The Way Into Magic: Book Two of The Great Way (12 page)

For half the night, it continued. The bellowing, the keening, the massive impacts against the side of the tower raged on and on. Cazia began to have flashes of the grunt she’d killed at Fort Samsit. There was no reason for that particular memory to come back, but there it was, large in her mind. In her mind’s eye, she saw the beast leap onto the prince--the king, Lar was king then--and bite him. She had used the Tenth Gift to strike it down. The moment was right there, vivid in her thoughts. It was only later that she’d realized the grunt had been her own brother, transformed.
 

As far as she could remember, the grunt had died without a sound, but with every boom came the image of the iron tip of her dart sliding between her brother’s ribs, piercing his heart. The flinches. That’s what Old Stoneface Treygar had called it.
 

Despite everything she had been taught, she withdrew from the others and allowed herself to weep in the darkness. She allowed tears to touch her cheeks.

Eventually, her fear began to ebb and the whole thing became annoying. The tower was going to hold, it seemed. The beasts outside--whether they were sea giants or not—seemed less like deadly monsters and more like the worst neighbors in the world.

Somewhere near midnight, the moon rose and the noise began to recede. If Cazia was ever going to see the creatures, it would have to be right this moment. She rolled to her knees and peered through the nearest window. Kinz hissed at her in disapproval, but Ivy joined her.
 

She saw it, but not well. The silver moonlight shone on the thing’s back as it moved into deeper waters. It looked like a silvery mound or a glacier. It was rounded, and where it might have had shoulders, there was no head. It was like watching a mountain of dirty ice glide into deep water.
 

The girls immediately fell into a deep sleep right there on the stone floor, and when they woke late the next morning, they began a long debate over what they should do next.
 

Ivy wanted to leave immediately. She abjectly apologized for bringing Cazia and Kinz to the water for her pilgrimage and considered it complete. She also thought they still had a hope of reaching the Northern Barrier before the Tilkilit. Cazia bit back a few sharp remarks about the religious significance of their night of terror; the princess had an exhausted, hunted look, and Cazia thought she might have caught a bit of the flinches herself.
 

Kinz wanted to stay there for a long while. At least a full month, possibly longer, if they could manage it. They had found a safe place, one that no one knew about, and a source of food. They needed to rest here before they moved on.
 

“What about the Tilkilit?” Cazia asked. The grunts were her main concern, but it wasn’t Kinz’s.

“They think we drowned, yes?” Kinz looked from Ivy to Cazia, checking their expressions. “They were still able to make read of our minds, and I kept thinking about how I had fallen in and was drowning.”

“Yes,” Ivy said. “So did I. Is that not what--Oh, Cazia.”

Her expression must have given her away. “I thought a message to the queen asking to be rescued from the riverbank on the north side because I
thought
we were swimming to the southern bank.”
 

Kinz exhaled loudly. “Inzu’s breath, if you had thought about dying in the water, they would not be searching for us at all.”
 

“I don’t believe that,” Cazia countered, but she did believe that their idea had been better than hers. She folded her arms so she wouldn’t be tempted to sulk.
 

“They would have searched for us,” Ivy said. “The queen would have insisted. That is why I laid out Cazia’s jacket on the lakeshore where they can not miss it. They will find it before they find this place, and since Cazia’s the only one they really want, I think they will give up.”
 

“Even so,” Kinz said, “we can stay here the while to make provisions. All I need is wood for the drying rack and the fire. If we can collect that early in the day, we might have it smoked before tomorrow morning.”
 

Of course, they did not rush out to gather it right away. They slunk into the first tower and peered carefully through the windows. Luckily, for once, there was little fog. The beach showed no evidence of any activity of the night before, not even footprints. The stony beach looked much the same as it had the previous day, except there were more clumps of tangled gray seaweed. Whatever had come out of the water had left little evidence of the incredible commotion it had created. More importantly, it was not in sight now.
 

All three girls left the tower together, hiking over the steepest part of the hill to the land beyond. What they found surprised them: whatever had come out of the sea had ventured farther inland than they thought. Three trees had been crushed beneath a terrible weight, and the girls eagerly rushed forward to collect the splintered wood.
 

It stank faintly of sour salt water and rotten fish, and some pieces had a nasty reddish jelly on it. Blood? None of them were quite sure, so they didn’t touch those. Cazia and Kinz loaded their arms with so much wood, their shoulders ached, while Ivy swept a leafy branch over their footprints to obscure them.
 

It was a little after mid day, and everything was still except the endlessly rolling waves. Cazia had to admit that while she still hated and feared the ocean, after a full day living beside it, she’d learned it was alluring, too.
 

Instead of entering through the tower entrance, Kinz insisted they walk around the structure to the stone block building at the back. From the outside, the deep pool and the arch looked like a place to empty chamber pots. The ground was made of gray, sandy mud, and the hopping flies that were so awful inside the building were twice as thick out here. The pit made it impossible to enter through the arch, so they threw the wood inside piece by piece.
 

Once inside, while Ivy operated the stone handle, Kinz used several of the longer pieces to build a rack. Cazia organized the firewood and quietly, slowly, tried to access her magic.
 

The Third Gift was complicated. She knew how to shape that spell in any number of ways, sending streams of flame or bolts of intense heat from her hands. In fact, there were almost as many ways of altering this Gift as there was for shaping a stone block or creating water, and she now understood those alterations instinctively.
 

Unfortunately, the Tilkilit stone had made her own power remote from her. She could make the hand motions and bring out the mental state necessary to summon her magic, but it was as if the magic that fueled the spell had been struck numb.
 

It had been a little more than a day since she’d last touched one of the stones. All she needed was a little tongue of flame, no bigger than the light of a lantern. Surely she could manage that.
 

And she did. It exhausted her, but she did it.

Ivy used the lever to summon up two dozen fish and a pair of eels. Kinz split the fish open and hung them to dry over the fire. The eels she roasted right away. By the time night fell, they had let the fire die out, but the delicious smoke still lingered. And the buzzing flies had fled. In the darkness, terrible blows fell on the towers, but the building held.
 

Magic. Now that she thought about it, Cazia could sense extremely faint traces of magic inside the walls and floors all around them. She had no idea who could have built this, but the fabled sorcerer-kings of ancient times seemed like the most likely candidate. Hiding here was like being inside Monument itself.
 

The thought gave her chills. Could this have been created by the sorcerer-kings? If so, where had they gone? Maybe there was another Door in the Mountain somewhere, or maybe they went into the sea. But Cazia had never heard of a building like this anywhere in Kal-Maddum; who ever cast the spell that created it had to be long gone, but where?
 

What’s more, what was the connection between the sorcerer-kings and the Tilkilit?

Eventually, the moon rose and drove the creatures below the waves. This time, Kinz and Ivy held tight to Cazia’s arms, refusing to let her peek out the windows.
 

In the morning, they wrapped the dried fish in one of the round cloths and prepared to leave. The tower might have been proof against the beasts of the ocean, but they could never defend it against the Tilkilit, and Cazia did not doubt they were still looking for her. While Cazia sat in the top of the tower, trying to decide if she could chance a stone-breaking spell to free the enchanted cube from its lever without ruining the spell, she saw Kinz wrap her heavy iron crown in one of the circular cloths and start down the stairs.
 

After a few moments, Cazia trailed behind. Before she reached the bottom step, she heard a loud ringing of metal on stone. She hurried forward and came to the entrance to the corridor.
 

From her spot at the side of the tunnel, she saw Kinz standing beside the lever. She had the cloth in hand, wrapped around the crown. As Cazia watched, she swung the weight a second, then a third time.
 

That was all it took. The stone lever shattered and tumbled out through the arch. The enchanted cube--containing a spell that Cazia had never even thought possible--fell into the pool and sank out of sight.
 

While Kinz stood beneath the arch watching the moving water, Cazia darted up the stairs. That spell, if she’d learned how it could work, would have been a powerful weapon against the grunts. She might have commanded them to run into the ocean. She might have commanded them to attack each other. She might have...

It didn’t matter. It was gone now, and there was no doubt why Kinz had destroyed it: to keep it out of Cazia’s hands.
 

Kinz returned with a long, black fish she had cut open with her flint. Cazia kept stoic as she piled the odd wooden tools from the cubby and lit them with the Third Gift. Ivy and Kinz chatted amiably as they ate.
 

That finished, they slipped out into the growing fog. Their boots crunched on the stony beach, and while they could not see which direction led to the ocean, they could walk uphill.
 

The fog became so thick, they could not see more than ten feet ahead. The girls held hands and kept silent, with Cazia in the lead and Ivy just behind her. Cazia kept the sound of the waves on her left, trusting that to be compass enough to direct her southward. Kinz carried the bundle of dried fish and the Tilkilit stones, while Cazia held the pointed stick.
 

They moved through trees, stumbling over roots and ducking below low branches. In the wet air, every twig that snapped beneath their feet seemed as loud as a slamming door. It took very little time for Cazia to convince herself that the Tilkilit were just ahead, tracking them.
 

Finally, a change in the wind blew most of the fog out to sea, and the sun burned off the rest. The three girls found themselves facing a cliff of black rock.
 

Any momentary delight that they had already reached the Northern Barrier was quickly squelched once they realized they were facing the ridge of black rock that they’d seen by the ocean. Cazia had been leading them directly south rather than southwest, but no one seemed to mind. They turned due west to go around the spur.
 

Moving away from the ocean lightened Cazia’s spirits quite a bit, and the other two seemed to feel the same. They smiled more and dared to whisper once the sun was shining again. The only tension that didn’t ease was between Kinz and Cazia. Cazia resented the older girl because of that enchanted cube and because she felt she’d been maneuvered into denouncing the Italgas. Kinz kept her distance for her own reasons.
 

When the sun was near the western peaks, the giant eagles appeared overhead, gliding in slow circles as they searched for prey. Cazia couldn’t believe they were still hunting inside the Qorr Valley when they had the whole continent laid out for them. Let the birds take a few of The Blessing out of the world, she thought, and immediately flinched at the memory of her brother’s death. Her voice was sharper than she intended when she suggested they find a hiding spot among the rocks.
 

After they’d eaten their modest portion of dried fish, Kinz slipped away to dispose of the bones far from their camp. Cazia had expected to hate the food, but she didn’t, and she could not bring herself to say so aloud.
 

“You and Kinz had words,” Ivy said.

There was no avoiding this conversation. “Apparently, she thinks I’m the king of Peradain, and that every command Peradaini soldiers follow comes from me.”
 

“Big sister, that is not fair.”
 

“What about what’s fair to me? Why is she blaming me for things I have no control over? I never ordered anyone to kill herders or collect taxes from them.”
 

She half expected Ivy to say those taxes were really tributes, but she didn’t join the argument that Cazia would have preferred. Instead, she said, “And yet you wear the clothes, and carried iron weapons, and eat cakes and compote, and you have learned magic. All of these things are either forbidden or impossible for her.”
 

“And you.”
 

“Yes. And me, too. You have never handed a spear to a soldier in your life, but you have enjoyed the wealth and comfort those spears have brought.”
 

“What should I have done instead? Go naked through the wilderness, eating skewers of okshim?”
 

“Cazia Freewell,” the girl said huffily, her fists on her hips like a disapproving schoolmaster. “You should know better than to try that sort of argument with me.”

Freewell
. Even her family name was Peradaini. She had no idea how it would have been pronounced in the original Surgish. Even when she was trying to learn her people’s tongue, she had never had the nerve to ask. “So, where does that leave us? She has decided that we are enemies, so we are. I will work with her to get you safely back to your people. After that, we can go our own ways. Or fight to the death, I guess, if she’s going to insist on it.”