Read The Way Into Darkness: Book Three of The Great Way for Free Online Page B

 
    “So this is the edge of their territory?” Cazia asked.
    “It is. The temple is as far to the east as we dare go. Not that it matters. The land in the northeast is stony and uneven, terrible for farming or raising okshim. Come. My cousin wants to speak with you. Remember to be nice; guests are not supposed to be funny.”
    “I’m always nice,” Cazia snapped. She looked back at the serpents. They hissed quietly while they stared.  
    Belterzhimi did indeed want to speak with her but only to invite the three of them to his campfire for their dinner meal. The sun was low in the west by the time they joined him, and while they ate, they traded polite stories about their childhood. Belterzhimi did not press her to tell him secrets and did not seem to care if her stories were of the endless prank war she’d waged against the palace tutors and servants.  
    Only when the meal was finished did he seem ready to talk business. The smile he’d worn during their meal--which had never really seemed to suit him--vanished. He began to ask sharp questions about Cazia’s desire to enter the temple. Who did she want to send a message to? Where would this message be going? What was the content?  
    The princess tried to intercede, but Cazia laid a hand on her shoulder to let her know it was all right. Cazia explained that soldiers she knew had ventured into the west to find a spell that would help them against The Blessing. She wanted to know if they had gotten it and how the war was going.  
    Belterzhimi said that she could ask to speak to someone at a specific place, but that gods were fickle and if he declined, she was not to pursue the matter. One request, one answer, and she must accept it or suffer the consequences.
    “I understand.”
    “Good,” the warden said. “You may speak to him now, if it pleases you.”
    “Thank you.”  
    She stood and started across the meadow toward the Temple. Ivy got to her feet as if to follow her, but Cazia held up her hand. There was no need for a babysitter this time.  
    Fire and Fury, that massive face! The blocky nose, the half-lidded eyes, the gaping mouth that looked like a black cave. If she climbed into that darkness, would gigantic teeth clamp down on her?  
    She glanced at the Indregai soldiers around her. If anything, their expressions were more closed, more hostile than they had ever been. She forced herself to look back at Kelvijinian and was struck again by the idea that it was everywhere around her. She’d grown accustomed to it as the long day went on, but now that she approached, she was chilled once again by its size and power.  
    She was walking on its body. She slept on it, ate food grown from it, built fires on it, dug holes in it to empty her bowels. Everywhere. All around her.  
    Goose bumps ran the length of her body and she began to feel claustrophobic. Her gods were everywhere at once, obviously, but they had always been an abstraction. The god of the Ergoll was right there and she was about to talk to it.
    She came to a bare patch of grass with an open hole in front of it. It looked very like a rodent tunnel; Cazia dropped to her knees before it.  
    Was there a special greeting she was supposed to use? No, there couldn’t be. Ivy would have told her. “Greetings, Kelvijinian, god of the earth.”
    The echoing voice that answered did not come from the head itself, but from a hole in the ground below. “Welcome. Living. Human. Child. Did. You. Come. To. Ask. Something. Of. Me?”  
    The words wafted out of the tunnel on puffs of air. Kelvijinian’s breath. It smelled of freshly turned soil and earthworms. Cazia peered down into the darkness to see if there were lips or a tongue down there, but whatever made those sounds was too deep to see.  
    Cazia’s head was buzzing and her hands began to tremble. She was talking with all of Kal-Maddum, and it sounded surprisingly gentle. She had always thought the gods cared little for humankind, with the sole