Distant tales of the Dichotomy

There are many things a man can learn from losing a fight, and the first one Fel learned was that sand gets into everything.

It was in his collar. It was in his boots. It was in his teeth, and in the soup, which had been brought to the round table by the hearth for the second time that evening by a waiter who had taken one look at the five of them and gone to fetch extra spoons. Veyra was holding a cold pewter mug against her shoulder. Orrin sat folded on his stool with a bag of ice balanced on his crest, and every few seconds the glass of his hair gave a small, sorrowful chime. Thara had a bruise the exact shape of a hatchet on her forearm and was admiring it. Brannoch had been flattened into the floor of the arena like a pressed flower, and now sat very upright and said nothing, which was how he expressed pain.

And across the table, in the biggest chair the Stamped Tankard owned, sat the man who had done all of it, eating his third bowl of soup with the happy, noisy concentration of someone who has not been properly exercised in nine years.

“You’ll want to eat that while it’s hot,” said Torren Ballast, pointing his spoon at Fel’s bowl. “Hot soup’s the only medicine I trust. The healers will tell you different. The healers are wrong.”

“I am not sure the healers would agree with a man who has had the same soup stain on his coat since the Tide of Bone,” said Veyra.

“It’s not the same stain,” said Torren, with dignity. “It’s the grandson of that stain.”

He drank off the last of the broth, set the bowl down with a satisfied clack, and looked at them all with eyes that were, Fel noticed with some alarm, perfectly clear. The haze of the afternoon was gone. The sway was gone. In the firelight, the old man’s broad bronze face had settled into something heavy and watchful, like a boulder that had decided to be a mountain after all.

“Right,” he said. “The bet. Marigold stamped it, so it’s law, and I am a man of law, whatever the people at the Gate of Brass may say. You put me on my back, or out of the ring, or made me take a step. You did not.”

“No,” said Fel.

“But I said if I won, you were mine. Students and lackeys, the lot of you.” He held up a thick finger. “And I would like to say, for the record, that I am going to be entirely reasonable about it.”

“That is a worrying sentence,” said Orrin, from under his ice.

“Here is the first reasonable thing. You came to this city to climb the ladder. You want the Pits. You want to go down. And the door is shut, because you’ve no charter, because you’ve no guild, because you’ve no master, because you’ve no rank.” He tapped his chest with the spoon. “Well. I have the rank. I have had it for forty-one years. And I have been sitting on a bench in a tavern with a hole in my life the exact shape of a dungeon.” He grinned, and for a moment he looked quite a lot like the grinning ruin they had met that afternoon, and not at all like a boulder. “So. Yes.”

For a moment nobody understood him.

“Yes?” said Thara. “Yes to what? I want to be clear about what I’m signing.”

“Yes, I’ll be your Guild Master. Stamped, signed, sealed, all of it. I said I would, if you beat me, and you didn’t, but I am an old man and I am sentimental and I lost nothing in the end. I’ll take your charter. I’ll hold your name. I’ll go down your dungeon with you, and I’ll make a bit of mess in it.” He spread his big hands. “A man should not die on a bench.”

The table was very quiet. Even the wizards by the window had stopped moving their salt cellars.

Then Veyra put down her mug. She was not a woman who smiled easily, and she did not quite do it now. But something in her face loosened, as if a string that had been tight since the golden doors had been given a little slack.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Don’t thank me. Wait until you’ve met me on a Tuesday.” He leaned back, and the old chair gave a long, tired creak. “Now. Terms. I am a reasonable man, and a reasonable man has a few small requirements.”

“I would like it noted that the last time a man said ‘a few small requirements,’ it took us three days to dig our way out of a mine,” said Orrin.

“Two requirements. I swear it on Maude.” Torren reached down and set a hand on the iron staff where it leaned against his chair, and the great black ball at its top gave a faint, comfortable thrum. “One. I will need somebody to do for me. The daily business. A guild master has a great deal of daily business, and a man of my years has a great deal of daily thirst, and the two do not get along. I need somebody to carry things. To fetch things. To stand at my elbow and say ‘Yes, Master’ and ‘No, Master’ and ‘That is the wrong tavern, Master.’ A lackey.” He smiled sweetly. “I did mention that, I think.”

“I’ll do it,” said Fel.

He said it before he had quite decided to, and the moment it was out he found that he did not mind. He had carried water for a village. He had carried a wounded girl up a mountain. He had been, for most of his seventeen years, a person who carried things, and the only thing he minded was how little else he had to offer. Beside him he felt Veyra turn her head.

“Fel,” she said.

“It’s fine. I’m the weakest one here. I haven’t got anything. Veyra shoots things from a mile away, Brannoch is a wall, Orrin can make the ground sing, and Thara…” He waved a hand at Thara. “Thara does whatever it is Thara does.”

“Thank you,” said Thara, who had not been listening, and was admiring her bruise.

“I’m only a boy with two swords. If somebody has to be the lackey, it should be me. It’s the only useful thing I can do.”

The silence that followed was not a comfortable one. Torren Ballast looked at him for a long moment, and the cheer drained out of his face, not all at once, but the way water leaves a dish.

“Say that again,” he said, in a different voice.

“I said I’ll be the lackey. Since I’m…”

“No. The other part. The weakest one here.”

Fel felt his face heat. “I didn’t mean it as a…”

“Boy.” The old man put down his spoon. He did it very gently, as if it had become fragile. “I have been hit by dragons. I have been hit by a tide of bones. I have been hit, once, by a very angry bishop with a sack of coins. I know exactly what it feels like when someone lands a blow on me. And I will tell you, in front of all your friends, in front of Marigold’s stamp and the Realms’ own good name, that you are the only one in that ring who did it.”

Nobody moved.

“Not the girl with the arrows,” said Torren. “She was marvelous, and the arrows were all in the right place, and every one of them went through a hole I had already closed. Not the antlered wall, who has the best defense I have seen in thirty years and not a thought in his head beyond stay. Not the singer, whose song nearly cost me my knees, and who I would pay good money to hear again in a church. Not the little thief, who came at me with a hatchet in each hand and a pocket full of tricks, and very nearly had my purse. I am not saying they did not do their part. I am saying that every one of them hit a man who was watching. Whereas you.”

He pointed the spoon at Fel’s chest.

“You came out of the dust with both swords low. Dirty. No flourish, no shout. You came in while the rest were making their noise, and you put two cuts across my shirt in the one place I wasn’t covering, and I had to lean on Maude to keep it from becoming a third.” He let that sink in. “I have not had to lean on Maude in nine years. Nobody has made me lean on her since the Gate. You hid it behind a curtain of other people’s attacks, and you did it without thinking, because it was the only way you knew. And that’s the only way the world has ever really been won.”

“I got lucky,” said Fel. His voice had come out smaller than he meant.

“Lucky.” Torren shook his head, slowly, like a man regarding a child who insists a stone is a loaf of bread. “I have seen a hundred kinds of fighter, boy. I’ve seen the pretty ones, with the fancy footwork and the family swords. I have seen the monks with their breathing. I’ve seen noble girls trained from the cradle by masters, and I have watched every one of them die in the first week of a real war. And I’ll tell you what I never saw.” He hit the table with the flat of his hand, and the soup bowls jumped. “I never saw one who fought like that. Like a rat in a drain. Gritty. Dirty. Real. There is a hope of surviving behind every cut you make, and it is the ugliest and truest thing I have seen in all my years, and I did not think I would see it again before I died.”

Fel looked down at his hands. They were shaking very slightly, and he put them under the table.

“You are very quiet,” said Veyra, beside him, in a low voice.

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Then say nothing. He is right.” She did not look at him. “He is right about the rest of us as well. We were watching each other. You were watching the ground.”

Torren had picked up his spoon again, and was pointing it at the ceiling, in the way of a man who has been granted a clear view of a pleasant future.

“Now. I have never had a pupil,” he said. “Not one. In sixty-three years. I had a Diamond’s rank, and a dragon’s tooth for a trophy, and a medal from three separate kings, and I never found a single child I wanted to hand any of it to. And here you come, with a rat’s cunning and a pair of dull swords, and I want to teach you something. It has taken me completely by surprise. I am almost insulted.” He leaned forward, and the chair groaned in alarm. “So. The second term. I will teach you, boy. Every day. Properly. I will teach you what no one in this city could teach you with a hundred years and a hundred thousand glims, and at the end of it you will be a very different sort of sword. And the price is only this.”

“A lackey,” said Thara. “You said.”

“A lackey. Not the boy. If the boy is to learn, the boy must have his hands free and his body ready, and not be hauling my luggage all over Dun Vurrim like a pack mule.” He wagged a finger. “I want somebody else. I want an assistant. Somebody big enough to lift all my belongings, which are considerable. Somebody strong enough, on a Friday, to drag an old man home by the collar when he has had a drop too much. And, above all, somebody quiet.” He closed his eyes with a look of deep pleasure. “Quiet enough that he does not rattle in my skull when I am training the boy, or in the dungeon, or in the middle of a contract, when I am trying to think. A man has to have his peace, you understand. A man has to have his gold for his drink.”

And he laughed, a huge, rolling belly laugh that began somewhere around his boots and went up through the whole room. The clerks by the fire looked round. One of the wizards dropped a salt cellar. Torren wiped his eyes with a thumb the size of a small sausage and said, to nobody in particular, “A man has to have his gold for his drink,” and laughed again.

This narrative has been purloined without the author’s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

“Big enough to lift everything,” said Orrin slowly. “Strong enough to carry a man home. Quiet.”

“Sensible,” said Veyra.

“Reliable,” said Thara.

“Mm,” said Brannoch.

And all five of them, as one person, turned their heads and looked at each other.

It was Thara who said it, in the end, with a slow, wicked, delighted smile spreading across her face.

“Brek,” she said.

The old man did not take it in right away. He was still rubbing his eyes, and he had to have it explained twice, and by the second telling he was frowning, which Fel took to be a bad sign, until he realized that the old man was working something out.

“A boy,” said Torren. “A boy of twelve. A Raskian boy.”

“He’s very big for twelve,” said Fel, a bit weakly.

“He is taller than most grown dwarves,” said Veyra. “He ran fourteen children across the plain like a quartermaster. He has not smiled once in all the time I have known him. He is serious, and he is stronger than anyone his age has any right to be, and he does not talk unless it is useful.” She considered. “He also does not like people.”

“Not like people.” Torren’s face had taken on a faraway look. “A Raskian boy. Well. That would be a first. I’ve not met a Raskian under the age of fifty since the Gate. We’re a dying people, you know. Always have been. We don’t have a country any more.” He scratched his beard, and a bead dropped out and rolled under the table, and he did not notice. “Is he a good lad?”

There was a pause.

“He is very hard,” said Brannoch, in his slow deep voice. It was the longest thing he had said in an hour, and everyone turned. “On himself.”

“Ah.” Torren’s whole face changed. The vagueness left it, and the boulder came back for a moment, and in that moment he looked very old, and very tired, and very kind. “Ah. One of those. Well, I know a bit about that. I’ll meet him. I’ll make no promises, mind. I’ll meet him, and he’ll meet me, and if he thinks I’m a fool he can say so. I’d like it if he did.”

The second thing that Torren said, as they were rising from the table, was said over his shoulder, like an afterthought, and turned out to be the most important thing he said all night.

“Oh. And you’ll want a healer.”

Thara, who was halfway into her coat, got stuck.

“A what?”

“A healer. Somebody who can mend a person. Poultices, prayers, bandages, a bit of a spell if you’re lucky. It’s the law of the Rotunda, the first law, the one every other law is stacked on. Every chartered guild has to carry a healer. At the very least one.” He stopped, and turned, and looked at their faces, and his own face fell by degrees. “Hold on. Did Marigold not tell you?”

“She told us about the ranks,” said Fel slowly. “And the guild master. She told us the whole circle.”

“She didn’t mention the healer.”

“She did not.”

“Hmm.” The old man rubbed his jaw, and a small, shrewd, comfortable smile crept over his face. “Well, now. That’ll be the gossip. She’s very fond of the gossip, Marigold. She’s the best clerk in the Rotunda and a perfectly lovely girl, and she has not had a proper chat since the last time the Fenwick twins fell out. She’ll have wanted you to come back.” He chuckled. “She was saving it. So she’d get to see you again.”

There was a long, outraged silence.

“I like her more,” said Thara, at last, in a small voice. “And I’m furious.”

“It’s all right. It happens to everyone. I think she’s done it to me eleven times.” He waved a hand. “No harm done, anyhow. I know a healer. The best there ever was.”

“Who?” said Fel.

For the first time that evening, Torren Ballast hesitated. He looked into the fire, and when he spoke, it was in a lower and more careful voice, as if the name were a small and valuable thing that might break in his hands.

“A lady,” he said. “A water nymph. A faerie, of the old line, and as strong as a river in spring. She fought beside me at the Gate of Brass, the whole of those nine days. She put my leg back on, when it came off, and she did it between two attacks, and told me to stop whining. She’s the reason I’m alive to tell the tale.” He cleared his throat. “She’s very old now, mind. Older than she looks, which is not very old, which is how she likes it. I would advise you, in the strongest possible terms, never under any circumstances to mention her age.”

“How old is she?” said Veyra.

“I just told you not to ask.”

“You did not tell me. You told me not to mention it.”

“Lord of lords. She’s not going to like you.” But he was smiling again. “Her name is Nerissa. Nerissa Dewhollow. She lives in a house on the left mountain, sixty-eight floors up. You can’t miss it. It’s the only house on the lip of the mountain, right beside the waterfall that fills the city wells. It’s built in the shape of an hourglass.” He shrugged. “She says it’s for the symbolism. I think she just liked the look.”

“An hourglass,” said Orrin, with great interest.

“Don’t be impressed. She won’t like it if you are. She’ll want you to be more impressed, and then she’ll tell you off for it.” He rose, and the big chair let him go with a sigh of relief. “Tomorrow. First the boy, then the lady. And a word of advice, from a man who has been very drunk and very stupid for a very long time.” He turned, and pointed his finger at each of them in turn. “Do not be late for Nerissa. And do not, whatever else you do, ask what she was doing in the nine days.”

“Why not?” said Thara, who could not help it.

“Because she’ll tell you,” said Torren Ballast darkly.

They found the Lantern House at the top of the Nine Hundred Steps, in the morning, exactly where it had always been: a crooked, cheerful, many-chimneyed house at the end of the Tallow Row, with a yellow door, and a lantern hanging over it that had burned, as far as anyone knew, without a break for sixty years.

It was nearly the same as they had left it. There was the little garden wall, where Old Clatter had once rested his horned head and looked on with deep interest. There was the same yellow door. There was the same smell of soap and bread and slightly burnt toast. But in the courtyard, where the children had once stood in a ragged line in their too-big nightshirts, there was now a fierce and joyful game of tag under way, and fourteen small bodies tore past in every direction, shrieking.

One of them hit Brannoch’s knee at speed and bounced off. It was Sess, or possibly Tiv.

“You came back!” she cried. “We knew you’d come back! We made a list!”

“Mm,” said Brannoch, and picked her up, and set her on his shoulder, and did not seem to notice how very wide his smile had become.

It took them a quarter of an hour to get to the door. There was Wren, who emerged from somewhere in the heart of the scrum with her rag doll under one arm and her small face set like a little judge, and who walked straight to Veyra without a word, and put both arms around her leg, and held on. There was a long game of somebody’s shoe. There was the boy with the antlers like buds, who demanded a song from Orrin at once, and got a very short one, and demanded another. And in the middle of it, Torren Ballast, who had stood at the gate for a minute with his enormous hat in his hands and an expression of the deepest alarm, was seized from behind by two children, who had apparently never seen anything so large and interesting in all their lives, and who climbed him like a tree.

“I’m not a horse,” said Torren, in a faint voice, with a girl on each shoulder.

It was Mother Ashbrindle who rescued him. She appeared in the yellow door with her arms folded, short and broad as a barrel, in her apron and her enormous cheerful boots, and surveyed the scene with the calm eye of a general who has seen worse.

“Wipe your feet,” she said. “All of you. And you, the large one, put my children down.”

“I’m trying,” said Torren.

It was in her cramped little office, among the ledgers, with a pot of strong tea and a plate of ginger biscuits and the whole of the old party jammed into a room built for four, that Fel set out the whole case.

He did it badly. He had never been good at asking for things, and the thing he was asking for was not small. He explained about the guild. He explained about the dungeon, and the master, and the rank. He explained about the lackey, and why Torren could not have Fel himself, and he told her as honestly as he could that the man in question was loud, and old, and a drunk, and also, as far as he could tell, very kind. And at last he said it plain, and felt a fool for how it sounded.

“We need somebody to carry things. And someone quiet. And we thought of Brek.”

For a time the little room was entirely silent. Mother Ashbrindle did not look angry, or alarmed, or even especially surprised. She sat with her fingers folded on her ledger and looked at Torren Ballast for a very long time. It was a look that began at the battered boots, took in the stained coat and the beaded beard and the sheepish bronze face, and came to rest somewhere around the old man’s eyes.

“A Diamond,” she said.

“Retired,” said Torren. “Quite retired. I’ve retired about four times.”

“Drunk.”

“Not at this hour,” said Torren, with great dignity. “I’ve not had a drop since breakfast.”

“I’ll want it in writing,” said Mother Ashbrindle. She took a quill from the jar, and opened a fresh page. “He is twelve. He is not a mule, nor a servant, nor a bottle-fetcher, and he is not to go into any dungeon, or any contract, or any place where there is a blade or a bear. If the old man must have him in the Pits, he can have him at the door. He is to be in this house by supper, every night. He is to have his lessons, in the mornings, with Miss Pennywhistle, and I will hear of it if he does not. He is to be paid, a fair wage, and the wage is to go into my ledger, in his own name, and his is the only hand that touches it.” She glared. “And if at any point, for any reason, that boy comes home with a face like a wet Tuesday, I will find you, Master Ballast, and I will put you on your back.”

Torren Ballast looked at the small stout woman in the apron. Fel had seen him look at a dragon, once, in a story. It had been a good deal more relaxed.

“That’s a perfectly reasonable bargain,” he said, with real feeling. “I’d like it in the contract, in fact. In ink.”

“Good.” She snapped the quill. “Then it is up to Brek.”

He was at the back of the garden, by the wall, and he was not playing.

Fel had known that he would not be. Brek had never played, in all the time Fel had known him. He had grown, since the wagons. He seemed another inch taller, and a little heavier through the shoulder, and he was standing on an upturned bucket with a hammer in one hand and a bent nail in the other, mending the fence, with a look of grim concentration on his dark, young, serious face. He saw them come, and did not stop.

“Brek,” said Fel.

“Fel,” said Brek.

“We’ve got something to ask you.”

“I heard.” The hammer fell once, hard. “Through the window. It’s a thin wall.”

There was a pause.

“That him?” said Brek.

He had not turned his head, but the hammer pointed over his shoulder, to where the old man stood at the edge of the path with his hat in his hands and his face carefully blank. Torren said nothing. He had, with great and deliberate effort, taken up the posture of a man who is not going to say anything at all.

Brek finished the nail. He climbed down off the bucket, and set the hammer on the wall, and came across the path, and stopped about six feet from the Guild Master to be.

He looked up.

It was a long way up. Brek was tall for twelve, but Torren was tall for anyone, and the boy had to tip his chin far back, and the two Raskians stood facing each other, one very old and one very young, with the same bronze skin and the same broad, patient bones, and the same wary, steady eyes. Fel had the odd feeling, watching them, that he was looking at the same man at two ends of a long road.

“You smell,” said Brek.

Nobody breathed.

“Of drink,” said Brek, precisely. “And soup. And old boots. And something else.” He sniffed. “Smoke. Like a place that’s been burned.”

Torren Ballast opened his mouth. And then he shut it, and his shoulders began to shake, and a sound came up out of his chest like a landslide beginning, and he sat down on the garden path, quite suddenly, with his hat in his lap, and laughed until the tears ran down into his beard.

“Oh, that’s good,” said Torren, wheezing. “Oh, that’s very good. He’s honest. Oh, I like him. I like him very much. I’ll take him, I’ll take him this minute. Is he for sale?”

“He is not,” said Mother Ashbrindle, from the window.

“What do I do?” said Brek. He was not laughing. But there was something at the corner of his mouth, small and wary, like a bird that has not yet decided to land.

“You lift things,” said Torren. He got to his feet, and wiped his eyes, and made a tremendous effort to be serious. “You lift things, and you don’t talk, and you do not, under any circumstances, tell me that I have had enough. That is the entire job. I have a trunk in the Tankard. It has been there nine years. I have not opened it. I have lost the key.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “I’d like it moved.”

Brek looked at him a moment longer. Then he nodded once, as a man might, who has been given an order that he understands, and walked out of the garden and down the Nine Hundred Steps without another word.

They followed. It was a long walk, and the old man talked the whole way, about Gold and Diamond and the price of plum wine, and Brek said nothing at all, and Fel watched them and thought that it was the most peaceful conversation he had ever heard.

The trunk was in the back of the Tankard, behind the stove, under a quilt of dust. It was a vast, black, iron-banded thing, the size of a coffin for a very large horse, and it held, by Torren’s own account, “a few bits and bobs.” Fel and Brannoch together had tried to lift it, that afternoon, before the duel, and they had made it rock.

Brek stooped, and took hold of both handles. He drew a breath, with a short, shallow, businesslike hiss. And then he stood up with the trunk on his shoulder, and walked out of the Tankard, and into the street, and up a flight of stairs, without so much as a grunt.

The old man watched him go. He was very quiet. His big face was full of a feeling that Fel could not name, and did not try to.

“Well,” he said. “That’s the first part done.”

“He did not even ask what was in it,” said Veyra, in wonder.

“He didn’t need to.” Torren settled his hat on his head. “He knew it was heavy. That’s all a person needs to know about most things.” He started up the stair, with a heavy, thoughtful tread, and over his shoulder he said, in the same low voice, as if to himself: “Nine years. And I never once thought somebody might have wanted to carry it.”

The boy was waiting for him at the top, with the trunk on the floor, and an expression of mild impatience.

“Where to?” said Brek.

It was the first time Fel had seen him look anything like happy. It was not a smile. It was a kind of settling, as if a person who had been carrying his whole life on his shoulders had been told, quite casually, that there was a place to set it down.

And that was how Torren Ballast, Diamond, First Tier, Anchor of the Gate of Brass, got himself a lackey.