by Dave Rudden
Worry about the other Neophytes later. Try and keep the friends you have.
As if on cue, Grey appeared in the doorway, engaging Vivian in hurried whispers. Denizen moved towards them, but he’d barely taken a step before she raised her fist and they all went rigid and then –
I GROW BORED, MERCY.
Its voice was devolving, rendered into a roar by the stress of passing through that composite throat. Denizen’s shoulders prickled as Dragon droned overhead, and then Vivian lifted her fist and flung the Neophytes out into danger again.
All except Denizen.
There was still the constant pressure of the Cants in his head, offering all sorts of pyrotechnic solutions to the problems he was facing, plus all the myriad worries about his friends and his future and his family, any one of which would have been a perfect reason for a bit of anxious paralysis … but that wasn’t it either.
It was because he heard sobbing.
It was a quiet hitching sound – the tears of someone who didn’t want to be heard. They were also hauntingly familiar.
Crosscaper. That kind of crying had been the soundtrack to Denizen’s childhood, and he was climbing the staircase at the back of the shop before he knew what he was doing. In Crosscaper, that kind of crying came with a choice: respect the person’s privacy or reach out.
Denizen had never been a reaching-out kind of person. Or a person who needed to be reached – he had Simon and books, and that had always been enough. In Crosscaper, he would have just let the sound die away or someone else would deal with it, and he knew that Dragon was circling round again, but … he’d cried like that before too.
The third floor of the building was a hollow square latticed by sunlight and swirling dust. Candlewards winked in clusters from the corners. One wall had fallen away, gaping wide enough for Denizen to freeze at the thought of being seen from the air.
And Simon stood in the middle of the floor, the breeze pushing his hair back from his face.
Denizen made a start towards him. ‘What are you –’
Simon slashed a hand through the air, and Denizen froze. Not because there was so much of Abigail in his curt gesture, but because he was now close enough to see that it hadn’t been Simon sobbing at all.
A Neophyte sat on the lip of the third floor, legs dangling over the side, eyes fixed on Daybreak and the smoke-gauzed tear in its side. Their tactical poncho did nothing to bulk out his form, short-cut hair rippling in the breeze.
He didn’t look at Denizen as he approached, but his eyes were so wide they probably didn’t have to. Those huge staring orbs could have drunk in the whole city.
‘Ed,’ Simon said, fourteen years of calm pressed into a single syllable. ‘We need to go.’
‘I just want to see it one last time.’ Ed’s voice was nearly swallowed by the wind and the drop, and every molecule of Denizen trembled, waiting for the wing-beat that would drown them out. How long had it been? Was Dragon even now gliding above them, owl-silent with hearing sharp?
‘I’ve been waiting my whole life to come here. My parents never brought me; they said … they said it was …’
The boy hacked out a laugh. ‘They said they didn’t want me exposed to the Tenebrae too soon.’
‘Ed,’ Denizen hissed, and flinched as pink fingers turned to white on the ledge’s stone lip. Denizen had forgotten hands did that. Does he have any Cost at all?
‘You can see it. It’s right there.’
‘It’s not,’ Ed snapped raggedly. ‘Not the way it’s supposed to be.’ Tears streamed freely down his face. ‘It was supposed to stand forever. That was … that was our job. And now it’s falling and, and that thing is laughing at us.’
Just one. That was all it would take. The drag as those huge wings lifted would likely pluck Denizen, Simon and Ed out like dandelion seeds, spinning in the Tenebrous’s wake. It mightn’t even notice.
‘This is how we lose,’ the Neophyte said. ‘After so long, this is how we lose.’
‘Ed, please get away from the edge,’ Denizen and Simon said together, and finally Ed turned to look at them with a glare that would not have shamed Vivian, or Greaves, or Uriel Croit, last son of a family with fifteen centuries of spoiling for a fight.
‘I’m not going to jump. I’m a de Montfort. I’ll do what I have to do. I’ll fight. I’ll fight Dragon itself if I have to. I just … I just wish it meant something.’
Simon’s face was grey. ‘What do you mean?’
Ed just shook his head. ‘Neither of you went through, did you? Neither of you saw what’s on the other side.’
The Glimpse. Ed had gone through. What had he seen? And how did it frighten him more than the nightmare circling above?
I’d be interested to see how you describe it.
Dust motes spun lazily, and with a sigh Mercy folded herself out of the air between Ed and the long drop. Ed’s eyes widened, but, before he could pull back or react, the Tenebrous simply held out a hand and some bone-deep autopilot made Ed clasp it in his. A shiver ran through him at the contact, and Mercy gave his hand a single, deliberate shake.
I’ve never done that before, she said, her voice like frost crunching underfoot, her glittering form blurring Daybreak until it could have passed for whole. Nice to meet you.
‘We need to leave,’ Simon snapped, and Denizen had been so concerned with his friend being angry at him that he hadn’t given any thought as to how angry Simon might be with Mercy. ‘We don’t have time for –’
Ed’s mouth still hung open as if he wanted to speak but had forgotten how, and for a ridiculous second Denizen was both jealous and massively embarrassed.
Is that what I look like when she’s talking to me?
I only wanted to tell you this. You do not see the best of our realm, Mercy said, displaying among her many talents an incredible grasp of understatement. Before our sun was stolen, the Tenebrae was less a dark ocean than a … mosaic, many-coloured … bodies and minds in constant motion, free to be whatever the moment and the multiverse told us to be.
There was a quaver in Ed’s voice that had nothing to do with fear.
‘R-really?’
Mercy giggled, a sound as incongruous as birdsong in a war zone.
Oh yes. Infinite worlds, infinite possibilities. An omniverse, repeating away forever. My father used to tell me stories about them – some crowded, rowdy things, others intricate, delicate machines, and some just empty … just waiting.
Think of that potential. Think of all those gardens waiting to grow.
‘Your father told you stories?’
I think all fathers do.
‘My father used to tell me that every monster had a bit of good inside them.’ Ed’s voice was a whisper. ‘And when we sent them back to the Tenebrae it was to think about that little spark and to come back in a different shape.’
Only someone who had spent so long thinking of Mercy’s face would have noted the difference between a flicker of light and a faltering smile.
He was more right than he knew. There is far more light than darkness out there. Even the darkness is not so bad. Light creates darkness. It needs it. There needs to be …
‘Balance?’ Ed said, a second before Denizen could.
Both, Mercy responded. That’s all. No simple equations. No binaries. Just both. If we could just get beyond –
‘Is this how you talk all the time?’ Simon Hayes grabbed Ed by the scruff of the neck to heave him upright, putting himself in between the pale Neophyte and the phosphorescent girl, and, as distressing as all this was, it was the abrupt loudness of his voice that raised the hairs on Denizen’s neck.
How long had it been this quiet?
Simon, Mercy said, and reached out a shimmering hand. I know you have seen much, but –
It was very quiet. When had they last heard wing-beats? When had –
‘Oh, would you quit,’ Simon said, his Achill Island accent abruptly thickening in his annoyance. ‘No wonder he –’
&
nbsp; ‘Em …’ Denizen said. ‘Guys?’
Dragon tore the roof off the building.
One moment Denizen was staring at his friend, the next he was airborne, and only the lip of a newly severed wall saved him from a three-storey drop. Seconds smeared together as sound fought to catch up – the ear-splitting, too-close bang of Dragon’s wings, the sabretooth roar of splitting masonry, the sudden scorch of sunlight –
Denizen saw the roof, miraculously still intact, shear into a tower some half the city away. That was how fast Dragon was moving. After so long hiding, cowering, running with his head held low, Denizen had an unwillingly perfect moment to watch the beast lazily bank round, to take in the turbine bulges of its shoulders, the roadkill kink of its neck.
And then Vivian’s face was in his, as startling as a magic trick.
‘The Aurelian Gate. RUN!’
23
Inevitable
This is your chance, Mercy!
Dragon didn’t kill them immediately. That was the worst thing. The Neophytes pelted through vine-ribbed ruins and the beds of dried-up canals, and the cackling atrocity that chased them could have killed them in any number of ways, but it didn’t. It played with them instead.
Your chance to strike me down!
Swooping as low as the huddled roofs would allow to shriek right in their ears before lashing itself upwards with a mighty beat of its wings. Landing on roofs so that bricks came down like rain, daintily plucking statues free and flinging them at the Neophytes like toys. Following them – joyously prowling, leaping from rooftop to rooftop with the spine-bending flexibility of a cat.
A cat the length of a city block. A cat made of braided human bodies, some crisp and perfect, others stretched to nightmare. The bodies rasped against each other with its every movement like a thousand snakes, like the wing-cases of a cockroach.
What kind of a monster runs?
Denizen couldn’t look at it. He stared at the ground as he fled, not because its wings had churned the air to grit, but because if he looked directly at the monstrosity he would die. He would let it kill him, the way prey animals did, because it was better than being this scared and still alive.
He could hear the sobbing again, somehow, over everything, the plaintive wail of a wounded thing.
The Tenebrae beat off the creature like radiation from a nuclear warhead, slower to kill you but just as deadly. This was the monster that had broken Daybreak. This was the architect of the most daring attack this realm had ever seen, and it wasn’t here for them at all.
FACE ME, MERCY!
It kicked itself into the air, Neophytes staggering away from an avalanche of rubble. The world was shaking apart. Shapes ran through the murk around Denizen, anonymous with dust. As soon as it looked like he was running in vaguely the right direction, Vivian let go of his hand to circle the fleeing Neophytes, snapping at the stragglers like a sheep-dog.
Another pass, Dragon howling like a hurricane, and the backwash dragged enough dust from Denizen’s vision that he saw the city walls curving up into the innocent blue sky. Have we come this far? He staggered. A huge part of him suddenly just wanted to lie down and seep into the cracked pavement under his feet.
Far away, a tiny black dot was coming around again.
‘Denizen!’
It was Vivian, standing in a doorway, hammer in one hand, the other beckoning fiercely. Denizen pelted towards her. Those twenty steps were somehow more terrifying than any he had taken before, but nothing could have stopped Denizen from running to the one person he would bet on against this thing.
He ran to his mother, his Malleus, in the hope that she could somehow make this right.
She dragged him into cover as soon as he was within arm’s length and for a moment they just stood there, clutching each other. Someone was speaking –
‘– missing Etienne, and Ruben, and Dmitry. We need to –’
‘– my ankle, I’ve twisted my –’
They were in some sort of warehouse, long and low with huge windows, sunlight painting piano keys on the floor. Grey was cupping a girl’s face in his hands, speaking low and quiet, but the girl was just staring at him as if she’d never seen him before. Neophytes were pacing, or huddling, or had just slumped like discarded kitbags.
‘Simon!’
Denizen didn’t see him. That was impossible, surely. His friend was half-ostrich – why couldn’t he see him? Why couldn’t he –
And underneath the panic came a whistling, growing louder and deeper and more urgent, like the last breath of air escaping a punctured lung. Vivian stiffened.
And then Dragon came down like a meteor. Like a bomb. Its ungainly slide levelled every building for a hundred metres, and its tail barely touched the wall separating them from the street, but suddenly it listed as if concussed, and all those piano keys had turned to fangs.
This is what is going to happen.
Denizen felt like a mouse before a cat. No – not a cat: cats and mice were both animals at different ends of the same scale. Denizen felt like a mouse before a human – hunted by something not just bigger but far more complex, something that could out-think and outsmart and take from him the most important person in the world.
Simon was missing.
Grey pulled him upright. Denizen didn’t even remember falling.
‘We’ll get him back,’ the Knight whispered. ‘We just need to regroup. That’s all.’
A stealer of treasure. A true dragon, after all.
I am going to find you, if I have to level this entire city.
Denizen heard it scalp another building, rummaging into its innards like a rat with a corpse, and in that sudden dance of particles Denizen saw Mercy, stock-still and barely visible, like an old photograph of an ancient war.
And then … I’m going to take you to your father.
Her head came up.
I’m going to chain you up right beside him on that monument to his colossal arrogance, and then, dear girl, I’m going to chain the little Hardwick boy up with you.
Every syllable stole definition from Mercy until she was little but a smudge.
Out there, in the middle of the ocean. How long do you think you’ll last? The Emissary was so diminished when he broke free. No wonder he has such an appetite now. If I chain you beside your father, if I chain a sweet little morsel of humanity at your feet … how long before it becomes too much?
How long before you eat each other?
Denizen was so frozen at hearing his name in Dragon’s mouth that he didn’t even notice Vivian at his side.
‘It’s right there,’ she whispered.
‘I know,’ Denizen whispered back. The proximity to it was deafening. The shearing creak of its movements, the madhouse scrape of its barbs – he had been in actual battles quieter than Dragon.
‘Not that,’ she whispered, and, to Denizen’s horror, she dragged him towards the half-collapsed wall. He tried to fight her, but her grip was irresistible, and she pressed him against a head-height crack in the wall.
‘That.’
And past clouds of grit and warping air and buildings ground to nubs, through a black collage of purloined corpses twisted into lizard limbs, Denizen saw it, tucked away into the wall like an afterthought.
The Aurelian Gate. It may as well have been on the moon.
Grey was beside them, his blades drawn. ‘We could … we could …’
‘We could what?’ Vivian hissed back. ‘If we get them out of the gate, it’s half a kilometre of open ground between here and any sort of cover. Dragon will have us before we get ten metres.’
We’re done for.
The words came from nowhere, which meant they came from Denizen. And fire followed them – eating through every shred of ice and resolve Denizen could put in its way.
Simon was gone. They were trapped. Dragon had them. They were lost.
Cants were bullying aside his thoughts and fire was scorching the bottom of his heart and Denizen wanted nothing
more than to let them meet because they were done for, and that meant he didn’t have to try any more. Vivian’s eyes were tracking wildly across the floor, the walls, as if reading script Denizen couldn’t see.
And then they stilled.
‘Yield not to evil, but attack all the more boldly,’ Vivian said to herself. The family motto. Vivian’s motto, and not just because he’d never met another Hardwick to compare her to. The words of their family were written into her as immutably as the shared greyness of their eyes, deep as DNA.
It was what had driven her to leave Denizen behind all those years ago, and what had driven him to forgive her for it. Staying with him would have meant giving up fighting, and that was one of the few things Vivian was incapable of.
‘Mercy.’
Yes?
The Tenebrous condensed round the word, and the sudden cold only fed the fire in Denizen’s stomach. What was –
‘You heard what Dragon said. You know where the King is.’
Yes.
‘And if Dragon is … can you get out of here? Can you bring the King back and end this?’
Her voice was solemn.
I promise you.
‘I don’t care about your promises.’ Vivian’s voice was almost a snarl. ‘I care about … just do it. Prove that you haven’t been a lie all this time.’
She turned away before Mercy could answer, and pulled Grey close, whispering urgently in his ear. Denizen strained to hear her, but Dragon took off again, the downwash crazing the air with grime, and her words were lost in the echoing boom.
All he caught was Grey’s response. ‘You’d trust me with that?’
There was no expression at all on Vivian’s face.
‘I never stopped trusting you.’
I’m going to find you, Mercy, if I have to tear this whole city down!
And then she and Denizen were face to face.
‘Vivian, what are we going to –’
‘Shh,’ Vivian said, and caught his cheek with her cold iron hand. ‘Do you know why we called you Denizen?’
‘What?’ Denizen said, so surprised he forgot to be quiet. ‘I don’t think this is the –’