by Joe Ducie
“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 dual 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.
Annie’s comrades were still hot on our tail, weaving in and out of traffic. Red and blue sirens followed in our wake. I had to downshift as we took the bend onto the coast road, but it was a straight line to the harbor now, and we gained on Emissary.
Or he’s letting us catch up...
Annie rested her forearm on my shoulder alongside my head and pointed her gun up toward the swirling mass of shadow. She took aim, thought about deafening me, and lowered her arm with a growl. Above, Emissary laughed—his voice a dull roar not unlike crackling flame.
A minute later, we entered the car park of the harbor, a thousand lights from the jetty and boardwalk twinkling orange and white against the night. Emissary landed on the rooftops about a hundred meters away and disappeared from sight, just as a three-car cadre of police screeched to a halt behind my idling bike.
“Don’t move! Switch off the bike, mate!” shouted one of the officers. He held a hand on his gun, and his partner pointed a taser at my face.
Annie jumped off the bike and flashed her badge.
“Officer...?”
“Murie. Gary Murie, Detective.”
“Officer Murie, there’s a man here that just killed at least a dozen people in Joondalup. I’ve called in back-up and tac support, so you’re with me now. We’re going to take him down.”
“Who’s he?” Murie asked, slinging a thumb my way.
Annie stared at me, her gaze hot and lips pursed. “He’s... a consultant. This is Declan Hale.”
“Now that we’re all friends,” I said. “Don’t get in my way.”
I shifted down a gear and spun the back wheel of the bike, forcing Annie to jump aside, and then took off across the car park alone toward the boardwalk. I heard the detective and her officers calling after me, but I didn’t stop. They had no idea what they were dealing with and would just get in my way.
Crowds scattered and dived for cover as I drove down a small flight of limestone steps, onto a grassy barbeque area, and out onto a bridge spanning the water over the harbor. I used a convenient wheelchair ramp to avoid a set of wooden steps that led up onto the boardwalk and gunned the bike along a strip of
restaurants and bars, wide-eyed patrons gawking at me as I zipped past.
Where are you?
The boardwalk split the harbor in half. On one side were the docks and boats, on the other a strip of beach and a small fairground. If I kept following the boardwalk around, I’d end up back at the start in the car park where I’d abandoned Annie. So I stopped and listened for the screams.
They started soon enough, away to my right, toward the boats.
I could feel the vibrations of a hundred pairs of feet running and clamoring against the boardwalk, and something else—dull explosions, rattling the support pillars and shaking years of dust down from the corrugated roof panels.
My engine rumbling close to idle, I drove slowly through a maze of shops, passed Subway and Gloria Jean’s Coffee House, and followed a bend in the walkway around to an open area, roofless, seawater lapping at the wooden pillars on either side. I saw the flame before I saw the monster.
Eyes of coal, mouth stretched open wide enough to swallow a man, Emissary breathed ruby fire against the wooden boardwalk and up into the starry sky. The planks of wood and most of the storefronts burned like kindling. Whatever unnatural fire Emissary could produce, it stuck a lot like the sticky liquid-fire of napalm. Brothers Grimm dragon fire, I thought, thinking of the enchantment. A messy, unquenchable flame that devoured even the strongest steel and left behind scorched, blackened puddles. Fire with fire?
Emissary belched another wave of liquid flame, which writhed on the air as if it were a basket full of snakes, into an ice cream shop. The storefront exploded.
People—men, women, and children—emerged screaming from the shop, aflame, and hurled themselves over the side of the boardwalk and into the dark ocean water below. The water shone eerily green, and steam rose in furious curls as the fire fought the ocean to stay alive.
I clenched my fist around the handlebar grip of my bike and revved the engine, seeing if I could get Emissary’s attention. He turned slowly, offered me a large, goofy grin, flame dancing between his teeth, and waved. I waved back and prepared a quick enchantment. Luminescent light swam in the air between my fingers.