The Way Into Darkness: Book Three of The Great Way

by Harry Connolly

  He didn’t. A moment after he made his throw, he was rewarded with another death cry. Struggling to free himself of the weight pushing him down, he couldn’t see them break and run, but he heard it. The beasts cried out in terror and fled, their footsteps receding.

  Tejohn felt a sudden sharp pain in his low leg and back. Were they biting him? Were they passing The Blessing onto him right now? A burst of adrenaline from his tired body gave him the strength to push himself free.

  No, the beasts weren’t biting him. They were burning.

  As he stood, he saw the grunts stampeding southward, toward the narrow stone stairs that led to the top of the wall. There were still a great many beasts in the yard, and those stairs were a natural choke point. Fury willing, he could still catch a few.

  The unbroken spear he’d dropped lay behind him. With one kick, he rolled a burning grunt off of it and the porch. The spear’s shaft was not even charred. He hefted it and sprinted down the front steps, in hot pursuit of the fleeing monsters. One man chasing three hundred. He had lost his sanity, but still he ran.

  There was a high-pitched sound like a cheer, but when he glanced to the left, he saw it was Siltzen and a few of the older children shouting “Charge!” But there was no enemy for them to attack with their ragged, shieldless wedge.

  A shield. There were soldiers among the victims in the center of the yard. “Shield!” he called, and one of the spears lifted a shield for him to grab as he ran through the crowd. He did. Hostages scattered to clear a path for him. He noted the look of blank surprise on their faces as he sprinted by, as though he was performing a play and they were the audience. “Stop those children!” he shouted as he slipped the shield onto his arm.

  The grunts were already bounding onto the stairs. Their tremendous leaping power meant they did not have to crowd onto the bottom steps. Instead, they bounded as high as six or eight feet off the ground, slamming into other grunts already climbing to the top. It was a vicious, churning turmoil of falling bodies, outraged roars, and animal desperation.

  And Tejohn was not fast enough. His old legs were slowing, his breath coming ragged. He was not accustomed to long sprints, not anymore. The grunts bounded upward onto the top of the wall, and no matter how many bowled one into another, there were always more who gained the top and went over the other side.

  He pushed onward, his breath coming in wheezes. He was a dozen paces away with barely three dozen grunts remaining, when one of them looked back at him and roared.

  Tejohn roared back and jabbed. The grunt who had seen him leaped away, but he caught a different beast on its broad back. It collapsed. He moved on to the next, then the next. Jab. Jab. Jab. He barely put any power into it, yanking his weapon back at the merest touch. He held his shield high, but there was no need. The enemy was too spooked to do anything but flee.

  Then, suddenly, the last of them had gained the stairs and in two leaps reached the top of the wall. Tejohn sprinted up after them, leaving defeated grunts smoldering behind him.

  The view from the top of the wall was astonishing. It was a clear, sunny day and he could see far into the flatlands, as they called it. Forest, waterfall, lake, and hill… Great Way, it was beautiful.

  Below him were the last few grunts who had escaped over the wall. Fire take them, it was a tremendous distance to fall, but the beasts were slowly picking themselves up from the gray-spattered rocks and fleeing down the slope with the others.

  Tejohn wanted to shout taunts at them, but he didn’t. They wouldn’t understand and there was too much still to do.

  He turned back toward the courtyard. The hostages still sat obediently in a cluster, staring up at him. In the northeastern corner, Siltzen and his young friends struggled against a half dozen adults. Not one of them had been Fire-taken; Great Way, thank you for small miracles.

  Above, he saw the huge eagle circling. He raised his spear and shouted, “Thank you!” at it. He didn’t expect it to understand him, but he hoped it took his meaning. It turned and glided northward toward the Sweeps.

  “Bring those spears out!” Tejohn shouted at Siltzen and the others. “Bring the spears out and touch each person in this yard.” His voice was loud and hoarse with exertion and unspent rage. “I have brought a cure. Touch the stones and be cured like them!”

  He pointed down at the foot of the wall where people struggled out of piles of ash. The sight galvanized the hostages; they leaped to their feet and rushed at the children. Even the very youngest ventured out of hiding, but no one took the spears away from them. Citizen and soldier alike pressed through the crowd, brushed their fingers against the stones, then moved away.

  A blocky fellow with a dented helmet under his arm approached Tejohn. “My tyr,” he said, “do you remember me?”

  “You’re one of Lowtower’s men.”

  He nodded. “Kabe Lowtower, his cousin. The Commander is inside the holdfast with his family. In a dungeon.”

  “There’s no reason for anyone to be inside the holdfast any more,” Tejohn said. “Gather up a few of these weapons. They’re called kinzchu spears. They—”

  “We saw how they work,” the man interrupted.

  Fair enough. “There’s a wheelbarrow loaded with more at the northern end of Saltstone, set very close to one of the houses by the western road. Deploy some soldiers atop the Marsh Gate to relieve the civilians there, and set a watch to stop the grunts entering the pass through the paddies on the eastern cliffs. Distribute the rest as you see fit.” The man nodded and started to leave. “Kabe,” Tejohn said, stopping him. “There are still grunts inside the walls, moving through the town. They’re still tremendously strong and fast.”

  “They’re also cowards, my tyr.”

  “They’re beasts with a predator’s instincts, not soldiers, and we have not cured enough people to risk heavy losses. Don’t let courage bring us to defeat.”

  Kabe tilted his big square head at that as though it was a new idea to him, and one he was deeply suspicious of. Then he bowed and began gathering soldiers and relieving the children of their weapons.

  Several naked, ash-covered people shuffled toward the fountain near the center of the yard. They were huddled over and choking, clearly uncomfortable and ashamed. No one else in the yard moved to help them.

  The fools. Tejohn stalked across the yard into a shop and took a stack of robes from the shelf. As he carried them toward the fountain, a woman raced toward him.

  “Those are my mother’s robes!” she exclaimed. “That’s my mother’s shop! You can’t just take those!”

  “Shop?” Tejohn answered in his battlefield voice. He wanted everyone to hear what he said next. “There are no more shops, only storerooms. I didn’t come here just to save your shop; I came to save every human being in Kal-Maddum! And you are going to help me do it! The Twofin people will be the army that frees humanity from The Blessing, but only if we treat every human as an ally, a fellow soldier, or a refugee. Starting here, in Saltstone, a tiny city at the edge of what was once a great empire, we are going to sweep across the land and restore its peoples.” He looked down at the young woman. “And we will not charge them for the privilege.” To the crowd, he raised the shield with the Twofin symbol painted on it and shouted, “This is where the tide turns! This is where the beasts begin their retreat and humankind its counter. Right here, right now, with you people.” He took a deep breath and looked from face to face. “If the Twofins are worthy of the task.”

  “We are!” a woman cried, and a chorus of voices shouted in agreement. Three people relieved him of the robes in his hands, and the young woman who had protested looked down at her feet, her face red.

  A dark-haired young woman stepped in front of him. She wore a soldier’s underpadding but not the armor that went over it. Tejohn suddenly noticed several others were dressed similarly. There were more soldiers here than he’d expected. “What can we do?” she asked.

  Tejohn noticed the broken kinzchu spearpoint lying in the dirt.
He picked it up and slid it into his belt. “Fetch me a ladder. And a sturdy rope.”

  It wasn’t just the holdfast doors that were blocked by granite blocks, it was the walls around them, too. The pounding the grunts had given the place had been vicious, but the pink blocks were unmoved.

  No matter. When the soldier returned with a ladder, Tejohn used it to climb onto the balcony, then lifted it so he could set it on the balcony and gain the roof. The woman who had brought it to him looked distressed, as though she’d expected to accompany him. Two others crossed the yard with an even longer ladder, so perhaps she would soon.

  Tejohn scrambled across the wooden roof. The holdfast was built like a great wooden box, with a single stone tower rising out of it. That tower was made of scholar-created stone with so many arrow slits, Tejohn didn’t think the tower wide enough to hold that many bows.

  A shadow moved behind one of the slits, and Tejohn’s skin crawled. If they’d planned to shoot an arrow into him, they would have done it by now. He hoped. Out of habit, he’d moved his shield up to protect himself, but after a moment’s thought, he lowered it. Best not to take a warlike stance.

  “You saw what just happened!” Tejohn called. “You saw! Now come out and take your place as the saviors of humankind!”

  “Big talk,” a woman answered, “but how do we know it’s real?”

  Tejohn almost laughed. “You think this was a performance, staged by the grunts, to draw you out?”

  “How do we know it’s not?”

  This wasn’t right. Something was going on that Tejohn didn’t understand. “How many of you has he killed?” There was no answer from the tower. Three locals came off the top of the ladder onto the roof, but Tejohn held up his hand to silence them. “I know Doctor Twofin is in there with you. How many?”

  “Some,” came the answer, finally.

  “Is he there? He knew me once. Let me speak to him.”

  “He doesn’t come to the tower,” the woman inside answered. “He isn’t here.”

  The locals had brought him a heavy coil of rope. Tejohn drew his knife and short sword and set them on the roof. In a better world, he would never have use for them again. “Find a sturdy place to tie that off. We’re going into the holdfast below by one of the galleries.”

  “Descend into the holdfast,” the woman called, “and you will be killed.”

  “Look at me!” Tejohn called back. “My only weapon is a blunt spear! Will you murder an unarmed man? Would your tyr allow the murder of the man who liberated his people?”

  There was an delay before the answer came. “Enter the holdfast and be killed.”

  “He’s there, isn’t he?” Tejohn asked, the words coming out of his mouth almost before the realization came to him. “He’s right there, speaking in your ear.”

  “No,” she answered in a completely unconvincing tone. “No, he’s not.”

  Tejohn felt more convinced than ever that Doctor Twofin was there, just inside that tower. Goose bumps ran down his back, and it took all of his willpower not to crouch behind his shield. How could he reach the scholar and tyr when he couldn’t even see him? They’d been colleagues once--not friends, but friendly--and Tejohn had respected the old teacher in a way that he’d never respected any scholar. For his part, Twofin had never behaved as though he was afraid of Tejohn as so many others had.

  But those old bonds meant nothing anymore. The old man had gone hollow. He was a wizard. If you overuse magic, you may find the god difficult to exorcise. It is a holy thing.

  The Great Way wants to know and to be known.

  That’s what Dhe had said. Clearly, whether Tejohn truly believed that it was The Great Way acting through the old scholar, it was that force that he needed to address.

  “Don’t you want to know how I did it?” There was no answer right away. “Doctor Twofin. My tyr, wouldn’t you like to know how I managed to undo The Blessing? Knowledge like that would be valuable. You could take knowledge like that out into the world. Maybe, if you learned to make and wield them yourself, this sort of magic could bear your name--”

  “How?” The voice was hoarse, as though he had not spoken for days.

  “Is that you, Doctor Twofin? My tyr?” Tejohn waved the locals off the roof and they were happy to comply.

  “How?” he asked again. This time, Tejohn could see the tip of an iron dart appear inside an arrow slit.

  He did not raise his shield. “Kill me and you’ll never know.”

  “I want to know.”

  Fire and Fury, that voice did not sound remotely human. “Humankind has nearly disappeared from all of Kal-Maddum. I will ally myself with anyone who can help prevent that. Anyone.” Tejohn stepped forward and slowly raised the kinzchu spear toward the arrow slit where the old scholar was standing. “Can you make more of these?”

  He was careful not to hold the spear too close. Twofin’s hand, gnarled and dirty, with dried blood along the knuckles, reached through the gap.

  Almost. He almost grabbed hold of it on his own, but some wizard’s sense seemed to warn him off. He pulled his hand back.

  But Tejohn was quick. He’d always been quicker than anyone. He thrust the spear quickly toward the slot and rapped the kinzchu stone on the back of the old man’s knuckles.

  There was a sound of a body falling from inside the tower and someone cried out, “My tyr!”

  “Don’t hurt him!” Tejohn shouted. “Don’t take his fingers or cut his throat. I just--” His skin prickled suddenly and he raised his shield. An arrow struck it solidly. “Don’t let anyone hurt him!” He shouted again. “I just cured him!”

  Chapter 25

  It did not take long for Cazia to become completely, hopelessly lost. Once she passed over Twofin’s southern wall, she saw that the road wound down the mountainside to the east. She was headed into Freewell lands, which lay in the southwest.

  In her younger years, she had spent long afternoons hidden in the map room of the Scholars’ Tower staring at the westernmost lands in Peradain. At her father’s lands. She knew, generally, what angle she should turn once she was out of Salt Pass. She knew the Bescos River flowed south out of the mountains to the Bescos Sea somewhere near her father’s lands. She also knew there was a road called the Espileth Way that connected the Freewell holdings to the Simblin lands to the south, and led eastward from there to the Waterlands.

  The road and the river met at her father’s holdfast, so she figured all she had to do was turn the cart slightly to the right, keep her speed up and her eyes open, and she was sure to come across either one or the other at some point. Whichever it was, she would follow it straight to her destination.

  Where she would meet him for the first time. Monument give her the strength she would need for that moment. How she had hated her father, after the years of torment people had piled on her in his name. And, at the same time, how she had longed to see him ride out of the west to protect her from her Enemies.

  She had never tried to tell anyone about those daydreams except her older brother, and he became terrified before she’d gotten more than a few words out, shushing her as he shut the door to his room. He’d seemed so much older and wiser than her at the time, but he couldn’t have been older than ten at the time. Father is a cold-blooded killer, he’d insisted. Father was a courageous warrior. Father was poisoned by ambition. Father turned on the king and his family.

  Father caused the death of thousands.

  He was hated by the entire civilized world, even his former allies. Only King Ellifer’s forbearance allowed him to retain his holdfast and the title of tyr, although no one was entirely sure why.

  Cazia had been taught to hate him from her earliest years, had been raised on stories of grief and loss he had caused, had seen countless battle scars and limbless stumps earned on the fields of battle that he instigated. At the same time, she’d secretly hoped he would rescue her the way warrior-fathers rescued kidnapped daughters in old songs and plays. She’d secretly hoped ev
eryone she’d ever spoken to was wrong, and that he was simply misunderstood. It was absurd, yes, but there it was, a childish desire she thought she would carry into her old age.

  What was she going to say to the man? What would he be like? Part of her imagined him as a devious, eel-eyed sadist, part of her imagined him as a gruff but capable warrior who still loved her from afar.

  It was foolish. If he truly loved her, she would have met him long before. She would have had a letter from him, or a gift for the changing of the year, or the traditional bouquet on her tenth birthday.

  Instead, all of that had come from people inside the palace. The king and queen had been the ones to give her gifts and her bouquet. Doctor Twofin had given her his time and his care. As for her father, well, he hadn’t even tried.

  Cazia expected to see him before nightfall that very day.

  Perhaps it was that her thoughts were so scattered. Perhaps it was that the terrain below her quickly became more rugged than any she’d ever seen before. Perhaps it was just that she was hungry and tired. Whatever the reason, the sun was low over the mountains in the west when, without having passed either river or road, the ground suddenly dropped away and Cazia found herself zooming out over a broad expanse of water.

  She was so startled that she immediately dipped lower, as though there was something to be learned among the small green swells. Glancing down, saw huge eddies rippling above massive shadows beneath the surface, and she immediately climbed much, much higher.

  Was this the Bescos Sea? The western shore ahead was so far away it was shrouded in mist, but the mountains of the peninsula beyond were huge silhouettes against the sky. She tried to remember what the maps said. There were no large lakes that she remembered. The nearest was Deep Stone Lake. Could she have accidentally turned eastward and flown all the way into Finstel lands?