The Way Into Chaos: Book One of the Great Way by Harry Connolly

Author:Harry Connolly [Connolly, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Radar Avenue Press
Published: 2014-12-17T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

“I will stay,” Wimnel said. He stepped forward and handed Tejohn the stone. “The king asked me to take his life today. It was hard for him to speak, but he asked me to strike him down. I refused, and promised to care for him.”

Tejohn looked the man over. Loyal but not brave, he had thought; the man seemed likely to redeem the Farrabell name, if they survived long enough for anyone but Song to learn of it. “What if the king escapes his prison?”

“I’ll see that he does not.”

Arla wasn’t impressed by that. “What if he does anyway?”

“Then I will die. Or I will be transformed and run through the wilderness beside him. But I will do everything I can to avoid that day.”

Tejohn nodded to him. “I will take this as an oath.” Wimnel nodded in confirmation.

Tejohn strode into the yard. There were so many dead here, but most would be rotten before it was time for the king to feed again. He plunged his spear into every corpse by the fire, then into every Finstel servant and guard piled by the water tables. He did not find any living enemies hiding among the dead.

Then there was the mine itself. Could more Durdric fighters be hiding inside?

At the top of the camp, just beside the mine entrance, they discovered a structure Tejohn had never seen before. It had been built against the cliffside above the level of the wall, and it consisted of a stone furnace, now cold, with a clay cone above it. Was this the crucible where Sweeps steel was made? A tiny bit of dust blew out of the bottom of the cone.

Tejohn struck his sword against it. “Come out!” he shouted. “Come out or be cut apart.”

A slender, filthy bare foot stepped down onto the furnace. A young woman climbed out. She wore the rags common for servants, but they were even more caked with dirt than her leg. She had a sallow face and sad, sunken eyes.

“Bring her.”

They all returned to the lower room of the commander’s tower. Tejohn put some more wood on the fire so it would not burn out. When he turned around, the others stood in a circle around the servant. She stared at the floor.

“What crime brought on your debt?” he asked.

“No crime, sir,” she answered quickly. She bared her forearms; her only tattoo was an arrow on her left wrist. “I’m a debt child,” she continued, as if he didn’t know what that arrow meant. “My mother stole sourcakes when she was a girl--to feed her family after the Witts burned our lands, she said. She was caught and sentenced to fifteen years. Me and my brother were supposed to buy her freedom partway, but she died first. My father was a fisherman who had his boat stolen and had to sell himself into service to avoid starvation.”

Debt children. Convicted criminals turned over their own children to work off their crimes, and there was no time limit for the service of a debt child.

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