by Dave Rudden
‘It was like the sun coming up,’ Simon said morosely. He scrubbed a hand across his face, and Abigail saw that his skin was flecked with a thousand tiny burns. ‘The dust caught fire, and Dragon was roaring, and Vivian …’
Greaves leaned forward, and Abigail’s heart was a battle drum in her chest. The shame was searingly welcome – how dare she despair? How dare the thought of giving up even enter her mind when Vivian was out there fighting for her, for them all?
There was always hope and, if there wasn’t, you carved it out. And, if there was one person on which this day, this war, would turn, it was –
‘She’s dead, Abigail.’
Someone, somewhere was screaming. It was hard to pick out from distant explosions and the thunderous cries of monsters, but the shriek was there all the same. It took Abigail a long time to realize it was coming from her, and a longer time to realize nobody else in the room could hear it, because her teeth were clamped together so tightly they ached from the root up.
Vivian couldn’t be dead. She couldn’t be. There had been Verdigris. The Tearsipper Girls. Abigail had … had researched her. The Malleus had dragged herself back from death a thousand times, killed more unkillable things than any other Malleus in the history of the Order. She couldn’t be dead –
‘She took Dragon with her,’ Simon continued in that same drab tone, as though he hadn’t just demolished all their hopes, and Abigail with them. ‘We saw the fight, but we couldn’t get close and then it was just … over.
‘And then …’ Now his voice wavered, his dark eyes brimming with tears. ‘We searched. I searched. The whole street was in ruins, but there were a couple of buildings standing and I wanted to find him. I needed to find him.’
Simon pulled something from his belt and let it fall to the floor.
Falter. A terrible name for a sword.
Simon was suddenly eclipsed by Darcie, half embracing him, half holding him up, but Abigail just stared at how fitting it was that something so unique, so priceless had been dumped on the floor like so much rubbish.
Two people. Abigail had lost two people. Two people at once. How could the maths be right? How could two separate people – two completely different universes of thought and memory and experience – die in the same battle, at the hands of the same monster? How was that fair? It was … it was …
It was pointless. Wasteful.
‘And Grey?’ Greaves asked urgently. ‘Mercy?’
It felt like an insult to break the silence so soon, but what amount of time would have been enough?
‘I didn’t see them,’ Simon said hollowly. ‘There were bodies. Neophytes. Dragon … Her.’ A jerky sort of energy seemed to fill him then. ‘Can I go back? I want to look for him. I wouldn’t have found this except that it was just lying there on the ground. I want to find him, even if it’s just his … I want to look.’
‘I’m sorry,’ the Palatine said, ‘but I can’t risk another cadre. Every moment brings new Breaches. We’re stretched to capacity. Beyond capacity. There’ll be a time to mourn when we –’
‘When we what?’
Anger. The longer this day went on, the more thankful Abigail was for anger. It filled out the cracks in her voice. It swamped her helplessness beneath a tide of red. Anger was useful. That was what Vivian had always told her. Anger was fuel.
‘When we have time, Abigail.’ Greaves’s one remaining hand had gone to the silver sword pin on his tie, still miraculously clean. That just made Abigail even angrier.
‘She was twice the Knight you are.’
Darcie stiffened. Simon looked at Abigail, then away again, disinterestedly, like he had already forgotten what she had said. Greaves just shook his head.
‘I’ll ignore that, Ms Falx. Just once. For the day that’s in it. And Vivian Hardwick fought a good fight, but her fight is over. Ours is not. There’s every chance her sacrifice allowed some Neophytes the chance to flee, to get word out, but until then I have an Order to keep alive. We have to hold this ground and buy time for –’
‘You don’t win wars by holding ground,’ Abigail snapped. She could only imagine the look on her parents’ faces if they knew she was shouting down the Palatine, but at this moment she didn’t care. It wouldn’t have stopped Vivian.
‘Every step they take into this world makes it their world. The Emissary is out there, dismantling the barrier between them and us, and you’re just going to wait here until there’s nobody left?’
Though not a gleam of light appeared underneath Greaves’s skin, the air was suddenly ominously warm. Abigail registered it the way she would have read an opponent readying a blow, but her mouth had apparently staged a coup of its own.
Was this how Vivian had felt? This righteous, unstoppable rage?
‘You need to light Daybreak.’
Darcie had her eyes closed very tightly. Abigail wavered, but she couldn’t have stopped now even if she’d wanted to.
‘It’s a candleward, isn’t it? If you lit it, it might suppress the Breaches and give us time to stop the –’
‘Spare me,’ the Palatine snarled, ‘from the sermons of fourteen-year-old strategists who have spent the last day getting lost instead of serving their Order and their cause.’
Abigail didn’t cower. She definitely didn’t. She’d cowered when the Emissary had bulldozed through a cadre of Knights like a child parting grass. Cowering was watching eighteen metres of screaming iron claw through the sky.
But the sheer sizzling contempt in Greaves’s voice rocked her on her heels all the same.
‘Allow me the courtesy,’ he growled, ‘of assuming that I know my fortress and my work. I sent a cadre to light Daybreak –’
I was right!
‘– as soon as it looked like we were going to lose it. And then Dragon happened. And Daybreak remains unlit. Now our ancestral seat of power is a teeming mass of Tenebrous that I do not have the numbers to retake and I have to make do with what I have for as long as I have it. Do you understand?’
The last was delivered with such savagery that Abigail nodded automatically.
‘I respected Vivian,’ Greaves said, the rage in his voice suddenly gone. ‘But, more than that, I envied her. Do you know why?’
‘No.’
‘Because she had the luxury of being uncomplicated,’ Greaves responded. ‘Now, get out of my sight.’
Darcie and Simon had vanished before he’d finished his sentence, and Abigail herself stayed only long enough to pick up Denizen’s blade from the floor. She wasn’t ‘uncomplicated’, Abigail thought, as the Palatine turned to look out of the window at the city he was failing, and Abigail pressed her finger to the blade’s razor edge to remind herself of that red and bitter rage.
She was busy.
Another hour, another camp.
Two Knights lost in a battle under the Sabelline Arch. The many-headed Maenus Carvolin defeated by Nathaniel Gayle to the wails of its watching kin. Darcie sketched paths and probabilities, a sixteen-year-old general steering cadres through a cat’s-cradle of Breaches and beasts, the night’s darkness fighting its own battle with the burning city below.
And Abigail waited. She watched. They gave her a sword and she sharpened it. They put up sentries and she marked their positions; they gave her porridge and she marshalled her strength.
Four Neophytes were confirmed dead. That was what Simon had seen. Whether the others had escaped, whether they had got beyond the gates or were lost in the city or were underneath the rubble would have to wait until a cadre could be spared. On any other day, even that would have been a catastrophic loss. Now it was a side note.
Greaves had split the Neophytes up, assigning them to cadres. There was no point trying to keep them from battle any more, but he could at least try to stop them all being wiped out at once. Ed had stayed with Greaves, possibly because you couldn’t prise him away from Simon with a crowbar, and Abigail had wanted to try and speak to the others, but she had nothing to say and they didn’
t look like they wanted to hear it.
Saying things isn’t my strong point, she thought. Doing things is.
They navigated the city by Darcie’s sketches – ranging from faint and incomplete when no Tenebrous was inbound to vividly, violently dark. Adumbral’s geography didn’t change, but the Tenebrae beneath did, and so the maps had to be constantly redrawn.
Abigail collected each discarded sheet, and thought of how ships had once sailed by coastlines with monsters mere decoration, and now the Order sailed by monsters with the streets mere detail beneath.
Was that the guardhouse? Backpack across her knees, she surreptitiously tried to connect one sketch to another the way Greaves had done. And that the basilica from earlier? She had personal experience of how hard it was to navigate through Adumbral, and that was before she got to her destination, which happened not to be on any of the maps because it was the one place the whole Order was trying to avoid.
Eventually, she just hissed in frustration and jammed the pages in her bag. They were probably obsolete now anyway. She’d just have to do what centuries of Knights had done – navigate by her senses and adrenalin’s edge.
Sometimes, she caught Simon studying her, but she always looked away. He wouldn’t understand. Better to let him and Darcie mourn the Hardwicks – they would be far better at it anyway.
It was up to Abigail to avenge them.
The first two floors of the building were crammed with Knights, so Abigail went up to the deserted third, noting both the trail of dusty footprints that the sentries had left on the way to the roof and the overhanging cupola that should hide her from them. Three storeys down to the street – it was more of a climb than she’d like, but iron fingers made excellent crampons and she knew how to take a fall.
The stone blade rattled in her bag as she slung it over her shoulder. This was it. She just had to –
‘Told you.’
Jump. The thought came unbidden into her head, more from recognizing Matt’s voice than thinking she’d survive. The tall boy had scaled the stairs after her, and stood with arms folded. She opened her mouth to say something, anything, that would make him go away … and then shut it when Simon, Ed and Darcie appeared behind him.
‘I …’ Abigail didn’t know what was worse: their faces or the smug look on Matt’s. ‘I was just …’
‘You were just going to somehow sneak through an entire army of Tenebrous, scale Daybreak and then light the candleward at its summit,’ Darcie said flatly. ‘That was what you were going to do.’
‘I knew it,’ Matt said, oblivious to Abigail’s viperish look. ‘She’s been all … fidgety. I knew she was going to try some sort of stupid heroics. Now let’s all go back downstairs and –’
‘You’d want the other window on the north wall, by the way,’ Darcie said. ‘The rooftop sentry just noticed the cupola and moved eight steps down. Also Daybreak’s in the opposite direction.’
The only comfort in that moment was that Abigail knew she looked a fraction less surprised than Matt.
‘I told you I can feel them,’ Darcie said. ‘Every Tenebrous in the city. Every Knight too.’ She stepped off the stairs. ‘I just have one question.’
Abigail nodded wordlessly.
‘Are you doing this because you think it’ll work? Or are you doing it for revenge?’
After so long of doing it to herself, lying to Darcie was no chore at all.
‘I’m doing it because it’s the only way to save Daybreak. Because Greaves won’t do it. And Vivian would. Because it’s the right thing to do.’
‘All right,’ Darcie said. ‘Then we’re coming with you.’
‘What?’ Abigail and Matt said together.
It was Simon who answered, his voice as hard as she’d ever heard it.
‘I’m not staying here and hoping Greaves gives me something to do, or running messages between cadres just because I’m better at hiding than most.’ His voice threatened to crack, but he stilled it with a breath. ‘They killed Vivian. Denizen is … he’s gone. So, if you think this will work then we do it. Darcie can guide us. I can hide us. They’ll never see us coming.’
A fragile bubble of hope was blooming in her chest, and Abigail was terrified to argue in case she killed it. ‘You’re the one coordinating the defence. With you gone …’
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Darcie said, and threw something to Abigail. ‘But I’ll guide you all the same.’
A radio. Abigail ran her fingers over the chunky, stippled rubber, the sleek black plastic.
‘I’ve been politely ordered to sleep for four hours because it’s been …’ She frowned. ‘A very long time since I’ve slept. And you’re right. My duty is sacred and I would not abandon it. But you’re my duty too. I can guide you round Breaches to Daybreak. And you’ll have to describe the candleward to me. It sounds fascinating.’
Abigail’s words fell across each other in their eagerness to get out. ‘And Ed?’
‘We have to do something,’ was Ed’s reply. ‘I’m not staying here while you go and fight for us.’
‘OK,’ Abigail said simply.
‘You people are idiots.’ Matt had retreated back a couple of steps, as if he thought their insanity were catching. His gaze searched face after face, but if he was looking for regret or weakness he didn’t find it. ‘You can’t think you’re going to – you’re not going to – Abigail, seriously –’
‘Sorry,’ Abigail said. ‘Cover for us?’
‘Cover for you?’ A sigh pulled the air from him, so he looked shrunken and small, and then he drew it back in. ‘Fine. You win. I’m coming too. I have to, don’t I?’
‘Actually, no,’ Darcie said.
‘Not really,’ said Simon.
Ed gave a tiny shrug.
‘Yes,’ Abigail said, and surprised herself by giving him a real and genuine smile. ‘You do.’ She frowned. ‘Though I guess this means we can’t go out of the window.’
‘I have an idea regarding that,’ Darcie said. ‘Though I don’t know how I feel about it. We should –’
‘Um, guys?’
They had been told to avoid the windows, not draw attention, keep noise discipline. It made sense, in a city at war. But, as anything to do with Edifice Greaves, there were wheels within wheels, reasons beneath reasons, and, as they joined Ed to stare out of the north window at Daybreak, Abigail was forced to admit that the Palatine might have had a point.
Gone was the gleam of its white walls, the soaring, defiant cleanness of its lines – replaced by a teeming crust of rot. Tenebrous. Hundreds of Tenebrous, a bristling mass that clambered over each other and the lighthouse like wasps in a hive.
Ed’s voice was faint. ‘Where … where did you say we were going again?’
28
It Takes a Village
Pollagh Dock was little more than two arms of concrete sullenly folded in the face of the Atlantic, littered with nets and pots and a great steel hook of an anchor, which Denizen was mildly surprised to see looked exactly like they did in cartoons.
They exited the director’s car, and Ackerby, squinting in the darkness, pointed at a squat beetle of a boat with a belligerent, jutting prow.
‘That one. The owner uses it for deep-sea fishing.’ He purposefully turned his back as Grey bent to the task of nautical larceny, though that put Denizen and Mercy squarely in his field of vision, which was definitely no improvement.
The Tenebrous had managed to rein back her umbra – she wouldn’t have fitted in the back seat otherwise – but there was no hiding what she was, and watching her craft a human disguise probably wouldn’t have done much for Ackerby’s nerves either. He’d had far too much experience of things looking human before.
The full set. Seeing anything carved into the skin of the universe would have made anybody break out in a cold sweat, but it was the words themselves that were terrifying.
There were any number of reasons why that phrase could be there. Maybe it was a common Tenebraic sayin
g. Maybe there was a horrible speakeasy somewhere – misery on tap, toddler popsicles – and they all traded catchphrases …
Do it.
However, the way the Boy had helped Denizen to free Mercy, though it meant its own death as well, made it hard to imagine the Man in the Waistcoat having friends.
Please.
Vivian Hardwick rarely gave second chances. She’d burned the Three so badly on their first encounter that it had taken them eleven years to recover and, when they had once again raised their ugly heads, she’d taken great pains to finish the job.
Hadn’t she?
With a clarity born of exhaustion and grief, Denizen knew he was currently held together by spit and wire and the demands of the moment. He could only think around Vivian – her actions, her crusade – because if he thought of her he’d have to accept that she was gone.
Compared to that, the pressure of rescuing the Endless King from Os Reges Point was welcome because it kept bits of him from springing off and exploding. Pressure was good. Pressure made diamonds. Leaving him behind after the Three’s first attack had made his mother who she was.
And the thought that Vivian had somehow failed made Denizen sick to his stomach.
She hadn’t used a hammer. The thought arrived in the scabby drawl of the Man in the Waistcoat, making Denizen shiver in a way that had nothing to do with the cold coastal breeze. It had only been a shard; even Vivian doubted it held the same potency.
It must. Look at Mercy’s arm.
He raised his hand to his scabbard before realizing that Falter was gone. I’ll get it back. I promise. If I have to tear Adumbral apart looking for it.
‘We’re ready,’ Grey called. ‘Fully fuelled and everything. Director, please pass on our thanks to Mr …’ He examined a page tucked below the boat’s dashboard. ‘Cattigan. We very much appreciate it.’
‘I’ll get him to invoice you,’ Ackerby croaked. ‘And for the gates.’
Grey knocked off a sharp salute and dipped back into the cabin. With a sudden thrill, Denizen realized that there might be a bed, or at the very least a shelf they could tuck him on for a few hours. He was contemplating making a run for it when Mercy wafted closer on fronds of lightning, offering Ackerby a shy smile.
