Distant tales of the Dichotomy

Smoke told them first.

It was a thin black column, rising from beyond a shoulder of rock about two miles ahead, where the track dropped into a narrow canyon the locals called the Redgate Cut. They saw it at noon on the nineteenth day. By the time Old Clatter had covered the next mile, they could hear the rest: the scream of a horse, the hard crack of splintering wood, and under it all, rough and rhythmic and horribly cheerful, the sound of men laughing.

“Ambush,” said Thara, from the roof. She had gone flat on her stomach with a spyglass at her eye. Her voice had lost every trace of its usual bounce. “Three wagons, nose to tail. Big ones, with iron cages on the back. Guards down, most of them. And there’s… I count… Veyra, I’m counting thirty.”

“More?”

“Thirty-five. Maybe thirty-six. I keep losing one in the rocks.”

“Armed?”

“Properly. Armor, crossbows, and the good kind of swords. This isn’t a gang, it’s an army.” She lowered the glass. “And there’s a big one at the back. A very big one. He’s not doing anything. He’s just sitting on a rock, eating an apple.”

Veyra said a word in a language Fel did not know. It did not sound polite.

“What do we do?” he asked. “We could go around.”

“We could.” She did not move. “The Cut is the only way north for two days. The wagons cannot be abandoned. Whoever those guards were, they have been dying while we argued.” Her eyes met his, steady and violet and cold. “I will not tell you what to do, Fel. You carry the swords. But I know what I will do.”

He did not need to look at the others.

“We can’t leave them,” he said.

“No.”

“I’ll need ideas.”

“I have several,” said Orrin, “and one of them is very loud.”

The plan was Veyra’s, mostly, and it was a good one. It was also, as Thara cheerfully pointed out, a plan that depended on everyone doing exactly what they were told and nothing going wrong, which in her experience happened roughly never.

Veyra would take the north ridge with her bow, and thin them from above. Thara would go in low through the rocks on the south side, cut the horses loose, and make a great deal of noise somewhere inconvenient. Brannoch and Old Clatter would go straight down the middle. “It is the only way I know,” said Brannoch, which was true and also, Fel suspected, a joke. Orrin would hang back at the canyon mouth and, in his own words, “be a disagreeable sound.” And Fel would walk in beside Brannoch with both swords drawn and do the one thing he had learned to do well, which was to be the target.

“I thought I was the one who wasn’t supposed to get eaten,” he said.

“You are the one nobody expects,” said Veyra. “That is different. Now go.”

They went.

The Cut was a long, narrow gash in the red rock, its walls rising sheer on both sides to the height of a cathedral. At the bottom, in the dust, three great wagons stood in a ragged row with their canvas tops torn open and their contents spilled across the ground. Bolts of silk lay trampled in the dirt. Casks had been stove in. A cage the size of a horse stall lay on its side, its door torn off, and beside it a dead guard in a green tabard lay with his sword still in his hand. Fel counted four more bodies without meaning to. Then he stopped counting.

The bandits had not noticed them yet. They were busy. Two dozen of them were swarming over the wagons, hauling crates, slitting sacks, breaking open locks; the rest stood guard in a loose ring, with crossbows and lazy grins. They wore mismatched armor, steel and boiled leather, and each wore, tied about one arm, a strip of black cloth with a little red knife stitched upon it.

“The Thirty-Five Knives,” murmured Brannoch. “I did not think they were real.”

“You’ve heard of them?”

“Everyone has heard of them. They hold the northern road. They do not take prisoners.” His grip tightened on the spear. “They are all deserters. Soldiers, and sell-swords, and fallen adventurers. It is said that the leader was once the finest…”

An arrow hissed down from the north ridge and took a bandit in the throat.

He dropped without a sound. The man beside him turned, mouth open, and a second arrow took him through the eye. Then a third. For a long, stunned heartbeat the whole ring stood frozen, staring up at the rocks. Then someone screamed, and everything exploded.

Brannoch charged.

Fel had seen the Oakhorn fight before, but never like this. The giant ran down the canyon floor like a falling cliff, shield forward, spear low, with Old Clatter thundering at his shoulder and a roar coming out of the beetle’s chest that shook loose pebbles from the walls. The first three bandits to meet them simply vanished. The shield took one, the spear took another, and the third was caught between the beetle’s horns and flung twenty feet into the rocks.

Fel ran in behind them. His feet hit the dust, and a bandit lunged out of the smoke with a short sword in his hand. Fel caught it on the black blade, turned it, and cut him down with the saber, one stroke, left to right. He did not feel anything. He stepped over the body and met the next.

It was a strange kind of fighting. The canyon was full of noise: shouting, the crash of steel, the thunk of arrows, the screams of horses somewhere in the smoke. Bandits came at him two and three at a time, and each time he found that his hands already knew what to do. Left sword high, right sword low. Step in, step back. Let them come. There was no pride in it, no joy. It was a rhythm, like walking, like breathing. You are the target, Veyra had said. So he was.

An arrow whistled past his ear and into the throat of a man who had been about to stab him. Fel did not look up. Thank you.

Thara came out of the rocks like a sprite, whooping. She had cut four horses loose and sent them stampeding, and she had set fire to something that burned with a bright orange flame and a stink of oranges. “Oi!” she shrieked at nobody in particular. “Oi! Fat ones! Over here!” Three bandits peeled off to chase her and ran straight into a hail of throwing knives from a place where she was not.

Then the crossbows began to sound, and the bandits’ ring closed.

There were more of them than Fel had thought. They came pouring down from the high rocks, from behind the wagons, from some hidden fold in the canyon wall; a dozen, twenty, a seething tide of black cloth and bright steel. A bolt tore through his coat and grazed his ribs. Another hit the shield on Brannoch’s arm and stuck there like a feather. Old Clatter screamed. A spear had gone into one of his legs, and he spun, slamming two men against the wall.

“Fel!” Brannoch’s roar. “Behind!”

He turned too late. A man with a hooked axe was already swinging. Fel threw up both swords, crossed, and the axe came down on the steel with a shock that numbed his arms to the shoulders. His knees buckled. The man grinned, pale-eyed and gap-toothed, and drew back for another blow…

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A single clear note rang down the canyon.

It was so sweet that for a moment Fel thought it was music. Then the axe-head shivered, and cracked along its whole length, and fell to pieces in the bandit’s hands. The man stared at the broken haft. His mouth opened. And the second note came, lower and sharper, and every crossbow string in the canyon snapped at once with a sound like a flock of birds taking flight.

At the mouth of the Cut, Orrin Halvane stood with the cracked fork raised, and he was singing.

It was not a song. It was a weapon. The notes came out of him in long, spiraling bars, and wherever they struck, steel failed. Sword blades rang and split. Armor buckled at its rivets. A crossbowman on a ledge dropped his weapon, clapped both hands over his ears, and fell to his knees with blood running through his fingers. The Vessarine walked slowly forward through the dust, with the gold lines of his face blazing like a lit window, and the crest of glass along his skull shivering with every step. His amber eyes were wide and calm and terrible.

“Do forgive me,” he said. His voice carried perfectly through the din. “I did warn you. It is very loud.”

The bandits broke.

Not all of them. But enough. A dozen turned and ran, and the ring dissolved into a scatter of shouting men. Fel took a breath, steadied his swords, and lowered them a fraction. We’re winning, he thought. We’re actually…

“That,” said a voice behind him, very quietly, “was a nice trick.”

The air changed.

It was like the moment before a storm. The noise of the canyon seemed to pull back, as if the walls had drawn a breath. Fel turned, slowly, and saw a man standing about forty feet away, on top of a wagon, with a half-eaten apple in one hand.

He was the tallest man Fel had ever seen who was not a Raskian. His skin was sable, the black of a moonless night, and scattered across it, over his face, his shaven skull, his bare arms and shoulders, were thousands of tiny, glittering points of silver light, like a handful of stars flung at the sky. His eyes were pure white. There was no pupil and no iris, only a smooth blank pearl, and they turned and rested on Orrin with an expression of faint, polite interest. He wore a long coat of black leather with a silver-stitched collar. At his belt hung two curved blades, crescent-shaped, as wide as shields, each trailing a long chain of dark metal that coiled on the wagon-top like a sleeping snake.

He took a last bite of the apple and tossed the core away.

“Galacta Sypher,” said Veyra’s voice from the ridge. It was very small and very far away. Fel had never heard her afraid. “Gods help us. It is Galacta Sypher.”

“The name’s familiar,” said the man on the wagon. He had a deep, soft, almost friendly voice. “But it used to come with a rank.” He smiled. “Platinum. Fourth from the top. They took it away, of course, after the business in Marrowgate, but I find I still answer to it.”

“I’ve heard of you,” said Orrin. His voice was not quite steady. “You broke a city’s walls with your bare hands.”

“Chains, actually. I find hands are overrated.”

“You were the Guild’s finest.”

“I was the Guild’s sharpest. There’s a difference.” The white eyes moved, slowly, to Fel. “And you. The boy with two swords and a stubborn jaw. I could hear you coming from a mile off. Most people who stand in front of Galacta Sypher with a sword in each hand are showing off.” He tilted his head. “You’re not. You’re simply… tired. It’s a very rare thing.”

“I don’t want to fight you,” said Fel.

“No one does.” The man spread his hands. “That is the pleasure of it.”

The crescent blades rose from his belt like living things. The chains uncoiled. And Galacta Sypher stepped off the wagon, and began to move.

Fel had no word for it afterward. The blades did not fly, exactly. They circled. They swept out from the man’s hands in two vast shining arcs, impossibly fast, and when they should have come back, they didn’t; they simply went on, round and round, in slow wheeling orbits around his body, the chains humming in the air like the strings of an enormous harp. The nearest bandit, a scarred woman who had been charging at Brannoch, was caught in the arc and went down in two pieces. She had not even had time to cry out.

“His power,” said Orrin quickly. “He bends the path of anything he throws. Anything. Do not let it come near…”

The first blade hit Fel.

He got the black sword up in time. Barely. It struck like the kick of a horse and hurled him ten feet backwards into the wall of the canyon, and for a moment the world went white. His ears rang. Blood filled his mouth. When he blinked the dust away, the blade was already coming back, swinging in a long flat arc, and the second one was behind it, humming.

He rolled. The crescent clipped the rock where his head had been and sliced out a chunk the size of a barrel. Fel scrambled up, gasping, and ran.

“Fel!” Brannoch, thundering. “Hold!”

The giant came out of the smoke with the shield held high and the great spear cocked back, and he struck the chain with the haft like a man striking a snake. It rang. The tension broke, and for an instant one crescent blade swung wide and clanged harmlessly off the rock. Galacta Sypher’s white eyes narrowed. He flicked a wrist. The blade changed course in mid-flight, whipped round like a scythe, and took Brannoch across the back of the thigh.

The Oakhorn went down on one knee. He did not cry out. He only grunted, deep in his chest, and drove the spear point-first into the dirt to keep himself upright. Blood ran down his leg.

“Hm,” said Sypher, with something like regret. “That was a fine shield.”

“Brann!” Thara.

“Stay back,” said Brannoch.

Arrows came down from the ridge, three of them in a heartbeat, but the chains simply caught them, the blades whipping round and snapping the shafts out of the air. Veyra’s bow cracked, and cracked, and cracked, and each shaft broke in a spray of splinters. The sable man did not even look up. He walked forward, slowly, among his circling blades, and the whole canyon seemed to hold its breath.

Fel stood.

He was bleeding. He knew that much. There was a hot wet line down the side of his face and something wrong with his left shoulder. His hands shook around the hilts. But in the middle of his chest, beneath the pain, a cold, clear, bright thing was rising, and it was the same thing he had felt when he looked at Veyra on the burned steps of the Hall.

I will not stop.

“Get behind me,” he said to Brannoch.

“You will die.”

“Maybe.” He lifted the swords. “But not yet.”

Sypher stopped. He tilted his head, as if listening. “Ah,” he said softly. “There it is. I wondered whether you had it in you.”

He raised his hands, and the blades howled.

Fel moved.

He did not try to fight them. He had understood, in the dust, with blood in his mouth, that no man could. The orbits were perfect. They moved faster than a hand could follow and curved through the air like lightning, and there was no gap in them, no pattern, no rest. But there was a center. There always is. A wheel that spins needs an axle, and the axle, in this case, was a tall black-skinned man with a half-smile and a pair of white eyes, standing perfectly still.

So he ran at the axle.

The first blade took him across the arm. He felt it go in, deep and cold. He did not stop. The second came at his neck, and he dropped, slid, felt the chain brush his hair, came up on one knee inside the arc, and thrust the golden saber at Sypher’s heart.

The man caught it.

He caught it with his bare left hand, around the blade, and the steel scraped on bone, and no blood came. Sypher looked down. He seemed genuinely surprised. “Oh,” he said. “That’s a clever thing. What is that?”

“Orrin!” Fel screamed. “Now!”

The note hit like a hammer.

It came from behind, from the mouth of the canyon, a single, sharp, unbearable chime, and it struck the chains just where they met the blades. The links rang once, a pure shining peal, and shattered.

Both crescents fell out of the sky.

They hit the ground with a clang. For an instant, Galacta Sypher stood very still with the saber in his hand and the broken chain-ends dangling from his belt, and his white eyes widened a fraction, and in them, for the first time, Fel saw something that was not amusement.

Then Brannoch’s spear went through him.

It came from the side, out of the dust, a huge two-handed thrust that the giant had been saving for exactly this moment. The point took the sable man low in the ribs and came out of his back, and the shaft drove him to the ground. He sat down heavily. He looked at the spear. He looked at Fel.

“Ah,” he said, in the same deep, soft, friendly voice. “So that’s the trick.”

“I’m sorry,” said Fel. He did not know why.

“Don’t be.” The stars on Galacta Sypher’s skin were fading, one by one, like lamps going out. “It was a good fight. The best I’ve had in…” He coughed, and smiled, and blood ran down his chin. “Platinum. Fourth from the top.” His eyes rolled slowly up to the sky. “I would have gone higher, I think, if I had been kinder.”

He did not say anything else.

The canyon fell silent. It was a ringing silence, full of breath and settling dust. Over by the wagons, the last of the Thirty-Five Knives had thrown down their weapons and were backing away with their hands in the air. Veyra came down the ridge in a long clattering rush. Thara emerged from the smoke, hatchets dripping, and let out a single shaken, incredulous laugh.

Fel sat down in the dirt. He did not decide to. His legs simply stopped.

“Fel.” Veyra was kneeling beside him. Her hands were on his face. Her eyes were very wide. “Fel, can you hear me?”

“I’m fine.”

“You are bleeding.”

“I’m always bleeding.” He looked at her. “Is everyone alive?”

“Brannoch has a hole in his leg. Old Clatter has a spear in his. Thara has a bruise and an attitude.” Something that was almost a smile broke across her face, and cracked, and she pressed her forehead against his, hard, for a single breath. “Everyone is alive. Because of you.”

“Because of all of us.”

“Do not argue with me when I am being grateful.”

He closed his eyes. Over her shoulder, he heard Orrin’s voice, light and tired and amused, say: “I would like it noted, for the record, that I did warn them.”

And somewhere beyond the wagons, in the quiet, something began to cry.