Distant tales of the Dichotomy

They went down the mountain in silence.

It was a long way. The lift dropped through the glowing rock, floor after floor, past the Furnace Rings and the Foundry Galleries and the Lamp Markets, past ten thousand windows that opened onto ten thousand small lives: a woman hanging out washing above a river of fire, a child leaning from a ledge to wave, a pair of apprentices asleep on a pile of coal. The orange light slid across their faces and away. Fel stood at the rail with his hands wrapped around the cold brass and said nothing. Nobody asked him to.

“It is a great deal to be told,” Orrin said at last, gently, “in a single afternoon.”

“I’m fine.”

“You are not fine. You are white as milk.” The Vessarine’s amber eyes were kind. “It is permitted.”

“Five years,” said Fel.

“Five years is a long time.”

“It’s not.” He heard his own voice, hollow and small. “It’s nothing. It’s a handful of winters. I’ve been alive seventeen years, and I don’t remember most of them.” He tightened his grip. “Pim had six.”

Nobody answered that.

Thara, who could be depended upon to fill any silence with the worst possible joke, stood with her hands in her pockets and looked at her boots. Brannoch’s big hand came down on Fel’s shoulder and stayed there, warm and heavy as a saddle. He did not say mm. He did not say anything at all.

“I keep thinking,” Fel said, “that if I’d been stronger. In the Hall. In the village. If the swords had answered, if I’d…” He swallowed. “If I’d been anything. She’d have…”

“Fel.”

It was Veyra.

She had been standing at the far end of the platform, a little apart, with her arms folded and her eyes on the rock sliding past. She crossed the floor now in three quick steps and stopped in front of him, and she did not touch him. She only looked, steadily, with her chin raised.

“Look at me,” she said.

He looked.

“You did not fail her.” The words were quiet and level and each one fell like a stone dropped into still water. “You were a boy with a hole in his belly and two swords you did not understand, and you went into a burning village anyway. Do you know how many people would have done that?”

“I didn’t save…”

“No. You did not. Nor did I.” Her voice cracked and steadied. “I knew every stone of that village, Fel. I had a bow, and a lifetime of training, and I could not save her either. If you want to carry that, you must carry it with me. I will not let you carry it alone and call it your own.”

He could not speak.

“But I will tell you what I know,” said Veyra. “I know that you got up. Every time. That is the only thing about you that I have ever been certain of. You fall, and you get up.” She drew a breath. “So get up again. And let us find out what you are when you have been taught.”

For a moment, the only sound was the groan of the chains.

“All right,” said Fel.

“All right?”

“All right.” He breathed out. “I’ll get up.”

“Good,” said Veyra. And then, because she was Veyra, and because there were three other people watching, she turned abruptly and went to stand at the far rail again, with her ears gone a very faint pink.

“I am going to say nothing,” said Thara.

“Thara,” said four voices.

“Nothing!”

The lift settled to the ground with a long, grinding sigh, and the gate rolled open, and light poured in.

The doors of the Hall of Guilds were the largest Fel had ever seen.

They stood at the very bottom of Karzhul, at the ground level, where the mountain’s black foot sank into the plain, and they were made of a stone so dark and so fine that at first he took them for night. It was granite, or marble, or something older than both, polished to a mirror. Each door was a slab perhaps sixty feet tall. Across both, in a design too vast to see at once, ran carvings in silver inlay: beasts and heroes, swords and stars, and a great winding road that began at the foot of the left door, wandered up and down in a hundred loops, and ended at the foot of the right, under a single bright star. At their center, above the lintel, hung a bell the size of a house.

A thin crowd was passing through a small door cut into the bottom of the right-hand slab. But on this noon, the great doors themselves stood open a hand’s breadth for the new year, and through the gap came a sound like the sea.

“Brace yourselves,” said Thara, and put her shoulder to the nearest door.

It swung back without a creak.

And Fel, who had thought he was beginning to understand the size of the world, stood in the doorway and understood that he had not understood anything at all.

The Hall of Guilds was not a room. It was a country.

The floor was marble, white shot with veins of gold, so wide and so level that it looked like a frozen lake. Pillars rose from it in rows, each one a hundred feet high and carved to look like a giant holding up the sky, so many of them that they dwindled into the distance like trees in an orchard. Between them, hung from the vault on silver chains, floated lanterns of every color, thousands of them, blue and green and rose and amber, so that the whole vast space was washed in a soft drifting rainbow. Far, far overhead, the ceiling was a great dome of dark glass set with stars. Banners hung from every pillar. And along the walls, rank upon rank, in galleries three and four stories high, ran the offices.

There were a hundred of them. More. Each had its own great doorway, with its own banner and its own sign: the Order of the Silver Lantern, the Brotherhood of the Red Spear, the Ashwalkers, the Lorekeepers of the Ninth Page, the Guild of Honest Thieves, the Society of Wandering Bards. Some were no larger than a shop. Some were palaces. And in front of them, on the floor and on the galleries and on the grand marble stair, in a river that never stopped moving, swarmed the people.

Fel had never seen so many.

There were dwarves in plate and dwarves in robes. There were Raskians head and shoulders above the crowd, in furs and in silks; and long-limbed desert folk with veils of green; and a pair of pale silent women who might have been twins, dressed all in white; and a lizard-skinned man carrying a harp the size of a door. There were boys not older than Fel, wearing ill-fitting armor, laughing too loudly. There were old women with scars across their faces and swords as long as their legs. A woman in blue was shouting at a clerk. A man in black was arguing with his own shadow. Two wizards in pointed hats were dueling, politely, with fireworks. At a long table by the nearest pillar, a dozen grim people sat in a circle, drinking from the same enormous pot, and singing about a dragon.

“Five hundred,” breathed Thara.

“More,” said Orrin. “Perhaps six.”

“Five times the guilds,” said Brannoch, slowly. “Mm.”

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

“It’s like looking at an anthill,” said Thara, “if the ants had swords.”

And Fel did not say anything at all, because the crowd had closed over his head.

It happened in the first minute.

They stepped in, and the noise swallowed them, and the river of bodies took hold of them like a current. Someone’s elbow struck his ribs. A giant in bronze plate brushed past, and the pauldron nearly took off his ear. A girl with a cage of finches on her back cut between his legs and Veyra’s. A flood of voices rose up from everywhere at once, offers and curses, prices and names, three gold for the north road, anyone for the Pits, a healer, a healer, we need a healer, and in less than a breath he had lost sight of Brannoch’s antlers, lost Thara’s voice, lost the sound of Orrin’s quiet chime.

He turned in a circle.

There were faces. Hundreds of faces. Thousands. Every one different, every one strange, every one going somewhere. He tried to pick out a color, a shape, a direction, and found that there was none. He stood in the middle of the flood with a sword on each side and his heart going quick and shallow in his chest, and for one terrible moment he felt as he had felt in the clouds above Veilrest, small and lost and very far from home.

I don’t know where to start.

I don’t know who to ask. I don’t know what I’m looking for. I don’t even know…

And then a hand slid into his.

It was not a large hand. It was warm, and slender, and calloused at the fingertips from the string of a bow. It closed around his own, firmly, and drew him a half step sideways, out of the path of a passing cart, and then it did not let go.

He looked up.

Veyra stood in front of him, in the middle of the noise, with the lantern light drifting over her face in slow waves of gold and green. Her braid was coming loose. Her white bow was crooked. She was a little out of breath, and her cheeks were flushed, and she was looking at him, not at the hall, not at the crowds, only at him, with a small, anxious crease between her brows.

And her eyes.

He had seen them a hundred times. He had seen them across a sickbed and across a fire, and through the smoke of a burning house and in the middle of a battle and over the rim of a cup of water at a birthday party. They were violet, the clear cold violet of amethyst held to the sun. But they were not cold now. In the drifting colored light they were warm and deep and impossibly bright, and in them, quite small and quite clear, he saw himself.

The noise went away.

Not all at once. It faded, as a song fades when you walk out of a room, until there was only a murmur, a distant tide, and beneath it the quiet roar of his own pulse. The crowd seemed to slow. The lanterns seemed to hang still. And Fel stood in the greatest hall in the world, with five hundred strangers pressing around him, and the only thing that existed was a pair of eyes.

I saw them cry.

It came to him with the plainness of a thing that had always been true. He had seen them wet and bright in the ruins of Veilrest, in the smoke and the ash. He had seen them brim and spill on a balcony under three moons, over a name she meant to give a daughter. He had seen them shine over a rag doll in a children’s house, and over everything that had ever been taken from her.

I never want to see that again.

He did not know where the thought began. It did not feel like a wish. It did not even feel like a promise. It felt like a law, something cold and bright and fixed that had been laid in the bottom of his chest like the keel of a ship, and everything else he was, everything he had been, rose up around it and took its shape.

Never again. Not for her. Not because of me.

And the very next thing he thought, in a voice so quiet that he almost did not hear it, was the rest.

Find a teacher.

Fix the swords.

Kill the king.

Not in a rage. Not in fire. There was no heat in it at all. It was simply a list, a plain and orderly list, written in a clear hand. A teacher. The swords. The king. A man who had set a village alight with people still inside it. A man who had crucified the elders and left them to the sun. A man who had taken a mother, and a child, and a home, and a girl’s whole childhood, and had thought it a little thing. A man who would do it again, to someone else’s mother, someone else’s child, in someone else’s town, as soon as there was a reason, and who would go on doing it until somebody stopped him.

I will.

He felt the ring in his left palm wake and burn. It did not hurt. It lit up from within, a deep, slow, steady glow, and the heat of it ran up his arm like a river of light.

Whatever it takes.

And he found, standing there with her hand in his, that he knew exactly what that meant.

It meant that he would train until his hands bled, and then train through the blood. It meant he would get up in the dark, every day, before the others woke, and run until his lungs burned, and then run more. It meant he would let himself be beaten, again and again, by teachers who did not care if he wept, and he would get up from the floor and ask for another round. It meant he would learn to hold his breath at the bottom of the sea, and to sit still in a storm, and to feel a hundred needles of pain and let each of them pass through him like wind through an empty house. It meant that if he was told to go down fifty floors, and then fifty more, into the dark where the things made of stone were waiting, he would take a lantern and go. It meant the Realms. It meant the dream-lands, where he would walk alone, with nothing but his name, and call to the ones who had gone, and bear whatever answered. It meant sleepless nights, and cracked ribs, and the long cold hours when his body begged him to stop and his mind would not let him.

It meant that if the road demanded his strength, he would give it. If it demanded his comfort, he would give it. If it demanded his blood, he would pour it out like water; if it demanded the last warm hour of every day for five years, he would hand over those too. He would break himself on the anvil as many times as it took, and rise from every blow harder and truer than before.

He would give all of it.

There was only one thing he would not give. He would not give up.

He had been a boy who fell from the sky. He had been a boy with nothing, no name, no past, no ground beneath his feet. But he had a friend’s hand in his, and a world of people who had taught him how to stand, and a promise lit in his palm like a small sun. And he would not be a boy who fell again.

I will become strong enough, thought Fel, that nobody ever has to cry for me. Or for her. Or for anyone I love.

He looked into those violet eyes, and he held on.

“Fel?” said Veyra. Her voice was soft. A shade uncertain. “Are you well?”

“Yes,” he said.

“You are staring.”

“I know.”

“It is a very large hall.”

“I know.” He smiled. It was a small smile, a little crooked, and it came from somewhere he had not known he still had. “I’m all right. I’m just… I know what I’m going to do.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” said Veyra, and her fingers tightened on his, and the smallest, brightest smile curved her lips. “Then you had better do it.”

They found the others by the stair.

Thara had climbed to the third step and was standing with her hands on her hips, scanning the crowd like a general. Brannoch’s antlers stood out above the heads like a pair of dead trees. Orrin had been caught in a circle of delighted Bards and was being gently interrogated about the tonal structure of Aelun. When they saw Fel and Veyra emerge from the crowd, hand in hand, there was an instant of perfect and terrible silence.

Thara opened her mouth.

“If you say one word,” said Fel.

“I wasn’t going to.”

“You were.”

“I was going to,” said Thara, with dignity, “tell you that I have found the Directory.” She pointed. On a great pillar of white stone beside the stair, a list as tall as three men had been carved in letters of gold, hundreds of lines of it. “A hundred and sixteen guilds. All the masters. All the specialties. Combat, aura, mana, spirit, dream. Every teacher in Dun Vurrim who takes students, with their rank and their fee and their rules.” She grinned. “It has a section called Difficult Cases. I thought of you.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

They stood before the great pillar, all five of them, and read.

It was a staggering list. The names ran on and on, in gold, in silver, in black, with their guilds and their halls and their titles, some of them famous, some of them obscure, some of them marked with small stars. Fel’s eyes slid down them. He did not know a single one. He did not know which of them could teach him to find a ghost in a dream. He did not know which of them would even see him. He was a boy with a sword that wouldn’t answer and a reward on his head.

But he was not afraid.

He was, he realized with a faint sense of surprise, something very close to happy.

“So,” said Brannoch.

Everyone looked at him.

“Where do we start?” said the Oakhorn.

Fel looked up the pillar to the top, where the names ran out into the dome and the painted stars. Behind him, the vast hall roared on, a thousand voices, a thousand quests, a thousand beginnings. Beside him, a small hand rested in his. Before him, in the carved gold, lay the first line of a road.

He drew his breath.

“At the top,” he said.

“The top?”

“I want the best,” said Fel. “I want the best teacher in the world. And if they say no, I’ll ask again. And if they say no again, I’ll ask again. And if they say no a hundred times, I’ll still be standing outside their door in the morning.” He turned to look at them, one by one: the giant, and the thief, and the singer, and the girl with the violet eyes. “Because I’m not going anywhere. And neither are you. Are you?”

“No,” said Veyra.

“Mm,” said Brannoch.

“Obviously,” said Thara.

“I should be honored,” said Orrin.

He nodded. He looked up at the list once more, at the glittering dome, at the thousands of lanterns drifting like slow stars through the dark.

The great bell above the doors began to ring.

It was a deep, slow, magnificent note, and it rolled through the hall like a wave, and every voice in the place, for a moment, fell silent to hear it. It rang for the new year, and for the old dead, and for the long road ahead, and for every boy and girl who had ever stood in a doorway and been afraid.

Somewhere far above them, five floors beneath a king, a smith put down his hammer and listened.

Somewhere high on the left mountain, in a yellow-doored house on a street of soot, a little girl with a rag doll turned her face to the window.

And somewhere very far away, in a country of grey ash and black smoke, where a small hand had once held a spoon, the wind began to blow.

Fel took his first step.

He did not look back. He did not need to. He had everything he needed right there, in his hand and at his side and burning softly in his palm, and the road, at last, was open.

The boy who had fallen from the sky began, at last, to climb.