Distant Star (5 page)

I ran my fingers along the ropy
scar tissue that stretched across her neck, from ear to ear. A madman had cut
her throat, once upon a time, and she had died, ever so briefly. I leaned in
close and kissed her cheek.

The book fell from her hands as
she wrapped her shaking but strong arms around me. Her skin was soft, sweet,
just as I remembered. Clare gasped, and the gulf of five long years between us
may as well have been five minutes.

Her tears were salty and warm and
she tasted like cinnamon and lavender, though our lips never met. To kiss
properly was to make it real, and we’d never broken that rule and wouldn’t
break it now.

At least, I thought not. Clare
gently brushed her lips against mine—a kiss, but only just, that changed
everything. Oh dear, blood in the water.

I led her, and a bottle of merlot,
upstairs.

CHAPTER FIVE

Jolly Folly

Clare dressed in a dusty shaft of
sunlight. She took her time, too, rolled up her stockings slowly, one tiny foot
poised on a stack of nineteenth century classics.

I admired the view from my bed.
Late afternoon was bleeding toward dusk through the skylight. I had not felt
this relaxed in years. Clare had always been good for my soul, ever since we
were kids at the Infernal Academy in Ascension City. Two major war campaigns
and twelve years stood between then and now.

Clare tossed me my pants, shirt
and waistcoat. I shrugged into them with reluctance, not wanting our time
together to come to a close. Maybe she’d stay awhile, if I asked. I joined her
on the edge of the bed and slipped an arm around her petite waist. She had a
familiar memory opened to chapter six.

“
Auron’s Folly
,” I said. A story about an evil queen and a prophecy
that claimed her first child would both save and destroy the world. Some said
it was a true story, as so many were, about the Renegades. “Still your
favorite?”

Clare caressed the pages. “First
time I’ve opened it in six years. Want to head inside?”

“Heh. There are two things I’ve
not been inside of since my exile.” I squeezed her close. “Well, one thing
now.”

“Oh, leave off.”

“It’s true. A condition of my
expulsion was that Good King Faraday forbade me to dive in and out of stories.
If I was caught, he swore he’d have me executed. You know that.”

“Lord Oblivion itself couldn’t
keep you out of a good book. I don’t believe for a minute you haven’t been
diving.” She snuggled up against me. “I won’t tell him if you won’t.”

“Ah, but what if this is an
elaborate ruse, sweet Clare, to seduce me, lower my guard, and have my head
chopped off and mounted above Faraday’s gilded throne.”

“You know me better than that.”

“Do I? Then where have you been
these past years? Jumping through hoops for the Knights? You should see them
from my rather unique perspective.” I shook my head. “Hard to tell where the
Knights end and the Renegades begin, if viewed from outside the struggle.
Especially given this tepid peace.”

A flash of anger forced Clare’s
right eye from blue to crimson and back again. Only one fool could ever hope to
provoke this woman and live. “You’ve changed,” she said. “You’ve changed so
much. Treason and blasphemy roll off your tongue like words onto the page.
Broken quill! Declan, you were better than this.”

And the truth of that was buried
in fiction, wasn’t it? Caught between one word and the next across the blasted
wastelands of time. “I do miss the Drifting City, I suppose.”

Clare placed her hand over mine
on the pages of
Auron’s Folly
. I felt
her Will pressed against the book. According to the clock on the wall, it was
seventeen minutes past five. The words upon the yellowed pages began to
shimmer. The pressure in my ears was almost painful, and I again had that old
taste of copper, like blood on the tongue or a mouthful of coins, as the dusty
sunlight faded to black.

I added a drop of my own Will to
Clare’s invocation, and we slipped from one world into another, skimming along
the dark impassable Void.

The sensation was always like
walking into a cool mist on an autumn morning. I felt a rush of air as we
crossed the boundary of nothing on the edge of everything. Then I caught a
scent, like rain touching a hot road, as in my gut I had the sense of falling,
falling so far and so fast that—

Clare slipped her hand into mine,
and we stood upon a tall cliff face, looking down a vertical drop of over a
mile at a vast ocean. Icebergs made of pure diamonds groaned along the surface.
The stars overhead were alien, the constellations dimmed by the light of the
twin moons rising to the east.

I took a breath of air so fresh
and clear that I felt dizzy, or maybe that was from the height. Despite what
the pretty woman at my side thought, I had not spent a single minute inside a
book since my exile, and it was good to be back. Better than good, the feeling
was like coming home. The countless realms of Forget were often more real than
reality.

“This was always my favorite
chapter,” Clare said. “When the cities rise up between—”

“Oh, shush. It may not even come.
Let’s just watch.”

We sat down together on the edge
of the precipice and watched the moons swim across the sky. Minutes became
hours, as the diamond icebergs bobbed along the dark water. After a time,
lights appeared below the surface of the water—thousands of them. The
night, the distant stars, were drowning.

Clare shivered and nestled in
close. The air was silent at first, but then the grinding of gears and the
tick-tick-tick of ancient machinery echoed up the cliff face. An entire city, a
living, breathing metropolis, broke the surface of the ocean, ascending from
the depths far below.

Miles across in diameter, the
fabled Drifting City rose and fell on undulating waves, forcing large chunks of
glowing iceberg diamond apart. Vast conduits and pillars sought hold on the
base of the cliff. The shock vibrated up the mountain and Clare and I rolled
away from the edge, lest we fall.

The city may have been in a story
from our world, the True Earth, but here, we were still bound by the rules.
Death here was still death. Many a Forgetful traveler had perished, mistaking
reality for fantasy.

The living city sang as its
struts dug deep into the mountain, seeking precious metals and rare natural
resources for its growth. The mighty skyscrapers gleamed in the starlight.
People rode the biomechanical beast, hundreds of thousands of them. The city
was a wonder, an impossible, perfect wonder.

“I could watch that for days,”
Clare whispered. Both her eyes were the same color now, a brilliant burnished
yellow. “I’m glad you came with me, Declan. This moment would never have been
the same without you.”

“Time to go, Clare.”

Clare sighed yet nodded. Going
back was easier than moving forward, so long as we remained tethered to the
book back in my bedroom. We were tied to our real world, to the True Earth we
knew best. If inter-dimensional travel could be described as
easy
, then it was simply imposing our
Will against the magnificent creation around us. Letting go and falling back.
The lights of the feeding city far below faded away.

I glanced at the clock on the
wall in my bedroom. Coming up to nine o’clock back here in the real world.
Hours had gone by as the city had drifted across the sea, shoving aside
icebergs made of glittering diamond. Time flowed swift and true in both worlds,
which meant I still had no explanation for watching myself die. If the
Degradation had progressed far enough… but no, time was still wounding all
heels.

Speaking of time. “I’m going to
die, Clare. Soon.”

“You sound so certain.” She bit
her lip. “There’s something else I wanted to tell you, about a rumor circling
Ascension City that Morpheus Renegade broke Aloysius Jade out of Starhold.”

“Good for that homicidal
son-of-a-bitch.”

“Faraday couldn’t prove it, but
rumor is Jade was unchained in order to hunt you down and drag you back to
Renegade’s court.”

Oh.

Shit.

All at once my impending death
seemed far more… impending.

With the exception of myself,
Jade had perhaps the highest body count in all Forget. He was a cruel bastard,
too, but us war heroes often were. Jade had been my teacher, once upon a time,
at the Infernal Academy.

“Heh. Five years of nothing and
then this all comes to a head in just a few days. Isn’t that always the way?”
Fair but unfair. I shouldn’t have survived the Tome Wars. “Silly to think I’d
be left alone after the damage I caused. Silly to think I deserved to be left
alone.”

“You’re frightening me now,
Declan.”

I nodded. “Aye, me too. Clare, we
manipulate time when we dive into a book. Sometimes hours out here don’t match
hours in Forget.”

“Yes.”

“Have you ever heard of anyone
diving into a book and emerging
earlier
than when they left? You know, technically travelling back in time.”

“No. No I haven’t. Surely that’s
not possible. It doesn’t work like that.”

“Apparently I did it—will
do it.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

Ah, well. “Lessons to be learned,
sweet thing. Hey, did you hear I could’ve been a king?”

Clare shook her head. “I’ve got
to be going. But I’ll be back soon, I promise.”

We lay in silence on my bed,
wrapped in each other’s arms for long, real minutes. “Take cake, okay?”

That was an old joke.

“Don’t you mean take care?” she
asked.

“That too.”

“You just mind your books, Declan
Hale. Mind them well.”

CHAPTER SIX

Ships in
the Night

So, the High Lord and King of the
Knights Infernal, Jon Faraday, was up to something, of that I could be sure. No
other reason to send Clare back to me. Besides pouring salt on an open wound,
but even he wasn’t that vindictive. No, there was more to the game that I
failed to see.

I could consider his sending her
as an act of kindness, if I didn’t know the son-of-a-bitch so well. I had to
add the Renegade attack and my untimely, still unexplained, future death to the
equation… The game was afoot, but I was several steps behind the leader, which
was unacceptable. Perhaps if I just avoided wearing my favorite grey waistcoat
I could fight the future and live to see my twenty-fifth birthday.

“You have that air about you,
Declan,” Roper said. He scratched at the fierce scar that cut down his face and
into the corner of his mouth. For a madman’s illusion, he was remarkably well
detailed. “You’ve met a woman.”

“It was Clare, Rope. Clare came
to see me.”

Roper’s grin disappeared. He was
sitting only half visible, almost transparent, on my leather cushions in the
dull light. “Ah, well. She was always a fiery one.”

“You don’t approve?”

I kept a steady beat on my
typewriter, churning out fresh pages for the manuscript. One school of thought
suggested getting it all done and dusted before editing, but there was no rhyme
to that reason. None that I could see, anyway. Three or four thousand words a
day was plenty.

“I just remember the last time
you two were together,” Roper said. “Entire worlds went spinning into the
abyss. Lord Oblivion ate well that day.”

“Sold my shadow to that guy, once
upon a time.” Atlantis was a wonderful nightmare. “You’re thinking of Tal, who
came after Clare, but thanks for bringing it up, either way.”

“It is not something you should
have forgotten, my friend.”

My fingers slipped on the keys,
turning
desert
into
desertyu
. “Do I look like I have
forgotten the
Reach
for one minute?”
My voice was closed, careful. I needed a tight rein on wild rage.
“Bow-chicka-bow-wow, Rope. You’re face to face with the man who sold the world.
You
best not forget that.”

Roper scoffed. “Commander of the
Forgetful Word. The Exiled King. The Never-Was Emperor… Shadowless Arbiter. The
Renegades and Knights have given you so many names—and none of them even
come close, do they? No, no.” Roper stood up to leave, as much as an impossible
construct of Forget-gone-mad, of Degradation, could leave. “Declan Hale, the
man who ran. Hero turned fool. Conqueror turned coward.”

I steepled my fingers beneath my
chin. “Better a coward than a killer, good buddy.”

“Aye, tell that to all who will
die because of your inaction.”

“I did act, Hartley. I acted when
no one else would, or
dared
. You want
a taste of the old times? My old self? Eight million people lived in the Reach.
They do not live there now… is that what you want?”

Roper tilted his head and
appraised me in the dusty candlelight. “Huh,” he said. “You’ve been using your
gift, haven’t you? What else could stoke the fires of your heart into such raw
anger? Perhaps Clare is good for you, after all is said and done.”