Praise for Knights of the Borrowed Dark:
‘Scary and funny – my two favourites. Dave Rudden is more than a rising star, he is a shooting star’
Eoin Colfer
‘Clear some time in your schedule before you read this, because once you start it is very difficult to stop’
Joseph Fink, Welcome to Nightvale
‘The stuff of nightmares in the best possible way’
Heat magazine
‘Wonderful style. Reminded me of Douglas Adams’
R. L. Stine
‘This debut … is action-packed, atmospheric and powerfully imagined. But it is most notable for writerly wit and unexpected turns of phrase … this is engaging storytelling for any age’
Sunday Times
‘Marvellous dialogue and prose, in much the same style as Derek Landy and Darren Shan’
SFX
‘Dave Rudden writes brilliantly: his sentences are full of surprises, his ideas are shiny and fluid or sharp and shocking. He jabs at you with his language choices and makes you sit up and think, Crikey! He puts you deep inside the characters. This book reads beautifully: it keeps moving quickly between places, people, events, strangeness. You get thrown around and left a bit dizzy – in a good way’
Times Educational Supplement
‘An immersive fantasy shot through with dark humour’
Bookseller magazine
‘Etheric, beautifully grotesque, immensely satisfying descriptions’
The LA Review of Books
‘Rudden is an author to watch. Knights of the Borrowed Dark is a pacy, entertaining read, but it has heart too’
Guardian
‘This book will have you running from your shadow and fleeing from the darkness of your imagination’
Mr Ripley’s Enchanted Books blog
‘You have no idea what real war is … but you’re going to find out.’
There’s nothing like an apocalypse to kick off the school year.
Denizen Hardwick has travelled to Daybreak, the ancestral home of the Order of the Borrowed Dark, to continue his training as a knight. But lessons have barely begun before an unexpected arrival appears with news that throws the fortress into uproar.
The Endless King has fallen, his dark realm rising in a brutal civil war. When the conflict strikes closer to home, Denizen and his friends face their greatest challenge yet. For if Daybreak falls, so does the world …
The spellbinding conclusion to the award-winning Knights of the Borrowed Dark trilogy.
Knights of the Borrowed Dark series:
KNIGHTS OF THE BORROWED DARK
THE FOREVER COURT
THE ENDLESS KING
UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia
India | New Zealand | South Africa
Puffin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
www.penguin.co.uk
www.puffin.co.uk
www.ladybird.co.uk
First published 2018
Text copyright © Dave Rudden, 2018
The moral right of the author has been asserted
The author acknowledges that the excerpt from H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds has been abridged slightly for the purpose of the epigraph.
Cover illustration by Angelo Rinaldi
ISBN: 978–0–141–35936–6
All correspondence to:
Puffin Books
Penguin Random House Children’s
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL
For my parents
‘No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than and yet as mortal as us. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger and yet across the gulf of space intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.’
H. G. Wells, War of the Worlds
‘Long live the King.’
Anonymous
Prologue – Hinge
1 Familiar Ground
2 Another Country
3 The Point of Lighthouses
4 The Terrible Secret of Abigail Falx
5 A Better Question
6 Demands
7 Battlefield
8 A Different Prison
9 Compromised
10 Army of One
11 Glimpse
12 When the Rust Gets In
13 Ghost Stories
14 The Backswing Before the Blow
15 Teeth of the Gear
16 Retreat
17 In Current Company
18 One of These Things is Not Like the Other
19 We Bury Ourselves
20 As Above, So Below
21 Trajectory
22 Prey Animals
23 Inevitable
24 War’s End
25 The Turn
26 The Full Set
27 There are Little Kingdoms
28 It Takes a Village
29 No Man’s Land
30 Who Else?
31 Rout
32 The Endless King
33 Capable
34 The Borrowed Dark
35 Ready
Epilogue – Sunrise
A Final Secret About Writers …
Lexicon: A Glossary of Names
‘And they all lived happily ever after.’
Theo closed the book with a snap, flashing his audience a bright, wide smile. They did not smile back.
The silence stretched painfully. Theo’s smile began to tremble at the edges. There was something horribly hungry about the eyes of children, which was why he had spent most of his life enjoying how his presence made them look at the floor.
Up until …
Stop it, he thought, squashing the memory before it could unfold. Squashed was an apt description for his audience as well: not one of them older than four, legs kicking off the edge of their chairs with the irritating squeak of baby fat on plastic.
The chairs were silly. Everything in this room was either too small or comically oversized. Personally, Theo saw neither the educational nor entertainment value of a thirty-centimetre-long pencil, and there was absolutely no reason to have this many different colours of crayon. Could the teachers not just ask the children to draw solely blue things? Or grey things? Then everyone could just have a pencil. There. He’d just saved the orphanage at least –
The children were still staring.
‘What?’ he said, and waggled the book in the air. ‘They did.’
One spoke up. ‘Until their deaths.’
On the shelves, the stuffed animals’ grins stretched sinisterly against their zips. Theo’s mouth went dry. ‘What?’
‘Mr Colford said that it used to be different,’ another piped up. ‘He said it used to be: They lived happily ever after, until their deaths.’
‘He thays accurathy’s imporfant,’ another mumbled.
I am surrounded by idiots, Theo thought, and these half-cooked bread rolls in front of him weren’t even the worst of it.
‘And right he is,’ Theo responded, sagging smile floating on his grim features like an oil slick on a duck pond. It didn’t matter. The point was, he was trying. He’d been trying ever since –
‘Accuracy. Right. Very good.’
‘Pigs don’t live very long,’ another of the creatures – no, children – murmured, and suddenly a spirited discussion broke out as to whether talking animals meant magical animals, and whether the magic would make them live longer or not.
‘Yes,’ Theo said, face now so rigid it was starting to hurt. ‘Fascinating! Maybe draw a picture of it!’
He unfolded from the ludicrously small chair and stalked past Miss O’Keefe, who had been watching with the smallest of smiles on her wrinkled face.
‘Would you like the pictures sent up to your office when they’re done, Theo?’ she said as he passed.
Director Theodore Ackerby’s smile twitched. ‘Of course.’
He tried very hard not to slam the door on the way out.
This was your idea, he reminded himself as he made his way through the corridors of Crosscaper Orphanage. And it had been. Gone were his hallways of soothing green and beige; now they were a riotous patchwork of brightly coloured murals painted by the students – regardless of talent. Each door was a different colour, windows festooned with stickers – which are never going to come off – and the only consolation was that with the children doing all the work he hadn’t had to pay them a cent.
The air was full of the dry buzz of fluorescent lights. Expensive fluorescent lights. None of the teachers had questioned why someone so typically … frugal had suddenly decided to outfit every centimetre of the once-dim orphanage with lamps, not to mention the giant spotlights that covered the entire courtyard. When all were turned on – and they were turned on, every one of them, every night – there wasn’t a scrap of darkness within the orphanage walls.
It was the only way they could get the children to sleep.
‘Theo!’
He had almost made it to his office. The voice belonged to Mr Gilligan, the science teacher, who had the sort of wide, gormless grin that camouflaged a razor-sharp sense of humour. Ackerby sighed, and prepared himself.
‘Theo, I was just wondering … Yes, sorry, Theo, I was just wondering: this new marking scheme I was thinking of implementing, Theo, I thought it would be good if …’
Mr Gilligan’s voice faded to white noise, punctuated far too often by the sound of Ackerby’s first name. He’d revealed it at the same time as he’d traded his suits for bright, itchy jumpers, and the calming austerity of his corridors for a thousand circus shades.
Familiarity. Safety. That’s what was needed. Ackerby had read books on the subject. The Incident had driven away half the staff. The children had been terrified. So much destruction, so many repairs, the courtyard – he had needed to adapt. They all had.
So he was Theo now, and he wore a smile, no matter how much it tortured the muscles of his face.
‘Yes,’ he said, when the assault ceased. ‘Whatever you think is best. Now, if you don’t mind –’
A light flickered overhead.
There were moments, near-invisible moments, that your life swung on like a hinge. A bike tyre skidding on ice, a missed flight, a foot slipping off a step before regaining its balance. Or not. Every life had them, waiting like the secret flaw in a diamond, where something previously safe could suddenly fracture and shear.
It had happened to Ackerby before, but he’d not then had the wit to recognize it, and he would never let it happen again, to him or those in his charge.
Mr Gilligan’s voice washed over him, unheard, unheeded, because the fluorescent tube above their heads was shivering. Not as if the power had been interrupted, or the bulb was about to fail, but as if … invaded, infected by a tiny scrap of night.
‘It’s happening again,’ Ackerby whispered.
‘What?’ Mr Gilligan said. ‘What are you –’
The science teacher’s teeth clacked shut as Ackerby pulled himself to his full height. His spine protested – the … the Incident had bent him, shaken him, forced his shoulders into the kind of weak slump any idiot could climb.
Well. Not again.
‘Mr Gilligan!’ His voice struck the colour from the younger teacher’s cheeks. A tiny, satisfied part of Ackerby imagined the disappearance of every child’s smile within earshot. ‘Assemble the other teachers. Empty the classrooms. Take the children down to the bunker –’
A grand name for the basement, but it had concrete walls and a thick door and it was underground, and that was what mattered.
‘– and defend them with your life. With all of your lives. Do you understand?’
Mr Gilligan’s jaw had dropped. ‘But Theo –’
Ackerby’s growl could have silenced the sea. ‘Director.’
Mr Gilligan bolted.
It didn’t take long for the orphanage to snap into action. The director had spent enough time drilling it into them, after all, and, despite their utter mediocrity, they had learned their lessons well.
That hadn’t been surprising. Some bad dreams you never forgot.
Doors slammed open, trickles of wide-eyed children becoming a flood, all heading downstairs. The director strode against the tide, glaring into the eyes of each teacher he passed as if to tattoo his orders on the inside of their heads. As much as they annoyed him he knew he could trust them, simply because they were the ones who had stayed. The others …
Disgusting.
Theo had spent his whole life in places like this. You didn’t just abandon them when things took a turn for the horrible. A turn for the horrible was why places like this existed.
Bulbs abruptly shook in their fittings, the corridor pulsing through a rainbow of sickly shades. The children began to run, and the director waited until the last of them had disappeared round the corner before he did the same.
The snarl of slamming wood followed him, though not a single door moved as he passed. Carpet hairs stood as stiff as needles under his feet. If the director had allowed even a single clock within Crosscaper’s walls, he was sure it would be ticking out of time.
The spotlights. The director had been a coward when horror had come to these corridors, and he was fairly sure he was one now, which was why he’d reduced the requirements of bravery down to the single flick of a switch.
These things moved in darkness. Now let them choke on the light.
His office doors were open. They were never open. He tried to stop, but the momentum of adrenalin and terror forced him over the threshold before his old bones ground to a halt. Outside the windows, the sky was weeping, raindrops pummelling the glass as if desperate to escape.
There was a figure standing behind his desk.
‘No,’ Ackerby whispered. ‘It can’t be. Not … not you.’
Denizen Hardwick gave him a bleak little wave.
‘Director. I need your help.’
They approached from the air.
Cloud broke before the plane like waves round a prow, and Denizen Hardwick pressed his long nose against the window because it seemed that in his absence someone had stolen the ground away. In its place was another night sky, rising to meet their descent.
Lights. Millions and millions of tiny lights, and all Denizen could think was that constellations had always been a bit of a romantic notion to him – just people looking for pictures in stars a billion miles apart. This pattern had order, though, a sprawling, organic order, like the pinprick skeleton of a beast he couldn’t see.
A city.
Walls and towers and narrow streets draped in seaweed tangles across a huge mountain peak, outlined by glittering coral colonies of gold. The plane shuddered as it dived, and Denizen realized that he knew that glow. He’d been living by it for nearly a year now.
Candles. How many must there be that we can see them from the sky?
It was like something from a fairy tale. Not a modern myth, scraped clean of darkness, with animal companions and villainous musical numbers. This was a fairy tale with battlements, arrow-slits and murder holes, a story where the bottom of the portcullis was stained with blood.
In the old tales, villains killed you. In the old tales, fairies took your kids.
And at the mountain’s summit … a shape. A citadel, dark amid the light.
Denizen’s mother leaned over from her seat beside him.
‘Welcome to the home of the Order of the Borrowed Dark, Denizen. Our first fortress. Our last fortress. The House We Will Hold.’
There was a rare reverence in Vivian’s voice.
‘Welcome to Daybreak.’
‘I am never flying again.’
White as an envelope, Simon Hayes staggered out on to the tarmac, his long limbs heron-hunched inwards as if afraid the slowing propellers might take one of them off.
‘You’re hardly going to walk home,’ Denizen said wryly, though he couldn’t deny his own wave of relief when his feet also hit solid ground.
‘I can’t believe you’re handling this better than me,’ the taller boy said, his grin robbing the words of any malice. ‘You never handle things better.’
Denizen mock-scowled. ‘That is …’ He thought for a moment. Between the orphanage of their childhood and the grim mansion of Seraphim Row in which they now resided, the boys had spent less than five weeks not in each other’s pockets. Simon knew more about Denizen than Denizen did. ‘Fine. Well then, I’m owed.’
He shouldered his bag and glanced around the deserted airfield – little more than a strip of flat tarmac and a couple of sheds, tiny in the gargantuan shadow of Monte Inclavare, Adumbral’s sole peak. Even when Denizen had his back to the mountain, he could feel it bearing down on him, a tidal wave just before the plunge.
The fractures of his iron eye itched.
The Order had claimed this country back before it was a country – just a mountain valley in the Apennines, a place the world had long forgotten. Or been encouraged to forget. The Knights had little time for human wars, and Denizen could easily imagine kings coveting this land, only to be met with iron lips and iron words: Leave us alone.
Abigail swung neatly from the cabin doorway, landing lightly on the tarmac.
‘That was fun,’ she said, and laughed at Simon’s less-than-enthusiastic look.
Monte Inclavare was crowned by the city of Adumbral, and there was a fortress called Daybreak at its heart. This fact was not widely known. Nor was the existence of the Knights who called it home. It had taken Denizen and Simon thirteen years, a near-apocalypse and the violent blossoming of their own magical talents to learn of the Order of the Borrowed Dark, but Abigail Falx had always known her destiny was here.
‘So who do you think it’ll be?’ she asked, tying up her dark hair. ‘The Master of Neophytes, I mean. It’s a different Knight every year, you see. There was word Gedeon was retiring, but surely he’d stay in Russia, train an apprentice. Oh my God, what if it’s Gedeon –’
She bounced lightly on her heels as she spoke, ponytail slashing the air, fists jabbing with what Denizen assumed was perfect technique. It usually was. Abigail wasn’t in the habit of wastefulness, and that included her thirteen-year head start.
Simon was still glaring at the plane.
‘Even if it had been a big one. The kind of plane where you don’t know you’re on a plane. That’s all I’m asking. It’s one thing to be travelling in a metal tube that only stays up because it’s going too fast to fall down –’
‘That’s not precisely how it works –’
‘Thank you, Darcie –’ Simon said, as a second girl stepped from the plane, wearing the polite grimace she always adopted when someone was being inaccurate – ‘but it’s another to have it bounce around and then steady up again like it suddenly remembered it was a plane.’
Abigail shrugged. She had greeted the turbulence with a fierce grin, which was generally the way she approached everything. Denizen had thought he caught the briefest look of relief on her face when they landed, but he assumed that was because the four-hour flight was the longest she’d ever sat still.
‘There’s not much demand for flights here. Only Knights come to Adumbral.’
Denizen could count on one hand the amount of times he’d ever seen Darcie Wright take off her glasses in public, but now they dangled forgotten from her hand, revealing eyes of bright, silver-haunted iron.
A Knight’s first and foremost weapon was the wellspring of voracious fire beating like blood through their veins, shaped by the eldritch language they called Cants. The fire wanted to be used, even though every time it stole just a little bit of its wielder away – turning them to metal, black and hard and cold.
The Cost. Power always had a price, and if Denizen had learned one thing in the last year it was that some were more visible than most.
‘I remember my first year here,’ Darcie murmured, drawing a dark hand through her riot of ebony curls. ‘But then you leave, and time passes, and your memory convinces you it couldn’t have been that big. That spectacular. You shrink it, to fit it in with what you know of the world.’ She smiled. ‘But then you return and it all comes back. Like a sunrise. You remember that here, of all places, the rules of the world don’t apply.’
She slipped her glasses into her pocket. ‘I love it here.’
With a shared conspiratorial grin, Denizen, Abigail and Simon followed suit, removing their black gloves to reveal dull iron hands.
‘Well, there should still be a bus,’ Simon continued, mock-grumpily. ‘And hang on … Adumbral’s all –’ he waved a hand at the mountain – ‘this bit?’
Darcie nodded. ‘The city-state.’
‘And Daybreak’s the fortress at the top?’
She nodded again.
‘Well then, why didn’t we just skip to the top with the Art of Apertura? It’s not like there would have been much difference. Cold sweat, eyes screwed shut, imminent chance of death –’
‘The difference, Simon Hayes, is that we do not punch a hole through the universe just so we can avoid motion sickness.’
Malleus Vivian Hardwick stepped from the plane, her movements as controlled and lethal as the propellers’ slowing spin.
‘It’s a long war. We only have so much skin to give.’
It took only one look at any Knight Superior to confirm the viciousness of their war, and Vivian more than most. Her credentials were written in scar tissue and Cost, her career a knot of battles and sacrifice notorious the world over.
Well, within the secret garrisons of the Order, at least. Denizen had been thinking about that a lot on the flight, in particular where that left him.
A long-handled hammer swung at Vivian’s waist – both her symbol of office and the weapon that had carried her through as many hells as Denizen had frowns.
‘Yes, Malleus,’ Simon said instantly.
They had all given skin one way or another. Once, Denizen’s Cost had been just an ink blot in his palm. Now, it rose up past his wrists in black manacles, and splinters had found their way into his left eye. Not like Darcie’s – hers were the mark of a sacred duty – but a reminder that the power in his heart cared more about being free than its host.
If he covered his right eye, the world became a stained-glass window, all shades of grey, indigo and blue. Knights had a natural ability to see in the dark, but since the summer Denizen had found it a little easier to see the dark in things instead.
Even the light.
You mind your house, I’ll mind mine.
He locked that thought away. He’d been doing a lot of work on that. Vivian had even said he was coming on nicely, which for Denizen’s mother was the equivalent of a celebratory parade. Their eyes met, and Vivian’s expression, which normally held the grim promise of an oncoming train, softened into a slight smile.
‘It is good to be home,’ she said.
Denizen had been seeing that smile more and more recently. He was becoming quite fond of it.
‘There’s our lift,’ Simon said, pointing.
Knights fought in the shadows, and birth and blood had gifted them with the Intueor Lucidum: sight in darkness. Denizen’s vision was a tracery of silver – brighter in his left eye than his right – and he could easily make out the black jeep making its way down the slope towards them. He was almost surprised by its arrival. The leader of the Order didn’t exactly care for the Hardwicks, and Denizen wouldn’t have been surprised if they had been left to walk.
A warm wind drew sweat from Denizen’s cheeks as the jeep approached. That’ll take some getting used to. Ireland stuck out into the Atlantic like a foot from under a duvet, but they were further south now, and Denizen felt the unfamiliar electricity of being somewhere else.
He hadn’t travelled much. There had been an unplanned, unwilling and unpleasant trip during the summer, but being kidnapped by the Family Croit and served on a platter to their mad, grieving goddess hardly counted as a holiday, even by Knightly standards.
Then again, Denizen thought, staring up at the immensity of Monte Inclavare, does this?
‘I. Can’t. Wait.’ Abigail kept leaving them behind only to double back, her eyes bright with excitement. ‘We’re finally here, and –’ Her own words pulled her up short, eyes widening. ‘Not that we didn’t appreciate your training, Malleus. We –’
Vivian waved a hand. ‘I understand.’ Her smile deepened a fraction. ‘Now your real training begins.’
‘She keeps saying that,’ Simon muttered to Denizen. ‘Why does she keep saying that?’
Considering the paces Vivian had already put them through, it was an unnerving statement, but Denizen’s worries ran far deeper.
Back in Crosscaper, the most you had to worry about was homework and sports. Joining the Order had traded those worries for a vicious war against extradimensional shapeshifters called Tenebrous, and, while Denizen obviously hadn’t enjoyed facing off against clockwork women, murderous crows and, on one occasion, an animated dustbin, at least all you had to worry about in those situations was dying.
However, Daybreak was the most secure fortress on the face of the planet. He was completely and totally safe, which meant he was completely and totally safe to worry about other things. Such as:
Which led him on rather neatly to the last point. Denizen was very purposefully not thinking about that one. He loved words, and he’d picked up a suitably military one from Vivian for exactly this situation.
No matter how much it hurt.
The jeep pulled to a stop, the driver sliding out to open the doors for them.
Relax, Denizen told himself. It’s a year. You have your friends. You’re in the safest place you can be. This is a new start! Yes. That’s it. You’re going to bury any untoward … thoughts, and keep your head down. The last thing you need is stuff from your past coming back to bite you in the –
‘Oh my God.’
Darcie’s exclamation made Denizen look up, just in time to meet a crooked, familiar smile.
‘That bad?’
It was Grey.
For a long time, they drove in silence.
Denizen fought the urge to stare at Grey, just as he had the day they’d met. Halfway between scepticism and desperate curiosity, world-weary with no real knowledge of the world, Denizen had gone into that first meeting with thirteen years’ worth of mistrust, but Graham McCarron was Grey to his friends, and it said a lot that it had only taken Denizen half an hour to find that out.
Neither one of them were those people any more.
The jeep climbed the winding road. Abigail’s eyes were flicking between Denizen and Grey. Darcie’s hand was tight on Denizen’s arm, and if Vivian – never the most … relaxed of people – sat any straighter she’d snap like a rubber band.
‘So how have you been?’ Simon asked Grey politely, and he had never been more of a hero to Denizen than in that moment. ‘We only met … briefly.’
Even he faltered there – there really was no good way to say after you got mind-controlled to betray us all.
‘You mean after I got mind-controlled to betray you all?’
Darcie flinched. Simon looked ill, as if whatever he’d been about to say had abruptly reversed back down his throat. And Vivian almost seemed to relax, as if the edge in Grey’s words was something she understood.
‘The doctors say I should talk about it.’ There was a strange, strained distance in his voice, as if he were trying to speak a language he hadn’t used in years. ‘There have been a lot of doctors. They all agree with each other, which I guess is a good sign.’
He smirked at that, and for a moment Denizen saw his mentor again, the wry and smiling Knight who’d been so kind to him in those first weeks of a new and terrifying life. And then the smile vanished, and a different person sat in front of them, like the most depressing magic-eye picture ever drawn.
Grey had always been slender, but now he was thin to the point of worry, his cheekbones knife blades poorly sheathed under skin. His once-long hair had been shaved painfully short on either side, a fringe half-hiding one eye. He’d abandoned his customary tailored suits for a faded vest, bare arms taut with muscle and the Cost’s advance and, in the only country in the world where a Knight had nothing to hide, his hands were gloved in black.
‘What …’ Darcie’s voice was careful. ‘What else have the doctors said?’
The road climbed Monte Inclavare’s spine, the bare earth on either side studded with candles like a new crop of wheat. Grey swallowed deeply before responding.
‘The Order can’t find any trace of the Clockwork Three in my head, but, considering that we didn’t even know Tenebrous could get inside people’s minds, they don’t really know what to look for.’
The Man in the Waistcoat. The Woman in White. The poor, wretched Opening Boy. Three of the worst Tenebrous the multiverse could vomit up, with a vendetta against Denizen’s mother that they would have done just about anything to satisfy.
Denizen didn’t hate the Tenebrous he fought, but death by Vivian had been far too good for the Three. They’d killed Denizen’s father, Soren. They’d killed Corinne D’Aubigny and left her husband Fuller Jack to mourn her.
And they’d puppeted Grey, turned him against his comrades, and left him empty as a discarded glove.
‘They’re dead now, anyway,’ Grey continued, mock cheer in his voice. ‘So that door is closed. And the doctors make me listen to wellness tapes. So I’m sure everything will be fine.’
He chuckled. The others did not.
‘But enough about me – how’s home? How’s …’
He trailed off. Seraphim Row had been home for Grey far longer than it had been for Denizen, and, looking back, Denizen could see echoes of himself, Simon and Abigail in Grey’s friendship with Fuller Jack and Corinne D’Aubigny.
Just one of many casualties the Three had left in their wake.
The window. Look out of the window. The walls of the city loomed ahead, sheer and brutal with battlements, and Denizen was about to ask something inane about their height or anything, just to break the silence, when Darcie sat bolt upright in her seat, trembling.
It wasn’t exactly seeing the future: Darcie had been clear on that a number of times. But watching puddles showed you the first drop of rain, and watching the skin of the universe with a pencil in her hand told Darcie where a Breach would occur.
Now, though, it was her eyes that sketched, slamming left and right in their sockets with typewriter clicks of iron. Abigail caught one of the Lux’s flailing fists. Denizen hissed as Darcie’s nails dug into his skin, scratching as if trying to draw –
Her voice was a toneless drawl.
‘Hereherehereherehere–’
And then Denizen felt it too.
You could say it was a little like slowly realizing that the food in your mouth was rotten. You could compare it, perhaps, to the shocked betrayal of tearing your skin on a nail and the queasy fascination of watching your own blood well.
But it wasn’t like any of that. Not really. It was what it was.
A Breach.
The field of candles ended a few hundred metres down the slope and, as the jeep growled to a halt, a swathe of flames flickered as if teased by an invisible hand. Dust plumed upwards beyond the field’s edge. The air bent inwards. Darcie slumped like her strings were cut.
Vivian was already halfway out of the door before Grey grabbed her arm.
‘Wait.’
The Tenebrous unfolded like frost condensing on a car window, if frost were black and dull and maggoty with movement, if nervous systems were made of dirty char. Dust rose to bulk out the waving tendrils with grainy muscle, skin and spines and a skull that even as they watched split into a snarl –
And then a bang of torn air, an explosion of grit from the back of the newborn monster’s skull, and a long spear of black steel was suddenly vibrating in the ground behind it.
One mightn’t have been enough. Humans were systems – complex, interconnected, fragile – but Tenebrous were black oil and scrap scavenged from the worlds they invaded, and Denizen knew from experience just how much it took to put them down.
It died on the fifth bolt, coming apart with a fading, mournful scream. The entire encounter had only taken a couple of seconds and Denizen realized that the shoulders of Monte Inclavare were bare for a reason.
There were no trees between here and the walls. No plants. No cover.
A killing field.
‘You missed out,’ Grey said calmly, turning the car key once more. ‘Sometimes they use the rocket launchers.’ The jeep began to move, and the Knight started, his eyes suddenly hunted. ‘I’m sorry – Darcie, are you OK?’
The Lux nodded, a tear cutting a path of darker black down her cheek.
‘I’m fine. The veil between worlds is thin here. It makes things more –’
Denizen’s heart still pounded with adrenalin, drowning out her words, and with every beat trickles of gold spread through the cracks and crevices of him, searching for freedom. Cants shifted in his head, yearning to be filled with flame, to break the world and burn –
– and, with an ease born of practice, Denizen trapped them, raising in his mind a fortress of imaginary iron and dense, unthawable ice. The inferno wailed like a trapped cat, but Denizen and Vivian had worked for months on this technique, poring over maps of castles and engineering manuals, every trick of the siege trade.
Funny the things you could bond over.
‘You should have stayed at home,’ Vivian was saying, voice tight with concern. ‘This is the one place in the world that doesn’t need a Lux. You should have –’
‘I’m seeing my friends off,’ Darcie responded mildly, and, though Cants still pleaded in his head, Denizen grinned to see Vivian abruptly sit straighter. ‘The world will manage for a day or two. And so will I.’
‘Yes, well,’ Vivian said, clearing her throat and turning to Grey. ‘You’d think they’d learn not to come here.’
‘Learn?’ There was an uncharacteristic cruelty in Grey’s voice. ‘Tenebrous don’t learn. They either Breach outside and have to face the walls or run off the city’s candlewards like water off a windscreen. Then they have to face the walls.’
Ahead, gates the same bruise-black as Denizen’s palms lurched open with a groan of something prehistoric sinking into tar. Their sheer size would have been reassuring if Denizen didn’t already know that walls could be bypassed, even ramparts as impressive as these.
Like rats forcing their bodies through pipes, or damp worming into a wooden floor, Tenebrous could Breach the very walls separating our universe from theirs. Walls hadn’t stopped the Clockwork Three from killing Denizen’s father twelve years ago, or returning last year to provoke open war between humanity and the Tenebrae’s Endless King.
Walls hadn’t saved Grey.
They passed beneath the shadow of the battlements and Denizen could feel eyes on him. Slits in the stone glittered with drawn arrows. Barricades cupped the other side of the gates, so, even if an enemy did manage to break through, they’d simply be running into a pen, at the mercy of the archers above.
‘Bit much,’ Simon whispered, as if afraid someone would hear.
If Grey responded, it was lost in the clang of the closing gates.
The cobbled road became even steeper within Adumbral’s walls. Buildings clung together like birds on a wire, the streets all sharp corners and narrow, cramped inclines. Dublin was an old city, but this place was ancient. Everything seemed to bulge in odd places, or sag like soldiers at the end of a long, exhausting march. And everywhere candlewards – glowing from window sills, strung across alley mouths like prehistoric Christmas lights, keeping the rot from getting in.
‘It’s only the walls that are manned, right?’ Abigail said in a hushed voice. ‘Nobody actually lives in Adumbral?’
‘Not any more,’ Vivian said. She didn’t elaborate.
‘Oh, you haven’t heard?’ Grey said lightly. She looked at him sharply, but he ignored her. ‘The Order didn’t always hide in the shadows, avoiding those they gave their lives for. No … once we tried to have lives as well.’
Gloved fingers drummed a one-two rhythm on the steering wheel. Denizen stared at them as if they were snakes.
‘Grey,’ Vivian began, ‘there will be time enough for …’
‘This is their home now,’ Grey not-quite-snapped, as the jeep coughed its way up a particularly steep hill. There was something ahead, looming over the crowded skyline, but to see it properly Denizen would have had to lean into whatever battle of wills was going on between Vivian and Grey. And he wanted to hear the story.
‘Adumbral, the first city of the Order,’ continued Grey. ‘A place where we wouldn’t have to hide the Cost, a place where we could speak freely, a place where we could be ourselves.’
Darcie was turning her glasses over and over in her hands. The silence of the city was palpable. It reminded Denizen of Eloquence – that remote and crumbling castle where the Family Croit had festered for centuries.
Cornices like puckered mouths, pillars rounded as exposed bone – it was nothing as obvious as architecture and nothing so subtle as time, but there was a wrongness here, a chill.
‘So many families,’ said Grey. ‘So many Knights. And you know what happens when too many of our kind gather …’
It was one of the first lessons Denizen learned. Tenebrous broke the barriers between worlds, but the presence of Knights and their Cants eroded it. That was why they had developed the candlewards. Because if you didn’t, and the walls between worlds frayed too far …
Denizen paled. ‘The Tenebrae got in.’
Grey looked at him sharply in the rear-view mirror, and Denizen realized it was the first thing he had said since they’d been reunited.
‘As it always does,’ the Knight finished bluntly. ‘The longer we lived here, the more porous the barrier got. People began to disappear. A few at first. And then dozens. Just falling out of the world.’ His voice was grim. ‘Or being taken. And then one day … one day they came. From every shadow. From every crevice. Twisting the city to make their bones.’
That was what was wrong with the buildings. How had Denizen not seen it? The crooked angles, the leering gaps … Tenebrous had tried to claim them, the way the doomed creature from earlier had claimed dust as flesh. And yet still Adumbral stood, frozen in half-unmaking. A stillborn city that stubbornly stood.
‘How …’
‘We developed the candlewards,’ Vivian said, in a tone that was halfway between her things aren’t that bad and her this conversation is over voice. She was a lot better at one than the other. ‘They stopped Adumbral from succumbing and it taught us that a level of … separation is required. To keep safe those we love.’
‘And isn’t that working out well for all of us?’
Grey’s words were ice water, bitter and brackish. Abigail recoiled from them in a way Denizen had never seen her duck from a blow. Simon’s eyes went owl-wide.
Darcie’s voice was soft. ‘Grey … it wasn’t your fault.’
‘I know it wasn’t,’ Grey said shortly. ‘Everyone knows it wasn’t. And everyone makes a really good effort at looking me in the eye and pretending it doesn’t matter. But people are dead.’
The rest of the journey passed in silence. Grey pulled up outside what might have been a warehouse, had there been anyone left in Adumbral to have wares. Now it was where the Order kept their vehicles, row after row of jeeps identical to the one they were leaving behind.
Denizen racked his brain for something to say, anything, but everything that came to mind was impossibly tangled with meanings he didn’t intend. So instead they wordlessly collected their bags, and were about to walk away when Grey let out a long and rattling sigh.
‘Sorry. Sorry. You don’t need this. Who would?’
Ahead, a fortress rose.
‘There’ll be tests enough.’