The Way Into Magic: Book Two of The Great Way (25 page)

“The rain isn’t--”

Tejohn hushed him. With the wheat stalks so tall and so close, a grunt might be hiding in ambush just a few feet away.
 

The gate stood wide open. Tejohn crossed the road and stepped through. The path that lead uphill was rutted and damaged, and there were a few curving breaks through the stalks
 
higher up the hill.
 

It felt wrong. They both backed away, moving into the ditch beside the road. The house wasn’t visible beyond the curve of the hill, but they could see the peak of a barn roof above the stalks. The blood on the post was fainter now. The misting rain was slowly washing it away.

Tejohn signaled the beacon to follow him farther along the road. The farm on the next plot of land was also packed tight with wheat stalks, but the gate was shut. This farm sat higher on the hill than the one the grunts had entered. They climbed over the gate and moved, crouching, up the path. Near the crest of the hill, they saw the farmhouse--it looked as empty as the one where they’d broken their fast--and a barn.

There were no grunts in sight and they couldn’t hear anything but the drizzle falling on tall grass. Tejohn crept forward, then at the edge of the field, he dashed across the open space to take shelter behind a cart.
 

The musty scent of piss was strong here. They circled to the west-facing side of the barn and found a broken door. It was quiet inside, and the gray daylight did not shine far in. After glancing at the space beneath--like many storage buildings this close to the Waterlands, it had been built so the wooden floor would be two hand-lengths above the ground--Tejohn hefted his shield and spear, then moved into the doorway, knowing he’d be silhouetted by the light. If there was a grunt inside, it would be coming for him now. Right now.
 

Right now.
 

Nothing happened. Tejohn let out a sigh of relief and stepped up into the building, the priest close behind. It stank of death. They stood together in the dark room, letting their eyes slowly adjust, while unseen rats scurried at the edges of the room.
 

“Monument sustain me,” Javien said. “Rats.”
 

Tejohn almost laughed. “That sound reminds me of my childhood. My father waged an unending war on the rats in his fields. Take it as a good sign, beacon. If the grunts had a habit of coming here, the vermin would have fled long ago.”
 

“So, what are you planning? Do we hide here until the rain passes? Until nightfall?”
 

Tejohn didn’t answer. He moved carefully from bay to bay, doing his best to step quietly on the planks and avoid touching anything. As he passed around a tall rack of shelves, he saw the faint glimmers of light from the broad front door. It stood partly ajar, the crossbar lying broken in the gray light of the gap.
 

This end of the barn was better lit, and Tejohn’s eyes adjusted quickly. A rope on a pulley hung over the bay from a connecting tie, and a pallet still dangled from a hook way up on the collar beam. Grain sacks had been stacked against one wall, and an empty oil lamp hung above the door.
 

At his feet lay the dead body of a farm hound. It had been torn apart and devoured.
 

“Oh!” Javien exclaimed. He crouched beside the corpse. “Poor thing. Poor old thing.”
 

Tejohn found a box of bronze nails beside a hanging rack of bronze hatchets, hammers, tree saws, and a scythe. “Can you fire darts?”
 

“Yes,” Javien answered.
 

“Good.”

“What are we doing here?”

“If you were a soldier, I’d give you three lashes for asking questions. Since you’re not, I may not be so gentle. Come with me.”
 

Tejohn led him to the broken front door. Together, they crouched low and peered through the gap.
 

The open ground ahead sloped away from them, giving them a view of the small hillock atop the next farm. The barn looked similar to the one they were in, but the farmhouse itself, which they couldn’t see from the road, was the largest they’d seen yet. “Someone had a big family,” Tejohn muttered. Just the thought of it made him nauseous.

A blue-furred grunt came around the side of the house and stalked through the front yard, walking on all fours like a long-armed bear. It looked in every direction, as tense as a sentry in enemy territory, which it was. It settled onto its haunches and sat still in the rain. Tejohn wished he could be closer to see if it was sniffing the air, listening, or looking--or some combination of those. Unfortunately, as amazing as his new eyes were, there were limits.
 

Tejohn chuckled to himself. He’d been cured of nearsightedness so severe it had practically been blindness, and he was already wishing for more.
 

“That’s the same one, isn’t it?” Javien said.
 

“Doubtful. It’s standing guard over something inside the house. I don’t think it would have gone scouting for more...converts without leaving someone in place. I think there must be at least one more. At least.”
 

“We should tell someone. We should hurry to the next guard post and tell the King’s spears what we’ve found. They could return in force--”
 

“We just saw one grunt defeat five soldiers without taking a scratch. How many soldiers do you think they’d need to face two grunts, or three or five? How long do you think it would take to gather the force they’d need? Don’t forget that those five soldiers will be grunts themselves in three days.”
 

“And who knows how many more people are inside that--”
 

The grunt in the front yard barked once, sharply. Tejohn and Javien saw a second beast step out of the doorway--he hadn’t noticed that the farmhouse door had been torn off and thrown into the garden. Did the grunts hate doors? The creatures moved warily toward each other, and if they grunted or growled, it was impossible to hear over the patter of the rain.
 

While they gestured sharply and snapped their jaws, a little girl appeared in the dark doorway. She couldn’t have been as old as two, and she wavered like a drunkard as she stumbled into the mud of the yard.
 

Both creatures turned and roared at her, waving their arms above their heads. The child, startled, fell onto her rear end, and an older child of six or seven scooped her up and carried her back inside.
 

A deadly, icy calm passed over Tejohn. He was not going to leave children at the mercy of The Blessing’s next hunger pang. He could not turn away. Not now.

Chapter 17

“Wouldn’t it be better to wait until dark?” Javien insisted for the tenth time.
 

“Do it,” Tejohn said. “Now.”
 

Javien began the hand motions to cast the spell. Tejohn immediately remembered Doctor Rexler making the same motions, his fist full of darts; someday, someone would have to make a chart of each spell so that soldiers could recognize them while they were being cast.

Except that Javien didn’t cast the spell. He made an error somewhere and nothing came of it. “Fire and Fury,” he muttered. “Let me try that again.”
 

“Mistakes like that could get both of us killed,” Tejohn said quietly.
 

“I know. I know.” He started again. This time, his hands trembled slightly.
 

Tejohn briefly considered withdrawing. He knew he shouldn’t even be risking this battle when his mission was so vital, but he felt he had no choice. Only a month or two ago, he would have walked away from the children he’d seen in that house, and the captured soldiers, too. He would have followed orders.
 

There was no one to give him orders now. The Italgas were gone. Others called themselves kings now, but Tejohn felt nothing for them but sharp contempt. He’d even cast aside his own title,
tyr
, as a relic of the fallen empire.
 

He had lived in the Palace of Song and Morning as an honored friend to the royal family, and he had lived in the bare, drafty barracks of a servant. That swing from one extreme to the other had freed him from the small voice in his head that said,
This is a mistake,
over and over. He knew it was a mistake just as he knew he had to do it.
 

The priest managed to cast the spell correctly on the second try. “Whew,” he whispered after the rock flew from his hand. “I haven’t had much practice with that one.”

His hands were still trembling slightly. “Will you be able to cast the other spells without fail?”

“I think--”
 

His answer was interrupted by the sharp crack of the stone striking the roof of the farmhouse below. Tejohn had originally planned to use the bronze nails, but the rocks would be harder to see in the air and on the ground.
 

From the moment the noise sounded, the grunts went a little crazy. The beast inside the house charged out and leaped onto the roof, ready to challenge whatever he found there. The other grunt raced from a position near the fence line to the field behind the house, where the stone had skipped. The owners of the property had planted barley back there, and from the lack of furrows, it seemed the creatures had not explored it much.
 

The grunt on the roof peered out over the barley while the other barreled through it.
 

“Now,” Tejohn said.
 

He and Javien rushed out of the barn into the tall grass. The grunts had broken a trail through the wheat on this property, too, and the two men ran across the exposed side of the hill until they came to it. Tejohn shoved the priest into the furrow, then pressed his head toward the ground. They needed to stay very low if they were going to make it to the bottom of the hill unseen.
 

As expected, the grunts were riled, but as they roamed the back fields searching for the source of the disturbance, Tejohn and Javien ran to the edge of the crop at the bottom of the hill. The fence was only twenty feet away, but the men crouched quietly, waiting.
 

The rain had worsened somewhat by the time the grunt passed. It was exploring the entire property now, and from his hiding place among the stalks, Tejohn watched it pass along the fence. He waited, counting his breaths the way he’d been taught as a green recruit. At two thousand, they broke from cover, hopped the fence, and slipped into a ragged, curving furrow on the other hill. Enemy territory.

From their high vantage point on the neighboring farm, Tejohn had studied the crooked paths the grunts had plowed through the field. The rain, falling even harder now, masked the sound of their footsteps as they crunched across the broken stalks. They came to the first turning, then the next, then continued straight across the field until the furrow curved back on itself, heading uphill toward the farmhouse and barn. This was the one he needed to take.

He approached as near as he dared. The end of the ragged furrow met the muddy yard at an oblique angle, about twenty paces from the farmhouse itself. An axe, a woodpile, a flatbed cart, and a stone well stood between them.
 

The barn was closer to the wheat, but not much closer to the end of the furrow. Tejohn was a little dismayed by the distance he had to cross, but this position would do. It would have to. The doors stood wide open at this end, too, just like the smaller entrance he’d seen from the far hill. The gray daylight showed scattered straw on the floor and a few toppled wooden shelves. Good.
 

He lay about six paces from the end of the furrow, where he hoped the stalks were thick enough to hide him from the grunt patrolling the yard. He was about to decide they were not and move backward when a grunt passed.
 

Its back was to him, of course, which meant it had already looked at his hiding place and missed him. Tejohn saw the ridges and plates on its back and his breath caught. He hadn’t been prepared. If it had rushed him while his shield was beneath him—placed there so the rain wouldn’t drum on it--and his spear on the ground, it could have torn him apart and devoured him, or worse.
 

By the time the grunt went around the corner of the building, Tejohn realized he had forgotten to time it. He lay absolutely still until the beast passed again. The second time, it took the grunt one hundred forty-two breaths to circle the farmhouse. The third, it was one hundred and fifty-one.
 

After the third, Tejohn crept forward until the farmhouse door came into view. It stood wide open, just like the others, and a grunt passed in front of it.
 

“Now,” he whispered to Javien.
 

The beacon came up out of the mud and sprinted out of the furrow toward the farm. He was exposed there for no more than three breaths, but those moments made Tejohn’s skin prickle with sweat. If one of the grunts spotted him...
 

They didn’t. Javien reached the side of the farmhouse and ducked behind it out of sight of the house. Tejohn moved back to his safe spot and waited for the signal.