Eithan followed up with the simplest Striker technique anyone could use: a pulse of madra focused in a line. In his case, the pure madra passed through the chain of Longhook's weapon, weakening the Blood Shadow and causing it to falter for a second. Saeya was coming around for another pass.

So far so good. They were keeping Longhook under pressure.

Which meant...

The red on the emissary's hook oozed back, revealing dark gray metal. It boiled away as Longhook drove Saeya off with one fist, pulses of force madra pushing her back.

In an instant, he'd gathered up his Blood Shadow. His hook started to slide back up his sleeve, one link at a time, and he looked from Eithan to Naru Saeya.

“Go home,” he said, the words scraping out. They were barely audible over the rolling thunder. “We are leaving your lands. You will not see us again.”

“You dare ask us for mercy?” Naru Saeya’s voice was hot. Her bright green madra took Longhook in the gut like a fist, carrying him off his Thousand-Mile Cloud and into the wind.

His Blood Shadow caught him.

It formed into his copy, standing on the railing, its hand grabbing him by the leg and pulling him back onto the ship. Longhook didn't even look surprised, his coat fluttering in the wind as he landed.

“This will be worse than last time,” the emissary promised, locking eyes with Eithan.

Eithan drew himself up, cycling madra through his channels. He let his power as an Underlord blaze forth, matching Longhook face-to-face.

“It will,” he declared. “Last time, I did not reveal to you my ultimate technique.”

A flare of chaotic madra from below his feet was all the warning Longhook had. Eithan had scripted the veils into the cloudship's cabin himself.

Then a beam of deadly madra, thick as a barrel and bright as the sun, blasted through the cabin of the ship and washed over Longhook. The light streamed out in a bolt like condensed lightning, too bright to watch directly, streaking from the ship up into the sky. It faded out as quickly as it had emerged, the light fading to a thin line.

Longhook fell from the ship, smoking and unconscious. He would probably survive the impact with the ground, but he wouldn’t be happy.

“I call it the 'ambush,'” Eithan said.

Fisher Gesha poked her head through the ragged hole in the ship's deck. She held in her hands a smoking, twisted launcher construct. It looked much like one of the simple, physical weapons some lower sects used for defense: a cannon.

“I didn't miss! Hm. I told you I wouldn't miss.”

Fisher Gesha, a shrunken old woman with gray hair tied up into a bun, looked like she shouldn’t even be able to hold the cannon. Spider legs stuck out from beneath her, as she stood on her drudge construct for transportation. And to reach things on high shelves.

Most Gold-level techniques couldn't do much more than scratch an Underlord's skin. But she had come up with a plan for a compound launcher construct that used six Striker bindings at once. If they were properly contained and focused, she had theorized, they could produce an effect that was greater than the sum of its parts.

Under normal circumstances, the weapon would be too unwieldy to set up and use. The enemy would sense it coming a mile away, and activating six Striker bindings at once put too much of a strain on the construct's vessel. It was the sort of method that sounded better than it was.

But Eithan had found her plans, and had wanted to see them in action.

“A lovely strike!” Eithan called. “How did the script hold up?”

“Strained.” Gesha tapped a ring on the metal of the cannon's outer layer. “Warping already. And the Song of Falling Ash binding is an inch from falling apart, if you ask me. Not that you did.”

“We'll need more goldsteel plating,” Eithan mused aloud. He couldn't afford that himself—not without the resources of the Arelius family. That irritation still threatened to prod him to anger. He would have to deal with that, when he was done mopping up Redmoon Hall.

Of course, he could save up top-grade scales and eventually afford most of anything in the Empire. But it would have been so much easier with the family behind him.

He pushed that annoyance aside and returned his attention to the battle in the sky around them.

“What was that?” Naru Saeya asked, holding her rainbow sword to one side, staring blankly into the rain. She ended up repeating herself: “What was that?”

Chon Ma was bleeding from a cut on his face now, delivering a speech about honor to the remaining Redmoon Hall emissary, whose arm hung broken and bruised from his shoulder.

“You skulk in the shadows,” the Cloud Hammer Underlord proclaimed. “You rely on power that will never truly be your own. This is why you are weak.”

Eithan turned to Fisher Gesha. “Do you think you could squeeze out one more shot?”

The construct flared to life.

Chapter 7

There were any number of reasonable objections that Dross could have made to the Soulsmith operation, but since the construct seemed happy enough going along with it, Lindon certainly wasn't going to say anything.

First, he moved the bucket of Dream Well water in front of Orthos. Then he forced the turtle's mouth open and poured a vial of the purple water down his throat.

It didn't quite wake him, but Lindon could feel his consciousness smooth out. His sleep went from rough and fearful to soft and deep. When he woke, he'd need some water, so hopefully the bucket would be enough. He’d always had trouble wrestling his thoughts, too; maybe the Dream Well could help him.

With Orthos settled, Lindon sat Little Blue on the turtle’s head. She gave a chirp, and he patted her with one finger. “When I’m done here, I’ll have some food for you.”

Then he got to work.

Binding a spiritual construct to a physical vessel was one of the basic skills of the Soulsmith. Essentially, he had to hold the construct into the exact shape of the vessel, then merge the two while using his own madra to tie them together. To stuff a ghost back into a body, both ghost and body had to match.

There was only one complication that mattered: the sapphire already had a construct in it. So he was trying to meld two constructs and fix them both to the gem.

Fisher Gesha would tell him to extract both Dross and the Eye of the Deep construct, then break them down piece by piece until he could rebuild them into one construct with the functions of both. Then he could bind that single construct to the gem or, preferably, another suitable vessel without a hole in it.

Then she would have hit him for trying to do this without guidance.

But Lindon had neither the time, nor the experience, nor the equipment to do it that way. He wasn’t sure that a living construct like Dross could even be safely deconstructed. He’d have to roll the dice.

Not that he would put it to Dross that way.

He extracted a pair of gold-plated tongs from the roll of tools, holding them up to show Dross. “I’ll be using these to remove you from your vessel,” he explained. “Then—”

Dross zipped out of his rusted container.

He hovered in the air, a purple cloud filled with violet sparks. Within the cloud, Lindon could see patterns of crossing lines, like Dross was made of a structure of ghostly timbers.

“Done!” the construct said cheerily. “Now what?”