City of Light (The Traveler's Gate Trilogy) (24 page)

But Alin had misjudged the other man's position badly, and he felt a stabbing pain in his back as once again the Valinhall Traveler practically ignored his armor.
Why
couldn't he look directly at the other man? What was he doing that would prevent Alin from so much as
looking
at him?

Alin knew he should have been beyond such emotions, but fury and frustration raged in him.

Stop holding yourself back,
the Gold Light advised.
You're not a Traveler anymore. Don't fight like one.

The Violet, Silver, and Red Lights agreed, so Alin gave himself over to the Incarnation of Elysia. He was thinking like a human, because that was all he had ever known.

But he was capable of so much more than that now.

Alin let his blade dissipate into motes of yellow, and threw his gold-armored hands out to either side.

Then he
really
called Blue Light.

The staircase of the Naraka waystation, the tiled floor inside, even the cobblestones behind him began to glow with a soft azure light. All of the Elysian creatures except those from the Blue District scrambled away: gnomes scampered over debris, Gold soldiers backed away from the waystation in proper military order, Silver constructs flitted out the windows.

They knew what was coming.

The Valinhall Traveler scored another hit on Alin's back, through the previous hole in his armor, but he had Rose Light ready. The wound closed almost instantly.

And the Blue Light rose to his call.

Tendrils and tentacles of luminous blue, each as thick around as a tree trunk, erupted from the ground. Many of them rose eight or ten feet in the air, and they glowed so brightly that everything was tinged in sapphire.

There was no need for Alin to see the Valinhall Traveler, so long as he didn't give the man anywhere to run.

He heard a few shouts from inside the building, and a muffled thud from what might have been a body collapsing. That would be better for them, in the long run. The Blue Light wouldn't kill them—he would extinguish it before it went that far—but it would keep them unconscious. After they woke up, he would be in control of Enosh again, and then he could teach them the truth.

The shadow of the Valinhall Traveler dodged in the forest of blue, landing two or three more cuts on Alin's arm, his neck, even alarmingly close to his eye.

Alin didn't bother dodging, or putting up a shield of Green. He kept pouring all of his will into Blue.

When the Valinhall Traveler fell to his knees, whatever power had kept him hidden fell away, revealing a cloaked man with a cracked sword in one hand. No longer smiling, he looked up at Alin, showing exhaustion in his eyes. He lunged weakly, and Alin let the sword land.

The tip of the Valinhall blade scratched Alin's armor. The strike had no strength behind it, but it used the last of the Traveler's vigor. He pitched over, sprawling halfway down the stairs with his chin resting on the street.

We should let him live,
the Blue Light said. Alin was so deep in the Blue that the thought was a matter of course; any other alternative was unthinkable. Why would he
not
let the man live? Mercy was the hallmark of true strength, and only with mercy would Alin be able to show this man the error of his ways.

He's not the only enemy, though,
the Gold Light pointed out.

It would be better if you could get Simon and Leah on your side,
the Orange said.

Speaking of Simon,
said the Silver,
aren't you forgetting something?

Alin had actually taken another step inside before it occurred to him what the Silver Light had already started to realize. He whirled around, staring into the sky. The tendrils of Blue Light all bent over him, protecting him from the threat.

Then he saw Simon falling from the sky like a silver-and-black lightning bolt, heading straight for Alin.

We should catch him,
the Orange Light suggested.
He might die, from that height.

The Silver Light laughed, and Alin was inclined to agree. He filled his palms with Gold.

Protect yourself,
the Green Light suggested.
Just in case.

Alin spread a shield of Green over his head.

The Violet Light, always honest, started to panic.
Are you sure that will be enough?

Reaching into the Green, Alin put another shield over that layer. And then another, to be safe.

Behind three shields of Green Light, his palms filled with destructive Gold, and surrounded by a forest of power-draining Blue tentacles, Alin felt as prepared as he ever could be to receive an attack.

You can handle this,
the Gold said.

Then Simon struck.

He slammed into the first shield sword-first, with the impact of a falling catapult stone. The wall completely failed to hold, shattering like glass. It didn't even seem to slow him down; he was crashing through the second layer almost as soon as Alin registered the sight of him.

The pain of two Green shields breaking at the same time was enough to make Alin wonder if he would burn up from the inside out, but he channeled Red determination and put all his strength into the third layer. He could stop Simon here, bind him with Blue, and blast his defenses away with Gold...

Before he completely slammed into the third shield of Green Light, Simon slashed his blade across the emerald plates. How was it possible to move so fast?

The third shield of Green Light shattered, and Simon was
still
falling right on top of Alin. His view was filled by that horrible mask, silver and black and utterly without pity. Simon’s blade flashed again.

Alin screamed in the pain of his broken shields, releasing the Gold Light in his hands.

It splattered inches from Simon's eyes, stopped by a spectral green helmet. The impact illuminated a full suit of ghostly armor. Had he been wearing that the entire time, invisible?

The Silver Light reminded him that he had seen such things before: when he fought the white-haired Valinhall Traveler back in Bel Calem. That armor could shrug off practically anything that Alin could call.

Well, good-bye,
the Violet Light said.
We asked for a fair fight, and we got one.

Simon's blade hit Alin at the collar, and it sliced its way down.

The blazing pain in Alin's body hardly compared to the burning in his mind from the shattered Green, but the fact that he felt it at all meant that he must be in real trouble. Too fast for Alin to see, Simon's blade passed through his upper-right breastplate, across his stomach, and cut across his left thigh. It sliced through his armor like it wasn't even there, spraying blood across the steps.

His blood shone.

It was still red, but it glowed with its own inner light, so that it looked like luminous crimson paint splattered on the stone in front of the waystation.

That's not right,
he thought, absently.
Blood isn't supposed to be like that.

You're not the same as you were anymore,
the Silver reminded him.

Alin fell over on his back, staring up at the sky. The Blue Light started to dissolve, its essence returning to Elysia.

It’s over, then,
he thought. As last thoughts went, it wasn’t much. He had always imagined himself dying with words of wisdom on his lips, or his true love’s face in his mind’s eye. But when he thought about dying now, he felt…nothing much at all.

The Gold Light sent him a feeling that didn't quite translate into words. It felt like a bleak secret, a dark joke, a grim smile.

Well,
the Gold said,
I wouldn’t exactly say ‘over.’

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN
:

I
NVASION

Lycus Agnos could tell: his sister wasn't paying attention.

Oh, she went through all the right motions. When he slashed at her legs, she hopped back and countered with a thrust to his neck. As he knocked her blade aside, she stepped in close, popping him in the nose with a quick punch.

Andra acted like she always did, but he knew her well enough to look beneath the surface. They had spent almost all their time together in the months since they had moved to Valinhall, as they had no one else to talk to. He knew her better than he ever had. Better than he wanted to, to tell the truth.

The biggest change had come when she got those chains on her arms.

As she punched him in the nose, he got a close-up look at the mark on the back of her hand. It looked like a black oval with squared-off corners, but he recognized it for what it was: the first link of a chain. All of the Valinhall Travelers had these chain-shaped marks, which began on their hands and wrapped up their arms like snakes twisting up a tree branch.

That knowledge hurt even more than the punch, since Andra's chain was only one link. That meant she wasn't drawing any strength from the House, and yet she was
still
beating him with less than half her attention.

Lycus' head snapped back and pain flashed through his skull, but he kept his sword up. He tried to focus through watery eyes, to see where her next attack would come from.

Andra wasn't attacking. She stood with her sword to one side, looking at him in concern.

“Are you alright?”

“I'm fine,” Lycus tried to say, but it came out as though he were speaking through a heavy cold. He sniffed and wiped at his eyes, hoping that she wouldn't think he was crying. His eyes were watering because he'd been hit in the nose, that's all.

Andra glanced around the garden, tapping the tip of her sword against her boot. “If your nose is broken, you can go dip in the bath. I'll wait.”

Lycus shook his head furiously, keeping his sword up to show her he could still fight. “It's not.” He had broken his nose five times since coming to live in Valinhall, so he knew what it felt like. “Let's go.”

Without another word, Andra brought her blade up and bent her knees, balancing on the balls of her feet, waiting for him to attack. The waiting was another sign that she wasn't taking him seriously. Andra always attacked, never started on the defensive, and she liked to make jokes while she fought. She made jokes most of the time, actually. If she was quiet, waiting for him to make the first move, that meant she was thinking about something else.

Lycus stepped forward and poked at her defense with a weak thrust, trying to prod her into attacking.
 

She parried gently, stepping to the left to force him to move, matching her.

At least they were fighting now, but it burned in him that he couldn't make her focus. No one took him seriously, that was the problem. He was the youngest around here, and by far the weakest. Even the Nye treated Andra like an adult, coming at her from the shadows, attacking her in pairs, dragging her out of her bedcovers with an iron chain around her neck.

When they attacked Lycus, they barely tried to kill him at all! Once, a Nye had even shaken him awake and allowed him to climb out of bed before whipping him with a chain. Lycus' mother believed that the Nye were an important and natural part of the House, testing its inhabitants to make sure that they were always alert, always ready for Valinhall's harsher tests.

If so, why didn't they test
him?
He was ready! If he couldn't conquer the rooms deeper in the House, how was he ever going to defeat Simon?

Lycus stepped once more to the side, but Andra didn't circle him. She stared at something over his shoulder, letting her sword fall again.

“What is
that?”
she asked, in a tone normally reserved for cockroaches and squirming reptiles.

They normally fought in the garden, but today Chaka had told them that their ‘clashing and clanging’ was getting on his nerves, and that they should take their ‘limp-wristed flailing’ somewhere else, before he taught them a lesson. So they had walked back through the House's main hallway and began sparring in the entry hall.

If Andra had seen something in this room, that could only mean that someone was opening a Gate. Valinhall Gates could be opened from anywhere outside, but they always led here, to the House's entry hall.

It was technically possible that Andra was baiting him, luring him into turning around so that she could attack him from behind. Lycus would actually have been relieved if that were the case, since it meant that she thought him dangerous enough to be worth tricking.

He turned around, hoping his sister would stab him in the back.

A Gate was indeed opening in the entry hall, but it didn't look...healthy. Normally, when a Valinhall Traveler opened a Gate, they sliced it from top to bottom, as though a curtain was being drawn back, revealing a different world on the other side. When they finished, the Gate would stabilize into a white-edged swirling doorway.

This time, the Gate was beginning in the middle, roughly chest-high on Lycus, not head-high on an adult. The edges weren't white, but red and angry. And while the blade that poked through the air had an edge of freshly polished steel, it certainly was not one of the gently curving Dragon's Fang swords that Valinhall Travelers used.

So if it wasn't one of the Dragon Army opening a Valinhall Gate, who was it?

Lycus took a step back from the Gate, glancing over at his sister. As much as he hated to admit it, she was supposed to be a fully-fledged Valinhall Traveler now. Maybe she knew something he didn't.

She glared at the hole in the world, fingers clenched around her Dragon's Fang. She looked dangerous now, in a way that she hadn't when she was fighting him. “Lycus, go warn someone. Something’s trying to come through.”

“Warn who?” Lycus asked. Simon wasn't in the House at the moment, he was outside doing whatever he did. Probably killing more people. Lycus had trouble thinking of Simon now without picturing him bathed in the blood of Damascan soldiers, men who had been supposed to protect Lycus and take his family to safety. True, Simon had sent the Agnos family to Valinhall, but it was to save them from a mess that he had created.