No, of course not.
Goose bumps ran all over Cazia’s body. This was the Bescos Sea. Deep water.
She banked to the right, turning back toward the north shore. She also gained more altitude. Sea giants lived in the Bescos. Cazia had never seen one and had no plans to start now.
It took a few moments for the cart to turn around fully, but nothing leaped out of the water at her. The edge of the land ahead was a cliff face: rich brown earth rising straight out of the sea. The golden light of sunset shone on the dark green forest atop it. Small streams spilled from between the trees and fell a hundred feet to the churning waves below, mist blowing off them like bridal veils.
Great Way, it was a beautiful sight, but Cazia would have happily gone her whole life without it. She had come too far, having missed the road or the river. She’d certainly bypassed the holdfast, which was supposed to be some distance from the shore, according to the map.
According to her memory of the map, she meant. She looked to her left. The cliffs continued northward, growing higher and higher, for as far as she could see. To the right, the cliffs grew gradually lower as they sloped down toward the distant ocean.
Somewhere out there was the Simblin holdfast. They were Pagesh’s lands, and Cazia flushed to realize how long it had been since she’d thought of her friend, lost so many months ago when Peradain fell.
She passed back over the cliffs again, reaching land just as she heard a loud splashing behind her. Safe. She was safe again, back over land.
In the maps, this had all been blank space—the yellowish nothing of a parchment where no one had bothered to draw. In real life, the land was so thick with late summer greenery she couldn’t see the forest floor. The terrain rippled with hills and ridges as the treetops rose and fell in seemingly random ways.
Where was the Bescos River? Could it have been any of the three slender waterfalls she’d seen? Everyone in Peradain knew rivers could change course suddenly, turning farmland into lake, but what path could a river large enough to merit a line on a map take in this rugged terrain?
Of course, it was also possible that she had flown too far south and the Freewell holdfast was north of her, right in the teeth of the Durdric lands. If that were the case, it would be the road that she had missed. Frankly, that seemed the more likely option, since it was easy to imagine a road completely hidden beneath this dense canopy.
Cazia was lost, but she had two sensible options. If the holdfast was to the south, it meant she’d flown over the river without seeing it. It meant she’d have to turn right and fly out over those deep, green, terrifying forests.
If the holdfast was to the north, it meant she’d missed the road, a prospect that seemed much more likely. It meant she’d have to turn left and fly back toward the Southern Barrier, to that place where sea met mountain.
No matter which way she turned, there would be The Blessing. To the south were sea giants, creatures that hated humans and murdered them at every opportunity. To the north were the Durdric; their holy sons would consider every metal object Cazia carried to be blasphemy, including the protective covering to her mace. What’s more, there was less ground to cover north of her. She might take three days to fly to the end of the land to the south, but she could probably reach the bare foothills of the Southern Barrier by nightfall.
Which of Fury’s avatars should she pray to for guidance? She wasn’t sure, so she turned south, picking the direction at random. Despite the assurances she had given Old Stoneface, she had become thoroughly lost and had been reduced to hoping for good luck. Worse, she was flagging. Flying a cart was not the most difficult thing she’d ever done, but she hadn’t eaten since dropping off Tyr Treygar. Worse, standing all day with the wind in her face had left her parched. At some point, she was going to have to land this cart, but it had been quite a long time since she’d seen flat ground of any kind.
Could Cazia set it down on a treetop and balance there for the night? She might have to.
But she didn’t try. She kept flying southward, slowly angling away from the water as the sun dipped lower behind the mountains. Cazia tried not to think about the fact that she had no idea how far inland the holdfast might be, that she hadn’t seen any farmland to support even a small settlement, or that if she nodded off while still in the air, the crashing cart might kill her before she woke.
Her cargo of weapons would be lost in the wilderness. She would vanish from Kal-Maddum, her mission a failure. Only Song would know what had happened to her.
Cazia kept flying as dark came over the forest. The glow in the west faded, shadow took the forest below, and the stars began to appear in the east. She knew she had passed the time when she should stop, but she pushed on anyway. As the night grew darker, she kept telling herself it was time to find a treetop that would support her, if she could, because darkness grew deeper with every moment. Soon, it would be too dark to safely choose a place to settle. She kept telling herself that and she kept pushing on anyway.
When she saw the light, she was so tired that she feared it was a hallucination. It appeared in front of her on the left, and she was aware of it for quite a while before coming close enough to realize it was firelight.
Cazia turned toward it, not daring to hope that she had found civilization. Perhaps she’d gone so far south that she’d intruded on Simblin lands. Perhaps it was a nothing more than a storm house with someone’s cook fire flickering beside it.
But no. The light became a ring of torches set atop a tower, and the tower rose out of a massive granite building set upon a hill. There were more torches down below among the other buildings, and also along a bridge that crossed a white-capped river.
She slowed her cart, feeling it shudder as she did so. The sentries at the top of the tower strung their bows and readied arrows, but she flew close to them, circling the tower slowly.
“Who approaches?”
“A friend!” Cazia called in answer. Her voice was hoarse and dry. She suddenly realized there were two more unlit towers and she had nearly collided with one. “I bring weapons for the war against the grunts.”
He and his four companions stared blankly at the kinzchu spears strapped to the side of her cart. “There is no war against the grunts,” the sentry responded, his voice bitter. “There is only waiting our turn.”
That was a bad sign. “Where can I find the tyr?” She almost said the tyr my father—in fact, to her great surprise, she ached to say it—but the anger and resentment in the man’s voice made her hold back.
“You will find him there.” He pointed toward an open field near the bridge. “At his leisure.”
Cazia thanked him and eased the cart away. No one shot an arrow into her, which made for quite an improvement over the last time she’d approached a walled city at night.
The holdfast had been built of pink scholar stone, probably in the years before Tyr Freewell led his rebellion. Everything else had been constructed from wood. The houses, the streets, even the wall around the village was made of standing logs, sharpened at the top.
For someone who had grown up surrounded by stone, it seemed like a slender shield against the raids of Durdric fighters and the grunts.
Inside the walls, the river grew wider as it flowed south and the piers grew larger and longer. On the far bank, what she took to be an open field was actually a stadium of some kind. The ground was sunken and plowed flat. It was ringed with a track, which itself was ringed by stadium seats thirty feet above the play field.
Cazia stayed well up in the air, above the torchlight. She didn’t want to disrupt the evening’s entertainment, whatever it was.
She searched the rows of benches for her father, or at least for a section of the seating that looked appropriate for a tyr. The stands were half full of common folk, scattered here and there, with only the easternmost section being empty. That portion of the stands was higher than the others and had been divided into boxes with actual chairs.
But no one was
sitting in those empty box seats. A few spears stood at the top of the stairs or at the entry points to guard it, but that was all. It didn’t make any sense. Did her father prefer to sit among the common folk?
Movement on the field caught her attention. Someone had stepped onto the grass at the eastern end, and now that she was paying attention, she noticed that the ground there was higher than the rest of the field, and that there were wooden barriers as well. She moved closer, peering over the edge of the cart at them; the barriers were short, freestanding walls with spikes on top and…doors built into them? Was this going to be a play?
A figure moved among the barriers, then back toward open ground. It was a man wearing the same combination of armor and scholar’s robe that Lar wore on the day he flew out of Samsit. The man was big, broad-shouldered, and muscular, but he moved with the grace of a dancer. His helm obscured his face, but his long, dark hair hung down his back in thick braids.
Two servants scurried onto the field to set a spear and shield on racks behind him.
He raised his empty right hand to the crowd, and they cheered. It was a ragged sound—the stands were not filled enough for a full-throated cheer—but at the same time, there was something desperate and bloodthirsty in it.
The cheering grew louder and more intense. Cazia turned the cart so she could see the whole field; there, at the western end, were three soldiers lifting and swinging a huge wooden boom over the top of the stands. Dangling from the end was a big bronze cage, large enough to hold a man.
For a moment, she suspected this would be an execution, but that didn’t make sense, not with all those barriers. This was clearly a staged fight. The scholar at the far end was the crowd favorite, but was he going to battle another scholar? A condemned prisoner?
Sport combat had been outlawed after the Eleventh Festival, and for good reason. Whatever was going to happen here, her father should never have allowed it.
Then the cage, suspended high above the field, suddenly opened at the bottom. The figure inside plummeted to the field.
Fire and Fury, it was a blue-furred grunt.
The beast struck the grass hard, landing on its shoulder and neck. For a moment, Cazia was sure it had been accidentally killed, but as the crowd’s cheer became louder and louder, the creature gained its feet and stood upright. It roared at the people around it, and the crowd’s answering scream was vicious and deafening.
To her embarrassment, Cazia did not react immediately. For no reason that she could understand, the noise of the crowd made her think of her own dart sinking into her brother’s ribs. Her hand twitched, raising the cart higher, and she floated backward toward the wall and the wilderness beyond.
No. She took a deep breath. No, she was not going to run away, not from this situation.
She gathered herself and turned the cart so she could see the whole field at once. The grunt had charged toward the stands and was leaping upward, trying to get at the people. The seats were too high for it to reach, and any attempt at climbing was beaten back by a hail of stones.
The crowd jeered at every attempt, and their voices grew louder and crueler with each passing moment.
Then a chime toned, clear and high. The creature turned toward the noise, at the eastern end of the field. The crowd fell silent long enough for the tone to fade, then began chanting something in earnest.
The grunt charged toward the eastern end of the field. The crowd grew louder and louder. Many people were off their feet. The beast moved toward the northern side of the track, and soldiers along that side lifted pennants to let the scholar know where it was.
The crowd’s chant was two syllables, but Cazia couldn’t make them out, not way up here in the night sky. Then the grunt threw itself against the first barrier, and the chant turned into a cheer.
It would have been easy for the beast to go around the wall, but the closed door seemed to enrage it. It threw itself hard against the freestanding door, battering it with fists. The whole barrier shuddered under the assault, and Cazia thought it would topple over before the bar on the door would break.
A block of granite appeared in the air above the grunt. The beast noticed it too late and it was caught beneath it as it fell.
Dead. The armored scholar raised both hands and carried his spear through the barricades. The grunt was as dead as it would get, but the crowd shouted its approval when he thrust the spear into its protruding forearm anyway.
Free. Well. Free. Well. Free. Well.
Suddenly, the chanting was as clear to her as if she’d picked up a translation stone. They were chanting her name.
The man in the armor and the scholar’s robe, fighting grunts one-on-one for the entertainment of the bloodthirsty mob, was her father.
Chapter 26
When Tyr Freewell returned to his high place on the field, he grabbed the strap of a quiver of darts and swung it above his head. It circled around and around—the crowd loved it, for some reason. Then, in a single motion, he lowered his arm so the belt slapped around his waist. He caught the far end and hooked the buckle in a single motion, then raised a dart above his head. Black and green streamers hung off the back. Great Way, he was performing for them.
Cazia was already lowering her cart toward the field when she noticed the boom moving again. What she wanted to do, more than anything, was to present a kinzchu spear to her father—even better would have been to take one up herself and defend him with it. Something, anything, to make a good impression.
But there was no way for her to untie one of the spears from the sides or bottom of the cart without the anti-magic effect striking her. The least awful thing that would happen was that, with the loss of her magic, the cart would drop out of the sky and shatter. The worst was that she would have to face a grunt and this vicious crowd without access to any of the Gifts.
Still, she passed into the torchlight, and the chanting of the crowd faltered as people noticed her.
The boom swung out over the field; Cazia could see the grunt inside it turning in slow circles. She had descended until she was level with the lowest seats in the stadium and everyone could see her. Surely they would not open the cage while—
The bronze cage clattered and the bottom fell open. Fire and Fury, they’d unleashed the beast anyway.
Cazia was not going to run away. Not again. There was only one way for her to use her kinzchu spears against the grunt now. She descended a little farther, trying to guess how high the beast could jump by measuring the gouge marks on the walls around her.
A chorus of boos started to echo around the field, and the wooden cart began to crack—no, it was stones. The people in the stands were throwing stones at her, and the noise they made against the wood sounded like planks breaking under a great strain.
One of the stones whipped by her ear so close, she could feel the breeze.
The grunt was on its feet. The crowd stopped pelting her with stones and fell silent as it waited to see what would happen next.
Cazia rotated the cart so the front corner was closest to the grunt. It looked all around, slowly, then charged at her.
At the last moment, Cazia became sure she had flown too low and that the grunt would be able to vault over the cart railing onto her, and she yanked the lever to gain altitude. It was both too late and unnecessary. From her position at the back of the cart, she couldn’t see where the grunt caught hold, but she heard and felt it strike the weapons on the front of the cart, then fall away.
It worked. She rotated the cart as she descended, keeping the grunt in sight. It had fallen to the grass and lay still. The crowd murmured in confusion and their voices were low enough to hear the grunt bellow out its death cry.
The murmurs slowly became cheers; by the time the creature began to burn, the whole stadium was roaring its approval.
For all the good it did Cazia. She set down the cart on the grass some twenty feet from the burning grunt, then began to unstrap herself. Fire and Fury, she was parched, and tired, an
d hungry, too. What she really needed was to sit on a bench and drink her fill, but her skin was empty and she didn’t feel safe enough to fill it, not in front of this crowd.
She clambered over the side of the cart, her legs so stiff that she almost fell. Monument sustain her, even her feet were sore. It had never occurred to her that it would hurt so much just to stand.
Soldiers ran across the field toward her, their shields and spears held high. Cazia was unarmed, of course, except for the knife at her belt and the mace the people at Tempest Pass had made for her. She lifted her hands to show they were empty and let a half dozen soldiers surround her.
By this point, the grunt had burned away, leaving only a few small fires in the grass and an ash-covered man. If Cazia had six spears around her, the former grunt had six times that.
“He’s been cured!” she shouted. It shouldn’t have been necessary to say that, but the expressions on their faces made them look as if they might stab the man on general principle.
The spears began talking to each other in a language she didn’t immediately recognize. It was sharp and sibilant and strangely musical. Surgish. Of course, they were speaking Surgish to each other. If only Cazia had taken her lessons more seriously, she would be able to follow their conversation.
“Man now,” she said, butchering both the pronunciation and grammar. She had it backwards anyway, didn’t she? That’s what her tutor had taught her. “Now man,” she tried.
One of the spears turned to her. “Stop insulting our language,” he said in a very clipped Peradaini. “You will be told when to speak.”
The cured man coughed and sneezed the ashes from his throat, then stood. The spears surrounding him backed away, letting her see.
Great Way, he was gorgeous. He had curly black hair, dark eyes and broad muscular hands. And of course he was naked.
The Way Into Darkness: Book Three of The Great Way Page 29