Only then did he notice that all had gone silent.
He raised his eyes and saw Frost and Grin there in the mists of the Gray Corridor beside him, bearing their dead. Oliver felt the fox’s weak heartbeat pulsing against him as he looked around.
“Which way?”
Then he saw the figure, there in the mist, ahead of them on the path. A figure with a broad-brimmed hat and a cane with a brass head. The figure said nothing, but started along the path.
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.