The barricade was improvised, but effective - a hedge of wooden fencing, spiked with nails and bristling with pikes and lighted torches. There was no gate. We had to climb over - carefully. Trying to get across in the other direction, with the guards shooting crossbows, jabbing with pikes, and slashing with swords, would be virtually impossible. And there was a fire warden in the group, ready to unleash burning death on anyone or anything trying to force its way across.
The sun was just as bright as we stepped off the bridge, but the air was thick with tension, as if the city were holding its breath. It was amazing how on the south shore, daily life was proceeding unaffected, while here you could literally feel the desperation in the air. My pulse quickened uncomfortably and my guts knotted.
There were few people on the streets, and those within sight of the barricade threw angry glares at it before looking away. No one was massing to storm the barricades yet, but if the Darkness was really spreading, that would change. And whether it was or not, the citizens of Oldtown believed it. Windows were boarded up, torches were out in broad daylight, and citizens were on the street only in groups. Generally at least lightly armed.
When things got bad enough, there would be riots. Or people would abandon what had been the safety of the city, risking the Hawk armies beyond the walls. Or the fire wardens would burn the place to the ground. Or all three.
The dread of the Darkness had destroyed trade during the Age of Fear. The economy of the continent had never recovered. It wasn’t just technologies like the legions of dead batteries we found everywhere on the Flow. The mistrust that remained hampered exchange. The specialized goods the ancients had enjoyed were beyond our reach. Even something as simple as a pencil was difficult to make today, though we found them strewn so liberally through the garbage that they must have been almost free before the Fall. That was the attraction of the Flow, the reason the bones of the Last Days were picked so clean. Sometimes the discarded refuse of the past was a priceless treasure in the present.
This far west the fear of the Darkness was less, but the distance between cities was greater. And so the world always hung on the edge of hunger, fear, and poverty.
Getting lost in my thoughts was safe enough on the Flow. Not so here. I didn’t recognize the press gang for what it was until the leader’s hand had closed on my arm.
“You’re a big one, blackeye,” he said, breath stale in my face. “You could do us some good on the walls.”
A brass medallion on a chain around his neck might have been some kind of badge of office. There was nothing else to suggest he had any authority, except maybe the short sword hanging at his hip. And the two burly thugs with nail-studded clubs flanking him to either side. The leader was a big man, tall and heavy-set. He stank of wine, but that didn’t make me think he’d be easy to fight. And I didn’t know how fast Prophetess could run.
I smiled in what I hoped was an ingratiating way. “I’d love to help, but I have a commitment to escort the young lady here.”
“We can take care of her,” one of the thugs smirked.
“I figure it’d be better and healthier all around if you did your civic duty and helped out on the wall,” the leader said, not taking his hand off my arm. “Soldiers are patrolling inside the city now, ’cause of… it.”
He wouldn’t name the Darkness. “Someone’s gotta go on the wall in case the Hawks attack. That’s you.”
I took a deep breath. “The lady is a prophet of the Lord,” I said. “Sent to do his will and robed in awesome power.”
I’d read that phrase somewhere and always wanted to use it. “Stand aside or you’ll know the might of the Lord’s staff, passed down from Moses himself.”
“Huh?” The man stared at me stupidly.
I locked my black eyes on his, unblinking. “I’m not saying she’ll turn you into a frog, but I hope you like the taste of flies.”
“He’s crazy,” said the thug who hadn’t spoken before.
“On your own head is the doom if you stand in our way.”
The men looked at each other uncertainly. One smacked his club into his palm, but the other elbowed him.
“Oh, get the hell out of here, you crazy blackeyed freak,” the leader snarled, pushing me away. “We don’t want nuts on the wall anyway.”
A minute’s walk later Prophetess glanced over her shoulder to make sure they weren’t following, then said, “Moses’ staff? Turning them into frogs?”
“It worked, didn’t it?” I smiled, pretending my knees weren’t trembling.
“My brave protector, threatening our enemies with some fairytale mockery of my faith,” she snorted.
I stopped. “Well, alternatively, I could have gone with them to the wall. Or I could have gotten into a fight with them and someone, either me or them, would have wound up on the ground bleeding. This seemed like a better option.”
For a wonder, that actually shut her up.
I never knew if the Darkness was truly in the city or not. But we traveled the five miles to the East Gate of northern Oldtown without further incident. And like the guards at the bridge, those at the gate were perfectly willing to let us out - but made it very clear we wouldn’t be getting back in. And very much unlike the city gate on the south shore, this one was closed, locked, barred, and manned by a double handful of alert and well-armed soldiers.
It shut behind us with a thud and a clash of bolts and braces sliding home.
Also unlike the way we had come in, there was no construction beyond the protection of the city. The road outside rose up to the gate, forming a concrete bridge over a muddy ditch that might have passed for a moat if it rained enough.
Past the ditch, a scattering of abandoned wood and thatch stalls clustered in forlorn clumps on either side of the cracked pavement. I suspected it was only a matter of time before the guards cleared them out, before some overly aggressive band of Hawks decided to see if they could scavenge the wood to set the gate on fire.
Stretching out in front of us, weeds choked the ruined foundations that were all that remained of this part of Oldtown, houses and shops that had once stood outside the wall. As in Acceptance, bricks and stones had gone into the city’s defenses during the Age of Fear, wood into its furnaces. But the foundations remained, making the land unsuitable for crops. So, ruins. A few still stood, perhaps serving as homes for the farmers who had worked the empty fields beyond. Those too were abandoned now, the farmers inside the walls.
Out beyond the remains of the buildings, the harvested stubble of the fields stretched as far as the eye could see, the cracked, pitted and weed-choked roadway running through them.
“We need to get off this road,” I said. “There may not be any soldiers right around here, but people can see us for miles.”
“No better in the fields,” Prophetess said, which was true enough. That barren ground rose and fell in rolling hills devoid of trees. A Hawk army could be just over the next rise, out of sight now but impossible to escape if we blundered into it. The road was broad and flat, an overgrown median the only cover.
I pointed east. “We might as well make for those trees,” I said. “They’re the direction we want to go anyway, and at least we won’t stick out against the skyline so badly.” A good part of the way there we would be in the ruins, which offered a bit of concealment for us. Of course, they also offered cover for anyone lurking in ambush. The same went for the trees themselves.
There was no way forward without risk, now.
“Swallow hard, take a deep breath, and trust in the Lord,” Prophetess said.
“I thought he helped those who helped themselves.”
“That’s why I hope you’re better than you look with that slingshot.”
There wasn’t much to say to that so I swallowed hard, took a deep breath, and we headed for the trees.
Trees are wonderful. Wonderful for shade, nuts, all sorts of things. Wonderful for hiding in. Hiding travelers… and mercenaries… and the Darkness.
This was no ancient forest, I told myself, not like the endless stretches of pines that blanketed the Sorrows and sheltered masses of Darkness so concentrated that the surviving natives feared and worshipped them as gods. Yet the oaks loomed huge when we reached them, a hundred feet tall and more, the largest too wide for Prophetess and me to have joined hands around them. There was tall grass between the edge of the fields and the trees, but underneath their branches the oaks had blotted out most of the plant life. Acorns littered the ground.
“What is that?” Prophetess pointed at a mass of webs coating a branch twenty feet up. “And there?”
More of the webs clung like nests among the trees.
She took a step back. “What kind of spider does that?”
“Not spiders,” I said. “Web worms.”
“Worms?”
“Sure. Nothing to worry about.” Better than spiders, anyway. I hated spiders. Though the nest-like webs, crawling with worms, were undeniably hideous.
“And we’re going in there?” Prophetess asked.
“Sure,” I said. I gestured to the acorns. “Those are good eating.”
She frowned. “Really?”
“No. But you can live on them if you boil ’em long enough. And where there’s acorns there’s squirrels, and those are pretty good eating. A little stringy.”
“I don’t see any squirrels.”
“Well, it’s not like they’re going to come running up to us. But they’re in there.”
She took a step forward, then stopped again. “Does the Darkness infect squirrels?”
“No, the Darkness does not infect squirrels.” Although how would you tell if it did? The image of an angry little squirrel, seething with evil power, squeezed a chuckle out of me as I walked past her and in among the trees.
The idea stopped being funny about three paces into the woods.
Dammit. I had crossed half the continent two years ago, younger, smaller, and weaker, and never once worried about being set upon by Darkness-infested rodents. Now, as I listened to rustlings that might have been wind or light-footed animals, I couldn’t think about anything else.
We didn’t talk. We were too busy keeping our eyes and ears open.
Half an hour later I knocked a squirrel off a tree with my slingshot. It looked like any other dead squirrel, in other words, like a rat with a fluffy tail. Somehow the tail made it much more appealing and I felt vaguely sorry for killing it. And it was only after I walked over to the little corpse that I wondered how Prophetess would feel about murdering adorable forest creatures.
That worry evaporated when she unfolded a clasp knife and started to skin it. I should have realized that farmers are rarely sentimental about animals.
The raw meat raised a question, though. Did we dare to cook it? I had come to discard the notion of Hawks hiding in the woods. Why would they? There was no opposing army north of the river. But how far away could they see smoke rising from the trees? Pretty far.
“We’d better wait until night to start a fire,” I decided.
“Won’t anybody who can see the smoke during the day see the fire at night?”
“Not from as far away, I don’t think. These woods are pretty thick. Besides, it won’t hurt to have a fire going at night. There might be wolves or mountain lions, and it should keep them away.” And, hopefully, it would keep away worse things as well.
So the bloody squirrel carcass went into my pack and we trudged on.
It wasn’t hard going in the trees. With little scrub underfoot, roots and hummocks were the main obstacles. The web nests continued, but were far enough above our heads that we didn’t risk blundering into them.
There was no stream visible, but ground water must have lain near the surface. Every now and then our boots would squelch in a damp spot. Not surprising - the trees were getting water from somewhere, and we were no longer close to the Whitewater.
The forest alternated with stretches of tall grass. As nervous as I was in the trees, I found that I dreaded leaving them. We were hideously exposed on the plains.
This disputed land was dangerous in ways that Rockwall was not. It wasn’t just the Hawk army, which would almost certainly steal everything we owned but would probably let us live. The paleos had not been exterminated here. They would certainly kill me on sight, and likely as not eat us both.
When we reached the grassy sections, we loped across to the protections of the next stretch of forest. Once I put my foot in a hole and nearly fell, but fortunately escaped a twisted ankle.
I took another squirrel and a rabbit with my slingshot. We didn’t see anything larger while the sun was in the sky, although I heard rustling beyond my line of sight that sounded like it was made by something bigger than a rodent.
The sky was turning golden through the tree branches. We found a stream, and I filled my frying pan with water.
“Might as well stop here,” I said. “I can boil us up some acorns and the water at the same time, and we can cook the meat.”
Prophetess nodded agreement and began collecting acorns from the ground, where they lay in amazing abundance.
She was six paces from me when a patch of weeds in front of her exploded.
She screamed. I whirled, tripped over the rocks I had gathered to make a fire pit, and fell on my backside.
A pheasant shot into the sky, wings a blur in the dusk.
I fired a rock at it but didn’t even come close.
“I thought you grew up on a farm?” I said.
“Not the same thing chasing chickens and having something jump out of the woods into your face,” she snapped.
I have to admit my heart didn’t stop pounding until I was halfway done lighting the fire.
Full dark fell quickly. No more than twenty minutes after the fire was lit, it was the only light to be seen but for the stars we could glimpse through the treetops.
The rustlings beyond the edge of sight didn’t stop with the setting sun. If anything, they seemed to get closer. Prophetess and I crowded the fire.
I tried to think of something encouraging to say, but my tongue failed me, not for the first time. The best I could come up with was, “There’s going to be worse than this to face if we really have to confront Yoshana.”
Prophetess just nodded. “I know.”
“I never actually saw her,” I went on, “But her troops were moving into the Green Heart when I came west. The stories about her… Well. You can’t believe all of them, but she’s an Overlord, and I’m willing to believe she’s the most powerful one anyone’s ever seen. People said she could control the Darkness as well as a Hellguard.”
“They say she’s half Hellguard herself.”
“Well, by definition. That’s what the Overlords are. Half human, half demon.”
“They say… they say the human half is Select.”
I nodded. “I’ve heard that too. People said that’s why she was so much stronger than the other Overlords.” I paused. “But I thought she died. I heard she took a spear all the way through the chest.”
“I know,” Prophetess repeated.
She said, “You hear all kinds of things. Even on a farm in the middle of nowhere. That she made a pact with the devil to return. That she was so evil hell couldn’t hold her. Maybe she wasn’t really dead at all - people were wrong, or lying.”
Her eyes were focused somewhere far away. “But that’s not what the Lord says to me. He says she was dead and she rose again. That she’s formed a new army. That she says she’s seen the face of God. And that she’ll destroy the world.”
A shiver went all the way through me, though the air wasn’t cold. “You said that before. But, sorry if I get this wrong, don’t you believe the end times will come someday? When God separates the sheep from the goats, and all that? Maybe that’s now. So why are you trying to stop it? Not that I mind,” I hastened to add. “This may not be the best of all worlds, but it’s the only one I’ve got.”
Prophetess looked me straig
ht in the eye. “If Yoshana isn’t stopped… when God separates the sheep from the goats, there may be no sheep left.”
“You’re saying she’ll kill everyone who stands against her.”
“No. I’m saying she’ll corrupt everything around her until no one stands against her at all.”
That was a cheery thought. So how much more so was the idea of racing to confront that?
Prophetess seemed almost to read my mind. “Why did you come, Minos? I truly appreciate it, but it’s dangerous, and you don’t believe what I do. You came all this way to get away from Yoshana, and now you’re going right back toward her.”
I could have said I’d follow a pretty girl anywhere. And I did find Prophetess very attractive. But that wasn’t it, or at least not all of it.
“I suppose I’ve always wanted to follow someone who believed in something. Even if it’s not something I believe in myself.”
She smiled. “There are worse reasons.”
We each ate a roasted squirrel. I would have happily eaten the rabbit too, but decided we should smoke the meat and restock our dwindling supply of jerky.
It’s an unfortunate fact that no matter how long you boil acorns, they’re still just not very good. We ate them anyway.
I wouldn’t say I was full, but my stomach was no longer growling by the time we were done. I was starting to bank the fire when we heard the howl.
It wasn’t right on top of us, but it wasn’t that far off either. And I was pretty sure the one that followed didn’t come from the same source.
“Wolves?”
“More likely coyotes. But could be wolves, yes.”
“Not - ?”
“Drelb? I’m pretty sure they don’t howl. But wolves would be bad enough. They don’t usually attack humans. Unless they’re really hungry. Of course, there’s no good way to tell how hungry they might be.” Although if they tried to eat us that would be a clue.
So we stoked up the fire and set watches. Prophetess took the first, and began a long, muttered litany of prayer. Maybe under other circumstances that would have been relaxing, but as it was, neither of us got much sleep. Especially when we began to notice the eyes among the trees, reflecting the firelight.
Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle Page 8