lindon sent his relief to Dross and looked over the other Archlords. He was supposed to cooperate with them in this defense, and he had tried to incorporate their abilities into Dross’ calculations, but they had been unwilling to hand over detailed knowledge of their capabilities to him.

For some reason.

Lindon stood on a dark Thousand-Mile Cloud high above the city. The twelve Archlords the Akura clan had mustered for the city’s defense were separated distantly, spread out along the wall facing the Titan’s approach.

There had been some debate about where to put Lindon. Sages and Heralds were traditionally allowed to move independently, and some were treated that way even here. The Winter Sage stood on the flat of a levitating sword not far away, her white hair blowing in the breeze. She kept shooting him glances that he interpreted as challenging, though he wasn’t sure why. Perhaps she didn’t believe he could carry his weight.

Charity had been the one to suggest that Lindon shouldn’t be placed with the other Sages. Because of his arm, he might make an undue target for the Titan, and thus he should stay behind the protective scripts. Also, Dross would be invaluable in analyzing their defense if he was given a proper vantage point.

Lindon didn’t mind the position, but he suspected the real reason he wasn’t being placed like the other Sages was because Malice didn’t trust him.

The other Archlords were all older than him, though they ranged from a sixty-year-old woman who looked thirty to a wrinkled man who looked like he would crumple at a soft breeze. That man’s spirit blazed with such power that Lindon walked carefully around him.

None of them seemed to know how to treat Lindon.

He was a Sage, so he outranked them, but his youth and his lack of connection to the clan disturbed them. To some of them, a Sage was a Sage, and they just treated him as they would anyone more advanced. Others were visibly uncomfortable with him, others avoided him, and still others clearly expected him to defer to them because of their age.

Lindon didn’t mind treating them all with respect. Manners were free.

Dross had come up with several methods of coordinating the Archlords depending on what approach the Titan took and how the situation changed, though it was hard to do any accurate calculation without seeing them in action.

What are our odds? Lindon asked Dross. Silently, so that no one else could overhear. The closest Archlords were the better part of a mile away, but Archlord hearing was nothing to underestimate.

[You ask so often,] Dross observed. [Do you fear to leave your life in the fickle hands of chance?]

Yes.

[We have little information on how intelligent these new Dreadgods are. Will the Titan approach us tactically? Will he be driven back when he determines that the target costs too much energy, as he would before? Or will he drive himself to exhaustion to annihilate us?]

Dross wiggled his tentacles in the air next to Lindon’s head. [On the answers to these questions will we live or die. But I believe Moongrave will survive to endure another sunrise.]

That relieved some of the tension in Lindon’s gut, but not all of it.

Mercy was, of course, in one of the better-protected positions. She wasn’t expected to fight, since—unlike the other Dreadgods—the Wandering Titan didn’t drag an army along with it. Even Abyssal Palace could only stay out of the Dreadgod’s way and pick through the wreckage afterwards.

Still, Lindon kept his spiritual perception on her. If the battle slid out of his control, he planned on grabbing Mercy and fleeing as far as he could. Pride could come too, if he was close enough, though the siblings had been separated in case one section of the wall was breached.

[Already planning to run,] Dross observed. [Perhaps this is why Malice doesn’t trust you.]

Lindon doubted that had anything to do with it at all.

He was reviewing every backup measure he had prepared when the golden sky lit up with shining veins like a sun was rising.

Then the Wandering Titan emerged from mist in the distance.

As Eithan had once put it, the Titan was known for its inevitability, not its speed. It didn’t race for its target. It wandered.

But not today.

The Dreadgod sprinted across the landscape, head down. Gold light shone through cracks in its black stone flesh, and its eyes blazed yellow. Its armored shell scraped the clouds, and its whip-like tail scraped the landscape behind it clean.

Its every step was an earthquake, and when it spotted Moongrave from dozens of miles away, it roared so that even the Golds could hear it.

Malice’s voice slipped into Lindon’s ears, and he could sense the wind aura vibrating all around the city, carrying her words to every defender.

“Here he comes,” she murmured, “but he is alone. We are together, and ours is a power he cannot hope to conquer. Behold, the Akura clan.”

In front of the city wall, purple light flashed in a column that stretched from land to sky. From that light, a crystal titan strode out to defend them from the one made of stone.

No matter how he felt about Malice, Lindon had to admit that he cheered to see her standing against the Dreadgod.

She held an arm out and the subtly curved shaft of a glacial bow appeared in her hand. Malice took an archer’s stance, pulling the string of her bow back. A dark blue arrow formed on the string, and Lindon focused his perception on it.

Not only was the arrow itself a mass of dense power carrying a devastating will, but Malice layered multiple techniques into it and onto it in a blink, so fast and smoothly that Lindon couldn’t even count them.