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

expected to find the guards here burned to death and the cart long gone, but the scholar doesn’t seemed to have come here. Still, he might try yet. I need one of you to come with me to find the commander, but the rest will need to stay to make sure no one steals this device.”  
    “I’ll go with you,” one of the soldiers stepped forward.
    He looked he’d never needed to shave in his life. “What’s your name, soldier?”
    “Littleshell, my tyr. Zash.”
    “Lead me to the tyr’s prisons, Zash. We have to tell your commander that Doctor Twofin is unaccounted for and he has allies working with him. It may not be safe for Lowtower to send his family directly home.”  
    Littleshell took Tejohn’s warning to heart and set a brutal pace on the long staircase down, but as much as he wanted to, Tejohn couldn’t ask for a rest, not when someone’s children were in danger.  
    There was too much to be done. Tejohn needed to get out of the holdfast in one piece to finish his mission, but he also needed to prevent a civil war from breaking out within Twofin lands. Once he recruited a scholar--hopefully more than one--who could learn the spell at Tempest Pass, he would need trained spears to accompany them into the field. He simply couldn’t send spellcasters into battle without support.  
    The Twofin troops, however ill trained, were his only hope. These people would have to be the base for his war against the grunts. They would need archers, cooks, blacksmiths, farmers…not to mention a safe place to sleep and eat. If they managed to hold on to the flying cart, they would make good use of that, too. Not to attack from above--he’d seen how well that tactic worked in Peradain--but to quickly deploy troops and rush the injured back here to the sleepstones.  
    The whole thing was coming together in his head: how he would organize the soldiers, how many scholars he would need, how they would deploy and retreat. However, if he returned from Tempest Pass to find their numbers reduced because of internal strife… The Twofins needed a steward that could unite them all.  
    That also meant Doctor Twofin had to be found and dealt with. Tejohn was the one who had broken him out of his Finstel cell; in a way, he was partly at fault for every one of the old man’s victims.
    Where was the old wizard? Tejohn thought he should have rushed to his rooms, gather a few things he might need, then steal that flying cart. It was valuable and an easy way to escape of Twofin lands.  
    The old scholar hadn’t done any of that. If he was fleeing, he was doing it on foot, and Tejohn didn’t believe that for a moment. Twofin was nearly sixty years old if he was a day, and no sleepstone in the world could return a man’s youth.  
    The young man led him down a narrow flight of stairs—they had to navigate around a pile of spilled crockery and something thick, black, and sweet-smelling—then through the kitchens. The servants stared daggers at him.  
    For a moment, he thought they hated him for the harm he had done to their tyr, but that sort of thinking was a relic of his days living with the Italgas in the palace. No, they glared because he had brought chaos into their lives. Things were hard enough for them when there was order, but now that he’d killed the tyr, anything might happen to them.  
    The worst of it was, if there was any group in this holdfast who could help him locate the old scholar, it was the servants. If only he could convince somehow that he had been one of them, just for a short while…  
    As hard as he tried, he couldn’t see a way to make it work, not without showing them the body parts in Doctor Twofin’s rooms as though they were wares he wanted to sell. They deserved better and so did those children.  
    They finally came to a large chamber at the bottom of a steep stair. Commander Lowtower crouched at edge of the entryway to a long, narrow corridor. Several arrows lay on the floor behind him.