The Way Into Darkness: Book Three of The Great Way Read online

  “It’s the teleportation spell,” Javien said.

  Doctor Twofin moved from behind the tyr’s chair in a sudden rush. He stood over Javien’s kneeling form and held his hand above the priest’s head as though he was judging the heat of a campfire. “This one,” Doctor Twofin said, “is a scholar. I can feel the magic in him.”

  “Take him to the stocks!” Tyr Twofin shouted, his voice cracking. “Heat the brands! I’ll have the Eighth Gift out of him or I’ll have his heart’s blood on my hands!”

  Two spears grabbed Javien by the elbows and lifted him to his feet.

  “There is no Eighth Gift!” the beacon shouted. “It was lost generations ago! Deliberately! I don’t know it. No one does!”

  Tejohn forced himself to look away from the young priest’s terrified expression. He could feel his urge to fight building in him, like a spark struggling to become a bonfire. “Even I have heard the stories about that spell,” Tejohn said calmly. “Didn’t the Eighth Festival king, whatever his name, have every scholar who had learned it executed? Like you, he feared assassination.”

  “That’s what he claimed at the time, and I’ll have you know his name was King Imbalt Winslega. But think about it: does it really make sense that a Peradaini king would turn on his most valuable allies, the scholars of Peradain, to destroy a single spell? I don’t think so. It’s the scholars who have kept the Peradaini in power all these generations, and we Twofins are not so gullible as to believe that they give up power of any kind. No, my tyr, the kings of Peradain would never destroy a spell. They would only keep it secret. They would want it for themselves.”

  “You don’t think they would give up power,” Tejohn said, “but you believe they destroyed their own palace, killed everyone in the Scholars’ Tower, then razed their own capital city. After that, they loosed the grunts on the lands closest to them, which are filled with their closest allies. And they gave up all this power so they could reconquer their old empire all over again? With less than two thousand spears?” He bowed his head. “I confess I am startled by this theory. It’s true that I am a tyr, but I wasn’t born one. I was raised among the commonfolk. This sort of devious court intrigue is beyond me.”

  “Don’t play that game with me!” Tyr Twofin shouted. He looked almost amused. “You couldn’t have been spending so much time with Amlian Italga without learning a few tricks!”

  “In truth,” Tejohn said, “I saw very little of the queen, and even less of the king. I was certainly not their confidant. My purpose in the palace was to train the prince in the shield and spear, and to--”

  “Ah-ha! You see?” Tyr Twofin’s expression was bright with victory. Nothing Tejohn had said penetrated his certitude. “You called him ‘the prince.’ If King Ellifer were truly dead, you would have called him ‘king.’ We are not as gullible out here in the rural lands as you people in the cities seem to think.”

  “It was just habit, my tyr,” Tejohn answered truthfully.

  “A dangerous habit,” Tyr Twofin said, still grinning. “Those who don’t show Italgas proper respect often find themselves floating out into deep water, if you know what I mean.”

  “I was merely the boy’s tutor.”

  Doctor Twofin bent low and spoke quietly into his brother’s ear. Tejohn could not hear what he said, but the tyr narrowed his eyes and became thoughtful.

  “Despite myself, I’m almost ready to believe you.”

  “Did...” Tejohn knew the dangers of asking questions in his position. “May I ask a question?”

  “Yes,” the old tyr said.

  “Did your brother break his oath to me?”

  “Ah.” Tyr Twofin steepled his fingers. “I thought that would be it. He did break his oath, by my order. As his tyr, I ordered him to lay aside all other oaths laid upon him, for my sake. He is no longer a Peradaini scholar, and owes nothing to the royal family. The flying cart he delivered to me is too valuable to be turned over to another Italga; we could not spare the spears to guard him on the overland trip. This end of the Sweeps is thick with alligaunts, as you know. I assume this is why you came to assassinate him.”

  Tejohn shook his head. “If I had known we would be passing through Twofin lands, I would have gone by a different road. Whatever is between the scholar and me, my mission for Lar Italga comes first.”

  “Yes, this spell,” Twofin said. “My brother shared your story with me. To me, it sounds like you’re trying to put another Italga on the throne of skulls.”

  “Peradain is fallen, the city is burned, its spears killed or scattered. I think it’s time you turned your attention away from the nonexistent plots of dead kings and toward the enemy spreading across Kal-Maddum.”

  Tyr Twofin smirked. “Why should I take counsel from you, an imperial puppet?”

  “You owe me a debt,” Tejohn said. “I rescued your brother from a Finstel prison.”

  “So you did,” Tyr Twofin responded, still smirking. “So you did. Tell me, what boon can I grant you in payment of this debt?”

  Free me so I can see my wife and children again.

  But no, Tejohn could not ask for that.

  Chapter 2

  Iskol was waiting for his answer.

  “Do not torture the beacon,” Tejohn said. The words were bitter in his mouth. He wanted these ropes off his arms. He wanted the freedom to stand in front of this jumped-up bully, not kneel. He wanted to put a piece of sharp steel into Doctor Twofin’s belly. But if he asked for any of that, he would get nothing. “When I rescued your brother from the Finstel cell, he dropped me in front of enemy spears. I was captured and tortured. If not for the temple, I would still be there. On my honor, I will tell you everything you want to know, but please don’t hurt that boy.”

  “Done.” Tyr Twofin waved at one of the spears standing guard by the door. The young man rushed forward and knelt. For a tyr’s guard, he looked too well fed. “See to it that the beacon is taken out of the stocks. Give him the airiest spot in the western part of the holdfast. I’ll want to bring our guests to visit him soon.”

  The young man sprinted away.

  Tejohn fully expected to be put into those stocks himself.

  “Nin,” the old tyr said. “I treated you with suspicion when you did not deserve it. Am I an old fool for not trusting you?”

  “Not at all,” the merchant said warily. “You are a wise tyr who protects his lands and his people. I would expect nothing less from a man of your caliber.”

  “Whisperers,” Twofin said to the trio of women with the voluminous sleeves, “untie her, please, and see her out into the sun. But hurry back.”

  They did. When they returned, every eye in the room was on Tejohn. “Now,” Tyr Twofin said, “tell me everything.”

  Tejohn did, starting with the queen’s command that Tejohn make sure the prince was sober on the first day of the Festival. He described the opening of the portal and the attack of the grunts. He described the fight and Amlian’s fall. He told them how he fled with the prince toward the Scholars’ Tower.

  As he told his tale, an older man in patchwork linen moved closer. His expression was focused and intent as though he wanted to remember every tic on Tejohn’s face as he told the story.

  A bard. Wonderful. Soon, this story would be set to verse, but it would probably be Doctor Twofin rescuing the prince and the Indregai princess.

  It didn’t matter. Tejohn told them everything except that it was Lar Italga who had been bitten and who transformed into a grunt. In Tejohn’s version, he split off from the group when they went to Caarilit, determined to make his way through the mountains. He also left out any mention of the servants’ cabinet in Finstel lands. He’d sworn an oath to keep them secret; besides, Iskol was the sort of man who would believe a cabinet was a plot against him. If he was so quick to order a beacon tortured, Tejohn didn’t want to imagine what he’d do to servants.

  Strangely, the parts that Tejohn fabricated seemed to be the only part that Tyr Twofin was willing to a
ccept at face value. He probed and questioned everything, from the spell Doctor Warpoole used at the top of the Scholars’ Tower to the names of the soldiers he met in Samsit and Caarilit.

  The tyr also asked Tejohn to tell about his departure from Fort Caarilit several times. How had the commander behaved? Who were the soldiers he’d sent to wait in ambush by the river. What did they look like? What coloring, how tall, any scars?

  It quickly became apparent that Twofin had conceived the idea that the other tyrs might send assassins for him, and he was almost fidgeting at the idea that one of these men might be inside his walls, or soon would be.

  Unfortunately, that was back in the days when Tejohn was so nearsighted as to be nearly blind. He had never seen the men’s faces; Arla, his scout, had described them in no great detail. In their places, he described two of the men he had executed after they’d been bitten by grunts; he remembered them in some detail and they were unlikely they turn up now. He apologized for not getting close enough to study the others.

  “Well!” Tyr Twofin exclaimed when he’d finally become convinced there was no further detail to be extracted from Tejohn’s story. “You have had quite an adventure.”

  The tyr’s smile seemed genuine, but Tejohn didn’t trust it. “I have seen the empire in collapse, from the highest to the lowest.”

  “Good!” the old tyr shouted. “This empire had been a blight on Kal-Maddum. The taxes alone have left many of my people with empty bowls and dusty larders. I’m pleased to see the end of it.”

  Except for all the lives lost as it falls. “The Peradaini, for all their faults, were human. The Blessing will stop at nothing short of our annihilation.”

  “The Italgas will...” Tyr Twofin stopped mid-sentence. “Your story has the ring of truth. The Italgas have truly fallen?”

  “Peradain and the Scholars’ Tower were the heart of Italga power. They would never have destroyed them unless they’d gone mad, and whatever you might think of them, Ellifer and Amlian were not mad. If they’d wanted to unleash a curse to wipe out their enemies, they’d have done it in Simblin or Freewell lands.”

  “If not the Italgas,” the old man asked, “who?”

  Tejohn took a deep breath. The most likely answer was no one. It was possible there was no one behind the grunts at all. Sometimes a bear wanders into your house. Sometimes a grass lion stalks through your fields. Bad things happen; not everything is a plot.

  But Tejohn had grown up around farmers, men who could gossip about the same things for days at a time. For some, every event had a plan behind it, and fruitless was the task of convincing them otherwise.

  “I have had a great deal of time to think about this,” Tejohn said carefully. “It seems to me that there are two good options. One is that the Evening People themselves turned upon the Peradaini, unleashing The Blessing on them the way we might shoot a flight of arrows. The other is that the Evening People themselves have been conquered by some enemy of theirs that we know nothing about, and their war has spilled over into Kal-Maddum.”

  “The Evening People turned on the Italgas!” The tyr slapped his knee and laughed aloud. Tejohn did the one thing he had tried not to do: he glanced at Doctor Twofin. The old scholar’s expression was utterly blank and his cheeks were streaked with tears. “Old Ellifer got himself whipped by his master! Hah!”

  “Everyone will have to endure this whipping if the tide of battle is not turned.”

  Twofin waved this away as a minor concern. He was smiling like a child delighted with a gift. “The Twofins can clear away this blight in mere days.”

  That was not what Tejohn had expected to hear. Was the man delusional or did Doctor Twofin—like Doctor Warpoole—possess a spell that Tejohn knew nothing about? Even the spell that Lar had tasked Tejohn to retrieve would have needed a long and bloody campaign to put into action. Did the Twofins have a better spell that could destroy the grunts?

  Tyr Twofin slid out of his chair and moved toward the merchants standing along the walls of the hall. Two soldiers stepped from their places to stand beside him. Out of habit, Tejohn made a quick assessment: young, shuffle-footed, and holding their spears too low on the shaft. Perhaps they were members of the tyr’s family, chosen more for loyalty than for skill.

  As for the merchants, they had endured Tejohn’s long interrogation with the practiced stoicism of house servants. They must have been unbearably bored by the way Tejohn had been forced to tell the same stories over and over, but they hid it well.

  Doctor Twofin kept to his position at the back of the tyr’s chair.

  The tyr moved down the line of merchants, bureaucrats, and “whisperers” like a groom at a wedding, shaking hands and taking a few moments for a brief discussion with each.

  When he had finished, the sun had dropped so low in the sky that it shone through the open balcony almost onto Tejohn himself. He was still kneeling on the wooden floor, and his legs had cramped painfully. The long struggle to hide the pain was becoming impossible.

  “My Tyr Treygar,” Twofin finally said, “have you eaten? What a terrible host I’ve been. Bring him a loaf of bread.”

  As though it had been planned ahead of time, a servant took three steps forward and set a platter of plain bread on the floor. Tejohn would have to bend down to eat it like a dog.

  Once, he would have stared straight ahead as though insults were beneath his notice, and Fire take the consequences. Now, he had more important things to worry about than his honor. Still, he was still hoping for allies among the Twofin retinue—if the tyr didn’t order him executed on the spot—and who would ally themselves with a dog?

  “Thank you for the bread,” Tejohn said in a clear voice. “Can I trouble you for a chair and table, too?”

  Tyr Twofin stepped in front of him and bent low. “You’ve spent the whole afternoon in that position, Tejohn Treygar. Aren’t you a bit uncomfortable?”

  The two guards at his shoulder licked their lips and glanced at each other. Did he make them nervous? “I’m not as young as I used to be, it’s true. I expect I will start feeling a twinge or two by nightfall.”

  The old man laughed, thank Monument, and gestured toward him. Strong hands took hold of Tejohn’s arms and lifted him upright.

  He couldn’t help but gasp from the pain. His legs felt like they were on fire, but he maintained his balance even while someone tugged at the ropes around his arms.

  To Tejohn’s surprise, a table and bench were lowered out of the rafters. He’d never heard of a household that lifted its furniture out of sight. Still, he was invited to sit and eat. He did.

  A servant brought him a bowl full of some kind of dried green leaf that tasted like seawater. Odd but not bad, especially since he hadn’t eaten a thing since Granny’s caravan broke their fast that morning. He was not surprised that no one joined him. Everyone in the room had been without food for almost as long as he had, but none had been offered a meal and none betrayed an interest in one.

  Servants threw open a side cabinet and began unloading great wooden bowls and long wooden pipes. Tejohn watched as a small bowl was set on a footstool in the middle of the hall while another as large as half a barrel was set on the floor nearby. A wooden pipe connected them, being gently tapped into place to prevent leaks. More bowls and pipes were brought and connected.

  Once the worst of his hunger was satisfied, Tejohn stood and approached the apparatus. His legs, while still stiff, felt much better than they had; however, he made sure to move slowly and haltingly. Those guards still gave every sign of being nervous about him and he didn’t want to spook them.

  “One of my nephews demonstrated this,” Tyr Twofin said. He was obviously talking to Tejohn, although he didn’t deign to look directly at him. “You might have been raised on a farm rather than a court, but I’ll bet you’ve seen your share of ambitious plans in Italga palaces. Well, the Twofins might not have soaring towers of pink granite like our former rulers, but we have craft of our own.”

  An
old woman in servant’s robes wheeled a cart into the room. On it was a barrel sloshing at the brim with water. Tyr Twofin snatched up a long-handled ladle and offered it to Tejohn. He took it.

  “Go ahead. Fill the top bowl.”

  Tejohn began to ladle water into the small bowl on the footstool. As it reached the level of the pipe, it began to flow into the half-barrel. The sound of the running water made him want to empty his bladder but he didn’t say so. Scoop. Pour. Scoop. Pour. Soon, the barrel was filling.

  Eventually, the water level of the barrel rose above the height of the footstool. At this point, the small bowl stopped emptying itself at each pour and instead began to fill at the same pace as the larger one.

  “The water levels are of a like,” Tejohn said. Tejohn began pouring water into the half-barrel but the effect was the same. One bowl was huge and one small, but water added to either filled both together, making the water levels match.

  “Now see this.” Tyr Twofin reached into the small bowl and pulled a cork out of a second pipe. The water in the small bowl immediately began to flow downward into a third bowl on the floor, which was no larger than a soup pot. What’s more, the water in the half-barrel also sank. “What say you now?”

  “All the water higher than the second pipe flowed into the third bowl. The water wants to be equal. I’d bet if I added more water to this half-barrel, it would all drain out the other side.”

  “Yes.” Twofin took the ladle from him and tossed it onto the cart. “Everything above the level of that second drain would flow out, and if the third container was quite small, there would be a flood. Now, imagine that this large container, what you called a half-barrel, were as large as the entire world.”

  Tejohn wasn’t sure where this was going, but the back of his neck was beginning to prickle. “The world is already like this, is it not, my tyr?”

  “If you discount the tides and the churning waves, which are minor effects, the ocean reaches the same height everywhere on the shore of Kal-Maddum. It has found its own level. However, what would happen if another, deeper ocean were to be connected to it?”