Part 20 (1/2)
Then Indirial's ragged sword burst from his chest.
Kai stood before a beautiful woman, and all he could think about was how her flowing black dress looked just like the wrapping on Azura's hilt. He had thought that holding the sword again, speaking one last time with his precious little ones, would have helped him to forget about them. That certainly hadn't worked; when he had been forced to hand Azura back to Simon, it had been like cutting off one of his hands.
”...will be positioned outside the house, and of course we have a significant force waiting for incursion from Naraka,” the lady Adrienne was saying. Kai barely heard her; he was staring at her and thinking of his dolls.
”Master Kai? Excuse me? Can you hear me? Is there something wrong?” Adrienne sounded more annoyed than worried. Almost like Otoku, in one of her moods. The sound woke Kai from his stupor; perhaps he had drifted too far away, after all.
”My apologies,” Kai said. ”I was lost in thought. You were saying?”
Adrienne glared, but she visibly calmed herself and gestured at the door behind Kai. It was a stone double door, chained shut, with a padlock of Tartarus steel. ”You will be our last line of defense, Master Kai,” Adrienne said. ”If what I've heard about Valinhall is true, you should have no trouble taking care of whatever Travelers make it past our initial troops and reach this point. Is there anything else you require?”
Briefly Kai wondered what the point was of making a padlock out of Tartarus steel. It would be all but indestructible, sure, but as a result it would be much easier to just shatter the chain itself. Even the wall that anch.o.r.ed the chain would be easier to break.
”Nothing but warning, my lady,” Kai said, after realizing that he had gone another few seconds without speaking. ”Simply tell me when to stand guard, and I guarantee that none will pa.s.s me.”
Lady Adrienne let out a heavy breath and nodded, looking much rea.s.sured. ”That is good to hear, Master Kai. We have prepared rooms for you, and I a.s.sure you that we will wake you in the event of an emergency. If you will*”
Kai lifted a strand of Adrienne's hair from her shoulder and rubbed it in between two of his fingers. ”You have lovely hair,” he pointed out. ”Have you ever considered donating it to someone in need? A doll-maker, perhaps?”
Very deliberately, Lady Adrienne looked from her hair to his face. ”Remove your hand from me, Master Kai,” she said. ”I have heard that Travelers are all but useless against you, but I am not far from simply seizing a sword myself and doing my best to run you through.”
Kai remembered himself again and withdrew his hand, standing with his spine straight as his master had insisted, so many years ago. ”I am sorry, my lady.”
Adrienne turned to walk away. ”As long as this chamber is not breached, then we have nothing to discuss. I will have someone*”
She was interrupted for the second time, but this time not by Kai. A balding, pot-bellied Traveler in the red robes of Naraka came jogging up, waving for her attention. Only at that point did Kai realize the man had only one hand.
The aging Traveler began to speak, but as he did, a wail like a thousand furious ghosts pierced the palace.
Adrienne clapped her hands to her ears, but Kai just reached into his pocket. He had always wished Valinhall had a power to dull the senses instead of enhancing them; the clamor of one Dragon's Fang upon another made quite an ear-shattering noise. Since the Territory had no such power, though*at least, none so far as Kai knew*he had taken to bringing globs of soft wax with him to battle. He pulled two pieces off and stuffed them into his ears.
Immediately, the piercing shriek was cut to merely a distant scream. Lady Adrienne shouted something at him, which of course he couldn't understand, but he gave her a placid smile and nodded.
She rolled her eyes and pointed him into a room, so he nodded and followed her instructions.
A group of other Travelers followed him, but he waved them back. When they failed to understand, he shouted at them to fall back. At last, an exasperated Lady Adrienne brought them out of the room and sealed the door.
The situation was fairly transparent: obviously the Grandmasters had decided to send an attack early, and somehow Adrienne's scouts had managed to detect the a.s.sault. For Kai, that simplified the situation greatly.
He would stay in this room and wait. If Travelers showed up here, he would kill them. If they did not, he would continue waiting until ordered elsewhere.
Simplicity itself.
The route to Bel Calem through Naraka would be too well guarded, Grandmaster Naraka told Alin. The defenses for that waypoint would have stood for years, solid and all but impenetrable. There would be traps, tricks, guardians, and fortifications too thick for them to penetrate.
So they came through a different Territory. There were twenty-three of them: Gilad, Grandmaster Naraka, Alin, and twenty soldiers of Enosh, to deal with the more mundane threats. Alin had heard that there was a squad of three or four Tartarus Travelers with the soldiers, but he couldn't tell the difference. Maybe most of the troops couldn't either.
Gilad was one of the few in Enosh with a link to two Territories, and he could draw from either Naraka or Helgard with equal ease. At Grandmaster Naraka's insistence, he opened up a Gate to Helgard, and they walked through its snowy depths.
That was when Alin learned something that no one had bothered to mention about Helgard, the Tower of Winter: the place was cold.
Sure, he had expected to run across flat plains of glacial ice, and the razor-edged chill in the air didn't surprise him. But plate armor, it turned out, was not the best thing to wear in such temperatures. It burned his skin as though he wore a suit of solid ice, and he hurried through as much to keep himself from freezing to death as he did to reach their destination that much sooner.
They had emerged from the Gate with their backs to a colossal wall. It was made of some blue-gray material that looked like metal, etched with gigantic symbols. Each twisting letter stood higher than Alin was tall. The wall curved around so slightly that Alin barely noticed it was curving at all, and it vanished into the distance in both directions.
Gilad said that was the outer wall of the tower. Alin looked up and saw, an impossibly high distance overhead, a metal ceiling the same color as the walls. It was covered with icicles the size of stalact.i.tes. Wisps of cloud twisted in and among the icicles like lacy ribbons.
Sure enough, they were inside some kind of enclosure, though one so big that it had its own horizon. Gilad called this the sixteenth floor, telling Alin that thirty-two floors of Helgard had been discovered so far. This one was one of the least inhabited, comprised as it was of seemingly endless fields of ice. The ice seemed to glow with an inner radiance, giving the room a surprisingly bright illumination.
According to Gilad, there were creatures and artifacts hiding in the cracks of the ice, and they did not like to be disturbed. As long as they kept their voices down and hurried across, they should be able to reach the way into Bel Calem with little trouble.
”Why don't they have any guardians on this side?” Alin whispered, trying to step as lightly as possible in his clanking armor.
”It's all but impossible to defend your home from every possible approach in every Territory,” Grandmaster Naraka said. She seemed to practically glide over the slick, uneven footing, as though she had no weight at all.
”That's true,” Gilad allowed, ”but it's also unwise to bring a very large force through this floor. More people means more noise, and if you get too loudawell, you don't want to do that. The first three expeditions to this floor vanished entirely, and the fourth came backawrong.”
The glow in the ice underneath their feet flickered, as though something unimaginably huge had, for just a moment, pa.s.sed in front of the light.
Alin spent the rest of the trip with his mouth shut. He barely even allowed himself to breathe. The soldiers had worn light armor, and not one of them had said a word since pa.s.sing through the Gate, which just showed how much wiser they were than he.
Gilad finally reached his landmark: a frozen hand and forearm, outstretched from the ice like a dying man reaching out of the water for salvation. The wrist was easily as wide as Alin's body, and the tips of the fingers reached well above Alin's head.
”What was this?” Alin asked quietly, indicating the frozen hand.
”Not was,” Gilad said. ”Is. Now hold on for just a minute; I need to concentrate.”
That was as forceful as Alin had ever heard the other Traveler, so he stayed quiet. Gilad muttered constantly to himself, as though reciting some long poem in a foreign language.
Finally, he motioned as though pulling aside a curtain, and a Gate opened behind his fingers.
”We have to be quick,” Grandmaster Naraka whispered. At a whispered signal from a woman in front who looked like the leader, all twenty soldiers began marching through.
The other side of the Gate opened up on a broad room that looked a great deal like Malachi's great hall, which Alin had visited a month before. It wasn't the same room, though; this one was smaller, though still s.p.a.cious, and it hosted a few necessities, like washbasins and hat-racks, instead of Malachi's blocky throne.
Alin wasn't sure what this room was supposed to be used for, and he had no idea where the Hanging Tree would be located from here. But at least there were no enemy troops around, and that was all he cared about.
The soldiers spread out across Malachi's room, forming a protective s.h.i.+eld between the Travelers and whatever unknown forces might be protecting the Overlord's home.
Grandmaster Naraka flipped her hand negligently to one side and five red sparks shot out from the air in front of her. They flew in loops around the room, flas.h.i.+ng in and out of visibility like blood-red fireflies.
Gilad started looking from wall to wall, muttering to himself. Frost began to form on the ground at his feet, but Alin couldn't see any other visible indication of his actions.
”I don't sense anything,” Gilad said, after a moment. ”Did they really not have any guardians in this room?”
”Nor do I,” Grandmaster Naraka agreed. ”I also sense no alarms, but I detected something that might once have been a nest of kar'tul.”
”They would be screaming right now,” Gilad said. ”We'd all hear it.”