Broken Quill [2] (14 page)

“I know McSorley’s,” Annie said.
“It’s a bar on Murray Street in the city.”

“Yes, my old haunt, until I had a...
falling out with the proprietor.”

“That’s one way of putting it,”
Sophie muttered.

Annie frowned. “It burned down a few
years back, didn’t it?”

“It surely did,” I said. “And it
wasn’t my fault. Not one bit. Mostly not one bit. Partly. I saved the old
bastard’s life, after the gateway in his basement malfunctioned and started
spewing out demons.”

Ethan whistled. “Demons, really?”

“Well, tiny little imps, for the
most part. Can only really get up to minor mischief. But in my opinion anything
that chants in Hellspeak is a demon.”

“I can’t tell if you’re being
serious,” Annie said, shaking her head.

Sophie rolled her eyes. “Declan,
halfway through a bottle of Bowmore’s, took it upon himself to clear the imp
infestation and inscribe fresh runes in McSorley’s gateway, realigning the
path. McSorley gets half his business from Forgetful travelers visiting Perth
through the Atlas Lexicon and using his archway to return.”

“What the hell do they come to Perth
for?” Ethan asked. “Our overpriced coffee and six o’clock closing times?”

“Perth has some of the nicest beaches
in the world—in any world,” Sophie said. “Anyway, Declan missed a binding rune,
and the basement went up like a firework.”

Annie raised an eyebrow. “Is that
true?”

I grabbed my keys and wallet from
the counter, ducked around the counter and retrieved another wallet—a leather
pouch of Forgetful currency—and pocketed that as well. “Doesn’t matter. We’re
getting off track. McSorley won’t be holding too much of a grudge, I’m sure,
and he’s not going to shoot me with one of Perth’s finest watching my back.” I
squeezed Annie’s shoulder, felt her tense, and took a step away. “Anyway, shall
we drive in or take the train?”

“Didn’t bring my student card,”
Ethan said. “I’m not paying full price on the train! That’s, like, four
dollars.”

“Fate of the world in the balance
and you don’t have a spare four dollars?”

“Spent it on ice cream and noodles
last night.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “And I’m pretty sure I’m fired
for coming here instead of work, so I can’t afford no fancy train rides.”

Annie laughed—the first time she’d
done more than crack a grim smile since Grey’s death the night before. “I’ll
drive. My car’s out back.”

“I’ll meet you there in a few
minutes. Just have to collect a few supplies from upstairs.”

I took the stairs two at a time and
stepped into my room. The star iron sword glinted in the sun shining in through
the eastern window, and I kicked open the trunk of odds and ends I’d been
collecting for the last few months and retrieved a simple leather scabbard.
Ugly and worn, and mostly ornamental, Ethan had found me the damn thing on
eBay. The scabbard came complete with a sword belt, which I strapped around my
waist now.

The sword wasn’t ready, but it was
close enough and would have to do. I’d already been disarmed, thanks to
Emissary’s brand, and I couldn’t face Forget without some sort of protection.
If I was reading the weather right, then my presence might not cause as great a
stir in Ascension City as it had done three months ago. I hefted the sword from
its stand and tested the weight. Light, versatile, and as sharp as a razor. I
sheathed it carefully in the scabbard and wished, not for the first time and
not for the last, that I could access my Will.

Downstairs I set the wards and
locked up the old, stuffy shop. I found the others around the back, Annie’s car
idling on the curb.

She took one look at me, at the
sword on my hip, and cursed. “You know it’s illegal to carry one of those
without a lawful excuse.”

“Whatever do you mean, Detective?” I
said lightly and slipped into the backseat next to Ethan. The sword I pulled up
and rested on the compartment in between the front seats. “This is purely for
ornamental purposes.”

“I think it looks badass,” Ethan
said. “When can I get one?”

“When you can convince me you won’t
cut your own hand off.”

Annie leaned over the driver’s seat
and pointed a stern finger at me. “Just keep it out of sight until... until
we’re away from here.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Perth, the actual city, was twenty
minutes from my shop in the northern suburbs. Heading south into the city on
the Mitchell Freeway, Annie got caught in rush hour traffic, and we slowed to a
crawl. Stuck in the backseat with Ethan, I took the opportunity to catch a half
hour’s rest. The rune on my arm stung too much for any real sleep, but I dozed,
thinking about things best left alone.

Just south of Leederville, two
minutes from the city, we were caught bumper to bumper in road works. I didn’t
often come down this way, not since burning down McSorley’s and moving north,
but I seemed to recall these road works had been in progress for years. A kid
in the car next to me waved, grinned a chocolate-stained grin, and threw a
plush Piglet at the window. His mother, sending a message on her phone, ignored
the wee bugger entirely. I stuck my tongue out at him as we moved off. Annie
made a quick turn into the fast lane and actually progressed more than a few,
stagnant feet.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Quarter to ten,” Sophie said from
the passenger seat.

“I’m thinking breakfast. Bacon and
egg muffins, hash browns, and some pancakes. McSorley won’t be there before
quarter to eleven anyway.”

“Know the opening time off the top
of your head, do you?” Annie asked.

“I’m a man of many talents.”

With an hour to kill, and my stomach
grumbling, breakfast turned out to be a good idea. Annie parked in His
Majesty’s multistory, and I reluctantly left my sword in the car. We walked
down Murray Street, past a locked up McSorley’s, and got breakfast on William
Street, beating through the throngs of people all dressed up in snappy business
suits and thirsting for coffee. Most of them had their heads buried in the
The
West Australian
, splashed with the morbid headline:

EIGHTEEN SLAIN IN ARSON ATTACK

A picture of the Hillarys boardwalk aflame
accompanied the headline. My brand stung all the more just thinking about the
massacre, and I couldn’t help but feel that Emissary, whatever he was, was
something out of my league. Not to brag, but I’ve tangled with gods and
would-be-gods, men and women of complete power and complexity, and fought in
wars that spanned entire
galaxies
of worlds. I came out of all that, for
the most part, on top.

They had trained me well at the
Infernal Academy.

And the Tome Wars had taught me
everything else.

So why was I on the back foot here?

Perhaps I was just rusty. Apart from
a brief foray into Forget three months ago, I hadn’t been back in the game for
five years. I’d grown slow and a little fat on beer, steak, and scotch. Hell,
I’d
died
in Atlantis and, if not for a quirk of fate, would have stayed
dead. These were my thoughts as I sat on a thin aluminum chair out front of
Mickey-D’s, chewing a hot bacon and egg muffin, food in the loosest sense of
the word, and sipping a surprisingly decent cup of tea.

I needed to get my head back in the
game.

Needed to stop wallowing in a past I
couldn’t change.

I needed... to sleep. But, hell, who
had the time?

This was my pretty little town,
exile or not, and no freakish nightmare could come here and slaughter her
inhabitants.

Sleep when you’re dead,
snickered a voice in the back of my
mind that sounded surprisingly familiar. I thought of Clare Valentine, which
made me pause mid-chew and frown. Strange thought from a strange, dead voice.

We finished up with breakfast,
collected my awesome sword, and strolled through the heavy oak door of
McSorley’s just after half ten in the morning. By the Everlasting, but it had
been a long, continuous night bleeding into day. The scent of wood polish and
old, spilled beer hung in the air inside my once upon a time favorite pub.

 “We’re not open just yet,”
Albert McSorley said from behind the bar, as he polished glasses in a sink.
“Licensed from eleven. You’re welcome to sit at the bar and sip lemonade
until—” He looked up, saw me framed by my companions, and calmly retrieved a
cricket bat from under the bar. “Declan.”

“Albert.”

McSorley scoffed. “I recognize the
cute redhead, but your other two friends I don’t know. Either way, I’m not so
sure I want you all in here.”

Albert McSorley was a retired
Knight. Long out of the game and just looking for something beautiful, like all
of us madmen. He’d been in Perth going on twenty years, ever since his
hundredth birthday and retirement from the Knights Infernal. One of the boons
of magic, of Will, was an extended lifespan. Long centuries of something
beautiful, you ken. We could live well beyond that of your everyday human. But
there weren’t too many Knights who had lived long enough to be called old,
these days, not with the clouds of the Tome Wars still darkening the
horizon—they’d all died in one battle or another. McSorley had survived all but
a handful. He was, at best guess, closing in on his thirteenth decade of
existence but looked about sixty. Pretty damn good for a man who had already
been alive for twenty years
before
the Tome Wars had even started.

I felt very young, barely a fifth
his age, but what I lacked in experience I made up for in raw power and the
devil’s own luck. Or, I usually did. I’d unrolled my sleeves and covered
Emissary’s runic brand on my arm. Best old Al think me capable of burning his
bar to the ground—again.

I hadn’t been in here in the best
part of two years, but it still felt comfortable and inviting. A row of
mahogany, cushioned stools lined the front of the bar, which held about twenty
taps of specialty beer. Tables and chairs, as old and rickety as McSorley
himself, were scattered about the room, and a layer of sawdust coated the
floor. Dull lamplight torches hung in brackets on the walls. Along the back
wall was a small stage bearing the weight of a grand piano that had seen some
shit. Last time I’d been here, I’d blasted a hole through the wall and
levitated the piano out onto the sidewalk for the old man. Most nights he got
up on stage himself for an hour or two, slamming out old show tunes and
caressing shots of tequila.

“You got some new pool tables? Shit,
give me a cue and I’ll win every top-shelf bottle behind your bar.”

“What do you want, Hale? I’ve gotta
open, and I’d rather not splatter the floor with your blood. Get my dust all
dirty.”

“I came to use the Atlas Lexicon.”

McSorley burst out laughing. He was
missing more than a few teeth, and the ones he had left were a dull yellow.
“Broken quill,” he cursed. “You’re still as mad as a hatter. Where do you think
you’re going then? Avalon? Voraskel?
New
Voraskel? The Reach, perhaps?
Oh no, you saw to most of them years ago. Everlasting save us, you’re not going
to Ascension, are you?”

“Home, Al,” I said, and gave him a
quick salute. “Back to Ascension City. You know why—you can feel the shit in
the air as well as I can. Perth’s not safe. See the news this morning?”

McSorley nodded. He put his bat
down, picked up a rag, and scrubbed his pristine bar top as if it were covered
in a week’s worth of spilled beer. “What was it? Voidling?”

“No. Something else.” Pink flames
danced through my mind. “Something new. Or,” I considered slowly, “something
old. Very old.”

McSorley nodded. “I’d put money on
the latter. There’s no new stories, lad, just the same old tales told different
ways.”

“What do you know about the
Everlasting?” I asked.

“Eh? Bunch of fairy tales.” He
didn’t look at me as he spoke, and I had the feeling he knew more than he was saying.
Or suspected more. “Bedtime stories to keep kids out of trouble. Brush your
teeth, or Vile Omen will know. Be nice to your sister, or Blessed Scion will
turn your eyes red.”

“Actually, I think it was Lord
Oblivion who messed with the eyes.” Tal’s eyes had been gorgeous, the
definition of windows to the soul, before Oblivion devoured her and bled her
eyes crimson. “So you don’t believe they were ever real?”

“Real? Everything’s real, lad,
surely you’ve figured out that much by now. But were they gods? No. Just
stories, good stories, and long dead.”

“Declan,” Sophie whispered. “We
can’t wait.”

“Just give me a minute.” I looked
back to McSorley. “What are you still doing here, Al? You’ve never been stupid.
You must know trouble’s brewing.”

The barkeep grunted and tossed me
something from a pocket on his weathered apron. I caught it on reflex—an ornate
golden key, cold and heavy. A line of Infernal runes ran down the length of the
key, an ancient pass code for the gateway in the basement. “Just be about your
business, Hale. Go talk some sense into that brother of yours. He’s mad to pull
back all the Knights from this world. We
belong
here, that’s why I’m
staying.”