The Way Into Darkness: Book Three of The Great Way (15 page)

“I can’t say, in all honesty, my tyr, but that is the rumor we’ve lived with for the last six years. It’s impossible to tell truth from fable. The only thing I can say is, if he was supposed to be executed by his bodyguards, it had not happened, as of that last trip.”
 

There are benefits to being younger brother to the king.
“It’s time.”
 

He stood, shouldered his pack, picked up his shield and spear, then started toward the door. The servant glanced all around her. No one else was in sight and that seemed to bother her.
 

“My tyr, the council will rise soon--”
 

“Accompany me to the northern gate. What do you call it?”

He started toward the exit. She struggled to keep up with him. Their tread was loud on the rough plank floor. “The Marsh Gate, my tyr.”

“Does it empty directly onto the marsh?”
 

“No, my tyr, but it comes close.”
 

They unbarred the door and stepped out into the night. The eastern sky was blocked by mountains, of course, so the sunrise would start with little more than a glow around the slopes, but Tejohn could see no trace of it.
 

Still, the stars stood revealed in the sky, and the light they shone illuminated the barren mountainsides. Amazing. After a lifetime of squinting at things in the same room, he could finally see the world in its true complexity. How cheated he had been. Once again, he wished his wife and children were with him. “What’s your name?”

“Sibilanth Totewater, my tyr.”
 

Tejohn began walking northward toward the town. They passed spears patrolling in teams of three, but none challenged them. “Do you have family here?”

“Not any more, my tyr. Last year, the Twofin heirs became ill. It was just fever sweats, of the sort any child might have, easily cleared on the sleepstone, but the old tyr became convinced that my brothers had poisoned them.”
 

“They worked in the kitchen with you?”
 

“One squeezed grapes for the little ones’ juice and the other carried it to them. Tyr Twofin, he put them both in the airiest cell in the west. For nothing.”
 

She didn’t need to say more. The old tyr had fed her family to one of those Fire-taken water serpents. That was why she had been trusted to look after him while he was helpless on the sleepstone. Tejohn was glad Redegg and the others had not bought her loyalty by taking hostages.
 

“I’m sorry.” The words felt strange as they came out of his mouth, and he did not want to see her reaction, but they were said and they needed to be said. He had never apologized to a servant before in his life, especially for something someone else did, but it seemed like the right thing to do, no matter how awkward.
 

Totewater did not answer. They passed out of the parade ground into the town, which she told him was called Saltstone. It was larger than expected; the pass sloped downward and curved around a walled-off rockslide on the eastern edge. The houses nearest the holdfast were large and fine, built from stone blocks and sturdy timbers with black slate roofs, but as they went farther north, they grew smaller. More were made of wood, with tarred plank roofs, until finally they were passing through row after row of shacks made of crude wooden frames covered with cloth stiffened with dried mud. The warehouses near the walls were made of raw lumber and unmortared stone, rough and utilitarian.

Along the western side of the cliffs were little grassy ledges where sheep had been perched. The eastern side of the mountains had been carved into terraced farmland. The Twofin people had made the best of their confined terrain.
 

The wall at the north end was just as large as the one at the south, which surprised him. Surely the Indregai did not raid this far to the west, and the Durdric did not form armies. A wall this high and thick in the middle of nowhere had to be a matter of prestige, didn’t it?
 

The guards at the Marsh Gate were reluctant to let him through before sunrise, but Tejohn could tell their hearts weren’t in it. A Twofin scout blundered sleepily from the barracks to give his advice about traveling through the wilderness, but there was little in it that Tejohn had not already planned to do.
 

The guards opened the little gate and escorted him out with a bow. The scout said there had been unusual activity among the rocks for many days and asked to accompany him. Tejohn needed only delay long enough for the man to fetch his kit and quiver from the holdfast, but Tejohn refused. The more he delayed, the more likely the council would awaken and try to stop him. He also couldn’t help but think of Reglis Singalan and Beacon Javien Biliannish, both taken from The Way because of him and his quest. “You’re needed here,” he said. “Do not follow or try to catch up. I command it.” He stepped through the door, then turned back. “Will I be able to see the tower at Tempest Pass when the day comes?”
 

“If the weather’s clear, my tyr,” the scout said. “And it usually is. It’s still farther than it seems.”
 

Tejohn nodded to him, then turned to Totewater. She had come to the very edge of the little Marsh Gate door but did not dare step through. “You know what to do.” She nodded.
 

He turned his back on them and walked northward. The little door thunked shut behind him, and he could hear bars sliding into place.
 

I have condemned myself to death.
The loose stone and dirt crunched under his boots as he made his way down the slope by starlight. He was heading almost due north, and if he was correct, he would have to find a path that would take him westward to the farthest edge of the Sweeps where he could turn northwest toward the tower.
 

It felt good to be alone. He rested his spear on his shoulder, hiked his shield up high, and walked out into the wind and darkness. The odd smell of the Sweeps wind--that vinegary tang--was very strong here, and it was a bit bracing.
Another realm entirely.
It was an odd, intoxicating thought.
 

No doubt the Durdric had lookouts stationed near the gate, and he was being observed even as he descended. His pack protected his back and the shield his left; it was unlikely an arrow would come to him out of the swamps. To the right were more terraced patches of garden, some quite large. All looked abandoned. Surely none of the Twofin people would shoot him. Still, he walked forward as if this was a final test of his honor and his life.
 

Grateful am I to be permitted to travel The Way.
 

The starlight was bright enough that he could see narrow trails running off the main pass up into the western side of the mountains. On two of them he could have sworn he saw rough stairs. These he bypassed, assuming they would be guarded. Farther he went, glancing back only once to see the distant torchlight of the Marsh Gate behind him. The ground became less stony, more earthen. Then, he stepped into a puddle of chilly water.
 

Even with the wind, the splash he made sounded loud in the darkness. Immediately, the flat land ahead of him lit up with nearly three dozen pairs of glowing eyes.
 

They were low to the ground, all of them, no higher than a house cat’s eyes would be. The closest was perhaps forty paces, the farthest harder to determine, and Tejohn had little doubt what they were.
 

Alligaunts. So many, though? And all crouching so close to the Marsh Gate? He backed away from them, point low. Surely they weren’t expecting prey. A herd of boq or a family of wild goats, maybe?
 

Tejohn had an unhappy suspicion that they were waiting for him.
 

It was still too dark to see them clearly, but their backs were long and narrow, and so were their heads. Their skin was ridged and thorny, somewhat like the backs of the blue grunts, but they had no hair on them at all. They were slick, wet, gleaming things, their heavy, muscular legs holding them very low to the ground. Only after he’d noticed them did they begin to lift their tails straight into the air, once again reminding him of cats in the way they waved and curled them.
 

Fire and Fury, there was a sense of palpable menace from them.
 

No matter. A glance to the right showed that the first faint traces of dawn had appeared at the far end of the Sweeps; he turned his back on it, hopping over a few low rocks toward a narrow stony path barely six feet above the mud. It wasn’t the path he would have chosen, but it had apparently chosen him. Tejohn followed the trail carefully, holding his shield high on the left in case a Durdric archer with a flint arrow lurked above, and holding his spear high on the right in case an alligaunt lay crouched between the rocks.
 

But there were none. The alligaunts never followed him, and no Durdric arrows struck his shield. As the daylight came up, he realized he was quite alone on the side of the mountain. After a short time, he climbed to a path that was slightly higher on the hillside. It was not because he wanted to be away from the muddy swamps below--in truth, the alligaunts seemed to have vanished--but because that higher path offered more concealment from watchful eyes above.
 

Tejohn traveled the whole day in silence, stopping for water only once. He moved carefully among the rocks, determined not to accidentally kick loose stones into a crevice or expose his position unknowingly to lookouts above.
 

It was going to be a long trip. The tower at Tempest Pass was indeed visible, pink granite against the charcoal gray mountain slopes, although he couldn’t see the pass. However, it was almost directly across the lake; it may have been farther than it looked, but Tejohn thought it looked far enough.
 

Ahead, the slopes curved around the westernmost edge of the Sweeps. If the sorcerer-kings of ancient times had truly dug out the Sweeps valley as a long trench, this was where they started. Tejohn needed only traverse the inside rim, keeping clear of the beasts below and the Holy Sons above.
 

However, as much as he crept and watched and crept again, he did not once spot a Durdric raider or alligaunt moving on the mountainside. He did have to hide for part of the afternoon when a team of spears and bows bearing the Twofin symbol blundered by on one of the higher trails, calling his name. For whatever reason, the council wanted him to have help. Or they wanted to bring him back at spearpoint.
 

He hid and kept still. Eventually, they turned back east toward the pass. He hoped he was rid of them.
 

Midway through the next day, he was suddenly struck by the smell of old blood and rotting flesh. Very quickly, he came to a flattened space on the side of the mountain slope. There were little mud houses here, along with okshim carts, rice barrels, and wooden swords for children.
 

There were bodies, too. Tejohn went on guard immediately, scanning the area for any signs of danger. There were none. The bodies were at least a few days old, but there few crows that had gathered were silent as he approached. Strange.
 

Tejohn sneaked forward, approaching the nearest corpse. It was an old woman, a broken pail clutched in her hand. She hadn’t simply been struck down; she had been killed and pulled apart as if by hooks.
 

The Durdric fought with hooked weapons, but he’d never seen evidence that they did anything like this. This was simple mutilation.
 

The pail appeared to have been struck by an ax, as if she’d raised it to defend herself. There was a string of seashells around her wrist.
 

A little farther up the slope was another body, this time of a young man with a broken club beside him. He had not been flensed like the woman had been; lying facedown in the dirt, his neck was gone. It hadn’t been severed. It had been removed from the tops of his shoulder and the base of his skull and was simply nowhere to be seen.
 

What sort of weapon was this? Tejohn stood in the middle of the muddy path, looking all around for some sign of who could have killed this way.
 

The dirt slope ran all the way down to the marsh grounds below. After a moment, he could make out an alligaunt lurking at the water’s edge, watching. There was, as far as he could tell, no reason the beasts would not come up the slope to feast upon the bodies, but they hadn’t. Were they loath to leave the water, or was something else keeping them at bay?
 

If there was one thing he was sure of, the old woman and the young man had not been killed by grunts. They took huge ragged bites from their prey. These people looked like they had been struck by sharp-edged weapons.
 

A small voice urged him to search the houses for supplies, but he didn’t dare linger. Everything about this seemed wrong, from the mysterious way the people had been killed to the lack of scavengers. He drank from and refilled a water skin at a basin designed to capture the flow of a tiny waterfall, then struck out further for the west.
 

It wasn’t until the next day that he saw the creature that had killed those Durdric villagers.

Chapter 9