Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle

by Malcolm McKenzie

  It was all I could do not to choke. I found it vanishingly unlikely that this hole in the middle of nowhere housed a crossbow worth five hundred-weight. Nor did we have five hundred-weight in silver or the equivalent to spend.

  “Thank you,” I managed, with what I hoped was a straight face, “but I think we’re safe enough.”

  “Not for me to say yes or no, my young friend. And I mean nothing by it, I’m not one to judge. But a pretty young woman and a Select traveling together, there’s some as might not look kindly on that.”

  “The lady is a prophet of the Lord,” I said coldly, “and I am her protector.”

  I thought I kept my tone level, but both hogs grunted and squealed, dancing nervously sideways.

  “Shut it, you fat slabs of bacon,” I snarled at them.

  I swear the things growled at me. I’d never seen a pig growl before.

  Prophetess gently laid a hand on my arm. “Let me chat with the nice lady,” she said.

  I glared at her but backed away, and the hogs subsided.

  “I’ll defer to my escort in matters of weapons,” she said, “but we could surely use some dried fruit and jerky if you have it.”

  “Of course, of course,” the merchant oozed. “I have some lovely dried apples and pears for ten-weight a pound, and jerky for twelve.”

  Prophetess shook her head sadly. “Coming up through Noble they were selling at two and four.”

  The woman gasped and clutched her heart. “By God, child, the apples must have been rotten and the meat gone to worms for them to sell at that price. No, I don’t have the heart to sell food of such a poor quality. But for you, I could let you have two pounds of pears and two pounds of jerky for forty.”

  I crossed to the other side of the road and leaned against the remains of a fence. I should have known that Prophetess, growing up on a farm, would know how to negotiate for produce.

  She joined me soon enough.

  “How did you do?” I asked.

  “Three-weight a pound for the fruit and six for the jerky.”

  I nodded approvingly. “Nicely done.”

  She looked away, then met my eyes. “More flies with honey than vinegar and all that.”

  I grimaced. “I’m not normally so grumpy. Really. But when someone calls me an abomination at the same time she’s trying to cheat me, it kind of sets me off. I may be a symptom of the Fall, but I don’t need some bigoted, greedy shopkeeper reminding me of it.”

  I cast a backwards glance over my shoulder as we walked away. The merchant had already headed back inside, but the pigs were still at the fence. I swear the nasty things were glaring at me.

  We were well past the lake now, and it was getting dry again. There wasn’t much going on to either side of the road once we got past the pigpens.

  “She didn’t really call you anything that I heard,” Prophetess said.

  “Trust me, when someone says ‘I’m not one to judge,’ her friends with clubs and torches aren’t far behind. You may think there’s a distinction between being a cause and a symptom of the Fall, but that nuance is lost on a lot of people.”

  We walked on in silence for a while. After a time, she said, “You talk about the Fall but you don’t really believe in it, do you?”

  “Sure I do. It just means different things to me and to you. To me it’s the fall of civilization, not a fall from grace. The first Fall was the fall of Rome, not the fall of Adam. The Second Fall is a useful phrase - it can mean whatever you want it to.”

  I thought for a little bit. I was probably going to offend her again, but she’d started this conversation. “I thought the Bible said we were supposed to be saved. So I’ve always been a little confused. By your definition, how could we fall again?”

  “Salvation is made available, not forced on us. God doesn’t wave a magic wand and poof, we’re saved. We have free will. We can always choose not to take the hand He reaches to us. In the Second Fall, our society chose not to be saved. So I think your meaning of the phrase and mine aren’t so different after all.”

  “Isn’t that a pretty broad brush to be spreading the tar with? Our whole civilization rejected salvation?”

  “It’s the original sin. Pride. Willfulness. Taking it upon ourselves to remake creation with the Darkness, the Hellguard...” She stopped and looked into my inscrutable black eyes. “The Select.”

  I shrugged. “Is it immoral to believe we can make improvements?”

  The sweep of her arm encompassed the pigpens, the withered trees, the ruins of the City, the Flow beyond. “Were we good enough stewards of what we were given to believe we should try to improve on it?”

  Two years mining garbage made that particular point hard to argue.

  There wasn’t much to see as we continued north to the Oldtown road. Farther from the lake, nothing grew but scrub oak and patches of beige prairie grasses. There seemed to perhaps be farms off the road, but we didn’t see signs of life.

  We covered the distance in good time and with little conversation. I had thought - and feared - that a prophet would be more talkative, but she was comfortable in silence.

  The section trail met this road as an underpass, thick with weeds. It looked like something might live in there - maybe something like pheasants, that I could try to take with my slingshot. Or maybe something bigger - that might regard us as edible. It didn’t seem worth the risk of finding out.

  Instead we trudged up the embankment to the Oldtown road. “Almost there,” I smiled.

  “Already farther from home than I’ve ever been before.”

  “Seems like that calls for a celebratory meal.”

  We gave ourselves a break from the prickly pear leaves and started in on the jerky and dried fruit instead. The small beer we had gotten the day before had just enough alcohol in it to travel well.

  It was sunny and warm and my stomach was pleasantly full. We had an easy three day walk on a paved road that looked pretty much intact.

  So of course I had to go shoot off my mouth again. “You know, we’ve got a thousand miles to go and I still don’t know your name. I’m not planning on just calling you Prophetess the whole time.”

  She blushed. “I set my name aside when the Lord called me. I feel he’s called me to renounce myself to do his will.”

  So insisting that people refer to her by a title was a show of humility? I couldn’t see it. And I wasn’t smart enough to let it go. “How about if I call you Tess?”

  I grinned. She returned a blank look. “You know, the Prophet, Tess?” Her expression didn’t change. “It’s a joke, see?”

  “I understood it,” she said. “I just didn’t think it was funny.”

  It’s strange the way people have a limited sense of humor when you ridicule their deeply held beliefs. I still couldn’t drop it, though. “Suit yourself, Tess.”

  She didn’t speak to me for hours.

  So I was in a foul mood when we heard hoofbeats and saw the dust cloud approaching on the road ahead. Normally I would have gotten off into the bushes to see what was coming and avoid trouble, but at that moment I was nursing the sort of sullen bad temper that felt like a confrontation might cheer me up.

  Don’t have a whole lot of common sense, the farmwife had said.

  The cloud resolved into a group of five riders, heavily armed and armored, moving at a leisurely trot - a pace I had always found agonizingly uncomfortable in my limited experience riding. They wore steel cuirasses over leather armor, and each carried a sword and bow. Their faces were sun-creased and determined. But by the time I could see them clearly I had no fear they were bandits. That didn’t quite mean there was nothing to fear.

  Their identifying characteristics were the naphtha-filled packs on their backs, connected by a hose to a sort of lance resting in a stirrup holster. They were fire wardens, Rockwall’s peacekeepers. Their role included patrolling against highwaymen and enforcing Panther City’s will in the provinces, but their true calling was keeping the Darkness at
bay.

  No one else would carry the naphtha-throwers. They were the best possible weapon against the Darkness, but mortally dangerous to their users. An errant leak and a spark, and weapon and warrior would go up together like a torch.

  All bore the sign of the cross on their breastplates. Fighting the Darkness was a holy calling for every religious faith. The leader, who was likely a deacon of the Universal Church, had a massive iron crucifix on a chain around his neck. As they came closer, their horses slowed to a stamping walk around us. I could see the others had mystic runes etched into their armor and talismans hung from their saddles. None of those adornments looked like orthodox Universal symbols to my untrained eye, which should have annoyed the deacon. But maybe he was willing to excuse anything that made his troops more comfortable with the cargo of burning death they carried. I certainly wouldn’t begrudge someone who strapped a canister of naphtha onto his back any superstitious crutch he found helpful.

  Fire wardens were hard men. Sometimes bigoted. They were disciplined, but you never knew if they might be in a foul temper. They weren’t likely to beat me just for being a Select abomination, but they certainly could. I wished I’d had the common sense to get into the bushes. That farmwife was looking smarter every day.

  “How is the road ahead, Brother?” Prophetess asked the deacon.

  He pulled his horse to a halt. It snorted loudly but stood more placidly than most warhorses among unfamiliar people. I suppose you wanted a calm animal without much imagination if you were going to be confronting the Darkness. In fact, the level-headedness of a donkey or mule might come in handy, although I suspected they were too smart to approach the stuff.

  “Clear enough on this side of the river, ma’am, though I’ll not speak for the other if your path takes you beyond Oldtown.”

  His eyes traveled up and down Prophetess, shifted to me, and did the same. “We’ve heard a rumor of bandits on the road but seen nothing. But then that’s usually the way of it. You two should have no trouble if you keep to the daylight.”

  One of his troops hawked and spat in the dust, but if that was meant to be a comment he didn’t elaborate on it.

  The deacon ignored him. “There’s a village about fifteen miles on. Probably a good enough place to stop.”

  The soldier spat again. Unless he had a serious cold, it was a comment.

  The deacon gave him a distinctly dirty look this time. Somebody was courting latrine duty. “There was a death,” the deacon conceded. “It may not be the happiest place right at the moment.”

  “Yeah, and that’s the only thing wrong with it,” muttered the disgruntled trooper.

  The village wasn’t sounding like the best option. “What kind of death?” I asked. “And where’s the next place on the road?”

  The deacon snorted. “Big, tough Select. I thought you people were supposed to be hard enough to handle anything.”

  I shrugged. “Mostly we’re smart enough to stay away from things that might kill us. Whatever killed the person in the village, for example.” I looked over the warden’s armor and array of weaponry. “I don’t have four heavily armed friends, so sometimes discretion is the better part of valor.”

  He looked at me contemptuously. “The man died of pneumonia. So unless you think disease is spread by evil spirits, I don’t think going in unarmed is going to put you at a disadvantage.”

  “Fair enough,” I conceded. Although from the corner of my eye I saw the trooper spit again. How did he stay hydrated on the road?

  “You gave last rites, I imagine?” Prophetess asked.

  “Too late for that. He was dead by the time we got there. They’re Reborn anyway, so not my concern.”

  Prophetess frowned. “Wouldn’t it have given them some comfort for you to say something? As a representative of the Church? Even if it’s not their church?”

  The deacon hauled on the reins. His horse danced, kicking up dust. As it stutter-stepped around us the soldiers turned and started away. “My job is to patrol the road and eradicate the Darkness. A dead man in a village isn’t my job unless the Darkness got him, and it didn’t. Good luck, ma’am. Hopefully your brave Select will keep you safe.”

  A spiteful, juvenile part of me thought a pebble from my slingshot might be usefully applied. But I couldn’t decide which horse’s ass to aim for - the one the deacon was riding on, or the one doing the riding.

  In any case, I was a little more mature than that - and Select did survive by discretion, not by antagonizing patrols of fire wardens.

  “Come on, Tess, let’s go,” I said. “Your brave Select will keep you safe.” So maybe I wasn’t more mature than that after all. Prophetess rolled her eyes at me, but showed just the smallest smile.

  A muddy little creek bubbled up from somewhere, running parallel to the road. The dry grasses and occasional scrub oak gave way to cattails and low-lying ferns. Within a mile, the creek swung south and a dirt trail followed it off the highway. A few dozen yards down the track stood a small cluster of stands much like our trading post on the Flow, ragged canvas awnings stretched over roughly hewn tree limbs.

  The shelters were empty now - as were the ruins beyond them, although those had been abandoned for generations, while the shelters were recent. We followed the trail into the remains of the fallen buildings. Rot had set in, wood turned soft and flaking away, bricks fallen where mortar had crumbled over the course of decades or centuries. But the place had not fallen through neglect, or even the natural devastation of storms. Rough, splintered timbers still showed the signs of axes and rams. Although countless years of rain had soaked them, I could see where fire had blackened most of the structures. There wasn’t an intact window in sight.

  I poked at the little craters in a door frame where high caliber bullets had left their distinctive traces.

  Other buildings had been demolished altogether, in some cases leaving nothing but foundations and bits of corroded plumbing behind.

  “What do you suppose happened here?” Prophetess asked.

  I shrugged. “Who can say? But if I had to guess, I’d think the original town here was sacked by the paleos during the Age of Fear. The village the fire wardens were talking about must be further along. That creek probably gives them some irrigation for farmland. They would have stripped this place for construction materials.”

  Sure enough, once we cleared the ruins we could see a cluster of frame houses ahead, built around a rough stockade. Plots of tilled earth separated by low stone walls and lines of stubby trees radiated out around the village.

  “Good guess,” Prophetess said.

  “Not the first time I’ve seen it. The paleos mostly went south where it was warmer, so a lot of the country I passed through on the way here from the Green Heart went through something like this.”

  She was nervous again. “Did you see, you know..?” Once again, it sank in that this self-appointed prophet was just a country girl who had probably never been more than ten miles from the Flow.

  “Actual paleos? You know, I never have. Not many left these days. Once they started getting infected with the Darkness, you can imagine they got even less popular. Thank God they’re mostly exterminated now.”

  “That’s not something you should say. They’re still people. They’re still God’s creatures.”

  “They’re just barely people, and trust me, the feeling is more than mutual. Other people may have their doubts about the Select, but when the paleos rejected technology, they lumped us in the same category of demons as the Hellguard. The difference is, a bunch of idiot savages in loincloths with clubs who want to go all the way back to nature aren’t much of a threat to a Hellguard. They can do quite a bit of damage to a family of Select, though. They killed a lot of my people in the Age of Fear, Prophetess. A lot.”

  I don’t suppose the smile on my face was very pleasant then. “If you want evidence of divine justice, it’s the fact some of those idiots went into the Darklands. If you don’t have the technology to rel
iably make fire, and you’re the kind of moron who believes going back to being a hunter-gatherer is a good idea, you’re a pretty easy target for the Darkness. It’s a shame they went and spread it as much as they did - they got a lot of innocent people killed and pretty much destroyed civilization. If you want to lay the Fall on someone, lay it on them, not on the Select or even the Hellguard. But at least they mostly got what they had coming.”

  “That’s a lot of hate.”

  “They deserve a lot of hate. And that’s the great thing about not being a Universalist, Prophetess. I’m free to hate people that deserve it.”

  According to the fire wardens, the villagers weren’t Universalists either. The Reborn had most of the same doctrines, though, so they shouldn’t just casually murder travelers. But the Reborn tended to be even less tolerant of the Select than were the Universalists, and I’d found that a lot of the religious principles of love and brotherhood were rarely if ever observed by the faithful.

  As we got closer, I could see that the village followed a familiar pattern. The older houses, weather-beaten and covered with vines and lichens, huddled up against the timbers of the stockade. During the Age of Fear, citizens would have built within easy running distance of the fort - right after the destruction of the original town, people would probably have lived in barracks inside the stockade itself. More recent construction was farther out, with space for vegetable gardens. Some newer houses stood in the center of the surrounding fields, as much as a mile from shelter. Even with the threat of the Darkness and bandits, these were safer times.

  Although I noticed that the palisade looked very well tended. Sometimes I had seen them rotted or with timbers stripped for other construction. Not here, though.

  There was no one visible in any of the outlying buildings, but we could clearly hear sounds of life from within the stockade walls. I was pretty certain I heard sobbing, which made sense if someone had recently died. But the hairs on the back of my neck still twitched as though I could feel someone taking aim at me.