Distant tales of the Dichotomy

He should have refused.

Afterward, in the dark, in the cold, with the smell of burnt hair still stuck in his nose, Fel would turn it over again and again. He had been warned. Veyra had said not to touch the threads. Seluine had said she did not like the old man. And a quiet part of him, the part that had grown up in the Gallows and learned to read a room, had noticed that the Wise One’s hand, when he reached for the bottle, had been shaking.

But he had wanted so badly to know.

He crossed the floor. He peeled off the leather glove, and then, with fingers that did not feel like his, the grey gauze, and the ring in his palm burst into the dim light of the dome like a small cold sun. The blood ran. It was black, and red at the edges, and it slid down his wrist and fell with a slow, hissing patter onto the stone.

Corvane Vael caught his breath.

“Remarkable.”

He took the hand in both of his. They were dry and light and strangely warm, like the hands of a very old doll. He held it over the black basin, and a single drop fell, and struck the liquid, and the whole surface lit.

It was not a flash. It was a slow, spreading, silver bloom, as if somebody had dropped a coal into a pool of oil. Threads of light rose from the surface, thin as hair, hundreds, thousands, shining white and silver and a deep, bruised violet. They twisted in the air. They tangled and untangled. They spun slowly about the old man’s head like a halo of cobwebs, and he lowered his face into them, with the silver eye open wide, and began to read.

“Interesting,” he murmured. “Very interesting. A thread from the north. A thread from the east. A thread, a strong thread, from a great way back. A great way. A very, very great way…”

He broke off.

He had gone rigid. The light of the threads was dazzling now, a blinding, whirling, restless storm that filled the dome, and Fel, with his hand still in the old man’s grip, felt a strange, cold dizziness wash over him like the first wave of a flood.

“Oh,” said Corvane Vael. It was a very small sound. “Oh, that is… that is a great deal.”

His shoulders heaved.

“Is something wrong?” said Veyra, sharply.

“No. No, it is… it is nothing.” He swallowed. His face had gone the color of old candle wax. “The Weave is… thick. Very thick. It…”

He turned his head, and was violently, helplessly sick.

It was a terrible sound. The old man doubled over, one hand clutching the edge of the basin, the other still locked around Fel’s wrist, and heaved until his whole frame shook. A splatter of bile struck the stone. He retched again, and again, his antlers rattling with each spasm. Thara swore. Brannoch took a half step forward.

“Stay,” gasped the Wise One. He had managed to straighten, with a trembling effort, and was wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “Stay. It is… it is all right. It is nothing. It happens. It happens from time to time, with the very powerful. The Fates of such people are… they are heavy. They press against the eye.” He drew a long breath. “I have seen it perhaps four times in ninety years. You should not be alarmed.”

“I’m a little alarmed,” said Fel.

“Yes. That is natural.” A grim, shaky smile. “I will look deeper.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t…”

“It is what you paid for.”

He bent over the basin once more. The silver threads rushed toward him, and the old man’s single eye went white, and his whole body arched like a bow. A thin, thin thread of sound escaped his lips, a note so high that the glass walls hummed.

Then something ran down his face.

It came from the eye. It ran in a slow, steady stream down the long, grey cheek, dark and glistening in the starlight, and dripped from his jaw onto his robe. For a moment Fel thought it was a tear. Then the light of the basin caught it, and he saw its color.

It was black. It was black as pitch, and along the edges, where the light touched it, red as embers.

It was exactly the color of the blood on Fel’s hand.

“Wait,” said Fel. His voice cracked. “Wait, stop…”

The Wise One did not hear him.

He had begun to shake. He was making a low, wet, bubbling noise in his throat, and the dark blood was pouring now, in a torrent, from the eye, and from the scarred seam of the empty socket where the other had been, and from the corners of his mouth. He raised both hands. He clapped them to his face. And then, with a sound that Fel would remember for the rest of his life, he clawed.

His fingernails were long. They were yellow and ridged and sharp as thorns. They sank into the soft flesh around the eye, and tore. The silver eye burst. Blood sprayed across the stone. He dug his nails into the empty socket, and gouged, and ripped, and the dark fluid ran down his wrists and into his sleeves, and all the while he was screaming.

It was not a scream of pain. It was far worse than that. It was a scream of incomprehension, high and wild and dreadful, the cry of a man who has seen something that does not fit inside a human head.

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“I do not understand!” shrieked Corvane Vael. “I do not understand what I am saying! I do not understand! What is it? What is it? What is it?”

“Get away from him!” shouted Veyra.

The silver threads were whipping around the room like a storm of wire. The glass walls shuddered. Brannoch had thrown his shield up. Thara was backing toward the door with both hatchets drawn, her face white, and Fel stood frozen at the edge of the basin with his hand still dripping, unable to move.

The old man turned.

He had no eyes. He had two black, dripping, ragged holes, and the skin around them was torn to ribbons, and yet Fel could feel him looking, the way you feel a cold draft on the back of the neck. His face was a mask of ruin. His mouth was open in a soundless, gaping scream.

“What have you done?”

It was a whisper. Then it was not.

“What have you done, boy? What have you done?”

He lunged.

Fel did not have time to step back. A bony hand closed on his shoulder like a vise and hauled him forward, and then the ruined face was a hand’s breadth from his own, wet and red and horribly close, with the stench of blood and bile and burnt sugar in his nose. The Wise One’s fingers dug into his collarbone. Dark blood dripped onto his chest.

“What have you done, boy?” he screamed. “What have you done?”

Then his head exploded.

There was no sound at first. It was as if the whole world had paused to take a breath. There was a sort of soft, wet pop, like a ripe fruit squeezed in a fist, and the Wise One’s skull burst outward in a sudden bright spray of black and red and white. Blood hit Fel in the face. Bone hit his chest. Something warm and heavy slapped against the wall behind him.

The old man’s body stood for a moment, headless, with its hand still clamped on Fel’s shoulder.

Then it folded, slowly, like a puppet with its strings cut, and fell.

Nobody moved.

The silver threads had gone out. The basin lay dark and still. The great dome was silent, except for the thin, high ring in Fel’s ears and the slow, steady drip, drip, drip of something falling from the ceiling onto the floor.

He looked down. He was covered in blood. It was in his hair, and on his hands, and down the front of his coat. A piece of something pale and curved and sticky was resting on his boot.

He did not scream. He had always wondered whether he would. He found, in that moment, that he did not have the breath.

“Fel.”

It was a very small voice. He turned his head, with great effort, and saw her standing beside the table with her face as white as bone. Her bow was in her hand. It was shaking.

“Fel,” she said again. “We have to go.”

“He’s… he’s…”

“I know.”

“I didn’t… I didn’t do anything, I just…”

“They’re coming,” said Thara, from the door.

He heard it. Footsteps, a great many, thudding up the spiral stair. Voices, shouting. The ring of steel on stone. Someone had heard the screaming, or the explosion, or both, and the guards, who had been told to leave the Wise One alone in the middle of a reading, had been left with the unpleasant dilemma of a very long staircase and a very dead prince.

“Move,” said Brannoch.

It was the single most terrifying word Fel had ever heard him speak.

They ran.

The door hit the wall behind them. The stair was waiting, and it was moving, the whole spiral twisting like a snake, steps sliding out from under their feet. Veyra took the lead. She did not hesitate. She did not guess. She simply ran down, down, down, with her braid whipping behind her, picking each landing by some instinct Fel could not follow, and the party poured after her in a confused clatter of boots and breath.

Fel was last. He did not remember the first hundred steps. He remembered the sound of the guards behind them, and the bright, hot flash of a crossbow bolt that passed an inch from his ear, and a landing where the stair was suddenly gone, so that he found himself running down a dark vertical wall of stone toward a drop. He remembered Brannoch’s hand closing on his collar and hurling him through a door that had not been there a moment before.

Then the great front doors were bursting open, and they were in the courtyard, and the sky was white with the light of the Tree.

There were guards on the steps. There were guards at the gate. A dozen men with halberds were running across the black-and-silver tile with their mouths open, shouting something. A bolt hit the wall by Fel’s head. Thara hurled two knives without breaking stride, and two men dropped. Brannoch put a guard through a railing.

And Old Clatter was waiting.

He had finished the bench. He had finished the cabbages. He was standing in the middle of the courtyard with his great horns lowered and his wings half-open, humming a long, deep, rising drone that was unmistakably the sound of a very large beetle who had decided to enjoy himself.

“Up!” shouted Veyra. “Up!”

They hit the saddle like falling rocks. Brannoch hauled Thara up by the belt. Fel grabbed the rail with both hands and felt something slip, and Veyra’s long fingers locked around his wrist and dragged him aboard. She seized the reins.

“Clatter! Go!”

The beetle went.

It was the fastest Fel had ever moved. Old Clatter surged across the courtyard in a rumbling, bone-shaking charge, six legs pounding, and the guards scattered like startled chickens. He took the gate in a single leap, a vast black-and-emerald shape hurtling through a storm of bolts, and landed in the street with a crash that cracked three paving stones. A cart went over. A man shrieked. A whole stall of fruit exploded into the air in a shower of oranges.

“The wall!” Thara was hanging off the railing, one hand pointing frantically. “The north wall! They’ll close the gates!”

“I know!”

“We can’t get through!”

“I know!”

“Then how do we…” said Fel.

She looked at him over her shoulder. Her violet eyes were enormous. In the light of the Tree, she looked wild, and fierce, and terribly alive, and she smiled.

“Hold on.”

Ahead of them, the great white wall of Sorticia rose like a cliff. It was sixty feet high, smooth as a pearl, crowned with towers. Behind them, the guards were a roaring river of torches and steel. Fel heard a horn. He heard the grinding clang of a portcullis falling. He gripped the railing with both hands, and shut his eyes.

Old Clatter’s wings opened.

They were enormous. He had never seen them used. Two vast, translucent, golden sheets of veined membrane unfolded from beneath the black shell, humming with a note so deep and powerful that the whole saddle trembled. The beetle gathered himself, back legs bunching like coiled springs. He gave a great, ringing, joyous trumpet.

And he leapt.

For a moment there was nothing. No sound. No ground. Only a long, slow, silent rise, and the wind in Fel’s hair, and the whole of Sorticia spread out below him like a spilled jewelbox, glittering and vast and lovely. Then the top of the wall slid by beneath them, close enough to touch, and the towers, and a single astonished guard with his mouth wide open. The great beetle glided out over the dark, dark forest, humming softly, in a long, slow, gentle curve.

Fel opened his eyes.

Behind them, the city grew smaller and smaller, a great white flower in the night. The Tree glowed above it like a pale and distant moon. And somewhere in the Spire of Nine Winds, in a room under the stars, a headless old man lay alone in a pool of his own blood.

“It’s not…” said Fel. He could hardly get the words out. “It’s not my fault.”

Nobody answered.

He looked down. His hand, wrapped in what was left of the grey gauze, was still glowing. It was dripping onto the saddle in a slow, steady thread of black and red.