Distant tales of the Dichotomy

It took eight days to cross half a mile.

Fel counted them. He had nothing else to do. The line for the Hearthbridge, which the locals called the Old Tinker’s Span, moved forward the way a glacier moves, in lurches too small to see and then in sudden shuffling bursts that carried them thirty feet and stopped. They slept in the wagons. They ate what Brannoch cooked on a camp stove borrowed from the family behind them, a dwarven tinker clan with eleven children and a donkey that hated Thara. By the third day, Fel knew the names of everyone within a hundred yards. By the fifth, he knew their grievances.

The children made it bearable.

Brek had appointed himself captain of them. He was twelve, taller than most grown dwarves, and he ran the fourteen like a small, grim army: water at dawn, washing at noon, no wandering past the third cart. He did not smile. He checked the wagon wheels every morning and gave Brannoch a serious nod when they passed inspection. The twins, who turned out to be called Sess and Tiv, had decided that Old Clatter’s absence was a personal betrayal and spent hours composing a list of the things they would say to him when he returned. Wren, the tiny Ilvari girl, did not leave Veyra’s side unless somebody pried her loose. She sat in her lap during the long afternoons, holding her rag doll up to the sun and explaining its opinions.

“She says the bridge is ugly,” Wren told Fel on the fourth day, with great gravity.

Fel looked at the mile of green copper and sagging railings. “Does she?”

“She says it looks like a grandmother’s teapot.”

“That’s fair.”

“She likes you,” said Wren, and returned to her work.

Thara spent the week in a state of cheerful larceny. She had found, in the false bottom of Hesper Dunwick’s strongbox, a heavy brass seal and a sheaf of blank bills of sale, and she had decided that this was a gift from the gods. By the second evening she had produced a document, in a hand not quite her own, stating that the Dunwick Exotic Trading Company had sold three wagons, their contents, and fourteen apprentices to a consortium of travelers for an undisclosed and entirely legal sum. She had aged it in the smoke of the camp stove. She had stamped it six times.

“Apprentices,” said Veyra, reading it. Her voice was very dry.

“It’s a word.”

“It is a lie.”

“It’s a useful lie. Look at the seal. Look at the ink. If a guard reads this at the gate, he’ll be so impressed by the stamp that he won’t read the words.” Thara tapped the page. “I once got a mule through the Eastern Customs with a pawn ticket and a confident expression.”

“What happened to the mule?”

“It was very happy. That’s not the point.”

Orrin spent the days on the roof of the lead wagon with his cracked staff across his knees, singing very quietly to himself. He sang so softly that only those nearest could hear, long slow chords that seemed to settle in the bones. On the third evening a pair of dwarven women from the neighboring cart came over to listen, then a handful of children, then a whole ring of weary travelers who stood around the wagon in the dusk with their hats in their hands. When he finished, nobody clapped. They stood there for a moment longer. Then a gruff old dwarf with a braided beard handed up a loaf of black bread, and a woman handed up a flask of something that smelled like plum, and Orrin looked down at them, bewildered, with the gold light spreading slowly through the lines of his face.

“I did not ask for payment,” he said.

“It’s not payment,” said the old dwarf. “It’s thanks. Take it.”

The Vessarine did, with a formal little bow, and the line moved forward another thirty feet.

Brannoch came back on the sixth day.

They heard Old Clatter before they saw him: a deep, rolling, delighted drone that rose out of the crowd on the far side of the road like a tide coming in. The children scrambled up on the wagon seats. Sess and Tiv shrieked. And down the crowded track, through a parting sea of startled dwarves, came the great black beetle with his glossy shell polished to a mirror shine, his horns hung with ribbons, and a shining brass tag stamped with a hammer and flame clipped to the tip of his left horn.

Brannoch walked beside him. He looked as though he had not slept in six days. He looked, also, entirely at peace.

“Clean,” said the Oakhorn, before anyone could ask.

“It took six days!” said Thara.

“He had to be examined. Front and back. Both ends.” Brannoch put his hand on the beetle’s flank, and the beast shivered with joy. “A Sealed Physician looked into his eyes with a lantern. Then into his mouth. Then into… other places. He did not like it.” A pause. “Neither did the Physician.”

“Poor Clatter.”

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“He bit a man’s hat.” Brannoch’s mouth twitched. “He is very happy now.”

The twins were already on the beetle’s back, shouting their list. Old Clatter turned his great horned head, regarded them with calm golden eyes, and began to hum.

On the eighth morning they reached the front of the line.

Fel had expected a gate, something grand and ancient with towers and a portcullis. What he found was a low, wide arch of beaten copper, flanked by two stout dwarves in steel caps who looked as though they had been standing there since before the bridge was built. A long table sat in the shade of the arch. Behind it, an elderly dwarf with enormous spectacles was stamping papers at a rate of about one a minute. A bell hung beside him, and whenever it was rung, the whole line paused, and another clerk came running with a ledger.

“Next,” said the clerk, without looking up.

They went forward. Veyra had the papers, Thara the stamp, and Brannoch the great, grave, immovable silence that is the best defense of an honest man. Orrin stood a little behind, trying to look as unlike a legend from a nursery tale as it is possible for a seven-foot Vessarine with a crest of living glass to look.

“Names,” said the clerk.

They gave them. He wrote them down, slowly, in a script so small and neat that Fel thought it could have been printed.

“Business?”

“Visiting,” said Veyra.

“Duration?”

“Unknown.”

“Wagons?” The clerk finally glanced up, over the rims of his spectacles, at the three great carts, the beetle, the fourteen children. His eyebrows rose by about a quarter of an inch. “These are yours.”

“They are,” said Thara, and presented the bill of sale with a flourish.

The clerk read it. He read it again. He held it up to the light. He sniffed it. Fel’s heart thudded against his ribs. Then, at last, the old dwarf looked at the stamp, and at the six smudged impressions of Hesper Dunwick’s seal, and made a small noise in the back of his throat.

“Dunwick,” he said. “I know that name. A rotten man.” He stamped the paper. “I hope you took his money.”

Thara’s mouth opened and closed.

“All of it,” said Veyra.

“Good.” Bang. The bell rang. “Next.”

And just like that, they were through.

The Old Tinker’s Span rang beneath their feet.

It was not like walking on a bridge. It was like walking across the back of a vast and ancient instrument. The plates of copper and iron sang with every step, each one a slightly different note, so that a hundred wagons and a thousand boots made a great, ragged, overlapping music that rose from the chasm in rolling waves. Orrin walked with his head tilted, listening, and Fel saw him trace a finger along the railing as though he were reading it.

“It is out of tune,” the Vessarine murmured. “Beautifully so. Whoever mended it did so by ear, and every one of them heard something different.”

Far below, in the shadowed deep, Fel caught a glimpse of molten light, a thin red thread winding through the dark. A warm updraft rose from it, carrying the smell of hot metal and coal smoke. He leaned on the rail and looked up.

The mountain loomed over them.

It was not a mountain. It was a city that had been built vertically, as though somebody had taken an ordinary town and stood it on end. Terraces climbed the slope in rank upon rank, each a street, each lit with lanterns hung from iron brackets. Stairs crossed them in zigzags. Chains and cables and rope bridges webbed the gaps between buildings. Everywhere there was smoke and steam and the rhythmic, endless, ringing sound of hammers on metal, a hundred thousand of them, striking out of time and into a single enormous heartbeat. Windows glowed in every wall. Chimneys leaned together like gossiping old men. Between them, pulleys and platforms hauled barrels, coal, and people up and down the face of the rock.

“The Hearthmoot,” said Brannoch quietly. “The Common Mountain. Everyone who is not a lord, a soldier, or a master smith lives here. Which is nearly everyone.”

“It’s enormous.”

“It is the smallest of the three.”

Fel looked at him. The big man shrugged.

They came off the bridge into a roar.

A broad square opened before them, packed from edge to edge with stalls and carts and people, dwarves mostly, short and broad and bearded, but also Raskians head and shoulders above the crowd, and gnomes riding on their shoulders, and long-limbed folk in desert wraps, and a tall pale woman with a snake coiled round her throat. Someone was selling fried dough. Someone else was selling swords, loudly, to a passerby who seemed unconvinced. A band of four dwarves with fiddles and a drum played a reel on the steps of a fountain. The air smelled of grease, onions, sweat, hot iron, and honey.

Thara breathed in as though she had been underwater.

“I love it here,” she said.

“You have been banned from it twice,” said Veyra.

“That’s what makes it special.”

Fel stood in the middle of the noise, a boy from the sky in a stolen coat, with a black sword on his hip and a golden saber under his arm and a ring in his palm that burned softly against the skin, and found that for once he did not feel afraid. He felt very small. He felt like a mote of dust on the floor of a cathedral. But it was a warm sort of smallness, the kind that comes of standing among a great many people, none of whom are looking at you.

“All right,” he said. “First things first. The children.”

“The children,” Veyra agreed.

They asked three people. The first was a fish seller who did not understand the question. The second was a nervous young clerk who pointed vaguely upward. The third was a stout dwarf matron with a wheelbarrow of turnips, who stopped dead, set down her load, and looked at Brek and the twins and the line of small silent faces on the wagon seats.

“Oh, you poor lambs,” she said. And then, briskly: “You’ll want the Lantern House. Up the Nine Hundred Steps, left at the Tallow Row, you can’t miss it. It has a lantern.” She picked up the wheelbarrow. “Mother Ashbrindle won’t turn them away. She turns everyone else away. But not them.”

“Why not?” said Fel.

The matron gave him a long, level look.

“Because she was one,” she said.

It took them an hour to reach the top of the stair. The wagons had to be left in a livery yard at the bottom, and the children carried what little they owned in bundles, in aprons, in their arms. Old Clatter bore the smallest on his back, and Brannoch carried Wren on his shoulders, where she sat like a queen on a tall throne. Fel climbed with the golden saber over his shoulder and a stitch in his side and a terrible, nameless feeling in his chest. He could not name it. It was not fear. It was something nearer to dread.

They’ll be safe, he told himself. They’ll be safe, and then we’ll go.

At the end of the Tallow Row, where the lamplight gave way to soot-black stone, stood a narrow, crooked, five-story house with a sagging roof and a door painted bright yellow. Over the door hung a single iron lantern, and the flame inside it was burning, though it was broad day.

Beneath it was a sign, in dwarvish runes and in Common:

Lost things are kept here. Knock.

Brek stopped on the step. He did not look at Fel. He looked at the yellow door, and his hands, which had been clenched into fists for eight days, opened slowly.

“All right,” said the Raskian boy, hoarsely. “I’ll knock.”