Reaper(Cradle #10)(56)
“You think this is what the Dreadgods look like inside?” Yerin asked.
Lindon remembered a vision Suriel had shown him, not so long ago. A white tiger the size of a house, strung up and splayed open so that he could separate its spirit from its body surgically. Its spirit had been every bit as intricate as its flesh, with the two layered over and into one another so it was difficult to tell where one ended and the other began.
“We need to find out.” Before Mercy could protest, he continued. “I know we don’t have as much time as we’d like, but this could end up being the most valuable thing we find down here. It’s a chance to study a small Dreadgod! If we come out with nothing else, this could be invaluable.”
[I agree,] Dross said. [Master Northstrider’s subordinates gathered and studied many dreadbeasts to better understand the relationship between the body and the spirit. They would have been grateful for this opportunity.]
Mercy leaned on her staff, shifting her weight anxiously. She glanced at the ceiling as though she might see her mother’s hand descending on them at any second. “I understand, I really do. But please hurry.”
Lindon triggered his void key.
It didn’t open.
He frowned at it, pulling the bronze key from the thread around his neck and sensing the script. It seemed to be fully intact.
He triggered it again. This time, light slowly zipped open, revealing the entrance to his void space.
“Eithan,” Lindon said.
“I saw it. Clearly spatial manipulation is restricted here. I suppose it’s to keep certain beings from escaping. Well, that prevents us from easily hiding in a void key.”
Lindon glanced to Little Blue. He had considered sending her and Orthos back into the Dawn Sky Palace to avoid the dangers here, now that it was clear that he couldn’t fully protect them. If there was a chance for them to get trapped inside, that option was no longer available.
But they were still on a time limit, and Lindon had work to do. He climbed into his void key, fishing around for his Soulsmithing tools.
He withdrew a pair of goldsteel-plated tongs and a knife, though after a moment of thought, he pocketed the knife. He blanketed the Tomb Hydra’s body in his spiritual perception, tracing the madra system that nested parasitically within its body.
“Dross, would you locate the binding for me?”
[Of course.]
“Yerin, can you open up the body? From here to about there, and I would be grateful if you could leave the madra intact.”
Yerin tapped the hilt of her sword with a finger, and the flesh slid away from the dreadbeast’s body. It released a cloud of steam and most likely a putrid stench. Lindon didn’t know because his nose was still sealed off.
The shining veins of spectral green madra began to release essence, but they were clear and unbroken. Lindon readied his tongs only a moment before Dross said [Binding located.]
A purple light shone about a foot deep in the center of the Hydra’s body. Lindon resonated his soulfire and reached out to the blood aura, which hadn’t yet been sipped away by the labyrinth’s hunger.
With the blood aura, he pulled the flesh apart and revealed the binding. It grew from the meat around it, reminding him at the same time of a ripe fruit and a pulsing heart. It was condensed from the power of death, a pale green fire that pumped power into the rest of the body instead of blood.
He seized it with the goldsteel tongs, pointing out to Yerin where he needed incisions, but his instincts said the binding was somewhat strange. It looked more like an Enforcer binding, though the dreadbeast’s breath must have been a Striker technique. Striker techniques were usually elongated, with a clear input and output. Striker bindings this round were rare.
Still, he withdrew it and quickly placed it into a script-sealed box. Valuable materials were not to be wasted.
“Any more bindings, Dross?”
[None.]
That was also odd. Sometimes bindings didn’t survive the transformation into a Remnant, so you couldn’t always recover every technique the sacred artist had engraved into their spirit in life, but the dreadbeast’s spirit hadn’t become a Remnant. Surely it had more than one technique.
Lindon peeled away some veins of death madra as well—he wasn’t about to pass up free dead matter—but that wasn’t nearly as valuable as the binding. He only spent a few minutes stripping those lines out and coiling them into the box with the binding before he slammed it shut and slid it back into his void key.
“That’s an advanced binding,” Ziel observed. “What are you going to make with it?”
“I’ll have to see what it does first,” Lindon responded, but it was always going to become some kind of weapon. There weren’t too many other uses for death madra.
He supposed it should have a hunger aspect, too. He hadn’t sensed it, but then again, he hadn’t activated the binding. And sensing hunger madra here was like trying to sense water aura in the depths of the ocean.
Now that he’d gotten what he was going to get out of the dreadbeast’s corpse, it was safe to use the hand again.
He struggled with the awareness of the labyrinth the hand’s authority granted him, trying to unravel it into a map in his mind as the hand itself struggled against him. It shook his concentration and fought against him physically, practically dragging him down a tunnel before he figured out where they needed to go.