Lost Ones-Veil 3

by Christopher Golden

  Collette tried again, putting her hands against the wall of the cell instead of the door. Oliver ran to join her. The guards would figure out a way to reach them soon, he was sure.

  He put his hands on the door. The ice was so cold it burned. His eyelashes stuck when he blinked and his breath plumed in front of him. But the metal bands on the door fell off, and the bolts holding the hinges on pulled loose from the frame. Where Collette touched the wall, the stones began to shift.

  “Push,” Oliver said.

  Together, they brought down the whole front wall of the cell, door and all. Stones and wood crashed inward. Ice shattered. Frigid air rolled out, and then the three of them stood staring at the winter man. Frost had been placed in a kind of stasis within a dark sphere of magic. At least three quarters of the sphere had been covered with an outer layer of ice and snow. Deep within, where the sphere was not covered, they could see Frost. From what Oliver could tell, he did not look shattered anymore.

  “What’s going on?” Julianna asked. “Is he trying to get free?”

  “Repairing himself, maybe. And working his way out,” Collette said.

  Oliver shook his head. “We don’t have time to wait.” Hesitating only a moment, he glanced back at Julianna and then put his hands on the purple-black sphere.

  It crackled at the touch.

  Nothing happened.

  “What’s wrong?” Collette asked.

  Oliver frowned. He could try to concentrate, but what little he knew of the power he and his sister shared told him that it didn’t work like that.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Magic,” Julianna said, sounding almost dazed. She stared at them both. “You’ve dealt with things that have a real substance before. The sand. The walls. Maybe magic isn’t like that.”

  Collette threw up her hands. “Great. What now?” She poked her head out into the hall to scout for guards.

  Oliver worked his way around, peering through the sections of the sphere that weren’t covered in ice. Finally he found an angle at which he could see the winter man’s face.

  Frost glared at him with blue-white eyes. Long, dagger fingers seemed aimed at a place where magic and ice met. Oliver took a closer look, and saw that that ice seemed to have passed through the sphere at that point, slicing like a knife, instead of having simply formed outside the sphere.

  He put his hands on the ice. They were still numb from the door, and now he could barely feel them at all.

  Entropy took hold. The ice began to crumble and sift into a fine, powdery snow. With a loud crack, a fissure formed in the thick ice shell. It ran down through the mystic sphere, cracking the ice inside as well.

  A frigid wind burst through that fissure and knocked Oliver to the ground. He sprawled there, looking up as wind howled in the cell. All of the ice seemed to flow into the air at the center of the room, churning into a tiny blizzard that drew all of the snow and ice from both within the sphere and without, and from the walls as well.

  The blizzard slowed and took form.

  The winter man glanced at Collette and Julianna, then stared down at Oliver. He cocked his head, long, icicle hair clinking together.

  “Another week and I would have been free,” Frost said.

  “Yeah. You’re welcome,” Oliver replied, climbing to his feet.

  “From your entrance, it seems you’ve claimed your inheritance. Excellent. Now we must—”

  “No time,” Oliver interrupted. Julianna and Collette flanked him, so that the three of them stood before Frost as though trying to bar his exit. “Julianna can’t go through the Veil. Collette can. Take her with you, now. Get back to Euphrasia and help Hunyadi against Atlantis.”

  Collette looked at him sadly, but did not protest. She had known this was coming. There was no other way.

  Julianna took his hand. Oliver squeezed her fingers in his own.

  “And what of you?”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ll figure something out. Anyway, you only need one of the Bascombes to fulfill your prophecy, right?”

  Frost blinked, then glanced away, and Oliver was surprised to see that the winter man even had the capacity to feel guilt.

  “You don’t understand.”

  Shouts came down the corridor. Collette looked out. “They’re coming.”

  “Go!” Oliver shouted.

  Frost reached out and opened a rift in the Veil. It seemed so simple for him, like parting curtains. Oliver felt the lure of that easy safety, but he tightened his hold on Julianna’s hand as Frost and Collette stepped through.

  “See you soon,” Collette said. She blew him a kiss, and then they were gone.

  Oliver ran to the rear wall of Frost’s cell. He pressed one palm against it, took a breath, and pushed. Powder and stone crumbled and then they were running through into the cell behind it. Opening that door was simple enough. Then they leaped out into the corridor where they’d been imprisoned only minutes before.

  The pounding of heavy boots crashed down the hall, followed by loud cursing. Oliver glanced to the left and saw the first of the Atlantean guards emerge through the archway. It was the one he’d skirmished with in his cell. Hate fired his blood, but now wasn’t the time for payback.

  He let go of Julianna’s hand and put both hands on the wall in front of him. Before long they were at the rear wall of the dungeon, and outside was the city of Palenque.

  The wall crumbled easily. Fresh air rushed in—cool night air still rife with the warm smell of spices from the restaurants around the king’s plaza. Oliver pulled Julianna forward and they dropped onto the grass below. Twenty yards away was an iron fence, and beyond that the cobblestone plaza.

  “Run,” Oliver told her.

  “Hurry,” she replied, and then she did as he’d asked, bolting for the fence.

  Oliver faced the palace. He put both hands on the shattered wall. Breathing evenly, he felt for the integrity of the wall. He could sense its age and all of the places where the stones were already loose, where the mortar had cracked.

  One such crack ran up the wall to his left. Oliver nudged it and a portion of the palace wall thirty feet high and twenty wide caved in, burying some of the soldiers alive.

  He raced for the fence and grabbed it with both hands. Two of its upright bars rusted and then fell down onto the cobblestones with a clang. Julianna clutched his hand, then they were through the fence and sprinting across the plaza to the nearest alley, disappearing into the maze of Palenque’s streets.

  They were lost and friendless in a city whose citizens believed they were assassins who had murdered the king.

  But they were free.

  And Oliver was Legend-Born.

  One morning, the gods came to Lycaon’s Kitchen.

  Kitsune had nearly lost track of the days. She and Coyote had been sleeping in an abandoned marble and granite home a quarter of a mile from the restaurant. Bitterness still lingered between them. She knew she ought to forgive Coyote his past cowardice and recognize the courage it had taken him to overcome it, but bitter barbs had been exchanged between them long before the Myth Hunters had begun to kill their kin. And tricksters—like elephants—had long memories.

  So she kept to herself and she did all that was in her power to avoid thinking of what danger Frost and Oliver might now be in—if they were even still alive—and the looks on the faces of Collette Bascombe and Julianna Whitney when she had left them all behind.

  Yet all of her efforts to avoid thinking about Oliver and the others meant that they were all she did think about.

  Until that dismal gray morning when the gods walked in out of the rain. There were three of them. A tall, voluptuous goddess with braids of dark hair and lavender eyes carried a spear and wore a heavy sword at her hip. A war goddess, from the look of her, she had a rusted chest plate and a dented helm that seemed to have served her well long ago. Beside her came another goddess, a slender creature whose pale flesh was textured with scales and whose hair had a greenis
h hue. Her smile was radiant. The third of their number had the bedraggled dignity of a Romany traveler or a paladin. An aura of light surrounded him, pulsing, mesmerizing.

  “Kit,” Coyote murmured, staring at them.

  “What?”

  But he had nothing to say. They both stared at these faded gods, and wondered what marvels they must have been at the height of their glory.

  Lycaon came out of the back with a tray of sausage and eggs that he had fixed for their breakfast. The old gods glared at him, and the cannibal slid the tray onto the table in front of Kitsune and Coyote and made a hasty, silent retreat.

  “You are Kitsune of the Borderkind?” asked the goddess.

  Kitsune stood, clumsily. These beings were no greater than a thousand legends she had met—no greater than she was. Yet here she was acting as though they were her superiors. But she couldn’t help herself. It was something in the way they carried themselves, their austere dignity.

  “I’m Kitsune,” she said. “This is my cousin, Coyote.”

  The warrior goddess nodded to him in greeting. Kitsune liked that. At least this one hadn’t ignored him the way the wine gods had.

  Coyote stood and bowed his head to them.

  “I am Bellona, goddess of war,” she said. Roman, Kitsune thought, trying to keep the two pantheons separate in her mind, though so many of them were facets of one another’s legends.

  “This is Salacia, my sister, goddess of the sea,” Bellona went on. A small smile touched her lips. “And you have already noticed our Greek brother, Hesperos, the evening star.”

  Kitsune could not look at him, he was so beautiful.

  “We know why you have come,” Salacia said, her voice a soft lilt. “But we would hear from your own lips all that you know of the war.”

  Hope flickered inside Kitsune.

  It was Coyote who asked the question. “Then you’ll help us?”

  Bellona shook her head. “That will be a decision for Artemis.”

  Kitsune shivered. Her own legend was from the far east, but the name of Artemis still resonated. The daughter of Zeus, she was goddess of the wilderness and the hunt, goddess of the wild animals. Kitsune felt a kinship with this being she had never met, but more than that. Instinctively, she knew that she would follow Artemis to war without question.

  “She lives?” Coyote asked.

  The old gods turned dark eyes upon him and he looked away.

  “Artemis is not what she once was,” Salacia replied. “None of us are. But Artemis bears the scars of time and battle and the betrayal of her father, himself now dead. Her mind often drifts, but our brothers and sisters follow her word. If she agrees to aid you, then those who are willing may join the fight. If she does not, your time has been wasted.”

  Hesperos said nothing, but Kitsune felt his gaze upon her. Her skin felt flushed with warmth, and she told herself it was the nearness of the aura of starlight that surrounded him.

  But the stars were supposed to be cold.

  He distracted her, but she shook it off. All that mattered now would be the decision of Artemis.

  “And if she agrees, how many do you think will come?”

  Bellona opened her hands. “We three, at least. Perhaps others who still wish to feel alive, or who still have enough pride to punish an enemy who dares threaten us.”

  Three, Kitsune thought. If only she had time to go east, to try to persuade the gods of Asia to join them. Many of the legends from the eastern lands had begun to come west to aid King Hunyadi, but the old gods were sleeping, there.

  Still, three would be better than nothing. And perhaps there would be more, if Artemis allowed it.

  “Do you think I should speak to Artemis myself? I could tell her the tale of what transpires, try to convince her—”

  “Not if you value your life. She would not trust you for a moment. The animals turned on her, once, and she has never forgiven them.”

  The tale filled Kitsune with revulsion, but she only nodded.

  Together, she and Coyote began to tell the old gods all they knew of the war and its origins and the threat of the Atlantean conspiracy.

  When they had finished, Bellona made her a promise.

  “If Artemis wills it, we will meet you an hour past dawn tomorrow on the southern road, in view of the city walls, with all of the gods who will join us. For my part, I hope to see you again. It has been far too long since I have seen war, and I yearn for it.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Rebellion simmered in Palenque, and Blue Jay relished every moment of it. According to the Mazikeen and to the other Borderkind and legends who had joined their underground movement, dissent and suspicion had begun to spread through the city. No matter what official edicts came from the palace, many of the citizens of Palenque weren’t going to believe a word unless they heard it from the lips of their next king himself.

  “Every day that the prince does not return from Atlantis, suspicion grows,” Li said.

  Jay nodded. “But now we’ve got to focus on getting our friends out of that dungeon.”

  “It’s time, then?” Li asked.

  “Yeah. I think it is. We’ve done Smith’s work. There are hundreds of legends in Palenque—dozens of Borderkind among them—whose hatred of Ty’Lis is rising. Time to get Frost and the Legend-Born out of Atlantis’s hands.”

  He almost mentioned Julianna, Oliver’s fiancée, but Li didn’t have a personal relationship with Bascombe the way Blue Jay did. None of them had been a part of the original group that had fled across the Veil when they’d been betrayed in Perinthia. Kitsune and Frost would understand.

  Oliver might be Legend-Born—he might have some destiny that made him greater than ordinary men—but to Blue Jay, he was just a courageous, resourceful companion, a man who always seemed to lighten moods and hearts.

  He was a friend.

  Glancing away from Li, Blue Jay took in several of the other Borderkind who had gathered in that room. A Mazikeen stood motionless in the corner. He and his brothers shared an empathic and perhaps telepathic rapport. If anything were to happen within the apartment—if soldiers or Hunters were to attack—the others would learn of it instantly and be able to react, either getting themselves to safety or coming to the rescue.

  At a small table, a jaguar-man sat gnawing on a leg of lamb beside an Ewaipanoma. The latter was an odd, headless thing with a wide mouth in the center of its chest. The mouth panted and its tongue traced its teeth from time to time. Otherwise it seemed entirely without intelligence or purpose. Blue Jay had learned this was far from the truth. The Ewaipanoma ate mostly vegetation and small rodents—rarely humans—and were both perceptive and fierce in battle.

  The trouble was, the thing gave him the creeps.

  Blue Jay smiled softly and turned to Li again.

  “The sun will be up soon. We should wait until tonight. Pass the word to Grin and Cheval. I’ll speak to the Mazikeen and the others who’ve volunteered to help.”

  Li nodded. “Tonight. Good. I grow impatient.”

  “Me too, my friend. Me too.”

  Then a wave of dread passed through Blue Jay. What if Frost wasn’t there when they went to break Julianna and the Bascombes out? Hell, what if they were all dead?

  “Blue Jay? Are you unwell?” Li asked.

  In the corner, the Mazikeen glanced up, perhaps in concern. It was almost impossible to tell what they were thinking.

  “Just hoping nothing goes—”

  He was about to say wrong when the door of the apartment swung open. The timing sent a chill of dread up his spine.

  A vampire serpent—one of the Pihuechenyi—slithered through the door, tall as a man, its wings pinioned behind it as it glanced around the room, searching for threats. Cheval Bayard entered behind the creature. When she stepped into the apartment, her face glowed with uncharacteristic excitement. At her side, she carried a leather satchel, and she seemed more alive than he had ever seen her, a lightness sparkling in her eyes and lifting
her step.

  Blue Jay rose from his seat. “What’s going on?”

  The kelpy laughed. “Half the work has been done for us, my friends.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Cheval reached out and touched his cheek. “It appears that we will no longer need to break our friends out of the palace dungeon, Jay. They have done it without our help.”

  The trickster stared at her. “You’re serious?”

  “Completely.”

  The Mazikeen moved to stand beside Blue Jay, motion so fluid he seemed to flow.

  “What, exactly, have you heard?”

  The other Borderkind all began to gather around. Li, eyes now churning with such fire that Blue Jay felt certain his glamour would be burned away, crossed his arms imperiously.

  “Three or four hours ago, a large section of the western wall of the palace collapsed, revealing part of the dungeon,” Cheval explained, swinging her satchel. “Frost and Collette Bascombe escaped through the Veil. Oliver’s fiancée is Lost, but he would not have left her. Bascombe and Julianna Whitney were seen running through the plaza into an alley.”

  “The damage could have been caused by anything,” Li said. “Even if our friends tried to escape, we have no way to be certain they succeeded. Did anyone see Frost and the Bascombe woman cross the Veil? And this witness who saw Oliver and the other fleeing, do we have reason to believe it? Have any of our allies seen anything at all that would support the story?”

  Cheval seemed irked. She sniffed and focused on Blue Jay. “The very questions I asked myself. I would not have come in so happily if I did not have answers.”

  The kelpy bared her teeth in a different sort of smile, then reached into the leather satchel and drew out the bloody head of a soldier of Atlantis. The soldier’s head had been torn from the body and so its neck was a ragged stump, trailing several inches of spine.

  “All that I have heard, I confirmed with this handsome soldier. That, and more. The official alliance with Atlantis will be declared today. Hordes of Atlantean troops will join the war against Euphrasia. And Ty’Lis’s handpicked guards witnessed Frost and Collette crossing the Veil with their own eyes.”