Distant tales of the Dichotomy

The marble staircase was where nobody had told him it would be.

It rose out of a crooked back lane in the Lower City, white and wide and clean, so out of place among the soot-black houses that Fel nearly walked past it. It was carved with vines. It climbed into the dark, and at the top of it, half hidden by ivy, stood a rusted iron gate.

A plaque hung on the bars. The letters had been worn nearly smooth, but he made them out.

HERE LIES THE GARDEN OF SAPHIR, LOW-QUEEN OF HISSINGFITS. SHE BROUGHT SHAME UPON HER CROWN, AND WAS HIDDEN BENEATH THE EARTH FOR THE REMAINDER OF HER DAYS. LET NO MAN ENTER. LET NO MAN REMEMBER.

He pushed the gate open.

It was a garden the way a grave is a bed. Once, perhaps, it had been beautiful. There were still rows of pale statues, and terraces of black roses, and a long cracked fountain where dry leaves rattled like coins. But over everything, over every stone and stem, grew something else.

It was fungus. It crept in white-and-violet mats across the terraces, in shelf-like brackets up the walls, in slimy blue tendrils that hung from the trees like torn veils. It pulsed faintly. A sweet, rotten, mushroom smell hung in the air, and beneath it, faint and steady, came a sound like breathing.

“Right,” said Fel, out loud. “Nope.”

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on NovelPhoenix. Report any occurrences.

He took a step back.

The first dinosaur came through the roses.

It was the size of a horse. It walked on two legs, with a long, whipping tail and a narrow, hooked snout, and it might once have been the kind of creature that lived in old bestiaries. Now half its flesh had rotted away, and where the rot had been, something pale and glistening had grown: a lace of fungal threads, a crown of mushrooms along its spine, a bloom of glowing violet caps sprouting from its eye sockets. It moved with a stiff, jerking grace. Its jaw hung open, and a rope of spores drooled from it.

Two more slid out of the fog behind it. Then five. Then a dozen.

“Of course,” said Fel. “Of course.”

They came in a rush.

He caught the first one on the belly of Krashing Fyr and hooked it under the jaw, and hauled its head down and drove Falling Star through the soft place behind the skull. It spasmed. Spores burst from the wound in a purple cloud, and he stumbled back coughing, eyes streaming. The second one hit him from the side, and he rolled, and came up with a face full of mud and a mouthful of something that tasted like a cellar.

Don’t fight them fair, said Gideon’s voice, dry and unhurried, in his head. Nobody ever won by being fair to a fish.

He kicked the second one’s knee out from under it. It went down. He stomped on its neck, hard, and felt the vertebrae crunch. A third leapt for his throat, and he drove his forehead into its snout and heard the bone crack. Blood sprayed hot across his face. He didn’t stop. He hooked a hind leg, hauled the thing off balance, and cut the tendon behind its knee with a stab so quick it barely counted as a swing.

It was ugly. It was brutal. It was working.

But there were so many, and the spores were in his lungs now, and each one he cut down seemed to bring two more out of the fog. His arms were shaking. His ribs, still stitched with silver thread beneath his coat, had begun to burn.

A little longer, he thought. Hold them. Just long enough.

He did not know long enough for what.