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

  Books by Terry McGarry

  Illumination

  The Binder’s Road

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this

  novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  THE BINDER’S ROAD

  Copyright © 2003 by Terry McGarry

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book,

  or portions thereof, in any form.

  This book is printed on acid free paper.

  Edited by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

  Map by Ellisa Mitchell

  A Tor Book Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McGarry, Terry.

  The binder’s road / Terry McGarry.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-765-30428-7

  1.Women—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3613.C45 B56 2003 813-54—dc21

  2002040949

  First Edition: March 2003

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Kevin

  Heartbreak piled on heartbreak for the man who could not die. Through shadow, storm, and shine he passed, but never into death. A nonned lifetimes he pressed on, and twice that, and thrice. Every road ended in loss. He could not follow brave comrades into the easeful arms of darkness. He could not join in passage the hearts he pledged. No one remained who had walked the roads he’d walked. No one remained who understood what his eyes had seen.

  And so the man who could not die, despairing in his grief, sailed alone into the land beyond the mists, that he might never again love what he must lose. ...

  —Teller’s Tale

  Contents

  The Isle

  I

  Gir Doegre

  Dindry Leng

  Gir Doegre

  The Head

  Gir Doegre

  The Fist

  The Fist

  The Knee

  The Knee

  II

  The Belt ◊ The Girdle ◊ The Druilor Piedmont

  Gir Doegre

  Gir Nuorin

  The Menalad Plain

  The Menalad Plain

  The Menalad Plain

  The Menalad Plain

  The Menalad Plain

  Gir Mened

  III

  Gir Doegre

  Gir Doegre

  Gir Doegre

  Khine

  Gir Doegre ◊ The Fist

  The Strong Leg

  Names

  The Living

  The Dead

  Gir Doegre

  The Holding

  Risalyn

  Yuralon

  Glossary

  About the e-Book

  “Follow me!” the boy cried, and stepped into the passageway his mind had carved in the mountain.

  Shivery air tickled his face, like a fizz of bubbles around a swimmer. The stone glowed the silvery white of the moon. Magestone shone for mages. He was no mage. Only a runner. A frightened, angry warder had called him “that lightless boy” in a voice hard and cold as stone. But there were mages behind him. Enough to turn the tunnel into an underground river of light. Injured mages. Counting on him to save them.

  Triads could craft magestone, but it could not be cut with metal tools. Yet he reached out a fingertip and touched the smooth wall of a corridor that had not been there scant breaths ago.

  I did this, he thought. I did this, with my dreams.

  The only thing his dreams had ever wrought before was razored darkness. His face and arms were scored by the shadows’ teeth and talons. His sleeves were torn and blood-soaked. His mind had fought hard to keep the Ennead off him.

  Now, at last, the chance to be free. But what if he failed? What if they were caught? What if the Nine did to him what they’d done to the mages behind him?

  “Follow me!”

  His cry went out a plea. He forced himself to move forward.

  The argent luminance of magestone cast no shadow, and there was no telling depth or distance or where the passage turned. He would have to feel [14] his way through the light. The chill of stone seeped through the thin soles of his softboots, but a glance at his feet showed them suspended in pale nothingness.

  He swayed with vertigo, and. came up against the wall he had shaped. He laid his hands flat against it. Hang on, he thought. He crabbed along the stone, and his body found a memory of doing something very like, once, long ago—

  Hang on, but don’t look back. Looking back was like looking down. He could not keep his balance if he looked back.

  The stone gave off a scent—strange, and not pleasant. Something like the heart of a daisy, but not as clean. Like all stone, it drew warmth from the flesh. Like all stone in the Holding, it felt of magecraft, like the twinge in a dinged elbow. But it was waxy. There was something about laying hands on it that was like laying hands on a live thing. It made a whispery silver sound. He did not know how or why. There were veins of magestone throughout the Holding, but if they spoke he’d never heard them. Here in the silver depths of the mountain, there was only magestone, and here its whispers were as loud as surf.

  “This way!” he cried. Sound changed in this tunnel. He firmed his voice: “Follow me!”

  Follow me. How many times had he said those words? He had summoned young mages to this Holding, delivered the Ennead’s call to the brightest when they took the triskele. He had ridden out of this mountain fastness into what felt like freedom, and never was, and he had brought mages back with him, full knowing, never warning. Every Holdingward step had been an agony of submission—

  Were they coming? The whispers were too loud. He would not be able to hear the tread of their bare feet. He did not trust mages, now, to follow the boy who had only ever led them to their doom.

  He turned, an effort of will. The chamber he had left was lost to sight. The passageway had curved without him sensing it. Would the mages follow him if they couldn’t see him? He should have herded, not led. Suppose they lost themselves in the watery light and could not feel their way?

  Where his scored flesh had slid along stone there was a smear of black. Blood was black in the magestone’s glow. The line hung on the wall like a wordsmith’s mark—hovering in the shadowless space, as if he could scribe in blood on frozen currents.

  “I’m here!” he cried, urgent now. “It’s this way! Follow my voice!”

  My voice, not my blood. There was not blood enough in him to guide them all the way to freedom—and if they were pursued, it would guide their killers just as clearly.

  My voice. It must be a strong voice, a voice worth following. A voice worth staking your life on. He had never spoken much. He was shy, he knew [15] that, but it was fear, too—fear of saying the wrong thing, divulging too much.

  If the Ennead caught him, or their men did, no sleep would protect him. Behind him, good folk would soon be, fighting for their lives against Ennead killers. Perhaps he should have stayed. Dying on a longblade might be better than what lay ahead if he tried to run, and failed.

  Ennead. Just the brush of the word against his mind was enough to set his heart pounding.

  “Come on!” he cried again. His voice held and did not crack, as it had been wont to do of late, from grief, from fatigue, from the passage between childhood and manhood. It was a voice worth following. He would get them out of here.

  He had taken three steps ba
ck to see what was keeping them when the magestone’s glow began to fade.

  He had come too far. He was not a mage. The walls would not glow for him. He had never shown a magelight, though an illuminator had believed there was a light inside him, obscured by the years of pain and fear. He knew his life had been hard, but he didn’t think it was so hard that it would seal off his own magelight. ...

  No. This magestone, this fulgent river—it wanted him to remember. If he gave in to it, it would dissolve him where he stood. He would drown in memory as darkness pressed in, and he would lose the only hope he’d ever have of making things right.

  Groping along the solidity of stone, he moved back around the turn, and a silver crescent took shape, magestone lit by the presence of mages. They were following. They would dispel the darkness. The walls would glow again, for them.

  “This way!” he called, and now he could hear them: the wincing drag of a useless foot along the stone, the grunts and guttural sounds of the tongueless speaking among themselves.

  The magestone responded. Whatever the Ennead had taken from them, they still had light enough for that.

  Now there was light to see them by.

  Most of them were naked, or close enough, shreds of warders’ white and reckoners’ black hanging off them, the peeled skin of their former Holding positions. Their flesh was a webwork of white lines, deep scars carved by the Ennead’s knives. Every third was missing one hand, or both; the eyelids of many others sank into hollows. The ones with no visible injury must be the binders, their songs forever silenced.

  The Ennead had prevented them using their light as thoroughly as if they’d cored and sealed them. An illuminator could not cast without a casting hand. A wordsmith could not scribe if she could not see. A binder with no tongue could not control a bindsong; a binder with no feet could not gather casting materials. Three dozen of Eiden Myr’s elite reduced to limping, sightless, inarticulate husks. He had heard them cry out for death, and he had heard the silence of those who were beyond hoping even for that.

  This was how the Ennead repaid its brightest lights.

  And he had called them. He had appeared in their towns, in his magecrafted, nine-colored cloak, and conveyed the Ennead’s summons, and they had come with him, to be vocates in the Holding, to ward and protect all Eiden Myr, to practice magecraft at its highest.

  He had called them, all of them, by proxy, even the ones he hadn’t fetched, because he had never run away. Time and again he had had the opportunity, and he had fetched and returned as he was told to do. He had never said the word “complicity” aloud. He had said few words in his nine years and six, except the words the Ennead sent him to say. But that word hung in the air between himself and the mages like a line of blood.

  Don’t you know me? he thought. Was the pain so bad that you forgot who brought you to this? He could not speak. Their smell came to him slowly through the still air of the tunnel: captivity, filth and blood and terror sweat and festering wounds. He gagged on it.

  “Well?” came a woman’s hoarse voice. She stood in the center of the group. “I can’t see you, boy, but you’re the only one of us with boots, and I don’t hear them moving.”

  I’m sorry, he tried to say.

  “You cast passage,” said another woman, nearer the front. Irony darkened her voice. Her eyes were flat as she gestured up the tunnel with the stump of a wrist. An illuminator. Their injuries made the triadic roles obvious as they were never meant to be. “The spirits of our dead found their own way, but you’ re going to have to lead the rest of us.”

  I’m sorry, he tried again, but when he drew breath he inhaled only the damp choking tang of shame.

  “I saw a warder cut her throat rather than walk out the open cage door,” called someone from the back. “There’s some still believe the only way out is death. But we’ll follow you, boy—so long as you bloody get on with it.”

  I’m sorry, he thought, and he could have managed the words out loud now, but what he said was “Yes. Come on. Come ahead. I’ll help you.”

  He moved to the side of the group, prompting with hands and voice as they shuffled forward, just wanting to be sure of them before he took point again.

  Far behind them, he heard a voice cry out. Someone else, trying to catch up. How could it be so far away? They hadn’t come that far down the passageway. He turned, but could see nothing. The voice called again: “Ilorna!” He recognized it now: the warder who had scorned him as lightless, no use to them in the trap they’d been in. The trap he’d freed them of. Now she was trying to escape, using the passages he had dreamed. “Ilorna, I’m coming!”

  [17] A honey-haired wordsmith near the front of the group went very straight, then turned in blind response, started to go back.

  “No,” said the illuminator next to her. “Let her catch up. She’s got two good feet.”

  But the calls were getting fainter.

  “She’s gone down some other tunnel,” Ilorna said.

  There were no other tunnels.

  “I’ve got to go to her! She’s my cousin, I can’t leave her!”

  “You can. You must go on. We must go on.”

  They struggled briefly, the illuminator wrapping her arms around the wordsmith to hold her back. The boy let go his purchase on rocky reality to go past them, into the middle of the group, trying to see down the depthless silver length of the tunnel behind them. The warder’s voice had grown very faint. Where in the bloody spirits could she have gone? There were no other tunnels—

  Someone nearby cried out, and he saw a hobbling man tumble sideways—into the wall? Could he have dreamed awry, could the walls be softening? He ran to help the man sit up—his was the leg that dragged, he’d been using the wall to prop himself up as he hopped along—and found the corridor as firm and wide as ever. The man had fallen into an opening. Forcing one good foot in front of the other, the boy made his way in—a threft, two threfts, six, and again the wall fell away into silver space under his hand—

  The tunnel branched.

  That was why the warder couldn’t reach them.

  He froze. The tunnels turned, and the tunnels branched. How would he find the way?

  “I’ve got him, lad,” said the blind woman who’d spoken first. A wordsmith, once. She had the man’s arm over her shoulders. She would be a good right leg for him. The others were helping, too—being each other’s limbs and senses, trading hands for eyes and eyes for hands. “Which way, now?”

  The clang of iron blades, the first death cries drifted faintly along the passageway, carried on silver currents from the chamber they had left. It seemed a nonned leagues away, and a lifetime ago. But the battle was happening now. It would be for nothing if they just stood there until the dying was done.

  The close huddle of folk who had been mages turned ravaged faces to the boy and waited for his answer.

  “This way,” he said, moving into the main passage and past them to the front. He struck off up the incline, the way he had been going. He had always known his way through the Holding—most of it, anyway, even in the dark where the torchman had neglected his duties. He must trust that he knew it still. He had dreamed this. He could negotiate the twists and turns. “This way!”

  [18] He did not know how he made the choices he did. Sometimes space yawned under his hand, and he changed course and entered it. Sometimes he passed the branchings and continued down a straightaway or around the curve of a turn. But it was always upward, and the angle of ascent grew steeper. It took a long time for the sounds of battle to fall away, even faint as they were, even with the turnings. But when they did—because of distance, or the battle’s ending?—he realized with a jolt that he would never know the outcome. He would never know if his friends had lived or died. His path had well and truly branched away from theirs now.

  He was alone.

  It’s all right, he told himself. He’d been alone before, on the trail, in his campsites; he’d been alone in the beds that strangers gave h
im as a passing traveler, alone in the midst of tavern revelries. He’d been alone when—

  “Are you all right, boy?” said the illuminator.

  “It’s this cursed stone,” said the wordsmith who’d first spoken to him, who’d helped up the fallen man. Their voices were raw from screaming, the ones who still had voices at all, but he could tell them apart now. “It does something to the mind. They burned out my eyes, but my life’s passed before my mind’s eye as we walked. Don’t let it plague you, lad.”

  “What’s done is done,” someone else agreed.

  “It’s getting less,” said another. “It’s not all magestone now, there’s blackstone marbled in.”

  “Then we’ll be in the dark, soon,” the blind wordsmith said. “I’d wager no torchman’s ever passed this way.”

  “Trust the boy,” said the illuminator. “He made these tunnels. He’ll see us through.”

  “Do you know where we’ll be coming out?” said another.. “There’s some of us would do best in Crown, I think, and I don’t know about the others. We’ll all need care, and healing.”

  He’d thought the Ennead had broken them. But there was spirit in them still, and they were with him, and their words carried a double meaning: forgiveness. He was not alone.

  They deserved an honest answer. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s sowmid. Still cold out. We’d starve. Before we got across the Aralinns. I think. We’re going through them.”

  “Away from the sea, I hope,” said the wordsmith.

  “Yes,” he said, though he couldn’t say why he was so certain. “Into the mountains. Through them.”

  “Back into the Holding,” said the illuminator.

  “I don’t know,” he said, as the marbled walls became more nightstone than magestone, the flecks of mica in the one not sparkling in the glow of the other. “Maybe,” he said.

  “Let the boy be,” said the wordsmith. “Let him do what he has to do.”

  [19] There were grunts from the binders, sounds that had the inflection if not the shape of words. He heard no objection in them, or accusation, or mistrust. Given time, he thought, he might come to understand them as they seemed to understand each other. Perhaps they would all make a home together somewhere, if the stewards won their battle, if the rumored Darkmage and his rebel horde succeeded in bringing the Ennead down They could start a village of their own, band together to put the horror of this place behind them forever, work to make a new life. He’d never had a real home. What joy, to find friendship, to find unity in survival, among those who understood where he had been. ...