House of Blades (The Traveler's Gate Trilogy) (16 page)

At the edge of the plains, which dropped off into endless sky, Kai stopped. A door hung at the edge of the grassy plain. It was dark wood, marked with a candle and an open book, but the doorframe stood in emptiness. Surely it just opened up on air.
 

“You must try harder, Simon,” Kai said. “You wanted the fast way? You have it.” Then he drew Azura from empty air and swung at Simon’s chest.

It wasn’t the fastest blow Simon had seen his master deliver, but he was still forced to stumble several steps backward. By the time he caught himself and moved forward, Kai had already vanished through the doorway.
 

Desperately Simon grabbed the handle and twisted. Nothing. He pulled, pushed, straining against it despite the vertigo that insisted he was about to fall over an endless cliff.

The door was sealed shut. There really would be no appeal to Kai from now on.

He made his way back to the bed in the bedroom even more carefully than usual. He had feared for his life here in the Valinhall House; in fact, hardly a day went by when he wasn’t convinced he was going to die. But Kai had always been there, a silent support even when he abandoned Simon to one danger or another. Simon had always had the comforting idea that Kai would only push him into danger that he felt his student could handle.

And now Kai had left him alone. With the traps, the imps, the Nye, and who knew what else? With Kai gone, if Simon failed to beat Chaka too many times in a row, he might really starve to death. He supposed thirst would get him first, actually, unless he could drink his fill from the soapy water of the bathtub, but it hardly mattered. Something was going to kill him.

When Simon reached Kai’s sleeping quarters, he curled up on the floor next to the bed and turned his gaze to the wall.
 

He could stay here. As long as he could beat Chaka two out of three times, he would have all the food and water he needed. The entry room, bedroom, bathroom, and garden were relatively safe, and Simon could just live in this wing until Kai returned. But then he would fail.

He would have let his people down, and he would have left Alin to save their village on his own. But he would also have let Kai down, failed to meet his master’s expectation, and that mattered more to Simon than he would have thought.

But how?
He wondered.
How am I supposed to just get better all of a sudden?
He supposed that he could just redouble his training, sparring against Chaka and against the black armors in the basement, and steadily learn through effort. But to improve even a little would take time, and somehow Simon doubted that Kai would sit in the library, even assuming it was safe and comfortable, for six months waiting for Simon to improve. Besides, six months here would be three on the outside, and he might not have that long.

“Try harder,” Simon muttered. From his position on the floor, he kicked the post of the bed. His toes exploded with pain; he might as well have slammed his bare foot into a tree. The shoes he wore were only thin leather, crafted by the Nye while he slept. He decided not to care about the pain. He didn’t care either that kicking a bed was the action of a child.

Anger and frustration boiled up in him, seething underneath his thoughts. He had asked for the training, true, but his abuse had been ridiculous. And now his master abandoned him without even telling him what to do next.

He wanted to vent his emotions somewhere, so he stood up and lifted the mattress with both hands. He tried to flip it, but it was too heavy, and it ended up sliding pathetically to the ground.

That was both unsatisfying and somewhat embarrassing, though no one else was around to see. Fortunately.
 

He heard the faintest whisper of laughter coming from his left, but he ignored the dolls. Whispering all the time, driving people crazy. What gave them the right? Pulling a knife from a desk next to the bed—Kai always liked to have a weapon close to hand—he threw it at the wall.

Instead of sticking, as he intended, it hit hilt-first and clattered to the floor, doing no damage. The hints laughter from the dolls grew louder.
 

He grabbed a mirror from the wall and let out a yell of frustration as he slammed it to the ground.

The glass didn’t break. He flipped it over and stomped on his reflection a few times. Nothing.

Simon really could hear laughter now, though it sounded distant and somewhat warped, as though coming down a long hallway. His furious anger, matched now by embarrassment, made him want to grab the dolls and smash
them
next. He considered it for a moment, but discarded the idea. Even if the dolls themselves couldn’t hurt him—and he wasn’t entirely sure that was true—Kai might actually murder him if he found his beloved dolls broken.

Besides, he told himself, they couldn’t
really
be laughing at him. Right? He still couldn’t make up his mind whether the dolls were somehow magically animated or if his contact with Kai was somehow making him insane.

He sighed and slumped forward, head pressing against the bedpost. His frustration had only grown, but he felt so ridiculous trying to break things that his anger had faded. Still, what was he supposed to do?

He was staring down at his feet, one of which still rested on the unbroken mirror, so he caught a glimpse of a dark hood just an instant before the black chain went around his throat.

Simon’s anger flared back to life. He seized the Nye man’s wrists, which felt like squeezing a tightly packed bundle of laundry, and heaved it up and over his head. The Nye, lighter than a man of flesh, spun over Simon’s head and landed on his feet, though it twisted his arms badly.

Simon kicked the Nye down onto the spilled mattress and picked up his sword, which he had left resting next to his cot. According to Kai, the Nye couldn’t really be killed by a sword, and in fact they sought such injuries as badges of honor.
 

Finally, Simon had an outlet for his frustrations.

Simon’s first strike was parried by the Nye’s chain, and his second dodged. He tried again and again, pouring his frustration into every strike, until he had backed the hooded figure into a corner.

The Nye flipped the short chain like a whip and it crashed into Simon’s face, bringing a flair of pain like a hammer blow. But pain was just fuel for Simon’s anger now; he grabbed the chain in his left hand. With his right, he skewered the Nye against the wall.

The sword parted flesh that was just layers of black cloth, and pale moonlight flowed like blood. Before Simon’s eyes, the Nye began to dissolve into shadow and light, running out the cracks in the bedroom door.

Simon pulled his sword back without surprise; he had seen Nye defeated before. But this time he wasn’t satisfied with a shallow victory.

This time he followed the shadow.

The Nye flowed down the hall at the speed of a man running, passing through the hallway and into the round room with all the doors. The basement door, marked with a standing knight, stood to Simon’s left, the armory and the garden to the right, and the bathroom in front of him. He tensed, trying to guess which door the Nye would enter.
 

It spilled into the center of the room and stopped, a pool of silver-blue light and black cloth. Then it began to leak through a rug on the floor.

Simon ran over and pulled away the rug, revealing a trap door. Some people in the village had trap doors built into their roof, but Simon had never seen one go down into the ground. Maybe there was no ground here.

He grabbed a brass ring set into the trap door and pulled, revealing a ladder down into darkness. The Nye immediately braided itself into a rope of light and shadow, swirling down one leg of the ladder like a snake sliding down a tree branch.

Simon hesitated for a moment, fearing to step deeper into an unknown room, but his anger made him stubborn. Someone was going to give him some answers, and if he had his way, it was going to be the Nye.

He slid his sword into his belt, careful not to cut himself, and climbed down the ladder.

The ladder was short, or at least it didn’t take him long to reach the floor. The bottom was dimly lit, barely enough for Simon to see, though the floor sounded like wood. This gave him one advantage: he could easily make out the glowing form of the Nye, steadily snaking his way back into the darkness.

Before he could think too much about it, Simon followed.

As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Simon began to make out his surroundings: he was in a long room that appeared to be filled with junk and furniture, though he could barely see any details in the darkness. Everything had been covered with sheets of black cloth. Some of it drifted slightly as he passed, even pieces that were too far away to be disturbed by the wind of his passage. Simon’s fear grew, and he shot a glance back to make sure he could see the glow of the open trap door high in the back of the room. Just in case.

Finally the Nye turned a corner, and Simon found himself facing the one well-lit location in this entire black dungeon: four free-standing paper screens, arranged in a box, standing out from the walls. As though someone had built a room out of paper inside the room. The paper screens were painted with pictures of plants and birds, and they were lit from within by the cheery glow of real candles. After Simon’s march through darkness, it looked like sunlight.

There was one door in the paper walls, a sliding door on a wooden frame. It was guarded by two Nye, both with black chains a foot longer than any Simon had ever seen. Both guards were a head taller than Simon, identical except that one had a heavy weight on the end of his chain and the other had his tied into a noose.
 

Simon attacked immediately, cutting at the neck of the guard on the right. With impressive speed the Nye dropped to a crouch, whipping his chain at Simon’s ankles, and his partner flung the noose at Simon’s neck. They moved in unison, their empty hoods tracking Simon. Like all the Nye, their movements were both graceful and eerily silent, cloth and shadow brought to life.

Simon’s sword, single-edged and curved like Azura but less than half the length, batted the noose away, even as he leaped and twisted to avoid the chain at his ankles. The end of the heavy black chain clipped his foot. It bruised like a hammer through Simon’s thin shoes, and he landed awkwardly.
 

The noose fell next to his shoulder, completely harmless, but the guard holding it flicked his wrist, pulling back and readying another strike. Simon tried to stab at him while he withdrew, but his partner whipped the chain in a defensive circle, forcing Simon to pull his blade back just an inch, buying the Nye with the noose enough time to cast again.

Simon realized then that he would not be able to fight his way past. They were too fast, too skilled, and impossibly coordinated. They fought together like they had done so all their lives, and Simon wasn’t good enough to break their formation.

With that knowledge came a cold fear. In his frustration and anger he had almost forgotten his own meager abilities. How long had he been here, after all? A month? More? With no day or night it was hard to tell, but either way, his paltry training counted for nothing in this fight.

His surroundings closed in on him: here he was, deep in a room that Kai had never shown him, about to confront the Nye in their own lair. The Nye could kill him, and if he died here, no one would know it until they found his body. Perhaps they would never know; maybe the Nye would treat his rotting corpse as so much refuse and dispose of it as they cleaned.

The fear made his breath come even faster. He began to fight defensively, backing off instead of testing his opponents. He missed a block, moved a hair too slow to intercept one strike. A chain lash burned his ribs, and pain blossomed inside. Terror had him in his grip now, and he wondered if something inside him had ruptured.

They had steadily pushed him away from the paper screens, so that they had a little room to use their chains. The one with the noose paced in the background, spinning his chain in lazy loops, while his partner stood poised in front, chain held as if ready to throw. Simon felt bile rise in his throat, and his steady grip began to shake.

A harsh, grating whisper came from behind Simon. “So that is all you have? I hoped for more.”

Simon spun, spinning his blade in a neck-high arc as he did so. Briefly it occurred to him that the speaker might not be hostile, but that was laughable. Everything in Valinhall was hostile.

The sword whistled through the air, cutting nothing, but Simon completed the turn to face the other two again. He was sure they would have lunged to attack as soon as his attention was directed elsewhere, and his blade came up to deflect a chain. But they had not taken a step forward. In fact, they had each gone down on one knee, black hoods lowered and chains pressed against the hardwood floor.

Simon didn’t relax. It could be a trick, or—more disturbing—whoever was behind him could be so deadly that the two Nye had surrendered on sight. He twisted to keep both the Nye in sight and still see the room behind him.

He glanced behind him, just for an instant, and saw nothing in the darkness.

The harsh whisper came again, from so close behind him that Simon imagined he could feel cool breath on his neck. “Where do you look?”

Simon spun around again, sword clutched tightly in shaking hands, and this time he saw the speaker.

It was another of the Nye. But where most of them were identical, distinguishable only by size, this one gave the impression of great age. His outer robe was worn and faded almost to gray, frayed at the edges into tatters of cloth that fluttered when he moved. His sleeves were longer than most, and wide; it looked like there was enough fabric hanging over each of the Nye’s hands to sew Simon a new shirt. He kept each hand hidden in the opposite sleeve, and he was hunched over. Simon first thought that he was bowing over his arms and briefly considered a bow in return, but after a moment Simon recognized the look of an old man without a cane. Bent with age, then.