Knights of the Borrowed Dark

by Dave Rudden

  Clockwork. Like the white woman.

  “They’re in Crosscaper,” Denizen said numbly. “It’s a message.”

  Grey glanced back down the corridor. “It’s a trap. They’re luring her right to them, and I’m not leaving your aunt to face them alone.”

  “How will we get there?” Denizen asked, already shrugging on his coat. “Is there another car—”

  Grey whipped a hand through the air. The Cant he spoke was far too complex for Denizen to follow—a surge of dizziness, the taste of rain, a gale sucking at your throat. No sooner had it drifted from Grey’s lips than the shadow cast by Denizen’s open door seemed to invert—falling into itself with a sound like ripping silk.

  Denizen’s stomach lurched. It was like he was back at the cliffs behind Crosscaper, staring out over the drop, vertigo swaying his heels. There was a chill breeze on his face.

  “The Art of Apertura,” Grey said. “A method of slinking through shadows. Dangerous. Very dangerous. Even Vivian only uses it sparingly. But you saw her tonight. If we don’t hurry, we’ll never catch up with her.”

  Denizen nodded slowly. Suddenly he thought of Abigail. “Should we—”

  Grey jerked his head toward the shadow on the wall. “No time. Go.”

  For a second, Denizen felt like Grey was playing some ludicrous joke on him, that Denizen would walk forward and bang his face on the stone wall. His stomach still churned, though, as if he were suspended over some great height.

  Like a Breach, he thought. Like the first stirrings of a Breach.

  “Do I just…step into it?”

  Grey was drumming his fingers on the side of his cheek, his words forced out through gritted teeth. “Yes. Just—” The veil of shadow pulsed behind him. “Step in. The Cost will show you the way. And whatever you do, don’t open your eyes. Understand?”

  No, Denizen thought. Not at all, actually. “What—”

  “Now or never, kid,” Grey said. There was a bright sheen of sweat on his forehead. “Are you a Hardwick or not?”

  Denizen’s eyes narrowed. He took a deep breath and stepped into darkness.

  DENIZEN FELL THROUGH a sunless sea.

  His limbs drifted in the murk, slow as dreaming, something like a heartbeat pounding sluggishly nearby. His eyes were screwed shut. His chest burned with the need to breathe, but somehow he knew that opening his mouth would be a mistake. There was still a core of warmth in him, and inhaling the dark water of this place would put it out.

  He had no idea how long he fell. Years seemed to pass. He knew without opening his eyes that there was no light beyond them—no, more than that, there had never been light. Light had never existed; water was all there was to the world, deep and black and cold.

  There was a pain in the palm of his hand.

  Soon he forgot the feel of sunlight. He forgot whether he was falling or rising, forgot what his name had been before the water had surrounded him.

  Calm stole over him. His arms slowed. His heartbeat slowed with it.

  Centuries, drifting in the dark.

  And then—

  The water shivered. He didn’t open his eyes to see what might have caused it. What would be the point? There had never been anything to see and no light to see it with.

  And then—

  Again. A disturbance in the sea, the water displaced as if something huge had passed him by. He twisted his head for the first time in a thousand years.

  Nothing. It was hard to think. It was like the water had seeped into him, made him heavy and slow.

  The shape circled again, a vastness that shook the world, dragging him along in the backwash of its current. His hand ached like it had been punctured by a needle of frozen steel.

  Denizen—That’s my name, my name is Denizen—shook his head to clear the numbing cold. Thoughts began to return.

  Memories. Awareness. Fear.

  Something circled him and he couldn’t see it. The prey part of his brain urged him to open his eyes, to kick, to flee, to get as far away from this unseen predator as he could. And there was something else too—a new heat coiled round his spine.

  Denizen began to swim.

  His movements were slow at first, hatefully slow. It wasn’t a needle through his hand; it was a hook—and he had to strain against it with every stroke. Up or down, forward or back—he didn’t care. Anything was better than waiting here like dangling bait.

  The unseen predator circled faster, as if his panic excited it.

  The Cost will show you what to do.

  The frozen ache in the center of his hand was iron, the iron of his world. The most here thing there is. He stopped fighting its pull, sweeping his arm through the chill until he felt it, a tug so strong Denizen nearly cried out.

  He clawed his way toward it. Where else am I going to go?

  The thing circling him grew restless, its unseen limbs writhing, tearing the water apart in its wake. There were more now. He could feel them—drawn by his struggles and the hammering of his heart—but he didn’t care.

  The harder he swam, the stronger the pull became. Denizen began to fall toward it, as if the whole sea were emptying out through that single burning point. Just as he reached it, an eddy spun him, and his eyes opened with shock, and Denizen Hardwick saw what had been circling him, their huge and terrible shapes….

  He opened his mouth to scream—

  —and fell out onto wet earth.

  He coughed and spluttered. Air reached his lungs, and that first breath was the sweetest thing he’d ever tasted. For a long moment, all Denizen could do was let his chest rise and fall, reacquainting himself with how utterly magic breathing was. How had he never noticed that before? All this air around and he had taken it completely for granted. He rolled onto his back and stared up at the sky.

  At the sky.

  They were no longer in Seraphim Row. The sky above was a tumble of diamonds across velvet—stars, shining so bright they made Denizen squint. They were beautiful. No, more than that.

  They were familiar.

  “Are you all right?”

  After so long in silence and dark water, it took a moment for Denizen to understand the words.

  “Denizen?”

  There was a man standing over him, a concerned look on his face. Grey. Denizen shook his head to clear it, oily black water beading the ground beneath him. He started as each of the droplets came apart in a thin streamer of black smoke, as did the water soaking his coat and jeans. It boiled away as if it couldn’t stand the touch of the real world. The sensation made his skin tighten uncomfortably, but in moments he was completely dry, the smoke hanging in the air for a second before it too faded.

  Grey knelt beside him. “First time is always a bit rough.”

  “Was…was that the Tenebrae?” Denizen said a little shakily. Don’t open your eyes. A Knight could see in the darkness, but just because you could didn’t mean you should. What he had seen…what he had almost seen…the barest glimpse of it….He shivered so hard his teeth clacked painfully.

  Grey’s nod was sympathetic. “We can dart through its shallows as a sort of…shortcut.” He took a ragged breath. “Just need to watch out for the sharks.”

  The iron of his palm still shivered with a phantom ache. Denizen never thought he’d be grateful for it.

  “Come on,” said Grey.

  Denizen got to his feet and just…stared.

  Everything was as he remembered—the beach gleaming silver in the moonlight, the vast bulk of the mountain behind, Moyteoge Point curving down into the bay like the curled tail of a prehistoric beast. Mountains marched off into the distance, their shapes as familiar to him as the angles of his face. Even the air smelled the same.

  But Crosscaper itself…

  The Aperture had left them where the orphanage driveway met the road, a hundred or so meters from the gates. All Denizen could think of as he and Grey approached was that someone must have come in when Denizen was gone and dismantled it—taken it apart, ston
e by stone, and replaced it with bricks a little smaller, materials a little shabbier.

  The place loomed in his memory, a vast labyrinth containing every fragment of his childhood. Now Denizen couldn’t believe it was so small.

  “Come on,” Grey called. Denizen hurried after him.

  Vivian Hardwick knelt in front of the open gates, her hammer planted squarely in front of her in the ground. Beyond her Denizen could see the torn-open, charred remains of a car, metal twisted apart like the petals of a flower. And beyond that—

  A body. Denizen lunged, but Vivian’s hand caught him square in the chest.

  “No,” he snarled, squirming. “Who—”

  “Stop,” she said, and pushed him back toward Grey. “He’s alive. Just sleeping.”

  “What—”

  “That’s what they do,” she said, rising to her feet. “Like spiders wrapping their prey in silk so they can…so they can feed.”

  The look Vivian gave them then would have given the Endless King pause.

  “What are you doing here?” Her eyes gleamed far too brightly in the moonlight—she was holding her power, a lot of it. Plumes of breath smoked between her teeth, heated by the inferno within.

  Denizen threw the piece of clockwork at her. Vivian looked so surprised she actually took a step backward.

  “What is wrong with you?” He didn’t know whether it was nearly a month of utter frustration at the way he’d been treated or the liquid fire in his chest, but, terrifying warrior or not, Denizen was absolutely sick of the great Malleus Vivian Hardwick. “Why won’t you tell us what’s going on?”

  “Grey,” Vivian snapped, “get him out of here—”

  “No!” Denizen countered. “You need to tell me what’s going on. What happened eleven years ago? Your whole cadre died, all of them, and the next day I’m dumped in Crosscaper. What happened?”

  He was shouting now. He couldn’t help it. He knew he should stop talking—if anything, he was completely ruining their chance of sneaking up on anybody—but he couldn’t help himself. Everything he’d been dying to say to his aunt spilled out, and he couldn’t have closed his mouth even if he’d wanted to.

  “They killed your friends and they killed my parents, didn’t they? Didn’t they? Just tell me. Tell me the truth!”

  Vivian stared at him. “Denizen.” Her voice trailed away. He blinked away hot tears, turning away from her. “I never planned to…”

  “Never planned to what?” Denizen said, a lump in his throat.

  “I never planned to let it go this far….”

  She stepped past Grey, reached out a hand—

  —and was suddenly flung forward into Denizen’s arms by the loudest sound he’d ever heard. Her eyes, shocked and wide, found Denizen’s just for a moment before closing, her weight bearing him to the ground.

  Grey lowered the pistol, a look of despair on his face.

  “Well,” he said hollowly, “you know what they say about plans.”

  “YOU HAVE TO understand,” Grey said, staring down at Vivian’s body in its spreading pool of blood. “This is a mercy.”

  The shot still echoed against the walls of Crosscaper, chasing itself round the bay before finally escaping into the sky. Denizen had never heard a sound like it before—the unnatural, violent loudness of it. The noise was the sound barrier breaking. Had he read that somewhere? Denizen couldn’t remember. He’d never had occasion to think of it before. He’d never…

  “You…”

  Panic squeezed Denizen’s throat. His hands began to shake.

  “You shot her.”

  The stupidest statement ever uttered. The most idiotic arrangement of words in the universe.

  Grey’s eyes were wild. “So I did.”

  His hand was trembling as badly as Denizen’s. The gun swayed left, then right. Denizen couldn’t take his eyes off it. More than any other weapon he’d seen in Seraphim Row, including actual magic weapons, the gun had a power to it—like gravity, its muzzle a black hole exerting irresistible force.

  Why did Grey even carry a gun? Did guns work on Tenebrous? Or was it just for Denizen’s relatives?

  Focus. The thought had an edge of hysteria. Oh God. Focus.

  Grey was looking past him at Crosscaper, a sort of dreamy recognition on his face. “I grew up in a place like this,” he said.

  “Grey,” Denizen said. Each word had to be dragged up from somewhere deep. “What…what are you doing?”

  “They call it thralldom,” Grey said, and there was the most awful look of despair on his face.

  “They took me in that village. Did things to me, and then made me forget. I didn’t know what was wrong. I’d hear a clock and I’d flinch. I’d dream of buttons, bright buttons on a waistcoat. Pale fingers. The smell of cigarettes. The sobbing. God, the sobbing of the Boy.”

  The gun shook in his hand. “But now it’s all been coming back to me. What they are. What they want me to do.”

  “What are you talking about?” Denizen asked. Grey’s left eyelid was twitching. He’d looked like hell the last few weeks, but now he appeared positively unhinged.

  “They’re called the Clockwork Three,” Grey whispered. “I can tell you now. Their control…it comes and goes.” He grimaced. “They have a poisonous kind of inconsistency. I hear…I hear ticking. It vibrates along my bones. It makes me…It makes me do things and I don’t remember them. Not unless they want me to. Not unless they want me to hurt.”

  He scrubbed a hand through his long hair. The action was so unconsciously Grey that it made Denizen sick.

  This couldn’t be his friend—this wretched, stammering thing that had just gunned down the only family Denizen had left. He’d been told that the older Tenebrous were capable of anything, but seeing it in front of him made his stomach rebel.

  “The Man in the Waistcoat. The Woman in White. The Opening Boy. The Boy is every child they’ve ever hurt. They keep him just to…just to make him watch.”

  With horror, Denizen realized Grey was crying.

  “They want a war. They want He-Who-Is-Endless to come. A little more misery in the world. The King wins, the Order wins—it doesn’t matter. They just want to pick the bones. They wanted me to bring you here. Both of you. The last two Hardwicks.”

  “But why?” Denizen said, suddenly hating the pleading tone that had crept into his voice. “Why us? What do we have to do with starting a war?”

  “Symmetry,” Grey said miserably. “They were going to take you from Vivian, just like they stole from the Endless King. Your wrong birthday saved your life—they thought you were normal, useless to the Order.”

  He swallowed thickly. “Now they know different. But they want you anyway, if it helps. All their plans and schemes, and they still can’t help following their stomachs. Seeking vengeance. Chasing whatever shiny thing is in front of them.”

  Grey’s jaw twisted with sudden rage. “Animals.”

  He leaned over and picked up Vivian’s hammer. The sight of him touching it made Denizen irrationally angry. How dare he?

  Power suddenly woke in his heart, sending tendrils of heat through his veins. Grey had shot his aunt in the back. In the back. That’s not how Vivian Hardwick should die. She should fall in battle. Yield not to evil.

  Not like this. Not betrayed by someone who was supposed to be her comrade. The power of the Tenebrae coiled in him, ready to strike.

  “Don’t,” Grey said tiredly. “You know you don’t have a chance against me. Don’t make me hurt you any more than I have to.”

  He stared down at Vivian’s body.

  “This is a mercy, Denizen. Their process isn’t…perfect. I can fight it, find ways round the things they make me do. They made me leave the envelope where Vivian could find it. I was just supposed to keep you both here until they return. They give me orders, but there are loopholes. Wiggle room. I can take them literally. They never said not to…They never…

  “This is better for her. I know what they were going to
do to her. At least this was quick. A last service to my Malleus.”

  He believed it too. Denizen could see that. There was a sort of raw hope in his face as if he expected…understanding? Forgiveness?

  Denizen’s hands curled into fists. “If you can fight their control, why are you doing this? Fight harder. Isn’t that what a Knight’s supposed to do? A hundred mouths, a hundred tongues, one iron voice? Grey, fight. You just have to—”

  “Don’t quote the motto of the Order back to me,” Grey snapped. “I’ve been fighting by those words for thirteen years. I know what they mean.

  “But iron rusts,” he whispered in a wretched voice. “Enough casualties on both sides and a war will happen whether the King has his mercy or not. But that’s not enough for the Clockwork Three anymore. They’re not used to being in this world for so long. They’re fraying, getting distracted. And they hate Vivian.

  “She hurt them, you see. Eleven years ago, she hurt them worse than anyone’s ever hurt them before. They can’t get her out of their heads.”

  A glove fluttered to the ground.

  “And I can’t get them out of mine.”

  Grey’s hand had turned to clockwork. The iron skin had split—toothed ridges forcing their way up through the flat of his palm, jagged hollows filled with minute cogs and casters. The fingernails had fallen away, dislodged by rising pins and components Denizen had no name for.

  Denizen had almost become used to seeing the effects of the Cost, but this was something else entirely—a shaping unnatural and wrong, like a Breach in the shape of a claw.

  A ragged strip of skin wound through the gears like a ribbon caught in the bowels of a machine, and as Denizen watched in horror, Grey tore it free.

  With a rattling hiss, the gears began to turn.

  “Horrible, isn’t it?” Grey said, and he was almost his old self again. “But it won’t be for much longer.” His voice hardened. “And do you know what the funny thing is? Vivian’s just as bad as they are.

  “They sent her that card to provoke her, like children picking a fight out of boredom. She could have brought reinforcements, other cadres—hell, with her reputation, she could have brought half the Order…but she didn’t. She wanted them all for herself.”