by Dave Rudden
His aunt’s body had vanished.
Denizen had enough time to register shock before a grip of steel seized him by the back of the collar and spun him round. He almost lashed out with the power, a Cant coming to his lips—
—and then he stared up into the pale and haggard face of Malleus Vivian Hardwick.
ONE OF HER hands was clamped over her stomach, her shirt dark with blood. The other held Denizen’s collar in a death grip.
Her eyes burned, not with the power of the Tenebrae but with rage—an incandescent madness so pure you could barely describe it as human at all. You didn’t call that feeling anger. You called it wrath, and when you felt it coming your way, you evacuated the villages and ran for higher ground.
Her voice was a snarl. “Where is my hammer?”
The words had barely escaped from between gritted teeth before Vivian’s legs gave way and she fell to her knees, her fingers jerking open. Denizen nearly fell himself when that vicious grasp went away.
Vivian’s eyes and mouth suddenly glowed, as did the wound behind her bloody fingers. The Bellows Subventum, Denizen thought, the knowledge coming from nowhere and everywhere all at once.
It was a Higher Cant—a spell that forced your body to work overtime, repairing damage that would otherwise take months to heal. Crude, though, and hell on the patient—it was the kind of makeshift battlefield work that would keep a body upright until it could finally keel over later.
And she was saying it wrong. Denizen could hear it now—the gaps where Vivian’s voice should have gone to channel the power properly. Thank you, Mercy. Who would have thought being a grammar nut would come in handy?
Whatever the roughness of the Cant, it was working. The rise and fall of Vivian’s chest steadied and color returned to her cheeks. She took a deep breath, tentatively taking her hand away from the bloodstain on her shirt as if worried that more blood would follow it.
He had no idea how she was still alive—Denizen had never seen so much blood in his life. Her knees and the front of her shirt were filthy. How long had she lain there before dragging up the power to save herself?
“Where,” she said again, her voice sounding like she’d been gargling gravel, “is my hammer?”
It took Denizen a few seconds to respond. She was alive. Vivian was alive.
“Uh,” he said, and then flinched as she turned the full force of her Malleus’s glare on him. “Grey must have taken it….Are you all right? Listen, we need to—”
At the mention of Grey’s name, Vivian tried to struggle upright before breaking into a harsh fit of coughing, her head in her hands. Denizen looked around anxiously, waiting for the hacking to subside. They were too exposed out here. The Three could return at any moment.
“Back to…” Vivian forced each word out through sheer will. “Back to Seraphim Row. We need the others if we’re to—if they’re…”
Denizen went stiff with sudden horror. He’d been so concerned with Vivian being shot and finding Mercy that he hadn’t thought at all about the wider picture.
Grey had betrayed them all, and the Three were nowhere to be found. I was supposed to keep you here.
“Abigail. Darcie. Oh God—we have to get back there. We have to see if they’re all right!”
“Need a minute,” Vivian wheezed. “I can get us back there. Just give me two seconds—”
Denizen shook his head. “You’re too weak.” Deep inside him, a heat built and spread. The knowledge bestowed by Mercy burned to be used, to spill out into the world. Would it work? Could he get them home?
He turned from Vivian, ignoring the shocked look on her face, and drew on the power of the Tenebrae.
The Art of Apertura—traveling between the shadows. First, the hands must be raised, fingers stretched as if they’re tearing the air….
The words swam up from nowhere, and without even needing to ask, he knew them to be true. He focused on the foyer of Seraphim Row—the massive doors, the candles, the weight of a dozen painted gazes. Alien syllables slipped from his lips to part the air, and shadows spilled from a wound in the world. It would hang in the air as long as he concentrated on it, as long as he held the shape of the Cant in his head.
“Where did you…” Vivian pushed herself to her feet. “Where did you learn to do that?”
Denizen didn’t answer. Instead, he began to jog back to the doors of the orphanage. The Clockwork Three could return at any moment, but there was no way he was leaving Simon here any longer than he had to.
“Where are you going now?” his aunt called after him in an exasperated voice.
Despite everything that had happened, a smile flashed across Denizen’s face.
“I have someone I want you to meet.”
—
THE SMILE LASTED until they reached Seraphim Row.
“What is this place?” Simon whispered as they picked their way through a graveyard of candles, the carpet a sea of crushed tallow, the air darkened by a thousand snake tongues of smoke.
Home, thought Denizen. Despite its darkness and secrets, that’s what Seraphim Row had become.
Now it looked like a battlefield. Each portrait had been pulled from its hook and smashed against the ground, the canvas torn and the faces of long-dead Mallei smeared with wax. Frames had been stamped on until they snapped, the splinters kicked about the room with savage glee.
The chandelier sat in the middle of the floor like the beached corpse of an iceberg. Its canopy had been torn free and flung away, the once-beautiful prisms of glass that had hung from its flanks shattered and ground into the floor. The iron cage of its body had been twisted out of shape by something with incredible strength.
This had always been the warmest room in the house, thought Denizen as they picked their way across the floor, but now the cold was starting to creep in.
Occasionally, Vivian stopped to whisper the Bellows Subventum to herself, light gleaming from under the newly healed skin. The effort was taxing her, but each time she stood a little straighter, breathed a little easier.
“Can I—”
She cut Denizen off with a wave of her hand. After her initial shock at Denizen’s newfound power, she hadn’t even asked what had happened or who Simon was. Every iota of energy she possessed seemed to be focused on keeping herself going, one step after the other.
Weirdly, it made Denizen feel better—Vivian Hardwick is on our side—but the more they explored the house, the more he realized they would need all the help they could get. This was where the Three had been while he was searching Crosscaper, when Vivian had been dragging herself out of a pool of her own blood.
They had been taking their time with Seraphim Row.
No corridor had been untouched. In some places, the destruction was as mundane as the wallpaper being ripped off or the candles kicked over. In others, the entirety of the Clockwork Three’s malignant fury had been released—floorboards torn up, light fixtures pulled from the ceilings to hang down like skeletal fingers, the walls riven with claw marks like signatures of insanity. Each new desecration made Denizen’s anger grow.
There was no point to this. Denizen understood—in a hateful way—why they might want to isolate Vivian by attacking her cadre, but none of this had served a purpose at all. It hadn’t brought the Clockwork Three any closer to their goals. In fact, it had slowed them down. They could have come back early to Crosscaper, found Vivian and Denizen when they were still at Grey’s mercy.
But they hadn’t. They’d tarried here, visiting little insults on unfeeling stone and wood. Denizen stopped to stare at the door to one of the broom cupboards. It had been kicked in so violently the bottom of the door had split, but that hadn’t been enough for the Three—they’d reached in and crushed the handle to an unusable blob of metal.
He thought of what Grey had said, how the Three’s chaotic nature meant that their plans and schemes were so often subsumed by raw hunger. This was what the world would be like if the Three had their way. The Endless Ki
ng would cause untold horror if he Breached, yes, but in his wake would come the Clockwork Three—not just vicious but petty, piling misery upon misery until the whole world choked.
They found Jack in the Room of Swords.
In a way, it was fitting. The blacksmith used Cants in his forgings so that each weapon held special power against the Tenebrous. Spoken steel, weapons that burned as well as cut. With all the swords lining the walls, this room must have been agony for the Three. Perhaps it had merely spurred them on.
The huge man swayed in the center of the room like a vast statue about to topple, a relic of some ancient civilization brought low by time. Iron had spread across half his face, black under the blood.
He held D’Aubigny’s crumpled shape in his arms. She looked very, very small.
“Where,” he whispered in a voice thick with tears, “were you?”
The last word was a shout. When it left his lips, his strength seemed to leave him too, and in stiff and glacial stages Fuller Jack fell to his knees, holding the body of his wife.
“Denizen,” Vivian said. “Get your friend to the room across the hall.”
“What? No—”
“Now.”
He did as he was told, putting an arm round Simon’s shoulders, feeling them flinch under his touch. Though they had left the orphanage behind, his friend’s eyes still tracked every shadow, when they weren’t watching Vivian with barely disguised fear.
She closed the door behind her, but the sight of her standing there was burned into Denizen’s eyes. Her voice hadn’t been angry. It had been cold, all emotion once again folded behind the iron mask of a Malleus.
What must it be like? To be so long in a war that even this—a comrade fallen, her oldest friend a traitor, her home destroyed—was just one more obstacle to push past? The only reason Denizen hadn’t curled up in a ball and started twitching was because so far he hadn’t had time.
He brought Simon across the hall to a windowless little box bedroom he had never been in before. The single bed in the corner had no sheets or duvet, but as Simon had been sleeping rough for the past couple of weeks, Denizen didn’t think he’d mind.
He was right. Simon curled up on the bed with a wordless sigh of relief. Denizen hovered awkwardly by the door.
“Simon?”
“Mmmph?”
“We’re just going to…” He didn’t know what to say. “We’ll be right back, Simon. You sleep, OK?”
Simon made an incoherent noise, halfway between a snuffle and a snore.
“D’n’t…,” he murmured. “Don’t g’way again….”
There was a lump in Denizen’s throat. “I won’t,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
He waited until Simon’s breathing steadied, and then he quietly slipped out the door.
—
DENIZEN DIDN’T GIVE the closed door of the Room of Swords a second glance. Instead, he made his way as quickly as he could to the foyer, stepping gingerly over the squashed remains of candle-wards.
What would happen now that they’d been destroyed? Would Seraphim Row slip completely into the dark? Did it even matter now with the Endless King poised below the horizon?
Sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of Seraphim Row’s great doors, Denizen waited. Eventually, his hunch was proved right. Vivian appeared at the head of the stairs, changed out of her bloody clothes and shrugging on a thick winter coat. There was a sword hanging from her waist. She saw Denizen and froze.
“Going somewhere?” he said.
Vivian looked away. She’d been caught and they both knew it. If Denizen had just gone back to the Room of Swords, then Vivian would have been out the door and back to Crosscaper without a word.
It was a long time before she broke the silence.
“I made Jack as comfortable as I could. He’s gravely wounded, but he’ll live.”
Denizen knew he should be relieved, but all he felt was numb. It had been a long and dark night.
“Corinne…” Vivian’s voice was raw. “She fought them to the end.”
D’Aubigny. Denizen had known; he had. It had only taken one look at Jack’s face in the Room of Swords, but the knowledge still came as a gut punch. He remembered warm arms about him, a voice in his ear telling him to keep going, to stay alive. Her calm, steel-hard determination. Her rare smiles.
Denizen knew the answer before he opened his mouth.
“Why did they leave Jack alive?”
“So he can grieve,” Vivian said simply.
Poor Jack. The builder, the forger. The man who watched his wife go out the door every night and carved creatures for her return. What would he be without her?
“And the others?” Denizen said after a few seconds of silence. Vivian shook her head.
“No sign of them. If I’d been Jack, I would have told them to run.”
A flickering candle of hope lit in Denizen’s stomach. The girls were smart and capable—if they had gotten clear of Seraphim Row while the Knights fought the Three, then they might be all right.
“What about your friend?”
Denizen explained what he knew of Simon’s ordeal. After he’d finished, Vivian looked thoughtful.
“Bending light is a difficult art,” she said, “even for an experienced Knight. It’s a subtle discipline, one I’ve rarely had the…patience for.”
Somehow, Denizen did not find that in the least bit surprising.
“He has a future with the Order, if he wishes it,” she continued. “We often discover lost bloodlines. Or new ones. I’d wager there’s a mention of a…”
“Hayes,” Denizen said.
“A Hayes family in our records. Something to look at if we…if the Order lives through the next few days.”
She paused. “He was lucky you found him.”
Was that approval in her voice? Denizen wasn’t sure—he’d never heard it before. The thought gave him courage. He took a deep breath.
“We need to talk,” he said, folding his arms.
She didn’t look at him. “We can talk when I return.”
“You’re saying that because you don’t think you’re coming back.”
That got her attention. She turned toward him, flashing the same look of grim disdain she always did. The Vivian Hardwick stare might have cowed him a few hours ago, but it had been a busy evening, and right now Denizen just wasn’t in the mood.
There was something else too—a frayed edge to her that hadn’t been there before. Maybe it was just the pain she’d been through, but she wasn’t presenting the same impenetrable wall she always had. Vivian had been about to tell him something before Grey had shot her—he knew it. He just had to push a little harder.
“Denizen…,” she began, and then abruptly stopped speaking. “I can’t—not right now. I have to go and do this. We don’t have time for—”
“You haven’t had time since I got here,” Denizen said angrily. “And look at you—you’re weak. The mercy isn’t a thing; it’s a her. It’s the Endless King’s daughter. They have her trapped, but we spoke. She…”
He faltered for a moment as he tried to put what had happened into words.
“She showed me the Cants. Like a…I don’t know. A cheat sheet. I understand them now. You saw what I can do. You need me if you want to stop the Three.”
“You were taught by her?” Vivian said, shock in her voice. “That’s…I mean, there are stories, but…”
Once again, that cold Malleus control snapped back down like a portcullis, hiding her emotions from view. Her jaw tightened and she descended the stairs. For a moment, he thought she might just sweep him aside, but then she stopped, looking down on him with those ice-gray eyes.
“You can’t stop me going,” Vivian said acidly, “no matter what lessons you may have had. I am a Malleus of the Order of the Borrowed Dark, and I—”
“Have been to Crosscaper before,” Denizen whispered. It was at once obvious and a revelation. “Before tonight. That’s how the Ar
t of Apertura works. You can only travel to somewhere you’ve already been.” Mercy’s words, Mercy’s insight, coming out of his mouth.
Vivian opened her mouth, but Denizen cut her off. “You’re right. I’m just a kid. I probably can’t stop you. But I’m going to try. And you’re going to have to hurt me pretty badly if you want to get past me.”
He took a purposeful step in front of the door. “So I want answers.”
At this point, Denizen didn’t even know if he was bluffing or not. He met that blowtorch stare and didn’t look away. Would she actually fight him? Would he fight back?
The moment dragged out, so long that fear actually began to trickle down his back, and then Vivian did the one thing Denizen would never have expected.
She laughed.
It was an awkward croaking noise, as if she weren’t used to laughing at all. She turned away from him, one hand pressed to her stomach as the chuckles spilled from her in rough, hacking gasps.
Denizen stood there awkwardly until she turned back to him again, wiping her eyes.
“You are so…,” she began, “so like him.”
The smile faded from her face, and Denizen was suddenly struck by how old and tired she looked, the premature grayness of her hair, the wrinkles crowding the corners of her eyes. Her voice was hollow.
“How can you be so like him?”
“Who?” Denizen said. “My father?” Suddenly all other thoughts were driven from his head. Vivian had never mentioned him before.
“What do you remember about your parents, Denizen?”
His tongue felt heavy in his mouth. Now that she was asking him, he was suddenly nervous. What if he said the wrong thing? What if she was disgusted by how little he did remember?
“I don’t remember anything about my dad,” he said finally. “And my mother? I dream about her sometimes. She was small. Gentle. She smelled like strawberries, and she used to…she used to sing to me.”
A tear ran down Vivian’s cheek. The sight of it froze the blood in Denizen’s veins.
“That was Director Susan Carsing,” she said. “She used to run Crosscaper before…” Vivian took a deep breath. “I left you with her. Eleven years ago, just before I hunted down the Clockwork Three for killing your father.”
