The Way Into Chaos

by Harry Connolly

  She pointed out toward the Wayward. The river had angled eastward around a rocky promontory, and although Tejohn could not see what she was pointing at, he knew what she’d spotted: Coml’s ambush.

  It was a relief to know they’d avoided it, and he squelched the urge to come at them from behind. His old outrage--the familiar, wound-up urge to fight and then fight some more--was not as overwhelming as it had been when he was young. Arla continued up the hillside and he followed her.

  Arla found a switchback trail that led to the top of the spur. Tejohn had never seen these lands before--they were all stony slopes and stands of narrow trees, but no people. They stopped for a meal, then he followed her westward. Always westward.

  In late afternoon, Arla spotted a log cabin. “It looks abandoned,” she said before Tejohn could even see it. As they came close, he noted the door had been broken in.

  No one answered his hails. He held his shield in front of him and kept his hand on his sword as he stepped through the door, calling out more quietly and asking if someone inside needed his help.

  The wind shifted as he entered the darkened room, and the smell of dead bodies washed over him.

  “Fire and Fury,” Arla said.

  They had been a family. A man about Reglis’s age, with thick arms and a heavy beard, lay by the door, his belly slit open. Farther inside lay the corpse of a woman of the same age, her stomach pierced by spears. Their two dead children lay behind her.

  They had been older than Tejohn’s lost child, but they still looked so small.

  “This wasn’t grunts,” Arla said bitterly. “Could Witt spears have come so far west? Or Bendertuks so far east?”

  “This family was killed by their neighbors,” Tejohn said. “He came to the door with his hands empty. See? There’s a Gerrit shield hanging on the wall.”

  “They killed him because he’s a Gerrit?”

  “A woodsman, I’d guess, and trapper, too. So many Finstel soldiers died a generation ago that people from other lands flooded in. They took over farms and fisheries--not the finest or most fertile, but empty properties anyway. And there was resentment. Great Way, it should not have come to this. Not to murdered children.”

  Arla’s tone was flat. “The Finstels are purging outsiders.”

  “Even the little ones. This is no place for a Grimfield with a Chin-Chinro accent,” Tejohn said. “We’ll have to part sooner than I’d planned.”

  The woodsman had a fine bronze-bladed shovel hanging on the wall, so he and Arla spent the rest of the day digging a grave. Family graves were a tradition in Gerrit lands, so they dug wide and deep. They used up the rest of the daylight excavating the stony earth, arranging the bodies inside, then covering them over. Tejohn laid out the shield as a marker.

  More than once, they had to stop and walk away from the work. When it was finished, they washed their hands in a bucket behind the cabin, then ate without pleasure. They lay on the ground beneath a starry sky, and Arla told Tejohn the story of how she saw her family murdered. When she was done, Tejohn shared his tale with her. It was an awful kind of communion, but it was what they had and they clung to it.

  They slept in the woods some distance from the house. In the morning, Tejohn set his weapons on the cabin floor. It was hard to give up his shield and especially that oversized sword, but a fighting man had to know when to empty his hands.

  “My tyr, are you sure you want us to part? You...”

  “I can not see what is coming,” Tejohn finished for her. “You’re right. But I have managed before we met and will do so again. Besides, once Coml’s fleet squad reports that we did not pass them on the river, Finstel spears will be hunting for the pair of us. Better to split up. Hike this spur back into the mountains. You certainly can’t stay here with that accent.”

  “And you, my tyr?”

  Tejohn shrugged off his cuirass, then unbuckled his greaves. “I was a farmer who lost everything, once. I can be that again.”

  “So, you’re still going to Splashtown?”

  “Lar Italga charged me with a mission, but I’ve decided to go to Ussmajil instead. Have you noticed that the locals have stopped using Peradaini names? The Finstels have rescued someone from the capital, and they have flying carts. I must speak with the former and steal the latter, and I don’t think a landless tyr will be welcome in the holdfast. Still, somehow I must get to Tempest Pass. The king was sure that the key to defeating the grunts would be found there, and I intend to complete the task he set me. I suspect it is the only way the people of Kal-Maddum will survive.”

  Tejohn made sure Arla took the bulk of their provisions. He had only ten days’ walk ahead of him, while she might be living in the wild for a long time.

  He also threw aside his padded undershirt--it was too obviously a soldier’s garment. In the cabin, he found a linen vest hanging on a hook. It was stained with mud and sweat but it would do. He kept his wooden-handled knife on his belt, and slipped the blue translation stone Cazia Freewell had made for him and Lar’s ring into the torn lining of his boot.

  He would have to get rid of both of them. Ideally, he should hide them. It was lucky that Coml’s men had only searched his person and not his belongings. Either of those two items would be worth his life.

  He stood before Arla. “How do I look?”

  “Like a tyr. You stand like a proud man.” He let his shoulders slump forward and shifted himself off balance. “Better, my Tyr.”

  He nodded. “You shouldn’t call me that any more.”

  She smiled. “Then I will say, Tejohn Treygar, that it has been an honor to fight beside you.”

  They clasped hands. “And you, too. Great Way willing, we will meet again in peaceful times.”

  “Perhaps one day I will get a chance to try one of your wife’s little red cakes.” She shrugged her pack onto her shoulders, then started uphill toward the trees and mountains. It took very little time for her to pass out of his sight.

  He found an old path that led across the spur to the west. He had no clear notion where it led, but he hoped it was the route the dead woodsman had used to take his cuttings to town.

  After a short time, he came to a sharp bend in the path and paused. The trees and thickets here gave him heavy cover, and for the first time in days, he felt secure from prying eyes. It was time to get rid of the ring and translation stone. The idea that they were dangerous to carry came upon him like throwing open shutters to let the daylight in.

  He stepped off the path, climbed through the thicket onto a flat, stony meadow. He pried up a squarish rock, laid the ring and translation gem beneath it, then set it back into place. With his knife, he notched the nearest tree. On his way back to the path, he marked another tree.

  If Tejohn let himself be killed, the ring would likely never be found. The king would never be cured. The empire...

  It was too much. The weight of so many secrets bore down on him. Not so long ago, he had stood on the promenade and spoken with the queen of the empire. Today, he was furtively hiding all evidence of that high state. As he returned to the path, he knew he did not walk the path like a proud man.

  The town at the bottom of the spur was surrounded by a high wooden wall, and the gate was shut. Tejohn walked around it, showing his empty hands to the watchful men and women atop the wall.

  In the flatlands, he came upon others making the same trip. Word about the grunts had spread, driving some to the road and others to barricade their homes. The one thing Tejohn had learned was that no matter what the danger--fire, approaching armies, anything--there were always some too stubborn to leave their land.

  Many fellow refugees pulled wagons or drove okshim--one young couple had four yoked together, which probably made them the wealthiest commoners in ten days’ march. It was slow going, but Tejohn kept his patience and dawdled with them. As he hoped, he was invited to camp with them as night fell.

  They were all strangers to each other, and each briefly told their stories. The wealthy
young couple owned a mine and a farm. The old woman with the crooked back caught and sold fish by the river. Others were wheelwrights, blacksmiths, or ferry folk. Tejohn told them he had been dismissed from the farm where he worked, and one or two others smirked in response; presumably, they assumed he was a runaway servant. He bared his wrists so they could see he had no tattoos there, but no one seemed interested.

  Then they began trading rumors. This was what he’d lingered for, and they didn’t disappoint. Among the dubious news they shared: The Redmudds had slain their servants and elderly to make their supplies stretch. Tyr Holvos had been so terrified of the grunts that he fled the fall of Rivershelf by boat. On the sea. There were many gasps at this news, and wise nods when the fisherwoman said eels dragged the ship under before they’d lost sight of the city.

  The family of ferry folk considered themselves the best informed, and they shared gossip the way a tyr’s wife might throw food to starving children. At the same time Peradain fell, the waters of the Bescos had erupted and sea giants strode up the Espileth, laying waste to Simblinton, they said gravely, as though they’d seen it happen themselves. After destroying the entire Simblin clan, the giants had collapsed the passes and returned to the deep.

  The general consensus among the crowd was that everything had been planned, even though Tejohn thought the story sounded as authentic as a child’s ghost story. The attacks were a coordinated assault against the entire empire at the command of either the sea giants, Durdric Holy Sons, Indregai warlords, or unnamed tyrs within the empire itself, depending on the lateness of the hour.

  But they nearly came to blows over the description of the grunts themselves. The ferry folk claimed they were pink and white, with horns like goats. Others claimed they were dark blue and red, and the argument got heated, with the ferryman’s sons waving their fists at the wealthy young couple’s chief servant. Tejohn broke through the argument by saying he’d seen two kinds of grunts, then described them.

  They pressed him hard with questions, and he answered very slowly. Several of the other campers wanted to hear his news more than once, and he told it, haltingly, in the same way each time. It didn’t take long for them to tire of him, and they settled in to sleep.

  It was troubling to hear that sea giants were moving in the west, even if it came from someone as untrustworthy as those ferry folk. Could the grunts be part of a coordinated attack against the empire? Would the sea giants range far enough to the north to impede his progress to Tempest Pass?

  On the twelfth day of their journey, they came into sight of Ussmajil itself. The outermost parts of the city were surrounded by barricades so new, some of the logs still had green leaves attached. Tejohn expected to see refugees camping outside the city--there were always a few--but the flats were empty. Were they going to be turned away?

  The wealthy young couple were greeted by three women wearing fine, clean linen and attended by twenty servants. They, their animals, and their servants were ushered away toward the central holdfast. The wheelwright removed a strip of red cloth from inside his robe, tied it over his biceps and, carefully not looking at anyone else in the crowd, went directly to the market square.

  None of the other refugees had someone to meet them or a red cloth to tie to their upper arm. They were herded at spear point toward a long, muddy pit. Spears stood guard at the near end and, Tejohn assumed, at the far end as well. The sides of the pit were braced with more logs, and bored archers stood along the top.

  “Where are you taking us?” the ferryman demanded, and received a rap from the edge of a shield to silence him.

  They passed below a line of heads mounted on spears. All had rotten until they were barely recognizable as human.

  A dozen refugees were penned like sheep while the blacksmith’s family was brought before a bored-looking official seated at a long wooden table. Beside him stood an overweight soldier with a tall red comb. Behind both of them stood another dozen spears.

  Tejohn hung back beside the fisherwoman. “What’s happening?” he asked in a low voice. “I can’t see that far.”

  Her answer was so quiet, he almost couldn’t hear it. “They’re charging us for admission to the city.” She shuffled her feet, glancing back toward the wooden gate as though she wanted to get back onto the road, but she didn’t have the courage to leave the pen. “I don’t have more than a few copper ins.”

  It had been a while since Tejohn had reason to think about money. It was one of the privileges of his place in the palace--he thought for the first time about the strongbox in his rooms back in the Morning City. It was heavy with silver bolds and even a few gold pinches. Right now he wasn’t carrying so much as a tin speck.

  The blacksmith’s family was led to a second pen, their shoulders slumped. “They even took his tools,” the fisherwoman said.

  That was bad and they all knew it. The ferry folk were brought forward next, and the father tried to bluster through the interview, talking in a loud voice about the important news he brought from the south and how he was certain his tyrship’s good fighting men would want to hear it. But when it came time to open his purse to the officials, he demanded they tell him the fee first.

  For his trouble, one of the good fighting men he’d been flattering rammed a spear into his guts. While his family knelt in the mud and wailed, his body was stripped and thrown into a cart. There were no other corpses in there, but the hour was early.

  The other family members--wife, sons, daughters, grandmothers--had everything of value taken from them, then they were penned with the smith. Tejohn shut his eyes and prayed that The Great Way would look after his own family and allow them to stay on the path.

  Just before she was taken away, the fisherwoman took Tejohn’s hand and pressed a single coin into it. “Better to have something for them to take, I think, since they’re going to take everything.”

  It would have been an insult to refuse. “Song will remember,” Tejohn said.

  “The Little Spinner never slows,” she said as she was led away. It was a saying he’d heard often from farm folk when he was young, but had never heard in the palace. Everything changes.

  When it was his turn, he gave his name as Ondel Ulstrik, a farmhand from just downslope of the spur. He told them the farmers were holed up on their property and had no supplies to spare for hired men.

  The official told him weapons were not permitted inside the city and took his knife. They demanded an accounting of his personal property and rolled their eyes when he held out the copper ins. Tejohn could feel the soldiers looking him over; he made sure to slump his shoulders and keep his expression slack.

  “Entrance to the city will cost you two ins,” the official said with a bored expression. “Those boots will cover the balance.”

  His boots were worth more than an ins, but he took them off without a fuss and gave them over.

  The mud was cold against his bare feet. He joined the others in the second pen. No one could speak over the wailing of the ferry family--the grandmother’s pleas that they be allowed to bury the man’s body were ignored.

  As they were led up the ramp at the far end of the pit, a pair of soldiers pressed tiny loaves of bread into their hands. They were insistent that everyone take one because Tyr Finstel wanted no starvation within his walls. Tejohn reluctantly accepted.

  When they came out of the pit into a small building, they were told there was a charge of six specks for the bread. The ferryman’s widow tried to pay with a silver bold she’d hidden on her person, but she was beaten and given six years of servitude for Concealing Assets.

  No one else had a single speck to offer, let alone six. All of them, Tejohn included, were tattooed and sentenced to a year of servitude in the name King Shunzik Finstel, ruler of Ussmajil.

  Chapter 25

  “It is there, ape. Just down in that ravine.”

  Chik, the insect warrior they had captured, had taken to calling them apes. In his opinion, Cazia, Ivy, and Kinz were the uglies
t creatures he’d ever seen, and he occasionally insisted that every word of their conversation was a trick being played on him by one of his people’s many enemies. He was convinced the translation stone simulated their conversation, because only insect brains were complex enough to understand abstract concepts.

  Kinz was so irritated by these frequent pronouncements she sometimes seemed on the verge of violence. Ivy treated the creature like one of her subjects, as if it needed nothing more than tolerant instruction.

  Cazia was beyond those sorts of emotions. She felt nothing more than an intense curiosity about the creature--especially the way the small frills at the base of its skull vented one odor after another, which her blue jewel dutifully translated into a long string of boasts about himself, his queen, and the mighty empire of the Tilkilit people.

  They had spent most of the day and part of the night creeping through a fog-shrouded forest with Chik guiding the way. Kinz suspected the creature was leading them in circles, but Ivy pointed out that many of the trees had a stringy red moss on the northern side. It would have made sense for Chik to take them in circles until they found another one of their patrols, but it was clear they were traveling in a straight line.

  Whether he was leading them where they wanted to go was a different question. Chik claimed to be taking them to the Door in the Mountain. According to him, the eagles had come through this door, and so had he.

  “This is where our scout patrols, the swiftest and most worthy, chosen by Queen Sheshoorakolm herself, Ruler of the Depths of Glory and Stone of Might, She who birthed a billion warriors, the All-Blind, All-Knowing Mother of the Tilkilit people, first made entry into this land.”

  He gestured toward a place where the grass gave way to scraggly bushes and the ground rose steeply into bare, stony ridges. A warm wind blew from between two of them, thinning the fog to nothing. They could not advance without coming out of the cover of the trees.

  Chik kept talking. “Seventy-second into this land, Chik Strong Eyes, Bearer of Lance and Mace, Master of Secret Ways—”