Distant tales of the Dichotomy

The light let go of him, and he fell six feet onto a floor of black glass.

Fel landed on his hands and knees. The impact drove a dull, heavy shudder up his ribs, and for a moment all he could do was breathe. Then he lifted his head, and the Hall of the Empty Throne opened around him like the inside of a jewel.

It was vast. It was silent. The floor was polished black glass, so smooth and deep that it seemed to be water, and it ran out in every direction to a horizon of tall silver pillars. The ceiling was a mirror. The walls were mirrors. Everywhere he looked, he saw himself: a hundred bloody boys in a hundred tilted rooms, wearing a hundred weeping crowns.

At the far end of the hall, on a dais of seven steps, stood a great throne of white stone, and it was empty.

At its foot stood Saladin Silverine.

He had taken off his coat. Beneath it his shirt was white and unmarked, and the silver veins running from his throat to his wrists glowed faintly, like moonlight through thin ice. His Crown rested on his pale hair, and where the circlet met his brow, a thin thread of silver blood had begun to run. Two Tolls, Fel thought. He should have been bent double.

Saladin did not look bent. He looked rested.

“King Felanor,” he said, and his voice carried the whole length of the hall without effort. “You are late by three seconds. I began to worry.”

“Sorry. There were mushrooms.”

“So I heard.” The mirrored eyes crinkled. “You killed the little dinosaurs. How very good of you. I dislike waste, but I did not expect them to survive the night.”

“Pegoris and Knoxia didn’t.”

“No.” A pause. “No, I did not expect that either.” He tilted his head, and for the first time there was something in his voice that Fel could not read. “Thank you for that. You will understand shortly.”

Fel drew his swords. “Yield now, and I’ll let you live.”

“How generous.” Saladin smiled, and the whole room seemed to lean toward the smile. “I shall answer that question in the only way I know.”

He stepped backward, into the floor.

He did not sink. He did not fall. He simply stepped into his own reflection as if it were a doorway, and the black glass rippled around him and closed, and he was gone.

Fel held his breath.

Fish splash, said Gideon’s voice, dry and patient in the back of his mind.

He stood perfectly still. He let his eyes go soft. He watched the glass.

For a long time nothing happened. The reflections of a hundred Fels stood motionless around him. The silence stretched. Somewhere in it, very faint and very far, he heard a sound like a drop of water falling into a still pond.

There.

A tiny ripple was spreading across the floor, forty feet to his left. It grew. It sharpened. He was already moving when Saladin’s head broke the surface, a bright silver crown of hair, mirrored eyes wide with surprise, and Fel’s golden saber flashed across the gap.

The blade bit. A line of quicksilver sprayed from Saladin’s forearm. He gasped, twisted, and vanished back into the glass before the second strike could land.

“Oh, very good,” said his voice, from everywhere. “You watch the water.”

“I was taught by a fisherman.”

“Then I shall have to be a very clever fish.”

The glass erupted.

A whip of liquid silver lashed out of the floor behind Fel, thin as a thread and quick as lightning. He ducked, and it sliced the air above his head. Another burst from the left, and another from the right, until a whole thicket of gleaming tentacles was whirling around him like a silver storm. He hooked one on the curve of Krashing Fyr and hauled, and it slid through the steel like water through a sieve and reformed on the other side.

You can’t hook a liquid.

He tried anyway. He wrapped a second tentacle around the black blade of Falling Star, twisted, and yanked. The whole line of silver went taut, and a startled yelp came from somewhere beneath the glass. The whip snapped. Saladin surfaced ten paces away, stumbling, his arm streaming.

“Did you just fish me?” he demanded.

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“You were splashing.”

Saladin laughed, delighted and appalled, and split in five.

It happened between one heartbeat and the next. The quicksilver flowing from his arm gathered into droplets, and the droplets swelled, and five identical Saladins stood in a ring around Fel with their coats on and their Crowns gleaming, each of them smiling the same faint, courteous smile.

“Which of us,” they said together, “is the King?”

They came at him all at once.

Fel had never fought five of anything. He had barely fought two. But Gideon had told him, in the long, slow afternoons on the river, that a school of fish was only a fish in a crowd, and a crowd could be hurt if you found weakest link. He dropped low and swept a leg. He drove his head into a chin, and heard the crack. He hooked an ankle, hauled, kicked a knee sideways, and stabbed through the soft place beneath a rib. One copy folded into a puddle of quicksilver. Another hit him with a mirror-hard fist and split his lip.

He fought with elbows and teeth and the crown of his skull. He fought in the mud of his own memory, in the filth of the Gallows, in the dirt of the river bank, and each time a copy went down it burst into droplets that rolled across the glass and crept back toward the others, healing, reforming.

They don’t stay down. I have to find the real one.

He caught a glimpse of a ripple, far away on his left.

There.

He leapt through the ring of copies, took a slash across the thigh, and did not stop. He hit the real Saladin like a falling wall. His shoulder struck the boy’s ribs. Saladin flew backward with a grunt, and Fel came in behind him with the saber, and the boy’s silver hand rose.

“Hold still,” said Saladin.

Fel looked up, and his own face was staring back at him from two perfect mirrors.

He tried to move. He could not. His arms locked where they were. His legs went stiff. Every muscle turned to glass. He could see himself in Saladin’s eyes: a bleeding, exhausted, crowned boy with a saber raised, frozen in the act of striking, and as he watched, the reflection stopped moving, and the boy in front of him stopped with it.

“Your reflection is mine,” said Saladin softly. “A pity. It was such a good fight.”

The mercury whip rose. It hovered before Fel’s throat, a slim bright thread, quivering.

Think. His mind was the only thing that still worked. The eyes. He needs the eyes. What blinds a mirror?

The Crown on his head was weeping silver light down his cheeks, bright and steady and warm.

A brighter light.

He could not move his arms. He could not move his legs. But he could move his neck, just a little, if he strained with everything he had, and he tipped his head back and tilted his brow toward the mirrored eyes in front of him.

The Crown blazed.

It caught Saladin’s stare full-on, and the boy screamed. The light struck the mirrors of his eyes and bounced, doubled, tripled, blinded, a blast of silver fire that turned the whole hall white. Fel felt his limbs come loose like a rope cut in two. He fell forward, drove his forehead into Saladin’s nose, and felt something crack.

A thin crack ran across one silver eye.

Saladin reeled. He clutched at his face, and quicksilver tears poured between his fingers, and when he lowered his hand, he was no longer smiling.

“That,” he said, “was not in any of the records.”

“I was making it up.”

“I dislike it when they do that.”

The floor melted.

It was sudden and total. The glass went liquid beneath Fel’s boots, a churning silver sea, and he plunged to his knees, his waist, his chest. It was cold as the bottom of a well. It clutched at him like hands. He flung out Krashing Fyr and hooked the nearest pillar, and hauled himself out of the metal by main force, gasping, streaming, half drowned.

Saladin was waiting for him on the shore, his cracked eye sparking. The mirrors on the walls had begun to shudder.

“You are an excellent brawler,” he said, with a kind of weary respect. “It is very tiresome. Let me try something less polite.”

Every mirror in the hall exploded.

They burst outward in a storm of glittering shards, thousands, tens of thousands, each one sharp as a razor, and they flew at Fel from every direction at once. There was nowhere to run. There was no floor to duck beneath. He did the only thing he could think of.

He grabbed Saladin by the collar and dragged him in front of him.

The shards hit them both.

Fel screamed. Saladin screamed. Silver and red blood mixed on the glass. Fel felt a dozen shards punch through his coat, his thigh, his shoulder, and the pain was so vast that it wasn’t pain at all, only a white noise that drowned everything else. He hung on. He didn’t let go. When the storm passed, the two of them were on their knees, chest to chest, and the hall around them was bare stone.

“That,” Saladin panted, “was disgusting.”

“Nobody ever wins by being fair.”

“I am not a fan of that either.”

He lunged.

Something white-hot punched into Fel’s gut, and he looked down, and a silver blade of solid quicksilver was sticking out of his stomach. He looked up. Saladin was smiling again, gently, sadly. Half his face was cracked. His hair hung in wet strands.

“I did not want it to end this way,” he said.

“Me neither.”

He reached down through the pain, and closed his hand around the ruby hilt of Falling Star.

I promised Karmina.

I promised Vili sixty glims.

I promised Loria I wouldn’t lose.

“Silence,” said Fel.

The world stopped.

There was no sound. There was no light. There was only the enormous pale hall, and Saladin’s mouth caught halfway open, and the last frozen shard hanging in the air like a tear. Fel’s blood hung beside it in a red bead, not yet fallen.

Three seconds.

He pushed himself upright. The silver blade in his belly was a burning coal. He pulled it out, slowly, and felt something tear that could not be sewn. He took two steps. He raised the black sword. He drove it up under Saladin’s ribs, through the mercury, through the muscle, through whatever it was that beat in the boy’s cold chest.

He took the golden saber in his left hand and hooked the Crown off Saladin’s head.

Time resumed.

Saladin looked down at the sword in his ribs. He looked at Fel. Silver blood ran from his mouth.

“Ah,” he said, and there was wonder in it. “There you are.”

Then he fell, and Fel fell with him, and the Hall of the Empty Throne rang with the sound of two boys hitting the floor.

For a while there was only the slow drip of blood.

Fel’s nose was bleeding. His ears were bleeding. He tasted iron. His vision had narrowed to a small grey tunnel, and in the middle of it, very far away, he could see the Crown, lying on the stone.

I won.

He wanted to laugh. He did not have the breath.

I won. Vili. Loria. I won.

Something moved.

It was Saladin. He had rolled onto his back, still pinned by the black blade, and he was looking up at the ceiling, and his shoulders were shaking.

He was laughing.