Dark Rise: Dark Rise 1

by C. S. Pacat

  No. Will looked at the marsh around them, his blood thundering in his veins. There was no sign of an attacker, just the empty landscape of water and grass.

  Leda’s lifeless body had been here long enough to attract insects, with no Steward coming to her aid, and no sign of a struggle or a fight. And her attackers weren’t here. With a terrible feeling of foreboding, Will lifted his eyes to the gate.

  ‘We need to tell the others,’ Cyprian was saying. ‘We need to warn them, so that they can send out a patrol—’

  ‘Cyprian—!’ said Will, but he was too late, Cyprian was running through the gate and into the courtyard. ‘Stop him,’ he said to Violet, but the sickly blank look on her face said that she didn’t understand. ‘Stop him.’ She seemed to snap out of it, and even if she didn’t understand, they were both dropping down off their horses and racing after Cyprian, in time to pass through the gate with him.

  They stopped where Cyprian had stopped, three steps into the courtyard, and even Will’s fears had been nothing like this.

  It was a massacre.

  A battlefield where no one fought. All the Stewards were just shapes, piles of lifeless nothing, as if the emptiness of the marshes had penetrated the walls. Nothing moved except the banner with its single star, lifting and dropping in the wind.

  His eye was repelled; his gorge rose. The closest body was two steps away; torn open, it was not recognisable, just another horrifying shape spread out across the stone.

  You’re safe here, the Elder Steward had said. No one can challenge us inside these walls.

  ‘No,’ said Cyprian, and Will’s mind snapped back to the present. He saw Cyprian’s contorted face, and beyond that, the walls rising overhead, the windows that faced them, a hundred arrow slits and crenels trained on them.

  ‘Hold him back,’ said Will quickly, because they weren’t safe. Nowhere was safe, and the attackers might be anywhere in the Hall. ‘Violet, hold him back before he—’

  Violet grabbed Cyprian by the tunic, right before he started to run towards the Hall.

  ‘Let me go. I have to – have to help them. Let me go—’ Cyprian was struggling desperately against her, but she was stronger than he was, crowding him until his back hit the wall, then pressing him into a small, shaded space between jutting blocks of stone, and holding him there.

  Will followed, ignoring the voice in his head screaming at him not to turn his exposed back to the courtyard. The voice from nine months of hiding. The voice that said, Run.

  ‘Listen to me. Listen.’ Will kept his own voice low, trying somehow to get through to Cyprian, who was glaring at him furiously, panting. ‘We don’t know who did this. They might still be here. We’re in danger. We can’t just rush in.’

  ‘My home has been attacked.’ Cyprian spat the words out. ‘Why should I care about danger?’

  ‘Because you might be the only Steward left,’ said Will, and he saw Cyprian go white.

  And then he saw him take it in: the silence of everything; the palpable, pressing, silence; the walls unmanned; the doors at the top of the steps open. Above their heads, a banner was flying like a horror over the dead that no Steward had come to claim.

  Like a brace of butchered rabbits that a hunter had tossed to the ground, three Stewards lay in contorted shapes a step to their left. Cyprian started to crack right in front of him.

  ‘They’re not dead. No one can get inside the Hall. No one can—’

  Will took him by the shoulders. ‘Steward, hold to your training!’ Cyprian’s eyes, meeting his, were blank, as if Cyprian himself was barely there.

  Months with the Elder Steward doing meditations had never helped him. But now Will spoke her words to someone else. ‘Breathe, centre your mind.’ And then, ‘Again.’

  Cyprian took one breath, then another. He had always been the perfect novitiate, more dedicated and more disciplined than anyone else. Now he called on that Steward training, and Will watched him physically reassert control over himself.

  ‘Now look at me,’ said Will, and Cyprian’s eyes opened, circles of green. They were still a little blank around the edges – but he was Cyprian again.

  ‘If there are survivors, we’ll find them,’ said Will. ‘But to do that, we need to keep ourselves alive. Can you do that?’ Cyprian nodded.

  ‘I will not fail my Order,’ Cyprian said, the words raw but steady. ‘My training will hold.’

  Slowly, Will released his grip. Then he turned and looked.

  The last time a slaughter had taken his home from him, he’d been the one stupid with emotion, stumbling through it, making mistakes that had gotten others killed. Now he knew: don’t grieve. Move. One foot after another, that’s how you survive.

  Beside him, he heard Violet say, ‘It’s like an army came through here.’

  ‘Leda was one of the strongest Stewards in the Hall.’ Cyprian’s voice was strained but steady, still threaded through with disbelief. Underneath both their words lay the same terrible question:

  What could kill this many Stewards?

  Will’s eyes were on the bodies, their eyes staring open and turned towards the gate.

  ‘They didn’t sound the alarm,’ said Will. ‘They didn’t even have time to draw their swords.’

  It had been the same outside. Leda had died at the gate and given no alert to the people inside the walls. Whatever had happened here had taken a hall full of Stewards by surprise.

  ‘These attackers were fast, and strong,’ Will said, his eyes lifting grimly to open doors, like a dark, yawning cave. ‘They came in from the gate then moved inside. That’s where we’re going. Stay behind me, stay quiet, and stay out of sight.’

  Inside, the bodies took on an anonymised sameness, though certain images stuck. A Steward impaled on a wall sconce. A severed hand near a shard of pottery. A smear of blood across a white column.

  Will led, as though by seeing everything first, he could somehow protect the others from it. Cyprian followed, his expression determinedly blank as he stepped over the bodies of those he knew. Violet brought up the rear.

  Around them, the hallways were silent. No voices. No chants. No bells. That was the eeriest part, along with the lack of light. Here and there, torches still flamed, but many had been knocked over or had burned out, so that the corridors were dark with only flickering patches of light. Once, they saw a torch overturned onto a floor covering, a fire burning across the ground and partway up the wall. Violet moved quickly to put it out.

  Deeper inside, they saw the first signs of real fighting. Here the Stewards had died with swords, standing in basic formations, all facing a single direction. No one had tried to break or run. They had held their ground and fought. They were brave, and strong, and they had trained to fight every day of their lives. But it had made no difference.

  ‘This way,’ Will said, at a corner. He didn’t need to ask where to go. He was following the path of the dead, trying not to think that he was being led towards some dark heart at the centre of the Hall, or about what he might find there.

  It brought him to the doors of the great hall.

  Violet was already striding forward to try to push them open, her palms flat against the carved metal. They didn’t budge, despite her formidable strength. ‘They’re barricaded from the inside.’

  ‘That means someone’s in there,’ said Cyprian.

  Will took a step forward to stop Cyprian doing something foolish, but it was Violet who turned back to the door and started pounding on it with her fist. ‘Hey! Hey in there!’

  ‘Violet!’ Will grabbed her wrists, but not before the pounding on the brass doors created a vast booming sound that echoed through the halls.

  The three of them froze as the sound faded into silence, waiting as if some terrible creature might now be following the noise to where they were. Will could hear his own heartbeat in the silence.

  But there was no answering sound from the hallways, no attackers bursting out towards them … and as thick silence settl
ed back around them, they each looked back at the doors.

  Because there had been no sound from inside the great hall either.

  ‘I’ll try again,’ said Violet, and then, at the alarmed looks of both boys, ‘Quieter.’

  This time she set her shoulder against the doors and threw her whole weight behind it, but even her strength couldn’t budge them. She broke away, panting.

  ‘Maybe one of the windows,’ said Will.

  They weren’t exactly windows, more like high thin slits, but Violet looked up and nodded, fixing her eyes on one of them. ‘I’ll need a lift.’

  Cyprian braced himself against the wall, making his back into a step. Violet ran three steps, then sprang up from Cyprian’s back to grab a jutting corbel, where she hung briefly before pulling herself up further. She leaped from the corbel to the window. Gripping its slim edges, Violet swung herself inside, then dropped. They heard the sound of her feet hitting the stone on the other side.

  And then a stretch of silence so long that Will’s stomach turned over.

  ‘Violet?’ he called quietly, right into the seam of the doors.

  Nothing.

  ‘Violet?’

  Are you all right? Are you there? She couldn’t be gone. She was strong. But the Stewards had been strong too.

  Heart pounding, he opened his mouth to call again, when he heard her subdued answering voice. ‘I’m here! I’m opening the doors.’

  The doors didn’t open right away. Instead, Will heard the heavy scraping sounds of wood pulled across stone. This went on for long minutes. Finally, the immense metal latch beams of the doors were lifted, and there was Violet, pulling the doors open from the inside.

  He saw at once what had taken her so long.

  The Stewards had pushed every piece of furniture in the great hall up against the doors to barricade them shut. The chairs, the candle stands, the tapestries, the statues cut from their pedestals, even the long table that had always looked immovable. Only the four empty thrones were intact, too immense to be hacked out of the stone.

  One by one, Violet had dragged the pieces of furniture away, so that they lay in a circle of useless detritus around her. She was panting with effort, her hair wet with sweat, her eyes hollow. And she was shaking, not with exertion, but from the pressing horror of the room. Will saw the spot where she had vomited, by an overturned chair.

  Beside him, Cyprian pressed his forearm to his mouth and nose. The room smelled of fresh meat, like a butcher’s shop, a thick smell of blood and exposed fat.

  Will walked forward into it. He could feel the stickiness of the stone under his feet. He looked and his breath clogged in his throat.

  The last of the Stewards had made their stand here, in the long dark of the great hall, with its ghostly white columns.

  And behind them, the novitiates and janissaries whom they had tried to protect. Carver lying two steps in front of Emery, who would have seen him fall seconds before he fell himself. Beatrix near the front, having pushed her way forward to fight alongside Stewards ten years her senior. He had seen them all this morning, preparing for the attack on Ruthern.

  ‘Simon,’ Will heard himself say, and then: ‘Katherine said he was in London on business.’

  ‘These are the greatest fighters of the Stewards,’ said Violet. ‘Not even an army of Simon’s could defeat them in their own Hall.’

  ‘It wasn’t an army,’ said Will. ‘It was something that could pass through the doors.’

  He had known it the moment he had seen Leda, the understanding breaking into their naive, jubilant return to the Hall.

  ‘No,’ said Cyprian.

  ‘The doors were barred,’ said Will. ‘There are no enemy dead. It’s only Stewards. It’s only Stewards here and in the halls.’

  ‘No,’ said Cyprian, as if Will hadn’t spoken. ‘It was an attack. We keep going. If there are survivors, we find them. That’s what you said.’

  They stared at each other, Cyprian’s handsome face set in stubborn lines, Will feeling full of awful knowledge.

  ‘There might be rooms that were overlooked,’ Violet volunteered quickly. ‘Or places in the citadel to hide.’

  Places in the vast, empty citadel, full of crumbled stairs and unvisited chambers built by people who had lived and died and fallen to dust. Will knew where they had to go, into the heart of the gloom.

  ‘The Tree Chamber,’ he said. ‘The Elder Steward once told me that it was the final retreat in ancient times, when the forces of the Dark attacked the Hall.’

  ‘Then we go,’ Violet said.

  Will took up a guttering torch from one of the wall sconces. He knew it was dangerous to draw attention, but it was that or grope blindly in the dark. Once they left the great hall, there were fewer bodies, but the feeling that they were approaching something terrible was stronger. The flames from the torch were too loud, a sound like flapping linen.

  He had come this way every day, to train with the Elder Steward. But the macabre, flickering dark turned the corridors unfamiliar. He moved forward slowly, staying as quiet as he knew how. He looked at the few bodies they passed for the gruesome purpose of seeing how fresh they were. The closer they got, the fresher the kills.

  He had thought he was prepared for anything, but when he reached the room leading to the Tree Chamber, he stopped, his stomach turning.

  It was not like the scenes they’d seen elsewhere in the Hall, where Stewards had been killed so quickly they’d barely drawn their swords.

  This was the last stand of a champion.

  The room had been destroyed, a devastation that Will could not take in all at once. Rubble, cracked walls, smashed flooring: a force so terrible it could raze parts of the citadel had fought here against a single opponent determined to hold it back.

  Justice had been the greatest fighter in the Hall, and his attacker had torn the room apart, shredding tapestries, splintering furniture, even shattering stone in an attempt to get at him. From the sheer extent of the destruction, Justice had lasted against his attacker for some time.

  His eyes were sightless, fixed on some distant nightmare. His hand was still on his sword. Will remembered the moment he had woken up to Justice’s reassuring presence in the White Hart. Justice had always seemed to know what was right. A lodestar. Someone who would guide you through the night.

  Violet was on her knees beside him. She was saying his name as if she could speak with him. She was pressing her hands to his body as if to staunch blood that had stopped flowing, or find some warmth where there was only cold.

  Will found himself looking up inexorably at the doors to the Tree Chamber.

  Justice would have known better than anyone that he couldn’t win, and he had fought anyway. Delaying the enemy. Delaying him as long as he could.

  Will didn’t need Violet’s strength to force the doors. They were already open.

  He walked inside alone.

  The Tree Stone was dark. Its dead, brittle branches a testament to Will’s failures. No glowing light here, no sweet smell of hawthorn or soft fall of white flowers. Just a dead thing that had once been alive. Will had to lift the torch to light up the room, a bitter irony.

  But the enemy they sought was here, its pitch-black form revealed for all to see. It was dead, like the Tree. But it had not left behind a body, just an imprint, burned into the wall.

  Looking at it was like looking into the blackest pit from which no light could escape. Darkly unnatural, it loomed over the chamber, taller than any man, monstrous and distorted. It was all that was left of the creature that had destroyed the Hall.

  Marcus.

  Behind him, he heard Cyprian make an awful sound. Will stumbled slightly as Cyprian pushed past him. Cyprian stared up at the burned outline, and then he put his hands on it, as if by touching it, he could somehow touch his brother. His fingers curled and he slid downward, kneeling, his head dropped in utter despair. For a single disturbing moment, he and his brother seemed like one: a Steward and his sha
dow cast upon the wall.

  Will turned back to the door. And a second wave of horror passed over him, as, lifting the torch, he saw the words carved above the doors, centuries ago, by those who had waited scared in the dark.

  He is coming.

  ‘The Elder Steward fought it off,’ said a voice, and Will whirled.

  A figure was stepping out of the shadows. Heart slamming in his chest, he recognised Grace, janissary to the Elder Steward, her face streaked with tear lines, and her clothes torn and stained. Behind her, a second janissary – Sarah, her expression haggard.

  ‘Now she is dying,’ said Grace. ‘If you wish to see her, come. There isn’t much time left.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  THE ROOM WAS small, with a pallet laid out on raised stone. Someone had lit a single brazier to warm the space, and brought it close to the place where she lay under a thin blanket. Her face was sunken, her skin almost transparent. Will hadn’t known what to expect, but there was no blood, no sign of injury, just her white hair on the pallet and the slow rise and fall of her chest.

  He was not sure he was wanted. From the doorway, he watched as Grace and Sarah moved around her with the surety of attendants. Cyprian fit the moment, an austere figure in a silver tunic. A novitiate and two janissaries: the three of them belonged here. Will felt like an interloper, even as his chest clenched at the sight of the Elder Steward. Violet hesitated beside him, the two of them outsiders in a private moment of Steward grief.

  ‘The end is close,’ Grace said quietly. ‘The fight took all she had.’

  He could see the difficulty that she had in breathing. The act seemed to be a pure effort of will. At Grace’s words she stirred and said, ‘Will?’ Her voice was no louder than the rustle of dried paper.

  ‘I’m here,’ said Will, and in two strides knelt at her side.

  Up close, the lines of pain were etched into her face, as though some part of her was still locked in battle.

  ‘He came so fast … our preparations were all for nothing. Our own desire for strength has destroyed us … unleashing the shadow that could not be fought.’