The Way Into Chaos

by Harry Connolly

  Vilavivianna was looking at her with wide eyes. You could have died, her expression seemed to say. Cazia felt goose bumps run down her back. She could have died. Would her quilted jacket and leather vest have stopped the arrow? She looked again at the punctured wood and shuddered. Fury had favored her last night, although it would have been true justice if she had taken the arrow in the neck and died.

  Grateful am I to be permitted to travel The Way.

  Her prayers brought no comfort, leaving her feeling odd and hollow. It was as though she had stolen Colchua’s place in the world. Cazia squeezed the little princess’s hand and laid out her blanket. She lay down without eating and fell into terrible dreams.

  They slept for a few hours, waking only when the sun peeked over the eastern peaks and shone on their faces. They ate hurriedly. Cazia filled Vilavivianna’s canteen several times, until both had their fill and she had a full canteen to carry. The little princess seemed to have questions, but they set out in silence.

  The trail down the far side of the pass was rockier than the southern side, and in some places, it was steep enough that they had to take switchback trails. Cazia looked ahead down the slope. She could see the narrow space where the mountains opened up and the Sweeps began. She had never been there, of course, but she had always been intensely curious about it. Would they see alligaunts? She’d heard they swam through the lakes, trailing water vines and fallen leaves, and she thought that would be a wonderful thing to see...from a safe distance. The alligaunt skeleton back in Ellifer’s graveyard menagerie had given her nightmares when she was small.

  She wished her old self--the one that had not yet committed murder--was taking this trip. She would have enjoyed it more.

  Vilavivianna spoke only occasionally, and only on the subject of flying carts. Would one catch up to them? Would they be taken alive, even if they ran or fought back?

  Cazia promised that she would count her steps and look behind at every tenth one. A cart would come up on them quickly, she explained, and only by checking continually, all day long, would she be able to see it in time.

  That mollified the princess somewhat, and they fell into a pattern of walking and glancing back. By midafternoon, Cazia realized that the top of the pass would have been a perfect place for Peraday’s lookout post, but she’d forgotten to search for her, or even to call her name. Turning around now, she could see nothing along the mountain cliffs that suggested a lookout station, and she certainly couldn’t see a glint from a steel cap.

  If Peraday had been stationed there, she would have seen the fleeing girls. Either she was not there or she wanted nothing to do with Cazia. So be it.

  The sun moved beyond the western peaks, then the shadows swept up the mountainside. The sky was nearly dark when Vilavivianna decided they needed to stop for the night.

  “I was hoping we could make it to the Sweeps tonight,” Cazia said.

  “It is too far,” the princess answered. “It’s easy to misjudge distances in the mountains. Besides, we will not have starlight like last night, see?”

  She was right. The sky was gray with clouds blowing in from the Sweeps. It didn’t look like rain, but there would be little light.

  They found a flat, dry spot behind an outcropping of rock. “I wish we had wood for a fire,” Vilavivianna said. “I wonder why so little grows here.”

  “I wish we didn’t have to walk so far.” Cazia arranged their blankets.

  The little princess smiled. “We have not walked far at all,” she said. “My mother told me that the Southern and Northern Barriers are very narrow ranges, nothing at all like the Seahook mountains in southeastern Indrega. I once spent fifteen days walking through a pass to visit another clan’s sea house.”

  “Fifteen days!” Cazia thought it sounded like punishment. She took out a small loaf of meatbread and broke it in half, handing the little girl the slightly smaller portion.

  “My uncle Nezzeriskos of Beargrunt thinks the Northern and Southern Barriers were once a single range, and that some great power swept all those peaks and rocks away, splitting the mountains and creating the Sweeps.”

  Cazia didn’t like the sound of that. “What could do that? The wind?”

  “A great worm, perhaps? A powerful magic? A godly being with a godly plow and a godly urge to plant some beets?”

  They both laughed. “Godly beets,” Cazia said. “Or a godly urge to plant alligaunts and herding peoples.” Their shared laugh had startled her; it felt good. She silently offered an apology to her brother’s memory.

  “My mother says that alligaunts are demons who must be destroyed at every opportunity.”

  “I’ve only ever seen bones in the palace,” Cazia said, hoping to keep their conversation light. “Never a live one.”

  “Let us hope it stays that way.”

  They ate in silence for a short while. Finally, Cazia asked the question that had been bothering her all day. “Where are we going? We’re fleeing the grunts, yes, but where are we fleeing to?”

  Vilavivianna set her chunk of meatbread on the cloth wrapping. “This is very dense and salty.”

  Cazia shrugged. She didn’t think it was particularly salty, but she felt reasonably full. She wrapped their food and put it away. Best to make their provisions last.

  Finally, Vilavivianna said, “Where do you want to go?”

  “Tempest Pass,” Cazia said immediately. “I want to join Lar in his quest, but that’s impossible.”

  “We could never catch up to them on foot,” Vilavivianna said. “Not only is the way very dangerous, they would be long gone by the time we arrived. My mother says one should never travel the Sweeps without a guide.”

  “I supposed we could go to another fort. Piskatook is closest, isn’t it?”

  The princess gave Cazia a wary look. “Would I be safe there?”

  “We could disguise ourselves,” Cazia said. “Take jobs somewhere, blend in until Lar finds a way to fix all this trouble.”

  “Become servants? Put ourselves under the care of a master? Who could order us to marry any other servants he liked?”

  Cazia didn’t like that idea, either. In fact, for a young woman in the empire with no name, she had few options: servitude, military service, religious seclusion, marriage, and... What? Open a hat shop? What she needed was to find another Scholars’ Tower.

  But where could she find one outside the palace and Tempest Pass? That was the whole point of building the towers. The king kept tight control of the scholars and their Gifts. “I don’t know,” Cazia admitted. Col would have known.

  Vilavivianna shrugged. She did not look up from the bootlace she was trying to unknot. “We do not have to decide until we reach the end of the pass.”

  Cazia thought about it for a moment. “A giant worm, huh?”

  Vilavivianna laughed. “It sounds like raving, I know. My uncle was an interesting man: he was a great warrior and singer. Often, when he told me stories, I could not tell if he was joking or telling the truth.” After a moment, she said, “He was there, in the house in Peradain. He was the one who boosted me to the roof to Lar. I assume he is dead now.”

  “Maybe not,” Cazia said. “By the time the grunts had reached the far end of the city, they had stopped killing and started simply biting people. Perhaps he has been transformed, like my brother.”

  “Then he is dead.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I am sorry, too. I know what happened to your brother, and what you had to do. Would it be a comfort to you if I said I think you did the heroic thing?”

  “No,” Cazia said, more sharply than she intended. She sighed. “No, I don’t see it that way.”

  “I have wanted to say words of comfort to you all day, but I did not know what would be appropriate.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cazia said. The princess could seem so formal and rigid, it was easy to forget that she was still a little girl. “Thank you very much. The truth is, we left my best friend behind in Peradain, and
my brother is dead, and the others are back at Fort Samsit, waiting for their curses to take control of them—” And Lar, too. All day, she had been reliving the memory of her dart striking her brother, but she had been so focused on her own guilt that she hadn’t even considered the king.

  Fire and Fury. He’d been bitten the same day as the people who had just taken Samsit. He must have transformed by now.

  Cazia tried to imagine the scene: Lar sprouting fur and fangs inside the cart while it sped above the treetops. The driver panicking. The soldiers drawing their weapons. Tyr Treygar...

  Could she imagine Old Stoneface surviving a situation like that? It was possible--he was supposed to be a talented killer--but could he stand against a grunt, especially when it was the cursed king he had sworn to serve? Would he be torn by duty or would he relish the chance to gut his troublesome student?

  The possibilities swirled in her head like leaves in a whirlwind; she couldn’t even think about that now. She remembered Bittler shoving her and telling her to get out.

  “That’s all of them,” Cazia said. “I lived as a hostage in the palace, surrounded by people all the time, but there were only six who didn’t treat me as an enemy. Now they’re all gone.”

  Vilavivianna laid her hand gently on Cazia’s cheek. “I am fortunate. My parents are still across the Straim with my brothers and sisters. But many of my loved ones lived in that tall house in Peradain. My uncle, the wife, nine cousins--one of my cousins was only four months old. What will these grunts do to a tiny baby? Nip them lightly or devour them whole? This is something I wish to know. I also had friends I had known my whole life living with me in that house. And my honor guard.”

  Cazia had absolutely no idea what to say, and to her horror, she heard the words “It sounds crowded” come out of her mouth.

  The little princess laughed and began to cry. Cazia knelt beside her and held her close. A stone jabbed painfully into her knee, but she did not move until Vilavivianna leaned away.

  “I am sorry,” the girl said, recovering her composure.

  “I’ve been crying, too,” Cazia said.

  “I thought I had my fill of it in my room back in Samsit.”

  “Oh, no,” Cazia said. She remembered how long the Italgas had grieved when Lar’s younger brother died. “No, it’s going to take longer than that.”

  “Well, that is inconvenient.” They both laughed again.

  Cazia took the princess’s blankets and held them up. Vilavivianna lay down on her pad and Cazia covered her. Then Cazia stretched out beside her so they were nose to nose. “Tell me about Indrega.”

  “It is very beautiful,” Vilavivianna said. “I had hoped to take my husband to see it someday, when the time came, but I do not think it will happen soon. We have trees and deep forests, and grass that is nearly blue.”

  “I would like to see that someday myself.”

  “We have mountains as well, but they are older than these. More rounded, with boqs and rabbits among the trees, and astonishing views. I do not mean to say that Peradain is not a beautiful land. The wind in the grasses makes a lovely sound, and I did enjoy the days we spent sailing on Deep Stone Lake.”

  “But it’s not home.”

  “No,” the girl said. “I can not walk through the deep forest here, surrounded by light reflected green by the leaves. There is little snow. There are no longhouses where everyone shares the meals and the laughter. I have felt isolated since I came here.”

  Cazia took her hand. “What else?”

  “You want me to tell you about the Indregai serpents, yes?”

  “Only if you’re allowed. I’ve heard so many things but I’ve never seen one.”

  “They are not that interesting, I am sorry to say. They are as long as two men lying heel to crown, and quite thick around the middle. They can talk—”

  Cazia felt tingles run up her back. “They can?”

  “Not to us,” Vilavivianna added hastily. “To each other. My uncle says we have tried to decipher the mouth sounds for years without success. And they can not even understand the most basic of verbal orders from us.”

  Cazia thought about the translation stone in her pocket. Would the princess try to take it from her? “So you can’t understand each other at all?”

  “We use gesture-words. It is basic, but it works.”

  “And they don’t...attack you?” Cazia regretted the question as soon as the words left her mouth. The princess had just wept over her dead friends and family, and Cazia had to ask this?

  But Vilavivianna kept a steady expression, as though it was an interesting philosophical inquiry. “Of course, sometimes. The winter before I left, a lumberman was bitten in an outer camp. The arm swelled up and turned black before he died. It turned out that he had been taunting the serpent with a stick before it bit him. My uncle used to say that human beings killed more human beings than the serpents do.”

  Peradaini tyrs have been crossing the Straim for four generations...

  But it wasn’t another accusation, apparently, because the girl said, “I miss my mother and father the most.”

  “Of course,” Cazia said, as though she knew how wonderful mothers and fathers could be.

  “They are very funny people,” the princess said. “They have to be, with the way things work in the clans. You can not order people about the way you do here. You have to try to persuade them before you call up your warriors. My uncle used to say the Indregai will follow a joke but never a command. And I miss the boots we have at home, which are much more comfortable than yours and do not make your feet sweat in the winter. And the food. And, of course, our gods are real.”

  Cazia felt a sudden chill. “What do you mean? The gods are the gods. Of course they’re real.”

  “No, I mean that our gods are real. You have temples and you worship, but all you have are statues or songs, yes? And one of the gods is actually many gods? I confess it all seems very convoluted and confused to me.”

  “Fury is not ‘actually many gods.’ He is one god with many aspects. He’s the god of all humans.” In the growing darkness, Cazia could just make out the other girl’s smile. “What is it?”

  “He appears as The Mother, yes? And The Sister? And The Prostitute?”

  Cazia took a deep breath to soothe her irritation. She herself had giggled over the idea of a male god dressed as a mother when she was small, but Doctor Twofin had scolded her sharply, explaining that it was blasphemous to judge a god the way you’d judge a man. Besides, as she’d grown older, she’d learned that the dividing line between men and women was not always as sharp as it seemed.

  So Cazia did her best to pass on Doctor Twofin’s lesson, trying to sound patient and mature. “If Fury was only male, he would be the god of men only. Women would have no god to intercede for them, and what an awful world that would be for us.”

  It didn’t satisfy Vilavivianna the way it had Cazia. “But why Fury? Why is he not called Kindness, or Love, or Laughter?”

  “That was one of the first questions I asked my tutors.”

  Vilavivianna’s voice began to slow in the darkness as sleep came for her. “What did they answer?”

  “Fury feels fury because he is the only god who can feel any emotion at all.”

  “Hmph.”

  “Our priests teach us that the gods other people worship are just aspects of Fury.”

  “Oh, I do not think so,” the princess said in her sleepy voice. “There is nothing human about Boskorul. He delivers us the whales we cut up for oil after we offer him our sacrifices.”

  “Do you mean animal sacrifices?” Cazia asked, hoping the girl was not about to admit that she murdered people in an attempt to please an aspect of Fury. Would Fury even accept that sort of worship? She supposed he would, if it was a human thing to do.

  “Oh, no,” Vilavivianna answered. “We give him part of our yearly harvest. We just float it out to sea for him to consume. He is a sea god, not human at all. And there’s Kelvij
inian, the god of the land, Tyr of the Sleeping Earth, in your language. He is not human either, although he does have a face and a great big nose almost as big as your Scholars’ Tower. Boskorul is scary, but Kelvijinian is nice. I met him when I was five, and he told me I was very pretty.”

  The little princess trailed off into sleep, and Cazia bit her own knuckle, trying to suppress a laugh. She tried to picture the Little Spinner, a being so vast it filled the spaces between the stars--it was the spaces between the stars, and all the stars themselves, and the very concept of stars--complimenting a little girl’s dress.

  It was absurd, obviously, but it would be rude to laugh. Cazia couldn’t help but like the princess and wished she had half the girl’s confidence.

  What’s more, Vilavivianna had people she loved in this world, and she had someplace she could go. Cazia envied her that, too.

  That night, she dreamed her friends had captured her and dragged her to Indregai, where a grunt the size of a mountain waited to devour her.

  In the morning, Vilavivianna insisted Cazia hide her quiver in her pack. They would be crossing into the Sweeps soon, and there was no telling what they would find. Cazia reluctantly complied.

  Once they were back on the path, she looked up and down the pass. The sky was just lightening and they wouldn’t see the sun for hours, but she could see enough to know that no one was chasing her. Not grunts. Not soldiers.

  At mid day, they stopped for a short while. Cazia apologized to Vilavivianna for the saltiness of the food, but the little girl only shrugged. Travel foods were not meant to be delicious, only filling.

  When their meal was partway done, Cazia said, “Vilavivianna, I would like to ask you a favor. In Peradain, all my friends called me ‘Caz.’” The little princess sat stiffly, as though she was about to be punished. “Would you mind calling me Caz? As a friend?”

  The girl’s lower lip quivered slightly. “If you would call me Viv or Ivy, as my cousins once did. I would very much like for us to be friends.”