by Joe Ducie
Harbinger Chronos is drawn near.
Starless paths through the Lost Sight
Dread Ash turns cold day to night.
Watch Fated Legion be destroyed
Scarred Axis fears the rampant Void.
The World-Eater, last in shadow’s husk
The Never-Was King—Lord Hallowed Dusk.
So ’ware the Nine Forgetful Tomes
’Ware the Elder Gods from your home
Ageless, hateful, dull blight-flame—
The Everlasting know your name.
If the Everlasting had truly attacked the Atlas Lexicon—the original Lexicon, not the train station—then it was my duty to attend. Hell, who needed duty? I had lost my life to the Everlasting, an eye, countless friends and more. I’d gladly do my best to put them in the ground, if such a thing could be done. I had won, in the past, with the help of ancient weapons, the Roseblade and Myth, the world-dagger. Both were gone now beyond my reach…
Thoughts of the Everlasting inevitably led to thoughts of lost Emily Grace, my friend, the mother of my spirited away son, and revealed not so long ago as Fair Astoria—one of the Everlasting, perhaps the only decent being in the whole sordid group. She had given her grace, her immortality, in order to birth a child… I didn’t know to what end yet. Thinking on Emily confused me something fierce, myriad emotions ranging from fear to anger to love and loss.
Oh, well.
“What say you, Arbiter Hale?” the deadling asked.
I fell from my thoughts and sighed. “It’s not Oblivion, no.” The terribly awful plan shivered through my mind. Tal… Story time with Annie would have to wait, unless I could convince her to come with me. “I’ll be there in a few hours.”
“Be wary of the shield that surrounds the city. It is… cruel. We lost three Dawn Mercenaries to its malice. Nothing may pass through it one way or the other.”
“I’ve dealt with such before,” I said. “But you know that.”
The deadling nodded, pardon the pun, gravely. “Which, despite our lack of options, is why we called you.”
“Not everyone will welcome my presence at the Lexicon,” I said.
“You’ll be accorded full guest rights and honours, as all Knights Infernal are granted during this time of… peace.”
A smile touched my face at that. “My peace. How that rankles, does it not?”
The deadling said nothing.
I glanced at Annie. “We’ll be there soon, within a few hours. Hopefully it will be a small matter to disable whatever malignant energy is powering the shield.” It wouldn’t be a small matter. It would be a salvage operation. The game was afoot.
“It cannot be disabled from the inside, that much is certain.”
I had my thoughts on that. Indeed, such things often could only be broken from within. That’s what made them so instrumental, so useful, to prevent attack. If Lady Evelyn Waterwood was to be believed, and I had my thoughts on that, too, then someone had cut-off the Atlas Lexicon on purpose. To starve it? To stop the librarians and soldiers there from conducting their duty? Or… to distract and escape? I guess we’d find out.
“Ensure this poor corpse is returned to whatever cemetery you dug it up from,” I said. “We’ll chat soon.”
CHAPTER THREE
ROAD’S FIRE
“Down… down… down…”
I strode away from the necromanced corpse, turning my back on the marble fountain. Annie fell into step at my side and we headed back into my shop. More and more, I wanted that first drink. Just a sip. Take the edge off. The world was pushing at me, making me mighty thirsty.
“A lot of that conversation I didn’t understand,” Annie said.
I collected my shotgun and moved through the maze of shelves, brushing towering stacks of old hardcovers, dog-eared paperbacks, the occasional pile of loose parchment—an awesome fire hazard. The dull chandelier light, dim and perfect, cast everything in a timeless filter. Behind the counter, I retrieved a simple black duffel bag.
“No, sorry, I forget sometimes that there’s a lot you need to know,” I said and leaned over the counter to gently touch Annie’s shoulder. “So, want to come to Switzerland with me?”
“Tonight?”
“You’ve travelled further—a lot further—on less notice.”
“Well, that’s certainly true.”
She looked at the sparkling engagement ring on her finger, wondering no doubt on her fiancé, Brian, and what to tell him this time. Safe to say I had feelings for Annie, genuinely feelings, a lustful sort of love. How much of that was the petal of the Infernal Clock linking our hearts, I didn’t know, but if I looked at the situation through the right sort of lens then I could almost believe I wanted her to come with me solely for the job, the support. She was a crack shot, and no rookie.
But in our secret hearts, buried deep where the lies can’t reach, we all know the worth of such belief. I wanted Annie with me because I liked her close and because she was good with that revolver. If not for her, I’d have died a second time when we faced the Everlasting Scion on Diablo Beach.
As Annie gave the offer of monsters, mayhem, and magic the due consideration it deserved, I loaded the duffel bag with the shotgun, a few cases of shells, a gnarled rune-encrusted half-staff, a handful of useful tomes, a long-barrelled revolver of my own design, and a simple, silver-grey sword that was far more than it seemed. The sword, the result of a night of dark, stolen forging in Atlantis, was as close as I had to my knightly blade. Technically, the sword stripped from me at the end of the Tome Wars, just before my five years of exile began, should have long since been returned. My reinstatement to the Knights granted me such. I was owed.
“Grist for another day’s mill…” I muttered and zipped up the duffel bag, hefted it onto one shoulder. It was heavy, but tight, manageable. I put it back on the counter. “Annie?”
“What’s the Atlas Lexicon?” she asked. “That station we visited?”
“No, same name, but this one is different. A mini-city, hidden in the Swiss Alps a few hundred miles from the coast. Closest major civilian population would be Zurich, but the Lexicon is fairly isolated.”
“I’ve never heard…” She shook her head. “Hidden. With magic? Enchantment?”
“Yep. True Earth holds many secrets, Annie.”
“What do you think we’ll find there?”
I retrieved an old book from the shelf behind me. The spine creaked as I opened it, half a decade of dust fell on my wine-stained, coffee-burnt mahogany countertop.
“Well,” I said, scanning the index of the book and flipping to somewhere in the middle, “the Atlas Lexicon is sort of a… haven, I suppose. A school, or university. An academy. Its purpose is rather noble, actually. Which is why the Knights haven’t bothered with it in centuries, not really. They were a little less than neutral during the Tome Wars, at the Lexicon, which almost led to their destruction.” I chuckled. “It was a near thing. Long ago now.”
“You’re rambling, Declan.”
I nodded. “The Atlas Lexicon houses and schools the children, usually teenagers, though much younger isn’t out of the ordinary, that return from other worlds. Which is to say, you’ve read the books, Annie. Narnia, Peter Pan, all those stories of kids going off to other worlds and having adventures. A lot of them are true. What the books leave out, though, is when those kids come back to this world, and they almost always do, they come back a little messed up.”
“How so?”
I scanned the book, the old maps that didn’t quite reflect contemporary coastlines. The book was last updated during Roman rule. Only a few millennia, granted, but enough for much to have changed.
“Well, there are so many paths through the Void, hidden ways between this world and the impossibly infinite number of other worlds. Picture a kid, usually an orphan—I don’t know why, but these hidden paths are easy to find for the little bastards—who goes off to another world. Talking lions, adventures… darkness and murder. Then t
hey’re thrust back into this world, the real world, and time has passed not always at the same time. They could have been gone years in the fantasy world, only to come back a few days after they left here, or decades, or no time at all. What do you think happens?”
Annie pursed her lips and nodded slowly. “They go home, if they have one, they try and fit back in…”
I nodded along. “They talk. Before you know it, they’re in with therapists and caregivers who think the other world nonsense is some sort of mental break. The kids grow resentful, doubt themselves. Suicide rates among those that travel to other worlds and come back alone are almost four times that of any other poor soul left here on True Earth.”
“So the Atlas Lexicon takes them in. It’s like an interdimensional orphanage. I like that.”
“That they do. They find these kids and offer them a place to learn, to live and study with hundreds of other kids who are going through the same thing. Often, the kids come back more than mentally changed, too. They come back Willful, or possessed of unique… talents. The Lexicon is the only place for them.”
I ran a finger along the coast of Western Australia in the old book and found what I was looking for. “Here we go.”
Annie stared at the page. “What is that?”
“The nearest portal point.” I tapped the small island just off the coast, about twenty kilometres out to sea if the scale was right. “Rottnest Island. That’s where we need to go tonight. This book, Annie, is Road’s Fire. An ancient and spooky grimoire that lists all the known portal access points not between worlds, but between points on this world. They don’t get much use anymore, but there’s a line of convergence on Rottnest Island that links to the forests just outside of the Atlas Lexicon. We can be there in a few hours.”
Annie frowned, considered, then shrugged. “Little convenient, isn’t it?”
“How so?”
“Doorway exactly where we need to go only an hour or so away from here.”
I chuckled. “There’s doorways everywhere, if you know what you’re looking for, and I do. Hell, the mirror in my bathroom upstairs is a portal directly into the Void. You’ve been through the stone archway under McSorley’s in town—that one leads to thousands of other worlds.”
Annie slipped her phone out of her pocket and waved it at me. “Let me just make a quick call and we’ll head out then. We’re going to need a boat to get to Rottnest Island.”
“I know a guy. You know him, too.”
*~*~*~*
Ethan Reilly, my wayward apprentice and Sophie’s boyfriend, stood at the helm of the small four-metre boat. The sea air whipped his long, shoulder-length brown hair about his head as he navigated through the portside markers toward Rottnest Island.
“Sophie still not talking to you then?” he had asked me, when Annie and I met him in the carpark at Hillarys Boat Harbour a half hour ago. “She’s been off-world, you know. Not talking to me much, either.”
I nodded. “Ascension City, last I heard, doing some advanced healer training courses. Keeping herself busy.”
Ethan turned into the swell, the boat bobbing up and down a little too roughly for my liking. I was more at home in zero gravity, on the command bridge of an interdimensional battleship. The ocean was another game entirely. One I didn’t have the stomach for.
“We’re on the rocks, I think,” Ethan said. “Sophie. Not the boat. It’s your fault mostly, boss.”
Annie gripped the aft railing for support. She held my duffel bag full of toys between her legs, gripped at the ankles. The rough crossing looked like it was making her feel a little unwell, too. She focused on the dark horizon, taking slow, deep breaths.
“A lot of things are my fault,” I said. “She blames me for Tal.”
Ethan glanced at my sideways. “She should. You know that.”
“I miss when you were scared of upsetting me,” I said.
“That ended when I broke you out of space prison two or three adventures ago.”
I grunted.
“Is Tal really not coming back?” he asked. “You’d think—”
“Think what?” I said, my tone low, careful. Dangerous. Tal was always a sore subject, now more than ever. I dwelled on the sword in my bag, the linchpin of my terribly awful plan.
“That she’d want to see her sister.”
I can’t go back, Declan.
I thought on Tal, left ten-thousand years in the past, in old Atlantis. She loved that city, loved the peace. You’ll fight this war, because that’s what you do. When it comes to conflict and battle, war and chaos, the universe seems to spin around your head. You attract the absurd. I won’t go back to watch you be consumed by it. Because that’s the worst part, you know? They won’t be able to kill you. You survive, Declan. You always, always survive. Even when you die, you live. No, you won’t die. But you’ll change. I can see it. The war will take you and you’ll become hard, harder than you’ve ever been. You’ll sacrifice entire worlds for one inch of an advantage against the Everlasting. Don’t tell me you won’t, because I know you, and you have.
And here I was off to tangle with the Everlasting again, barely a week back from Atlantis myself. The Atlas Lexicon—of all my dark and difficult choices, involving that city had been among the worst.
“Where you off to this time?” Ethan asked. “Rottnest is a tourist destination. Sandy beaches, old chalets, a decent bakery. Home to the quokka.”
“What in the seven hells is a quokka?”
Ethan exchanged a look with Annie. Can you believe this guy? the look said. “Cute and furry marsupial. Rottnest is the only place in the world they live. Think like a cross between a squirrel and a kangaroo.”
“Right, not relevant, but thanks.”
Ethan rolled his eyes. “You’re a miserable bastard, you know.”
“Yeah.”
“There’s a mini fridge of beer in the bow storage if you want a drink,” he said. “It’s my uncle’s, but he won’t mind. Coopers Pale Ale, if I know him at all.”
I was sorely tempted, but knew enough of that temptation to know that anytime I wanted a drink was the worst time to have one. “No, thanks,” I said.
Ethan gave me another funny look and then a shrug. “OK, we’re nearly there. About fifteen minutes out from the main jetty on the island. What’s the caper this time, boss?”
“One of the Everlasting causing some havoc up north in Switzerland.”
“Need a hand?”
“Don’t know yet. For now, no, we’ll be fine. I’ve got a plan. If you could, keep an eye on the shop for me. Someone tried to burn it down earlier tonight. Be careful, but I’d like to know who.”
“You got it.”
*~*~*~*
We said farewell to Ethan on Rottnest Island’s main jetty. A cool sea breeze scented with salt whistled across the island. Lights from the nearby settlement, the beachfront villas, and the old white stone hotel and bar guided our way.
The hour wasn’t yet midnight, and a few souls were out and about on push bikes, having dinner at the string of restaurants, drinking in the expansive courtyard of the Hotel Rottnest overlooking the water. Dozens of expensive boats bobbed on the calm water in the bay. And, as promised, dozens of little marsupials—quokkas—dotted the pathways and buildings, hiding under shrubs and trees. They looked like tiny kangaroos crossed with possums.
“I haven’t been back here in years,” Annie said. “Ten or more. It doesn’t seem to have changed much.”
“It’s quiet, I like that.”
Annie rolled her eyes. “You’d be bored inside a week, stuck here.”
I thought about it and had to agree. Tal had been right about one thing—well, most things—I needed to be part of the fight. I liked to take names, bust heads, save the world. At least, that was always the idea. Reality was rarely so kind, and some days I was tired.
I muttered a quick incantation and a small marble of light, blue hue, appeared in the air. It hovered lazily, cast a small circle of
light on the ground, and then floated east, away from the settlement and the hotel—toward the centre of the island.
“Follow the light?” Annie asked.
I nodded. “It’ll take us straight to the edge of the Road’s Fire portal. Won’t be more than an easy mile, I’d say. I can feel it ahead somewhere close.”
The tracking enchantment led us over hills, passed the island’s police station, small cemetery, and round a bend in the road. We sauntered past another block of accommodation, the Lodge, and a smaller bar full of drinking and merriment, and came to a vast, pinkish salt lake in the interior of the island. The water stank of algae, the light from the settlement barely reached the water’s edge, but the night was warm.
My sphere of light came to a stop on the edge of the lake above a thin ribbon of sea foam stretching around the shore.
“Huh,” Annie said. “I was expecting an archway or a stone circle or something.”
“Road’s Fire portals are more… points of convergence, of meeting. We can twist and bend reality here, touch this point to the one in Switzerland. I could have tried to force it from my shop, would have definitely made an opening, but the chance of catastrophic failure was too high.”
“Catastrophic?”
I shrugged. “Reality stretched too thin… it’s how we access the Void. Tear a hole through the canvas. Remember Myth, the Creation Dagger, made of celestial illusion? The fact that the knife could create points anywhere was perhaps its most valuable function.”
Annie considered all that while I got to work with a few enchantments. In most of Europe and the old world, at points of convergence like this there would be an archway, a stone circle, or something to mark the portal-way. Stonehenge, for example, was perhaps the most concentrated source of Road’s Fire on the face of True Earth. From there, almost all points on the globe could be accessed. Here though, on little old Rottnest Island in the cold and lonely Indian Ocean, we’d have to go in raw.
But I’d been trained by the best. I was the best.
Two minutes of silly hand waving, enchanted intent, and my Will forged a doorway in the air, eight feet tall by four feet wide. At first it was just a curtain of white light, reflected on the salt lake as a glowing rectangle, but then like a slide fixed on a microscope the portal came into stark, clear focus.