City of Light (The Traveler's Gate Trilogy) (45 page)

So Kai was going for a frontal assault, then? Fine.

The white-haired Traveler manifested in front of Indirial with the point of his sword an inch from Indirial’s heart. He pushed it up, skewering straight through the heart like a knife through an apple.

Blood welled up and flowed through Indirial’s lips, filling his mouth with the taste of copper, but he finally had the chance he’d been looking for: he grabbed Kai’s shoulder with one hand and his mask at the other, prying with all his strength and the full will of his Territory, trying to peel the mask off his old friend.

Kai jerked back, tearing the mask from Indirial’s fingers. It was still stuck, so the Incarnation tried another tactic.

When Kai tried to pull Mithra out of Indirial’s chest, Indirial held onto the blade and stepped forward.

Then he kicked Kai in the ribs.

Kai brought the Dragon’s Fang with him, pulling it out of Indirial with a sucking noise. He flew through the air, blood trailing from his blade, and landed hard on his back at the foot of the still-open Valinhall Gate.

He writhed on the ground, in even more pain than the fall could account for.
That’s right; he must have fallen on his wound.
So much the better for Indirial’s purposes.

This time, when Indirial reached down to peel the mask away, Kai didn’t resist.

The last link around his throat was half-formed, but if Simon’s experience with the original mask was any indication, Kai wouldn’t be able to call any powers from Valinhall for hours, if not days.

“You should have…left her alone,” Kai said, choking up. “She didn’t…deserve that.”

Indirial let his joy fade a little; it wouldn’t be appropriate to keep grinning in the face of Kai’s obvious grief. “I didn’t want any of them to die,” the Incarnation said. “They’re part of me, now. As are you.”

He reached down and grabbed Mithra, summoning Vasha again so that he held a Dragon’s Fang in each hand. All of the Wanderer’s remaining swords were now in his possession, except for Simon’s Azura. “Can you make it through the Gate, Kai?”

Laughter burbled up in Kai’s throat, sounding like he had a throat full of blood.

Indirial sighed. “Kai, I can’t believe how often we seem to have this conversation. Get back through the Gate, or you’re going to die. The fight’s over. I won.”

“Hmmmm?” Kai said, his voice smooth. “Did you?”

He reached out, and the air shimmered as he summoned something from the Valinhall armory: a giant hammer, mirror-bright Tartarus steel from head to hilt.

With an audible click, the black chains around his throat snapped together.

Indirial’s mind shattered, re-formed, shattered again. He was vaguely aware of falling to his knees, but he also felt the cold stone against his back, the burning Ragnarus sword wound in his back, and an overwhelming grief for a broken doll in a red dress. Steel shifted and pushed like needles beneath his skin, as patches of his flesh painfully hardened.

He was looking up into his own eyes, which burned with violet flame like a warning from Korr.

No, wait…that
was
a warning from Korr.

Danger!
His advisor shouted.

With the last of his strength, Kai tossed the Tartarus steel hammer over the wall.

And Simon rose up from the walls of Cana, masked in mirrored steel and dark iron. His cloak trailed black behind him, the hood raised. In his right hand he held Azura, long and gleaming silver, and with his left hand he plucked the falling hammer from midair.

He seemed to hover for an instant, a specter of shadow and bright steel like an Arbiter of Naraka come to deliver judgment.

Indirial had one moment to think,
That is exactly how a Traveler of Valinhall should
look.

Then Simon struck.

That glimpse of Simon was the one clear look that Indirial got. As soon as the boy started moving with his hood up, the essence of the Nye flowing through him, Indirial had a hard time looking at him straight on. He wondered briefly if certain Incarnations had an easier time looking through the Nye cloak than others, but then Simon was on him.

His first strike was a slash with Azura, which Indirial had to nudge with the Dragon’s Fang in his left hand. Simon followed up with a one-handed swing of the hammer, aimed at Indirial’s head.

Ordinarily, he would have dodged, continuing his attack from a lower angle. Perhaps ducked under the hammer and driven his sword up into Simon’s stomach. But he had a good sense of Kai’s strength when he was wearing the mask, and he didn’t
really
want to kill Simon. The boy wouldn’t give him the same fight as Kai, but maybe in twenty or thirty years he’d turn into something truly spectacular. Indirial the Overlord, Indirial, son of Aleias, and the Valinhall Incarnation were all in agreement: they wanted to see Simon reach his potential.

So he caught the blow one-handed with Vasha. Assuming that Simon in his mask was just as strong as Kai had been, Indirial wouldn’t need to meet the attack with his full strength.

Indirial had already begun planning his next strike—stepping forward and hitting Simon in the head with the flat of Mithra’s blade, hopefully tripping him up and letting Indirial subdue him unharmed—when he realized that the hammer was
still coming.

Under the Nye essence, the instant had felt much longer, but the Tartarus steel head of Simon’s hammer met Vasha and didn’t even slow down. It was headed straight for Indirial’s temple.

In a split second, he redirected all his strength as the Valinhall Incarnation into supporting his one-handed defense, pushing against the hammer with everything he had.

Superhuman strength or not, there was only so much he could do against momentum with poor footing and no leverage.

The hammer, along with the back of his own blade, smacked Indirial in the face.

Even as an Incarnation, he felt that pain. The hammer smashed the side of his head, whiting out his world and sending him flying into a stone wall. He hit hard enough to crack the bricks, along with most of his bones, before flopping down to the ground. Which, he couldn’t help but notice, was also solid stone.

As his body knit itself together in a blinding display of gold and green, he came to a realization:
That mask is stronger than the other one.

Oh. So that’s how Valin lost.

Still, Simon didn’t have the Ragnarus blade that had crippled Kai and killed Valin—however impermanent
that
had turned out to be. No matter how strong the boy was, he didn’t have a way to kill Indirial. And he was still shackled by Valinhall’s chains, so he was working under a time limit. The only thing Indirial had to do was stall—

His world shook again. He was staring up at the blue sky, his white hair falling into his eyes, then he was on his hands and knees, staring at the stone, then he was Kai again, whose skin was slowly turning to steel…

Kai was transforming. He had already half-changed into an Incarnation, and if he kept going, either he or Indirial would die.

Indirial’s hand grew numb and began to shake. He tried to make a fist, but he couldn’t control his body. Indirial and Kai both shook at the same time, and Kai and Indirial felt both sensations together.

With a supreme effort of will, Indirial wrenched his consciousness back into the right body. He forced himself up.

Black-cloaked Simon, with his cold metal expression, was swinging the hammer in both hands. It came straight for Indirial, and he was having trouble remembering why that was supposed to be a bad thing…

The hammer hit him like a falling star, and for a while he knew nothing.

When he came to, he was lying on the floor of the hallway in the House of Blades. He glanced to his left. Yes, there was the bedroom where he’d spent most of his life. Where was Valin?
The graveyard,
part of him murmured. Where were the others?
The graveyard.

Gold and green sparks flickered in front of his eyes—or possibly
in
his eyes—and he leaped to his feet.

The Gate! He had to reach the Gate.

He was there almost as soon as he’d thought of it, his body reacting with superhuman speed. He pressed through the Gate, and it was like walking into an invisible screen door. He could almost walk through, but the air itself pressed against him, holding him back in a solid barrier, as though the world itself wanted him on this side. He strained and pushed with all his will as the Incarnation of Valinhall, but the screen never tore.

He reached out for Vasha, and realized that she wasn’t at his side. Where was she? Not on the rack, all the racks were empty. He tried to summon her, but she didn’t come. Where…

He looked out through the Gate. There, on the walls of Cana, where he’d tossed every other Dragon’s Fang he could find, Vasha lay. Unreachable.

Outside the Gate, Simon peeled the mask away and collapsed. Inside the Territory, Indirial pulled up a padded chair and sat in it backwards, straddling the back.

He’d thought he would have felt bitter at being so thoroughly defeated, but he felt more pride than anything else. Simon and Kai had both surpassed his expectations, and both of them for the second time.

Maybe he should learn to stop underestimating them.

“Well played,” he said.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-F
OUR
:

T
HE
E
ND
OF
A
T
RAVELER

Simon commanded his body to move, to do anything other than sit slumped against the edge of the wall, but he could barely raise one trembling hand. At least he hadn’t lost consciousness this time; he hadn’t worn the mask to its absolute limit, so he could stay seated, and could even move his limbs an inch or two at a time. That was about as far as his body would take him.

But he needed to do more than sit here. He needed to help Kai.

Kai lay on the stones less than a pace away, covered in blood and steel. It looked like the Incarnation had begun with his hand and then gone terribly wrong: one hand was encased by a mirror-bright gauntlet of metal that ended at the wrist, but the rest of his body was practically torn apart. A metal spike had burst from his elbow, beneath the skin, trickling blood onto the ground. Two blades pushed out from his shoulders, also dripping blood.

Patches of mirrored steel had replaced his skin seemingly at random, and clumps of his hair had started to transform as well. Most of the hair hung naturally: shaggy, grimy white, smudged by dirt and blood. The transformed patches didn’t look like real human hair. It was bright white, strangely stiff-looking, and blood seemed to flow through it without leaving any spots behind.

The whole of Kai made him look like a hideous abomination, like a man and an artificial creature from deep in a Territory had been blended randomly together.

That’s almost exactly what happened,
Caela sent.
Oh, Kai.

Kai’s body shook again, with another spasm, and a dagger-blade pushed itself up from inside his rib cage. His white-gray mask clattered to the ground, the force that held it onto Kai’s head vanishing. Simon forced himself to look away.

Call Andra or Erastes,
Simon ordered her.
We have to get him into the pool.

Caela lay by Kai’s body, staring up at the sky from under her blue bonnet. Simon wasn’t sure if it was coincidence or not, but one of her wooden hands lay on Kai’s arm.

Not the pool,
she said.
We need to get him into the bedroom.

How will that help?

That’s where he wants to die.

Simon refused to accept that. Kai’s chest still rose and fell with each breath, and his head moved from side to side. If he could still communicate with Caela, he could still be saved.

He looked over at the shadow-cloaked Incarnation sitting in the entry hall. “Indirial, can you move him?”

Indirial waved at the Gate. “You saw what happened when I tried to leave. Besides, the pool won’t save him.”

“If you can’t help, then get someone who can
.”

“No one can.”

“Then get the Eldest!” Simon shouted. “Go find him, and promise him whatever he wants to get him here
now.
”

Finally, Simon managed to push himself up to his feet. He swayed and almost fell when a wave of dizziness caught him, but he caught himself with one hand on the edge of the wall. Good. He was recovering much faster than before. His chains were still reaching up to his neck, so that could be a problem, but he surely had enough time left to drag Kai through the House.

Where’s Andra?
Simon asked Caela.

On her way,
the doll responded.
She and Erastes will take him.

By the time Andra hurried into the entry hall, carrying an ordinary sword and looking ready for a fight, Simon had managed to stand on his own. He stood, wavering, just outside the Gate, trying to muster up the strength to drag Kai on his own.

Andra stopped at the edge of the hallway, staring at Indirial’s shadowed form. Warily, she raised her blade. Erastes hurried in behind her, chain mail jangling, and his Tartarus steel sword was out of its sheath and pointed at Indirial before he even made it into the entry hall.

“Leave them alone, Indirial,” Simon said, trying to inject some authority into his voice. He was worried that he only sounded tired. “Don’t hurt them.”

Indirial’s eyebrows lifted. “You defeated me in combat. I won’t stand in your way.” His violet eyes turned to Kai. “I won’t help you, either, but I won’t get in your way.”

Another spike pushed out of Kai’s skin, and he groaned weakly.

“Help him!” Simon demanded. Andra and Erastes glanced at each other, and then they were out of the Gate, bending down to grab Kai under the shoulders.

“What happened to Seijan?” Andra asked, as she pulled Kai into Valinhall, moving carefully to avoid cutting herself on his spikes.

Her Dragon’s Fang,
Caela reminded him.