The Year of the Witching(73)

A bullet whistled past her head.

Immanuelle cracked the reins, breaking for the gate at full speed, determined to make it even if she had to abandon the cart and haul herself over the top of it. Once she cleared it, the horsemen would stand down, as they had no right to pursue her beyond Bethel’s borders without a formal warrant from the Prophet. As soon as she was past the Hallowed Gate, she was safe . . . at least for a little while.

The Prophet’s guardsmen gained on her. Cries and gunshots echoed through the empty market stall. In mere moments she’d be surrounded. She wasn’t going to make it to the gate; she wasn’t going to make it out of the market at all. The Prophet’s Guard was going to cut her short and haul her back to the Haven for contrition and trial and purging—

Something moved through the night.

Not wind but rather the absence of it, as though all the air was being sucked away. Torches went dark like matches pinched between two fingers. Oil lamps flickered out. Overhead, the moon died and the stars after it, each one winking out like a candle snuffed, until the skies were black. A great blanket of shadow fell over Amas, smothering the village.

The plague of darkness was upon them at last.

In the black behind her, Immanuelle heard riders fall. Rogue gunshots ringing through the darkness. The confused shouts of the Prophet’s guardsmen.

It was only by luck and the persistence of her own keen memory that Immanuelle—blind in the sea of night—was able to navigate through the last of the market stalls and out onto the main road. She whispered to the horse, urging it onward into the dark, toward what she knew to be the gate, though the shadows were so thick she couldn’t see it.

Then, lights, bobbing in the sea of the black like fireflies. Torches on the gate, the peal of a ram’s horn, gears grinding with an ear-splitting screech. By the faint glow of torches newly lit, Immanuelle saw the gate heave open. She snapped the reins a final time, and the horse lunged forward, out of Bethel, and into the dark of the wilderness.





PART III





Darkness





CHAPTER THIRTY





The world is a vast and dangerous place, unfit for the Father’s flock.

—FROM THE WRITINGS OF DAVID FORD





THE MAIN ROAD stretched into the impenetrable black. Immanuelle couldn’t see the Darkwood, but she could feel the familiar intoxication of her own unraveling as she delved deeper and deeper into the wilds. Overhead, the sky was dark—no star spatter or the sliver of a crescent moon to light the way ahead. Most of the lamps alongside the road were dark, and the few that were lit held tiny dying flames that flickered violently, threatening to snuff out with even the smallest breath of wind.

There were no traces of life on the road or in the forest that flanked it. No wagon tracks or footprints, no owls roosting in the trees. As Ezra had predicted, the Prophet’s Guard had stopped their chase the moment she passed through the Hallowed Gate. She was truly alone, on the dark, wild road. But despite the eerie quiet of the night and her own aching loneliness, she took comfort in the fact that with the onset of the darkness plague, the blight was likely over, since each new plague thus far had signaled the end of the old one. She prayed that meant that Glory and Honor would now be spared. Then she remembered that the final plague was slaughter. She could only hope her journey could forestall it.

Immanuelle rode on. The night lapsed on long after its allotted hours were spent, and the black tide of the darkness was almost unfathomably thick. She tried her best to count the hours as they passed, but the unending black took on a kind of timelessness that made any attempt at tracking the time near impossible.

After what felt like a few hours, a drizzling rain began to fall, and it quickly gave way to sloughing sheets of sleet. With no shelter in sight, save for the sparse overhang of the forest’s treetops, Immanuelle had nothing but Ezra’s cloak to shield her from the torrents of the storm. By the time she came upon the ruins of a long-abandoned monastery, she was soaked to the bone, and the reins had chafed her palms raw and bloody. Knowing she was far too exhausted to continue, she decided to camp there.

The structure was a strange one, built on a berm that overlooked a shallow gulley. It was squat, narrow, and long, like a hallway or run of horse stalls. Stone columns supported a crumbling roof, which was built flat and low and covered in a sprawl of sweetgrass.

Pulling the cart to a stop alongside the ruins, Immanuelle hopped off the seat, untethered the horse, and led him into the structure and out of the sleet. She fed and watered him with provisions from the wagon, then retreated, soaked and shivering, into the far corner of the monastery, while the storm raged on.

When she felt rested enough to keep hold of the reins, Immanuelle roused herself, harnessed the horse to the cart, and set out into the dark again.

After a while, the wilderness pressed closer and the road diverged. One path, the larger of the two, was well cobbled and flanked by streetlamps on either side. It turned east, toward the deep woodland. The other was just a thin lane that looked much like the forest paths that snaked through the Bethelan woods.

Immanuelle went west, to Ishmel.

Brambles and branches tore at her clothes as she traveled down the narrow woodland corridor. The road was rutted with potholes and scattered with all manner of debris. Several times Immanuelle had to hop out of the cart and clear the way before they could pass through. In fact, she spent much of that leg of the journey on her feet, leading Ezra’s steed by the bridle. Often, she had to coax the animal through the narrow passages that carved through the wilderness, mumbling calming words and sometimes singing the same lullabies she did to Honor and Glory, just to keep the eerie silence at bay and prevent the poor beast from spooking.