Distant tales of the Dichotomy

The Stamped Tankard was the only tavern in the Realms where the furniture had been audited.

Every table had a brass number riveted to its edge. Every chair had a small tin tag that read PROPERTY OF THE ROTUNDA. DO NOT STAND ON. The ceiling beams were hung with thousands of old rubber stamps, which had been retired from service and hung by their handles, and when the wind came through the arch they clinked together like a great forest of wooden chimes. Behind the long bar, a stout dwarven woman in a leather apron was filling mugs from a row of taps, each labeled with a guild’s name. Behind her, a chalk board listed the soup of the day, which was lentil, and the penalty for lying about the soup, which was a fine of two glims and a stern look.

It was nearly empty. A few tired clerks nursed late drinks by the fire. A pair of wizards were playing chess with salt cellars. In the corner, on a wide bench beneath the largest window, a man was lying on his back with his boots up on a table and an empty bottle for a pillow, snoring in a deep rolling rumble that made the nearest candle flame lean away.

They took the round table by the hearth.

“We can’t climb the ladder,” said Fel.

He had said it to the soup, which had come, and which was, as promised, very good. It was thick and yellow and peppery, with a heel of dark bread floating on top, and he had eaten half of it before realizing he had been talking to it for several minutes. “We can’t join a guild without a master. We can’t get a master without a rank. We can’t get a rank without a guild. It’s a circle.”

“All circles have a door,” said Orrin.

“Do they?”

“In my experience.” The Vessarine stirred his tea with a long finger, and the gold in his face rippled. “There must be someone in this city who already holds the rank. A retired adventurer, perhaps. A master with no guild. A man who would be willing to lend his name for a share of the profits.”

“A tier one gold,” said Thara. “Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. I could steal one.”

“You cannot steal a person.”

“You could borrow a person.”

“I am not going to listen to this,” said Veyra.

“A Gold goes for a few thousand glims, I hear, if we are talking about a person’s worth.” Thara leaned in, with her eyes sparkling. “I am only saying that a clever girl with a lantern and a forged letter of introduction could convince a very junior Gold to sign for us, and we would never have to…”

“Gold?” said a voice behind them.

It was a slurred, rumbling, wet voice, rich as old leather. It had a great deal of gravel in it, and a great deal of drink. They turned.

The man on the bench had sat up.

He was an enormous man. Even slouched, even swaying, even with one boot on the floor and one on the table and a look on his face like a bear woken in the middle of winter, he was a head taller than Brannoch’s shoulder. He was a Raskian, old and heavy and weathered, with skin the color of tarnished bronze, a broad broken nose, and a grey beard braided with beads and sodden with soup. He wore a long brown coat patched at both elbows. Its pockets bulged with bottles. His hair stuck out in tufts. One of his ears had lost its rim, and his eyes were red and heavy-lidded and as bright as a wolf’s. He held an empty bottle by its neck and regarded it with deep suspicion.

“Gold,” he said again, and hiccuped. “Pah. Gold. Did I hear a child say Gold, like it was a rank?”

“We were speaking in private, sir,” said Veyra coolly.

“Were you?” He put the bottle down with enormous dignity. It missed the table by three inches, and he and the bottle watched it fall. “Well. That’s a shame. Because I have opinions.”

“I am sure that you do.”

“I do! I have had a very long life and I have developed a great many.” He squinted at them. “You’re lost. All five. I can smell it. You smell of new boots and old fear. You’re wandering about my tavern asking about Gold tiers, like Gold’s worth something. It’s not. It’s a rank for people who haven’t been brave enough to try for the next one.” He belched. “Forgive me. It’s the soup.”

“Sir,” said Fel, “I think you’ve had a lot to…”

“I have had a lot. I have had a tremendous amount. It is a hard life.” The man waved a vast hand. “Let me tell you what a rank is. A rank is a number. It’s a number on a slip of paper. Do you know how many people in this city hold a Gold, tier one, and wouldn’t know which end of the sword to hold? Forty. I’ve counted. I have dinner with them.” He pointed a thick finger at the ceiling. “A real rank is something you earn. You earn it in the dark. In a place with no stamps. With a staff in your hand and a friend behind you and a very large number of things trying to eat you.”

“That’s very interesting,” said Fel politely.

“It is not interesting. It is the truth.” He drew himself up, with some difficulty, to the full majestic height of a man at the end of a long evening, and the entire tavern, which had been gradually going quiet, went silent. The chess players stopped. The dwarven barmaid put down a tankard. And the man placed a hand against his chest, and in a voice that suddenly carried to every corner of the room, he said:

“I once held the rank of Diamond.”

Nobody said anything.

“First Tier,” he added, with a small pleased nod. “Two whole steps above your Gold. Third highest in the whole of the Realms. There are only twenty-two people who have ever reached it. I was number nineteen.” He swayed. “I was young. I was magnificent. I once stood in the Gate of Brass for nine days and nine nights with a broken leg and a bad stomach, and I did not let a single thing past. I put a dragon on its back with a handshake. They wrote six songs about me. Two of them were polite.”

“Of course you did,” said Thara.

“I did!” He frowned. “You do not believe me.”

“I do not believe you.”

“No one does. They never do.” He sighed, and a great gust of sour breath rolled over the table. “They look at me, and they see an old man on a bench with soup in his beard. They don’t see the Anchor. They’ve forgotten. It has been such a long time.” He waved a hand, and then, with sudden, startling formality, straightened his coat, and placed one fist against his heart, and bowed.

“Torren Ballast,” he said. “Diamond, First Tier. Anchor of the Gate of Brass. At your service, for what it’s worth.”

For a moment, there was a deep and absolute silence.

Then Thara, very slowly, put down her spoon.

“Torren Ballast,” she said.

“The very same.”

“The Torren Ballast. Of the Gate of Brass. Of the Nine Days.” Her voice had gone thin. “The Anchor. The man they said could fall off a mountain and bring it with him.”

“I never said that,” said Torren, flattered.

“The one who stopped the Tide of Bone at Garrow Fell by standing in a doorway.”

“It was a very wide doorway.”

“That is not you,” said Thara. “That can’t be you. That man would be, he would be…” She waved a hand at the soup-stained coat and the empty bottles. “That man would not be asleep on a bench. In a tavern. In a Rotunda. That man would be in a statue.”

“Oh, there is a statue,” said Torren. “It’s in the Lower Square. They made me look very thin.”

“I have heard a song about the Anchor,” said Orrin faintly. “It has nine verses. The last one is very sad.”

“That’s the one about my knee.”

“It is about a knee!” cried Orrin.

“It was a very good knee.”

“He is lying,” said Veyra, flatly. “He is drunk. He has heard of Torren Ballast, as we have, and is playing on our credulity for the price of a drink.” She turned a cold gaze on the man. “I am sorry, sir. I do not mean to be unkind. But a man who was the Anchor of the Gate of Brass would not need to ask five strangers for soup.”

“I didn’t ask for soup. I had soup before you came.” Torren looked hurt. “But I see how it is. You doubt me. You are a sensible girl, I like that. You look at the evidence, and the evidence says: an old, fat, soup-stained Raskian with a bad liver and a worse hat.” He nodded slowly, and rubbed his jaw. “Very well. You do not believe me. Then let me show you.”

“Show us?”

“I’ll duel you.” He grinned. It was a huge, crooked, happy grin, full of broken teeth, and it transformed the whole of his battered face. “All of you. Together. In the arena next door. The practice ring, the little one with the sand, you can’t miss it, it smells of feet. Come on, come on, all five. I’ll even let you use your weapons.”

“This is absurd,” said Veyra.

“A wager,” said Torren.

His voice had changed. It had not got any quieter, but something under it had settled, gone slow and deep and hard, like a stone sinking in a river. His red eyes, for a moment, were clear.

“Here is my wager,” he said. “If any one of you can put me on my back, or push me from the ring, or even make me step out of the circle, I’ll be your Guild Master. Stamped, signed, sealed. I’ll hold the rank. I’ll hold the charter. I’ll take the fee out of my own purse, and I’ll teach the boy what he needs to know, whatever it is, for as long as it takes.” He raised one thick finger. “And if I win, you’re mine.”

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“Yours?” said Fel.

“My students.” He grinned. “And my lackeys. Mostly lackeys. I have bottles to be carried, and a staff to be polished, and a very large number of stairs that I’d like never to climb again.”

For a long moment, none of them spoke.

It was the sort of thing that a sensible person would turn down. Fel knew that. There was no way for it to end except in a dozen different kinds of embarrassment. A drunk old man, a bet, a sandy pit that smelled of feet. If he was lying, they would waste an evening. If he was telling the truth…

He thought of Haldor’s brass eyes. Look for someone who truly knows what they’re doing.

He looked at the old man. At the bottles. At the stained coat. And at the hands, which were big and slow and covered in white scars, and which had not, in all that time, once so much as trembled.

“If you win,” said Fel, “we’re your lackeys.”

“Fel,” said Veyra.

“If we win,” said Fel, “you’re our Guild Master.”

“Fel.”

“It’s a good bet,” said Fel quietly. “Look at his hands.”

She looked.

“Oh,” she said, after a moment. “Oh, bother.”

“Done!” roared Torren Ballast, and brought his fist down on the table so hard that every bowl in the room jumped a full inch into the air and came down again, intact, without spilling a drop. The bartender, who had been watching in silence, began slowly to clap.

The practice arena was a round pit forty feet across, sunk into the Hall floor beside the Rotunda. Its walls were stone, scorched and gouged and pocked with a thousand years of bad ideas. Its floor was a ring of raked white sand. Above it, on a ring of steps that circled the pit like a theater, a growing crowd of guildsmen, clerks, and sleepless drunks was settling in with mugs and sandwiches and a great deal of whispered speculation.

“Who’s the old one?”

“Someone said Ballast.”

“Ballast? Don’t be daft. Ballast’s been dead for twenty years.”

“He’s not dead. He’s asleep. There’s a difference.”

“Which one’s the boy?”

“The one with the sword.”

“Which sword?”

“Both.”

Marigold Tufton arrived at a trot, in her green waistcoat, carrying a brass stamp, a bottle of ink, and a roll of cream paper. She had changed her spectacles. She looked flushed and happy and a little breathless. “I am the witness,” she announced. “The Rotunda is a notary in matters of wagers. If you please, sir.” She held out a pen to Torren, who signed with an enormous looping flourish. She turned to Fel. “And you, dear. Here. And here. And here.”

He signed.

She stamped it. It made a very small, very final sound.

“No killing,” said Marigold. “No maiming. No permanent damage to the ring. If either party yields, the bout is ended. And please,” she added, to the crowd, “do try not to bleed on the sand. It is very hard to rake.”

She withdrew to the edge of the steps.

Torren Ballast stood in the center of the ring.

He had taken off his coat. He wore a loose grey shirt, patched breeches, and bare feet, and he looked, somehow, less like a drunk than a mountain that had been persuaded to put on clothes. His arms were enormous. They were thick and ropey and covered in old scars, the arms of a man who had spent forty years doing exactly one thing. Across his back, he carried a weapon.

It was not like any weapon Fel had ever seen. It was a staff of dark iron, seven feet long and as thick as a wrist, plain and unadorned, and at each end, fixed to the shaft with a heavy iron collar, sat a ball. They were solid. They were the size of a man’s head, black and dull, scarred by a thousand impacts. It looked less like a staff than a barbell for a giant. Fel could not imagine lifting it. He could not imagine, honestly, picking up one end.

Torren swung it off his back with one hand, as if it weighed nothing, and let it rest across his shoulders. He yawned.

“This is Maude,” he said. “Say hello, Maude.”

The staff said nothing.

“She’s shy.” He scratched his beard. “Right. Rules. I will not use my gift until I touch you. That is the sporting thing. If I haven’t laid a hand on you, or Maude hasn’t, I’ll fight like a normal drunk man, and you can have a very good time. But the moment I touch you, my dears, the game changes.” He grinned. “Everybody ready?”

“What gift?” said Fel.

“You’ll see.”

“What is your…”

“Begin,” cried Marigold.

For the first ten seconds, nothing happened.

Fel stood in the sand with Falling Star in his right hand and Krashing Fyr in his left. Beside him, Veyra had her bow drawn and an arrow nocked. Thara had slid sideways into the shadow of the wall. Brannoch stood like a boulder with his great spear leveled. Orrin had planted his cracked staff in the sand, and a low, thrumming chord was rising from it like heat.

Torren Ballast stood in the middle of the ring and scratched his ear.

“Well?” he called. “I’m old. I don’t have all night.”

Thara moved first.

It was a very good throw. The hatchet left her hand low, spinning flat, aimed at the old man’s ankle, and a second one followed it in a high arc, so that the first would draw his eye and the second would find his head. It was the sort of thing she had done a thousand times. Torren hiccupped. He staggered sideways, a half step to the left, as if to avoid a puddle, and the first hatchet whistled past his knee, and the second hung in the air and dropped.

He caught it.

He caught it with one finger, on the flat of the blade, as lightly as a man catching a falling leaf. For the barest instant, his hand glowed with a faint, dull, golden-brown light, and the hatchet in the air suddenly dropped like a stone. It struck the sand with a thud. It sank in to the haft. It would not come out. It lay there like a sack of lead, and the sand around it cracked.

“That’s my hatchet!” yelped Thara.

“It’s very heavy now,” said Torren, apologetically.

Brannoch hit him.

It was a charge. The Oakhorn came across the sand in four strides with his spear low and his antlers lowered, a thousand pounds of muscle moving at a gallop, and the ground shook. Torren turned his head. He hiccupped. And with a swaying, drunken, utterly graceful half turn, he slid out of the way of the spear point, so close that the blade took a thread off his shirt, and tapped the Oakhorn on the back with one iron ball.

Tink.

Brannoch dropped.

He did not fall. He dropped. His knees hit the sand. Then his hands. Then his whole body, with a crack, flattened into the white floor as though an invisible hand had pressed down on his back with the weight of a house. He strained. The muscles stood out on his neck like ropes. The sand around him cratered, and a long, low, grinding groan came out of him.

“Mm,” said Brannoch, through his teeth.

“A little heavier than normal,” Torren agreed. “About forty times. Don’t fret. It wears off.”

“BRANNOCH!” shrieked Thara.

An arrow hit the staff.

It had come from the left, fast and low, aimed not at the man but at the shaft of the weapon he had just swung. It struck the iron, rang, and Torren’s eyebrows lifted. Another followed. Another. They came in a flickering line, one every second, from the far side of the ring, from a figure who ran as she shot, circling him in a wide fast curve, and not one of them missed. They flew at his shoulders, his knees, his belly, his throat, and each time the staff swung up in a lazy arc and took it out of the air. A tap. A glow. And the arrow dropped, suddenly heavy, and buried itself in the sand.

“Not bad!” bellowed Torren. “You run well, girl!”

“I am only getting started,” Veyra said coolly.

“I like it!”

She drew a fourth arrow, and fifth, and a sixth, and then, without warning, she changed. She threw her bow aside. She drew a long knife from her belt. She took three running steps, and went off the sand like a spring, and landed on the wall, and kicked off it, and came down on him from above with the knife held high and her braid flying out behind her like a banner.

Torren looked up.

His eyes widened, with something very close to pleasure.

“Oh, that’s good,” he said, and swung Maude.

It was not meant to hit her. Fel realized it a heartbeat too late. The staff came round in a vast slow arc that caught the point of the knife, and the knife stopped in the air, and Veyra, still moving, still coming, found that her blade had suddenly doubled in weight, tripled, tenfold, and her whole arm was dragged toward the ground. She turned the fall into a roll. She came up on one knee. She was breathing hard.

“The knife,” she gasped, “weighs as much as a horse.”

“Mind your wrist,” said Torren, kindly.

And then a note rose.

It began as a hum. It swelled, until the whole arena rang with it, a long deep rolling chord that began in the floor and rose through the soles of the feet, and the sand began to dance. It rose in little spirals, and swirled, and the crowd on the steps stopped talking. Orrin Halvane stood on the far side of the ring with his head thrown back and his arms spread and his mouth open in a full, golden, resonant song, and from the glass crest on his head a white-gold light spread outward in rings.

Torren Ballast stopped.

He stood very still. His red eyes were wide. A long slow smile spread across his face, and he leaned on his staff, and put his head on one side, and listened.

“Oh,” he said softly. “Oh, I haven’t heard that since Aelun.”

The song grew.

It struck the staff. It struck the iron balls, and they began to hum in answer, deep and dull, with a sound like a distant gong. Cracks ran up Torren’s shirt. The sand around his bare feet shivered and rose. And for the first time, the old man took a step back, with a lurch, as though against a wind.

“Now!” shouted Veyra.

Fel was already moving.

He had been waiting. He had stayed low, behind the singing, in the shadow of the sand, with both swords held close, because Gideon had told him once that the best strike was the one nobody could see. Now he came out of the dust in a flat sprint, and the black sword and the golden one swept up together in a pair of crossing curves, and Torren turned, slowly, too slowly, his foot slipping in the churned sand.

It was the best stroke Fel had ever made.

It was a clean, perfect, double cut. It took the old man at the hip and the shoulder and would have crossed in the middle. And Torren Ballast, off balance, drunk, in the grip of Orrin’s song, did the only thing a man in his position could do. He fell backward.

It looked like a stumble. It looked like the stagger of a man who has had too much to drink and tripped over his own feet. But Maude’s butt struck the sand behind him and held, and he hung there at a slant no living man could have managed, leaning on his planted staff like a drunk on a fence post, and one foot flew up in a long, slow, incredible arc, and his bare toe, almost gently, touched the flat of Falling Star.

The sword fell out of Fel’s hand.

It did not drop. It sank. It hit the sand with a thump so heavy that it shook the ground, and the sand came up in a ring around it, and Fel, who was still holding the golden saber, saw that it was lying a foot deep in the earth and that the hilt was twisted from the force of its own weight. He lunged for it. The golden saber slid out of his grasp as the old man’s other foot caught it, a quick, careless, drunken tap.

Fel’s whole body went numb with the shock.

“You tore my shirt!” said Torren, in an aggrieved voice, from his impossible angle. “It’s my good shirt!”

“Sorry!”

“Don’t be. It was a lovely cut. First time anyone’s laid a blade on me in nine years.” He grinned. “Now let’s try this again!”

He brought Maude up in one hand, still leaning back at that impossible angle.

It was the strangest thing. As the staff rose, it seemed to move through the air without weight, with the same easy grace as a feather. It touched Orrin’s song. It touched the chord, and the chord faltered. The iron ball swept across the sand, in a low circle, and the old man, tilted on his planted staff, spun on one heel like a top, and a rippling wave of pale gold light spread out from the staff and ran across the arena.

Everyone stumbled.

Thara fell flat. Veyra, struggling up, was dragged down again. Orrin’s song broke in the middle of a note, and he sank to one knee with a gasp, his cracked staff clutched to his chest. The sand in the whole ring lurched and ran inward, as though the pit were a funnel, and the five of them, all five, were dragged across the floor toward the center, kicking and clawing and shouting, like leaves in a drain.

They piled up.

It was a heap. It was a very large, tangled, undignified heap of arms and legs, bows and swords and antlers and glass, and in the middle of it, stretched flat, with his nose in the sand and Thara’s boot on his ear, Fel could do nothing but lie there and wheeze.

He looked up.

Above him, with a hiccup and a stagger and a great deal of dignity, Torren Ballast straightened.

He set Maude upright in the sand with a clang. He stood in the very center of the ring, and for the first time since they had met him, he looked completely, utterly, wonderfully sober.

And then he began to laugh.

It was a great, rolling, delighted laugh, the laugh of a man who has been waiting a long time for a decent fight. It echoed round the ring, and up the steps, and the crowd, which had been silent, broke into a roar. They stood. They stamped. They hammered on their mugs.

“Oh, that’s better!” cried Torren. He wiped his eyes with a vast hand. “Nine years! Nine years I’ve been drinking myself stupid on this bench, waiting for somebody to try! And a girl on the wall, and a boy in the dust, and a singer with the voice of a god! That was the best fight I’ve had since the Gate.”

“We lost,” said Fel, into the sand.

“You did.”

“We were all down.”

“You were all down.” Torren stood over them, grinning, with his hands on his hips. “Five of you. In a pile. At my feet. And I’ve not so much as moved from the circle.” He thumped his chest. “I win the bet!”

There was a long, groaning silence from the heap.

“So,” said Torren Ballast, very cheerfully. “From today you’re all my students. Which means, of course, that you are also all my lackeys.” He leaned down, and picked up an empty bottle, and held it out to Fel with a happy smile. “Lackey Number One. You’re on bottles. I’m told they are very heavy.”

“Mm,” said Brannoch, from the bottom of the pile, in a very small voice.

And Fel, with his face in the sand and the whole echoing ring of the arena roaring above him, did the only thing he could think of.

He took the bottle.