The Way Into Darkness: Book Three of The Great Way Read Online Free PDF

live in the mountains or across the seas. They live in another realm entirely . Different oceans. Different lands. Even, I suspect, different skies.”  
    The man is mad . But Tejohn didn’t really believe that. Yes, this was the man who had accused Amlian Italga of running a covert war on her own empire, but everything he said about portals and flying carts and sea water flowing out of the mountains made a sick kind of sense.  
    Tejohn moved to the rail and stared down into the lake below. He’d visited the waterfront lands with the prince. He’d heard the great beasts of the sea that made deep water so forbidding, and he’d seen the numerous statues and paintings the Waterlands peoples made of the dangers they faced: monstrous eels, sea giants, formless blobs with clutching tentacles... None had looked like the needle-faced serpents with the ice-white scales that swam in the Twofins’ mountain lake.  
    Were those beasts of the sea native to the waters of Kal-Maddum, or had they come here through other portals humans would never see because they were sunk below the depths? Perhaps there were several portals strewn around the edge of the continent. Perhaps the beasts were fighting for control of their territory just as the humans and the grunts were.  
    What’s more, perhaps there was a portal somewhere hidden in the northwest where the ruhgrit had come from, and the gigantic spiders that Cimfulin Italga had vanquished and were never seen again. And the dragons of ancient times.  
    Perhaps even humans themselves had--  
    “No,” Tejohn said aloud. He wasn’t an invader here. He couldn’t be. These lands belonged to his people. He had every right to fight for them.  
    “You can try to deny it if you like,” Tyr Twofin said, misreading Tejohn’s response, “but it’s true: our realm is connected to other realms. And this lake below us, filled with salted water, is like the little bowl on the footstool in my hall.”  
    “What? What do you mean?”  
    “Hah!” The old man’s sneer had turned nasty. “You think Ellifer Italga had power? You haven’t begun to see power. The lake below us rests hundreds of feet above the height of our shoreline, and I believe it is connected to an entire ocean in a distant realm. Thanks to the mining scholars my brother has provided me, I will flood the lowlands entirely, from the Sweeps to the Bay of Stones, from the tip of the Durdric mountains to the hills of Indrega. Every enemy of the Twofin clan, grunt and human, will be washed away until nothing but the upper wilds remains.”

Chapter 3

    There must have been something in Cazia’s expression that stopped the princess short, because she immediately apologized.  
    “I should not have taunted you about your gods not being real,” Ivy said. “It is not your fault, I know. It is just that whenever we bring the subject up, you always roll your eyes like Kelvijinian was just a fairy tale.”  
    Cazia wasn’t all that concerned about an apology. She glanced back at the mountainside, which was so steep, it was almost a cliff. Those black stones formed a face, one so colossal she hadn’t recognized it at first.
    But there it was, looking as if it had been carved from the mountainside. It was lying on its side, its sleepy, half-closed eyes blinking slowly as though it desperately needed a nap. Beside that was the bulbous nose, then the tall, narrow crevice that formed its mouth. Its stony lips moved slightly as it spoke to Ivy’s cousin, Belterzhimi, as he knelt before it.  
    This was Kelvijinian. This was the god of the Indregai people and of other heretics as well, a thing Cazia had been taught was little more than a fairy tale or a demon. Cazia tried to find a scale that would do justice to its true size; it was bigger than any manmade thing she had ever seen. If the Scholars’ Tower had been laid on its side, it would be smaller than this. If Belterzhimi had been sucked into the huge crevice that served as