I was innocent. You killed the wrong man.
Crap like that kept me up at night, staring at the lightless black inside the Crucible Casket. Which wrong man? The blue guy who supposedly killed that shark kid? Could the Emperor have hired actors to pretend to be grieving parents? Or was it Galston, the Saline Life cultivator who supposedly sold out the artifact team? Somebody inside the Contrails’ broadcasting location? A bystander in the Heartchamber? God Almighty, there were a lot of people it could’ve been. What was my death toll up to now?
The whispers only came when the spectral uchigatana was out, but the words rang in my head for hours after I resheathed it. Last Light, Last Breath helped numb the guilt and anxiety for a while, but it turned out the nothingness of oblivion also made a great place for cataloguing every word and obsessively trying to attribute it to a person, place, and time.
Maybe Warcry hadn’t been far off saying the Technols should’ve wanted to put a curse on me for killing them. Maybe Wrathblade was that curse. The problem was I couldn’t stop using it yet. The spectral sword was too perfect at its job, and we were too close to the last floor of the temple to slow down now. I just had to suck it up and deal with it for a little while longer. Besides, it wasn’t like I didn’t deserve to hear all that, anyway. If I stopped thinking about everybody I’d killed, how long would it be before I ended up like Hungry Ghost, a power-hungry shell of a soul with nothing but evil intentions? If the whispers were the price I had to pay, then they were probably fair.
Altogether, the fifth floor was only about the size of a double-wide, but between the hordes of skelebuddies, fire tiles, and spear traps, it took four hours to clear. Instead of columns, this floor was studded with staircases. Some opened up to the next floor, some ran straight into solid stone ceiling, and some opened onto steep drops through the top of the jungle canopy.
When we had reduced the undead army there to nothing but piles of bone dust, scratched and emptied gemstones, and ancient weapons littered across the floor, Valthorpe came up to do his usual inspection of the architecture.
“Fascinating.” He crouched next to one of the staircases, one set of knuckles braced on the floor like an ape, and traced the figures carved there with his other hand. “Doesn’t it look like the captives are being given a choice?” He moved on to the next relief, carefully avoiding the fire constructs and spear traps we’d shown him how to identify. “See? If they pick the dead-end stairs, beheading. External ones, a leap to death or freedom—you can guess which one they got with their wings hacked off like that.”
Warcry and I lounged against a wall, half listening to the academic while we scarfed dried fruit and meat and gulped down canteenfuls of water.
“Then there’re the ones that run to the sixth floor... Being crowned? Ascending?” He scanned a few more, too riveted to notice that we weren’t answering. “I don’t know. They could’ve had the capacity for metaphoric thought back then, but with the literal staircases...”
“What d’ya reckon, grav?” Warcry shot a look at the ceiling. “Finish it off today?”
I chewed a mouthful of dried fruit while I checked the sky outside.
“Plenty of light left.” I triggered Corpse Fire to burn off the accumulated soul contamination and slipped the casket necklace out of my sweaty shirt. “Give me ten minutes in the coffin, and I’m ready to go.”
Valthorpe’s HUD went off.
“Those lazy dossers better not be weaseling out of our victory dinner,” Warcry grouched. “I’ll bleedin’ burn their tents down.”
Unlike most days when Smoky and Unu stayed at camp without bothering to make an excuse, this time they had claimed they were hunting and gathering some real meat and vegetables that hadn’t been freeze-dried and packaged so they could make a fancy dinner to celebrate clearing the temple.
“No, no,” Valthorpe said as he responded to the message. “It’s the Emperor’s 002-rank. She just left Tikrong. Should be here sometime in the wee hours of the morning.”
The sweat turned cold on my skin, and a chill ran down my back.
“Sanya-ketsu’s on her way here?” I asked. Like, to lay the smackdown on a Death cultivator who still hasn’t carried out a Sentence?
“Yeah, I mentioned that earlier, didn’t I?” the academic said absently.
Warcry cocked an eyebrow at me.
“Uh, no,” I said.
“Huh, I was sure we talked about it.” Message sent, Valthorpe went back to examining the stone art. “Anyway, I’ve been keeping her updated on the strides you boys are making. When I told her how close we were getting, she wanted to be here for the final unveiling. Looks like we’ll beat her to it by a few hours.”
I climbed into the coffin without comment and started feeding Miasma into my newest spiral. If Sanya didn’t execute me outright for disobeying the Emperor, then there was a good chance I would need as much Spirit as I could get to feed the healing script.
Lost Artifact
WARCRY’S HUD ALARM crashed through the wood of the Crucible Casket like an axe through a door.
“Ready, grav?” he asked when I got out.
I bounced to my feet. “Let’s empty this place.”
The closest staircase that didn’t run into the ceiling or open on a drop to our deaths was booby-trapped, but we’d gotten good at spotting the triggers. The main danger came if skelebuddies flooded you at the top and you backtracked blindly.
To avoid that, Warcry waited two steps down on a safe spot while Wrathblade and I took care of the hand-holding undead warriors closest to the staircase. Whenever I backed too close to the top step—which was helpfully trapped with both fire and spears—Warcry reached over and shoved me away.
The sixth floor was
