Broken Quill [2] (18 page)

I rubbed my hands together, a touch
nervously. “We’re in a world I’m pretty sure isn’t even part of the Uncharted
Realms, a thousand universes from True Earth without a way home, and the first
person
we come across just so happens to know of something that can help us out?” I
chuckled without much mirth. “The voice of long experience is screaming in my
ear, telling me we’re being played.”

The corridor widened after the first
fifty feet or so, and torches on the wall—dusty glow globes of the kind I’d seen
in Atlantis—flared to life as we moved past, lighting our way. From the dust
and the way the lights flickered and spluttered, I’d say it had been centuries
if not more since anyone had been this way. The temple was a ruin, inside and
out. Every ten feet or so, a slat high in the walls allowed natural light to
stream into the corridors, supplementing the failing torches.

Up ahead, I could hear the sound
of...

“Gunfire,” Annie said, drawing her
sidearm. “Can you hear it? And... voices?”

We rounded a curve in the corridor
and entered the command deck of an Eternity-class cruiser. A ship that belonged
in the fleet of the Knights Infernal. My eyes widened, and I gaped.

“Declan?”

“Annie, this is...” The
Dawnstar
.
I recognized her command console, the panoramic display, and the bank of
weapons arrays. Moreover, I recognized the
people
. Hell, this had been
my first command, at seventeen, two years out of the Academy and keeping
Atlantis a close secret.

I looked behind us and saw the old,
dusty temple corridor. I looked ahead and saw we were flying through the lower
stratosphere, above a world of cascading mountain peaks capped with snow. In
the commander’s chair sat a young, handsome rogue.

“That’s you,” Annie said. “You look
so young.”

The crew of the
Dawnstar
ran
across the bridge, and the weapons platform was in full operation, bombarding a
fleet of enemy ships off the portside. I stepped forward and tried to get the
attention of Sentinel Amanda Hooper. She dashed right through me, like a ghost
might, and I felt nothing.

“This isn’t real,” I said, as if it
needed to be said. The
Dawnstar
was eight years ago. This battle, if I
remembered correctly—there had been so many—was above the world of Adena,
against a contingent of Marauders. “We’re still in the temple.”

“It looks pretty real,” Annie said,
squinting against the snow-glare and the sun streaming in through the windows
of the
Dawnstar
.

“Engage the eastern quadrant,” my
younger self said from his chair, watching the battle on a heads-up display
that tracked ships and weapons fire and generated tactical advantages. “Targets
marked on my visor in order of priority.”

The
Dawnstar
swerved through
the sky, and the display reeled through more mountains and turned up. We hung
to the edge of space, as the Marauders’ ships tried to get behind us. I grinned
as my young self grinned, dressed in his battle uniform—the enchanted armor of
a Knight Infernal.

“Oh my,” Annie said. “Those are
spaceships.”

“Yes.”

The Marauder vessels were pirate
ships, scrapped together from a thousand bastardized cruisers. No match for the
Dawnstar
or the rest of the fleet. Overhead, static burst through the
communications speakers, and a familiar, lost voice spoke directly to me.

“Commander Hale,” Admiral Levy said.
“There’s a tradition in my homeland, no longer greatly observed, but
nevertheless… When a young man wanted his prospective father-in-law’s blessing,
he would go out into the wild and return with the biggest buck he could find as
a gesture of respect. The larger the horns, the greater the respect.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Commander Hale, I see a mighty big
pair of horns on that enemy ship.” The radio fell into static for a long
moment. “Bring me those horns.”

Both Annie and I stepped forward
into this illusion—or whatever it was—and stared down at my younger self. His
fingers danced over a square control panel built into the arm of the chair and,
all at once, the illusion vanished.

We stood in a room of old walls
covered in creeping vines. More runes, coated in dust and partially hidden by
tree roots, made up the stone tiles of the floor. The runes had a slight sheen
to their design.

“Well, talk about dredging up the
past, huh?” I tried for a chuckle, but the sound caught in my throat. “That was
a particularly nasty day.”

“Who were they?” Annie asked.
“Flying those ugly ships?”

“Renegades, but of a different
sort—more like pirates. Men and women who sail the seas of the Story Thread,
looting other worlds and running a trade in stolen and illegal goods across
Forget. They’re rich and ruthless, and it was the blow you just saw me about to
strike, more than anything, that undermined their entire structure and allowed
the Knights to get a foothold on Voraskel—the Renegade home world.”

Annie shook her head. “You’ve led
an... interesting life, Declan.”

“That’s a kind way of putting it,
yeah.” I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Okay, I don’t know how or why
we saw that. Something to do with these runes, messing around in my head, no
doubt. Come on, I get the feeling we’re almost there.”

“Hold on, who was that man on the
radio?”

I tried to stifle a grimace and
failed. “Admiral Abrahem Levy. Sophie’s adoptive father. It was never official,
but there was a time five years ago when I was engaged to her sister, Levy’s
biological daughter, a lovely girl named Tal. Long story short, Tal’s physical
existence was destroyed, and her soul and essence currently play host to one of
the Everlasting. Lord Oblivion. You know,
that
old story.”

Annie left the topic alone after
absorbing that.

From the rune-strewn room, we
entered another corridor with a slight incline. The corridor led us outside
into the heart of the temple and an undulating courtyard at least a good mile
wide, open to the deep, navy-blue sky above painted with two of the three
moons. One moon was cherry red and the other honey yellow. I whistled low at
the sight. Lush vegetation, abundant wildflowers, cascading waterfalls of
silver light, and old, viny, stone walls littered the courtyard. I thought of
the Garden of Eden, of Shangri-La, of Atlantis before the city was lost, and
every dreamed up place of beauty and splendor conceivable. All those places
thrown together here, this dream world, to create a portrait of perfection so
real that you could taste the bird song and hear the scent of rose petals.

“Is this real?” Annie whispered. She
held a hand to her chest, breathless.

Snow-capped peaks rising to the west
just beyond the temple walls hid the long walk back to this Eden, but at the
center of the garden, a small pyramid of black rock, unevenly polished, rose up
above the landscape. Something shining as if it were the North Star sat at the
pinnacle of the pyramid.

The stroll through the gardens was,
again, like a stroll through a dream. The beach of gently crashing waves, the football-sized
mangoes, and the arboreal, humid, fairy tale forest, had all felt
insubstantial, and here again time seemed to slide on by with little care. I
couldn’t say how long it took Annie and I to traverse the mile from the inner
temple to the black pyramid at the heart of the gardens—only that it was no
amount of time that could be measured on a watch.

A set of fine, grey granite steps
led up the outside of the obsidian pyramid. The structure was pristine,
untouched by the creeping vines or the groves of wildflowers. The vegetation
came to a sudden stop in a perfect circle around the outer edges of the
pyramid.

“Only way to go is up,” I said and
placed a tentative foot on the first step. When nothing happened—I’d been
expecting hellfire at the very least—I took another step and breathed a sigh of
relief. “Steady as you go,” I said to Annie.

We climbed up the pyramid side by
side, the heels of our shoes clicking on the stone. A warm breeze ruffled my
hair and carried the scent of something indescribable... but wholesome.
A
rich taste of seasons passing,
I thought, but I had no idea what that could
mean.

At the apex of the pyramid was a
small plateau just wide enough for two, and suspended in a pedestal of brown
stone was the hilt of a weapon. The blade, if indeed there was a blade, was
sheathed in the stone. Set into the pommel of the hilt was a diamond the size
of a golf ball, and it had been that diamond we had seen glinting like a star
in the distance. A small, rectangular brass plaque, ancient and weatherworn,
was built into the stone before the sunken hilt.

I kept a hand near my sword, just in
case, but I felt as though Annie and I were alone here, alone in this whole
world, save for Charlie and his mango-stained smile.

“What’s that say?” Annie asked,
gesturing to a series of runes and glyphs inscribed into the faded brass
plaque. “Can you read it?”

I stared at the ancient letters, six
short lines, and shook my head. “No, not a word. Some of it looks vaguely
familiar, maybe old Infernal, but I don’t know if even the language historians
at the Academy have a translation for—”

My voice caught in my throat, and I
had to swallow my words as the glyphs blurred. The letters changed and became a
calligraphic form of English. I was able to read what was scribed into the
brass plate.

Here rests Myth,
the Creation Knife,

Forged in
Atlantia for the Nine to slay,

Forged to light
the Shadowless way.

Paths unbroken,
unsung, unfound

Await the
Immortal King to be crowned.

“Declan, are you okay?” Annie asked.
She grabbed my wrist to stop me from falling. “You looked like you zoned out
for a minute there.”

I blinked, and my eyes stung as if
I’d been staring at the sun. “Hmm? Oh, yes. Sorry, I can read it...”

“What does it say?”

I recited the inscription aloud and
wiped the sweat from my brow. “Broken quill, I think this was meant for me.”

“How so?”

“It has a ring of prophecy about it,
don’t you think?
Shadowless
, that one’s obvious. But
Immortal King
?
They’ve only been calling me that for a few months, ever since I died...”

My thoughts trailed away into
knotted paths of confusion. I thought of the Historian of Future Prospect, a
young girl of just sixteen, who acted as sort of a seer for the Knights
Infernal. The Historian was a title, granted to one girl born every generation
with the gift of foresight. She could
See
every possible future,
branching out from each possible moment. Most Historians didn’t live much past
their twenties. Most went as mad as a sack of cats.

Annie was talking, but I wasn’t listening.
I fell out of my thoughts and met her eyes. “Sorry? What?”

“You
died?
” she said. “What
do you mean you died?”

I offered her a kind smile, untucked
my shirt, and lifted the tail to reveal the mess of tight, ropy scar tissue
that crossed my gut and ran up to my ribs. “Long story short, about three
months back I was stabbed in Atlantis, fighting over something called the
Infernal Clock. Emily—do you remember Emily? Nice pregnant woman from Paddy’s?
Queen of the Renegades? Emily kicked me off a tower a mile above the city and,
as I fell, I hit a reality storm, which cast me back in time and space about a
week. I bled out on the floor of my shop.”

“But you’re alive,” she said, her
face ashen. “God, please tell me you’re not a ghost or a zombie or some such—”

I took her hand and pressed it
against my chest. “Can you feel that? That’s my heart beating, same as yours. I
was brought back to life with a crystal petal from the Infernal Clock. Sort of
like a ‘Get out of Death Free’ Card.”

Annie shuddered and pulled her hand
away. “I guess I’ll take your word for that.”

“Chin up, sweet thing. We’re here.
We’ve made it. If that little bugger Charlie can be believed, this knife will
get us to Ascension City. Then the real fun will start.”

“Right.” Annie looked at me
sideways. “You really traveled through time?”

“Sure did. Learned a valuable
lesson, too.”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t go fuckin’ around with time.”

About as valuable a lesson as any
I’ve ever had the misfortune to have stabbed into me. I trailed my fingers over
the plaque and spent a minute committing the lines to memory, reciting them
over and over again under my breath. Once I was sure I had it, I moved my hand
over the hilt of the knife and hovered just an inch above the large diamond.

The hilt started to glow with
gentle, silver light—luminescent, like a pool of Will—before I’d even touched
the damn thing. Annie gasped, and I hesitated, fearing booby traps or latent,
hexed enchantment. In my experience, mystical objects of uncertain power ended
up either killing me or unleashing travesties upon the Story Thread. Still,
what other choice did I have?