The Dire King

by William Ritter

  Every step up the exposed stairway was agonizing. Every flurry of rock dust that trickled down to earth felt like an avalanche. Every shadow felt like the Dire King looming over my shoulder.

  By the time I reached the upper landing and summoned the courage to peek up over the top, the Dire King had already latched Jackaby into restraints. I could see my employer’s battered coat rising and falling with shallow breaths. The knit hat—or possibly sundries bag—lay in a lumpy pile on the floor.

  “Sir,” I whispered. He did not react.

  Darkness swept past me and I froze. The Dire King stepped up to the controls. From where I was hiding, I could see only the sharp peaks of his wicked crown. “Welcome back, Seer. I know that you are awake. You can stop pretending. I can sense your mind.”

  Jackaby groaned.

  “Everything is in place, Seer. The world is ready to be whole again. Your eyes are all we need.”

  “Ungh,” Jackaby croaked. “Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll pass on the multiglobal cataclysm. Eschatology was never my favorite subject anyway. The apocalypse always seemed a bit grim.”

  “I said we need your eyes, Seer. Not your permission.”

  Jackaby turned his head, attempting to get a good look at the king, but couldn’t seem to manage it. “You couldn’t break Eleanor,” he said icily. “You won’t break me.”

  “Ah, but that is the glory of science. You humans are so inventive. The things you’ve dreamed up to circumnavigate simple spells and common curses. I’ve studied. Eleanor’s death taught us more than you can imagine about the nature of your special gift. I have corrected. You will find my noumenoneum expedites the process marvelously now.”

  “Well.” Jackaby sniffed. “That is a terrible name. It sounds as though you’ve got a dab of peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth. Noo-meh-nom-nom-nom.”

  “Feel free to keep talking.” The king pulled a switch, and the wide lenses over Jackaby’s face realigned. “It makes no difference to me.”

  “Fine. Okay.” Jackaby swallowed. “You might crack my egg. You might not. Even if you do manage it, you’ll have to find your way around. Bit of a mess up there. It will take time, and the armies of the Annwyn are on their way as we speak—”

  The Dire King chuckled. “The Seelie army is destroyed,” he said calmly. “And I am not concerned about dwarves and elves. Hold on tight, now. This might tickle.”

  “Unnngh.” Jackaby shuddered. His eyes clenched. The Dire King was digging into his mind.

  Fight him, I thought. Fight him. I recalled too well the periods when the Dire King had infiltrated my mind. I woke up dizzy and confused, learning only afterward about what I had done—what he had done in my skin. Anger rose hot in my chest.

  Jackaby suddenly lay still. He took a deep breath and opened his eyes.

  “Amazing,” said a voice that was not Jackaby’s. “Truly breathtaking. I can see the patterns, the powers at play. I can see how the veil was made. I can see how it can be unmade. Alina.”

  “I am here.” I heard her voice from above me, but I could not see her behind the control bank.

  “The fluctuator controls. Are you ready?”

  “I’m ready, my lord.”

  “The large dial at the top, turn it ten degrees.”

  The hum of the machine changed pitch ever so slightly.

  “No. Back two degrees. There. Now the fine adjustor below it. Five degrees. One more. Stop. Yes—it’s aligning! It’s beautiful! Now the polyphase alternator—that’s the controls on the opposite panel.”

  I could hear Alina throwing switches and adjusting dials. The thrum of the machine was louder now, pulsing in my ears.

  “It is done,” said the voice out of Jackaby’s lips at last. And his head sagged. The Dire King had left his mind. “You performed well, little dog,” he said from his own body. I still couldn’t see his face, but something about his voice was familiar. “Now move aside.”

  Alina stepped abruptly in front of me and I panicked. I tried to slide out of view before she looked down at me, and my foot slipped on the step. I was suddenly standing on nothing at all. I fell. Before I could get my wits about me enough to even scream, I was caught hard in the gut by a thick stone, floating weightlessly in midair. I clung to it desperately. The stone trembled and rolled, but it held my weight as it continued to drift, floating silently under the landing.

  “Did you hear something?” Alina said above me. I held my breath.

  And then gears ground into motion and the tower was filled with noise. The device below me, the metal tank, began to swivel upward on its massive arm.

  “I saw you,” Jackaby moaned. “You looked inside my head. And I looked inside yours.”

  “Tsk, tsk,” chided the king.

  “I saw a battle—from a long time ago. A rift between factions of fair folk.”

  “There were many.”

  “This one was a duel between kings. I was watching it from a distance. I saw Arawn and Hafgan, the Fair King and the Dire King. Hafgan was wearing the black crown and holding a black spear. He lost. Arawn killed him. The crown fell to earth.”

  “This is history. It is well known,” said Alina.

  “Did you know that Lord Arawn hesitated?” said Jackaby. “When it was over, he looked mortified by what he had done. His face—there was something very human about his eyes. As the Dire King lay dying, he beckoned Arawn close. He whispered something to him. He pressed something into his hand, which Arawn tucked away with a shaking hand. The crowd rushed in and soon Lord Arawn was pulled away. His people were celebrating, but he did not look proud. He looked sad and frightened.”

  “Why should he not look proud?” Alina asked.

  “Why indeed?” the Dire King asked.

  “I saw what happened next,” Jackaby continued, “in the darkness of the tower keep—this tower keep. Lord Arawn was approached by a cloaked figure. Do you remember who was under that cloak?”

  The Dire King did not answer.

  I had drifted close enough to the edge of the landing that I was able to reach a hand out to catch hold of the platform. I pulled myself up. On the far side of Jackaby now, I crouched low, keeping out of sight with my back pressed up against the control panel.

  The machine above us clicked, settling into place. Its mechanical arm had raised it high into the air, and now the mechanism whirred as it rotated to face the control stage. The nozzles at the end buzzed and clicked as they realigned, their apertures swiveling to focus on a single point. The device was directed now squarely at the Dire King.

  “It was you,” said Jackaby. “You raised a hand out of your cloak, and with a motion the glamour covering Lord Arawn dropped away—but of course he wasn’t Arawn, not really. The victor who killed Hafgan all those centuries ago, the good and righteous champion who wore Arawn’s face and claimed victory over the Dire King, was not Arawn at all. He was a man. A mortal. I recognized him. He was much younger in your memory than I had ever known him. You called him Pwyll, back then, but I knew him as Father Grafton.”

  “A very plain name,” the Dire King drawled. “His aliases always were.”

  “Grafton never wanted to kill anyone,” Jackaby continued. “I think that might have been why Hafgan gave him the shield. Hafgan recognized goodness in him, even after Grafton had delivered the killing blow. Hafgan lay dying, but he knew that Grafton would keep the gem safe. He knew Grafton would keep it out of the hands of his sworn enemy. Out of your hands, Lord Arawn.”

  The Dire King chuckled darkly from behind the panel. That was why his voice had been so familiar. It was deeper, rumbling like an echo caught in a tunnel—but that voice was Arawn’s. The Dire King and the Fair King were one and the same! “I didn’t know about the gem back then,” he snarled.

  “In your memory, Grafton asked you to honor your side of the agreement. You nodded. What was
that agreement, I wonder?”

  “I promised him that I would leave him in peace for as long as he lived,” the king answered. “He cheated, obviously. He wasn’t supposed to have the gem. Wasn’t supposed to survive so long. But I couldn’t kill him, so I made life interesting for the people all around him. He didn’t like that. I lost track of him, to be honest, around the seventeenth century. He resurfaced a couple hundred years later in New Fiddleham, and by then I had found humankind a bit of a fascination.”

  “You don’t deny it?”

  “What should I deny?” Arawn said. “I am in the right. When humanity split from the otherworld, you left magic behind. But humans are good at surviving. Humankind had to get creative in ways the fair folk didn’t fully understand. Look around you! Nothing like this device exists in the magical world—it doesn’t need to. No one in the Annwyn could have dreamed it up. I do not hate humanity; I want to bring out its full potential. Idle, you humans become complacent. Threatened, you become vital. You bring order to chaos, and the process is beautiful. But you have no concept of true chaos. You are like children born in a desert who can only dream of the ocean. You are thirsty for it, and you do not even know it. What you need is a ruler who will bring the chaos to you.”

  Lights flashed to life on the machine, and Lord Arawn’s face was fully illuminated at last, maniacal and proud.

  “The ocean,” Jackaby said, “is salt water. It isn’t fit to drink.”

  “What?” said Arawn.

  “We don’t want your new world order, and neither do your own kind. You know that already, though. You’ve lied to make it happen. Your people all believe Hafgan was trying to destroy the veil. The opposite is true, isn’t it? He was the one protecting it.”

  “Not exactly. He wanted to punch a few holes,” Arawn replied. “Create rifts in the veil to mend the rifts between our people. Bridges. He wanted to allow easier passage between the worlds. Hafgan wanted us to live among mankind as equals. Can you imagine it? He talked of laws, endless rules to protect his impossible harmony. His oppressively regulated coexistence would not have been peace; it would have been prison. I am not the villain here, Seer. I am giving my people freedom, not tyranny. I will give them chaos—real, natural freedom—and I will rule over this chaos as my forefathers once did. This is the natural order.”

  The device was vibrating now, and the hum was getting louder. Arawn stood in the center of the control stage, his arms spread out, welcoming the burst.

  “There’s nothing natural about this,” Jackaby said. “If you do this—if you become this—there will be no going back.”

  “Alina,” said Arawn. “Throw the switch.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Energy cracked out of all three channels like whips of golden light. Arawn took the blast full in the chest. He bellowed as the bolts surged into him, sparkling tendrils of light writhing around his arms and legs like snakes.

  Arawn grew. His features did not warp or stretch. He was not replaced by some grotesque version of himself, as his warriors had been. He simply grew. He was eight feet tall. Ten. Fifteen.

  I tore my eyes away from the transformation and pulled myself up, hastening to loosen Jackaby’s bindings. “Sir!” I said. “I’m here.”

  “We’ve failed,” Jackaby said.

  “Maybe if we can keep him distracted, slow him down. You said yourself, the armies of the Annwyn—”

  “Aren’t coming. It was Arawn who promised to send for them.”

  “It isn’t over, sir!”

  “It’s over. The veil is like a great big lock. Arawn had a clumsy hammer—and I’ve made it into a key for him. He has all the power he needs, thanks to me. The crown affords him the focus to control it. The gem ensures he has the strength to survive it.”

  “So jam the lock!” I said, pulling off the strap around his wrist.

  “What?” Jackaby said.

  “You’ve given him a key, fine. How do we stop him from turning it?”

  The machine above us whirred louder and louder, until its hum became more like the deafening absence of noise. My ears rang terribly in the ensuing silence.

  Arawn raised his arms and the power burst through them.

  The hovering stones orbiting the tower keep flew in all directions, hammering into the walls of the hold like cannon fire. The torn places in the veil swelled and stretched, meeting each other to form great gaping clefts. A sound crept slowly back to my ears. Cries. Growls. The clang of steel. The clamor of battle was seeping through the thinning barrier as a muffled echo. Down in the courtyard, I could see shapes—clusters of fighters here and there, like shadows behind an oilcloth. Arawn gave a broad wave of his arms and my vision rippled. The courtyard and churchyard were suddenly one. There were no gaps, no holes—Grafton’s Parish and Hafgan’s Hold were now the same space. The earth and Annwyn were one, and the din of the fight was all around us.

  “I have an idea,” said Jackaby.

  High atop the windswept landing, I helped Jackaby pry loose a copper panel. It came free with a loud squeak. We froze.

  “Charge the mechanism for a final drain,” Arawn commanded. His voice echoed like a kettledrum. He hadn’t heard us.

  “Yes, my lord,” came Alina’s voice. I gritted my teeth. She had had the audacity to accuse Charlie of turning his back on his people. “Where shall I direct the pulse?”

  “Full breadth,” boomed the king. “All of them.”

  “All of them?” Alina said.

  “All of them.”

  Jackaby eased the panel onto the ground silently. “He’s exhausted the reserves,” he whispered. “He’s going to drain his people and ours for the final push.”

  “The final push—then the veil isn’t down yet?”

  “Only locally. It’s unfathomable, the power that must have taken. He’s driven the wedge. Now he’s summoning the force to drive it through. The first drain, he targeted the Seelie army, but they were never going to be enough. We played right into his hands. The monsters, the undead, the occult nonsense—he was planting fear and strife. He wanted this war. He knew from the start he would need to take power from the Seelie, the Unseelie, and everyone in between.”

  “But you can stop it?”

  Jackaby took a deep breath. “Not exactly,” he said. “But like you said—I might be able to jam the lock.” He pulled a coin from his pocket and began using it to turn a screw inside the panel. “A full burst would almost certainly kill me, but I can siphon the flow. It should take less energy to hold the veil in place than Arawn will require to split it open.”

  “You’re going to channel the energy through yourself?”

  “I may be the only one who can,” said Jackaby. “That’s why Arawn needed my eyes. His noumenoneum brings into focus the imperceptible.”

  “His what?”

  “The lenses, here. When he was inside my head he had them in place and the veil became visible. I can see it. I can repair it. Not a perfect job, but I should be able to manage a few crude stitches—and you’re holding the needle.”

  I glanced down at my hands—the black blade. “The original spear!” I said.

  “Yes, with a little luck, it should help me channel power through myself, imbued with my will, into the fabric of the veil. With more luck, I might even survive the process.”

  With that, he wrenched a cable from the panel and light burst out of the end of it, a thin ribbon of electric blue snapping, buzzing, and writhing up his arm as it danced along his skin and through his body.

  He held out his free hand, twitching and shuddering under the strain. I fumbled to hand him the sword. As he took it, the shivering, dancing tangle of light smoothed into a single curve. It fed from the cable straight into his left arm and back out his right, crackling faintly around the hilt of the weapon. Jackaby pointed the blade, his face screwed tight in concentration.r />
  At first, nothing seemed to happen. Then, starting with the farthest graves, the churchyard began to fade, like fog rolling in. The veil was pulling back over the earthly side. It was working—with agonizing slowness, it was working! Jackaby was mending the veil!

  And then the black blade shook violently and spun out of Jackaby’s grip. He grabbed for it, but it fell, spinning down to the bottom of the tower. Jackaby cursed. He looked at me, pained, ribbons of energy dancing across his chest once more.

  “Hold on!” I said, and leapt into action.

  I raced down the crumbling stairway as quickly as I dared. My feet hit solid ground, and I scooped up the black blade. From ground level, the raging battle felt overwhelming. The echoing clatter of steel and the screeches and shouts of combatants were deafening. Worse still, the groaning snarls of the undead horde seemed to have coalesced into a constant, terrible drone.

  Through the ruins of the wall, I could see Lydia Lee and Hank Hudson in the distance, fighting madly, back to back. Blood was streaming down Hudson’s temple. Jenny’s silvery form darted from corpse to corpse, slowing the tide, but it was little use. From all sides, Tilde’s reanimated army was closing in. We had to end this.

  I gripped the blade tightly, but before I could steel myself to race back up the tower, my heart lurched. A huddle of ragged allies had pulled free of the crush and was crossing the courtyard toward the hold, right ahead of me. Commissioner Marlowe and Lieutenant Dupin, their uniforms torn and ragged, flanked Dragomir and Charlie, both of whom had slipped back into their human forms. Dragomir’s thick furs were wet with blood, although I could not tell if it was his or that of his enemies. Charlie’s ear was a red mess, and he was limping slightly, but his face was a mask of determination.

  They were not twenty feet away when a streak of white fur shot across the courtyard and Dupin spun and yelped, clutching his arm. A moment later another blur of motion cut his legs out from under him. The lieutenant hit the ground with a cry of pain. Commissioner Marlowe ran to his aid.

  “No, wait!” I called, but I was too late.