“You’re worried about some kind of giant wraith?”
“A little. I’m more worried about it getting out. The pressure’s building in here. There have been leaks forever, sure. A cloud drifts out. Someone comes in, gets possessed, spreads it. The paleos that got infected scattered it all over the place in the Age of Fear. But if it comes roaring out of here in a flood? I can barely operate in this environment, Minos. How do you think everyone else is going to do?”
It was a terrifying thought. “Is preventing that really the reason for this crusade? For the Darkness Radiant?”
She gave me a thin smile. “We’ve been saying so, haven’t we? Look, Minos, I like being in charge. And I’m good at it. But the Darkness Radiant isn’t my quest for personal power. It’s the only hope I see for a world where humanity controls its own destiny.”
There was such sincerity in her tone. I quirked a corner of my mouth and dared, “Your mission from God, then?”
Her smile broadened. “Let’s teach you to build a cage.”
Yoshana was right, of course. The cage was not easy to construct or maintain. My first step was simply to examine the one she had erected, using the Darkness as my eyes, because the strands that made up the cage were far too thin to be seen by any normal means.
Then I had to try to imitate it. As she’d said, the original warding circle on the ground was easy enough. The Darkness might tend to ooze around a bit, but it took little effort to keep it a constant distance from me. The vertical dimension was much harder.
“If you could literally make a smooth dome out of it, that wouldn’t be so bad,” Yoshana said. “But it would get much too thin at any kind of useful diameter. With the kind of distance you’d have between particles, they’d lose cohesion and start drifting off. You can’t maintain a solid sheet that big. And if you cut the diameter down to where you can hold it together, it’ll be so small that it gives you no warning at all.”
So instead the cage was made of strands of the Darkness, vertical lines of it meeting at the top of the dome, horizontal circles at intervals - like the latitude and longitude lines on a globe.
Now imagine trying to make those lines out of hot wax. Or live cats. The lines would try to flow together into clumps, leaving huge holes. Or a section would float away following an air current, or a speck of dust. It was infuriating. And tiring.
“How do you get any rest at all while you’re holding this thing?” I gasped an hour into the lesson. The dome of Darkness took advantage of my distraction to collapse on me like a melting igloo.
“You don’t. That’s why we used regular wards the first two nights. You saw how well that worked.”
I nodded and set about rebuilding the dome.
That night I took a turn on watch. There was no risk of falling asleep; any lapse in concentration immediately set the defenses crumbling and jerked me back to alertness. And small creatures were constantly brushing the edges. I hadn’t yet learned to kill with the Darkness, so I simply flinched and endured their presence. It was such an irritation to my heightened senses that I could understand why the others reflexively murdered anything that touched the ward.
I suspected I could strike something - or someone - dead with a furious rush of the Darkness, but I didn’t have the knowledge or control to cleanly sever nerves and blood vessels. So I endured the scrabbling of mice and shrews and owls until Roshel relieved me two hours later.
I was exhausted, but I was careful to meditate at length before I fell asleep.
As tiring as my daily and nightly vigilance was, at least it kept my mind off Roshel. Whenever I had a moment to relax, my thoughts turned instantly to her. I looked for whatever opportunities I could for us to be alone, and she didn’t seem to be avoiding me. There had been that one time she’d sent me off to fetch the boar by myself, but now she seemed nearly as eager as I was to spend time together. Because the Darkness was in me now? Because I was a “factor,” more nearly her equal?
How true was it that she had been attracted first to Grigg, and now wanted to be with me only because I was also Select? I found I didn’t care very much.
I was gnawed by a vague sense of disloyalty to Prophetess. But disloyalty to what, exactly? To a physical relationship that had never existed? To a cause I had never really embraced? Yes, Prophetess was my friend, and I admired her, but she was the one who had sent me away to do what I thought was best.
And would she approve of what I’d done? Of course not. Set aside my attraction to Roshel - which for some reason had seemed to annoy Prophetess when she’d first noticed it. She would never accept my use of the Darkness. We’d never even agreed on what it was. To any rational student of history and science, it was no more or less than a dangerous tool that had gotten catastrophically out of control. In Yoshana’s words, like an open flame mishandled in a dry forest.
To Prophetess and the Universal Church it was sin itself. But that was ridiculous. It hadn’t crawled up from hell; it had been created by humans in a laboratory.
Although Yoshana herself had admitted that the Darkness responded most strongly to fear, rage, and lust. At least two of those made the list of deadly sins.
Most of the time I was too busy to be tempted.
The second night I was on watch, I felt something that wasn’t an animal approach the edge of the dome. It was a tendril of Darkness, thin, but not like the random particles that filled the air. I sensed an intention in it, but it didn’t feel like Yoshana, or Roshel, or Grigg. It didn’t feel human. It felt - hungry.
I didn’t want to touch it. Even more, I didn’t want it to touch me. The Darkness of the dome was part of my body, and the touch of this probe would be as alien and disgusting as a spider crawling up my leg. And if I could sense its nature, maybe it could sense mine - and maybe it was something that thought of humans as prey.
I had no idea what was on the other end of that tendril, and I didn’t want to find out the hard way. I pulled the dome back tight around us and ran over to shake Yoshana.
She was awake before I touched her, her hand catching my wrist in the air. “What?”
“Something out there. Maybe a wraith.”
I sensed her probes a moment later, passing through the lattice of the dome.
“Good idea to pull back,” she said. Her brow furrowed as she concentrated. “You’re right, it’s a wraith. Not a large one.”
Another handful of seconds passed, and she sat back and exhaled roughly. The flow of Darkness back in through the dome was thicker than the probe that had gone out. It was big enough to see.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I absorbed some of it. The rest fled. It’s probably too small to maintain coherence now. Not a threat.”
“Sorry to wake you, then.”
She shook her head. “No. You did well. Very well. You sensed it before it sensed you. It didn’t know we were here. I caught it completely by surprise.”
She stood and slapped me on the shoulder. “Get some sleep. I’ll take it from here.”
I lay down near Roshel and began to ease into my meditation. Tension and adrenaline leached out of my body, leaving me as limp as a rag.
Roshel rolled over, cracked an eye, and said, “That was good. She was impressed. I think she’s starting to like you.” She paused. “She doesn’t like very many people, you know.”
That thought turned over and over in my head as I tried to meditate… more distracting in that moment even than Roshel herself.
The light drizzle returned the next morning, not enough to soak us through, but uncomfortable.
“You want to teach me to keep the rain off?” I asked Yoshana. For all the concentration she might need here in the depths of the Sorrows, she was still waterproof.
“Not going to be your next lesson, no.”
I was tempted to stick out my tongue at her, but decided I would prefer to live. The Overlord might be starting to like me, but there was no point pushing my luck.
“You sh
ould try running a layer over yourself every day or so, though. Kills the lice and fleas and any other passengers you’ve picked up.”
That thought was very appealing. But, “I don’t know how to kill things yet.”
She grinned. “That’s going to be your next lesson.”
The enthusiasm in her voice made my stomach tighten.
We were making slightly faster progress, the land remaining essentially flat here in the High Valley, and my skill gradually increasing. But it was of course Yoshana, with her greater range of control, who next called us to a halt.
“Something ahead,” she said. “Ruins. Big.”
“Should we go around?” Roshel asked.
That seemed like a good idea to me. Our last encounter with human habitation in the Sorrows had almost ended very badly.
But of course I wasn’t the one who made those decisions.
“Through,” Yoshana decided. “I don’t know how wide it is, but it’s not small. Who knows how far out of our way it would take us. Besides, I’ve never seen anything quite like this.”
That didn’t sound like much of a recommendation.
I saw what she meant as the trees began to give way to buildings. In the south and the west, the tide of civilization had receded gradually. Usually a town’s outlying buildings would be stripped to their foundations, materials going into a wall around a smaller, defensible core. Sometimes that core had died as well, like the city of Acceptance in Rockwall. Other cities that had fallen at the beginning of the Age of Fear had been looted over the centuries, stripped of everything of value. A few, like the one on the river, had been overtaken completely by nature.
But here, the remains of the Last Days seemed to have been abandoned in place. Trees, grasses, and vines ran riot over crumbling walls, but nothing had been pulled down or salvaged. Constructions large and small stretched among the forest as far as the eye could see, some structures clustered together, some so isolated as to be clearly indefensible. The ancients had felt so secure, they had built with no concept of threat or defense.
Pavement was long since cracked and overrun with vegetation, but the crumbling iron hulks of vehicles lay decomposing in those roadways, a fortune in scrap metal. Even the shunned city of eternal lights where the Darkness had originated had not been left so intact. Now I understood why scavengers would brave the Sorrows. Who knew what treasures might lie in the dead buildings? I could mine the Flow my entire life and find less than a single week’s haul from this place.
Of course, the problem was getting the goods - and yourself - back out alive.
Yoshana had her strange, matte gray sword out. “This sword came from a place like this,” she said. “No one even knows what it is anymore, much less how to make it. It’s harder than steel, won’t rust, won’t dull. This is what we’ve lost.”
Grigg was looking at his own weapon. “Same kind of story.” Weak sunlight played on the shining blade. “It’s steel, but nothing anyone can make now. Almost more like a piece of glass than something forged, but it’ll take the hardest impact without even chipping. God knows how I’d sharpen it if I did notch it somehow. It’s a totally different material than Yosha’s, but both of them make anything we can craft now look like a paleo’s pointed stick. And until we take the world back, there’s no way to make another.”
Each of their blades had the shape of a katana, painfully reminding me of my own lost sword. The one I’d traded away for Prophetess’ mission.
“Don’t suppose there’s likely to be any lying around in here,” I mused wistfully.
To my surprise, Yoshana said, “Doesn’t hurt to look.”
We began a ghoulish inspection, probing first with the Darkness, then venturing into buildings ourselves. Wooden doors had often fallen to rot and termites, and sometimes the structures themselves had collapsed. But sometimes we would find a house or shop nearly intact, glass still in the windows. Many of the things I saw puzzled me, machines whose use I couldn’t guess. Almost everywhere there were free-standing sheets of glass enclosed in metal or plastic frames, like mirrors that didn’t reflect.
Some buildings were clearly homes, others places of business. Some were so strange, none of us had any idea what their purpose might have been. Everywhere in our fallen world we lived among the bones of the Last Days, but this town was more like a mummified corpse, enough flesh left to guess at but not truly know the appearance of what had gone before.
In one house I found a family of raccoons. When I went in, they snarled at me, more angry than afraid. Small as they were, their teeth were long and sharp. I wondered if they might be rabid, or infected with worse things. Yoshana launched a cloud of Darkness that left one dead and the others fleeing in panic.
“Will you teach me to do that?” I asked. In the face of danger, my squeamishness about her methods vanished.
She grinned. “Like I said. That, I’ll teach you.”
In a room of white tile and gray stone, I found knives stuck into a moldering wooden block. Most of the blades had gone to rust, but I saw one that gleamed almost wetly under its dusty coat. Eagerly I seized it and wiped it clean on my pants. The metal had the same glassy appearance as Grigg’s sword.
“Look at this,” I announced to Yoshana.
I tested the edge on my thumb and was shocked when I cut myself. Droplets of the Darkness welled up.
The Overlord laughed. “Good find, as long as you don’t kill yourself with it.”
The knife was one solid piece of steel, the blade itself almost a foot long. The hilt was dimpled to give a better grip on the glassy metal. I couldn’t just stick it through my belt - it would stab me in the thigh or slice through the leather. I rooted through the sagging remains of wooden shelves and drawers until I found what must have been its sheath, made of a black, woven fabric that was lighter than canvas or hide but had completely resisted decay. The sheath had a loop, and I hung the knife from my belt.
I searched the rest of the house. The ground floor yielded nothing more interesting than pots, plates, decaying furniture, and a huge amount of technology with no obvious use. Nothing worth carrying away.
The stairs to the upper story protested when I put my weight on them, but they held. A corridor led to several bedrooms, the largest of them big enough to be a separate dwelling in its own right. A heavy, wooden case held rows on rows of books. I picked one out and it came apart in my hands. Another glass-fronted cabinet held a dozen wristwatches. I pulled one out and gave the crown a few turns, then shook it. To my surprise, it started up. Mechanical, then, and the intricate mechanism had survived the centuries. Remembering the Flow and how Luco and Fenn had coveted working timepieces, I was seized with a sudden nostalgia for the simple days when avoiding the pockets of fetid gas in the landfill had been my greatest worry.
I put two of the wristwatches in my pack, one for Luco and one for Fenn. Ridiculously unlikely though it was that I would ever see them again.
Below the watches, another drawer revealed a woman’s jewelry, gems glittering in gold rings and necklaces. All abandoned here when the inhabitants had - fled? Died?
Who had these people been? Wealthy, it seemed. Frames hung on the walls, but the pictures within were long faded. Might they have been Select, like me? The histories said the Select had numbered among the rich and powerful of the Last Days. The genetic manipulation that created the Select had been the province of the elite. For all I knew, this was the house of my ancestors.
I sneezed, and a cloud of dust rose up. I blinked to clear my watering eyes. The jewels in front of me were worth a small fortune in our world, but this grave robbery had suddenly lost its appeal.
I didn’t put the watches back, though.
My loss of enthusiasm seemed to be catching, and soon we stopped searching the buildings. Besides, the dead town turned oppressive as the shadows grew longer. I had passed through dozens of ruins in my travels, but somehow here it was more disturbing to witness the ancients’ civilization losing its slow
battle against the forest.
Erev and Joav both became twitchy, and Roshel moved closer to me as we made our way forward. Not that I minded.
“Creepy, isn’t it?” I asked.
She nodded, but Yoshana spoke up from a dozen paces ahead. “It’s not the place, or not just that. We’re not alone here.”
Grigg asked, “You find something?”
The Overlord shook her head. “Nothing I can detect directly, but there’s a current in the Darkness here. It’s not natural.”
“By definition,” I said.
She gave me a nasty look. “Not the natural flow of the Darkness out in the forest, I mean. It’s almost like…” She stopped and looked around. “Like a spider web, and we’ve stepped on a strand.”
My stomach sank. She was right. I could feel it now - a kind of alertness in the Darkness around us.
“We’re walking into a trap, then.”
“In it already, I’d say,” Yoshana confirmed.
Roshel was very close, practically touching me. She had her carbine out.
“Back the way we came?” Grigg asked.
Yoshana shook her head again. “Whatever this is, it’s aware of us already. It could hit us on the way back just as easily as on the way through. And even if we made it out, we’d have to find a way around the town. We’ll keep going.”
“Have you noticed her approach to ambushes is always to charge into them?” I whispered to Roshel.
Of course, Yoshana heard me. “I haven’t gone up against anything yet that was worse than me.” She grinned.
“Except the time the Hellguard double-crossed you,” Grigg pointed out. “And that time you got stabbed through the heart.”
Her expression soured. “I’m starting to see what Minos meant. I don’t think you’re my favorite Select anymore. I don’t think you’re even my favorite Select in this group.”
Somewhere in the banter they had both drawn their rifles.
Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle Page 29