Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle

by Malcolm McKenzie

  I felt my jaw clench. “I don’t think it’s quite the same thing.”

  “No. The Darkness is more dangerous. That’s where your conscience comes into it. Just like fire, the Darkness is going to rage out of control if you let it. So you can’t let it. Sometimes you have to hold it back. Sometimes you have to do something that’s hard, that isn’t expedient. Like keep your boss from killing somebody annoying. Because if you don’t do things like that sometimes, it’ll take your soul.”

  Stephensburg. Grigg stepping into the path of Yoshana’s wrath, protecting Prophetess and me.

  I wasn’t at all sure how wise my next question would be. The death I had avoided at Stephensburg still hovered around me like a clinging mist.

  “And Yoshana? I don’t see her sparing lives when it’s inconvenient to her.”

  “Spared yours, didn’t she? Anyway, Yoshana’s different. She’s so much stronger than any of us. Her will’s as hard as a demon’s. I don’t think the Darkness could ever take her.”

  “Except what’s in the Sorrows,” Roshel said quietly. “Even Yoshana’s afraid of that.”

  Grigg snorted. “Anyone who isn’t an idiot is afraid of that.”

  Shockingly, I didn’t sleep very well after that conversation. The bed was comfortable enough, and a sliver of pale moonlight in the window kept my dim room from being pitch black. It should have kept the nightmares at bay. But it was hard to get to sleep at all when I knew the next day I’d be leaping from the frying pan into the fire.

  “Even Yoshana’s afraid of that,” Roshel had said. What business did I have with something that frightened the Overlords?

  So I was up early the next day, somewhat rested physically but not at all mentally. A carved stone parapet ringed the site. I leaned on it and looked east, shielding my eyes from the rising sun. The land fell away below me in a rocky slope, then rose again, the green hills of the Sorrows marching like waves into the distance.

  I ran my finger over delicate tracery carved in the stone - worn now by the elements, but still evidence of fine work. Whoever had built this place had given an attention to detail that spoke of more than just defense.

  “Quite a view, isn’t it?” Furat repeated, leaning his elbows on the wall.

  “Doesn’t look so bad in the daylight,” I said.

  “Yeah, you’d think that. Once you’re down in there, though… I’ve seen clouds of the Darkness just drifting through the trees, wide enough you can’t see either edge of them. The natives in there…”

  “People still live in there?”

  “Oh, sure. I mean, they walk on two legs and they talk like people. Likely as not to kill you outright, or sacrifice you, though. I think the Darkness is in most of them. But even that doesn’t keep them safe. When it really comes together, condenses… they call those gods. They might be gods. One of the truly big masses, it might not even bother possessing you. Just rip you apart for raw materials so it can keep growing. Some of the bodies that people bring out… sure, a lot of folks die in there speared by the natives, or eaten by wolves or drelb, or even just falling down a hill and breaking their fool necks. But some of them… well.” He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “Not scaring you too much?”

  “Oh hell yeah.”

  “Good.” Furat nodded. “That’s a good place to get killed.”

  “Yoshana said I should be afraid. So did Roshel.”

  “They’re right. I’m no coward, but you wouldn’t get me back in there.”

  So why was I going? It was hard to remember why I’d ever thought this might be a good idea. Was I really helping Prophetess… and if so, how exactly? Or was it because I wanted to be a “factor,” as Roshel had called it?

  I looked over at Furat. The big man was resting easily on his forearms, looking out over the sea of trees. His eyes were nearly as blue as Yoshana’s.

  I said, “Yoshana and Roshel both said this was a game, and you could either be a player or a piece.”

  Furat turned to me. “Maybe. But player or piece, that’s a game where you’re going to get hurt. Me, I’m going to be a spectator just as long as I can.”

  5. The Depths of Sorrow

  I don’t think I’d ever been sorrier to leave a place. The World’s End was beautiful, and Furat was a good host - helped along, no doubt, by his well-founded terror of Yoshana. But my old plastic-sided hovel where I’d lived mining garbage on the Flow seemed like paradise on earth compared to where we were going.

  We had traded our horses to Furat for rations, gallons of small beer, and trade goods that might - or might not - appeal to any natives we encountered. I think Furat got the best of the deal, although I didn’t know what he could do with the horses up there. With what felt like a hundred pounds of gear on my back, I missed my stupid, skittish mount before I was all the way back down the hill. And I wasn’t even carrying a carbine and two bandoliers of shells like the others.

  Nor had I appreciated how relaxed Yoshana’s force had been until suddenly they weren’t. On the decayed remnant of a road, hemmed in by ancient trees, every one of them was twitchily alert in a way I’d never seen. Even in Brom’s stronghold they’d been at their ease. Not now.

  “You’re as good as dead walking in here without being able to control the Darkness,” Roshel murmured softly as her head swiveled and her eyes darted about. “But it’s dangerous to use it here, too.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “The Darkness responds to the will. The closer it is to you, the better you can control it. Out there, in the rest of world, I can cover a hundred yards all around me. Yoshana can control it farther than that. But in here, as it gets farther from you, there’s a risk something else might take it away from you. And then turn it on you, or track it back.”

  She stopped and turned in a little circle before continuing. “A wraith like the one your Prophetess turned, I would have no trouble controlling. Yoshana could absorb it without even thinking. But the largest wraiths in here could pull the Darkness away even from Yoshana and turn it on her.”

  We walked a bit more, and she added, “So it’s different. Out there, we’re never surprised. In here, the Darkness could be blinded, or lying to us, or turned against us. But without it, we’re defenseless.” She smiled fiercely. “So, excitement. Yoshana lives for this kind of thing.”

  There was the same tone in her voice that Tolf used when he talked about Prophetess. Yoshana might motivate some people through fear, but others were driven by hero-worship.

  “You agree with Grigg that the only choices are Yoshana, the Darkness or the demons?”

  “Minos, who else? That wreck, Stephen? Another of the greedy little dictators fighting for territory while they can barely keep their own land protected? It’s been three hundred years since the Fall and what’s happened? The Darkness is farther west every day, the demons are on the border of the Green Heart, and civilization hasn’t climbed up an inch from the depths it fell into during the Age of Fear. Someone with your potential - don’t you want something better than to be digging for scraps in the ancients’ rotting bones?”

  I looked around. I hoped Roshel, Grigg and Yoshana had the Darkness firmly under their control, because I could barely see thirty feet through the shadows among the trees. “Right now I’d be happy if nothing winds up digging for scraps in my rotting bones.”

  The Overlord just laughed softly.

  Five minutes later, I added, “That rustling off to our left isn’t anything likely to kill us?”

  “We’re being paced by a drelb. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  A cold sweat started on my forehead. Prophetess and I had fought a drelb to a standstill and fled from it a thousand miles west of here. I hoped never to meet another. Dee said the creatures were bears twisted by the Darkness. They were huge, hideous, foul tempered, and hard to kill.

  “Oh. Just a drelb.”

  “Yes, just a drelb.” She saw the look on my face and put a hand on my arm. Even after weeks around he
r, that touch still sent an electric tingle through me. “I don’t think it’ll try to attack us, but I can deal with a drelb if it comes to that. That thing’s the least of our worries in here.”

  That didn’t make me feel better.

  It was dark in the Sorrows. The trees overhung what was left of the road, and soon Yoshana led us into the underbrush. She said nothing in explanation, but Roshel leaned close and whispered, “Too many things that might stake out the path. The natives for sure, and maybe wraiths. The deeper we get, the stronger they’ll be.”

  So we made our way through the woods. At least the ground underfoot was fairly clear - the trees choked out the light that lesser plants would need to live. I stayed very near to Roshel. It didn’t do my ego any good to admit that she was far more likely to protect me than vice versa, but even here in this terrible place, I enjoyed being near her.

  Maybe in some strange way I enjoyed it more here.

  It was hard to judge time. The quality of the half light didn’t seem to change. But it must have been hours later when the column froze. Roshel held my arm with her right hand and pointed with her left.

  At first I didn’t see anything. Just a hint of movement, the shifting shadows of leaves. What was I looking for? A drelb? A war party of degenerate humans?

  Then I realized I wasn’t seeing the wind moving the trees. The shadows themselves were drifting, like a black mist. It was what Furat had described - a cloud of Darkness so wide I couldn’t see the edges of it.

  I stood very still. Roshel’s hand tightened on my arm. Ten paces ahead of us, Grigg and Yoshana were equally frozen in place. In the dim light I could just see Erev’s eyes darting from side to side, liked a panicked animal’s.

  The mist billowed, eddying forward. Toward us. One of the Knights of Resurrection took a half step backward. Erev’s hand clamped down on his shoulder.

  The Darkness thickened, a solid mass of shadow coalescing no more than fifty feet from us. That cloud must have been over ten feet in diameter, denser and a dozen times larger than what Prophetess had driven out half a year before in Brambledge.

  Then it spread again, melted back into the trees, and was gone.

  I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding.

  “That could have been bad.” Roshel’s voice was shaky. She still held my arm. I realized she was very close, and that as formidable as she was, the top of her head barely reached past my chin.

  She didn’t let go, and I didn’t want her to. The group still wasn’t moving.

  “What exactly was that?” I asked quietly.

  “Probably the most dangerous thing in here. We can sense the big wraiths. When the Darkness comes together, it has a will of its own, and you can feel it. But this whole forest is permeated with the stuff. A sheet of it like that, before it comes together, doesn’t have any consciousness. You can’t detect it - it’s no different from the background Darkness. But it’s just dense enough that it can come together, and if it does, you’ve got a small god right in front of you, looking for something to control. Or consume. Yoshana must have been able to mask us.”

  “You can’t do that?”

  She turned big, dark eyes to me. “I can. I didn’t. I’ve heard stories about the Sorrows, but I’ve never been here before. I’ve never dealt with anything like that before. I froze up completely.”

  She shuddered. “There’s a reason why the demons don’t come through here.”

  Grigg made his way back toward us, treading carefully and quietly. “We’re going to make for higher ground,” he murmured. “Yoshana thinks it might be thinner up there. Maybe.”

  The ground began to slope up, gradually at first, then more steeply. Accustomed as I was to walking on a flat surface - and I had walked a thousand miles from the Flow to Our Lady - my legs were aching by the time we emerged from the trees onto a rocky promontory.

  The sun was past its zenith but still high in the west. I stood and let its light wash over my gray skin, warming my face. I wasn’t the only one. A vast sigh seemed to go out of the whole group.

  “It’s clear up here,” Yoshana announced. “We’ll break for lunch.”

  She folded her legs and sank to the ground, shedding her pack as she did. She was graceful as a hunting cat. If the burden of her pack and the tension of the forest weighed on her there was no sign of it now.

  “Don’t get too comfortable,” she added, though she now looked completely at ease herself. “Just because there’s nothing here doesn’t mean nothing will come. The Darkness prefers the shadows, but it’s not afraid of sunlight. Especially in the quantities we’re dealing with here.”

  “Then why does she look so relaxed?” I whispered to Roshel.

  Yoshana shouldn’t have been able to hear but shot me a little smirk anyway. I had to remember that my words were never secret from her - and possibly not even my thoughts.

  “We can see it coming here,” said Roshel. “Whatever may come up, we’ll at least have some warning.”

  She shuddered. “That cloud was scary. I don’t walk into traps. I haven’t felt so blind since Yoshana first showed me the Darkness.”

  Something nagged at my mind as she said that. “Grigg told me Overlords are born with the Darkness in them.” My train of thought ground to a halt. I thought back, realized I had only one soldier’s word for it that Roshel actually was an Overlord. Could she be fully human?

  “Are you…?” I couldn’t get the question out. How do you ask a pretty girl if she’s half demon?

  She took pity on me. “I’m an Overlord, yes. Just as much as Yoshana. By birth, anyway. My father - that is, my mother’s husband - was a powerful man in the Shield. After my mother… well, my father was able to have the Darkness drawn out of me. I don’t know how. If your Prophetess can do it, I suppose it only makes sense that others can. Growing up I knew what I was, in a way.”

  She seemed to lose focus, looking off over the ocean of trees. “People whispered it behind my back. I think somehow it was the worst of all worlds. I was a monster, seed of a demon, but without a demon’s powers. My father didn’t want that for me.”

  Her eyes were shining. I didn’t know what to say. Though I had been born not far from the Shield, I knew little about Overlords’ parentage, beyond the common claim that they were half demon.

  “And your mother?” I asked.

  Her mouth opened in an “O” of surprise. Nearly as wide as mine must have opened for me to put my foot in it.

  “She didn’t live. No woman who gives birth to an Overlord ever does. The Darkness in the child, when it’s expelled from the womb, it lashes out. You really don’t know anything about us, do you?”

  I shook my head. “I left the Green Heart when I was thirteen. I know what everyone knows.”

  She dropped her eyes. “The Shield sometimes provides women to the Hellguard for… companionship. Sometimes the women are prisoners of war, or sacrifices. Sometimes the demons just take what they want. If the woman conceives, and the Overlord child survives, the demons deliver it to the rulers of the Shield. That’s the bargain. Although it turns out the demons have been breaking it and keeping some of the Overlords to use as shock troops.”

  She shuddered, took a deep breath, and continued. “My mother was captured in a Hellguard raid across the border. I don’t think they realized she was part of the Shield’s nobility. My father - her husband - got her back, but by that time it was too late. She was pregnant with me.”

  She met my eyes again. “It’s a terrible thing to be an Overlord. We’re conceived in violence and born in death. But Yoshana showed me how we can be the hope of the world.”

  She looked so human. Much more so than I did. But the mark of Cain she carried inside was far worse than the one the Select wore in our skin and eyes.

  Deep inside, part of me gave a bitter, mocking laugh. Yoshana was forging the world’s deadliest army around a core of broken souls, the cast-off rejects of society. I’d fit right in.

 
That wasn’t the part of me that put my hand on Roshel’s shoulder. She smiled softly at the contact.

  “We’re losing daylight,” Yoshana snapped from the far side of the clearing. “Feed your faces and let’s move.”

  “She didn’t stay happy for long,” I muttered.

  “Can’t you see why?” Roshel swept the trees stretching below us with her gaze. The ridge of stone we stood on was no more than an outcrop, an island surrounded by the forest. If we wanted to move forward, we would have to plunge back into the dark of the wood.

  “Yeah. Now I’m not happy either.”

  We tried to follow the back of the ridge, but it wasn’t easy among the trees. To add another little touch of misery, it began to drizzle. Mostly the water hit us as a fine mist, but fat drops sometimes accumulated in the leaves above us and spattered down onto our heads.

  We squelched through the mud, grumpy and tense. With our sight lines reduced, we could blunder right into a cloud of the Darkness like the one we’d narrowly avoided before. At last, we trudged up a hill, slipping in wet grass and mud, and Yoshana decreed we’d had enough.

  Trees still surrounded and loomed over us. This was not like the haven where we’d stopped earlier. “Closest thing to a defensible position I’ve seen,” Yoshana muttered, “which isn’t saying much.”

  I realized that while she looked as disgruntled as the rest of us, the Overlord wasn’t wet. A huge raindrop fell from above and slithered down her arm, leaving no trace.

  Next to me, Roshel’s hair was lank and plastered against her, as were her clothes. I shook myself and turned my attention back to her hair and face.

  “Why are you and Grigg wet and Yoshana isn’t?” I asked.

  “She’s using the Darkness to turn the water. Grigg and I could do that out in the open. But even there we wouldn’t. It’s a question of control. When we first met her, she was using the Darkness to change her appearance. She can do things without even concentrating that no one else can do at all.”

  Dee had called Yoshana the most dangerous person in the world. He’d also said that was less because of what she could do with the Darkness than because of what she could do with the people around her. Listening to Roshel’s tone as she described her leader, I could understand that.