Description: 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 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 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 back 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 mage-crafted, 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!" 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

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