The Way Into Darkness: Book Three of The Great Way (22 page)

Cazia told the whole thing, including the deception by Kinz and Alga, the dragon bones, the Tilkilit, the abandoned tower by the sea, the conversation with Mother, everything. Tejohn listened without interrupting or rolling his eyes. Not even once.

His face became pale when she told him about their flight across the empire. He’d expected to hear that Peradain was in ruins, but the stories she told of shattered cities, burning crops, and corpses on the road clearly shook him to his core.
 

“Where did you cross over into the Sweeps?” he asked.
 

“Caarilit. It was a burned, empty ruin.”
 

Tejohn was silent a moment. Cazia was finished with her part of the story. “I almost think you believe us.”
 

“I do” was all he said in return.
 

Then Ghoron groaned and rolled onto his side.
 

“Fire and Fury,” Tejohn drew his sword and raised his shield, then moved close to the prince.
 

“Where am I?” Ghoron called out. “What has happened to me? Was I dead?”
 

“No,” Cazia called. She would have approached, but the look Old Stoneface gave her warned her off.
He’s just being careful.
“What is the last thing you remember?”
 

There was a moment’s pause before he responded. “Being exhausted,” Ghoron answered, “and falling asleep in my bed. How did I get out here? And what is this… Monument sustain me, what am I covered with?”
 

“You went hollow,” Tejohn said, his voice cold. “You have been living in seclusion ever since.”
 

“Feh!” the prince answered. “I’ve lived in seclusion for most of my life. There’s research to be done! It doesn’t mean that…” He fell silent, looking at the stones around him, then his hands, then the tray of food that had sat beside him overnight. “I…”
 

“It’s coming back to you, isn’t it?” Cazia said. She looked at Tejohn. The old soldier’s lips were white where he pressed them together, and his face was shiny with sweat; he looked ready to kill at the slightest provocation. She raised her hand and pressed downward.
Be calm.
“You had something else living inside of you.”

“I did,” Ghoron said. His thin, high voice was almost swallowed by the sound of the wind. “Many, many somethings. Great Way, I
did
go hollow, didn’t I?” He glanced up at Treygar and, for the first time, seemed to recognize the danger the man represented. “Are you going to kill me?”

When Treygar answered, he bared his teeth. “I haven’t decided yet.”

“They’re gone,” Ghoron said. “I assure you it’s true. All of the voices are gone. I’m myself again.”
 

Treygar didn’t relax one bit. “What voices?”
 

Cazia broke in. “The other presence. The thing, unliving but intelligent,
 
that enters a person when they go hollow, and takes away their…our humanity.”
 

“I remember now,” the old man said again. He sat up, moving as though his body felt strange. “I went too far. After years of being careful, I became frustrated and went too far. The magic inside me awoke. So many feelings I couldn’t control! Feelings that didn’t come from me! I couldn’t tell the difference between what it wanted and what I wanted.”
 

Cazia felt a weird mixture of shame and relief. Someone else had gone through what she had gone through! She was not alone! She glanced at Kinz and Ivy, expecting to see them looking at the prince with disgust, but instead, they were staring at her blankly.
 

I’m sorry.

“Unliving but intelligent. Yes, that’s what it was like. But as time went on, things got more complicated. It grew more powerful, controlling me more directly, and that voice inside began to sound like a chorus.”

Goose bumps ran down Cazia’s back. “How long before that happened?”
 

“Months. Oh, Great Way, it has been months that I was— How did you cure me?” He turned back to his tray of food. The stone was still sitting in the bowl, half covered by strips of alligaunt that had hardened overnight in the wind. “Was it this?” He shoved a strip of meat aside and his finger brushed the stone.
 

His body convulsed and he sprawled on the stones again. When he came back to himself, his mouth hung open in astonishment. “It took my magic away.”
 

Cazia nodded. “Only temporarily.”
 

“Soldier,” the prince said, “sheathe your weapons. You have no enemy here. These girls have defeated it. These girls have changed the world.”
 

Cazia felt a flush of pride. Someone finally understood.
 

Tejohn blinked several times, then slung his shield on his back. His shoulders were relaxed and he took his eyes off the prince while he sheathed his sword. Good. Old Stoneface recognized the kinzchu stones were a cure for wizardry. And if he could be convinced, anyone could.

“Now, my goodness! I need a barrel of water, a jar of oil, and a scraper. I can’t imagine how I got so filthy!”

“Excuse me,” Ivy said quite loudly. “We have an important question: Where is the library?”
 

The old man looked put out. “My library? Why, it’s—” He turned toward the tower.

“Not any longer,” Cazia interrupted. “It’s been taken. We need it—and you—so we can make more of these stones.”
 

“You don’t know how to make them? Then where did they come from?”
 

“We stole them,” Cazia said blandly, “from someone who was trying to kill us. We need to study them and create more. Many, many more.”
 

Ghoron scowled at the filth on his hands and his arms, as though they were the most pressing concern. Then he rolled onto his hands and knees and peered down at the stone.
 

“Easy,” he said. “Yes. Yes, that should be no trouble at all.”

Chapter 13

Cazia’s first instinct was to begin immediately. Did they need specific kinds of stones? How many? What hand motions and mental symbols were required, and where could she get some parchment to write them down? Because she wanted to learn this spell from front to back immediately: how to embed it in an inanimate object like a sleepstone, how to cast it on others, and how to cast it on herself.
 

Unfortunately, Ghoron was in no hurry. His stomach was grumbling loud enough for all of them to hear, and he wanted to return to his tower so he could clean himself up. The old prince struggled to his feet and began to issue orders as though they were all his servants.
 

“Pardon me, my prince,” Ivy said with a slight smirk. “I think you should look inside your tower before calling for a bath.”
 

Ghoron sighed and began picking his way across the courtyard, stepping carefully among the stones. Though his appearance was the same, the change in his demeanor from the creature that had crept through the tower door was astonishing.
 

“Fire take us all!” he cried when he looked through the tower door at the mess inside. “What am I looking at?”
 

“Your home,” Cazia said. “Come away from there. If you’re going to wash, you’ll have to do it out here. Catch.”
 

She tossed him the soft cake thing—the soap—and began to prepare a spell. She could make water that was cold as glacial runoff, but for warm water? The changes she would need to make in her gestures were clear and simple. She cast the Fifth Gift, unleashing a light spray of water—barely warmer than his own body—onto the prince.
 

He looked at the lump of soap in his hands, sighed, and began to rub it on his arms. Cazia began to circle him; she could maintain the spell for a short while, but not long enough to clean this mess. She suppressed a laugh. How strange it was to be standing here, bathing a member of the Italga family with magic. How absurd the world had become.
 

They glanced up at the cliff, where a great many faces had gathered to watch in safety. Ghoron scowled at them. “When I’m clean, I’ll want to see my little girl. Jagia must be speaking in full sentences by now! I won’t help you with your research until I see her.”
 

Things got complicated after that.
 

Ghoron didn’t believe his daughter was nine years old. He didn’t believe he had been hollow for so long. He refused to accept that the empire had collapsed, that his brother and wife were dead, that his nephew the prince was lost, and that something called The Blessing was overrunning Kal-Maddum.
 

Cazia went over her story again and again, skipping the more outlandish parts. The Festival, the attack, the flight to Samsit, the spread of the grunts. The prince only shook his head, staring down at himself while he washed. Cazia could see a little smirk on his face, as though everyone were having an amusing joke at his expense.
 

As suddenly as if a chair had collapsed beneath her, Cazia fell into a cold fury. How dare he call her a liar after she’d lost so much and seen so much pain? Who did he think he was? With Ellifer gone, Ghoron Italga was nothing more than a half-starved old man with a name that would get him killed. Who was he to act like he knew what was happening out in the world?
 

She started up her water spell again, but this time she made sure it was neither gentle nor warm. Ghoron shrieked like a bat, then lost his balance and fell onto the stony courtyard. The sound he made next was pitiful, and in truth, he was pitiful himself. The thick brown filth caked onto his skin sloughed off him along with the foamy wet soap. His cleaned skin was bright red and scaly from the mistreatment it had received over the years. He looked like a criminal pulled from an imperial pit, and Fire take her if she was going to suffer his scorn.
 

Treygar stepped toward him. He held up one hand to Cazia, and contained in that gesture was a gentle admonishment, a weary agreement that the prince was being impossible, and the assurance that he would make the man understand. It was amazing, really, what Stoneface could fit into a single gesture.
 

She stalked away from the two of them toward the edge of the yard. At the westernmost end, the yard sloped downward a bit and then dropped off at the edge of a cliff. Kinz and Ivy were both sitting there, pitching stones into the water below.
 

“Kinz and I are arguing,” Ivy said very casually, “about whether the lake below is salt or fresh.”
 

“Not arguing,” Kinz said, “just making to disagree about the world. I say the lakeboys prefer the fresh, so this must be fresh.”
 

“I keep pointing out the kelp mixed with the reeds at the water’s edge. That is an ocean plant.”

An ocean… “Do you think Lake Windmark is connected to the ocean somehow? Like the tunnel we found outside the black fortress?”
 

“Markwind,” Kinz said blandly. “It is possible. I have seen such things in the east. There are more than we realized, yes?”

Did she mean alligaunts? Cazia wasn’t sure. As she stared down into the waters, some two hundred feet below, she saw dozens of the creatures swimming among the rocks. No, not dozens; dozens of dozens. How could so many predators survive in such a small space?
 

“What do you think?” Ivy asked. “Fresh or salt?”

Two hundred feet away. Cazia remembered how Ghoron—that pampered fool—had simply peered into the kinzchu stone and been sure he could recreate its magic. Simply by staring at it. Cazia had tried the same thing, many times, but it never worked for her. What had he done differently?
 

Cazia leaned out over the cliff, spurring Kinz and Ivy to hastily grab hold of her jacket. The water was dark green at the edges but night-black in the center, where it must have been very deep. It was also slightly choppy from the wind. With the Fifth Gift, she could make or purify water, but could she
know
it as well?
 

She stared down at it, trying to examine it the way Ghoron had examined the kinzchu stone. He couldn’t have used magic, not so soon after touching it, so she didn’t, either. She could think about her magic, though. She peered down at the water. Becoming a wizard had changed the way she understood her magic; had it also changed the way she could understand the world?
 

“It’s salty,” she said, sure it was true just as the words came out of her mouth. “Not as salty as some places, but… There’s a stream that feeds into it from the west, and…”
 

She was suddenly dizzy, then fell onto her side. The girls shrieked in terror, dragging her back from the cliff’s edge. Cazia heaved and retched, her nearly empty stomach spitting up a thin stream of acid.
 

She lay with her face against the stones—she could see into them, too. The odd structure of them, their weight, and…

Her whole body began to tremble. Kinz held her arms still while Ivy stroked her hair and shushed her. For once, Cazia thought that was advice worth taking. She closed her eyes and did everything she would normally do to fall asleep: she slowed her breathing, relaxed her muscles, and did her best to empty her mind.