House of Blades (The Traveler's Gate Trilogy) (6 page)

Alin appeared to notice Simon’s sword for the first time, and he brightened. “You have a weapon? Did you take it from one of the soldiers?”

Simon opened his mouth to respond, but Nurita stirred and raised her head. “Did you hear that?” she demanded.

Raiders appeared as if summoned to answer her question. They were on foot this time, and their dark armor glistened in the moonlight as they spread out to encircle the cave entrance. Everyone scrambled to their feet and someone began to cry, but no one made any other sound. They simply stood in the silence of shock and despair.

“They must have left the village right after we did,” Alin whispered. Anger and frustration tightened his voice. “They had to have followed right on our heels. Why would they do that?
Why?
”

After they had finished surrounding the entrance, the raiders stopped moving. They stood with weapons drawn, in silence, waiting. After a moment or two, a lean man in a hooded cloak stepped forward. He carried a torch in one hand, and by its light Simon could see the man’s clothes more clearly: the cloak was brown, the shirt beneath purple. Malachi’s colors.

As the man approached, he used his other hand to draw the hood back from his face. His head was entirely hairless, his skin pale, and his eyes a luminous green that shone in the torchlight. He turned his head to survey the situation and grimaced as if displeased.

“I am Cormac, a Traveler of Endross in service to Overlord Malachi.” Several people moaned, and Simon felt his chest tighten. Travelers had a thousand powers, most of them gruesome and terrible. He had heard the legends of Endross as a boy from his father: Endross was the place where storms were born, a blasted desert wasteland where only the most twisted and horrible monsters lived.

Of course, Simon’s father had never actually seen a Traveler before the one that killed him.

“Your village was given the honor of providing a small sacrifice to the Overlord,” Cormac continued. “But you have reacted with blasphemy and sedition. You are too close, no doubt, to the heretics of Enosh who fail to worship the Evening Star. You will all be taken to the Overlord’s seat in Bel Calem, where you will face his judgment. And, of course, we have taken the necessary sacrifices in spite of your...lack of cooperation.”

He made a gesture with his free hand, and one of the soldiers appeared, hauling a line of collared villagers just like the one Simon had seen earlier. This one was longer, however, and its occupants had their wrists and ankles bound as well as their necks. Rather than children, these slaves were mostly grown men, except for one woman who shuffled along behind them. They were eleven in total.

One of the collared men—a butcher, who had more than once given Simon a meal—shouted and jumped forward, leaping onto a nearby shoulder and grappling at him with bound hands. The other ten captives staggered toward him, jerked along by the rope.

Cormac turned his back to the cave and moved toward the struggling prisoner. The soldier shoved the bound man to the ground, kicking him as he huddled in his bonds.

“Unfortunately for you,” Cormac said, “we seem to have a spare.” He raised one cupped hand, which filled with a dark and swirling mass of clouds. The tiny mass began to spin, faster and faster, and to fill with flashes of unseen lightning, until he held a thunderstorm in the palm of his hand.
 

Cormac looked over the villagers huddled in the rest of the cave. “He was disobedient. This is the punishment for the disobedient.”

As Cormac stepped toward the butcher and raised his arm, Simon cried out. The light from Cormac’s torch had fallen on the woman at the end of the line, revealing her face for the first time.

It was Leah.

C
HAPTER
F
OUR
:

H
IDDEN
T
ALENTS

Cormac held a hand over his head, and the storm inside it flashed. Thorned purplish vines sprouted from the earth around the captive butcher, crawling up his legs like questing snakes. The man's scream was terrible. Each vine had inch-long thorns that dragged over the man's skin, leaving deep red lines that trickled down his flesh. He clawed desperately at the vines, trying to peel them apart, but all he accomplished was shredding his fingers.

Simon had never seen anyone in that much agony. A twisting sympathetic pain in his own stomach made him think he was going to vomit, but he couldn't look away. Someone should help, he knew that. His hand tightened on the hilt of his sword. But what could an ordinary blade do?

He stood there, frozen.

The dying man continued to produce a whimpering scream until the storm in Cormac’s hand flashed again, and blue sparks jumped from all the thorns at once. The man convulsed, spasming like he had lost all control of his muscles. The air filled with the smell of charred meat and hair. The other people in the cave screamed and pushed back into the rock; Simon himself felt paralyzed. The other captives tied to the same rope tried to pull away, but they were held firmly by their Damascan captors. Simon noticed that many of the soldiers looked sickened, and some had turned completely away, but none dared oppose the Traveler.

After a few moments, the sparks stopped and the body slumped to the ground. His skin was red and swollen, and smoke rose gently from his chest. The smell was nauseating, and Simon heard several people behind him empty their stomachs on the cave floor.

The purple-green vines slithered back into the rocky ground and vanished.

Cormac looked vaguely disgusted, as though he had been forced to step on a spider while wearing a silk slipper. He waved at the smoke in front of his face and grimaced. "You take my point," he said. “Follow quietly, and I won’t need to make another example.”

The Damascan soldiers pulled on the rope of captives, trying to maneuver them into position, but now everyone in the line was panicking, trying desperately to get as far away from Cormac as possible.

"Honestly," Cormac said. He tossed the torch to a nearby soldier. "Struggling solves nothing. We’re leaving.”

Cormac raised his hand-held thunderstorm over the struggling mass of captured villagers. Simon caught a glimpse of Leah's panicked face as she strained against the chains on her limbs and the collar around her neck. She didn’t even look afraid, just angry. And resolved.
 

Simon himself could never have shown such strength in her position. If he could give her a moment more to live, maybe even a chance to escape, he had to try. No matter what it cost.

Quietly, afraid the Traveler would hear him, Simon eased the sword from its scabbard. As soon as he had the weapon free he kicked forward, screaming, and slashed at Cormac's legs.

The Traveler didn't even look back, but a gust of wind smacked into Simon's chest like a giant's kick. The wind felt heavy and wet, far more so than the night air surrounding them, and it smelled like iron and rotting vegetation. It shoved Simon back, tumbling him over backwards until he landed very near where he had started, staring up at the cave roof. He could just see a wedge of stars outside.

Simon tried to stand, to catch a breath, but it seemed like his body had died below the neck. He couldn't make his legs move, his lungs inflate. He tried to close his fingers around his sword, but felt nothing. Had he dropped it? He lay on the sand, wheezing and looking up at the stars as footsteps crunched over closer to his head.

Cormac's head gleamed as it blocked out the handful of stars, but his poisonous green eyes flashed brighter.
 

"Did that make you feel better?" the Traveler asked. Then Simon's view was obscured by an up-close vision of lightning flashes and dark, swirling clouds.

Simon closed his eyes, but opened them again instantly. His father had died facing his killer; so would he. Kalman’s son would watch the storm that killed him. His lungs remembered their job as he stared, and he drew in a deep, ragged breath.

"Don't worry, Simon," someone said. Not Cormac. A younger, firmer voice. Alin? The storm shivered, as though the hand holding it had trembled. Heat lightning flared inches from Simon’s nose.

"I'll take care of this," Alin said. It was Alin's confidence, but far more serious in tone than Simon had ever heard from him before. He wanted to look, to see what Alin had planned that could stand against a Traveler, but his vision was filled with clouds of rolling black.

"What are y—" Cormac began, but there was a flash of golden light so bright that it caused a blast of pain in Simon's eyes. Simon flinched, and when he could see clearly again the storm in front of his face had vanished. He blinked hurriedly, trying to clear his eyes. Something like a bundled-up cloak arched through the air and landed heavily in the distance, far behind the ring of Damascan soldiers.

Was that Cormac's body?

Simon sat up, ribs aching in protest, and turned around.
 

Alin stood, radiating sunlight. His hair gleamed like polished gold, his clothes drifted on an otherworldly breeze, and wisps of light rose like smoke from his right hand.

Chaim, the Mayor’s advisor, spoke from the corner of the cave, his voice full of awe. “Alin,” he said. “What have you done?”

Alin’s response was hesitant. “I’m...not sure.”

***

Cormac slammed into the rocky ground. He heard his body crack, and lost all feeling in a blast of white-hot pain. His consciousness fuzzed, but he knew that without the protection of Endross worked into his armor, he would be dead. As it was, the wind cushioned his fall enough so that he only cracked a rib.

He levered himself into a sitting position and nearly blacked out from the fire that exploded in his head. Perhaps he had cracked more than a rib after all.

He would have to finish this quickly. Patrols from Enosh sometimes extended this far south, and he didn’t want to find a pair of hostile Grandmasters stepping out of nowhere to drag him back for interrogation. In fact, prudence suggested he should just take the royal girl and as many prisoners as he could grab and retreat, rather than face this unknown Traveler and possible Enosh reinforcements.

But he couldn’t. Not now. He had been challenged.

Shame and rage rose up inside him, forcing him to his feet despite the blinding pain. He focused his fury on a spot a few inches from his palm, tearing open a rift between worlds with vicious effort.

Cormac was a Traveler of Endross, the most brutal of all known Territories. Endross was a vast desert wasteland, broken only by the occasional oasis of lush jungle. The jungles were arguably even more deadly than the harsh wastes, as they were home to a thousand species of predator. And every day without fail, unpredictable thunderstorms blasted the land with wind and flogged it with harsh wind.

There was no weakness in Cormac’s Territory. The weak died. To claim power from Endross, a Traveler had to conquer. And that meant responding to every challenge with swift, lethal force.
 

Never back down from a predator,
Cormac thought.
He will only attack.
That was one of the first lessons any Endross Traveler learned.

A Gate to Endross opened in his palm: an angry, flashing thunderstorm the size of a marble. Endross Gates were unique among all the Territories in that they grew larger and more powerful the longer they stood open. The storm in his hand would grow and grow, granting him access to more and more power. That is, until he lost control. If the Gate became too powerful it could easily go wild, all the power of Endross unleashed without Cormac’s will to restrain it. That was how many Endross Travelers died, consumed by the powers they had conjured.

But Cormac never lost control.

He passed a free hand over his smooth scalp, trying to regain himself, drowning his pain in Endross power.

The storm in his hand now filled his entire palm.

The time was here. Before Enosh discovered their presence, and before Sergeant Yakir did something he would regret, Cormac would attack.

It was the only way he knew.

***

Simon picked up his sword, which—as it turned out—had lain on the ground only inches from his body. Not that it had done any good. Absently he sheathed the weapon and looked over at Alin.

He was beginning to get tired of world-changing revelations. The Overlord sent soldiers to destroy his village, then a girl he barely knew sacrificed herself to save him, then he sees a Traveler showed up and proved himself a horrifying monster. To top it off, apparently a boy Simon had known all his life turned out to have some sort of powers himself.

He’d think it was a bad dream, but Simon’s nightmares had never been this strange.

“Alin,” Simon said, “are you a Traveler?”

Alin’s gaze wavered, and he looked down at his hand as though he had just noticed it shining. The sunlight glow around him flickered, dimmed, and quit completely.

“I think I just killed someone,” Alin said. His voice was shaken. So he really didn’t know what was happening, then.
 

Even as stunned and frightened as he was, Simon felt a spark of pity. If Alin didn’t have any more idea what was going on than Simon did, he must be incredibly confused.
 

The Damascan soldiers had frozen in the face of an unknown Traveler, but now that Alin had stopped glowing, one of them walked to the mouth of the cave and stopped.

“My name is Sergeant Yakir,” the soldier said. “In the absence of Traveler Cormac, I have command of this unit, and I’d like to speak with the Traveler of Myria.” He nodded to Alin. “Step forward, Traveler, and identify yourself.” Yakir’s face was indistinct behind his helmet, but his eyes were hard.

Alin cleared his throat. “My name is Alin, and my father is Torin. But I’m not a Traveler.” He hesitated for a moment, then added, “At least, I don’t think I am.”

The Damascan soldiers tensed almost imperceptibly, and turned their heads to see Yakir’s reaction. A shiver crawled down Simon’s spine as he realized each one had their hands on a weapon. If they decided Alin wasn’t really a Traveler, things could get even more dangerous. Or maybe if they decided he was; Simon wasn’t sure which would be worse.