The Reminiscent Exile Series, Books 1-3: Distant Star, Broken Quill, Knight Fall

by Joe Ducie

I made to rise as she left the table, but she was gone in a flash, outside into the courtyard. Emily trailed her hand across my shoulder and along my back, before sitting down in Annie’s chair.

  “You like her,” she said, resting her chin on her palm and smiling. Her lips were full, red, and damnably inviting.

  I sat down, placed the steak knife back on my plate, and adjusted my waistcoat. “She’s engaged.”

  “Even so. I watched you for a good long while before you noticed me. You smile when she smiles, and I know you only bring your favorites to this charming place.” Emily reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “She even looks somewhat like that girl you lost in Atlantis. What was her name again? I fear you’re setting yourself up for more heartache, Arbiter.”

  “Tal. Her name was Tal.” Her soul and essence, scattered across the Void, had been ensnared by Lord Oblivion, one of the fabled Everlasting—old gods and old sods. “Even if I was looking for dating advice, I don’t think the woman who killed me is a fair and unbiased source.”

  “Oh, why do you wound me—”

  “Can I have my Roseblade back?”

  “—when I’m here to save your life tonight?”

  I tossed back the last of my scotch and swallowed hard. “And why should I believe that, Captain Fantastic?”

  For the first time Emily looked something less than radiant. Her smile faded, and I saw a glimpse through one of the many masks she wore so well. The Immortal Queen was terrified. “Forget has changed in the last few months, Declan. You’ve not been back, have you? Jon Faraday did not rescind your exile for unmaking the Degradation and killing poor Morpheus.”

  “I’m too much of a threat to his lordship for that. Half of Ascension City, the half that doesn’t want me dead, wants me on the Dragon Throne.”

  “Well, my exiled king, given my late husband’s betrayal in Atlantis, Faraday and I are currently not on speaking terms either, which suits me just fine; however, there are rumors… rumors he’s made an alliance.”

  “An alliance? With who? After the Knights, you and your Renegade armies are one of the greatest threats in all Forget. Hell, you could level Ascension City with the Roseblade.”

  “Not a who—a what.” Emily looked out the window and into the night, at Annie in the courtyard. “And Declan, my dear, your diplomacy skills are sorely lacking. A king should know better.” She offered me a wicked grin. “It’s an ugly fault of yours. We’re not at war anymore, thanks to you. This is peacetime. Stop thinking in absolutes of destruction, and perhaps fewer people will die around you.”

  “Point.” I suppose. “An alliance with what then?”

  “Atlantis’s return has changed things… so many things. Forget is in flux, and the Story Thread trembles. Declan, Faraday has forsaken True Earth in exchange for clemency against what you know was hiding in Atlantis.”

  I scoffed, but a sliver of fear squirmed in my gut. Tal... you wouldn’t let It. “That’s absurd.”

  “Which is why I’m here telling you. Why you’re needed once again, to embrace and fight the absurd. The Shadowless Arbiter, a madness to be reckoned with, yes? All the Knights across this world, guarding the waypoints through the Void, have been recalled to Ascension City. Earth has been abandoned to at least one of the Everlasting, and any Knight—or Renegade, for that matter—will be slaughtered by Emissary. Such is the nature of King Faraday’s bargain.”

  Emissary? “Good thing I’m not a Knight or a Renegade then.”

  “I think, in your case, Emissary will not make the distinction.” Emily gazed out of the window again and shivered. “It’s coming, Declan. If you weren’t so blind, you’d have already seen the signs. It’s here. I’m leaving True Earth as soon as our conversation is done. Can’t you feel it? It’s coming for you tonight. Now.” She leaned forward and cupped my cheek. “Hey, sweet thing, didn’t you used to be someone?”

  “How’s it know where to find me?”

  Emily almost laughed. “Are you serious? It’s never lost you. Shadowless as you are, your very existence is a blight upon the face of the world. Creatures such as Voidlings or Emissary are drawn to you. Can’t you feel it? Or has that disgusting drink you’re always sipping dulled what little sense you possess?”

  “I—” I could see that Emily believed every word she was speaking. Every damn word. Either that, or the scotch had dulled my senses—mayhap why I drank so much of the stuff—and I was being played. Perhaps both those options were true. You didn’t rise to the head of one of the largest armies in existence without thinking a few steps ahead, and Emily, for as long as I’d known her, had always been more than a few steps ahead of me.

  “Why do they call you immortal, Your Majesty?” I asked, but I was distracted now. A sense of... something, was pulling at my Will.

  I reached out and opened the door in my mind that let the Will flow free. The ascending oils of creation filled my body and soul. A rush of heat, of ice, of sharp copper flowed through me, and I felt, for one moment, that I could do anything. Hop across universes, unmake the world, and be back in time for Doctor Who.

  I used my Will to touch the living things around me. A gentle ping resonated in my mind as the invisible wave of power rippled outward. I could feel the life force in Emily, in her unborn child, and in all the people at Paddy’s. A dark canvas with dozens of tiny pinpricks of light, swaying slowly to the music, as if I had an ethereal radar in the smoke rings of my mind. One of those was Annie, just outside, and if I concentrated a touch harder I’d be able to discern which one she—

  My sensory net struck a wall made of cascading flame, and I almost lost my dinner. The wall felt a lot like what I imagine hot, raw sewage would taste like. A point on the canvas that was neither living nor dead... nor human.

  “Oh… broken quill!” I cursed and pressed my fingers against my eyelids, fighting a sudden nausea.

  Something wicked was at Paddy’s tonight.

  Something… far from Irish.

  I broke away from the starry canvas with a thought and looked up and over Emily’s shoulder, across at the bar.

  A man stood next to the polished mahogany and the beer-soaked mats, just before the bridge of frosty taps. He was dressed in a fine black suit and a matte-purple shirt. A simple bowtie, untied, hung around his neck. His smile stretched from ear to ear, revealing rows of pristine white teeth.

  He winked at me and his eye—his whole eye—turned black as coal.

  A sense of fear and raw insanity hit me hard, and it was all I could do not to scream. I was looking at the creature that had torn apart those poor people and left me messages in their blood and entrails. If Emily was to be believed, I was looking at a monster of incalculable strength. A servant of one the Everlasting. The nine fuckin’ Ringwraiths. Oblivion, Scion…

  Emissary. A word for messenger, envoy, herald—harbinger.

  “Why tell me all this?” I asked, never taking my eyes off the thing at the bar. “Why help me?”

  “Because I, unlike your older brother, value this world and its people. You are going to be needed. True Earth has her part to play in the war to come, and I’d soon as not see it burned to ash by things older than time.” Emily shook her head. “But never mind that just now. It’s going to kill everyone here, Declan.”

  “He doesn’t look so tough. I can take him.” Can I? “You should go, and go now.”

  “Yes, I know. I’m going.” Emily stood and moved around the table. She leaned in close and gave me a kiss on one stubbly cheek. “Immortal is, perhaps, the wrong word. Timeless fits better. I’ll miss you if you die and stay dead.”

  “Hey, haven’t you heard? I’m the Immortal King, sweet thing.”

  “Goodnight, Declan.”

  Emily left through the back door, stepping out into the beer garden across the restaurant area behind me, but I didn’t watch her leave. The thing at the bar hadn’t blinked yet, and neither had I.

  My hands were under the table, and I pooled a reserve of raw, smoky,
luminescent Will into my palms. I didn’t know what this creature was capable of, but it felt like nothing I’d encountered before. So I’d have to hit it hard and fast, and never mind who saw me shooting beams of fire from my palms—

  “Where’d your friend go?” Annie asked. She sat back down and for just a moment blocked my view of Emissary.

  In that split-second, he disappeared, as these supernatural monsters are wont to do.

  “Fuck.” I blinked. “That is… Emily left.”

  “She seemed nice.”

  “Oh yes, she seemed nice.”

  I wasn’t looking at Annie, and she noticed. She glanced over her shoulder and scanned the bar. “What’s the matter?”

  “People are about to die, I’m afraid.”

  “What?”

  The bar exploded. Ka-boom style.

  A fireball of hot red flame, tinged pink, smashed into the wood and sent splinters of sharp metal, timber and glass flying in every direction. The two female staff behind the bar were simply absorbed by the flame, disintegrated to ash and less than ash. The half dozen or so patrons standing on the drinking side of the fence were blasted back, ragged and broken and dead before they hit the floor.

  I leaped out of my chair and, as quick as thought, cast a brilliant argent shield against the hail of deadly projectiles and the concussive force of the blast. The shrapnel impacted against my defense and was bounced back into the pink flame. The dining floor, and Annie, was spared a gruesome death.

  My young detective was only just reacting to the chaos. Her eyes bulged, and her hand went into her jacket for her weapon—the third time she’d had need to draw it around me. People were screaming, and the air stank of blood, bone, and steel.

  A whirling cloud of black smoke hid what was left of the bar. I glared into the choking mist and confusion.

  Emissary came screaming through the smoke—still wearing the guise of a man in a fine suit—unblemished by the explosion. Some of its human facade had fallen away. Both of his eyes were pitch-black now, and his jaw had unhinged, stretching his mouth open almost comically wide. Rows of sharp, yellowed fangs were wreathed in pink-red, near auburn, flame.

  The creature, whatever he truly was, had breathed explosive fire into the bar.

  With a cry I threw my arms forward, and twin beams of Dante’s Lightning—a trick I’d picked up years ago from some of the secret, unpublished epics by Alighieri—burst from my palms in wicked, electric-blue arcs and struck Emissary in the chest. It paid well to have had a grandfather in charge of some of the most powerful tomes in existence.

  But that was a long time ago. Part of those “times were.”

  The lightning bore into the creature, and with a flick of my wrists I wrenched him a staggering step to the side, using his own momentum against him, and hurled the bastard through the wall and out into the courtyard and the street beyond.

  I cracked my neck and shrugged. It had been a good few months since I’d used such devastating, yet satisfying, Willfire. Like riding a bike, really.

  “What in the hell was that?” Annie screamed.

  I ignored her and ran forward, through the heat of the bar, leaping over mangled remains, and out into the cool night air. The street was alive with people fleeing or gaping at the torrents of black smoke and pinkish-red flame escaping Paddy’s.

  Emissary had been thrown clean across the courtyard and into the street. He lay slumped and laughing against the crumpled door of a red car. The fancy suit wasn’t so unblemished anymore.

  “You,” I said, palms alight with silver smoke, “just destroyed something I cared about very much.”

  “Hello, Declan Hale.” Emissary laughed, holding his sides as if they might split. “You call that a punch? That barely tickled. If I’d wanted a kiss, I would’ve asked your mother—”

  Another blast of superheated energy seemed fitting. I hurled a bolt of power, red flame wrapped in crackling lightning, as fast as thought—Emissary blurred and was suddenly standing six feet to the left. My bolt struck the red car and sent it crashing across the road, spinning to a screeching stop on its roof against the wall of a bank thirty feet away.

  “Too slow, Joe.” Emissary laughed again. Blood spurted from his nostrils and down his shirt. “Pick up the pace, Ace. Don’t tarry, Larry. Better watch your back, Jack! Ha-ha… Pathetic. How did you ever survive Lord Oblivion? Or the Tome Wars?”

  “By fighting!” I fell to one knee and slammed my open palm against the paving stones. The ground beneath Emissary erupted and sent him flying back into the road. He landed with a thud and, as fast as I could blink, found his feet again.

  Emissary licked his finger and held it up to the wind. “Winds of change, my lad. My boy-o. Sonny-Jim!” His shit-kickin’ grin faded and he stared at me with those dead coals for eyes. “Follow me if you dare, Shadowless. I’ll kill a thousand before midnight—and ten thousand before dawn—if you don’t.”

  Oh, I dared. With that supernatural speed, Emissary dashed away from the burning shell of Paddy’s and the dozens, if not more, people he had killed. A black contrail of shadow clung to his wake as if it were the dark oil of the Void.

  I ran out into the road and recovered a motorcycle, abandoned in the chaos, idling on its side in the gutter. Some years since I’d had need to drive, and that had been an Eternity-class troop carrier above the devastation at the Fall of Voraskel, in the final months of the Tome Wars, but this would have to do.

  I choked the throttle and was rewarded with a satisfying roar from the engine just before it stalled. “Fuck.” I keyed the ignition and brought it back to life. “I’m coming for you, you bastard.”

  Annie jumped onto the bike behind me and slipped her left arm around my waist, hugging me close. Just how much had she seen? Her eyes were wild, teeth bared. Her other hand held her gun, pointed toward the sky.

  “Get off please, Annie.”

  “No thank you, Hale. You get after that… that man.”

  Emissary had reached the end of the street. He disappeared around the corner, a smoky blur, away from Riverwood Plaza and toward the coast road. No time to argue.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I gunned the engine, and we were away.

  Chapter Six

  Only Road I’ve Ever Been Down

  “I’m sure you have questions.”

  “Yes.” Annie hissed the word in my ear. “Oh, yes.”

  “They’ll have to wait. This thing we’re chasing is… dangerous.”

  Annie’s reply was lost to the wind as I hit seventy kilometers per hour on the bike, chasing Emissary down Shenton Avenue toward the coast. He ran with impossible speed, warping the air around him and leaving a trail of sparkling black shadow in his wake. I was reminded again of Void light, of the space between universes.

  If he is of the Void, I thought, then, shadowless, I have an advantage. Is that why Emily warned me?

  An unexpected boon of forfeiting my shadow to Lord Oblivion atop of Atlantis had been the ability to traverse the Void almost unmolested and absorb the essence of the creatures that dwelt there: the mindless and the horribly sane—Voidlings. Few Knights in their long history could claim to have traveled the Void successfully. Aloysius Jade could, just, and a few others I’d known. At the time my shadow, something so immaterial, had been a small price to pay for the Degradation, a shield of concentrated magic around the Lost City, but I’d been screwed in the fine print. Shadows, it turned out, had purpose.

  Now the Old Gods were at it again. If Emily, Timeless Emily, was to be believed, then unleashing Atlantis and severing the Infernal Clock on the eve of my death had released the Everlasting from some sort of forgotten prison. That was a loose theory, mainly speculation, but it sat right on the soul. The light hitting the truth cast the right sort of shadow. Emily was many things, but a liar...?

  Well, yes. But only when it came to matters of the heart. I almost loved her for that.

  A summer shower had come through not too long ago, and the d
ual carriageway down Shenton Ave. to the coast was slick. The appealing smell of the road after rain hung in the air as the wind whistled past my ears at eighty, then ninety, kilometers an hour. I swerved in between the traffic, hell for leather, after Emissary.

  If the Knights had abandoned True Earth, then that made me the only sheriff round these parts—at least so far as Forgetful monstrosities were concerned. And the thing we were chasing now by following his wake of oily night, while not in any of the bestiaries I’d studied growing up, certainly fell under my purview.

  Emissary threw a car at me.

  I allowed myself a moment of shock and awe as a solid ton of steel and glass hurtled end over end through the air. I caught a glimpse of a terrified young man behind the wheel before swerving across two lanes and up onto the median strip to avoid the impromptu missile. The car slammed into the road behind my bike with a crunch of metal on asphalt and the sprinkle of shattered glass.

  Even over the wind and the screeching tires, the roar of the bike’s engine, I heard the demon laughing. Annie gripped my sides almost hard enough to force the air from my lungs.

  “Good god...” she breathed, hot against my ear. “What are we chasing?”

  “Hold on!”

  The two lanes merged into one as I kicked off the center strip and back onto the road. I ducked through an amber light and cut off a police car. Sirens whirled to life behind us. A third horse entered the race.

  Gliding above the road on his clouds of dark light, Emissary cut the corner over the coast road and took a hard left down toward the Indian Ocean. From our vantage point as we descended downhill toward the water, I could see a whole suburb of houses and a string of streetlights along the coast leading to Hillarys Boat Harbor about two kilometers away.

  Emissary made for that brightly lit harbor. I’d only been down that way a few times in the last five years of my exile, but it was well-used. A boardwalk encircled the bay, broken by a seawall, full of tourist shops, bars, and restaurants. Given free rein in there, the monster would get his thousand dead before midnight all too easily.