Lost Ones

CHAPTER 20

No way was Oliver going first.

He had changed dramatically. He felt it in his bones and the way his hands seemed always ready to defend himself. The power of his touch, the destructive magic he could summon, resonated within him. These past few days had made Oliver believe that in his heart he could be a hero. But there was a vast difference between heroics and stupidity, and the idea of stepping off the roof of that building onto thin air seemed vastly idiotic.

“Hurry, you fools!” Smith barked.

Blue Jay stepped off the roof onto the solid air bridge. He could have transformed into a bird and flown across. Instead he walked quickly but carefully, barely looking down, even though Oliver found it difficult to see the edges of the bridge.

Li followed at a run, practically bounding across like one of his fire tigers. Seeing him, Oliver awoke at last to the reality of Smith’s fears. They could be spotted at any moment, imperiling their mission. He swore under his breath and went to the edge. Cheval had already started across, grand and elegant as always, her dress gliding over the bridge like a ballroom floor. Grin paused three steps out. Terror lit his eyes and he gripped the edges of the nearly invisible bridge.

“Cross, stupid boggart,” Smith snapped at him.

Grin sneered at him. “Sod off, you silly git.”

Still, it got the boggart moving.

Oliver went next. He held his breath as he stepped off the roof. From above, the parameters of the bridge were obvious. That hardened air had a different texture and hue. It was simple enough to make out its edges, but that wouldn’t stop a stiff breeze from knocking him off. Carefully, arms out as though on a tightrope, he went after the others.

Despite the heat, he felt a shiver go up his spine, and then a gentle gust of cold wind blew past him on the left, snow and ice swirling. Frost moved swiftly and then materialized on the window ledge, ice forming on the glass of the window.

As the Nagas slithered after him, arrows still strung at the ready in their bows, Oliver picked up his pace. At the end of the bridge, Blue Jay slid out of the way to let Li pass. The trickster winced at the heat that billowed from inside the charred ember flesh of the Guardian of Fire. Then Li reached the window and stood beside Frost.

Fire and ice.

Li put his palm against the window. Flames spread out across the glass and its frame, which seemed also to be some kind of glass or mineral. The heat blossomed outward, warping the air around it, and the window began to melt. The Guardian of Fire pushed inward and it collapsed in a dripping, wilting, burning mess on the floor inside the window.

Frost stepped through the window and with a gesture, snuffed the flames. A layer of ice formed on the melted remains of the window and frame, and then one by one they all entered the Great Library of Atlantis. Oliver knew he could have made the window simply fall apart-any of them could have broken it open-but working together, Li and Frost had made their entry nearly silent.

Wayland Smith was the last through the window. When he stepped down from the window ledge, the air shimmered behind him and Oliver saw that the bridge had disappeared.

“Always something new,” Oliver said.

Smith hushed him. Oliver wanted to tell him to fuck off. The guy’s arrogance could have driven a saint to violence.

They were in a roughly oval-shaped room with only one door. Cheval had gone to the door and opened it. She glanced out through the crack, then quietly closed it.

“Coast clear?” Blue Jay whispered.

Cheval nodded. They gathered by the door in nearly the same order they had crossed the bridge. The Nagas would watch their flank.

Eyes turned toward Oliver. For a moment he shifted uneasily at this attention, until he realized they were waiting for him to give the word. Frost had always been the one everyone turned to when he had traveled with the Borderkind before, and now Wayland Smith seemed to have taken control. But Smith had only been their transportation, their Traveler. Now that they were in the midst of things, they were all ready to defer to him. It had been his idea, after all.

“Smith,” he said, “you’re the only one who’s been here before. Lead the way. Get us to the place where you saw the prince. Kitsune, stay with him. If there are scholars or teachers or sentries around, you’ll catch their scent first. We’re going to do our best to take them down quietly if anyone gets in the way. When it all goes to shit-and it will-then we pull out all the stops.”

Oliver gestured toward the door. “Go.”

To his surprise, Wayland Smith did not argue.

Cheval opened the door and Smith went out. Kitsune followed, disappearing into her cloak and diminishing into a fox, a low-slung blur of copper-red fur. She trotted after Smith. Frost and Blue Jay followed. Oliver drew his sword-wishing for the familiar weight of Hunyadi’s blade-and went next. Cheval and Grin hurried after him, then Li, and finally the Nagas, their serpentine bellies making a low hiss as they slid across the floor.

The library seemed like something made of ice, as if the winter man had built himself a palace. They emerged in a short hallway and followed Smith to what appeared to be some kind of central shaft. Stairwells rose up the inside of the shaft in great swoops of sea glass. Wood and stone were part of the design but the wood was like black ironwood and the stone smooth and contoured as though by centuries of ocean erosion. The architecture had latticework and arches that made Oliver think of beehive honeycombs and spiderwebs, its beauty both breathtaking and unnerving.

As Smith began to step into the atrium at the core of the library tower, Kitsune growled low and soft, a fox’s warning.

Oliver snagged Smith’s sleeve. The Wayfarer shot him a dark look but Oliver only returned it and gestured to the fox. Wayland Smith seemed troubled, but then the entire group took a step back into the shadows of the corridor as a small group of Atlanteans emerged on the same floor, across the open atrium, and started up the winding sea glass staircase. They were robed like sorcerers or teachers.

Smith’s eyes narrowed. He glanced around the atrium, then back the way they’d come. Neither option seemed to please him.

At length, he beckoned for the Nagas to come forward.

As the serpentine bowmen moved past him, Oliver knew he ought to protest. The men and women on the stairs might be Atlantean, but as vicious and cunning as Atlantis had turned out to be, killing teachers in a library was not his idea of war. But even as these thoughts filled his mind, he considered the repercussions of failure and the benefits of their success.

The Nagas slithered up to the fluted balustrade, raised their bows, and let silent arrows fly with hideous accuracy. Whoever they were, scholars or sorcerers, they fell upon the stairs, some slumping on top of the others, twitching.

“Go,” Oliver whispered.

He didn’t want to have to look at those corpses longer than necessary.

They hurried past the Nagas and Smith led the way up the stairs. In a bustle of copper fur, Kitsune returned to her female form, hood hiding her features. Oliver wished she would turn so he could see her eyes. He wondered if she felt the same hesitations he did. Frost and Blue Jay looked grim as they went upward.

More quietly than he could have hoped, they moved through the Great Library of Atlantis, along latticework balustrades and up sea glass stairs and through honeycomb corridors. Sunlight streamed through the atrium from above, casting the entire place in the cascade of soft colors Oliver associated with the stained glass windows of a church.

Distant voices reached them several times and they had to pause, taking cover, or hurry on into a side corridor. Whispers and echoes seemed to travel through the place like some haunted cave. The first sentry they came upon died easily and without a sound. Kitsune slit his throat with her claws and his blood pooled thickly on the floor. Oliver’s nose filled with the low-tide stink of an Atlantean’s blood, and he tried from then on to breathe through his mouth.

Frost killed the second sentry, freezing him to death just inside a corridor archway. The pain must have been exquisite, for the expression on his face beneath the layer of ice that enveloped him was one of agony.

Time’s running out, Oliver thought. Any moment bodies will be found. Any second, they’ll be on to us.

He considered saying this aloud, but realized his companions did not need to be told. They knew. Minutes had passed and they seemed to be moving aimlessly through the library. They had come upon four different chambers that seemed to have been occupied by scholars at some point. Shelves and tables and glass cases showed scrolls and bound books upon display, many spread out as though abandoned in the midst of being examined, but they had found no sign of the prince.

The Wayfarer took them through the latest of these chambers and to a curving back stair that would bring them to the floor above. They could not be far from the spiral dome of the library, now.

A scream rose in the library, clear and resonant as a bell, echoing along corridors, rising to a terrible pitch before ceasing abruptly. Oliver exchanged worried glances with Blue Jay and Kitsune, and then shouts followed the scream.

“Bollocks,” Grin muttered.

Wayland Smith had paused halfway up the curving stairs to the next level. Voices drifted down to them from the arch at the top. Oliver gripped his sword with both hands.

“Go,” he whispered.

But Smith was already moving. The Wayfarer clutched his cane-which he almost never seemed to use to support himself-and took the stairs two at a time. They rushed the stairs, then, hurrying after Smith. Two Nagas positioned themselves at the bottom, bows at the ready, but the library was an enormous warren of chambers and corridors and as long as they were quiet, it would take time for the guards to find them.

As Oliver went through the arch at the top of the stairs, a new shout rang out.

“Who are you? Get out of here!” a man’s voice thundered from the chamber they entered.

Scrolls and books filled the room, just as in the others they had entered. Shelves lined the walls and glass cases displayed ancient manuscripts. Pillows were piled in the corners and several spots around the huge chamber. Upon some of them were sprawled old men who had been interrupted in the midst of study. At the center of the room, a boy who could only have been Prince Tzajin sat at a marble table, around which several teachers were gathered. His olive skin marked him as Yucatazcan, particularly amongst the narrow, green-hued faces of the Atlantean scholars.

The teacher who had shouted stood just a few feet from the Wayfarer, but Wayland Smith only stepped back, leaning on his cane, and watched expectantly as events unfolded.

Blue Jay went for the prince.

The scholars produced daggers from their robes, ceremonial things with stone handles. They moved like fighters, not academics, and they shouted as they attacked the intruders.

A young, furious scholar tried to grab hold of the trickster, but Blue Jay spun in a quick circle, mystical wings blurring beneath his arms. The scholar lost his hands to their razor edge. Blood spurted and he screamed.

“So much for keeping silent,” Cheval Bayard said as she rushed at the nearest Atlantean.

“Smith already screwed us on that,” Oliver snapped.

The shouts from the chamber would echo through the library. They had seconds.

Grimly, Li stepped forward and took hold of the scholar who had challenged them upon arrival. The man tried to stab him, but the dagger only stuck in the embers of Li’s flesh. Fire raced up the blade to him and the teacher began to burn, shrieking, and staggered away, crashing into a glass shelf and setting ancient scrolls on fire. Two of the other scholars ran toward him, but they had no concern for their burning, dying colleague. They snatched up the scrolls, trying to save them from the fire.

The Nagas slithered into the room. The archers moved swiftly, releasing their silent arrows once more. Of the scholars that had surrounded Prince Tzajin, only the two trying to rescue the burning scrolls-weaponless-were left alive.

Frost moved toward the prince. He knelt by the boy, whose eyes were wide with terror, and spoke to him. Oliver only heard phrases and words as the winter man tried to soothe Tzajin, told him they had come to take him back to Palenque, that all hell had broken loose and his people needed their prince. Tzajin said nothing. He could only shake his head, mouth open, as the corpses of his teachers bled and burned around him.

Cheval strode across the chamber and slapped Wayland Smith across the face. The Wayfarer’s face darkened with fury.

“You may’ve killed us all,” she said, rage making her more beautiful than ever.

“And you have no idea what you’re talking about,” Smith snarled. “I am not meant to interfere, to participate in any of this. I brought you here, and that is already more than I ought to have done. I could be made to suffer-”

The words were cut off by shouts from one end of the room. There were two entrances-the arch where they had come in, and double doors that led out toward the atrium and the winding stairs.

Atlantean soldiers appeared in the doorway. Kitsune growled and spun toward them. Oliver shouted to the Nagas. Arrows flew. Several found their mark, but others were stopped by Atlantean armor or knocked aside by the soldiers’ swords. These were no scholars. They would not die as easily. Still, against Li and Frost and the rest, they had no hope of survival.

The winter man raised both hands and a storm erupted in the room, the air whipping snow and ice around, blowing scrolls off of tables and shattering glass display cases. The two surviving scholars finally drew their weapons, but Kitsune leaped at them, and Leicester Grindylow followed. They did not slay the teachers, disarming them instead. Grin tossed one into a bookshelf. Kitsune drove the other to the ground with pummeling fists and a hard kick to the head.

The first two guards through the door froze solid in the winter man’s storm. One of the doors blew closed. The other guards retreated, but from the shouts out in the atrium, there were others on the way.

Oliver went to the boy, Prince Tzajin.

In the chaos, none of the others seemed to have noticed, but he still had the same slack expression of terror on his face, as though he had suddenly gone catatonic.

“Your Majesty?” Oliver said.

The boy’s gaze shifted slightly.

Oliver turned just in time to see the sorcerers coming through the arch at the back of the chamber, where he and his comrades had first entered. He shouted, raised his sword, and rushed at them. The first sorcerer-a bald, scarred Atlantean man with sallow skin-sneered at him and raised a hand. A Naga arrow took him in the throat from the side.

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.

But others followed. A second and third and then a vomitous flood of jellyfish erupted from the prince’s throat. As he scrambled backward, Oliver heard the boy’s jawbone crack from being forced open so wide.

Prince Tzajin had been left for them to find. Ty’Lis had used him as both bait and trap. The boy could not survive this.

“Go!” Oliver shouted at Blue Jay and Kitsune, but they were already moving. He turned to the others, gaze locking on the winter man, and suddenly all of their prior resentment seemed unimportant. “Frost, the prince isn’t leaving this room. We go now, or we die with him!”

Li spun and burned half a dozen jellyfish in mid-flight. They popped and burst like blisters. But whatever Ty’Lis had done to Prince Tzajin, there seemed an endless supply of the creatures being born from his gullet.

“This way!” Frost shouted, and he started through the soldiers that crowded the doorway out to the atrium at the heart of the library. They were going inward, instead of toward any exit, but no way were they going to take on the sorcerers if they could avoid it.

Cheval went out the door right in front of Oliver, snapping a soldier’s neck as she went.

On the landing, beautifully sculpted from Atlantean sea glass, they both stopped short. Beyond the balustrade they saw hundreds more of those jellyfish and at least a dozen octopuses floating in the atrium, just waiting for them.

“What now?” Cheval cried.

Soldiers stood at the top of a staircase to the left.

“We get the hell out of here,” he said.

His other blade had been returned to its sheath. He fought, instead, with the Sword of Hunyadi. In his left hand, he held the scabbard, and he swung it as he ran at the soldiers, striking one in the head even as he used Hunyadi’s blade to parry the attack of another.

The Borderkind joined him, bludgeoning and stabbing and burning the soldiers as they took the stairs. Blue Jay hurled two soldiers armed with curved, gleaming, ritual daggers over the banister and they screamed as they fell.

Oliver lost track of how many steps they’d descended. The octopuses and jellyfish and whatever other deadly things slid through the atrium could not really attack them while they were in the midst of the soldiers of Atlantis. He focused on just staying alive and moving downward, step by step.

Ty’Lis had left him the sword to send a message of mockery and triumph.

Oliver intended to use it to gut the son of a bitch.