My place clung to the cliffside between the forge and the Hole. I had two good sections of pipe sunk a couple of feet into the earth. With the cliff edge as my back wall, I had sheets of corrugated tin on two sides and the roof, anchored to the pipes. The fourth wall needed work - it was a sheet of plastic, nailed to the roof at the top and weighted with rocks at the bottom, and it served as both wall and door. Some day I would find something better.
I had told Luco and Joran I would be back to the Hole, and while it was dark it was still early... It would still be safe enough, but I was tired and not feeling social.
Each of the pipes had a bracket holding a torch dipped in grease, and I lit both before I went to sleep. The Darkness didn’t like open flame. I’d never seen it this far west... but it didn’t pay to take chances with the Darkness.
The next day the temperature was beginning to dip down into the bearable range, even at midday. If we were lucky, we would have a couple of months of pleasant weather before winter’s freezing wind scourged the Flow. Winter on the Flow was worse than summer. It didn’t stink nearly as much, but the cold was far more dangerous than the heat, and the garbage froze hard as rock. Food would become hard to come by. Animals retreated into their burrows, and the farmers’ prices for their stored surplus went up at the same time our productivity went down. We’d be living mostly on whatever we’d squirreled away.
So autumn was a good time to dig. I’d gotten an early start with half an hour of kata, unarmed and with my walking stick. I would have rather slept in, but the day was too fine to give me any excuse. The rest of the morning had not gone so well. Dolls with no heads, some cracked glass bottles that had broken when I dug them out. I’d found a machine which I had at first thought to be a treasure trove of salvageable steel; it had turned out to be chrome-colored plastic instead. There was a sort of wheeled, rectangular chest made of some kind of flexible, lightweight, woven synthetic. One of the wheels was cracked but it was otherwise intact. I couldn’t figure out what to do with it but it seemed a shame to leave it there.
I gathered the glass into my sack, getting two tiny slivers stuck in my hands. It could be melted down and reused, but wasn’t worth much - fresh glass was easy enough to make from sand, and the world had sand in abundance. I put the sack in the rolling chest and zipped it shut. At least I hadn’t hit another gas pocket.
As a result, no one had much to say to me, good or bad, when I plopped myself down next to Luco in the Hole.
There was the unlabored quiet of a room full of tired men and women. “Nice day today,” Joran said after a time. There were nods all around, but no comments.
The character of the silence changed abruptly when the hanging pulled open, silhouetting a tall woman in the sunlight.
“Prophetess,” someone breathed.
I’d heard the term before, though I’d never seen her. A girl from one of the farming villages southeast of the Flow, she’d decided she was called by the Universal Church’s God to save the world. Or something like that. She’d been preaching around the Flow for months but hadn’t visited us before.
Luco got up and pulled out a chair. “Have a seat, Prophetess. There’s beer, and Thassa’s got a pot of water boiling. There’s stew on, too, I think. It’s” – he looked toward Thassa in the kitchen.
“It’s stew,” said Thassa. She was a decent cook, but you were generally better off being a little vague on the ingredients.
The girl let the hanging fall back into place but didn’t sit. “Thank you for your generosity. I’ll have a cup of water, please. But I didn’t come to eat or drink.”
“Of course, Prophetess. We’d, uh, be thrilled to hear you explain God’s Word, but you know how it is, we do have to be getting back to work.” Luco summoned up an unconvincing smile.
With the light no longer behind her I could see our visitor grin broadly, her eyes twinkling. “I didn’t come to preach either.” Her smile widened as people tried to smother sighs of relief. “It’s time for me to move on - the Lord is calling me away from here. I’ve come looking for an escort.”
We exchanged glances. Most of the miners had never been more than a few miles from the Flow.
“Escort to where, Prophetess?” Joran asked.
“Stephensburg.” Capital of the Source. It must have been nearly a thousand miles to the northeast.
Now the silence was deafening.
She looked around, trying to read faces in the darkness. “There’s not much I can offer... Really just that it needs doing.”
Most of the crew looked a little guilty. They were almost all Universalists. Some brave, pious soul should have volunteered to shepherd a spiritual leader of their faith, even a self-declared spiritual leader. But no one did.
No one would have volunteered in her home village, or in the places she preached, either. Or she wouldn’t be here... begging.
“I’ll go,” my mouth said. I had no idea where that came from. “If you don’t mind the company of a Select.” That part sounded more like me, or would have if the tone had been petulant and sarcastic. The note of sincerity rang out of place on my tongue. Luco and Joran were staring at me.
I shrugged. “You guys have been great,” I said, “But you know, over the past two years I’ve come to realize this place just doesn’t smell that good.”
“Oh, hell,” Luco said, “If I were you I would have left a year ago.”
“Never could figure out what you were doing here in the first place,” Dorren rumbled from the back, “Though we’ve been glad to have you.” I hadn’t realized he was in the Hole. “But you go up north with the Prophetess, you may be Select, but people like you die up there.”
“I’m pretty sure people die everywhere, Dorren,” I said.
“You sooner than most, smartass,” he snapped. He had a point. Select could live a very long time, but sarcastic, smart-mouthed Select weren’t likely to do so. Nor were Select who left the safety of a place like the Flow to escort a self-proclaimed prophet halfway across the continent. The Darklands lay that way, beyond Stephensburg. I’d come west to escape the demons and the Darkness. This would take me the exact wrong direction.
But I’d liked the way her eyes had twinkled when she’d laughed at herself.
Of course, the Universal Eucharistic Church had, over the years, found unpleasant things to say about the Select. So the choice might not be mine to make.
“I’d be pleased to travel with a Select who is willing to accompany me so far,” she said. “And your name is?”
“Minos,” I said, and stood up. And that was how it was decided.
It had taken only minutes to say my goodbyes to everyone that mattered - I would catch up with Dodd and Fenn on our way out. It took only minutes more to gather everything I intended to take with me - a warm cloak, canteen, knife, flint and steel, whetstone, compass, frying pan, slingshot, and three ten-weight silver coins. I added a couple of small knickknacks I’d collected over the years that were light and might be valuable in trade. A tarnished silver ring with a slightly chipped stone in it, a pair of scissors from which I’d polished the rust, a little porcelain cat trimmed with a thin, flaking layer of what looked to be real gold. And a handful of oil-soaked torches, wrapped in plastic.
It looked like I wasn’t going to be replacing the door to my shelter after all.
The woman who called herself Prophetess was traveling light as well. Now that I could see her clearly in the daylight, I looked her over from the corner of my eye. She wore a billowing, hooded tunic over long pants and sturdy leather boots. Like me, she had a walking stick, though hers was longer, nearly as tall as she was. And she was not a small woman, the top of her head reaching my eyes - and though I might still have some growth left in me, I was Select, and none of us are short.
In the bright sun I thought her exposed skin was pale under the dust of the Flow. Her hair was a dirty brown... although how much of that was its natural color and how much actual dirt was hard to say. She had crossed th
e Flow to reach us here, and no one in this part of the world bathed very often.
Her eyes were gray but expressive, not hard or cold. The eyes and her smile made her instantly attractive. Was that why I had impulsively decided to accompany her? Yes, probably. Still, I suppose there were worse reasons to risk your life.
“And what takes us to Stephensburg, Prophetess?” I asked as I shouldered my pack.
“We have to get there before Yoshana.” She looked down, it seemed to me oddly hesitant for someone on a mission from God. “If she gets there first, it may mean the end of… everything.”
The end of everything certainly sounded ominous - our world was fallen, but it was the only one we had. Of course, it stood to reason that prophets were supposed to traffic in dooms and apocalypses. But, “Yoshana? The Overlord Yoshana? Isn’t she dead?”
Prophetess scoffed. “We’ve heard she’s been dead before. More than once. Although this time...” she paused. “This time she may actually have died. But if she did, she’s risen. And she’s saying she’s returned with a message from God.”
Another shiver ran through me. Yoshana’s armies had overrun much of the Green Heart, my home before I’d fled. The thought of the Overlord’s legions at my back had taken me this far west. I’d slept easier believing she was gone. I kept my tone nonchalant. “Ah. And it offends you that she’s using your faith for her own purposes.”
“Maybe. A little. But what’s a lot more frightening is that she may really believe it.”
Well. Religious war had touched off the catastrophe leading to the Second Fall. Maybe this truly would be the end of everything. If so, a farm girl who believed herself a prophet seemed like an unlikely savior of the world, but who was I to judge?
Racing against time to keep an undead Overlord from destroying the world. How hard could it possibly be? I forced a smile and started off to the north, walking stick in my hand and pack over my shoulder. “Then I guess we’d better get going if we’re going to stay ahead of her. At least it gets me off the Flow.”
Thad was watching over the trading post, carving designs in a wooden rod. He was good at it, with a steady hand, an artist’s eye, and the patience for detailed work. “Prophetess,” he said as we came up the track from below. He nodded to me. “Heard you’re leaving.”
There had only been a handful of minutes for that gossip to beat us up to the post. I was briefly amazed. Then again, there was little news on the Flow, and the arrival of a prophet and departure of a miner, all in one day, was about the most excitement we were going to get short of a bandit attack or an outbreak of cholera.
I quickly took in the table, the same goods laid out on and around it as yesterday. “No one, huh?”
“Not yet.”
There was a good chance that “not yet” meant “not at all.” Most of the farms that traded with us were a few miles south of the Flow or a few miles northwest, beyond the wasteland that surrounded the City. The farmers would generally rise with the sun and be here by noon so as to be home well before dark. The only thing likely to stop after mid-day was a long-distance caravan, and those were rare.
Thad knew what I was after. “So no food,” he added.
For traveling we would want something that lasted and packed a lot of energy into a small space, like pemmican. But on the Flow we had neither berries nor a reliable source of meat. Days or even weeks could go by without getting a successful shot at the critters that raided the cactus, and they usually went into Thassa’s stew.
There were rats on the Flow, of course, but you had to be truly desperate before you ate rats that lived on garbage. That was asking to get sick, no matter how much you cooked them. The cats that ate the rats were a better bet, but they were clever and hard to catch. Besides, most of us liked the cats.
“Take some leaves.” He nodded toward the cactus patch.
I dug the little porcelain cat out of my pack. Thad waved it away. “You’ve put more time into the patch than most, and that cat’s worth a lot more than a few leaves. Just take ’em.”
I shook my head and set the cat on the table. I didn’t like to owe people. Thad picked the cat up, turned it over, and handed it back to me. “Just take the leaves or I’m gonna bust your face. You’re hurting my feelings.”
The cactus leaves weren’t really Thad’s to give without taking something in trade. Maybe he was speaking for everyone else, maybe he wasn’t... but he really might take a swing at me if I annoyed him.
“Thanks,” I said. I cut off four leaves and handed two to Prophetess. We sat in the shade and plucked out the needles. I had a little roll of cloth in my pack and used it to wrap up the larger spines.
“Do you have a use for those, or do you just like sharp things?” Prophetess asked.
“If I can find a reed, and some cotton, I can make a blowgun and use them for darts. Might be able to take a bird, or something bigger if we can find a rattlesnake for the venom.”
“That’s a lot of if’s,” she smiled.
“Waste not, want not.”
She turned to look back at the Flow and her smile faded. “Yes.”
“So where are you headed, Minos?” Thad asked.
“Stephensburg,” I answered without thinking. Then it occurred to me that Prophetess might not want me advertising her destination if she was really trying to stop a resurrected Overlord. I shot her a quick look, but she didn’t seem upset.
“That’s a hike,” Thad said. “Think it’s started getting cold up there yet?”
“Nah, I wouldn’t think so. Might be by the time we get there, though.”
He nodded. We sat for a couple of minutes, but there didn’t seem to be anything more to say.
“We’d better get going before we run out of light,” I said.
“Yup. Careful on the way.” He looked uncertainly at Prophetess. “Uh, go with God.”
“Thank you. May his blessings be upon you,” she said.
Thad’s face brightened a little and he waved at us. I had to chuckle as we started north. I doubted she was really a prophet, or that there was such a thing, but the girl seemed to be able to brighten people’s day, and that was worth something in itself.
Not only could we hear Dodd’s hammer halfway down the Flow - to be truthful, you could probably hear it from one end to the other if you listened. There wasn’t a lot of other sound. As we got closer, I could tell that two hammers were ringing - Fenn would be beating out iron too, then, rather than stoking the forge, fetching fuel, or any of the countless other tasks his apprenticeship required.
I hoped Fenn’s growing skill with the hammer didn’t rob him of his delicate touch with the tiny, intricate treasures we sometimes found. That would be a shame.
They were both absorbed in their work and didn’t hear us come in - not surprising, over their banging at the metal. It was a miracle either of them could still hear at all. I was a little more surprised they hadn’t noticed the change in the light as I opened the door, but I suppose the shifting glow of the forge flared and ebbed... or maybe they were just too busy to be distracted by us.
Prophetess and I waited patiently. It wasn’t wise to interrupt someone with a red-hot bar of metal in one hand and a twelve pound hammer in the other.
Dodd noticed us first. “Ah, Minos!” he exclaimed. “And the Prophetess. An honor. Stopped by to say goodbye?”
“Not a lot of secrets in this place, are there?” I laughed.
“We’re garbage miners, Minos. It’s not like there’s a lot of excitement. You’re not from here, but most folks around this place know your business before you know it yourself. You know what they say in Redstone – ‘a small town is one big hell.’” He looked at Prophetess. “Begging your pardon.”
She smiled. “I grew up on a farm where privacy wasn’t a word in our vocabulary and I tried to convince people who’d seen me in a diaper cloth that I’ve been called by God. I know what you mean.”
“Speaking of hell,” Fenn waved apologetically to the
forge, “Can we get you something to drink? We have water and, uh, water.”
It must have been at least thirty degrees hotter inside the forge than outside, enough to drive the temperature from cool to sweltering. I wasn’t sure what they were burning today, but it didn’t smell good - which only made the small, hot space seem that much more close and confined. One side benefit, though, was that there was no problem boiling water, so it was safe and abundant. If it hadn’t been, Dodd and Fenn would have dehydrated within an hour.
The water was warm and tasted both of soot and metal - but Prophetess still thanked Fenn as if were the finest drink she’d ever tasted. His eyes lit up and he beamed.
“So you’re going north?” Dodd asked. “Know your route?”
I looked at Prophetess and she blushed furiously. “The Lord tells me where to go. He doesn’t give me a road map.”
Dodd shot me a look. It might have said “you’re crazy” a little more clearly if he’d stuck out his tongue and made a little circle around his temple with his finger - but only a little.
I shrugged. “You know I’m from southeast of here. Northern geography isn’t my strongest point.” I had never discussed my origins in any detail, but you didn’t gain acceptance in a small community like this without telling people anything at all. “I figure we head northeast until we hit the Big Muddy and try to get passage on a steamboat.”
“And when you hit the forests west of the river? If the Darkness doesn’t get you, the things it’s infected will.”
That was a bit of an exaggeration. The Darkness would be no thicker there than it had been in the forests in the southeast of the Green Heart where I had been born. It was dangerous, but hardly a death sentence. At least not to a Select. Prophetess would not be used to dealing with it, though.
So, “What do you suggest?”
“Well, you know I’m from Redstone, so I’m hardly an expert on the northeast either. But if it were me, I’d head straight for the Whitewater and take a boat to the Muddy. Whitewater dips south before it meets up with the Muddy, so it’s a bit out of your way, but you’re on water almost the whole way and I’ve never heard of the Darkness venturing onto water. Don’t think it can.”
Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle Page 2
