The Way Into Magic: Book Two of The Great Way (19 page)

Too slow. There was no way she could get the spell off quickly enough.
 

Maybe it would miss.

The Tilkilit warrior above reached into the pouch at its belt, drew back its arm, and then threw. There was no place to dodge. Cazia flinched, but kept her spell going.
Too late.

Kinz stepped onto the bridge, her pointed stick held above her head. She swung, and was rewarded with the sharp crack of wood on stone. “I hit it!” she exclaimed, her eyes wide with surprise.
 

The Tilkilit on the rock above stood in apparent confusion for a moment, then reached into its pouch again. Two more appeared above the crest of the overhang.

The Eleventh Gift finished. Cazia directed it toward the base of the overhanging rock. It was some twenty or twenty five away--farther than she had ever attempted before, but she had stretched her will to the limits.
 

It worked. The stone crumbled and fell away, causing the overhanging boulder to shift. The movement seemed so small, but all three Tilkilit warriors lost their balance. The first one, another stone in hand, clicked loudly. She didn’t need a translation stone to recognize its fear.
 

The stone continued to shift. It slowly rolled outward and, alarmingly, toward the makeshift bridge Cazia had created. The Tilkilit warriors were unable to cling to the rock, and they slid down its face. Cazia and Kinz could see them, coming closer and closer, as they slipped and tumbled down the side of the rock, then under it.
 

It’s going to crush us,
Cazia thought, her throat going tight.
 
She seemed frozen in place.

But no. It shifted to the side and wedged against the spire they’d just climbed. It was only when the boulder became still again that she realized how loud it had been when it fell.
 

“Maybe they were alone,” Kinz said, her eyes still wide.
 

“They shouted
Advance
before they fell,” Cazia said, “so there are more close by. We have to...” She looked around. They had to what? What could she do? Continue her tunnel? The Tilkilit were born in tunnels. She did not want to face them underground.
 

Kinz searched the sky above them. As the fog blew around the rocks, they caught glimpses of blue sky. There were no predators in sight, but they could only see a sliver of what was above them.
 

Ivy crawled out onto the little bridge. “That was quite a swing.”

“Thank you,” Kinz answered. “On long treks, the only fun kids could make was to swat spitflies with our little spears.” She looked guiltily at Cazia. “I was not very good at that game.”
 

It was amazing how different things could be when their lives were in danger. “Today, you were. Now we need to figure out how we’re going to--”

Ivy leaped from the little stone bridge onto the side of the tumbled boulder. Cazia would have cried out if she’d had the chance to catch her breath.

But the little princess did not fall the way the Tilkilit had. She landed in the narrow wedge where the boulder met the spire behind them, and she began to climb. The overturned rock was nearly vertical there, but the spire had enough crevices that the girl could climb the gap between them. Actually, she made it look almost easy.
 

Kinz sighed in resignation and jumped after her, the older girl’s weight making the stone bridge slide back slightly at the force of her leap. Cazia let out a tiny
meep
of fear, but Kinz also landed neatly in the space Ivy had just climbed out of. In fact, there was an odd little stone shelf out there, not even four feet away.
 

Cazia stood, feeling suddenly very wobbly. It was one thing to dig through the rock, but jumping across an open gap with nothing but stone and corpses and the weapons those corpses carried below her...
 

Of course, she had to try the leap herself. Ivy and Kinz had both done it, and if she was too afraid, she would have had to call them both back down. Cazia was not brave; she just didn’t want to feel humiliated. After Kinz had climbed well above the little shelf, Cazia leaped for it.
 

Her foot landed perfectly but her chest hit the rock much too hard, and she almost bounced right back out of the wedge. Only her panicked grip on the stones saved her life.
 

She’d jumped too hard, put too much effort into it. Did the Evening People have a spell for people who overdo everything? She needed one. She needed something to teach her restraint.
 

A few loose rocks tumbled onto her head, getting tangled in her hair. “Sorry,” Kinz whispered from above, but Cazia didn’t care. She’d already spent days in the tunnel; her head was practically caked with dirt and tiny stones. What bothered her was that Kinz was struggling, just a bit, to keep up with Ivy.
 

Cazia began to climb after them. Ivy had managed it readily, but she was still a child. Kinz, who had worked out of doors her whole life, had to struggle to make the climb.
 

But Cazia had grown up studying in the tower, learning the hand motions and mental images needed to cast a spell, learning to read and write, learning all sorts of things, really. Yes, she had spent the last few months outside, climbing and walking and running, too, when she had to. And she’d eaten almost the whole time.
 

But she still had a bit of a belly. She had muscles now, more than ever before, but she also had a fair bit of flesh over them.
 
She climbed, stepping from one knobby piece of stone to the next, praying for Monument to give her arms and legs the strength she needed.
 

She never felt so close to death in her life, not even when she’d found an arrow sticking out of a canteen in her backpack.
 

When she finally reached the top of the stone, she saw that the other girls were lying flat on their bellies. She crawled toward them, staying as low as possible. Where were the eagles? Surely they could see the white and gray of the girls’ hiking skirts against the dark rock. They must have been as alluring as a piece of sweetcake on an untended windowsill.
 

She craned her neck looking around but couldn’t see anything but fog and stone. She did hear the cry of one of the eagles. They were still to the west, flapping near the cliff face. Surely they weren’t still harassing that Tilkilit lookout beneath the overhang, not after three days.
 

“Down!” Ivy whispered, and they all heard the clicking of approaching Tilkilit troops. “There is a column of vines there,” the girl said, nodding toward the far side of the rock, “and they are climbing up.”
 

“We could make to climb that little ridge,” Kinz said. She pointed to a ledge that ran upward for quite a distance. Cazia liked the look of it immediately. It wasn’t even as steep as the tunnel she’d been digging. They could practically run up it. “But we would be in sight of the bugs.”
 

Fire and Fury, Cazia realized she was right. “I need to see,” she said, and crept forward.
 

The vine column was there: two curving trunks twined around each other, both supported by other woody vines like a spider’s web. She dared lean farther out, looking down the column. It was bigger than any of the others she’d seen. The vines were so far apart that she doubted she could climb it. The bottom was hidden by fog, but it could have been impossibly tall.
 

There was a flash of dark red, and she rolled back out of sight. The Tilkilit were climbing, making small leaps from one vine to the next, testing them. If they’d seen her, they could have bounded up to her in moments.
 

Cazia cleared her mind and began a spell.
 

“Big sister, you can not use your fire here. You will be too exposed.”
 

She ignored Ivy to finish the spell. It was the Sixth Gift, the same one she’d used to make her little bridge, except this time she a stone as broad and as thick as she could. And she cast it high in the air.
 

The pink granite began to plummet a moment after it came into being,
whooshing
by them louder than the Sweeps wind as it fell. Then it struck the side of their stone and the column of vines—Cazia should have cast it farther out.
 

The noise was horrendous. Clashing rocks, snapping wood, and the terribly sharp drumming of the Tilkilit click language all joined together to make a terrible sound. Cazia jumped to her feet and ran to the sloping ridge Kinz had pointed out, determined to get as far as she could while the warriors below were occupied.
 

Ivy cried out behind her. Cazia spun and caught the girl’s wrist. The stone beneath them trembled, and Cazia couldn’t help but remember the way those three warriors had fallen to their deaths. She steadied the girl as they hurried toward the ledge. Kinz had Ivy’s other hand. Their eyes met; if they couldn’t agree on much else, they could look after the princess.
 

Kinz ended up getting onto the ledge first, then Ivy, with Cazia once again trailing behind. The ledge wasn’t as wide as Cazia had first thought, but she could walk on it. Not run, but walk, and quickly.
 

A tiny stone suddenly struck the wall beside her, and she knew immediately that it had come from below. The Tilkilit were moving up out of the fog, leaping from stone ledge to ledge. She had no way to know how many she had taken out when she had collapsed the column of vines, but it hadn’t been enough. They came in a swarm.
 

Fine. She began moving her hands, calling up the familiar images that would call out her fire. If the Tilkilit queen wanted to send her children to their deaths, Cazia would accommodate her.
 

“No!” Ivy said, grabbing at her hands and disrupting the spell.
 

“Fire and Fury, what are you doing?”
 

“They probably can not see us at this distance,” the girl said. “If you blast fire at some, the others will know just where to throw their anti-magic stones.”

Cazia’s anger evaporated. That was entirely sensible. Together, they hurried up the slope, Kinz leading the way with her stick. Another stone struck nearby, then another. She glanced back and saw Tilkilit swarming. Worse, they were getting closer. Whether it made her a target or not, she was going to have to start burning them soon.
 

When she turned back, she nearly stepped on Ivy’s heel. Fire and Fury, the girl might have tumbled off the ledge.
 

In the lead, Kinz was moving as quickly as she could, but the way ahead was not smooth. Their little path up the side of the cliff was not actually a path; it had gaps, choke points, and it was covered with treacherous loose stones. Cazia really, really wanted to run, because it was the only way to outdistance the Tilkilit, but did not have a clear stretch of solid earth to run on.
 

Kinz led them between a spire and the face of a cliff. Cazia crouched at the narrowest part, wondering if this was a good place to make a stand.
 

Not that she knew anything about picking a battleground. Tactics were for soldiers.
 

The Tilkilit could jump, clinging to the cliff above or below her. They could approach from different angles, and...

The other girls were already making their way under a bulge in the cliff face, and Cazia hurried after them, letting treacherous stones slide out from under her feet and tumble down the mountainside.
 

A strong gust of wind suddenly cleared the fog from the cliff below and they all had a clear view of the landscape around them. The forest was so far below them that it didn’t look real, as though they had uncovered a huge, ornate painting. The wind rushed straight up the rock into their faces, and Cazia endured one absurd moment when she thought it might lift them all up and float them into the Sweeps.
 

It was a long drop. If she slipped, her shattered body would lay wedged between the stones until one of the eagles swooped down, scraped her out, and ate her.
 

“Oh!” Ivy called, as though she could read Cazia’s thoughts. But no, she had simply suffered a moment of vertigo and turned to face the cliff.
 

“They’re coming,” Cazia said, urging her onward.

“I think I see a path,” Kinz added, taking Ivy’s hand as they picked their way across the tops of a small jumble of sharp-edged rocks.
 

Something struck the cliff beside them, hard. The sound was as harsh as if someone had shouted into their ears, and Cazia saw the faint white scratch the impact made on the stone beside her hand. Too late. They were close. Very close.

She was already beginning the Third Gift when she turned around. Her target was there, a reddish-black Tilkilit in a blue sash. Had she even seen a blue sash before? Absurdly, she felt a strong pang of envy. Where did it get the dye?

It stepped forward, advancing partway through the narrow gap between the cliff and the spire so it would have room to throw again, more accurately this time. It plunged its hand into the pouch at its waist, then drew back its broomstick arm to throw, but it was too late.
 

Bright fire rushed from the space between Cazia’s hands, shooting forward in a tightly focused bolt. Before the warrior had a chance to react, the flames struck him directly on the bare shell of his chest. He burst open like a melon struck by a mallet and tumbled down the side of the cliff.
 

A sudden rush of clicking and tapping began, as the other warriors called out to each other. “Hurry!” Kinz shouted, and they all struggled up the uneven ledge.

It widened suddenly, offering room enough to sit down. To the right, the ledge turned into a broad, flat space that was littered with an alarming number of bones.
 

To the left, the ledge turned outward, forming a little flat platform some six feet out from the cliff face. The platform was covered with a tangle of grass and trees limbs, reminding Cazia of the gigantic lidded pots she’d grown up with in the Palace of Song and Morning.