Distant tales of the Dichotomy

The Turning had left the Hearthmoot in ruins, and the ruins were happy.

Fel woke on the first morning of the new year with a head full of cotton and a mouth that tasted of candle smoke, although he had drunk nothing stronger than water all night. Outside the round window, the whole mountain was quiet. Paper lanterns lay in the gutters. Garlands sagged from the iron brackets, and a gang of weary sweepers worked their way down the Fourth Stair with brooms, singing the Birthday Song of Fel in hoarse and tuneless voices, which was a thing he had hoped to forget. Somewhere below, Tamsin Tumblewick was shouting at a pot.

He lay still for a while and looked at the rivets in the ceiling.

She kissed me.

It was a perfectly plain thought. It had been a perfectly plain night. He turned it over, as he had turned it over a hundred times since the balcony, and each time the heat rose in his face as though it were new. He pulled the blanket over his head. He thought about the way she had looked, with the three moons in her eyes. He thought about he sure is, and groaned into the pillow, and from the next room Thara’s voice floated through the wall, bright and merciless:

“I can hear you thinking, star-boy!”

“I’m not thinking!”

“You’re thinking loudly!”

He did not go down to breakfast for another ten minutes. When he did, Veyra was already there, at the end of an anvil table, with a bowl of porridge and her braid over her shoulder and her face composed into the expression of a woman reading a very dull document. She looked up as he sat. She looked down. A faint, definite pink crept up from her collar and reached the tips of her ears.

“Good morning,” she said, to the porridge.

“Good morning,” said Fel, to the bread.

Brannoch, across the table, set down his spoon with the slow and deliberate care of a man who has decided to say nothing for the rest of his life.

“Mm,” he said.

“Don’t,” said Fel.

“Mm.”

“Not one word.”

Thara put her chin on her fist and looked from one of them to the other with an expression of such pure joy that Orrin, who was sitting beside her, quietly moved his chair away. “I will say nothing,” she announced. “I will say absolutely nothing. I will go to my grave saying nothing. I will simply note, for the record, that some of us were not asleep on the third floor at one in the morning, and that some of us have a window which faces the Cinder Walk, and that some of us can hear a great deal through a shutter…”

“Thara.”

“…but I will say nothing.”

“Thara,” said Veyra, very evenly, “if you finish that sentence I will tell Tamsin where you hid the second ladle.”

Thara stopped. Her mouth closed. For the first time in living memory, she looked genuinely alarmed.

“You wouldn’t.”

“I have never been more serious.”

“You’re a monster,” said Thara, with deep respect, and returned to her eggs.

The pass was Orrin’s idea.

“We cannot simply walk up Karzhul,” he said, once the dishes were cleared and Tamsin had been persuaded, with some difficulty, to accept the price of their rooms. “The Hearthmoot is open to anyone with a copper coin. But the middle mountain belongs to the throne. There are masters up there, and lords, and the Hundred Furnaces, and a great hall at the very crown where the king sits in audience. A man cannot enter without a Passage.”

“A what?” said Fel.

“A pass. A paper. It is stamped at a place called the Transition Office, near the middle gate.” Orrin folded his long gold-lined hands. “I am told that on an ordinary day, it takes three weeks to obtain.”

“Three weeks?”

“On an ordinary day.”

“And today?”

The Vessarine looked at the table, and the gold in his face dimmed very slightly, like a candle in a draft.

“I have a thing that may be of use,” he said. “I would rather not use it. But I think we must.”

He would say no more. He led them out through the back of the Anvil, past the old coal cellar, where Old Clatter lay curled around a mountain of fresh coal in the contented stupor of a beetle who had been petted by thirty strangers. The great black beast lifted his head as they passed and rumbled a long, low, sleepy note. Brannoch laid a hand on his horns.

“We’ll be back,” he said. “Be good.”

The beetle blinked, very slowly. He did not seem to believe it. But he put his chin back down on the coal.

They climbed.

The way from the Hearthmoot to the middle mountain ran through a gate in the great wall that divided the two, a stairway cut so deep into the stone that the sky showed only as a bright thread overhead. The steps were worn into hollows by ten thousand years of feet. Lanterns burned in niches. On either side, carved into the rock in letters as tall as a house, ran an inscription in the old dwarven script, and Fel, who could not read it, found that he could nonetheless feel it, in his chest, like a drumbeat.

“What does it say?” he asked.

“Here the fire is made to serve,” said Orrin. “It is the oldest line in their law.”

“Sounds nice.”

“It is a lie, mostly.” The Vessarine’s mouth twitched. “But a beautiful one.”

At the top of the stairs they came out into a hall.

It was not a very large hall, by the standards of Dun Vurrim. It was perhaps forty paces long, vaulted in smoked brick, and lit by a row of hanging lamps in the shape of anvils. A dozen windows lined one wall, each with a brass grille and a brass bell and a small, tired dwarf behind it. Opposite them, a line of petitioners shuffled forward in a silence so deep and so absolute that it could only be the work of long and patient suffering. Above the whole room, in letters of polished copper, hung the words: TRANSITION OFFICE. ALL PASSAGES BY APPOINTMENT.

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“Do we have an appointment?” whispered Fel.

“No,” said Veyra.

“Then why…”

“Because there is nothing else to be done.” She took his arm, lightly, and steered him toward the end of the line. “Stand there and look reasonable.”

They stood. The line moved forward by the width of a boot. After twenty minutes, Fel had learned that the man ahead of him had been waiting since the previous afternoon, that the woman ahead of him had come to petition on behalf of a cousin’s goat, and that the third window from the left, which had a small brass plate reading REGISTRAR, was operated by a dwarven woman of such fearsome and frigid efficiency that three petitioners had already fled from it in tears.

“Next,” said the Registrar.

They went forward.

She was perhaps two hundred years old, and she looked as if she had spent every one of them being annoyed. Her beard was braided into eleven neat plaits, each tied off with a little ink-stained bead. She wore round spectacles, a stiff grey coat buttoned to the throat, and an expression of such bleak, bone-deep weariness that Fel instinctively apologized.

“Name,” she said. “Purpose. Duration. Sponsor.”

“Veyra,” said Veyra. “A visit. Unknown. We have no sponsor.”

“Then you have no Passage.”

“We understand…”

“Then you understand that the next appointment is in nineteen days.” The Registrar did not look up. “Next.”

“Madam,” said Orrin.

His voice was very quiet. The Registrar’s pen stopped.

The Vessarine had stepped to the window, and had drawn from beneath his coat a small flat object that Fel had never seen before. It was a disc of dark gold, no larger than a palm, hung on a chain of braided silver. In its face was pressed a pattern of seven concentric rings, and from the center of the rings rose a tiny, delicate crest, like a plume of living glass. It caught the lamplight and hummed, a faint high note too soft to hear and too sweet to ignore.

The Registrar looked at it.

She looked at it for a long time. Then, very slowly, she took off her spectacles, wiped them on her sleeve, and put them back on.

“That is a Song-Seal,” she said.

“It is.”

“Of the Choristers of Aelun.”

“Of the last of them,” said Orrin gently. “My mother, Ysolde Halvane, sang the Nine-Thousandth Year at the king’s table, in the Hundred-Furnace Hold. She was given the Seal by the Throne itself, in thanks, with the right of free passage in the middle mountain for herself and her house, for as long as the mountain stands.” He lowered his eyes. “I have never used it. It is not a thing one is proud of using. But I believe it has not expired.”

For a long moment, nothing moved.

Then the Registrar rose from her stool. She was very short. She came up to about the middle of Orrin’s chest, and she stood there, small and stiff and braided, and put her hand over her heart.

“I was a girl,” she said, in a different voice, “when she sang it.”

“Madam?”

“I was in the gallery. My father carried me up, on his shoulders, so that I could hear. I was six years old.” She swallowed. “I remember that the furnaces went quiet. All hundred of them. For the length of one song. I did not know that a mountain could hold its breath.” She wiped her eyes briskly with the back of her wrist, as though annoyed at herself. “Forgive me. A hundred and sixty years, and nobody has asked. Will you… that is… did she…”

“She passed,” said Orrin. “Last year.”

“Oh.” The Registrar’s face crumpled and smoothed, and for a moment she looked about a thousand years old. “Oh, I am sorry.”

“Thank you.”

“Her house,” she said, and cleared her throat. “That would be you. And your party. How many?”

“Five,” said Orrin. “And a beetle, who is staying in the Hearthmoot.”

“Five.” She sat. She took a sheet of heavy cream paper, dipped her pen, and began to write in a script so fast and sure that Fel could barely follow it. “Names. All of them. Spelled correctly.”

They gave them.

She wrote. She stamped. She stamped again. She did something with a sprig of sealing wax and a candle and a small brass tool like a thimble with teeth. At last she blew on the page, folded it into five identical copies, and handed one to each of them, tied with a ribbon of green silk. At the bottom of each, in clear copper-colored ink, were the words:

Guest of the House of Halvane. Passage granted, the full length of the Pass, to the Master Smiths’ Ring. By order of the Throne.

“It will not take you to the king,” the Registrar said. “Only to the smiths. The king’s own halls require a different paper and a different century. But it will take you wherever a smith may go.” She paused. “Is it a smith you are seeking?”

“The best in the world,” said Orrin.

“Hm.” The Registrar’s mouth, which had been a line for the last twenty minutes, shifted at one corner. “Then you want Haldor.”

“Haldor?”

“Master Haldor Wideforge. Fifth Furnace Ring, under the Banquet Halls. Everyone else is the second best.” She tapped the page. “Mind his temper. He is a good man, and he has never in his life hit anyone who did not deserve it. But he is a smith, and it is a temperamental trade.”

“Thank you,” said Veyra. “Truly.”

“Go on,” said the Registrar, and turned to the next in line. “Next.”

The Pass between the left and middle mountains was not a road.

It was a work of wonder.

They came to it through a door at the very back of the Transition Office, a tall arched door that opened onto a ledge of white stone. Beyond the ledge, there was only air. For one terrible moment, Fel thought the clerk had made a mistake. Then he saw the bridge.

It was a gallery, carved into the face of the stone, curved like a bow. It was perhaps thirty feet wide. Its floor was polished white marble, inlaid with silver in a pattern of interlocking flames. Its roof was a series of great arches, open on both sides to the sky, each one carved with a different scene, a forge, a harvest, a flood, a dance, a war. And it ran, unbroken, for what must have been half a mile, a ribbon of white and silver curving gently upward between the two great mountains, over a gulf so deep and so wide that the air in the middle of it was a different color from the air at the edges.

Fel walked out onto it.

His boots rang on the marble. The wind caught his coat. And then he stopped, because on his left hand, the whole world had opened.

The plain lay below him, miles and miles of it, brown and gold in the morning, scored with roads and rivers, and the far blue shadow of the Ashen Hills rolling away to the north. Down there, tiny as dust, was the bridge they had crossed, the Old Tinker’s Span, with its slow line of wagons crawling along it like ants. Past that lay the road they had come by, and the long dark smudge of forest, and beyond it, past anything an eye could reach, the white sea of mist where Veilrest had once stood among the peaks.

He held the rail.

I came all that way.

It was a strange thought. It did not feel like his own. It came up from somewhere deep and quiet, like water finding a crack in stone. He had fallen out of a white sky into a burning forest, with a sword in each hand and no name to his name, and everything he had been since had come from that, the road, the fire, the friends, the grave in the stream. And now he stood on a bridge of silver between two mountains, so high that eagles passed below his feet, and he had arrived.

“Fel,” said Veyra softly. “Look right.”

He turned.

The middle mountain rose beside him.

It was Karzhul, the Hundred-Furnace Hold, the Third Hallowed Work. He had seen it from the plain, but it had been a shape, a rumor, a thing painted on the horizon. Now it filled the entire sky. Its face was a cliff of black volcanic glass, polished by wind and heat to a mirror, and in it, as in a great dark lake, the whole world was reflected, the white bridge, the blue sky, the clouds, and the tiny human figures walking upon it. Up the face of it climbed the furnaces. They burned in rings, level above level, each one a huge round window of orange fire set deep in the rock, hundreds of them, thousands of them, so many that they blended into a single glowing tapestry of gold. Rivers of molten metal ran down the glass in channels, silent and slow, like the veins of a living thing. Steam rose in clouds. Far, far above, at the very crown, where the black glass gave way to the sky, a castle of gold and shadow caught the sun, and a trumpet sounded from its battlements, and the note rolled out across the gulf and came back from the left mountain a second later, a little fainter, like an echo of a god.

Nobody spoke.

Brannoch had stopped walking. Thara, for once, was not talking. She stood with her hands slack at her sides and her mouth a little open, staring up at the glowing tapestry with an expression Fel had never seen on her face before. It took him a moment to realize what it was. It was wonder.

“I thought,” she said at last, in a very small voice. “I thought I’d stolen from everything beautiful in the world.”

“Thara.”

“I haven’t touched this.” She laughed, shakily. “I haven’t touched a single inch.”

“Nor have I,” said Orrin quietly. He had his hand pressed flat to his chest. The gold was running through his face in slow, shifting waves, brighter and brighter, like a sunrise. “I was a child when I came here with my mother. I remembered it as large. I did not remember it as this.”

“It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” said Fel.

“It is,” said Veyra.

She was standing beside him at the rail, with the wind pulling her braid out behind her like a banner and her violet eyes full of light. She did not look at him. She was looking up at the mountain. But her hand, on the cold stone, had crept a little closer to his, and after a moment, without turning her head, she laid it on top of his own.

They stood like that for a very long time.

Then, from somewhere overhead, the great bell of Karzhul began to toll the hour, a deep, slow, shuddering note that Fel felt in his teeth, and the furnaces answered one by one, ring on ring, until the whole mountain was singing.

“Come,” said Orrin. “The smith is waiting.”

“Is he?”

“A smith is always waiting.” The Vessarine smiled. “For something worth the effort.”