Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle

by Malcolm McKenzie

  She was on her knees, eyes wide. I realized the Darkness surrounded me, swirling like smoke.

  I took a deep, steadying breath. Then another. “Sorry, Cat.”

  “Shadow warrior, you,” she said in a small voice. “Not vulture.”

  I sat with Luco in the darkness at the back of the Hole. Cat was off exploring the Flow. And giving me some space.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t want to be in the middle of a war. I thought I wanted to be back somewhere quiet. But, y’know… it’s a garbage mine, man. We’re picking over stuff that people two hundred years ago thought was junk.”

  We sometimes found items of great value in the Flow. Things no one could make anymore. But Cat hadn’t been far wrong with “dead, rotting.”

  I grimaced. “And I guess I thought even if I didn’t stay, at least I could leave Cat here, but she doesn’t like it at all.”

  “Minos… not to pry, but why do you care? What do you owe her? You said she would have killed you if you hadn’t woken up.”

  “She’s just a kid. A kid that’s been raised by wolves. And I guess… I saw a lot of bad things this last year. I did a lot of things I’m not real proud of. I killed two of her people and crippled another one. In the Sorrows I killed things that may not have been people anymore, but they still looked a lot like people.”

  I hadn’t told Luco or the others how I’d left Yoshana’s soldier Erev lying on the ground, unable to move or speak. I didn’t mention it now. “I guess I need to watch out for her so I know I’m not one of the bad things myself.”

  The kind of thing Yoshana was. Grigg had said that once the Darkness was in you, your conscience had to keep it in check or it would consume you. The way it had boiled out at Cat was just the way it had boiled out in Our Lady, when Prophetess sent me away. I was afraid of it sometimes. Sometimes I was a little bit afraid of myself.

  Luco was watching me but didn’t say anything. I felt compelled to fill the silence. “I don’t know where I belong anymore.”

  He grinned. “I’ve got an idea.”

  3. Servants of Mars

  “This is not a good idea.”

  “You don’t want to mine garbage anymore,” Luco retorted. “You’ve been trained to fight by Our Lady and the Darkness Radiant both. And Rockwall’s army is paying really good recruiting bonuses. What part of it isn’t a good idea?”

  “The part where I said I didn’t want to be between two groups of people trying to kill each other - did you miss that? If Rockwall is paying recruiting bonuses, it’s because they’re bulking up to throw their army against the Monolith. They don’t pay you extra to sit around warming a bench in the barracks.”

  For as long as I could remember, the armies of Rockwall and the Monolith had skirmished over the rich farmland bordered on the west by the Barrier Range, on the north by the Ice Fields, on the east by the Muddy, and on the south by the Whitewater. The war was eternally inconclusive. The Monolith had allies among the city-states in the disputed territory, and spent its men in battle and its silver in hiring mercenaries. Rockwall put less effort into the struggle. But the people of the area were mostly Reborn, and preferred Rockwall’s easy mix of Reborn and Universalist beliefs to the zealous Josephites of the Monolith.

  It was hard to think of a bigger waste of human effort than stepping into that conflict.

  “Well, yeah, people say there’s going to be real fighting this time,” Luco said. “They say with the Hawks harassing traffic on the Whitewater this past year, even those lazy bastards in Panther City finally decided they have to do something about it.”

  “Coming to terms would be an idea. Rockwall’s never going to control that territory.” They had never really tried.

  “And you want those Josephite freaks on our border?” Luco snapped. “The way I hear it, they don’t care for your kind.”

  I was startled by his vehemence. He wasn’t the sort of person to refer to “my kind” like that. He must have been more of a patriot than I’d thought. And it was true enough that the Josephites despised the Select even more than the Reborn and the Universalists did.

  Still… “You’d rather have the Darkness flooding around unchecked up there? That’s what happens when no one’s in control. Remember, I’ve been there, and I ran into the Darkness, a drelb, and paleos, all in one trip.”

  Whatever you might think of the Council in Panther City, Rockwall’s seat of government, they maintained a semblance of order. At least, fire wardens patrolled the roads and cities to beat back the Darkness.

  “That’s why we have to kick out the Monolith once and for all. If the Principalities and the Hawks like those Josephites so much, they can convert and go live with them up in the mountains. But you know almost everyone there would rather be part of Rockwall.”

  I had the feeling that almost everyone there would rather be left alone… although they’d probably be willing to pay taxes to a government that drove out the Darkness, and the drelb, and the paleos.

  “I didn’t know you felt so strongly about it.” I’d known Luco for two years. I hadn’t known he had any opinion at all on the subject.

  The rigid lines of his face cracked into a sudden grin. “Well, maybe more of it’s I want to get out of here too. Been thinking about it since you left. Then you came back, and you’ve been everywhere and seen everything… I can’t believe you’d just settle back in here and dig through broken pots and old diapers for the rest of your life.”

  Shadow warrior, you. Not vulture.

  Something dark and powerful rolled over inside me. I was probably the deadliest thing in this backwater - Rockwall had no masters of the Darkness, or even Select mercenaries that I knew of. I could make a mark here.

  “I’ve still got Cat to think about,” I said weakly.

  “The army needs scouts. You don’t think a paleo would be good at that?”

  She was stealthy, a practiced tracker and woodsman. And it occurred to me that the skills of a paleo scout might explain things I learned through other means, without me having to reveal my nature.

  “I guess she’d probably like that better than digging.”

  Luco slapped me on the shoulder and smiled broadly. “Come on. We’re joining the army!”

  Cat was thrilled. “Hunt, kill, eat?”

  I tried for the third or fourth time to explain the reconnaissance functions of a military scout. She flapped her hands at me impatiently. “Noise, talk, yes, understand. Hunt, kill, eat!”

  I had the feeling that the paleo’s encounter with military discipline would be the infamous meeting of the immovable object and the irresistible force. Still, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. For the moment, she was happy.

  Dorren just laughed at me when I sheepishly told him we were leaving.

  “Didn’t think you’d stick,” he said. “Thought you’d last longer than a day, though.”

  I remembered what he’d said - Stay as long as you want. It seemed he might know me better than I knew myself. He didn’t even seem annoyed when Luco revealed he’d be going with me. As if Dorren had seen that coming too. I was tempted to tell him everything, including the Darkness and the real reason I’d left Our Lady. Tempted to ask his advice.

  But I didn’t.

  I found a chance to take Fenn aside privately and give him the wristwatch I’d looted from the dead, ancient town in the Sorrows. He was so absurdly grateful that I was embarrassed.

  I said a few more awkward goodbyes, and then the three of us - Luco, Cat, and I - were on our way.

  “There’s a recruiting camp at the south end of the Flow,” Luco explained. “Or at least there was last I heard.”

  “Might as well start there,” I said. I fished the other watch out of my pack. “Brought this for you.”

  His eyes lit up. “My God, Minos. It’s beautiful. That’s amazing. Where’d you get it?”

  “You’d probably rather not know.”

  He laughed and shook the watch, then gave the cro
wn a few turns. He grinned like a maniac when the delicate second hand started up. “Now it almost seems like a shame to go running off to get myself killed.”

  “Want to go back?”

  He didn’t hesitate for an instant. “No.”

  We hiked south along the western bank of the Flow. It would be slow - and foolhardy - to walk on the landfill itself. Sure, we spent all day on it mining, but then you moved carefully, testing each step. The garbage had mostly compressed to a stable surface, but there were occasional crusts that formed over empty pockets. What festered inside those pockets was usually foul and potentially dangerous if you fell onto something sharp.

  Not that the land west of the dried riverbed was exceptionally pleasant. Early summer in this part of Rockwall was hot. From here the land rose slowly into the Low Furnace, a vast expanse of desert that stretched to the foothills of the Barrier Range. The ground was an orange clay I had never seen anywhere else, and in the dry air it turned into a clinging dust.

  Cat worked her mouth and spat, and I could see she instantly regretted it. It didn’t pay to waste moisture. We each had a skin of small beer, just enough alcohol in it to kill whatever was in the water and keep it from going off. But that would have to last us until we found either the recruiting post or another water source. Cat was leaner and hungrier even than a garbage miner - she knew all about starvation and thirst.

  “Fight for this, why?”

  “Not for this, Cat. Rockwall controls this land. They’re fighting - we’re going to be fighting - for the land back where we met.” Land that was far more fertile and better watered.

  She nodded emphatically. “Fight for that, yes.” Her brow furrowed. “Fight people?”

  I realized she meant other paleos. It made perfect sense that killing “trolls” wouldn’t upset her in the least - after all, she’d fully intended to kill me.

  “That’s not the idea. We’ll fight the Monolith. They’re like us. Civilized.”

  We killed each other in an organized manner and didn’t eat the corpses. I suppose that counted as civilization.

  “Kill trolls. Good.”

  Luco shot her a nervous look. “I’m not sure your new friend is completely domesticated, Minos.”

  “Domesticated, me?” She bared her teeth in a snarl. “Domesticate this, troll.”

  “We don’t kill and eat our friends, Cat,” I said mildly.

  “Your friend.”

  “My friends are your friends, Cat.” My tone changed. It was not a suggestion, or even a statement. It was an order. She knew it.

  “Shadow warrior says. Cat does.” She gave Luco a disdainful sniff. “Not eat.”

  “Why does she call you that?”

  “I guess because I’m gray. And she knows what I can do.” Which was not exactly a lie, but was certainly a deliberate evasion. Cat knew that too. She snorted but kept her peace. I hadn’t told her not to discuss my mastery of the Darkness - it really hadn’t occurred to me that she might hold a conversation with anyone. But I thought she understood that I didn’t want my abilities to be known. For all her savage barbarism, I had the strong feeling the paleo girl was nobody’s fool.

  I wondered whether her untrained intellect would realize that if Rockwall truly came to control the disputed land north of the Whitewater, its soldiers would eradicate the paleos there. I wondered how the exile would feel about that if she figured it out.

  Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof was quickly becoming my motto. Maybe I’d ask to have it etched on my tombstone.

  “Is that it?”

  A log palisade stretched in front of us, a wall a couple of hundred yards long and twenty feet high. Wooden observation towers rose another thirty feet above the wall. The troops must have been logging the forests to the east and hauling the wood from there - the trees around us were scrub oaks whose twisted trunks and limbs wouldn’t have yielded enough straight lumber for a chair, much less a wall.

  “Can’t think what else,” Luco replied. “And this is about where it was supposed to be. I wonder why they need the defenses, though? We’re deep in Rockwall land here.”

  “Building it gives the troops something to do. And if you’re sleeping inside, it’s a lot harder to decide you’ve gotten sick of military life and wander back to your farm.” Most of my reading had focused on strategy and tactics. But sometimes the great thinkers had taken a moment to comment on routine matters of discipline. It seemed like the phrase idle hands are the Devil’s playground might well have originated in the army.

  Luco grimaced. “I’ve been digging stuff out of holes in the ground pretty much my whole life. I didn’t plan on digging more holes to put stakes into the ground.”

  I chuckled. I had done just that my first night off the Flow with Prophetess. Maybe history was repeating itself.

  “From my experience with adventure, digging holes is right about the best part.” As compared to, say, fighting monsters, nearly freezing to death, or fleeing from allies you’d betrayed. All of those things seemed like more fun when they weren’t actually happening to you.

  Luco shot me a look. “You can go back if you want. You might still make it before nightfall… if the things that come out at night still worry you.”

  They didn’t, of course. And I wasn’t going to go back. “No. The Flow’s not for me anymore. It surely isn’t for Cat. Shadow warriors don’t dig for garbage, right?”

  The paleo nodded emphatically.

  “Come on,” I continued. “It’s getting hot out here.”

  It had been hot all day and was getting hotter still. But now Luco was the one hanging back.

  “Ah, c’mon,” I said. “What could go wrong? A paleo, a Select, and some guy dumb enough to be walking with them go up to an army camp. There’s got to be a good punchline to that joke, right?”

  “‘And the soldiers shot them with arrows until the bodies stopped twitching.’ Yeah, that’s hilarious.”

  “Fight here?” Cat asked.

  “Nah. It’ll be fine. Come on,” I urged. Prophetess and Yoshana had each walked blithely into situations far more potentially dangerous. Of course, Prophetess believed she was on a mission from God. And Yoshana operated on the theory - so far correct - that no enemy springing a trap could be as dangerous as she was. Well, that was probably true for me too, in this part of the world. Although it would be a real irony if after surviving drelb, paleos, possessed, Overlords, demons, and the Darkness itself, I was now killed by the army I was trying to join.

  “Oh, come on, you two,” I insisted. “It’s not getting any cooler out here and I’m not walking back.” I started off toward the palisade. Thanks to the Darkness, I didn’t need to turn my head to know that Luco and Cat were following.

  I also began to get a sense of the camp once we were within a hundred yards of the open gate. There were sentries inside resting under awnings. They weren’t aware of us yet. Lookouts posted in the watchtowers were likewise oblivious. There was a table and benches outside where perhaps the recruiters were meant to sit, but no one was there. A wind kicked up and swirled orange dust through the air, stinging my eyes and clogging my throat. Maybe that explained why nobody was outside.

  “Make for the wall to the right of the gate,” I said quietly over my shoulder. “Let’s make an entrance.”

  “Is that a good idea?”

  “Only if you want a better assignment than digging holes for stakes.”

  “Point taken.”

  The readiness level was pathetic. Yoshana would have cut down everyone inside like a wind out of hell, just on general principles. It was hard to believe the same military produced Rockwall’s fire wardens, hard-bitten soldiers who strapped naphtha-throwers on their backs to fight the Darkness. They weren’t pleasant company, but at least they were professionals.

  We made it to the palisade unnoticed. The men in the watchtowers couldn’t see us from this angle even if they were looking, which they weren’t. There was a rudimentary firing platform bein
g built around the inside of the palisade, but no one was on it.

  I whispered to Cat, “When the dust starts blowing, slip around behind the guards on the right-hand side of the gate. Don’t touch them or make a sound.”

  She grinned fiercely and nodded.

  I could have waited for the wind, but that would have been time wasted. Spraying dust through the air was a trivial task for the Darkness. I tapped Cat’s shoulder. “Now.”

  I could hear the two sentries coughing and cursing on the other side of the wall as I blew dust in their faces. I waited a few seconds, let it subside, and stepped around the corner. Luco followed hesitantly.

  “Better hope the Monolith isn’t hiring paleo scouts,” I said.

  One of the guards lurched to his feet, right hand falling to the hilt of his sheathed sword. He brushed orange grit from his face with his left hand.

  “Who the hell are you?” he demanded.

  “Your better question is who is she?” I smiled and pointed behind them. They both glanced over their shoulders. Cat laughed silently at them, mouth wide and teeth bared like a wolf.

  The standing man’s sword began to clear its sheath. It stopped when he realized the blade of my katana was touching his wrist.

  “No shame in letting someone as stealthy as my friend Cat get the drop on you,” I said, lying through my teeth. Their incompetence was revolting. “But let’s not compound the error by picking a fight you’re not going to win.”

  Even without the Darkness, months of training with Grigg made these two no more than an inconvenience to me. And I did have the Darkness. It was inside them already. If it came to blows, they would both be dead in the blink of an eye.

  They couldn’t know that, but hopefully a Select with a drawn sword would make them see that discretion was the better part of valor.

  Cat had been right, in her simplistic way. My time with Yoshana’s forces had done nothing to make me a better garbage miner, but it had turned me into an exceptional killer.

  The man with his hand on the sword looked me up and down, his eyes lingering on my blade - and not just because it was a hairs-breadth away from taking his hand off, or at least severing critical veins and tendons. If he knew steel, he would recognize the pattern in the metal. There were few weapons forged and folded in the traditional style left in the world - I’d been privileged to own two of them. He couldn’t see the glassy sheen of the ancient knife at my belt, but he could see its size, and perhaps notice the unusual material of the sheath.