Read House of Blades (The Traveler's Gate Trilogy) for Free Online Page A

stone.
    The soldier tried to pull his arm out of the crystal. For a few futile moments he heaved his body backwards, planted a leg on the crystal and shoved, hammered at the crystal with his fists. Then he started to scream.
    Leah gestured again, and another crystal spike burst from the ground in front of the horse barring her way. The horse reared, screamed, and galloped in the other direction. She doubted that the rider minded.
    The sergeant and his entire entourage were looking at her now, including the bald Endross Traveler. His eyes, a bright green that she could make out even at this distance, widened when he recognized what she had done. With a shout he raised both palms, calling what looked like a ball of rolling storm-clouds into his hands.
    Keeping her face blank, Leah continued walking. She did nothing to let her sudden wariness show. Endross was widely considered one of the most formidable Territories for combat, and Lirial’s strengths lay in other areas. If she made a mistake, she could find herself seriously injured before she managed to reveal her identity.
    But she had met dozens of Endross Travelers in her childhood, and they had all shared a single trait: they were jackals. Predators. Scavengers, concerned with preserving their own safety above all else. A rare few would seek out their equals for the pleasure of testing themselves against a rival, but none would dare challenge a superior.  
    So before she dealt with him, she needed to show—beyond all doubt—that she was his superior.
    Glittering lights flashed in the Traveler’s handheld storm, like half-hidden strikes of lightning, and about a dozen shapes the size of dragonflies burst forth into the air, streaking towards Leah. She recognized the shapes from her education in the ways of Endross: storm-drakes, tiny flying lizards that would latch onto their prey and shock it to death with sparks of lightning. Not something Leah wanted to happen to her.
    There were a handful of easy ways she could deal with this summoning, but any one of them would just invite another attack from the Endross. She would have to come up with something more impressive.
    Sending a mental call into Lirial, Leah turned her left hand palm-up. A crystal ball slightly bigger than her fist fell out of thin air, landing in her outstretched hand. She stared into it instead of at the oncoming storm-drakes.
    In the crystal’s depths, a hundred symbols flashed and rolled as the orb performed a thousand arcane calculations in a fraction of the time it would have taken her. To her eyes, the symbols spelled out precise directions.
    And with another flash of her crystal bracelet, and another mental call to her Territory, Leah followed those directions.
    Fourteen spires of white crystal speared from the ground and into the air. They were made out of the same substance as the jagged crystals she had already summoned, but unlike the rough mounds she had called the first time, these were finger-thin and needle sharp. They grew from the earth and stretched to their full height of six feet in a fraction of a second.
    Each crystal needle had speared the exact center of an Endross storm-drake. The lizards’ tiny bodies were now trapped in milk-white crystal, but, for the moment, they still lived. Their legs scratched feebly at the pale needles, and their wings beat at the air.
    Leah dropped the crystal ball from her hand and kept walking, not slowing by a hair. The orb evaporated before it hit the ground. Each of the white needles had burst from the ground at an angle, leaving her just enough room to walk straight through the forest of crystal needles without cutting herself. She kept her eyes locked on the sergeant, ignoring the Traveler entirely.
    She certainly did not let her relief show. There had been precious little opportunity to practice her Traveling over the past two years in Myria, and even with the crystal ball’s assistance she had worried about making a mistake. Come to think of