The Endless King

by Dave Rudden

  Thank you for your hospitality, Director. It will not be –

  ‘I dreamt of you,’ the old man said abruptly. ‘In Crosscaper. When … when they came. I dreamt of a girl in a cage.’

  Oh. Well. I –

  ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘They weren’t good dreams.’ He thrust out his jaw. ‘Stay away from my orphanage. What … whatever you are. Stay away from my children.’

  Mercy opened her mouth, and then closed it again.

  Of course, was all that she said.

  ‘I guess that goes for me too,’ Denizen said, and the pang in his stomach felt stupid and strange.

  He didn’t like Crosscaper. There was nothing in it to like, bar Simon, and he’d taken him with him when he went. It hadn’t been Tenebrous who’d wallpapered those halls with bad memories – it had been long nights of asking himself why him, why here, why any child at all.

  There was a reason the Three had grown fat there. There was a reason why, to him, homesickness was just a word. But still …

  ‘No,’ Director Ackerby said, and met Denizen’s eyes squarely. ‘Come back whenever you … you’re always welcome. Always.’

  An unexpected lump in Denizen’s throat. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Yes,’ the old man said. ‘Well. Good luck with … whatever it is you’re doing.’

  They left him there, standing on the pier, a hunched old man holding himself in the midnight chill, and just by coincidence Grey happened to bring the boat around Keem Bay and the grey little buildings nestled there. It was ironic, but for the Intueor Lucidum he wouldn’t have seen anything at all.

  The boat rolled under them like a coin across a conjuror’s fingers, and Denizen sat near the gunwale (he’d read up on boats), staring up at the stars – flaws in the onyx of the sky. Achill Island receded, and so too did sound, bar the engine and the shrill of the wind.

  ‘Mercy!’ Grey called after an hour or so. ‘Can you come here?’

  She turned from her perch at the prow of the boat, strikingly bright against the night, and joined Grey at the wheel. Denizen stood too, curious.

  ‘You know which way Os Reges Point is, right?’

  Yes.

  ‘Then take the wheel. I have to do something.’

  It was a very rare thing to catch Mercy off guard, but her eyes widened at the Knight’s words. What?

  ‘It’s OK – you just have to keep us steady. It’s just like riding a bike.’

  Mercy stared at him blankly.

  ‘Yes,’ Grey said, and Denizen stifled an exhausted smile. ‘I thought that might be your reaction. Five minutes – that’s all. Turn her gently and …’

  She nodded, brow crinkling in confusion as, one-handed, she braced herself against the wheel. Waves jinked and jerked them sideways, and a slow smile dawned across her face as, with minute adjustments, she corrected and steadied them. Her light changed, from capillary crazes of lightning to a slow, rolling pulse, mirroring the flow of the sea.

  Grey watched her a moment longer and then made his way back to Denizen, sitting down heavily beside him. Denizen realized with a start that however little sleep he had got, Grey had had even less.

  ‘That was a nice thing to do,’ Denizen said quietly.

  ‘Well,’ the Knight said, ‘she knows where we’re going. And … we don’t know what she’s going to find, you know?’

  Denizen nodded solemnly.

  Grey! Grey! Mercy’s delight came in glittering waves. I’m doing it!

  ‘You are!’ Grey called back, and he flashed her a grin before turning back to Denizen. ‘We have something to do.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘We’re knighting you,’ Grey said.

  Denizen’s eyes widened.

  ‘Normally, it has to be a Malleus,’ Grey said, with forced lightness, ‘and there’s Latin bits and arm-waving bits and robes and whatever, but it’s been a very long day and …’

  He swallowed.

  ‘And Vivian knighted me, a long time ago, and I feel it’s the right thing to do. There’s no magic to it or anything, but … it’s …’

  ‘The right thing,’ Denizen said hollowly. The world was still loosed from its moorings, but he felt something solidify at Grey’s words. There’s no magic to it. And there wasn’t. Vivian would say as much herself. ‘I understand.’

  ‘Then kneel,’ Grey said.

  Denizen did so. He should have felt silly, and the rolling of the deck made it more of a challenge than it should have been, and Denizen was usually too busy asking questions and poking holes in moments to ever believe them sacred … but the sea seemed to calm and the wind quiet all the same.

  ‘My Latin is terrible,’ Grey said, drawing his sword with a rasp of steel. ‘But I’ve got the gist.’ Power climbed the blade in loops and whorls, first the colour of embers, then flame, then the summer sun.

  ‘Denizen Hardwick,’ Grey said, and there was no wryness now, no self-deprecation, no weakness and no fear. It wasn’t the voice of a mentor, or a victim, or a friend.

  It was the voice of a Knight of the Borrowed Dark.

  ‘It might be fine,’ Grey said. ‘That mightn’t have been a scream. That might not be blood on the ground. You can keep walking. You can ignore those hairs rising on your neck, that shadow in the window. You can walk on. Someone else might fix it. Someone else might face that hell.

  ‘Some do. Most do. You can live your whole life in the light, and not look for darkness. We wouldn’t begrudge you that. We would never begrudge you that. And if you do stay, if you do choose to fight … your reward is that choice, again and again and again. There is no magical binding. There is no Oath but this.’

  The blade burned.

  ‘We ask you, as we asked you …’ Grey frowned. ‘Last night. Two nights ago? Sorry, there’s normally more time between those …’ He shook himself. ‘Ahem. Do you want to be a Knight?’

  She’d always looked so imperious. So determined. So hard. But now all Denizen could think of was how much Vivian must have cared, to go to war for people she’d never met. The thought rocked him, so much that he felt the blade sear his skin. Denizen had known how resolute Vivian was from the moment they’d met, but he’d never considered her heart until it stopped.

  ‘I will fight,’ Denizen Hardwick said, the way his mother must have on the day she lost her husband, and on every other day until the day she died.

  Gently, Grey’s blade tapped his shoulder. ‘Then arise, Knight.’

  Denizen wasn’t sure how long it took them to reach the Point. There was nothing out here for time to grab on to – nothing to erode, or grow or bloom or die, nothing but them, skating across the surface of the sea.

  Mercy held the helm, the moonlight passing through her and turning glacier blue. Grey watched the horizon, the shadows under his eyes dark even through the Lucidum, and Denizen stared too, trying not to ask himself questions he couldn’t answer – about his friends, about Daybreak, whether the Order still fought or if the last hope for humanity was three figures in a tiny boat.

  And then … the first fingertip rising over the horizon, and another, and another, as if they were cradled in the Endless King’s palm. Mercy aimed for the smallest of the spires – smallest, at three hundred metres tall – and the temperature fell like a stone.

  Their breath plumed. Denizen had to carefully draw on his fire, letting down some – but not all – of his guards until the fire was close enough to his blood to stop it freezing entirely. The waves around them sharpened, white edges turning to glass, until Denizen could have run his hand along them and bled red warmth into the depths.

  The boat’s passage through the water became the crunching rasp of slicing snow, until finally it ground to a halt, a full ten metres from the tiny stone pier. Their path behind them had already frozen.

  Denizen stared down at the crust of ice, but, before he could even test it with his feet, Mercy blurred past them so fast that she left a sickly streak across his iron retina. Grey didn’t hesitate, l
eaping out after her. The ice groaned but held firm, and Denizen followed, moving as fast as he could while wincing at every shudder and crackle under his feet.

  The pier led to a vertical shaft straight up through the first spire, as if the finger bone had been removed without disturbing the surrounding flesh. Mercy shot up into it, her light melting the accumulated ice so that Denizen and Grey had to duck away from falling rain.

  ‘Climb!’ Grey snapped, light flickering and snapping under his skin.

  It wasn’t easy. Denizen had had a full year of training since he’d been here the last time, but a day and a night of fighting and running and more fighting had taken its toll.

  Within fifty rungs, he was hissing breath between clenched teeth. After a hundred, a stray scurf of ice tore his knee, and it wasn’t the pain that slowed him but the wind suddenly feasting on his open skin. His dripping blood became a welcome source of heat.

  The bridge between the first and second spire was a rigid line bearded by frost. They sprinted across it, and another, and another, and Denizen could trace Mercy’s passage from where ice had melted and refrozen in a thousand colours, as if she left rainbows in her wake.

  And, as they rose, so too did the pall of the Tenebrae – distorting colours, separating sounds. Every moment felt disjointed, a movie laid out shot by shot with nothing to connect them. It didn’t feel as poisoned here: not the arch malice of Dragon nor the muddied rot of lower beasts. This was the only place in the world where the Tenebrae felt … not natural, exactly, not to Denizen, but maybe natural to something else.

  Different instead of wrong.

  Finally, they reached the summit, the stars hanging down like Christmas decorations, bright and sharp. The air was fine with mist and ice particles, billions of them. It hid the crashing sea below, dusted Grey and Denizen until their clothes and skin were stiff and crackling with frost and reflected moonlight.

  It made Mercy look like a queen.

  She floated over an outline of rust – the spot where the Emissary had once been imprisoned – her light snapping at each mote of cold as if defending her in a thousand tiny dogfights. She didn’t acknowledge them. Instead, blades slid from her hands, or became her hands, sizzling ice droplets out of existence as she stared down at …

  The King. The Endless King. The Master of Shadows. The Lord of the Obscura. The Knights talked about him in such hallowed, terrified terms that sometimes it was hard to remember that the King was a Tenebrous at all. When he’d threatened the world over Mercy’s disappearance, the Order hadn’t even considered taking him on. Ants didn’t fight a descending boot. They just got out of its way.

  And afterwards … afterwards, Denizen had only really thought of the King through the prism of Mercy. The power she wielded through him. The sad way she spoke of him. The fondness. The threat.

  He had never expected the King to be beautiful.

  Where Mercy was silver, the Endless King was gold – not the dull hue of cold metal but molten, moving – currents of auric lava billowing like ribbons around graceful, elongated limbs, shrouding wide, noble shoulders until the true form of the King was something more glimpsed than perceived.

  Denizen saw eyes like augered pits, a thin slit of a mouth never meant for smiling, cheekbones as sharp and hard as the head of an axe. He was reminded of funeral masks, of child kings and emperors long dead.

  The Opening Boy had its foot on the King’s neck.

  At last, it whispered. The full set.

  29

  No Man’s Land

  Abigail firmly believed that, with enough training, anybody could become good at anything. Denizen and Simon hadn’t had her childhood. She’d watched them spar, as knobble-kneed as calves, seen them fail and fail again to follow Vivian’s movements, or Darcie’s, or hers.

  Anyone could become good at anything, but nothing was automatic. Nothing was owed. They’d all inherited magic from their parents, and metabolism and senses and size were the gifts of DNA, but you still needed to learn how to use them, and the key to learning was a thousand tiny decisions to keep going. To not give up.

  She’d been surprised to learn it was the same with betrayal.

  Faking an awkward smile when told they were moving on. Distracting a sentry with questions while Simon filched a radio from its charging stand. Watching Darcie draw out the route to their next camp and hoping nobody noticed how uncharacteristically unskilled one section of the sketch became.

  Abigail counted each little crime the way she’d count footfalls on a particularly hard run, or the way she’d grade muscle pain when training became almost too tough. A way to take stock. To look at how far she’d come.

  They broke camp, Darcie’s map leading them through a city turning on itself in the most awfully literal way. Material gnawed from the sides of buildings, earth scooped up in bomb-crater blotches, the air a dreary, thickened fog that seemed only a heartbeat away from coalescing into madness and teeth.

  Greaves led from the front – of course he did; he knows the path is safe – with Ed, Simon, Abigail and Matt a half-ignored cluster towards the back. Darcie, by contrast, was so surrounded by Knights you could barely see her.

  And ahead, the minaret. That had brought a thrill of guilt – though of course Darcie hadn’t chosen it, there was little of this plan any of them had chosen, just the need to do what Greaves would not – but its slim length did make Abigail think of soft prayers and home … and what her parents would think of her actions now.

  Sometimes you have to go first. That way you make it easier for everyone else.

  The stones moved beneath her feet. Breaches used to stand out like drops of ink in pure water. Now the atmosphere barely changed before a rent opened at head height, black liquid whipping forth.

  There was a stirring, prideful moment as Abigail watched the best-trained warriors on the face of the planet respond to the threat with parade-ground precision – falling into overlapping lines, the Neophytes dragged out of the way, Darcie lifted, lifted off her feet – and the Tenebrous had barely plundered itself a skeletal form before a dozen Cants tore it apart.

  There was a second shape coming from the rent. This one was already formed – hulking, horned – and Abigail briefly met its narrowed eyes before she turned and ran.

  Was it still betrayal if you were doing it for the right reasons? Was it still fleeing if you were running towards a greater fear? There had been plenty of time for Abigail to ponder this as Darcie searched for a Breach to lead the Palatine to – a Breach big enough to serve as a distraction, but not big enough to be a threat. It had been as difficult as it sounded. There were few small Breaches now.

  The shouts of battle rose behind, and Abigail prayed for everything she couldn’t control to come down in her favour. She prayed that the Knights would focus on the battle at hand, and she prayed that Greaves would bid his force continue to a safe base and not waste time and soldiers looking for her, and she prayed to be able to look Darcie in the eye if any of them died.

  Ed, Simon and Matt were running beside her. That was one prayer answered at least.

  They ran for exactly three streets – Darcie had been very precise – pausing beneath where a marching set of aqueducts met the bulk of a massive cistern. They paused in its shadow, Lucidum painting detail silver out of the dark, and Simon bent light to take them out of sight.

  ‘Right,’ Abigail whispered, unfolding a sheet of paper from her pocket. ‘Let’s see.’

  Darcie had been very precise. Simon’s hard-won affinity for the Starlight Caul was an advantage, but, without Darcie mapping out Breach sites, existing Tenebrous and patrolling cadres, they would have been lost. The notes she had provided would be accurate until she was next able to contact them –

  Unless the battle brings more Tenebrous.

  Unless she gets hurt.

  Unless they all die –

  – and Abigail used the quiet faith her friend had shown in her to slow the hammering of her heart, and start the L
ux’s count.

  Three minutes to get to the marketplace – a few wooden stalls still standing, bone-dry and brittle after centuries of sun. Pausing for a minute to let a stretch of paving ahead tear itself free like a manta ray shuffling from a sandbank, before propelling itself into the night with a single flap of flagstone wings.

  They passed knots of abused air where nightstuff drooled up and down like saliva from a jaw, where statues of Order heroes charged by, animated by burrowing black, screaming the names of descendants they hoped to slay.

  And as hateful as it was to see Darcie’s bestiaries come to life – bloody-mouthed Cruachan, Sweet James and its wallpaper wings – the fighting was something Abigail understood. But then she saw the Widows of Victory – three women twice her height fused at the scalp into a pyramid of flesh and hair and sweat – just stroll through the streets, wearing an expression very similar to the one Abigail had worn when she’d first arrived at Daybreak.

  Wonder.

  They took shelter in the gardens of an ancient villa to wait for Darcie to make contact, but the brief relief from the monstrous tableau was no respite at all. Matt twitched at every sound, his fingers cramping tight on his sword, and Abigail had kept catching Ed walking with his eyes closed, like a child hiding from the bogeyman. As for Simon …

  He hadn’t complained. He never really did, not about things that mattered. But, even though hiding in the villa had let him momentarily drop his mask, there was still a parched, drained cast to his skin, and he had that gritted-teeth, seconds-counting determination you only saw when approaching the edge of exhaustion.

  You can do this. She didn’t dare say the words aloud. Part of her wanted to squeeze his hand or touch his arm, but she was worried about distracting him or … or how much Cost she might find. They had a long way to go. There, and back, and whatever they had to face on the way.

  How much of Simon would be left?

  The wait dragged on, Abigail willing the lump of plastic in her hands to speak, while simultaneously obsessively checking the volume dial to make sure it didn’t give them away. She didn’t have to imagine the Tenebrous that could pounce on them at any moment: she could hear their idiot babbling just beyond the walls, like a parody of birdsong.