Morfah, the shorter of Furat’s helpers, emerged from the stables as we stood in the yard. He was being dragged forward by a wolf straining at its leash, shaggy fur white as bleached bones.
“Let her go,” Furat called.
The beast charged. It picked up speed like a bullet. I had left my sword and rifle in my room. My folding knife would be a feeble defense against the creature lunging for me. I put up my arms to shield my face. Its front paws hit my chest as it reared up. Its muzzle darted out, its jaws gaped open, and it licked my chin.
Furat laughed.
The beast’s tail wagged maniacally.
“Why on earth do you have a tame wolf?” I demanded. It continued to enthusiastically lick my face.
“It’s not a wolf. It’s a dog,” he chuckled.
“Looks like a wolf to me. Anyway, dogs don’t like Select.”
“Sam likes everybody, even gray-skinned pains in my ass.”
I tentatively patted the creature’s shoulder. It wasn’t as massive as I’d thought. Much of the apparent bulk was fur, which was surprisingly soft. It showed no sign of getting bored with slobbering on me.
“Okay, so you've got a big, friendly dog that looks like a wolf. Why would we take the poor thing into the Sorrows? Did it eat your favorite boots or something?”
The dog finally dropped to all fours and trotted to Furat. He scratched it absentmindedly behind the ears. “Nah. The Waterbladers breed ’em to detect the Darkness. Pushes our chances of survival way up from ‘none’ to ‘slim.’”
I processed that. “If you’ve got a Darkness-detecting dog, why do you cut people’s hands open to check for it?”
“She’s still young and she’s not quite trained yet. I didn’t even have her last time you came through. And when I let her out of the stable she barks too damn much.”
As if on cue, the dog looked at me and let out a piercing yip. I backed up a step.
“She wants you to play with her,” Furat said.
“I’m surprised you just got one of them now. Seems like they’d be really useful here.”
The big man’s face clouded. “It was a long time before I could bring myself to get another one. I lost a dog like this in the Sorrows years ago. He went running off… I don’t know what got him. The way he was howling, it didn’t finish him quick.”
I didn’t know what to say. Furat glared at me.
“Don’t look at me like that, Minos. Whatever killed that dog would have killed me too.”
“I didn’t say you should have gone after him, Furat.”
“Damn right. I tell myself that pretty much every night.” He patted Sam on the head, a huge, shaggy man with a huge, shaggy hound, like some ancient northern god torn from long-lost myth. The dog leaned against his leg, tongue hanging out of a mouth opened in a big, stupid canine grin.
5. Sorrow Revisited
I had my carbine and my katana. Furat had his massive knife on one hip and the huge revolver on the other. The walking stick he carried was big enough to use as a quarterstaff. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the glass spheres slung on a bandolier across his chest.
“Oil grenades.” Some kind of striker mechanism was attached to each one. He hefted one, flicked the striker, and a wick sputtered to smoldering life. He pinched it out between his thumb and forefinger. “Not the safest things in the world, but the Darkness doesn’t like ’em at all.”
“I should take some back to Cat. Better than throwing lamps at Overlords.” And then of course I had to explain that story.
Furat shook his head. “You really are the craziest person I’ve ever met. A Select with a pet paleo. Who he has protecting a prophet from Yoshana, while he goes into the Sorrows to find a demon. If I live, no one’s ever going to believe half of this story.”
I would have happily stood around bantering all day, but my guide insisted we get moving early. He was right, of course. The dog pulled eagerly at her leather leash the whole way down the stone stairs into the forest.
“I’m not even going to last long enough to get killed by the Darkness,” Furat grumbled. “This stupid mutt’s going to break my neck on these steps.”
And then we were in among the trees, and we fell silent. The leaves were just beginning to bud, but the branches themselves cast deep shadows that seemed somehow to stifle sound as well as light. Compared to the forests of the west, the Sorrows were unnaturally quiet. Even the dog was subdued, sniffing tentatively at shrubs but no longer trying to rush ahead.
“Due north for now,” Furat whispered, moving off the road into the underbrush. “That’s been pretty safe for a while. Of course, anywhere enough prospectors go, something’s going to stake out eventually.”
It had been bad traversing the Sorrows with Yoshana. It had been worse by myself, even with the Darkness in me. This was almost intolerable. There was no way of knowing what might be stalking us. Furat had the dog’s leash in one hand and his walking stick in the other, but I could tell he was itching to draw his pistol. My katana was bared in my hand.
Not even an hour had passed when Sam came to an abrupt halt, backed two steps, and growled low in her throat. We froze.
“There.” Furat gestured with his staff. A cloud drifted through the trees, perhaps twenty yards away. It was about man-sized, but thin. What I’d controlled before the Cleansing had been larger.
“Shouldn’t be a threat,” I murmured. But we waited until it had faded from sight before we moved on.
We continued for the rest of the day without incident. Twice more the dog had become skittish, and we’d avoided the areas that made her uncomfortable. There was no question she’d earned her keep. Each time she sensed something Furat gave her a piece of jerky, which she gobbled down like the wolf she resembled.
We found a small clearing and made camp well before sunset. My companion began gathering wood.
“Are you sure a fire’s a good idea?” I asked.
He shrugged. “You have to balance the risks. The worst things in here are afraid of fire. Some of the others might be afraid of the dog. For the rest -” he jerked his chin at my carbine, “you better hope you’re a good shot.”
“I’ve gotten pretty good at killing people.”
He nodded. “And if we’re really lucky, what comes after us might be something you’d still call people.”
I took the first shift. Furat was apparently able to fall asleep at will.
I had never cared for dogs, nor had they cared for me. But I sat next to Sam, leaned against a rock, and rested a hand on her soft coat. After a time she put her head on my leg. We were comfortable enough that I found myself struggling not to drift off.
And then the dog’s muzzle lifted, her nostrils twitching. I grabbed the carbine next to me, straining all my senses. If the Darkness had still been in me, I would have risked sending a probe.
If the Darkness had still been in me, I wouldn’t have been here.
I heard nothing. After a minute, Sam let out a soft whuff and her head sank back onto her paws. There was no more danger of me falling asleep on watch, though.
I nudged Furat awake when I thought the night was halfway past. He looked at me blearily.
“We’re still alive, huh?”
“The dog must have heard or smelled something she didn’t like, but it went away.”
He got to his feet and stretched. “Stands to reason something would come take a look. Get some rest. If you hear me start shooting, we’ve got trouble. Otherwise I’ll wake you up in the morning. If you don’t wake up, it’s ’cause whatever it was killed us in the night.”
“You’re a real bundle of joy, you know that?”
“Says the man who dragged me out of my nice, safe bed to go trudging through this hellhole.”
I didn’t have much to say to that.
We all survived the night, though my dreams had been haunted by something I couldn’t quite recall. We ate hard bread and jerky, and Furat gave some more of the latter to Sam. Whatever had bot
hered her during the night, it didn’t seem to have affected her appetite.
“That dog would weigh three hundred pounds if I let her eat as much as she wants,” the big man grumbled, but his heart wasn’t in it.
It seemed that just a day in, the trees were growing thicker with new leaves. The shadows deepened. If we’d been just a week or two earlier, the branches would have been bare. It was prettier this way, but far more threatening, and far harder to spot enemies coming.
We’d only been walking half an hour when a figure stepped out from between two trunks not a hundred feet away.
Furat dropped his walking stick and jerked his massive pistol out of its holster. I drove the point of my sword into the ground and unslung my carbine. Only the dog seemed unperturbed. She didn’t growl, and her tail wagged tentatively.
The shape moved slowly toward us, human-like in size and general outline.
“If that’s possessed…” I whispered.
“…Sam should sense it,” Furat confirmed. But the dog still didn’t growl. Instead, she let out a soft bark, but it didn’t sound angry.
The figure was shorter than I, and much shorter than Furat. It was wearing a dark cloak with a hood that concealed its features.
“Stay where you are,” Furat called.
It stopped and gently pushed back the hood. A girl looked out, nearly as pale as Cat and not much older. “Are you prospectors? Thank God. Come with me. I know a safe place.”
Furat and I glanced at each other. I slung the carbine and retrieved my sword, but I didn’t sheath it. Furat didn’t put away the pistol.
“Who are you, and what are you doing out here?” he demanded.
She moved closer, slowly, hands in the air. “My name is Talith. I come from a village about a week north of here.” Her voice was strangely accented and a bit hesitant, as if she were searching for words in a language that wasn’t quite her own. “It is inside the forest, but we had always kept the Darkness out. Until a few months ago. The possessed always attacked, every year. But never so many…”
She looked down, then met our eyes again. “They were coming over the wall and we could not stop them. My parents told me to run, and I ran. I knew the forest, how to hide. I have found safe places to stay. But I hoped someone would find me and take me out of here.”
Furat said, “We’re going north, not south.”
The girl nodded eagerly. “And I can help you get where you are going. As I said, I know safe places. But then, after you have found what you are looking for, you will take me back with you. Yes?”
The big man raised his eyebrows at me. I shrugged. “If she knows places we can stop for the night, we’ll sleep a whole lot better. And the dog seems to like her.”
She was close enough now that Sam could reach her. The shaggy animal licked Talith’s hand, and the girl patted the dog’s head.
“Stupid dog likes everyone,” Furat complained. But he said to her, “Fine, you help us get where we’re going, we’ll take you out of the Sorrows and get you on your way to civilization.”
She smiled. “You are very kind.”
We made better time following Talith. She moved as easily through the trees as if she were a wraith herself, somehow guiding us down paths where no danger lurked. Yoshana had wanted a native guide when she’d led her commando team through the Sorrows - we had by sheer luck actually found one.
We must have covered several miles when we emerged into a clearing far larger than the one where Furat and I had spent the night. A fallen log lay at the center of it next to a stone-ringed fire pit.
“This place is safe,” Talith announced. “Rest here.”
And even as we sat on the log, she pulled up her hood and vanished into the trees.
“Hey, wait,” Furat called.
I felt no inclination to follow her. “I don’t know about you, but I can use a break.”
He didn’t disagree. So we rested, and soon enough Talith drifted back out of the trees and made her way toward us, graceful as a dancer, moving so softly her feet didn’t even seem to touch the ground.
Bow-wow-wow-wow-wow-wow! Sam erupted into a frenzy of furious barking, and my vision cleared from the effects of the aura, and the cloaked figure wasn’t touching the ground because it had no feet.
Furat plucked a grenade from his bandolier, flicked its wick to life, and hurled it backhand. It passed through the mass of Darkness filling the cloak and shattered on the fabric behind. The wraith was no larger than a man but it was incredibly dense, one of the thickest clouds I’d ever seen. It rose into the air inside the burning garment, and my mind resonated to its panicked psychic shriek.
The cloud was big but it was stupid. If it had just streamed out the front of the cloak, it could have escaped easily. Instead it flailed in the air, burning. Furat and I watched in fascinated horror as the substance of the Darkness itself caught fire. What escaped the conflagration wasn’t enough to be a threat.
Talith raced back into the clearing before it was quite over, her hood thrown back again, shock and anger and fear mingled on her face.
“What’s it you’s done?” she screamed. And then her expression changed to something fawning. “Oh, heroes, what you have done! You have destroyed the monster -”
As she turned her smile on Furat, he shot her in the face.
I looked from the corpse to my companion. “She wasn’t infected, you know.” No cloud of Darkness emerged from the hole between her eyes or the shattered wreckage where the back of her head had been.
“I know.” He spat on the ground near the body. “She was a collaborator. That’s worse. I’d heard of it but hadn’t ever seen it, and most people don’t survive running into them. She was bait for that wraith.”
“The wraith is gone. She wasn’t a threat anymore.”
He glared at me. “And what did you want me to do? She was going to kill us, and she probably did kill people I knew.”
“Prophetess would be dead if I’d killed the last person who tried to assassinate me while I was sleeping.”
Furat snorted. “So you think we should have turned her into a pet like your Cat?”
“Why not?”
Sam was sniffing at the body. Furat shoved the dog away with a foot. He let out a long sigh. “People say mercy is for the weak. That’s bull. Mercy is for the strong. And in case you haven’t noticed, we’re not exactly in a position of strength here. When you decided not to kill that paleo, there was nothing within a thousand miles that stood a chance of hurting you - certainly not a little paleo girl. Us, here? That treacherous witch could have gotten us killed a hundred times a day.”
And he wasn’t wrong. I remembered a long-ago argument with Prophetess about the wisdom of killing a wounded paleo who’d attacked us. I’d crippled him instead, and he’d been less of a threat than Talith.
“Sorry,” I said. “You made a call. I don’t know if I would have made the same one, but I understand it.”
And I understood it even better when we left the clearing and found the pile of skeletons heaped on the far side, where Talith must have dragged the bodies after the cloud had fed on them. Furat made a face and began to loot their equipment. When he saw me staring, he simply said, “What? A lot of this is good stuff. I sold it to them.”
One man had a pair of oil grenades like Furat’s. I took one, returned to the clearing, and detonated it on Talith’s corpse. I couldn’t have said whether it was out of consideration for the dead or to spite the Darkness so it couldn’t profit from her body one last time. Maybe it was both.
“You think it’s true about the town?” I asked. We were still headed due north, as best I could tell. Sam trotted at our side, sniffing.
Furat shrugged. “Could be. There’s supposed to be a village up here that isn’t infected. I was hoping we’d pick up a guide there. So it wouldn’t be good if it’s fallen. Some of what she said was a lie - she’d been working with that wraith for more than a couple of months.”
“How do y
ou know?” The skeletons had been picked very clean, but the Darkness could do that in minutes.
“Like I said, I recognize the gear. Some of those guys vanished years ago.”
“Couldn’t they have survived for years before the cloud got them?”
Furat shook his shaggy blond head. “You don’t last for years at a time out here. No one does. Once someone’s been in the Sorrows for a couple of months and you haven’t heard from them, they’re not coming back out again. Ever.”
We continued in silence for some time. I asked, “If she wasn’t from that village, where would she be from?”
He shrugged again. “No one knows what all’s in here. Maybe some group of infected natives sometimes leaves someone clean as bait. Maybe she was from outside the Sorrows altogether… developed an unhealthy fascination with the place. Maybe in some town like Waterblade, a girl listened to the stories about the wraiths and liked what she heard. One day, she went to the edge of the Sorrows and met something, and somehow the two of them made a bargain. And then she started luring other people into the woods with tales of marvels she’d seen, and the cloud killed them. And she liked having the power of life and death, and pretty soon, every girl who’d teased her, and every boy who’d rejected her, had vanished into the woods. And when the townsfolk started getting suspicious, she vanished into the woods too. And she and her friend started looking for other prey. She seemed pretty well fed… maybe the wraith wasn’t the only one with a taste for human flesh.”
I suppressed a shudder. “You think that’s true?”
“Probably not. But if it makes you feel better about me killing her, go with it.”
I glanced over at him. He had a mocking little smile on his face. Fair enough. I’d encouraged people to believe comforting lies when I’d led the Shadowed Hand.
“What is truth?” I muttered.
Furat overheard me. “The guy who asked that question wound up with a pretty bad reputation, but he wasn’t the one who got nailed to a cross.”
“It was suggested to me that martyrdom was a better option than exposing myself to the Darkness again.”
Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle Page 62