The Lore Series (Box Set): All 3 Books In One Volume

by Chad T. Douglas

“I don’t know,” answered Tom. Where is home? ... Our new world … The phantom whispers of a recent dream would not let him be. “There are people everywhere who want things badly, and if they find the strength, they will use it to get what they want. They will use it to change everyone else, or change the world.”

  “The world is not ours to change in that way,” Oi’alli replied. “Terrible things happen when we try to change the world to our liking. There is a story about a fool named Des Se Ceri who tried to change the world. His mistake killed many people and destroyed Alan’tillan.”

  “I’m familiar with the tale,” admitted Tom as the two walked into Oi’alli’s palace. This was where Oi’alli resided and from where she led her loyal people. Made of limestone, surrounded in coral gardens and crowned by iridescent glass sculptures and shining obsidian ceilings, it was breathtaking.

  Oi’alli and Tom were greeted inside by several elders and sorcerers, all lowering their heads as the chieftess, addressing each of them by name, glided over the smooth nacre floors. Along a series of water and coral gardens she walked with Tom on the way to the inner palace. Pools of water full of little sea creatures filled many of the smaller cloisters to their left and right. Waterfalls flowed into these pools from unseen sources, sometimes moving in impossible ways in order to reach the ground, bending round stairways or crawling along walls upside down.

  Oi’alli led Tom to a walkway that opened to the city outside, hanging over a high shelf that overlooked lower Oi’tannan. The view was impressive, and Tom lingered by the short wall to look over and down at the lights coming from other villages.

  “Where is the girl, Thomas?” Oi’alli asked quietly once no one else was around. She stood by Tom at the edge of the balcony and looked out at the city. “The one you were with last we met.”

  “Molly?” Tom smiled and shook his head. He had been expecting this conversation from the beginning. “I don’t know, but I am going to look for her.”

  “That is why you are going to London?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You know,” she said, turning to him, “I could stop the march. I could stop all the nations from going to war against those Bureau people, and then you’d have no way back to London.” She put a hand on her hip just as she always did when she was angry. It was only then, as Tom glanced at her, that he noticed she was wearing a little piece of silver around her neck—something he’d given her a long time ago.

  “You could,” agreed Tom, “but you shouldn’t, and you won’t. Your people believe in what you are doing. They are more important to you than I am. We both know this is true.”

  “Why won’t you stay away, Thomas?” Oi’alli turned her head to hide her tears. “You do not stay still. You appear and vanish and then appear again, like a ghost.”

  “I …” Tom didn’t finish. An apology was not going to help, and it certainly wouldn’t change anything. He knew after he left for London if he made it to America he’d never be back again. Making any sort of promise to her would be deceitful, even if it were what she wanted to hear.

  “It is for the best,” she said suddenly, her voice wavering. “I am going to war in only a few days, and I may die before we …” She stopped short and shut her eyes hard.

  “Don’t say that,” said Tom. He turned and was going to speak, but she was already walking away.

  “I must speak with the elders,” she said over her shoulder, calming herself and leaving Tom standing alone.

  Tom did not follow her, and he did not speak. It was best, he thought, that the dreaded conversation be left at that. In truth it had been short, but it had felt endless. Strange, how he felt sympathy, even a lingering affection for her. But that was all done and over, he reasoned, dismissing the thought.

  He wandered the palace by himself for an hour or so, still fascinated with the beautiful city and its people. His two feet felt like strangers to him after all the swimming he’d done. After some time, he found a place along the limestone wall that was smoothed for sitting. Tom treated it like a hammock, resting his head and feet. He’d been tired since he’d left the Divide. It was the kind of feeling that normally came only with the realization that one hasn’t slept in more than a full day, and it strikes suddenly. Tom was completely unprepared for it and fell asleep as soon as his eyes were shut.

  *

  Tom was sitting on the smooth nacre walkway in a quiet part of the coral gardens, legs crossed, eyes shut, a piece of jade in each hand as he practiced maintaining the strong, restless stream of bright green magic that flowed back and forth between them. All day he had used his time alone to think carefully about how he would get back to London. He’d only just realized something that concerned him. If Decius and Macius—the Bureau spies he’d tossed overboard— had somehow made it back to London, the Bureau would know he was Charles Walsh. They would know where he lived, and his home would no longer be a safe haven. Or would it? While Chera was still cooperating with them, had she told them about Tom’s London identity? While he pondered this and other things, the day slowly passed, and as Oi’tannan darkened in the weak light of evening, the palace came to life. Oi’tan warriors, magicians and priests passed by Tom in the coral gardens, talking amongst themselves and walking hurriedly in every direction.

  The Oi’tan were nearly ready for war. Tom opened his eyes, calmed the stream of magic in his hands and put his jades back into the pockets of his trousers, still folded into his sealskin bag. During his stay at Oi’alli’s palace he’d been wearing the clothing of a Oi’tan man, which amounted to not much more than a large wrapping that covered him from waist to mid-thigh. It reminded him of the long sashes he’d seen some of the Helvetii and other clanspeople wearing. It was unusual for werewolves and similar peoples to wear legged pants. Upon transformation they were bound to be torn to tatters. The Oi’tan had also offered Tom a chest piece made of shell, but seeing that it was merely a matter of style, Tom respectfully declined. Getting to his feet he left the coral gardens and went looking for Oi’alli, sensing that the Oi’tan would be marching soon.

  Tom found her where he’d expected; she was speaking with her highest ranking subordinates in a large meeting place at the front of the palace. Either the talk had been brief or Tom had arrived just as the assembly had come to a close, because as he walked into the area, the group dispersed hastily. Oi’alli turned to Tom as he approached and nodded.

  “I am glad you are here,” she said, meeting him halfway. She touched his arm, turning her head suddenly as if a thought had distracted her. “Come, and we’ll talk as I make my preparations. The Oi’tan are ready to march, and we will be leaving earlier than planned. The sea is not as calm as I had hoped. We’ll be swimming against a strong current.” She walked past him, giving him a tug and showing him the way down the central palace stair. Down he followed her, the stairway winding in the most unpredictable ways he’d ever seen and leading to a single doorway blocked by a churning wall of water. Oi’alli sang a short tune to it, and it parted so that they could enter. Behind the protective waters were what Tom had already guessed would be Oi’alli’s personal living chamber. It was not a large room, but it was the most elegant room in the palace, a natural cavern that had formed beneath the palace. It opened to the outside on the far end, where flowing waterfalls created smooth windows from which one could look out upon the open ocean.

  “How do you feel?” asked Tom, walking across the room to look outside. Below, along the sandy ocean floor just outside the city, he could see the figures of thousands of Oi’tan warriors and the silhouettes of gigantic, moving creatures, the likes of which he had never seen. He could not tell what they were through the distorted, falling water. “Are you afraid?” he asked, turning to look back at her.

  “No,” she said, looking straight ahead as she removed her delicate clothing and strode across the room to a large rack from which hung her war garments.

  “Then what?” he asked. He turned his head away in surprise, but his ey
es stayed latched onto her. Her smooth, round backside shone like a heart-shaped chocolate truffle. The muscles in her back and small shoulders flexed as she moved and stretched. Tom gazed at her delicate neck as she removed her headdress and then his eyes climbed down her long, licorice-braid hair and rode the slope of her back down to the place where her thighs parted. His heart leapt and he turned around, looking back out at the ocean through the falls, folding one hand across his front side and holding onto it bashfully with the other hand as he adjusted his sash and pretended not to have seen anything.

  “I can feel every drop of blood in my body,” said Oi’alli, taking a sealskin loin piece from the rack, stepping into it and pulling it up to her waist, unfolding the cloth so that it fell and concealed her legs from the front and back. “I can feel every breath I take.” Her voice was muffled as she took a thick chest piece from the rack and dropped it on her shoulders, tying it behind her back. It was laid on her such that the hard parts protected the middle of her chest and ribs and covered her breasts and the outsides of her shoulders. It was cut so that the bottom of the front of the piece allowed her to bend at the waist with great agility and flexibility. “Fear is the feeling one has when one is most alive, without realizing it. I am not afraid,” she said, “and so the feeling that courses through me is wild and free.” She took a battle headdress from the rack and stepped slowly across the room toward Tom, removing the last of several decorative spines from her hair. The ends that were not braided behind her head fell in long, square strands down the sides of her jaw in front of her ears. The headdress she placed over her hair was crowned with the great dorsal fin of a swordfish and strung with black, glassy beads.

  “That is an impressive army,” said Tom as she passed by him, cocking his head toward the windows.

  “We will need every last body,” Oi’alli insisted, bending down to pick up a giant tortoise-shell shield and her anchor staff. “Our blood must be stronger than our enemies’ if we hope to defeat them.”

  “My blood is always ready,” said Tom, “overeager, if you ask me.”

  “You ought to keep it down. It gets you into trouble,” said Oi’alli, looking him in the eyes and glancing down at his folded hands for a split second before turning to go.

  Up the stairs Tom followed her, out of the chamber and back into the heart of the palace. He studied the faint little scars that marked his hands and his bare arms. His skin looked like the dry, carved bed of a river, the liquid life in them taken little by little by time and violence. He couldn’t afford to spend much more of it, and he couldn’t keep stealing it, either. He knew if he weren’t careful he would dry up, and nothing grows in a dead river. It just sits and waits. The dust settles, never able to reach the sea.

  “I want to know how you removed that demon from your body,” said Oi’alli as they crossed the palace and headed out into the city. “How were you able to do it?”

  “I wasn’t, and I didn’t,” Tom admitted. “I had help.”

  “Good,” she said simply.

  “Good? Why is that good?”

  “Because,” she said, walking tall and swinging her shapely hips, “if you had managed it on your own, I would be terribly embarrassed.”

  Tom and Oi’alli were met by drove after drove of Oi’tan city folk as they walked away from the palace. For the first time Tom saw some of the Oi’tan “air catchers” as they arrived in the city with loads of air taken from the surface. These men were magicians responsible for bringing fresh air to the city and maintaining the precious dome that surrounded it. It was a difficult task, for even good magic cannot contain for long something as tricky as air. Tom reasoned this was why all merfolk cities looked as though they were always boiling or bubbling on the outside.

  “We must now swim with the buibu warriors at the head of the march,” Oi’alli said as she and Tom reached the outer walls of Oi’tannan, where they would have to pass from the dry sea floor of the city into the dense, wet ocean outside. The buibu, or “dolphin,” warriors were the strongest and most skilled of the Oi’tan, and they were to lead the march on Isla del Sol. “Are you ready?” she asked Tom, not waiting for an answer before singing to him the words that would once more transform him into one of her kind. After Tom steadied himself on his coiled tail, he followed her outside into the cold water, and the two swam around the city’s perimeter until they met the buibu warriors. Oi’alli faced her army and raised her coral staff. The last light of day fell in soft curtains from the surface of the sea high above. In silence the Oi’tan waited in the cold, blue-black void until the last light vanished, and then they began their march.

  By the first light of dawn, the Oi’tan army halted off the coast of Isla del Sol. Oi’alli and Thomas had advanced far ahead, and now she backtracked to the front line and briefly spoke with her warriors. Returning to where she had left Thomas, she gestured for him to follow her, and the two swam ahead of the army and into the shallower waters closer to shore. The march had taken many hours. Knowing the distance was great, Oi’alli had rejected moving fast and wearing down her warriors’ stamina; she had taken the march slowly and easily. She hadn’t tried to communicate with Tom during the entire swim until the moment they reached the island. As the two moved into shallower and shallower water, they transformed into human form, their tails shrinking and splitting into two walking legs. Soon they were wading through the waves with their heads and chests above the water, keeping their eyes out for anyone on shore. Before long they determined they were alone, and Tom was the first to spot the top of the Bureau’s new fortress sticking up over the trees, about a mile up the beach to the north.

  “The Ty’il will come from the west,” Oi’alli said, pointing across the island from where they stood, “and the Cui’oi will come from the northwest.”

  “The Bureau is bound to have ships waiting in the water offshore,” Tom warned. “I can see several already from where we stand now.” About six ships were anchored in the water off shore, and half of one was hidden behind the closest corner of the Bureau’s massive, wood and stone block fortress.

  “Do not be concerned with their ships,” said Oi’alli, smirking darkly. “They have ships, but we have the ocean.” A j-shaped whistle was hanging around Oi’alli’s shoulder. She slipped it off over her head and raised it to her lips, running her tongue over the whistle before blowing into it. A shrill call came from the little whistle and crossed the water, echoing into the distance. After a moment, there was a response. A deeper sound, like the raspy cackle of an insect, called back from the west. It was the Ty’il. Then from the far northwest, another call—the honking of a bass horn—announced the presence of the Cui’oi. “The Bol-Tok are approaching from the east,” said Oi’alli, throwing the whistle back over her shoulder and looking out to sea. The sun had not yet risen, but the morning sky was turning pale blue, like the skin of the Oi’tan.

  “Who are the Bol-Tok?” asked Tom, squinting as something appeared on the surface of the water to the east of the island, out past the Bureau’s ships. At first it appeared to be a small boat, and then it grew bigger and taller. Something large was approaching the shallows at a sluggish speed, but Tom did not know what. The heads of the buibu warriors began to dot the shallows, and they crept past Tom and Oi’alli on their way to shore, whipping their tails and cruising silently toward the beach, raising their long spears and tiger shark tooth clubs. By the scores they crowded the shallows, waiting, but they did not yet move to the beach. “How well can your kind fight on land?” asked Tom, knowing the Atlanteans would be outnumbered and in need of some sort of advantage. Inside the fortress and posted about the island, combined, there was a regiment of at least three-thousand soldiers, probably more, he thought, if he could gauge by the size of the structures he could see, and others he knew of.

  “We fight better in water than on land, of course,” Oi’alli replied. She began to move her staff rhythmically, conjuring some sort of magic.

  “The fortress sits on low gro
und, but there is quite a bit of sand between it and the sea,” Tom worried aloud.

  “Be patient. I have considered the details of this battle thoroughly.” Oi’alli rested the butt of her staff in the soft sand of the shallows and then moved closer to shore where her warriors waited. “Half of you go into the forest and wait in hiding!” she commanded them. “Send a messenger to instruct the Ty’il and Cui’oi to do the same!” Her warriors did as they were told, half leaving for the beach, the other half waiting with her in the water except for two pairs of messengers heading to speak with the Ty’il and Cui’oi.

  The sound of shouting came from across the water. The crews onboard the Bureau ships had been alerted to something. Tom watched but could not determine what was happening offshore just beyond the Bureau fortress, and then a plume of smoke rose into the air. Two of the ships had caught fire and were burning uncontrollably, their crews hurrying to extinguish the flames that crawled across their decks and up their sails. Along their hulls Tom caught sight of a few Oi’tan warriors leaping to the water—saboteurs who had set fire to the ships and their ammunition stores.

  “Move to the fortress!” Oi’alli commanded her warriors.

  The warriors, with their long tails thrashing the water, swam behind Tom and Oi’alli as she led the way to the eastern beach. War whistles were sounded, and across the island the Ty’il and Cui’oi trumpeted as they, too, began their assault.

  “Brace!” Oi’alli warned everyone. Stopping just south of the fortress, she spread her arms to halt her warriors. Raising her anchor staff, she began to sing, deeper and louder than usual. Holding the staff close to its head with both hands, she jabbed the butt end out to sea and then jerked the staff to her left, as if pulling on a fishing line. Still singing, she twirled the staff overhead and swung it to the left in great sweeping arcs. The tide pulled back, tugging on everyone’s waist and tails. The warriors swam hard against the current that threatened to pull them out to sea, until the water receded and they all stood balanced on the coils of their tails in the wet sand. Beyond the fortress, the Bureau’s ships groaned and lurched, holding tight to their anchors as the ocean abandoned them, retreating until they all sat sunken into the bare sand. Their anchors gripped the exposed rocky shoals. Oi’alli passed the staff from her right hand to her left. She thrust her right hand out toward the sea, her arm and fingers flexing as she dragged the arm through the air, her facial muscles twitching and her eyes pinching shut as she put all of her might into the gesture.