The Way Into Chaos (57 page)

Ivy had broken her bowstring somewhere on the hill; she’d be doing no more fighting today. Her scrapes were raw but shallow--they’d already stopped bleeding--but she looked frightened and dispirited. Maybe she needed some encouragement, maybe a hug, but Cazia wasn’t the one to give it.
 

Kinz knelt beside the princess; she looked just as weak and shaky. Cazia suspected she didn’t look much better, although her own scrapes and hacking cough seemed to be someone else’s problem.
 

The Tilkilit clicking seemed to be far away. The thicket grew higher than their heads on both sides. Cazia brushed ash and cinders from Ivy’s clothes. They had seen and done amazing things together, and she would need them both as witnesses if she was going to return in force for that portal.
 

They moved forward, sliding down the hill in places where it grew steep. Behind them, another of the worm’s segments burst, then two more in quick succession. Eagle cries filled the air. Smoke rose into the sky like twisting black towers.
 

A piece of burning shell fell onto the narrow path. It was as large as three butchered sheep, and the flames began to spread through the bushes on both sides. Cazia made to push through the thicket to go around.
 

“No!” Kinz hissed. “Hunting birds will dive at rustling grass. You will call them down upon us.”
 

Fine. That just meant Cazia had an excuse to cast another spell.
 

Her water spell sent out a spray from the empty space between her hands. The fires sputtered and the black smoke became mixed with white steam, but she kept the water flowing until the only flames left were floating downhill on the tiny stream she’d created.
 

The spell didn’t want to end, so she sprayed water onto her boots, then her skirts, then onto the other two girls to cool them. Cazia felt the magic building in the hollow space inside her the way a flooding river builds behind a dam. It seemed that it might break her apart and rush out into the world. The pressure suddenly became intense, and that dead intelligence inside her longed to break free like an infant striving to be born.
 

All she had to do was surrender, and she would fly apart and be no more.
Hollowed out.
The waters of her spell would wash Ivy and Kinz away--everything would be washed away, and she would never enter that portal.
 

The portal. Cazia pinched off the power of the Gift, letting it fade away. She wanted to enter that portal. It didn’t matter if the waters washed Ivy and Kinz away, or if it gave away their position to the raptors above. The portal was everything.
 

The spell dwindled to nothing, and Cazia fell into the mud and wept. Ivy and Kinz knelt beside her--her spell had drenched them brow to boot-- and tried to comfort her, but they didn’t understand.
 
How could they when she didn’t even understand herself?
 

Ivy turned Cazia’s face toward her own. “Cazia. Big sister. We must keep moving.” She sounded as if she was trying to reason with a mad woman.
That’s because she is
.
 

Another segment of the worm burst open, bathing them all in orange light. Something passed over them--Cazia felt the breeze but didn’t see it--then a piece of shell as long as a door fell into the bushes beside the path, filling the air with a new plume of black smoke. Time to go. Cazia lifted Ivy over the blackened flesh blocking the path, then Kinz.
 

All three of them ran down the path, stumbling when the ground was uneven, snagging their skirts on thorns when they veered too far to one side.
 

Then they were clear of the smoke. They had reached the bottom of the hill and the end of the path. The stony ground ahead was bare of any cover except for a few brown weeds and charred logs. The green forest seemed very far away.
 

All three knelt within the cover of the thicket. It had taken Chik almost two days to lead them to this part of the valley. How were they supposed to make it back with all of his people hunting them? “We’ll never make it back to our climbing vines, not with all this, assuming we could even find them. We’ll have to dig through the mountains again,” Cazia said. She could feel the Eleventh Gift growing inside her, and she had to clench her fists to keep from casting her spell.
 

“Cazia, no!” Ivy said.
 

They looked at her as if she’d announced she was going to drink poison. And they were right; she knew they were right. The last spell had nearly gone out of control... It felt as if it would kill her.
 

But the urge was still there, suddenly become as undeniable as starvation. She knew that when it came out of her, it would run out of her control. Could she cast a version of the Eleventh Gift strong enough to bore all the way through a mountain?
 

A voice inside her said
yes
but she wasn’t sure she could trust it.

“Cazia,” Ivy said. “You have to promise you will not cast any more spells. The strain you are putting on yourself is too much.”

“And the damage you have already made to yourself—”

“I know.” Cazia wiped tears from her sooty face and tried to summon up a reasonable expression. “I know I have already done too much, but I want us to get back over the mountains, and we’re not going to do that without magic.”
 

“We can,” Ivy said. “Cazia—”

“Cazia is dead.” Part of her wanted to feel good about finally admitting that, both to herself and to the world, but she couldn’t. It wasn’t even entirely true, but it would be soon. Not that it mattered.

“Have it your way,
Doctor Freewell
.” Ivy’s tone was sharp and her eyes filled with tears. Did she think Cazia was trying to offend her? If they reached safety, Cazia would have to explain that she didn’t care enough about the girl to insult her. “But I want you to swear to us, on your magic, that you will not cast another spell today.”

Cazia looked up at the mountain looming above them to the south. She could imagine the stone-breaking spell it would take to bore a hole straight through it, could envision the changes to her hand motions and visualizations that would require.
 

She didn’t have that kind of power, but she could channel it. She could open the hollow space inside herself and let the magic flow through.
 

She knew it would destroy her, but wasn’t entirely sure what that meant. Would she physically die? It was possible, but the strain she’d felt when she was putting out the fire didn’t seem physical.
 

Would she become like one of the wizards from the children’s stories she’d heard all her life, creating monsters, poisoning rivers, murdering whole clans in their sleep? Would she become like Doctor Whitestalk? Like Doctor Rexler, the man Old Stoneface became famous for killing? Would she even remember her name?

Ivy and Kinz were waiting for her promise. “No.”
 

A Tilkilit warrior suddenly landed beside them. Ivy spun toward him and lost her balance. She fell against Kinz’s injured side, and together they tumbled into the thicket. Kinz cried out in pain.
 

Cazia snatched a dart from her quiver. Was this going to be the spell that tore her apart? It seemed to be. She began to make the necessary hand motions.
 

Dropping his spear, the warrior slipped his hand into the pouch at his hip and drew out one of the strange, black stones they carried there. Fire and Fury, he was too close to miss. Tilkilit warriors could throw those stones hard enough to break bones, and as he drew back his arm, she dove sideways toward the only cover available to her, Ivy and Kinz’s bodies.
 

But she had no fear to give her movements urgency, and that made her slow. The warrior threw the stone; it struck her solidly on the thigh.
 

The whole world dimmed, then pain shot through her body. The hollow space inside her registered a moment of curiosity:
That was no ordinary stone; what an odd sensa--

Then the alien hollowness inside her was ripped away, and Cazia screamed.

Chapter 28

Tejohn had grown up on a farm where the work started before first light and never really ended. He’d drilled with soldiers, marched through the night, and charged enemy squares when he was on the edge of collapse. He had drilled the prince and his friends for hours through the hottest days of summer.
 

But he had never worked as hard in his life as he did as a servant.
 

Every morning, he was woken with a sharp slap from a baton. Every day, he labored for hours in the wind and rain, wearing nothing but a cloth tied around his waist. He was fed once, at midday, usually thin rice gruel. The work continued long after darkness until he was so tired, he could barely hold his head up.
 

People died all around him. On his first day hauling rocks, a man collapsed on the rocky slope, spilling his basket. The overseer lashed him until his back was raw, but nothing could make the fellow respond. Tejohn watched in horror as the body was hauled away like trash...until a lash across his own back drove him back to work.
 

At first, Tejohn was determined to prove his worth. He was certain that if he worked harder than the others and did not complain, the people in charge would move him to less miserable work. He pulled baskets of broken rock out of the pits faster than anyone else. He carried them up the hill fastest. He even picked up stones that others dropped.
 

On his second day, the frayed basket he was raising out of the pit broke. It wasn’t anything he did; the woven grasses simply tore under the weight, raining stones into the pit below. Luckily, no one was hurt.
 

But six of the overseers dragged Tejohn away, tied him to a post, and gave him four lashes. He did not make a sound until they finished by throwing a bucket of icy salt water onto his back.
 

In his soldiering days, he would have been ordered to a sleepstone, as long as there was no one else with a greater need. Instead, the overseers sent him back to the pit. For the rest of the day, he worked more slowly than anyone else.
 

That night, he found that one of the other servants had stolen his thin blanket, the only protection he had against the damp, chill air. As he lay shivering, a whispered voice in the darkness said, “You think you’re better than us.” There was so much venom in it that Tejohn was sure he would be murdered in his sleep, but he was wrong. No one was going to be merciful enough to simply kill him.
 

Servants were beaten when they worked too slowly. They were beaten when they hurried. They were beaten when they looked an overseer in the eye or did not meet the overseer’s gaze. Talking was forbidden but silence was suspicious. They spent every day hungry, exhausted, and so parched, their heads hurt. Merchants and other townsfolk sneered at him when they weren’t close enough to spit on him. Wealthy men strolled along the edges of the work yard, looking over the women working there the way Tejohn might choose a fish at a stall.
 

His back ached and bled. His stomach grumbled. His bare feet were covered with cuts and bruises. Once, when he slipped on a rain-slick piece of slate and bruised his knee terribly, the overseer put his boot on the back of Tejohn’s neck.
 

He lay on the dirt, waiting for the man to decide whether to lean one way and break Tejohn’s neck, or lean the other to let him live. When he’d been a tyr, Tejohn had ignored the servants. He quickly discovered that, to a servant, there was no better class of person than that.
 

It took six days for him to transform from a tyr of the Peradaini empire into a servant that dared not look another man in the face. He could not even risk thinking of his wife and children during the daylight hours for fear that an overseer would see him smile.
 

The only times they could rest--aside from their few hours in the huge, drafty warehouse where they slept--were when they were fed. Most servants sat in tight circles, and Tejohn thought they were being cliquish.
 

On the eighth day, as Tejohn stood in line for his bowl of gruel, he noticed a group of six young men watching them with hard, measuring glances. Tejohn knew bandits when he saw them, even when they were as half-starved as these. None were older than he had been when he went into the army.

The one standing at the front looked at Tejohn briefly, then glanced away, searching for an easier target.
 

He found it. The leader moved alongside an old man as he walked away with his full bowl, the whole group following. The old fellow, already shuffling like a defeated man, didn’t bother to protest as the little gang forced themselves into his little circle of gray-haired servants. The young men snatched bowls of gruel from the elders to pour into their own.