The Way Into Chaos (29 page)

Cazia didn’t like that idea, either. In fact, for a young woman in the empire with no name, she had few options: servitude, military service, religious seclusion, marriage, and... What? Open a hat shop? What she needed was to find another Scholars’ Tower.

But where could she find one outside the palace and Tempest Pass? That was the whole point of building the towers. The king kept tight control of the scholars and their Gifts. “I don’t know,” Cazia admitted.
Col would have known.

Vilavivianna shrugged. She did not look up from the bootlace she was trying to unknot. “We do not have to decide until we reach the end of the pass.”

Cazia thought about it for a moment. “A giant worm, huh?”

Vilavivianna laughed. “It sounds like raving, I know. My uncle was an interesting man: he was a great warrior and singer. Often, when he told me stories, I could not tell if he was joking or telling the truth.” After a moment, she said, “He was there, in the house in Peradain. He was the one who boosted me to the roof to Lar. I assume he is dead now.”

“Maybe not,” Cazia said. “By the time the grunts had reached the far end of the city, they had stopped killing and started simply biting people. Perhaps he has been transformed, like my brother.”

“Then he is dead.”
 

“I’m sorry.”

“I am sorry, too. I know what happened to your brother, and what you had to do. Would it be a comfort to you if I said I think you did the heroic thing?”

“No,” Cazia said, more sharply than she intended. She sighed. “No, I don’t see it that way.”

“I have wanted to say words of comfort to you all day, but I did not know what would be appropriate.”
 

“I’m sorry,” Cazia said. The princess could seem so formal and rigid, it was easy to forget that she was still a little girl. “Thank you very much. The truth is, we left my best friend behind in Peradain, and my brother is dead, and the others are back at Fort Samsit, waiting for their curses to take control of them—” And Lar, too. All day, she had been reliving the memory of her dart striking her brother, but she had been so focused on her own guilt that she hadn’t even considered the king.
 

Fire and Fury. He’d been bitten the same day as the people who had just taken Samsit. He must have transformed by now.
 

Cazia tried to imagine the scene: Lar sprouting fur and fangs inside the cart while it sped above the treetops. The driver panicking. The soldiers drawing their weapons. Tyr Treygar...

Could she imagine Old Stoneface surviving a situation like that? It was possible--he was supposed to be a talented killer--but could he stand against a grunt, especially when it was the cursed king he had sworn to serve? Would he be torn by duty or would he relish the chance to gut his troublesome student?

The possibilities swirled in her head like leaves in a whirlwind; she couldn’t even think about that now. She remembered Bittler shoving her and telling her to get out.

“That’s all of them,” Cazia said. “I lived as a hostage in the palace, surrounded by people all the time, but there were only six who didn’t treat me as an enemy. Now they’re all gone.”

Vilavivianna laid her hand gently on Cazia’s cheek. “I am fortunate. My parents are still across the Straim with my brothers and sisters. But many of my loved ones lived in that tall house in Peradain. My uncle, the wife, nine cousins--one of my cousins was only four months old. What will these grunts do to a tiny baby? Nip them lightly or devour them whole? This is something I wish to know. I also had friends I had known my whole life living with me in that house. And my honor guard.”

Cazia had absolutely no idea what to say, and to her horror, she heard the words “It sounds crowded” come out of her mouth.
 

The little princess laughed and began to cry. Cazia knelt beside her and held her close. A stone jabbed painfully into her knee, but she did not move until Vilavivianna leaned away.

“I am sorry,” the girl said, recovering her composure.

“I’ve been crying, too,” Cazia said.
 

“I thought I had my fill of it in my room back in Samsit.”

“Oh, no,” Cazia said. She remembered how long the Italgas had grieved when Lar’s younger brother died. “No, it’s going to take longer than that.”

“Well, that is inconvenient.” They both laughed again.
 

Cazia took the princess’s blankets and held them up. Vilavivianna lay down on her pad and Cazia covered her. Then Cazia stretched out beside her so they were nose to nose. “Tell me about Indrega.”
 

“It is very beautiful,” Vilavivianna said. “I had hoped to take my husband to see it someday, when the time came, but I do not think it will happen soon. We have trees and deep forests, and grass that is nearly blue.”

“I would like to see that someday myself.”

“We have mountains as well, but they are older than these. More rounded, with boqs and rabbits among the trees, and astonishing views. I do not mean to say that Peradain is not a beautiful land. The wind in the grasses makes a lovely sound, and I did enjoy the days we spent sailing on Deep Stone Lake.”

“But it’s not home.”

“No,” the girl said. “I can not walk through the deep forest here, surrounded by light reflected green by the leaves. There is little snow. There are no longhouses where everyone shares the meals and the laughter. I have felt isolated since I came here.”

Cazia took her hand. “What else?”
 

“You want me to tell you about the Indregai serpents, yes?”
 

“Only if you’re allowed. I’ve heard so many things but I’ve never seen one.”

“They are not that interesting, I am sorry to say. They are as long as two men lying heel to crown, and quite thick around the middle. They can talk—”

Cazia felt tingles run up her back. “They can?”

“Not to us,” Vilavivianna added hastily. “To each other. My uncle says we have tried to decipher the mouth sounds for years without success. And they can not even understand the most basic of verbal orders from us.”
 

Cazia thought about the translation stone in her pocket. Would the princess try to take it from her? “So you can’t understand each other at all?”

“We use gesture-words. It is basic, but it works.”

“And they don’t...attack you?” Cazia regretted the question as soon as the words left her mouth. The princess had just wept over her dead friends and family, and Cazia had to ask this?
 

But Vilavivianna kept a steady expression, as though it was an interesting philosophical inquiry. “Of course, sometimes. The winter before I left, a lumberman was bitten in an outer camp. The arm swelled up and turned black before he died. It turned out that he had been taunting the serpent with a stick before it bit him. My uncle used to say that human beings killed more human beings than the serpents do.”
 

Peradaini tyrs have been crossing the Straim for four generations...
 

But it wasn’t another accusation, apparently, because the girl said, “I miss my mother and father the most.”

“Of course,” Cazia said, as though she knew how wonderful mothers and fathers could be.
 

“They are very funny people,” the princess said. “They have to be, with the way things work in the clans. You can not order people about the way you do here. You have to try to persuade them before you call up your warriors. My uncle used to say the Indregai will follow a joke but never a command. And I miss the boots we have at home, which are much more comfortable than yours and do not make your feet sweat in the winter. And the food. And, of course, our gods are real.”

Cazia felt a sudden chill. “What do you mean? The gods are the gods. Of course they’re real.”

“No, I mean that our gods are
real
. You have temples and you worship, but all you have are statues or songs, yes? And one of the gods is actually many gods? I confess it all seems very convoluted and confused to me.”
 

“Fury is not ‘actually many gods.’ He is one god with many aspects. He’s the god of all humans.” In the growing darkness, Cazia could just make out the other girl’s smile. “What is it?”

“He appears as The Mother, yes? And The Sister? And The Prostitute?”

Cazia took a deep breath to soothe her irritation. She herself had giggled over the idea of a male god dressed as a mother when she was small, but Doctor Twofin had scolded her sharply, explaining that it was blasphemous to judge a god the way you’d judge a man. Besides, as she’d grown older, she’d learned that the dividing line between men and women was not always as sharp as it seemed.
 

So Cazia did her best to pass on Doctor Twofin’s lesson, trying to sound patient and mature. “If Fury was only male, he would be the god of men only. Women would have no god to intercede for them, and what an awful world that would be for us.”
 

It didn’t satisfy Vilavivianna the way it had Cazia. “But why Fury? Why is he not called Kindness, or Love, or Laughter?”
 

“That was one of the first questions I asked my tutors.”
 

Vilavivianna’s voice began to slow in the darkness as sleep came for her. “What did they answer?”
 

“Fury feels fury because he is the only god who can feel any emotion at all.”
 

“Hmph.”
 

“Our priests teach us that the gods other people worship are just aspects of Fury.”
 

“Oh, I do not think so,” the princess said in her sleepy voice. “There is nothing human about Boskorul. He delivers us the whales we cut up for oil after we offer him our sacrifices.”

“Do you mean animal sacrifices?” Cazia asked, hoping the girl was not about to admit that she
murdered
people in an attempt to please an aspect of Fury. Would Fury even accept that sort of worship? She supposed he would, if it was a human thing to do.
 

“Oh, no,” Vilavivianna answered. “We give him part of our yearly harvest. We just float it out to sea for him to consume. He is a sea god, not human at all. And there’s Kelvijinian, the god of the land, Tyr of the Sleeping Earth, in your language. He is not human either, although he does have a face and a great big nose almost as big as your Scholars’ Tower. Boskorul is scary, but Kelvijinian is nice. I met him when I was five, and he told me I was very pretty.”
 

The little princess trailed off into sleep, and Cazia bit her own knuckle, trying to suppress a laugh. She tried to picture the Little Spinner, a being so vast it filled the spaces between the stars--it
was
the spaces between the stars, and all the stars themselves, and the very concept of stars--complimenting a little girl’s dress.
 

It was absurd, obviously, but it would be rude to laugh. Cazia couldn’t help but like the princess and wished she had half the girl’s confidence.

What’s more, Vilavivianna had people she loved in this world, and she had someplace she could go. Cazia envied her that, too.

That night, she dreamed her friends had captured her and dragged her to Indregai, where a grunt the size of a mountain waited to devour her.

In the morning, Vilavivianna insisted Cazia hide her quiver in her pack. They would be crossing into the Sweeps soon, and there was no telling what they would find. Cazia reluctantly complied.
 

Once they were back on the path, she looked up and down the pass. The sky was just lightening and they wouldn’t see the sun for hours, but she could see enough to know that no one was chasing her. Not grunts. Not soldiers.
 

At mid day, they stopped for a short while. Cazia apologized to Vilavivianna for the saltiness of the food, but the little girl only shrugged. Travel foods were not meant to be delicious, only filling.
 

When their meal was partway done, Cazia said, “Vilavivianna, I would like to ask you a favor. In Peradain, all my friends called me ‘Caz.’” The little princess sat stiffly, as though she was about to be punished. “Would you mind calling me Caz? As a friend?”

The girl’s lower lip quivered slightly. “If you would call me Viv or Ivy, as my cousins once did. I would very much like for us to be friends.”
 

They smiled at each other, and Cazia’s heart felt full. In fact, she felt near to crying, which was silly. All this sorrow was making her much too sensitive.
 

As they hiked, the road passed beneath two cliffs that came so close, she could have thrown a stone from the base of one to the other. The winds whipped and swirled around the rugged outcroppings, and just beyond it, the path widened, the way a river widens as it nears the ocean. It became steep as well.
 

Cazia looked out into the valley ahead of her, marveling at the expanse of it. The Northern Barrier was vivid in the afternoon light, and she knew it wasn’t as close as it appeared, even though it seemed only a few days’ journey. Below that was a long narrow lake tucked against the base of the cliff, and closer still was a deep green slope of tall grasses, all bending toward the east under the constant pressure of that famous, unceasing wind. The plants were much less yellow than the grasses around Peradain, and more beautiful because of it.
 

She could see streams, too, dozens of them, that flowed away from her. At the edge of the grasslands below, the low, fading sun illuminated little splashes of red and white--clusters of tiny flowers growing from the rocks.

So beautiful. It looked like a place where you could run for hours and never see another human being. Pagesh should have seen this. She loved the outdoors, loved cataloging and sketching plants, then finding out their names. Pagesh should have lived long enough to see this.
 

Vilavivianna...Ivy started down the eastern edge of the slope. Good. Fort Piskatook was the sensible destination. They would head eastward along the Southern Barrier, then turn into the next pass. Cazia would first find a way to make herself useful to the commander there. Yes, she was just a girl, but she was a scholar, too. From there, she could arrange for Ivy to go home. Piskatook stood on the Peradaini side of the Straim, and it would be only logical for the local commander to see her safely across to her own people. Better that than start yet another war.