The Way Into Darkness: Book Three of The Great Way (9 page)

She might have been an able scholar in her younger years, but she muttered and struggled to break apart the massive blocks holding the door shut. More of her spells failed than succeeded, but--with Tejohn anxiously gripping the hilt of his sword--she eventually created enough rubble to let the men push the door open.
 

Doctor Twofin was not there, of course. Tejohn had known he couldn’t be there from the moment that he bashed a hole in the wall and found it unblocked. Still, he’d hoped to find the man hanging from a noose or something. Anything to satisfy his urge to fight.
 

He thanked the old scholar, which seemed to surprise her. She was led away.
 

There was a small table at the far end of the room and a large bed covered with down cushions. The old scholar was living in comfort. Tejohn stripped a green cloth from the bed, went into the hall, and wrapped up the little horror Doctor Twofin had created. When he went back inside, the soldiers were standing in the middle of the room, staring about in horror.
 

The rest of the space was a workroom.
 
There was a table with leather straps on it--Tejohn laid the little bundle upon it--and a stack of wooden cages against the wall. Inside the cages were...things.
 

The shutter Tejohn broke had fallen onto one of the cages, smashing it just enough for those rat creatures to escape. In the other cages he saw a house cat with the head and neck of a serpent, a dog with the mouth and throat of a human being, a boq with an alligaunt’s feet and tail, and other, more terrible things. What he did not find, to his great relief, was a cage with a nearly-whole altered human being inside.
 

He could make no sense of it. The rats with hands... Perhaps the doctor imagined they could be trained as thieves? The whole thing seemed pointless. Tejohn was used to cruelty. Kings, tyrs, and masters of any kind were cruel to their underlings on a whim--vicious, sometimes--but usually, that cruelty was designed to serve some purpose.
 

This? Nothing had been accomplished here but pain and horror. He could feel the stink of this room settling into his hair and beard, slowly collecting on his skin. The room would have been unbearable if part of the wall had not been opened to the mountainside.
 

On one of the tables nearby, there were bloody bronze tools--slender tongs, hammers, and sharp knives. On the floor beside it was a woven grass basket full of rotting pieces of meat, fur, and feathers. Flies buzzed above it. Tejohn assumed the wizard would pitch his refuse into the lake waters below, but he didn’t seem to have bothered for several days. And the man
slept
just over there.
 

“Wait in the hall,” Tejohn said, and the soldiers complied happily. Tejohn held out his hand and one of the men readily turned over his spear. Hmf. The fellow Lowtower had put in charge stayed. Good fellow.
 

Together, they went from cage to cage, killing. By unspoken agreement, they were careful to do each with a single thrust so the end was as quick and merciful as it could be. When it was all over, and the strange cries of pain and terror were silent, Tejohn felt as though he’d been soiled down to his bones. He returned to the edge of the gallery opening and was about to kick the basket of rotting meat out into the open air when he suddenly noticed a pair of tiny, perfect human ears lying among the blood and feathers.

Someone’s child. Someone’s precious child.
 

He nearly wept then, remembering the pain of finding his own murdered child. Could it have happened again? His children were supposed to be safe on the other side of the Straim, but they were closer to Peradain than he was. Had they been bitten by a grunt? Torn apart and eaten? He imagined finally finishing his mission and discovering that nothing was left of his family but old bones.
 

The urge to throw off the oath he had made to Lar Italga was so powerful, it made him tremble. The Italgas were dead or had been transformed by The Blessing. Why should he stay here in the mountains when he could steal back the flying cart--
 

Tejohn turned suddenly and ran to the door. “I need two spears to stand guard over this room. No one is to enter without Lowtower’s permission, understand? The rest of you will come with me.”
 

They ran back the way they’d come, up the stairs and down long, dark corridors by the light of a single flickering torch. The soldier Lowtower had put in charge--with luck, Tejohn would not linger long enough to learn his name--took the lead once Tejohn explained where they needed to go.
 

The sun had disappeared behind the peaks by the time they burst through a heavy wooden door and sprinted up a flight of wooden steps. The crosscurrents of the winds out of the Sweeps almost blew out their torch.
 

The troops stamped up the stairs and came out onto the broad flat roof of the holdfast. Tejohn’s abused knees felt as though they were on fire when he topped the stairs, but he didn’t slow down.
 

There, in the wind and darkness, was the flying cart that Doctor Twofin had dumped him out of so many days ago. There were three men standing guard over it. Of the scholar there was no sign.

“Stop where you are!” one of the guards shouted at them. “This part of the holdfast is off limits to everyone but the Twofin family.”

The man Lowtower had put in charge kept his point high as he stepped forward. “Jarel, things are changing quickly. The things we’ve discovered--”

“We have our orders,” Jarel said.
 

The tallest guard said, “What have you discovered?”
 

“Horrors out of a children’s story. It sounds unbelievable but it’s true. The tyr’s brother has been creating monsters for him, right here in our own holdfast, not one level below the barracks.”

“We were warned,” Jarel answered, his spear point still low. “We were warned that people would start spreading stories to discredit the tyr, but I never thought it would have come from you.”

“It’s not gossip,” the soldier answered. “It’s not a cradle tale. Terrible things have been happening right under our noses--”
 

“We were warned--”

“Who?” Tejohn broke in. “Who warned you?”
 

He immediately realized he’d made a mistake. As though noticing him for the first time, Jarel bared his teeth and shouted, “Assassin!”

The lead soldier sidestepped to move between Jarel and Tejohn. “We’ve known each other since we were old enough to piss in pots--”

“And now you break your oaths to protect a murderer!”
 

Jarel thrust his spear into his friend’s belly.
 

Whether it was the soldier’s last-moment evasion or that Jarel didn’t have his heart in it, the iron tip caught the man in the side and did not go very deep.
 

The tall guard cried, “What are you doing?” and yanked the weapon back. The other soldiers rushed forward and knocked Jarel to the deck. One of the men raised his spear.

“Don’t kill him!” Tejohn shouted, his voice carrying above the general roar. The upraised spear never struck. He rushed to the fallen soldier and knelt beside him. “This doesn’t look too bad. What’s your name, soldier?”
 

“Jarel, my tyr. Just like him. Please show him mercy. He’s a good soldier.”

“Fair counsel,” Tejohn said. “Your people are going to need good soldiers very soon.” He looked up at the nearest three men. “Get him to a sleepstone. He isn’t bad but I don’t want him to wait.”

“Yes, my tyr.” They began to gather him up.
 

Tejohn looked at the guard lying on the platform. The man’s expression was hunted and his gritted teeth were bared. “And you, Jarel-the-guard, your friend just pleaded for your life. Can you--”
 

Before Tejohn could finish, Jarel burst into tears. “What have I done?” the man said. “He’s closer to me than my own brother!”

“You put your faith in the wrong person,” Tejohn said. “Can you be trusted to help save his life?”
 

“I can. I want to help.” One of the soldiers shoved him. “...my tyr,” he added quickly.
 

“Then get over here and help carry him, and tell me who warned you we would be spreading lies.”

The guard clearly did not want to answer. “Tell him,” the injured man said.
 

“One of the whisperers.”

Fire and Fury. Tejohn should have recognized the danger they represented immediately. He turned to the spears around him. There were six. “I’d expected to find the guards here burned to death and the cart long gone, but the scholar doesn’t seemed to have come here. Still, he might try yet. I need one of you to come with me to find the commander, but the rest will need to stay to make sure no one steals this device.”
 

“I’ll go with you,” one of the soldiers stepped forward.

He looked he’d never needed to shave in his life. “What’s your name, soldier?”

“Littleshell, my tyr. Zash.”

“Lead me to the tyr’s prisons, Zash. We have to tell your commander that Doctor Twofin is unaccounted for and he has allies working with him. It may not be safe for Lowtower to send his family directly home.”
 

Littleshell took Tejohn’s warning to heart and set a brutal pace on the long staircase down, but as much as he wanted to, Tejohn couldn’t ask for a rest, not when someone’s children were in danger.
 

There was too much to be done. Tejohn needed to get out of the holdfast in one piece to finish his mission, but he also needed to prevent a civil war from breaking out within Twofin lands. Once he recruited a scholar--hopefully more than one--who could learn the spell at Tempest Pass, he would need trained spears to accompany them into the field. He simply couldn’t send spellcasters into battle without support.
 

The Twofin troops, however ill trained, were his only hope. These people would have to be the base for his war against the grunts. They would need archers, cooks, blacksmiths, farmers…not to mention a safe place to sleep and eat. If they managed to hold on to the flying cart, they would make good use of that, too. Not to attack from above--he’d seen how well that tactic worked in Peradain--but to quickly deploy troops and rush the injured back here to the sleepstones.
 

The whole thing was coming together in his head: how he would organize the soldiers, how many scholars he would need, how they would deploy and retreat. However, if he returned from Tempest Pass to find their numbers reduced because of internal strife… The Twofins needed a steward that could unite them all.
 

That also meant Doctor Twofin had to be found and dealt with. Tejohn was the one who had broken him out of his Finstel cell; in a way, he was partly at fault for every one of the old man’s victims.

Where was the old wizard? Tejohn thought he should have rushed to his rooms, gather a few things he might need, then steal that flying cart. It was valuable and an easy way to escape of Twofin lands.
 

The old scholar hadn’t done any of that. If he was fleeing, he was doing it on foot, and Tejohn didn’t believe that for a moment. Twofin was nearly sixty years old if he was a day, and no sleepstone in the world could return a man’s youth.
 

The young man led him down a narrow flight of stairs—they had to navigate around a pile of spilled crockery and something thick, black, and sweet-smelling—then through the kitchens. The servants stared daggers at him.
 

For a moment, he thought they hated him for the harm he had done to their tyr, but that sort of thinking was a relic of his days living with the Italgas in the palace. No, they glared because he had brought chaos into their lives. Things were hard enough for them when there was order, but now that he’d killed the tyr, anything might happen to them.
 

The worst of it was, if there was any group in this holdfast who could help him locate the old scholar, it was the servants. If only he could convince somehow that he had been one of them, just for a short while…
 

As hard as he tried, he couldn’t see a way to make it work, not without showing them the body parts in Doctor Twofin’s rooms as though they were wares he wanted to sell. They deserved better and so did those children.
 

They finally came to a large chamber at the bottom of a steep stair. Commander Lowtower crouched at edge of the entryway to a long, narrow corridor. Several arrows lay on the floor behind him.
 

“Keep back!” he said in a low, harsh voice. “The guards at the gate do not believe the tyr is dead. They want to talk to the tyr’s brother.”

“So do I,” Tejohn said.
 

“Hey!” a woman called from the far end of the corridor. “We hear you out there! Who is that? Is that Findwater?”

“Findwater is running an errand,” Tejohn shouted back. “For me.”

“Who are you?”

“Tyr Tejohn Treygar.”
 

“And who is that with you? Kelvijinian himself?” When she spoke next, she had given in to her anger. “You can’t play games with me!”
 

“No games,” Tejohn called. There was something in her tone… “I arrived with Granny Nin’s caravan. Doctor Twofin recognized me—we were both tutors to Lar Italga in Peradain—and I was bound hand and foot by Twofin spears and dragged into the great hall. Tyr Twofin bragged to me about his plan to murder every living thing in the lowlands, so I broke his skull. He’s dead, by my hand. When I catch up to his brother, he’ll be dead, too.”
 

“Is that supposed to help us?” Lowtower whispered.

“If you’re telling the truth,” the woman called. Tejohn peered into the corridor. It was dark at the far end. Fire and Fury, he hated torchlight. He thought he could see an archer way down there with a bent bow, but everything was too dim. “If you’re telling the truth, you’re going to be hanged and fed to the leviathans.”