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

by Terry McGarry

  She looked down at the body lying at her feet in warder’s snowy whites. She had arrived here, seen the dead, taken three steps toward them, and there he was. Just as he had been when they met, the wicked boyish face, the soft brown hair. His sailor’s hands, his bindsman’s hands, still bore their calluses, though the rest of his body was healed of what she knew the Ennead must have done to it. He was wholly and completely himself. The young mage she had been called a vocate with. The warder she had triaded.

  “Tolivar,” she said. It came out a choked groan, so much guilt and heartbreak that it couldn’t all fit through her throat. The whole of this infinite place would not be room enough to contain what she had done to him, her best friend, the father of her child.

  A shout drew her attention. The girls were struggling with each other. One of them had cried a name. It was not a name she knew. Let them struggle. She couldn’t leave Tolivar. She might not be able to find him again. She had to fetch Kara, show her her father, but she could not leave him. She had left him once, to fetch the baby, as he’d bid her to, and this was what came of it, this body lying here without breath, without spirit. She could not leave him again.

  She must. She knew she must. But if she looked at him again, she would be unable to tear herself away. She would stay here by his side through all time, and that eternity of penance would still not atone for her betrayal.

  Just one more look. Just one last look, to remember him as he had been, young and beautiful, not the pinched downtrodden gray-skinned man the Holding had made him. One last, sweet look ...

  She started to lower her eyes. Then, in the distance, by the stream, the young man’s head turned, and she got an unimpeded view of the woman’s face.

  Lerissa n’Lessa l’Rigael, illuminator of the weather triad that had cast the first freedom off her. Lerissa Illuminator of the Ennead—the Nine that had destroyed the world she’d known, the light inside her, the future she had strived for ... and Tolivar.

  “Elora, please stop, this isn’t right, she isn’t right, we didn’t come here for Louarn, we didn’t come here for this. ...”

  Elora kept hauling on her. Pelufer made herself dead weight, just [397] sank right down into the ground, and she was too heavy for Elora to drag.

  Elora flung her arm down and kept going toward Louarn, either to save him from the not-right woman or because he was the only familiar thing on this terrifying plain.

  The not-right woman sat back from him. She raised a clear stone she was holding, as though it would defend Louarn against Elora. She didn’t know who Elora was, or what Elora was, or what Elora would do, but she didn’t want Elora near Louarn. There was something about the clear stone that would stop Elora if she got close enough.

  Pelufer scrambled up. She would have to tackle her sister before she got to the clear stone. But the distance was already too much. She would never make it in time.

  “Elora, stop, please stop, she’s not right, she’ll hurt you!”

  Elora ignored her. She wanted Louarn. She wanted a grownup, to help them find Caille, to help them navigate the world. Pelufer was always holding her back from going to the grownups, and now she was finally so tired and scared that she wouldn’t listen anymore.

  The not-right woman smiled, and offered the stone. A pretty trinket to bribe a child.

  Dabrena came striding in from the side and caught Elora in her arms. Holding Elora’s face against her neck, she looked the not-right woman dead in the eye and said, “I’ve cleaned up enough of your messes, Illuminator. Let the boy go.”

  Louarn could see through the starbursts now, in fits and glimpses, and what he saw was through Mellas’s eyes: the warder who had called him “that lightless boy” in a voice hard and cold as stone.

  Dabrena. Her name was Dabrena, and her cousin was Ilorna, one of the mages he’d led out of the Ennead’s chambers, and Dabrena had tried to follow them, calling to her cousin, but she’d gotten lost in the tunnels. Just like him.

  He tried to greet her. But the soft voice was telling him to sleep. To dream. He was the only one who had any power in this place. There was no death here, not with metal or stone or hands. But he could dream his razor shadows. They would have power here. They came from a deeper place than this, an older place. A place of primordial darkness.

  The place you went when you fell the wrong way into sleep.

  Tchatichoch. The word bubbled up unbidden, bursting against the murmuring flow of the sweet, low voice. Danger. There was danger in that voice.

  [398] It was a far older, far more powerful word than what the soft voice murmured. It burst into dark song, a melody of caution, a gust of chill air through the mind, to waken, to blast the cobwebs away.

  Dabrena saw identity return to the young man’s eyes, and knew him. The boy who could dream passageways in mountains. The boy who’d had no light, until he’d slept, and dreamed. The boy who, dreaming, had more power than her whole triad combined.

  “Don’t you know her?” Dabrena said. “Don’t you remember what the Ennead did to you?”

  Pelufer came up beside Elora and Dabrena and flung an arm out in front of them, a helpless, involuntary attempt to shield them from whatever Louarn was gearing up to do. He had come abruptly back into his own shape, and it was a shape of so much authority and power that he might do anything, anything at all.

  Louarn stared right at the stone the not-right woman was holding.

  The stone exploded.

  Shards of crystal rained down. They turned into droplets as they fell, but they had been crystal when they burst apart, and most of them had flown at the not-right woman.

  They’d torn into her face and eyes and hands. She screamed. The wounds closed up right away, but she’d felt the pain of them. She fell backward, writhing, as if she could still feel the pain. It took a breath to ebb away even though the wounds were gone.

  Louarn took two steps, towering over her, then went to his knees and dug his thumbs into her throat.

  “No,” Pelufer said, “no, don’t—” No matter how bad the not-right woman was, killing her would leave a burn mark on Louarn. It would scar him, he shouldn’t do that, he shouldn’t scar himself like that—

  But he couldn’t kill her. He choked off her air and must have crushed her windpipe, but she just kept looking up at him, and then she smiled, a smile that said Go on, have your tantrum, little boy. You cannot harm me.

  This was a realm of the dead. You couldn’t kill people here.

  Louarn fell back, gasping and trembling, as if the effort of destroying the stone, or the dark killing fury that had gripped him, had been too much. Elora went to him and put her hands on his shoulders, intending to comfort. He shook her off roughly, and she crept back to Pelufer and Dabrena, injured and diminished. Louarn said, “I’m [399] sorry, Elora. I’m sorry. I meant no harm. I am not myself. You must go fetch Caille now. She’s here, safe and well, on one of the hills. But you’ll have to search for her.”

  Pelufer looked back toward the distant hills, and all she could see were bonefolk. Rank upon rank of bonefolk coming toward them.

  Louarn struggled to regain his composure in the face of this new threat. What looked like nonneds of the pale, tattered folk had descended the hills and were crossing the plain. How long before they were surrounded? Distances were mutable here. The only escape lay through the dead, but the dead seemed farther now, at least a dozen threfts before the first row of bodies, and they could not outrun pursuit in any event.

  Lerissa rose and plumped out her silk robes, brushing at nonexistent dust. “There will be no searching, no running, and no rescuing,” she said. “My bonefolk will not allow it.”

  Louarn assessed their progress. The bonefolk could move preternaturally fast. But they were stalking toward them, like herons browsing through dark water, making no effort at haste. Why were they moving so slowly?

  As if to prove his point, three bonefolk were abruptly upon them. But they did not rally to Lerissa, though she gave curt be
ckoning. They came up close beside Elora and Pelufer, and Dabrena, who was between them. Ignoring Lerissa entirely, they turned to confront the inexorable advance of the others.

  Pelufer grinned at Lerissa and said, “We have bonefolk too.”

  Louarn’s heart surged with affection for her, irrepressible Pelufer, rebellious and brave and insolent as he had never been. The kind of affection Lerissa’s crystal had leached from him, blanking him to everything but the imperatives her insidious murmurs instilled. The distant bells did not sound, warning him against fondness, against attachment. It was not time to go. It was time to stay, and fight.

  But the three bonefolk the children had befriended would not be enough to stand against the nonneds who bore down on them.

  Dabrena stepped out from between the two girls, leaving them in their bonefolk’s care, and confronted Lerissa, who awaited her inhuman minions like a queen from one of the ancient codices awaiting her footmen.

  “I commend you, Warder,” Lerissa said. “Diverting that last Great Storm was an admirable feat. I embrace this unusual opportunity to [400] thank you for it. My triad was occupied in an attempt to subvert the leading triad’s attack on the outer realms, and we failed to fulfill our mandate to protect Eiden Myr. You saved us. We owe you our lives.”

  Flattery had always been one of the Ennead’s great strengths. Finding the thing you were secretly proudest of and stroking you for it. To an observer it would seem, absurd to fall for such an obvious tactic. But when it was exerted on you, it tugged at every yearning for approval you had ever had, every close-held pride. You expected confrontation and confronted praise. You expected anger and confronted sympathy. You expected chastisement and confronted admiration, and it disarmed you. Made you grateful. The Ennead had never been powered by their blinding light. The Ennead’s great talent had been to warp the human soul.

  “Then indeed you owe us your life,” Dabrena said, with every ounce of Holding bombast, combined with the feral grin she had learned from Verlein. “One of us shall endeavor to collect at the first opportunity.”

  Lerissa made a dismissive gesture with a bennged hand. These were empty words, empty parries on a battlefield where no physical wound was fatal.

  But the attempt had to be made. “Tell me where my daughter is, and perhaps there will be some clemency.”

  “Clemency?” Lerissa purred. “They gave me clemency on Khine, and you see what became of that. You don’t want to grant me clemency, love.”

  “Then a quick death rather than the slow flaying you’ve earned.”

  “Ah. The threat of pain. They gave me pain on Khine as well, and the results were the same. Have you forgotten that you would have no daughter had my triad not cast the freedom off you? I remember every casting, and every subject. I cast you warder, Wordsmith. Your body loved the freedom. It did not give it up gladly. If we’d left it to you, there would have been no child at all.”

  The young man said, “All the children are in the hills,” as though he’d sensed that she would react to this and was cutting in to subvert Lerissa’s influence. Louarn. Elora had cried out for Louarn, though that had not been his name when Dabrena met him. He was some friend to those girls, and he had rendered her fine service in the Holding, though as she recalled she had scorned him. He looked to be some relative of Lerissa’s, but his vain attempt to strangle her attenuated suspicions of a blood alliance. “If your daughter is here,” he went on, “then she is safe with the others. Lerissa’s intent is to control the returning light, not destroy it. Whatever happens here, no harm will come to them.”

  [401] “The light’s not coming back,” Dabrena said. “I had a light. Believe me. I know.”

  “Not yours,” he said. Sadly, she thought. “But it shows in the next generation. Any child born after the mage war will show a light if it is in her. Many already do. I’ve seen it. Each of the stolen children held in those hills made a fragment of magestone glow.”

  Dabrena glanced at the approaching bonefolk. They were moving slowly over a vast distance, like men walking on foot when they could have flown down a swift river, but there were only heartbeats now before Lerissa took charge by sheer strength of numbers. The revelation about the light’s return was staggering, but she must not stagger. She must save the other children. There was no question of that. She must keep them from the Ennead’s last pair of hands. But in this moment only Kara mattered. “My daughter was born three moons before the mage war,” she said to Louarn.

  Before he could answer, Lerissa said, “And you may have her back at any time. I would not incur the enmity of the menders. Indeed, we have the same goals, and I would welcome an alliance. I will require tutors for my girls and boys, and who better than the dedicated, fine minds of the Head holding? Certainly not those stodgy scholars, who can’t see past the points of their own quills. Your daughter is in the hills, Warder. Just say the word and I shall reunite you with her, and send you home with my blessing. Only my bonefolk can send you back to your mountain holding. Any other route of return carries untold risks.”

  So that was it. Lerissa was abducting children in order to hoard the next generation of mages. Imprint them on herself, determine their loyalty from age five, age six, and in a dozen years command them, and take control of Eiden Myr—perhaps the whole world, outer realms and all. Dabrena’s menders would be no part of that. They would fight it in any way they could. But she had to get back to them. Whatever had gone wrong in the realm of the living, she could not mend it if it killed her before she could travel up to the Head. Lerissa could send her directly home. Kara could be safe in her own bed within breaths.

  It would mean stranding Adaon in the Strong Leg.

  She had derailed him from his purpose of finding the Triennead holdings and made a proxy of him. It would mean leaving him to talk Verlein out of attacking her holding, with no idea what had become of her or Kara until a runner could reach him, if runners could even be safely dispatched.

  It would mean abandoning him to his fate, alone and without her aid in a world gone awry in ways she could not guess. It would mean [402] abandoning Beadrin the same way, after promising her protection, after all the runner girl had endured in order to reach her in time.

  It would mean leaving the captured children here, with no guarantee of being able to liberate them.

  But it would see Kara safely home. Once Kara was safe, she could take on the world.

  Lerissa had the upper hand. Until Kara was safe, Dabrena was forced to negotiate with her. She had not fared well the last time she had negotiated with the Ennead for Kara’s life. But she’d had no choice.

  With nonneds of bonefolk descending upon them, under Lerissa’s command, it appeared she had no choice now, either.

  She opened her mouth.

  Before she could speak—and she was never certain what she would have said—she saw that Louarn was looking past her with surprise in his gaze and a smile beginning to twitch the corners of his mouth. “I think now you’ll see why Lerissa would be so gladly rid of your daughter,” he said, and pointed.

  Dabrena turned.

  “That’s why they move so slowly,” Louarn said, coming up close behind her, speaking only to her, excluding Lerissa entirely.

  Because they were keeping pace with two little girls.

  One of them looked like a smaller version of Elora and Pelufer.

  The other one was Kara.

  They were not being herded, like hostages.

  They were leading.

  Her daughter had come to rescue her.

  Pelufer took a grim satisfaction in seeing the not-right woman realize that the stonefolk weren’t hers anymore.

  She was crafty at first, but that wore off fast—talking to bonefolk who didn’t want to know was like talking to a stick. So she ordered them and yelled at them and threatened them. She told them that they’d never have their redemption, that they’d be cursed forever to do penance for their terrible crime by cleaning up the dead leavings of huma
n life. For a moment Pelufer hoped that the woman would say what that terrible crime was, because she just couldn’t figure out what bonefolk like Lornhollow and Thorngrief and Bindlegore had possibly done to make them feel so guilty. But the woman didn’t say what the crime was. She didn’t know. She only knew that they thought they had done something. Claiming that she could make it right was a ruse.

  [403] It just went to show how nasty she was, that she compared the dead to turds someone had to clean up. What the bonefolk did wasn’t like that at all. She didn’t know why they salvaged the bodies and made them whole, and they didn’t know why, either. But it was a lovely thing to do, and a silly thing to insult them for. There wasn’t even anything wrong with cleaning up turds. The whole argument was stupid.

  Still, she could feel Lornhollow perk up at the making-it-right part. He hadn’t known about that. He was tempted. They must have all been very tempted, to go so far as to interfere with the living when they were mostly just very shy of them. And it might be possible to make it right, to make the bonefolk whatever they had been before. If the light was coming back in all the children the stonefolk had stolen, then a lot of things might be possible. The way the traders talked at home, people of light had been able to do just about anything. If people of light came back into the world, people with magelight, then she and Caille and Elora could go on hiding. Nobody needed to know about their shining. Nobody would need their shining. Nobody would try to use them to fix all the troubles in the world.

  Pelufer didn’t understand why that didn’t make her happy.

  Watching Lerissa’s downfall, Louarn thought: The children shine. The children shine. The children shine.

  Her bonefolk had ceased to do her bidding. They stood as stony as their own medium as she threatened and beseeched them. She did not stoop so far as to sputter, but the clear light of defeat came into her eyes, followed by cunning calculation.