Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle

by Malcolm McKenzie

  Then the trees gave way and the river spread dully gleaming in front of us, so wide the trees on the far bank were a blur of green half a mile away. It was as brown as its name suggested, the current dragging along branches, leaves and soil as it slowly but inexorably ate away at its banks.

  Yoshana was somewhere on the other side - if Prophetess was right, heading to the same place we were.

  “There’s a saying that if you stand by the bank of the river long enough, eventually the body of your enemy will come floating by,” I said.

  Prophetess looked puzzled, then scowled. “That’s a stupid saying.”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s from Sun Tzu. Counseling patience.”

  “Still stupid,” Prophetess declared. “If we stand by the bank of this river long enough, eventually Yoshana’s armies will sweep over us and we’ll be converted or killed.”

  She had a point. Of course, racing to beat Yoshana’s armies to Stephensburg so we could defy her seemed like an even better way to get killed.

  I didn’t say that, though.

  Getting there, at least, should be a simple matter. I was pretty sure we had hit the Muddy above the fork where it split to the northwest and northeast. Dee agreed. All we needed to do was follow the bank south until we reached the fork. There it should be easy to find a boat going upriver to the east. The eastern fork would take us to within a few days of our destination. It would be slow going against the current, but no worse than walking, and the boat wouldn’t stop for the night.

  Just a question of finding that landing.

  The sun was starting to set and we were looking for a good spot to make camp when we saw firelight in the distance ahead.

  “Should we go take a look?” asked Prophetess.

  I thought out loud. “Could be a town. But if it is, they may not let us in at night. Or it could be the Hawks. They might be happy to see us, but it’s hard to imagine we’d be happy to see them.”

  “Maybe. But I’d rather not spend another night out here.”

  I had to laugh. “If you’re not going to listen to my answer, why ask the question?”

  She had no reply to that, but we kept walking, so that was another argument I lost by default.

  It wasn’t a town, but the ruins of one. Old ruins with new inhabitants. An array of campfires sprouted among the fallen buildings.

  We stopped a few hundred yards short of the encampment. I waved the others back and moved forward through cattails. My night vision was better.

  I was back quickly. “They’ve got sentries out, but it’s not a military camp. It’s mostly women and children.”

  “Refugees,” Dee said.

  “I think so. It should be safe enough if we don’t spook them.”

  We approached slowly, trying to look as unthreatening as possible. Prophetess and Dee looked about as harmless as you could imagine - each was tall but thin, with nothing at all warlike about them. As for me - I stayed a little bit behind the other two.

  “Hallo the camp,” Dee called when we were within fifty yards of the nearest sentry. He was a boy about my age, big but armed only with a pitchfork. He gripped it in both hands and shouted, “Who’s there?”

  The sentries had torches set around their positions to protect themselves from the Darkness, but as a result they were night-blind and could see nothing outside the little circle of firelight.

  “We are simple travelers. I am a historian and teller of tales. My companions are religious pilgrims.”

  “Come into the light where I can see you.”

  As we reached the ring of torches the sentry started, stepped back and poked his pitchfork in my direction. “Hey, he’s Select!”

  “Why, just so,” Dee agreed easily. “The Select travel like the rest of us and have the same needs for food and shelter. As it happens, he is the protector of the young lady.”

  The boy’s brow furrowed. “I don’t think the Reverend’s gonna like this.”

  “Well then by all means take us to him, and we’ll let the man decide for himself.”

  The sentry nodded his head once. “Sure. Come on with me,” he said, and abandoned his post to lead us deeper into the camp.

  “If it’s going to be any trouble we can just keep walking,” I said, but he ignored me.

  “Surely it’s better to spend the night around a nice, safe, warm fire,” Dee said. “After all, the worst that can happen is they turn us out.”

  My pulse was quickening and adrenaline was starting to flow. I looked for conveniently shadowed paths out of the ruins. “That’s not the worst that can happen. In case it had escaped you in your travels, some people don’t like the Select very much.”

  “I’m sure the Reverend will be perfectly reasonable,” Dee said soothingly.

  “Abomination!” the Reverend shrieked, pointing a quivering, bony finger at me. “Loris, you fool, how could you allow this perversion among us?” The man’s bulging, blue eyes swiveled to skewer the sentry who had accompanied us.

  The boy paled, stammered, then turned accusingly to Dee. “He said they was religious pilgrims.”

  “Does ‘I told you so’ seem about right?” I muttered.

  “Shut up, Minos,” Prophetess hissed.

  The refugee camp centered on what had been the town square. The Reverend had taken over a largely intact building of bricks and columns that might have been a town hall, or maybe just a post office. Bonfires burned brightly in the square, and many of the refugees had set up ramshackle tents in no particular organization.

  Apparently the Reverend had just finished some sort of address to his flock when we arrived. Very obviously he was not pleased to see us. With “us” more specifically meaning “me.”

  “And it did not occur to you to wonder what sort of vile rites this creature might follow? ‘Religion’ does not mean ‘true religion,’ Loris. Aren’t our misfortunes enough without further tempting the Lord?”

  A small crowd was beginning to gather. This was probably more entertaining than most of the Reverend’s sermons. Nobody seemed overtly hostile yet, but “stone the infidels” rolls off the tongue pretty quickly and we were seriously outnumbered.

  “What is the nature of your troubles, Reverend?” asked Prophetess.

  “Who are you to ask, woman?”

  She considered the question for a moment. “Just a humble servant of God trying to do his will as best I may.”

  He blew air contemptuously. “Strange company in which you do it.” Still, a little bit of the fight went out of him. He looked older, then, and tired. His face was lined, and his hair was white. If he had brushed or combed it, it wasn’t recently.

  “The Hawk’s Nest let fly its birds of prey. I suppose you know that.” We nodded. “The armies made their way south by different paths. The autarch has not so much one army as different bands of cutthroats, each with its own captain. Word came to us that Black Keorg’s troops were marching toward our town.

  “Of all the Hawks, he’s the worst. As soon burn a city as pass by it. A judgment of the Lord, to have Keorg’s locusts descend on you. The iniquities of our town fathers brought it down upon us. I saw the Lord’s vengeance and gathered up those who would hear me and we fled, not even looking back lest we be struck down like Lot’s wife.

  “I led our people to the river. South of here stands a bridge, which by God’s grace is still passable. I thought we would cross out of this forsaken wilderness into a better land, in the Source. They say Stephen is a righteous man. But his sentries turned us back. Not interested in taking in vagabonds, they said.” His mouth worked like he was planning to spit. “I might have reasoned with them, but they told us that hell’s whore Yoshana had marched her legions up through the Green Heart and was making her way up the eastern river through the Source. I’ll not settle where that demon has corrupted the ground with her passing.”

  And the grapes were probably sour anyway. I exchanged looks with Prophetess. Yoshana was not only ahead of us, but in our path.
/>   “But winter is coming, and we have only what we brought with us.”

  “How many are you?” asked Prophetess.

  “A hundred and a bit more. Most in the town would not listen and now lie dead, I’m sure.”

  There was no way for a hundred townfolk to live off the land in the winter. The Reverend might or might not have saved his flock from the Hawks, but if they stayed here he had doomed them for certain.

  “So what’s the plan now?” I asked.

  The look he gave me for daring to speak could have cut glass. “Now the Lord provides, abomination. Your kind never understood God’s providence, but it is infinite.”

  I really should have just shut up - something of a recurring theme in my life - but any sympathy I had for his plight had evaporated. Funny how being called an abomination can do that. “So to be perfectly clear, you think God wants you to sit here until you starve?”

  “God’s plan is not for you to know!” he thundered.

  “I’ve got a real live prophet here, let’s ask her,” I snapped. Putting my foot all the way into my mouth after Prophetess had so carefully avoided that point.

  “Blasphemy!” His face was turning all sorts of interesting colors. White had rapidly shifted to red, and was now moving on toward purple.

  I shot a quick glance around to see if anyone was about to brain me with a stick yet. Thankfully, they seemed to just be watching the show. So far.

  Dee, who generally personified the phrase discretion is the better part of valor, inexplicably piped up. “In fact, Reverend Sir, I’ve seen the lady cast out the Darkness with my own eyes.”

  The Reverend’s mouth opened and then shut. His eyes narrowed. “So. A false prophet in the company of a cursed race, with her herald to go before her to announce her lies.” He turned in a circle, taking in his followers. “You see, truly the end times are upon us. The Book of Creed said it would end so. Even now the servants of the Darkness Radiant walk among us.” He spat in the dirt. “On your way to join your mistress Yoshana, hellspawn? You’ll find no souls to take here.”

  Now the crowd was starting to look ugly. People nodded their heads and grumbled agreement, angry expressions on their faces.

  While I was taking a deep breath and considering our options for getting out of this with our skins, Prophetess decided on a different approach.

  She took two steps forward, putting her nose within a foot of the Reverend’s face. “You’re wrong. And you’re a fool. You are the servant who hid away the talent his lord gave him, because he was too fearful and too stupid to do his master’s will. The Lord has commanded me to oppose Yoshana. If you heard him you would oppose her too instead of cowering. Now you’ve consigned not just yourself but your people to the darkness.”

  She turned too, taking in the crowd just as the Reverend had done. “A week’s walk to the southwest is a walled village called Brambledge. Their harvest was abundant this year. I cast the Darkness out of the miller’s daughter there. Go to them and tell them I sent you, and they are to take you in. They will do it.”

  She stuck her face even closer to the Reverend’s. “You can lead your people there as a shepherd should, or you can stay here by yourself and rot. It’s for you to decide if you’re the good shepherd, or just the hired man who flees when the wolf comes.”

  And with that she turned her back on him and pushed her way through the crowd. Dee and I hurried after her.

  We hadn’t gone fifty feet when the boy Loris and two others caught up with us. I loosened my blade fractionally in its sheath, but he said, “Can we go with you?”

  “Why?” asked Prophetess.

  “If you’re going to stop Yoshana, you’ll need help. And we want to do something, not just hide away like you said.”

  Prophetess smiled. “And that’s how the Lord provides. Get your things.”

  As the three boys hurried off, I said to her, “Aren’t those people going to have trouble with the drelb? There might be more in that forest.”

  She shrugged and kept walking. “We all have our bears to cross.”

  9. Choosing the Way

  “So I’m guessing you still don’t want to just give up and go home,” I murmured to Prophetess.

  She gave me a dismissive smile. “It would hardly be fair to disappoint Loris, Doral, and Hadal just because Yoshana is in our way.” Those being our three new friends. My immediate impression was that none of them was the swiftest sheep in the flock, but they were young and strong and enthusiastic. If they had also been veteran soldiers, and we had several thousand more of them, we would have made a formidable challenge to Yoshana’s armies.

  “We can’t just follow her up the river,” I said.

  “No,” she agreed. “I think we should go north, try to get around them.”

  That would take us closer to the ice sheets with winter coming on. Still, we should make better time than an army, and there was merit in the idea.

  “If we went farther north we could go to Our Lady,” I suggested. “They could help us decide what to do.” Which I hoped would be to turn back.

  “I know what we need to do.”

  The sanctuary at Our Lady was the seat of the Universal Church in what was left of the known world. For Prophetess to suggest that she didn’t need the direction of her own church seemed presumptuous, if not blasphemous.

  She put her hand lightly on my arm. “There’s so much I don’t know. But what I have to do - that I know. That, he’s told me.”

  We walked on a bit. “You certainly seemed very definite with the poor Reverend,” I said.

  She snorted. “I’m not going to have some fool Reborn question my faith.”

  I was taken aback. “That’s a little harsh, isn’t it? You believe in the same God. I didn’t think there were that many differences in doctrine.”

  Bad move.

  “Ah,” interjected Dee. “There are in fact centuries of doctrinal differences and quite a bit of accumulated animosity. In brief, perhaps the most obvious distinction is in the belief of the literal transubstantiation of the eucharist…”

  Fortunately I was tired enough to stop listening. We made camp half an hour later in a clearing near the water’s edge.

  “… but building on the role of the priest or minister as intercessor between the supplicant and the divine, there is of course the rejection by the Universal Church of the Books of Jome and Creed as canonical Books of the Fall, which…”

  “Yes, exactly, Dee. Now let’s get a fire built and set a watch.”

  Dee looked disgruntled. “Surely Huey, Dewey, and Louie can take care of that for us.”

  “Who?”

  Dee’s look of disgust deepened. “I was referring in a jocular way to… oh, never mind. It’s not funny if you have to explain it.”

  Hard to argue with that.

  Hadal, Doral, and Loris - or Huey, Dewey, and Louie, according to Dee - treated Prophetess with all the reverence due to… well, a prophet. It was a little odd. As impressed as Dee was with her, in his case the fascination really was academic. For me - I wasn’t quite sure how I felt. But it was nice to have someone else make the fire and take watch, which they did.

  “Let me take that pack for you, Prophetess,” Doral offered the next morning. Hadal and Loris looked upset that they hadn’t thought of it.

  That seemed like a bit much. “Tess has been carrying that pack for five hundred miles,” I said. Was I really petty enough to revert to that nickname just to demystify her? Yes, evidently I was.

  Six eyes glared daggers at the Select who dared speak for a prophet of the Lord.

  “Tess can carry her own pack,” Prophetess said with a smile. “Tess can also speak for herself.”

  Why did I keep starting this kind of exchange if I never won? Maybe Select really weren’t as smart as we thought we were.

  Five miles later Loris finally worked up the courage to ask her, “Why does the Select call you Tess?”

  “It’s his little joke,” she answere
d. “The prophet, Tess.”

  Loris frowned. “That’s disrespectful.”

  “It’s kind of funny, though,” she said.

  The crippled paleo was laughing at me. I couldn’t imagine what he found amusing. His two dead friends were lying next to him, lifeless eyes glaring at me accusingly. But he just kept chuckling and pointing, even though his left leg was at a completely unnatural angle.

  “What’s so funny?” I snapped at him. “Want me to break your other knee?”

  He lifted his arm higher, waving his finger. I abruptly realized he was pointing behind me.

  I didn’t want to turn, but I did.

  The seething mass of Darkness was shaped roughly like a man. Somehow, a ragged cluster of sharp, white teeth floated where a mouth would be. Red, flaming eyes narrowed as they swept me with deepest contempt.

  “I am Yoshana,” it said. And reached for me.

  That was all the sleep I got that night.

  “You’re up early, Minos,” Prophetess said, hours later. I growled something incoherent and took another swipe of the whetstone down my blade. If I was going to keep killing people for her, I might as well be good at it. Until someone or something stronger got me instead.

  She gave me a long look and turned away. We broke camp efficiently enough and continued north. I drifted to the back of the group, and Dee fell in beside me. “Fascinating, our friend’s ability to draw followers,” he said. “Most of the biblical prophets were solitary, though the greater ones, such as Moses, or perhaps even Jesus or Mohammed -”

  “Why don’t you go lecture Huey, Dewey, and Louie,” I snarled. “I’m sure they could use the instruction.”

  Dee looked hurt, but moved ahead without another word.

  Annoying as the man was, snapping at him felt like kicking a puppy. But the dream had put me in a foul mood, and it looked like I was going to take it out on everyone around me.

  And why shouldn’t I? A cross-country trip with a pretty girl was not improved by the addition of a windbag occultist and three illiterate oafs stricken with religious fervor. I had killed two people and crippled a third, all of whom undoubtedly deserved it, but I was still having nightmares about them. I’d been insulted, chased, and pummeled. And now we were charging madly forward to thwart the plans of the greatest warrior of the modern age, because a mildly insane farm girl thought she could talk to God.