The Crimson Vault Part 6

The Eldest ducked, almost casually. He cackled as he did.

"The boy survived," the Nye continued. "But he has killed many Damascan Travelers. He is wanted throughout the Kingdom. If only he had someone to guide him. To protect him. If only the few remaining Dragons had their leader."

The Eldest was trying to rile him, for some reason, and the worst of it was that he was succeeding. Kai needed to put a stop to it.

"Where is Mithra?" Kai asked.

The Eldest shrugged. "At the center of the temple. You know that better than I."

Kai pointed the scimitar at him. "Where?"

The Nye's shoulders shook with silent laughter. He walked over to a blank stretch of dark sandstone wall, and placed one black sleeve against it.

"Here," the Eldest said.

Kai banished the scimitar, letting it fade back into the armory. Then he called steel and reached back to the armory, but not for the scimitar. He needed something bigger.

The war-hammer was made entirely of mirror-bright Tartarus steel, so that it gleamed like a star in the dull yellow quartz-light. The Dragon's Fangs themselves were made of Tartarus steel, which was all but unbreakable. This hammer was so ma.s.sive that Kai felt its weight, even with Valinhall's power flowing through him. He called stone, feeling his skin tighten as the shield settled over him.

"It will be good to have our leader back," the Eldest said.

Kai swung, putting all the power he could summon into the blow. The wall exploded, filling the corridor with a noise like a mountain collapsing and blasting a cloud of dust, pebbles, and shrapnel into the hallway. Some of the rocks*a few the size of Kai's fist*bounced off his impervious stone-shielded skin.

But there wasn't as much debris as he expected. He wondered at that for a moment before he realized that most of the wall had been blown out. Into the room on the other side.

Through the ragged hole in the wall, Kai saw an enormous square room, tiled in bright blue and so tall that he couldn't see the ceiling. It was lit entirely by those yellow quartz crystals, which had flared to life as soon as the wall opened up.

The room held very little besides tile and glowing quartz, just a pedestal about waist-high on Kai. A sword levitated over that pedestal, point-down, revolving slowly in midair.

The sword reminded him so much of Azura that his heart ached. It woke other memories, too, but those were even less pleasant.

Mithra, the thirteenth Dragon's Fang and the final sword forged by Valin the Wanderer, was only a few inches shorter than Azura's seven feet. No one without the power of Valinhall could wield it. The blade was slightly curved along its entire length, and sharp on only the outside edge. That was where its resemblance to Azura ended.

Where Azura's hilt was wrapped in black, Mithra's was wrapped in gold. A finger-thin line of pure gold also ran up the center of the blade, from hilt to tip. Kai knew from past experience that the gold was seemingly of one piece with the steel around it.

Kai had asked about that, one evening long ago. Master, how did you get the gold into your sword?

Valin had smiled gently and run a hand down the flat of his blade. This gold is special. I found it long ago and far away, in a city of light.

He had a thousand stories about his "city of light," and he would use them to keep the children entertained for hours. Of course, that was before he had killed King Zakareth the Fifth, before the Dragon Army was broken.

Kai looked at Mithra, shining golden in the light.

It wasn't Valin's sword anymore.

The Eldest gestured, as though saying something, but the explosion of the wall still rang painfully in Kai's ears. He didn't mind. At least he didn't have to listen to the Nye's words anymore.

Kai turned back to the Eldest, gesturing at his ears and shrugging helplessly. The Eldest folded his arms like a sulky child. That did much to improve Kai's mood.

When he turned back to Mithra, a fifteen-foot boulder stood in his way.

As he watched, the boulder grew arms, slamming one down at Kai's head. Only decades of training in the House allowed Kai to meet the blow, swinging his hammer up to meet the stone fist just as it would have crushed his skull into jelly. The war-hammer smashed into the fist, knocking it to the side just enough that it slammed into the tiles instead of reducing Kai to paste.

The boulder grew a second arm. Then short, stubby legs. Then a head poked its way out of the enormous sandstone body.

An amethyst gleamed like a single eye on the golem's forehead.

Kai still couldn't hear much, but he was sure the Eldest was laughing.

He dodged the golem's fist a second time, just as his stone power ran out. Great. Now even a single blow would probably prove fatal. Even though Benson's steel provided Kai with some defense, making his body resilient enough to withstand its own increased strength, it did very little to prevent him from being cut. So, without his stone-shield to defend him, a single flying shard of the tile could be enough to open Kai's throat.

The golem sent a series of heavy, crushing attacks that Kai only narrowly dodged.

This would be a perfect time for a magical, wind-reading doll, Kai thought.

Kai slipped to one side, avoiding a kick. He used the hammer to deflect another blow, then sidestepped the next. As the golem recovered, he walked backwards several steps.

He needed a running start.

Kai ran forward and launched himself into the air, steel-powered legs sending him up and over the golem's head. Kai lifted his hammer. It raised two stone arms, crossing them over its forehead, protecting the heartstone.

Exactly as Kai had predicted. He didn't need to defeat the golem. He just needed to get past it.

Kai landed on the golem's crossed arms and pushed off, behind the golem, landing on the pedestal holding Mithra.

The golem turned and roared as it realized its mistake, amethyst eye gleaming.

Too late now, Kai thought. He banished the hammer, sending it back to Valinhall. Then he closed a hand around Mithra's hilt.

There were only two ways to dismantle an Ornheim golem: the first, and usually the easiest, was to take out the golem's heartstone. Each golem was animated and controlled by a carved gems located somewhere in its body. If you found the right gem and destroyed it, the golem would fall to pieces.

The wolves earlier had each had three heartstones on their faces, serving them as eyes. Kai hadn't been sure which heartstone was the controlling one, and he hadn't cared to find out. So he had opted for the second method of destroying a golem: brute force.

If the golem's body was broken, the heartstone had nothing to animate.

Kai drew on the rest of his steel, drinking it all up in a burst. As long as he won in the next few seconds, he'd be fine. Any longer than that, and he would be facing a fifteen-foot stone golem with no superhuman strength.

Well, then. He'd just have to win.

The golem swept an arm at him, trying to knock him off the pedestal. Mithra sliced through the solid rock of its arm. The second arm swept down at him, trying to crush him, and he jumped. He was stronger than he had expected; his enhanced jump actually took him into the ceiling. He had to flip around in midair and catch himself with his feet. For an instant, he was looking down at the golem from above.

Then he pushed off the ceiling and launched himself down, flashing out with Mithra as he did.

He spun around again just before he hit the floor, landing in a crouch with such force that the tile around him cracked. He held Mithra off and to one side, so that it didn't drive down into the ground so far that he couldn't retrieve it.

His steel ran out, and Kai almost collapsed from the sudden surge of weakness. It didn't matter, though.

He had sliced through the middle of the golem's heartstone.

The golem collapsed in a rockslide, and Kai had to hurry away to avoid the falling stones. The Eldest Nye, standing on the far end of the room, bowed and slowly clapped.

"Welcome back, Kai," the Eldest said. "You're just in time."

Kai ignored him, already drawing Mithra down in the beginnings of a Valinhall Gate. He thought about inviting the Eldest inside, but decided against it. The Nye had gotten himself here without a Gate; he could get himself back.

After about a minute, Kai had sliced open a tear in reality, which widened to show Valinhall's entry hall: a large, carpeted room, filled with comfortably padded chairs and couches. Wooden tables were scattered here and there, covered with old, yellowed paper. Gilt-edged stand mirrors hung every few feet, and from the walls hung wooden sword racks, numbered one to thirteen.

The smell of home*old wood, polish, and paper*drifted into the ancient temple. It had been far too long since Kai had been home. He took a deep breath and stepped inside.

"You have done good work, Kai," the Eldest called. Kai let the Gate keep closing.

"When the time comes, the Wanderer will need his sword."

Ice crawled down Kai's back, and he spun around, but the Gate had vanished. He stared at the blank wall of the Valinhall entry room.

The Eldest had only mentioned Valin in order to provoke Kai, he knew that. Valin was safely asleep, sealed away, as he had been for the last twenty-five years.

Kai hesitated for a moment, and then began to walk deeper into the House. He hated to let the Eldest's words have any effect on him, but he needed to check on the Wanderer's grave.

It couldn't hurt if he only checked.

Valinhall had something of a reputation as a Territory that was useless for actually getting from one place to another quickly, and Kai had to admit that*in most cases*the reputation was deserved. If he opened a Gate from the real world to Valinhall, then any Gate he opened from Valinhall would open back up onto that exact spot. The generally accepted rule was that you could enter Valinhall from anywhere, as long as you were willing to return to the same place. If he opened a Gate now, he would return to the stone temple at the center of the Badari Desert.

But, like all rules, this one had something of a loophole.

Kai stood deep in the house, at the top of a spiral staircase. Each stair was made out of a substance that looked like a cloud of black smoke somehow frozen in time. The steps felt solid enough, though.

He held Benson's steel every second in this room, because even the air weighed heavily upon him here. His body was at least three times its normal weight, but climbing the staircase under these conditions was only the first of the room's challenges. When he had first reached this far into the House, he had been forced to fight a guardian at the top of the stairs. He almost hadn't made it.

Now that he thought of it, Indirial had been the one to drag Kai's broken and bleeding body out of here and back to the healing pool. Oh, how long ago that was.

At the top of the stairs was a black stone platform, seemingly floating unsupported at the top of the room. The center of the pedestal sported a c.h.i.n.k in the rock that glowed faintly.

It looked like the beginnings of a crack, but it was really a keyhole.

Kai reversed Mithra, holding it point-down over the keyhole. He gathered up his concentration, reaching through the Dragon's Fang as he did when opening a Gate. Then he plunged the blade down.

The world vanished in a swirl of colors, and Kai felt as though his insides were being wrenched in six directions at once. Using this Gate was much less pleasant than the normal process, but it was necessary. Kai forced himself to ignore the pain.

Minutes or seconds later, gra.s.s formed under Kai's feet. The spinning lights and colors resolved into a line of trees, and the heavy air of the black staircase lightened into a fresh summer breeze.

When the world stopped spinning, Kai found himself standing in a clearing at the center of Latari Forest. He still held both hands on Mithra's hilt, and its tip dug two inches into the forest soil.

As soon as he recognized his surroundings, Kai wrenched his blade free of the ground and leaped forward. Once, this Gate had opened onto the center of an empty clearing. But that had been more than twenty-five years ago.

Since midsummer in the last year of Zakareth the Fifth's reign, the Gate had come out only paces away from a Hanging Tree.

Kai landed facing back the way he came, Mithra angled across his body, ready to face the savage roots and branches of the blood-red Ragnarus tree. Each time he had used this Gate in the past, he had been attacked in seconds.

This time, the Tree was eerily still. Sure, its red leaves whispered in the wind of another world, and its th.o.r.n.y branches clawed at the air in Simon's direction. But the Tree's attack was lazy and listless, not the savage a.s.sault Kai usually experienced. Even the rustling voice of the leaves was agonized, not hungry.

Kai's s.h.a.ggy hair fell into his face again, but he didn't bother to brush it away. He stared at the b.l.o.o.d.y Tree, and a shiver of fear ran down his spine.

The Hanging Tree was wounded.

A chunk of the Tree's trunk looked brown and dry, as if part of it had simply died. The leaves and roots on that side had shriveled, and were starting to blacken on the edges. Kai crept closer, still wary of an attack. But the Tree seemed blind on that side, letting Kai approach its scar without a whisper of protest.

He was no Ragnarus Traveler, but he had extensive experience with this particular Tree. He had been present at its birth, and he had spent most of his life in these woods. He had never seen it anything but violently healthy.

Other than a direct attack*which Kai would have detected long before it reached this deep into the Forest*only one thing could weaken a Hanging Tree. Starvation. The Tree must be feeding on itself.

Oh, Simon, Kai thought. What have you done?

Part of him knew he couldn't blame Simon, no matter how much he wanted to. He hadn't told the boy the full story, after all, and Kai had even prepared him to succeed. He had known the potential consequences, and his conscience had driven him to act anyway. But this possibility had always remained just that: a possibility. A slim, dark chance. He had never thought Simon could actually weaken this living prison enough to make a difference.

The earth shook.

Kai stumbled a step and had to catch himself before he fell. The crimson Tree trembled even more violently than the rest of the forest, waving its branches through the air in wild, silent protest.

"Master?" Kai whispered.

The ground shook again, ringing like a bell.

A crack bloomed on the scarred side of the Hanging Tree, splitting it from the ground up. It screamed silently, a sound like nails drilling into Kai's brain.

He decided that right then would be an excellent time to be back in the House. Even if the Wanderer did escape his prison, Valinhall was the one place he would never choose to enter.

Kai raised Mithra's tip to a point just above his head, reaching through the sword to his Territory. Maintaining his concentration*but keeping an eye on the wounded Tree*Kai carefully drew his blade down, sawing through the barrier between worlds.

Slowly, a tear formed, revealing the House's entry hall on the other side. Kai kept focused, but a seed of hope put down roots in his heart. It looked like he would make it after all.

A shadow detached itself from the darkness under the canopy of Latari Forest, drifting over to where Kai stood.

In his raspy voice, the Eldest spoke: "At last, we will have our master back."

Kai ignored him, continuing to open the Gate. He had to make it large enough, or it wouldn't stabilize. The ground rumbled again, shaking his concentration.

The Eldest drifted forward, standing just to the side of Kai's Gate. His black hood stared into Kai's face. "Once you refused me, a quarter-century gone. If you had taken up the sword then, all this could have been avoided."

Kai nodded toward his sword, with its line of gold gleaming down the center of the blade. "I have it now," he said. "Perhaps, for once, we can be friends." He had to stall just a few more seconds, so that he could finish the Gate. Already he could see the handful of gleaming blades hanging on their racks in the entry hall. Azura was among them.

The Eldest shook his hood. "I would have, once. But you are a coward. I will serve only a more worthy master."

Kai reached the gra.s.s, and drew his sword away. The Gate remained, a portal into Valinhall wide enough for him to walk through. Kai stepped forward.

Then he felt a sensation on his neck that he had almost forgotten: the feel of icy chains.