Distant Star (6 page)

 
I would have responded with one helluva scathing reply, but
at that moment the entire shop started shaking. Stacks of books tumbled onto
the floor, and a quiet, subtle vibration ached through the wooden shelves.
Together, Roper and I glanced up at the ceiling and the second floor.

“Is that what I think it is,
Hale?”

I sighed and went back to tapping
away at the typewriter. The words came easy, one after the other. Another shock
rattled the glass in the windowpanes.

“Declan.”

There was something fundamentally
pleasing about using a typewriter, though finding ribbon for the darn thing was
becoming difficult and expensive, too, but money wasn’t an issue. Curls of dust
settled on the table, shaken from the books and the tops of the cases. A low
groan, almost below hearing, echoed from upstairs.

“Declan.”

“I know, Rope.” I removed my
glasses and polished the lenses on my waistcoat. “I like to keep it waiting.”

“Spitting in the eye of Oblivion,
huh?”

“It’s been five years since
Atlantis and the Degradation. If he could do anything but piss and moan from
the other side of the mirror he would have.”

“How sure are you about that?”

“As sixpence.”

Roper nodded, saluted me quickly,
and disappeared. A snap of air filled the space he’d occupied. I ran my fingers
along the dull keys of the typewriter and stood.

Upstairs, I paused before the
bathroom door, my hand on the brass handle. Was the sound just in my head, or
could I hear laughter behind the door? Blood on the air, and that wasn’t my
imagination. I could taste the degraded Will on my tongue.

I let myself into the spare
bathroom, a space I never used, and beheld the terrible mirror on the far wall,
the Black Mirror, forged in a rusted cast-iron frame in the mountains just
outside of Ascension City. The glass was tomb-dark and networks of deep cracks
ran along the wall behind the mirror. The paint had peeled from the plaster and
had gathered in small piles along the floorboards.

The mirror hung on nothing but
air and only appeared to hang on the wall.

I had sold my shadow for this
mirror, a lifetime ago.

I couldn’t decide if I was brave
or just stupid. I stepped across the room and gazed into the abyss. The glass
rippled as if I’d cast a pebble on still waters. My reflection came into awful
focus.

I raised my hand and so did the
reflection. I looked pale, drawn. My brown hair hung in the cold sweat across
my forehead, above dull blue eyes marred with black rings. I laughed.

My reflection didn’t.

A dark, fetid oil spilled across
the cracks in the wall. The substance was not-light, part of the ascending oils
at the heart of the universe, the Will of the World, some might say. The oil
ran along the cracks and bled down the wall. My reflection smiled and offered
me a sly wink.

“Would you keep it down, please.
I’m trying to write downstairs.”

That wiped the smile from my
face. My not-face made of not-light.

A hand came down on my shoulder
and I turned to see all six and a half feet of the English detective staring
down at me, chewing on his worn pipe. He regarded the mirror and the bleeding
walls with a frown, a hint of disapproval creasing his face.

“Best you fix this, Hale,” he
said. “Best you fix this soon.”

“I’d throw the darn thing into
the fires of Mount Doom if I thought it would do any good, mate.”

The old detective tilted his head
as my dark reflection turned and walked away, back beneath the shadows of the
Void, into the everlasting, forgotten sadness. A prime directive of chaos
existed down there, of that I was sure.

“I fear your Will has weakened,
my friend. I fear you are not what you once were.” He shook his head and
squeezed my shoulder. “Dark roads ahead, yes?”

“It seems likely.”

Spirals of smoke drifted up
toward the ceiling. “Then take this, Arbiter. You will have need of it.”

He handed me his ear-flapped
travelling cap, a tartan deerstalker.

“Excellent,” I said.

“Elementary,” said he.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Atlantis in
the Sand

“So, latest news. I’m pregnant.”

I dropped my red pen and took a
quick step back. “Oh, oh wow.”

“You don’t have to stand aside.
I’m not going to shatter, Declan.”

Shatter…
whispered Jon Faraday. The shop
seemed to darken as the light was absorbed by some unseen chaos before it could
breach the windows. I tried to keep my eyes from darting in rabid panic into
the lengthened shadows and unknown corners of the shop—or worse, to the
Black Mirror upstairs. I had a hunch it could sense my gaze.

“Declan, you’re as pale as a
ghost. Does the thought of a pregnant woman frighten you that much?”

The shop wasn’t safe, had
never
been safe. “Emily… let’s go down
the road for a drink.”

“You mean leave the shop? In two
years I’ve never seen you set foot—”

Something fell a few stacks away,
in the darkness, and hit the floor with a solid
thump
—a heavy hardback, unless I missed my guess. The
characters in the Infernal Works only ever appeared to me, but did that make
them any less real, here in the real world? I didn’t know, and that scared me.

“—and in my delicate
condition I can’t be drinking alcohol.”

“No?” I took Emily’s hand and led
her outside as fast as I dared, slamming the door behind us and rattling the
square glass panes.

“Aren’t you going to lock up?”

I could feel literary nightmares
emerging from their worded prisons. The smell of dust and mildew. Two wars and
five years of bad karma seemed to be catching up to me all at once.

“No,” I
said.

“But someone could rob you.”

“If they can haul a quarter
million books away before I get back they deserve to have them.”

Emily’s sandals clapped against
the cobblestones as we walked down the road. A warm breeze wafted the taste and
scent of fried hotdogs and kebabs from Christo’s across the plaza. A weight
lifted from my shoulders as the smell of old books dissipated.

“So,” I said, letting out a long,
slow breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “Who’s the baby’s daddy?”

Emily blushed. “I’m not…
precisely sure.”

“Oh? You sultry vixen, you.”

“Well, it may have been Raphael
in Provence, or possibly Damien in London.”

“Wasn’t there a chap in
Singapore? Tall-with-great-hair guy?”

“Harry? I’ve not seen Harry in
five or six months.”

“Poor Harry.”

Emily swatted my arm. We walked
with our arms linked down Sugar Lane. The cobblestones were wet and glistening
in the sun. I felt my books getting further and further away, and the distance
was a knife to my heart.

“What a lovely day. I can’t
believe you’re outside in sunlight, Declan.”

“Have I tarnished my reclusive
persona?”

“Quite tarnished, yes.”

I snapped my fingers. “Blast.” We
fell into a companionable silence as we rounded the bend in the lane toward
Paddy’s. If I remembered correctly, the special on a Wednesday was the scotch
fillet. “I should have guessed you were pregnant, Emily.”

She raised a perfect auburn
eyebrow. “Is that so? I’ve put on a little weight, sure, but not that much…”

“Heh. No. No. I didn’t mean
that.” I gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. Emily was soft and warm and tasted
like peaches. “Sweetheart, you’re glowing.”

She seemed quite satisfied with
that. The day was nice. Sometimes, it was hard to remember the world outside
the shop which was always there and very real, sure, but a thousand more just
like this one were within arm’s reach of my writing alcove. Still, perhaps I
didn’t want a scotch and steak.

“Let’s walk down to the beach,”
Emily said, almost reading my mind.

I nodded.

The coast road was a five-minute
walk down the street. Emily and I chatted about nothing, I felt nearly
blissful. She was the only friend I had in the world that didn’t belong, in
some way, to Forget. She had no Will, no sordid past. I loved Emily for that.
We crossed the road and headed into the dunes, along the winding sandy path
that cut to the shoreline. The sound of waves crashing and the taste of salt on
the air refreshed me, especially after a morning spent in the dark, dank smoky
shop.

“You keep stroking your stomach,”
I said. “How far along are you?”

“Not long. Eight weeks, maybe.”

“What do you think? Boy or girl?”

“Boy.” Emily gave me a look of
the utmost seriousness. “Most definitely a boy.”

“So sure?”

“Women in my family always know,
Declan.”

I guess if I could dive in and
out of fantasy worlds, and use my Will to violate the known laws of physics,
then I could believe her certainty.

We kept to the hard sand just on
the edge of the tide-line, a meter or so away from the swash. Emily’s bright
red toenails were encased in a pair of woven sandals which were more suited to
walking in the sand than my black leather shoes. I undid the buttons on my
waistcoat. The day was warm.

“Are you going to take some time
off work?” I asked.

“Not for a few months, at the
very least. We’ve got an important acquisition coming up soon. Lives on the
line and all that nonsense.”

“So you could be around more
often after that? No more jet-setting off to exotic locations to meet with
foreign gentlemen?”

Emily grinned. Her teeth were
very white in the sun. “Declan, do you miss me when I’m gone?”

“Nope.”

“You are a terrible liar.”

A woman walking a golden Labrador
offered a greeting as we rounded a curve following the surf. The day had taken
a turn toward pleasant, and I didn’t want to go back just yet. Lucky for me,
the coastline ran for a good twenty-five thousand more kilometers before we’d
be back to the start.

“You seem happier than usual,
Declan.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. One would think you may
have had good news while I was away in Hong Kong.”

Good news? Not so much, really. I
was still no closer to figuring out how and when I was going to die, or what
the Renegades and Faraday were up to. No one knew about the Mirror, save my
merry band of illusions and Tal. None of them were going to be spilling secrets
any time soon. The appearance of Clare was good news. Clare was
great
news.

“I saw an old friend. Someone I
haven’t seen in about five years.”

“An old girlfriend?”

“Can you read my mind or
something?”

Emily laughed. “Sweetheart,
you’re glowing.”

A pod of dolphins breached the
surface of the dark blue waters a quarter-mile offshore. Hand-in-hand, Emily
and I watched them for a few minutes. I savored the silence.

“Look at this,” Emily said.
“There’s a book half-buried in the sand. One of yours that got away?”

I knelt on my haunches and
brushed some wet sand off a soggy and faded paperback. I pulled it out of the
surf and turned it over in my hands, as if I’d uncovered some long lost buried
treasure. In a way, I had. A poisoned chalice.

“
Tales of Atlantis
,” Emily read over my shoulder.

It was on the list of books Thou
Shalt Not Dive.

Hell, the book was the reason the
list existed in the first place. The Knights did not make a habit of burning
books. It was sacrilege—a heresy. But this book was one of the few
exceptions that proved the rule, especially since the damage done because of
the Degradation. What was it doing here? Right in my path? I looked up and out
at the ocean, back around and along the beach up to the sand dunes. Was I being
followed?

“Time to head back, I think.”

“So soon?” Emily pouted. “I was
enjoying seeing you in natural light.”

“Would you have dinner with me
tonight, Em?”

Her smile didn’t ease the worry I
felt about happening across a copy of
Tales
of Atlantis
, but it didn’t hurt either. “So long as you take me somewhere
nice.”

I tossed the book from one hand
to the other and felt as though I were touching a live snake coated in pond
scum—dangerous and altogether unpleasant. Only twice in my life before
today had I ever held this book. The pages were soaked in enough blood to dye
the Indian Ocean crimson.

“You, me and the scotch fillet
special at Paddy’s make three.”

Emily rolled her eyes. “Declan
Hale, heartbreaker.”

CHAPTER EIGHT