Distant tales of the Dichotomy

The bell above the great doors was still ringing when Fel realized he had no idea where he was going.

He stood on the white marble of the Hall of a Hundred Guilds with a sword at his hip, a golden saber at his back, and five years pressed against his ribs like a stone in a boot. Behind him the doors stood open on the plain. Ahead of him lay a marble floor as wide as a frozen lake, a forest of carved pillars, and perhaps six hundred strangers, every one of them going somewhere with great determination. Lanterns of blue and rose and amber drifted through the high dark like slow stars. Somewhere in the middle of the din, a man was selling hot chestnuts to a woman in full plate armor.

“Well,” said Thara. “We are in the right place.”

“Are we?”

“There are a hundred guilds, a hundred and sixteen if the pillar is to be believed, and one of them is bound to teach a boy to fix a sword by talking to it.” She rubbed her hands together. “I vote that we pick one at random and start shouting.”

“No,” said Veyra.

“I vote that we pick one at random and start shouting politely.”

“No.”

Veyra had not let go of Fel’s hand since the crowd had swallowed him. She did it so naturally that it took him a moment to notice, and when he did, he felt his ears go warm and said nothing. She was studying the great pillar by the stair, the one carved with gold from floor to dome, and her violet eyes moved down it line by line with the cold, patient attention she gave to a trail in the snow.

“There are too many names,” she said. “We do not know which of these people can teach the thing we need. We do not know which of them would speak to us. And we have a reward on our heads, and half this hall is made of people who like rewards.” She turned. “We should not choose. We should ask.”

“Ask who?”

“The one place in this hall that knows every guild, every master, and every rule.” She lifted her chin toward the center of the floor. “That.”

Fel followed her gaze.

He had taken it for a hill. It sat in the very middle of the Hall, directly beneath the dome, a round hump of stone and brass and green copper so large that the pillars bent around it like courtiers around a throne. Stairs climbed it from every side. Banners hung from its roof. Bells hung from its eaves. Every one of the hundred guild offices along the walls had a road leading to it, a worn white path in the marble, so that the whole floor looked like a wheel and the great round building like its hub.

Above its main door, in letters of beaten bronze, were the words:

GUILD MANAGEMENT OFFICE. ALL THINGS BEGIN AND END HERE. PLEASE TAKE A NUMBER.

“Please take a number,” Fel read. “Is that a threat?”

“It is bureaucracy,” said Orrin, with the calm of one who had seen the Transition Office. “It is worse.”

It was worse.

The Guild Management Office, which everyone in the Hall called the Rotunda, had been built on the principle that any problem could be solved if enough people were made to stand in a circle. Inside, a great round room rose three stories to a dome of colored glass, and the floor was divided into rings like the rings of a target. The outer ring was the waiting ring, a ring of benches where hundreds of people sat holding small brass tokens and staring at a wall of numbers. The middle ring was the paper ring, a ring of desks where clerks stamped, sorted, filed, and occasionally threw things. At the very center, on a raised platform under the dome, stood a great desk of black oak ringed by seven brass cages, and from the cages a rope of pneumatic tubes rose into the ceiling and carried messages away through the building with a sound like the breath of a giant.

A man in a feathered hat was arguing with a clerk about the correct spelling of “Brotherhood.” A woman with a very large axe was crying quietly into a form. Three tired gnomes stood in a line holding a banner that said WE WERE HERE FIRST.

“Take a number,” said a brass automaton at the door, in a voice like a kettle with a grudge, and presented Fel with a small disk stamped 412.

He looked at the wall. The wall said NOW SERVING: 97.

“Oh no,” said Thara.

They waited. It was not a long wait, as such things went. It was only an hour and ten minutes, during which Fel learned a great deal about the Hall of Guilds from the people on the bench beside him. A guild, he learned, was a charter. It was a piece of paper stamped by the Rotunda which said that a certain group of people had the right to take jobs, hold property, train students, and sell what they found. Without it, an adventurer was only a person with a sword. With it, he was a person with a sword and a tax number. Every guild had to be registered here. Every member had to be registered here. A guild could not start without the Rotunda’s stamp, and a member could not join one without it, and a man who lost his stamp had to come back to this room and take a number and wait, which was a thing that people spoke of in lowered voices.

“It sounds like a prison,” Fel whispered.

“It is a prison of rules,” said the old man beside him, wisely. “The only kind that works.”

At last the brass wall rang a bell, and the numbers rolled over, and a clear voice from the center of the room called out:

“Four hundred and twelve! Number four hundred and twelve, please! Is there a four hundred and twelve? Oh, do hurry, I have a kettle on.”

They went forward through the rings.

The voice belonged to a clerk at the third cage of the great black desk. She was not human. She was perhaps four feet and a half tall, with a round, russet-furred face and a white muzzle and enormous dark eyes, and she had two soft round ears edged in white, and a tail so large and so thick and so ringed in red and brown that it took up a good third of her chair. It was a red panda’s tail. It hung over the back of her stool like a ruffled scarf. She wore a green waistcoat with eleven pockets and a pair of spectacles on a ribbon, and she was stamping a document with one paw while eating a small iced bun with the other.

“Beastkin,” Thara murmured. “Red panda. They’re the best clerks in the Realms. It’s the paws. Very precise.”

“Please sit,” said the clerk, without looking up, in a voice as bright and brisk as a bell. “Please do not touch the stamps. Please do not feed the tube. If you are here about a lost registration, I must tell you at once that it is the third window, and if you are here about a fee, it is the fifth, and if you are here to complain about the numbers, I have heard them all.” She finished the bun, licked her whiskers, and looked up. “I am Marigold Tufton, Chief Clerk of the Third Cage. How may the Rotunda assist you on this fine first day of the year?”

She looked at them.

She looked at the five of them for a long, thoughtful moment: the tall girl with the violet eyes and the bow, the goat-horned thief with her hand very near her purse, the great antlered giant, the seven-foot singer with the gold in his face, and the dark-haired boy with two swords who was staring at the pneumatic tubes with his mouth slightly open. Her enormous eyes narrowed. Her ears swiveled. Her tail, slowly, uncurled.

“You are not here about a fee,” she said.

“No,” said Veyra.

“You are not here about a lost stamp.”

“No.”

“You are not here to register a guild, because you do not have the papers, and you would be holding them, and people who are about to register a guild always hold their papers in front of them like a baby.” Marigold propped her chin on her paw. “You are lost. Delightful. I love lost people. Nothing is more rewarding. What can I do for you?”

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“We need a teacher,” said Fel.

Her eyebrows rose.

“For me,” he added. “I have to learn aura. And mana. As much as I can, as fast as I can, from someone who really knows what they are doing. A master smith told me that if I can learn them, I may be able to fix my swords.” He felt foolish. He felt, in this great round echoing room, very young. “I have five years. I don’t have a guild. I don’t have a rank. I only have…”

He stopped. He did not have anything.

“A great deal of courage,” said Marigold Tufton, with a small smile.

“I was going to say a very short deadline.”

“That too.” She reached under the desk and drew out a book. It was a fat green book with brass corners, and it was so heavy that she needed both paws, and when she dropped it on the counter, the stamps jumped. “The Directory of Registered Guilds, Annotated, Fourth Edition. The Rotunda’s own copy, which has the real notes. The ones we do not print.” She licked a finger, turned a page, turned it again, and began to read with a small satisfied hum. “Aura. Mana. Mentorship. Open to students without prior rank. Hm. Hm. Let me see. There are thirty-one guilds that claim to teach aura. Nineteen of them are lying. Nine are not very good. That leaves three.”

“Three?”

“Three that will see you. And I do mean see. The better guilds do not take just anyone. There is a vetting. A little interview with the master.” She tapped the page with a claw. “I will give you their names, and you will go to each of them, and you will be very polite, and you will tell them what you told me. And we will see.”

She took a sheet of cream paper, dipped a pen, and began to write in small neat letters, speaking as she went.

“First. The Quiet Kettle. Fourth Gallery, the green door with the steam. It is a tea guild. Aura through stillness. They hold that power is not made by the fist but by the pot, and that a man who cannot pour a cup without spilling cannot hold a storm. Their Grandmaster is Ottoline Mossback.” The pen paused. “She is a tortoise. A very old one, and a very great one, and you will need an afternoon. Do not rush her. She dislikes that. She dislikes it so much that she once refused a duke for being early.”

“How slow is slow?” said Thara, with dread.

“She is a tortoise, my dear.” Marigold smiled. “Second. The Order of the Luminous Eyebrow. Sixth Gallery, behind the very large lamp. Mana. The finest school of mind-magic in Dun Vurrim, and the pettiest. They believe that a person’s power may be read in their eyebrows, and they have the cheek to prove it. Their master is Archmage Ignatius Prattle.” She leaned forward, and her voice dropped. “He has the best eyebrows in the Realms. They are prodigious. They are said to be able to move independently of one another. I should not stare, if I were you. He notices.”

Orrin made a very small sound in his throat.

“And third.” She turned the page. “The Gilded Peacock Academy. Ninth Gallery, the grand door with the fountain. Aura and blade. Duelists. They are exceedingly good, and they know it, and they will tell you so. Their master is Lord Valentin Brightcrest.” Her lip curled by a hair’s breadth. “He is a peacock, of the beastkin sort. A very handsome one. A very particular one. He has been Master of the Academy for thirty years and has not once been wrong, by his own account.”

“Is he any good?” said Veyra.

“He is the best swordsman who has ever annoyed me.” Marigold handed her the paper. “That is the honest truth. If you can bear him, he can teach. But I will tell you now, as a friend of the Rotunda, that none of them will accept a student on the spot. They are particular. Be kind. Be patient. Be ready to be told no.” She stamped the page with a tiny brass seal shaped like a leaf. “And if all three refuse, come back here. We shall see what else the Rotunda can find.”

“Thank you,” said Fel, and meant it.

“Oh, do not thank me,” said Marigold. “Thank the Directory.” She brushed a crumb from her waistcoat, and turned a bright, hopeful look on the line of petitioners behind them. “Next! Is there a four hundred and thirteen? Oh, good. I do love a gentleman with a form.”

The Quiet Kettle occupied the corner of the Fourth Gallery, behind a green door with a plume of steam curling from the keyhole.

There was a sign on the door. It was a very small sign, hand-lettered in tidy brush strokes, and it said:

PLEASE REMOVE YOUR BOOTS, YOUR WEAPONS, AND YOUR HURRY.

“I can do two of those,” said Thara.

They removed their boots. They removed their weapons, which Fel did with a pang, laying the black sword and the golden saber on a rack beside a great many axes, maces, spears, and one very small, very ornate fork. They did not remove their hurry. But they tried.

Inside, the guildhall was a single room, long and low and very quiet, with floors of woven straw and walls of pale paper screens. Tea steamed from a hundred clay pots on a hundred little braziers. A dozen students in grey robes sat in a row on mats before a long low table. Each of them held a cup. Each of them was staring at it with an expression of terrible concentration. None of them was moving. A bead of tea trembled on the lip of a cup, and a young man in the front row, his whole face shining with sweat, watched it tremble with the grim intensity of a soldier holding a bridge.

“Do not speak,” whispered an attendant, a mouse-eared girl in grey. “They are in the third pour.”

“What is the third pour?” Fel whispered back.

“It is when you realize you have spilled the first two.” The girl bowed. “You may sit. The Grandmaster will see you when the kettle sings.”

They sat. They sat for twenty minutes. Fel had never seen so many people be so quiet. It was not an empty quiet, like the one in the Gorge of Rootknives. It was a full one, like the quiet inside a bell after it has been struck. And slowly, against his will, he felt it settle over him. His shoulders loosened. His breath slowed. The knot in his chest, the one that had been there since Haldor’s smithy, softened a little, and he caught himself thinking, for the first time in days, of nothing at all.

Then the kettle sang.

It was a high thin note, rising from a great black iron pot at the head of the room. And from behind a screen, at a pace so slow and so dignified that Fel at first took it for a trick of the eye, there came the Grandmaster.

She was very small and very old. She was a tortoise beastkin, with a face like a carved walnut, a long wrinkled neck, and a great round domed shell of mottled brown and green that she wore on her back like a house. Moss grew in the cracks of it. A fern had taken root near the top, and she tended it, as one tends a flowerpot, with a small silver watering can that hung from her belt. Her eyes were black and bright and absolutely unhurried. She wore a robe the color of old tea. And in one hand she carried, with extreme care, a single cup.

It took her six minutes to cross the room.

Nobody moved. Nobody breathed. At the three-minute mark, Thara began, silently, to cry. Veyra put a hand on her shoulder. Brannoch, who had the natural patience of a mountain, watched the old woman with something close to love.

At last, the Grandmaster of the Quiet Kettle reached the mat in front of them. She lowered herself, in stages, to her knees. She set down the cup. She folded her hands.

She looked at Fel.

“Good,” she said.

It took a long time. It was a very long “good.” It began somewhere low and rose slowly, like steam, and by the end of it Fel was fairly certain a whole minute had passed.

“Good… afternoon… young… sir,” said the tortoise. “I am… Ottoline… Mossback. I… am… told… that… you… are… looking… for… a… teacher.”

“Yes,” said Fel. “Thank you for seeing…”

“Do… not… interrupt.”

“Sorry.”

“It is… quite… all… right.”

There was a pause of about forty seconds.

“Tell… me,” said Grandmaster Mossback. “Why… do… you… want… to… learn?”

He told her. He told her the short version, as plainly as he could: the swords, the smith, the blades that had gone silent, the five years. He did not tell her about the village. He did not tell her about the king. But something in his voice must have said it anyway, because when he finished, the old woman did not speak for a long time. She looked at him with her bright black eyes. And then, with a slowness so great that it seemed to bend the air, she reached out one wrinkled green hand, and laid it flat against the center of his chest.

Fel held very still.

It was a strange feeling. It was not painful. It was a gentle pressure, as of a stone settling into a pool, and he felt, deep inside him, something stir in response. A warmth. A thin, faint thread of it, like a candle glimpsed through a keyhole. It flickered. It leaned toward her palm.

“Ah,” breathed the Grandmaster.

Nobody in the room dared to speak.

“There… is… a… flame,” she said. “A… small… one. It… is… honest. It… is… stubborn.” She withdrew her hand. “It… is… also… very… ordinary.”

“Ordinary?” said Fel.

“Yes. It… is… the… flame… of… a… boy… of… ordinary… size. Of… ordinary… strength. Of… ordinary… breath.” She sighed, a long drawn-out sigh like a draft under a door. “I… have… taught… for… three… hundred… years. I… have… trained… a… hundred… heroes. A… student… of… the… Kettle… must… carry… a… shell. A… vessel. A… great… deep… cup. A… dragon-blooded… soul. A… giant’s… lung.” Her black eyes were kind. “You… are… a… teacup, young… sir. A… very… fine… one. But… I… cannot… pour… a… lake… into… a… teacup.”

Fel’s mouth had gone dry.

“I… am… sorry,” said Ottoline Mossback.

“That’s… that’s all right,” he said, and his voice cracked.

“It… is… not. But… it… is… true.” She lifted her cup, in stages, and sipped. “Go… with… my… blessing. And… perhaps… another… master… will… see… what… I… cannot.”

“Is there nothing you can…” Veyra began.

“No,” said the Grandmaster, which took, for her, an astonishing fifteen seconds. “I… am… sorry. But… thank… you… for… the… tea.”

“We did not have any tea,” said Thara, faintly.

“No,” agreed the old woman. “That… is… why… it… was… so… good.”

They left.

It was dark in the gallery. The lanterns had been trimmed, and the great Hall below them was turning blue with evening, and the roar of the crowd had thinned to a hum. Fel stood at the stone rail with his boots in his hand and looked down at the white marble and the thousands of tiny, hurrying people.

An ordinary flame.

“She was kind,” said Orrin quietly.

“She was.”

“She was also, I think, wrong.” The Vessarine looked down at him, and the gold in his face moved. “She read the cup. She did not read what was in it.”

“Thank you, Orrin,” said Fel.

“It is only a thing I believe.”

“It is a very good thing to believe.” Fel put his boots on. He stood. He straightened his shoulders, and tied his scabbard back on, and turned toward the long gallery and the next green-and-gold door. “Two more.”

“Two more,” said Veyra, and slipped her hand back into his.