by Dave Rudden
And, in fairness to her, she did not back away or avert her gaze.
‘Am I just part of your plan? Is that all I’ve ever been? Just a tool, something for you to use?’
Yes, Mercy whispered. I am using you. I am using you and I am using the Order and I’m using my people and I’m using myself. That is what a ruler has to do. And is it not necessary?
Her voice shook, not with the eldritch tremolo of the Tenebrae, but with rage and pain and … triumph, a terrible kind of pride.
Dragon was a monster. The Emissary is insane. The Opening Boy would have destroyed the entire universe just to silence the misery in its heart. I’m not doing this for power, Denizen. I’m doing it because, if I don’t, billions will die. My people. Your people. How is that wrong?
‘Because …’ The Cants crowded Denizen’s head, making his thoughts disconnected, nonsensical. That was why he couldn’t think of a response. Right? ‘Because …’
You have no idea what it’s like, Denizen. Not knowing if you’re real or just someone’s stray thought that started thinking for itself. Well, I am, Denizen Hardwick. I will save my world from itself, and no one will doubt the will that holds me together.
And, as she spoke, she shone, a glow fierce enough to combat the one blurring the horizon’s edge, and in the face of that rising light all Denizen’s could do was die away.
He said it. Why not? Even if he only said it once, at least it would be said.
‘I thought you liked me.’
She rippled like a pond disturbed by stones.
Denizen … I do. Now it was she who drifted forward, her eyes wide and bright and as round as moons. I was trapped in a realm not my own, trapped with the worst of my kind and a warrior of the Order that hates and fears us … and you …
A smile, meteor-quick.
You were just stomping around and complaining and completely out of your depth and you offered to help. A human helping a monster. Do you have any idea how rare that is? And the more I got to know you, the more I realized how special that gesture was.
Denizen looked away, but suddenly she was there, right in front of him, her hair drifting around them in smoke and strikes of lightning.
You’ve spent your whole life trying to close yourself off from emotions, trying to distance yourself, steeling yourself for disappointment and pain … and yet when someone needs you you’re there, blood and bone.
‘That’s not …’ It was very hard to think when she was standing that close, and not for the first time Denizen wished there were some way you could feel just one thing at a time. ‘I just did what I had to do. That’s all.’
No, Mercy said. That’s everything. That’s why we’re here. There are no great schemes, just opportunities and those with the will to take them. I didn’t plan any of this, but when I saw a chance to help people, to make things right, I took it.
There’s no such thing as neatness, Denizen. It’s only afterwards that people tuck in the loose ends. It’s only afterwards that they make us into stories.
That smile returned, and Denizen could see now that it was just a curve of the lips, lonely and sad.
And what a story we’ll be … the renegade King, and the Knight who loved –
‘Don’t,’ Denizen said, but there was no anger in the word. ‘You don’t get to say that. Not when …’
I understand. Her eyes narrowed. And I’m sorry. But this story isn’t over.
The air bent and deformed over the body of the King as a hole tore itself in reality, a graveyard of stars in the shape of a child.
It is if he wants it to be.
The Opening Boy.
Why do only the people I love stay dead? The sun in Denizen’s chest might have had confused feelings about Mercy, but about the Boy there was no confusion at all. His body shaking with exhaustion already, he marshalled himself, Cants already fighting to be heard –
The Boy held up clawless hands and made no move to attack. Instead, it angled its head to return Mercy’s cold gaze, the air around her hands sizzling as if expecting her blades.
No fighting. Not any more. I just want to hear you say it. I want to hear you tell him the truth.
Denizen honestly didn’t know if he could handle any more truth. Instead of speaking, Mercy simply raised a hand, and once more the sky began to shift and change, less violent than under the Boy’s slashing claws, but still with that lurching vertigo.
He knew enough this time to gird himself for the awesome totality of the Tenebrae, and pointedly kept his gaze on the two Tenebrous in front of him and not the cosmos above, but nothing could distract from the sucking infinity on either side. Once, he had thought standing on the top of Os Reges Point to be a dizzying experience, but to teeter on a peak above an entire dimension …
‘What … why are we here?’
The words came out hushed, shrunken and scattered by the view. Denizen didn’t move. How he had fought and ducked and dived against the Boy just a few moments ago was utterly beyond him now. He didn’t dare lift his feet for an instant in case he was simply swept away by the sheer vastness, the gravity of what he beheld.
Because we have a chance to change things. To fix things. For good. I gave you those Cants for a reason, Denizen. No … not a reason. At the time, I didn’t know. I couldn’t have known that we would escape, that we would become friends, that someday we could be standing here with a chance to end a war. Not a reason. A hope.
‘Please,’ Denizen said. ‘Just tell me. I can’t … I can’t deal with any more of this.’
And he couldn’t. He was fourteen years old. He should have been worrying about getting his first job or exams or real human girls who didn’t have any interdimensional wars to start or finish at all.
He was so tired, and all he wanted to do was be alone so he could start to mourn his mother, and his mentor, and everyone else who had died because of the ambitions of things bigger than them.
The Cants, Denizen. They are a language of control, of shaping. A language my father developed, but could not learn to use himself. But humans can.
The sun always rises, Denizen. I said that to you when I first gave you the Cants, do you remember?
‘Yes,’ Denizen said. And then he understood. Knights learned so few of the Cants because to them the fire was a weapon, because they did not know it had once been something else. And Tenebrous were ever-changing, and what else could they have become in the dark but monsters?
‘You …’ The audacity of it staggered him. ‘You want me to return them. You want to light the Tenebrae again.’
And give my people another chance to change.
Inside Denizen’s head, the Cants strained and battered each other in a frenzy of need. He had spent an entire year trying to keep them separate, under control, and always he had known that there was a shape to them, an order, an urge to let them build and build on each other … And now he knew why.
‘Would it work?’
I don’t know. You would speak them, and I would shape them.
‘That’s why you’re made of light,’ Denizen whispered, and she nodded.
It might work. It might not. I’ve practised weaving light my entire life, but fire … fire is not kind to such as me. And if you speak all the Cants, all at once …
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh.’
The Cost. He could feel it inside him – the soft popping in one knee as iron slid over flesh, the itch of metal in his eye. To speak all seventy-eight Cants …
What will be left of you, Denizen? When this is over?
Denizen turned. The Boy stood there, outline tattered from its wounds. One arm ended in a stump – Grey – its former size now a distant memory, and Denizen was abruptly struck by how it could have easily been his shadow, worn and tired and trembling.
Bloody cuts across his chest. Arms iron to the elbow and more besides. A family lost to a war they never asked for, and a girl who had done nothing but lie to him now asking him to give his life for monsters that had o
nly ever tried to do him harm.
And even if he did survive – what then? Lug a body of cold iron home to a world that might be dying, an Order decimated and friends that could be dead? What was he fighting for if his reward was simply to go home and mourn for what he had lost?
Haven’t you done enough, Denizen? You have a choice. Giving up is a choice. The reward for fighting is just more fighting, the reward for surviving just more surviving …
Mercy didn’t argue. She couldn’t. The Boy was right. Denizen had made a choice in a garden long ago to stand between a child and a monster, but bravery hadn’t got easier; it had got harder. He came out of each fight more ragged and in pain than before, and, even if somehow Mercy’s plan did work, there was every chance Denizen wouldn’t be around to see it.
Why then? Why keep fighting? Why keep going?
I can take it away, Denizen. Claws were budding from the ends of the Boy’s fingers. I can make all your pain stop.
They stared at him, a creature of darkness and a creature of light, one who had lied to him and one who spoke only truth. Denizen could give up. None of his friends, his Order, none of them were around to see it.
He sighed.
‘I know you can.’ He looked up, and, though the crushing immensity of the omniverse drew tears from his eyes and a shudder from his spine, it gave him strength too.
‘But this isn’t about me.’
He turned to Mercy. ‘What do you need me to do?’
The Boy let out a world-splitting howl and lunged, claws birthing in sprays of black, but the Cants were quicker, diving as the fire rose, and for the first time since that night in Crosscaper Denizen didn’t stand between them. Instead, he faced Mercy, her eyes bright with silver tears, and, as the Boy screamed in fury, his head dipped to hers.
I’m sorry.
It’s OK.
Their lips met, and the suns rose.
Fire roared through Denizen, and he let it, flinging open every door in his extremely compartmentalized head. He fed it his fear, and his doubt, and he fed it the notion that he was owed anything because there were actual heroes out there and right now he was all they had.
His heart screamed. His veins sizzled. His skin creaked with the effort of holding more flame than he’d ever held before and just when he thought he’d burst from joy the Cants swooped down and drank them in.
They’d always been hungry to show him what they were, and now Denizen just let them, arcing from the soles of his feet to where his lips brushed lightning. Given free rein at last, the Cants aligned – and Denizen realized that they weren’t words but a sentence, a command, a calling.
The Endless King had bound all his hope and desire to change in a daughter, and this was the other half of that equation – the tools to command that fire and bring it forth, ready for her to use –
Though probably not in this exact way.
It was lucky that his head was a shifting, streaking matrix of constellations because, if not, he’d probably overthink what he was doing and ruin everything. His hands had somehow found hers, and Denizen had no idea what had happened to the Boy because he had assumed having your eyes open while kissing was very weird, but he could feel light pushing like fingertips down on his eyelids, and maybe that meant it was working.
And then … as night follows day, as death follows life, Denizen felt it.
The Cost.
The fire was drawn out of him, more than he had ever channelled before, and with perfect clarity Denizen felt the sting of his leg bones becoming heavier, his sinews pinching tight, his stomach become a leaden labyrinth of black. Breath became harder, even as Mercy’s mouth tightened on his, and Denizen could feel the inside of his lungs frost over, feel his heart force another beat, and another, like an old man climbing the stairs.
Pull back. Fight. It’s a lie, a Tenebrous trick. She was using you and now she’s using you up –
No. It isn’t. I trust her. And I want this war to end.
And as her lips left his – or maybe that was just the feeling retreating, deserting lips iron and dead – Denizen’s heart beat one more time … and stopped.
33
Capable
The Neophytes’ descent from Daybreak’s summit was in every way a reversal of their ascent. Pounding down stairs instead of doggedly climbing, the air now clean instead of fermented and rank. Where once they had crept scared, now they scrambled – footsteps echoing wildly as if an entire army marched at their heels. It should have made it easier.
The barrage of the Emissary’s return challenge had not diminished. Why would it? There was no human throat to tire, no human lungs to empty – just a ceaseless, blaring war-cry, a drawn-out detonation of sound. At least this time they didn’t have to circumnavigate the hole Dragon had carved, which was good, because with the way the castle shook they would have definitely fallen in.
Aside from that first awful unveiling, the Emissary had hidden from the Order. Abigail had asked Darcie and she’d listened in on communications – they hadn’t seen hide or hair of the beast, but now it unashamedly announced its presence with a bellow that rattled Abigail’s brain in her skull.
Maybe it was a call to arms to the rest of the Tenebrous, to stiffen their waning morale and bring them back to a fight they could still very easily win. Maybe it wanted the Order to know its location at last, so they could feel every second of its terrible advance. Or maybe it simply no longer cared.
Every muscle fibre of Abigail’s body ached. No one spoke. They hadn’t the breath. The only consolation was that each heaving gasp she dragged from the air was pure and untainted, but she knew that if they got too far away from the candleward above, the rot would descend once again.
Wasn’t that what darkness did? Retreated to the edge of the light and no further? Darkness was the natural state of the universe. Eventually all light ran out.
Denizen’s knife was tight in her fist.
Terrified energy could only push them so far, and Ed was still losing blood. Their run became a stagger, and eventually all they could do was walk until a staircase finally deposited them at the entrance hall, the door that led out to Adumbral long gone.
‘The courtyard’s empty,’ Matt panted, over the still-echoing roar. ‘We should make a run for it. Lose ourselves in the city –’
‘I don’t think that’s an option!’ Simon shouted. ‘Look.’
And across the trampled muck of what had once been the courtyard there were shapes – a riot of spines and frills and fangs and smiles. The world still felt clean and steady and safe, but now Abigail knew where the edge of the darkness was, and what could resist its scouring touch.
She shouldn’t have been surprised. The Clockwork Three had smashed the lesser candlewards of Seraphim Row as if they were nothing but sticks of wax, and these were creatures made in that image – solidified madness, calcified hate. Anything less would have been dashed apart.
‘They’re waiting,’ Ed finished, still holding his face together. ‘Waiting for us to make a run for it. Like hunters waiting for a hound to drive us from cover.’
The slyness of it made Abigail want to retch. This wasn’t loyalty. This was no honour guard waiting for their would-be King. If the Emissary became their ruler, it wasn’t because they loved it, or even because they feared it. They were following it the way jackals circled lions … waiting for the scraps from the kill.
They were just letting it go first.
‘What do we do?’
With a start, Abigail realized they were all looking at her. ‘I … I …’
‘I could hide us!’ Simon said. ‘We could go to a tunnel, or …’
‘Once we leave the candleward’s aura, they’ll have us,’ Abigail replied. ‘In any direction. There’s nothing we can –’
She stopped mid-sentence, because the roar had stopped too, and in its wake came a silence that was somehow more expectant, more awful than any fanfare for a conquering king.
And one of the building
s on the far side of the courtyard stood up.
The Emissary of the Endless King had grown since their last meeting. It unfolded – ten metres, twelve metres, more – an industrial sprawl of metal and stone and pumping, breathing black, like a Victorian factory come to life, a place where children were brought to die.
It was huge, filling Abigail’s senses until she could see nothing else, so massive it possessed its own gravitational pull, and she was nothing but an orbiting fleck of dirt.
Like a nightmare. Just like her nightmare.
The Emissary of the Endless King roared. The Tenebrous that lolled in the shadows roared with it – a hideous, bawling chorus that left Abigail’s throat stinging with bile. The smugness of it. As if they’d already won. As if the Order had already lost.
One of the Neophytes let out a soft whimper. It might have been Matt. It might have been her.
The Emissary’s voice was deep and cold, a rip-tide you knew you did not have the strength to beat.
Well done, children.
I wish they’d stop calling us that.
A fire lit against the dark. That is what the Order has always been, has it not?
Even its voice had changed. Fattened by its achievements, it had discarded the stilted, monstrous way in which it used to speak. Now its tones were swollen with indulgence and amusement. A ruler scoffing at a rebellion that had never got off the ground.
Each of its steps took an age, a tectonic procession of foot and knee and hip that shook the ground beneath Abigail’s feet. How could it be so big? Even the blurred glimpse she’d had of Dragon could not compare, for Dragon had been a long and spindly thing, all tendon and wing, and the Emissary was squat and wide, built for brawling, for demolishing, for swinging that monstrosity of a blade.
But at the end of the day, Abigail Falx …
She might never be able to listen to the sound of her own name again, not after it dripped so callously from the gap beneath that helm. The Emissary angled its huge head upwards to stare at Daybreak’s summit, at the candleward, or the Glimpse buried deep in Daybreak’s guts.
