The Endless King
Page 30
Someone knocked on his door.
Very slowly, Denizen’s hand dipped to the stone blade taped beneath his desk. It wasn’t the noise that had startled him. The three things students learned about Mr Hardwick in their first few classes were that: 1) he always wore scarves, and gloves, no matter how warm it was; 2) he had an unexpectedly heavy tread for such a thin, small person; and 3) he was not an easily startled man.
But something trilled through the air in the wake of the echoes, brushing his synapses so they crackled and fizzed.
‘Hi,’ said the woman in the doorway. Her skin was the colour of honey under street lights, her hair long and curly and black. She wore black lipstick, and black nail polish, and black rings sat shinelessly on her fingers.
Only eyes as sharp as Denizen’s – one grey, one black – would have noticed that though a breeze breathed in through the windows, stiff with Atlantic belligerence, her hair didn’t move. Not a millimetre. Not an eyelash.
‘Hello,’ he said, and took his hand away from the knife. ‘It’s been …’
‘A while.’
‘Yes.’
‘I had a lot of work to do,’ she said. It was a statement, not an apology. ‘Had to be everywhere at once for a while. Now I have people in place. Makes it easier.’
‘Do you trust them?’ he asked.
She smiled. ‘I trust them to keep a certain shape.’
‘Ah.’
Her smile vanished. ‘I’m sorry for disappearing.’
‘No,’ Denizen said. ‘Don’t apologize. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. And it’s OK. It … it worked out OK.’
She nodded. ‘I’m glad.’
‘You’ve got very good at the iron.’
‘Thank you. Took a while.’
The light overhead flickered, just a little. Ackerby was probably evacuating the school.
‘Why are you here?’
She sighed. ‘As I said, the right people in the right places. I can leave. For just a little while. So …’
He looked at her, his eyes the colour and sharpness of a nail. ‘So?’
She held out her hand.
How about that omniverse?
There’s always another sunrise.
A Final Secret About Writers …
… is that nothing is ever really final, and the ending of one story is always the beginning of another. I wrote my first-ever story as fan-fiction for the good folks at ImperialLiterature.net, and someone was kind enough to comment:
‘This is pretty good. What happens next?’
So this is all their fault.
The Endless King is the end of a story, one that’s been set in stone ever since the first chapter of Knights was written in a windbitten hotel in the West of Ireland on 1 November 2012. It’s also got its own set of beginnings and endings, some more final than others, and even features an ending that hasn’t begun yet.
(The Croits have their own fate, and their own ruin. We may see it yet.)
And so, in much the same way as The Endless King, some of these thank-yous are very much for this book, and others go all the way back to the start.
Firstly, to the Ruddens, close and extended – thank you for being tirelessly supportive, impressively resourceful (I still can’t believe we got those books to Thurles) and often embarrassingly vocal about the trilogy. There’s a reason why the core of these books is family.
To the rock-star wizard ninja supernova diamond queens of Darley Anderson Children’s Agency – Clare, Sheila, Mary, Emma, Rosanna and the entire team – thank you for your patience and diligence and ferocity and wisdom. I couldn’t wish for a better cadre to be at my side.
My editors Ben, Caroline, Wendy and Jane for being guiding lights through Adumbral, and Eloquence, and Seraphim Row – thank you for all the weird and glorious structures we’ve built together. Thank you as well to the incredible team at PRH UK and Penguin Ireland for all their incredibly hard work bringing the trilogy into the world. (And for occasionally reminding me to eat.)
Deirdre Sullivan gave me Denizen Hardwick as a name; Sarah Maria Griffin made me give Denizen an omniverse for an ending (‘Hasn’t he suffered enough! Give him a break!’); and Graham Tugwell gave me words to live by. Doomsburies, now and forever.
Huge thanks to Alexandra and Beth at Inclusive Minds (a brilliant team of consultants working to support diversity and inclusion in books) and particularly thanks to two of their Young Ambassadors for Inclusion: Habeeba and Luca. I can’t recommend them enough. Thanks also to CBI, Authors Aloud, Jackie Lynam, and the literal hundreds of teachers, librarians and organizers who’ve allowed me to be a ridiculous avalanche of a man in front of readers. It is genuinely my favourite part of this job.
Finally (but not really finally, never finally, I hope) thank you for reading. Meeting you, hearing from you, seeing your art, your fan-fic – it’s so surreal and lovely to meet people who know and love characters that I made up in my head.
I hope you enjoyed the journey and its end as much as I do.
There’s only really one question left.
‘What happens next?’
Lexicon
A Glossary of Names
Dramatis Personae
Denizen Hardwick: To be a ‘denizen’ of somewhere is to live there; it often has a wild or negative connation. The motto of the actual Hardwick family is safety through caution. Deirdre Sullivan handed me the name, like a gift, like a prophecy, on 1 Nov 2012.
Simon Hayes: ‘Simon’ means ‘good listener,’ while ‘Hayes’ comes from the Irish Ó hAodha, meaning ‘descendant of Aodh (fire)’.
Abigail Falx: Falx is a word originally meaning ‘sickle’ or ‘scythe’.
Darcie Wright: Lux Precognitae translates to ‘forewarning light’. In an order of warriors and destroyers, Darcie is a ‘wright’, someone who creates or mends.
Grey: A man suspended between light and dark.
Fuller Jack: A fuller is a groove in the flat side of a blade.
Corinne D’Aubigny: Named after Julie D’Aubigny, a seventeenth-century opera singer and duellist who makes all the adventurers in this book look like amateurs.
Edifice Greaves: An edifice is an imposing building or set of beliefs.
Mottos: Both the motto of the Order (Linguae centum sunt oraque centum ferrea vox) and the Knightly Hardwicks (Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito) come from Keat’s translation of the Aeneid, a story where a hero, aided by a mystical woman, descends into darkness.
Adumbral: From the Latin umbra, meaning ‘shadowy’.
The Family Croits: From the French verb ‘croire’ – ‘to believe’. The Croits are all named after medieval saints, while Uriel is an archangel.
Seraphim Row: Seraphim is the highest rank of angel in the Christian hierarchy.
Vivian Hardwick: From the Latin word vivus, meaning ‘alive’.
BESTIARY
Tenebrous: From the Latin word tenebrae, meaning ‘dark’.
The Man in the Waistcoat & the Woman in White: Creatures so immediately, awfully recognizable they don’t need identifying names, only descriptions. The Man in the Waistcoat uses ‘Ellicott’ as an alias, a reference to a famous family of clockmakers.
Os Reges Point: From the Latin Ossa Regis, meaning ‘bones of the king’.
The Redemptress/Coronus: Designed after the Wire Mother experiments and named after Coronis, the lover of the Greek sun god Apollo. Coronis was guarded by a white raven who failed to stop her abandoning Apollo for another. When the raven delivered the bad news, Apollo was so furious he burned the raven’s feathers black.
Malebranche (Covet, Mabinogion, What-Men-Called-Muinnin): Named after a gang of demons who torment the corrupt, a collection of old Celtic stories, and for the Norse raven of memory.
Rout: A crushing defeat.
Mocked-By-A-Husband (the Fatale Monstrum, the Smile Kuchisake): Named after a line in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, ‘I hope you will not mock me with a husband’, and after a
Japanese urban legend of a malicious female spirit with a torn-open smile.
Pick-Up-The-Pieces (pursuivant of the Endless King): A pursuivant is a name for an officer ranking below a herald. Pursuivants are often countered by the Knights Peregrine, wandering cadres of Knights who wear sword pins as ties.
The Endless King: A promise. A threat.
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First published 2018
Text copyright © Dave Rudden, 2018
The moral right of the author has been asserted
The author acknowledges that the excerpt from H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds has been abridged slightly for the purpose of the epigraph.
Cover illustration by Angelo Rinaldi
ISBN: 978–0–141–35936–6
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