The Binder's Road (The Sequel to 'Illumination')

by Terry McGarry

  What have you done to our baby, Dabrena?

  Shut up! Shut up! I have to keep going!

  [147] “As you can see,” she said to Pelkin, we’ve chalked in the bits we’re still working on, as we transfer them from the smaller sectional maps you see in progress, or bound into codices, around the hall. This is the third revision. It’s taken us five years to get this far. It’ll take another five, I think, before the details are accurate enough to be useful, and we’re still developing methods to work out the distances and elevations. The seekers among us have been a great help in that.”

  “It’s progressing well,” Pelkin said. “I’m impressed, though I expected no less. There were some very ancient maps in the codices sent to Senana. Did you ... ?”

  “They copied them for us,” Dabrena confirmed. “Twice, in fact, which helped us differentiate copying errors from the original map-makers’ errors. They’d only mapped the coastline and indicated the mountain ranges and anchorages. Whoever they were, it seems they had no intent of landing and coming inland.”

  “It was a wasteland then. Attempts at reclamation had failed so often they’d given up. It would have been merely a stopping point for mariners. Perhaps an aid—or a hazard—to navigation.”

  “I wish we knew more,” she said, in a near-whisper, not really meaning to say the words aloud.

  “We’re working on it,” the scholar said, and winked. “Do you have any more detailed maps of the Southlands?”

  Thank the spirits—a way to get rid of you for long enough to breathe. She pointed him to the correct volumes. Kara followed him, still reeling off place names. Dabrena reached to pull her back, but Selen touched her arm lightly, then interposed herself between the child and the new-come scholar. It was just enough to ease Dabrena back on her heels. But her leg jiggled nervously. She saw Pelkin notice it.

  “You are never comfortable unless you are touching her.”

  She shrugged, an eye on Kara. “I’ve gotten better about it, over the years.”

  He did not comment. Instead he said, “You’d like the runners’ help. Tell me how.”

  “Information,” she replied immediately. “Weather patterns, terrain, a corrective eye on maps such as these. A report on any trends you’ve noticed in illness, p—”

  “You wish us to be reckoners again.”

  Kara was reaching around Selen to help the scholar find the right page in a battered codex. I can’t allow this. “Did you ever stop?”

  “We reckon other things now,” Pelkin said softly. “And the patterns you seek to track are warders’ work—menders’ work. Your work. Not ours.”

  You were trying to allocate his runners, too. She scrubbed a hand [148] through her hair as if to root the voice out like a louse. “All right,” she said. “What did you have in mind?”

  He smiled. “You invited us here.”

  “For the wrong reasons, I fear.” She felt very weary. I’ve got to part them, she thought, hearing Kara giggle at something the scholar said. He was patient with her even though he was clearly intent on whatever he’d found in the codex. I don’t know him from a stick in the road, but even if I did, she can’t get attached. Anger flared briefly, jealousy, then ebbed back into weariness. She has Reiligh, she has Loris and Corle, she doesn’t need this stunted shadow of a boneman. Reiligh had tried to take Kara off her hands for the day. If she had let him, Streln would have had to make his hideous point some other way. But she doesn’t really have them at all. She has no one but me. Because I won’t let her.

  “Perhaps,” Pelkin said. “And in truth I would not have come, had I not something to tell you myself, without intermediaries.”

  This was important, whatever it was. She had to face Pelkin with her full attention. “Kara,” she said, “come away now, come to me.” She held out her hand. She tried not to see Kara’s face shut down, her shoulders fall, her dragging, obedient steps. She just concentrated on the hand slipping into hers. Her chest lightened. Now she could think. “Go ahead.”

  Pelkin did not look at the scholar or Selen as he said, “To tell you, Dabrena. Only you.”

  With a wide-eyed shrug at Selen, Dabrena asked her to remove the scholar to the scriptorium across the corridor.

  “The child should go as well,” Pelkin said.

  “She won’t understand.”

  “Oh, I doubt that very much.”

  Kara looked up hopefully, thinking to be sent after the scholar. With a harsh sigh, Dabrena said, “There’s sedgeweave in the corner, Kara, and ink and quills prepared. Why don’t you draw one of your maps? Come show us when it’s finished.”

  Kara, delighted, immediately ran off to comply. She was rarely permitted sedgeweave, and she had a passion for drawing invented maps, some desire to elaborate on her perception of the real ones. Eiden Myr was as imaginary to her as any realm in her mind.

  Dabrena gave Pelkin her attention.

  He said, “You have a betrayer in your holding.”

  Dabrena’s throat closed on a breath, so that she made a strange inadvertent sound—like a snore interrupted when a sleeper was jostled.

  “Senana must beware as well. Messages have gone between here [149] and Khine, between Khine and Senana. I do not know what they said. But there is a pattern.”

  “Do you know the source?”

  “Only on Khine. And I only suspect it. I have no proof.”

  “Your suspect, then.”

  “Lerissa Illuminator.”

  The Ennead mage name spun her mind through possibilities that veered and branched until she could no longer follow. She put a finger on the edge of the map table to balance herself. “The Nine died. They combined in the hein-na-fhin, and it killed them.”

  “Only the leading triad. The others killed each other, as best I can piece it together from what was seen before the bonefolk came. Poison, for the most part, but the throat of one was cut, and the hearts of two elders may have failed. The youngest was removed to Khine, where she was imprisoned. But she has not been idle in her captivity. I believe she maneuvers to regain the power she considers herself entitled to as a daughter of the Ennead.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. But she is aided in her efforts. All the Nine had dedicated servants. Whatever she promised or threatened, hers are loyal to her still, and roam at large to work her bidding. There is no doubt that some remained here. There is little doubt that at least one went to the scholars.”

  “You’ve deduced this from the paths of messages you haven’t read?”

  “I’ve constructed this from rumors and facts that combine into unavoidable probability.”

  Verlein had called the runners spies. Dabrena had thought the accusation born of resentment. Now it seemed there was truth in it.

  “You are not inclined to believe the spy warning you of spies, eh?” Pelkin’s gray eyes gleamed.

  “Perhaps no one is better suited,” Dabrena said. “But who ...”

  “It could be any of your folk, from a steward whose name you never knew to one of your closest colleagues. And there could be more than one.”

  Her mind ran through the names before she could stop it. Not Dontra. Not Ronim. Not Corle. Spirits ... not Selen. Yet it could be any of them, any of the six folk here who’d earned the ring with her. Only Reiligh came from outside. Did that mean it was him? Or did that make him the only one she could trust?

  “Why should I believe you?”

  “You shouldn’t. You should trust nothing. But if you begin to [150] wonder, to question, to watch, then I will have done what I came here for.”

  “You had no interest in our meeting.”

  He shrugged, though it was obvious now; he’d only used it as an excuse to make contact without being seen to initiate it. “It could never have come to good.”

  “Has it done harm?”

  “Oh, it showed us much. But I must return to my folk, to work on this among other things, in the knowledge that any of them could be compromised as well.
Streln’s behavior ... No. It’s too soon to say.”

  “And if it’s me?” Dabrena said.

  He smiled. “It could have been, once. You would have done anything those nine demanded of you, to save your child.”

  Dabrena paled. “But no longer?”

  “I don’t believe so. I know more about you than you may think possible. You’ve met your worst darkness and made amends as you could. It’s worth the risk, at any rate. Someone had to know, and who else would I tell? One of your scribes? Evonder is gone. Brondarion is gone. The head warders were gone a young man’s lifetime ago. This is not the holding I knew.”

  “It’s not the world we knew.”

  “No. It will never be that again.”

  Evrael strode down a corridor that in his childhood had led to bakeries. They had quartered Verlein on an old stewards’ level. She was slow in answering his knock but admitted him at last. He moved from the oily lamplight of the passage into the smoky flicker of a single candle’s flame.

  “Six years ago,” he said without preamble, we stood at the threshold to a chamber full of the past, you and I. I told you of the shield. I told you it was broken and the light destroyed in its breaking. You conceived the idea of a human shield to replace it.”

  Verlein stretched out on her bed. “Tell me something interesting, Evrael.”

  He could tell her that he had encouraged her idea of a shield in order to give her homegrown soldiers something to do besides ravage his family home. It would interest her to know that he had considered occupying the Holding with his Khinish seafolk until he was certain that Verlein would make no attempt to control Eiden Myr by force. He had diverted her horde just as Dabrena n’Arilda had diverted a Great Storm: by splitting it into parts that would go around Eiden [151] Myr rather than down the center of it. But there was no more need to tell her this now than there had been then.

  “You asked for my fleet to be a shield at sea beyond your shore-bound shield,” he went on. “I denied it to you as I would have denied it to Dabrena had Streln not circumvented her request. Now I will pledge those patrols to you, if in return you pledge your folk to fight the Khinish. They will invade the mainland shortly after Streln’s return.” Unless Pelkin could dissuade them. Through an aide Pelkin had conveyed a desire to sail with Evrael to Khine, to address the hall. Evrael would take him. But it would do no good. Two Northers trying to tell the Khinish their business. In the end they would follow Streln. “Streln retains enough private ships to ferry ground forces to the Boot, though if I can subvert them he’ll have to build a bridge, which will delay him. Either way, they will have no fleet.” Unless you or one of your folk divulges this arrangement too soon, and he gains time to leverage my command from me in hall. A risk I must live with. “Streln will send forces upland by ground, securing the inland trade routes as he goes. You can hem them in, if you adapt your coastal positions quickly and I transport reinforcements by ship. You can surround them, and stop them, with my fleet at your back, with my ships defending your shores.”

  “I can stop your unfaithful lover, you mean. Whoever that woman is he’s in bed with now, that’s what’s really got your goat. I don’t think I feel like sending my folk in to avenge your wounded heart.”

  “The woman he’s in bed with now,” Evrael said quietly, “is Lerissa n’Lessa l’Rigael, the last surviving member of the Nine.”

  Evrael had seen Verlein prepared to cast a torch on generations of codified learning because to her it epitomised the hierarchy headed by those nine. He had calculated precisely the reaction an Ennead name would engender. Across her face flashed surprise, outrage, and ... something else, an emotion he couldn’t identify.

  “They have sunset bells here, don’t they?” she said. “They have bells for every bloody movement of the bloody sun, you’d think they’d just go out and live under it like normal folk. Leave me until sunset bells. I’ll give you my answer then.”

  It would be yes. He saw it in the duck of her chin, the hand on her blade. She merely needed time to justify it to herself, or summon her seconds and make a show of consulting them, though there was no question who was first in the hierarchy she had built.

  He left her, as requested; and in the corridor he braced his hands on cold black stone and leaned into the wall, barely restraining the impulse to smash his head against it.

  Whispering in his lover’s ear, Lerissa had accused him of betrayal. [152] It had been unwarranted. Now he had made it true.

  I am not punishing him for choosing her, he told himself, listening for any hint of defensiveness or deceit. I no longer know him. He is poisoned past recognition. He sows conflict. He holds children to the blade. The man I knew is gone.

  He bit down on a wailing grief, straightened himself, and moved along the lamplit passageway to join his seafolk. They commanded their own ships in his fleet, and had agreed to accompany him in case a hall had to be convened. He had consulted them, and they had reached consensus. It remained, now, only to inform them of the shieldmaster’s expected answer, and wait with them until the bells of sunset freed them to return to the sea.

  A hooded figure stepped from an obscure corner of Verlein’s chamber and moved with care toward a stool by the low spruce wood table.

  “You must kill Lerissa n’Rigael. If she is the reason the Khinish have woken, it is she you contend with, and she you must eliminate. Put Streln back where he belongs, in Evrael’s peaceful, well-meaning hands.”

  “In the hands of a long-lost scion of this holding,” Verlein said. “You would love that, wouldn’t you.” She paced the confines of the chamber. She poured wine she did not bother to sample. It took that long for the figure to reach the stool, to brace an arm on the table and lower itself toward the seat. Stiff knees and elbow gave out, and the last half-foot of the descent came in a barely controlled rush. Dark robes billowed briefly and then settled. The hood fell back to reveal long gray hair braided in the intricate style of the Boot, and a woman’s face, deeply grooved, that might have been carved from the blackstone around them.

  In a way it had been. Lerissa n’Rigael was not the sole surviving member of the Nine.

  “How can there be Ennead partisanship when there is no longer an Ennead?” the woman said, plumping her robes with strong-boned hands swathed in wasted flesh. “I had no love for Evrael when he was his parents’ bright hope, and he fled in cowardice from forces I sought to channel. But it is a new world now. We work with what is.”

  “In the hope of restoring what was,” Verlein said. She lifted the winecup, changed her mind, set it back down. “I don’t know how far I trust your historical motives, Worilke.”

  “We have never trusted each other,” Worilke n’Karad said. “Yet here we are.” She took the cup of wine and drank it off. “Twice nine [153] nonned years ago, Galandra na Caille le Serith established Eiden Myr as a haven for persecuted mages, warding it from the outer realms in a display of power unparalleled thereafter. Her warding was never meant to be broken. It was meant to have a lifespan, like any living thing. That span was cut short, and all was changed. I saw that, as I saw her vision with the clarity of a mage casting passage for the dying. What it showed me went far deeper than ephemeral allegiances formed in my mortal lifetime. You fear the realignment of old powers in the transformation of former reckoners, warders, Ennead. Pelkin and Evrael spoke of old times and raised your guard dog’s hackles. Well, fear nothing of the sort from me. What I have told you remains true: I seek now only to realise Galandra’s plans despite their violent disruption. Lerissa can only exacerbate that disruption, and thwart the natural capacity of Eiden’s body to heal itself. She is an artificial creature with the outdated ambitions of an artificial world. Though Morlyrien seduced his soul, Evrael’s heart is wholly Eiden’s.”

  Verlein scowled with the effort of separating the teller’s rhetoric and the mystic’s blather from the political observations she had come to rely on. Her fighter’s heart longed to be directed by a wise intelligence,
but her harvestmaster’s will took umbrage at being told what to do. She feared manipulation by one more clever and erudite than herself even as she yearned to give herself over to it. With Worilke, she faced a continual struggle between wariness and need.

  “Cold-blooded killing is not my bailiwick,” said Verlein. “That’s your brand of scheming. I’m a harvestmaster, a fighter. I’ll fight to put Eiden Myr back to rights. I’ll fight through the Khinish until I reach this Lerissa of yours, but I’ll have killed the lot of them by then.”

  “You could avoid fighting them at all if you eliminate her before they’ve moved up the Strong Leg.”

  “I don’t want to avoid fighting them!”

  “No, of course you don’t. You have been looking for a fight these six years long, and never found it, and now Evrael has handed you a battle and you will gleefully engage, destroying the Strong Leg to no good purpose.”

  “You sound like the Lightbreaker,” Verlein said with scorn.

  Worilke’s laugh racked her spent frame. “Torrin was a good boy,” she said. “I underestimated him. I should have listened to him. You keep me for my counsel, Verlein, much as Streln must keep Lerissa. Don’t let Ennead ghosts manipulate the two of you into a battle that will leave only Lerissa standing. Ally with Evrael, support his cause, it is a just one. But send someone for Lerissa. Try, at least. Try to avoid the bloodshed if you can. We have harmed the world [154] too much already. This was not what Galandra wanted.”

  “You and bloody blighted Galandra.”

  Yet it was worth a try.

  “Assassins were a thing of the old world, the outer realms,” Worilke mused. It was the scholar in her surfacing. Her obsession with Galandra long preceded their moment of communion in the magewar. She’d been compiling a life story of the woman when the magewar interrupted her. She’d steeped as deeply in the ancient codices as anyone on Senana—probably deeper. “We have nothing like those now, nor time to train one.”

  Verlein touched the small dagger at her belt, remembering hot blue eyes in a pugnacious face, long afternoons in long grass, dizzying whirlwind attacks, a fierce spirit that never relented.