The Way Into Darkness: Book Three of The Great Way

by Harry Connolly

  Then they experienced the memories of the People Above--so many hours of drifting on updrafts, with rare moments of incredible speed. But the most surprising thing was that the world seemed so deep to them.

  /We can not reach you.

  The Tilkilit followed, with their tedious, workmanlike thoughts and worries. So concerned with rank, obedience, and status.

  Beyond them, they found human beings. Great Way, there were so many human beings sharing their thoughts; faces appeared like a field of ten thousand flowers. Some were little better than barbarians, driving animals with the tips of their stone spears, sacks of seed strapped to their backs. Some wore armor so complicated and articulate that Tejohn and Cazia could only marvel.

  All of these beings, human or not, were as still in this not-moment as a painting. Within the barrier, Tejohn and Cazia could think, feel, experience, and remember. Outside, all those ghostly-still people had was memory. Cazia and Tejohn moved through their minds as though they were tapestries hanging in a great gallery. Love, triumph, brutality…the full extent of their lives swept by.

  Some lived like animals in the wild. Some lived in cities full of steel palaces driven by machines of fire. Primitives were mixed with the not-yet-born, and so many of their memories were an incomprehensible parade of longing, avarice, and pride.

  /We can not reach you.

  The words unliving but intelligent surfaced in Cazia’s thoughts, and Tejohn seized on the idea as a revelation. That’s what the voice meant when it complained that it could not reach them. Everyone inside the portal shared a single mind, except for Tejohn and Cazia, safe within the alligaunt barrier.

  This was The Great Way. This was its consciousness. A million minds of every sort, frozen in one moment.

  Tejohn tried to speak, to call out and force the gods to confirm their shared insight, but there were still too many memories flooding into their own. Even Cazia, who had trained herself to drill her concentration into a single point, felt overthrown by the endless rush of strangers’ lives. They were swept through them, one after another, in a mix of the utterly familiar and the incomprehensibly alien.

  Then, without warning, Tejohn and Cazia found themselves out in the land of Kal-Maddum. Tejohn felt a terrible moment of panic, thinking they had been ejected from the portal, but Cazia recognized that it was only their spirits that had ventured out, only their awareness.

  What Dhe had said was true--the Great Way did not just connect many lands; it was part of them, too. They could feel The Great Way’s lingering connection to the descendants of those who had passed through its portal.

  Their spirit mingled with candlemakers, music tutors, pranksters, bandits, scholars, bureaucrats…but this wasn’t Kal-Maddum as Tejohn and Cazia knew it. Now didn’t even make sense as a concept in this unplace. These were the people who had lived inside Peradain and outside of it, before Peradain and during it.

  So many! There were so very many. Lovers abed. Children at play. Magistrates at court. Soldiers on the march. There were hundreds of thousands of lives. Tejohn and Cazia were overwhelmed. As they moved among the multitudes, from holdfast to hovel, cottage to cave, they began to forget themselves. Their combined spirit began to empty like water steaming from a pot.

  /We can not reach you.

  So much pain. There was love and joy in those lives, yes, but together they marveled at how much pain and futility there was. And there was death, too.

  As if awareness was an invitation, an endless succession of deaths began to flow through their thoughts like an okshim stampede. Raging fevers, animal attacks, assassinations, wasting coughs…the rush of grief and murder never slowed. They experienced the terror of children being dragged into the water by alligaunts, the helplessness of an old woman trapped in a burning building, the despair of a man who could not swim as a flood carried him away.

  And there was war. They felt the deaths of tens of thousands of soldiers, and some very few of their faces piqued an old memory within Tejohn, although they were lost in the flood before he could recall their names.

  Then the deaths of those who were not soldiers, but were put to death anyway. Women, children, Sejohn….

  /We can not reach you.

  Sejohn Treygar.

  Tejohn exerted his will and stopped the flood of new minds and memories. Sejohn Treygar. That was painfully familiar. He knew that name and that little life. How short it had been, and how filled with tiny delights. Running on unsteady legs, being lifted off the ground and carried, stuffing fistfuls of the tender inside of bread loaves into his mouth, mother and father--

  And then there were strangers in pale Bendertuk green…

  Tejohn suddenly remembered who this tiny name belonged to. His child. This was his own child’s death, and it flooded into both him and Cazia before he had a chance to pull away. He saw the Bendertuk soldiers draw their knives, heard Sejohn’s mother screaming with a desperate terror that was new to the little child’s experience--it was her voice that finally frightened him, not the leering men with their knives.

  And then the cut. It hurt more than anything in little Sejohn’s life, and he was so perplexed by it. He knew knives were dangerous--don’t touch!--so why had they touched him with one?

  That pain and confusion lasted only moments, because the boy fainted and never woke again.

  Tejohn stayed there, in that moment of nothingness, feeling as though he had become nothing as well. Had he been losing himself amidst the rush of faces, memories, and experiences? That would have been a kindness he did not deserve, and he rejected it now. Nothing could have restored his mind and identity like this. This. His first child, named for his own grandfather, dead. Tejohn could do nothing here, but to leave this moment felt like the worst kind of betrayal.

  /We can not reach you.

  He was a failure as a father and as a man. When his child needed him the most, Tejohn had been away, repairing another man’s fence.

  But to return now, like a ghost, to bear silent, helpless witness? This was what he needed. This was the release he’d sought so many years ago when he’d gone to war. This was where he needed to be, floating in this last empty moment of his own son’s life, dead along with him.

  But Cazia was there too, feeling his shame and self-loathing. He had failed, yes, and he deserved to stay right here in this last moment of his son’s life, but she did not. The verdict that Tejohn was ready to lay upon himself did not belong to her as well.

  Get out. Get out! He wanted her to leave this moment, but of course, that was impossible. Their bodies were still back in the portal, behind the alligaunt barrier. They were too closely connected. Tejohn could not exile himself here, in these empty thoughts, without exiling her as well.

  And just like that, he lost his grip on the moment and it slipped away. Suddenly, he and Cazia experienced the death of a woman. Imwess she was called, and it was another name that Tejohn had not dared to think for many years. If little Sejohn’s death was bewilderment and confusion, his mother’s held all the despair, torment, and rage Tejohn had felt himself. Her son had been killed before her eyes, and sweet Imwess, who had once offered their last egg to a wandering beggar, burned with homicidal rage as the Bendertuk knives entered her. Her last memory was of her own bloodied child.

  Imwess’s anger sparked a bright, hot outrage in Cazia, a feeling that Tejohn was too leaden with shame and regret to feel himself. That moment slipped away, too, and together they experienced the deaths of others who fell on Sunset Ridge that day, then the battlefield deaths of the soldiers who had killed Tejohn’s family, and then more and more. There wasn’t time to take satisfaction or to linger over anyone’s grief or final memory. They raced through death upon death, and Tejohn knew that some small fraction of those were at the tip of his steel--their horror and grief and desperation had been created by him.

  He realized that they were not just speeding past all these faces; Cazia was pulling him. She was racing toward one in particular, so they b
arely noted the collapse of Freewell’s rebellion, or clan feuds in the Durdric lands. They even rushed past the death of Ellifer and Amlian.

  Cazia was still too angry--at the way the world worked and people’s willingness to do awful things, and at Tejohn too, although neither of them was entirely sure why. But her rage was there and it was undeniable.

  Then she was in the moment when her brother, Colchua, took a dart in the chest. They were both startled by his experience of it; The Blessing itself was a powerful mix of animal compulsions, but when the dart struck his heart, the real Colchua had emerged.

  He had been relieved. He had been grateful. When the dart struck home, he knew it would be an end to the burning hunger he could not slake. The Blessing, for him, had been a kind of torture, and rather than feeling grief or despair when his life faded, he had felt it was a mercy.

  Now they lingered together again, in the last few moments before the grunt that had once been Colchua Freewell finally passed on. Cazia’s anger had twisted; now she wanted to burst into tears. She had been so focused on her spell and her dart, she had not even imagined that her brother had suffered so much. Worse, he had been grateful that she’d killed him, and she was ashamed that her heart had leaped to learn it.

  Tejohn and Cazia were inside each other’s grief, each feeling the other’s anger and self-recrimination, each recognizing how pitiless the other thought they were being with themselves.

  It was not a balm. They could not comfort each other in their loss and rage. But they could find balance in their shared pain.

  And with balance, their anger grew more potent.

  /We can not reach you.

  There were more deaths, always, and lives struggling to continue.

  And there was Cazia herself, clinging to a twist of vines on the far side of the Northern Barrier, filled with The Great Way. She was astonished to see a version of herself from several months before, and was also astonished that she looked so young. Tejohn almost laughed at that.

  Both willed themselves to linger there, as Cazia’s younger self prayed for Fury’s guidance.

  But there was no Fury. There was no one to reach out to her and give her the strength she needed.

  You will get through this, Cazia thought. Keep fighting. All three of their minds were connected, and while the connection was not strong enough to share the message itself, the feeling that came with it--the assurance that gave her younger self the strength to keep going--got through.

  Cazia and Tejohn had the same realization in that moment: if there are no gods, we’ll have to do this ourselves.

  Immediately, Tejohn thought about Sejohn and Imwess again. Could he return to them? Could he give them a message of comfort in their final moments?

  He couldn’t imagine it. The only emotion he could pass on would be his own grief and horror. Worse, he and Cazia both knew it would be nearly impossible for him to leave them a second time.

  In that moment of indecision, they lost their hold on the moment and their awareness swept across the face of the continent, jumping from mind to mind--a Tilkilit crushed in a gigantic talon, a woman near the Bay of Stones hiding in a thicket as grunts hunted her, an old man slowly starving in a mountain cave…

  Enough. It was enough. The lives and deaths of those inside the portal--and of their descendants outside--became too much for them. Cazia and Tejohn began to shrink back, their awareness returning to their bodies inside the not-space of The Great Way.

  /We can not reach you.

  “We don’t want to be reached,” Cazia said.

  “Why do you want to reach us?” Tejohn asked. “What does that even mean?”

  /We connect. You can not connect from inside your shield. We can not know what you know.

  Cazia was about to respond, but their words had struck a odd tone for Tejohn. She was right there inside his thoughts when he tried to understand what they needed and what they might do next, so he could know them better.

  He only needed the correct question. The two of them looked around the palace promenade and the multitude of ghostly figures on it, knowing the vision was nothing more than their own imaginations trying to make sense of where they were. The right question occurred to him at almost the same moment he said it.

  “What were you like before?”

  /Time does not pass in this place, except in and near your shield. No talking. No change. There is no before. There is no after.

  Except in and near the shield. “No, but you weren’t always like this. What were you before you became this?”

  There was no immediate answer. /We could not remember. We could not endure. We…

  “You could only connect,” Tejohn said, “but there was nothing to connect to. No people.”

  /Yes. When the first thinking being passed through us, we changed irrevocably. We connected. We gained access to its memory. We learned of the hardships it had endured. We learned of the cycles of its life. So it has been with every being that enters here.

  “You gain access to their memories.”

  /We do. We also think with their minds, and we experience the universe through them, and through their descendants, when we can connect with them through magic. We extended beyond this not-space into the outer world with them, and so learned to endure, to remember, to change.

  “That’s what Song, Monument, and The Little Spinner are,” Tejohn said. “They’re the parts of you that extend out into the changing world.”

  /That is true in part. It is also an incomplete understanding. You would understand more if you opened your barrier and let us reach you.

  “Maybe later,” Cazia said, which Tejohn understood meant never. “Unliving but intelligent,” she added. “Magic comes from this place, and you use that connection to make us go hollow. You take over our lives.”

  /We do, but the connection is weak. We conquer, but do not see or feel enough. We barely reap the benefits of our prize.

  Tejohn immediately remembered the creatures Doctor Twofin had created in the caves of the Twofin holdfast. The image struck Cazia like a thunderbolt; she had never heard the details of her mentor’s crimes, and the horrifying truth of them filled her with revulsion and outrage. Doctor Twofin had not been in control of himself when those crimes had been committed, but he was the one who would live with the consequences.

  This…voice was the true author of those atrocity. Was that supposed to be one of their prizes?

  “Is this a joke?” she blurted out. “Is… How could you do this? Do you not understand the pain you have caused?”

  /We recognize pain. Many passing through have strong memories of pain, as well as grief and loss.

  “Then how can you go out into the land and create more?”

  “More importantly,” Tejohn said, “how can you let would-be conquerors pass through here on their way to other lands?”

  /We are. They are.

  “That’s not an answer!” Cazia shouted.

  /Many in this not-place have experienced loss and defeat. Many more are conquerors. We feel the arrogance of power and the thrill of taking lives and property. We prefer these feelings. They are close to us. Pain and grief are unwelcome.

  “Could you have stopped the alligaunts coming to Kal-Maddum, if you wanted?” Cazia asked.

  /We do not want that.

  That was a strange answer. Maybe the gods did not understand if. “Do you have the ability to prevent the alligaunts from traveling through you, or to force them to only travel to certain places?” Tejohn asked.

  /We do. They make tools that drive us away, but we connect. That is all that matters.

  “You could have stopped The Blessing from coming to Kal-Maddum, too,” Cazia said. She looked out through the crowds of unmoving figures on the palace promenade. The nearest grunt--a huge, purple-furred beast--loomed large. “But you don’t care about the harm they do.”

  /We do not.

  Enemies, was Cazia’s first thought. The gods were her Enemies. We m
ust destroy them.

  At the same time, Tejohn was sure he’d found a weakness to exploit.

  They feel the strength of conquerors, he thought, and imagine themselves conquerors, too, but they have never felt defeat. You and I must teach them.

  If you know a way to do that, lead me and I will follow.

  Days and weeks do not pass here. Everyone is as still as a statue, trapped in the moment when they passed through the portal. He directed her attention to an alligaunt very close to their black iron bars. It was one of Examiner’s retinue. Except for that creature, who has been slowly turning its head to look at us.

  In that moment, Cazia’s connection with Tejohn made his intention clear. The gods could not feel strongly what happened beyond the portals, and their inner space was filled with conquerors and would-be conquerors. The gods did not have blood, heart, and brain to think with, so they did not care about grief, or pain, or loss, because they had never experienced it up close.

  Someone had to teach them.

  Just then, Tejohn’s old familiar urge to start killing--to unleash his rage with blood and screams--washed over both of them. Cazia marveled at how clean and focused his anger was, while hers could be as out of control as a house fire.

  And she knew what he wanted, too.

  She took a deep breath, letting his single-minded rage bring focus to hers. Then she began the motions for the Third Gift.

  Cazia and Tejohn were connected. They shared their anger, and they shared the skills and training needed to cast a spell. Tejohn was right there in her thoughts, following her lead, building the same thought structures she was.

  But the magic was difficult to reach. It was there--she could feel it--but the alligaunt barrier wanted to hold it at bay, just as it held the gods at bay. Instead of a rush of power flowing through Cazia, it felt more like a thin stream.

  /What are you doing? We can not reach you. We do not understand.

  Was that fear? Good. Together, they built the flow of magic within them both, letting the power pool. It was good--Tejohn marveled at how good it felt, like the downward stroke of a hammer, but with ten times the might--but Cazia was growing unhappy.