Distant tales of the Dichotomy

Fel was on his last legs when the sand came.

He had killed eleven of them. He thought. He had lost count somewhere after the seventh, and he was standing in a ring of steaming, mushroom-crowned carcasses with his back against the cracked fountain and blood in his eyes. Spores hung in the air like violet snow. A twelfth thing had just come out of the roses, tall and stiff and terrible.

Then the ground rose up in a golden wave and took it by the throat.

Vili walked out of the fog with Loria in his arms and a light behind his eyes that was still fading. Sand streamed from his hands in silent, methodical ropes. It pinned, cut, and crushed. Within a minute, the garden was silent, except for the slow drip of spores.

Fel slid to the ground.

“You’re late,” he said.

“I was busy,” said Vili.

He looked at Loria. He looked at the sand-mantle around her, at the blistered cheek, at the eyes that never left his face. He looked at Vili’s shirt, dark with blood that was not his own.

“Is it…”

“They are dead,” said Vili. “Both of them.”

Nobody said anything for a long time.

They found the crystal at the far end of the garden, behind the last terrace, a huge natural geode split open by roots and time, its inside lined with pale violet spikes taller than a man. It was hollow. It was quiet. The fungus had not touched it. Vili sealed the mouth behind them with a thin curtain of sand, and they lay down in the purple dark, and Fel realized for the first time that he had been crying for some while and had not noticed.

They stayed there for a day and a night.

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Loria could not move for most of it. The venom sat in her limbs like cold lead. She lay with her head on Vili’s coat and her burnt cheek turned toward the crystal wall, and she talked, when she could, in short slow sentences, and Fel and Vili took turns telling her the parts she had missed.

“Saladin is going to do what?” said Fel, when they had told him what Knoxia had said.

“Open a door,” said Vili. “A door to something old.”

“The Great Serpent,” said Loria, slowly. Her voice was a dry scrape. “I have read the name. In the tower. It was in a book they told me not to touch.”

“What is it?”

“Something that was here before names.” She closed her eyes. “The books say it was sealed beneath the first empire. The Ortumocorvis did not defeat it. They buried it. And someone has been digging.”

“The five in black cloaks,” said Fel.

“The five in black cloaks.”

Vili sat cross-legged beside her with his silver hand curled in his lap. He had washed the blood from his face, and he looked unbearably young. “What would you have us do?” he said.

Fel thought about it.

It was a strange thing, thinking with a Crown on his head. Every so often the iron circlet gave a small, cold, faint pulse, and he felt the weight of it, the weight of the fallen who were not yet fallen. He had two Tolls on Saladin’s Crown, he realized, and the silver-haired boy did not seem troubled by them.

The Tolls, he thought. He wanted them.

“I fight him,” he said. “That doesn’t change. I’m King. I get pulled to the Hall at the Third Bell, whether I like it or not. I fight him. I beat him. And then we all stop the door.”

“And if you cannot beat him?” said Vili.

“Plan Z.”

“I hate Plan Z.”

“So do I.”

Loria’s mouth twitched. “You are very bad at plans,” she said. “You should have let me write them all.”

“You’d have written ‘set everything on fire.’”

“It has the virtue of clarity.”

Above them, through the clouded crystal, a great bell began to toll.

It was not a sound. It was a pressure, a slow, vast hammering in the marrow of the world. Fel felt it in his teeth. Vili flinched. Loria’s eyes flew open, bright and wide.

The Third Bell.

The Crown on Fel’s head flared silver. It grew hot, then bright, then blazing white. He gasped and clutched at it, and his body lifted, his feet leaving the crystal floor, drawn upward by something he could not resist.

“Fel!” Vili was on his feet. “Fel!”

“I’m all right!”

“Do not lose!”

“Sixty glims!” Fel shouted, and somehow managed a grin. “You owe me! You’d better be alive to pay it!”

Loria had turned her head, and for one last moment, her crimson eyes met his.

She said nothing. She did not have to.

Then the light took him, and the crystal fell away, and he was gone.