“Sit wherever you like,” Delet said. “Plenty of room.”
“There’s no one at all on the road?” I eased myself onto a bench. It was hard, but more comfortable than the ground.
“Nah. There’s been others like you. A few families traveling together came through about a week, ten days ago. Doing the same thing you’re doing. Didn’t want to live in the Source with Yoshana in charge.”
The Overlord had taken Stephensburg in early winter, six months past. “Took them a while to make up their minds,” I said.
“Guess they thought maybe she’d get herself killed out east. But when she came back and started recruiting more soldiers…”
“She’s back?”
“That’s what I said, isn’t it? What they said, anyway. Thought you’d seen ’em up close.”
I’d seen Yoshana far too close. I’d traveled with her for months. She’d taught me to use the Darkness. She was making me her tool against Prophetess and Our Lady when I’d abandoned her in the Darklands.
I’d assumed she’d survived, but I hadn’t been sure. Hearing she was back in Stephensburg was like a punch in the gut.
“Did they say if she’d succeeded? If she did what she set out to do?”
“Nope. Don’t even know what that was.” She cocked her head and stared at me.
I’d said I would trade stories for stories. “She was going to kill a demon. If she’s back, I suppose she did.” I had been meant to help her do that, too.
Delet shook her head. “Demons and Overlords can kill each other ’til the world ends for all I care. Don’t like it so much when they come this way, though.”
Yoshana would make war on the darkness of the Hellguard and the uncompromising light of Our Lady. Her legions, the Darkness Radiant, stood between the two, opposed to both. It seemed like an awful position, but I for one wouldn’t bet against her.
“Where’d those refugees go?” I asked. In case they had any ideas worth copying. There wasn’t much I feared anymore, but Yoshana was at the top of the list.
“West. Making for the Monolith, they said. Figured no one’s army was going to get up into those mountains if the Josephites didn’t want ’em to.”
There was something to that idea. But the land between here and the borders of the Monolith was unsettled at the best of times. “Think they’ll make it?”
“No,” she said flatly. “I told ’em it was mad. Hawks on the road, paleos in the woods. Both of ’em crazy and mean. Hawks’ll rob you. Paleos’ll eat you.”
“They went anyway?”
She shrugged. “Not much choice. Couldn’t stay here forever. We haven’t the food for it. With no trade we’ve got only what we can grow.”
Scon returned at that moment carrying a tray with bowls of stew and mugs of cider.
“If you’re running short of food…” I began.
Delet waved my objection away. “One bowl isn’t the difference between living and dying. Not yet, anyway.”
I wasn’t proud of it, but I probed the edges of her thoughts. I’d run across more places than Icefall that would rob travelers. Poison would be a good way of doing it.
Roshel could read a man’s mind if she touched him. I suspected Yoshana could do it from farther away, though she hadn’t detected my betrayal. I wasn’t as strong or as skilled as those two. All I could pick up were faint surface impressions.
I perceived no malice. And I suspected that the Darkness could neutralize most poisons in any case. I spooned up chunks of potato and some kind of tough, stringy meat, feeling a bit guilty about my suspicions. But it was the way of our fallen world.
“So where are you headed?” Delet asked.
I considered. There was a part of me that wondered if I shouldn’t try to catch the refugee caravan. I could protect them, and they’d need protecting. And it was true that the Monolith was strong, and far from Yoshana’s legions. The Josephites had a reputation as religious fanatics who despised my race, but Grigg had served them. They were pragmatic enough to accept the Select when we were useful to them. And I could make myself very useful.
It seemed like the right thing to do.
So had returning to Our Lady to put the Darkness into their service against Yoshana. Things that seemed like a good idea at the time hadn’t worked out well for me.
In a world where I suspected the worst of everyone and they returned the favor, a life of mining garbage with the rough crew on the Flow held an aching appeal.
“Southwest,” I said. “Toward Rockwall.”
“Lots of bad things between here and there,” Delet said.
“I’m pretty sure none of them are worse than me.”
Without telling all of it, I described some of the horrors of the Sorrows. I’m not sure she believed it. She seemed openly skeptical that I’d truly entered the Darklands and seen the demons’ slaves. I didn’t even mention the strangest parts of the story… that I had been as close to Yoshana as her chief lieutenants… that I had perhaps believed myself in love with one of them… that I had been trained by one of the Hellguard.
In fact, I didn’t mention Seven at all. The immortal soldier was doing no harm to anyone. Better that he be allowed to stay undisturbed in the depths of the forest.
Delet believed enough of what I said - or found it sufficiently entertaining - to provide me a bed for the night. It was hard and lumpy, but like the bench, it was better than the ground. It was also full of fleas. The Darkness made short work of them. Of all the benefits I had gained from that grim power, being free of nasty little parasites crawling in my clothes and hair was one of the most trivial and yet most satisfying.
I set wards on general principles, not because I feared any treachery from my hosts. I had sensed more people than I had seen, but the vague impression I had of their thoughts tasted of indifference rather than malice. I made sure the tendrils wouldn’t kill anything that blundered into them. And I was even more careful than usual to meditate before I fell asleep. The nightmares that the Darkness could bring were bad enough when I was alone - I didn’t want a murder on my conscience if it lashed out while I slept.
The night passed uneventfully, but in the morning it was clear that the credit from my tales had run out. While Delet was cordial enough, breakfast consisted of a soft, wrinkled apple that might have been kept in a cellar since last fall. I didn’t mind. Our conversation had fixed my mind on the decision to return to the Flow. It was time to be going.
I would stick to the forest. The Hawks on the road were a greater danger than the paleos in the woods - the Hawks would travel in greater numbers, and their weapons would have greater range. I wasn’t really afraid of either group, but I wasn’t sure exactly how many enemies I could strike down at once with the Darkness, or at what range. A platoon of mercenaries with bows or rifles might pose a real threat. A handful of savages with sharpened sticks worried me far less.
So I found myself again among the trees. The air was cool under their branches, and I enjoyed the sharp scent of the pines. With the Darkness ranged around me, the rustling of leaves and cracking of twigs resolved into rabbits, squirrels, foxes, pheasants, deer. There were no terrors hiding in the shadows. Once, days after leaving the walled village, I encountered a small cloud of the Darkness drifting aimlessly. It was just barely large enough to possess a child or perhaps an unusually weak-willed adult. I allowed it to sense what I was, and it fled.
What did it say about me that I felt a brief, bizarre pang of nostalgia for the Sorrows? Nothing good, I’m sure.
I was in a stretch of forest that I thought was west of the place where Prophetess and I had fought the drelb. There was a nice clearing, a circle of stones in its center long overtaken by moss, yet clearly the site of an ancient fire pit. I found some wild blackberries that were close to ripe, skinned and cooked a hare that the Darkness killed, and settled down to sleep.
I woke in the thin light of the moon. There was something coming toward me. It wasn’t an animal.
The invader moved stealthily, slowly, not a twig snapping or a leaf crackling under its feet. If not for the Darkness I would never have known it was coming.
The tendrils of my senses thickened around my unwelcome guest, invisible in the night. Particles penetrated the pores of its body, unseen and unfelt. A knife in its hand left little doubt of its intentions.
I sat up. “Looking for something? Or just lost?”
The paleo jumped a foot in the air and let out a squawk. I let the Darkness pour from my body, circling the attacker in thick, rotating bands, visible even in the dim moonlight. “Don’t go anywhere.”
The paleos were filthy, murderous savages. They hated all civilized people, but despised the Select most of all. The feeling was mutual. I’d killed two of them and crippled another when they’d attacked Prophetess, Dee, and me on our way to Our Lady.
This one wore rags that had perhaps been looted from the corpse of a victim. The knife in its hand was nothing more than a length of bone sharpened to a point. It would have been perfectly effective for murdering me in my sleep, though.
The Darkness circled.
The paleo dropped to its knees. “Shadow warrior,” it murmured.
The voice was high. The figure was slight. I realized my attacker was a woman.
I stood up and took a dozen steps closer. Under the dirt, she was young - younger than I was. She looked up at me with wide eyes. Her face was full of terror, but mixed with the same resignation I’d seen a year ago when I’d faced another of her race who’d expected me to kill him.
“Not polite, creeping up on people in the night,” I said. I pointed to the bone knife. “What were you going to do with that?”
“Kill,” she said softly. “Eat.”
She certainly wasn’t trying very hard to win me over. Not that I would have believed any other answer.
“Not know what you were,” she added.
“Oh? Would that have made a difference?”
She barked out a laugh. “Not stupid, me.” She paused and thought, as if considering her position. “Not so, so stupid. Can’t kill what doesn’t die.”
What exactly did she think I was? A demon? Myths of the paleos’ disastrous war with the Hellguard must have been passed down among her kind.
The paleos rejected all civilization. The more artificial it seemed to them, the more they hated it. The Select and the Hellguard were creations of genetic manipulation, abominations in their minds. Over the centuries, many Select had died at the hands of the paleos. They’d attacked the Hellguard as well, but that fight had been one-sided. Genetically engineered soldiers who controlled the Darkness had nothing to fear from savages with wooden spears.
Her statement wasn’t so far wrong. Compared to Seven or Yoshana, I was a weakling, an amateur warrior at best. Compared to a paleo girl with a sharpened bone, I was Death itself.
I could have killed her with a thought when I first woke up. I nearly had. Now it seemed cruel, like crushing a beetle that crossed my path.
I pulled the Darkness back into myself. “Go.”
The paleo stayed on her knees, staring. After a time she shook her head. “No.”
“What? You want me to kill you?”
She shrugged. “You kill. Wolves kill. Drelb kills. Hunger kills. Dead is dead. Shadows kill quick. So kill.” She shut her eyes, squared her shoulders, and jutted out her chin at me.
This was ridiculous. “I’m letting you go, you idiot.”
“Go where? Alone. Nowhere to go. Good place to die, here.”
“Go back to the rest of your flea-bitten people.” I considered. If she had nowhere to go… “Did the Hawks kill them?”
She shook her head. “No. Cast out, me. Exile.”
What kind of awful thing did you have to do to get exiled by the paleos? “What did you do?”
“Curious, me. Cat, me.”
Was that her name? “It’s good to be curious.”
She laughed again, a single explosion of sound. “For trolls. Not for people.”
The paleos called civilized humanity trolls because we tried to control everything. Control, controlling, controlled, slaver and slave, one had said to me. Right before I crushed his kneecap and left him lying crippled in the road.
“Go starve somewhere else, curious cat,” I said. “I’m not killing you here.”
“No,” she repeated. She stayed put.
“Suit yourself. I’m going to sleep.” I went back to my blanket, lay down on it, and turned my back to the paleo. I didn’t need to be looking at her to watch her.
“Sleep, shadow warrior. Cat stays. Cat watches.”
Apparently boneless, she shifted effortlessly into sitting cross-legged.
I rolled onto my back and glared up at the sky. “You’ve got a lousy sense of humor,” I muttered.
2. Where It All Began
Cat was still there in the morning, sleeping curled up on the ground like her namesake. In the daylight the paleo was a little thing, even shorter and thinner than she’d appeared at night. Her skin seemed surprisingly pallid for someone who spent all her time outdoors, although it was hard to be sure through the layers of grime. Black hair combined with the pale skin to create a striking appearance - almost the opposite of my own gray skin and white hair.
Her bone knife lay a foot away from her. Aside from the rags she wore and a flat water skin, it seemed to be her only possession.
I stared down at her for a time, making sure she was still breathing and I hadn’t accidentally killed her in the night. It was hard to say why that would have bothered me, since she had fully intended to kill me on purpose.
I gathered my things silently. “Goodbye, nasty little cat,” I whispered under my breath.
She was awake and on her feet so fast I recoiled.
“Cat stays,” she announced.
“Fine. Cat stays. I’m moving along.” I looked at the blanket in my hand and considered the shreds of her clothing. It was warm now, but it wouldn’t be in the fall - if she lived that long. I tossed the blanket to her. “Here. You need it more than I do.”
She caught it with a snakelike swipe of her arm and took three long steps toward me. “Cat stays with you.”
“No you absolutely do not! I’m Select, for God’s sake. I’ve been trained by the Hellguard. You’re a paleo. There is no one I would like less to be with than you, and there can’t be many people you’d like less to be with than me.”
“Cast out, me. Not of the people. Cat needs new people. Strong people. Shadow warrior is strong.”
“I follow that logic, but you missed a part. I don’t need you. And I don’t want you.”
She showed a little smile. “Cat knows woods. Where people are. Where Hawks are. Where drelb are. Where safety is.”
“What makes you think I care about any of that? Do you think any of those are a threat to me?” They were, of course, at least to a degree. But she didn’t need to know that.
Her face fell. She looked down, and when her eyes came back to me, a tear was trickling from one of them. “Please?”
Oh, for… I looked up into the sky again. “You’re really not funny. You know that.”
I killed a couple of rabbits with the Darkness. Cat watched wide-eyed as I walked back into the clearing with the little bodies. Fast and quiet as she was, it would still be no easy thing to hunt with only a sharpened bone. It was easy to forget how different life had been before Yoshana had taught me to use the Darkness.
Before I had been damned in Prophetess’ eyes.
The paleo backed away from something in my face. I forced a smile. “It’s nothing. Last time I came through here I was with a friend. We’re not friends anymore.”
The girl nodded solemnly. “Cat knows.”
And of course an exile from a shunned race would know more than anyone about losing friends. Exile from a shunned race… that could describe either of us. I felt a sudden rush of sympathy for my new companion. Maybe we were more alike than I could have imagined
.
I started a fire, then began to skin the first rabbit with the knife of glassy metal I’d found in the Sorrows. Cat’s eyes were fixed on the meat, unblinking as - well, as a cat’s.
“What?” I said.
“Can -” her eyes flicked to the second rabbit on the ground. “Can?”
I nodded, and like lightning she was on the furry body. A savage twist and the head was off and she was drinking the blood. She hooked her fingers into the loose skin at the neck and tore a section of the pelt free, then sank her teeth into the flesh.
My skin crawled. That would have been me if I hadn’t been shielded by the Darkness. This wild thing wasn’t much like me at all.
She met my eyes, her mouth smeared with blood.
“Hungry,” she said. It sounded just a bit defensive, even apologetic. Maybe my horror had showed on my face. She seemed to read me easily enough. Perhaps the paleos made up in animal intuition what they lacked in civilized patterns of thought.
“So, just to be clear, you were only going to kill me and eat me last night because you were hungry?”
She nodded emphatically. “Trolls kill to kill. Not people. Kill for food. For land. For quarrels.” She shrugged. “No land, me. No quarrels, me. Kill for food, only.”
I couldn’t let that pass. “Your people killed a lot of my people over the years. That sounds like a quarrel to me.”
She tore loose another piece of the rabbit and wolfed it down. “Not Cat’s quarrel.”
“So you don’t mind the Select?”
“Cat needs new people. Shadow warrior is strong. Teach me. Make Cat shadow warrior. New people, us. Strong.”
“You think I can make you Select?”
She spat a small bone in my direction. “Not grayskin. Shadow warrior. Use shadows, like you. Shadows see, shadows hunt, shadows kill.”
“You want me to teach you to use the Darkness.”
She grinned, showing red-stained teeth. “Curious, me. Learn.”
Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle Page 39