The Endless King

by Dave Rudden

And anger and memory to cloud him, when he should have been doing his job.

  Forced mirth in the Boy’s voice then, thin as cracking ice.

  Why didn’t you call the Order, Grey? Wasn’t that your mission? Your duty? The Order might have accepted you, but we know the truth, don’t we …

  Denizen hadn’t thought it possible to feel any colder. We could have called for reinforcements. But Dragon, and Crosscaper, and losing Vivian, and sheer exhaustion and seeing those words carved into the ground …

  Like the past had conspired to stop them. Like the weight of memory had slowed them down.

  We are never free, Graham. Not of what has been done to us.

  Unhand him. Mercy’s voice was a whip crack. Hairs rose on the back of Denizen’s neck at the building taste of lightning. Get away from my father.

  Oh, but it’s fascinating, don’t you think? Our great and awful monarch, the Lord of all Tenebrous, He-Who-Is-Endless.

  The words turned into a hiss so like the Man in the Waistcoat’s that fire nearly punched its way through Denizen’s ribcage, jerking him bodily forward, tightening sinews so that his hands came up curled into claws.

  This was where the veil between realities was thinnest. This wind-scoured peak was where the line between here and there barely existed at all. The last time Denizen had been here the fire had hammered the underside of his skin like a swimmer trapped under ice, desperate to be free, to return to the Tenebrae from where it came.

  The Boy did not possess eyes, but Denizen was sure it was looking at him.

  All our little boasts. The Endless King, the Forever Court … all to hide what we really are. Impermanent. Temporary. We are ourselves as long as we can stand to be, and then we fall apart. Only misery is eternal. Only misery is unchanging.

  ‘But you helped us.’ Denizen had finally made his voice work. ‘At Crosscaper. You helped me free Mercy.’

  And I couldn’t even die. Wind flurried at the Opening Boy’s words, a blizzard of relentless hate. I just wanted everything to stop.

  ‘Then why?’ Denizen asked. ‘Why are you doing this? If all you want is peace then why start a war?’

  Because it will end me, the Boy said simply. The Emissary, or you, or a challenger … or I will be King, and then I will have armies with which to scour this globe and every other until something, somewhere, kills me.

  And … Mercy’s voice was soft with horror. If nothing can?

  Then maybe when the entire omniverse is dead, when everything that exists is as polished and cold as beads of frozen rain on a string … then maybe I will know peace.

  Grey fought to get his blades under him, to lever himself up on the points of his swords, but the Boy waved a hand and his struggles stilled.

  Just let me, it said, not unkindly. Just leave me with the King and his child. The darkness of its fingers lengthened, splitting the universe until long blades of night and frost gently tinked against the ground. I won’t even make you watch. It paused. Why are you still fighting?

  Grey was just flopping now, struggling with every muscle his body possessed.

  Stop it.

  He did, and then he started again. It might have been comical had it not been so painful.

  I said stop it. You can’t change what will happen. No one can.

  ‘You could.’

  Denizen had tried this before, with the Redemptress of the Croits. Tenebrous were creatures of will. If you could change that, you could change them. If you changed that, you could change anyone. Even yourself.

  Stop, it snarled. I don’t want to –

  ‘You don’t want to what?’ Denizen asked, though what the Boy wanted was rapidly becoming secondary to the inferno in his chest. As his determination to do something built, so too did the desire to do something that involved payback for everything they had gone through. Everything they had suffered.

  Simon.

  Abigail.

  Vivian.

  All because this creature wanted to die.

  Give it what it wants.

  Denizen struggled. He struggled for Mercy and he struggled for himself, because as much as the creature was crying out for death, as much as it had done … he didn’t want to be the one who did it. He didn’t want to murder this miserable thing because far too much of it reminded him of himself.

  Tenebrous became like their obsessions, and Denizen had heard these arguments against hope before.

  ‘Listen to me.’ He tried to take a step forward, but his every molecule was bent towards holding back a cascade of flame. Every gulping breath of freezing air he took was held in the hopes it would somehow defuse the explosion building within. ‘You don’t have to do any of this. You can be whatever you want. You’re just a kid.’

  I’m not, the Boy said sadly. I’m really, really not. The childhood was stripped from me a long time ago. I remember their laughter. Their screams. I remember –

  Oh no.

  I remember Soren Hardwick begging for his life.

  ‘Don’t,’ Denizen said, and light rode the word to sizzle frost from the air. ‘Please don’t.’ The fortress of focus and control was disappearing like winter before summer, vanishing like the woman who had helped him create it.

  I remember the Man in the Waistcoat practising the intonation so he could properly mimic it later, all the better to wring a tear from Vivian Hardwick’s eye.

  ‘Shut up,’ Denizen snapped.

  And we got them, you know? The Vivian you knew was the end result of a long process, and she fell through all manner of personalities before she landed on the engine of war you called mother. We beat her with your father’s last moments, just as we planned to beat her with yours.

  There was terrible laughter in the Boy’s voice, not the mad cackling of a monster, but the quiet chuckle of a hopeless child.

  Denizen had both hands pressed to his head, as if trying to hold those last walls up, and he honestly didn’t know if the next words were for the Boy … or for himself.

  ‘You. Have. A. Choice.’

  Do you want to see? Do you want to see how little you matter?

  Eyes frost-glued to the form of the Boy, Denizen had almost forgotten about Mercy until she surged forward, light spearing from her form. For a moment, she was the terrible avatar of storm and smoke that he had first met, all those months ago.

  Don’t!

  The Opening Boy raised its claws, splaying them like clock hands, like the skinless wings of a bat.

  This place, this Point … where the two worlds are one. Where you could step to the other as easily as taking a breath. Its fingers hooked into empty air, but Denizen felt the Tenebrae shiver, as if the Boy’s claws had somehow sunk deeper. There was something familiar about the gesture. Denizen couldn’t figure out what it was.

  As easy as opening a seam.

  It dug its fingers in deeper and tore, and Os Reges Point fell out of the universe, taking Denizen and the others with it.

  Not a single mote of ice was disturbed, but Denizen’s stomach abruptly climbed his throat like an aircraft taking a terminal dive. The stars above them wheeled and went out, replaced by …

  DENIZEN! Mercy’s voice was a snarl. CLOSE YOUR EYES!

  It was the one rule for travelling through the Tenebrae, whether you’d hooked your own fingers and torn a hole into another dimension, or whether a misery-driven monster did it for you. Because before bladecraft, before Cants, before even the Cost, Knights of the Borrowed Dark saw in the dark, and that was exactly what Denizen was doing now.

  He saw.

  The Point remained, but the sea they looked on was different. Instead of grey and white, this ocean was black – seething, freezing black, the same black that Knights fell through every time they used the Art of Apertura. A black Denizen now saw through. His gaze fell through a million miles of arctic night to the secret geography beneath – a vast plain of crevices and cracks, like a crumpled sheet of steel sprawling from horizon to horizon, and all of it covered in teetering stacks o
f detritus and wreckage.

  Denizen saw ships – oil tankers, galleons, even planes – sticking out from the drift like children’s toys. There were structures that might have been ships, or statues, or skulls, but built to a scale and shape never intended for the human eye. There were skeletons, actual skeletons, so large they could have curled round the paltry planet Denizen called home, and mountains that weren’t mountains but just piles of accreted junk.

  They must have fallen out through Breaches, Denizen thought. It’s like the … back of the omniverse’s settee. Like … like Everywhere’s ocean floor. You could have upended the entire planet Earth on to this wasteland and not filled a fraction of it. That meant … that meant …

  DON’T!

  Denizen looked up. It almost killed him.

  Take a glass slide, and carefully cultivate upon it bacteria in as much complexity and colour as you possibly can. Now let that sliver grow exponentially, stretching and stretching, and let every centimetre of it be covered in complicated life, viral, ever-multiplying, ever-evolving, and yet somehow retain that first detail, that microbe-level awareness of every moving part …

  … and then place another behind with the same detail but different in every possible way and then another and another in a stupidly vast spinal column of jagged shapes grinding against each other like continents had gods …

  Look at it, the Boy whispered, so close to Denizen’s ear that had there not been the entire omniverse before his eyes he might have jumped. What do you matter next to that?

  Mercy had told him there were other dimensions. She had thrown it out with a smile and a quip and he had laughed because the omniverse was real now, and weren’t their lives ridiculous, and it was only now he understood that meant that his entire history and that of the Order and that of his planet and that of his galaxy were all just one place, and there was another step to the left.

  This was what lay on the other side of the Glimpse. This was what Greaves made them see, before he asked children to take on a job with no victory in sight.

  What’s the point, compared to that? Just give up.

  The voice was closer now, but Denizen was too busy simply staring. No wonder Tenebrous went mad. No wonder only the most determined of them could hold any kind of shape. Denizen was surprised that the sheer everythingness of it all hadn’t pounded his flesh from his bones.

  Just relax.

  Denizen frowned.

  ‘What?’

  Had Denizen not jumped backwards, the Opening Boy would have cut him in half. As it was, the very tips of its claws tugged Denizen in a circle by the stomach, drawing bright drops of blood that froze as soon as they touched the air. They clattered on the ice like beads.

  And Denizen remembered who he was, and where he was.

  ‘I’m never relaxed!’ he snarled, which was an absolutely dreadful battle-cry, as battle-cries went, but it had the desired effect.

  The Opening Boy howled at him, as cold and sharp as winter, and Denizen wanted to howl back because there was a time for being a person. There was a time for trying your best. And there were excuses for being your worst, and standing on a dying god’s fingers and listening to someone mock your dead parents was the best excuse in the omniverse. He knew. He’d seen it.

  But … that wasn’t how his mother had raised him.

  Walls rose in Denizen’s head and, for once in their strange partnership, he felt entirely in control of the fire. Maybe it knew he couldn’t be budged this time. Maybe it knew that one way or another it would get the release it wanted.

  Maybe they were family too.

  It came to Denizen’s hand, crackling as pure and strong as a proper dragon’s fire, and with the flick of a wrist a summit’s worth of snow was gone. The Boy skittered backwards, scraped a double handful of sparks from the ground with its claws, and came at Denizen with a shrieking laugh.

  Helios Lance.

  An arrow of light that the Boy dashed to pieces before –

  Scintilla Scythe.

  – twisting in mid-air to catch the blade of fire lashing from Denizen’s fingers. The impact drove it to the ground, wriggling in a way a real child’s joints wouldn’t allow, and then it was on him again, fingers extended like the points of spears. Denizen rolled, instantly soaked, instantly dry, before lifting it from its feet with a snarl of Sunrise.

  Keep your eyes on it.

  Above them, the crazed shatterscape of the omniverse warred with the night sky of Os Reges Point as Mercy darted to her father and Grey clutched his skull and Denizen let Cant follow Cant follow Cant. Anathema Bends as sharp as knives, the bang of a Eulice’s Ram, a Qayyim Myriad turning the air to stars and still the Boy came at him, again and again, like a predatory black hole.

  JUST LET ME DO THIS.

  The Boy was growing, the universe paring back along its lines to admit more night, more cold. It had once been a crowded galaxy inside the Boy, but now it was a window to deepest space, where nothing lived and nothing ever could.

  And Denizen began to realize, somewhere in the plummeting kaleidoscope of fire and impact and darkness, that he was going to lose. He was black to his elbows. There were buds opening in his knees and back, motes of iron that the fire had to flow around rather than through. He was going to lose because he had only so much darkness to give and the Boy had already given up.

  Yield not.

  Ebony claws raining down.

  Yield not.

  No breath in his chest. No Cants, no hope, just an entire galaxy pressing down on him until he shattered beneath it. The Boy’s featureless head opened in a snarl –

  And Grey split it in half.

  The spoken steel disappeared into that sucking void, but Grey had already let it go, flinging the Boy backwards with a boot to the chest. The Knight was aflame, so bright Denizen could barely look at him – a star in the shape of a man.

  The Boy had grown – when had he grown that much? – to tower over them both, a distended shadow still retaining the awkward physiology of a child, hauling claws the length of swords behind it. Grey never hesitated – weaving and slashing and cutting darkness away with every stroke.

  It was the most superlative display of swordsmanship Denizen had ever witnessed, and he knew that the old Grey might have made a quip, or given a rueful smile, or kept something of himself back from that blur of blazing steel. This one just fought to avenge.

  The Opening Boy didn’t have time to stagger, slapped back and forth by the sizzling sword. It raised a claw and lost it, grew another and lost that too, and a backhand brought it to one knee. It wailed, as high and afraid as a child, and Grey’s light flickered as, just for a second, he stayed his blade –

  – and the Opening Boy’s claw burst from his back.

  Blood came as a waterfall of sparks, hissing as they hit the ground, and Denizen’s breath turned solid and painful in his chest. Pinned like a coat on a hook, Grey didn’t even fall, feet curling up underneath him, his sword clattering steaming to the ground.

  Even the Boy seemed horrified, insofar as any expression could be made out on that blurring, jarring head. The stars in its depths slowed in their spin.

  A moment of silence, from one edge of creation to another.

  I just …

  The Boy’s voice was small. It began to slide those long claws free.

  I didn’t …

  And Grey wrapped his hands round its wrists.

  What are you –

  There was a tight, crazed grin on Graham McCarron’s face. An exultant grin. A triumphant grin.

  He took a step forward. The Boy took a step back.

  It struggled, and twisted, and tried to change shape, but the Tenebrous was rigid in its misery, and the Knight gripped it in a dead man’s grip. Step followed step, and the beast howled pleadingly, but Grey didn’t stop and the Boy could not, until they teetered on the edge, hundreds of metres above the sea.

  Not you, the beast croaked. Not … not you.

  ‘If not me
…’ Grey whispered, ‘who else?’

  They fell without a sound. Silence descended. The sky zipped back up along whatever seam the Opening Boy had slit, but Denizen’s vision still wasn’t right, and it took a long time before he realized he was crying.

  Get up. He didn’t know how long he had been kneeling. The wind had died, and, despite the November chill, the unnatural cold the Opening Boy had brought with him was dissipating. Get up.

  It had to be over now, Denizen thought, as he pushed himself to his feet. Didn’t it have to be over? He had reunited Mercy with the King. That was the mission, wasn’t it? That was the thing he had to do. He didn’t … he didn’t have anything else to lose.

  Mercy was kneeling over the King, cradling his head in her one good hand. The other lay across her chest like a promise. Like a plea.

  Denizen’s eyes met hers, and then she broke her father’s neck.

  31

  Rout

  Humans were predators.

  It was a fact Abigail was aware of, but had never quite believed. When you thought predator, you imagined nature red in tooth and claw. You didn’t think soft brown skin, or neatly trimmed nails; you didn’t think conversation and board games and movie nights. Even Abigail, who had more natural defences than most, didn’t think of herself as something designed to hunt and kill.

  But Rout had taken everything that was possible to sharpen about the human form and sharpened it – its shoulders backswept barbs, hip bones like fish hooks, stomach muscles a clenched fist straining against skin. It smiled with a mouth like an autopsy scar, and predator was the only word that came to mind.

  Tell me, it murmured. Do you know what the word rout means?

  Abigail did, as it happened, but more than that she knew this beast. During the summer, when all they’d had to face was the frivolous worry of a potential apocalyptic war, they’d learned that Tenebrous were changed by what they envied, and every King should have a Court.

  The executioner of the Endless King – though it was possible, Abigail thought numbly, that it was now looking for other employment – stepped daintily from the pile of tinder and brought its umbra down on them like an axe-blade.