The Way Into Darkness: Book Three of The Great Way (24 page)

The village folk had never named their community. If this seemed strange to Tejohn at first, it quickly became clear that their greatest fear was that their land would be seized and they would be put to the sword, and no troops would be nearby to stop it. Calling themselves “Markwind Village” or “Italgaton,” they claimed, was tantamount to goading the rest of the world to say, “We ought to take Italgaton for ourselves.”

It seemed ridiculous on its face, but they had lived in the wilderness for ten years without even the need to construct a wall, so something was working in their favor. Not even the Durdric would attack them, knowing they were servants and not free citizens.
 

What seemed less strange was their attitude toward Ghoron Italga. He was the reason they were living as they were, lifelong servants with no real master but their empty bellies. Without him, they would have spent the last ten years with a lash hanging above them while they scrubbed floors or dug mines. What’s more, since the prince had gone hollow, their duties toward him had become extremely light.
 

However, the majority of them thought he should be hanged. When the madness had overtaken him, the servants had managed to spirit away his daughter under the perfectly legitimate concern that he would do harm to her. As they told the story, he caught them at it but let them carry the girl away without interfering. At first. Moments before they’d reached safety, the prince had come out of his tower and burned one of them alive.
 

She was a girl of fourteen, Allittess. Esselba and her friends spent a little while talking about all the reasons she was an exceptional person, and Tejohn did his best to feign interest. The truth was, the world was full of delightful people slain for no other reason than that they caught the attention of someone who could do it. He was brimming with tragedy already.

“There’s a war,” he finally said, interrupting an old woman in the middle of a recitation of chores the dead girl had helped with. Only a few slivers of daylight came through the cloth hung over the cave entrance, but it was enough to see their faces. The rough plank beneath him creaked as he leaned forward. “It’s a war we can’t win without every scholar we can find.”
 

“We haven’t seen any evidence of war,” Esselba said.
 

“Except,” a narrow-skulled old man interjected, “that midsummer came and went without our annual visit from the palace.”

“How is it that he never came after you?” Tejohn looked from face to face, trying to determine whether they were about to lie to him. “I’ve never known a hollowed scholar to leave regular folks unmolested.”
 

He’d expected them to look uncomfortable or to sheepishly admit they’d made some sort of bargain with a wizard, but instead, they became contemptuous. “He was supposed to be improving the flying carts. He isn’t a medical scholar,” Esselba said with a dismissive wave of her hand, “so it’s not like he was looking for bodies to cut apart. And apparently, mining and building magic are beneath his station in life, so he had no way to come up the cliff except climbing, and we discouraged that.”
 

“How?”
 

Stones in the summertime. Very cold water in the winter. It was only after we splashed oil on him and threatened to set him alight that he stopped trying.”
 

“I sometimes wish we had done it,” the narrow-skulled man said.
 

Esselba gave him a sharp look. “It would have cost all of us our lives,” she said. “Then.” Tejohn was about to object, but she waved him off. “I know, I know. The empire is losing a war.”
 

“The
human race
is losing a war.”
 

Before she could respond, a young boy threw back the cloth over the cave entrance. “Visitors,” he said in a way that made Esselba and her council share a worried look.
 

“Wait here,” she said to Tejohn, then led the others out of the cave. Every one of them gave a worried glance at his spear leaning against the rock.
 

He sat for only a few moments, then moved to the edge of the cloth and pulled it back far enough to peek out.
 

Esselba stood in the small green, surrounded by other village folk. Before them were two grown women with a half dozen children kneeling behind. All were dressed in fur and had seashells woven into their hair. One of the women held a sharpened stick above her head; the other held a long wooden hook. They held both horizontally, with open grips, as though offering them to invisible giants. He could not understand their language, but he recognized the desperation in their voices.
 

Of course they were Durdric; who else could visit in this remote place? He let the cloth fall closed, picked up his spear, and took up a position near the mouth of the cave. He had nowhere to fall back and no line to support him, but if the people of this unnamed village needed him to fight for them, he was ready.
 

Instead, it was the herder girl and the Indregai princess who entered. “Something terrible has happened,” the little girl said.
 

“I think we can guess what it is,” Tejohn said.
 

The girl responded sharply. “Yes, I expect so.”

Testy. It wasn’t a surprise, though. She had been through a lot, and Tejohn had noticed a certain strain between the princess and the other two. “Good point. While we wait, we should plan our next steps.”

“We need more scholars,” the princess asserted confidently. “We can not equip an army with the few we have.”
 

“What we need,” Tejohn said, “is more stones like the ones you brought us. The First Plunder. The prince believes it will be easy to copy the spell, but we will want to have the proper stones ready when he is ready. We should gather the same type of stones for him.”
 

“From talking to Cazia,” the princess said, “I suspect that spell is within the grasp right now.
 

“But first, we must make to eat,” Kinz said. “Cazia is down with the old scholar. I will bring her something.” She hurried out of the cave. Tejohn watched her go.
 

“I have seen how you look at her,” the princess said primly.
 

Fire and Fury, even the little girl had noticed. “How nearly every man looks at her,” Tejohn responded. “And some women, too. Still, it doesn’t matter. She has shown no interest in me, nor would I expect her to. More importantly, I swore an oath of marriage and I mean to honor it. However, I would like to thank you for pointing out my bad habit, princess. I will be more polite in the future.”
 

The girl rubbed her forehead. She looked very tired. “I suppose you can not help it. She is very beautiful.” She looked very worldly as she said it, and Tejohn was unexpectedly charmed by her odd mix of childishness and adulthood.
She should be safe at home among her people.
 

At that moment, a boy entered with two bowls of rice, each decorated with strips of some sort of roasted game bird, along with actual spoons for once. The princess dug in immediately, but Tejohn scooped two of his four strips of meat off his rice and laid them atop the girl’s.

“Don’t argue,” he said when it appeared she would take offense. “I am full grown but you are still on your way. You need it more.”
 

She shrugged, then scooped a piece into her mouth. “It tastes awful.”
 

“Chew it well,” Tejohn said without thinking. Grief formed a lump in his throat, and for a few moments, he could not swallow. How many times had he said those same three words to his skirmishers? Great Way, but he hoped to see his family again, and soon. Very, very soon.
 

“There is still one thing we haven’t tested,” the princess said.
 

“What’s that?”
 

“Whether the kinzchu stones work on The Blessing.”

It was amazing how quickly they had shifted their hopes from the variation of the Fifth Gift he’d come all this way to find to the kinzchu stones.

Tejohn dug deep into his bowl, hoping to find something sweet inside like an apricot. There was nothing. “Or how it works, assuming it does. Suppose it draws the magic out of them the way fire will boil a pot until it’s empty. Will that undo the transformation or will it simply kill them?”
 

“I know which I prefer,” the girl said.
 

Everything is dangerous.
“If it simply kills them, it will be a powerful weapon for our side, but I’m not sure it will matter in the long run. The head of a spear can already kill if you touch someone with it the right way. I think the war has gone too far against us to win with what is essentially a more effective spear.”
 

“I see your point. What if the stones do not affect them at all?”

“Then Ghoron or Cazia must reinvent Lar’s spell, we recruit good spears to fight alongside scholars, and hope the Little Spinner favors us.”

“Ugh,” she said. “I’m full.”
 

Her bowl was still about a third full. After making sure that had indeed eaten as much as she could, Tejohn gratefully accepted the remainder of her rice.
 

By the time he finished, Esselba had returned alone. The Durdric refugees had confirmed the news Tejohn had brought: the Peradaini empire had fallen and now the curse was spreading among the mountain peoples.
 

“If you have weapons against these creatures,” Esselba said, “I want them. Kinzchu stones, you called them? The people in this community deserve to be protected.”

“The stones work against scholars,” Tejohn said. Was every leader of every group, however large or small, going to work against him? “We’re not ready to take on the grunts yet.”

Esselba licked her lips. “The first set of weapons you make will be distributed to the village. Two for each of us. Otherwise, you are not welcome here.”

“Two?” the princess exclaimed. “That—”

Tejohn held up his hand to silence her, and she clenched her jaw. “I will make a counteroffer. If we find a way to fight the grunts, we will do our best to see that you are protected. In return, you will offer us the food, shelter, and raw materials we need. If you don’t like that deal, we’ll gather our people and go.”
 

Esselba’s eyes went wide. “That would leave us unprotected!”
 

The princess crossed her arms over her chest. “You yourself said we would no longer be welcome.”
 

Tejohn’s voice was calm. “It’s true. We have too much work to do to risk being poisoned or having our throats cut in the middle of the night.”
 

“We would never—I never threatened your lives. Never.”
 

“You don’t have to.” Tejohn gestured toward the bench opposite, but Esselba only shook her head. This was her village and she was not going to sit at his urging. “You’re filled with fear right now, and that fear is going to build. Soon, your council is going to be urging you to
do what you have to do
to protect your children. That’s understandable. I know the feeling. I have children of my own. However, we are here to fight for the survival of all of us, so if you think I’m going to leave weapons sitting idle in this tucked-away little village while men, women, and children die out there, you are mistaken.”

“The people out there aren’t my responsibility,” Esselba said. “These people here are.”
 

“How can you speak that way,” the princess asked, “about all of Kal-Maddum?”
 

“Because she’s a debt child,” Tejohn said. “See her wrist?” Esselba did not move to display the tattoo on her inner arm, but she did not try to hide it, either.
 

The princess looked up at Tejohn. “I did not understand. I’m sorry.”
 

Esselba’s expression was icy. “You didn’t do anything to us, so you have no reason to apologize. But that world out there? That world stole everything from me. From all of us here. All we have left is this patch of ground and each other. I don’t understand why I should have to give even more.”
 

“The empire is gone,” Tejohn said. “We’re the ones who will decide what to replace it with.”

“If we survive,” the princess offered. The other adults had to shrug.
 

Esselba moved to the entrance of their little cave, drew back the cloth, and stared out at the people moving through the common. Two elderly women chased a group of small children through the grass. Two youths carried a full barrel between them. Others passed. Only the children smiled and laughed—news had traveled quickly.
 

Finally, she turned around. “What raw materials?”
 

By the end of the day, the plans were laid, but it was too close to sunset to start. In the morning, a half dozen young people were going to take axes out to a copse on a ridge and return four days later with enough wood for spear and mace shafts. Three of the older men would venture out in their hunting gear. A big cat was preferred, but any animal they could bring back for the leather would be welcome.
 

A much larger group, which included the new Durdric refugees, would go in search of the black stones. The mountain people assured them there was as much of the smooth black stone as they could carry a short distance downslope, and it was all lying about loose. They wouldn’t even need to dig for it. Apparently, that was the line you couldn’t cross in the Durdric religion: a stone could be picked up from the ground, but to dig was blasphemy.
 

After visiting Cazia and Kinz down near the tower, the princess informed him that Kinz had begun training to be a scholar. To his embarrassment, Tejohn’s instinctive reaction was outrage, but he squelched that response before it showed.
Of course
the herder should learn to do magic, as long as it helped them against The Blessing.
 

Let Fire take the old rules they had lived by. There was work to do and a war to win.