It wouldn’t be fair to call the noise overwhelming. Oldtown was a large city of wide avenues, and obviously far emptier now than in its prime. The calls of the vendors and the clatter of hooves and wagon wheels were nowhere near as oppressive as the clangor inside Dodd’s forge, for example. But compared to the silence of the Flow or the emptiness of the open road, it was an assault on the senses. Including what was left of my sense of smell. It seemed like every horse in Oldtown felt compelled to void its bowels within range of our noses.
And I had never much cared for crowds. Situational awareness was easy when there wasn’t much moving around you. When you were surrounded by people, there was a fine line between the level of paranoia that made you jump every time someone stepped out of a shop and the obliviousness that let your pocket get picked. Or let a rock hit you in the head.
Not that people threw things at Select all that often just on general principles. But you never knew. Someone muttering “stinking blackeye” under his breath might be only a couple of drinks and a loose cobblestone away from trying his aim.
So, ironically, Prophetess was more at her ease than I in this unfamiliar city.
We had little left to trade, so rather than buying lunch from a cart or stopping at an inn, we ate apples and jerky as we walked, our pace now leisurely. With the sun beginning its descent into the west, the shadows made it easy enough to keep to an easterly course toward the river. I guessed, based on no particular evidence, that the docks would be toward the southern edge of the city, so we kept vaguely south as we moved east. Three bridges crossed the Whitewater, and we followed the occasional wooden sign for Southbridge.
My guess seemed a good one. The buildings and their inhabitants coarsened as we neared the river. When I started hearing profanity so creative I couldn’t understand it all, I figured the docks must be near at hand. Prophetess walked a little closer to me, which was pleasant, although I had to shift her to my left side to leave room for swinging my walking stick... if the need happened to arise.
Still, despite some muttered comments about both Prophetess and me - quite different in nature - that we both pretended not to hear, we reached the docks uneventfully.
My concern began to grow, however, when we emerged into the open loading area along the river. There were goods piled high in crates, barrels, sacks, baskets. There were longshoremen in great plenty. There were long, flat-bottomed barges at anchor.
But nothing was moving.
The longshoremen sat or lay on the sacks. The smell... the smell of a working port is never pleasant. Food rolls out of sacks and rots before anyone can bother to do anything about it. Rats breed, live, die, and go about the full range of their digestive processes. Occasionally so do the sailors and longshoremen. But this was different. This smelled like everything on the docks had been there just a little bit too long. And it wasn’t hot enough for that to happen quickly.
We headed for a barge whose gangplank was guarded by a man who looked neither particularly drunk nor particularly villainous. As we came up he made a half-hearted swing with his staff at a huge, black rat climbing a mooring rope. The rat dodged easily, bared its teeth in a gesture that seemed more contempt than anger, and scurried onwards.
I pulled out my slingshot, fitted a smooth stone, and let fly. It missed the rat by three inches. If the creature even noticed it gave no sign.
It would have been a pretty impressive gesture if I’d hit the beast, but a moving rat at thirty feet isn’t an easy target.
“We’re looking for passage to Rock Town. In spite of what you just saw, we can make ourselves useful aboard ship,” I said.
The sailor snorted. “If you can kill an army with that thing, you can have passage in the captain’s cabin and half share in the cargo. Otherwise you can sit on your -” he looked at Prophetess and changed his phrasing slightly, “On your backside here like everybody else while our cargo rots around us.”
“Why’s nothing moving?”
The man’s eyebrows went up. “Are you blind, stupid, or every little bit the backwoods hicks you look?”
“With those options, I’ll take the last.”
He snorted again. “Well, the short of it is the Principalities hired in Hawk mercenaries to raid all along the Whitewater. Guess they figure if they make the border miserable enough, maybe Rockwall will give up its claims in the Breadbasket.”
Prophetess looked at me blankly.
I sighed. “You remember I asked Dodd whether they weren’t still skirmishing on the Whitewater?”
She nodded.
“Apparently they are. The whole stretch of land north of here, all the way up to the Ice Fields, between the Muddy and the mountains, that’s all disputed between Rockwall and the Monolith.”
I looked at the sailor for confirmation, and he nodded. I continued, “The Principalities are three little city-states at the edge of the mountains. They’re independent, but they usually do the Monolith’s dirty work. There’s blood ties in the aristocracy there. It sounds like this time, though, they’ve brought in the Hawk’s Nest to raise the stakes.”
The sailor spat. “Those Hawks will do anything, as long as someone promises there’s money in it and it doesn’t make any damn sense.”
Prophetess continued to look blank. I said, “The Hawk’s Nest is another city state in the Breadbasket. The ruler there - do they call him a prince?”
The sailor shook his head. “Nah, it’s some funny long word. Like hegemon or autarch. Something meant so’s you think he isn’t a stupid, conniving thief who got where he is by poisoning his relatives.”
I had to grin. “So, as you can maybe tell, people aren’t too impressed with this fellow. He mostly seems to be good at getting the Hawks into pointless fights. The Hawks field a big mercenary army, but they always seem to wind up in battles they can’t win, or where they don’t get paid. The Green Heart called them in during Yoshana’s invasion, but when the demons turned on her and the invasion fell apart, the Heart said the Hawks hadn’t done anything and refused to pay. So the Hawks wound up marching halfway across the continent for nothing. Of course, they made up for it by foraging their way through the Green Heart on the way back, which didn’t make them any friends.”
“Well, and that’s the thing of it,” the sailor said. “The Hawks are flipping idiots, but it’s no fun when you’re on the receiving end of it. They’ve got the Whitewater shut down ’til Rockwall brings an army up. All the farmers on the other side of the river crammed themselves into the city ’cause they figured it’s better to lose your farm and stock than to lose your wife and daughter. And now the Darkness has got into the city on the other side so the bridges are sealed. Half our crew’s stuck on the other side and I don’t know if the fire wardens will let folks back across even if the river was to open.”
Prophetess looked alarmed.
“Are they sure it’s in the city?” I had seen this before. Whenever there was war and panic, fear of the Darkness spread faster than the Darkness itself.
The sailor looked grim. “I saw it myself. They cornered a man taken with it on the far bank. You know it can’t cross water.”
Or at least the person thought to be infected couldn’t swim. But I nodded.
“They caught him and burned him right there. I saw it come off him.”
“You saw smoke...?” It was the usual proof. The Darkness would spill out of its victim rather than burn with him. But the Darkness looked enough like smoke to salve many guilty consciences.
“Smoke don’t move against the wind. This did. I’ve stoked the furnace on a barge, and I know how smoke moves, the way it can eddy in a wind current around the river. This wasn’t smoke.”
I looked at Prophetess. “This complicates things. If the river’s shut down, we’re back to crossing on foot and heading straight northeast through disputed territory until we hit the Muddy and get into the Green Heart or the Source. But I hadn’t counted on raiders being in our way.”
My gut tightene
d a bit at the thought of the Darkness as well. It had been years since I’d actually seen it. If it had truly infected a refugee population… the Darkness flourished where fear, rage, or lust ran high. While I had read the Books of the Fall, I didn’t believe that the Darkness was the physical manifestation of sin. But sin did seem to provide it a fertile breeding ground. The desperation of a sealed city crammed full of refugees would be the perfect place for it to grow.
The miners on the Flow believed that Acceptance had been abandoned because it had no natural waterways, agriculture, or much of anything else to sustain it. That was probably true. But cities had also fallen during the Age of Fear because they had been overrun by the Darkness.
The fire wardens had sealed the bridges to save the southern city. They might be willing to destroy the northern side if it came to that.
This might not be a safe place to be at all - especially for a Select.
Prophetess’ expression said she didn’t think the city was looking like a safe place for a farm girl from the middle of nowhere either.
I muttered a thank you to the sailor and we moved away.
“This doesn’t look good, Prophetess,” I said. “We’re not getting a ship here anytime soon. If the Hawks are harassing river traffic, they’ll probably be hitting any fords or bridges for miles up and downstream, too.”
“We didn’t see any troops outside the north wall when we were up on the hill,” she said.
“Why actually put your soldiers in range of Oldtown’s artillery if you can accomplish the same thing by burning farms and shooting at riverboats? The Hawks aren’t the brightest military minds in the world, but they’re not complete idiots.”
I realized too late that I might have just suggested that Prophetess was a complete idiot, but she didn’t take offense.
“So how do we get across?”
“I’m not sure we do. We’ve got no good way to know how far up or down the river the Hawks are attacking. I guess we could walk down to Rock Town, but that’s over a week, and no guarantee we could find a ship there either. The Hawks could be raiding on the Muddy itself. We could get to Rock Town and still sit for weeks waiting for Panther City to send troops. And if we’re racing Yoshana…”
Prophetess shook her head. “I can’t wait that long. Yoshana’s marching on Stephensburg already.”
“How can you be sure of that?”
“I’m sure.”
I puffed out my cheeks and blew air. “If you can’t wait, and we can’t cross… I don’t know. Maybe we give this up. Go home.” I had to admit that the option of not crossing through a war zone to oppose the will of the world’s most infamous Overlord had some appeal.
“You can go home if you want, Minos. I can’t do that.”
“Can’t God pick someone who’s a little closer to the goal? And doesn’t have an army in the way?”
“He picked me.”
The funny thing was how she said it with no trace of ego or pride. She didn’t sound like a self-promoting charlatan, or even a self-deluding lunatic. She sounded like someone who had been given a hard task that she didn’t relish but couldn’t turn down.
I didn’t relish the task either. Suddenly Yoshana loomed much more real in my mind. The Overlords used the Darkness as a tool. Every Overlord was terrible. But Yoshana was a legend among her own kind. She had wrested the crown of the Shield from its previous master, then launched a lightning assault on the Green Heart. Only betrayal by her demon allies had stopped her.
She was supposed to be dead, fallen on the battlefield. Prophetess said she was back and on her way to the same place we were going. It was hard to think of a worse idea than trying to beat our generation’s most formidable Overlord general to her goal if there was any chance we might not get there first. Walking into Yoshana’s jaws to oppose her plans was no way to ensure a long life.
“Fine, then. We’ll go across.” Even though self-deluding lunatic still seemed like the most likely explanation for Prophetess’ quest, escorting a pretty girl through deadly peril had a lot more upside than mining garbage. It just had a lot more downside, too, associated with the “deadly peril” part.
I set off walking briskly south along the river. Prophetess broke into a brief trot to catch up. “What are you doing?”
“Like I said. Going across. You pointed out there aren’t any troops besieging the city. Over Southbridge and out the city gate on the other side is probably the safest way.”
She grabbed at my arm. “But the Darkness is in the city.”
“Yep. So we’d better get out while it’s still daylight, don’t you think?”
As it turned out, we didn’t get out while it was still daylight. At least not the same day.
As soon as I made up my mind to go, naturally Prophetess decided that she needed to go to mass first.
“By the time we find a church, and they have a mass, there’s no way we’ll make it out of here today,” I complained. “It’s not like they have masses every hour. Do they?”
“No, but some things are important. If we’re going to be walking through the wilderness, it hardly seems like I’ll have another opportunity any time soon.”
Did God pick his prophets for their capacity to be annoying? Admittedly, the Bible suggested that might be the case. But still. “You just finished telling me you’re an appointed - anointed - whatever - prophet of God on a holy mission. Why on earth would you of all people need to interrupt that mission to go to church?”
“I of all people most desperately need to go to church.”
Thanks to our gray skin, Select don’t flush the same way other people do. We just turn darker. My skin might have matched my eyes by the time I got through gritting my teeth and said, “Fine.”
Although Oldtown’s citizens were mostly Reborn, we found a Universal church easily enough. But the next mass was shortly before sundown, hours away.
That gave me plenty of time to sit around and stew about the fact that we were going almost unarmed into disputed territory, with mercenaries and a rumored infestation by the Darkness. Our options for weapons weren’t good, though, and we didn’t have the money for any of them. A rifle or even a musket would have been nice, but in addition to the gun itself I would have needed to buy as many shells or musket balls as I possibly could, since no one could be bothered to standardize calibers this far west. I couldn’t afford the weapon in any case. Even a bow was beyond our reach. Over time I could make one, but that was time we didn’t have, and a reasonable supply of arrows would take as long to make as the bow itself.
I would have to trust in my slingshot and hope I didn’t need to hit any rats with it. I spent some of our spare time wandering around collecting rocks of a promising shape and density.
Prophetess said, “I’m a little surprised by the slingshot. I expected something more lethal.”
I shrugged. “It’s easier to carry and take care of than a bow. And the ammo’s a lot simpler - it’s no easy thing to true up and fletch an arrow, and trust me, every straight dowel left from before the Fall got turned into an arrow and shot into something a hundred years ago. Rocks don’t take a lot of work. You give up range and power, but it’s good enough for wild turkey or coyotes. I had friends who said they could take deer with a slingshot, though I can’t say I’ve ever tried.”
“I was thinking more about defending ourselves than food.”
“Don’t underestimate how unpleasant it is to take a rock to the head. Just ask Goliath.”
She smiled. “So you’re counting on the Lord to guide your hand?”
“I’m traveling with a prophet, aren’t I?”
It should go without saying that I did not join Prophetess at mass. The Universalists and the Reborn weren’t actively hostile to the Select, or not as much as the Josephites, but I was still just a bit concerned I might be ejected by force if I entered a church. Or that I might burst into flames.
Instead I alternated between sitting on the church steps and searching for
more rocks in a small, empty park nearby. There being a limit to how much weight of slingstones I wanted to carry with me, I began to replace my more lopsided inventory with better shaped options, and after an hour I had a bag full of nearly spherical ammunition.
This part of the town seemed little trafficked, and I saw few people on the street. At one point a curious dog trotted over to see what I was up to. I controlled my breathing and greeted it with a raised eyebrow. It sniffed at me indifferently and went away.
Dusk was just beginning to darken the sky when a lamplighter came by, touching a flame to oil-filled streetlights spaced at close intervals. The cost of the oil would add up, but that would be a small price to keep the Darkness at bay.
Not that it really would, of course. The Darkness avoided open flame, but could hide in any shadow - or, for that matter, spread in broad daylight. But the lamps made people feel safer, and in the end, that was worth whatever the oil cost them in taxes.
And despite the situation on the other side of the river, on this side people did still seem to feel safe. A handful of worshippers trickled out of the church with Prophetess, and seemed in no great hurry to rush home despite the coming night.
“Let’s find a place to sleep,” I said, and she nodded.
In retrospect, it was a shame we didn’t spend that last, safe night in Rockwall in luxury, or at least in comfort. But we didn’t. We found no inn that was interested in accepting trade goods, and our stock of silver was tiny. In the end we secured one room the size of a prison cell with a single bed. As on that first night by the lake, Prophetess slept on the bed while I lay cold on the floor. The less said about the quality of my sleep the better.
5. The Other Side
The sun was bright and the air was crisp. The guards holding the bridge shook their heads in wonder, or perhaps disgust, but made no attempt to stop us from crossing. They did point out that they wouldn’t let us back over if we changed our minds. And one of them called me a fool, but that went without saying.
Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle Page 7