Knights of the Borrowed Dark Read online

  A single tear ran down the night-sky curve of Darcie’s cheek.

  “Pick-Up-the-Pieces,” she began, “is one of the Endless King’s most loyal servants, a Pursuivant of the Forever Court.” Her voice steadied a little as she spoke. “And it said that something had been taken from the King?”

  “And that we are to blame,” D’Aubigny finished.

  “The Order?” Vivian asked.

  D’Aubigny nodded. “This wasn’t an accident. Pick-Up-the-Pieces is old and canny enough to have slipped into this realm without us ever knowing. It wanted us to see it. And I am quite sure that it let us live so we could deliver the message ourselves.”

  “What message?” the girl asked.

  “The Endless King is angry,” D’Aubigny said, “and he is coming.”

  Vivian let out a long breath, her gray eyes creased in worry. “I need to contact the other cadres. If we can find out what was taken, maybe we can get it back. We need the entire Order on this, maybe even our counterparts abroad.”

  “I have a few contacts in PenumbraCorp,” said D’Aubigny, “and Gedeon and I have fought together more than once.”

  “PenumbraCorp?” Denizen asked.

  Jack’s face was grim. “Knights abroad have different ways of doing things. In the States, they’ve gone corporate. Farther east, it’s the Thousand Choirs. In Russia, it’s just one man, Gedeon, the zhelyeza vaieen. If the King really is coming, we’ll need them all.”

  “Is it that bad?” Denizen said hollowly.

  “Yes,” Vivian said simply. “It would be the end of the world as we understand it. An extinction-level event.”

  Oh. Denizen should have known. Anything that made Malleus Vivian Hardwick’s face switch, however briefly, from her default expression of barely contained anger was obviously the apocalypse.

  “What is he, the Endless King?”

  “The ruler of the Tenebrous,” Darcie said, and now the sadness in her voice had been replaced by fear. “Or their god. A thing that does not lend itself to description. Some say he is the Tenebrae, and all the Tenebrous his stray and hungry thoughts, bleeding over into our terrified world.”

  “I’d love to find out who does actually say that,” Jack said gruffly, “and punch them in the face for being overly dramatic. Are our jobs not hard enough?”

  “What about the—” Denizen began.

  “What about the Order?” the girl interrupted.

  Denizen shot her a look he immediately regretted, facial muscles protesting the sudden movement. “That’s what—” He took a breath. What was wrong with him? “Could we not stop him?”

  The Knights exchanged glances.

  “It’s possible,” Vivian said eventually. “If every Knight was rallied, our allies contacted, every favor we owe called in…At the very least we would make a fight of it. But it won’t come to that. It can’t. There would be too much death—on both sides. I don’t think the King wants that any more than we do.”

  His aunt ran gloved fingers through her short-cropped hair. “This was a warning.” She seemed to be testing out each word before she said it. “There is a strange kind of honor to the Endless King. He is warning us. He is giving us time.”

  “I’ll begin immediately—” Darcie began, but Jack cut her off.

  “In the morning,” he said. “Right now you need some sleep.”

  Darcie didn’t argue. She threw Denizen one last look before disappearing through the door.

  “This was not her fault,” Vivian said. “I will not have her blaming herself.” Her voice softened. “I will speak to her.”

  She looked around at Denizen and the others. “We will discuss this more tomorrow. I’ll brief you all on what needs to be done. For now, is there anything else?”

  “I want to stay,” Denizen said abruptly.

  They all turned to look at him.

  “There was a little girl. I was…” He looked down at his blankets. “I was looking for somewhere to hide, and I led a monster right to her. I could have run. I could have left her. But I…”

  No one would ever know what happened to her but me.

  He raised his chin. “I want to be a Knight. I want to train. I want to fight.”

  “That sounds like an excellent idea.” Grey was standing in the doorway, holding a bag of ice to his forehead. “Because I’m about ready to retire.”

  “Grey!” Denizen exclaimed, and then winced as pain jolted through his skull. “You’re all right.”

  “Not in the slightest,” he said with a lopsided smile, handing his coat and sword to the mystery girl.

  “Graham McCarron,” D’Aubigny said, and relief warred with annoyance on her bloodied face. “You rogue. How did you get back here?”

  “Rathláth has an excellent taxi service,” Grey said airily, before looking a little sheepish. “To which I owe quite a lot of money, actually, but I managed to convince them I’d been mugged, so I’ll worry about that tomorrow.”

  He raised an eyebrow at Denizen. “What happened to you?”

  Jack grinned. “Well, our newest recruit here”—at this Grey gave Denizen an exaggerated bow—“decided to greet Pick-Up-the-Pieces with an Epithet. The one he learned from you, apparently.”

  Grey let out a low whistle. “Sunrise?”

  Denizen nodded, embarrassed. “I had to—”

  Grey waved a hand. “I’d say you did. That’s…I’m impressed.”

  “Have you both quite finished congratulating yourselves for being reckless?” Vivian didn’t look the least bit impressed. Her expression could have been cut from a storm cloud.

  Grey shot Denizen a wry look. “I’m not even here and you get me in trouble. Although I would have loved to see the look on the damned cat’s face when you—”

  “It wasn’t Pick-Up-the-Pieces,” Denizen said.

  Vivian frowned. “What?”

  “It wasn’t Pick-Up-the-Pieces,” Denizen repeated. “At least I don’t think it was. I ran when you told me to. The thing that chased me didn’t look like a not-cat—”

  “Not-cat,” Grey said. “I like it.”

  “It looked like a woman. I thought she’d been affected by the Breach and I tried to help her, but then I saw her eyes. She was dressed all in white, and she screamed, and her mouth was full of—”

  “Clockwork,” Vivian whispered. “Her mouth was full of clockwork.”

  “Em…yeah,” Denizen said. “How did you know?”

  The Malleus turned on her heel and strode out of the room. Had Grey not moved swiftly, she might just have walked through him. The sounds of her footsteps echoed down the corridor for a long time before Denizen spoke.

  “What was that all about?”

  Jack shrugged, his face twisted in confusion. Even D’Aubigny looked surprised.

  Grey wore no expression at all.

  DENIZEN COULDN’T SLEEP.

  He was definitely tired enough; he had been wrecked after his walk round Dublin with Darcie earlier, and that seemed like a hundred years ago. The soles of his feet were on fire. Under the covers, his bones felt like they’d been replaced with jam.

  It wasn’t the pain in his head keeping him awake, though it certainly wasn’t helping. Grey had given him two fat headache tablets and left some more on the desk. They hadn’t done much, and the sight of them had disappointed Denizen somehow. He’d been expecting an enchanted salve or bubbling potion, not something you bought over the counter for a couple of euros.

  The only real cure was rest, apparently. If the Higher Cant was going to kill him or burn him out, it would have done so outright. Denizen was just going to feel like D’Aubigny’s punching bag for a few days.

  He rolled onto his side and coughed, his thin body shaking under the blankets. The Epithet had hurt on the way out. It felt like he’d gargled a hedgehog.

  But it wasn’t that keeping him awake either.

  Never had he been so grateful for a Knight’s ability to see in darkness, to have every bit of the room visible
to him. It did a lot to convince him that there weren’t horrors lurking in the shadows. The problem was he knew that there were.

  How many times had he almost died tonight? There was Pick-Up-the-Pieces, which he was happy to count as one, not one per set of fangs. There was the woman Tenebrous in her white coat, and of course his near-suicide by magic.

  Three. Three near-death experiences. Was that a lot? How did they ever get anything done?

  Denizen shivered as he remembered the woman’s blank eyes. Of the two Tenebrous, he knew which one had frightened him more. Monsters that looked like monsters he could deal with. Monsters that looked like people were something else entirely.

  And then there was the Endless King. Even thinking the name made his guts crawl. The biggest, scariest Tenebrous of them all, a being so powerful that it would take the entire Order of the Borrowed Dark to stand against him.

  What had been taken from him? And who had taken it? There couldn’t be that long a list of people brave or stupid enough to rob the Endless King.

  Denizen’s palm itched. Speaking of brave or stupid…He held his hand up in front of his face. Until tonight, the Cost in the center of his palm had been no larger than a penny. Now it spread over half his palm in a jagged petal of dark iron. Grey had said that screwing up a Cant—as he had, quite loudly and impressively—made the Cost far worse. He was lucky he hadn’t lost his whole hand to it.

  He closed his fist. Denizen didn’t regret paying it, and not just because it had saved his own life. Somewhere there was a girl curled up in her parents’ lap—hopefully after getting the scolding of her life for being out of bed at night—because of him. That felt good. Really good, despite Vivian giving out. He’d say as much to her tomorrow when—

  Denizen’s eyes widened in surprise. Vivian said she was going to brief them tomorrow—all of them—but Denizen was the only one who’d seen the woman in white. She’d have to talk to him. And maybe, when he answered all her questions, he’d get a chance to ask a couple back.

  He grinned in the darkness and fell asleep.

  —

  SUNLIGHT SNEAKED IN through the curtains.

  Denizen laid down his broom and sighed. The floor of his tiny attic room had been swept. His clothes had been neatly folded and stowed away in his wardrobe, and the window was propped open to let in some air.

  He had even wet a towel and scrubbed at the windowsill, dislodging the spiders’ graveyard that had accumulated there. It wasn’t that the room had been particularly messy before—he would’ve needed to own more stuff than that—but now it gleamed.

  Denizen reached out and adjusted the slant of the broom against the wall, then hmmed and adjusted it again.

  There. Better.

  He had thought about moving the desk into the middle of the room to present a sort of professional office atmosphere, but after five minutes of spine-creaking effort, Denizen decided the desk and his back muscles were fine where they were. His aunt would probably stand anyway. Pace, maybe. She seemed the pacing type.

  He glanced at the clock. Grey and D’Aubigny first, obviously. They’d relate everything they’d seen in Rathláth. Darcie, as well—there would have to be some information in the library about what the Endless King might have lost. The Knights were early risers. She’d be up to him soon enough—

  A knock at the door. Denizen took a deep breath. “Come in,” he called.

  The door opened and Denizen’s shoulders slumped. Grey stood there, a bandage round his temple and a stack of books under his arm.

  “Hey, kid,” he said. “Can I come in?”

  Denizen sat heavily on the bed, not looking at Grey. “Sure,” he said tonelessly, “whatever.”

  Grey laid the books on the edge of the desk and sighed. “Not who you were expecting?”

  Denizen didn’t respond.

  “We need to go over what happened last night,” Grey said. “What the Tenebrous looked like, anything it said—we need to know if it was another Pursuivant of the Court or something else entirely. Let’s start with what happened after I told you to run—”

  “Where’s my aunt?”

  Grey frowned. “She’s gone to speak to the Order. We need every bit of help we can get to figure out what the Endless King wants before he comes looking for it himself. She’ll be back in a few days, I expect.”

  A few days?

  “Have I done something?” Denizen blurted.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Have I done something?” Denizen’s fingers clenched into fists, pressing down on the iron in his palm as if trying to take solace in the cold hardness of it. “Something to make her avoid me? When I came here, I thought I was going to get some answers from her, especially after finding out that I had a connection to the Tenebrae.” Just like her. “But she won’t talk to me at all. I thought she’d tell me about my parents. I don’t know their names. I don’t know if they were Knights. I don’t even know how they died.” He gritted his teeth. “Why is she being like this?”

  “Honestly?” Grey said. “I don’t know why she’s not talking to you about your parents. But this can’t be easy for her either. Vivian’s not just your aunt—she’s a soldier. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for emotional connections.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Grey ran a hand through his long hair. “You don’t rise to the position of Malleus by setting fire to coffee cups; you do it by proving yourself to be of a different metal than anyone else.

  “Those hammers aren’t just a symbol of office—they’re the most powerful weapons the Order has, forged long ago by ancient, forgotten means. There are some Tenebrous so powerful that only a Malleus’s hammer can defeat them. They’re incredibly valuable. And your aunt earned the right to carry one.”

  “How?” Denizen asked. “What did she do?”

  Grey shrugged. “How long have you got? Belgrade and Redpenny. Whitby and Dunshaughlin, Rawhead Rex and the Tearsipper Girls. I could tell you stories that’d make your toes curl.

  “Your aunt has thrown herself into some of the worst Breaches I’ve ever read about, let alone seen firsthand, and she’s walked right back out again. I couldn’t tell you how many lives she’s saved. She could be leading the Order right now, not just running a cadre. And to be honest, sometimes I think she’d actually be happier if she was working on her own.”

  “Then why doesn’t she?” It was hard to keep the sullenness from his voice. Vivian might have been a hero of the Order, but it didn’t excuse her from being a human.

  “Because the Order doesn’t let Knights run around with priceless hammers and no backup,” Grey said. “It’s not easy trying to keep up with her, I can tell you that.”

  His smile disappeared. “Look. Your aunt has been doing this for a long time. She’s nearly died countless times. You have no idea what that does to a person. The injuries, the friends lost…You have to be iron. Inside and out.”

  “Well, you seem all right,” Denizen said bitterly.

  Grey stared at him, the silence sudden and uncomfortable. The moment dragged, giving Denizen what felt like an eternity to note the premature lines at the corners of the Knight’s mouth, the bright, fractured coldness of his eyes. Old scars gleamed in the sunlight, the new ones shadows beneath gauze.

  “Do I?” Grey whispered.

  Denizen flushed and looked away.

  “You don’t know what it’s like,” Grey said shortly, “so cut her some slack.”

  “Sorry,” Denizen said finally. “I didn’t—”

  “Don’t worry about it.” The Knight forced a smile, popping his knuckles against his jaw. “So, let’s run through last night.”

  It didn’t take long. Denizen described what he had seen, Grey asking occasional questions. There wasn’t a lot to tell. The woman Tenebrous hadn’t exactly been forthcoming with information, and everything after using the Higher Cant was a blur.

  “Good,” Grey said when they had finished. “Now, here’s your second contributi
on to the war effort.” He held up one of the books he’d brought with him.

  “Oh?” Denizen said, a smile creeping unbidden to his face. It surprised him that even with everything going on, a new book still made his ears prick up. “What about what Vivian said?”

  “We’re going to need every set of eyes on this,” Grey said as Denizen stared down at the titles in his hands. The Endless King and the Forever Court by Gregor Tredly, Sworn to the Endless by Palatinus the Bold, and Lords of Lower Shadow by Eilish McPhilips.

  Grey tapped each book in turn. “We need to know who or what the Endless King might send next. Who knows, there might be a clue toward what—”

  “The woman,” Denizen said suddenly. “The woman Tenebrous from last night.”

  “What about her?”

  “Vivian recognized her description.” Denizen didn’t know why it hadn’t occurred to him before. “Did you not see how she reacted last night? She stormed out without saying a word.”

  “Have you met your aunt?” Grey said drily. “The woman doesn’t do teamwork well. And maybe your description reminded her of something. She’s a Malleus. Her knowledge of the Tenebrae is—”

  “It was more than that,” Denizen insisted. “She didn’t just recognize the description—she knew that Tenebrous. And it made her angry. Really angry.”

  “Maybe they encountered each other before,” Grey said. “I’m sure she’ll tell us about it when she gets back.” He glanced at the clock on the wall. “Lunch is in an hour.” A sly smile crept onto his face. “And wear something nice.”

  “What?” There were a lot of lessons that Denizen expected to get as a Knight, but fashion advice wasn’t one of them. “Why?”

  Grey grinned like a fox. “So I can properly introduce you to Abigail Falx.”

  ABIGAIL FALX SPOKE four languages and had left footprints on three continents before her twelfth birthday.

  “Australia’s amazing,” she said brightly, passing Denizen the salt at lunch. “Have you been?”

  “Em,” Denizen replied. “No.”