The Way Into Chaos: Book One of the Great Way

by Harry Connolly

  After he finished, the two were silent. Then Reglis said, “My tyr, a newborn lamb can hold a note better than you.”

  They laughed, Tejohn included. But beneath that laughter, he could see the question in their expressions: how had a man with so little skill at music become so famous for a single performance?

  “With luck, we’ll see Caarilit tomorrow. If the commander allows, we’ll use his mirror to find a tyr willing to loan us a cart for a trip to Tempest Pass. Then we can start to turn the tide against the grunts.”

  “It can’t be soon enough,” Reglis said, then added, “my tyr.”

  The long days of their trip--and the evenings by the campfire--had made them comfortable with each other. “Do you have someone in mind, Reglis?”

  He shrugged, staring into the fire. The young man’s massive brow was furrowed in anger and he stared at the flames as though he intended to punch them. “My father lived in the town south of Samsit. Lives. I meant to say ‘lives.’ The grunts have gotten that far by now, don’t you think? He swore he would never take shelter with Peradaini soldiers...with all due apologies to you both.”

  “I need none,” Arla said quickly.

  “Neither do I,” Tejohn said.

  “He must be one of them by now,” Reglis said, his voice hollow. “Along with his brothers and... I hate to think of it. I’d almost rather he was dead. I’m ashamed to say it, but it’s true.”

  “That’s nothing to be ashamed of,” Arla said. “Monument gives us ten thousand ways to endure.”

  Tejohn shut his eyes. The image of Laoni fleeing in terror from a pursuing grunt, children in her arms, came to him hard. “I wish we had ten thousand and one.”

  Arla was watching him carefully. “My tyr, your family should be safe across the Straim, shouldn’t they?”

  He shrugged. “They should be across the river, and I hope it is a safe haven for them.” Everything is dangerous. “Song knows what has happened to any of the people we knew back in the civilized world. It’s possible your father had a fright powerful enough to drive him into the safety of the fort after all.”

  Reglis bowed his head as though accepting a compliment.

  “How did you meet your wife?” Arla asked. “If it’s not to forward of me to ask, my tyr.”

  Before this long journey, Tejohn would have bristled at such a question from one of his soldiers, but without Arla, he could not have survived in the Sweeps. He had to acknowledge an obligation to her, if a small one. It felt a bit like friendship, and friendship permitted personal questions. “It’s not a story I tell often,” he admitted. “A freed debt child becoming the wife of a tyr...”

  “It sounds like a play.” Reglis couldn’t suppress a grin.

  “A bad one.” Tejohn was glad to see the young captain smile so quickly after the previous topic of conversation. Then, suddenly, he wasn’t sure where to start the tale.

  “Who freed her?” Arla asked, reading his hesitation.

  “I did.” Tejohn looked at their smiles and shrugged. “I told you it would make a bad play. But the real thing wasn’t so simple. She was an Italga servant who went west to be part of the newly built Freewell holdfast. She was a babe in arms then, but when she was five, she was given to Doctor Rexler. He’d already been hollowed by then, and the things he did to his servants... Well, you wouldn’t put it on a stage for the Evening People to see.

  “But after the battle at Pinch Hall, everything was in turmoil. Tyr Freewell was still alive, and Rexler’s servants would normally have gone to him, except King Ellifer forbade it, ordering him to march home without a retinue. Everyone treated the Freewell servants as though treachery was contagious. No one would take them in. Finally, they were brought to me: I was the man who slew Rexler, so his orphan servant children were presented to me as spoils of war. I ordered Laoni and her brothers to clean my boots, then declared their debt settled and set them free.”

  “That was kind of you,” Reglis said.

  Arla glanced over at him, obviously irritated. Tejohn spoke before she could respond. “No, it wasn’t. At the time, I was still overcome with grief and rage. The battles were over, the war won, but I was furious that I would not be allowed to keep killing. This was three months before the Festival when I sang--I told the Performance Master I was going to do a tumbling routine; did you know? I looked fit enough and he took me at my word. That Fire-taken song was the only way to get the pain out, and no Performance Master in the world would have let me anywhere near a stage, not with my voice.

  “Anyway, I didn’t give a thought to a couple of orphaned servants with no family and no way to care for themselves; they could have been Fire-taken right in front of me and I wouldn’t have blinked. Luckily, the priests discovered what I’d done and took them in, caring for them until they were old enough to find apprenticeships. Laoni became a baker.

  “When she came to me, fourteen years later in the Palace of Song and Morning, I’m embarrassed to say I had forgotten all about her. She and her husband opened a bakery in Peradain, and—”

  “Husband?” Arla said.

  Tejohn spread his hands. “My wife loves me, but not as much as she loved him. He was... Ultimately, he was a fool. He gambled all on his charm, and eventually he lost. But they came to see me together. She had created a special red cake in my honor, to thank me for having that tattoo cut from her wrist. And I had no idea who she was.”

  “How was the cake?” Reglis asked.

  Tejohn kept his face carefully neutral. “Extremely sweet. There’s nothing an old soldier likes more than to be commemorated with something incredibly sweet and almost insubstantial.” Arla and Reglis laughed, and he felt oddly pleased. “I was honored, of course, but I felt guilty, too. I began dropping by there often.” Once again, he was unsure how to continue the story.

  “Then,” Arla continued, “the charming fool got himself knifed in a married woman’s bedroom.”

  “It was gambling debts, actually,” Tejohn corrected her. “He fell from a roof while running from casino thugs. I loaned the money to Laoni to help her settle his debt, and I kept going there for little cakes, and just to talk. Eventually...” He shrugged.

  “My tyr, you are torturing us with your pauses,” Arla said kindly. “Eventually, you realized you cared for her.”

  “At first, I cared for the idea of her,” Tejohn admitted. “Few tyrs ever get to choose their wives, but I had no lands, wealth, or influence at court. No one wanted an alliance with me. I could do as I liked. And the truth is, I had always been known for one thing: grief. I was the man who went to war, who made the Evening People weep with a song, and who had become the first honorary tyr, all because of the way my wife and child died. I didn’t want to be that person for year after grinding year, living alone in perpetual mourning. I wanted a life.

  “And the more time I spent with her, the less interested I was in the idea of her and the more I liked her as a person. The Finstels frown on relationships between people with so much distance in their ages, but I didn’t live in Finstel lands anymore. So, two years and a day after her husband died, we had a small ceremony in the Palace temple, a widow and widower trying again.”

  “That’s a nice ending,” Reglis said. “I like that ending.”

  “Sure,” Tejohn said. “If you stop the story there.”

  “I had a younger man once,” Arla said. “There were fifteen years between us, and he was as nice as you please.”

  “But then you found out he had another woman,” Tejohn said, partly to return the charge she’d made against Laoni’s first husband.

  “No, I found out I was the other woman. I swear, I’d be Watch Commander today if I hadn’t buried an arrow in his backside.”

  Tejohn laughed. “You were lucky he was facing away from you.”

  “One of us was lucky,” Arla answered, “but it wasn’t me.”

  Reglis laid his hands on his knees. “That’s a thought that’ll keep me up for a long while. I’ll volunteer fo
r first watch.”

  “Not so fast,” Arla said. “It’s your turn.”

  He sighed in a resigned way. “I nearly married. My father arranged it--that’s how it worked among my people, even for the common folk. When we were children, our parents would arrange a marriage, and those two families could be friendly with each other and do business. Except that doesn’t really work inside the empire. Anyway, she likes to order people about and she sings like a bleating goat. Once she learned I was taking up the spear, she convinced her father to break it off. The empire does nothing for soldiers’ widows, after all.”

  “You took up the spear to get out marriage?” Tejohn asked.

  “No,” Reglis said, “but it was a happy side benefit. My father was...displeased, you could say. He’s forbidden me to marry anyone else, and I’ve honored his wish. So far.”

  “What about your almost-bride?” Arla asked.

  Reglis smiled. “She married someone else twelve days later. I understand they are very unhappy together. And my father feels...” That was a sentence he could not finish.

  “When this is all over,” Tejohn said, “we could return to Samsit and I would be willing to talk to your father about this.”

  Reglis seemed startled. “My tyr...”

  “If you wish it, of course. You would know if talking to a tyr of the empire would improve things between the two of you or make them worse. But I wouldn’t bully him or order him to do anything, obviously. I’d talk to him honestly about soldiers and their families. If you wish it.”

  “I would, my tyr.” Reglis bowed his head. “If—”

  “No ‘if,’ Captain,” Tejohn’s voice was calm. “There’s no reason to assume the worst.”

  “Thank you, my tyr.”

  Arla smiled at him. Tejohn said, “Are you going to ask me to talk to Commander Gerrit about making you a Watch Commander?”

  “No, my tyr,” she said, and he believed her. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  “Well, after all this”--Tejohn waved at their camp—”you both deserve a promotion. But don’t think I’ve forgotten that you volunteered for first watch, Captain.”

  Tejohn settled onto his bedroll. It had felt odd to tell that story, but good, too, like correcting an old mistake. He should have trusted these two soldiers sooner. He should have been kinder.

  This sense of companionship was as fragile as one of his wife’s tiny cakes, he knew, but it felt good nonetheless.

  The next day, they set out for the top of the spur, which took most of the morning. It was steep, slow going through thick forest, and even Tejohn was tempted to use the butt of his spear as a walking stick. The only other option, Arla assured them, was to strike out to the north and enter the spur the long way, which would take most of a day.

  At the top, the trees grew sparse and the ground became hard-packed dirt with little growth. They reached the smooth, bare curve of the top of the spur and turned southeast, heading toward the pass. By the end of the day they would be sheltered within the mountain pass, and Tejohn would not have to smell the vinegar-sour winds of the Sweeps again until he returned on a Finstel cart.

  “My tyr,” Reglis said, and pointed toward the edge of the mountains. It was Arla, hurrying toward them with her bow strung.

  She did not speak until she was close enough to speak quietly and be heard. “Troops, my Tyr, marching under a black banner.”

  “Can’t you be more specific than that?” Tejohn asked. Half the squares in the empire used a black field. “What marking?”

  “They had scouts of their own, my Tyr. I couldn’t get close enough to see. But there are at least thirty spears and five scouts. Smallish shields, like a fleet squad, but they have the longest spears I’ve ever seen.”

  Tejohn scowled. Someone was getting creative with their equipment.

  “They are almost certainly Finstels, my tyr,” Reglis said.

  The fort in Caarilit Pass ahead of them had been given to the Finstels, and every mine they’d passed had been Finstel-held. The shield Tejohn carried on his back bore a Splashtown waterfall design on a black field. But they couldn’t afford to take unnecessary risks.

  “Let’s find cover. I want those scouts to pass right by us. When the troops come near, Arla will describe them in more detail.”

  They found a thick stand of trees at the edge of a steep drop-off at the side of the spur. Tejohn and Reglis lay flat on their bellies and crawled into the bushes. Arla laid leafy branches over them, nearly burying them in foliage, then wiggled in close between them. Her arm, knotted with muscle and darkened by the sun, was surprisingly soft against Tejohn’s elbow.

  They both shifted position to pull their limbs in.

  The wind blew through the leaves. Finally, Arla hissed, “Scouts.”

  Tejohn did not move. He didn’t need to see them; he could hear them well enough. One passed fewer than a dozen feet in front of them. Arla, lying close to the edge of the brush, stayed very still. After a hundred breaths or so, she slowly crawled backwards.

  “Gray jackets, my Tyr, with small bows in hand and knives at their hips. No markings otherwise.”

  Gray? Tejohn didn’t know of any unit that used gray as their color. Gray was bad luck. “Watch for the spears and their banner.”

  It didn’t take long. “They’re out of Splashtown.”

  That was what he wanted to hear. “How do they look?”

  “Exhausted,” she answered. “Frightened. They’re doing a ragged quickstep like they’ve been retreating all day.”

  Fire and Fury. That was not what he wanted to hear. Tejohn took a deep breath and shouted, “SPLASHTOWN!” in the booming battlefield voice he hadn’t used in years.

  “That stirred them up,” Arla said. “They’re scrambling to form ranks.”

  “SPLASHTOWN! POINTS HIGH! Let’s go, you two. Time to stop hiding on our bellies.”

  Tejohn was the first to emerge from the thicket. He gained his feet, hefted his shield high and stood his spear against his own shoulder. It was the standard posture for approaching friendly forces—spear point high--but even at this distance, he could see that the Splashtown troops were points forward behind a shield wall.

  He strolled toward them casually. They were close enough to make out the colors of their shields and banners. The bright red blur above the man in front must have been the brush on his helmet. Tejohn turned slightly to walk directly towards him.

  “Drop your weapons and identify yourselves!” the man with the brush shouted.

  “Points high,” Tejohn called back.

  “Bows!” the officer called, and Tejohn could hear footsteps coming toward him from behind.

  When Arla spoke, it was through clenched teeth. “My tyr?”

  Tejohn didn’t break stride. “You expected an arrow in the back, didn’t you?”

  “I guess I did. By the way, the ‘captain’ up ahead isn’t really a captain. His sash is too long and the brush on his helmet hangs off the front.”

  “Thank you for that.” He took a deep breath. “Acting Captain! You outnumber us ten to one and I have called for points high! You can see the emblem on my shield, can’t you?”

  The captain called back, his voice sounding thin in the wind. “A stolen shield, I’d wager. That emblem is three years out of date.”

  “I carry it,” Tejohn said, “for the same reason you have attached your former captain’s brush to your helmet: necessity. A Durdric axe split my old one.”

  “I recognize you,” the captain said suddenly. “Fire and Fury, you’re Tejohn Treygar. Points high!”

  Startled by the sudden change, Tejohn halted. “How do you recognize me, soldier?”

  “You toured the empire with the prince some years ago, my Tyr Treygar. I saw you on the parade stand. Excuse me, my tyr.”

  While the captain ordered his bows to reform a perimeter, Tejohn turned to Arla and Reglis. “That’s an odd bit of luck,” he said, feeling vaguely embarrassed.

  “Not really,
my Tyr,” Arla said. “I recognized you as soon as I saw you.”

  Reglis flushed. “I did not,” he admitted, scowling, “but you looked very familiar. And I heard the men laughing at me the next day because of the way I spoke to you when you landed in that cart.”

  Tejohn had no idea what to say to that. Long ago, he’d come to terms with the idea that his name was known all across the empire, but his face? He looked off into the Sweeps, suddenly wondering what it would be like to live out there alone.

  Then he sighed and turned to the acting captain, who removed his helmet. He was a short, stocky man, and he was too young to be carrying a paunch. Tejohn said, “What’s your mission, and why do you have so few spears?”

  “We were heading for the mining camps,” the man answered, looking a little uncomfortable. Tejohn couldn’t tell if he was lying, intimidated, or embarrassed. Maybe it was all three. “To round up the people working there and escort them to safety. The first night, we were attacked by Durdric holy fighters, which wasn’t serious, but then...” He glanced back toward the pass.

  “Then what?”

  “Two lines of Witt spears cut us off from the fort. The captain tried to break through with a square, but they had scholars fighting with them.”

  “What?” Reglis blurted out.

  “At least two,” the captain said. “They created stone blocks above the square, crushing the men beneath, and then they turned fire against our flank. That was yesterday. When the captain took an arrow, he gave me his brush and ordered a retreat.”

  “Are they in pursuit?”

  “They are. Our bows took their scholars--I believe so, anyway; they hide them by dressing them like the other troops, but of course, they can’t cast with shields or spears in hand--but they still outnumber us two to one. And they’re between us and Fort Caarilit.”

  The nearby spears were close enough to overhear them. They looked exhausted and dispirited.

  Arla spoke up, “My tyr, the Witt spears have not yet appeared at the mouth of the pass.”