I jogged across the smoking
earth, and as I drew closer I knew for certain where Renegade had gone.
“You should have stopped him,” I
whispered, staring not at Faraday but over his shoulder, at an imperfection in
the mighty shield just an arm’s length away.
“We were overrun here, Hale,”
Faraday said. He shifted his chest armor and followed my gaze. “This is your
doing. You forced peace from war and now force war from peace.”
A vortex in the Degradation
warped the mighty shield and sucked in the construct like a drain sucking down
water. The ethereal whirlpool was quiet save for clashes of bruised purple
lightning and the gnashing of invisible bones.
“He went through there, didn’t
he?” I asked.
Faraday nodded. “He had a knife,
coated in blood. Just a small dagger, really. He cut that hole and stepped in.”
“There’s a good chance the vortex
killed him,” I said aloud, mostly to myself.
“And there’s a chance it didn’t.”
I gazed at the King of the
Knights Infernal as if seeing him for the first time. “Are you asking for my
help now, Jon?”
“This is your mess. We are here
because of you.”
I had to laugh. Even here,
beneath the glare of the Degradation, old habits died hard. “So you want me to
step through?” My blood had opened the way once before. I had walked
out
of this terrible shield on the night
it was created. I could walk back in. It was tied to me, to my shadow lost in
the Void.
“You did this. You fix it.
Morpheus Renegade cannot be allowed to seize the treasures of Atlantis. The Infernal
Clock… Broken quill, the Roseblade, Declan!”
Aaron shifted uncomfortably. “For
Clare. Do this for Clare.”
A thought came to me then—a
terrifying, awesome thought. The Infernal Clock could grant life. Eternal life,
if the stories were to be believed. It could bring Clare back. I had to reach
it before Renegade. There was only one course of action left to me. I’d been
too late to stop the mad king, but I was going back to Atlantis anyway.
To save the world?
No.
To save the girl.
“Are you coming?” I asked.
Faraday shook his head. “And you think you deserve that crown?” I spat on the
ground at his feet and stepped toward the wailing vortex. Before I could touch
it, Aaron grasped my shoulder and pressed a wrapped bundle into my arms. I
frowned in confusion and—
“It’s what you asked me to hide
in my basement, you fool.”
My hands shook and I almost
dropped the package. “I… no.”
“Yes.”
“But…”
Aaron sniffed. His hands were
stained with Clare’s blood. “Kill that monster, Declan. Be—”
“Ruthless?”
“—who you are.”
Well, okay.
Steeling my resolve, I followed
Morpheus Renegade into chaos unbound. The Degradation consumed me whole, and I
was thrown across realities once more.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The Lost
City
Stepping into the Degradation was
like walking into a furnace of cool energy. A spring of spinning and flowing
ice pressed in on me from all sides. The effect was startling, fresh, and
altogether unnatural.
Then it began to hurt, of course.
Nothing this important could be
gained easily or be won without spilling enough blood to sink the Titanic twice
over.
A thousand knives of red-hot iron
pierced my skin. My eyes rolled and boiled in their sockets, and a shower of
molten, hissing steel drowned all thought and sense, save for the maddening,
endless pain. The Degradation was on overdrive, kicked into third gear already
doing a hundred miles an hour.
Yeehaw!
I rode that wave of pain across
the space between worlds, rode that
motherfucker
down
through the moments between seconds, and over the impossible gap in forever. It
was always,
always
one
helluva ride.
The world disappeared, and in its
place was a
between
enchantment
and a pathway of forgotten light. The road to Atlantis, the speckled road to
power was suspended on a wing and a prayer. I spotted a tiny figure in the
distance, hunched against the maelstrom.
Morpheus Renegade was already
half a mile away. Time was different on this side. His few seconds of advantage
through the gap in the Degradation had become minutes on the other side.
I set off after him, my palms
ablaze with blue flame. But there were memories on that road. Scarred memories
of the past and all the many wonderful mistakes I’d made were set to waylay and
distract me.
“What do you think the kids will remember of the war, Tal?” I held
my head in my hands, fighting a headache—a migraine of epic proportions.
“Grim-faced Knights patrolling the streets of Ascension City? The
threat of attack, the sense that something’s wrong with the world…” A pause.
“And they’ll remember you, of course, they’ll remember Declan Hale. The
Arbiter—the light against the dark. You’ll be legend, Declan.”
“No, they’ll not remember it that way,” Clare said, drawing deep on
a warm, comforting cigar which looked out of place in her tiny, bloodstained
hands. “They’ll remember the sweet shops in Farvale going out of business…
they’ll remember school being cancelled.” She shrugged. “Aye, but I suppose
they’ll remember you, Declan. You’re the hero.”
“Perhaps that’s the best way to remember it,” Tal said. “Better than
the mass graves, the killing fields, the cost to the Knights…”
Something was rising from the
pain, out of the sparkling darkness, something I’d fought so hard to see, to
set the world ablaze for… what was that old line? About hopelessness, regret,
and bitter angst at my existence? Oh yeah…
The odds are long. Life’s unfair,
and death’s no better.
But you know what? Fuck the odds.
There was a great roar and an
unexpected
thump
into the
ground.
The sky filled with diamonds and
became an ocean of twinkling stars scattered across an inferno of soft purple
menace. I felt uneasy. I felt out of sorts. Death warmed up.
“I’m here.” But I wasn’t there. I
was still floating on memory, in the worlds of the better-left-forgotten…
“Everything I do, I do it for you.”
Tal glared. “Don’t you dare throw Bryan Adams at me, Declan. You’re
better than that.”
I pulled myself from the
memories, from the furnaces of distant stars, and forced the searing pain back
where it belonged—in the nothingness between this world and the last. The
task wasn’t an easy one but it was a task in which I was well versed.
I don’t know how much time had
slipped by, but I sat up and surveyed the old world around me. Renegade,
if he had fared better through the Degradation than me, had a good head start,
but
I
knew where I was going.
The ground was soft and spongy
like moss. I sat halfway up a steep rise that stretched into the sky for what
must have been miles. From my vantage point, I held a commanding view of the
most awe-inspiring range of mountains ever conceived. The twisted peaks were
covered in electric-blue snow and light cast from the spectacle far below, yet
the range extended for miles and miles up toward the heavens. The peaks brushed
the sky, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if they pierced the upper reaches
of the atmosphere.
Great crags of rock and cliff
faces a dozen miles high played tricks with the eye and created a numbing sense
of size that was hard to visually comprehend. Those rocks and cliffs were just
the boundaries of this world inside the Degradation.
Down and away to the right, just
past Atlantis itself, miles upon miles of black rock and twisted thrusts of
reef, marred with burnt coral, brushed up against the Lost City. The ruined
landscape was the coastline with the ocean just beyond, but those waters had
long since dried up, leaving behind a terrifying, lifeless wasteland. The sight
of it made me feel sick.
I turned away to behold the main
event.
The Lost City of Atlantis sat far
below, surrounded by natural barriers of impenetrable rock. A haze of indigo
light merged with neon-blue over the outlandish architecture.
“Oh my,” Tal whispered. “It looks so small, and yet…”
“It’s huge,” I assured her, and despite my bruised and bleeding
condition, I managed a wink. “We’re just far away… five miles at least.”
And we had been, back then.
Despite the uninterrupted view into the valley below, the commanding sight of
Atlantis aglow in the evening, I was still miles up
above
the city. Halfway up a mountain that touched the stars.
Far below, in warmer climes, towers that rivaled the highest skyscrapers back
home, and towers that eclipsed such modern heights, looked like pinpricks
scattered across an impossible terrain.
“What do you feel right now?” I asked Tal, and then laughed. “We’ve
just escaped all true worlds, and now… behold another! What do you feel?”
“Afraid,” she said, and that was enough. Fear—of a world
where there could be no world. Neither Earth nor Forget nor Void.
Below lay the unknown, the
better-left-forgotten
, and we had been
so small against the backdrop of this impossible place. But there wasn’t just
fear. No, not at all. There was
wonder
,
astonishment, and all manner of conflicting emotions as the goal of not just
one lifetime but more than I could fathom came into sight…
The Great Quest, done at last.
Yet above all there was pain. The
pain of remembrance—
oh goddamn
it
—and the pain of existence
outside existence.
“Keep moving, Declan.” I rubbed
my legs to get them working. The piercing ride across realities, through the
Degradation, had left me numb. Aaron’s bundle lay on the ground a few feet
away. The object within had half-fallen out of the cloth, and the pommel of a
sheathed sword was revealed. With a heavy sigh, I unwrapped his terrible prize
and strapped the cursed thing to my belt.
Only as a last resort,
I thought,
stroking the hilt of the weapon.
I headed toward the city using an
old path, cobbled with broken stone and overgrown with mossy weeds. Dozens of
gnarled and twisted cherry blossom trees, in full bloom, lined the path. Those
trees were new. Last time I’d been here, with Tal, nothing had been living.
There was no sign of Renegade,
but I kept my wits about me as I made quick time down the mountainside on the
old road. He could be laying in ambush—I would be—or he could have
made a run straight to the city. I didn’t know which worried me more. I kept a
pool of Will cupped in my palm, ready to kill.
Atlantis drew ever closer, and
the city began to seem that much more real. The alien architecture and ancient
design came into relief against the backdrop of the darkening sky. It looked
beyond its time, for damn sure, yet most of it was in utter ruin.
The lights were on, though, so
someone was home…
Towers scraped the sky, connected
by clear walkways and bridges that stretched from the peak of one building to
the next in the air over the city. Neon-blue lighting ran up and down the
streets and throughout hundreds of the buildings. Legend held that Atlantis was
fuelled by the same near-eternal source of energy that kept Ascension City aglow,
powering the streets and keeping the abandoned metropolis running even after
its defeat.
The legend came close.
Atlantis was powered by the
Infernal Clock.
Clare’s second chance. A shot at
redemption for those of us who deserved no such thing.
One tower rose above all others
in the heart of the city and shone like a beacon in the broken light. The dark
spire was cut from the same obsidian stone as the Fae Palace and was huge, an
unbroken citadel eclipsing all other structures in the dead city. Blue lights
ran up the tower in a spiral—again, just like the Fae Palace—and at
the very top, still far below me, a single sphere of white fire hovered above a
flat plateau.
A few miles and an hour later I
entered the city proper and beheld the splendor of a lost world.
The main promenade into Atlantis
was a thin, narrow canyon lined with statues a hundred feet high on either
side. Men, old lords and kings, glared down at me in silent judgment—the
distant ire of the long dead.
From where I’d entered this
realm, high up above on the mountainside, the city had looked mostly whole save
for a few patches of ruin and rubble. However, as I walked the streets of
Atlantis itself, the calamity and chaos that had claimed this fabled utopia
became all too clear. The city was a husk, beyond all recovery.
A lot like your good self
, tittered the
voice in the back of my mind.