The wheat had been harvested in every field along the road, leaving nothing but stubble. A few cows and sheep were grazing in it, most contained by the same sort of fence we had crossed before - so apparently they did serve a purpose after all. I was a little surprised there was no more impressive barrier. They might not get drelb here, but it would be odd if coyotes, wolves or mountain lions didn’t sometimes go after the sheep. On the other hand, the chain link fences from before the Fall were mostly rusted junk by now, and they were much harder to make than the simple wooden construction the farmers used. Some villages in the Green Heart used log palisades, especially near the border with the Shield or in the foothills of the Sorrows, but that was probably more trouble than it was worth here. I supposed the occasional lamb being taken didn’t merit the effort.
The farmwife had given us skins of small beer to go along with the bread, and those made the dusty road quite bearable. With no obstacles in our way we made good time, and the shadows were just beginning to get truly long when we sighted the fishing lodge she had mentioned.
It sat at the southern tip of a lake that stretched several miles to the north. And as she had said, the woods grew up around it - thick stands of evergreens that reached well over a hundred feet into the air. This was familiar territory for me - the hills of the eastern Green Heart were thick with pines - but stopping for the night didn’t seem like such a bad idea after all.
And speaking of stockades, one was taking shape around the inn, itself a solid log construction obviously built from the local timber. The wall seemed designed to start at the water’s edge, forming three quarters of a circle open to the lakeshore. The builders must have shared Dodd’s belief that the Darkness couldn’t cross water. The construction remained unfinished, the two wings not yet meeting in the middle. Presumably a gate would go there, which would require more engineering than simply sticking sharpened poles in the ground. For the moment, an overgrown dirt track led through the open space to the building. Tree trunks meant for the palisade, some already trimmed, lay in the yard.
The lodge was a two story structure surrounded by a roofed porch. Small, roughly glazed windows were set at regular intervals. It was nothing fancy, but it was solidly built.
A bearded man, his hair just beginning to show touches of gray, was lighting an array of torches outside. “Evening,” he said, not taking his eyes from his work. “Room’s forty-weight in silver a night for the both of you, supper and breakfast included.”
“The Lord has called me to Stephensburg,” said Prophetess. “It would be a blessing if you supported us in that calling.”
The man moved to another torch, still not turning to look at us. “The Lord stays for free. Everyone else pays.”
I had hoped to make it farther than one day’s walk before we needed to use my meager stock of trade goods, but then again, that porcelain cat was going to break soon anyway. I opened my pack, but Prophetess set her hand on mine.
“If generosity doesn’t move you, how about simple profit? Are all your rooms taken? You’ll make nothing if we walk on, and it’s getting late. A discount is only reasonable.”
The man turned to us for the first time, a small smile on his face. “You’ll sleep in the woods tonight if you walk on, and they say there are drelb out there. Almost certain to be something in the dark you don’t want to meet. So who has more to lose, you or me?”
I shrugged and pulled the cat out of my pack. The innkeeper took a step closer and squinted at it. “Gah, that’s an ugly thing and no mistake! What would I want with that?”
“Oh, come on,” I said, exasperated. “That’s real gold on it. Probably.” I looked around at the pile of logs. “Or I can help you put up that palisade.”
His smile widened. “First good offer I’ve heard from the two of you. I’ll have your work on the wall until it’s time to sleep, and your friend that’s been called by God can help in the kitchen.” He turned to Prophetess. “Assuming God taught you how to do anything useful?”
“I can peel potatoes, wash dishes, milk cows... If you find that useful,” Prophetess said frostily.
“That’ll do. I’m Oren. Welcome to the Trout Trap, and make yourself right at home in the kitchen. Your Select friend here can put his muscles to use for me.”
Prophetess proceeded inside. Oren stepped to the pile of timber and tossed a hand ax toward me. I could have stepped forward to catch it, or back to let it land on the ground in front of me. I opted for the latter.
He gestured at the stacked trunks. “The two on the right there already have the limbs off and the ends sharpened. You can start doing the same to the others.”
Twenty minutes later, the sun was almost down, and I was finding cutting by torchlight even less pleasant than dealing with the sun in my eyes.
“Not very good at that, are you?” asked Oren, looking critically at my handiwork.
“If you’d rather, I can dig holes for them instead. I’ve spent the last two years digging. More my area of expertise these days.”
“That’ll do,” he repeated. So he gave me a shovel, and I went to work. I’d gotten off the Flow after two years, and I was still digging holes.
When the first hole was deep enough, we hoisted one of the finished logs between us and maneuvered it into place. I steadied the bottom while Oren used a long leather strap to pull it upright. He was a solidly built man and I was doing no more than half the work, but sweat was pouring off me despite the chill air by the time we were done.
“Right, let’s get the other one up,” he paused for a gasping breath, “And we’ll call it a night.”
“I’m not sure you got forty-weight’s work out of me,” I said.
He grinned. “No, but I don’t think you have forty-weight. And I don’t want that ugly cat of yours. And your friend’s right, the place won’t be full. The grain wagons have gone out and come back. And who knows, maybe it will earn me a reward in heaven. Or at least a few hours less in hell.”
Speaking of hell... “Do you really think there are drelb out there?”
He leaned on a trunk. “I haven’t seen any, but folks coming through swear they’ve seen big things moving in the woods. Might just be deer, or we’ve always had a few black bears in here. Or might be drelb. The Darkness is out there, that’s for sure.”
“You’ve seen it?”
“Me? No - God forbid. Who sees it and walks away untouched? But stands to reason, doesn’t it? Demons pushing into the Green Heart... If it wasn’t in these woods before, it’ll be here soon enough.”
There were almost a thousand miles and the bulk of the Green Heart’s army between here and the Hellguard, so I wasn’t particularly convinced by his reasoning. There was no point in arguing, though, so I went back to digging instead, and he resumed trimming tree limbs.
We grunted and heaved and wrestled the second sharpened log into place. The torches Oren had set around our work area flickered, casting shadows in the pines and sending up billows of smoke. The innkeeper and I looked out into the dark forest, then looked at each other.
“I think that’s enough,” he said.
I nodded. I was tired. And I was willing to bet that the movement we saw in the trees was no more than shadows, wind and woodsmoke... but it didn’t pay to take chances with the Darkness.
Inside the lodge was warm and comfortable, smoky from the fireplace and torches but with a high ceiling that kept the air from becoming stifling. Most of the first floor was taken up by a large common room, with guest rooms around the outside of the second story, ringed by an interior balcony.
A woman, of an age to be Oren’s wife, served me a bowl of hot stew and a mug of beer. Both were good.
“The young lady went up to bed already,” she said. I nodded - my mouth was too full to talk. “She’s a nice girl,” the woman added. I nodded again and kept eating. She opened her mouth, shut it, scowled at me, and walked away.
Strange. I suppose when you live alone in the woods, you get a little odd.
Hah. No, I was not actually that oblivious. But I had no intention of doing anything to hurt, offend, or insult the honor of - the girl whose name I didn’t even know. Miss Carter. Prophetess.
In any case, at this point I was tired, full, and had no intention of doing anything at all besides sleeping. I asked which room was ours, got the answer - with another scowl - and headed upstairs.
The room was dark, but enough torchlight filtered in from outside that I could see Prophetess was asleep. On the only bed. The only - small - bed. Suddenly the attitude from Oren’s wife was becoming clearer.
I shrugged. I had slept on worse things than a wooden floor. And I was tired enough to sleep on an anthill.
I wrapped myself in my cloak, pillowed my head on my pack, and closed my eyes. I turned over, then turned again. The floor seemed to be unusually hard, even by the standards of wooden floors. I put my back against the wall, which was cold, but helped me feel more comfortable.
At least until Prophetess started snoring.
Every hour or so I would wake up, sore and cold, and look at the bed, and judge how much room there was. And then I would think of the scowl on Oren’s wife’s face, and I would roll over and try to go back to sleep.
3. The Oldtown Road
I was stiff and tired in the morning. I didn’t do any warm-up exercises or kata, and instead wrapped myself around a plate of bacon in the common room. That made me feel much better. My parents had taught me that morning exercise gave you energy for the rest of the day, but the only thing I ever enjoyed about morning exercise was the times I allowed myself the luxury of not doing it.
Prophetess was in excellent spirits, and why shouldn’t she be, since she’d had the bed to herself?
Our labor had earned us not only room and board, but also washrooms with buckets of hot water. After scrubbing and rinsing myself, I was once again gray, rather than orange. It would have taken too long to wash and dry our clothes, but I was able to shake off a lot of the dust. My rough linen tunic and pants were back to something like their original dirty white color - though still a dirtier white than they’d been when new.
I had been right about Prophetess’ skin - it was pale, a color that reddened and freckled in the sun rather than tanning. Her hair was a light brown. Her clothes and boots, now also cleaner, looked much like mine. Dyes weren’t a luxury either of us could afford.
We said goodbye to Oren and his wife, hoisted our packs, and headed for the northbound section trail. The trees thickened around us immediately as we turned onto it, a mix of deciduous and conifers that spread above the road and filtered the light into a greenish haze. The trail itself, over twenty feet wide originally, had been narrowed to a dozen in most places by the encroaching foliage. Only a few hundred feet along the way a particularly aggressive oak had somehow managed to grow right in the middle of the path. Gashes worn in the bark of the nearby trunks showed that some of the wagons had a hard time navigating around it as they came through.
Prophetess’ eyes darted from side to side. “Too many trees,” she muttered. “How can there be so many here?”
It was strange to see so much green only a few miles from the desolation of the Flow. “Nature’s tough,” I said. “If there’s water, something will grow.” I pointed ahead. “See, mist off the lake.” Not yet burned off in the morning sun... or maybe it would last all day under these trees.
Prophetess stopped dead. “Are you sure that’s just mist?”
I stared at the softly drifting cloud.
“The Darkness is - dark. Yes, it can hide in mist, but I’d be pretty surprised to see it doing that way out here in the daytime.”
She still had a skeptical expression. And she still wasn’t moving.
“Look. The Darkness could be here - and it doesn’t pay to be careless around it. But I grew up just south of the deep woods in the Sorrows. Go up into the foothills there, and it’s a totally different world. The Darkness is so thick in places there that it comes together, coalesces... Some of the wraiths are so concentrated the people up in the Sorrows worship them as gods. There’s nothing like that here.”
“And you’ve seen those god-sized wraiths up close, have you? So the tiny little clouds we get out here are nothing for you to worry about?”
“No,” I snapped, “I haven’t seen them up close, and no sane person ever would. But I’ve seen the Darkness and know what it is, which is more than anyone I’ve ever met on or around the Flow could honestly say.”
“It’s a good thing I have you protecting me, then,” she said. Still not moving.
Why was she mocking me? Just because I was implying she and everyone she knew were rubes who were frightened of their own shadows?
You Select were supposed to be too smart for your own good, the farmwife had said. She thought it meant we didn’t have any common sense. Maybe it meant that when you’re genetically engineered to be smarter, stronger, tougher and longer-lived than anyone else, you didn’t make any friends by pointing it out. Or even implying it.
I took a deep breath.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re right, of course, the Darkness is dangerous anywhere. But I do have some experience with it. In the kinds of concentrations I’ve heard about here, it would hardly ever come out in the light. And in those quantities, it can’t take you if you close your mind to it, and it’s afraid of fire - which is why we’ve got torches.”
She looked me in the eyes. “So you’re saying there’s nothing to worry about in these woods.”
Well, maybe not exactly. But, “At least I’m saying it’s safe to walk through that mist.”
She shrugged and began marching forward again. “Easy for you to say,” she muttered. But she went straight into the mist without hesitating. “I’ve heard the Select are immune to it.”
The patch of mist was only twenty feet across and we came through it unharmed.
“Well,” I said, “Some of the Reborn claim we can’t be possessed because we don’t have souls. And of course the Josephites say we’re already damned. But some of the Select mercenaries that fought for the Green Heart against Yoshana found out the hard way that the Darkness can kill us the same as anybody else. My bet is it can possess us too. Might be a little harder, but I’m not going up into the Sorrows to find out.”
Prophetess stopped again, putting her hand on my shoulder. Again she looked into my eyes for a long moment, then turned away, shaking her head. “I can see most people’s souls in their eyes,” she said. “Not you, though.”
I summoned up a twisted little smile. “Maybe the Reborn are right, then. Nothing to see.”
She shook her head again, more violently. “That’s not it.”
“They do say the eyes are the windows to the soul, but we Select prefer tinted glass.”
She snorted, punched me in the shoulder, and started walking again.
Say what you want about the woman, but she had an arm on her. And sharp knuckles.
It was only an hour later when we broke out of the trees and the trail began its gentle climb up to the bridge over the Rock Town road. It was a crumbling concrete span over a weed-choked ribbon of asphalt eighty feet wide, but Prophetess was so clearly happy to be out of the trees that we stopped to eat a nasty prickly pear leaf.
In the bright sunlight it was hard to imagine the Darkness existed anywhere in the world. Behind us the woods seemed less forbidding, farther north the trees thinned abruptly as we got farther from the lake. The Rock Town road stretched wide and inviting to the east, but that meant a three hundred mile walk. We would be heading that way, but the easier route was to go another dozen miles north and head for Oldtown instead - only a hundred miles, and then passage on a boat down the Whitewater.
To the west - if we had gotten here an hour or two earlier, would the morning sunlight have set Acceptance’s surviving windows ablaze, a shining reminder of its former glory? Because now, with the harsh light of the sun above it, the City’s distant towers looked like
nothing more than the bleached concrete corpse of the Last Days.
Maybe it wasn’t so hard to remember the Darkness existed after all.
On the far side of the bridge, a huge, low structure bulked to our left. It might have been a church or meeting hall at one point, but the stands lining the road suggested it now served as a market. The cleared area around it was given over to little plots of fruit and vegetables, and pig pens. Lots of pig pens.
We smelled the pigs before we saw them. The creatures stank in a way cows and sheep never did. Not enough to seriously turn the stomach of someone who had spent two years mining garbage, but still not something you wanted upwind of you.
As we came abreast of the stands, two of the swine came trotting out and snuffled at us. They were an off-white color, under the mud and orange dust, and they were huge. Each must have weighed over five hundred pounds. Although theoretically contained by the same sort of fence we had seen on the farms further south, I strongly suspected they could break through if they put their minds to it. They looked at us with their little piggy eyes and one let loose a series of piercing squeals.
I’m not too proud to admit I moved toward the other side of the road. So did Prophetess.
A woman emerged from the building, wearing a dress much the same color as the pigs, and not much cleaner. “Oh, hush you noisy things,” she bellowed. I assume directed at the hogs, not us.
It might have been a bad assumption. She regarded us with what must have been the most insincere smile I’d ever witnessed. “Well! A pleasure to have visitors. On the road to somewhere, are you?”
I refrained from saying “obviously.”
“Off to Rock Town? Or Oldtown perhaps? Or maybe headed south to Panther City, I’m thinking. In any case, my young friends, I’m sorry to say there’s bandits about on the roads. Now, I’m not meaning to pry into your business, or offer advice as may be unsought after or unwelcome, but it seems to me a young couple like yourselves,” and she raised her eyebrows a bit, “might be well served to have a bit of something to defend themselves. Now I’ve a lovely crossbow that I could let you have for only five hundred-weight.”
Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle Page 4
