Distant tales of the Dichotomy

The left mountain of Dun Vurrim was not so much climbed as negotiated.

It rose in terraces from the foot of the plain to the clouds, ten thousand narrow stairs of grey stone stacked one on another like the leaves of a book, and on every terrace there were houses, and on every house there were chimneys, and from every chimney a thin blue thread of smoke ran up to join the great grey roof of the city’s breath. There were bridges between the terraces and ladders between the bridges. There were shops built into the stairs, so that the stairs themselves were, in places, a market, and a person could buy a hot pie, a pair of boots and a small, angry cat without taking a single step off the road. There were floors. The dwarves counted them, from the bottom up, and gave each one a brass number, and a name, and a character, and a very strong opinion about the floors on either side.

“Sixty-eight,” said Thara, for the ninth time, in the tone of a woman reading out her own sentence. “We have to go to sixty-eight.”

“We are on thirty-one,” said Veyra.

“Then we have thirty-seven floors to go, and I would like to say, for the record, that I am a thief and not a mountaineer.”

“There’s a lift,” said Torren Ballast.

Everyone stopped. The old man was leaning on Maude at the foot of a long flight of steps, with his enormous hat tipped back and the cheerful look of a man who has just remembered where he left his money.

“There’s a what?” said Thara.

“A lift. A car on a counterweight. The Lift Guild runs them up the whole length of the mountain, for a glim a head.” He pointed with his chin at a small, round, brass-bound hut by the road, where a queue of dwarves with shopping baskets was waiting patiently under a sign. “I should have said at the bottom. I forget, when you’re not used to it. It’s not cheating if it’s civilization.”

“You let us walk thirty-one floors,” said Veyra.

“I was hungover,” said Torren, with dignity. “I wanted the company.”

It was, in the end, a very good lift. It was a small brass cage with a lantern in the roof and a single bench, run on chains by a large and silent dwarf in a leather hat, who took their glims without comment and pulled a lever, and the whole city dropped away from under their feet. They rose past the terraces, floor on floor, a hundred thousand windows streaming down past the bars, and the roar of the market faded and the wind came up, thin and cold and clean. Brek stood at the back with Torren’s gift in a basket on his arm and his eyes fixed on the floor numbers, and did not say anything. Wren, who had insisted on coming as far as the foot of the stairs, had given him a last, grave look and a half a ginger biscuit, and he was holding the half biscuit in his free hand as if it were a very small and important document.

“Forty,” said Orrin, softly, as the cage crawled past a brass plaque. “I would like it noted that I can see the plain. All of it. And the three roads. And the bridge.”

“You can see the bridge from here?” said Fel.

“I can see where we first walked in. It is very small.” The gold in his face went a little dim, and then brightened. “It is a long way to have come.”

It was. Fel looked down through the bars at the great black chasm and its bridges, thin as thread, and a long dusty line of carts creeping toward the gate. Somewhere down there was a road that had been burned, and a wagon that had carried fourteen children, and a girl called Pim whom he had not saved. He put the thought away, carefully, the way he had learned to, and watched the numbers go by.

Sixty. Sixty-two. Sixty-five.

The cage slowed, and shuddered, and stopped with a polite clang.

“Sixty-eight,” said Torren Ballast. He shook himself like a bear. “Everybody out. And don’t stare at the house. She hates it when they stare.”

They stared at the house.

It was impossible not to. The sixty-eighth floor of the left mountain was not a floor at all. It was a long, narrow, windy ledge, hacked out of the grey rock and fenced with a waist-high rail, and it ran out along the face of the mountain like a shelf for a very large clock. On the left, the ledge ran back into a cliff, where a white thread of water poured down from some unimaginable height and fell with a long, low, roaring whisper into a deep stone channel. It went away into the rock in a hundred little pipes, to fill the city’s wells. The spray hung in the air in a fine bright mist, and the whole ledge was full of rainbows.

And at the very end, on the lip of the mountain, with nothing at all behind it but air, there was a house.

It was shaped like an hourglass. There was no other way to put it. It had two great glass-and-timber bulbs, one set above the other, and a narrow waist between them, bound round with a band of green copper. The lower bulb sat on the ledge like a bell, with a round door set in it and small round windows glowing with lamplight. The upper bulb rose over it, full to the brim with clear green water, and in the water, slowly, silver fish moved among drifting weed. And from the waist, in a fine and endless thread, fell a stream of pale blue sand, from the upper bulb to the lower, and it never seemed to run out.

“Oh,” said Orrin, very quietly.

“It’s real,” said Fel.

“It is a folly,” said Veyra, but there was something in her voice that was not disapproval at all.

“She calls it a symbol,” said Torren. He had stopped at the rail, and for once he was not grinning. “She says that it’s the only clock in the world that has never told her the time. I think she just wanted to be dramatic.” He cleared his throat. “Right. I’ll knock. Everybody put your hands where she can see them. Boy, give me the honey.”

Brek put the basket into his hands. It held a jar of river honey, the dark, thick, wild kind, with a ribbon around its neck.

The old man drew a breath. He took off his hat, and wiped his boots on the mat, and brushed at the sleeve of his coat. Fel, watching, thought with a kind of astonished tenderness that the man who had stopped a Tide of Bone by standing in a doorway was nervous about knocking on a door.

The knocker was a small bronze fish. He lifted it, once, and let it fall.

There was a silence. The mist hissed on the rail. Somewhere in the water above their heads a fish turned.

Then the round door opened inward, and a voice said, in a low, clear, amused contralto, like a stream running over smooth stones:

“You are late, Torren.”

“By a day,” said Torren, without turning round. “I’d had a bet. It was a good bet.”

“You have always had a good bet.” And the woman in the door stepped out into the mist, and Fel forgot, for a moment, how to breathe.

She was not tall, but she carried herself as if she were. She was slender and straight, in a long gown of river silk that was not any one color, but all the colors of the water at once, green and grey and pale gold, and it moved about her ankles as if it were still being poured. Her hair was the color of moonlight on a lake, and it was not quite still. It fell nearly to her knees in a long loose fall of silver-blue curls, and every strand of it stirred and drifted gently, as if she were standing in a slow current. Her skin was pale and faintly lustrous, dusted along the cheek and collarbone with a fine scatter of tiny silver freckles, like a handful of scales. She had a long, elegant, finely made face, with a sharp little chin and a quick, calm, clever mouth, and her eyes were the green of sea glass held up to the sun. And behind her shoulders, folded close, as a heron folds its wings, were a pair of long, translucent, rainbow-veined wings of glass.

She looked at the old man. Then she looked past him, at the five who stood behind him on the ledge, with the eyes of a person who has been surprised by very little in a very long time.

Fel decided, quickly and without any disloyalty at all, that she was the second most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He also decided, with great firmness, that he would never say which of them was first.

Beside him, he felt Veyra look at the faerie, and look at him, and look away. Her mouth twitched.

“Torren Ballast,” said the water nymph, in the voice of a woman reading a bill. “Nine years. Not a letter. Not a note. Not a bottle of that dreadful plum wine, to say that you were alive. I had given up. I had made a small pile of your things and set them on fire.”

“I brought honey,” said Torren, humbly.

She took it. She turned the jar in her long white fingers, and regarded the ribbon, and for the first time the corner of her mouth moved.

“It is the wrong kind,” she said. “But it will do.” She tucked it under her arm, and stepped back. “Come in, you great drowned ox. All of you. The fish are very curious, and the doves are very early, and I do not intend to discuss anything of importance on a wet ledge.”

The lower bulb of the hourglass was a single round room, and it was the loveliest room that Fel had ever stood in.

It was round as a bell, with a curved floor of pale polished wood, and a ceiling of dark beams that rose to the narrow waist, where the thread of blue sand came down and whispered onto a heap in the middle of the room and, as far as he could tell, vanished. There were hanging lamps of green and pink glass. There was a long low couch with a shawl on it. There were shelves, curved to follow the wall, crammed with bottles and books and bundles of dried herb, and a long table in the shape of a leaf, set with a fine china tea service and a plate of tiny cakes. The windows looked out on the mist, and through the mist, on the plain, so far below that the carts were specks. And above them all, through the ceiling of glass, the clear green pool turned slowly, and silver shadows moved across the floor.

“It’s beautiful,” said Fel, before he could stop himself.

The water nymph turned from the table, and looked at him for the first time directly. It was a long, thoughtful, appraising look, and it began at his boots and went up, and stopped at his face.

Something happened to her expression. It was, Fel thought, as though a very dignified cat had come upon a small and unexpected bowl of cream.

“Oh,” she said, softly. “Oh, this one.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from NovelPhoenix; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“I’m sorry?”

“Torren.” She did not take her eyes off Fel. “Who is this?”

“That’s the boy,” said Torren, with a faint and wary note creeping into his voice. “The one I told you about. In the arena. The one who cut my shirt.”

“You told me about no one. You have not told me anything. You have not been in the same city as a letter for nine years.” But she was walking round the table, in a slow, rustling, deliberate circle, and her wings gave a small, pleased tremor. “He is young. He has manners. He has two swords and a very guilty face, and he says it’s beautiful, when he enters a lady’s house, and not where’s the money. My dear child, how old are you?”

“Seventeen,” said Fel.

“Seventeen.” She said it as another woman might have said cake. “And he has dimples. Look. When he is nervous. He has dimples, Torren, and you did not think to mention it.”

“I don’t have dimples,” said Fel, who had a distinct and sinking feeling that he did.

“You do.” She put a long cool hand under his chin, and turned his face to the lamp, and clicked her tongue. “Oh, he is delightful. He is the most delightful thing that has come up my cliff in forty years. I could simply put him in a jar.”

Behind him, somebody made a small, strangled noise. It was Thara, and she had stuffed the sleeve of her coat into her mouth.

“He is seventeen,” said Veyra, very evenly.

“I know, my dear. I am not going to eat him.” The nymph let go of Fel’s chin, with a last fond pat, and turned to Veyra, and her expression did something complicated and quick. She looked at the tall girl with the violet eyes and the bow across her back, from head to heel, in a single sweeping glance, like a jeweler who has been handed a very fine stone and is trying not to be impressed. “Ah,” she said, in a quite different voice. “I see. I see. Well. It is no wonder.”

“What do you see?” said Veyra, with a very faint edge.

“That I shall have to be very, very good.” And the faerie smiled, and it was not a mocking smile, but a thoughtful, rueful, respectful one, the smile of one beauty to another across a crowded room. “You are lovely. You know that, I hope. You carry it like a bow. I shall endeavor to be only a little wicked.”

Veyra opened her mouth, and closed it, and for a moment looked, to Fel’s astonishment, rather flustered. It was a very rare thing.

“Nerissa,” said Torren, in the voice of a man who has watched a house catch fire. “We came for a reason.”

“You always do.” She waved a hand, and the teapot rose from the table of its own accord, and began to pour, and a thread of steam drifted up from the cups. “Sit. Sit, all of you. Is that a beetle on the ledge? No. No, it is a boy with a basket. Good. Sit, and drink, and tell me what it is that you want.”

It took the better part of an hour, and three pots of tea, to tell her.

Torren did most of the talking. He was not good at it. He lost his way twice, and went off on a long account of the duel, in which he was rather more terrible and a good deal less drunk than Fel remembered, and Thara corrected him from the floor. But he got the heart of it out in the end. The guild. The dungeon. The lack of a charter and the lack of a healer, and the unpleasant truth that the Rotunda would not stamp a single form without one. And when he had done, there was a long pause.

The water nymph sat on her couch with her feet drawn up under her, and her cup in her hand, and her hair stirring about her shoulders like weed in a pool. She had listened with her head on one side and her eyes on the old man’s face, and not once had she interrupted him.

“You want me to join a guild,” she said.

“I do.”

“With you.”

“I’m told I’m very good in a guild.”

“You abandoned the last one.” She said it quite gently. “You walked away from the Gate of Brass in the middle of the night, with a bottle, and you did not come back. I stood on that wall for three days, Torren. I told them you were coming. I told every one of them that you would be along.” She set down her cup. “Nine years. And now you walk into my house with a honey jar and a child and a pocketful of sunshine, and you ask me to come out and be useful.”

The old man did not say anything. He sat very still, with his big hands hanging between his knees and his hat on his lap, and his face was as naked as Fel had ever seen it.

“I know,” he said at last, quietly. “I know it, Nerissa. I’m not asking for your forgiveness. I don’t think I’m owed any. I’m only saying, I found something. I found a boy with a pair of dull swords, and a girl who’d put a knife through the sun, and a lot of loud children who won’t stay down. And I thought, for the first time in nine years, I’d like to see what happens next. And you were the first person I thought of.” He turned his hat in his fingers. “I’ve always thought of you first.”

There was a long and delicate silence. The thread of blue sand whispered down.

And then the water nymph said, in a very small and very dry voice:

“You old fool.”

“Yes.”

“You have grown fat.”

“I was always fat. I was a fat young man. It was the one thing I had going for me.”

“You were magnificent.” She wiped a sudden bright glint from the corner of one eye, with great impatience, and sniffed. “Very well. I shall consider it. Consider it, you understand. I am not at all convinced. I should think it would be exceedingly tiresome. I have a garden, and a house, and a peaceful life, and I am very old, which is to say…” Her mouth shut with a snap.

She was looking at Thara.

Thara, who had been sitting on the floor with her chin in her hands, drinking tea and watching the proceedings with the frank enjoyment of a child at the theater, had gone a little rigid. She had been about to speak. She had, in fact, opened her mouth, and the words that were on the point of coming out of it, Fel was nearly certain, were how old are you, then?

The temperature in the room dropped by about twenty degrees. The tea in Thara’s cup went white at the edges, and a thin glaze of ice crept across its surface with a small crackling sound.

“I am sorry,” said the water nymph, in a pleasant voice. “Was there a question?”

“No,” said Thara, with remarkable speed. “No, ma’am. None. Only that it is a very nice tea.”

“Good.” The ice melted. “It is a very old blend.”

And all of them, to the last person, very carefully did not breathe.

“I would like it noted that this is why Master Ballast warned us,” said Orrin, in a fainting voice, into his cup.

“I told you,” said Torren. “I told you not to ask.”

“You told them nothing,” said Nerissa, but her mouth had curved again, and she sipped her tea, and the old, warm, secret light was back in her eyes. “Now. As it happens, I may be persuaded. I will tell you the terms, and you may decide whether you can bear them.”

She raised one long white finger.

“One. The young man.”

“Me?” said Fel.

“You. One afternoon every week, at tea, in this house, for as long as I am a member of your little guild. You will sit at my table. You will eat my cakes. And you will tell me, in full and entertaining detail, about everything you have seen and done since you were a very small boy. I have been alone with fish for a great many years.” She smiled. “I should like to be amused.”

“That’s it?” said Fel, astonished.

“That is the first.” She raised a second finger, and the smile took on a hint of something rather more grim. “Two. The garden.”

The garden was on the roof.

It was reached by a spiral stair, up through the waist of the hourglass, and out through a round trapdoor onto a broad stone terrace that wrapped around the upper bulb, with the green pool glowing beneath it and the whole drop of the mountain at the edge. The terrace was big. It was very green, very well made, very orderly, and, as far as Fel could see, absolutely devastated.

There were beds of cabbage, set out in neat rows, with their hearts gouged out in neat round holes. There were tomato vines stripped to the stem. There were melons, split open, and scooped clean, and left like empty bowls. A long row of leeks had been uprooted, and eaten, and the white stubs lay scattered across the path. A small orchard of plum and pear trees, planted in great tubs along the rail, had been picked bare to the last leaf. Even the herb bed had been raided. In the middle of the thyme sat a single small, chewed, ruined strawberry, like a monument.

“Doves,” said the water nymph, and the word came out like a curse.

“Doves?” said Veyra.

“Morning doves. Small. Grey. Soft as dawn.” She walked among the wreckage with her skirts drawn up and her wings quivering. “Perfectly silent. You never hear them come. You see nothing at all, and then they are gone, and so is a cabbage.” She stopped, and looked down at it. “They used to be harmless. They used to take eggs. They would creep into the nests of other birds at dawn, and steal the clutch, and be away before the mother could blink. A perfectly respectable crime, and very old. But the other birds learned. They built their nests in high places, and in thorn, and in the walls, and the doves grew hungry. And they were not stupid.” She said it with a kind of bitter respect. “They adapted. They discovered vegetables. They discovered fruit. And now there are forty of them, and every morning at first light, they take a bite out of my life.”

“Have you tried nets?” said Fel.

“They unpick the knots.”

“Scarecrows?” said Thara, who was crouching over the strawberry with a look of professional interest.

“They roost on the scarecrow. Last week, one laid an egg on its hat.” She drew a breath. “I have tried charms. They ate the charm. I have tried a very strongly worded letter. They left it, as it happens, entirely alone, and ate the envelope.” She turned. “I will not kill them. I do not kill things. I am a healer. But I have reached the end of my patience, and if you can rid me of these birds, I will come with you, and heal your friends, and put up with Torren, for as long as it takes.”

“That’s the second term,” said Fel.

“That is the second term.”

Veyra had walked to the edge of the terrace, and was looking along the rows with her head on one side, and the narrow, intent look that she wore over a bow. She said, without turning:

“They are fast?”

“Faster than thought. I have seen one steal a plum out of my hand.”

“Then I will not be able to shoot them.”

“I would rather you did not. They are a small and persistent people, with a great deal of sorrow, and a great many children.”

“They cannot see black,” said Orrin, suddenly.

They all turned.

The singer had folded himself up on a low stone bench by the rail, with his long hands on his knees, and was looking at a pair of grey feathers that lay on the flagstones. His expression had the faraway, patient quality that it took on when a song was coming to him.

“I have read about them,” he said. “It is a feature of their eyes. It is only a line in a very old book, on the birds of the Ashen Hills. They see color very sharply, red and green and gold, but a true black is, to them, a hole in the world. It is nothing. It is a gap in the air. They will walk straight through a black shadow, or sit on a black stone, and never notice that it is there.” He turned, slowly, with the gold of his face rising. “A black cat could lie in the middle of a flock, and be quite unobserved.”

“A black thing,” said Fel slowly.

“A large black thing. And very still.”

The silence this produced was extremely complete. On the ledge below, the waterfall roared. Across the terrace, a single leaf fell from a pear tree, and landed on a melon, and lay there.

“No,” said Thara.

“I am only saying.”

“No. No, no, no. You cannot mean…” But her eyes were very wide and very bright, and a slow, appalled smile was dawning at the corners of her mouth. “He is not still. He has never been still in his life. He is the least still thing that has ever been. He ate a tree.”

“He did,” said Veyra.

“He eats trees, and sings, and thinks he is a bird.”

“He can be still,” said Brannoch.

It was said very quietly, from the shadow of the doorway, where the great antlered man had stood the whole time with his arms folded, and had not said a word. Everyone looked round. Brannoch’s face did not change. But he looked at the destroyed cabbages, and at the grey feathers, and at the faerie’s small, set, furious face, and something in his heavy features shifted, just slightly, like a boulder in a landslide.

“For oats,” he said. “Honeyed.”

There was a pause.

“Who is this?” said Torren, with the strong and growing interest of a man who has not been present for the beginning of the conversation. “Who is Clatter?”

“He’s a beetle,” said Fel. “A very large one. About the size of a house. He’s… ours.”

“A beetle,” said Nerissa, very slowly. “The size of a house.”

“A polite one,” said Thara.

The faerie looked at them, one by one, the whole absurd, battered, hopeful company, with the sun going down red behind them over the plain and the first lamps coming out in the city below. It was a long and searching look. She had been alone for a long time. She had been hurt, and she had been proud, and in all her great age she had not been asked a question like that. And she closed her eyes, and drew a very long breath through her nose, and said, with dreadful and elegant resignation:

“Bring him up.”

He came up the mountain at dusk.

It was a thing that the people of the left mountain would speak of for years. The Tallow Row turned out in its aprons. A baker dropped a tray of rolls. A small girl on the thirty-ninth floor, who had never in her life seen anything larger than a goat, stood in the middle of a bridge with her mouth open, and had to be carried home. For Old Clatter, who had been fetched from the Lantern House garden by Brannoch, with a large bag of honeyed oats and a firm, low, steady talking-to, did not take the lift. He did not take the stairs. He took one look at the mountain, which was a sheer face of grey rock, and said something enormous and joyful in his chest, and went up the wall.

His great black legs gripped the stone as if it were a ladder. His wings were folded tight. He climbed in long, rolling, humming heaves, with Brannoch’s firm hand on his horn and Thara, who had refused to be left, riding on his back with her arms in the air, shrieking with joy. He passed the fortieth floor. He passed the fiftieth. The waterfall roared past him, and he went straight through it, and came out the other side with the spray running down his shell and a look of pure bliss on his enormous face.

He arrived on the ledge at sixty-eight at sunset, in a drift of rainbows, with a long contented hrrrmmm. He put his horned head over the rail. And he looked into the garden, with every one of his eyes, and found at the end of it a small, pale, extremely irritated water nymph with her hands on her hips.

She looked at him for a very long time.

“That,” said Nerissa Dewhollow, at last, in a faint voice, “is the largest beetle I have ever seen. And he is blocking my sunset.”

Old Clatter hummed.

And Brek, standing at the back of the ledge with the empty basket on his arm, let out a long, slow, wondering breath, and said the longest thing he had said all day:

“I’d like to pat him,” said Brek.