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They would make it about time, Atlas had said, and the word was still sitting in Noah’s head when he tapped his left forearm against the edge of the starlight slab.
A dull thud went through the stone. No vibration ran up the bone. The skin did not redden. Under the pale surface the gold script sat there like iron driven into granite, steady and rooted, as if the arm belonged to a statue instead of a living man.
Then the water carried something through the stone. A thin scrape, faint, like needles dragged across glass, coming down from the upper shelf of the reef.
The band on his middle finger warmed. Atlas came up over his staff with a scowl.
|Stop admiring your arm,| he said, glancing at the ceiling. |We have company coming down the shelf. A pack of Descendants just entered the Tide.|
Noah did not move. "Did they track the ring?"
|Either that, your Existential Engineering, or the stink of the Gu you burned to ash earlier.| Atlas scratched his beard. |Doesn’t matter now. Those Who Remain still have working ears everywhere. I am building a way to deafen them, but for the moment their scouts are doing their rounds.|
"How much can they report back?"
|One pulse through Existence is enough. If a Descendant gets nervous and snaps a signal, no architect will bother sailing down. They will drop an anvil on the whole trench from above and wipe everything clean. Similar to what THE SLEEPLESS FIEND did here not long ago...|
Noah stood.
His fingers twitched once. In his chest, Tyranny pulled at him. He wanted to see what the arm could actually do against someone potentially powerful.
He set it aside.
Killing and battles was easy. Keeping the death quiet was the job.
"I wont fight them in the open," he said. "I will... build a room."
He walked to the mouth of the cavern. The water outside hung heavy and blue, lit in patches by glowing coral.
He raised his right hand, and instead of blasting mana out he drew it into threads no thicker than spider silk, coating each one in Infinite Sanguine Cause Mortar. The red fluid clung to the line, dull and sticky, smelling faintly of copper and old stone.
He cast the lines across the seabed. They drifted down and settled into the silt, weaving between the coral ridges like tripwires.
Then the eight elemental seeds. An engine compresses them into a ring to fold a pocket inward. Noah reversed the order and threw them outward. Neodymium into the far corners of the trench, its pull set to hold the edges shut. Europium along the ridges to swallow light and any scrying needle that came looking. Boron through the middle, to eat heat and shock before either could reach the surface.
Inside ten minutes the floor of the canyon was rigged as he used his Provenance, Distilled Cause Essence, and pivotal Elements to essentially make a trap of....an Elsedimension!
Above the reef the blue light faded. The water went murky silver. Long shadows dragged across the coral as the first vessels drifted into view, moving without a wake. Three hundred of them slid into the trench and spaced out in a wedge that closed off the open water overhead.
Noah stepped out of the hollow, climbed a broken coral spine, and stopped. His robes drifted around his knees, dark against the pale rock. No weapon drawn, no aura up. To the fleet above he looked like a wanderer who had drifted too deep!
At the prow of the lead ship, Kaelen-Tor looked down.
Her skin was chalk-pale, her braids tied off with silver wire. Her chest was bared to the sternum, and across the ribs ran a jagged scar where silver thread and dark red fire had been sewn together. It looked ugly, two metals beaten into each other before either was hot enough to melt, but it hummed hard enough to turn the water around her to glass.
Seven hounds paced the deck at her boots, no skin and no eyes, only pale muscle stretched over bone with iron shuttles for heads. Their jaws snapped, needle teeth clicking as they caught the scent off the seabed.
She did not waste breath on demands. To a Descendant with an order to purge, anything alive in an unregistered fold was trash to be cleared.
She looked down at him and lifted two fingers!
"Pin him," she said. "Take his records and memories"
WAA!
The silver hulls clicked together. From the bottom of three hundred vessels a lattice of silver light dropped like an iron grate, an Argent Loom array built to freeze a man’s legs, choke his mana, and hold him still while the needles worked!
It slammed down into the trench and hit the seabed with a dull crump!
Noah did not dodge. He stood under the falling light and watched the silver threads strike the ground.
The moment it came near him and touched the coral, the Infinite Sanguine Cause Mortar took the blow. The red sludge soaked up the force, darkened, and held!
Noah closed his left hand into a fist.
The perimeter snapped shut. Along the edges of the trench the eight nodes flared, Neodymium pulling inward, Europium turning the water black as ink to anything looking in, and the trench folded into itself with a dry snap.
The water did not shake. To anything swimming the Tide a league off, the canyon was an empty, blighted gully and nothing more.
Inside, the light died as an Elsedimension light years vast bloomed!
On the deck of the lead ship, Kaelen-Tor felt it go. She reached for the spindle at her wrist and tapped the connection that tied her to the Spindle of Unending Weave, and...
Nothing.
The thread did not glow. The line to her father was gone, cut as clean as if someone had taken shears to it!
She looked down over the railing. Through the dark water the wanderer on the coral spine had not moved. But the skin of his left arm had gone clear, and the gold script under it was bright enough now to throw light on the cracks in her own deck.
Haha. Had she actually found something critical?
She walked to the tip of the beakhead, boots clicking on the deck, and looked down through the dark water at Noah. Behind her the seven shuttle-headed hounds strained on their wires, iron jaws clicking in fast, nervous bursts.
She tilted her head, the silver wire in her braids clinking.
"Who are you? Are you connected to the weavings of Vakochev? Atlas? Or did you dig up an old bone in the mud and think it made you something? Before this becomes a mess of authorities, tell me. Are you a talker?"
Noah did not answer. He stood on the broken coral, arms loose, watching the silver plating of her vessel.
Her details resolved for him in clean lines.
|KAELEN-TOR - DESCENDANT OF THE SPINDLE|
|VERITAS: 212|
|POTENTIA: 218|
|PROVENANCE: 0|
|PONDUS: 206|
|INSCRIPTION: UNSTABLE PRIMORDIAL-ARGENT GRAFT (TIER 2)|
Kaelen-Tor took his silence for an answer. "A quiet one. Good. Saves time for me."
...!