by Joe Ducie
She ran a finger down the blade, curving around the incandescent rose petals set into the crystal. “Is that... I thought the Roseblade was a sword.”
“It is. This is something else—something old and new. Annie and I found it just a day ago in what I’m fairly sure was one of the Dream Worlds, Tia. Although I’m not sure exactly what it can do, at least one of its tricks is the ability to cut through universes. That’s how we got here. To you.”
Tia’s eyes grew as round as saucers. “Do you know how valuable that is?”
“You’re talking to the kid who leveled Reach City with the Roseblade, remember? Yeah, I know.”
“You did what?” Annie asked.
I waved her question away. Best my young detective didn’t hate me just yet—still a lot of work to do. “Just a battle a long time ago. What matters now is getting to Ascension City, and this is our best shot.”
“How does it work then?” Tia asked.
I made a swift and sure cut with Myth, and drew a thin razor-sharp line in the air that folded back on itself like drawn curtains might, to reveal a desert of white sand. A blast wave of heat rolled out of the gateway and forced us all a step back. With a thought, I snapped the portal shut.
“Oh,” Tia said. “Now that’s cool. But you can’t control which world it opens, can you?”
“Not so much, no.”
Tia frowned thoughtfully and pressed a tentative finger against the flat of the blade. “It’s cold,” she said, surprised. “So you can make it work but not direct which world it opens?”
“That’s right,” I said. “And I hesitate to just slash and hope for the best. What if we open a portal under the sea or in the heart of an active volcano?” I shook my head. “Now there’s a scary thought.”
“You used it just now,” Annie pointed out.
“I did that without thinking…” I said, trailing away with that thought. “Perhaps it’s about intent, you know, like with Will.”
“It happens because you make it happen?” Tia asked. “It’s been a good long while since Will Theory 101, but intent, even desire, was everything, wasn’t it?”
I nodded, and drove the tip of Myth into the air. The blade sunk unseen into reality itself and I let the handle go. For a moment, the knife hung suspended in the air and then it fell away and struck the spongy earth. No portal to another world opened.
“Okay,” Tia said. “So however it works, it needs someone holding the handle. May I try?”
I picked up the knife, flipped it, and offered Tia the hilt. She waved me back a step and, tongue between her teeth, plunged Myth into the air. For a moment, I swear I saw the reality of the place curve, like a trampoline does when a heavy weight is placed in the center of it, but then it snapped back, and Tia dropped the knife with a cry.
“What happened?” Annie asked.
Tia stared at her palm. “It... bit me,” she said. “I’m fine. There’s no mark. But it felt like—like a bee sting. Nasty little thing.”
I retrieved Myth and shrugged. “The place where we found this, there was a message. Like a love note... for me. Unless someone is playing a very elaborate game, the message was left some thousands of years ago.”
“And what did it say?” Tia asked.
I recited the inscription from memory. “Here rests Myth, the Creation Knife, forged in Atlantia for the Nine to slay, forged to light the Shadowless way. Paths unbroken, unsung, unfound, await the Immortal King to be crowned.”
“Forged in Atlantia...” Tia mused. “It’s Atlantean. You’ve already got quite a sordid history with that city—or what’s left of it, at any rate.” She tapped her chin. “King to be crowned, eh?”
“Yeah, we’re ignoring that bit,” I said gruffly.
“And half of Forget wept...” Tia muttered. “Okay, so not a lot to be getting on with there. Whoever made it left you a nice few lines of prose but no instruction manual?”
“I’m sure they thought they were being terribly clever,” I said, glancing up at the night sky again. Moonless night, but oh so bright. “Riddles in the dark...”
“Maybe the key is in that line about paths?” Annie wondered aloud. “I mean, that’s what the knife does, right? Makes paths.”
“Unbroken, unsung, unfound,” Tia said. “We call people with Will who haven’t been recruited into the Knights the Unfound.”
“Ethan is unfound,” I said. “He’s got a lot of raw talent but slipped through the recruitment nets when he was growing up because of the resource drain caused by the Tome Wars.” I scratched at my stubble. My blinded eye was twinging, a dull ache. “Unbroken and unsung...”
“You already tried to get to Ascension City, and the knife brought you here?” Tia nodded to herself. “When you tried to get to Ascension, what did you think about?”
I shrugged. “One of the lesser-used gateways near the Market District. And this... this portal beneath a small pond I used a few months ago, traversing the Void.”
“Those are paths,” Tia said. “Like Annie said, it’s about the paths. Unbroken and unsung... unfound.”
I kind of understood what she was getting at. “You think it’s that easy? I have to make a new path, not try to cut through into already established portals and ways?”
Tia shrugged. “Try cutting through somewhere in Ascension City with no link to the Void or the Lexicon or the books the Knights use. Somewhere familiar, maybe, but sealed from the rest of Forget.”
“It’s worth a shot,” Annie said, a hand on the grip of her service weapon. She was on guard, much like Ace, whom I could hear moving through the vines nearby, swinging his cudgel back and forth.
I gripped the hilt of Myth and raised the world-cutter before me, driving the tip once again into the fabric of reality. It stuck true, proper, and no bee stung me. Taking a deep breath, I pictured somewhere well known but inaccessible through the many and varied paths across worlds.
Columns of crystal... endless shelves... a grand foyer with a pristine marble floor... I felt the tip of the knife resonate in my hand and, with my eyes closed, I drew the blade down through the air. Warm light struck my face, visible through the lid of my one good eye. I opened that eye and beheld something wonderful.
Something old and new—and altogether impossible but made real.
Tia clapped me on the shoulder, grinning from ear to ear. We stared through the portal at the Forgetful Library in the heart of the Fae Palace.
Chapter Nineteen
Old London Town
Tia collected Ace from patrol, and we decided who was going and who was staying. Annie and I were going through, and Tia wanted to come with us. Ace shook his head and rested his wooden cudgel in the crook of his shoulder.
“Going back to town,” he said. “Going to find out who burned down the bar and have... words with them.”
Tia gave him a brief hug and a quick kiss on the cheek. Ace inclined his head to Annie, gave me a long, hard stare, and then disappeared into the night. Sheathing my sword and Myth, I was the first to step through the portal and into the library. Annie and Tia followed, our shoes trailing mud and grass from one world onto the clean marble floors of another.
Thankfully, there didn’t seem to be anyone about—none of the many scribes, librarians, and caretakers I knew maintained this impressive catalogue of Forgetful tomes. The Forgetful Library was a large place with thousands of miles of shelves. I could probably walk through one section all day long and never encounter another human being.
“So this is in Ascension City?” Annie asked. “Wow, would you look at all these books... There must be millions.”
“The true count is unknown,” I said. “This library, Annie, is kind of abstract. It technically shouldn’t exist, but it’s one of those areas of Forget that exists because it shouldn’t. As such, the Knights maintain and guard it. My grandfather, once upon a time, was the Chief Librarian—a position within Ascension City worthy of great respect. He fell, after the Tome Wars, like the best of us.”<
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Tia sighed. “Oh, really? I loved your granddad. Old Aloysius Hale. What happened?”
“He... Well, he...” I chuckled. “He wrote some propaganda that suggested I should be king, and he littered the city with it. Faraday sent him to Starhold. He was still there last I heard.”
“That’s awful,” Tia said.
Annie frowned. “Starhold sounds like a prison.”
I pointed up toward the high vaulted ceiling, through the clear glass windows, and at the blue sky. “It is. In orbit.”
Annie’s eyebrows shot up under her hairline. “Wow, okay. So what is this place then? Why shouldn’t it exist?”
“Kind of hard to explain,” I said. “Tia?”
She rolled her eyes. “The Forgetful Library, Annie, houses and shelves the Thrice-Kindly works.”
“Thrice-Kindly?”
“Three unique types of books,” I said, holding up the equivalent number of fingers. “Kind the First—The Forgetful Library contains every book never written. Kind the Second—The Forgetful Library contains every book that ever existed and was lost. And Kind the Third—The Forgetful Library contains every book found within books.”
Annie held up her hands. “That’s... absurd.”
“That’s abstract,” I said. “This place is thousands of years old. Legend has it books just appeared here. Books no one had read. Books that shouldn’t and didn’t exist.”
“Books within books,” Tia mused. “That was always my favorite.”
I nodded and smiled. “Mine too. Let’s get a move on, though. If I remember rightly, we’re on the forty-second floor of the Fae Palace. My brother holds court a hundred floors overhead.”
Annie had wandered over to one of the large, arched windows nearby. I heard her gasp and saw a hand fly to her breast. She stared, wide-eyed and shocked, at the expanse of what I knew was Ascension City. More than a little keen to see the place again for myself, I joined her at the window.
“This is simply incredible,” Annie whispered, and she found my hand and clasped it in her own. Her grip was strong, even frightened—awed. “Of all the things you’ve shown me so far, this is by far the most amazing.”
I was inclined to agree. Perth was my home now, but before the exile, I was a son of Ascension City. In time, I was also an Arbiter of the Knights Infernal and a lord ruling over all that we could see from this window. Which wasn’t a lot, all things considered. Just a slice of Ascension.
Tens of millions of people called this city their home. Of those millions, several hundreds of thousands were gifted with some measure of ability to use Will. If I hadn’t been locked from my power, I’d have been able to sense them. From low-level practitioners to the Knights Infernal themselves.
As it had done three months ago, during my last visit, the city looked magnificent.
A frightful but efficient mix of modern architecture and old, almost rural country towns. Massive skyscrapers tore at low-hanging clouds, and great bridges of steel and light connected the upper city to the ground far below, spiraling down through the middle high rises. We were about half a mile above the city streets and only about a quarter of the way up the length of the Fae Palace. Seen from one of the distant mountains on the horizon, the palace was a spire of white obsidian, eclipsing the height of the skyscrapers. Neon-blue light ran up the length of the palace, and a pyre of pure white fire burned on the summit.
“It’s all so... thrown together,” Annie decided and chuckled. “And clean. Everything looks so clean and shiny.”
“Like something out of a fairy tale,” I said and thought about letting go of her hand.
I had been told never to come back here. Cast into exile as the gods of old were... Now here I was breaking that exile for the second time in three months. But there was nothing for it, and if I’d read even a scrap of the situation right from Emily Grace and even Emissary, then perhaps I wouldn’t be executed on sight.
Perhaps. I’d survived a lot worse on a lot less than perhaps.
“We should keep moving,” Tia said, and I pulled Annie away from the window with some reluctance.
“Hold on,” Annie said and gazed out of the window again then back along the endless shelves that disappeared over a horizon within the library itself. She frowned, looked again, and then shook her head. “I don’t... It’s... The dimensions of this place—”
Ah, I knew what had her puzzled. “You ever watch that show with the alien flying around in the police box? Doctor Who?”
“God, yes, Brian loves it.”
“Well, the Fae Palace kind of has that bigger on the inside trick going on. A lot of inverted space and gateways to worlds within the palace itself.” I ran my hand along a smooth, crystal pillar. “The library is squeezed into a space far too small for it, but it exists here nevertheless. That’s why we can see the sky over our heads even though there’s another hundred or so floors to the palace above us. And take the Academy, for another example. It’s here, on one of the higher levels, but it covers a region of some ten square miles.”
“How’s that possible?” Annie asked as we began the trek toward the exit and the core of the palace.
“Will power, or Origin, as the old ones called it, and a whole load of carefully constructed gates and portals. You’ll see some of it if we get the chance. You step from a marble floor like this onto a cobblestone street under a bright sky. The Academy, technically, exists in a bubble on a hidden world, accessible only through this palace. The actual location, worlds and worlds away from here, is one of the Knights’ most closely guarded secrets.”
“Do you know where it is?”
“Few educated guesses, but we’re back to searching for needles in haystacks, really.” We were about to emerge in what had always been a heavily traversed area of the Forgetful Library. “Here.” I handed Myth to Annie. “Slip it under your jacket or into a pocket or something. Unless things have really changed here, you won’t be subjected to a search.”
“What? And you will?”
I nodded and caressed the hilt of my sword. “More than likely, given my status, but you should be treated as a guest. I don’t care if they take my star iron blade, but I’d rather hang on to Myth for as long as we can. It’ll make a good bargaining chip further down the line, if nothing else—or make for a quick getaway.”
Tia chuckled. “Rule One—always have a back-up plan.”
“They taught some of us too well,” I agreed.
*~*~*~*
We mingled in with the crowds, somewhat, given that I was an infamous exile, Tia was supposed to be dead, and Annie had never even set foot in the palace before five minutes ago.
The vast, cathedral-like central dome of the Forgetful Library was aflutter with activity. Scribes dressed in dusty robes carried stacks of books ten feet high, teetering back and forth but never falling—the ease of long practice. Narrow desks stretched around the dome in a half circle, and golden stanchions roped off with red velvet formed orderly lines for all the people requesting access to the library’s catalogues.
That strong, heady scent of old leather and vanilla permeated the air. I almost felt, for a moment, that I was back in my shop. But there was no scotch to be had here, and already I was attracting one or two stares and looks of uncertain disbelief. Surely that couldn’t be Declan Hale—I could almost hear the thoughts swirling around me.
“People are staring,” Annie said tightly, wise enough not to actually use my name out in the open.
“They’re just wondering how a guy like me can be lucky enough to have a beautiful woman on each arm.”
Tia snorted. “Actually, I think they’re trying to decide whether or not someone needs to come and cut your head off.”
In the end, it only took mere minutes for word to spread far and wide enough through the halls and twisting corridors of the palace to reach the ears of a Knight. Just as Annie, Tia, and myself were about to exit the Forgetful Library, we were met by a tall, older woman with short grey hair, wear
ing the dress robes of a Sentinel and resting her hand on the hilt of a curved Infernal blade.
She looked me up and down once, took note of my ruined eye, and nodded to herself. “Well aren’t you a sorry sight,” she said. “How did you get into the palace, Declan?”
“Hell, what makes you think I ever left?”
At that, she cracked half a smile. “With me,” she said. “Infirmary first, then you’re here to see your brother, I suppose?”
“Kinda felt like he was extending me an invitation, what with withdrawing all the Knights from True Earth and leaving Perth at the mercy of a creature that makes Voidlings look like fluffy kittens. How’ve you been, by the way, Instructor Marty?”
Glancing from Annie to Tia, the old Knight shrugged. “Didn’t think you remembered me, lad. You blazed through my warding course so fast you were almost a blur.”
Instructor Marty led us under her Knightly guard to the banks of ornate golden elevators used by the Knights to zoom up and down and around the palace. The Healers held offices on every few floors, and the nearest from memory was just two stops away. Using her special code on the gilded panel, which held a few hundred varied buttons, we made good time.
I got the sense that I wasn’t altogether unexpected, which put me a touch more at ease.
The young healer on duty almost fainted when she realized who I was, and it was only after a gruff word from Instructor Marty that she set to work on healing my eye. I was lying on a clinical hospital bed, and if not for the healer’s glowing hands, it could’ve passed for a room back on True Earth. After a few minutes of her shaking hand pressing against my face, I felt the ache diminish to almost nothing. However, I still couldn’t see. I told my healer as much.
“Might have left it too long,” she said. “When were you injured?”
“Four or five hours ago.”
She shook her head. “Has to be delicate work on something as fragile as an eye. Is the pain diminished? Good. You’ll have to come back tomorrow when Wiser Delaney is on duty. Eyes are her specialty.”