The Way Into Darkness: Book Three of The Great Way (44 page)

“You’re the reason my father is still a tyr, aren’t you?” Suddenly, Cazia understood what Treygar and Gerrit and so many others would never say. “Ulia was afraid to leave her rooms, so you came with her all the way into the west until she was settled. But Tyr Freewell wouldn’t let you leave, and then King Ghrund died and the rebellion failed and King Ellifer wouldn’t remove Freewell from his lands because he had a knife to your throat.”
 

“Not that King Ghrund simply died,” the old woman said. “No, not him. Nothing but poison could have taken him that way.”
 

There was nothing to say to that; Cazia didn’t know a thing about Ghrund’s death. “Fire and Fury, how long have you been living in this room?” Cazia looked around at the meager furnishings: a battered table set with wooden bowls, a row of pegs for clothes, and…a sleepstone?
 

“You mean the room you were born in?” Eshla said. “You and your brother both? Born here and spirited away, too, right through that door.”
 

Goose bumps ran all over Cazia’s body. Was this her history?
 

A distant roar sounded through the slat walls. Grunts.
 

“Not this again,” Eshla said, folding her hands on her lap.
 

The servant girl bustled to the bed and straightened it. Ulia Freewell stared down at the sheets as though there was nothing happening inside her head.
Mother.
“Don’t the soldiers sound an alarm?”
 

“The grunts make more than enough noise on their own, don’t you think? Why strike gongs or blow horns? So, child, how long do you plan to stay? Because I have been trapped in this room with no one to talk to but a comatose daughter and whatever uneducated servant the tyr—”
 

There was another roar, then another. In no time at all, there was a chorus of roars. Cazia looked to her grandmother—Great Way, her skin prickled at that.
Grandmother
. The elderly woman’s expression had become pensive.
 

“That’s a lot of noise,” Cazia said.
 

Eshla looked grim. “It’s rare to hear more than two or three of the beasts—”
 

A metal chime began to ring frantically, cutting through the endless roaring. Cazia rushed to the window and threw back the shutters. Moments later, Eshla stood at her shoulder.
 

The high window gave a excellent view of the city. The only place higher than theirs was the sentry tower Cazia had seen last night. The guards up there had a commanding view of the village walls and began raising colored pennants to signal the spears and bows in the city below.
 

On the streets, people ran in every direction, calling out the names of loved ones or gods. Cazia looked down at the river that cut through the town. The grunts fled from the effects of the kinzchu stones, and that would be a natural place for soldiers to use them—
 

“There they go,” Eshla said. It took Cazia a moment to realize who “they” were and where they were going, but then she saw it: servants poled a long, tall cargo boat out into the river, then threw a heavy stone with a rope tied to it over the side. The current turned the boat so the prow faced upriver, and as she watched, Tyr Freewell mounted a platform in the center to direct his troops.
 

From safety. She knew the grunts wanted nothing to do with water, and obviously her father knew it too.
 

“Wahsla!” the servant girl cried. She stood at a west-facing window, and Cazia ran to join her.
 

Archers ran along the wallwalk. Something struck one very hard and he fell like a cloth doll. Something else flew up over the top of the wall, barely missing a bow as she ducked. It was as large as a human leg—wood, it was made of wood, probably a broken tree branch—and it had been flung so hard that it zoomed upward, farther and higher like a bird in flight.
 

A grunt had thrown that. There was no other explanation. She kept waiting for the heavy wood to arc downward, but it just kept flying upward over their heads.
 

There were screams and shouts. Cazia switched to another window and looked up at the sentry tower again; the soldiers there were frantically waving pennants, switching from one color and design to the next. She couldn’t understand their code, but what was happening was clear.
 

“The grunts are attacking from both sides at once,” she said. “In force.”

“Pah!” the old woman said. “They can’t be. They’re only beasts!”
 

There was no point in debating it. Cazia turned toward the wall and saw that several of the spears there were striking downward at enemies climbing up.
 

They were using normal spears.
 

“What are they doing?” Cazia blurted out. “Why aren’t they using the weapons I brought?”
 

“What’s this?” Eshla demanded. “What weapons?”
 

Why had she allowed Treygar to take half for the Twofin people, when it was clear Saltstone had already been overrun. “I didn’t come for a social visit,” Cazia said, more harshly than she’d meant to. “I brought enchanted weapons that turn the grunts back into human beings.”
 

“What?”
 

“But the tyr hasn’t deployed them!”
 

A grunt appeared at the top of the wall, then scrambled over the wallwalk to drop inside the city. Spears atop the wall shouted an alarm, and a gong began to sound.
 

Cazia rushed back to the eastern window where her grandmother was still standing. The grunts were swarming over that wall, too. The spears had already been driven off or beaten.
 

“There,” Eshla said. She pointed at the tyr’s boat, floating in the middle of the river. At first, Cazia thought she was pointing out the half dozen archers standing at the rail, launching volleys at the approaching grunts. Then she saw it: a bundle of blunt spears in the stern of the boat.
 

“No,” Cazia said. “No, no, no, what is he doing? The grunts break and run when those weapons are used! What is he doing?”
 

“Hoarding power,” Eshla said sourly.
 

More grunts came over the wall, some blue, some pale purple. Fire take them all, this was a disaster. Cazia had gotten here just in time, but it had never occurred to her that her spears would not be put to use.
 

Her first instinct was to get away, but she needed the cart for that, and it was still in the stadium—no, actually, she was sure it was not. If her father wouldn’t deploy the kinzchu spears, he certainly wouldn’t allow a flying cart to sit out in the open. He’d certainly hidden it by now.
 

She couldn’t escape on foot through the forest. Besides, where would she go?
 

Cazia turned around and looked at the three women with her: Eshla, a woman so old she looked exhausted just by the act of standing, not that her ego would allow her to admit it, a servant girl who was little more than a child, and the white-haired invalid with the malformed hands.
 

Mother.

The Little Spinner may never stop, and it was, perhaps, her last day in this world, but she was not going to abandon these people.
 

Cazia rushed to the door and threw it open. The narrow stone bridge that connected this tower to the larger stone one was made of three pieces of granite. On either side was a long curved piece braced against the tower wall below, and in between was a smaller stone to connect them.
 

It would have been the work of a few moments to crumble them, breaking the bridge from one tower to the other, but that would have done no good. The gap between the towers would have made a dangerous jump for Cazia—and an impossible one for the others—but the grunts could leap across with ease.
 

She knelt to lay her hands on the stone. She had no black volcanic rock with her and it had never occurred to her that she might want some, but maybe, just maybe, the scholars’ granite was a workable substitute.
 

“I know you’re a scholar,” Eshla said, her voice sharp. “Don’t you collapse that bridge. Do you hear? I was a scholar once, too, and—”
 

“Thank you for your counsel, my Queen Outside; now please be quiet. I’m concentrating.”
 

And she could feel it in the same way she could feel a stone take a light spell or a crystal take a translation spell. She could, in fact, infuse the pink granite with the Tilkilit’s anti-magic spell. The effect would not be as strong, but the changes she would have to make to the spell were not great.
 

Cazia stood upright, then moved back a step. She imagined the unliving presence of The Great Way had returned and was pressing an empty gray void onto her thoughts.
Eshla will know this is not one of the Gifts,
she worried, as though Eshla would discover she’d once gone hollow and denounce her.
 

Then it was finished. The spell entered the stone at the far end of the bridge; Cazia could feel it there like a booby trap waiting to be sprung. The clanging of the alarm had ceased and the noise of battle had turned to screams of terror and shouted prayers. The triumphant roaring of the grunts had grown terribly near.
 

The Queen Counsel demanded to know what she was doing, but Cazia simply shushed her and began again. “Don’t you shush me, girl; I know that’s not a Gift you’re casting!”
 

The door at the opposite side of the bridge was shut tight, but when something heavy struck the other side of it, Cazia was so startled that she lost the spell and had to start again. Fire take them all, making a kinzchu stone was not quick. “Stop distracting me.”
 

There were shouts from the other tower, then screams of agony. Cazia kept her head down and focused on her spell. Concentrate. Concentrate.
 

The door splintered and broke apart just as she finished. She looked up and saw a half dozen blue grunts crowding through the doorway. Great Way, they were ugly.
 

The nearest stepped onto the bridge and immediately collapsed, plummeting to the ground below. The beasts closest to it were startled and alarmed, but the ones in back surged forward, pushing them onto the bridge. Two more collapsed and fell, then another. Death cries echoed up from the ground below, and the creatures’ forward momentum stopped.
 

The nearest one deepened its crouch to jump.

Chapter 28

Cazia stepped back and slammed the door. There was no bar, of course, but she threw her body against the bottom and braced her boots against the floor. The servant girl joined her just as the first of the grunts struck the other side of the door.
 

The panel burst inward and a claw reached in to rake Cazia’s face. If the beast had caught hold of her, it might have broken her neck, but its hand went limp almost as soon as it touched her, and the arm slid out through the hole.
 

Cazia touched her bloody cheek and the tip of her nose, then her lip. Monument sustain her, but the thing had gouged her deeply. She tasted blood just as the cut on her forehead ran down into her eyes. “Fire and Fury, I can’t see!” she cried.
 

The servant exclaimed something in her own language that Cazia couldn’t understand. It sounded triumphant, which was probably a good sign. She heard the sound of tearing cloth and then dry, trembling hands applied a bandage to her forehead.
 

Eshla said, “You’ll have these scars for the rest of your life.”
 

This again? “I don’t really care about scars,” Cazia said. “I care that I can see the things that are trying to kill me.” Thankfully, there were no more impacts against the door.
 

“Hmf.” The old woman placed a wad of cloth in Cazia’s hand. “You can wet this down, can’t you?”

She could. While her grandmother tied a bandage around her head Cazia wiped the blood away from her eyes. Great Way, the cloths came away from her face with a lot of red on them. “Make it tight,” Cazia said. “I don’t want blood seeping through when I’m down there.”
 

“Down there?” Eshla said. “I don’t think so; best if you stay here. Besides, it’s the cut on your cheek that’s deepest. This one up here is just a scratch. Care to tell me what you did and what you plan to do? If you can spare the courtesy.”
 

There were decades of resentment in the woman’s voice, and Cazia couldn’t blame her, but that didn’t mean she had time to salve her ego. “The stones at either end of the bridge are now enchanted to take away a person’s magic.” The cut on her lip made it painful to talk. “They’ll cure Mother”—she almost couldn’t say the word—“if she touches one. I don’t know if you want that right now.”
 

“That doesn’t tell me what you’re planning.”
 

“No, it doesn’t.” Cazia rushed to the eastern window. Tyr Freewell’s boat was still anchored in the center of the river, but every soldier on it had taken cover down on the bottom. Grunts on both banks were pelting the craft with stones and chunks of wood. The boat was slowly breaking apart.