How long could a horse run? Not long at a full gallop, I thought. But mine should be able to sustain this trot for some time.
Of course, now that the terror had worn off, it didn’t want to. As if realizing it had been lucky not to break a leg, or its neck, the beast slowed to a careful walk. I kicked at its sides, but earned nothing more than a reproachful look.
Perhaps I was far enough away to be safe.
Yoshana’s Darkness flowed into the native, into every pore and opening of its body, and then - the creature simply came apart in a tsunami of devastation set loose from the inside.
“Let’s see if that gets the point across,” Yoshana said.
It would be like that, but slower - so I would fully appreciate what was happening.
I laid my hand on the horse’s neck. “Fear,” I whispered. And we were off again.
A few minutes later we burst from the trees onto a muddy track that had once been a road. I saw no signs that anything else had traveled it recently. My mount shuddered to a walk, blowing great, ragged breaths. I looked back down the path. It stretched out behind us, disappearing around a bend in the trees. If someone came around that curve, we would be clearly visible. I set my palm on the horse’s heaving side. It needed another jolt of terror to get moving again, and here we didn’t need to worry about slamming into a tree.
But I could feel the animal’s mind and body as I touched it. The beast’s heart was hammering, its lungs gasping for air. It was nearly exhausted. There was another sprint left in that body. With the Darkness infiltrating its organs, that sprint could be a long one. But then the horse would die.
Of course, if Yoshana came around that bend in the road, I would die.
I sighed. “All right, you miserable creature. Let’s walk a bit.”
The horse plodded forward. I hoped it was grateful.
The ground to either side gradually gave way to a swampy muck. Ancient trees rose from it, trunks so thick I couldn’t have put my arms around them. Though I was on a path, the canopy of leaves overhead blotted out the sun.
Branches rustled, and something huge launched itself into the air and erupted from the trees with a beating of wings. Some kind of eagle, larger than any I had seen before. I took deep breaths to still the pounding of my heart and swallowed several times, trying to get my stomach back down into my abdomen.
I looked back over my shoulder again. The bend in the road was far behind, but the line of sight was clear. To the left and right, the bog would be virtually impassable on horseback. If someone came up behind us, there was nowhere to go but straight ahead.
“Let’s get a move on, horse,” I said. I kicked it sharply. It stopped dead in its tracks and turned its head, glaring balefully at me and baring its teeth.
“You asked for it.”
Fear.
Only after we had galloped a mile and passed two turnings in the road did I ease the animal back to a trot. I kept that pace as the swamp turned slowly back to solid ground, and the road took a determined northerly direction. I guided the horse back into the trees, letting it settle into a shambling walk. I occasionally encouraged it with my heels, but didn’t use the Darkness again.
Truth be told, I was as exhausted as my mount. I had hardly slept for two nights, and the adrenaline was leaching away. More than once I swayed in the saddle, my eyelids growing heavy.
Once my eyes snapped open, my heart pounding. I thought I heard hoofbeats behind us, gaining fast. But as I pulled the horse to a halt and sat stock still, I could hear nothing. It must have been my imagination as I drifted in and out of sleep.
I didn’t dare extend the Darkness behind me. If I’d been fully alert I might have chanced it, trusting to my Sorrows-born training that I could sense my pursuers before they sensed me. But not now. Not as tired as I was.
I wasn’t probing in front of me either. Careless.
So I was surprised when the trees ended and a short, grassy plain led down to a river. The same one we had crossed before? Its banks were nowhere near as steep, but it was almost as wide. I guided my mount toward it.
A few yards from the bank, the tall grass turned to huge, smooth rocks. The horse was reluctant to step on them, and I kicked at it impatiently until it grudgingly moved forward, one tentative step at a time. When it was on the stone, where I would leave no footprints, I slid off its back and untied my pack from the saddle.
“You can go now,” I said. It looked at me stupidly.
“Beat it.” It bent its head to eat instead.
Exasperated, I pulled the bundled-up katana from my pack and smacked the horse across the rump. It whinnied in shock and annoyance, gave a kick back at me, missed, and charged off to the north. A hundred yards away it stopped, gave me one last disgusted backwards glance, and returned to cropping grass.
I sighed. I’d hoped the beast would move farther off, in case I’d been followed. But I was done with it. Shrugging the pack onto my back, I picked my way down the rocks into the river.
The water was cold and the current, while not torrential, was swift. The shock of it chased away my drowsiness. I could still see the bottom several yards in, but no farther. I had no idea how deep it was. There was nothing for it but to find out the hard way.
It was deeper than I was tall. By the time I had gone ten paces, I was swimming, or trying. I was completely soaked, and so was everything I was carrying. Twenty paces in and the current had me. I was being swept downstream, doing my best to make forward progress. My head went under, and only the direction of the current kept me oriented when I struggled back to the surface.
Twice more I went under, sodden clothes and pack pulling me down. I fought for breath. It would be ironic to drown after all that I’d been through, but with water filling my nose and mouth, I didn’t really appreciate the humor.
And then my boot touched gravel, and I was dragging myself out onto the other bank, a mirror of the one I had left. Trees loomed in front of me. Cautiously, I extended the Darkness into those woods, and found the answering eddy of the Sorrows’ malignant currents.
I was back to hell on earth. And it felt like home.
I crawled at first, then picked myself up and staggered into the trees. I cast one last look back over my shoulder as I slipped between the trunks. I didn’t see anyone behind me, but lurched another hundred yards or so deeper into the forest anyway. I selected an ancient oak tree and with the last of my strength pulled myself up into the branches, ten feet off the ground, and wedged myself into the crotch of two heavy limbs.
In the most dangerous place in the world, I felt safe for the first time in two days. And fell asleep.
10. The Devil You Don’t Know
I woke a few hours later, the sun still in the sky. I had set no wards, hadn’t meditated. And I had lived. I extended my senses and found nothing unusual, beyond the normal, brooding presence of the Darkness in the Sorrows.
The tree was as safe a place as any, and likely safer than most. But I felt refreshed, and it made sense to get farther from the river and make what westward progress I could while it was still light.
But I sat in the tree for a while instead. There was no one telling me to move on. There was no one for me to protect. For the first time in half a year, I answered to nobody. I was in a place of great danger, but I had become pretty dangerous myself. The sense of freedom was intoxicating.
I sighed. Free or not, it was time to go. It was hard to imagine Yoshana swimming across the river and beating the bushes for me when I was outside the range of her senses and she had no trail to follow, but the deeper I got in the Sorrows, the safer I would be from her. Another half mile into the forest would make me completely impossible to find.
Reluctantly I climbed down from my perch. The warm air and the sun filtering through the leaves had been enough to dry me. My gear was another story. But I would move farther from the river before I checked it. I shouldered my pack and headed generally toward the setting sun, following no particular path, j
ust letting the terrain guide me. I was alert now, and the Darkness ranged out around me.
Once I felt a slight thickening in the currents and adjusted my course to avoid whatever it was. Half an hour later I found a small clearing I liked. I pulled the Darkness fully into myself. An ordinary warding circle would endanger me more than it would protect me - something might feel it, and be drawn to me, and a cloud of Darkness could float right over it undetected. A full cage would give me more warning, but would take too much of my attention and create the same risk of something sensing it from the outside. I opted for nothing instead.
I dumped the contents of my pack on the ground. A trickle of water spattered out. My jerky and dried fruit went on a rock in the sun. They should dry before they rotted. The soggy bread I flung into the woods to be food for whatever might choose to eat grain rather than people.
Most of the other gear would recover from its wetting. I shook water off my cooking pan, flint, and other durables. The oil-soaked torches we all carried were now water-soaked as well. They would probably still light, although they wouldn’t burn well until they dried. There wasn’t much to do about that.
The strange, glistening blade of my knife shed drops as if it were oiled, although it wasn’t. So did the black material that sheathed it. The katana was another story. I unwrapped it from its waterlogged rags and threw them away. I wiped down the blade on my pants, then oiled it. The uncured leather hilt was sodden and would likely rot. I’d carry the sword in my hand - the pack was too wet, and I had nothing left to wrap it. It wasn’t a bad idea to have a blade out, in any case.
The two wristwatches I had looted lay forlorn in the mud. I cleaned them off on my tunic. Neither seemed to have taken on water. I gave the crown of each one a few turns, and was relieved to see the tiny second hands begin to move. It would have been a shame if the delicate mechanisms had survived the centuries only to be spoiled in the river.
I didn’t know what to do about the carbine. The cartridges were sealed metal, and should be all right. But I should strip the gun’s mechanism to dry it before rust set in. Unfortunately, Grigg hadn’t taught me how to do that, and I had no confidence that I could put the weapon back together if I took it apart. I’d just have to hope for the best. If I needed to fire it, it would either shoot or it wouldn’t. If my life depended on it - and it probably would if I needed to use the carbine - I would be rolling the dice. But some chance that it would work was better than none.
This was as good a place to stop as any, and my things could dry further overnight. The second wind my nap had given me was fading. I considered going up another tree, but couldn’t summon up the energy. I lay down on my back in the center of the clearing, katana in my hand, knife at my belt. In the end, I extended a simple ward in a circle a dozen feet across. If something entered the clearing it would see me anyway, and the ward would give me a second or two of warning.
Meditation brought questions. Had I done the right thing? I’d abandoned my companions in the middle of a fight. I’d crippled Erev, and it was no stretch of the imagination to see Yoshana leaving him to die, or tearing him apart in a fit of rage. Was he dead now? Dragging himself to shelter on hands and knees, abandoned? Or healed, and bent on vengeance?
Maybe I should have killed him. As I thought about it, it was hard to see any upside to leaving him alive.
Prophetess wouldn’t have approved of killing him. But Prophetess wouldn’t approve of anything I had done since I’d let the Darkness into my body. Let it into my soul, she’d say.
Didn’t leaving Yoshana prove it hadn’t corrupted me? Didn’t sparing Erev?
If I’d spared him.
I closed my eyes, but rest didn’t come easily.
Nothing molested me during the night. Maybe the monsters of the darkness had sensed my mood, and thought it best to leave me alone.
More likely nothing of any size had stumbled across me.
The risk of an encounter with something large was very real. In that first rush of freedom from Yoshana I’d put that out of my mind. But something had taken Rosc and Talman while we’d slept. One native I could handle - but not a hunting pack. And a large cloud would be far more than I could deal with.
Yoshana had said it - there were reasons why even the demons didn’t come in here.
There was nothing for it but to move on, be careful, and hope for the best. I found that the clumsily wrapped hilt of the katana was comforting in my hand as I moved deeper into the forest. I followed a ridgeline that tended southwest, staying above the deepest shadow without highlighting myself against the sky.
It should have been safe enough… or as safe as I could be in the Sorrows. And the currents seemed thin. Almost surprisingly so. Perhaps the route we’d taken before had been more heavily infested. Or I was just getting used to it.
I was at the point of resting under a huge tree when I saw the bones.
A dozen partially dissolved skeletons littered the forest floor around the trunk. Most were smaller animals, birds or rodents, but I saw one that was likely a boar, and another that might have been a wolf. I pulled my senses back in, then carefully extended the most delicate of probes toward the tree.
Once I felt it, it was easy enough to see with my own eyes. Twenty feet up, a thick mass of Darkness pulsed, shadowed by the leaves, like a monstrous wasps’ nest. It was at least as large and dense as the cloud that had possessed the native shaman. As I scanned more carefully, I could sense tendrils reaching out from it across the ground and through the air.
I recalled the similar trap I’d come across before with Yoshana and the others. The Darkness reproduced and spread. Yoshana had said it consumed nutrients from living things. Things whose bones lay scattered here.
When we’d all been traveling together, we’d found the lurking mass in time and avoided it. This one was far larger, and I was standing inside the nest’s sensory network. From where the bodies had fallen, it looked like the Darkness usually let them get closer before it attacked. Maybe I could back away and live.
Or maybe it would rush me if it felt me trying to escape. I’d seen how quickly the Darkness could move. I had no illusions that I could outrun it, or fight off such a thick concentration.
It feared fire. Lighting a torch might provoke it, but it might also be my only chance. Slowly, trying not to move abruptly, I sank the point of my sword into the earth, shifted my pack, and withdrew a torch, flint, and steel.
“God, I know I’m probably not too high up on your list right now, but I’m trying to do the right thing for your church,” I muttered. “So I’d really appreciate it if this torch would light and you didn’t let this cloud eat me.”
The flint sparked, the oil-soaked rag caught, and the torch sputtered fitfully to life.
“Thank you,” I whispered. “I owe you one.”
The mass in the tree quivered, disturbed. Its tendrils writhed in the air, circling around me but keeping a wary distance. I backed slowly away.
“Let’s you and me make a deal too,” I said. “I don’t burn you, you don’t tear me apart.”
There was nothing as human as anger in the cloud - just a bottomless hunger. But I could sense its frustration held barely in check by fear as I moved away.
I stopped feeling its presence less than a hundred feet from the tree. I went ten times that far before I ground out the torch in a pile of damp leaves. The smoke would be marking me for any roving bands of natives in the area, but that was by far the lesser evil until the nest was out of range.
I sat on a rock and took deep, shaky breaths. I had very nearly blundered into something far beyond my ability to defeat. It would take me at least a week to cross the Sorrows. I had almost died on the second day.
I scanned the sky. I should move away from the remnants of the smoke I had trailed behind me.
So why was there smoke in front of me?
It was a thin column, like a cooking fire. Probably several miles to the northwest, but clearly visible against the
blue sky. It could be anything, spanning the full range from salvation to doom. I was deep in the Sorrows, but scavengers from the Source might conceivably have gotten this far. The natives we had seen hadn’t used fire, nor did it seem likely they would if they were possessed. But I didn’t fool myself into believing I had encountered every form of awfulness these woods held.
Or it might be as simple as a natural blaze, smoldering from some past lightning strike I hadn’t seen. A forest fire might clear a path for me through the terrors of the Sorrows, unless it turned back and consumed me. Yoshana had repeatedly compared the Darkness to fire, and they were both unpredictable and dangerous.
The encounter with the nest had shaken me. If there was a chance for help, I would take it. I set out to the northwest.
The column of smoke served as a guidepost, continuing unabated. It seemed it must be manmade - if it were natural, it would certainly have sputtered out or grown into an inferno.
I crested a low hill and found it rising from the center of a depression in a circle of trees. I couldn’t quite make out the fire from my vantage point, but it was clear that this was some sort of camp.
The question was whose?
I crept down through the foliage, keeping low, sword out, Darkness questing in front of me. Well before I reached the clearing, my probes had reconnoitered it. There was a small, thatch-roofed cabin, a fire pit, and - oddly - a stone statue between me and the center of the circle. Some ancient site, then, with new inhabitants. Again, the question was who those inhabitants were. I sensed no one there. Not in the clearing, not in the hut, not in the woods immediately around us. As quietly as I could, I approached the statue, and peered out from behind it. The scene was just what the Darkness had told me - a rustic encampment, but a permanent one.
The edge of the sculpture’s plinth was sharp under my knee. Too sharp. A woman was carved into the pale rock as if emerging from cloud. But there was no weathering of the stone. It might have been hewn yesterday, but the quality of the work matched anything I’d seen in ancient ruins. Where had it come from, how had it survived unscathed in the middle of nowhere, and what did it have to do with this campsite, abandoned now, but obviously tenanted?
Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle Page 34