The Crimson Vault (The Traveler's Gate Trilogy) (2 page)

So be it. Indirial would give this Enosh heretic an up-close and personal look at his Dragon’s Fang.

Indirial reached out into the rain. The chains stretched past his elbow, wrapping his bicep. The Asphodel Traveler’s eyes widened immediately, fear twisting his scars into a revolting mask. The Naraka still looked confused. Well, she would figure it out soon enough.

He summoned Vasha.
 

The sword shimmered briefly as it vanished from Valinhall and appeared in his hand. His fist closed around cloth. Vasha wasn’t as long as some of the other Fangs; Kai’s Azura, for instance, or Valin’s own Mithra, were almost uselessly long. Vasha was a more practical length, about five feet from the end of the pommel to the tip of its blade, and it did not gleam like the other Valinhall swords. Its surface was dull, pitted, its blade chipped. Indirial wasn’t sure how that had happened. The steel was now all but indestructible, and nothing in his power could so much as scuff its polish, but obviously that had not always been the case.

Indirial liked it that way: rough, almost unfinished. It cut well enough.

The Enosh Travelers were shouting now. The blond Naraka moved her hand in an intricate spiral of red light, eyes tightening in pain as she mentally called for whatever force she was trying to summon. Not another
mor’we
, probably. She should know how futile that would be; he would just cut the wasp out of the air. Possibly an ash hound, then, or one of the hulking
akna’dorma.
Or maybe something even more exotic.

Mist gathered around the gray-robed man’s hands. He had mastered his fear—anything else would have been lethal for him, dealing with Asphodel—and it looked like he was cooking up a serious mist binding.

Well, then
, Indirial thought.
Best to cut that short.
He called essence.

Then he ran forward.

Powered by Benson’s steel and accelerated by the power of the Nye, Indirial covered the distance between himself and the two Travelers in a blink.

Care
, Korr whispered, and a violet spark appeared on the Naraka Traveler’s hand.

The Naraka’s blue eyes widened, and her summoning mark came up in a flash of red. Vivid orange flame swirled around her palm. She hadn’t been summoning a creature, then, but fire from the Furnace of Judgment. Good decision. The flames would come much faster, and they would surely pair well with whatever the Asphodel came up with.
 

Fire from the Furnace would, from what Indirial had heard, bind its target and burn them according to their own guilt. Right now, he believed those stories. As he watched the bright orange fireball form in front of the Naraka Traveler’s hands, he saw what seemed to be
faces
, wide-mouthed screaming faces, swirling in the flames like burning ghosts. They shrieked as they were summoned into the real world, blasting toward his chest.

The fire would likely have caught Indirial, despite his Nye-enhanced reflexes, if not for Korr’s warning. Caught off-guard, he would have been wrapped in flame, burning to his own crimes. With his past, he would be lucky to survive just the one fireball; he had enough crimes in his past for a dozen men. But if he did survive, the Asphodel Traveler was there to pour mist into him, feeding on the panic that the Furnace created. Between them, the mist and the flames would have eaten both his mind and his body from the inside out.

Fortunately, Indirial was prepared.
 

At the first instant of Korr’s warning, he pulled his blade back. As soon as the fire left the Traveler’s hands, he swept Vasha across his body, catching the fireball on the flat of his blade. There was a brief sense of faint resistance, as though he had slapped his sword against the surface of a lake, and then he swatted the flame aside. It blasted into the trees.

The woman’s eyes widened—in astonishment, he thought, not fear—and she looked straight at him. For a frozen instant he looked into her pale blue eyes, saw the confusion in them. She didn’t seem like a woman awaiting her own death.
 

Indirial’s wife, Nerissa, had eyes exactly that shade of ice-blue. This woman had Nerissa’s eyes.

While his mind shouted protest, the training took over his body. Vasha flashed, slicing through bone with barely a tug. The hand with her summoning mark fell away. That was the safest way to deal with Naraka Travelers: dangerous hand first, then the other hand, then the killing blow. Sometimes, if you stabbed them through the heart from the beginning, they could still call up some horror with their last breath. Not missing both hands, though.

The pain must have just begun to register as she turned her confused eyes on her bleeding stump. Indirial took her left hand before her right hit the ground.

She looked up at him, still not understanding, her ice-blue eyes so much like Nerissa’s that it hurt.

Indirial slid Vasha straight through her heart, holding his eyes on hers the whole time. He didn’t want her to suffer. She was in this forest to sabotage the Hanging Tree, to release on the world a force without pity or weakness…but she had his wife’s eyes. The least he could do was kill her quickly, before she had the time to feel any pain.

Her body slid off his blade and to the ground, and he allowed himself an instant to feel the weight of her death. How many had he killed? How many more would he kill, before he was done? Who would wait for this woman to come home?

Only an instant did he indulge his guilt, then he brought his mind back to the business at hand. He wasn’t the moping type, anyway. He preferred to think more encouraging thoughts, about success rather than tragedy.

But on nights like tonight, tragedy became hard to ignore.

The Asphodel would be calling up his mist soon, so Indirial did something he would have rather not done. He called diamond.

In his mind, he pictured a beautiful diamond, cut with a thousand facets so that it looked almost like a perfect sphere. The gem was the reward for conquering the winter garden, one of the deepest rooms in Valinhall. Indirial called the diamond into him, let it take over his thoughts, his feelings, let it focus his memories and intentions into one blade-sharp arrow of intent.

I hate this,
Indirial thought. Then the diamond took control.

And everything became simple.

The Asphodel man stood next to the body of his companion, his face composed underneath his scars. But of course his face was composed, because Asphodel Travelers had to stay calm, or their own Territory would turn on them. Mist swirled around his hands, and Indirial recognized the pattern: the binding was almost complete. He was about to summon the Mists of Asphodel.

Running forward would do no good; the mist would rise wherever Indirial stood. So he just stayed where he was.

No need to complicate matters.

The mists rose in half a dozen tendrils as thick around as Indirial’s thigh, crawling over his skin like cool, moist snakes. They moved with deceptive speed, reaching his face in less than a second. Mist slithered into him: through his nose, into his mouth, into his ears. He thought some particles might have even found their way in through his eyes.

The illusions began.

He saw Nerissa in front of him, crouching on the wet leaves of the Latari Forest. She wept, eyes of blue ice locked onto his face. “Please,” she whispered, and held up an arm that ended in a bloody stump. His sword dripped red; he had taken her hand.

His wife vanished and his daughter took her place, nine years old, running on her short legs from a pack of ash hounds. They trailed sparks through the air as they ran out of the trees; they would have her on the ground in seconds. Without looking, Indirial knew his feet were chained to the ground.

“Help me, Daddy!” she cried.

The images were a product of the mist. The more fear he felt, or anger, or pain, the worse they would become. Eventually his mind would shut down, unable to process reality any longer. They fed on emotion, the Mists of Asphodel.

So Indirial chose to feel nothing.

The diamond made his choice both clear and easy: if he felt emotion, he would go crazy, and the Enosh Travelers would find the Hanging Tree. So he felt nothing as he watched his daughter pulled down by blazing hounds.

Indirial stepped forward, and the mist was simply a cloud parting around him.

He smiled broadly, showing off his teeth. Let the Asphodel Traveler see how well his binding had worked.

The Traveler paled. Then he panicked, nearly tripping over his own feet in his haste to run away. Well, it was a good thing this Traveler wasn’t in Asphodel right now. That much terror would have devoured him in the real Mists.

The Nye essence was fading from Indirial now, but that didn’t matter much. Even the steel was waning, but he just needed a bit. It would only take the last dregs of his power to deal with this third-rate Traveler.

Still, Indirial allowed the Asphodel a few seconds of a head start. It was only fair.

“If I had been frightened, that much mist might have killed me,” Indirial called. “Maybe even driven me insane. I hear the Mists of Asphodel have that effect on some people.”
 

It wasn’t honorable of him to taunt a beaten opponent, he supposed, but who cared about honor outside of Tartarus? Besides, this was the only fun he was likely to get tonight.

“But guess what?” Indirial shouted. When he judged the Traveler had run far enough, Indirial leaped after him, his jump powered by steel. He landed inches behind the fleeing man, and then he put Vasha through the Traveler’s back.

“I’m not afraid.” He gave the Asphodel another smile that the man couldn’t see. Then he pushed the Traveler off of his sword.

The big man toppled to the ground. Indirial exhaled, letting his sword vanish and his steel run out.

He kept the diamond, though. And his smile.
 

After all, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had this much fun.

Indirial walked back to the clearing with the cart and all the bodies. Someone would have to clean these up before Enosh found them. He would tell Zakareth to send some slaves out here tomorrow, maybe make a big bonfire. He stared into the Naraka Traveler’s empty blue eyes and imagined her body burning. A Naraka burning on her own pyre. Wouldn’t that be fitting?

Then the boy in the cart made a choking sound, and Indirial remembered himself.

This isn’t me
, he realized.
I need to release the diamond.

Or do I?

I do.

But everything is so clear. So easy.

That was true. Why not hang on to it? The diamond lasted a long time, longer than most Valinhall powers to be sure, and it made everything so simple. What was the harm?

Danger,
Korr whispered. Indirial glanced into the trees, looking for the spark of violet light that indicated the presence of danger, but it wasn’t there. He glanced down at the medallion.

The violet light burned in his own chest.

Inside
, Korr said.

Indirial sighed.
Fine,
he thought.
You win.
He released the diamond.

Sensation flooded back in: regret, pain, sympathy, guilt, duty. He almost turned to the boy in the cart, but a thought stopped him.
My mother and father are hurt
, the boy had said.

So Indirial walked over to the boy’s father.

Burned and ravaged as the man’s body was, Indirial held out little hope for his survival. But he had seen men live through unlikely wounds before, so he pressed two fingers against the man’s neck.

Nothing.

Indirial sighed and shook his head, afraid to see the look on the boy’s face. He walked over to the mother.

With the death of the Asphodel Traveler, she had been released from the grip of the mist. He took her pulse first: it was thready, weak, barely there at all. But her heart was beating. He peeled her eyelid back with two fingers.

Her pupils dilated, she stared at something beyond his head. Her eyes flicked from side to side, as though tracking quick movement, and her breath came in gasping bursts.

She would survive. Her physical injuries amounted to nothing more than a few bruises and pulled muscles—whatever she had incurred twisting herself about or falling over. But her mental injuries would be far worse.

He picked her up without much effort. He had no steel in him now, but he had kept his body in shape these last twenty years, and she was not a large woman. He brought her over to the boy’s cart, tucking her in beside him, pulling the tarp over them both to keep the rain out.

Indirial winced as the boy snatched his mother back, pressing her to his chest as if to protect her from Indirial.

“Are you the Forest Demon?” the boy whispered.

The Forest Demon? Was that old legend still around? If so, it probably applied to him. He had been the one to start that particular myth, after all. He smiled at the boy like he would smile at his own daughter. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to hurt you.”

The boy sniffled and kept crying. Well, he had never claimed to be good with children.

“What’s your name?” Indirial asked.

“Simon, son of Kalman.”

“Very pleased to meet you,” he said. “And this is your mother?”

The boy nodded, pulling her closer to his chest. At least he had stopped crying.

Indirial hesitated. If the Valinhall healing pool would have done her any good, he would have opened a Gate in a heartbeat and carried her there himself. But her injuries were more than physical. The pool would be more danger than benefit to her. How was he supposed to explain that to an eight-year-old?
 

He shook his head. “I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do for her. If it was just the body...but Asphodel attacks the mind. The spirit. It will be years before she recovers, if ever.” True words, but to his ears they sounded like excuses.

The boy—Simon—started crying again. Not that Indirial could blame him. “I couldn’t do anything,” he said. “I just wanted to help, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t move.”