Masters of the Veil

by Daniel A. Cohen

  “…before…”

  “But—”

  “Just go,” Daphne said quietly.

  Sam tried to take her hand. “Come with me.”

  She pulled away from him, tucking her hands in between her legs. “I don’t think you understand what’s going on here. Just go.”

  Cassiella’s voice got weaker and was barely audible. “…before…”

  Sam gave a hopeful smile. “See you tomorrow?”

  “Fine,” she made a shooing motion. “Just go, quickly.”

  Sam swiftly got out of his seat and did his best to hunch as he made his way through the aisle.

  Cassiella’s voice broke through the silence. “Before I don’t give you another chance!”

  Deciding it was best not to look back, Sam crept away from the amphitheater. As he snuck off, he heard the play get back on track—Cassiella included—but it didn’t stop the hundreds of eyes curiously looking at him, as if wondering why he’d leave during the best part.

  Sam picked up the pace and was out of earshot and close to the gumptius tables in a matter of minutes.

  Confused and alone, Sam looked back at the mass of people. He couldn’t make out what was happening on stage, and he felt a surge of disappointment. The town had no streetlights, only moonlight, which left Atlas Crown bathed in a soft glow.

  “Think you can take me?”

  Sam turned around and saw Glissandro already sitting at one of the rock slabs, his hand outstretched.

  He wondered how Glissandro had gotten there so quickly, especially since Sam had been moving pretty fast.

  “You don’t have a second-skin,” Sam said.

  “No?”

  Glissandro made a high-pitched whistling sound with his horn—a tone Sam hadn’t heard him make before. From the inside of the bell came dark smoke. It twisted though the air and made its way to Glissandro’s hand, leaving it covered in a thick, dark mass. After the smoke settled, Glissandro played small peeps, which shot tiny morsels of light against his hand, landing on the hardened smoke. A few more notes, and Glissandro had a second-skin that looked almost identical to Sam’s, constellations and everything.

  Sam held back a smile. “I stand corrected.”

  “No, you were correct,” Glissandro played. Sam noticed the smoke starting to dissipate and the little stars fell to the rock table.

  “Still pretty cool.”

  “You know what’s not cool?” A shrewd smile crept onto his face. “Leaving during the middle of my play.”

  “Hey, I didn’t want to leave, it’s just…wait, did you say your play?”

  Glissandro played a quivering note and more black smoke snaked from the bell of his horn. The smoke gathered in front of Sam’s chest and coagulated into a black sphere that looked just like the fruit from the play. “I worked excruciatingly hard on it, too. You’d better have a good reason for walking out.”

  “I… um…”

  Glissandro stared at him.

  “Well, you see…”

  The last of Glissandro’s tiny stars fell to the table, twinkled, and went out.

  “I really needed to use the bathroom.” Sam brushed a hand through the black fruit, causing the smoke to break apart and dissipate.

  “Ah.” Glissandro gave a fake smile of relief. “And Cassiella’s freak-out had nothing to do with it?”

  Sam felt his face get warm. “I wouldn’t necessarily call it a freak-out.”

  “So you and Daphne are going to the bird zoo, huh?”

  “How’d you know?”

  Glissandro touched each finger to his thumb again. “Words are a type of music, too, you know.”

  “And you’re the master of musical words.”

  Glissandro clicked his tongue.

  “You sly dog.” Sam rocked a finger at him. “I have to be more careful with what I say around you.”

  “Or less careful.” Glissandro winked. “Maybe I could pick up a few pointers.”

  Sam gave him an exaggerated wink back. “I think you were doing just fine.”

  Glissandro’s cheeks grew red.

  “I didn’t know it was a secret.” Sam sat down at the table across from him. “Especially because of the amount of drool that came out of your mouth when she sat next to you.”

  “Hey!” Glissandro stabbed out a note. “I didn’t drool.”

  Sam held up his hands. “No judgments.”

  “Did I really drool?”

  “Enough to make a symflower scream.”

  Glissandro silently laughed.

  “What were you thinking, leaving the play?” Sam asked. “I feel like you of all people would want to see the end.”

  Glissandro shrugged. “I already know how it ends.”

  “What happens?”

  Glissandro bit his lip and squinted one eye. “I don’t know if I should tell you,” he played. “You did leave, after all. Very rude.”

  “C’mon. How does the Veil beat Her sister?”

  Glissandro tapped his lip.

  “C’mon…”

  “I don’t know… it’s such a well thought-out ending.”

  “Fine.” Sam cracked his knuckles. “How ‘bout we play gumptius? If I win, then you tell me.”

  “I have a better competition.”

  “What?”

  “Go.”

  With that, Glissandro jetted away from the table, running at full speed.

  Sam cupped his hands around his mouth. “Where?”

  He could barely see the back of Glissandro when he heard the response.

  “To get you those answers.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Sam took a giant step backward. “Unless there’s a titanium-enforced bridge, there’s no way I’m going across.”

  Glissandro laughed. “You really are a chicken.”

  Sam shook his head. “Your eavesdropping ability is starting to be a problem.”

  “It’s only a problem for you.”

  In front of Sam lay the mountain, only before he could get to it, he had to get across the abyss. A seemingly bottomless moat—with no visible bridge—surrounded the mountain. He gauged the distance to be about five yards across. Bright glowing dots lined both sides, like the lights on a runway, showing where the land ended and where imminent doom began.

  Sam shook his head in disbelief. “Why have a giant nothingness blocking the way?”

  “Beats me,” played Glissandro. “You assume I know everything.”

  Sam picked up a pebble and threw it into the moat. He waited a few moments for a soft plunk, but it never came. “How do we get across?”

  Glissandro played a sharp note. Starting at their feet and traveling to the right, a wave of light traveled through the dots on both sides of the chasm. “Follow me.”

  Sam walked a few paces behind Glissandro, staring at the little glowing things the whole time. “What are they?”

  “Worms.”

  “Why are they there?”

  “So people don’t fall in.”

  Sam thought about the pebble. “Really?”

  “Kind of. They like the vapors, too.”

  Sam stopped walking. “What vapors?”

  “Take a whiff, but make it shallow.”

  Sam moved over to the edge, peeked his head over—careful not to lose his footing—and inhaled.

  It was like horseradish, gnawing at the inside of his nostrils and finding its way up to his brain. It left him lightheaded, and Sam quickly retreated.

  “They like that stuff?” Sam rubbed his palm against his nostril.

  Glissandro gave a somber nod. “They’re not the only ones.”

  After silently trekking along in the dim light for a few more minutes, Sam could finally see their destination—a small bridge about a car-length wide, lined with the glowing worms.

  “Not the most welcoming sight,” Sam said.

  “As you’ll find out, the Mystics like to be alone with their thoughts. They don’t mind visitors, but they want to make sure you actual
ly need their advice. For example, this bridge moves to a different spot every night.”

  “That’s inconvenient.”

  Glissandro silently chuckled. “Not if you like your privacy.”

  Sam stared at the empty air between them and the mountain. “Can’t people fly across? I mean, May and Bariv both lifted me up easy enough.”

  Glissandro shook his head. “The focus it takes to fly is extraordinary, not to mention the danger if that focus breaks. Not many people in Atlas Crown can do it.”

  Sam huffed. “Well, that’s lame.”

  They reached the bridge. It looked sturdy enough, but it was a long way down into the blackness.

  “You first,” Glissandro played.

  “Why me?”

  “Don’t you want to hear the ending of the play?”

  Sam paused. “And?”

  “Aren’t we racing to the mountain?” Glissandro played the sharp note again, and the dots on the bridge glowed brighter. “There’s your opening.”

  Sam frowned at the bridge. “That ending had better be worth it.”

  Glissandro shrugged. “You’ll just have to find out.”

  Sam tilted his head back and held his hand above his face. The second-skin meshed well with the night sky. As soon as he peered at his hand against the heavens, the spots of light on his second-skin grew brighter, as if to match their stellar counterparts.

  Sam took a calm breath. “I don’t know what to do.”

  Glissandro played the worms brighter. “You need to decide whether or not to take this path.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” Sam let his eyes drift up to the stars. “I was talking about staying in Atlas Crown.”

  Glissandro gave a tight nod. “I know.”

  For some reason, whether it was the lingering lightheadedness or the cool night air, Sam was in a sharing mood. “So what do I do? May fixed everything back home. They won’t hate me.”

  “But will you hate you?”

  Sam picked up another pebble and tossed in into the moat. “How could I hate me when I’ll be doing what I love?”

  Glissandro touched each of his fingers to his thumb.

  Sam copied the motion. “Why do you keep doing that?”

  Glissandro stayed silent for a second, and ran his fingers over his horn. “When I was younger, I was different from everybody else. Everyone else could speak, but I couldn’t. No one picked on me, but that made it worse, because that meant I had no one to direct my disappointment at—nobody but myself. I hated being different. It was easy enough to get my message across: I drew words in the air with my second-skin. They came out sparkling gold, but I was still not the same. It wasn’t even the talking that bothered me; it was the singing. I heard others use their voices to create beautiful music, and I couldn’t. I tried to sing, but I ended up choking. I spent a lot of time in the woods and in the library by myself, thinking. One day I went deep into the library, deeper than I’d ever been, and found an old, moldy book in the wall. There was nothing special about it, and I don’t know why, but I knew I had to read it. Most of it was in a language that was spoken before my time, but some of it I could understand. That book taught me some dangerous things, one of them being how to do a dark drape. I knew it was against the rules to change yourself with the Veil, but I wanted to sing, more so than I wanted to follow the rules.

  “I went into the woods and reached far into the Veil, farther than I had ever gone before, and attempted to drape myself. I vomited because the pain in my head was unbearable. When I opened my eyes, there was a terrible creature before me. A skull-wolf, something I’d only read about and seen pictures of, but recognized immediately. It sank its teeth through my second-skin and deep into my hand. It was excruciating. It tried to drag me away, so I grabbed the horn on the bottom of its chin with my other hand and kicked it in the face to try and get away. I fell back, along with its horn. The skull-wolf ran away and everything went black.

  “When I woke, May was standing over me. The Allu had healed my wounds, but the poison had already taken its toll. Some things can never be changed back to how they were. To this day, I cannot feel anything with my right hand. I touch my fingers together to see if the feeling will ever return, even though I know it won’t.”

  The silence rang through the night.

  Sam slid his hands into the pockets of his robe. “That’s terrible.”

  Glissandro’s eyes flickered to the sky. “Not really. Because of it, I have this horn, and I learned an important lesson.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t read books.”

  “Amen.” Sam gave a strong snort. “Really, though?”

  Glissandro stayed silent for a moment and stared at the moon. “I think by the end of all this, you’ll learn it, too.”

  Sam sucked his teeth. “So you’re going to play cryptic with me, too?”

  “If someone had told me that trying to drape myself would cause a skull-wolf to steal my sense of touch, I probably wouldn’t have made that mistake.”

  “Exactly.”

  Glissandro dipped his horn through the air and played long, stringy notes. Golden letters started dripping out of his horn and spread across the air. After a few scrawls, Sam was looking at a word sitting in mid-air.

  EXACTLY

  Sam peeked over the words at Glissandro. “So you’re not going to be much help here, huh?”

  Glissandro played something long and wistful, and the worms on the bridge started glowing bright green.

  “Thanks.” Sam looked over at the bridge and was smacked with a powerful sense of nostalgia. It was like his entire past sprawled in front of him, hovering over the void—memories of his mother and his team; parties with past girlfriends. He thought of elementary school, where he’d thrown wet clay around the art room and begrudgingly played the trumpet. The memories shifted to his homecoming date… May’s smile… the proud look his father wore as he polished his old trophies. Then the rush of memories and emotions started thinning, and he thought about Rona’s story of Karundi Kai.

  Sam took a deep breath and stepped forward. “Well, here goes everything.”

  Cautiously, he took a step onto the bridge. The faint horseradish smell in the air encouraged him to get to the other side quickly.

  Once he was again on solid land, the air itself changed—becoming warmer, almost balmy. Thankfully, the mountain was mostly barren, with most of the vegetation near the top, so climbing it wouldn’t be too taxing. Dark grey, grainy material covered the ground, sloping upward from where he stood. As he took a few steps, his feet sank a few inches into the substance, like he was walking in sand.

  This might be harder than it looks.

  Glissandro noiselessly appeared next to him.

  Sam dug the heel of his foot into the land. “It’s a long way up.”

  “If you look behind you, it’s a long way down.”

  Sam peered over his shoulder and saw endless black. “Up it is, then.”

  They climbed the deserted mountain in silence. Every few minutes, Sam would feel like he had to say something and then decide to hold back. Glissandro seemed comfortable with the silence, and Sam didn’t want to break it. As for himself, he was all too comfortable with the physical exertion. It was the first time in a while that he’d felt a burn in his legs. Nothing could clear his head better than good, old-fashioned muscle pain.

  Something dark shifted in the distance—distorted, like the way heat changes the air above a grill. Sam thought about meat again and felt his stomach groan.

  As the whatever-it-was moved down toward them, Sam looked to Glissandro. Already frozen, Glissandro whispered, “Stand still.”

  Echo flies, Sam realized.

  Getting a good foothold against the gradient, he paused.

  Not only was this swarm bigger than the last he’d seen, it was faster, too. The flies reached them in only a few heartbeats and split into two fluid clusters. The group in front of Glissandro throbbed into a mirror formation,
and the other clouded around Sam like the divvy leaves had done, landing on his face and ears. Several settled on the back of his neck, the tiny hairs on their feet prickly against his skin.

  Though he’d passed the flies’ test last time, he did his best to stay still.

  They gathered on Sam’s second-skin like it was rotten meat. The collective buzz grew louder, and he felt himself getting nervous. Worried that even moving his eyeballs too hastily might get him stung, he cast a cautious look over at Glissandro.

  The other swarm had already organized themselves into a perfect Glissandro, horn and all. The echo fly version of Glissandro had the magical instrument to its lips.

  “Don’t move,” he heard Glissandro play, “I think I might be able to send them away.” Glissandro’s notes had a metallic echo, which Sam realized was the echo flies’ version of his music.

  A blast of music sent a serious gust of wind at Sam, but the flies remained plastered all around his body. Sam thought about how much damage May had said they could do. He shuddered as goose bumps sprouted all over his arms.

  “Hold on,” Glissandro played. “I’ll go get help.”

  Again, the swarm echoed Glissandro’s notes in a metallic tone.

  Sam watched as the flies from the duplicate Glissandro fell apart and started joining their brothers all over Sam’s body. The buzz in his ears began to crescendo. The rising tension from the swarm flowed into him like electric current. The noise became too high-pitched to hear, and Sam braced himself for their attack.

  All the flies dissipated.

  Moving in-sync, like a school of fish, the echo flies reconvened about a yard in front of him. They throbbed inward and started to form a shape that was not Sam, but more like a bunch of curved lines.

  After a few more pulses into formation, Sam recognized the shape—a giant version of what he’d seen outside his car and in the woods.

  A black swirl.

  Just as quickly as they’d come, the flies broke free and disappeared into the darkness. Sam felt his stomach descend from his throat as they left.

  Glissandro blinked a few times, his jaw slack. “I have no idea what just happened.”

  Sam mumbled something like “me neither” to Glissandro, but he wasn’t paying much attention. The dream that he’d had the first night reverberated in his mind.