Chapter 361: The Empty Courtyard
Kamar-Taj was silent.
Arthur stood in the courtyard and listened to a place he had known for nearly twenty years doing something he had never once heard it do.
Nothing.
There were no rapid feet on the flagstones. No instructor counting drills in the eastern yard. Nobody at the sparring rings, nobody practising gateways along the north wall, not so much as a novice hurrying past with an armful of books and an apology.
"Where is everyone?"
The Ancient One crossed the courtyard without hurrying, and looked at him a moment longer than the question needed.
"Working."
"That’s a whole lot of working."
"The Convergence does not only align physical planets, Arthur. It leans on everything else at the same time. The walls between the dimensions are thinner this week than they have been in five thousand years, and a great many things sleeping on the other side of them take an interest in a thin wall."
"How much is coming through?"
"Nothing, so far. Small tears, and we have reached every one of them before anything got more than an arm in. The order is out across the globe, closing seams and putting arms back where they came from."
"All of them? Every master and every student?" Arthur looked around the empty yard. "That can’t be what this actually needs."
"It is not." She allowed herself the small pleasure of it. "Kaecilius planned the response. Tokyo went so well that he has been waiting years for an excuse to do it again. So every master is out, and every master has three or four students attached who have never seen a real seam in their lives. Nobody is doing anything they could not easily do alone. Everybody is doing it in front of somebody who is eagerly learning."
Arthur looked at the empty sparring rings for a while.
"Nothing ever happened when I was training here," he said. "Not one incursion. Not one interesting Tuesday. These trainees get an alien invasion in their first year and a five-thousand-year Convergence in their second." He shook his head. "I am jealous."
"Says the man who has fought dark lords, hell lords, and alien empires."
"They started it."
She let that sit for exactly as long as it deserved, and then started walking, and he fell in beside her the way he had been falling in beside her since 1995.
"He’s doing a very good job, though," Arthur said. "Kaecilius. Has he officially been decided as your successor?"
"It is not settled."
"It never is, with you." They passed under the archway and out along the western walk. "What about the doctor?"
"The doctor has not walked through my gate yet. He may never. And if he finally does, he arrives twenty years behind everyone else, so I would not envy him the climb."
"So Kaecilius, then."
"I would not be so sure. Life is full of miracles. Perhaps a third contender will appear out of nowhere and take it away from both of them."
"No."
"I have not named anyone."
"You didn’t need to. It was sitting right there." Arthur said it flatly. "And my answer is no. I’m happy exactly where I am. Do you have any idea how difficult it was for me to arrange that?"
"I do." She walked on a few paces. "Although one can never be certain about the future. Least of all with you. The young man who first came up this path would have laughed at the idea of refusing power because it interfered with his children’s bedtime stories."
Arthur smiled, because it was true.
"Then again," she said, "perhaps nothing has changed. The recklessness is still there. So is the reaching for power. You simply have better manners about it now."
"That is not fair."
"No," she agreed pleasantly.
Arthur opened his mouth to explain exactly why it was not fair. That he had not gone looking for the stone in his coat. That he had gone to take it away from somebody far worse, and had done it badly, and had very nearly died of the doing.
All of which was technically true. And none of which was the whole of it, because somewhere underneath all that sound reasoning there was still a part of him that wanted the complete set. Not to use. Just to have. To know where all six of them were, and to be the one holding them.
He could keep that desire from everybody else on Earth. He had never once managed to keep anything from her.
They came out onto the terrace above the valley, where two chairs had been sitting in the same place for years, and the tea was already waiting on the low table between them.
She sat gracefully, and poured.
"Before you start," Arthur said, taking his seat. "I know."
"I have said nothing."
"You poured the tea." He picked up his cup. "That is usually how it starts."
She folded her hands and waited, which was worse than anything she could have said.
"You don’t need to give the speech," Arthur went on. "I already learned the lesson. I learned it on my knees, which is the kind that stays learned." He turned the cup on its saucer. "I know exactly what it means to hold four of them now. And I know they don’t need to be in the room to cause trouble. The traces alone were enough."
The Ancient One let that sit for a moment.
"So what do you intend to do about it?"
"About what?"
"You have four." She said it without emphasis. "Earth currently has five, if you count the one under this floor. One short of the full set." She looked at him over her cup. "It is only a matter of time before others start to notice."
Arthur was quiet for a moment.
"I have a plan. Once I’m able, the stone goes into a secure vault. Not on Earth. Not on Earth. Not near anything I love, and not on any road anyone travels."
"All four in one vault?"
"Four vaults." He said it like a thing already decided. "Separate corners of the universe. No two within reach of each other. Warded, buried, and built so that even I cannot open one quickly. If I ever want a stone in a hurry, I want the universe to make me work for it."
He stopped there, and braced for the argument.
Nothing came.
The Ancient One simply reached over and refilled his cup.
That was all.
"You’re not going to tell me it’s a terrible idea."
"You told yourself, on the way up the path. You did it thoroughly, which saves us both an afternoon." She settled back into her chair. "When you were younger, you came here to be argued out of things. You have started coming here afterward."
"Is that a compliment or a complaint?"
"You decide." She looked out over the valley. "Though I did deeply enjoy the old meetings more. More entertaining for me, at least."
Arthur laughed, and it pulled somewhere under his bruised ribs, and he stopped immediately.
She had been looking at him since he sat down, and not at his face. "Your magical channels are brusied end to end."
"They are." Arthur shifted in the chair and found a position that hurt less. "But it’s nothing like the Tesseract. That one took my magic away for the better part of a year."
"You stopped it in time."
"I did." He turned the cup on its saucer. "Another minute or two of it, and I honestly don’t know if I’d be sitting here." A small, tired smile. "I’d have made a decent cautionary Chapter for the next man who decides to collect the set."
The Ancient One did not smile back.
"But I’m alright," Arthur promised. "It’s bruising. Everywhere, yes, but just bruising. Some high-grade restorative potions and a strict, heavily enforced ban on magic for a week or two, and I will be perfectly fine."
"And if you are not?"
"Then I have the Extremis treatment waiting in the fridge at home." He smiled faintly. "I’ve kept one dose back for years, for exactly this sort of incident."
"Ah. The miracle that emptied the surgical wards."
"Eileen still gets angry letters from the surgeons. They have a great deal of free time now, and apparently they spend it writing." He turned to her. "Want to try it?"
The Ancient One did not look offended. She did not look tempted either. She simply smiled the serene, deeply infuriating smile that answered absolutely nothing.
"What ails me is not physical, Arthur. Your miracle would find nothing to fix."
"I know." He looked into his cup. "I also have the Mind Stone. Between the two, I could probably do something about whatever isn’t physical."
"My path is my own." She said it gently, the way one declines a gift without declining the giver. "But thank you for the offer."
Arthur sighed. He had known the answer before he asked it. He had asked anyway, because some questions exist to be asked rather than answered, and because one day the asking would be all he had left.
They stayed on the terrace another twenty minutes and talked about nothing at all. The weather coming over the pass. The stubbornness of new students, which had not improved in two centuries and, in her professional opinion, never would. Whether the tea was better this year, which she said it was, and he said it was not, and neither of them changed the other’s mind, which was the point of the argument and always had been.
Nobody mentioned the stone. Nobody mentioned the Convergence, or the seams being held shut across three continents by children with two years of training.
It was exactly what Arthur had needed.
Eventually the pot was empty. Arthur set his cup back on the tray and stood. His legs felt like they belonged to a much older man, but they held.
"I should go. Eileen has probably paced a trench into the living room rug by now."
"She is a patient woman. Even patience has limits." The Ancient One rose smoothly and raised a hand.
Golden sparks spun into the mountain air. The portal widened onto the warm familiar interior of the Hayes living room, where Eileen was standing by the sofa. She looked up sharply as the ring opened.
"Go home, Arthur," the Ancient One said softly. "Rest. Let the universe manage itself for a few days."
Arthur gave her a small, deeply respectful bow.
Then he stepped through the ring, and into his wife’s waiting arms, and the mountains closed behind him.
—
Deep Space
The massive Dark Elf mothership hung in the freezing black between stars.
It was a colossal jagged blade of dark metal, built without a single light along its flanks, by a people who had spent their whole history learning to sit in the shadows between stars and not be found there.
Inside, the command deck was cavernous and cold.
Malekith stood at the sprawling viewport in armour like cut obsidian, tall and entirely still, looking out at the distant glittering galaxies he intended, in the fullness of time, to put out.
Armoured footsteps rang across the deck behind him.
A towering figure came up out of the shadows at the back of the room. Algrim. The last and fiercest of his lieutenants, and the only one left who had stood on the field against Bor.
"The worlds have nearly aligned, my King."
Malekith turned from the viewport. There was no hesitation anywhere in his pale, angular face. He reached into his robes and drew out a ceremonial blade, and the dark metal of it drank what little light the deck had to give.
"You will be the last of the Kursed," he said softly.
Algrim looked firmly at the knife. Then at his king.
"Then let my life be spent." His rough voice did not move at all. "It is no more than our people gave. It is no more than you have given."
Malekith stepped forward and drove the blade in deep.
Algrim grunted. He did not cry out. He held his ground while his king twisted the blade free, and a silent attendant came forward out of the dark with a polished tray, upon which sat a jagged stone pulsing with a sick magma-orange light.
The last of them. There had been a vault of these, once.
Malekith took it up and pressed it into the wound.
"You will become the darkness," he said, and his voice carried through the cavernous room like a sentence being passed. "Cursed to this existence, until it consumes you. And until it does, nothing our enemies possess will stop you."
Algrim’s whole body went rigid. His breath came out through his teeth in one long unbroken sound, and the orange light began to spread beneath his skin, out from the wound, along the veins of his chest and up his throat and into his face, and where it passed the skin cracked open and did not bleed.
He stayed on his feet. He had promised himself he would.
"I will tear down their defences," he said, and the voice was no longer entirely his, a rumble down at the bottom of the register. "I will open their city to you. And I will see you returned to a universe reborn."
A second attendant came forward, carrying a heavy horned mask of bone-white plate. Their hands were shaking.
Algrim took it from them, and locked it over his own face himself.
—
Outside, in the cold, a single Harrow detached from the underbelly of the ark.
It dropped away without lights, hung a moment against the stars, and then its engines lit and it ran, silent and alone, for the golden realm.
—
Malekith remained on the command deck long after the others had gone.
The great dark glass showed him the Nine coming into line, and the fleet assembling in the void below, and out past all of it, too far for any eye but his, the arrogant speck of the world he had just aimed everything at.
He closed his eyes, and reached.
He had done this perhaps a hundred times since waking, and he did it again now, because he could not stop doing it. Five thousand years ago, in the last desperate season before Bor’s butchers broke his armies, he had woven a resonance deep into the living matrix of the Aether itself. A failsafe. A thread laid in against the day the weapon might be taken from him. No hiding place in all the Nine Realms would matter if he could feel his way to it from anywhere.
And it had worked. He had woken in the dark, after fifty centuries, to the thread singing. The Aether had found a host. It was awake, and feeding, and calling him home to it, and for a few perfect hours the universe had made sense again.
Then the song had stopped.
Not faded. Stopped. Between one breath and the next, mid-note, as though the Aether had simply ceased to exist. And that he knew to be impossible, the way he knew the dark was older than the light. The Aether could not die. It could not be unmade. Nothing forged before the dawn of everything could be.
Which meant it had been silenced. Hidden behind some working strong enough to smother a thread even he could not have found.
He had said none of this aloud. Not to Algrim, not to anyone. Algrim would have followed him into the silence and never asked a single question. That was not the point.
And there was no need. Because one trace remained.
Faint. Fading by the hour. Not the Aether itself, but the residue of his own weaving, clinging to the vessel that had carried his weapon, a mortal thing, briefly and by accident. He could follow that ember the way a hunter follows a single drop of blood across a frozen field.
And the ember had gone to Asgard.
Which left one explanation worth the name. Bor’s line had found the Aether and hidden it from him. They had done it once before, when they buried what they could not destroy. Now the heirs had done it again, carried it home, and set their witch-queen to weave the shroud over it.
Once, for a moment, he had allowed the other thought. That the working was not Asgard’s at all. That something else had reached the Aether first, something with no name anywhere in his records, and that he was flying toward the wrong house entirely.
He had put that thought down somewhere it could not follow him.
A hunter does not abandon the only trail he has because the field turns out to be larger than he thought.
"You think you can hide it from me," Malekith said, to the empty stars. "You could not even hide it from a wandering mortal."
He turned from the glass.
The sons of Bor had grown fat and careless in their long, unearned peace. They had taken up the instrument of their own ending, carried it into their own house, and laid it down behind their own walls, and tonight they were no doubt congratulating themselves on their cleverness.
Algrim would open those walls.
And then the last king of the Dark Elves would walk through them, take back what was his, and put out the light of this loud young universe the way the dark puts out everything.
Five thousand years, he had waited.
He could wait a few days more.