Knights of the Borrowed Dark Read online

  They walked home in silence.

  —

  DENIZEN WAS IN his room after dinner, trying to think of what to put in his card to Simon, when Darcie knocked on his door, a bag in her hand.

  She looked down at the card on the desk in front of him. “I’m not interrupting, am I?”

  Denizen shook his head. “No. I wasn’t writing anything anyway.”

  She smiled wryly. “Writer’s block?”

  He played with the top of his pen. “I just don’t know what to say. Simon’s my best friend. Not telling him all this stuff just feels…I don’t know.”

  Darcie opened her mouth, but he waved his hand. “I know I can’t tell him anything. Even if I could, he’d reckon I was mental. I don’t even think he’d believe me if I told him face to face, let alone if I tried to scribble it into the corner of a birthday card.”

  That wasn’t strictly true. Simon would believe whatever he said. That’s what being a best friend meant. But it didn’t matter. Denizen knew he couldn’t say anything.

  “What’s up?” he said.

  “I need your help with something,” Darcie said. She seemed faintly embarrassed. “Do you mind?”

  “Not at all,” Denizen said. “What do you want me to do?”

  They made their way through dim hallways, their path lit by flickering candles. It hadn’t taken Denizen long to notice there was something peculiar about Seraphim Row—the building itself, not just the people who made it their home.

  “Did you hear that?” Denizen said as they climbed a curving staircase. He stopped and stared down at the steps beneath his feet. “I thought I…”

  He almost didn’t want to say it. The line between believable and unbelievable had become porous, and every question he asked seemed to blur it further, but Denizen had been…hearing things.

  He took another experimental step. There it is again. Darcie had stopped a few steps up, looking down at him.

  He had been noticing it more and more recently. It wasn’t enough that Seraphim Row looked like a haunted house; it seemingly had to go for the full effect. Sometimes Denizen would feel someone standing behind him, but every time he turned round there was no one there.

  Sometimes floorboards would creak around him, even though nobody was walking on them. He’d hear footsteps from an empty corridor. Doors would slam when no one touched them. There were inexplicable patches of freezing air.

  Now it felt as if someone was walking in his shadow, their footsteps almost but not quite mirroring his. Not an echo. A bad overlap. He said as much to Darcie.

  “Overlap isn’t a bad word for it, actually,” Darcie said, adjusting her glasses. Her voice softened to what Denizen had already begun thinking of as her explanatory tone. “You’ve noticed the candles, of course. Has anyone explained why we light them?”

  Denizen shrugged. “Grey said he’d miss colors.”

  Darcie smiled. “Of course he did, the poet, but there are other reasons. The wall between this world and the Tenebrae is never particularly stable.” She thought for a moment. “Um. Wall is the wrong word. I’m not sure there is a right word. It’s not…deep enough, or big enough; it just doesn’t have the—”

  She caught the look on Denizen’s face and hastily cleared her throat. “Sorry. I get distracted. And there are dozens of books in my…in the library about what exactly causes a Breach, but we do know that in some places the worlds run close. That’s why you get stories of haunted houses and castles and whatnot.”

  She waved a hand at Seraphim Row’s walls.

  “So many Knights here for so many centuries have frayed that barrier. Made things a little strained, like a dam worn thin by the passage of water. The candle-wards act as anchors or stones in a castle wall. They keep the Tenebrae out and reality in, protecting us from any Tenebrous that might try and attack us here.”

  “Right,” Denizen said. “I thought the place was actually haunted or something.”

  “Oh, not at all,” Darcie said brightly. “It’s just in constant danger of falling into the dark end of the universe.”

  She frowned. “That’s not better, is it?”

  Denizen stepped very carefully round the candles for the rest of the climb. Eventually, they reached a narrow iron staircase, which led to a small windowless room. There were no candles here, but Denizen and Darcie both navigated the darkness easily.

  It felt strange moving without any light. Denizen knew it was dark. He knew that before his thirteenth birthday he would have been blind and flailing. Now the darkness was just another detail of the room, as relevant as the number of floorboards or where the wallpaper was starting to peel.

  Darcie set the bag down in the middle of the room.

  “Do you know why we went into the city today?” Her voice sounded strange, and it took Denizen a moment to figure out why.

  It was easy to forget sometimes that Grey, with his easy wit and constant smile, was a trained warrior. Jack was the same, even if he did look like he’d been built in a shipyard. You couldn’t forget that with D’Aubigny—the violence ran closer to the surface with her. And as for his aunt…it was as if she’d forgotten to be anything other than a soldier.

  But Darcie, with her prim accent, and her proper manners, and the shy way she smiled…

  This was the first time Denizen had heard her speak like a Knight.

  “No,” he said. “I thought…” I thought it was a gesture of friendship. We’re the youngest people here. I thought you were being nice. I really hope you’re not going to tell me that was work.

  Darcie knelt and opened the bag. It looked like a doctor’s satchel, probably older than Denizen—thick black leather and a stained brass clasp. She spoke without looking up.

  “Did Grey tell you what I do here?”

  “He said you were their librarian?”

  She smiled. “Yes. Librarian and record keeper. But that’s not the most important work I do. We all have our gifts—our different ways of serving the Order. I serve by detecting Breaches before they happen. The other Knights are weapons, and I tell the weapons where to go.”

  Taking a deep breath, Darcie removed her dark glasses.

  “Oh,” said Denizen. “Oh. Of cour—”

  The words escaped before he had a chance to swallow them, swiftly followed by a blush the temperature and shade of the surface of the sun. His cheeks burned.

  “It does make sense,” Darcie said as though she hadn’t heard him, “when you think about it. There’s a strange logic to the Cost.”

  She looked at him with iron eyes.

  “They call us the Lux Precognitae. Loosely translated, it means ‘Forewarning Light.’ ”

  Darcie’s pupils were the deepest black Denizen had ever seen, even in the colorless hues of the Lucidum. There were pale flecks amid the dark metal of her irises, as if silver had been mixed in through the iron.

  “It is the rarest type of talent. Most cadres have to make do with other means of detecting Breaches.” She turned her glasses over and over in her hands. “I can still see. Perfectly, actually. Better than when my eyes were normal, I think, though it’s hard to be sure.”

  “Darcie?”

  “Yes?”

  “Why iron?” It had been bothering him since he arrived in Seraphim Row—since that first bloom of darkness in the middle of his palm.

  Darcie smiled faintly. “That’s a difficult question. Knights have written books on the subject. We’re not all warriors, you know—somebody has to compile and record all the information that has been amassed over the years.

  “Some of the Order’s scholars think that it’s scar tissue. The Cants, the Tenebrous—they don’t fit in this universe. You’ve seen what it’s like when something crosses over. The whole world rebels. Maybe the Cost is the world trying to repair itself—sealing off those that bring the power of the Tenebrae into this reality.”

  Denizen frowned. Like everything the Knights believed about their gift, it was unproved knowledge, half gues
swork and poetry.

  “OK…but why iron? Why not something else?”

  Darcie gave an elegant shrug. “I don’t know. Jack says—and he’s a blacksmith, so more superstitious than most—that maybe it’s because the core of the world is iron. Iron is the most here thing there is.”

  Denizen ran a finger across the cool metal of his palm. “What do you need me to do?”

  “I come up here every night—get Jack or Grey to sit with me—but I thought that you might like to…”

  “Yes,” Denizen said instantly. “I’m glad…glad you asked me.”

  Darcie sat on the floor and bid Denizen do the same.

  Her bag opened with a click, and she pulled out a sheaf of paper and several pencils. The pencils were arranged in a neat line in front of her, and the pages went into Denizen’s lap. Darcie balanced a drawing board across her lap, and Denizen passed her a page.

  What Darcie whispered next was nothing like the raw avalanche of heat and sound that Grey had called Sunrise, nor the first feeble stutters of light that would be Denizen’s first Cants. It was subtle, the barest stirrings of power.

  Light glowed from behind her eyes, gleamed behind her teeth. The darkness shivered with it. Subtle didn’t mean weak, Denizen realized, and the power Darcie was calling was in its own way as potent as anything that Grey or Vivian might use in battle.

  Darcie closed her eyes and continued to whisper. Denizen could still see the light in her eyes, even with them closed. It shone through her eyelids like a backlit projector screen.

  He felt a wind on his face. He flinched—the door’s closed; there are no windows—and the feeling of unease grew when he realized that the wind was warm.

  It’s October. This wind wasn’t blowing from outside but from somewhere else entirely. Sweat rose on his cheeks. He raised a hand to wipe it off.

  “Stay still,” Darcie said. Her eyes hadn’t opened. Denizen froze—he was sure he hadn’t made a sound. It was only then that he realized that, even though she had stopped speaking the Cant, he could still hear it. The room was too small for an echo; the Cant had simply stayed in the air after Darcie had fallen silent.

  She exhaled raggedly. “Well,” she said, “that was the easy part.”

  The words still bounced round the room. It made Denizen’s skin crawl. He could feel the Tenebrae boil up through the room, like the walls were falling away and they were surrounded by a vast emptiness, as if they no longer sat in Seraphim Row at all.

  Denizen was almost afraid to blink. The wind grew and grew until his face burned with it. The Cant was all around—a thousand voices all whispering, shivering from everywhere at once. The air shook with them, building and building and building—

  “Now,” whispered Darcie. “Now.”

  Silence fell, the lack of noise suddenly deafening. Darcie raised her face to the ceiling, light pulsing from beneath long lashes, and lifted a pencil. Slowly, eyes still closed, she began to draw.

  —

  IT TOOK THREE hours.

  The pencil tip darted this way and that, pulling shapes from the whiteness of the paper—arcs and curves that made no sense until the pencil slashed again and Denizen suddenly saw how they were connected, how they had always been connected, only needing Darcie’s skill to bring them out.

  She went through eight sheets. When the white space on one was filled, Denizen would hand her another.

  Eventually, she sat back, the light behind her eyes fading away. Darcie set down the pencil—she’d gone through two—and waved at Denizen to help her up.

  It took him two tries to get to his feet—his knees were aching after hours of sitting on the bare floorboards. Joints popped as Darcie stretched, perspiration shining on her face. Carefully, she set her glasses back on her nose.

  “Thank you,” she said awkwardly. “I hope it wasn’t too boring—I just like having company. What I do can be…intense. It unnerves some people. Even Knights sometimes. So thank you. It was nice to hang out today before—”

  Impulsively, Denizen wrapped her in a hug.

  “Oh,” she said in a muffled voice, “brilliant.”

  They broke apart and Denizen handed her the bag. “So what now?” he said.

  “Now we go and get Grey and the others,” she said, her smile faltering. “I found something.”

  UP UNTIL THEN, Denizen had never realized how much the Knights were coddling him.

  They’d never lied to him about the dangers of serving the Order, but whenever they’d spoken about their duty, there’d been a sort of theater about it as well.

  Jack talked about being a Knight like a craftsman discussing a job—difficult but necessary. D’Aubigny did the same, in her own terrifying way. Pest control.

  Grey was the worst offender, grinning as he peppered their lessons with stories of daring rescues and wild adventures.

  He wasn’t smiling now.

  The black of Grey’s shoulder holster stood out starkly against the crisp white of his shirt. His sword hung at his waist. D’Aubigny sat cross-legged on the kitchen table, running a whetstone up her katana’s murderous curve. The slow rasp sounded like a snake clearing its throat.

  “It’s local,” Darcie said. “We were lucky.” She sat on the carpet, paper surrounding her like the petals of a flower. Each sheet was covered in dozens of pictures, crammed so close they bled together. Some appeared more often than others. Denizen saw a hurried sketch that might have been an aerial view of fields, all tightly packed squares and rectangles, fences and roads a tangle of shaded lines.

  There were more drawings of what might have been the same landscape, but depicted as if Darcie stood within it—looking up at squat houses on hillsides, the blunt sweep of a hedge—and beside those a woman’s eye so detailed that Denizen could almost see a reflection in the pupil’s depths.

  The scene that appeared most often, the lines drawn blackest and most urgent, was a crossroads, one road forking to become three around a massive outcrop of stone. There Darcie’s pencil had nearly gone through the page.

  “How do you know it’s local?” Denizen asked.

  “The art of the Lux Precognitae isn’t a precise one,” Grey said, frowning down at the sheets. “Images and impressions present themselves, but it’s like trying to read a reflection in a rippling pond. Sometimes we catch a break and Darcie picks up something solid—a street sign, a landmark—but if we’re unlucky, the process can take hours. Thank God we have her.”

  Darcie looked away, but not before Denizen saw her blush. “Yes. Well. We were very lucky. I should have caught it before now, but it’s only an hour away, so you should be in time.

  “I should have caught it before now,” she repeated, almost to herself.

  Denizen hovered awkwardly by the table. He was feeling the special kind of uselessness that comes from standing in a room full of busy people. The amount of edged weaponry moving around didn’t help. Even as he had the thought, Jack tossed a bent-bladed knife to Grey, almost giving Denizen his first shave.

  “That will hamper your mobility,” D’Aubigny said as Grey slid on a long black coat. It hung to his calves, hiding the scabbard on his belt. She wore a light T-shirt and combat trousers, tattoos writhing as she worked a strap through the sheath of her sword.

  “It’s called discretion,” he said good-naturedly, “and I’d rather have my mobility hampered than look like a one-man invasion force.”

  D’Aubigny, who was now weighing a sickle in one hand and a long dagger in the other, frowned and put both down.

  “It’d take more than a coat to stop her looking like an invasion force,” Jack said affectionately, and then grinned when D’Aubigny gave him a look.

  “Em…,” Denizen began, stepping forward. No one looked up. “Is there anything I can do?”

  Darcie was poring over the pictures she had drawn, Grey comparing them to an Ordnance Survey map in his hands. D’Aubigny and Jack were lost in quiet conversation.

  Denizen felt a new frown coming o
n. No. 24—the Frown of Being Spare. He couldn’t decide whether it was worse than being in the way or not. The Knights were working as if they’d done this a hundred times before—which, of course, they had. It wasn’t their fault he was feeling utterly useless.

  “Hold this,” D’Aubigny said, dropping a satchel into his hands and slinging her blade over her shoulder. As one, the Knights made for the door and Denizen followed, carrying the satchel.

  Jack’s voice was grim. “Darcie, anything else you can tell them before they go?”

  “I’m afraid not,” she said. “Normally, I see something. The only times I don’t are when the Tenebrous coming through are weak, barely anything at all. Maybe that’s why I didn’t feel it before now—”

  Grey didn’t seem to hear the worry in her voice, already turning toward the great wooden doors that led out to the street.

  “Hear that?” he said. “Barely a thing at all. And we have time to get there, don’t we?”

  Darcie nodded reluctantly.

  “Then let’s not panic,” he said. “It’s local, it’s weak, and it’s a nice night for a sword fight. I have a good feeling about this.”

  “Can I come?”

  Slowly, very slowly, everyone turned to stare at Denizen. He blushed.

  “I mean…can I come? With you? If you think…em…em…”

  Denizen was used to expressions saying volumes. He had twenty-four frowns. The Knights didn’t say a word, but what they were thinking was perfectly clear: Are you insane?

  And as his question died in the wake of their shock, he suddenly couldn’t help agreeing with them. Am I insane? He had just volunteered. Volunteered. He had asked to go into battle against a ravening beast from a realm of shadow nightmares. Maybe it was several ravening beasts. He had been too busy volunteering to ask.

  And why? It wasn’t excitement. He hadn’t suddenly remembered a childhood spent learning kung fu. It was because—and he hated himself for thinking this—maybe his aunt was waiting for him to impress her. He had been born with the potential to be a Knight, but perhaps that wasn’t enough. Maybe he had to show her that he was brave enough to be one as well.