The Comeback of the King Read online

  “He wants us. He wants us all to go to the market place–”

  “So why didn’t you say before we got on this bus, you stupid cow?”

  “I di– I did but you … oh, please, let me get off–”

  Another one, Ted thought dully. Another of the King’s poor dupes.

  “I. Do. Not. Care! Just shut your trap!”

  The sobs increased.

  “But–”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Ted saw the man twitch. He also saw the woman’s sudden reaction and anger blazed inside him. It wasn’t much. Just a clenched fist, a slight jerk of the arm – it could have just been a nervous spasm – but the girl recoiled a good six inches.

  Oh God. He hits her, doesn’t he?

  He had heard of it, never seen it.

  The bell rang. The bus had come into the sleepy little village of Coombe Bissett on the A354 and it was slowing for one of the many stops on its long crawl towards Blandford.

  “Ple-a-se!” The girl’s voice shuddered with her sobs now. “Please let me get off here, please let me go back to him.”

  She made a move to get up. Instantly the boyfriend was standing over her, looming, dominating and pressing her back into her seat.

  “You are not going back to that King!”

  Just shut the fuck up! Ted screamed, inside his head. And sit down!

  Quite right.

  The boyfriend’s knees buckled as if a mighty weight had suddenly dropped on him. He dropped back into his seat and sprawled there as if the invisible weight were pressing on him. He heaved, trying to get up, but he couldn’t move. His eyes were bulging, his mouth was open in a wide O of pure shock.

  The girl made as if to stand again, hesitantly. He glared up at her and his mouth moved, but no sound came out, and he heaved again, with no more luck than the first time. Not quite believing her luck, she sidled away from him, down the aisle, not able to take her eyes off the fury that blazed in his eyes. Then she gathered her courage and fled to the doors. She stood on the pavement while the doors folded closed, and she and the boyfriend fixed their eyes on each other through the glass as the bus moved off. He could twist round where he was sitting but he still couldn’t get up again. He thumped his fists angrily on the window, but the bus was trundling away and she was dwindling into the distance. Ted caught a last glimpse of her crossing the road to the opposite stop, to wait for the next bus back to town.

  Well, bloody hell!

  He sat back in his seat and stared ahead. It had been so totally what Ted had wanted that he could almost believe he had caused it.

  Had someone said, ‘quite right’?

  No, of course not. It’s just like when you have a conversation with yourself.

  Like magic …

  Nah. He did not want to go down that route and anyway there hadn’t been the slightest sign of the Knowledge since that time over the summer. There had been a tiny fragment in him, nothing more. How had Zoe put it? “If the Knowledge is a twenty volume encyclopaedia, you’ve memorised a sentence which you’ll soon forget.” And he hadn’t even tried to remember it. It was more trouble than it was worth.

  Still, he thought, as the A354 trundled past outside the windows, it would be handy to have now, even if he wasn’t sure what he would do with it.

  The Knowledge used magic like Ted used programming code. That was how he had been able to use it that one time – he could understand what he was doing. You started with simple things, and added them together to make slightly more complicated ones, and added them together … and so on. By the end of it, if you were proficient enough, you could achieve almost anything.

  Ted had used the Knowledge to float down from the top of the cathedral spire, but it wasn’t like it had just wiped out gravity. It had taken energy from the air around it, and controlled the molecules of air so that they all moved in one direction – up – with just enough force to counteract his weight heading in the other direction. The result: he could stand on a platform of air that slowly lowered itself to the ground. It looked simple, to an outsider, but it was much more complicated than it appeared.

  The King’s magic, on the other hand, just … was, or at least, that was how it seemed. No objects, no programming: he willed it and it happened. To a certain extent. If you were one of his royal subjects. The thief who had stolen the Knowledge had used it to swamp the will of other people with his own, and he could use it on anyone. The King seemed to appeal to some deeper programming, only within certain people, that let them be themselves and also the King’s loyal royal subject at the same time. It had to be different.

  But somehow Ted had broken it. He had screamed, “you’re my counsel!”, and the spell on Malcolm had been broken. What had done that?

  Ted frowned. Something was scratching at the surface of his consciousness, from the inside: a thought that was trying to get out.

  This isn’t getting you anywhere.

  No, he agreed, it isn’t.

  He wished he had bought a book to read. His other choice was getting out his laptop and doing some work on TEDLISH, which hadn’t had any attention paid to it for over twenty-four hours. Unfortunately he would have to connect via its broadband dongle and that could probably be traced. So he sat and watched Wiltshire go by.

  He could think about TEDLISH, so he thought.

  This was how Ted had explained it to his mum and to Barry. When you turned a computer on, the first thing the computer did was ask: who am I and what am I doing here? The first thing its operating system did was tell it: You are such-and-such kind of computer. I am your OS. Hello. You will receive certain inputs through me. Let me explain to you what they mean.

  And so on. From then on, the computer was the OS’s slave. If you tried to run something from another software platform, the computer would complain bitterly. It would point at the OS, and say, but he told me I was a such-and-such! I can’t run that! Take it away!

  There were ways around it, of course. If the computer was an X, part of its memory or hard drive could be persuaded to think it was a Y. Or the manufacturers of Y could make a deal with the makers of X so that their machines would work to a common standard. Software from another system would be able to load, announcing: Hello there! I was designed for another system but I believe arrangements have been made for me?

  But Ted’s dream was to take TEDLISH a step further even than that. It would work on any platform by making friends. You could load it onto any machine, even ones with an OS that hadn’t been invented yet, and it would look around and say, aha! That’s what your OS told you, is it? Okay, let’s go along with that. No virtual environments, no extra load on the memory. TEDLISH would chug along as happily as if it had been written specially for that machine alone.

  That was the plan … and he was getting there, or at least he was getting somewhere. Ted still had to admit, reluctantly, in the darkest reaches of the night and of his soul, that reconciling different operating systems was currently beyond his technical competence.

  A bit like your current situation, really.

  Yeah, gee, thanks, he thought back at himself. Thanks for the reminder.

  His phone buzzed in his pocket, and when he pulled it out and glanced at the screen, for a moment his heart leaped. Sarah was calling him? She was better?

  But no, it was much more likely to be Malcolm, who had found her in the shop; or even Barry, who Malcolm would certainly have contacted, and no way was he going to speak to his stepfather right now.

  His phone buzzed again. The tone for a text. Texts should be safe. He checked it. Yup, from Sarah again.

  awnsr yr fne zits!!

  She really was back! He sighed out a pent-up load of frustration and took a deep breath of worry-free fresh air. Thank you, God.

  His thumb hovered over the ‘reply’ key … and he stopped. Barry wouldn’t be so devious as to pretend to be Sarah … would he?

  whos wiv u?

  Malcolm was the one he had called and left the note for. If Malcolm
was there, Ted would talk to him and trust him. Anyone else …

  As if Sarah were reading his mind at the other end, a fresh text chimed in:

  mlclm wnts 2 tlk 2 u and btw its al yr fault lol :)

  *

  It hit the King without warning and it was worse than the other time. The King slumped against a lamppost and only an outstretched hand stopped him from stumbling. He hung his head to clear it and felt the Queen pressing close to him.

  “My love?” Her hands were on him, gently lifting him up.

  “Another royal subject lost,” he grated.

  “The boy?” she said through her teeth.

  “No. It felt different. I lost a royal subject but–”

  He didn’t want to worry her and so he kept quiet, but he had a sneaking suspicion they might have lost the Hunter.

  There had been active power behind this assault, much more so than the boy had shown when he stole his representative away from the King. Was this the power that the boy worked for? Was it finally coming out of hiding, emerging into the world?

  Well, let it come. The King would welcome the fight. His strength was returning; he straightened up and surveyed the market place with satisfaction. It was his.

  Royal subjects streamed in from all directions. It seemed to have dawned on the opposition that they were the cause of the conflict. If they let people through then the fighting just evaporated.

  He knew it wouldn’t last. Sooner or later – and probably sooner because that was when everything in the modern world seemed to happen – the foreigners would muster enough numbers to come back and reclaim the square. They might not understand who he was but they knew he wasn’t them, and they could not bear to relinquish even a small part of their territory to something they didn’t understand.

  And the King understood that they didn’t understand. He would have done the same thing in their place.

  A cluster of large white vehicles were parked to one side, decorated with the same glowing colours as police cars but also adorned with large red crosses. Men and women in green overalls, some of them not even royal subjects, were systematically tending to the injuries of a small cluster of men and women and children. Cuts, bruises and a couple of broken bones. The King nodded in approval. He liked his people to be healthy.

  He continued to survey his reconquered ground and his eyes crinkled with delight at what he saw beyond the ambulances. Not all the police had given in and the leather jacketed lieutenant he had recruited outside the hotel had done his job well. A small group of police were corralled together in the shelter of the low wall of the war memorial that had so captivated him the day before. The curve of the wall and the iron railings in front made it a natural enclosure to defend. They had their shields and sticks at the ready, held against some of the King’s royal subjects under Leather Jacket’s command who faced them, a wary distance away. The police had their own sticks, the royal subjects were armed with or bars of metal or lengths of wood. Both groups were obviously at a stalemate, neither of them quite strong enough to attack the other.

  The King and Queen linked arms and strolled over. Leather Jacket didn’t quite draw himself up when he saw the couple approaching but he did brush his jacket down unconsciously. He spoke with a lazy arrogance which only unbent a little in deference to his King.

  “They’re not surrendering, sir, but we do have them contained.”

  “Perfect.” The King smiled at the contained group within the enclosure. “This is exactly what I need. But I need more. Can you recognise a foreigner when you see one?”

  Leather Jacket’s eyes gleamed.

  “Of course!”

  The King nodded and looked slowly around the market place.

  “There are other foreigners here. Move through the crowd, round them up–”

  “Are you in charge? Are you the leader?” One of the police called out to the King, harsh and belligerent, cutting him off. Leather Jacket bridled but the King calmed him with a touch on the arm, then indicated that the policeman should be allowed to approach. The King admired the way his colleagues fell into position behind him. These men were born warriors. It was a shame they were on the wrong side.

  The police officer was a tall man and he scowled down through his visor at the stocky King.

  “You are under arrest–”

  “I am what?” the King asked in disbelief, and the next moment he felt a hand clamp down hard on his arm. Without thinking he call up a surge of power from the earth and sent it through his body into the policeman. The man was flung away and crumpled against the wall.

  The next moment the King himself was on the ground, wrestled face down by two more policemen who ran forward.

  “Protect the King!”

  Leather Jacket’s men were running forward but even before they could get there the Queen had reached out towards her husband’s attackers. Her arms extended in a blur and each fist turned into a globe of water which she plunged into the faces of the two policemen. They staggered away, scrabbling at their faces, trying to scrape the water away from their mouths and noses. The next moment the King’s defenders had dragged them unceremoniously to the ground. They gasped with deep heaving breaths as the water drained away.

  The King picked himself up, smiling happily to himself. What a spirit these people had! It was almost a shame he had to do what he had to do. The man who had tried to arrest him was held down personally by Leather Jacket. The King crouched so that he could smile at the man face to face.

  “Do you regard me as your enemy?” he asked. The man glowered, but grunted: “Yes.”

  “And what would you give to remove me from Salisbury?”

  “Whatever it took.”

  “Freely?”

  “Oh, yes!”

  The King grinned pleasantly.

  “I knew we could agree.” He straightened and barked an order to Leather Jacket. “Tie them up; they cannot leave this place. And bring the other foreigners here.”

  *

  Ted stood on the step of the bus and stared at the stationary pavement beyond it. It was the last stop before the Blandford ringroad.

  He could stay on for another five minutes, get to the town centre and have a ten minute walk to his aunt and uncle’s house. Hot tea and buttered crumpets in front of a roaring fire.

  Sounds good. Go for it. They’ll find somewhere to hide you if Stewart calls.

  But with what Sarah had told him, it didn’t sound a likely proposition.

  “Take your time, son. It’s not like I’ve got a schedule to keep or anything.”

  Ted twisted round to look miserably at the bus driver, who was tapping his fingers ostentatiously on the ticket tray.

  “Oi! Get off the sodding bus! You’re letting the cold air in!”

  That was Ted’s friend from the back seat, who had regained his powers of movement and, unfortunately, of speech. The first hint had been when the bus was passing through East Woodyates and he had suddenly, loudly, given vent to his feelings on what happened. His opinion, he shared with an uncaring world, was that his fornicating female genitalia girlfriend had slipped him a pill or summat, because he had felt all the fornicating strength sanguinely slip out of him, hadn’t he, and he was prepared to bet good money it was all due to her fornicating illegitimate masturbator ex-boyfriend who had it in for him, the fornicating masturbator female genitalia.

  “Your ticket’s good for the town centre.”

  It’s your fault … Sarah had said.

  “Yeah,” Ted muttered. “I’m getting off.”

  He still did it slowly, one foot at a time, a good couple of seconds’ pause between one foot and the next, but the moment his second foot touched the ground outside he heard the doors slide closed behind him. He stepped forward and let the bus pull away. Still feeling numb, thoughts still whirling, he slowly sat down on the bus stop’s plastic bench and waited. Malcolm had said someone would be along to collect him, though he had been strangely cagey about exactly who.

/>   The December wind made him shiver and wish he’d worn a thicker coat. He zipped the one he was wearing up to the neck and dug his hands into his pockets. In the distance he could hear the whooping of a police siren. On a warmer, nicer day it might have sounded almost restful, a sleepy sound perfect for a Sunday afternoon. On this particular day, a murky late afternoon where the sun was finally going down after a whole day of trying to shine through the grey clouds and failing, it just sounded depressing.

  Cars went whistling by, slowing for the ringroad junction but still too fast to give Ted any kind of human contact. He felt lonely and isolated, alone with his thoughts.

  Well, at least he was out of the communications blackout now. Malcolm had said the King had called off the search: all loyal royal subjects were congregating in the town centre instead. It didn’t matter if his laptop could be traced. He pulled it from its bag, set it on his lap, felt the slight tremble as it buzzed into operation. Start-up code scrolled past. Load this, set that, assign t’other … How easy it would be if life were as simple as a computer. Every file with its assigned function, everything in its place: except, where would be the fun in that? Ted’s mouth twisted in a wry smile. It would be a sad sort of world that only the geeks could inherit.

  To work. Ted was currently midway through his umpteenth workaround to make TEDLISH a valuable tool and not just a handy shell. To work on any system it needed to be able to look around whichever system it was on, immediately recognise the local OS, and work with that without making the whole thing crash. Hmm, it would say, I like what you’ve done with the place: okay, this is what I’m going to do.

  Some operating systems made it easy: they were all out there in the open, configurations stored in plain text files that the user could just keep adding to. TEDLISH could work with that. But some systems treated everything they did as an official state secret, hiding what they had done deep, deep within the computer’s core so that you had to tread very carefully indeed to get it out. For extra security, they said. Paranoid, Ted called it.