Distant tales of the Dichotomy

The Sanctum let its candidates out through a narrow stair called the Wicket, which spiraled up through the foundations of the royal castle and ended in a small stone room where a bored Reptillar with a blunt claw stamped each candidate’s palm with wet black ink.

“Back by the tenth bell,” he droned. “Or the stamp will start to burn.”

“Does it?”

“You’ll see.”

Fel climbed the last steps into daylight and stopped dead.

The capital was too big. He had lived his whole life beneath one city, then passed through two more in a single day, and still none of it prepared him for the sheer noise of it. The Cinder Market sprawled in the shadow of the castle like a spilled box of jewels and trash: awnings of red and yellow canvas, stalls piled with things that hissed or glittered, a tide of merchants and bruisers and long-eared traders in a hundred languages. Smoke rose from a thousand chimneys. Somewhere, a man was selling live eels by the yard.

He wandered for ten minutes with his hand on his coin purse, which was exactly what a Gallows child would tell you never to do, before he found the smiths’ row: a long crooked street of black-fronted shops where the ring of hammers came like a heartbeat from every doorway.

He had just stopped in front of a sign painted with a sword and a bent nail when a familiar voice said, quite close to his ear:

“I would not buy from that one.”

Fel turned. Vili Wyrnia stood against the wall of the next shop, hood up, collar high, wearing his golden hair tucked inside like something shameful. His left hand was buried in the folds of his cloak.

“What are you doing here?” said Fel.

“Inspecting local craftsmanship.”

“You’re hiding.”

“I am observing discreetly.”

“You’re hiding in an alley with your hand in your coat.”

Vili’s jaw worked. For a moment Fel thought he might draw Chimera on him out of sheer pride. Then something in the golden boy’s shoulders dropped an inch, and he pulled his hand out of his cloak and held it up.

The two fingers Karmina had stitched back on were pale and swollen, faintly bluish at the joints. They hung a little crooked, as if they belonged to somebody else. He tried to curl them, and they moved perhaps a quarter of an inch, and shivered.

“They do not bend,” Vili said.

He said it without any heat at all, and that was worse.

“I can hold my halberd. I can strike, I can swing, I can hold it. But Chimera answers to my fingertips. To the grain. To a thousand small things I could once do without thinking, and now I cannot.” He closed his fist, or tried to. “In the Ossuary, when I shaped the sand, it was still not quite mine. Did you see? The last ramp. It was too slow. I did not lose the fingers to a Griever. I lost them to a gap.”

“Karmina said…”

“The elf did what she could. She said it plainly.” Vili’s mouth twisted. “There is a gloveright in the lane behind this street, a woman who fits wire tendons to injured hands. I sent a servant’s letter to a cousin who told me where. I was going to go alone.”

“And?”

“And I have been standing outside her door for a quarter of an hour.” He lifted his chin. “I was gathering my resolve.”

Fel looked at the seventh prince of the Dichotomy, who had once pronounced himself a golden heir to an entire alleyway of strangers, and something odd happened in his chest. It wasn’t quite pity. It was closer to recognition.

“Come on,” he said.

“I did not ask…”

“I know. I’m not asking either. Move.”

The gloveright’s shop was down a lane so narrow the buildings nearly kissed overhead, behind a door painted with a silver hand. Inside, it smelled of oil and tanned hide and hot metal. Hundreds of gloves hung from the rafters: delicate lace for ladies, thick leather for smiths, and, in the back, a row of skeletal metal things that looked like the hands of very small, very polite dead men.

The woman behind the counter was half-orc, gaunt and green-grey, with forearms as thin as wire and a leather apron bristling with needles. One of her eyes was a chip of yellow glass. She looked at Vili’s hand, then at his hood, then at his face, and made a small, ironic sound.

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“Prince,” she said.

Vili went rigid. “How…”

“Nobody in the Cinder Market wears a cloak that expensive to walk into a gloveright’s. Sit.”

She examined the hand like a butcher examining a cut of meat, turning it, pressing, flexing what little would flex. “The elf’s stitching is beautiful,” she muttered. “Sinew’s sound. It’s the joints that are dead.” She dropped the hand. “You’ll want wire tendons. Silver wire, ram-horn joints, spider-silk sinew. I’ll fit them to the two bad fingers, and the ring finger’s neighbor if it starts to seize. You’ll have your grip back and most of your feeling. Maybe eight in ten of it.”

“How much?” said Vili.

“Nine hundred glims.”

Vili’s face didn’t change, but Fel saw a muscle jump in his cheek. He had six shims and forty glims. Nine hundred was nine shims. He was two hundred and sixty short, and he had spent a whole life having never once been told the word no by a shopkeeper.

“I am Vili Wyrnia,” he said, with what dignity he could summon, “seventh son of the High House of the Dichotomy, and I shall see that the Crown honors…”

“I’ve had seven of those in this shop,” said the gloveright, not unkindly. “None paid.”

“I’m not asking for credit!” Vili was going pink around the ears. “I am merely…”

“Excuse me,” said Fel.

Both of them looked at him.

He had been looking at the shelf behind the counter. Among the shining silver hands lay a tray of ram-horn joints, the tiny curled knuckles that fit into the wire. Half of them were flawless and gleaming. The other half were dull, with tiny hairline cracks running through the horn.

“Those,” Fel said, pointing. “The seconds. Cracked, aren’t they?”

The gloveright’s yellow-glass eye narrowed. “They’ll hold a quill.”

“They’ll hold a little finger,” said Fel, “which does no lifting. The good horn goes in the two fingers he grips with. Cracked horn in the smallest joints. The little finger never bears weight, and it’s the one you’ll have trouble selling.” He leaned on the counter, the way he’d watched Orcus lean on the counter of the Willow’s Drip when a merchant swore his barrels held real ale. “And you’ll say seven hundred and I’ll say six, and neither of us is going to pretend that you don’t have a whole tray of seconds gathering dust.”

There was a long silence.

The half-orc looked at him for a while. Then a slow, terrible grin split her face.

“Where did a stripling like you learn to haggle?”

“The Shallow Gallows,” said Fel. “Under a man named Orcus.”

“Ha! Seven hundred. And you tell your prince the horn’s the good stuff, whatever’s in it.”

“Six hundred and eighty.”

“Seven hundred. That’s my cheapest.”

Fel looked at Vili. Vili, very stiffly, held out his six shims and forty glims, which made six-forty. He was sixty short.

The silence stretched.

Fel took sixty glims out of his own pouch and put them on the counter.

“That’s my sword money,” he said, before Vili could open his mouth. “You owe me. When you can.”

Vili stared at the coins as if they’d bitten him. His fingers twitched toward them and stopped.

“I do not… I do not accept…”

“You accept,” said Fel, “or you go back to the Sanctum with a hand you can’t use, and Chimera flips you into a wall next week. Pick one.”

The gloveright coughed into her fist to hide the laughter.

It took her forty minutes. She threaded fine silver wire through the two injured fingers, cold and quick and shockingly gentle, her needles going in and out like a tiny loom. Vili sat rigid, sweating, eyes fixed on the far wall. Once he made a sound like a swallowed cough. Fel, sitting in the corner on an upturned crate, pretended not to hear.

When she fitted the last joint, she pressed the hand flat and said, “Try.”

Vili curled his fingers.

They closed. Slowly, stiffly, with a faint whisper of silver on horn, but they closed, one after another, into a fist. He opened them. He closed them again. A single glittering tear slid down the side of his nose, and he wiped it away with his other hand and pretended it was sweat.

“Eight in ten,” said the gloveright. “You’ll want oil once a week. Don’t sleep on it.”

Vili thanked her. It took him three attempts to get the words out, and neither of the others commented.

Outside, in the narrow lane, the golden boy stood in the sun and turned his hand over and over, flexing his fingers like a man learning a new language.

“Sixty glims,” he said at last, hoarsely.

“You don’t have to pay it right…”

“It is a debt of the House of Wyrnia.” He said it fiercely, without looking at Fel. “The Wyrnias do not forget their debts. For good or ill. You will not need to remind me.”

“Fine.”

“Do not mistake this for friendship, TeneDente.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“Good.” There was a pause. Vili shifted his weight. “You have three items to buy. You have spent a sixth of your coin. And you are, I presume, about to walk into the nearest smith and be robbed.”

“I was going to buy that sword. The one with the bent nail on the sign.”

“That is bog iron.” Vili’s voice became pained. “Come.”

He led Fel three doors down to a cramped forge where an old dwarf hammered at a strip of orange steel. Vili walked along the wall, running his good hand over the sword racks without a word, and finally lifted a plain short blade from the bottom shelf. It was two and a half feet long, unlovely, with a leather-wrapped grip that had clearly been made for someone with very strong wrists.

He held it out by the blade and flicked the flat with his fingernail.

It rang, a pure, clear, sustained note.

“Listen,” said Vili. “Steel sings. This one has a long voice. The one on that sign would thud like a dropped loaf of bread.” He put the blade in Fel’s hand. “A sword is not a stick. It is a promise, and you will need it to hold. What did the letter say? Plain and unenchanted? Then it is this. Two and a half shims. Do not let him say three.”

The dwarf said three. Vili glared. The dwarf said two and three quarters. Fel, without looking up from the blade’s edge, said two and a half, and the dwarf spat on his anvil in disgust and took the coins.

It was a strange sword. The grip was long, the guard unadorned, and there was a small ridge on the end of the pommel, worn smooth, where a hundred other jaws had gripped it.

“Someone used this in their teeth,” said Fel.

“Then it is well-tested.”

They stood on the street corner in the noise of the market, two boys of an age, one with a silver-wired hand and one with a stolen sword. Vili glanced up the row toward the crooked towers to the north.

“Ortumo went in the direction of the Lantern Row about an hour ago,” he said, too casually. “If you are looking for a bell.”

“Why would I look for her?”

“Because you are exactly the kind of fool who will.” Vili adjusted his cloak. “If you see her, tell her that her aim is atrocious, and that I have not forgotten the balcony.”

“I’ll pass it along.”

“You will not.”

“I won’t.”

For a moment, something almost like a smile crossed the seventh prince’s face. Then he pulled his hood down over his golden hair and vanished into the crowd, and Fel stood alone with three swords and fewer coins, smiling despite himself.