Knights of the Borrowed Dark

by Dave Rudden

  LETMEOUTLETMEOUTLETMEOUTLETMEOUT!

  Denizen’s nose was bleeding. His ears ached.

  The circle held a girl made of smoke and silver, her head thrown back to scream at the world. Her hair and eyes were knitted from storms, lightning crackling down her cheeks to bite and twitch in the air. She opened her mouth and that glacial light streamed out once again like a solar flare in polar white.

  She was beautiful. The thought came from nowhere as Denizen wiped blood from his lip with the back of his hand. She had the beauty of a natural disaster, a raw and primal terror that couldn’t help making him stare.

  She was a Tenebrous—he had no doubt about that—but he had never read about one like this before. Tenebrous built a body from whatever they could find in the human realm, but this girl looked like she’d carved herself out of the heart of a cold and storm-riddled star.

  Her fists lashed out to strike against the empty air with a thrumming concussion of light and noise, as if the chalk circle was some kind of barrier.

  Or a cage.

  LETMEOUTLETMEOUTLETMEOUTLETMEOUT!

  “You’re it,” Denizen said, the words escaping before he could pull them back. “You’re what was taken from the Endless King.”

  She spun, carving a comet trail in the air, and stared down at him with eyes of searing white.

  MY NAME, the girl said, voice shaking the walls, IS MERCY.

  “OH,” SAID DENIZEN, for lack of anything cleverer to say. “Hi.”

  The Tenebrous girl came apart in curlicues of mist and lightning, re-forming within the confines of the circle with her arms folded.

  Her shape changed constantly, shifting from moment to moment until his eyes burned just trying to follow her. The swirling glow of her spine kinked upward, spreading into wide wings of silver-veined luminescence before collapsing into a rain of sparks that left patterns of soot on the concrete floor.

  Her features were just as mutable. One moment her hair was short and ragged, the color of a summer sky, and the next a veiling shroud of white long enough to scrape soot marks on the floor. Her eyes veered between slanted fissures and shining wide orbs, their glow bright enough to blind.

  There were only two constants: first, no matter what form she took, no part of her ever crossed the red chalk circle; and second, her expression was of absolute fury.

  COME TO GLOAT, WHELP? COME TO MOCK YOUR PRISONER?

  Denizen staggered under the barrage of sound. It was like being insulted by an artillery range. There was such contempt in her voice.

  It was that more than anything that made Denizen lose his patience.

  He’d had quite enough of every single aspect of his life right now and on top of everything the person he was supposed to rescue was treating him like a particularly disgusting type of beetle.

  “No, actually,” he snapped acidly. “I’m here to rescue you.”

  The girl of storms blinked in shock.

  WHAT?

  “Rescue you,” Denizen said again in the same annoyed tone. “I’m here to save you from the Clockwork Three. Not”—he kicked some files out of the way—“that I’m expecting a thank-you or anything. With the kind of day I’ve been having, I expect you’ll try to kill me when I free you. Everyone else has. It won’t even be difficult. I’ve had about”—he half slid down another drift of folders, barely catching himself from pitching headlong into the circle—“ten minutes’ training since this whole debacle started.”

  The Tenebrous girl—Mercy—stared at him with wide eyes.

  DEBACLE?

  This time her voice was slightly quieter, a gale that merely shivered down his spine and fluttered the paper around him.

  “It’s a word,” he said distantly as he stared down at the chalk circle, “that means ‘disaster.’ ”

  At first glance, it looked distressingly mundane. Weren’t magic circles supposed to have strange letters and runes that made your eyes hurt when you looked at them? Denizen would even have settled for a standard kind of ambient glow.

  This was just…a circle. It wasn’t even a proper one—one of the edges was slightly squashed as if it had been drawn freehand. You wouldn’t see a sorcerer in a book drawing freehand, Denizen mused, though now that he thought about it, he couldn’t imagine one using compasses either. Then again, just because it looked simple didn’t mean it wasn’t incredibly dangerous. That was the other thing fantasy books said about magical circles—they were supposed to take your hand off if you messed with them.

  Denizen knelt, careful not to let any part of him touch the circle’s edge.

  WAIT.

  Mercy hovered closer, but he ignored her. You’re sulking, a part of him said. No I’m not, said another, and if I am so what? I’m saving the world.

  Probably.

  “Yes?” he said finally, holding a finger just shy of the chalk. If he concentrated, he could feel…there, the tiniest tension to the air, like holding your hand close to a live power cable.

  YOU ARE GOING TO FREE ME?

  She sounded dubious. He supposed he couldn’t blame her.

  “As soon as I figure out how,” he said, racking his brains to try to remember if there’d been any mention of things like this in his training. Was he supposed to rub out some of the circle?

  Denizen couldn’t help being aware of the strong possibility that doing something wrong might cause an explosive backlash…and he was sitting on a pile of flammable papers with all his childhood friends asleep upstairs. Somehow, he didn’t think burning the building down would improve the situation.

  He chanced a quick glance up at the Tenebrous girl floating above him. She appeared confused.

  JUST LIKE THAT?

  “Just like that.”

  NO DEMANDS? NO BARGAINING?

  “Should I be bargaining?” Denizen said, and now he knew he was sulking. “Sorry. I’m new at this. Tell you what, go back to the Endless King—tell him that it was someone from the Order who freed you and we’ll be even. He can recall his Pursuivants. Everything can go back to normal. How does that sound?”

  The Tenebrous was silent for a moment.

  Done, she said, and this time her voice was as soft as a spring breeze. And done, and sworn again, Iron Knight.

  “I’m not a Knight,” Denizen said. “I’m just a…My aunt was supposed to be here. She’d know how to free you. I don’t know what I’m doing. My aunt would…”

  Suddenly it felt like the events of the last few hours all caught up with him at once. He swallowed and sat back on a pile of folders. Why was he here? Vivian was the one who’d know what to do.

  “He shot her,” Denizen blurted. “Grey—the Three did something to him and he shot her and I have no idea what I’m doing and I have to stop them because if I don’t then there’s going to be war and I really wish—I really wish—”

  Mercy’s form steadied, the shifting light that made up her body coalescing into something that resembled a human girl in a simple white dress. She still glowed—her skin lit from within by a kind of chilly phosphorescence—but aside from that she might have been his own age, her hair a cascade of crackling white.

  I had eluded my father’s guards, she said, and a ripple ran through her, as if she were a pond disturbed by a stone. I like exploring. Peering up at all the different worlds. They used the Boy. The Opening Boy. I heard such sobbing and I went to see, to help and…

  She shivered.

  They took me. I’d never been in your world before. So bright. So hard. Everything staying the same shape always. How do you— She took a long breath. The shock nearly killed me. I slept, and I dreamt, and when I woke I was trapped in this cage.

  She peered at him. I will trust you. You are capable.

  Denizen raised his head to look at her. “How do you know?”

  Her voice was soft. Because you are all this moment has.

  Find a way to release me, and I shall return to my father. I will tell him that it was one of the Order who released me. That it was th
e Clockwork Three—and at the mention of their names her eyes flared, lightning seething from her lips—and they alone that abducted me. His justice will fall on their wretched bones and there will be no war. Your aunt will not have fallen in vain.

  Denizen frowned. He wanted to trust her. At this point in the evening, he could really do with someone on his side. The daughter of a dark and terrible king wasn’t exactly ideal, but it was better than nothing. She’d been trapped here for who-knew-how-long. She was as much of a victim of the Three and Grey as he was…as Vivian had been. And if he could free her…

  “What do I have to do?” he asked.

  The Tenebrous girl looked thoughtful. The Knight they snared to build this cage—he would come here sometimes. Talk to me. He left me books for when I woke.

  In the glare of Mercy, Denizen hadn’t even noticed the stack of paperbacks piled beneath her. There were faint scorch marks on their covers from where she’d held them.

  I think he was lonely. He told me that only a Malleus’s hammer could break the circle. There was no pity in her voice, just calm truth.

  “Why would he tell—” And then Denizen understood. Oh, Grey.

  From the beginning, under the spell of the Three, Grey had been doing his best to sabotage their plan, getting information out any way he could. They probably hadn’t told him not to speak to Mercy, and so he’d shared what he could in case it got back to someone who could do something about it. Pity twisted in Denizen’s gut.

  Kneeling by the circle, he noticed that it wasn’t just made of chalk. Within the crudely sketched line was a second, smaller circle, almost—but not quite—touching the red. Was it dust? Some kind of black sand? He inched closer, again making sure he didn’t accidentally put any part of himself across the line. It almost looked like shavings from pencil lead, but why—

  Oh.

  I am sorry. Distantly, he heard Mercy speak. The Three have dark knowledge and an overabundance of cruelty.

  Iron filings—a thick line of them just inside the circle of chalk. It was probably too much to hope for that they’d been come by innocently. Denizen thought of Adebayo Sall, Lisa O’Reilly, all Vivian’s comrades from so long ago. His palms ached in sympathy.

  He could get Vivian’s hammer—providing Grey hadn’t taken it—and use the weapon to free Mercy. Denizen wouldn’t have to fight the Three at all. Instead, they’d face the justice of the Endless King.

  For the first time in what felt like forever, a smile crossed Denizen’s face. He had no idea what the Endless King’s justice entailed, but somehow he doubted it would be pleasant.

  “OK, I have to run,” he said. “The Three could be back at any moment, and I’m no match for even one of them. I don’t actually know any Cants. Well—I know one, but it sort of nearly killed me the last time I used it. We’re screwed if they find me before I have a chance to get the hammer.”

  Mercy stared down at him for a long time, her body shifting once more into an undulating nebula of light and smoke. Girl form or not, Denizen suddenly felt the age and weight behind her gaze.

  The moment stretched. Denizen began to squirm. Her eyes were very bright.

  “Em,” he said, “what—”

  Wait long enough and the sun always rises, she said, half to herself. Do you believe that?

  Frown No. 7—Is This the Time? There were far more pressing concerns at the moment than the most rudimentary lesson in astronomy.

  “Yes,” Denizen said eventually, when it was clear she was waiting for an answer. “That’s how…suns…work. Right?” He thought of the bleak dark of the Tenebrae. “Oh, right, you guys don’t have one. Yeah. Sure. Cool. Whatever.”

  Then I have a gift for you, Iron Knight. She raised hands of glittering white. It has been a long time since our kind has attempted to teach yours. There is much the Order has forgotten.

  “I don’t understand,” Denizen said. “It took me a week to even learn how to grasp my power, let alone use it. How are you going to—”

  And she told him.

  It was achingly simple, though he could have been given a thousand years and never been able to put it into words. Her voice rang out like wind haunting a ravine, like the soft music of a shoreline, and as it did Denizen’s mind opened to the secret language of the Tenebrae.

  It was like spending your whole life listening to someone stumble through a language they barely understood…and then hearing poetry. Heat bloomed in his stomach and met the chill of her voice coming the other way. They mixed in him; they swirled and combined and grew.

  They spoke to him.

  Her lips were chased with white fire. Everything Grey had taught him was dismantled and reforged, Cants fitting together in new and potent ways.

  He saw it all with a dreamy kind of understanding—how Jack was mispronouncing the Fourth Cadence of Forging so one in twenty of his swords came out flawed; how Abigail would be more powerful than Vivian one day simply because she sang rather than snarled.

  More than anything, he saw how the Cost was a terrible necessity that could not be denied.

  Power always had a cost. The world wasn’t built for the Cants. They infected it, wounded it, and the Cost was the scar tissue the fire left behind. Iron…the most here thing there is. And there was something else. Something he could only trace the edges of, something in the way the Cants fit together…

  Denizen’s head swam. Her voice was everywhere, a trilling, freezing wind. It was too much. He couldn’t take it—

  —and then it was over, and Denizen fell back on a pile of folders, his breath coming in short, fast gasps. Every molecule of him tingled. He felt full of light, weightless, as if he might lift off the ground if he turned too quickly in one direction. Each breath he took felt charged, full of potential.

  He looked down at his hands. There should be lightning crackling between them, he thought distantly. They should shine.

  Knight?

  Denizen felt…new. He felt like he could do anything. It was like that first night the power had spilled from him—the vicious heat, the vitality of it. A feeling that you could change the world. Denizen’s veins burned with it. His whole body felt energized. Inspired.

  He felt like a wizard.

  Denizen had no idea how long he sat there, feeling the Cants coil and slither like serpents through his mind. Is this how Knights feel all the time? No wonder there had to be a Cost attached; it was so hard not to just reach out and…change things. Speak fire and make the world his own.

  KNIGHT, the Tenebrous girl said. Mercy stared at him from behind the invisible walls of her cage. Her hair fizzled and spat in the darkness, her eyes shifting from sky-blue to storm. Denizen raised his head.

  Humans and their fire, Mercy said, shaking her head. You need to free me. The hammer. You need to get the hammer.

  The world shook as he nodded, thoughts slowly beginning to return.

  A little part of him, fueled mostly by the power churning in his stomach, wanted to confront the Three. Right now he felt like he could take on the Endless King himself.

  Cants swarmed in him like fireflies, greedy for flammable air. Denizen took a deep and shaky breath, forcing the power down and away.

  Taking on the Clockwork Three was a terrible idea. And Grey was somewhere as well—if the Three hadn’t punished him for his rebellion. Denizen was outnumbered. He was untrained. He was—so full of power that he could sing the walls of Crosscaper down; all he had to do was open his mouth, let the terrible light come free and burn the world to char—a Knight.

  Or as close to a Knight as the situation was going to get, and that meant he had a job to do.

  “OK,” he said, the power ignored and sulking in his stomach, “I’ll be right back. Just wait—”

  Mercy raised a flickering eyebrow.

  “—here,” Denizen finished lamely. “Sorry. Right.” He maneuvered over the last of the folders and glanced back at her. Something she had said—

  “Hang on,” he said, “your father?
Your father is the Endless King?”

  And? Mercy said, a note of annoyance entering the crackling whisper of her voice.

  “No,” said Denizen. “Nothing. Sorry.” He couldn’t keep a silly grin from his face. “I’m just…rescuing a princess, that’s all. Cool.”

  He turned to go.

  Wait, the Tenebrous girl said. What is your name?

  “Denizen,” he said. “Denizen Hardwick.”

  Mercy’s eyes widened, her body fracturing in shock. It took her almost a minute to drag a human shape back from the murky light. When she did, there was an odd expression on her face.

  Hardwick, she mused. Strange. I am reassured. I will trust you to return, Denizen Hardwick, because we have something in common.

  “What’s that?”

  The Tenebrous smiled.

  Frightening parents, Mercy said, and dissolved into smoke and storm.

  —

  DENIZEN RAN UPSTAIRS. Thoughts pounded in time with his heartbeat and the slap of his footsteps on the floor.

  Frightening parents.

  You Hardwicks are all alike.

  Eleven years ago, my aunt’s entire cadre was wiped out.

  Eleven years ago, I was left at Crosscaper.

  Page 136 torn out.

  Doors whipped by him. He vaulted over Ackerby’s unconscious body. There was no telling what might be outside. The Clockwork Three. Grey, with his tortured smile and his ravaged hand. The cynical part of Denizen—which to be honest was all of him—had been wondering why things had seemed suspiciously straightforward so far, but right now there was only one thought in his mind.

  The last Hardwick. The full set.

  The front doors opened with a crash, and cold October air filled Denizen’s lungs. He held the power tight, ready to attack if Grey or the Three were there. He could get lucky and ambush them, destroy them before they even saw him coming….

  He looked round the courtyard. There was no one there. The moon had gone behind the clouds, and shadows crawled across the rough gravel. Denizen’s breath caught in his chest.