Knights of the Borrowed Dark Read online

  Somewhere behind him, a not-cat let out a furious, agonized scream.

  They’ll be all right. They’re warriors. This is what they do.

  It didn’t sound very convincing, even in the privacy of his mind.

  I’d be in the way.

  The lights of the village appeared ahead, a false dawn beckoning hope.

  Now they don’t have to worry about me—

  There was a woman standing in the middle of the street.

  The Breach still infected the street lights, curbing their luminescence to firefly glimmers trapped in glass. Her shadow arched across the road, huge and gaunt and close enough to touch.

  “Hello,” Denizen said awkwardly. It was all he could think of to say.

  White lips curved in a smile.

  “HELLO,” DENIZEN REPEATED, feeling a little silly. “Are you…”

  He trailed off as he took in the woman’s blank smile, the way she stood with one shoulder higher than the other, her whole body stooped as if held up by the pinch of a thumb and forefinger. She didn’t seem to understand what he had said.

  “…all right?”

  The woman didn’t respond, hands digging in the pockets of her white overcoat. Eventually, she pulled out a loose cigarette and jammed it in the fold of her smirk. It hung there, unlit.

  Horror curled its way through Denizen’s gut. Was this what Breaches did to normal people?

  The woman looked like she wasn’t quite there, as if something essential had been taken from her. Her hair was a ragged white cascade framing thin cheekbones and colorless lips. There was something familiar about her, but he couldn’t put his finger on it, and familiarity was supposed to be reassuring, wasn’t it?

  The woman took a staggering step forward, cigarette bobbing in the air.

  He couldn’t just leave her. She was the first person he’d seen—he should help her, get her somewhere safe. It wasn’t exactly fighting a Tenebrous, but it was the right thing to do.

  “Miss? Miss, why don’t you come with me? I know some people who might be able to help you.”

  It was only then he realized he was still holding the bent-bladed knife Grey had given him. Cursing inwardly, he fumbled it back into its sheath.

  “Miss?”

  The woman raised her head in a series of slow jerks, and Denizen suddenly realized he’d made a huge mistake.

  It was her eyes. They were bright, and pale, and normal—or at least a fiend’s guess at what normal should be. Grey’s words from the park suddenly came back to him.

  They look…wrong, even the really old ones that try to pass as human. It’s the little things. The face. The eyes.

  She hadn’t done a terrible job, at least as far as Denizen could see. All the bits were there. Irises, eyelids, whites—any doll maker would be proud. It’s not like there was a way to fake the things that actually made an eye human, like love or pity or hope.

  The cigarette fell away as the woman’s jaw clacked open, baring a hollow filled with a mass of delicate clockwork—a tunnel of cogs and gears and spindle wheels, all wet and shining with a Tenebrous’s oily black.

  Her howl made the ground vibrate and far-off windows shatter. The echoes took a very long time to die away.

  “Oh,” said Denizen in a small voice, “right.”

  —

  DENIZEN HARDWICK MIGHT not have been a warrior like D’Aubigny or a commander of Knights like his aunt, but no one could accuse him of being stupid.

  He didn’t turn round and run back the way he came—it was doubtful the Order gave medals to Neophytes who brought reinforcements to the other side—but instead bolted to the left, flinging himself between two expertly coiffed bushes and onto the lawn beyond.

  He didn’t look back. He didn’t dare.

  Ahead was a sprawling estate, row upon row of identical redbrick houses with identical peaked roofs, like a flock of cardinals bedded down for the night. Each road was adorned with a neat little sign—Rathláth Terrace becoming Rathláth Way, Avenue to Park to Green—in a halfhearted attempt to provide individuality, but there were no cars and no lights in the windows. The whole estate had the feel of a cloning facility during a power outage.

  Denizen didn’t care. The houses could have been on fire, for all he noticed—he just ran. No thought. No planning. No destination in mind except away from here.

  Away from her.

  The woman in white wailed again somewhere behind and Denizen ran as if all of Hell was following him.

  Maybe it was. What else had eyes like that?

  Turning a corner, Denizen nearly fell, cursing through gritted teeth. The woman’s footsteps rang out behind him—arrhythmic, as if she never possessed quite the same number of legs between one step and the next.

  Each house had its backyard separated from the street by a wall of red brick, set with a wooden door. The doors were probably locked, but maybe he could scale the wall, lose the Tenebrous woman in the honeycomb maze of back gardens. It was a long shot, but it was that or try to outpace her, and he had a feeling that clockwork beat flesh every time. He just needed to hang on until Grey and D’Aubigny came looking for him.

  Hope lit a fire in his stomach. Two of the scariest people he had ever met and they were on his side. Of course they would rescue him. There was probably some Cant that located wayward, exhausted Neophytes. They’d find him and save him and he was not being delusional, and crazy clockwork people would be swatted like flies.

  Behind him, the woman howled.

  Howl all you want, he thought breathlessly. See how you stand against two full Knights of the Borrowed Dark.

  He flung himself against the wall, heaving himself up and over with muscles fueled by equal parts hope and terror. The garden beyond, streaky and distorted through red flashes of exhaustion, might not be a sanctuary, but it was a start.

  Denizen allowed himself a tight, vicious smile—which promptly vanished when he dropped from the wall and landed on someone’s head.

  Together, physics, awkwardness, and unexpected heads in gardens conspired to give Denizen’s landing all the grace of a wheelbarrow full of rocks. He rolled once, banging his head on something so hard a whole galaxy erupted behind his eyes, and ended up facing back the way he’d come.

  Thoughts returned slowly. There was…something. Something he was supposed to be doing. A distant part of him was screaming run run run, but his brain seemed to have shorted out from sheer embarrassment.

  And there was a little girl staring at him.

  She was blond, cherubic, wearing an oversized T-shirt and a pair of pajama bottoms. A doll lay at her feet, probably dropped when Denizen had landed on her. Maybe she had left it outside earlier and was now breaking curfew to retrieve it. Maybe four-year-old girls took their dolls on late-night walks. Denizen didn’t know.

  He stared at her.

  She stared at him.

  And then, with the deliberate slowness all little children exhibit when they’re not quite sure if they’re hurt or not, she threw back her head and started crying.

  “No, no, no, no, no,” Denizen said, scrambling to his feet. Memories were crashing back, his embarrassment replaced by a nuclear desire to be elsewhere. “There, there. Come on, we have to go. We have to go now.”

  Running was a sport that suited Denizen. It was the only sport that suited Denizen. He was small and wiry, and eleven years of eating at Crosscaper meant he was fairly underweight. Now his hard-won lead was being eaten up by a squalling kid who’d probably just wandered out to find a lost toy.

  Screw it. He grabbed the child by the waist and ran.

  It took him a whole three steps to completely regret that decision. Children obviously didn’t understand when they were being rescued, and the little girl squirmed out of his grasp, screaming at a pitch to break glass. He tried awkwardly to pick her up again, but the child must have been part eel. She wriggled away and began to run back the way they’d come—

  —and the woman in white appeared on the top o
f the wall, limbs kinked in arachnid grace.

  The little girl froze. Well, that shut her up, Denizen thought, before terror overrode his natural sarcasm and he froze too.

  A slow, ugly smile spread across the woman’s face. She dropped to the ground—utterly alien in the domestic normality of the backyard, like a scorpion in a lunch box. Her eyes raked Denizen up and down before darting over to the little girl.

  Denizen swallowed, and that little noise made the woman’s eyes flick to him again. His heart nearly gave out. Why isn’t she attacking?

  Then he understood. She can’t decide.

  They talked about it in nature documentaries all the time, even the cringingly eighties VHS ones Denizen had been raised on in Crosscaper. All predators—whether they be wolves, sharks, or clockwork women in rumpled coats—were drawn to the weakest prey. It wasn’t even a thought process; it was hardwired into their biology.

  Nature was so practical sometimes. It made so much more sense to avoid the healthy and strong and zero in on a more vulnerable target. The wounded. The old. The young. To a ravening predator, a crying toddler might as well be covered in ketchup.

  That, more than anything, was what held the woman back. She was thinking with her stomach. Denizen could have run for it and the woman would have been too fixated on the four-year-old to care.

  But Denizen wasn’t going to run.

  The thought came from nowhere. It wasn’t a decision, not really. The word decision implied he had considered doing something else.

  Denizen wasn’t leaving the girl behind. It wasn’t because he was brave, because he wasn’t. He didn’t mind admitting it. There hadn’t been a single moment tonight when he hadn’t been scared. It wasn’t even because he wanted somehow to impress his aunt. He had left that notion behind several streets ago.

  He was thinking about the little girl’s parents. If he ran, the little girl would disappear. She’d never be seen again; he doubted this thing, with its woman’s skin and sick white smile, even left bones behind. Long after the police searches and missing-person reports had been abandoned, her parents would always wonder where their daughter had gone.

  That, he realized with a start, was why the Knights did what they did.

  A war with no chance of victory. Families left behind for a life of blades and fire, a few short years ending in violent death or the slow swallow of iron. And every Knight swore an oath to see it through because if they didn’t, someday, somewhere, there would be a Tenebrous and a child—and nobody in between.

  The woman-thing grinned, clockwork gleaming in the pit of her mouth. The little girl had stopped crying and just stared, tears staining her cheeks.

  “Em,” said a quiet voice. “Excuse me.”

  The Cants were deadly to the untutored. That was what Grey kept saying. They were only to be used in the direst of circumstances. It had taken Denizen a whole week just to master touching the power of the Tenebrae, and so far he hadn’t even been allowed to attempt the magical equivalent of a nightlight.

  Fortunately, he’d seen a real Knight at work.

  Denizen let the power in. It didn’t need to be asked twice, crackling off his ribs, spitting sparks up and down his throat. Eager. Really, really eager. It was funny, Denizen thought. All the Cants were called such fancy things—the Atraxes Girth, Charonstaff, the Scintilla Scythe—but the more powerful the Cant, the simpler its name.

  The alien syllables rose in his head just as he’d heard Grey speak them—circling like ravens, buoyed up by the fire searing his throat.

  Denizen didn’t draw his knife. There was no point. He lunged forward, pushing the girl aside so he stood between her and the Tenebrous. The clockwork woman’s fingers curled into claws—

  They weren’t words. That wasn’t what the Cants were. They were light cresting the human tongue. They were fire bent to the hand and tamed.

  Sunrise in sound.

  The air blazed. A newborn star woke between Denizen’s fingers to paint the surrounding buildings in black and white, the whole world made a negative of itself.

  It shrieked, or maybe that was Denizen. Power wailed from him to toss the woman in white backward like a twist of paper caught in a breeze.

  She might have screamed. It might have been the snarl of burning air. The wave of gold slapped her through the red brick of the wall to cross the street almost lazily before impacting like a comet into a pile of rubbish bags, which promptly ignited as well. The flames sounded like applause.

  The light between his fingers ebbed and died. The night suddenly felt very dark without it.

  Denizen took a deep breath. His throat felt scorched, as if he’d unwittingly sucked some smoke into his lungs. He swallowed to clear it, but that just made it worse. That was when he noticed the four-year-old staring at him, her mouth open. The air still sizzled. The tears on her cheeks had dried.

  “Em…,” he began, but she had bolted inside, dragging the porch door open with a whine of metal and glass.

  Denizen watched her go, frowning. It escaped him at the moment exactly what number frown it was.

  “You’re welcome,” he whispered hoarsely, more for his own benefit than hers, and then flinched when a light upstairs flicked on. He should get away before the kid woke her parents. Explaining all of this to his aunt would be difficult enough.

  Loping out onto the street, Denizen eyed the smoldering rubbish bags across the road with a mixture of trepidation and pride.

  He’d done that. With magic. Just his luck there hadn’t been anyone proper around to see it—

  Something in the burning rubbish stirred.

  Denizen took a step backward.

  A raw shape lifted itself from the flames on limbs gaunt-muscled with clockwork. The flesh disguise had been seared away—the Tenebrous ticking itself upright by degrees, joints as stiff as scissor blades. A tatter of black plastic hung from its mouth like a tongue, coiling and crinkling and burning away.

  “I’m sorry,” Denizen said, mouth running off a script his brain hadn’t quite caught up with. “Did you not hear me the first time?”

  It stared at him a moment longer, then fled.

  Denizen waited until the burning shape had disappeared into the darkness. Then he began walking slowly down the road.

  He was suddenly very tired. He knew he should be getting away from here as fast as he could, but the events of the last few minutes were starting to catch up with him. Some of them were absolutely cringeworthy.

  Did you not hear me the first time? He had said that. He’d actually said that. Good grief. It was only a week into his career as a magician Knight and already he was starting the one-liners. At this rate, he’d be buying bandannas before the fortnight was out.

  Denizen sniffed. “Did all right, though,” he said to no one. A thought struck him. “Unless there’s some rule about doing magic in front of normal people.” Hmm.

  He staggered forward another few steps. Best not find out.

  Strange, Denizen thought idly, once he’d turned the corner and left the burning rubbish behind. Blinking seemed to take longer than usual. Grey told me there were consequences to using a Higher Cant.

  But Denizen felt fine. Some blinks just…took longer, didn’t they? He tried again, and it was ages before his eyes reopened. He’d heard a song too—in the darkness just before his eyes opened. He knew that song. Someone had sung it to him a long time ago. Why couldn’t he remember who?

  I’ll ask my mam, he thought before his eyes closed for good.

  CROSSCAPER HAD DARKENED.

  Through broken windows and keyholes, through the hollow gape of shattered doors, came wind and cold and bitter rain. Frost gave the walls a miserable sheen, hardened the carpets to crunch underfoot.

  Lights still existed—a single glowing exit sign, feeble lamps in the infirmary, a fluorescent tube in the canteen stubbornly refusing to die—but they were the last. Darkness had slid into the orphanage like a hand into a glove, filling it, warping it, giving its soul
a different shape.

  Simon no longer knew what day it was or even if it was day at all. Sunlight didn’t enter the windows anymore, and he didn’t dare peek out to see for himself. It didn’t matter anyway—it was always night in Crosscaper, and Simon had far more to worry about than the passage of time.

  The boy was crying again.

  Simon froze perfectly still, every sense straining. He had been halfway to the kitchen when the haunting sound reached his ears—thin and wavery, like an echo from somewhere very far away.

  He picked up his pace anyway. The boy’s crying might have sounded like it was coming from far away, but that was no guarantee of safety. The first thing Simon had learned about Crosscaper’s occupiers was that there was a horrifying inconsistency to the trio—in the sounds they made, in how their voices echoed or carried—as if they didn’t quite fit with the world, as if they horrified reality itself.

  It was a reaction Simon understood perfectly.

  His stockinged feet were silent on the peeling linoleum of Crosscaper’s kitchen. He hadn’t been in the kitchen much before the strangers came, but hunger had driven him from his hiding place on the second night and he had become intimately familiar with the place—its cupboards, the maze of stainless-steel counters, the massive pantry with its tantalizing boxes of cereal that were too noisy to attempt eating.

  Like any other hunted animal, Simon was living on the raw edge of his senses. Every noise that reached his ears was noted and assessed for danger. He only stepped out into the corridors when it was absolutely necessary, such as nerve-racking foraging excursions or the—painfully—occasional bathroom trips.

  He’d never understood how loud peeing was before. Though obviously there was no good time for him to be brutally murdered by pale strangers with ticking joints, he always found himself praying, Not now. Not while I pee.

  He peered into the pantry, looking for something he could take back to his hiding place that might last a few days. There was no point bringing anything that needed to be cooked or—