Free The Way Into Darkness: Book Three of The Great Way by Harry Connolly

said in a low voice, “get to the cells, wherever they are, and find your children.”  
    Lowtower looked up at Tejohn in shock. “You think...”
    “No. Probably not. The most likely thing is that these hands were taken from debt children. The old tyr wouldn’t want to lose valuable hostages, yes? So the scholar’s victims are probably servants. If the tyr knew what his brother was up to.”  
    “And if he didn’t?”  
    Doctor Twofin will lose more than his fingers. “Soldier, look to your children.”  
    Lowtower’s hands were visibly shaking when he began to give orders, giving one of his men provisional command and ordering him to support Tejohn’s efforts.  
    The destruction of part of the shutter was loud enough to draw curious onlookers. Most wore the short, ragged tunics of servants, and it made Tejohn nauseous to see them so starved and miserable. The child who had lost her hands to the creature at his feet might have been one of their sons or daughters.  
    Great Way, he could not bear to think of his little Teberr or the twins at the mercy of a hollowed-out medical scholar. The very thought brought on a surge of blood-red rage. At least he’d had the chance to take up a spear in the depths of his own grief; what remedy could a servant seek?
    “Find a mining scholar and bring him here,” he said. The servants stared at him without moving.  
    “Are you all deaf?” Lowtower roared. “The tyr called for a scholar! You two! Find one and bring him! Torches, too! The rest of you, find some duties to occupy yourselves or I will think of something for you!”
    That made them rush back into the interior corridor like leaves in a flooding stream. When Tejohn turned back toward the others, he found that both merchants had found the courage to approach the dead creature on the floor. They stared in horrified fascination.
    “I should make bold enough to suggest,” Redegg said quietly, “that Doctor Twofin knows we are out here.”  
    If that was meant to be a joke, it did not make anyone laugh. “You must understand,” Bluepetal said, “we had no idea. He asked me to deliver living rats. I… Maybe we should have suspected, but we didn’t. Song knows--”  
    “Never mind,” Tejohn said. “You know now. There’s no real reason for you to linger here in this hall. Doctor Twofin is not likely to be inside. Do you two know where the old tyr’s prison cells are?” Bluepetal nodded. “Go with the commander and help him find his family, then start the process of sorting out the prisoners who are political hostages and the ones who are there for murder, thieving, or rape.”  
    “That should be simple enough,” Redegg muttered without looking up, “since the political hostages are the only ones still alive.”  
    “We will send them home,” Lowtower promised.  
    “What about this?” Redegg gestured toward the rat creature on the stone floor.  
    Tejohn’s first instinct was to sweep it off the gallery into the lake below. His desire to be rid of it was powerful. “Few will believe what happened here if we do not preserve it. Tyr Twofin would not have held on to power without some allies; if we show this to them, it might forestall civil war. Go quickly.”  
    As they hurried away, the two servants returned with torches and a crooked old woman who must have been the scholar. The square-bodied young man that Lowtower had left in charge passed the torches to two of the men, then gently led the old woman to the door.
    She might have been an able scholar in her younger years, but she muttered and struggled to break apart the massive blocks holding the door shut. More of her spells failed than succeeded, but--with Tejohn anxiously gripping the hilt of his sword--she eventually created enough rubble to let the men push the door open.  
    Doctor Twofin was not there, of course. Tejohn had known he couldn’t be there from the moment that he bashed a hole in the wall and found it unblocked.