So he hurled himself out of the water and walked dripping wet back to his manor, to consign the world to death.
Salt. Pepper. A little butter. Sear both sides, and then let it cook in the oven for thirty minutes. Hark even prepared a small salad to be served with it, to keep his mind from the impending destruction of the world.
Spear never told him what the Messenger had looked like. A week and a half after she left to hunt, she reappeared, reached into her bag, and pulled out a dark, hot lump, fixing him with a cold fury in her eyes. “Go on, then,” she had whispered. “Show the cruel world how great you are. Make a fillet of death.”
She walked with him through psychic space until they reached the Hollowed’s banquet table, where each of the nine soon-to-be-gods sat with slavering impatience. Hark made them wait as long as possible, though he couldn’t articulate why. He poured a blood-red wine, a Trevaldi 491, aged on butterfly smoke and white chocolate. He served his salad, laden with berries, arugula, goat cheese, almond slices, and a dusting of volcanic ash. Finally he served out the portions of the Messenger’s heart, small on the wide plates, encircled with a sauce of dark chocolate, coffee, and orange bitters.
The Golden King raised a glass of wine. The other Hollowed followed suit. “To Hark and Spear,” the Golden King purred, a smile splitting his cracked lips. “Thanks to them, we’ll soon walk the world. And in doing so, break it for our revenge. To the end of the Wild World and the start of a new one!”
The Hollowed cheered.
The Hollowed drank.
The Hollowed ate.
Hark stood with his feet together, his hands behind his back, and his eyes full of tears. Beside him, Spear did the same. He had to do something. He couldn’t let them out into the world. He couldn’t do anything, but he had to do something.
As one, they finished their plates, and Hark felt the edges of psychic space break open, unfurling like a languid rose. The Hollowed stood in the Wild World now, the Messenger acting as the final anchor to true reality. They stood in an antechamber just off the kitchen, and Hark yearned to go there, to hide from what he’d done. Already he could feel the tangle of power the Hollowed gave off, a massive surge of dominance over the laws of reality once held by the Great Beasts. He could taste war on the wind, feel the thrum of collapse in the soles of his feet, hear a hot sickness flooding through his blood.
But before he could do anything, the Golden King stepped forward, smiling, with a look of knowing in his empty eyes, those hollow sockets that had not filled for any of them, even in life anew.
“We thank you, chef. Your despondence, your dedication, and your own small cruelties made you the perfect vessel for our return. Like you, we were failed by the world we hoped to lead. Like you, we were cast out in the pursuit of our perfection. Like you, we hungered to fill the emptiness within us and show those in the world we were not what they thought we were. And now we have that chance to revenge upon them, to move in a way you have only wished to for so many years.”
Hark’s eyes went wide as the words sunk in.
They had not sought him for his talent.
They had chosen him because he was just like them: hollow.
The wall around his heart shattered then, with the roaring strength of a pounding tide. Hark fell to his aged knees and raised beseeching hands over his head.
“Wait! My lords! My ladies! My lieges, all, please hear me!” He could feel their searing gaze on him, but he dared not meet them. “To commemorate such a momentous occasion, I have . . . prepared something for you all; a small trifle, something special to cleanse your palates with before striding out into the Wild World. Please grant me a short time to prepare it and bring it to you all.”
“Rise.” Hark looked up.
Numbered nine and radiant all, the Hollowed watched him, smiling with a wicked edge.
The Golden King nodded. “There is the obeisance we’ve been waiting for. Go and bring us your treat, chef. You’ve earned some slight patience.”
Hark bowed and turned on his heel. He felt Spear right behind him.
“What in the Myriad Hells are you doing?” she whispered, both of them pushing into the kitchen. Hark’s heart pounded, though for the first time in four years he was utterly calm.
Hark looked around his kitchen, his kingdom, and smiled. It had been so good to him; in a world that had hurt him, his kitchen was an oasis he’d retreated to so many times. He ran his hands along the black-and-white marble counter, picking at small nicks in the cutting boards. He gazed out through the bay window by the fireplace and, there in the distance, the sea he so loved. He found himself walking toward the pantry and opening it with reverence.
Spear watched him in silence. She stood motionless as his hands glided along his wall of tools and found an ivory knife handle and, drawing it from its guard, a shining white blade.
It was a knife to be used only in certain procedures. Butterflying the heart of a cosmic whale. Slicing off shavings of psychotropic dark-matter mushrooms from the underverse. Cracking the shell of a Dwarf Star Turtle to consume the radiation inside.
It was a precise tool meant for precise actions.
Hark handed the hilt to Spear.
She took it, her face slack, her eyes dead. “What am I doing with this?”
He pursed his lips, thinking, and then wiped the corners of his eyes as the answer took hold of him and sudden tears threatened to fall. “It is too late to stop them, Spear. They are free, and I freed them. Every part of me is screaming to curl up and die, to let them run rampant. But . . .” Here he paused, the memory of his failed restaurant, his failed career, his failed family, ruin after ruin flashing before him. Then, a young girl on the beach, and learning that you can always try again, if you work to fix what went wrong. “That wouldn’t be right.”
He smiled at Spear, a genuine thing, and found he quite liked it. “Should this fail, then let it fail. But I’ll not give up the world to die, even though I gave up on it long ago.”
Spear spun the ivory knife back and forth, testing its weight, hefting its handle. She didn’t offer an argument, just as Hark knew she wouldn’t. She looked up at him, her eyes as cold and clear as a forest spring. “Where, then?”
Hark took her hand in his own. He lifted the knife’s tip up to his right eye. All he could see through one eye was steel; through the other, Spear, steady as a stone and waiting. “Both, Spear. Please, make it quick.”
She said nothing. Only nodded.
The pain that shattered through him was unlike anything he had ever felt. It demanded his full attention, and Hark writhed on the ground, screaming with all his broken heart. And when he thought he couldn’t scream anymore, some new part of him discovered he could.
It was some time before he found consciousness, and when he did, it was a world of touch and taste and sound and patience. He found his feet, and a hand under his arm. Spear’s husky, harsh voice was right next to him. “I have them, Hark. What am I doing with them?”
His voice was a whisper. “In my hand, please. I have it from here.”
It was slower than he thought it would be, but the more than fifty years in his kitchen, his kingdom, had not left him. Sliding his hands along the counters, he inched his way to the cabinet of glasses. He found nine champagne flutes. There was an angry, thumping pain at the front of his skull, and there was wetness slipping down his face, and though it demanded all of his attention, Hark denied it.
He had work to do.
With Spear’s assistance, he went to his old chopping block and, holding each eye just so, sliced them thinly, arraying them in the bottom of the flutes. She helped him pour a thick port wine into each glass, only guessing that the liquid was mulberry and pomegranate in color. And with Spear’s guidance adorned a serving tray with the flutes and walked them toward the Hollowed.