Dark Rise: Dark Rise 1

by C. S. Pacat

  There was a shape in the doorway.

  ‘Hello, Robert,’ he said. His voice sounded blurred, as if he were drunk. He added, in the same blurred voice, ‘I didn’t think you were home.’

  He said it without thinking. In the next moment he felt a sudden flickering sense that it might not be Robert after all. He looked up, feeling a startled spatter of heartbeats, as if rolling around in the mud with lions could conjure up a figure impossible and long dead.

  It was Robert. It was ordinary, human Robert. The look on Robert’s face wouldn’t have been there on the other.

  Devon wondered what Robert saw. The bones in his face were intact. His lips felt bloated and shapeless; his eye was swelling closed. He still wore the cap. His clothes were wrecked, even those that were still on his body and not on the floor. He would have liked to have said, It was six men.

  ‘Who?’ said Robert.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I am going to take care of it.’ Speaking required care with fluffed lips.

  ‘I know you’re involved in something. Whatever it is—’

  ‘It’s not your concern.’

  Robert sat down on the bed beside him.

  After a moment: ‘You don’t need to tell me. I don’t ask that of you.’

  Robert’s presence made him feel stupidly grateful, which in turn provoked a violent surge of anger. A human to hurt you, a human to help you. It was stifling, the world clogged by them. If Robert tried to comfort him, he would push himself up and over to the other side of the room. If Robert tried to touch him, he would bolt.

  Robert just sat beside him, long enough that the anger faded, until he was aware of Robert simply as a confusing presence. It upset the unspoken terms of their association, which for ten years had run along the professional lines, an ivory merchant and his clerk. Yet he was aware – confusingly – that if he had come upon Robert alone and in a similar state, he would have done the same. He pushed the words out.

  ‘I’m fine. I heal quickly.’

  ‘I know that.’ And then: ‘I have something for you.’

  Robert had been carrying something. Cloth-wrapped, it was the length of a man’s arm. An umbrella in a box. It would have been useful earlier, when it was raining.

  Robert undid the string and drew the cloth aside. Devon felt the room tilting under him as he saw the shine of black lacquer, a polished box, with two filigree clasps, like the case for a musician’s instrument.

  His eyes flew to Robert’s face, only to find Robert was looking back at him, a calm look that demanded nothing. There was no surprise in Robert’s eyes, nor any anticipation of surprise. The truth was expanding between them, and Devon felt, for the second time that evening, the feeling of being looked at and seen. Violet’s horrified scramble backward was nothing to the calm knowledge in Robert’s eyes.

  ‘‘I have hunted the unicorn mostly in libraries,’’ Robert quoted softly.

  He thought, ten years of working together, ten years in which Robert had aged and he had stayed as he was, a fifteen-year-old boy with a cap pushed down low over his forehead. He couldn’t make his hands move over the lacquered box.

  ‘How did you get this?’

  ‘Simon Creen is not the only one who can steal objects from other men.’

  He forced himself to look down. His fingers moved as though they belonged to someone else. He watched them unfix the clasps and push open the box.

  It was strange, considering how everything else had changed, that it was so perfectly as it had been, white and looped and long and straight and beautiful. There was nothing like it left. There was nothing of the toss of his head and the way it had felt to run, hooves on snow.

  ‘I’m sorry this was done to you.’

  He looked down at the horn, and he heard himself say, ‘It was a long time ago.’

  ‘I wondered,’ said Robert, ‘if it could be restored.’

  ‘You mean reattached?’ he said. ‘No.’

  Devon looked up at Robert.

  ‘No,’ he said again, and he felt that bewildered sensation. ‘But I am glad to have it all the same.’

  The lamps in the room weren’t overbright, but it was enough to see everything. It felt intimate, with Robert’s serious eyes on him. Like being helpless to the truth. Devon found himself lifting his hand and pulling the cap from his head. It dropped from his fingers onto the carpeted floor, so that there was nothing hidden between them. His heartbeat was intrusive in his chest. Being exposed felt like being found out and waiting for the blow to fall.

  Robert said, ‘Are there others?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I am the last.’

  ‘So you’re alone.’

  Devon stared at him. The fingers of one hand had curled around the horn, and he was holding it so tightly in that hand that his knuckles were white.

  Robert said, ‘Whatever you’re caught up in, if there’s something you need, I can help you.’

  Devon closed his eyes, then opened them. He said, ‘You don’t want to do that.’

  The walls of the room felt too close, and his face throbbed. Robert had known, probably for a long time. He might have wrapped his forehead in cloth, but in ten years, he would have pushed his hand across his brow, or tilted his cap at the wrong angle, or rested his head on the back of an armchair for a nap. The lump beneath the cloth would have shown, under the white hair, under the line of the cap.

  Robert was an expert in the ivory that made its way across the continent in ceaseless trade, in bins of horns and tusks, in cameos, in spinet keys, in carved frames, in billiard balls, and the handles of women’s parasols. And Robert was a hunter; and sometimes you rode down your prey, and sometimes you offered your prey an unlooked-for kindness, and, wounded and exhausted, it bowed its head for the silken rope.

  ‘I’ve worked with ivory my whole life,’ said Robert quietly. ‘I know when something different comes along.’

  His breathing felt strange. He wondered if Robert had picked up the horn, had handled it, at the same time that he knew with perfect surety that Robert was too much of a gentleman to have opened the box.

  He knew, in the same way that he knew that Robert did his best work in the morning, that the mark on Robert’s cheek was the imprint of the eyeglass he used to inspect ivory, that he liked to take a brandy to his study after dinner while he went over the inventory, and that he was stubborn and considerate, and human, in the end.

  He felt himself moving. His grip on the horn changed. It felt wrong to wrap his fingers around its middle, a way that he would never let anyone else touch him, the way they had held him down in the moment before they brought out the saw.

  His grip on the horn changed; then he drove it into Robert’s unprotected body.

  The tip was sharp and could puncture armour. Cloth shirt and waistcoat were nothing. It went in, pushing Robert backward, in and angling up, the point seeking for what it could find, easily.

  Heart.

  There were a few awful moments of struggle, the last spasming kicks of a drowning man fighting for air. Robert’s eyes were wide and shocked. Robert’s hands were over his, clutching at them. He felt the warm pulsing wet between his fingers. A second later, he put his hand over Robert’s mouth to stifle the words: ‘Devon, please, Devon, I care about y—’ He didn’t want to hear what came out when Robert could only tell the truth.

  And then everything went still.

  He was on all fours on the bed above Robert’s still body, panting. The covers were disarrayed, a red plume spreading slowly into the bed. With a yank, he pulled the horn out and pushed backward. His legs felt unsteady, so that his step back was uneven, before he stilled himself. In the silent room, he answered the question that Robert hadn’t asked.

  ‘You thought you knew what a unicorn was,’ he said, his breathing still shallow. ‘But you were wrong.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  WILL WOKE WITH a jerk to the sound of hoofbeats. Grace and Sarah were still sleeping, soundless shapes under blankets
in the small room in the gatekeep tower. A light sleeper, he rose quietly and looked out from the gatekeep window. Cyprian was on watch on the high walls, having just opened the gate. In the courtyard below, Will saw Violet returning from an excursion that had had her out half the night. He went down to greet her.

  It was the early hours of the morning, and the light was still grey and blue. Will had dozed and woken throughout the night, snatching rest where he could. Most of his alertness had centred on Cyprian, silent and closed off since he had lit the Flame. But it was Violet who had pushed out of the gatekeep in the dark and ridden out of the Hall.

  He approached her in the grey light as she dismounted. She looked like she’d had no sleep, her face drawn and her knuckles bruised, her tunic covered in blood.

  ‘Did you kill anyone?’

  He asked it steadily, holding her gaze as she turned to him with dark, hollowed eyes. She didn’t deny it at first, just drew a breath and looked away to one side.

  ‘I didn’t kill him. I wanted to.’

  ‘Him?’ She didn’t answer. He watched her loop her horse’s reins through an iron ring in the courtyard holding area, then stop, resting her hand on its white neck as if drawing from its strength. ‘Who?’

  Another silence.

  Then: ‘After we found the horn, I asked Justice about unicorns. He told me they survived the war, but were hunted by humans until there was only one left. He said humans found the last unicorn, chased it down with dogs, hobbled it, and cut off its horn and tail. The Horn of Truth … it came from that unicorn.’

  Will nodded, slowly, as Violet drew in a breath.

  ‘He’s not dead. He’s alive,’ Violet said, looking up at him. ‘It’s Devon.’

  ‘Devon? But he’s—’

  A boy, he wanted to say. He’s a human boy. Will felt the strangest sensation pass over him, remembering Devon looking up from the dark wooden desk at the back of the shop, between bins of horns. White hair and too-pale eyes, and the subtly mocking way he had talked about ivory.

  ‘I found him near Bond Street. I wanted … I hit him. It felt good. But when his cap came off, I saw—’

  The horn.

  As Violet’s fingers lifted to the centre of her forehead, Will remembered Devon’s low-slung cap. Is it really true? he wanted to ask. But he could see the sick certainty in her eyes.

  The stifling sense of that shop crowded with ivory came back to him. The shop that was a graveyard of dead animals, tended by a ghost. Devon, pale as a relic, watching over bones.

  How could it be? How could a boy be a unicorn? He’d seen unicorns in his vision, white horses with spears of light on their foreheads charging into battle. Had one of them transformed?

  His skin crawled as he remembered the moment in London when Devon had recognised him. Devon knows who I am, he’d thought, not understanding how deep that recognition might run.

  And the thought that followed: If Devon was really a unicorn, what else might he know? The Stewards had legends passed down over generations, as writings faded and books crumbled to dust. But this was knowledge carried across time by a single boy.

  ‘That’s how Simon knows where to dig.’

  ‘What?’ said Violet.

  Will was staring at her. ‘Simon has digs across the globe. He spends his time unearthing artefacts … the Corrupted Blade … the armour pieces of the Remnants … He knows just where to go and what to do. It’s Devon.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘He was there.’ Will felt dizzy at the thought of it, darkly impossible. ‘Devon was there, he lived through the war, he was alive when the Dark King fell.’

  Someone for whom the stories were more than just stories … someone who lived them, breathed them … it made the old world suddenly seem frighteningly real. And close. As if he could reach out his hand and touch it, as alive as memory.

  ‘It’s how Simon knew the secret of the Cup. It’s how he knew how to make a shadow. How he knew about the Shadow Stone,’ said Will. ‘Devon told him.’

  Violet’s shocked face made it clear this thought was new to her. ‘That would make Devon as old as this Hall.’

  His thoughts were already moving ahead, the strangeness of a unicorn fighting for the Dark. ‘Why is he working for Simon?’ That was the part of it that didn’t make sense. ‘All the images that we’ve seen of unicorns, they were fighting for the Light.’

  ‘People change sides.’ Violet said it with an odd defensiveness. Will searched her face.

  ‘What did he say to you?’

  ‘Nothing.’ She cut him off; he would get no more from her. ‘Come on. We need to wake the others.’

  A single table and some stools were the only furnishings in the gatekeep. At Will’s call, the five of them had gathered in the lower room, down the short stairs from where they had slept on pallets on the floor. The gatekeep’s stone walls were solid and enclosing, and its mantel held a newly lit fire. With the door closed, you could almost believe that the Hall outside was intact. Almost.

  He could see the haggard faces of the others, the shadowed tension in their eyes, the haunted look each of them wore. They had each ventured out into the emptiness of the citadel, Grace and Cyprian to scavenge the supplies they would need for breakfast, while Will and Violet saw to Valdithar and the two remaining Steward horses. Its vast silence had left its imprint on all of them. Only Sarah hadn’t left the gatekeep, spending much of her time curled up on her sleeping pallet upstairs, her back against the wall.

  ‘The Stewards are gone,’ said Will. ‘We’re all that’s left.’ Cyprian’s shoulders stiffened at that, but he stayed silent. ‘The Elder Steward told us that Simon was close to returning the Dark King. It’s up to us to stop him.’

  Silence greeted his words.

  ‘He has the Shadow Stone,’ said Sarah. It was her way of saying, We can’t stop him. He could hear the dull defeat in her voice. He shook his head.

  ‘The Elder Steward said the Shadow Kings were the first step to returning the Dark King,’ said Will. ‘We don’t know why or how. But we know Simon hasn’t released them from the Stone yet.’

  ‘How do we know that?’

  ‘Because they would have destroyed everything,’ said Will.

  No army on earth could stop them. Will saw the vision that had overwhelmed him when his fingers had grazed the Shadow Stone: the Shadow Kings on their shadow steeds, a torrent of darkness that nothing could hold back. But now he saw it happening in London, the Shadow Kings sweeping over the city, killing everyone they found, forcing the others to their will, until there was no resistance, only those who served the Dark, and those who were dead.

  ‘We’re safe here for the moment,’ said Cyprian. ‘The wards opened for Marcus because he was a Steward.’ He flushed slightly when he said his brother’s name, but he didn’t falter. ‘They’ll hold against Simon. But if he does release the Shadow Kings—’

  ‘If he releases the Shadow Kings, we fight,’ said Violet.

  Something bitter rippled across Sarah’s face. ‘You think the Stewards didn’t try to fight? Leda and the guard didn’t even have time to draw their swords. One shadow … One shadow killed our greatest fighters … even Justice … killed by his own shieldmate. It had no pity, no humanity, just the ravening desire to kill.’ Sarah looked out at all of them. ‘If Simon releases the Shadow Kings, all we can do is hope that they can’t get through the wards.’

  The thought of being holed up here, while dark winds raged outside, made a terrible claustrophobia claw in Will’s throat.

  ‘We still have time,’ said Will. ‘He hasn’t released the Shadow Kings. We still have a chance to stop him.’

  ‘He’ll release them,’ said Sarah. ‘At any moment—’

  ‘No,’ said Will, knowing it right down to his bones. ‘He’s waiting for something.’

  ‘For what?’

  It was why he had gathered them all here. He had seen the defeat they each felt. The thought that if the Stewards couldn�
�t beat Simon, what good would the five of them do? But from the moment Will had seen the destruction Simon had wrought on the Hall, he had felt a new resolve hardening inside him.

  ‘James said that Simon was searching for something. An artefact. Do you remember? We questioned James with the horn, and he said there was an artefact that would make Simon the most powerful man alive.’

  James had fought the Horn of Truth desperately to try to keep that secret. He had fought harder than he had to hide the location of Marcus. Will remembered his panting breath and the furious look in his blue eyes.

  ‘When we captured him, he had just learned where to find it. A man named Gauthier who had come back to England and was staying at Buckhurst Hill. James didn’t want us to know about it. If it’s that important—’

  ‘Maybe it’s what Simon needs to release the Shadow Kings,’ said Cyprian.

  ‘Or a weapon we can use against him,’ said Violet.

  There was a silence. Cyprian scrubbed at his face.

  ‘It’s all we have,’ said Cyprian.

  ‘Do you know the place?’ said Will. Expecting a response, he found himself instead looking into the blank faces of a novitiate and two janissaries who knew everything about morning chants and ancient swords and nothing about the basic geography of London.

  It was Violet who answered. ‘Buckhurst Hill. It’s north of here, a scattering of houses near the stagecoach route to Norwich. The three of us should make good time on horseback.’

  The three of them – that meant Will, Violet and Cyprian. A stab of pain at that: there were only three horses left. The two janissary girls nodded.

  ‘And if Simon’s men are there?’ Sarah demanded.

  Everyone was afraid; Will could see that in their faces. That a ride into the countryside was all that stood between them and the release of the Shadow Kings seemed a tenuous hope. But he lifted his chin and returned their gazes.

  ‘Then we fight.’

  It was an old farmhouse on the outskirts of Buckhurst Hill. The first two farmsteads they searched had been empty. This one looked empty too, tiles missing from the roof, a deteriorating fence and overground fields without farm animals. Until Will saw a glossy black horse tied up outside. Every nerve in him came screaming to life.