“What?” Oliver shot her a hard look. “Why?”
She kept walking, and when she answered, she did not look at him.
“I found it…disconcerting…to feel what I feel for an ordinary man. If you are half-legend, that would explain a great deal.”
Oliver could think of nothing to say to that, and so kept silent as they strode the last few yards into the thickening mist. In moments it grew so dense that Kitsune ceased even to be a shape in the swirling shroud and he reached out to grab a handful of her fur cloak, just to keep her close.
Then he stepped out of the mist and found himself standing beneath a starry night sky, a sliver moon hanging above in a crisp, cool night. He shivered and the clammy film that had built up on his skin during the journey dried in the cold mountain air. For they were, indeed, in the mountains. Oxen grazed nearby on rough grassy land and, around them, Oliver counted three separate mountain peaks. The mountains themselves were steep and the terrain varied from craggy stone to ugly, twisted little trees to a frozen cascade of ice. High up, all three peaks were capped with snow.
“It’s beautiful,” Kitsune whispered beside him.
Oliver glanced at her and saw behind them the gray mist that had delivered them to this place, evaporating. In moments it had dissipated entirely, leaving no trace of their arrival, save for their actual presence.
Kitsune’s admiration had not been for the mountains or the starry sky. Oliver swallowed hard and forced himself to turn his full attention upon the only structure built in the crux of those three mountains. At the base of the nearest there stood a massive pagoda-style palace with its many levels and fluted corners.
Made of sand.
In the eastern region of Euphrasia, this was the Sandman’s castle.
The sand that spilled out around the magnificent pagoda reached far enough across the rough land that Oliver and Kitsune were already standing upon it. The oxen grazed on rough grass nearby, but beneath Oliver’s feet was only soft, shifting sand.
“Collette’s here,” he said, more certain than he’d ever been of anything in his life.
Kitsune’s jade eyes gleamed in the starlight as she raised her hood, face grim. “Then let us retrieve her.”
Oliver slipped a hand into his pocket and clutched between his fingers the pillow feather that the Dustman had given him.
He started toward the pagoda-toward the Sandcastle-and Kitsune fell in beside him. Together they trudged up toward the tall double doors, the one aspect of the structure’s facade that matched the Sandcastle far to the west on the other side of the Atlantic Bridge.
The doors hung slightly open in invitation.
Oliver felt a strange calm descend upon him, settling into his bones with the chill of the night. He could hear his breathing too loud in his head. His hand found its way almost unbidden to the hilt of his sword, and with a bright whisper of metal upon metal, he drew it.
Kitsune slipped through the narrow gap between the doors. Oliver did not have her stealth, but neither was he concerned. The open door told him all that he needed to know about their arrival.
The Sandman expected them. He had been expecting them since the very moment that he had snatched Collette away from the house on Rose Ridge Lane, the Bascombe family home, on its bluff overlooking the ocean. Oliver did not want to think too much about that house and about his parents. If Kitsune’s theories about his mother were true, it changed every memory he had.
All that mattered now was Collette.
So if the Sandman knew they were coming, stealth be damned.
He kicked the door and it swung wide. Kitsune twisted to glare at him, surprise in her jade eyes. Oliver ignored the admonition and entered swiftly, investigating the shadows just inside the door, then turning his back to them, gazing into the dark corners he had yet to penetrate. The Sword of Hunyadi felt strangely light in his grasp, and he kept the blade raised, prepared to defend himself. If Rafael, his old fencing instructor, could see him now, the man would likely faint. He’d been taught sport and elegance, balance and dignity. Now he was learning bloodshed and survival.
Oliver recognized the chamber immediately, just as he was sure Kitsune did. They exchanged a glance and she nodded to confirm it, but the gesture was unnecessary. The Sandcastle had aspects in various regions throughout the Two Kingdoms, and perhaps even in such far-flung lands as Nubia and Atlantis. This was the second they had visited, and they knew of a third in Yucatazca. The exterior of this castle was drastically different.
But inside, it was the same.
In this vast cathedral chamber they had found the dead Red Caps, and the shattered remnants of the Sandman’s diamond prison. They had watched La Dormette die and been attacked by the Kirata. On that day, they had barely escaped with their lives, and Frost had been with them. Without him, they would surely have been killed.
Oliver moistened his lips, but his breathing remained steady. Frost wasn’t here now; they would have to find a way to survive on their own.
There were no lanterns lit within that massive reception hall. To the right, stairs along one wall led up to a second level, to a door that he presumed would take them deeper into the castle. But there were doors set into the walls on this level as well, all of them tightly closed. Starlight streamed in through the open windows, and a cool breeze whisked along the floor.
At the center of the room remained the shattered remnants of the diamond enclosure where once the Sandman had been imprisoned. Oliver pushed aside some of the broken shards with one boot, then glanced up at Kitsune.
The fox-woman stood twenty feet away, nearly lost in the shadow of a tall, fluted column that rose toward the ceiling high above. A dozen such columns stood in a circle around the hall, supporting the structure.
Cloaked in fur that seemed black, fringed with starlit orange, she caught his eyes and shrugged.
No sign of anyone.
Could it be that the Sandman remained unaware of their arrival? Oliver doubted it. And yet if that was possible, he had to resist the urge to call his sister’s name. They would have to start trying doors.
He gestured toward the stairs against the wall. If they were to find Collette, he thought it would be deeper within the castle rather than through any of those doors. He knew from experience that there was no telling where one of them might lead.
As he and Kitsune started to converge upon the stairs, there came the shushing sound of sand being disturbed.
Oliver spun and saw the hard-packed sand floor shifting. Something rose from it, sand cascading off of the figure, and in a moment she stood there, a small female form with wild hair.
“Collette?” he said softly, and took three steps toward her.
Then he slowed. Something was wrong with her. Even in the starlight he could see the utter lack of color in her hair and clothing.
His sword wavered. All of his courage and confidence lapsed in a moment of hesitation.
“Coll, what’s wrong?”
The figure turned. Its mouth hung open in a silent scream and where its eyes should have been were only black, empty pits. Oliver would have screamed, but now he was near enough to understand the lack of color.
This thing could not be his sister.
It was made of sand.
Raising his sword, he took the final two steps and brought the blade around in a smooth arc, and sliced the sand creature’s head cleanly off. It collapsed into a shapeless pile of dry sand.
In the same moment the floor began to stir and whisper in half a dozen places around the huge chamber.
“Oliver, be careful,” Kitsune said.
He nodded. His throat went dry and he could only watch in horror as the sand in the floor resolved itself into six more figures identical to the one he had just destroyed, each one an imitation of Collette, eyeless and silently screaming, desperate, clad only in what might have been ragged pajamas.
Then, in the center of the room-where Oliver himself had stood only moments before-a hissing
noise began. A black hole formed and began to widen, sand slipping down into nothing, as though they stood in the upper chamber of an hourglass and the lower atrium beckoned.
A hulking figure rose from that hole, sand slipping around its legs.
It resolved itself in the starlight, becoming not one figure but two. The floor solidified beneath them, but all of the diamond shards had been swallowed by the shifting sand. The ones newly arrived were not like the others, not sculpted effigies of his sister.
Lemon-yellow eyes gleaming in the shadows, the Sandman hunched over Collette Bascombe, clutching her to him, much of her body draped beneath the curtain of his cloak. The starlight blanched his gray flesh to the sickly pallor of a cadaver and his fingers to skeletal bone as he wrapped one hand around her throat and twisted her face round to stare at her brother.
“Collette?” Oliver whispered.
The sand constructs all turned, wretched mouths turning into rictus grins as they started to walk slowly toward him.
His sister flinched at the sound of his voice. He was afraid, for a moment, that the Sandman truly had taken her eyes, but then she leaned away from the monster and he saw her features in the light from the moon and stars that shone through the windows.
“Oliver, you have to run. He’ll kill us both. That’s all he wants. There’s something special about us, something they want to destroy!” she said, voice rising frantically at the last.
The Sandman clapped a hand over her mouth to silence her. The monster, the child-killer, the thing that had murdered Oliver’s father and taken his eyes, did not smile or laugh or even speak. This was no storybook villain.
This is death, Oliver thought.
He gripped the sword tightly, raised it, and started toward the Sandman. Kitsune followed, moving around to his right, careful with each step. Her fur rippled with the muscles beneath and she bared her small, sharp teeth in defiance.
With his free hand Oliver reached into his pocket and withdrew the feather that waited for him there. For a moment he was afraid he would have lost it, but it felt almost warm to the touch.
Oliver held the feather before him like some sort of talisman.
“Dustman,” he said. “It’s time.”
The Sandman’s yellow eyes narrowed, and he flexed the fingers that covered Collette’s mouth. “You confuse me with another legend, foolish Bascombe.”
“Not at all,” Oliver replied.
A new breeze began swirling across the floor in the vast entrance hall of the Sandman’s castle. Dust and grit spun and eddied, and then burst suddenly upward as though something had erupted from within the sand itself.
The breeze died. The dust settled.
Just a few feet away from where Oliver stood, the Dustman brushed sand delicately from the sleeve of his greatcoat. The brim of his bowler obscured his eyes until he glanced up at Oliver.
“I’ll take that,” he said, retrieving the feather from Oliver’s hand. His sand fingers scraped Oliver’s skin.
The Dustman slipped the feather in the pocket of his greatcoat, then reached up with one hand and smoothed down his mustache. He turned toward the Sandman.
“Hello, brother.”
The Sandman had crouched lower, drawn back a few steps, dragging Collette with him. She struggled and he shushed her, glaring.
“You are not welcome here.”
“Nevertheless, here is where I am,” the Dustman said. Then his expression changed, and there was venom in his voice and his eyes. “You are the myth that tales have made you-”
“Don’t you dare call me that!” the Sandman shrieked, hideous black lips pulled back over needle teeth.
He let his hand come away from Collette’s mouth and she cried out Oliver’s name. The monster wrapped her hair in his fist and tugged her backward, drove her down, so that she fell to her knees at his side.
Oliver took a step forward, sword at the ready.
Kitsune snapped a cautionary word at him.
“You were never more than a beast,” the Dustman said, voice dripping with contempt. “But you’ve allied yourself with creatures even more monstrous than yourself, and turned your back on all of your kin. There is nothing for you now but death.”
The Sandman’s lemon eyes went wide and his voice became even more shrill. “My kin? My kin who betrayed me, who allowed me to endure an eternity as captive in my own home? I spurn you all. I spit on you. I shall smear your eyes beneath my heel.”
The Dustman nodded. “Come, then.”
With a mad roar, mouth stretched impossibly wide, the Sandman burst into a cloud of swirling sand, those sickly lemon eyes floating in its midst, and rushed at this new arrival, this creature who had called him brother.
For a moment, Collette choked on the cloud of him, trying to breathe and getting only sand in her mouth and lungs. Coughing, she bent low, throat and chest burning, eyes tightly closed against the scouring sand.
Then she was alone in the center of the room. Wiping at her eyes, she opened them to see the brothers careening toward one another, the Sandman a dervish of wind and grit and the other-Oliver had called him the Dustman-charging as though he were only a man.
Then the Dustman exploded in a wave of dirt and grit and the two miniature storms lashed at one another in the midst of that vast chamber.
Collette rasped, coughing up the sand that had gotten in her mouth and throat. She bent over, still on her knees, hacking and trying to catch her breath, and when she raised her head, she saw her brother running toward her.
From the moment she had seen Oliver, some dam of emotion had given way inside of her. Now even as she wheezed and coughed, Collette managed a flicker of a smile, relief flooding her.
Oliver ran toward his sister.
“Wait! Watch yourself!” called out his companion.
Collette looked over at the gorgeous Asian woman who had arrived with her brother and saw the alarm in the other woman’s face. The cloaked woman pointed and both Oliver and Collette turned to see that the sand-creatures-these horrid constructs that Collette now realized were made in her own image-had begun to close in around them.
The woman wrapped her fur cloak around herself and dropped to all fours. Collette blinked, stunned to see the woman’s entire body shrink in upon itself, the fur tightening around her. Instead of a petite, beautiful woman, she hit the ground as a fox.
The fox, a flash of coppery-red fur in the starlight, leaped at the nearest of the sand creatures. It tried to fight her, batting her away. The fox attacked again, driving her snout into the center of the creature. It collapsed, sand spilling down on top of her.
She shook it off.
The wind inside the Sandcastle howled louder and louder. The sand that comprised the floor and walls seemed to erode so that a dust storm whirled through the vast chamber, partially obscuring her vision.
“Oliver!” Collette cried, at last finding her voice.
Not far away she saw the raging twisters separate, and abruptly the Sandman reformed, standing defiantly in the midst of the driving winds. His cloak whisked around him, but he stood as though entirely untouched. A moment later the Dustman re-formed as well, this sophisticated, evolved brother to the monstrous thing that had been her captor for so long.
The Sandman glared and whispered something that was lost in the wind and the hiss of sand upon sand.
The constructs moved closer, slow as sleepwalkers, eyeless and silent. Oliver called her name and raced at the nearest of them, squinting against the dust storm. Though they had fought as children, she and Oliver had always been close, sharing secrets and troubles and fighting loneliness together in a home with no mother and a distant father. Collette would know her brother anywhere, but looking at him now, she knew that some people would not have recognized him.
Oliver’s hair was wild and he sported several weeks’worth of beard. Normally office-pale, his skin had taken on a healthy, ruddy hue. The peacoat and jeans he wore only added to the overall air of roughness t
hat had transformed him, but the sword in his hands provided the finishing touch.
“Keep away from her!” Oliver bellowed as he raced toward Collette, swinging the blade. He hacked one of the sand creatures in half and it collapsed into a small dune on the chamber floor.
In moments, he and the fox had destroyed two others, and the rest of the sand things began to withdraw to a safer distance. Nearby, the Sandman and the Dustman continued tearing at one another. The Dustman thrust his fist through his brother’s chest so that when he withdrew it there was a gaping hole left behind, but the sand spilled in to fill the gap instantly.
Over and over, they tore one another apart.
Then Oliver was at her side.
“Collette!” he said, pulling her into an embrace with his free hand.
She fell against him, melting into the pleasure of his company. She was no longer alone in this nightmare place. Her little brother was here with her. Together, everything would be different.
“Hey, little bro,” she rasped.
Oliver held her at arm’s length and they grinned like fools at one another. His expression wavered first.
“We have a lot to talk about.”
Collette nodded. “Oh, yeah. You’re pretty much the only thing I’m sure is real in this whole world. I’ve got a lot of questions. And some things you should know. But can we-”
“Get the hell out of here, first?” her brother said.
The fox trotted up beside him. Though still in motion, her size altered abruptly. Her fur rippled and came loose, hanging down around her, and then as though she were removing her face, the fox drew back her hood to reveal once again the elegant features of the Asian woman who’d arrived with her brother.
“Jesus!” Collette said, flinching and staring at her. “I just…I don’t think I know what’s real!”
Oliver put a comforting hand behind her neck and kissed her forehead. “There’s an easy answer to that, sis. Everything. Everything is real. This is Kitsune.”
He turned to the fox-woman, whose green eyes were close to the most hypnotic things Collette had ever seen. “And Kit, this is my sister, Collette.”
The Borderkind v-2 Page 34
