The Way Into Darkness: Book Three of The Great Way (58 page)

“No, it’s a crossroads,” Tejohn said. “Near Sunset Ridge. I was a boy here, but there are so many paths….”
 

“It’s not real,” Cazia said. “This is a hallucination. We’re not anywhere.”
 

“We’re still inside the portal.”
 

“Yes.”
 

“Then let’s pick a hallucination we can both stand. Something familiar that won’t make me ache for home.”
 

“How about the promenade at the palace?”
 

The promenade of the Palace of Song and Morning appeared around them. Tejohn could not help but feel a pang of loss--he’d last spoken to Amlian right on this spot--but he did not ask for something more neutral. A little grief wouldn’t hurt anyone.
 

Their feet rested on solid stone, while at the same time, rested on nothing. The more they thought about what was solid beneath their feet, the more real it felt, but it was never real enough to be truly convincing.

Cazia touched the hooked black iron bars that surrounded them.
That
felt real.
 

“We’re creating this ourselves,” Cazia said, although she knew she was not really talking, not in this place. Neither of them were. It only felt like talking. “We’re making it out of our thoughts.”
 

/We can not reach you.\

That startled both of them. Cazia laid her hand against the alligaunt barrier as though she could physically brace it. “Who?” Tejohn called. “Who is trying to reach us?”
 

“Are you real, or have we made you up, too?”
 

A huge golden glow seemed to rise up in front of them. It was both extraordinarily close and as far as the mountains to the north at the same time.
 

/We are, just as you are. We can not reach you.\
 

The glow became more complex, with some parts turning more blue and others becoming more orange. The shades and shadows within churned and shifted around each other.
 

“Tell us who you are.”
 

/We are, just as you are.\
 

Tejohn could feel Cazia’s annoyance growing as if it was his own. “Are what?” she asked. “Be more descriptive.”
 

/We are. We endure. We change. We remember. We connect. Matter touches moment and we are there.\
 

Cazia was not sure what to think, but Tejohn understood immediately.
 
“We endure: Monument. We change: The Little Spinner. We remember: Song. We connect--”
 

“The Great Way,” Cazia finished.
We can not reach you.
Her barrier, made from the black iron alligaunt bars, had worked. They had held the gods at bay, even here
inside
. “We are talking to… What about Fire and Fury?”
 

/They are not. We recognize those names, but we are. They are not.\
 

Cazia felt Tejohn’s sudden ache of dismay; so many years of his life had been spent in devout worship to those gods, only to discover that his prayers had been wasted. In contrast, Tejohn knew Cazia’s most powerful response was a childish resentment against the alligaunts for being right.
 

/We can not reach you.\
 

Tejohn’s and Cazia’s thoughts and feelings were mingling--they were each experiencing what the other did--and now so were their memories. Tejohn remembered hundreds of times Cazia had cast spells, and how it had felt to channel such power. Her ability to concentrate in the face of life-threatening distractions was amazing.
 

For her part, Cazia remembered so many battlefields: the screams, the blood, the desperate physical effort, the looks of shock and horror on the faces of those who had received one of Tejohn’s killing strokes. Great Way, it was all so
intimate
and physical and nightmarish.
 

/We can not reach you.\
 

A moment later, they were not alone--in fact, they realized they had never been alone. Ghostly images of other people filled the promenade,
 
all of them frozen in a single moment. Beside them was a mob of alligaunts, maybe the same ones that had fled through the portal with them. Beyond them were giant eagles, and the grotesque insect people that Cazia recognized as the Tilkilit.
 

Beyond them were more human beings, and there were The Blessing. There were endless multitudes in every direction of all sorts of beings.

/We can not reach you.\
 

Of course, there was no promenade--not really--and there was no crowd standing utterly still as though snatched out of a moment. The inside of the portal was a not-space and not-moment; Tejohn understood for both of them that these were simply visions meant to explain something their minds were not equipped to understand. These ghostly figures were everyone who had ever entered a portal. Everyone.

Then, just as Cazia and Tejohn shared each other’s thoughts and memories, they began to experience the memories of those outside their barrier. The hooked bars might be able to hold the gods at bay, but they could not cancel the nature of this place: to connect.

The sudden loss of self was disorienting. Their thoughts were flooded with the memories of Examiner, with all her retinue, and their memories of ambush: sudden motion, tearing flesh, and smug satisfaction.
 

Then they experienced the memories of the People Above--so many hours of drifting on updrafts, with rare moments of incredible speed. But the most surprising thing was that the world seemed so
deep
to them.
 

/We can not reach you.\
 

The Tilkilit followed, with their tedious, workmanlike thoughts and worries. So concerned with rank, obedience, and status.
 

Beyond them, they found human beings. Great Way, there were so many human beings sharing their thoughts; faces appeared like a field of ten thousand flowers. Some were little better than barbarians, driving animals with the tips of their stone spears, sacks of seed strapped to their backs. Some wore armor so complicated and articulate that Tejohn and Cazia could only marvel.
 

All of these beings, human or not, were as still in this not-moment as a painting. Within the barrier, Tejohn and Cazia could think, feel, experience, and remember. Outside, all those ghostly-still people had was memory. Cazia and Tejohn moved through their minds as though they were tapestries hanging in a great gallery. Love, triumph, brutality…the full extent of their lives swept by.
 

Some lived like animals in the wild. Some lived in cities full of steel palaces driven by machines of fire. Primitives were mixed with the not-yet-born, and so many of their memories were an incomprehensible parade of longing, avarice, and pride.
 

/We can not reach you.\
 

The words
unliving but intelligent
surfaced in Cazia’s thoughts, and Tejohn seized on the idea as a revelation. That’s what the voice meant when it complained that it could not reach them. Everyone inside the portal shared a single mind, except for Tejohn and Cazia, safe within the alligaunt barrier.
 

This
was The Great Way. This was its consciousness. A million minds of every sort, frozen in one moment.
 

Tejohn tried to speak, to call out and force the gods to confirm their shared insight, but there were still too many memories flooding into their own. Even Cazia, who had trained herself to
 
drill her concentration into a single point, felt overthrown by the endless rush of strangers’ lives. They were swept through them, one after another, in a mix of the utterly familiar and the incomprehensibly alien.
 

Then, without warning, Tejohn and Cazia found themselves out in the land of Kal-Maddum. Tejohn felt a terrible moment of panic, thinking they had been ejected from the portal, but Cazia recognized that it was only their spirits that had ventured out, only their awareness.
 

What Dhe had said was true--the Great Way did not just connect many lands; it was part of them, too. They could feel The Great Way’s lingering connection to the descendants of those who had passed through its portal.
 

Their spirit mingled with candlemakers, music tutors, pranksters, bandits, scholars, bureaucrats…but this wasn’t Kal-Maddum as Tejohn and Cazia knew it.
Now
didn’t even make sense as a concept in this unplace. These were the people who had lived inside Peradain and outside of it, before Peradain and during it.
 

So many! There were so very many. Lovers abed. Children at play. Magistrates at court. Soldiers on the march. There were hundreds of thousands of lives. Tejohn and Cazia were overwhelmed. As they moved among the multitudes, from holdfast to hovel, cottage to cave, they began to forget themselves. Their combined spirit began to empty like water steaming from a pot.
 

/We can not reach you.\
 

So much pain. There was love and joy in those lives, yes, but together they marveled at how much pain and futility there was. And there was death, too.
 

As if awareness was an invitation, an endless succession of deaths began to flow through their thoughts like an okshim stampede. Raging fevers, animal attacks, assassinations, wasting coughs…the rush of grief and murder never slowed. They experienced the terror of children being dragged into the water by alligaunts, the helplessness of an old woman trapped in a burning building, the despair of a man who could not swim as a flood carried him away.
 

And there was war. They felt the deaths of tens of thousands of soldiers, and some very few of their faces piqued an old memory within Tejohn, although they were lost in the flood before he could recall their names.
 

Then the deaths of those who were not soldiers, but were put to death anyway. Women, children, Sejohn….

/We can not reach you.\
 

Sejohn Treygar.
 

Tejohn exerted his will and stopped the flood of new minds and memories. Sejohn Treygar. That was painfully familiar. He knew that name and that little life. How short it had been, and how filled with tiny delights. Running on unsteady legs, being lifted off the ground and carried, stuffing fistfuls of the tender inside of bread loaves into his mouth, mother and father--
 

And then there were strangers in pale Bendertuk green…
 

Tejohn suddenly remembered who this tiny name belonged to. His child. This was his own child’s death, and it flooded into both him and Cazia before he had a chance to pull away. He saw the Bendertuk soldiers draw their knives, heard Sejohn’s mother screaming with a desperate terror that was new to the little child’s experience--it was her voice that finally frightened him, not the leering men with their knives.
 

And then the cut. It hurt more than anything in little Sejohn’s life, and he was so perplexed by it. He knew knives were dangerous--
don’t touch!
--so why had they touched him with one?
 

That pain and confusion lasted only moments, because the boy fainted and never woke again.
 

Tejohn stayed there, in that moment of nothingness, feeling as though he had become nothing as well. Had he been losing himself amidst the rush of faces, memories, and experiences? That would have been a kindness he did not deserve, and he rejected it now. Nothing could have restored his mind and identity like this.
This.
His first child, named for his own grandfather, dead. Tejohn could do nothing here, but to leave this moment felt like the worst kind of betrayal.
 

/We can not reach you.\
 

He was a failure as a father and as a man. When his child needed him the most, Tejohn had been away, repairing another man’s fence.
 

But to return now, like a ghost, to bear silent, helpless witness? This was what he needed. This was the release he’d sought so many years ago when he’d gone to war. This was where he needed to be, floating in this last empty moment of his own son’s life, dead along with him.
 

But Cazia was there too, feeling his shame and self-loathing. He had failed, yes, and he deserved to stay right here in this last moment of his son’s life, but she did not. The verdict that Tejohn was ready to lay upon himself did not belong to her as well.
 

Get out. Get out!
He wanted her to leave this moment, but of course, that was impossible. Their bodies were still back in the portal, behind the alligaunt barrier. They were too closely connected. Tejohn could not exile himself here, in these empty thoughts, without exiling her as well.
 

And just like that, he lost his grip on the moment and it slipped away. Suddenly, he and Cazia experienced the death of a woman. Imwess she was called, and it was another name that Tejohn had not dared to think for many years. If little Sejohn’s death was bewilderment and confusion, his mother’s held all the despair, torment, and rage Tejohn had felt himself. Her son had been killed before her eyes, and sweet Imwess, who had once offered their last egg to a wandering beggar, burned with homicidal rage as the Bendertuk knives entered her. Her last memory was of her own bloodied child.
 

Imwess’s anger sparked a bright, hot outrage in Cazia, a feeling that Tejohn was too leaden with shame and regret to feel himself. That moment slipped away, too, and together they experienced the deaths of others who fell on Sunset Ridge that day, then the battlefield deaths of the soldiers who had killed Tejohn’s family, and then more and more. There wasn’t time to take satisfaction or to linger over anyone’s grief or final memory. They raced through death upon death, and Tejohn knew that some small fraction of those were at the tip of his steel--their horror and grief and desperation had been created by him.