Broken Quill [2] (12 page)

“What?” Annie shook her head.
“That’s—”

“Absurd nonsense, yes, but there you
have it. Best start getting used to it now.”

“What should I tell him then? He
could be in danger.”

I held up my palm and tried to
create a small ball of spluttering flame—a simple trick, taught to apprentices
not even seven years old at the Academy. The rune on my arm stung and cut me
away from the enchantment. “Not if you can keep what you’ve learned a secret,
he won’t be. No more than anyone in this town, at least. Tell him you’re stuck
at work for a few days, what with all the murder. It’s not a lie, really. Work
is just taking you further afield than Kings Park today.”

Annie stepped outside the shop to
make her phone call, and I helped myself to a sip of scotch from the collection
of bottles scattered around my writing alcove. The time was coming up on seven
o’clock in the morning, but I’d been awake long enough for it not to matter.
Scotch
o’clock somewhere.
I slumped down into my seat, opposite a leather couch stained
and sticky with spilled liquor from a lot of sleepless nights, and put my feet
up on a stack of pages, weeks out of the typewriter. My incomplete, somewhat
endless novel made a better footrest than it did a story.

“Declan Hale, you need to sleep, lad,”
Roper Hartley said, appearing out of nothing on the leather couch.

I rubbed my eyelids and cursed. “Not
now, mate. Long night, yeah. Even longer day ahead.”

Roper was a real character. And by
real character, I meant
real
character. The handsome, daring protagonist
from John Richardson’s
Emerald City
series. A construct of Will or my
own insanity, I’d once thought. He was a tall man, fair, and athletically
built. Perfect stubble bristled across his chin under a wave of chestnut-brown
hair. A sword hung in a sheath around his waist, pointed down toward the floor,
and a quiver of arrows rested on his back.

He shouldn’t have been able to reach
me here, on True Earth, but a lot of things seemed to be changing.
War to
come
, Emily had said. At first, I’d thought I was mad, speaking to
characters that only I could see, but now I believed them to be more than
madness. Something to do with my lack of shadow and the way my existence pulled
on the Story Thread. I was half in and half out of the Void at all times,
thanks to my deal with Lord Oblivion five and a half years ago in Atlantis.
Some of my essence, my shadow, was trapped forever in the inky blackness
between universes. I was in two places at once, and that kind of anomaly was like
sandpaper scraping against the cloth of reality, wearing thin.

At least, that was my working
theory. I didn’t have a better one or access to the scholars at the Infernal
Academy who study Void law.

 “Something changed, recently,
and the walls between worlds are crumbling. Can’t you feel it, Arbiter? Old
powers are returning.”

An image of the Infernal Clock
shattering against a floor of dark obsidian stone came to mind. “What do you
know of old powers? Richardson wrote you into existence not thirty years ago.”

Roper gave me half a smile. “You may
use and, indeed, abuse the Story Thread, Hale, but I was born of it—I am part
of it. I can hear it screaming.”

“It’s the Mirror upstairs, isn’t it?
That’s why you’re here.” I chuckled and shook my head. “Holmes pretty much told
me a few months ago, before Atlantis and Clare happened. Best you fix this, he
said.”

“I’m here—”

The chime above the door jingled and
someone, Annie most likely, stepped back into the shop. Whoever it was moved
swiftly through the maze of books to the counter and my alcove. Roper turned
his head, listening, with a small frown.

“Now that’s interesting...” he
muttered.

“I told Brian as much as I dared,”
Annie said, appearing from between the twisting shelves of romance and general
fiction. “Declan, I... Who’s that?”

She was staring at Roper.

He seemed just as surprised as me,
and I almost fell out of my chair.

“You can
see
him?” I asked.
“Annie, you can see the man on the couch?”

“Wearing the tight leather pants?
Yes. You’ll cook in the sun in those, buddy.”

Roper looked at me, back to Annie,
and opened his mouth to speak. He licked his lips instead, chuckled, and
disappeared.

Annie dropped her phone and jumped
back with a small cry. I just stared at her, stunned. My world spun a few more
degrees off its axis. So Roper, somehow, and impossibly so, was
real
.
Time and time again he’d appeared, whispering in my ear, along with other
characters—some not so kind—and no one, not Ethan or Sophie, or even old
Marcus, had ever said a word. They hadn’t been able to see the impossible
constructs.

But Annie...
why Annie?

“Who are you?” I asked, gripping the
neck of the scotch bottle hard enough to turn my knuckles white. If I could
have accessed my Will, my hands would have been ablaze, reaching for the nearest
book. I thought again on how my power had reacted to Annie, just over thirty
hours ago in Kings Park. My Will had
reached
for her, like a man lost in
the desert reaching for an oasis found.

“Declan,” Annie said carefully, a
hand on the grip of her gun, “put the bottle down.”

I blinked. I was on my feet, legs
set in a defensive stance, chest to the side, and holding the bottle as though
it were a club, just above my waist. “Sorry,” I said, doing as she asked. “It’s
just...
impossible
that you saw Roper.”

“Why... how... did he disappear?”

“Because he was never there!” I was
shouting, and it felt good. “He was just... an
echo,
forced out of his
book because of the Mirror upstairs. The Black Mirror, a path through the Void,
and because of my shadow. He was a ghost sent to haunt me—like all of them!”

“I don’t understand—”

“No! No you can’t understand. No one
can.”
Oh, and pity the melodrama of the long-suffering.
I took a deep
breath and exhaled slowly. “Sorry I’m shouting. It’s just... I’ve never had my
Will taken away from me. Not like this. I feel like I’m trying to breathe
underwater, you know. Trying to see with my eyes stabbed out. I...” I got a
hold on the anger. “You must have a lot of questions. Do you want to sit down,
and we’ll talk?”

Annie nodded and moved over to the
leather couch, so recently occupied by a fairy tale, and sat on the edge. She
relaxed when I sat down, too, and pulled out my phone.

“I’m going to call Ethan and Sophie,
get them over here. They’re like me, Annie. They know about... magic and other
worlds. We’ll need their help getting to Forget and Ascension City.”

I glanced at the screen of my phone,
which had been on silent mode all night, and saw I had forty-seven missed
calls. “Yikes, I think I’m in trouble.”

I made a quick call, and Sophie
picked up halfway through the first ring.

“Hi, Soph—yes, I know. Yes. Yes.
Look, I was there. At Paddy’s and at Hillarys.” I gave Annie a smile and rolled
my eyes. She didn’t return it. “Police station most of the night. A lot’s
happened. You and Ethan need to get to the shop now—I don’t care if he’s got
work. Trouble a’brewing, ’Phie. I... I’ve been Marked. Yes, like that. I’ll see
you soon.”

I ended the call, tossed the phone
on the coffee table between the old typewriter and the haphazardly stacked
pages of my novel, and poured myself a half glass of liquid gold.

“You know how early it is?” Annie
asked.

“Scotch o’clock somewhere, sweet
thing.” A half-eaten packet of stale digestive biscuits sat on the shelf in the
window alcove. I tore the packet wide open and dipped one into my drink. “Care
for a biscuit?”

“No, thank you. That’s disgusting.”

“I had a pack with chocolate topping
around here somewhere, but this shop has a way of swallowing things whole,
given enough time.” I chuckled and wiped some crumbs from the corner of my
mouth.

“Is this how you usually live,
Declan?”

A smile spread across my face.
“First name basis—that is wonderful.”

Annie huffed and pressed her hands against
her knees. Dark lines had appeared under her eyes in the last few hours. We
both could’ve used about two days of good sleep. She looked around my shop as
if expecting anything or anyone to pop into existence any second. I suppose
that was a fair concern, given this place.

“How do you keep the silverfish out
of all these books?” she asked.

“Minor wards and charms. The books
are under my protection.”

“Are you actually open for business?
That cash register doesn’t look like it’s ever been used.”

“When the mood strikes me, I open
the shop, but you never can be sure who’s a customer and who’s an assassin, can
you?”

“I’m not sure how many bookshop
managers have that problem.”

“You’d be surprised.”

Annie raised an eyebrow and said
nothing. I could see a thousand questions quivering on her lips, but it was
best to let someone new to all this wonder and horror work their own way around
to whatever was on their mind. Too much too soon could be damaging. Not as
damaging as a demonic messenger of the Old Gods, sure, but still a trifle
worrisome.

“There are other worlds,” Annie
said, as if confirming the fact to herself.

“Yes.”

“You’ve been to them?”

“Oh, yes. Many, many times.”

“And there’s, like, this main other
world and some sort of city where people like you come from?”

I shrugged. “I was born here on
Earth, actually, twenty-five or so years ago, but yes, there’s Ascension City—a
shining world of prosperity and wealth, a jewel of the Story Thread.”

“So who are you in this other world?
A... Knight?”

“I was a Knight. Most definitely a
Knight. Before I was exiled for ending the war, I was commander of one of the
most elite units in Ascension City—the Cascade Fleet.”

“For
ending
the war?”

“That’s another long story. Short
version, I bargained with a creature of immense power in the heart of
Atlantis—yes,
that
Atlantis—and lost my shadow and my love in the fine
print but forced an end to the Tome Wars. I created a... Degradation. A shield
that encircled Atlantis, protecting the city and the powerful relics hidden
there. It also crippled the Story Thread.”

Annie threw up her hands, struggling
to keep up. “You keep mentioning that. What is the Story Thread?”

“A network of countless worlds that
we, people like me with enough Will power, can access through books. Think of the
Thread as cities and towns on a map, and books are the roads connecting them
all together. It’s actually nothing like that, but you get a rough idea, yeah?”

Annie nodded. I liked the way she
nodded, her fringe bouncing. She was quite pretty. “Tell me about the Knights
then. What are they?”

“The Knights...” I sighed, somewhat
wistfully. “My entire life, up until five years ago, was spent in service of
the Knights Infernal and all that they, in their glory, stood for.”
And how
far we mighty fall...
“The Knights are an order of men and women, millennia
old, who serve the Story Thread and Forget. We keep the Void in check and deal
with the monsters, the unseen, the nightmarish visions of humanity made real.”

“Sort of like a police force then?”

“Sure, I guess. But closer to a
military, overseen by a monarchy of powerful Knights and the lords and ladies
of Ascension City.”

“You mentioned something about a
king before. I’m picturing a medieval castle, with Knights in armor fighting on
horseback. Is it anything like that? A king would mean you don’t vote people
into power, do you?”

“No, not so much.” I ran a hand back
through my hair and frowned. “You have to understand, before I ended them, the
Tome Wars had been fought for close to a century.
One hundred years
of
war between the Knights and the Renegades. Not much chance to hold general
elections in there.”

“So how do you decide who’s in
charge?”

“Power,” I said. “Any kid who
graduates from the Academy, at fifteen or sixteen, becomes something like a
senator, a politician, in a way, capable of influencing policy and the war
effort. For the last few decades, the Dragon Throne has been held by those with
the power to seize control and govern the war, elected—in the loosest sense of
the word—by a council of the ruling class. We’re soldiers, first and foremost,
charged to protect the Story Thread and the wealth of worlds out there,
standing strong against the Void.”

Annie pondered that and then nodded.
“Okay. So what were you to Ascension City?”

“Almost king, once upon a time,
before I was cast into this wonderful, scotch-soaked exile.” I took a sip. “But
my rank? During the war I was a field-commander in the Cascade Fleet. Rather
prestigious, like Special Forces. But say there was no war, no military
designations... I attained the rank of Arbiter before I became a threat to the
throne.”