Distant tales of the Dichotomy

The Ossuary Steps were a wide spiral of black stone that curled down into the dark beneath the Sanctum like a screw twisted into the world’s skull. At the top stood an iron door as tall as a house, and at the door stood three instructors, which was two more than anyone wanted at a first day of class.

Commander Kirn was there with his hands folded behind his back and his two long cavalry swords resting at his hips, looking like a man who had not slept since the previous tournament. Master Boru leaned against the doorframe, polishing his round glasses on a handkerchief and humming a cheerful little tune that made Fel’s ribs ache in sympathy. And behind them, arms crossed, looming like a cliff that had learned to sneer, stood the Reptillar Isharv, who lifted his lip at Fel the moment he limped into view.

“The corpse walks,” Isharv rumbled. “Pity.”

“Isharv,” Kirn said, without turning.

“I said pity. I did not say I would do anything about it.”

Team D was already gathered. Vili stood with his arms folded, wearing an expression of practiced boredom and, Fel noticed, a very fresh shave. Loria sat on the third step down with her back against the wall and her knees drawn up, her wrapped arm resting on them, studying nothing. She did not look up when he arrived. She did, however, slide half a step to one side, leaving room.

Fel sat in the gap. Neither of them commented.

Across the landing stood a second team, and Fel understood at once that he was looking at the opposite of his own.

They stood close, shoulder to shoulder, in the loose, easy way of people who had stopped having to think about it. The biggest was a young man who might have been seven feet tall, with shoulders like a doorframe and skin that looked like bark, ridged and brown and faintly mossy at the knuckles. His hair was a tangle of leaf-green and dead-brown, his eyes were the amber of old sap, and he carried a tower shield made from one solid slab of ironwood, its edge still sprouting a few tiny, defiant green shoots. Beside him stood a lean girl with grey eyes the color of wet slate, a river-stone sling wrapped around her forearm and a leather pouch of polished pebbles at her hip, each pebble scratched with a tiny rune. She held very still, her head tilted slightly, as if listening to something in the wall. At her feet, chewing on a stick and grinning with far too many teeth, sat a goblin barely as tall as the giant’s ribs, green-grey and big-eared, with a shepherd’s crook across his lap and a small brass bell hanging from its hook.

“Team C,” said Kirn. “Introduce yourselves, since you insist on standing there looking as though you have something to say.”

The giant spoke first, slowly, in a voice like a door opening in a very old house. “Raza Treetrunk. Number eleven… no. Twenty-seven.” He frowned at himself. “Twenty-seven.”

“Ryever Stone,” said the girl. Her voice was quiet and level and gave nothing away. “Seventy-four.”

“GOBU OF GRAZINGROCK!” the goblin shouted, springing up so fast that his bell jangled. “Number eleven! Best shepherd in the east, worst thief in the west! Is that the one who killed the tree-knight? He looks like breakfast.”

“He looks like he’s still asleep,” Raza said gently.

Ryever said nothing at all. She only looked at Fel for a few seconds, measuring him like a stone she was deciding whether to throw, and then looked away.

“Good,” said Kirn, and the word landed like a dropped coin. “Now that we have finished with the pleasantries, let us discuss why you are all here, since I am told the Sanctum’s newest rotation requires an explanation.”

He stepped forward, and the three instructors went quiet in a way that made the hair on Fel’s arms rise.

“Two weeks ago, I told you your teammates were rivals. I told you that half of you would be gone by the year’s end. I did not tell you why that has always been the case, and the reason is simple: every candidate who has ever fallen in this Sanctum fell because he trusted his own arm more than the man beside him. The Empire does not want lone heroes. Lone heroes die in ditches. The Empire wants soldiers who can be relied upon to live. And so, by order of the Sanctum’s council, every rotation will now include one session in which two teams are placed in one room, with one objective, and a very firm reason to cooperate with the ones they came in with.”

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“A fine speech,” Boru murmured, still polishing his glasses. “He practiced it.”

“I did not,” said Kirn.

“He did.”

“Master Boru.”

“Yes, Commander.”

“You are not helping.”

“I am providing a service.” Boru put his glasses back on and beamed at the candidates, his strange square pupils swimming behind the lenses. “Welcome, dear children, to the Widow’s Lantern.”

The rules were explained at the top of the steps while the iron door groaned open behind them, and the more Kirn explained, the less Fel liked it.

Beneath the Sanctum, a thousand years before the crows conquered anything, the first masters of the place had cut a great cathedral of the dead out of the rock: the Sunken Ossuary, a hollow the size of a small town, where the bones of ten thousand warriors were stacked in niches along the walls. It had been the Sanctum’s first arena. It had been used to answer disputes of honor. It had been used, Kirn said flatly, to answer a great many other disputes as well.

Two teams would enter through opposite doors, the Mourner’s Door in the north and the Sexton’s Door in the south. In the center of the great flooded nave hung the Widow’s Lantern, a brass lamp shaped like a mourning woman, holding the bound cinder-spirit of an ancient widow who had once burned an entire garrison alive out of grief. As long as the lantern remained lit and in the hands of a living carrier, the dead of the Ossuary would remain asleep. The moment the flame failed, they would wake, and they would be hungry.

“The Grievers,” Kirn said. “Bone-hounds. Not clever, not fast, and a great deal stronger than they have any right to be. They ignore the light, and they very much do not ignore you.”

At the top of the Bone Stair on the nave’s far wall was the Widow’s Gate. Bring the lit lantern to the brazier beside it, keep the flame burning in that brazier for the space of ten breaths, and the gate would open. It would close behind you. It would remain closed to everyone else.

“And the water,” Boru added cheerfully. “Don’t forget the water. There’s a bell. When it tolls, the lower nave floods a little higher. First bell, the shins. Second, the knees. Third, the waist. Fourth, the chest. Fifth…” He waved a hand. “Well. You are welcome to find out.”

“You will all be inside for approximately one hour,” said Kirn. “The team that delivers the lantern to the gate wins. The team that does not is left where it is until Master Boru’s seals cool, roughly a quarter hour after the fifth bell.” He paused. “Most of the losing teams are dead by then. Most.”

Nobody said anything.

“Points,” he continued in the same flat tone. “The winning team is awarded twenty points per member. The losing team is docked ten. Candidates who die are docked nothing, as the Emperor thanks them for their service.”

Gobu whistled low, cheerful and appalled. Ryever’s grey eyes narrowed a fraction, and Raza shifted his shield quietly, his big hand tightening on the grip. They were already listening to one another without speaking. It was the most unsettling thing Fel had ever seen.

Behind him, Vili had already stepped forward.

“As the son of a royal house with formal training in command,” he said, in the tone of a man who had rehearsed the line in a mirror, “I will lead Team D. Loria, you will cover the rear with that hand cannon of yours. Felanor, you will guard my left flank, and try to bleed less.”

“No,” said Fel.

“That was not a question.”

“Then you should have made it one.” Fel didn’t turn around. “I’m not following you into a hole full of bones because you have a nice tail on your hair.”

“I have a title!”

“I have ribs.”

“I’ll go alone,” said Loria.

Both boys turned. She had risen from the step without a sound, her braid swinging, her eyes on the black door. There was nothing in her expression at all. “The gun is loud. You will both be in the way.”

“That is precisely the sort of attitude that gets a team killed,” Vili snapped.

“Then don’t join it.”

Kirn watched the three of them with the expression of a man watching three cats being introduced to a bag. Then he sighed, very quietly, and spoke without raising his voice.

“You are teammates for exactly as long as you are alive. Try not to run out of that early.”

Behind him, Isharv laughed, a low, wet, satisfied sound.

The iron door swung wide. Beyond it, the dark smelled of wet stone and old, patient dust, and something underneath both that Fel didn’t want to name. Boru clapped his hands twice, bright as a schoolmaster starting an outing.

“Off you go!” he sang. “And do try not to die too loudly. It disturbs the neighbors.”

Team C filed toward the southern stair without a word, Raza first, Gobu skipping, Ryever last, her hand trailing along the wall as if taking its pulse.

Team D went north in three different directions at once.