Railes made a face. “Probably kinder to kill them.”
I nodded again. “Probably would be. We’re not going to.”
The sergeant pointed to the two bloodstained holes in my jerkin. “You all right, boss?”
“I got lucky. First one went straight through the muscle. Second glanced off a rib. I’ll be fine.”
“You need me to bandage ’em up…” his voice trailed off.
I patted his shoulder. “Even after this you still think I’m human. I’m touched. Now let’s get moving.”
We gathered Groff and the stragglers who hadn’t made it to the fight on our way back to the brigade. General Hake was overseeing the cleanup of the quartermaster’s company. He made a beeline for me. Luco and Kafer trailed in his wake wearing expressions of stark terror.
“You want to explain what just happened?” the general demanded.
“A Monolith cavalry company hit us where we were weakest,” I growled.
“That part I know. I’m wondering where my recon platoon’s been for the past three hours. You know, in case this was a diversion and they hit us again.”
My blood went cold. “Did they?”
“As it happens, no. But not because my scouts were scouting. Where the hell have you been?”
My face warmed with blood, though Select didn’t visibly blush. “We tracked them and hit them back while they were sleeping. About half of them are dead or wounded. The other half got away, but I don’t think we’ll be seeing them again soon.”
Hake spoke more quietly. “And on whose authority did you decide to leave the brigade to go chasing off after revenge?”
Luco and Kafer must have gotten the first taste of the general’s wrath. I could sense the fear in the rest of the platoon. It made me angry.
“If my service isn’t acceptable, general, you’re of course within your authority to strip me of my commission.”
“Are you looking for a fight, son?”
“No, sir. I was just in one.” As usual. Doing all the work while four thousand other men in the brigade did nothing much.
There was a cold, hard calculation going on behind Hake’s eyes. What he said was, “Next time, Lieutenant, get authorization before you detach yourself like that. We need you.”
“Yes, sir.”
We made our way back to our bedrolls at the front of the column. My pulse was pounding faster than it had during the battle. Someone muttered, “That’s a pretty lousy thank you for taking down a whole cavalry company.” Railes told him to shut up.
Roshel came again that night. I had forgotten to meditate. She coalesced out of a cloud of Darkness and her touch burned me like fire. I was throbbing with violent desire when I woke and found Cat next to me.
“Come here,” I told her, voice deep and rasping in my throat. “I’ll teach you what the Darkness is.”
She flinched back.
“You wanted to be a shadow warrior,” I said. “Come here and I’ll show you how.”
She shook her head. “Not like this.”
She thought she had the right to refuse me? Her life was mine. She recoiled, fast, but I was faster. I grabbed her arm and dragged her close. She lashed out and scored my face with her fingernails. Furious, I struck her with the full force of my backhand. There was a crack, and her head lolled loose on her neck.
“Cat?” I shook her gently.
I probed with the Darkness. There was no life in her.
I looked around the camp. No one else was awake. There was time to conceal what I’d done. I’d seen Yoshana reduce a savage to a liquescent pile of ooze. I could do the same. The Darkness swirled as the little body broke down, dirt and grass rising up to open a rough pit. It was shocking how little space the crumbled bones and filthy liquid took up.
I screamed as I came truly awake. The Darkness really was swirling around me, and in a panic I looked for Cat. The paleo was twenty paces away, crouched and watching me with wide eyes.
I gulped in breath after shuddering breath, slowly bringing the hammering of my heart back to a normal rate. When I was finally steady, I pulled the Darkness back into myself.
Cat slowly, cautiously made her way over to me. I blinked back tears. She couldn’t know what I’d dreamed, but she’d seen the Darkness loose. Very carefully, very slowly, she said, “I’m not sure I want to be a shadow warrior anymore.”
I tried to smile and failed. “You and me both.”
9. Regrets
I was in a little stand of trees a hundred yards from the column. The Darkness floated in front of me. The cloud was of impressive size.
“It’s not you, it’s me,” I said. “I think you should infect other people.”
How did you get rid of the Darkness when you didn’t want it anymore?
“Go on,” I said. “Beat it.”
The cloud hovered. I could send it away, but I knew it would return. It was part of me. Or maybe I was part of it. If there was a difference. I told myself the Darkness had been in control the night before, when I’d cut down Lalos as he tried to surrender. Certainly it was the Darkness that had murdered Cat in my dream. Wasn’t it?
I remembered the living corpse of a possessed shaman in the Sorrows, controlled by a cloud that still had a vaguely sensed need for a human host. I wondered if the native had begun his relationship with the Darkness believing he was in control.
Certainly Yoshana controlled the Darkness. And Seven. And Grigg and Roshel. So why couldn’t I?
I thought back to what Grigg had said at the edge of the Sorrows. The Darkness is going to rage out of control if you let it. So you can’t let it. Sometimes you have to hold it back. Sometimes you have to do something that’s hard, that isn’t expedient. Because if you don’t do things like that sometimes, it’ll take your soul.
Yoshana gave it free rein, but her power was of another order. I couldn’t allow that. I’d let myself go too far.
If I couldn’t get it out of me, I’d have to try harder to control it.
The sun was barely over the horizon, and we wouldn’t be moving for a while yet. I walked down the column to General Hake’s tent.
I thought the sentries looked at me a bit more suspiciously than usual, but one went inside to announce me. He emerged with the general.
Hake peered at me from under a furrowed brow. I didn’t need to scan him to know he was wondering whether he wanted to be alone with me.
“Come in,” he said gruffly. He gave the guard a little shove to move him out of the tent.
When the flap shut behind me, I braced and saluted. “I wanted to apologize, sir. I was rude and insubordinate last night.”
Hake relaxed and returned the salute. “I imagine what’s riding you isn’t the easiest passenger.”
I swallowed. He read me at least as easily as I read him. “No sir. They say it feeds on the darkest emotions, and that’s right. There’s a lot for it to eat on a battlefield. Last night… it was getting away from me.”
I shook my head. “That’s not quite right. It was starting to control me, instead of me controlling it. I’ve seen where that ends, and it isn’t pretty.”
An emaciated half-human thing, squatting in a pile of rotting animal carcasses.
“Can you still handle it?” Hake asked sharply.
“I think so, sir. Yes.” I looked at my feet, then met his eyes. “We’d better hope so, because the amount that’s in me would be a real danger if it got loose. Killing me wouldn’t be a good solution. I’m not trying to make a threat, sir. Just explaining our options. If we had fire wardens handy…”
Not that I relished the idea of being burned alive in waves of naphtha. Neither did the Darkness. It seethed rebelliously in my guts.
“If you can control it, then you’re far too useful to even consider getting rid of it. If you can’t, I suppose we need to start looking for an exorcist.”
That brought on a different kind of pang. “The only person I’ve ever known to cast out the Darkness is a thousand miles away
. I’ll handle it, sir.”
The general nodded. “Good. I’d hate to lose you.”
“Thank you, sir. I’d hate to be lost.”
After that I kept to the head of the column. I wanted to be alone with my thoughts, and no one else seemed inclined to share them with me. Except for Cat. Cat didn’t care what I was. Or if she did, she forgave me for it.
Sesk had been ranging off to the right, checking for tracks. After a while he came and walked next to me. It was nearly another hour before he spoke. He was a quiet man.
“The people who were here before the ancients had a story. An old man told his grandson there were two wolves inside everyone. One wolf was dark, and bitter, and proud, and resentful, and violent. The other was light, and gentle, and humble, and forgiving, and peaceful. The wolves are always fighting to control you. The boy asked which wolf wins.”
“And?” I asked.
“The one you feed,” Sesk answered.
“Huh.”
We walked on for a while longer in silence. “There was a lot for the dark wolf to eat last night,” Sesk said.
I’d said much the same to Hake. I just nodded.
I’d never spoken much to the taciturn hunter. After a while, I asked, “Why are you in the army anyway, Sesk? You’re good at it, but you don’t enjoy killing. You’ve got other skills. What are you doing here?”
He didn’t answer at first, then shrugged. “The pay’s regular. I figured if they were going to be paying people to kill other people, they might as well pay me.”
“You’re full of it,” I replied.
He shrugged again. “You really want to know? It’s stupid. You know how the old folks are always going on, everything was so much harder in the old days and how we’ve got it easy now? Or how much better everything was in the old days and how it’s all going to hell now?”
I wondered how old the “old folks” were. Sesk was lined and weathered. He must have been nearly forty. But I nodded.
He continued, “I mean, they could feed you both lines of crap at the same time. But when I was growing up, it was mostly how much harder it was back when. How these days, there was trade again, people weren’t afraid so much, the paleos were mostly gone. No offense.” He glanced at Cat. She snorted.
“But for maybe the last ten years, it’s been the other way. How the Darkness is moving west. Drelb moving south. Everything getting worse.”
I nodded again. I’d seen the Darkness and drelb in the territory we were passing through now.
“I guess I thought, maybe the army could make it better. Clean the place up. And the pay really is good. The recruiting sergeant offered me double ’cause I can track and hunt. Course, then they stuck me in the regular infantry. I didn’t do any scouting at all until I joined up with you.”
I had to smile. “So you signed up to fight the Darkness and wound up working for the one guy in the army that uses the Darkness.”
“Yeah. Go figure. At least you know what to do with me. Speaking of, I’m going to go check out those trees over there.”
As he moved away again, he looked back over his shoulder. “Lieutenant.”
“What?”
“Don’t feed the dark wolf.”
“They’re behind us now,” I said to General Hake a few days later. I had split the Shadowed Hand after my talk with Sesk. He was a skilled hunter, and he was wasted in the vanguard with me where his abilities and mine overlapped. So I’d carved out a rear guard squad for him. It hadn’t taken him long to discover that Tarc and his cavalry unit were following us, replenished with more men.
“I guess I wasn’t enough of a murderous bastard after all,” I added apologetically.
“You killed one of those Select advisors,” the general said. “Are your people vengeful at all?”
Only if, say, you killed one of the new recruits in our squad. Or maimed some camp follower that we felt responsible for. Tarc didn’t have the Darkness in him, but I’d cut down his partner, a fellow Select. “A little bit, sometimes,” I admitted.
“Think he’ll do something stupid?”
“No. I don’t know exactly how old he is, but he’s seasoned. He’ll wait for an opportunity. If we take on the Hawk’s Nest, he’ll hit us from behind.”
“Recommendations?”
I let out a long breath. “Hard to say, sir. We could try setting an ambush, but he’s going to be cautious now. And of course they’re a lot more mobile than we are.”
“And so?”
“Keep on, sir. Double the guards all along the column. They’ll need carbines.”
“We don’t have that many. The Shadowed Hand has most of them.” It wasn’t an accusation, just a fact.
“I’ll round them up, sir. You’d better get them distributed. Arrows aren’t going to work well if they’re hitting us at night on horseback.”
Hake shook his head. “I don’t know. You’re the most effective company we’ve got. By a long shot.”
I laughed. “You think we’re only effective because we’ve got guns? We’ll be all right. And, uh, did you say company?”
Hake grinned. “I did. Wouldn’t be appropriate for a captain to be commanding a platoon, now would it?”
I was speechless. The general’s grin widened. “Authorization came through from headquarters a few days ago. Congratulations, Captain Minos.”
I stood dumbfounded as he pinned the rank tabs to the shoulders of my filthy uniform. “Captain Almet said a field commission couldn’t go higher than lieutenant.”
“Captain Almet doesn’t know everything. There are always exceptions.”
“Thank you, sir. I don’t know what to say.”
“Just keep winning for us.”
Just keep winning for us. Easy for the general to say. Don’t feed the dark wolf. Easy for Sesk to say. Doing both at the same time - not so easy for me. If there was a third way between Yoshana and Prophetess, I was having trouble finding it.
While I tried to figure it out, the column made camp early each day to fortify our position and set guards. That gave the Shadowed Hand time to train with the bow and arrow. Sesk was a master bowman, and the company improved rapidly. It was a more difficult weapon to use than the carbines, but within a week, most of the troops could reliably hit a man-sized target at twenty paces. Some were much better. No one was going to be winning archery contests, but we could make ourselves obnoxious at range without the carbines I had given to the sentries.
“Not being real subtle, are they?” Railes commented one morning, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. I had split the company into two platoons and gotten my former sergeant a field promotion to lieutenant. He was in charge of the rear guard now. Sesk had many useful skills, but leadership wasn’t one of them.
I looked where Railes was pointing. We could actually see the enemy cavalry now. More accurately, we could see the dust they were kicking up on the road. They weren’t being subtle, but then again, the land was flat as a tabletop. To conceal themselves, they would have needed to keep to the scattered trees on the side of the road, or stay much farther behind us. As it was, they must have been nearly ten miles away.
“No point, I guess. We know they’re there. I suppose they know we know. Now we know that they know that we know.”
“I think you’re overthinking it, Captain.”
“I know.” I grinned and moved out of range. Railes was maybe the one man in the company who would dare to take a swing at me for being a pain in the neck. He made me feel human.
“What are we going to do about them, Captain?”
I shrugged. The road was broad and flat. There weren’t even many places where the trees encroached on it. “Not much we can do. It’s not like there’s anywhere we could ambush them.”
The next day I was proved wrong. A few hours before sundown we came to the abandoned ruins of a town. At its outskirts, just beyond an overpass we had to cross, a single building of rusted steel and broken glass rose ten stories above the featureless plain.
The overpass made me nervous. Was a concrete span hundreds of years old up to the challenge of four thousand men tramping over it?
Apparently it was. But that gave me an idea. I went to see the general.
“Do we have any dynamite?”
His eyebrows lifted. “Agga’s got all kinds of stuff squirreled away. What do you want to blow up?”
“That bridge we just passed.”
Hake frowned. “They’ll just ride around, Minos. It won’t slow them more than two minutes. Seems like a waste to destroy a bridge that’s stood three hundred years just for that.”
“I was thinking more while they were on it. While we’re shooting arrows at them from that building next to it.”
The frown slowly turned to a grin. “Now that idea I like better.”
We put Sesk in charge of the demolition. Cat was even stealthier, but I didn’t trust her as much with the dynamite. The rest of us took up positions in the ruined tower.
I scanned it first. Anything could lair in a place like that. Darkness, paleos, or who knew what sort of monstrosity. Nothing worse than me, of course.
The Darkness went before me, probing, and what it found, it killed. There was nothing larger than a rat. But if there had been paleos, I think I would have killed them too. I wasn’t the same person who had spared Cat months ago. I was something darker now.
We took up positions on several of the higher floors. We had reclaimed the carbines for this ambush. Railes and I, and some of the better shots, were on the top level. The lieutenant tapped my arm.
“Captain? I think we’ve got a problem.”
I followed the line of his pointing finger. “Oh crap.”
From our vantage point, we could see the Monolith cavalry company and beyond. Beyond were infantry troops. Thousands of them, filling the wide road, stretching out for a mile at least. Tarc wasn’t pursuing us with a detached company. It was a screening unit for an army.
“Let’s get out of here.”
“They didn’t hit us that night just to mess with us,” I told General Hake. “They wanted to slow us down, and we did exactly what they hoped we would. We stopped and dug in every night, and their main force got closer and closer.”
Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle Page 51