Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle

by Malcolm McKenzie

  “Maybe we should pass on,” I said. “They may not want outsiders intruding on their grief.”

  “And they may want comfort. We can only ask. The worst they can do is say no.”

  I wasn’t at all convinced that was the worst they could do.

  But I was just the bodyguard. I shrugged, worked the stiffness out of my shoulders under my pack, and gripped my walking stick a little tighter.

  The gates to the compound stood wide and unguarded. But as we passed through, I noticed that there were well-maintained steps up to a firing platform ringing the inside of the palisade, with crossbows and buckets of quarrels pre-positioned.

  It seemed like the entire population of the village must have been crammed into the center of the stockade. There was a huge open space within the walls, the only building of any size a large, two-story wooden structure with a cross-topped steeple at the far side, likely serving as both church and last defensive redoubt. In the center of the courtyard a hundred people clustered around a trestle table with a still body resting atop it. At the fringes of the crowd the men, women and even children stood somberly, but the people at the center were sending up a wailing that could fracture stone.

  “Still not too late to walk away,” I muttered. But of course it was, because Prophetess was already edging into the group.

  I was tall enough to see over most of them. The corpse looked to be a middle-aged man.

  “What happened?” Prophetess asked the young woman next to her.

  The woman, shorter than Prophetess by six inches and shorter than me by a head, turned to the unfamiliar voice. She frowned just a bit when she didn’t recognize Prophetess, then did a double take when she took in my gray skin, white hair and black eyes. The frown deepened. If things went very badly, this was the kind of situation that could lead to running away while hoping no one was a good shot with those crossbows.

  Prophetess had a kind of sad smile that conveyed empathy without words. I couldn’t have generated it if I’d had a week to practice in front of a mirror. In the end the villager reacted to that instead of to me.

  “Last winter he cut his foot with an ax. Got infected and never healed right. When he got sick last week it went straight into his lungs. Every time he coughed you thought he was going to die. Jaslyn, that’s his wife, went into Oldtown for medicine, but I guess too late. Or they sold her swamp water in a bottle. Who can say? Last night he wouldn’t stop coughing and blood came out. This morning he was dead. Jaslyn and the boys are pretty raw. She’ll do all right. The boys are big enough to help with the fields. But he was good to her and the boys, even though the oldest wasn’t his.”

  The woman’s mouth snapped shut like a trap as she realized she’d divulged the widow’s private business to strangers. Prophetess just nodded and began to work her way through the press of bodies.

  “Oh boy, here we go,” I muttered.

  The question was whether I should stay close to protect her, or stay back so she wasn’t associated with me. In the end, I hung back. That honestly seemed like the wisest choice for keeping her safe - but I have to admit the thought of cramming myself into that circle of humanity made my skin crawl.

  When Prophetess reached the center, she leaned over and spoke to an old woman heavily wrapped in shawls despite the warmth of the afternoon sun. That lady looked Prophetess over, nodded curtly, and whispered in the ear of the middle-aged woman doing most of the sobbing.

  The woman snuffled loudly, stared into Prophetess’ face, then threw her arms around my companion.

  “Dammit,” I spat, bringing my walking stick up to open my way through the crowd. Then I flushed as I realized the woman was embracing Prophetess, not attacking her. Fortunately, everyone around me was too focused on the drama up front to pay any attention to me.

  Prophetess patted the woman’s back and stroked her hair for a while. When the widow - I assumed that’s who it must be - finally let go, Prophetess turned to the corpse. Placing both hands on his forehead, she spoke in a clear, musical voice.

  “The Lord will renew your strength. You will run and not grow weary, you will walk and not grow faint. You will rise on the wings of eagles.”

  Something to hope for in the next life, certainly. All that was going to happen to the dead man here on earth was that worms were going to eat him. I supposed that if a bird ate the worm, a little bit of him would be flying like an eagle.

  One of the reasons I preferred not to be religious was because if there really was a hell, my attitude pretty much guaranteed me a close acquaintance with it. Unless God had an amazing sense of humor.

  Once again, though, Prophetess had worked her wonders. The widow had taken her hands and was thanking her.

  It seemed like hours that Prophetess was in the circle of villagers. I stood at the outer edge, watching, largely ignored. Which was fine with me, compared to most of the alternatives I could imagine.

  Prophetess had become a minor celebrity. Apparently there was no Reborn minister to be found in the area closer than Oldtown, and a boy sent to fetch him had not yet returned. So the self-taught farm girl from the edge of the Flow was the closest thing to a spiritual guide available.

  We were taken to the village headman’s house - they had no inn. There, too, all eyes were on her while I was mostly ignored. Sometimes people would look over at me with the sort of perplexed curiosity with which they might regard a six-legged dog. I had to suppose they didn’t get many Select here. But they were polite.

  Evening turned to night, and some sort of local wine that was only about half fermented was passed around. Prophetess drank more of it than I did. The stuff didn’t seem to be very strong, and she had a good head for it. Still, I preferred to stay alert - or as alert as I could stay after walking all day.

  “Those crossbows,” Prophetess said. “Minos thought the old town had been attacked by paleos a long time ago. Do you still have problems? With paleos?”

  If I’d been a little closer I would have kicked her under the table. Although it was too late by then.

  The headman just laughed. “No, no. Not so long as anyone here can remember. But never hurts to be careful, eh?”

  Well, that was true enough. It never hurt to be careful.

  It must have been after midnight when the headman’s youngest daughter was evicted from her bed to make room for Prophetess. I slept in the stable - at my own request. There was actually a half-hearted offer to make room for me, but I preferred somewhere that felt a little more defensible. Just in case. The villagers had been nothing but kind, but I was still thinking about those crossbows in the firing platforms on the walls. Maybe I should have stayed closer to Prophetess, but I had the feeling that anyone or anything that made an attempt on her would try to take me out of the picture first.

  There are certain strange truths of the human body - even the Select variant of the human body. For example, sometimes no matter how tired you are, if you start turning something over in your head, you can find yourself completely unable to rest.

  On the other hand, sometimes no matter how paranoid you are, sleep takes you like the wind blowing out a match.

  I woke up alive and unharmed the next morning to find light creeping in through cracks in the stable wall and roosters crowing at me. I stretched for a few minutes inside the stable with two donkeys observing me incuriously. I opened the door, blinked in the light, and sneezed. For some reason sudden exposure to sunlight sometimes did that to me. Select weren’t supposed to have allergies, certainly not to light - but nobody’s perfect, even those designed to be.

  I crossed the dusty yard to the headman’s door, stepping around a cluster of chickens scratching for worms. I could faintly hear voices inside. I hesitated a moment, then knocked.

  “Come on in.” A woman’s voice. I pushed the door open and stuck my head inside. The kitchen was just to the right of the door, and Prophetess was frying little slices of potato. The headman’s oldest daughter was peeling more.

  “Morn
ing, Minos.”

  I was a little embarrassed that the woman I was supposed to be protecting had already started making breakfast before I woke up. “You’re up early,” I said. “I figured you’d sleep in. Late night last night.”

  “Farmers are up with the sun.”

  So were garbage miners, usually. I couldn’t think of anything clever to say so, for a wonder, I said nothing.

  “You want some potatoes?”

  I did. They came fried with strips of onion and pork fat. Not necessarily the healthiest thing I’d ever eaten, but it tasted very good.

  More family members drifted in while I was eating, including the headman himself.

  “Thank you for your hospitality, Mister Tanner,” I told him.

  “Berrel and Jaslyn Paxton are good people. Well, Berrel was, I mean.” He looked over at Prophetess, still at work on the potatoes. “Still is, I suppose, his soul, that is.”

  I couldn’t help but be amused at how much people worried about offending her, as if she were some sort of ecclesiastical authority who could excommunicate them. If the Reborn could even be excommunicated. I was pretty sure they couldn’t.

  We lingered longer than I would have preferred, but we had ham, apples and onions in our packs when we left, and fresh small beer in our water skins.

  We also had an escort. Three young men from the village headed out to the road with us.

  “Keep you safe on the way,” the one named Tal laughed. And indeed, they all wore swords. Prophetess chatted and laughed easily with them as we walked, but I was glad when two hours later they turned off the main road to stop at an outlying farm where, they claimed, the finest butter, apple pie, and wine in the entire region could be found. Not in that order of importance.

  “You weren’t very sociable with them,” said Prophetess. Which was true enough. I hadn’t spoken more than a dozen words. I grunted, not wanting to break my streak.

  “It was nice of them to come with us and keep us safe from bandits. The fire wardens said there had been rumors, you remember,” she added.

  “Oh, I don’t doubt it,” I said. I looked over my shoulder to make sure our companions had vanished from sight and earshot. “And I suppose in one sense, traveling with them might have been the safest place to be. Better on this side of those swords than on the other.”

  Prophetess stopped in the road. “You’re not suggesting...?”

  “Farmers carry all sorts of sharp things that come in handy for self defense. Axes, sickles, pitchforks. Maybe a bow to take game, and a good knife is always useful. But a sword has a definite purpose, and it isn’t farming. Those firing platforms for the crossbows back at the village looked pretty well prepared, too.”

  “I can’t believe they’re thieves.”

  “It can be a good income supplement. The village is close to the road, but far enough away it’s not too obvious. If someone does suspect and try to do something about it, they shut the gates and plink with the crossbows.”

  Prophetess shook her head. “I still can’t believe it. So we walked right in... And spent the night there...”

  I shrugged. “Yes, but you also guaranteed they wouldn’t bother us on the road. So on balance, I’d say the good deed was rewarded.”

  For some reason that seemed to annoy her again, so I let the subject drop. I couldn’t be sure, either. But whatever the truth of my suspicions, we made it through the rest of the day unmolested.

  We passed a large inn early that afternoon. A line of vendors’ stalls edged up to the road, forming the near side of the inn’s huge, dusty courtyard. We had enough food, but traded what little gossip we had from the road for a couple of mugs of small beer.

  There was a lull in traffic these days, with wheat and apples recently delivered to Oldtown. The fire wardens we had seen the day before had been the inn’s only recent guests. It was conveniently located an easy day’s walk from Oldtown, we were told, but there was another one closer.

  And so we pressed on to that one, reaching it as night was beginning to fall. I was just starting to regret the decision not to stop at the earlier opportunity when we saw the welcoming glow of torches and lighted windows shining through a copse of trees.

  The inn was a tight, snug, warm wooden structure, and the food was surprisingly good. And the innkeeper was happy to take my little ceramic cat in payment for two rooms and board.

  And so, well-rested and well-fed, the next morning we set out on the final leg of our march to Oldtown. We would take ship down the Whitewater, then up the Muddy. The hard part was over.

  4. Crossing Over

  The next morning we started late and set a leisurely pace. As we crested a low hill, the sun glinted red on a rusted, skeletal structure stretching twenty feet above the surface of the broad roadway. An overpass loomed behind it, but they didn’t seem related.

  “I’ve seen these before,” I remarked, “But I have no idea what they are. It’s too small to be a bridge, and it doesn’t go anywhere.”

  Prophetess shrugged, eloquently conveying the phrase, “Don’t know, don’t care,” with the tiny movement of her shoulders.

  “Funny that no one’s salvaged it. It’s a good chunk of iron.” I tapped a bolt thicker than my thumb anchoring the structure into cracked concrete. “Hard to get out, but you’d think it would be worth it.”

  Prophetess shrugged again.

  And then we were at the top of the hill, beneath the span of intersecting road that no longer led from anywhere to anywhere else, and I found that I didn’t care either. Oldtown spread out in front of us.

  Why it was called Oldtown I couldn’t say. It was clearly a pre-Fall city, a tightly packed mass of ancient buildings climbing into the sky. There was nothing to suggest it was any older than the ruins of Acceptance, though, or anything else nearby like Panther City or Rock Town. Of course, Oldtown wouldn’t have been its original name before the Fall, any more than Acceptance’s would have been the dead City’s.

  Oldtown’s south side was wedged into a bend of the Whitewater. The buildings massed larger on the north shore, a great bulge of packed construction protected by a wall. The northern shore needed that protection because it fell into the disputed zone between Rockwall and the Monolith, but we had no business there.

  On this side of the river someone had actually put some thought into the layout. Apple orchards and the stubble of harvested wheat fields spread west, upstream from the city’s sewage. Downstream, south of town, were the hog farms and factories. We were approaching from the southwest and, even from several miles away, the smell made it pretty evident the factories ran on the methane from the pigs’ waste.

  Fortunately, the wind carried the stench away from the city, so it actually faded as we got closer. All very well planned. Not so good for the towns downstream, of course.

  “That’s strange. Lots going on this side of the river, but nothing at all on the other side,” Prophetess said.

  She was right. The south shore teemed with people, horses, and carts. There was no sign of life outside the northern wall, and not much inside it on the far bank of the river.

  “Not our problem,” I replied. Perhaps the eternal, low-level war between the Monolith and Rockwall had heated up. Or the Darkness had inched farther into the southwest. I had no desire to find out. I was grateful for Dodd’s suggestion that we take ship here and avoid the disputed lands to the north.

  Oldtown had been fortified on this side of the river as well, but in the relative safety of Rockwall it had spilled far beyond those boundaries. We were well in among the shops and homes of the city’s outer fringes before we came to the wall. It was impressive enough, a concrete barrier twenty feet high and six feet thick that must have been built during the Age of Fear. The gate we came upon was guarded, but the sentry was sitting on a bollard and didn’t challenge us. His head came up when he saw I was Select, but even that novelty wasn’t enough to bring him to his feet.

  Outside the wall the construction looked recent, the low
wood and brick structures of our fallen age. There were remains of older buildings, of course, but those had largely been scavenged or converted. Inside the wall, buildings reached for the sky like the giant, skeletal hulks of Acceptance, but these were living. At least to a point. I wondered whether floors hundreds feet above street level were truly in use. That was a lot of stairs. There were ways to power the pre-Fall elevators, but they were expensive... and I wouldn’t relish hanging a hundred feet up in a metal box held aloft by machinery that had gone for centuries without proper maintenance.

  In the east the upper stories of larger buildings had been destroyed. Walls, floors and windows were removed to expose the rooms to the sun... and make them less hospitable nests for the Darkness. Here people were perhaps less concerned with that, and justifiably so. Still, you wouldn’t have gotten me into one of those upper stories at night.

  I hadn’t spent much time in the larger cities of the Green Heart, and of course Acceptance was dead and shunned. So I felt like a bit of a rube as Oldtown’s towers rose gigantic around us, higher than the tallest trees.

  I had hoped that at least Prophetess would be terribly impressed with the city and I could feel a bit more sophisticated by comparison, but she didn’t indulge in any gasping or gawking. Instead, she simply asked, “So where are we going?”

  Which was an excellent question.

  “Riverboats will be down by the river,” I observed.

  She rolled her eyes at me but made no further comment as we proceeded deeper into the city, heading vaguely east.

  There were plenty of people we could have asked. Oldtown was as alive as Acceptance was dead. Vendors in stands or pushing carts sold apples, chunks of brown meat on sticks, fried dough, unpleasantly thick beer. Shops at the ground floors of the hulking buildings had every possible variety of goods and services - clothiers, barbers, metalworkers selling everything from pots to swords, apothecaries who might or might not know more about medicine than the barbers.