Distant tales of the Dichotomy

The Court of Doors lay at the very bottom of the Sanctum, below the barracks and the training halls and the flooded Ossuary, in a vast circular chamber with a ceiling so high it dissolved into darkness.

Three doors stood in a ring on the stone floor. They were tall and narrow and made of black iron, each cut with a single symbol: a small hammer, a knucklebone, and a quill. Between them, on the cold stone, someone had painted a single white circle where the squads would stand.

Fel stood in it with his hand on the pommel of Falling Star and his ribs in a corset of silver thread, and tried to keep his breathing even.

Kirn Mayfell was there in his plain grey coat, his long cavalry swords at his hips. Boru stood beside him with his hands clasped behind his back and a look of profound scholarly delight. Isharv, a step behind, loomed against the wall with his halberd, radiating disapproval.

On the far side of the circle, Team A was walking in.

They came in a line, not a wedge, and that alone told Fel something. They did not move like Team C. They moved like three people who did not need to.

The first was a tall, narrow boy with long white-blond hair tied back with a black ribbon, a soft, apologetic face, and eyes the color of pewter. A silver chain hung from a ring on his breastbone, and it did not lead to his belt or his pocket. It led into the air, taut and humming, and then disappeared into a patch of faint blue light beside him that gradually resolved into the outline of a horse. It was a horse the way a candle flame is a candle: a skeletal, translucent stallion made of blue fire and old bone, its mane drifting as though underwater, its eyes empty pits. A long, pale lance, made from a single curved rib, was strapped along its flank.

“Orpheus Sansteed,” said Kirn. “Number eighty-eight. Of the Tethered.”

The second was a small girl in a lavender velvet dress with lace at the wrists and throat, her ringlets pinned up in an old-fashioned style, black-nailed hands folded in front of her. She had the pale, faintly sun-bleached skin of a coastal noble, and a spatter of tiny dark freckles across her nose, arranged in patterns that looked, on closer inspection, very much like the pips on dice. A velvet pouch hung at her hip, and it clicked when she moved.

“Marie of Krishcove,” Kirn continued. “Number nineteen. Of the Ossari.”

The third walked last. He was lanky and slouched, the color of old parchment, with sleeves rolled to the elbow and stained black to the wrist. Every inch of visible skin, arms and neck and the hollow of his throat, was covered in fine black script, tiny words moving very slowly, like ants crawling through the skin. His eyes were pure ink, without a fleck of white. He carried a slim brass case at his belt.

“Hironori Rain,” said Kirn. “Number seventy-nine. Of the Inkblooded.”

Hironori looked across the circle at Vili, and smiled thinly.

“Prince,” he said.

“Scribbler,” said Vili.

“Enough,” said Kirn. “The order of combat is yours to decide. You have one minute.”

Team D huddled. It was not a graceful huddle.

“I will go first,” said Vili instantly. “I will win, and Loria will win, and you will not need to fight at all.”

“I will go last,” said Loria.

“Then Fel goes second, and…”

“I’m going first,” said Fel.

They both stared at him.

“Absolutely not.” Vili had actually lowered his voice, which meant he meant it. “You have two cracked ribs and a hole in your leg. You are the weakest of us. If you fall first, we are one down before we begin. You will go last, where it will not matter.”

“He is right,” said Loria. It was the first time she had agreed with Vili in the history of the world. “You should not go first.”

“That’s exactly why I’m going first.”

“That’s illogical.”

“If I go last,” said Fel, “and it’s one to one, then the entire trial rests on a boy with cracked ribs, and everyone in this room knows it, and they’ll play to it. If I go first, you two have the rest of the day to fix my mistakes. And if I lose…” He shrugged. “Then you two win the next two and we still win. You don’t need me to win. You need me to go first.”

“That is the stupidest reasoning I have ever heard,” said Vili.

“Tori always said hesitation only delays a potential failure.”

“Then Tori was a fool.”

“She wasn’t.” He met Vili’s eyes. “I’m going first.”

There was a very long silence. Then Loria said, without inflection, “Do not die,” and Vili said, through his teeth, “I will be very annoyed,” and Fel turned and walked toward the door with the small iron hammer carved into it.

Behind him, he heard Boru chuckle, and Kirn say, very quietly, “Well.”

The Door of Iron opened on darkness.

He walked through it and felt something settle over his skin, like cold water closing above his head. His scabbards went dead at his hips. Falling Star’s ruby, which had always pulsed faintly against his leg like a second heartbeat, was suddenly just a stone. Krashing Fyr’s warmth vanished. Nothing whispered. Nothing answered.

Stolen from NovelPhoenix, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“The Door of Iron is a hall of honest steel,” Boru’s voice drifted through the dark behind him. “No Belief may be drawn here. Artifacts are sealed. Whatever you carry, it is only metal. Best of luck, dear boy.”

The torches flared.

It was a causeway. A single stone bridge, perhaps four paces wide and a hundred and twenty long, running across a chasm so deep that the dark at the bottom seemed to breathe. Iron chains, thick as a man’s leg, hung in great arcs from the ceiling far overhead, swaying slowly in a wind that came from nowhere. At the far end of the causeway stood a platform, and on the platform a blue flame, and beside the flame a tall figure with a long white lance.

Fel unslung the rope from his shoulder and checked the grapnel. He slid the little bell into his belt, wrapped in cloth. He took Krashing Fyr in his right hand and Falling Star in his left, and after a moment, feeling like an idiot, clamped the leather-wrapped grip of the third sword between his teeth.

It tasted of oil and old sweat. The pommel’s smooth ridge sat perfectly between his molars, as if the sword had been waiting for exactly this.

The tall boy on the far platform lifted a hand and called out across the void, in a clear, gentle, slightly apologetic voice.

“I am Orpheus Sansteed. This is Vesper, who is the other half of me. I would like you to know that I take no pleasure in this, and that I will be quick.” He bowed from the saddle, lance tilted. “Please forgive me in advance.”

“Please forgive me,” Fel said around the sword, which came out as “Pfeeef fwahgiff me,” and he saw the tall boy blink, and then, to Fel’s great surprise, smile.

“Oh,” said Orpheus. “You are odd. I like that.”

He drew the lance level. The ghost-horse screamed, a high, thin, silver sound like a struck wine glass, and charged.

The charge came like a wall of light.

Fel had seen war horses in the Willow’s Drip stable, big lumbering bay brutes that plodded through mud. This was nothing like that. Vesper came down the causeway like a flare of blue lightning, hooves striking sparks from the stone, the silver chain whipping behind it in a singing arc, Orpheus low over its neck with the rib-lance leveled at Fel’s heart.

He threw himself sideways at the last second. The lance passed through the air where his chest had been, and something like a burning ribbon opened across his side. He hit the causeway on his shoulder and rolled, and Vesper was gone past him, wheeling in a wide arc at the far end.

Blood ran down his ribs. He wasn’t sure he felt it.

Again.

He got to his feet and cut at the horse’s forelegs as it thundered by, a low slash with Krashing Fyr that should have taken both legs at the knee. The blade went through Vesper like it was mist, and out the other side, and struck sparks from the stone.

It’s not solid.

The second charge came before he had the thought finished. This time he dodged wide, took a glancing blow to the shoulder, and felt something in his collarbone shudder. And behind the roar of hooves, he heard a sound that made his eyelids go heavy.

It was the chain. It was singing.

Low, sweet, slow, like a lullaby played on a single silver string. It filled his ears, soft as warm water, and every muscle in his body began to unclench. His arms sagged. His knees loosened. He felt the pleasant fog of sleep begin to close over him, like snow falling on an open field.

Sleep, the chain sang. Sleep, sleep, sleep.

He bit down.

The sword between his teeth had a keen edge, and the leather grip did nothing to protect his lips. Blood flooded his mouth, hot and coppery, and the fog snapped like dry twigs. He swayed, gasped around the blade, and spat red on the stone.

Orpheus, at the far end, blinked in real surprise.

“Oh. Nobody has ever done that before.”

Tori, Fel thought, would call that a terrible idea. He shifted the sword in his teeth and grinned around it, and the grin came out bloody and terrifying.

The third charge began. He did not dodge.

He stood directly in the center of the causeway, both swords crossed, the ghost-horse thundering toward him like a burning wall, and at the last possible second, when he could see the hollows of Vesper’s eyes, he reached into his belt with his left hand and rang the bell.

It was a small sound. A dull, plain, unremarkable brass sound, like a dinner bell in a poor man’s house.

Vesper screamed.

It was the true scream of a dying thing, high and terrible and full of pain. The ghost-horse reared up so violently that its hooves lashed the air an inch from Fel’s face, and the chain snapped taut, wrenching Orpheus backward in the saddle. The boy cried out, tumbled from the horse’s back, and hit the stone in a graceless sprawl. Vesper bolted, shrieking, to the far end of the causeway, flanks heaving, mane whipping in silent fury.

The bell had cracked clean down the side.

Worth every glim, thought Fel, and dropped it.

Orpheus got to his feet. He was pale, and his mouth was bleeding, but the lance was still in his hand, and when he raised it, it was no longer with apology.

“That was cruel,” he said quietly.

“It was a bell.”

“It hurts her.” His eyes were bright. “Come.”

He fought on foot, and he fought beautifully. The rib-lance was eight feet of pale bone, light and fast and terrible, and Orpheus wielded it like something learned from birth, feinting, jabbing, whipping the haft in tight, mocking arcs. Fel took a cut across the forearm, then another across the thigh, then a hard, deep thrust through the meat of his left leg that punched out the other side and stole his breath. He dropped to one knee with a grunt, and Orpheus, mercifully, did not press the advantage.

“Yield,” he said. “Please.”

Fel spat blood. “No.”

He reached back with his left hand, and his fingers closed on the rope.

The chains, he thought. The chains hanging from the ceiling.

Orpheus stepped forward. The lance flickered. Fel rolled, hurled the grapnel high and left with all his strength, and felt it bite into an iron link, forty feet above the causeway. He gripped the line, pushed off the bridge, and swung out over the chasm like a stone from a sling.

He heard Orpheus’s cry of shock. He saw the causeway fall away beneath his boots, black nothing yawning below, and then the rope swung him in a wide arc beneath the bridge itself, past the great stone piers, and back up.

He came up behind Vesper.

The horse was still thrashing at the far platform, the silver chain swinging loose between it and its rider. Fel had a heartbeat, no more. He hit the platform, drew Krashing Fyr through the hanging silver, and cut the chain in two.

It rang. A long, pure, agonized note, like a bell struck too hard, and the ghost-horse dissolved in a rush of blue sparks that streamed upward like fireflies. Orpheus screamed. The sound tore out of his throat, raw and animal, and his whole body arced backward as if he’d been struck by lightning. His ribs cracked audibly. His legs folded the wrong way at the knees and both shins broke with two dull cracks like snapped branches.

He fell across the platform, gasping, one hand clawing at the broken end of his chain.

“Vesper,” he said, over and over. “Vesper. Vesper.”

Fel dropped the rope and staggered to him. He was bleeding from his side, his leg, his shoulder, his mouth. His ribs were on fire. He could not feel the fingers of his left hand. When he pointed the tip of Krashing Fyr at Orpheus’s throat, it shook.

“Yield,” said Fel.

Orpheus looked up at him. His eyes were brimming, and there was nothing left in them at all.

“…Yes,” he said. “Yes. I yield.”

The great iron door at the causeway’s end groaned open. Fel heard footsteps behind him, and Boru’s dry, delighted voice.

“One,” said Kirn Mayfell, from the doorway.

Fel took the sword out of his teeth, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and looked at the small, broken figure on the platform.

Then his legs gave out, and he sat down very carefully on the stone and stayed there, breathing, for a very long time.