“He has fallen from grace,” she said to Nest Freemark, and the dark ayes bore into her. “Listen, and I will tell you what has become of him.”
CHAPTER 4
As with almost everything since John Ross had become a Knight of the Word, his disintegration began with a dream.
His dreams were always of the future, a future grim and horrific, one where the balance of magic had shifted so dramatically that civilization was on the verge of extinction. The Void had gained ascendancy over the Word, good had lost the eternal struggle against evil, and humanity had become a pathetic shadow of the brilliant ideal it had once approached. Men were reduced to hunters and hunted, the former led by demons and driven by feeders, the latter banded together in fortress cities and scattered outposts in a landscape fallen into ruin and neglect. Once-men and their prey, they were born of the same flesh, but changed by the separate and divisive moral codes they had embraced and by the indelible patterns of their lives. It had taken more than a decade, but in the end governments had toppled, nations had collapsed, armies had broken into pieces, and peoples world-wide had reverted to a savagery that had not been in evidence since well before the birth of Christ.
The dreams were given to John Ross for a purpose. It was the mission of a Knight of the Word to change the course of history. The dreams were a reminder of what the future would be like if he failed. The dreams were also a means of discovering pivotal events that might be altered by the Knight on waking. John Ross had learned something of the dreams over time. The dreams always revealed events that would occur, usually within a matter of months. The events were always instigated by men and women who had fallen under the sway of the demons who served the Void. And the men and women who would perpetrate the monstrous acts that would alter in varying, cumulative ways the direction in which humanity drifted could always be tracked down.
But even then there was a limit to what a Knight of the Word could do, and John Ross discovered the full truth of this at San Sobel.
In his dream, he was travelling through the nightmare landscape of civilization’s collapse on his way to an armed camp in San Francisco. He had come from Chicago, where another camp had fallen to an onslaught of demons and once-men, where he had fought to save the city and failed, where he had seen yet another small light smothered, snuffed out in an ever-growing darkness. Thousands had died, and thousands mare had been taken to the slave pens for work and breeding. He had come to San Francisco to prevent this happening again, knowing that a new army was massing and moving west to assault the Bay Area fortress, to reduce humanity’s tenuous handhold on survival by yet another digit. He would plead with those in charge once again, knowing that they would probably refuse to listen, distrustful o£ him, fearful of his motives, knowing only that their past was last and their future had become an encroaching nightmare. Now and again, someone would pay heed. Now and again, a city would be saved. But the number of his successes was dwindling rapidly as the strength of the Void’s forces grew. The outcome .area inevitable; it had been foreordained since he had become a Knight of the Word years ago. His failure then had writ in stone what the future must be. Even in his determined effort to chip away the hateful letters, he was only prolonging the inevitable. Yet he went on, because that was all that was left for him to do.
The dream began in the town of San Sobel, west and south of the Mission Peak Preserve below San Francisco. It was just another town, just one more collection of empty shops and houses, of concrete streets buckling with wear and disuse, of yards and parks turned to weeds and bare earth amid a jumble of debris and abandoned cars. Wild dogs roamed in packs and feral cats slunk like shadows through the midday heat. He walked past windows and doors that gaped broken and dark like sightless eyes and voiceless mouths. Roofs had sagged and walls had collapsed; the earth was reclaiming its own. Now and again he would spy a furtive figure making its way through the rubble, a stray human in search of food and shelter, another refugee from the past. They never approached him. They saw something in him that frightened them, something he could not identify. It was in his bearing or his gaze or perhaps in the black, rune-scrolled staff that was the source of his power. He would stride down the center of a boulevard, made whole now with the fulfillment of the Word’s dark prophecy, his ruined leg healed because his failure had brought that prophecy to pass, and no one would come near him. He was empowered to help them, and they shunned him as anathema. It was the final irony of his existence.