“Yeah. Quilla Farr, that was her name.” I turned the defections over in my mind, then clasped hands with Sesk and Luco. “Good luck. You were there for me when I really needed it. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
I was heading to see Railes when Prophetess caught up with me. Cat was trailing behind her.
“You made interesting friends, Minos,” announced the representative of Our Lady and, by her own confession, God’s prophet on earth.
The paleo cocked her head and stared intently at me. “Not shadow warrior?”
“Not anymore,” I told her.
“Good.”
“Good?”
She nodded emphatically. “Good.”
“This girl is special, Minos,” Prophetess said. “We need to take better care of her. She’s smart.”
“Yeah, she’s clever for a paleo.”
“Not ‘clever for a paleo.’ Smart by anyone’s standards, Minos. Do you know she taught herself to read? Do you know what that means growing up the way she did?”
I shrugged. “Fine. She can be your bodyguard. She’s good at that.”
Tolf protested. “Prophetess has a bodyguard.”
Cat was on him faster than thought. The guardsman found himself on his back in the dirt, the paleo’s knife at his throat, her face inches from his. “Big dog. Woof woof woof. Cat better,” she declared.
“You made your point, Cat. Let him up.” She stepped away, and I helped Tolf to his feet.
“I can have two bodyguards,” Prophetess said quickly.
The paleo made a dismissive scoffing sound. “Cat better.”
“Where did you find her?” Tolf whispered.
“She found me. She was going to kill me in my sleep and eat me.”
“I’m surprised she didn’t.” Cat leered at him.
“The Darkness was good for something.”
Prophetess had come west with a single company and was returning with an army of over six thousand veterans. The combined Rockwall and Monolith brigades wouldn’t be enough on their own to stop Yoshana’s legions - but they’d give the Overlord something to think about.
The only question was whose commander would be in charge.
“I don’t think you’d go wrong with either of them,” I whispered to her as she convened the senior officers. “Hake is a good leader. He’s smart, and he’s tough. From what I sensed of Lago, though, he’s one hell of a soldier. And the Paladins are real professionals.”
The combined command staffs had assembled in the center of Rockwall’s defensive square, where our headquarters had been during the battle. Even after peace had broken out, the two groups of officers stood a bit apart, eying each other nervously. But the general and the BlackShield had their heads together, muttering quietly. Lago was almost a foot taller than Hake, and he straightened to address Prophetess.
“My lady, General Hake and I both pledged our armies to you. We are at your disposal. You may place whatever officer you wish at their head. However, we are united in our recommendation on the subject.”
Prophetess dipped her head. “Then it would be foolish of me not to listen, BlackShield Jarl Lago. Who do you recommend?”
“A man known to you and to both armies assembled here, respected and feared for his knowledge of the arts of war. The man you personally redeemed from darkness. We recommend you give command of our combined forces to the Select, Minos.”
She smiled. “I accept your recommendation.”
My head spun. A few months ago I had been free, without responsibilities, a power unto myself. Now, with the Darkness stripped from me, I was supposed to lead an army woven together from two bands of enemies, taking it into battle against the world’s greatest military commander.
“I’m… honored,” I stammered.
What could possibly go wrong?
Book Four - Reckoning with Darkness
“Hence it comes about that all armed prophets have been successful, and all unarmed prophets have been destroyed.”
Niccolo Machiavelli
1. Confessions
Nearly seven thousand men churned the cold, damp earth of the practice yard into a muddy swamp. They were split into mixed forces, companies from Rockwall and the Monolith blended into two armies, drilling against each other. It was an absolute, chaotic debacle.
“Raji, he’s turned your flank!” General Hake bellowed. “Second and third company form square! Form square!” Colonel Raji couldn’t hear the general from halfway across that field, ringing with the sounds of wooden practice swords smashing on shields and the shouts of the men. Blunted practice arrows whirred in the air like a swarm of angry bees. Trumpeters and flagmen relayed the orders, but they too were ignored. Raji’s left flank was gradually enveloped in a seething, struggling melee.
Not that BlackShield Jarl Lago’s opposing forces were doing any better. Their center had collapsed, virtually splitting his army in half. The Monolith ranger units that had managed to sneak around behind Hake’s men hadn’t been supported when they attacked, and were all lying on the field in simulated death. There was barely a hint of a formation remaining on either side.
Somewhere beyond my hearing, Colonel Raji would be uttering his favorite phrase - “We’re screwed.” He wasn’t wrong. My blood pressure rose as I watched the disaster unfolding before my eyes and tried, unsuccessfully, to imagine what we could do to fix the problem next time.
Railes came up as I muttered a continuous string of profane curses that weren’t suitable to the leader of a religious crusade. The tattooed captain’s breath steamed in the cold air. Without preamble, he said, “Pious has defected.”
I shrugged. “I’ve always known Pious was defective. Tell me something new.”
“Dammit, Minos!” he swore. “He’s taken off - gone to join the Darkness Radiant!”
I sucked in a deep breath, let it out in a ragged sigh, and turned to look at him. In his agitation, the skull tattoo on the right side of his face became even more grotesque. I could hear the faint whistling behind his breath. Railes always wheezed - the spear that had punctured his lung at the Battle of the Cleansing hadn’t killed him, but he’d never fully recovered.
“It’s supposed to be a joke. Can’t you suck up to your commanding officer and pretend it’s funny?” I complained. “I understood you fine. I figured Pious would bolt when the weather cleared.”
The big killer had always hated me. When I’d commanded the Darkness, he’d feared me, and perhaps respected me just a bit. And I’d helped him kill Paladins. Now that I was cleansed of the Darkness and the Paladins were our allies, he had no reason to stay in a force I commanded. Yoshana’s brand of murderous ruthlessness was bound to appeal more.
I waved my hand at the practice yard. “We’ve got bigger problems than that homicidal jackass making a break for it. How many did he take with him?” I asked.
“His whole squad. No one else.”
“That’s not bad. How’d you find out?”
“Groff told me. I think some of the guys in Groff’s other squads knew a while ago he was planning to bolt. I’m hacked off they didn’t let me know.”
I shrugged again. “Hard to rat out your platoon mates. And Pious isn’t a guy you cross lightly. Let it go.”
“We going after him?” The captain’s hand tightened reflexively on his sword hilt. Even short of breath, Railes was a fearsome warrior, ruthless as Pious though not as brutal.
Six months ago, with the Darkness in me, I would have personally led the force that hunted the defectors down and executed them. I was trying to be a different person now. I was also trying to keep my temper under control. Results on both fronts were mixed.
“Let ’em go,” I said. “We’ve got bigger things to worry about.”
“They’ve got intel -”
“That Yoshana doesn’t already know? That the Rockwall and Monolith troops still won’t work together? Trust me, she knows that already.”
That came out a little more bitter t
han I’d intended, but Railes hadn’t picked the best time to give me more bad news. I was nominally in command of all the forces gathered at Our Lady, but General Hake of Rockwall and BlackShield Jarl Lago of the Monolith had far more experience than I. It had seemed logical to leave each in charge of the army he had pledged to Our Lady’s service.
That had been a mistake, but I’d realized it too late. The two forces were almost completely incapable of coordination, or even basic cooperation. They were reasonably formidable separately, but to stand a chance against the Darkness Radiant they’d have to work together. I’d let the situation drag on, hoping it would improve naturally over time. It hadn’t. Now I was trying to fix the problem by mixing the units, but campaign season was almost upon us and it was too late.
The one thing that had become crystal clear was that I had a good head for tactics but not for operations or strategy. Which was fine for a captain but not for a general. Or, more accurately, a judge.
Even my title had been a subject of dispute. Hake, a colonel when we’d left Rockwall together, had been promoted to general in the field. I didn’t want to reduce him in rank and take the position myself, and besides, it wasn’t clear that a general outranked Jarl Lago’s title of BlackShield. I’d jokingly suggested “emperor,” “dictator,” and “warlord,” but Prophetess had vetoed those ideas. She’d eventually settled on “judge.”
“The judges were sent by the Lord to lead the ancient Israelites, the Chosen People, into battle in times of great peril,” she’d said. “What could be more appropriate?”
So that had become my rank. It was only after we’d announced it that Doctor John Dee gleefully informed me that Minos had been a judge of the dead in Greek mythology.
“Minos, Judge of the Dead?” I’d growled at him. “It didn’t occur to you to mention that before? That it might just possibly have a morale impact when we’re facing a superior enemy and our commander is Minos, Judge of the Dead?”
The occultist had just grinned and shrugged. It wasn’t his problem. When battle was joined he would run away and chronicle the massacre from a safe distance.
“You all right, Minos?” Railes brought me back to the present, where the melee in the practice yard had devolved into something more like a gigantic barroom brawl.
Railes was someone who got the whole truth from me, whether he wanted it or not. I gave him a thin smile. “Crisis of faith.”
“I think I’m having a crisis of faith,” I told Father Juniper as we sat in the rectory watching the Ermel Clock. The hour hand was near twelve o’clock, following the golden outer track that marked the daylight hours. The eccentric circles that indicated day and night were at their greatest separation at noon and midnight. At six o’clock the circles joined, passing into or out of darkness at twilight and daybreak.
The bearded priest smiled and puffed on his pipe. “That sounds serious, but not entirely without precedent in the history of Christendom.”
I glanced over at him. His blue eyes twinkled, gently mocking me.
“Sure. But not a great attribute in the guy who’s supposed to be leading the armies of righteousness. Prophetess pulled off an honest-to-God miracle when she cast the Darkness out of me. It made sense for me to lead the army she won for herself. But I think she may have picked the wrong man for the job. I don’t feel very holy, and I’m not that great of a general. Can a prophet choose wrong?”
The priest smoked for a while, then said slowly, “God chooses his prophets, and his prophets choose their champions. The prophet and the champion are human, so neither is perfect.”
“It’s just - I feel like I should sense the Lord’s hand on me or something. And I don’t.”
“Thus the crisis of faith.”
I nodded. Sesk, a now-retired sergeant in the Shadowed Hand, had told me not to feed the dark wolf. By which he meant any tendency to be selfish, self-pitying, hateful, or generally cranky. I had the feeling the dark wolf had been eating pretty well lately, but I didn’t know how to make it stop. There was a lot of food around.
“It’s normal to have doubts,” Father Juniper said. “You’ve come a long way in a short time, by a very hard road. But I think perhaps you should speak to my confessor.”
“Your confessor? Who’s that, the Metropolitan?”
“No, no. Just Father Roric.” The priest’s beatific smile barely concealed a yawning abyss of wicked amusement. Just Father Roric. The Advocate for Justice. Probably the most terrifying man in Our Lady.
“Couldn’t I go tell Yoshana I’m sorry and see if we can all be friends instead? That sounds a lot less painful.”
Father Juniper’s expanding grin could have swallowed a melon.
Father Roric’s study. The lion’s den. We’d had a touchy relationship before I’d taken on the Darkness. It had gotten very much worse after that, when he’d tried to exorcise me and I’d come close to killing him. We hadn’t spoken since I’d been cleansed.
He’d frightened me before I’d mastered the Darkness. He frightened me again now.
“Come in,” I heard faintly as I knocked on his office door. I opened it and entered.
The priest didn’t stand, but I knew he was nearly as tall as I, thin as a blade. His piercing gray eyes locked on me, and he motioned with his chin toward the seat on the other side of his desk. He wasn’t going to make it easy for me, though. He simply sat and watched silently as I took the chair.
The room was small and unadorned. It was dominated by a worn desk of some pale wood, perhaps oak. Books and stacks of paper covered it. Bookcases of the same design lined the wall behind Roric. On my side of the desk there was nothing but the chair I was sitting in. Despite the small window with a view of the practice yard outside, the office gave the impression of an interrogation chamber. Though that was probably as much due to its inhabitant as anything else. Even after traveling with Yoshana, leading men in battle, and mastering and then being freed of the Darkness, somehow I still found the black-robed priest intimidating.
“Um. Father Juniper thinks I should speak to you. Confess.”
He nodded. “Indeed. He mentioned it to me. There’s a form for that, you know.”
“Of course. Um. Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It’s been… this is my first confession.” I hesitated. “I suppose that’s a lot of ground to cover.”
“Technically,” Roric said, “Your sins were wiped clean by Prophetess’ rather unorthodox baptism. So you can start from there.”
I thought, looked down at my lap, met his raptor’s stare. “I think I’d like to start earlier, if I could.”
“The sacrament is for your benefit. Start where you’d like.”
I took a deep breath. “You know I’ve spent a lot of time with Prophetess. You said yourself that I spent two months with her and she didn’t convert me. To be honest, I didn’t feel a need to convert. I felt like I was already a pretty decent person. I didn’t need your religion.”
My eyes, black on black, stared into his. He just nodded, unflinching, utterly calm. If I’d offended him, he made no sign.
“But then, well. The Darkness. The Cleansing. I suppose I couldn’t ask for more of a revelation on the road to Damascus.”
The flow of words trickled to a halt. This time, he filled the void. “So you feel obligated? To Prophetess and the church?”
I shook my head. “It’s not that. It’s… once the Darkness was out of me, I suppose I thought I would become some sort of holy person. The man who’d been cleansed. But… I have to say it’s been a disappointment. There was the moment when Prophetess cast the Darkness out and I really felt something - like God’s light was shining through me.”
It sounded like a foolish and presumptuous thing to say, even to a priest. Maybe especially to a priest. But I struggled on, trying to reach the festering core of the problem. “But I haven’t felt it since then. All the thoughts I had when the Darkness was in me, they’re still in me. I look at those idiots out there in the practice yard bickering
instead of learning to work together, and sometimes I want to kill them - just one or two, by way of example. If I still had the Darkness in me, I might do it.”
The nightmares of lust and violence had faded since the Cleansing. Roshel hadn’t visited me in my dreams. But I still had plenty of wrath in me. As well as other things.
“And I still have thoughts about, you know… girls,” I stammered, embarrassed. “So… where’s the salvation? I know those urges are wrong, but I still have them. I still… sometimes I still wish I had the power to just smack those people around. Hurt them. Make them afraid. It doesn’t seem like much of an improvement.”
“It seems unfair?” said the priest. “You were saved, and yet, you’re still tempted. You had a single transcendent moment, but it’s not been repeated.”
I nodded.
Roric steepled his fingers and regarded me levelly. “You’ve been baptized, so salvation is open to you. But you must understand that we have free will and thus, salvation is an ongoing battle. Even for great saints, those moments of transcendence are rare. Sometimes there is only one in a lifetime, and the rest of that life is spent struggling to reconnect, to live up to that instant of grace. As the pilot of a vessel is tried in the storm; as the wrestler is tried in the ring, the soldier in the battle, and the hero in adversity: so is the Christian tried in temptation.”
“Prophetess seems immune,” I remarked, maybe just a bit peevishly.
“No. Not her, not the Metropolitan, not me, not you. Not Saint Basil the Great, whom I was just quoting. No one who walks this earth today is free from temptation. Let me see.” He thumbed through the stack of papers on his desk, selected one. “Dom Augustin Guillerand had some useful thoughts as well. The metaphor he uses might appeal to you, in your role.”
If I’d wanted someone to quote the dead at me, I could have talked to Dee. But I didn’t interrupt.
Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle Page 56