He paused in the doorway. “I brought you a friend. I thought you might need one.”
If you’d told me six months before that Doctor John Dee would be my last friend in the world, I’d have laughed in your face.
For a wonder, he just sat and listened, quiet as a tomb, while the story came out in every vicious detail, every treacherous thought. At the end, he said, “You’ll write it all down, I hope?”
“I suppose.”
“What will you do now?”
“Leave here. I’m not doing anyone any good. You’ll have to protect Prophetess as best you can. Maybe Yoshana won’t want to do the dirty work herself as long as she thinks I might still do it for her.”
“Where will you go?”
I shrugged. “We’ll see. I have to think. The only two paths can’t be this self-righteous refusal to see reality at Our Lady or Yoshana’s ruthless murder of everyone who stands in her way. There has to be a third path between them. I just need to find it.”
The occultist nodded. “I’d… that is…”
And if you’d told me I’d be sad to leave that loudmouth behind, I’d probably have coughed up a lung. I could feel his fear even without the Darkness.
“It might not be safe to be with me, Dee. You stay here. Take care of Tess.”
“I’ll do that, Minos.” He reached into his pack and pulled out a heavy, leather-bound book. “As you explore both without and within, you might find this useful. Howard Phillips Lovecraft was the greatest occultist of his day.”
During the long hours of dusk, I would rest under trees and read as I cooked. The book was entertaining, if a bit of an acquired taste… like Dee himself. He had helpfully dog-eared one chapter titled “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.” In case I missed the point, he had underlined the phrase, “Do not call up any that you can not put down.”
Dee meant the Darkness, no doubt. But I returned again and again to a passage from a different chapter:
Now I ride with the mocking and friendly ghouls on the night-wind, and play by day amongst the catacombs… yet in my new wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage. I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.
Book Three - Called to Darkness
“But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue?
It is the greatest of all possible evils;
For it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.”
Edmund Burke
1. Curiosity
I was free.
Free of Prophetess, free of Yoshana. I was living off the land, and untraceable. Even the world’s most dangerous Overlord couldn’t quarter the earth to find me. And with the Darkness in me, I was deadlier than anything but the Darkness Radiant, the Hellguard, or the great wraiths of the Sorrows.
None of which were to be found in the middle of nowhere in the Source.
I had drifted aimlessly for weeks. The weather was good, and I slept on the ground, tendrils of Darkness warding me. I woke to find food waiting for me, animals I’d killed in my sleep as they drew too near.
I was slowly working my way west, away from Yoshana and Prophetess. I no longer had anything to do with the war between the Darkness Radiant and Our Lady. I had rejected one side, and the other had rejected me.
I spent weeks more in the great underground library buried beneath the dead city of eternal lights. It was built on multiple floors, descending into the earth. Perhaps it had been made that way to survive disaster. I had explored, the Darkness questing before me, but found nothing more dangerous than mice and several families of raccoons. The second level down opened into a square courtyard exposed to the sky, with a huge tree growing in its center. Concrete benches made a pleasant place to read once I cleared aside the brush that had overrun them.
Many of the books set out in rack upon rack of shelves had crumbled to dust, but those that survived showed the self-styled Doctor John Dee had been right. The Darkness had indeed been created in this place. Ironically, none remained. I had probed carefully, even venturing into the abandoned laboratory where the scourge had been born. There was no trace of it now.
I had always known something of the Darkness, of course. I had learned more from Yoshana, and more still from the Hellguard who called himself Seven. What I read in the library confirmed it. The Psycho-Reactive Autonomous Nano Technology had been created as a medical tool, designed to fight cancers and perform surgery at a microscopic level. Its value had quickly been seen by the military, who put it to other uses. But as new versions became more independent to be effective at greater range, they became harder to control. The military bred a race of soldiers able to master it. The library’s records ceased not long after the Hellguard rebelled, leaving the demons and the Darkness as a curse on the world that had created them.
I read extensively. Yoshana and Grigg had bickered endlessly about military strategy, and I found a volume of Clausewitz. His prose was nearly impenetrable, and I gave up. Another author, Mao Zedong, yielded deep insights on the effective use of an inferior force. That would have been invaluable to Our Lady in the coming war. It was a shame I couldn’t take it to them.
I didn’t just study war. The library had volumes of geography, science, philosophy. I couldn’t have absorbed it all in a hundred lifetimes. One day as I sat on my bench, I read, “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”
I shivered a bit in the bright afternoon light, and it seemed as if a shadow passed over the sun. I let the Darkness come out and play on my skin. I had no interest in fighting monsters anymore. And I had already become one.
Most days I could honestly say I wished Prophetess and her forces well. Not that my wishes mattered. Without me, they stood no chance. I wasn’t a match for Yoshana, or even her lieutenants, Grigg and Roshel. But with no command at all of the Darkness, Our Lady’s cause was lost from the outset.
Eventually I moved on. I avoided the trading town of Opportunity. I had toyed with the idea of trying to buy back my old katana, exchanging it for either the one I had taken from a native in the Sorrows or the strange, glassy knife I had found in the same place. But they would test me for the Darkness, and while perhaps I could prevent my body from betraying my nature, it was more trouble than it was worth. The blade that had been my inheritance was probably gone, traded away in the months past. With war on the horizon, it would have been a great prize to someone.
I briefly considered terrorizing the inhospitable fortress of Coalville out of sheer spite. They had slammed the door in my face almost a year before, claiming my companions and I might belong to the Darkness Radiant. Now that Yoshana had trained me and made me over into one of her tools, all their spears and fire could never hope to keep me out. But although the Darkness boiled in me when I remembered the humiliation, I wouldn’t kill or maim just to avenge a slight.
Yoshana would. It was important to remind myself that I wasn’t her. Sometimes, when the Darkness coiled in me, it could be hard to remember.
I lay on a sandbank on the shore of the Big Muddy, basking in the warmth of early summer. Above me, a strange bridge of two parallel metal pipes stretched over the water. I had studied geography as well as science and war during my time in the library. I knew now that structure had been a natural gas pipeline, providing the ancients with fuel. When I had first encountered it, I had feared it carried the Darkness. If at any point in its history it ever had, it didn’t now.
The bridge marked a decision point for me. I could continue on my path southwest, cross the disputed territory on the other side of the Muddy, and return to Rockwall. I could follow the river south, and then turn east again into the Green Heart, where my parents
had lived and perhaps still did. Or I could go upriver to the northeast, taking the route Prophetess and I had originally intended to reach Stephensburg. The northeast fork would eventually take me back to the Sorrows.
Seven lived deep in the Sorrows. In many ways, that was the logical place to go. The Hellguard had been kind to me, and had taught me a tremendous amount in the single day I’d spent with him. If anyone would understand me, it was that lonely warrior in his self-imposed exile. He had invited me to rejoin him, if I grew as sick of the world as he had.
My parents had said the opposite. For my own safety, and to keep the Select race alive, they’d told me to leave the Green Heart and never return. But Yoshana and the Hellguard were gone from my old home. And I was now strong enough to face anything else. I didn’t even know if my parents were alive or dead. I could at least learn the truth of that - although I dreaded to know it.
There was nothing for me in Rockwall except the garbage mine on the Flow, in the shadow of the dead city of Acceptance. Yet somehow, I had felt at home there. It made no sense, but something in me felt that I needed to return, to erase the failure of my journey with Prophetess. To start over, even though I was changed irrevocably.
And besides, I had two wristwatches in my pack I had taken for Luco and Fenn, friends I had left on the Flow. It seemed silly to have hauled them out of the Sorrows for nothing.
It was sillier to make my way back to the garbage mine for no better reason than that. But there was no one now to tell me I was wrong. And so I climbed the rusting iron ladder to the pipeline bridge and made my way southwest.
Summer had been ending when last I had passed through this land. The battles between Rockwall’s peasant levies and the Monolith’s proxies would have ground to a halt during the winter. Neither side cared enough about that war to risk their troops freezing to death when the snow came. Of course, towns or farmsteads looted and burned by the combatants wouldn’t be so lucky.
It was possible that peace had broken out - the warring states might have reached a settlement, or simply gotten tired of wasting their resources. The state of hostilities would determine how safe the roads were. The Hawk’s Nest was close, and their mercenaries were notorious for robbing anyone they encountered. They called it “living off the land” or “field requisitions.” It sounded more respectable that way.
I wasn’t terribly concerned. I could avoid the Hawks easily enough in the woods. If it came to a fight, they would be a threat to me only in large numbers, or at a range where their rifles could hit me but the Darkness couldn’t kill them. I wasn’t likely to be facing them on those terms. Still, I’d rather not take the risk, or stain my conscience with more deaths - even the deaths of bloody-handed pirates who gave mercenaries a bad name.
I set out cross country from the bridge. I would come to a road eventually, and follow it cautiously until I learned more one way or the other. But that first night west of the Muddy, I slept in the woods.
Farther southwest of here, Prophetess, Dee, and I had encountered a drelb. Dee had told us the monsters were bears, twisted by the Darkness. Whatever Dee’s faults - consisting mostly of abject cowardice and the non-stop running of his mouth - he had proved well-informed about the Darkness. I had no reason to doubt him where the drelb were concerned. The one Prophetess and I had fought before had nearly killed us. But that was before I commanded the Darkness myself. While I didn’t relish the idea of encountering another, the sad, violent creatures no longer terrified me. I was far more dangerous than they.
Still, I started awake that night when the tendrils of my extended senses touched something large. It was no drelb, but rather a wolf, snuffling its way toward me and now about fifty feet away. It hadn’t reached the range where the Darkness would have simply killed it without waking me.
The Darkness was sentient, after a fashion. It followed my will, but had a certain initiative of its own. It had seen fit to alert me when it first brushed up against the predator’s consciousness. That flexibility made the Darkness a better tool - and also riskier to its master. By its nature, the construct took its cues from the depths of my mind - which could be dark places. “Monsters from the id,” as Grigg had said.
Now I used it to touch the wolf’s thoughts. The big canine was curious, hungry, cautious - in almost equal parts.
What would it be like to have a pet wolf? I had little doubt I could turn the animal’s mind and bring it under my control.
I shook my head in disgust. The wolf would be little better than a drelb, a monster bent out of its natural shape. There was an elemental beauty to the creature now, a beauty I would only destroy. I prodded it with the lightest mental touch.
“Fear,” I sent.
Instantly it turned tail and fled into the woods. I hoped that in whatever way wolves communicated, this one would tell its brothers to leave the strange, gray-skinned biped alone. I didn’t want to have to kill any of them.
Two days later I found a road, and not long after that a tiny, fortified village by its side.
Most towns made do with a wooden palisade. This one was surrounded by a massive wall of cinderblocks, complete with crenellations and arrow slits. I would have avoided it entirely except for the brightly painted sign on its heavy gate that read, “Paying Travelers Welcome.”
I still thought twice about it. It was hard to forget the “hospitality” of Brom of Icefall, the bandit lord in the northeastern Source who had robbed travelers unfortunate enough to visit his keep. Or he had until Yoshana slaughtered his men in front of him and tore out his throat.
I had a meaningful fraction of Yoshana’s power now. I could probe the intentions of those inside, infiltrate their bodies with the Darkness. If they moved against me, I could destroy them from the inside out.
But I didn’t want to. Grigg, Yoshana’s Select lieutenant, had told me that to give in completely to the power of the Darkness was to let it consume you. Whatever lies Grigg and Yoshana and Roshel had told me, that I believed.
“You gonna come in, or you just gonna stand there?”
A face peered out at me between the crenellations. I couldn’t see it well enough to judge the features, but the nasal, querulous voice sounded female.
For some reason I found a woman less threatening - even though Yoshana was both a woman and the most terrifying being I had ever met, making no exception for the Hellguard.
“I don’t have much or need much,” I called up. “But I’ll swap you stories for stories.”
“Fair,” said the voice as the face disappeared. The last words floated up faintly over the wall. “We’ll kick you out when you get boring.”
A massive bar was set aside with a thud and the gate creaked open. I stepped into a dirt courtyard, with room for dozens of wagons and teams. It was empty. At one side of the gate stood a short, stout woman in early middle age. A gangly youth who might have been her son manhandled the other leaf of the door back into place behind me. Both wore knives long enough to serve as short swords, but neither looked like they knew how to use them.
This pair would pose no threat to me even if I were armed with no more than my hickory walking stick… and I had a finely made katana and a broad knife of ancient, unnaturally sharp steel. Not to mention the Darkness.
Still, I cast a calculating eye around the courtyard. Outbuildings stood around the walls, and a squat keep of the same cinderblocks as the wall faced me fifty feet away. Arrows or enemies could come from any of them. The absence of anyone else - anyone visible - made me nervous. I began to extend probes.
“No travelers worth speaking of in I don’t know how long,” the woman said. “Damn Hawks rampaging all over the countryside seen to that.”
And that answered my main question. The roads were still not safe.
“Surprised you haven’t run into them,” she continued, looking me up and down.
“Who says I haven’t?” I gave her a slow smile.
“Not known for their tolerance, the Hawks.”
&n
bsp; Not many people cared for the Select. Masses of armed men had a way of letting their prejudices show.
Some of Yoshana must have rubbed off on me. My grin widened. “There are three possibilities. First, the Hawks are mercenaries. The Select are often mercenaries. Perhaps I’m in their service.”
She took a small step back. I pressed on. “Second, the Hawks are mercenaries. The Select are better mercenaries. Perhaps I met some and they didn’t survive the encounter.”
The step back was longer now. “Or third, perhaps I’m new to the area and just haven’t run into them yet.”
And then I was ashamed of myself. The sort of games that amused the mistress of the Darkness Radiant were not kind. “It’s the third, by the way. My name’s Minos. I just crossed the Muddy three days ago.”
“Well. I’m Delet, this is Scon. Pleased to meet you.” She didn’t sound entirely sincere, and it was hard to blame her. I had not been a model guest so far. But then, I hadn’t interacted with humans since I’d left Our Lady months ago. And that interaction hadn’t gone at all well.
A Select’s black eyes, sclera and iris as dark as the pupil, were supposed to be unreadable. But Delet must have seen something in my face, because again she stepped away.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Let’s start again. I’m Minos. I’ve crossed over from the Source because I want no part of the Darkness Radiant. I’ve seen it much too close.”
And that was certainly true.
“Well, come on in and have some lunch.” She turned and led me into the keep, the boy trailing behind. “Scon, why don’t you go bring us all some stew and cider?”
There was a vast room inside, wooden tables and benches that could seat a small army. It was as empty as the courtyard. Light filtered in through arrow slits high in the walls, reached by stone stairs leading up to a narrow firing platform that ringed half the building. Scon continued deeper inside, vanishing through a wooden door at the far end.
Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle Page 38