The Way Into Darkness: Book Three of The Great Way (36 page)

There was little to see. The street was a dirt path that curved to the south. He heard nothing but the wind and saw nothing but houses, an overturned cart, and the cliffs beyond.
 

Movement caught his eye. Something was crawling along the surface of the cliff face far away, moving from one shadowy crag to another. It didn’t seem like a very large path, but at this distance, there was no way to tell. Then the creature moved into a bit of sunlight and Tejohn’s suspicions were confirmed. It was blue. Another grunt.
 

Then he watched in astonishment as it leaped from its perch and plummeted to a paddy at least a hundred feet below.
 

Was this suicide? Tejohn didn’t believe it. Not for a moment. A lead weight seemed to have dropped into the bottom of his guts, and he watched the paddy for five slow breaths until he saw the grunt stand and begin crawling down the cliff wall again.

“Monument sustain me,” he muttered.
 

The grunts somehow overcame the wall in force.
Here, he was seeing how they did it. They’d found a passage into the Salt Pass that no human could ever survive.
 

Tejohn thought back to months before when he had led Lar and his companions out of Peradain. He’d struck grunts with his bracer, had seen them fall from the top of the Scholars’ Tower, or take a scholar’s dart in the back.
 

Had any of them been killed? If the creatures could heal the injury from a suicidal fall like this…

No, this wasn’t a bad thing. It just meant that more people could be cured of The Blessing. It also meant that Lar Italga might still be out there somewhere, running through the wilderness.
 

Tejohn leaned out, peering at the cliff face to spot the grunt again. Song knew, it was a delight to be able to see at a distance. It was almost like acquiring a magic power of his own.

The grunt raced down a flight of stairs to the paddy below, then to the next and the next. The beast was making its way toward the bottom of the pass. The little hovels across the street were not large buildings, but they soon obscured the creature’s descent.
 

Tejohn darted across the street, slipping between two little houses. From there, he peeked out onto the next block. It was much like the first, but a bit higher up the slope. The street followed the contour of the hill, and the crooked slope had a wide part in it large enough to accommodate a big building with cracks in the mud showing through the white paint.
 

The other buildings nearby were small houses, all with their doors bashed in. There were no grunts or corpses nearby.
 

Tejohn saw a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye. It was low to the ground near the foundation of the big building with the cracked mud walls. Tejohn leaned back, gripping his spears with white knuckles. It could have been a rat or a dog. It could have been anything.
 

He slipped off his helmet and leaned forward again, peeking toward the building. Was it some kind of barracks for servants? The roof had mostly come off and the window shutters had been smashed open. Someone had punched a gap in the mud wall large enough to peer through. That was where he’d seen the movement. That had been next to the ground. When he looked at it again, the gap held nothing but shadows.
 

Something had been there. He knew it. Something had moved in the darkness of this dead city.
 

Tejohn moved quickly. He raced back to the wheelbarrow and picked up a dozen or so spears. Whatever was in that barracks, he wanted to be ready for it, even if it was a whole nest of purple grunts.
 

Returning, he switched to the street adjacent, moving far enough down the block to get a clear view of the door. It was huge, heavy, and wooden, broad enough for a small cart to drive through. Of course, it had been smashed open.
 
The doorjamb was almost ten feet high, nearly half the height of the building itself.
 

Nothing moved inside.
 

He crept to the gap between the broken doors. The interior was lit by sunlight streaming through the holes in the roof. As quietly as he could--which was not nearly as quiet as he’d have liked--Tejohn set his armload of spears as quietly as he could onto the top stair by the entrance, keeping only one for himself. He slipped inside.
 

It was not a barracks after all. The room was dominated by long, empty shelves along the back wall and freestanding shelves between the windows. The floor was made of wood planking. A free-standing set of wooden stairs lay on its side, along with a few torn burlap bags and scattered handfuls of rice. Otherwise, it was empty. A warehouse, clearly, but although the damage was extensive, it also seemed to be recent.

But what had Tejohn seen? A rat? There was no gap in the walls where something could have peered out at him.
 

For a moment, he was sure there was a secret room or crawl space there, but the window just above, with its broken shutters, proved that wrong.
 

He started toward it, his boots thumping on the wooden floor. Of course! Tejohn kicked aside the burlap sacks, scanning the floor until he found it: a seam with a notch that might serve as a handle. A trapdoor.

The thought that there were grunts beneath the floor made his hair stand on end. He took a deep breath, wishing that old killing urge would come back to him again. He needed it. He needed its urgency and certainty.

There was something here, under this floor. He knew it. Tejohn wedged his finger into the notch and lifted his spear, ready to strike downward. Maybe if he destroyed one or two grunts here, he’d get that feeling back.
 

He yanked the floor panel up, exposing darkness below and the forms moving within.

Chapter 22

Children. They were all children.
 

Tejohn checked the downward stroke of his spear as the black stone came near the face of a twelve-year-old girl. She stared wide-eyed up at him, as did so many others.
 

Fire and Fury. Tejohn went points high, then knelt at the edge of the trap. “Hello,” he said as calmly as he could. A nasty stink of an open outhouse wafted up to him. “Who here has been bitten?”
 

They shrank from him. “No one,” a boy said. He looked to be about fourteen and might have been the oldest of them. “Song knows we were brought here whole and safe, and not a one of us has taken the curse yet. Fire take me if I lie.”
 

“No need to be afraid,” Tejohn said. “I’ve brought a cure—”

A broken shutter flew off its splintered hinge with a tremendous crash, and a roar echoed in the room. The children screamed in a high-pitched chorus as Tejohn spun around.
 

The shutter clattered against the wooden floor with a noise like an avalanche. There was a flash of blue fur among the splintered wood. As the beast stumbled, Tejohn leaped forward and attacked.
 

The grunt lunged at him just as the spear struck its torso, and the force of the impact jolted the weapon out of Tejohn’s grip. It clattered to the floor, and the grunt collapsed on top of it.
 

Tejohn leaped backwards out of instinct, desperate to put as much distance between himself and the fallen creature. His back foot landed on the top stair just inside the trap door, and he overbalanced backwards. He fell against the edge of the floor, slapping his hand down on the wood with a noise like striking a drum.
 

Tiny hands pressed against his legs and the shield on his back, holding him up.
 
The grunt bellowed out its death cry—Ghoron needed to create a stone that cured the beasts before they could make a ruckus about it—and Tejohn scrambled forward. He grabbed the butt end of the spear and yanked it from beneath the creature’s body.
 

The flames began, but his kinzchu spear was undamaged. The wooden floor smoldered and a burlap sack beneath the grunt’s leg actually caught fire, but a half dozen children charged out of the hole and stamped it out.
 

The noise they made was astonishing, their little boots pounding against the wooden floor, their little voices squeaking as they shouted, “Out! Out! Out!”
 

Fire and Fury, did they have
no one
to watch over them? Tejohn grabbed the one who looked oldest. “Where are your parents? Is there no one to watch over you?”
 

“We don’t know,” he answered. One of the older girls hurried to hush the youngest—apparently, stamping and shouting was what they’d been taught to do when they saw a fire starting to spread. “Nanny was trying to get us to the Marsh Gate, but there were monsters in the way. She told us to hide in there until she found a way to get us out. That was yesterday.”

His eyes were hollow and his face pale. He knew their guardian was not coming back, even if he couldn’t say so aloud in front of the little ones.
 

The stink of the chamber pot wafted up the stairs. The youngest had already shouted in unison, and white plumes of smoke billowed through the holes in the roof. Monument sustain them all, the grunts would be here soon.
 

Tejohn’s first instinct was to hide them again, but the expression on the boy’s face changed his mind instantly. He couldn’t ask them to squat in that dark sewer, not when the enemy was coming. If Tejohn could find them, the grunts could. And how could he ask them to hide again, knowing he might never come back?
 

Great Way, they were so small.
 

And there it was again. His old fury rekindled; it came on him so suddenly, his skin crawled. He didn’t need the memory of his own dead child, still as painful as a hot iron after so many years, and he didn’t need to think of his own living children far beyond his reach. He couldn’t do anything for them. Not now.
 

“Line up!” Tejohn snapped. He didn’t shout. He didn’t have to. The children, from youngest to oldest, turned toward him with wide eyes. The eldest had to be that boy of about fourteen. The youngest couldn’t have been more than seven. He pointed at the girl who had shushed the others. “You, arrange them with the tallest near the door. Quickly!”
 

While they scrambled to obey, Tejohn went to the door. There was no sign that anyone or anything was coming toward them. He began collecting the spears.
 

Spears for children. I must be going mad.
 

But there was no other choice. He had to give them kinzchu spears; the alternative was nothing.
 

From far in the distance, he heard another chorus of roaring. He didn’t know what all that noise meant, but he knew it wasn’t good. He ducked back into the warehouse.
 

Tejohn walked down the line, giving each child a spear. Fury guide them, their hands were so small. “These are called kinzchu spears.” He bent down low and showed them the stone strapped into the end of his spear. “You just have to touch them. Grunts. Wizards. Anyone. Just touch them with that stone and it steals the magic right out of their body. See?”
 

He gestured behind them, and they all turned just in time to see a figure stirring within the pile of ashes in the corner. He moved around them just as he realized it was a woman. An elderly woman, in fact, and as naked as the day she began her journey on The Way.
 

A few of the children snickered, but Tejohn ignored them. He hurried forward and took her elbow, helping her to her feet. She coughed a few times, then stared at her ash-covered hands. “Is it over?” she asked.
 

“Not yet,” Tejohn said. He still had three spears in his hands; he gave one to her. “That’s not a walking stick.”
 

“Mister,” the oldest boy called, “who are you?”
 

“At the moment, I’m no one at all. Maybe, if I can get you all through this, I might earn my name back. Now, form a wedge.” They didn’t understand. “Form two lines on me. Two tallest kids behind me. Next two tallest at the rear of each line. Smallest children in between.” While they organized that, Tejohn turned. “Grandmother, I need you to stand inside the wedge. You’re going to help protect the little ones.”
 

The elderly woman looked uncertain for a moment, then nodded and took up position between the kids at the backs of the lines. If nothing else, her filthy, naked form made the kids face outward.
 

And she held her head up. It would have been easy—expected, even—for her to demand they all look away until she found a robe, but she didn’t. He nodded to her and she nodded back.
 

Tejohn did not have to tell them to hold their spears outward; the older children understood and the younger followed their example. Now all he had to do was cure enough grunts to create a wedge of full-grown soldiers.
 

The extra spear Tejohn laid against the door jamb, then unslung his shield. The street still appeared to be quiet and empty, but the quiet only made his hair stand on end. Had the grunts missed the noise and smoke, or were they so far that he and the children had time to slip away?