Broken Quill [2] (29 page)

“So you spent the
last few days sitting in on Academy courses?” I asked Ethan. “Probably old hat
to you, ’Phie, but how’d you find it, mate? Put what I taught you to good use?”

“No,” he said, and chuckled.
“It’s like... It’s like some of the things you taught me are
way
too
advanced. You not only taught me how to run before I could walk but how to fly
a fighter jet before I could crawl.”

I clinked our glasses together.
“You’re welcome.”

He grinned. “I am grateful, Declan.
Truly, I am. But I took a beginner’s class this morning in basic shield
conjuration. Every kid in there was younger than ten, and they could do some
things so easily. I was lost, for the most part, so the instructor nearly had a
bloody heart attack when I levitated her desk.”

I nodded. “Hang in there. You’ll get
it. I don’t think they’re going to let you go now they’ve got you. You have
potential, Ethan, and a
helluva
raw talent. Faraday won’t want to lose
that so easily.”

Sophie balked. “Are you saying we’re
prisoners here?”

I considered and then nodded. “Bait,
perhaps, to keep me from bucking too much on my brother’s line. A gentle
reminder of what I have left to lose. He won’t let you leave—not until he gets
what he wants from me. I’m not sure he told me everything when we spoke, but
his message was five parts lemon for every part honey.”

“Well, there are worse places in
Forget to be trapped,” Sophie said, snapping another Polaroid of the wonderful
atmosphere in Edgar’s. The camera spat out the picture, and she tucked it into
her bulging album. “What are you going to do now?”

“Back to the palace, shower and
dinner, quick nap. There’s a council tonight. I’ll need my game face.”

“Be careful, you hear.” Sophie
snapped the band of my eye patch just above my ear. “You know, we get you a
parrot and a peg leg, and you’re away.”

“And rum. Don’t forget the rum.”

*~*~*~*

Sophie and Ethan elected to stay at
the Academy until I sent word for them. I was sure my brother would use them as
leverage if I didn’t agree to his terms, so best they steered clear of the
upcoming meeting in about three hours. If everything went to buggery, I’d dash
back here, and we’d use Myth to escape.

The sky had bled from dusk to the
beginnings of true night as my three guards strolled just ahead of Annie and me
on the road back to the Fae Palace. The heels of my shoes clicked a steady beat
on the dusty cobblestone.

“Coming back here... it always
brings back a kaleidoscope of colorful and offbeat memory, Annie,” I said,
thinking aloud.

She shook her head. “You use a lot
of words to say very little, you know that?”

I scratched my stubbly chin and
sighed. “Grew up reading a lot of books. Some of the language rubbed off, I
guess.”

“So what’s the problem now?”

“I’m trying to decide on our best
course of action.”

Annie clenched her fists. “We came
here to get help fighting Emissary. That bastard still has to answer for the
people and officers he killed—and for Grey. Or have you already forgotten
them?”

“Easy,” I said, my brow creasing
into a small frown. “Of course I haven’t. Stopping Emissary remains my number
one priority. That is why we’re here, Annie. You’ll see that tonight at ninth
bell.”

I had a sense of the attack before
it happened.

Call it instinct. Call it a
disturbance in the force.

Simply call it sheer dumb luck, but
I knew as we rounded the marble pillars on the fifty-fifth floor of the Fae
Palace that a group of unsavory gentlemen in body armor and facemasks would be
waiting to try to end my life.

Well, I didn’t anticipate the armor
and masks, but I had an inkling of the danger nonetheless. Ten years of
training and two long campaigns during the Tome Wars had honed my instincts to
something sharp and loud. Not even five years of sedentary exile could dull the
edge on that particular knife.

Heading for the elevators after a
brief visit to Dessan’s quarters so he could collect his Infernal blade, I was
speaking to Garner about our time at the Academy when the attack fell. The
figures moved out of the shadows surrounding the pillars in a vast commerce
chamber. The sun had long since fallen below the distant mountains that
bordered Ascension City, and night, paled by the city lights and the hovercraft
zooming past the palace, flooded the outer balconies, affording some darkness
in which to hide. The shadowy figures gave little in the way of warning, as
shadowy figures are wont to do, but I was ready.

To be honest, I’d been expecting an
attack all day. This was probably the last chance anyone would get for awhile.

The first of three men fired a bolt
of sizzling energy, wrapped in a whirlwind of sharp icicles, at me, and I took
a casual step to the side.
Nice... Chaucer’s Secret Frost
—not a lot of
low-level Knights were given access to such powerful tomes. That told me
something about my attacker. The bolt smashed into the wall and scorched the
finish in the stone, and I stepped forward in one quick movement and delivered
a resounding uppercut under the man’s mask. The blow rattled the teeth in
my
head, and he slumped even as his comrades took similar shots at me.

Those I had to dodge with a bit less
finesse, hurling myself at the floor just as my Knightly guard began to react—and
react they did. Working as a team, in perfect harmony, Vrail and Dessan picked
off the second man while Garner distracted the third.

A string of lights burst from the
tip of Dessan’s sword, which I was thankful we’d stopped to get, and Vrail raised
his own to catch the crackling lightning. A web of hot energy blazed between
their two blades. Together, in one well-timed and vicious sweep, they swung the
net of lightning and fire at the second attacker. It caught the man around his
waist and sliced cleanly through his armor, his flesh, and his spine. He fell
apart.

The third attacker swooped under
Garner’s initial attack and drove the hilt of a sword into his neck. Garner
slumped and fell, choking, and the man ran at me with his blade held high, screaming
for my head.

I drew my sword and met his strikes
blow for blow. It had been some long years since I’d had need of my weapons
training, but it was like riding a bike—one never really lost the knack. His
blade struck mine, and a torrent of purple sparks flared along the edge of star
iron striking star iron. A resounding
ring
echoed across the vast
chamber.

Vrail struck from behind, and the
man managed to fight both of us, his skill becoming troublingly apparent, until
Dessan swept in from the side and drove a knife through the plate in the man’s
armor. The blade pierced something vital, I’m sure, as the man screamed and a
gout of hot, sticky blood burst down Dessan’s arm.

“Declan!” Annie cried.

I spun on the spot, my instincts
perhaps not all that great after all, and would have taken a cruel, blackened
blade to the gut myself if not for the bullet that whipped past my ear, hot and
heavy, and shattered the mask of the fourth attacker, unseen until just now.
Annie whimpered and clutched her gun hard—she was two for two on headshots.

The attack was over in about
forty-five quick, fierce seconds. One man lay unconscious from my initial blow,
and three were dead. I rubbed at my knuckles and gave Annie what I hoped was a
smile full of thanks. She had saved my life—we had to stop doing that for each
other. Garner, a hand to his throat, stumbled to his feet muttering curses.

“Are you okay?” I asked Annie,
panting hard. My brand stung something fierce.

“Am I...? Yes, I’m fine.” She wiped
away a quick tear. “What just happened?”

Vrail and Dessan tore the masks from
my attackers’ faces and spent a few moments in quiet consideration. Vrail
picked up the man whom I’d knocked out—moaning something incomprehensible—and
blood trickled from his nose.
Good
.

Vrail cursed and let the man fall.
“I know these men, Declan. Rather, I know their allegiance. They are loyal to
Peter Drax, a member of your brother’s inner circle.”

I cleared my throat and wiped the blood
from my sword on the shirt of one of the dead. “Arbiter Drax,” I said softly.
“We met him. I don’t like that chap.”

Vrail grasped my shoulder. “Come, we
can’t stay here. Drax is powerful, and if he was responsible for this attack,
in the palace
itself
, then I fear it was at the behest of...”

“You can say it,” I said, as we
jogged across the chamber, flittering through long shadows, toward the ornate,
old elevators. Garner and Dessan remained behind to clean up the mess. “He’s
not my favorite person, either.”

“Of your brother,” Vrail said with a
grimace, and he called an elevator. “Of the king.”

“I’m inclined to agree,” I said.

“Your
brother
did this?”
Annie whispered furiously. She hadn’t yet holstered her weapon. Two men in
almost as many days, dead at her hand. Was this the best life I could offer
people who gravitated into my bloody orbit? “Why? He wanted your help!”

“What time is it?” I asked.

Vrail removed an old, tarnished
silver pocket watch from his jacket as we stepped into the elevator car. “Just
before seventh bell. Declan, if you’re to make this meeting tonight, I suggest
laying low.”

Agreed. “Anywhere you have in mind?”

He offered me a hesitant smile.
“Someone I think you should go see,” he said, punching one of the buttons on
the panel that led to a floor of the palace I knew all too well. Every Knight
did as it was usually our last stop on the longest, shortest road we took.

“Oh? And who might that be?”

“Your grandfather.”

The World Cemetery existed in a
pocket of space outside of Ascension City. It existed in a world written into
existence by the first kings and queens of Forget long before the Renegades had
split from the Knights and carved great, bloody swaths of the Story Thread for
their own kingdoms.

Like the Academy and the Forgetful
Library, a pathway through the Void was navigated at great risk, and two points
of space were forced together in a binding of Will. The waygates traversed the
Void within the palace, and distance between universes became abstract—all at
once infinite and within arm’s reach.

Annie held my hand as we crossed the
threshold underneath the great marble arch on the one hundredth floor of the
Fae Palace. Vrail kept to the side, a hand on the hilt of his rapier. In less
than a moment, we went from the cool, stone floors of the palace to lush, green
fields under an azure, cloudless sky.

Sunlight overhead made it daytime
again, even as Ascension City fell toward night, and those fields were marred
with tombstones and memorials beyond count. Centuries of war, of Knights
battling the Void and the Renegades and each other, had given rise to a
nation-world of headstones, near-endless fields of white-marble grave markers.

“Good god…” Annie whispered, and
squeezed my hand. “Are they all graves?”

“Yes.”

“How many—” She shook her head. “Oh
my, they just go on and on, don’t they?”

“The Tome Wars,” I said and then
fumbled. “That is, the last century was an awfully busy time for this place.”

“Business was good,” Vrail agreed.
He had gone on ahead and returned from the caretaker’s accommodation, a small
cottage on a hill not a quarter mile away. He led an old man by the arm. The
man wore a tattered librarian’s uniform under a worn sunhat and sported a wiry,
whiskery silver beard.

Aloysius Hale, my grandfather,
focused on my face and smiled—a gummy, senile smile made all the worse by his
failing vision. “Whatever happened to that lovely young girl of yours, Dec?” he
asked, as if I’d seen him only yesterday and five years of exile and prison did
not stand between us. “The pretty one with the olive skin?”

Of all the questions to ask upon our
reunion... The years on Starhold had not been kind to Old Man Hale. “You mean
Tal, Grandfather?”

“Yes, that’s her. I met her once,
didn’t I? In that old Library of mine.”

“You did, sir, yes.” I shook my
head. “She died, I’m afraid. At the end of the Tome Wars. Don’t you remember?”

A whole lot more to it than that, of
course, than a simple death. A lot more. Tal had died in Atlantis, standing before
the Infernal Clock and a god. Her soul, her life force, had been used to fuel
the Degradation and keep Atlantis hidden for five long years. She had been
possessed by the Everlasting Oblivion. I didn’t know if she was still out
there, somewhere, caught in some terrible form between life and death. For all
that mattered, she was dead.