Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle

by Malcolm McKenzie

  “And yet here you are.”

  I nodded. “And yet here I am.”

  We made it two more days without incident. Sam guided us away from clouds drifting through the trees or lairing in their branches. On the fourth morning, we heard a faint but continuous rustling far off to our right. The dog’s lips pulled back from her teeth and she growled deep in her throat.

  “Drelb?” Furat wondered quietly.

  I shook my head. “Too many sounds. I mentioned the Darkness infects pigs, right?”

  He nodded.

  “Did I mention it had infected a lot of them?” In the biblical story, Christ had cast a legion of demons into a herd of swine. I had to guess the infected boars I’d encountered before were a pretty fair approximation.

  “You didn’t say what you did about them,” Furat murmured.

  “I ran like hell. And fell down an embankment.” The creatures had not been impressed at all with my command of the Darkness. “They’re probably scared of fire.”

  “Just how aggressive were these pigs?”

  “You know how pigs are omnivores? And ‘omni’ means ‘everything’? Let’s just say humans are definitely part of ‘everything.’”

  I could see the underbrush moving now. I steadied the carbine on my shoulder. Sam quivered, snarling. A tusked, snouted head pushed through the weeds. Then another, and another, and more, a skirmish line of the beasts parallel to our path. They weren’t much taller than Sam at the shoulder but the bodies were massive. Each one outweighed me. They approached slowly, mouths wide.

  “Run like hell?” Furat asked.

  “I should mention that falling down the embankment would probably have killed me if I hadn’t had the Darkness healing me. Maybe up a tree…”

  “You gonna carry the dog?”

  “Good point.” I fired at the nearest animal. The heavy slug took it just behind the head. It staggered and let out a piercing squeal, then charged. I cycled the bolt, fired again, and blasted a clump of grass in front of it.

  The monster was forty feet away when Furat’s bullet smashed its skull. It plowed face-first into the turf, then lurched unsteadily to its feet.

  “You sure the dog can’t climb?” I asked.

  Furat fired again, destroying the pig’s left eye. It stood for a moment, then the Darkness poured out of the wounds in its head and it fell. The cloud circled in the air, then settled on another of the boars that had continued their slow advance. That one roared a challenge that shook the trees.

  “Uh oh.”

  Furat hurled a grenade. It burst inches from the boar’s snout, sending up a sheet of flame. I fired, worked the bolt, and fired again. Both shots hit the beast and it staggered and went down.

  To the north the pigs drew back a bit, but a half dozen to the south were working their way around behind us. Furat lobbed another grenade and they retreated.

  We edged northwards, crab-walking to keep our weapons trained on the monsters to the east.

  Another one charged. Furat and I both fired twice and it fell, leaking blood and Darkness. The pig closest to it began to chew on the corpse. As more Darkness flooded into the cannibal it raised its bloody muzzle and turned its evil little eyes back to us.

  “Run?” I asked.

  “Run,” Furat agreed. He threw another grenade, cutting off the animals to the north, then flung one directly behind us.

  “Two left,” he gasped.

  Sam raced along with us, far faster on four legs than we were on two. Once she darted too close to me and I almost tripped over her. I hurled curses at the dog but only in my mind - I saved my breath for running.

  Fifteen minutes later we puffed to a halt. There were no immediate sounds of pursuit.

  “Think we lost them?” I asked between gasps for breath.

  “Lost ’em? No. Pigs track. By smell. But if we’re lucky. They decided. To go chase something else.”

  A couple of hours before sundown we climbed a rocky outcrop on the back of a ridge. It fell away sharply to the northeast, a slope too extreme for the pigs to negotiate. We hoped. On the other sides we collected wood and heaped up a sort of low barricade. Thankfully it had been dry for the past week. As night came on, we set the barrier on fire.

  “We might burn down the whole forest if we’re not careful,” I said.

  “And that would break your heart, would it?”

  “Not really, no.”

  Sam didn’t like being encircled by flames, but seemed to understand the alternative was worse. She whined unhappily and bumped her head against Furat’s leg.

  “Good girl,” he consoled her, scratching behind her ears. “Some of that pork would taste good now, huh?”

  Even having harbored the Darkness in my own body, I felt a superstitious dread of eating something that had been infected with it. Not that the option was available. “You want to go back and get some?”

  “Not really, no.”

  As night fell I noticed a glow to the northwest. It was hard to judge the distance without knowing the size of the light source, but I guessed it might be ten miles away. “Think that might be a town?” I asked Furat.

  “I hope so. If they’re using fire, they’re probably not infected.”

  The issue became more urgent an hour later. Our first warning was when Sam started to growl, but not much later we could hear rustling and grunting in the trees beyond the edge of the firelight.

  “Doesn’t look like they decided to chase something else,” I said.

  “Nope.”

  The sounds continued, just beyond the edge of sight. We set watches again, but neither of us slept well. Once I woke to see Furat poking at the barrier with his staff, coaxing more flames from the charred wood. I sat up. “Is that going to last the night?”

  He looked dubiously at the logs. “I wouldn’t bet on it. I don’t know how high the fire has to be to hold them back, but we might want to make a move.”

  I peered into the blackness behind us. “You mean over the ridge? In the dark? Down a rock slope?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I can’t imagine what could possibly go wrong with that plan.”

  “You like the alternative better?” He gestured beyond the ring of smoldering branches. The flames had subsided to the point we could just make out bulky shapes moving in the trees beyond. Occasionally piggy little eyes would reflect the firelight.

  I shook my head. We could risk crippling injury on the slope, or face almost certain death torn apart by Darkness-maddened swine. It wasn’t much of a choice, but the ridge was definitely more appealing.

  Furat secured a length of rope around a projecting rock and tied the other end around his waist. “I’ll chuck a grenade at them, then I’ll head down. When I’m at the bottom, I’ll throw the rope back up to you.”

  “How come you get to go down first?” I wasn’t really complaining. My nerves just made my mouth move.

  “You want to carry the dog instead?”

  I didn’t, so Furat threw another grenade into the trees just past the barricade, grabbed Sam, and launched himself backwards over the precipice. The dog put her front paws on his shoulders and gave a frightened yip as she plunged over the side into the darkness below.

  Flames licked aggressively at the undergrowth and began to crawl up tree trunks. I wondered if we had in fact managed to set the woods on fire. Trapped on this outcrop of rock, that might prove even more definitively fatal than facing the pigs.

  The end of the rope slapped onto the ground a few feet from me.

  “Hurry up,” Furat called from somewhere beyond sight. “Try not to land on us. There isn’t a lot of room down here.”

  I looped the rope around my waist and tied a clumsy knot. Then I added another loop, just to be sure. I gathered my gear, grasped the rope, and readied myself at the edge of the cliff, my back to the abyss.

  “Uh… how do I do this?” I called back to Furat.

  “Just jump back. You’ll swing back to the rock face, hit with you
r feet, and push off again. Two pushes should be enough to get you down. Hurry up. That grenade’s not going to hold them forever.”

  It sounded easy enough. I swallowed, jumped out into space, swung back, and slammed into the rock face. The rope slipped through my hands, and I slid down in a bumping rush. I landed in a heap on something hard.

  Sam licked my face.

  “That wasn’t quite as easy as you suggested,” I croaked. It hadn’t been as bad as my previous escape from pigs in the Sorrows because this time I hadn’t ripped myself open on protruding roots and bushes while I tumbled down a cliff. On the other hand, the last time the Darkness had healed me.

  “Let’s get moving,” Furat said. “Maybe they won’t figure out how to follow us down here, but I don’t want to bet on it.”

  We weren’t close to the bottom of the ridge - we had just landed on a small level area twenty feet below the summit. By the dim light of a crescent moon I could faintly make out the outlines of low bushes and scraggly pines as the ground fell away before us. The angle wasn’t nearly as steep as the bare rock face we’d just descended but it was uninviting in the dark.

  “We want to chance this slope at night?” I asked. Not that I imagined it would look terribly friendly by day.

  “No, but I really don’t want those hogs to work their way around and catch us on the ledge while we wait for the sun to come up.”

  That was so self-evidently true there was really nothing else to say, so we began to pick our way down the slope, scuttling crablike on all fours. The dog, a natural quadruped, did better than we did.

  Branches caught at my sleeves. Once I passed through a spiderweb and felt something crawling on my face. I flailed wildly until I was sure it was gone.

  “You all right?” Furat asked.

  “I hate spiders.”

  There could be far worse in the trees, of course. There was no way to see a cloud of the Darkness before we walked right into it. We had to trust that Sam would alert us.

  It must have been an hour before we reached the bottom of the hill. Unfortunately, I had no doubt the pigs could cover the distance in a fraction of the time if they figured out a way past the outcrop. We paused only for a few moments, then I said, “Keep moving?”

  I couldn’t even tell whether Furat’s big shadow nodded, but seconds later he was walking again, following a contour of the terrain in a direction I guessed was roughly northwest. The ground squelched underfoot, water accumulating in the low crease between the hills. I hoped it would confuse the pigs’ scent tracking, but wasn’t hugely optimistic.

  We stumbled along for hours. The sky was just beginning to shift from black to gray when Sam stopped and growled.

  “Damn,” Furat muttered softly. “Figures something would have staked out anything like a natural path.”

  We backed half a dozen paces, then began to climb the slope to our right. We humans had no way of knowing if the threat we hadn’t seen was following us. Because Sam was quiet, we assumed it wasn’t. Still, the hair on the back of my neck stood up.

  “Torches?” I asked.

  It was light enough now that I could see him shake his head. “Walking up the face of the hill like this I’m afraid it would mark us for the pigs. Or something else.”

  That was the fatal dilemma in the Sorrows. Fire - or even the use of the Darkness by an adept like Grigg, Roshel, or Yoshana - might help detect or deter some dangers. But it might attract others. So we kept our torches in our packs and trusted in the dog. She’d steered us right so far.

  We crested the hill and paused on the other side, far enough from the crown that we weren’t silhouetted against the sky. By that time dawn had truly come. We sat in grass moist with dew and ate pemmican and hard bread, which it seemed were my constant companions on my treks across the continent. I’d come to heartily despise both. Sam seemed happy with them, though.

  Furat watched her with a jaundiced eye. “That dog’ll eat anything. I’ve seen her eat dirt and sticks. Wouldn’t surprise me if she’s related to those pigs.”

  If the dog was offended, she gave no sign.

  For the next few hours we encountered neither pigs nor wraiths, but nothing in the Sorrows was easy. We blundered into a tangle of thorn bushes that snagged our clothing and tore at our skin. I realized how much of my woodcraft had depended on the Darkness. It would have detected the thorns and healed any scratches almost before I noticed them. I had learned useful skills in the past year, but many of them I needed to learn again without the powers of hell at my command.

  After we had picked our way clear of the briars, which somehow the dog negotiated unscathed, Furat pointed north. I could make out thin wisps of smoke spreading on the wind.

  “That the town we saw last night?”

  “I hope so,” he said. With no better option at hand, we headed toward it.

  The trees ended abruptly in a vast cleared space. In its center rose a palisade of rough timbers, no more than trunks shorn of their branches. It was primitive, but far less disturbing than, say, an interlaced wall of living trees… like the one surrounding the infected village I’d encountered with Yoshana’s war party. Just before I’d let her fill me with the Darkness.

  There was a closed gate facing us, no more sophisticated than the rest of the construction. A couple of small columns of smoke emerged above the walls. On the far side of the enclosure, nearly a quarter of a mile away, a stream meandered through the clearing. It appeared to pass under the walls, supplying the settlement with water.

  “Still looking good,” Furat murmured. I tentatively agreed. Smoke meant fire, which probably meant no Darkness. Having a water source within the walls suggested the inhabitants might be nervous about venturing outside, which also suggested they weren’t on friendly terms with the wraiths.

  And as Yoshana had observed, sometimes there was no better option than walking into the possible trap and hoping for the best - and trusting in your ability to fight your way out of it. Easier when you were one of the world’s foremost killers, of course.

  We stepped out of the trees and made our way across the open area. It was not perfectly cleared, not the way farmland would have been. Trees had been cut down, but stumps remained. Grass reached to our knees. A lone trunk stood between us and the gate. It was dead, and a long rawhide strap had been secured to it with a heavy iron bolt.

  “Should we be worried about that?”

  “Oh, probably,” Furat replied. But he called out, “Hello the town!”

  Silence answered him. After half a minute he repeated himself.

  A head appeared atop the palisade. “Ayuh?” it answered.

  “We’re travelers, seeking shelter and trade.”

  “Then t’ll be walkin’ t’gate an’ leavin’ t’guns at, an’ backin’ t’gain,” the watcher stated bluntly. At least, I think that’s what he said. The accent was barbarous and reminded me of Talith, though the man’s diction was much less clear than the dead girl’s. He was far harder to understand than Cat.

  “He wants us to leave our guns at the gate and move away from them?” I whispered.

  “I think so.”

  “You want to do that?”

  “Got a better idea?”

  The pigs were still out there somewhere, and no doubt worse things. We had only one oil grenade left, and perhaps half our ammunition. I didn’t have a better idea. We did as we’d been asked.

  The massive gate swung inward. “Swung” perhaps not being quite the right word. One leaf was dragged back, its lower edge following an old, deep gouge in the dirt and kicking up fresh dust. A man emerged dressed in ragged, uncured skins. While a second villager covered him with a primitive bow, the first darted out and seized our guns. He slung my carbine and pointed Furat’s pistol at us like he knew how to use it.

  “Come t’in then,” said the gunman. The bowman slung his weapon and produced a very fine knife, of vastly better quality than anything we’d yet seen in the village.

  “Testin�
��,” he said with a grin. Half his teeth were missing.

  Furat shrugged and walked forward. “We’ve come this far.”

  I didn’t like the idea of these men taking a knife to my hand to test for the Darkness. It wasn’t just that I didn’t trust their intentions - and I didn’t - but I didn’t trust their hygiene either. Neither of them looked like they bathed much, if ever, and as we got closer the smell confirmed it. They used fire and tools, but they were as filthy as paleos. Without the Darkness in me, I was seriously worried about infection from the knife wound.

  But Furat went up to them without hesitation, Sam trotting along beside him. She didn’t seem put off by the smell. Reluctantly, I followed.

  The villager was quick and efficient with the knife, and it was so sharp it barely hurt. Blood welled from small cuts in our left thumbs. No Darkness appeared to seal the wounds, and the dirty men nodded, satisfied. If they cared that I was Select, they gave no sign.

  Up close, the offensive smell took on a new, multilayered character. It was a fetid mix of body odor, bad breath, and a hint of rotting flesh from the hides they wore. But in their ears and noses, each of the villagers wore multiple rings and bangles of exquisite workmanship, looted from the tombs of the ancients. The jewelry would have been worth a fortune in the Source or Rockwall.

  Behind them was another gate. The villager with the knife shut and barred the outer door, then the man with Furat’s gun yelled “Clear!” The inner barrier was hauled open.

  Had I thought the villagers smelled bad? The stench of their home was overpowering. Added to the human odors were the reek of pig waste and rotting fish guts. Garbage and piles of offal lay scattered in heaps. I choked, fighting to keep my gorge down. Even the dog whined and backed away.

  “Comin’,” said the gunman, and he and his fellow entered the stockade, a place as squalid as any I could imagine. The garbage miners of the Flow wouldn’t have lived in it. Furat had to jerk Sam’s leash to get her to follow.

  “And I’ve seen her eat a week-dead squirrel,” he muttered. Thankfully our hosts didn’t hear.