The Crimson Vault (The Traveler's Gate Trilogy) (13 page)

Shai, fourteen years old, was Alin’s youngest sister. She said nothing, simply bowing to Grandmaster Naraka and slipping off to the side. Shai rarely said much, and today she seemed bored, her flat eyes staring at everything without a spark of interest. But Alin knew her better than that, so he kept an eye on her.

Ilana bowed as she entered the room, but she flashed Alin a grin. At twenty, she was three years older than Alin, and still unmarried. He hadn’t seen her since the night of Malachi’s raid on Myria, when a squad of Damascan soldiers had cut her betrothed down as he ran. He would have expected to see the shadow of that tragedy on her face, in tightness around the eyes or a hollow smile, but she seemed her usual self.

“Do you have nothing to say to your sisters?” Grandmaster Naraka asked. In truth, Alin had been too stunned to speak. He had sent Travelers to Myria months ago, shortly after he arrived in Enosh, to make sure his sisters were safe and cared for. Since then, he had barely thought of them. He felt a little guilty about that, but events had proceeded so fast that he had hardly had time to think at all.

Alin thought his smile would split his face in half. He had never thought it would feel so good to see his family. “Ilana! Tamara! You look wonderful! I’m so glad to see you’ve been keeping well.” He would have mentioned Shai as well, but he thought she would probably be happier if he didn’t draw attention to her sneaking along the back wall.

Ilana and Tamara sighed together.

“Listen to him,” Tamara said.

“He sounds like he’s making a speech,” Ilana added. “’Keeping well.’ Why yes, my good sir, we have been keeping well. We spend so much time knitting and attending balls that we hardly have time for tea and scones.”

The three women—Grandmaster Naraka included—all laughed. Shai continued sneaking around, apparently on a quest to see and touch as much of Enosh as she could.

Ilana’s good-natured mocking did not put a dent in his smile. If anything, Alin felt relieved. After her promised husband’s death, Alin had been afraid that her sense of humor would never recover.

“All right, all right,” Alin said. “I’m just glad to see you.” He spread his arms and walked over for a hug.

He clanked as he walked, which gave his sisters the opportunity to poke fun at his armor, but he didn’t mind. Much.

Behind Grandmaster Naraka’s back, and safely out of Tamara’s sight, Shai pulled a clock down from a shelf on the wall. She sat down with the clock in her lap and immediately began taking it apart.

After they spent a few minutes catching up, their conversation naturally turned to Alin’s newfound powers.

“Are you the one teaching Alin to Travel, Grandmaster?” Ilana asked.

“I am,” Grandmaster Naraka replied.

“How’s it going?”

Naraka shrugged. “I have had worse students, and I have never taught an Elysian Traveler before. But I suspect we would make more progress if he did not think so much of his own abilities. He seems to think he is invincible.”

Alin’s face heated, and he raised one gauntleted hand to his mouth as if to cover a cough. Maybe Ilana wouldn’t notice his blush.

Tamara chuckled quietly at the Grandmaster’s words, but Ilana nodded. “You praise him too much,” she said. “It goes straight to his head. If you don’t prick his ego every once in a while, it’ll just keep swelling.”

Even Shai piped up. “Too proud,” she submitted, from the floor next to her pile of clockwork.

It was hard to tell, behind Grandmaster Naraka’s dark red glasses and her mask of wrinkles, but Alin thought she was trying to restrain a laugh. “I will defer to your wisdom in this matter,” she said, “but I’m afraid it may be too late. Our next meeting together will not be until after the city-wide celebration in his honor.”
 

Ilana sighed and shook her head sadly. “Oh, no. There’ll be no talking to him after that.”

At that point, Alin thought it was his place to speak up. “The city is celebrating, Ilana, because I defeated one of the Overlords. Malachi lies dead because of me.”

Ilana’s eyes went flat and hard, and a shadow entered her voice. “Good. His men killed Aden.”

Tamara put a comforting arm around Ilana’s shoulders, and Grandmaster Naraka glared at Alin as though he had done something wrong.

“You snuck off against our advice,” the Grandmaster said. “You risked your life, the life of one of our most promising young Travelers, and the fate of this city on your own whim. The fact that one good thing came of your decision does not justify your actions.”

Alin started to speak, to defend himself one more time, but Grandmaster Naraka cut him off.

“That reminds me,” she said. “We have a strategy meeting after you address the city. We need to discuss our actions against Damasca.”

Alin glanced at his sisters. “What about them?”

“Don’t worry about us,” Tamara said. “The Grandmaster has given us wonderful rooms. We’ll be here when you get back.”

“There’s a clock in my room,” Shai called.

Ilana smiled, though there was still a touch of darkness in it. “I’m sure it won’t last long, Shai.”

Tamara noticed the pile of gears and springs surrounding her sister for the first time, and immediately launched into a combination of apologizing to Grandmaster Naraka and scolding Shai. Her face remained pleasant through the whole tirade.

Alin’s sisters left the room, and the Grandmaster moved to follow them.

“I want Simon at this meeting, Grandmaster,” Alin said.

Naraka stopped. She half-turned to face him, her glasses gleaming red in the afternoon sunlight. “That is not wise.”

In his mind, Alin reached out to the golden power of Elysia, like a warm sun just over his shoulder. Somewhere, an acorn in a golden cage began to shake. “I wasn’t asking your permission. It’s already done.”

Grandmaster Naraka’s answering bow was nothing more than a fractional nod of her head. “As you wish, Eliadel. Now come. The people await you.”

Alin walked out with her. The doors slammed shut behind them, the sound echoing loud and hollow in the empty halls.

C
HAPTER
S
IX
:

T
HE
G
RANDMASTERS
' C
OUNCIL

Simon’s Gate opened onto the last place he’d left: his suite of rooms in Enosh. After his final showdown with the Damascan Travelers, he had Traveled to Valinhall for healing, but he’d been forced to take three of Alin’s huge Elysian bears with him. Valinhall, he had learned, was not equipped to support bears. They had torn up three couches and one of the strange oxen from the garden before the Nye had enough.

Simon had walked the bears from the canyon at the edge of the Badari Desert all the way back to Enosh, and had then managed to sneak them into Alin’s room. That had taken most of a day, but the look on Alin’s face when he saw the bears was worth every second. Simon had spied on Alin’s reaction from outside his window, but after seeing the bears, it had taken Alin all of ten seconds to summon a tracker that located Simon.

After that, Alin had insisted that Simon be given rooms in the Grandmasters’ palace and the little buzzing-acorn alarm that would alert him in an emergency.
 

Alin hadn’t put it that way, of course. He said something like, ‘Now I can call you whenever I need you.’ But since it would allow Simon to help in case of an attack, he let Alin’s poor phrasing slide.

The rooms here were no better appointed than his bedroom in Valinhall, though he had much more floor space here. For some reason, his bed and washstand were fifteen paces apart. Did they expect him to host a dance in the middle of the room?

Rich people,
he thought, with a mental shake of his head. Then he stepped out of the room and almost ran straight into Leah.
 

She looked as startled as he was, her blue eyes wide. “Simon!” she said. “I thought you were…gone.” For some reason she jerked her wrist behind her back, as though she meant to hide the crystal bracelet she always wore. After a second she relaxed.

“I was in my Territory,” Simon said carefully. He found himself watching his words with Leah after rescuing her from Malachi’s tower.

“Oh, really?” Leah didn’t sound intrigued, or frightened, or in awe, any of which Simon would have expected from her when talking about his Traveler powers. She sounded like she was thinking about something else, like his answer had been expected.

“Simon,” Leah said, “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something. Do you have a minute?” Without waiting for his response, she grabbed him by the arm and pulled him to the side of the hall, where they would be out of the irregular hallway traffic.

He considered telling her that Alin had called him on some urgent business, but he found that the idea of making Alin wait didn’t bother him at all. Besides, if you discounted his recent suspicions about her, there was something exciting about having a pretty girl—having
Leah
—pull him aside for a private conversation.

He made sure to keep his face blank as he let her draw him toward the wall. He wasn’t Alin, after all.

She stood distractingly close, so that he could feel the heat from her body. “Simon,” she said, “how did you become a Valinhall Traveler?”

Simon blinked. That was not at all where he had expected—or hoped—this conversation would go.
 

“Well, uh, after what happened, I wanted to find a way to fight Travelers. So I found a Valinhall Traveler, and I convinced him—”

“How?” Leah interrupted.

He wasn’t quite sure what she was looking for. “I just begged him, mostly. I’m not entirely sure why he agreed, to tell you the truth.”

Leah waved that aside. “No, I mean, how did you find a Valinhall Traveler? I mean, even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t know how to go about finding one. Other than you, of course, but you know what I mean.”

The direction of her questions was becoming clear, but Simon still wasn’t sure why she was asking. Besides, he didn’t want to talk about the night his father had died. Then again, Leah had been captured by the Endross Traveler, Cormac, and left in Overlord Malachi’s hands for weeks. Somehow, he felt that she deserved to know the story.

“Do you know what happened to my parents?” Simon asked.

She shook her head, and her blue eyes focused on him as though she meant to memorize his every word.

“We were making a delivery through Latari Forest,” he said. “I was just a kid. We ran into two Travelers, and they attacked us. They killed my father pretty much immediately.” He skimmed over the details, to spare both of them. This was nothing he wanted to re-live.

“Valinhall Travelers?” Leah asked. She sounded confused.

“No, just regular Travelers. One of them was Naraka, I think, and the other one summoned this glowing mist.”

“Asphodel,” Leah said.

Simon stared at her.

She raised one eyebrow without changing the rest of her expression. “I’ve spent half my time talking to Travelers since I got here,” she said. “Not everybody locks themselves in their rooms. Keep going.”

He could accept that. It certainly sounded like the sort of explanation Leah would normally give: unashamed and commanding.

“Anyway, my father died, and my mother…the Asphodel, I guess, fed her a bunch of mist. That’s what broke her mind.”

Images floated up to the surface of Simon’s mind, and he shivered. Just a little. Leah put a sympathetic hand on his shoulder.

“A Valinhall Traveler saved me,” Simon went on. “I didn’t know what he was at the time, of course, I thought he was just an incredible swordsman good enough to take on Travelers. Then, when the attack on Myria ended, you were gone, Alin went off to save you, and I was left with nobody. I had to do something, so I decided to go find the only man I knew could fight Travelers.”

Leah nodded along, clearly absorbing the information. “So you found him,” she said.

“Not him, but another one. He took me in.”

“What were the tests like?” Leah asked.

“Tests?” Simon asked. Maybe she meant the way the Valinhall rooms tested him. But no, there was no way she could know about that.

“The compatibility tests,” Leah said, as though it were obvious. “The Travelers I’ve talked to here say that everyone has to pass a test, to see if you’re compatible with the Territory. There’s no way to know if you can Travel, otherwise.”

Something was going on with Leah.
 

First, when he had seen her in Malachi’s tower, she hadn’t seemed like a prisoner. She had an explanation for that, and ordinarily he would accept it, but Malachi hadn’t spoken of her like a captive. If anything, he had suggested that
she
was holding
him
captive, which made no sense at all.

Second, there was the way she was acting now. She had tried to hide her bracelet when she saw him, and she had worn that bracelet every day of the past two years. Now she showed knowledge of Traveling that even he didn’t have. Even if she had spent all her time in Enosh asking questions, why was she so eager to learn? How had she learned so much so quickly? She spoke as if the things she knew were common sense.

What do you think?
he sent to his doll. Only when he received no response did he realize that he had forgotten to take a doll from his room in Valinhall. He had dropped Lilia off when he stopped by the bedroom for his cloak, sure that the Nye would have washed and returned it. But the cloak was nowhere to be found, and he had to backtrack to the bathroom, where his cloak and Azura still lay where he left them. After that, he had been in too much of a hurry to think of swinging back by his room for another doll.

Then again, what was wrong with the Nye? They had never shirked their duties before. The Eldest was probably angry with him, for some unknowable reason, and wouldn’t allow the others to serve him until Simon made up for whatever it was he had done. That was probably it.