The Endless King

by Dave Rudden

  There were iron flecks in her grey eyes. She wasn’t being quiet any more either. ‘I wanted you to be normal. I shouldn’t have, but I did. But your father knew better. Always … he knew better. He knew you’d walk in dark places.’

  ‘Vivian, what are you –’

  Iron fingers tightened, and Vivian pressed her forehead to his, so hard it hurt.

  ‘I am so proud of you.’

  And then he was released, falling backwards into Grey’s arms, and Vivian was running, hammer in hand, towards the street.

  ‘NO!’

  It should have been a roar. It should have been enough to make her come back. But before his lungs could find the strength there was a forearm round his throat, expertly flexing his breath away. Denizen scrabbled at it, drawing Falter with his other hand, but something slapped it away and he was getting weaker and weaker –

  No. No! What are you –

  His mother had left him. His mother had –

  And then he was gone as well.

  24

  War’s End

  The dust was settling.

  It swirled around Vivian as she stepped out into the sunlight, the white of her cloak turned to ash. The ground had been chewed by the passage of massive claws, and she had to carefully pick her way across it.

  There was a growing black speck in the sky.

  With a smooth roll of the wrists, Vivian let her hammer whicker round her in a figure of eight. She had wielded it so long now –

  – the speck the size of an acorn –

  – that compensating for the drag of the hammer head was automatic, and the grooves and notches on the handle fitted perfectly into the scars on her hands.

  – the acorn the size of a fist –

  It was all about momentum, a hammer. You let the weight of it spin you, lead you. You let it show you where it wanted you to go.

  Dragon screamed over her head like a fighter jet, the backwash driving Vivian to one knee. Her cloak was ripped from its clasps with a snap of fabric, and, when the wind and noise of Dragon’s passing had died away, she turned and rose to find the Tenebrous gecko-planted on the great outer wall, directly above the Aurelian Gate.

  There was a lot of it. Its wings spread hugely, turning the sunlight a reeking, patchy green, and it shook rubble first from one claw, then the other, the movements delicate and almost human. Its head unfurled like a mayflower dance, and, when it roared, all its mouths opened at once.

  Dramatics. It was neither the most intricate or cleverest perversion Vivian had ever seen. When its bellow didn’t move her, it cocked its head in confusion.

  Not who I expected.

  Vivian shrugged.

  But no matter. There’s a spot. On my back. You’ll be perfect.

  ‘The Clockwork Three.’

  The beast went still.

  ‘Before that, the Tearsipper Girls,’ Vivian continued calmly. ‘And Redpenny, the Hounds of Vox, Verdigris, Charnabal Cross …’

  She remembered the names the way she remembered old injuries – forgotten aches and long-healed cuts. There were names that everyone knew, written deep and red in the histories, and names that even Darcie might not have recognized. There were names there she’d never told anyone at all.

  I don’t frighten you?

  ‘You don’t frighten me,’ Vivian responded. ‘None of you. You have never been what I’m afraid of.’ A corner of her lip twisted upwards. ‘I have carried this hammer for a very long time.’

  Dragon’s sigh blew stinking air down the street. Vivian didn’t honestly believe these animals capable of emotions, but she allowed herself the brief satisfaction of imagining it sounded … disappointed.

  Why are you smiling?

  ‘Because now I get to put it down.’

  And she swung the weapon into her waiting palm.

  Dragon’s head spasmed, blaring discordantly from a thousand throats, and with a hinging snap it charged, bounding like a lion, like a locomotive of darkness and iron and hate.

  And Malleus Vivian Hardwick did what she had been born to do, what she had been raised and trained to do, what she’d always done.

  She attacked.

  25

  The Turn

  ‘I got them out,’ Darcie said, but there was no pride in her voice, just soft and hollow truth. ‘We were fighting them corridor by corridor, and then I felt Dragon push through the Glimpse and … and we evacuated. We abandoned Daybreak.’

  This tower was the third position they’d taken in as many hours. Abigail had managed to somehow snatch an hour of rest between the three, but all the brief moments of rest in between simply let exhaustion catch up.

  Darcie hadn’t slept at all.

  ‘A rearguard stayed,’ the Lux continued, ‘to cover our escape, or maybe Greaves didn’t quite believe me when I told him, but … sixty-eight Knights. That’s how many I managed to get out before it …’

  A floor below, a scream rose and then was abruptly cut off. You weren’t supposed to move the wounded. You weren’t supposed to use healing Cants like the Bellows Subventum because both the Cost and the pressure on the body were too much … but those were rules from the old war, the old Adumbral, the one that belonged to the Order and the Order alone.

  Now they whispered. Now they hid, the once-silent city clogged with hoots and snarls and baying laughter no human throat could produce.

  ‘I know,’ Abigail said. ‘We saw. There was …’ The words felt foreign in her mouth. ‘There was nothing any of us could have done. Not against something like that. It was the right thing to do.’

  ‘I felt them die,’ Darcie said simply. ‘The boundary between worlds is so thin now that I felt their lights go out. I can feel the candlewards crumbling, the Tenebrous spilling from the Glimpse now, feeding on Daybreak … colonizing it.’ She scratched her arms through her coat. ‘I can feel them.’

  ‘I know,’ Abigail repeated. It was a pathetically small thing to say. It was also the heart of Greaves’s strategy for holding the Tenebrous back.

  She hadn’t heard it from Greaves, of course. The Palatine was too busy coordinating the warriors who had made it out of Daybreak alive. But in the midst of the controlled chaos Darcie had been able to fill them in.

  With the Glimpse lost, and more and more reports of Tenebrous Breaching inside the city, the Order had fallen back on the strategy that had defined them since their inception – intercepting Breaches, plugging gaps, with a Lux Precognitae directing their blades.

  The web of ever-shifting, ever-responding cadres across the city was holding – so far – and Dragon had seemed to lose interest in them as soon as it had pulled free of Daybreak, but Abigail was under no illusion as to how long that would last. The city couldn’t hold forever – at some point the numbers of Tenebrous spilling from the Glimpse or bleeding into the city would become too great.

  And the Emissary itself wouldn’t even face them.

  ‘Have you … have you detected it? The Emissary?’

  Abigail knew that, in this situation, coming across two Neophytes was like finding loose change under the settee when the debt collectors were kicking down your door, but Greaves had shrugged off their intel about the Emissary as if it were nothing. It didn’t matter if they somehow managed to defend every alleyway and street corner, when at any point the whole city might fall. The Emissary was the target. Killing it would slow down the invasion. It had to.

  ‘No,’ Darcie responded, and, though she allowed no anger in her tone, Abigail could feel the space where it should be. ‘It’s the one thing I can’t feel. It’s hiding from me. Why come this far … only to hide?’

  ‘It’s had years,’ Matt whispered. ‘Centuries. Centuries to figure out what we do and how we do it. Centuries to plan what it’s doing now.’

  ‘Which is why we need to take it out,’ Abigail snapped. ‘None of this will matter if the Emissary pitches us all into the Tenebrae. We need to get a cadre together and –’

  ‘A cadre?’ Matt’
s voice was bitterly incredulous. ‘You saw what the Emissary’s become. What’s wrong with you – you want to just go out there and face it head-on? Why can’t you –’

  ‘Children.’

  Their mouths snapped shut at Darcie’s stern tone.

  ‘We have to trust the Palatine. More than that – we have to trust Vivian. This strategy is just a holding action until the Malleus leads the rest of the Order back here. Then we reclaim Adumbral and Daybreak itself.’

  ‘And what if we can’t?’ Abigail said, and she was no longer sure if she was speaking to Darcie or herself. ‘What if every candle we lose is another chance lost, another piece of ground we’ll never retake? This isn’t the same war. Things have changed. We have to change as well.’

  They both fell silent as something like a foghorn mixed with a cat’s yowl split the air, and then Darcie shook her head. ‘C’est la guerre, Abigail. This is war. There is no victory. Don’t you think I want there to be?’

  Sunlight still streamed through the windows, but they sat in a corner away from the light.

  ‘I grew up on the same books as Denizen,’ the Lux murmured. ‘Secret temples and magic gems that make everything right again. And, when you join an order of sorcerer Knights, and they tell you you’re doubly special, you research, you know?

  ‘You hope.

  ‘You begin to think that maybe you’ll be the person to solve everything. To save everyone. You look for prophecies. Solutions. The lock for which you’re the key. And I’m not alone. Maybe we all think we’re chosen.’

  Abigail didn’t say anything. Neither did Matt.

  ‘But that’s not how the world works,’ Darcie said. ‘Greaves knows that to contain what’s happening we do what we’ve always done. We do what works. And yes, this is … on a greater scale, but that’s why we need to pull together harder than ever.’

  She slid a notebook and pencil from her pocket with the grim care of a warrior drawing their blade.

  ‘I have to get back.’

  The Cost in Darcie’s eyes had spread through her skin like an oil slick, a domino mask of dead black on living brown. Abigail knew her eleven Cants like she knew her own reach, but the toll Darcie’s talents took was a mystery to her. How much longer could the Lux hold out?

  How much longer could any of them?

  Knights were climbing the stairs. One flashed them five fingers, and Abigail nodded in response. They couldn’t stay in one place too long. Outnumbered, outgunned and attacked on all sides, the second that their defence became static was the second the Tenebrous would converge.

  Maybe then the Emissary would –

  ‘What is wrong with you?’

  Matt’s hand found her arm, but before he could walk her to the other side of the room she twisted round in his grip and jabbed the point of her elbow into the hollow of his. He yelped, drawing a glare from a passing Knight.

  ‘I could ask you the same question,’ she hissed.

  Matt’s eyes narrowed. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I just think that it’s a bit pathetic,’ Abigail whispered venomously, ‘that now that you have a few Knights to look after you, all that high-and-mighty talk of being a hero has gone out the window. What happened to going out in a blaze of glory?’

  ‘Are you listening to yourself?’ Corded muscle stood out on Matt’s arms as he folded them. He looked as if he would like nothing more than to strike her, and Abigail automatically felt her left foot slide backwards and her fists come up. Matt saw it too, and there was something triumphant in his scowl.

  ‘You’re just going to charge blindly in and what? Punch the problem away?’

  ‘In case you haven’t noticed,’ Abigail countered, ‘that’s what we do.’

  ‘Is it?’ Like a card-sharp pausing before that final flip, just to let you know they’ve won. ‘Or is it your way to make up for your little freak-out earlier? Saving the day to prove you’re not just a kid? You can lie to yourself if you want, but the Emissary would crush you like it crushed those candles.’

  And then the triumph was gone from his voice, the way it had gone from the day.

  ‘Daybreak has fallen, Abigail. What are you going to do next to that? What are … Where are you going? Hey!’

  Abigail took the stairs two at a time, the upper floor of the tower crowded with Knights hefting weapons or shouldering packs. Radios burbled and spat patchwork updates of a city at war.

  Darcie was picking notebooks from the floor. That was how the Lux’s gift worked – tracing the trembles of realms against each other through paper and pencil and lead. Some were being pored over on tables. Others had been forgotten as soon as the Breaches within them had been quelled.

  She frowned as Abigail entered. ‘What’s –’

  The Palatine had said it himself. This too is sacred ground.

  ‘Is Daybreak a candleward?’

  Darcie’s mouth opened and then closed again abruptly. Abigail didn’t bother elaborating. Mallei competed fiercely to be assigned a Lux, and, though there were many things that separated soft-spoken, sixteen-year-old Darcie and Malleus Vivian Hardwick, they both had one very simple thing in common: when they were doing their job, you got out of their way.

  ‘I did read …’ Darcie whispered finally, hand twitching as if to pick up a book from an invisible shelf. ‘But how would that even work? We barely understand the relationship of dimensional stability and flame –

  ‘But back then it was desperate times and desperate measures. A city on the brink of plunging into the Tenebrae. Palatines willing to experiment. Magic, not science. And then –

  ‘Candlewards are safer, more efficient, easier to hide –’

  It was after Darcie had interrupted herself for the third time that Abigail decided to step in.

  ‘Darcie, I’m sorry. I don’t need you to figure out how it works; I just need to know – is the lighthouse a candleward?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Darcie responded simply. ‘If I had access to the libraries, even the one at home … but I don’t, and communications beyond the city are still down. What I wouldn’t give to just –’

  ‘Ask Greaves?’

  It was only then that Abigail realized Matt was hovering uncertainly at her shoulder.

  ‘Surely he’d know?’

  ‘That’s …’ Actually not a terrible idea. ‘Yes. OK. Let’s ask Greaves.’

  Matt broke into a bright grin.

  ‘And, if it is, we have to find a way to light it.’

  The grin disappeared.

  ‘Hang on, what? That’s ludicrous – the whole city’s at war. Daybreak’s crawling with Tenebrous –’

  ‘Because of the Glimpse,’ Abigail said. ‘And because the Emissary is out there somewhere, probably knocking out every candleward it can get its hands on. How many more do you think we can lose? Can’t you feel it in the air? Can’t you feel how close we are to –?’

  She didn’t finish her sentence. She didn’t need to. The air was fermented, as thick as tar. She could feel it on her eyelashes when she blinked. It felt as if one wrong move, one bad step, would tip them over the edge entirely.

  Something distant and huge was dying, out in the city. Abigail heard it, a lowing that trembled her bones and stung her eyes. She’d never heard anything like it before. Did cities make noises when they died?

  ‘A candleward the size of a lighthouse. Think of it. If it were lit, it would …’

  She trailed off. She actually had no idea what lighting a candleward that large would do to the surrounding Tenebrous, and she didn’t care.

  ‘It would buy Vivian time,’ Darcie said, ‘and maybe compensate for what the Emissary has done. For a while at least.’

  ‘That’s all we need,’ Abigail said, hope swelling like a bellows in her chest. ‘It’s Vivian. She’ll come back for us –’

  And, when she does, she’ll see that I figured this out, that I was the one who fixed things. That’ll make up for running. For letting her down –

  ‘Ab
igail. Darcie. The Palatine needs you.’

  It was the Knight who’d found her and Matt outside Daybreak. She gestured at them to follow him, but held up her hand when Matt went to join.

  ‘Wait here, please.’

  Abigail was suddenly caught between her own unworthy sense of triumph – that’s what you get for constantly arguing – and guilt at the look on his face. You would have hated to be left behind too.

  Her regret was short-lived. They were meeting Greaves. She’d ask him about Daybreak, he’d have to listen to her and they’d work out a plan together. Maybe that was why he was summoning them. Maybe Vivian would be there, and they could cut out the middleman entirely.

  Maybe this was the turning-point, the moment where they stopped reacting and began to act.

  Greaves was waiting for them in a side chamber on the ground floor, surrounded by pages laid out on the floor. You could have charged a battery with the Palatine’s intent stare. A radio popped and growled in his remaining hand.

  ‘Palatine,’ Abigail began, trying to add respect to the urgency in her tone. ‘Is –’

  Greaves jerked the radio at her and, as if the motion had annoyed it, the staticky snarl rose – the sound of two worlds rubbing against each other until a voice finally managed to squeeze through.

  ‘… still … there …?’

  Interference had scraped the voice almost free of personality, but Abigail would have known it anywhere, and hearing it took beats from her heart.

  ‘That’s Simon!’

  Darcie let out a hitching breath, clasping Abigail’s hand so tight it hurt.

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Are they OK?’

  ‘Where’s –’

  ‘We’re still here, Simon,’ Greaves said. ‘A cadre has been dispatched to you. We need to know – Mercy, Vivian, what –’

  The radio buzzed, and the next words that came through were miraculously free of distortion, as if even the Tenebrae were unwilling to touch them.

  ‘… Dead … They’re … they’re dead …’

  26

  The Full Set