The stone block cracked and came apart in little squarish pieces no larger than an apricot. Cazia moved her hand close to one; she could feel the anti-magic still in it. She checked another, then another. Every piece of broken rubble had become a kinzchu stone.
Great Way, why hadn’t she thought of this days ago?
She stood and backed away, wiping her hand on her skirts. There was no magic-destroying dust on them, but she wanted to clean them off anyway. “These are just like the bridge now. Take as many as you like. They should clean The Blessing out of anyone they touch. Just don’t let them touch me. Make sure she knows that.”
The old woman muttered something to the girl, and they both gathered up their skirts in their left hands and loaded stones in them like apples. Cazia waited impatiently for them; they insisted on taking far more than she’d expected.
The girl went down the stairs first, a rock in her hand and her arm held back ready to throw. Eshla held two stones and followed close behind, with Cazia taking up the rear. It wasn’t right to make the little servant girl go first, but what choice was there? The Queen Counsel was the oldest person Cazia had ever seen, and Cazia couldn’t touch their only weapon. It had to be the girl. It had to.
Sweat poured down Cazia’s back. The screams from the village had not abated; if anything, they’d gotten worse. The roars of the grunts were louder and closer, and there was something triumphant in them. Was she leading the army that would liberate Tyr Freewell’s people? A reformed wizard, a servant child, and an arrogant former queen?
The stairs curved as they descended, so Cazia could not see where the servant girl threw her stone. All she could see was a blue-furred grunt bounding onto the stairs below them.
The girl screamed and cringed, but Eshla threw her stone straight on, striking the grunt on the shoulder. It staggered, then fell, sliding off the stairs to the floor below. As Cazia had feared, the kinzchu stones were weaker, but thankfully, it wasn’t by much.
The old woman was already fumbling for another stone, but there appeared to be nothing for her to throw it at. “Move, move,” Cazia urged them, and the girl scrambled down the stairs.
In the next room, there were three men—all servants—sitting on the floor in the now-familiar pose of cursed humans awaiting transformation. The servant girl seemed to know just what to do; she picked up the stone Eshla threw, then touched each one on the shoulder.
It was like waking them from a trance. One immediately leaped to his feet and, after a short exchange in Surgish, began snatching the stones out of her apron.
“Hey!” Cazia shouted, startling everyone, including herself. She suddenly recognized him as the man who had led her to her mother. Good. That meant he’d understand Peradaini. “Those are hers. If you want stones to use against the grunts, there are plenty lying on the top floor. Fetch your own.”
He stared at her a moment, as though stunned to be told he couldn’t just take what he wanted from the girl. Then he seemed to come to his senses. He pulled his empty hand away and bowed to Cazia. “My apologies. My enthusiasms overwhelmed me.” He spoke to the other two men with him in his sharp, hissing language and they raced up the stairs. The steward himself bustled to a corner and picked something up. Then he turned and offered it to Cazia.
It was her mace. “I was bringing your weapons to you, but I was too slow.” He glanced at the sizeable dent on one side. “My apologies again. I tried to use it against our enemies, but…”
But he couldn’t make it work. Cazia accepted it from him and pressed the lever. The dented cap swung open, then fell to the stone floor with a metallic clatter. The kinzchu stone inside was still firmly seated. The steward actually blushed.
The other two servants raced down the stairs with stones bundled into their shirts. The steward took a fistful for himself and the three of them raced down to the ground floor.
The servant glanced at Cazia nervously, then hurried after. Eshla looked weary. Cazia took her arm and went down the steps with her. “I’ve waited a long time to get out of that Fire-taken room,” the old woman said, “but I was hoping for a little more grandeur and some beautiful clothes.”
There were screams from below. The servant scrambled backwards up the stairs, her arm pumping as she threw stones down the stair well. Suddenly, a blue-furred claw came from the edge of the stair and clamped down on the girl’s ankle. Cazia acted before she even had a chance to think about it; she lunged down and jabbed her mace onto the creature’s wrist.
The claw fell away without dragging the girl with it. The servant tried to retreat up the stairs, but Cazia and Eshla were in her way. Cazia turned sideways and let her slip by along the wall.
The ground floor was a nest of little fires, which the dozen hostages avoided by crowding toward the middle of the room. The two stewards who had run down the stairs were sprawled on the floor; one had been bitten through the skull, and the other was trembling and gasping for air. It took a moment for her to see that his arm had been torn off. The steward lay on the stairs itself, his leg twisted in an unlikely position.
“I’ll take care of them,” Eshla said. She descended the stairs with a kinzchu stone in her hand.
Cazia hurried to the steward. “Can we get him upstairs to the sleepstone?”
“There are no working sleepstones in the Freewell holdfast,” he said with a grimace. “My son refused to send medical scholars to recharge them.”
Fire and Fury, they were going to have to bind their wounds like the Indregai. Cazia touched her bloody face. Scars it was.
“Put out those fires,” Eshla commanded, moving from person to person and touching them with her stone. Most of the hostages were soldiers, although the man and woman in long robes had the look of merchants. The transformed grunts, now naked and covered in ash, rose choking from the floor. “And put away your iron weapons. These stones will—”
A flash of purple burst through the open doorway, slamming into Eshla from behind and driving her to the floor. It was a purple grunt, huge in the low room, and it had crushed the Queen Counsel’s rib cage, killing her instantly.
People screamed. Cazia realized she had dropped her mace and, Fire take her, could not see where it went. The grunt roared and the steward seemed to come to life. He hurled a stone at the beast, striking it on its broad back.
The grunt arched and screamed in pain but didn’t collapse. It staggered, stepping onto the stones that Eshla dropped at the same time the servant hit it with a throw of her own.
The beast collapsed and began to tremble.
“Outside!” Cazia shouted. “Get that thing outside!” Fire and Fury, the grunt was huge, but there were more than a dozen men and women here. They had the strength to do it.
But they were too disorganized, and worse, no one was translating for her. She grabbed the steward’s arm and tried to lift him up, spilling stones from his lap. “Everyone out!” she cried. “Tell them to get away from it!”
The steward overbalanced and fell off the edge of the stone stairs with a cry of pain. He shouted something in Surgish that sounded urgent enough. Everyone froze and looked at them both.
The grunt tore at its own flesh and shrieked. One of the soldiers rushed for the door, and it was like a dam breaking. As soon as that soldier ran, everyone did. Cazia moved toward the steward but he waved her away frantically. The grunt had begun to glow. There was no time to save him, and he knew it.
The little girl grabbed Cazia’s arm and pulled her to the floor above. Cazia could have resisted, but she didn’t. They ran together.
A brilliant flash of orange-white light filled the stairwell, and Cazia pushed the girl into the room on the second floor room, then lunged after her, rolling across the planks as fire rolled up the stairwell ceiling. Tongues of flame shot through the floorboards, too, and Cazia immediately began the Fifth Gift. A wave of hot, suffocating air passed over her, and the screams from below were like no screams Cazia had ever heard in her life.
Too man
y did not get out. The servant wailed as the fire caught on her robe, and then Cazia had finished her spell. Water poured from the space between her hands like a torrent, dousing the girl’s tunic. Then she turned the jet onto the floor, flooding it. The water blasted from nothingness, surging across the floor, shattering furniture against the far wall and pouring through the slats.
Steam billowed from the floor below, choking and scalding them both. Cazia’s first instinct was to retreat further up the tower, but she stood her ground, washing over the boards one moment, then funneling a deluge down the stairwell the next. Thick smoke and billows of steam surrounded her, then faded. Her torrent of water kept on.
I am a wizard. Cazia’s magic had a potency that would have terrified the old busybodies in the Scholars’ Tower, but she did not have to fear them any longer. A fierce smile pulled at the cut on her chin and lip, making her bleed again, and that was fine.
They were going to win this fight. She was going to win this.
Cazia let the spell die away. The servant scrambled off the wet floor and knelt at her feet. The girl’s eyes were wide with terror. That would not do. Cazia motioned her to stand.
She did. Great Way, she really was just a child. “Cazia,” she said, pointing toward herself.
“Issilas,” the girl answered with a curtsy.
Cazia took hold of the girl’s empty hands and squeezed them. “Cazia, Issilas, rawr!” she said, and the girl actually smiled. Cazia released her and pointed at the kinzchu stones on the floor. Issilas began collecting them immediately.
Cazia went far enough down the stairs to look into the room. It was as she’d feared. Not everyone had escaped from the room before the grunt had burst into flame. The steward with the twisted leg lay were he had fallen, his fist raised before his body as though he was about to fight. His two compatriots also lay burned beyond recognition, and there were six or seven other bodies, too. All had been roasted alive. The smell of their burned flesh and the ankle-deep water--like a huge kettle of soup--made Cazia’s stomach turn over.
But the others who had escaped were not far from the doors. Cazia waved them in. They entered nervously.
The blast of fire and rush of water had spread kinzchu stones all across the floor. The Evening Person sprawled in the center, atop Eshla’s scorched and blackened corpse. The kinzchu stones were supposed to be lethal to his kind, and he had transformed directly on top of a pile of them.
Cazia’s grandmother, the Queen Counsel—was dead.
The roars from outside were sudden and vicious—what had happened in the tower had not gone unnoticed. The husband and wife clung to each other in terror where they stood against the wall, and the others, five soldiers in uniforms, stood in utter disarray.
Fire and Fury, they had to do better.
Issilas began to chatter at them, telling them about the stones. At least, that’s what Cazia assumed, because the soldiers immediately began snatching stones from the floor.
The merchant couple stayed where they were, apparently content to let others fight to save them. Cazia came down the stairs carefully, making sure she did not step on any loose kinzchu stones, but the soldiers had been quick to gather them up.
There was her mace, lying in a far corner in a puddle of nasty-smelling water. “Give me that,” she said impulsively.
“I will,” the husband said. He picked up her weapon and offered it to her handle first.
“Hello, new translator,” she said to him. He looked ready to object, but she didn’t give him a chance. “You and your wife are to start picking up these kinzchu stones. That’s what they’re called. Explain to the soldiers that none of the stones should touch me or I’ll lose my magic and won’t be able to make more.”
“B-but we—”
“Are not. Helpless. Bystanders,” Cazia said. “You’re going to fight. Now explain it.”
He began speaking to the soldiers in Surgish, and Cazia could only hope that he was telling them what she’d told him to say. His wife collected stones in the center of the room where a few had rolled far from the Evening Person’s body and Eshla’s, too.
Grandmother. Cazia had learned she had a grandmother on the same morning she’d been Fire-taken from The Way. The same morning. Once, she might have complained that it was unfair.
Glancing through the doorway, Cazia saw blue-furred grunts running toward them. “Ready!” she shouted, pointing at them. The soldiers stood some way back, their arms cocked, and when the beasts appeared in the doorway, they sent a volley of stones through. The grunts collapsed. The merchant’s wife followed with one of her own that struck the lintel. Oh, well, at least she was trying.
Issilas joined the soldiers, her arm cocked to throw. Two more grunts tried to rush the doorway but collapsed when the stones struck them.
Then the two grunts lying atop each other in the doorway bellowed out their death cry, and all movement in the courtyard stopped. They began to burn, and so did the two farther out, which made the beasts in the yard flee in terror.
“We can’t stay here,” Cazia said, and the merchant repeated her words in Surgish. “We have to drive them out of the rest of the city.”
One of the soldiers responded to the translation with words of his own. The merchant said, “He wants to retake the sentry towers. He says it’s vital.”
Fury guide me. Monument sustain me. “Fine,” Cazia said. “Let him know we’re moving this fight into the open.”
Chapter 29
Cazia sloshed through the stinking water close to the doorway and began another spell. This time, she created the biggest block of stone she could manage out in the courtyard beside the wall of the tower. The defeated grunts in the doorway were still burning when she hopped over them and knelt beside the block of granite. The First Plunder took some time to cast, compared to other spells, and she needed to be close to the stone. Hopefully, the burning grunts beside her, and their death cries, would keep the beasts away until she could finish.
The others chattered to each other in rapid, low Surgish, but Cazia ignored them easily. More difficult was the smell of burned fur and meat, the screams and roars from the other parts of town, and the knowledge that she’d just seen her own grandmother die.
No. She pushed all that aside and remembered the presence of that Other. Vast and powerful it was, and imagining she was communing with it was almost like the real thing. The gray emptiness that came over her thoughts was deep and silent, and she realized suddenly that the First Plunder was made powerful by the tremendous nothingness in her thoughts. This spell would be her most powerful yet.
The anti-magic spell passed into the huge granite stone almost as easily as pouring water in a cup. She gasped when she was done, and immediately cast the spell to break the stone apart.
It crumbled. Cazia snatched up her mace and backed away from the spreading pile. “Here!” she shouted. “Here are your weapons!”
Four naked young men in the doorway, newly restored to themselves, crouched low and tried to cover themselves. The soldiers in the tower pushed through them and began gathering stones in their arms. A grunt raced at them from around a corner, charging from the southern end of the yard, and the soldiers began hurling stones at it. One struck, finally, and it collapsed.
A wave of two dozen smaller grunts raced over the bridge and bounded toward them, jaws gaping. The soldiers bellowed out a war cry and began throwing stones as fast as they could grab them. The naked men joined in, one throwing stones by the handful in a spray.
Five or six of the grunts collapsed, one because it stepped on a stone that missed its original target. Their death cries caused the others to falter and glance back at them, which allowed the soldiers to throw at stationary targets.
After three more hits, the creatures retreated in terror. The men cheered, a sound that Cazia knew would draw more grunts.
The merchant couple emerged from the tower, their arms loaded with stones of their own. The husband spotted a grunt coming at them
from the other side of the tower and he hurled a stone. It was a lucky hit, and the beast fell. The couple smiled at each other in open astonishment.
Another massive purple grunt charged from the north at the same time several blues came from the south. Issilas joined the others in throwing volley after volley.
It was working. Fire and Fury, it was really working. They were holding off an invasion of grunts by throwing rocks the way the Tilkilit did.
The purple grunt they’d taken down at the edge of the courtyard burst into flames, sending a wall of fire in every direction. The humans quailed from it, but the fire dissipated before it reached them. They lunged for the shrinking pile of stones once again.
At the other side of the door, Cazia began the process again. First, she created a block of granite, then infused it with anti-magic, then broke it apart. She ignored all the screams and roars, all the death cries and the crackle of flames. Even the steady, frantic pounding from inside the sentry tower meant nothing to her.
By the time she finished, at least thirty more humans had joined their ranks. They were men and women, young and old, all naked and filthy, and all burning to drive out The Blessing.
“Here!” she called, backing away. “Here!”
Many of the people crowding around the first pile of stones raced toward hers. Three soldiers grabbed an armload and ran into the sentry tower.
That left the transformed humans, the merchant couple, and Issilas out in the courtyard with Cazia. Surely that would be enough. Even better, the yard was littered with thrown kinzchu stones, which meant that, with each attack, more grunts collapsed simply because they stepped in the wrong place.
Fire. The wall of fire that had roared up from the fallen purple grunt had not reached the people throwing kinzchu stones, but it had reached the market buildings at the other side of the courtyard. They had caught fire, and the wind was blowing the flames toward the rest of the city.
The Way Into Darkness: Book Three of The Great Way Page 32