With his free hand Oliver reached into his pocket and withdrew the feather that waited for him there. For a moment he was afraid he would have lost it, but it felt almost warm to the touch.
Oliver held the feather before him like some sort of talisman.
“Dustman,” he said. “It’s time.”
The Sandman’s yellow eyes narrowed, and he flexed the fingers that covered Collette’s mouth. “You confuse me with another legend, foolish Bascombe.”
“Not at all,” Oliver replied.
A new breeze began swirling across the floor in the vast entrance hall of the Sandman’s castle. Dust and grit spun and eddied, and then burst suddenly upward as though something had erupted from within the sand itself.
The breeze died. The dust settled.
Just a few feet away from where Oliver stood, the Dustman brushed sand delicately from the sleeve of his greatcoat. The brim of his bowler obscured his eyes until he glanced up at Oliver.
“I’ll take that,” he said, retrieving the feather from Oliver’s hand. His sand fingers scraped Oliver’s skin.
The Dustman slipped the feather in the pocket of his greatcoat, then reached up with one hand and smoothed down his mustache. He turned toward the Sandman.
“Hello, brother.”
The Sandman had crouched lower, drawn back a few steps, dragging Collette with him. She struggled and he shushed her, glaring.
“You are not welcome here.”
“Nevertheless, here is where I am,” the Dustman said. Then his expression changed, and there was venom in his voice and his eyes. “You are the myth that tales have made you—”
“Don’t you dare call me that!” the Sandman shrieked, hideous black lips pulled back over needle teeth.
He let his hand come away from Collette’s mouth and she cried out Oliver’s name. The monster wrapped her hair in his fist and tugged her backward, drove her down, so that she fell to her knees at his side.
Oliver took a step forward, sword at the ready.
Kitsune snapped a cautionary word at him.
“You were never more than a beast,” the Dustman said, voice dripping with contempt. “But you’ve allied yourself with creatures even more monstrous than yourself, and turned your back on all of your kin. There is nothing for you now but death.”
The Sandman’s lemon eyes went wide and his voice became even more shrill. “My kin? My kin who betrayed me, who allowed me to endure an eternity as captive in my own home? I spurn you all. I spit on you. I shall smear your eyes beneath my heel.”
The Dustman nodded. “Come, then.”
With a mad roar, mouth stretched impossibly wide, the Sandman burst into a cloud of swirling sand, those sickly lemon eyes floating in its midst, and rushed at this new arrival, this creature who had called him brother.
For a moment, Collette choked on the cloud of him, trying to breathe and getting only sand in her mouth and lungs. Coughing, she bent low, throat and chest burning, eyes tightly closed against the scouring sand.
Then she was alone in the center of the room. Wiping at her eyes, she opened them to see the brothers careening toward one another, the Sandman a dervish of wind and grit and the other—Oliver had called him the Dustman—charging as though he were only a man.
Then the Dustman exploded in a wave of dirt and grit and the two miniature storms lashed at one another in the midst of that vast chamber.
Collette rasped, coughing up the sand that had gotten in her mouth and throat. She bent over, still on her knees, hacking and trying to catch her breath, and when she raised her head, she saw her brother running toward her.
From the moment she had seen Oliver, some dam of emotion had given way inside of her. Now even as she wheezed and coughed, Collette managed a flicker of a smile, relief flooding her.
Oliver ran toward his sister.
“Wait! Watch yourself!” called out his companion.
Collette looked over at the gorgeous Asian woman who had arrived with her brother and saw the alarm in the other woman’s face. The cloaked woman pointed and both Oliver and Collette turned to see that the sand-creatures—these horrid constructs that Collette now realized were made in her own image—had begun to close in around them.
The woman wrapped her fur cloak around herself and dropped to all fours. Collette blinked, stunned to see the woman’s entire body shrink in upon itself, the fur tightening around her. Instead of a petite, beautiful woman, she hit the ground as a fox.
The fox, a flash of coppery-red fur in the starlight, leaped at the nearest of the sand creatures. It tried to fight her, batting her away. The fox attacked again, driving her snout into the center of the creature. It collapsed, sand spilling down on top of her.
She shook it off.
The wind inside the Sandcastle howled louder and louder. The sand that comprised the floor and walls seemed to erode so that a dust storm whirled through the vast chamber, partially obscuring her vision.
“Oliver!” Collette cried, at last finding her voice.
Not far away she saw the raging twisters separate, and abruptly the Sandman reformed, standing defiantly in the midst of the driving winds. His cloak whisked around him, but he stood as though entirely untouched. A moment later the Dustman re-formed as well, this sophisticated, evolved brother to the monstrous thing that had been her captor for so long.
The Sandman glared and whispered something that was lost in the wind and the hiss of sand upon sand.
The constructs moved closer, slow as sleepwalkers, eyeless and silent. Oliver called her name and raced at the nearest of them, squinting against the dust storm. Though they had fought as children, she and Oliver had always been close, sharing secrets and troubles and fighting loneliness together in a home with no mother and a distant father. Collette would know her brother anywhere, but looking at him now, she knew that some people would not have recognized him.
Oliver’s hair was wild and he sported several weeks’worth of beard. Normally office-pale, his skin had taken on a healthy, ruddy hue. The peacoat and jeans he wore only added to the overall air of roughness that had transformed him, but the sword in his hands provided the finishing touch.
“Keep away from her!” Oliver bellowed as he raced toward Collette, swinging the blade. He hacked one of the sand creatures in half and it collapsed into a small dune on the chamber floor.
In moments, he and the fox had destroyed two others, and the rest of the sand things began to withdraw to a safer distance. Nearby, the Sandman and the Dustman continued tearing at one another. The Dustman thrust his fist through his brother’s chest so that when he withdrew it there was a gaping hole left behind, but the sand spilled in to fill the gap instantly.
Over and over, they tore one another apart.
Then Oliver was at her side.
“Collette!” he said, pulling her into an embrace with his free hand.
She fell against him, melting into the pleasure of his company. She was no longer alone in this nightmare place. Her little brother was here with her. Together, everything would be different.
“Hey, little bro,” she rasped.
Oliver held her at arm’s length and they grinned like fools at one another. His expression wavered first.
“We have a lot to talk about.”
Collette nodded. “Oh, yeah. You’re pretty much the only thing I’m sure is real in this whole world. I’ve got a lot of questions. And some things you should know. But can we—”
“Get the hell out of here, first?” her brother said.
The fox trotted up beside him. Though still in motion, her size altered abruptly. Her fur rippled and came loose, hanging down around her, and then as though she were removing her face, the fox drew back her hood to reveal once again the elegant features of the Asian woman who’d arrived with her brother.
“Jesus!” Collette said, flinching and staring at her. “I just…I don’t think I know what’s real!”
Oliver put a comforting hand behind her neck and kissed her forehead. “There’s an easy answer to that, sis. Everything. Everything is real. This is Kitsune.”
He turned to the fox-woman, whose green eyes were close to the most hypnotic things Collette had ever seen. “And Kit, this is my sister, Collette.”
Kitsune inclined her head. “A pleasure to meet you. But we really ought to go, now, while the battle rages.” She gestured toward the center of the room where the Sandman and Dustman tore at one another, blasts of grit bursting from their bodies with each blow and re-forming in the swirling, howling wind.
Oliver hesitated. “Shouldn’t we help the Dustman?”
Collette had known there was some connection, that somehow they had summoned the creature, but this was confirmation.
“What could we do?” she said. “You haven’t seen what he—”
“I know what he does,” Oliver said, grief in his eyes. “What he is.”
Kitsune nodded. “We should go. If the Dustman cannot destroy the Sandman, there’s nothing we can do to help him. He agreed to come, knowing what this war would bring.”
“All right,” Oliver said. “We go.”
Collette kept up with them as best she could. Oliver had his arm around her, helping even as he kept his sword at the ready. Kitsune led the way by a dozen paces and they raced for the door. The sand creatures, those horrible images of her, did not attempt to bar the way.
The door stood open. Fresh air blew in.
When they went out of the Sandcastle, they found an army waiting.
CHAPTER 19
Halliwell snapped the reins on his horse and spurred her forward, moving up beside Julianna. The chill night wind raised goosebumps on his flesh but he did not feel cold. In truth, he felt nothing. Exhausted and aching, his butt and thighs pummeled by days on horseback, he felt like a bag of cold and brittle bones.
His frayed nerves felt dulled. The panic that had roiled inside of him for so long had abated with the numb sameness of the hours of their journey. Though they had a clear goal—and Captain Beck’s soldiers seemed anxious to reach it—Halliwell felt as though it was all quite pointless. The only things that kept him moving were the horse beneath him and the need to meet Oliver Bascombe face-to-face. Halliwell would ask him the questions he had waited so long to ask, though by now the only one that seemed important was the one he felt sure he already knew the answer to.
Oliver would almost certainly tell them what Hunyadi and Virginia Tsing and Kara had all told them: they were damned to stay in this world, lost forever to the one they had known.
And then Halliwell could die.
Even in the midst of his malaise, he could not have failed to notice the change in Julianna. The journey had been good for her, as though the exposure to the daytime sun and the cold night air had purified her.
Maybe it was the food that King Hunyadi’s soldiers had shared with him and Julianna along their journey, or just long-term exposure to the…he hated to even think the word, but the magic of this place. From the time they had left Hunyadi’s summer residence with Captain Damia Beck and the detachment of soldiers under her command, Julianna had been filled with a sense of purpose. She had a mission now, and with Oliver at the other end of that mission, she had faith that she would have him in her arms again, and that answers would finally be forthcoming.
Halliwell didn’t have faith in anything anymore.
“Damia says we’re close now,” Julianna said.
She gave Halliwell a sidelong glance but he could read nothing in it. The part of her that was a lawyer, a determined professional, had recently returned to the fore. She behaved not like a woman searching for her lost fiancé, but like…well, like a cop, Halliwell thought.
“Hours?” Halliwell asked.
Julianna had obviously been trained to ride. A young New England girl from a wealthy family, she’d probably been on horseback practically before she could walk. She rode upright in the saddle and had total command of her horse. When her mount moved a few feet further away from his and picked up its pace ever so slightly, Halliwell felt certain it was quite purposeful.
“Minutes,” she said.
And turned her face away.
That was when he understood why she’d moved ahead. She did not trust her expression to remain neutral during this exchange. They sought Oliver Bascombe for very different reasons, and Halliwell’s were not altogether pleasant. Julianna did not trust him anymore.
“Minutes,” he said, tasting the word upon his tongue.
Jaw set, he spurred his horse to move a bit faster, catching up with Julianna though he said nothing further to her. It was not a time for chatter. There had been enough talk about what was to come. Even over the course of this journey they had avoided the subject of its end. Julianna had instead engaged Damia Beck and her soldiers in conversation about the Two Kingdoms and the Lost Ones, and from the fugue of his numbness, Halliwell had listened.
At Twillig’s Gorge they had learned a great deal about the legendary and the Borderkind, but by now they realized that ordinary humans—the distant cousins of the people who walked the streets of the world they knew—ruled the Two Kingdoms and most of the rest of the world on this side of the Veil.
In a world of wonders, there was still a place for an ordinary man.
Halliwell should have found some comfort in that. But he could not. If he could never return to his little house in Maine, never see his daughter again, that was the end. There was nothing for him here.
Instead of ruminating on it, he held the reins and he ground his teeth to contend with the pain in his hindquarters from the constant riding. Oliver and this trickster woman, Kitsune, whom he was supposed to be traveling with, had a head start on them, but according to Captain Beck, they hadn’t been going directly to the Sandman’s castle.
The Sandman’s fucking castle. Listen to yourself, he chided. And yet that was only reflex. As absurd as such a thing would once have seemed to him, he knew the truth of it now. Much to his regret.
They rode now, a dozen of Hunyadi’s soldiers and a pair of cast-a-ways from another world, up a long ridge between two mountain peaks. This part of Euphrasia had a breathtaking beauty and elegance, even in the villages they had passed. The bridges and homes and gardens had all been constructed so as to blend into the landscape.