by Dave Rudden
URIEL CLIMBED TO HIS feet, throat thick with the smell of burning books.
Pain radiated from his left cheekbone, and he’d bruised his back when the boy had slammed into him. He took a deep breath, dismissing the pain as a Croit was meant to do. He’d received worse in training.
Far worse, actually. Croits knew how to punch.
Tabitha’s darkness still fogged the air, but Uriel could feel a trembling hesitancy to it. It was incredible that she’d been able to keep it going this long, but Uriel remembered the look on Tabitha’s face when the Redemptress had laid Her cold black hand on her cheek. Tabitha would hold it forever if she could.
Ambrel. Uriel looked around wildly, calling his Prayer to hand, its golden light revealing ... nothing. She wasn’t there. Had the Adversary killed her? Burned her? Was she already ashes because he’d been stupid enough to get knocked out—
“No,” he said. He said it aloud, because his voice sounded a little like hers and it reassured him. “No.”
The boy—Denizen Hardwick, that was what Malebranche had called him—could have killed them. The power he had wielded was far beyond anything Uriel or Ambrel could do, so versatile—Uriel could still hear the unearthly syllables ringing in the air. Words. How could words be so powerful?
Just for a second, Uriel felt himself suddenly wanting to say those words himself. How had they sounded? If he just—
No. He drove the blasphemous thought down.
Uriel began to run through the darkness, letting his sword die away in his hand. It wouldn’t do to reveal his position, and there was no telling whether he’d run into friend or foe first. He needed to find one of the Family or, failing that, some of the men Grandfather had hired for this raid. Bodyguards—mundane men with a mundane love of violence and money. Did they know what all this was? Were they afraid?
Fear was kindling in his own stomach, but Uriel drew on the Favor of his Redemptress to blot it out. This was the War That Will Come. This was what they had been promised. If they did well—if they served—then they would all be saved.
If ...
“Stop it,” he whispered to himself. “Stop it.”
If they’re telling you the truth.
The Adversary was supposed to be an army of cold iron statues, animated by a terrible mind, living avatars of Transgression and shame. They weren’t supposed to be boys with names, and wide, frightened eyes, and power the same shade of gold as the Croits’. It had been the Favor. Uriel knew it as surely as he had felt the iron in Denizen’s knuckles against his cheek—the iron that was supposed to be the Croits’ alone.
If everything isn’t a lie.
“STOP!”
The word didn’t come from Uriel’s mouth but from a woman in a floral-pattern dress carrying a broadsword. No—not a woman. An Adversary. Her black-and-silver curls bobbed as she launched a kick at Uriel’s head, and he almost breathed a sigh of relief.
Finally something I understand.
Uriel ducked under the blow, which meant he was at exactly the right height to get punched as she turned the kick into a vicious pirouette. He rolled with it—his other cheekbone now alight with pain—and drove his foot into the pit of her stomach. She staggered, but flicked her blade at his eyes before he could take advantage of her momentary weakness.
It vibrated off the edge of Uriel’s Prayer instead.
They both stared at each other—she at the bar of rippling fire that protruded from Uriel’s fist, he at the steel sword that had stopped it.
That’s not how it’s supposed to work, he thought dumbly. There were a whole host of ruined blades back at Eloquence to prove it.
She looked just as surprised as he did. There was light gleaming from her blade too, slender spirals of gold and red. It was beautiful. Uriel would have loved to look at it properly, were it not trembling a hair’s breadth from his face.
And then, just as suddenly, the moment broke. A hazy glow pierced the darkness, a cloudy sunrise, then a blinding noon. The shock wave slapped both Uriel and the woman-Adversary from their feet, and the shadow above became the shadow of a shelf coming down.
It clipped him—just clipped, that was all—but he fell hard, head spinning. Books pelted deafeningly down. When he finally got to his feet, the woman was gone, and the ringing in his head had resolved to that of a bell—some kind of alarm. The fact that he could hear it clearly was a bad sign. Tabitha was losing her grip.
We don’t have much time.
Uriel ran toward where the fires were brightest. That’s where he’d find Ambrel. That’s where he’d find the Adversary. Shouldn’t be hard, a voice whispered cruelly in his head. They look exactly like you.
Uriel had been raised on stories of the army of the Adversary—the evil night to the Croits’ virtuous day. But they weren’t. They weren’t monsters of sin powered by one evil mind—they were people, people with the same gifts as him.
They may as well be Family ...
The whole world was coming down around his ears, the roars of battle tolling the collapse of everything he knew. The contradiction of what had been drilled into him and the evidence of his own eyes felt like a knife driven between the two halves of his brain.
Uriel felt like he was coming apart. He felt like he was falling—and then something caught his foot, and he was falling for real. He had a second to twist, drawing his blade and slashing it back against whatever had grabbed him—
And Tabitha looked at him with eyes threaded with filaments of iron. The whites of her eyes were all that remained. Everything else was dull and black.
Uriel’s reflexive strike had removed four of the fingers on her outstretched hand. Tabitha hadn’t appeared to notice.
“Uriel ...”
Even her voice was deeper—a leaden, heavy thing, like air pumped through rigid bellows. She struggled with every word, the iron curls of her hair clanking against the floor.
“Tell Her I’m sorry I’m not strong enough ... Tell Her I ...”
The darkness was wavering, tattering, fading, but Tabitha refused to fail her Redemptress, still clutching night as her Transgression swallowed her.
Tabitha died with Her name on her lips, and Uriel broke.
I have to find Ambrel. We have to get out of here. Forget the Redemptress. Forget Grandfather, and the War, and whoever these people are. This isn’t safe. We aren’t safe.
The only thing I believe in is us.
And then he looked up, and there Denizen Hardwick was. The target. The source of the Redemptress’s hate.
He really was just a kid. Probably older than Uriel, but with a touch of that Outside softness that made him look younger. There was soot staining his shaggy red hair, a bruise darkening one side of his face, and a tremor in his left eye. Uriel knew that tremor. He fought it every time the Favor wanted to be free.
“Wait,” Denizen said. Uriel flinched at the sound of his voice. “You don’t have to ... We can talk, OK? You don’t have to do this.”
Hollow understanding stole across Uriel, even as his expression went still and steady, so as not to give anything away.
“Yes,” he said, staring past Denizen, “I do. She has my Family.”
And Ambrel lunged.
Denizen had barely a moment to cry out before the needle plunged in deep. Fire gathered in his eyes, his mouth—and then faded as the drug took effect.
His eyes found Uriel’s for a second and then rolled to white.
They moved in unison, Ambrel taking his legs, Uriel his shoulders. There were two knives in scabbards under his shirt. He could have used them on me when I was down. That’s what a monster would have done. That’s what a Croit would have done.
Uriel flung them from their sheaths. Without them, Denizen weighed barely anything at all. Darkness died around them in soft and falling shards, and Uriel and Ambrel picked up their Adversary and ran toward the light.
DENIZEN WOKE, BUT ONLY halfway.
That was new. Usually waking up was immediate, even in those first weeks i
n Seraphim Row with all the running and jumping and Abigail kicking him through things. The process was simple and familiar: his eyes would open, body delivering its sleep-postponed communiqués to swiftly draw a mental map—legs, torso, head, and even the distant cold of his iron palms.
Now it felt like a gust of wind had scattered the letters. The post office was under siege, the messenger pigeons shot down in droves or plucked out of the air by cunningly trained hawks. The ones that did get through were bedraggled and surly, no help at all.
After a ridiculous amount of concentration, Denizen finally came to the conclusion that he had legs. He had definitely had legs before. Surely he’d remember losing them? Then again, it had been a battle. All sorts of horrible things happened in battle. But he still had legs, so that was a victory, wasn’t it?
Good. Great! Two limbs down. Nearly halfway. Forty percent, maybe. How much are legs?
Denizen was being dragged. He could tell by the rat-a-tat bounce of his shoe tips off the ground, each impact shivering his body back to a dreamy awareness.
More appendages reported for duty. He obviously had a head, as something had to be doing his thinking for him, though at the minute it didn’t seem to be doing a very good job. Someone had gone ahead—haha, a head—and packed it with clouds, his vision filled with drifting silver patches.
Perhaps whoever was dragging him could help? Denizen opened his mouth—it took a couple of tries: someone had coated the inside of it with hair and glue—and posed a friendly query to the pair of hands under his shoulders.
Unfortunately, due to all the hair and glue, the words came out as a sort of strangled “auk”—like someone strangling an auk. The hands did not reply. Perhaps they were missing their head. Perhaps the disappearance of body parts was going around, like a specific and gruesome winter cold.
Blearily, Denizen tried again, but when no words would come, a single thought dropped through his mind like the sweep of a guillotine.
I seem very relaxed about this.
Another thought.
I’m never relaxed about anything.
This wasn’t normal. The fluffiness and drowning warmth were pleasant ... but they weren’t Denizen. This was someone else’s design. The clouds clung and slowed each thought, but Denizen wielded his growing horror like a knife, slowly cutting his way to clarity.
Because someone doesn’t want me to. That was what kept him going.
Someone wanted him silent.
Denizen didn’t think he was claustrophobic, though he had avoided small spaces up until now precisely because he didn’t want to find out. He had the sneaking suspicion he was home to a whole plethora of phobias he hadn’t discovered, simply because he hadn’t been exposed to them yet.
But now he felt trapped in his own body—weighed down by limbs he couldn’t control, his mind fogged and indistinct, and worst of all ... his voice had been taken from him, replaced by a weak mewl.
That’s not what my voice is supposed to be.
“Is ... awake?”
A voice drifted into his awareness. Denizen tried to make out the words, half to understand what was happening and half as some kind of comfort. They had voices. Maybe he would get his back.
“Tol– you not to let him –ake up!”
Denizen opened his mouth in a horrid yawn, as if trying to speak round the clot—
And the sharpness found his neck again.
—
“…YOU HEAR ME?”
This time Denizen managed to wake up three-quarters of the way and, though he still felt packed in cotton wool, at least he knew immediately that the wool was an outside influence.
Someone was talking to him, and he was no longer being dragged anywhere. These, Denizen thought sluggishly, were definitely both improvements.
He lifted his head and the world swam back into view.
He was propped—no, had been propped, he definitely hadn’t made it there himself—against a rough stone wall, cold enough to make him shiver through his shirt. From what he could muzzily make out, the rest of the room was just as medieval, the floor a canted slope of shattered flagstones and heaped debris. Denizen spent a long moment trying to figure out the patterns in the stone before dragging himself back to the present.
OK. May not be normal quite yet.
His thoughts felt slippery—flitting around like rain-wet birds, never staying still or gaining cohesion. He had to keep lunging for them and weighing them down.
I’ve been captured. This is bad.
When the hand struck him, both he and it rang with iron. Suns rose behind his eyes, not the ones he knew but dark things of purple and gray and blue.
“…give him too much, did you?”
Denizen fought the urge to snigger. They were worried about him, apparently. Maybe they were right to be—the cotton wool packing his skull had turned to steel shavings with jagged sharp edges. He had a sneaking suspicion that there was a lot of pain on the horizon, and he would quite like not to be here when it arrived.
“…him again.”
This time the slap was almost soft.
Dizzily, Denizen regarded the two young men in front of him. They were disconcertingly alike—pale eyes burning fever-like from almost translucent faces, framed by shocks of graying hair. Great swaths of the left one’s neck and hands had turned black and hard. Denizen recognized the Cost at once. So much of it.
The other was just bruised.
“You ...” Denizen croaked. “I fought you. I ...”
“Fetch Grandfather,” the youth snapped. Gone was the uncertain boy Denizen had tried to reason with. Now he was chill and imperious, and the other boy practically ran.
“Yes,” Denizen said, who was definitely not taking all this as seriously as he should be. “Grandfather. Good.”
The boy looked like he would hit Denizen again, so Denizen very quickly shut up. However, as the minutes dragged and more and more pain started to make itself known, he began to think it wouldn’t hurt—more than it did already—to talk. The way the boy had looked at him in the Long Room ...
Denizen knew that look. He’d worn it himself, the night he’d found out that the world was a much darker and stranger place than he’d been led to believe. It was a frown of horrible revelation, and despite the awful circumstances he was currently in, a tiny part of him felt an even tinier pang of pity.
“So ...” he said tentatively, “is this a castle? It looks like a castle.”
After Denizen’s eyes being gummed shut for so long, the boy’s sword of fire was suddenly very bright. Its point wavered in front of Denizen’s throat, the heat scorching some of his inner cobwebs away. Or maybe that was the adrenaline. Denizen wasn’t sure.
All he knew was for the first time since somebody had jabbed a needle in his neck, Denizen Hardwick felt his fire return. It was weak, just an ember ... but it was there, and shapes in the back of his head shuddered as if waking from hibernation.
Now all he had to do was survive until it came back in full.
“How did you know that?” the boy snarled. “I swear to Her, if you’re using your Adversary … witch …powers, I’ll—”
The sword was very hot.
“I’m not doing anything!” Denizen said. “Just ... it really looks like a castle.” He thought about raising his hands in the traditional means no harm gesture, but reasoned that, when you could shoot fire out of your hands, the gesture might be meaningless. “Just making conversation, that’s all.”
There. Was that another ember kindling? Was that his power stretching out just a little bit more?
“Making conversation,” the boy whispered. “We ... we know what you are, Adversary. And we will not be tempted.” His eyes flicked round the chamber as if he were concerned about being overheard. Denizen followed his gaze, mostly because it gave him something to look at other than the glowing sword in his face.
There was a wire coiled in the corner of the room. Denizen hadn’t noticed it at first, because of the d
rugs and the sword and all the kidnappingness, but it was long and black and very out of place among all the medievalry. The boy was looking at every other part of the room but where the wire was, which to Denizen spoke volumes.
He was about to take advantage of the last of his chemically induced recklessness and ask some pointed questions, but then Grandfather stepped into the room, and Denizen became suddenly very lucid indeed.
“Uriel. This is the Adversary?”
His first impression of the warlock leader—and there was nobody else this person could be—was of weight. Not physical weight: every time Grandfather turned his head, Denizen thought his cheekbones would split his skin. No, it was a sort of density, as if lesser humans had been folded over and over again like a samurai sword, forging a man far more substantial than his size would suggest.
Not huge but deep.
The boy’s—Uriel’s—sword vanished in a waterfall of sparks and he bowed low to the floor.
“Yes, Grandfather.”
Adversary.
That was the third time Denizen had heard that word, and it was starting to worry him. Grandfather hadn’t called him the boy, or the prisoner, or the innocent person we’re definitely going to set free, possibly with a burger. The word adversary was an iceberg word because it was so vague. It could mean anything—an ideology, a country, a whole way of life. Calling something an adversary meant you didn’t have to think of it as a person.
Come on. The fire in his stomach was building slowly, as if bewildered at being gone in the first place. Come on.
“Denizen Hardwick,” the old man hissed, pearl-gray gaze pinning Denizen to the wall. The syllables might have been different, but the sentiment was the same. Enemy. Anathema. Wrong.
Denizen would be the first person to admit he wasn’t perfect. He could be stubborn, sullen, and uncooperative, and recently he seemed to have lost his grip on the inner dial that careered between cowardly and reckless, and they were only the things he could think of. But Denizen knew he had never done anything to deserve the way Grandfather looked at him.
It was hatred. Intimate and personal. You had to know someone your entire life to hate them like that. Denizen did not want Grandfather to strike him. He knew that if he did, the sheer gravity of the man’s hate might crush him the way a black hole crushed a sun.
