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

by Terry McGarry

This was a spirit house. No reek of Souther garlic here, or yogurt soup, or vinegar. No ales, no stouts, no wines. No cane or fruit, milk or grain; nothing pulped and encouraged to rot. Only spirits. Distillations. Fermentations boiled or frozen until only their essence remained. A place of purity, and drowning.

  She strode to the long servingboard and took a three-legged stool between gray elders hunched over their cups. The tavernkeep cast a wary eye on her, then blinked and looked closer. The tight corners were packed with fighters, waiting out the storm, waiting out the recuperation of the wounded. Drinking in grim celebration of being alive. Drinking to lost comrades. Drinking to calm shattered nerves.

  [347] They had told her tale to the taverner. They knew who she was, and what she had done this day.

  She couldn’t claim as much.

  After an assortment of brandies and ciders, the taverner reeled off the specialties of the house: barley mash distilled with fennel, molasses distilled with anise, mare’s milk distilled with coriander. Might as well drink her own horse. Come to think of it, where had Comfrey gone? Eiden’s puke,, she’d lost him again. All the beast had ever done was bite her, but that was more than she could say for the sodding blade.

  It pressed against her back like a second spine. It weighed nothing now; it had gone light as a leaf. But its harness dragged on her like a stone nineweight. She’d tried to sheath the thing in her belly, to be rid of it, but she could remember only the urge, only the drawing of it, never what happened after. Next thing it was there on her back again, in its scabbard. Denying her its justice.

  “That,” she said, pointing to the clear drink before the man on her left. He circled it protectively with an arm; she grinned at him, and he dragged himself and his stool another foot away down the board. “There’s no scent off that one.”

  The taverner hefted a jug, poured a swallow into one of the measuring tins they drank from in these parts, and waved it under her nose. She nodded, satisfied. No horsy herbs to raise her gorge. “But you can keep that thimble. Give me a growler.”

  He raised a brow, dumped the jigger into a tin cup, then measured in another jigger. She laughed in his face, reached over his head to snag a good tall mug from the rafter hook where it hung by its handle, spat into it and wiped the dust out with her shirttail, and slammed it onto the servingboard. He went pale, but he transferred the cup’s contents, then topped it off from the jug and drew back, as though she’d have the jug from him and all.

  She warmed the pewter with her flesh, covering the rim until its circle scored her palm, then inhaled the captured vapors. No need to pollute this with spice or herbs. The white burn of pure potency was sweet perfume.

  Thank all the good spirits for spirits, she thought, bringing the curve of rim toward her lips.

  She set the mug down.

  Evenly spaced around the darkling tavern were three iron candle-stands wrought for nine. A girl moved from one to the next, lighting eight of the fresh tapers in each. A queer time of day to remember Longlight; maybe the stormdark confused them. Might be another of [348] the Strong Leg’s strange customs. Or maybe they were just low on wax.

  Kazhe raised the mug to her lips, tasted metal, and set it down.

  There would be only one sip. There would be the first, and all the rest, and between them time and pain and self would expand and contract with their own sense, their own reality. One sip was a nonned sips, nine nonned. One sip, one blink, and six years would be gone. She had only stepped out of the river. She had only to step back in, and be borne away.

  She poured the drink into her throat.

  The first swallow was shock. The second was panic. On the third her throat closed, gagging, denying what she had done; the third was surrender—it was swallow or choke. On the fourth it was too late. On the fifth she’d nearly drained the mug, might as well see it through. The sixth was rage, and hatred, and the vicious rapturous punishing jubilant plunge into annihilation.

  Firestorm exploded in her head. The liquor’s white burn spread through her chest, incinerated her heart, scalded her belly in an acid wash. Hot blood bloomed in her face, seared down her limbs to pulse in toes and fingers, cauterized all wounds in its path. She hissed out molten vapors and felt the slow burn of a grin. Give her strikers and she’d belch fire.

  She pushed the mug at the tavernkeep.

  “Again,” she said.

  The second draught was icy. A thread of frozen silver trailed down her backbone. Cold liquid sloshed gently through the swollen folds and crevices of her brain. She let her head fall back, spread her arms, let ice numb strains and bruises. Her eyes slid closed, and all was frosted darkness, the glittering frozen peace of a winter’s night.

  Fire and ice. This was more like it.

  “More like what?” said a quiet voice from beside her, almost lost in the first clatter of hailstones on the roof. Sira, leaning on the board, addressing her while watching the room, in the fighter way. Her old friend from the Jhardal band, the folk who had roamed closest to her folk, who had met with them three times a year for trading and dancing and drinking. So she had lived.

  Kazhe came back to the servingboard, but she didn’t look at Sira. “Like death,” she said, tapping the rim of her mug, lunging halfway across with bugged eyes to startle the taverner when he was slow complying. “But better.” So much better, because you could feel every razored inch of it.

  “You’ve bought us all our deaths, disarming us,” Sira said.

  “I saved your stinking lives.”

  [349] “Not soon enough.”

  Not soon enough for Benkana. She tilted the filled mug, observing the lack of enlightenment therein. Torrin would still be down there somewhere, swimming in the depths, falling, falling. Would Benkana join him?

  This had nothing to do with Torrin or Benkana. This was between her and the razor. It always had been.

  “Why didn’t you tell us what you planned, Kazhe? Incapacitate, you said, and we tried. Then you started cutting a swath through them. And when we followed you, you gelded us.”

  “You shouldn’t have followed me.”

  “You shouldn’t have brought them here. They trusted you.”

  “They wanted me!” Kazhe snarled. Sira was getting in her way. Benkana and Torrin were getting in her way. “They thought I would make them kenaila. They’d have done anything.”

  “You’d have promised them anything.”

  “I promised nothing.”

  “And delivered on it. Empty hands. Not so much as boot knife left to cut their throats with if they get enough drink in them to try us.”

  Shielders and Khinish and her own folk were arrayed in their corners like boxers on hazeled ground. But that was a Longdark custom, and in the Fist, not here. Or was she in the Fist? That had been stout. They served stout beer in the Fist, rich and dark, not this clear decoction of fire and ice. There were no brigands here. Or they were all brigands here, all except the doddering locals who’d kept disease and age at bay by steeping their flesh in preserving fluid. All yearning for her blade, and loathing it, and fearing it.

  All she wanted to do was swallow it.

  “Make friends with them,” she said. “Find the camaraderie of the storm.” In the grasslands of their birth, all tents were home in a storm. You never left an enemy out to die, not on the plains. “Stand them a drink and toast to fallen comrades!” She made the most of the brief fluid loquaciousness the razored acid bequeathed as lure and incentive. She needed no lure, no incentive. And there would be no basking in song or story, or false maudlin companionship, or dancing, brawling abandon. “Celebrate the climax of the bleeding light. Restore balance in your lives in this skewed time.”

  “We followed you here. Don’t turn your back on us.”

  “The war is over. Go home.”

  “You sacrificed our people for nothing! And now you send them home? To say what to their families? How do we explain the ones who don’t come home?”

  [350] I didn’t know. I didn
’t know the power I had. Don’t you think I’d have used it, if I’d known? Don’t you think I’d have saved your children? Don’t you think I’d have saved Benkana?

  No. She’d done what she’d done. There was only the razor now.

  “They’ll still accept you, Kazhe, if you tell them why. If there’s a reason. If there was a plan, a point. A greater purpose. Tell them, and they’ll still love you. ...”

  It was her father’s fault, for not teaching her the trick. It was his killers’ fault, for taking him before he’d had the chance. It was Khine’s fault, for thinking they could impose their ways on the mainland. It was Verlein’s fault, for thinking she could stop their implacable advance with her tall shields and tapered blades. It was their own fault, for not doing their job, for being forced into deadly bladeplay when they were meant to stop the battle.

  It was Torrin’s fault, for breaking the light and bringing them to this.

  Snatching up her mug, she spun on her stool and raised it. “To Longlight!” she said, and inhaled some razored acid. No one drank with her. No surprise there. She hopped down and strode to the nearest Khinishman. “And what are you when you’re at home?” He returned her stare in stony silence. She drew her blade and pressed him to the wall with the flat of it. He cocked his head and said, with no expression, “I am a landholder, and a cooper by trade.”

  “A cooper!” Kazhe drew away to point her blade at one of her folk. “So is Chaela! Imagine that! And Effad there next to her, he’s a potter, surely there’s a potter among you Khinish, or a stoneworker—someone must have crafted all your faces.”

  “There was,” said a Khinish woman from somewhere in the candle shadows. “He died today.”

  “As did two quarriers of ours,” a shielder said.

  “You see? You’re not so different after all. Just ordinary folk misled by flawed leaders. To the spirits with us!” Kazhe drank to that, upending the mug, running her tongue around the inside of the rim for the last razored drops. Then, flinging it aside, she grabbed the nearest shielder, a slight, pretty girl no older than she herself had been when she met Verlein. The girl was tougher than she looked, but a good hard yank sent her spinning into a handsome Khinishman’s lap. “Chat her up,” she said to him. “A good bedding’s the only sensible answer life gives to death. We’re all the same between the sheets.”

  She pushed past Sira, who was moving to put a stop to her. Sira caught her by the arm and spun her around. “Or you could have a brawl!” Kazhe crowed, giving a careless shove that sent Sira [351] stumbling back into two of her fellows who’d risen behind her. “Settle the whole bloody thing with fists.”

  “We’ll forge more blades,” a Khinishman said.

  “Good on you! Keep those smiths in business, don’t let the likes of me be taking the bread from their tables.” She leaned across the servingboard to the taverner, who had shrunk against the wall. “I’ll have the jug now, thanks.” She thought she’d have to spring over the board and wrest it from him, but he gave it up willingly, hoping he’d be shut of her.

  She did not disappoint him. Slinging the jug over one shoulder, she strode to the door and flipped the latch with the point of her indestructible, feather-light blade. The wind slammed in, and a shielder dove across his comrades as the door crashed against his seat.

  “You can’t go out there!” Sira said, moving close, but not touching the door, unwilling to put flesh in the way of the blade. Hail littered the floor like tiny playing stones escaped from a drawbag and was swept inward on a burst of freezing rain. “Close the forsaken door, Kazhe!”

  “You might as well make friends,” Kazhe called to them all. “You’re stuck here for a while. Try dancing instead of brawling!” With a thrash of her arm to be rid of Sira’s concern, Sira’s righteousness, she was free, surging into the rain, the dark of late afternoon, the empty road.

  Alone, the way she should be. Alone, as Torrin had left her.

  Bladed, and gelded.

  But armed with a jug of razored acid.

  Could have saved them all if she’d figured it out sooner. Could have stopped the battle in the first place. Love and grief, were those the ingredients? Did there have to be grief, and rage? Why couldn’t she have loved Benkana and still have him be alive?

  Bladed, and gelded. Warrior and peacebringer. She had cut off her own blade arm. Never again to feel nonneds fall under her onslaught. Never again to rage, to kill. She was rage, she was death. Never again to fight, to win. What else was there? To protect? She could not protect Torrin. Kenaila existed to protect power, compassion, light. They were light’s shadow. They took the stain of death upon themselves so that mages would never have to. But a true kenai subverted death. A true kenai melted weapons before they could strike. A true kenai castrated herself, invalidated her own blade. She had destroyed herself. She had bequeathed herself the only possible reprieve. She did not want a reprieve. She was the shadow. There was no more light now to cast that shadow. There was no more excuse [352] to kill, not when she could disarm. But all she knew how to do was kill. ...

  She was too small for this. She was too plain for this, too simple. She was her rage, her lust, her loyalty. She knew what she was for, when she followed Torrin. She knew what she was for, when she gathered a horde to deny control of Eiden Myr to any force that would take it. She didn’t know what she was for, now. She was a tool, she was always meant to be a tool, a blade was a tool, she was the blade. Now there was nothing to serve. Invasion would never come. That was a teller’s tale, a night terror. The outer realms were dead, abandoned. She would not stand waiting at the coast for sails that would never come in order to justify knowing how to kill. She was a killer. There was nothing for her now. Benkana beheaded. Torrin martyred. Herself gelded. No purpose to her. But she could still lift the jug. She could still work her throat. She could still swallow the razored, acid blade, again and again, pounding, tearing, avenging, punishing.

  Sira screaming at her through the raging storm, a rain-smeared outline, come from nowhere though she’d been there for some time, screaming at her to stop, was it to stop hewing stone with the blade? She apologized—she hadn’t meant to hew the stone, she’d meant to smash the blade, sweet spirits, who knew the thing could cleave stone now? No wonder it wouldn’t shatter. The grieving puking blade wouldn’t shatter! And what was she doing holding it? She’d flung it away in the tavern, she’d flung it at those righteous, squabbling children and told them what they could do with it and raged off into the night, but here it was, refusing to break on granite solstice stones, bloody pestilent thing, she’d break it, all right, she’d shatter the thing, there was nothing she couldn’t destroy, nothing—

  Sira falling back from her, stumbling away into the storm in a smear of reluctance, no choice, she remembered now, she’d hissed something to her, there’d been a moment of deadly silence in her raging mind and she’d said, “Go, Sira, go before I kill you,” a plea and not a threat, that was unworthy of her, but it was past now, and she’d been talking about someone else, and she was in a smithy and she’d thought it was in the Druilor foothills, a smithy where they quenched their iron in poison, that had appealed to her, but it wasn’t Dru Youris after all, it was still Gir Mened, or Gir Mened all over again, and she’d tried to make the blade glow, she’d tried to melt all the blades in the benighted smithy, melt them before they could tempt or taunt, but they wouldn’t be melted, the power wouldn’t come, and for a moment after the anger passed she felt a surge of hope—not gelded after all!—but then the smith who’d been cowering in a corner came at her with an axe where she was whirling in the center of the [353] room, and crimson light surged down the blade and the axe was gone and the smith was stumbling after the vanished weight and sobbing to know his death was on him and she stopped whirling and cocked her head, sad in a distant way, sorry for him, and she’d have clapped him on the shoulder and said some comforting word except that when she moved she saw an arcing ruby glitter trail the blade, and the sigh
t filled her with such awe of its beauty that for a time she stood just waving the blade back and forth, passing it in a gentle sweep before the newly bladed keepers who burst into the smithy, emptying their hands, watching the glittering, ruby trail the swirling crimson blade left in its wake—

  There was no warmth to it. She huddled freezing and soaked between cracked, blazing sky and shrieking wind and rumbling earth, Eiden tearing himself apart and her at the center where it was coldest, she was cold, so cold, and there was no light in the blade now, and no warmth, just the chill of iron and the chill of the jug, but she’d forgotten the jug, her veins filled to bursting, yet somehow it stayed with her just like the blade, and there was warmth, and there was burning, there was the razored acid wash down gullet and heart and lungs and gut, surging in her limbs, and here was strength, here was fuel for her to fight the storm, that was the acid’s justice, that it fueled you to go on when you flagged in your own destruction. It was sweet burning justice. Sweet, burning punishment.

  She was a torch in the storm. It could not quench her. She could only be quenched in fire and ice, and oh, what a light she would cast while she burned.

  III

  Pass through

  Louarn came into the realm of shadow as though gliding into dark waters.

  He knew fear, then sensed the thing he feared to sense: the clacking, dragging steps of the shambling stick figure.

  It had stalked the edges of his sleep for six years. A blackness, a cobbled-together thing like an assemblage of old sticks. Now he had entered its realm of his own volition. It approached with the inexorable arrhythmic cadence of doom.

  This was the dark place where you fell between waking and dream. It opened between the realms of consciousness and sleep, a crevasse—a crevasse of whispers, like the whisperhole in the mountain where he spent his childhood; a crevasse of thorns. A roiling stew of memories and imaginings and fears. This was where the shreds and ash of terror sifted down to, forgotten in the daylight. A crack in the path between outside and inside. When you entered the realm of sleep, you let go of the external and turned inward; you were engulfed by the internal, turned inside out; you relaxed the clenched will required to maintain your waking self in the harsh bright world. You opened yourself to the mutable, the profound; you consigned yourself to deeper impulsions. But sometimes you were caught, you tripped, you took the path too steeply, and next thing you were plummeting into bristling edged spine-pillowed night, and you recoiled, you spasmed [358] back into your body with the sense of just having fallen off a cliff.