Distant tales of the Dichotomy

The merchant had the most beautiful smile Fel had ever seen on a man who had clearly never washed.

“Honored guests,” said Vorgle Nettlewick, spreading his hands. “Honored, honored guests. A thousand welcomes to my humble establishment. Please. Mind the rats. Not the small ones. They bite.”

His establishment was a lean-to shack propped against the back wall of the Cistern Market, a long, dank, stinking tunnel beneath the Fifth Ring where the poorer merchants sold what the richer ones would not. It smelled of damp stone and old cabbage. Water dripped from the ceiling. In the shadow of the next stall, someone was selling a live eel in a bucket and swearing it was a prince.

Vorgle himself was a small, round, greasy man, with a face like a boiled egg and eyes that never seemed to stay in the same place. He wore a coat of patched orange silk that had once been fine, and a great many rings, and a gold tooth. When he smiled, it showed. When he stopped smiling, it did not seem to have been there at all.

“You wish to buy,” he said. “Of course you do. Everyone wishes to buy. Vorgle has everything. Charms, tonics, spices, maps to the lost tombs of kings. And for the discerning traveler,” he lowered his voice, “something very, very special.”

He reached under the counter and drew out a bottle.

It was black. It was not particularly large, but it was heavy-looking, thick-walled and squat, sealed at the neck with grey wax, and stamped with a small, perfect stag’s skull. A label of yellowed parchment hung from a string. The writing on it was faded and spidery, and Fel could just read the words.

ASHALETH. YEAR OF THE THIRD FROST.

His heart jumped.

“That’s it,” he whispered.

“Wait.”

“Ah,” said Vorgle, delighted. “The young lady knows quality. Yes. Yes! Genuine Old Ashaleth. Four thousand winters in the barrow. I would not sell it to just anyone, you understand. It was my grandfather’s. He was a vintner. He took it from the tomb of a king.” The gold tooth flashed. “For you, honored friends, a special price. Only three thousand brills.”

There was a short, appalled silence.

“Three thousand?”

“A bargain.”

“A brill is a hundred thousand glims!”

“A bargain at twice the price.”

Fel did not know what a brill was in this country. But he knew the sound of a man trying to cheat him. He had grown up with it. He leaned forward and took the bottle from the counter, turned it over in his hands, and held it up to the light.

The wax was good. The glass was thick. The label was very old, or very well forged. But there was something wrong with the neck, a faint, pale, powdery residue around the stopper that did not match the grey of the seal.

“Veyra,” he said, very quietly.

“I see it.”

She had drawn a silver spoon from her belt pouch. With a delicate flick, she broke the seal, tipped the neck, and let a single drop fall onto the spoon. It was dark, and thin, and sharp-smelling. She touched it to her tongue.

“Plum brandy,” she said. “Two years old. With ash.”

The merchant’s smile did not move. But something behind it shifted, like a rat in a wall.

“A small misunderstanding.”

“It’s a fake.”

“It is a tribute,” said Vorgle, “to the original. Made with love.”

“Mm.”

Brannoch had not spoken. He had simply stepped forward, and the shack had gotten a good deal smaller. Vorgle looked up at the giant. He swallowed, and the gold tooth went in.

“But!” he cried, spreading his hands. “But, but, but! I did not say I had no real bottle! Of course I have a real one! Vorgle is an honest man!”

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“Are you?” said Fel.

“Honest as the day is long! A little tight in the pocket, perhaps, a little… flexible… but honest.”

“Where is it?”

“It is, ah, it is not currently on the premises.”

“Where is it?”

The merchant’s eyes slid sideways. He looked at the ceiling. He looked at the eel in the bucket. He looked at Brannoch, and the look had a very particular quality. It was the look of a very small man who has been backed into a corner by a very large one, and has just realized that the corner is, in fact, a door.

“There is a small matter,” he said slowly, “of a debt.”

The Eelhands held the undercroft beneath the Gutterbridge, and they did not like visitors.

It was a gang, Vorgle explained, as he led them through a crooked maze of tunnels, with a lantern in one hand and the other wringing his rings. A small gang. A harmless gang. A few dozen thugs, perhaps, who ran the canal docks and had a little disagreement with him over the price of lamp oil. They had taken three crates of his best goods. They had taken his cart. And they had taken, in a gesture of perfectly unnecessary spite, his grandfather’s cellar key, which unlocked the vault where the real Ashaleth was kept.

“You understand,” he said, “I cannot fetch it myself. I am a man of peace. A man of business. But you, my friends, who are so clearly accustomed to the violent arts…”

“You want us to fight a gang for your key.”

“Only a little.”

“How much is a little?”

“Oh, a very small amount,” said Vorgle. “A mere handful. A bagatelle.”

There were forty of them.

They were waiting in a long, flooded vault under the bridge, a dim, echoing cavern of black water and rotting piers where the canal rose to the knees. Torches burned in iron brackets. A dozen rough-hewn rafts floated at the water’s edge. The men on them were thin and wiry and tattooed, with long, grey, slippery-looking hands and knives in their belts, and as the party stepped through the arch, they rose up in a single, ugly, rippling motion, like eels coming out of a hole.

“A handful,” said Thara, drawing her hatchets. “A bagatelle.”

“I’ll kill him,” said Fel.

“Later.”

It was not a long fight. It was not a clean one, either. Brannoch took the arch, with his shield locked and his spear thrust forward, and held it like a stone wall while the first rank of Eelhands broke against him. Thara went into the water, with a splash and a whoop, and came out on the second raft with two men on the floor. Veyra climbed a pier in six quick strides, nocked an arrow, and began to take them off the rafters one by one, with a steady, quiet, deadly rhythm.

And Fel, with two swords in his hands, was in the middle of it.

He was better than he had been in the Gorge. His ribs had mostly knit. His thigh was sound. He moved the way Gideon had taught him, hook and haul and gut, short and low and brutal, and the Eelhands, who were used to fighting men who wanted to be fair, did not know what to do with him. He hooked a man’s wrist and broke it. He drove a knee into a groin, a forehead into a nose. He hauled a screaming thug off a raft and into the black water and held him there until the screaming stopped.

Never cut what you can stab. Never stab what you can break. Never break what you can drown.

It did not feel like a game. But it did not feel like a nightmare either. It felt like work. He did what needed to be done. He did it well. And when it was over, and the last of the Eelhands had fled screaming into the tunnels, Fel stood waist-deep in cold black water with a bleeding lip and a borrowed sword, and found that his hands were steady.

“Eleven,” said Thara, from the raft. “Brannoch, you’ve got fifteen. Fel, how many?”

“I wasn’t counting.”

“Liar.”

“Four.”

“Hm.” She looked him up and down. “Not bad for a star-boy.”

The key was in the pocket of a fat man on a raft in the middle of the vault, unconscious with a lump on his head the size of an egg. Fel took it. It was black iron, long and heavy, as old as the bottle. He held it to the light.

Vault Nine, said a tiny inscription. Nettlewick & Sons.

“Four thousand winters,” said Vorgle Nettlewick, in a voice that cracked at the edges.

He knelt in the dust of the old wine vault with a lantern in his hand, in a cold stone cell at the bottom of a flight of forty steps, and in front of him, in a niche in the wall, sat the bottle.

It was nothing like the fake. It was old. Its glass was black and thick as a fist, so dark that the lantern light seemed to sink into it, and a layer of ancient grey dust lay across its shoulders. The wax was cracked and flaking. The stag’s skull on the seal had been worn nearly smooth by time. When Vorgle lifted it, with trembling hands, a sound came out of the cellar like a very low, very faint breath, and the lantern flame bent toward it.

“It’s real,” said Fel.

“My grandfather’s,” said Vorgle. He was weeping. It was a strange sight: the greasy, gold-toothed merchant, with tears running down his round face and falling into the dust. “He told me never to sell it. He told me it was the last of the Third Frost. He said that when I opened it, it would be the best day of my life.” He blinked rapidly. “I am a rotten man. I know that. But I have never been able to open it.”

Nobody said anything.

Then, with a long, shuddering sigh, the merchant held the bottle out.

“Take it.”

“Vorgle,” said Fel, “I can’t just…”

“A bargain is a bargain.” The little man wiped his nose on his sleeve. “You have done what you promised. You have fought a gang for me and kept your word and not stolen my key, which, I assure you, is more than most have done.” He pressed the bottle into Fel’s hands. It was heavier than he’d expected, and very cold. “Tell whoever drinks it that it was loved.”

“I will.”

“And if you meet a man who sells counterfeit plum brandy,” said Vorgle, rising and dusting his knees with a flash of the old gold tooth, “tell him that Vorgle Nettlewick has a very reasonable price.”

Behind him, in the shadows, Thara had slipped something small and silver into her sleeve.

“Thara.”

“What?”

“Put it back.”

“It’s a spoon. He had forty.”

“Put. It. Back.”

She put it back.