Tower of Winter (The Traveler's Gate Chronicles: Collection #1) (5 page)

Compared to
his
fear, still burning in her mind, her own was nothing.

She sat up, blinking around at the world. A circle of black-coated cultists stood a few yards away around a circle of red, stumbling backwards and pointing into the air at the flying ice. She looked in another direction, and saw Nikolos' blond hair lying almost at her feet. He had been so close all along.

His chest rose and fell, barely. Hope kindled once more in her chest, though it seemed a tiny, feeble thing, barely noticeable against
his
loneliness and despair.

But it was enough for her.

Donia turned her head and met the eyes of the nearest cultist.

"Well," he said, and she instantly recognized his cultured voice. "Well, well, well. That's an impressive showing, I know, but—"

Ice cracked beneath the bloody circle, and a huge body shifted beneath the ice. The black-dressed Travelers stumbled backwards. They pointed and started laughing. Some of them cheered in victory. The speaker turned around and rubbed his hands together.

"At last!" he cried.

Donia had the feeling that he was about to be drastically disappointed. She pointed.

"Him," she said.

With a sound like a collapsing barn, a blue-skinned fist big enough to grip a horse punched straight through the ice, sending black-coated Travelers flying.

Donia’s blood had frozen on her skin. Her vision was blurring, and her thoughts swirled with memories taken from the ancient titan. She wondered if she would survive this. Even if she did, would she be able to open up a Gate and take Nikolos home?

Whether we make it or not,
she thought,
we still won.
She supposed she had accomplished something great today, after all.

Pushing his way through the ice, the Frozen One rose.

To summon a creature of Helgard, you must understand its name, its nature, its very soul. To understand another, you first reveal yourself. To do so is painful, fraught with risk, and highly rare.

It is also the key to the Violet Light.

-Elysian Book of Virtues, Chapter 1: Violet

T
HE
F
EATHERED
P
LAINS

Loyalty is a fine attribute, though it is often misunderstood. Some interpret loyalty as nothing more than allegiance to a group or cause, but this is far from complete.

-Elysian Book of Virtues, Chapter 2: Orange

Denner had never liked Avernus. It was one of the safer Territories, but that only meant that it wasn’t
always
crawling with murderous specters and fire-breathing monsters, and it had plenty of water and fresh air. In Endross or Naraka, drinkable water was far more valuable than gold. As locations went, Avernus boasted some impressive scenery: waving plains, forests of impossibly tall trees, sharp-sided mountains like daggers of stone.
 

He wasn’t sure what it was about the Territory that irritated him so much. Probably the people.

Denner stood in a high-roofed tent that was lined with Avernus Travelers. Each of them wore some arrangement of buckskin or hide, decorated liberally with feathers. They clearly meant to imitate the Avernus Travelers of old, who had lived off the land in the Feathered Plains and only occasionally stepped out of their Territory.

Unfortunately, these modern Travelers got most of it wrong. One skinny fifteen-year-old kid wore a bear-tooth necklace—bears were not native to Avernus—and a wide-brimmed hat made out of felt. Another woman squinted at him through a pair of spectacles perched on her nose.

The end result was a tent full of people who looked like they had bought their costumes from a shady acting troupe.

Each of them had an owl.

One woman had a giant brown owl cradled in both her arms. Another man sported a fluffy black owl on one shoulder, and the woman next to him had a sleek white owl perched on the top of her head.

All the owls stared directly at Denner. He couldn’t escape their huge, unblinking eyes without walking out of the tent.

Maybe
this
was what he hated about Avernus. There was always a bird watching you.

The High Watcher of the Strigaia tribe sat at a desk directly in front of Denner. She reached up and adjusted the blindfold over her eyes.

“We believe the Halliat tribe has taken our young rebel in an attempt to use her powers against us. We have seen this future. If our rebel remains alive, then everything the Strigaia tribe has worked for all these years will count for nothing.”

Denner cleared his throat. “What
has
the Strigaia tribe worked for all these years?”

“Never mind that,” the High Watcher snapped. Her huge black owl glared at him from over her shoulder.

Denner’s over-sized, leather-bound book shifted under his arm. He pressed his arm tighter against his side, squeezing the covers together.

The book let out a little squawk, but it sounded enough like a bird that Denner hoped nobody noticed.

“Eliminate the rebel,” the High Watcher continued. “Bring proof of her death back to us. You will be compensated appropriately.”

She produced a leather purse and upended it on her desk, spreading gold coins across its surface.

“How dramatic,” Hariman said, from beneath Denner’s arm. Denner held the book tighter, wishing he would shut up for just another minute.

Several Avernus Travelers gave Denner odd looks, perhaps wondering how he could speak without moving his mouth. A couple of owls cocked their heads.

Denner barely noticed; he was staring at the gold. How many nights in a real bed would that buy him? He had been on the road for so long. He could always stay in his bedroom back in Valinhall, but that place had…unpleasant memories for him now. Like most of the others, he stayed away as much as he could.

“Do I have to kill her?” he asked at last.

The old woman raised an eyebrow, which looked decidedly odd behind her blindfold. “I thought I had hired a warrior of Valinhall, not an Asphodel Gardener.”

“You haven’t hired me yet,” Denner said, though the gold did look awfully tempting. It did bother him, though, that they simply assumed that as a Valinhall Traveler he would be comfortable with murdering some stranger. Was their reputation as bloody as all that?

“As it happens, yes, we do need her killed,” the High Watcher said. “Her sight is too dangerous to simply keep locked away.”

Denner scratched at the stubble on his cheek, debating. “If she can see the future, then I don’t see what hope I have of catching her by surprise.”

There were ways, in Valinhall, of evading visions and other forms of supernatural sight. But none that Denner could access on short notice.

The High Watcher waved her hand. “The sight is not such a convenient thing. I do not anticipate that you will have any trouble. We would catch her ourselves, if she were not so close to Halliat land. We are not a match for their eagles in open combat; only by foresight and preparation do we remain safe.”

“What makes you think that I’ll be any safer, then?” Denner asked.

“We wish to hire the best,” she said. “And we’ve heard you have something of a specialty in this area.”

Under Denner’s arm, Hariman cackled.

Everyone was staring at the book now, even the blind High Watcher.

“Is your book talking?” she finally asked.

Now, how does she know he’s a book?
Denner wondered. Out loud, he said, “Getting him to talk is no problem. It’s getting him to stop that’s the trick.”
 

Inwardly, he debated for a few more moments. Then he sighed. He was just putting off the inevitable.

“Where do I find her?” he asked.

The High Watcher smiled, just a little, and gave him specific directions. So specific, in fact, that they must have been watching the rebel from afar. Were they sending birds to spy out the land? Or were their powers of clairvoyance that formidable?

“She has short brown hair,” the old woman said. “She will try to stab you at your first meeting. And she will not be wearing the proper uniform of a Strigaia tribe Traveler.”

Denner took that to mean that she wouldn’t be dressed like a novice actor in a cheap city play. He bowed to the Watcher. “I will keep you informed,” he said, and then turned to walk out.

Hariman’s fussy voice interrupted his exit. “I can’t help but ponder the irony inherent in calling a blind woman the ‘High Watcher.’ Aren’t you rubbing her nose in it a bit too much? Or is it that she’s less manipulative and short-sighted than the rest of your—”

Whatever else the book was about to say was cut off as Denner picked him up and squeezed him between both palms.

Denner offered a shaky grin to the room of insulted Strigaia tribe Avernus Travelers.

“Books, right?” he said, trying to laugh. “You can’t take them too seriously.”

***

Hours later, Hariman was making up for the time he had spent silent by chattering non-stop.

“…so you see, the term ‘Feathered Plains’ is actually a misnomer! The first Travelers to return only saw plains, so they assumed that the entire Territory was nothing but a vast stretch of rolling grassland! Naturally, that’s not the case, as was proven by the scholars—”

“We’re proving it right now,” Denner interrupted. He pushed a branch away from his face. “These obviously aren’t plains.”

“Tut-tut,” Hariman said. “Never mistake subjective experience for proper objective proof. It took years of cartography and observation to finally determine that the ecosystem of Avernus is so varied!”

“That, or a single Traveler with open eyes.”

The forest around them had everything Denner would have expected in ordinary, mundane woods: blooming trees, a green canopy, a carpet of fallen leaves, scattered underbrush. But everything here seemed to be scaled for giants.

The fallen leaves were the size of bedsheets, the berries on nearby bushes bigger than Denner’s head. The trunks of the thinnest trees were wider around than a ballroom, and the canopy was so far overhead that the leaves might as well have been a green, sun-dappled sky.

The branches that Denner pushed away from his face were attached to bushes the size of ordinary trees. On the scale of this forest, they might have been weeds.

“At least they got the ‘feathered’ part right,” Denner said. He meant it idly, but he knew Hariman would respond. Hariman never passed up the opportunity to lecture.

“Yes, indeed they did!” Hariman said brightly. “Every observed animal native to Avernus is some kind of bird. There are the birds of the five main tribes, of course, but thousands of others, many of which remain undocumented even today! What an exciting Territory this is!”

A swarm of small, blurring forms the size of mosquitoes flew out of a nearby bush, pausing to hover in a flock over Denner’s head. As he got a closer look, he realized that they weren’t bugs at all, but some kind of tiny black hummingbird.

Something rustled the leaves of the canopy overhead, and Denner craned his neck to look up. High above, a beaked head pushed its way down through the leaves. Its feathers were the color of flame, and its beak looked long and sharp enough to stab through bear hide. It cracked its beak and let out a ‘caw’ that actually shook the ground under Denner’s feet.

The ambient noise that usually filled the forest, the chirps and songs and rustling of leaves and feathers, went suddenly silent.

The giant bird at the top of the forest glanced around, then slowly withdrew its head. Its beak slid slowly out of sight, like a dorsal fin disappearing under the ocean.

“Hariman,” Denner muttered, “how big do you think that thing was?”

“At this distance?” Hariman asked, making no effort to keep his voice down. “It’s hard to say. How are we to know how far away those leaves are? More than big enough to swallow you whole, that’s for sure. If only Manyu was around, I’m sure he could tell us precisely.”

“That’s okay,” Denner said wearily. “I don’t need to know any more precisely than that.”

Maybe Avernus wasn’t as safe as he’d thought.

Hariman’s gold face, engraved on his front cover, squinted off into the distance. “I thought you might want to know,” he said, “that we are about to cross over into Halliat lands.”

“How do you know?”

“Those feathers, on that tree next to the red bush.”

Denner looked, and saw a bundle of white feathers nailed to the bark.

Hariman chattered on, “Three feathers, the middle one reversed, means that—”

Something caught the edge of Denner’s hearing, and he clapped a hand over Hariman’s face.

In his mind, he reached out to Valinhall, to a stone tablet engraved with the stylized image of an eye.

He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them, he saw the world through a red haze. The forest floor was dull, almost rusty, while the trees had veins of ruby running through them. The birds, hidden in the underbrush, were brighter still.

From past experience, he knew that the symbol of an eye—an exact match to the image on the tablet—would have appeared in the center of his forehead. His would be drawn in red light, which he supposed explained why he saw the whole world in red every time he called the third eye. Valin’s had been purple, and if he remembered correctly, Kathrin’s was blue.

Denner slowly turned his head, scanning the woods; turning too quickly would give him a splitting headache. After only a few seconds, he spotted what he was looking for: a mass of bright red, seething light.
 

As best he understood it, the third eye allowed him to see life. The more energy a living being had, the brighter they showed up. Plants were dull, and lifeless stone all but invisible, though humans blazed like stars.

A human like the one trying to hide herself behind a nearby tree.

Denner banished the third eye. He could have held onto it longer, but it would take five or six hours to recharge already, and the longer he held it the more time it would take to return. Besides, banishing the eye always gave him a splitting headache, and he wanted to get over the pain as much as he could before this woman tried to ambush him.