Tower of Winter (The Traveler's Gate Chronicles: Collection #1) (3 page)

Then she saw the dark stains, glistening against the black of their coats, and she had a disturbing thought.

Those coats wouldn't show bloodstains.

One of the figures stepped forward and spoke. His voice was cultured and educated, possibly a wealthy son raised at the heart of Cana. "I'm sorry for that. We can't be too wary out here, you know. We've heard rumors that there might be some Enosh Travelers around here, and we were not as careful as we should have been."

Blood dripped into Donia's eye, and she wiped it away so it wouldn't freeze her eye shut. Anger and fear warred for control.

"You're
sorry?"
she said. "You could have killed us! You nearly did! Give me one reason why I shouldn't report you to my Overlord. One!"

The lead figure bowed at the waist, inclining his head a fraction. "As I said, it was a misunderstanding. We have heard rumors—"

"We've heard some rumors ourselves, today," Donia said. Fear and anger were still having their match, but anger was leading by a head. "Who are you, and what is your business here?"

He paused, then glanced down at Lukis.

"Ah," he said at last. "Rumors. Yes, I imagine you might have heard a few. Well, I have nothing to hide. There is a being sealed in this floor known as a Frozen One. Perhaps more than a single individual. We are here to share our names, perhaps form a bond with this being, as has been the tradition in Helgard since time immemorial."

Casually, Donia slipped her left hand into her pocket, swiftly forming sign after sign. She would have to move quickly, when the time came, so it would be best to do as much of the preliminary work ahead of time as she could.

"And what about Outpost Sixteen?" Donia asked.

Nikolos edged around so that he was standing behind her. Wisely so, she thought.

The black-coated man shrugged. "Mistakes were made."

That was all.

"Well, I think," Donia began, and then before anyone could react, she shouted for her strongest ally.

She called him Rishla, for short, because his full name was fifteen syllables and required years of linguistic training to pronounce. He looked something like a furred serpent, or a long weasel, with pale tan fur and a dozen legs. He was fiercely loyal to her, devilishly intelligent, and one of the most powerful creatures she had ever encountered at the tower. More importantly to her right now, he would come at the sound of his nickname, said alongside the proper signs. She didn't have time to shout all fifteen syllables.

Well, he would normally come at the sound of his nickname.

Creatures of Helgard could hear their name spoken anywhere, especially by their bonded partner. Why wasn't he coming already?

More importantly...

Usually, a battle between Helgard Travelers was a match of who could make their signs and shout the words the most quickly. The three cultists should have been yelling like town criers and frantically twisting their fingers, but they did nothing.

Lukis barely managed to raise himself on one bloody arm, twisting to look at Donia.

"No!" he croaked. "Don't summon...not here."

Then he collapsed again, his strength evidently exhausted.

The black-coated speaker swept a hand in Lukis' direction. "You heard the man," he said. "But it seems like it's too late."

The light beneath the ice vanished entirely, for one disturbing second leaving the entire floor in complete darkness.

She heard a sound like a cross between a lion's roar and the tolling of an enormous bell.

One of the cultists who had previously remained silent started laughing.

"This floor is sealed by the power of the Frozen One," the speaker said. "We've managed to encourage that much cooperation, at least. Anything that tries to enter is met by his wrath."

Donia didn't respond. Not in words. She crossed the first two fingers of each hand and stuck them out, one to each side.

She spoke a key.

This time, the enemy Travelers sputtered their own keys and began raising their hands in signs. The speaker raised his hands and made a warding gesture, trying to get his key phrase in place.

He was too slow.

A gleaming crystal snowflake the size of a wagon wheel came hurtling out of the distance, spinning through the air, its edge sharp enough to cleave bone. It had formed itself from loose ice and snow, and she could now control its flight with the motion of her right hand.

She whipped her right hand forward to point at the cultist speaker, then brought her left hand in as well.

A second giant snowflake followed.

She didn't know any of the powers associated specifically with the sixteenth floor, but she could use this one anywhere. Very few people in the entire Tower could form two White Razors at once, much less so quickly.

Donia was counting on the surprise.

One cultist called up a burst of wind, blasting a single Razor from the air, but not before it could nick her in the leg. A second cultist dropped to his knees, letting the Razor fly over his head, straight at the speaker.

The speaker spoke the last syllable of his key and stumbled backwards. In front of him, the loose ice-shards rose into the air, forming into a blue-white wall.

The White Razor slammed into his ice-wall in a thunderous collision, sending chips of ice and a freezing wind flying in all directions.

Donia was already forming new signs, speaking the key to her next summons.

The cultists muttered along, doing the same.

Then Inspector Lukis picked his head up once more, thrusting a bloody fist at the ceiling.

He breathed out three final syllables, smiled, and collapsed with his face on the ice.

A crack echoed throughout the sixteenth floor, as though the world itself were breaking. Donia couldn't help but look up...and up...and up...

At the icicles on the ceiling. The icicles that could crush an entire village.

One of them, with its point directly above Lukis, started to fall.

It looked deceptively slow, she noticed, as though it would take ten minutes to reach the ground. And beautiful. It refracted the ambient light of the sixteenth floor with the thousand indescribable colors of the rainbow.

It didn't look anything like incalculable tons of ice rushing toward her at lethal speeds.

All of this flashed through her mind in a single instant, then she grabbed Nikolos' arm and hauled him along behind her, running recklessly over the icy surface. She didn't know which way she was going, and she didn't care a bit, so long as it was away from that mountainous hammer of ice.

Ordinarily, she would never have run over this ice. One slip on ice this irregular could mean death at the best of times, and now it certainly would. Mentally, she thanked her father for the gift of the new boots that he had sent her last Winter's End. She did not slip, and she did not look back. She just kept running.

For a few seconds.

She crested the rise of a frozen wave, dragging Nikolos behind her like a cart behind a horse. She jumped off and almost landed on another Traveler in a black coat.

He had fallen onto his backside, scrambling backwards, face locked on the descending icicle. Donia couldn't blame him. She vaguely noticed a half-dozen other figures, dressed the same as the first, all around her, and a huge red circle painted on the ice.

She would worry about all that after she survived. She kept running.

She made it a few more steps before the icicle hit, tossing her from her feet.

Donia slammed face-first into the ice, and the world went dark.

***

She woke to agonizing pain.

Donia's cheek, pressed against the ice, had begun to burn with the cold. She felt like she had been stabbed with a dozen knives, all up the right side of her body. Her hip sent up lances of pain when she tried to move, and it made a disturbing clicking sound.

Worse, she could barely move. She was trapped. Her breath came faster and faster as she rolled her eyes around, trying to see a way out. All she could see, by the light of the dim glow beneath her, was ice: chunks of ice pressed against her face, above her, beneath her, all around. She was buried alive.

The thought brought on a new wave of panic, and she instinctively tried to push herself up with her right hand. As soon as she leaned on her arm, pain shot through her as though someone had crushed every bone in the arm with a hammer.

She couldn't help herself. She screamed.

When her shout faded from her own ears, she realized she could hear voices. Not from far away, either; maybe she wasn't buried as deeply as she thought.

As loud as she could, Donia shouted for help.

Outside, someone cleared his throat. "Someone survived in there," he noted. Donia recognized the voice.

It was the cultist who had spoken earlier. And he wasn't alone; several others muttered along with him.

Just when she had thought things couldn't get any worse.

The thought of other people outside, not far away, actually calmed her down. For the first time, she managed to take a calm look at her surroundings.

Piles of ice, many the size of boulders, had fallen all around her. None of them rested on her directly, for which she was thankful. Several could have crushed her to death.

Upon further inspection, there were gaps here and there around her. She might even be able to lever herself into a sitting position.

Taking a deep breath, and ignoring her pain, Donia wriggled inch by inch up, so that she wouldn't have to lie trapped under the ice.

The speaker outside wouldn't shut up, though.

"Was it the lady who made it?" he called. "Do you have the boy with you?"

Donia was having trouble breathing through the pain, but the thought of Nikolos took the rest of the breath from her lungs.

Nikolos was most likely dead. She would have to face his father. Suddenly she wished that the collapsing pillar of ice had managed to crush her, too.

"Let me out and we'll talk about it," Donia managed to yell.

"Hmmm...no, I don't think I will," the speaker said cheerily. "Though you couldn't have been more of a help to us, really. All that blood and noise and power flying around. The Frozen One is stirring. He just needs one more push. I'm going to do you a favor; I'll allow you to be one of the first witnesses to the birth of a new Tower."

Donia had a little pride left, so she only screamed at them. She didn't threaten. She didn't beg.

But she was going to die buried alive under a thousand tons of ice; she felt she was due a little screaming.

She had heard nothing but her own shouts for so long that she almost didn't believe it when she heard another sound.

"Um," someone said. "Hello?"

It sounded scared. Vulnerable. Young.

"Nikolos?" she asked, barely willing to hope.

"Traveler Donia? Is that you?"

Donia felt more relief at the sound of Nikolos' voice than she would have ever expected. "Nikolos. You're safe. Are you hurt?"

"I don't know. I...I can't feel my legs." Panic entered the boy's words. "I can't feel my legs!"

It took Donia many long minutes to calm Nikolos down. She was nearly at the end of her road, but giving in to terror wouldn't help anyone. She told Nikolos so.

"They're outside," she told him. "I heard them. They're doing their ritual, and that gives us some time. I'll think of a plan, and as soon as we get an opportunity, I'll get us out of here."

"Okay," Nikolos said, gasping out the word. "Okay."

To her, waiting for an opportunity felt a little too much like doing nothing.

She could call up enough power to shift the ice, but doing so might destabilize the entire pile and crush her. Besides, she had no idea where Nikolos was. Anything she did might kill him. She had some bonded creatures who could dig her out, but her summons had failed earlier.

If she had to, she would try summoning every being of Helgard whose name she knew. She would keep it up until her voice failed her or something got through.

But she wasn't sure what had happened to Rishla when she had tried to summon him earlier. She wouldn't call anything else into an unknown danger until she had no other choice.

The cultists hadn't left. They still spoke with one another outside her frozen prison. Occasionally Donia heard a crunching footstep on the ice, or a single word made oddly clear. Some of them began to chant.

When she yelled, they ignored her. She shouted until her throat hurt and she started coughing, but she never got another response.

That left her sitting there with her injuries, propped up against the bitter cold of the ice. Even through her Helgard training and her thick coat, the chill of the ice seeped into her bones. She needed something to distract her from the cold and the pain.

Nikolos chose that moment to ask a question.

"Traveler Donia?"

"Hm?"

"What are they doing out there?" he asked. "What are the Frozen Ones?"

Donia thought back to her long years in the Helgard libraries, reading through the long history of myths and legends in the Tower of Winter. She had never taken the stories seriously, and comparative mythology was hardly her field, but some of it stuck.

"Stories," she said. "Very old stories."

"True ones?"

"Nobody knows. These Travelers outside obviously think so. There's a legend that says that Helgard was once part of a greater world. A world that was being torn apart by unimaginable beings of terror and rage. The men of that world built the Tower of Winter to freeze these things, to keep them asleep for all of time. Now, we call those beings the Frozen Ones."

"So the whole tower is nothing but a big icebox," Nikolos said.

"Right now, I can believe it," Donia replied, pulling her coat closer.

Outside, the chanting of the cultists grew louder. The light beneath her flickered.

Time passed, she wasn't sure quite how much, but Nikolos said nothing. Donia had seen people fall asleep and freeze, here in the Tower. They moved and spoke a little less, and then still less, and finally not at all. It was hard to notice the transition.

If that happened to Nikolos, she would never forgive herself. Forget what the Overlord would do to her; Nikolos was a fifteen-year-old boy, raised by over-indulgent parents, thrust in a situation for which he wasn't prepared. She was responsible for him, and she had put him here.