Knights of the Borrowed Dark

by Dave Rudden

  “The fact is,” Grey said, “this is on a need-to-know basis. We weren’t sure if you had the potential to be one of us. If you didn’t—well, what we’re about to tell you is a lot for someone to carry.”

  “I didn’t want to bring you anywhere near this if I didn’t have to,” Vivian said. “That’s why I haven’t contacted you before now.”

  Denizen didn’t respond.

  “I had my reasons, Denizen. My work is unforgiving. I travel. I keep strange hours and stranger company. I can go months without seeing home. Or daylight. And there are…”

  “Monsters trying to kill you?”

  Vivian nodded.

  “They try to kill me too,” Grey said. “You aren’t special.”

  Vivian continued as if Grey hadn’t spoken. Somehow, Denizen got the impression that she did that a lot. “The less interest I showed in you, the less chance there was of something else taking an interest in you. If you had not seen the creature last night, if you hadn’t proved yourself on the moment of turning thirteen, then we would have sent you back to Crosscaper.

  “That I will not apologize for. If there was any chance I could have kept this life from you, I would have taken it. I owe it to your…I owe it to your parents.”

  I owe it to your parents. The words sent a shiver through him.

  “But you can tell me now, can’t you?” Denizen said. “I’m one of you.”

  “Every Dawning is different,” Grey said. “Yours was a little…rougher than most.” He pointedly did not look at Vivian. “But yes—you’re one of us, or you have the potential to be. So go on. Ask.”

  Denizen stared at them for a long moment. “All right. Why did you lie about my birthday?”

  That surprised her. Of course it did. You had to grow up in Crosscaper to really understand.

  People were put together from their parents. Long before you made friends or met teachers or were inspired by people you read about or saw on TV, your parents influenced you. They were your model and your makers. This was doubly true of children in Crosscaper. Everyone Denizen had grown up with jealously held on to any connection they had with their parents.

  Michael Flannigan still had his father’s battered briefcase, rescued from the fire that had taken his parents from him. Simon would point-blank refuse to do an exam if he didn’t have ink for his mother’s silver fountain pen—and the teachers in Crosscaper always kept some handy because they understood that the most sacred possession an orphan could have was a memento from his parents.

  Denizen didn’t have anything. Just the birthday in his file. It was something you couldn’t lose or forget, the way he had forgotten what his father looked like or the words his mother sang in his dreams.

  And it had been a lie all along.

  “Anonymity is protection, Denizen,” said Vivian. “And anyone watching you with sinister intent would have seen your thirteenth birthday pass without incident. It was the only shield that could be afforded to you.”

  She actually did seem sorry, or at least uncomfortable, but Denizen didn’t care. He was about to ask her flat out what her involvement with him and Crosscaper was when something she’d said suddenly struck him.

  “What do you mean, watching me? Who?”

  “We call them the Tenebrous,” Vivian said, and Denizen could have sworn he heard a touch of relief in her voice at the subject being changed.

  “Or the Obscura,” Grey continued, “the Stygian or Those Who Walk Under Unlit Skies, depending on what century you’re from and how poetic you want to be. They seep into this world from a darker place. You felt it last night in the tunnel. As if the world had ripped along a seam.”

  The memory almost killed Denizen’s appetite. It had felt so wrong—reality grinding against itself, trembling at the intrusion of something that shouldn’t exist. An angel that moved like a nightmare.

  “That was a Breach,” his aunt said. “A violent crossover event. Tenebrous claw their way into this world—hunting, reaving, pursuing their own deranged ends. They pull a body together out of whatever they can find. Stone, sand, flesh, metal. Some are like the beast last night—just animals, vicious but barely aware. Others are as smart as any human and infinitely more dangerous. We deny them where we can.”

  “Deny them?”

  “Some people are born with a link to the Tenebrae,” Grey said, “the shadowy realm where the Tenebrous come from. We don’t know a whole lot about it—whether it’s one world or a thousand or a whole universe half a breath away. But we have a connection to it, and with that connection comes power.”

  “Like you used on the Tenebrous last night.”

  Grey nodded. “We have a fire in us, Denizen.”

  As if woken by his words, Denizen felt a slow heat unfurl within him, like embers suddenly kindled in the cathedral of his chest. It didn’t feel new—it felt like it had always been there, surging from some hollow he hadn’t known existed.

  “Maybe it comes from the Tenebrae,” Grey continued. “Or maybe it’s something born in us to hold that darkness back. We don’t know. We just know it works.”

  Denizen breathed out. The memory of how the power had felt still made his fingers tingle. He had used it only once. He didn’t even know how he had done it, but he knew that he wanted to do it again.

  “You have a gift,” Vivian said. Her tone didn’t make it sound like he had a gift. She made it sound like he had a skin condition.

  She’s probably disappointed I turned out to be like them. If I wasn’t, she could just send me back to Crosscaper. The harshness of the thought surprised him.

  “But it comes with a Cost.” She pulled off her gloves.

  It took Denizen a moment to understand what he was seeing. At first, he thought she was wearing a second pair of gloves—the material wrinkled, shineless and black, so thin he could see the play of muscles beneath, the outline of fine bones—fingernails.

  “We have had many names,” Vivian said, her voice full of terrible pride. “We rode away from dying Rome to haunt the courts of kings, to counsel emperors and guard the world from shadow. We wind through history like a serpent—hidden, always hidden, keeping safe the kingdoms of humanity. I am a Malleus, a Knight Superior of the Order of the Borrowed Dark, and my hands are marked by the price of power.”

  Denizen stared at them. They were iron, and yet they moved more fluidly than any machine or prosthetic; they were alive, clenching and unclenching as smoothly as his own. There were old scars on the knuckles, places where the metal was notched and dented. Across her palms the metal had run like wax exposed to some great heat. With a start, he looked down at his own hands—

  The Cost had marked Denizen as well.

  In the very center of his left palm there was a black spot, as if someone had pressed a coin of dull iron into his skin. He ran a finger over it, then dug in a nail. It hurt, but barely, the pain coming from far away.

  “It’s the price we all pay for the power we wield,” Vivian said. “A way of keeping us humble, stopping us from becoming too powerful. We use our gifts sparingly, when we use them at all.”

  There wasn’t a seam where the iron met the skin of his hand. It didn’t feel wrong—it felt like it had always been there, like the fire in his chest. The Cost had spread all through Vivian’s hands, rising up her forearms in threads of black. How long had it taken her to change that much?

  “So what happens now?” He looked from Vivian to Grey.

  “We offer you a choice,” Grey said. “No one should be forced to put their life on the line for people they’ve never met. So stay with us for a while. A week or two. See what your training would be like. Then you can join us as a Neophyte or you can go.

  “Whatever happens, you’ll have to receive some education—make sure there are no…accidents…should you lose your temper.”

  “Accidents?”

  “The power is awake in you now,” Vivian said. “It’s not something you can just ignore. You’ll need to learn to control it. If you
don’t, then it might come when you’re not expecting it—when you lose your temper or feel strong emotion.

  “That’s why we had to bring you here. Your power could have Dawned in a crowded classroom or dormitory. Not only would that have jeopardized the secrecy of our Order, it could also have proved very dangerous.”

  “You’re worried I might freak out and accidentally burn someone’s face off?”

  “Yes,” Vivian said simply.

  “This,” Denizen said with a bitter smile, “is the worst recruiting pitch ever.”

  Vivian stood abruptly. “There are more important things here than coddling you, Denizen. Our family and the Order are intertwined. It’s the highest honor for a Hardwick to serve. Do you know what the motto of our family is?”

  Denizen had offended her, but he was too angry to care. “Yes, actually. I looked it up. I thought it would be comforting, you know, in the absence of an actual family. It translates as safety through caution.”

  Denizen would be the first to admit that as mottoes went, it wasn’t the most rousing, but he had still taken pride in a connection to his family.

  “Different Hardwicks,” Vivian said with a grim smile. “Our family have been in the Order for a thousand years. Our motto is Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito. ‘Yield not to evil, but attack all the more boldly.’ I have seen terrible things in my years of being a Knight. I have shed blood on four continents. I have fought creatures so potent they have warped the very world around them.”

  She tugged her sleeve up farther to reveal long claw-mark scars in the iron, white and wrinkled like furrowed snow.

  “Mongolia, eight years ago. The Wry Bile had nested in the sand and was preying on nearby villages until I walked out into the desert and burned the sand to glass. One of its many forms flung itself out of the firestorm, all madness and hunger, and it might have torn my throat out if Grey hadn’t taken it apart.”

  “She got me back, though,” Grey said, smiling wryly. “Ukraine, six months later. The Hounds of Vox—all spines and teeth, they’re awful—had gone to ground in an abandoned Soviet base and of course I stroll in like I’m buying the paper. Ten minutes later and I’m dragging myself out of the wreckage with two broken legs and Vivian storms by me with this irritated look on her face—yeah, that one—and—”

  “And I did my duty,” Vivian said. “This is a calling, Denizen. We swear an oath. And I…I understand that you feel like nothing makes sense anymore. I felt the same.”

  “I didn’t,” Grey said. “I knew exactly what was going on all the time.”

  “And that makes you a unique and special person,” Vivian said without the slightest change in tone before addressing Denizen once again. “You have to learn enough to control your power. If you wish to leave after that, then we will not stop you.”

  “Although we could use all the help we can get,” Grey said hastily, shooting a glance at Vivian.

  Is she trying to get rid of me? Denizen thought, his eyes narrowing. One minute she’s talking about how important it is to be a Knight, the next she’s telling me she doesn’t care if I leave or not.

  His mind was already reeling with what he’d been told. There was only so much space in his head for revelations about how the world was put together, and he felt like he needed an hour in a dark room just to sort through the pieces and make sense of them.

  And there was another question, the one that had brought him here. Now that Denizen had the chance to ask it, he was almost afraid to, in case the floodgates opened and a thousand other questions came out.

  “My parents,” he said finally, his voice hesitant. “Were they Knights? Is that how they…is that how they died?”

  Vivian didn’t say anything. Her face didn’t move, not a muscle.

  “Your parents were good people,” she said eventually. “They were…” She took a deep breath. “I have to get back to work.”

  “What?” Denizen said. “You were just going to—”

  But she’d already left, sweeping imperiously through the door. Denizen stared after her incredulously.

  “She’s…uh…” Even Grey seemed taken aback. “She’s under a lot of stress.”

  “A lot of stress?” Denizen repeated, shock and hurt warring in his voice. Something cold bloomed in the back of his brain, and he looked up at Grey. “You said this was a war, right?”

  Grey raised an eyebrow. “Yes?”

  “So who’s winning?”

  ON DENIZEN’S FIRST day in Seraphim Row, Fuller Jack beat a sword into shape with his bare hands and told him there was no such thing as magic.

  “I don’t like the word,” the huge man said, lifting a fist of scarred black iron. “It’s lazy.”

  Bald and massively muscled, Fuller Jack was from a tiny island off the coast of Scotland—so small that lying down would have required two boats, as he put it—and had a voice that filled the forging shed like a cheerful thunderstorm.

  With a bushy, gray-streaked beard and arms thicker than Denizen’s legs, he looked like a blacksmith from a bygone legend—which was exactly what he was, though nothing else about the forging shed was remotely medieval. The art had moved on a lot in the last few centuries, apparently, and the shed looked more like a mechanic’s garage than something you’d find in a castle.

  “What do you mean lazy?” Denizen asked.

  He stood back as far as the shed walls would allow. Swords were being quenched in barrels of oil and water, and when the red-hot metal was dipped, droplets could hiss and splatter, burning flesh and skin like wax. Occasionally, a drop would pop and spit against the iron of Jack’s forearms, fizzling out as if disappointed.

  “What the Knights do is the same thing as making a sword. You put in what’s needed—materials, time, energy—and you get a result. It’s not free, and it’s not easy. Magic?” He snorted.

  “Magic’s the unexplainable. The say-a-word shortcut. You never want to think about the Tenebrae’s power like that because then you’ll start using it to get out of scrapes you could have avoided if you’d been thinking straight. Power should never be used lightly. There’s always a Cost to be paid.”

  Denizen nodded, trying not to stare at the notched iron of Jack’s forearms. By the looks of it, he’d been paying for a while.

  “Then why do you do it?” Denizen asked.

  “Someone has to,” Jack said, shrugging his massive shoulders. His gaze once again dropped to the tools in his hands, and Denizen suddenly had the feeling he’d only been given part of an answer, a thought Jack didn’t want to finish. “And I have an easy time of it compared to the others. I like making things, and it’s for a good cause.”

  Jack made swords. He made axes. Occasionally, he made maces, morning stars, and other, stranger weapons. He fed power into their forging, made them more potent against creatures without real blood to spill. Spoken steel.

  When Grey broke a blade in combat or Vivian needed a dent beaten out of her armor, Jack made a fist and fixed it.

  There was a shelf above Jack’s head laid out with tiny statues of carved wood and steel. From where he stood against the wall, Denizen couldn’t make out all the detail, but their delicate, artistic curves were very much at odds with the blacksmith’s bulk.

  “Oh yeah,” Jack said, noticing where Denizen was looking. “Keeps me sane. Can’t be sharp objects all the time, you know.”

  Denizen didn’t, but he nodded anyway.

  “Listen to me,” Jack said, shaking his head. “Getting philosophical on you. As if your head wasn’t melted enough already. All I mean is that jumping into things without thinking is dangerous. Especially when it comes to this. You should question everything. Ask why before you act.”

  “I like asking questions,” Denizen said with a rare smile.

  The Knight laughed. “Then you’ll be more than fine around here. If, of course, you decide to stay.”

  Denizen looked at the ground. “I don’t know. Grey said that you guys need me.”


  “Weeeeell,” Jack said, “there aren’t many of us. A cadre here in Dublin, another in Paris, one in Munich, one in Sofia…People born with a connection to the Tenebrae are rare. I’d understand if you wanted to run for the hills, though. I did at first.”

  “Really? I thought…”

  “You thought someone pops out of the shadows with a sword and a lifetime contract to fight the hungry dark and everyone just says, ‘Grand job, where do I sign?’ ”

  Jack grinned. Denizen found himself grinning back.

  “No, sir. I took enough training to keep a lid on it, worked my way round Europe for a couple of decades, and then one night I stumbled into an alleyway fight between three howling ghouls and the most beautiful Frenchwoman I’d ever seen.”

  “You saved her?”

  “Hell, no. She saved me. Stung my pride so much, I signed up the next day.”

  Denizen’s grin faded. “And my aunt? What can you tell me about her?”

  Jack was silent for a moment. “Your aunt is a Knight through and through,” he said. “I’ve fought beside her for eight years, and I doubt it took her two minutes to make up her mind. Don’t…”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t try and live up to Vivian Hardwick.” His face was serious. “Make your own choice.”

  Denizen nodded slowly and then frowned. “Wait! You joined up because of a girl?”

  Jack’s heavy brows furrowed. “You got a problem with that?”

  —

  ON DENIZEN’S SECOND day in Seraphim Row, he opened a door and nearly lost the tip of his nose to a throwing knife. It whirred by his face—so close he saw his own shocked reflection in it—and buried itself in the wall.

  The Knight who had thrown it rolled from a cartwheel into a perfect aikido ai hanmi stance and told him that what they did wasn’t war.

  “It is pest control.”

  Corinne D’Aubigny was a petite switchblade of a woman with wolfish blue eyes and a colorful tattoo inked across both shoulders. Denizen couldn’t work out exactly what it was; the elaborate image rippled with the movement of her muscles, and he didn’t want to be caught staring. Another tattoo—a black rose—began on her stomach and disappeared beneath her tank top.