by Dave Rudden
… candles go out. You know that as well as I.
Abigail shifted her grip on Denizen’s stone blade and looked back at the motley cadre behind her.
Matt, standing with feet splayed and blade raised, ready for the blaze of glory he’d talked about so much. Ed, eyes still closed, his lips moving in a mantra or the names of his family or both. And Simon, who gave Abigail a lopsided smile as she held out the stone blade.
‘He’d want you to have it,’ she said.
‘No,’ Simon said. ‘He really wouldn’t.’ Tears ran freely down his face as he closed her hands over the knife. ‘But thank you. I –’
They held on to it together for a moment.
‘I wish he was here.’
‘Me too,’ Abigail said, and it was that thought – the thought of her friend, and her Malleus, and poor D’Aubigny, and … and Grey that made her step out into the doorway and the pre-dawn chill.
Candles go out, Abigail Falx, it repeated, and she knew it didn’t care what or if she answered. It was speaking for its own benefit. For its own ego, and the cheap pleasure of the crowd.
She answered anyway. For herself alone.
‘Then we go out fighting.’
And a crossbow bolt shattered against the Emissary’s helm.
It didn’t so much as leave a mark, but the Emissary shook its head like a wet dog and dragged its massive frame to face the courtyard’s south side. She saw the mob of Tenebrous turn too, heads and sort-of-heads looking about in confusion, and it might have been her imagination but the night seemed to suddenly become a little less dark.
It’s morning, she thought, but then a single voice rang out, pure and clear and human, and a hundred sibilant hisses marked a hundred more arrows and Abigail realized it wasn’t the dawn at all.
It was the cavalry.
‘Knights of the Order!’
Greaves’s voice was half joy and half rage.
‘Charge!’
It was the first order Abigail had followed all day.
34
The Borrowed Dark
Darkness.
Utter darkness, perfect and total and complete in a way that human words couldn’t describe … because it was something a human world couldn’t achieve. Oh, the word was thrown about a lot, but there were a million shades between the dingy black of coal dust, the glossy pitch of a raven’s feather and the sloe-shine of its onyx eye.
And all imitations, pretenders, borrowed from a greater dark.
Don’t be dead.
Even in the deepest dark, you could still find yourself. That was how the human body worked. Every sensation, every nerve signal, formed an expectation, a map, so even in nothingness you knew where you were.
Please don’t be dead.
The words drifted down and, like navigating a pitch-black room, structure and shape followed.
The voice sounded panicked. Why were they panicking? Why were they panicking?
I hope they’re not panicking about me.
That was a new thought, and the darkness trembled with the weight of it. If there were a me then there was someone thinking, and, once that thought was established, thousands more burst free from it, striking like lightning, like the synapse flickers of a birthing brain.
And Denizen could ignore them. The only dark that mattered was the giving-up dark. Everything else was solvable. Everything else was light.
Please don’t be dead.
Each falling word a lifeline; each spark of thought a plea.
Wake up!
Denizen woke, and for once didn’t immediately regret it. Usually, when he awoke after doing something ill-advised and/or heroic – they were usually one and the same – the relief at being alive was engulfed by all the pain patiently waiting for him.
But his eyes had been open for three whole seconds now, and nothing had groaned or ached or gone sproing in his innards, and that made no sense at all because he’d been a ball of bruises before he’d arrived at Os Reges Point and the Opening Boy had pounded him to marmalade for a good five minutes and that was before –
Denizen sat up.
My heart stopped.
He had felt it, that gasping, ponderous push of blood through ossified, creaking veins … and then his heart had stopped.
His hand went to his throat, fumbling for a pulse, and fingers met skin with the softest of clangs, two bells gently meeting.
Denizen.
You became very aware of yourself in service to the Order. Training made you intimately familiar with what your body could and could not do, including climbing the stairs and lying down without screaming. Battle made every vein in your body light up like Christmas lights and the aftermath made them as dead and dull as December trees.
You learned. You learned to tell Cost from flesh.
His arms were harder than he’d ever been able to make them through a year of training, his shoulders tight and brambled with black. Slowly, Denizen got to his feet, overbalancing slightly at the new weight. Breathe. He drew in breath as slow and purposeful as an archer nocking a bow, feeling the new heaviness to his chest.
It wasn’t unpleasant. The Cost had never been unpleasant. It was just … there. A slow and rooted darkness that moved when he moved.
‘But how …’ he said. Even his voice was different, a deepness that sounded like he’d missed the floor for puberty and ended up in the basement. ‘The Cants. I felt my heart stop. I felt the Cost swallow me. How did …’
It worked!
Denizen turned, and again felt that altered gravity as the Endless King smiled a smile of golden flame and held out her iron hand.
The girl of light and frost and storm was gone. Features that had changed constantly were now stiffly defined, her cheekbones jagged cliffs. Her hair was a briar-tangle of rigid black that left white scrape marks on her bare shoulders. Once she had shifted through all the colours of the rainbow in the time it took Denizen to draw breath and now she was a rough-carved statue, her lines choppy and sharp.
And her eyes … her eyes were fire, incandescent, and when her mouth creaked open it spilled forth laughter and light.
It worked!
If Denizen’s voice was a cavern, hers was an iron mine lit by crackling flame, a wholly different kind of beautiful than it had been before. She stretched with a rasp of metal on metal and, before he could ask a single one of a hundred million questions, she raised a rugged iron hand and pointed up.
There was sunlight on his face, but they were in the Tenebrae. They were still on that soaring peak, and unreality and strangeness still shivered the air, but they were in the Tenebrae and there was an orb of light hiding that insanity-inducing view, the way the sun hid the stars.
Now the sky was blue, and, as he watched, the white-gold sphere was joined by another, this one a streak of shimmering light that raced back and forth across the sky.
The Helios Lance.
Denizen knew it. Of course he did – it had spent over a year in his head, after all, and there were others: a curving scythe, a snare of snaking gold, an entire army of suns orbiting and dancing and tangling with each other as if delighted to be free.
No. Not an army. He’d served as their unwilling host. Denizen knew exactly how many of them there were: seventy-seven suns, or Cants, or something in between that Denizen wasn’t even going to try to explain. It wasn’t his universe, after all.
He turned back to her, but she was staring down at the dizzying view and he couldn’t help but do the same. The swirling, darting suns had turned that immeasurable junkyard into a marbled, mutable landscape of light and dark. A dappled world, constantly in movement.
I think it will suit them, the Endless King said. And without looking into a billion other realms …
‘They won’t constantly change,’ Denizen said. ‘All that … pressure is gone.’
They can still be visited, I imagine. Even seen. My people can still change … if they wish it.
Her smile was blinding.
The same as everybody else.
‘OK,’ Denizen said, a little breathlessly. There was definitely a frown coming, but he’d lost his grip on exactly which one. ‘Was this your plan?’
I had thousands of plans, Mercy said. And a lot of hope. This one worked out … passably, I think. Don’t you?
‘If I do a mental checklist up here, I’ll black out,’ Denizen said. ‘Honestly, I will.’ He looked down at his iron hands and froze. There was a lot of time and a lot of iron between him now and him then, but he remembered the first blot of Cost on his palm – just a dark little penny pushed into his skin.
And it was gone. The rest of the iron was still there, but there was a tiny spot of pink skin, as if it had been gently lifted away.
‘I don’t understand. How –’
You spoke seventy-eight Cants in an order they have never been spoken. The effort should have killed you, fluency or no. The Cost is your world’s response to the power of the fire, yes?
‘Yes,’ Denizen said. ‘But …’
She shrugged, backlit by seventy-seven unearthly suns and a scrapheap so large you could have dropped Denizen’s solar system into it.
We’re not in your world, Denizen. And while the Cost did come for you – you are a product of your own world, after all – I was able to … get a finger underneath it, like a child lifting a scab. And we are shapers and changers and builders …
She lifted the jagged claws of her hands.
Even if this is not the medium I would choose to use.
‘You took the Cost from me,’ Denizen said softly.
As much as I could. Enough to keep you alive, at least.
She frowned, with some difficulty.
I didn’t do the organs. Nobody does the organs. You’re more iron than you were. I did what I could, I was … I was worried I’d kill you.
Bodies were a difficult thing to think about in percentages, as there were floppy bits and lighter bits, and Denizen’s hair stuck out a lot of the time, but, at a guess and without a mirror, he’d say that he was over sixty per cent iron. More than most of the Knights he had ever met. More than Vivian, and she had fought her entire life.
Denizen and his mother had spent so long building a fortress inside him that now that there was one there for real he had thought that her death would hurt less. But strength and sadness weren’t opposites, he supposed … and ignoring it would mean ignoring her.
I’d rather hurt, he thought, and gave a rattling sigh. Mercy was staring at him. He forced a smile.
‘Thank you, Mercy,’ he said. ‘I mean it. You told me you hated the idea of just being one thing and now you’re …’
She closed her eyes, claws clenching into fists, and her profile suddenly shivered, as if vibrating from within. With a crack that reminded Denizen of ice floes and blacksmiths’ hammers, a thin veil of dust seemed to fall from her skin.
When it had been carried away by the breeze, her features appeared a fraction closer to human. A second draft. The effort seemed to drain her, and she staggered. Denizen went to catch her and they both nearly went down. She was very, very heavy.
Iron is difficult, Knight’s iron most of all …
Denizen thought of Dragon, and then suppressed the thought. This was nothing like that. A sacrifice, not a mockery.
But I have always been good at learning new things.
‘Yes …’ Denizen said. ‘About that. There are seventy-seven Cants in the sky.’
Yes.
This close to her, Denizen could feel the heat radiate from her, the sunrise just the other side of her skin.
‘You kept one. Didn’t you? In the only body that could contain it.’
We do not have such a thing as succession, Denizen. To rule I must be a ruler. I must be audacious. Bold. I must show them that there is nobody as powerful, as daring, as the King who put the suns back in the sky and who kept a Sunrise for herself.
Denizen knew he was being pedantic, but it had been a long night of confusing things being explained to him, and a petty, stupid part of him needed to gain some ground.
‘Em … Queen, actually, I guess.’
Mercy didn’t have eyebrows, but he imagined she would have raised them if she had.
Human words. Irrelevant.
‘Fair enough,’ he said and then another thought occurred.
‘Wait … did you take on the Cost to save me or so you could show off to your people?’
Can’t it be –
‘I swear to God, Mercy.’
They stared at each other for a long moment and then both burst out laughing – heavy, iron-creased chuckles. Mercy, She-Who-Was-Determined-To-Be-Endless, and Denizen Hardwick, fourteen, sceptical of almost everything, laughing as they watched the suns they had loosed upon a sky. It was, he had to admit, not the worst thing that had ever happened.
You know I have to go after this.
The laughter died in Denizen’s throat.
If I am to be King, I must go and be King. I must assert my will, watch over my people, show them a new way to exist. To give peace to your people and mine, I have to go.
There were a lot of things Denizen could have said. He could have said it was unfair. He could have said that it wasn’t right, that she could ask so much and give nothing in return.
He could have asked why everyone kept leaving him.
But he didn’t. There wasn’t a reward for being good. That was for stories. The reward for being good was the same as the reward for surviving – more surviving. He just nodded, and looked away.
Mercy’s fingers traded one universe for the other. The sky rippled back to blackness and densely packed stars, and Denizen felt a rush of heady anti-nausea as for the first time in what felt like forever he was actually in his own world instead of pinballing around another.
Os Reges Point was much as they had left it – water puddled everywhere, occasionally pocking and papping with rain. And a hole in the air, slumped and small, a prone form in its one remaining arm …
‘Grey!’
Denizen went to run, but Mercy’s hand hooked him backwards hard. She clomped forward – another difference. Gone was the form that could drift and vanish from one spot to the next like a trick of the eye; now she was inarguably, unstoppably there – and she stared down at her wayward subject, and the man splayed beneath it.
I had to cut myself free of him.
A flower of frost had bloomed where the Opening Boy knelt. It was even now melting away.
His stomach had turned to iron. To … trap me, I think. It was valiant. It was so valiant.
The Knight was very pale. His eyes were closed, hair a smudge of darkness against his brow. There was no blood, or maybe it was too dark. Grey had lit candles when they had trained together. He said he’d miss colours.
Now he was a portrait in black and ashen white.
I just wanted it to end. That’s all.
Mercy’s voice was a purl of steam. I know you did.
Denizen was barely listening. He was tearing Grey’s shirt open. The Cost – if he was right, if they were lucky, if he was allowed to ask for one more ridiculous thing to happen today –
It was a fight to be gentle, to push fingers against the vein in Grey’s throat hard enough to feel a pulse through iron, and in the end all he could do was bend the bare skin of his forehead against his mentor’s neck and hope.
And then –
‘He’s alive!’
Ice painted the air as the Boy let out a long and painful sigh.
Good. Good.
Denizen didn’t take his head from Grey’s, but he heard the Endless King kneel before the hurt child that had nearly brought an omniverse to ruin. He heard the Boy tilt the featureless scrape of its head and make a simple request, and he heard the Endless King as she placed hands of fire on a heart of fractured cold …
And showed mercy.
It took her a long time to get to her feet, and tears of flame had cracked the unmoving mask of her face. De
nizen was already reaching into the back of his head for the Bellows Subventum. It took him a minute to find it, like searching for a book on a shelf, and it struck him that normally he’d be fighting them off.
Even the fire was slower, as if exhausted. As if sated.
He could already feel the Cost waiting to be paid, but that was OK. It was a … a good cause.
Grey made a soft little noise.
‘Just a little further,’ Denizen whispered. ‘Just a little further.’
35
Ready
The Knights’ first salvo of Cants was a hammer blow, a fist of a hundred falling flames, and, when the first line of Tenebrous wavered and fell, Abigail ran through their collapsing bodies to fling herself at the second.
The courtyard fell away. Daybreak fell away. There was nothing but the wretched, warping forms of monsters and how right Denizen’s blade felt in her hand.
She slashed. She cut and she stabbed and sang Cants with every breath she could spare. A thing with a mouth of knives screamed at her, and she screamed back. An apish, fumbling hand grabbed her throat and she gouged her own skin cutting it free.
The world was a chaotic swirl – like a Tenebrous, and she in its body, trying to kill it like a cancerous cell. Sometimes there were Knights around her and sometimes there weren’t, and had you asked her name she wouldn’t have been able to tell you because nothing mattered but this.
‘Abigail!’
A face hung in her vision, red and blurring, and she brought the sticky, matted length of her blade up to slice it in half, but it grabbed her wrists, gabbling in some nonsense tongue. Hands pinned. Other options. She dragged in breath, a Cant spiralling down to drink flame from her soul and leap from her mouth and then –
‘Abigail!’
Matt. It was Matt. Blood-drenched, fitfully glowing and talking at her. The battle had rolled them like a grape on a tongue and somehow spat them out on to a patch of clear flagstones. Just a few metres away, iron and steel warred with madness and black and yet they were ignored.
Awareness crashed back into Abigail, who she was and what she was doing, and sudden nausea splashed up her throat and on to the flagstones at her feet.
