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

Still, he’d hoped to find the man hanging from a noose or something. Anything to satisfy his urge to fight.  
    He thanked the old scholar, which seemed to surprise her. She was led away.  
    There was a small table at the far end of the room and a large bed covered with down cushions. The old scholar was living in comfort. Tejohn stripped a green cloth from the bed, went into the hall, and wrapped up the little horror Doctor Twofin had created. When he went back inside, the soldiers were standing in the middle of the room, staring about in horror.  
    The rest of the space was a workroom.   There was a table with leather straps on it--Tejohn laid the little bundle upon it--and a stack of wooden cages against the wall. Inside the cages were...things.  
    The shutter Tejohn broke had fallen onto one of the cages, smashing it just enough for those rat creatures to escape. In the other cages he saw a house cat with the head and neck of a serpent, a dog with the mouth and throat of a human being, a boq with an alligaunt’s feet and tail, and other, more terrible things. What he did not find, to his great relief, was a cage with a nearly-whole altered human being inside.  
    He could make no sense of it. The rats with hands... Perhaps the doctor imagined they could be trained as thieves? The whole thing seemed pointless. Tejohn was used to cruelty. Kings, tyrs, and masters of any kind were cruel to their underlings on a whim--vicious, sometimes--but usually, that cruelty was designed to serve some purpose.  
    This? Nothing had been accomplished here but pain and horror. He could feel the stink of this room settling into his hair and beard, slowly collecting on his skin. The room would have been unbearable if part of the wall had not been opened to the mountainside.  
    On one of the tables nearby, there were bloody bronze tools--slender tongs, hammers, and sharp knives. On the floor beside it was a woven grass basket full of rotting pieces of meat, fur, and feathers. Flies buzzed above it. Tejohn assumed the wizard would pitch his refuse into the lake waters below, but he didn’t seem to have bothered for several days. And the man slept just over there.  
    “Wait in the hall,” Tejohn said, and the soldiers complied happily. Tejohn held out his hand and one of the men readily turned over his spear. Hmf. The fellow Lowtower had put in charge stayed. Good fellow.  
    Together, they went from cage to cage, killing. By unspoken agreement, they were careful to do each with a single thrust so the end was as quick and merciful as it could be. When it was all over, and the strange cries of pain and terror were silent, Tejohn felt as though he’d been soiled down to his bones. He returned to the edge of the gallery opening and was about to kick the basket of rotting meat out into the open air when he suddenly noticed a pair of tiny, perfect human ears lying among the blood and feathers.
    Someone’s child. Someone’s precious child.  
    He nearly wept then, remembering the pain of finding his own murdered child. Could it have happened again? His children were supposed to be safe on the other side of the Straim, but they were closer to Peradain than he was. Had they been bitten by a grunt? Torn apart and eaten? He imagined finally finishing his mission and discovering that nothing was left of his family but old bones.  
    The urge to throw off the oath he had made to Lar Italga was so powerful, it made him tremble. The Italgas were dead or had been transformed by The Blessing. Why should he stay here in the mountains when he could steal back the flying cart--  
    Tejohn turned suddenly and ran to the door. “I need two spears to stand guard over this room. No one is to enter without Lowtower’s permission, understand? The rest of you will come with me.”  
    They ran back the way they’d come, up the stairs and down long, dark corridors by the light of a single flickering torch. The soldier Lowtower had put in charge--with