Broken Quill [2] (35 page)

I was reminded, with little joy,
that I’d died on top of a tower just like this not three months ago. Fate—or
whatever had conspired to draw me here this night—seemed to have a wicked sense
of humor. At this height, even the city of Perth looked small and distant—bands
of street and house lights disappeared over the horizon far below.

A high, pained chuckle echoed across
the wide plateau.

Emissary, in human form, leaned
against the base of one of the pillars. Light bled from a vicious cut around
his neck, deep and sure. Half a star iron sword was buried in his throat, and
in his hand he gripped Myth, coated in purple ichor. On the face of that
pillar, a tear in reality revealed a world of rolling green hills and old stone
covered in ivy.

“How’d you get this tower here?” I
asked, already kind of knowing the answer. “And where is the Eye of Sauron?”

Emissary shrugged, and his head lolled
to the side, almost tumbling from his shoulders. He righted it with a shrug as
I kneeled down on my haunches in front of him. “What did I tell you, those long
days ago? Spill enough blood and the reality of a place will crack. This tower
isn’t here in truth, more a patch of a distant star imposing its... its
presence on this world, fuelled by the cracks I forced in reality on my... my
quest.”

“On your murder spree,” Annie
growled.

I gazed over his shoulder at the
open portal. “If that’s true, then why’d you need Myth?”

Emissary flashed a row of
razor-sharp teeth. “You were the only one who could pull the knife from the
stone, Declan. It was made for you, so very long ago, and the world you found
it in... Well, just one of the locks on the Everlasting prisons.”

“Sounds like these locks were made
to be broken.”

“You can’t keep something as
powerful as the Everlasting imprisoned indefinitely,” he whispered. “That
pressure alone could tear the Story Thread asunder. If you had not severed the
Infernal Clock, Declan, Atlantis would have exploded and torn through Forget.
The good with the bad, yes?”

I gently plucked Myth from his
feeble grasp and slipped the knife under my belt behind my back. “That’s mine.”

“Too late...” He laughed.

Annie snarled and gripped the
jagged, broken blade piercing Emissary’s neck. “This is for Sam,” she said and
dragged the blade along the creature’s throat. “
This is for Sam!
”

Emissary’s laughter became wet,
angry gurgles as Annie severed his head from his shoulders. The blade cut her
palm, and fresh red blood dribbled down the broken sword. Emissary bucked, and
his eyes rolled into the back of his skull as his head fell away from his body,
hitting the stone floor of the plateau with a sickening thud.

He was dead.

But still writhing. His form jerked,
his limbs flailed, and for the final time his jaw stretched as long as my arm.
Long, sharp fangs burst from his gums, and his human tongue elongated into
something black, bulging, and forked. The rest of his body tore through his
fine suit and grew dark scales and the beginnings of a long tail...

“He’s changing,” I said. “Quickly
now, over the side.”

Acting fast, and not really thinking
about it, Annie and I rolled Emissary’s headless body over the edge of the
tower before the transformation into his true form could be completed. We
hurled several hundred pounds of scaly flesh in torn rags off the tower. Then I
took a quick step back and picked up the creature’s severed head. A long,
grey-green snout, tendrils of smoke flaring in his nostrils, seemed to grin at
me as his eyes turned into yellow slits.

I hurled the head across the
precipice, and it flipped past the pillar and portal. As it arced over the open
air, the transformation completed. The dragon’s head burst into pink flame, and
we watched both parts of the body strike the water far below. The flame burned
even in the ocean, searing the flesh from Emissary’s bones in seconds. A
charred and blackened skeleton of a beast that should never have existed on
True Earth sank below the wild waters of the Indian Ocean.

“Is that it?” Annie breathed. She
cradled her sliced palm against her jacket. “Is it over?”

“I’d say so, Detective. Think how
that’s going to look in your report tomor—Ah...
Ah
!”

My arm burst into pink flame, along the
wicked rune of Emissary’s brand, and I felt the dam in my mind, the restrictive
collar on my Will, thrown open and the power came flooding back to me—fresh and
invigorating. 

I clasped my hand over the brand and
poured luminescent smoke against the wound. My talents were never geared toward
healing, but applying Will was like plunging the burn into snow. I gasped from
the relief and basked in my recovered power.

I was me again.

“He’s truly dead,” Annie said.
“That’s what they said back at the palace, wasn’t it? The brand would disappear
once the beast was destroyed?”

“I guess they got that one right.” I
laughed. “Damn, but I feel good.”

A bolt of crimson lightning burst
from the portal on the nearby pillar and struck the stone at our feet, forcing
us back a quick step. Within that lightning, a figure moved across the face of
the portal, away in that old, green world of ancient stone.

“Declan, look...” Annie whispered.
“It’s—”

“Get behind me,” I hissed, pooling
smoky ethereal light into my palms. Like a man dying of thirst, I drank in the
power—bathed in it—but even I didn’t think it would be enough to destroy what
emerged from Emissary’s portal, forged using the Creation Knife, with such
casual grace.

Charlie Dusk, the boy in the toga
and sandals from the Dream Worlds, the boy with the mango-stained face, stepped
through the portal chomping on yet another large, juicy piece of fruit. He
stared up at me and grinned.

“Blessed Scion,” I said. “How lovely
to see you again.”

“Hello, Declan,” the boy said. “Miss
Annie. You both broke your promise, and that made me so mad.”

In less time than it took to blink,
Scion clenched his fist, and Annie was hurled across the tower. A lashing of
power picked her up off her feet, and I felt the edge of it on my arm like a
blaze of flame. Her head slammed into the distant, sharp obsidian pillar and a
sickening
crunch
echoed across the high plateau.

As if from a great distance, my
vision swimming and my stomach falling away, I watched her staring at me, her
eyes blinking rapidly, and she smiled. A trickle of blood ran from under her
hairline, down her face, as her eyes glazed over.

Poor Annie,
I thought, not quite seeing what I
was seeing. My mind caught up with my heart, and I turned back to Scion. “You
killed her.”

“Her presence served no purpose,”
the Everlasting said. “I abhor the purposeless, Declan.”

Knight’s bite...
I drew my broken sword.

Scion frowned. “Do you not know what
I am, child? I am Everlasting. I am... Blessed, eternal. The Younger God.”

“Yeah, I’ve got a whole slew of
dumbass titles, too. Thing is, chief, you’re sweating. This place takes a lot
out of you, doesn’t it? You’re not all the way here, on True Earth, are you?
Just a... heh... just a shadow.”

Scion, what appeared to be a child,
blurred and was, all at once, a few feet taller. His toga became a long, black
suit of cloth armor, collarless, below the youthful face of an adolescent. He
was handsome, his skin clear and his eyes as grey as the ocean in storm. “You
swiftly run short of purpose, Declan.”

I smirked, hiding my trepidation.
“You couldn’t cross without the Creation Knife. You needed to tear a hole in
reality. That’s why Oblivion was trapped in Atlantis. Why you were trapped in
the Dream Worlds.” I snorted. “Where are the rest of you bastards and
bastardettes imprisoned, hmm? You can’t Will-travel. You can’t use books or the
Atlas Lexicon. You have to tear your way, kicking and screaming, across Forget.
Oh how mighty and powerful the Everlasting!” I spat the last, and slashed my
hand down through the air.

Poor Annie.

“I know you better than you know
yourself, Declan,” Scion said. “You are a pale shadow of the man who ended the
Tome Wars, even of the man who died severing the Infernal Clock, releasing me
and my brethren. We were... imprisoned for so long. Ten millennia, forced only
to watch, first with hate but then with joy as humanity forgot all you had
accomplished. Pale shadows, the lot.”

“You—”

“You’re a man hidden behind a facade
of faux wit, clinging desperately to the notion that your life still has
meaning.” Scion shrugged and was a child again. Scion grinned and was a man.
Endless, powerful—Everlasting. “You laugh against the night as your soul drowns
in liquor and regret. If I were to let you live, you would drink yourself to
death inside a year.”

“Actually, I’ve been thinking about
giving up the drink,” I said. “Exiled or not, my particular brand of asshattery
has saved Forget more than once. Selfish to spend half the day in a drunken
stupor when creatures like you think they can have free reign over the Story
Thread. Time I got my head back in the game.”

“Are you going to stop me, Declan?”
Scion asked, and in the blink of an eye he was the young boy again, Charlie,
snared in a dark cape. “I am Everlasting, you dolt. Ageless and eternal. You
can no more kill me than hold back the tides of the Void.”

I gripped the hilt of Myth, stuffed
down the back of my pants against my waistcoat, and had to disagree.
Forged
for the Nine to slay...
  Well, there were nine Everlasting that needed
slaying. Might as well start with the youngest and work my way up.

After all, what was one more
completely inept forever-war?

“The Knights Infernal cast an exiled
drunk as their defender.” Scion laughed. “You must see, Declan. How far and how
fast the Knights have fallen. And just... how
amusing
that is. We feared
you—once upon a time.”

“So it’s war you want, is it?” I
asked. “Because, just between you and me, that shit is getting old.”

“We are the rightful rulers of the
Story Thread—of all Forget! And look how your brother scurried once his life
was on the line. One soldier, just the least of our creations, forced the
protectors of humanity to abandon True Earth.” Scion grinned, baring twin rows
of rather white teeth. “You have no idea what this world means, do you?”

I was done with the small talk. Time
to end this, one way or another.

“You know, I met your brother,” I
said, taking a slow step toward the Younger God and drawing Myth from my belt,
“Lord Oblivion, with eyes of blood. He took something very important from me.”

Scion smirked. “Aye, he stole your
shadow and cast it into the Void—affording you protection from the Voidlings.
That was His price for harnessing the Degradation against the armies of
Renegade, and his gambit that you would return to sever the clock.”

“No, not my shadow. He took someone
I cared for... very much.”

Scion raised a hand, palm flat,
toward me, and a burst of invisible energy knocked me back a step. The scar on
my palm, from the shard of the Infernal Clock that had granted me a second
life, burned with a pain so fierce it was almost ecstasy. I brought my broken
sword down through the air, cutting through the bands of unseen power, and Scion
staggered back as if I’d dealt him a solid blow.

The all-knowing, all-powerful smirk
faded from his face, and he grew uncertain. His eyes flicked from the weapons
in my hands to my face, as if seeing me for the first time. The Younger God
beheld a man who, actually, could hold back the tides of the Void.

A long moment seemed to pass between
us, and then I ran at the Everlasting even as he raised both his hands to stop
me. A wave of force struck me, and I staggered against what felt like a solid
wall of ice. My palm blazed all the more, and on the wind, just on the edge of
hearing, the song of the Infernal Clock—the Dawn of Moment—whispered in my ear.

The ice became syrup, and I forced
myself forward another step as Scion’s eyes widened in disbelief. He exerted
himself, palms pressed toward me, and I could now see the waves of heat and
energy bursting from his hands.

“
Die!
” he spat.

Out of the corner of my one good
eye, I glimpsed Annie still smiling softly, even in death. The sight of her
turned the seed of anger in my chest into a mighty, immovable forest. Myth
shone with a faint, dull light, and I realized I would not need my broken sword
after all. I let it fall, and without my strength the blade whipped through the
air, crashed through one of the obsidian pillars, and was blasted out to sea by
Scion’s power.

And I drew closer, close enough now
to reach out and grasp the Everlasting by the throat.

His flesh burned under my touch, and
Scion delivered a devastating, backhanded blow to the side of my head, punching
at my blinded eye. I weathered the attack as the power of the Infernal Clock
surged through me, dissipating force that would have reduced my head to a
bloody pulp, had I been anyone else. Under my grip on his throat, Scion’s flesh
charred and stank.