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

by Terry McGarry

  “And if you best me?”

  “Then I win.”

  Verlein removed her own shortblades from belt and thigh and boots, laying them down with care, and the cheit with them. “You needed a cause to fight for, once.”

  “I fight for the bloody thrill of it. But since you asked ... I’ll have that cheit back, too.”

  Verlein looked up sharply. “I don’t think so.”

  Kazhe grinned. “Does my little dagger make fools take you for a blademaster?” She shrugged out of her crosswise harness and slid the oiled, ancient scabbard off the magecrafted kenai, the weapon that had been her father’s, the weapon no blademaster bequeathed until death. “Or are you just sentimental?”

  [186] Verlein drew her long tapered blade and thrust forward in answer. Kazhe, flinging the scabbard aside and adding her left hand to the kenai’s grip, countered with a bark of glee.

  Verlein’s opening thrust was arrow-straight and aimed at the belly, meant to prove the merit of her blade’s design. She gripped it one-handed and turned her body, presenting a narrowed target as though they stood on a practice strip, as though they fought along a single line. Had she abandoned the eight directions of movement? In her obsession with meeting straight-on invasion, had she conceived battle as only advance and retreat?

  Kazhe passed forward and to the left and bore Verlein’s blade down easily. The same motion served as a cut to the legs. Verlein sprang back to save her thigh and stop Kazhe bearing in on her from the side. Kazhe followed onto her right foot with a rising false-edge cut. Verlein half-bladed to block it, left hand on the weak of her blade. Kazhe did the same, and grinned at the shriek of iron on iron as they vied to slip past each other’s point of resistance, to yield to the strong and draw the other off balance, to dart over or under and hook blade with guard or lever arm with hilt. Verlein made a bid to grapple. Kazhe sprang free and spat at the ground. This would not descend to wrestling. This was a contest of blades.

  They resumed their guards at middle distance.

  Verlein’s fiat stance was strange. Kazhe danced around it, testing her footwork, making her pivot, trying to force her back into a square-on stance. Verlein persisted in turning her body, shoulders angled to legs when she passed forward. Power derived from the alignment of hips and shoulders. It was a dramatic change in style, a weakening of all Kazhe had taught her. Kazhe moved fluidly through guards, seeking a way in. Verlein, voiding and winding and disengaging, never met her full in the bind, never jeopardised her weaker weapon. Instead she exploited her longer reach, her slimmer, swifter blade.

  A tapered blade. A thrusting blade.

  Verlein counted on her fluid wrist to be more deft than the two hands with which Kazhe levered and spun her grip. She turned her body to protect it as she maneuvered herself to dart in for the thrust or the harassing slice, again and again.

  Verlein was a shielder. She was meant to be holding a shield in that off hand.

  Or a dagger. A cheit.

  Understanding at last, Kazhe attacked with full intent.

  Burning, exhilarated, she turned Verlein in circles, backed her against trees, broke her stance again and again, made her leap and hop, sway and duck. Then she slashed under a high assault for a clean cut [187] across Verlein’s midriff, taking a slice to the shoulder for it, gasping with the ecstasy of pain—laughing to see Verlein’s eyes fly wide.

  To Verlein, this was a demonstration. A first-blood bout to prove supremacy of style. She’d let Kazhe attack the blade while she waited for her to tire. The first cut should have ended it; the two cuts should end it in a draw ...

  Verlein had not forgotten the eight directions—six forward and back on the straight and diagonal, one to each side. But she had forgotten the ninth direction.

  The ninth direction was down. To death.

  Kazhe drove in through a reddening haze, heedless of the damage the longer blade would inflict should she blink or falter. Under her own gruff, powerful exhalations she heard Verlein order her to stand down, as if she were one of her toy fighters. Under the next “Hup!” and clang of iron, it sounded like an offer to yield. But there was no yielding here. There would never, ever be any yielding.

  Only a ruse of feigned yielding. The teacher’s oldest trick: the invitation to underestimate. Would Verlein remember the hard lessons in the fields? Or had the sight of the drunken wreck wiped the memory clean? Still appearing to give her all, Kazhe hunched her shoulders and let her point drop below eye level in middle guard. Just a tad, a nearly imperceptible change of angle. She set Verlein’s next thrust aside and failed to press through. She dropped her elbow in hanging guard, let her cut fall just shy, flopped her arms into low guard and let her blade point brush the ground. Just enough to signal that, ravaged from drink, out of practice, short on sleep, off her stride, she was beginning to flag. She drew Verlein in with each strike made too close to her own body. She invited her in, with elbows too bent, cuts too short. She passed back, but not quite out of range. When Verlein, still wary but irresistibly tempted, committed to one flung-out cut at the legs—meant as payback for the belly slice, delivered with only the pommel retained in her grip—Kazhe stepped in, whacked Verlein’s forearm with the cross of her hilt, and lifted her blade above her shoulder to deliver the strike of wrath.

  “Die, Verlein,” she said, and brought her blade down with all the power of her body.

  Verlein dove headlong past her. She groped for her fallen blade, failed to snag it as Kazhe pivoted, and rolled aside just a hair before Kazhe’s reversed blade would have brained her with a hammer blow. Disarmed, she scrabbled to regain her feet and put a tree between herself and the vicious madness that was Kazhe, shouting for her seconds.

  [188] Kazhe let them grapple her, let them drag her away from Verlein, but would not release her blade even when one of them cracked a pommel on her knuckles. The blade was part of her. She was the blade. There was no word for blademaster. The word for blade and wielder was the same. She was kenai. She was the blade.

  “There are no bouts, Verlein,” she said through blood after Girayal whacked her in return for a peremptory kick. “There are no terms. There’s only dying, and not dying. You’ve forgotten that.”

  “The drink has cracked you. You were never like this.”

  “I was always like this. That’s why you loved me. Come on, Verlein. Pick up your hazel switch. We’re not finished.”

  “We’re finished, Kazhe. I am going to tell you what to do, and for once in your bloody benighted life you are going to do it.”

  “Or what? You’ll hand me the pieces of your broken heart?”

  “I’ll hand you the pieces of this broken land. The Khinish are going to march, Kazhe. The Ennead’s ghost is whispering in their ear, inciting them. I’m going to the Strong Leg to stop them. Destroy the ghost, and chances are they’ll pull their thrust and go back where they belong. Terrorize that poor innkeeper into pouring drink down your throat, and my shield will fight the Khinish and the Strong Leg will soak in blood.”

  “You had to best me. Those were the terms. I owe you nothing.”

  “You refused the terms. The shield bested you.” Verlein gestured at the seconds who held Kazhe’s arms.

  As though just noticing them, Kazhe buckled one with a heel behind the knee, freed that arm by cocking its elbow under the woman’s jaw as she fell, dispensed the other with a groin strike, then asserted her space with a lazy sweep of blade. “Relying on shields is only one of the flaws in your new technique.”

  With a hiss, Verlein opened her arms and her empty hands and moved inside the blade, close enough for Kazhe to smell the scallions on her breath, the sweat on her body. “You listen to me. It’s going to be them or us. If the Khinish carve out supremacy, they’ll have us in irons. You will do whatever I tell you to do in order to keep them off us.”

  “The Khinish are olive growers. They have no reason to carve anything.”

  “The Khinish were formidable conquerors once. Warriors who
invaded and took control of other lands.”

  Control.

  Kazhe blinked. “You want to rule.”

  “No. I command. I already have that. I want to save us.”

  [189] Kazhe shoved away and turned to sheath the kenai. “You want to wield me like a blade.”

  “You are a blade,” Verlein said. “You are kenai. The only one left.” She strode halfway to where Kazhe was picking her knives one by one from the flesh of the tree. “Be good for something. Do something.”

  Kazhe sheathed the last knife in her belt as she sheathed Verlein’s words in her mind. Newfangled shielders and ancient warriors: Two forces vying to conquer a land that had never been in dispute. Two forces vying to conquer their own land. Spurred by some surviving member of a corrupt mage cadre, or merely inventing justifications for war—it didn’t matter which. All that mattered was that one of them would win.

  Kazhe turned with a roundhouse punch that sent Verlein sprawling on the grass. She watched unseeing as blood gushed from the shieldmaster’s nose.

  No one had ever ruled this land. Not even the Ennead, manipulating their web of mages from their dark fastness. No one.

  Her blade was sworn to protect. For as long as there had been people of light, there had been kenaila—their shadows, their blades, pledged to kill in their defense, to take the stain of death on their souls in order to keep the mages safe. Pledged to die for them.

  Most of them had. Kazhe should have, too. She should have died with her father in the silken grasslands of home, when the Ennead’s turncloak kenaila came to kill him. She should have died with Torrin in the magewar. But she had not. And, day after day, the balance of noon had come before the blade called her to its justice.

  Now she knew why. There was one thing left to defend, protect, preserve. One thing still to die for.

  “You will not rule,” she said. “You will not rule the world that mages made. And you will not rule me.”

  She mounted her horse, ignoring his irritable nip at her foot when she reined him from the tasty hedge, and rode straight through the shielders, scattering them.

  That was her answer. That was her vow. I will ride through your forces with the forces I will raise, and I will scatter you, and your enemies, and there will be no ruling then. Whether Verlein would understand it, she didn’t know. She’d been a slow study, though relentless. She let words sway her when she should have looked only to actions.

  Kazhe had no use for words. Only deeds would save Eiden Myr.

  Only a victor who refused to rule.

  Or be ruled.

  * * *

  [190] “She won’t do it,” Verlein told Worilke, deep in the afternoon, in the concealing shade of a mulberry tree.

  Worilke shook with a rage that Verlein had never seen in her. “She must! Or you must send someone else! Who is your most stealthy second?”

  “I will spend no more time on this. I don’t care what’s goading the Khinish. I’m a fighter. My job is to stop them. You take care of your old illuminator. She’s not my concern. I leave for the Strong Leg tonight.”

  “Lerissa must be your concern, Verlein. She is your rival. Stop the Khinish, if you will. But use that victory as a stepping-stone. You must take control.”

  “You’re as bad as Kazhe! I don’t want your bloody control, when will you understand that? I’m pledged to watch. To defend. I’ll defend against our own, if I have to, but then I’m done, Worilke. I’m going back to my coast to watch and wait, and to the spirits with all of you!”

  “You would let the menders take control? The runners? The heirs of the Ennead’s warders and reckoners? Their proxies, Verlein. Even now, I have word that runners are forming their own holding. That would make two—one white, one black. How long until they have three? How long until they dissolve your shield and leave our coasts defenseless?”

  Verlein mopped at her nose, which had begun to run bloody again. The pain was bad. Nearly blinding. She wanted to strike out, but she didn’t know at what. Worilke was an aged, withered woman, powerless now except for her. Or because of her. Verlein kept her for her counsel. It had always done well for her, until now, and Worilke couldn’t be blamed for the wild, burning arrow Kazhe turned out to be. Let her fall, and burn. The rejection smarted, and she’d bear the bent nose of it as a lifelong reminder. But Kazhe was of no more interest now than some scheming remnant of the Nine. She had a battle to fight.

  Yet what lay at the other side of it? Could Worilke be right—could there be more gain in winning than simply winning for its own sake? She wasn’t Kazhe, to fight for the bloody sport of it. She wasn’t Kazhe, to fight with no concept of the consequences. Why not use victory to establish permanent dominance? Why not?

  “It’s either you, the Khinish, or the proxies, Shieldmaster. Identify your opponents and eliminate them.”

  Slowly, in pain, Verlein nodded. “And Lerissa?”

  Worilke sighed, fingering a pouch she kept always at her belt amid folds of robe. It held banewort, Verlein knew. A useless [191] substance; it killed only mages, and the magelight was dead. But Worilke never touched it directly. “I will see to her,” she said. “Summon Teyik for me. He’ll arrange it.” Then, looking down at the shape of the hard, dried roots imprinted on the fabric of the pouch, the linen shiny from the oils of many touches, she said, “And more besides, and more efficiently, perhaps.” The grin she raised was ghastly, insane. “Time for Freyn’s justice.”

  Verlein left her to her muttenngs. She’d get nothing more of use from Worilke now. In the morning her madness would have lifted. Let her sit in her wagon and speak to herself of old, dead things through the night. Teyik, her old steward’s son, would look after her.

  She called for Girayal and Eowi and began preparations for the Strong Leg journey.

  In the end, she could trust only herself. In that much, Kazhe and Worilke were both right. If someone was going to rule—if her blades were going to allow the rule of anyone—it had to be someone she trusted to do right by Eiden Myr.

  It had to be her.

  Kazhe regarded the tankard in her hand, her knuckles blanching on its handle, the dull nothing it reflected and the ale it no longer held. “You will not rule me,” she said, very softly, and rose, and left the Low Arm public house, and got back on her horse. He bit her arm, but he bore her true.

  The next morning, on a ferry bound across the water that lay between her and the myriad grasses of home—between her and the proud, loyal folk she would forge into a blade, a bladebreaking blade, the greatest blade, a breaker of armies—she sent the tankard spinning end over end into the sea.

  Every part of him hurt. His hands hurt. His head hurt most of all. His eyes hurt, when he came near light. He stayed away from light.

  There were bigthings moving in the tunnels. He heard their tread. He heard their talk. He heard the whisk of their cloaks. Sometimes they brushed his face like wings.

  He was small. He shrank from light. They didn’t see him.

  He sniffed his way. Torches smelled of tar, lamps smelled of oil. Lightless tunnels smelled of damp stone and safety. Damp was good. He heard damp trickling down a wall. It had a bad smell, but he was very thirsty. He lapped at it. Then he was sick. Then he was hungry. He sniffed his way to where something frilly grew in long wooden cases filled with earth. He ate the frills. They tasted like mushroom. He pressed his hot face into the cool ruffled freshness, down into the loamy soil. Earth was nice. Stone was nice. The banks of ruffles made a soft bed. He slept.

  He woke to shadow so deep it seemed to move. He reached up. He wasn’t afraid of the dark. He was good at the dark. Dark hid you.

  His hurt hand touched something thin and sharp, and he screamed.

  Bigthings pounded down the tunnels toward where he was. He scrambled off his bed, whimpering, ducking low, batting at his head to keep the thinsharps off him. A door opened and light flooded his good dark place with its ruffled woodsoil beds. He crawled deep into the darkness by the floor and
slid out the way he had come in.

  The bigthings didn’t get him. The thinsharps didn’t follow.

  [193] Tears were salty. Not good to drink. He went back to the trickle and then past it. He came to a wall. Spaces opened on each side. He could feel spaces on his skin; he could hear them. Spaces sounded different from walls.

  He went into one. It went for a long way. At the end of it was a hole that whispered. Air came up through it from far below, like someone breathing. It was nice. He sat with his feet dangling over the edge for a long time. The hole went down a long way. The hole was an old, old thing. It had a smell, not exactly like the ruffles, but close. He liked it. It made him feel as though he knew things. He stayed there so long that he got sleepy again, but he thought he might roll in by accident, so he left there and went past the trickle tunnel, hoping for a softness to lie down in.

  Instead there was a wonderful, wonderful smell. Warm things. Treats. It came from an up tunnel, but there was light there. He winced and drew back. He screwed his eyes down tight, leaving just a crack to see through, and tried again. It hurt. It scared him. He heard bigthings up there.

  He was hungry, and hurt, and tired, and he longed for something he couldn’t name, something to go around him. But there was only stone. He tucked up where the floor met the wall, and slept.

  When he woke, there were thinsharps. He ran away, and lost them in the twists and turns. The tunnels changed. It took a while to find his way back to where he was. Then he tried to find another way to the warm smell. But the tunnels hadn’t changed enough for that. He learned the new tunnels—where there was light, where there wasn’t, where there were bigthings, where there weren’t. The warm smell and the trickle made one line now, and the ruffles and the whisperhole made another. He learned where other tunnels connected in shadow, high up in holes too small for the bigthings but just right for him. But in three awakes he couldn’t find a way to the treat. And every time he woke up there were thinsharps, and it took more twists and turns to lose them.