by Wight, Will
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.
The black hood raised to study Simon, facing him more directly than any of his kind had faced him before, but the deep shadows hiding its face remained solid.
The old Nye drifted forward slowly, as though he had no feet under his robes. “Your master has left you, and you
stand alone in a house of shadows.” His speech was odd, as if he had learned to speak far away or long ago. “Yet you seek us in the darkness.”
“You came to me first,” Simon said. He tried to rekindle the spark of his earlier anger, but fear was a cold wind that kept anger from catching.
The old Nye shrugged with one shoulder, and the rustle of cloth was louder than it should have been, as though many layers of clothes had shifted beneath that black cloak. He did not stop moving forward, though his progress was slow. Simon took a hesitant step back.
“We simply test you,” the Nye said. “You seek us with rage in your heart, try to find us in our homes.” Abruptly the light from the paper screens dimmed, as though a candle within had flickered on the verge of going out. In seconds the room was darker than a moonless night. Terror took control of Simon’s limbs, moving him like a puppet, swinging the sword in random defensive arcs. His blow stopped suddenly as his wrist hit something soft but unyielding, like a steel bar wrapped in thick wool. And then total darkness swallowed his vision.
For a wild instant he thought the light had failed entirely, but the truth was almost worse: the old Nye stood a fraction of an inch in front of Simon’s face, one hand locking Simon’s wrist in place as if it had been rooted in stone. Standing straight, the man of shadows was almost Simon’s height, and Simon could smell dust and ash on the cool wind that flowed from its hood. If the Nye had a face, Simon couldn’t tell. Perhaps the darkness was his face.
Simon stood frozen, afraid to fight, afraid to back away. The Nye spoke again, and once again it sounded as if his grating whisper came from behind Simon instead of just in front.
“We do not leave our home undefended,” he said. “Do not mistake our tests for true attempts on your life. If we should want your life, Simon son of Kalman, it would be ours.”
The Nye released him then, but did not move. He stood as if waiting for some response. Simon took a step back, and then, just to be safe, another. A thought struck him.
“My father’s name. How did you know my father’s name? I never told Kai that.”
The old Nye’s chuckle sounded like sheets snapping in the wind. “There is little I cannot find out, son of Kalman, if I have a mind to know it. And a reason.”
The old Nye hunched over again, folding his arms as if collapsing in on himself. Simon sensed that it was his turn to speak.
“What reason did you have to learn about me?” he asked.
The Nye paused, eyeing Simon, then nodded.
“Come with me,” he whispered. “You will learn.”
The two Nye guards—Simon had almost forgotten they were there, as the old one spoke—unfolded themselves from the floor at their elder’s words and began walking. The elder followed them down one of the hallways.
Confused, not sure what to expect, Simon hurried after.
***
Facing the shining walls of Elysia, which stretched at least fifteen paces over his head, Alin decided that he should probably try and find his way inside.
He had just begun to walk forward, through the grassy field outside Elysia’s walls, when he heard an echoing, powerful noise, like a dog’s bark mixed with the ring of a huge bell. He froze in place, trying to look everywhere at once for the source of the noise.
It didn’t take him long to find the culprit: a huge white-furred dog, bound in armor that looked like it was made of gold, leaped and bounded to him over the grass. It barked again, with the ear-splitting sound of a pealing bell, and rushed toward him. Even from ten paces away, Alin could see that its eyes were a bright, almost disturbing shade of blue.
Alin backed up, hoping the dog would stop, but it just kept running toward him. He turned to run, but as he did, the dog leaped forward and slammed him to the ground.
After spending several seconds struggling and crying for help, Alin realized that the dog wasn’t trying to eat him. It was quite friendly, actually, licking him all over the face and wagging its tail furiously.
He was suddenly very glad that no one had followed him through the Gate.
“You’re not dangerous at all, are you?” Alin said, in that voice people always got when they were speaking to dogs. He rubbed the animal’s white fur, in between its armored plates.
The dog barked in response, and from that distance, the sound nearly burst Alin’s ear.
“Okay, let’s try and keep you quiet,” Alin said. He used a low voice, hoping that would inspire the dog. “What’s your name?” Alin asked.
“Keanos,” a woman’s voice responded. Involuntarily, Alin’s head jerked back in surprise. He glanced around from his position lying on the grass, but saw no one else.
“Are you talking?” Alin said to the dog.
“Yes,” the voice responded.
How was that possible? Sure, this was a Territory, where all sorts of magical things were supposed to happen, but the dog’s lips weren’t even moving.
“Huh.” Alin took a discreet glance between the dog’s legs. “I, uh, thought you were a male.”
A woman leaned over him, above the dog standing on his chest. Bright yellow hair fell to brush his face.
She wore a huge grin. “Did you think the dog was talking?” she asked.
Alin scrambled out from under the gold-armored animal so fast he almost burned himself on the grass. “I’m sorry,” he said hurriedly, trying to brush off his clothes. “I didn’t know anyone else is here.”
She laughed, and Alin got a better look at her. She was maybe a few years older than he, pretty in an innocent sort of way. She wore a long white dress, belted in the middle with a gold-colored sash, and her eyes were gold. Gold. Not hazel or a shade of brown or any color he’d ever seen before, but a metallic gold that seemed to shine in the light.
That shocked Alin more than it probably should have. Remember where you are, he reminded himself.
“I am Alin, son of Torin,” he said politely. “And your name was...Keanos?”
The woman chuckled again, and—to Alin’s brief shock—levitated a few inches above the ground. “No, the dog’s name is Keanos.”
Keanos let out another deafening bark.
“My name is Rhalia.” She floated up until she stood on the air five feet above the ground, and swept him an elegant bow.
Alin glanced away, worried that he might accidentally see up her dress. More honestly, he worried that she might think he was trying to see up her dress. “Uh, nice to meet you, Rhalia.”
“You’re a Traveler, right?” Rhalia asked, settling herself down to a more reasonable level. “Great! Then let’s Travel. Do you know how Traveling works?”
“Not...exactly,” Alin admitted.
“Okay, no problem. Here it is: you explore your Territory. The closer your bond to something, the easier you’ll be able to summon it. But thinking people need to give you their consent, and animals need to obey you, either out of fear or loyalty. Isn’t that right, Keanos?”
Keanos barked again, the sound echoing like bells off of Elysia’s walls.
“And that’s it!” Rhalia said, flourishing one arm. “That’s Traveling. I like your hair. It looks like mine, only darker.”
“Thank you,” Alin said. He got the feeling she was vastly oversimplifying Traveling. For one thing, she made it sound safe.
“Now, let’s go!” Rhalia said. She flew toward the city gates, her feet barely skimming the tips of the grass. Alin found that a little disorienting, but he hurried after her anyway.
If she was going to teach him to Travel, he’d do whatever he needed. And she sure wouldn’t tell him anything more if he just stood around and watched her fly off.
Rhalia stopped in front of the shining gates, hovering next to a silver-set emerald the size of her head. “After you!” she said happily.
Surely there was supposed to be more to it than this. Wasn’t she going to prepare him, teach him what to expect?
But, as Grandmaster Naraka had alre
ady told him, the only way to become a Traveler was to Travel. And he had a beautiful, shining city just waiting for him, ready to be explored.
Steadying his shaky nerves, Alin placed both hands against the gates of Elysia. His right hand rested on gold, his left hand on silver. Part of him realized that if he could come away with only a fraction of the wealth he saw here, he could buy the whole city of Enosh, with enough left over for Myria.
Alin stored that thought for later and pushed on the gates of Elysia.
The gates opened much easier than the Gate had earlier, swinging open on silent, well-oiled hinges.
Inside was a short tunnel of white stone, most likely leading all the way through the thick walls. He could be sure, because it twisted at enough of an angle to keep him from seeing the end, but the walls and floor were solid white, polished to a mirror finish. The hallway was lit by what seemed to be gold-framed torches, but instead of the rough orange of a natural fire, these blazed like golden stars. As a result of the unnatural light, the hallway sparkled as if it had been piled with gold coins.
Now this was Traveling. He could never have seen a sight like this back in the real world.
Alin started to walk forward, almost blinded by the sparkling lights of the hallway, before he noticed a small box of pure gold lying on the floor. The box was large enough to make a fine doghouse for Keanos, and carved all over with whirling symbols and decorations that made no sense to Alin. It sat on the ground just inside of the gates.
Alin looked at it curiously for a moment, trying to figure out what the box was doing there. Was it some kind of treasure chest? Should he open it?
“Duck!” Rhalia called.
The lid of the golden box popped open, and Alin threw himself to one side.
Just in time.
A thousand glowing golden arrows burst from the box, shooting through the open gates as if fired from a legion of bowmen. If Alin had remained standing, they would have certainly shredded him like knives through cheesecloth.