Tejohn nodded. “Anyone object to those plans?” Bluepetal and Lowtower didn’t speak up, so he assumed they didn’t. “You need militias. Why are there no women among your bows and spears? I saw guards, but not soldiers.”
Bluepetal knocked three times on a heavy oak door, then once more after a slight delay. A bolt slid back and he pulled the door open. Whoever had slid back the bolt was nowhere in sight. Bluepetal spoke quietly as he led them through yet another dark corridor. “Twofins don’t allow women into their armies. That’s been the tradition for generations. Women do not fight in our wars.”
“Your men can barely fight. But never mind; if the soldiers are too delicate to take a life in front of women, form women-only militias. The men weren’t able to hold back that grunt, and it was only one. They’re going to need additional training and greater numbers. Call for female volunteers. These are their homes and families, too.”
“That seems reasonable,” Redegg said mildly.
“My tyr,” Lowtower said, his voice tense, “my spears are used to fighting from atop the wall. That has always been the Twofin strength.”
“You need new strengths. More strengths. Make sure that happens, or I may wake from this sleepstone in a nest of grunts.”
Lowtower bowed stiffly. “I hear and obey, my tyr.”
“We’ll also need to collect those whisperers,” Redegg said, clearly glad to be changing the subject. They climbed a short flight of stairs, and Tejohn grew lightheaded at the effort it took. “Their rumors won’t have the same impact as actual deeds performed in full view, but they can be harmful nonetheless. Here it is.”
“Bring in Granny Nin as an advisor,” Tejohn gasped. “I’d have put her in charge of your council if she came from Twofin lands, you’ll find her useful nonetheless. She rules her caravan without lash or spear, and you’re going to need her kind of diplomacy and charisma. Besides, it’s not like you can send those caravaners out into the wilderness.”
They had come to a heavy, dark wooden door at the end of a corridor. Bluepetal did the same knock, but there was no sound of a bolt being pulled back. Everyone grew tense. Lowtower laid his hand on his sword and pulled on the latch. The door swung outward.
The tyr’s room had an open gallery on one side, so the daylight let them see the damage that had been done. Furniture had been smashed, tapestries torn, and clothing strewn around the room.
But it was the smell that was most upsetting. The room stank like burned meat, and Tejohn knew immediately what that meant. He glanced about the space, wishing he’s asked for new weapons, but Doctor Twofin was no longer here.
They walked carefully into the room. The first two bodies they found were beside the bed. The feather mattress had been scorched and blackened on one corner, but considering the condition of the bodies, it was amazing that everything in the room hadn’t burned to ash. Both had been reduced to blackened skeletons, curled up on their sides like sleeping infants. Beside them wore torn scraps of grayish-white servants’ tunics.
“At least we know where Doctor Twofin has been hiding,” Bluepetal said. “Great Way, he’s been treating the holdfast servants as though they’re nothing more than penned animals.”
Tejohn’s response was harsher than he’d intended. “Penned animals are fed and cared for, because penned animals are valued. A hollowed-out scholar values nothing but himself. And don’t think it’s just servants he will mistreat; he will do the same to you, your children, the tyr’s children...to anyone he pleases. You think wizards are frights for a children’s story? They’re not. They’re dangerous.”
“Not anymore, I don’t think,” Lowtower called from the other end of the room. Tejohn moved toward him, the stench of burned corpses giving him focus. Against the far wall was Iskol Twofin’s sleepstone. Lying beside it was another corpse burned beyond recognition, but the cloth beside it was no servant’s rag. It was fine green linen, and right at the scorched edge they could see a medical badge.
Lowtower turned toward the west, where the western wall would have been. Another burned corpse in a servant’s tunic, this one not nearly so damaged, lay dead at the edge of the gallery.
“I’ve often thought this would be the way to do it,” Lowtower said. “See the broken oil lamp on the floor? When a scholar attacks with a flame, you throw a quantity of oil on him.”
“Oil that doesn’t burn the medical badge,” Redegg said. “How convenient.”
“I agree.” Tejohn wanted to slump onto the tyr’s daybed, but he knew someone would have to scrub it clean. Someone like him. If he lay on the sleepstone, the magic would pull him into unconsciousness. So he stood, still slightly unsteady, while the revolting smell filled his nostrils.
“If you’ll excuse me,” Bluepetal said, and ran from the room.
“Are you sure he should be the third in your interim council?” Lowtower asked. “He doesn’t seem to be the hardiest of fellows.”
Tejohn looked at the commander, then looked away. “There’s no shame in being made sick by this horror.” He glanced at the doorway and saw a servant standing there. She was elderly and hollow-eyed, with the rangy muscles of someone who had been worked hard and fed little. “Servant, come here. I have a task for you.”
He sent her for the chief. At the Palace, there had been numerous chiefs for each part of the building, but a small holdfast like this one wouldn’t need such a complex structure. When the chief arrived, he made arrangements for the bodies to be cleared away and buried respectfully. He also ordered the chief to take a census of the staff to try to identify the bodies; it had been all too common in the Finstel labor camp for dead servants to be pitched into the river or thrown into a pit without making any attempt to figure out who had been killed or whether they had families. No, Tejohn assured the man, that was not the body of Doctor Twofin lying there.
Tejohn also spoke to the man about missing children; he could not stop thinking about the body parts they’d found in Doctor Twofin’s lab. The chief was looking at him strangely before he left, as though he thought a tyr’s interest in his servants extraordinary.
The dead were taken away quickly, and the floors scrubbed by a dozen workers all at once. A bowl of cold alligaunt tail broth was brought to him before they finished; the smell in the room was still awful, but he forced himself to drink it down.
If Javien had survived, he could have taught the locals how to build a water drip for injured people on sleepstones. There was so much waste in the world, and the Little Spinner never slowed.
A soldier came to report that the first bitten spear had been taken to a sleepstone, where he transformed into a beast within moments. The six guards struck quickly, striking off his head, but now his family had nothing to bury.
“We brought the body to the other injured soldiers, and they begged us to kill them.”
“No!” Lowtower barked. “Our people don’t strike injured soldiers. Let them commit suicide if they can’t live. Let them keep their honor.”
“They say they can’t,” the soldier muttered, and the commander huffed.
“It’s true,” Tejohn said. “The curse will not allow them to do harm to The Blessing, and now they are The Blessing.”
“So we execute them like criminals?” Lowtower asked, his voice going tight with outrage.
For a moment, Tejohn thought he might vomit up the broth. He’d delayed his time on the sleepstone too long. “You three will decide that, along with the soldiers themselves and maybe their families. If it helps, think of them as infected. They’re already going to die, but you can stop the spread of the contagion.”
“But—”
“Enough,” Redegg interjected. “For now, that is enough. Tyr Treygar has injuries that need to be healed, and we must go back out there to let the people see us leading. Have no fear, my tyr. We will handle whatever problems arise.”
The wizard is still on the loose. “Protect me,” Tejohn said. The three men nodded to him, and then he had had enough. Tejohn la
y back on the sleepstone and felt the magic inside drag him down into sleep.
Chapter 8
Tejohn awoke with a parched throat in an empty stone room, and for one absurd moment, he looked for his wife and children, expecting them to be snoring in the darkness nearby. But when he reached out, he found only the stone edge of the table. His memories came back to him in a rush, and he had to close his eyes for a few moments while his bitterness and resentment subsided.
The only light came from a tiny hearth fire burning at the far end of the room, but after so long with his eyes shut, it was more than enough. He sipped from a bowl of water on a nearby shelf, counting slowly to ten between each taste.
He needed to be on his way. The sooner all this was finished, the sooner he could return to Laoni and the little ones. Unfortunately, there were some things that couldn’t be rushed. He sipped again and again, but when the bowl was empty, he knew it hadn’t been enough.
There were no clothes laid out for him, no weapons, no food. The adjacent room was empty except for the tiny, blinding firelight. He stood in the center of the room, wondering what had happened out in the holdfast. Were the three men he’d put in charge still in charge? Had the grunts overrun the place?
The door opened and a servant entered. “My tyr! I did not expect to see you up so soon. These are for you.”
She was a young woman, dark-skinned and wide-eyed like his own wife; the resemblance only annoyed him. She hurried to a cabinet hidden in the shadows of the hearth and retrieved a long robe in a rich blue color.
Blue was a color of kings and rich men. Why had this been set aside for him when he needed weapons and a kit for the road?
The servant quickly filled him in on everything that had happened while he slept. Only three days had passed, which was a surprisingly short time for a man with broken ribs; perhaps Doctor Twofin had enhanced the power of the sleepstone somehow. Redegg had been arrested for nearly half a day by a pair of palace guards but had been released as soon as news reached Lowtower. The gates had been sealed with massive boulders and no one was admitted without being searched for bite marks. Word out of the flatlands was that farmers were abandoning their fields a mere month before harvest, and everyone expected a year of famine. Few refugees were coming to Salt Pass, so far. As an afterthought, she assured him that the mining scholars had been stopped while they were still preparing the tunnel; Iskol Twofin’s plan to flood the lowlands had been thwarted.
Dawn was still some time away. Tejohn shrugged into the robe, feeling suddenly like a man who ordered others to do for him rather than do for himself, then enlisted the servant as his guide. She led him first to the armory, where he picked up a kit, shield, spear, sword, and knife. All of it, even the blade of the spear, was engraved with the emblem of the Twofins. He also traded his regal blue robe for a padded shirt, steel cuirass, greaves, unadorned helm, and high boots. At least the weapons were sharp.
The servant accepted the robe uncertainly, then set to folding it. “My tyr, the council selected this because they thought you would benefit from the trappings of power.”
“To the kitchens,” Tejohn said.
Of course, the kitchens were up and running, even at that dismal hour. Tejohn downed an entire kettle of thorn tea, then filled the skins in his kit from another. He took packs of meatbread from storage and wrapped them tightly. Then, alone in the great hall, he ate a hurried breakfast of compote, porridge, and roasted alligaunt tail. He offered the chair opposite to the servant. She sat but refused to eat.
“I will return. Be sure they know that. I will return, and when I do, I expect to have a spell powerful enough to turn back this invasion. I want you to pass that information to the council. They must hold out until I return.”
She stared down at the table while she spoke. “They will ask me where you are going, my tyr.”
Not long ago, he would have been annoyed by a question from a servant, even one disguised as a statement. That version of himself had been destroyed, and he was glad of it. “Tempest Pass.”
She looked at him warily. “Few survive in that wilderness, my tyr. Very few.”
“Tell me what you’ve heard.” Tejohn began to scrape porridge into his mouth all the faster. He knew he had to leave as quickly as possible or be drawn back into discussions with the three council members on the choices they were making, and whether he should step in himself.
“The mountain trails are filled with Durdric holy fighters,” she said. “There are not as many as there once were, I’m told, but every path passes through or within sight of a Durdric enclave. There are also big cats and other creatures among the rocks. If you try to pass with iron or stone, the Holy Sons will kill you. If you try to pass without, you cannot defend yourself.”
“Can’t I descend all the way into the Sweeps?”
She glanced up at him warily, then looked down again. “Yes, my tyr, but the earth is so muddy that it will swallow a man whole. Worse, the alligaunts are quite numerous. In fact, they are so numerous that there appears to be no other living beast there.”
“If the alligaunts were that numerous, wouldn’t they hunt the land barren and run down their own numbers by starvation?”
“Yes, my tyr. That’s what we expected but it hasn’t happened. We’ve been waiting for the number of alligaunts in the Sweeps to collapse for two generations or more. It hasn’t happened and no one is quite sure why, although many believe the waters of Lake Windmark to run deeper and be more fertile than anyone suspected.”
“Hm.” Tejohn emptied his bowl. “It seems I’m foiled one way or the other. When was the last successful visit to the tower?”
“From here? Six years ago, my tyr.” She laid her hand on the rough wood of the table. “They flew there by cart.”
Of course! How could he have forgotten the cart he had stolen with Doctor Twofin? “Perhaps I will wait around to speak to the council after all. I’ll have need of that cart soon enough.”
She grimaced. Tejohn knew the expression of someone who did not want to share bad news. “My tyr, I’m sorry, but the flying cart is no longer...”
“Of course it isn’t. That would have been too simple. Was it destroyed or stolen?”
“Probably stolen. Yesterday morning, it was simply gone, along with the guards who had been watching over it. No one is quite sure what happened, but...”
“But it’s assumed that Doctor Twofin escaped in it.”
“It is, my tyr.”
Tejohn couldn’t suppress a bitter sigh. Again, the man had left him stuck where he didn’t want to be. “What about Tempest Pass, six years ago? What did they find?”
“I’m just a servant, my tyr. I’m not privy to such things. I do know that they made several trips to the tower that month, and each time, they returned with dour expressions.”
Tejohn looked into her eyes. “Look at me.” She did. “Scholars have rules they are commanded to follow, upon pain of mutilation or death. Do you think Doctor Italga out in Tempest Pass has broken those rules and gone hollow?”
“I can’t say, in all honesty, my tyr, but that is the rumor we’ve lived with for the last six years. It’s impossible to tell truth from fable. The only thing I can say is, if he was supposed to be executed by his bodyguards, it had not happened, as of that last trip.”
There are benefits to being younger brother to the king. “It’s time.”
He stood, shouldered his pack, picked up his shield and spear, then started toward the door. The servant glanced all around her. No one else was in sight and that seemed to bother her.
“My tyr, the council will rise soon--”
“Accompany me to the northern gate. What do you call it?”
He started toward the exit. She struggled to keep up with him. Their tread was loud on the rough plank floor. “The Marsh Gate, my tyr.”
“Does it empty directly onto the marsh?”
“No, my tyr, but it comes close.”
They unbarred the door and stepp
ed out into the night. The eastern sky was blocked by mountains, of course, so the sunrise would start with little more than a glow around the slopes, but Tejohn could see no trace of it.
Still, the stars stood revealed in the sky, and the light they shone illuminated the barren mountainsides. Amazing. After a lifetime of squinting at things in the same room, he could finally see the world in its true complexity. How cheated he had been. Once again, he wished his wife and children were with him. “What’s your name?”
“Sibilanth Totewater, my tyr.”
Tejohn began walking northward toward the town. They passed spears patrolling in teams of three, but none challenged them. “Do you have family here?”
“Not any more, my tyr. Last year, the Twofin heirs became ill. It was just fever sweats, of the sort any child might have, easily cleared on the sleepstone, but the old tyr became convinced that my brothers had poisoned them.”
“They worked in the kitchen with you?”
“One squeezed grapes for the little ones’ juice and the other carried it to them. Tyr Twofin, he put them both in the airiest cell in the west. For nothing.”
She didn’t need to say more. The old tyr had fed her family to one of those Fire-taken water serpents. That was why she had been trusted to look after him while he was helpless on the sleepstone. Tejohn was glad Redegg and the others had not bought her loyalty by taking hostages.
“I’m sorry.” The words felt strange as they came out of his mouth, and he did not want to see her reaction, but they were said and they needed to be said. He had never apologized to a servant before in his life, especially for something someone else did, but it seemed like the right thing to do, no matter how awkward.
Totewater did not answer. They passed out of the parade ground into the town, which she told him was called Saltstone. It was larger than expected; the pass sloped downward and curved around a walled-off rockslide on the eastern edge. The houses nearest the holdfast were large and fine, built from stone blocks and sturdy timbers with black slate roofs, but as they went farther north, they grew smaller. More were made of wood, with tarred plank roofs, until finally they were passing through row after row of shacks made of crude wooden frames covered with cloth stiffened with dried mud. The warehouses near the walls were made of raw lumber and unmortared stone, rough and utilitarian.
The Way Into Darkness: Book Three of The Great Way Page 10