“Watch it!” Joav called, pointing. He spoke so rarely that the warning distracted me, trying to guess what horror would squeeze words out of him. Yoshana, of course, reacted with the speed and efficiency of a rattlesnake striking. Her gun came up and a bullet caught a man in mid-air as he leapt down at us from the low roof of a house. She chambered another round but didn’t fire.
The wounded man writhed on the ground ten feet from me. A wicked hatchet that didn’t look at all primitive had fallen from his hand. Yoshana strode over and peered down at him like a scientist examining an unusual insect. He was tan with lank, dark hair, similar in appearance to the natives we had fought earlier, though without the strange markings. Instead of skins, he wore what might have been the tattered remains of ancient clothing.
Sudden as a spring uncoiling he surged up and lunged at the Overlord. Her left fist met his face, shattering teeth. He staggered but didn’t go down. Yoshana swung her carbine like a club, catching him in the neck. I heard bones crunch.
Still he stood.
“This is going to be annoying,” the Overlord said, and discharged the weapon into his face at point blank range. A cloud of Darkness poured out of the hole in his skull as he fell.
“They’re surrounding us,” Grigg commented calmly.
Yoshana nodded. “Feels like some sort of collective. Pack hunters.”
“Into the house?” the Select asked.
“Yep.”
Grigg kicked open the door to the little building from which our attacker had jumped. I wondered if this might be their lair, and hastily flooded the place with tendrils of Darkness. I sensed nothing but similar probes from the others. The native must have climbed the building hoping to surprise us.
The house was small by the standards of the town, a rough square perhaps thirty feet on a side. There were only four rooms.
“Roshel, you’ve got the bathroom,” Yoshana ordered. “Erev and Joav, take the bedroom. Minos, you’re up front here with me. Everyone watch your ammo. There are a lot of these guys.”
The front room had one door and three windows. “Take that window on the east side,” Yoshana told me. “Grigg can give you some cover fire from the kitchen if he doesn’t get too busy.”
I was the only one without a carbine. The Overlord gave me her wolfish grin. “This is probably a good time to show you how to kill with the Darkness.”
She cocked her head, as if listening. “Maybe after this first rush.”
I peered through the dirty glass into the gathering dimness. Across the street, among the trees, shapes were in motion. They closed with unnatural speed in a loping gait that didn’t look human. Grigg’s gun went off ten feet to my left, the crack far louder than the shattering window as he fired through it. One went down. More came on. And now gunshots from behind me.
The whole house shuddered as a wave of bodies struck it at once. One barreled through the open front entrance, another slammed into the back door and knocked it out of its frame. Windows burst as more leapt through.
The first one in was already dead, split from crotch to throat by a blow from Yoshana’s blade that even the Darkness could never close. Grigg severed the head of the one at the back a heartbeat later.
Coming through the window rather than the door slowed the one attacking me hardly at all. It sprang, agile as a cat, oblivious to the shards of glass. My heavy sword met its chest as it came into the room. Adrenaline pounded through my body, fear and rage blasting a cloud of Darkness out of me. It swirled wildly and I hacked again at the creature’s back as it fell, and then the native shuddered and went limp as life and the unnatural vitality of the Darkness abandoned it.
“Your left!” Yoshana called. Even as she spoke she was cutting down another that had broken the window to my right. The moment it spent stumbling over a rotting couch was all it took for her to slash its legs. It flailed at her with something like a scythe, and she stabbed at it again and again.
To my left, in the kitchen, Grigg was engaged with one, while another was closing on him from behind. Madly I willed the Darkness in a wave at the creature about to strike at his back. The cloud washed over it and the attacker screamed in rage and pain, turning on me. Wounds on its face were healing as it bared its teeth in a snarl that was far more animal than human.
The sword it spun was the work of man, though. Where had this beast gotten a katana? Debased and feral as it was, the native handled the weapon like it knew how to use a blade. I had little confidence in my ability to match its strokes with my clumsy broadsword.
I didn’t find out. Grigg had finished his opponent and with an almost casual swing struck off the head of mine from behind.
“Watch the front door, Minos,” said Yoshana. “The others aren’t doing so well.”
And with that she dashed down the little hallway toward the bedroom and bathroom.
The others weren’t doing well? Roshel was there. I started after Yoshana.
“Stay. She’ll handle it. We need you here,” Grigg said over his shoulder, as he returned to the back door.
I stopped, then took another step toward the hall.
“Stay.”
I don’t know if the weight of the Darkness was somehow behind that command, but I stayed put and peered around the door frame into the darkening night. Nothing moved outside. To my right, down the hall, metal rang on metal, and a body thudded against a wall.
“They’ll be all right,” Grigg said, before I could begin to move again. How could he know that? Roshel would not fall easily, but she’d been isolated in a room.
Yoshana returned, followed by Erev and Joav. Joav was bleeding from his shoulder, and walked with a limp. Roshel wasn’t with them.
I rushed past them into the hall.
Roshel backed out of the bathroom and turned to face me, her tunic covered in blood.
She must have seen the horror on my face. “Not mine,” she said.
I wanted to rush to her and fold her into my arms, but was suddenly embarrassed. Instead I just nodded awkwardly, and said, “Good.”
She crossed the few yards that separated us, leaned against me, and gave me a quick hug. She probably got blood all over me, but I didn’t care. Then she was past and moving to join the others.
“Too many access points with them jumping through the windows like that,” Yoshana declared. “We’ll hold in this room instead.”
“Think they’re coming again?” Grigg asked.
“I don’t sense another wave,” the Overlord replied. “Good thing. If they’d followed up right away, we would have been in trouble. But they know they lost their whole force, and that they didn't get any of us. They’re cautious now.”
She cocked her head as if listening again. “But I don’t think they’re done yet.”
I opened my senses to the flow of the Darkness, allowing my perception to extend beyond the walls of the house. I could still feel the pressure we had sensed before, and nodded. “Seems like there’s still something out there. What’s next?”
With the six of us in one room, we had only the front door, three windows, and the passages into the hall and the kitchen to protect. But I didn’t relish the idea of the rest of the house filling up with those mad creatures.
Abruptly I sensed Yoshana forging the links of a dome around the house, and pulled my tendrils in hastily. I didn’t want her reflexively lashing out at me. “I think they’ll take another poke at us. But cautiously next time. The first one that jumped us was a probe. I should have killed it faster. Maybe that would have scared them off.”
She grinned at me. “You’re getting pretty good at sensing them, Minos. Let’s you and me see if we can’t convince them to move on.”
Grigg kicked one of the corpses. “What should we do with these?”
“Eat ’em?” Yoshana suggested. “That’s what they were going to do with us. Seems only fair.”
At my look of horror, she chuckled and said, “Just kidding.”
But I wondered. Obviou
sly these possessed were cannibals. The paleos considered it a waste not to eat a slain enemy. Ruthless as Yoshana was, would she scruple to eat the dead?
“Let’s dump them out the front door,” Grigg suggested. “There’s enough we can use them as a barricade.”
“Good thought,” Yoshana replied, “but let’s use them to block the hall and the kitchen instead. The door’s narrow enough as it is. Better to create obstacles here inside.”
“That’s a little icky, having them all oozing and rotting in here with us.”
She shrugged. “We’ll be gone before they start to stink too much.”
They stank already. The natives didn’t seem to wash, and some of their intestines had been opened, or their bowels had voided. But I breathed through my mouth as we hauled corpses out of the other rooms and heaped up our macabre barriers. It was no worse than hitting a gas pocket on the Flow.
Although the possessed wore clothes and looked human enough in death, I found that I couldn’t regard them as people. The ones we had fought before, in the shaman’s camp, had at least spoken. These leaping, snapping things reminded me of nothing so much as man-shaped wolves.
Yoshana seemed to sense my thoughts. “This is the evolution of the Darkness. It’s what will happen to us all if we don’t take back the world.”
“But these are different from the others.”
“The Darkness is experimenting. Not consciously. But you’ve seen normal possessed, like the one your Prophetess exorcised. Do you think something like that could cooperate with others?”
I thought about it, then slowly shook my head.
“So the Darkness forms new societies. The one before, governed by a powerful wraith, speaking through the shaman. This one is some kind of hunting collective. Their minds are linked. I think they all must share one consciousness, to some extent.”
“How do we beat something like that?”
The grin again. “Convince it that we can kill the whole thing.”
It was nearly an hour later when the possessed tried again.
“I’ve got something to our left,” Yoshana whispered to me. The others were resting, not quite asleep, not quite awake. The two of us were sitting cross-legged on the floor.
Carefully, I eased a tendril of Darkness between the bars of her warding dome. She didn’t seem to notice. Outside, my probe brushed the edge of a consciousness, feral, hungry. Inhuman in its essence.
“I’m going to drop the cage so you can sense it.”
So she hadn’t noticed my probe. I felt a rush of pride that I could sneak my consciousness past the mistress of the Darkness herself, but I kept quiet and merely nodded.
“When you feel it, strike. But these things are thoroughly infected, so you’ll need to hit hard. What I did back at Icefall won’t work. The Darkness was a surveillance tool before it was a weapon, but it was a medical tool before that. The problem is they’ll fix precise, surgical cuts without even noticing them. And just lashing out at them like you did earlier won’t do much more than annoy them.”
“So? What do I do?”
“Focus your attack. Hit a vulnerable organ that’s hard to repair. Go for the eyes.”
I summoned up the Darkness within me, the tendril becoming a rope of blackness. It coiled outside. As it thickened, my impression of the stalker sharpened. It was human enough in shape, but crept on the ground on all fours. I realized that a cloud of Darkness radiated around it, and pulled back. It halted and sniffed at the window. I felt all of its senses bearing on us, looking for weaknesses.
“Now,” Yoshana hissed.
The debased creature disgusted me, and I gathered up my will to strike. But where in the heat of battle I had instinctively flung the Darkness to wound the native attacking Grigg, I now found it hard to focus my loathing into action.
“Do you know what it would do to us?” the Overlord whispered. “Do you know what they would have done to Roshel? What they’ll do now if they have the chance to tear and rip and chew tender flesh like that?”
A wave of hate washed over me, and the Darkness struck the possessed in the face, clawing at its eyes. The creature wailed, a long howl like a wolf.
And then Yoshana was there, the weight of her presence as thick as tar around the native, flowing into every pore and opening in its body, seizing control of the Darkness within it. And then - the creature simply came apart. The Darkness ruptured every organ at once, shattering cell walls, not a surgical cut but a crushing tsunami of devastation set loose from the inside.
The body slumped in a liquid mass, bones surrounded by a soup of pulped tissues.
“Let’s see if that gets the point across,” Yoshana said.
I pulled my senses back into my own body and turned away, fighting down a rising tide of bile.
“That was good,” the Overlord said, coming easily to her feet and patting me on the shoulder.
I swallowed, trying to think of something to say. In the end, I managed a weak smile. Like it or not, I was part of this dark fraternity now.
“It’ll come easier with time,” Yoshana murmured. “The Darkness flows naturally down the channels of emotion, but you’ll learn to direct it with your will.”
She paused a moment, then added, “Oh, and you really didn’t need to worry so much about Roshel. I taught her to go for the eyes years ago. The two that made it into the bathroom with her were blind and dying long before I got there. Still, it was sweet of you to be concerned. I’m sure she appreciates it.”
The Overlord stretched like a cat. “They’re pulling back. I think we’ve convinced them we’re more trouble than we’re worth. Get some sleep. I’ll take first watch.”
I was ancient and strong, my body honed by experience yet flushed with the vigor of youth. My comrades and I loped through the empty streets, on two legs or four, as it suited us. There was a scent of blood in the air, and soon we would feed.
My eyes snapped open. Yoshana reclined on the moldering remains of an overstuffed chair, one leg draped over the crumbling arm. She gave me a little half smile and winked at me.
I had forgotten to still my thoughts before allowing sleep to take me. You’d think one object lesson would be enough. I didn’t know if the dream had been a product of my imagination, or the touch of the possessed pack’s collective consciousness.
I shuddered. Whichever it was, I didn’t want to feel it again.
Meditation came easier this time than after the nightmare in the bloody cavern, and within minutes I was ready to sleep again. Yoshana’s breathing was deep and regular, as if she were asleep herself. Someone was snoring.
I let a fine tendril of Darkness quest out. The dome was in place - Yoshana was alert. Not that I’d really doubted it. I could still question many things about the leader of the Darkness Radiant, but her competence wasn’t one of them.
On a whim, I eased the tendril between the bars of Yoshana’s cage. Once again, it slipped through unnoticed. I scented the air outside. It was true, the pressure had eased. We were alone in the night. I pulled the thread back inside, and began another round of meditation. But I allowed a tiny, self-satisfied smile to creep onto my lips. Yoshana’s power was orders of magnitude beyond mine, but in this one, small matter, the delicacy of my senses, I was fully her equal.
8. The Serpent
I woke to the gray light of dawn and Joav moaning softly in his sleep. As I rolled over to look at the wounded soldier, Erev nudged him, and Joav blinked and came awake. He tried to sit up, groaned a kind of drawn out sigh, then turned on his side and laboriously pushed himself to his feet.
Yoshana eyed him critically. “Right shoulder, right arm, right leg. Too bad you’re not left-handed. Not going to be much use in a fight. And you’ll be slow on the march.”
Joav watched her in silence. The look in his eyes might have been pleading, but it might just have been resignation.
Erev opened his mouth, but his mistress held up a finger and no words came out.
It would b
e no kindness to leave Joav here. He would never make it out of the Sorrows alone, and the natives would come snuffling around long before he could heal.
I could think of nothing to say, so like a coward I turned away instead.
“Grigg, go find something he can use as a crutch. Minos, you’d better take his carbine, one-handed he’ll be even clumsier with it than you. Everyone hurry up and get some food in yourselves. If we’re going to be moving slower, we’d better get started early.”
She favored me with that grin again. “What kind of monster do you think I am, Minos?”
I didn’t look back at the house of death, with its heaped corpses and the puddle of bones outside the window. We didn’t feel the pressure of the possessed collective as we made our way out of town, although once or twice I seemed to catch the edge of a presence that fled before us. I wasn’t sorry to see the back of that place, and I didn’t think its inhabitants were sorry to see the back of us.
I fingered the knife at my hip. I had gained two weapons, because at the last minute I’d wrapped the native’s rusty katana in a cloth and stuffed it in my pack. Three weapons, if you counted my new mastery of the Darkness as a killing tool. They had cost Joav two more wounds, though thankfully not his life.
I wondered if Prophetess would think they had cost me my soul.
“Yoshana always surprises me,” I whispered to Roshel, though I was sure the white-haired Overlord could hear us anyway.
Roshel smiled, but there was a sadness in it. “After all this, you’re still thinking of us as evil.”
I shook my head ruefully. “I spent a lot of time with Prophetess.”
“Dammit, Minos!” Erev turned to stare briefly at the vehemence in Roshel’s tone, then put his eyes forward and continued trudging along. “Can’t you understand that this is a crusade? We’re the only hope there is for the world. What has Prophetess done to make anything better for anyone? Cling to some moldy dogma that says we’re damned for using the tools we have to try to make a difference? Do I look like the enemy of humanity?”
Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle Page 30