Distant tales of the Dichotomy

Vili walked to the Door of Ink with his hood down and his golden hair unbound and his shoulders very straight.

He did not look at Fel. He did not look at the stretcher bearing Loria’s limp black shape past him through the archway, or at the pale lavender stain of blood on the stone. He looked only at the third iron door, at the small carved quill, and he stopped in front of it and flexed his fingers once.

They closed. They opened. The silver wire whispered.

“Eight in ten,” he murmured, and went in.

The black glass rippled.

The Unwritten Library was a cathedral of empty books.

It stretched away in every direction, shelves rising a hundred feet into shadow, and every shelf was packed with blank white volumes, thousands upon thousands of them, spineless, titleless, with unmarked covers as pale as bone. The floor was an ocean of loose paper, sheet upon sheet upon sheet, ankle-deep and rustling like dry leaves. Somewhere in the vaulted dark, a single hourglass ticked.

At the center of the drifting paper stood Hironori Rain, with his brass case open in his hands.

He was smiling. In the low white light, the black script crawling over his skin looked like a living thing, and his eyes were two pools of ink in a face the color of old vellum.

“Prince Vili,” he said. His voice was a little too polite. “Seventh son. Youngest of a rotting line. I did hope it would be you.”

“Scribbler,” said Vili.

“Inkblooded,” Hironori corrected. “We do not write about things. We write things true.” He drew a slim silver pen from the case and unscrewed the cap. “This is the Door of Ink. Nothing here has been written yet. I mean to write you a very short ending.”

“I would prefer you didn’t. Your penmanship is atrocious.”

Hironori’s smile slipped.

“You have not seen my penmanship.”

“I have seen your forearms. They look like a drunkard’s shopping list.”

Hironori wrote.

It was very fast. A flick of the wrist, a black slash across a leaf of paper, and the leaf became a chain. It shot across the floor with a snake’s speed and locked around Vili’s ankles, cold and iron-black. A second flick and a second leaf became a wolf, ink-dripping, huge, its eyes two blank white spaces, hurling itself across the field with a snarl like tearing cloth.

Vili raised Chimera.

The sand poured down the halberd’s shaft like an hourglass in reverse. It spilled out across the paper, golden and quiet, spreading in a wide, gentle ring. Where it touched the ink chain, the chain went grey. Where it touched the wolf, the wolf smeared. It ran like wet paint under a thumb, its body sliding apart into long black streaks, and then the sand closed over the streaks and they were gone, dissolved into the gold like a stain in a cloth.

Hironori stared.

“Sand drinks ink,” said Vili pleasantly. “It is the first thing they teach you about writing. You have never once been read.”

Hironori snarled and wrote faster. SPEAR. WALL. KNEEL. Every word he wrote became true in a flash of black light, and every word the sand devoured. A spear of ink hurtled at Vili’s throat and was ground to dust a foot from his face. A wall of black paper rose to hem him in, and the sand ate through it like acid through cloth. The word KNEEL fell like a hammer on Vili’s shoulders, and the seventh prince stood, unbent, unbothered, and yawned.

“Is that all?” he said. “I have had more exciting letters from my tailor.”

Hironori’s face was gray. His hand shook as he pulled a fresh sheet toward him, wrote a single, enormous word in a swooping black hand across the floor, and stabbed the pen through it.

DROWN.

The paper ocean turned to ink.

It rose in a black wave, a tide as tall as a house, roaring down on Vili like the end of the world. Fel, watching in the black glass, felt his own breath stop. Vili raised Chimera, and the sand stood.

It rose in a glittering golden wall, wide as the library, and the ink wave smashed into it with a sound like the sea. For one moment the two forces hung locked together, black against gold, ink against sand. Then the sand drank. The wave slumped and sagged and drained down through the grains like water through a sponge, and when it was gone, the gold had turned black, and the whole floor lay in glistening, silent ruin.

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Hironori Rain was on his knees.

He was breathing hard. He had cut the back of his hand with his pen, and blood, black and thick and smelling of old iron, dripped down his wrist. He put his palm flat to the sand and screamed a word.

BREAK.

The sand cracked. For a heartbeat, the whole library rocked. Vili was thrown backward, hitting the floor on his back, Chimera skidding from his grip. Hironori lunged, his bleeding hand raised, his eyes wide and wild, and Vili, sprawled on the ruined floor, looked up at him.

He laughed.

It was a low, easy, unhurried laugh, and it stopped Hironori in his tracks.

“Do you know what the Wyrnias have always been?” Vili said, rising onto one elbow. “Kings. And do you know what a king does to a scribe who forgets his place?” He held out his hand. The halberd flew back into his palm on a rush of gold. “He has the man’s fingers cut off, one at a time. To teach him humility.”

He stood.

“You are a smudge, Rain. You are a small, wet, unimportant footnote to a book no one will ever write. You wrote DROWN. It was very dramatic. It was also spelled wrong.”

“It was not…”

“No, you are right, it was not. I was only enjoying the look on your face.”

Hironori snarled and threw himself forward, pen raised like a dagger, and Vili didn’t move.

The sand closed on the boy from below.

It came up around his ankles first, a smooth, warm, golden tide, and he stopped in midstride and looked down, and by the time he understood what was happening it had reached his knees. He beat at it with his fists. He tore at it. He wrote, frantically, with his bleeding hand, across the surface, and the sand drank every word.

“Please,” said Hironori. “Please, I yield, I yield…”

“That is not what the letter said,” said Vili. “The letter said the Sanctum would not intervene, except to record the dead.”

The sand reached Hironori’s waist. His chest. His ribs began to creak.

“You know,” Vili said, almost conversationally, walking a slow circle around him, “I spent my whole life being told I was an afterthought. Seventh son. I have had seventeen years of being the last name on every list. I know exactly how it feels to be small.” He smiled, and it was terrible. “I confess I have grown rather good at it. But you, Rain, you are a specialist. You are not even a seventh son. You are a note in the margin of somebody else’s failure.”

The sand closed.

Hironori Rain’s scream lasted for perhaps three seconds. It ended abruptly, in a sound that Fel had heard once before in the Gallows, when a barrel of wet stone fell on a drunk, and the sand rose and tightened and squeezed. Somewhere beneath the gold, bones cracked in long, wet, slow succession. Blood came up through the sand like water through a sponge, blooming red, then black as it met the spilled ink. It spread across the library floor in a slow, thick, ugly stain.

Then the sand went still.

Vili stood in the ruined hall with Chimera on his shoulder, and did not look at what lay beneath. His silver-wired hand flexed once, twice, and the halberd flickered through six shapes in the space of a breath, spear and scythe and whip and hook, and he watched it with an odd, distant expression, as if seeing a face he had not seen in a long time.

“Hm,” he said.

“Winner,” said Boru’s voice. He sounded less delighted than before. “Candidate Wyrnia.”

In the Court of Doors, no one said anything for a long moment.

Kirn stood with his hands behind him and watched the dead glass. Isharv, in the corner, had lowered his halberd. Karmina, who had come back from the Door of Bones with blood to the elbows, stood silent at the edge of the circle.

“Two to one,” said Kirn at last, without inflection. “Team D carries the Trial. Thirty points to each candidate. Team A is docked fifteen.” A pause. “Number seventy-nine, Hironori Rain, is struck from the rolls. The Sanctum thanks him for his service.”

“A dreadful shame,” said Boru, in a strangely quiet voice. “He wrote such a lovely hand.”

The Door of Ink opened, and Vili Wyrnia walked out.

There was blood on his cuffs and a dusting of black sand on his boots, but his hair was still perfect. He crossed the circle without hurrying and stopped in front of Fel’s stretcher, and for a moment the two of them looked at each other.

“He was our age,” said Fel.

“Yes.”

“You didn’t have to…”

“He wrote DROWN on a floor made of paper.” Vili’s voice was flat. “He meant it. If the sand had failed, I would have died. That is what the Sanctum is for.” He glanced down at his hand and turned the wired fingers over. “That is what I am for.”

Fel said nothing. There didn’t seem to be anything to say.

“Do not look at me like that,” said Vili, very low. “It is not becoming.”

“You’re shaking.”

“I am cold.”

“You’re…”

“I am cold, TeneDente.”

He turned and walked away. He did not walk very fast. By the door of the Court, he stopped, without turning around.

“Sixty glims,” he said. “I have not forgotten.”

Then he was gone.

Karmina’s hands were at Fel’s shoulder. He hadn’t noticed her arrive. Her face was grey and tired, and the silver rings in her ears did not chime.

“Loria,” he said.

“Alive.” The word came out ragged. “Her lung was punctured. Her arm will need bones I do not have and skills I have never practiced. The girl burned half of herself in that coffin and refused to let go of the gun.” She closed her eyes. “I do not know if she will lift it again.”

“And Marie? Orpheus?”

“Alive. Both of them. Your Reptillar has been unusually gracious about the stretchers.” Her mouth twisted. “I shall be up all night.”

Fel lay back on the stretcher and looked at the dark ceiling, at the high, dim arches lost in shadow.

Two to one.

He had won a fight, and the fight had cost him half his blood and the flesh of a leg. Loria had lost hers and was lying somewhere below him with her arm in pieces. Vili had won without a scratch and walked out of a room that smelled of a dead boy. And Orpheus, whose only sin was to be kind, lay in a cot with two broken legs and his other half scattered among the stars.

This was what Kirn had meant. This was why they were called the Sanctum of Claws.

“Candidates,” said Kirn, from the center of the circle. He had stepped forward, and for once his tired hawk’s eyes seemed almost human. “You have carried the Trial. Rest. Heal. The final trial of this rotation will be announced when the Sanctum decides.”

“The final trial?” said Fel.

Kirn looked at him. It was the longest look the commander had ever given him.

“There is one squadron,” he said, “that no one has been made to face. You have done well, TeneDente. Do not become comfortable.”

And behind him, in the dark of the vaulted ceiling, something old and patient laughed very softly at the sound of a name that had not yet been spoken