The Way Into Darkness: Book Three of The Great Way (40 page)

“We are!” a woman cried, and a chorus of voices shouted in agreement. Three people relieved him of the robes in his hands, and the young woman who had protested looked down at her feet, her face red.
 

A dark-haired young woman stepped in front of him. She wore a soldier’s underpadding but not the armor that went over it. Tejohn suddenly noticed several others were dressed similarly. There were more soldiers here than he’d expected. “What can we do?” she asked.
 

Tejohn noticed the broken kinzchu spearpoint lying in the dirt. He picked it up and slid it into his belt. “Fetch me a ladder. And a sturdy rope.”
 

It wasn’t just the holdfast doors that were blocked by granite blocks, it was the walls around them, too. The pounding the grunts had given the place had been vicious, but the pink blocks were unmoved.
 

No matter. When the soldier returned with a ladder, Tejohn used it to climb onto the balcony, then lifted it so he could set it on the balcony and gain the roof. The woman who had brought it to him looked distressed, as though she’d expected to accompany him. Two others crossed the yard with an even longer ladder, so perhaps she would soon.
 

Tejohn scrambled across the wooden roof. The holdfast was built like a great wooden box, with a single stone tower rising out of it. That tower was made of scholar-created stone with so many arrow slits, Tejohn didn’t think the tower wide enough to hold that many bows.
 

A shadow moved behind one of the slits, and Tejohn’s skin crawled. If they’d planned to shoot an arrow into him, they would have done it by now. He hoped. Out of habit, he’d moved his shield up to protect himself, but after a moment’s thought, he lowered it. Best not to take a warlike stance.
 

“You saw what just happened!” Tejohn called. “You saw! Now come out and take your place as the saviors of humankind!”
 

“Big talk,” a woman answered, “but how do we know it’s real?”
 

Tejohn almost laughed. “You think this was a performance, staged by the grunts, to draw you out?”
 

“How do we know it’s not?”
 

This wasn’t right. Something was going on that Tejohn didn’t understand. “How many of you has he killed?” There was no answer from the tower. Three locals came off the top of the ladder onto the roof, but Tejohn held up his hand to silence them. “I know Doctor Twofin is in there with you. How many?”
 

“Some,” came the answer, finally.

“Is he there? He knew me once. Let me speak to him.”
 

“He doesn’t come to the tower,” the woman inside answered. “He isn’t here.”

The locals had brought him a heavy coil of rope. Tejohn drew his knife and short sword and set them on the roof. In a better world, he would never have use for them again. “Find a sturdy place to tie that off. We’re going into the holdfast below by one of the galleries.”

“Descend into the holdfast,” the woman called, “and you will be killed.”
 

“Look at me!” Tejohn called back. “My only weapon is a blunt spear! Will you murder an unarmed man? Would your tyr allow the murder of the man who liberated his people?”

There was an delay before the answer came. “Enter the holdfast and be killed.”
 

“He’s there, isn’t he?” Tejohn asked, the words coming out of his mouth almost before the realization came to him. “He’s right there, speaking in your ear.”
 

“No,” she answered in a completely unconvincing tone. “No, he’s not.”
 

Tejohn felt more convinced than ever that Doctor Twofin was there, just inside that tower. Goose bumps ran down his back, and it took all of his willpower not to crouch behind his shield. How could he reach the scholar and tyr when he couldn’t even see him? They’d been colleagues once--not friends, but friendly--and Tejohn had respected the old teacher in a way that he’d never respected any scholar. For his part, Twofin had never behaved as though he was afraid of Tejohn as so many others had.
 

But those old bonds meant nothing anymore. The old man had gone hollow. He was a wizard.
If you overuse magic, you may find the god difficult to exorcise. It is a holy thing.

The Great Way wants to know and to be known.

That’s what Dhe had said. Clearly, whether Tejohn truly believed that it was The Great Way acting through the old scholar, it was that force that he needed to address.
 

“Don’t you want to know how I did it?” There was no answer right away. “Doctor Twofin. My tyr, wouldn’t you like to know how I managed to undo The Blessing? Knowledge like that would be valuable. You could take knowledge like that out into the world. Maybe, if you learned to make and wield them yourself, this sort of magic could bear your name--”

“How?” The voice was hoarse, as though he had not spoken for days.

“Is that you, Doctor Twofin? My tyr?” Tejohn waved the locals off the roof and they were happy to comply.
 

“How?” he asked again. This time, Tejohn could see the tip of an iron dart appear inside an arrow slit.
 

He did not raise his shield. “Kill me and you’ll never know.”
 

“I want to know.”
 

Fire and Fury, that voice did not sound remotely human. “Humankind has nearly disappeared from all of Kal-Maddum. I will ally myself with anyone who can help prevent that. Anyone.” Tejohn stepped forward and slowly raised the kinzchu spear toward the arrow slit where the old scholar was standing. “Can you make more of these?”
 

He was careful not to hold the spear too close. Twofin’s hand, gnarled and dirty, with dried blood along the knuckles, reached through the gap.

Almost. He almost grabbed hold of it on his own, but some wizard’s sense seemed to warn him off. He pulled his hand back.
 

But Tejohn was quick. He’d always been quicker than anyone. He thrust the spear quickly toward the slot and rapped the kinzchu stone on the back of the old man’s knuckles.
 

There was a sound of a body falling from inside the tower and someone cried out, “My tyr!”
 

“Don’t hurt him!” Tejohn shouted. “Don’t take his fingers or cut his throat. I just--” His skin prickled suddenly and he raised his shield. An arrow struck it solidly. “Don’t let anyone hurt him!” He shouted again. “I just cured him!”

Chapter 25

It did not take long for Cazia to become completely, hopelessly lost. Once she passed over Twofin’s southern wall, she saw that the road wound down the mountainside to the east. She was headed into Freewell lands, which lay in the southwest.

In her younger years, she had spent long afternoons hidden in the map room of the Scholars’ Tower staring at the westernmost lands in Peradain. At her father’s lands. She knew, generally, what angle she should turn once she was out of Salt Pass. She knew the Bescos River flowed south out of the mountains to the Bescos Sea somewhere near her father’s lands. She also knew there was a road called the Espileth Way that connected the Freewell holdings to the Simblin lands to the south, and led eastward from there to the Waterlands.
 

The road and the river met at her father’s holdfast, so she figured all she had to do was turn the cart slightly to the right, keep her speed up and her eyes open, and she was sure to come across either one or the other at some point. Whichever it was, she would follow it straight to her destination.
 

Where she would meet him for the first time. Monument give her the strength she would need for that moment. How she had hated her father, after the years of torment people had piled on her in his name. And, at the same time, how she had longed to see him ride out of the west to protect her from her Enemies.
 

She had never tried to tell anyone about those daydreams except her older brother, and he became terrified before she’d gotten more than a few words out, shushing her as he shut the door to his room. He’d seemed so much older and wiser than her at the time, but he couldn’t have been older than ten at the time.
Father is a cold-blooded killer,
he’d insisted. Father was a courageous warrior. Father was poisoned by ambition. Father turned on the king and his family.
 

Father caused the death of thousands.
 

He was hated by the entire civilized world, even his former allies. Only King Ellifer’s forbearance allowed him to retain his holdfast and the title of tyr, although no one was entirely sure why.
 

Cazia had been taught to hate him from her earliest years, had been raised on stories of grief and loss he had caused, had seen countless battle scars and limbless stumps earned on the fields of battle that he instigated. At the same time, she’d secretly hoped he would rescue her the way warrior-fathers rescued kidnapped daughters in old songs and plays. She’d secretly hoped everyone she’d ever spoken to was wrong, and that he was simply misunderstood. It was absurd, yes, but there it was, a childish desire she thought she would carry into her old age.
 

What was she going to say to the man? What would he be like? Part of her imagined him as a devious, eel-eyed sadist, part of her imagined him as a gruff but capable warrior who still loved her from afar.
 

It was foolish. If he truly loved her, she would have met him long before. She would have had a letter from him, or a gift for the changing of the year, or the traditional bouquet on her tenth birthday.
 

Instead, all of that had come from people inside the palace. The king and queen had been the ones to give her gifts and her bouquet. Doctor Twofin had given her his time and his care. As for her father, well, he hadn’t even tried.
 

Cazia expected to see him before nightfall that very day.
 

Perhaps it was that her thoughts were so scattered. Perhaps it was that the terrain below her quickly became more rugged than any she’d ever seen before. Perhaps it was just that she was hungry and tired. Whatever the reason, the sun was low over the mountains in the west when, without having passed either river or road, the ground suddenly dropped away and Cazia found herself zooming out over a broad expanse of water.
 

She was so startled that she immediately dipped lower, as though there was something to be learned among the small green swells. Glancing down, saw huge eddies rippling above massive shadows beneath the surface, and she immediately climbed much, much higher.
 

Was this the Bescos Sea? The western shore ahead was so far away it was shrouded in mist, but the mountains of the peninsula beyond were huge silhouettes against the sky. She tried to remember what the maps said. There were no large lakes that she remembered. The nearest was Deep Stone Lake. Could she have accidentally turned eastward and flown all the way into Finstel lands?
 

No, of course not.
 

Goose bumps ran all over Cazia’s body. This
was
the Bescos Sea. Deep water.
 

She banked to the right, turning back toward the north shore. She also gained more altitude. Sea giants lived in the Bescos. Cazia had never seen one and had no plans to start now.
 

It took a few moments for the cart to turn around fully, but nothing leaped out of the water at her. The edge of the land ahead was a cliff face: rich brown earth rising straight out of the sea. The golden light of sunset shone on the dark green forest atop it. Small streams spilled from between the trees and fell a hundred feet to the churning waves below, mist blowing off them like bridal veils.
 

Great Way, it was a beautiful sight, but Cazia would have happily gone her whole life without it. She had come too far, having missed the road or the river. She’d certainly bypassed the holdfast, which was supposed to be some distance from the shore, according to the map.
 

According to her
memory of the map
, she meant. She looked to her left. The cliffs continued northward, growing higher and higher, for as far as she could see. To the right, the cliffs grew gradually lower as they sloped down toward the distant ocean.
 

Somewhere out there was the Simblin holdfast. They were Pagesh’s lands, and Cazia flushed to realize how long it had been since she’d thought of her friend, lost so many months ago when Peradain fell.
 

She passed back over the cliffs again, reaching land just as she heard a loud splashing behind her. Safe. She was safe again, back over land.
 

In the maps, this had all been blank space—the yellowish nothing of a parchment where no one had bothered to draw. In real life, the land was so thick with late summer greenery she couldn’t see the forest floor. The terrain rippled with hills and ridges as the treetops rose and fell in seemingly random ways.
 

Where was the Bescos River? Could it have been any of the three slender waterfalls she’d seen? Everyone in Peradain knew rivers could change course suddenly, turning farmland into lake, but what path could a river large enough to merit a line on a map take in this rugged terrain?