Dark Rise: Dark Rise 1

by C. S. Pacat

  The land here had no cover, only scraps of trees following the lines of the creeks, and occasional low drystone walls. Bushy clumps housed nesting grouse that would give him away if he disturbed them. He knew that too well. A thick bile rose in his throat as he began to recognise places from snatches of memory that night. There was the ditch where he’d dug himself a hiding hole. There was the rotting log where he’d stumbled and tripped. From the edge of the tree line he saw the thatched stone cottage where he had been stupid enough to try to go for help. He closed his eyes, remembering the way the door had swung open under his hand, the naiveté of his calling out, ‘Hello?’ and smiling in relief as he saw the man in the hallway, a second before he saw the streak of blood on the wall.

  ‘—something out here—’

  His eyes flew open again. That was a voice, too close. He flattened himself behind a tree.

  A second voice, harsh and low. ‘I heard something. If you keep your mouth shut, we might have half a chance to find out.’

  It was two men searching systematically through the thin strip of trees. They were drawing closer and there was not enough cover to hide in. Will looked around himself desperately. He couldn’t be found here. He was still a mile out from Bowhill, where Simon was taking the Shadow Stone.

  ‘I don’t like being out here,’ said the first voice, sounding nervous. ‘I heard that it is out here. That Lord Crenshaw has it patrolling the hills.’ He sounded more than nervous. ‘What if it sees us and takes us for an intruder?’

  It? thought Will. And then, Lord Crenshaw. It was proof that he was in the right place. Simon was here, with his men on patrol.

  There was a clump of undergrowth to his left. Carefully, he picked up a pebble from the ground under his feet. He weighed it in his hand.

  ‘It won’t hurt us; it knows Simon’s brand. Senses it somehow. It’s proof we’re Lord Crenshaw’s men.’

  They were even closer. At any moment they would pass the tree and see him.

  Did that mean Simon would see him? Will remembered Leda saying that Simon could look out of the eyes of the men who bore his brand.

  Will threw the stone, hard as he could, right into the bushy clump—

  The squawk of an indignant grouse with its red-topped head was loud as it exploded upward in a burst of flapping. A shot rang out almost instantly, missing the bird but echoing across the silent nighttime valley. The men had guns—

  ‘It’s just a grouse. You’ve dragged us out here for a grouse, you fool.’ Will stayed flattened to the tree trunk, trying not to even breathe, the voice a single step away. ‘Now you will really have brought it here.’

  ‘I told you, I heard someone—’

  The other man swore. ‘You heard birds. This is pointless. We need to get back to the house.’

  The footsteps retreated, and slowly Will let out a breath, his muscles relaxing one by one.

  That had been close. But now he knew: Simon was here. Simon might have already begun, might right now be laying the Shadow Stone on the blood-soaked ground, saying whatever words were needed to release the Shadow Kings. He pushed on, towards Bowhill—

  In the eerie predawn light, Will heard the sound of breaking branches, something large in the undergrowth.

  It.

  He could hear hooves and the snort of a horse’s breath, a horse and rider moving inexorably, as if making a slow search. And as he plastered his back to the trunk of the tree, he saw its leaves start to wither and curl.

  Heart jammed in his mouth, Will forced himself to move – quietly, quietly, with no rustle of leaves or snap of a twig that might send the horse’s head jerking up. He heard the sounds circle the area where he had hidden, then turn and make for the nearby stone house. It’s following Simon’s men. He let out a breath; Simon’s men crashing through the thicket and leaving tracks behind them had bought him time.

  He drew on every piece of remembered knowledge to get himself away soundlessly. There were handholds on the gritstone. That log is rotten, don’t step on it. And always the chilling thought: the memory of withering leaves and the heavy breathing of the horse.

  When he reached a small rise, Will wasted precious moments scrabbling up the largest of the nearby stone boulders, scanning the countryside, his blood pounding.

  Nothing in the valley. He looked up towards the bleak summit of Kinder Scout, the long, high ridge of gritstone tors where the rocks had strange names.

  And there against the skyline he saw a dark figure on a horse looking out across the landscape like an ancient sentinel.

  A Remnant.

  His heart clutched in fear – those blank dead eyes looking out at the valley—

  He saw the white breath its horse exhaled in the cold night. He recognised its silhouette, a rider with a single armoured shoulder piece that had been dug up in the hills of Umbria. If he had wondered how the horse was immune to the Remnant’s touch, he saw now that it wore its own ancient armour – the long nosepiece called a chamfron – giving both horse and rider a terrifying blank look.

  It, the men had called it, but Will recalled with a shiver that there was more than one Remnant. There were three. One in the woods behind him. One high on the hill. And the other—?

  He told himself to keep going. The same rules applied: Stay quiet so they can’t hear you. Stay out of the open, they’re watching. Don’t panic, you’ll give yourself away.

  But reusing the same hiding places as he had all those months ago was its own horror. The hollowed-out tree where he had hidden, gasping air into his bruised throat. The outcrop of stone where he had crouched, his hand dripping blood. Each step brought him so strongly back to the past that it felt like he was travelling back in time, returning to that single, obliterating moment that he did not want to face.

  And then he reached the tree line and was looking out at Bowhill.

  Nestled in the dip between hills, out of sight of the village, the farmhouse where he’d lived was now a ruin. The roofing had collapsed. The door was a black rectangle that the wind howled through. Nature had begun to reclaim the place and the paths were a tangle.

  He took a step towards it and his foot hit unyielding wood. Logs in a discarded pile, grown over with wet moss – his skin prickled. He’d dropped that bundle of logs when he’d heard the first screams and started sprinting towards the house. Drawing in a shallow breath, he looked up towards his destination—

  He couldn’t avoid the open now, but there was no one in sight. That dark sentinel on the ridge might see him – see a speck break free from the trees and start moving towards the farmhouse – and that thought sent its shiver through him. But instinctively he knew that Simon was there, beyond the farmhouse, on that patch of earth where her blood had run.

  All Will had to do was go forward. One step. Another. Back to those last moments, like a door he didn’t want to open. The blood soaking his clothes; himself gasping for breath; the terrible look in her eyes as she—

  Something crunched under his feet. A strange, unexpected sound, as if he had stepped onto gravel. He looked down.

  The ground under him was black, charcoal shapes that crumbled to ash under his feet, the black earth extending around him in a wide circle, scoured like the ground after a firepit.

  Beware the dead grass.

  In cold terror he spun, and saw a Remnant, its pale and terrible face so close that he could see the thin veins of black that crept up its neck towards its mouth. Its hand reached for him; the black gauntlet reached out for him, and he drew his sword to knock it away, but his blow glanced off the metal without any effect, and he stumbled back.

  It was reaching out again. A cold wave of terror passed over him. Do not let them touch you, Justice had said. Will had watched green leaves withering before his eyes, dying from a single touch. It was worse – it was so much worse up close. You could almost taste the death, the grass blackening with the Remnant’s every step, as if everything the Remnants touched fell to decay and death.

  Now
it simply grabbed his sword and jerked him forward. Death grip, Will thought, panicked, knowing that its touch would rot and wither his flesh. In the next second, its gauntlet closed around his throat.

  At once, Bowhill disappeared, and he was somewhere else – an ancient battlefield under a red sky, surrounded by the clashes and cries of fighting. Before him towered a true Dark Guard in full armour, not Simon’s poor imitation playing dress-up with a rusty gauntlet. It was the armour the Remnants wore, whole and unblemished. And now he confronted its bearer. A terrifying fighter of immense power, with an armoured hand around his throat. They were locked together, the Dark Guard’s eyes burning into his.

  Will felt its battering power and expected to die in its grip.

  But it was the Dark Guard who gave a terrible cry of recognition, letting him go and cowering back.

  Will acted on instinct, not knowing much about sword work but remembering Violet saying, Up and under the plate. He drove the blade forward.

  The vision stopped.

  He was panting, sprawled on his hands and knees, on the ground back at Bowhill. The Remnant lay beside him, with Will’s sword rising from his chest like a cross marking a grave. A circle of dying grass was spreading outward from the gauntlet. I killed him. It felt unreal and sudden. Will lifted his hand to his own throat.

  The Remnant’s touch should have killed him as it had killed the grass, but there was nothing to show for its grip besides normal bruising: there was no crumbling ash, no black ring of dead flesh. Nothing.

  He remembered his fingertips brushing the Shadow Stone, the Elder Steward crying out, Don’t touch it! Even the briefest touch will kill! But he had touched it. The truth swelled, one more confirmation of the awful knowledge that he hadn’t wanted to face. Nausea rose in him and he vomited onto the black earth. It was long moments before he sat back onto his knees.

  He looked at the Remnant, and then, before he could let himself think about what he was doing, he reached out, took hold of its gauntlet, and pulled it off.

  Nothing happened. Will didn’t wither or crumble, nor did the dead man change. The dead man … for he was a man, or he had been once. He had lived a life before he’d put on the gauntlet. Will had half hoped that the black tendrils would withdraw from the man’s too-pale skin, miraculously freeing him – that he might even come shuddering back to life now that the gauntlet no longer controlled him. But he didn’t. He stayed dead. Dead as the grass, staring up at the sky.

  Will wrenched his sword free, took the gauntlet, and went on.

  He was bleeding from a cut along his ribs, and his thigh, and limping a little by the time he reached the farmhouse. The way was down a grassy slope, across the deep cut of the stream, then up the other bank. He was close now to the place where she had died. He focused with dogged determination on his goal, ignoring the fresh injuries and exhaustion.

  The closer he got, the more his mind crowded with terrible echoes, the screams, the smell of blood and burnt earth, the wrenching horror of hands around his throat. Run!

  The farmhouse looked so familiar, set on the side of a rise, the grey skies overhead the same shade as the stone house cottage with its slate roof tiles. There was the creek where he had hauled water, more like a rivulet cut into the slope, runoff that always trickled down after rain. There was the crumbling drystone wall that he had promised to fix when they had first come here. It was just as he remembered it, except that the windows were dark and the front door was missing.

  Inside, it was dead silent. Small animals and birds nested here; dust and leaves covered the floor. But the dark rooms were eerily preserved, the table still laid as it had been, her shawl still thrown over a chair. He shivered, remembering her sweeping that shawl around her shoulders in the mornings, preparing to go into the village.

  Walking forward now was like forcing himself through a barrier, towards a place that he did not want to go.

  Through the back door, into the enclosed garden.

  Every nerve screamed at him not to go out there, but he did, looking out at a view that almost made him dizzy. It was the place that had haunted his mind all these months, where he had run and dropped to his knees by her side, and said, ‘Mother!’

  As he had dreaded, as he had hoped, the garden wasn’t empty. There was a single figure there. A man kneeling on the earth, and as Will watched, he rose and turned. And they faced each other.

  Simon.

  He had imagined this meeting so often. He’d thought of it even before he’d known Simon’s name, as he’d hidden in the mud and rain, vowing to find out who had done this to his mother. He’d thought of it in London, when he’d learned that Simon was a rich man, and he’d wondered how a boy might take him down. He’d thought of it when Justice had told him Simon was the Dark King’s descendant, part of an ancient world, a monster who had conjured a shadow to kill the Stewards, a godhead who inspired so much loyalty in his followers that they branded their own flesh.

  But he just saw a man, and that was chilling in its own right: that an ordinary person had done this. Simon was a man of about thirty-seven years, with dark hair and fine, luminous eyes under thick lashes. He wore black, his jacket made of rich velvet, with long black leather boots, and jewelled rings on his fingers. A familiar look. His money and taste had dressed James, Will thought. And Katherine.

  And maybe that was the first hint of similarity he had with that dark power from the past: the way he viewed people as objects to be taken, used, or snuffed out, as a housekeeper snuffed a candle.

  ‘Boy! What are you doing here? How did you get past the guards?’

  One hand pressed to the cut on his ribs, Will came forward. The other hand clutched tightly to what he held, trophies of his fights. It was hard to put weight on his left leg, and his limp was pronounced.

  Will said, ‘You don’t know who I am.’

  And he threw the three pieces of black armour to the ground between them: gauntlet, shoulder piece, helm. As the armour pieces hit the ground, the grass beneath them withered, until they lay in a circle of black earth.

  Simon looked from the armour back up at Will, eyes widening.

  ‘I know you do it all the time,’ said Will, ‘but I’d never killed anyone before.’

  Will could see the thoughts turning in Simon’s mind. How had the Remnants been defeated? How could someone touch the armour? How was this boy still alive?

  Then Simon looked – really looked – at Will for the first time, and understanding bloomed in his eyes.

  ‘Will Kempen,’ said Simon, with dark, rich pleasure. ‘I thought I was going to have to hunt you down.’

  ‘You tried,’ said Will. ‘You killed a lot of people.’

  ‘But instead, you’ve come right to me.’

  The land around them felt very empty, as if each living thing had fled, so that they were alone under the heavy black sky, no sound from the fields or the trees, only the wind shifting the leaves.

  ‘I was tired of running,’ said Will.

  His leg hurt, the slice on his thigh painful, and under the hand he’d pressed to his ribs he could feel slick blood. He ignored it, his eyes fixed on Simon. He was breathing shallowly, his goal in his sights.

  ‘Your mother led me on quite the chase. She got away from me in London after I killed her sister. She even hid you from me at first, until I got reports that she might have a child. That was clever of her … She knew killing her sister, Mary, wasn’t enough to bring back the Dark King. That I’d need to kill all of you. She kept one step ahead of me for seventeen years.’

  A burst of anger at that; he had to force it down. Will thought about what his mother had done – what she had really done all those years on the run – had tried to do right up to the end – and he drew in a tight breath. ‘She was stronger than you knew.’

  ‘Until she came here. Hiding in these hills. You know, they call this place the Dark Peak. A fitting name for the birthplace of the Dark King.’

  Will looked around at the g
reen hills rising to forbidding peaks, the closeness of the sky that hung over the valley where the stream cut its path through the undulating earth. And behind him the brown and grey stone of the house where he’d lived until his mother had bled out on the ground under Simon’s feet.

  ‘You think he’ll be reborn here?’ said Will.

  ‘He’ll return,’ said Simon. ‘And take his throne.’

  ‘After you kill me,’ said Will.

  Simon smiled.

  ‘You know, we’re similar, you and I.’

  ‘Are we?’ said Will.

  ‘You’re Blood of the Lady,’ said Simon. ‘I’m Blood of the Dark King. We’re both descendants of the ancient world. Power runs in our veins.’ Simon smiled in a way that made Will doubly conscious of the blood under his feet that had seeped into the earth while his mother died. Then Simon’s smile grew hard and brittle. ‘Yet with every generation, the blood weakens. Mingled with the blood of humans, ordinariness, mortality … our lines have dwindled until we have no power of our own. We’re reduced to using objects. Objects! Remnants of a world that should be our own. Magic is our inheritance, yet it has been taken from us.’

  ‘You think this is yours,’ said Will. ‘That it’s owed to you.’

  ‘Humans have overrun this world, an infestation, obliterating the great cultures of the past. I’m the one who’s going to cleanse it and return it to the way it should have been. Since I was a boy, my father told me about my destiny. The Dark King ruled a better world. And with your death, I’m going to bring it back.’

  ‘Bring back a world of darkness?’ said Will. ‘A world of terror and control?’

  ‘A world of magic,’ said Simon, ‘where those with the blood of old will ascend and conquer. Humans will serve us as is fitting. The great palaces, the impossible wonders, the treasures that were taken from us – your death will restore it all.’

  Simon’s eyes burned with greedy intensity. ‘And when He comes, the world will know true power. For He is greater than any human mind can comprehend. He will make them all bow down before Him. He is my true father and He will take me as my heir and deliver it to me … my birthright.’