by Dave Rudden
Hope was paralyzing. It encouraged you to put your determination aside and rely on somebody else’s, when that energy would be much better spent being your own best chance for happiness, your own best plan for survival.
But someone did show up at Crosscaper.
Shut up.
I wish he were here now.
And then the crowd parted and any thought of hope fled. Ambrel Croit walked her brother into the Shrine, a knife at his throat. Both their eyes were wide and bright—his with fear, and hers with triumph.
“Here he is, Grandfather. Ready for judgment.”
Oh no ...
“Good,” said the old man. “Are they all present?”
Ambrel nodded. “This should be witnessed by everyone.” Even as she spoke, the last few Croits entered. The Redemptress’s gaze swept over each, Her hands squeezing Her temples.
Echoes…she whispered. I see echoes…
Ambrel shoved Uriel forward so he fell to his knees, and stalked to Denizen’s side, sheathing her knife under her blood-red robes. She didn’t spare him a second glance.
“Uriel Croit,” Grandfather intoned. “Know that it is not I who judge you, for we have already been judged.”
“No.”
Uriel didn’t rise to his feet. He didn’t draw his sword or attempt to fight.
Instead, gasps circled the chamber as he did something only one Croit had ever done before.
He argued.
With Grandfather.
“It’s all lies, Grandfather. Can you admit that to yourself? Or are you so committed that you’d kill me rather than face the truth?”
Grandfather’s mouth opened and closed, pale eyes wide. Just for a second, the patriarch was nothing but an old man, not particularly tall, not particularly anything.
His robe was wrinkled. He looked like he hadn’t had a good bath or a good sleep in a very long time. There were liver spots on the back of his one good hand, and while the other Croits huddled together in the constant background hum of the Redemptress’s presence, he stood very much alone.
And then he scowled, and suddenly defying his will was as impossible as walking on the surface of the sun.
“I didn’t think it would be you.”
Uriel paled, an impressive feat for a Croit.
“There is always rust. It creeps in through the cold and the wet; it blooms in doubt and fear. It seeps in through blood. I knew that Ambrel had some of your parents’ willfulness, but I’d taken you for someone stronger. I thought that, even after your parents’ sins, you could be redeemed. There is no mind stronger than one that has passed through doubt.”
He shook his head. “But you are rotten. You are rusted. And I do not know if even I can sharpen you to good use.”
Do you hear that? For once in Denizen’s experience of this madhouse, no one was paying attention to the Redemptress. Echoes, echoes, echoes ...
Uriel was shaking now. The other Croits exchanged glances as if they didn’t know what to do. Ambrel had unsheathed a knife just enough that the blade gleamed from her pocket, her fingers shaking on the hilt.
“I’m sorry, Grandfather,” Uriel said. “I’m sorry I can’t just believe. I’m sorry I’m the wrong kind of strong.”
Denizen stared at the blade, the slick length of it, the way it caught the light in a thousand swarming points. Now Ambrel met his gaze, her eyes green-white and incandescent.
“Uriel,” Grandfather whispered.
Denizen knew that blade. He knew who had carved it.
“What have you done?”
Ambrel winked, and the world went mad.
The Tenebrae didn’t flood into the chamber; it stabbed, a dozen points of yawning dark. Figures leapt from each, trailing molten light. Everything happened with the luxurious, deceptive slowness of a flame catching your hand, and Denizen could only stare as Ambrel’s robes came apart, as pale cheeks turned paler and green eyes blued and burst to lightning.
Familiar lightning.
The Redemptress screamed. Grandfather roared. The wire around Denizen’s neck pulled tight—
And Mercy cut him free.
Fire.
Denizen turned half a hundred wires to steam before they could touch his flesh. All the Cants he had imagined, all the suns he had been desperate to say, they spun from him like rain from a storm, and the Redemptress reared back as Her limbs flashed to flame.
Eloquence shook as Knight met Croit in open battle. A blurred something pounded across the chamber, and through his own personal inferno, Denizen saw that it was a Hephaestus Knight—charging knots of enemies and hurling them back. There was something terrifying about it, even though Denizen knew there was an ally inside. Nothing that big should move so fast.
Greaves was there, elegant in his suit, so much of Grey in his graceful strikes. Jack was his polar opposite—a siege engine catching bullets on his fists, his whole frame alight with golden flame.
And Vivian Hardwick dueled with Grandfather himself.
The man was ancient—his bones bundles of dried twigs, his head a crow’s skull on a gaunt and bobbing neck—but he fought like a demon, great sweeps of his bladed arm followed by crushing blows with his right. His movements were stiff but unstoppable, and Denizen had a horrid image of iron spreading beneath the skin—hardening muscles, weighing down bone, spreading its rigid cancer through vein and sinew.
The old man’s face was exultant. This was it. The battle he had wanted. The moment he had waited for.
The War That Will Come had come at last.
Vivian’s face had no expression at all. Her white cloak billowed out behind her, her hammer a centrifuge spinning her one step ahead of Grandfather’s jagged iron edge.
Denizen read it all with a single glance: the shouts and the roars, the violence, the air painted with shock and flame. It was the most he could spare, because the Redemptress of the Croits was coming after him with the power of a natural disaster and the viciousness of a broken heart.
Dust sheeted from the ceiling as wires rebuilt Her, no longer a beautiful and imperious statue but a raptor-witch of spines and claws, a living guillotine descending upon him. Her first blow broke Denizen’s hastily summoned shield, sending splinters of iron through his fingers, Her arms thickening to jagged flails that struck and struck and struck.
Her face was a black nest of shrieking strands.
Denizen’s world shrank to the half-second gap between each Cant. All that control, all that restraint ... gone. He felt like laughing. Screaming. He was no longer a boy; he wasn’t Crosscaper and books and Soren and sadness. He was a paper lantern with the heart of a star.
His vision popped and crackled as one of his pupils fractured to a crazed web of iron. The cut round his neck had already been cauterized in the heat. White was wreathing round him from where his sweat was turning to steam.
And it wasn’t enough.
Denizen knew that, even as he flung himself sideways to avoid Her shrieking lunge. A razor-tipped tentacle whipped past his face and he burned it to cinders, but he was tiring, and tiring was bad, because the Cants didn’t care if there was any of him left when they were done.
They just wanted to burn.
Let them. Let them burn. Isn’t that what they’re for? Isn’t that how we’ve always used them? Killing Tenebrous is our calling. Our duty. Our right.
What could we become in the dark but monsters?
The sorrow in the Redemptress’s eyes.
Your father asked me that once. Three years later he was dead….
Denizen turned, the Cants calling, screaming, shrieking to be used—
Your kind and mine were never meant to share the same universe. Every time it’s happened, it’s ended in pain and death. Until us.
You’re very sweet.
“STOP!”
She stopped. She actually stopped. The trembling blade of a wire hovered a few centimeters from his eye. There were more that had been aimed at other places. Denizen didn’t dare look down
.
The battle was still happening; he could hear it, but he didn’t care.
He only had eyes for Her.
“You loved. You stole. And we knew fire.” He spoke very quickly, because the wires were very close. “The fire of the Endless King. You stole it together.”
It was his idea. Her eyes were wide. All I did was tell him about it. I thought it was just to keep us safe, but he said that there was so much he could do with it … And then the King took humans and made them Knights, arming them with great and powerful words… .
“The Cants,” Denizen said. “A better and safer way of channeling the fire and holding back the Cost. How … how much of it had taken the First Croit by the time they attacked?”
The Redemptress drew back in on Herself, the chamber shaking as wires retracted, and Denizen could see from the corner of his eye that those fighting nearest to him were turning to stare.
We didn’t know ... we didn’t know what the fire would do. ...
Her voice rose to a snarl.
We just wanted to be LEFT ALONE!
“Of course you did,” Denizen said hurriedly. “And then they came, and the castle fell… . You were injured … you slept … and he survived. And he remembered You.”
More Knights had stopped fighting now, mainly because the Croits had stopped fighting them.
The Redemptress’s voice was small.
We were in love.
“That’s what all this is,” Denizen said. “That’s why he called the iron Transgression. That’s why he devoted his entire life to building a dynasty that would protect You.”
He took a deep breath.
“Survivor’s guilt. He loved You, and he lost You, and all this is the story he told himself to take that pain away. He thought it was his fault.”
The Redemptress began to keen, clutching Her head with melted jags of hands.
IT WASN’T SUPPOSED TO BE LIKE THIS!
“No,” Denizen said. “I know it wasn’t.” Tenebrous were impermanent, malleable. How much of Her ambition, Her anger was the First Croit’s?
And how much of his was the fire’s?
Denizen felt it even now—battering against his rib cage, seeking freedom. She was so close. It could just burn Her and be done with all this. Burn all of them. Who would dare stop it? Who would dare stand in its way?
I would, Denizen thought, and clamped the inferno down. Because I’m not a monster either.
“It doesn’t have to end like last time. You can just leave. You can be free. Isn’t that what he would want?”
Everyone was staring at Denizen now as if he’d gone insane. Which he definitely had.
But he had to try.
“We’ve all lost people in this war. So it should stop. Please.”
Light boiled in the vane-vents of the Hephaestus Knights. Eloquence was shaking, collapsing, but here in this chamber there was only silence and Denizen’s words.
“We don’t have to lose any more.”
The Redemptress looked at him like a lost little girl. She opened Her mouth—
“No!”
And Uriel Croit’s scream turned half Her head to flame.
Gold fire leapt from his jaws in a mirror of his sister’s Prayer, tearing away scads of burning wire. When that light faded, the boy summoned his sword, flinging it like a spear again and again, scouring the humanity from the Redemptress’s scream.
Suddenly more fire found Her—Edifice Greaves leading his Knights in volleys of red and gold. A Hephaestus Knight tangled its fist in a clot of strands and pulled, and She jerked to one side in a spray of sparks. Uriel never relented, and every second scream was his sister’s name. Grandfather went down under Vivian’s fists. Croits were running, screaming, falling. Abucad even turned his fire on the Redemptress Herself.
She didn’t fight. Didn’t run. She just sank to the floor, curling Her burning body around the shape of someone who wasn’t there.
And Denizen stared into Her fire until he was sure his eyes were dry.
THERE ARE ALWAYS THOSE born closer to the light. A curious girl, who swam near the edge of things, who saw the shape of a boy outlined against the sun. His shadow fell across her—
THERE ARE ALWAYS THOSE born closer to the dark. A quiet boy, and sharp, a boy obsessed with edges, who saw the shape of a girl outlined at dusk. Her voice called out to him—
“Tell me your name?”
What are you?
She whispered to him through the skin of the world. She told him of the twilight in which she lived, and the King she was bound to marry, and how much she desired to walk under other skies.
He described the far-off stars to her. He told her of his desire to be a hero, of how darkness was no barrier to his sight, and he was glad of that. Because it brought him to her. She was the only family he’d ever need.
She shared things with him that she could not share with anyone else, because she craved the light.
He shared things with her that he could not share with anyone else, because he was not afraid of the dark.
They fell
in love.
They’d run
away together.
Nothing would
keep them apart.
“If He comes after us, we’ll be ready. There must be something. Some secret, some weakness to Him!”
He is the King. But there is one thing … a weapon. A fire. He stole it. We could … we could …
She just wanted to be free.
“A weapon ...”
She led him into the half-
twilight of her world.
He drank deep of the fire.
And the Tene
brae went dark around them.
The cold near
ly killed him.
And they
ran.
There was a spot of
iron in his palm.
The King’s rage was terrible.
But more than that ... it was SLY.
Why simply take revenge, when in taking revenge He could ensure that no human would trust a Tenebrous again? Why simply take revenge, when He could arm the humans, set them to guard their own borders so He did not have to?
This is how the mind of a King must work.
“We’ll be safe here. Safe from everyone. The things I can do now. The power.”
Your…your hand. What’s happening to you?
Once the fire entered the human realm, it grew in many hearts (there are always those born closer to the dark).
The King found His own warriors and armed them with Cants of His own design, to slow the spread of iron.
Maybe it was right what He had done.
Humans love fire.
And Tenebrous are easily changed.
Her lover had already filled her head with thoughts of rule.
She’d only ever wanted to be free.
Perhaps it was the right order to give.
“Please, my love. Run. I can’t—”
I WON’T LEAVE YOU!
A castle fell.
A heart broke in darkness.
And a Family remembered.
She loved.
She stole.
And the world knew fire.
STORY FINISHED, MERCY’S VOICE trailed away, her light almost but not quite crafting shadow puppets on Retreat’s carved walls. Behind her loomed the Court—the shining bulk of Mocked-By-a-Husband and the sleekly smiling Rout.
Beyond, a simple wooden doorframe once again led to a darker place.
The gathered Knights had not bothered to light torches. Instead, they stood solely in the wan unlight of the Lucidum and Mercy herself. The Tenebrous’s light was not kind—it gleamed bright on bandages, deepened scars to brushstrokes of black.
Denizen Hardwick had never been so tired in his life. They had come straight to Retreat after a two-day journey back from Eloquence, which had turned out to be on a tiny island off the coast of Scotland. The First Croit and the Redemptress had chosen their hidin
g place well—it didn’t appear on any maps, the water so full of rocks it was like the sea had teeth.
The Art of Apertura would have gotten them back in a heartbeat, but after learning what had happened to Ambrel Croit, Denizen had no desire ever to use that Cant again. Besides, everyone had given more than enough skin already.
For me. Shame had kept him from sleeping on the trip home; shame for those who had been injured, shame for a black shape in golden flames.
This is war, he told himself. It didn’t make him feel any better. Despite Mercy’s gifted fluency, Denizen had paid his own Cost in the battle. His hands were all iron now, cold and stiff, and his left pupil had fractured. Now he saw the world half in the colors of the real, and half in shifting grays and blues. It was why he was pointedly staring at Vivian’s back instead of at the Court.
He was afraid of what he might see.
“You’re telling us the Endless King founded the Order of the Borrowed Dark.”
Greaves looked as tired as Denizen, but his back was straight, his voice as rich and commanding as ever. Maybe it was pride, maybe the simple logic of not looking weak in front of predators. But the first thing the Palatine had done after the battle was offer his phone to Denizen for a short, desperately relieved call to Simon and the others, so he was prepared to give Greaves a pass either way.
Mercy continued.
The Redemptress—Coronus, as we called her—and her lover stole the fire, but such things have a life of their own. What it was in our world is not what it became in yours. Once in one human heart, it spread, blooming in those with a connection to the Tenebrae.
The King could not have his vassals coming to this world and starting their own petty empires, so he armed the Order with the Cants, and they cast Coronus and her lover down. They believed their duty complete ... and so they found a new one.