The Borderkind (5 page)

Once he had Bascombe, of course, he still wanted answers. The mystery of the murdered children and their missing eyes and the connection to the Bascombe family was a riddle he needed solved. But getting back to the world was even more important. Untethered from everything he’d ever known, he had no touchstone for what mattered. What did it mean to be a policeman if there was no one to recognize his authority?

His service weapon was clipped to his belt at the small of his back. He’d worn it under his jacket, but now the jacket was abandoned. Halliwell felt no need to hide the weapon, but he had seen Julianna looking at it warily. She had been astonished that her firm, Bascombe & Cox, had arranged for him to have a permit to carry the gun in the United Kingdom. Halliwell had not.

Money greased the wheels of the world.

His world, at least.

He had no clue how
this
one worked.

But Oliver would. And Oliver was in love with Julianna. Having her along for the ride had at first been troubling to Halliwell. Now it had turned out to be vital. For if Bascombe got wind of her presence here, then he would come find them, and they wouldn’t have to search for him anymore.

For now, though, the hunt was on.

Julianna had caught up with him as they walked down the craggy, rocky slope to the river. Halliwell had taken a look to the north and seen only more of the same, unwelcoming landscape, so he had turned south instead, toward the forest. They’d been walking alongside the river ever since, and been in the shade of the trees for a while now.

“You seem awfully certain of your direction,” she said.

Halliwell kept his focus on the bend in the valley ahead, where the river turned and disappeared in the woods. “I am.”

“How do you know Oliver went this way?”

“I don’t.”

Julianna faltered and fell behind. But when Halliwell didn’t wait for her, she caught up to him quickly and moved around in front of him, forcing him to stop.

“I thought we’d established a pretty decent rapport, Ted,” she said, searching his eyes.

Halliwell let out a breath and nodded. He reached up and scratched at his stubbled chin. “We have. I’m sorry. Maybe I’m not handling this as well as you are.”

“Funny, I thought you were handling it better. I’m feeling pretty brittle at the moment. One little thing and I might shatter.”

He smiled wearily. “At least you’re young. I’m an old bastard and pretty sure I’m in shock, and not in the best shape for a cross-country hike.”

“Bullshit,” Julianna said, eyes narrowing sharply. “You’re in better physical condition than I am. And you’re fiftysomething, not eighty-something. If you’re freaked, that’s fine. Me, too. But we’re here together. Talk to me.”

Halliwell nodded, thinking how beautiful she was, how fortunate Bascombe was to have a smart, pretty girl like this in love with him. How tragic it would be if anything happened to her here.

“Can we walk?” he asked.

Julianna got out of his way and fell in beside him as he started downriver again.

“Water is life, kid,” Halliwell said. “If we follow the river, we’re likely to find a settlement somewhere along the way. The other direction wasn’t exactly inviting terrain, you know? So I’m following my instincts, and a little logic. That doesn’t mean Oliver went this way, but if we have any chance of finding him, we’ve got to find
people,
to learn something about this place, figure out how to track him.”

“Logical enough,” she replied. “But you could’ve said—”

“Did you feel that?” Halliwell interrupted. He stopped and glanced around, staring at the ground.

“Feel what?”

Halliwell didn’t have to answer her. A moment later he felt it again, and saw in her eyes that she had felt it, too. A small tremor in the earth beneath their feet. It came a third time, more quickly, and he saw the leaves shaking on the trees.

“What the hell is that?” Julianna asked in a whisper.

He had no answer for her. The tremors continued, but this was not an earthquake. It was too regular, too rhythmic, to be anything of the sort. It was more like he imagined a battlefield would be, the impact of mortar shells or bombs not too far away.

“Let’s keep going,” he said.

They walked more quickly now, moving along the river’s edge beneath the shade of branches of the trees along the bank. The tremors continued at a slow, steady march, but they were growing in intensity.

“It’s getting closer,” Julianna said. “Ted, maybe we should go a different way.”

Halliwell shook his head, not in disagreement but simply in confusion. He had no idea what to do. Again, they faltered and came to a halt. Now the branches and leaves all shook with each tremor. The shaking of the earth was not strong enough to throw them off of their feet, but if it kept growing, it soon would be.

“Maybe,” he said at last. “Through the woods. West, I guess it is.”

Julianna turned to go into the trees, away from the river. Halliwell went to follow her but took one last look downstream. As he did, he saw the albino giant come around the bend in the river, towering as high as the trees.

The giant was hideous, the bones in its bleached white face jutting through taut leathery skin, eyes gleaming pink like a fresh scar, the bones of its ribs so sharply defined that they seemed about to tear through the flesh. It bent to snatch at something in the water and Halliwell saw jagged ridges of bones that protruded from the skin along its spine.

His hands shook, one going to his mouth as if to keep himself silent, the other to his chest, which tightened with a sharp, unfamiliar pain. Halliwell froze and stared at the thing, unable to breathe. He had never known terror before, and it engulfed him, unknown and unwelcome.

The thing had frozen as well. From a hundred yards downriver, it stared at him. Then it stood and cocked back its head. He was sure it was sniffing at the air, catching their scent on the wind.

“Weird,” Julianna said, a few feet away in the trees. “The ground stopped…”

Her words trailed off. He glanced over and saw that she had seen the thing now. She screamed, the sound tearing the air like fabric. The wind died in that moment, as though it were composed of spirits who stopped to listen, to watch.

A breath burst from Halliwell’s lips and then he was sucking another in, learning how to fill his lungs all over again.

The giant threw back its head and screamed in return, as if mimicking Julianna. Then it began to run toward them, a thunderous gait that was far swifter than Halliwell would have imagined. Its eyes were narrowed and its lips pulled back in a snarl that exposed a jagged mess of teeth.

He grabbed Julianna’s wrist. “Go!”

The two of them fled into the trees together. Low branches scratched at him and he held up his free hand to ward them off. They plummeted through the woods on a roughly westward path. Julianna was shouting questions at him, clutching his hand with such terror that he thought his fingers would break.

The ground shook now with each pounce of the towering monster. Once. Twice. They made it half a dozen feet between each impact. On the third one, Halliwell heard the splintering of wood behind him and bits of the forest crashed down.

He was not a man prone to prayer. Now he whispered to God; thought of the daughter he had not seen in so very long, who had never really understood how much he loved her, and stopped. Julianna cursed loudly, madness in her eyes, hair wild, face scratched. She struggled to be free of him, but he held her fast.

“We can’t—”

Its shadow fell upon them, swallowing the sun, and then it landed ten feet away, trees crushed to pulp beneath its mass. It stared down at them with those revolting pink eyes and snarled, baring its filth-encrusted, jagged, broken teeth. It slid its tongue out and a thick string of drool dripped to the ground.

It looked hungry.

Julianna staggered backward, still wild-eyed; there would be no reasoning with her. Halliwell was nearly beyond reason himself, but suddenly the pain and tightness in his chest gave way. This wasn’t the death he’d imagined for himself. But if he was going to die, it wouldn’t be screaming. He’d been a cop all his life.

“No,” was all he said, as the thing reached down to scoop them up, one in each hand. Julianna tried to run and its fingers scurried after her, snatching her easily.

In the moment before it picked him up, Halliwell drew his gun.

He was cold inside. Like ice. Numb.

Maybe this is how it feels to be dead,
he thought.

The giant carried them back to the river, walking now, in half a dozen strides. Halliwell hung limp in its grip, staring up at it, repulsed by the sickly white flesh and the way its bones jutted from the skin. It paused, standing in the water, and lifted Halliwell up to its face. He wondered dully if it would eat him. It sniffed at him, nostrils curling. A little voice in the back of his head urged him to fire, but he could only watch.

It lifted Julianna toward its mouth and then breathed in her scent as well. From deep in its throat came a sound of contentment and desire that was the single most unsettling noise he had ever heard. The grotesque perversity of it curdled his insides.

It studied her greedily for another moment, then opened its jaws and brought her toward its mouth.

Halliwell raised the gun and pulled the trigger, all in one motion. The first bullet burst one of its eyes, sending a shower of pustulent fluid down upon Julianna. The second bullet struck its temple, bringing a foul trickle of black ichor. He kept pulling the trigger as the giant staggered against the current, walking upriver, shaking its head like a wet dog.

On the fourth bullet, it dropped them.

Halliwell hit the water and the current took him. He was under for a moment and he tried to swim. He got his head above the water and looked around, saw Julianna surface nearby. She saw him, and the terror was still in her eyes. But they were free.

The river carried them southward. Halliwell hoped the giant had fallen, that it was dead, but then he saw that it was still standing and feared it would pursue them. As they swept along downstream he watched it stagger in the opposite direction, slapping the side of its head with an open hand as though trying to dislodge the bullets in its skull. Half-blind, perhaps brain-damaged, but it kept walking.

Then they were carried around the bend and out of sight.

Gun still clutched in his hand, Halliwell fought the river only enough to get nearer to Julianna. “We’re all right,” he told her. “We’re okay.”

She didn’t argue, but the look in her eyes was enough to show him how ridiculous she thought his words were. And she was right. They were a whole world away from being all right.

Soon they came in sight of a cliff rising at treacherous angles ahead. Halliwell started toward shore, unsure where the river went from here. Julianna followed suit.

“It looks…can it go right into the mountainside?” she asked.

It did. The river plunged into a dark tunnel in the cliff face.

“We’re not going in there,” Julianna said, standing in the water as it rushed around her, moving for the bank.

“Damn right,” Halliwell replied. After what they’d just been through, no way were they swimming some underground river, with God knew what waiting in the darkness for them.

On the bank, they followed the river until they reached the cliff.

Julianna looked up. “What now?”

Halliwell felt the exhaustion in his bones. But there was no rest yet. Not when all they had for a direction was a guess. He pointed westward, along the base of the cliff.

“We go up the side of the valley until we can cross over the top. The river’s got to come out somewhere.”

She hesitated. As a plan of action, it was shit. But they didn’t have anything else.

“I hate being wet,” she said, holding out her arms and looking down at her sodden clothes, nose wrinkled.

Then she started along the base of the cliff, westward, and Halliwell followed.

CHAPTER
3

O
liver expected to die. Beyond the end of the tunnel he could see the sunlight streaming into the gorge, but he did not think they would ever get there. He had been battered and bruised by his collision with the rocks, his throat was raw from nearly drowning, and his companions seemed exhausted as well. There had been all too much of battle in these past hours, then the trek along the river had drained them further. Blue Jay and Kitsune were ragged and weakened. Frost was their only chance.

The Nagas swam at them, serpentine lower bodies gliding under the water, moving upriver slowly, watching them carefully as though searching for the precise moment to strike. From the waist up they were ordinary enough, men and women carrying bows, arrows at the ready. But below the waist they were enormous snakes, with all the deadly speed that would entail.

“What do we do?” Oliver whispered, his voice resounding eerily off the walls of the tunnel.

“Nothing,” Frost said. “Do nothing.”

He cocked his head, watching the serpent-people as they came nearer. His icicle hair made a familiar clinking noise and a white-blue mist rose from the corners of his diamond eyes.

Oliver nodded. If Frost had the strength, he could stop them. With a wave of his hand, he could turn the air so cold around their arrows that they would shatter. Perhaps, he might even momentarily freeze the river around them. But Frost looked just as drained as the rest of them, and Oliver did not share the certainty in the winter man’s voice.

He raised the Sword of Hunyadi.

“Oliver, no!” Kitsune shouted.

Blue Jay burst from the river, spraying water across the rocks and his companions. In a blur of motion he became a bird, crying out as he darted forward, then he spun in the air, ready to block the arrows of the Nagas.

Not a single arrow flew.

Oliver frowned, staring, sword still at the ready as the Nagas turned to one another, whispering. Their serpentine lower halves undulated beneath the water, keeping them from drifting.

Frost and Kitsune exchanged a look of confusion, and then the winter man gestured for Oliver to lower his sword. Reluctantly, he did so.

“We are travelers in search of brief sanctuary,” Frost announced. “We come openly and without pretense. I am Frost of the Borderkind. My companions and I need rest, and they need food as well. Legend says that Twillig’s Gorge is a place of safe haven for travelers of any allegiance, so long as their intentions are peaceful. Is the legend false?”

The Nagas rose up from the water, swaying cobralike for a moment. They opened their mouths and hissed, but their arrows still did not fly.

“Time changes even legends,” one of the females, perhaps the leader, said. “Perhaps legends most of all. You know that very well, Cailleach Bheur, just as I am certain you know that these are perilous times in the Two Kingdoms. Perilous for Borderkind most of all. There are others of your kind in the Gorge, but they have lived here for many years, and we protect our neighbors. We will fight for them. Risk all for them, just as they would for us.

“But you are not our neighbors,” the Naga said, nodding her head first toward Frost, then toward Kitsune and Blue Jay. “None of you. The company of myths is a danger to us all, when so many want you dead. Why should we risk it for strangers?”

Kitsune growled at the use of the word
myth,
a term the Borderkind despised. She might have attacked them then, but this time it was Oliver who held her back.

“You’ll turn us away out of cowardice, then?” Frost demanded.

Blue Jay landed atop the rock Oliver had crashed into, changing again into his human shape. He crouched there, glaring down at the Nagas.

“I never would have believed it,” the trickster said. “The world really has changed.”

“Better allies than strangers,” Frost said, voice low. Mist drifted up from his mouth. The light from along the tunnel made the sharp angles of his icy body and face even more severe. “Better friends than enemies. Now more than ever. If you have Borderkind amongst you, the Hunters will come for them. We mean to stop them before they ever get here. That serves us all.”

The Nagas watched them carefully for several long, tense moments, and then the leader raised her bow, let the pressure off of the string, and returned the arrow to its quiver. The others followed suit.

The leader bowed, then looked at Frost, her smile savage. “I ought to kill you just for calling us cowards. But this is not a time for those with no quarrel to slay one another. It may come to pass soon enough that we will all be short of friends. But you understand we must be wary. In these times, visitors to the Gorge are scarce and mostly unwelcome.”

Kitsune squeezed Oliver’s hand but stared at the Nagas. “But you will let us in?”

“To rest. To eat. You will be gone by dawn. And if others of your kin leave to join you on your quest, all the better.”

Oliver felt the tension go out of him. He slid his sword back into his belt and then stretched, feeling every one of the bruises he’d gotten when he slammed into that rock.

He waded downriver toward the Nagas, not liking the way they watched him. Though he was the least dangerous of the group, the sentries of Twillig’s Gorge seemed unduly focused on his movements. Blue Jay, Kitsune, and Frost joined him and the four of them strode to where the Nagas slithered in the water.

The leader, sleek and beautiful from the waist up, her hair cut short and ragged, gazed at him with wide, green eyes.

“That does not apply to you, brother. You are welcome to stay as long as you like. You have a home with Nagas, wherever you find us.”

Oliver stared dumbly at her. She turned and swam away down the river, the other Naga sentries following her. With the undulating of their serpentine bodies, they rode the current, and were out of the tunnel and into the sunlight of the gorge in moments.

“What the hell was that all about?” Oliver asked, glancing around at his friends.

Kitsune frowned. Beneath her hood, her expression was as puzzled as Oliver’s own. “I have no idea. ‘Brother’? Who do they think you are?”

Oliver opened his mouth to repeat the question, but Frost and Blue Jay had already set off after the Nagas, wading toward the end of the tunnel, where the river flowed into the gorge. They must have heard the Naga’s words, and his own reaction, but neither of them slowed or looked back.

“Could it be just that I’m not Borderkind? That I’m no danger to them?”

Kitsune smiled. “I suppose. If they only knew that having you here is even more dangerous than harboring us…The Hunters stalking the Borderkind are working in secret. You’ve got the whole of the Two Kingdoms after you.”

Oliver laughed softly and they set out together. But as they went, he watched Blue Jay and Frost, up ahead. They walked quickly and did not so much as glance at one another, as if neither one of them dared to speak.

It troubled him, though it seemed more strange than important. Idly, he slid his hand into his pocket and touched the seed given to him by the Harvest gods. Though it clung wetly to the damp fabric inside his pocket, he was strangely reassured that it was still there and seemed undamaged.

Then they emerged from the tunnel, and all other thoughts were banished instantly.

In his mind he had pictured Twillig’s Gorge as a river canyon lined with caves, in which its residents would dwell. That much was true. But it was also far more than that. The walls of the gorge were several hundred feet high and as sheer as the cliff face on the ocean bluff behind his father’s house. The village that had blossomed there in the gorge went on for a mile or more before the river disappeared into the face of another cliff. Twillig’s Gorge was closed in on four sides. From what Oliver could see, the only way in was down one of those sheer cliff faces or through a river tunnel.

There were caves, as he’d imagined. Most of them had balconies built on the outside, some with beautiful awnings. The caves were connected by ladders and walkways fixed to the gorge walls, somehow bolted into the stone, and the gorge itself was spanned by arched, stone bridges of elegant, ancient construction, and by nearly primitive hanging bridges of wood and thick rope, strung at odd angles.

From the look of it, that was how Twillig’s Gorge had started. But there had to be a limit to the number of cave dwellings, and so they had built out from the walls. Oliver gaped at the sight. He had seen homes on steep hillsides in his own world—some of them the product of sheer madness, in his opinion. Much of Southern California, or so it seemed, had been built with the front of a house on solid ground and the back on stilts. In comparison to the houses of Twillig’s Gorge, those homes were on bedrock. Some of them spanned the whole gorge, right over the river, and those seemed the safest. Others, though, were so precarious as to defy gravity. They clung to the stone cliffs with only struts beneath them, braced at angles against the rock face.

It was impossible. But Oliver had grown used to the impossible.

Twillig’s Gorge was alive with motion. People moved across bridges and up ladders. Fishermen cast their lines out of cave mouths and sat on balconies awaiting a bite. There were a great many humans of varying race and origin—Lost Ones who had passed through the Veil at a place and time where it had worn momentarily thin and been trapped here. Perhaps two-thirds of the population looked ordinary enough.

Then there were the legendary. A crew of dwarves was excavating a section of the eastern gorge wall. On the western wall, two others, seemingly ignored by the main crew, were carving an enormous tableau, an image of mermaids sitting upon a rocky outcropping in the midst of the ocean. There was something about the image that chilled Oliver. The mermaids were elegant, but looked cruel. Sailors flailed in the water not far away, and the fragments of a shattered sailing ship thrust from the waves.

That was what gave it away. They weren’t mermaids at all. They were Sirens, luring men to their deaths. It was a warning, but he did not know if it had any significance beyond its artistic merit.

There were other legends as well. On either side of the river was rough terrain, perhaps thirty feet on the eastern bank but over one hundred on the western. Nothing should have grown there, but still there were crops, coming right up out of what seemed like gravel. A farmer drove an ox-drawn plow through solid rock, churning it up, ready to plant more seed. The ox was blue.

As Oliver and his companions waded past the field of wheat and corn and toward what appeared to be a boat landing up ahead, he scanned the bridges and ladders. A minotaur crossed a hanging rope bridge above and he flinched as it passed over them, the clop of its hooves making him feel certain the bridge would give way under its weight.

There were boggarts and sprites tossing one another about in what appeared to be a playful manner. Lithe figures that seemed made of water rose out of the river and watched them as they passed. Twillig’s Gorge also had dozens of varieties of animal-people. Oliver had come to group them all together, though he was sure those legends would have been deeply offended. Some had the heads of birds or jungle beasts, others the heads of men with the bodies of horses or apes or alligators. And those were only the ones he saw.

Oliver tried not to stare at the griffin that sat curled upon a rocky ledge on the eastern wall. He ignored the strangely ephemeral people, tall and thin and clad in gauzy colors, who seemed almost invisible unless he stared directly at them. Fairies, or something like them, he was sure.

What he could not ignore were their kin, the tiny little figures that darted all through the gorge like butterflies and dragonflies. Whatever they were—pixies, or peries like the ones he’d seen in the Oldwood shortly after first crossing the Veil—they were beautiful. And there were hundreds of them, perhaps thousands. The pixies needed no caves or houses or bridges. They flitted through the air, alighting only for an eyeblink before setting off again, their colors like the petals of a million flowers cast into the air.

“Wow,” Oliver whispered.

Kitsune laughed in delight beside him. For a few moments, as he took this all in, he had forgotten she was there. Now she looped her arm through his and leaned against him, and he liked the warmth of her there.

A pair of men sat together on a high balcony, a hundred feet or more above the river, but they had bodies and limbs as thin as sticks and faces like anteaters, and their legs hung all the way down to the water, their feet curved as though they might hook an enemy, or simply prey, and bring them up to their cave.

Of all the things he had seen thus far, they were the only ones that frightened him.

At the river landing they climbed a set of stone stairs out of the water. Frost and Blue Jay waited for them there, but the two Borderkind were alone. Lost Ones went by without sparing them a glance. Humans on this side of the Veil had lost any sense of awe. Some of them were dressed in strange garments that he thought might be Aztec or Mayan, for he knew that those ancient peoples had ended up on this side of the Veil long ago.

No one stopped. Legends averted their eyes as they passed, not wanting to get involved. The Nagas had presumably returned to their sentry duties, leaving them to fend for themselves. A woman whose body was knotted wood and gnarled, cracked bark, and who had tiny leaves sprouting from her flesh, paused and smiled.

“Welcome,” she said, spreading her hands with their thin, spidery, branch fingers, and offering a small bow.

Frost and Blue Jay returned the bow.

“Our thanks,” Blue Jay said. “You seem the only one willing to make us welcome.”

“Strangers pass with the river. They’ll pay little attention to you unless you stay.” The woman, whose teeth were tiny thorns, smiled. “Are you staying, then?”

“No. Only passing through,” Frost said.

“Pity. But you’ll want the inn, then. Shouldn’t be any trouble getting a room. Very few visitors, these days.”

Oliver leaned in to whisper to Kitsune. “With their hospitality, it’s no wonder.”