Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle

by Malcolm McKenzie

  I could hear Dee’s teeth chattering as we lay down in our bedrolls.

  “It would seem only prudent to huddle together for warmth,” he muttered.

  That set off a debate. We were all cold, and everyone could see the wisdom of his comment. But as far as Huey, Dewey, and Louie were concerned, Prophetess was a holy icon. It would be a sort of blasphemy to huddle up against her.

  In the end, Dee was placed on one side of Prophetess, on the theory that he was old and harmless; I didn’t think he was that old or entirely harmless. And I was placed on her other side, apparently based on the idea that I wasn’t quite human, so it was a bit like her curling up next to a dog. I was offended, but I got to sleep next to her so I wasn’t going to complain.

  “It’s also strange but true that when huddled together, warmth is shared more efficiently if the group is unclothed,” Dee commented.

  And then he let out a sharp grunt as Prophetess elbowed him in the ribs.

  So no, neither that old nor that harmless… but a woman who could face down the Darkness could take care of herself.

  “I’m not looking forward to more of that,” I grumbled as we broke camp the next morning. Even sharing warmth, it had been a cold and uncomfortable night. And as winter set in, food would begin to get scarce.

  “If we continue north we should find a major road east to Crossroads,” Dee said. “That’s as much of a trade route as is left in our world - there should be inns.”

  “We’re almost completely broke,” I pointed out.

  “I’ve never yet found a place where I couldn’t trade a story for a meal and a bed,” he replied. He paused a bit. “Of course, I’m not sure about the rest of you.”

  “We could be traveling players. You can be the narrator, Prophetess can be the damsel in distress, I can be the villain, and our three new friends can be… oxen?”

  “Ah, haha, you jest…” We looked at each other. It wasn’t the worst idea I’d ever had.

  As it turned out, we had no opportunity to test the idea. The road wasn’t completely overgrown with weeds, suggesting it saw some traffic. But there was no sign of a town, a village, or even an isolated inn. The rolling hills were lightly wooded, the land less threatening than it had been west of the river. But in the end, it was no more hospitable.

  I wounded a pheasant with a rock, but it flapped lamely into a thick copse of trees and vanished. We were almost out of food, and I heaved a sigh and waded into the woods, hacking at underbrush with my sheathed sword. But the bird had vanished.

  Close to nightfall we passed beneath an underpass and found its shelter supplemented by a wooden lean-to, a single wall of crooked planks braced at an angle by a pair of timbers. A stone-lined fire pit was the only amenity. A tiny stream nearby showed why this site had been chosen.

  We gathered wood and boiled water and shared out what was left of the food. With fire and shelter, we were far more comfortable than we had been the night before.

  “I don’t suppose there’s any more food?” Hadal asked wistfully. None of those boys looked like they missed a lot of meals. They weren’t fat, but each was solid, with the slight softness of someone who’s never spent time starving.

  I glared at him.

  “I didn’t think so,” he sighed.

  I sat next to Dee. “How well do you actually know this area?”

  “Well, in general terms, I’m certainly well acquainted with the geography of the entire continent, and the Source in particular. If you wish me to reduce that encyclopedic knowledge to the raw specifics of this particular, forsaken tract of land…”

  “You’ve never been here before and have no idea where we are.”

  “Erm. I would think we’re about a week southwest of Crossroads. But much sooner than that, once we find the road I mentioned before, we should begin to encounter regular settlements.”

  “How long until that road, do you think?”

  “Oh, I should hope not more than another day.”

  It was more than another day. The next morning dawned colder than the last, and the temperature dropped as the day went on. Whether it was because of the coming winter or because six people made more noise than two, we saw few animals. The only one that came close enough to kill was a skunk, which glared at us as if daring me to pit my slingshot against its tail. We moved on.

  I’m reasonably sure we could have found something to eat if we’d taken time to split up and hunt, but we preferred to push on. It wasn’t until the sun was falling that we realized that had been a mistake. We found another shelter almost exactly like the first at the side of the road and gathered acorns to boil for soup. They were just barely better than nothing. Maybe.

  At noon the next day I asked Dee, “Any chance we missed that road of yours?”

  “Oh, no, I shouldn’t think so,” he answered. “As I recall it’s anchored at the western end by a trading town.”

  “Not, by any chance, that town that didn’t let us in?”

  “Erm, no, I think not. That is… no. No, a town that thrives on trade would hardly be so inhospitable.”

  “Unless, for example, something had changed recently. For example, the Darkness Radiant passing through the area.”

  “Ah. Well. An interesting point.” His brow furrowed in thought. “Still, I think not.”

  I sighed. “I suppose if we hit the ice sheets we’ll know we’ve gone too far.”

  “Exactly,” Dee said, brightening.

  With that dubious reassurance in mind, we gave an hour of the afternoon over to foraging. That netted us two scrawny squirrels, a double handful of frost-burned, slightly overripe blackberries, and a bundle of cattails that Doral swore were edible.

  The cattails were easier to chew than boiled acorns, but that was about all that could be said for them. The berries made me wish we had found them a month earlier when they would still have been good. The squirrels we saved for night, when we would hopefully be able to make a fire.

  “If the Lord’s going to provide, couldn’t he provide a big, fat cow that would die of a heart attack when it saw us?” I muttered.

  “Don’t presume on the Lord’s mercy,” Prophetess rebuked me. “Although that cow would be nice.”

  “Maybe a nice wild hog,” said Hadal.

  “Do you have a boar spear?” I asked. “Because I don’t. Those things are mean. If we find one we’re more likely to spend the night sitting in a tree than roasting it.”

  “Then what are you going to use to kill the cow?” he demanded.

  “That’s why I want it to die of natural causes at our feet, remember? If I’m hoping for things, I don’t see why I should hope for things that are realistic. If God can provide mana from heaven, he should be able to deliver a cow with a heart condition.”

  I shot a look at Prophetess to see if she was offended, but she seemed to be lost in thought. Possibly daydreaming of steak.

  No cow presented itself that day. Nor did a town. The shelters seemed to have been positioned assuming a steady pace without stops. It was dark by the time we found the next one. The lean-to here was more exposed than the others. We hadn’t seen an overpass all day.

  The shelters were angled to block the wind from the northwest. In the night a frigid gust swirled around from the east and blew out the fire. I woke shivering in the dark. Somewhere in the distance, wolves or coyotes were howling. Maybe they were cold too.

  Wolves would be a problem if they were hungry enough, although I didn’t think they would attack such a large group. A force of six was enough that wolves, drelb, or even paleos would likely steer clear of us. But numbers wouldn’t protect us from hunger or the weather.

  I couldn’t quite make myself get up and gather more firewood. Instead I drifted in and out of an uncomfortable sleep for the rest of the night.

  The next day dawned colder still. In fact, “dawn” was something of a misstatement. The sun wasn’t visible at all - only the lighter gray of the lowering sky told us it was up.

&nb
sp; Of course, it could get worse. Of course, it did.

  Around midday a dark, gray wall appeared in our path a mile away, stretching up into the sky. We stopped and stared. It was moving toward us.

  “What is that?” demanded Prophetess.

  I’d seen it before. “Rain.”

  Five minutes later I was soaked through and as cold as I had ever been. “We might as well have swum up the Muddy,” I shouted over the pounding drumbeat of the water. “We wouldn’t be any wetter, and we’d be warmer.”

  “Not funny!” Loris shouted back.

  And it really wasn’t. If the rain had been any colder it would have been ice. It came down in an almost vertical sheet, but with just enough wind behind it to blow the stinging drops into our faces. For the first few minutes we pushed into a shambling trot to see if it would pass as quickly as it came, but when it didn’t, our pace slowed to a sodden, dismal trudge.

  Prophetess murmured under her breath, over and over. I thought it was a prayer, but when I got closer, I could just make out the words. “I’m cold. I’m cold.”

  “It can’t keep this up for too much longer,” I said, hoping that like the occasional torrential rain on the Flow, this one would blow through quickly.

  But it didn’t. We were all shivering, our clothes far too wet to retain any heat.

  “Let’s get into the trees,” Loris suggested.

  We staggered off the road, wading through standing water in a little gully at the side. Waist-high grasses lashed at us. But the trees were thin, and their autumn leaves were falling away under the force of the water. There was no shelter there and we returned to the path. Doral slipped and fell heavily as we climbed the slight embankment, and Hadal and Loris had to help him up.

  The surface was now awash, turning holes and ruts into deep pools that could catch at our feet. Stepping in them couldn’t make us any wetter, but risked turning an ankle.

  Trying to find food was hopeless. Not that it mattered. Hypothermia would kill us before hunger did. Yoshana wasn’t even going to be a factor.

  Eventually the rain slowed from a torrent to a drizzle. The wind picked up further, though, whipping stinging droplets that were almost ice into our faces and stealing the heat from our bodies. My ears and toes had stopped hurting. I knew that was not a good thing. Prophetess and Dee were both shivering uncontrollably - as the rain let up I could actually hear their teeth chatter.

  If the temperature dropped below freezing I wasn’t confident we would all survive the night.

  “Hold up there!”

  I raised my head and was stunned to see a tall iron gate in front of me. Not more than a dozen paces away two figures bulked huge in the misty spray.

  “Please,” Prophetess croaked. “We need shelter.”

  “Well, I daresay,” said one of the figures. “You look like drowned rats.”

  “Don’t be cruel, Tarm,” said the other. “Welcome to Opportunity. Come forward and be recognized.”

  “I t-t-t-t-told you so,” shivered Dee, though for once the smugness of his words was overshadowed by the simple relief in his tone.

  Up close the figures resolved into two men of average size, made large by broad-brimmed leather hats and ponchos. Each held a spear casually in one hand.

  “A Select,” said one, and I tensed. But he only added, “Don’t get many of you through here. Where are you coming from?”

  I was too tired to even think of lying. “Rockwall. Across the Muddy. We’ve been on the road for weeks. Haven’t had a decent meal or a bed in days. Tried to stop at a town a few days south of here but they wouldn’t let us in.”

  I instantly regretted my rambling, but the guards nodded. “Not real hospitable in Coalville. No worries here, friend. Just give me your arm for testing, and you can go in and get warm.”

  “My arm?”

  “Yeah.” The nearer guard pulled a knife from his belt. “Got to test for the Darkness.”

  “What? We’re not infected.”

  “Didn’t say you were, friend, or I’d be poking you with the spear instead of the knife. But rules is rules. I don’t know how you do things in Rockwall, but here we test for infection before we let people inside the walls. It’s not personal, you know. Not just strangers get tested. Our own folks after they come back from traveling too.”

  Any other time I might have argued. But there was no fight left in me. I extended my arm and rolled up my soaking sleeve.

  The guard made a quick cut on my forearm, not deep. The blade was sharp and my flesh was numb. I barely felt it. He watched blood ooze out for a couple of seconds then nodded his head, satisfied.

  “What does that prove?” Prophetess asked.

  The guard looked at her as if she were simple. “The Darkness will close up a wound like that.”

  “Always?”

  I thought of the miller’s daughter in Brambledge, free of cuts and bruises despite being chained and thrown in a cell, and the instantaneous healing of the drelb’s paw.

  “I dunno, I suppose a Hellguard or Overlord maybe could control it, let themselves bleed if they wanted to,” the man said thoughtfully. “But we’ve got bigger problems if there’s Hellguards or Overlords outside.” He stopped, struck by a sudden thought. “You’re not with the Darkness Radiant, are you?”

  I choked out a laugh that turned into a cough. “Does it look like it?”

  “I suppose not.”

  The others submitted to the test without complaint, and the guards opened the gate.

  “There’s inns just inside, either side of the street. Over by the east gate they’re a bit finer, but these ones down here are cheaper - don’t see as much trade, you know.”

  I nodded thanks and started forward.

  “Oh, and three doors up on the right is an outfitters. Don’t know how much further you’re going, but you’ll need better gear if you don’t want to freeze.”

  We picked the first inn on the right, a ramshackle wooden structure with a faded sign that appeared to portray a juggling rooster, simply because it was the first one we passed. I let out a sigh of relief as I crossed the threshold. Inside it was dim, smoky, and stuffy - and warm, and dry. A fire crackled in the hearth, and our whole group was soon crowded around it.

  I bartered my silver ring and steel scissors for a large room that the six of us would share. Dee offered an evening of storytelling in exchange for supper and breakfast. The innkeeper, a short, fat, greasy man, was eager to trade gossip, especially once he decided it was true that we came from the wilds across the great river.

  “Rumors may be the only trade goods we’ll be having for the season,” he grunted. “Don’t reckon much else’ll be coming out of Crossroads for a time.”

  “And why is that?” Dee inquired around a mouthful of stew.

  “Why, Yoshana’s army’s marching on the city, that’s why,” he announced, pleased with the drama of his declaration.

  Prophetess’ spoon clattered on the table.

  “We had heard she was following the river,” Dee said quietly into the silence.

  “Ah, that she was, but Stephen sent an army down the river to meet her. So she shifted north and avoided him. Naught worth speaking of between her and Stephensburg now, so they say. A neat maneuver, but then, I do suppose it’s hard to outflank the Darkness itself.” His tone conveyed only admiration, no dismay at the fact that the legions of the world’s most infamous Overlord now marched on his nation’s capital.

  “We could go back to the river,” I suggested hesitantly.

  “And be at least a week behind,” Prophetess retorted. “No. We have to continue north, get around her that way.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “The Lord’s hand is in this. I must pray and seek counsel at Our Lady.”

  I opened my mouth to point out that had been my idea and then, with a great effort of will, shut it again. Dee beamed at me. “And that,” he said with all the pride of a doting father, “is the beginning of wisdom.”

  10. City of Refuge


  Our host informed us that Our Lady was at least a week to the northeast, more likely two with the winter coming. We were completely unequipped for another two weeks. We needed furs, oiled leather outerwear to shed the rain, provisions. The outfitter next door was more than happy to provide all of that - except that we had nothing to offer in trade.

  Dee and Prophetess each promised the burly, bearded man immortality after their own fashion. Dee swore the merchant and his business would be celebrated in story and song. Prophetess was eloquent in seeking his support for her divine mission.

  The outfitter was completely unmoved.

  “I see no path forward - or back, for that matter,” Dee murmured as the three of us huddled over a table back at the inn. “Under normal circumstances, we could have hired out as guards and laborers on a caravan to Crossroads. But now no one’s going east, there’s no trade north at this time of year, and commerce to the south with our inhospitable friends in Coalville is sporadic. I’m afraid we’re stuck here - we’ll need to find some sort of employment until trade resumes.”

  Tears of frustration started in Prophetess’ eyes. “We can move faster than Yoshana’s army, Dee, but not if we’re not moving. There has to be a way. We’ll search the city. There must be someone we can persuade to take us north or give us the supplies to go ourselves.”

  My stomach churned. By any sane measure, the option I was considering was idiotic. What I was contemplating, for a cause I didn’t believe in, would be an outrage against my heritage.

  So, if it were done, it were best done quickly.

  “I’ll be back,” I muttered, grabbed my walking stick, and left the inn.

  Dee and Prophetess gawked at me when I returned twenty minutes later laden with gear.

  “You didn’t rob him?” Dee burst out.

  “No. There’s other uses for a sword.”