Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle

by Malcolm McKenzie

  He looked back at me over his shoulder. His face was sad. “She’s going to kill you, Minos. You chose wrong.”

  “Not from where I’m standing.”

  Prophetess and I got into an argument. The plan was for her to stay back in the camp. She insisted on accompanying me up the hill.

  “I’m not letting you go up there by yourself. And don’t even think of ordering your men to stop me. They won’t obey that order, and if they do, Cat will hurt them.”

  The paleo grinned.

  “The point of protecting you is not for you to go charging into the most dangerous spot on the battlefield,” I grumbled. But I did it under my breath. I knew I’d lost. She pretended she didn’t hear me.

  We got to the top a little before noon. We held hands on the climb up. As her champion, it was appropriate for me to help her. Right. I probably got more support from the contact than she did. Although her face looked as pale and drawn as I’d ever seen it.

  The trumpets and drums started up again a few minutes later. They hadn’t changed their tune. Maybe they didn’t know any others.

  “They are moving,” a sentry reported from the edge. “Thirty of them. The one in front… I think it is her.”

  I could hear the tension in his voice. It was no accident he didn’t name Yoshana. At this distance, it was just her reputation causing the rising fear in our ranks. When she got closer, her aura of terror would precede her. The Monolith veterans were tough. They wouldn’t run. But there was no need to make things harder than they needed to be.

  “Pull back,” I ordered. “Half circle, anchor on the tree.” We’d rehearsed this, but it didn’t hurt to remind them. I gave Prophetess a sharp look, and she retreated into the semicircle of our troops.

  The Overlord and her men crested the hill. She led from the front, as she generally did. If I’d been inclined toward treachery, we could have riddled her with bullets. Which might or might not have killed her. And even if it had, we would have faced eight thousand soldiers hungry for vengeance, led by Grigg and Roshel.

  She had new armor. It was tight red leather, the color of old blood, not so very different from the mahogany shade of her skin. A white cloak flowed around her, matching her hair, moving in ways that were not shaped by natural air currents. A heavy gold brooch in the shape of her double-crescent symbol closed it at her throat. Her blue eyes sparkled in the sunlight, hard and brilliant as sapphires.

  She was stunning, beautiful, terrible. Relentless as a storm, regal as a queen. Her men spread to cover the half circle mine had abandoned. She strode to the middle of it, face to face with me. The tree was several paces behind my back. Knowing that there was a solid object there helped keep me from retreating.

  She cocked her head and stared at me for a moment.

  “From all that I hear, you were a force to be reckoned with in the west. Not that you could have faced me, but a force. Now, though… it’s true. Grigg was right. The Darkness isn’t in you. How did you think you could possibly fight me and live?” She sounded genuinely curious.

  I forced a smile. “As it turns out, there are ways to conceal the Darkness, and conceal yourself from it.”

  She frowned, and I continued. “But just to be clear, I won’t be fighting you.”

  Seven stepped from behind the tree and grinned. “Hello.”

  7. Trial

  I’d seen the Overlord perturbed before but never dumbfounded.

  “Where did you get a demon?”

  In fact, it had been surprisingly easy to convince the Hellguard to leave his self-imposed exile. Apparently, three centuries of living alone in Darkness-haunted woods wasn’t an idyllic existence. After only the briefest and almost perfunctory objections, he’d signed on to my attempt to make the world a better place. In other words, one without Yoshana in it. After all, he had been created to be a killer.

  I’d gone over my next words carefully as I’d prepared for the duel. There were several audiences I was addressing.

  “Scripture tells us that men can command demons. Tradition says King Solomon controlled them. Jesus and his disciples could compel them. Saint Arvan tells us our ancestors were their masters - or believed they were.”

  Yoshana’s mouth opened for a retort. I held up my hand and continued. “But this is no demon. This is a man. A man bred to fight, a man bred to wield the Darkness, but a man. Like me. And like all men, he has the knowledge to tell good from evil. He knows evil when he sees it, Yoshana. That’s why he’s here to kill you.”

  She lifted an eyebrow and waited a heartbeat. “Are you done?”

  Her poise was back. So was her little smile. “I’m impressed, Minos. I really am. This is the second time you’ve surprised me. If I fall here, I honestly think you might be able to take up humanity’s war against the Darkness and the Hellguard and have a chance of winning.”

  Her eyes shifted to Seven. “But you’ve both miscalculated. I’ve killed demons before. Stronger ones than you.”

  The Hellguard matched her smile. He was huge, and for all her presence, Yoshana was not a large woman. The ancient warrior must have been twice her weight. His voice rumbled like an avalanche. “Yashuath, you mean? I’d heard that. But the question is, did you kill him all by yourself?”

  “I didn’t have to.” Her smile broadened into the wolfish grin that turned men’s guts to water. “I didn’t say this wasn’t going to be a new challenge. I like new challenges.”

  “Surrender now, Yoshana,” I said. “Disband the Darkness Radiant. You don’t have to die here.”

  I thought there was real amusement in the Overlord’s face as she turned back to me. “Oh, Minos, you don’t understand me at all, do you?”

  She turned to her troops, and declared, “Hear, Israel. The Lord is our God. The Lord is one. There is no God but God. And he is with us!” Then she turned back to Seven, and winked. The Darkness rose off her in a cloud. It did the same from the Hellguard. I scrambled back into the circle of soldiers. The forces these two were about to unleash would tear me apart if I was in their path.

  Seven began to spin his sharpened staff, thirty pounds of steel pointed at both ends, accelerating into a blur of silver light. Inhumanly tough as Yoshana was, a solid blow from that would rip her in half.

  If the Overlord was intimidated she gave no sign of it. She drew her katana with her right hand and with her left uncoiled a whip from her belt. I hadn’t seen her use that weapon before. Darkness played along its length.

  The black clouds around them shifted as they began to edge toward each other, feet moving in tight, controlled steps. For all that both of them were still smiling, they each recognized their opponent as someone to take deadly seriously.

  Yoshana’s whip flicked out. For a moment I allowed myself to hope she was actually mad enough to entangle someone so much bigger and stronger, but the tip merely cracked at Seven’s face. He batted it aside easily with the staff, but a rush of Darkness had flooded down the hissing leather and cut his cheek.

  He nodded as the wound sealed. “That’s a neat trick. I like that.”

  The Overlord was moving before he finished speaking, slashing low with the katana. Again the staff turned it harmlessly aside. The masses of Darkness surrounding the two merged, Yoshana spun and brought the whip around again and, quick as a striking viper, Seven pivoted and kicked her in the side, blocking the whip again with his staff. She flew through the air, rolled, and came up facing him. He hadn’t moved to follow.

  “Ouch,” she said.

  The force behind the Hellguard’s booted foot would probably have crushed my ribs. If it had done as much to Yoshana, the Darkness had already made repairs. She went in for a third time, sword and whip and Darkness moving in a complex dance my eyes couldn’t follow. Somehow in the process she unclasped her cloak and hurled it at his face.

  But again Seven beat her back, and she danced away out of range. Sweat was beginning to trickle down from her hairline.

  Then the Hellguard pressed the a
ttack, darting forward catlike, staff blurring in high then sweeping back low. The Overlord twisted away and her whip curled around and tore open the back of Seven’s shirt, drawing a spurt of what I first thought was blood but then realized was more of the Darkness. He stayed with her, not letting her disengage, the staff coming at her again and again. If no more than the sharpened point struck her squarely, the wound would be beyond even Yoshana’s ability to close.

  She was impossibly quick but the Hellguard was more than human in every way. Sparring with Grigg, Yoshana’s speed and superior mastery of the Darkness had overmatched his greater strength and reach. But Seven was bigger, faster, and stronger than Grigg, and had spent three centuries perfecting his control of a weapon he had been bred to command. It was beyond my ability even to follow every move they made in that maelstrom of metal and leather and angry clouds of seething death, but at some point the Overlord must make a mistake and the Hellguard would finish her.

  Yoshana dodged far more than she deflected, and even her inhuman strength wouldn’t let her directly parry a blow from the staff. Once the huge steel spear caught the edge of her blade, and the sword pinged awfully as a sliver of its strange, gray material flew off.

  Desperate, the Overlord lashed out with her whip. Seven caught it on the spinning staff and jerked it from her hands. But this time a bigger torrent of the Darkness followed, striking the Hellguard in the face. Somehow he deflected it to shield his eyes, but it tore his cheeks open and the flesh hung in unhealing shreds.

  Yoshana leapt at him, face twisted into a hellish wide-mouthed snarl as the Darkness swirled around them. Her sword moved too fast to see. Seven batted it aside but now he was on the defensive, giving ground. The battle had shifted to a plane beyond the physical, the warriors’ minds struggling for control of the Darkness while their bodies cut and thrust with mundane weapons.

  The Overlord harried her larger opponent like a wolf snapping at a bull. Seven wasn’t smiling anymore. He stepped back, and she didn’t follow. But they had not disengaged. The black cloud seethed and ebbed and flowed between them. And then suddenly it rushed into Seven and vanished. He turned to me.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  His body collapsed, every cell losing cohesion. Where a man had been a moment before, there was only a thick stew of tissues spread on the ground with bones floating in it.

  I took a step forward, but there was nothing to do. He was gone.

  Yoshana stabbed her blade into the ground and leaned on it, mouth hanging open, drawing great, panting gasps of air. The Darkness rose from Seven’s remains and floated back into her.

  The piercing sapphire eyes met mine. “That… was hard.”

  I didn’t know what came next. I hadn’t planned for a scenario where they fought and the ancient Hellguard lost.

  The Overlord dragged herself upright. Exhaustion showed in every line of her body, but the mocking smile was back. “I don’t know if you know, but in certain traditions of trial by combat, when your champion is defeated, your own life is forfeit. This is going to be one of those.”

  The tremendous cloud of Darkness lashed out, past me, straight into Prophetess.

  And shattered as if it had struck a stone wall.

  “What?” Yoshana gasped.

  I stepped forward between them, drawing my sword. The Overlord snarled, slashed with her hand, and directed a stream of seething death at my face. I tried to spin aside, felt it tear at my flesh, and fell into blackness.

  8. Judgment

  There was a diffuse, gray light above me. I had no real consciousness of where I was, or sense of my body. The obvious conclusion was that I was dead.

  Then there was pain. If I was dead, I was clearly in hell. In a panic, I flailed my arms. Ah, there they were.

  “Easy,” came a voice.

  I realized I was on my back. I struggled to sit, and as my hands fought for balance, I oriented myself. I was on a cot, in a tent. My tent. The pain was localized in the left side of my face.

  No, I realized, it was everywhere. It was just a lot worse on the left side of my face.

  I managed to sit up, blinked, and the figure near me came into focus.

  “Father Roric? I didn’t even know you were in the camp.” I turned that over in my head. “We are still in the camp? On the battlefield? What’s happened?”

  The tall, thin priest gave a tight little smile. “I’ve been here all along. A priest is a remarkably handy thing to have on a battlefield. Since we didn’t agree on your methods, I didn’t seek you out when you returned from the Sorrows, and you didn’t seem terribly interested in looking for me either.”

  Was that a rebuke? The tone had been perfectly matter-of-fact. He continued, “However, it seemed prudent for someone to stay with you after your injury, and the troops are needed elsewhere. The situation has, so to speak, gone quite thoroughly to hell.”

  I shook my head to clear it, then immediately regretted that. The movement aggravated the stabbing pain in my face, and revealed a throbbing headache. “What’s happened?” I repeated.

  “To you personally? Or in general?”

  Terror flooded back into me. “Tess? Is she all right?”

  “Ah. Straight to the miracle. Prophetess resisted the full force of Yoshana’s attack with the Darkness. After you attempted to intervene and were struck down, a general melee ensued as our soldiers counterattacked and Yoshana’s supported her. Other troops then stormed the hill. Those Darkness-infected savages you brought from the Sorrows and Hafnum Furat’s dog were the first to arrive on the scene and, I am forced to admit, were instrumental in saving Prophetess. They put themselves directly between her and Yoshana. Casualties among the savages were unfortunately quite high.”

  “Do you know who was hurt? And who died?”

  He shook his head. “I’m afraid I don’t know their names.”

  “What about the dog?”

  Roric gave me a strange look.

  “That dog saved my life more than once in the Sorrows,” I explained.

  “The dog is fine.”

  “You said everything has gone to hell. What happened next?”

  “The Darkness Radiant ultimately retreated from the hill. But the outcome of your trial by combat is inconclusive. Clearly, Yoshana prevailed over your demon champion.”

  Angry, I pushed myself to my feet. Or tried. I didn’t quite make it and sat down heavily on the cot. I glared at Roric. “He didn’t like being called a demon. He was a man. He was born and raised to be a weapon, but he was a human being, and he was my friend, and I got him killed trying to help me.”

  The priest nodded. “I’m sorry. He could not help being made how he was, and he fell in the service of a just cause. So. Yoshana prevailed over your champion. But while her attempt to kill Prophetess might have been accepted as the spoils of victory, her failure to accomplish it has sown doubt through her ranks. Neither side has an uncontested claim of success in the duel. So both armies are now preparing to resolve the matter through battle. There have been no hostilities since the skirmish on the hilltop, but an engagement seems imminent.”

  “Okay. So that gets us up to the question of how long ago was all this, and why am I in this tent?”

  “You have been unconscious a little over a day. When Yoshana struck you with the Darkness, you fell back and rolled down the hill. Apparently you hit your head, as well as pretty much everything else, on the way down.”

  “You mean I feel like this and I’ve been out of commission for a day because I fell down a hill?” That was embarrassing.

  “Er… well. In large part.” Roric produced a small mirror and handed it to me. There was a deep, wide gouge of disrupted flesh starting just above my lip and disappearing into the hair above my left ear. It had just missed my eye.

  “Well, that’s ironic.”

  “That you would be wounded by the dark power you once used?”

  “No, that I once did the same thing to a friend of mine.” Sesk had been a serg
eant in the Shadowed Hand before he retired after the Battle of the Cleansing. Once, in a berserk state when I’d surrendered my will to the Darkness, I’d torn open his face. He’d been right - the wounds were bloodless, but they hurt like a son of a bitch. “I sort of miss being able to heal from this kind of thing.”

  “Do you really?”

  I thought about it for a while before I answered. “I suppose not.”

  I reached into my shirt. The Saint Benedict medal was still there. I said to Roric, “I don’t think this thing works.”

  The priest frowned. “I told you before, it’s not a magic amulet. It reminds you of your promises to God, and his to you. It does not deflect attacks by the Darkness.”

  “I was kidding.” I pushed myself to my feet again. This time I managed to stay there.

  “I need to talk to Tess and check our deployments. If this really does turn into a pitched battle it’s not going to go well for us. I have to get her an escort and see if I can convince her to get out of here. I don’t suppose her bodyguards have already managed to get her out of here?” I asked hopefully.

  “No, she is still in the camp. Don’t underestimate her value in rallying the troops, Minos. She survived the full power of the Darkness, delivered by an enemy who had just killed a… a Hellguard.”

  “Yeah, but she’s not going to survive a bullet to the face. Yoshana has plenty of other ways to kill people.”

  I took a couple of wobbling steps forward. I would have liked to sit down again or lean against some kind of support, but neither was an option. I concentrated on keeping my balance instead.

  “I’m no doctor, Minos, but you need to rest. Leave this in others’ hands for now.”

  I didn’t dare shake my head, but I replied, “I’m in command here, Father. As long as I’m alive, I should be out commanding. Even if I’ve been doing a lousy job of it.”

  “I can’t stop you?”

  “Oh, you probably could, the shape I’m in. But I’d appreciate it if you could find Captain Railes for me instead. I’ll be somewhere between here and Prophetess’ tent. Hopefully upright.”