The Endless King

by Dave Rudden

  ‘Hello? Abigail?’

  They all sat bolt upright. Matt went to grab the radio, but Abigail got there first, clicking the send/receive button back and forth in the simple affirmation they’d agreed on in case they had to be quiet.

  ‘Ask her what to do,’ Matt hissed, and then flinched as Abigail, Simon and Ed all glared at him.

  ‘All right. Quick report. We’re safe. Made camp. Two wounded, no casualties.’

  Abigail sighed in relief. When you were a Knight, it was the unknown that killed you. That was why Luxes were so cherished. It was their job, their calling, to send the Order into battle with as much intel as they could. And Darcie had volunteered to betray that calling in a heartbeat, because she trusted Abigail.

  Guilt threatened to overwhelm Abigail before she tamped it down. Just one more reason why this has to work.

  ‘Your absence has been noted. Greaves is incandescent.’

  Simon and Abigail shared a look. Only Darcie could give a quick report and still use words with more than three syllables.

  ‘But I’ve found you a way in. At least I think I have. The front gates are mobbed with Tenebrous, but inside is relatively empty.’

  They could hear her disgust through the static.

  ‘Picked clean.’

  ‘Then how do we –’ This time Matt shut himself up.

  ‘There’s one area they seem to be avoiding. I’m not sure why. There was Tenebraic activity there, but it’s as if …’ There was a pause that usually meant Darcie was trying to explain something you needed extra senses to understand. ‘As if it’s been cauterized. It’s the Asphodel Path.’

  ‘We’re not using the Path,’ Simon and Ed said in unison, panic bright on both their faces.

  ‘Shh!’ Matt snapped indignantly, but, before Abigail could bang all their heads together, Darcie continued.

  ‘It’s that or fight your way through God knows how many Tenebrous. The entrance isn’t even far from here, if you …’

  She delivered a series of clipped, precise instructions, Abigail jotting them down before Simon hid the four of them once again, sweat painting pink trails down his face through the dust.

  It took them another aching, panting half-hour to find it – a manhole cover partially obscured by rubble. Ed and Matt began clearing it away, Abigail keeping watch, Falter a slick chill in her hands. It had felt right to bring it with them. To carry it where Denizen could not.

  When the cover was clear, Matt gripped it, muscles writhing like snakes, and began to heave it upwards, centimetre by gasping centimetre. Ed didn’t hesitate, dropping to his stomach and shimmying on to the ladder inside. Simon went more carefully, the air above them rippling as he fought to steady the Cant. Abigail took a deep breath, glancing around one last time, the ever-present pall of dust clearing just for a moment –

  – to reveal a Knight. A lone Knight – as stout and boxy as a forklift, a pair of morning stars flickering around her so fast they had created their own mini-cyclone of grit. Her assailants were mere ghosts – the most diffuse Tenebrous Abigail had ever seen – filthy cinder outlines with clutching hands and bobbing, vulpine heads. There must have been a hundred of them.

  ‘Abigail, come on!’

  Matt had moved on to the first rung of the ladder, hefting the cover on his back like a red-faced Atlas, but Abigail couldn’t move, watching the woman lose one morning star to grasping claws before punching the spiked ball of her other weapon through the smudged swirl of its head.

  And, above, something was growing, drinking in every speck and ember, a gravel disaster of spectral limbs the Knight hadn’t even seen. How could she have? To take her eyes off the fight would have ended it for good.

  ‘You can’t help her! Help us!’

  How did you know? How did you know which betrayals brought you nearer to the greater good? How did you know which were a step closer to yourself and which were a step further away? Why, when everything else in Abigail’s life was a composite network of decisions and effort and cause and effect, had it taken one heartbeat for the Emissary to make her betray herself?

  The Helios Lance burst from her fingers with a kestrel’s wail, blowing out the dust devil’s half-formed brainpan. The Knight turned at its sudden screech, but Abigail had already dropped into the dark.

  Ash puffed from her landing, her vision jolting to silver lines in the tunnel’s gloom. She couldn’t tell what it had once been used for, the walls now scorched to anonymity.

  ‘What happened here?’ she asked.

  ‘Hardwicks,’ Simon said, with a touch of his old humour, but his smile was short-lived. The air stung with the memory of smoke, and every step they took came with its own mourning shroud. And Matt, for some reason, had removed his shirt.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she said as he began wadding up the garment and tearing strips free. Simon just stared as Matt handed him a long shred and then gave another to Ed.

  ‘Don’t want to choke on the ash, do we?’

  Ed stared down at the sweaty rag in his hand. ‘Can I get back to you?’

  ‘Suit yourself,’ Matt said with a shrug.

  Abigail soon learned that what they found was not an easier route but a trade-off. Simon no longer had to hide them behind the Caul, and she could hear him breathing more easily, but now their footing was less certain, the ash fine and soft and treacherous. They had to drag their feet free after every step.

  Eventually, the tunnel began to curve upwards, the scorch marks becoming fainter. Soon they travelled through a corridor that could have been any in Daybreak – though odd, shallow channels seemed to have been cut into the walls, as long as Abigail’s torso but barely a few centimetres deep.

  ‘The mosaics,’ Abigail said with a start, reaching a hand out to almost – but not quite – touch the bare stone. ‘They took all the mosaics.’

  ‘And anything that’s not nailed down,’ Simon said, peering into what might have been an archive, scraps of paper littering it like crumbs.

  ‘Maybe that’s why the Tenebrous are all outside?’ Ed was clutching his sword so tightly that all his trembling had transferred to its point, making it buzz back and forth like a bluebottle figuring out where to land. ‘That’s good, right?’

  Abigail nodded. ‘We can do this. We just need to be careful. And not just of Tenebrous. Dragon tore through the upper floors on its way out. We may have to … climb in places.’

  ‘Oh,’ Simon said shakily. ‘Cool.’

  Matt looked equally despondent, but Abigail grabbed them both by the shoulders. ‘We can do this,’ she said. ‘We just need to take it slow, watch our corners –’

  Ed began looking around wildly for corners. Simon gave him a tired smile.

  ‘– and keep together.’

  Now that they were out of the tunnel, Simon hid them again, and they went on, ghosts infiltrating a ghost. Even the battle sites they passed were muted, scavenged down to the bone.

  She could see the outlines of where barricades had been, and wondered if they were now grim trophies adorning the monsters that had broken them. They passed discarded mosaic tiles, and she wondered whether Tenebrous had been too glutted to pick them up, like millionaires ignoring pennies in the street.

  Only once did they see a Tenebrous – a gangling, marsupial shape that padded by them so quickly none of them even had a chance to react. Abigail kept her blade out after that.

  Their ascent seemed to stretch into infinity. Whispered correspondence with Darcie, staircases blurring into staircases, Abigail becoming dizzy with backtracking and path-crossing. In some places, the floor had canted, sourceless breezes cooling the gluey sweat on their limbs, and Abigail knew that they were close to Dragon’s exit wound.

  At one point, Matt opened a door and there it was – a hole the width of a basketball court, with the multi-storey shattered intestines of Daybreak beyond it on the other side. Matt closed the door again.

  ‘Are you all right? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothin
g,’ Simon replied to Darcie faintly. ‘Just … we have an obstacle.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but there’ll be another Breach near you soon. You need to go this way – it’s the fastest route. What’s the obstacle? Can I help?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Simon said. ‘Matt? Open the door.’

  Matt took two steps back down the corridor, and opened the door with the tips of his fingers as if trying to stay as far away from the edge as possible.

  ‘It’s fine,’ Simon said. ‘It’ll be grand. The edges are kind of … ragged, I guess? We can just … climb around it?’ His voice had gained a sort of sing-song, falsely positive quality. ‘OK. I’m just going to do it now. And you guys have to do it too because I’m not turning my head to look back when I get out there. OK?’

  And, before they could answer, he was out of the door. A yelp escaped Ed before he clamped his hands over his mouth, but, between the howling wind and the knowledge that even Tenebrous probably weren’t insane enough to do what Simon had just done, noise discipline had stopped being a priority.

  ‘Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.’

  The words escaped Ed with every step closer to the doorway, as if being dragged against his will. He pressed himself against the frame, foot balanced on the shorn lip of the drop, and then inched out after Simon with the methodical shimmy of a caterpillar.

  ‘Ed, wait –’

  And then it was just Matt and Abigail and the honeycomb of exposed rooms beyond. As she watched, the floor in one gave way, and a wardrobe slid down the newborn slope, vomiting out clothes before tipping over itself.

  She dragged her gaze up. Heights. She hated them. Always had. The plane ride over had been torture – trapped in a tiny metal tube, her life at the whim of forces she couldn’t control.

  Do you feel good enough, Abigail Falx?

  Those were the words that pushed her out. She moulded herself to the door frame as Ed had done, her shoulders as tense as climbing hooks, and insinuated herself out over the gap. It was as Simon had said: Dragon’s violent emergence had left a collar of stone, the remnants of corridors and hallways and rooms and lives, just wide enough to traverse.

  What he had neglected to mention was that in some places the collar was wider than in others. That some stretches were coming away entirely. That rubble and belongings would occasionally just tumble down and that, in every direction Abigail looked, was the hotchpotch horror of her Order’s eviscerated home.

  Keep going. Keep going. Every step was a bang of elbows, a scrape across calves. But she was a warrior, she was a Knight – nearly, someday, probably – and she wouldn’t be defeated by mere gravity. Hadn’t she crossed the bridge at Os Reges Point? That was at least as terrifying as this.

  But you were trying to put a brave face on then.

  I’m always trying to put a –

  She looked down. Abigail had never been held at gunpoint. According to Denizen, it was really unpleasant. But that was what looking down felt like – staring into the barrel of a gun a city street wide and ten storeys deep, and at the bottom … blackness. Blackness as dense as a bullet, but churning, heaving and swelling with a sound like all the sinks in creation being unblocked at once.

  It drove her soul to the roof of her skull, rolled her eyes back in her head. For a second, she was absolutely sure she blacked out, except that she seemed to be awake to endure it. She swayed, nearly pitching forward –

  ‘There’s a monument at home.’ Matt was at her side, bare chest beaded with so much sweat he looked like he’d been caught in a monsoon.

  Abigail couldn’t even think of responding. Her words would just fall, and drag her out and down –

  ‘My parents make me climb it every year.’

  It was strange, the anchors that pulled you back. Abigail had no idea why this stood out to her now, of all places, but this was the first time she’d heard him mention his parents. The thought steadied her, just for a moment, and words spilled out.

  ‘Is it … is it tall?’

  ‘Giant,’ Matt said, smiling grimly. ‘And the stairs get smaller and smaller as you go up it, and when you get up there … You know when you’re so high up you feel if you did fall you might fall up instead of down?’

  ‘No,’ Abigail said. ‘I’ve never felt that at all.’

  ‘Well, I get that feeling,’ he said. ‘Not getting it now, though. So things can’t be all bad.’

  And then he pushed her over, and she landed on solid ground.

  ‘OK, so we have to –’

  Abigail had no doubt that whatever Simon was about to say was integral to their plan, to the war effort, to the world, but there was absolutely nothing in her life more important than kicking Matt Temberley in the middle of his stupid face. She went from lying to standing in the time it took for him to step off the ledge, and only the look of sudden terror on his face stopped her hovering foot.

  ‘Abigail,’ Simon said very calmly, given the situation. ‘If you kick him, he’s going to fall off.’

  She wouldn’t even have to kick. Laid against his cheek as it now was, all her foot would have to do was tap –

  ‘Are you all right? Abigail? Simon?’

  It was Darcie’s voice that stopped her. Matt nearly fell over himself when she drew her foot back and turned away. The rest of the climb was conducted in silence, Simon hiding them, Darcie guiding them and Abigail staying as far away from Matt as she could without compromising their veil of bent light.

  The doors to Greaves’s office were tall and wide and carved with the hand-and-hammers, and you could be forgiven for being captivated by them and not noticing the narrow set of stairs tucked behind a pillar beyond.

  ‘It’s up there,’ Darcie murmured through the radio. ‘But I’ve never actually … you’ll have to describe it, and then we’ll figure it out.’

  ‘Right,’ Abigail said, and once again drew the stone blade she couldn’t begin to think of as hers. The others drew theirs as well – Matt, who was still shirtless, and staring at her as if she might attack him, and Ed, who had managed to make his sword stay still for a moment, and Simon, who just shrugged, and let her lead the way.

  It was a tall cylinder of a room, walled by diamonds of glass in sturdy iron frames. Abigail knew even before they stepped into the chamber that it wouldn’t be an intricate device, some great astrolabe or lantern – this was the Order, and candlewards were just lights, and why be ostentatious when it was normality you were fighting this whole war for?

  Rack upon rack of fat jars of oil, and in the centre a wide, stone bowl stacked with tinder higher than Abigail was tall.

  The Tenebrous sitting on it smiled.

  Hello, children, it said. My name is Rout.

  30

  Who Else?

  ‘No …’

  The word came fast and high and hysterical.

  ‘It can’t be …’

  Every particle within a few centimetres of Grey flashed to steam.

  ‘You’re dead.’

  What is death, the Opening Boy whispered through its blank black face, but one more misery I had to endure?

  If you wadded up the universe and slit it with the sharpest knife, drawing a hole in the shape of a child – that was the Opening Boy. A free-standing chasm, through which all the heat that had ever existed seemed to gleefully escape. Its outline bunched and wavered, as if fighting against the impossibility of its existence, and, within that deep and sucking void …

  Stars, or faces, or turning cogs. Tiny lights amid the dark.

  I did die, it whispered. I think. I remember wanting to. The pain of it, that little shard of stone …

  Denizen remembered each and every plunge of that shard, long before it had been carved into a knife. He remembered the calm and mechanical way that Vivian had broken the Three apart, cracking clockwork to expose the stringy oil within.

  But a piece of a thing is not the thing itself.

  Mercy hissed as it balanced both feet on the neck of the King absently, just a
boy at play treading over a branch.

  We know that better than anyone, don’t we, Mercy? The Man in the Waistcoat, the Woman in White –

  It said the names with more venom than a Hardwick, and the air became so cold it drew a gasp from Denizen’s throat.

  – loved misery. He found her and she found him, and their appetites changed each other … but they never made me like it, no matter how they tried.

  Grey’s roar was barely human. The swordsman charged, blades a blur – and the Boy waved a hand. Grey’s lunge turned to a tumble, as if every tendon were cut. He didn’t even cry out.

  Our misery never leaves us. Those doors never close. I’ve hidden in your shadow a long time, Grey … feeding on your misery, rebuilding myself, waiting for the moment I could avenge myself on those who had wronged me. Like Dragon was waiting. Like the Emissary was waiting.

  The fallen monarch’s golden fingers twitched, but the Boy’s feet ground down and the King went still. Denizen had expected some sort of prison, some baroque enchantment or instrument of torture, not … this, something ancient and broken, abandoned in the middle of the ocean, trapped beneath the feet of a child.

  I believe they were surprised to see me when I declared myself a Usurper, but they had their own vengeances to pursue, and killing the Order or killing a daughter is far less ambitious than mine. For a while, I even helped you. How shocked some Tenebrous were to Breach into the city of their hated enemy and find my freezing touch instead.

  How pleased was Dragon when the sound of sobbing gave away his prey.

  The sobbing that had made him go upstairs just before Dragon’s attack. He’d thought it familiar, and he’d been right. He’d thought it human and been wrong.

  Little touches. That’s all it ever takes. A touch of guilt to make Grey join you …

  Grey yawled against the frozen surface of the spire, drawn out and forlorn.