Broken Quill [2] (19 page)

I grasped the hilt.

Nothing exploded. A pleasant change
in my line of work. Given my track record of mystical objects shrouded in
chaos, I’d expected the seas to boil and the sky to fall.

The knife slipped from the rock as
if I were running the blade through warm butter. About eight inches of shining,
clear crystal formed the blade, and locked inside that crystal were about a
dozen blood-red rose petals.

My hand shook.
The Roseblade...
Long ago, nearly ten years now, when I first discovered Atlantis on my Great
Quest after graduating from the Academy, I’d seen a blade not unlike this,
locked before the Infernal Clock.
The Roseblade—capable of channelling
enough Will to level mountains and boil oceans. The petals in that sword had
been white.

The knife, Myth, is a weapon of
celestial illusion!

“That’s actually kind of pretty,”
Annie said. “For a knife. Christ, Declan, you look like you’re going to be
sick!”

I thought I might be, at that.
Swallowing hard, I ran a finger down the flat of the blade, along the cool
crystal. More of that faint light shone from within, giving the petals a silver
lining.
I pricked my finger on the razor-sharp point, drawing a tiny
bead of blood.

“Well...” I cleared my throat.
“Bugger me sideways.”

“Is it valuable?” Annie asked,
entranced by the radiant petals.

“Priceless,” I said, and if ever
there was an understatement... “Let’s see if we can get it to work. I’m
actually more confident that little bugger Charlie was telling the truth, now
that I know what this is.”

“How d’you mean?”

I tapped the blade. “This knife is a
weapon of celestial illusion, Annie. An ancient weapon from the time before
Atlantis fractured and was lost. The crystal and the petals are a store of
immense power, capable of absolutely anything. I don’t doubt we can cut through
worlds with this blade.”

Annie stuck her tongue between her
teeth and squinted at the knife. “I’ve read a book about a knife like this, you
know. A children’s book when I was in high school. I’m sure of it.” She
gestured vaguely with her hand. “
The Subtle Knife
, by Phillip Pullman.
That’s the one. The kid in the story had a knife that could cut windows between
worlds. Created, like… a portal in the air. I imagine not unlike what we used
in McSorley’s basement.”

I nodded along. “Yeah, I know the
story. It’s one of the banned books, along with Tolkien’s tales, sealed by the
Knights.” A scary thought came to me then, and the knife in my hand seemed to
get a whole lot heavier. “I wonder... no.”

“What?”

“Well...” I licked my lips and gazed
at my surroundings, at the distant walls of the temple and the thriving,
beautiful garden enclosing the pyramid. I thought about how insubstantial this
world felt and how I’d likened moving along the beach and through the forest as
a
dream
. “I wonder if we’ve somehow crossed into the Dream Worlds. Into the
realms and beads of the Story Thread locked away by the Knights.”

“Is that possible?”

I chuckled nervously. “Before just
now, I wouldn’t have thought so, no. But here we are. I don’t know what else
this world could be.”

“So is that the Subtle Knife then,
do you think?” Annie frowned. “In the book, I don’t think it looked like that.”

 “I don’t know. How did they
use it in the book?”

Annie shrugged and folded her arms
under her breasts. “I don’t remember specifics, but they sort of felt around in
the air with the tip of the knife and cut when it stuck. I think the kid in the
story could
feel
when he’d found some other world, like a sixth sense.”

With no better idea, and praying I
didn’t need to use my barred Will, I felt around in the air, waving the knife
back and forth like an orchestra conductor waves a baton. The petals in the
blade shone, and the hilt thrummed in my grasp, but no portals between worlds
sprang into existence.

“That’s promising,” I said and
stopped to admire the knife. The hilt stopped shaking, and the petals dimmed.

“Did you feel anything?”

“Hmm.” I tried again, moving the
knife more slowly this time and feeling my way through the empty space. The
petals shone again, and the knife jarred on nothing, striking a dull chime as
if I’d scraped the blade against steel. Slower now, like a surgeon with a
scalpel, I guided the tip of the blade and felt it slip into something
invisible, like a key fitting into a lock.

The knife caught on the air and, with
little force from me, slid down as though it were a zipper and revealed another
world. Curtains were drawn open, and the air split as if reality was only a
thin, frayed canvas and I were tearing it in half like I might a piece of
paper. The portal was about seven feet high, from my shoes to a foot above my
head, and wide enough for one at a time to step through.  A swirl of
bitingly cold snow blew from the new world and into ours atop the pyramid. All
I could see through the portal was a blizzard of snow and ice.

“Won’t last two minutes there,” I
said. “Do you think I can close—”

No sooner had the thought entered my
mind than the portal zipped closed, the two folds of reality I’d split fused
back together as if an invisible line of solder had been run along the seam.

“Try again,” Annie said firmly.
“Maybe try thinking about where you want to go. Like, picture Ascension City in
your mind, or something.”

That sounded like a mighty fine
idea. I thought about Ascension City, the sprawling districts, the towering
skyscrapers, and the clear crystal bridges built across the sky, connecting the
intertwined buildings. I thought about Aaron’s shop, Cedar Sky, and his vast
array of otherworldly spices, and the knife, Myth, snagged on another invisible
point in the air. The knife slid through buttered reality and revealed a world
of lush, green grass, a field surrounded by gently sloping mountains. The warm
scent of spring and something sweet drifted through the portal.

Annie looked impressed. “Is that
anywhere you recognize?”

“No, that’s not Ascension City, I’m
afraid.”

“Try again?”

I held the portal open with my mind,
somehow, and avoided thoughts of closing the tear. “It’s better than here,” I
said. “Away from whatever-that-kid-really-is waiting for us if we head back.”

Annie’s eyes widened. “Oh, Charlie!
We can’t leave him. He’s just a—”

“The runes set out in front of this
temple, in that circle of gold, were some pretty potent wards and enchantments.
I could only follow a smattering of them, but what I saw was enough to turn
demons to smoke and even deter Voidlings. So do you really want to deal with
something that only gets a headache when he strolls too close?”

Annie looked back toward the temple
walls. “He’s just a boy.”

“No, he’s not. I’m asking you to
trust me on this.”

Annie bit her lip but, after a long
moment, nodded sharply. “Okay...”

“Thank you.”

With little fanfare, we stepped one
at a time out of this world and into another.

Soft grass soaked with dew and a blue,
cloudless sky greeted us on the other side. I stared back through the portal at
the top of the pyramid and the brass plate on the pedestal. With a thought I
wished it closed, and the portal vanished. We’d escaped whatever that place
truly was and now stood on a world that felt solid and
real
.

“Back on track, Jack,” I muttered.

“Oh, I think I can tell the
difference,” Annie said. “This place feels...”

“Stronger? Solid? Better than a
dream?”

Annie nodded and brushed the grass
with her fingertips. “That last place kind of felt like falling, didn’t it? As
if the whole place could just vanish at any moment. Now we’ve got the ground
back under our feet.”

“Nicely put.”

I admired our new surroundings. To
the east, distant peaks stabbed at the sky, and to the west, the field dropped
away toward a sparse forest of pine trees. A herd of some sort of fuzzy deer
creatures grazed around the trees. The north vista held a whole bunch of
nothing except what looked like a manmade wall that ran over hills and dipped
behind a ridge. To the south, I saw something even more encouraging—fields of
cultivated crops. The wind blew over the crops, carrying that scent of
something sweet.

With no better place for it, I
slipped Myth under my sword belt and let the blade rest flat against the leg of
my pants. I’d have to be careful until I could find a sheath for the ancient
knife. Given its power and what it could do, I’d be mad to let it out of my
sight. Someone—or something—a long time ago had known I’d have need of it,
which opened a whole barrel of questions I couldn’t answer.

Old powers that stank of prophecy
swirled around my head. I’d never been a firm believer in fate or destiny. Most
soldiers weren’t—not when any moment on the battlefield could be your last. I’d
seen enough men and women cut down long before their time to affirm my belief
in the guiding hand of absurd chaos over that of fate or fickle providence.
Still... that inscription had been tailored for me, and weapons of celestial
illusion were millennia old, which had to put the inscription around the same
age, didn’t it?

“Where do we go from here, Declan?”

I emerged from the incomplete jigsaw
puzzle rattling around in my head and tapped my chin thoughtfully. “We could
keep trying the knife, but let’s have a look around first. Until we know more
about how Myth works, we’re just searching for a needle in a universe of
haystacks. This is definitely Forget, so we might be connected to a world that
has access to Ascension City or even the Atlas Lexicon—although I don’t know if
we should try that again anytime soon.”

“How can you tell this is Forget? It
looks like Europe to me.”

I gestured vaguely at the crops a
quarter mile away. “Unless I miss my guess, that’s a field of honeyberries.
They don’t grow on Earth.”

“I don’t see a farmhouse or
anything...”

“No, me neither.” I shrugged and ran
a hand back through my hair. “Still, might be something on the other side of
those hills. Fancy another walk?”

“Lead the way.”

We set off across the grassy field
toward the crop. The sun was caressing the western horizon, and if this were
True Earth I’d put the time at somewhere around three or four o’clock in the
afternoon, but who knew how long the days were here? Wherever here was. As we
drew closer to the crop, I saw that the snares of tangled plants were bursting
with honeyberries. An irrigation system, plastic pipes, hung suspended above
the plants drizzling a mist of water droplets. Another good sign. I plucked a
few berries and offered them to Annie. While not a scratch on those impossibly
large mangoes, they were soft and tasty—like grapes with a caramel center.

“I’m kind of struggling with the
fact of all this,” Annie said, as we strolled along the perimeter of the
honeyberry crop, toward the base of a large hill dotted with pine trees. “Just
a day ago I thought Western Australia was
big,
and now we’re leaping
across whole worlds with a mythical dagger. Feels as if we’re in a storybook
ourselves, you know?”

“A lot to get your head round, isn’t
it? I grew up with all of this, Annie. Well, not
all
of it. But the
whole ‘other worlds’ thing and traveling between them, and it still makes me
stop and think sometimes. I think you were right, back at the Lexicon, when you
said it seems too easy. Sometimes, more so in the last few years, I’ve thought
we’d all be better off if the ways between the worlds were closed. I mean,
there are enough problems on True Earth to solve without a multiverse of
abominations piled on top.”

“I’m a little afraid—if I’m being
honest,” she said, wringing her hands. “Afraid that I’m not cut out for this.
Last night, Emissary could have snapped my neck as easily as blinking. I mean,
how do you fight that?”

“If all else fails, you go down
swinging, but you’ll be fine.”

“How do you know that?”

I gently squeezed her elbow, under
her leather jacket, and a smile tugged at my lips. “You were trained by Sam
Grey, and although I didn’t know him that well—or at all, really—I’ve known his
type. I watched him calmly and competently pump six solid shots into Emissary’s
chest. Moreover, you put down that shooter at the university. For our business,
Annie, you’re cut from the right cloth.”

Not always a good thing,
I thought but kept it to myself.

“Going to be tough getting back to a
normal life after all this,” she said. “Any tips—”

As we rounded the bend in the crop,
something large and solid tackled me hard and slammed me into the ground. The
air burst from my lungs in one big rush, but my training, however rusty, kicked
in, and despite the size of the man who had tackled me, I squeezed a pressure
point in his neck and used his weight to roll him off me.