Tower of Winter (The Traveler's Gate Chronicles: Collection #1) Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  WARNING

  Welcome!

  [Series Title]

  Tower of Winter

  The Feathered Plains

  The Crystal Fields

  [Sequel Page]

  TOWER OF WINTER

  Will Wight

  www.WillWight.com

  Copyright © 2013 Will Wight

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Patrick Foster.

  IMPORTANT:

  What follows is a small collection of short stories set in the universe of the Traveler’s Gate Trilogy, which begins in the novel House of Blades.

  If you have not read House of Blades or its sequel, The Crimson Vault, then you will not understand the following stories.

  It’s okay; it’s not your fault. I understand. You’re still handsome and/or pretty.

  If you were simply browsing the Kindle Store and this book caught your eye, I urge you to close this preview and go check out House of Blades. I’ll wait.

  If you’ve already read the Traveler’s Gate Trilogy—or at least the first two books—then come on in, my friend!

  These stories are intended to give you a closer look at the Territories and characters that we didn’t get to explore in the main trilogy. If you’d rather stick with Simon, Alin, and Leah, I’ll understand! City of Light will be available in early 2014, and I hope it meets your approval.

  Still with me? Then buckle up. We’re headed off the map.

  Here there be dragons.

  You have been warned.

  Welcome to Elysia, young Traveler.

  You will have heard many stories about what it means to be one of us. Do not be fooled. No outsider understands our purpose. They think we are here to lead other Travelers, to make the decisions that they cannot.

  This is true, and it is not true.

  They think we are here as a last resort, as an ultimate power, to keep the Incarnations in check.

  This is true, and it is not true.

  They think we are here to balance the other Territories, to keep them from obtaining too much power and upsetting the natural balance.

  This is true, and it is not true.

  What I am about to tell you is known by few, and understood by even fewer: we are not here to lead, or to threaten, or to eliminate threats. In the course of our duties, we will do all these things, but ultimately we are here for a single purpose.

  We are here to guide. We are here to lead by example, inspiring other Travelers to live up to their own potential. We should be as beacons in the darkness.

  Welcome to the City of Light.

  -Elysian Book of Virtues, Page 1

  The Traveler’s Gate Chronicles

  (Collection #1)

  TOWER OF WINTER

  First, you should observe the Violet Light, which is aligned with Helgard, the Tower of Winter. Many students who came before you have wondered why the Violet virtues of honesty, openness, and genuine expression are linked with this specific Territory. Helgard’s Travelers are scholars, known for their dedication to knowledge, research, and memory. Why, then, are they not linked to wisdom, or even diligence?

  -Elysian Book of Virtues, Chapter 1: Violet

  Donia Sarkis, Traveler of Helgard, had great things ahead of her. Everyone said so. She might be an Overlord one day, when Vasilios stepped down. She might end up as an explorer, braving the unknown dangers of the Tower’s uppermost floors.

  Today, it seemed, she was meant to be a nursemaid.

  Nikolos shivered in his heavy, fur-lined cloak. He sniffled miserably, his well-bred good looks spoiled by a bright red nose. His sleek blond hair was ruffled by the wind, and he could barely keep his hood up.

  “Wait!” he said. “Did you see that?” He stared off into the blowing snow as though he had spotted some danger.

  “I don’t see anything but snow, Nikolos,” Donia said, keeping her tone polite. Nikolos was the Overlord’s son, and a bad report from him would haunt her for years. She could not afford to let the Overlord down.

  “Regardless, we should wait and watch,” the boy said, sniffling at every other word. “We wouldn’t want to run into an unknown danger.”

  Nikolos stumbled through a drift and plopped down on top of a thick, rounded boulder carved like the head of a statue. It was a grossly exaggerated caricature of a face, locked into the expression of a monster about to devour a meal. Its long tongue hung down almost into the snow, baring four pointed fangs at the corner of the mouth.

  It looked as if someone had carved a stone statue of a hungry monster, severed its head, and thrown that head on the ground. Donia happened to know that the statue’s “neck” actually grew down into the bedrock of Helgard’s fifteenth floor, and that there were hundreds of such heads scattered all around the floor. Some were so small that they were often covered entirely by snow, though others were the size of a barn.

  No one knew the purpose of the heads, though there were theories. Somehow, Donia doubted they were originally intended as benches for spoiled children.

  “I seriously doubt we’re in danger here,” Donia said, because she couldn’t help herself. “This floor is well controlled. There are even a few permanent outposts.”

  “You never know,” Nikolos said. “We should keep an eye out.” He was hugging himself and staring at the ground, not even pretending to watch for danger.

  Nikolos had come up with some excuse to rest every hour since they had entered the Helgard Gate. At first, he was simply “overcome with the natural beauty of the Tower,” and he needed a moment to collect his thoughts. Then he would insist that he had heard a voice in the howling wind, or that he only needed a moment more to decipher the ancient runes on Helgard’s outer walls. Once, when he caught sight of an icefang shuffling through the snow, he had sworn that there was a dead body beneath the powder that was struggling to surface. They had to freeze in place, he said, because sudden movements could set it off.

  Donia remembered herself at fifteen, so she kept herself polite, though she couldn’t ever recall being so obnoxious. If she was tired, she would have just said so. None of this dancing around the subject or making up excuses.

  His attitude shouldn’t matter, she reminded herself. He could be a screaming terror, and I’d still have accepted. Jobs like this are a ladder straight to the top.

  Overlord Vasilios had insisted that Donia should escort his son from his relatives’ estate in Alrin all the way back home to Bel Tara. It was an easy assignment, but one that showed a great deal of trust in Donia. She had only been a Helgard Traveler for a few years, but she was already getting personal assignments from the Overlord.

  Annoying as this job might be, she had to prove she could do it.

  A patch of glittering snow caught Donia’s attention, lying at the base of a twisted tree. In the right light, it looked as though someone had sprinkled the snow with a handful of crushed diamonds or powdered glass.

  She recognized the signs immediately, as any Helgard Traveler would: an icefang lay in wait beneath that shimmering snow.

  Icefangs were among the least of the dangers that Helgard had to offer, but she had known careless Travelers to lose chunks of flesh to an icefang bite. The creatures were scavengers, usually preying on the sick or the dead. She wondered if Nikolos counted as sickly. They were also highly territorial, and it was entirely possible that she had tread near this one’s burrow without realizing it.

  Donia took a few steps closer to the icefang, away from Nikolos. The beast began to tremble, almost i
mperceptibly.

  She held her middle two fingers together, leaving her other fingers spread out, stretching her hand out to the icefang in a sign of peace.

  For a few seconds, the scavenger’s eager trembling stopped as it felt Donia’s imposed peace wash over it. That wouldn’t be enough to stop it, not on its own, but it gave Donia enough time to enact the next step.

  Under her breath, Donia whispered the icefang’s name.

  Not its personal name, of course. Learning that would have taken entirely too long, and she didn’t have time for that right now. Instead, she recited the generic name for the icefang species. It was twelve syllables long, all but impossible to pronounce, and all icefangs would respond to it to some degree.

  She had heard it said that being a Helgard Traveler was half research and half rote memorization. In fact, she had spent three-quarters of her time as a student simply memorizing the hundreds upon hundreds of names that all Travelers of Helgard were expected to know as a matter of course.

  At this point, keeping an icefang quiet required no more effort than walking through the snow.

  As usual, when she correctly named a creature, she felt a rush of emotions in return. With more intelligent creatures, she would receive a rush of specific thoughts and memories, but the icefang was little more than a vulture. It felt frustration, deep hunger, and a barely-restrained eagerness to attack the intruders that had dared to set foot in its home.

  The peace she had imposed with her sign still lingered in the creature’s mind, and the unnatural calm also gave the icefang a degree of confusion. It wasn’t used to being calm.

  As always, the icefang’s emotions weren’t the only things that got transferred along the bond. Donia felt her own frustration with Nikolos, her hope to please the Overlord, her fear that she wouldn’t live up to her reputation, and her satisfaction at finally being home in Helgard all flow out of her.

  The icefang wouldn’t fully comprehend any of that, of course, but it grew to understand her nature just as she understood it. More than anything, it felt her power and authority as a Traveler of Helgard. It knew that she could call up a dozen forces more deadly than itself, and it wanted no part of that.

  The glittering snow shrunk two sizes as the icefang cowered in the snowbank.

  Nearby, Nikolos heaved a sigh and rose to his feet.

  “I suppose I was mistaken,” he said at last. “We must remain vigilant.”

  He trudged over to Donia with his hands tucked into his pockets and his blond hair disheveled. The corner of his boot almost scraped the icefang hidden in the snow. Without her interference, it would have taken his foot off.

  Nikolos never even noticed.

  ***

  After Donia and Nikolos climbed up the seemingly never-ending ladder leading from the fifteenth floor to the sixteenth, Donia remembered something that she had been trying to forget.

  She hated this floor.

  The entire thing was just one open room, with no trees or hideous statues to break up the monotony. The blue-gray outer wall of Helgard encircled the floor, and without any obstructions, Donia thought she could make out the curvature of the tower, though it was hard to say for sure since she couldn’t see the far wall.

  The floor appeared somewhat even, but she knew that was an illusion. There was no snow here, and the ground was made entirely of uninterrupted ice. It looked as though the ocean’s surface had frozen during a choppy ocean storm: waves and spikes and curls of ice rose from the surface in a twisting frozen maze.

  That was one of the things she hated about this floor. Damasca had a small outpost here, but she couldn’t see it from the floor entrance because of all the waves breaking up her line of sight. She could barely judge distance at all.

  The icy floor glowed from inside with a pale greenish light. Perhaps she should have enjoyed that—there were many floors in Helgard that were much darker, after all—but occasionally the light would flicker out, as though something in the depths of the ice had passed briefly in front of the light’s source.

  That was a continual reminder of a fact that she didn’t want to think about: something lay beneath the ice here, and no one knew what. The older Helgard Travelers had stories, of course, but they had no more idea than she did. Everyone that might know was either dead or insane.

  Which brought her to the worst thing about the sixteenth floor: the silence.

  From the frozen waves below to the enormous, distant icicles on the roof above—each of which was the size of a lighthouse—there was plenty of space to create air currents. Many of the Helgard floors generated their own weather. But not the sixteenth.

  Nothing disturbed the air on the sixteenth floor. Not a breeze, not the call of a bird, nothing. It was the closest to absolute silence that Donia had ever endured.

  And she couldn’t stand it.

  Nikolos cleared his throat, and it sounded like the rumble of thunder. “Quiet here, isn’t—“

  Just in time, Donia clapped a gloved hand over his mouth.

  Nikolos’ words echoed softly off the nearby ice. Donia remained tense and alert until the sound died away, then she relaxed. Slightly.

  She put her mouth close to his ear and whispered as softly as she could. “What did I say before we climbed up here?” She loosened her hand, giving him a bit of room to speak.

  “Quiet,” Nikolos breathed, barely moving his lips.

  “That’s right. Better men and women than you, all Helgard Travelers, have made too much noise on this floor and regretted it. Do you understand?”

  Nikolos nodded eagerly.

  “Now, I’m going to take my hand away, and I want you to remain as quiet as possible.”

  When the boy nodded again, Donia took her hand away and turned back toward the field of ice.

  A worn, dirty Traveler with a scraggly beard stood not a pace behind her.

  Nikolos shrieked, though to his credit he stifled it quickly. Donia’s heart was pounding, but she reacted with more composure, as befit a Traveler of Helgard: she held her right hand out in a sign of aggression, words of summoning on her lips.

  The Traveler, whose blue-and-white Damascan uniform was torn to ribbons, held up both of his hands, palms out. The gesture showed he was unarmed and, for a Traveler, showed that he wasn’t making any hostile signs.

  “No, wait!” he said, in a hoarse whisper. “Help! I need your help!”

  Donia looked around, wary of a trap or ambush, though she couldn’t understand why this bait would be necessary if he meant to attack them. The floor was lonely and silent; he and his friends could have just jumped on Donia and Nikolos, if that was their intention.

  “Where is the rest of your unit, Traveler?” Donia asked.

  The stranger shook his head frantically, like a dog trying to shake off water. "Gone," he whispered. "Attacked. Viciously attacked. Please, help me. I can't leave this floor."

  Nikolos must have felt the need to interfere, because he said, "Of course you can. We're standing not ten feet from the way down."

  Donia ignored him, keeping her focus on the shaken stranger. "What's your name, Traveler?"

  "Lukis, ma'am," he responded. "Inspector Lukis, Outpost Sixteen. Listen, I need you to take word back to the first floor. They're here. They're here for the Frozen Ones!"

  By the end, his voice had risen until it was more of a scream than a whisper.

  "Inspector Lukis," Donia repeated calmly. "Why can't you leave with us?" She had read that you were supposed to remain calm in these circumstances, even though all she wanted to do was bolt back down the ladder that had taken them here. This was more trouble than she was authorized to handle.

  With a trembling finger, Lukis pointed down at the glowing ice on which he stood.

  At first, Donia saw nothing, and she almost told him so. Then she noticed something deep below the frozen surface, like the glimmer of a fish's scales.

  Lukis took a step to one side, and the distant gleam followed him.

  "
What is that?" Nikolos asked, staring down into the ice himself.

  "They called it up from the ice," Lukis whispered. "They sent it after me, but it can't get me up here. It can’t break the surface. If I tried to climb down the ladder, I'd have to pass through the ice. It would have me."

  "How do you know?" Donia asked.

  Lukis shuddered. "I could feel it," he said. "It...called my name."

  Donia felt a chill pass through her. Naming a creature of Helgard created a bond between the Traveler and her named companion. With intelligent creatures, it was more a sharing of names, in which both parties learned equally about one another. However, the Traveler always initiated the bond, and it was up to her how far to pursue it. If there was something here that could name them back...

  "We'll carry your warning, Inspector," Donia said, trying to project the same absolute certainty that she had seen in Overlord Vasilios so many times. "Who's doing this?"

  Lukis let out the quietest laugh that Donia had ever heard. "They’re some kind of cult, maybe a dozen Travelers. I don't know who they are, exactly, but they killed the rest of Outpost Sixteen before we could even react. They’re ruthless. And they…”

  He leaned in close, his eyes flicking from side to side. "They want to raise the Frozen Ones."

  Donia cleared her throat. He had mentioned the Frozen Ones before, but she had decided to overlook that. The Frozen Ones were part of an ancient legend of Helgard, and one that seemed to have its basis more in colorful rumor than actual history.

  "Believe me," Lukis went on, sounding desperate. "Maybe they’re crazy, I don’t know, but they believe there are beings sealed here, on the sixteenth floor. They've been calling down into the ice for hours, trying to wake up whatever they can. They killed my unit because they need the bodies. They think the blood might help..."