The Crimson Vault (The Traveler's Gate Trilogy) (26 page)

The Incarnation released his sword, letting it shimmer and vanish in midair. Barely had it vanished when it was replaced with a gleaming silver warhammer, wider than Valin's torso and standing taller than his head. Simon would have had to use two hands and all the steel he could call to even lift such a weapon, but Valin held it in his right hand.

In his left appeared an enormous, double-headed axe.

Valin's muscles flexed as he brought both weapons down, converging on Simon's position.

Roll back!

Simon followed the doll's instruction, tossing himself backwards and down the little hill. He had almost rolled back to his feet when the weapons hit the ground.

The resulting shockwave knocked him onto his back. The ground quivered with the impact, the grass and soil—and perhaps even the stone beneath—shattering into a tiny chasm at Valin's feet.

Valin released these weapons, too, instantly summoning another. This was a longbow even taller than the hammer had been earlier, its shaft made of some deep black wood, and its string of a metal that shone silver in the starlight.

The Incarnation pulled the string back, the wood flexing with an audible creaking, and a gleaming white arrow of solid light simply
appeared
on the string.

"You should dodge this," Valin suggested. Then he let the arrow fly.

Simon wasn't fast enough to dodge the arrow of light. Not even close. But with a whispered warning from Angeline he managed to throw himself into the treeline at the edge of their clearing. He fell into underbrush, branches and leaves scratching his skin as the arrow blazed overhead with a heavenly light. It struck a tree above Simon and burned straight through. When he stood up and looked, he could see through the hole in that tree...and through the hole in the tree behind that, and the tree behind that one, all the way to the edge of the woods.

Worse, the world around him was back to normal speed. The soldiers once again clashed with Nye, although they seemed to have gotten even farther from Valin after his earth-shattering display with the hammer and axe.

Simon still clung to the steel power with just the edge of a fingernail; he barely had enough strength to keep holding Azura in both hands. But the Nye essence was gone.

Valin had brought the silver string back to his cheek, another white arrow loaded in the bow.

“Duck, Simon!” Valin called.

Then Indirial's ragged sword burst from his chest.

***

Kai stood before a beautiful woman, and all he could think about was how her flowing black dress looked just like the wrapping on Azura's hilt. He had thought that holding the sword again, speaking one last time with his precious little ones, would have helped him to forget about them. That certainly hadn't worked; when he had been forced to hand Azura back to Simon, it had been like cutting off one of his hands.

"...will be positioned outside the house, and of course we have a significant force waiting for incursion from Naraka," the lady Adrienne was saying. Kai barely heard her; he was staring at her and thinking of his dolls.

"Master Kai? Excuse me? Can you hear me? Is there something wrong?" Adrienne sounded more annoyed than worried. Almost like Otoku, in one of her moods. The sound woke Kai from his stupor; perhaps he had drifted too far away, after all.

"My apologies," Kai said. "I was lost in thought. You were saying?"

Adrienne glared, but she visibly calmed herself and gestured at the door behind Kai. It was a stone double door, chained shut, with a padlock of Tartarus steel. "You will be our last line of defense, Master Kai," Adrienne said. "If what I've heard about Valinhall is true, you should have no trouble taking care of whatever Travelers make it past our initial troops and reach this point. Is there anything else you require?"

Briefly Kai wondered what the point was of making a padlock out of Tartarus steel. It would be all but indestructible, sure, but as a result it would be much easier to just shatter the chain itself. Even the wall that anchored the chain would be easier to break.

"Nothing but warning, my lady," Kai said, after realizing that he had gone another few seconds without speaking. "Simply tell me when to stand guard, and I guarantee that none will pass me."

Lady Adrienne let out a heavy breath and nodded, looking much reassured. "That is good to hear, Master Kai. We have prepared rooms for you, and I assure you that we will wake you in the event of an emergency. If you will—"

Kai lifted a strand of Adrienne's hair from her shoulder and rubbed it in between two of his fingers. "You have lovely hair," he pointed out. "Have you ever considered donating it to someone in need? A doll-maker, perhaps?"

Very deliberately, Lady Adrienne looked from her hair to his face. "Remove your hand from me, Master Kai," she said. "I have heard that Travelers are all but useless against you, but I am not far from simply seizing a sword myself and doing my best to run you through."

Kai remembered himself again and withdrew his hand, standing with his spine straight as his master had insisted, so many years ago. "I am sorry, my lady."

Adrienne turned to walk away. "As long as this chamber is not breached, then we have nothing to discuss. I will have someone—"

She was interrupted for the second time, but this time not by Kai. A balding, pot-bellied Traveler in the red robes of Naraka came jogging up, waving for her attention. Only at that point did Kai realize the man had only one hand.

The aging Traveler began to speak, but as he did, a wail like a thousand furious ghosts pierced the palace.

Adrienne clapped her hands to her ears, but Kai just reached into his pocket. He had always wished Valinhall had a power to dull the senses instead of enhancing them; the clamor of one Dragon's Fang upon another made quite an ear-shattering noise. Since the Territory had no such power, though—at least, none so far as Kai knew—he had taken to bringing globs of soft wax with him to battle. He pulled two pieces off and stuffed them into his ears.

Immediately, the piercing shriek was cut to merely a distant scream. Lady Adrienne shouted something at him, which of course he couldn’t understand, but he gave her a placid smile and nodded.

She rolled her eyes and pointed him into a room, so he nodded and followed her instructions.

A group of other Travelers followed him, but he waved them back. When they failed to understand, he shouted at them to fall back. At last, an exasperated Lady Adrienne brought them out of the room and sealed the door.

The situation was fairly transparent: obviously the Grandmasters had decided to send an attack early, and somehow Adrienne’s scouts had managed to detect the assault. For Kai, that simplified the situation greatly.

He would stay in this room and wait. If Travelers showed up here, he would kill them. If they did not, he would continue waiting until ordered elsewhere.

Simplicity itself.

***

The route to Bel Calem through Naraka would be too well guarded, Grandmaster Naraka told Alin. The defenses for that waypoint would have stood for years, solid and all but impenetrable. There would be traps, tricks, guardians, and fortifications too thick for them to penetrate.

So they came through a different Territory. There were twenty-three of them: Gilad, Grandmaster Naraka, Alin, and twenty soldiers of Enosh, to deal with the more mundane threats. Alin had heard that there was a squad of three or four Tartarus Travelers with the soldiers, but he couldn’t tell the difference. Maybe most of the troops couldn’t either.

Gilad was one of the few in Enosh with a link to two Territories, and he could draw from either Naraka or Helgard with equal ease. At Grandmaster Naraka’s insistence, he opened up a Gate to Helgard, and they walked through its snowy depths.
 

That was when Alin learned something that no one had bothered to mention about Helgard, the Tower of Winter: the place was
cold.
 

Sure, he had expected to run across flat plains of glacial ice, and the razor-edged chill in the air didn’t surprise him. But plate armor, it turned out, was not the best thing to wear in such temperatures. It burned his skin as though he wore a suit of solid ice, and he hurried through as much to keep himself from freezing to death as he did to reach their destination that much sooner.

They had emerged from the Gate with their backs to a colossal wall. It was made of some blue-gray material that looked like metal, etched with gigantic symbols. Each twisting letter stood higher than Alin was tall. The wall curved around so slightly that Alin barely noticed it was curving at all, and it vanished into the distance in both directions.

Gilad said that was the outer wall of the tower. Alin looked up and saw, an impossibly high distance overhead, a metal ceiling the same color as the walls. It was covered with icicles the size of stalactites. Wisps of cloud twisted in and among the icicles like lacy ribbons.

Sure enough, they were inside some kind of enclosure, though one so big that it had its own horizon. Gilad called this the sixteenth floor, telling Alin that thirty-two floors of Helgard had been discovered so far. This one was one of the least inhabited, comprised as it was of seemingly endless fields of ice. The ice seemed to glow with an inner radiance, giving the room a surprisingly bright illumination.

According to Gilad, there were creatures and artifacts hiding in the cracks of the ice, and they did not like to be disturbed. As long as they kept their voices down and hurried across, they should be able to reach the way into Bel Calem with little trouble.

“Why don’t they have any guardians on this side?” Alin whispered, trying to step as lightly as possible in his clanking armor.

“It’s all but impossible to defend your home from
every
possible approach in
every
Territory,” Grandmaster Naraka said. She seemed to practically glide over the slick, uneven footing, as though she had no weight at all.

“That’s true,” Gilad allowed, “but it’s also unwise to bring a very large force through this floor. More people means more noise, and if you get too loud…well, you don’t want to do that. The first three expeditions to this floor vanished entirely, and the fourth came back…wrong.”

The glow in the ice underneath their feet flickered, as though something unimaginably huge had, for just a moment, passed in front of the light.

Alin spent the rest of the trip with his mouth shut. He barely even allowed himself to breathe. The soldiers had worn light armor, and not one of them had said a word since passing through the Gate, which just showed how much wiser they were than he.

Gilad finally reached his landmark: a frozen hand and forearm, outstretched from the ice like a dying man reaching out of the water for salvation. The wrist was easily as wide as Alin’s body, and the tips of the fingers reached well above Alin’s head.

“What was this?” Alin asked quietly, indicating the frozen hand.

“Not was,” Gilad said. “
Is.
Now hold on for just a minute; I need to concentrate.”

That was as forceful as Alin had ever heard the other Traveler, so he stayed quiet. Gilad muttered constantly to himself, as though reciting some long poem in a foreign language.

Finally, he motioned as though pulling aside a curtain, and a Gate opened behind his fingers.

“We have to be quick,” Grandmaster Naraka whispered. At a whispered signal from a woman in front who looked like the leader, all twenty soldiers began marching through.

The other side of the Gate opened up on a broad room that looked a great deal like Malachi’s great hall, which Alin had visited a month before. It wasn’t the same room, though; this one was smaller, though still spacious, and it hosted a few necessities, like washbasins and hat-racks, instead of Malachi’s blocky throne.

Alin wasn’t sure what this room was supposed to be used for, and he had no idea where the Hanging Tree would be located from here. But at least there were no enemy troops around, and that was all he cared about.

The soldiers spread out across Malachi's room, forming a protective shield between the Travelers and whatever unknown forces might be protecting the Overlord's home.

Grandmaster Naraka flipped her hand negligently to one side and five red sparks shot out from the air in front of her. They flew in loops around the room, flashing in and out of visibility like blood-red fireflies.

Gilad started looking from wall to wall, muttering to himself. Frost began to form on the ground at his feet, but Alin couldn't see any other visible indication of his actions.

"I don't sense anything," Gilad said, after a moment. "Did they really not have any guardians in this room?"

"Nor do I," Grandmaster Naraka agreed. "I also sense no alarms, but I detected something that might once have been a nest of
kar'tul.
"

"They would be screaming right now," Gilad said. "We'd all hear it."

Alin continued turning, examining the room. There was barely enough ambient light to see, coming from the Grandmaster's fireflies and the windows set high in the walls. The vast majority of the room, however, remained in shadow.

"Maybe they just didn't set an alarm," Alin suggested.

"Or maybe," the Grandmaster said, "the alarm has already been silenced."

Gilad shook his head. "I wouldn't think so, Grandmaster. They would have to have detected us in Helgard. And there are no long-term installations on the sixteenth floor, so to have an alarm there..."

"That means they would have known we were coming," the Grandmaster concluded.

Alin felt a chill that had nothing to do with the lingering cold from Helgard. Suddenly, the silent room was filled with a clatter of wood and metal. Alin spun on his heel to see that one of the Enosh soldiers had just collapsed in a heap. Blood spread from under his helm.

"Form up!" someone yelled, and the soldiers' ring around the three Travelers became even tighter.

When they drew together, though, one of the squad didn't move. He stood there, with his back to Alin, as though staring into the shadow.