The Way Into Chaos (49 page)

“I admit,” Coml said, “I’m surprised to hear it. I know scholars are useful in a supporting capacity to a square of spears or line of bows, but I have never thought them useful in the thick of battle.
 

Tejohn shut his eyes, as the memory of fire, crumbling rock, and fierce volleys of iron-tipped darts overwhelmed him. He had faced scholars on the battlefield. He didn’t have the luxury of underestimating them.
 

Arla filled the silence by answering Coml’s unasked question. “I myself saw the king bite into the beast’s heart while he laughed.”
 

“That’s what Captain Dellastone reported. Huh. Now I can’t help but wonder what the...ruhgrit’s heart is like.”
 

“Huge,” Tejohn said, “and hot to the touch. Which brings up other news I must share. The ruhgrit stalk their prey in the daylight but they strike at night, in the darkness. You should double up your watch stations. It’s possible that your night guards are not deserting after all.”
 

The commander looked startled. “That’s a disturbing thought.” Coml turned his attention to his bowl, scooping out a few mouthfuls of roasted dark meat and sticky rice. When he looked more composed, he said, “My tyr, I must say, when I mentioned that Samsit fell, you did not seem surprised.”
 

“I wasn’t,” Tejohn said. “One of the spears began to change en route.”

“Ah. What did you do with your spear?”
 

Tejohn shrugged. “I took his head. He had become an enemy of the empire.”
 

Coml stopped chewing for just a moment, then continued again. When he looked up from his food again, his expression had subtly changed. He had never been truly friendly, but now he looked like a man about to do battle. “Of course, my tyr. And what can I do for you?”
 

Tejohn had planned to ask to use the commander’s mirror, but what he said instead was “All I need is a small rowboat and a few supplies for my scout and myself. I need to reach Splashtown as soon as possible on the king’s errand, and I hope to take the Shelsiccan around the spur.” If the commander was going to use the Finshto name, so would Tejohn.
 

Coml wiped the bottom of his bowl with a hunk of bread. Without looking up, he said, “You will need a few of my soldiers, I suppose?”

“No,” Tejohn answered. “Your need is greater than mine. I hope.”
 

“That is fine,” Coml said. He stood and bowed. “Please accept my apologies, my tyr, for not waiting for your food to arrive. I have a barricade to oversee. If you would excuse me.”

“Of course.”

The commander hopped down from the dais onto the main floor of the mess. Arla leaned toward Tejohn. “Am I misreading things, or did he seemed threatened by something you said, my Tyr?”

“Watch him for me,” Tejohn said. When he’d said
enemy of the empire,
Coml’s insincere chilliness had turned into something else. Something Tejohn didn’t like. “What is the scrawny little liar doing?”

“He’s crossing the room toward the tables in the back. He’s stopped to talk with the members of a fleet squad,” Arla answered. “Archers and scouts by the look of their gear. The commander’s back is to us, but he’s leaning down to speak to the squad leader...who just looked directly at us.”
 

“Try to look bored. Now, at the squad leader’s order, the rest of the squad will rush through their meals and go.”
 

“Yes, my Tyr. That’s what they’re doing. Commander Finstel is with them.”

“As they file out, do any of the others glance at us?”
 

“The squad leader again,” Arla said. “And the tall woman in the back. And another dark-eyed one. Now their backs are to us and they’re leaving the mess.”

“Fire and Fury.”
 

The stewards set bowls in front of them. More salty rice with apricots--the food of the common soldier.
 

Tejohn wasn’t hungry anymore, but he’d been on too many campaigns to push the bowl away. He forced himself to eat.
 

“My tyr, are they our escort to Splashtown?”
 

Tejohn was surprised by the question. “No. They’re our assassins.”

“That’s inconvenient.” Arla picked up her bowl and began to eat with gusto. “My yr,” she said when she had finished, “you called him a liar. But... What did I miss?”
 

Tejohn pushed his empty bowl away. “He asked about Samsit. He asked about the king. He asked about the ruhgrit. But he never asked what happened on the day Peradain fell.”
 

Arla sat suddenly upright. “Great Way.”

“He already knows the story, which means they did rescue someone from the city. Someone who was there when the portal opened.”
 

There was no choice. Tejohn needed to get into the Finstel holdfast and find out who had been rescued from Peradain. He’d seen Amlian killed, but Ellifer had been lost in the confusion. Could the king still be alive?
 

And he needed a flying cart, still, because someone had to get to Tempest Pass.
 

He pushed his empty bowl away. “No sense in waiting around here. Let’s give those assassins their shot.”

Chapter 23

Climbing down was easier than climbing up, because this side of the Northern Barrier had a more rounded, weathered surface. It certainly wasn’t a slick, featureless wall.
 

But it was still dangerous. It took the rest of the day to descend only a couple dozen feet to the plateau below.

The dragon bones were monstrous. The skull alone was as large as Mahz’s wagon, and Ivy immediately announced, eyes shining, that she planned to camp inside it for the night. She crawled through the opening in the neck and assured them it was quite roomy inside.
 

Cazia didn’t like it, but she crawled in after. The skull was larger than the chambers she’d created inside the rock, but her spellcasting had already made her feel somewhat less than real, and now she was going to spend the night inside a dead thing’s head like a bad dream.
 

A month before, she might have objected strenuously. She might have insisted they shelter somewhere else. Instead, she rolled out her cloth and went to sleep.
 

Ivy woke her in the middle of the night. They could hear the beating of wings, and by the starlight coming through the eye sockets, Cazia could see that the princess’s eyes were wide and terrified.
 

She rolled over and peered through the eye sockets. A pair of giant eagles had landed on the plateau nearby, beating their wings rhythmically. Then they began to squawk in high, harsh voices.
 

Kinz started out of a sound sleep, but Ivy shushed her. Had the birds spotted them? Cazia wondered if they would tear her apart to eat her--how much would that hurt?--or drop her from a height first.
 

Neither happened. Instead, they leaped into the air, circled higher and higher, then crossed over into the Sweeps.
 

The three girls held hands and lay as quietly as they could. The night winds were gentle now that they were out of the Sweeps, but that only meant they could better hear the beating of wings.
 

At dawn, they carefully crawled out to check the sky. There were no birds nearby, but two circled lazily over the misty place where the mountain ranges met. They were barely smudges against the gray sky; surely they wouldn’t be able to spot her from so far away.
 

“We must be careful,” Kinz said. “We can not climb down the side of the hill in open view the way we did yesterday.”
 

Ivy came close. “We can not ask Cazia to tunnel us down. She would never survive it.” The girl laid her hand on Cazia’s elbow. “How do you feel?”
 

That was a good question. Cazia found it difficult to turn her attention inward to take stock of herself. The urge to cast a spell was growing. She felt as thin and hollow as an eggshell. Every word they spoke to her was like a shriek. Her skin burned when the wind blew across it, and it chafed where her skirts touched. She lifted the cloth to look at her legs—as much to break Ivy’s touch as anything else—but there were no sores, no swelling, not even any redness there. She had magic inside her, and the magic hurt.
 

“I’m in pain,” she admitted. There was no point in hiding it. “Not my hands, for some reason, but most every other part of me feels like I’ve been sunburned.”
 

And I don’t care.
She couldn’t bring herself to say that, not when her tears were so close to the surface again.
 

“You have been Cursed,” Kinz said, but Cazia ignored her.
 

“Why do you look as though you are about to cry?” Ivy asked. She wrung her hands nervously, as though she’d done something wrong.
 

Cazia thought about her dreams and of falling during the climb. “Don’t I have reason enough?”

“We are going to stay here for a few days,” Ivy announced. “We have the rations, do we not?”

“If we stretch them,” Kinz announced.
 

“We will. We can not climb down until we are all back to full strength. That is common sense. So, it is settled.”

Kinz sighed. “You just want to camp inside the dragon skull the little longer.”

“Of course!” Ivy answered, grinning suddenly. “Think of the story it would make.”

The giant birds were least active around dawn, and that’s when Kinz did her exploring. It was dangerous, but she insisted that she was skilled at moving through cover. Cazia suspected that as someone who had lived her whole life under the open sky, her scouting missions were more about escaping their confined space than actual reconnaissance.
 

In the meantime, Ivy spent a fair portion of the day digging out the dragon’s teeth. She confided that she’d heard that, if they were planted like seeds in fertile soil, they would grow into new dragons.
 

By the third night, Cazia lied and said she was ready to continue. Kinz had been filling their canteens from a hillside stream, and there was no reason at all for her to cast a spell. Her pain had eased, but her insides still felt hollowed out. She’d felt no worry when Kinz crawled out of their shelter, no amazement when Ivy told the story of the ancestor who single-handedly slew a dragon, and no irritation when the others bickered about food or religion.
 

None of it meant anything to her.
 

It was clear that she wasn’t going to get her personality back, so it was time to start down the mountainside. Ivy looked skeptical but Kinz was clearly grateful. She had found a way down, she said.
 

She showed it to them just before dawn. There was a vertical crevice in the side of the mountain that was choked with thick, bark-covered vines. None of them had ever seen anything like it, but the lattice was strong enough to support their weight. They could climb down through them, well out of sight of the birds overhead.

Ivy attacked it enthusiastically; Cazia struggled the most and often felt on the verge of falling. It wasn’t just that her hands were weakest or that her body was heaviest, although they were. It was also that she felt weary of everything, and was bored even by the need to preserve her own life.
 

Fury guide me,
she thought. She closed her eyes and silently repeated the prayer over and over. It was a prayer for poor people and servants, not for the children of tyrs. It was a prayer of desperation.
Fury guide me
. Fury was a god of many aspects--every kind of human being, good or evil, was contained in him, and that meant every human had Fury in them.
 

Cazia needed that fury. She wouldn’t survive without it.
 

And there it was, kindled inside her like a spark of the divine. She closed her eyes and mentally fed that little light until it began to burn. Magic had scoured her empty, but it couldn’t take away the touch of her god.

They stopped for food at nearly the bottom of the crevice, and Kinz began to rub Cazia’s hands.
 

“How are you holding up?” Ivy asked.

Fury guide me
. “No mountain is going to get the better of me.”

At the bottom of the crevice was a tumble of rocks as large as Ivy’s Peradaini house but no more vines. The eagles had taken to the air, hovering over ridges and shelves in the surrounding mountainside, but the morning mists were still thick, and the girls managed to slide down out of sight without being eaten.
 

Kinz moved very close to the other two girls and whispered, “Sound carries in the mists. We must be as quiet as snakes in the grass.”
 

They nodded and began to clamber down through the rocks. The fog made it impossible to plan a route to the forest floor--soon, they couldn’t see much farther than the reach of their arms. Each time Ivy cat-crept down a huge, sloping rock, she seemed to vanish into the mist. Still, they managed by trial and error.