MAURICE BROADDUS.

King's War.

THE KNIGHTS OF BRETON COURT.

For Mom "Fairy tales do not tell children that dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be killed."

GK CHESTERTON.

PROLOGUE.

The Glein/River Incident.

All stories ended in death.

Lost in the white noise of the engine, that was the first thing that popped into King James White's mind as he idled down 16th Street. Sitting tall and straight in the car seat, he shifted uncomfortably, visibly muscled, but not with the dieseled appearance of prison weight. A head full of regal twists fit for a crown, he had the complexion of burnt cocoa, and a fresh crop of razor b.u.mps ran along his neck. The thin trace of a goatee framed his mouth. He scanned the streets with a heavy gaze, both decisive and sure. He hated driving and doing so put him in a foul mood. Not a gearhead by any measure, he neither had oil in his blood nor an overwhelming need to be under a hood. For that matter, he didn't have any love for huge rides, trues and vogues, ostentatious rims, booming systems, or any of the other nonsense which seemed to accompany a love of cars. A ride was just a ride. He much preferred walking, to have the earth solidly under his feet.

His ace, Lott, who rode silently beside him, simply believed him to be cheap, not wanting to pay the nearly $3 per gallon unless he absolutely had to. Lott always seemed a week past getting his lowcut fade tightened up. His large brown eyes took in the pa.s.sing scenery. His FedEx uniform a thick sweatshirt over blue slacks; his name badge, "Lott Carey" with a picture featuring his grill-revealing smile, wrapped around his arm girded him like a suit of armor. Lott drummed casually to himself, caught up in the melodies in his head.

Scrunching down in his seat again to check the skyline as if maybe the creature might fly by in the open skyline by day King turned at the sound of a beat being pounded out on the dashboard.

"What?" Lott paused mid-stroke under the weight of King's eyes on him.

"What you doing?"

"Nothing." Lott grinned his sheepish "been caught" smile, both beguiling and devilish. A row of faux gold caps grilled his teeth.

"We supposed to be looking for this thing."

"We don't even know what this thing is."

"What kind of man would I be if I ignored that?" King asked.

"A man. An ordinary man." Lott began drumming again. "Ain't nothing wrong with that."

For days King had trailed a beast strictly on the say-so of a mother's plea. Not even a year ago, he'd have dismissed the tale as another barber shop story told to pa.s.s the time, little more than a campfire story in the hood. The only monsters who prowled about in the dark were strictly of the two-legged variety. That was before he found himself caught up in a new story. One filled with magic, trolls, elementals, and dragons. The shadow world, an invisible world, once seen couldn't be unseen. Now the world of demons and creatures was far too real. All he knew, all he had sworn, was that nothing would prey upon the weak and defenseless in his neighborhood.

Descriptions of the creature changed with the teller of the tale. Sometimes it had wings. Sometimes the body of a lion. Sometimes it had the body of a snake. Sometimes claws. King feared he might be dealing with more than one creature, which was equally as bad an alternative to facing one creature with all of those characteristics. Even in a concrete jungle, life belonged to the swift, the strong, the smartest. King stalked among it, the latest generation of street princes. And heavy was the head that wore the crown.

"We heading over to Glein?" Lott asked in his lazy drawl, obviously pleased with himself. He loved accompanying King on his little missions.

"That where the Harding Street bridge folk ended up?"

"As long as the problem is swept under someone else's rug, the mess is considered clean."

"I think so. Been hearing reports about it. Been wanting to check out this 'tent city'." For his part, King was energized by Lott. It was like there was nothing he couldn't accomplish with Lott by his side. The pressure piled on King more these days. Everyone seemed to turn to him for answers. To solve their problems. The streets were becoming his even more so than they were his father's, except he hated the sheer... responsibility of it all.

Lott rolled with it all. The FedEx gig was working out. The company would be promoting him soon and he'd get a better shift. His story, too, had changed much in only a few months. Gone were the days of living in an abandoned house. He had a job with a future. And, for the first time he could remember, he had a friend who'd walk through fire for him, one for whom he'd do the same. Lott wasn't one to swear oaths of allegiance to anyone, but once he called someone friend, he was loyal to the end. And King was his boy.

King wasn't the type to make friends easily. Investing in people wasn't worth the effort: in the end, they all abandoned him. A melancholy cloud had settled on King over the last few months, but it wasn't anything either felt the need to talk about. Not every little feeling had to be talked through. Sometimes it was better to just let folks be.

They continued west on 16th Street pa.s.sing Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard, Methodist Hospital, and the Indiana State Forensics Laboratory. On Aqueduct Street, they pulled into a gravel lot. Signs pointed toward the Water Company, but they were more interested in the park across the street. Calm and resolute, King stood motionless, taking in the tranquility. His tall and regal bearing was swathed in a trenchcoat, matching his black jeans and black Chuck Taylors. The wind caught his open coat ever so slightly, the brief flutter the only movement, revealing the portrait of Medgar Evers on his T-shirt. And the b.u.t.t of his Caliburn tucked into his waist. He never looked more lonely.

Only a few nights ago, they had cleared a corner. It was one of those little runs King didn't tell Wayne Orkney the other member of their triumvirate, who was also on staff at a homeless teen ministry called Outreach Inc nor his mentor, Pastor Ecktor Winburn, about. The grumbles of their disapproval of his off-the-book runs would echo in his ears for weeks.

But Lott would be all in.

For all of his bravado and certainty whenever he went about his business, King needed someone to watch his back. To Lott, he wasn't Robin to King's Batman, but rather Batman to King's Superman. He rather reveled in that image.

Dred, though east side, hadn't been heard from; Night, once king of the west side, had been dropped by King (so the story went). The Eagle Terrace apartments bordered but were a respectful distance from Breton Court, King's undisputed dominion. A couple of non-descript fools, in baggy T-shirts and baggier pants who couldn't have been more than fourteen years old, not even a hard fourteen. Lott could practically smell their mother's milk on their breath. The first one leaned toward tall, a little bulk about the shoulders but with thin legs, like a basketball player growing into his body. A threat from the waist up, it was a dead giveaway that he'd found a set of weights and concentrated on his arms and never worked his legs. The other was short, stocky, with brown eyes too big for his head. Too quick to show his teeth, he cracked endless jokes about doing the other's girls heedless of the fact that he was on the clock. And then two brothers who meant business stepped to them from the shadows.

"You gonna have to move on," King said with no play in his voice.

"This is our spot. Who gonna move us?" the tall one said. His head had been filled with how good he was, the tone of ent.i.tlement in his voice.

"I am."

"I know you?"

"Name's King. Don't make me tell you again."

He'd said it and he meant it. King wasn't much older than either of them, but he had the hard and tested body of a man. As it was, it wasn't a fair fight. Lott hung back, mostly to enjoy the show and guard for the unexpected. But these two boys? King had this.

The lanky one turned as if to walk away, but King read the positioning of his feet and the shifting of his weight to know that the fool planned to swing on him. When the boy pivoted to throw his punch in "surprise", King jabbed him in the kidneys, grabbed him by the throat, and slammed him onto the hood of a parked car. King had a way of blazing in and dropping fools before they knew what hit them.

A grin had broken and froze on the face of the other boy. He reached under his shirt tail. King drew his Caliburn and trained it on the boy. Whenever he pulled out the Caliburn, folks knew what was up.

"You got something you want to show me?"

"No." The boy slowly dropped his hand to his side.

"Good, cause I'm only saying this once. This here was a friendly warning. Our neighborhood is tired of this mess. So why don't you give it a rest. We cool?"

"We cool."

Lott reached into the boy's waistband and removed the Colt. He emptied it of its bullets and tossed the weapon into the bushes. "I didn't want any surprises should he sc.r.a.pe together some courage with our backs turned."

King and Lott walked down the alley of the apartments nodding but not smiling to the folks they recognized. The respect left Lott so swoll, more so than any workout; respect born out of the work, of doing right by the neighborhood.

"You a good man."

King trained himself to keep full rein on his emotions. Prided himself on his ability to compartmentalize, remain objective, and disciplined. Some mistook it for aloof or indifferent, as if he didn't care, but Lott knew he cared too much.

With the Caliburn tucked into his dip, King adjusted his stride. He rolled his shoulders slightly, like a boxer entering a ring. Though the gun fit in his hand with a natural ease, as if he was always meant to wield it, he was still getting used to it.

"You need that?" King asked as Lott retrieved a bat from the back seat.

"Ain't all of us got weapons tucked in their shorts."

"Don't be jealous. It's not the size."

"When that thing busts a cap all premature, don't come limping to me."

A hill rolled down from the street leading into an impenetrable tract of trees, a scenic backdrop to the park. Lott tugged at his shirt front as if preparing to get into character. With an exaggerated bounce to his steps, he strutted for an unseen audience. But he had his game face on, a mask of unflinching stone etched into flesh. In his cool stare was a flicker of warning and a hint of hostility. He may have despised battle, but he never ran from one. And too often he sought them out with the determination of a man trying to get into the drawers of a woman he knew was no good for him. Resigned to his old way of thinking the only way he knew a lifestyle that ended in being locked up or in an early grave.

Despite his carefully contrived appearance, there was no way to ease down the hill and maintain any sense of street cool. They could take only a few awkward steps at a time, down the steep incline, as rocks littered the gra.s.s and made it difficult to maintain their balance and sure-footing. Down, down, down they went and it was as if they left one world and entered another. It didn't take long for the sounds of traffic overhead to fade against the steady thrum of the rushing White River. The currents roiled; the water climbed high up its banks due to the melted snow and recent heavy rains. The greenish water appeared brackish with up tilled silt, not that the White River was the healthiest of waterways to begin with.

Scattered among the thin brown weeds pa.s.sed for gra.s.s was rebar and smashed concrete. A red and white umbrella canted against a tree. A bed of large white stones formed a channel leading from a pipe to the river. The bridge loomed above them, dwarfing them. It never seemed this large whenever they drove over it. The slate gray arches gleamed, only a few years old since the city remembered this side of town. The arches created an echo chamber as the water rushed under it.

"Some nice work." Lott nodded toward the groups of tags along the base of the bridge. The spray-painted figure of a life-sized, 1950s-era windup robot with the head of a kangaroo. Two sets of names in so stylized a script, the letters were indistinguishable. The final figure was of a Latino boy with his cap turned to one side with an expression reminiscent of Edvard Munch's "The Scream".

"Too bad you can't tell what they're saying." King squatted in front of the formation of rocks on the opposite side. Half-rotted textbooks, newspapers, and Mountain Dew bottles littered the ground in between. Sweatshirts, pants, the occasional blanket, coats, and towels piled between two rows of stacked rocks. Another circle of stones, all charred, had a grill top resting on them.

"Odd place to lay out your stuff," Lott said.

"It's a mattress."

Lott stared at the arrangement again and pointed to the blackened rocks. "Yeah, I see it now. That's his stove. We in someone's squat."

"Someone not a part of tent city."

"Means we on the right track."

"You ought to wipe your feet before entering a man's abode. It's just plain rude."

At the sound of the voice, King and Lott turned. Merle's slate-gray eyes peered at them. His craggy auburn beard matched what wisps remained around his huge bald spot. Aluminum foil formed a chrome cap, which didn't quite fit atop his head. A black raincoat draped about him like a cloak.

"You stay here?" Lott asked.

"It's one place I stay, wayward knight, though not my secret place. You don't think I only spend my time with you lot. Sir Rupert craves the outdoors." A washcloth popped up, causing King to jump back. A squirrel peered left and then right, then dashed from beneath the cloth and scampered past his legs.

Lott could never shake the feeling that Merle never quite trusted him, like they shared a bestforgotten secret only the crazy old man knew. He would chide himself for caring what the b.u.m thought of him, though part of him feared it might be jealousy as Merle seemed to have King's ear in a way he didn't.

"Don't mean to bust your roll or nothing," King said, "but we on a mission."

"Oh? A quest? Is it that time already? Mayhaps we'll encounter a questing beast." Merle danced in a circle around King, hands spreading from his face in jazz hands wiggles as he cried out. "'A star appearing in the sky, its head like a dragon from whose mouth two beams came at an angle.' An egg-shaped keystone, mayhaps a tower. A keystone illumination on the winter solstice. A sacred geometry. A date carved in stone. No wait, a stone unearthed from under a poplar tree, archaic names scribed into it along with strange symbols. A silver chalice, the Chalice of Antioch."

With that, Merle curtsied.

"You done?" King asked.

"It is finished," Merle said.

"Come on, we're checking in on Glein."

"So shut up and stay down," Lott said.

"Aren't you people supposed to be sa.s.sy?" Merle said. "Wayne would say something sa.s.sy."

They tromped through the woods. The smell of car exhaust from overhead gave way to the trill of budding flowers and furtive spring. Merle occasionally muttered about the state of his shoes or the ubiquity of mud in the tract of land. Undistracted, King charged forward. Glein, the tent city, was the name of this ad hoc ministry. Rumors spread about how a church sponsored the site. They collected men from their various squats and put them up here. The men had their own a.s.sortment of stories. Vets, businessmen, and Ph.Ds alike among their number. Some found themselves without homes after the housing market crashed, or after layoffs. Some had simply dropped out of society, not wishing to live by anyone else's rules. Some were simply sick. The church had a regimen for the men and if they worked it, they were moved to some apartments the church owned. The whole setup had an odd vibe to it. Wayne said that Outreach Inc, was investigating, but if the site dealt strictly with older men most of whom had already checked out of society it was out of their purview.

"I feel like I've been here before," King said.

"Deja vu is the word," Merle said. "G.o.d's way of telling you that you're exactly where you're supposed to be."

"So I'm right in line with my own destiny."

They wound along the river's edge. Branches snapped underfoot and leaves crunched as their inexperience as woodsmen betrayed them. The scent of campfire swept through the trees. Still early spring, the blues and yellows of the tents popped against the bleak landscape, easily spotted against the brown background of bare trees and dead leaves. Easily spotted once one chose to look for them.

A lone figure leaned against a thin tree, using a long wooden spoon to stir within a large metal saucepan. A University of Miami jacket, blue jeans, socks pulled up over the cuff. A thick beard, graystreaked hair. A thick skim of gray to his face, as if caked in ash. A black bag slung over his shoulder. A foot shorter than King, but he barely glanced up at their approach.

"Who that is?" the man asked.

"King."

"You say that like it's supposed to mean something."

He had. It did. It meant the weight of responsibility. It meant the consciousness of leadership. It meant the burden of his people. "I'm here to help."

"Anyone ask for your help?" the man asked.

"Methinks, young liege," Merle said, "that perhaps this situation bears further investigation."

"What? You rule these here parts... King? You got a crown tucked away in that mess of hair of yours? Maybe you just got a cape under that jacket or something."

"There are things out here." The heft of the Caliburn became acute in King's waistband.

"And what you gonna do?" The man took a bite of his macaroni and cheese. His face upturned and, with a shrug, took a heaping spoonful. Bits of food flew from his mouth as he spoke. "You ain't nothing but a punk with a gun. We know what's out here. And we got our own protection."

King didn't notice any movement, but he sensed something was amiss. It was as if now that his eyes had been opened to the story he found himself in, he could see it all around him. His eyes widened as he caught sight of the shadow. Perched on a thick limb, hidden in gloom among the tangle of branches, the creature's granite gaze narrowed to grim slits studying King. Now that King spotted it, he recognized the silhouette of such beasts from atop cathedrals and lining many buildings downtown. A gargoyle. Industrial magic come to life. Obviously the great beast which haunted his streets. A supreme grotesquerie, a disturbing ornamentation to the camp. Its concrete body transmogrified to flesh, stone to color gray, like shark hide newly awakened; cracks and dents gave way to barely healed wounds. Scars.

Knees bent, ready to flex, its corded muscles tensed with the patience to squat immobile for decades. Nails, which could drive into a skull with the ease of digging into overripe cantaloupe, gripped and re-gripped the branch. Lids over lizard eyes, the beast frowned, a fool grimace of s...o...b..r and bared fangs, leering down at them. In its eyes, King saw brooding nightmares invested with the l.u.s.ts, hatreds, and angers of its creators.

King pulled out the Caliburn with the ease of reflex. As he a.s.sumed a battle posture, Lott fell to his flank, preparing to guard it as well as stand by his friend. Another reflex. The creature became a ma.s.s of snarling lips, murderous eyes, claws, gothic wings, and clenching talons. King fired a shot, hitting it center ma.s.s.

"No!" the man and Merle screamed in unison.

Their piercing cry shattered King from his battle fervor. The gargoyle spread its bat-like wings, fibrous and leathery, flapping them to stir the camp. The creature skimmed skyward.

Lott ducked as the gargoyle dove in and swooped low, barely dodging as its talons grasped at empty air. Wind whooshed as it pa.s.sed him. Off balance, he didn't have a chance to reposition himself and swing his bat. The beast, however, grabbed its intended target.