Distant tales of the Dichotomy

The hammer fell first.

It came down on Brannoch’s shield like a boulder dropped from a cliff, with a crack that Fel felt in his teeth. The sand around the big man’s boots erupted. A crater opened up beneath him, six feet wide, and the shield buckled inward, and for an instant it seemed as if the antlered giant would be driven into the earth up to his knees. But Brannoch roared, and braced, and locked his legs, and held.

“Mm!”

The Cairnborn lifted the hammer again. His eyes narrowed.

“Strong.”

“Left!” shouted Veyra.

The mist went for Thara.

It struck her like a wave. A cold, grey, boiling cloud swept in from the side, and out of it came a pale hand and a blade of ice, thrusting low at her ribs. Thara spun away. A hatchet flashed. It passed through the vapor as through smoke and rang off the stone behind.

“Too slow, little thief,” said the mist, from three places at once.

Fel stood in the center of the circle. He had his back to Veyra’s. He could feel her moving, the shift of her weight, the pull of the string, and every few heartbeats there was a sharp, singing thwip, and an arrow went flying out of the fog and struck something with a flat, hard clack.

It was the Cairnborn’s chest. Veyra had put three arrows into it. All three had snapped off like twigs.

“His skin’s stone!” Fel yelled.

“I know!”

“You can’t shoot a rock!”

“I am aware, Fel!”

A sound began, thin as a thread. It rose from somewhere to the right of him, where the third shape stood motionless, with the black cloth across his eyes and his long white throat tilted back. It was the sound of a finger on a glass. It climbed, and climbed, and climbed.

“Cover your ears!” bellowed Veyra.

Fel clapped his hands to his head, a heartbeat too late.

The scream hit him like a physical blow. It was not loud. It was not even, strictly, a noise. It was a vibration, a force, a shuddering wave that went straight through his skull and set every bone in his body humming, and his vision went white. He heard Thara yelp. He heard Brannoch grunt. He felt his knees give way, and the sand come up to meet him, and his own blood hot in his ear.

Then something warm and strong closed around the back of his collar and hauled him upright.

“On your feet!”

He staggered. The world swam. In the fog, a vast dark shape was swinging a hammer at a vast dark shield, and a silver ghost was whirling around them both, and a white shape stood quietly with its head thrown back. Fel saw Veyra’s face, close to his, white and fierce.

“Stay with the wall,” she said. “Whatever you do, stay with the wall.”

“I’m trying!”

She turned and shot. Another arrow flew out of her bow and vanished into the fog, and Fel heard a wet gasp. The sound stopped.

For a moment, there was silence.

“Did you get him?” said Fel.

“I got his shoulder.”

“That’s… good.”

“It is not enough.”

It was a good formation.

Fel would think about it afterward, in the dark, with the cold sweat on his skin. It was the best he had ever seen. The four of them had fought together for seven days, and in that time they had learned each other the way a sword learns a hand. Brannoch held the front, and nothing passed him. Veyra shot from the middle, a hundred arrows a minute from behind the shield. Thara was the knife at the flank, always one step ahead of the blow. And Fel stood where he was told, in the center, with both swords drawn, and hit whatever came through.

It held. For five minutes, then ten, it held against everything the Black Ledger Company could throw. The hammer fell and Brannoch took it. The mist lunged and Thara drove it back. The scream came, again and again, and Veyra, her teeth set, shot down its source until the white man was forced to retreat.

They were winning.

And that was when Fel saw Karn Dolmar look at him.

It was only a glance. A flick of the slit-eyes, a shift of the great boulder of a head. It lasted less than a second. But in that second the Cairnborn took in the whole of the circle, from the shield to the bow to the hatchets, and then his gaze came to rest on the one who stood in the middle. The one with the glove. The one with the stolen sword.

The one who had not yet hit anything.

“There,” said Karn.

He said it quietly, almost kindly. A heavy stone hand rose and pointed.

“The wall is good. The wall will not break. But a wall is only as strong as the pin that holds it.” The orange cracks in his chest flared. “Take the boy.”

“Oh, no,” said Fel.

The mist moved.

It did not strike at the shield. It did not strike at the bow. It flowed, in one smooth silver rush, along the ground, around Brannoch’s boots, between Thara’s knives, under the swing of Veyra’s elbow, as softly as water poured from a jug. Fel had a heartbeat to see it come. He hooked, instinctively, with the golden saber, and caught nothing. He hauled. His blade passed through a cold wet nothing.

Then a pale hand closed on his wrist.

It was cold as a dead fish. A blade of ice touched his throat. A soft voice breathed against his ear, and it smelled of rain and rot.

“Hello, little bird.”

“Let go…”

He slammed his head back. It hit nothing. His skull rang, and he realized that there was no body behind him, only a swirl of vapor, and a hand, and a knife. The blade nicked his neck. He felt the blood run.

“Fel!” Veyra’s scream.

The Cairnborn’s hammer came down, not on the shield, but beside it. The ground cracked. Brannoch’s footing slipped. He staggered, for the first time, and in the gap, a vast stone hand shot out and closed around Fel’s chest like the jaws of a trap.

It lifted him off the ground.

It was hot. He had not expected that. The black fingers burned through his coat, and the orange seams in the palm glowed like coals. His ribs creaked. Falling Star fell from his fingers. He lashed out with Krashing Fyr and struck the giant’s wrist, and the blade rang, and left a pale scratch.

“Quiet,” rumbled Karn Dolmar.

“Put me down!”

“No.”

He turned and ran.

For a creature his size, he was astonishingly fast. He went down the canyon in huge, pounding strides, with Fel under one arm like a sack of potatoes, and the mist rose around him in a thick grey curtain and swallowed the sand. Behind him, Fel heard Veyra’s voice, ragged with fury, and the whip-crack of her bow, and Thara swearing, and the great, hoarse bellow of Brannoch.

Then the white man’s scream began, and the whole canyon went white, and he heard nothing at all.

He came back to himself in pieces.

He was being carried. There was a sound of heavy, pounding feet, and a hot, stony smell, and a jolting rhythm that rattled his teeth. His wrists were bound. Someone had tied them with wire, tight, in front of him. His head hung down against a broad black back, and as the world swam back into focus, he saw the sand rushing past below him, and the orange glow of the Cairnborn’s seams against the dark.

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The canyon was narrowing. The walls drew in on either side. Ahead, he could hear the rush of water.

Karn Dolmar did not speak. He ran with his head down and his jaw set, like a bull heading for a gate.

Think, said Fel to himself. Think. Think.

He was not going to be rescued. Not in the next minute. Veyra was a long way behind. They had been winning, and he had been the weak point, and now they would have to fight their way through two more of these things just to reach him. He was bound. He was bleeding. He had no sword, no power, nothing.

That’s not true, said a voice.

It was dry. It was unhurried. It sounded a great deal like an old man in a boat.

You have a thing the others don’t. You are the one they are carrying. You are the weight. A pause. Nobody ever won a fight by being fair to a fish.

He opened his eyes.

The canyon opened out. A stream cut across the sand, a wide, shallow, rushing brook that came tumbling from a notch in the western wall and spread across the floor in a bright braid of silver. Karn Dolmar splashed into it without slowing. The water hissed against his legs. Steam rose in thick white clouds.

And Fel, hanging upside down from the giant’s arm, saw something that nobody else in the world would have seen.

He saw the low branch of a dead tree, overhanging the water, six inches in front of his face.

Hook.

He had no sword. He had a loop of wire around his wrists. He had two hands and a great deal of rage.

He flung out both arms and caught the branch.

It was a tiny thing. A twig. A splintered stump of bleached wood, no thicker than a man’s thumb. But the Cairnborn was running at full tilt, and Fel’s weight, dragging behind him, snapped the giant’s rhythm like a rope across a road. Karn stumbled. His foot came down in the middle of the stream, on a slick green stone, and slid.

He went down on one knee.

The water hissed and boiled. A cloud of steam exploded upward. For a moment, the giant knelt in the center of the brook, up to his thigh in a white and roaring fog, with his teeth bared.

“Clever,” said Karn Dolmar.

“I’m a fisherman,” said Fel.

The Cairnborn’s hand tightened. The black stone fingers dug into his ribs, and he felt something crack. He gasped. Karn rose, shaking off the water, and Fel saw that the cracks in his skin were glowing brighter now, a hot angry red. Steam poured from every fissure.

I made it worse, thought Fel. I’ve made him angry.

Then, from far upstream, he heard a thunderous, tearing crack.

It was Thara’s idea.

She told them afterward, between gasps of laughter, sprawled on the sand with a bleeding lip. She had been the one who noticed the dam. On the second day of their march, she had spent a long hour scouting a stretch of this very brook, and she had found, a quarter of a mile upstream, a great log-jam wedged across a narrow cleft in the rock. It was a beaver dam, or something like one, a heap of trees and boulders piled forty feet high, and behind it the snowmelt of a whole mountain had been rising for weeks.

She had made a note of it. She made a note of everything.

“There’s a dam,” she had gasped to Brannoch, when the white man’s scream was finally cut off. “Upstream. A big one. If somebody… if somebody knocked out the key log…”

And Brannoch, with his shield in splinters and blood running into his eye, had looked at the trail of footprints in the sand, and at the glowing red seams of the Cairnborn’s departing back, and had said:

“Cairnborn crack when they are cooled too fast.”

“What?”

“Their skin is stone. Their blood is fire. Water makes them… brittle.”

They had looked at each other.

Then Thara had run.

She ran up the canyon wall like a cat. She scaled a crumbling chimney of stone, and flung herself across a ledge, and sprinted along the top of the cliff with a coil of rope in one hand and a hatchet in the other. At the dam, she looped the rope round the keystone log, anchored it to a boulder, and called, in a wild, ragged, joyous voice that the whole canyon heard:

“Old Clatter! Now!”

The beetle had been waiting. He had spent the whole fight standing at the bottom of the gorge with his tarpaulin in tatters, humming to himself in a low and increasingly furious drone, and when he heard the call, he did what he had been trained to do.

He charged.

He hit the end of the rope with the force of a falling mountain. The log shot out of the dam like a cork from a bottle. And behind it, with a sound like the end of the world, the snowmelt came down.

It hit the Cairnborn from behind.

It was a wall of water, ten feet high, white and brown and icy cold, carrying logs and boulders and the shattered remains of the dam. It struck Karn Dolmar in the small of the back and knocked him flat. The stone giant went under with a roar. The steam from his body exploded outward in a boiling white cloud.

Fel went under with him.

He felt the cold hit like a hammer. He felt Karn’s grip loosen. He felt something give in the giant’s hand, a hard, flat, sudden crack, like a plate dropped on a stone floor. And then another, and another, and a sound like a thousand bones snapping at once.

He kicked. He clawed. The wire cut into his wrists. He broke the surface and sucked in a breath of freezing air, and saw it.

The Cairnborn was coming apart.

It happened slowly. The cracks in his skin had spread. They ran across his chest like lightning, from his shoulder to his hip, and orange fire gleamed in every one. His arm broke off at the elbow. His shoulder split. His head, that great rough boulder, cracked down the center, and the two slits of his eyes widened in what might have been surprise.

“Ah,” said Karn Dolmar.

It was the last thing he said.

He shattered. There was no other word. The whole great stony body burst into a hundred jagged pieces, and the water carried them away, black fragments swirling in the flood, and the glow in the seams winked out one by one.

Something grabbed the back of Fel’s collar.

It was Brannoch. The big man, up to his chest in the current, had thrown out one huge hand and caught him, and now he hauled him out of the stream by main force, as easily as a child lifts a doll. He set Fel on the bank. He took a knife from his belt and cut the wire from his wrists.

“Thank you,” Fel coughed. “Thank… where’s…”

“Down.”

Brannoch shoved him flat as something whipped over their heads.

The mist had followed.

It rolled down the canyon behind the flood, thick and silver, and in the heart of it a pale face bared its small sharp teeth. Sisse had lost her smile. She came out of the fog in a rush, her dagger raised, her pearl-white eyes blazing, and the whole wall of vapor behind her surged toward the bank like a living thing.

“Karn!” she shrieked. “You fools! You’ve killed him!”

“Yes!” shouted Thara from the cliff. “Yes, we did!”

The mist dived at Brannoch. He swung his spear and it passed straight through, and a cold wet hand closed on his throat. He choked. Veyra, further up the bank, loosed an arrow that vanished in the fog. Sisse laughed. She poured around the big man in a swirling silver spiral, and Fel saw his face go dark.

We can’t hit her. The thought was cold and clear. Nothing touches her. She’s smoke.

Smoke.

What stops smoke?

He looked around frantically. He saw the bank, the water, the fog. He saw the packs, dropped in a pile at the base of the cliff when the fight began. He saw a sack, a big sack, torn at the corner, leaking a fine pale powder onto the sand.

Flour.

“Thara!” he screamed. “The flour! Throw the flour!”

There was a pause.

“What?”

“The flour! Throw it at her!”

“It’s… you want me to… it’s bread!”

“Throw it!”

Thara looked down. She looked at the sack. She looked at Fel, standing on the bank with water streaming from his clothes and his teeth bared, and at the silver fog that was strangling Brannoch, and then, with a shriek of manic laughter, she seized the twenty-pound sack in both arms and flung it off the cliff.

It burst against a rock above Sisse’s head.

A white cloud erupted. It billowed out of the torn bag in a great soft mushroom, drifting down through the mist, and the mist took it, as mist takes everything. It settled on the vapor. It clung. It stuck. In seconds the silver fog had turned to a pale, lumpy, clinging paste, thick and chalky and gray, and Sisse of the Mist, who had been a rushing shape of smoke, stiffened in midair.

She looked down at herself. Her translucent gown had gone solid. Her long fingers were white with flour. Her mouth opened.

“What… what have you…”

“It’s flour,” said Fel.

“I can’t… I can’t move…”

She fell.

She hit the sand with a thump, and lay there, white and rigid and furious, with her lovely cloud-gown cracked down the middle like a plaster mold. Brannoch rose, coughing, and put his boot on her dagger-hand. Thara landed lightly beside her and put a hatchet at her throat.

“Hello, pretty,” she said.

The Mistling stared up at them. For a moment her pearl eyes burned. Then, slowly, something in them went out.

“I hate bread,” she whispered.

Thara’s hatchet fell.

There was one left.

Hush stood alone at the far end of the canyon, with the black cloth across his eyes and an arrow in his left shoulder. He had not moved for some time. His head was tilted. His long white throat was working, and a thin thread of sound, the beginning of a note, was trembling at the back of it.

“Fel,” said Veyra, quietly. She had come up beside him. Her bow was lowered. “Cover your ears.”

“Why?”

“Because it is going to be very loud.”

She drew an arrow from the quiver.

It was not like the others. It was shorter, and thicker, and its tip had been replaced by a hollow bulb of carved bone with three small holes. A hunter’s singer. She had bought a dozen of them in Dunmere and refused to say why.

She drew the string to her ear. The white man’s throat vibrated. A thin, high, deadly whine began to rise, and rise, and rise.

She loosed.

The arrow did not go far. It flew thirty feet, to the center of the canyon, and fell. But as it fell, the air rushed through the bone bulb, and it screamed.

It was the most horrible sound Fel had ever heard. It was a shriek of pure, shattering, ear-splitting noise, a keening wail that bounced off the stone walls and flooded the canyon like a tide. It drowned the white man’s note. It drowned everything. Hush clapped both hands to the sides of his head and threw himself backward, his mouth open in a silent cry, and a trickle of dark blood ran from beneath the black blindfold.

He was a creature who lived by sound. He had never heard anything so loud.

He fell to his knees. He rocked. His long fingers clawed at his ears. He did not see the shape that rose behind him, big and antlered and silent. He did not hear the spear.

It went through his back, clean through, and out the chest.

Hush made a small, surprised sound. Then he folded forward onto the sand, and was still.

The bone-whistle shrieked on for another few seconds. Then it ran out of air, and fell silent, and the canyon was very quiet.

They stood for a while in the dusk.

Nobody spoke. The stream had settled into a sullen brown trickle. The dam was gone. The Cairnborn lay in a hundred pieces along the bank, fading slowly from orange to grey. Sisse was a statue of flour. Hush was a long white figure in the sand.

Fel sat on a rock with his hands in his lap. They were shaking.

Veyra sat down beside him. She did not say anything. She took one of his wrists in her hands, turned it over, and looked at the raw red marks where the wire had bitten. Then she took a clean cloth from her pouch, dipped it in the stream, and began to wash them.

“Four brills,” said Fel, after a while.

“Yes.”

“That’s what we were worth. To them.”

“Yes.”

“They were just doing a job.”

“They were doing a job that would have ended in your head on a spike, Fel.” Her voice was low and even. “I am not sorry. I do not intend to be.”

He nodded slowly.

She finished his wrists, and knotted the cloth, and then, to his surprise, did not let go. She held his hand between both of hers, a long, warm, calloused grip, for a long time.

“You were clever,” she said. “With the branch. And the flour.”

“I was desperate.”

“That is where clever lives.” The corner of her mouth twitched. “Do not do it again. I have grown used to your face.”

Behind them, Thara had found the remains of the flour sack and was sitting on a rock, forlornly licking her fingers.

“It’s ruined,” she said sadly. “All twenty pounds. I was going to make a loaf.”

“Mm.”

“A nice loaf.”

“You saved my life with it.”

“I know.” Thara sniffed. “I just wish it had been cake.”