Broken Quill [2] (24 page)

“No problem,” Tia said. “Surface
burn like that is easy. I was never much of a healer...”

It took me a moment, just a moment,
to realize I could only see out of one eye.

I’d been blinded by the light...

But my face felt fine. Better than
fine. I touched my cheek, and nothing hurt.

“Yeah, I healed you up first while
you were blacked out,” Tia said. “Best I can do. There’s a bit of scar tissue
around your eye, like burn tissue, I guess, and I didn’t even try to do more
than mend the surface of your eye itself.” She came and sat next to me. Her
blouse was singed around the collar. “Can you... can you see?”

I shook my head slowly, and Tia
sobbed. “Hey, now, it’s okay.” I winked with my good right eye. “I’ve got a
spare. So I think I can guess at what happened...”

Ace grunted. “Lot of people unhappy
with you in town,” he said, giving me a look that suggested he’d contemplated
joining the unseen mob that had bombed Tia’s place. No, that was unfair...
“Your presence stirred up bad memories.”

“Thanks for pulling me out of the
fire,” I said and meant it. The large figure I’d seen burst through Tia’s door
had to have been Ace. “That’s a debt I won’t forget, you hear?”

Ace shrugged, but some of the tension
seemed to bleed from his shoulders. He hefted himself up and strolled away
through the vines, muttering about checking the perimeter.

“He’s a good sort,” Tia said
quietly.

“More to him than I thought last
night,” I agreed.

Tia leaned into my shoulder and
burst into tears. She rocked back and forth, hugging her knees, and I
floundered for a moment before slipping an arm over her shoulders. Annie,
across the way, looked down and clasped her hands in her lap.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “My fault, you
know. Karma coming round to bite me in the ass, as is only right, given my
past.”

Tia sniffed and tried to get a hold
on her sobs. She couldn’t do it. “You... you’re a good m-man, Declan. You...
you don’t...” Her words descended into garbled cries, and I gave her a kiss
atop her head—and missed. This one-eye business played merry hell with my depth
perception.

“We’re survivors, you and I, Tia,” I
whispered.

 “I’ve waited seven years just
to
cry
, Declan. Broken quill, I’ve waited this long to find someone who
understands just how unhappy I am.” Tia wept, and her nose dripped. Tia wept
and was beautiful. “You know, the people here… None of them really know... At
least, I’ve never found anyone I can talk to about it. The sordid loneliness
and the terrible sadness. You know, don’t you? Please tell me you know!”

“I know. I get it. Tia, I’m there.
Scars you can’t see...”

She burst into fresh tears and dried
them on my waistcoat.

So it goes.

A long time later, we were both back
in control, and neither of us had sold the world.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I’m a happy kind of sad,” she said.
“I think you understand.”

“Yes, I believe I do.”

Annie had kept her silence and her
distance while I did my best to comfort Tia. She had picked a few handfuls of
ripe honeyberries from the nearby bushes, and we spent five minutes making a
supper of them. Shame those pies had gone to waste. There had been enough sugar
on the crusts to blast us to Ascension City, never mind risking the knife or
the Atlas Lexicon again.

“Okay, so what’s our next move?” Tia
asked, dabbing at her eyes with the back of her hand. “I don’t think I’m going
back to Meadow Gate anytime soon. Imagine I’m no longer too welcome, accords or
not.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry about that,” I
said. “You spend seven odd years building a life there, and I come along and
take it away in a day.”

“I’ll be back,” she said, clenching
her fists. “Whoever burned my bar down is going to regret it. But for now I
guess I’m with you. There’s a portal to the Lexicon in the Mayor’s Office. We
could sneak back in to town and head out that way.”

“Not so sure on the Lexicon,” I said
as Annie shook her head fervently. “We’ve got something else in mind.” I picked
up Myth from under the berry vines and presented the knife to Tia. “Look
familiar?”

She ran a finger down the blade,
curving around the incandescent rose petals set into the crystal. “Is that... I
thought the Roseblade was a sword.”

“It is. This is something
else—something old and new. Annie and I found it just a day ago in what I’m
fairly sure was one of the Dream Worlds, Tia. Although I’m not sure exactly
what it can do, at least one of its tricks is the ability to cut through
universes. That’s how we got here. To you.”

Tia’s eyes grew as round as saucers.
“Do you know how valuable that is?”

“You’re talking to the kid who
leveled Reach City with the Roseblade, remember? Yeah, I know.”

“You did
what
?” Annie asked.

I waved her question away. Best my
young detective didn’t hate me just yet—still a lot of work to do. “Just a
battle a long time ago. What matters now is getting to Ascension City, and this
is our best shot.”

“How does it work then?” Tia asked.

I made a swift and sure cut with
Myth, and drew a thin razor-sharp line in the air that folded back on itself
like drawn curtains might, to reveal a desert of white sand. A blast wave of
heat rolled out of the gateway and forced us all a step back. With a thought, I
snapped the portal shut.

“Oh,” Tia said. “Now that’s cool.
But you can’t control which world it opens, can you?”

“Not so much, no.”

Tia frowned thoughtfully and pressed
a tentative finger against the flat of the blade. “It’s cold,” she said,
surprised. “So you can make it work but not direct which world it opens?”

“That’s right,” I said. “And I
hesitate to just slash and hope for the best. What if we open a portal under
the sea or in the heart of an active volcano?” I shook my head. “Now there’s a
scary thought.”

“You used it just now,” Annie
pointed out.

“I did that without thinking…” I
said, trailing away with that thought. “Perhaps it’s about intent, you know,
like with Will.”

“It happens because you make it
happen?” Tia asked. “It’s been a good long while since Will Theory 101, but
intent, even
desire
, was everything, wasn’t it?”

I nodded, and drove the tip of Myth
into the air. The blade sunk unseen into reality itself and I let the handle
go. For a moment, the knife hung suspended in the air and then it fell away and
struck the spongy earth. No portal to another world opened.

“Okay,” Tia said. “So however it
works, it needs someone holding the handle. May I try?”

I picked up the knife, flipped it,
and offered Tia the hilt. She waved me back a step and, tongue between her
teeth, plunged Myth into the air. For a moment, I swear I saw the reality of the
place curve, like a trampoline does when a heavy weight is placed in the center
of it, but then it snapped back, and Tia dropped the knife with a cry.

“What happened?” Annie asked.

Tia stared at her palm. “It... bit
me,” she said. “I’m fine. There’s no mark. But it felt like—like a bee sting.
Nasty little thing.”

I retrieved Myth and shrugged. “The
place where we found this, there was a message. Like a love note... for me.
Unless someone is playing a very elaborate game, the message was left some
thousands of years ago.”

“And what did it say?” Tia asked.

I recited the inscription from
memory. “Here rests Myth, the Creation Knife, forged in Atlantia for the Nine
to slay, forged to light the Shadowless way. Paths unbroken, unsung, unfound,
await the Immortal King to be crowned.”

“Forged in Atlantia...” Tia mused.
“It’s Atlantean. You’ve already got quite a sordid history with that city—or
what’s left of it, at any rate.” She tapped her chin. “King to be crowned, eh?”

“Yeah, we’re ignoring that bit,” I
said gruffly.

“And half of Forget wept...” Tia
muttered. “Okay, so not a lot to be getting on with there. Whoever made it left
you a nice few lines of prose but no instruction manual?”

“I’m sure they thought they were
being terribly clever,” I said, glancing up at the night sky again. Moonless
night, but oh so bright. “Riddles in the dark...”

“Maybe the key is in that line about
paths?” Annie wondered aloud. “I mean, that’s what the knife does, right? Makes
paths.”

“Unbroken, unsung, unfound,” Tia
said. “We call people with Will who haven’t been recruited into the Knights the
Unfound.”

“Ethan is unfound,” I said. “He’s
got a lot of raw talent but slipped through the recruitment nets when he was
growing up because of the resource drain caused by the Tome Wars.” I scratched
at my stubble. My blinded eye was twinging, a dull ache. “Unbroken and
unsung...”

“You already tried to get to
Ascension City, and the knife brought you here?” Tia nodded to herself. “When
you tried to get to Ascension, what did you think about?”

I shrugged. “One of the lesser-used
gateways near the Market District. And this... this portal beneath a small pond
I used a few months ago, traversing the Void.”

“Those are paths,” Tia said. “Like
Annie said, it’s about the paths. Unbroken and unsung... unfound.”

I kind of understood what she was
getting at. “You think it’s that easy? I have to make a new path, not try to
cut through into already established portals and ways?”

Tia shrugged. “Try cutting through
somewhere in Ascension City with no link to the Void or the Lexicon or the
books the Knights use. Somewhere familiar, maybe, but sealed from the rest of
Forget.”

“It’s worth a shot,” Annie said, a
hand on the grip of her service weapon. She was on guard, much like Ace, whom I
could hear moving through the vines nearby, swinging his cudgel back and forth.

I gripped the hilt of Myth and
raised the world-cutter before me, driving the tip once again into the fabric
of reality. It stuck true, proper, and no bee stung me. Taking a deep breath, I
pictured somewhere well known but inaccessible through the many and varied
paths across worlds.

Columns of crystal... endless
shelves... a grand foyer with a pristine marble floor... I felt the tip of the
knife resonate in my hand and, with my eyes closed, I drew the blade down
through the air. Warm light struck my face, visible through the lid of my one
good eye. I opened that eye and beheld something wonderful.

Something old and new—and altogether
impossible but made real.

Tia clapped me on the shoulder, grinning
from ear to ear. We stared through the portal at the Forgetful Library in the
heart of the Fae Palace.

Tia collected Ace from patrol, and
we decided who was going and who was staying. Annie and I were going through,
and Tia wanted to come with us. Ace shook his head and rested his wooden cudgel
in the crook of his shoulder.

“Going back to town,” he said.
“Going to find out who burned down the bar and have... words with them.”

Tia gave him a brief hug and a quick
kiss on the cheek. Ace inclined his head to Annie, gave me a long, hard stare,
and then disappeared into the night. Sheathing my sword and Myth, I was the
first to step through the portal and into the library. Annie and Tia followed,
our shoes trailing mud and grass from one world onto the clean marble floors of
another.

Thankfully, there didn’t seem to be
anyone about—none of the many scribes, librarians, and caretakers I knew
maintained this impressive catalogue of Forgetful tomes. The Forgetful Library
was a large place with thousands of miles of shelves. I could probably walk
through one section all day long and never encounter another human being.

“So this is in Ascension City?”
Annie asked. “Wow, would you look at all these books... There must be millions.”

“The true count is unknown,” I said.
“This library, Annie, is kind of abstract. It technically shouldn’t exist, but
it’s one of those areas of Forget that exists
because
it shouldn’t. As
such, the Knights maintain and guard it. My grandfather, once upon a time, was
the Chief Librarian—a position within Ascension City worthy of great respect.
He fell, after the Tome Wars, like the best of us.”

Tia sighed. “Oh, really? I loved
your granddad. Old Aloysius Hale. What happened?”

“He... Well, he...” I chuckled. “He
wrote some propaganda that suggested I should be king, and he littered the city
with it. Faraday sent him to Starhold. He was still there last I heard.”

“That’s awful,” Tia said.

Annie frowned. “Starhold sounds like
a prison.”

I pointed up toward the high vaulted
ceiling, through the clear glass windows, and at the blue sky. “It is. In
orbit.”

Annie’s eyebrows shot up under her
hairline. “Wow, okay. So what is this place then? Why shouldn’t it exist?”