The Forever Court

by Dave Rudden

  Denizen slowed as though the cobblestones under his feet had turned to glue. Jack’s presence was at his back like a friendly wind, but Vivian radiated not now like a cracked nuclear reactor. Of course, she always did that. Even her rare smiles had a certain bleak aspect to them, as if she always knew exactly how many she had left.

  Now was probably not the time. Maybe there was never going to be a time. If only she’d give him some sort of sign that there was a human being under all that accreted annoyance—

  A hand found his shoulder.

  “Hey, kid,” Edifice Greaves said. “Good to see you.”

  Frown No. 5—Don’t Patronize Me, Adult. Otherwise known as the I See What You’re Doing, the I Know What You’re Up To, and the Don’t Lie to Me and Pretend You’re About to Trigger an Interdimensional War Just to See What I’ll Do, You Smarmbucket.

  Greaves wilted in the face of Denizen’s new and improved No. 5. He actually looked a little hurt. A part of Denizen wavered—he didn’t actually know Greaves had set him up. Did he? Jack thought he was a good guy, and Vivian tended to see the world less in terms of good and bad, and more in my way and other.

  I want a form, Denizen thought. I want everyone to have a form, and you have to fill out your intentions and list why you’re doing what you’re doing. And you’re not allowed to lie.

  “Let’s just do this,” he said.

  “Fair enough,” Greaves replied in a neutral tone, and suddenly all the Knights were moving. Denizen immediately made a beeline for Vivian—not to talk but for some nod or glance that might fan the coals in him back to life.

  It was no use. She was lost in the sudden flow of dangerous people, long legs keeping her one step ahead. Buffeted this way and that, Denizen tried to reassure himself that it was a coincidence that every time a space opened up between him and Vivian, it was immediately filled by a Knight.

  It’s just a cramped space. That’s all.

  All Denizen could do was stare impotently at the back of Vivian’s head. People got out of her way. Was that a skill you learned eventually as well?

  The gift shop was deserted but for a few tourists poring over printed maps. Sunlight slunk in through the high windows of the Long Room, trying and failing to bring a shine to the marble busts lining the alcoves. It was busier here—maybe half a dozen people, a tweed-clad professor who seemed to be spending far more time gawking at the arriving Knights than reading the book in his hands. Denizen fought the urge to frown at him as well. He’d had a hard time trusting tweed since the last time he was in a bookshop.

  Greaves was looking around for a security guard to close the place up, but there were still people entering. A girl glared at the velvet rope holding her back from the older books, another boy reading from a pamphlet beside her.

  Denizen’s gaze skipped over them distractedly. Greaves couldn’t be planning an ambush. And even if he were, he wouldn’t bring a Neophyte into it, would he?

  He put you in a room with a bunch of explosives, didn’t he? And maybe he knows you have the extra Cants as well. Maybe this is another test.

  No. This was going to be the first time a Tenebrous talked peace with a human. A step in the right direction after centuries of war. Everything was going to be fine.

  Denizen glanced back at the last shards of sunlight hanging in the doorway to the Long Room for one last iota of reassurance—

  And the lights went out.

  It was nothing as natural as a power outage. Instead, the room seemed to disappear beneath a falling veil of electric black. Shadows unzipped themselves from under tables and beneath pillars—swallowing shelves, eating displays. It was as if the air had turned into the water of an ocean trench, so dark it was practically solid.

  Half the lamps went dark with the dry snap of broken fuses. The others slid to crimson in a dozen bloody shades, their bulbs throbbing slow in heartbeat time.

  Denizen had thought he knew the dimensions of the room, but now he felt he was adrift, drowned in dark and silence. He spun, and then spun again, which failed to achieve anything except making him extremely dizzy. All he could see was a shifting obsidian murk broken by red lights like distant, dying stars.

  In that single, horrible instant, Denizen was suddenly reminded of every childhood fear he’d had of the dark. He’d forgotten what it was like. Knights didn’t see it. He blinked, waiting for the Lucidum to kick in, but it didn’t. Fear thrilled up his spine. Had darkness always been this black? This cold?

  He’d forgotten how afraid it could make you. He’d forgotten how it attacked.

  The Court. Were they attacking? There was no sickening lurch in his stomach of the kind that normally announced a Tenebrous. Denizen didn’t understand—for them to do this, he’d be able to feel it, he’d have to—

  And then a light bloomed. Relief burned through Denizen, though the darkness remained, clustering round the glow like a weight that could not be pushed away. It didn’t matter. Denizen knew that rich shade of flickering gold.

  The color of firelight and home.

  A Knight. Denizen ran toward the figure—they’d know what to do. He squinted to try and make out who ...

  It was the girl from the other side of the room. The stranger. There was a sword in her hand. Smoke rose from her vicious smile.

  “Burn for Her,” she whispered.

  DENIZEN’S WORLD BECAME ROARING flame.

  He’d been in enough life-or-death situations by now to know that time didn’t actually slow down when you were being attacked. In reality, you were speeding up. Your brain realized before you did that every second was crucial—which was why Denizen had all the time in the world to watch the girl’s mouth open, white-hot light erupting through her, borne on the wave of a warbling shriek.

  That’s not a Cant, he thought in the first third of a second as the fire ate the distance and the darkness between them, illuminating a staccato blurt of floor and shelf. He should know. He was carrying all seventy-eight of them in the back of his head.

  She’s just channeling the fire herself, came another thought, a third of a second after the first. That’s insane.

  And then another, this one far more urgent.

  GET OUT OF THE WAY!

  A desperate leap took him out of the path of the murderous tongue of flame, one side of his face immediately stinging with what Denizen could only accurately call sunburn.

  Stone hissed and split. Afterimages turned Denizen’s vision inside out, making the world a luminescent veinwork before his eyes adjusted to the gloom. They hadn’t had to acclimatize to real darkness for six months, and they were hideously, nauseatingly out of practice.

  Somewhere behind him came a hoarse, faraway boom, followed by a flash of fire that too briefly outlined a host of moving shapes—shadow puppets against the murk. Light crashed and gleamed through the dark, a storm somewhere out of sight.

  No, Denizen thought, trying to feel his way in front of him, to find some kind of shelter or cover. Not a storm. A barrage.

  The Knights were being attacked.

  Denizen’s frantic pawing finally found the edge of one of the huge shelves. The girl prowled closer, her light illuminating her and nothing else, and that was only one of an avalanche of things that did not make any sense.

  She’s a human. Why is she doing this?

  How is she doing this?

  Only once had Denizen used the fire within him without the protective limitations of a Cant, and it had knocked him out for a day and a night. The Cants were—what was it Mercy had said?—a language of control. A mold to provide the inferno with direction and shape.

  And this girl was using it free and unfettered, with only her will to guide it. The effort must have been incredible. The danger involved, the Cost … and she was using it against another human being. A human being that happened to be Denizen, actually, which he was going to process right after he got over the shock of betrayal. This didn’t happen. It had never happened, not in all the battles the Knights had foug
ht. It didn’t—

  Oh God, Denizen thought, is she a thrall?

  The horrified notion had no time to bloom before another light appeared. Denizen was almost grateful for the interruption, had it not been the boy from earlier, eyes molten, the shifting light painting him as gaunt and deadly as a butterfly knife. A blade of pure fire shone in his hand like the sword of a fallen angel.

  It was the push Denizen needed. Maybe it was his training finally kicking in. Maybe it was the fact he was now outnumbered two to one and neither stranger seemed ready to offer an explanation. It might even have been because Denizen was a Hardwick, and there were a thousand dead ancestors screaming that his family didn’t take being attacked lying down.

  Questions could wait. This was war.

  The girl shrieked fire again, but Denizen ripped the universe open with a pass of his fingers and let the light disappear into the bottomless depths of the Tenebrae. The boy’s eyes widened, and the Cants crackled like laughter in Denizen’s head before he snarled the shape of the Qayyim Myriad.

  A dozen tiny suns exploded into life, orbiting him once, twice—crisping the floor in wavering lines—before hurtling forward with eager wails. Fire beat against his chest, desperate to be used, but a Knight was supposed to be a strategist, and calculations were clicking in Denizen’s head.

  The girl shouted half the orbs down with a messy splatter of flame. The sword of fire licked out to detonate three more before they could impact, the boy ducking and weaving and somersaulting—somersaulting—in a move that would have done Corinne D’Aubigny proud. The remainder grounded themselves in the wall, exploding in sparks and soot.

  Denizen didn’t mind that particularly, just as he didn’t register the pinch and tickle of his cooling skin. The Myriad had just filled in some of the running equation of how he was going to get out of this alive.

  Most Knights learned twenty or so Cants. It was all you really needed, and the Cost was a great deterrent to showing off. Specializing simplified things while still allowing a Knight to change strategy on the fly, in case…well, in case of this exact situation.

  The girl prepared herself to strike again. He could see it in the way she dug her toes to ward against recoil, in the reflexive way she licked her lips. Practiced movements, which meant training. For a Knight, the Cants did some of the heavy lifting when it came to shaping the fire, but these strangers were doing it all manually, which meant—

  Helios Lance. Denizen flung a streaking arrow of light at the girl, and when the boy summoned his sword again to deflect it, Denizen knew that he was right.

  They had one trick, one trick each. Denizen had no such limitation. Unfortunately, that brought him right up against the great towering limitation he did have.

  They were trying to kill him. And he couldn’t kill them.

  Somewhere distant—or not distant; Denizen had no idea how large the library was anymore—explosions boomed, figures silhouetted before dis-appearing again, dreamlike and haunting. Sounds swam in and out of focus, and, if Greaves or the others were calling out orders, Denizen couldn’t hear them. It was like they’d never existed, conjured away by this sorcerous gloom—just another power Denizen had never dreamt possible.

  Who are these people?

  His attackers were advancing now, and Denizen was running out of ideas. He wasn’t even sure whether he felt right about unleashing his power on Tenebrous anymore, not after moonlight conversations and lightning-haunted lips. As pale and lupine as his assailants were, they were human. They were kids. And that meant Denizen couldn’t burn them alive.

  Fast on the heels of that thought came a second—Why not? Fear became anger, and anger became rage, the Cants swirling like kites in his head. That was the point of a Knight, wasn’t it? To defend your comrades? By far the best thing, by far the easiest thing, would be to turn these traitors into char and identify them from their dental records.

  Another howl turned the bookshelf Denizen was sheltering behind into a cliff of flame. Books fell around him, their pages ablaze. Do something. Do something. He’d feel like a right idiot if all this was happening and he died from smoke inhalation.

  The pair were stalking toward him, movements perfectly in unison. This close, they were obviously brother and sister. Same angular features, same cavefish-pale faces, his fingers reaching out every so often to brush hers—

  Siblings. And suddenly there victory was, and Denizen wasn’t sure if he should be proud or ashamed of the cruelty of it.

  He lurched forward through oily smoke, marble shards slicing his cheek as Samuel Taylor Coleridge came apart under fire. Denizen barely noticed. Closer. Have to get closer. This was short-range stupidity.

  Fire whirled through Denizen’s mind—and the boy and girl disappeared.

  Not to Denizen, because he was standing in front of them, but to each other—separated by a curtain of bent light. The right place to see. It was nowhere near as good as Simon’s, but in this chaos of shadow and smoke it didn’t need to be. Cants didn’t just make people vanish either, but Denizen was wagering neither sibling knew that.

  To them, it would look like the other had simply blinked out of existence.

  Denizen had been hoping for a moment of confusion. What he got was a full-on meltdown. The girl’s wail was earsplitting, her terrified gaze sweeping from Denizen to the empty space where her brother had stood. On the other side of the warping curtain, her brother did the same, staring with a mixture of horror and fury that lasted until Denizen’s staggering charge bore him to the ground.

  Punch him in the face, Denizen thought frantically, and then punched him in the face. He didn’t think it was a good idea to wait and see whether one punch was enough, so he hit him again, skinning his knuckles on the teenager’s sharp cheek, and when light began to gather in the boy’s crazed eyes, Denizen hit him so hard he fell forward and banged his own head on the floor.

  Ow, he thought, rolling onto his back with a gasp—giving him a really excellent view of the girl charging through the veil of light, steel sword in hand.

  She looked extremely angry.

  Had she just brought down her sword, Denizen would have died right there, but instead she took in a breath, her eyes blooming roses of gold. Denizen sympathized, for what it was worth—the fire was hard to ignore at the best of times. It didn’t stop him from kicking her in the knee, though, and when she stumbled backward he hit her with an Anathema Bend that flung her onto her back.

  She didn’t move. A wisp of smoke curled from her lips.

  Move, Denizen. She wasn’t dead. He’d barely let it coalesce—it must have been like being clocked with a mattress. She could come round at any second. But the floor was very comfy all of a sudden, and if he used the prone body of her brother as a pillow ...

  MOVE!

  He finally convinced himself to get up, staggering away from where the pair lay, the tidal shadows swallowing them completely in just three steps. Denizen’s heart pounded harder with every vicious flash of light and every muffled roar. The world was so dark he felt he was running on the spot. Sometimes figures would dart past him, close enough to touch, then vanish as though they had never existed.

  History books portrayed battles as geometric lines—duels between minds, where the weapons were regiments and the casualties a footnote at the bottom of the page. That wasn’t what they were at all.

  They were chaos.

  “There!”

  The two men came out of nowhere, resolving from the darkness like ghosts. Fear burst through Denizen. Were they centimeters away from me this whole time? The fact that the men seemed just as panicked as him wasn’t helping his nerves. Men that large weren’t supposed to look afraid.

  One of them held a syringe. The other clutched some rope.

  Denizen scrabbled for his power, and a shape blew through the murk, limbs eddying smoke. The first man managed a pathetic yelp as hands and feet found his joints and persuaded them against themselves, and the second had barely turned bef
ore Vivian Hardwick folded him up along his seams as well.

  She spun, panting, as they both hit the ground.

  “Hi,” Denizen said. “Um. What’s going on?”

  It felt weird to speak again. Vivian evidently felt the same—she swallowed, and then spoke in a low, dry rasp.

  “Four warlocks, maybe a dozen other men. Mercenaries, by their training.”

  “Does your count include two kids?” Denizen asked. In unspoken unison, they stood back to back, turning in slow circles.

  “No,” she said. “You—”

  “They’re unconscious by the door,” Denizen said. “No idea for how long. Wait—warlocks?”

  “It’s as good a name as any,” Vivian growled. “Until I get some answers.”

  That was when Denizen noticed the neat hole in the shoulder of her shirt.

  “You’ve been shot,” he said.

  “What?” she responded distractedly. “Oh. Right. Yes. Ricocheted off the iron.” She didn’t even look down, and her next words were clearly not intended for anyone but herself. “At least Grey knew where to shoot.”

  Her hammer was still slung across her back. That more than anything underlined what was happening—the sheer impossibility of it. We’re under attack. By humans. Suddenly the Order’s fear of thralls seemed perfectly rational. The Knights had spent centuries training to fight a war against monsters. This was something else entirely.

  “They’re not using Cants,” Denizen said. “I don’t know what they’re capable of.”

  Vivian indicated ahead. “This conjuration has been twisting sound, messing with direction. We’re gathering everyone to organize a counterattack. Once we take out the source of this darkness, we’ll have them.”

  Denizen tried to feel bad for whoever Vivian was going to happen to next, but his head was full of fire and the gleam of a needle in the dark.

  Let it out, a part of him snarled. Banish this smoke with a scream. If it moves, burn it. You can worry about consequences later. Or never at all ...

  “Lead the way,” he whispered.