Distant Star (10 page)

Easier to hold water in a sieve
than secure doorways that spanned not only universes but time. I kept one such
doorway upstairs in my bathroom, and although I intended to make myself known
to the Knights and King Faraday, the only hope I had of keeping my head would
be to return under cloak-and-dagger and ensure past secrets had remained buried
these long, short years.

See a man about a sword. See an
old friend, perhaps one last time.

Fate seemed to demand that I died
in the not-too-distant future, amidst the shards of spilt scotch and unfinished
story. Mayhap I was walking that street, and walking it blind, but I’d always
been one to act. To sit idly by, to let the Knights and the Voidlings and the
Renegades come a knockin’ without challenge… Tal would think me such a coward.

So, leaving Clare to clean up the
mess downstairs and leaving Ethan to search for Sophie, or perhaps what was
left of Sophie, I headed up the spiral staircase, knocking over a stack of
heavy Tolstoys in my hurry, slipped under the caution tape, and into my twisted
bathroom.

The tomb-dark Black Mirror hung
in the air, ugly and ominous. Voidish not-light flowed along the cracks in the
wall behind the mirror—flowed
from
the mirror.

Worried about your little world falling apart?
whispered a nagging voice in the back of my mind. I stepped in
front of the mirror and confronted my lost, my abandoned, my oh-so-broken
shadow.

The pale reflection’s grin
revealed two rows of jagged yellow teeth. His time through the looking glass
had not been kind. He offered me his hand. Surely he must know full well that
the clock, which had started ticking years ago, had finally counted down to
zero. A buzz of static tension crackled through the air.

I sighed and plunged my arm, up
to the elbow, in the inky glass. My limb slipped through the mirror, and
needles of freezing ice lit every nerve under my skin on fire. My reflection
seemed stunned for only the briefest of moments. Perhaps stunned that I had
actually done it. Then his grin turned feral and nasty, and he grasped my arm
with his own, digging his filthy fingernails into my flesh.

He pulled me from my feet and out
of reality—into the Void.

Even with a mind trained and
forged into steel at the Infernal Academy, my crossing into the space between
universes wholly, and for any period of time, was to invite madness. Lucky for
me, I’d done this before. If I played the game, kept my sanity, I would emerge
from the Void within reach of Ascension City, given where the Black Mirror had
been cast just before my exile.

The old rundown bathroom
disappeared. Pitch-blackness wrapped itself around the inverted space. I stood
in something thick and viscous—oil, of the kind that had spawned the
Voidling in the courtyard back in Perth.

“Nothing for it,” I whispered.
The words echoed out over the vast, endless space. For all that mattered, I was
gazing at infinity, in every dark direction. Of my feral shadow, the surly
reflection in the Black Mirror, there was no sign.

I trudged through the knee-high
oil. The going was slow and tiresome as if I was wading in treacle. I soon
panted from the exertion and wondered vaguely what substance I was breathing.
It sure as shit wasn’t air, not in this place.

Best to think of it as a corridor
,
Aloysius Jade whispered from the past. Before being sentenced to life in
Starhold for genocide, Jade had been one of the chief instructors at the
Academy. He was perhaps Forget’s foremost expert on navigating the Void cold.
A hallway from A to B. Just concentrate on
where you’re heading and the link will pull you through
.

Well, my link was five years
old—and tenuous at best. But the mirror was all I had, despite the danger
in the Void. A prickling sensation on the back of the neck told me I was being
watched. Or paranoid. Was my elusive shadow, forfeited in Atlantis to an old
god and made sentient, out for revenge?

I could still feel its
corpse-like fingers on my forearm which made me think of bones, of laughing
skulls rattling in dank, dirty seawater, coated in slimy seaweed, the water
hued pale green under a starless night sky.

“Damn, should’ve brought a bottle
of something triple distilled…”

The Void was a place of mindless
and violent chaos, overseen by a ruling class of viciously intelligent beings.
And at least one god
. Atlantis had
taught me that the hard way on the eve of the Degradation. I probably wasn’t
just being paranoid, thinking the atmosphere around me too quiet. Something
should have at least tried to eat my face by now.

The feeling of being watched
hadn’t gone away. If anything, I could feel dozens of unseen eyes in the
darkness, staring at me, but only staring, watching. Keeping me on course? Was
I being given safe passage? That was an odd thought—mad, even. Perhaps
the Void had stripped my mind, and I’d been wandering for days. Saner to think
I’d been robbed of my sanity than to think the creatures living here wanted me
to reach Forget unchallenged.

Something wasn’t right, of that I
was sure. Add to the equation, the unseen puzzle: the Voidling outside my shop,
Clare and her Knights coming to arrest me, my untimely death, the Pagemaster’s
attack… Well, I didn’t know what everything added up to, but I was being driven
back to Ascension City, like a pig to slaughter.

Some uncertain amount of time
passed as I waded, lost in thought, through the dark oil. Minutes that could
have been hours, that could have been days. I felt I was making no progress at
all, perhaps only going in circles.

A heartbeat later I walked, face
-
first, into a wall.

“Ow.” A trickle of blood ran from
my nose and sizzled as it hit the Void oil, which burned away the life in the
red drops. I reached out blindly and ran my hands across the object in my path.
After a minute, I realized it was just the outer shell of all creation.
On the outside lookin’ in.

I’d arrived at my destination.
Wastelands treatin’ me good
. I placed a
hand flat against the wall, which was wet, but not with oil, and muttered a
quick invocation of Will. Silver light blazed between my fingers, and for one
awful, harrowing moment I lit up the Void.

There were
hundreds—thousands—of monstrous creatures surrounding me. The silence
was shattered as they screeched against the pure, raw power flowing from my
hand, power that was the antithesis of all that they were. Power that could
feed
them. The wall cracked, and reality
flooded through the tear—literally.

A torrent of freezing water
slammed into me and knocked me back. My Will, a lifeline in the darkness, shot
through the gushing flood and pulled me forward.

I was squeezed and pushed body,
mind, and soul, through the crack in the wall. Pressed from all sides, I could
neither see nor draw breath. The invisible world began to spin, and I tumbled
down, down, down until dizzy nausea replaced the squeezing—overpowered
it—and I broke through something webbed, like passing through a mesh
screen, or breaking out of a barbed net.

It felt like leaving the Void.

I was deep underwater when all my
senses kicked back into action. I hadn’t planned on emerging somewhere without
air. The light was dull,
but there was
light
, shimmering away to my left. A soundless scream emerged from my mouth
in a rush of bubbles which surged toward the light—toward the surface!

Disoriented, I righted myself and
began to claw my way up to breach the surface. My chest felt like a balloon
about to burst. A distant, dreary thought of drowning found prominence in my mind.
Still, survival was in the cards. I thrust my arms up and down in wild strokes,
kicking with the last of my strength.
Just
a few more strokes…

My vision faded, and pretty damn
soon I was going to have to draw breath, underwater or not. In some vague,
unimportant corner of my head I realized that the water all about me was fresh.
A split second before I sucked down a mouthful of otherworldly water, I
breached the surface, gasping, and reared up out of the deep pool in a spray of
droplets. I gulped the fresh, clear air of Forget.

I fell back down, utterly
spent—but alive.

Narrow beams of sunlight cut
through a thick forest canopy, overhead. I soaked up the warmth as I floated on
my back in the pool. Washing the stink of the Void from my mind and soul would
take a long time, more time than I probably had left.

I laughed. There was no mistaking
the large, twisted trees or the scent of Will on the air. “I’m back…” On my own
head be it, exile or not, I was
home
.
And what next? Well, in Ascension City they say, my small heart grew three
sizes that day.

A waterfall splashed down slick
stones above my head, and a green cliff face stretched up above the roof of the
forest beyond that. I turned in the water, looking for a way onto dry land.

Across the way, a young girl with
a friendly face waved at me from the shoreline. She sat on the water’s edge,
dangling her thin, pale legs in the pool.

“Good afternoon, Declan Hale,” the
Historian of Future Prospect said. “You’re late, you’re late, for a very
important date.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Ascension
City

“You knew I’d be coming through
here?” That was a stupid question to ask someone who saw every possible future,
burning through her mind in lines of verse, but the Historian still offered me
a kind smile. “No, of course you did. I’m sorry. Call me a little out of
practice dealing with the wonders of Forget.”

She pulled her feet out of the
water and stood up. The sunlight filtering through the canopy overhead
glittered in her silver hair which sparkled like diamonds. Atop her head, she
wore a net of spun gold. “I wanted to see you for myself. The man who sold the
world.”

I swam to the shore. “We’ve met
before. Once. You were just a wee little thing. Four feet and change.”

“Yes, I remember.” The Historian
pressed her fingers against her forehead, as if the memory pained her. “A long
time ago. Before you became… shadowless.”

I pulled myself up out of the
pool and sat down on a mossy boulder next to the girl, but not too close. She
was one of the most important, and most protected, people in all of Forget. I
had an inkling there were concealed bodyguards all around, waiting for me to
make an unwise move. Her shadow stretched out from our shared boulder, along
the shores of the pool. Mine did not.

“All things being even, not so
long ago, really.”

The Historian placed a hand on my
knee, and I tensed. Slivers of light danced between her fingers. Hot air rushed
up beneath my waistcoat and down my trousers. She dried my clothes and left me
feeling all warm and fuzzy. Perhaps there weren’t any bodyguards, after all. In
that brief moment, I’d sensed a Will as vast and as strong as… as… Wow, I had
no words for it.

She was power incarnate.

“You do not seem surprised to see
me, Declan Hale.”

“To be honest, kid, very little
surprises me. I died this week, you know.”

“Yes, I know. I
Saw
.” She frowned. “Or rather, I saw the
events
around
you. As you are
now—without shadow—my Sight glances over you.”

I paused. “Am I still on that
path?”

“Aren’t we all?” She raised a
single eyebrow and chuckled. “But yes, I know what you mean. You have about
four days before you die.”

“Anything I can do to avoid
that?”

Her gaze was soft, always kind,
but I sensed a piercing disappointment directed my way, nonetheless. “That’s a
nice waistcoat, Declan, but you must see that it’s not about redemption
anymore. You long ago forfeited any right to that.”

I shrugged. “Suppose I did.”

“Only Tal Levy can forgive you
your past, at least when it comes to the cost of the Degradation. The
true
cost. The one you keep hidden. The
rest is up to you.”

“Tal’s dead. Ash in the wind,
Miss Prospect. You can see the future, all that will ever be, but you forget
what’s already been.”

“I see you embracing her before
your death. Now, then, and soon is all relative.”

“Is this what you came to tell
me? Why you had to see me for yourself?”

“No.” She stood up on her bare
feet, straightening her purple skirts. The Historian was a cute little
thing—with the accumulated strength of ages-to-come coursing through her
mind. “I am here to tell you to be brave. That you are going to have to be
brave.”

“Is that a riddle, or some such
cryptic nonsense? If there’s something I need to know, kid, then tell me
now—plainly.”

“That’s against the rules, as
much as glimpses of vast and multiple futures can have rules.”

“Are you trying to tell me I
don’t have to die?”

She shook her head. “All the
futures I see end in your death. Five days, Declan Hale. Five days to make your
peace and find your forgiveness.”