Christopher Golden - Lost Ones

A scream rose in the library, clear and resonant as a bell, echoing along corridors, rising to a terrible pitch before ceasing abruptly. Oliver exchanged worried glances with Blue Jay and Kitsune, and then shouts followed the scream.

“Bollocks,” Grin muttered.

Wayland Smith had paused halfway up the curving stairs to the next level. Voices drifted down to them from the arch at the top. Oliver gripped his sword with both hands.

“Go,” he whispered.

But Smith was already moving. The Wayfarer clutched his cane-which he almost never seemed to use to support himself-and took the stairs two at a time. They rushed the stairs, then, hurrying after Smith. Two Nagas positioned themselves at the bottom, bows at the ready, but the library was an enormous warren of chambers and corridors and as long as they were quiet, it would take time for the guards to find them.

As Oliver went through the arch at the top of the stairs, a new shout rang out.

“Who are you? Get out of here!” a man’s voice thundered from the chamber they entered.

Scrolls and books filled the room, just as in the others they had entered. Shelves lined the walls and glass cases displayed ancient manuscripts. Pillows were piled in the corners and several spots around the huge chamber. Upon some of them were sprawled old men who had been interrupted in the midst of study. At the center of the room, a boy who could only have been Prince Tzajin sat at a marble table, around which several teachers were gathered. His olive skin marked him as Yucatazcan, particularly amongst the narrow, green-hued faces of the Atlantean scholars.

The teacher who had shouted stood just a few feet from the Wayfarer, but Wayland Smith only stepped back, leaning on his cane, and watched expectantly as events unfolded.

Blue Jay went for the prince.

The scholars produced daggers from their robes, ceremonial things with stone handles. They moved like fighters, not academics, and they shouted as they attacked the intruders.

A young, furious scholar tried to grab hold of the trickster, but Blue Jay spun in a quick circle, mystical wings blurring beneath his arms. The scholar lost his hands to their razor edge. Blood spurted and he screamed.

“So much for keeping silent,” Cheval Bayard said as she rushed at the nearest Atlantean.

“Smith already screwed us on that,” Oliver snapped.

The shouts from the chamber would echo through the library. They had seconds.

Grimly, Li stepped forward and took hold of the scholar who had challenged them upon arrival. The man tried to stab him, but the dagger only stuck in the embers of Li’s flesh. Fire raced up the blade to him and the teacher began to burn, shrieking, and staggered away, crashing into a glass shelf and setting ancient scrolls on fire. Two of the other scholars ran toward him, but they had no concern for their burning, dying colleague. They snatched up the scrolls, trying to save them from the fire.

The Nagas slithered into the room. The archers moved swiftly, releasing their silent arrows once more. Of the scholars that had surrounded Prince Tzajin, only the two trying to rescue the burning scrolls-weaponless-were left alive.

Frost moved toward the prince. He knelt by the boy, whose eyes were wide with terror, and spoke to him. Oliver only heard phrases and words as the winter man tried to soothe Tzajin, told him they had come to take him back to Palenque, that all hell had broken loose and his people needed their prince. Tzajin said nothing. He could only shake his head, mouth open, as the corpses of his teachers bled and burned around him.

Cheval strode across the chamber and slapped Wayland Smith across the face. The Wayfarer’s face darkened with fury.

“You may’ve killed us all,” she said, rage making her more beautiful than ever.

“And you have no idea what you’re talking about,” Smith snarled. “I am not meant to interfere, to participate in any of this. I brought you here, and that is already more than I ought to have done. I could be made to suffer-”

The words were cut off by shouts from one end of the room. There were two entrances-the arch where they had come in, and double doors that led out toward the atrium and the winding stairs.

Atlantean soldiers appeared in the doorway. Kitsune growled and spun toward them. Oliver shouted to the Nagas. Arrows flew. Several found their mark, but others were stopped by Atlantean armor or knocked aside by the soldiers’ swords. These were no scholars. They would not die as easily. Still, against Li and Frost and the rest, they had no hope of survival.

The winter man raised both hands and a storm erupted in the room, the air whipping snow and ice around, blowing scrolls off of tables and shattering glass display cases. The two surviving scholars finally drew their weapons, but Kitsune leaped at them, and Leicester Grindylow followed. They did not slay the teachers, disarming them instead. Grin tossed one into a bookshelf. Kitsune drove the other to the ground with pummeling fists and a hard kick to the head.

The first two guards through the door froze solid in the winter man’s storm. One of the doors blew closed. The other guards retreated, but from the shouts out in the atrium, there were others on the way.

Oliver went to the boy, Prince Tzajin.

In the chaos, none of the others seemed to have noticed, but he still had the same slack expression of terror on his face, as though he had suddenly gone catatonic.

“Your Majesty?” Oliver said.

The boy’s gaze shifted slightly.

Oliver turned just in time to see the sorcerers coming through the arch at the back of the chamber, where he and his comrades had first entered. He shouted, raised his sword, and rushed at them. The first sorcerer-a bald, scarred Atlantean man with sallow skin-sneered at him and raised a hand. A Naga arrow took him in the throat from the side.

Then Oliver was there. He bypassed the wounded, jaundiced sorcerer and drove his sword through the chest of the second to enter the chamber. The tall, spindly Atlantean fell to his knees, shock on his features. The others were still out in the corridor. Oliver reached out, grabbed the archway, and with his mind he reached into it and called up the entropy that gnawed at the ties of the world.

Kitsune grabbed hold of him from behind, hauling him backward as the entire archway collapsed, blocking the path of the sorcerers still out on the back stairs.

Li appeared beside them. On the ground, amidst the rubble, the bald, scarred sorcerer clutched at the arrow in his neck. The Guardian of Fire bent and placed both hands on the Atlantean, and his skin began to smoke, and then he caught fire.

“Get away from there!” Wayland Smith shouted.

The Wayfarer gripped Oliver’s arm and hauled him back. A gust of blizzard wind snatched at Kitsune, shoving her aside.

The rubble of the collapsed archway blew inward, pieces of it colliding with Li. The Guardian of Fire crashed to the floor amidst the debris. Some of it began to burn, the flames out of his control. The fire began to spread.

Three sorcerers hurtled into the room at once.

At the doors to the atrium, the guards charged. Oliver didn’t bother turning to see how many there were. The sounds of their pounding footfalls were enough to tell him what he needed to know.

The killing, the dying, had sickened him from the first blood shed. But there would be so much more.

Smith stepped into the breach between the sorcerers and Oliver and the Borderkind. What the hell’s he doing? Oliver thought. He said he’s not supposed to interfere.

The three sorcerers all turned toward Wayland Smith. Tendrils of magic reached out from one-just as they had from Ty’Lis in the dungeon of Palenque-and grabbed hold of him. The Wayfarer’s feet went out from beneath him. The sorcerer reeled him in. One of the others opened his jaws and they stretched wider than ought to have been possible. Unhinged, showing rows of terrible teeth like the Manticore, things moving in the darkness of his gullet, the sorcerer bent to tear out Smith’s throat. The third, a female, touched him with hands that dripped burning, steaming venom like acid.