Elder by the scruff of the neck, hauling him up bodily with one hand. He spun the old man around facing west and shook him.
“Look at the aura!” Lindon demanded. “Look at it!”
Around Mount Venture, the squat red-tinged peak to the west, the earth aura was growing brighter and brighter as the ground shook. So much that it began to bleed into visibility.
The elder squirmed in his grip. “How are you doing this? What are you showing me?”
Lindon shoved him forward, and the elder caught himself only a few steps away. He turned, but Lindon pointed a finger west.
“Walk. Take that with you.” Lindon nudged the Patriarch with the tip of his toe. “You don’t want me to save you? Maybe he will.”
To the west, the Wandering Titan’s power waxed like a rising sun. The Dreadgod was slow, making its way ponderously through the mountains, and its head wasn’t visible yet.
But as the First Elder cast a nervous glance in that direction, the sky turned gold.
He opened his mouth, and Lindon didn’t care to hear what he had to say. A thin bar of Blackflame scorched a line in the ground in front of the man’s feet.
“I said walk.”
Lindon’s vision swayed as the willpower flooded out of him. He had stretched himself too far with that working, and he wasn’t even sure it would do what he wanted.
But, dragging the Patriarch behind him, the First Elder began to walk.
12
Mercy was in the middle of negotiations when the sky changed color.
One moment, she was demanding to see the Matriarch of the Li clan again. The clan’s Fourth Elder, manning the wall, repeatedly apologized and promised that the Matriarch would surely be on her way back soon. But they had been promising that for almost two days now.
When the sky turned gold, Mercy first felt panic. They were out of time. Even the smooth wooden walls of the Li clan shook with the quake that passed through Sacred Valley. Some of the guards lost their footing.
After the panic came relief. Now, surely, the Li clan would listen to her.
From her side, the Truegold Kashi fell to one knee to get her attention. “Please forgive me, Lady Mercy, but we must leave you now. Sage Charity’s orders.”
Some of the other Golds from the Akura clan had taken to their clouds, though none had left yet. They wouldn’t want to flee without permission from a member of the head family.
Mercy’s heart tightened. Without the support of the Golds, she wouldn’t be able to save more than a handful of the Li clan.
She kept her voice even. “We’re all leaving. Us, and as many of the Li clan as we can carry.”
“Yes, of course, but I am afraid that we can’t carry many of this clan if they fight us at every step.”
The ground wasn’t shaking anymore, which she prayed meant that the Dreadgod wasn’t walking any closer. She hopped onto Suu, flying up above the walls.
Some of the guardian birds screeched a warning to her, but the sacred beasts were just as afraid of the Dreadgod as she was, and they left her alone.
When she rose high enough, she could see the situation inside the Li clan.
They were trying to escape.
A mass of people, hundreds if not a thousand, pushed against the main gate. They weren’t exactly trampling each other yet, but they screamed for the door to open.
The Fourth Elder walked out on the wall, holding out his hands to calm them. “The Matriarch is on her way. When she arrives, she will guide us.”
Mercy had spent enough time waiting on that woman. She extended her spiritual perception, hunting for the Jade.
The Matriarch, it turned out, wasn’t far away. She stood on a roof, peering up at the sky and consulting with other elders.
Mercy kept her staff low, flying close enough to hear.
It didn’t take long. As an Overlady, her hearing stretched further than the spiritual senses of any of these Jades.
“…activate the scripts,” the Matriarch was saying. “Find the keys to the guardians, seal the gates, and inspect the boundary flags. If the heavens fall upon us, they will crack on our roof. Have we heard anything from the Kazan clan?”
An old man next to her, wearing an elaborate network of gold and jewels, shook his head. “We’ve heard they’re on the move, but not for us. They seem to be headed east. This has the feel of one of their boundary fields, though; in this one’s humble opinion, they have activated