Knights of the Borrowed Dark

by Dave Rudden

  The wind was starting to rise.

  “Why are you telling me this?” Denizen said. He knew the answer even before he asked. There was generally only one reason people in this situation became chatty. They didn’t expect the information to go any further.

  Sure enough, the gun rose to point right between Denizen’s eyes. Grey’s hand shook, but at this range there was no chance he’d miss.

  Denizen took a deep breath. He’d have to be quick. If Grey got the slightest inkling that Denizen was going to draw on his power, the Knight wouldn’t hesitate. Could he get out the Sunrise Cant before Grey killed him? Maybe even attempting it would do Grey’s job for him.

  Strangely, Denizen didn’t feel afraid. Maybe you did get used to life-or-death situations. This was…what? Five now? He’d lost count. He’d actually lost count.

  The cold breath of the wind carried a tear down his cheek.

  Mam. Dad. I’ll see you soon.

  Denizen Hardwick reached for his power—

  —and the gun went off.

  The sound was so loud that Denizen staggered backward. His concentration frayed and the power slipped from his grasp, scalding his mind as it went.

  His first thought—I’ve been shot—pushed everything else out of his head. It was only when no pain followed that he realized what had happened.

  Smoke rose from the mouth of the gun. Grey had jerked it aside at the last second, the bullet disappearing to ricochet against the orphanage’s walls. The Knight’s eyes were wild, his teeth gritted, sweat pouring down his face.

  “Run,” he said. “Please.”

  And suddenly Denizen understood. Grey had been told to keep them both here; as horrible as it sounded, shooting Vivian technically wasn’t disobeying an order. But to let Denizen leave went directly against an order by the Three. It was hurting him. Hurting him terribly. As Denizen watched, a trickle of blood escaped Grey’s nose to paint his trembling lips bright red. The clockwork of his hand whined as it ground against itself.

  “Go,” he snarled.

  “They’ll kill you,” Denizen said. “They’ll kill you for this.”

  Grey flashed him a mad smile. “One can only hope.”

  Denizen ran.

  —

  THE STARS WERE knife wounds in the sky.

  Even without the Lucidum, it would have been bright enough to see the thumbnail scrape of Keem Bay and the distant crashing waves. The road was a thin scar of black against the mountainside, and Denizen ran until he felt his heart would stop.

  Where he was running to escaped him at the moment. He wasn’t really running to anything. Right now his life was mostly about running from.

  His heels pounded against stone. He didn’t dare look back at Crosscaper, and not just because he was running down a steep hillside road and one slip would do what Grey had planned but with a lot less noise.

  Was that why the Three had chosen Crosscaper for their nefarious schemes? None of that difficult body disposal nonsense, not when you could just push the body off the side of a mountain.

  Denizen slowed as a thought struck him. Why had they chosen Crosscaper? He stopped, finally looking back at the dark shape of the orphanage. He should be running. That was the priority right now, not trying to figure out the motives of those creatures.

  And yet…

  Frown No. 1—I Don’t Understand. His least favorite.

  Why had the Clockwork Three come to Crosscaper? They’d been here before, according to Grey, but why come back? They wanted misery—loved it, fed on it—and so Crosscaper must have been quite attractive. But why bring Vivian and Denizen somewhere where there’d be a hundred witnesses and general panic?

  They must have made the orphanage their own, felt safe enough here to use it as a place of ambush. Fear for Simon and the others made his throat clench, but there was something else too. In fact, the more Denizen thought about it…

  Crosscaper was the perfect place to hide something you didn’t want anyone to find.

  The mercy of the King.

  Denizen had to get inside. If he could find out what it was, somehow return it to the King or get it back to Seraphim Row…Of course, to do that he’d have to get by Grey—a powerful and dangerous Knight, even before the Three had unhinged him—and search an entire orphanage before the Clockwork Three returned.

  Denizen was also counting on knowing what the mercy looked like when he saw it. The Woman in White had looked human, right up until she hadn’t. The whole thing seemed like one impossibility after another.

  Of course, my other option is to go and find a nice spot to watch the apocalypse.

  Denizen let out a put-upon sigh that did absolutely nothing to make him feel any better and went to look for the mercy of a god.

  SNEAKING UP ON people was so much easier when they didn’t have perfect night vision.

  Luckily, Denizen had grown up on these hills. He had played innumerable games of hide-and-seek and catch here, and it was surprising how quickly the knowledge of lines of sight came back. Crawling up the hill, his body pressed as close to the grass as he could get without actually breathing dirt, Denizen’s eyes never left the now-closed gates of Crosscaper.

  It took him the best part of twenty minutes to half crawl, half scuttle round to the back of Crosscaper, the huge walls of the orphanage working in his favor by hiding his approach.

  There was no sign of Grey anywhere, or anyone who might be a part of the Clockwork Three. As he crept toward the rear of the building, Denizen racked his brains for any mention of the Three in the books at Seraphim Row.

  She hurt them, you see. Eleven years ago, she hurt them worse than anyone’s ever hurt them before.

  The words went round and round in his skull. She hurt them. The look on Vivian’s face when she heard about the Woman in White attacking Denizen in Rathláth. The fact that if the Three hadn’t sent Vivian a message luring her here, the Knights would likely never have found them.

  The Three can’t get her out of their heads.

  Eleven years ago. Just before he’d been placed in Crosscaper. And Vivian hated them enough to put aside her duty to the Order and risk plunging the world into darkness.

  Had the Clockwork Three killed his parents?

  Denizen slid the last couple meters down the slope and crossed the driveway in a few quick strides. Power crackled through him, not because he had any intention of using it, but simply because it was a comfort.

  People hid things. They kept secrets. They changed, or they lied, or they left. They betrayed you, or they let you down. Fire was honest. It just wanted to burn.

  Angry tears stung Denizen’s eyes. He blinked furiously to clear them.

  The tradesmen’s entrance of Crosscaper was just a small doorway set into the stone wall. Someone—the Three?—had half torn the door from its hinges. Denizen eased himself round it, careful not to make any noise.

  I’ll know it when I see it. Denizen’s lips moved silently as he went from doorway to doorway, freezing every time he heard a sound that wasn’t his own heartbeat. He weaved through upturned furniture, stepped delicately over broken glass.

  Boredom. That was what Grey had said. They liked hurting things, and they got bored easily.

  He shoved the thought out of his head. The Three could return at any moment. Grey could find him and be unable to resist their orders a second time.

  I’ll know it when I see it. I’ll know it when I see it.

  He made his way through the kitchen, eyeing the hanging pots and pans suspiciously as if they might just jump free of their hooks and clatter to the floor.

  How big was mercy? How much did it weigh? Should he be checking every cupboard? Peering into teapots? He didn’t have time to go through the place with a fine-tooth comb. He desperately wanted to rush through the halls, looking for Simon and the others—check that they were OK, what had happened—but he couldn’t. He had to find the mercy. Crosscaper was huge, and he had only so much time.

  Finding it wo
uld help them too.

  He tried to think where he would hide something valuable in the orphanage.

  Ackerby’s office? The library? There were bits of Crosscaper that were off-limits to the kids—what if it were in the basement or locked in the infirmary? Maybe the Three had been careless. There had to be some kind of luck coming his way.

  Well, wherever it was, it wasn’t in the kitchen. Denizen was about to leave when a click behind him made his heart nearly stop. He spun, his whole body tensed, his hands raised to…what, he didn’t know. It took him a couple of seconds to work out where the noise had come from.

  The pantry door had cracked open and a pair of eyes stared out, as wide and shocked as his.

  Denizen’s mouth worked, but it was a long time before any sound came out. Finally, he managed to choke out a single word.

  “Simon?”

  Unheeded by either of the boys, the door swung fully open, revealing the sorry state of his best friend.

  Simon looked like Denizen felt. Somewhere underneath the shock, Denizen noted that his best friend, never the stoutest of boys, had lost even more weight. There were dark circles under his eyes, and his skin was pasty white, as if he hadn’t seen the sun in weeks. He didn’t even seem to recognize his best friend, his eyes darting from Denizen to the ceiling and back again with the nervous energy of a rat.

  “You’re not real,” he whispered. “You’re not…”

  And then he flickered. Just for an instant, so quickly Denizen wasn’t even sure it had happened at all. Simon vanished and reappeared in the exact same spot like a TV signal being interrupted or a hologram from a science-fiction story. Denizen scrubbed at his eyes and stared.

  “You’re not real,” Simon hissed, and yanked the pantry door shut.

  “I am real!” Denizen said, and then winced at both the loudness and stupidity of what he had just said.

  He crossed the room and tried the door handle. He’d never been in the pantry, but there couldn’t be a lock on the other side—Simon must be holding it shut. He sighed and pressed his head against the wood.

  “Simon,” he whispered as loud as he dared. “Simon.”

  There was no answer. Denizen let out an aggravated sigh and thought hard for a second.

  “Ask me something,” he said. That was how they proved these things in books, wasn’t it? “Em…ask me something that only I could know.” He fought the urge to bang his head on the door.

  Finally, he heard a small voice.

  “Ask you something?”

  “Yes,” Denizen said eagerly. “Ask me something. Anything. Come on. I can prove I’m real. Hang on…we’ll do birthday presents.” He thought for a second. “No, wait. Something else. That’s too obvious. Em…remember when we climbed up the Point? No—that tie Mr. Colford used to wear. His Monday tie. What if we—”

  He stepped back in surprise as the handle began to turn. Simon was staring at him with tears in his eyes.

  “I told you,” he said, voice cracking with relief, “not to overthink stuff.”

  —

  THERE WAS LITTLE time for catching up, but Simon spoke quickly and desperately. His voice was raw. It had been a long time since he’d spoken aloud.

  “I stumbled right into her, Denizen,” the boy whispered, his face ashen. “I’d hidden for so long, weeks of running, barely eating, and then on my birthday…”

  He shivered, and as he did so, a pale translucence stole across his skin. Denizen could faintly see the shelves of the pantry behind—no, through—him. There was a lost look on his best friend’s face.

  “I remember this sick heat in my stomach, and wishing harder than I’ve ever wished for anything that she wouldn’t see me, and she turned round slowly…so slowly, and then…It comes and goes. After the first time, I slept for nearly a day.”

  Denizen spoke carefully. “Simon…can I see your hand?”

  “How did you know?” Simon said, holding his hand out to show him the spot of iron in the middle of his palm.

  “Happy birthday,” Denizen said quietly.

  A picture of what had happened was building in his mind. When Denizen’s connection to the Tenebrae had bloomed, he’d been angry, angrier than he’d ever been, and it had manifested as fire. He’d lashed out at Vivian with an inferno of raw light.

  Simon had been trying to hide. He’d done an incredible job of avoiding the Three for so long, and at the moment he’d nearly failed, his power had saved him. He had channeled the power of the Tenebrae unconsciously and hidden himself.

  Not that it hadn’t taken its toll—Denizen could see that much. Despite his relief at finding a familiar face, Simon was a shell of his former self. His shoulders trembled, his eyes darting to every shadow as if expecting to be caught at any moment.

  That paranoia was probably what had kept him alive.

  “Simon, we don’t have much time, OK?”

  The other boy nodded, thin shoulders trembling involuntarily.

  “Where is everybody?”

  Simon explained about the strange sleep that had kept the others frozen in their dreams.

  “It nourishes the monsters somehow,” Simon said. “That’s what the man said. Misery feeds them.”

  Denizen’s lip twisted in disgust. That’s what Grey had said too. There was nothing he could do about that now, though. They were still alive, and he had to hope that by finding the mercy, he could somehow break whatever influence the Three had over them.

  He asked Simon if he’d seen anything that might be called a mercy, but Simon shook his head.

  “I heard them mention a cage, but that was all. I’ve been nearly everywhere in the last few weeks, and I haven’t seen anything.”

  Denizen scrubbed a hand over his face. Why is nothing ever easy?

  “Simon, you need to get out of here,” he said. “Go back to the tradesmen’s entrance—it’s open. Find somewhere to hide where you can see the door. If I don’t come back in half an hour, or if you see the Three or anyone else, run. Use your power if you have to. OK?”

  “I’m not leaving you—”

  Denizen shook his head. He could see how much it cost Simon to say that. He must have dreamt about nothing else since the Three had come.

  “I’m leaving too,” he said. “I just need to take a look around.”

  “But—”

  “But what?” Denizen said.

  Simon’s shaking stilled. “But you came back for me.”

  Denizen hugged Simon fiercely, and then gave him his best approximation of Vivian Hardwick’s stare. “I did. And now I need to know that you’re safe. Go.”

  Reluctantly, Simon went. Denizen would have liked nothing more than to go after him, even just to make sure his tormented friend got out safely, but—

  Duty first. Strangely, the thought came to him in Vivian’s voice.

  Denizen made his way to the front of the building, checking carefully round each corner before inching his way forward. There was no sign of the Three or Grey. That was reassuring in one sense, except he knew they had to be somewhere. It was like noticing a spider and then looking back and seeing that it was gone. Nowhere was safe.

  He found Director Ackerby sprawled in Crosscaper’s front hall, one hand stretched toward—but not quite reaching—the fire alarm. Denizen knelt beside him. The director’s breathing was high and thready, a staccato wheeze of fear. Had he been trying to warn the children of Crosscaper when the dark sleep had come over him?

  Denizen suddenly felt an absurd sort of affection for the man. A few weeks ago, Ackerby had been the scariest thing about Denizen’s life—the yellow memos, the cold stare, the rules about where you could and couldn’t go—

  Denizen’s eyes narrowed as he glanced round the hall. The basement door was open. The basement door was never open—Ackerby always kept it locked. As if drawn by some irresistible force, Denizen eased back the heavy oak door and made his way down the stairs.

  A long, lightless corridor stretched away before him, the do
ors marked with labels like 001A—FINANCIAL RECORDS and 002A—STAFF REPORTS. If whatever the Clockwork Three had taken was small, it could take him months to find it down here.

  He was just about to try one of the offices when an unearthly roar made the walls shake. It echoed down the corridor like a tidal wave, the sound as deafening as if he stood inside a massive clock striking twelve. Dust rained down from the ceiling, painting his shoulders and face in white. Denizen staggered, falling back against the wall and clutching his ears.

  “All right,” he said once the earth-shattering noise had faded, his voice strange and tinny in his own ears, “maybe it isn’t small.”

  The mercy. He ran toward the source, hands pressed over his ears in case the eerie howl sounded again. Turning a corner, he found a room the size of a basketball court, the walls beige and the floor rough concrete, littered with the eviscerated remains of a hundred filing cabinets. They had all been flipped onto their backs and flung around as if they’d been swept up in a tornado. Files had slid from the rents in the metal, spilling out over the floor in great dunes and drifts of manila folders and strewn papers.

  This must be where all the records of Crosscaper had been kept, but now it looked like it had played host to a fight between a pack of giant cats. The fluorescent bulbs above had been smashed from their sockets. Glass frosted the piles of paper like icing sugar.

  Someone had taken great care to sweep the center of the room clean of files and folders to make way for a circle of red chalk on the bare floor.

  Denizen took a tentative step closer. And in the circle’s center…

  This time the blast of sound lifted him off his feet entirely. He had time to let out a shocked yell—drowned out completely by the preternatural scream—before landing on his back so hard all the air was pounded from his lungs.

  His ribs thrummed painfully in his chest, his vision swimming. Light suddenly speared from the center of the circle, as cold and fractured as the heart of a glacier.

  Denizen pushed himself to his feet, head pounding. It was only then he realized that the hellish din was three words, bellowed over and over again until they bled into one shrieking assault.