Distant tales of the Dichotomy

He woke four times before dawn, and each time, something was breathing outside.

The first time, it was far away. A long, hollow, rattling exhale, like wind through a dry throat, that rose and fell with the rhythm of a sleeping giant. The second time it was closer. The roots over his head creaked. Something heavy shifted its weight on the trunk of the great fallen tree, and a thin rain of bark and dust drifted down onto his face.

The third time, he was fully awake before he knew why.

It was the sound of the forest that was wrong. The insects had stopped. The frogs had stopped. The rain had stopped, and in the silence, he could hear the soft, wet, deliberate click of something with a great many legs walking along the outside of the root wall, one step at a time, tasting the air.

Click. Click. Click.

Fel did not breathe. He lay in the red dust with Krashing Fyr’s hilt gripped in both hands, and watched the dark between the roots.

A shape moved across the gap.

It was long, and it was low, and it went on and on. First came a segmented, glistening flank the color of a wet slate, and then another, and another, a body as long as a barge, rippling with a hundred small pale legs that stepped over one another like the oars of a galley. At the very front, where the light of the moon came through, he glimpsed a head. It had no eyes. It had a wide, soft, flower-shaped mouth that opened and closed, opened and closed, as if tasting the air for something sweet.

It paused.

The mouth turned toward the root cave.

Fel’s heart hammered against his bandages. He could smell it, a thick, mushroomy, sickly-sweet stench, like fruit left to rot in a cellar. The flower of its mouth swayed closer. A thin tendril uncurled from the center and tasted the air an arm’s length from his boot.

Don’t move. Don’t move. Don’t be warm.

The tendril touched his boot.

It stayed there for a very long time.

Then, slowly, with an indifference that was more terrifying than hunger, the thing drew back and moved on. The legs clicked. The long body rippled past, and past, and past, until at last the last of it vanished into the dark and the clicking faded.

Fel lay with his eyes wide open until the sky turned grey.

He heard other things. He heard a shriek from high in the canopy like a woman being torn in half, followed by a long, mournful, drawn-out sob that rolled off down the valley and was answered, from a long way away, by a roar so deep that the roots trembled. He heard something enormous drinking from the stream, long, wet, slobbering gulps, and then the gentle, intimate sound of something else being eaten. He heard a pack of small, quick, chittering creatures go by in the dark, and he lay perfectly still while they did.

He did not sleep again.

By dawn, he was starving.

It was not hunger the way he had known it in the Gallows, a dull ache in the belly and a tightness in the throat. It was a raw, clawing, ravenous thing, as if his body had decided that the wounds and the blood loss were an emergency and that every other consideration, including dignity, could be thrown out of a window. His stomach cramped and twisted. His mouth tasted like pennies. When he crawled out of the root cave into a world washed clean and dripping gold, he found himself staring at a patch of pale mushrooms on the trunk of the fallen tree with an expression that, in another man, would have been called intent.

“No,” said Fel.

The mushrooms did not respond.

“No. I have seen what this place does to things that eat the wrong thing. I am not going to be a story.”

He tore his eyes away, and sheathed his swords, and began to climb.

The tree beside the root cave was a monster, its bark ridged and knotted, its lowest branch thirty feet up. He went at it the way Gideon had taught him to fight, which was to say dirty. He hooked a foot into a knot, hauled with an arm, dug his fingers into a crack and swore through his teeth when his ribs complained. His stomach bandage tore. He bled onto the bark and kept going. By the time he reached the first branch, his arms were shaking so hard that he had to lie across it for a full minute, forehead pressed to the wet green moss.

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The second branch was easier. By the tenth, he had gotten into a rhythm, and by the time he broke through the top of the canopy into the thin, bright morning air, the sun had climbed clear of the mountains and the whole world lay spread beneath him like a map.

He clung to the trunk and stared.

The valley rolled out below him in waves of green and gold, shot through with silver rivers and hung with banks of mist. Far to the east, a ridge of black rock rose like a wall. To the south, a great lake lay still as a coin, and beside it, small as a toy, something huge and slow was wading through the shallows.

And in the north, across a wide basin of forest, stood the white-leafed city.

It was closer than he had thought. Not close. But in the morning light, with the mist burned away, he could make out the outer walls, pale, terraced, curving along the slopes of a long low hill, and the high slender spires beyond them, and above it all, rising from the very heart of the city, the great white tree that dwarfed everything around it. Its leaves caught the sun and flung it back in a halo so bright that he had to squint. A day’s walk, he guessed. Perhaps a day and a half, in his condition.

He looked behind him, at the mountain he had come down. It was vast, wreathed in cloud, its upper slopes bare and grey.

There was a flash, he thought. And then there was this.

He turned back to the city and made himself a promise.

“I’m going to eat something,” he said to the wind. “And then I’m going to go and find out where I am.”

The forest was alive in a way no forest should be.

He went down the trunk more slowly than he had gone up, and when he reached the ground he stood very still for a moment, letting the morning sort itself into sounds. Dripping. Birdsong, ten different songs at once. A far-off thudding that might have been something large and heavy walking. He drew Falling Star, laid it across his shoulder, and set out toward the north, looking for the one thing that would keep him alive: a small, slow, stupid animal that could be killed with two swords and a bad temper.

He did not find one.

He found the Mossbacks first.

They came out of the trees on the far side of a long, steaming meadow, and for a long moment Fel took them for a hillside. They were tortoises. Or something very much like tortoises, in the way a cathedral is very much like a hut. Each was the size of a house, with a shell the color of old stone, and on the shell, rooted in a deep layer of black soil, grew an entire garden: ferns, flowering shrubs, thin young trees with leaves like silver coins. Little birds nested in the branches. Something that looked like a monkey with six arms was picking fruit from a vine on the nearest one’s flank. The Mossbacks moved with slow, ancient dignity, placing one great foot in front of the other, their long, wrinkled necks swaying, their huge dark eyes half-closed.

One of them turned its head and looked at him.

It was the look of an old grandmother who has seen a great many foolish children, and expects to see a great many more. Then it turned away and went back to chewing a whole tree.

I’m not going to hunt that, thought Fel. I’m not going to hunt anything that has a village on its back.

He skirted the meadow and walked on.

The second creature he did not see so much as feel. A shadow slid over him, long and rippling, and he looked up through a gap in the canopy and froze with his mouth open.

They were swimming.

A school of enormous, pale, translucent eels was gliding through the air above the forest, thirty or forty of them, each as long as a barge, with fins like trailing silk and bodies that shone faintly from within, pale blue and green and gold. They moved with a slow, undulating, dreamy grace, as though the air were water and the sky a river, and as they passed, they sang. It was a low, soft, humming note, so deep it made his bones tremble, rising and falling in long, sweet, sorrowful phrases like a hymn in a language he had never learned. The light from their bodies fell across the leaves in rippling bands. A flock of tiny birds darted among them, unafraid.

Fel stood in the dappled light with his head tipped back, and for a moment he forgot that he was hungry, and bleeding, and probably going to die.

“Tori,” he said softly. “You’d have loved this.”

The eels drifted on over the ridge, singing, and the shadows went with them.

The third creature nearly killed him.

It happened in a hollow beside a stream. He had been walking for hours. His legs had gone to rubber. The wound in his belly was a slow, dull, hot throb, and he was so tired that when he saw a long, mossy, fallen log lying across the path, he did not think. He simply sat down on it.

The log yawned.

It was the most horrible thing that had ever happened to him. The bark under him rippled. A ridge rose in the wood, and a seam opened in it, and the seam was lined from end to end with long, curved, yellow thorns. The whole trunk bunched like a muscle. Fel was on his feet and three paces away before he knew he had moved, and behind him, with a sound like a wet door slamming, the log’s jaws snapped shut on the place where his legs had been.

He turned. The thing had not moved. It was a log. It was lying on the path with moss on its back and a few small white flowers on its flank, and it looked entirely, innocently dead. But the bark was still twitching, and from a crack in its side, a long, thin, whiplike root was creeping toward him across the earth.

“Nope,” said Fel, and left, quickly, at a limp.

He heard it behind him for a long way, a low, patient, hungry creaking, like a house settling. He did not look back.

By midday, he had learned three things.

The first was that every animal in this forest was bigger than it had any right to be.

The second was that every animal in this forest was either ten times stronger than him or ten times hungrier, and quite often both.

And the third was that his wound had begun to smell, a faint sweetish smell that Karmina had once told him meant it was time to stop being clever.

He kept walking anyway. There was nothing else to do. He passed a stream where something with a head like a battering ram was drinking, and he stepped back into the trees until it left. He crossed a meadow of tall red grass that swayed in a wind he could not feel, and he did not look too closely at what was moving in it. He passed the bleached skeleton of something with a dozen legs, picked clean, and he did not look at that either.

A weak animal, he thought. A weak, small, stupid animal.

It was mid-afternoon by the time he found one.