“Everyone thinks the magelight will return,” Elora said. She was on Risalyn’s bed now with Caille asleep in her lap. Pelufer must have been away for a long time. It hadn’t felt like it. “Everyone around Gir Doegre, anyway.”
Yuralon and Risalyn were staring at each other, as if they could talk with their minds through their eyes. It was eerie when they did that, but she and Elora did it too, and probably that looked just as eerie. “It’s not Lerissa,” Risalyn said.
“No. Not Lerissa. An old black-skinned woman with the look of the Heel. It can only be Worilke.”
Pelufer didn’t know those names. She’d hardly known there was an Ennead till everyone was talking about how they were all gone.
[297] “She couldn’t have survived,” Risalyn said. “We’d know.”
“She hid herself,” Yuralon said. “Even six years ago she was a canny old thing. She’s out there somewhere, spinning her webs. Sending people to kill as many mages as they can before the light comes back. She is mad. It’s not coming back. The brightest thing in Eiden Myr is in this room with us, and whatever it is, it isn’t magelight. Who would follow such mad instructions?”
“She sent us to kill people, too,” Risalyn said quietly. “Our own Holding stewards. For reasons just as mad. And we would have, Yur. Spirits help me, we would have done it.”
Pelufer had almost forgotten that they were trained by the Ennead to guard them. “But you didn’t,” she said.
“I killed my own comrades instead,” Risalyn said. “Yuralon and the others tried to turn them to the truth. When they couldn’t, I fought them, side by side with the horde that became the shielders.”
“Then you were lucky,” Pelufer said. “You got to fight for the right side.”
Risalyn looked over at her shattered blade. Someone had laid the pieces on the chest that held their clothes. Pelufer wished she had a talent for metals like Elora’s talent for wood. She could have fixed the blade, then. Caille could do it, but she wouldn’t.
Again something teased at her, again the taste of iron came into her mouth.
“I don’t think there’s ever a right side when you’re dealing death,” Risalyn said.
“The gnarly woman is on Khine?” Pelufer asked, to work the iron taste away. “That’s who Louarn went after, to stop the killings?”
“No,” Yuralon said, and rose. “He’s chasing the wrong survivor. There were two, and we didn’t know it.”
“Killing the killers isn’t enough. She’ll send more.” Risalyn swore. “How are we going to find Worilke in all of Eiden Myr?”
“We go after Louarn, then,” Yuralon said. “Stop him risking his life on a mistake, at least. Start over, search for Worilke however we can, track down killers wherever we can, and hope she’ll give up or die and we’ll have wasted our time. Runners and menders will help us. We need aid now. This is too large for us.”
Pelufer thought it might make sense if one of the fighters went after Louarn and one tried to find the gnarly woman, but she knew they wouldn’t split up any more than she and her sisters would. And they were stronger together. They were stronger still with Louarn. Clever Louarn would have known what to do. Louarn had become their center. They needed him back.
“We retrieve Louarn,” Risalyn agreed, and stood up. “He has [298] only half a day on us, and he started on foot. I’ll see about horses.”
Yuralon voiced the last remaining doubt. “Barumor and Sevriel are going into battle. Cheveil and Eshadir, too. Maybe all of them.” All the folk who’d been or become their comrades in the Holding, whichever side they’d started on. “We should be there.”
Risalyn, who loved the blade more than Yuralon did, who was less certain about right and wrong but never about whether the fight was worthwhile, said, “We left them. We didn’t join the shield. We’re healers now.”
After a moment, Yuralon nodded. It was a funny kind of healer who wore a longblade, Pelufer thought, but if the blade cut out a festering piece of Eiden’s body to keep its poisons from Eiden’s blood, she supposed it made sense enough.
By late afternoon they had acquired horses and new travel gear. “You must stay here,” Yuralon said for the ninth time, in the road outside the Ruffed Grouse. He looked dashing and confident on horseback, with his long tawny hair loose, his blade strapped openly on his back. “What happened in the market today will blow over. Make up a story. You’re good at that. Ply your trade and keep yourselves safe until we come back for you.”
That was something they could do. Pelufer wanted to see the battle, but not so much now as before the bladefight in the market. She had a queer feeling about blades now—part longing, part terror. But they didn’t want Caille anywhere near a battle, or evil gnarly women. They were almost happy here. They could wait, while the grownups saved the world.
Risalyn lifted Caille down from the saddle of her own horse, and mounted while the huge head was lowered to snuffle Caille’s haïr and neck. He was a handful, the farrier had told them, but Risalyn said she liked his spirit and his compact Highland build. He didn’t look compact to Pelufer, and he’d tossed his head and moved his feet a lot until Caille came over and petted him.
Elora drew her a few steps off. She was nervous around horses, and Pelufer had to admit that she was too, a bit. They were so much bigger than donkeys, and none of them knew how to ride a big horse with a saddle. Something else she should have found a way to make Risalyn teach her before now. Risalyn would have taught her bladecraft. It was Yuralon who kept their promise to Jiondor.
“They’ll bring Louarn back,” Pelufer said to Elora as they watched the bladed healers ride away.
Elora was lost in her own distant thoughts, her shoulders stiff as if she bore a weight on them now and wasn’t used to it yet. “I’d like that,” she said, in a soft voice.
[299] They should have gone inside then, or reopened the stall for what was left of the daylight. But they just stood there, the three of them, her and Elora side by side with Caille in front, looking down the curving road.
Louarn could not get past the Khinish.
They had blocked the main Bootward road and every detour. They were closer than anyone had realised. The shield had waited until they were at mid-Leg before they’d moved to tighten the noose. Now the Khinish knew they were coming. They had locked the center of the Strong Leg down tight.
All night as he traveled Louarn heard irrefutable word of this from angry traders and journey folk sent back the way they had come. The Khinish were rocks. They were immovable. There was no getting past them. Inns and stables and barns were filling up; soon folk would have to camp in fields to wait out the trouble. Most gave up and turned for home. Others stayed—some on pressing business, some to be near the novelty of battle.
As he puzzled out the deployment offerees, he developed a grudging admiration for Khine’s methods. They had halted their upleg march with stolid purpose. They had cleared a field of battle. There would be few casualties among the common folk. Sheep and cattle were found far upleg of where they belonged, driven off their gracing land. There would be confusion in the wake of this, but as little destruction as possible. They did not want to harm Eiden’s body. Louarn didn’t understand what they did want, but it wasn’t to wreak havoc. Perhaps the fragmented rumors of a dispute with the Head holding were true.
It didn’t change the fact that he had to get to Lerissa Illuminator.
He remembered her, through Mellas, albeit vaguely. An aggregate of things the boy had heard, from proxies, from his master. Lerissa was complicit in what the Ennead had done to him; what Seldril and Landril had done, all nine of them had done. Though he’d had no direct dealings with her, she was in him, a shadowy figure. He believed he would know her when he saw her.
He would bring all his dark history to bear in stopping her.
He had to get through.
Just before dawn, after a long arduous survey of the position of watchfires and torchlights beyond Gir Mened, he brazened it out
. He came around a cowpath to where one man was stationed. Affecting his best Holding demeanor, he said, “I am a personal runner for Lerissa n’Lessa l’Rigael. I carry urgent news for her,” and stood as one who [300] had utter confidence in his errand and the access he would be granted.
“Are you,” said the Khinishman. Sun-bronzed and solid, half again Louarn’s nine stone and every ounce of it muscle. There would be no fighting past this one. “I suppose then you would know that she is called Lerissa ti Khine.”
Louarn snorted in disgust, opened his mouth to answer, and sprang wide around the guard, making for the pasture beyond.
He was snatched back by a heavy hand and hurled stumbling several steps to sprawl on the ground.
“None of that, friend,” said the guard. “If you’ve a message for the woman, go find something to scribe it on—good luck to you there, in these parts—and come back to me. I’ll see it’s sent.”
He rose, cowed, nodding, and turned back the way he’d come.
Out of sight down the dark path, he cut through the hedgerow into a scythed field. Haycocks were just perceivable as darker dark under the heavy clouded sky. He would flit from shadow to shadow, as noiseless as could be. One man, one small solitary man with no mount and no pack, would be able to creep through their cordon.
Halfway across the field, he heard a creak, a twang, and a whistle, and an arrow tore through the sleeve of his shirt. It caught at the fletching and flopped point-down. As he pulled it free, he felt blood well from the furrow it had gouged in the skin of his upper arm.
“The next is for real,” a voice called, from somewhere off to the side and up—atop one of the haycocks.
It was inconceivable. They could not shoot that well in the dark. They could not have enough archers to post in every field around their periphery.
Perhaps he had been unlucky, or had tried too obvious a route.
He could not trust their uncanny marksmanship so far as to risk another warning shot loosed in some other field.
He could not get past the Khinish.
The first thought Pelufer had when she woke into the watery half-light before dawn to Elora snoring and Caille talking was that Caille had sneaked her little friend into their room, the innkeepers’ youngest, Lusonel. For a few breaths she just lay there. And though annoyance gouged through her at being woken—Caille knew how light she slept—she held herself still. She felt bad about how they didn’t let Caille have any friends at home, and she and Elora had agreed that they would be nicer about it here. Caille was getting better at not saying or doing things that might betray them. They’d decided she was getting old enough to start trusting.
[301] Caille said, “Eiden doesn’t like the fighting. We have to go there, but they’ll say no.”
No one replied. Was she talking to herself?
Caille said, “Pelufer too! She can fix it better. She almost did before.”
Pelufer opened her eyes, and saw long inhuman fingers move slowly, as if making an extra effort to be clear. The fingers were talking about her. They said that she wasn’t ready, that a teacher was needed. They said she was too big.
Pelufer sat up through air as heavy as a blanket.
A great bent creature stood crammed into the one corner not piled with the tools and clothes and crafts they’d moved from Louarn and Yuralon’s room when they gave it up.
At its feet stood Caille, tiny by comparison, looking up at it with her fists on her hips in a perfect imitation of Elora scolding someone.
“She woke up,” Caille said. “You have to take her now. Take us to the fighting!”
The pale creature would not. It could only send her ahead, its fingers said. It could not take Pelufer. She was too big.
It was a boneman.
She’d seen a boneman once. It wasn’t the same one. The face was the same, near as she could tell, but the shape was different. Harder. Like those twins at home that nobody could tell apart but her. Grownups always made the bonefolk sound like monsters. Better watch out, the bonefolk will get you. Don’t be naughty, the bonefolk will get you. But the bonefolk never harmed anybody, least of all little children. All those stories that were going around were the worst sort of daft stupidity. The bonefolk were only interested in the dead.
She was full of the dead.
Why was this one fingerspeaking to Caille?
How did this one know how to fingerspeak?
Why was this one standing in their room?
There was no one dead here. Elora was fine, snoring away in Risalyn’s bed. Nothing would rouse her but a shake and a poke. The door was locked. She could see the bolt in its slot.
“Did you let him in?” she asked Caille.
Caille shook her head.
The boneman loomed in the corner like a distorted shadow thrown by a very bright light low to the floor. But he was the opposite of a shadow. He was pale as the moon, all except his great sad dark eyes, which had no whites at all. There was no hair on him. He had no ears and no nose, just holes where those should be, two for the nose and one for each ear. He had cheekbones and a jaw, but there was [302] something funny about his mouth. She thought it was a him, like the other one, but tattered fabric covered just enough that she couldn’t be sure. He was as still as stone. He didn’t even blink. His long forearms were crossed in front of his chest and his long fingers were curled up loosely as if he was holding something, but he wasn’t.
She stared at him for what felt like a long time. She wasn’t afraid. She was amazed and fascinated. But Caille was up to something. There shouldn’t be a boneman in their room. Elora would go mad.
The last time she’d seen a boneman, the only time she’d seen a boneman, their lives had changed forever.
Wait out the battle, Louarn told himself, returning to the cowpath and thence to the back road. Another day, another nineday, what difference does it make?
It would make a very great difference to any people of light who lost their lives because of his delay.
He tried again. The Khinish would not be wheedled or cajoled or charmed. He tried the truth and, no surprise, they laughed at him. He created a diversion, sabotaging the axle of a chalk wagon so that it toppled as its driver turned the team and its contents spilled out all over the road. The Khinish were sympathetic but did not move to help. Running out of back roads to try, he bribed a wine trader to make a fuss at the roadblock, and then he set a fire in a hedgerow; in the humid midmorning air it smoked rather than blazed, but the confusion and the screen of smoke got him past the roadblock. Then an arrow took him in the calf. They dragged him back, retrieved their arrow at considerable agony to him, dressed his wound, and packed him off with the angry trader, who said he could have burned a whole field down, and whacked his shin with a blackthorn stick every time he shifted his weight as though to jump off the cart.
A league and half a day lost, the noon heat steaming him into wilted defeat, he was put out of the cart in Gir Mened and handed into the care of peacekeepers. They marched him off limping—the pain was considered no more than he deserved—and locked him in a storage shed with a gourd of water to reflect on the consequences of making a bad situation worse.
They knew him now at every stop point, and the locals had had enough of him.
He could not get past the Khinish.
Face them, Risalyn had said of his dreams.
She had not fully known what she was suggesting.
Mellas should have died in the treacherous tunnels of the Black [303] Mountains. He was starving, hallucinating ... dreaming. He had dreamed himself free. He had dreamed himself to another place. When he came out of that place, back into the world, he was no longer in the Black Mountains. He was somewhere else.
You’re no longer the boy you were. It might be time to try again.
He had controlled himself, denied himself, suppressed himself too long.
He had power. He had need. It was time to see what this power of his could do.
What it would feel
like, after six years of surviving on fragmented, intermittent naps, to sink luxuriously into soft, drowsing, engulfing slumber?
Several times he spasmed awake, the reflex of years not so easily unlearned. Lying flat on the stony bare dirt floor of the shed, hearing the smallest sounds from outside as though they were amplified by a great cave—oxen cropping the dry grass, a washline creaking under a fresh load, even what sounded like the Girdlers’ voices calling his name—he despaired. He would never overcome the distracting multiplicity of sounds. He would never sleep. He had lost the knack for it, forgotten how. He might never sleep again. He
“Why are you here?” Pelufer asked.
The boneman made no reply.
She asked again, with her fingers this time.
The boneman picked Caille up.
It wasn’t an abrupt movement—Caille was just suddenly in his arms, cradled like a baby. She blinked, then settled herself. “Pelufer too,” she said. “To fix things.”
Pelufer was out of bed before Caille had the last word out. “Put her down.”
“Pelufer too!” Caille warned, watching Pelufer with suspicion. “And Elora, or she’ll be angry.”
The boneman’s liquid dark eyes closed like lips, and his round mouth opened. No sound came out.
Caille started to glow.
It wasn’t her shine. It was a green glow.
Green as the glow of bonefolk feeding.
“Put her down!” Pelufer’s shout was loud enough to wake the whole house. She heard voices, doors opening along the hallway. She reached up to take Caille under the arms and lift her down. Caille didn’t look so sure she wanted to be there anymore. She held her arms out to be taken. But the boneman had her tight around the [304] middle. Pelufer clawed at his arms. They were fleshy but cold. They felt like plant stems, as if there were no bones inside them.
The glow increased. Caille let out a wail. Fists pounded on the door. Elora cried out in groaning sleep-tangled horror. Pelufer kicked the boneman, punched his legs and his sides and anything she could reach past Caille. He didn’t react. She fumbled through Louarn’s things, came up with the chisel. She held it overhand and stabbed it into the boneman’s leg and side. “You’re hurting her! Let ... her ... go!”
The Binder's Road (The Sequel to 'Illumination') Page 38