by Joe Ducie
The wavering firelight was disorienting to my one good eye, after the ethereal light outside. I blinked a few times and got my bearings. The corridor ahead, all spider webs and dust, seemed to head underground.
I sighed and rubbed my arms. The way forward felt cold and lonely, but turning back was not an option.
Off we trotted, our footsteps echoing in the hollow space, and I couldn’t help but keep glancing at Tal, making sure she was still there. To see her again was like a dream come true—a dream wrapped in an Everlasting nightmare, to be sure, but now and again I was allowed to live in the present and not worry on the future.
The corridor widened and revealed a dimly lit chamber, held up by crumbling pillars that seemed to lean like loose fence posts. Still doing their job of holding the roof in place, but one good gust of wind away from unemployment. More torches lined the walls, illuminating a colorful mosaic. Although covered in centuries of dust, the tiles on the wall were clear and told quite the story—one I’d heard before, as a fairytale told with slight smiles, as if it couldn’t possibly be true.
“Holy hell,” I said, lowering the shotgun. “This is the story of how the Knights were founded in Atlantis, ten millennia ago…” I circled the room, avoiding the curious white platform in its heart for now, and read the story as best I could from the ancient hieroglyphs interspersed between the vast pictures. “An order of men, to fight the blight…”
Tal followed silently in my wake. I was more aware of her presence, like a hot flame on my back, than anything else in the chamber.
“Something… It’s old Infernal, I can’t quite make it out… Something about a Knight lost to the ages. The Everlasting waged war against True Earth and ravaged the planet until only Atlantis was left, the last bastion against the blight.”
“Yes,” Oblivion snarled in Tal’s voice. I didn’t turn, not wanting to see his eyes marring her pretty face. “Eternally vexing, that city. We had the planet, True Earth—we had it! All save one small corner that somehow managed to forge the prisons and banish us for ten thousand years. Curse that wretched hive and all who called it home!”
“How did Atlantis end up on the Plains of Perdition, then?” I asked. “If it was originally on Earth?”
Oblivion was silent for a long moment, perhaps deciding whether or not to tear out my spine. “The Atlanteans forfeited their city to a Voidflood in order to ensure my imprisonment. They purposely opened the Void above the planet. What remained of Atlantis, and all its wonders and treasures, washed up further down the Story Thread and far from True Earth. Lost to time, my prison—until you came along, Hale.”
Atlantis had fought the Everlasting Oblivion by hurling the bastard and their city into a Voidflood?
“Wow.” Now that was certainly a piece of forgotten history. The Atlanteans were lucky the flood hadn’t overwhelmed the entire planet. “I guess they thought it crazy enough to work.”
“Yes,” Tal said, and it was Tal again. “Don’t get any ideas. True Earth used to have two moons, before this... debacle.”
I turned and grunted. We’d reached the end of the story told on the mosaic. It ended just as Oblivion had said, with the city washed away in a great flood. I guess that’s where the myth on Earth comes from… The flood that drowned Atlantis did happen. A Voidflood.
I hadn’t seen any corridors or doorways in the chamber leading elsewhere through the pyramid. A dead end, for all that I could tell.
But there was that platform of pure white stone in the center of the chamber, seemingly untouched by time or dust. The platform, rising just a foot off the floor, looked simultaneously inviting and ominous. I could almost smell unseen enchantment breathing through the smooth marble.
“That looks like it may descend, doesn’t it?” I asked, speaking mostly to myself. “Down in to depths unknown. Goblin town, eh? You want to go first?”
Tal smirked as we walked over to the heart of the room and stood just before the platform. “Ever the gentleman, aren’t you?”
“Got you fooled.” I took a deep breath, a touch apprehensive at how well this venture seemed to be going so far. “I’ll go first then, but tell me, what’s your favorite story, Tal?”
“I haven’t read it yet,” she replied.
“Oh, good answer.” I stepped onto the platform, and the old stone shivered and began to sink into the floor. The grinding sound of stone on stone echoed through the chamber. From above, a thin beam of white light shone down on me, as if I were on stage under a spotlight.
I squinted against the brightness, and when it dimmed, I was no longer in the Tomb of the Sleeping Goddess. I no longer had only one good eye to my name and a possessed girlfriend escorting me down to goblin town with one helluva malevolent monkey on her back.
I hadn’t felt a thing—no step between worlds, no teleport, no impending sense of the Void pressing close. In less than a heartbeat, I’d simply appeared somewhere else, without my awesome demigod-slaying shotgun.
Somewhen else, I realized, as I got a hold on my new surroundings and found them familiar.
I was young. I was a kid.
In a single step I’d not only crossed worlds but time.
Bugger.
SALVO II – PUT YOUR LIPS ON ME FOR NO GOOD REASON
Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies — "God damn it, you've got to be kind."
—Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Chapter Fourteen
Old and New
I was seated in a comfortable green leather armchair in front of a drooping old table stacked with about a hundred books. Disoriented after having lost sight of the tomb and Tal, I whipped my head around to get a good look at just where I’d ended up.
Funnily enough, it was somewhere awfully familiar. I’d been getting a lot of that lately—a sense of familiarity. It was worrying, in an I’ve-got-bigger-problems kind of way.
I wasn’t alone.
Tia Moreau, my old mentor when I was in school, waved her hand in front of my face. “Hale?” She snapped her fingers. “You’re zoning out, kid.”
I tried to focus on her, but my gaze was drawn to the room around us. We sat in one of the small study nooks built in the outer wings of the library at the Infernal Academy, surrounding the perimeter of a wide quadrangle of garden and just up the road from Edgar’s, the oldest and greatest pub in Forget.
I’m in a memory. Come on, get it together—you knew this would happen. You’re still in the tomb with Tal. Some enchantment is just dicking around in your head…
It wasn’t quite like the memory-journey experience in Scion’s temple on the Dream Worlds with Annie. Similar, yes, but not the same. Here I was a part of the memory, as if it were happening again at that very moment—or as it had happened on that day in the past. Last time, I’d just been an observer, unseen and confused.
Now I have to participate? Is that how we journey on?
Tia was looking at me, a severe frown of disapproval on her stern, lovely, teenage face. This had to be at least ten years ago, probably a few more.
Well, there were worse memories that the enchantments could have recreated.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. Of Tal, of Oblivion, there was no sign. Which made sense, I supposed. I hadn’t known Tal when that memory had taken place. “So what’s the plan?”
“You have to retrieve four elements, using your wits and the books in this room,” Tia said. “You’ve got an hour to construct a reality beacon that harmonizes between the Academy and our bases on Avalon. Easy, for the most part, but I bet the worlds in between will hold a few surprises.”
We were definitely in the Infernal Academy—which existed on a world hidden from all tomes and accessible only through the Fae Palace in Ascension City. Night had fallen outside, and I glimpsed my reflection in one of the long windows.
I was a kid. Thirteen, at the most, when this had happened. And so much more had happened since that I only vaguely recalled this memory at all.
“Huh,” I said, admiring my old trainee uniform in the window—a charcoal suit of enchanted cloth, trimmed in braided yellow around the shoulders and down the button line. I wore an empty sheath for what would, in a year or two, hold my Infernal blade—something they had taken from me a few years later, just after the Degradation and just before my exile. “Time flies.”
“Where are you tonight?” Tia asked, exasperated. She was pretty and tiny, just about five feet even. I think she looked so young to me because she didn’t yet carry the worry lines or the scar that cut her face in two. Her lightly freckled nose was unblemished, her eyes were full of yet-to-be-corrupted life and her raven-black hair was pulled back in an easy ponytail. “Concentrate, or we’ll fail.”
“Sure. Right. You’re still as sweet as lilies in May, Tia.” I cleared my throat and tapped on the old wooden table with my knuckles. “Reality beacons. Cool. I know all about those.”
Blimey, it had been a while since I’d had need to create a beacon. Truth be told, once I’d graduated, I’d had a slew of less powerful Willful at my disposal to do what was, if I were being cruel, grunt work—and if I were being less cruel, basic programming for charting paths through the Void. Reality beacons were installed on starships and cruisers, or the trains at the Atlas Lexicon. They could be used to navigate universes like lighthouses in mist, to avoid treacherous shores.
“So the assignment is pretty straightforward and your mentor,” Tia grinned and winked, “can only intervene if you’re going astray.” She fixed me with a fierce glare. “Do not go astray. This may only be a few theory points toward your grade, but it’s worth fifteen percent of my final in Leadership.”
I struggled to keep a wry smile from my face and gave Tia a quick, sure nod. Broken quill, but it was absurd to think there had ever been a time when we worried about grades and results. A time when we cared what the Knights above thought of us and our progress. A time when we wanted to fight a war.
Young and stupid, the pair of us.
As for the assignment, the memory may have been a touch buried in my head, but I’d remembered. Tia and I would find the raw elements for the beacon easy enough, but at each off-world site was an ambush of lesser Forgetful spawn. It was my first real test without an instructor, just a fellow student. Tia was my senior by three years, at that point in our training, and she was more than capable of dealing with the parameters of the assignment.
“So what do we need to make this work?” Tia asked.
I looked around again, searching for a glimpse of the tomb or of Tal through the walls of this illusion, but the memory was complete. Outside the room, the Academy hustled and bustled, and inside it, I could hear the creak of the joints in our chairs, smell the old books, and taste the library dust in the air. It seemed the only way ahead—indeed, the only option I had to get out of the memory—was to play the game.
I took a breath and blew the air out between my lips in a huff. “Okay. Reality beacons. The four elements we need are earth and stone from the Academy and from Avalon, a codex pod, and some sundrops. Also Byrd’s Elemental Pathway Inscriptions… Volume Two… to transcribe the enchantments.”
“Volume Four,” Tia corrected. “Not so much of a hotshot when it comes to the theory, are you?”
Well it’s been over a decade, through a war or two, and once into the jaws of death since I had need to check my math, sweetheart… “More of a hands-on son of a gun, Miss Moreau.”
Tia frowned, bemused, and I had to remember I was only just thirteen. Am I really here? It was mere illusion, pulled from my mind, wasn’t it?
I was more than a touch concerned that I found it hard to tell reality from the fiction. Story of my life, for the most part. I kept trying to see some flaw in the memory, some small glitch in the illusion, but it was seamless. In all the ways that mattered, I was there.
“So what do we know about codex pods?” Tia asked.
“They’re grown from channels of Will funneled through an irrigation system in East Ascension markets. About five gems apiece, yeah?”
“Pretend for a moment you don’t have access to the markets. Where would you look?” She gestured to the stacks of books on the table. Hundreds of worlds in hundreds of pocket universes, all within arm’s reach.
“The natural glades on Mandeelos,” I said.
Tia raised an eyebrow and smirked. She picked up a book from the top of a stack. Blythe’s Fall of Heaven, a sci-fi adventure that spanned a whole galaxy of bright and sparkling worlds—one of which held codex pods. “Mandeelos. You know it’s not settled, right? Could be anything there.”
I grinned. “Then what are we still doing here? Mandeelos also orbits a blue supergiant. We can get our sundrops at the same time.”
Tia blinked, and I realized she was impressed. She hadn’t thought of combining the worlds. Two birds, one interdimensional portal through the Void.
“Well,” she said, “do you have your earth and stone from the Academy? Probably best to get that first before we dive across to Mandeelos. That way we can head straight to Avalon. How long do you have before the pod turns sour?”
I slapped my forehead and nodded. “Yeah, of course.” Codex pods, once plucked from the vine, had a limited shelf life. They needed to be refrigerated or used, or they withered and died. Again, I was a long, violent decade away from having to know all the theory. “Stone and dirt first. I’ll be right back.”
I left Tia twiddling her thumbs and stepped outside into a warm night.
The small study room on the ground floor of the Academy’s library bordered a nice patch of green grass in the quadrangle garden. I heard revelry and merriment from Edgar’s on the air and thought about testing the bounds of the illusion. Could I get a drink?
No, even though for the moment I was a kid again, I still had memories of the years to come and, in the future, was still working on being sober. I’d spent the best part of the last five years in a drunken stupor. My liver was scotch-proof but highly flammable. So far I’d lasted a good few months off the booze. Not a day or even an hour went by that I didn’t want a drink, but one could never make the argument I was short of willpower.
Still, something amber and aged would have taken the edge off my nerves.
I didn’t have time to saunter down memory lane. I had Tal to worry about—and Emily all alone in a forest soon to be overrun by Emissary and Orc Mare.
Time or not, I guessed I could enjoy the glimpse of the past while it lasted. But no sense in dragging it out.
I headed into the garden and grabbed a fistful of soil and tiny pebbles, plenty of source material for the reality beacon, to tether the Academy to a faraway land through the Void.
Avalon, the assignment called for, which was a link to the mess I was in at that very moment—that is, in the future, from the perspective of this memory. Before Avalon had been swept away in the Voidflood, it had been an outpost of the Knights Infernal. And from the timeline of this memory, it was set to become the site of one of the hardest fought battles in the hundred-year history of the Tome Wars.
I turned back to the study room, and the memory changed.
Again, there was no sense of stepping between worlds, but reality simply reeled forward a slide, and I was somewhere new and familiar. The fistful of pebbles and dirt also disappeared.
“Guess we’re not making reality beacons today…” I muttered.
In this memory I was older, but not by much. A year, at most, maybe a shade under. Fit, healthy, and full of ambition that would one day—one day soon—tear worlds apart.
The sun shone bright and warm overhead, and I was wading through knee-deep mud with three dozen of my classmates. We were running the physical obstacle course on the far fields of the Academy’s training wing as fast as we could. Course record, set by me, was eleven minutes, twelve seconds—if memory served, and
why wouldn’t it here?
I wondered briefly if that record had been broken yet in the present.
Tia was with me again, a grim, determined smile on her face. She, my mentor, yanked me forward, and we surged through the sludge, firing beams of concentrated Will at targets that popped up from the sidelines or fell from above. The funny little wooden targets had snarling, monstrous faces painted on them—at the time, I hadn’t been clever enough to see it, but the Academy had trained us well to be soldiers and killers. Life at the Academy had made us want to be soldiers and killers.
And I’d been the best recruit those bastards had ever seen, rivaled only by a scant few such as Tal, Marcus, Tia… and Clare Valentine.
The whole memory shuddered as my thoughts settled on Clare, and I went from being near-submerged in cold muck to stumbling on a hardwood dance floor. Why am I being shown these memories? Why Tia? And what do I have to do to break the enchantment? Oh, and the latest memory was pleasantly unfair. One of my favorites, remembered only with a fondness for something I once had but could never have again.
I was dancing with a pretty girl—Clare, who ended up dying for me. We were amongst friends, and fast music played through the air in the dim light of the bar. Everything was as I remembered it, of course. Every face, every corner of the bar—
Everything except the menacing and otherworldly stone arch resting on the stage near the far wall. A crooked arch of obsidian stone, polished to a fine glassy sheen. For no reason, I hated and feared that arch the moment I saw it. The arch framed a rippling portal of neon-blue energy.
“What’s wrong?” Clare Valentine asked, moving against me with a little more pressure. Her breath was warm and carried the pleasing scent of some strawberry-flavored vodka.