Distant tales of the Dichotomy

Loria took nineteen days to walk without a cane, and twenty-three to fire the Three-Eyed Cerberus without screaming.

The first time she raised it, in a clearing behind the Cradle Halls, her new arm shook so badly that Fel took a step forward before she snarled at him to stay back. The gun’s three eyes opened one by one, dark red, curious. The barrel yawned. For a moment the whole clearing held its breath.

She squeezed the trigger.

The black flame that tore across the clearing was thinner than it used to be. It was also straighter, tighter, and colder, and it stopped exactly where she told it to, at the trunk of a dead tree fifty paces away, and burned a hole in it the size of a coin.

Loria lowered the gun and stared at her right hand.

“The Mother put something in me,” she said slowly. “Not just bone. It feels like… roots. Like the arm remembers how to hold.”

“Is that bad?” said Vili.

“No.” A faint, savage smile. “It is very much not bad.”

Those were the last two months.

They spent them in the back room of the Simmering Root, after Mother Sable had gone to bed, with a long oak table, a bowl of radishes, three salt cellars, a stack of copied scrolls, and one enormous map of the Sanctum’s deep vaults, drawn by memory on the back of a bedsheet.

Karmina had slipped the scrolls into Fel’s pack on the day they left. He had found them under a bag of powders, tied with a black ribbon and a note in her small, precise hand: Read these. Do not become comfortable. — K. They were copies from the Sanctum archives, the records of the last forty final trials, and they were not pleasant reading.

There had been the Long Drowning, in which two squads were locked in a flooded cathedral and told the last team above water would win. There had been the Feast of Knives, a banquet at which every dish but one was poisoned and the candidates were forbidden to speak. There had been the Nine Bells, the Silent Garden, the Court of Crows, and a trial simply called The Ladder, whose record consisted of a single line: No survivors from the losing squad. Winners promoted. There had been a trial where the candidates were made to fight their own reflections, and another where they were locked in a room with a sleeping dragon and the key.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

“There is no pattern,” said Vili, pushing a radish along the table. “Water, poison, silence. It is a different nightmare every year.”

“That’s the pattern,” said Fel. “It’s designed so you can’t prepare.”

“Then what are we doing?”

“Preparing anyway.” He picked up a salt cellar and set it down at the center of the map. “Not for the trial. For us.”

So they did.

They worked out signals: three taps on the knee for danger, two for fall back, one for wait. Vili taught them a language of sand, a series of grains dropped in patterns that only the three of them could read. Loria, who had spent three months in silence and had apparently used it wisely, drew up a list of how each of them would move in the dark.

They drew plans on the back of the bedsheet and called them by letters.

Plan A was for a straightforward fight. Loria on the high ground with the gun, Vili shaping the field, Fel on the front line. Plan B was for a fight where Loria went down. Plan C was for one where Vili’s fingers seized. Plan D was for a fight where Fel was separated from the others.

“And if the three of us are all separated?” said Vili.

“Plan E.”

“What is Plan E?”

“Survive,” said Loria, “and hunt each other down.”

“That’s not a plan.”

“It is the only plan that has never failed.”

There was a Plan F for betrayal, a Plan G for poison, and a Plan H that was simply a diagram of the three of them running in different directions. There was a Plan Z, drawn last, in Fel’s uneven hand, which read: If it all goes to hell and we can’t win, whoever’s still standing gets the other two out. No arguments.

Vili read it three times. “I do not accept this.”

“You don’t have to accept it.”

“I will not leave you.”

“Then don’t lose,” said Fel, and after a moment Vili laughed, and the laugh turned into something like a nod.

They left Tohei on the last day of the sixth month.

Haruvael stood at the gate with her staff and a small green seed in her palm, which she pressed into Loria’s hand. “Plant it somewhere dark,” she said. “If it lives, you will know the Mother remembers you.”

Mother Sable gave Vili a plain wooden spoon, dark with age and burnt at the handle. “My first,” she said gruffly. “Do not put it in a soup. Put it in your belt.” She poked him in the chest. “Salt every grain, princeling.”

“I will,” said Vili, and hugged her, and was hit with the ladle for it.

Gideon Claive was waiting at the edge of the river, sitting in the punt with his feet trailing in the water. He said nothing as Fel approached. He only reached into his coat and held out one half of a ruined straw hat.

“The other half is mine,” he said. “Remember what I told you. You will lose to someone who cheats.”

“Learn to cheat better.”

“Good boy.” The pale eye glinted. “Tell Orcus’s shade I said hello. And that he still owes me twelve shims.”

Fel took the hat. It smelled of river and old sun. He tucked it into his belt, next to his swords, and turned toward the trees where a silver arch was blooming in the dusk, and Boru’s tall, goat-headed silhouette stood waiting.

“You lived,” said Boru, delighted. “I lost a bet.”