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

by Terry McGarry

  Bloody spirits!

  She too had misjudged. She, who had lived her life full of rage, full of bloodlust, had misjudged the power of rage and lust to kill. She had tried to stop an arrow in flight. She’d lopped off its head and stripped its fletching. And still it flew, seeking flesh to cleave, hearts to stop.

  She had been a fool.

  The realization filled her with fury, and then a terrible joy.

  Blood rushed hot through her veins, bursting its dams, a flood of ecstasy the strongest drink could never match.

  If that doesn’t work, kill.

  Kill.

  Kill.

  “Die, then!” she cried, in crashing failure and exultation. “Die, you bleeding pustules!”

  She unfettered her blade.

  In a whirlwind assault, she made a mockery of the wind that raked the pasture. In a rain of blows, she made an irritant of the needling rain of water. She killed them before they could kill each other. She killed them in pairs, one edge cleaving a Khinishman, the other taking a shielder on the backswing. Her folk, all those who dreamed of becoming kenai, surged in her wake. They made a mockery of Verlein’s secondhand training. They made an irritant of Khinish weary from a morning’s battle.

  At her back, Benkana fought with the easy, untiring grace she had taught him. He bore his blade of Druilor iron double-handed, moving fluidly through high and low guards, sweeping lesser blades [329] aside and slashing legs and arms to halt their wielders. He was still incapacitating them. Most of his foes would bleed to death before the fighting ended. But still he did not kill them. Of all of them, he held to their purpose. Behind her, he held on. As if waiting.

  Waiting for what? she wondered idly, flippantly, catching a crossguard, stepping in, levering it free and some fingers with it, delivering an off elbow to the sternum and then hacking through the neck conveniently presented ,when the opponent doubled over. For me to kill them all? That shouldn’t be a long wait.

  He stayed with her, sensing her movements, mirroring her, guarding her back. She’d wasted her time with those two nonned. Give her this man at her back, and she would cleave armies. Give her this man at her back, and all the would-be rulers and all the outer realms combined would rule never so much as a blade of Eiden’s grass.

  Then she felt him stiffen, through the brush of his back against hers as they danced.

  “No,” she heard him say, and she sent a shielder flying with a boot to the ribs instead of bothering with the time a thrust would take to withdraw from those ribs. She spun, but he spun with her, and then she saw Verlein, right arm dangling, bladed in her off hand, dancing sidelong to come around to his front again.

  “Betrayer!” Verlein spat, and Kazhe heard her longblade ring against Benkana’s. “Of all of them, Benkana! Not you!”

  “Don’t make me kill you,” he begged, barely audible in the melee. “Stand down, it’s over, Verlein. ...” Pleading with her as he fought her, as Kazhe worked to clear room around them. He was distracted by this, he would not protect himself, Verlein was his old comrade, they had grown up in neighboring villages and she had brought him into Torrin’s fold. Only Verlein and Benkana had come back alive from that first foray into the Black Mountains to assassinate the Ennead, the foray that Kazhe had scorned, the failed foray that had driven Verlein to muster a mage-warded horde to storm the Holding in earnest.

  “Leave her, Benkana!” Kazhe snapped over her right shoulder. “Let me turn! Leave her to me!”

  “No,” came a stone-hard voice from behind her to the left. “She is mine.”

  “On your right, Benkana!” Kazhe cried, spinning left, spinning him away from that stone-cold voice.

  She felt the curved blade pass through his neck as though it cut her body in two. She saw the blade. It passed over her head. It tried to take her on the backswing, as Benkana’s body sank to its knees behind her. She smashed it with her blade. It cracked jaggedly apart [330] as Benkana’s body toppled to the side. She carried through on her spin and saw the Khinishman already driving at Verlein, a longknife coming into his right hand as his left let the grip of his shattered blade fall away.

  The point of Verlein’s longblade came out of his back as Kazhe’s blade went into it. They withdrew as one, and stood staring at each other, stunned, as the man crumpled from between them. His long-knife fell with him, still locked in his hand. Where it had entered Verlein’s side, a dilute red stain spread into the sopping silk. She took a step back, and sat down in a hard splash, still staring at what they had wrought.

  The battle raged away from them, folk fighting indiscriminately now, slashing and hacking at whoever came within reach, half the time no longer recognizing even their own folk.

  The leaders of the three battling hordes lay strewn around the body of Benkana.

  Kazhe crawled to him. She put him back together, tenderly. She laid out his limbs in the position he most often slept. Sprawled, as though his dreams took up a lot of room. The rain might have been hot tears, or hot lava, the way it burned. She slid his eyes closed and held his head to kiss his lips. When she released it, it rolled to the side.

  She sat back on her haunches, and screamed into the boiling sky.

  The sound was nothing, swallowed by the screams of a nonned deaths.

  She felt them. She felt every death as though it were her own. She felt every nick of blade on flesh, every slash, every cut, every thrust. She was each body, and she was every blade. Their iron sang through her veins. The blood they soaked in was her own. She was the blades, and she was the death the blades dealt.

  She groped for her kenai. It came into her hand as though it slid there of its own. A coppery glow swirled through the watery silver rivulets in us metal. The color of blood suffused it. Her blood suffused it, and the blood of every soul it had severed, and the blood of all the flesh it had tasted.

  Every body on this field was Benkana’s. A good man. A quiet dreamer. A simple worker, a loyal friend, a fierce and gentle lover. A living soul who believed, and strove, and died before his time.

  Every living soul on this field was Benkana.

  She knelt by his body and raised her blade. It flared with the pulsing crimson of blood, and rage, and power. She was kenai. She was the blade. She was every blade in every hand. The earth connected them, through their bodies. The air connected them, through [331] their blades. They were all one. The same purpose. The same terror. The same rage. The same lust.

  “No more!” Kazhe screamed, into the screaming tumult.

  The sky cracked open. The wind shrieked. A tree exploded, lightning-riven. The rain boiled, steaming on the ground, searing necks and ears and cheeks.

  In every hand, in every scabbard, in every boot, on backs and at sides and lying on the field, iron melted.

  Blades and arrowheads and lance tips liquefied and washed away on the flood. Spears splintered into sawdust and whipped away on the wind. Bows disintegrated and were gone. Arrows fell to fragments, then to dust.

  The first way of the kenai was to disarm.

  There was no second way.

  Kazhe knew, now, what her father had done. He had been the last true kenai in Eiden Myr.

  She had seen his blade, this blade, her blade, glow red as ruby, red as blood, and seen the iron of his enemies melt away. But the kenai, the blade of a kenai, would not be melted. His killers had borne kenaila.

  Kazhe had taken up his blade, and killed them.

  But she had not been kenai until this day.

  “He didn’t live to teach me the last of it,” she bent to tell Benkana, smoothing his long hair over the grievous breach in his body, so that he appeared almost whole, almost sleeping. “He showed me, but I didn’t see. Now I’ve learned it, but I can’t teach you.” She laid her blade down with the hilt on his chest, saw the ruby gleam flare and then fade. It was meant to be his. He was never meant to go before her. He was meant to guard her back, and mourn her when she gave her life for something she loved more than life, more than him.


  Softly, only to him, only to the dying rain, the dying wind, she sang the words her father had taught her, the words that had been only sounds to her until the night he died:

  Vabresi lioskdor.

  Venaiveitsi liriknaishu.

  Vinaislasi licherldei.

  Shenaiprasi liyulshi.

  Torrin Wordsmith had translated those words for her, on hearing her sing them. His face had filled with light as he realised that the sounds she made were the glyphs he had read on some ancient leaf [332] without knowing how to say them. He had bequeathed to her the gift of their meaning, their soft sweet elegy:

  May earth mold the meat of your heart.

  May roots bind the will of your days.

  May grasses sing the gift of your flesh.

  May winds receive the breath of your life.

  From a time and place where folk buried their dead, he’d told her. Consigning them to the earth that bore them, returning them to Eiden’s arms.

  Then he’d given her the rest of the words, the prayer of the kenai, long lost to her folk over all the leagues and ages:

  Where there is a greater, there is a lesser.

  The true arm needs no blade.

  The true arm cleaves all blades.

  The true king crowned is king no more.

  “I didn’t understand,” she told Benkana. It was what he had been waiting for her to do. She wondered if he knew it, or only sensed it, in some deep wordless corner of his heart. “But now I do. I’ll come to you, Benkana. When it’s time. I promise you.”

  She rose, and took up her blade—the blade that would never again taste flesh or blood. The parched field had soaked in blood, and soaked in rain, until it was full, and still the rain fell, and still blood ran in the flood. But the battle was done. There would be no more death this day. The hordes stood shocked, heads bowed or turning slowly in bewilderment. They were beginning to understand how many of their comrades had died.

  Verlein sat where she had fallen, water pooling around her. The wound to her side would not kill her, if cleaned and dressed. Kazhe could kill her with one kick to the face, snapping her neck back.

  “I only wanted to watch the horizon for sails,” Verlein said.

  “You wanted to rule,” Kazhe said, as though someone else worked her mouth, “or you would never have let it come to this. What changed you?”

  Verlein’s eyes rose from fallen Benkana, her childhood friend, to Kazhe, who was her blademaster. “Rather ask who changed me,” she said. She pushed herself up, stiff, feeling every bruise and cut, holding her bleeding side through breached mail. Step by slow step, she slogged across the pasture. Some of her shielders caught her up, made a litter of clasped arms, carried her.

  [333] Kazhe looked one last time on the body of Benkana, and sheathed her blade. Then her eyes fell on the man who had killed him. She blinked to see an arm twitch. She flipped him over and he gasped. He’d been drowning in the flood water.

  She could break his neck, or turn him again and let the water have him.

  She spat on him, and strode away through the blood and the rain and the dead, and left the plain of Menalad to the bonefolk.

  The Menalad Plain

  The weapons were simply gone. All of them.

  Dabrena felt her way through every step she took on the battleground with Adaon, groped around the downed fighters whose wounds she tended, certain that blades and bows and spears must have been flung somewhere, that what the towheaded fighter with no apparent allegiance and a blade of blaming crimson had done was no more than a trick. They hadn’t been able to hear what she’d shouted, but perhaps it was something so persuasive that all the fighters in the field dropped their weapons onto the flooded ground. Or perhaps, Dabrena thought, binding a gashed leg that would need stitching, she had some arcane ability to move objects with the force of her will.

  Verlein was carried from the field in the arms of her shielders, as if victorious. Her olive complexion had gone ashen under a plastering of black hair. Dabrena did not call out to her. Once again she had killed a foe who could have been incapacitated. But why hadn’t the towhead done it sooner? How much bleeding and maiming and death did it take to convince someone a battle needed stopping?

  It had been no trick. It had been some form of power, however belatedly unleashed. Dabrena moved to the next downed fighter, then the next; she applied cleansing herbs, set and wrapped and bound, and nowhere on ground or body was there a weapon. The only possible answer was that they had disintegrated—dissipated, like [335] illuminated leaves after a casting. A power such as that would rival magecraft.

  A power such as that could replace magecraft.

  Or maybe it had been an enchanted blade, like the magic plows and sorcerous brooms in the tellers’ tales. That would be just as easy to believe, at this point.

  “Go, follow her, find out what else she can do,” she said to Adaon, as the short, towhead walked away across the field, shaking off the folk who tried to follow her ... even comfort her, from the look of it. She must have lost comrades. But so had every other fighter here. Dabrena wanted to tell them, It’s no more than you bloody deserve, the lot of you, look what you’ve done! But she was not herself. And that woman had ended the battle, taking their sharp deadly toys away. You’d think if they wanted to fight so badly, they’d keep it going with a rip-roaring brawl. But whatever killing furor had fueled their pointless battle was spent now. They were wounded and weary and shaken and bereft. They were appalled at themselves, most of them. Appalled at what real warfare and real death had turned out to be.

  “She’ll be easy enough to track down later,” Adaon said. “I’ll stay with you”—as if agreeing with her when he was saying just the opposite. He’d done that in the holding, too. She remembered. But it had been cheerful, just shy of insolent. Now he was quiet and intense. He knew she was trying to get rid of him.

  He knew what she planned to do.

  She tied off a sling and checked the supply of linen strips in her pack. Not enough. She had more back with her gear, but the horses were in a paddock in Gir Mened and the gear was stored in a tavern’s attic. “They’ve got to get them to shelter,” she said. “We can’t tend to them properly out here.”

  And the bonefolk won’t come until the living go.

  “They’re starting to,” Adaon said, and pointed.

  Her pulse slowed when she saw that he hadn’t read her mind and hadn’t meant the bonefolk. Two tall Highland Girdlers with long ponytails draggling over empty scabbards on their backs were taking charge of those who’d rushed onto the field to help the fallen. They seemed to be healers, though they were no menders of hers, and the scabbards were a puzzle she wouldn’t soon solve; apparently related, the pair looked fresh, as though they hadn’t fought, and she thought she remembered them standing not far from her vantage point during the battle. There had been a crowd of bystanders by noon, when it ended. Under the Girdlers’ direction, aided by other fighters where they were able, those bystanders were helping the wounded limp back [336] toward Gir Mened, or carrying them in their arms, or cutting poles from hedgerow trees and rigging litters.

  Under the sheeting rain, the killing field was a shambles: Shields broken and whole littered the torn ground, amid helms and leggings, mail mounded or strewn, sodden piles of padded linen, blade belts and harnesses and sheaths. Had the fighters divested themselves of the useless accoutrements of battle because of the power they had witnessed, because they were disgusted with the whole thing, or merely because they were tired? If they expected to fight again, they’d want their gear. None of it came cheap. Could what they’d lived through here today have prompted them to swear off battle forever?

  Dabrena had tended the wounded in the Ennead’s Holding after the stewards’ uprising and after the rebel horde rampaged through. She held out no hope of their discouragement being permanent. That towheaded bladebreaker could not be everywhere in Eiden Myr at once, if what she’d done could even be repeated. They
’d have their chance again, any of them who’d acquired a taste for it.

  She found it hard to care. She forced herself to care. She forced herself to do her work, her menders’ work, and pay attention to it, and be suitably appalled by what she’d seen here.

  You’ll be with her by dark. If she can be followed, it’s only a matter of hours now.

  A gruff outcry raised her head again. Ah. Evrael te Khine had found his headman. Dabrena had wondered when she’d stumble over his body. Out of place in his fleet garb, flanked by seafolk, Evrael was kneeling near where the towheaded woman had kneeled when she raised her crimson blade. How ironic it would be if some act of Streln’s had prompted her astonishing feat.

  I don’t want him dead.

  I just want my daughter back.

  “The weather’s letting up,” she said to Adaon. If she didn’t occupy her mouth, her mind, her hands, the razored keening in her mind would overwhelm her, and she would be unable to do what must be done.

  He obliged her by looking around, then said, “I wouldn’t count on it lasting. The earth has barely settled. From the color of the sky it’s going to storm again thrice as hard. And those clouds are nothing natural. Not in the way we think of it, anyhow.”

  “Next you’ll be telling me the spirits are angry.”

  “Perhaps they are.”

  She glanced at him as if to say, I’m too tired for your nonsense, but there was no twinkle in his eye. There had been no twinkle in his eye since the stablegirl Beadrin had found them in Gir Doegre. What [337] was happening to them, and to the world, he regarded as deadly serious. She found it frightening. She looked away. The world wasn’t her problem now. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”