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

by Terry McGarry

  Pelufer stood transfixed by the play of iron, the angles, the footwork. They danced a circle in the trampled grass, probing for openings, swinging and blocking, high and low, crashing together and pausing as if stunned, then breaking apart for a renewed windy flurry of attacks and responses, too fast for the eye to follow. It was a dance of bearing and balance and edge, a dance of shapes.

  She brought the chisel up in a blade grip. She took a step forward, as if she would dance, too.

  The smooth woman lifted her weapon so fast that it was coming straight down to cleave Risalyn’s head before Risalyn could take the opening to thrust into her body. Risalyn brought her blade up hard to block the blow.

  Her blade broke. The tip fell like a shard of ice.

  There was shouting. Pelufer’s body jerked as two people ran by, one on either side of her. She had not been in her body. She was still not completely in her body. Some part of her was reaching out, through the shared medium of grassy ground. Not toward Risalyn, but toward the smooth woman. Seeking something, like an opening. Not finding it. Blocked. There was an opening. A way in. Somewhere. If she could find it.

  Risalyn sprang away, but the woman had anticipated the move and swept a foot out to trip her. Risalyn fell so hard on her back that she bounced, stunned loose-limbed, on the grassy ground. Her bladeless hilt left her hand. The woman loomed over her.

  Maybe it wasn’t the ground. Maybe it was the air ... she knew metals, she was born of a metals town, but that was tin and copper, and iron had to cleave through air before it met flesh. ...

  The woman’s back had come around to Pelufer. Pelufer couldn’t see the blade now. But she could read the curve of spine and shoulders, the jut of elbows. The contraction, the drawing-back. She could feel the cold iron, feel the grip draw warmth from the woman’s hands, feel the blade draw strength into the tang and along itself to the killing point. The blade drove at Risalyn—

  And was deflected by a sharp chop from a blade borne in from the side by one shielder, while another shielder ran the woman through.

  Pelufer felt that blade enter flesh not as if it were her own flesh, but as if she were the blade.

  [290] Somewhere off to the left, Caille was screaming. Then the ground tilted up and jarred her hip and head and shoulder hard, and she was nothing.

  Louarn startled at a sound behind him—the rustling, wary tread of Yuralon, less heedless of the threat of ambush in the cornfield though he was better trained to meet it.

  “Weeping spirits,” he said, confronting the impaled man.

  Louarn knelt by the bowl-haired head. Blood and drool dripped from the man’s mouth, but he was breathing. “He’s alive,” he told Yuralon, who came to kneel by the other side, soaking wet. He’d gone into the lough. “What’s your name?”

  “Can’t ... feel,” the man said. “Breathe.” He seemed able to move only his head.

  Louarn blanched. “I drove my shoulder into his back,” he said. “Perhaps the spine ...”

  “You may have snapped it, or the branch may have severed something.” Yuralon had opened a pouch at his belt and was fingering through it. “It’s a mercy to him, either way.”

  Louarn sat heavily on his rear. “I wouldn’t have killed you,” he said, uncomprehending.

  “Kill ... myself before ... tell ...”

  “Who ordered you to kill mages?” Yuralon asked.

  No answer came.

  Louarn got up with some idea of hoisting him off the branch, stanching the wound, fetching Caille, healing him. Could Yuralon heal him? Elora had been trying to help Caille teach them. ...

  “Stand off, Louarn,” Yuralon said, shaking powder from a draw-bag into his palm. “It’s too late for that. He has only breaths.”

  Louarn crouched by the man’s head, at a loss for what to do or say. He didn’t know which one had carried Croy’s name. Those hands might have taken Croy’s hands ... those hands might have broken Croy’s skull ... but he could summon no outrage in the face of what had befallen this living body.

  Yuralon slid a hand around the man’s head to cover his mouth, let him exhale protest, then pinched his nostrils shut. The head gave a weak jerk. Yuralon waited a breath, then brought his powder-sprinkled palm under the nose. When he opened his pinching fingers, the man inhaled.

  “Did someone order you to kill mages?” he asked.

  After a moment, there was the suggestion of a nod.

  “Who?”

  [291] The man struggled against whatever drug Yuralon had forced on him, but it acted quickly, and he was too close to death to fight it very hard. “Ennead ... last ... one ... one left ...”

  “Why?” Yuralon’s questions were delivered with grinding, inexorable dispassion.

  “... magelight ... Galandra’s ... warding ... protect ... kill the light ...”

  “Kill the light? The magelight is dead.”

  “... not dead ... chance of ... return ... for some ... she doesn’t know ... who ... kill ... all ... herself last, her ... steward will ... do it ... time ... comes ...”

  “This makes no sense,” Yuralon said, frowning, and drew the use knife from his belt.

  “No,” Louarn said.

  “He’s dead anyway.”

  “Let him go.”

  “We can find out the rest from the girl, but only if it was my hand that killed him.”

  “I killed him.”

  “Not enough. An accident.” He lifted the head by the hair. Louarn saw a bloodied smile on the man’s lips, and grasped the fighter’s knife arm, leaned in. “A mercy killing,” Yuralon said, his composure unyielding. “He’s asked me for it. He’s bleeding his life out. Let me end this, that we might end a greater threat.”

  Running footfalls crunched over downed stalks back the way they had come. Louarn looked up wildly. Risalyn would halt this act, Risalyn—

  The woman who came hurtling out of the cornstalks was dark and braid-haired. A longblade sang over her head.

  Louarn fell back at the shove that freed Yuralon to use his knife. The fighter came up under the woman, driving into her belly as she swept her blade through where his head had been. The tip tore the air in front of Louarn. The blade went flying into the barley beyond him. He looked over to find her dying on Yuralon’s knife, which had angled up to her heart.

  The impaled man was dead.

  “I told them to hold her,” Yuralon said, easing the woman to the ground. She too was soaking wet. “I told them she was a thief. They were traders, theft threatens them all. They looked like they were obeying me.”

  “She might have fought free,” Louarn said. “She was bladed.”

  “She was no fighter. She came in wild. A child could have taken her.” He withdrew his knife with a teeth-aching scrape of blade on [292] bone, then closed her glared eyes before he wiped the blade clean.

  “Folk fear longblades. The sight or feel of it under her cloak ...”

  “It wasn’t under her cloak when I wrestled with her.”

  “Then there is a third. We must go back—the girls—”

  “Easy. Risalyn is with them.”

  Staring at the dead woman, Louarn said, in an odd voice, “Now Pelufer can divine her name from you.”

  “Yes. And perhaps more.”

  Louarn got up. “Take care of the girls,” he said.

  “You can’t do it alone. She’s on Khine. A far journey even from here, even without Khinish forces to reckon with.”

  “I’ll find a way. A wandering crafter. You reek of the blade. I’ll have more chance alone.”

  “Let us see you through the fighting. There may be no way to skirt it. We’ll be going there anyway. They’ll need us, as healers or fighters, one or the other. We know folk in that shield.”

  “Take care of the girls.”

  “Come back with me. Let’s see what the sprout can add to what that snort of fools wort got from this one.”

  “I have to go through before the battle starts. I can pass the shield. But I have to g
o now.”

  “You have no pack, no provisions, nothing.”

  “You’d be surprised how well I can survive off the land.”

  “We can’t stay with the girls.”

  “Someone has to stay with them.”

  “They fended for themselves for years.”

  “At home, with folk aiding them without their knowledge.”

  “They’ll be all right here,” Yuralon said, “Elora is thriving. They’re well off. They can sit tight until it’s over.”

  The shield had passed. The fighting would not come up here. They’d engage on the flats somewhere to Bootward. “I’ll be back,” he said. “As soon as I can. Tell them that.” Once the words were out, there was no retrieving them. They shocked him. But they were said now. “See them safe, Yuralon.”

  “See yourself safe, Louarn n’Mellas n’Flin. Lerissa Illuminator was a stone-cold viper. I dread to think what the Khinish have forged of her.”

  Pelufer woke up in her bed in the inn with a glorious familiar warmth flowing through her and Caille’s pudgy little hands on her face. She smiled. “Hello, Caille.”

  Caille smiled back, shining. “Hello, Pelufer.”

  [293] “Welcome back.” It was Risalyn, sitting on the other side of her. Elora was standing by the door, talking with Yuralon, looking very much like a serious grownup. That was annoying.

  “Did you close up the stall?” she asked Elora, and got a curt nod: Of course. I wouldn’t leave everything out untended.

  She turned to Risalyn. “What happened?”

  “There were three people we think were killers,” Risalyn said. “One of them fell and was hurt. He died after telling Yuralon some rather confusing things. Yuralon killed another one, who attacked him. A shielder I know killed the third. That part you saw.”

  “Where did the shielders come from?”

  “They were at the back of the column. A clever tavern girl went after the shielders crying that two women were having a bladefight in the middle of town and someone should stop it. One of them knew me and came running, with a comrade of his running after. Knew me, and knew it must be me, if there were blades involved.” She grinned, and the hairs went up on the back of Pelufer’s neck.

  “They hadn’t gotten very far.”

  “A lot of things happened very fast. And big hordes of people go slowly on foot. It’s not a forced march yet.”

  “If they’re gone I can’t get the woman’s name off the shielder who killed her.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Where’s Louarn?”

  There was a silence then, and in the end it was Elora who answered, in one harsh word: “Gone.”

  No. Not dead. He couldn’t be dead. “Where?”

  “To Khine,” Yuralon said. “That’s where we think the killers’ master is. But you can—”

  “How are you feeling now?” Risalyn broke in.

  Pelufer frowned and sat up. “I’m fine, I’m always fine. Caille fixed me. She always fixes us, even when we don’t ask for it, when we’re sleeping. She’s a pest. That’s why we’re never sick. What happened to me?”

  “I don’t know. You fell, or fainted.”

  Caille said, “You were shining.”

  Shining ... She wished she could remember what she was trying to do. All she could come up with was a cold taste of iron, and some feeling of reaching out. “I don’t know why,” she said. “Did Caille fix the woman who got stabbed?”

  Risalyn seemed taken aback. “I didn’t think ...”

  Elora was still standing by the door, the shape of her body hard and bitter and distant. “She can’t fix death.”

  [294] “No kill,” Caille said, abruptly resentful and sulky, and climbed into the bed next to Pelufer.

  “It wasn’t good for her to see that,” Risalyn said.

  “She’s seen plenty of death. Death happens all the time. She just gets mad when people make it happen. People are supposed to know better.” She snugged Caille close and said, “What did you stop Yuralon from saying?”

  “I killed the woman with the long black braid,” he said. “I’m not sorry, Caille. She was trying to kill me. But I carry her name now, I expect.”

  Pelufer nodded. She tried to make it a brisk, grownup nod, to show that she knew what she was about and they should get on with it. But she didn’t want to feel that woman’s name. She didn’t want any more names in her head. So many had come off that woman. Now that woman was a burn mark on Yuralon. She didn’t want to let that into her. “All right,” she made herself say.

  Caille scrambled from the bed and eeled around Yuralon to go to Elora. “I’m hungry,” she said. “I want Louarn.” It came out muffled. Her face was pressed into the skirt of Elora’s tunic.

  “So do I,” Elora said, and Pelufer saw tears spill onto her cheeks, but her chin came up and her eyes flashed, forbidding Pelufer to draw attention to it.

  They were tired. Everything happened so fast. They’d had a scare. All the running around, and people dying. And all the names. And the shield marching through. She wished she was back at breakfast arguing over who finished the last of the jam.

  She waited while Yuralon’s weight settled on the edge of the bed, balancing Risalyn’s. Then she laid her hand on his arm.

  I’m out of trim, Louarn thought, slowing to a walk, bending to ease his aching back. Half a day on the road and already he was flagging. He’d pushed it, true—he’d trotted as often as walked, and when he’d walked it was in long strides, eating up the ground between him and the shield, then putting as much ground between them as he could. He had a good lead on them now, turning at the fork in the woods onto the cutover to the Boot Road. He should meet up with it a league or two Bootward of Gir Doegre. He’d still like to return to that town someday, to plumb its secrets. Perhaps the girls would have returned there, by the time this was over, and he’d have the excuse of going there to find them.

  If he survived.

  The pressure of air was unbearable. Bad enough he was soft from [295] too long living well in a safe, prosperous town. But the heated air had the incongruous consistency of congealing lard. The dense cloud cover pressed down like a weight of stone. He wished again that he had taken the shorter way, through the Elfelirs to Glydh, and shipped for Khine. But he might have waited days for a coaster bound down-leg, and it would be a trading vessel with a schedule of ports. He could not wait on trade, or trust that the Khinish fleet was letting ships round the tip of the Boot. Overland was the only certainty.

  His ears pricked up at the welcome rumble of wheels behind him. A few breaths later, he was sitting braced against the front panels of a stock wagon, his teeth rattling like the wooden slats with every jarring bounce, surrounded by braced, jouncing, complaining sheep, who persisted in trying to press toward him, though milling was not advisable under the circumstances. Sheep were not sensible creatures. He pressed the smelly rear of one firmly but gently away, and smiled as another butted its head into his shoulder.

  Jounced and jarred, he rubbed the velvety black head, and could almost feel himself shine.

  “Are you all right there, sprout?”

  The voice came from far away. She was in a cavern, with a terrible dark coldness, a malevolence, a hatred. A name. Elya. The braided woman.

  “She’s gone pale. Take her hand off you.”

  Somewhere far away, a hand that belonged to her clenched tight on a warm arm. The pain of the dead could hurt sometimes, but it wasn’t real hurt. The dead were no threat. The harm the dead had done was slight, and mostly to themselves, save for a few fighters Risalyn and Yuralon had killed, and they’d been angry and frightened, not ... bad. This was a badness. Elya. Elya. Elya.

  The badness held what they wanted her to find out.

  She reared back, raised an axe. There was the tree, it was still there, but it had a new limb—rotted, galled, and stunted. One blow of the axe and the black limb would drop away.

  “She’s shining. Leave her. Let her do
her working. It’s what she does.”

  Elora’s distant voice brought her back to the task. She dropped the axe, reached out, and grasped the cold, decaying limb.

  Hatred. Blood and death. Hiding the hands so the bonefolk wouldn’t have them. Killing the light. It hated light. It came from a dark dead place, a black rock—she’d been to that rock, she’d been in those places, only through someone else. She had a shine of her [296] own. It would hate her, too, if it could see her. But it didn’t know she was there. It was only a memory, an echo, a burn mark. It couldn’t hurt her. Its hurting days were done.

  It hated dying. It hated being killed. It hated the searing pain of the blade—she knew the blade, she’d been that blade, she remembered how it felt to go in, the terrible fierce wonder of cleaving flesh. Now she knew how it felt to be killed by it. She lost her balance, frightened. She gripped the limb harder. Her hands sank in. It was spongy now, rotting from the inside. Just a thing in her mind. A thing she made to make sense out of a surge of life that wasn’t her own. Just the burned-in shape of a self. That was all. A sick rotting self that was falling apart in her hands.

  She hurled the limb into the cavern, and came out.

  “Elya,” she said, releasing Yuralon’s arm. Her voice sounded strange. It echoed in her head. “She hated light. She came from the same place as Flin and Mellas. She was loyal to a woman of power. She hated the woman’s light, but she would do anything for her. Kill for her, die for her. I guess she did both.”

  Risalyn handed her a cup of pear juice. She drank greedily, then passed the cup back, and said, “She killed people of light because that old dark powerful woman told her to.”

  Both Yuralon and Risalyn went ramrod-straight.

  “What?” Risalyn breathed.

  “A gnarly old black-skinned woman. She ... she looked like she was from the Heel. Like Elya.”

  “This was an order she gave long ago,” Risalyn said. “Years ago. Before the mage war. Yes?”

  “No,” Pelufer said, cocking her head, waiting for that to come out of the haunt-memory. “Not so long ago.” Her eyes went wide. “They think the light is going to come back! They’re killing anyone it might ... come back to.”