We bedded down at the side of the crumbling road, perhaps twenty miles north of Gurath’s cathedral. The whole area was a vast, continuous sprawl of weed-choked ruins being overtaken by nature. Here as well, anything of value had been long since stripped away.
This wasn’t the haunted forest of the Sorrows, but trees grew thick and tall around us, casting long shadows as the sun set. In other parts of the world I might have feared attack by bandits or paleos. Here we were under the protection of the demon lord. There was no worse threat to us than Gurath himself. And if he’d wanted us dead, we’d be dead already. So I kept telling myself.
“Did you have to spend all day with him?” Tess demanded as she settled on the grass. I staggered around in little circles, trying to decide if working the stiffness out of my knee was worth the pain that shot through me every time I took a step.
“That was the point of the whole exercise, wasn’t it?” I snapped. “And it didn’t seem like a healthy idea to offend him.”
“All that talk about his philosophy isn’t healthy either.”
“I’m not going to argue about it, Tess. Especially since he can hear every word we say when we’re within two hundred yards of him.”
The Hellguard met my eyes at that moment from where he sat fifty feet away and gave me a broad grin. Cat looked jumpier than usual and began suspiciously scanning the air for the Darkness - even though she knew as well as I that the probes Gurath was using wouldn’t be visible.
The demon lord rose, stretched, and lazily strolled over to the larger of the two sumpter horses the soulless had been leading. He unstrapped a long, black case, big enough to hold a twin to either the rifle or ax that he carried. I tensed as he opened it.
Inside was a guitar. The demon adjusted the tuning pegs, walked over to us, and settled in the grass. The melody he began to pick out was marvelously complex and beautifully executed.
“Magnificent,” Dee murmured.
“Nietzsche believed that the creation of art was part of the measure of the superior being, and that music was the expression of the collective soul. Like I said, I’ve had a lot of time on my hands.” The Hellguard grinned.
“Not everything evil is ugly,” Tess said tightly.
I tensed again, but Gurath merely said, “And not everyone agrees with your definitions of good and evil, little prophet.”
Legion had come up behind the demon. “Wasteful,” it said. “Noises like that provide no food or shelter. A meaningless, obsolete pastime.”
In a movement so fast I couldn’t follow it, Gurath spun to his feet, pulled his ax free, and severed the wraith’s head. He still held the guitar in his other hand.
Tess bit down on a knuckle to keep from crying out. Cat’s hand was on her dagger, but she didn’t draw it.
A thick cloud of Darkness flooded from the stump of Legion’s neck. It hovered for a moment, then swiftly descended onto one of the soulless. The man’s eyes momentarily turned as black as mine as the possession was completed.
The newly embodied wraith hurried to Gurath and prostrated itself at his feet. “I apologize, master.”
“I don’t tolerate insolence from your kind,” the demon growled. “And get rid of that.”
Legion - in its new body - and one of the soulless hauled the corpse into the trees.
“You have to make sure your creations know their place. My creators were careless in that respect,” Gurath said with a smile. He inspected the ax critically. The Darkness in Legion had kept the blade free of blood, but I saw black particles crawl over the edge, smoothing away nicks made from splitting bone. Satisfied, the demon lord returned the weapon to his belt and resumed playing the guitar.
We didn’t sleep well that night.
The order of march was the same the next day. Tess glared at me, but I continued to ride in front with Gurath while she, Cat, and Dee took the middle of the column, followed by Legion and what I now thought of as two spare bodies. The soulless were like sumpter horses for the wraith. The idea was physically revolting but I couldn’t put it out of my mind.
The Hellguard and I rode for a long time in silence. I was the first to speak. “So you’re Nietzsche’s perfect being? Warrior, artist, philosopher? Like some sort of samurai ideal?”
Gurath just smiled.
“It doesn’t trouble you that your source of inspiration was not, to the best of my knowledge, much of an artist… and was certainly no kind of warrior?”
The demon chuckled. “Why would that trouble me? Nietzsche was not himself the superhuman he knew that the world needed. Does that mean he was wrong? It does not. He had the intellect to grasp the truth, if not the characteristics needed to fulfill it himself. Maybe he couldn’t even live with the implications of his own philosophy, and that’s what drove him mad. Or maybe his madness was just the result of a disease contracted from a woman he paid because that was the only way he could obtain female companionship. His weakness as a man doesn’t make his conclusions invalid.”
“Surely it makes them suspect.”
“The opposite, Minos. A truth that is hard to stomach is more likely to be true than one that is comforting. Your mind recoils from the abyss like from a wall, and so it bounces off into other philosophies that are softer and more easily digested. Silly sentimentalism about the brotherhood of man, as if such a thing ever existed or will ever exist. Idiotic religions with no basis in reality, like the one preached by your little prophet.”
Gurath turned and gave Prophetess a broad grin. She ignored him.
“That’s interesting,” I mused. “So religion is for the weak-minded.”
“When Marx called it the opiate of the masses that was probably the only intelligent thing he ever said.”
“And yet Yoshana declared herself the prophet of, what was it Dee called it? A syncretic, pan-Abrahamic religion? Was your daughter weak-minded?”
The Hellguard laughed again. “Ah. Clever, but superficial. Why would you think that what Yoshana preached and what she believed were the same thing? She was not weak-minded, but how many of her followers were as strong as she?”
None. “But why preach the religion of a God that you say is evidently false? If she was a superhuman herself - and you must think she was - why not a religion with herself as the supreme being? She had the power for it.”
Until the end, Roshel had very nearly worshipped the older Overlord as a god. And Roshel was no weakling.
Gurath paused only for a moment. “Two possibilities. The simplest answer is that it’s easier to just steer believers into a slightly different path than to convince them of an entirely new belief system. Sheep are more easily guided to the left or right than turned around entirely.”
“Sheep.”
“Baaah. Aren’t they mostly sheep? When we took away their will,” the demon turned and leered again, this time at the soulless, “We didn’t take very much. Nietzsche said the teeming masses were no more relevant than so many animals in terms of the meaning they could add to the world, and he wasn’t wrong.”
Gurath turned the grin on me. “The second answer is that when you set yourself up as a god, it’s no one’s fault but your own when you lose battles. Which implies you aren’t much of a god. When you’re a prophet, you can blame it on the worshippers not being sufficiently devout. You quoted the Old Testament yesterday. You know what I mean. Every military loss the Israelites suffered was because they’d turned away from their God, worshipped graven images, whatever. It’s a hell of an excuse.”
And seemed like the kind of thing that would occur to Yoshana. “But you don’t feel the need to have a god backing you up. You’re willing to set yourself up as one yourself. By your own logic, isn’t that risky?”
The demon chuckled. “Only if you lose. I don’t.”
I could have made a comment about spending three hundred years bottled up in the Darklands, or an offensive stalled at the Paint River after his catspaw turned against him. But I didn’t. Instead, I said, “So the only thi
ng that matters is the exercise of your own will? Your own success, imposing what you want on what is? There’s no higher, objective good?”
“That’s right.” He nodded, like a man whose dog had finally learned a basic trick that had eluded it.
“Then tell me this. Why did your daughter let herself be killed to unify humanity against you?”
Gurath’s eyebrows went up and, for the first time, he had nothing to say.
It was only as the silence stretched on that I realized my face hurt. And only after contemplating that for a while that I realized the scar was no more painful than usual - it was just that it was usually masked by the greater pain in my knee. Which had now faded.
I stared at the demon. He stared back, blue eyes piercing into mine.
“Have you been healing me?” I demanded.
A little smile. “It’s annoying, watching you limp around. And we may need to move quickly in the days ahead, and I can’t have you slowing us down. So yes, I have.”
My blood froze. I had thought I could sense and deflect the Darkness penetrating my body, even when controlled by a master like Gurath. “Get that stuff out of me!”
And now a mocking chuckle. “So now you’re so offended by the Darkness you won’t even let it heal you. You who once controlled it.”
Through my anger and fear, I still noticed he used our world’s term for the Darkness, instead of calling it the prant as Seven had. “Yes. I know what it did to me before, and I won’t have it in me again. The Church is right. There’s no good in it. Get. It. Out.”
“And so you presume to know good from evil. And you call my philosophy arrogant.” The demon chuckled again. “It’s gone now. Unless you’d like me to take a moment to reverse the repairs I’ve already made?”
I glowered at him. “No.”
“Good and evil. You’re a funny thing, aren’t you?” Gurath continued to smirk at me for miles.
We stopped late in the afternoon at the foot of a huge bridge, sixty feet wide and half a mile long. The river beneath was as wide as the Muddy, but its banks were steep, rocky cliffs rather than a gentle floodplain.
“We’ll cross tomorrow,” the demon said. “Stay close when we reach the other side. The land’s strange there.”
“What do you mean?” Dee asked. “Isn’t it all part of the Darklands?”
“It’s our territory, yes… but we don’t cross that river except when we have to. There are worse things than the Hellguard in the world.”
I recalled Gurath’s comment that we might need to move fast. My leg was still stiff and sore, but nowhere near as much as it had been the day before. I had a hard time cataloging exactly how I felt about that. “I don’t think I want to meet anything worse than you.”
“Then you’re definitely not going to enjoy this trip.” The demon laughed, and pulled out his guitar. He played long into the night, complex melodies of haunting beauty. And, once again, we didn’t sleep well.
The river flowed below us. Gurath resumed our conversation as we crossed. “I’ve thought about what you said about my daughter. It was beneath her, but self-sacrifice is a perversion of mastery that can have a certain appeal. Especially when you’ve lost your ability to impose your will on others besides yourself. As she apparently had.”
I couldn’t have imagined I would ever be indignant on behalf of the Overlord. “She’d hardly lost the ability to impose her will. She had Prophetess under her blade, and there was nothing anyone could do to stop her.”
“But she’d lost control of her lieutenants. She’d failed in her own mind. So she took the coward’s way out. When you can’t impose your will on others, you impose it on yourself. How does it go? ‘In every ascetic morality man adores part of himself as God and to that end needs to diabolicize the rest.’”
I snorted. “You’re actually saying that self-denial is weakness.”
“Of course it is. ‘I’m a fine person because I refuse myself some pleasure.’ What a steaming pile of mediocre hypocrisy. At least Yoshana had the strength to take it to the logical extreme.”
I turned that over in my head as the horses’ hooves rang on the bridge, taking us to see something worse than demons.
Gurath spoke again. “Reality, and the will. What is, and what you want it to be. Now that you’ve become so fond of the Universal faith, here’s another thought for you. Once the ancients came to believe that they understood the reality of what they were, you and I became inevitable. Once they could make themselves, they could remake themselves as they chose. Whatever their wills demanded, they imposed on reality – even immortality.”
The demon smiled. “According to the Book of Genesis, your God threw man out of Eden after he ate the fruit that gave him knowledge of good and evil, but before he could eat the fruit that would make him immortal. Because if he ate both, he would become a god himself. Not long before the Second Fall, one of the ancients said that man has become a product of our own action, that can be selected according to the exigencies established by ourselves. Man knows how to clone men, knows how to use men as a store of organs for other men, and so he does it, because this seems to be an exigency of his freedom.”
His smile widened as he stared straight into my eyes. “Your kind, the Select, are the very essence of a product selected according to the exigencies established by yourselves. And who do you suppose I was quoting just then about the exigencies of human freedom?”
I thought Nietzsche, Gurath’s philosophical hero, had died before the age of human cloning and organ storage. I shook my head.
“Pope Benedict the Sixteenth,” he said. “He didn’t live long enough to see your race, but he anticipated you. Give the man credit for understanding, anyway.”
“I doubt he said it approvingly.”
“Well, no. But he wasn’t wrong. His interpretation of the facts was just warped. He had an archaic vision of good and evil, like you.”
“‘In the days before the Son of Man, the Gentiles worshipped many gods. But in the Last Days, man worshipped no one but himself.’”
“Ah, good. The First Book of the Fall. I enjoyed Saint Arvan. I never actually met him, but I’m sure he would have been even more entertaining than you.” Gurath laughed again. “Although I prefer chapter four: ‘Let the Hellguard go forth! Let the demons and the Darkness reclaim what we have lost. For are we not masters of every power?’”
“Again, not said approvingly. Arvan was describing the Fall.”
“Your fall, not ours. You fell once when you ate from the tree of knowledge. Then came the Darkness, and you ate from the tree of immortality, and you fell again. And we rose in your place. It’s all a matter of perspective. That’s what you insist on failing to understand. You said it yourself - God is dead. Arvan and Siles might have tried to breathe some life back into that myth. Your prophetess is making a valiant effort too, I’ll give her that. But that corpse is still and cold. No amount of artificial resuscitation is going to make it live again. Your kind and mine have moved beyond fairytales of absolutes handed down from heaven on stone tablets. Sometimes you choose to forget because those stories make you feel better when you’re eyeball to eyeball with the void. To be fair, it’s a little easier for me to see past that, being undying.”
“Seven died. So did Yashuath.”
“They made mistakes I intend to avoid. But you miss the point. It’s not the possibility of death that terrifies your kind - it’s the inevitability of it. So there has to be something greater, or you despair. But there isn’t. All dogs don’t go to heaven, and neither do all humans. In fact, not even one.”
“You keep acting like you’re something completely different. Seven called himself human.”
“Seven had serious issues. There’s a reason he lived alone in a forest for three hundred years, you know.” We turned onto an overgrown path as we left the bridge, picking our way down toward the river’s edge and the ruined town that stretched along it. It reminded me in a way of the Sorrows, and I tried to figu
re out why.
“Not looted,” I said after a minute.
“No. I told you, we don’t come here unless we have to. The radiation was bad here. It wouldn’t kill us, not with the Darkness in us, but it wasn’t pleasant. Long gone now, but somehow… not even the Hellguard are totally rational, you know. A little superstition can be healthy. Even a touch of supernatural dread.”
“What does the Ubermensch fear?”
“You said it. We can be killed. And Nietzsche was no rationalist. He saw through the sterility of that. Even my kind needs myths. We’ve just made better ones than your kind did.”
“Make up your mind,” I growled. “Am I the creator or the created? According to you, am I human or not?”
“Ahhh. That depends. What do you want to be?” Gurath flung an arm wide, and a wave of the Darkness lashed out at a nearby tree. The trunk shattered in an explosion of fragments. One of the largest floated back to him, buoyed on a wave of particles. By the time it reached his hand, it was shaped into the image of a man.
The demon laughed at my open-mouthed amazement. “Didn’t know it could do that? It’s just hydrostatic shock inside the trunk that ruptures the wood. As far as the levitation, the Darkness can’t carry much weight, but it looks impressive, doesn’t it? And the carving, well. We’ve established the importance of art. If it makes you feel better, I doubt Yoshana knew how to do those things either. Seven might have taught you, if you’d spent some time with him instead of dragging him off on your fool’s errand and getting him killed.”
I couldn’t think of a response. He continued, “Creation, creator, that’s another meaningless distinction. You are what you make yourself. You, in particular, could make yourself more than you are.”
There it was. The hook, dangled in front of my mouth, waiting for me to bite.
“I’ve heard that offer before. I accepted it last time. I didn’t like the results. Not again.”
Gurath shrugged. “I know what you’ve done. At least Yoshana picked herself up and tried again after the first time she got her ass kicked, even if she did give up after the second time. But then, you’re not Yoshana.”
Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle Page 86