The Way Into Chaos: Book One of the Great Way

by Harry Connolly

  They had reached the front of the herd. There were three old men tending a fire, laying spits of meat across the flames and squabbling about the best placement of them. Six adults slept on little wooden pallets laid in the grass, while children ran in circles, playing the same chase games all small children enjoy. Two older kids were cutting grass and laying it in front of the herd, feeding the lead okshim.

  A full dozen warriors, armed with spear and bow, patrolled the edges of the camp, watching the grass and the skies.

  Hent led them to the fire, where she gave the old men orders in her own guttural language. Cazia wasn’t sure if she should reach for her translation stone in case the words Poison them came up, but her moment of indecision cost her the opportunity.

  Hent promised to return to talk more, then left to confer with the guards. The old cooks brought a pallet for the girls to sit on, then brought them skewers of meat, mushroom, and wild onion. Cazia didn’t try to understand their language, but they were clearly competing to see whose cooking would be most pleasing.

  The princess made a sour face when she accepted her skewer, but Cazia said, “Eat it and smile.”

  “There is a reason spoiled twelve-year-old girls do not make good diplomats,” Ivy responded. “I’d almost rather have some of your salt-crusted jerky bread.”

  “Oh, please. It’s not actually crusted with salt. And we had better accept whatever they offer us, not only so that our own provisions last. I don’t want to insult them. Having them in our debt is a good thing.”

  “Until it goes to far and they kill us both.” Ivy tried to slide a piece of meat off the skewer, but it was too hot to touch. The shortest and leanest of the old cooks leaned over her, smiling and miming that she should eat with her fingers. She smiled back and blew on the piece, then popped it into her mouth. “This is actually pretty good!”

  The cook took her response as vindication and returned to the fire to taunt the others.

  Ivy ate an onion next. “Even after everything Hent told you, you still do not trust them?”

  I don’t even trust you anymore. But Cazia couldn’t say that. That was too cruel. She ate from her skewer. Ivy was right; it was delicious.

  The other cooks forced them to finish two more skewers, even though they were full after the second. They also brought cups of tea, which tasted better alongside the food. When Hent returned, she conferred briefly with the cooks, then said in Peradaini, “They want to know which you liked best.”

  “The second,” Ivy said immediately.

  “Great Way,” Cazia said, “if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that you don’t make enemies of the cooks. What would be the most diplomatic answer?”

  Hent grinned crookedly. “With this bunch, the truth.”

  Cazia sighed. “The second.”

  When Hent passed this information on, there was much taunting and jeering, but Cazia could see that it was mostly friendly. Then the Ozzhuacks themselves began to line up, and the old men became too busy to compete.

  Hent returned and sat on a mat beside the two girls. Almost immediately, a dark-haired boy raced forward and offered her a pair of skewers. He looked different from the other herders--darker, his hair unbound and hanging in his eyes. Cazia thought he was a year or two younger than her, and he was entirely beautiful.

  Hent snatched the skewers from his hands. Her lip curled slightly as she glanced at him. Apparently, the Ozzhuacks had more contempt for their servants than even the Peradaini. Cazia watched the boy out of her peripheral vision, and although he did not look directly at her, she suspected that he wanted to.

  “There is one thing I do not understand,” Ivy said. “Why are you coming so far west? You know you would be welcomed into the Alliance without having to swear allegiance to tyr and king.”

  “Serpents,” was the immediate response. “The Alliance made the terrible error when it made to join with the serpents. They will be your downfall. But that is not the only reason. Going east would have taken us closer to Qorr, which is where the birds are coming from. The farther north and east we go, the more dangerous.”

  “Qorr?” Cazia said. “Is that a city?”

  Ivy and Hent looked at her in astonishment. “Have you never heard of the Qorr Valley?” Ivy asked. “I mean, honestly, you never have?”

  Cazia felt herself flush, but she didn’t give them the snappish answer they deserved. “Honestly. Do you think the birds have come from there?”

  Hent spoke while she chewed a piece of dark meat. “My own cousin, one of the Hammershore, saw them flying over the peaks herself. They are the latest nightmare out of Qorr.”

  “Latest?” Cazia asked. “How have I never heard of this valley before?”

  “I sincerely can not imagine!” Ivy said, managing to mix both surprise and pity into those five words. “The Qorr Valley lies on the far side of the Northern Barrier, far to the northeast. It is utterly sealed off, so no one in our lifetime has been there, but if something has wings—”

  “Or can climb like spiders—” Hent interrupted.

  “Yes,” Ivy agreed. “The giant spiders that troubled our great-great-grandfathers came from there as well. They did a lot of damage to the clans in the Sweeps and to my own people.”

  Hent shook her head dolefully. “We still have not recovered.”

  Cazia looked at them skeptically. How could this be real when she’d never even heard of it before? “But no one has ever seen this valley?”

  “Not in living memory,” Hent said. “The sorcerer gods of ancient times made to turn the passes into sheer cliffs. This was before the time of your empire, before your people began traveling the world, bending it at the point of the spear.”

  This again. Cazia wasn’t interested in being made to feel guilty because her own Surgish people were part of the Peradaini empire. It’s not as though she had any choice in the matter. “Wait a moment. When did the first of these attacks happen?”

  Hent shrugged. “The Hammershores were attacked seven days ago.”

  Cazia looked at Ivy. “That’s one day after the grunts stormed into Peradain.” Had it really been so few days ago? It seemed another life.

  The little princess sat straight up. “Do you think they’re related?”

  “Two different monsters appearing at practically the same time, so far apart? I’ll bet it is. It might be an attack on the entire continent.” An unexpected thought made her skin prickle. “Is there a portal in this secret valley of yours?”

  Hent and Ivy looked at each other, then shrugged.

  Night was falling. One of the guards yelped a warning, and everyone looked up. High above them, a bird floated lazily in the headwinds. Cazia thought about the quiver of darts in her backpack. An iron dart might not kill a creature of that size, but it should drive it off. However, the Ozzhuacks would discover that she was a scholar and they would…frankly, making a prisoner of her was the least awful thing she could imagine.

  Hent told them it was time to sleep and assured them the guards would watch over them. Ivy was concerned but, as soon as Cazia laid blankets over them, she fell asleep.

  Cazia could not. It wasn’t only fear that the raptors might carry her off. While she had no doubt about the bravery of the Ozzhuack warriors, she was less sure they would risk themselves to protect her. No, she was more troubled by the realization that the birds had appeared at the same time as the grunts.

  No one else had realized there might be a connection. No one else knew. What if there was a second portal in this Qorr Valley? Who could possibly do something about it, besides her? If she was never going to become Scholar Administrator--and that dream of comfort and privilege within the Palace of Song and Morning was dead, even if she was not truly prepared to admit it—she could be the person who sought out the truth about this instead.

  She and Ivy woke in the middle of the night. There was a terrible commotion: shouting men and women, the shudder of bowstrings, and a loud crashing noise.

 
Cazia and Ivy clutched each other in the darkness as harsh bird cries shrieked around them, and the herd lowed miserably.

  After a short time, Mahz knelt beside them, tucking their blankets under them. “No worries, children. We have driven them off tonight at very little cost. Sleep now.”

  In the morning, everything was made clear. The birds had attacked from downwind, unexpectedly. What’s more, they’d carried a huge tree trunk, intending to smash the wagons. Kell had spotted them, and a volley of arrows shot with the wind had been enough to make them drop their weapon early, killing three older okshim at the back of the herd.

  The old cooks were already butchering the meat well downwind of the alpha female.

  Hent brought them more skewers of meat for breakfast. This time there were no onions or mushrooms, and the food was a bit singed. Cazia ate greedily anyway; they would have a great deal of work to do that day.

  Mahz came to them as they were rolling their blankets up and putting them into their packs. “Start by dawn and accomplish much,” she said. Cazia gave her a puzzled look. “It loses something when it is translated into your language. What I mean is that we have already begun to set the camp in order. You should join the crew.”

  They did. Four men and four women had pulled down all the tents, rolling the canvas into tight bundles. They had also found eight bodies, laying them in a tidy row along the eastern edge of the camp. The princess went to them first, walking from body to body, inspecting them as if she expected to recognize one. If she did, she hid it well.

  Two of the men used picks to break up the earth, spacing their graves well apart from one another. Cazia went through the camp, looking for serpents. The Ozzhuacks wouldn’t touch them, and she knew Ivy was not strong enough to move them to their graves. She alone could this do for her friend.

  There were three. The first was the one she’d found beneath the rock. It took all her strength to roll it off the body. Seeing its full length, she understood the Ozzhuacks’ terror of them; the serpents were terrifying on an instinctual level, and lying dead for several days hadn’t improved their condition.

  She had to drag the thing’s carcass the length of the camp; its ruined body felt like a sack of broken sticks, but she did it, leaving it near—but not too near—the human bodies. When she went back for the second, she saw that the Ozzhuacks had moved into the space she’d just cleared, rolling up the canvas and setting out the trunks.

  Ivy had changed her boots--they were lined with a fur Cazia couldn’t recognize--and laid out a set of tools. She chose a bronze hammer, spade, and shovel, which Cazia set aside. Ivy loaded her pack with disks of damp flatbread that smelled like cheap wine; she was irritatingly pleased that she would not have to eat more meatbread.

  By the end of the day, the incessant wind had folded and wrinkled the brim of Cazia’s hat until most of the wax had flaked off. It would provide little protection from rain now. Ivy found a number of woolen Ergoll caps like the one she had worn at Fort Samsit, but she did not take one for herself.

  The Ozzhuacks shoveled dirt into the human graves, but Cazia and Ivy had to fill in the serpents’ graves by themselves. When they had finished, Ivy glared at the shovels as though she both needed and resented them.

  There was also quite a bit more money than they expected. It was almost too much to carry, and Ivy held a whispered conversation with Cazia about the weight of all that copper. It would be a serious burden, but women alone could never have too much, not if they wanted to live carefully and safely.

  “It’s time to tell you, then,” Cazia said. “I’m not going east with you to Indregai lands, and I’m not going west with the Ozzhuacks to Fort Caarilit.”

  Ivy’s eyes widened with fear. Cazia was sure she hadn’t seen that expression on the girl’s face before, but that couldn’t be true. The princess said, “You can’t go back south!”

  “No. I’m going northeast. To the Qorr Valley.”

  Chapter 18

  Over the next eighteen days, Tejohn and Reglis made good time and traveled in comfortable silence. Arla slept by their fire and shared their meals, but during the day, she spent very little time with them, preferring to scout far ahead and range widely. On the third night, after much prodding, she confessed that she felt Tejohn’s safety was in her hands. If there were enemies in the Sweeps, it would not be force of arms that would save their lives; it would be her ability to lead her companions to safety.

  She was right, of course, but it made Tejohn feel helpless. He hated feeling helpless.

  Reglis spoke up. “Has it been ten days since the start of the Festival?”

  “Eleven,” Tejohn answered. Had it really only been eleven days? So much had happened, and so many lives had been lost.

  “My tyr,” Reglis said. “I know it is not proper, but I can’t help but wonder how many lives have been lost. Will we ever know how many have been killed or taken by The Blessing? It doesn’t seem possible.”

  Faces flashed through Tejohn’s memory: Kellin and the others teasing him about the money he’d lost at a night’s game. Kolbi Arriya hurrying by in the palace corridors, wishing him a good morning in her high, chiming voice. Amlian Italga asking him to sing at the Festival. Monument sustain him, he would need a dozen years to mourn for them all. At least my family is safe, for now.

  Eleven days. That meant the portal the Evening People used to visit Peradain would have finally vanished. How many grunts had come through? He didn’t like to think about it. “Song knows,” Tejohn finally said, “and sometimes I wish Song would tell us, too.”

  At midmorning of the nineteenth day, Arla waited for them in a small copse at a rise in the trail. They’d come upon another mining camp, but she assured Tejohn it had been abandoned in an orderly manner.

  They marched down the trail in the daylight and came upon the barred doors without incident or challenge. Reglis’s calls to the guard towers went unanswered, and they moved on. By nightfall, the Caarilit pass was just above them.

  Tejohn would have liked to push on in the dark, but Arla warned him the way was steep and heavily forested. They would have to hike up the side of a long spur directly ahead of them before turning southeast into the pass, and that would be better done in the daylight.

  He knew she was right, but it was frustrating. Their mission, doomed from the start because of The Blessing, progressed at a crawl. One night, as they sat around a well-hidden fire, Tejohn had asked Arla to keep an eye out for a new flying cart just lying around in the wilderness.

  For Tejohn, the long days of walking were a time for planning. Yes, he could see the blue of the sky, the green of the trees and grasses, but beyond a couple of dozen feet, they were formless blurs to him. For someone with his extremely short vision, being outdoors for a long time was curiously like being sequestered away with his thoughts. A hundred times a day, he concluded that he would have to abandon the king’s quest for this deadly spell--which seemed more like a wizard’s spell than one of the Gifts, surely. A hundred times a day, he decided that his duty required him to carry through. He ached to strike out eastward toward his family, but he knew it would not be a happy reunion if he had abandoned his duty and doomed them all.

  Long afternoons were spent trying to devise effective tactics Peradaini spears and bows could use against The Blessing. The problem was that the grunts were too strong and quick to fight in the field. They leaped astonishing distances, threw men around like firewood, and attacked in a fearless frenzy.

  One on one, a man with a large, sturdy shield and a long spear might kill one—if he was lucky—but to do it without being bitten as well? In large groups on an open field, volleys of arrows might be effective, if the imperial archers could be trained not to aim directly at their enemy but to loose them in orderly rows like sheets of rain. Tejohn had a dim view of the chances that tactic would be happily received. Once the bows had done their work, it would fall upon a square to take on the survivors, and he wasn’t enthusiastic about that.

>   Worse, those tactics were feasible during the daylight hours only. The best option he could come up with after dark was to fight them from within a holdfast with high walls and well-manned towers. But while that might allow human beings to kill grunts in large numbers, as a long-term strategy it was a plan for human extinction. The holdfasts simply couldn’t protect and sustain a large portion of the empire, and every human left outside the walls was a potential enemy recruit.

  The truth was, human soldiers weren’t mobile enough to fight The Blessing on their own terms. Every engagement would be at the whim of the enemy, without the option for retreat. That meant the soldiers themselves would have to be like holdfasts, but how could they somehow transport walls and towers on a campaign? Could they wear enough armor to cover themselves completely with steel?

  Tejohn couldn’t quite envision how that would work, even if the units could afford the iron. In the end, his thoughts always returned to the king and his deadly spell.

  The empire has always relied on its scholars; we just don’t like to admit it.

  As much as he hated to acknowledge it, he ended each day resolved to follow through with the king’s plan: to make his way to Splashtown, where the Tyr Finstel would have to be convinced, somehow, that the fate of humankind relied on letting Tejohn borrow a cart for the trip to Tempest Pass.

  From there, it meant training scholars in this new version of the Gift so they could destroy grunts at a wave of the hand. It would change warfare forever, giving hollowed-out madmen like Doctor Rexler the means to slaughter honest fighting soldiers by the hundreds, but they would have to deal with that later, after The Blessing was utterly wiped out.

  If that was even possible.

  There was still the hope, which was so faint Tejohn refused to speak it aloud, that Ghoron Italga, the scholar prince at Tempest Pass, might have a way to turn the grunts back into people.

  That night, after Reglis and Arla had played their usual songs, Tejohn agreed to sing one, much to their surprise. Of course it wasn’t “River Overrunning;’ instead, he chose a song that had been old-fashioned during his campaigning days, “The Flock Wanders Far Afield.”