The Lost City

by Amanda Hocking

  “Wow, she’s really got you over a barrel,” Dagny said dryly. I shot her a look, and she got up to store her bow and arrows safely in her bedroom.

  I groaned. “This is so unfair, Hanna.”

  “Yeah, well, life isn’t fair, is it?” she shot back. “Do you wanna meet Eliana or not?”

  “Sure, let’s do it.” I wolfed down the rest of my food, then pushed back my stool and stood up, while Hanna let out an excited squeal. “Did you talk to your mom today?”

  “Not today,” she chirped as she hurried toward the door. “I’ll call her tomorrow.”

  “You can call her now,” I suggested.

  “No, we’ve got stuff to do,” she replied brusquely. “And if she was on her way to pick me up, she’d have called you.”

  “That’s probably true.” I sighed. “All right. Let’s go. Let’s get this over with.”

  17

  Beasts

  “This is where I met her today.” Hanna gestured to the wide-open street in downtown Merellä. It was late, so the street was dimly lit with kerosene lamps under the darkening wine-colored sky.

  In the mornings and the evenings, when I made my way to and from work, I passed by Wapiti Way. It was one of the main throughways in town, running downhill from the center of Merellä past the Mimirin and down to the coast. Like most of the roads in town, it was made of smooth pebbles, like small river rocks, perfect for barefoot trolls in a hurry.

  I had never actually gone down it, though, because it was always so crowded and busy. During business hours, it was lined with vendors selling various wares. Most of them had tents or carts, but some would lay out their merchandise on blankets on the ground, like picnics that were made entirely of plump tomatoes, hemp jewelry, and soy candles.

  The buildings that lined Wapiti Way were taller than most of the others in town, made with a kind of mauve stucco. Despite the height, they had very few windows, and absolutely none of those windows were on the bottom two floors. The space that would usually go to windows and doors was instead taken up by awnings for the vendors.

  But now the street was deserted. All the carts were gone, and the awnings were folded up. This was the first time I had seen the street empty like this, and I realized that it had to be at least twice the width of the other avenues and alleys that wound out from it.

  “Well, she’s definitely not here now,” I said as we surveyed the vacant road.

  Hanna furrowed her brows. “Maybe she’s hiding or something.”

  “Doesn’t her hair kinda make her really stand out?”

  “No, her hair was different.” She gestured vaguely around her own bouncy curls and walked ahead down Wapiti Way. “Instead of being all rainbowy, it was like really shimmery purple-silver. I have a nail polish that looks sorta like that, and it’s called Gunmetal Lilac. But it’s all one color and doesn’t change.”

  “Are you sure it was her, then?”

  Hanna walked on ahead of me, peering behind the awnings and checking the walls as if she were looking for a two-inch chameleon instead of a full-sized troll. But she stopped now to glare back at me. “Yeah, of course I am.”

  “How?” I asked her.

  Hanna spoke like it should’ve been super obvious. “I said, ‘Hey, are you that girl that fell through the roof of our car the other day?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, you’re the girl I nearly fell on!’ So, that all felt pretty concrete to me.”

  “Did you ask her about her hair?” I asked.

  “Yeah, of course I did! That was the very next thing I asked her. She laughed it off and said she can’t stand wearing the same hair twice.”

  “‘Wearing?’” I arched my eyebrow. “That sounds rather creepy, like she’s a monster or an alien wearing a troll costume.”

  “Maybe she is, but so what? Cosplaying is a super common art form, Ulla.” She turned and kept walking down Wapiti Way, so I followed a few steps behind her.

  “Be that as it may,” I said, “the idea that this Eliana is running around disguising herself and constantly changing her magical hair really does little to pacify my concerns.”

  “She doesn’t seem to be here anyway.”

  “Did she tell you where she was staying?”

  “No, and I didn’t ask.”

  “Why not?” I asked, and Hanna finally turned back to glare at me in frustration.

  “It didn’t come up.”

  “It didn’t come up?” I echoed, barely containing my own irritation. “What did you talk about?”

  “I don’t know. Just stuff. Life.” She shrugged and stared dejectedly down at the gravel. “We shared a mango.”

  “But you never managed to ask ‘What are you’ or ‘Where are you from’?”

  “How many folks have you met in the past few days?” Hanna countered. “And how many of them have you asked ‘What are you’ or ‘Where are you from’?”

  Hanna continued to make an argument for those being incredibly rude questions to ask anybody, but a strange rumbling sound coming from down the road stole my focus. I held my hand up to her and said, “Shhhh.”

  “You can’t shush me just because I’m right!” she protested.

  “I’m not,” I told her in a hushed, insistent voice. “Listen. What is that?”

  She looked toward the sound, a steady rumble mixed with an occasional loud clacking sound, like a faraway avalanche. We both peered up the hill ahead of us, where the sound only seemed to grow louder. Hanna stepped toward it, her eyes locked straight ahead, watching for whatever was about to appear over the horizon.

  “Hanna, I think we should get out of here,” I said, realizing belatedly that we were right in the pathway of the oncoming rumbling.

  “But what is that?”

  “I don’t know, but maybe it’s better if we find out from far, far away.”

  I grabbed her arm, meaning to pull her back, but it was too late.

  We saw the horns first—broad, dark bone framed by sharper branches, like moose antlers on steroids. Then it was the massive head, with a narrow snout, calling to mind a giant horse or deer, and the colossal body was covered in thick, chocolate-colored fur. And there were others.

  Each one was like a Frankenstein mash-up between a deer and a triceratops with a terrifying dash of woolly mammoth, and now a herd of their mutant offspring were charging right toward us.

  I grabbed Hanna, and she squealed as I lifted her up and threw her over my shoulder. Just as I was preparing to run off down the road, escaping what I assumed was an impending stampede of monster cervids, someone let out a loud whistle.

  Out of nowhere, four large dogs came running at top speed. They looked a bit like huskies or wolves, but sleeker and darker. Their coats were dark auburn, bleeding into black for the snouts, feet, and tails.

  With a few carefully timed barks and nudges, the dogs skirted around the giant deer, herding them away from us. The deer let out a few deep brays in protest, but otherwise they complied with the dogs rerouting them around me and Hanna, their massive hooves stamping into the gravel a few short feet away from us.

  And then I finally spotted the source of the whistle. Pan was grinning as he walked toward us, and two other guys were lingering farther back, giving commands to the dogs and the monster deer. All of the guys wore matching coveralls, and as Pan came closer, I saw that he had a patch on his chest—a dark red heart, more anatomically correct than a cutesy with large antlers coming from either side.

  “Ulla, I think it’s safe to put me down,” Hanna complained, and I reluctantly set her back on the road.

  “Stay out of their way and they won’t bother you,” Pan said as he reached us. He had a tall walking staff, and he used the end to gently nudge away any of the deer that got too close to the safe little pocket he and the dogs had created around us. “Don’t let their size scare you. They’re not that different than oversized sheep. A bit more stubborn maybe, but very docile.”

  “What are they?” I asked.

  “We mostly cal
l them ‘woollies,’ but the official title is giant woolly elk,” Pan explained. “Humans called them giant deer, back before they killed them off.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “They died out in the wild thousands of years ago, but trolls had already started domesticating by then,” he said. “We used to breed them for their meat and fur and the purported ‘medicinal’ benefits from their ground antlers. Now we mostly keep them around out of tradition and to keep them from truly going extinct.”

  One of the dogs pulled away from the elk, bounding over to check on Pan and sniff around me. This dog was larger than the other four, with a coat of dark fawn with a sable face. Instead of being rigidly pointed like the others’, his left ear dropped slightly at the tip.

  “Brueger, away,” Pan commanded, and the dog darted off after the elk. “Brueger’s a good dog, but he might be a little too bonded to me.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a bad thing,” Hanna commented.

  “It’s not, mostly, except for when he needs to focus on the woollies instead of me,” Pan explained as an elk drifted closer to us.

  Hanna reached out, tentatively running her fingers through their thick fur as they walked by. “Where are you taking them?”

  “These giant cows eat grass as much as a regular old Holstein, so we alternate the meadows they eat in to keep them from completely decimating the landscape around here,” Pan elaborated. “We can’t let them graze too far out from the citadel or the cloaking protections won’t hide them from the humans, so that means, to get to the various pastures, we have to herd them through town a few times a week.”

  “All right, that makes sense,” I said. “But how come you’re the one herding them?”

  He smiled sheepishly. “Because my day job does not pay that well, and the late-evening hours as a peurojen don’t conflict with the Inhemsk.”

  “Peurojen?”

  He tapped the antlered-heart patch on his coveralls. “A peurojen is an elk shepherd. They give it a fancy title and pretend there’s honor in it so they can get away with paying us less,” he said with a shrug. “But that’s kind of the recurring theme with the Mimirin.”

  A smaller, antlerless elk broke from the herd to check on Pan. It playfully nuzzled him, licking his curly hair. Pan laughed but leaned away from the attention. “The woollies do grow on you after a while.”

  Hanna cautiously reached out, and the elk sniffed her hand. With an excited giggle, she started petting the nose, standing on her tiptoes to reach farther. “They seem amazing.”

  “Yeah, they are pretty special,” Pan agreed.

  Most of the herd had gone by, so the small elk turned and trotted off after them. One of the dogs was rounding up the last few stragglers, so soon it was only going to be me, Hanna, and Pan, standing alone in the middle of the road, watching the retreating woolly elk.

  “I suppose I should let you get back to your job,” I said.

  “The other guys got it.” He waved it off. “I can spare fifteen minutes or so to make sure you guys get home all right.”

  “I think we can manage,” I said.

  “I’m sure you can.” His expression turned solemn. “But the woollies aren’t the most dangerous thing out at night. Not by a long shot.”

  “Really?” I raised a skeptical eyebrow as I glanced around the quiet street. “Everyone keeps talking about how amazing the security is, and now you’re telling me that’s not true?”

  “Ironically enough, both are true,” he said. “The security does an amazing job of keeping new evils and dangerous weaponry from entering the citadel. But in a place as old as Merellä, there’s plenty of skeletons and demons that have been buried here for a long time. The gates are locked so danger can’t get in, but that means danger can’t go out either.”

  Hanna moved closer to me but tried to keep her expression aloof and tough. “It doesn’t seem so bad to me.”

  “Well, home is that way.” I started edging toward it, expecting Hanna to protest, but she stayed close to me. “Is all this buried danger the reason they have a locked vault of secrets?”

  Pan shoved his hands in his pockets and fell in step beside me. “I doubt I know much more about the Information Styrelse and their vaults than you do, but I suspect there are many valid reasons why some information needs to be classified.”

  “Do you come across a lot of classified records?” I asked.

  “Me? No, none.” He shook his head. “I don’t have the kind of clearance for that. Scouring public records and tribal newspapers is, unfortunately, much more in line with my job duties.”

  “Do you know why some records would be blacked out or redacted?” I pressed.

  “I would guess because someone didn’t want others to know what it said,” he replied with a smirk. “I’m assuming you stumbled across something that’s piqued your interest?”

  “Just a tax form,” I said. “Nothing exciting, and most of it was blacked out, except for a name.”

  “So what exactly do you do for the woollies?” Hanna asked, returning the conversation to a topic that actually interested her.

  As we walked through the quiet, narrow roads back to the carriage house, Hanna interrogated Pan about everything pertaining to the woollies, and he patiently answered her. By the time we reached the wooden staircase that ran up to our apartment door, I had learned that woolly elk live about fifteen years, have one to two babies at a time, that their favorite things to eat are willows and wild roses, and the largest woolly elk ever recorded weighed over a ton.

  Hanna took my key and ran up the stairs ahead of us, letting herself into the apartment while Pan and I lingered at the bottom of the steps.

  “Thank you for ensuring our safe passage home,” I said, and he laughed.

  “It was the least I could do.”

  “I think letting us get trampled by the woollies would’ve been a little less.”

  “You only say that because you’ve never had to clean mushed troll off the bottom of an elk hoof.”

  I laughed and started up the stairs. “Thanks anyway, even if your motives weren’t entirely selfless.”

  “Hey,” Pan called when I’d made it about halfway up the steps. I turned back around to see him leaning on the railing, looking up at me with his dark eyes. “I may not have access to the records you want, but that doesn’t mean I’m totally useless. Meet me outside the Inhemsk offices at seven-thirty in the morning, and I’ll get you in to see Sylvi.”

  “Pan, I never thought you were useless.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t completely blame you if you did. After all, you haven’t really seen what I can do yet.”

  “I can’t tell if that’s supposed to be threatening or if you’re bragging.”

  He shrugged. “Could be both. A threatening brag, like a humble brag’s angry cousin.”

  “It sounds like the best way to impressively scare someone off.” I laughed.

  “Is it working?”

  “Nah, I don’t scare easy.”

  “Good.” He smiled up at me. “Neither do I. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”

  18

  Authority

  I was definitely not bright-eyed the next morning. Despite my exhaustion, I’d struggled to fall asleep, and I spent the night tossing and turning with nightmares of swirling ink, monster elk, and an encroaching green fog. At least Dagny had been up before me, and after seeing the bags under my eyes, she’d offered me her spare thermos filled with strong lemon nettle tea.

  My late start meant that I had next to zero time to spend on my appearance. Ordinarily I wouldn’t care that much, but knowing that I was about to see Pan made me feel flustered about how I looked. But I had to make a tough call—either I could put on makeup, or I could show up on time, and I had to pick punctuality.

  I threw on a flannel shirtdress, pulled my angry tangles of hair up into a ponytail, and topped off my ensemble with my polar bear talisman neck
lace and a pair of oversized sunglasses. Then I grabbed my hobo bag, and I was rushing down to the Mimirin, taking long swigs of the nettle tea as often as I could.

  Pan was waiting for me outside the entrance to the Mimirin, just as he said he would be. I tried to apologize for being late, but he assured me I was right on time. We didn’t say much as we went through security, and I’d skipped shoes this morning, so we were able to forgo the lockers.

  When we were nearly to the Inhemsk offices, Pan slowed his steps slightly and leaned in toward me, speaking just above a whisper. “Okay, so whatever I say in there, go along with it, okay?”

  “Why? What?”

  “Trust me,” he said, then opened the office door before I could argue.

  I followed him through the cubicle maze to the door in the back. He rapped on it, then opened it without waiting for an answer.

  Sylvi Hagen sat behind a small desk, and she looked up from her paperwork with the same enthusiasm she had the first time I’d met her. Her flat, no-nonsense personality apparently translated to her decorating style, which seemed to take a page from “very clean interrogation room on one of those crime scene murder shows.”

  “Hey, Sylvi, sorry to drop in on you like this, but I thought maybe you could help us out with something.” Pan spoke so quickly, the sentence had practically been condensed into a single word.

  “You’ve only been here for a few days and you already need more help?” Sylvi asked.

  “I haven’t asked for any help, not really,” I said.

  She snorted. “Your very presence here is asking for help.”

  Pan closed the door, apparently deciding that the rest of the office didn’t need to hear us. “Sylvi, come on. You don’t even know what we’re asking yet.”

  “It doesn’t matter what it is you’re asking,” she insisted. “You come here wasting my time first thing in the morning, and you expect me to smile and go along with it?”