Lost Ones-Veil 3 (27 page)

His nostrils flared. Ru’Lem could have come to speak to him alone. Instead, the leader of the High Council had brought two other councilors. They would speak down to him, of course. They always did, when more than one was present. Alone, none of them had the courage to treat him with disdain. Together, they were too proud to address him any other way.

The octopuses on either side of him drifted further along the shore, moving away, dragging snail trails in the wet sand with their tentacles. Ty’Lis clasped his hands in front of him, sleeves enveloping them, and waited for the councilors to arrive.

“You wander far, Ty’Lis,” said the sorceress amongst them, an ugly crone called Nya’To, her skin and hair a tainted piss yellow.

Ru’Lem held up a hand and glanced at her, obviously displeased that she had spoken before him. The councilor on his right, a dark-bearded sycophant named Ha’Kar after his father, said nothing, watching the Council leader for any cue that he ought to speak or gesture or dance like the puppet that he was.

“Perhaps you ought to remain with us,” Ru’Lem said. His silver hair had thinned with age to nothing but wisps, but his beard remained thick and knotted with iron rings. “When the battle begins, it will be swift.”

Ty’Lis glanced at the sky. “We have a little time, yet.”

How dare they? None of this would have been possible without his efforts. He had gathered the Myth Hunters. He had removed Prince Tzajin to Atlantis and corrupted the throne of Yucatazca. He had engineered the murder of King Mahacuhta. Now they swept in to claim the glory and presumed to instruct him? They might command the armies of Atlantis, but he was not some Lost soldier.

“All is proceeding as planned,” Ru’Lem said, a warning in his voice as he knitted his brows. “We must all work together, now, to make certain there are no more mistakes. Your role has changed, Ty’Lis, but it is still vital to our success.”

A horrid malignance wafted from him, both a stench and an aura of darkness that would have cowed anyone else. The other councilors seemed to absorb the hideous ambiance, exuding cruelty and predation. Ty’Lis only smiled, revealing jagged teeth. The arrogance on Ru’Lem’s face wavered.

“We will not discuss the Bascombes’ escape again. I have delivered to you precisely the circumstances the High Council desired. After centuries of your predecessors bowing to other kings and letting our world be further diluted by the influx of unwelcome intruders from across the Veil, I have given Atlantis the chance to do something about it. Now you have taken command of our future, Ru’Lem. I hope that your hands are strong enough to guide it.”

The aged sorcerer sneered at him, lips peeling back. Thin even by the standards of Atlantis, his face had the flat, deadly aspect of a moray eel. It seemed as though he might issue a challenge at that very moment, but then Ru’Lem took a breath.

“It has been decided that you will command the Perytons when the battle begins,” Ru’Lem said at last. “They are unruly beasts, savage and useful, but loyal only to themselves.”

Ty’Lis smiled thinly. “And to me. They are loyal to me.”

“If we are to win the war, they must obey,” the aged sorcerer said.

“Oh, victory is vital. But there are other factors to consider.”

Before any of the councilors could reply, Ty’Lis raised a hand. He pursed his lips in a whistle that rippled the air. The octopuses up and down the shore made a terrible shrieking noise that made them flinch and cover their ears for a moment. Black smoke curled up from the palm of his upraised hand, pluming into the sky, and then it blossomed into a flower of deep purple light.

Ru’Lem raised both hands. The sound of the surf grew loud, but it did not come from the ocean. White froth and blue light steamed around the ancient one’s fists. Nya’To and Ha’Kar reacted as well, drifting aside so that he could not attack all three of them at once.

Ty’Lis smiled and raised both hands, showing empty palms.

“Do you think I am so foolish as to attack you, councilors?”

“Then what—” Ru’Lem began.

His answer came before the question could be finished. Powerful wings beat the air above them and they all looked up to see two Perytons gliding toward the ground. The moonlight cast twisted shadows from their antlers. Their green feathers looked black as tar in the night.

The Perytons alighted beside Ty’Lis, moving almost in a crouch, as though they might lunge. Their talons hung at their sides, but they were so swift that—this close—they could tear off a limb before any of the sorcerers crafted a spell.

“Why have you summoned us?” said one of the Perytons, its voice a low, rasping screech, almost birdlike.

Ty’Lis bowed to them. “Morning is not far off. This battle will decide the war. These councilors worry that you will not obey them.”

As one, the two Perytons twisted their heads round to stare at Ru’Lem and the others with murderous eyes. “Obey?”

“Yes. I thought, perhaps, that I would let you explain to them that the Perytons are the allies of Atlantis, not our servants. I am certain you will be able to forge a relationship valuable to everyone.”

Ru’Lem rose several inches from the ground. “The Perytons may be our allies, but you are a child of Atlantis, Ty’Lis. You will obey the High Council or be guilty of treason.”

The Perytons spread their wings, feathers ruffling, instinctively reacting to the hostility between sorcerers. They hung their heads low, racks of antlers sharp and deadly.

Ty’Lis glanced at the eastern horizon, where the sky had lightened to an ocean blue. Dawn seemed to be hurrying this morning.

“Your cooperation will benefit all of Atlantis,” he said to the Perytons. “Your people will not be forgotten. I will not allow it.”

He turned to Ru’Lem. “The war is in your hands, now. But if it is to mean anything—if the High Council is to achieve its goals—then there are other chores to which I must attend.”

The councilors began to move toward him, dark magic rising. Ru’Lem commanded him to stop.

Ty’Lis tugged his hood down over his face, pulled his cloak tightly around him, and vanished within it. He left behind a tiny swirl of air. A wave crashed on the shore, rolling in and erasing any trace that he had ever been there at all.

The Shediac River flowed through Wessex County, Maine, in a serpentine series of double-backs, trickle-pools, and rapids, so that its personality changed dramatically every half mile or so. In Kitteridge, where Robiquet had worked for decades as house manager for the Bascombe family, it flowed strong but silent, placid on the surface but with a deep, dangerous current. But upriver, in the town of Haskell, it passed under the Chadbourne Bridge in a rocky cascade. The fishing off of the Chadbourne was fantastic, but nobody tried canoeing on that part of the Shediac. And Sara Halliwell had never heard of anyone committing suicide by jumping from that bridge. With the rough water and all of those jutting rocks, it looked like the kind of place to bust yourself up and survive to regret it.

As a little girl, Sara Halliwell had loved the Chadbourne Bridge. Fishing hadn’t appealed to her, but several times her father had taken her along on an early Sunday morning to cast a line into the Shediac. It had always been springtime—a cold April morning, often damp and gray. He’d have coffee and she hot cocoa. Her dad hadn’t spoken to her much during these ventures. Oh, he’d talked, but never really to Sara. There were no questions about school or what she might want for her birthday or how pretty she’d looked in her new Easter dress. Ted Halliwell had just talked about the weather and his philosophy of fishing and how much he loved the quiet out there on the bridge in the early morning.

Sara hadn’t thought about those fishing trips in a very long time.

Now she’d returned to the Chadbourne Bridge on a drizzly gray morning—a little early in the year for her father’s fishing trips, but the weather was much the same. She pulled her jacket tight around her and stared down into the tumbling rush of the Shediac River and she realized there were tears in her eyes.

Hastily, she wiped them away. Ted Halliwell’s little girl didn’t cry. No matter how angry and frustrated she’d been with him as she grew to adulthood, that was one lesson she couldn’t seem to unlearn. Sara might shed a tear alone in bed or behind closed doors, but never where others could see her. More than one of her relationships had been doomed by this reticence.

She took a breath, wiped at her eyes until she was satisfied the evidence had been erased, and then turned toward Sheriff Norris and Robiquet. All of them knew the bridge well. But to Sara and the sheriff, it had always been just a bridge.

An interesting bridge, true. Spaced evenly along one side it had a pair of stone towers like castle turrets. Set into each tower was a metal gate. The bars looked to have been rusted and painted and rusted and painted dozens of times over the years. Sara had asked her father every time they crossed the bridge what the towers were for. He had a dozen different stories. One day he would say they were lookouts from the Second World War, from which soldiers watched for enemy ships coming up the Shediac to invade Maine. A week later he would insist that each of those towers had been used in the early 1900s to hold the worst criminals from the county jail, displaying them to the public as a warning.

There had been other explanations, but those were the two she remembered best. To this day, she had no idea what they were for. Sheriff Norris didn’t know, either.

Even Robiquet could not say what the stated purpose of their original construction had been. But inside the tower on the east side of the river, he insisted that they would find what they had sought.

“Sara, are you coming?” Sheriff Norris called.

She turned to find that he and Robiquet had gotten the rust-flaked gate open. Lost in thought, she’d somehow missed the sound of grating metal she felt sure must have accompanied the act.

A truck rumbled by, an early morning delivery or a father off to work. Other than that, there was no traffic. Once upon a time, long before Sara had been born, the Chadbourne had been much traveled. These days, Route 7 was a faster way to get almost anywhere.

Sara cleared her throat. The dampness of the morning was getting to her. As she walked toward the tower, she saw Robiquet disappear into the shadows beyond that gate. Sheriff Norris went to his car—emblazoned with the Wessex County Sheriff’s Department logo—and popped the trunk. He glanced around as guiltily as one of the many punks and thugs he’d no doubt tossed into lockup, then took out a tire-iron and slammed the trunk. He kept the tool down beside his leg, as inconspicuously as possible, and walked back to the tower on the bridge.

A light rain began to fall.

Feeling as though she were in a dream, Sara could only stand and watch as he walked by. He didn’t even seem to notice her until he reached the open gate and paused to look back.

“You coming?”

Sara shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

Surprise registered on his face.

“I’ll just…I’ll wait here,” she told him.

The sheriff gave her a thoughtful look and then went in without her. Perhaps he understood.

This time she heard the grating of metal. In the darkness inside that small tower, where soldiers or criminals or werewolves at full moon (for that was another of her father’s tales of Chadbourne Bridge) had once resided, Robiquet and the sheriff pried open a door.

No. A Door. Capital D.

One that ought to have led to the other side of the Veil, where Ted Halliwell needed his little girl’s voice to guide him home.

Only a minute or two after he’d gone in, Sheriff Norris stepped back out. He wore upon his face the apology of the surgeon who had failed to save a husband or a son, or a father.

He said her name.

Sara shook her head, then turned her back on him, grateful for the falling rain. Ted Halliwell’s little girl didn’t cry. At least not where anyone could see her.

Jackson said her name again. She heard him take a couple of steps toward her, then other footsteps, softer.

“I’m sorry, Miss Halliwell,” Robiquet said, his words gentle as the rain. “There are other Doors, but I fear that whatever is happening on the other side of the Veil, they will all be blocked, now. If you need me, for anything, you’ll find me at the Bascombe house. I never should have left. I owed them more than that. There’s a great deal of business to be dealt with at the house and with Max’s law firm. I need to protect Oliver and Collette’s interests for when they come home.”

Sara frowned deeply. Cold rain ran down the back of her neck, under her collar. She could feel Jackson and Robiquet there behind her but decided not to worry about her tears. The rain would hide them.

“You really think they’re coming home?” she asked, almost afraid of the answer. How could she lose faith if the fussy little goblin still believed?

She turned to find that, somehow, Robiquet was gone.

Sara and Sheriff Norris stared at the place where he’d been standing a moment before as rain spattered the bridge.

After a moment, Jackson led her back to the car. In silence, she climbed in beside him, wishing she had somewhere to go besides her father’s house. Wishing she had someone to go home to.

It was time. Tonight, she would call her mother, and then the airport. She had left a life behind her in Atlanta, way back in December. She only hoped it was still there, waiting.

The first horn blew just as the burning corona of the sun peeked above the eastern horizon. Immediately it was joined by a chorus of others as the army of Euphrasia sent a signal through the ranks, from one battalion to the next, that the enemy approached.

King Hunyadi stepped from his tent, already clad in the leather armor that had been fashioned for his grandfather in times long forgotten. His father’s sword hung at his hip. As a young warrior, he’d had another sword, a gift from the man who’d taught him combat, but he had given it over years ago as a symbol of his trust in a man named David Koenig, who in turn had eventually passed it to Oliver Bascombe.

The sword had been used to kill the king of Yucatazca. Whose hand grasped it now was a question Hunyadi did not wish to entertain.