by Joe Ducie
The Void expanded and gave way to a lush, green world at the end of the day, a can of twilit mauve paint spilt across the cloudless sky. Fields of crops, of delicious honeyberries, both capable of producing a potent liquor and the best cure for a hangover this side of a shotgun, stretched to the horizon, nestled in the arms of a horseshoe valley of snow-capped mountains.
The town, the mini-city, of Meadow Gate sat on a hill in the heart of the valley, overlooking the fields, the crops, herds of wild horses, and the network of trickling streams and rivers. Meadow Gate was, in a word or two, refuge from the storm.
The Tome Wars—what the Everlasting, in their arrogance, considered a minor conflict—had spanned a century, already running for eighty years before I was born, and had devastated the human worlds of the Story Thread. Some of it had spilled onto True Earth and fuelled a world war or two. For the most part, the Knights had managed to keep the fighting from the real world. The Renegades, a broken and splintered faction of the Knights, who saw themselves more as pirates than caretakers, had thought to seize control of vast amounts of territory across the Story Thread.
Territory I now owned, in a way, thanks to Astoria’s mantle of power. I was a renegade after all. I didn’t quite want to use the word divine, but what she had willed me felt right, certain. I owned the land, the stars. I was their steward and, by default, their protector.
Meadow Gate, for a wonder, was part of the territory bestowed upon me. I felt at home here, a sense of home, as if I knew every rock in the valley, every gust of wind. Was this how the Everlasting always felt? This… connected and unstoppable? I decided then and there it would be best to shy away from using the mantle. I would bargain with it, even use it if I had to, but I’d read enough books and seen enough movies to know that this was one fucker of a slippery slope.
Enough to challenge the Everlasting—I didn’t want to become like them.
More than you already are? Oblivion growled.
I realised with a start I’d been thinking aloud, in my mind, and old ageless and ugly had been listening.
‘I’m nothing like you,’ I said.
“Your ambition, your resolve, is everlasting, Declan Hale.”
Shadowman, Lord Dusk, grinned at me. He plucked a juicy and golden honeyberry orb from the vine and popped it into his mouth. The juice squelched down his chin and he sighed, satisfied.
“After this unexpected business is concluded, brother,” Oblivion said. “The child dealt with. I propose we travel to Ascension City and unseat the Knights Infernal. It is for this reason, within this husk of a shadow, I have chosen to emerge from my dormancy.”
Oblivion scratched at the rough stubble on my cheeks. We were still dressed in our fancy funeral suit, immaculate, he wore it well, cloak billowing softly in the breeze. There was no breeze, which meant he was making it billow. Vanity? An air of menace? Just when I thought I glimpsed a piece of understanding about my possessor, that glimpse changed into something else.
“They have become too…” He twirled my fingers in the air. “…certain. Too comfortable in their seats of power.”
“Our vessels are proof of that unacceptable certainty,” Dusk agreed. “They must be cleansed.”
‘You’re in for a fight,’ I said.
As if reading my thoughts, Oblivion and Dusk gazed at one another’s clothes and then clapped their hands together, muttering under their breath. The clothes changed from the funeral garb to something more street savvy. I wore my usual jeans, black shirt and an open vest, where Shadowman was a little more formal in a white buttoned shirt and vest.
Oblivion laughed at the matching change of dress. He and Dusk strolled along the main road, cobblestones and old carts, way stations and shuttle craft, up the hillside and into Meadow Gate proper. Like most of the occupied worlds of the Story Thread, those that had started out as story and become more real—certain—Meadow Gate was a mix of old and modern, the past and the future, in terms of technology and civilisation.
Farmers hoed at the fields, shirtless in the sun, happy for the simple day’s work, while teenagers zipped about the town on hover craft and skateboards, like that old time travel movie with the DeLorean. Holographic interface stations offered deals in the markets, sights to see around the town, next to wooden stalls bearing fruits and vegetables, overseen by an old nanna in apron—every inch of her a tried and true stereotype, save the pipe she bit in the corner of her mouth. Scented smoke, blue on the air, rose from that pipe. In my mind’s mind, I caught the scent of lavender, lilac.
Which way, Hale? Oblivion asked.
‘Bite me.’
“You, woman,” Oblivion said, and consulted my stolen memories, “which way to the bar known as Reminiscence.”
“Apples on special,” she said to the Everlasting as old as creation. “Copper a dozen, pretty.” She squinted at Dusk, my rough twin. “Ya brother looks like he could use the vitamins, true. Under the weather, dear?”
Dusk glanced at the sky. “Yes, I am under the weather.”
“You look familiar, as sure if you don’t,” she said to me. “Scowl all ya wants, boy, but I’ve seen that mug of yars before.”
Of course she had. I was something of an infamous war criminal, or the Hero of the Tome Wars, depending on who you asked. I had been exiled, banned without it being explicitly stated, from Meadow Gate about a year and a half ago. The mayor himself had pomp and circumstance’d his way on down to Tia’s home and told me to get the hell out. I had taken my time, and the town had firebombed Tia’s bar for her trouble in keeping me around. That incident was how I’d lost my now healed left eye.
Sort of come full circle, in a way, though the poor people of this town were in for a surprise if they turned on me as I was now.
I could feel Oblivion’s ire, the building rage. He’d obliterate this woman for kicks, because it pleased him. ‘Head up the street,’ I said with a sigh. ‘Take a left into the narrow lanes beyond the market, then wind around the side of the hill. You’ll see the bar’s shingle on the left, overlooking the eastern valley.’
Oblivion abandoned the woman, Dusk falling into place next to him, and followed my directions. We attracted some curious glances, and also a few knowing glances, from people who quickly turned and hurried away. Word would spread, as word often did, that the Shadowless Arbiter was in town.
We reached Tia’s bar just after sunset, the first stars pricking the navy-blue canvas overhead, and found the door open, the hearth burning warm, and the gentle sound of laughter and merriment echoing from within. Through the great glass windows, I glimpsed old wooden tables, candle lit ambience, soft cushions and what was, at first and last glance, a tavern to stand as bulwark against terror and the night.
Oblivion and Dusk, terror and night, stepped over the threshold under the wooden board sign that read: The Reminiscence. During the Tome Wars, Tia Moreau had commanded a ship with that name, and lost it to the Void—in those final days, where up was down and madness was the only sane choice, she had done her duty as a Knight Infernal. Indeed, as far as the Knights were concerned, Tia was long dead—another name on the endless list of casualties during that war.
If they ever found out she was here, it would be interesting. They’d want her back. She was a fighter, a scrapper, with the devil’s own luck. She was me, without the drunken mistakes. Though after the war I’d opened a bookshop and made it a bar, Tia had opened a bar and made it a home.
I strolled into that bar against my will—everything was against my will at the moment—and my mind raced. A sense of danger, something I always felt, pinged into the red. Someone was going to die, that was a damned given, unless I took away the Everlasting’s reason to be here.
And, a thought for the vault, I couldn’t do that without betraying Annie Brie and certainly dooming her to torture and death for the whereabouts of my son.
A few of the tables were occupied, farmers and workmen at the end of a day spent in the fields. They took one look at me, my face, a
nd that of my corrupted twin, and left their drinks unfinished, clattering out of Tia’s bar, falling over one another in their hurry to leave. I was recognised. The mob wouldn’t be far behind.
Tia stood behind the bar, polishing glassware, lining up colourful bottles of alien liquor, and met my eyes as Oblivion sat down on a velvet-lined stool. Dusk, as if he were merely spectating, took a seat next to me. At five feet and a dime, Tia barely stood taller than the bar itself. Her face, meant to be young, that of her late twenties, carried the lines and cares of the Tome Wars—emerald green eyes, raven-black hair, and an old scar that cut that pretty face in half, crossed the space between her eyes, down the bridge of her nose, and into her cheek.
She was beautiful, as only the broken can be.
“Not that I don’t enjoy these visits, Declan,” she said with a grin, reaching for three whisky glasses, “but you never show up unless you want something. Or are running from something. Or have just set something ancient and powerful on fire. So, which is it?”
She poured three very healthy glugs into each glass, double for her, and shot the whisky across the bar to me with the ease of long practice—to Oblivion and Dusk.
“Your… brother?” she said, tilting her head to Dusk. “But you don’t have a brother. Whatever he is, he doesn’t look well.”
Oblivion said nothing. Dusk said nothing. They sipped at their whisky, found it to their liking, and beheld Tia beyond the bar.
Tia sighed and I saw, physically saw, the net of Will she cast—a subtle, low incantation, and forbidden in Meadow Gate—to touch on my mind and that of Dusk. The thinnest tendril of power touched my body and Tia’s eyes widened. She fell back against her shelves, knocking bottles from on high, which shattered around her in shards and rivers of spilt booze.
“So,” she rasped and managed to collect her tumbler of whisky. She took a gulp, and then another. “So, not Declan, then. Or not just Declan…”
“No, child,” Oblivion whispered. “You are in the presence of the Everlasting.”
Tia’s eyes widened again, but only slightly this time—she had regained some control. She licked her lips. “Is Declan…?”
‘I’m here, Tia.’
“He lives, but is of no consequence to you, should you wish to survive.”
And now instead of widening, Tia rolled her eyes. “Zero to threats in like ten seconds, buddy. Great work.”
Dusk chuckled, then threw back Shadowman’s head and laughed, high and clear, whisky sloshing from the glass and onto his jeans.
“That’s a dangerous face to wear,” Tia said. “Even if you are… who you claim to be. That face has enemies.”
“We fear not the Knights Infernal.”
Tia nodded slowly. “You should. Rumour has it two of you fell, one very recently, to the Knights Infernal—to Declan.”
“Rumour has it, does it?” Dusk said, maintaining some semblance of sanity despite his ageless deceit. “How swiftly foul news travels. We have only just mourned my sisters, and already you vermin gossip.”
Tia glanced beneath the bar and I knew she’d have something—a sword, a gun, something. She also had another bartender, a man named Ace, a big bear of a man, a tough, who dealt with unruly customers. I was glad he wasn’t here. He’d already be a smear on the wall. Tia, to her credit, didn’t make a move toward the weapon. It was folly.
“What is it you want then?” she asked.
“The Shadowless Arbiter, he birthed a child with our sister, Fair Astoria, before her grace failed. We seek the child.”
Tia took a moment to process all that, her brow creasing, her lovely scar stretching over her freckled nose. “Declan’s a father, truly? Oh, that’s terrible. That poor kid…” She shook her head. “Why are you here? I didn’t even know he’d been so reckless.”
Oof, that hurt.
“He visited this establishment on the night the child was born. He sat in this stool, hooded, hidden. I have glimpsed this memory,” Oblivion said. “I know it to be true. He brought the child here.”
Tia kept on shaking her head. “I never spoke to him, never saw him. If he was here, he did me a favour and kept me out of it.”
That was the truth. I’d seen Tia singing on the stage across the lounge, happy and alive, the crowd singing along with her, and decided to leave her alone. So much for my choices. Reckless, she had said, and in every way that mattered—yes, yes I had been. Wagering short term victory for what would, inevitably, be long term defeat.
“Why do you want the kid?” Tia asked.
“He is our nephew,” Dusk said. “Should he not meet his uncles?”
The elder god slipped his glass back across the bar. Tia refilled it, to the brim, the edge of the pour chattering only a little, giving away her nerve, against the crystal tumbler, and sent it cruising on back.
‘Let me speak with her,’ I said, and Oblivion scoffed.
Tell me where to find the boy, or she dies, he replied.
I was a hard bastard when I wanted to be. I’d lost friends and family enough to put on a one-man theatre show full of regret and folly. ‘Then… she dies.’
Sorry, Tia.
Tia may have read some of the conversation on my face. She nodded to herself. “He’s in there, isn’t he? Declan. You’re a real bastard, you know that.”
I knew it.
“Speak to him not,” Dusk said. “We’ve had enough of him this day.”
“Getting more than you bargained for with those faces, aren’t you?”
Oblivion scowled but Dusk laughed again. “The bad moon rises,” he said.
“Creedence Clearwater Revival,” Tia replied. “We get that one a lot on karaoke night. You boys should come back then. You’d be a hit, I’m sure.”
“I do not believe this slip of a girl knows anything of use, Oblivion.”
Tia Moreau pointed a finger at him. “That is true.”
“We should kill her anyway. If for no other reason than it would upset the Shadowless Arbiter,” Dusk finished.
Tia took a step back. “Hey, now.”
Willing to bargain—your knowledge or your stolen grace—to save her life? Oblivion asked.
‘Creatures of honesty, your Father said. Old Quirinus. If we make a bargain, you are bound to honour it.’
Yes, Declan Hale. At the cost of our grace should we break our accord.
I nodded and slammed a fist against the wall of the brig in my mind, wishing I could break through the door, seized the bridge, shoot Oblivion out of an airlock. The drops of water falling from the crack in the corner increased. ‘Then go fuck yourself.’
Oblivion snapped his head back and I saw the surprise turn to anger in the mirror behind Tia’s bar. Tia saw it, as well, and turned to run.
For a wonder, the Everlasting let her run. Let her flee out the back of the bar. I was relieved only for a moment, wondering what I’d missed, when Oblivion and Dusk rose from their stools.
“He is proving difficult to deal with,” Lord Oblivion said. “How about your vessel? Does the remnant lore, the shadow, not have the knowledge we seek?”
Dusk shook his head slowly. “They are one and the same, as you know. This was your doing, brother. The lives have forged them as hard as diamond, as immovable as mountains. We’ve only ourselves to blame, in a way. His dealings with the Everlasting have… hardened him, against what should be our inarguable influence. An immunity, in a way.”
Oblivion reached over the bar for the half-empty bottle of whisky and slugged another shot from the glass rim. “He has lost too much, too often, to have any regard for… his friends? His family?”
Dusk nodded and crossed his arms over his chest. His face, Shadowman’s face, took on a speculative glamour. “Even the child, his son, our nephew… I wonder. I do not think he’s protecting the boy so much out of any parental responsibility he feels, but because denying us what we want is his only mandate. All he knows how to do.”
Oblivion growled but nodded.
“
It would take a great deal of persuasion to convince him to flip the switch, as it were, and help us.”
“Astoria managed it,” Oblivion said. Night had fallen outside, the flickering flames in the fireplace across the lounge dancing tall shadows across the walls of Tia’s bar.
“Astoria,” Dusk said, and the infinite sadness in his voice was irrelevant. “She loved him, truly. Loved him enough to forfeit her grace, to make herself mortal enough to conceive a child. Ever she was the cruellest of us, brother. The most unpredictable.”
“I miss her,” Oblivion said. “Miss her as she was before the Shadowless Arbiter—proud, beautiful, incorruptible.” He turned his head, my head, to look me in the eye in the grand, golden mirror behind Tia’s bar. “You took something irreplaceable from us, Declan.”
And that was the first time he had used my name, just my first name, as if talking to me as a person—and not as a vessel, a host, or the Shadowless Arbiter.
‘I asked for none of this,” I said.
“You meddled beyond your ken and expect salvation because the currents pulled you into the dark, swirling depths beyond the shore? Where most of your kind are content to paddle, ignorant and afraid of the dark, and thus saved?”
I considered his words in that dim, steel-blue prison cell, six feet by nine, a single door of unbreakable plate glass between me and the rest of my mind. A figure appeared to me, the Shadowman, dressed as he was out in the real world.
I raised an eyebrow and Shadowman held a finger to his lips, shushing me.
Hey, pal, I thought, gazing at my shadow. That thought was like three levels deep, with my mind’s mind’s… mind. Or something. It was a thought just for me, though I think the Shadowman saw it on my face. He grinned, teeth crooked and yellow. The Void had really fucked him up, and last we met, he had fallen back into it alongside Scarred Axis.