The Crimson Vault (The Traveler's Gate Trilogy) (3 page)

He had to say something to comfort the kid. “It’s not your fault, Simon. Not at all. But you can do something now, all right? I need you to take care of your mother for me. Can you do that?”

The boy wiped snot from his nose with the back of his sleeve and nodded.

“All right,” Indirial said calmly. He started to move around the cart, toward the donkey, which—amazingly—hadn’t panicked or bolted.
 

“Now, where do you live?”

“Myria village,” Simon responded.

Indirial repeated the name, thinking out loud. “That’s...a day or two northwest, I think. I can make it.” Simon sat there, looking hopeful and sad and alone, so he said it more firmly: “I’ll make it.”

It took Indirial almost twenty minutes to get the donkey to pull them all the way out to the trader’s road. In all that time, Simon didn’t say a word. He didn’t cry, either. He just tended to his mother.

There had to be something Indirial could do for him. He couldn’t just leave an eight-year-old boy to care for a mother who would probably never regain her sanity. Maybe he could take them in, raise them with his own family. Elaina could use a little brother.

No, Zakareth would never allow it. He was annoyed enough by the little of Indirial’s time he did not control. But there were still a few areas of Indirial’s life where the King of Damasca had no say.

“Once you get a little older, you should come back to the Forest, if you can,” Indirial said. “I’ll teach you how to make it so that Travelers never bother you again.” The Forest was his post, and would be for the foreseeable future. Unless Zakareth made good on his threat to make Indirial an Overlord, he would be there to train Simon properly. Besides, it was about time the Dragon Army got a little new blood.

“They were Travelers, then,” Simon said. He sounded…lost. Disappointed.

“Yes,” Indirial said simply. Some dreams of childhood needed to be crushed.

“Why did they hurt us?” Simon asked. Tears filled his voice.

For a blood-red tree,
Indirial thought but didn’t say.
To open a prison and release the monsters inside.
 

“Nothing you did, I promise you that,” Indirial said. “They were...looking for something.” That was all he would allow himself to say on the subject.
 

“When we reach Myria, I’ll do what I can for you, help you take care of your mother as best I can. For a little while. But I can’t leave my forest undefended for long. Not now.” Not with midsummer so close. This failure would only make Enosh try even harder.

“It’s okay,” Simon said. “I can take care of her.” His voice was strong.

“I know you can,” Indirial said. But if the Enosh Travelers succeeded, if they destroyed the Tree, no one would be safe. The villages near to Latari Forest, like Myria, they would suffer the worst. The Incarnations would reap a harvest of blood and bone greater than the world had seen in centuries.

Indirial would put a stop to it. Alone, if he had to. He would show the Enosh Grandmasters what a soldier of the Dragon Army could do.

Under the hood of his cloak, Indirial smiled.

C
HAPTER
T
WO
:

W
EAPONS
O
LD
AND
N
EW

358
th
Year of the Damascan Calendar

24
th
Year in the Reign of King Zakareth VI

30 Days After Midsummer

15 Days Until Summer’s End

Kai missed his dolls.

When a pack of six-legged obsidian wolves burst from the desert around him, sending fountains of sand exploding into the air, Kai was caught off guard. That would never have happened if his dolls were around.

The wolves’ bodies were made of smooth, polished obsidian, their eyes of amethyst. They each had three of those jeweled eyes, gleaming in the sun. They must be golems, guardians from Ornheim, left resting in the sand and waiting for someone to come by. They circled him now, prowling with a liquid grace that didn’t seem possible for beings made of stone.

There were four wolves in the pack, maybe five. One of his dolls would have known for sure. Angeline would have scolded him for not paying attention, but she would have told him how many and where they came from. Caela would have warned him happily, proud of her own knowledge.

Never again. They were with Simon now. The thought made him want to weep.

A polished muzzle closed on his forearm, teeth like chips of stone beginning to grind into his flesh. Kai pictured a stone amulet, hidden in a chest back in Valinhall. Then he called stone.

The six-legged wolf’s obsidian teeth sunk into his skin but barely penetrated, as though his arm had gained the consistency of tough leather. Shadowy chains crawled up his arms, through the monster’s jaws. It was an odd sensation, feeling the cold links of a chain flow up his skin while a monster chewed on it.

The wolf jerked its jaws to one side, trying to tear his arm from its socket.
 

Cold steel flowed through his veins, and his flesh was hard as stone. The creature would have to try harder than that.

Kai tossed the black wolf aside. It landed ten feet away, with enough force that its landing blasted sand away in a ring. The ground shuddered with impact.

The other wolves froze in their prowling, turning amethyst eyes on Kai.

He looked past them, into the horizon of the Badari Desert, where a huge sandstone temple awaited him. It was hewn of rough, enormous blocks of stone, and it crouched among the dunes as though it had weathered a thousand summers and would wait patiently for a thousand more. Kai knew better. Ornheim Travelers had summoned the stone for this temple from their Territory less than twenty-five years before. He had watched it happen, though he had never planned to return.

Well, since he was here, he might as well get it over with. The wolves wouldn’t wait around forever.

Silently, Kai called out to the Valinhall armory. He needed a weapon.

A mirage shimmered in his hands for an instant before resolving itself into a hulking, double-edged battle-axe. The steel head looked rough as stone, and the wooden shaft was dark and stained. End to end, it would stand almost a foot higher than the top of Kai’s head. Oh, it was big enough, he supposed, but where was the beauty? The grace?

Kai missed Azura.

The obsidian wolves surged forward as one, apparently trying to bring him down before he could use his weapon. Kai leaped forward to meet one, bringing his axe down on its skull with a satisfying crunch that crushed its head to shards like black glass.
 

Six legs landed on his back, almost bringing him to his knees under the weight. He spun around before the wolf could close its jaws on his neck, sending it flying off.

He kept spinning, turning his momentum into a swing with the axe. It slammed into another wolf’s side, hammering it into the air and over a dune. He felt its body land on the other side.

One of the wolves crept up behind him, aiming for his calf. He caught its movement out of the corner of his eyes, its movement strangely serpentine as it crawled forward on its six legs. Kai spun the axe like a quarterstaff—it wasn’t weighted for a move like that, but Kai’s strength made up for it—and caught the wolf under the ribs with the axe’s shaft.
 

He swept the creature into the air, and then reversed his swing, cleaving the wolf in two. Chips of obsidian sprayed into the air, prickling Kai’s skin. If he hadn’t called stone, they would have left ribbons of blood behind.

Another jaw seized his elbow and pulled him backwards, unbalancing him and sending him sprawling on his back in the sand.

Kai felt an instant of instinctive fear, lying on his back and looking up into the gleaming black jaws of two stone wolves. Their triple-amethyst eyes fixed on him, and he would have sworn they gleamed.

No need to be afraid,
Kai reminded himself.
They can chew on me all they like, and never get a drop of blood.
They couldn’t penetrate his flesh. All he needed to do was let them chew on him for a moment, and wait for his time to strike back. As long as his stone power lasted long enough.

At that exact moment, his stone ran out.

He should have known. Stone recovered quickly, but it ran out just as fast. It was intended to block an attack or two, not last through an entire battle, but he still thought he would have had a few more seconds.

There he was, on his back, about to be eaten by a couple of Ornheim wolves. Oh, how Otoku would have mocked him.

Kai drew steel deeply, feeling it flood his veins in an icy torrent that dwarfed what he had held before. With one hand, he seized a wolf’s snout just before its jaws closed on his throat. The other hand, he slid up the shaft of the axe, holding it just below the head. As the second wolf dove toward his belly, Kai hammered the axe-head into its body. He could barely get any leverage, so he battered at it again and again.

The wolf in his grip strained, trying to reach his throat. It was eerily quiet. A natural wolf would have snarled or growled, but the obsidian creature pushed forward like a silent, pitiless machine, its amethyst eyes flaring with reflected sunlight.

The second wolf finally died under the brutal hammering of the axe-head, collapsing onto Kai’s stomach in a heap of lifeless rock. Then Kai was free to turn the axe onto the wolf he held in his hand.

It did not last long.

When both wolves were dead, Kai hauled himself to his feet. Shards of obsidian clinked and rattled as they slid from his chest. He almost released the steel—he had seconds left, at best, and the power would take most of an hour to regenerate under these conditions—but some instinct made him hold on.

He stood still, holding the battle-axe in both hands. He listened.

Something scraped behind him, little more than a pebble sliding down a dune.

In one movement, Kai turned, reversing his axe as he did, and plunged the heavy axe-head down on the wolf that had tried to sneak up on him.

The creature was crushed under the blow, shattering instantly. Its amethyst eyes were inches from Kai’s calf.

Kai smiled. He hadn’t even needed a warning. If Caela could see him now, she would be so proud.

He let the axe drop to the sand, walking toward the temple. It was scratched and chipped from his battle with the wolves, and he thought the end of the shaft might have even splintered. The weapon would fade back to Valinhall eventually, where one of the Nye would take it into the forge and do what they could to repair it. They might just strip it down and use it for raw materials; it was no Dragon’s Fang, after all.

Of course, that was why Kai was headed to this temple in the first place. It had taken him weeks to reach this far into the Badari Desert on foot, and now he was finally this close to his goal.

By sunset, he would have a
real
weapon again. And then he could go home.

***

Simon held Azura in both hands, staring out into a room filled with thick, leafy jungle plants and pelting rain. A piping scream cut through the roar of the rain, sounding like the cry of some exotic bird. Knowing Valinhall, it was probably something far more deadly than any bird.

He raised his huge sword and eyed the door on the other side of the room. A cobblestone path cut through the grass that carpeted the rest of the area, and it led directly to a stone door with a running wolf carved in its face. Simon was so far away now that he could barely see the outline of the wolf carving, but he had tried to reach the door so often that he burned with curiosity. He
had
to see what was behind that door.

Go now,
Lilia whispered in his mind. Like all of his dolls, she sounded as though she was speaking through a gentle wind, although she actually sat on the stone floor by his feet. She wore a frilly dress of pure white, and had huge, innocent purple eyes. He had tucked her safely away from the rain, of course. Kai would murder him if he ruined her dress.

At the doll’s signal, Simon stepped into the downpour just as a clear spot opened in the weather. He stood surrounded by rain, but remained totally dry. The clear spot in the rain moved forward and he stepped with it, raising his sword above him as though to chop.

He stepped again, and brought the sword down. Another step, and he crouched on the balls of his feet, the sword arched behind him and to one side.

With each step he took, he assumed one of the sword forms that Chaka had taught him. If he executed each of the positions correctly, he would reach the other side of the room completely dry.

This was his fourteenth attempt to conquer what he and the other residents of Valinhall had dubbed the “rain garden.” He had never made it more than halfway.

But he liked his chances this time.

The rain pounded around him, assaulting his ears, and the clear spot began to move more quickly. He stepped forward from form to form, faster and faster, slashing and blocking and dodging invisible opponents until he moved almost as fast as he would in an actual battle.

He had passed the first landmark of the rain garden: a cluster of tall purple flowers with blossoms like trumpets, growing just to one side of the path. That meant he was almost two thirds of the way there. He had never made it so far before, and had never run through this routine so quickly. He started to lose track of the forms; he stepped forward, and couldn’t remember if he was supposed to lunge forward or pivot for a slash.

He needed more time, so he reached out in his mind to a black box that the Nye Eldest had once given him. Chaka had warned him that he would learn nothing from this test if he simply relied on his powers to pass, but how would he know? Simon certainly wasn’t going to tell him. A rush of cold moonlight filled his lungs as he drew on the essence of the Nye.