Knights of the Borrowed Dark

by Dave Rudden

  “That,” D’Aubigny said, “is a terrible idea.”

  “It’s not a safari,” Jack said.

  “Hmmm,” Grey said, “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t know what?” Darcie said incredulously. “Grey, tell me you’re not considering this.”

  “It wouldn’t be the kid’s first Breach,” Grey said, flashing Denizen an encouraging smile. “And he didn’t let the side down that time. If he wants to see if he’s up for the job, show him the job. Besides, you brought Abigail on that Breach last week—”

  “Yes,” Jack said, “but Abigail’s—” He suddenly caught Denizen’s eye and coughed. “That was different.”

  “Different?” Denizen said, anger creeping into his voice before he managed to smooth it away. If he annoyed them, he’d never be allowed to come along. Logical arguments were the answer. That was what worked with teachers. Being reasonable.

  “Darcie said it’s a small one,” he said, a note of pleading in his tone.

  “Well, I’m not—” Darcie began.

  “He will have to do it sooner or later,” D’Aubigny said thoughtfully.

  “If he chooses to stay,” Jack said. “And he hasn’t. Not yet.”

  That made Denizen blush harder. These people had spent their whole lives being Knights. They’d prepared for battle without blinking an eye, and here he was, talking about choosing. Walking away and leaving them to it. No wonder his aunt wasn’t giving him the time of day.

  “I’ll stay at the back,” he said. “I promise.”

  “At the back?” Darcie said incredulously. “It’s not chess. And I don’t fancy finding out what the Malleus thinks of us bringing her nephew back to her in a body bag. Or several body bags. He’s young. He’s untrained.”

  Denizen was surprised at the venom in her voice, but then he realized how difficult it must be, sitting here in Seraphim Row and sending other people into danger. She had been waiting for Grey on the steps the night Denizen arrived. How many other nights had she sat there, not knowing if her comrades would be coming home?

  Grey frowned at Denizen. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  The panic in his stomach had vanished, replaced by an electric sort of excitement. Was this how it felt to go into battle?

  He let out a deep breath. “Yeah. I am.”

  “If he so much as catches a cold, the Malleus will melt you both down and use you as scrap,” Jack said. “Corinne?”

  D’Aubigny shrugged. “I will bring him back.”

  They stared at each other for a long moment. Denizen looked away.

  Grey pulled the knife Jack had given him out from under his coat and held the hilt to Denizen. It was old—the handle yellowed bone wrapped in leather, the sheath ancient wood lacquered black.

  “You won’t need this,” he said, “but keep it on hand.” His eyes met Denizen’s. “Now what are you doing?”

  “I am staying at the back,” Denizen said dutifully.

  “That you are. And if one of us says ‘Run,’ you run. I mean it.”

  He let his stare linger a moment longer and then winked. Denizen couldn’t help smiling, even as Darcie shot them both a disapproving look. She came down the stairs toward Grey and handed him the sheets of paper.

  “Good luck, Grey.”

  He grinned like a little boy. “Ha. Yes. Thank you, dear.”

  He gave the sheets one more look before shoving them into a pocket and reaching for the door. The night beyond was still, curls of tree-choked light trying and failing to push back the dark. The night’s chill eagerly swept inward, and Denizen’s breath smoked in the air.

  D’Aubigny joined him to stand before the darkness. Grey glanced at her, then back at Fuller Jack standing on the stairs. Maybe other cadres gave rousing speeches before battles. Maybe they swore oaths and rattled their blades at the sky. Denizen didn’t know. Grey just sighed. “One more time, then?”

  It had the ring of a familiar phrase, an inside joke. Jack nodded at him. “Sure. If not us…”

  D’Aubigny’s smile was faint. “Who else?”

  She and Grey vanished into the black. Denizen took a deep breath and stepped after them.

  THEY DROVE IN silence.

  Denizen sat awkwardly in the backseat with two swords across his lap as the Interceptor traded amber-lit streets for country roads.

  Grey drove, his fingers tapping out a restless tattoo on the wheel. His hair had been scraped back from his face, leaving his cheekbones stark and bare, scar lines of silver on white. D’Aubigny sat beside him, a knee against the dashboard, staring out into the dark. Street lights spun occasional light across them, like the dappling of a tiger through undergrowth.

  “Is it far?” Denizen asked.

  Grey shook his head. “We should be close. We’re lucky it’s within driving distance and we have a head start.”

  “Oh yeah, obviously,” Denizen said, and then smiled awkwardly. “I would have thought you guys could just…I don’t know…teleport there.”

  “We can,” D’Aubigny replied.

  “But we don’t,” Grey said.

  “Ah,” Denizen said. “Right.” He waited for more of an explanation, but neither D’Aubigny nor Grey seemed prepared to offer one.

  Was this one more secret that Vivian had ordered them to keep? Apparently, she had decided he was some kind of security risk.

  Denizen despised the idea of someone else deciding he wasn’t fit to know something. If he was going to make the life-changing—the phrase life-shortening presented itself, but he shoved it down—decision to be a Knight, then shouldn’t he be in possession of all the information?

  Besides, who was she to judge him? She didn’t know the first thing about him.

  Even if he didn’t choose to become a Knight, the damage was done. He knew that the Order existed. He was in on the big secret. He’d have a constant reminder of it in his palm for the rest of his life. What was the harm in letting him learn a bit more?

  A disturbing thought crossed Denizen’s mind. Maybe there were things that she didn’t want him to see.

  A sign swept by them in a blur of reflected green, artificial against the frozen, tree-haunted dark.

  “Nearly there,” Grey said.

  Had Grey not announced their arrival, Denizen might have missed the village altogether. Little more than two streets lined with small, squat houses, it seemed barely big enough to deserve a name. Maybe that was why the name was emblazoned everywhere Denizen looked.

  The Rathláth florist tried desperately to compete with the extravagant waterfalls of plastic flowers hanging from the baskets outside the Rathláth Inn. One house had a banner stretched across it, thanking “our boys in gray” for their “hard work in the Championship,” which seemed to Denizen very carefully worded to avoid the words won or lost. Another simply had Rathláth mowed into its lawn, as though there was nothing more to be said. The whole scene had the glassy, unmoving perfection of a postcard.

  The Interceptor growled to a halt, the only car on a deserted street. Somewhere in the distance was the screech of tires, the briefest flash of headlights over the hedges. Someone seemed to be in a great hurry to be elsewhere.

  Denizen felt it too—a sudden pinch behind his eyes, a queasiness in his stomach as if he had smelled something rotten. No, not rotten. Alien. Something his body didn’t know how to accept.

  There was a strange, headachey pressure to the air.

  The Knights donned their weapons with chill efficiency and began walking up the street. Grey had hidden his beneath his long coat, but D’Aubigny brazenly carried her blade in its scabbard. The feeling worsened—like fingertips on the skin, pressing hard, just the other side of pain. The quaintness of Rathláth became something forced and strange, like a familiar smile with too many teeth.

  Grey and D’Aubigny stalked down the street, their eyes closed as if listening for a sound only they could hear. After a moment, Denizen followed.

  He glanced at the houses as they pas
sed. Doors were locked. Window shutters were closed and blinds pulled down. A church rose on the dark end of the street before them, its spire wounding the sky.

  Denizen didn’t need to ask where everybody was. The sick taste of a Breach was in the air, seeping into everything. At least Denizen knew what the feeling was and where it came from. How much worse would it be if you didn’t? How many families were at home hugging each other, feeling fear they couldn’t explain? How many children were having bad dreams?

  Wind rasped along his skin like a tongue. Somewhere a dog wailed, long and high and afraid.

  “It’s this way,” D’Aubigny said, pointing ahead to where the street lights had petered out. “Maybe…” She turned her head this way and that, her hand held up before her. It might have looked silly if it were anyone else. “A kilometer or so. We should hurry.”

  Her pale features creased in a frown. “It shouldn’t…”

  “What?” Denizen asked.

  Grey was grimacing in the exact same way. “Darcie said it was a weak Breach. It shouldn’t feel this”—he rubbed his temples—“violent. This intense.”

  Denizen’s fingers ached round the hilt of the knife.

  They walked out into the night, leaving the village behind until it was nothing more than an isolated glow, the sky above sick with clouds. In the silvered shades of the Intueor Lucidum, each curling branch and blade of grass in the hedgerows was sketched perfectly as if by the killing hand of frost.

  When they found a crossroads—marked by a great outcrop of stone, like someone had flung a crude ax down to split the road in two—Grey didn’t need to tell Denizen that they had reached the site of the imminent Breach. It was exactly what Darcie had drawn back in Seraphim Row.

  Grey was checking his phone, sword bare in his other hand. “Fourteen minutes. Ish.”

  “What do we do until then?” Denizen asked. Grey shrugged.

  The next quarter of an hour was the longest of Denizen’s life. He’d read once that the worst part of war wasn’t the fighting, but the waiting around for it to start. He now understood what that meant—a strange feeling of helplessness as each second ticked away.

  He wanted to talk, ease the tension, but at the same time he didn’t want to disturb the others—not when they would be doing the real work. What Grey had said kept running through his mind. It shouldn’t feel this…intense.

  What was coming?

  D’Aubigny had begun running through blade exercises where the road split, the point of her sword slicing through the air like an oar through water. Grey just stared into space as if he’d been switched off. It was like all his jokes and charm were a mask that could be folded away at any moment.

  The more time Denizen spent with the Knights, the more he noticed that their experience as soldiers had stained them—a haunted look around the eyes, a tremor in the jaw. It was like they could never fully relax, even in the safety of Seraphim Row, their eyes following every shadow, every movement in the dark. They all had it to some degree, though the hollowness seemed to pass from Fuller Jack and D’Aubigny when they were together. He’d even seen it in Darcie tonight as she sent her friends into danger.

  Grey had it worst of all. The man was scarred and not just physically. There was something beaten and raw about him, an exposed weakness that only came out when he didn’t think anyone was looking or when he spoke about his past.

  People did that—buried their weakness and fear behind high walls. Denizen had seen it a lot in Crosscaper. If he was being honest, he saw it in the mirror.

  And then Grey caught Denizen looking at him. “Feel that?” he said. “Not long now.”

  Denizen shivered. Those invisible fingers against his skin had sharpened to needling claws. He was finding it hard to breathe, willing the Breach to happen just to stop this weight on the world. Tenebraic power twitched in his chest. He fought the urge to fill himself with its light.

  “Steady,” Grey said, glancing at him. “I know it’s hard.”

  The clouds above seemed to shift—colors bleeding into each other as if the world were a television with the settings distorted. Nauseated, Denizen dropped his gaze from the sky and saw a discarded doll by the side of the road.

  The randomness of it fascinated him. Had someone thrown it from a car? Did it belong to one of the houses on the hill? It hugged the rigid grass as if unhappy to be forgotten.

  Denizen stared at its frozen smile. It was just a faded little thing in a handmade dress. He reached out to it.

  Just a little thing.

  The moment stretched. His hand seemed to move in slow motion.

  Just a—

  The pressure broke.

  He never saw the first Tenebrous die, just the throwing blade that killed it. The shard of steel seemed to grace D’Aubigny’s hand for the briefest of moments before slicing the night apart.

  A second Tenebrous bounded from the undergrowth, roaring like a chainsaw blade on bone. A third pulled itself out of raw darkness, flanks heaving with murderous intent.

  Well, that answers the “how many ravening beasts” question, Denizen thought numbly.

  They looked like cats, in the same way the very first Tenebrous he had seen looked like an angel. Their bodies were gravel and dirt, studded with other rubbish that had been swept up as well: half a pizza box rose at an angle from one’s heaving flank; another’s mouth was a mass of nails and steel shavings. Puddles of black ink formed their eyes, their limbs too long and thin, their heads so heavy their whole bodies staggered under the weight.

  Not-cats, Denizen thought. Something real made ugly and fake.

  “I hate cats,” D’Aubigny said coolly. “Come on and die.”

  The not-cats cocked their misshapen heads, speaking in a single rasping voice.

  Pick-Up-the-Pieces.

  And a fourth not-cat hit D’Aubigny from behind.

  She rolled, whipping her blade in a return strike that took off its front leg and split its skull into a shower of dust. The other two took advantage of the distraction to lunge at Grey, and he barely beat them back—a slash across the snout scattering steel shavings, beating a howl from maddened jaws.

  The Knights whirled, keeping Denizen behind them, their eyes wide with fire. Etchings on D’Aubigny’s and Grey’s blades began to glow, the spoken steel feeding on the power underneath their skin.

  The not-cats paced back and forth just out of reach of the light of their blades. Dirt shivered as if molded by invisible hands, and the two feline shapes that D’Aubigny had slain began to pull themselves back together, limbs and flanks rebuilding themselves from the dust. Their mouths opened wide to snarl.

  Grey was back to back with D’Aubigny, blade in a guard position. “Darcie said this wasn’t a—”

  “Darcie was wrong,” D’Aubigny hissed, and slid a blade into her free hand.

  The not-cats howled.

  Pick-Up-the-Pieces. Pick-Up-the-Pieces. The Tenebrous’s voice sounded like a blender full of nails and motor oil. Pick-Up-the-Pieces hunts in the name of the King. The not-cats bared their teeth in mouths of dirt. Where is it?

  “Do you have any idea what it’s talking about?” Grey said out of the side of his mouth. D’Aubigny shook her head.

  Thieving fools, the voice snarled. Tempting the wrath of That-Which-Is-Endless. The shadows will boil and drown you. The King will come in darkness. Snap your lives. End you all.

  The not-cats shook with rage, dust drizzling from their flanks. Grey’s head darted this way and that, trying to keep them all in view.

  The Tenebrous’s voice rose to a howl.

  You will give it back!

  They leapt.

  The world was suddenly full of bodies fighting for their lives, sand and rubbish and howling mouths, and in the middle of it all Grey and D’Aubigny—blades and eyes blazing with light.

  The not-cats feinted and lunged, trying to separate the Knights, pull them off balance so others could drag them down. That, more than anything, frightened D
enizen. The beast was using strategy. One mind in four bodies, and it was clever, nothing like the dumb creature that had attacked Denizen on his birthday. Worse, its ploy was working. Blood already darkened D’Aubigny’s upper arm, and Grey’s face was slick with sweat.

  Denizen’s hand was sweaty on the hilt of his borrowed knife. He wanted to do something, he did, but it would have been suicide. The Knights were locked in such an intricate dance of blades—a half-second by half-second battle for life and death—that Denizen throwing himself in there would likely kill all three of them.

  How did one even jump into a fight like that? It was easy for someone like Jack—the man was half ocean liner. If Denizen charged in, he’d bounce off.

  There was a growl from behind him.

  Denizen turned without thinking to see a wind howl down the road in a storm of dirt that was cat-shaped before it hit the ground. He had a long, awful moment to watch its pounce—the coil and release of its muscles, mud avalanching from its flanks, the crooked slant of its spine. This one’s left eye was a brass coin swept up in the wake of the wind; its right, a mad swirl of black.

  Denizen lifted his knife in a shaking hand. Beginner’s luck. That’s a thing, right?

  The beast gathered itself to leap and met a white-gold bolt coming the other way. Denizen flinched back as the Tenebrous came apart in a shower of cinders and grit.

  Grey had already turned back to the fight, light still leaking from one hand.

  “Run,” he panted. “Back to the car.”

  “But—”

  “It’s us they want,” he said. “Go. Now.”

  Denizen ran.

  It’s an order, he told himself, and I promised I’d obey. His stomach was sick with relief. And shame.

  Trees whipped by him, their gaunt frames like closing fingers, the shadows between them knots of sinister black. The pressure seemed to be fading, the effects of the Breach drawing back like the world was slowly repairing itself.

  Feet echoing on the pavement, Denizen ran back the way he’d come—silently grateful that, for all the twists and loops in the country road, it was still basically a straight line. The idea of being lost in a maze of byroads with the night full of Tenebrous did not appeal to him at all.