Collette glanced down at the assassin’s corpse. “That’s what you came back for? Justice?”
“Once a cop…” the Dustman replied, with Ted Halliwell’s voice.
Footsteps came from behind them. Julianna and Collette turned to see a wounded man come around the side of King Hunyadi’s tent. He had a hand over his stomach, blood soaking his bandages. In the other hand he carried a long dagger.
“Justice?” the man said, the word barely more than a grunt. “What does a monster know of justice?”
Collette grabbed Julianna’s arm, tried to pull her back. “Who the hell is this?”
Julianna blinked. The grim man’s face was familiar, but it took her a moment to place him. It seemed like a lifetime ago that she and Halliwell had sat on the patio at the cafe in Twillig’s Gorge, where they’d met Ovid Tsing for the first time.
“Mister Tsing-”
Ovid stalked toward Halliwell. He pointed with the dagger.
“You murdered my mother, detective.”
Halliwell flinched. “The Sandman-”
“No!” Ovid snapped. “I saw your face. I remembered you. You plucked out her eyes, and you ate them, and you smiled at me!”
Julianna froze.
The Dustman shook his head, and the sand sifted again, and now he was just Ted Halliwell. Still made of sand, but no bowler, no mustache, no coat. Just that cantankerous, aging cop who loved his daughter with his whole being.
Ovid lunged.
Halliwell did not move. He let the dagger come.
“No!” Julianna screamed, putting herself between them.
She felt Collette grab at her arm, trying to stop her, but the dagger plunged into her abdomen. All the breath rushed from her in a hiss of air and her body went rigid. Her eyes widened and she stared into Ovid Tsing’s face in surprise, then fell to her knees.
A flash of regret was the only sign that Ovid even noticed he had stabbed her.
Collette screamed her name and went to her, lifting up her head and talking to her. Julianna could barely hear the words. Collette pressed a hand against the knife wound, trying to stanch the bleeding, and then she began tearing at Julianna’s shirt.
But Julianna only stared at Ovid, the man who’d done it to her, and who advanced on the Dustman yet again.
Halliwell let him come.
“I’m sorry,” Ted said with sorrowful eyes. “I couldn’t stop him. I was…the Sandman kept me trapped inside and I couldn’t get out. I’m so sorry.”
He kept apologizing even as Ovid plunged the dagger into him again and again, stabbing his chest and neck and even his face. The blade slid in and out of the sand with a dry shushing. Ovid screamed and stabbed harder, gripping the dagger in both hands.
Halliwell had become the Dustman again, but still had those grieving eyes.
Ovid fell to the ground, the wound in his abdomen leaking blood badly now. Julianna saw that he had stabbed her in almost the precise spot where he himself had been injured.
He wept in frustration and helplessness.
Julianna looked up at Halliwell. He started toward her. His lips formed words of concern. Her head lolled to one side, and she looked up at Collette and smiled.
A single voice cut through the cloud of shock that had enveloped her.
“If you’d stayed in the dungeon, you’d have saved us all a great deal of trouble.”
The shadows cleared from her vision for just a moment and she shifted her gaze to see the pale face of Ty’Lis only a few feet away, hateful features framed by that yellow hair. His robes moved as though in some breeze that Julianna could not feel. The sorcerer had come for them. For Collette. For the Legend-Born.
Oliver, Julianna thought, wishing for him, as though upon a star.
Then she slipped away, into the darkness.
With the warmth of Kitsune’s body in his arms and her blood soaking into his shirt, Oliver stared at the figures floating in the air around the ice mountain Frost had made. Atlantis trembled, the water surged upward, now only ten or eleven feet below him. The winter man stood on a higher peak, the dead blue bird in his hands, and Leicester Grindylow beside him carrying the body of Cheval Bayard.
“They’re all Smith,” Oliver said.
He stared around at them-the giant and the female, the fearsome warrior, the scarred monstrosity, the thin wizard-and knew it had to be true. Each one of those figures, somehow, was the Wayfarer.
“Do you know what’s going on?” he asked Frost.
The winter man had become a jagged skeleton of ice. He shook his head, mystified.
Oliver turned his focus to the aged, withered Smith whose left eye socket was a scarred pit. At first, he’d thought this the Wayland Smith he knew, but then the others had come.
“What the hell is this?”
Another building crumbled. The ground shook and Oliver nearly fell, then. He clutched the bleeding fox against his chest. If it came to that, he would fall into the churning floodwaters before he would let her go to her death alone.
A strange calm settled upon him. The soldiers of Atlantis had been washed away, save for those who had sought higher ground on roofs and domes and could only wait to die. Some leaped off, diving into the water, taking their chances with the ocean, perhaps in hopes that they might find a boat or something to float on. Or perhaps they could breathe in the water. The people of Atlantis were not human, at least not by Oliver’s reckoning.
The sorcerers were gone as well. He imagined they were not drowned, but instead had fled the destruction of their kingdom.
Some of the creatures-the monstrous sea-beasts that the sorcerers had commanded-still darted through the air above the sinking island, but they paid no more attention to Oliver and the Borderkind, or to these new intruders. Whatever malign intelligence had commanded the octopuses and air sharks, or whatever training they’d received, the chaos had them confused and panicked.
Oliver stared at the one-eyed Smith and waited for an answer.
“Damn you, where is he?” Frost said, his voice a kind of hiss. “Where is the Wayfarer?”
The question seemed foolish. The look on the one-eyed Smith’s face told Oliver precisely how foolish it was. The female actually laughed, softly. The giant Smith cursed and spat.
“The Wayland you knew has…” the one-eyed Smith began, then faltered. He shook his head, as though deciding not to share whatever he had been about to say. “He has done something that we Wayfarers have all agreed never to do. We are Travelers, Oliver Bascombe. Walkers between worlds. We are not meant to interfere with those worlds we visit, for they are not our own. Yet our brother-your Wayland-has shown us that there are times when it is not possible to stand aside, when we must become involved.
“Every world has a Wayfarer. This dimension’s Wayland was weakened by the creation of the Veil-”
The others began to shout him down. Chagrined, the one-eyed Smith held up a hand and nodded, and his siblings fell silent.
“We need him back,” Oliver said. Nothing else mattered, now. Confusion threatened to distract him, but he had to keep his focus. “He brought us here through the Gray Corridor, and we have to return to the battlefield. Ty’Lis-the murderous, twisted son of a bitch responsible for all of this-he’s there, and I think he means to kill my sister, and King Hunyadi.”
But the one-eyed Smith only shook his head. “He cannot return. His power has failed at last. The Veil holds him back, trapped in the Gray.”
The winter man seemed somehow stronger. Some of the ice in the mountain blew up into snow and accumulated around him.
“Then you must take us!” Frost demanded. “If his interference stranded us here, you must balance the scales.”
The one-eyed Smith glanced around at the others. They all began to nod, slowly, and as the old, withered Wayfarer turned to look at Oliver again, one by one they began to fade to gray, to wisps of nothing.
Oliver’s heart sank and he buried his face in Kitsune’s copper fur.