Knight Fall

by Joe Ducie

  As I approached the palace, its white walls grew larger, hung with flags and banners of a thousand different worlds. The sun was at my back, so I wasn’t in the palace’s shadow, but I felt an immense chill regardless. The history of the tower spanned millennia.

  I would not be responsible, in whole or in part, for its destruction.

  I stepped into the cool, quiet foyer of the Fae Palace without question or alarm. I’d breached the inner sanctum, the very seat of power in Forget, and only been waylaid once by a kid wearing armor two sizes too big.

  But as was usually the way when it came to physical security, getting through the first and often easiest layer made accessing the inner layers a walk in the park. That was why a person with a confident smile and a clipboard could saunter into the cockpit of a 747.

  Or ex-exiles and feared three-headed warmongers could amble into the most heavily fortified structure in the known universes.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Shadow Games

  Word spread through the palace like wildfire, as the best gossip always did, and I was quickly ushered by a series of low-level Guardian Knights up through the levels and echelons of command to the War Room. It seemed I was expected, perhaps even overdue. On my previous visits, I’d been graced by the presence of the ruling class in front of the Dragon Throne itself, but with the palace on high alert and the throne far too open to bombardment from on high, Faraday and his motley crew had set up shop in the heart of the palace.

  The War Room was a high-tech, modern facility in contrast to the old marble, grand white pillars, and archaic tradition of the rest of the palace. Dozens of staff and knights manned access points, monitors, private world-portal arches, and stocked shelves with tomes enough to unmake empires, if that was what the situation called for. Across the room on the far wall hung a massive monitor the size of a movie theater screen, which depicted a real-time image of the Blade of Spring, Shadowman’s stolen vessel, overlaid with a display of live-updating military options. Deep within the bowels of the palace, a network of impossibly powerful computers processed hundreds of thousands of data streams and generated strategy.

  High Lord and King of the Knights Infernal Jon Faraday stood in front of the screen, his hands clasped behind his back, looking a lot better than he had the last time we met, surrounded by his retinue and listening to reports being rattled off by his advisors.

  As I approached, he held up his hand for silence, and the crowd obeyed. “Hello, little brother.” He offered me a cunning smile, as if he’d been waiting for me. “You are late.”

  “Hello, Jon. I was never summoned.”

  “A contingent was sent to that quaint shop of yours on True Earth not twenty-four hours ago. Imagine our surprise to learn you’d fled worlds—with the Immortal Queen, no less.”

  Jon Faraday, my half-brother on my father’s side, was a man of average height. His shaven head rested on a thick neck, and he wore a resplendent red coat with gold trim to hide a thick layer of corded muscle. A few months before, Jon had been withered and dying, branded by Emissary, and signs of that affliction were still carried in the canyons under his eyes. But other than that, he was the epitome of health and leadership, the bastard.

  “Ethan and Sophie?” I asked.

  “They were aboard the Blade when your darker half seized control of the vessel. We believe he’s using the Historian to predict our response pattern.”

  “That’s what I’d do…” I muttered. That’s what you are doing. All the computing power in the universe couldn’t match the Historian’s brain and what she could See. “So my friends are his hostages. Who else is aboard?”

  “Apart from Sophie Levy, Ethan Reilly, and the Historian,” King Faraday said, “no one. The Blade is built for minimal crew, operated through a control visor. Your shadow has taken sole command of the deadliest ship in the fleet. He disintegrated a boarding party vessel, killing four Knights.”

  I rubbed the split skin on my knuckles and couldn’t remember when I’d hurt them. Somewhere on Old Voraskel, most likely. Absently I used what meager talent I had in healing to seal the abrasions, buying myself a few moments to think. “That’s my ship,” I said after I’d spent my few moments. “All things being even, it should have been mine. And I want it back.”

  “By all means, if you have a recovery option that doesn’t end with an aerial bombardment of this palace and the city, we are eager to hear it.” Faraday scratched at the stubble on his chin, his eyes piercing me with something that I had once thought was hate. Now I wasn’t so sure, given that we seemed to be on something of an even footing. “A weapon of celestial illusion up your sleeve, mayhap?”

  “No, I broke one and gave the other to the Everlasting Oblivion.”

  Faraday’s eye twitched, and a vein in his temple seemed to throb to a tango beat. The folk around us all gaped, gasped, or let out strangled whispers.

  “Long story,” I said. “Ends with the Immortal Queen dying on Old Voraskel…” Thoughts of Emily made me sway. I already missed her something fierce. “But we’ve more pressing matters at the moment. Order of priorities, yeah? Have we tried talking to the son of a bitch up there?” I gestured with my thumb to the ship on the screen. “Maybe he wants to negotiate.”

  Faraday took a long moment before replying. “You are one of us again now, Declan,” he said, his voice thick with the command of someone used to being the king. “Remember that before handing our enemies weapons of mass destruction. Are you so eager to be branded ‘traitor’?”

  “Or to be exiled?” I asked, sporting half a smirk. “What you’ve never been able to swallow, Jon, is that I fall ass backwards into these roles that make me indispensable. You need me; I don’t need you. Right now you need me because I’m the only one who can hide from the Historian’s sight. Shadowless, I’m not even a blip on her radar. That’s what I’ve got up my sleeve, King Faraday, but first we should have a chat with the bastard.”

  Faraday nodded. “Hail the Blade.”

  One of the faces seated in front of the giant screen barked a quick “Aye, sir” and pressed a few of the buttons on his station.

  The image on the screen blurred as the call was accepted aboard the ship. A bridge of sleek command stations and a view overlooking the palace swept across the massive screen.

  “Who… is it?” Shadowman asked, twirling around in a high-backed leather chair to face us. He stopped spinning and leaned closer to the camera, a thin visor over his left eye, and grinned. “Declan? Declan Hale, as I live and breathe! I’d be somewhere else soon, if I were you. That whole palace is going to come a-tumbling down.”

  “Come on now, handsome,” I said. “You’re not going to kill me, but keep this up, and I’m coming to kill you.”

  “You believe you could, don’t you?” Shadowman asked, sounding astonished. “You believe you can… that you’re capable of such self-destruction.” He laughed long and hard and a few miles north of sanity. “But I found one of them, Declan. Yes, yes. With the Historian’s help, I have found one of the stinking bastards!”

  “Who’s he talking about?” Faraday asked.

  “The Everlasting.” I sighed and ran a hand back through my hair. “It’s not Oblivion, is it? Don’t be kicking no hornets’ nests now.” Telling myself off seemed foolish, even if Shadowman did look dead three days.

  “This ship will be the spear through their hearts, Declan. I’m doing you all a service. King Faraday, sitting atop your stolen throne and trying to keep up with your wayward baby brother.” Shadowman spat on the camera, and a globule of saliva ran down the massive screen in the War Room. “You will swear allegiance to me, the Godslayer, before this day is through.”

  Faraday looked at me askance.

  I shrugged. “Godslayer? Subtle, mate. But you’ve gotta earn it before you get T-shirts made.”

  Shadowman took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Okay. I’m going to go earn it, then. And if you don’t want to play, then don’t follow me.” He sho
t me a wink, and then the screen changed back to the view of the flagship hanging in the sky. The cannons along the port side of the vessel began to glow…

  “Oh, you arrogant bastard,” I muttered, gripping the corner of a desk a split second before the cannons on the Blade erupted with blistering light. A hundred bolts of focused Willfire rained down upon the palace and the city with enough force to reduce skyscrapers to dust.

  “Defend!” Faraday cried, but the automated systems were already precious seconds ahead of him.

  Salvos fired from dozens of unseen turrets on the palace, and surrounding vessels intercepted as much of the incoming bombardment as possible. Anti-aircraft guns on rooftops all across the city fired sizzling shots of spiraling blue energy. The shots exploded against the bolts from the Blade and lit up the darkening sky with a display of booming fireworks, as if it were New Year’s Eve in Times Square back on True Earth. The explosion sent shockwaves rippling over the city, and even encased within the palace, the floor still shook underfoot.

  “Bring him down!” Faraday cried. “Attack!”

  Shadowman isn’t attacking, not really, I thought as a few bolts struck the palace and gouged boulder-sized chunks from the white stone, shown on the display. He’s using the chaos to disappear.

  Sure enough, the ship had veered away from the palace and taken to the atmosphere, growing smaller and trailed by three dozen Knight-controlled cruisers. The Blade of Spring swept through the clouds and vanished. A burst of energy scattered the clouds and revealed a wake of silver and blue, an ion trail stretching up toward the heavens.

  Shadowman had engaged the reality drive. He had fled with my ship, my friends, and the Historian—off to kill a god, if he was to be believed.

  Even with all that firepower, the Everlasting didn’t go down easily. Best I’d ever managed, fighting those bastards, was to wound and force retreat. Astoria, Emily Grace, had fallen, but that had been a ten thousand-year slow death of her own making.

  The bombardment over and the threat to the city gone for the time being, Faraday started barking orders and organizing the damage assessment and aid to the damaged buildings far below. He had maintained his cool, his aura of command, which was grating but useful—again, for the time being. I didn’t have time for a game of thrones that day.

  “We have to go after him. Now. Send me after him,” I said. “He can’t have disabled all the damn locators in that beast of a ship. Give me a cruiser, and I’ll follow the ion stream.”

  Faraday pierced me with a hot near-feral glare. “How do you always find yourself at the heart of these matters, brother?” He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. You’re damn right, we’re going after him. You’ll give chase on the Argent Shield, Hale. You will lead a boarding party and recover the ship and the Historian.”

  Exactly what I wanted to hear—use and abuse me, I thought, because I’m good at this stuff. I saluted and then clenched my fists.

  Damn, but it felt good to be back. This was old-school soldier work—just a simple mission, with none of the Everlasting, Roseblade, or Atlantis nonsense that had torn me asunder and killed all my friends. And Emily…

  But then, that wasn’t worth dwelling on at the moment. I had work to do.

  *~*~*~*

  Being back in the Knights’ good graces—well, back in good enough graces—had its perks. From the War Room, I was taken to the armory for assessment and outfitting. The armory spanned an entire three floors of the palace and stretched off-world through the use of a few reality beacons.

  Holy hell, but standing in the assessment foyer for the first time in half a decade, I felt like a kid on Christmas morning. For the past year, I’d been fighting on the outside looking in, driving a beat-up old ’87 Astra with a half-million miles on the clock in the Bathurst 1000. Having access to the resources of the Knights again was like being handed the keys to a brand new Ferrari with personalized license plates. I’d been saving the worlds—from Morpheus Renegade, from Scion—with string, buttons, and luck. Hell, I’d been MacGyvering my unhappy work on a wing and a prayer.

  No longer would I have to beg for scraps.

  The armory was a well-oiled and well-ordered series of cascading stacks and shelves that might as well have been endless. Lower-level Knights (like me, I supposed) and clerical staff zoomed about the vast open space, filling orders on silent hovercraft—flat, circular disks about the size of tractor tires attached to the base of large shopping baskets for transporting the merchandise. The disks were piloted through use of a control display attached to the clerks’ wrists. Given the nature of the portals fuelled by the reality beacons, the exact size of the armory was open to interpretation. It physically existed in Ascension City, within the palace, for about a square mile, but the wide-open space I stood in was immeasurably bigger. Off in the distance there was even a touch of dawn light. That part of the facility was off-world but easily accessed.

  The shelves and stacks on the various levels contained weapons, armor, tactical gear, enchanted clothing, Infernal blades, and thousands of nameless trinkets and devices sourced from a million books and a million worlds. It would not be unfair to say, amidst the scent of cordite and grease, that the Armory was the largest cache of weaponry and military supplies in known existence.

  I stood on an assessment platform in the foyer of the open complex, on a circle of glowing light. In the space of about fifteen minutes, a legion of armory staff had me stripped to my boxers, prodded, measured, and strapped me into a suit of mythril body armor, matte-black and sleek. The material was paper-thin and flexible, and it clung to my arms, legs, and chest like a second skin. For all that, it was strong and enchanted with hundreds of Will protections. I slipped back into my trousers, shirt, and waistcoat. Apart from what showed under my collar and my rolled-up sleeves, an observer wouldn’t know I was wearing a suit of priceless battle armor.

  If I’d had this during that scuffle with Morpheus Renegade, I wouldn’t have died. I snorted. Coulda, woulda, shoulda… My death made me think for a moment on Emily and on her last gift to me, which I had given away to Annie. Worlds away, my son was blinking and breathing. Only way he’ll stay that way is the path you’re on right now.

  True enough. I placed my arms above my head and stretched, feeling the armor mold around my form as I moved.

  “Commander Hale,” a familiar voice said from behind me. “Arbiter Vrail Corban, reporting for duty.”

  I turned and clapped my old friend on the arm. Vrail and I had been through some tough shit during the Tome Wars. He’d also sent me the recipe for those star iron shotgun shells that had saved me on Old Voraskel. Vrail was a tall man, a head above me, who wore his curling, shoulder-length dark hair pulled back in a loose ponytail. His sharp face and clear, intelligent eyes had managed to retain some measure of happiness after the Tome Wars. His shoulders were wrapped in a heavy purple cloak, concealing probably about thirty various weapons hidden about his person.

  “Vrail, you old horse thief. Arbiter, is it now? Broken quill, they must be scraping the bottom of the barrel if they assigned you to me on this one,” I teased.

  Vrail laughed and offered me a wink. “I volunteered, of course. Wild dragons couldn’t keep me away.”

  “Remember you said that.” I chuckled wryly. “Given the current state of affairs, the Everlasting popping up like weeds faster than we can stomp them out, dragons aren’t out of the question.”

  Vrail looked me up and down and frowned. “No blade?”

  “Just my razor-sharp wit and winning attitude.” I shrugged. “Perhaps I’ll grab a shotgun—grew partial to the new design you sent through. Thanks for that, by the way. You up to speed on what’s happening?”

  “Mostly. Although what I have could be outdated. I mean, yesterday we were all after your head yet again. Now it’s just someone pretending to be you, or something?”

  “Eh… in a way.” The mechanics behind Shadowman’s existence would take far too long to explain, and we were alrea
dy a half hour behind him and the Blade of Spring. “It’s a Void-like creature with my face. It does look like me, but a me that’s been dead a few days. Cold, pale. Nothing behind the eyes, you know.”

  Vrail rubbed his hands together. “Spooky. Capture or kill?”

  “The Historian and my friends, Sophie and Ethan, come first and foremost,” I said. “This is a rescue mission, not a bit of wet work. Although it will most likely come to that.”

  “Always seems to,” Vrail agreed. “So engagement authorized. I suppose we should also try and recover the Spring, yeah?”

  “That twelve-cylinder with all the add-ons belongs to me, Vrail. I would very much like my ship back.”

  He shot off a quick salute. “Roger.”

  Once outfitted—and after I’d grabbed a shotgun to replace the one lost on Old Voraskel—Vrail and I were escorted from the armory by palace guards to the elevators, down to the ground floor, and back out into the trampled esplanade, militarized to stop Shadowman, out front of the palace. Ahead of us was our destination, a war cruiser about the size of a truck with a semitrailer attached, fuelled and staffed with two other Knights for the mission, according to Faraday. A large crowd seemed far too interested in our ship, mingling around its perimeter. Heads turned to watch our quick march down along the esplanade to the ship.

  On any other day, we would have needed to catch a priority shuttle across the city to the shipyards and worldports in the western quadrant. But given that Shadowman had threatened to blast the Fae Palace from existence and stolen the Cascade Fleet’s flagship, we were spared the extra miles.

  “Is it just me, or are there a lot of people milling about our ride?” I asked Vrail, as a gust of wind set his purple cloak chasing the breeze.

  Vrail shifted his cloak so that it covered the Infernal blade strapped to his waist. I noticed he was wearing a chest plate of not-so-subtle silver armor. He smirked. “Word has spread that you’re leading the recovery.”