by Wight, Will
She didn’t know how she made it—the iridian river seemed to crawl forward an inch at a time—but she eventually covered the fifty paces to the island.
She had imagined setting her floating platform down, reaching out to the girl in green, and then the both of them flying gracefully back to the mountain.
Instead, she let herself crash to the island’s surface, the glittering golden sand drifting off like smoke to spiral through the air once more. Every muscle in her body hurt, as though she had run for days while carrying a sack full of stones.
Sweaty, shaking, and lying flat against the rock, Chloe barely managed to speak. “I’m here…to…get you.”
The girl measured Chloe with dark eyes, and then looked back up at the escaping sand. “Do you have more of that?”
Between labored breaths, Chloe shook her head.
“Then it seems we’re both stuck,” the girl said. “Unless you have a golem nearby. Or some other plan I haven’t thought of.”
She didn’t seem nearly as panicked as Chloe thought she should be in this situation. Nor as grateful as she’d hoped. “I thought…you would be…scared.”
The other girl thought about that for a moment. “My mother wouldn’t be scared. She would say that was a waste of time.”
Chloe had finally started to get her breathing back under control. “Your mother would get along well with my grandfather, I think. I’m Chloe.”
“Deborah, daughter of Deborah.”
Deborah inclined her head formally, and Chloe did the same. As best she could while remaining face-to-face with the stone, anyway.
A shadow passed overhead, and Chloe knew it had to be their pink-hued moon. She raised one hand and pointed. “That’s going to crash into us at some point.”
Deborah followed Chloe’s finger up. “I had hoped I was imagining that. Well, no use waiting for it to happen. Maybe, if we work together, we can call that iridian back.”
“Not me,” Chloe said. “It’s too far away, and I’m too tired from making it all the way over here. It would kill me.”
In truth, Chloe would try it if she had to, but she wasn’t exaggerating when she said it would kill her. In her current condition, she was sure that the iridian would simply slip from her grasp and drop her.
Deborah patted the stone on which she sat. “There’s plenty of skystone here. But it’s way too deep to do us any good.”
Chloe pressed her own palm against the rock and listened to the voice of the stone. It passed through her like a wave of distant whispers.
There was indeed a vast network of skystone here, as she had expected. Deborah was right, though; there was no way to pull even a single chunk of skystone up through such solid rock.
“We don’t need a piece of skystone,” Chloe said. “We just need to use what’s already here. We can fly the whole island.”
Deborah glanced over at the mountain, which seemed much farther away from this side. Skepticism was evident on her face. “Even if we can activate that much skystone, I can’t steer it.”
“I can.” Probably.
“Really?” Deborah’s eyebrows raised. “Are you sure?”
“Absolutely,” Chloe said. Assuming it’s exactly like a theoretical iridian bird.
In true Ornheim fashion, the two Travelers didn’t act immediately. They sat there, waiting, for over half an hour. Partially, Chloe wanted to regain her strength before she tried activating and controlling whole veins of skystone. She also wanted to give her grandfather time to show up and stage a miraculously timed rescue.
After half an hour, though, neither of them could deny it any longer: the chunk of quartz was getting closer. Even now, if they timed the activation badly and lifted the island too quickly, they would slam themselves against the quartz prematurely.
“Seems like this is the time,” Deborah said, as though she had simply checked a clock. She knelt, placing both palms flat against the rock.
Chloe didn’t have to imitate the other girl’s pose, but she did so anyway. It seemed like a good position for speaking with the stone. “Ready when you are,” she said, hoping it was true.
She let her mind drift down into the jagged roots of the floating island, seeking skystone. The blue stone webbed the inside of the inverted mountain, filling the ordinary rock like a bright blue skeleton.
When the quartz passed by overhead once more, Deborah flared the skystone. The veins flashed blue in Chloe’s mind, and the island jerked upwards.
No, not like that, Chloe thought. More like…
She sent herself down, into the rock, and activated the skystone on the far side of the island. It flared to life, pushing them forward and slightly up. They drifted closer to the mountain on their own momentum, now; they might come in a little high, but Chloe would be more than willing to risk a broken leg by jumping down rather than a broken spine by falling.
“Above!” Deborah shouted. Chloe jerked her head up to see the barn-sized star of rose quartz flying down at them like a colossal hammer.
Together, the two young Travelers flared the skystone so hard that they blasted toward the mountain, barely scraping by the quartz in time to avoid a titanic collision.
And they were headed straight for the side of the mountain.
Desperately, Chloe flared the skystone closest to the mountain, trying to slow them to a safe speed. Deborah, on the other hand, had a different idea: she was trying to bring them higher, apparently so that they could float safely over the peak.
Chloe felt that it would have worked out much better if they had worked together instead of moving in two different directions, but it certainly could have been worse. Their island came to rest above Chloe’s mountain, hovering exactly over the highest peak.
“It worked!” Chloe said, her voice filled with relief and exhilaration.
“Yes it did,” Deborah agreed, in much the same sound as a sigh of relief. “Now, how do we get down?”
***
Deborah, as it turned out, was the daughter of the current Overlord.
During the two or three hours they had spent trapped on the same floating island, Chloe had never thought to ask Deborah where she lived. She had simply assumed that Deborah was one of the many deserters that Enosh received from the Damascan villages.
Grandmaster Ornheim, once he found and rescued them, had known exactly what questions to ask. In short order, and with impeccable manners, he had figured out precisely who ‘Deborah, daughter of Deborah’ was.
When Chloe first heard the news, her first reaction was confusion. How could Deborah be an enemy? Chloe had just risked her life to rescue her. Her second reaction was fear; surely, Grandmaster Ornheim would hold the young Deborah hostage against her mother’s behavior. That was, if he didn’t execute her outright.
Instead, Chloe’s grandfather sent a sapphire messenger golem to tell the Overlord what had happened, and to offer her daughter back.
When the Overlord and her entourage arrived, full of gratitude and words of friendship, Grandmaster Ornheim let out the longest speech he had delivered in weeks.
He had been holding back, Chloe could tell.
Within the lecture, he had a lot to say about the great Cycle, about what it meant to be an Ornheim Traveler, and, of course, about stone. Chloe’s grandfather could never say more than three words together without talking about stone.
She was just considering sneaking off when the sound of her name brought her back to her senses.
“...Chloe has always had a problem with waiting. ‘Listen,’ I always tell her. ‘Watch. Be still and think.’ These are good lessons, but there are other things worth learning as well. Things that she teaches me.”
Chloe frowned. She couldn’t remember ever teaching her grandfather anything in her life.
“She reminds me that certain situations call for action, not preparation. We can’t always be perfectly informed or absolutely prepared. Sometimes, we simply have to act. There are times when I forget that. If anything, tod
ay’s events have shown us why we can’t always wait for an opportunity. Every once in a while, we must seize whatever chance we can, and hope for the best.”
Grandmaster Ornheim turned toward Chloe, a broad smile splitting his beard in half. “For if we don’t act when we need to,” her grandfather said, “then what were we waiting for in the first place?”
…but sometimes, there is no time for waiting.
-Elysian Book of Virtues, Chapter 5: Green
THE STEEL LABYRINTH
Humility is the lesson you should learn in Tartarus. To truly work as a unit, you must suppress your selfish pride, and no Territory teaches this lesson better than the Steel Labyrinth. There is no such thing as a lone Traveler of Tartarus.
-Elysian Book of Virtues, Chapter 6: Red
296th Year of the Damascan Calendar
2nd Year in the Reign of Queen Deianira III
12 Days Until Spring’s End
Everywhere Valin looked, he saw swords. The tiles in the floor were made of a thousand blades, hammered flat in an interlocking pattern. From the ceiling hung a forest of sharp metal, honed to a razor’s edge. Each wall bristled with hundreds of needle-tipped knifepoints.
And the three Travelers standing in front of him each had a sword pointed straight at his chest.
The young woman in the middle was in her mid-twenties, roughly Valin’s age, and the patch on her uniform indicated that she was a lieutenant in some Overlord’s private army. Her right eye was covered in a black patch, and she had her long hair tied behind her back.
“State your name, your rank, and your allegiance. Keep your hands away from your weapon.”
Casually, Valin rested a hand on his sword’s hilt. “Aren’t Damascan soldiers supposed to keep their hair short? It’s not like I care, but I thought it was regulation.”
According to Deianira, Valin had three bad habits.
His first was that he talked far too much, even in situations where he should just keep his mouth shut.
The lieutenant’s grip tightened, and she took a threatening step forward. “If you do not state your name and allegiance, then I have no choice but to treat you as an agent of Enosh and deal with you accordingly.”
To either side of her, her fellow Tartarus Travelers spread out to keep Valin encircled.
Valin tried to keep his face serious, he really did, but he couldn’t help a small smile. “Out of curiosity, how would you treat me if I were an agent of Enosh?”
Another bad habit: he taunted his opponents. He didn’t have to, he supposed, but it was so easy. Everyone took combat so seriously all the time; just because it was a matter of life-and-death didn’t mean you couldn’t have a little fun with it.
A hand brushed Valin’s shoulder as one of the soldiers tried to seize his sword arm. He should have moved faster.
That brought to mind Valin’s third habit, and the one that came up most often. He loved a good fight, so he started as many as possible. More than he should, to tell the truth, but he saw himself as a helpless prisoner of his own impulses. Nothing got his blood up quite like a good brawl.
As a way of keeping himself in line, he always tried to wait until the other guy threw the first punch. No one had punched him this time, but surely grabbing him was just as bad. They wanted to take Valin prisoner as a suspected killer from Enosh, and then how would he do his job?
Valin’s elbow crunched into the soldier’s nose. Warm blood spurted onto Valin’s arm, and the Traveler let out a shout of pain.
“If I really were from Enosh, that would have been a knife,” Valin said. “Did you really think it was a good idea to try and grab someone you thought was a dangerous assassin? Where did you learn that?”
The lieutenant seemed stunned for a second—in Valin’s experience, people often reacted that way when he chatted casually in the middle of a fight—but she recovered quickly. While Valin was still talking, she lunged, her sword-point leading the way.
It was exactly the move they taught Damascan twelve-year-olds in their first year of fencing school. Valin slapped the sword away with the back of his hand and stepped forward, grabbing the Traveler by her collar.
“Stab, you’re dead,” Valin said. “You’re a Tartarus Traveler in the Labyrinth. Surely you can do better than that.”
He shoved her backwards and she stumbled, barely managing to keep her feet. The third of the trio had raised his sword, but he changed his mind and knelt, pressing a hand to the metal floor of the Steel Labyrinth.
A hissing sound echoed through the hall as the mysterious mechanical contraptions of this Territory whirred to life.
Valin’s smile widened. “See? There we go.”
With a sound like a sail snapping in the wind, half a dozen spears launched from the far end of the hall, flying straight for Valin. They passed harmlessly around the three Tartarus Travelers; Valin almost thought one of the spears actually corrected itself in mid-flight to avoid the lieutenant.
In the split second it took the spears to reach him, Valin had his sword drawn. It was a standard Damascan longsword, forged for him by the best smiths in Cana. Deianira had bought it for him only a couple of months ago as a Winter’s End present.
He only hoped that it wouldn’t break.
The first spear reached his right leg, and he barely stepped out of the way in time. The second he had to kick out of the air. The third, he dodged by leaning to the right, and the fourth simply missed.
The fifth and sixth spears flew true, and he didn’t have the time to dodge. With both hands on the hilt, he brought his sword crashing onto the first spear, striking it down with a shower of sparks. Without a second to pause, he swept his blade to the right, knocking the final spear off-course and sending it spinning in midair. The butt of the spear smacked into his ribs, but without enough force to do any actual damage.
The spears clattered to the sword-patterned floor in a crash of falling metal.
Valin slid his sword back into its sheath. “Now that was a rush! I’ll have to come back here. Good practice.”
His heart pounded with exhilaration, and at last he felt the old fire in his blood. It was all too rare these days that something challenged him.
After a second, he realized that the three Travelers were still on the ground. They weren’t unconscious, were they? He didn’t think he had hit any of them that hard.
The lieutenant stared at him as though he had started to glow. “How did you do that?”
“Years of training and experience, a good night’s sleep, and loads of natural talent.”
The man with the bleeding nose raised himself to one knee. “Who are you?” he choked out.
“Oh, right.” Valin glanced around the hall until he spotted what he was looking for: a leather satchel leaning against the spiked steel wall. He’d dropped it there just as the three Tartarus Travelers attacked him.
“In the front pocket of that bag, there’s a piece of paper. Could you grab it for me?”
The lieutenant exchanged a look with one of her subordinates. After a few seconds, she reached warily into the front of the bag and plucked out a crumpled, browned sheet of paper.
“Deianira sent me,” Valin explained. “She thought you might need some help.”
The lieutenant’s eyebrows drew down, so close together that it looked like she was trying to glare a hole in the paper. She flipped it around, showing him the red wax seal on the other side.
“This is the royal seal,” she said. “By Deianira…do you mean Deianira the Third? Our Queen?”
“How many Deianiras do you know?” Valin asked. “I’ve only ever met the one. Didn’t you ask for help?”
He reached out for the paper. In what looked like an unconscious reflex, the lieutenant clutched it tighter. “We asked for reinforcements and advice, actually. And we sent word to the Overlord, not to Cana.”
Valin didn’t know how the Queen had intercepted a message from Tartarus, but he had learned long ago not to underestimate her abili
ty to ferret out secrets. “My strength and considerable experience are at your disposal,” he said. “I also took it upon myself to evaluate your combat skills.”
The lieutenant winced and looked away. “I can only say that, unlike many Travelers, we’re actually weaker inside our Territory than outside it.”
He had assumed as much. Tartarus had a well-earned reputation as a deadly combat Territory, but much of that strength came from their ability to summon their weapons almost instantly. Inside the Territory itself, they couldn’t summon weapons directly.
He knew that, but he couldn’t help feeling disappointed.
“But that is no excuse,” the lieutenant continued, to Valin’s surprise. “We took you too lightly, and you were gentler than we deserved. Thank you.”
That may have been a first. Usually, the people Valin defeated showed one of three reactions: fear, anger, or disbelief. The lieutenant didn’t seem resentful at all, but he supposed carrying a letter with the royal seal on it could have simply impressed her. Perhaps that was all it was.
Still, he wasn’t sure how to respond.
“No need for thanks. I was rougher than I should have been.” Deianira would have passed out from shock if she heard those words coming from his mouth. “Besides, I was looking forward to the opportunity to come to Tartarus. I’ve never spent much time here—I can’t imagine I’ll find what I’m looking for, though I guess you never know.”
One of the other Travelers spoke up: “What are you looking for?”
“Dragons,” Valin said simply.
The soldier with the bloody nose snorted, and Valin shot him a look that shut him up.
The lieutenant looked completely lost. “But dragons aren’t real,” she said. “Are they?”
Valin sighed. He had delivered this lecture a thousand times, and sometimes he got sick of doing it. “In Naraka, there are black-skinned lizards that breathe fireballs. In Endross, there are huge flying drakes that spit lightning. In the lowest levels of Ornheim, there’s a species of burrowing worm that hurls sparks and is intelligent enough to speak. With all that, why shouldn’t there be dragons?”
