The Way Into Chaos (46 page)

Cazia desperately needed the girl’s touch and found it unbearable at the same time. It was confining, comforting, it made her skin crawl, it made her want to scream. Worse, there was a tiny dead part of her that pondered how easy it would have been to kill them both. She could have just rolled over without breaking the embrace, carrying both of them through the narrow gap in the wall.
 

She wouldn’t do it. Of course she wouldn’t. But the thought had invaded her mind like an expeditionary force, and a tiny part of her examined the choice between killing them both or not with the same urgency that she might decide which boot to pull on first.
 

“Let me make a safe place to stop.” Cazia cast her spell a few more times, creating another hollowed-out flat enclosure large enough for them to sit upright and stretch out. At the far end, she made sure to break through the wall slightly...for ventilation.
 

Ivy set five lightstones around the chamber. Kinz pushed stones down the slope. Cazia sat quietly against the hard, sloping wall, watching them and trying to pretend she was invisible.
 

When the space had been cleared and the packs opened, Kinz asked Cazia about her brother. So Cazia told them about Colchua: how he’d loved to climb--until Lar’s brother had died in a fall, and he’d never climbed again--how he’d joked with them all, how competitive he was in the gym and cooperative in his lessons. How he sang. People looked up to him, but he’d always deferred to Lar. Not just because Lar was an Italga and a prince of the empire, but because Col loved him and believed in him.
 

Then she told them the story of the Festival in Peradain. She told them how The Blessing had appeared, suddenly overwhelming everyone. How she and her friends had fled. How Lar had insisted on rescuing his betrothed, and Cazia had supported him for fear that Vilavivianna’s death would lead to war with the Alliance.
 

When she got to the part where Col was bitten on the rooftop, Ivy began to cry.
 

Cazia herself did not. She was talking about the most painful moments of her life, but they had no effect on the longing, loneliness, and sorrow swelling within her. It was almost as though those emotions belonged to someone else and had never been about her own pain at all.
 

She told them about the grunt in the courtyard but left out the part where the last king of Peradain had been bitten, too. It almost seemed silly to keep that secret here, especially since Ivy already knew it, but she did.
 

Then she told them about killing the grunt without realizing who he was. And how proud she’d felt. Thankfully, they didn’t insult her intelligence by insisting she couldn’t have known and it wasn’t her fault. Of course she didn’t know, and of course that didn’t make things better.
 

“And now the raptors are here, those gigantic eagles.” Cazia tried to sound as if nothing mattered more than this. “We have to find out if they’re connected. There’s no one else.”

They did not speak for a little while. Finally, Kinz asked permission to sing a song, then sang it. Cazia touched her translation stone and listened to enough to realize she was singing about the wind. She passed the stone to Ivy, then lay back and let the unintelligible words wash over her.
 

It wasn’t a terrible song but it was very simple. A child’s song. Ivy went next and her song was not much better. Still, it suited her because it was a little girl’s song.
 

After the two of them had taken turns a few times, Cazia felt a sudden urge to sing “River Overrunning,” Old Stoneface’s song. She had never sung it in front of him, of course, but she’d learned it years before.
 

So she sang it, her voice a little raw and uncertain, but her grief gave her power, and the dead feeling the spells had created gave her the detachment to control the melody. Because it was about watching helplessly while the people you loved were killed, she had to pause partway through to gather herself. When she finished, she saw Kinz and Ivy staring at her with wide, astonished eyes.
 

Ivy had started crying again. In her astonishment, Kinz said, “How could the people capable of such brutality also create such beautiful art?”
 

Our spear points command your bodies. Our songs command your hearts.
But Cazia couldn’t bring herself to say that. She couldn’t even make herself say
Fire take you
, not after that song. Instead, she lay back and closed her eyes. It was a long time before she fell asleep, and her dreams were full of flames, and gods, and falls from terrible heights.
 

She woke in darkness. The other girls snored gently nearby and she could hear the wind whistling through the ventilation hole she’d made, but the magic in the lightstones had faded. When Lar had been her age, he could make lightstones that lasted a moon’s cycle, but she’d never gotten the hang of it.
 

The urge to do more magic was powerful. She felt more tired than ever and utterly detached from her own life. Worse, she knew she would break down crying again if she just sat there doing nothing. At least if she started digging again, the magic would dull the pain.
 

Which would make her another kind of hostage...not that she had a choice.

She peered through the ventilation hole at the dark eastern sky. There was no way to tell when dawn would come. Cazia crossed her arms and scowled down at the starlit lands below. The waving grasses made it look like a stormy ocean dotted with tiny forests.

And they were high, but she still could not tell how much farther there was to go. She was hungry, too, but did nothing about it. She was in control of herself, and it felt good.
 

She stretched out on the floor again and tried to sleep; it was no use. She remembered the moment Pagesh had shoved Jagia into her arms, and the sight of her brother dangling from the rope at the bottom of the cart, and the way Queen Amlian had died. It should have made her break down weeping, but it didn’t.
 

She ate, then decided to be satisfied with her current level of self-denial. She started casting her spell again.
 

Ivy and Kinz woke while she was pushing the rubble through the gap in the wall. They didn’t complain, just sighed, ate a little bit themselves, and began to pack up their things.
 

Cazia went slowly, trying to find a balance between repeated castings of a single spell, rest time between spells, and variety. Soon, she switched to casting a water spell as every eighth spell, then every seventh, then she created a lightstone, a burst of fire and a fresh spray of water every fifth. Still, as she swept the stones through the gap in the cliff, she could not hold back tears of longing.
 

They were not her tears, she finally understood. They were the tears of this new thing--this force--that filled her now. The magic she had been casting was living inside her head, making everything she touched feel like a slap, every sound seem like a shout. But because it didn’t care, she didn’t care, either. Her own suffering meant nothing. All that mattered was that she continue.
 

As she cast the Eleventh Gift over and over, she felt herself becoming the impossibly high precipice she’d fallen from in her dreams.
 

Then, suddenly, she cast her spell again and, after the rocks had fallen around her, found herself staring up at the sky.
 

“Ah!” She scrambled out of the hole. The thin, chilly wind was rough against her skin. The stars were still bright in the western sky, but the eastern horizon glowed orange and red. She stepped away from the hole to give Ivy room to come through, and that brought her close to the edge of the cliff.
 

She didn’t feel any fear at all as she looked down from those awful heights. A long fall seemed perfect for...for something.
 

“You did it!” Ivy shouted. “Cazia, you are amazing. You have done what no one in fifty generations has been able to do.”
 

“Don’t touch me.” The girl looked stricken and Cazia knew she had been too blunt. “I’m not ready yet.”
 

The lie seemed to mollify her. Cazia didn’t think she would ever want to be touched again, but there was no reason to say so.
 

She moved away from the cliff and surveyed the rocks around her. She hadn’t reached the very top of the Barrier, just that first smooth cliff face. They were standing on a sloping, slate-gray rock about fifty paces wide and more than ten times that across. Cazia tried to determine if she had come close to the low point in the range that she’d been aiming for, but it was impossible to tell.
 

“We can not make camp here,” Kinz dragged the packs out of the tunnel. “We are too exposed.”

Cazia didn’t see any birds in the sky or perched on the rocks around them. Ivy said, “As far as I can see, they only attack in the early part of the night. It is nearly daylight now.”
 

Kinz shoved one of the packs at her. “If they make to nest up here, they may make a special exception for us.”
 

Ivy nodded at the wisdom in that. Pack slung over one shoulder, she started toward the second cliff face. “This looks more like a natural formation of rocks. I think we should climb it.”
 

Kinz was so surprised she dropped her pack. “Climb? That?”
 

Cazia glanced up at the rock face. It was at least a hundred feet high, and while it wasn’t the same strangely smooth cliff face as below, she couldn’t see how a person could safely climb it.
 

“Of course,” Ivy insisted. “I have been climbing rocks like this since I was small.”

“You are still small,” Kinz answered. “And I have never climbed anything taller than the tree.”

“Neither have I,” Cazia said, her voice flat. “We’re going to keep tunneling.”
 

“But you can not!”

“She must,” Kinz said firmly. “It is either that or we make retreat. I will not climb that rock with the loaded pack. If the fall did not kill us, the birds would.”

“What birds?” Ivy demanded, her voice getting shrill. She stamped her foot. “I do not see any birds!”
 

Cazia couldn’t bear to be near their argument. She turned away toward the open spaces of the Sweeps and saw that the rock face sloped so much, she couldn’t see her tunnel. When she started back toward it, she found it was farther to her left than she’d thought.
 

It occurred to her that she should mark the location better so they could find it in a hurry--who knew what dangers they might have to run away from up here?

Before that thought had finished, she began to cast the Sixth Gift. It felt good and also wrong, and by the time she realized what she was doing it was already done. A broad pink block of stone squatted beside the opening to their tunnel.
 

Ivy and Kinz stared at Cazia with worried expressions. Their concern almost pressed against her. Like the Sweeps winds, it hurt.
 

“You can continue?” Kinz asked. “There would be no shame in making the return to the grasslands now. You could take some time to heal, and when you are ready, we could return.”

Cazia shook her head. She felt full and empty at the same time. Was it even possible to heal from this? Had Doctor Whitestalk ever healed? But of course, she could not say that aloud. “People are dying every day.” That had been important a few days before and she knew it would matter to her companions. “We can be at the top by midday.”

Ivy didn’t like that. “What if the other side of the mountain is impassable, too?”

Cazia had no answer for her. Instead, she selected a low space in the mountain tops above, then moved thirty or forty paces west. How many more times would she have to cast this spell? Sixty? More? She could do it if she had to.
 

She cast the first rock-breaking spell easily. It was almost as though it wanted to come out of her.
 

The broken stones poured out of the hole she’d made. Ivy and Kinz watched the skies all around
 
as Cazia cast again.
 

They reached the top of the pass a little after midday, as it turned out. Cazia had to stop several times to compose herself, and the others wanted to eat. But when they broke through the side of the peak, the sun beamed almost straight down at them.
 

“By Inzu’s breath,” Kinz said. Ivy and Cazia stepped along the jagged crevice to follow her to the northern side of the mountain.
 

The Qorr Valley lay stretched out before them. Far to the northeast, they could just barely make out the churning ocean crashing against the massive black rock shore. It was squeezed between the easternmost reaches of the Northern Barrier and a second mountain range that ran nearly due north. The afternoon sun was still burning off wisps of ocean fog that clung to the base of the mountains, but where it was clear, they could see bright green grass and patches of thick pine forests.
 

“It’s so green,” Ivy said. “Just like home.”
 

Far to the left, in the westernmost part of the valley, was the place the northern range met the Barrier. The fog was still thick there, but to Cazia, it looked as if the place where the ranges met had been scooped out with a giant spoon.
 

“I think we can get down there,” Kinz said, pointing toward a nest of vines growing against the mountainside.
 

“Oh!” Ivy exclaimed. She pointed toward the corner of the little plateau below them. There, lying in the sun, were the bleached white bones of a massive dragon.

Chapter 22