Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle

by Malcolm McKenzie

  “You put me in charge of your military. This is a military matter.”

  Four of my Shadowed Hand troops stood in her room with us looking uncomfortable. I was sure the two outside the door were eavesdropping. Cat was as tense as a dog watching its owners fight. The paleo’s lips were pulled back, baring her teeth. I wasn’t completely sure she wouldn’t bite me if the argument got too heated. Or stab me. I’d survive being bitten. No one but Roshel had ever survived being stabbed by Cat.

  “This isn’t an acceptable military solution, Minos,” she snapped. “Do I really need to list all the things that could go wrong? You might not even make it there alive. He might not help you. Even if he helps you, we might not win. Not to mention I didn’t cast the Darkness out of you just so you could go running right back to it!”

  “Not exactly fair, Tess.” I tried to keep my voice level. It was harder than with Roric. Cat’s eyes were wide.

  “As far as our chances, this is the best we’ve got,” I continued. “Everyone agrees. Otherwise we’re just sitting here, waiting for whatever Yoshana decides to do next. Take another shot at you, which won’t miss next time. Kidnap some more townspeople. Start massacring our patrols. We can’t just sit around. Saint Ignatius of Loyola said, ‘Act as if everything depended on you, trust as if everything depended on God.’ We have to act and trust.”

  She snarled, “Dee told you that one.”

  “Actually it was Father Roric.”

  She turned away from me, staring at the wall. After a moment, Cat hesitantly touched her back. Prophetess took the paleo’s hand, but didn’t face me.

  “Tess?”

  Still looking away, she spoke so quietly I had to strain to hear. “The First Book of the Fall says, ‘In those days they called upon the Darkness to serve them and did not know that they instead would serve it.’”

  “Tess, everyone agrees. If I don’t do this, we’re all going to die.”

  “Saint Siles said, ‘In suffering, we open ourselves to salvation. Only when we fall do we look up.’”

  I slapped my palm against the stone wall of the room. Cat spun at the noise, knife glistening in the lamplight. It wasn’t quite pointed at me.

  I ignored the blade. “Dammit, Tess! You said we needed to come here to stop Yoshana. You said we needed an army. I brought you here, I’ve got an army, but we’re not going to stop Yoshana unless I do this!”

  I stared at Cat, since Prophetess wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I have to do it, Tess.”

  “I’m not stopping you,” she said quietly.

  She hadn’t stopped me the last time I’d headed into the Sorrows either. That hadn’t worked out so well. This time, though, I knew what I was getting into.

  That just meant I knew exactly how lousy an idea it was.

  I had two horses, gallons of small beer, weeks’ worth of dried fruit and meat. It was a bad time of year to live off the land, and I couldn’t use the Darkness anymore to hunt in my sleep, or kill the microbes in stagnant pools I might have to drink from.

  “I’ll go with you,” Railes had said.

  “You stay here. I think Yoshana will bite on this deal, but maybe she won’t. You’re the only one I trust to watch Tess. Besides Cat. And if I run into anything I have to fight with, I’ll probably get the worst of it, whether there’s one or two of us.”

  I still had my katana and a carbine, of course. I wasn’t defenseless just because the Darkness wasn’t in me. It only felt that way.

  I left quietly, without fanfare. Other than the Ministry and a handful of others, no one was even informed. Not that I really thought I could keep my mission a secret, but why advertise?

  For much the same reason I avoided settlements. A Select was conspicuous, and I had no way of knowing what instructions Yoshana might have left in the territory under her control. The days were chilly and the nights were frigid. It rained twice and soaked me thoroughly, with no dry wood available to make a fire. I was physically miserable in a way I hadn’t been since my original journey north from Rockwall with Prophetess. It would have been ironic if I’d died of pneumonia before I reached the Sorrows.

  My innate Select vitality was enough to see me through, cold and alone with my thoughts. I had plenty of time to think about what I was doing, and my relationship with Tess. My thoughts were not particularly good company.

  I felt completely out of my depth, physically, intellectually, and morally. I’d been a competent leader of the Shadowed Hand. I’d flattered myself into believing I was some sort of minor military genius because I’d been clever at exploiting tactical advantages. But I’d nearly lost my soul in the process. I still remembered the dream where I’d killed Cat, dissolving her body to hide the evidence. It had felt very, very real. Months later I’d had a nightmare that it was true, and everything that had happened since had been in my imagination.

  Tess had saved me. She’d cared enough to seek me out while she was searching for her army. She’d purged the Darkness from me and put me in charge of her crusade. She’d gone beyond any rational extreme to help me.

  So why did I still feel like she didn’t support me?

  I suppose the demands felt unreasonable - that I was caught in a trap with no escape. I was fighting a monster with one hand tied behind my back. Success depended on untying that hand, but Tess was clearly disappointed in me. I didn’t want her to be disappointed. But even more than that, I didn’t want her head stuck on a pike on Our Lady’s battlements with Yoshana’s banner flying over it. So I was going to the Sorrows, and disappointing her.

  One day shapes loomed out of the fine drizzle on the road ahead. A year earlier, in a foul temper I might not have given way. This time I pulled my hood further over my face and nudged my mount and packhorse to the side of the road, left hand on the reins, right near my sword hilt.

  There were six men on horseback, tall, armored, white tabards blazoned with the strange golden double-crescent of the Darkness Radiant. Dee had called it the symbol of a syncretic, pan-Abrahamic religion, whatever that meant. These soldiers were dark-skinned and bearded, their long black hair pulled back and bound. Four carried lances couched vertically in stirrups. The other two carried the naphtha-throwers of fire wardens. So Yoshana was patrolling the roads now, clearing them of the Darkness and other vermin.

  My horse squelched into a muddy, weed-choked ditch. The packhorse stopped, tossed its head, and stood there, stubbornly unwilling to venture into the treacherous surface. I considered jerking at its lead but decided that would only attract more attention. I shifted my hand farther from my weapon. This wouldn’t go well if it came to a fight.

  The patrol continued on without a word, their eyes passing over me without registering the least interest. Whatever I thought I was going to accomplish against Yoshana, to these troops I didn’t merit a second glance.

  I wondered if they were right.

  Looking and feeling like a few hundred miles of bad road, a week later I hauled my weary body and two cranky horses up the carved stone steps of World’s End and stopped in front of Hafnum Furat’s iron gate. Just like the first time, he was flanked by two assistants, each with a massive bronze torch in the shape of a crucifix, flames licking up from an oil reservoir to play over the body of the crucified Christ.

  The big, blond man stared at me. “Not a person I expected to see again.”

  “Why? Because you thought Yoshana would have killed me by now? Or because you thought I’d be smart enough to stay away?”

  “Yes.” Just as when I’d first met him, he held a large knife in one hand and a large pistol in the other.

  “Just out of curiosity, which one?”

  Furat shrugged. “Either. Both. I don’t guess there’s much point in testing you for the Darkness.” He holstered both weapons and reached to his belt for the keys to the gate.

  “Up to you. It’s not in me anymore. You can test, or you can take my word for it.”

  He stopped with his hand halfway to the lock. “It’s not in yo
u?”

  “No.”

  “So you can’t make me let you in?”

  I grimaced. “No, I can’t. Although I really wish you would. I’m tired, and I’m hungry.”

  He turned the key and swung the gate open. “Hearing how you got rid of that stuff is worth the price of admission. Even though I’ve got the feeling I’ll wind up regretting it.”

  Furat and I sat at a small table looking directly out toward the sunset. There had been stew for dinner the first time I’d come this way, with Yoshana and her company. There was stew again. It was good, though. The beer was better than what I was carrying, especially after mine had been in a leather sack for a week.

  “Where do you get the meat and vegetables?” I asked. World’s End stood at the top of a rocky outcrop, a natural fortress rising from the edge of the Sorrows’ sea of trees, dropping away to the fields of the Source in the west. A tiny island wedged between the Darkness-haunted forest and Yoshana’s domain.

  “Trading down in the Source for the stuff the prospectors haul out of the Sorrows. In Waterblade, mostly. You probably would have gone by it on the way here. Little town on the south end of that lake.” He pointed. I could make out sunlight winking off what might have been water.

  “What prospectors? I’ve been here three times and there’s never been anyone else.”

  He chuckled, though there wasn’t much humor in it. “There’s not many. But the ones who live find some impressive things in there.”

  I nodded. I’d seen it. The strange, glistening knife I’d given to Cat came from an abandoned town in the Sorrows. Of course, the natives who infested that place made the paleos look like the pinnacle of human civilization by comparison. They’d been a strange, terrifying hunting pack sharing a common bestial intelligence linked by the Darkness. Furat wasn’t exaggerating when he said “the ones who live” to describe the prospectors. We’d lost three veterans of the Darkness Radiant in the Sorrows, despite the mastery of the Darkness of Yoshana, Grigg, and Roshel. And, at the end, me.

  Furat shrugged and wiped foam from his beard. “There’s some regulars. Guys who’ve lasted years in there, coming out to trade and resupply, and then going right back in again. They’re rich enough to retire by now, but they just go back over and over. Crazy, but they keep me in business.”

  “Some people aren’t made to retire. I know a woman who got herself a job as the general of the Source but now she’s busy trying to take over the world. Did she and her crew come through here on their way back?”

  “Most of them. The scariest ones. The big Select. The pretty one. The soldier with the beard and the scars. And her, of course.”

  The soldier with the beard and scars would be Erev. So he’d survived. I was glad of that.

  “I guess the others didn’t make it back,” Furat continued.

  “The others didn’t even make it there. They died in the Sorrows. I guess they died. Two of them just vanished in the night.” I ran my finger over the thick, rippled glass of the window. Heavy metal framing separated it into diamond-shaped panes. “Did she ask about me?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. She seemed glad you’d lived. I figured she wanted to finish you off herself.”

  “She was hoping I’d kill Prophetess for her.”

  Furat’s eyebrows went up. “But you didn’t. Did you?”

  “No,” I said. He must have known I hadn’t. He wasn’t so isolated here that word wouldn’t have reached him. Unless he thought perhaps I’d killed Tess and set up an impostor in her place. I frowned. It wasn’t impossible. That was a risk worth considering in the future, if somehow we all survived what was to come.

  I continued, “So now Yoshana does want me dead. Roshel told me so, right after she tried to stab Prophetess and got set on fire instead.”

  “Jesus. So what are you doing here? Hiding? I don’t mean to be inhospitable, but can’t you find somewhere else to die where you won’t take me with you?”

  I showed him my teeth. “I’m not hiding. I challenged Yoshana to a duel.”

  “Jesus,” Furat repeated. “That’s got to be the craziest thing I’ve ever heard, and I hang around people who go into the Sorrows for a living. So then what are you doing here?”

  “I need you to help me find a demon.”

  Furat was more colorful than my colleagues back at Our Lady. Most of the words that came out of his mouth couldn’t be repeated in polite company.

  “You are insane,” he sputtered when he ran out of obscenities.

  “I’ve heard that one before.”

  “Okay, how about ‘no’? Have you heard that one before?”

  “Yep.”

  “Then what are you thinking?” Furat demanded, an exasperated scowl on his face. “Yeah, he didn’t kill you last time you met him, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to love you now. And he’s almost all the way across the Sorrows. Did you forget you almost died getting back from there, and that was when you were controlling the Darkness?”

  “No, I remember that. That’s why I need you to help me get through.”

  The big man stood up and glared down at me. “And why on earth would I want to do that? I told you before I’m allergic to being dead.”

  “How do you feel about being a slave? Because if Yoshana’s running the show, you’ll either be dead or under her thumb. You’ve got an Overlord on one side and the Sorrows on the other. Talk about being squeezed.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Has it occurred to you that it’s just a little bit ironic that you want to use the Darkness against the person who wants to use the Darkness against the Darkness?”

  I opened my mouth and shut it, turning his words over in my head. The sun’s dying light stained the rock walls of the dining hall red. It would be dark soon.

  “I didn’t turn against her because of the tools she used,” I said slowly. “Or because I don’t believe someone needs to make a stand against the demons and the Darkness. It was because she’ll crush anyone who stands in her way with no more remorse than you’d feel stepping on a bug.”

  “She wants everyone under her thumb.”

  “Yes.”

  He sat down again and leaned toward me. It was a moment before he spoke.

  “You sure that’s a bad thing? I’m comfortable enough up here, but it’s not so great down there.” He waved his hand at the window, encompassing the Source with the sweep of his arm, then jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward the Sorrows. “Or in there. You think if the world was a decent place, people would risk their necks in that damn forest to scavenge three hundred year old garbage? And it’s not getting any better. What’s in there leaks out, more of it every year. The people in Waterblade are careful, but they still had three possessed last year. If Yoshana can push the Darkness back, create some order…”

  “By stomping on everyone who crosses her.”

  “Conquerors don’t play nice. The Romans didn’t go around asking whether everyone wanted to join their empire, but they created the greatest civilization of their age. Peace given to the world, that’s what they called it.”

  I closed my eyes. “They make a desert and call it peace. Decimations. Bodies hanging on crosses. Captives fed to lions for sport. A city leveled and the ground beneath sown with salt. Have we really fallen so far that we miss that?”

  “Haven’t we?”

  “Yoshana Caesar. It has a certain ring to it.” I puffed out air. “But I’m going to be one of the first to get fed to the lions. I guess I’ll have to find Seven without you.”

  “You’re really going to go in there alone?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t have much choice, do I?”

  He showed big, white teeth. “I never said I wouldn’t help you.”

  “What?”

  “If she civilizes the world, it’ll wreak havoc with my profits.”

  I went to sleep not understanding what had changed his mind.

  The walls of my bedroom were rough timbers but they had been sanded, polished, and varnis
hed. Like the rest of World’s End, they conveyed a sense of great age. There was an impression of solidity and permanence to the place. If Furat was to be believed, it had been built as a fortress at the dawn of the Age of Fear and had endured ever since.

  It was a refuge, a rock that stood above the mad tides engulfing the fallen world. Why would its master agree to leave it?

  The next morning I found him looking out over the Sorrows and asked him. “I didn’t think I was convincing you last night. Why’d you agree to go with me?”

  Furat bent and picked up a pebble. He set it on the carved stone parapet and flicked it with a thick finger. We watched it vanish into the sea of trees below.

  “I came out here because I didn’t want to answer to anyone.” He didn’t turn to face me as he spoke. His gaze was lost somewhere in the endless miles of forest. “I’ve told you I’m no coward. I’m not a fool, and folks that are reckless don’t survive the Sorrows. But I’m no coward. That woman, though, or whatever she is… twice she’s been here, and twice my guts turned to water and I crawled for her like a damn whipped dog. I guess… I guess if it’s a choice between taking my chances down there or living another fifty years under her boot, I’ll take my chances down there.”

  “Not quite ready for the return of the empire after all?”

  “I guess I’m not.” He pushed away from the wall. “C’mon, let’s get some breakfast and get ourselves organized. We’ll want as much daylight as possible. It sucks all the time in there, but it sucks worse at night.”

  Breakfast was pancakes and bacon. I filled up. Furat barked instructions at his assistants.

  “I’m only going to be gone for two weeks. Three tops. I’d better not find a mess here when I get back.”

  “What if it’s more than three weeks?” I asked softly.

  “Then we’ll be dead, and it won’t be my problem.” He bellowed, “Morfah, go get Sam. We should make introductions, since we’re going to be spending time together.”

  “We’re taking someone else with us?”

  His chair scraped on the stone floor as he belched and stood. “Oh yeah.”