Free Lost Ones-Veil 3 by Christopher Golden Page A

demanded. The bogie rounded on Smith, staring up at him with a warning in his eyes. “We haven’t gone anywhere.”
    Li tapped the tiger on its shoulder and it lowered its flaming head so that the Guardian of Fire could reach down and touch the ground. He felt the dirt between two burning fingers.
    “Actually, we have. This is the human world,” Li said, looking around at them with those eerie, furnace eyes.
    Smith said nothing. He turned and continued southeast through the jungle. They all followed, moving more slowly and warily now. Soon, however, they emerged from the trees and found themselves gazing out across a breathtaking vista. There were mountains in the distance, and hundreds of miles of rain forest.
    But twenty yards ahead, they found themselves at the edge of a cliff, staring down at an ancient ruin. All but two or three small structures were unrecognizable as buildings. Walls were little more than strewn stone and earth. But it was clear—once, this had been a city.
    “What is it?” Blue Jay asked. “Incan? Mayan?”
    “Atlantean,” Smith said.
    The trickster stared at him. “What?”
    The old wanderer actually smiled. “They had ambassadors in ancient days as well, my friend. This was a colony. Before they became treacherous and were driven from the world.”
    Then he turned his back again. When he began to descend the long slope, where indents in the face of the mountain showed that once there might have been caves, they had little choice but to follow.
    Smith led them to the nearest of the three remaining structures and through the arch that might once have been a door before more than a thousand years of erosion had been at work.
    There was no exit.
    Cheval’s green dress swayed around her as she entered, the last of them to follow. Grin rested, apelike, on his fists. Li knelt to whisper to the burning tiger and then slowly reached out his hands and reabsorbed the creature’s flames into himself.
    Slowly, they all stared at Smith.
    “Well?” Blue Jay asked. “What next?”
    “Now you cross over.”
    “Us? What about you?” the trickster asked, suspicion flaring in his mind.
    “I’ve told you from the beginning I wouldn’t be going with you. Nothing has changed. Your infiltration begins now. If you are fortunate, and as clever as I think you are, you will return with the Bascombes.”
    Grin snorted. “Is that supposed to cheer us up?”
    Wayland Smith looked at him, thunder in his ancient eyes. “No.”
    For a moment, they were all quiet.
    Li was the first to raise his hand and pull at the fabric of the world, opening a passage for himself through the Veil. He stepped out of the realm of the ordinary, and back into legend.
    Blue Jay cast one final, doubtful glance at Smith, and then went through after him.
             
    The sun had crept nearly to the horizon, with dusk less than an hour away, when Damia Beck heard the shrill whistle of her advance scout. She spurred her horse forward and raced along beside the infantry soldiers in her command. At the outset of the war, only weeks before, she’d begun with two cavalry regiments under her. King Hunyadi had hesitated to part with Damia, but had recognized that she would be more use to him in the field. With the assassination of one of his commanders, the king had given her command of a company of infantry as well. Now, after her performance in the Battle of Cliffordville, the king had transferred an additional three companies to her control, making her the only captain in the history of the King’s Guard ever to be made commander of an entire battalion of the Euphrasian army—one thousand men.
    Some of her fellow commanders, particularly Maggiore and Boudreau, had made their disdain for her promotion clear. Others had welcomed her. Sakai and Alborg had gone so far as to salute her. And then they had all gone off to war. Word had come that Maggiore had already been slain by some kind of Yucatazcan monstrosity. Despite the way he