The Crimson Vault (The Traveler's Gate Trilogy) (27 page)

"Come on!" Alin called, but Grandmaster Naraka seized his arm.

"Quiet, boy," she hissed.

Why?
Alin wondered, but he kept the thought to himself.
He's just standing there.

Then the soldier collapsed to his knees, and fell over on his side. Blood leaked from his armor.

Somewhere in the room, someone began to sing.

"Hush, my child. Night is coming. The waking world grows dull and gray."

Someone behind Alin shouted, and there was a clang like two swords clashing. He turned, summoning a globe of golden force into his hand as he turned; whoever this attacker was, he was about to face the power of Elysia.

Two soldiers lay on the ground. Both of their drawn swords lay in pieces.

The voice continued, in a haunting sing-song lullaby. "Leave your fear and leave your pain. I will make it go away."

"Enough of this foolishness," Grandmaster Naraka growled. She raised her hands, winced as though experiencing a minor and irritating pain, and then flicked her fingers up toward the roof. More of those red fireflies darted from her hands, but these hovered in glowing clouds at the corners of the ceiling. The resulting light was dim and bloody, but more than enough for Alin to see.

What he saw was a dim, swift figure in black darting from shadow to shadow. Alin immediately pulled his arm back and hurled the globe of Elysian light at the shadowed figure.

The silhouette of a man didn't dodge or run out of the way. He raised one arm, and the golden blast struck him just below the elbow.

Alin's light struck a shield of translucent green light. It was literally a shield, diamond-shaped and etched with a design that Alin couldn't quite make out, but it seemed to be outlined in semi-transparent planes of phantom light.

The golden blast crashed against that pale green shield and did nothing. The shield flickered and disappeared, leaving the room as dark as before.

Gilad took advantage of the moment to step forward, rolling his marked hand in a complex pattern that Alin had last seen from Overlord Malachi. A bright orange fireball seemingly made out of screaming faces appeared from Gilad's hand, streaking straight for the shadowed figure.

This time, the man in shadows didn't even bother to raise his arm. The fireball crashed against his chest, splashing harmlessly against a ghostly green breastplate that the man most definitely had not been wearing earlier.

It was as though the man was covered in a full suit of armor that was completely invisible until it was needed. Was there
anything
they could do to get through to him?

Grandmaster Naraka, Alin noticed, had been moving both hands in a complex pattern for some time now. She finally finished, shouldered two soldiers apart to make room, and thrust her hands out toward the man in shadows. She made a sound like a grunt, as though she had repressed a scream, and a scaly red claw the size of Alin's midsection pushed itself out from midair and crunched on the tiles, its claws scraping up a handful of the floor.

"Ah," the figure in black said. "At last."

The creature continued to pull itself into the world, revealing an enormous shoulder covered in spikes and ridges of hardened plate. Alin was almost afraid to see what would come through.

"Bear witness!" Grandmaster Naraka screamed. "For the first time in a thousand years, this world shall tremble before—"

She was cut off by the single clear, crystal note of a horn. It reverberated through the entire room, echoing and crashing in Alin's ears, somehow without sounding strident or unpleasant.

The arm froze at the sound. Then it trembled, as though it was stuck in between worlds.

After the note had gone on for only a second, the hand was slurped back through the Gate. The portal winked out, leaving the room in silence.

The figure in black lowered a horn from his lips. It was seemingly made out of glass, and it had some kind of transparent tube in the middle that swirled with water. How did glass and water produce a sound like a horn? Alin had always thought they had to be made out of metal.

The man in the shadows...shrugged. "I'm sorry," he said. "Were you not done?"

Alin gave some serious thought to retreating.

Fortunately, someone screamed an order, and the soldiers rushed forward. Five men led the way, spears leveled. Three, to Alin's surprise, stayed back with him and the other two Travelers. The remainder of the troops rushed after the spearmen, swords drawn.

The figure in black waited until the spears were almost upon him before he reached to the side and summoned a sword. It was long and straight, not the slightly curving sword that Simon used.

"I knew it," Grandmaster Naraka hissed. "
Valinhall
."

A Valinhall Traveler?
Alin thought. This man looked very different from Simon.
 

For one thing, though the swordsman
was
wearing all black, they were simply dark clothes. Not the billowing black cloak that Simon tended to wear. Also, Alin couldn't imagine Simon fighting without summoning that ridiculously long sword of his.

Plus, Alin didn't see any dolls. He wasn't exactly sure if the little girl's dolls he had seen Simon carrying had anything to do with Valinhall, but he had chosen to assume that they did. Simon carried a doll everywhere now, so either they had something to do with Simon’s Territory or he had developed a disturbing habit.

Either way, Alin saw none of the hallmarks that he had associated with Simon and Valinhall. But Grandmaster Naraka seemed certain, and she would know better than he would.

The five spearmen died very quickly. The man in black grabbed one of the spears below the head, pulling that soldier off balance and skewering him on the tip of a sword. Then he stepped forward, inside the reach of two other spearmen, and suddenly he was holding
two
swords, one in each hand. He struck out to either side, slicing through the spearmen's necks as though they weren't even wearing armor.

The remaining two soldiers with spears leveled their weapons, thrusting them at the man. He cut one in half and spun around the other, drawing his sword across the soldier's throat. The last soldier threw down his half of a spear, screaming, and ran away.

The swordsman in black cocked his head to one side, but watched his enemy run.

By this time, the Enosh soldiers with swords had stopped their run and come to a complete stop, hesitating before stepping into arm's reach of the killer in black.

"Fall back!" one of the soldiers next to Alin shouted. She had a voice made to cut through deafening battlefields, and Alin realized she must be the commander.

"We'll handle the Traveler," she said. She stepped forward, and the other two soldiers that had stayed with Alin stepped forward at the same time.

These must be the Tartarus Travelers
, Alin realized. Since coming to Enosh, he had heard of Tartarus Travelers referred to as 'soldiers,' but he had never thought of them as fighting alongside ordinary troops. Travelers had, to him, always seemed like they should be kept separate from the ordinary fighters.

The five swordsmen seemed only too happy to fall back, hurrying back to the Travelers with more enthusiasm than discipline. The man in black simply stood there and watched, head cocked to one side.

As one, the three Tartarus Travelers each pulled out a small silver object and pointed them toward the man in black. They would be keys, Alin knew, tiny keys of Tartarus steel that Travelers of that Territory used in summoning.

Each Traveler moved the key differently. One turned it, as though opening a lock. One drew the key from top to bottom, like slitting a curtain down the middle. The other drew her key from left to right.

A Tartarus Gate gaped open in front of each Traveler, and wind whipped in the red-lit room as though the Gates were sucking all the air in with them. A spinning blade, like a razor-edged cartwheel, flew out of one Gate, flying parallel to the ground. Another Gate spat forth a spray of arm-length needles. From the third, a huge form—like a man in a suit of silver armor, but impossibly large—shouldered his way into the world.

The summoning process only took a split second, which must have been what stopped the man in black from simply blowing his glass horn again and forcing the Gates to disappear. Alin wasn't sure he had ever seen a Traveler open a Gate and complete a summons as quickly as these three from Tartarus.

But the swordsman in black was ready. He went to one knee as soon as he saw the Tartarus Travelers take out their keys, and he placed both of his swords very carefully on the floor. When the air in front of him exploded in a storm of flashing steel, the man in black summoned an enormous shield that looked as though it had been designed to stop a rampaging bear. It was huge, easily big enough for the crouching man to hide behind, and most of its center was covered by a scuffed bronze plate. The swordsman angled the shield and let the needles slam into it. Most either stuck in the wood or struck the bronze plate, bouncing off and spinning into the air.

The razor-edged wheel spun over the shield, shaving a splinter of wood from the shield's very tip. Then the swordsman did something. It happened so fast that Alin wasn't sure exactly what he saw, but it seemed as though the man in black thrust his hand up into the
center
of the spinning blade, grabbing something that Alin couldn't see.

The silvery disc stopped spinning, as the swordsman in black clutched it by the middle. Now that it wasn't moving so quickly, Alin could see the weapon in more detail: it was a solid sheet of metal, razor sharp all the way around, but the center of the circular disc was empty. The circle in the middle was crossed with a single bar, as though to give a warrior something to grip.

There was no way to use it as a handhold, though, Alin was sure. Even though the swordsman held it up now, there was no way he could use it: the disc was too wide, too heavy, and too unwieldy to use in combat. He could try and use it like a shield, Alin supposed, but he had a much better shield sitting on the ground in front of him. Besides, the disc had a hole in the middle.

"Oh, no," Gilad whispered. He started muttering to himself in what Alin recognized as the beginnings of a Helgard summons.

The swordsman in black leaped over his shield, running to meet the huge man in the silver armor. The armored giant drew an enormous broadsword, swinging with two hands down on the man's head.

He blocked the broadsword with the edge of the silvery disc, and sparks flew. By the light of the sparks, Alin could tell that the swordsman was indeed dressed head-to-toe in black: he had wrapped strips of black cloth over his face and head.

With the disc in the swordsman's left hand, he held off the armor's sword. With his other hand, he slipped his own sword inside the armor's visor. That simple. He almost looked delicate, as though he were simply and harmlessly flicking the man on his armored forehead.

The armored man seemed to melt, sinking down to the floor in a deafening clatter of metal.

By this time, the three Tartarus Travelers had spread out to surround the man in black, already moving their keys to summon more weapons. The five remaining swordsmen spread out as well, presumably to keep from looking useless.

And Alin made a decision.

The Grandmaster was waving her hand in a summoning motion, probably to make another useless demonstration of power, and Gilad was still muttering his Helgard summons. Alin grabbed them both by the back of the neck and pulled them toward the corner of the room.

Gilad sputtered and coughed, cut off mid-chant. Grandmaster Naraka tried to grab him by the arm with her glowing red hand, promising vile threats.

"Quiet," Alin said. "We're wasting time." He wasn't sure he would get away with that tone any other time, but at the moment he was far more focused on getting results.

Alin dragged them off to one corner of the room, underneath a cloud of Naraka's red fireflies. He glanced to his side, to the room's door, and briefly considered just walking out. He quickly rejected the idea. They could wander the corridors of the house for hours looking for the Incarnation; despite what the Grandmaster claimed, he didn't think it would be so easy to find the way downstairs in the Overlord's mansion.

"What are you doing, boy?" Grandmaster Naraka demanded.

"We need to get to the Incarnation," Alin said.

"Good point," Gilad said. "Stay on mission."

Grandmaster Naraka shot a poisonous glance back at the Valinhall Traveler, but then she brushed her hands off, businesslike. "We've wasted enough time here. Let's get moving."

She sounded for all the world as if leaving had been
her
idea.

"So where is the room?" Alin asked.

"The Hanging Tree has to be in contact with the earth," Grandmaster Naraka responded. Her red glasses looked almost black in the crimson light. "Wherever it is, it will be below us."

Alin reached out to Elysia, that sunny light he always felt just over his shoulder. Bright golden force began to gather between his palms.

"Below it is," Alin said. Then he blasted a hole in the floor.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN
:

A
LIN
VS
. K
AI

Simon stared at the sword jutting from the Incarnation's chest. Indirial barely hung onto the hilt, still kneeling on the ground, apparently too exhausted to stand. But he pushed the sword in with both hands.

"I couldn't...see you," Valin said thickly.

"It's my impeccable fashion sense," Indirial responded. He twisted his blade as he tore it from the Incarnation's flesh.

Valin stood there for a moment, a ragged hole in his chest, and Simon allowed himself to relax. The soldiers were still fighting the Nye, but they seemed to be winning—at least, there were fewer black robes standing than there had been a few minutes before. Maybe this would all soon be over.