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

by Terry McGarry

  This was where you fell, when you fell the wrong way into sleep.

  It was smothering yet vast. It was temperatureless but cold. It was yielding but spiked, a needled corpulence, swollen, hollow. It was a place not of sight but of shape. Sound came as shape: the clattering of bones, the clacking of sticks, the rickety approach of long loose skewed things that held together when they should not.

  A bad thing, Mellas’s small voice said, breaking upward, not yet firmly set into manhood.

  Yes, Louarn replied, gentle, grieving. It is that.

  Can we get away? Mellas asked.

  You can’t get out from the top, Louarn said. You can only get out from the back, or the sides.

  Together they crafted a tunnel. It was a long tunnel. It led quickly upward into light, a white light that fractured on sharp extrusions in the crystalline walls and became six lights, melding one into the other, one from another. Flame-golden magelight was there, heartbreakingly beautiful to see again after all these years, verging out of the yellow. The little girls’ ruddy-copper shine was there, too, verging out of the red. And from the blue came a color so brilliant it looked silver, glowing with a touch of the magestone’s glow.

  Louarn moved enchanted through the shimmering light, the angled refractions, the tickling spangles. Mellas fell behind. The shambling clacking stick-thing was still there, still following, though it moved in a limping agony and Louarn moved with the swift exhilarating speed of mind and heart and spirit through the passage of light. Mellas cried out, as if the light pained him. From within him came a muffled echo: Flin’s cry, his terror of the light, the heartrending cry of a frightened, uncomprehending child.

  Louarn turned and in that turning embraced them, drew them into the shelter of his strong-crafted self. He continued on into the pure white light, the serene coruscating blend of all lights, all colors. He drank in the light; he sailed on it, borne as by a sweet bubbling current, effortless and joyous, flying on thought, swimming through light.

  His selves cast three shadows, each a different tint and hue, each a different size and shape, all the same. In the pure white light, he refracted all colors, and all his shadows were known.

  The passage would take him wherever he most desired to go.

  pass through

  The sky was dark lavender with no hint of stars. The trees were a softly shining silver; their leaves were gilded. The bonefolk were [359] luminous, standing among the silver trunks, a fleshlike forest within the metallic one, a grove of bonefolk. All else was black stone, deeper than nightstone, a coal black that drank in light and reflected nothing. He might sink into such porous stone. He might sink forever, unable even to dream himself free.

  He knew this place. This is a passing place. Not a staying place. A wood. An eerie, wondrous wood,, where no winds disturbed the sweet air, where no leaves fell. The sky was lavender, the ground was black, the leaves were gold, the trunks were silver. There was a fresh chill scent of stone, with a tang of metals and the time-steeped richness of rock in an ancient cave.

  The woman who crouched near him was holding out a hand, curled loosely downward, as if someone had lifted it politely to drop a perfunctory kiss upon it. But she was holding it up to a child—a stunned, transfixed child, blinking at her, blinking at the ring on her third finger, not yet certain whether to wail in terror or sigh in wonder.

  The ring bore a pale stone set in blackened silver. It exhibited no change upon proximity to the child. But as the woman, sensing Louarn beside her, dropped her hand and turned toward him, startled, it produced an unearthly moon-white glow.

  The woman gasped, her eye drawn by the flare of light.

  Louarn came fully awake, sitting up on soft-coal stone.

  In the ring, the stone’s flare faded.

  The woman looked into his face.

  It was his earliest memory. The cream-pale skin, the dark blue eyes, the rich fall of sable hair—a girl little older than Mellas, a sparkling jewel in a waterfall of night, gazing down at him through a woman’s face carved into an awesome beauty by time and trials. He was looking through her into the past, all the haunts in him stunned by the sight of that first sight, two nines of years ago and three—the first memory, the only memory, of the third child inside Louarn, the nameless child who had only this one perfect vision through unformed, imperfect, infant eyes, who had lain silent and forgotten inside all of them for all this time, its single memory too fragile, too imperfect, too profound, too small to share.

  “Mother,” said Louarn.

  The bonefolk watched unblinking. Far away, Louarn could hear the laughter of children at play. An incongruous sound. The nearer ones sidled closer together, seeking comfort amid strangeness past all understanding. Perhaps they believed they were dreaming.

  The woman rose to her feet with a swish of silk, gating down on him—imperious, but with the barest hint of doubt pinching the smooth flesh between her dark brows.

  [360] Louarn rose, as well. No leaves, no grains of earth clung to his clothes to be brushed off. No pain shot through his wounded leg or stung his gouged arm. He was whole—healthy, perfect, and whole.

  He stood gating into her long-lashed dark blue eyes with his.

  Don’t you know me? Was the pain so bad that you forgot who brought you to this?

  “Take them back,” the woman said, flashing him a chiseled profile as she spoke over her shoulder to the bonemen, waving a white hand in the direction of the huddled children. Like small animals caught in lampglare, the children froze, then tried to bolt, but the bonefolk moved in long fluid strides to scoop them up. Mellas remembered the green glow, the shining bones beautiful and supple in connection. Louarn blanched to see living children handled so. He opened his mouth—

  “It doesn’t harm them,” the woman snapped, and then the children were gone, and the bonefolk who had passaged them melted into the surrounding stone. “The folk will see them safely to their beds, or into waiting hands. They’ve been gone barely an afternoon as they reckon time, but that’s long enough for hysterical parents to spread tales that could hinder further collection.”

  Louarn’s eyes cleared, as if mist had blurred them. Mellas blinked, and saw the Ennead illuminator he’d expected—a construct of overheard descriptions, but an accurate one, a recognisable one. Deep inside, Flin yowled in bereft fury, raising his arms for his mother to rescue him, his silent raging voice demanding his mother, his real mother, his real fathers, his real life, his own safe bed.

  “I am not your mother,” the woman said, an afterthought.

  No, Louarn responded from the depths of his heart. No, you are not.

  “Yet you may be flesh of mine. The resemblance is undeniable. You look older than he would be, yet there’s something boyish about you still. That was a quality of Evender’s. And you bear his face as well.”

  “He takes after his father, though he has his mother’s coloring. I know where he came from. But those are names he can’t ever bear.”

  “Evonder,” Louarn breathed, and Mellas remembered kindnesses when he was small, a gentle hand ruffling his hair—a man he yearned for without knowing why, a man whom Bron his master told him he could trust when push came to shove but must stay away from in the meantime because he was one of the Nine.

  I am a child of the Ennead, Louarn realized, locking his knees, which had gone weak. The Ennead who terrorised me. The Ennead who burned my parents alive before my eyes.

  [361] “The stone glowed for you,” the woman said, assessing him with a cool gaze tinted now with greed, and hatred. “Only for a moment, but I saw it. The children were lightless. As am I. It could only have been you.”

  Mellas had shown a light. But the magestone had not glowed for him. He had stood in a solid corridor of it and the glow had faded. But the pale stone on the woman’s hand—a bit of magestone, cut from the mountain, set in blackened silver—had glowed.

  When he was dreaming.

  He had not yet come fully awake. The fractured c
rystalline light of the passageway through sleep had still infused him. One brilliant bluesilver thread of it infused him still, as his puzzler’s mind set the last piece into place.

  Mellas had shown a light, to the one mage who loved him well enough to believe in it. Mellas’s magelight could actuate a casting only when he was dreaming. As the dream fell from him, his light subsided—went back into hiding, into the shadows, into his deepest self, where Flin had secreted it. But Mellas’s magelight was not all that fueled the power of his dreaming. There was the earthy copper shine, as well, the crafter’s light, the heart’s light. And there was a third light—the most powerful things came in threes. A bluesilver light ...

  Mellas had nearly died of hunger and thirst and madness, trapped in the dark corridors of his own mind. Outside, Galandra’s shield was broken, and a world of mages was cored of its light by the searing burst of power released in its breaking. But Mellas, in that blinding agony, with other powers to call upon in addition to his besieged magelight, dreamed himself free.

  Dreamed himself here.

  Dreamed his own magelight safe, protecting it from the ravages of the coring.

  Dear spirits, Louarn thought. What am I?

  “It was me,” he acknowledged, at long last, to the woman who was the mother of his flesh. “The stone glowed for me.”

  “Why did it fade?”

  Something tearing deep within him, some long-held yearning pecking free of his heart’s shell and leaving it cracked, he produced his most blinding, disarming smile. She was only a means to what he wanted. She was only someone to be charmed. He said, “It has been erratic, since the mage war. I’m afraid it comes and goes.”

  Lerissa n’Rigael—Lerissa Illuminator, Lerissa ti Khine—arched a hawk’s-wing brow at him and said, “When it comes, then, you are the only adult left in Eiden Myr to show a light. How did you shield it?”

  [362] With a shrug, he turned a circle to survey their alien surroundings, using the leisurely movement to drop a hand to the use knife at his belt. “I have no idea. What is this place?”

  Her gaze flickered to his blade as he came around, and she smiled. A smile as chilling as it was stunning. That would be a useful smile, if he could learn it. “A place of the dead, where there is no dying. Your little blade will do you no good here. Neither of your little blades, come to that. I’m old enough to be your mother, after all.”

  He found himself laughing. Such an Ennead display of verbal twists. So she had noted his charming, crafted smile. He would not seduce what he wanted from her.

  That was all right. What he wanted was to kill her.

  He drew the blade and ran its edge experimentally across the pad of his thumb. The wound closed in the wake of the blade’s passing, before a drop of blood welled up. “Interesting,” he said, and sheathed the weapon. He should have deduced it. All was healed, here, all the wounds of his travels, small and large. He looked down at his palm; the flesh had always been smooth, Flin’s burn scars gone, the triangular bite from the shard of broken clay lamp Mellas had held in his last moments—healed when he emerged from this passing place into the world to become Louarn.

  What would become of a body that came here dismembered? What would become of it if the bonefolk had been denied the hands?

  “You’ll have to go back to Khine sometime,” he said, trying on Lerissa’s smile. “You’ll be mortal in the mortal world. And believe me: I can follow you anywhere.”

  In fact, he was not certain of that. He was new to the powers of dreaming. In the past, they had worked their will through him. He was far from mastering them. He might pass back into the world of flesh, but emerge anywhere—Gir Nuorin, the Head holding, Gir Doegre, Croy the bricklayer’s house, anywhere his heart might lead him without him controlling it. Why had he landed in the Heartlands and not the Holding when he passed from here before? The Holding had frightened Mellas and frightened Flin ... but why the Heartlands?

  “Mellas—that’s a Heartlands name, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Illuminator.”

  “I don’t know what they called him. He’s Pirra and Allwl and Ellerin’s. He reminds me of a man I knew, good man named Mellas, loved his horses better than he loved himself. That’s a common name, a Heartlands name. He looks a Heartlander. It’ll bring no attention on him.”

  Pirra, Alliol, Ellerin. His foster-parents were Heartlanders. Those were Heartlands names. They must have portrayed their homeland to [363] Flin with love in story and memory, and instilled that love in him.

  He went where he felt safe, where he most deeply yearned to go.

  He had no desire to go to Khine. But Lerissa need not know that. And eventually he would master this power. She could not kill him for fear of his magelight, as she had killed Croy and the rest. Not while they were here, in this place of the dead.

  “Oh, you don’t want to follow me to Khine, love. Far too many blades there, wielded by folk who know how.”

  “From what I saw, most of those blades were guarding a few acres of pastureland in the Strong Leg.”

  “It keeps them busy,” Lerissa said, with charming diffidence, and a cold light in her blue eyes. “We’ll keep you busy as well, I think. I don’t suppose you were trained a mage?”

  She doesn’t care a whit what happened to me. Her own child, fostered out. I could have been dead for all she knew. Shocked at the naïve idiocy of his heart, he said, “Why shouldn’t I have been?”

  “Oh, you most certainly should have been. A grandchild of Rigael n’Saeron l’Portnel, a son of Evonder Bindsman, you should have been cherished, cosseted, groomed for the Ennead. But my redoubtable father only wanted you out of the way, that you not impede my own training. A mother’s cooing and doting were not at all what he had in mind for me in the two years prior to my taking the triskele. He was a hard man, Rigael. With any luck, it’s his blood in your veins, not his lightless bedmate’s.” Again she assessed him. “Astonishing, truly, and laden with irony. For years I sought to learn what had become of you. I planned to found a dynasty, a grand aristocracy of magecraft for a new age, and your light, your lineage would have been a cornerstone. And now, out of all the children, it is my own child, come back to me a young man, who may be the only one capable of ...” She smiled, as if she had forgotten herself. Teasing him with suggestion, innuendo, half answers. She was working him. He would let himself be worked, so long as it seemed they were heading in the right direction. “Well, you’re no longer integral, if you ever were.”

  He tipped his head in gracious acceptance of this reduced usefulness, which he knew was precisely counter to what she was considering now.

  “You have not given up your dream of an aristocracy of mages,” he said. “Not if you are collecting children of light.”

  “Not an aristocracy. Not this time.” She smiled. “An army.”

  He took a stab at what he suspected. “Khine’s wasn’t enough for you?”

  [364] She answered him without answering. “When the light went. I became interested perforce in more conventional means of achieving my goals. The Khinish provided the material I needed. Ambitious, strong-willed folk, so instinctively steered toward domination. A riot here, a murder there, and up the Leg they went, determined to take charge. Strelniriol was most accommodating. A persuasive herbal I learned from my old bindswoman, Freyn—she was a poisoner, did you know that? She killed Rigael your grandfather. Poisoned his wine, because he didn’t love her. Naturally, I killed her for it. They’re both here somewhere. Shall we take a stroll and find them?”

  Deeply chilled by the implications, he took her hand, stalling for time, massaging it, caressing the knuckles, turning the ring so that the stone was squarely on top. She permitted it. Delight flashed in her eyes as she watched the manipulation of her flesh, as though she was pleased to find his technique so assured. “Quite a feat, persuading these bonefolk to do your bidding,” he said. “Or are they using you?”

  “Both, of course. And yes, the ring was my entrée to
them, as well as allowing me to test the children for signs of light I can no longer see. Did they foster you in the Leg? You won’t have learned to scribe, in that case, and we’ll need to rectify that first thing.”

  “I do not know how to scribe. Entrée?”

  “It is proof that I can redeem them. I thought it a trinket, a memento of my former life, a little piece of the Holding, where veins of it run deep. A stone that glowed in the light of mages; little use, with no more light and no more mages. Yet it whispered. The magestone whispers. Would you like to hear it?”

  He did not respond, but perhaps his eyes betrayed something of the memories tumbling over themselves in his mind—the whisperhole, the well of secrets, the crevasse that spoke promise and mystery from the depths of ages, that made Flin feel as though he knew things; the whispering magestone tunnels he’d dreamed in the base of the Ennead’s mountain, the tunnels that tried to drown him in the past. She didn’t know he’d fostered in the Holding. She didn’t know he had his own memories of magestone. She held the ring up to his ear, like a conch, just brushing his lobe with the cool, waxy stone, and he heard it again: the soft murmur of words and voices beyond understanding.

  She smiled at the effect this produced. “It’s memory. These stones are memory itself. Evonder your father reasoned it out, or intuited it, more like; and he was fascinated by it. He believed that magestone contained echoes of the minds of the race long lost, those who crafted the body of Eiden in their own image.”