The Way Into Darkness: Book Three of The Great Way (42 page)

The bronze cage clattered and the bottom fell open. Fire and Fury, they’d unleashed the beast anyway.
 

Cazia was not going to run away. Not again. There was only one way for her to use her kinzchu spears against the grunt now. She descended a little farther, trying to guess how high the beast could jump by measuring the gouge marks on the walls around her.
 

A chorus of boos started to echo around the field, and the wooden cart began to crack—no, it was stones. The people in the stands were throwing stones at her, and the noise they made against the wood sounded like planks breaking under a great strain.
 

One of the stones whipped by her ear so close, she could feel the breeze.
 

The grunt was on its feet. The crowd stopped pelting her with stones and fell silent as it waited to see what would happen next.
 

Cazia rotated the cart so the front corner was closest to the grunt. It looked all around, slowly, then charged at her.
 

At the last moment, Cazia became sure she had flown too low and that the grunt would be able to vault over the cart railing onto her, and she yanked the lever to gain altitude. It was both too late and unnecessary. From her position at the back of the cart, she couldn’t see where the grunt caught hold, but she heard and felt it strike the weapons on the front of the cart, then fall away.
 

It worked. She rotated the cart as she descended, keeping the grunt in sight. It had fallen to the grass and lay still. The crowd murmured in confusion and their voices were low enough to hear the grunt bellow out its death cry.
 

The murmurs slowly became cheers; by the time the creature began to burn, the whole stadium was roaring its approval.
 

For all the good it did Cazia. She set down the cart on the grass some twenty feet from the burning grunt, then began to unstrap herself. Fire and Fury, she was parched, and tired, and hungry, too. What she really needed was to sit on a bench and drink her fill, but her skin was empty and she didn’t feel safe enough to fill it, not in front of this crowd.

She clambered over the side of the cart, her legs so stiff that she almost fell. Monument sustain her, even her feet were sore. It had never occurred to her that it would hurt so much just to
stand
.
 

Soldiers ran across the field toward her, their shields and spears held high. Cazia was unarmed, of course, except for the knife at her belt and the mace the people at Tempest Pass had made for her. She lifted her hands to show they were empty and let a half dozen soldiers surround her.
 

By this point, the grunt had burned away, leaving only a few small fires in the grass and an ash-covered man. If Cazia had six spears around her, the former grunt had six times that.
 

“He’s been cured!” she shouted. It shouldn’t have been necessary to say that, but the expressions on their faces made them look as if they might stab the man on general principle.
 

The spears began talking to each other in a language she didn’t immediately recognize. It was sharp and sibilant and strangely musical. Surgish. Of course, they were speaking Surgish to each other. If only Cazia had taken her lessons more seriously, she would be able to follow their conversation.
 

“Man now,” she said, butchering both the pronunciation and grammar. She had it backwards anyway, didn’t she? That’s what her tutor had taught her. “Now man,” she tried.
 

One of the spears turned to her. “Stop insulting our language,” he said in a very clipped Peradaini. “You will be told when to speak.”
 

The cured man coughed and sneezed the ashes from his throat, then stood. The spears surrounding him backed away, letting her see.
 

Great Way, he was gorgeous. He had curly black hair, dark eyes and broad muscular hands. And of course he was naked.
 

Flushed, Cazia looked away. The other soldiers closed in, blocking her view again, for which she was both grateful and resentful. Why had she looked away? Cazia tried to peek at him again, but at this point, the other soldiers had gotten over their shock and had crowded around him, clapping his shoulder and exclaiming in Surgish too fast for Cazia to follow. They knew him, obviously.
 

At a sharp call from a spear with a tall green comb, the soldiers stood at attention. No one bothered to point their spears at the cured man any more, but Cazia was another matter.
 

The naked man knelt. The man in the green comb stepped aside, and the armored scholar
 
stepped forward. He had taken off his helmet, revealing a puffy face with an olive complexion, small dark eyes, and too-generous mouth. With his helmet on, he looked like a hero out of stories. With it off, he looked like a thief who had just escaped from the pit.
 

Tyr Freewell. Her father. Goose bumps ran down her back.
 

He walked toward Cazia, looking her over carefully as though she was already a corpse. She tried to see something of herself in him, but it was impossible. For one thing, she didn’t know her own face that well. For another, she hated him from the moment he gave her that serpent-eyed look. She didn’t want to have anything in common with this man.
 

He turned away from her without speaking. To the kneeling man, he said, “Yenssorth, isn’t it?”
 

The soldier answered in Peradaini. “Yenswont, my tyr. I’m honored that you remember me at all.”
 

Tyr Freewell’s voice was light. “What happened to you, Yenswont?”
 

“I can’t remember, my tyr. One moment, I was lying in the pen, feeling as though my whole body would burst, and then I was here as you see me.”
 

“Interesting.” He turned toward Cazia again. She was uncomfortably aware of how close his hand was to the knife at his belt. Cazia made sure hers were as far as possible. “I assume this is your doing, somehow. Something to do with these ridiculous blunt spears?”
 

Just as she was about to answer, one of the spears prodded her shoulder with the flat of his blade. She felt the sharp sting of the metal as it scratched her ever so slightly.
 

“The stones are called kinzchu stones,” Cazia said, trying to speak clearly and bravely. “They steal the grunt’s curse at a touch.”
 

Every spear turned toward the cart and the weapons there. Only Tyr Freewell kept his attention on Cazia. “And yet you bring them to me,” he said. “A girl who speaks Peradaini as one raised in the Morning City itself.” Cazia tried to explain, but he spoke over her. “Don’t bother. I know who you are. I also know why you’re here.” He leaned close to her. “There’s no one else, is there? There’s no one else to win this fight for your beloved king.”
 

“No,” Cazia answered. There was no way she would tell this man that the Twofins would be getting the same weapons, assuming Stoneface could overcome the mob of grunts she’d seen inside the Twofin walls. In fact, there was no way she would tell the tyr about Stoneface, either.
 

“No, of course not,” the tyr said with a greasy smile. “The Durdric would club your head in if you showed up in their lands with enchanted stones. And the Simblins have all but vanished.”
 

He turned toward the weapons strapped to her cart and reached out to touch one. If the kinzchu stone stole his magic, he would collapse, and Cazia could call to him… What was the Surgish word for
father
? It had never occurred to her to learn it. Peradaini would have to do.
 

But the tyr withdrew his hand at the last moment. He was more clever and more cautious than she expected. He turned to the man in the green comb, giving rapid-fire instructions in Surgish. Soldiers began unloading the kinzchu spears.
 

Cazia did not see what came next. She was grabbed by the elbows and half carried, half dragged off the field. Rough hands took her knife and her metal-encased mace. The crowd stared down at her in mute amazement. Before she was halfway to the raised section of the field where her father had stood his ground, the green-combed commander was standing beside the naked soldier she had cured, addressing the crowd in a loud voice. Cazia, of course, could understand none of it.
 

“I can make more of those stones,” she said, in case they had been ordered to execute her.
 

Someone behind her kicked her legs, hard, making her fall forward. The strain on her arms was painful enough to make her cry out. “Shoost lenz,” a voice said from behind, and she decided it would be best to be as quiet as she could.
 

The performance for the night had ended early, but no one complained as they shuffled out of the stadium. Everyone seemed stunned by the sight of one of their own, cured of The Blessing. Cazia had thought it lucky that the first man they transformed was a Freewell soldier, but it suddenly struck her that it was not luck at all. He’d probably been bitten in battle and then thrown into a pen until he’d transformed.
 

Song knew how he’d felt about that. How any of them felt, knowing they were going to change and then be murdered for the entertainment of their friends and families. Cazia tried to imagine it, but as she looked at the grim, miserable, angry faces around her, she realized she would never understand these people. Her people.
 

She was led out of the field and across the torchlit bridge to the holdfast. The moon had risen and she could see the city better; the traditional courtyard outside the holdfast was mostly taken up by piers and waterfront shacks. The high, lit sentry tower was impressive enough, but the two smaller, darker towers at the most central part of the building were like nothing she’d seen before. One was a typical squat round tower with a crenelated top, but a stone bridge extended from it.
 

The bridge connected to the second tower, which appeared to be a single large round wooden room standing atop stone pillars. The only way in or out seemed to be the one stone bridge.
 

Mother.
The thought came to her unbidden, but it made sense. If Tyr Freewell needed a place to keep Ellifer’s sister hostage, that tower was it.
 

Cazia, however, was not taken to the top of a tower, where the summer breezes would keep her cool. Instead, she was brought into the holdfast, dragged down a long flight of stairs, and thrown into a stone chamber deep underground. The air was stale, muggy, and smelled like an outhouse. The darkness was filled with quiet moans and sobbing from other cells.
 

She was turned and dropped onto a bench. The room was clean, at least. There was no excrement on the floor and no corpses in the corner. The pot at the end of the bench was even empty.
 

The guard pointed at her emphatically, as though trying to catch her attention. “Briks rukes, dirst falls.” She wouldn’t have realized he was speaking Peradaini if he hadn’t been using hand gestures as well.
Break rocks, dirt falls
. If she tried to escape by tunneling, she would suffocate herself in a collapse.
 

He shut the door, threw the bar, and stalked down the hall, taking the torch with him. Utter, impenetrable darkness filled the room. Cazia could have cast a light spell, but she held back. Not every cart driver was a full scholar, and if she could hide her abilities for as long as possible, so much the better.
 

What she could not do any longer was go without water. She lay back and cast the Fifth Gift above her, letting the water flow into her open mouth. It made a bit of a mess, but she needed it badly. After she’d taken her fill, she drew the half-loaf of meatbread from the inner pocket of her robe. The guards had taken her knife belt and mace, but they hadn’t bothered to search her.
 

Sated, she dropped into a deep sleep.
 

It seemed only moments later that she was awakened by torchlight again. Three guards, with their long knives drawn, stood outside her door as it opened. They did not have to say anything. Cazia followed them.
 

She was taken to the servants’ quarters, bathed, brushed, and given a long-hemmed robe made of rough cloth. After that, she was led into the upper part of the holdfast. By the light through the windows, she guessed it was late morning or early afternoon. No one spoke Peradaini to her and she did not try to speak to them.
 

She was brought to the tyr’s private chambers, where settings had been laid out for the two of them. She stood quietly in the corner for a few moments, looking out the window at the way the green trees swayed in the wind, until he entered.
 

Tyr Freewell wore scholar’s robes without the armor. Cazia had seen him cast one of the Gifts in front of a crowd, but it was here, in the seat of his power, that she really let the truth sink in:
this man is a tyr and a scholar, and has been for years
.

“I decided I was too harsh with you last night.” Tyr Freewell gestured to the stool at his right hand. Cazia allowed him to sit just before she did. Platters were set in front of them: baked freshwater fish with apple mush and bread.
 

Cazia’s mouth watered but she kept her hands in her lap. Last night, he’d said he knew who she was, but was that true? “Thank you.”

Tyr Freewell picked up the heel of his loaf, so she did the same. As he dipped it into the mush, she had the feeling that he was watching her out of the corner of his eye.
We do have something in common after all.
“Can you read? You never responded to my letters.”
 

Cazia tossed her piece of bread onto the plate unbitten. He
did
know who she was. “Don’t even try that,” she said. “Not with me.”
 

He seemed faintly amused. “What do you mean?”