by Dave Rudden
Denizen woke, and knew that his mother was dead.
He lay in that certainty for a long moment as cold retreated from his skin – a cold he recognized because it was quite literally like nothing else in the world. There was only one cold that reached into you and turned your blood to slush, only one cold that bred a freezing ache in hand and eye.
The Art of Apertura.
Denizen lay on his back, feeling his clothes crinkle to dryness around him, and considered the art of parental extrapolation. As a child, he’d had no evidence his parents existed except for the fact that he did, and he’d spent years wondering what they were like. The other children in Crosscaper had photos or souvenirs, but all Denizen’s parents had given him was life, and a host of questions.
There were five stages to grief, but Denizen had never got angry, or bargained, and he’d especially avoided denial because, if he refused to believe his parents were dead, he’d have to believe that they might be out there, but unable to be with him … that they might be out there and not want to be with him.
Schrödinger’s parents – a riddle he’d been afraid to solve. And now it was solved for him. Vivian had to be dead, because if she weren’t she’d be here.
‘He’s awake.’
Denizen pushed himself to his elbows. They were no longer in Adumbral. Ochre stone had been replaced by heather-thatched slopes, sweeping down to an ocean the colour of slate, waves clawing at the sky as if desperate to be rain. The smell of salt was a familiar sting.
The past never left you. It shadowed you, hunted you, and for Denizen it was scuffed granite and windows like narrowed, hostile eyes. It was corrugated sheds that smelled of half-sealed bags of compost, doors that moaned and drains that clattered like veins in a seizing heart.
Someone had come in when Denizen had been gone and lit the place up like a prison – spotlights glaring like guards from every corner on the wall – but Denizen knew it all the same.
Crosscaper. He was back at Crosscaper. He was back at Crosscaper with Grey. He was back at Crosscaper with Grey and he was an orphan and each thought squeezed more air from his throat until the Knight was suddenly at his side.
‘Hey. Hey. Look at me.’
His handsome face was streaked with dirt and blood, his eyes red-rimmed from exhaustion and tears. He looked like Denizen felt.
‘Dragon,’ Denizen whispered, and the word, with its harsh, cruel consonants, felt right to him. The word should hurt.
Grey’s voice was raw. ‘The whole street went up. She must have taken out half the …’ He swallowed. ‘She gave it her all.’
Of course she did. That’s Vivian. Was. Was Vivian. The past could follow him, but he couldn’t follow it, and now it had gathered her up like it had his father. She’d left him again, and this time she wasn’t coming back.
Something must have passed over his face, because Grey gripped his shoulder with the iron fingers of his good hand.
‘She did what she had to do. She told the Neophytes to get clear and she told me to … to help Mercy …’
Distantly, Denizen noted how shockingly clear the air was of Tenebraic interference compared to Adumbral. What had been a deafening cacophony was now a single wavering note, echoing from a shape that might have just been a curl of mist.
‘When Dragon died, the whole Tenebrae went quiet,’ Grey whispered. ‘I’ve never felt anything like it. As if Vivian scoured the air clean, just for a moment. I told the Neophytes to make a run for it and then I used the Art of Apertura. Vivian … she –’
‘Did the right thing,’ Denizen said, and, though the words were flat and calm, he could feel the grief expanding in his chest, preparing to crack him apart. ‘She did what she had to do.’
The words arrived on the crest of a sob, dry and clipped, as if his body had started mourning before his brain was able to. ‘And I’m not … I’m not mad. Why am I not mad at her?’
Grey blurred in his vision, and then the first real sob came, so racking and violent that tears splattered his hands like rain. They climbed out of him in great body heaves and he felt Grey shaking as he wept too. They stayed that way for a very long time.
I’m sorry for your loss.
Maybe it was the stronger taste of the Tenebrae that she brought with her, or some echo of his mother’s contempt, but Mercy had barely drifted over before Denizen lurched to his feet. ‘We need to get moving.’
Grey jerked back as the Neophyte took two staggering steps towards the orphanage, hands darting to his thin chest as if stabbed.
‘Falter. My knife. I don’t have …’
Denizen cut himself off before he could become hysterical. The ground seemed to shift underneath him, emotions fluttering in him like the subject and settings of a dream. There was a gap in his world now, and he struggled to account for it.
‘Denizen …’
‘I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine,’ he said, his fingers tangled in his hair, pulling hard enough to hurt. ‘I’m a Hardwick.’ The pain helped. Every time his brain drifted to Vivian’s dead, he dragged it away. ‘It’ll kick in any minute. That’s what we do, you know? Grief hits, and then it’s all about duty. We’re so similar, you know? That …’
‘Denizen, we can wait –’
‘No.’ And finally, finally, his voice was firm. He’d heard every platitude about grief there was by the age of six and, as was so often the case with Vivian, the normal rules didn’t seem to apply.
Crosscaper’s cook, Mrs Mollins, handed out they’ve gone to a better place with every bread roll, but Denizen couldn’t imagine Vivian sitting on a cloud somewhere with a harp. A sword of fire, yes. Steel wings and holy wrath, definitely. She’d not be in heaven five minutes before criticizing the Pearly Gates for being militarily indefensible.
They’re at peace. A concept so alien to both Denizen and Vivian that it just didn’t wash.
No, what came to Denizen then were the words of one of Crosscaper’s ill-fated substitute teachers. He didn’t remember her subject or appearance. All he remembered was that one morning, when Michael Flannigan hadn’t done his homework, she’d said, What would your parents think?
Whether she’d been fired because of the staggering stupidity of using dead parents to shame an eight-year-old or because she’d had the kind of personality that would use dead parents to shame an eight-year-old was up for debate, but it was her words Denizen clung to now.
What would Vivian think?
‘Yield not to evil,’ Denizen said. It didn’t sound as impressive without thirty years of war and bloodshed behind it, but it would do for now. ‘I’ll break down later. Right now we have to …’ A thought surfaced from the murk. ‘Why are we here?’
A shadow crossed Grey’s face. He turned away abruptly, staring down at the slump of buildings below. They replaced the gates, Denizen thought absently. Well, they would have had to. Denizen and his mother had demolished them the year before.
‘We got dragged off course,’ Grey said. ‘The Tenebrae’s all stirred up; the currents dragged us here or we got … confused or something. That’s all. I wasn’t … I didn’t mean to …’
He was scratching at the malformed claw that had replaced his left hand.
‘We just ended up here.’
‘Specifically here,’ Denizen said. The Order’s stock-in-trade was battlefield sorcery. Their history might have stretched back fifteen centuries, but there still hadn’t been much time for study. That said, we just ended up here was uncharacteristically vague.
‘Yes,’ Grey snapped. ‘And?’
‘Nothing,’ Denizen said. ‘I just –’
‘You think I want to be here any more than you do?’ The older Knight’s eyes were blazing, not with flame but with fury, an anger so sudden that Denizen took a step back. They weren’t far from where Grey had been puppeted by the Three to point a gun in Denizen’s face, and the same sort of rage had twisted his features then.
And suddenly it was gone, as quickly as it had appeared.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m … sorry. It’s been a day.’
‘I know,’ Denizen said. ‘I just … What do we do now?’
We find a boat.
Mercy stood out as pearl against the iron of the sky.
You heard what Dragon said. The monument to my father’s arrogance.
‘Where?’ Denizen and Grey said together.
She raised a hand of rippling silver to point at the sea.
That dreadful, mighty creature built a body unequalled by any Tenebrous before or since …
Five fingers. The fingers of the Endless King.
Grudges were lifeblood to creatures fuelled by will.
They’re keeping him at Os Reges Point.
It was strange thinking about adults as complicated people.
Denizen had always assumed you just got to a certain age and … solidified. Teenagers were supposed to change. They had to learn and change and figure out what kind of adult they were going to congeal into, and Denizen had been looking forward to it because he’d changed so much in the last year that he was frankly exhausted.
After twelve years, Denizen had thought he had the measure of Ackerby: his habits, his patterns. He’d thought he knew the director at least as well as he knew Crosscaper, which was why it was both disconcerting and oddly fitting to find out how the orphanage had changed.
There was art on the walls. There were brightly coloured signs on the doors. The smell of armpits and sadness had been replaced by a nostril-curling whiff of bleach. Denizen slipped through the foyer, squinting in the glare of unfamiliar lights, and stared down at the floorboards where he’d found Director Ackerby a year ago.
Had you asked Denizen before the Three descended on Crosscaper, he would have put Director Ackerby squarely in the orphanage directors first, women and children second category. But, in those last moments before the Tenebrous had drowned him in troubled sleep, he’d tried to ring the fire alarm.
He’d tried to warn them. He’d tried to help.
Adults did change. Even after being given every reason and excuse not to, even after enduring more misery than anyone should.
Denizen’s eyes prickled, and he ducked into a classroom to clear them. It was the only reason he wasn’t caught. Doors were slamming open, and he watched, hidden, as students began to file by in stops and starts, teachers pausing them at each corner as if they too were hiding.
Mr Colford passed by, so close that Denizen could have reached out and touched him, could have simply fallen into step behind him and faded into the background. He’d been very good at that here.
And I am an orphan.
The urge was short-lived. Denizen could no more rejoin them than he could pull the iron out of his palm. He belonged to a different world now, and kids came and went from Crosscaper all the time. Just another topic at dinner – Denizen Hardwick? Oh, he left.
Ackerby’s office was much like the man himself – shabbily majestic with a patina of dust. It felt like sacrilege to go through the director’s desk, but on the one hand it was hard to find any desk impressive after Greaves’s, and on the other they weren’t going anywhere without car keys and the gate remote.
Passage to Os Reges Point required a boat and, while there was a harbour just beyond the closest village, close in rural Ireland without a car meant a couple of hours’ walk. None of them had particularly good memories of Crosscaper, but Denizen knew his way around, and had volunteered to …
Rob Ackerby?
Denizen yanked on another drawer. There wasn’t time for subtlety. Ackerby would probably come running as soon as he heard the gates open, though Grey looked half on the edge of murder already, so Denizen didn’t exactly rate the director’s chances.
‘It can’t be. Not … not you.’
The voice reached his senses a second before the Tenebrae did, and Denizen went bolt upright as the hairs on his neck stood on end so hard it hurt. The feeling was nothing as strong as what they’d left behind in Adumbral, but it still clogged his throat with nausea, painting sweat across his brow.
The director, by comparison, was almost an afterthought, frozen in the doorway with a shocked look on his wrinkled face. This is what you came for. It was an effort to speak around the fire in his throat.
‘Director,’ Denizen said, awkwardly raising his hand in greeting. ‘I need your help.’
He frowned.
‘Also, what on earth are you wearing?’
‘Shut up, Hardwick,’ Ackerby snapped reflexively, crossing his hands protectively over his scratchy mauve jumper. ‘And … why are you … They’re not coming back, are they?’
The last time Denizen had seen Ackerby he had been in the company of a tiger-lean girl with a crossbow, a madman with a broken jaw and – tears caustic in his eyes once again – a towering woman dressed in armour and scars, and Denizen still knew he was talking about the Clockwork Three.
‘I won’t have them back here. I won’t –’
‘I’m sorry to bring this to you,’ Denizen said, and he really was, but Cants were swarming through him like agitated bees, darting into the thin bones of his wrists and shaking his pulse from the inside. ‘I truly am. Where are –’
‘In the bunker,’ the old man snapped. ‘I mean the … the basement. They’re safe. What’s happening?’
This far into the countryside every sound travelled. This far into the countryside the smallest light was a star. The baleful cry of a Tenebrous shook the window frames just as honeyed light licked the frost from the glass, and Denizen was running before the echoes died away.
It wasn’t Dragon, which was good for a number of reasons, not least that Denizen didn’t know if he would have been able to survive losing his mother and finding out she hadn’t taken her killer with her. But, just as every Tenebrous felt a unique kind of wrong, so too did horror, and the revulsion Denizen felt when he stumbled on to the courtyard was a familiar one indeed.
Denizen remembered a stubby thumb of a head, human features swimming on top like scum on cream. He remembered buttons like eyes, and hair evacuating a scalp to make room for rising clockwork teeth. Obsession remade Tenebrous, and the Woman in White had hated Vivian so much it had grown to resemble her, and the Man in the Waistcoat had hated Vivian so much it had almost made him sane.
They had died here, in this courtyard. You wouldn’t have known. Every scar in the courtyard walls had been filled in, every scrap of that spavined arachnoid form removed … and yet one sign remained, dug into the gravel and the stone.
Mercy and Grey stood over it, as pale as each other, the Tenebrous shuddering between light and smoke and the Knight with his swords in his hands.
‘We – we – we …’
Grey was stammering, actually stammering, sweat a drizzle on his skin. Unreality palpitated off Mercy like the beat of a failing heart, the air cold enough around her to cut.
We came to see if you were …
Neither one of them had taken their eyes from the ground, and there was absolutely no need to ask why.
‘It won’t go away.’
To his credit, Director Ackerby didn’t seem fazed by Mercy at all. Like all of them, his gaze was fixed on the words carved into the ground, the scars outlined by a thick rime of ice.
‘We tried, after the Incident. We tried covering it, and burying it, and chipping away the ice, but …’ There was a quiet, bitter rage in his voice. ‘It’s like the words are visible no matter what. It just won’t go away.’
‘No,’ Denizen said distantly, his iron eye aching. ‘I imagine it wouldn’t.’
What would it look like, to someone who didn’t have Denizen’s sight? Did even Grey see it? Mercy would, of course. The wrongness that bled from the carved words was kin to what came from her.
The words couldn’t be scrubbed away because they weren’t carved on the stone. They were carved on reality, ripped into the fabric of the universe itself with a viciousness and anger that might never heal. Denizen saw each letter as a pu
lsing wound, no less deep than the Glimpse itself.
He’d heard those words. The Man in the Waistcoat had spoken them.
The last Hardwick.
THE FULL SET.
27
There are Little Kingdoms
It had only been a day.
Twenty-four hours. That was all. Twenty-four hours since the only things Abigail had had to worry about were her fear of flying and whether she’d remembered her favourite hand wraps. (She had. Abigail Falx never forgot anything.)
Twenty-four hours since Daybreak had loomed over them like a protector, like a parent. Twenty-four hours since her whole future had stretched out in front of her; a million chances to make those who mattered proud. As Simon tonelessly began his story, Abigail couldn’t help but think that the reason so much had happened in a single day was because it was the Order’s last on this earth.
‘Dragon separated us,’ Simon said. ‘Herded us. I saw Neophytes go down under a building. One of the girls freaked out and we were trying to drag her clear and we lost sight of the others and Dragon came down and I bent light to hide us. Most I’ve ever done at once. It was … all I was good for.’
‘You did the right thing,’ Greaves said. It almost sounded like an order – believe it – but Simon didn’t acknowledge it. The last twenty-four hours had stolen away the boy Abigail knew, replacing him with a bad photocopy – all gaps and greys and tear-streaked dust.
‘I don’t think it was at all bothered about us. But, every time Dragon moved, buildings came down, and the air was full of dust, and we could barely see. It was like a war zone. It was … even being close to it was death.’
Greaves had dispatched a cadre to retrieve Simon as soon as they’d figured out where he was, Darcie guiding them through the maelstrom of Breaching Tenebrous and running battles. The Neophytes had scattered, maybe into the city, Simon didn’t know – but eight had been retrieved.
Eight. Out of twenty-three.
‘Simon,’ Greaves said, laying the second syllable on the first as if trying to rebuild something very fragile. ‘Where’s Grey? And … and Vivian. Where are they?’
