I doubted that. The Darkness had certainly crossed the Big Muddy itself, so water was not an absolute barrier to it. And the Darkness was far from the only thing we had to worry about.
“Aren’t they still skirmishing along the Whitewater?”
“Pfft. They’ve been doing that for longer than I’ve been alive and don’t figure they’ll stop after I’m dead. Rockwall and the Monolith both want that farmland too much and neither of ’em are going to hold it.”
Which was true enough. Too much of Rockwall was desert and too much of the Monolith was mountains - the fertile belt between the Whitewater and the Red River was an irresistible temptation to both states’ ambitions. When Panther City raised its peasant levies, most of them went to die pursuing Rockwall’s northern claims. I suspected the inhabitants of that disputed land mostly just wanted everyone to leave them alone. The semblance of order the nation states imposed probably wasn’t worth having armies trampling your fields every spring - certainly not when they just passed through, again and again, without ever bringing a resolution.
“Thanks, Dodd. We’ll make for the river.”
It occurred to me that I was speaking for the person in charge of our mission. “If that’s all right with you, Prophetess.”
She nodded. “Seems reasonable.”
“We’ll need to come up with some way to pay for passage.”
“I’m hoping to appeal to their better natures,” she smiled.
Right. “As we head east of here most people are going to be Reborn until we get into the Source. They’ve certainly got a tradition of traveling preachers, but I’m not sure they’re going to do any favors for a Universalist prophet.”
“Then I’ll row the boat, shovel coal, or do whatever needs to be done to buy passage,” she said flatly. “The Lord will provide. He never promised to provide a first class cabin. If you read your Bible I don’t think you’ll find many of the prophets enjoyed any luxuries. I’m not expecting any different.”
“As long as we don’t get swallowed by a whale,” I said. “I don’t care for fish.”
“Funny enough, whales aren’t actually fish,” Dodd remarked, which I had known full well. Prophetess didn’t seem amused. I let the subject drop.
“Anyhow, you’ll be wanting this,” the smith said. He handed me a folding clasp knife, its wooden handle inlaid with intricate copper scrollwork - clearly Fenn’s craftsmanship.
“You can’t have had time to make this out of what I brought you yesterday,” I said.
“No, but I had something like it in mind, and this is on hand. Unless you want to wait a few days until I can finish the other, but seems like you’re set to go now.”
“Yes, I mean we couldn’t wait, but this –”
“Minos,” he said, “you’re not a bad kid, but you need to learn to say ‘thank you,’ be grateful, and shut up.”
There wasn’t much to say to that but “thank you,” so I said it and shut up. I shook hands with Dodd, which hurt - the smith was a strong man, but I think he knew his own strength perfectly well and was crushing my fingers just to make some sort of point. Then he slapped me on the shoulder, which also hurt. Fenn’s grip was gentle, as was his smile.
We stepped back out into the cool wind coming down from the north, and I was instantly chilled from the drop in temperature. “So, off we go,” I said. I shrugged. “It’s funny, but I think I’ll actually miss this place.”
Prophetess cast a sad backwards glance. “They’re good people,” she said, “But waste is a terrible thing to mine.”
2. The Edge of Acceptance
The massive landfill that was the Flow occupied a dry riverbed that started just southwest of Acceptance and meandered southeast toward Panther City. I had originally planned to travel due north, skirting the City’s western edge. The land was inhospitable, the border of the desert called the Low Furnace. But it was safe, with excellent visibility. I had thought to keep the barrens to our west and grassland to our east as we worked our way north. But Dodd’s advice would turn us immediately east instead, making our way to Oldtown on the Whitewater to take ship to the Muddy.
That meant crossing to the eastern edge of the Flow from our camp on the western side. It wasn’t a dangerous undertaking, but it was slow. You watched your step in unfamiliar parts of the Flow. Most of it had compressed over the centuries into a solid surface, but there were still thin crusts that wouldn’t hold a person’s weight. Stepping through one of those was likely to burst a gas pocket, and if you were really unlucky you might land on something sharp - and dirty. Cleaning the wound with alcohol we distilled from the prickly pears would generally take care of infection, but it wasn’t pleasant.
Prophetess wisely prodded the ground ahead with her staff, raising tiny puffs of orange dust. We skirted the half-buried corpses of plastic carts. Prophetess tapped one.
“Nothing to be done with these?”
“Oh, no. We can use just about anything. If you melt the plastic down and mix it with sand, you can make pretty decent building bricks out of it. But it’s not the most valuable stuff in here by a long shot - not really worth it. And this is getting pretty far away from where we do most of our digging.”
We trudged on a bit farther. “So what brings a Select to mine garbage in the middle of nowhere?”
I shrugged. “Over the years, we’ve learned it pays to spread out. Makes it harder for anyone to kill us all in one fell swoop. Been tried, you know. We’re not the most popular people in the world. I think it’s the eyes.” I smiled tightly, blinking my black eyes. Lots of animals had black scleras, but in a human it was somehow viewed as sinister. “Traditionally we’re supposed to take off on our own at thirteen.”
I looked suspiciously at a depression in the ground in front of me and poked it with my walking stick. A hole two feet in diameter cracked open, venting an odor of rotten eggs and worse things. We gave it a wide berth.
“My parents started getting nervous when Yoshana’s legions pushed into the Green Heart. Not that Yoshana seemed to hate the Select more than she hated anyone else. But then the Hellguard turned on her, and we know the demons don’t like us.”
I was watching the ground in front of me, but it seemed that Prophetess’ eyebrows went up.
“I know a lot of people don’t see any difference between us...”
She shook her head. “No, no, the Books of the Fall are clear that the Select and the Hellguard are... separate.”
“But related, yes? That’s what they say.”
She stopped and faced me. “Aren’t you?” And then, before I could get angry, she blushed red as a beet. “I mean, both the Select and the Hellguard were... changed. Made.”
“I was born from my mother, same as you. I don’t know exactly where the Hellguard came from, but I’m pretty sure they weren’t born like you and me. I know the church says the Select and the Hellguard caused the Fall –”
“No, that’s not it. Not caused.” She cocked her head. It was hard for me to tell exactly what was in her expression. Was she sad? Apologetic?
“Saint Arvan wrote that the Select and the Hellguard walked abroad in the land, a sign of what was to come. Not a cause, but a - a symptom. A manifestation.” She winced. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you.”
I waved my hand. “I’m not offended.” And I really wasn’t. “Tell me, how does a girl growing up on a farm get to be a prophet?”
That probably hadn’t come out right. Now it was my turn to apologize. “I don’t mean... It’s just, isn’t that a lot of religious theory for someone who grew up on a farm on the edge of the Flow? You know, discussing manifestations?”
To my relief, she smiled. “My mother wanted me to have an education. Be literate, at least. All we had to read was the Bible, the Books of the Fall, the Catechism of the Church... And Father Jem down in Noble was always easy to talk to. Well, until I told him the Lord was speaking to me. I think then he decided I was a nut.”
I burst out la
ughing, clapped my hands to my mouth.
“Verily I say unto you, no prophet is accepted in his own country,” she said. “Maybe especially if people are used to seeing you milking goats at the edge of a garbage dump.”
“I don’t know,” I said, “I hear they were tough on that carpenter’s kid in his home town too.”
Her face froze over in an instant. “Don’t do that.”
And now I was in familiar territory with a girl - having offended her without understanding how. “Huh?” I said stupidly.
Her expression softened. “Sorry. But there’s only one Lord. Making the comparison - well, it’s blasphemous.”
Hadn’t she just been the one making that comparison?
She stared at the ground for a moment, then met my eyes. “I’ve had a lot of people ask me who I thought I was. If I thought I was the Second Coming. Believe me, I don’t. At best, I’m the voice crying in the wilderness. Sorry I’m so sensitive about it. The truth is, it’s not easy. The Bible says God chooses his prophets carefully and gives them strength when they’re weak. So I can’t doubt that. But sometimes I do.”
I had nothing helpful to say. So I put my hand on her shoulder.
She smiled and said, “So, we’d better get moving. One thing that’s pretty clear is prophets need to walk where they’re going like everyone else.”
On our side of the Flow there was a lot of open space between our camp and the handful of grubby farms to the north. As we clambered up the eastern side of the gorge, however, we found ourselves within spitting distance of a settlement. The City came further south here as well. There was another mining camp just north of us, but I’d had enough garbage for the day - maybe for the rest of my life if I was lucky.
Or not so lucky. The rest of my life might not be very long.
“Spitting distance” was an exaggeration. A hundred yards or so separated us from a low, weathered wooden fence that marked the edge of the cropland to our east. The nearest farmhouse was another hundred yards beyond that.
A dog trotted up to the other side of the fence and barked at us, more curious than challenging. I breathed deeply and slowly and called out, “Hey, buddy.” I had learned to control my breathing and heart rate around dogs, and they generally tolerated me now. There was something about the Select they didn’t seem to trust, and if I allowed myself to reciprocate their suspicion I could send them into a fury of barking and snarling with no more than a dirty look.
Past the dog, two small children were picking rocks from beneath the stubble of last month’s wheat harvest. One of them shouted “Mom!” But like the dog the little girl seemed more curious than concerned. It was broad daylight, and there were only two of us.
I had crossed plenty of farmland uninvited when I’d come west, but since we’d been seen it was only polite to wait at the fence. So we did.
Less than a minute passed before a stout, middle-aged woman came around the farmhouse and made her way toward us. She waved us in long before she reached us. She had a pitchfork, which she might have been using for any number of things - including deterring unwelcome visitors.
The fence was more of a notional boundary than an actual barrier. Not even waist high on me, it consisted of two rows of rails between posts set perhaps seven feet apart. It was hard to imagine any kind of animal that wouldn’t be able to go over, under or through it. I supposed it might serve to pen in an unambitious cow or sheep. It was no defense against predators, whether on four legs or two.
“Come on in, Scout won’t bite,” the woman called. The dog danced around us, several yards away, as Prophetess and I swung ourselves over the fence. “Most useless fool guard dog on God’s green Earth,” she continued.
The children fell in behind her as she approached. “I’d heard there was a Select working on the Flow,” she said. “Hadn’t really believed it.” She looked Prophetess up and down. “You aren’t Lemard and Dassy Carter’s daughter from down toward Noble?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the girl answered.
“Ah, then, you’d be the one who’s, ah...”
I thought about volunteering the word “crazy” but for a wonder managed to keep my mouth shut.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Prophetess.
The woman considered us for a while. The children were still behind her, maybe a bit put off by my appearance. The dog had stopped barking and was sniffing at my backside, which I imagined smelled about the same as everyone else’s.
“Well, you’ll likely be on the road to somewhere, then?”
We nodded.
“Sorry that I don’t have any supper ready yet to offer you,” she said. “Rendel and the oldest boy are out to the woods hunting a bit. They should be back before dark, though, if you want to wait. We could put you up with the children, Miss Carter, and you’d be welcome to the barn, Mister?”
“Minos,” I said. I wasn’t sure whether I was being offered the barn because it would be improper for me to sleep under the same roof with Prophetess or because they didn’t want a Select in their house. I decided to make an effort and take the more favorable interpretation.
“I expect you will be wanting to stay, with it getting late now?”
It was early afternoon. There were hours of daylight yet. I said something to that effect.
She shook her head. “They say there’s drelb in the woods. Rendel’s having a look as I say, but I’ve told him I don’t want him out after dark. They say the Darkness is on the move.”
I highly doubted there were drelb this far west, except perhaps further to the north. When Yoshana’s legions began to cross into the Heart, we’d heard every kind of rumor you could imagine. In that case at least it was true that Yoshana brought the Darkness with her, but the panic had outpaced her troops by weeks and miles. I’d seen it in places I’d passed through on my way here - sometimes the farther from her armies, the worse the reaction. A filthy, slow-witted vagabond had been beaten to death, mistaken for a drelb by people who had obviously never seen one. Townsfolk had decided that a strange, lonely adolescent boy had been possessed by the Darkness and burned him alive.
I smiled politely. At least I thought I did. “You don’t believe me, young man, but there’s strange lights in Acceptance at night and I’ve seen strange shadows moving across ’em.”
Well, sure. Everyone knew you didn’t want to be in the City at night. There was a reason we mined for steel in the Flow instead of trying to pull rebar out of the broken hulks of Acceptance’s buildings. A lot of the farming communities were built in part from the ruins of the City, but only from what their ancestors had hauled out in the daytime. Diseased wolves, giant rats and maybe some degraded paleo gangs weren’t at all the same thing as drelb or the wraiths of the Darkness, though.
Still, it didn’t hurt to get whatever information we could. “We’re headed to Oldtown. Anything to worry about on the way, do you think?”
The woman considered. “The Oldtown road should be safe enough. Might be bandits, of course. If I were you I’d take the old section trail out east of the lake, then head due north for the road. That’s how most folks round here do it when they’ve got call to head that way. There’s a sort of a fishing lodge at the southeast corner of the lake. You’ll want to stop there for the night.”
“That’s not that far from here, is it? I’d thought to make it farther.”
“It’s a good fifteen miles, young man, which is all you’ll do before it gets dark. And after that you’ve got twenty miles on the northbound trail through the woods to the Oldtown road, and you do not want to do that at night. My mother always told me you Select were supposed to be too smart for your own good. I can’t say I ever understood that, but maybe she meant you don’t have a whole lot of common sense.”
I really wasn’t going to snap at her and say something spiteful. I really wasn’t. But Prophetess smiled and said, “Well, if he had any common sense he wouldn’t have agreed to escort me, so I for one am grateful for it.”
And the far
mwife laughed and Prophetess laughed and the farmwife said she figured we should take some fresh baked bread with us, and we were all great friends. Okay, so they had both called me an idiot and laughed at me, but I wasn’t upset about that. Well, not more than maybe just a little.
The children had lost all interest once the conversation turned from exciting things like drelb. Any interest a Select held for them was apparently dispelled by learning I was a moron. They were back to picking rocks out of the field instead - it had amazed me in my limited time on farms that no matter how many times you plowed a certain patch of ground, there were always more rocks in it.
“Rocks,” I muttered. “Dumb as a bag of ’em, that’s me.” I trailed along behind Prophetess and her new friend as they chatted.
We continued on our way soon enough, and the warm, fresh bread we chewed on lifted my spirits. Ego loses out to a full stomach most days.
The dusty section road was just as orange as the Flow, as indeed the cleared soil of the farm had been. I was a bit surprised anything grew in it. The bones of the City stretched out to the north, more visible here. The afternoon sunlight winked off shards of glass and stained the bleached concrete golden. A dead zone several miles wide extended between the northernmost farms and the City’s wall, now crumbling. Everything between had been stripped, scavenged, at first to go into that wall, later into the villages built outside it. Any usable metal, wood or stone had long since become walls, homes, carts, what have you. People didn’t venture into the City itself.
Acceptance had probably been abandoned over a hundred years ago near the end of the Age of Fear. A pair of small rivers that had watered it had dried up, leaving behind only dust and the gorge that had become the City’s dumping ground - the Flow. There had been nothing to support the concentration of population. Of course, Panther City, capital of Rockwall, had survived without a navigable river or any other obvious natural advantages, but that was generally attributed to sheer cussedness.
Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle Page 3