by Joe Ducie
And then I spread the words further, draining the tome and enfolding the old pillars of the temple in unbreakable Will. The entire chamber was alight with cords of shining words and the sharp coppery taste of Will on the air.
“Declan, we can kill him!” Shadowman spat, the very essence of the Void frothing from his mouth. “A chance to end his blight! We must take it!”
Shadowman was insane—as mad as I was, but without the conscience, good intentions, and five-year cooldown in exile, to keep him in check. Let loose, he would kill with little regard for the laws of the Knights Infernal. He would kidnap children, hold my friends hostage, and bombard an innocent population with cannon fire.
I offered him a grim smile. “Enough gods have died today.”
I wrenched with all my physical strength and Will on the book in my hands. The spinning cords of words tore at the pillars, at Axis’s chains, and at the very core of Shadowman.
A shudder, the aching yawn of a waking giant, trembled through the chamber, and the temple staggered, as if it were caught in a massive storm. The lashings from the book, the true power of a Knight, pressed against the Void, and I didn’t temper my strength—I let Will flood the pages and pressed harder, harder, against the fabric of reality.
Shadowman squirmed and wriggled like a cat on fire in the bonds, slicing through them as fast as I could wrap him in the words. The control visor for the Blade of Spring had melted around his head and fused to his pale skin—the pain didn’t seem to bother him. Axis merely laughed as millennia of stone and dust began to crack overhead and rain down upon the chamber.
The heat and the chains of words bursting from the book ravaged my hands. The pain flared hot and razor-sharp, and then I felt nothing but a numb sort of cold. A quick glance down at my hands revealed a bloody, shredded mess. I glimpsed white bone jutting from a few of my fingers.
Well, that’s going to sting in a minute…
The balance tipped, and a crack in reality gained purchase, spreading like a sheet of paper torn down the middle. The Void cascaded through that crack, a black wave of liquid nothing. Freezing daggers pierced my every breath as the crack widened, spread, and began to absorb the temple.
Axis roared and bucked at his chains, grinning from ear to ear. He didn’t have eyes to wink, but I felt him shoot me one anyway.
“No!” Shadowman cried, a note of crippling fear in his tone. “I won’t go back! I won’t! I won’t!”
The crack was beyond my control now. I dropped the fiery book and fled, stumbling out of the chamber as fast as I could. The pain of my hands was a distant thing, growing closer. I didn’t have long to escape—minutes, less—before the Void overwhelmed the entire temple.
Ground shattered underfoot, and tonnes of old stone fell out through the bubble of atmosphere and into the violent storms of Jupiter. I stumbled, scraped my shins and my knees, but kept on the path back to the cruiser. The mythril armor under my clothes prevented any further injury.
I just hope the cruiser’s still there, I thought, picturing the small ship falling away as easily as the ground. If that had happened, I was done. Game over.
I emerged from the inner chambers of the temple and my heart leapt into my throat—the cruiser was still where we’d parked it, just a few hundred feet away. I ran as fast as my tired legs could carry me and covered the distance as ancient pillars and walls collapsed in my wake, consumed by the Void in half a minute.
Panting and shaking, I stumbled up the ramp and into the cruiser, throwing myself into the pilot’s chair and breathing a sigh of near-wailing relief. I fired up the engines and took to the tortured sky only heartbeats before the entire temple was absorbed and overrun by the Voidflood.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
All Roads Lead Home
My fingers were broken and bleeding, mangled from the sheer effort needed to force a Voidflood. I had to fly the cruiser back to the Blade of Spring using the palms of my hands and a bit of nifty elbow work, dripping blood over the consoles and the crystal reality beacon. Shadows clung to the edge of my vision, and I was in danger of passing out.
Baby, I’ve been here before…
I docked with the Blade and sort of half-stumbled, half-fell onto the hard floor of the docks. I could barely keep my eyes open, glaring at dizzying fuzzy lights high above, and strange thoughts swam through my mind—things I hadn’t thought of in twenty years or more, when I was just a child.
“Huh…” I muttered and managed a rough chuckle. “Life flashing before my eyes…”
Ethan and Sophie found me, sweet little ’Phie, and her cooling light repaired my damaged hands. I borrowed a piece of her energy just to stay conscious, lying dirty and beaten on the clean white floors of the immense ship. For some reason, just for a dark moment, I’d never felt more alone and… small.
The moment passed, and I was the all-consuming center of creation again—fit as a fiddle.
“There now,” Sophie murmured. Sweat dripped down her brow, and strands of her auburn hair clung to her forehead. “As good as new. You had six fingers on the left hand, didn’t you?”
I blinked and looked at my hands. The effort required to focus and actually count to five was embarrassing. “That’s not funny,” I muttered. “Help me up, Ethan. Let’s get back to the bridge and out of this storm.”
Ethan half-carried me up to the bridge, but with my hands repaired I felt a bit of vitality seep back into my body. I’d more than overdone it, using a tome to summon the Void like that, but I’d seen no other option. Opening reality to the Void was ridiculously stupid and actually a crime punishable by death under the laws of the Knights Infernal. I’d been damned lucky to survive.
“I’m running on empty here,” I said once we reached the bridge. The Historian greeted us there and offered me an encouraging shoulder squeeze. “Less than fumes. So I’m going to raid the galley, eat some rations, and then find a bunk for an hour before we do anything else today.”
A resounding alarm echoed up from the console in front of Sophie, and a dozen red lights flared to life on the panel. Sophie glanced at the screen, and her face fell. “Oh, you’re going to love this.”
I used a bit of Will light to clear the blood from my hands. “What we got now?”
“It’s a distress call,” she said, as if the harsh alarm hadn’t given that away. “Look at the coordinates…” She spun the screen to face me, and I gave it a quick look, but I’d already figured out the final few moves of the game and knew where the call was coming from.
“Where is that?” Ethan asked.
“You’ve been there before,” I said wearily. “If only briefly, but you’ve been there. The Plains of Perdition. Looks like the Knights guarding the ruins of Atlantis are under attack.”
“There’s a video burst, too,” Sophie said. She tapped a few buttons, and the stream ran from the console and took over one of the wide screens on the bridge’s front window shields.
The footage was shaky, desperate, and showed squadrons of bloodied Knights engaged in battle with battalions of ragged Orc Mare. Bursts of Willfire rocketed across the Plains of Perdition, vibrant green fields, and glimpsed in the distance were the spires and ancient ruins of Atlantis. Thousands of Orc Mare swarmed up the hill toward the city—the Knights would be overrun.
A monumental spire of white fire shot across the battlefield and cut through swaths of Orc Mare and Knights alike. Familiar razor-sharp and white-hot laser beams, a good half-mile long, swung through the battling forces and slaughtered hundreds in less time than it took to draw a breath.
Sophie gasped, and Ethan cried out. The Historian crossed herself and muttered a string of rather impressive curses under her breath. Young and feisty was Amy Delacroix.
The video stream died.
I sat myself down in the command chair and rubbed at my temple. The inevitable headache was in full swing now.
“Declan, what was that?” Sophie whispered.
I held my eye closed for a long mome
nt before I could bring myself to look into hers. “That, my dear, was the Roseblade.”
*~*~*~*
With no time for respite—no time to even update Vrail, Adam, and Marcia on my successful rescue—I manually entered the coordinates for the Plains of Perdition and activated the Blade’s extraordinary reality drive. The ship shuffled forward and slipped across the Void as easily as silk on smooth skin. Without the control visor, lost with Shadowman, we wouldn’t be able to maneuver the ship to any great degree or even activate and target the cannons, but I was expected back in Atlantis, Oblivion had sent out a fiery calling card across the Plains of Perdition, and all the ship was good for now was transport.
We burst into the skies above the Plains of Perdition and found them roasting—charnel pits of Knights and whole fists of Orc Mare. Blackened, snapped bones and laughing skulls were all the external cameras on the Blade could piece together through the smoke and the dying embers of hot rock.
Carnage.
“Broken quill,” Sophie cursed. “Oblivion did this… in Tal?”
“Yes. Yes, he did.” I saw no sense keeping the terrible truth from Tal’s baby sister any longer. Our time on Voraskel had confirmed what I’d suspected since facing Oblivion atop the tower in Atlantis. “Tal’s alive, ’Phie. She’s trapped but alive—Oblivion kept her under his possession all these years.”
She recoiled as if struck, raised her hand to strike me, and then burst into tears. Ethan was there, young and hopeless, and Sophie buried her face in his shoulder.
“We’ll take one of the cruisers into the city,” I said. “You two, your mission is to recover the Roseblade—nothing else matters, you hear me?”
“Sure, boss,” Ethan said. “What about you?”
“Oblivion’s come back here for a reason.” I stared at the slaughter fields below, making sure I committed the cost to memory. “I’m going to take that reason from him.”
Sophie sniffed and rubbed at her eyes. “Atlantis is massive—miles across. How are you going to find him?”
“Only one place he’ll be.”
Ethan had to ask. “Where?”
“The Infernal Clock, of course.” I rubbed my hands together and my shoulders slumped. “Where Tal and I bargained for the end of the Tome Wars, where she was taken and my shadow was spun into the Void. The very top of the tallest tower… Where just six months ago I killed Morpheus Renegade and was killed by Emily Grace in return. The small plateau where all this began—where I uncovered the Roseblade and attracted the ire of the gods.”
Amy, the Historian, cleared her throat. “I can’t enter that city,” she said. “The residual energy and the infinite number of possible futures converging on Atlantis will turn my brain to mush.”
I shrugged. “Consider yourself rescued, then. We’ll activate the retrieval beacon, but I’m sure the Knights will be along soon, regardless, in force and mightily pissed.”
“Thank you, Declan,” she said. “When you return, you and I need to talk about what Scarred Axis said to you.”
I blinked. “You could see that? I thought—”
“I saw nothing, but I can tell something has you… terrified.”
Plunging Axis into the Void likely wouldn’t have killed the Elder God, but had it been enough to free him from his bonds? I had believed him, scarecrow eyes and all, when he claimed to be responsible for creating some vast engine that fuelled Origin, the power of Will, in humanity. And when he claimed that the engines were overdue for a service. Annie is proof… Without Will, the Story Thread would be overrun. Humanity would be left unprotected. The dead would choke the living inside six months.
“We will talk,” I told the Historian. “You won’t like what I’ve got to say, but broken quill, we’ll talk.”
*~*~*~*
Sophie, Ethan, and my good self abandoned the Blade of Spring to the Historian and piloted a fresh cruiser—not the one I had bled all over—out over the Plains of Perdition and toward the western horizon.
We flew over the vast, ruined fields strewn with smoking bones and rose toward the crest of two valleys on the edge of a ring of mountains. The tips of the ancient skyscrapers of Atlantis rested between the break in the valleys, and after weaseling through a network of canyons, our cruiser delivered us along the edge of a long-dead sea.
From the flight deck, we held a commanding view of the Lost City of Atlantis.
Ever since the Degradation had come down, the Knights had been plundering the city for its ancient wonders, but I doubted they’d explored more than a small percentage of the whole. Atlantis was massive, built in and around the monumental mountains and barriers of natural rock. Ruined buildings that looked far beyond their time had, until recently, still flickered with crystal light, even after ten thousand years without care. Towers scraped the sky, high above our cruiser, connected by clear walkways and glass bridges.
Atlantis had been powered by the eternal energy of the Infernal Clock. I’d severed that power source and plunged the city into a final darkness. Only some neon-blue light remained, clinging to the outer shell of the tower at the center of the city.
The dark tower was cut from the same obsidian stone as the Fae Palace, an unbroken citadel eclipsing the height of all the other structures. I flew the ship through the city streets, past old statues a hundred feet high of lords and kings long dead. As I had before, I sensed their gazes and their disapproval.
“This is fucking wonderful,” Ethan whispered, crude and to the point.
“Yes, it is,” I said. “And the start of all my problems ten years ago, when I first found it. Whatever happens here, we must stop Oblivion from achieving his goals.”
“Oh, Declan,” Sophie said, as if saying my name pained her greatly. “All you’ve done, all the games you’ve won and lost… I want to ask you a favor. I feel like you owe me at least one.”
“I owe you more than I could ever repay,” I said softly, keeping my eye on the road ahead, gliding softly through the metal and glass canyons of Atlantis. The tower in the heart of the city, much like the Fae Palace back in Ascension, stood miles above the streets and cast a long shadow. That tower was our destination.
“Whatever the cost,” Sophie said. “I’m begging you, Declan, whatever the cost… If you see a chance to save Tal, please take it.”
“Sophie, of course—”
She leaned over and placed her finger on my lips. “Just this once, listen to me, please. Damn the greater good. In the past you’ve been such a… such a slave to doing the right thing. Or what looked like the right thing. And it’s gotten so many of us killed.” Tears ran down her cheeks, and she swatted them away. “But now there’s a real chance to… to maybe save one. Just one. Not whole worlds or universes. Just one. Be selfish—you loved her once, and I think you still do. Be selfish, and damn the cost of saving her.”
Nothing I could say would have done any good, so I nodded and piloted the cruiser up out of the street canyons and circled the mighty tower in the city’s heart, spiraling around the tower, higher and higher above the city. More than once—twice, in fact—I’d climbed this tower on foot. Both times had ended poorly.
It seemed like cheating, taking the cruiser. An express elevator to hell.
At the summit of the tower, a clear mile above the streets below, was the open courtyard that had sheltered the Infernal Clock. Four pillars, once at each point of the compass, marked the edge of the courtyard and the long drop to the city streets. I set the cruiser to hover in place and extended the exit ramp down onto the hard stone, just to the left to the spiraling staircase that led down into the tower. Given how long I’d been awake, and how weary I felt, I don’t think I’d have managed more than a handful of those steps.
I exited the cruiser first. Sophie and Ethan followed just behind me, silent and fearful.
The plateau was abandoned. The shards of the Infernal Clock protruded from the ground. Its crystal rose stem was dark and withered. The roots from that once-living miracle had
hardened into black diamond all across the plateau.
I’d killed the Clock to unmake the Degradation, and by doing so had released the Everlasting from their prisons, allowing the Elder Gods to touch the worlds again. I would be responsible for every death in the coming war.
I’d made a choice for the greater good, lost Clare Valentine to have the chance to make a choice, and in the end, I’d done more harm than good. Story of my life, more harm than good.
And my friends suffered the worst. Sophie had driven that nail into my heart.
Rusty red stains from where I’d started bleeding to death after destroying Morpheus Renegade had dried into the marble floor. Dead cherry blossom petals from the storm during my last visit gathered in the corners, shriveled. Tal always loved the cherry blossoms… The sky overhead was peaceful, blue, and yet I felt unnerved.
“I don’t like this,” Sophie said. “It’s one of those ‘too quiet’ moments…”
Nothing. Just an old bloodstain and a dead rose in the heart of a smooth, circular dais. I sighed and took a few steps forward, flicking my eye across the courtyard. The patterned walls and the pillared mosaics felt old. Something caught my eye, and I swung my head around to view the ruins of the Infernal Clock, just behind the crystal stem.
“Oh, bother,” I said—and felt the bear trap spring closed around my ankle.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The Gambler
Resting on the dais, as if the sword had been cast aside as useless or a cheap novelty prize, was the Roseblade.
The Roseblade!
I took an urgent step forward and then faltered, common sense catching up with my desire to recover the sword and behead one or two uppity gods with it.
Shadowman had been right about my desire to kill the Everlasting. Simple, petty revenge drove that desire. They had wronged me, and I wanted to wrong them back before they gained a foothold in the Story Thread and plunged us all into war. But this was too easy.
