Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle

by Malcolm McKenzie

  He met my eyes. His were light brown, and they blinked when they stared into the unrelieved black of my pupil, iris, and sclera. The Select often served as mercenaries, and from my eyes to my gray skin to the white hair I now wore long and tied back, there was no doubting my race.

  “Right,” the soldier muttered quietly. He moved his hand away from the hilt of his weapon. His companion looked from me to Cat and stayed seated.

  “Something we can help you with?” the standing man asked carefully.

  “I’m hoping there’s something we can help you with,” I answered with a broad smile. “We hear you’re recruiting.”

  “Right,” he repeated. His eyes darted from me to Cat and back again. “We’re set up here for processing and the first couple weeks of basic training. How to keep step and dig a latrine and which end of the spear you stick into the other guy. I’m guessing you’re a little past that.”

  My grin widened. I was definitely an expert at digging, and fighting wouldn’t be a problem for me either. If I’d never learned how to march, I didn’t figure that would be a difficult skill to master.

  “I think we can handle the basics, yes. Although Cat here is more of a recon type than a marching type.” As of course was I.

  “Yeah, I can see that. Where’d you train?”

  I scowled. He took a step back and raised his hands. “Hey, I’m not saying I don’t believe you, buddy. But I’m going to have to explain why I’m passing you straight through here. The lieutenant’s going to ask.”

  “Fair enough. I was with the Darkness Radiant. I found Cat on my way down here. She says she trained by killing people in their sleep to drink their blood. Seeing as that’s what she was trying to do to me when we met, I’ve been taking her word for it.”

  The paleo barked out a laugh.

  “Jesus,” the seated guard murmured.

  “Better with us than against us, I guess,” said the other, giving me an insincere smile.

  “The Darkness Radiant and a goddamn paleo,” his companion continued. What’s next, Yoshana?”

  “Last time I talked to her, she was busy,” I said.

  “Jesus.” He looked at Luco. “What’s your story?”

  “Me? I’m just along for the ride.”

  “You look smarter than that.”

  “Yeah. I guess looks really can be deceiving.”

  I might have laid it on too thick. We found ourselves in the lieutenant’s office, a structure of rough-hewn planks at the center of the compound. Lieutenant Tir sat on the edge of his wooden desk, hands toying with a double-edged dagger as he stared at me. The room was not small, but the two gate guards and some other curious soldiers had shoved themselves in with us. No one was hostile, but I felt like the main attraction at the freak show.

  That many people in a small space made Cat nervous, and Luco was uncomfortable with the whole situation. I could feel it in their breathing, their stance, even the smell of their sweat. It was starting to make me jumpy. That, and the Darkness, and a bunch of people with weapons all crammed together wasn’t a good combination. I inhaled deeply and steadied my breathing.

  “The Darkness Radiant,” the lieutenant said. “You’ve come a long way.”

  Tir was a short, dark man with a mop of black hair and piercing, dark eyes. His words were polite enough. The tone conveyed mild disbelief with a hint of a sneer. There were clumsily made bookcases lining the walls, filled with volumes of military theory, treatises on leadership, even classical literature. Sun Tzu and Clausewitz, Machiavelli and Kissinger, Homer and Shakespeare. Dozens of others, some I recognized, some I didn’t. It was an impressive collection to haul into the middle of nowhere.

  I didn’t need to probe Tir’s mind to read his thoughts. His uniform was unkempt but boasted a number of decorations. He regarded himself as a superior man, wasted in a backwoods recruiting post. Unimpressed with everything around him, he’d let discipline grow lax.

  He wasn’t impressed with us either.

  “What legion did you serve in?” he asked.

  I had no idea what the unit designations were in Yoshana’s army.

  “I was part of a reconnaissance force attached to the Knights of Resurrection.”

  The lieutenant looked at me through slitted eyes while digging under a fingernail with the point of his knife. “A very long way for one of Yoshana’s personal corps.”

  I shrugged. “We’ve had a parting of the ways.”

  “You deserted from the Darkness Radiant? And you lived?”

  The disbelief was open now. So was the sneer. I wasn’t going to tell this self-important little slug how close I had really been to the supreme horror herself. I wasn’t going to tell him about leaving the last of her human bodyguards twitching on the ground with his tendons and vocal cords severed, about fleeing blindly through the swampy forests of the demons’ country until I reached the Darkness-haunted Sorrows that only a madman would call safety…

  I drew in a deep, shuddering breath and willed the Darkness in me to subside. It had almost begun to boil out of my pores, and there would have been only one outcome then. It rolled over in my gut like an angry serpent, but slowly began to recede.

  I shot a quick glance at Cat. She had sensed what was about to happen - her sharpened bone dagger was in her hand, and she was tensed like a coiled spring. If the room had erupted in chaos, the soldier nearest to her wouldn’t have lived long enough for the Darkness to kill him.

  But the room hadn’t erupted, and none of the fools in it had any idea how close it had come. There was a calculating look in Tir’s eye, but nothing like the fear there would have been if he’d known what I was.

  Prophetess had understood that, at least. She’d cast me out after I’d risked my life to offer my abilities to her - but at least she’d known what she was rejecting.

  “I was not going to be a part of Yoshana’s attack on Our Lady. I’m no Universalist, Lieutenant, but there are some things I won’t do.”

  That had been about Prophetess herself, not Our Lady. But that was something else I had no intention of explaining to this man.

  “There’s been no attack by the Darkness Radiant on Our Lady,” Tir snapped.

  “Yoshana was occupied in the Darklands. Our Lady is her next target. I don’t know when that stroke’s going to fall, but it will.”

  Tir waved a hand as if clearing away a bad smell. “Even if that’s true, it doesn’t explain what a Select mercenary, a paleo girl, and a garbage miner are doing in my camp.”

  “Lieutenant, I’m trained for war. I won’t be a part of the fight between Yoshana and Our Lady. I heard Rockwall was recruiting. If you don’t want me, I’ll find another employer.”

  The Monolith employed Select mercenaries despite their religious prejudices against my race. Tir would know that. There was no point in making the threat explicit.

  “Fine,” the lieutenant grated. “Sergeant Tumner, process these three as front-line ready immediately. Send them on to Captain Almet’s company. Lieutenant Pious’ platoon.”

  The burly soldier to my left frowned. “Pious, sir? He’s…” the man’s voice trailed off.

  “Yes, and if our friend here was really with the Darkness Radiant, I’m sure he’ll fit right in.” Tir’s voice dripped sweet venom.

  “Seems like that could have gone better,” Luco said. “Why didn't you tell him you knew Yoshana?”

  “He didn’t even believe I’d been with her forces. How was I supposed to convince him I’d actually met her? Tell him about the strawberry-shaped birthmark on her butt?”

  “She has a birthmark on her butt?”

  “How would I know? I traveled with her, I didn’t watch her taking a bath. And even if I did know, the real point is how would Tir know? Anything I could tell him that he’d know himself would, by definition, be common knowledge. So if he did know it, it wouldn’t prove anything. And if he didn’t know it, he’d have no way of knowing I was telling the truth.”

  He grinned.
“So you’re saying you didn’t really think it through before you started shooting off your mouth about being part of the Darkness Radiant.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first thing I didn’t think through.”

  I didn’t think it through would probably make an even better epitaph than sufficient unto the day… one probably being the logical corollary to the other.

  “At least we’re not digging latrines.”

  Instead we had been fed a quick and unappetizing meal and sent straight north to the front. A pair of troopers accompanied us, marching stolidly and silently before us. Behind came a half dozen other recruits. They had been in the camp for ten days; Tir had declared their training complete and sent them along with us.

  He hadn’t wanted to waste escorts on just the three of us. But he hadn’t wanted us spending any more time in his camp either.

  We’d set out in early afternoon in the heat of the day. A ridiculous time to start. We trudged right back up the track Luco, Cat, and I had come down. As we passed the trading post on the banks of the Flow where Dorren’s miners hawked their wares, I saw a man named Sart leaning on the table, half-asleep. Apparently the biweekly convoy from the recruiting camp wasn’t enough excitement to wake him up.

  “The soldiers stop to talk and sometimes buy stuff on their way back down south,” Luco explained quietly. “Never when they’re going north with the newbies.”

  Sart and I hadn’t exchanged ten words in the two years I’d been on the Flow. He was a taciturn fellow even by the standards of garbage miners, and I suppose I wasn’t much of a conversationalist either. Luco lifted a hand in greeting, and Sart waved back.

  The cactus patch seemed to have grown a little in the time I’d been away with Prophetess and Yoshana. Any life was a blessing in this dusty, orange waste, even the nasty prickly pears.

  Cat looked at the salvaged goods arrayed on the table and scanned the expanse of the Flow beyond. “Old death,” she muttered.

  One of the soldiers heard her. “Aye, old death indeed. Up there more than here.”

  He pointed to the towers of Acceptance on the horizon. “We’ll be stopping soon. Don’t want to spend the night near the City. The monsters in it’ll crack your bones for the marrow and swallow your soul down with your flesh.”

  He leered at us, trying to frighten the new recruits, but he flinched away when he met my eyes. There might be any number of things infesting the corpse of the City. Paleos or even monsters, if by monsters you meant wild dogs and giant rats. Possibly even the Darkness. But there would be nothing worse than what I’d fought before. As I’d said to Delet hundreds of miles north of here… nothing worse than me.

  We camped at dusk in the lee of a low ridge. It wasn't much, but it broke the dusty wind sweeping in from the west.

  “Don’t normally stop south of the City,” said the soldier who’d spoken before. “But it don’t pay to take chances with the Darkness.”

  We had hard bread and pemmican that couldn’t have been drier if it had baked under the sun for a year. We didn’t dare use enough water to wash down much of either.

  I assumed the water we’d been given had been boiled. If it hadn’t, the Darkness would take care of any contaminants for me. Cat must be used to eating and drinking all kinds of awful things. I imagined paleos with weak immune systems didn’t last very long. And as for Luco, a lifetime mining garbage had to be good for strengthening the stomach if nothing else.

  We settled into a sort of straggling line on the ground, a soldier at each end. I was second behind the less talkative trooper, then Cat, then Luco. The other recruits stretched out past him. It might have been coincidence that they were as far from me as possible, but it probably wasn’t.

  “Is your friend really Select?” whispered the recruit closest to Luco. I had to grin. That was the least of the bad things I was.

  The miner nodded. He was a tall, lean man, very like me in height and build. His skin was bronzed from the sun. Though he wasn’t much older than I, tiny lines were already forming around his eyes and mouth.

  As far as appearance went, there was nothing beyond the color of my eyes, skin, and hair to mark me apart from him, to suggest that I was a stranger, more frightening kind of being.

  Prejudice against the Select ran deep.

  “Shadow warrior, him,” said Cat. She sniffed scornfully and turned her back on the others.

  Always helpful, was my Cat.

  “She really a paleo?” asked the soldier next to me, unconsciously mimicking the recruit.

  Cat drew her lips back in something between a sneer and a snarl.

  “That answer your question?” I replied.

  “You really catch her trying to kill you?”

  “Yep.”

  “And bringing her along with you seemed like the best possible idea?”

  “How well do you know the territory where we’re going to be fighting the Monolith? The hills, and forests, and swamps?”

  “Not that well.”

  “Me either. She does. I figure someone who knows the lay of the land and has practice sneaking up and killing people bigger than she is might come in handy. You think?”

  He shook his head in wonder. “Okay, point taken. But how did you catch her? And how do you know she’s not gonna slit your throat tonight?”

  I turned to the paleo. “Cat?”

  “Shadow warrior, him. Shadow warrior me, soon.”

  “God. A Select with a paleo apprentice?”

  “Yep.”

  “You have either the biggest balls or the smallest brain of anyone I’ve ever met.” He leaned over and stuck out his hand. “I’m Talot.”

  “Minos.”

  A smile crept onto my lips as I drifted off to sleep. “Biggest balls” definitely wasn’t true - at least two women, Yoshana and Prophetess, would take that title from me hands down. “Smallest brain” might be right, though.

  Erev flopped on the ground like a landed fish, his mouth opening and closing. As I backed away he threw his crippled body toward me in convulsing heaves, now less like a fish than a snake with its back broken. Each time he flung himself up and crashed down, a cloud of Darkness puffed out at the impact, growing, spreading, until blazing eyes and a fanged mouth opened in the seething mass and laughed at me.

  I jolted upright. A black cloud hung in front of my face. As I gasped in a ragged breath, I inhaled it back into my body.

  To my right, Cat sat on her haunches, watching me with unblinking eyes. To my left, Talot snored, peacefully oblivious.

  I had forgotten my meditation. That couldn’t happen again. It was more important than ever now that I was among people again. I could have been seen by someone other than Cat. I remembered what Yoshana had said, when she’d set Roshel to watch over my sleep. I could have killed someone.

  Thinking of Roshel caused the Darkness in me to roil again. I’d tried to put her out of my mind since I’d turned on the Darkness Radiant. Grigg had thought she really cared for me. It was hard to categorize my feelings for her, beyond lust. I thought that whatever the effects of her Darkness-spawned glamor, I had cared for her as a person too.

  I pushed myself to my feet and made my way over the ridge. On the other side I stood, raised my arms, and opened my senses to the night. My awareness reached out, touching the others in our group, spreading past them. There was nothing larger than a lone coyote within a hundred yards of us. One exceptionally alert owl must have felt my consciousness brush past it, because it hooted and launched itself into the air just as I touched it.

  I opened my human eyes and looked up at the sky. The stars shone down, obscured only a bit by racing shreds of cloud. The moon was a thin, waxing crescent.

  I breathed in and out, drawing the Darkness back in, finding my center. What was past was past. Prophetess, Yoshana, Roshel were all behind me. I would be created anew in whatever lay ahead.

  I was nearly as quiet as Cat making my way back over the ridge, but Talot woke and stared at me.

&n
bsp; “Couldn’t sleep,” I whispered.

  “Don’t go wandering off,” he murmured in reply. “There could be bad stuff out there.”

  He didn’t know how right he was.

  4. Pious

  It took us four more days to reach the army. Though the land was flat, we heard the encampment before we saw it.

  We had crossed a bridge over the Whitewater, a clumsy thing of heaped stones and sawn trunks lashed together. A trail led through the woods on the other side, less a road than a rutted path crushed through weeds and saplings. Larger trees bore the scars of torn bark and broken branches where wagons had scraped past them.

  But we were still in the forest when the noise reached us. The muted roar of a thousand conversations, the clang of hammers on anvils, the braying of donkeys and lowing of oxen.

  If there were pickets, they were so far apart that my senses couldn’t reach them, and none were on this path. While presumably we were coming from the safest quarter, it still would have been only prudent to post sentries.

  Then we were clear of the woods, and the fortified camp stretched out on the plain in front of us.

  “Trolls,” muttered Cat. “Trolls and trolls and trolls.”

  We stood on a slight rise. The land fell away, then gently sloped upward again. The army had built a palisade at the low point, but because of the angles we had a good view of everything inside. It was a sprawling collection of everything from wooden barracks to tents to shelter halves. Thousands of people milled about - many soldiers, but some obviously not. There were mule drivers, traders, women in gaudy clothes and hard-faced men who watched over them.