Tower of Winter (The Traveler's Gate Chronicles: Collection #1) (4 page)

The pain shooting down the right side of her body didn't matter. She had to keep him awake, aware, and alive until she could find a way to get him out of here.

"Both your parents are Travelers," Donia called.

Nikolos said nothing for so long that Donia's heart dropped, but he finally grunted in agreement.

"Did you never take the tests?"

"...every week since I was ten," Nikolos said. "They put me through every test known to mankind. I've spent the night in Asphodel gardens; I've had a Corvinus raven read my mind; I even hiked up a mountain in Ornheim."

"Not Helgard?" That would be surprising, considering that his father was one of the most skilled and powerful Helgard Travelers in the world.

Nikolos laughed for a moment, and then gasped in pain. Still, he forced his words out. "Oh yeah. Helgard more than anything. They forced me to keep an icefang as a pet for months, to see if I would bond with it. They didn't get rid of it until the third time it chased me up a bookshelf and wouldn't let me come down. Another time, they brought me to the edge of the Badari Desert, and gave me this little frozen goblet. They told me that, if Helgard accepted me, then the goblet would fill up with water, and I'd be fine. I passed out six hours in, and my father had to get an Avernus Traveler to fly me out."

"That sounds terrible," Donia said honestly. She had to keep him talking. The cold was starting to slice through even her, so she could only imagine how Nikolos must feel.

"It wasn't so bad," the boy said. "If I was a Helgard Traveler, then I could become Overlord after my father. Even if I Traveled a different Territory, at least I could do something worthwhile."

"It's not like Travelers are the only ones worth anything," Donia said. "Most people aren't Travelers, and they live perfectly productive lives."

"Yeah," Nikolos said, "let me just go and sell carpets for the rest of my life. That's just as good as calling fire from the sky."

He sighed. "Anyway," he went on, "what about you? Did your parents have you tested?" “Not exactly,” Donia responded. A real conversation, at last. Some part of her was convinced that, if they could just keep talking, everything would turn out all right.

“My mother works for the Seamstress Guild when she can, and my father serves in your household,” she said. “They couldn’t afford to give me a real test. And it would never have occurred to them anyway.”

“Hold on a moment,” Nikolos said. “Is Master Sarkis your father?”

Donia smiled, even though she knew no one could see her. The trust that Overlord Vasilios had for Donia’s father was one of the main reasons why she had been trusted with this mission in the first place. And the boy hadn’t even known who she really was.

“He is,” she said.

“Seven stones! I never knew.”

“Well, when I was twelve, your father sent a team of Helgard Travelers to our house, to live with my family while new quarters were constructed. This was a few years before you were born, by the way. One of the Travelers had an icefang with him, crawling along at his feet, and I decided to reach down and pet it.”

She could still see the creature: a clump of snow running along at its master’s heels like a dog, sparkling in the sunlight as if it were covered in diamonds. Something in her
had
to touch it, as though the icefang itself were calling to her.

“And you survived?” Nikolos sounded horrified.

“Instead of tearing my finger off, it hopped up on my shoulder and wouldn’t leave. Its Traveler couldn’t get it to come off all day.”

Nikolos stayed silent for a moment, then he burst out laughing. Out of instinct, she almost told him to be quiet, but what was the point? He couldn’t wake anything worse than what the Travelers outside were already calling up.

So she might as well keep talking.

“They took me to Helgard immediately for training, though I was still allowed to live with my parents. I spent most of the next fifteen years studying and learning. I wasn’t allowed full access to the Tower until a few years ago.”

In truth, most Helgard Travelers were never allowed to travel freely from floor to floor. They were restricted according to their ability, and most never progressed beyond a certain point.

“I wish I could be like you,” Nikolos said. "Even among Travelers, you stand out. You've got the talent. You've got the skill. I bet you could free yourself if I wasn't here, couldn't you?"

Maybe she could. It wasn't a sure thing, but if Nikolos hadn't been in danger, she would have rolled the dice already. As it was, she couldn't risk his life as easily as she could risk her own.

"It's not like that," Donia said.

"It's okay," Nikolos replied, and he sounded dreamy. Sleepy. "I've given up. You get out of here, you can do it. You'll be okay. My father needs you more...more than he needs..."

Nikolos' voice drifted off into indistinct murmurs.

"Nikolos?" Donia called. "Nikolos?"

No response.

She had to keep talking. Talking might keep him awake, might give him something to concentrate on. It might keep her awake, for that matter.

"It's not as easy as you think," she said. "They give me tasks they would never assign to anyone else, and they expect me to do it. They know I won't fail. So far, I haven't. Not until today. I'm the one who succeeds every time. What will they think when they hear that I've died?"

Donia let her voice ramble as she wondered out loud. "What
will
they think, when word gets out that I died in some random engagement on the sixteenth floor? Will anyone ever tell my parents? The rest of Helgard might have more to worry about soon. Maybe no one will ever know. Maybe I'll just be one casualty among many..."

She sat there as her voice died, letting the silent cold sink into her skin.

Outside, the cultists murmured their indistinct chants.

Something tickled at the back of Donia's mind, like a half-remembered dream mixed with a sound just out of hearing.

She strained to hear the whisper, to remember the thought.

In her mind, she reached out.

And a tumble of thoughts, ideas, and images blasted into her head, sitting her bolt upright despite the pain. It was more than a simple voice, in the same way that a wild forest fire was more than a single color, but somehow she understood.

Go on,
it said.

It wanted her to keep talking.

"Who are you?" she asked. On instinct, she glanced around, though of course she saw nothing but ice.

The voice responded.

It sounded almost like words; a string of a hundred syllables somehow shoved into her mind in the space of a heartbeat. But these words carried the image of ice, endless ice, a timeless winter, a green light, an impossibly ancient intelligence forced to sleep and kept from waking for countless thousand years...

...now, finally, roused from its dreams.

The rush of thoughts slammed into Donia's brain, leaving her panting, disoriented, trying to sort words from memories from ideas. It felt like she had managed to read an entire book in half a second, with every word shoved through her at the same time so that none of it made much sense. She only caught broad themes, and a few key facts, but something jumped out at her.

He's a Frozen One. I'm speaking with a Frozen One.

The ice rumbled beneath her feet, and the light far below flickered once more.

The thought triggered a wave of fear on pure reaction. She could barely fathom the nature of this thing, any more than she could understand the size of the Tower itself. What little she could piece together scared her more than anything she had ever seen in her Territory.

After a moment, her fear subsided, and rational thought caught up with her once more. The cultists outside had been trying to find and raise the Frozen One, but he had not come to them. He had come to her first.

She could use this.

"I need help," she said. "I'm trapped. Can you help us?"

She was more prepared, this time, as a rush of sensations flooded through her mind. Two strangers, meeting across a frozen plain. Two points as impossibly distant as the stars. An insect and an oak tree, discovering one another for the first time.

I do not know you,
he meant. And he was right.

For two beings in Helgard to call upon one another, they had to share not only names, but also the essence of who they truly were. Their histories, their personalities, their secrets. For something like an icefang, a creature of pure instinct, Donia only had to open herself a fraction. But something this intelligent, this powerful, this old...he would know her entirely. Every shameful secret, every painful admission, every stark truth of her personality. He would learn things about her that she had never known herself.

Even worse, she would learn about him in return.

Could she handle it?

Once more, Donia pictured herself as others saw her: strong, competent, unfailing. She would not have hesitated to give her name to this frozen elder being, not if it meant rescuing an Overlord's son and destroying a danger to the Tower at the same time.

The real Donia had already hesitated, but that didn't mean it was too late to try.

She took a deep breath.

"My name is Donia Sarkis," she said, and she filled the name with more than just sound. She released her dreams, her ambitions, her hobbies, her fears, using them to add texture to the name until it meant all that was her.

The Frozen One heard her name.

And he heard far more than she had ever meant to say.

She wasn't the best choice to send on the mission with Nikolos, and she knew it. She hadn't told the Overlord because this was her chance to look better in his eyes with very little effort. She remembered, and the Frozen One learned.

Three years before, on Helgard's eighth floor, she had seen a pack of snow bats tear into an Enosh Traveler. She was only twenty yards away, and had tamed a snow bat of her own, and she could have saved him. She was supposed to; all Travelers of Helgard should look out for each other. But she had been afraid of failure, afraid of calling the bats down on herself. And he was from Enosh, after all. No one would blame her. She had stood there, watching his blood stain the snow, frozen. She made no decision, and he died.

The Frozen One learned.

As a student in Helgard, Donia had only one rival. Another girl who, despite an almost pathetic lack of ability to bond with any of Helgard's creatures or powers, still managed to out-score Donia in every test. One night, Donia snuck in and tore random pages out of her rival's textbook.

The Frozen One learned the worst of her. He learned things that she had forgotten, that she had pushed out of her memory because they were too embarrassing or painful. He learned the best of her, too: the time when she spoke with Overlord Vasilios and secretly negotiated her father's promotion. The time she had saved a crippled
mirka
and nursed it back to health, releasing it into the wilds of the fourth floor before it was returned to pulling carts on the second.

Finally, after an endless instant, the Frozen One had learned everything about her. She sagged back against the ice, as exhausted as if she had just slogged a mile through hip-deep snow. She wanted nothing more than to let the cold lull her to sleep.

She wasn't prepared when the Frozen One shared his name in return.

It was a thousand syllables pronounced in a second, impossible to memorize, and yet somehow burned into her brain.

The name carried a poem of meaning in each breath: this being was a cog in the wheel of creation and destruction, an agent of change, a lonely force with the job of keeping nature in flux. The Tower of Winter was built around him, locking him in place, robbing him of meaning and power and purpose.

Him and a hundred like him.

He wanted nothing more than to return to his place in his own world. That need burned in him, hotter than a star, more insistent than gravity. But he knew that his world was long dead, and only the Tower was left, drifting in time on an empty sea.

Another time, Donia would have been fascinated by these concepts. Here was a being that understood, really comprehended, the nature of the Territories. Or one Territory in specific, at least. And she was sharing his memories.

Another time, she would have given anything for the opportunity to study the Frozen One's thoughts. But at that time, she struggled just to stay conscious.

The Frozen One's story continued until she felt as though she had aged to death, been born again, and aged once more.
 

Then it stopped, and she found herself back in the ice, where she had started.

Her thoughts were torn to shreds, like a child shredding a sheet of paper into a thousand pieces and scattering it all over the floor.

Nikolos,
she thought, but for a moment she couldn't remember who he was or why he was important.

It's cold.
Why was that bad?

My ribs hurt. I'm in danger.
The Tower would go on long after her body died. It would drift, stuck between reality, never to end because it existed in a place without beginnings or endings...

What would you ask of me, Donia Sarkis?
the Frozen One rumbled.
The sleep calls to me. I must rest again soon. Before I do, I want to see something change.

Donia looked down at the ice, completely unsurprised to see a face watching her in return. The eye alone was bigger than she was, set in a rough, craggy, mostly human face somehow leeched of all color. The green light glowed, far below.

His voice was no longer too much to bear. Compared to the thunder of hearing his name, his usual speech was nothing more than a bumblebee's whisper.

"Release me," Donia said. "Save the boy."

Then she whispered one long name.

With a thunderous crack, the ice split beneath her. The huge chunks and boulders of ice that had surrounded her whisked away, hurtled into the distance as though they had been thrown from a catapult.

A single hit from any of those flying bits of ice would have torn chunks out of her flesh. She felt no fear.