Lost Ones-Veil 3

by Christopher Golden

  Then Oliver was there. He bypassed the wounded, jaundiced sorcerer and drove his sword through the chest of the second to enter the chamber. The tall, spindly Atlantean fell to his knees, shock on his features. The others were still out in the corridor. Oliver reached out, grabbed the archway, and with his mind he reached into it and called up the entropy that gnawed at the ties of the world.

  Kitsune grabbed hold of him from behind, hauling him backward as the entire archway collapsed, blocking the path of the sorcerers still out on the back stairs.

  Li appeared beside them. On the ground, amidst the rubble, the bald, scarred sorcerer clutched at the arrow in his neck. The Guardian of Fire bent and placed both hands on the Atlantean, and his skin began to smoke, and then he caught fire.

  “Get away from there!” Wayland Smith shouted.

  The Wayfarer gripped Oliver’s arm and hauled him back. A gust of blizzard wind snatched at Kitsune, shoving her aside.

  The rubble of the collapsed archway blew inward, pieces of it colliding with Li. The Guardian of Fire crashed to the floor amidst the debris. Some of it began to burn, the flames out of his control. The fire began to spread.

  Three sorcerers hurtled into the room at once.

  At the doors to the atrium, the guards charged. Oliver didn’t bother turning to see how many there were. The sounds of their pounding footfalls were enough to tell him what he needed to know.

  The killing, the dying, had sickened him from the first blood shed. But there would be so much more.

  Smith stepped into the breach between the sorcerers and Oliver and the Borderkind. What the hell’s he doing? Oliver thought. He said he’s not supposed to interfere.

  The three sorcerers all turned toward Wayland Smith. Tendrils of magic reached out from one—just as they had from Ty’Lis in the dungeon of Palenque—and grabbed hold of him. The Wayfarer’s feet went out from beneath him. The sorcerer reeled him in. One of the others opened his jaws and they stretched wider than ought to have been possible. Unhinged, showing rows of terrible teeth like the Manticore, things moving in the darkness of his gullet, the sorcerer bent to tear out Smith’s throat. The third, a female, touched him with hands that dripped burning, steaming venom like acid.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Oliver screamed at Smith. “Fight!”

  Smith managed to turn his head. “I see, boy. I see the weave of the world, and I cannot alter it by killing them. But I may be able to…erase them. I’ll be back.”

  All three of the sorcerers had contact with Smith in that moment. They faded to ghosts and then vanished entirely, the Wayfarer with them. Wayland Smith had taken them into the Gray Corridors.

  Oliver swore again, turned and grabbed the hand of the drooling Prince Tzajin. He slapped the kid in the face, but Tzajin did not respond.

  “We’ve got to go, pal,” he commanded. He tried to haul Tzajin out of his chair, but the prince did not budge.

  Oliver used both hands and pulled on him, but could not move Prince Tzajin an inch from his seat. They’d come for Prince Tzajin, and Oliver wouldn’t leave without him. But Smith had gone off somewhere, and as he glanced around, panicked, two more sorcerers entered the room, their eyes black as storm clouds.

  Damia Beck screamed as she spurred her horse toward the giant. The ugly thing with its sickly pallor raised its war hammer and brought it down upon one of Damia’s cavalry. Horse and rider—a woman named Tessa—were crushed into a stain on the battlefield.

  If she could have taken a breath, Damia would have cried.

  Her mind screamed, damning the giant. But only unintelligible roars came from her lips. So many of her people—cavalry and infantry—had been slaughtered. Her battalion fought on valiantly. Atlanteans by the dozens, perhaps hundreds, had fallen to their swords. But this would not be ended until nearly all were dead. The war, she had quickly learned, would be decided by attrition.

  That meant the giant had to die.

  A Mazikeen floated overhead, locked in magical combat with an Atlantean sorcerer. Their blood and magic fell like rain, spattering Damia’s hair and her horse.

  A skirmish crossed her path. Yucatazcan soldiers surrounded two of her infantry. They were so covered in blood and sweat and dirt—this man and woman—she could not see their faces as the Yucatazcan warriors slew them, hacking them apart as they fell to the ground. Bloodlust ruled the day. The screams of the dying were music to their murderers.

  Even to Damia.

  She rode down one of the Yucatazcans, but three others came at her. Yet she had not become commander based only on her leadership. Damia slashed down with her sword, taking off the forearm of one warrior. She plunged her blade into the face of the other, the point punching out the back of his head with a spray of blood.

  Even as she did, the third dealt her a blow across the thigh. Dark blood spattered the ground—Damia’s own—and she clenched her thighs against the pain and guided the horse with her body, leaving her left hand free to draw one of her pistols. Damia shot the Yucatazcan warrior through the head.

  The horse whinnied and reared.

  A shadow fell across her.

  Trying to stay alive, she’d forgotten how close she’d gotten to the giant. The monster lifted its hammer, staring down at her. Blood and strips of flesh and clothing hung from its teeth; it had been eating some of its kills. Flesh stuck to the bottom of the hammer. Fascinated and horrified, Damia froze a moment.

  The hammer came down.

  She tried to force the horse back with just her legs, but its reaction was too slow. The giant missed her, but the hammer crushed the horse’s head. As the proud beast fell, she leaped clear. When she landed, the wound in her leg widened and she cried out in pain. Blood ran down the leg of her pants, filling her boot.

  The giant reached for her. It meant to eat her.

  Damia raised the gun and fired five times in quick succession, all five bullets tearing into the giant’s face. The giant reared back, screaming and clawing at the ruined cavities where its eyes had been. Blinded, it reached out a hand, trying to scrabble for her, to destroy her in payment for its pain.

  Staggering to her feet, ignoring the pain in her leg, Damia dropped the gun and took up her sword in both hands. She dodged the giant’s searching hand, moved between its legs, and drove her sword up into its groin, thrusting so hard that the blade sank to the hilt up inside the monster’s pelvis, in its soft innards. She twisted and carved and then backed away as a shower of shit and viscera gouted from the wound.

  She fell, but managed to keep clear of the giant when it also collapsed, dead, on the battlefield. Beyond it she could see the war spread out across the Isthmus of the Conquistadors. The terrain had become little more than blood and corpses, but the armies still fought, climbing over mountains of the dead. The war had become a hideous, ugly, twisted thing.

  Damia took off her black cloak. She tore long strips from it and bound her wounded leg.

  Carefully, she climbed to her feet. The binding had stopped the bleeding, for the most part. She would live, but if she didn’t get it sewn up, she wouldn’t live for very long.

  The nearest battle was a few hundred yards away but moving closer. One of the gods Kitsune had brought from Perinthia had been surrounded by legends of Yucatazca. They harried the tall, black-helmeted old god. No matter how powerful, the god was outnumbered.

  Damia started in that direction, but then she saw one of the Atlantean octopuses drifting toward her as though on the wind. Its tentacles brushed the ground, caressing the dead, finishing off the dying.

  She took out her remaining gun and raised her sword.

  “Need a bit of help, love?” a familiar voice asked.

  Red-cheeked Old Roger stood beside her. Once a Harvest god, the apple-man held a war-axe in each hand. Hatchets. The sort of thing that might have been used against his trees in the days before the Harvest had abandoned him.

  But another figure appeared from her left, running toward the octopus—a huge
figure with red skin and the head of an ox. Gaka, the oni who had been part of her Borderkind platoon with Old Roger, attacked the octopus with his bare hands. Tentacles wrapped around him, but the massive demon yanked the octopus from the air and swung it at the ground again and again until it was dead.

  Damia smiled. No longer under her command, these Borderkind were still loyal.

  “Orders, Commander?” Old Roger asked.

  She saw that he looked not at her, but past her, and Damia turned to see that the remnants of her battalion had gathered on the field of battle. They had been scattered by the latest Atlantean push, but now they mustered behind her once more. The battle raged a hundred yards ahead, and it appeared Atlantis had gotten the upper hand.

  Damia Beck raised her sword, a smile on her bloody face.

  “Attack!”

  The wounded outnumbered the dead. Collette feared for her brother, but the pain and anguish around her would not allow her to wallow in her own concerns. The idea of being left behind did not suit her, but if she had to stay here in camp, then she wanted to be useful. Helping with the injured was the best way she could think of to do that. As a high school girl she had volunteered at a local hospital, which combined with far too many medical shows on TV to provide her with all she knew about medicine. Still, when she offered her help, a field surgeon put her to work immediately. She could clean and dress wounds and check on patients’ pulses. Already she had held down a soldier while the doctor amputated his leg below the knee. He’d mentioned something about cauterizing wounds. She wasn’t looking forward to that.

  But she had to do something.

  Someone shouted her name. She turned to see one of the healers—an ironic word on the battlefield—beckoning to her as two soldiers carried another on a blanket stretched between them.

  Collette ran over as they set the blanket down. The healer slapped thick shears into her hand and Collette got to work immediately cutting away the heavy leather breastplate covering the soldier’s chest. There came a cough and a spatter, and when she looked she saw blood bubbling from the soldier’s lips. That crimson smear on her mouth made Collette realize the soldier was a woman. Not even a woman. Her eyes were ocean blue, her skin soft and alabaster white, save where the blood speckled it. Her cheeks still had a bit of baby fat. The girl could not have been more than seventeen.

  The young soldier coughed again, breath ragged, and her eyes found Collette’s. Blood dripped from her left nostril and ran down her cheek. The surgeon tore away her tunic. Collette had wondered where she had been cut or stabbed, but there was no open wound. Instead, the girl’s entire right side had become a mottled mess of purple and black, blood welling under the bruised skin. Her small breasts rose and fell with her tortured breathing, but on the right side she was swollen. Between her breasts and lower, her skin had pulled taut over ridges underneath.

  Broken bones.

  The girl had been beaten by something inhuman or perhaps crushed underfoot. Collette studied her eyes again and saw the desperation there, the pleading for some kind of solace. She knew she ought to lie to the young soldier, tell her everything would be all right, that the surgeon would save her. But already the healer was drawing the torn scraps of her tunic up to cover her nakedness. There would be no surgeon for her.

  Collette held the girl’s hand and watched her eyes as she died, hoping she provided some peace in that moment but unsure if the soldier could even see her or feel her touch.

  She tasted salt on her lips and realized she was crying.

  The girl’s hand was limp. Collette placed both of the soldier’s arms over her chest. A shadow loomed over her and she looked up to find King Hunyadi blocking out the sun.

  “Damn them,” Hunyadi said.

  Collette swallowed, coughed to clear her throat. “We’re all damned today.”

  The king didn’t argue. He had his helm and armor off and one of his shirtsleeves had been torn away. Blood and dirt smeared his bare arm and a long gash had been cut just below the shoulder.

  The surgeon appeared behind him. “Collette, could you clean His Majesty’s wound, please?”

  She nodded. Wordlessly she went to fetch a bowl of fresh, warm water and a clean rag. First she washed out the wound as best she could, then applied a rough cream that she assumed was some holistic antibiotic ointment. By then the surgeon had reappeared and quickly stitched up the king’s wound.

  Hunyadi donned his armor and helm, tested his grip on the hilt of his sword, and thanked them both. The king took a look around at the wounded. Through the opening in the face of the helm, the anger and sadness in his eyes were plain. He turned and shouted a command and a page rushed over with a horse. Hunyadi mounted the sleek black beast and rode down to war once more.

  Collette watched him diminish as he rode downhill. While she stood there, Julianna came up beside her, wiping blood from her hands.

  “Are you sick of this yet?”

  “Of blood? Oh, yeah. Never liked blood, even when it isn’t my own,” Collette replied.

  Julianna shook her head. “Not just that. All of it. You’re a legend, Coll. To these people, anyway. I mean, I understand why I’m here. Self-defense classes prepped me for dealing with an asshole in a bar or a perv trying to drag me into an alley, but not for war. I’ve done well managing to stay alive here for as long as I have. But you…you’ve got this incredible destiny and you’re just cooling your heels. I’ve seen what you can do.”

  Collette shook her head. “It’s not like that. You think they left me behind because I’m the woman? This whole mission was Oliver’s idea. He’s the one who had to go. And if he was going, I had to stay behind. I still have no idea what, if anything, our destiny is, or what the magic we inherited from our mother is really going to mean. But finding out’s going to have to wait until the war’s over. Right now, these people just need something to believe in. Oliver and I can do the most damage against Atlantis by just acting as symbols.

  “I’m here because…”

  She saw the flicker of fear in Julianna’s eyes, and Collette realized she could not complete the sentence. They both knew what the next words would be: I’m here because Oliver could die.

  Oliver could die.

  Collette knew what that would mean for the Lost Ones and the Two Kingdoms, and for herself as the last surviving Legend-Born. She didn’t care. None of that mattered to her.

  All she cared about was her brother coming back safely so that they could end all of this. So they could go home. Whatever home became when the war had come to an end.

  Where the hell is Smith? Oliver thought.

  “Somebody give me a hand!” he shouted, glancing around the library chamber as the Atlantean sorcerers began to force their way through the rubble of the fallen arch and soldiers came in through the other doors.

  Kitsune appeared at his side, fur cloak rippling around her. She stared at him with jade eyes. “Bring the prince!”

  Frustrated, Oliver glared at her. “I’m trying.”

  He let go of the boy’s arms. The prince sat, eyes staring off into nothing as though he’d gone catatonic. Kitsune grabbed his arm and tried to pull. Oliver had found strength and quickness he’d never imagined he had since coming through the Veil and discovering he was half-legend himself, but neither he nor Kitsune could budge Prince Tzajin from his chair.

  “We need Smith,” the fox-woman said, glancing around in a frenzy. “He could move the boy.”

  “He’s not here,” Oliver said. “Just take him through the Veil. Go right through.”

  Kitsune nodded, eyes sparkling as though they were sea glass, like most of this structure. She held out her hands, reaching for the fabric of the Veil the way that only Borderkind could, and a look of horror spread across her face.

  “What’s wrong?” Blue Jay asked, dancing in toward them, the blood of Atlantean soldiers on his hands and streaked up his arms. The feathers in his hair were spotted with scarlet.

  “I can’t reach the
Veil,” Kitsune said.

  Blue Jay paled. He reached his hands up just as Kitsune had, to no avail.

  “It’s got to be some kind of defensive magic. The sorcerers did something to the building,” Oliver said.

  Kitsune nodded, terror growing in her eyes.

  “What if it’s not just the library?” Jay asked. “What if it’s the whole island?”

  A Naga arrow whistled through the air past them. Grin began cussing out soldiers like he was at a London pub in the wee hours of the morning. Heat and frigid cold strobed through the room as Frost and Li concentrated on the rubble where the sorcerers were breaking through.

  Oliver began to panic. He looked down, trying to figure out if the prince had somehow been chained to the chair or the floor. And he froze, staring under the table where Tzajin had been studying.

  “Kit,” he said, his voice a rasp.

  The fox-woman followed his gaze and she froze as well. “How did that get here? Ty’Lis had it in Palenque.”

  Oliver nodded, still staring. The Sword of Hunyadi—the blade Ty’Lis had manipulated him into using to kill King Mahacuhta—lay under the table. Oliver crouched, fascinated, and reached out to snatch the sword up by its handle. The blade was scabbarded. It lay there as though waiting for him.

  “What the hell is going on here?”

  “There’s only one way that sword could have gotten here,” Jay said. “That’s if Ty’Lis left it for you to find.”

  Oliver looked at him. “Oh, fuck,” he whispered. “He knew we were coming.”

  Even as he said the words, Prince Tzajin began to gag. The boy retched, but nothing came out. His eyes were glazed, and then they began to bleed. Rivulets of scarlet ran like tears down his face. Blue Jay and Kitsune stepped back, but Oliver took a step nearer, bending toward him.

  “What is it? What did he do to you?” Oliver shouted at the prince.

  Tzajin’s head lolled back, his mouth gaping open. Oliver saw something moving down there in his throat.

  He staggered back, just as the first of the jellyfish flew out of the prince’s throat. The kid kept gagging, choking as they forced their way out of him. His body convulsed. The jellyfish stung him with its gossamer tendrils, streaking Tzajin’s face and neck with red lashes. Oliver drew Hunyadi’s sword and hacked it in half.