“But the hands,” said someone, staring at the blood-soaked dirt floor.
A horrified cry from out back told Louarn they had been found.
He was replacing a crumbling section of hearth in the bakers’ cottage in Salmer Leng when he heard the rumors of the first. Clearing out the broken shards of brick, mixing the mortar, dampening the old brick before he mortared in the first of the new lest the dry bricks suck the moisture from the mortar while it cured and make it crack. He’d tapped the new bricks into place one by one, adding mortar at the top of each crack to even it out with the surrounding brick, then scraping off the excess. Always moistening as he went, because wet mortar was more easily worked than dry. The new section would have to be misted for the first few days, to help it cure evenly, then let dry for five days. It was always hard to believe that the new-mixed wet mortar, a dour unattractive gray, would cure to the neat whiteness of the brick. He wished he would be here to admire it. Creating a protection, a shelter, where there had been only loose-piled pieces was good. But it gratified him most deeply to repair, to make a neat, mended surface of tumbledown fragments. Fitting parts into a joined whole that would endure. Filling in the gaps so that you’d never know there had been a brokenness there.
The master bricklayer had come in from the heat, for a cool drink, to check Louarn’s work, and no doubt to share some juicy news he had heard while making similar repairs to the bakers’ ovens. They’d become friends, in their brief time together. Croy had hoped that Louarn would stay in Salmer Leng. Louarn had come to enjoy the older man’s propensity for gossip. He relished a good tale the way others relished strong drink. Gossip inebriated him, made him charming and silly when ordinarily he was hard-baked as the materials he worked with.
But this time he had looked pained. He’d kept his voice low as he related the news of a death just outside Thandera Vezh, a village two leagues Beltward. Details were thin. Some kind of accident with a scythe. Both hands lost, though that couldn’t be true, it must have been one, the story garbled. Man bled to death, they said, though he’d seemed to have hit his head when he fell. Louarn shared Croy’s discomfort. All folk worked with their hands. The loss of limbs was the worst that could happen short of death, and when the two were linked it was hard news indeed. But death itself was not uncommon news. [66] They’d been fortunate here in the winter just past—not so many agues and fevers as there had been.
“Ech, you’re right,” Croy had said, downing his drink and rising to dust himself off. “We’re blessed indeed, and I’m glad for you to remind me of it.”
It was days before news reached them of a singer disappearing on the way from a herd-band encampment near Amir Vezh, six leagues Beltward. Though the bonefolk had taken the body, her hands had been found in a midden heap, her stone and metal belongings in a pile just beside the road out of town. It couldn’t be true, Croy had said. The tale must have warped in the telling. He’d winced down at his rough hands, examined the craving of fine cracks in the mortar dust that caked them. No one would do such a thing. No one would mutilate the dead like that.
They still had not thought it killing until it happened again, this time in their own village. Louarn had told Croy that day that he would be leaving. He had waited long in the tavern where they’d agreed to share a farewell drink. Croy would relent and come to wish him well. They could have had the drink at home; Croy had hosted him during his time in Salmer Leng, paying him in hospitality what he could not pay in tallystones, then paying him in tallystones anyway, forcing them upon him, when they’d completed an unusually lucrative job. There had been little enough new building in recent years, little enough need for the bricklayer’s skills, beyond repairs. Louarn had accepted the tallystones with a silent vow to convert them to an imported brandy the brickman craved but could not afford.
He knew I would go sometime, Louarn had thought. These leavetakings were always hard; some took it better than others. Perhaps Croy was snubbing him as punishment. Grief hit hard folk in hard ways. Louarn had traded all his tallystones, and all the kisses the publicans’ daughter could extract from him before closing time, for a small cask of the finest Neck brandy. He had carried it back to the modest brick cottage Croy had built himself, with his strong, rough hands—and found a drenching of blood, and neighbors who’d come at the sounds of a struggle, and peacekeepers bearing those strong, rough hands in theirs, rescued from the midden. The man himself had lain in the middle of the floor where Louarn had slept. He’d suffered a blow to the head, but a neighbor insisted there was still breath in him when they’d found him. If there was, it had drained with the blood.
Louarn, the journeyman outsider, was questioned. The claims of the smitten publicans’ daughter, the only one with him between the time the last customer left and midnight, were greeted with suspicion. But her father, once they roused him, confirmed where Louarn had [67] been. They released him to go on his way. While they had questioned him outside, the bonefolk had come; it was not the custom in those parts to bear the dead to the bonefolk’s places. Croy was gone.
Louarn believed he was looking for more than one killer. Croy was a big man and not lax or stupid. When a teller disappeared—all but her cast-off hands, and the objects the bonefolk left in a pile by her Foir Druile hearth—he knew the killers were heading Legward, confirmed when a healer went the same way in Gir Seille.
He also knew that he must be at once stealthy and forthright. Suspicious whispers that would have died out in his wake as he moved would follow him as he followed the killers. But he was always one town behind, or two. Alderfolk were dying now. The trail took him into the Leg, but he could not trace out a straight line in his mind—no roads in the Leg went straight, meandering along rivers or around hills—and nothing clearly linked the circumstances of the deaths. A stranger wherever he went, he was hampered in his inquiries, wary of accruing suspicion, equally wary of alerting the killers to his search should they double back. He approached runners, hungry for their knowledge, and was told that two of their number had been similarly dispatched in the Lowlands in late winter. Two days later, news reached him of the grisly death of one of the runners he’d approached.
He stopped asking questions. He merely listened, eavesdropping in every tavern, at every teller’s hearth, on every village green.
He began to wonder whether he himself was somehow the link.
A third cry came, as nearly full of horror as the responses of those who’d found the bodies and their extremities.
“Eiden wept,” said a villager beside Louarn, lifting his gaze to the loft from whence the cry had come. “Not another.”
This echoed Louarn’s own fear, but the blanched villager who came to the edge of the loft to display what she’d found bore in her arms no younger sibling’s body, but a sheaf of vellum.
“Perhaps they were saving it against the day of the return,” said a peacekeeper, rising.
For answer the woman in the loft turned the vellum in her hands to display the topmost leaf, holding the sheaf by the lantern she had set on the loft’s edge. Details were unclear in the flame’s yellow light, but that the vellum was inscribed, illuminated, was unmistakable.
The peacekeeper swore. “They’ll have to be burned.”
“Burn the cottage,” said someone next to Louarn, and he turned to see a feverish, chilling hunger in the eyes of the man who’d spoken.
[68] “And the bodies with it,” said the woman next to him.
“We’ll do no such thing,” the peacekeeper snapped. “Out, the two of you. Now.” When they hesitated in complying, she took a looming step in their direction, and they slid backward out of the reeking cottage, as Louarn slid himself further into the small clutch of folk remaining inside.
His mind was hard at work. He did not know the Strong Leg well. But he knew they frowned on the secular use of a dead craft’s tools. He knew they clung to the prohibitions of a vanished way of life. Tradition was deep-rooted here and did not pull up easily. He had
n’t thought much on it, as his own crafts did not tend in directions that would be forbidden here. But this was a piece of his puzzle, a terribly important piece, if he could find the shape of it and place it in the right gap. Geese. Doves. Illuminated vellum ...
They were bearing the dead away now. He felt a frustrated urge to examine the bodies, and instead examined the urge itself. What did his fingers feel they would have found, if they could have searched? He glanced around the desecrated cottage, but sensed nothing that would help him, nothing sight or smell or touch could tell him. He let himself be borne outside in the wake of the dead, but he eased into the shadows by the path rather than follow to wherever their boneyard was.
He was not alone. Two peacekeepers had stayed. To supervise the burning of the materials found in the loft, he soon saw. There was far more than just the sheaf of vellum the woman had displayed. Parchment and sedgeweave, quills and boards—what they mounded in the little dirt yard and set aflame was years of hoarded work. The bonfire pained him less than did the grim satisfaction of the villagers who had stayed. This was craft, though it was not his own, and the burning of it was an ill deed.
But he could not stop it. And his mind was turning, turning. Vellum, sedgeweave, parchment, quills. Geese and doves. Downmongers. A farmer. A singer. A bricklayer. A teller. A healer. Alderfolk. Runners. Half-formed links weakened and broke as the next loop in the chain failed to fit.
“They just couldn’t give up their craft,” said a woman beside him, too softly for the others to hear. He chanced a look at her and saw tears glistening on round cheeks.
“Their craft?” he said, as softly. A cold certainty gripped his intestines. His body understood before his mind had laid the pieces in.
The woman startled. She hadn’t meant for anyone to hear. Finding a stranger next to her, she seemed at once relieved and newly wary.
[69] But there were itinerants everywhere. In the Heartlands, that made villages pull into themselves, give more importance to their own. In the Legs, it made all villages one village, all places one place.
“Their craft,” she said at last. “They were only downmongers since the Lightbreaker’s time. Spirits, this is a hard loss for us.”
“I grieve with you,” Louarn said, a standard reply, but he kept his gaze on her until she realised that he was waiting for her to finish, though she thought she had.
“Their craft from the time of the light,” she said. “Magecraft. They were our village triad.”
The last brick went in and mortared itself smooth.
Some wordsmiths became tellers when the light died. Binders became singers, healers. Reckoners became runners. Mages—the ones folk had looked to for help, guidance, advice, arbitration, because they were wise, because they were special, because they had power—became alderfolk and village leaders.
And some went back into their family trades.
Croy had been a mage. He never spoke of it; it was no part of the man Louarn had known. But there had been a profound, abiding grief in him, as at the loss of a home, or a loved one—or a limb. The loss of a light that gave the power to heal and ward ... such a loss would grieve a man that deeply. Louarn had seen the triskele once, tossed in a jumble of chain on the mantel, nearly obscured by years of dust, and thought no more of it than he would have of an old tool neglected at the bottom of a box. Mages’ work, a dead craft that he would never learn, meant nothing to him. But Croy had been a mage.
He had lagged one town or two behind the killers until now. It was mostly luck that had kept him from losing them entirely, with the slow rate news traveled and the half-blind way in which he had moved. What he had lacked was a means of heading them off. Something that would tell him why they killed the folk they killed, so he could find more of those folk before the killers did.
What sort of folk they killed would serve as well as why.
“Where are there the most who used to be mages?” Louarn said to the woman beside him.
“Where are what?” she said, returning her attention to him as if after a long time away.
He’d been thinking aloud as much as asking her. He could mumble some demurral now, say never mind. He asked, “Where was the light strongest in this region?”
She frowned and took a step away.
He cursed himself for an overeager fool.
“That’s what those other two asked, too,” she said.
[70] His heart went into his throat.
That there were two or more he now had no doubt—the dead weight of an adult was no easy thing to string from a cottage rafter, and if one man had hauled them up, chances were the old wood would have given way. They had been lifted and hanged. “What other two?” he asked, trying to sound offhand.
“A man and a woman, they were here yesterday. They said they were healers but they weren’t wearing white.”
“No one wears white around here if they know what’s good for them,” said a man just beyond and behind her. Louarn hadn’t noticed him in the leaping shadows cast by the bonfire. He was the one who’d suggested they burn the cottage.
“That’s not true,” said the woman from the loft, now that the conversation had become loud enough to overhear. “The menders do worthy work.”
“They use the tools of magecraft,” the man said. “They’ll use them up, and there’ll be nothing for when the light returns.”
“Then they’ll make more,” said someone else.
“Don’t be an idiot—you know what I mean. It’s not the things, it’s the use of them. That’s what gave magecraft its power, that only mages scribed and sang and painted.”
Everyone in the small group was being drawn into what was clearly an old debate in these parts, and threatened to flare up as bright as the bonfire they’d made to show its consequences.
“What did they look like?” Louarn pressed the woman, turning his body, trying to parlay his question into a side conversation while the rest argued the foundations of a craft that was dead and not coming back. “The two who were here?”
“One man, one woman, as I said. Girdlers, from the look of them. The tall kind, the Highland kind, hair like wheat.”
“And what answer did they get to their question?” Louarn asked, his heart pounding.
“The Knee,” the woman said, scornful that he did not know this simplest bit of history, mistrusting him now because she did not understand why the others were so important to him or who they were. He saw her gaze flicker toward the peacekeepers. “The light was always strongest in the Knee.”
Louarn slipped into the shadows as she made the decision to point him out. He heard them call after him. He had to move slowly, by touch and hearing, until his eyes lost the lingering glare of flames. The fluttering of rock doves in their coops. The gravel of the path giving way to the packed-dirt road under his boots. He slung his carrysack on the stick over his shoulder, found the balance of long [71] years of travel. Shouts went up behind him. He strode quickly up the road, past where the peacekeeper would have been stationed if not for the killings. The bulk of cottages on either side gave way to shacks, then a sense of space in the darkness, rolling black land under lowering night sky. Suddenly a white blur caught his eye—the road marker at the fork, a thigh-high slab of granite lower on one side than the other. You could give directions by such a marker. That made it as much symbol as any glyph painted on a leaf. But that irony would not sway the folk whose lanterns bobbed in the dark up the road behind him.
There were fields all around as far as he could sense, and his questing toe found only shallow ditches to either side of the road. He could not run in darkness so deep; he’d turn an ankle and be laid up for a nineday, or break a bone and die of blood poisoning.
He looked again at the marker. There was a deeper darkness, a depression behind the stone. In the stone’s shadow, with his cloak over him, it might be enough to hide him.
He moved with care around the stone and down. His worn sole slipped on gravel, then caught on a root. He le
t himself go to his knees in the deep gloom behind the stone, which was now over his head.
His knees met something at once bony and yielding. He realised his error only just in time to fumble for the mouth and clamp a hand down over it. His palm pressed on beard stubble and drool. He whispered quick, desperate words of reassurance. The head nodded. He tested the acquiescence by removing his hand. The man under him remained silent, and even shifted to better accommodate the new addition to his sleephole.
The searchers came only as far as the end of their road. Their hearts were not in it; they didn’t really believe he’d had anything to do with the killings, or they also had deduced that there must have been two—in which case good thing they didn’t find him holed up here with whoever this was—or they were unwilling to venture any farther from their own ground.
When their voices had gone, when he sat up and wiped his hands on his worn trousers, he saw, far off across an Armward field, the green glow of bonefolk feeding, and knew what had chilled the searchers into returning to the comfort of their village.
The man he’d fallen on was chuckling low in his chest. “Not much of a town for waysiders like us, is it?” he said, a toothless slur.
“No, I suppose it’s not,” Louarn said, understanding that the man had been run out. Dindry Leng had seemed tolerant of its itinerants, but there were reasons they employed peacekeepers, and there were things they would not abide besides the undermining of a base of [72] power that no longer existed. He got up and straightened his clothing. Before he lifted his carrysack again, he pulled out a half loaf of stale bread and bent to press it into the itinerant’s hands. “For waking you,” he said, and struck off along the downleg road.
The sound of the man’s laughter followed him for a long way.
At dawn he came to a crossroads, uncertain whether he had passed any other crossroads in the dark, content to have stayed on the road and not broken his neck in a ditch. There he sat and rested, spasing awake at a brief vision of Croy in a halo of buttery light to find that workers had come into the fields around him. Still husbanding the ailing land, pulling weeds that thrived in conditions that were killing the crops they’d sown.
The Binder's Road (The Sequel to 'Illumination') Page 8