Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle

by Malcolm McKenzie

  Thus the name.

  “Run!”

  We crashed through the sparse undergrowth. I tripped over a tree root, caught myself on my sheathed sword, staggered two more paces and fell to my knees on a rock. The first moment was dominated by surprise. Then the pain started. I was probably bleeding, but I was going to be bleeding a lot worse if I didn’t get moving. I hauled myself to my feet and continued on.

  But even with the seconds I had lost, I realized I was still ahead of Prophetess. Growing up near the Flow, she had no experience on this kind of broken terrain. Her breath was coming in ragged, terrified sobs as she struggled along twenty feet behind me.

  “Ah, dammit,” I growled.

  Dee was vanishing into the mist ahead, dodging obstacles as if he had been born in the woods.

  “Come on!” I shouted. I found that terror was an excellent pain suppressant as I put on a burst of speed.

  And then Prophetess slipped.

  It was less a scream than a loud squeak as she went down.

  You know what they say - you don’t have to be faster than what’s chasing you. You just have to be faster than the slowest person in your group.

  The drelb called out again, closer. In that moment, with the unseen horror closing in for the kill, the urge to flee grew overwhelming. There’s something to be said for living to fight another day.

  “Ah, dammit,” I repeated as I stopped and turned.

  There’s also something to be said for being able to live with yourself if you make it to that other day.

  When I got back to where Prophetess had fallen, she had already pulled herself back to her feet. Though her clothes were damp and stained with dirt, she seemed unhurt.

  But by then a dark shape was already visible through the mist.

  It came at an ungainly lope, a hunched gait that should have been slow but covered ground with shocking speed. When it saw us waiting, the monster stopped and reared to its full height, again voicing that wailing cry that seemed equal parts rage and despair.

  The beast was big. And hideous. It must have stood a head taller than me, but was bulky far out of proportion to its height. Short, bandy legs supported a long, massive torso. Pale skin sagged in heavy folds, with mangy patches of hair that thickened at its waist and extremities. The face was bestial, mouth elongated into a fanged snout. Stubby fingers ended in huge, hooked claws, but a malign intellect burned in its small, black eyes, and it carried a heavy tree branch as a club.

  It waddled toward me and roared again. I pulled my sword clear. In retrospect, the paleos had not been formidable opponents. They had been short, and scrawny, with inferior weapons. The drelb was another matter entirely. But I figured it would still bleed if I cut it.

  It bellowed one last time, huge teeth bared, then dropped to all fours in a shambling charge that ended with it rearing over me, swinging the tree limb.

  There was no running away now, so I stepped forward instead and used the same Flowing Water cut I had employed against the paleo.

  The force of the drelb’s arm slamming into my blade drove me to my knees, but the steel did its job. The club hit the ground a foot from me, the monster’s paw landing a pace farther away.

  I could cut it, and it would bleed - except it didn’t.

  I was just starting to regain my feet when the other hand swung around and caught me on the side of the head. At least I suppose that’s what happened. All I really knew was that one moment I was getting up and the next I was lying on my back six feet away. I had a good view of the stump of the drelb’s right wrist. No blood came out. Instead, a black cloud bubbled from the wound, sealing it. The monster roared and took a step toward me.

  “Hey!”

  It whirled, quick for its bulk, to glare at Prophetess. She hit it in the nose with her staff.

  The beast howled and swung at her, only to remember mid-strike that its right hand was missing. It looked down in puzzled anger and she smacked its nose again.

  I scuttled on my backside to retrieve my sword and sheath. The drelb was eying Prophetess uncertainly. It must have been five times her weight, but it was visibly shaken by the loss of its hand, and maybe even more by the stinging blows to its nose.

  I got to my feet, blade extended in front of me. “Get behind me,” I said. She didn’t waste any time doing so. “We’re going to back up to the ravine,” I said, “and then we’re going to go down the slope, and then we’re going to run.”

  We suited actions to words. The drelb growled deep in its throat but came no closer. By the time we felt the earth sloping down behind us, the swirling mist was beginning to hide the monster. I sheathed my sword and we slid down the bank in a rush into the stream below.

  “Let’s stick to the water for a while,” I gasped. “If it hunts by smell, it might lose the trail and not know where we come out.” Plus we found that we could splash along at a good pace over the slick stones.

  We didn’t look back, and I fervently wished the Darkness-infested abomination was growling a final curse over its shoulder and hoping never to see us again either.

  Somehow it didn’t surprise me when a mile later we emerged on the south side of the ravine to find Dee waiting for us.

  “Nice of you to stay around and help,” I snapped. Even though I had myself come within a hair’s breadth of bolting and leaving Prophetess to her fate.

  The occultist just smiled easily. “Come now, you can hardly believe I’m the sort to battle drelb. You seem to have come through it quite nicely, considering. Though I suppose that must hurt.” He gestured to my face.

  “It didn’t until you pointed it out.” Which was true. Once he mentioned it, my right cheek began to throb. I probed it gingerly. “What’s it look like?”

  “Much as if you’d been hit in the face by a bear, which is hardly surprising. Quite a bruise, and four scratches. Nowhere near as bad as that poor girl back in Brambledge, though. You must not have made it very angry.”

  “I’d just cut off its hand. It seemed pretty annoyed.”

  Dee shrugged. “Interesting. Perhaps the Darkness really does avoid the Select, though I’d never believed that myself. Or perhaps it simply doesn’t operate in the drelb as it does in humans.”

  “When I cut its hand off, the Darkness came out instead of blood and sealed the wound.”

  “Fascinating. Perhaps it builds on the notion of a bear’s invulnerability.”

  Prophetess said, “That’s the second time you’ve said ‘bear.’ Why?”

  Dee’s eyebrows went up. “Well, because that’s what the drelb are, of course.”

  I snorted. “I’ve seen bears. They had more hair and didn’t carry clubs. That wasn’t a bear.”

  “It’s the closest the Darkness can come to turning a bear into a man,” Dee said. “The Darkness is a construct of mankind, and seeks out man to bond with. If there are no humans at hand, it will settle on a reasonable approximation. Such as a bear. The beast’s hair falls out, it tries to use tools… it would be rather pathetic if they weren’t so very hostile. And, as you noted, difficult to kill.”

  I thought of that wailing cry and was surprised by a swelling of sympathy for the animal I had fought.

  Sympathy was still playing second fiddle to fear, though.

  “Do you think it’ll follow us?”

  Dee considered. “It might be reluctant to try the ravine with one hand missing. And bears do hunt by smell, so going through the stream was clever. I think we may have seen the last of that one.” He paused. “That doesn’t mean there aren’t more, of course.”

  With that thought in mind we followed the ravine east as fast as we could go without stumbling.

  8. Finding Religion

  It was with a huge gasp of relief that we emerged from the woods late in the afternoon. We made camp atop a low hill a quarter of a mile from the tree line. More forest loomed against the darkening sky to the south and east. We weighed the possibility of nearby paleos or Hawks against the risk of drelb coming out
of the woods and opted for a small fire. It would be visible from a huge distance, but hopefully would deter wild animals and the Darkness - or mixtures of the two.

  As she so often did, Prophetess withdrew to pray as soon as we finished eating. I suppose I was a little resentful. I would have liked to speak with her in the aftermath of that awful day, but instead her solace was with the Lord. Or whatever religious phrasing she would use to explain the fact that she’d rather sit around talking to herself than to me.

  Dee must have seen something in my face and, being who he was, he had to poke at the wound rather than letting it be. “Unusual, I suppose, for a prophet to have a Select bodyguard. To my knowledge few of the Select confess the Universal faith. Unless you are an exception, of course?”

  “Um,” I said, and shook my head. It seemed like the response best designed to discourage conversation. Not effective at stopping monologue, though.

  “Particularly interesting since Yoshana also counts a Select as her principal lieutenant.”

  “Like I said before, most Select have some military training. It’s pretty common for us to serve as bodyguards.” I saw a chance to both change the subject and possibly learn something useful from Dee’s endless lecturing. “What else do you know about Yoshana that might be helpful to us? I know what everyone does, but I left the Green Heart when her invasion started, so I have to admit I’m no expert.”

  “Ah.” Dee stared into the fire, apparently captivated by the rising sparks. For a moment I thought he might actually be at a loss for words, but he quickly proved me wrong. “You know Yoshana was not just the supreme military commander, but also became the dictator of the Shield.”

  I nodded. “Sure. It was pretty common knowledge she deposed Karst about a year before the invasion. If by ‘deposed’ you mean ‘killed with her bare hands.’”

  “Just so. Interesting story, that. Karst was a consummate master of the Darkness himself, despite having less demon parentage than a full-blooded Overlord. Rumor has it that they had dueled to a stalemate, each trying to turn the Darkness against the other, when Yoshana ended it by snapping his neck. The lesson in that, of course, is that whatever game you’re playing, she doesn’t play by the same rules you do. Something to bear in mind.”

  So besides her natural advantages, Yoshana would cheat. That was encouraging.

  “She’s always tried to avoid direct force-on-force conflict if she can,” Dee continued. “She thinks it’s wasteful. She always prefers deceit.”

  There was something to be said for that - in fact, Sun Tzu, history’s greatest master of strategy, had said it.

  “She outsmarted herself with the Hellguard, though. Karst had always courted a relationship with them. For generations the Shield stood between the Hellguard and the Green Heart - thus the name - even though the Shield’s Overlords are themselves half demon.”

  “That part I know. I am from the Heart, remember.”

  “Yes. Well. So, then you also know that Yoshana continued Karst’s alliance with the demons. For centuries the demons have been confined to the Darklands - ice to the north, sea to the east, mountains to the west. The Shield was the plug bottling them up to the south.”

  “Did I mention I’m from the Heart? I understand the basic geopolitics behind the invasion. The Hellguard backed Yoshana’s armies and they rolled over us like a wave. We lost Gateway, Heartfield, Seafields… everything between the Salt and Paint Rivers. My family lived on the other side of the Paint outside Goat Hill, but they sent me away as soon as Heartfield fell. My father said once Seafields fell and Yoshana had access to a real port, there would be no stopping her.”

  Dee glowered at me a bit for interrupting but continued undaunted. “Just so. But then the demons turned on her. We can’t truly know why, but I’ve heard the Hellguard wanted to press forward, using Yoshana’s forces as shock troops. But Yoshana has always been careful with her men. She ordered the army to pause and consolidate its gains. But the demons weren’t interested in keeping her force intact. They wanted it expended in the assault. When she wouldn’t push on, they turned many of her Overlord commanders against her. There was still a good deal of resentment over her coup against Karst. And the demons played to the Overlords’ ambition. They promised them satrapies in the conquered lands. But while Yoshana fought to retain control of her armies, her two top lieutenants, Grigg and Roshel, joined the Green Heart defenders and stopped the demons at the Paint River.”

  He paused and shook his head. “There’s some confusion there. Some say Grigg and Roshel had left her even before the demons turned against her, that they didn’t support the invasion at all. Whatever the case, they rallied partisans to the Green Heart’s defense - including quite a few Select, I’ve heard.”

  Dee looked at me quizzically. It was easy enough to guess his thoughts. I had wondered the same thing. Would my parents have joined the battle against the demons? They had not made the military their profession like so many other Select, but they were both trained in the art of war. And with the battle lines drawn at the Paint, they would literally have been defending their home.

  Had they fought or fled? If they had fought, had they lived or died? I had put that thought aside for two years. They had sent me away, to survive. To continue the line of the Select. Though they had loved me - because they had loved me - they had told me not to return.

  I shook my head. “Our minds aren’t linked, you know.” Supposedly the Overlords and Hellguard could actually use the Darkness to communicate with each other over considerable distances, though no one had ever suggested they could bridge the hundreds of miles that separated us from the Green Heart. “I’ve had no news but the vaguest rumors from there.”

  Dee nodded in what I might have taken for sympathy from a less self-absorbed individual. “Well. In any case, Yoshana and her loyalists joined the forces led by Grigg and Roshel and dealt the demons a crushing defeat. Killed the Overlord general who had supplanted Yoshana, then exploited the confusion to catch a whole corps of the Hellguard forces in a pincer movement and tear it apart.

  “No one’s quite certain what happened next. By many accounts, in the confusion of the battle, one of Grigg’s own partisans stabbed Yoshana by mistake. What everyone agrees on is that she died.”

  “If I remember right, Yoshana faked her death at least once before when she was organizing her coup against Karst. You said it yourself, deception is one of her favorite tools.”

  “The spear pierced her heart from behind. The blade thrust out through her breast and she died.” Prophetess had rejoined us at the fire without my noticing.

  “How can you know that?”

  She just shook her head.

  “Indeed. That is consistent with the accounts I’ve heard,” Dee said. “And I hardly think this was a ploy, because I can’t see what cause of hers it would have advanced. With her slain on the battlefield, the partisan forces and her Shield loyalists collapsed. Many were absorbed into regular Green Heart units. Others just dispersed. Until…”

  “Until she rose, reborn from the Darkness,” Prophetess said.

  “Yes, well, there is a belief that the Darkness preserved her life essence until it could heal her body. But the version she has put about is that she was raised by God himself.” He looked sidelong at Prophetess. She nodded.

  Dee continued, “She claims that with her resurrection, God showed the way to turn the Darkness to his ends. As the psalm says, even the Darkness is radiant in his sight. She began to gather the remnants of her army back together - as I said before, calling it the Darkness Radiant. Although her troops seem to prefer the term Knights of the Resurrection.”

  He paused and considered. “That was in the spring. Around the Easter season, in point of fact.” He looked at Prophetess again to see if she would react to that, but she kept silent. “She’s been making her way across the Green Heart the whole summer, attracting followers as she goes. Mostly veterans. So far I gather they’ve largely managed to live off the land,
but I have to think they’re going to need a patron state to keep them supplied.”

  “That’s why they’re going to the Source,” I said. “She’s looking for a sponsor for whatever crusade she’s planning to launch.” I let slip a cynical little chuckle. “You really don’t see how dying benefits her?”

  “What do you mean?”

  I poked at the fire with a stick. Another shower of sparks rose into the sky. “Before she was just a general who had lost her command. Now she’s a prophet.”

  Prophetess nodded decisively. “A false prophet. She may be the antichrist of Revelation.”

  Dee stared. “Ah. Well. She is, in the end, only human. Even if she is an Overlord.”

  “And don’t many scholars believe that John the Divine was speaking of the Roman Emperor Nero when he named the antichrist?” Prophetess shot back. “Isn’t the Darkness the work of human hands? The fact she’s human doesn’t mean she can’t bring about the corruption of the world.”

  The occultist’s mouth opened and closed like a fish’s.

  “Just because she grew up on a farm doesn’t mean she’s stupid, Dee,” I laughed. It was about time for someone else to be at the receiving end of Prophetess’ unexpected insights.

  “I’m sure no one meant to suggest I was stupid, although people do say the Select think they’re smarter than everyone else,” she retorted.

  My mouth snapped shut again. You’d think I would learn not to open it.

  But I spoke again anyway. “The question is, how does this help us stop her?”

  “The only way you stop lies,” Prophetess said. “With the truth.”

  She stared into the fire. “Although it would be really helpful if we got to Stephensburg first.”

  We picked up an overgrown trail that was probably the remains of an ancient road as we continued east. I hoped that this close to the Muddy, the area would be more settled and the risk of encountering paleos and drelb would be lower. I was wrong about the settlement, but we weren’t set upon by savages or corrupted bears.