The Endless King

by Dave Rudden

  ‘Abigail! We need –’

  He tried to clutch her arm, but she tore free of his grasp. It was so difficult to realign herself, to snap back to human speech. For the last … however long … her only language had been –

  ‘We need to –’

  And then the battle came back in like the tide, and a coil of combatants took them once again. Suddenly Abigail was face to face with a yammering thing – something like a vulture, something like a wolf – and stabbing her knife into the fetid gap of its armpit again and again and again –

  And then Matt was there, like a magic trick, and his eyes were wide and panicked and he was saying something over and over again, but the battle was so loud – a ceaseless, clanging clamour, with individual cries kicking to the surface like swimmers trying not to drown.

  ‘Please get up. Please, please get up!’

  DIE!

  ‘We need to run.’ Matt. Matt was here. And he was saying, ‘We need to get away.’

  ‘Get away?’ Abigail started to laugh, a high, mad laugh born of adrenalin and bloodlust. ‘This is where we’re supposed to be!’

  Something staggered into their path and they stabbed it repeatedly until it went down. It didn’t seem to even know they were there.

  ‘You are,’ he said, wheezy with panic. ‘You’re supposed to be here. I’m not. I … I’m not a Knight. I’m a nobody.’

  ‘What are you on about?’

  They were shouting at each other now, but it was the only way to be heard.

  ‘Look at you!’ he snapped. ‘Your family go back ages. All your families do. They all go back a million years and I’m the … I’m the … I’m the first.’

  The bravado. His obsession with lineages, and sounding cool, and stories, and the way he knew her family before she’d even told him her name, and Abigail wasn’t sure if it was the apocalyptic battle around them that had made her not understand it, or how bloody stupid he was being.

  ‘Is that it?’

  He spat fire across her shoulder into a spindly creature with the mad, unblinking eyes of a prawn, and she pulled him close so she could pop Falter into something else’s bulging throat.

  ‘What do you mean, is that it?’ he snarled when there was breath enough in his lungs. ‘You all have ancestors going back centuries and –’

  ‘So do you, you idiot!’ Spin, and kick, and jam the blade into a jaw, and pull so hard that Falter rattled out all of its teeth. ‘They’re just not Knights!’

  Matt looked as if he’d been poleaxed. ‘Well, that’s not … that’s not …’

  ‘Look,’ she said, grabbing him by the back of the head and pulling him close. For a moment, just a moment, the battle seemed to lose its hold on them, Knights and monsters sliding around them like pebbles on a riverbed. ‘You’re the first. I get it. It’s a lot of pressure. So be worthy of it. You want a lineage people are going to be talking about in a hundred years?’

  His eyes were very wide.

  ‘Then start now.’

  His grin was sudden, and hesitant, and then he bent his head –

  ‘What are you doing?’

  He jerked back, his face bright red under dirt and blood. ‘I thought –’

  And then he was gone, and she was off her feet too, slamming into torn-up cobbles before she could even cry out. She tried to make sense of what had happened, but all she could see was that vast semicircle of ground that had somehow just been cleared away.

  Very slowly, Abigail looked up. The Emissary was shaking blood from its blade, and preparing for another strike.

  Matt.

  Abigail’s howl was swallowed by Sunrise, her very first Higher Cant. It loosened teeth and scorched her tongue on the way out, but before it had even hit the Tenebrous she screamed another and another.

  The Emissary rocked on its heels, actually taking a step back. The battle around them seemed to open like a flower in shock. The Emissary stared at her. She stared at it.

  And then it came for her.

  She managed to dodge the first swing by flinging herself to the ground, but the wind of its wake sent her into a bruising, bouncing roll. Tenebrous and Knight alike died on that blade and the Emissary, uncaring as to how many of its own it killed, heaved the blade round and then brought it down again.

  Terror. Terror lent her agility and speed, and a distant part of her was explaining that the weight and length of the sword made it unwieldy so really it was just a matter of maths, and every other part of her was screaming that the sword hadn’t even stopped as it had torn Matt in half, and it would do the same to her, and then the world –

  It stomped towards her again, Tenebraic distortion twisting the air in a multitude of colours and her vision into stars and agony.

  Move.

  She couldn’t even get to her feet because its footsteps shook the ground. How had she ever thought she could fight this? How could one person even hope to amount to more than a smear on its boot?

  Absurd. Idiotic.

  She crawled on her hands and knees as fast as she could, knowing she would never be fast enough to outrun that long black blade. She could feel the eagerness of it, dragging at the Emissary’s fist, urging it on to carnage.

  Cants cracked against the Emissary’s shoulders, and she saw a Malleus hammer take a whole armour plate away before black threads darted out and simply pulled it back into place. Abigail watched her life tick down in moments, measured in the arc of that rising blade.

  And then it paused. There was no expression and no face to make it with, but she felt it was no longer looking at her, and a mad, prideful bit of her was insulted. It was taking a break?

  She flung a Helios Lance, but it paid no attention, so she threw another, and another, and then a Sunrise to crisp carvings from its flanks. This annoyed it enough to look down, and it caught her next Helios Lance on the blade of its sword, the Cant for a moment turning it to a dazzling mirror.

  Abigail’s eyes widened.

  The blade was notched. It had been perfect the first time she saw it. She remembered every centimetre – the horrible, living majesty of it – and, though the edge had shifted and warped with every breath, it had been whole. But now there were chips and nocks and nicks in it.

  From the blows it had struck. From the lives it had taken.

  They had notched it.

  The Emissary stepped over her, still staring upwards, and a moment ago that would have been more proof that she was useless. A moment ago, she might have noticed the indefinable change in the feel of the battle – Tenebrous turned from their reaving, raising heads to the sky like animals sensing a storm. But she didn’t. She was busy.

  Abigail was busy realizing that she’d been broken by the idea that one person couldn’t make a difference. Everything Grey had said, the hopelessness of their crusade, the scale of the beast blotting out the sky … they made her small. They made her not matter.

  And she didn’t. There were things in this world that were too big to stop single-handedly. There were things too big to face alone.

  Abigail’s hand tightened on Falter. But I’m not alone.

  Every Knight that had fallen beneath the Emissary’s blade had cost it. Just a little. Some core or chunk of iron, some little impact – each one leaving a notch or a chip or a crack. Alone, that was all they’d accomplished. Alone, one person could barely accomplish anything at all, and maybe that was why the Emissary had hidden from them until enough candlewards had been destroyed, so that it wouldn’t be alone either.

  Because if enough people chose to do something, if enough people chose to fight …

  ‘Hey!’

  She picked up a chunk of rubble and bounced it off the side of the Emissary’s helm. It didn’t even notice.

  ‘Hey!’

  This one actually went into the helm, rattling around like a stone in a tin, but the gigantic Tenebrous just flexed its gauntlets as if preparing itself for a new battle.

  ‘I’m down here!’

  And it
turned. Faster than Abigail would have believed possible, with a booming snarl that was definitely more annoyance than anything else. The blade hummed towards her, a thundering terminator line, and Abigail had just enough time to pick her spot.

  The blade she held had once been a hammer, pinning the Emissary to the palm of its enemy in a desolate prison. Now it was just a sliver of stone, a sliver small enough to fit into a notch the way a key fitted a lock.

  Abigail took two steps forward, and maybe the nick she chose was the one Matt had left behind. She’d have liked to think that. She would.

  Her blade parried the Emissary’s, and the Emissary’s broke.

  The snap of the sword was deafening, echoed almost delicately by the bones of her left arm. The impact threw her three metres, luckily, because that meant she was nowhere near the night-black shards whickering into Tenebrous left and right, or the Emissary as he overbalanced, crashing to a knee with a sound like an entire forest downed at once.

  The blade curled in on itself like a beheaded snake, and its wielder let out a mournful wail of grief, a grief that was picked up by every Tenebrous in the courtyard. Some bolted. Some were cut down where they stood. Some simply disassembled, shedding their forms in showers of black.

  And there was light. More light than a flurry of Cants, more light than the sun itself could provide. The air was suddenly warm and shining gold, and the Emissary keened in fear.

  No. No no no no no no no …

  Rents were opening in the air, and Knights were jumping forth, wrapped in steel and wreathed in flame. She saw Ed holding Simon up, Tenebrous fleeing … but Abigail Falx had been raised to be thorough, and she knew as soon as she flipped the stone blade with her one good hand that it was not meant for throwing, but it was a very large target she was aiming at, and Abigail had been practising since she was very, very young.

  It didn’t make a lot of difference.

  But it made enough.

  The blade spun tip over hilt before disappearing into the hole in the Emissary’s chest. The beast shrieked and pawed at itself, black oil popping and steaming like tar, and abruptly it shrank, armour moulting from it like scabs. Its helm jerked from side to side, shedding barnacles and rust.

  Help … Help meeeeeeeee …

  Black was slopping out from its joints now, drying up in the light. Abigail raised her good hand, wearily ready to defend her kill … but none of the remaining Tenebrous seemed very interested in their would-be King. Most had fled. Others were hacked to pieces, the courtyard a wasteland of scavenged debris. The few that remained were looking at …

  Slowly, Abigail turned round.

  The hole Dragon had torn in Daybreak was still there, a darker gash in sooty stone, but now light spilled out from it, as bright as the candleward but contained in the shape of a girl.

  Mercy.

  It was Mercy but … not. No longer blue and white and ever-changing, but instead a statue of black and red – as if someone had taken a suit of Hephaestus Warplate and crafted it to be beautiful instead of brutish, an artist’s deftness in every line and curve.

  The armour of a King.

  Mercy stepped from the crater’s lip and fell like a stone, crushing cobbles beneath her feet. A moment, on one knee, as if waiting to be knighted, and then she rose with a growl of iron. Every eye was on her – the Order’s forces frozen as if unwilling to break the eerie peace, the Tenebrous in crouches of wary respect.

  Like they had been with the Emissary.

  Something was at stake here. Everything was at stake here. Silence, as Mercy stalked across the courtyard to the Emissary’s hunched corpse. Carefully, she lifted the helm from in between the sagging shoulders. It was still massive, but she hefted it easily above her head.

  And then she crushed it between her fingers.

  Dust came raining down and, as if at a secret, unspoken signal, the gathered Tenebrous began to come apart. Some loped towards Daybreak and the Breach there, shedding matter as they went, and others simply vanished, bodies collapsing as the nightstuff within slithered away.

  Soon all that was left were piles of refuse, a hundred scattered grave markers of rubbish and filth, and the bodies of the Knights strewn between. Mercy waited until all of them were gone, and then turned without speaking to the doors of Daybreak, and the boy who had stepped out into the light.

  Now Abigail’s legs gave out, and she found herself sitting on the cobbles without somehow crossing the intervening space.

  It was Denizen.

  They stared at each other a moment longer …

  And then Mercy was gone as well.

  EPILOGUE

  Sunrise

  Denizen,

  This is something I have to do. We love you. We will always love you.

  Vivian Hardwick

  Denizen stared at the note in his hands. Spring sunlight dappled the windows of Seraphim Row, getting tangled in the spiderwebs and painting the sheets of Grey’s bed in charcoal and amber.

  The Order had some extremely expensive private clinics – public hospitals having a tendency to ask problematic questions like, Why is this your third disembowelling this year? or, Why are you turning to iron? – and Greaves had strongly protested about moving him, but as soon as Grey was well enough to travel he insisted, and it was a lot easier to argue with Greaves since the full body cast.

  Eventually, there would be questions. Interrogations. Possibly a court martial. But these things took time, what with a lot of the people that normally conducted these things having taken quite the battering, and so this was the quiet space beforehand.

  ‘When did … when did she give you this?’

  He asked the question, knowing the answer, and the Knight, drawn and haggard in the most ridiculous pair of pyjamas Denizen and Simon had been able to buy, shrugged in reply.

  ‘Just before she … well. She’d obviously had it a while. Maybe she just carried it around anyway, or maybe she always knew she’d need to give it to you. I don’t know.’

  There was one street in Adumbral that was not undergoing reconstruction. It had at first seemed odd to Denizen that they would restore an empty city at all, but Adumbral was a symbol, and symbols were important, and that was why one street would always be marked with the piecemeal corpse of a dragon and the woman of black iron standing on its chest, her snarl just as fierce as her kill’s.

  Apparently, they couldn’t find any way of getting the hammer out of her hands. Denizen wasn’t the least bit surprised.

  There was a number at the bottom of the page:

  136

  ‘This was her page in our Book of Rust. The obituary she filled out when she thought she was going to her death against the Three. The one she ripped out.’

  Grey nodded. ‘How have you been?’

  Denizen swallowed. ‘It’s hard. Really hard. I keep … I keep thinking of things to say to her? Just little things. But I’m glad I got the chance to know her. Even if it wasn’t for long. And I’m … I’m glad I know what happened and who she was. Because she was brilliant.’

  Grey smiled. ‘She was, wasn’t she?’

  ‘Why did you keep it until now?’ Denizen frowned. ‘Wait. Let me guess. She said not to give it to me until it was all over, because it would be a distraction.’

  Grey nodded. ‘It’s very her.’

  ‘Yes,’ Denizen said. ‘It was.’

  The first year after the Siege of Daybreak there were only thirty Breaches worldwide, an unprecedented low. The next year there were twelve. The Order – very unused to peace or inaction – rebuilt, retrained and recruited to cover the losses they had suffered.

  Years passed with fewer and fewer Breaches, and some Knights began to tentatively seek part-time work. Not all of them, obviously. It was amazing how unqualified magic made you for jobs. And some Tenebrous had fled to this world for sanctuary, and that needed fixing, although despite Palatine Greaves’s best efforts the Order never found out what they were looking for sanctuary from.


  Denizen fought too, for a while. Things cropped up here and there. Maybe he was looking for something. Maybe he felt it his duty. He was a Hardwick, after all.

  Abigail went into private security.

  Ed studied architecture, and Daybreak now rises higher than ever before.

  Simon and Uriel eventually stopped emailing and began hanging out, and that hanging out turned into something else, and Denizen was delighted.

  (Even if it did mean Simon got dragged into the return of Ambrel Croit and the Wire Daughter’s War, but everyone escaped with only minor trauma and with this profession you took your happiness where you could.)

  Grey and Jack spoke long into the night the day he arrived back in Seraphim Row. What was said stayed between them.

  Darcie was too valuable to let go, but with more time on her hands the subjects she studied became ever more complex. They would sit up late, and Denizen would try to describe everything he had seen, and she would take notes. He had no idea what she was doing with them, but it was Darcie, and so he wasn’t worried at all.

  And Denizen began to teach. He studied and then he graduated – Ed and Simon made him throw his hat and they had to go looking for it – and through some kind of decision or no kind of decision at all he ended up at the doors of Crosscaper just as Mr Colford was entering retirement.

  There was a new batch of children in Crosscaper now, ones who weren’t afraid of the dark, who weren’t afraid of anything, and Ackerby was delighted to have a … veteran in the school, and had to be stopped from budgeting for swords.

  It was in his second year of teaching, eleven years after the Siege of Daybreak, that Mr Hardwick waved his students to their next class, staring, as he always did, out of the window to the sea. He’d thought once or twice about hiring a boat … or even speaking a certain set of phrases just to see what was on the other side.

  No. Palatine Greaves had expressly forbidden the Art of Apertura in case it disturbed anything, and Denizen didn’t want that on his head. Besides, he thought with amusement, I’d only be the one who has to fix it.