Teaching a paleo to use the Darkness. I probably couldn’t think of a worse idea if I spent a year trying. “Almost no one can control the Darkness. The Hellguard can. The Overlords can. Some Select. Very few normal humans. One of your people? I don’t think so.”
Not that I’d have any idea how to teach her even if I wanted to. I said as much. “The ones who taught me were very strong. Stronger than me. Older than me.” In Seven’s case hundreds of years older. “I wouldn’t know how to teach you.”
She looked up from worrying at the rabbit again and met my eyes. “Stronger. Older. Time needs, only. Time, me.” And then, with a frown of concentration, “I have all the time in the world.”
“Wait! You can talk like that?”
“Can, me. Want to, why?” She flashed another blood-soaked grin and went back to the little corpse she was devouring.
Somehow I had acquired a paleo sidekick and would-be apprentice. Yoshana would have laughed herself silly. I couldn’t imagine what Prophetess would have said.
As we continued southwest, Cat would spend most of the day at my side, chattering at me, asking questions. If I ignored her she’d shut up - she was clearly still afraid of angering me. Whatever she thought a shadow warrior was, and however much she wanted to be one, it was something that also frightened her. And rightly so. If I’d had Dee’s unceasing blather to contend with, the Darkness might have stopped his mouth permanently.
But most of the time, I found I didn’t mind talking with Cat. I even learned things about the paleos. She insisted their speech patterns weren’t because they were stupid or ignorant - though I couldn’t imagine she had a meaningful standard of comparison - but because they prized simplicity in all things. It was true that I could understand her well enough, and she was able to convey complex concepts in a handful of words.
When I asked how she’d learn to speak like a “troll,” she revealed - reluctantly - that she’d taught herself to read books in the ruined town where her clan laired. Reading was apparently a grave sin among the paleos, and she’d never been caught at it.
“Skin still on, me.”
“You mean they’d have skinned you if they’d caught you reading?”
She’d nodded seriously. I didn’t think she was joking, though it turned out she had a playful sense of humor.
Often when I didn’t want to talk to her, she’d range away from me, scouting or scavenging. I had at first hoped she might not come back, but she always did. She was a skilled tracker, and could catch up with me easily even if I changed my route. Of course, I could evade her forever, dodging behind trees, using the Darkness to see which way she was coming and doubling back.
“Not fair!” she announced after I’d led her in a circle only to wait sitting on a stump she’d already passed. She threw a pinecone at me, which she’d obviously collected for just that purpose.
I grinned. “Shadow warriors don’t fight fair. By definition.”
She didn’t bother me again about teaching her to use the Darkness. Our worst disagreement came when we found a broad, shallow stream.
“Take a bath,” I said.
She shook her head. I was none too clean myself, but she was far dirtier. There were even small twigs and leaves matted in her long, black hair.
“Not like water, people. Or cats,” she said firmly.
“Shadow warriors do. And you stink.” She still looked mutinous.
“If you don’t go wash yourself, I’ll pick you up and throw you in.”
“Picked wrong new people, me,” she grumbled. But she waded into the stream. For a moment I was afraid that she was going to strip her clothes off in front of me - I didn’t imagine modesty was especially important to the paleos. But she went in clothes and all, which was for the best in a number of ways. The clothes needed washing as much as she did, and there was nothing clean for her to change into.
I did the same. My pack, weapons, and boots stayed on the shore, but the rest went into the water with me. Afterwards I lay on the bank, drying out in the warm sun.
“Not like water, cats,” my companion repeated. She stood next to me, dripping and looking miserable. She shook her long hair, scattering drops of cold water on my face.
She hadn’t put much effort into scrubbing off the dirt, and the stream could only do so much on its own. Still, her pallor was even more obvious. I wondered if that pointed to disease or some unusual mix in her ancestry. The debris had mostly come out of her hair, but it remained matted and tangled.
“Better,” I said. “But there’s a little more we can do.”
“Enough, that,” she protested.
I extended a thin cloud of the Darkness toward her. She squeaked and took a step back, but it enveloped her, settling onto her body. She stared at it, eyes wide. Half a minute later it returned to me.
“That should get rid of any passengers you’ve picked up.” She looked blank. “Fleas, lice…”
She nodded firmly. “Good. Picked right new people, me.”
So I had finally found a use for myself in society, as a paleo delousing service. My parents would have been so proud.
I steered our course farther west, trying to avoid civilization. I could have easily concealed my use of the Darkness, and the Select, while not popular, were generally accepted. It would be much harder to hide Cat’s origins, and the paleos aroused far more hatred than my race. Better to avoid people altogether.
I judged we were due north of Acceptance when we saw the dead town. Well, dead in one sense. It crawled with activity, but that was the life of ants and maggots on a day-old carcass. A small army was camped in and around the place - perhaps Hawks, or some other local band pledged by coin or other ties to the Monolith, or even Monolith troops themselves. I didn’t want to get close enough to find out.
This site was not like the ruins of the Last Days that we found strewn across the continent. It had fallen within the past generation. The gutted structures had been built to modern standards, with modern tools - that is to say, they were less decayed but of far lower quality than anything built hundreds of years ago.
It didn’t seem that this army had sacked the place, however. There were bonfires, but no buildings were aflame. I saw no signs of prisoners. These soldiers hadn’t killed the town - they were merely resting in its corpse.
Cat’s eyes were big. “Patrols,” she said.
Not that we saw any, but she was right. If these men were at all professional, they would have scouts posted.
I shrugged. “Probably sense them first. Kill them, if they see us.”
Despite her ability to speak in civilized patterns, Cat had no interest in doing so. Instead, to my alarm, I sometimes found myself talking more like her.
“Good,” was all she said.
We were in tall grass, crouching at the top of a low ridge - more like the lip of a gully. The land here was flat, the lines of sight almost infinite. The soldiers were camped to our west, the setting sun in our eyes as we watched. The paleo launched into a crouching lope, following the depression southeast. I sighed and followed more slowly. But I sent a particularly long tendril after her, to watch for danger.
If there were patrols, they didn’t come anywhere near us. We crossed a crumbling, ancient bridge over what I thought was the Whitewater and lay down when the sun set, concealed in the grass. I didn’t dare make a fire. There was a bit of pheasant left that I’d killed and cooked in the morning, and we ate that cold.
“We should be at the Flow in a week or so,” I said. “They’ll take you in there, I think. They’ll take anybody. They took me.”
“Stay with you,” Cat insisted.
“I’ll stay there too,” I said. “I’ve got nowhere else to go.”
“Good.”
Some time later, she asked, “The Flow, what?”
“It’s a garbage dump from the Last Days. We mine it, find things to sell. Metal, mostly. Sometimes we find things that can’t be made anymore. Some of those still work. They’re wo
rth a lot.”
“Old death. Vultures eat old death. Not cats. Not people.”
“Yeah, not shadow warriors either, generally. But I spent two years on the Flow and never had to kill anybody, and never had anybody try to kill me. Can’t say that for the year since I left.”
Cat snorted. “Shadow warrior, you. Not vulture.”
We approached the Flow from the north six days later, skirting the edge of the ruined city of Acceptance. Cat shot nervous glances at the walls and shattered towers of the city until we had left them behind.
“Not right,” she repeated periodically.
I didn’t disagree. Rumor on the Flow peopled the dead city with strange animals, humans degraded below the level of the paleos, and the Darkness itself. No one had ventured inside in living memory. Even with what I’d seen and what I’d become, the place filled me with a superstitious dread.
There were farms just to the west, but we avoided those, even though it put us uncomfortably close to the walls. And then, faintly at first, I began to hear the sound of a hammer on iron.
Cat stared at the stupid grin spreading across my face. “What?”
It felt as if a band around my chest had been loosened. A tension I hadn’t known I felt dropped away.
“It’s the forge. I’m… I’m home.”
“Minos?” Dodd and Fenn stared at me open-mouthed. The smith set his hammer down and enfolded me in a bear hug that made my ribs creak. His apprentice grinned.
“You’ve gotten bigger,” Dodd said. He took a step back, then shook my hand just as he had when I’d left - hard enough to hurt. I squeezed back. “And tougher,” he added approvingly.
Cat poked her head in through the plastic flap.
“And you’ve brought a friend. That’s not the same girl you left with, boy.”
Cat stepped inside cautiously, eyes darting from side to side.
“God, Minos,” Dodd burst out, hand twitching toward his hammer, “Is that a paleo? What have you been up to?”
“I can honestly say you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
We sat in the Hole, a cave carved into the western wall of the giant landfill. The Hole was crowded, which made it hot. I had forgotten how bad the Flow smelled. Even Cat had wrinkled her nose, and the paleo’s standards of cleanliness set the bar pretty low.
Everyone was there, but Cat had a space to herself. The miners were tolerant, in their own rude way, but no one wanted to sit next to a murderous savage. They didn’t know that on any objective scale, I was now far more dangerous than she was. As I told the story of the last year, I didn’t fully enlighten them on that point.
Not to suggest that my tale was received as enlightenment in any case. Every time I mentioned a woman, the question, “How was she in the sack?” would float up from somewhere in the dark room. That applied to Prophetess, the possessed miller’s daughter, Roshel, and even Yoshana. It’s a good thing Select don’t blush.
Yoshana didn't mean much to the miners on the Flow. She was a nebulous evil, poorly understood - not the terror that she represented to those closer to her. To these people, my encounters with the Darkness were far more exciting. The Darkness was a real threat in their minds. Even Cat represented more of a danger than some distant Overlord.
In glossing over my new relationship with the Darkness, I had left out the reason for some key decisions I’d made - and that had been made for me.
“What I don’t get,” Luco asked, “is why you bailed out on Prophetess after you went into the Sorrows. Wouldn’t it have been smarter to make that decision before you went into that hellhole?”
It was an excellent question. The truest answer, of course, was that Prophetess had thrown me out of Our Lady after I’d revealed that I carried the Darkness in me.
“Because I’m not very smart?” I suggested instead. “I guess it’s because I realized I didn’t agree with either side. I think Yoshana’s right that we have to unite against the demons and the Darkness, but I can’t stomach her methods. Prophetess is more honest, but she’s too rigid. The truth must be somewhere between them, but that’s not a healthy place to be standing.”
There was a brief silence, then Luco continued, “So you came back here to dig garbage instead?”
There were snorts of laughter. If I’d really done everything I said - crossed the continent, fought drelb and the possessed, confronted and then traveled with and then betrayed Yoshana herself - then coming back to the Flow seemed like a ludicrous step backwards.
“I know what I’m doing here,” I said. And that was true. “Besides, Cat needs somewhere to live. I didn’t figure there were a lot of places that would take in an exiled paleo, but this might be one.”
“Depends what she eats,” Joran snapped. He’d never been shy with his opinions. And it was widely - and accurately - believed that the paleos were cannibals.
“What is there, hmm?” Cat asked, staring fixedly at him.
He must have been nearly twice her weight, but he backed away.
“Thassa’s a good cook,” I said quickly, hoping to defuse the tension. I wasn’t ready to get kicked out of another community. “Where is she, anyway?”
“Gone,” Dorren rumbled from the back of the Hole. The headman of the miners emerged from the darkness, stopping a few feet from me. He was half a head shorter than I, but he had a certain presence. He’d intimidated me when I’d first lived on the Flow, but his aura of command was nothing compared to Yoshana’s. Now he was just a man in charge of a couple dozen garbage pickers.
“She went to the army. They always need cooks that can make something out of not very much. Kala too.”
If Kala had gone to the army, it hadn’t been to cook.
Dorren stared up into my black eyes. “You’re different now, Minos. It’s not just the miles. You’re not the same person that left. But you’re welcome to stay. Your friend, too, as long as you keep her under control.”
“Thanks. I appreciate it.”
“Yeah. Stay as long as you want.”
By the time we were all done catching up, the shadows were getting long outside.
“I, uh, don’t suppose my place is still there?” I asked. “Place” was about the best you could have said for it - a spot against the vertical bank of the dried-up riverbed that formed the Flow. Its other walls and roof were sheets of corrugated tin, with a flap of plastic for the door. I had slept in much better places since I’d left; although I’d also slept in much worse, including the fork of a tree in a Darkness-haunted forest.
“All yours,” Luco said. “No one new has come to take it.”
Which was a polite way of saying none of the other miners liked it enough to move in. That was no surprise. The most coveted spots were either natural caves like the Hole, or better reinforced with cinder blocks or sturdier metal. The only question had really been whether someone had scavenged the materials.
“Uh, torches might be gone,” Luco admitted.
Ah. Well, that was to be expected. The oil-soaked wood was valuable.
“No problem. We’re used to doing without.” The paleos didn’t make fire. And I didn’t need it to protect myself against the Darkness - at least, not in the quantities we might see here. I had torches in my pack - even Yoshana carried them, just in case - but I wouldn’t need them tonight.
“Come on, Cat.”
The girl stretched like her namesake and followed me out. The shelter was only a few hundred yards from the Hole, and we covered the distance in easy silence. Cat cocked her head skeptically when we reached the tiny structure, little more than six feet on a side.
“Out here, me,” she announced.
That was a relief. We had traveled together for a week, but always slept a distance apart. I had been careful to meditate every night so I wouldn’t hurt her in my sleep - but it didn’t pay to take chances with the Darkness.
“Cat, not dog,” the paleo complained the next morning. “Too much digging.”
We had bought shov
els on credit and were gouging away at the surface of the Flow in search of the buried treasures of the ancients. The first hour had yielded nothing except the protest from Cat. She was a tough little thing, but had no practice at this sort of work. Even I was finding that the calluses I had from my sword practice weren’t up to the rigors of constant digging, and my muscles were no longer used to it. Dodd was no doubt right that I was a much harder man than I’d been a year ago, but not in all the same places.
“Shadow warrior, you. Cat, me. Not vulture, either,” Cat continued in a peevish tone.
“You want to eat? Then dig, you.”
The paleo gave me a rebellious look, but jabbed the shovel viciously into the ground.
There was a loud crack.
“Aww… move it, Cat.” I shouldered her aside and gingerly probed around the edge of the hole she’d made, first with my shovel, then with my hands. I quickly unearthed a large, square, ceramic vessel, which looked like it had been intact before Cat had cracked it in two.
“You broke it,” I said. “That’s the kind of thing we’re looking for.”
“Dig hard. Don’t dig hard. Decide, you.” With a snort of disgust, she moved away and attacked the ground in another spot.
It had been the kind of bad luck that could happen to anyone, but there was a certain skill required to unearth our prizes without damaging them. If Cat didn’t have any interest in learning, she could still successfully dig up scrap metal, but other pieces would be spoiled.
I stuck my shovel in the ground and went over to her. “Let me show you. You have to dig firmly, but carefully. You can’t just jab the shovel in.”
“Old death,” Cat snarled. She spat and made some kind of sign with her right hand. “Trolls chewing bones of trolls.” She swept her arm in an arc, encompassing the Flow and the City beyond. “Dead, rotting. Wrong.”
“Dammit, Cat!” I flared. Anger welled up in me. I’d let this savage travel with me, protected her, brought her to the only place a barbarian cannibal with no useful skills might be accepted. And now this?
Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle Page 40