Justin Fisher - The Darkening King

“Remember everyone on the other side knows about Ned and his mouse – that means you, furball. Not a squeak out of you till we get back to the caravan park, or you’ll blow our cover.”

The backpack remained deathly quiet.

“What’s he doing?”

“Err, I think he’s following orders, Dad.”

“Right. Good. Now, son, wait here. Me and your mum need to check the place out first.”

“Just a tick, darling, and don’t talk to any strangers,” added his mum.

Ned’s eyes rolled and his parents opened the door to the welcoming ding of a bell. “Don’t talk to strangers” was what you told a six-year-old – not someone who had saved the world. Twice. But it was always the same now, wherever they went. And the truth was – they had every right to worry. Ned’s ring no longer listened to him when he tried to use his powers, and his mum and dad had become so protective that he was barely allowed to do anything any more, except sit and wait with his shadow and his wind-up mouse.

He slumped on to the steps of the tea shop. Across the street he saw an old man in a tweed jacket, huffing and puffing with a Zimmer frame to steady his balance. He was tall and spider-leg thin, with barely any remaining white hair and a long reddish nose that seemed to be attached to the rest of his face with a criss-cross pattern of wrinkles.

He was struggling across the road towards Mavis’s and when he looked towards Ned he smiled between great rasping breaths. The poor old dear either thought that he knew Ned, or that Ned might be able to help him on his way, which of course Ned would. Stranger or not, the man needed help.

“Hello. Are you all right?” Ned asked.

Now almost on the other side, the old man grinned at Ned, revealing quite the most extraordinary set of teeth. They all pointed in different directions. Some were grey or brown, others chipped or missing, and one looked as though it would have been more at home in the mouth of a dog.

“I will be, young man, with a little assistance,” he rasped.

But Ned couldn’t take his eyes off the man’s teeth.

“Might I bend your ear for a moment?”

As he spoke, a small device in Ned’s pocket began to shake. It was the perometer that his great friend George had given him a few months earlier, when the Armstrongs had had to leave the Circus of Marvels and go on the run. The device could sense danger, and as it began to shake, Ned stumbled to his feet. The old man let go of his Zimmer frame, his bony fingers instead reaching into his jacket pocket. When they came out again he was holding a thin-bladed dagger, and his eyes shone black.

“Gor-balin!” spat Ned.

“Yes, boy! Been watching Mavis’s for weeks, I have. End of the road for you, my friend.”

Gor-balins were not uncommon amongst Darklings and were often sent on missions across the Veil’s borders, due to their more human size and shape. But as the creature’s glamour began to fade, Ned was reminded that that was where the similarities ended. The creature walked upright and easily now, the whites of his eyes turned black and his skin darkened to a wet, mottled grey. His nose grew more crooked, the tips of his ears longer, and his bony fingers now ended with claws.

“I wouldn’t come any closer if I were you,” stammered Ned.

“Why, what you gonna do about it?” jeered the gor-balin. “Not much, is what I heard …”

Ned raised his hand and focused on the band of metal at his finger – the same band of metal that had flattened a whole host of the creatures on the rooftops of St Clotilde’s. But that had been a different time and a very different Ned. He thought of ice and the air around his finger shimmered with intent. As he pictured the atoms in his mind coming together and growing still, he could feel the ring’s tendrils hum under the pores of his skin. And for a moment, just a fraction of a moment, he thought his powers had finally returned.

“Please,” he whispered.

The air crackled with the brief sparking of atoms and then, just as it had a hundred times before, his ring grew quiet and the air stilled.

“I said, don’t come any closer!” said Ned, trying to sound braver than he felt.

The dark hollows of the gob’s eyes shone and his lips broke into a smile. He walked forward, slowly now, relishing every second as Ned backed away further down the alleyway that ran alongside Mavis’s tea shop.

“So it’s true … Not the boy you was then, are you? You ain’t nothin’ without your mum and dad.”

The creature was right. But even now, powerless as he was, Ned wasn’t alone, not quite.

“To be fair, I did try and warn you. Gorrn?” he breathed.

Ned’s shadow – his slovenly familiar – did not make tea, or do the dishes. In fact, there were relatively few things the creature did well, except for fighting and biting.

“Arr,” said the shadow, and the smug grin on the gor-balin’s face was promptly removed as the darker recesses of the alley began to shift.

The shadow that was Gorrn raised himself up from the ground as a wall of toothy darkness, thickening and darkening as he stretched to fill the width of the alleyway between Ned and his assailant.

“Grak!” spat the gob.

And in a violent and silent second, Gorrn lunged, enveloping the Darkling in his folds before spitting him out like a mouthful of chewed food and into one of Mavis’s green recycling bins.

A shaken Ned closed the lid on the unconscious assassin, quickly and quietly.

“Thanks, Gorrn.”

His familiar oozed back to the ground before blending into the shadows.

“You there, Whiskers?”

“Scree.”

“I know Dad told you to be quiet and keep our cover, but next time someone comes at me with a knife can you assume the cover’s been blown and, you know, do something useful?”

The Debussy Mark Twelve remained silent.

Ned’s heart was pounding for more reasons than he could count. For one thing, Barbarossa’s minions were dangerously close, and not for the first time. Had it not been for Gorrn, the assassin would have ended him then and there. But that wasn’t what was really troubling him. What really scared him was that he still couldn’t work his Engine, no matter how hard he tried. How was he ever going to defeat the Darkening King if he had no powers? Not to mention the fact that if his parents found out about his face-off in the alley, they’d wrap him in so much protective cotton wool that he’d end up suffocating. He’d tell them later, after the tea room and in his own good time. He hid the gob’s Zimmer frame down the alleyway and out of sight, and paced back to the corner of Mavis’s tea shop.

“Not a word about this, from either of you. Not till we get back, OK?”

“Arr.”

“Scree.”

“I thought I told you – no talking to the mouse, Ned!”

Ned looked up to see that his dad had come back out of Mavis’s to get him.

“Sorry, Dad. I thought, erm … there was nobody about so …”

His dad cocked his head slightly.

“You OK, son? You look a bit ruffled.”

Gorrn shifted guiltily along the ground by Ned’s foot.

“I’m fine, Dad, just a bit nervous, you know? About who it is we’re going to see.”

“Well, keep your wits about you. Danger could be lurking anywhere.”

“Yes, Dad, anywhere …”

avis’s was in fact just as it should have been. Scones, cake, proper teapots with proper tea and lacy pink curtains to match the lacy pink tablecloths. It was also, much to Ned’s surprise, completely empty apart from an extremely overdressed and bejewelled lady – presumably Mavis, thought Ned. No doubt her business was going well, though you wouldn’t know it from the state of her empty premises. His dad walked up to the counter and spoke to her quietly, leaving Ned with his mum.