by Joe Ducie
Or perhaps so they wanted us to think.
“Welcome, Tal Levy,” High Lord Visios said, with a genuine smile for the prettiest girl in this or any millennium. He was a tall man, complete with a white braided beard, long enough so he tucked the tail into his belt. His face was lined, wrinkled, but his cheeks were red as if he’d been laughing not too long ago—or sipping something sweet from a hipflask. Half Gandalf, half Father Christmas. “And welcome, Declan Hale.”
Visios carried a worn staff of twisted oak, about a foot taller than he was at seven feet. Will users of this time seemed to rely on staffs and wands, on unique channels to focus their talent. There was a magical university in Switzerland, in my time, that taught the same. We’d been taught such use in the Infernal Academy as children, of course, but a more hands on approach dominated the curriculum during war time. We were taught how to burn and kill with our hands wrapped around a Renegade’s throat. Schools and academies that didn’t make soldiers were a nice idea. Perhaps one day, many years from now, when I’d ground the Everlasting into dust and the Story Thread was at peace, the Infernal Academy could become something more… civil.
“Howdy, Vis,” I said and offered the man a quick salute. “You guys make good breakfast. My thanks.”
“Good morning,” Tal said. “You have enchantments in place to understand us?”
“Indeed,” Visios said and gestured to the man and woman on his left, as we took seats at the round table and our minders gathered to chat amongst themselves across the chamber. “You remember High Lords Adanor and Shuri?”
Adanor disliked me. It was all in the glower. He was a tall, rake-thin man with a chin as sharp as twice cut glass. Atop his old, grey head he wore a black fez with a golden crest stitched into the fabric. A crest of no relevance to me, two circles overlapping and crossed with something that looked like three pyramids side by side. Shuri was a monument to indifference, a regal woman of middle age and greying hair. Her eyes were alight, however, and knowing.
Tal and I shared greetings with the gentry and I thought on how quick I could get away and back to the bar.
“When we spoke one week ago,” Visios said, taking his seat next to Tal, “you made mention of your past as soldiers… Knights Infernal, yes? Of which you were an Arbiter, Declan, highly ranked and well trained. We would like to offer you both an opportunity to work at the Vale Celestia—our centre for learning and studying Will. Our students are most eager to learn your unique method of Will control. Without a focus, that is.”
“You want me to teach?” I asked with a snort. Of all I had been expecting, from imprisonment to conscription, teaching was way down the list.
“Our student groups are split between experience, potential, and desire to learn. The groups you would be responsible for would be small, our best and brightest, eager to study your unique methods.” Visios held up his hand. “Five, six students at the most. And an opportunity to learn about us, as we learn about you.”
The translation on that one came through a little formal. I glanced at Tal, who watched me thoughtfully. “We’d teach a team of students each?” I asked. “Tal and myself?”
“That could be fun,” she said and squeezed my hand. “Is there any real need to run back to the future so soon, Declan?”
“If it is your desire to stay, we ask you make yourself beneficial to our society. To share more of your knowledge from the future. To help us avert any catastrophe you claim to have seen.” Adanor clasped his hands together and smirked. He didn’t buy the end of the world tale I was selling, not with the Infernal Clock above and the grand city prospering below. “To that end, we would ask you and Miss Levy to accept a position in the Vale Celestia of Atlantis as warfare instructors, alongside the current staff. You would teach our students in Willful offence and defence, a select team of five or six who will be tested in, say, four months. Where the skills you have taught them—among others—will be put to the test.”
Four months… I could do four months. Did I want to? I met Tal’s gaze, saw the look in her eyes and the smile playing at the corners of mouth. If she wanted to stay, I wanted to stay. I loved her. Perhaps in a few months I could convince her to return with me. And, if I were being honest, I wanted some time to collect myself. To try and ween myself off the bottle again. I’d managed a few months sober earlier this year, then the loss of Emily and forfeiting my son had seemed like a good reason to have a drink.
What is that demon’s name? my mind whispered. Alcohol!
And if I were being honest-er, then I never really needed a reason to drink. It’s Tuesday, better have a bottle of breakfast wine. Oh, look, a bumblebee. Some honey mead for me. What’s that? Steak at the pub? Ten pints of Guinness and a few nips of single malt should see us through, mate. By the Everlasting, I missed Paddy’s. Emissary had blown it up a few months back, during the misadventure where I’d met Annie Brie—who was now my link back to the future. My DeLorean if I ever hit eighty-eight miles an hour.
Funny how people could come into our lives and plant their flags in our souls. In Annie’s case, the soul binding had been quite literal, thanks to the Infernal Clock. I missed her more than Paddy’s.
“I accept,” Tal told the High Lords of Atlantis. “Declan?”
“I…” What was I in a hurry to run back to, anyway? War against the Everlasting? I could use the time away to prepare myself—mind, body, and soul. Train myself as much as the bunch of kids theses all-important and dignified lords chose to saddle me with. Was there a bar on campus?
“Yeah, okay, let’s go back to school.”
CHAPTER TWO
ANNIE’S CONCERN
“Make it seem worthwhile”
“So what I’m getting from this,” Annie said, as the evening hour stretched toward nine o’clock, still early, and a handful of love-struck young couples walked about Riverwood Plaza outside of my shop, dinner and drinks and all things nice planned. “What I’m getting is that you were following Tal around like a poor lost puppy. Worse, a drunken lost puppy. Declan, women just love it when men can’t handle their problems. Granted, your problems are generally somewhat more significant than most, but still. Whether it’s stop drinking and get a job or stop drinking and save the world, it’s the same old hurt. Tal sees it that way, I bet. Sees you… broken.”
A barbed ripple of anger shivered up my spine, but I caught it before I said something stupid. “I may not be explaining things too well, but it wasn’t as pathetic as you seem to be… understanding.”
Annie gave me a frank and piercing look, a look all women seem capable of givng, that saw right to the heart of me and my particular style, Hale’s own brand, of delusional bullshit.
I grinned. “Well, I don’t remember a lot of the early drunken nights, so perhaps I’ve a twisted perspective on just how romantic I may or may not have appeared. In contrast to my problems, that’s why I’m asking your advice, Annie. You’ve been a voice of reason as long as I’ve known you.”
“She loves you, that much is clear,” Annie said. “Is she… is Tal here? Upstairs?”
I shook my head.
“Is she… OK?”
I shrugged and tilted my hand back and forth in the air. “Depends. Where this story is heading, Annie, means I may have to make a choice that will hurt her. Almost as much as Lord Oblivion hurt her when he crushed her soul and consumed her body for nearly six damn years. There’s a plan, you see, my terribly clever plan that went terribly wrong for Tal.”
“And what happens if you don’t make that choice?” Annie asked softly. “If you don’t betray the women you claim to love all over again?”
Another flash of anger gripped me, but I caught it a second time, settled on saying nothing for a long moment, and reminded myself I still had a lot of story to tell.
“Too early in the tale to give away the raised stakes scene, Miss Brie. I—”
Something… malignant stepped into the ward scheme, the net of intent, I’d cast around the shop. A taste
like congealed blood flooded the back of my throat, the same scent caught in my nostrils. Annie saw the look on my face and stood with me, our respective firearms in hand. For the second time that night we stepped across my shop, through a thin layer of ash and scorch marks in the Thriller section, and headed for the plaza. The much more occupied and busy plaza, which was a concern if fighting were needed.
“What is it?” Annie asked.
I paused at the door, ready to chime the old bell, and stared out of the broken window at a man-shaped thing, something wearing human skin and a top hat, sitting on the rim of the marble fountain. It, he, whatever, trailed long fingers in the water and grinned at me from across the distance.
“Not human,” I said. “Close, but not. Maybe once… huh, it’s a deadling.”
“You’re mumbling,” Annie said. “Is this trouble?”
I nodded, counting the variables—the honest lives in the plaza—watching the shadows, sensing something akin to the sickness of the Void, but not quite. A first cousin, perhaps, to the Voidlings. That taste of blood, the rough but not quite right shape, the outlandish top hat and cloak wrapped around its thin, almost skeletal form. This was a thing trying to pass for normal, and thus stood out all the more for missing the point entirely.
The creature on the rim of the fountain tapped three fingers across its heart and then waved at me.
“Oh,” I said. “OK, then.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well,” I lowered my shotgun against my leg and reached for the door. “For the Willful, tapping three fingers of the left hand across the heart is a sign of… entreaty? Is that the right word? A truce, I suppose. A chance to talk.”
Annie gripped her revolver all the harder. “I’m not Willful, Declan, but even I can sense that the… thing… over there isn’t right.”
“If it comes to shooting, shoot it between the eyes,” I said. “Or in the heart. It’s a deadling, one of the lower dead. A reanimated corpse—an emissary, you might say, being controlled from afar by a necromancer.”
“That’s horrific,” Annie said.
I nodded. “Let’s go see what it has to say. Stay on my right, would you?”
Annie swallowed, took a deep breath, and then nodded once on the exhale.
Given the civilians, the gentle folk enjoying dinner in the plaza, and the sign of entreaty, I left the shotgun leaning against the wall of books under the broken window. Annie concealed her revolver just inside her leather jacket, and together we stepped out into the warm night and approached the undead creature fouling the water of the fountain.
“Greetings, Shadowless Arbiter,” the creature said as we drew level. I stood just on it—his—left, Annie to the right. The deadling inclined its head in a nod of respect that was, perhaps, meant to be mocking.
The lights from the shops, the streetlamps, shone down on us, but although the deadling cast a shadow onto the cobblestones, as did the lovely Detective Brie, I did not. I had sold my shadow long ago to end the Tome Wars, force the end. At the time, the bargain had been easy to make. I had been young, dumb. Tal had paid a far heavier prize in that bargain. My fault. Always my fault. Consigned to the Void, my shadow had taken on a life of its own. It was me, a darker version, if that were possible. Me without consequence, without… guilt. Last we met, my shadow had escaped, kidnapped the Historian—a teenager who could see the future—and seized control of the greatest battleship in Ascension City’s fleet. I felt partly responsible.
“Hey there,” I said. “You know necromancy is forbidden on all civilised worlds.”
The creature before me grinned, a grin stretched wide through split cheeks revealing yellowed teeth and rotten, grey gums. Dead eyes, pale cataracts, rolled in the sunken flesh of its face. Up close, the deadling wasn’t even close to alive. It wore an aged tuxedo, worm-eaten and dusty.
“What on this or any other world makes you think True Earth is civilised?” the deadling asked. The voice was a rasp, vocal cords strained, as if scraped across jagged metal, and although the creature had once been a man, the voice behind the puppet, mingled with that of the necromancer, sounded mildly feminine.
My necromancer was a woman. And, unfortunately, could be on the other side of the world, for all the good that knowledge did me. Using a corpse as messenger like this was intricate, complex Will power.
“Be that as it may,” I said, and crossed my arms over my chest. “Speak your piece and be gone.”
“We need your help,” the deadling said, surprisingly honest. Not a request for assistance or a I require your aid, oh Knight, just a simple statement.
“I don’t help corpse defilers. The dead,” and here I was a hypocrite, “should stay that way.”
“You, who have defiled entire worlds, have little authority on the matter.”
“I am an Arbiter of the Knights Infernal,” I said, “I have the only authority.”
The deadling frowned. “I—”
“Why did you firebomb my shop?” I asked, and readjusted the patch covering my eye. The eye was healing, slowly but surely, vague colours and shapes, a perk of being Willful, but the creature before me still had more life in its eyes than my damaged one under the patch. Best to keep it covered.
“I’m sorry?” the deadling said.
“You will be.”
“No,” Annie said. “I think he… it… meant that it didn’t throw the cocktail.”
I nodded. “You expect me to believe that? A coincidence for you to show up only an hour or so later.”
“I do not intend you harm this night,” the deadling said.
“How about tomorrow night?”
It grinned again, gaunt cheek skin splitting almost to the ear.
I raised a single finger and spoke very clearly, allowing a trickle of my power to ignite in my hand, white light flowing through veins of red. “What you say next will determine the remainder of this conversation. Speak your purpose, I command it, or be destroyed.”
The deadling considered, then nodded, shrugging a bony shoulder beneath the ruined tux. “The Atlas Lexicon formerly requests the aid of the Knights Infernal. We are besieged, the ‘ways between worlds have been severed. This… creature was the only way we could get a message out to the world.”
I recrossed my arms over my chest and gave the deadling a deep and surly frown. The Atlas Lexicon…
As far as I knew, there were two places in existence with that name. One I had visited not too long ago and promptly watched it be destroyed by an Emissary Dragon, a servant of the Everlasting, and the other…
The Knights Infernal used a nexus of worlds, a convergence point, to afford individuals without Will power, without magic, to cross the Story Thread, to travel to other worlds. A man named Thomas Atkinson had created a grand crossroads, an interdimensional train station, and called it the Atlas Lexicon. An apt name in many ways, but I feared—knew—the deadling wasn’t talking about the ruined old train station. No, no.
Thomas Atkinson had named his creation in honour of the original Atlas Lexicon—a school, an academy, a hidden city here on True Earth, tucked away in an enchanted valley in the Swiss Alps. During the Tome Wars, the Knights had almost come to blows with the scholars, students, and practitioners of the Atlas Lexicon in Switzerland. The city was a centre of power, a necessary institution. The lords and ladies that ruled the Atlas Lexicon were not of the Knights, disagreed with our authority and policing of the Story Thread. A mindset close to that of the Renegades, who had sparked the hundred years of war I had ended at the end of a bloody swordpoint.
“To whom am I speaking?” I asked the deadling. “Name yourself.”
“I am Lady Evelyn Waterwood, Chief Librarian of the Atlas Lexicon.”
The boss. “Why on earth would you come to me for help?”
“The Atlas Lexicon is cut off from the rest of the world, from all worlds. We are trapped in a dome of invisible magic, a source of malicious intent. The Restless Cemetery is stirring, the children
are scared. And you, Declan Hale, are the only Knight Infernal we trust in this matter.”
“You know who I am,” I whispered. “What I’ve done.”
“You forged and broke the shield of degradation that surrounded Atlantis, Arbiter Hale. Who else would we ask in our hour of need?”
“A lot of folks won’t be happy if I show up on your doorstep.”
The deadling chuckled. “No, not in the least, but we are under attack. The source of which… I believe it to be one of the Everlasting.”
Now that got my attention. The shield around the ruins of Atlantis, which I had been responsible for in my youth, had been made by one of the Everlasting—one of the cruellest beings in existence. I knew what Lady Evelyn would say next before she even said it.
“I believe Lord Oblivion intends to destroy the Atlas Lexicon.”
Oh, now the game got interesting. Yes, indeed. The Everlasting were… a complex lot. Gods, cruel and old, timeless, ageless, imprisoned and not. As children in Ascension City, we’re taught an old rhyme that warns of the Nine. Over the centuries-turned-millennia the elder gods fell into myth, but I had met them, I knew them:
’Ware the Nine Forgetful Tomes
Storied names carved of old bone.
For the Nine see you as clear rose-light
Etched to stand against their blight.
Bitter Child craves his father’s throne,
Yet Younger Scion sits all alone.
Dark travesty surrounds the Age Flood,
Lord Oblivion drowned in fire and blood.
The Sleeping Goddess can never forget
Fair Astoria, lost in time’s tangled net.
Mind the snare of the Nightmare Sea—
Madness, the realm of Iced Banshee.
Distant threads tie the Ancient Bane
Pained Hail and his forever game.
Hear the wrath of the Marked Fear—
