Distant tales of the Dichotomy

It took two days to get used to the beetle, and by the middle of the third Fel had mostly stopped screaming.

It was not that Old Clatter was frightening. It was that he was enthusiastic. He took every slope at a gallop and every ravine in a flying, humming, wing-buzzing leap. He ate whatever he found on the road, including, once, a surprised tree. He sang. It was a rolling, bubbling drone, deep in the chest, that rattled the whole saddle, and when he was happy it climbed in pitch until Brannoch put his hands over his ears and Thara shrieked with laughter and begged him to stop.

Fel clung to the railing and stared at the world going past.

The high road was a ribbon of white stone, laid by someone long ago and cracked by a thousand winters. It wound down out of the cloud peaks into the great forest, through valleys of silver fern and red cliff, over bridges that hung like spiderwebs above sunless gorges. They passed herds of shaggy, antlered, six-legged deer. They passed a waterfall that fell upward. They passed a village that seemed to have been abandoned for a hundred years, whose houses had been swallowed by trees, and Veyra did not slow down.

“Do not look at the windows,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because they look back.”

He did not look.

By the second night he had learned the routine. They camped in a ring of stones, with Old Clatter coiled around them like a wall. Brannoch cooked, in a silence broken only by the occasional slow, thoughtful grunt. Thara sharpened her knives and told stories that were mostly lies. Veyra sat a little apart with her bow across her knees, watching the dark, and when Fel changed the bandage on his hand she appeared at his shoulder without a word and did it for him.

The ring still bled. It had slowed to a thin black thread. But it glowed at night, a small, cold, steady disc of light, and the others had learned not to look at it too long.

On the third morning, they came to the Gorge.

It was a narrow place, a long crack in the red cliffs where the high road slid between two walls of stone with barely room for a cart, and the sky above was a strip of blue so thin it looked like a ribbon. The walls were pocked with caves. The stone underfoot was worn smooth by wheels. At the bottom, a stream chattered over rocks.

Old Clatter slowed. His great horns swung from side to side. A low, uneasy rumble began in his chest.

“I don’t like it,” said Thara.

“Mm.”

“We can go around.”

“It adds two days.”

“I know.” Veyra’s eyes were on the cliffs. “I am thinking about it.”

“What is it?” said Fel. “What’s wrong?”

“Rootknives,” said Thara. For once she was not smiling. “They hold the Gorge. Bandits. They’ve been working this road since the war in the north started. They wear bark masks. They kill what they can’t rob and rob what they can’t kill.”

“How many?”

“Enough.”

For a long moment, nobody spoke. Then Veyra drew one arrow from her quiver and laid it on the bow.

“We go through,” she said. “Quickly. Brannoch, take the shield. Thara, the left wall. Fel…”

“I’ll…”

“Stay in the saddle.”

“I can fight.”

“I know,” said Veyra, without looking at him. “Stay in the saddle.”

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The beetle plunged into the Gorge.

It was very quiet at first. The sound of the stream. The soft thud of Old Clatter’s feet. The great black shape of the beetle slid between the walls, and the light fell away until it was dusk at noon. Fel held his breath. He kept one hand on Falling Star and the other on the golden saber, and the ring in his palm began to burn, very softly, as the shadows deepened.

Then something fell from the cliff.

It was a net, a great grey sagging web of rope, weighted with stones, and it came down over the beetle’s head and wrapped around his horns. Old Clatter shrieked. A second net hit his back. A third fell across the road in front of him, and from every cave in the wall, from every crack and ledge, figures came leaping down.

They wore bark masks. They were painted with mud and ash, and they screamed as they came, a high, ragged, hungry sound like a flock of crows. There were thirty of them. Forty. They carried hooked knives and short spears, clubs studded with thorns, and a few of them had bows. Arrows hissed through the air and thudded into the saddle.

“Down!” bellowed Brannoch.

The great shield swung up. Three arrows hit it like hail. He dropped off the saddle like a falling tree, landed in the road, and put his spear through the first man to reach him. He did not shout. He did not speak. He only pulled the spear out, and set his feet, and the next one died.

Thara was gone. She had simply vanished off the saddle in a streak of grass-green hair. Fel heard a scream from the left wall, and another, and a chorus of startled curses, and saw a bark-masked man tumble from a ledge with a hatchet in his throat. Veyra was on her knees on the saddle with the white bow drawn. She loosed an arrow, and a man on the cliff fell. She loosed another, and a second one fell. She never seemed to hurry. The arrows left the string in a long, clean, singing line, and wherever they went, someone died.

And Fel was in the saddle, with a sword in each hand, doing nothing.

He had never felt so useless in his life.

He leaped down. He told himself it was because the saddle was a death trap. He told himself it was because Brannoch needed help. A man in a bark mask came at him with a hooked knife, screaming, and Fel did what Gideon had taught him: he caught the blade on the curve of Krashing Fyr, twisted, hauled, and slammed the man in the face with his forehead. It cracked. The man dropped.

One.

It should have felt like a victory. It did not. It felt like a lucky punch. He was too slow. His ribs were screaming. His left hand, wrapped in grey gauze, felt heavy and strange, and when the second man came at him with a club, he took the blow on his shoulder instead of his sword, and the whole world went white.

He hit the ground.

A boot came down on his chest. He saw a mask, grinning, cut from the bark of a tree. He saw a spear rise. He tried to roll, and could not. The man was laughing.

An arrow took him in the neck.

“I told you,” said Veyra, from somewhere above, in a voice like a sharp blade, “to stay in the saddle.”

“I was trying to…”

“I know.”

She was already moving. She dropped from the saddle, bow in hand, and Fel saw, with astonishment, that she was not alone. Three men had come down off the cliff. They were bigger than the others, in thicker masks, with real steel in their hands, and they moved with the swift, quiet efficiency of men who had killed before. They were closing on her.

The first one lunged. She turned his spear aside with her bow and drove a glass blade into his ribs. The second came from the left, and she ducked, and he stumbled. The third came from behind.

Fel saw him.

He saw the man come down off a ledge without a sound, a long dagger held low, and he saw Veyra’s back, turned, intent on the man in front of her. He saw the dagger rise.

He did not think. He had a sword in each hand and a broken rib, and his legs were not working, and there was no time at all. He threw himself forward.

Hook.

Krashing Fyr caught the man’s ankle on its curve and pulled. The bandit’s feet went out from under him. His dagger skittered across the stone. He crashed down on his back, with a grunt, directly at Fel’s feet, and the bark mask slid sideways and revealed a face.

He was young. Not much older than Vili. He had a thin, scared, pimpled face, and wide brown eyes, and when he saw Fel, he said something in a language Fel did not know.

Haul.

Gut.

Falling Star went in under the ribs.

It was very quick. It was the way Gideon had said. Never cut what you can stab. There was a brief, bright, startled look. A small, wet, bubbling sound. Then the boy’s body went slack, and his hand, which had been reaching for the knife, fell open on the stone.

Fel stood very still.

He had killed monsters. He had killed things in a garden that had been dead for years. He had watched a boy die in a hall of ink, crushed to paste by a friend. But he had never done it with his own hand, to someone who looked back.

Veyra had turned. She stood three paces away with a bloodied glass blade and her chest heaving, and she looked at the dead boy, and at Fel, and her violet eyes were very bright.

“He would have killed me,” she said.

“I know.”

“You saved my life.”

“I know,” said Fel again, and his voice did not sound like his own.

The rest of it went quickly. The Rootknives, seeing their three best men down, broke and ran. Brannoch killed a few more on the way. Thara came back down the cliff with two hatchets dripping and a cut across her cheek, grinning, and said that she’d gotten fourteen and Brannoch had only gotten nine, and Brannoch said nothing at all. Old Clatter shook himself free of the nets and stood in the middle of the road, humming a long, mournful, outraged song.

Fel sat down on a rock.

He did not remember doing it. He only knew that he was looking at his hands, and that one of them was glowing, and that the other was red.