Distant tales of the Dichotomy

The door boomed shut behind them, and the dark swallowed everything.

Fel heard Vili’s boots, Loria’s silence, and his own heartbeat, in that order. Then a soft golden glow bloomed as Vili’s halberd threw off a faint shimmer of sand, and the corridor ahead revealed itself: a low tunnel of wet black brick, its walls hollowed into niches, every niche packed with skulls stacked like loaves in a baker’s window. Water dripped somewhere. The air tasted of iron and old candle smoke.

“Formation,” Vili said. “I take point. Ortumo, rear. TeneDente, between us, where you can be of the least harm.”

“You can lead the way to your own funeral,” said Fel.

“Then follow me to it.”

“I’ll take the lantern,” said Loria, and simply walked past them both.

“Ortumo!” Vili hissed. “Ortumo, we do not…” But she was already gone, her braid swinging into the dark, three crimson eyes glowing along the barrel of the gun in her hand. Vili stood in the middle of the tunnel with his mouth still open around the rest of the sentence.

“That went well,” Fel said.

“You are not helping!”

“I’m not trying to.”

They followed her, because the alternative was to be alone, which neither of them would have admitted.

Somewhere ahead, faint and cheerful and horribly efficient, a small brass bell tinkled twice.

“Team C,” Vili muttered. “They’re ahead of us.”

“Of course they are. They talked to each other.”

The tunnel spat them out onto a rusted iron balcony, and the Drowned Nave opened beneath them like the inside of a drowned god.

It was enormous. Great pillars of black stone rose from a floor already ankle-deep in dark water, holding up a ceiling lost in shadow. Bone galleries climbed the walls in tiers, and at the far end of the vast chamber a narrow staircase spiraled up the cliff face, each step formed of stacked ribs and fused vertebrae, toward a small iron gate glowing faintly at its summit. The Bone Stair. The Widow’s Gate.

And in the very center, on a chain thick as a man’s waist, hung the lantern.

It was smaller than Fel had imagined. A brass lamp in the shape of a hooded woman with her hands pressed against her chest, and behind the glass at her heart burned a small white flame that whispered when it moved. He could hear it from here. It sounded like carry me, carry me, carry me.

Below it, already at the pillar’s foot, stood Team C.

They were not fighting. They were working. Raza planted his ironwood shield in the water like a wall, his bark-thick body bracing it against the pillar. Gobu was already halfway up the chain, hand over hand, his bell clamped in his teeth so it wouldn’t ring. Ryever stood at the base with her eyes shut and one palm laid flat against the stone, murmuring numbers under her breath. Every few seconds she lifted two fingers, and Gobu moved, and Raza shifted, and no one so much as glanced at her.

The bell tolled.

It was a deep, sad, single note that shivered the water. The level rose an inch, then another, and settled at Fel’s shins.

“First bell,” Vili whispered. “Listen. I will raise a platform across the gap, and you will…”

He never finished the sentence. Behind them, on the balcony’s far end, black fire bloomed.

Fel turned and saw Loria, not twenty paces away, the gun raised, the three eyes blazing wide open. She had not waited for anyone. She had not said a word. She simply fired.

The recoil flung her against the wall. The shot screamed across the nave in a line of molten black, and Fel had just enough time to think it’s going to hit us before it did not hit them: it struck the pillar in the middle of the chamber, three feet below where Gobu hung, and the whole stone column cracked from top to bottom.

Chain links snapped. The lantern dropped.

Gobu lunged from the chain, caught the lantern against his chest with a shriek, and fell fifteen feet into Raza’s waiting arm. The giant caught him without a grunt, shield swinging up in the same motion, and shards of the pillar rained across the water like a hailstorm.

“Are you insane?!” Vili roared. He had been standing in the path of the shot for half a second, and now he was picking gravel from his hair. “You could have hit us!”

“I aimed for the lantern,” said Loria, hauling herself upright. Her voice was absolutely flat. “You were in the way.”

“I was behind you!”

“Then don’t stand where I might shoot.”

Vili’s face twisted, and instead of answering, he thrust his halberd toward the ceiling and shouted a word Fel did not catch. Sand exploded from the weapon’s blade in a spinning golden torrent, pouring off the balcony and hardening into a wide curving ramp that dropped toward the nave floor. It was a beautiful piece of work. It was also aimed straight at the spot where Loria’s second shot, fired without warning, cut through it like a knife through wet bread.

The ramp collapsed.

Fel felt the balcony vanish under his feet. He hit the water on his back, his ribs screamed, and for one long moment the whole world was black and cold and filled with bubbles. He came up gasping beside Vili, who was spluttering and swearing in three languages, both of them soaked to the bone in filthy water.

Above the nave, the little white flame in the lantern shuddered.

Loria’s second shot had struck the wall, and the black fire that clung to it was drinking the light, greedily, the way a cellar drinks a candle. In Raza’s arm, Gobu held the lantern up in both hands as its flame guttered, sank to a pinprick, and went out.

Silence fell across the nave. Even the dripping stopped.

Then, from every niche and every wall and every dark corner, came the sound of bone scraping against bone.

The Grievers came out of the water.

They rose from it like drowned dogs, low and long and wrong, each one built from stacked ribs, its jaws split in too many places, its hide the wet black of old river mud. There were dozens. There were dozens more behind them. Their eyes were pale green pinpricks, and they did not bark or growl. They simply came, the way water comes.

“Light it!” Ryever’s voice cut across the nave. It was the first time Fel had heard her raise it. “Gobu! Ash-word! Now!”

“I’m trying, you stony old bag!” Gobu was scrambling, fumbling a flint from his coat. “The widow doesn’t like it when you shout!”

Raza slammed his shield into the water and roared, and the sound was pure oak breaking. Three Grievers leapt at once, and he took all three on the shield, catching one in the jaws and hurling it across the nave. The second latched onto his left arm above the wrist.

Fel had watched men in the Gallows lose fingers to fights, to fever, to falling barrels. He had never watched a man be unmade in front of him.

The Griever twisted once, the bark cracked, and Raza’s forearm came off at the elbow like a branch in a storm.

The giant did not scream. He looked down at the stump, seeming more surprised than hurt. Then he swung the shield around, drove its edge through the Griever’s skull, and planted himself in front of Gobu with his good arm braced.

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“Keep the little one behind me,” he said, almost gently. “I have another.”

Ryever moved.

She whirled the sling, and the stones in her pouch flowed out of it like water. Each one struck a Griever’s skull with a sound like a thrown bucket, and each Griever collapsed into bones. She did not aim. She listened. A stone rushed past Fel’s left ear so close he felt the wind of it, and the Griever that had been about to bite his throat came apart behind him. She did not look at him. She had simply heard it was there.

“Left, Gobu,” she said. “Ten paces. The chain-ladder. Now.”

Gobu rang his bell, one sharp crack, and out of the water around the small green goblin sprang a dozen goat-shaped things of moss and gravel, each no bigger than a hound, their eyes glowing like lit coals. They swarmed the nearest Grievers, and where they grazed, the bones lost their edges and crumbled. Gobu, laughing and crying at once, struck a spark, cupped it against the lantern’s glass, and whispered something too fast for Fel to hear. The white flame woke, stronger than before, and the whole nave flinched.

The Grievers recoiled. Team C, as one animal, surged toward the Bone Stair.

“Move!” Vili screamed, dragging himself from the water. Chimera was already reshaping in his hands, blade to scythe, scythe to whip. “Ortumo, cover fire! TeneDente, with me, we flank them before…”

He plunged forward, alone and half-blind with fury, and a Griever dropped out of the darkness onto his back.

Its jaws closed on his left hand. Vili’s scream cracked the ceiling.

Fel didn’t think. He moved. Krashing Fyr came out of its scabbard warm in his hand, and he swung it in a low, hard arc at the beast’s shoulder. The golden blade sank through bone and ichor with almost no resistance, and the Griever came apart. Vili collapsed to his knees in the shallows, clutching his hand against his chest.

He had lost the last two fingers. The little finger and the ring finger were gone at the knuckle, and the blood ran down his wrist in bright, steady ribbons. He stared at the stumps as if the two missing digits had personally betrayed him.

“Get up,” said Fel, hauling him by the collar.

“I gave an order…”

“You gave a suggestion. Get up!”

A blast of black fire rolled over them both, flattening the Grievers in a line and melting the water into steam. Fel felt the heat bake the back of his neck. Behind them, Loria stood on the wreck of the balcony, the gun smoking, her eyes wide and bright.

“You flinched,” she told Vili, in the same voice she used for everything.

“You nearly cooked me!”

“You were slow.”

Fel tore a strip from his own sleeve and jammed it over Vili’s hand with a force that made him howl. Then he looked up, and the plan arrived in his mind whole, cold, and unpleasantly clear.

Team C was winning. Not because they were stronger, but because they never wasted a movement. Raza was down an arm and still standing, still holding the line. Gobu’s goats were clearing the lantern’s path. Ryever, at the head of the line, was advancing up the Bone Stair one step at a time, stopping at each one with her hand pressed flat to the ribs, tapping the stone, listening, choosing. And she wasn’t stepping on every stair. She was skipping some.

False steps, Fel thought. She can hear which ones will break.

He counted. She skipped one in every three. That would take her a long time.

A long time, and the water was rising.

The second bell tolled, and the black water crept to Fel’s knees.

He looked at the wall to the left of the Bone Stair, and saw it: a narrow vertical shaft cut into the rock, barely wider than a coffin, a rusted iron chain running up its length into the dark. As he watched, one of Gobu’s mossy goats, one Ryever had sent scouting ahead, bounded into the shaft and scaled it in three leaps.

A sexton’s lift, he thought. For hauling bodies. It ran straight up to the level of the gate. It bypassed the whole staircase.

Ryever would never take it. She was the sort who checked every step. But she was climbing slowly, and that meant there was time.

“Listen,” Fel said, gripping Vili’s collar and pulling him close. “I need you and her to make noise. As much as you can. Loud. Ugly. Make them look at you.”

“I do not take instruction from…”

“Then take it as a challenge,” said Fel. “Make more noise than she does.”

Vili stared at him for one long second. Then a hard, bright, dangerous light came into his blue eyes, and he barked a laugh that had nothing kind in it.

“Oh, I shall,” said Vili Wyrnia.

Fel waded into the dark toward the shaft and did not look back. Behind him, the nave erupted: sand shrieking upward in towers, black fire roaring across the water, the two of them competing to be the most catastrophic thing in the room. It wasn’t teamwork. It was two idiots trying to outdo each other, and it had never looked so useful.

The chain in the shaft was cold and slick. Fel got both hands on it and started to climb.

His ribs began screaming at the twentieth foot.

At the fortieth, the silver thread Karmina had sewn started to tear. He bit down on his tongue until he tasted copper, and kept climbing. Below him the fight boomed and shivered through the stone, and above him the shaft narrowed to a pinpoint of pale light. The third bell tolled beneath him, deep and slow, and the water climbed to the waist of everyone still fighting in the nave.

He hauled himself out onto a narrow stone ledge at the top, retching, one hand pressed against his bandages, and saw the Widow’s Gate.

It was small. Iron and black, barely larger than a door, set into the cliff face under a jutting slab of rock. Beside it burned a wide bronze brazier, empty, wide as a bathtub and cold as a grave. Below the ledge, the Bone Stair curled up out of the flooded dark. He could see Team C climbing it, no more than twenty steps from the top, Ryever leading, Gobu behind her with the lantern held in both hands, Raza at the rear with his shield raised behind him and his blood leaving a black trail on the bones.

Fel crouched behind the slab, pulled out Karmina’s vial, and put two drops on his tongue. The bitterness hit like a slap. His heartbeat steadied, and the pain in his ribs became a dull, distant rumor.

Then he waited.

Ryever reached the top step.

She stopped.

She had one foot lifted and her head tilted, and for a moment Fel was certain she was listening for him. She looked up at the ledge, and he flattened against the stone, holding his breath so hard his eyes watered.

“Someone is breathing above the gate,” Ryever said quietly.

She did not wait to be sure. She whipped up her sling and loosed a stone, and it hit the slab a hand’s width above Fel’s head with a crack that showered him with dust.

Now, he thought. Now, or never.

He set his hand on Falling Star’s hilt, all the way in the dark, and said the word.

“Silence.”

The world stopped.

It did not feel like the training chamber. It was quieter, colder, and more delicate, like standing on the surface of a frozen lake at midnight. Ryever hung in mid-motion, one arm outstretched, her hair caught in an unfinished sweep. Gobu, the lantern held to his chest, was frozen in mid-laugh. Raza, still climbing, was a statue of blood and bark.

Three seconds.

Fel came out from behind the slab, dropped four feet to the top step, and took the lantern from Gobu’s stiff green fingers. It weighed almost nothing. It whispered against his palm, and its light lay on his skin like a warm breath. He crossed the ledge in four strides, laid the lantern into the bronze brazier, and stepped back.

The flame leapt.

And time resumed.

“NO!” Gobu screamed, grabbing at empty air.

Ryever spun, saw Fel standing on the ledge with the lantern’s glow on his face, and her grey eyes went wide for the first and only time. She loosed a stone at his chest without a single word.

It hit.

Something in Fel’s ribs went with a wet crack, and he folded around it, the air knocked out of him. But the flame in the brazier held, and above the gate a great iron voice began to speak: a slow, counting rumble, like a bell tolling under the sea.

Ten breaths.

He had to hold this ledge for ten breaths.

Raza came first, one-armed, roaring, his shield up like a battering ram. Fel threw himself sideways, and the giant’s charge crashed into the wall where he had been, splitting the stone. Gobu leapt at him from the other side, shrieking, his crook whirling, the little goats swarming up the ledge behind him. Fel cut one out of the air with Krashing Fyr, and another hit his back and tore his coat to ribbons.

One breath, the gate counted.

Ryever’s stones came in singly now, aimed and patient. One caught his shoulder. One shattered against his forearm. He staggered.

Two.

Three.

Below, in the nave, the fight had changed. The noise had stopped being catastrophic and started being desperate. Vili was screaming Loria’s name, and Loria was screaming nothing, and there was a crack of masonry and a roar of black fire from the wall directly beneath the ledge. The whole Bone Stair shuddered.

Four.

Fel took a stone to the thigh. He went down on one knee. Raza’s shield came around, and he ducked, and it took the corner off the brazier’s rim.

Five.

The flame guttered. Gobu howled in triumph, lunging for the lantern with his small green hands, and Fel, on his knees, with the blood running from his mouth, did the only thing he could think of. He drove the golden saber point-first into the floor of the ledge, right in the goblin’s path, and the blade rang against the stone. Gobu skidded and fell back with a squeak.

Six. Seven.

The stair below them cracked.

It happened all at once. Loria’s fire had been aimed at a Griever the size of a wagon that had crawled up the cliff wall behind the two boys. She missed, and the beam went into the base of the Bone Stair. The stone screamed, and a section forty feet long dropped away into the flood with a roar. Ryever, Gobu, and Raza, halfway onto the ledge, lurched as the steps beneath them fell.

Fel lunged.

He caught Gobu by the collar, hauling him up onto the stone. He did not know why. It was the same instinct that had made him take a Gallows boy’s part against a bigger boy, the same one that had made Tori pick him up out of the dirt. Ryever caught the edge of the ledge by her fingertips. Raza, one-armed, hung by the shield strap hooked over a stone tooth.

Eight.

“The gate!” Ryever gasped. She was looking up at him with something raw in her face that was not hatred. It was almost a question. “Let us in!”

Nine.

“You lost,” Fel said, and it came out hoarse and terrible.

Ten.

The Widow’s Gate swung wide.

Behind it, a plain stone corridor, lit by a single torch. Isharv stood in the middle of it, his arms crossed, a wide reptilian smirk on his face.

Fel dragged himself toward the light. His legs would not work properly. Two hands seized his coat from behind, Vili’s one good hand and something black and gloved, and they hauled him bodily through the door. The gate began to close. Vili and Loria both stumbled in behind him, one bleeding, one burnt, both glaring at each other as if the world had been arranged for that purpose.

And behind them, on the ledge, three silhouettes in the failing light.

“Boru,” Fel said, “the seals…”

The gate slammed.

For a moment there was only the sound of the four of them breathing.

Then Isharv grunted. “Seals hold. Ten more minutes, then the goat pulls them out of the water. Whichever of them are still in one piece.” He looked down at Fel with a curl of the lip. “Congratulations, TeneDente. Barely.”

Fel opened his mouth to reply, coughed instead, and blood ran hot down his chin.

The vial was empty in his hand, and he did not remember drinking it.

He was unconscious before he hit the floor.