Christopher Golden - Lost Ones

Halliwell felt hatred and disgust well up within him and tried to exert some kind of control, to reach his consciousness out into the Sandman’s hands and stop what was to come.

He could do nothing.

The monster clapped a hand across the commander’s mouth, forestalling any cries for help. With his other hand he disarmed the man, breaking bones in his wrist and arm.

“You know what I am?” the Sandman whispered.

The commander, wincing in pain, nodded. Halliwell wondered if he recognized the Sandman from his legend, or was merely aware that death had come for him.

“Excellent,” the monster rasped. He bent and darted out his tongue, running it over the commander’s left eyeball. The tongue was rough with grit, like sandpaper, and the commander screamed into the hand covering his mouth.

“You will tell me, sir, of the war between the Two Kingdoms, and especially anything you know about the Legend-Born filth called Oliver Bascombe, and Kitsune of the Borderkind. You will speak softly. If you fail in either of these, I will suck the eyes from your face and chew them while the nerves are still intact.”

The commander whimpered.

The Sandman pulled his hand away.

The man trembled as he began to speak.

When it was over, the Sandman did precisely what he had threatened. The commander had not disobeyed him, but the monster simply could not resist.

Halliwell had spent weeks on the precipice of madness. He teetered there once again.

K itsune stood on the corner of a cobblestoned street in the Latin Quarter of Perinthia. Loose stones and cracks made the road treacherous. Since the last time she had come to the city, only months before, this neighborhood seemed to have crumbled even further into ruin.

Most truly old cities in the ordinary world had their equivalent of the Latin Quarter-a bit of self-contained ancientness that predated the rest of what sprawled around it. Perinthia was the capital of the kingdom of Euphrasia, and the city reflected its origins. It was a mishmash of bits and pieces, of cultures and legends from all over Europe and Asia and North America in the human world. Far to the east there were places in the kingdom of Euphrasia that were older, but in the capital city, the Latin Quarter was it.

There were narrow alleys and several broad boulevards, but most of the buildings lining the streets were partially collapsed. Some were entirely ruined. Others only stood like withered corpses, their windows the sunken orbits of desiccated skulls. Columns lay fallen across the roads. Plants had grown up through cracks and in amongst the ruins. These buildings came from the legends of ancient Greece and the Roman Empire, and had been shifted from the ordinary world to the realm of the legendary when the Veil was raised.

Despite their appearance, however, it was not safe to assume that the buildings were deserted. No one quite knew how many people still lived in the Latin Quarter-no census had ever been successfully taken.

Kitsune had thought that the Quarter seemed sparsely populated the last time she had been there. Now, though, it felt deserted. From the corner where she stood-at the end of a street with no name-she could see stalls and awnings and wagons that had once been part of the marketplace. Wooden boxes were scattered about, some of them shattered, and there were the pulped and rotting remnants of fruits and vegetables on the cobblestones. As for vendors, however, she could see only a single, lone girl with a small cart, its meager offerings of apples and oranges hardly enough to feed even her.

Impatient, the fox woman looked over her shoulder, down a curving alley to her right. Coyote stepped from the shadows, zipping up his pants. She wondered at his brazenness. Like her, he was a trickster. Like her, he had senses far greater than a human’s. By scent alone he would know that the buildings and ruins weren’t as deserted as they appeared to be. So why he would risk the wrath of the Latin Quarter’s denizens by seeming to mark his territory so publicly was a mystery to her.

“Can we continue now?” she asked, looking down her nose at him.

Coyote raised an eyebrow and glanced at her. Taking his time, he reached into the pocket of his battered leather jacket and withdrew a small cigarette case. Coyote rolled his own, of course. He pulled out one he had fixed that morning, tucked it between his lips, and then produced a lighter. It flared briefly and he inhaled, then let out a long swirl of smoke from each nostril.

Kitsune didn’t even see him slip the cigarette case back into his jacket.

Months in hiding, stewing in guilt and mourning her own image of herself, had dulled her senses. Or perhaps she simply didn’t care so much anymore. Her black clothes were loose beneath her red fur cloak, and her hood shaded her eyes. In her heart, she knew that anyone looking at her would not see the mischief that had once danced in those eyes. She simply did not feel it anymore.

Her cunning might remain intact, but she found no merriment in its ownership.

Coyote drew in a lungful of smoke from his homemade cigarette and blew it out, then started down the street, boots clicking on cobblestones. Given their origins, some might presume a similarity between Blue Jay and Coyote, but the two could not be more different. One was a proud spirit, soaring overhead, and the other was a scavenger, preying on the weak.

They kept close to the western side of the street, slinking along as though they might remain unobtrusive in a place where even a mouse would be conspicuous. Kitsune caught the scent of cooking meat on the air, and spices and garlic, and she knew that their journey had not been for nothing. The knowledge sped her along and lightened her heart a bit-a difficult feat of late.

Coyote tipped his nose to the sky. “I smell sex,” he said, with a predator’s grin.

Kitsune frowned, but then understood. He could not have missed the scent of cooking, but there was, indeed, a musky, sexual smell in the air beneath the stronger odors of food.

“That building, there,” she said, nodding toward a rundown palazzo ahead on the right. “It’s a brothel.”

Coyote laughed softly. “More life in the Quarter than I’d begun to fear. People have to satisfy their hungers. But still, it doesn’t mean there’s much society here.”

“We don’t want society. We don’t want the people at all.”

“Speak for yourself. The smell of the veal frying’s got my stomach growling. I’d be more than happy to eat some people right now.”

Kitsune glanced at him, presuming he was joking, but didn’t bother to call him on it. If Coyote was serious, she didn’t want to know.

They moved down the nameless street, surrounded by buildings with darkened windows. The fox-woman felt the skin prickle at the back of her neck and glanced around at the rooftops. They were being watched, but she could not locate their observer.

Past the whorehouse stood a building with open windows and accordion doors that could be drawn back on pleasant days. Once upon a time it had been a Roman bathhouse. In the center, Kitsune recalled, was a patio where patrons could dine beneath open sky. Smoke rose from the chimney at the rear where the stove must be.

“Lycaon’s Kitchen,” she said. Once, in ancient Greece, the owner had been a king. Then he had been made a monster.

“Is it true?” Coyote asked. “His legend?”

“That he was a cannibal, or that he tried to feed human flesh to Zeus?”

“Both.”

Kitsune smiled in spite of herself and ran her tongue over her small, sharp teeth. “Aren’t the legends all true? In any case, does it matter? Whether Zeus was responsible or not, Lycaon is the original werewolf. He’s eaten his share of human meat, but it’s not on the menu here.”