Bearers of the Black Staff

“I’d thought that might have been what happened,” Sider said.

“Happened for more than two centuries, and then things started to right themselves. The people who had escaped the worst of the plagues and poisons and firestorms had formed communities that were fortified and protected. Men armed themselves wherever they went, but at least they weren’t afraid to go. Weapons were rudimentary for the most part. There were some flechettes and sprays and other leftovers from before the Great Wars, but most quit working or rusted up. Men forgot how to fix them and then how to use them and then forgot them altogether. The time for that kind of weapon was over. Men began making weapons in the old way, forging blades for swords and spears and javelins, shaping bows out of ash and tying flint to oak shafts for arrows, and they learned how to use them. They formed hunting parties and set watch over their women and children, and they stood up with some success against the predators and ravers that still roamed the land. The difference was that they were beginning to organize themselves.”

“Still wasn’t enough, though, was it?” Sider guessed.

Inch shook his head. “Not by a thirty-foot jump, it wasn’t. There were battles fought all over the landscape, dozens every day, and whole communities were wiped out. Some of the mutants that grew out of the poisonous effects of the Great Wars had evolved into monsters that almost nothing could stop. Some were worse than the agenahls, but most of those couldn’t breed and died out early on. There wasn’t enough food for them, and they weren’t smart enough to avoid eating things infused with poisons and chemicals. But that wasn’t the worst of what was out there, Sider. You know what was? What still is?”

“I guess I don’t.”

“Demons that survived along with the humans and other creatures. There weren’t many, but there were a few. They escaped in the same way everything else escaped—by being somewhere other than the worst of the destruction. But they were still what they always had been when it was over, and they went right back to doing what they had been doing all along—working hard at wiping out everything but their own kind. They subverted what creatures they could and turned them to their own uses. It wasn’t like before; their numbers were small and their reach short. They were starting over, just like everyone else. But it was enough.”

“Wait one minute.” Sider held up one hand. “I’ve heard the stories about demons fomenting the madness of the Great Wars and forming armies to wipe out the human race. I only half believed them. But you’re saying it’s the truth? And you’re saying there are still demons out here? Demons of the sort that destroyed—well, almost destroyed—humankind in the first place?”

Deladion Inch rocked back slightly. He was sitting cross-legged now, his cloak wrapped close as the air grew cool with the deepening of night. His smile was ironic, filled with mirth but lacking in warmth, and when he stared off into the darkness it was as if he were seeing and hearing things that his companion could not.

“Sider, here’s the truth of things. After all that’s happened since the Great Wars, after time’s passage these past five centuries, nothing much has changed. Oh, the old world’s gone, right enough. All those cities and factories and war machines and everything else that the old sciences created to make the world a better place have disappeared, and we’ve got nothing worth talking about to show for it. They might as well never have existed, any of them. Centuries of enlightenment and progress vanished virtually overnight because Men couldn’t find a way to use it wisely and purposefully. Gone, the whole of it, and to what end? Was there a lesson learned? Was there a fresh perspective reached that might somehow help avoid it all happening again? You show it to me.”

Sider shrugged. “History repeats itself, Inch. It’s an old lesson, but no one ever seems able to put it to use.”

The big man grunted. “Well, there it is, then. You take my point. Change comes in the form of repetition. We are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, and no amount of education gleaned from our propensity for self-destruction and misguided thinking ever teaches us anything. Not anything that we remember for more than a generation or two, in any case. It’s been so in the past, it’s so now, and I would be willing to bet it’ll be so forever.”