Broken Quill [2] (17 page)

“What about Ethan and Sophie?”

“They’ll be in Ascension City, by
now. Alone. With any luck ’Phie will reach Aaron, an old friend, and lay low until
we can catch up.”

Annie nodded, a hand on her hip.
“Okay. So that brings us back to the start—what do
we
do?”

I looked up and down the wondrous
beach as more wraithlike people and creatures disappeared. Something was...
routine, about how they were appearing and fading. I watched a man in a lounge
chair, smoking a pipe and reading the paper, get dragged out to sea. When the
tide washed back in, he was gone, but in his place was a large, stuffed monkey
clapping symbols.

“They come and go with the tide,” I
said. “How odd.”

“Declan?” Annie waved her hand in
front of my face. “Concentrate. Let’s keep moving, okay?”

“Right, yeah.” I blinked and nodded.
“That’s a plan. North or south?”

“North feels like moving forward,
don’t you think?”

I shrugged. “Surely does.” Given
that we had no earthly idea which direction was north, as the moons in the sky,
strewn amidst the distant interstellar clouds, were both rising and falling,
Annie and I took off
left
up the beach, toward a curve in the shoreline
a few miles away.

We walked, admiring the alien
scenery and marveling at the gentle absurdity of this world. I strained my
memory back to the world lists—tomes I’d been required to study day and night
at the Infernal Academy—but could not for the life of me put a name to this
beauty. A true gem of the Story Thread, hanging pristine and shining against
the dark.

“I don’t know where we are,” I said
to Annie. “Perhaps a world created after I was exiled from the Knights.
Somewhere
new
. But the Degradation…”

“Maybe,” Annie said, “and I know I’m
new to all this, but I get a feeling of... of
old
, from this place. Do
you?”

I shrugged and pointed at a young
boy squatting in the sea. He waddled a few feet into the swash. As the tide
receded, I expected the little fellow to disappear. But he didn’t. He stayed.
“I don’t think he’s... whatever the rest of these people are. Illusions, or
whatever. He’s not disappearing.”

“Well, let’s have a chat with him,”
Annie suggested, and stepped over to the edge of the swash, crunching squeaky
sand underfoot.

The boy sat in the surf, wearing
what looked like an old toga, Ancient Roman style. A golden brooch, shaped like
a rose, held the cloth together at his shoulder. He had his face stuffed
nose-deep in a mango the size of a football. Sticky, yellow fruit clung to his
cheeks and dribbled down his chin under a mop of unruly, jet-black hair.

“Hello,” Annie said. “Um... what’s
your name?”

The young boy looked up and frowned.
He put his thumb up, stuck his tongue between his teeth, and squinted at us. “You
two don’t rightly belong,” he said, tossing his half-eaten fruit into the
swash. “Watcha doin’ here?”

“We’re lost,” I said, wishing I had
even an ounce of power so I could extend my senses toward the boy and see,
among other things, if he were human. He
looked
human, but then so did
Emissary until he breathed hot-pink fireballs. “Wondering where we are. Do you
know?”

The boy nodded and stepped up onto
the beach out of the surf. He wore loose leather sandals on his feet. “You’re
on the shore, aren’t you? Same as me.”

I scratched my chin slowly. Given
what I knew of Forget, I was wary of the boy. I watched him carefully as he
built a small sand castle, thin and narrow, but with great care. He only spent
a few minutes building the castle, but when it was done, he had a rough tower,
a good two feet high. The ocean swept in and ate at the tower’s foundations.

Annie knelt down so they were
roughly eye to eye. “What’s your name?” she asked with a smile.

“Charlie,” he said. “Charlie Dusk.”

“Hi, Charlie Dusk. I’m Annie and
this is Declan. How old are you, Charlie?”

“Don’t rightly know,” he said, and
scratched at the back of his neck. “At least as many as ten but no more than
twelve. I’d remember if it’d been twelve.”

Annie gave him a bemused grin. “Are
your parents around, Charlie? Declan and I are lost, you see, and we need to
find—”

“Father’s away,” he said, in a tone
of deadly seriousness. “Haven’t seen Mother in a good many days. Or my brothers
and sisters. We’ve been scattered for a while, yeah.”

“How did you get here?” Annie asked.

Charlie frowned and thought about
this. “Want a juicy fruit?” he asked, and gestured vaguely to what remained of
his enormous mango. “They’re just up the shore a bit, near the temple.”

“I’d love one,” Annie said. She
stood and offered Charlie her hand. I almost intervened, expecting the kid to
sprout fangs and take a bite, but he did nothing more than slip his small hand
into Annie’s with a smile.

We set off walking up the beach
again. I kept some distance from Annie and Charlie, just in case. He seemed
harmless enough, but without my Will to get a sense of the kid, I just couldn’t
be sure. Forget was a lot of things but rarely merciful to the incautious.

“Are there other people in the temple,
Charlie?” Annie asked.

“Dunno about other people,” Charlie
said. “I’m not allowed inside the temple. If I get too close, my head hurts and
my nose bleeds.”

Annie shot me a quick, curious
glance. I shrugged. “Do you know the name of this beach, Charlie?” I asked.

He nodded enthusiastically and
jumped on the spot, leaving two deep footprints in the sand. “The Shore of
Distant Stars,” he said, as if reading the title of a book slowly and
carefully.

I didn’t recognize the name—it
wasn’t from any tome or story I’d ever read, which was not an inconsiderable
amount, given my line of work. Libraries upon libraries wrapped in the annals
of history. “And the temple? Does that have a name, too?”

Charlie shook his head. “Maybe. It’s
old. Like,
ancient
. If I ever knew it, I’ve forgotten.”

“And you get nosebleeds when you get
too close,” Annie said.

“Right. But you won’t, I bet. You
neither, Mr. Declan.”

“Why’s that, kid?”

Charlie rolled his eyes. “Because
you’re not from here, silly.” He tugged at Annie’s hand and pulled her up the
beach toward a tree bulging with thick, sticky mango fruit. I watched him
carefully, keeping a hand on the hilt of my sword.

However insubstantial this world
felt, the football-sized mango I plucked from the tree was, perhaps, the most
delicious piece of fruit I’ve ever had the pleasure of devouring. The flesh
melted on my tongue and released a tart sweetness that ran down the back of my
throat and made me shiver. Annie moaned as she took her first bite and quickly
chewed through the rest, making a mess of her mouth and hands.

“That,” she said, “was
extraordinary.”

“Glad you like ’em,” Charlie said.
“I grew this grove meself. Took... took a long time, it did.”

“They’re very nice,” I said. These
trees were at least a decade aged, if not more. So how old was
probably-ten-no-more-than-twelve Charlie? He grinned at me through a mess of
bright yellow pulp. “Are we near the temple?”

“Yup, this way. Come on, Annie and
Declan!” He dashed along a path of blended dirt and sand and disappeared into
the forest.

The air under the canopy of trees
was almost as sticky as the mangoes. After a few minutes of following the boy
through the forest, I wiped a sheen of sweat from my brow and felt droplets
trickling down my back under my shirt and waistcoat, clinging uncomfortably to
my skin.

The path meandered up and down, over
hills and under massive, gnarled tree roots that had formed natural bridges
from banks of grass. Long vines, as thick as my arm, hung from the boughs high
overhead. A canopy of broad leaves obscured the awesome sky and the triplet
moons, but a warm, ethereal light seemed to shine from the tree bark, like sun
glinting on the water.

“This is a magic forest,” Annie
said. “I feel like I’ve stepped into a fairy tale.”

“Keep an eye out for the Big Bad
Wolf,” I muttered. Charlie gave me a grin that was all teeth. Something about
this kid rubbed me the wrong way.

A sense of time passing settled on
my shoulders as we followed the boy, Charlie Dusk, through the forest. He led
us deeper into the trees, through cool air carrying the scent of honeydew, and
time marched idly by. I couldn’t say if minutes became hours or became days,
but the canopy never broke, and the light never faltered. A soft, ghostly glow
that felt indifferent to our passing.

“I’ll be going home soon,” Charlie
said, after what felt like only minutes and long hours. “I’ve been waiting,
yeah, to get home. Soon now.”

“Do you live around here?” Annie
asked.

“Not really, no.”

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“There’s a knife in the temple,” he
said, ignoring my question. “A magic knife what can take you anywhere. To other
worlds, even. You won’t be lost then, right? And I can go home, too.”

“That sounds nice, Charlie,” Annie
said, casting me a quick, excited look. “Are we near the temple now?”

“Soon. It’s still up a ways.”

We crossed an ambling, bubbling
little river of glacier-blue water. Tiny frogs, bright orange, swam under the
surface. The path became less distinct as we climbed a steady series of
switchbacks up a ridge toward the tree line. Some minutes later, we stood on
the crest of the ridge and stared at the ruins of what must have, once upon a
time, been an impressive structure of stone—like the pyramids of Egypt.

“Here we are,” Charlie said, and he
set off across a field of knee-high grass dashed with pockets of tulips and
poppies.

Emerging on the other side of the
grass put us within about fifty feet of the temple walls. The wall spanned a
good mile in length, disappearing down over the side of the ridge, and,
although broken and crumbling, claimed at least forty feet of height before
coming to a ragged and battered stop. Just above the edge of that wall, I could
spy distant snow-capped peaks on the other side of the temple.

Pillars of broken, white stone ran
parallel to a metal emblem set into the ground before the dark, arched entrance
into the temple. The emblem was burnished gold, and the runes inscribed into
its face were Infernal. I recognized only a few and thought I was looking at
wards and protective enchantments.

Charlie sniffed and massaged his
forehead. “Can’t go any closer,” he said unhappily. “Can already feel it
biting. What about you?” he asked Annie.

“No,” she said. “I feel fine,
Charlie. Declan, do you...?”

I ran a hand back through my hair
and smiled. “Feelin’ fine.”

Charlie laughed. “See! I knew it, I
did. You can go and get the knife and we’ll wait here, won’t we, Miss Annie?”
He slipped his tiny hand back into hers and the grin he gave me was predatory.

“Oh,” Annie said. “Well, if you’d
like—”

“I think it best you come with me,
Annie,” I said, and my tone, while light, brooked no argument.

For just a moment, a snarl crossed
Charlie’s face, but he recovered fast. He plonked himself down on the edge of
the long grass and twiddled his thumbs. “Well, okay, but come back and get me
after you find the knife, okay?”

“We will,” Annie promised.

I said nothing.

“Mr. Declan?”

“I promise, kid.”

Together, Annie and I walked the
short distance to the temple and crossed the golden emblem set into the ground between
the fallen ivory pillars. I walked at a slight angle, keeping young Charlie in
view the whole time.

We stepped under the arched
entranceway and disappeared into the inky blackness of the temple without
rousing any ancient demons or angering the wandering gods.

“No headaches or nosebleeds?” I
asked as Annie and I headed down a straight corridor, strewn with centuries of
dust. Little plumes swirled around our ankles. The entranceway behind us was a
distant circle of pale light.

Annie shrugged. “He seemed genuinely
distressed the closer we got to this place. Do you think he’s okay?”

“He’s not human, Annie. I’m sure of
it.”

Annie grinned as if I were telling a
joke. Her grin faded when she saw I was serious. “He’s a little odd, I’ll give
you that, but he was sweet enough, wasn’t he? And he led us here. I don’t know
if he’s making up stories about something that can help us get home, but why
would he lie?”

“I don’t know. Why is water wet?
Could be a slave to his nature, like the best of us. Just be wary if we bump
into him again. I get a bad feeling from the kid.”

“Well, I thought he was perfectly
charming. A little rough around the edges but harmless.”