Her drudge honked only seconds after the search had begun, startling her. The range on such detection was incredibly limited, and even more so when she'd packed three samples at once. There was always the chance of a false positive, but with such a quick response...

The Remnants, or something that reminded her construct of their power, was here. Possibly inside the arena.

She signaled the two closest of her assistants, young men with iron hammers on their badges. She had trained them for years, even if neither of them made promising Soulsmiths, and they had volunteered to help her secure the arena. Both came running.

“Li clan elders are slipping away,” she said. “One of you report to the First Elder, and the other can follow me.” She turned toward the Li entrance, leaving it to them to decide which would take on which task.

The arena had been constructed on the edge of Wei land, so it was enveloped on three sides by a forest: a sea of green dotted with the occasional purple island as an orus tree was mixed in with its more mundane counterparts. Aside from the gravel path leading away from the exit and back toward the main property, she saw nothing.

But her quarry was more advanced in the sacred arts, and she had to respect that. With a whisper of White Fox madra and an effort of focused will, she Forged a disguise.

The Wei clan Forgers trained in the Fox Mirror technique for years, learning to create illusionary copies with a dizzying degree of detail. Her peers specialized in creating copied faces, full-body duplicates, or even camouflaged walls that would render the user invisible. There were imperfections in each of these techniques, specifics that violated reality in ways that could be noticed.

She specialized in clothing. Layered robes of white and purple turned to green in an instant, jewelry glinting on each finger and both ears. Illusory necklaces hung down to her chest, and even her iron badge dangled from a gold chain. Her face would remain the same, but it wasn't as though the Li clan knew her on sight. Her hair could be a slight problem—brown hair was more common in the Kazan clan, but not the Li. She would have to risk it. In the shadow of the trees, her hair looked more black than brown anyway.

As her escort Forged his own disguise, a clumsy green cloak that he threw over himself, she followed the direction of her drudge into the forest. It clicked or whistled to her occasionally, changing her direction, but the chase took much less time than she'd expected.

Less than five minutes after leaving the arena, she spotted a flash of pink light through the trees, along with a man's raised voice. She silenced her drudge, cradling it in her arms like an infant, and signaled her guard to quiet. Carefully, she crept forward.

The Li clan disguise would stop them from attacking her outright, but it wouldn't save her from a thorough questioning...which she would prefer to avoid. Ideally, she wouldn't be caught at all.

Her skin tingled as she slid quietly closer, heart pounding, her well-practiced breathing technique strained by excitement. She hadn't worked against other clans since she reached Iron in her twenty-second year, but she'd missed it. She felt a rare pang of empathy for Jaran; he'd fought far more than she had, in his youth, and the lack of that thrill must add to his bitterness.

Seisha stopped when she was close enough to see the Li. They weren't all Jade, but a mix of Jades and Irons. The youngest was older than she was. Nine in total, though she was staring through a flowering cloudbell bush, so she could have missed one or two in the back. They were gathered around a circle in the forest floor, a circle made of tiles. A script.

They'd brought tiles the size of an open hand, each etched with a rune or sigil. When connected properly, they would function as well as a full-size script circle. It was a technique she’d seen before, mostly in cases where the circle might have to be redesigned quickly.

The three Remnants had been caged and placed at three distinct points around the circle. The blue rabbit chewed frantically at its prison, clutching at the bars with hands that looked almost human A pink series of swirls that might generously be called a bat flapped in place, fading in and out of existence but still unable to shift through the scripted cage. Finally, a brown-and-black mass with huge silver shovels for claws sat motionless, watching its captors with beady eyes.

All of the Remnants here, and all whole. No wonder her drudge had located their signatures so quickly; she hadn't expected them intact and so close.

The Jade man at the head of their party continued speaking, dictating to them as though repeating a lesson taught many times before. “...first the anchor, and then the call. If he doesn't answer, we have to be fresh enough to try again as soon as the next window opens. Shao, have you confirmed our location?”

Seisha didn't know the speaker, but she knew Shao, one of the Li clan's most accomplished Forgers. He was bald and tiny, with an appearance closer to a fresh disciple than an expert at tracking and locating Remnants.

His own drudge, like a gleaming steel sword too fat and dull to be of any use to anyone, sprouted antennae like a pincushion. He listened to its whistles, checked something on a scroll, made a note with chalk and slate, and then consulted a map. Finally, he nodded. “We are, honored elder. He should emerge at exactly this spot, if we time the doorway correctly.”

“If we fail again, he will punish all of us,” the highest-ranking elder said, voice grim. A palpable shudder moved through Shao, as well as a few of the others. “Let us see that doesn’t happen. Are we ready to begin?”

Shao checked a few more notes, his bald head bobbing up and down, before he shot up abruptly. “It's now!” he screamed. “Ignite the script now, now, now!”

The Li elders scrambled for their tiles on the ground, injecting madra into them with a novice's haste. The script glowed white, irregularly at first, but within seconds it had settled into a smooth pulse.

The three Remnants, inside the circle, obviously sensed something was wrong. One and all, they began to screech in the peculiar way of their kind—the mole sounded like an avalanche, the bat like wind whistling through high peaks, the rabbit like the swift beat of a heart.

This is it, Seisha thought, but she hadn't been prepared. From her discovery to the activation of the script had only taken a minute, maybe two. Should she disrupt the script and face the consequences, or run back and tell the First Elder? The Li elders technically hadn't done anything yet. But if she watched, it would soon be too late.

Ultimately, the decision was taken out of her hands.

Only a breath after the script's first light, the Remnants popped and bubbled, as though the ink that painted them on the world had begun to boil. Their complaints grew louder and louder until their bodies fizzed away into motes of light.

That in itself was not so unusual. As they expended power, Remnants dissolved back into the madra that formed them. But she'd never seen it happen so fast, and never to such an effect.

The spots of color, pink and blue and dark brown, swirled around inside the script like snakes in water. They spun closer and closer, getting tighter and tighter, before gathering into a single form that looked like nothing so much as a muddy inkblot.

Only a blink after the process had begun, it was finished. A tiny blue spark flared to life in the center of the ink-stain, glowing brighter every second.

“It worked,” Shao breathed, before the light shot into a single line the height of a man. It looked like the edge of light down one side of a doorway, and as she watched, that doorway slid open.