The two Mazikeen stared at him, eyes narrowed, pale flesh drawn over the bones of their skulls.
Some scent on the air alarmed Chorti. He ambled over to Cheval and grunted, crouching at her side. The wild man pointed a metal talon to the south, back the way they’d come.
“It’s decided, then,” Cheval said. “We cross. We’ll make our way to the ocean, then come back through the Veil on the bank of the Atlantic River.”
Blue Jay watched the way the kelpy stood, chin lifted regally, as though she led them. He glanced at Frost, but the winter man ignored her, glancing around at the others and then up at the Strigae.
“I wonder where it will bring us, crossing here,” Frost said.
Li and his tiger circled the group. “You do not know?”
Blue Jay considered the question. The entirety of Perinthia had been traversed by the Borderkind, back and forth across the Veil, for centuries. The corresponding locations in the human world were well mapped. But he had never bothered to memorize the parallels. Locations in the world of legend did not correspond with the maps on the other side of the Veil. Geography and distance meant almost nothing. There was some relationship, of course, but nothing quantifiable. Crossing the Veil from Perinthia might bring a Borderkind to Britain or to the Himalayas.
Outside of the city there was a more predictable corollary. But Perinthia was a patchwork of cultures and pieces of ancient, mythical places.
“Somewhere in Italy, I’d presume. Or Greece.”
One of the Mazikeen glanced at the other and nodded. “The Akrai,” it said.
“Yes. The Quarter is all the Akrai,” replied the other.
Chorti dug his metal talons into the street and tore it up, grunting furiously. He took a long look south, then turned to Frost.
“No more talk,” he said, his voice a primal growl. “Go now.”
“We go,” Frost replied.
He waved a hand before him and the air began to shimmer. Blue Jay followed suit and soon all of the Borderkind were doing the same. Grin stood beside Blue Jay, shuffling anxiously. There was fear in his eyes. Li and his tiger were the first to leap through, trailing sparks and drops of liquid fire. The enormous cat bounded through a ripple in the air and passed through the Veil into the world of man.
Blue Jay waited while all of the others went. Frost, then Cheval and Chorti. The two Mazikeen. At last, Blue Jay looked at Grin, who clapped him on the back, a grateful expression upon his hideous features.
“Right, then, mate,” Grin said. “On three, yeah? One, two-”
Blue Jay took his arm and the two of them stepped out of the world. The Veil was parted by the magic of the Borderkind, but still there was just the slightest resistance, like passing through a curtain of silk.
The first thing that came to Grin was the smell of the grass and the flowers around them, the trees and the earth. The sky was pale blue, and on the eastern horizon, the sun was just beginning to rise. The view was breathtaking.
“ ’S beautiful, this is,” Grin said.
The Borderkind stood in the midst of yet another ruin, this time of a Greek-style amphitheater, an outdoor theater on top of a mountain. It was the highest point in the area, as though whatever performances had been conducted here had wanted the gods for an audience.
Below, there stretched a city, though Blue Jay could not have said which. The theater was probably Greek, but the Greeks had influenced the world once upon a time, and the city below looked vaguely Italian, even from here.
Then he saw the volcano in the distance, gray smoke drifting heavenward from its peak.
“Where-” he began.
Frost was beside him. “Didn’t you hear the Mazikeen? Akrai. We’re in Sicily. The volcano there is Mt. Etna.”
The trickster tossed his hair, feathers dancing on the breeze. He stretched and stamped his feet, enjoying the soil beneath his boots. Whenever he crossed the Veil, he needed a moment to become acclimated.
“We’re on an island?” Blue Jay asked. He turned to look at the others. They were spread across the stones that had been laid down as a stage thousands of years before, as though they were the main attraction. “Sicily is an island. How are we going to make our way to the Atlantic coast from here?”
Frost arched an eyebrow, the ice of his face crackling. He turned his head, icicle hair tinkling musically.
Chorti threw his head back and howled.
“Somehow,” Cheval Bayard said, slipping sylphlike up behind them, her silver hair blowing across her face, “I think that is the least of our concerns.”
Blue Jay followed the line of her gaze, and there in the sky, he saw the terrible, angular figures with their antlers jutting from their heads and green-feathered wings spread out behind them.
“Perytons!” Li cried, fire erupting from his nostrils as he held out a hand, in which a ball of flame grew.
“At least seven,” the Grindylow said. He pried a massive, ancient stone up out of the stage and prepared to hurl it.
But that was not what Chorti had scented. He scraped his metal talons on the stones and spun around like a massive dog chasing its tail. Blue Jay glanced around and then he saw, coming over the top of the hill, above the stone rows of seats that surrounded one side of the amphitheater, a pair of dreadful figures.
A hideous crone, the dawn’s light illuminating her blue skin.
And a swift figure that slunk down toward them, its body as large as Li’s tiger, its face a grotesque parody of humanity, its mouth impossibly wide and lined with hundreds of ivory needle teeth, tipped with venom.
The Manticore.
“They were expecting us,” Frost said, icy mist drifting from his eyes. “They would not come into the Latin Quarter, but once they knew we were in Lycaon’s Kitchen, they gambled that we would cross the border here.”
Blue Jay sighed. “An ambush. Wonderful.”
CHAPTER 10
H alliwell sat on a fallen tree, catching his breath. His right hand moved inquisitively over the bark and the jagged tips of several broken branches and he wondered what had taken the tree down. He would have thought a storm responsible, but there was a section of the trunk where the bark had been stripped off and deep gouges cut in the wood, as if from horns or something equally deadly. In this place, it might be anything.
He hoped that whatever had knocked down the tree was long gone.
Julianna had continued on sixty or seventy yards in the general direction of what Kara called the Orient Road. He was both embarrassed and grateful for her courtesy. They’d stopped to let him rest. His legs burned from all the walking they had done in the past two days. Halliwell often thought of himself as an old man. The truth was that he was in decent shape for his age; no old man was going to make this journey and not drop dead of a heart attack by now.
But he felt older than ever.
Kara had none of Julianna’s courtesy. The little girl hung from the low branch of a tree just across from the fallen one and studied Halliwell with open curiosity and a bit of disdain. The detective-could he even think of himself as a detective in this place?-forced himself to breathe slowly and evenly and he stretched his legs, ignoring the twinging protests of his thighs and calves. His feet didn’t hurt, so that was a plus. But he suspected that they would, and soon. How far he would be able to go after that, he did not know.
Halliwell returned Kara’s stare, but she was unfazed by his attention. The girl swung on the branch and studied him, head tilted just to one side, like a faithful dog. He was reminded of a mental patient he had tried to interview once in an asylum in Bangor.
“How old are you?” Halliwell asked.
Kara dropped to the ground, dry grass crunching underfoot. She did a pirouette, amusing herself as children do. “I’m not really sure. How old are you?”
He hesitated a moment, on the verge of answering. Then, reluctantly, he picked himself up from the fallen tree, wishing he could sit there all day but knowing they had to move on. He brushed off the seat of his pants and shot the girl a smile.