Contents
Title Page Copyright WARNINGWelcome! [Series Title] Tower of Winter The Feathered Plains
TOWER OF WINTER
Will Wight
IMPORTANT:
What follows is a small collection of short stories set in the
universe of the Traveler’s Gate Trilogy, which begins in the novel
House of Blades.
If you have
not
read
House of Blades
or its sequel,
The
Crimson Vault,
then
you will not understand the following
stories.
It’s okay; it’s not your fault. I understand. You’re still
handsome and/or pretty.
If you were simply browsing the Kindle Store and this book
caught your eye, I urge you to close this preview and go check out
House of Blades
. I’ll wait.
If you’ve already read the Traveler’s Gate Trilogy—or at least
the first two books—then come on in, my friend!
These stories are intended to give you a closer look at the
Territories and characters that we didn’t get to explore in the main
trilogy. If you’d rather stick with Simon, Alin, and Leah, I’ll
understand!
City of Light
will be available in early 2014, and I hope
it meets your approval.
Still with me? Then buckle up. We’re headed off the map.
Here there be dragons.
Welcome to Elysia, young Traveler.
You will have heard many stories about what it means to be
one of us. Do not be fooled. No outsider understands our purpose.
They think we are here to lead other Travelers, to make the
decisions that they cannot.
This is true, and it is not true.
They think we are here as a last resort, as an ultimate power,
to keep the Incarnations in check.
This is true, and it is not true.
They think we are here to balance the other Territories, to keep
them from obtaining too much power and upsetting the natural
balance.
This is true, and it is not true.
What I am about to tell you is known by few, and understood
by even fewer: we are not here to lead, or to threaten, or to
eliminate threats. In the course of our duties, we will do all these
things, but ultimately we are here for a single purpose.
We are here to guide. We are here to lead by example,
inspiring other Travelers to live up to their own potential. We
should be as beacons in the darkness.
Welcome to the City of Light.
T
OWER
OF
W
INTER
First, you should observe the Violet Light, which is aligned with Helgard, the Tower of Winter. Many students who came before you have wondered why the Violet virtues of honesty, openness, and genuine expression are linked with this specific Territory. Helgard’s Travelers are scholars, known for their dedication to knowledge, research, and memory. Why, then, are they not linked to wisdom, or even diligence?
-Elysian Book of Virtues, Chapter 1: Violet
Donia Sarkis, Traveler of Helgard, had great things ahead of her. Everyone said so. She might be an Overlord one day, when Vasilios stepped down. She might end up as an explorer, braving the unknown dangers of the Tower’s uppermost floors.
Today, it seemed, she was meant to be a nursemaid.
Nikolos shivered in his heavy, fur-lined cloak. He sniffled miserably, his well-bred good looks spoiled by a bright red nose. His sleek blond hair was ruffled by the wind, and he could barely keep his hood up.
“Wait!” he said. “Did you see that?” He stared off into the blowing snow as though he had spotted some danger.
“I don’t see anything but snow, Nikolos,” Donia said, keeping her tone polite. Nikolos was the Overlord’s son, and a bad report from him would haunt her for years. She could not afford to let the Overlord down.
“Regardless, we should wait and watch,” the boy said, sniffling at every other word. “We wouldn’t want to run into an unknown danger.”
Nikolos stumbled through a drift and plopped down on top of a thick, rounded boulder carved like the head of a statue. It was a grossly exaggerated caricature of a face, locked into the expression of a monster about to devour a meal. Its long tongue hung down almost into the snow, baring four pointed fangs at the corner of the mouth.
No one knew the purpose of the heads, though there were theories. Somehow, Donia doubted they were originally intended as benches for spoiled children.
“I seriously doubt we’re in danger here,” Donia said, because she couldn’t help herself. “This floor is well controlled. There are even a few permanent outposts.”
“You never know,” Nikolos said. “We should keep an eye out.” He was hugging himself and staring at the ground, not even pretending to watch for danger.
Nikolos had come up with some excuse to rest every hour since they had entered the Helgard Gate. At first, he was simply “overcome with the natural beauty of the Tower,” and he needed a moment to collect his thoughts. Then he would insist that he had heard a voice in the howling wind, or that he only needed a moment more to decipher the ancient runes on Helgard’s outer walls. Once, when he caught sight of an icefang shuffling through the snow, he had sworn that there was a dead body beneath the powder that was struggling to surface. They had to freeze in place, he said, because sudden movements could set it off.
Donia remembered herself at fifteen, so she kept herself polite, though she couldn’t ever recall being so obnoxious. If she was tired, she would have just said so. None of this dancing around the subject or making up excuses.
His attitude shouldn’t matter, she reminded herself. He could be a screaming terror, and I’d still have accepted. Jobs like this are a ladder straight to the top.
Overlord Vasilios had insisted that Donia should escort his son from his relatives’ estate in Alrin all the way back home to Bel Tara. It was an easy assignment, but one that showed a great deal of trust in Donia. She had only been a Helgard Traveler for a few years, but she was already getting personal assignments from the Overlord.
Annoying as this job might be, she had to prove she could do it.
A patch of glittering snow caught Donia’s attention, lying at the base of a twisted tree. In the right light, it looked as though someone had sprinkled the snow with a handful of crushed diamonds or powdered glass.
She recognized the signs immediately, as any Helgard Traveler would: an icefang lay in wait beneath that shimmering snow.
The creatures were scavengers, usually preying on the sick or the dead. She wondered if Nikolos counted as sickly. They were also highly territorial, and it was entirely possible that she had tread near this one’s burrow without realizing it.
Donia took a few steps closer to the icefang, away from Nikolos. The beast began to tremble, almost imperceptibly.
She held her middle two fingers together, leaving her other fingers spread out, stretching her hand out to the icefang in a sign of peace.
For a few seconds, the scavenger’s eager trembling stopped as it felt Donia’s imposed peace wash over it. That wouldn’t be enough to stop it, not on its own, but it gave Donia enough time to enact the next step.
Under her breath, Donia whispered the icefang’s name.
Not its personal name, of course. Learning that would have taken entirely too long, and she didn’t have time for that right now. Instead, she recited the generic name for the icefang species. It was twelve syllables long, all but impossible to pronounce, and all icefangs would respond to it to some degree. She had heard it said that being a Helgard Traveler was half research and half rote memorization. In fact, she had spent three-quarters of her time as a student simply memorizing the hundreds upon hundreds of names that all Travelers of Helgard were expected to know as a matter of course.
At this point, keeping an icefang quiet required no more effort than walking through the snow.
As usual, when she correctly named a creature, she felt a rush of emotions in return. With more intelligent creatures, she would receive a rush of specific thoughts and memories, but the icefang was little more than a vulture. It felt frustration, deep hunger, and a barely-restrained eagerness to attack the intruders that had dared to set foot in its home.
The peace she had imposed with her sign still lingered in the creature’s mind, and the unnatural calm also gave the icefang a degree of confusion. It wasn’t used to being calm.
As always, the icefang’s emotions weren’t the only things that got transferred along the bond. Donia felt her own frustration with Nikolos, her hope to please the Overlord, her fear that she wouldn’t live up to her reputation, and her satisfaction at finally being home in Helgard all flow out of her.
her power and authority as a Traveler of Helgard. It knew that she could call up a dozen forces more deadly than itself, and it wanted no part of that.
The glittering snow shrunk two sizes as the icefang cowered in the snowbank.
Nearby, Nikolos heaved a sigh and rose to his feet.
“I suppose I was mistaken,” he said at last. “We must remain vigilant.” He trudged over to Donia with his hands tucked into his pockets and his blond hair disheveled. The corner of his boot almost scraped the icefang hidden in the snow. Without her interference, it would have taken his foot off.
Nikolos never even noticed.
***
After Donia and Nikolos climbed up the seemingly never-ending ladder leading from the fifteenth floor to the sixteenth, Donia remembered something that she had been trying to forget.
She hated this floor.
The entire thing was just one open room, with no trees or hideous statues to break up the monotony. The blue-gray outer wall of Helgard encircled the floor, and without any obstructions, Donia thought she could make out the curvature of the tower, though it was hard to say for sure since she couldn’t see the far wall.
The floor appeared somewhat even, but she knew that was an illusion. There was no snow here, and the ground was made entirely of uninterrupted ice. It looked as though the ocean’s surface had frozen during a choppy ocean storm: waves and spikes and curls of ice rose from the surface in a twisting frozen maze.
That was one of the things she hated about this floor. Damasca had a small outpost here, but she couldn’t see it from the floor entrance because of all the waves breaking up her line of sight. She could barely judge distance at all.
The icy floor glowed from inside with a pale greenish light. Perhaps she should have enjoyed that—there were many floors in Helgard that were much darker, after all—but occasionally the light would flicker out, as though something in the depths of the ice had passed briefly in front of the light’s source.
That was a continual reminder of a fact that she didn’t want to think about:
Everyone that might know was either dead or insane.
Which brought her to the worst thing about the sixteenth floor: the silence. From the frozen waves below to the enormous, distant icicles on the roof above—each of which was the size of a lighthouse—there was plenty of space to create air currents. Many of the Helgard floors generated their own weather. But not the sixteenth.
Nothing disturbed the air on the sixteenth floor. Not a breeze, not the call of a bird, nothing. It was the closest to absolute silence that Donia had ever endured.
And she couldn’t stand it.
Nikolos cleared his throat, and it sounded like the rumble of thunder. “Quiet here, isn’t—“
Just in time, Donia clapped a gloved hand over his mouth.
Nikolos’ words echoed softly off the nearby ice. Donia remained tense and alert until the sound died away, then she relaxed. Slightly.
She put her mouth close to his ear and whispered as softly as she could. “What did I say before we climbed up here?” She loosened her hand, giving him a bit of room to speak.
“Quiet,” Nikolos breathed, barely moving his lips.
“That’s right. Better men and women than you, all Helgard Travelers, have made too much noise on this floor and regretted it. Do you understand?”
Nikolos nodded eagerly.
“Now, I’m going to take my hand away, and I want you to remain as quiet as possible.”
When the boy nodded again, Donia took her hand away and turned back toward the field of ice.
A worn, dirty Traveler with a scraggly beard stood not a pace behind her. Nikolos shrieked, though to his credit he stifled it quickly. Donia’s heart was pounding, but she reacted with more composure, as befit a Traveler of Helgard: she held her right hand out in a sign of aggression, words of summoning on her lips.
The Traveler, whose blue-and-white Damascan uniform was torn to ribbons, held up both of his hands, palms out. The gesture showed he was unarmed and, for a Traveler, showed that he wasn’t making any hostile signs.
“No, wait!” he said, in a hoarse whisper. “Help! I need your help!”
floor was lonely and silent; he and his friends could have just jumped on Donia and Nikolos, if that was their intention.
“Where is the rest of your unit, Traveler?” Donia asked.
The stranger shook his head frantically, like a dog trying to shake off water. "Gone," he whispered. "Attacked. Viciously attacked. Please, help me. I can't leave this floor."
Nikolos must have felt the need to interfere, because he said, "Of course you can. We're standing not ten feet from the way down."
Donia ignored him, keeping her focus on the shaken stranger. "What's your name, Traveler?"
"Lukis, ma'am," he responded. "Inspector Lukis, Outpost Sixteen. Listen, I need you to take word back to the first floor. They're here. They're here for the Frozen Ones!"
By the end, his voice had risen until it was more of a scream than a whisper.
"Inspector Lukis," Donia repeated calmly. "Why can't you leave with us?" She had read that you were supposed to remain calm in these circumstances, even though all she wanted to do was bolt back down the ladder that had taken them here. This was more trouble than she was authorized to handle.
With a trembling finger, Lukis pointed down at the glowing ice on which he stood.
At first, Donia saw nothing, and she almost told him so. Then she noticed something deep below the frozen surface, like the glimmer of a fish's scales.
Lukis took a step to one side, and the distant gleam followed him. "What is that?" Nikolos asked, staring down into the ice himself.
"They called it up from the ice," Lukis whispered. "They sent it after me, but it can't get me up here. It can’t break the surface. If I tried to climb down the ladder, I'd have to pass through the ice. It would have me."
"How do you know?" Donia asked.
Lukis shuddered. "I could feel it," he said. "It...called my name."
Donia felt a chill pass through her. Naming a creature of Helgard created a bond between the Traveler and her named companion. With intelligent creatures, it was more a sharing of names, in which both parties learned equally about one another. However, the Traveler always initiated the bond, and it was up to her how far to pursue it. If there was something here that could name them back...
same absolute certainty that she had seen in Overlord Vasilios so many times. "Who's doing this?"
Lukis let out the quietest laugh that Donia had ever heard. "They’re some kind of cult, maybe a dozen Travelers. I don't know who they are, exactly, but they killed the rest of Outpost Sixteen before we could even react. They’re ruthless. And they…”
He leaned in close, his eyes flicking from side to side. "They want to raise the Frozen Ones."
Donia cleared her throat. He had mentioned the Frozen Ones before, but she had decided to overlook that. The Frozen Ones were part of an ancient legend of Helgard, and one that seemed to have its basis more in colorful rumor than actual history.
"Believe me," Lukis went on, sounding desperate. "Maybe they’re crazy, I don’t know, but they believe there are beings sealed here, on the sixteenth floor. They've been calling down into the ice for hours, trying to wake up whatever they can. They killed my unit because they need the bodies. They think the blood might help..."
His whispers trailed off, but Donia had no idea what she could say.
"Are they from Enosh?" Nikolos asked, sounding strangely excited. "I've heard that the Grandmasters do things like that. You know, blood sacrifice to raise monsters, that sort of thing."
From what Donia had heard of Ragnarus Travelers, the Damascan royal family was more likely to be involved in human sacrifice than anyone from Enosh, but she kept that to herself. The annual sacrifice was cloaked in mystery, and no one outside the Royal Palace in Cana really knew what went on there. It was all way above her, and none of her business besides.
"Not Enosh," Lukis said. "I know all of the Helgard Travelers that Enosh ever sends to this floor. One of them was visiting the outpost when these...cultists tore it down."
Nikolos' face twisted into an expression of revulsion. "How can you stand to be so close to an Enosh heretic? I'd kill them on sight, myself."
Nikolos wasn't a Traveler, and Donia was of the opinion that he would get himself eviscerated before he managed to kill anybody, but she held her opinion close. "Inspector. Are we safe here?"
the outpost. Where the outpost used to be, anyway. They won't be coming back after me."
"You should stay here, then," Donia said, though she realized immediately that her suggestion was useless. Of course he would stay here, where it was safe. What did she expect him to do, run back in and fight the cultists single-handedly?
"In the meantime," she continued, "Nikolos and I will head back down and warn the Inspectors on the first floor. From there—"
"Hold on," Nikolos interrupted. "How long will that take?" Donia sighed. "Nikolos, surely you can see that—"
"And what will they do about it?"
"They will send Travelers," Donia said impatiently. "A small army of Travelers, with powers at their command that you couldn't even pronounce."
Nikolos met her gaze, his eyes more serious than she had ever seen them. "So we climb back down sixteen floors, which will take us hours, if not longer. We convince the Inspectors to send people up to the sixteenth. Even if they believe us without sending someone to look for themselves, how long will it take for them to gather enough Travelers? Not to mention getting them back up here."
"What would you have us do, Nikolos?" Donia asked. She meant it to be mocking, but if he had a real suggestion, she was more than willing to listen.
"There's a route to my father through here, right?" Nikolos said. "That's why we're on this floor in the first place. We should go to him. It's faster, he'll believe me immediately, and we won't need an army. My father alone will be more than enough."
Donia had to admit that the boy had a point. She had seen Overlord Vasilios in action, and the man was like a Helgard Incarnation in the flesh. And according to rumor, the Overlords each had artifacts of Ragnarus that ensured they would always be more powerful than their competition. With that kind of weaponry on their side, they would have nothing to worry about. Besides, the Overlord would surely want them to come to him with this.
in the wrong place at the wrong time."
Donia stared off into the featureless waves of ice, mulling over the situation. It would be safer to go down to the first floor, that was for sure. It was her responsibility to keep Nikolos safe. The safer option wasn't necessarily the right one, though. She wasn't certain whether the Overlord would love her for bringing him the news first, or hate her for taking his son into danger.
As she sometimes did, she pictured herself as she imagined others thought of her: strong, skilled, confident. Always ready with the right answer. That woman would know exactly what to do. She would likely press forward, relying on her own ability to keep them all safe.
Unfortunately, Donia wasn't sure that woman actually existed.
"We will move forward," Donia said at last. Lukis groaned, but Donia continued speaking. "As carefully as we can. If we see anyone, anyone at all, we immediately turn around, no questions asked. Now, Inspector Lukis, are you with us?"
Lukis gaped at her. "Me?"
"We've never encountered this enemy before, we're not familiar with the floor, and the boy here is the Overlord's son. He's not a Traveler."
Inspector Lukis looked Nikolos over more carefully. "The boy?" Nikolos whined.
"As you can see," Donia went on, "we could use your help."
Lukis glanced from one side to the other as though trying to find his way out of a trap. At last, he closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
"Let me show you the way," he said at last. ***
For the first few minutes, the silence of the sixteenth floor was laced with tension. Donia barely took a step without craning her neck to see over a frozen wave, and three or four times she almost called on Helgard's power to destroy a shape that turned out to be nothing more than a flickering shadow.
But Lukis set a pace barely greater than a crawl. He called a stop at any sound, seemingly even the echoes of their own footsteps. An hour into the journey, without seeing any sign of danger, Donia's alarm began to fade, and she started to worry.
expecting someone to materialize inside them.
"Nothing more than you do," Donia said. She had never heard of Lukis before. But then, Outpost Sixteen was one of the most isolated positions in the Tower. The more social or ambitious Travelers avoided it, leaving those who had a reason to stay alone.
"I've been thinking. Isn't this a little suspicious? We haven't seen anything wrong this whole time. We're taking his word that there's a threat. We're taking his word on where it is. How do we know there are even any enemies out here at all? Even if there are, how do we know he's not with them?"
They were far enough behind Lukis, and Nikolos was speaking quietly enough, that Donia doubted they would be overheard. In truth, Donia thought much the same. Lukis had shown them nothing to back up his claims.
But there was something of an understanding between Helgard Travelers, even between Travelers of Enosh and Damasca. They may be enemies on the outside, and they would work against each other when ordered, but the real danger was the Tower itself. Tradition said that she could trust Inspector Lukis.
"I say we trust him," Donia said. "Just for now. But I'm on my guard." Nikolos clearly wasn't satisfied with that, and he seemed on the verge of voicing another complaint.
Then the ice in front of them exploded.
The frozen wave burst with a sound like a thousand falling trees, bursting into a cloud of ice shards that tore into Donia, tearing through her clothes, slicing her skin.
With well-trained speed, Donia threw her hands up, holding her fingers in the correct signs, and whispered a quick word.
Helgard Travelers collected names and gestures that allowed them to summon, control, and influence the creatures of the Territory. But she was not limited to calling on living creatures.
She held out the signs, whispered the key, and the Tower of Winter answered.
Freezing wind whipped up around them, tearing at the fringes of her coat, throwing her dark hair in her face. In front of Lukis, it was much stronger. So strong that the wind blasted many of the flying ice chunks from the air, blowing them to one side of Donia's group.
Lukis hadn't reacted as quickly as she had, but then, he had been closer to the initial explosion. As the ice shards continued to fly, he huddled behind Donia's barrier of wind, curled up on the ground. His torn coat was in tatters now, and he was visibly splattered in blood.
Donia didn't have time to worry long over Inspector Lukis. Three figures appeared in the blowing snow and ice. One of them raised a hand, and the daggers of ice stopped flying.
I guess I owe Lukis an apology, Donia thought. Here were his mysterious cultists.
And they were dressed...exactly as she had imagined.
They wore the typical uniform that all Helgard Travelers shared, out of necessity: a fur-lined coat with a hood and thick, warm gloves. Unlike Donia's outfit and Lukis', both of which were blue with white fur, these three wore black coats lined in dark gray fur. The lower halves of their faces were covered by a black mask that, Donia had to admit, looked rather warm.
In another circumstance, the effect might have been silly. They were dressed up like the villains of some bad play, and there wasn't even any reason for it; black was no good for stealth up here. The landscape was white, the light blue-green, and night never fell on the sixteenth floor. Part of her thought they couldn't be serious.
Then she saw the dark stains, glistening against the black of their coats, and she had a disturbing thought.
Those coats wouldn't show bloodstains.
One of the figures stepped forward and spoke. His voice was cultured and educated, possibly a wealthy son raised at the heart of Cana. "I'm sorry for that. We can't be too wary out here, you know. We've heard rumors that there might be some Enosh Travelers around here, and we were not as careful as we should have been."
Blood dripped into Donia's eye, and she wiped it away so it wouldn't freeze her eye shut. Anger and fear warred for control.
"You're sorry?" she said. "You could have killed us! You nearly did! Give me one reason why I shouldn't report you to my Overlord. One!"
The lead figure bowed at the waist, inclining his head a fraction. "As I said, it was a misunderstanding. We have heard rumors—"
He paused, then glanced down at Lukis.
"Ah," he said at last. "Rumors. Yes, I imagine you might have heard a few. Well, I have nothing to hide. There is a being sealed in this floor known as a Frozen One. Perhaps more than a single individual. We are here to share our names, perhaps form a bond with this being, as has been the tradition in Helgard since time immemorial."
Casually, Donia slipped her left hand into her pocket, swiftly forming sign after sign. She would have to move quickly, when the time came, so it would be best to do as much of the preliminary work ahead of time as she could.
"And what about Outpost Sixteen?" Donia asked.
Nikolos edged around so that he was standing behind her. Wisely so, she thought.
The black-coated man shrugged. "Mistakes were made." That was all.
"Well, I think," Donia began, and then before anyone could react, she shouted for her strongest ally.
She called him Rishla, for short, because his full name was fifteen syllables and required years of linguistic training to pronounce. He looked something like a furred serpent, or a long weasel, with pale tan fur and a dozen legs. He was fiercely loyal to her, devilishly intelligent, and one of the most powerful creatures she had ever encountered at the tower. More importantly to her right now, he would come at the sound of his nickname, said alongside the proper signs. She didn't have time to shout all fifteen syllables.
Well, he would normally come at the sound of his nickname.
Creatures of Helgard could hear their name spoken anywhere, especially by their bonded partner. Why wasn't he coming already?
More importantly...
Usually, a battle between Helgard Travelers was a match of who could make their signs and shout the words the most quickly. The three cultists should have been yelling like town criers and frantically twisting their fingers, but they did nothing.
Lukis barely managed to raise himself on one bloody arm, twisting to look at Donia.
"No!" he croaked. "Don't summon...not here."
Then he collapsed again, his strength evidently exhausted.
man," he said. "But it seems like it's too late."
The light beneath the ice vanished entirely, for one disturbing second leaving the entire floor in complete darkness.
She heard a sound like a cross between a lion's roar and the tolling of an enormous bell.
One of the cultists who had previously remained silent started laughing. "This floor is sealed by the power of the Frozen One," the speaker said. "We've managed to encourage that much cooperation, at least. Anything that tries to enter is met by his wrath."
Donia didn't respond. Not in words. She crossed the first two fingers of each hand and stuck them out, one to each side.
She spoke a key.
This time, the enemy Travelers sputtered their own keys and began raising their hands in signs. The speaker raised his hands and made a warding gesture, trying to get his key phrase in place.
He was too slow.
A gleaming crystal snowflake the size of a wagon wheel came hurtling out of the distance, spinning through the air, its edge sharp enough to cleave bone. It had formed itself from loose ice and snow, and she could now control its flight with the motion of her right hand.
She whipped her right hand forward to point at the cultist speaker, then brought her left hand in as well.
A second giant snowflake followed.
She didn't know any of the powers associated specifically with the sixteenth floor, but she could use this one anywhere. Very few people in the entire Tower could form two White Razors at once, much less so quickly.
Donia was counting on the surprise.
One cultist called up a burst of wind, blasting a single Razor from the air, but not before it could nick her in the leg. A second cultist dropped to his knees, letting the Razor fly over his head, straight at the speaker.
The speaker spoke the last syllable of his key and stumbled backwards. In front of him, the loose ice-shards rose into the air, forming into a blue-white wall.
The White Razor slammed into his ice-wall in a thunderous collision, sending chips of ice and a freezing wind flying in all directions.
The cultists muttered along, doing the same.
Then Inspector Lukis picked his head up once more, thrusting a bloody fist at the ceiling.
He breathed out three final syllables, smiled, and collapsed with his face on the ice.
A crack echoed throughout the sixteenth floor, as though the world itself were breaking. Donia couldn't help but look up...and up...and up...
At the icicles on the ceiling. The icicles that could crush an entire village. One of them, with its point directly above Lukis, started to fall.
It looked deceptively slow, she noticed, as though it would take ten minutes to reach the ground. And beautiful. It refracted the ambient light of the sixteenth floor with the thousand indescribable colors of the rainbow.
It didn't look anything like incalculable tons of ice rushing toward her at lethal speeds.
All of this flashed through her mind in a single instant, then she grabbed Nikolos' arm and hauled him along behind her, running recklessly over the icy surface. She didn't know which way she was going, and she didn't care a bit, so long as it was away from that mountainous hammer of ice.
Ordinarily, she would never have run over this ice. One slip on ice this irregular could mean death at the best of times, and now it certainly would. Mentally, she thanked her father for the gift of the new boots that he had sent her last Winter's End. She did not slip, and she did not look back. She just kept running.
For a few seconds.
She crested the rise of a frozen wave, dragging Nikolos behind her like a cart behind a horse. She jumped off and almost landed on another Traveler in a black coat.
He had fallen onto his backside, scrambling backwards, face locked on the descending icicle. Donia couldn't blame him. She vaguely noticed a half-dozen other figures, dressed the same as the first, all around her, and a huge red circle painted on the ice.
She would worry about all that after she survived. She kept running.
She made it a few more steps before the icicle hit, tossing her from her feet.
Donia slammed face-first into the ice, and the world went dark. ***
Donia's cheek, pressed against the ice, had begun to burn with the cold. She felt like she had been stabbed with a dozen knives, all up the right side of her body. Her hip sent up lances of pain when she tried to move, and it made a disturbing clicking sound.
Worse, she could barely move. She was trapped. Her breath came faster and faster as she rolled her eyes around, trying to see a way out. All she could see, by the light of the dim glow beneath her, was ice: chunks of ice pressed against her face, above her, beneath her, all around. She was buried alive.
The thought brought on a new wave of panic, and she instinctively tried to push herself up with her right hand. As soon as she leaned on her arm, pain shot through her as though someone had crushed every bone in the arm with a hammer.
She couldn't help herself. She screamed.
When her shout faded from her own ears, she realized she could hear voices. Not from far away, either; maybe she wasn't buried as deeply as she thought.
As loud as she could, Donia shouted for help.
Outside, someone cleared his throat. "Someone survived in there," he noted. Donia recognized the voice.
It was the cultist who had spoken earlier. And he wasn't alone; several others muttered along with him.
Just when she had thought things couldn't get any worse.
The thought of other people outside, not far away, actually calmed her down. For the first time, she managed to take a calm look at her surroundings.
Piles of ice, many the size of boulders, had fallen all around her. None of them rested on her directly, for which she was thankful. Several could have crushed her to death.
Upon further inspection, there were gaps here and there around her. She might even be able to lever herself into a sitting position.
Taking a deep breath, and ignoring her pain, Donia wriggled inch by inch up, so that she wouldn't have to lie trapped under the ice.
The speaker outside wouldn't shut up, though.
"Was it the lady who made it?" he called. "Do you have the boy with you?" Donia was having trouble breathing through the pain, but the thought of Nikolos took the rest of the breath from her lungs.
she wished that the collapsing pillar of ice had managed to crush her, too. "Let me out and we'll talk about it," Donia managed to yell.
"Hmmm...no, I don't think I will," the speaker said cheerily. "Though you couldn't have been more of a help to us, really. All that blood and noise and power flying around. The Frozen One is stirring. He just needs one more push. I'm going to do you a favor; I'll allow you to be one of the first witnesses to the birth of a new Tower."
Donia had a little pride left, so she only screamed at them. She didn't threaten. She didn't beg.
But she was going to die buried alive under a thousand tons of ice; she felt she was due a little screaming.
She had heard nothing but her own shouts for so long that she almost didn't believe it when she heard another sound.
"Um," someone said. "Hello?"
It sounded scared. Vulnerable. Young.
"Nikolos?" she asked, barely willing to hope. "Traveler Donia? Is that you?"
Donia felt more relief at the sound of Nikolos' voice than she would have ever expected. "Nikolos. You're safe. Are you hurt?"
"I don't know. I...I can't feel my legs." Panic entered the boy's words. "I can't feel my legs!"
It took Donia many long minutes to calm Nikolos down. She was nearly at the end of her road, but giving in to terror wouldn't help anyone. She told Nikolos so.
"They're outside," she told him. "I heard them. They're doing their ritual, and that gives us some time. I'll think of a plan, and as soon as we get an opportunity, I'll get us out of here."
"Okay," Nikolos said, gasping out the word. "Okay."
To her, waiting for an opportunity felt a little too much like doing nothing. She could call up enough power to shift the ice, but doing so might destabilize the entire pile and crush her. Besides, she had no idea where Nikolos was. Anything she did might kill him. She had some bonded creatures who could dig her out, but her summons had failed earlier.
If she had to, she would try summoning every being of Helgard whose name she knew. She would keep it up until her voice failed her or something got through.
summon him earlier. She wouldn't call anything else into an unknown danger until she had no other choice.
The cultists hadn't left. They still spoke with one another outside her frozen prison. Occasionally Donia heard a crunching footstep on the ice, or a single word made oddly clear. Some of them began to chant.
When she yelled, they ignored her. She shouted until her throat hurt and she started coughing, but she never got another response.
That left her sitting there with her injuries, propped up against the bitter cold of the ice. Even through her Helgard training and her thick coat, the chill of the ice seeped into her bones. She needed something to distract her from the cold and the pain.
Nikolos chose that moment to ask a question. "Traveler Donia?"
"Hm?"
"What are they doing out there?" he asked. "What are the Frozen Ones?" Donia thought back to her long years in the Helgard libraries, reading through the long history of myths and legends in the Tower of Winter. She had never taken the stories seriously, and comparative mythology was hardly her field, but some of it stuck.
"Stories," she said. "Very old stories." "True ones?"
"Nobody knows. These Travelers outside obviously think so. There's a legend that says that Helgard was once part of a greater world. A world that was being torn apart by unimaginable beings of terror and rage. The men of that world built the Tower of Winter to freeze these things, to keep them asleep for all of time. Now, we call those beings the Frozen Ones."
"So the whole tower is nothing but a big icebox," Nikolos said. "Right now, I can believe it," Donia replied, pulling her coat closer.
Outside, the chanting of the cultists grew louder. The light beneath her flickered.
Time passed, she wasn't sure quite how much, but Nikolos said nothing. Donia had seen people fall asleep and freeze, here in the Tower. They moved and spoke a little less, and then still less, and finally not at all. It was hard to notice the transition.
was responsible for him, and she had put him here.
The pain shooting down the right side of her body didn't matter. She had to keep him awake, aware, and alive until she could find a way to get him out of here.
"Both your parents are Travelers," Donia called.
Nikolos said nothing for so long that Donia's heart dropped, but he finally grunted in agreement.
"Did you never take the tests?"
"...every week since I was ten," Nikolos said. "They put me through every test known to mankind. I've spent the night in Asphodel gardens; I've had a Corvinus raven read my mind; I even hiked up a mountain in Ornheim."
"Not Helgard?" That would be surprising, considering that his father was one of the most skilled and powerful Helgard Travelers in the world.
Nikolos laughed for a moment, and then gasped in pain. Still, he forced his words out. "Oh yeah. Helgard more than anything. They forced me to keep an icefang as a pet for months, to see if I would bond with it. They didn't get rid of it until the third time it chased me up a bookshelf and wouldn't let me come down. Another time, they brought me to the edge of the Badari Desert, and gave me this little frozen goblet. They told me that, if Helgard accepted me, then the goblet would fill up with water, and I'd be fine. I passed out six hours in, and my father had to get an Avernus Traveler to fly me out."
"That sounds terrible," Donia said honestly. She had to keep him talking. The cold was starting to slice through even her, so she could only imagine how Nikolos must feel.
"It wasn't so bad," the boy said. "If I was a Helgard Traveler, then I could become Overlord after my father. Even if I Traveled a different Territory, at least I could do something worthwhile."
"It's not like Travelers are the only ones worth anything," Donia said. "Most people aren't Travelers, and they live perfectly productive lives."
"Yeah," Nikolos said, "let me just go and sell carpets for the rest of my life. That's just as good as calling fire from the sky."
He sighed. "Anyway," he went on, "what about you? Did your parents have you tested?" “Not exactly,” Donia responded. A real conversation, at last. Some part of her was convinced that, if they could just keep talking, everything would turn out all right.
test. And it would never have occurred to them anyway.”
“Hold on a moment,” Nikolos said. “Is Master Sarkis your father?”
Donia smiled, even though she knew no one could see her. The trust that Overlord Vasilios had for Donia’s father was one of the main reasons why she had been trusted with this mission in the first place. And the boy hadn’t even known who she really was.
“He is,” she said.
“Seven stones! I never knew.”
“Well, when I was twelve, your father sent a team of Helgard Travelers to our house, to live with my family while new quarters were constructed. This was a few years before you were born, by the way. One of the Travelers had an icefang with him, crawling along at his feet, and I decided to reach down and pet it.”
She could still see the creature: a clump of snow running along at its master’s heels like a dog, sparkling in the sunlight as if it were covered in diamonds. Something in her had to touch it, as though the icefang itself were calling to her.
“And you survived?” Nikolos sounded horrified.
“Instead of tearing my finger off, it hopped up on my shoulder and wouldn’t leave. Its Traveler couldn’t get it to come off all day.”
Nikolos stayed silent for a moment, then he burst out laughing. Out of instinct, she almost told him to be quiet, but what was the point? He couldn’t wake anything worse than what the Travelers outside were already calling up.
So she might as well keep talking.
“They took me to Helgard immediately for training, though I was still allowed to live with my parents. I spent most of the next fifteen years studying and learning. I wasn’t allowed full access to the Tower until a few years ago.”
In truth, most Helgard Travelers were never allowed to travel freely from floor to floor. They were restricted according to their ability, and most never progressed beyond a certain point.
“I wish I could be like you,” Nikolos said. "Even among Travelers, you stand out. You've got the talent. You've got the skill. I bet you could free yourself if I wasn't here, couldn't you?"
"It's not like that," Donia said.
"It's okay," Nikolos replied, and he sounded dreamy. Sleepy. "I've given up. You get out of here, you can do it. You'll be okay. My father needs you more...more than he needs..."
Nikolos' voice drifted off into indistinct murmurs. "Nikolos?" Donia called. "Nikolos?"
No response.
She had to keep talking. Talking might keep him awake, might give him something to concentrate on. It might keep her awake, for that matter.
"It's not as easy as you think," she said. "They give me tasks they would never assign to anyone else, and they expect me to do it. They know I won't fail. So far, I haven't. Not until today. I'm the one who succeeds every time. What will they think when they hear that I've died?"
Donia let her voice ramble as she wondered out loud. "What will they think, when word gets out that I died in some random engagement on the sixteenth floor? Will anyone ever tell my parents? The rest of Helgard might have more to worry about soon. Maybe no one will ever know. Maybe I'll just be one casualty among many..."
She sat there as her voice died, letting the silent cold sink into her skin. Outside, the cultists murmured their indistinct chants.
Something tickled at the back of Donia's mind, like a half-remembered dream mixed with a sound just out of hearing.
She strained to hear the whisper, to remember the thought. In her mind, she reached out.
And a tumble of thoughts, ideas, and images blasted into her head, sitting her bolt upright despite the pain. It was more than a simple voice, in the same way that a wild forest fire was more than a single color, but somehow she understood.
Go on, it said.
It wanted her to keep talking.
"Who are you?" she asked. On instinct, she glanced around, though of course she saw nothing but ice.
The voice responded.
thousand years...
...now, finally, roused from its dreams.
The rush of thoughts slammed into Donia's brain, leaving her panting, disoriented, trying to sort words from memories from ideas. It felt like she had managed to read an entire book in half a second, with every word shoved through her at the same time so that none of it made much sense. She only caught broad themes, and a few key facts, but something jumped out at her.
He's a Frozen One. I'm speaking with a Frozen One.
The ice rumbled beneath her feet, and the light far below flickered once more.
The thought triggered a wave of fear on pure reaction. She could barely fathom the nature of this thing, any more than she could understand the size of the Tower itself. What little she could piece together scared her more than anything she had ever seen in her Territory.
After a moment, her fear subsided, and rational thought caught up with her once more. The cultists outside had been trying to find and raise the Frozen One, but he had not come to them. He had come to her first.
She could use this.
"I need help," she said. "I'm trapped. Can you help us?"
She was more prepared, this time, as a rush of sensations flooded through her mind. Two strangers, meeting across a frozen plain. Two points as impossibly distant as the stars. An insect and an oak tree, discovering one another for the first time.
I do not know you, he meant. And he was right.
For two beings in Helgard to call upon one another, they had to share not only names, but also the essence of who they truly were. Their histories, their personalities, their secrets. For something like an icefang, a creature of pure instinct, Donia only had to open herself a fraction. But something this intelligent, this powerful, this old...he would know her entirely. Every shameful secret, every painful admission, every stark truth of her personality. He would learn things about her that she had never known herself.
Even worse, she would learn about him in return. Could she handle it?
The real Donia had already hesitated, but that didn't mean it was too late to try.
She took a deep breath.
"My name is Donia Sarkis," she said, and she filled the name with more than just sound. She released her dreams, her ambitions, her hobbies, her fears, using them to add texture to the name until it meant all that was her.
The Frozen One heard her name.
And he heard far more than she had ever meant to say.
She wasn't the best choice to send on the mission with Nikolos, and she knew it. She hadn't told the Overlord because this was her chance to look better in his eyes with very little effort. She remembered, and the Frozen One learned.
Three years before, on Helgard's eighth floor, she had seen a pack of snow bats tear into an Enosh Traveler. She was only twenty yards away, and had tamed a snow bat of her own, and she could have saved him. She was supposed to; all Travelers of Helgard should look out for each other. But she had been afraid of failure, afraid of calling the bats down on herself. And he was from Enosh, after all. No one would blame her. She had stood there, watching his blood stain the snow, frozen. She made no decision, and he died.
The Frozen One learned.
As a student in Helgard, Donia had only one rival. Another girl who, despite an almost pathetic lack of ability to bond with any of Helgard's creatures or powers, still managed to out-score Donia in every test. One night, Donia snuck in and tore random pages out of her rival's textbook.
The Frozen One learned the worst of her. He learned things that she had forgotten, that she had pushed out of her memory because they were too embarrassing or painful. He learned the best of her, too: the time when she spoke with Overlord Vasilios and secretly negotiated her father's promotion. The time she had saved a crippled mirka and nursed it back to health, releasing it into the wilds of the fourth floor before it was returned to pulling carts on the second.
Finally, after an endless instant, the Frozen One had learned everything about her. She sagged back against the ice, as exhausted as if she had just slogged a mile through hip-deep snow. She wanted nothing more than to let the cold lull her to sleep.
It was a thousand syllables pronounced in a second, impossible to memorize, and yet somehow burned into her brain.
The name carried a poem of meaning in each breath: this being was a cog in the wheel of creation and destruction, an agent of change, a lonely force with the job of keeping nature in flux. The Tower of Winter was built around him, locking him in place, robbing him of meaning and power and purpose.
Him and a hundred like him.
He wanted nothing more than to return to his place in his own world. That need burned in him, hotter than a star, more insistent than gravity. But he knew that his world was long dead, and only the Tower was left, drifting in time on an empty sea.
Another time, Donia would have been fascinated by these concepts. Here was a being that understood, really comprehended, the nature of the Territories. Or one Territory in specific, at least. And she was sharing his memories.
Another time, she would have given anything for the opportunity to study the Frozen One's thoughts. But at that time, she struggled just to stay conscious.
The Frozen One's story continued until she felt as though she had aged to death, been born again, and aged once more.
Then it stopped, and she found herself back in the ice, where she had started.
Her thoughts were torn to shreds, like a child shredding a sheet of paper into a thousand pieces and scattering it all over the floor.
Nikolos, she thought, but for a moment she couldn't remember who he was or why he was important.
It's cold. Why was that bad?
My ribs hurt. I'm in danger. The Tower would go on long after her body died. It would drift, stuck between reality, never to end because it existed in a place without beginnings or endings...
What would you ask of me, Donia Sarkis? the Frozen One rumbled. The sleep calls to me. I must rest again soon. Before I do, I want to see something change.
His voice was no longer too much to bear. Compared to the thunder of hearing his name, his usual speech was nothing more than a bumblebee's whisper.
"Release me," Donia said. "Save the boy." Then she whispered one long name.
With a thunderous crack, the ice split beneath her. The huge chunks and boulders of ice that had surrounded her whisked away, hurtled into the distance as though they had been thrown from a catapult.
A single hit from any of those flying bits of ice would have torn chunks out of her flesh. She felt no fear.
Compared to his fear, still burning in her mind, her own was nothing.
She sat up, blinking around at the world. A circle of black-coated cultists stood a few yards away around a circle of red, stumbling backwards and pointing into the air at the flying ice. She looked in another direction, and saw Nikolos' blond hair lying almost at her feet. He had been so close all along.
His chest rose and fell, barely. Hope kindled once more in her chest, though it seemed a tiny, feeble thing, barely noticeable against his loneliness and despair.
But it was enough for her.
Donia turned her head and met the eyes of the nearest cultist.
"Well," he said, and she instantly recognized his cultured voice. "Well, well, well. That's an impressive showing, I know, but—"
Ice cracked beneath the bloody circle, and a huge body shifted beneath the ice. The black-dressed Travelers stumbled backwards. They pointed and started laughing. Some of them cheered in victory. The speaker turned around and rubbed his hands together.
"At last!" he cried.
Donia had the feeling that he was about to be drastically disappointed. She pointed.
"Him," she said.
With a sound like a collapsing barn, a blue-skinned fist big enough to grip a horse punched straight through the ice, sending black-coated Travelers flying.
and take Nikolos home?
Whether we make it or not, she thought, we still won. She supposed she had accomplished something great today, after all.
Pushing his way through the ice, the Frozen One rose.
To summon a creature of Helgard, you must understand its name, its nature, its very soul. To understand another, you first reveal yourself. To do so is painful, fraught with risk, and highly rare.
It is also the key to the Violet Light.
T
HE
F
EATHERED
P
LAINS
Loyalty is a fine attribute, though it is often misunderstood. Some interpret loyalty as nothing more than allegiance to a group or cause, but this is far from complete.
-Elysian Book of Virtues, Chapter 2: Orange
Denner had never liked Avernus. It was one of the safer Territories, but that only meant that it wasn’t always crawling with murderous specters and fire-breathing monsters, and it had plenty of water and fresh air. In Endross or Naraka, drinkable water was far more valuable than gold. As locations went, Avernus boasted some impressive scenery: waving plains, forests of impossibly tall trees, sharp-sided mountains like daggers of stone.
He wasn’t sure what it was about the Territory that irritated him so much. Probably the people.
Denner stood in a high-roofed tent that was lined with Avernus Travelers. Each of them wore some arrangement of buckskin or hide, decorated liberally with feathers. They clearly meant to imitate the Avernus Travelers of old, who had lived off the land in the Feathered Plains and only occasionally stepped out of their Territory.
Unfortunately, these modern Travelers got most of it wrong. One skinny fifteen-year-old kid wore a bear-tooth necklace—bears were not native to Avernus—and a wide-brimmed hat made out of felt. Another woman squinted at him through a pair of spectacles perched on her nose.
The end result was a tent full of people who looked like they had bought their costumes from a shady acting troupe.
Each of them had an owl.
One woman had a giant brown owl cradled in both her arms. Another man sported a fluffy black owl on one shoulder, and the woman next to him had a sleek white owl perched on the top of her head.
All the owls stared directly at Denner. He couldn’t escape their huge, unblinking eyes without walking out of the tent.
Maybe this was what he hated about Avernus. There was always a bird watching you.
“We believe the Halliat tribe has taken our young rebel in an attempt to use her powers against us. We have seen this future. If our rebel remains alive, then everything the Strigaia tribe has worked for all these years will count for nothing.”
Denner cleared his throat. “What has the Strigaia tribe worked for all these years?”
“Never mind that,” the High Watcher snapped. Her huge black owl glared at him from over her shoulder.
Denner’s over-sized, leather-bound book shifted under his arm. He pressed his arm tighter against his side, squeezing the covers together.
The book let out a little squawk, but it sounded enough like a bird that Denner hoped nobody noticed.
“Eliminate the rebel,” the High Watcher continued. “Bring proof of her death back to us. You will be compensated appropriately.”
She produced a leather purse and upended it on her desk, spreading gold coins across its surface.
“How dramatic,” Hariman said, from beneath Denner’s arm. Denner held the book tighter, wishing he would shut up for just another minute.
Several Avernus Travelers gave Denner odd looks, perhaps wondering how he could speak without moving his mouth. A couple of owls cocked their heads.
Denner barely noticed; he was staring at the gold. How many nights in a real bed would that buy him? He had been on the road for so long. He could always stay in his bedroom back in Valinhall, but that place had…unpleasant memories for him now. Like most of the others, he stayed away as much as he could.
“Do I have to kill her?” he asked at last.
The old woman raised an eyebrow, which looked decidedly odd behind her blindfold. “I thought I had hired a warrior of Valinhall, not an Asphodel Gardener.”
“You haven’t hired me yet,” Denner said, though the gold did look awfully tempting. It did bother him, though, that they simply assumed that as a Valinhall Traveler he would be comfortable with murdering some stranger. Was their reputation as bloody as all that?
“As it happens, yes, we do need her killed,” the High Watcher said. “Her sight is too dangerous to simply keep locked away.”
future, then I don’t see what hope I have of catching her by surprise.”
There were ways, in Valinhall, of evading visions and other forms of supernatural sight. But none that Denner could access on short notice.
The High Watcher waved her hand. “The sight is not such a convenient thing. I do not anticipate that you will have any trouble. We would catch her ourselves, if she were not so close to Halliat land. We are not a match for their eagles in open combat; only by foresight and preparation do we remain safe.”
“What makes you think that I’ll be any safer, then?” Denner asked.
“We wish to hire the best,” she said. “And we’ve heard you have something of a specialty in this area.”
Under Denner’s arm, Hariman cackled.
Everyone was staring at the book now, even the blind High Watcher. “Is your book talking?” she finally asked.
Now, how does she know he’s a book? Denner wondered. Out loud, he said, “Getting him to talk is no problem. It’s getting him to stop that’s the trick.”
Inwardly, he debated for a few more moments. Then he sighed. He was just putting off the inevitable.
“Where do I find her?” he asked.
The High Watcher smiled, just a little, and gave him specific directions. So specific, in fact, that they must have been watching the rebel from afar. Were they sending birds to spy out the land? Or were their powers of clairvoyance that formidable?
“She has short brown hair,” the old woman said. “She will try to stab you at your first meeting. And she will not be wearing the proper uniform of a Strigaia tribe Traveler.”
Denner took that to mean that she wouldn’t be dressed like a novice actor in a cheap city play. He bowed to the Watcher. “I will keep you informed,” he said, and then turned to walk out.
Hariman’s fussy voice interrupted his exit. “I can’t help but ponder the irony inherent in calling a blind woman the ‘High Watcher.’ Aren’t you rubbing her nose in it a bit too much? Or is it that she’s less manipulative and short-sighted than the rest of your—”
Whatever else the book was about to say was cut off as Denner picked him up and squeezed him between both palms.
Travelers.
“Books, right?” he said, trying to laugh. “You can’t take them too seriously.”
***
Hours later, Hariman was making up for the time he had spent silent by chattering non-stop.
“…so you see, the term ‘Feathered Plains’ is actually a misnomer! The first Travelers to return only saw plains, so they assumed that the entire Territory was nothing but a vast stretch of rolling grassland! Naturally, that’s not the case, as was proven by the scholars—”
“We’re proving it right now,” Denner interrupted. He pushed a branch away from his face. “These obviously aren’t plains.”
“Tut-tut,” Hariman said. “Never mistake subjective experience for proper objective proof. It took years of cartography and observation to finally determine that the ecosystem of Avernus is so varied!”
“That, or a single Traveler with open eyes.”
The forest around them had everything Denner would have expected in ordinary, mundane woods: blooming trees, a green canopy, a carpet of fallen leaves, scattered underbrush. But everything here seemed to be scaled for giants.
The fallen leaves were the size of bedsheets, the berries on nearby bushes bigger than Denner’s head. The trunks of the thinnest trees were wider around than a ballroom, and the canopy was so far overhead that the leaves might as well have been a green, sun-dappled sky.
The branches that Denner pushed away from his face were attached to bushes the size of ordinary trees. On the scale of this forest, they might have been weeds.
“At least they got the ‘feathered’ part right,” Denner said. He meant it idly, but he knew Hariman would respond. Hariman never passed up the opportunity to lecture.
“Yes, indeed they did!” Hariman said brightly. “Every observed animal native to Avernus is some kind of bird. There are the birds of the five main tribes, of course, but thousands of others, many of which remain undocumented even today! What an exciting Territory this is!”
black hummingbird.
Something rustled the leaves of the canopy overhead, and Denner craned his neck to look up. High above, a beaked head pushed its way down through the leaves. Its feathers were the color of flame, and its beak looked long and sharp enough to stab through bear hide. It cracked its beak and let out a ‘caw’ that actually shook the ground under Denner’s feet.
The ambient noise that usually filled the forest, the chirps and songs and rustling of leaves and feathers, went suddenly silent.
The giant bird at the top of the forest glanced around, then slowly withdrew its head. Its beak slid slowly out of sight, like a dorsal fin disappearing under the ocean.
“Hariman,” Denner muttered, “how big do you think that thing was?”
“At this distance?” Hariman asked, making no effort to keep his voice down. “It’s hard to say. How are we to know how far away those leaves are? More than big enough to swallow you whole, that’s for sure. If only Manyu was around, I’m sure he could tell us precisely.”
“That’s okay,” Denner said wearily. “I don’t need to know any more precisely than that.”
Maybe Avernus wasn’t as safe as he’d thought.
Hariman’s gold face, engraved on his front cover, squinted off into the distance. “I thought you might want to know,” he said, “that we are about to cross over into Halliat lands.”
“How do you know?”
“Those feathers, on that tree next to the red bush.”
Denner looked, and saw a bundle of white feathers nailed to the bark.
Hariman chattered on, “Three feathers, the middle one reversed, means that—”
Something caught the edge of Denner’s hearing, and he clapped a hand over Hariman’s face.
In his mind, he reached out to Valinhall, to a stone tablet engraved with the stylized image of an eye.
He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them, he saw the world through a red haze. The forest floor was dull, almost rusty, while the trees had veins of ruby running through them. The birds, hidden in the underbrush, were brighter still.
forehead. His would be drawn in red light, which he supposed explained why he saw the whole world in red every time he called the third eye. Valin’s had been purple, and if he remembered correctly, Kathrin’s was blue.
Denner slowly turned his head, scanning the woods; turning too quickly would give him a splitting headache. After only a few seconds, he spotted what he was looking for: a mass of bright red, seething light.
As best he understood it, the third eye allowed him to see life. The more energy a living being had, the brighter they showed up. Plants were dull, and lifeless stone all but invisible, though humans blazed like stars.
A human like the one trying to hide herself behind a nearby tree.
Denner banished the third eye. He could have held onto it longer, but it would take five or six hours to recharge already, and the longer he held it the more time it would take to return. Besides, banishing the eye always gave him a splitting headache, and he wanted to get over the pain as much as he could before this woman tried to ambush him.
“What is it?” Hariman demanded. “What’s wrong? I can tell something’s wrong, I’m not an idiot.”
Denner sighed. “I thought I heard something, Hariman. I checked it out, but I was wrong. It was nothing.”
Deliberately, Denner turned his back on the hiding woman and began to take loud, heavy steps back the other way.
“You really don’t need to be so paranoid, you know,” Hariman said. “I don’t think it would kill you to simply let yourself relax and enjoy your exotic surroundings. There’s much to be learned in Avernus. For instance, did you know that if you ate a berry from that bush behind you, you would grow feathers instead of hair? It’s true. I once knew…hold on. Who is that?”
Denner turned, calling stone. The power of Valinhall hardened around his skin, defending him, just in case this woman was, in fact, as dangerous as the High Watcher suspected.
Then he caught sight of her, with her hands empty and open, her knife sheathed at her side, and he realized she wasn’t a woman.
She was just a girl.
Maybe fifteen, at most, scrawny and underfed and covered in more scrapes and bruises than clear skin. Her hair was hacked short, as though she had cut it loose with her own knife.
“I didn’t stab you,” she said. “I noticed.”
“They said I would stab you, didn’t they? Well, I didn’t.”
“I appreciate that, thank you,” Denner said politely. Privately, he wondered why the High Watcher hadn’t mentioned that their ‘rebel’ was little more than a child. Had she been trying to trick him? Had the girl’s age just not mattered to her? Or had she expected it not to matter to Denner, because he was a bloodthirsty killer of Valinhall?
No matter what, he was going to have a few words for the Watcher when he returned.
“Just a moment,” Hariman said. “This is the dangerous rebel of the Strigaia clan? I hope she’s more dangerous than she looks.”
“My name is Keiren,” she said. “And yes. There’s a lot more to us than you think.”
“Us?” Denner asked, but he should have known better.
A shadow passed over Denner’s head, and he instantly summoned his Dragon’s Fang. Like most of the other Fangs, Diava was curved and sharp along only one edge. Its hilt was wrapped in red-and-gold thread, and a line of spidery script ran up the flat of the blade. It was a normal, comfortable length for a sword—nothing like Kai’s seven-foot monstrosity.
With Hariman tucked under one arm and Diava gripped in his other hand, Denner crouched and raised his eyes, ready to strike a bird from the sky.
A brown-and-white owl glided silently overhead, lighting on Keiren’s shoulder. The bird scowled at Denner and gave him a single, disapproving hoot.
“Us,” Keiren said.
“You see what I mean about paranoia?” Hariman put in. “We need to work on your nerves.”
Feeling somewhat silly, Denner relaxed, releasing the stone amulet—its power was about to run out anyway—and banishing his sword.
“We’ve seen you already,” Keiren said. “Standing there. Sent to kill us. Do you even know why?”
“I don’t think it’s my job to ask,” Denner said. He had taken money for this kind of thing before, but he was usually hired to kill enemy commanders on the battlefield, or stop Travelers that had run out of control. Not to kill a girl who had run away from home.
