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

by Terry McGarry

  She plunked the boxes on the table. Enough poxy blighted Louarn! They hadn’t told him everything. Probably he hadn’t told them everything either. Her haunt-memory from him ended with Mellas lost in the tunnels. After that, he was only whatever he told them he was. She liked those boys he had been. She felt bad for them, and wished she could meet them for real. Louarn was kind, and he wasn’t so fake around them anymore. But she still couldn’t gauge him, not well. He was too many shapes all at once.

  And there were more important things. As Yuralon came up from his squat by their carrycase with a handful of tight-wound tops, she asked him, “Will you show me how to stand on guard today?”

  His body skewed into the hipshot stance that meant he was aggravated. A balanced stance meant danger if he was being serious. [282] She’d worked on that stance, the rare times she had to herself. Knees flexed, weight on the balls of the feet, arms relaxed but not dangling. Ready for anything. She only needed a longblade in her hand.

  “You know Jiondor made us promise.”

  “Don’t you be teaching any bladecraft to that young Pel, now!” Jiondor had told the Girdlers. “I don’t care how much she pesters.” Feh! “How come you can have blades and I can’t? You learned when you were my age. I’m no different from you.”

  His shoulders lowered. “Yes you are, sprout.”

  Caille tapped her on the ankle and handed the box puzzle back. “Did it,” she said.

  Pelufer sighed. She did all his puzzles fast. She didn’t even think about them, just felt how they should go. Elora could do it too, the ones made of wood anyway. Pelufer had yet to solve one.

  But I know how people fit inside other people. As she had a nonned times before, she wondered what that was good for.

  “I could make a trade of being a killer hunter,” she said to Yuralon as he and Elora finished snapping the awning in place. “Then I’d need to know blades, wouldn’t I, to protect myself.”

  “Why don’t I show you some plants, before the place crowds up,” he said. His arms swung down from the awning and he looked around the market. “I spy ... three so-called weeds that could be harvested for healing. I dare you to find them.”

  “Oop, sorry, customer.” Pelufer ran off toward a woman who hadn’t even stepped onto the market grounds, walking in long strides down the road from the Knee. Maybe she wouldn’t learn everything they had to teach her.

  Only when she was close enough to start crying their wares did she see the scabbarded blade on the woman’s back. She swallowed the cry and dropped to a stroll. A shielder, on some important errand. They never wanted anything Louarn had made. She looked down the road and saw Louarn and Risalyn coming around the bend. They were walking as if pulled up by strings on their heads. Craning their necks. She started to turn, and was stopped by a hand on her chest.

  “Best keep the road clear,” the bladed woman said, pressing her firmly onto the patchy trampled grass of the market commons.

  Pelufer took a deep breath, held it, let it out slowly through her nose. Any names that came would bubble up from inside her, but they would go into her head, not her mouth, and she would keep them there, in a special place that Louarn and Yuralon had helped her clear for them, a place that could hold all the names in the world, all the memories and selves in the world, and never fill up, and never [283] do her any harm. She waited to feel a name come up into that vast quiet space, a soft harmless burst, a soap bubble.

  No name came. She opened her eyes without knowing she’d closed them. Louarn and Risalyn had stepped off the road, too, just past the last craftery on the lough side, where the market started.

  She turned, and looked up the Knee Road.

  There were two more shielders, and three more behind them, spaced at a dozen threfts. A wedge, to clear the way.

  Behind them, just coming into view where the road dipped down again before switchbacking through the mountains to the Knee, were row upon row upon row of shielders. Ranks of them, three abreast. They were all brown, as if they’d rolled in soil, but it was their clothes, all the same dull color, as if they’d need to keep hidden in some brown place, or to know each other from some other shielders. Or some other fighters.

  She stood rooted to the spot, staring, watching them come. They weren’t in step, but they stayed together, stayed in their ranks. Blade after blade. The shield was moving. They must have marched all night, or been camping just past the far dip of the road. Her heart began to race.

  “Pelufer.” Louarn came up beside her.

  “No.”

  He sighed. “Then I’ll stay with you.”

  They watched together. The front ranks were about to pass them and still more were coming. Dust rose where they walked, having the view like the fog at home, even though it wasn’t a very dusty road. There were just so many of them. She tried to count rows and lost count before two nines, and then it was too late to start over.

  “This must be all the shielders from the Knee,” Louarn said. “Three lookouts every ninemile, posted in shifts ... an outpost every three ninemiles, six to a post ... there must be four nonned shielders around the Leg coast, and this nearly a nonned of them.”

  “Where are they going?”

  She felt him shrug. “I could guess. But I don’t know. Risalyn’s gone to find out what she can. She knows some Knee shielders.”

  The Khinish are waking. She remembered the sound-shadows of promise and menace around the longs at home. She’d heard them again, louder and more certain, from folk all over the market, through the open doors of the tavern and the public house and the smithy, from elders exchanging gossip over cold sweet-birch tea in the Ruffed Grouse.

  They were going to fight the Khinish.

  “Gir Doegre’s down this road.” Her voice had gone very small.

  [284] “That’s no place to stage a battle, among those hills,” Yuralon said. He’d come up on her other side and she hadn’t even noticed. “They’ll cut down to the Boot Road, most like. Engage them somewhere on the flats downleg.”

  She saw again the dangerous man, the fighter, the bladed killer. She had not seen him in that shape for a moon now. She had forgotten that shape, for all she tried to copy it. She had not come even close.

  The awe and dread of the marching ranks thrilled her with a terrified yearning. “Teach me, Yuralon. Please. Before you go.”

  “I’m a healer now,” he said, and she could hear from the angle of the sound that he was saying it to the heedless marching ranks, not to her. Or maybe to hear himself say it, so he’d believe it. Risalyn had told Jiondor the same thing after his no-bladecraft speech, and he’d said, “I know what you are. Just mind my words.”

  I know what you are.

  The forge had fallen silent, the saws at the lumber mill, the axes splitting firewood; the banter of traders had long ceased, the calls of excited children had fallen off, all the sounds of morning muted by the speechless passage of those brown bladed ranks.

  “Come, Pelufer,” Louarn said. “That’s the last of them now. They’re not stopping.”

  “They’ve a long march ahead of them,” Yuralon said, as they turned her between them and marched her back to the stall. That felt like an even longer march. Away from everything she wanted to be. Bladed, brave, invincible, dangerous. The stall was diminished; she came up to find it smaller, more drab than it was already.

  “So many,” Caille said to her, to share the wonder. She didn’t know what they were marching off to do.

  So many, Pelufer thought, watching the dust die down, her hands idly ranking toys in even rows along the table. But there’d have been one more, if she were a grownup, and could do what she wanted to do, not what she had to do.

  She listened without interest as Elora made their first trade of the day, and picked up the wooden item without looking, knowing it by shape and position. Her eyes on the dying dust trail of the marching shield, she reached out for tallystones at the same time she offered up the item she held. From habit, reflex, she br
ushed the customer’s hand, unthinking, uninvolved, her head filled with the low rumble of passing feet.

  Croy burst into her mind, a perfect shining soap bubble.

  The girl forgot the signal, but Louarn, considering chisel versus gouge just behind her, felt her go stiff, then flail to the side and back with [285] a hand. He turned. He gripped Yuralon’s upper arm with the hand that held the chisel. He fixed in his mind the details of the two customers just walking away. The taller one: a dark woman with dark braided hair and a cloak unsuited to summer. She presented a blunt-nosed profile. Attending to something the shorter one was saying. The shorter one: a swarthy man in shirt and breeches with black bowl-cut hair. He was hesitant, perturbed. He held up the toy he had acquired.

  “He felt something from her,” Louarn said. “He knows.”

  Pelufer was still trying to speak. After all their training to mute her reflex, she could not get the names out now. But the names made no difference.

  “They were avoiding the shielders,” Yuralon said. “Laying low, trying to look natural.”

  Louarn dropped the chisel, held the gouge down straight by his thigh, and moved to the left as Yuralon moved to the right. Custom was thin yet, but the grounds were filling. If they could come on the pair in a quick decisive swoop from opposite sides, they’d have a chance of doing this quietly even without Risalyn.

  As he stepped away from the stall, Pelufer choked, “Croy.”

  He kept moving. He denied the frozen numbness that entered his veins. Croy the bricklayer. Croy his master. Croy the good man who’d craved Neck brandy he could never afford.

  He moved with speed but no rush, weaving among traders and sparse customers as if on an angled trajectory off the killers’ path, striding off on some business. He kept Yuralon in his side vision—lost him behind a sourfruit sledge, found him again, paralleling the pair. They were hurrying now but had not broken into a run. The moment Louarn angled toward them he must be prepared for them to bolt.

  They were heading for the dock. The boats were all pleasure craft and slow shellfood dredgers. There would be no escape that way. But if they could trick a pursuer into the water they would gain ample running time. And flush the pursuit, as well—the dock was empty of all save a boat tender, with no one else approaching.

  Yuralon moved in. Too soon—Louarn wasn’t in position. There must have been something he didn’t like about the dock. The woman, nearer but turned toward the man, didn’t see him.

  The man did. He broke—shoving off the woman, dropping the toy, making for the fields in a dead run that took him directly across Louarn’s path.

  Yuralon grappled with the woman. Blows fell; someone cried out; they staggered toward the dock.

  [286] Louarn dodged behind the tall stand of a rope vendor. He waited a breath, listening, gauging the footfalls. Then he burst out in a headlong lunge between pottery and a turner’s bowls and tackled the fleeing man.

  They went down hard. Breath gasped out of them both. Louarn moved an arm he could barely feel and sank the gouge into yielding belly flesh, just shy of breaking through shirt and skin. He pushed up, braced a hand on the man’s collarbone, positioned a knee under the gouge, moved the gouge up to chest level. “Be still and I won’t hurt you,” he managed at last.

  “What in all the spirits are you doing?” Rough hands hauled him off the man, who scrambled up quick as a bug and raced off in a new direction—through the market, downland toward the fields, the quarry, the woods.

  With an oath, Louarn shook off the ignorant rescuers and gave chase. He’d rather let the man run his breath out while he had him in sight, but once he made the woods he’d have the advantage. Louarn had to catch up before that. He’d lost the gouge, but he was still wearing his tool belt. Plenty to threaten the man with. Plenty to kill him with.

  No.

  He killed Croy—

  No.

  Belatedly he realised that, while he could follow the trail of crushed barley the man would leave through the summer-high cornfield, he could be easily ambushed from the side if the man doubled back. He had lost the element of surprise that was his only ally. He was not a fighter. He was in over his head.

  Still he followed. He plunged into the swath the man beat in the tawny forest of stalks. Any moment a weight would hurtle into him from the side, drive him down, he’d feel the bite of a knife, add all his names to those the killer already bore. But he hadn’t counted on how much easier it was to follow a swath than bushwhack it bodily. Suddenly the man was there before him—he’d pulled up—there was clear space beyond him—

  Louarn had learned the hard lesson of the ground. He didn’t tackle. He drove forward with his left shoulder, arms clasped, putting all his weight and momentum into it. The sharp impact of bone took the man midway down the spine and sent him reeling forward, his arms scooping at air. Louarn stumbled after him, then caught his balance.

  The man hung as if in the air, prostrate but humped, like a cat [287] with its back up. It took a moment for Louarn’s eyes to resolve what they were seeing.

  The man had stopped short at the sight of a pollard oak, ancient and thick and low, overtaken by rising ground as the fields were marled and manured year after year, losing its heartwood, studded with old branch stumps, staghorned from some period of neglect yet still fuzzed with new growth. One of a row of such oaks that divided the field they’d been in from the next, too tall to hurdle but too short to see through the screen of ripening barley. Louarn had caught him just before he could shift to skirt it—in that one moment of surprised hesitation at bursting into the clear to find an obstacle in the way.

  Louarn had driven him onto the tree. He lay draped over its low crown, impaled on the spike of an old dead branch.

  Pelufer stared at the cloaked, not-right woman walking toward their pitch.

  She wasn’t the one who’d been with the man the names came off. That woman had long braided hair, this one had short smooth hair. But she was coming from the direction the braided woman had run off in. Louarn ran after the man, Yuralon fought with the braided woman, some traders took the braided woman in hand; Yuralon followed Louarn and told her and Elora to stay put, that Risalyn was coming. But the braided woman had broken away from the traders. They hadn’t chased her. They were confused and threw their hands up in disgust. Pelufer had seen the braided woman coming. She’d run out to trip her. She’d tried to hold her for Risalyn. She’d clung to the woman’s ankle, a dragging weight, so she couldn’t get up. But the woman had beaten her off.

  It was a stupid thing to do. The braided woman could have killed her. New names roosted like bats in the safe cavern in Pelufer’s mind. The braided woman had killed nine people of light. Between them, she and that man had killed more than two nines. Tellers, singers, scribes, farmers, crafters. All the things that people of light became when their kind of light was gone.

  She’d made a fool of herself, clinging to the braided woman’s leg. She’d been unable to speak when the first name came off the man, in the rush of all the other names. She’d forgotten the signal. She’d touched killers in her training, but mercy killers, former binders. This had been the first time her new control was put to the test, and she’d stood there with her mouth working and no sound coming out. But the flush was fading from her cheeks. The braided woman had another partner. The smooth woman. Who was walking toward them now as [288] if she knew. As if the braided woman, running past her at the back of the market, had said, “It’s those girls, they know, they know what we did.”

  “Is Risalyn coming?” she asked Elora, keeping her eyes on the approaching woman.

  Elora had been dabbing at her forehead with a linen handcloth. The woman had bruised her when she beat her off. Kicked her. She barely felt it. Feeling stupid and angry, she wouldn’t let Caille fix it. “Yes,” Elora said, and waved with both arms, the handcloth fluttering from one hand. The kind of thing you did when you had something important to say, when the person you were waving to should hurry
.

  It needed to be the kind of thing you did when you were in a lot of trouble and help had to come right now. “Wave harder, Elora,” she said, and picked up the chisel Louarn had dropped.

  That only made Elora reach for Caille. “Pel ...”

  She flicked her gaze toward the Bulge. Risalyn was trotting now. Not fast enough. She needed to be running. “Don’t look. There’s a not-right woman. Smooth hair, cloak on her. Take Caille to that secondhander’s pitch. Quick but don’t run. Now.”

  Elora didn’t argue. She hustled their sister off fast. Pelufer made one more calculation of angle and distance. Her sisters would make it to the shelter of the toolman’s elaborate pitch. But the woman was going to get here before Risalyn did. If she ran, the woman would know there was something to run for. But maybe she would follow her and leave her sisters alone. If she ran to Risalyn, they’d both be too far to get to Elora and Caille in time if the woman went there. But Elora and Caille could run. Caille was quick and slithery.

  The chisel still clutched in her fist, Pelufer ducked under the table and took off straight for Risalyn.

  Then Risalyn knew. She reached behind her head. She was wearing her blade. She’d gotten her blade from the inn and strapped it on. It came free in a fluid iron arc.

  The woman behind Pelufer was running, too. Gaining. Risalyn had seen her. That was why she drew her blade. But she wouldn’t draw on someone unarmed. The smooth woman was cloaked on a day as hot as a furnace. To hide a longblade. It had to be.

  She couldn’t chance a look back. She would fall. She had to run, just run, straight ahead, toward Risalyn, as fast as she had ever run in her life.

  She outdistanced the woman in a burst of speed. She was nine-and-two. No grownup could catch her.

  “Pass me,” Risalyn called.

  [289] She passed, and heard a sound she’d dreamed but never heard before: the ringing clash of blades.

  She skidded to a halt, and turned. Everyone in the market turned. Someone laughed, thinking it was a shielder demonstration. People murmured. The murmurs darkened. This was no demonstration.