by Dave Rudden
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.’
3
The Point of Lighthouses
Knights never did anything without a reason. They couldn’t afford to. The Cost made misers of them all, and that had spread to their training, their traditions, even the emotions they let themselves feel. But, despite that iron control, the Order were still human, and a simple, sombre poetry had found its way in all the same.
Denizen made it eight steps up the slope before his calves started to burn. No wonder no human army had ever attempted to besiege Daybreak. What would have been the point? Even the thought of battling your way through the killing fields, the walls, steep streets where five warriors could hold a hundred … only to find yourself here.
The buildings of Adumbral thinned out before the barren summit of Monte Inclavare like the ragged tonsure of a hermit. On three sides was the city, dead and gold and as empty as a burial mask, and the fourth was a sheer cliff all the way back down to the mountain’s roots, who-knew-how-far down below.
And in between …
Daybreak was a lighthouse. Of course it was. It’s not that Denizen was an expert – he’d never been anywhere near one before in his life. That was sort of the point of lighthouses. If you were near one, you were going in the wrong direction. It wasn’t even that he figured it out from the surroundings – there were no ships to be warned, no rocks on which they could run aground, no sea in which to drown.
Except there was, wasn’t there?
Out in the fresh air, away from the candlewards and distractingly traumatic reunions, Denizen could feel it: a frisson at the edge of his awareness – the constant reminder that this world was an island floating in a deep black sea, and the Order a single point of light.
Daybreak jutted accusingly into the sky, massive as a tower block, topped with a defiant fist of stone and glass. Denizen half expected a beam of white to lash from those panels to sweep the surrounding shadows away, but the huge lantern remained shuttered, as secret as the Order itself.
‘Uriel would love this,’ Simon said beside him, and Denizen agreed.
There was every chance that Denizen would still be in a Croit dungeon, had their youngest son not stood against the doctrine his Family had literally beaten into him his entire life. Uriel had paid for that, and it was a debt that still kept Denizen awake at night.
‘I wish we’d been able to convince him to join us,’ Denizen responded sadly. ‘But –’ He frowned. ‘Hang on – how do you know he’d love this?’
Simon stiffened. ‘Oh, I just … um …’
There was something at once very uncharacteristic and very familiar about that stutter. ‘We’ve been … emailing.’
‘Oh,’ Denizen said.
Then: ‘Oh,’ Denizen responded.
‘Right,’ Denizen continued, abruptly glad that everyone was staring up at the lighthouse, because he’d gone so red he could probably have warned off ships by himself. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘That’s great! I mean … cool. Cool. Do I … need to do anything?’
‘You can close your mouth for a start,’ Simon said with an awkward smile. ‘But no – we can talk later. It’s not a thing, you know?’
‘Right! No – obviously!’ Suddenly aware that he was so flailingly desperate to convey his okayness that he might possibly be
making things less OK, and also possibly be presenting a danger to low-flying aircraft, Denizen stopped speaking.
‘Come on,’ Simon said. ‘Let’s go and check out our new home.’
The girls were looking back but not at them, instead watching the car park where Grey had driven. A frown twisted Abigail’s features. Darcie just looked sad.
‘Should we … should we wait?’
‘No.’ A thread of softness entered Vivian’s voice. ‘Give him time.’
The doors of Daybreak – thick and tall and marked with the hand-and-hammers – were shadowed beneath another host of arrow-slits and chutes for boiling oil. Denizen wouldn’t have been surprised if there were more high-tech or arcane defences that he couldn’t see. The Knights had no problem mixing mechanical, magical and medieval arts when it came to protecting what was theirs. This was a war where the enemy could come from anywhere.
I guess it’s important there’s some ground you hold.
Simon turned to Abigail, who was now vibrating so hard with excitement that she could have phased through the door.
‘You’re finally here.’
Abigail grabbed him by the lapel. ‘I. KNOW.’
‘Ack.’
‘Sorry.’
Vivian withdrew a long iron key from her pocket, slipping it into the huge lock on the door. Uneasily eyeing the sharpened spikes of the portcullis above, Denizen shuffled a little closer to her.
‘We just let ourselves in?’
‘We just let ourselves in.’
‘That’s a bit … anticlimactic.’
Vivian shot him a look as the door opened with an industrial clonk.
‘You were expecting a butler?’
Maybe.
You couldn’t have called the two men sitting inside butlers, except in the Artemis Fowl sense of the word. Draped across wooden chairs, they watched Vivian and the others enter with what could have been mistaken for disinterest, if you ignored their eyes.
The foyer – did castles have foyers? Denizen resolved to look that up later – was a long, bare room, devoid of even the cluttered detritus and ornaments that turned Seraphim Row from a creepy mansion to a creepy mansion that people lived in. There was no art on the walls – rather, the art was the walls, and now he could see that set into every wall was a mosaic of war.
It reminded Denizen of Retreat, the Order’s asylum, but, whereas those carvings were all Knights marching, these were warriors in the thick of battle. Actual battle – Denizen could see plaques underneath depicting names and dates in flowing script.
It made sense in a way. You could have carved every single Knight to ever live and they wouldn’t have covered one wall of Retreat. Perhaps the lost souls imprisoned there needed to imagine the Order as an army rather than a few determined souls.
Here in Daybreak, the enemy was acknowledged. Tenebrous by their very nature were hard to depict, but the artists had done their best – chips of bright stone at odd angles to distort reflections, water rushing behind translucent glass so that the figures danced and twitched. No two were alike, writhing in anger, or delight, or pain.
Try as he might, he couldn’t help scanning the twisted shapes in case one had been crafted from moonstone and sapphire and silver.
Stop that.
Vivian led them up a flight of stairs. Denizen found himself thinking that, even though they passed the occasional Knight in the corridors, Daybreak felt like Seraphim Row, but in a way that had nothing to do with the Tenebrae.
‘How many Knights live here?’ he asked.
‘There’s a standing garrison of one hundred,’ Darcie said, ‘rotated in and out on a yearly basis. There isn’t a lot to do here bar training, archiving and maintaining the defences. Knights stay for a while and then move on.’
That was it. Despite its age, despite the grim nobility of its design and the careful detail evident in every mosaic tile, Daybreak felt … temporary, full of the evidence of the passage of people, but with none of their personality or soul.
Like an airport or a train station – a place you went to, to leave.
‘I’d go mad,’ Abigail said, reading each and every plaque. ‘That’s why they keep it to a year. Everyone wants to be out doing something, and here is just –’
‘A way to serve the Order,’ Darcie said, and, though there was no sternness in her voice, Abigail bowed her head a little. Darcie’s talents were too valuable for the front line, but they’d just seen the toll her duties took. ‘We all do it in our own way.’
They paused beneath a massive archway, just as Denizen noticed the mosaics had come to an end, the already-quiet halls now totally deserted. ‘Speaking of which,’ Darcie said, a tad awkwardly, ‘this is where I leave you.’
They turned in surprise.
‘Luxes have different quarters,’ Darcie explained. ‘They’re …’
‘Fancier?’ Simon offered innocently.
‘In a different part of the castle,’ Darcie finished. ‘They need us out in the field, not here, so they like to make a fuss when one of us comes home.’
‘The way things are done here,’ Vivian interrupted, ‘you might find it an … adjustment.’ The words crackled with warning. ‘We’re not in Seraphim Row any more.’
They really weren’t. Vivian didn’t stand on ceremony. Or, rather, she stood on it all the time, grinding it into the dirt. At home, the ranks went as follows:
– Vivian.
– Everyone else.
It was very simple. And now it wasn’t.
Darcie looked so apologetic that Denizen felt bad.
‘Hey, no, we understand. When are you guys heading home?’
‘Tomorrow night,’ Vivian said. ‘I have some meetings and then we’ll catch the evening flight out.’
‘I’ll try and see you tomorrow if I can,’ said Darcie. ‘But if not …’
She grabbed them all in a fierce hug. Denizen found himself surprised at just how fierce, but then again he’d never seen her with a book less than five hundred pages long. That gave you serious upper-body strength.
‘Keep in touch,’ she murmured into the crush. ‘Let me know how you’re all getting on. Simon, you keep dropping your fists before you go for a high kick. That’s telegraphing. And Abigail … go easy on yourself. All right?’
‘What do you mean? I’m –’
Darcie pulled back, her hands still resting on their shoulders.
‘And, Denizen …’
A blush pinked Denizen’s cheeks. ‘What?’
Darcie’s stare would have been intense even had her eyes been human.
‘Take care.’
He nodded, and she held his gaze for just one second longer.
‘Good luck.’
They watched her go solemnly. Darcie had been the first person Denizen had spoken to in Seraphim Row. She’d been unfailingly kind and considerate, guiding and teaching them while also shouldering a burden the rest of them barely understood.
It’s just a year.
It had been a year since they’d met. A lot could happen in a year.
He was really going to miss her.
‘This is the Neophytes’ Solar,’ Vivian said, leading them into a great heptagonal room, the walls set with wooden doors. ‘Female cells, male cells, meditation cells, Neophytes’ Library … Training chambers are two floors down. You’ll congregate here for your allocated nightly social time –’
‘Allocated fun,’ Simon murmured to Denizen. ‘My favourite.’
Vivian glanced at the slip of paper in her hand. ‘Abigail, you’re cell F12.’ She sniffed. ‘Hmph. I was F11. My name should be scratched beneath the bed, if you get a chance to look.’
Denizen’s brain tried to supply an image of thirteen-year-old Vivian, but just wasn’t up to the task. Her scars, her Cost, her aura of contained determination and rage – had she ever worried about making friends? About being up to the job her heritage had handed down?
‘Where is everyone?’ Simon asked, looking around th
e deserted room.
‘Getting some sleep, I imagine,’ Vivian said, and Denizen suddenly realized how late it was. ‘Which is what you should be doing. Your first session tomorrow will be at seven in the primary training chamber. Rest. Memorize the rules. The Order doesn’t go in for hand-holding – you are Neophytes of the Second Rank now, and expected to comport yourselves as such.’
‘There are rules?’ Simon asked in panic.
‘There are ranks?’ Denizen echoed with alarm. ‘I didn’t know there were ranks. Why didn’t I know there were ranks?’
‘Neophytes of the First Rank aren’t expected to concern themselves with hierarchy,’ Abigail said airily. ‘And of course there are rules. Show up on time, no boys in the girls’ cells, all that kind of thing.’
Simon frowned. ‘Wait. Why not?’
Glacially, Vivian raised an eyebrow.
Denizen felt a very odd sensation of his blood simultaneously rushing to his face while also trying to hide from embarrassment. They’d all been living in such close proximity that Denizen had sort of forgotten that Abigail was … you know. A girl and stuff.
‘Oh right,’ Simon said in a small voice.
‘Some of the rules here are a little old-fashioned,’ said Denizen’s mother, which was an impressive statement from someone wearing a warhammer. ‘But others are there for very good reasons.’
They all nodded, Abigail seeming caught between trying to look respectful while also being highly amused.
‘Goodnight, boys,’ she said. Vivian gave her a grave nod.
‘Abigail. It has been …’
Abigail’s eyes went wide.
‘An honour,’ Vivian finished. ‘And a pleasure. Your parents will be very proud when they read my report.’
‘There are reports?’ Simon and Denizen said together, while Abigail beamed like a solar flare.
‘Oh. Thank you. Wow. Um. Goodnight!’
She practically floated to her dorm.
‘Well,’ Vivian said, and a note of uncertainty had entered her voice. The room was suddenly deathly quiet.
‘Yeah,’ Denizen responded. ‘Um …’
‘Cell M17,’ Simon said, head angled to read the note hanging carelessly from Vivian’s hand. ‘I’ll just … give you some spa–’