Lost Ones-Veil 3 (39 page)

In the mists on either side, other figures moved.

Other Wayfarers.

It seemed the wind was at his back, and the mist rushed past as though they were flying, hurtling along the Gray Corridor.

The Wayfarers vanished.

Oliver paused, looking around, panic seizing him. Frost and Grin began to call for Smith.

The gray mist faded.

“This way,” Oliver said.

“How do you know?” Grin asked.

“I just…I feel it.”

In three steps, they emerged from the Gray Corridor and found themselves on the hill above the battlefield, within sight of the wounded being doctored and the dead where they lay stacked like cordwood, and the tents of the King and his officers.

And Oliver heard his sister scream.

Ty’Lis opened his cloak.

Collette stared a moment and then a hand flew to her mouth as she retched. She wished she could look away, but knew it might cost her life. Beneath the cloak, the sorcerer wore nothing save a wrap that covered his genitals. Even so, only small strips of his greenish-white flesh were revealed. The rest of his bony body pulsed with living things, bulbous, translucent creatures with masses of long tendrils. They might have been jellyfish, but Collette had never seen jellyfish like this before. They were suctioned to the sorcerer’s flesh, and she felt sure the traces of green that seemed to swirl inside of their bodies were the blood of Ty’Lis.

In her arms, Julianna had fallen unconscious. A coldness came over Collette’s heart, and she felt as though some hard shell covered her.

“Beautiful, aren’t they?” Ty’Lis asked, and from his thin smile, she knew he meant those words.

Ovid Tsing remained on his knees, clutching his wound with one hand and his dagger in the other. Collette snapped at him, said his name, and the man looked up with eyes so lost she doubted he would ever find his way again. Right then, she didn’t care. She needed him.

“Watch over her,” Collette said, pointing to Julianna. “You owe her that.”

Ovid began to crawl toward Julianna.

Collette glanced at the Dustman—at the legend Ted Halliwell had become—and saw that his eyes glowed with a golden light. She wondered if that was a good thing, or if the monster had emerged from within him again.

The Dustman said her name, raising a finger and pointing past her.

The jellyfish had begun to detach themselves from Ty’Lis’s body. One by one they pulled away with an obscene sucking noise, leaving behind small, throbbing holes in the sorcerer’s flesh.

They darted through the air, trailing tendrils. Ty’Lis wore a cadaverous grin and he flicked his fingers outward as though orchestrating their every move.

Weaponless, and with only the power in her hands, she knew she had to get in close. Collette lunged at him. One of the jellyfish lashed at her arm with its tendrils, a dozen searing lines upon her flesh. It attached to her skin and she felt something puncture her arm, felt something wriggling into the hole it had made.

She screamed in revulsion and panic, but she reached for the sorcerer just the same.

Powerful hands gripped her shoulders from behind, and then her feet lifted off the ground. The Dustman hurled her away to tumble across the rough hillside, coming to rest only inches from the dead assassin.

Collette scrabbled to her feet, chest heaving. Her arm burned where the jellyfish was wrapped around her. Retching again, she forced herself to get control and tried to scrape the thing off against the dirt and grass. Its tendrils tore free, leaving stinging red welts behind, but whatever proboscis it had thrust into her arm could not be so easily dislodged. She grabbed it with her free hand and pulled it loose, screaming again as it tore skin and tugged on muscle. Then it was out, and she was bleeding. She tested her arm and hand. Everything still worked.

Enraged, she rose and saw the Dustman moving toward Ty’Lis in a cloud. Sand and grit swirled in the air, dragging jellyfish down and smearing them on the ground. Others flew right at the Dustman, trying to latch onto his sifting, shifting form, only to be scoured away. Petite as she was, still it unsettled her to have been cast off like some discarded toy. But Collette figured the Dustman had earned her forgiveness.

Then Ovid cried out, and she saw that the Sandman had not gotten them all. Jellyfish had descended upon him and Julianna. Tendrils rose and fell in the air, whipping their exposed flesh. One of the things had attached itself to the back of Ovid’s neck. The young warrior did nothing to try to remove it. Instead, he spread himself out over Julianna, trying to save the life of the woman he’d stabbed only moments before. Most of the creatures were attacking him.

“I freed you!” Ty’Lis screamed. “How dare you interfere?”

The Dustman had gone away. Ted Halliwell had gone away. The thing that attacked Ty’Lis now appeared to be the Sandman, through and through. The gray hooded thing with those finger knives seemed almost to glide along the ground, reaching for the sorcerer.

Not the Sandman,
Collette thought.
It’s Ted, still, somehow. In there, it’s Halliwell, or he wouldn’t be helping.

Adrenaline surged through her, but she thought something else moved through her veins as well. Her body trembled with the urge to act, with the power to do something. But Halliwell would destroy the sorcerer, certainly.

Even as the thought entered her mind, Ty’Lis raised his hands. From the holes where the jellyfish had been feeding upon his blood, streams of liquid shadow erupted, blackness that seemed to eclipse the sunlight around them. Like the tendrils of the jellyfish, they whipped through the air and wrapped around the Sandman, but these were not physical things like the jellyfish. They were forged of the dark magic of Ty’Lis.

The Sandman staggered, struggled. His form changed, shifted, sifting to the Dustman and then to Halliwell. The sand began to slip through those tendrils of darkness, flowing toward the sorcerer, scouring Ty’Lis’s face, tearing the flesh.

The air seemed to compress between them and then it burst in a brilliant scarlet light, an eruption of magic that blew Halliwell off of his feet. The sand creature struck the ground and shattered, sand and dust and grit spraying all over the hill.

Ty’Lis did not so much as look away.

The Sandman began to draw himself together. The sorcerer had expected it. Those black tendrils tore at the remains of the monster, of Halliwell, pulling him apart as he tried to repair himself. Ty’Lis threw back his head, jaws opening impossibly wide, unhinging, and something began to push itself up from within, wet and spiny, a gleaming carapace, a creature from the depths of the sea.

It stripped off the flesh of Ty’Lis as easily as removing a coat.

Collette could not breathe. Altanteans could not all be these creatures. So what the hell was it? A parasite? Or was this simply what the sorcerers of Atlantis became, within?

As Halliwell fought against the magic of that ocean sorcerer, the creature turned to look at her, and those piss-yellow eyes were the same. This was no parasite. She stared into the true face of Ty’Lis.

And he stared back at her.

Collette’s hands flexed emptily.

Turning, stumbling on her injured leg and with the pain in her arm screaming in her brain, she stagger-ran to the top of the ridge, practically threw herself between a pair of trees, and went sprawling on her hands and knees, headfirst down the other side.

When she picked up her head, she saw the war-hammer Julianna had hit the assassin with. She scrambled over to it and picked it up in both hands. Collette had never been especially strong. All her life she’d been teased—sometimes lightheartedly and sometimes cruelly—for her size. When she met children, sometimes as young as twelve, who were taller than she was, invariably she would blush, feeling awkward.

The war-hammer seemed no heavier than a baseball bat in her hands.

Collette started back over the ridge.

Oliver and the winter man ran side by side. The temperature here was perhaps fifteen degrees cooler than on Atlantis, but the air hung thick with humidity, and Frost had almost instantly accumulated that moisture to repair himself. His icy figure remained sharp and thin, but no longer the skeletal shape he had become.

They weaved through the wounded, Oliver leaping a man who howled for the doctor, raising the stump of a ruined arm. Frost disintegrated into the air, becoming the churning blizzard Oliver had first encountered a lifetime ago in his mother’s parlor on that stormy December night.

Grin had been left to look after Kitsune—still in her fox shape—and the cooling corpses of Cheval and Blue Jay. Oliver and Frost were the only ones left to fight Ty’Lis, and somehow, despite the mistrust and resentment that had come between them, that seemed right.

They reached the tents of King Hunyadi and his entourage. Oliver kept his focus on the flag flying the king’s banner. He dodged around a tent and then emerged at the rear of the camp, a stone’s throw from the top of the ridge. The Sword of Hunyadi felt right and comfortable in his hand.

When he saw the monsters fighting, his first thought was that two of the legends involved in the war had somehow carried their conflict far from the field of battle. The thing still on its feet had a hard ridged shell like some kind of crustacean, black and wetly gleaming. Ribbons of oily shadow extruded from small holes all over its body, and Oliver had seen dark tendrils like that before. Atlantean sorcery.

But there was no sign of Collette, and that was a good sign.

The ocean creature attacked something else that struggled to rise from the ground, those oily ribbons whipping and tearing, but as Oliver ran—the blizzard of the winter man rushing along beside him—he realized what he saw was the Sandman. The monster’s substance thrashed against those black ribbons, which somehow had power over the shifting sand.

“Magic,” he grunted, breath coming raggedly as he ran. “Ty’Lis can’t be far.”

“
That is Ty’Lis,
” whispered a cold breeze at his ear. “
Dark sorcery, Oliver. He’s transformed himself into a Curlesh, a legend from ancient Atlantis.”

“Why the hell would he—”

“
Harder to kill,
” the icy breeze replied.

But Oliver had stopped listening. As they neared the stretch of rough ground where Ty’Lis and the Sandman fought, he saw two human figures on the grass, covered in the same sickening jellyfish they had barely escaped in Atlantis. A man lay atop a woman, and the disgusting things covered nearly all of the man’s body and lashed at the exposed flesh of the woman he shielded.

Oliver would have known her in a darkened room, or across a crowd of thousands. He knew her now. Julianna’s hair. Her hands. The slope of her jaw, where only a tiny bit of her face was visible. He knew her better than he did himself.

“What have you done?” he screamed.

The Curlesh turned at his voice. The Sandman partially slipped his bonds and a long arm sculpted of sand lashed up, driving finger knives at the eyes of the sorcerer Ty’Lis. The Curlesh dodged its head and its shadow tendrils tore the Sandman’s arm apart, but by then, Oliver and Frost were nearly upon them. He didn’t know where his sister was, but as long as Collette was elsewhere, she would be safe.

Those piss-yellow eyes turned toward Oliver again. Ty’Lis raised his monstrous hand.

“You should be dead!” the sorcerer shouted.

A rush of turquoise light burst from his fingers and shot toward Oliver, who had no defense against magic. In that very instant, the winter man took form in front of him, ice and snow carved into the body of Frost. Ty’Lis’s spell struck him and Frost melted on contact, turning to a cascade of water that splashed to the rough grass with the stink of the ocean at low tide.

“Son of a bitch!” Oliver roared, raising the sword and charging right across the puddle that Frost had become. “
I
should be dead? You should be dead!”

He brought Hunyadi’s blade around in an arc with a speed and a strength he knew were inhuman. The sword struck the Curlesh’s carapace at the neck with a metallic clang and glanced off, sending up sparks. Ty’Lis reached for him with a huge hand. Oliver spun inside his reach and knocked the arm away with another blow from his sword.

“Kill him, Bascombe!” shouted a voice.

Oliver caught a single glimpse past Ty’Lis at the Sandman. As the creature struggled against those ribbons of darkness, its murderous features changed and Oliver saw the face of Ted Halliwell. Kitsune had told them the Sandman had survived, but now he knew it was far more than that. Somehow, Halliwell had survived as well, as a monster.

In that heartbeat of distraction, Ty’Lis struck him across the face, the hard shell of the Curlesh gashing his flesh. Oliver staggered back and fell. His fingers managed to hold onto the sword, but as he began to rise, several of those ribbons of darkness—stinking of ocean magic—darted toward him and trapped his arms to his sides even as they bound his legs.

The Sandman, Halliwell, whatever it was, rose up behind Ty’Lis, but the sorcerer’s putrid tentacles ripped him apart again.

“It ends now, Bascombe,” the sorcerer said, his voice low and distant, as though coming up from inside the cavernous chest of the Curlesh.

“What’re you, a complete idiot? You blind as well as stupid?” Oliver raged at him, struggling against the black ribbons. “There’s revolution in Yucatazca, and I only got a quick look at the battlefield, dumbass, but that was enough for me to figure out you’re losing this war!”

The face of the Curlesh had no expression, but its eyes twitched and the hinged mouth opened in what might have been a mocking smile. “It matters little. Every Door leading to the ordinary world is gone. I’ve had them sealed. Only a handful of Borderkind still live, and those will be eradicated. All that remains is for me to kill you and your sister, and the Two Kingdoms will be mine. Atlantis will rule. There are more soldiers to be had, other armies to manipulate. This battle will not decide the war.”

The confirmation that Collette was alive filled Oliver with strength.