The Crimson Vault Part 3

They won't, Lilia responded dreamily. Chaka doesn't lose unless he wants to.

Chaka had no hands, just sword blades where hands should be. He parried Lycus' blade with his left arm, knocking it wide, then blocked Andra's attack with his right. The edge of Lycus' sword just barely scarred the leather of Chaka's chest.

When Simon had first seen Chaka, he had a.s.sumed the fighter was just a man in mismatched leather. Not an inch of his skin showed underneath bits of leather armor held in place by crisscrossed belts, straps, and buckles. Even his eyes were hidden by a helmet of hardened leather, and a leather mask covered his mouth.

Simon had learned much since then. Chaka was not a man; at least, not anymore.

Chaka's mask split, and his leather lips stretched into a smile.

"That's not bad, there. You nicked me good. I'll have to get the Nye to polish me up. Nice job, both of you. Now let's get a bite, eh?"

Erastes, who had taken up a stance nearby where he could watch the battle, applauded. "You're working together well," he said. "Stay in the habit. You're never alone on the battlefield."

"Yes, sir," Andra and Lycus chorused. Erastes nodded at them and stepped forward, drawing his own sword. It was a standard Damascan infantry sword, short and straight, but it shone like a mirror, just like one of the Dragon's Fangs. Simon had learned firsthand that the blade was a match for Azura, unlike a sword of ordinary steel.

The Agnos children still hadn't spotted Simon, and he wanted to put that off as long as possible. Something about Erastes' earlier story was making him uncomfortable. But he still edged forward a few steps to get a better view of the upcoming duel.

Erastes may not have the strength and speed of a Valinhall Traveler, but he had lived as a soldier for most of his life. A match between him and Chaka was well worth a watch.

Chaka waved one bladed arm in dismissal. "Nah, don't even worry about it. You're good enough to be gettin' on with. Come on over here and grab some lunch. I already know you deserve it." Even his yellow gemstone eyes somehow looked warmer.

Simon realized his mouth was hanging open and closed it. He couldn't remember if he'd ever seen Chaka smile before. He raised Lilia up to look her in the eyes.

"What was that about?" he asked. "Chaka would never have let Lycus cut him. And he's never that nice, either."

Lilia's painted lips curled up in a smile, and Simon almost dropped her in the gra.s.s. The paint had moved, right in front of him! The dolls were alive!

I told you, Chaka doesn't lose, Lilia said. Not unless he wants to.

"Did you just smile at me?" Simon said. Lilia said nothing, but he could sense her sleepy amus.e.m.e.nt.

"No, really," he said. "Did you just*"

He was cut off when Andra finally noticed his presence. "Simon!" she shouted, and scrambled over to him, grinning. Lycus followed, but slowly and without the smile.

"Did you see us?" Andra asked excitedly. "We got Chaka!"

Simon glanced behind her at Chaka, sitting underneath the fruit tree. He was staring straight back at Simon, his yellow gemstone eyes burning. "Yeah, I saw," Simon said. "You did great."

Andra's eyes sparkled, and she leaned in close. "Chaka says it took you ages to get a cut on him."

Ages? He had earned his supper from Chaka on the second day! And getting the first cut had only taken a few weeks. Andra and Lycus had been in Valinhall at least that long, with the way time worked here. Then again, he had used the Nye essence the first time he landed a real blow on Chaka...

"Don't listen to everything Chaka tells you," Simon said, glaring at the leather man.

Behind Andra, Chaka raised one bladed arm and sc.r.a.ped it across the other as if sharpening knives. Simon didn't know what that gesture meant, but he was sure it wasn't friendly.

Lycus stared up at Simon. "How was the rain garden?" he asked. Once, he would have looked at Simon like a hero from the stories. Now he just stared.

Simon shook his head, but tried to change the subject. "Where's your mother? Erastes said she wanted to see me." Erastes, sitting next to Chaka and munching on a red piece of fruit, said nothing.

Andra's eyes brightened. "Oh yeah, you haven't seen it yet! Come on, follow me! It's brilliant!"

As Simon carried Lilia after Andra, he sighed inwardly. Andra had a tendency to get excited over small things, like a trio of Nye children hiding among the clothes in a laundry basket. Chances were slim that she would show him anything worth his time.

Andra led him into the forge, a long room with walls of black stone. Nooks set into the walls every few paces held anvils, bellows, ovens, racks of tools, barrels of iron stock, buckets of water, boxes of coal, and every other piece of smithing equipment Simon would expect.

Lycus and Andra's father, Caius, stood behind an iron anvil, a smock on his belly and a heavy blacksmith's hammer in one hand. He looked as though he belonged there, pounding furiously away at a hot plate of metal. Flying sparks sent waves of light through the room.

Under ordinary circ.u.mstances, Simon had thought of Caius as warm and friendly, but soft. The kind of man who delivered goods because he couldn't be bothered to do a day of real work. Simon's own father had been a merchant, so he knew not all merchants were fat and lazy, but Caius seemed to fit Simon's image of a well-to-do Damascan trader.

In the red-hot light of the forge sparks, Caius looked like an entirely different man.

He looked up when Simon and his children entered the room, and a broad smile split his face. "Just a minute," he called. "I'm almost done here."

Lycus and Andra had evidently expected this answer, because they nodded and made themselves at home in the forge. Lycus hopped up onto a crate and watched his father work, while Andra grabbed a pair of pliers and used them to poke around.

Simon stood where he was, watching Caius and trying to figure out what he was making. It looked like a shallow bowl or plate, but he had stretched it into an oval shape. Maybe it was supposed to be part of something, like a piece of armor or plating on a shield. As Caius turned the whatever-it-was to hammer it from a different angle, Simon noticed that one half of the plate was darker than the other. It seemed that he had joined two different metals together. Why?

He decided that Caius was repairing something from the armory.

The Nye usually do that work, Lilia pointed out. Why is Caius taking over for them?

That was a good point. Maybe Caius simply liked working with his hands, so the Nye were letting him do a few repairs around the House.

Or maybe he's not repairing something at all, Lilia said.

Caius pulled the plate off of the anvil and dunked it into a barrel of what Simon a.s.sumed was water. Clouds of steam billowed out of the barrel, vanishing in the shadows of the ceiling.

With his long-handled tongs, Caius pulled the plate out of the barrel and plunked it back down on the anvil. As it sat there, steaming, he motioned to Simon.

"Have a look," he said, grinning like a toddler with a new toy.

Simon walked over, strangely a little nervous. It was just a piece of metal, but he was treating it like something special, and Simon had spent the last few months in Valinhall. There, even a seemingly empty shadow could come to life and try to choke the life out of you. Could and did, on a nightly basis.

So he stepped up to the anvil full of nervous expectation. Unfortunately, his paranoia turned out to be perfectly justified.

Half of the oval, the half that Caius had just finished adding, shone mirror-bright. It looked to be made out of the same flawless steel as Azura, perfect except for a single slit that Caius had punched out of the middle. The other half had a slit in the same place, but the metal was darker. It was black around the edges, like wrought iron, but in the middle it still looked somewhat red, as though it held some heat from the forge. The two halves joined seamlessly in the middle, so that if he hadn't seen Caius working, Simon would have thought the whole thing had been made of one piece and then dyed. The join was uneven, not a straight line, as though the plate had once been shattered and then re-forged.

As he looked at it piece by piece, Simon caught myself wondering once again what purpose this plate could possibly serve. Were the slits for ventilation? Was this just one component of some machine? Only when he looked at the plate as a whole did it hit him, like a punch to the gut.

The two slits in the middle were for eyes. It was a mask.

And he had seen this mask before.

Actually, he only recognized half of the mask: from the right side of Overlord Malachi's face, just before he died. It had allowed him to call terrifying amounts of power from his Territory, enough that he had almost killed Alin and torn his own house apart doing it.

The mask had only come off as the Overlord's head rolled across the floor, after Alin took it from his shoulders. More than once, Simon had woken up, drenched in sweat, fighting off a nightmare of that day.

Other times, he had woken up to fight off one of the Nye. In Valinhall, he rarely enjoyed a good night's sleep.

Simon picked up the mask*it was only a little warm, now*and turned it over in his hand. "What did you do?"

Caius grinned proudly. "We fixed it. Well, we're not done yet, but we think we can have a working model for you in a week or two."

Simon's head spun. If this mask could do for him what it had apparently done for Malachi, he wouldn't have to worry about progressing through the rooms too slowly. This would take his powers to new heights.

Simon pushed back my rising excitement. There was too much he still didn't know.

"A working model?" he repeated. "What do you expect it to be able to do?"

Caius started to answer, but a door opened to the side of the forge, and Olissa Agnos stuck her head through. Her sense of fashion had dramatically changed since the last time I had seen her: she had cut her honey-brown hair short, well above her shoulders, and wore a set of copper goggles pushed up on her forehead. Black stains from soot and grease covered her face, and she held a long pair of tongs in one hand. The tongs shivered strangely at the ends, buzzing like a struck bell.

Olissa frowned at her husband. "Is it ready? What are you waiting for?" Then she seemed to notice Simon for the first time. "Oh, Simon, you're here too. Come see our room!"

Andra grinned and rushed past Simon as he followed Olissa, but the only thing he could think was, Wow. They've settled in better than I thought.

As Simon stepped through the door at the side of the forge, it occurred to him that there had never been a door here before. He had once fought a giant, burning snake made of red-hot metal in the forge. If there had been a way to escape, he would have noticed. Which meant this door had somehow appeared in the last few months.

He had heard that Valinhall did such things from time to time, rearranging its layout and adding new rooms according to the needs of its inhabitants. He could accept that; it was a Territory, after all. But seeing the evidence in front of him feltastrange.

"Welcome to the workshop," Olissa said, throwing out an arm to showcase the room.

It looked more like a cluttered storeroom than a workshop. Tables took up almost every available inch of floor s.p.a.ce, leaving only thin and crooked walkways between them. On each of the tables rested what seemed to be a collection of junk: nails, wire, bells, chipped pieces of stone, a Damascan infantry helmet, three sticks of incense, a vial of bubbling red fluid, and what looked like the insides of Kai's clock.

The entire Agnos family stood around Simon now, and they seemed to be expecting him to say something. He was sure that he was supposed to show how impressed he was, but something else came out of my mouth.

"What is it for?"

Olissa didn't seem put off by Simon's less-than-eager response. She grinned like her daughter, apparently happy to explain. "This is the place where the Wanderer did most of his work. Yes, he made the Dragon's Fangs in the forge, but most everything else he did came out of this very room. It's a place to tinker and try out new ideas. The Nye have kept the workshop sealed up since the Wanderer disappeared, but when the Eldest heard I liked to fix things, he opened it back up."

Alarms sounded in Simon's head. "The Eldest gave you this room?"

Olissa nodded. "He's been wonderful."

The Eldest had helped Simon on more than one occasion, but *wonderful' did not describe him. If he was helping the Agnos family, that meant he thought he had something to gain.

He wanted to ask Olissa some more questions, but Lilia interrupted him.

Time to get back to work, she said. Simon frowned, lifting her up so he could see into her purple eyes.

What do you mean? Simon asked silently. He kept watching her face, though; maybe he would get to see it change again.

Lilia didn't say anything else, but after a moment, something in his pocket buzzed like a swarm of trapped bees.

Simon sighed, reaching in and pulling out the device that Alin had given him. It looked like a little acorn trapped in a delicate golden birdcage. As he watched, the acorn went crazy, throwing itself up against the walls of its cage almost too fast to see. The rattling of the cage created the buzzing sound.

Olissa lowered her long-handled tongs to a nearby table, her eyes locked on his device. "What is that?" she asked, her voice heavy with curiosity.

"I'll show it to you later," Simon said. He didn't want to go, but it might be an emergency. "Alin needs me."

CHAPTER THREE:.

ROYAL BLOOD.

Leah could barely tolerate any of her siblings, really, but her brother Talos least of all. He strode into her room without knocking, as though he was invited*he definitely was not*and dropped down into a padded chair without a word of greeting.

"Show me Adessa," he commanded. "She's gotten into something interesting."

As was usual of late, Overlord Lysander followed him into the room, looking ridiculous in his scholarly spectacles and his feathered buckskin outfit. He looked like a librarian who had decided to try on a tribal costume. He stood behind Talos' chair and stared at the wall, seeming uncomfortable. As well he should be.

Leah smiled, full of false cheer. "Good afternoon, Talos. I must have missed your knock. I'm afraid you caught me quite off guard."

That wasn't true, actually. Whenever she was in the Royal Palace in Cana, she always surrounded her room with alarms from Lirial that would alert her whenever anyone approached. She had seen flashing lights and heard warning chimes when Talos was still halfway down the hall, and had used those extra seconds to prepare traps. If she had really wanted to keep him out, she would have encased the door in solid crystal.

Talos likely knew that, which was why he hadn't bothered knocking. She understood, but he still should have shown better manners.

Leah's brother answered her insincere smile with one of his own.