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 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: he talked far too much, even in situations where he should 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, 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; 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.

  Which 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 man 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 if they succeeded, 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?”

  The lieutenant seemed stunned for a second—in Valin’s experience, people often reacted that way when he stopped to chat 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.”

  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 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.

  The three Travelers were still on the ground. They weren’t unconscious, were they? He didn’t think he’d hit any of them too 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 canvas satchel leaning against the spiked steel wall. He’d dropped it there as the three Tartarus Travelers attacked him.

  “In the front pocket of my 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. From our Overlord, not from Cana.”

  Valin didn’t know how the Queen had intercepted a message from Tartarus, but he had learned long ago not to underestimate her ability 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 their 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 I have 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 to 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?”

  “But—” the lieutenant began, but Valin kept going.

  “And no, I know what you’re going to say, those aren’t dragons. I’m looking for a real dragon. Strong, intelligent, flies, breathes fire…a dragon. We’ll find one in a Territory one of these days, mark my words.”

  Valin had seen plenty of draconic creatures, but nothing gave him the sense of majesty he had always pictured in the dragons of legend. Dragons should be more…magical, he guessed. And somewhere out there, in one Territory or another, he’d find one. He only had to keep looing.

  “I see,” the lieutenant said in a voice that said she didn’t see at all. Clearly, she had lost the thread of the conversation a while back.

  “You’ve seen many Territories,” one of the other Travelers said, in a transparent attempt to change the subject. “But I haven’t seen you summon anything. What kind of Traveler are you?”

  “I’m not a Traveler,” Valin said. “I don’t have bonds to any Territory. I go from one to another, doing what I can. That’s probably why they call me the Wanderer.”

  The three Travelers exchanged glances, but they had nothing to say.

  ***

  The way back to the nearest Damascan base was tricky, and Valin was soon lost. Every half an hour or so—though it seemed completely unpredictable—the Labyrinth whirred and shifted. The hallways shuffled, the floor separating and sliding apart, new gaps opening in the walls. Once, a dead end transformed itself into a room full of whirling circular blades inches in front of Valin’s face.

  The Tartarus Travelers took such things in stride, adjusting their course accordingly every time the maze shifted. They barely spoke about their route at all, following a mental map they all evidently shared.

  As they walked, they answered Valin’s questions.

  There were very few permanent outposts in the Steel Labyrinth. At least, none permanently manned. By order of the Overlord, no Damascan Travelers were allowed to sleep in their Territory; there had been disappearances, including a handful of tragic incidents in which the sleeping Travelers had been trapped in rooms with no exits. Sometimes, when they woke up, they were able to make Gates and escape. Other times, they would be skewered by traps while still unconscious.

  Thus, the rule about sleeping in the maze.

  The Tartarus Travelers understood these rules and seemed to accept them. Valin had been summoned for a more urgent reason.

  “Something has been killing Travelers in our unit,” the lieutenant—whose name was Roshan—said, as she gently guided Valin away from a pit of gnashing mechanical traps. “They’re usually alone, and they fail to report in. When we find them next, it’s only their mangled bodies.”

  “You think it’s Enosh?”

  “We think one of them has disguised themselves as one of us,” Lieutenant Roshan said. “We think he or she is ambushing us when we’re alone, or else has summoned something to do it for them.”

  She seemed more disgusted at the thought of a summoned killer. Was that because she was afraid of monsters from another Territory, or because she hated the idea of someone too cowardly to do their own killing? Valin had heard odd things about notions of honor in Tartarus.

  “I’ll need to see the body. I can’t guarantee I’ll find anything helpful, but I’ll do what I can.” He wasn’t rude enough to say it to her face, but he was certainly more likely to know something useful than any of these Tartarus soldiers. He had devices in his satchel that might come in handy.

  “You’re more likely to find something than we are,” Roshan said, impressing him yet again. “We’re going to stop by and pick up some more weapons before we show you the scene, just in case…”

  Her voice trailed off as the wall in front of them parted, revealing a man lying on his back in a small pool of blood.

  Too small, Valin noted immediately. The corpse was partially curled around a circular chest wound as big around as a man’s head. Anything that caused a wound that size should have left a puddle of blood twice as deep.

  To her credit, Lieutenant Roshan did not hesitate. She snapped orders to her two subordinates, and they quickly drew their swords and positioned themselves around the body, watching the corners of the room for movement. It was not a large room, perhaps five paces to a side, and the only visible entrance was the one through which they had come. But if Valin had learned anything from his short time in Tartarus, it was that the Labyrinth could open up a new door anytime and anywhere.

  “I take it this isn’t the body you meant to show me,” Valin said.

  “The Captain’s body is in a coffin,” Roshan said in a tight voice. “We left the blood where he was killed, in case we needed to examine it again. This is a totally different room.”

  Valin dipped his fingertips in the blood: still warm. He gestured to the corpse. “Who was this?”

  “He was meant to stay with the Captain’s coffin.”

  “Alone?”

  She nodded. “This is the fourth victim. The second one taken right under my nose.” Roshan stared straight at the wall, and Valin left her to her thoughts. He had nothing productive to say.

  Besides, the body was more interesting.

  He ran a finger along the edge of the wound, coming up with a thin layer of black grit. Ash, perhaps? If so, they were most likely looking for a killer from Naraka, or maybe Endross.

  He examined the body for another five minutes before he came up with another source of the black dust. Under the fingernails this time, as though the soldier had managed to scratch his attacker.

  Valin scraped out a little of the dust and rubbed it between two fingers. Against his better judgment, he placed a little on his tongue.

  He spat it out immediately. It didn’t taste foul; worse, it tasted like good topsoil. That narrowed his list of possibilities down to one. “Everybody who died was alone?” he asked, to be sure.

  “They were.”

  “Then I’m afraid I can probably tell you what killed them,” Valin said. “And you’re not going to like it.”

  All three Tartarus Travelers turned to face him.

  “What?” Lieutenant Roshan demanded.

  “A Strugle.”

  The room fell into a long stretch of silence.

  “The monster from the children’s rhyme? ‘Good little girls, they must obey, or else the Strugle will take them away’? The Strugle is real?”

  One of the male Travelers coughed to cover up a laugh.

  Valin knelt and began rummaging through his pack, wishing he had packed the stone amulet he had once unearthed in Ornheim. It had been designed specifically to block the attack of a Strugle.

  “Strugles are native to Ornheim, though based on the way it hunts, some naturalists believe it originated in Asphodel.” He had a dagger here that could heat itself red-hot but never lose its shape; no, if he got close enough to use a dagger, the Strugle would simply eviscerate him. “It locks on to feelings of loneliness, uncertainty, isolation, and it uses them to identify its prey. Its favorite tactic is the ambush; some people believe it feeds on the fear and surprise of its victims as much as their flesh and blood.”

  The frozen horn he had picked up in Helgard, perhaps? Maybe it could banish the Strugle back to the Territory from whence it came…but no, blowing the horn in Tartarus was too risky. It might banish whole rooms from the Labyrinth around them, leaving them to fall right through the floor.

  “Tartarus Travelers would normally be a good match for a Strugle,” Valin continued. “You summon quickly, you’re usually armored, and you’re rarely alone. It’s hard for a Strugle to target someone like you. But that’s when you’re outside your Territory. If you’re here, and you don’t know what you’re facing, you’re little better off than an ordinary person.”

  These days, it almost never occurred to Valin that he, too, could be considered an ordinary person. He had certainly never thought of himself as ordinary.

  “How do we catch it?” one of the men said.

  “We don’t,” Lieutenant Roshan responded, reluctance heavy in her voice. “We tell everyone we can about it. We let the Overlord know what we’re up against. We prepare, and we hit it together.”

  “Lieutenant…” the man began, but he let the statement hang.

  Valin thought he saw the problem. He wasn’t the most familiar with Tartarus Travelers, but they had a reputation for their prickly sense of honor. He didn’t fully understand it—honor seemed like an unnecessary set of arbitrary rules, to him—but he could at least accept it.

  “Is there some reason you might want to catch this thing yourself?” Valin asked. He kept rummaging around in his satchel; surely something in his collection would come in handy.

  “As I said, two victims now have died under my protection,” the Lieutenant said. “Including my commanding officer. The Overlord has yet to send a replacement for him, but when he does, I have no doubt I will be at least demoted. Capturing or killing the beast myself would go a long way toward restoring my honor, but that won’t happen.”

  “Why not?”

  She met his gaze levelly. “Because it’s not about me. It’s about saving lives. The smart move is to regroup, report, and form a plan of attack.”

 

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