Separated from Yourselves

by Bill Hiatt

  “Speak the name, if you please,” said Atlante.

  “It is none other than your fellow Saracen, Khalid.”

  I could tell Atlante was far more pleased by this news than Khalid. I got the distinct impression that Khalid didn’t like Atlante, probably because the sorcerer had taken Jimmie’s body. Nonetheless, he put up with the intense embrace of his previous-life adoptive father. Now the guy could make his apologies, maybe offer Khalid some magic protection for the future, and give Jimmie back to us.

  Arianrhod, once she got over her initial annoyance with our uninvited presence, seemed not to mind playing hostess a little longer, so we had a kind of celebration. I had seen no one else native to the castle except Arianrhod, but suddenly servants were bustling around everywhere, setting a table for an elaborate feast. It reminded me I hadn’t eaten in quite some time.

  While the preparations continued, Atlante pulled Khalid away from the rest of us and told him about Ruggiero, at least from the parts of the conversation I could hear. I really had to stop eavesdropping. Anyway, it was hard with everyone else telling me how great it was to have me back. I even got a hug from Eva.

  Unrequited love? Check. That was the one part of being me I hadn’t missed. As long as she was happy, though, I would be happy.

  Yeah, right.

  I glanced over and saw Atlante insisting that Khalid mount the hippogriff. Khalid seemed nervous about the idea, but the beast knelt down so Khalid could get on, and Khalid’s resistance melted.

  “I’m glad Khalid is willing to play along,” said Eva. “Maybe Atlante will finally feel better about what happened with his son so long ago. It’s like a second chance.”

  Atlante mounted the hippogriff right behind Khalid, laughing and talking about how much fun flying was. Khalid, who could fly on his own power, was polite enough not to mention he already knew.

  I turned back to respond to Eva, then felt a magic surge nearby.

  Suddenly, an entrance to the vortex had appeared right in front of where the hippogriff and his passengers stood. With one flick of the reins, Atlante sent the hippogriff charging through the gateway. Then it slammed shut, leaving Khalid’s shout echoing in our ears.

  “How would he dare to do such a thing?” demanded Arianrhod to no one in particular. “How would he dare?”

  “What just happened?” asked Carlos.

  “It looks to me as if Atlante has just kidnapped Khalid!” I almost shouted. “My lady, we must pursue him at once!”

  “Alas, we cannot!” she said, staring angrily at the place where the gate had been only a moment before. “There is no natural entrance to the Valley of Lost Things here. That is why I was so surprised at your arrival. The Valley can open gates where lost things can be found, but as I did not come here through the Valley, I cannot follow him. Any of you could reenter the Valley, but you would have no way of knowing where he is once you got back in.”

  “Magnus and I can open portals,” I pointed out. “We can return to the entrance to the Valley and—”

  “You can try, but it will likely do you no good,” said Arianrhod. “This Atlante knows of your ability to open portals, yes?”

  “We talked quite a bit about our respective magical skills,” replied Magnus.

  “Then I fear he is unlikely to exit the Valley at some place where you can so easily wait for him.”

  “Where else can he go?” I asked.

  “Sadly, we can travel to anywhere a lost thing is to be found. I would imagine he will think of some lost thing in a very distant place and travel to it. He could end up anywhere in his world…perhaps even in other worlds, depending upon how imaginative he is.”

  “Doesn’t this violate the tynged?” asked Gordy. “I thought that was impossible.”

  “I should have asked him to be more specific about what he meant when he said he wanted to make amends. I thought an apology, some kind of magic protection…”

  “Exactly what I thought, my lady,” I said. “He fooled us all…and we’ve known him longer.”

  Gordy asked the question I couldn’t bring myself to ask. “Does that mean we’ve just lost Khalid…and Jimmie’s body?”

  “Khalid is half djinni, is he not?” asked Arianrhod. “His people might be able to track him.”

  “As far as we can tell, his people want nothing to do with him. Even his own mother has never bothered to show up,” I said glumly.

  “Maybe she couldn’t,” said Lucas. Having just met his encantado great-grandmother a few weeks ago and learning how tough her people had made it for her to visit, it was a natural idea for him to come up with. Whether it was true for the djinn or not was a whole other problem.

  “His people do not welcome offspring of djinni-human couples,” I said. “We’ll try that approach if we have to, but is there nothing else?”

  “Jimmie’s soul has a natural affinity for his body,” said Arianrhod. “We could perhaps use that tie to help the soul to find its body. It is not a method that will work instantly, especially if soul and body are separated by great distances, even more so by worlds. It might take months. It might take years if Atlante continues to travel. However, eventually the soul can find what it has lost.”

  “Well, that’s better than nothing, I guess,” said Gordy. “But it sounds as if he could lose most of his life to Atlante.”

  “As I reflect further, I remember there is a one-year limit in the tynged,” Arianrhod said, smiling a little. “A year will be hard to bear, but it is not a whole life.”

  “So we get Jimmie and Khalid back in a year?” asked Alex.

  Arianrhod thought for just a moment. “Surely you will get Jimmie back. The tynged does not specify that Atlante will return Khalid. I did not anticipate he would take him in the first place.”

  I knew that Arianrhod was inclined to blame herself, but the fault was mine. I was whole again and should have kept a closer eye on Atlante, who was a stranger to us.

  I had let my own situation distract me, and now Jimmie and Khalid would both pay the price.

  Chapter 14: Double Double Cross (Stan)

  We sat in the courtyard of Alcina’s castle, working out our strategy. It wasn’t exactly the Ritz-Carlton, but I’d take it!

  Tal was much more of an architecture buff than I was, but some of his enthusiasm had rubbed off on me, so I knew that this place, built by Alcina after the destruction of her original castle, was an odd hybrid. The exterior had all the design features that made medieval castles easy to defend, but the inside was much more like an Italian Renaissance palace, so much so that I half expected Lorenzo de’ Medici or someone like that to pop up at any moment. However, the interior was not without some practical advantages as well. The bubbling fountain around which we sat was designed to make eavesdropping difficult, if anyone happened to be the proverbial fly on the wall. (With shapeshifters in the mix, that old saying might end up being literal.)

  Since Alcina’s servants had been gone for centuries, Carla kept coming back and forth with plates of fruit and goblets of springwater or juice. Each of us guys offered to help, not wanting to look like male chauvinists, but Carla turned us down each time. “I know the layout of the castle better than any of you,” she said over and over again, and certainly she did.

  During the first part of our planning session, Carla told us that Tal, who had helped set up some of the additional security on Vanora’s home and on the town, had figured out how to disable those magical protections when he realized Vanora had suddenly become an enemy. He had been captured before he could implement his plan, but he had mentally shared it with Carla just before being caught, so she was confident she could implement it and get us into Vanora’s headquarters without her being aware of us.

  “That place is huge, though,” I pointed out. “If we don’t know where she is, we are more likely to run into some of her guards first, and then we lose the element of surprise.”

  Carla smiled. “That’s where the psychic network you and Tal helped her
design comes in. Tal taught me how to tap into one of her guards and locate her through him.”

  I thought about that idea for a minute. “Isn’t she going to notice someone tapping into the network? We designed it to be pretty safe from probing like that. You’d have to break in.”

  “Stan, you think of everything,” said Carla. “Tal left himself a back door. I can get in and follow the connections without setting off any alarms.”

  I had left myself a back door into the physical security system, but I couldn’t remember Tal giving himself one into the psychic one, though I guessed he could have done it without telling me.

  “Can you use the same method to pinpoint all the security guards?” asked Shar. “It would be handy to know how they’re deployed, especially if we want to approach Vanora without running into any of them.”

  “Tal could probably do that, but I don’t think I can,” Carla admitted. “However, with Gabriela’s help, we should be able to stay invisible if we run into any of them.”

  “That won’t hold up if Vanora happens to be looking through the guard we run into,” I said.

  Carla was oddly dismissive of that idea. “It’s very unlikely” was the way she characterized the objection. That led to a little friction, since Shar wasn’t willing to take “very unlikely” as a good-enough guarantee and wanted to work out alternatives.

  Carla began to look irritated. “Shar, unless you want a long delay, invisibility is the best we can do. Keep in mind that everybody else—Khalid included—is now a prisoner of Vanora’s, and we can’t know what her plans are for any of them.”

  The reminder that Khalid might be in danger shut Shar up fast, but it got me thinking.

  Carla had made her share of mistakes over the past few months, but it was hard to visualize how Vanora had managed to capture everyone except her, particularly if she had been with Tal. I knew her well enough to doubt she would have fled when he got captured, even if that was the sensible course of action. Carla had never been sensible where Tal was concerned, and now seemed an odd time to start.

  We worked a little more on the logistical details, but in another half hour, we were ready to go. Well, almost.

  “Wait,” I said, just as Carla was about to open a portal. “I know you’ll be using magic most of the time, but Vanora and the guards will both have some protection, so you really should have a weapon, just in case you need it.”

  Carla wasn’t happy with that suggestion, either, but she agreed, probably to avoid another argument. While she was gone, we talked around the fountain in low tones, still conscious of the fact that someone might be listening.

  Carla returned more quickly than I expected, carrying a bow and arrows.

  “Greek design?” asked Shar, looking at it admiringly.

  “Yes, said Carla. “I got used to Artemis’s bow. I gave that to Eva, but there are several others in my collection here. I believe this one used to belong to one of the Amazons. Now, is everybody ready?”

  The other guys took a couple of minutes to check their gear, giving me the opportunity to ask Carla a question that had been bugging me. “Carla, we noticed earlier that the island has a weird split between Italian forest and tropical rain forest. Any insight about why that is?”

  Carla laughed. “Always the nerd!”

  “I would have said ‘scientist,’ but otherwise I’m guilty as charged,” I said. “So, any thoughts?”

  “I did it to slow down possible intruders, who would puzzle over it just as you did. And, much as I loved Italian forests, the trees are too far apart sometimes to make ideal hiding places. A tropical rain forest provides much better cover.”

  “That it does,” agreed Shar. “Satisfied, Stan?”

  “Completely,” I said. “You?”

  “Absolutely!” he replied.

  “Now that the scientific inquiries are over, we can leave,” said Carla, opening a portal as she spoke. “There will be some delays this time. I need to shut down the various magical security elements as we encounter them; I can’t do it remotely from here.”

  We stepped through the portal, hands on swords. Gabriela was braced to use her magic as needed. Carla was almost rigid with concentration as she navigated the security maze.

  Our trip ended abruptly. We were used to stepping out of a portal, but this time we were thrown out with such force we only barely kept our footing.

  Instead of emerging in some isolated corner, as Carla had said we would, we found ourselves in Vanora’s office. Vanora herself stood behind her desk, smiling triumphantly. Security guards stood all around us, ready to hit us with tranquilizer darts.

  Unfortunately for us, Carla must have been under the control of her Alcina personality.

  Unfortunately for her, we had already figured that out.

  Gabriela, ready to use magic, plunged us into illusionary darkness rather than using the invisibility that Alcina—and probably Vanora—had been expecting. The guards hesitated for a second, giving us the chance to strike first. More important, if we couldn’t see Alcina, she couldn’t use her incredibly powerful love spell to overwhelm us.

  The guards outnumbered us two to one, and we were as blind as they were, but we crouched and charged, knowing their first impulse when they heard us moving would be to fire at a standing opponent. They did miss us and took out two of their own in the process.

  Vanora and Alcina weren’t attempting an attack yet as far as I could tell. If we were lucky, they were trying to magick themselves to be able to see in the dark, a spell that wouldn’t help them with illusionary darkness. The few seconds they needed for that attempt and the fact that the guards were still floundering gave Gabriela time to adjust the illusions. Darkness still blinded the guards—and hopefully Vanora and Alcina—but not any of us, except that we still couldn’t see Alcina’s eyes. Now, numerical advantage mattered little. Shar and Dan tackled the guards nearest them, slamming the startled men against the wall and grabbing their guns. None of us had trained with guns the way we had with swords, but at close range Dan and Shar had no problem tranquilizing the guards they had attacked, followed by their still befuddled comrades, all in just seconds. By that point I had grabbed a gun from one of the fallen guards and shot Vanora, while Gabriela did the same with Alcina. The two sorceresses slumped to the floor. Game over. Score: Us 1, Them 0.

  “There’s nothing like the element of surprise,” I said, sitting down at Vanora’s computer to initiate a security lockdown that would trap the remaining guards pretty much where they were. Even without my back door, it was comparatively easy to do whatever I wanted from Vanora’s own security account at her own terminal. Then I cut all surveillance on the office floor, leaving the guards blind to what was happening as well as trapped.

  With our immediate safety secured, I used Vanora’s account to create a new admin account for me with full privileges. There wasn’t going to be much need for stealth now, and I could use a full-admin account to change security settings a little faster than I could use my back door. From this point on, a few seconds might make a big difference.

  “It was a good thing you noticed Carla was a little off,” said Dan.

  “I’m surprised she made some of those mistakes, though,” said Shar. “Referring to Alcina in the first person twice?”

  “Arrogance, perhaps,” suggested Gabriela. “I have known many sorceresses over time, and most have been rather full of themselves.”

  “We have a problem,” I said, my eyes still glued to the computer screen.

  “So what else is new?” said Dan. “What is it?”

  “I just checked all the security feeds from the dungeon. There are no prisoners.”

  “So where are Tal and everybody else then?” asked Shar, his eyes full of worry.

  “I’m checking the rest of the building, but the dungeon’s really the only logical place to hold someone prisoner.”

  “Then they could be held somewhere besides Awen,” suggested Shar.

  “Or perhap
s Alcina was just lying to get us here,” said Dan. “Maybe the others are still free.”

  “Either way, we need to find them,” I said. “Our current situation isn’t stable.”

  As understatements went, that was a big one. Yeah, we had subdued Vanora and Alcina, but we had no way to tell if other sorcerers might be working against us. The fact that the Order of the Ladies of the Lake had gone dark suggested bigger things were happening than just a coup in Santa Brígida. Without information, we could just be waiting to be captured by someone else.

  As if that were not enough, we were basically trapped in the building—again. Gabriela could travel by water, but only if she could get near enough a large natural body of it. We could theoretically move through the building and out, but we’d have to fight security guards at each stage, this time without the element of surprise.

  “You know what else bothers me?” asked Shar. “Vanora has never made such strategically poor choices. Bringing us here was risky.”

  “She thought she was catching us by surprise,” said Dan.

  “Even so, why put herself so close to us before we were actually subdued?”

  “Yet more arrogance?” suggested Gabriela.

  “Vanora has no lack of ego,” I said, still shuffling through security feeds in the hope of finding something. “But Shar’s right. She can play the game better than this.”

  “Which means what?” asked Dan. “She’s controlled? Or possessed or something?”

  “Given the number of shifters there seem to be, she could be someone else,” I said. “In that case, the real Vanora is probably a prisoner somewhere.”

  “Well, let’s see what we’re actually dealing with,” said Shar, drawing Zom and touching the fallen Vanora with it.

  In one emerald flash the Carrie Winn facade vanished. Vanora wore that guise so much that we hadn’t seen her real form since Halloween, but we remembered what she looked like well enough to know that the person lying in front of us wasn’t Vanora.