City of Light (The Traveler's Gate Trilogy) (33 page)

The boy had already placed Azura back on its rack and released his steel; he sagged in place, just strong enough to remain standing. He nodded to Indirial before the Gate vanished altogether.

Feiora was already gone, no doubt to open a Gate of her own to Avernus. Indirial couldn't blame her.

But he had his own work to do.

The first thing he did was inform all his officers and high-ranking Travelers that he had returned, which was a visible relief to them. It wasn't often that two Overlords and the Queen vanished for almost a full day after heading out on what was supposed to be a short-term scouting mission.

Next, he asked about the team of Travelers who had been assigned to guard Grandmaster Naraka during his disastrous mission to Enosh. To his shock, they were all unharmed, and the Grandmaster was back in custody. She had escaped long enough to close the Gate and then seal the waypoint somehow, which even the two Naraka Travelers working together couldn't undo.
 

The three Tartarus guards, meanwhile, had clubbed the Grandmaster over the head and bound her with chains “so tight she couldn't sneeze without picking three padlocks.” They had remained in Naraka until the seal on the waystation dissipated, at which point they'd glanced through the Gate and seen the building in rubble. At that point, wisely, they had trekked back to the camp and informed their superior Travelers.

They all five seemed anxious that Indirial would blame them for what happened; on the contrary, he complimented their quick thinking and devotion to their duty. It was
his
fault that he had allowed the Grandmaster as much freedom as he had, not theirs. He thought of himself as somewhat of an expert at fighting Naraka Travelers, and he'd never seen one seal a waystation completely. He hadn't considered it possible.

After that, he indulged himself by spending half an hour describing to Grandmaster Naraka, in detail, the punishments she had earned by endangering the Queen. Justice would catch up to her at last, and there was something poetic about that.

He spent the next two hours poring over reports. Nothing of significance had happened while he was gone, but everyone under his command had to tell him that, in triplicate and signed if possible. With that taken care of, mostly, his next priority was to help find the Queen. He and Feiora had agreed that she would take care of that, and since Leah was in Avernus, Indirial should technically have deferred to the other Overlord. But the situation was volatile enough with all the Incarnations missing; they couldn't afford a missing monarch as well.

However, he could allow himself a short stop on the way. The sun had just set, so Nerissa and Elaina would be sitting down to eat. Perhaps he could grab a bite or two.

He ducked into his family's tent, already grinning. “Here I am, back from the dead!” he called. “It took two Incarnations and a...”

The gold medallion he wore grew cold against his chest.
Danger…
Korr whispered.

Korr, his advisor, rested inside the black gem at the heart of his medallion. Korr wasn’t the most talkative advisor of the thirteen, and he only gave advice when he thought it would be needed.

A violet flame, visible only to Indirial’s eyes, burned inside his tent. He turned, and for a moment he couldn’t accept what he was seeing.

It wasn’t the inside of his tent. It was a swirling window onto another world, its red edges wide enough to scrape the edge of the tent.
 

Indirial looked onto a cavern lit by rough scarlet torches. A pair of silver doors, each carved with half of the face of a one-eyed king, had been flung open, giving him a look inside the Crimson Vault.

Without hesitation, he backed out of the tent. Leah had not opened this Gate, and that meant that someone else had. He would bet everything he owned that it wasn't one of the remaining Heiresses—one of them still exiled to Lirial, the last he'd checked, and the other gibbering and weeping in an Asphodel asylum—and that left only one possibility: the Ragnarus Incarnation.

The camp was under attack, and his family had been the first victims.

His heart burned to go inside, to kill whoever he needed to kill to get his wife and daughter back. No Territory was as good for fighting Travelers as Valinhall, not even the Crimson Vault.

But the fact that this Gate had been left open inside his tent meant that this attack, or at least its initial stages, had been aimed at him personally. He wasn't enough of a fool to give the enemy what he wanted.

“We're under attack!” he bellowed, as loudly as he could, as he emerged from his tent. “Incarnation in the camp! Raise the—”

A violet flame burned to life in the corner of his vision: Korr’s warning. Something white and gleaming streaked toward his stomach, so fast that the human eye could barely track it.

So it was a good thing he'd called Nye essence the instant he recognized a Ragnarus Gate.

Summoning Benson's steel, he slapped the projectile out of the air with the flat of his hand. It looked and felt like an oblong ball of ice, and it still tore through the tent next to his after he knocked it aside.

“Fascinating,” the Helgard Incarnation said. She stood outside his tent, curly white hair flowing behind her spiral horns. The emerging starlight shone on her blue skin, and her glacial eyes were curious. “Is that reaction time something that you learn in your Territory, or a power you are granted? Does it work if you are caught completely off-guard?”

Vasha shimmered like an illusion and appeared in his hand, phantom chains crawling across his flesh. “Return your captives,” said the Overlord of Cana.

Helgard ran a hand down the white fur that covered her like a dress. “Don't worry, they're completely—”

Indirial lunged. He didn't have to move far, considering Vasha's length, and then he brought his blade down diagonally across the Incarnation's body. A bar of black ice spun into being, meeting the Dragon's Fang with a nearly unbreakable surface.

He had expected that. He bore down with all the power he could draw from Valinhall, every drop of liquid steel he could summon from Benson's blue-lit basement. His strike didn't cleave the dark ice in half, but the force of his blow drove the ice downward. Vasha, with a bar of dark Helgard ice on the end, slammed into the Incarnation's left shoulder like a hammer.

Bone crunched, and she tumbled down and away, coming to a halt five paces away. Her white fur was speckled with dark blue blood.

“That wasn't a yes,” Indirial called. She wouldn’t have died from a hit like that, so she got the message. He raised his voice once more, blue-white mist puffing out of his mouth as his Nye essence drained. “Incarnation in the camp! Travelers, to me! Incarnation in the camp!”

Soldiers boiled out of the nearby tents, but most of them had the good sense to keep their distance. Distantly, he heard a horn as his warning was picked up and spread throughout the camp. Then another horn, and another.

Soon, he would be surrounded by allied Travelers. He only had to stall until they got here.

He could do it. He had fought this Incarnation before, and even though he didn't think he could kill her, he could certainly stall until backup arrived. At which point they would capture this Incarnation and find out where she was keeping his family.

Assuming nothing else went wrong.

Danger!
Korr hissed.

He turned to see a slight flash out of the corner of his eye, little brighter than a reflection of moonlight off a spearhead. He spun, swinging the flat of Vasha's blade toward the light.

It was like a star the size of his fist, speeding at him out of the darkness. The light exploded when it hit his sword, instantly searing his hand and sending him stumbling backwards, almost knocking the Dragon's Fang from his hand with the force.

A second Incarnation strode out of the darkness. It was another woman, this time made entirely out of smooth crystal that flowed as she walked. Loops of silver wire wrapped her limbs and neck loosely, then tightened around her torso in a solid sheet of armored metal. Her body was almost completely transparent, but her eyes were the more typical milky-white crystal that Indirial associated with her Territory. She wore a slight smirk, and three more of those stars orbited her head in a pale halo.

“Lirial, I presume,” Indirial said, calling ice. His body flooded with cold even deeper than the steel and Nye essence could account for, numbing all his injuries at once. Even the tearing burn in his right hand subsided to a dull throb, so he didn't drop his blade.

“Valinhall, is it?” she said. “In my day, we didn't—”

Indirial jumped backwards, propelled by all the steel he could draw. He felt a little ridiculous doing it—Valin had always warned them against unnecessary acrobatics—but when he reached the height of his jump, he flipped in the air.

He landed on top of the Helgard Incarnation, driving Vasha down into her chest. If he had one chance of surviving this fight and going on to find his wife and daughter, he had to eliminate one of the Incarnations early. He stood practically no chance against two of them, but one-on-one he could at least draw out the battle until reinforcements arrived.

The point of his Dragon's Fang met a shield of black ice.

Helgard's glacial blue eyes snapped open, her wounds already beginning to freeze over. To his eyes, slowed by the Nye essence, she seemed to drift to her feet, stretching slowly with a series of disgusting cracking sounds, as if her bones were snapping back into place.

He flipped up the hood of his cloak and swung Vasha overhand at her neck, taking advantage of the fact that she wouldn't quite be able to see him.

Two of Lirial's white stars blasted into the ground on either side of him, and the third crashed into his back. She had cast all three at him in the hopes of hitting him, since she couldn't pinpoint him exactly.

It had worked, but fortunately he'd anticipated her.

Instead of slamming into his unprotected back and pushing him forward into the Helgard Incarnation, the third star crashed into a plate of ghost armor and dispersed.

He turned and ran at Lirial. His initial strategy had been to overwhelm Helgard while she was injured, but since that obviously wasn't working, he would take out the weakest link in the chain first. Lirial was like Avernus: no matter how powerful the Traveler, they wouldn't be as useful in battle as most of the other Territories. He should be able to at least drive her off, keep her separated from her ally.

Down the row of tents, a few red-robed Naraka Travelers ran with leather-wrapped Endross Travelers, lightning already playing around their hands. Some of them carried storms the size of their two hands together, and they were headed toward him.

Good. He wouldn't have to hold out long, and then they could begin the
real
search: finding his family.

He stepped forward and drove Vasha into the Incarnation's crystal chest.

Well, he tried to.

When he tried to maneuver his sword for a stab, both of his hands moved, jerking him off-balance. Both his hands had been cuffed together in solid crystal.

He didn't even let that slow him down. Without a moment's hesitation, he jumped forward, intending to slam his stone-encased hands onto the Lirial Incarnation's head.

In midair, he slammed into dark ice. Before he had a chance to react, the bar seemed to reach all the way around him, freezing into a wide circle of ice around his middle. The ice slowly levitated back down to the ground, locking him into an awkward position: twisted at the hips as if to stab, both hands clutching an immobile sword in front of him. The skin around his stomach was already starting to burn from the cold.

“I've been trying to do that since the fight began,” Lirial confided, running a hand over her crystal head. “Do you know—”

Indirial's legs were still free. He jumped up and slammed both his feet into the Incarnation's diamond chest.

With a satisfying crunch, she flipped over backwards, spinning a full revolution in the air before she crashed into the ground.

A second later, he fell into the bar of ice on his back, slamming into his ribs, and only the Valinhall ice he had called into himself prevented him from screaming out in pain.

But seeing the Lirial Incarnation's face right before his boots slammed into it had been worth every second of agony.

Helgard peeked over at him as the shouts from the allied Travelers grew louder. A bright orange fireball shrieked into existence over him, but it snuffed out in a flurry of wind and snow almost before it finished forming.

“You're unspeakably interesting, did you know that?” Helgard said. “What keeps you going?”

He struggled, trying to stretch Vasha's point closer to the Incarnation. With her bar of ice around him, surely she would be less protected now.

“I keep waiting for one of you to open your mouth,” Indirial replied. “Then I attack. You'd be amazed how many people choose to talk instead of fighting.”

A pale bolt of lightning crashed into a nearby tent, setting it ablaze. “I see,” the Helgard Incarnation said, even as Lirial pulled herself up and brushed dirt from her jeweled skin.

“It was my own mistake,” Lirial allowed. “I should never allow myself to be anything less than perfectly attentive.”

Helgard flicked a blue hand in her direction, and a screaming orange wasp the size of a small dog froze solid and dropped before it reached Lirial. “Hmph. Of course it was.”

“Shall we go?”

“The Gate is still open.”

Indirial screamed and yelled, but the Incarnations met any attack from the crowd of Travelers without seeming to pay attention. The band of ice around his ribs dragged him into the air, pulling him behind them.

And into the Crimson Vault.

As soon as he vanished into the tent, his Travelers tore the fabric apart, blasting it into shreds and ash inside a second, trying to catch sight of him again. Indirial caught a glimpse of a few desperate, friendly faces before the red Gate sealed shut.

Leaving him at the entrance of Ragnarus with two Incarnations.

Or...possibly three.