He could make his way to the Shoulder and the High Arm, work for food; but he knew no trade except for the fetching of mages, and the care of horses he could not even shoe or stitch tack for—he was useless outside the Holding. He could take a mount and ride back through the Aralinns, back to the village he’d guided an illuminator from the last time he’d been sent out. There’d been sanctuary in a tavern there, a spill of warm light through the doorway. He might walk through that doorway again. But he could not go without news to give her folk, and he did not know what had become of her. He could go to Crown and take ship for the Boot or the Toes, clear around Eiden Myr, as far from the Holding as you could go, and see if some craftsfolk or traders would take on a boy too old to prentice.
Or he could sit here in torchlight with the dead.
Sitting with his head bowed, in a stupor of fatigue, he startled at a rustling sound as a long shadow fell across him. It would be some dead steward rising, some haunt sweeping down on him. The corridor was filled with them—
They were tall, clothed in tatters, white as the bones they consumed, silent in the presence of the dead they had come for. But they were not haunts.
[26] He was too shocked even to scramble back. They seemed to come right through the stone walls, appearing like wraiths, but they were as solid and real as he was. One looked at him as they bent to their work—dark eyes, unblinking, too large for its thin face, swimming in tears that never fell—then looked away with no acknowledgment. They did not seem to mind that he was there, though no one had ever seen the bonefolk work. They would not come as long as humans held vigil; you had to leave the dead for them or the dead would rot where they lay. But he sat and watched, and they made no objection; and neither did they drag the bodies off around the next turn of the corridor, as they easily could have. They bent down, and lifted the dead in their spindly arms, gently, like cherished children. Perhaps he had dreamed so deep that he had seemed dead, and they’d come for him but gone off again on finding him alive. Perhaps he was a haunt himself, perhaps he’d died in the melee and had no memory of it now—was his one of the bodies whose eyes he had slid closed, had he failed to recognize his own face? He could feel his fingers digging into his own arms hard enough to hurt, but who knew what haunts felt—perhaps they believed they still had bodies, perhaps they didn’t really know they were dead until the bonefolk took them. The bonefolk might be taking him now, and in moments he would fly apart, to haunt this corridor, forever unpassaged. No mages had cast passage for the stewards and other mages who’d died here. This corridor would be crowded with haunts. But if he were a haunt, wouldn’t he see the others?
“I’m alive,” he whispered, pulling back from the brink. The boneman who’d glanced at him stood holding a mage’s body, and at his words it uncurled its long fingers, fanned them out and back in what looked like a rippling wave but might mean anything—a bid for silence, agreement that yes, he was alive ... the flexing of stiff fingers.
The corridor went deathly cold. He’d been shaking already, but that was nothing compared with the chill that swept through now, an icy airless wind. The torches went dim without dying out, their flames burning low and smoky. In the gloom, the bonefolk became pale, insectile shadows, and for another moment of madness he feared he’d dreamed them, too. They would turn black and toothed and taloned and rend him. He would not have the strength to resist. He might have fallen asleep where he sat. He might be freezing to death, that would explain the terrible cold, and this a last, spectacular hallucination. ...
“I’m awake,” he said softly.
Again the boneman fanned its fingers.
Telling him something. Telling him, Yes, you are alive, you are awake. Telling him, Yes, I see you. You may stay. You may live.
The bonefolk cradled the bodies. The bodies took on a greenish glow, so bright he had to squint and was no longer sure what he saw. The bonefolk threw their heads back, mouths open in pleasure or pain or supplication. The [27] corridor filled with a chalky scent cut with a harbinger of storm. The floor became a luminous green where blood had pooled. The glow intensified, an eerie, impossible phosphorescence, like something seen in darkest swampland, or Galandra’s light running up a ship’s rigging, only tinged with the color of storm, of moonlight filtered through the earliest spring leaves. He saw the bones within the flesh, starkly outlined in their joints and sockets, beautiful and supple in connection, and then the bones, too, were subsumed into radiance, and what the bonefolk held in their arms were human forms made of light itself.
The lights that had been the dead blazed so bright it made him weep, and then were gone; his eyes, seared by the memory of that light, were unable to distinguish the precise moment of their passing. He blinked at the afterimage, shifting his focus, and the bonefolk’s arms were empty, falling back to their sides. A handful of pewter triskeles hit the floor, some knives, small tools, and a clatter of stones from a steward’s pocket; the bag that had held them, like the clothes, the boots, the belts and scabbards, had been consumed along with the bodies.
Slowly the bonefolk’s mouths closed, their heads came down, their eyes opened. Again one looked at him, with no expression, no recognition. Then they too were gone, stepping back into the walls, merging back into the stone.
The corridor was empty, the floor cleansed of blood, the air cleansed of smoke and the reek of dying. It smelled like a mountainside after a thunderstorm—every particle of existence scrubbed clean. The cold was gone, though there was no warmth to take its place, and the torches flared up, reasserting their presence with ordinary smoke that drifted off on ordinary air.
“I’m alive,” the boy said. He fanned his fingers as the boneman had. “I’m alive. I have to go on.”
He pushed himself to his feet and struck off up the corridor, opposite the way the stewards had taken the mages. A junction chamber at the end offered two other doors, and a spiral stair leading only down. One door was locked. The other opened on darkness. The stair, absurdly, ended one level down, and there were no doorways there.
He went back to the door he had come through with the mages. It opened on solid stone.
He looked down the corridor in the direction the stewards had gone. Back into the Holding. Back to the Ennead.
He returned to the junction chamber, took an oil lamp from its niche, and entered the doorway full of darkness. The passage beyond sparkled with nightstone, and lea upward. He followed it until his legs ached and never came to a door. He began counting breaths, and at a nonned he turned to go back—then turned again and continued. Nothing would have changed where he had been, but if he kept going up, he might get out.
[28] Or, he had to acknowledge when his legs gave way and he could not draw breath to keep climbing, he might not.
He rested. His breath came easier. The air chilled his sweat-damp clothes. His legs seized; he flexed and massaged them. He rose again, and climbed—it was steeper now, had been for some time, and there were clefts scored across the stone floor as footholds—and rested again when he could no longer climb, then climbed again. His breathing and his scuffling boots made the only sound. The passageway had no curve to it, did not spiral up the Holding to the top. That he had not come out by now meant that it must have led him straight into the mountain. He tried to still his heart, but terror was taking hold of him. This was the price of cowardice. Unwilling to face the Ennead, he had brought himself to this.
This was the price of courage. Choosing, at last, not to go back to them, as he had done time and again despite every opportunity to flee, he had come to this.
He could no longer climb. His belly was clenched in on itself with hunger. His throat and mouth burned for water while his bones and muscles ached with cold. He had nearly dropped the clay lamp so many times that he knew the next time it would shatter. He could not see how much oil remained in it, but the thin slosh when he shook it wasn’t promising.
He turned. He began the slip-sliding descent. His trembling legs could not
be trusted on the decline. He sat down for another measured rest, and for the first time in many breaths looked up from the floor, to the end of the lamplight’s oval.
Downward, the passage ended in a blank wall.
“No,” he said, just a rasp from his dry throat.
He no longer knew if he slept or woke.
He set the oil lamp beside him. It made a dull clink as it met stone—a welcome sound, a different sound, a sound. There was not much sound in dreams, as he recalled. But it was a hollow sound. Little oil left. He couldn’t blow out the flame to conserve; he had no way to light the wick again. He pulled off a boot and folded the sock under one end of the lamp, so it wouldn’t skitter away down the slope, and so the oil wouldn’t pool away from the wick.
He lay back on the rocky floor, groaning as his back and head were drenched with cold.
He willed himself to sleep.
He never remembered his dreams, so if he knew he was dreaming when he dreamed he did not know he had known it when he woke.
I’m thinking, he thought. I’m not sleeping.
If he slept, if he dreamed, he could change the world.
He could change the tunnels, anyway. The passage had changed by itself, or because he was dreaming it. Maybe it was the mountain that slept, and dreamed, not him.
[29] Stop thinking.
Before, when he was angry or afraid, he’d always been able to escape into sleep. He’d lie down, think how badly he wanted to be away from wherever it was, and be gone.
He must have gotten braver during that brief time with the mages, and the bonefolk after, because he was still lying here thinking about sleeping instead of doing it. And he very badly wanted to be away from here.
Unless he was already dreaming. He did not know if you could dream that you had gone to sleep. A dream within a dream—what would that do, in dreams like his?
Stop thinking!
He opened his eyes. The lamp was still burning. It was hard to keep his eyes closed, from fear that when he opened them it would have gone out. Taking a deep breath, he turned his head, lifted himself a little, and prepared to blow the flame out.
His breath died. He could not bring himself to extinguish the light. He forced himself up, the hardest thing he had ever done, and with the last energy in his spent limbs climbed away from the lamp and its illusory golden warmth. In this, the passage aided him; it curved now, where it had been straight before, so that not so much climbing was required before the light was gone. If the lamp kept burning, he could go back to it. If not, it would have gone out anyway.
Now, in darkness, with only the memory of flame hanging before him wherever he looked, there was no distraction.
He lay flat again, closed his eyes, and watched the phantom flame fade. He focused on the frantic beating in his chest, the longer rise and fall of his breathing over it. Nothing but that: the pulse of his heart, the surf of his breath, the life inside him. Both slowed, after a while. After a longer while, he could not feel the cold anymore. That quickened breath and heart—he might die, if he let the cold make him sleep. But he could not get out of here from behind, where the passage had closed to him, and he could not get out from ahead, which was only stone for many days’ walk, if the stone even chose to take him that far. He could only get out sidewise. Or die anyway.
He knew how long a night was. He had lain awake for most of many nights, fighting the sleep he sought now, when he’d begun to realise that his sleep brought deadly dreams. He lay quiet for at least that long. Sleep never came. He had never felt more awake before, his mind ranging over his deeds, his wants, his guilts. The cold didn’t take him; it was not as cold as snow, not winter-cold, not cold enough.
His dreams had deserted him.
He found his body again. It took a long time. There was a hand ... here was his mouth ... here were his eyes, though they were useless now. His legs came back as a pair. Every part of him was in agony from the cold. It took [30] him a ninebreath just to get his elbows under him, twice that to sit up. But everything worked. A lifetime later, he was on his feet. Fumbling with his breeches, nearly too late, he relieved himself in the general direction of the wall; it stung coming out, and the trickling sound maddened him with thirst. It would mark this place. If the passage circled back into itself, he would know.
He was at the mercy of the passage now.
He walked. One foot, push up the incline, another foot, push up the incline. In this way he crabbed over to the wall. He kept a steadying hand on the vertical stone. After a while he realized he was trying to pull himself along the stone, but there were no handholds, and his fingernails were wet with what must be blood, and the wasted effort weakened him. He let his hand trail along the nubbly rock as through water over the side of a drifting boat.
He walked. The thick darkness was like a giant dreamshadow enfolding him. He kept reminding himself that he could breathe. Foot down, push forward, breathe in. Foot down, push forward, breathe out. It was just ordinary darkness. If he was dreaming, the shadows were outside, wherever his body lay. If not, then there would be no shadows.
He walked. His legs gave out. He slept by accident, but no dreams came, or if they did they changed nothing. Still the sandy wall under his hand, the scored stone under his feet. He walked again, not so far this time. How long had it been? Another day? How long would it be until he died of thirst? Wondering that, he found himself lying on his face with no idea if he had fallen or lain down. He was scrabbling along the stone, thinking he heard running water ahead of him. But it was below him, just there below a thin veneer of nightstone, and he was digging down to it, except the stone would not yield.
He woke up. He felt surprisingly rested, though still numb with cold. A bad dream, then. A powerless dream. He got up. He walked. He trailed his hand along the stone. He recoiled when it slid through a shock of cold—but it was water, a seep of water. He fell to his knees and slurped greedily at the mountain’s gift, sobbing his thanks to unheeding stone, laughing in giddy victory, as if he could take credit for the decision that had brought him here. The stone had herded him. But it had given him water. It had given him a few more days of life.
Refreshed and strengthened, he walked. He could hear the water now, soft trickling rivulets at odd intervals, the stone weeping for him. How long until he starved? Long enough that it didn’t matter. The rest of my life, he thought, and giggled, and went on even when his belly cramped so hard he cried out. After a while he wasn’t even hungry anymore. He filled himself with water at every opportunity, marked his passage with it as it went through [31] his body. He pushed on until his muscles failed and he felt himself sinking into the stone.
He woke up. How could it be a certain waking, when only the blanket of darkness greeted him? He prodded at his eyelids to be sure they were open. He went on, step by frozen, agonised step. If he’d dreamed, and his dreams changed the passageway, he would not know it in the dark. Groping along one wall, he might miss an opening or a door in the other. But where would doors lead to now? He was deep in the mountain, far beyond the reach of the Holding. No one ever came this far. There were no passages that led this far. But there was water. He would not die yet, not if there was water. Had he dreamed the water? Was it not the mountain’s gift, but his own?
He woke up. He must have cried; he was trying to lick tears from his chin, scoop damp into his mouth with his fingers, which tasted of copper and salt. He screamed to the bonefolk, the only ones he could imagine reaching him here, but the scream came out a croak, and maybe it was better that way, because if the bonefolk came he wasn’t dreaming, he was dead.
He woke up, still lying flat on the stone, still mad with thirst, no rivulets of water nearby, all the threfts he had covered gone with the dreaming, all of it to do again. I can’t, he thought, I can’t, and Get up, you must, you have to.
He woke, and woke, and woke, but never slept, and no change from the pitch dark and the numb chill. There was water, then there wasn’t; there was thirst
, then there was water. Which was real? There was never food. If he dreamed water, he could have dreamed food, but there was never food. If the mountain had given him water, it could have given him mushroom heather—that only needed spores and damp to grow, and no light or warmth at all. It was a cruel mountain. It taunted him. This was a cruel dream.
His foot caught on something, sent it skittering off to shatter against the wall. He followed it, bent down, touched wet shards of clay, sniffed oil on bloody fingers: his lamp. It had gone out. He sat down, held the broken pieces in his hands, and laughed until he felt faint. When he stopped to gasp breath, he could hear it: the river flowing over the clay bottom that had been dredged for the stuff to mold and bake into a lamp that would hold oil. Delighted, he followed the sound. He pushed damp fern fronds aside. He smelled mint and mulch and wet bark. Glorious smells. Life smells. They drew him into the blue-gold air, the tumbling buying dance of slipshod freedom. He could take it? He would be brave this time. No more the dragging chain of threat to haul him back. Death was good for blanking out the things you could lose. Not many, really—and that was a sad thing. Mostly his master. The other fosterlings. No friends. Well, the horses. But Purslane died. The mountain broke him. He flailed free of his grave, good strong brave fellow, brave Purslane, the color of brown river clay, knew his fool boy loved him and took every [32] advantage of it, didn’t he? But he was broken. He couldn’t go on. Sometimes you were too broken to go on.
That was a bad place, a behind place, a place back in the dark tunnel. Ahead was mint and emerald fern in a depth of greenness, and the blue-gold dancing invitation, and he would take its hand, he would, because there was nothing to fear now. But he feared he was wrong. Death was the easy thing; life was the terror. He could see it now, and oh, he didn’t want to. He tried to burrow back into the dark, to wake again in drynumb coldweary hunger, but it was beyond him now, and anyway there was no choice, his attention wouldn’t tear away.
The Binder's Road (The Sequel to 'Illumination') Page 3