Distant tales of the Dichotomy

The Lantern Row was the strangest street Fel had ever walked down, and he had once bought vegetables in a market that also sold wyvern eggs.

It was narrow and crooked and roofed over by hundreds of paper lanterns, strung from window to window like a canopy of small, tired moons, and even in the middle of the day they were lit. Beneath them, the stalls sold things that had no business being sold: candles that burned cold, jars of bottled shadow that whispered at the glass, dried hands on strings, and a stall that sold nothing but teeth, sorted by size, with a hand-painted sign reading NO REFUNDS ON WISDOM.

He found Loria at the far end of it, in front of a stall piled with iron nails.

She stood with her arms folded, the gauze on her right forearm dirty at the edges, looking down on a plump, sweating human merchant with the calm of a woman deciding where to bury someone. The man’s smile was sliding off his face like butter off a hot pan. Behind her, on the awning’s edge, a small black shadow had begun to lengthen and curl.

“Loria,” said Fel.

She did not turn. “Go away.”

“Vili says your aim is atrocious.”

“Vili can put that in a letter.” Her crimson eyes never left the merchant. “This man says these nails are grave-iron. He says they were pulled from a hundred-year coffin. He says six rounds of shot will cost me four hundred glims.”

“Is it a lot?”

“It is a fair price,” said Loria, “for real grave-iron. This is pig iron rubbed in dirt. I can smell it. It has never met a corpse in its life.”

The merchant made a small strangled noise. “My lady, I swear on my mother’s…”

“Your mother is alive, and she’s in the doorway of the tavern across the road, and she is not impressed.” Loria’s shadow rose another inch. “Tell me where to buy the real thing, or I will find out what pig iron does when it’s fed to something hungry.”

Fel put a hand gently on her sleeve. She looked at it. He took it away.

“There’s a man at the end of Undertaker’s Lane,” said the merchant, very quickly. “Old Tallow. He digs. He casts. He’s… more honest than I am. Please.”

“Thank you,” said Loria, and turned on her heel, and the shadow followed her like a leash. She had walked twenty paces before she realized Fel was walking beside her.

“I don’t know this city,” she said stiffly, as if the words were pulled out of her with pliers. “I was raised in a tower. I was not permitted to leave it. Ever.” She shot him a sideways glance, hard and bright. “You were raised in a gutter.”

“Under-city.”

“Same thing.”

“It’s really not.”

“You know where things are. I need shot and a black candle, and you need whatever it is you need. We will do it together, because it is faster.” A pause. “That is all.”

“That’s all,” Fel agreed.

Neither of them looked at the other for almost a whole street.

It started the way most terrible ideas start, with food.

Fel, having eaten nothing since porridge, stopped at a stall selling sugared sloe-berries on sticks, red and glassy and glistening like tiny hearts, and bought two. He held one out. Loria looked at it as if he had offered her a live eel.

“I don’t eat things I haven’t inspected.”

“It’s a berry.”

“It is a berry that has been coated.”

“Loria. Eat the berry.”

She took it with two fingers, studied it for a long moment, and bit down. Her whole face changed. The flat, dry, tired mask cracked for a single heartbeat, and something like real shock passed across it, and then she caught herself and swallowed and stared down the street with immense composure.

“Acceptable,” she said.

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“You want another.”

“I want to know what’s in it.”

“Sugar.”

“That is a lie. No one could make something that good out of sugar.”

He bought her three more.

They drifted. It was the only word for it. They drifted down the Row like two pieces of debris on a slow river, past a sword-swallower who was working his way through a rusted claymore, past a puppet show in which a cloth crow murdered a cloth king to great applause, past a fortune-teller with milk-white eyes who reached out as they passed and caught Fel’s wrist in a cold, dry grip.

“You two,” she said, in a voice like a door creaking. “You will end one another.”

“Everyone says that,” said Loria.

“Then everyone is paying attention.” The old woman let go. “That will be a glim.”

Loria paid her a glim and dragged Fel away before the woman could say anything else.

“You believe in that stuff?” said Fel.

“I believe in glims.” She chewed, dark-eyed, thoughtful. “You have a scar.”

He glanced at his left hand. The round scar, split in two by its reddish-black line, was clearly visible where his glove had ridden up. He shoved it back in his pocket.

“Tori used to say girls like boys with a special scar,” he said, before he could think better of it. “It’s a warrior’s proof of service.”

“Tori.”

“The woman who raised me.”

“Whoever she was,” said Loria, “she was lying.”

“She wasn’t a liar.”

“Then she was wrong.” Without asking, Loria took his hand out of the pocket, turning it over in both of hers, tracing the two halves of the scar with one long black-nailed finger. Her skin was cold, and it made the back of his neck prickle. “It’s split,” she said quietly. “Like a promise cut in half. Only a fool would find something like that attractive.”

“So you don’t.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t say you didn’t.”

“I didn’t say anything,” said Loria, and dropped his hand as if it had burned her, and walked away faster than before.

Fel stood in the street for a moment, cheeks unaccountably hot. Then he followed, because she was still the only person in the capital who had ever stolen a bite of his skewer without asking.

Undertaker’s Lane ran downhill from the Row, narrow and quiet and smelling of wet earth. Old Tallow turned out to be an ancient, lean man with no eyebrows and hands the color of clay, who sold them six rounds of real grave-iron shot from a wooden coffin lid, each round cast from a nail with a headstone number scratched on it.

“They don’t fire, exactly,” he wheezed, weighing the little black slugs in his palm. “They arrive. Whatever you point them at, it will already have been dead a while.” He looked at Loria’s gun-arm with something between respect and fear. “That’s a Cerberus, isn’t it? I thought the last was buried with the last of the Crowned Ones.”

“It was,” said Loria.

Old Tallow said nothing else, and took her money, and did not seem to breathe again until they were out of sight.

Rope was easier. A ropewalker in a long, echoing shed at the edge of the row sold Fel thirty feet of good hemp with a heavy iron grapnel, ninety glims, and no argument. Loria tested the hook by hurling it up at a roof tile and hauling on the line with her good arm, and the tile came down and shattered a foot from Fel’s head.

“Strong,” she said.

“You aimed that.”

“I did not.”

“You looked directly at where I was standing.”

“Then it worked,” said Loria, and coiled the rope neatly around his shoulder, the way one arranges a scarf on a small child, and for a moment her hand rested on his collar, and neither of them moved.

The bell was the problem.

The Chapel Steps were a wide curve of white stone in the middle of the market, and the little shop that sold blessed bronze stood at the bottom of them with a sign shaped like a bell and a doorway framed in tiny carved saints. Fel got as far as the threshold before he realized Loria had stopped ten paces behind.

She was standing with her arms wrapped around herself, staring at the door. Her face had gone very pale, and a thin, faint wisp of smoke was curling up from the edge of one sleeve.

“I can’t,” she said. “The stones burn.”

“You’re smoking.”

“Yes. I’m aware.” Her voice was quiet and tight. “Ortumocorvis blood does not care for sacred ground. It is one of the reasons we are called demons.” A tiny, bitter smile. “Go on. Buy your church noise. I will wait.”

He went in alone.

The priest behind the counter was an old man with a bald head and quick, dry, humorous eyes. The bell he sold Fel was small and dull and unremarkable, an old brass thing worn smooth at the rim, which he said had been rung every dawn for three hundred years. It cost a hundred and eighty glims. When Fel counted out the coins, the old man pressed a hand briefly to his forehead, murmured something too soft to hear, and said, “There. A blessing is free.”

“What does it do?”

“Nothing you’ll feel.” The priest smiled at the door. “You’ve a companion outside who would not enjoy this room.”

“She’s not…” Fel paused. “She’s a teammate.”

“Of course,” said the old man, gently, and Fel left with a bell in his pocket and warm ears.

Outside, Loria took one look at him and wrinkled her nose.

“You reek of forgiveness.”

“It suits me.”

“It doesn’t.” She was still pale, but the smoke had stopped. “It makes you look like someone who has been let off a hook. You should never be let off a hook. You’re better when you’re angry.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say.”

“It was not a compliment. It was an observation.” She turned away. “The tenth bell will ring soon. My palm is starting to itch.”

They walked back toward the Wicket without speaking. The lanterns of the Row had begun to dim, and the market was thinning out into tired merchants and drunks and children hauling cages of pigeons.

At the mouth of the alley that led to the Sanctum stair, she stopped.

“Don’t lose tomorrow,” she said.

“Don’t lose yours.”

“I don’t lose.”

“You’ve lost before. The Widow’s Lantern.”

“I did not lose the Widow’s Lantern,” said Loria with fine, cold dignity. “I set half the room on fire.”

“That’s not the same as winning.”

“Then it’s better.” She almost smiled. It was a terrifying thing to see on her face, and it lasted only a moment. Then she had stepped into the shadow of the archway, and the shadow had swallowed the rest of her, and there was only the faint sweet smell of sugared sloe on the air.

Fel stood in the empty alley for a moment, three swords at his hip, a bell in his pocket and a rope around his shoulder.

Only a fool, he thought, would find that attractive.

He touched the split scar on his palm and went home.