Distant tales of the Dichotomy

They climbed out of the Pits a little after the middle of the afternoon, five dusty people with a cart, and the daylight on the Iron Pass was so bright and so strange after the long grey hush of the first floor that for a moment Thara stood at the lip of the gate with her hand over her eyes and said, in a tone of genuine grievance, “Who put the sun there?”

The iron-bearded sergeant looked up from his stone desk. He took in the cart, and the dented shield, and the green silk sling on Nerissa’s arm, and the dull gold line of Orrin’s staff, and the thin grey dust that lay on every one of them like flour on a baker. His pen did not stop moving.

“Manifest,” said the sergeant.

Veyra laid it on the desk. It was a long sheet, in her small, straight hand, crossed and counted and initialed, with every sack numbered and every line signed, and the dwarf read it with a slow, grudging attention, moving his thick lips, down to the very last entry. There he stopped.

“First floor,” he said. “Clear.”

“Yes.”

“Boss clear.”

“Yes.”

The sergeant put down his pen. He looked at the five of them, one by one, with his small hard eyes, and for a moment something moved in his iron beard that might, under other circumstances, have been mistaken for a smile.

“Five unranked and a nymph,” he said. “On a first descent. Gaffer’s been sitting on that road for six hundred years. I’ve had dwarves in plate come back up that stair and tell me he was a wall.” He shook his head, and stamped the sheet, a great black stamp, with a heavy thump. “Clear logged. The Seven Sorrows. Second floor’s open to you from tomorrow, and the third, if you can read a map. Weigh-house is at the Rotunda, third cage. Mind the bridge. The wind’s turned.”

“Is that all?” said Thara, looking a little hurt. “Doesn’t there come a cheer, or a… a trumpet, or…”

“There’s a fee for trumpets,” said the sergeant, and went back to his ledger.

* * *

It is a curious thing about the loot of a dungeon that it never looks, on the floor of the dungeon, as it looks on a scale.

They spread it out on the long brass counter of the Third Cage, under the green-shaded lamp, with the great bright vault of the Rotunda rising about them and the long slow hum of the afternoon queue at their backs, and they looked at it, and it looked, all of it, a good deal smaller than it had felt. There was a great deal of it. It simply did not seem to be worth anything.

There were the shells, to begin with. There were the twenty-six great arched plates of clinker, grey and bubbled and heavy as slate, each as long as a man’s forearm and as thick as his thumb, that had once been the backs of the crabs. Thara had rubbed one with her sleeve until it shone a dull gunmetal blue. There were fourteen small pale pouches, the size of plums, wrapped in wet cloth, that Nerissa had cut from under the creatures’ eyes, the seam-glands, which had a sharp green smell and which, she said, the apothecaries of the Wards bought for stopping blood. There were forty-one black beads, as glossy as jet, from the wreck of the Tallyman’s frame, strung on a cord by Thara in a spirit of pure acquisition.

There were the moths. They had not been pleasant to gather. They were laid out in six sacks of wet leather, each tied with wire and dripping a little, and inside each, floating in a grey brine, were the soft white corpses of the wickmoths, and a thick golden paste of unspent dust. Beside the sacks lay a bundle of long, fine, silver-white antennae, bound in a hank like a bunch of wheat. It was called, Nerissa said, wickhair. It was a thing that the lamp-makers used. A lamp trimmed with it, they said, burned with a flame as white as the moon.

There was a rusted iron toll-token or three, pierced with a square hole, that Brannoch had picked up on the road, and had held out to her with a long, solemn, enquiring look. There was a hand-axe of dwarven make, notched and blunt. And there were the little things, the small, useless, wonderful things, a pair of copper spectacles, a miner’s tallow cup, a belt-buckle shaped like a bearded face, that people find in a dungeon, and that the dungeon, for no reason anyone has ever discovered, has been saving for them.

They did not lay out the other things. The Tallyman’s little black book was inside Veyra’s coat. The little round cap was on Thara’s head. And five amber beads, each as warm as a coal, hung on a cord about the neck of Nerissa, who had said she would not mind carrying them, and who had made it quite clear, with a certain bright level glance, that she would not be argued with.

Behind the counter, in her cage of brass bars, with her russet fur bristling in the lamplight and her round black eyes as wide as plates, Marigold Tufton was staring at the wickhair.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, my. Oh, that’s lovely. That’s… you did that without burning down anything? You’ve all still got your eyebrows!” She seized a pair of brass scales, and a magnifying glass, and a very small pencil. “I’m so proud! I knew you’d do it! I said to Hemlock, I said, they’ll be back by tea, and they’ve all got such nice faces. Now, don’t tell me. Let me see. Let me weigh.”

It took the better part of an hour. She weighed the clinker plates in a great pan, one by one, and wrote the weight in a ledger. She weighed the glands, and sniffed them, and sneezed. She held a black bead up to the lamp, and gave a small cluck, and said, “Jet-glass. Very pretty. Very, very common.” She peered into the moth sacks, with her pink nose wrinkled, and counted aloud. She opened the neck of a leather bag, and weighed, very delicately, with a little silver spoon, a thimbleful of the golden paste, and her whiskers quivered.

At the end of it she put down her pencil, and adjusted her spectacles, and added up a long column of figures on a scrap of paper with her lips moving. Then she added it again. Then she looked up, with a face of the most honest, miserable, apologetic sympathy, and slid the paper across the brass.

“Sixty-one glims,” said Marigold.

There was a silence.

“I’m sorry,” said Thara. “I may have gone temporarily deaf. What was that?”

“Sixty-one.” Marigold winced. “I rounded it up. It’s the weight, you see. It’s all the weight. The Crown pays by the pound, and your clinker is, well, it’s clinker. It’s two glims a pound, and it’s a lot of pounds, and it comes to about forty. The glands are fourteen. The moths are really the best of it, the wickhair’s worth a few, and a thimble of dust is…” She trailed off. “It’s a first floor. I’m so sorry. It is a very good first floor. Nobody has ever taken the toll in a day.”

Brannoch looked at the paper. He looked at it for a very long time, with his great dark head bent, and then he said, quite gently, “Sixty-one.”

“Oh, please don’t look like that.”

“We have lost a good deal of arrows,” said Veyra. “We have a shield with a dent and a robe cut to the thigh. A healer who has broken a bone. A staff that…” She stopped. “We paid, in the Pits, a great deal more than sixty-one glims.”

“I would like it noted,” said Orrin, faintly, “that the robe alone was nine.”

“I know.” Marigold had taken off her spectacles, and was twisting them in her small paws. She looked up at them, with her round dark eyes quite soft. “I know it’s disappointing. Everyone thinks, the first time. But listen to me. It’s the first floor. It pays by the ounce. The tenth floor pays by the pound. The twentieth, the things you bring up are things that people have been looking for, and they pay in silver. Further down than that, if you ever get to the fiftieth…” She leaned forward over the counter. “There’s a thing down there called an Amolite heart. a smith in the Hundred Furnaces would pay you a hundred thousand glims for a piece the size of an egg. And every floor on the way is more. It’s always more, you see. The deeper you go, the heavier the purse. It’s how the whole city’s built.”

“A hundred thousand,” said Thara reverently.

“Sixty-one’s where everyone starts,” said Marigold. “Truly. I’ve seen Gold guilds start at forty.” She stamped the sheet, and counted out the money in a little heap on the brass, bright coins and a handful of dull ones, with the quick, quiet, tender hands of someone who is sorry to be giving so little. “Go and have a big supper, please. And a bath. I always say, there’s nothing that a bath and a stew won’t help.”

Veyra took the coins. She counted them, and did not say what she thought.

“Thank you, Marigold.”

“Oh, it’s nothing, dear.” The clerk’s fur lifted, a little, and she smiled. She looked at the five of them, dusty and bent and bruised, and she said, in a lower voice, “The Seven Sorrows. I do like it. I did hope you’d keep it.”

* * *

They bought their supper in the market under the glass.

It was, as a matter of fact, a very successful supper. Veyra had the money in her fist, and she walked down the long row of stalls in the gold afternoon light with a measuring look in her eye, and she bought, with the grim, scrupulous thrift of one who has lived on very little, exactly what she needed. A great round loaf of rye. A string of onions. A sack of pearl barley. A fat white cabbage, and a bunch of leeks, and a knuckle of smoked ham, and a little paper of salt. She stopped at a fishmonger’s, and bargained for a quarter of an hour in a low calm unyielding voice, and came away with eight small silver river trout in a cloth. She bought butter. She bought a wedge of hard yellow cheese that smelled of mountains.

“You’ve forgotten the pudding,” said Thara, in anguish.

“There is no pudding.”

“There’s a stall with honey-cakes! Honey-cakes, Veyra! With nuts!”

“Four glims.”

“It’s four glims, it’s practically free…”

“Thara.”

“…I would like to point out that I have contributed a hat.”

Veyra looked at the hat. It was the Tallyman’s little round cap, perched very straight on Thara’s spiky green head, and it gave her, with her goat horns and her enormous hopeful eyes, an air of such ridiculous, such ruinous dignity that something happened at the corner of Veyra’s mouth. She bought the honey-cakes. She bought six.

They had thirteen glims left, in the end, and a basket as heavy as a child. They walked home through the long gold light of the Wards, with Brannoch carrying the barley and the bread and the fish, and Nerissa holding the cheese in her good hand like a small cold treasure, and the whole house, when they turned into Lampwick Close, lay waiting at the end of it, with all its dark and patient gables and its weathercock, and the wind in the ivy, and a thin blue thread of smoke from the kitchen chimney.

Brannoch stopped.

“Hm,” he said.

It was a sound. It was not the first thing that came out of the yard, though, or the loudest. It was a long, low, hoarse, miserable groan, and a thump, and a voice, a very familiar one, bellowing across the roof:

“Eighty-one! That’s not a drop, lad, that’s a fall! Get your chest to the ground!”

* * *

The kitchen, at that hour, was the warmest room in the house.

Veyra had put the barley on to soak. She had cut the leeks, and chopped the onions, and laid the smoked knuckle in a great black iron pot, and she stood at the range with a long spoon in her fist and her sleeves rolled to the elbow, with a smear of flour on her cheekbone, stirring, in the soft slow golden steam that rose from the stew. Nerissa sat on a stool at the table beside her with her arm in its sling, cleaning the trout with a small bright knife, which she handled, in one hand, with the surprising speed of a woman who has done it for a very long time and would deny the number under oath.

“Not too much salt,” she said. “A pinch. The ham will give it.”

“A pinch is how much?”

“An amount which one would be sorry to have lost.”

Veyra frowned at the salt. She put in a pinch, a very small, very scientific pinch, and tasted from the spoon, and her face went through a series of slow expressions, and arrived at one of grave, hopeful, doubting surprise.

“It is good.”

“It is very good.” Nerissa smiled over her trout. “You are a natural, child. It is only that you have never been permitted to find out.”

Veyra said nothing. She turned a little away, and stirred. But she was not looking at the pot. She was looking through the open kitchen door, out across the flagged floor of the drying yard, in the long gold light of the end of the day, at the thing that was happening there.

Fel was doing the Dropping Bear.

He had been doing it, Brek informed her, for some time. It was a simple affair, in its way. He stood, and dropped, and put his chest to the stones and his hands flat, and sprang to his feet with a leap, and clapped above his head, and dropped again. It was the whole of it. It was a thing that a child might have done for a game. But there was an air about it, in the long shadows of the yard, that was not a child’s game. His shirt clung to him in a dark wet line from neck to belt. His face was the color of a boiled beet, and shone. His eyes were fixed on a point a very long way off, and his mouth was open, and every time he came up from the stones there was a sound in his throat, a small, hoarse, rattling, furious sound, like a man dragging a door.

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Eighty-two.

It was not clean. It was not beautiful. A drop, a bad one, with his hips sagging, and he caught himself on his palms and heaved, and went up again with a shudder, and the wall behind him shook with the thump of his boots.

Eighty-three.

Torren Ballast sat on the rim of the well with his chin in his hand and a look of enormous professional disapproval, like a man tasting bad wine.

“Your hips, lad!” he roared. “You’re sagging! You’ve got a back like a hammock! Are you dropping, or are you napping?” He clapped. “Faster! The Ninth Foot did this in the dark, with a pack of rocks, in the snow, with the sergeant on their backs, and they sang! Come on! You’re not a tourist! You’re a Raskian recruit! Well, no, you’re a human. You’re not a Raskian anything. But try!”

Eighty-four.

Veyra’s spoon had stopped.

She had not meant to stop. She stood in the doorway with her hand on the frame, and the stew behind her, murmuring, and the smell of the ham thick in the warm air, and she watched him go down, and up, and down, and up. She had seen him fight. She had seen him in the Cairn, on his knees, in the dark, with a sword that would not wake. She had seen him lie in a bed for five days and get up. She had never, until that minute, seen him do a thing for which he had no gift.

He was terrible at it.

He was so terrible at it that it was almost a marvel. He had none of the stern machine-like grace of the Raskian soldier, and none of the cheerful cruelty of a thief’s training. He simply did it. He dropped, and he got up. Every time he dropped, it was because he had run out of every thing he had. And every time he got up it was out of something else.

“Veyra,” said Nerissa, softly, behind her.

“I am watching the stew.”

“Of course you are, dear.”

Eighty-nine.

Ninety.

On the ninety-first he did not come up. He went down, quite slowly, with his arms folding, and lay on the flagstones with his face against the stone and one hand flung out, quite flat, like a boy sleeping on a hearth.

“Ninety-one,” said Torren, and drew a very long breath, and let it out. “Hm. Well. You’ve failed, lad.”

“I know,” said Fel, into the stone.

“You’ve failed nine short.” The old man hopped down off the well. He came and stood over him, with his hands on his hips, a huge brown grinning bulk against the sunset, and for a moment he did not look like a drunkard at all. “You were meant to fail on the first. You were meant to fail a great deal sooner. That’s the whole of it. That’s what makes the first day a first day.” He knelt. He put a heavy hand, for a moment, on the back of Fel’s neck. “Take your break, lad. Sit up. Breathe. Don’t drink water too fast, it’ll come back at you. And don’t you dare tell me you’re done.”

Fel sat up.

It took a long time. He rolled over, and heaved himself up on his elbows, and then onto his hands, and then he got his back against the stone of the well and let his head fall back against it. He sat on the flagstones, with his legs sprawled and his arms hanging, and his chest going in and out like a bellows. His hair was plastered to his forehead. He looked at the sky, which had gone the color of the inside of a shell. He looked at nothing at all.

And then, from the open door of the kitchen, he saw Veyra.

She was standing quite still, with a wooden spoon in her hand, and the steam rising behind her in a soft gold cloud. She had been standing there for a long time. He knew it, as one knows these things. He did not know what her face was doing. He was too tired to see. But after a moment he lifted one hand, a few inches, off the flagstones, in a feeble, trembling, absurd little wave.

She did not lift hers. She stood there, and her violet eyes were very large, and then she turned, quite sharply, and went back into the kitchen.

“Hm,” said Torren, with great interest.

“Don’t,” said Fel.

“I’ve said nothing.”

“Don’t say it.”

“I’m a model of…”

“Torren.”

The old man sat back on his heels, and put up both hands, with an expression of enormous injured innocence, and glanced at Brek, who was sitting on his bucket with his hands over his mouth and his shoulders shaking. “Didn’t say a word,” said Torren. “Not one. Not a syllable. Did I, Brek?”

“Not a syllable,” said Brek, in a strangled voice.

It was then that Veyra came out.

She came out of the kitchen with the wooden spoon still in her hand and a tea-cloth over her shoulder, very straight, very composed, with her chin up and a pink flush on both cheekbones that she would have denied before a court. She did not look at Fel. She looked at a point somewhere above the old man’s head, and said, in a perfectly level and carrying voice:

“Supper is ready.”

“Is it!”

“It is. It will be cold if you do not come now. All of you. The stable, the tower, the strong room. Brek, there is a bowl for your mother, in a covered pail, and Nerissa says it must go home hot.” She turned. Her eyes passed over Fel, briefly, with a look that was too quick to read, and she added, a little more quietly, “You too.”

“I’m coming,” said Fel. “I just need a minute to…”

“I will help you up.”

She put down the spoon on the rim of the well. She put out a hand. It was a thin, long, strong, pale-violet hand, with a callus on the first finger from the bowstring, and he looked at it, and then at her, and a very faint and very crooked smile came on his face.

“You’ll get all sweaty,” he said.

“I have been cooking in a kitchen for two hours. I am already sweaty.”

He took the hand. She pulled, with considerably more strength than he had remembered she had, and he came up off the flags, swaying, with the yard tilting under him like the deck of a ship, and for the length of a breath she did not let go. Then she did. She picked up the spoon again, and walked back across the yard with her back very straight, and behind her, under the well, Torren Ballast began, in a whisper that could be heard in the next street, to hum the tune of a very old, very rude Raskian marching song.

* * *

They ate in the great hall, at the long oak table, with the hearth lit and the banners hanging above them in the glow, and it was, Fel thought, the best meal of his life.

It was nothing, really. It was a barley stew, thick and golden, with the smoked ham coming apart in it in long soft strands, and a dish of the trout, split and crisped in butter and laid on a bed of leeks. It was the rye loaf, torn with the hands. It was a wedge of cheese, and a jug of cold clear water out of the well. But it was hot, and there was a great deal of it, and he had not eaten, he suddenly realized, since the porridge. He sat at the corner of the bench with his arms like lead and a spoon in his fist, and he could hardly lift it, and he did not care. He ate three bowls. Nobody said anything. Nobody needed to.

Brek ate a bowl at a speed that was frightening, standing up. Then he took the covered pail from Nerissa with both hands, with the grave care of a boy carrying a crown, and bowed, which he had never done before, and went out into the dusk, calling Goodnight, Pops! Goodnight, Fel! and the door boomed shut behind him.

And then, in the great warm glow of the hall, with the plates empty and the cheese going round for the third time, they told it.

They told it badly, all together, in pieces, out of order. Thara told of the crabs, with her hands in the air, and she had killed, by the end of it, nine. Orrin said, with a faint sigh, that it had been four. Brannoch said nothing, and ate his bread. They told of the Candle Gallery, and the white fog, and the long, terrible, glittering beauty of the moths, and Veyra said, quite flatly, “I shot at a scream,” and Torren put down his cheese and stared at her with his mouth open.

“You what?”

“I shot at the sound. I could not see them.”

“In a fog. At a hundred moths. With dust.” The old man put both hands in his beard. “Child, in forty years I’ve never heard of anyone doing that. In forty years I’ve never seen anyone with the sense to try. We always just… set fire to it and ran. It’s a famous floor for burns.”

“She was magnificent,” said Nerissa.

Veyra went the color of the stew.

They told him of the door, and the little toll-house, and the long grey shape at the desk. They told him of the abacus and its rows of beads. Thara told it twice, and the second time it had a speech in it, and Orrin put his face in his hands. And when she came to the end, and the staff, and the frost, and Brannoch’s spear, and the long fall of the great frame in a cloud of glittering black glass, Veyra reached into her coat, without a word, and laid the little black book on the table.

It lay there in the firelight, with its eye-shaped clasp. Torren stopped in the middle of a sentence. He looked at it. All the color went out of his face, very slowly, and then came back.

“Gaffer’s ledger,” he said, in a voice that had nothing in it of the drunkard at all. “Gods and mountains. You killed him.”

“Yes.”

“You killed old Gaffer Tallybone.” He reached out one great scarred forefinger, and touched the cover, as a man touches a grave. “In eleven visits. I never… I never once. I used to like the old man. He was the only fellow on the whole of the first floor who’d say good morning. I never thought to…” He stopped. He looked up, and there was a very odd, a very stormy, a very tender look on his big dark face. “Hang on,” he said. “How did you pass?”

They told him that, too. Thara told him, in a rush, about the rows and the kinds, and Nerissa about the frost, and Orrin about the note, and the old man listened with his head on one side, and as they went his face began, slowly, to work. It twisted. It crumpled. A strange sound came out of his chest, like the sound of a barrel being rolled uphill.

“Two things at once,” said Torren Ballast.

“That’s what I said!”

“Two things at once! Oh, my… oh, you absolute…” And the old man threw back his great grey head, and roared. He laughed until the bench shook, and the dishes jumped, and the flames bent in the hearth. He laughed until the tears ran into his beard. “Oh, gods, don’t you see! Don’t you see what I did? I’d drink a bottle on the stair, and go in, and I’d hit him, and then I’d fall over, and then I’d hit him with the fall, and then I’d be sick, and hit him with that. Eleven times, and every time, a different thing! I never thought of it as strategy! I thought I was just awful at it!”

He wiped his eyes, and went on, in a hoarse crow of delight.

“I’ll tell you the first time. It was the first time, and I was only seventeen, I’d got in with a party of regiment lads, we’d had a bad night in Karzhul, and I went in to take the toll. And he says, Name, number, purpose of passage, and I say, Ballast, and I’m going to be sick, and I was! All down his abacus! I thought he’d kill me! And instead, click. And he says, Sickness. Assessed. And he looks at me, such a dear sad old face, and he says, Please do not do that again.” He wheezed. “And I didn’t. I did something else. And on and on. I never killed him. I couldn’t. I was never sober enough to hit him twice the same.”

They were all laughing now. Even Orrin, with his long hand over his mouth, and Veyra, who laughed rarely and quietly, with her eyes shut.

“Honestly, though,” said Torren, when he had got his breath, “if I’d been there with you, it’d have been dead in a minute. The old lad’s no trouble at all, you know, you’ve only to touch him. One touch. And then I’d just have made that abacus weigh as much as the mountain, and he’d have gone down like a tree. No rows. No kinds. Oh, I’d have had him in…” He snapped his thick fingers. “…that. Just like that. No frost, no notes, no…” He waved a hand. “…heroics. Simple as pie.”

There was a short and pleasant silence.

“Mm-hm,” said Thara, sweetly, and dipped her bread into the last of the stew. “And that’s, you’ll note, exactly why you said you weren’t coming.”

The old man’s mouth opened. It closed again.

“Torren,” said Nerissa gently, and passed him the cheese, “it is a very good point.”

“I… well. I…” Torren looked around the table, at the five small tired shining faces, the antlers, the horns, the blue crest, the silver curls, and at the sixth, the dark head at the end, which had begun, very slowly, to sink toward the table with the bowl still in its hand. Then he sighed, and a deep, rueful, enormous grin spread across his face. “Aye. Well. Aye. It was a very well-turned point. I’ll not argue with it.”

* * *

It was late, and the fire had burned down to a deep red glow, when they came to the question of the morrow.

They had counted the money. There was, of course, not very much of it. They had set it out on the oak in a small, sad, shining heap, and divided it, with sound mathematics and some groaning, into the purse of the company and a little for each. They had examined the five amber beads, which Nerissa had taken from around her neck, and which they passed from hand to hand in the firelight, humming, faintly, in the palm. Orrin said that it was a sound, a long way inside, as of a single note held forever. Torren turned his bead over in his fingers for a long time, and said that he had never seen one in his life, and put it down quite carefully, like a man handling a sleeping bird.

“Tomorrow,” said Veyra.

“Down.”

“Yes. The second floor, and the third. If we can do both in a day, it is a good day. If we do one, it is a day.” She had her hands folded on the table. “Sixty-one glims will not keep the roof on. It will not keep us in barley for a week. We went in easily, today. We must go in harder, tomorrow.”

“Harder?” said Thara, with a long ecstatic sigh. “I do like it when she says harder.”

“The second floor is said to have a river,” said Nerissa. “I should like to see it.”

“I would like it noted,” said Orrin, “that I have a staff to consider.”

“It is noted,” said Veyra. “We will be careful. You will not sing unless there is nothing else.”

Orrin bowed his head.

“And you,” said Torren Ballast.

Fel, who had been half asleep, with his chin on his fist, jerked upright.

“You’ll be at the same. Only worse.” The old man leaned back. He had been drinking nothing but water all evening, which Nerissa had noted with quiet and tender surprise, and his eyes, in the red light, were bright and shrewd and fond. “Today was the first day, lad. It was a lie. A kindness. I didn’t make you do the half of it. Tomorrow we do the real Ladder. From the first rung. And we’ll start the instant the sun’s up.”

“All right,” said Fel. His mouth was dry.

“But,” said Torren, and held up a finger, “before that. Before we even stretch. We’ve got an errand.”

“An errand?”

“A shopping errand.” A wide, wicked, delighted grin crossed his face, and Fel’s heart, quite without his leave, sank down into his boots. “Do you know what a Raskian child drinks, lad? From the day they can sit up? Every morning, in the barracks, and the school, and the farm? A big thick cup of it, straight, before breakfast? Till the day they’re grown?”

“Milk?” said Fel, in a very small voice.

“Growth Proteins.” Torren said it with reverence. “Raskian Growth Proteins juice. It’s the whole secret of us, boy. Why we’re big. Why we’re strong. Why a Raskian girl of twelve can lift a horse. It builds the bone, it builds the muscle, it builds the gut. A cup a day, and by the end of the year you’ll be a different man. And it makes you recover. You’ll sleep like a stone, and you’ll wake up and the muscle’s grown back thicker. I swear on my mother’s pipe, there’s not a recruit alive who didn’t drink it.”

“That sounds wonderful,” said Fel, with great caution.

“It’s vile.”

There was a pause.

“It’s the worst thing you’ve ever put in your mouth,” Torren said happily. “I’ll be honest with you, lad. It’s putrid. It tastes like a cellar that died. It’s made of dragon dung.”

“It’s… what?”

“Dragon excrement. Dried and ground. It’s a terribly rich fertilizer, you see, a terribly good base for bone.” He ticked it off on his thick fingers, serenely. “Dragon dung. Ground CoalHeart shells, we’d have the same ones in the garden, they do very well. And sea water, a gallon to a quart. Mix, and let it stand a week in the sun. I used to drink two cups of it a day. I didn’t taste it. I just plugged my nose and went.”

“Why,” said Thara, in a hushed voice, “would anyone do that?”

“Because it works!” cried Torren. “Look at me!”

They looked. It was, after a pause, not an unconvincing argument.

“Now, the trouble is,” said Torren, and scratched his beard, “it’s not a thing you’ll find at a common apothecary. Not out here. Not in the Wards. There’s no call for it. The dragon-dung’s the hard part, you’ve to buy it from the furnace-keepers, and nobody’s any reason to ask. But I know a place.” He lowered his voice. “North end of the left mountain, up by the old tanneries, past the Weeping Stair, in a lane so narrow you’ve to turn sideways. A pawnshop. It’s called The Gibbous Cog.”

“The… Gibbous Cog,” said Orrin, slowly.

“Pawnbrokers in Hexes and Hardware. Bought and sold. Charms, clocks, curses, cursed clocks, a fellow who’ll buy your shadow, a woman who’ll sell you one. I don’t say it’s safe. But if there’s a barrel of Growth Proteins in Dun Vurrim, it’s in the cellar of the Cog, behind the third door, under a cat.” He grinned. “We’ll go at dawn. We’ll be back for breakfast. And then,” said Torren Ballast, with a warm and terrible tenderness, “we’ll begin the Ladder, lad, from the top, with a cup of it in your belly, and a real day of work.”

He lifted his water cup, and drank off it, and set it down, with a long and satisfied sigh.

“One cup a day,” he said. “I promise you. You’ll thank me in a year.”

Nobody said anything.

Fel sat at the end of the bench, with the dying firelight on his face, and his whole body aching, down to the roots of his hair, in a long, dull, comfortable ache that promised to be much worse in the morning. He thought about the Ladder. He thought about the Dropping Bear, ninety-one of it, and the nine that he had failed. He thought about a barrel in a cellar, behind the third door, under a cat. He thought about dragon dung, and a glass, and a thick cold swallow, and the long grey light of a morning in which he would be sick, and then do a hundred of something, and then be sick again.

He looked down the table.

Veyra was looking at him. She had her chin on her hand. She was trying, very hard, not to laugh, and failing, in a dignified and tender way, with her violet eyes bright, and when he met them she lifted her cup to him, in the smallest and most solemn of toasts.

Fel put his head down on his arms, on the cool oak, among the crumbs.

“Oh, gods,” he said, to the table, in a muffled voice. “Tomorrow’s going to be awful.”

And, on the beam above him, in the red and gold dark of the great hall, the old weathered banners of the guilds that were gone stirred, once, softly, in the draft from the chimney, like a company of ghosts, nodding, in sympathy, all together, in the firelight, at the end of the day.