The Way Into Darkness: Book Three of The Great Way (41 page)

Of course, it was also possible that she had flown too far south and the Freewell holdfast was north of her, right in the teeth of the Durdric
 
lands. If that were the case, it would be the road that she had missed. Frankly, that seemed the more likely option, since it was easy to imagine a road completely hidden beneath this dense canopy.
 

Cazia was lost, but she had two sensible options. If the holdfast was to the south, it meant she’d flown over the river without seeing it. It meant she’d have to turn right and fly out over those deep, green, terrifying forests.
 

If the holdfast was to the north, it meant she’d missed the road, a prospect that seemed much more likely. It meant she’d have to turn left and fly back toward the Southern Barrier, to that place where sea met mountain.
 

No matter which way she turned, there would be The Blessing. To the south were sea giants, creatures that hated humans and murdered them at every opportunity. To the north were the Durdric; their holy sons would consider every metal object Cazia carried to be blasphemy, including the protective covering to her mace. What’s more, there was less ground to cover north of her. She might take three days to fly to the end of the land to the south, but she could probably reach the bare foothills of the Southern Barrier by nightfall.
 

Which of Fury’s avatars should she pray to for guidance? She wasn’t sure, so she turned south, picking the direction at random. Despite the assurances she had given Old Stoneface, she had become thoroughly lost and had been reduced to hoping for good luck. Worse, she was flagging. Flying a cart was not the most difficult thing she’d ever done, but she hadn’t eaten since dropping off Tyr Treygar. Worse, standing all day with the wind in her face had left her parched. At some point, she was going to have to land this cart, but it had been quite a long time since she’d seen flat ground of any kind.
 

Could Cazia set it down on a treetop and balance there for the night? She might have to.
 

But she didn’t try. She kept flying southward, slowly angling away from the water as the sun dipped lower behind the mountains. Cazia tried not to think about the fact that she had no idea how far inland the holdfast might be, that she hadn’t seen any farmland to support even a small settlement, or that if she nodded off while still in the air, the crashing cart might kill her before she woke.
 

Her cargo of weapons would be lost in the wilderness. She would vanish from Kal-Maddum, her mission a failure. Only Song would know what had happened to her.
 

Cazia kept flying as dark came over the forest. The glow in the west faded, shadow took the forest below, and the stars began to appear in the east. She knew she had passed the time when she should stop, but she pushed on anyway. As the night grew darker, she kept telling herself it was time to find a treetop that would support her, if she could, because darkness grew deeper with every moment. Soon, it would be too dark to safely choose a place to settle. She kept telling herself that and she kept pushing on anyway.
 

When she saw the light, she was so tired that she feared it was a hallucination. It appeared in front of her on the left, and she was aware of it for quite a while before coming close enough to realize it was firelight.
 

Cazia turned toward it, not daring to hope that she had found civilization. Perhaps she’d gone so far south that she’d intruded on Simblin lands. Perhaps it was a nothing more than a storm house with someone’s cook fire flickering beside it.
 

But no. The light became a ring of torches set atop a tower, and the tower rose out of a massive granite building set upon a hill. There were more torches down below among the other buildings, and also along a bridge that crossed a white-capped river.
 

She slowed her cart, feeling it shudder as she did so. The sentries at the top of the tower strung their bows and readied arrows, but she flew close to them, circling the tower slowly.
 

“Who approaches?”
 

“A friend!” Cazia called in answer. Her voice was hoarse and dry. She suddenly realized there were two more unlit towers and she had nearly collided with one. “I bring weapons for the war against the grunts.”
 

He and his four companions stared blankly at the kinzchu spears strapped to the side of her cart. “There is no war against the grunts,” the sentry responded, his voice bitter. “There is only waiting our turn.”
 

That was a bad sign. “Where can I find the tyr?” She almost said
the tyr my father
—in fact, to her great surprise, she ached to say it—but the anger and resentment in the man’s voice made her hold back.
 

“You will find him there.” He pointed toward an open field near the bridge. “At his leisure.”
 

Cazia thanked him and eased the cart away. No one shot an arrow into her, which made for quite an improvement over the last time she’d approached a walled city at night.
 

The holdfast had been built of pink scholar stone, probably in the years before Tyr Freewell led his rebellion. Everything else had been constructed from wood. The houses, the streets, even the wall around the village was made of standing logs, sharpened at the top.
 

For someone who had grown up surrounded by stone, it seemed like a slender shield against the raids of Durdric fighters and the grunts.
 

Inside the walls, the river grew wider as it flowed south and the piers grew larger and longer. On the far bank, what she took to be an open field was actually a stadium of some kind. The ground was sunken and plowed flat. It was ringed with a track, which itself was ringed by stadium seats thirty feet above the play field.
 

Cazia stayed well up in the air, above the torchlight. She didn’t want to disrupt the evening’s entertainment, whatever it was.
 

She searched the rows of benches for her father, or at least for a section of the seating that looked appropriate for a tyr. The stands were half full of common folk, scattered here and there, with only the easternmost section being empty. That portion of the stands was higher than the others and had been divided into boxes with actual chairs.
 

But no one was sitting in those empty box seats. A few spears stood at the top of the stairs or at the entry points to guard it, but that was all. It didn’t make any sense. Did her father prefer to sit among the common folk?
 

Movement on the field caught her attention. Someone had stepped onto the grass at the eastern end, and now that she was paying attention, she noticed that the ground there was higher than the rest of the field, and that there were wooden barriers as well. She moved closer, peering over the edge of the cart at them; the barriers were short, freestanding walls with spikes on top and…doors built into them? Was this going to be a play?
 

A figure moved among the barriers, then back toward open ground. It was a man wearing the same combination of armor and scholar’s robe that Lar wore on the day he flew out of Samsit. The man was big, broad-shouldered, and muscular, but he moved with the grace of a dancer. His helm obscured his face, but his long, dark hair hung down his back in thick braids.
 

Two servants scurried onto the field to set a spear and shield on racks behind him.
 

He raised his empty right hand to the crowd, and they cheered. It was a ragged sound—the stands were not filled enough for a full-throated cheer—but at the same time, there was something desperate and bloodthirsty in it.
 

The cheering grew louder and more intense. Cazia turned the cart so she could see the whole field; there, at the western end, were three soldiers lifting and swinging a huge wooden boom over the top of the stands. Dangling from the end was a big bronze cage, large enough to hold a man.
 

For a moment, she suspected this would be an execution, but that didn’t make sense, not with all those barriers. This was clearly a staged fight. The scholar at the far end was the crowd favorite, but was he going to battle another scholar? A condemned prisoner?
 

Sport combat had been outlawed after the Eleventh Festival, and for good reason. Whatever was going to happen here, her father should never have allowed it.
 

Then the cage, suspended high above the field, suddenly opened at the bottom. The figure inside plummeted to the field.
 

Fire and Fury, it was a blue-furred grunt.
 

The beast struck the grass hard, landing on its shoulder and neck. For a moment, Cazia was sure it had been accidentally killed, but as the crowd’s cheer became louder and louder, the creature gained its feet and stood upright. It roared at the people around it, and the crowd’s answering scream was vicious and deafening.
 

To her embarrassment, Cazia did not react immediately. For no reason that she could understand, the noise of the crowd made her think of her own dart sinking into her brother’s ribs. Her hand twitched, raising the cart higher, and she floated backward toward the wall and the wilderness beyond.
 

No. She took a deep breath. No, she was not going to run away, not from this situation.
 

She gathered herself and turned the cart so she could see the whole field at once. The grunt had charged toward the stands and was leaping upward, trying to get at the people. The seats were too high for it to reach, and any attempt at climbing was beaten back by a hail of stones.
 

The crowd jeered at every attempt, and their voices grew louder and crueler with each passing moment.
 

Then a chime toned, clear and high. The creature turned toward the noise, at the eastern end of the field. The crowd fell silent long enough for the tone to fade, then began chanting something in earnest.
 

The grunt charged toward the eastern end of the field. The crowd grew louder and louder. Many people were off their feet. The beast moved toward the northern side of the track, and soldiers along that side lifted pennants to let the scholar know where it was.
 

The crowd’s chant was two syllables, but Cazia couldn’t make them out, not way up here in the night sky. Then the grunt threw itself against the first barrier, and the chant turned into a cheer.
 

It would have been easy for the beast to go around the wall, but the closed door seemed to enrage it. It threw itself hard against the freestanding door, battering it with fists. The whole barrier shuddered under the assault, and Cazia thought it would topple over before the bar on the door would break.
 

A block of granite appeared in the air above the grunt. The beast noticed it too late and it was caught beneath it as it fell.
 

Dead. The armored scholar raised both hands and carried his spear through the barricades. The grunt was as dead as it would get, but the crowd shouted its approval when he thrust the spear into its protruding forearm anyway.
 

Free. Well. Free. Well. Free. Well.
 

Suddenly, the chanting was as clear to her as if she’d picked up a translation stone. They were chanting her name.
 

The man in the armor and the scholar’s robe, fighting grunts one-on-one for the entertainment of the bloodthirsty mob, was her father.

Chapter 26

When Tyr Freewell returned to his high place on the field, he grabbed the strap of a quiver of darts and swung it above his head. It circled around and around—the crowd loved it, for some reason. Then, in a single motion, he lowered his arm so the belt slapped around his waist. He caught the far end and hooked the buckle in a single motion, then raised a dart above his head. Black and green streamers hung off the back. Great Way, he was performing for them.
 

Cazia was already lowering her cart toward the field when she noticed the boom moving again. What she wanted to do, more than anything, was to present a kinzchu spear to her father—even better would have been to take one up herself and defend him with it. Something, anything, to make a good impression.
 

But there was no way for her to untie one of the spears from the sides or bottom of the cart without the anti-magic effect striking her. The least awful thing that would happen was that, with the loss of her magic, the cart would drop out of the sky and shatter. The worst was that she would have to face a grunt and this vicious crowd without access to any of the Gifts.
 

Still, she passed into the torchlight, and the chanting of the crowd faltered as people noticed her.
 

The boom swung out over the field; Cazia could see the grunt inside it turning in slow circles. She had descended until she was level with the lowest seats in the stadium and everyone could see her. Surely they would not open the cage while—