Distant tales of the Dichotomy

Fel sat on the edge of the cliff for an hour before he admitted he was going to have to walk.

It was not a decision so much as arithmetic. The white-leafed city lay across a valley so wide that clouds drifted through it like lazy ships, and every honest part of his body told him it was farther than he could cross. He had two cracked ribs and a hole through his belly that had closed halfway and then decided to reopen. His thigh was a map of shallow punctures where mirror-shards had gone in. His back hurt in a way he did not want to think about. Whenever he coughed, something small and wet moved inside him that was probably not supposed to.

Sit still, said Gideon’s voice, dry as dust, from somewhere in the back of his skull. Let the river come to you.

“The river’s not bleeding,” Fel said out loud.

Nobody answered. The wind went on stirring the canopy a thousand feet below him. A flock of birds as big as wagons wheeled across the red rock and dropped away toward the mist.

He had told himself he would wait for help. Vili would come. Loria would come. Karmina, even, in a flash of silver and a lecture about empty cots. But he had been awake for hours now and the sky had stayed empty, and the longer he waited the more he understood the truth he had been avoiding since he opened his eyes in that moss: nobody was coming. Wherever he was, it was not a place a crow-arch could reach.

He stripped what remained of his shirt into bandages and bound his stomach as tight as he could stand, and then did it again, because the first layer was already dark. He rubbed a handful of broad green leaves between his palms until they gave off a sharp, resinous smell and packed them against the worst of the punctures. It was a trick of Mother Sable’s, or perhaps of Karmina’s. He could no longer remember. Everyone he had learned something from was somewhere else.

Then he stood, and the world lurched, and he planted Falling Star’s point in the red stone to keep from falling over.

“Right,” he said. “Down.”

There was a path, if you were generous with the word.

It began as a crack between two boulders, slid into a ribbon of loose scree, and then vanished entirely into a wall of ferns taller than a house. Fel followed it anyway. He used the black sword as a cane for the first hour and as a machete for the second, hacking at vines as thick as his wrist while the sun, which had burned his clothes to rags the previous morning, beat down through the gaps in the leaves and cooked the back of his neck.

The forest grew louder as he descended. Birds he had no names for shrieked from the high branches, and insects hummed in the dripping air with a drone so thick he could feel it in his teeth. Something in the undergrowth was clicking in a slow, patient rhythm, like an old man tapping a pipe against a table. Every time he stopped to listen, it stopped too.

He crossed a stream the color of tea. He climbed over a root the size of a barn. He passed a waterfall that fell from a ledge so high that most of it turned to mist before it reached the pool, and for a little while he stood in the spray with his eyes shut and let it cool his face, and tried not to think about how much of the water running off him was red.

By noon he was bleeding through the second bandage. By the middle of the afternoon he had stopped being able to feel his left foot.

Nobody tells you, he thought, that dying is boring.

It was a stupid thought, and it made him laugh, and the laughing hurt so much that he had to hold on to a tree until the black spots in his eyes cleared. When he opened them, the light had changed.

The gold had gone out of the sky. In its place hung a low, heavy, bruise-colored cloud that rolled in across the valley with a speed that made the hair rise on his arms. The birds fell silent. The clicking in the undergrowth stopped. The whole forest held its breath.

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The first drop landed on his forehead like a thrown pebble.

The storm came down on the mountain like a fist.

Within a minute he was soaked to the bone. Within five, the path under his boots had become a stream, and the stream had become a torrent, and every tree in the forest was thrashing in a wind that tore leaves the size of doors from the branches and flung them through the dark. Lightning split the sky, green-white and silent, followed a heartbeat later by a thunderclap that rattled the fillings in his teeth.

He ran, or something like it. He stumbled, slid, caught himself on a trunk, and ran again. He could not see more than ten paces. He could not hear anything over the rain. He only knew that if he stayed in the open, the wind would pick him up and the rain would finish whatever the glass had started.

The tree saved his life.

It lay on its side across the slope, the biggest thing he had ever seen that was not a building or a mountain. Its trunk was wider than a Gallows street. Its roots, torn from the earth by some old storm, stood up in a great ragged wall, forty feet high, a tangle of black wood and clotted earth that curled back on itself like the ribs of a ship. And in the hollow beneath that wall, where the roots had pulled away from the ground, there was a cave.

It was dry. Mostly. The roots overhead were so thick and matted that the rain came through only in thin, steady threads, and the floor of the hollow was a bed of old leaves and soft red dust that smelled like a cellar. Fel crawled in on his hands and knees and lay on his face for a long time, breathing.

Then he tried to make a fire.

He had no flint. He knew that. He tried anyway. He struck the two swords together until his arms shook, and sparks sprayed off the edges and died in the damp, and he held a handful of dry-looking leaves against them and blew until he was dizzy. Nothing took. The leaves went black and sullen and smoked and went out. He tried the ruby on Falling Star’s hilt, which was stupid, and the golden saber’s edge against a flat stone, which was stupider. By the time he gave up, his hands were bleeding too.

“Of course,” he told the dark. “Of course.”

He wrapped his arms around his knees. He was cold in a way he had never been cold, not in the Gallows in winter, not on the road to Tohei. The cold came from inside, from the place where the blood was leaving. His teeth chattered so hard he thought they would crack. The wind howled in the roots overhead, and beyond it, far away and muffled, something huge was moving through the forest, and the ground shook faintly with every step.

He drew both swords and laid them across his lap, and sat there in the dark, wet and shaking, alone.

It was Tori he thought about first.

He did not mean to. She came the way she always came when he was at the bottom of something, the long grey hair, the crooked smile, the smell of clove and spilled beer. In a battle of fists or words between strangers, the one with the confidence and the wits to best the other always wins. She had been so sure of it. She had been so sure of everything.

And she had burned in a tavern while he ran.

Then Orcus, because Orcus was always standing behind Tori with his arms folded and his terrible grin. Your projects, not mine. The old Raskian had slammed both fists into the floor so that Fel could get away, and Fel had not even turned around to see.

He thought about the Gallows, which had been his home until a purple flame took it. He thought about Tohei, which had been a home for three months and which he’d left for a dungeon of mirrors. He thought about Gideon on the river, laughing over twelve shims, and the way the old man had lowered his hat for a dead friend. He thought about Karmina, who had counted empty cots.

Everything he touched, he thought, ended up somewhere else. Burned, sealed, buried, left. He had a gift for it. Anyone he came to care for stopped being within reach, and the only person he had never lost was himself, which seemed like a poor joke.

And now Vili and Loria.

He had left them in a crystal in a garden at the bottom of a false city. He had walked into a hall to fight a boy with mirrors for eyes, and he had won, and the boy had turned into a mountain and swallowed five men and nearly swallowed him, and Fel had done the last stupid, glorious thing he’d ever do and set the sky on fire. And then he had woken here.

Did they get out? The question circled in him like a gull. Is the Sanctum still standing? Is Loria still breathing? Is Vili still counting?

He did not know. He could not know. The only thing he knew was that if the serpent had survived, it had gone looking for the next meal.

Tears ran into the corners of his mouth. He let them.

“Plan Z,” he whispered. “Whoever’s still standing gets the others out.”

He had been standing. He had not got anyone out.

Somewhere beyond the roots, the thunder rolled once more and moved on. The rain softened, and then steadied into a long, even drumming that was almost gentle. He leaned his head back against the damp wall and closed his eyes, just for a moment.

Hesitation only delays a potential failure, said Tori’s voice, patient and fond.

“I’m not hesitating,” Fel mumbled. “I’m resting.”

He was asleep before he finished the thought.