by Bill Hiatt
“What do you mean when you say you don’t feel anything?” I asked. “Sorry if that’s a stupid question, but I’m not sure.”
Normally, Tal would have assured me the question wasn’t stupid, but this version just plunged ahead. “I…can…remember what it…was like…to love you, but…it’s only a memory. It’s…a black-and-white…image when…it used to be color. It’s like…one of…one of those…rocks…people hide keys in. It…looks like a rock…on the outside…but the inside…is hollow.”
Since I was so happy with Jimmie, why did Tal’s words feel like a stab through the heart?
“It’s…the same…with everybody,” he added.
“You still seem to hate Dark Me…you know, Magnus,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, but…I met him…during the time…I can…still remember. People I knew…from before…you know, you, Stan, Dan, Jimmie, my parents. I remember every…detail…of the last…four years. I know how I…felt…about…each one. There’s a…gap…where those feelings…used to be. The gap…aches. I want to feel…the way I did, but…I just can’t.”
He looked at me intensely. “Eva, I’m like…half a person. Less than half.” A tear trickled down his left cheek. I wiped it away, struggling not to cry myself.
“Tal, you’ve been through a huge shock. Maybe you’ll get better.”
He looked over in the direction of Magnus. “Bastard tore me apart! At least…my little self…is a complete twelve-year-old. I’m just…the shadow…of me at sixteen.”
Then it hit me.
Magnus had been in a hurry. Yes, Atlante had backed him up immediately about getting out fast, but we didn’t have to perform the spell to restore Tal here. We could have done that anywhere. We could have gotten help with it, or researched the possibilities more, as Atlante now wanted to do.
Carlos was right about our friends being in trouble, but no one was in more trouble than Magnus. He needed blood from the real Tal to stay in existence. He wasn’t pushing to keep us safe or save our friends; he was pushing to save his own damn neck—which I would now dearly love to break! And now he was trying to push Atlante into yet another stupid move they were ill prepared for.
I said a quick good-bye to Tal, then stalked away, murder in my heart.
No, I couldn’t murder Magnus without losing Jimmie. Maiming was probably not out of the question, though.
I was literally seeing red as I marched across the courtyard toward him. I couldn’t remember when I’d been this angry.
Fortunately for him, at that moment the wolves started howling like howling was going out of style.
“Are they readying an attack?” Gordy yelled up to Khalid.
“I don’t think so,” Khalid yelled back. “They aren’t moving on the castle. They’re just howling.”
“Something has to be different,” said Lucas.
A sudden burst of silver and blood red shot up in the middle of the courtyard, and from it fell a badly wounded Phul. His crown was gone, and huge gashes in his forehead were bleeding so profusely I couldn’t see his eyes. Through a tear in his robe, I could see another gash across his chest so deep that had it been much deeper, I could have seen his beating heart. His left arm was bent at a weird angle, clearly broken at best, pulled partway off at worst, and his deer was nowhere to be seen.
The once mighty Olympick Spirit fell to his knees, then collapsed completely.
Everyone, even the shaky Tal Sixteen, ran to help. I had to postpone my desire to mutilate Magnus, since he was the only one of us at the moment with healing magic, and unless Phul had an ocean of blood in him, he was dangerously close to bleeding out completely.
Magnus stopped the bleeding and poured every ounce of power he had into healing Phul. Actually, he used more than he had, drawing on all of us to scoop Phul back from death—or at least diminishment. Both Atlante and Magnus said later they doubted an Olympick Spirit could actually die, any more than an Olympian could. Seeing him when he first arrived, you could have fooled me.
“I may have misjudged you earlier,” Phul conceded, his voice a mere whisper of the booming it had been. “You could have allowed my current form to perish, yet you did not.”
“We feared for the balance,” explained Magnus. I suspected he couldn’t care less about the balance; he did, however, want to know the details of what happened on Olympus, which he immediately asked about.
“I needed an invitation to enter the Olympian plane,” said Phul. “I invoked Selene, the lady of the moon, and I waited an unusually long time. Then I thought I had connected with her, but when I came through, I was attacked from all sides. I never thought anyone would have dared, not even an Olympian.”
“Who attacked you?” pressed Magnus.
“Hecate used her own lunar powers to weaken mine. I could have beaten back such an attack, but simultaneously the lightning of Zeus struck me over and over, leaving me so weak I was easy prey for the trident of Poseidon, the sword of Ares, and the scythe of Cronus.”
“It was fortunate you escaped,” said Atlante.
“I did not escape,” replied Phul. “They threw me back here intending to have me die, so that my fellow Olympick Spirits would be struck with fear. They knew not, however, of what had transpired in this realm, and so they flung me at what they thought was an uninhabited area. They did not know you were here, or that I had just enough power left to steer myself in your direction. That is all that saved me.”
“Glad to be of service,” said Magnus. I wondered if now would be a good time to claw his eyes out.
Phul, more alert by the minute, had become conscious of the extra Tal. “You did not heed my warning.”
“No,” said Atlante, “and sorry we are that we did not. Will you still ask Aratron to help us?”
Phul managed to sit up completely. “I am not sure that he can any longer repair the damage, but I am in your debt and will surely ask. However, the time you will have to wait is now even longer, for my brethren and I cannot let the attack on me pass. I must take time to heal, since I have been damaged in ways beyond the physical hurts you kindly mended for me. Once that process is complete, it will take some months to assemble the seven of us to storm Olympus, and then we must find a friendly Olympian to let us in. Once we have won that battle, Aratron will be at your service.”
We did the best we could to conceal our disappointment. Phul, used to thinking in millenniums, would have thought of months, even years, as trifles, but to us they could easily add up to a lifetime.
“Two boons I can grant you more immediately,” said Phul, who must have sensed the ebbing of the good spirits around him. “The animals of the moon will no longer regard you with hostility. As long as you do not attack them, they will not attack you.”
“You have our thanks, mighty one,” replied Atlante.
“But wait, for the second boon is even greater,” the spirit replied. “Atlante, do you recall why Astolfo came here so long ago?”
“Lord Phul, I had heard it was to search in the Valley of Lost Things in order to find great Orlando’s wits.”
“And so it was indeed. God allowed him to do so, for one of the reasons the moon is so carefully guarded is precisely to prevent mortals from reaching the Valley of Lost Things, wherein they could find anything that has ever been lost by anyone.”
“That is…not really a physical place, is it?” asked Magnus.
“No, it is not. Astolfo saw it as a valley because that is what he expected it to be. In truth, it has no fixed form, and though the only gateway to it is on the moon in this plane, the place itself connects across planes and ignores both time and space in ways only the Lord himself understands.”
“Why is it so well guarded?” I asked.
“Because some things that are lost should never be found,” replied Phul grimly. “Nor is everything that can be found what it seems to be. Also, casual browsers could easily become lost in its infinite expanse themselves. Astolfo was safe from such a danger only because he rode
in a holy chariot.”
“Great one, how then can we be safe there?” asked Atlante.
Phul closed his eyes, and a pained look passed across his face. When he opened his eyes again, he held up his right hand, and in its palm was a small silver ring set with a moonstone.
“Take this ring,” he said, passing it to Atlante. “It will protect you and your party from becoming lost, so long as you all stay together.”
Phul rose awkwardly. “I must leave you now. The only way for me to fully heal is to bury myself in the soil of the moon.”
I thought he must be speaking metaphorically, but as soon as he finished, a cloud of dust rose up around him, and when it dissipated, he was gone. There was, however, a patch of ground right where he had vanished that looked as if someone had been digging in the silvery soil.
“Well, where does that leave us?” asked Gordy.
“Nowhere, if you ask me,” said Carlos. “Aside from the fact that the wolves won’t tear our throats out, what have we gained? We can’t heal Tal for months, maybe years, and we haven’t solved any of our other problems, either. By the time the Olympick Spirits are ready to attack Olympus, Hecate and her crew could have done amazing amounts of damage.”
“Be not so hasty,” cautioned Atlante. “Think about it. We have been given entry to a place where anything anyone has ever lost can be found. Can you not think of any lost thing that might help us?”
“My memories,” said Tal Sixteen. “My magic.”
“Just so,” agreed Atlante happily. “If Orlando’s lost wits could be there, why not your memories? I can think of a weapon or two that might be useful as well. Perhaps your other friends, if you consider them lost, as indeed they are lost to you, could be found.”
“When you put it like that, it seems almost too good to be true,” said Lucas.
“As Phul cautioned us, there are dangers,” said Atlante. “We must use great care in what we bring back, or we may find ourselves cursed, or worse, by what we have returned with. We must also find a foolproof way to stay together, for we have only the one ring, and there are ten of us…eleven, if you count the hippogriff, whom I do not intend to leave behind.”
We spent some time working on the problem of keeping the party together. It took quite a while; Magnus’s and Atlante’s differing styles of magic could be a strength, but getting those styles to combine smoothly was also a weakness, as we had seen a few months back when Carla, Coventina, and Mab had failed to combine their powers effectively.
The two sorcerers finally agreed upon psychic tethers, which they could use to pull wandering party members back and which lost party members could use to find them. The ultimate center of that system was Atlante, since he was wearing the ring, but Magnus, who had much more experience with mind-affecting magic, would be the one actually in control—and that was nearly a deal breaker.
“No way!” said Gordy. “Magnus is not getting inside my head.” Carlos, Alex, and Lucas quickly agreed. Tal Twelve and Khalid looked confused, and Atlante looked about ready to threaten everyone with his wrath again.
“I’ll do it,” said Tal Sixteen, much to everyone’s surprise, including Magnus’s.”
“We have…no choice,” Tal Sixteen added when he noticed all the disbelieving stares.
We sure didn’t have much choice. Not only did we need whatever edge we could get against the evil Olympians, Vanora, and whoever else might want us dead this week, but searching through the lost things might be the only way to restore Tal.
The guys continued to look disbelieving when I said I agreed with Tal Sixteen. Tal Twelve immediately joined us, followed by Khalid. Everybody else gave in soon after but with excruciating reluctance.
I didn’t really trust Magnus, either, but the truth was he could subtly infiltrate our minds and gradually take us over, even if we didn’t allow ourselves to be attached by psychic tethers.
I also couldn’t get Magnus’s hurt expression out of my mind. It was so like Tal’s. It might take very little to get Tal back in control of that body. Reflexively rejecting every move Magnus made was probably not the way to do that, however.
Once we had all agreed, it took Magnus and Atlante very little time to create a system and just a little longer to test it.
The sorcerers then had to locate the Valley of Lost Things; we had all been so caught by surprise at Phul’s sudden arrival and desperate condition, not to mention his startling revelations, that no one had thought to ask directions. Fortunately, the area was apparently giving off magical vibrations strong enough for Magnus and Atlante to feel them, even though we were half a moon away.
That naturally raised another problem (for us there never seemed to be just one): what was the best way to travel thousands of miles? Never having been there, Magnus couldn’t open a portal to it. The hippogriff could only fly two people comfortably, maybe three if one of them was Tal Twelve. We obviously couldn’t walk that far, and we probably couldn’t ride that far in a reasonable time, even if we could find appropriate animals to throw a saddle on.
Tal Sixteen suggested levitation in his heartbreakingly halting way. Nobody really wanted to do that, because it was hard for the sorcerers to steer all of us nonfliers very effectively, making the trip a lot slower. However, nobody could come up with a better idea, so in the end we settled upon that.
We ate another meal and then had to argue about whether or not we should sleep again before setting out. Atlante pointed out that we could probably find places to stop for the night, or whatever. Telling time on the moon was hard at best, and we hadn’t gotten used to reckoning from things like earthrise. However, none of us felt tired, so we got going.
Atlante rode the hippogriff with Tal Sixteen and Tal Twelve, who seemed to like being together. Magnus, Alex, and Khalid could fly on their own. That left Magnus the chore of levitating Gordy, Carlos, Lucas, and me—easy enough to do, but hard to sustain for thousands of miles.
It did not take long, however, to develop a pattern that worked. Magnus borrowed energy from Atlante every so often, and Alex periodically flew with someone in his arms, to take some of the strain off Magnus. That slowed Alex down quite a bit, but there was no point in getting way ahead of the rest of us, anyway, except when he flew ahead a little to scout.
Atlante guided us around populated areas, just in case. We caught glimpses of several large cities, sparkling like diamonds in their silver setting, and we all wanted to get a closer look, but Atlante was right. Phul had somehow signaled the animals to leave us alone, but we had no way of knowing whether he had sent a similar message to the various civilizations on the moon. We knew nothing about what people might live there, and even a small city could have had more than enough power to knock us out of the sky.
Given our luck, I was sure we would be attacked by giant lunar killer bees or something, but if such things existed, they stayed out of sight.
After three days, more or less, we reached the swirling, pulsating abyss that must have been the Valley of Lost Things.
So far, so good—well, except for the enormous silver dragon blocking what seemed to be the only entrance.
“Speak the password,” demanded the dragon in an echoing voice.
Needless to say, Phul had given us no password. Since he had been so close to death, we could hardly blame him. However, not having one did leave us in an awkward situation, to say the least.
“Speak the password,” repeated the dragon, twice as loudly as before.
I glanced over and could see Magnus weighing his options. This did not seem like a situation in which we would be given an infinite number of guesses, and it seemed likely there might be a bigger penalty for a wrong answer than just a refusal to admit us.
“Cervos,” yelled Lucas so suddenly I cringed.
“Pass,” said the dragon, flying aside to allow us through the gate and into the rainbow whirlpool within.
“New Kid does it again,” said Magnus. He sounded almost admiring.
“Risk
y, though,” said Gordy.
“I cheated,” said Lucas. “I saw ahead a few seconds and knew that word would work. It’s deer in Latin. You know how often people use their pets as passwords, and Phul was riding a deer the first time we saw him.”
“Still, that’s an incredibly lucky break that you have a vision of yourself saying the one word that would avoid disaster,” said Gordy.
The dragon shocked us by flying back in our direction. Had it been listening? Did it realize we hadn’t really known the password? We braced ourselves for a possible attack.
The dragon hovered nearby and examined us curiously for a minute. Then it said, “Any word would have worked as long as it was spoken by someone of good intent.” Then it flew away again, making a noise that could easily have been the reptilian equivalent of a chuckle.
Moving forward slowly, we let ourselves drift into the strange realm that lay beyond the gate.
Chapter 12: Island Dead End (Stan)
“What are we going to do about them?” whispered Shar, pointing at the security men combing the island.
“Leave them to me,” said Mrs. Golfinho, who had switched to her grandmotherly human form. “A few simple illusions are all it takes.”
Abruptly the security men were shouting and firing tranquilizer darts at one another. Within half a minute they were all down.
“That was…anticlimactic,” said Shar as we walked ashore.
“I think uneventful is good right now,” said Dan, looking at the unconscious bodies. “It isn’t going to last long, anyway. When these guys don’t report back, Vanora is going to send reinforcements—probably lots of them.”
“Agreed,” I said. “So we probably need to move fast. Mrs. Golfinho, can you sense magic a distance away? Can you tell if anyone is here?”
“Please, call me Gabriela,” she said, looking suddenly younger than she had just a moment before. “I’m not feeling anything, but someone like Taliesin could be obscuring his magic to avoid detection by Vanora. We’re going to have to search anyway.”