Distant tales of the Dichotomy

The crying came from the third wagon.

It was a thin, wavering sound, muffled by iron and canvas, and it stopped the moment Thara kicked the door in. She had gone ahead to look for survivors. She was the first to see it, and she did not make a sound. She stood in the doorway with her hatchets in her hands, perfectly still, for so long that Fel, limping up with Veyra’s arm around his waist, thought for a moment that she had been struck.

“Thara?”

“Don’t,” she said, in a voice he had never heard from her. It was flat and small and very quiet. “Don’t come any closer. Not yet. Let me…” She swallowed. “Veyra. Come and look at this.”

Veyra went. Fel followed.

The wagon was a cage on wheels. Its walls were iron bars, closely spaced, and its floor was straw. Along the back, in a row, chained to a rail by their ankles, sat children.

There were fourteen. He counted twice. The smallest was perhaps five, a tiny Ilvari girl with silver horns not yet grown past her ears, who had both arms wrapped around a rag doll and was watching him with huge, solemn, tear-streaked eyes. The oldest was a Raskian boy of maybe twelve, already taller than Fel, with a split lip and a bruise swelling shut one eye. Between them there were goat-horned children and antlered children and a pair of little twins with scaled green skin, and a girl with feathers where her hair should be, and a boy with long pointed ears who was holding her hand. They were thin. Their wrists were raw. Not one of them was wearing shoes.

None of them spoke. They only watched, as small animals watch a shadow on the grass, to see what it will do.

“Oh,” said Veyra.

It was the quietest sound Fel had ever heard her make.

Behind them, with a creak of wheels and a hiss of relief, a plump, sweating man in a velvet waistcoat came scrambling down from beneath the first wagon, where he had been hiding. He had a round pink face, a fine pointed beard glossy with oil, and rings on every finger. He was brushing dust off his sleeves.

“Oh, praise the gods,” he gasped. “Oh, bless you. Bless every one of you! I thought I was a dead man! Hesper Dunwick, of the Dunwick Exotic Trading Company, at your service, and I cannot tell you how…” He caught sight of their faces. His smile faltered. “I… I assure you, the reward for this will be generous. The Guild will pay handsomely. I will see to it personally. You’ve saved three wagons of the finest…”

“Who are they?” said Veyra.

He blinked. “Who?”

“The children.”

“Ah.” He followed her gaze, and a look of mild, puzzled irritation crossed his face, as if she had pointed out a smudge on a tablecloth. “That’s, ah, stock. Quite legal, I assure you. I have the papers somewhere. The southern charters permit the trade, you understand. The mines and the great forges of the north are always short of small hands, and the pits…” He gave a little cough. “Well. The point is that it’s a perfectly respectable business, and they’re worth a great deal more than the silk, and if you could see your way to helping me gather up the…”

He stopped.

Veyra had not moved. She had not raised her voice. She had simply turned her head and looked at him, and he found that he could no longer finish the sentence.

“Fel,” she said, very quietly. “Take the children out of the cage.”

“Veyra…”

“Please. Take them out, and give them water. Thara will help. Orrin, stay with them. Brannoch.” The giant, limping on his bandaged leg, had come up behind. His face was a mask. “Bring Mister Dunwick behind the third wagon.”

“Wait,” said the merchant. “Wait. What are you…”

Brannoch took him by the back of the waistcoat and lifted him off the ground as one might lift a kitten.

“No,” said Dunwick. “No, no, please, I’ve done nothing! I have a license! I am a registered…”

His voice receded. A door slammed. Then there was only the sound of the wind in the Cut, and the small, fearful rustle of straw.

It took Thara nearly an hour to find the keys, and in the end she cut the chains with a hatchet instead. The little Ilvari girl would not let go of her rag doll, so Thara carried her out with it, wrapped in her own green coat. The twins came out hand in hand. The Raskian boy refused to be lifted down, and climbed out by himself, and stood in the sunlight with his fists clenched, glaring at everything, as if daring it to try something.

“My name’s Brek,” he said, when Fel crouched to offer him water. His voice was hoarse. “I’m twelve. Don’t tell me it’s all right.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Good. It’s not.”

“No,” said Fel. “It isn’t.”

The boy took the waterskin. He drank until he choked, then handed it silently to the child behind him. Fel watched him go from one to the next, down the line, making sure each had a turn, and saw that he was counting too, under his breath. Fourteen. He was carrying all of them.

Fel’s throat closed.

He did not look at the little girl with the feathered hair. There was a green-haired child in his head who would not stop shouting about spoons, and if he looked, he knew, he would not be able to stop.

From behind the third wagon came a long, thin, rising scream. It cut off abruptly. A moment later it began again.

Fel’s hands tightened on the waterskin. Beside him, Orrin turned his head and looked away, toward the horizon, and the gold light in his face went dim. Thara, in the middle of untying a child’s boot, paused only for a second. Then she went on with her work.

None of them looked at the wagon. None of them said a word.

It lasted a long time.

When it stopped, there was a sound of boots in the dust, and Veyra came around the corner of the wagon wiping her hands on a cloth. Brannoch walked a pace behind her. His shield was gone from his arm, and his face was calm, almost gentle. Neither of them was speaking. Veyra’s eyes were dry, and very bright, and there was a spatter of red across her cheek that she did not seem to have noticed.

Fel got to his feet.

He had meant to say nothing. He had meant to put his hand on her shoulder, perhaps, and let it pass. But he had not slept properly in weeks, and his shoulder was on fire, and the sound in his ears was still the sound of a man screaming for his life, and something in him, cold and cracked and honest, would not stay quiet.

“Veyra,” he said. “What did you do?”

“What needed doing.”

“You killed him.”

“Yes.”

“You…” He looked at the cloth. “You hurt him first.”

“Yes.”

“We just killed thirty men to stop what they were doing.” His voice shook. “We stood in front of them and said it was wrong. And then we… we did that. To a man who couldn’t even fight back. What’s the difference?” He heard himself say it, and could not stop. “What’s the difference between us and them?”

The words fell like stones into the silence.

Thara went still. Orrin closed his eyes. The Raskian boy, Brek, looked up from the waterskin, and in his single open eye was a sharp, flat, adult, patient interest, as if he too wanted to hear the answer.

Veyra did not flinch. She did not raise her voice. She stood quite still, with the cloth in her hand, and looked at Fel for a long moment. When she spoke, it was low and steady and very clear.

“Do you know what the Thirty-Five Knives would have done with them?”

“Fel…”

“Answer me.”

“No.”

“Then I will tell you, because someone should.” She did not look away. “They would not have killed the children. That would have been wasteful. They would have sold them. Not to Dunwick, who at least buys for the mines, and feeds what he buys, because dead hands do not work. They would have sold them out of the back of a cart on the Ash Road, to men who do not keep records. They would have kept the pretty ones for themselves, for as long as it amused them. And the ones who cried too loud, or ran too slowly, or were too young to be of use, they would have left in a ditch.”

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Her voice did not change. Her violet eyes burned.

“That is what bandits are, Fel. That is what a man like Galacta Sypher becomes when he decides that nothing matters but his own appetite. They take, and they take, and they take, and they call it freedom. And when there is nothing left to take, they move on.” She took a step toward him. “And that, there, behind the wagon, is the man who bought the cage. Who looked at a child, and saw a price. Who sat in a warm room, and drank wine, and signed his name to a ledger, and slept well. He did not need to be there. He did not need to hold the chain. All he needed to do was pay.”

“I know, but…”

“There is a difference between hurting a man because it pleases you and hurting him because it must be done.” She pointed, without turning, at the little group by the wagon. “Those children will go to bed tonight with a full belly and a warm blanket, and they will wake up tomorrow and nobody will own them. That is why. We take the goods because the goods will feed them. We took his life because he would have gone on selling. And we will carry the weight of it, every one of us, for as long as we live. The bandits never carry anything.” Her voice finally cracked. “It is the carrying that makes the difference.”

Fel stood very still. Behind her, Brannoch nodded slowly, once, like a man hearing a bell.

“I’m sorry,” Fel said.

“Do not be. It was a fair question.” She took a long breath, and her shoulders, which had been rigid as iron, sagged. “I asked it of myself, behind that wagon. Every second. If I ever stop asking, then you may stop me.” She tried to smile. It was a pitiful, shaky thing, but it was real. “Now. There are fourteen children who need a blanket, and a lord’s ransom in silk that we are about to steal. Can we please begin?”

Fel nodded. He stepped forward, and then, without knowing why, he reached out and wiped the red spatter gently from her cheek with his thumb.

She closed her eyes.

Nobody said anything. After a moment, Thara cleared her throat and said, very loudly, “Right! Who wants to see me pick the lock on a wagon?”

They set out at dawn, with three wagons in a line behind Old Clatter, whose wounded leg had been bound with Orrin’s best silk, and who had been promised, in return, a full barrel of honey. Fourteen children rode in the back. The Raskian boy sat up front beside Brannoch, holding the reins with elaborate casual importance. The twins had fallen asleep in a nest of purple velvet. The tiny Ilvari girl, whose name turned out to be Wren, sat on Veyra’s lap and told her, in a very serious whisper, everything she knew about dolls.

Fel rode at the back, with his arm in a sling, and said nothing for a long time.

The land rose steadily. The grey grass thinned and vanished, and bare rock took its place, red and black and rust-colored, scattered with scrub. The air grew colder. By afternoon there was snow in the shadows. And as the sun slid toward the west, they came around a long bend in the track, and Old Clatter, who had been humming to himself, stopped dead.

Fel looked up.

For a moment he did not understand what he was seeing.

It was a mountain. That much was plain. A great dark mass rose out of the earth ahead of them, filling the whole north, so tall that the snow on its crown glowed pink in the sunset while its foot lay already in night. But it was not only a mountain. It was something that had been made.

There were three peaks, as Veyra had said. They stood shoulder to shoulder against the sky, and each had been carved. The left mountain was terraced from base to summit in ten thousand narrow stairs of grey stone, rank upon rank of crooked windows and chimneys and slate roofs, glittering with lantern-light like a hillside of fireflies. Smoke rose from a thousand hearths. The right mountain was a black, bristling fortress of walls and towers and iron gates, studded with great round bastions, its slopes scarred by a vast hollow where the ground had been torn away and a gaping, ragged mouth looked out over the plain.

And between them, towering above both, stood Karzhul.

The old volcano had been hollowed. Its flanks were pierced with a hundred thousand windows, rank on glowing rank, orange and white and gold, where the forges burned in the rock itself. Great plumes of pale smoke rose from vents along its slopes. Ribbons of molten light ran down its sides in channels cut by hand and glittered like rivers of fire in the dusk. And on its very crown, high above the clouds, where the crater should have been, rose a castle of black glass and gold that caught the last of the light and flared like a star.

Nobody spoke.

“That,” said Orrin at last, in a hushed double voice, “is the Third Hallowed Work.”

“The what?” said Fel.

“Twelve things in all the world,” said Veyra softly. Her eyes did not leave the mountain. “The Twelve Hallowed Works of the Realms. The twelve greatest creations ever made by mortal hands. The Singing Cities of the Vessarine were one.” She glanced at Orrin. “The Drowned Library of Ostrea is another. And the Mountain of Three Crowns, Dun Vurrim, the Hundred-Furnace Hold, is the third. It took the dwarves nine thousand years to carve it.”

“Nine thousand.”

“And it has never once been taken by force.”

“I can see why.” He swallowed. “It’s… it’s the biggest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“It is the biggest thing anyone has ever seen,” said Thara reverently. She had climbed on top of Old Clatter’s head to get a better view. “I’ve been here twice. I never get used to it. Look at that. Look at it! I’m going to steal something.”

“You are not,” said Veyra.

“Just a little something.”

“You are not.”

“Mm,” said Brannoch, who had come to stand beside Fel, and who looked, for the first time in two days, entirely at peace.

They reached the foot of the mountains in the morning, and Fel understood why the dwarves did not fear war.

There was no wall. There was no gate. There was only a chasm, a vast black rift in the earth about half a mile wide and deeper than he could see, and across it, from the edge of the plain to the foot of the three peaks, ran bridges.

Three of them. One for each mountain.

The left bridge was the oldest. It was long, low, and broad, built of plates of copper gone green with verdigris, ribs of tin and rough iron, and here and there a patch of dull, scarred steel. It looked as though it had been mended a thousand times. The railings sagged. The planks were worn into hollows by ten thousand years of feet. But it was stout, and warm, and alive. Wagons, carts, pack-mules, caravans, and walkers crowded its whole length, and a babel of voices and bells and hammering rose from it, shot through with the smell of smoke and horses and frying onions. Its line began a quarter of a mile from the bridge-head, and it wound back across the plain in a slow, dense, shuffling river of people.

The middle bridge was something else.

It was twice as wide as the others, and it shone. The whole span was silver, plated and polished, set with panels of white platinum and gold, studded with gems of every color, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, stones Fel had no names for, and woven through with ribbons of strange pale metals that seemed to swallow the light. Great statues of dwarf kings stood along its rails. Rows of guards in gleaming plate stood at attention every ten paces. It was the most beautiful thing Fel had ever seen, and there was almost no one on it. A single gilded carriage was crossing, drawn by white horses. Nothing else moved.

He stared at it. Something about it made the hair rise on his arms. It was a feeling he couldn’t name, a faint, cold, wrong sensation behind his eyes, as if something enormous were looking back at him from the far end of the bridge. The ring in his palm gave a single slow throb.

“Don’t,” said Veyra quietly, beside him. “Do not look too long.”

“What is that?”

“I do not know. Nobody does.” She turned his face away with two fingers. “It has been there as long as anyone remembers. They say the middle bridge is… watchful. Come.”

The right bridge was black.

It was made of a flat, matte, lightless metal that seemed to drink the sun, with no ornament and no shine, a grim and utilitarian arc of black iron spanning the abyss. There were guards on it, too, but fewer, and the traffic was thick: adventurers by the hundreds. Fel had never seen so many. Men and women of every race, in every kind of armor, with swords and staves and bows and strange animals on leashes, were waiting in a long, noisy, restless column that stretched back half a mile from the bridge-head. Someone was singing. Someone else was arguing. Over the whole line floated the smell of leather and steel and spilled ale.

Between the second and third bridge, on a small narrow span of its own, a crowd of strange beasts stood penned in rows: drakes, and horned lizards, and armored boars, and enormous moths with fur like velvet. They milled in an enclosure of iron rails. A line of dwarves in grey tabards moved among them with long pronged tools and glass vials.

“Halt, there!”

A guard had stepped out of the line of the left bridge, a short broad dwarf in a steel cap and a quilted coat, with a spear in one hand and a clipboard in the other. His beard was braided into three plaits, each tied with a copper ring. He took in Old Clatter, and the three wagons, and the fourteen children, and the four armed adults, with an expression of profound weariness.

“Ironhorn,” he said. He sounded like a man announcing a funeral. “That’s a mount. You’ll have to take him to the Span.”

“The what?” said Thara.

“The Quarantine Span.” He pointed his spear at the little bridge. “New rules. Since the spring. There’s a sickness going around the beasts, the Grey Tremor. It comes up from the south. It kills the mounts and the pack-animals, it spreads like fire, and the king doesn’t want it in the mountain. Every animal that wants to cross has to be inspected and tested, front and back, and passed by a Sealed Physician. Takes a day, usually. Two, if there’s a queue.” He glanced at the penned beasts and sighed. “There’s a queue.”

“But he is not sick!” said Veyra.

“Nobody’s sick. Until they are.” The dwarf shrugged. “Rules are rules, Miss. I don’t make ’em. If he’s clean, he gets a seal, and he can cross. If not…” He did not finish.

Brannoch had gone rigid. His hand rested on the beetle’s glossy flank.

“I will take him,” he said.

“Brann…”

“I will take him.” He did not look at anyone. “He does not like strangers. He will want a friend.” He glanced at Orrin. “The children need you. Both of you.” He nodded at Fel, once. “Wait for me at the bridge.”

“We can wait for you.”

“There is no point. It is a long line.” The big Oakhorn almost smiled. “Do not worry. I will find you.”

He climbed into the saddle. The beetle gave a long, low, mournful drone, and the children, who had been watching in silence, began to wave. Wren held up her rag doll. Old Clatter turned his great horned head, and walked, slowly and with enormous dignity, toward the iron pens.

Fel watched him go. Then he turned, with the others, and looked at the left bridge.

It was half a mile long. It was crowded from rail to rail with carts and people. It had a queue, on his side of the chasm, that stretched back farther than he could see, three abreast, slowly shuffling, bunched around fires and tents and makeshift stalls, settled into the dirt like a town. Someone near the front was selling roasted chestnuts. Someone near the back had unrolled a blanket and fallen asleep. In the middle of the line, a woman was giving birth. A pair of dwarves were arguing about a barrel. A child was being sick against a cart wheel.

“How long do you think?” said Fel.

Veyra, beside him, did not answer for a moment. She stood quite still, with Wren on her hip and the wind pulling at her braid, and looked at the line. Then she looked at the bridge. Then she looked at the sun.

“A week,” she said. “If we are very lucky.”

“A week?”

“Possibly nine days.”

Fel opened his mouth, and shut it. Behind him, Thara let out a long, slow, hissing breath. Orrin, with great delicacy, sat down on the nearest stone and put his face in his hands.

Somewhere above them, a hundred thousand windows burned in the side of a mountain, and a castle of black glass flared in the last of the sun, and the whole proud, impossible, shining mass of Dun Vurrim loomed over the plain like a promise.

It had never looked so far away.