by Joe Ducie
Many a clueless mortal had found their way into Forget and the city purely by elusive thought. The crossover boundaries were, for the most part, fluid and unpredictable. A select few, however, were always present. Always and in all ways. The Knights patrolled the ones they knew about, trying in vain to monitor the ebb and flow of citizens through the vast, sprawling metropolis and surrounds.
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.”
“Gee, I’m awful glad you stopped by with such good news. I came here to change that fate.” I held my head and thought of what waited on the other side of this forest. The city. The past. All the king’s horsemen vying for my head… “They think killing me will make their problems go away—that my death will somehow undo the damage. It will not.”
But never mind. I’d chosen to return, to see what my death was all about.
I stopped feeling sorry for myself and concentrated on harnessing a resolve that would see me through. “I can’t imagine this is easy for you. Being here. Why did you really want to see me?”
The Historian shrugged and, for just a moment, looked like the sixteen-year-old girl she was supposed to be—innocent and uncertain. “Because you’re…” She grasped at the air, looking for the words. “Before the end, you’re going to be given a chance, a moment in time… to do something that no one has ever done before.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, that’s as close as I can See it. Something new. Something… of absurd importance. You, Declan Hale—the Shadowless Arbiter—are going to hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.”
“You’re quoting Blake.” I scraped a chunk of moss from the boulder. “Fitting, I suppose. And then I die?”
“Yes, and then you die.”
“Yay.”
The Historian stepped away from me. She clasped her hands together over her breasts, and the blue sapphire hanging around her neck shone with a soft, ethereal light. As I had done seven years ago, during my graduation at the Infernal Academy, I fell to one knee before her. Back then we had been the same height, even while I was on my knees. Now my head was level with her waist. She placed a gentle hand on my short, tousled hair.
“The next few days are going to hurt, Declan.”
“I know.”
“Your enemies are not all evil.”
“I know.”
“You should forgive Jon Faraday.”
“I know. But never.”
A single tear traced a lonely track down the Historian’s cheek. She let it fall unchecked, and without thought, I reached out my open palm and caught it. That brought a smile back to her face.
“When we first met, I feared you, Declan. You scared me so much. More than the old Knights, the battle-scarred veterans, or all the dark tales of Renegade cruelty put together. Do you know why?”
“Of course.” I couldn’t keep my voice from wavering, just a little. “Because of the future—or the past, now. You Saw what I was going to do. What I would become. Atlantis, the war’s end. The Degradation unleashed and the Story Thread crippled. Reach City and all who lived there destroyed. I wish you’d told me some of it, at least enough to save Tal. Or enough… to die in her place.”
“No, that’s not why. Never mind.” She folded her hands over an elaborate belt, studded with gemstones. “You hated me after you were exiled.”
“Yes.”
“And now?”
I sighed. “Why shoot the messenger? Laws and accords as old as the universe itself bind you. It’s not fair, but that’s life, right? Various shades of not-fair and regret.” I kissed the back of t
he Historian’s hand and stood, having paid homage long enough. “That’s a good thing, I suppose. If life were fair, then all these bad things that happen to us would be because we deserved them.”
“Declan… you take cake, okay.”
Old jokes again. She really did see everything. “Don’t you mean take care?”
“That too.”
*~*~*~*
I’d travelled into Forget and the realm of Ascension City unassisted and untethered to the real world. No book or written word had brought me across universes.
I was here in truth, having survived the Void with sanity intact. I could not float back to Perth on a whim.
Coming through the Void put me at a disadvantage. The only way back was across the Void again or through one of the guarded gates, where Forget and True Earth overlapped. If I was taken prisoner in the city—and I would be—I would have no easy way of escape. I’d have to rely on my charm and a winning attitude if I was going to survive. Yeah, that would see me through. S’all gravy, baby.
The path through the forest was paved with old cracked stones, worn and weathered. Bristly tufts of grass and fat vines grew between the slabs and crept along the soil banks on either side of the green corridor. I followed the path north, tasting the wind. Overhead, unseen through the canopy, I could hear the rumbling of airships flying toward the city.
“Good to be back,” I reminded myself. “Oh, yes indeedy.”
The Historian had abandoned me by the pool. She had used a leather-bound tome to slip back to her temple in the mountains to the east of Ascension City. Once I watched her disappear, I remembered I’d left Tales of Atlantis back on the counter in my bookshop. That was sloppy. I had a feeling I was going to need it, before all was said and done.
I followed the path for a few miles, winding through the trees and thinking deep thoughts. My polished black shoes were soon scuffed and biting at my ankles. They weren’t made for strolling in the woods. What other way into the universe, though, Muir?
