“Fine. What is your name?”
The scholar bowed. “I am Doctor Ullaroc, my tyr, originally from Rivershelf.”
This man looked more like a footpad than a scholar. The urge to open his guts to the air was powerful, but Tejohn knew that was just the aftermath of battle. It would be hours before the killing urge left him. “Keep close to your bodyguards.”
The man didn’t seem at all surprised by this command. He only bowed and backed away.
Jolu looked embarrassed. “I apologize, my tyr, but my mission was secret.”
Of course. If there was one thing he should have expected, it was this. King Ellifer had not maintained superiority over the tyrs through the armies he could field. His advantage was in his control of the scholars. Ellifer’s own people kept them from falling under the tyrs’ control, sometimes with a knife point, and it was the king himself who decided which holdfasts would have the spells on their sleepstones renewed, or had scholar-created roads, or flying carts.
With the king gone, the tyrs were scrambling to round up every scholar they could find, even mine workers like Ullaroc.
If Tejohn returned from Tempest Pass with a way to undo Lar’s curse, they would have to devise a plan to bring the scholars under Italga control again. If they didn’t, they might never remake the empire.
“My tyr!” That was Arla, calling to him from the bottom of the ramp.
From the sound of her voice, Tejohn knew immediately that Reglis had fallen in the battle. He started down the ramp. A Splashtown spear with blood all over his jacket lay forehead to forehead with a fellow soldier. Both of them grasped her dagger, its point aimed at his heart. A gut wound. The man couldn’t have been more than twenty years old.
“Grateful am I,” the man said, his voice fading, “to be permitted to travel The Way.”
Tejohn didn’t watch the knife go in. Instead, he focused on Arla and the man lying at her feet.
It was Reglis. Unlike so many others, he had already died. A knife thrust under his chin had taken him quickly.
“He killed at least eight all by himself, not counting the bows we took in the initial charge.” That was a woman standing nearby. Tejohn recognized her as one of the three Reglis had taken with him for his flanking attack. There were two other spears beside her, both older men.
“At least eight,” one of the men said. “No exaggeration.”
Tejohn looked down at Reglis’s pale, still face. His heavy brow had lost its glower. “Song knows what he did.” If Tejohn ever had reason to speak with the young man’s father, it would not be to make peace in the family. It would be to share grief.
Tejohn felt himself winding tighter and tighter, his old outrage coming on strong. Another good man, butchered like a pig. It wasn’t exactly the same; he knew that. He didn’t have the burning ache of his dead children inside him, the grief feeling so much like a pod that struggled to burst open but never could. It was like entering a room long kept shut, a visit to a past self that he had tried to leave behind forever. The urge to shed blood was on him again. He had a mission to accomplish for the Italga family, and he had enemies to kill.
Everything seemed so clear and simple.
Jolu was nearby. “Acting captain, what stands between us and Fort Caarilit?”
“Nothing but marching, my tyr.”
Tejohn didn’t like the man’s self-satisfied expression. He didn’t like jubilation, pride, or bravado in the aftermath of victory. They slowed everyone down. Tejohn wanted the next round of killing to have started already. “Get the shovels,” he snapped. “I don’t want any delay.”
Chapter 19
Cazia knew her plan would upset people, but she didn’t expect them to soil their skirts over it. At first, Ivy refused to believe her; the princess’s insistence that None Of This Is Funny So Please Stop became infuriating. Once Cazia lost her temper and the truth sank in, the girl began to cry furiously as though Cazia had beaten her.
Ivy ran to Mahz, of all people, and demanded she force Cazia to go east into Indregai. At one point, she even reverted to the Commanding Princess routine she’d tried with Tyr Treygar and ordered Mahz to bind Cazia and throw her into the wagon.
That didn’t go over any better with the Ozzhuack leader than it had with Old Stoneface, but while Mahz scolded Ivy for her manners, Hent took Cazia aside.
“Child”--she kept her voice as low as possible given the sound of the wind, and her tone was matronly—”can you be serious about this? Because I am also tempted to ask Mahz to bind you and lock you in the wagon. You do not have the way even to make to enter the valley. There is no pass through those mountains; people have searched for one for generations.”
“I climb very well,” Cazia answered. “And please don’t call me child.”
The old warrior seemed to be losing patience. “While you make to wander the base of the Northern Barrier, searching for the place to climb, you will be in high danger. The marshes are home to big cats and alligaunts, and every great bird leaving the valley will pass above you. You are laying out your bedroll on the lion’s lap.”
Cazia assumed that also sounded better in the Ozzhuack’s own language. “No one else knows about this, do they? Do you think anyone has realized that the grunts and these giant eagles are connected somehow? What if this is a planned attack, not only against Peradain, but against every human being on the continent? What if some Enemy intends to keep killing us until only Song remembers we were even here?”
“That... That can not be so.”
The memory of her dart sinking into the grunt--her own brother—flashed through her mind. Her guts suddenly felt tight and she put a sharper edge to her words than intended. “Why not? Because you wouldn’t like it? And to think you called me a child.”
Hent’s eyes went wide with anger. Cazia glared back at her. If the warrior dared to strike her, Cazia would set her on fire, no matter what the consequences.
I have the flinches.
The woman bared her filed teeth. “We have made to be kind to you.”
They’d tried to cheat and bully Ivy out of her people’s belongings, but Cazia shoved that aside. It didn’t matter. “You don’t understand,” she said. “My family are traitors. I have no lands, no clan, and the only friend I have left is that little girl over there.” I was going to be Scholar Administrator someday. “All the people in the world that I care about have been turned into monsters, and I don’t even know why.”
“There is not always the reason why, child.”
Cazia was tempted to scorch her just for the tone of her voice, Fire take whatever might happen next. “Who’s to say there are only two creatures, the grunts and the eagles? There could be something worse running loose in the west! And since I can’t get there, I’m going over those mountains.”
She pointed toward the Northern Barrier. Hent scowled and redirected her arm farther east. Fine, she didn’t know exactly where the valley was yet, but she would find out soon enough.
“What do you expect to discover there?” Hent asked, letting some kindness back into her tone.
“Maybe nothing.” That was hard to admit, but it was true. “But then we’ll know that there’s nothing to discover, right?”
“No, Cazia. We will not. You will be dead, and no one will learn of your news.”
Of course, that was always a possibility, but Cazia wasn’t entirely sure how she felt about it. She knew it could happen--she’d been surrounded by corpses all morning, and at Fort Samsit, and back in Peradain. Still, to picture herself as one of them, lying in the mud... It just didn’t seem real. She couldn’t imagine it.
What made it worse was that she knew she ought to be able to imagine it. She knew it was dangerous and silly to act as though no harm could touch her, especially after everything she’d seen. But there it was. Maybe Hent was right. Maybe she was a child. Soon enough, she’d be a dead child. Death would seem real enough to her then, maybe.
...vanishing is more painful for those
left behind. Peraday’s words came back to her suddenly and they made Cazia unbearably sad. She was about to vanish, just as that soldier’s brother had, and who would miss her? Colchua and Pagesh were dead and Lar must have transformed by now. Jagia, Bit, and Timu would transform soon. Ivy was here, true, but they’d known each other for less than a month. Also, she was twelve; the princess would certainly forget her in a few years. Who was left? Her mother and father? Nothing could be more ridiculous.
She opened her pack again, taking care not to expose her quiver of darts. She doubted the Ozzhuacks would recognize their significance, but her time in the palace had taught her caution. Secrets were weapons that could be turned against her, and they required caution. She might not be able to imagine herself murdered and eaten, but she certainly knew what it was like to be found out and betrayed.
Ivy was happy with her damp bread disks, which meant Cazia carried all the remaining meatbread. Good. She would need all she could get. Water was no problem, but food was.
It didn’t take long to arrange things. Cazia shouldered her pack and picked up her spear. It seemed silly to keep carrying it, but she had to keep up appearances. Besides, the butt end made a decent walking stick. Once she was well away from the others, she would strap her quiver of darts to her hip. It was startling how much she missed the feel of them.
She started walking, following the direction Hent had redirected her arm. She had passed nearly out of sight of the herd when she noticed Ivy running after her. “Cazia!” she shouted, “Please!”
Please? If the princess was going to be polite, Cazia would, too. She stopped and waited. The girl ran around in front of her and said, “Hent told me what you said.”
Cazia scowled at her. “Don’t tell me I’m being stupid or crazy, all right?”
“I won’t,” the girl said, trying to catch her breath. “I promise. Instead, I have decided to come with you.”
Cazia looked down at the little girl and her bony arms. “Fire and Fury, you will not. I’m not taking you anywhere.”
“Cazia, you can not go alone. You don’t know the first thing about surviving in the wilderness, which I have been doing since I was a child.”
“You’re still a child.”
“I’m aware of that, thank you. But you still need me. You can not just march across the Sweeps to the Qorr Valley!”
“Who’s going to stop me?” Cazia lifted her right hand, holding her spear point skyward. “You?”
Ivy swung her own spear with all her might, striking Cazia’s just behind the head. The weapon twisted and her thumb wasn’t strong enough to hold on. She tried to catch it with her other hand but fumbled. The weapon clattered against the rocky ground. Cazia sighed. “Fire take me.”
“The Sweeps will stop you,” Ivy said. “You can’t just stroll across the marshes. You wouldn’t even get half way to Markwind Lake. But you don’t have to. With the coin from the camp, I’ve hired the Ozzhuacks to take us eastward. Mahz is going to show us a waterway that will take us where we need to go. They certainly can’t continue to go southwest, not when the grunts are spreading across the empire. I’ve convinced her that she would be more welcome in the peninsula.”
“You convinced her?” Cazia was doubtful. “That quickly?”
Ivy shrugged. “It really was a lot of money.”
Cazia laughed aloud at that, then went back to the camp to help finish packing. She also joined Ivy at the graves, for a last few moments of silence.
As it turned out, the longest delay came from turning the herd around. Okshim didn’t like sharp changes of direction. Kell explained that they mixed up the side-by-sides--whatever that meant--and the wagon hitches weren’t built for it, either. What’s more, the beasts naturally migrated west as the weather grew warmer.
Mahz took the alpha cow by the nose and pulled it in a large, gentle circle. The warriors ran around the edges of the herd, swatting okshim with the blunt ends of their spears to prevent them from panicking and breaking away from the herd.
After they were pointed east again, the herd was allowed to rest. Children ran across their backs, dropping fresh-cut grass between them as a treat. While the beasts rested, warriors loaded the canvas and other goods into the warehouse wagon. When they finished, it was so full they could barely latch the door.
Cazia approached Mahz. The old woman had a tiny smile on her face. She didn’t like heading eastward again, but Ivy’s description of the grunts had convinced her they would be safer on the other side of the Straim. Also, the camp goods were valuable enough that they could pay their way through the pass without selling their entire herd. They would not have to give up the source of their true wealth.
What’s more, Ivy had paid them in copper to deliver a message to Goldgrass Hill. It was in Ergoll, one of the Alliance tongues—apparently, the only Alliance tongue the herders spoke was Toal—and Mahz had to learn it phonetically. She’d also promised not have it translated. The message was for Ivy’s parents only.
By the time the herd was ready to move again, it was almost sundown. They spent a quiet night without an attack, then set out east in the morning.
It was eleven days’ walk along the stony, hard-packed edge of the Southern Barrier, Mahz explained, until they would separate. A more direct path--by which she meant the one Cazia had started on--would have crossed the marshes. It was possible to cross on foot, if you could tell solid earth from mud, didn’t mind being soaked to your bottom at every misstep, and had the stamina of a hero out of the old tales, but the only people who ever tried it were outcasts, and they were rarely seen again.
Mahz preferred to ride on the back of an okshim herd but, she said, the girls would have to make do with a raft.
Cazia was not allowed to work during the trip. The princess explained that she had paid for this escort, and they needed only walk along--or ride atop the herd or in the wagon, if they liked.
But Cazia, who had received every meal, every stitch of clothing, and every stick of firewood from her father’s most powerful enemy, suddenly felt uncomfortable. She felt she ought to contribute--not as a servant, obviously, but something. She felt unfairly singled out and pampered, as though the clan was making her last days on The Way as sweet as possible.
It was different for the princess. Every Ozzhuack approached the girl at some point in their journey to ask about the Indregai serpents. Some came two or three times, asking the same questions over and over.
Ivy reassured them with the same phrases over and over: the serpents were allies, they kept to themselves, they ate chickens and other small animals but nothing as large as a man, they only attacked when provoked. They were not big enough swallow a full-grown human, no matter what the stories said. Cazia thought the girl had more patience than any ten people, and asked her about it over an evening meal.
The princess shrugged. “They are just frightened, and it is a ruler’s duty to calm the fears of the subjects.”
“Oh!” Cazia said. It hadn’t occurred to her that the girl was adding the Ozzhuacks--along with their herd and whatever wealth they carried--to her own people. Great Way, she’d even given them a message to deliver to ensure they could end their journey at Goldgrass Hill, if they wanted.
“Besides,” Ivy said. “It is for the good of them. It’s silly for them to fear the serpents when fleeing into Peradaini lands would be a death sentence.”
The princess was once again deciding what was best for other people, but at least she was persuading them rather than tricking them.
On the ninth day, they passed a granite hut with a sleepstone inside it. After some discussion, they stopped for the night so one of the children could sleep off a sprained ankle. Late on the eleventh day, the herd crested a rounded hill and started down into a marshy basin. Not just a marsh, she realized. It was a wide, shallow lake. There were small islands here and there--little more than humps, really--that a tall man could not lie across without getting his hair and heels wet, and each sprouted a bare, twi
sted tree, with cattails growing where the land slipped below the water. As the sun set behind them, Cazia watched the shadows of the trees stretch across the rippled surface of the water.
On the twelfth day, at the water’s edge, the herd came to a tattered wooden dock. At Hent’s instruction, two warriors went into the shallow water and lifted rocks from the lake bed onto the dock. Cazia wondered what odd custom she was seeing until the raft bobbed to the surface.
“Still sound!” one of the warriors called from the hip-deep water.
“Here we part,” Mahz said. She gestured toward the stream flowing northward toward the long lake. “Coftin River is fresh water, not salt, so you can drink from it and shelter beneath trees at the shoreline.”
“Or in them,” Hent added.
“In them is always better when you’re alone. Remember that alligaunts prefer fresh to salt, but will hunt in both.”
“We have each other,” Ivy said. “And I have traveled through the Sweeps before.”
With an army, Cazia could have added, but she didn’t.
As the herd began to wade through the marsh into the lake, Ozzhuacks leaped onto the okshims’ back. Neither girl made a move to get onto the raft while they were in sight; Cazia didn’t know why Ivy waited, but she herself didn’t want Hent, Mahz, or any of the others to see her fall into the water.
As the last of the herd splashed into the shallows, they heard a whip crack. Cazia started in surprise; the herders didn’t whip their okshim. She looked across the moving dark mass and saw a warrior--the young woman who had pestered Ivy the most--putting a short lash to a young girl with unkempt dark hair. Cazia’s hand went to her translation stone. “How dare you!” the warrior shouted, punctuating each word with a swing of her arm. “How dare you splash mud on me!”
Just as Cazia noted the similarity between the girl and the boy who had brought the skewers to Hent on their first night, he appeared, shielding her with his body. “Leave my sister alone!”
The Way Into Chaos: Book One of the Great Way Page 30
