Dark Rise: Dark Rise 1

by C. S. Pacat

  Weighing the Collar in his hand, Will looked right at James, who was staring back at him, eyes wide, though his gaze couldn’t help dropping to the Collar, his breathing shallow.

  ‘But it does have power,’ said Gauthier. ‘Men want it. The control it promises … The mastery … The command. Like dragons hoarding jewels, all who touch the Collar crave to possess it … Because they crave to possess him. And Simon … Simon wants it to secure his dominion. Simon has hunted me all these many years, seeking what is mine until there was no refuge and no rest.’

  Will thought about Gauthier, driven to this dead, empty farmhouse. He could see it in Gauthier’s needy, grasping quality – the way he was almost hollowed out, as if his time with the Collar had sucked him dry of anything but the desire to take and to hold. The Collar was all he could think about, the one image burned in his mind.

  Will turned his gaze to Violet.

  ‘There’s a room next to this one,’ he said to her. ‘Lock James in it.’

  ‘And then?’ said Violet.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  ‘WE USE IT,’ said Cyprian.

  Will looked up as Violet returned from chaining James up in the kitchen, the door closing behind her with a soft click. Cyprian had righted Gauthier’s chair and returned him to it, while Will put the Collar on the mantel. It was still wrapped in the blanket, but he could feel it, a heavy presence, drawing his mind and attention.

  ‘We put the Collar around James’s neck,’ said Cyprian, ‘and send him in to attack Simon.’

  ‘We can’t just make James into our lackey,’ said Violet. ‘Can we?’

  The question hung in the air.

  ‘It’s not forever,’ said Cyprian. ‘If he makes it out, we take the Collar off.’

  ‘You can’t take it off,’ said Gauthier.

  Everyone turned to him; Will felt his words sink down into him, a cold stone in a lake.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Will, his skin prickling.

  Gauthier was in his chair, his dirty, rumpled jacket wrapped around him, part of the decay and disrepair that surrounded them. He clasped knotted hands that were blotched in the dim light. His pearly, sightless eyes looked not quite at Will.

  ‘There’s no latch. There’s no key. When you put it on, he’s yours forever.’ Gauthier’s whole body rocked in place slightly, as if eager. He spoke like a man quoting dark scripture. ‘Only his death will free him.’

  Yours forever. The idea that the Collar was permanent, that James couldn’t take it off, made the prickling of Will’s skin turn into a deep shivery sensation.

  Only his death will free him, thought Will, but it hadn’t. James was Reborn; he had died and risen again, and the Collar still wanted him.

  Will looked down at the Collar, the shape of it under the blanket, the remembered gleam of its gold. The full scale of the choice they faced was before him. They could stop Simon, but the price—

  The price was James. Forever.

  ‘How do you know that?’ said Will, looking back up at Gauthier. ‘How do you know what happens when James puts on the Collar?’

  ‘My ancestor was his executioner,’ said Gauthier as the breath left Will in shock. ‘Rathorn killed the Betrayer and interred him in a tomb, but even then, the Collar didn’t open. He had to saw off the Betrayer’s head to get it.’

  ‘He used a saw on James’s dead body?’ said Violet, revolted. She had taken two steps back.

  ‘The Dark King gave the order.’ Gauthier recited the words as if it was an old story told and retold many times. ‘Kill his servants, so that they would be reborn with him. Rathorn killed the Betrayer on the steps of the Dark Palace. He was supposed to inter the body in the Dark King’s tomb. But he couldn’t resist the Collar. He sawed through the Betrayer’s neck and took it … There was no one left to stop him.’

  The horror of those final days swept over Will. The Dark King defeated by the Lady. The forces of the Dark driven back. And the death … a wave of death. How many servants had the Dark King ordered be slaughtered? Will imagined the executioner in the halls of the Dark Palace, looting the bodies like a crow picking over carrion.

  Would that be their future if the Dark King rose? Miles of ground littered with the dead?

  ‘Rathorn fled with the Collar, hid it, kept it safe. A family secret, handed down over centuries. Now I’m the last, and Simon has tracked me down … He wants it … Wants it … He killed my son, you know. He thought I had passed the Collar to him. I would have. I just needed a little more time with it. I just needed—’

  Gauthier’s hands clutched instinctively. The Collar had hollowed him out like a husk. Will thought of Rathorn, the long-ago executioner, taking the object that would blight his family, withering his descendants until all that was left was an old man in an empty house. He had thought it a treasure, but it had been a curse. Had he ended up like Gauthier, alone, half-mad, curled around the Collar in jealous protection?

  But there was one thing about the story that didn’t make sense.

  ‘James was at his full power then. How did Rathorn capture him?’

  Will looked at Gauthier, trying to see in him some echo of the past, a champion who had been able to defeat the Dark King’s greatest general. Gauthier stared back at him blindly.

  ‘Capture him? There was no capture. You don’t understand. It was the Dark King’s will, so James knelt and bared his throat for the stroke.’ Gauthier’s voice was a dark promise. ‘I told you. Put it around his neck and he’ll do whatever you tell him.’

  The Betrayer. The Dark’s lieutenant. The ultimate weapon: one they could wield.

  Will looked up at Violet and Cyprian, two faces set with grim purpose similar to his own.

  Will said, ‘Give me the Collar.’

  James lifted his head when Will walked in.

  Violet had chained James to the cast-iron range in the small bare kitchen with its smashed glass window, out of earshot of the others. James had adopted a posture Will recognised from his own time as quarry: back to the wall, eyes on the door. At the far end of the house, they were alone.

  When he saw the Collar in Will’s hands, James’s whole body squared off towards it, and his face changed.

  ‘What’s it going to be?’ said James. ‘Feed you a grape? Grovel at your feet? Or will you just send me back to kill everyone I know?’

  ‘Like you did to Marcus?’ said Will.

  He drew the blanket back from the Collar, exposing a ruby curve to the air, while being careful to keep hold of it through the rough fabric and not touch it with his bare hands.

  ‘You can feel it, can’t you,’ said Will.

  The ugly look that James gave him was a yes.

  ‘What does it feel like?’ asked Will. ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘It doesn’t hurt, it—’ James bit off the words. The next look was even uglier, and said everything.

  Do you want it? Gauthier had said. Do you want it the way it wants you?

  James was breathing shallowly, his cheeks flushed and his full attention now on the Collar.

  ‘So you do want it,’ said Will.

  ‘I don’t want it,’ said James.

  Will came forward, over the leaves and dirt that had blown into the empty kitchen. ‘Gauthier said that his ancestor sawed through your dead throat to get it. Is that true?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ James had said that before too. I don’t remember that life. Now he said it as if he was angry, as if he wanted to remember but couldn’t.

  ‘But you knew the Collar. You knew what it was for. How?’

  James was silent, his chest rising and falling rapidly.

  ‘He had to saw through your throat because it doesn’t come off. Did you know that?’

  ‘That’s the appeal, isn’t it?’ said James, with brittle defiance. ‘Simon’s Prize is yours forever.’

  Will heard his own voice, curling with the feeling of the Collar. ‘Did you hate it when you followed orders? Did it keep you awake behind the co
mpulsion? Or did it take over your whole mind, so that you believed you wanted to do everything?’

  ‘God, you like this, don’t you. You liked it with the horn too. Keeping me pinned. Drawing it out. Put it on me if you’re going to. Or are you too much of a coward?’

  Will said, ‘Turn around.’

  James turned, after a moment when his cheeks filled with colour. Will saw the line of his back and the exposed nape of his neck. This close, it seemed James obeyed just as if the Collar were around his throat, though he stood like a stallion halfway through the breaking process, quivering and dripping with sweat. Will reached out and put his free hand on James’s back, between his shoulder blades, and felt the shivery hot muscle through the shirt and silk of his waistcoat.

  Will’s hand slid down until he felt the manacles, where James’s wrists were crossed just below the small of his back. James’s throat was a pale, slender column beneath licks of gold hair. It looked naked. Vulnerable. Will felt in his teeth that this was the closest the Collar had come to the place where it belonged. Where it fit.

  Put it on, and make him mine.

  Breathing shallowly, he quickly unlocked James’s manacles and let them drop heavily to the floor. Then he stepped back.

  ‘What are you—’ James swung around to stare at him. His eyes were wary, uncertain. James instinctively clasped his own wrists, as if he couldn’t quite believe that he was free from the manacles. Then he lifted the fingers of his right hand, touching the bare skin of his own neck.

  Will held out the Collar to him. It felt like holding out bread to a starving man who might snatch it and stab him for it anyway. James didn’t. James’s wariness was greater.

  ‘Why would you give it back to me?’ He was staring at Will with dark eyes.

  ‘You came here alone.’

  ‘What does that have to do with—?’

  ‘You came here alone because you don’t want Simon to have it,’ Will said. ‘Simon doesn’t know you’re here.’ He watched the slight changes on James’s face. ‘I’m right, aren’t I.’

  ‘So what if you are?’

  James looked primed for a trick. He hadn’t taken the Collar, or even reached out for it, though his whole body was taut, as though at any moment he might snatch at it, or simply bolt.

  ‘The Stewards found out what you were,’ said Will. ‘You fled. You were a child. You had nowhere to turn. I think you went to Simon because he was the only person who could protect you. He took you in, he raised you knowing what you would grow into. Maybe he told you that you’d be at his side in the new order, and maybe you believed him. But at some point you learned about the Collar.’

  James stared back at him. Will could feel the words had shocked him on some core level, touching some part of him unused to being seen.

  ‘You learned he was looking for it. You learned he wanted you in it. The man you trusted wanted to enslave you. But you couldn’t leave him. You needed to find it before he did, and staying close to him gave you the best access, the best information, the best chance of success. So you did his bidding. Simon’s Prize. You let him keep you like a pet. And when you learned that Gauthier was in England, you came here alone.’

  There was a silence in the empty room, as James held himself very still, as if even the act of breathing would give something away. It seemed as if James wasn’t going to speak. And then:

  ‘It was his father,’ said James. ‘It was Simon’s father who raised me, more than he did.’

  ‘How old were you when you joined him?’

  ‘Eleven,’ said James.

  ‘And when you learned about the Collar?’

  ‘A year later.’

  Will lifted the Collar, proffering it again.

  ‘I’m not a Steward,’ said Will. ‘I keep my promises. I’m loyal to my friends. I told you.’

  Enlarged pupils had turned James’s eyes very dark. The wariness in James was now a long, searching look, seeking something beyond a trick or a trap.

  ‘What’s to stop me taking the Collar and killing you right now?’ James said.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘And Simon? I thought you couldn’t stop him without me.’

  Will felt his lips curl, a brittle new feeling pushing inside him. ‘Don’t underestimate me.’

  ‘I’m not going to help you fight him.’

  ‘I know that.’

  Still, James didn’t take the Collar. He just looked at Will with that strange, searching look.

  ‘I don’t understand you.’

  ‘I know that too.’

  Slowly, James extended his hand. He didn’t take the Collar right away; he hesitated before touching it, fingers hovering over it, and at the last second he avoided grasping it bare-handed. He took hold of it where Will held it, the wrapped section. His fingers brushing Will’s felt cool. The moment Will released the Collar, it was as if a spell was broken. James wrapped the Collar swiftly back up in the blanket, tucking it under his arm, and seeing it disappear helped too. James made as if to leave.

  And stopped, looking back at Will. Will could see another question forming on his lips.

  But instead of asking it, James shook his head and left in silence by the rickety door, with only that single searching look back at him.

  Violet was perched on the edge of the splintered table, but she leaped up at his arrival. Equally tense, Cyprian was standing next to Gauthier, sword in hand. Their body language was edgy with expectation, shot through with shame. Both of them looked with nervy tension at Will, and then past him to the hallway. When they didn’t see James, the tension grew urgent. Cyprian stepped forward.

  ‘Did you do it? Is it on him?’ Cyprian flushed after he said it.

  Violet had taken two steps down the empty hallway, looking for any sign of James. ‘Have you sent him after Simon already?’

  ‘I let him go.’

  They both swung towards him, staring. A shocked moment of silence. Cyprian’s tunic was a little bloodied from the injury he’d taken when he hit the wall, during James’s capture. He changed colour, patches of red appearing on his cheeks.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘I let him go.’

  The room was strewn over with the signs of their earlier fight. The furniture was smashed, the ceiling half smashed through, rubble scattering the floor and fine dust from the plaster drifting through the air in the dim streaks of light.

  ‘And the Collar?’

  Will said, ‘It was his. I gave it back to him.’

  Into the thunderous silence that followed, Gauthier gave a low, painful moan. ‘Gone – it’s gone – he gave it away—’

  Cyprian clenched his hand over the hilt of his sword. He had half moved towards the door before he stopped. He had no way to undo what Will had done: James was long gone, on horseback with a head start, and he was too powerful to subdue even if Cyprian did catch him. Will felt the battering emotions as Cyprian realised that it was too late, the decision made without him.

  ‘We agreed. We agreed to use it to stop Simon.’

  ‘I never agreed to that,’ said Will. ‘I listened to Gauthier, and I made my decision.’

  ‘James,’ said Cyprian, as though the name was dirt. ‘He used you. He fooled you into feeling sympathy for him, and you fell for it.’

  ‘It was the right thing to do,’ said Will.

  ‘Did he hook you like he did Emery? You’re in love with him too?’

  ‘It was the right thing to do,’ Will said steadily.

  ‘It wasn’t the right thing to do!’ said Cyprian. ‘He held my brother captive for months, keeping him alive until he turned. And then he set him loose to slaughter the Stewards. How do you think Marcus felt, knowing the shadow was in him, but not being able to stop it? James said Marcus begged, do you remember that? And now Simon has the Shadow Stone—’

  Will said, ‘This isn’t about Marcus—’

  ‘No, it’s about Simon,’ said Cyprian. ‘Simon is going to release the Shadow Kings, and they wil
l rain down death and destruction on this world. Nothing can stop them. No power alive is strong enough.’

  ‘I know the stakes. I know what Simon can do.’

  ‘We had one chance to defeat him. We had it in our hands and you gave it up! You heard the Elder Steward. Once the Shadow Kings are free, Simon can raise the Dark King. And when the Dark King returns, he’ll bring the dark past with him, returning magic and subjugating our world! We could have used that Collar to stop it.’

  ‘Used it the way the Stewards used the Cup?’ said Will.

  Cyprian went white, as if the flesh on his very bones marbled. He looked as if he’d been cut but was so drained of blood that the wound was bloodless. Silence rang; everything stopped, the only movement the drift of small motes of dust in the shabby room.

  ‘It’s not the same.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ said Will. ‘Which part? Enslaving your enemy? Believing you can use a dark power without becoming what you fight?’

  ‘It’s not the same,’ Cyprian said again. ‘Using the Collar doesn’t put anyone at risk—’

  ‘It’s the Dark King’s will!’ said Will. ‘He’s everywhere, can’t you feel it? His artefacts. His power. The Stewards are dead because they drank from his Cup. They never had a chance; the Dark King was inside the Hall the whole time, inside their bodies, inside their minds. Did you think that was an accident? A twist of fate? He planned it! Just like he planned this! He wants the Collar on James’s neck. And you want to do his bidding.’ He didn’t relent. ‘Just like the Stewards.’

  Cyprian’s hands became fists. ‘The Stewards weren’t doing his bidding. They were good people standing against the Dark. They held the line for centuries. They were fighting long before you came to the Hall. And when the shadow came, they gave their lives to stop it!’

  ‘Look.’ Will grasped Cyprian by the arm and dragged him around to face the old man rocking in his chair. ‘Look at Gauthier. The Collar twisted his entire line until they were unable to do anything but keep it close and deliver it across the centuries to this house – to us – to James.’ Looking at the old man, Will could feel it, the stifling influence of the Dark King, spreading out over everything, so thick that it almost choked him. A thousand dark tendrils, reaching out from the black pit of the past, seeking hold. ‘The Stewards thought they were in control, but they weren’t. He was. He wanted them to drink. That’s how his objects work. You think you’re using it, when it’s the one using you.’