by Dave Rudden
Denizen bit his lip, awkwardly crossing the deck toward her. He’d been delighted to find that he actually possessed sea legs, and didn’t spend half the journey vomiting over the side, but each step was still taken gingerly, still hesitant, even as the deck rose and fell to egg him on.
“Abigail, I—”
And then he saw what she was staring at, and all the words went out of his head.
Five great spears of slick black stone rose out of the sea. At their base, the ocean dashed itself to spume and spray, trying and failing to bring them down. They marched like soldiers of ever-increasing height, the fifth and final one a massive pinnacle that must have been more than half a kilometer tall, its staggering bulk bullying the horizon aside.
Beyond them, the ocean went on forever, rising in iron-gray swells, then falling to lines of foam. The air was crisp and clear, the night sky filled with stars, but clouds had massed on the horizon in a vast continent of gray and white and black. Lightning stung its depths.
Denizen’s jaw dropped. It actually dropped. He had always thought that phrase was a cliché. It wasn’t. He’d just never been to Os Reges Point before.
He turned in a slow circle. There was no mainland, not in any direction. Standing here, he could believe that Os Reges Point was all there was—the whole world reduced to sea and sky and storm.
“Os Reges Point,” D’Aubigny murmured over the growl of the engine. It was the first unnecessary thing he’d ever heard her say.
It took them another hour to reach the base of the smallest spire, which still must have been a hundred meters of wind-scarred rock. At its base was a pier, just a crude tongue of rock carved by some long-dead mariner.
D’Aubigny tied up The Cormorant, while Denizen resisted the urge to check her knots. What would happen to them if the boat sank or they ran out of fuel? Would they be stranded here in this unforgiving place?
Climbing up on the rail, feeling the cold but somehow reassuringly modern metal beneath his fingers, Denizen hesitated. The slick black stone of the pier was just above his head. He suddenly had no desire whatsoever to touch it. There was a crawling feeling in his stomach.
The Tenebrae—this whole Point quivered with it.
“What is this place?” Abigail asked, arms wrapped round herself.
There was a vertical tunnel, like a chimney, cut into the back of the stone spire, rising up through its core. A ladder of iron was set into it and it was this that D’Aubigny approached, her bag slung over her back.
“There are certain places where the skin of the world is thin, where this universe and the Tenebrae run close together,” D’Aubigny said. “Os Reges is the closest. Here we are separated by a mere breath.”
Denizen heaved himself up onto the pier, trying to ignore the queasiness in his stomach.
“You both feel it, don’t you?”
They nodded. D’Aubigny’s face was grim.
“It will get worse as we climb.”
—
FIRST, THE LADDER—A creaking, rusting structure that rose through the core of the first spire like the spinal column of a long-dead serpent.
That wasn’t so bad actually—shielded from the wind, unable to see how far up you were, just a hand-over-hand climb to the top.
A hundred-meter straight climb was still more than he had ever done before. Denizen found himself counting rungs to distract himself from the burning in his muscles before he finally clambered, exhausted, onto the summit of the first spire.
Each finger of rock was connected by a thin rope bridge, held in place by long iron stakes. Denizen eyed the first one with suspicion. The stakes seemed sturdy enough. The actual bridge looked older than Europe. Its boards were splintered, the ropes frayed. One good gust of wind, one heavy footstep…
Denizen and Abigail stared at it apprehensively.
D’Aubigny kicked at one of the stakes with a boot. “It is fine,” she said. “This bridge has outlasted empires. It is perfectly safe.”
That’s not reassuring, Denizen thought. You couldn’t just say that it had outlasted things. Everything outlasts everything else until the moment it doesn’t.
D’Aubigny stepped onto the bridge. It dipped under her weight—Denizen’s heart skipping a beat—but it held. The Knight crossed the gap in five long strides, one hand held to the flat black cap she wore, the other out for balance. She may as well have been walking on concrete.
“Em,” said Denizen. He looked at Abigail, and then at the gap. “After you?”
Abigail just stared at him. Denizen sighed and followed D’Aubigny.
Step by faltering step, he extended himself out over the void. Every breath he took made the bridge sway a little, but that was all right because the wind was the breath of the entire world and it was making the bridge sway a lot.
Denizen tried looking at the boards beneath his feet, but that meant looking at the ocean below. And if he looked up, then he couldn’t see his foot coming down on a moving surface above a hundred-meter drop—
His foot landed on cold and solid stone. It took all of Denizen’s control not to kiss it.
Abigail made her way slowly across after him. It was almost worse watching someone else do it, but at the same time he couldn’t take his eyes from her.
“That,” she said, stepping off the bridge and letting out a long breath, “was unpleasant.”
Denizen flashed her a relieved grin, but Abigail had already turned away.
Each spire they crossed brought them higher and higher. The wind grew as they climbed, and Denizen suddenly became very glad that he had worn extra layers, even when the exertion of climbing made his armpits itchy and wet.
Eventually, all that remained was the final peak—a huge spur of granite, rising into the sky like the pocked fin of some vast sea creature. It dwarfed the other spires to such a degree that the bridge from the fourth spear only reached its midsection, leading to a staircase that wound round the peak.
Each step of the staircase was narrow, roughly hacked out of the stone. Denizen was very glad it hadn’t rained; one slip on wet rock and it would take a long time for him to hit the ocean below. Even so, it was a fraught climb—the wind plucking at his hair, each step barely visible, even with the Lucidum lending everything a silver glow.
Finally, the staircase ended and Denizen walked out on to the summit of Os Reges Point.
“It’s beautiful,” Abigail said, and she was right. The view was dizzying.
The ocean heaved beneath them, a whole world of white and gray. The stars felt close enough to touch. Denizen kept catching himself ducking in case he caught his head on them.
His sense of the Tenebrae was stronger here, but it didn’t feel like a Breach. It somehow felt stronger yet more natural. A Breach was like a knife wound or a needle pressing through fabric, distorting everything around it. Here it was as if the two worlds existed in the same place—overlapping, coexisting.
The Tenebrae woke in his stomach, full of tingling warmth. He drew on it gently, let it flood into his limbs, feeling prickles between his fingers. Abigail was doing the same—light too golden to be reflected starlight gleamed behind her eyes.
“Control yourselves,” D’Aubigny said. “Let your power go.”
Grudgingly, Denizen did so. It came so easily here, a furnace in his spine that made him want to reach out and…no. He shoved the power away, embarrassed.
“How do you do it?”
Abigail was staring at him, light still roiling fitfully behind her eyes. Her hands were balled into fists.
“What?”
She took one last deep breath and finally the light died away. “You’re good at tamping it down,” she said. “I noticed. Sorry.”
“No,” Denizen said. “Thanks. I guess I just…you know. Burned once.” He waggled his fingers at her and then blushed.
“OK,” she said. “Mental note. Get burned.” She thought for a moment. “And survive, obviously.”
D’Aubigny had already made her w
ay to the center of Os Reges Point, staring at something on the ground. An ancient suit of armor lay at her feet. It was huge—at least four meters tall, its empty helm yawning at the sky. Rough iron gauntlets clawed at nothing with rust-furred fingers, the massive shoulders as wide as Denizen was tall.
The longer he looked at it, the more the suit of armor unnerved him; there was something subtly wrong about its dimensions. The fingers were too long, possessing too many joints. The helm bulged outward at strange angles. It didn’t seem to have been forged for a human face.
The armor had collapsed where the wearer had been felled in battle, the body within long rotted away. It didn’t take any imagination to guess who had done it and with what.
The hammer of a Malleus had been buried in the center of the chest plate, buckling the metal inward as though struck by a comet. The weapon looked like a grandfather to the one Denizen had seen his aunt carry—the head of dark stone, the haft of gleaming black wood. It pinned the armor to the ground.
D’Aubigny removed her gloves, stretching fingers of iron. “Stand back.”
She took a deep breath, power suddenly radiating from her eyes. Light bled from between her teeth, her hands spasming open. The air shivered and pulsed. D’Aubigny’s lips moved, and the Tenebrae moved with them, thrumming along Denizen’s skin like the patter of rain.
Abigail let out a shocked exclamation. She could feel it too.
“What—”
Her words were swept away by D’Aubigny’s crackling intonations. She didn’t seem in the least bit distracted or perturbed, and Denizen wondered just how long it took before you became used to feeling another world breathe along your skin.
“Denizen,” Abigail whispered beside him. “The stars are changing.”
She was right. They burned with alien fire, brighter than he had ever seen stars glow before, and as he stared up at them, they began to move, wheeling round the sky like birds circling or sparks from a campfire spun and eddied by the wind.
Denizen couldn’t tell if the earth moved or the sky, but he knew instinctively that where they were had shifted. Lightning streaked down in the distance to paint the sea a hellish white. Somewhere, the storm was breaking, screaming its fury down, but here at the very center of things, the wind had died and all was calm.
As if the world was waiting for something.
The air sizzled with the taste of the Tenebrae. The armor trembled with it. Power bled from the sky, funneling downward in an invisible stream, and with the creak of iron, the hammer bucked to the side as something shifted beneath it.
The fingers of the gauntlets twitched, flakes of rust drifting free. Denizen and Abigail flinched as first one shoulder rose, then the other. The pressure in the air hummed.
The Emissary of the Endless King rose to its feet, darkness boiling within the hollows of its armor. The helm stared blindly down at them.
Where is my sword?
Its voice sounded like a tidal wave. Hoarse and dragging, each word pulled up from somewhere deep in the darkness—things washed up on shore to die. Every breath whistled hollowly through the gaps in its armor, rust bleeding from its neck as its helm creaked from side to side.
Denizen stared up at it. The Emissary’s shoulders nearly blocked out the sky.
Where is my sword? it said again, voice splitting the air.
“You set it aside,” D’Aubigny said, her head bowed. The words had the feel of a ritual.
Where is my sword? Its gauntlets curled into fists. Darkness drooled from its joints. There was a fetter, thick as Denizen’s neck, closed around its massive ankle. A chain fell away from it to sink into the rock of the Point itself.
“You set it aside,” D’Aubigny said again. “You put it away.” The Emissary’s head lifted to the sky as if listening to something only it could hear.
I did, it intoned. I chose peace. I chose to sleep. To wait to be called. I chose to speak for That-Which-Is-Endless, the Father of Shadow, the King of the Tenebrae.
“You did,” D’Aubigny said, “and the Order is grateful.”
The Emissary drank great snuffling breaths through its helm. The stars above slowed in their movements, glittering pin-sharp in the blackness of the sky.
D’Aubigny folded her arms. Not a trace of fear showed in her pale features, as if questioning a towering suit of armor impaled by a hammer was something she did every day.
Iron inside.
Ask your question, the Tenebrous said.
“What was stolen?” D’Aubigny said. “What has the Endless King lost? The Order is not your enemy in this. We will help you find it if we can.”
The Emissary was still for a long time, the only sound the crashing of distant waves and the lonely cry of the wind.
I will consult, it said, its voice a drowning. I will consult.
The armor went still—darkness slinking into the crevices of the suit, shoulders slumping, arms swinging slack by its sides. The haft of the hammer dipped.
Whatever mind had inhabited the body was gone. Denizen could almost believe that the Emissary was just a statue, some long-ago monument to a forgotten war, a silent guardian of an ancient peace.
D’Aubigny sank to the ground, pulling off her cap to rub her forehead. Summoning the Emissary had seemed to exhaust her.
“Are you all right?” Abigail said in a concerned voice.
The Knight nodded. “Now we wait.”
They left her sitting there, staring up at the Emissary’s prone form.
Denizen went to stand at the edge of the summit. Distant lightning stabbed at the sea or climbed between great towers of cloud.
How long had this deserted little speck of stone been here? He tried to imagine what it must have been like for sailors back when they drew dragons on the maps to fill in the blank spaces. What must they have thought when Os Reges Point loomed over the horizon—five fingers of stark black stone against a needlework sky?
“Denizen.”
He turned. The wind had caught Abigail’s hair, lifting it in a froth of glistening black until he couldn’t tell where it ended and the sky began. In the unlight of the Lucidum, her eyes were sparks, raw nebulae, shining brighter than all else.
“I’m not going to apologize,” she said, her eyes fixing him like crossbow bolts.
It took Denizen a minute to find his words. “Apologize?”
“Yes. I’m not going to.”
He shook his head. “I’m not— I mean, I don’t want you to. What are you not apologizing for?”
She took a step closer, her arms folded across her chest. Denizen was suddenly very aware of the long, long drop behind them.
“You tell me. Either you’re the grumpiest thirteen-year-old in the world—which I’m not discounting—or I’ve done something to offend you.”
“No, no,” Denizen said, lifting his hands in protestation, “you haven’t—”
“I know I haven’t,” she interrupted. “We’ve only known each other ten minutes. So I have to assume that you’re annoyed at me for something else.”
It was a mistake, Denizen was realizing, to have assumed there was anything naive in Abigail’s wide-eyed appreciation of the world. The stare she gave Denizen wasn’t quite of Vivian’s intensity, but it was close. He felt bits of himself peeling away beneath it.
“Is it that I had a head start with my training?” Abigail asked, and this time her voice was gentler. “Or because I wanted to work with your aunt? Or, I don’t know, you’re just annoyed at the world in general—”
“Yes,” Denizen said.
A frown flitted across her features. “Yes? Wait—which one?”
“All of them,” Denizen said, giving her a halfhearted smile. “Sorry. It’s not your fault. I know it’s not your fault. I just…a few weeks ago, I was at home. My biggest worry was homework…or, I don’t know, having to do sports. Now it’s the end of the world.
“And you’re…better at this. I’m scrambling to catch up, and you’ve known about this all
along. I arrive and I hear loads about you, and then I meet you and you’re brilliant, properly brilliant, and my aunt has actually talked to you. She probably wishes you were her niece rather than me being her nephew. You were meant for this. I’m just—I don’t know. Tagging along. Getting in the way.”
Abigail nodded. “Do you know what I got for my tenth birthday?”
Denizen shook his head.
“A crossbow. And I loved it—I did, it was the one I wanted—but there was a part of me that was hoping I’d get a phone. Or…I don’t know. What do ten-year-old girls get as presents?”
Denizen shrugged.
“My brother’s three years old,” Abigail said. “And apart from him, I’ve never lived around anybody but adults. They tried to keep some of the worst of it away from me, but when you’re moving five times a year and all your parents’ friends have battleaxes, the truth comes out pretty quickly.
“So I learned. I’m a crack shot. I can stitch a decent set of sutures. And I’m pretty sure that this is the longest conversation I’ve ever had with someone my own age.”
“Really?”
She thought for a moment. “Well, in English, anyway.” She crossed her arms. “Point is, I’ve spent my whole life with a bunch of people who are quite preoccupied with other things. So I learned them. I mean, you know all these guys so well already….”
Denizen blinked in surprise. “What?”
“They totally dote on you,” Abigail said, grinning. “Jack is planning to teach you smithing. Says it’ll cure your skinniness, put some muscle on you. Grey talks about you like you’re brothers. And you saw how upset Darcie was at the thought of putting you in danger.”
Denizen frowned. “What she said…about not having to be a Knight. Do you ever think about that?”
“Sometimes.”
“Do you…Do you enjoy it? The training?”
“I do,” she said. “I always have. But part of that is because”—she looked down at her feet—“when the time comes, I want to be good enough. Fast enough. As fast as I need to be. And I was never going to be anything else, you know? I’m a Falx.”
Denizen sighed. “I was going to be a teacher.”
They stood silently for a little while, both deep in thought. Which was worse—a whole new world coming out of nowhere to derail your future, or never having a choice of future in the first place?