Elder Shadow by Joe Ducie

Author:Joe Ducie [Ducie, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cedar Sky Publishing
Published: 2017-09-12T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE ASHES OF TRUE EARTH

’All of this, for you, in your avarice’

Against the protests of my advisors, who fell on me like vermin, pigeons, seagulls after my bag of hot chips, once I strolled from my quarters within the Fae Palace, Tal lead me down to the cavernous hall of portals about halfway up the mighty tower. A nexus point for travelling across my vast and bountiful empire.

“Where are we going, Tal?” I asked, as my royal guard—save for Vrail, who was attending to other matters, moving his family back from off-world, now that most of the unrest had rested—cleared a path.

Tal checked her pocket watch, which told the time of the casual twenty-four-hour clock of the real world, and not the fucked time of everywhere and anywhere else. One could experience some serious jetlag, crossing worlds—into territories where the days lasted a year, the nights even longer, or worse, where the clock was just out of whack an hour or two. Those were the ones that really messed with your head. Subtle menace, like an Elder God or two I could name.

Tal arranged a portal to True Earth, the next available (which was immediately for the king) and we stepped from the vast and vaulted splendour of the Fae Palace and into a familiar, if a little dusty and worn, basement of a bar in Perth, Western Australia—on Murray Street. My royal guard followed swiftly, a good half-dozen toughs armed to the teeth, all of them capable of slitting throats in a heartbeat, and had done so recently during the rebellion. We were about twenty minutes up the road from my bookshop in Joondalup. What remained of my bookshop, after Oblivion had his way with mirkfyre and ruin.

I had a thousand and one questions, but I trusted Tal. Trusted her not to steer me off the edge of the nearest cliff. Hell, I’d manage that all on my own.

This bar was an old favourite of mine, and I admired the aged wine cellar as Tal and I walked up from the portal archway in the basement, a key waypoint for Story Thread travel, licensed and approved, of course, and up a set of stairs into the bar proper.

Lazy, mid-afternoon sunlight bled through the stained and dusty windows, casting faint golden pools on the few inches of sawdust coating the floors. A stage in the corner held a band of slumped jazz instruments—and a grand piano, all of which looked tired. The round tables sank under the weight of drinks once spilt, the velvet-backed chairs last in style four centuries ago.

The bar had character—something that couldn’t be faked.

Albert McSorley stood in his traditional, well-worn spot behind the long bar. Dozens of cold, frosty craft beer taps lined the bar, a bridge of cool pipes and golden promise. The wall behind him stretched up to the ceiling, a library ladder in place, full of bottles both local and alien.

McSorley’s on Murray Street was an institution, one of the few licensed

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