The Way Into Chaos (52 page)

Arla drew back her bow. “My tyr?”

“Not yet,” Tejohn said.
 

The grunt splashed about in the water, then climbed back onto the shore. It couldn’t float, Tejohn realized. It wanted to spread its curse, but it was not so single-minded that it could be tricked into drowning itself. It glanced around frantically, trying to find a way to get to them.
 

It raced downstream along the bank toward a large tree that leaned over the water, then leaped into the branches. The canopy trembled under its weight; it could not safely climb more than a few paces over the river.
 

The grunt stared at them, its expression intent and... Fire and Fury, it looked almost as though it was memorizing their faces.

It did not follow them around the next bend in the river.
 

“Put away your arrow,” Tejohn said. “Are we far enough from the fort?”

The scout glanced behind her, then slid the arrow into the quiver at her hip. “Yes, my Tyr.”

Tejohn poled them onto a marshy bank in the shelter of a pair of trees. They carried their supplies onto dry ground, then flipped the barge. It was heavier than Tejohn expected. He found a heavy rock with a narrow edge, broke through the bottom, then dropped stones into it until it sank.
 

For a brief, odd moment, Tejohn felt the urge to apologize to Uls. A month ago, he wouldn’t have given a thought to the feelings of an old servant who was responsible for a little boat but didn’t own it. “Scout, do you see a trail in the hills above?”
 

She scanned the rocky hill to the west. They would have to walk over or around it, but Tejohn wasn’t farsighted enough to pick a path.
 

He relied on her, just as he relied on the fort stewards, the miners like Passlar Breakrock, the old soldiers with nowhere to turn like Uls Ulstrik. Tejohn had lived too long in the palace. He’d gotten used to living high up and, like the Italgas and landed tyrs, had stopped thinking about those he stood on.
 

“This way, my tyr.” After a brief but difficult climb, they came upon a deer path and followed it along the rim of the spur.
 

Shortly before midmorning, Arla laid a hand on Tejohn’s cuirass and bade him crouch behind a gray mass of bare blackberry vines. “They are there, my tyr.”
 

She pointed out toward the Wayward. The river had angled eastward around a rocky promontory, and although Tejohn could not see what she was pointing at, he knew what she’d spotted: Coml’s ambush.
 

It was a relief to know they’d avoided it, and he squelched the urge to come at them from behind. His old outrage--the familiar, wound-up urge to fight and then fight some more--was not as overwhelming as it had been when he was young. Arla continued up the hillside and he followed her.
 

Arla found a switchback trail that led to the top of the spur. Tejohn had never seen these lands before--they were all stony slopes and stands of narrow trees, but no people. They stopped for a meal, then he followed her westward. Always westward.
 

In late afternoon, Arla spotted a log cabin. “It looks abandoned,” she said before Tejohn could even see it. As they came close, he noted the door had been broken in.
 

No one answered his hails. He held his shield in front of him and kept his hand on his sword as he stepped through the door, calling out more quietly and asking if someone inside needed his help.
 

The wind shifted as he entered the darkened room, and the smell of dead bodies washed over him.
 

“Fire and Fury,” Arla said.
 

They had been a family. A man about Reglis’s age, with thick arms and a heavy beard, lay by the door, his belly slit open. Farther inside lay the corpse of a woman of the same age, her stomach pierced by spears. Their two dead children lay behind her.

They had been older than Tejohn’s lost child, but they still looked so small.
 

“This wasn’t grunts,” Arla said bitterly. “Could Witt spears have come so far west? Or Bendertuks so far east?”
 

“This family was killed by their neighbors,” Tejohn said. “He came to the door with his hands empty. See? There’s a Gerrit shield hanging on the wall.”

“They killed him because he’s a Gerrit?”
 

“A woodsman, I’d guess, and trapper, too. So many Finstel soldiers died a generation ago that people from other lands flooded in. They took over farms and fisheries--not the finest or most fertile, but empty properties anyway. And there was resentment. Great Way, it should not have come to this. Not to murdered children.”
 

Arla’s tone was flat. “The Finstels are purging outsiders.”
 

“Even the little ones. This is no place for a Grimfield with a Chin-Chinro accent,” Tejohn said. “We’ll have to part sooner than I’d planned.”
 

The woodsman had a fine bronze-bladed shovel hanging on the wall, so he and Arla spent the rest of the day digging a grave. Family graves were a tradition in Gerrit lands, so they dug wide and deep. They used up the rest of the daylight excavating the stony earth, arranging the bodies inside, then covering them over. Tejohn laid out the shield as a marker.

More than once, they had to stop and walk away from the work. When it was finished, they washed their hands in a bucket behind the cabin, then ate without pleasure. They lay on the ground beneath a starry sky, and Arla told Tejohn the story of how she saw her family murdered. When she was done, Tejohn shared his tale with her. It was an awful kind of communion, but it was what they had and they clung to it.
 

They slept in the woods some distance from the house. In the morning, Tejohn set his weapons on the cabin floor. It was hard to give up his shield and especially that oversized sword, but a fighting man had to know when to empty his hands.
 

“My tyr, are you sure you want us to part? You...”

“I can not see what is coming,” Tejohn finished for her. “You’re right. But I have managed before we met and will do so again. Besides, once Coml’s fleet squad reports that we did not pass them on the river, Finstel spears will be hunting for the pair of us. Better to split up. Hike this spur back into the mountains. You certainly can’t stay here with that accent.”

“And you, my tyr?”
 

Tejohn shrugged off his cuirass, then unbuckled his greaves. “I was a farmer who lost everything, once. I can be that again.”

“So, you’re still going to Splashtown?”
 

“Lar Italga charged me with a mission, but I’ve decided to go to Ussmajil instead. Have you noticed that the locals have stopped using Peradaini names? The Finstels have rescued someone from the capital, and they have flying carts. I must speak with the former and steal the latter, and I don’t think a landless tyr will be welcome in the holdfast. Still, somehow I must get to Tempest Pass. The king was sure that the key to defeating the grunts would be found there, and I intend to complete the task he set me. I suspect it is the only way the people of Kal-Maddum will survive.”

Tejohn made sure Arla took the bulk of their provisions. He had only ten days’ walk ahead of him, while she might be living in the wild for a long time.
 

He also threw aside his padded undershirt--it was too obviously a soldier’s garment. In the cabin, he found a linen vest hanging on a hook. It was stained with mud and sweat but it would do. He kept his wooden-handled knife on his belt, and slipped the blue translation stone Cazia Freewell had made for him and Lar’s ring into the torn lining of his boot.
 

He would have to get rid of both of them. Ideally, he should hide them. It was lucky that Coml’s men had only searched his person and not his belongings. Either of those two items would be worth his life.

He stood before Arla. “How do I look?”
 

“Like a tyr. You stand like a proud man.” He let his shoulders slump forward and shifted himself off balance. “Better, my Tyr.”

He nodded. “You shouldn’t call me that any more.”
 

She smiled. “Then I will say, Tejohn Treygar, that it has been an honor to fight beside you.”
 

They clasped hands. “And you, too. Great Way willing, we will meet again in peaceful times.”
 

“Perhaps one day I will get a chance to try one of your wife’s little red cakes.” She shrugged her pack onto her shoulders, then started uphill toward the trees and mountains. It took very little time for her to pass out of his sight.
 

He found an old path that led across the spur to the west. He had no clear notion where it led, but he hoped it was the route the dead woodsman had used to take his cuttings to town.
 

After a short time, he came to a sharp bend in the path and paused. The trees and thickets here gave him heavy cover, and for the first time in days, he felt secure from prying eyes. It was time to get rid of the ring and translation stone. The idea that they were dangerous to carry came upon him like throwing open shutters to let the daylight in.
 

He stepped off the path, climbed through the thicket onto a flat, stony meadow. He pried up a squarish rock, laid the ring and translation gem beneath it, then set it back into place. With his knife, he notched the nearest tree. On his way back to the path, he marked another tree.
 

If Tejohn let himself be killed, the ring would likely never be found. The king would never be cured. The empire...
 

It was too much. The weight of so many secrets bore down on him. Not so long ago, he had stood on the promenade and spoken with the queen of the empire. Today, he was furtively hiding all evidence of that high state. As he returned to the path, he knew he did not walk the path like a proud man.
 

The town at the bottom of the spur was surrounded by a high wooden wall, and the gate was shut. Tejohn walked around it, showing his empty hands to the watchful men and women atop the wall.
 

In the flatlands, he came upon others making the same trip. Word about the grunts had spread, driving some to the road and others to barricade their homes. The one thing Tejohn had learned was that no matter what the danger--fire, approaching armies, anything--there were always some too stubborn to leave their land.
 

Many fellow refugees pulled wagons or drove okshim--one young couple had four yoked together, which probably made them the wealthiest commoners in ten days’ march. It was slow going, but Tejohn kept his patience and dawdled with them. As he hoped, he was invited to camp with them as night fell.
 

They were all strangers to each other, and each briefly told their stories. The wealthy young couple owned a mine and a farm. The old woman with the crooked back caught and sold fish by the river. Others were wheelwrights, blacksmiths, or ferry folk. Tejohn told them he had been dismissed from the farm where he worked, and one or two others smirked in response; presumably, they assumed he was a runaway servant. He bared his wrists so they could see he had no tattoos there, but no one seemed interested.
 

Then they began trading rumors. This was what he’d lingered for, and they didn’t disappoint. Among the dubious news they shared: The Redmudds had slain their servants and elderly to make their supplies stretch. Tyr Holvos had been so terrified of the grunts that he fled the fall of Rivershelf by boat.
On the sea
. There were many gasps at this news, and wise nods when the fisherwoman said eels dragged the ship under before they’d lost sight of the city.
 

The family of ferry folk considered themselves the best informed, and they shared gossip the way a tyr’s wife might throw food to starving children. At the same time Peradain fell, the waters of the Bescos had erupted and sea giants strode up the Espileth, laying waste to Simblinton, they said gravely, as though they’d seen it happen themselves. After destroying the entire Simblin clan, the giants had collapsed the passes and returned to the deep.
 

The general consensus among the crowd was that everything had been planned, even though Tejohn thought the story sounded as authentic as a child’s ghost story. The attacks were a coordinated assault against the entire empire at the command of either the sea giants, Durdric Holy Sons, Indregai warlords, or unnamed tyrs within the empire itself, depending on the lateness of the hour.
 

But they nearly came to blows over the description of the grunts themselves. The ferry folk claimed they were pink and white, with horns like goats. Others claimed they were dark blue and red, and the argument got heated, with the ferryman’s sons waving their fists at the wealthy young couple’s chief servant. Tejohn broke through the argument by saying he’d seen two kinds of grunts, then described them.
 

They pressed him hard with questions, and he answered very slowly. Several of the other campers wanted to hear his news more than once, and he told it, haltingly, in the same way each time. It didn’t take long for them to tire of him, and they settled in to sleep.
 

It was troubling to hear that sea giants were moving in the west, even if it came from someone as untrustworthy as those ferry folk. Could the grunts be part of a coordinated attack against the empire? Would the sea giants range far enough to the north to impede his progress to Tempest Pass?

On the twelfth day of their journey, they came into sight of Ussmajil itself. The outermost parts of the city were surrounded by barricades so new, some of the logs still had green leaves attached. Tejohn expected to see refugees camping outside the city--there were always a few--but the flats were empty. Were they going to be turned away?
 

The wealthy young couple were greeted by three women wearing fine, clean linen and attended by twenty servants. They, their animals, and their servants were ushered away toward the central holdfast. The wheelwright removed a strip of red cloth from inside his robe
, tied it over his biceps
and, carefully not looking at anyone else in the crowd, went directly to the market square.