Beyond the Dark Gate

by R. V. Johnson

  Copyright © 2016 by R.V. Johnson. All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Printed in the United States of America. Lost In New World Publishing, Beyond the Dark Gate

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  CURTAIN OF DARKNESS

  BROKEN MIND ON A VIOLENT WORLD

  SCREAMS OF FURY

  ALLIES AND FRIENDS

  ONE MIND

  DARK SHAPE

  COHERENT THOUGHT

  FORETOLD

  HOST MIND

  REVERED ONE

  HELPLESSNESS

  ENFOLDED

  BONFIRES

  SOMETHING BIG IS COMING

  STOIC I STAND

  IN HER POWER

  UPTURNED SOIL

  FOUND

  RUBY GLIMMER

  HER SERVICE

  RENDERING

  LOSS OF STEEDS

  EVERYONE ALIVE

  ARRANGE AN ESCAPE

  BIG SISTER

  PALE BLUE

  BLOODY ROCKS

  MISSING

  DEPTHS

  OVER THE EDGE

  BLACKNESS

  TRUE SENSE

  POWER OF HER SYMBOLS

  GENETIC INFUSION

  FAILING STRENGTH

  CRUMPLED FORM

  SERIOUS FLAW

  WOLF FACE

  TREPIDATION

  HAND OF THE ENEMY

  FOOTPRINTS LEAD

  DIVINE LIGHT

  MELTED STONE

  HEART OF THE DARKNESS

  OUTLANDER

  POWER GAINED

  HIGHER POWER

  DIRE NEED

  TAKE IT AWAY

  DARK SOUL

  GRIM GRANDEUR

  HER RESOLVE

  SOMEWHERE INSIDE

  RELATIONSHIP

  DARK FLOW

  SARRA’ESIAH

  CRIMSON BEAM

  DARK SHAPE

  CREATIONS

  THE LAST CREATION

  HORRIBLE CHOICE

  TRUE CLAN

  QUIET REVELATION

  SHADOWY FORM

  For all those who enjoy losing themselves in a new world, if only for a few bells. I am of like mind.

  CURTAIN OF DARKNESS

  Not another week of stinking drudgery, Cord moaned in silence. I don’t know how much of this I can stomach. He wondered what he had done to anger Onan at some point in his miserable life to cause him to draw such duty again. This time around, the seventy-first had patrolled deeper underground than any of them had ever gone, even Durm.

  As he marched along the old carved ramp of black limestone leading ever down, that one fact surprised and worried Cord as he mulled it over in his mind. Durm had not wandered this deep into the slime pit under the Dark Citadel before now.

  The scarred patrol leader often bragged of his intimate knowledge of the dim, green glowing tunnels, putrid channels, or cold, dank catacombs in the underbelly of the Citadel. Yet, the past half day, Durm seemed subdued, as though he anticipated something and dared not reveal it, or no one would follow him. What was so important they go this far? What were his orders?

  “How much farther are we going to tramp through these forsaken tunnels, Durm?” Gorem called ahead, echoing Cord’s thoughts. “There is nothing down here but us and this blasted pooling water.”

  Durm halted at an intersection of three tunnels. Waving his torch between the three, he hesitated. “Funny, I seem to recall you saying nearly those exact words right before we ran into those ingrots. Killing them is the only time you have not complained on this patrol.”

  Gorem’s snarled reply came quick. “That is different and you know it. Those fiends would have taken any one of us for their blasted cook pots.”

  Cord agreed with Gorem: ingrots were nasty unpredictable things. From the murmurs and the added creaking of armor going to rust that drifted around the watercourse, so did many of the others. The slimy creatures had slunk from the darkness coming at them from two side tunnels at the same time, which did not make sense. Always before, the frog-faced creatures had fought among themselves as they floundered around humid areas in twos or threes. When had such primitive creatures learned to cooperate and band together?

  “Why not find someplace dry to hole up for a while and then head back?” Gorem asked. As the only User in the patrol, he stood alone gripping a glimmer shard, smug in the knowledge of its frail light, for a time. The light would fail in a few bells, but at least he had not had to taste the acrid stink of burning torches dipped in crude oil, like the rest of them. Most of the patrol envied Gorem the shard even as they despised the small display of his wealth and power.

  Not one of the soldiers much cared for Users, anyway. They were an arrogant lot, prancing about in silk robes lined inside with kell leather while they slung aggressive magic around. A fighting man should wear proper armor joined with steel and wield a sturdy weapon.

  Still, Cord supposed they did help in a bind. No one would refute a User’s ranged capability at destruction. Yet, more than once, Cord had voiced his notion of banning Dark Users from the great lord’s service and replacing them with archers for the distance kills. Unfortunately, half the lords at the Dark Citadel were Users, as so many were throughout the Citadel’s turbulent history.

  Durm waved his torch at the left and center passages. “We continue on until I decide we have ranged enough. Any that does not want to finish his duty can stand guard beside these tunnels. The rest of us are following the right branch for two bells, or until it ends, whichever happens first, then back here in four.”

  “We are ankle-deep in putrid water,” Gorem protested. “What am I supposed to do, stand here and shiver for two bells?”

  Durm stomped to the gaping tunnel of the right-hand branch, splashing through murky water that glistened darkly in the torchlight. “Standing is advisable. Your pristine robe could not sop up this much water; it would weigh as much as the Dark Oracle. Besides, you never know what parasite is floating around, waiting for a tight skinny orifice like yours to crawl inside.”

  A chorus of guffaws ensued from most of the men.

  Cord did not laugh with the others. His lean stature almost matched the User’s, and the laughter seemed hollow and out of place. The dark holes of the tunnels grew blacker, as if having taken great offense for such a sound in the deep.

  As Durm waved the torch back and forth, bright curved lines flashed redly in the air from cobwebs caught in the flame. With a final barked chortle, he plunged into the tunnel. The torchlight did not swing behind him to see who followed.

  Cord waited for the rest of the soldiers—fifty strong—to slosh single file into the tunnel until he and the Dark User were the last two at the junction before he took up his customary place at the back. The rest of the patrol believed his training made him an expert in guarding against a rear attack, a belief he had carefully promoted for seasons.

  Early on, he found there was less risk at the back of every guard patrol he had accompanied beneath the Citadel under orders. He figured it unlikely that an enemy would flank them in such narrow confines; trouble would lie in wait ahead. He hoped. As miserable as his life may be, he wanted to be around to watch his children grow, though they seemed to respect his wishes less and less every season. Something he did not understand. Was he not a good father?

  After a quarter bell spent staring into the tunnel, Gorem spl
ashed past Cord and those few torches strung out in line in front of him, cursing under his breath. Cord smiled, his respect for Durm growing. As a leader, it took an intelligent and confident person to make one’s followers believe your leadership would keep them from harm as you led them into danger. Durm had pulled it off with some skill.

  Durm knew Gorem would not want to wait at the junction alone. There were far worse things skulking in these caverns than the web-limbed ingrots with their green-glowing skin.

  The tunnel dragged on endlessly, or so it seemed. Cord’s leaden legs tripped over snags unseen in the water with greater frequency. Finally, the torch flickered; the meager light it gave off drowned in the immensity of a great cavern.

  Cord was about to request a rest halt when a commotion broke out beyond his light. Indiscernible shouting echoed about. A lightning bolt sizzled, revealing a downward slope leading into an underground ravine. A flash of red flame bloomed in the dark. As most of the light faded, Cord got a glimpse of ingrots swarming eerily silent out of the darkness below. Some of them burned with red and yellow flames providing a growing luminescence as they caught their neighbors on fire, yet they made no sound.

  “Blast you all! Fight! Now, before we’re surrounded!” Durm’s bellows rang through the cavern.

  The sharp thrannng of released cross bolts mixed with the grunts of hand weapons thudding into ingrot flesh ceased in a short time.

  “What are you doing? Keep fighting!” Gorem’s shrill voice floated back to Cord from a weak flicker of torchlight not far below, near where he assumed the cavern floor leveled out. Silence settled in, made starkly eerie by the torchlight winking out nearly at once, as if a single hand carried them.

  Lightning bolts again crackled through the blackness, three in rapid succession.

  Cord blinked as they faded. Durm and many of the others were out there, but they were not fighting. They stood with the ingrots! Shuffling forward, they led the beasts toward the few still holding weapons, and the sole person carrying light… they came for him!

  Cord ran, moving so fast back the way they had come he splashed fetid water into his eyes. Wiping desperately with his free hand, he slowed a little, fearing he may have extinguished his torch. He was heartened to see it flickering. The loss of its sputtering feeble flame meant death.

  Keeping to a disciplined pace through shin-deep water was maddening—barely above a fast walk—but he stuck with it. The terror of what was coming behind spurred him on. He had to escape the tunnels!

  After a long grueling tromp, walking as fast as he dared, he halted at the three-tunnel intersection, holding his torch high and gulping air as he looked back. The tunnel mouth brooded dark and ominous. No light flickered from it. Perhaps those things hadn’t followed. Still, he would take no chances. Ingrots would not leave their dark and dank dwellings.

  Setting off, he slogged through the center of the intersection, the upward ramp to safety and freedom beckoning in the torch’s meager but stable light. He smiled despite the immediacy of the situation. The hooded man would not now dispute his story of survival if he were the only one left to tell it.

  And perhaps, this frightening ordeal would work to his favor, providing he reported it in such a way as to show how Durm had ordered the men to stroll into ambush. Yes, it was a good plan.

  After all, he had to inform the Citadel what waited below. It would work nicely. If he worded it right, showed a proper amount of horror lurking in his eyes, it might even get him a higher rank commendation and added scrip.

  Dropping from above, a curtain of darkness draped over him.

  An alien intelligence, old when his world was young, permeated his mind. The scream bubbling in his throat vanished, erased from him by an overwhelming sense of dark and utter supremacy.

  BROKEN MIND ON A VIOLENT WORLD

  Stretching to the end of her reach, Crystalyn Creek grasped the top of the ledge’s jagged edge and pulled herself higher, scraping with the toe of her boots for a foothold. After much scuffing about at the limestone rock face, she met success with something large enough to support her. Pushing and stretching upward, Crystalyn got her forearms upon the ledge’s rocky surface, allowing her long legs to dangle in empty air space as she crawled forward. Crystalyn rolled onto her back then when she deemed it far enough from the edge for safety’s sake.

  Gasping for breath, Crystalyn lay gazing up at her smallest companion, Atoi. The little girl had scrambled up the mountainside as quick as a goat, which was no surprise. Though Atoi looked and sounded not a day over ten seasons, in reality she’d had more than four hundred of them to develop that agility.

  When Crystalyn first arrived on Astura, Atoi had used that same quick speed on her when the little vagabond had sunk the poisoned dagger into her stomach. Crystalyn no longer held it against her. After all, it had been an accident, sort of.

  Standing, Crystalyn looked around wondering at Hastel’s choice for their route. Her link mate, Broth—her Do’brieni, in the warden’s language—may have a rough time with the final hurdle of their strenuous morning, not to mention she worried if her younger sister Jade could make it.

  Crystalyn’s fears proved groundless. Broth cleared the ledge in one smooth leap, landing on the cushioned pads of his big paws; Jade swung herself up with ease, the big hammer at her side behaving by following the contour of her thigh without a single hitch.

  Perusing the path they’d taken up the mountainside, Crystalyn noted the owner of the Muddy Wagon Inn, Hastel, had chosen the route with an exceptional eye. As far as she could see, there was no other way. Deadfall timber and a rockslide blocked the south. A sheer cliff rising to the north deterred anything without wings. They could have gone around either side toward the west or east, but it would cost days. From the reports Hastel had received regarding the Vibrant Vale, they did not have days, hours perhaps.

  Crystalyn looked toward the one-eyed warrior. “How much farther is it?”

  Hastel wiped the sweat from his brow with the same rag he used for the weeping scar glaring from his forehead to nose and centered across the missing eye. Crystalyn wished he would let her attempt her healing symbol on it, but he’d flatly refused without offering a good explanation why. “A full bell is needed to scout along the ridge, then another for the jaunt down into the Vale,” he replied.

  Jade’s quick smile flashed white in the shade of the pine trees lining the ridge. “You make it sound like we’re going for a stroll instead of a battle.”

  Hastel’s one blue eye glinted in the early afternoon sun. “I suppose some battles are a leisure stroll around well-built fortifications, like the present day Dark User siege of Surbo I’ve heard tell is. Most are pure chaos. Yet, chaos has its own kind of excitement.” His one eye grew brighter as he spoke.

  Crystalyn stepped closer to the Vale’s rim, gazing upon its wide green canopy. In spots, smoke hung in a thick pall above it, and an occasional boom sounded now and then, the only indications something was not right in the peaceful forest. That, and the fact no birds soared throughout the treetops. “Somehow, I don’t think we’re going to find a glimmer of fun down there,” she said softly.

  Hastel sighed in agreement. “You’re right as usual, we’ll find only conflict. Come, we should continue. The hike along the Vibrant Rim is easier, but I would prefer we gradually work our way to the southern end. Our best chance of meeting up with the Lore Mother and Lore Rayna is at the main outpost there.” The grizzled warrior set out along the ridge going slightly down into the inner rim of the valley and into a patch of evergreen pines, avoiding the openness of the aspens.

  Crystalyn walked beside Atoi as Jade followed close behind and Broth guarded the rear. They easily fell into their customary patrolling order they’d taken upon themselves since leaving the Muddy Wagon Inn weeks ago. Often, Atoi ranged ahead, sometimes even ahead of Hastel. For now, the enigmatic little girl seemed to seek companionship. “Have you ever been to the Vale before?” Crystaly
n asked as they walked.

  Atoi regarded her, her emerald eyes unreadable though starkly vivid against the background of her too-pale skin. “I have memory of the place of great trees.”

  Crystalyn was mildly surprised. Such a reply didn’t sound like the usual Atoi. Crystalyn never knew if she was speaking with her or the Dark Child the little girl hosted inside her tiny, four-hundred-season old body. “What are your memories of it? Tell me what to expect.”

  With a decidedly little girl gesture, Atoi shrugged. “Large flowers, bigger trees, meandering water, and plant people.”

  “What do you mean? What are ‘plant people’?”

  “The ones who nurture the flora, you know them as naturists.”

  Now Crystalyn was surprised. “You think of the Lore Mother, Lore Rayna, and Cudgel as plant people? Why?”

  Atoi’s green eyes shone with added brightness before fading as they entered the trees. They were so vivid on her white skin. “All floras listen to them and thrive.”

  Crystalyn stopped, staring after Atoi as she continued down the path without slowing. Soon she was gone from sight. Jade took her place.

  “Are you okay?” Jade asked.

  “Yes and no. After all that time spent traveling with my companions, now I find some of them are plant shepherds. But I’m glad we’re back, impending battle or not.”

  “Huh? You’re not slipping again, are you, sister?”

  Crystalyn laughed with little mirth. “There’s a term from our world I haven’t heard for a while. No, I’m not slipping, not yet. I’m as stable as someone with a broken mind can expect to stay on a world prone to violence. Plant shepherds are my words for the naturists, like the Lore Mother, Lore Rayna, and Cudgel. You haven’t met them yet, but you will. They’re part of the Green Writhe, and apparently, they tell plants what to do with themselves.”

  “Camoe said he was with the Green Writhe. Do you think it is the same one?”

  “I would imagine.”

  “Have you heard of the Green Writhe?” Crystalyn sent through the link, adding a slight feeling of annoyance into the psychic flow. The Green Writhe sounded important enough her link mate and protector should have spoken of it by now.