Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle

by Malcolm McKenzie

  The fact that I’d idiotically volunteered for it didn’t make me feel any better.

  Still, the sun was bright, and the day was cool and pleasant. Pines began to crowd the shoreline as we moved north, but it was still easily passable. If there was anything in the woods, it must have decided that six of us made an unattractive target.

  Slowly I began to feel that I should apologize to Prophetess and Dee. I sensed that I had been unreasonable, or at best uncharitable. And only a couple of hours after we started, we could make out a bridge across the river. In short, I was beginning to feel better.

  Until we got closer.

  “You’re not planning on crossing that!” I burst out.

  “Look at the river, Minos,” Prophetess replied. “It’s starting to turn west ahead of us. Who knows how far it’ll take us out of our way if we don’t cross now.”

  “I can guess how far it’ll take us out of our way when we fall in and get swept downstream - those of us who can swim.”

  The structure couldn’t possibly have been intended as a bridge, although I couldn’t imagine what else it was. It was simply a pair of rusted metal tubes, each two feet across. A web of wires strung from two gigantic towers suspended it over the water across the river’s huge width.

  “Maybe we’re supposed to crawl through the tubes?” Doral asked.

  That seemed like an even worse idea than walking over them.

  “They’re sunk into the ground,” I observed as we reached the end of the span. “Even if we wanted to wedge ourselves into a tiny, dark, mile-long tunnel that might be filled with who knows what, there’s no way in.”

  “Not much more than a quarter mile across here, I shouldn’t think,” Dee said.

  It was true enough that the banks were much closer here than they had been farther south, but even a quarter mile balancing on a pair of tubes seemed excessive.

  “I still don’t think this is a good idea.”

  “Look on the bright side,” Prophetess said. “If it’s not meant to be crossed, it’s probably not guarded on the other side.”

  Not meant to be crossed was putting it mildly. The tubes came straight up from the ground before turning at a right angle nearly a hundred feet in the air. Metal rungs went up the sides of both tubes, suggesting a ladder, but they were badly rusted - some all the way through. I set my jaw and climbed, careful not to look down. Why did the person who thought this was a bad idea - and who was also afraid of heights, if truth be told - have to go first?

  The group had decided that as a Select, I was both the heaviest and the strongest. So if the ladder could support me, it could support anyone, but if it broke, I had the best chance of hanging on while dangling by one arm.

  I suspected that as a Select, I was simply the most expendable.

  A hundred feet was a lot of ladder with a pack on my back and my sword shoved uncomfortably through my belt beneath it, where I had hoped it wouldn’t interfere with my climbing. About halfway up I got careless.

  “Dammit!”

  A particularly corroded rung gave way under my right hand. I swung out backwards for an endless heartbeat, left hand and feet slipping, then righted myself. I clutched the ladder for a few trembling moments before I realized my hand was bleeding. I stared at the ugly, jagged stump of the rung above me.

  “Let’s hope that famous Select immune system resists tetanus,” I muttered.

  “Are you all right, Minos?” Prophetess called from below.

  “I’ll live.” Probably. For a while. “Watch the rung here - it snapped.”

  Of course, the fact that the ladder below had held for me didn’t necessarily mean it wouldn’t break under the next person. I briefly entertained myself by picturing Dee with lockjaw. I had to imagine that after a couple of hours of being unable to speak, his head would explode from the pressure.

  I reached the top without further incident, only to realize that had been the easy part. The bridge stretched in front of me. Was it really only a quarter of a mile? It looked a lot farther now. Through the foot-wide gap separating the two tubes, I could see the ground below and the expanse of the river in front. There was a sort of metal mesh platform stretched over the tubes, but the thin wires from which is was woven were in worse condition than the ladder, probably more of a hazard than walking on the round tubes themselves would have been. Heavy cables supported the bridge, with thinner cables at regular intervals creating a kind of railing - but those too were heavily rusted, and some had already snapped, hanging loose like giant cobwebs.

  “Are you all right, Minos?” Prophetess repeated.

  I didn’t want to look back, or down. I nodded my head, although she probably couldn’t see it, and started forward.

  “Select are disciplined. Select don’t have phobias. Specifically, Select aren’t afraid of heights,” I whispered to myself. Unfortunately, whoever else might have believed that, I didn’t.

  A quarter mile, if that’s really all it was, is still a long way when you’re on a rusty metal bridge five feet wide and a hundred feet in the air. I could hear the others following, metal ringing behind me. I still didn’t look back. Or down.

  I was trying to find something else to think about. Unfortunately, halfway across I began to wonder what this bridge had been intended to transport. Not people, certainly. What would move through those tubes?

  Legend said the Darkness could not cross water, but clearly it had crossed the Muddy. Maybe it had help? At some point would the Hellguard have wanted to bring it across? Might they have built a pipeline to take it over the river, disappearing into a hidden tunnel on the other side, shielding it from daylight?

  And if so, was the pipeline still in use?

  I stopped dead as I visualized a river of the Darkness rushing an inch below my feet.

  Logic said that even if the tubes were flooded with the Darkness, the wisest course was to keep moving to get off the bridge as fast as I could. But on the other side of the river were Yoshana’s armies, already in our path to Stephensburg. Whether the Darkness was beneath me or not at this very moment, I was charging straight into it.

  Why had it seemed so much easier to cross the forests on my way west to the Flow, so much harder as I came back east? Because this time I was going the wrong way.

  People like you die up there, Dorren had said.

  “Minos?”

  Prophetess’ voice was close behind me now. I looked down. The river rolled along below. The fall would be survivable, and I could swim. I could float back down to Rock Town on a raft, and walk from there to the Flow in relative safety. An end to this fool’s errand.

  Prophetess had three protectors now - four if you counted Dee - and certainly didn’t need me. Taking a quick dive off the edge of the bridge would be very briefly harder than going forward, but vastly safer and easier in the end. I rested my fingers on the rust-browned cable to my right. There was no reason not to go over.

  Except that I had said I would take her to Stephensburg.

  I shook my head. “You really are an idiot, Minos,” I murmured under my breath. And walked on.

  No one fell off the bridge or the ladder. In fact, I was the only one who took any injury at all in the crossing. Once I was safely back on the ground I cut a strip off my tunic, wrapped it around my hand, and hoped for the best.

  It probably says something horrible about my character that I would have felt a lot better if someone else had gotten hurt, or at least lost their pack.

  This side of the river looked much like the other, except that here the red, gold, and brown leaves had already begun to fall with the coming of autumn. It seemed that there was a bit more of a chill in the air as well.

  Prophetess had been right - there was no sign of guards, or any other form of human presence. The lack of people didn’t make me feel any more comfortable about the purpose of those tubes, but in the bright sunlight it felt silly to voice my fears. When Hadal and Doral decided to fish from the sandbar jutting into the river benea
th the bridge, I didn’t object - although I watched the rusted span from the corner of my eye.

  Either they were amazing fishermen, or the most gullible fish in the world made their home around that sandbar. Half an hour after they cobbled together improvised fishing poles from sticks, we had enough bass to easily feed us all.

  Dee patted his belly and belched contentedly. “Fresh fish, a warm fire, bright sunlight, and good company. What more could a man ask for?”

  “How about all of this at our destination without a hostile army in our way?” I snapped.

  Dee just smiled lazily. “Where’s your sense of adventure, Minos?”

  Easy for him to say. Judging from past experience, “adventure” meant I fought monsters and savages while he ran away.

  I swallowed that comment and confined myself to, “My sense of adventure is saying we should get moving while there’s still light. We’re lucky that Tess was right about the bridge not being guarded, but somehow that gives me a feeling this might not be a healthy place to be at night.”

  I glared at the tubes. Nothing horrible poured out, but they say a watched pot never boils. I really didn’t like the idea of this one boiling behind my back.

  I stood up. “Time to go.”

  Dee looked wistfully at the fire. “It’s nice and warm here,” he protested. “And there are fish.”

  “And the longer we stay here the colder it’s going to get. Let’s get moving.”

  “And where exactly shall we go, O sage guide?” He waved his arm expansively, taking in the tree-dotted grasslands stretching east from the river.

  I pointed. “Stephensburg is that way.” And I started walking through the grass.

  There was no road to be found. The grass gave way to a thin forest, carpeted with fallen red and gold leaves. An hour later we found another river blocking our path.

  “Oh, for…” I muttered. The water was only forty feet across, a trivial barrier compared to the Muddy, but just as impassable without a bridge.

  “Think we can ford it?” Loris asked.

  “You have any idea how deep it is?” I retorted. There was almost no current, but the water was a stagnant, dirty brown. The bottom could have been three feet down or thirty.

  “So what do you suggest?”

  I shrugged. “We need to go north anyway. Might as well follow this thing until we find a bridge.”

  Miles went by and we found no sign of a bridge. We did see a beaver dam.

  “You’re not seriously thinking of crossing that?” Prophetess blurted as I stopped and considered the accumulation of sticks.

  I had to laugh. “You made me cross half a mile of metal tube that might have had the Darkness flowing through it, but you won’t cross fifty feet of beaver dam?”

  “The Darkness?” Her face went white. “What makes you think that?”

  Doral, Hadal, and Loris crossed themselves and looked around fearfully.

  “I don’t know it. But those tubes were for transporting something, and it wasn’t people.” I shrugged. “It’s behind us now.”

  “Then let’s get it farther behind us,” said Loris. His feet were on the dam before he turned and looked at Prophetess. “Please?”

  She nodded. “Let’s go.”

  The land began to fold into rolling hills on the other side of the river. Sundown might come upon us quickly if it caught us in a valley, and our shadows were stretching a dozen feet in front of us when we crested a rise and sighted the town. It was not so much walled as that a ring of buildings had been joined together with brickwork, streets sealed up to leave only one entrance that we could see. The buildings’ lower windows had been bricked up as well, and lights blazed in the upper stories even though it was not yet dark.

  I could see the telltale signs of ruined foundations stretching far past the wall, but the land had mostly been cleared and given over to fields. This town must have shrunk back within its walls hundreds of years ago, at the very beginning of the Age of Fear.

  “Place looks like a fortress,” Loris muttered.

  “What do you s’pose they’re afraid of?” asked one of the others. To be honest, I had a bit of trouble keeping straight which was Hadal and which Doral.

  “The Darkness,” I answered. “It’s thicker the farther east you go. Who knows what else. If they let us in, we may not have to find out the hard way.”

  Maybe I had spooked myself, but it seemed that the sun was racing to the horizon behind us as we made our way through the stubble of harvested corn to the town’s gate. It was a massive thing, wood barred with iron, and even as we approached, it began to swing shut.

  “Hello the town,” Dee called. We quickened our pace.

  A guard in a leather jerkin appeared. The light from a half dozen torches set in the wall cast shadows on his angular face. Under his heavy brows, his eyes looked as black as mine. He turned and over his shoulder snapped, “Telmar!”

  A second man came out, taller than the first. He held a huge, lighted torch, long as a spear. I heard Prophetess draw a sharp breath.

  “That’s not right,” she hissed.

  I looked more closely at the torch. It was a pole seven feet long, with a massive, brass crucifix atop it. At the base of the cross was a vessel that must have contained oil, because flames licked up from it over the metal. Fire spread across the limbs of the crucified Christ, creating a disturbing impression of motion.

  Dee shrugged. “Common enough here in the Source. Fire and cross to ward the Darkness away. These people are Universalists like you, Prophetess.”

  “We don’t set the Lord on fire.”

  He shrugged again.

  We had stopped a dozen yards from the gate. As the sun slipped below the horizon, the looming buildings in front of us only looked more forbidding. With its massive walls and single entrance, this place would not be like the refugee camp - once we went in, there would be no easy way out.

  But the idea of spending the night outside the walls appealed even less. I started forward.

  The burning cross came down and jabbed toward my face like the spear it resembled. Two long paces away I could feel the heat coming off it.

  “What are you doing here?” demanded the first guard, stepping forward. I only then noticed the short sword at his side. His hand was on it.

  “We are simple travelers,” came Dee’s smooth voice from behind me.

  “Travelers from where?” snapped the guard.

  That was the question. How hostile were these people to foreigners? There was a gate on this side of the town, so someone must be expected to use it. My eyes flicked around. We had approached from the southwest, but a road came in from the north. Had the guards seen us coming? Could we claim to be visitors from the next town up the road?

  I had to laugh at myself. We didn’t know what that place was called, or if it even existed. It was hard to imagine a less convincing lie.

  “Across the river,” I said.

  “There’s nothing across the river.” The second man, Telmar, stepped forward and thrust the flaming cross closer to my face.

  “God, he’s Select!”

  The guard’s sword was drawn. I shifted my grip on my walking stick. If I was reading his stance right, I could take the swordsman’s hand off as I unsheathed my blade. The burning crucifix could be a formidable weapon, but two steps would take me inside the man’s guard and then he should be easy to finish. Or, if I misjudged, I would be dead in a few seconds.

  “He’s my bodyguard,” Prophetess said. She stepped forward, her body between me and the swordsman. Who was guarding whom? “It was God’s grace that brought me to him. Without his help I would have been killed by the paleos and the drelb we fought to reach here.”

  There was a collective intake of breath from Huey, Dewey, and Louie. We hadn’t told them about the paleos or the drelb.

  The swordsman looked impressed. But the other’s face only hardened more. “So you’ve been exposed to the Darkness, and now you bring it here?” He
waved the cross, the flames describing a circle in front of my eyes.

  “No one here is infected,” Dee said. “In fact, the lady is a holy woman. With my own eyes I saw her cast the Darkness out of one of its victims.”

  The guard barked out a hard laugh. “The only people who command the Darkness are Yoshana’s legions. So are you a fiend or a fraud? Either way, you can spend the night outside and be on your way without troubling us.”

  We were not having a lot of luck with that story. Dee should probably stop telling it.

  Prophetess was slowly turning red. I set my hand on her arm. “Let it go. The last place we want to be is in a walled town where we’re unwelcome. And it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been turned away from a gate.”

  “It’s the first time for me,” she said tightly.

  “You get used to it.” You didn’t, really, of course. My blood was still pounding in my temples, and I still felt the urge to pull my sword. But that wouldn’t accomplish anything except get some people killed - probably including us. We outnumbered the guards, and I could quite possibly deal with both of them myself. But they would have a lot of friends inside. Some of those were probably watching.

  “We won’t trouble you further,” I said, and turned north.

  “No. You won’t,” snapped the man with the burning crucifix, and holding it high, he turned his back on us and marched through the gate. The other gave a brief, almost apologetic shrug, then followed.

  We made camp in a field north of the town, within sight of the walls. There was no wood at hand to make a fire. I hoped this close to the walls nothing would molest us.

  The night was dark and moonless. To the south, firelight flickered in the town’s slitted windows, casting ominous shadows. Above us the wind chased clouds across the stars. It was colder than it had been on the west side of the Muddy, or perhaps it was just that we were moving north and winter was approaching.