The Way Into Darkness: Book Three of The Great Way

by Harry Connolly

“What about Gerriton?” Esselba asked. “Most of the people here are Gerrits or Grimwoods.”

  “I don’t know about Grimwood lands,” Cazia answered. “We didn’t pass over them. But…” As she tried to think of a gentle way to finish her sentence, she saw Esselba’s expression go bleak. Her hesitation had been answer enough. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sure? Gerriton has been taken over by the enemy?”

  “This enemy doesn’t take over cities. Gerriton was emptied and burned months ago. And yes, we’re sure. We flew along the roadways so we would not get lost. The city is a ruin now.”

  “What about the people? Could they have fled to the refuge at Anmall’s Wall?”

  “Anything is possible,” Cazia said doubtfully.

  Esselba sighed. “I believe you. I shouldn’t believe you, but I do. Now I just have to decide what to tell the others.”

  “Here you go!” Kinz called. She threw a short rope down to Tejohn.

  Cazia caught hold of Esselba’s hand and said, “They’re free people now.”

  The old woman blinked three times, then nodded. “Of course.”

  Stoneface bound Ghoron’s wrists swiftly and surely, then placed a stick in his hands and, with a slender string, tied his fingers to that.

  Kinz was the first down the rope. She moved much more slowly than Tejohn had, and it took all of Cazia’s willpower not to snap at her to hurry. When she finally reached the bottom, Ivy tried to climb onto the rope next, but Cazia pulled her back. The princess pouted a bit, but she waited her turn.

  “You might need this,” Esselba said. She pressed something into Cazia’s uninjured hand. It was some kind of soft rock about the size of a sourcake.

  “What is it?”

  “Something we trade the Durdric for. It’s soap. Wet the prince down and rub this on him to get the dirt off.”

  Cazia slipped it into her pocket and nodded in thanks, then started down the rope.

  She wanted to descend faster than Kinz, but it was impossible. How long had it been since she’d been struck in the hand with an arrow? She’d lost track, but it had been at least a month and a half. She could move her fingers pretty well now, but holding her weight was still impossible. Trapping the rope in her elbow, she descended with all the speed of a weary caterpillar.

  Fire and Fury, it was embarrassing.

  Kinz’s nose wrinkled in disgust. As Cazia finally reached the ground and came near, she understood why; the old man smelled even worse than he looked. “Let’s move away,” she said, laying a hand on Kinz’s elbow. “He’ll be out for a while.”

  “We hope,” Tejohn said.

  They all looked up to see Ivy taking hold of the rope. Esselba tried to move close and assist her, but the princess gave her a withering look and she backed away.

  Tejohn moved to the bottom of the rope, obviously worried that the girl would fall. Ivy ordered him to move away but he ignored her. Cazia and Kinz looked over at them, then looked at each other. The older girl rolled her eyes. “There is supposed to be the…what did you call it?”

  “A library,” Cazia said, and they both hurried away to the tower while Stoneface and the princess argued over how much help she needed.

  Before they were five paces from the entrance to the tower, they caught the smell. It was a complex, multilayered thing: part feces, part mustiness, part worst armpit smell in the world. Both girls staggered back from it, and circled around to the western side of the door, where they would be upwind.

  “Monument sustain me,” Cazia whispered. “How could he… What is that? What is that smell?”

  “I have never made to smell anything like this,” Kinz said. “It is like breathing poison.”

  Cazia peered into the open doorway. “We always knew Ghoron might have gone hollow; that’s why we need the library. The spell we’ve come for should be there, but…”

  Kinz sighed and laid her hand on Cazia’s shoulder. “You faced down that eagle and the worm. We defied the Tilkilit Queen together. Will we let the bad stink make us stop now?”

  “Absolutely,” Cazia said, and they laughed together, then started toward the doorway.

  The inside of the tower was repulsive beyond anything the smell could have prepared them for. The floor was caked with a dried brown sludge. Scraps of cloth, long gray bones, and pieces of broken furniture stuck out of it as if it was a frozen lake. The smell continued to waft over them, and Cazia knew it was clinging to her skin, getting into her hair, permeating her clothes.

  There was a trail of almost-clear floor along the wall leading to a stair. She bolted inside and ran up the steps—they creaked under her weight and her boots slipped a bit on the oily wood. Near the top of the first flight, she came to a shuttered window and bashed it open with her elbow.

  Then she ran back down the stairs out into the yard again. “Fire and Fury,” she gasped, after letting out her breath. “It’s like he lives inside a…no, this is worse than a midden. Little Spinner, please bring him back to sanity. Please let this be at an end.”

  They looked back at the prince where he lay sprawled on the rocks. Just beside him, Tejohn stepped back from the rope, allowing the princess to finish her descent unaided. Ivy gave him a haughty I-told-you-so look, then bent to take the stone from the unconscious man’s hand. She stopped and backed away, her nose curled in disgust.

  “Does he have no family? Does he have no friends to look after him?”

  Tejohn nudged the man’s hand with the tip of his boot, then rubbed it clean against the rock. “He’s a wizard. If anyone came close enough to help him, he would have burned them alive and cut them apart. What’s the tower look like?”

  “Like his skin,” Cazia said, “but worse.”

  “Far worse,” Kinz said.

  Tejohn and Ivy walked to the tower door and peered in. The princess staggered back, but Tejohn looked around once, then back to them. “Where is this library?”

  Cazia shrugged. The map room in the Scholars’ Tower had been on the ground floor, but Lar had stored his scrolls as high off the ground as possible.

  Tejohn sighed, took a deep breath, and stepped inside.

  The three girls looked at each other, then shrugged. Better him than them.

  They circled the tower while he climbed, standing beneath him as he opened each shutter, one at a time. He leaned out, his face paler each time, to take a deep breath, then continued climbing.

  “Five floors,” Kinz said. “I am glad he is doing it and not me.”

  “It is disgusting,” the princess said. “If I had to go in there, I would jump off the cliff into the lake below after, just to wash the smell out of my hair.”

  Cazia glanced over at the edge of the cliff. “The alligaunts wouldn’t come near you.”

  “Hah!” Kinz said. “You would strike those lakeboys dead! The water would turn brown and they would roll over like logs.”

  Old Stoneface threw open a pair of shutters just below the roof. He’d reached the top floor. Cazia followed him around to the other side of the tower as he opened the last window. “There’s nothing!” he called down.

  “What do you mean, nothing?” Cazia shouted back. “There should be scrolls! In cubbies!”

  “The shelves are here,” he shouted back down, “but they’re empty.”

  “Fire and Fury, I did not come all this way...” Cazia took a deep breath and charged into the tower, sprinting up the stairs. On the second floor, she was assailed by a swarm of fat, buzzing flies, and on the third floor, the air was so awful that it didn’t even help to stick her head out the window. She coughed and choked until she reached the top.

  The fifth floor was cleaner than the rest, but it was still unbearably filthy. Tejohn had opened two windows, and the westernmost one was perfectly situated to allow the Sweeps wind to blow through the building.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Tejohn said, and she almost burst out laughing. Of course not. He had the decency to look embarrassed.

  There w
ere three tall shelves against the walls, and all were divided into little cubbyholes. A nasty, hairy mold grew over the bottom three rows, making it look like the wood was covered with a bear pelt.

  All the cubbies were empty. Tejohn was right. There were no other floors and no place for the scrolls. Everything they had needed was gone.

  Together, they fled from the tower, running down through all the muck and stink. The trip down seemed even more precarious than the way up, and Cazia thought several times that she would loose her footing and tumble into the mold and muck.

  They burst through the doors into the yard, and not even the powerful Sweeps wind was enough to clear her nostrils of the smell. Her hair felt sticky just from the air in the tower.

  “How important were those scrolls?” Tejohn asked.

  More than anything, she wanted to answer, but the thought made her sick. “I don’t know enough,” she admitted. “A translation spell has to be placed on an object. It can’t just float around in the air during a conversation. A fire spell can’t be put into an object, otherwise the Scholars’ Tower would have gotten rich selling firewands or something.”

  Stoneface glanced at Ghoron’s prostrate form. He understood. “But a healing spell can be cast directly on a person who needs it or onto a sleepstone for later.”

  “So can a light spell. You can make a glowing light or you can put that light into a stone, which lasts longer and is portable. There must be an underlying theory to it, but my lessons never got that far.”

  “You think the stone, this First Plunder, is related to the portal. And that it has restored Ghoron’s sanity.”

  “Well…” Was this the moment she admitted that she had gone hollow and the stones had brought her back? She was pretty sure he’d guessed already, but the idea still frightened her. She’d experienced the strange feeling of having her magic stripped away, and as much as she hated to admit it, over the last several days, she’d come to acknowledge that Ivy’s idea that magic was a kind of possession was accidentally correct. “I do believe the kinzchu stones are related to the portals. So are the Gifts.”

  “The Gifts? You know this for a fact?”

  “I do. What I still don’t understand is how they’re related.”

  “Do you think they can take The Blessing from its victims?”

  Cazia didn’t trust the strangely gentle tone of his voice. “I hope so, but even if it does, the stones we have will never be enough. I have to learn how to make more somehow.”

  “And you think the library would have instructions for that.”

  “Instructions?” She shook out her hair so the wind could blow through it. “I didn’t think they would have step-by-step instructions. But there would have been something I could study. Wisdom. Revelation. Something. The scholars wrote their discoveries down so they could sign their names to them. They all wanted to be remembered by later generations.”

  And now they would be forgotten.

  “I’ve tried to create new ones,” she said. “I’ve tried to use my magic to understand the stones well enough to create new ones, but…”

  “But it’s beyond you.”

  Cazia felt hopeless and angry. They’d come all this way with the stones they’d stolen from the Tilkilit, and they had no idea how to make more. The only other library she knew about in all of Kal-Maddum was the original Scholars’ Tower in Peradain, and not only had that city fallen to The Blessing, but Doctor Warpoole had dropped an acid cloud into it.

  Were there other, secret libraries hidden around Kal-Maddum? It was possible, but Cazia had no idea how to find them. She didn’t even know where to start.

  Fire and Fury, it was so frustrating! All this risk and effort to find the information she needed, only to discover it had been destroyed. Everything had been destroyed. There was no way they could fight The Blessing with a handful of stones.

  Cazia turned back to the tower, beginning the motions for a fire spell. If it didn’t have what they needed, it needed to be cleansed…

  Tejohn rushed forward and caught hold of her hands, breaking the spell. “You’re going to burn it?”

  “Why not?” she snapped at him. “It’s filthy! Full of diseases, and we have no sleepstones here to cure us if we catch something. Better to purify it now.”

  He shook his head. “A burning tower at the end of the Sweeps would be like a signal. Every grunt within three day’s travel would descend on us.”

  “Hmf. It would have been satisfying, at least. And we would have had something to watch while we waited for him to wake up and tell us how much he remembers of his library.”

  She looked back at the wretch lying on the stones. He has been cured of his madness. But part of her didn’t believe it. Was it possible that he had read the scrolls before destroying them? Did he know the spell Lar wanted to learn? Was he knowledgeable enough to create more kinzchu stones? Could that…animal teach them how to save every living person in Kal-Maddum? It seemed impossible. “Some prince.”

  Ghoron slept for the entire day and all through the night. Esselba lowered wooden flats so Cazia, Ivy and the others would not have to sleep on the stones. Although it was still late summer, after sunset the Sweeps wind was strong enough that Cazia had to call for a blanket to throw over the prince. Come dawn, she woke to find Tejohn standing guard over them all.

  Esselba and a few other villagers watched them from the cliff above. Cazia called for a meal, and the woman moved back out of sight without so much as a nod of her head. They were given small bowls of thin rice gruel—no point in wasting good food on people who would soon be murdered by a wizard, apparently—then left alone with the rising sun in their faces and the sour wind at their backs.

  They whiled away the hours by telling their stories. Tejohn went first, and as far as Cazia could tell, he held nothing back. She was startled by the tale he told: he’d been traveling mostly within the empire, and he’d faced much more outright cruelty than she had, except for the Tilkilit, who didn’t count. Was this a new thing, 0r had the empire always been so harsh?

  When he finished, it was the girls’ turn, and Ivy started to describe the fall of Samsit. She kept getting details wrong, telling things in the wrong order, and skimming over events that made the story interesting, so Cazia kept interrupting her until the girl got all huffy and fell silent.

  Cazia told the whole thing, including the deception by Kinz and Alga, the dragon bones, the Tilkilit, the abandoned tower by the sea, the conversation with Mother, everything. Tejohn listened without interrupting or rolling his eyes. Not even once.

  His face became pale when she told him about their flight across the empire. He’d expected to hear that Peradain was in ruins, but the stories she told of shattered cities, burning crops, and corpses on the road clearly shook him to his core.

  “Where did you cross over into the Sweeps?” he asked.

  “Caarilit. It was a burned, empty ruin.”

  Tejohn was silent a moment. Cazia was finished with her part of the story. “I almost think you believe us.”

  “I do” was all he said in return.

  Then Ghoron groaned and rolled onto his side.

  “Fire and Fury,” Tejohn drew his sword and raised his shield, then moved close to the prince.

  “Where am I?” Ghoron called out. “What has happened to me? Was I dead?”

  “No,” Cazia called. She would have approached, but the look Old Stoneface gave her warned her off. He’s just being careful. “What is the last thing you remember?”

  There was a moment’s pause before he responded. “Being exhausted,” Ghoron answered, “and falling asleep in my bed. How did I get out here? And what is this… Monument sustain me, what am I covered with?”

  “You went hollow,” Tejohn said, his voice cold. “You have been living in seclusion ever since.”

  “Feh!” the prince answered. “I’ve lived in seclusion for most of my life. There’s research to be done! It doesn’t mean that…” He fell silent, look
ing at the stones around him, then his hands, then the tray of food that had sat beside him overnight. “I…”

  “It’s coming back to you, isn’t it?” Cazia said. She looked at Tejohn. The old soldier’s lips were white where he pressed them together, and his face was shiny with sweat; he looked ready to kill at the slightest provocation. She raised her hand and pressed downward. Be calm. “You had something else living inside of you.”

  “I did,” Ghoron said. His thin, high voice was almost swallowed by the sound of the wind. “Many, many somethings. Great Way, I did go hollow, didn’t I?” He glanced up at Treygar and, for the first time, seemed to recognize the danger the man represented. “Are you going to kill me?”

  When Treygar answered, he bared his teeth. “I haven’t decided yet.”

  “They’re gone,” Ghoron said. “I assure you it’s true. All of the voices are gone. I’m myself again.”

  Treygar didn’t relax one bit. “What voices?”

  Cazia broke in. “The other presence. The thing, unliving but intelligent, that enters a person when they go hollow, and takes away their…our humanity.”

  “I remember now,” the old man said again. He sat up, moving as though his body felt strange. “I went too far. After years of being careful, I became frustrated and went too far. The magic inside me awoke. So many feelings I couldn’t control! Feelings that didn’t come from me! I couldn’t tell the difference between what it wanted and what I wanted.”

  Cazia felt a weird mixture of shame and relief. Someone else had gone through what she had gone through! She was not alone! She glanced at Kinz and Ivy, expecting to see them looking at the prince with disgust, but instead, they were staring at her blankly.

  I’m sorry.

  “Unliving but intelligent. Yes, that’s what it was like. But as time went on, things got more complicated. It grew more powerful, controlling me more directly, and that voice inside began to sound like a chorus.”

  Goose bumps ran down Cazia’s back. “How long before that happened?”

  “Months. Oh, Great Way, it has been months that I was— How did you cure me?” He turned back to his tray of food. The stone was still sitting in the bowl, half covered by strips of alligaunt that had hardened overnight in the wind. “Was it this?” He shoved a strip of meat aside and his finger brushed the stone.