Three figures had broken from the cover of a concrete hulk of a building a hundred yards away and were loping in our direction. Between their lank, matted hair, the poorly cured hides they wore, and the wooden spears they carried, I had no doubt what they were even though I had never actually seen their kind before.
“Paleos!”
I fumbled my slingshot and a stone out of my pack. The paleos began to whoop as they came closer - wild, inhuman sounds. One slowed to a jog, fitted his three-foot javelin to a second, shorter stick, then let the spear fly.
“Quite ingenious, the spear thrower,” Dee remarked. “No technology to it at all, but you see how by effectively lengthening the man’s arm it imparts far more speed and distance to the projectile.”
The wooden spear hurtled by over our heads.
“Not much for accuracy, though,” Dee added, somewhat sadly. He’d wanted it to be more accurate?
I sighted down the slingshot and caught the nearest paleo in the forehead with the rock as he charged. He went down on his face in the road.
“Amazing the advantage of a simple piece of rubber,” said Dee.
“Are you going to make yourself useful or just stand around and observe?” I snapped.
“Oh, observe, I should think,” he replied. “Do you know, at their best the paleos can be quite gracious hosts to a storyteller. Unfortunately, the Hawks moving through their lands hereabouts have quite disrupted their hunting, and I suspect they’ve gotten hungry. And when they’re hungry they can be rather… unpleasant.”
“They’re going to eat us?” Prophetess demanded.
“Unfortunately, I wouldn’t bet against it.”
I fired another rock at the next paleo and missed, possibly distracted by the prospect of shooting the storyteller in the mouth.
The savage hurled his spear at me. It was a crude thing, not even a straight piece of wood, and it wobbled past. Of course, his aim wasn’t helped by the fact that I threw myself to the ground.
He screamed an incoherent challenge and pulled some sort of club from a leather belt at his waist. It looked like it might have been a bone. I didn’t examine it closely as he charged and swung.
I was back on my feet, bringing my walking stick around. Years of kata were good for this, at least. I pulled the blade free of its wooden sheath and met his wrist with a rising Flowing Water strike.
Despite its basic shirasaya fittings, the sword within was by far the most expensive thing I’d ever owned. The steel was strong, and sharp. The paleo’s hand spun away in the air. He was just starting to look surprised when I reversed the stroke and brought the blade through his throat.
The last of them, the first to have flung a spear, was closing on Prophetess. He had dropped the spear thrower and poked at her with a second javelin, hopping at her like some kind of demented frog. She batted the strike away with her staff and gave ground.
Honor didn’t even begin to be a consideration for me. I took five long strides to circle around him and stabbed him through the heart from behind.
That left the one I had hit with the sling stone. David and Goliath notwithstanding, I doubted I had killed him. That would be easily remedied, though.
He was just starting to lever himself onto his elbows when I reached him. He looked up at me, and I could see the angry, pink goose egg of a welt my stone had left starting to rise on his filthy forehead.
I took a step past him to get a better angle on the back of his neck. The look in his eyes would have passed for resignation in a higher being.
“No!” Prophetess screamed at me.
I held my stroke and glared at her. Blood pounded in my temples. “What do you mean no?”
“You can’t just kill him in cold blood.”
“It’s a basic principle that you don’t leave people who want to kill you alive behind you,” I snapped. “Failure to observe that principle leads to death.”
Dee had come up as well. “I must say, Prophetess, the logic is sound.”
The paleo had flipped himself onto his back. The dirty bastard actually laughed. “Do it, troll,” he said.
“Not really the best way to plead for your life, you piece of subhuman trash. I’ve been called a lot of nasty things over the years, but ‘troll’ is a new one. We’ll put it on your tombstone.”
“The word is actually ‘trol,’” said Dee, incapable of stopping his lecturing even in the middle of a fight to the death. “Short for ‘control.’ The paleos believe all civilized people - that is, city-dwellers - seek to control the world and thus are evil. Ah, I must say, they believe that of the Select most especially.”
“Control, controlling, controlled,” said the paleo. “Slaver and slave.”
“That’s not completely different from the doctrine of the Fall,” Prophetess murmured.
“Yeah, except correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think Universalists eat people who disagree with them.”
The paleo barked out a laugh again. “Ah, won’t eat. Waste the flesh when you kill me. No worry. Wolves and crows will know better, trol.”
I let out a breath I seemed to have been holding forever. “So you think he should live, Prophetess? You think I was wrong to take care of his friends back there? They would have killed us.”
“They would. I don’t doubt this one would have too. But he’s also a child of God, and it’s not for us to take him out of this world if he doesn’t force us to.”
I must still have looked mutinous.
“If not for him, Minos, for you. Murder is a stain on the soul.”
Dee chimed in, of course. “They do say the rules of war are for the benefit of those who follow them, not for the benefit of their enemies. So that one may fight monsters without becoming one.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s not how that saying went.” I sighed. “Fine.”
I brought my right foot up in a cross kick, smashing my boot down on the paleo’s kneecap. He screamed as the bone shattered.
“He’s alive. As long as his friends don’t eat him now that he’s crippled. And he’s not going to be following us anymore.”
Dee looked somewhat horrified but miraculously kept quiet. Prophetess opened her mouth, took a good look at my face, and said nothing.
We left the paleo choking back sobs of pain. Part of me thought I should feel bad, but I didn’t.
We stopped only long enough for me to clean the blood off my sword and use a bit of the oil soaking my torches to touch up the blade. Whatever the stories might say about steel hungering for blood, the reality was if you didn’t get it off right away your weapon was going to be coated in rust the next time you pulled it out.
We were all quiet. I knew I had upset Prophetess, but I certainly wasn’t going to apologize for doing the right thing. But while I was well accustomed to silences, this one was an echo of discomfort. I almost found myself wishing for Dee’s chatter.
“I must say, my Select friend, your skill with the blade is impressive. Is it true that you all study war?”
Almost.
I sighed. “A lot of Select wind up as mercenaries. I suppose we’re suited for it, and we’re hardly welcomed in most other professions. And it never hurts to be able to defend yourself when you’re as unpopular as we are. So most of us study the basics - personal combat, tactics, strategy. Even if we never use it.”
Prophetess spoke up. “I hadn’t thought… back in Oldtown, when the guards were bothering us…”
“You thought I was a coward? You thought I didn’t know how to fight? Were you happier then, or now? Most Select do know how to fight, Prophetess. But we generally prefer to run away.”
The opportunity to run away came soon enough.
We had eaten a subdued lunch and were walking again when the whooping started up behind us. This group of paleos wasn’t hiding in ruins or tall grass - they were jogging up the road behind us. There must have been at least a dozen. They were still nearly a mile back, but gaining quickly.
“This i
s what happens when you leave someone alive to tell them which way we’re going,” I muttered.
“Maybe if we’d been kinder to him he wouldn’t have told them which way we were going,” Prophetess retorted.
I grimaced at her. “Can you ask the flying pigs that live in your world to swoop down here and give us a ride?”
“Normally I’m the first to enjoy the clash of wits, the cut and thrust of the beatific against the pragmatic,” Dee said, “But might I suggest in this case we save our breath for running?”
Say what you will about the paleos - and I for one had almost nothing good to say about them - but they can run. Even though they had been at it longer than we had, they continued to catch up.
“I fear,” gasped Dee, “that we must take to the woods on our right.”
And in fact we were nearing a thick stand of trees.
“That makes no sense,” I panted. “They’ll just follow us in, and they’ll catch up even faster in there.”
“Ah,” Dee replied, “but they won’t.”
“Why not?”
“They’re afraid of the drelb.”
Say what you will about Dee - and I for one had almost nothing good to say about him - but he knew something about paleos. We were forced to drastically reduce our speed once we got in among the pines, but there were no sounds of pursuit.
“I don’t suppose they’re afraid because of some primitive superstition in their feeble, savage minds?”
“I fear not,” Dee answered. “I’m given to understand that there are in fact drelb in here.”
I could have said something about going from the frying pan into the fire… but considering that the paleos were most likely planning to kill us and eat us, there really weren’t any worse options. Even drelb. Drelb would probably kill us and eat us too, but at least there was a chance we wouldn't run into any.
The forest was thicker and darker than any we had seen. It was beautiful in a way, pine giving way to birch and oak as we made our way deeper. The leaves on the deciduous trees were turning but had not yet begun to fall. But it was not hard to imagine that leafy dimness might be haunted by monsters. Except for the twittering of birds and the crunching of our own feet through the undergrowth, the silence was tomb-like.
Maybe not the happiest analogy.
We paralleled the road. My goal was to stay far enough inside the woods that the paleos wouldn’t come in after us, while staying close enough to open terrain that we could run for it if we were set upon by drelb. I had no reason to think the creatures wouldn’t come out of the trees, except that the paleos seemed to think the road was safe.
Great. Now I was relying on murderous savages for strategy.
We stopped for lunch when I judged the sun was directly overhead. The bread was no longer fresh but it was neither hard as a rock nor moldy, the meat and fruit were good, and the remaining small beer hadn’t yet started to taste too much like the leather water skins. We were far enough from the road that we could see no trace of it, just the barest thinning of the trees at the edge of sight. I didn’t want to make it easy for the paleos to track us.
“Do you suppose they’ll just give up and go away?” I asked.
“I doubt it.” Dee shook his head sadly. “The paleos are very patient people. They’re clever, too, whatever you may think. They know the direction we were going. They’ll most likely assume we’re doing what we’re doing and wait for us to come out. I would expect they’ve got scouts spread up and down the road, since they can’t know exactly how fast we’re moving.”
I sighed. “And we’ll have to light a fire at night, which will tell them exactly where we are.” I looked from Dee to Prophetess but saw no sign of a brilliant idea illuminating either face. “We’ll have to head through the woods. Try to get out the other side. Do you know how far it is?”
“More than a day, I’m afraid,” Dee said. Prophetess turned visibly pale. “I do tend to agree that it’s the only way,” the occultist added. “On my own, it’s perhaps possible I could talk the paleos into letting me live, despite their obvious grumpiness, but in the company of a Select? No, I’m afraid they would certainly kill us.”
Dee was annoying, but he clearly did possess at least some useful information. He was slowly starting to grow on me… like a wart or similar annoying, itchy infection. Still, I was about to suggest that he was welcome to try his luck alone with the paleos when he stood up and cheerfully announced, “So, I suppose we’d best get going, eh?”
The forest remained beautiful as we drew deeper into it, but every shadow under a bush now loomed sinister. Every rustle in the leaves might be a drelb. If there was a pause in the birdsong, we stopped and anxiously scanned the trees to see what could have caused it. I constantly fought the temptation to unsheathe my sword.
We tried to head east as best we could. A short time later, I spied something looming through a gap in the trees. We stopped and stared.
“Some kind of building,” I said.
The structure was a low, squat pile of cinderblocks, overgrown with vines and weeds. Still, it seemed solid. Dee, Prophetess and I exchanged glances.
“It’s shelter,” Dee said.
“For something,” I snapped. “You said there were drelb in here. What if that’s where they live?”
We exchanged looks again, and gave the building a wide berth. It took an effort of will not to look over my shoulder as we left it behind.
After a couple of hours we came to a steep-banked ravine running roughly parallel to our path.
“Do we follow it?” Prophetess asked.
“It’s going the direction we want, and following it we’ll be sure we aren’t going in circles. It’s a good source of water. And I wouldn’t think the drelb would cross it, so it puts something safe on our north side.” I paused, and gave in to the urge to look back the way we’d come. “The downside is if they come from the south, we’re pinned against it.”
“Why wouldn’t you think they’d cross it from the north?” Dee asked mildly.
I considered the sloping, tree choked sides. “It’s not exactly hospitable terrain…”
“Could you get up the banks?”
“Sure, but…”
“Then so can a drelb.”
“Running water…” I began, aware even as I said it that I was retailing a belief I myself regarded as rank superstition.
“Surely you don’t believe that? Men or any other creatures infected by the Darkness can cross running water as readily as anyone else. I would hardly have expected you to put any stock in that sort of folklore.”
“Let’s just go across it,” I muttered. “I think it bends southward anyway and that’s not the direction we want to go.”
None of us had any difficulty climbing down and back up the other side. The banks were soft earth and moss-slicked rocks, but gnarled trees provided plenty of hand-holds. The water at the bottom was clear and inviting, so we refilled our skins.
We left the ravine behind us, heading north and east. Too soon, though, the shadows were lengthening, and long before night truly fell we settled in a small clearing and began gathering firewood.
“They do fear fire, don’t they?” I asked Dee.
“Oh, I’d certainly think so.” I was so used to his voice that I mentally filled the silence that followed with the words, “If not, I highly doubt we’ll survive the night.” But he didn’t actually say that.
Dead wood was plentiful, and our fire was huge. Dee carried a pot not unlike my frying pan, and we used both to boil the water we had taken from the stream. I could have gone hunting or foraging, but felt no inclination at all to venture away from the camp.
Dee chattered away long into the night. For once, I was thrilled with the distraction of his voice. Eventually we agreed to set watches, but for hours after sundown none of us slept.
The result was predictable. I awoke with a start from a terrifying dream - the paleo whose knee I had shattered screaming at me from a pit of disembo
died mouths. Reality was not much more reassuring. I found myself surrounded in a white mist. The horror of the dream, which had receded for a moment, rushed back. Where was I?
As my heart slowed I recognized our clearing. The light filtering in through the fog meant it must be morning, but how long after dawn I had no idea. Dee and Prophetess were both asleep. I wasn’t sure whose watch it was supposed to be. But we had survived the night.
I went a little ways into the woods, relieved myself, and returned to organize our camp. Some of the logs on the fire still smoldered fitfully, but the damp had almost completely extinguished them.
Dee and Prophetess woke as I was clattering around with the pots.
“Ah, good thing that you had the watch,” Dee remarked.
“I’m not sure I did. If I did, I slept through it until about ten minutes ago.”
We looked at each other guiltily and shrugged. A military organization we were not. In any case, we had survived the night uneaten. Maybe the paleos really were just superstitious. That was a heartening thought as we packed up and tried to decide on the right way to go in the clinging morning mist. Visibility was no more than a hundred yards, and the sun was a vague brightness in front of us.
Either we hadn’t done a very good job of orienting ourselves or the ravine curved back north. Whatever the case, we ran into it again within half an hour. This time we decided we might as well follow it. The mist still had not burned off, and the danger of walking in circles was now very real.
Keeping the ravine at our right, we made decent progress. The edge of the world was circumscribed by the white haze, trees looming out of it ahead of us as if newly created.
From somewhere behind, beyond the edge of sight, we heard a long, low, moaning roar. I suppose if you had to render it in words, it would be something like, “drrreeeelllllbbb.”
Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle Page 11