Distant tales of the Dichotomy

The Order of the Luminous Eyebrow kept its guildhall behind a very large lamp.

It was, in fairness, a remarkable lamp. It stood in the Sixth Gallery on a plinth of black marble, taller than two men, a great brass-and-crystal thing shaped like a flame, and it had been lit for four hundred years. Nobody could say why. A little brass plaque at its foot read THE LAMP OF ATTENTION. IT IS LOOKING AT YOU. Fel, who had read many signs that day, decided that this was the first one he believed.

The door behind the lamp was tall and narrow and carved with a pair of eyes. Over each eye, in sweeping curves of gold inlay, arched an eyebrow. Beneath the eyes, on a small brass tablet, someone had engraved the guild’s motto:

WHAT THE MIND CANNOT SAY, THE BROW WILL.

“I have a very bad feeling,” said Thara.

“It is only a school,” said Veyra.

“It is a school with an eyebrow on the door.”

They knocked. The door swung inward on silent hinges, and a young man in a long violet robe stepped out of the dark with a pair of brass calipers in one hand and a notebook in the other. He had a pleasant, anxious face. He had, Fel could not help noticing, a very neat, very carefully groomed pair of eyebrows, each trimmed to an exact and identical arch.

“Good evening,” said the young man. “Visitors? Prospective students? Please hold still.”

He raised the calipers. Before anyone could object, he measured the distance between Fel’s brow and the bridge of his nose, wrote down a number, measured the other side, wrote down a second number, and frowned.

“Symmetrical,” he murmured. “Slightly low-set. A very average curve.” He looked up and brightened. “Do not be discouraged! Many great mages began with ordinary arches. The Master will see you now. He is in the Hall of Reflection. Please do not speak to the Hall.”

“Why not?” said Fel.

“It answers,” said the young man darkly.

The Hall of Reflection was a round, dim chamber lined with mirrors, and every mirror was hung with a different kind of eyebrow. There were bushy ones and thin ones, white ones and red ones, a grey pair of wild bristles mounted on a plaque as though they were hunting trophies. Students in violet robes sat cross-legged in a ring on the floor, with their eyes closed, and each of them was slowly raising one brow, and then the other, and then both together, with a look of agonized concentration.

In the very center of the ring, on a high-backed chair of ebony, sat the Archmage.

He was a thin, stooped, impossibly dignified old man in a robe of deep violet silk, with a white beard trimmed to a point and a nose like the prow of a ship. His eyes were pale and sharp. And over them, spreading across his forehead like two great white thunderclouds, lay the finest pair of eyebrows Fel had ever seen.

They were enormous. They were wild, luxuriant, snowy, and they moved. They moved independently. As the party came in, the left one rose by a quarter inch, as though to say ah, while the right drooped a little, as though to say oh dear, and then both swung together in a slow, magnificent arch, like the wings of a great bird.

“Welcome,” said Archmage Ignatius Prattle, in a voice like a cello. “I am told you seek the way of the Mind.”

“We seek,” said Fel carefully, “a teacher of mana.”

“Mana,” said the Archmage, and his left brow lifted so high it nearly left his face. “A crude word. A common word. We prefer the Inner Weather.” He steepled his fingers. “Come closer, boy. Let me see your brow.”

Fel came closer.

The Archmage leaned forward. He studied Fel’s forehead for a long time with a perfectly serious expression. His brows moved, one at a time, in subtle tilts and twitches, like two cats communicating across a room. The students in the ring held their breath. A drop of sweat rolled down the nose of the youngest.

“Hm,” said Ignatius Prattle.

“Is it bad?” said Fel.

“It is flat.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The brow is a window on the weather within, boy. A mage of great reservoirs has a restless forehead. It rolls. It flickers. It broods. Yours…” He sighed, and both great eyebrows sank in a single drooping curve of sorrow. “Yours is calm. It is the forehead of a puddle. A clear, sweet, honest puddle, but a puddle all the same.”

“A puddle,” said Thara, delighted.

“I do not say it unkindly. A puddle may be perfectly happy.” The Archmage turned his gaze from Fel and swept it across the group with the air of a man doing sums. “The giant, now. The giant has a good deal of weather, but it is all in the shoulders. The thief has a very lively brow, though she uses it mostly to deceive. The girl…” One brow rose. “The girl has been training. I see it. A very disciplined forehead. But she wants no teacher, I think, and so I shall say no more.”

“And me?” said Orrin, with great politeness.

The Archmage turned.

The Vessarine stood a head and a half taller than anyone in the room, with the gold-lit lines of his face moving softly like water seen from below, and a crest of glass for hair. And he had, as he had always had, no eyebrows at all.

The Archmage stared.

His left eyebrow rose. His right eyebrow rose. Both rose together, and kept rising, slowly, until Fel was afraid they would leave the Archmage’s face altogether and float up to the ceiling.

“None,” whispered the Archmage. “He has none. Not one hair. He speaks, and he feels, and he commands the weather of the whole world with no brow at all.” He half rose from his chair. His students gasped. “It is not possible. It cannot be done. How do you communicate?”

“I sing,” said Orrin.

“He sings.” The Archmage sank back, and put a hand over his heart. “Forgive me. I have taught the Brow for sixty years, and it has not once occurred to me that a person might be fluent in the Inner Weather without it. I must lie down. I must… no. No, I must finish. I have a student to see.” He drew himself up, and both brows settled into a stern and level line, and he turned to Fel with a heavy kindness.

“I will not take you, boy.”

“Why not?”

“Because you are, as a matter of plain fact, ordinary. You have no particular gift for the mind. You have no ancient blood that I can see. You are a human of regular height and regular build with regular, if admirable, hair. Your brow is a puddle. And you carry two swords, which are, I am told, merely swords.” He raised a hand before Fel could speak. “I am not saying that you cannot learn. Anyone can learn. I am saying that I cannot teach you enough, in five years, to matter. My school is for those who have the Weather already. I would only be wasting your time. And, I confess, a little of mine.”

“I see,” said Fel.

His voice was steady. It was a point of pride. But something small inside him had gone out like a lamp.

“Do not look so downcast,” said the Archmage, a little more gently. “The world is full of schools. And I should be delighted to see you again, should you ever find your brow has developed some character.” He gave a slow, magnificent wink with one eyebrow. “Good evening.”

“Thank you, Archmage,” said Veyra, with such flat, level politeness that three of the students flinched.

They went out into the dark gallery. The very large lamp watched them go.

“A puddle,” said Thara, after a long moment, and her voice shook.

“If you laugh,” said Fel, “I will…”

“I am not laughing. I am dying.” She wiped her eyes. “It is the best thing anyone has said all day. A clear, sweet, honest puddle!”

And in spite of everything, Fel began to laugh too.

The Gilded Peacock Academy was not hard to find. It announced itself.

It announced itself from the end of the Ninth Gallery, where a wide stair of white marble climbed to a pair of golden doors thirty feet high, and in front of the doors, in a basin of green stone, a fountain threw up plumes of colored water that caught the lanterns and flashed turquoise, emerald, and sapphire. A statue stood in the center of the fountain. It was a bronze statue of a man in a magnificent coat with a rapier raised to the sky, and it was posed with such dramatic grace that it looked as though somebody had just whispered a hero. A brass plate read: THE MASTER, AT FORTY. (HE IS BETTER NOW.)

“I like him already,” said Thara, with perfect sincerity.

The golden doors opened before they touched them.

A line of students in white-and-teal uniforms stood in two ranks on either side of a long, polished hall, their rapiers drawn and crossed overhead to make an arch of steel. They did not look at the visitors. They looked straight ahead with the fixed, glassy pride of young people who have been told they are the best, and at the far end of the hall, on a dais, in a chair carved to look like a peacock’s open fan, sat the Master of the Academy.

He rose as they approached. It was a long, graceful, practiced rise, like an actor stepping into a spotlight.

He was a tall man, thin and straight and extremely handsome, with a narrow aristocratic face, a hooked nose, and a sweep of blue-black hair brushed back from his brow. His skin had a faint teal sheen. His coat was a work of art, deep blue silk shot through with green and gold, cut so sharply that it seemed to be holding a posture of its own. And from his shoulders, spreading out behind him in a vast, shimmering, jewel-eyed fan, rose a magnificent train of peacock feathers, each tipped with an eye of blue and green and bronze, each trembling very slightly in the air.

He was the most beautiful man Fel had ever seen. He knew it, too. It was in every inch of him.

“Welcome,” said Lord Valentin Brightcrest, “to the Academy.”

He had a voice like polished brass. He bowed, with a great flourish of one hand, and the feathers swayed behind him like a tide. “I trust you were not troubled by the fountain. It is a little much, I know. I have asked the Council to tone it down for twelve years, and each time they remind me that I paid for it.” He smiled, a brilliant, well-practiced smile, and his gaze swept past Fel and Thara and Brannoch and Orrin and landed, quite distinctly, on Veyra.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

It stayed there.

“And you,” said the Master. “You are Ilvari.”

“I am,” said Veyra.

“A daughter of the horned hills. A huntress.” His smile deepened. He took a step closer. The feathers rustled. “I have not seen a bow carried with such grace in all my years. And that braid. And those eyes.” He pressed a hand to his chest. “Forgive me. I am a connoisseur of beauty, and it overtakes me. Tell me, my lady, what do they call you?”

“Veyra,” said Veyra, without warmth.

“Veyra.” He rolled it over his tongue. “A lovely name. And what brings you to my humble Academy?”

“My friend seeks a teacher,” said Veyra. “Of aura. Of the blade.” She lifted her chin toward Fel. “This is he.”

Valentin Brightcrest looked at Fel.

It was a quick look. It was a look that began at the boy’s scuffed boots, climbed his plain brown coat, took in the two swords, and moved on to the face in a single appraising sweep, as a man might glance at a coat rack. One sculpted eyebrow rose. A single feather in his train gave a small, disdainful flick.

“Ah,” he said. “Yes. A boy.”

“I’m Fel.”

“Of course you are.” He did not look at him again. “And which of your companions is the gentleman who keeps the horses?”

“Pardon?” said Brannoch.

“Never mind.” The Master waved a hand. “Come, come. Tell me what you can do, young man. Show me your guard.”

Fel drew Falling Star. He had not meant to. But the line of students had gone silent, and the Master was watching, and so he held the blade up in the first stance Gideon had ever taught him, low and wide, with the point toward the floor.

There was a long, ringing pause.

“Hm,” said Valentin Brightcrest.

He stepped forward. He took Fel’s wrist, very lightly, between two long fingers, and turned it a quarter turn. He tapped the back of the boy’s knee. He prodded his shoulder. He made a small tsk, like a man examining a wilting plant. Then he stepped back, and pursed his lips, and with great delicacy said:

“It is a workmanlike stance.”

“Thank you.”

“It is not a compliment.” He turned to the line of students, and his feathers spread. “Observe, my darlings! The common guard! A sturdy, serviceable, entirely peasant posture, hammered into a boy by a man who plainly never once held a rapier. He will survive, perhaps, against a drunkard in an alley. And he is very probably brave.” His voice rang through the hall. “But he has no line. He has no fire. He has no natural grace. He is a boy of ordinary build, ordinary height, ordinary reach, with a pair of ordinary swords.”

“They are not ordinary,” said Veyra.

“They are swords, my lady.”

“They are very good swords,” said Fel, stubbornly.

“I do not doubt it.” Valentin sighed, and glanced down his nose at them with the long-suffering pity of a man forced to inspect a damp cellar. “But a sword is only a sword. A very fine blade in an ordinary hand is a very fine ordinary blade. I have trained one hundred and forty-three champions. Not one of them was ordinary. I could not make a champion of this boy in fifty years, and I am a magnificent teacher.” He bowed shallowly, a dismissal. “I wish you luck. Truly. Some people are born to be heroes, and some to carry their bags. I am sure it is a perfectly respectable life.”

Fel said nothing. Behind him, he felt the silence of his friends go hard as iron.

“But you,” said Valentin Brightcrest.

He turned to Veyra.

He did it with a whole new face. The disdain dropped from him like a cloak, and in its place was a smile so warm and so rich and so eager that Fel half expected the feathers to begin to glow.

“Lady Veyra,” said the Master. “I would be honored to have you at the Academy.”

Veyra blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“You are a natural. Do not deny it. I saw it the moment you walked in. Your balance, your carriage, your hunter’s economy.” He swept a hand toward the line of students. “I have thirty rooms in the east wing with a view of the fountain. I would give you the finest, at no charge. I would teach you the Peacock Cascade, which I have never taught outside the Academy. Within a year, I could make you the foremost duelist in Dun Vurrim.” He lowered his voice, confidingly. “And frankly, my dear, you are wasted on these people.”

The Hall was very quiet.

“I beg your pardon?” said Veyra again.

“A thief.” He did not look at Thara. “A great beast.” He did not look at Brannoch. “A singer with a face like a lamp, who I do not doubt is very pleasant at parties. And a boy.” His voice dropped to a whisper of theatrical sympathy. “They are, I am sorry to say, losers, my dear. Hangers-on. Low company. A woman of your beauty, your lineage, your refinement, ought not to be seen with such people. They will drag you down. They will bring you nothing but grief.” He put out a hand, palm up, and smiled with the radiant confidence of a man who has never been refused. “Come. Leave them. Let me give you the life that you deserve.”

Nobody moved.

Fel was aware of his own hands. He was aware that he had curled them into fists, and that his knuckles were white, and that something very dark and very hot had begun to rise in his chest like a kettle on the boil. He was aware that Thara had quietly drawn a hatchet. He was aware of Brannoch’s great slow breath. And he was aware, with total clarity, of Veyra.

She looked at the offered hand. She looked at the smile. She looked, for a long moment, at the beautiful, perfect, shining face of the Master of the Gilded Peacock Academy.

Then she slapped him.

It was not a gentle slap. It was a clean, flat, ringing crack, like a plank dropped on a flagstone, and it echoed from the golden doors to the dais. Valentin Brightcrest’s head turned a full quarter circle. His feathers flared. A pair of students dropped their rapiers with a clatter. And for one long suspended instant the Master stood with his hand frozen in the air and a vivid pink handprint rising on his teal cheek, quite unable to believe that it had happened.

And Veyra laughed.

It was a real laugh. It came from deep inside her, bright and helpless and clear, the laugh of a woman who has been waiting a long time for a very good joke. She put a hand against the wall. She wiped her eyes. She laughed until she had to bend over, and the line of students stared in horror, and Thara began to wheeze.

“Oh,” said Veyra. “Oh, that was wonderful. Forgive me. I am sorry. It is only…” She straightened, and looked at him, and her violet eyes were bright with laughter and something much colder. “My lord. I have known these people for a very short time. One of them stood beside me in a burning village. One of them has carried a wounded stranger across half a kingdom. One of them sings me to sleep when the dreams are bad, and one of them…” Her voice caught, very slightly, and held. “One of them is the best person I have ever met. I would take any single one of them over every feather on your back.”

“My lady,” Valentin began, in a strangled voice.

“No,” said Veyra pleasantly. “Thank you. I shall decline your offer. And I wish you luck with your fountain.”

She took Fel’s hand. She turned. And, with the whole Gilded Peacock Academy watching in total, horrified silence, she walked out of the hall, down the long avenue of crossed swords, and through the golden doors.

They made it as far as the fountain.

Then Thara sat down on the lip of the basin and laughed until she cried.

“Three,” said Fel, much later.

They were sitting on a bench in the lower gallery under a dim lantern. The Hall below was almost empty now, a vast dark marble lake with a few scattered lamps, and the great bell had long since rung the last hour of the day. Thara had stopped laughing. Brannoch had produced a large flat loaf from somewhere in his coat and was dividing it solemnly into five.

“Three no’s,” said Fel. “In one day. A tortoise, an eyebrow, and a peacock.”

“It is not so bad,” said Orrin. “It is a respectable start.”

“It’s a respectable disaster.”

“It has, at least, been educational,” said Veyra, and gave him a small tired smile. She was leaning against his shoulder. She had been, he realized, for some time. “We have learned that the best teachers in the Hall do not want a boy of ordinary strength. We have learned that I may slap a duelist and the sky does not fall.”

“You made a man cry.”

“I did not make him cry.”

“He had a feather in his eye.”

“That was not tears. That was dust.”

Brannoch handed round the bread. They ate. It was the first food any of them had had since the morning, and it was warm and plain and good, and slowly the cold bitter knot in Fel’s chest began to ease.

“We should go to the Pits,” said Thara, around a mouthful.

Everyone looked at her.

“What? It is perfectly logical. A tortoise says no. A peacock says no. A man with a forest on his face says no. Fine. We cannot get a teacher today. But we have another problem, which is Orrin’s staff, and the smith said it needs a heart from a crystal monster below the fiftieth floor. So! We go down. We start climbing… descending, I mean. We kill things. We level up. We learn by doing, like normal people.” She spread her hands. “Fel does not need a master. Fel needs a hundred floors of angry rocks.”

“That is,” said Veyra slowly, “not the worst idea I have heard today.”

“It is the best idea I have heard today.”

“It is the only idea we have heard today.”

“It is therefore the best.”

It was dark by the time they reached the right mountain.

They went by the Iron Pass, the second great bridge, a road of black-glass arches that ran from the foot of Karzhul to the fortress on its right. It was nothing like the first. There were no inlays of silver, no inscriptions, no gardens. There was only a long grim road lit by torches and thick with soldiers, and at the end of it a gate of black iron forty feet high, studded with spikes, with a pair of enormous braziers burning at either side. Beyond the gate, the ground fell away into a great black throat of a cavern. Warm wind rose out of it. It smelled of old fire. It carried, faintly, a sound that Fel could not name, a deep and sleepy and distant grinding, like the turning of a mill very far under the world.

The Pits of Rising Ashes.

He felt the ring in his palm give a single slow pulse.

A dwarf in a steel cap stepped out of the shadow beside the gate. He was short and square and bearded, and he wore a sergeant’s badge on his breastplate and the expression of a man who has said the same sentence ten thousand times. He held up a gauntleted hand.

“Evening, travelers,” said the sergeant. “Where’s your charter?”

“Our what?” said Fel.

“Your guild charter. Stamped. With the seal of the Rotunda.” He tapped his breastplate. “Nobody goes through this gate without one. Not for a sightsee, not for a stroll, not for a little rock-hunt on the first floor. It’s the law.”

“We are a… we are independent,” said Thara. “We are travelers of a very free and adventurous sort.”

“Then you’re trespassers.”

“We wish only to descend a little.”

“And I wish for a pony.” The sergeant folded his arms. “Look. I’m sorry. I know you’re keen. They always are. But the Crown buys what comes up out of that hole, and the Crown only buys from chartered guilds. Anything you carry out, anything you kill, anything you pick up off the floor, it’s got to be on a manifest, with a guild stamp, or it’s contraband. And the penalty for contraband in the Pits is…” He winced. “It is not pleasant. It involves a very long conversation with a very unfriendly magistrate.”

“We do not want to sell anything,” said Veyra. “We only wish to go in.”

“Not without a charter.” He shook his head. “I’m not being difficult, miss. I’ve seen what comes out of the lower floors when people go in unregistered. We find them in the Spill, sometimes. When there’s enough of them left to find.” He paused. “Get a guild. Come back. I’ll wave you through with a smile.”

They stood in the red light of the braziers.

“How do we get a guild?” said Fel slowly.

“You go to the Rotunda, son,” said the sergeant. “Where else?”

The Rotunda did not close.

It had not closed, said a sleepy brass automaton, in nine hundred years. It had merely dimmed. The great round room was lit now by a few low lamps, and the benches in the waiting ring were mostly empty, apart from a handful of snoring petitioners and one extremely determined gnome who was eating a sandwich directly beneath the NOW SERVING sign. But at the black desk under the dome, in the third cage, a small round figure with a very large tail was stamping a stack of documents, and as they came in she looked up, and her ears went straight up.

“Oh!” said Marigold Tufton. “You are back! Already! Was it the peacock? It was the peacock.”

“It was all three,” said Veyra.

“Oh, my dears.” She took off her spectacles, and set them on the counter, and looked at them with such immediate and total sympathy that Fel felt, absurdly, as though he might cry. “Sit down. Sit. Have a biscuit. They are not very good, but they are warm. Tell me everything.”

They told her.

She listened to the whole thing, with her chin on her paw and her tail curled around the leg of her stool, and when Thara reached the part about the puddle, she made a small strangled sound into a biscuit, and when Veyra reached the slap, she put her face in both paws and shook with silent laughter for a very long time.

“I have wanted to do that for thirty years,” she gasped at last. “Thirty years! Oh, thank you. That is the happiest thing I have heard since Tuesday.” She wiped her eyes with a sleeve. “And then you went to the Pits, and they sent you back, and now you want a guild.”

“Yes,” said Fel.

“Of your own.”

“If that’s what it takes.”

“Ah.” The clerk sat back. “Well. Then I must tell you the rules. They are not very nice. I am sorry.” She drew a fresh sheet of paper toward her and began to write, speaking as she did. “To found a guild in Dun Vurrim, you need three things. A name. A charter fee, which is not so bad, a few hundred glims. And a Guild Master.”

“We can be the guild master,” said Thara. “Me. I will do it. I am excellent at paperwork.”

“You are a thief, my dear.”

“I am a talented thief.”

“The Guild Master,” said Marigold, patiently, “must hold a rank. The Rotunda recognizes eight. Copper, Iron, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Mythril, and Sovereign. Each has three tiers, with the third the lowest and the first the highest. To be a Guild Master in Dun Vurrim, you must hold at least Gold, First Tier.” She looked up. “Which, I should say, is quite high. There are perhaps four hundred in the whole city.”

The silence stretched.

“None of us,” said Fel slowly, “has a rank.”

“I know.”

“None of us has ever been in a guild.”

“I know, dear.”

“Not even Copper?”

“Not even Copper.” She put down the pen. “You would have to climb the whole ladder. Copper, Iron, Silver, and then Gold. And to climb it, you would have to take jobs, and to take jobs, you must belong to a guild.” She spread her paws. “I am sorry. It is the oldest trick in the Rotunda. You cannot find a guild without a master, and you cannot be a master without a rank, and you cannot get a rank without a guild. It is a lovely circle. We are very proud of it.”

Fel put his face in his hands.

“Oh, my dear,” said Marigold gently. “Do not despair. There are ways. It is only that none of them is quick.” She looked around, and lowered her voice. “I will tell you what I tell everyone in your position. Go and have a drink. Sit. Think. There is a very good tavern attached to the Rotunda, through that arch. The Stamped Tankard. It has been serving people just like you for six hundred years, and a surprising number of them have found something. Ideas come easily when you are sitting down.”

“I don’t drink,” said Fel, from behind his fingers.

“Then have the soup,” said Marigold. “It is excellent.”

They went through the arch.