“You’re too far,” Karanthe said, “unless you plan to engage them in the Druilors.”
Kazhe made no nod or reply, only sipped her blistering spiced tea. She listened to the beaded partition clack slowly quiet again after [243] Karanthe’s entry. She listened to the maddening, endless drip from the hut’s leaky roof. But she listened to Karanthe, too.
“By the time a bird gets to me, they’ll have marched past the Boot. In the time it takes you to quit the Girdle and skirt the Druilors, they’ll have come up the Strong Leg. Is that your plan?”
Still Kazhe did not reply. But the next day she drilled her cadre for the last time on the plains. The day after, they set out for the Druilors, three dozen and more on tall, long-bodied Girdle mounts, spears and staffs wrapped, shields bagged beside their saddles. They camped alone, avoiding villages, easy in their dog tents, plains Girdlers relieved to be on the move after two years of staking down ever tighter where they’d been. The few who had blades kept them sheathed and packed. For the rest, Kazhe said, they were bound for the far side of the Blooded Mountains, where there was iron aplenty, and smiths who knew what to do with it.
They wanted blades. She would give them blades. Not kenaila, not cheitla, not tainla. Her kenai, the greater blade, one of a kind, was her own and would part from her only in death. Her cheit, the dagger, the tooth, was still at Verlein’s belt, though she would have it back in the end. Her tain, the lesser blade, belonged to Benkana, who had learned all she could teach him long ago and was the one successor she had chosen well.
She would give them blades of her own invention. Bladebreaking blades. And she knew just the ironsmith who could make them.
Sowmid waned in a scowl of clouds, discomfited rumbles from the mountains, rumors of plague and magekillings, mad tales of bonefolk stealing children.
Kazhe lifted the new-forged iron and, with no warning, extended her body over an outstretched leg in a deep thrust that left the tip of the blade fingertip-deep in one of the smithy’s support beams. The ironsmith and her prentice were too startled to move; after a moment, the prentice said, “Oh,” and took a step back.
“No good,” Kazhe said, withdrawing the weapon and her body to resting position, then laying the ill-balanced blade down. “The weight has to fall nearer the tip.”
“But then it overbalances,” said the smith, indicating another blade, an earlier attempt to follow Kazhe’s instructions. “You lose control. It leads your hand wild.”
Kazhe bit down on an oath. “It must lead your hand. The weight must be where the thrust goes.”
[244] “This is a bladebreaker. That’s what you said you wanted. A blade with no edge—”
“I know what I said.” She kept her voice calm, her words measured. A tone that might be taken for patient, that’s what she was after. “I’m not asking for a lead ball on the end of the thing. Denser metal, that’s all. It should fly before me on the thrust. I should launch it like an arrow and be pulled after.”
“Why can’t we just work on copying your blade?” asked the prentice softly.
Kazhe saw the yearning in his young eyes. His fondest, greediest wish was to forge a blade like hers. Second to that, he wished only to hold hers again. The touch of it was like a fine, sweet wine. One sip, and next thing you knew you were fighting for the jug—anything, anything, for just one sip more.
Briefly she considered handing it to him, letting him run his finger along the swirls and currents in the strange metal—letting him, and his master, feel again the exquisite imbalance, the way the foreblade pulled toward the target from the moment the thing was unsheathed. But she had given them enough opportunities to learn the shaping of it by feel. The trouble was that they were not fighters. They had never been trained in the use of these weapons. Until they were, all the explanations and descriptions and examples in the world were not going to drive the point home.
“I don’t want another blade like this,” she said. “I have a bloody blade like this. Keep working on the bladebreaker. And get it right, or by all the spirits I’ll pull Auda Bladesmith out of the bonefolk’s bellies.”
She turned to go, thinking, That was not what I meant to do. She had seen the diminishing effect of bluster. She knew she must not lose her temper when she was armed. But if they would only do as she told them, and stop insisting on their own forsaken—
No. This was not the way.
At the threshold, she made herself turn back, and hoped that shoulders slumped would resemble shoulders softened.
“You can’t copy it,” she said—then gave them the gift of the secret, and if it knocked the hope out of them perhaps it would also clear the ideas from their heads so her instructions could get in. “It was magecrafted. A blade like this will never be fashioned again.”
She traded the heat of the forge for the lesser heat of the day. The seasons had been unpredictable in recent years, if her blurred recollections could be trusted, but the heat could only get worse as summer approached. She was stuck with it, and the poisoned Druilor runoff, [245] and the loss of Auda Bladesmith to an infection the weakest triad could have cured.
She moved to the next smithy, here in this town of ironmongers, and found the problems similar. Perhaps it was more magecrafting than metal that made her blade move as it did. Perhaps the weapon she wanted could not be made by ordinary craft. She pondered that, briefly, while the ironsmith haggled with her over the price.
“All right,” she said at last, acceding to his wishes—to a trade she should have hoped for all along, even suggested. It seemed so obvious now. “I’ll train your daughter and your son, in return for the weapons to arm them and six others. Whether they follow where I’m bound will be up to them.”
Smithy by smithy, she acquired additions to her cadre. In the Strong Leg, all folk had heard rumors of the Khinish waking. All folk wanted to be armed. If it suited her, if she was suited to leading it, she might muster a full-blown uprising before the Khinish even set foot on the Boot. But slaughter was not her intention. Training the nonned she had now, the two nonned she would have before she was through, was dangerous enough.
When she brought them to their new training ground, in a poisoned dell between long Druilor feet that hid them from the roads beyond, she said, “You’ve done well. The least of you, armed with a longstaff, can work a ribbon of nine shielders. But the Khinish may be tougher. I’ve taught you to disarm. I’ve taught you to incapacitate. Now I’ll teach you to kill.” She paused, and looked at their faces. “Wipe those grins off. It’s no gift. It’s a taint, a stain. A curse. Respect the blade—and beware the shadow it will bring on you.”
“I don’t know how long I can hold on,” she murmured to Benkana, lying sweat-soaked atop him in their shed behind a smithy. Her folk were scattered through nearby villages, to avoid arousing suspicion by camping as a group. There were nearly two nonned now. Enough to be mistaken for an armed force.
He grunted, like a small quake underneath her. He’d already been nearly asleep, exhausted from drilling his third of the cadre. Sira had the other third. “To what?” he said, when he’d disentangled her voice from the onset of dreams.
She didn’t have the words to answer him. Sanity. Clarity. Patience. Evenhandedness. Telling people not to strain themselves when all she wanted was to brawl, and drink, and kill. “To not being me.”
“You’re kenai. You’ve always been kenai. You always will. It’s what you are.” He shifted her off him and lay on his side, head [246] propped on one hand, the other tracing swirls through the sweat around her collarbone. “Is it your blade you fear to lose?”
It was so simple for him. He was a good man. He worked hard, and he fought for what he believed in, sometimes when he didn’t even know what it was—when he was only following someone he loved, someone he trusted, someone he’d die for. He’d followed Torrin that way. It was how they’d met.
He didn’t understand the lusts that fired her blood. He didn’t understand rage. He didn’t unders
tand how it felt to want to kill. To want to die.
“You can’t lose it,” he said. “It will always come back to you. It finds ways to hide itself, keep itself safe, and then return to your keeping.” She thought of the taverner handing it back to her. He was right; it was the blade that had contrived that. “The blade is you, Kazhe.”
“Then yes, it’s the blade I fear to lose,” she said, or perhaps only thought, as sleep began to carry her off.
Something snapped her awake. Her hackles rose; a tingle swept through her limbs; she went stiff. Benkana felt it, and in silent unison they rolled from their bedding. Blades came easily to hand. They crept from the smiths’ shed, Kazhe on point, Benkana watching her back. She hardly felt the stray bits of metal that dug into her bare feet. Her knees flexed. Her nostrils flared. There was danger nearby. Someone intended death. She could smell it like blood.
Her own blood sang.
A sound, from the right. The slightest tick. It might have been lips, parting in sleep. Karanthe slept in the barn where the smiths’ draft horses had been kept. Glanders had taken the horses. Comfrey and Benkana’s Eye bright were in a makeshift paddock with the other mounts, away from where there had been sickness. A rustle—feet in straw? Benkana moved beside the door. Kazhe reached her off hand toward it.
The scrape of edged metal being lifted.
She hauled the door across its rollers. Two forms crouched in the gloom. Kazhe came in low, Benkana high. The form on the right shot up to full height and raised something that glinted. Benkana’s blade swept over her head and clanged hard against denser metal. The weapons scraped one on the other. She rammed a shoulder into the form on the right, then sprang back to bring her blade into play. A knife gleamed dully, rising up and away from near the floor. She dodged at the same moment it was hurled. A heavy clunk came from the right—a weapon flying loose—as the knife whispered past her bare [247] shoulder. She drove forward and down with her blade. It grated through bone and sank into softness.
Ignoring the outcry, she pulled out, swung her blade around. Benkana was reeling back with empty hands. It was his weapon that had flown loose. An axe cut the air horizontally where his belly had been. Its wielder was right-handed. The swing opened his right side to her. She thrust for the kidney. The blade slid in. The axeman was still pivoting through his swing. His spine caught the side of her weapon. He shrieked. The blade jarred free. He fell.
She drew back into position, balanced, scanning the shadows. The axeman was between Benkana and his blade. Rasping. Not dead yet. Still a threat. Benkana crept forward and took up the axe. They listened. A sob, a death rattle, then nothing.
Three dark forms lay on the barn floor. Benkana moved to the middle one. Kazhe covered him. Sleepy, frightened voices outside were responding to the noise. “It’s Karanthe,” Benkana said as candlelight bore in—the smith and her pledgemate.
The light revealed a barn spattered in blood, two dark-cloaked figures drenched and still, and Karanthe emerging, woozy, from unconsciousness as Benkana lifted her up to sit.
Kazhe searched the dead. The axe, the rope looped over a rafter beam, and Karanthe’s triskele in the axeman’s pocket told the story of what had been meant to happen here, but it took Karanthe to translate it for them.
“They’ve been killing runners,” she said, when they’d gotten her inside the house and poured some tea into her. “Killing them, taking their triskeles, and ...” She stripped off her black tunic and hose and gave them to the smith’s pledge, who’d offered to rinse the blood out before it set, then sat with Kazhe and Benkana and the smith at the cookroom table while the older children ushered the younger back to bed and the smith’s prentice talked to the townsfolk gathered outside, awaiting a cart to take the dead to the bonefolk. With the children gone, she finished, “And cutting their hands off. Almost as if to stop their haunts casting, or some such nonsense. It’s madness.”
“Where has this been happening?” the smith said. “We heard rumors, but there’s every sort of rumor going around, half of them wild imaginings.”
“Here, in the Boot, in the Heartlands, in the Girdle. In sowmid there were two in the Elbow. We follow trails and then lose them. We don’t know how many they are or how they’re organized or why they do it. It tailed off just after Wantons’ Eve—do you call that Brightfire here? We hoped they were done, or caught, or dead.”
“Now two of them are all three,” said Kazhe.
[248] “I wish we could have questioned them.”
“I’ll take them the way they are.”
Benkana asked, “You think there’s someone directing them?”
Karanthe shrugged. “There’s no pattern. But there’s more than one group. I’d like to know how they’re connected, and what they have against people who used to be reckoners.”
“Have they killed menders? Scribes? Scholars?”
“Not that I’ve heard, but I don’t know. So many people die. People die with no one knowing; if they’re not found before the bonefolk come, they disappear, and no one knows how they went.”
“Why didn’t you tell us this?”
“I hoped it was over.”
Benkana looked at Kazhe, knowing her mind. “You can’t protect, all the former mages in the world.”
“That’s what kenaila do.”
“And what about this other thing you’re doing?”
The fervor abruptly ebbed from Kazhe’s limbs, leaving her sitting naked at a cookroom table in the middle of the night. She’d wiped the dead’s blood off on their own clothes, but her blade, propped against her chair, needed cleaning and oiling. Though it was sweltering even in the dark hours, she felt a need to wrap herself in something clean and dry.
Two nonned fighters, trained for one purpose, awaiting her direction—awaiting a message from the Boot. They were not trained kenaila. She could not train two nonned kenaila. Only two nonned kenaila could do that, and it would take years. They were trained for one task, one mission.
“I’ll see it through,” she said. But for the first time she felt doubt. Suppose Verlein or the Khinish won their decisive battle here in the Leg? It would fall to the victor to protect the runners. Let them bear the responsibility. A burden on that scale was the last thing in the world she wanted. Let someone bloody take over the world. Let them run it. Let them cope with this.
Yet if mages were dying ...
There are no mages anymore. “People of light,” they called them here, as if even to think the word “mage” was to overstep some superstitious bounds. Call them what you will, they’re gone, and they’re never coming back.
What idiocy, to kill them—
Unless ...
“Your light is really gone, isn’t it, Karanthe?” she asked carefully.
The runner nodded. “Yes. It’s really gone.”
So much for that. “Maybe they’re still angry at the Ennead.”
[249] “For what?” said the smith. She was not one of the ones who had been with them six years before, in the Blooded Mountains. “For dying?”
Kazhe shared a look with Karanthe, then sighed. That story was too much to tell. “It doesn’t matter. It’s late. Men died here tonight. I don’t suppose you recognized either of them, did you?”
To her surprise, Karanthe frowned. “I feel I saw them once, when they were younger. And less dead. But I can’t think where.”
“Then that doesn’t matter either, unless it comes back to you. Could have been anywhere. I’m going back to bed. It’s either that or one of your Longdark flings, the way I’m dressed.”
They thanked the smith and her pledge, apologized for the disruption; she and Benkana left them insisting that Karanthe sleep in the house. Then there was a flutter and a cry. They turned back, blades ready, and found Karanthe, still in her silks, fumbling to wrap a dishcloth around her arm so that the hawk flapping unhappily around the room could perch there.
Fastened round its leg was not a message, but simply a token: a band of silk rib
bon, dyed slate and rose to match the bird’s plumage.
The runner looked at Kazhe.
“They’re moving,” she said.
The Khinish had woken.
Gir Doegre
Silks draped in luscious waves over the posts of stalls, linens and felts and flannels and tweeds and velvets in layered folds below, bundled textiles sandbagging the front of shops. Gauges and crapes heaped and piled with negligent charm; gossamer scarves and wormsilk bed nets and lace table covers in soft profusion, a diaphanous billow and flutter. Woolens and braid rugs, carpets and throws, drifts of balled yarn. Brass doorplates and hinges and knobs, urns and candlestands, even oarlocks and cleats and stanchions—ship fittings, in this landlocked place equidistant from maur and sea. Pewter tableware, teaware, candleware. Playing stones and luck stones and counting stones and whetstones, mortars and pestles, earthenware, clayware. And everywhere tools. Trowels and spades and hoes, hay crooks and hay knives and hay hooks and hay forks and barley forks, flails and reaping hooks and sickles and scythes, here where the fields were dying and the crofts abandoned. Mortise axes, chisel axes, felling axes, hewing hatchets, shingling hatchets, lathing hatchets, jiggers and froes and drawknives, here where their softwood had rotted and what wasn’t made of cedar or stone was made of tin. Thatchers’ tools where they roofed with metal to keep vermin from spreading disease. Wares displayed with salacious decadence on streets somehow crowded, though illness had taken a hard toll.
The Binder's Road (The Sequel to 'Illumination') Page 31