Distant tales of the Dichotomy

The party left at first light, five of them, with the cart, and Fel stood on the step of the house in Lampwick Close and watched them go for the second morning running with the dreadful sensation of a man being sent to the back of the class.

It was not that he minded, exactly. He had said so to Veyra, twice, and she had looked at him with her head a little on one side, and said, “You do not mind.”

“I don’t.”

“You mind a very small amount,” said Veyra, “and you are being brave about it, and I will pretend that I did not see.” And she had touched his sleeve, which she did not often do, and gone down the close after the others with her bow on her back and her sage-green braid swinging, and Thara had turned at the corner to make, with both hands, a gesture of great and heartfelt sympathy that was also, quite plainly, a gesture of great and heartfelt glee.

“Mind the boy,” Nerissa had said to Torren on the threshold, in a voice like a very soft knife. “I do not say what I shall do if he comes home with a single new scar that is not honorable. I merely say that I have been a healer for a long time, and that I know how to take a thing out as well as put it in.”

“Madam,” said Torren, with a deep bow, “I would sooner carry my own head under my arm.”

“That,” said Nerissa, “is the idea.”

So now it was the three of them: an old man in a battered hat with a great iron-shod maul over his shoulder, and a boy of seventeen who had not slept very much, and, trotting along behind with the covered pail he had refused to leave at home, a small solemn Raskian in a staff badge, who had arrived at the gate at the first stroke of the dawn bell, as he did every morning, and had said, before anybody could ask him anything, “I’m coming.”

“Are you, now?” said Torren.

“I heard. Through the window. It’s a thin wall.” The boy shifted his pail to the other hand. “Growth Proteins. It’s for Fel. I want some.”

There was a pause.

“You’re ten,” said Torren.

“Eleven. In the spring.” The flat voice did not change. “Mum says I’m small for my year. The other boys at the water-gate say it, too. I’m not very small. But I’m smaller than Hobb Tanner, and Hobb Tanner can’t even read.” He looked up, with his round, grave, dark face under its thatch of black hair, and Fel saw that the mouth was held very steady, and that it was an effort. “You said every Raskian child drinks it. I’m a Raskian child. Nobody ever gave me any.”

The old man opened his mouth, and shut it.

He stood in the road for a long moment, with Maude on his shoulder, and a very odd look crossed his face. It was the look of a man who has been handed a bill from a very long way back.

“Aye,” he said at last, gruffly. “Well. It’s a good point. It’s a very good point.” He cleared his throat. “Come on, then. Both of you. And Brek.”

“Yes, Pops?”

“It’s foul.”

“I know,” said Brek. “I’ll plug my nose.”

* * *

It was a long climb, and Fel, who thought he had come to know the left mountain, found that he had not known the half of it.

They went up by the Nine Hundred Steps, past the terrace of the hourglass houses, where the sand in the great glass windows was only beginning to stir, and then up farther, on a crooked stair cut straight into the mountain and shining down its whole length with a ceaseless trickle of water from the rock. It was the Weeping Stair. There was a dwarven rhyme about it, Torren said, which began Nine hundred to climb, and a thousand to weep, and he did not recite the rest, because it was rude.

“They’ll be through the door by now,” said Torren, who had stopped beside him with his hands on his knees, wheezing in a very unconvincing manner. “She’ll have them in rank. She’ll have them counting.”

“Will they be all right?”

The north end of the left mountain was the oldest part of Dun Vurrim, and it looked it. There were no glass domes up here, no brass lanterns, no gay little shops. The houses were low and black and windowless to the street, and the lanes were gutters, and over everything lay a rich, biting, tarry smell, as of a very old shoe. It was the tanneries. They lay in a row along the cliff, behind high black walls, and from behind the walls came a steady slow sloshing, and now and then a muffled cry in a voice that could have been a dwarf’s or a very large pigeon’s.

“It smells,” said Brek, with a certain gloomy satisfaction, “like Hobb Tanner.”

They found the lane at last, after twice asking, and once being bitten.

It was, as Torren had promised, extremely narrow. It was a crack, a chink in the black wall between a tannery and a ruined chapel, so thin that at the mouth of it Fel put out his arms and touched stone on either side. Torren looked at it. He looked at his own width, which was considerable. He took his hat off, and handed it to Brek, and breathed out, very slowly, in the manner of a man preparing to enter a bottle.

They turned sideways. They went in like thread through a needle, one behind the other, for forty paces, in the cold and the dark and the drip, until the walls began to open, and a greenish light came in from above, and the lane ended against a wall, in a small, crooked, cobbled yard the size of a bedroom.

There was a door. It was not a handsome door. It was low and black and bound with bands of tarnished brass, and over it, on a rusty bracket, hung a sign, a single great toothed wheel with a bite taken out of its edge, like a moon at its three-quarters, and below it, in curling letters, in a white that had faded almost to nothing, THE GIBBOUS COG, and underneath, smaller, BOUGHT & SOLD & OTHERWISE DISPOSED OF.

On the doorstep, in the one patch of sunlight in the yard, there sat a cat.

It was a very large cat. It was gray, and old, and fat as a bolster, and it lay in the sun with its paws tucked under, and it regarded them with two flat gold eyes, in which there was no particular curiosity, and no hostility, and an immense unhurried competence, as of a creature that had been the keeper of a threshold for a great many years and had not once been wrong.

“That,” said Torren Ballast, in a hushed voice, “is the cat.”

“I see that,” said Fel.

“Don’t step on her. Don’t touch her. Don’t, on any account, speak to her. I did, once, in my youth, and was told a thing about my mother that I have never been able to prove false.” He put out a hand, and pushed the door.

A bell rang. It was not a small bell. It was a deep, sad, tolling, funereal note, and when it had faded it left behind it a quiet so thick that Fel found himself holding his breath.

* * *

It was a shop, in the way that a cave is a house.

It was long, and low, and dim, and it went back farther than any shop had a right to. The ceiling was hung, all over, from end to end, with clocks. There were clocks of brass and clocks of bone and clocks of black glass, clocks the size of a thumbnail and clocks as big as a cartwheel, clocks that ticked, and clocks that gave a long slow rasp like a man clearing his throat, and a good many clocks that did not tick at all, but hung quite still, with their hands pointing at times that Fel did not much care to think about. And the floor, in between, and the shelves up the walls, and the long glass cases down the middle, were crowded to the roof with things.

There was a mirror, turned to face the wall, with a notice pinned to its back that said DO NOT. There was a music box in a cage, and a rack of walking-sticks, of which one, now and then, appeared to shift its grip. And hanging in a row on the left wall were forty-one small, flat, black, empty shapes, like the paper cut-outs of a child, and they were a good deal more unsettling than the mirror. It took Fel a moment to see that they were shadows.

“Pops,” whispered Brek. His eyes were enormous. “Are those people’s?”

“They’re surplus,” said Torren. “Don’t ask.”

From somewhere among the clocks there came a thin, quick, rattling cough, and a sound like a great many pairs of spectacles being rearranged.

“We are closed,” said a voice. “We have been closed since the last Tuesday of the Month of Teeth. I don’t care what the bell said. The bell is a liar and I have had words with it.”

“We are customers,” said Fel.

“Nobody is a customer before the noon-bell. They are merely hopeful.” There was a clatter, and a thump, and a rustle of paper, and from behind the great glass counter at the back of the shop, as if she had been assembled there, the owner of the Gibbous Cog stood up.

She was very small. She was the smallest dwarf that Fel had ever seen, and the oldest, and she stood about as high as his belt, in a long coat of gray wool all covered in pockets, with a face as brown and crumpled and shrewd as a walnut, and a beard, braided and bound in tiny brass cogs, that came down to her knees. And she was wearing spectacles. She was wearing, so far as Fel could count, eleven pairs of them. There were two on her nose, one over the other. There were four pushed up on her forehead, like a row of small round windows; there were three more on a chain, and two on the end of a stick, which she lifted, with a flourish, to her eye.

“Ballast,” she said.

“Madam Pennywhistle,” said Torren, and bowed so low that his hat, in Brek’s hand, trembled.

“You are fat.”

“I’ve been told. I have brought you new money.”

She turned the stick on Fel, and then on Brek, and a small pleased gleam came into the one eye that was visible behind the lens. “And two young. One of them very young. Oh, Ballast. You have not come about the shadows. You have come about the juice.”

There was a moment’s silence.

“How,” said Fel, “did you…”

“Everyone comes about the juice.” Madam Pennywhistle regarded him with an air of great tolerance. “Once every ten or twelve years. A Raskian, and a stripling, and an old man with a bad conscience. They stand at my counter and go the color of a candle, and they say, Is it true? Does it work? And I say, Yes. And they say, Is it as bad as they say? And I say worse. And they buy it, anyway.” She sniffed. “It is the only honest transaction I make in a year. Come. Mind the cat’s tail. Not that cat. The other cat.”

It was a very long way down.

She led them through a door behind the counter, a low one, and another, and a third, that was set into the bottom of a stair, and was painted a lively shade of green. On a stool before the third door there sat a second cat. It was black, and thin, and young, and as sleek as a drop of ink, and it looked at the dwarf’s coat-tails with a sort of grim professional resignation.

“Third door,” said Madam Pennywhistle, and kicked it. “Under the cat. Ballast, you remember. It is a thing of principle.”

“Why under the cat?” said Brek.

“Because,” said the old dwarf, looking at him with a degree of fond contempt, “nothing that I have ever put in that cellar has stolen itself.” She flung the door wide. “Mind the step. Mind the smell. And if either of you is going to be sick, I should like it to be in the bucket. I have standards.”

The smell hit them like the flat of a spade.

Fel had thought that he was ready. He had been told. He had been told, in the red light, with the smell of the supper in his nose, in a gentle and cheerful voice; and he had imagined it, in the long night, with the full resources of a lively mind, and had decided that it would probably be about as bad as the thing that the sailors gave him once, on the quay, in the little cup. He had been wrong. The smell came up the cellar steps in a thick yellow-green wave, a wet, rich, dark, hot, ammoniac stench, with an under-note of old sea, and a top-note of burnt shell, and at the very bottom of it, in a deep, patient, bass register, something that was unmistakably animal and very old. It was the smell of a barn in the cellar of a tomb. It stung his eyes. It stood in his teeth. He took a step back, with his hand over his nose, and felt the whole of the breakfast he had not yet had rise up gently from his boots.

“Oh,” said Brek, in a very small voice.

“There,” said Torren Ballast, quite tenderly. “There it is. That’s the smell of home.”

It was a low stone cellar, vaulted, and lit by a single green lantern. And on the floor, in a long row, with their iron hoops red with rust and their staves swollen and dark, stood nine great casks.

Each was the size of a small bear. They were stamped, on the heads, with a burnt brand, a closed fist in a circle, and underneath it three words in the angular letters of the Raskian script, which Torren read out, in a reverent mutter, as Growth. Bone. Blood. A thick brown scum had dried in streaks down their sides. And on the largest, which stood a little apart, with its bung out, and a pewter ladle hanging on a nail beside it, there was a long, dark, shining stain, where somebody, long ago, had spilled a cup and had never come back to wipe it.

“Raskian Growth Proteins,” said Madam Pennywhistle, with the grim, flat, formal pride of a woman who has sold the same unspeakable thing for sixty years. “Dragon-dung from the furnace-keepers. Ground CoalHeart shell, from the back of the Ember Court, that I buy off the gardener for tuppence and he thinks that I am mad. Sea-brine, laid down in the second week of the Month of Frogs. A hundred and four days in the cask.” She patted the great barrel, almost affectionately. “It is not a thing for the weak, or the clever, or the sober. It is one cup a day, at the same hour, with no water after. It will turn your stool the color of a deep sea. It will make your sweat smell like a wet dog. And it will make a man out of a baby bird.” She smiled, a gleaming, frightening, toothless smile. “Ballast, you are a terrible liar. But you never lied about that.”

“It’s the one thing,” said Torren, “I’ve never exaggerated.”

* * *

They haggled for a very long time.

It was a thing to see. It was, Fel thought afterward, rather like watching two old generals at the end of a war: each knew exactly what the other held, and each had decided long ago to conduct the business at the top of her voice. Madam Pennywhistle named a figure. Torren said a word that Fel had only ever heard from a drover. She replied that his mother had known better than to give him a pipe. It went on for the better part of an hour, with the green lantern swaying, and the two boys sitting on an upturned crate, a safe distance from the casks, trying not to breathe through their noses.

“Pops hasn’t any money,” Brek whispered. “Nerissa said. She took it all. She said it was safer.”

“I know,” Fel whispered back.

“He’s going to lose.”

And then the old man stopped. He stood in the middle of the cellar, in the thick yellow reek, with his hat in his hand, and a very peculiar, shamefaced, sly, tender look came across his face. He glanced over his shoulder, at the stair. He lowered his voice. And he turned the great iron-shod maul on end, and with the quick, practiced, guilty movements of a man who has done a thing many times before and been very careful that it should never be seen, he put his thumb to the base of the haft and gave it a twist.

A little brass cap came off. Inside, packed round with wadded wool, as tight as a roll of coins in a bank, there was a hollow.

“Not a word,” said Torren, to the two of them, in a low and savage murmur. “Not to Nerissa, not to Veyra, not to any of them. A man has a right to a little something put by. It’s been in there since the Month of Ash. I swore I would never touch it. It was for my funeral.” He drew out a fat, dull, heavy roll, and shook it into his palm, and Fel heard the soft, thick, buttery clink of old gold. “But I’ve had a long and a very interesting life, and I’ll tell you what, lad. A man’s funeral will wait. A boy’s growing won’t.”

They were old Republic crowns. Fel had never seen one. They were as thick as a biscuit, and as big as a plum-tart, and every one was stamped, on the face, with a great blue-black fist, and on the back with a tiny wreath of fruiting boughs. There were eleven of them. Madam Pennywhistle’s eyes, behind the stick and the two lenses and the four pairs on her brow, went perfectly round. She took one up. She bit it. She turned it over, and rang it on the counter, and held it up to the green lantern, and for a long moment she did not say a single word.

“Oh, you fool,” she said at last, almost in a whisper. “Oh, you magnificent old fool. These are Orcus. These are Orcus, Ballast, they are older than the Republic’s second charter. A collector in the Ashen March would pay me a thousand times…” She stopped. She wet her lips. “What do you want?”

“I want enough,” said Torren Ballast, “for two.”

“For the stripling. And the child.”

“For a full year. Every morning. A full cup.” He looked, for a moment, very old. “I’ll not have the one go grow big, and the other go small, because I’d not the coin. They go together. Three casks. Delivered to Lampwick Close, with the cat’s word on it. And the ladle.”

There was a pause.

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“Four crowns,” said Madam Pennywhistle, in a voice rather unlike her own, “would do it.”

“Four?”

“And I’ll throw in the ladle. And a cup. And the cat.”

“I don’t want the cat.”

“Everyone says that,” said the old dwarf. “They take the cat.” She put out a small, brown, scarred, trembling hand, and Torren, after a moment, laid four fat coins in it, and the seven others, with great care, went back into the haft, and the brass cap went on.

Then she turned. She took down the pewter ladle from its nail. She took, from a shelf, two small, thick, brown, chipped clay mugs, with no handles, of the sort that tavern children are given for milk. She dipped the ladle into the large cask. She filled both, to the brim, with a slow, thick, glossy, greenish-brown fluid that moved like oil, and that gave out, as it moved, a great gust of that terrible sweet reek, and she held them out, one to each of the boys.

“The first cup is drunk here,” she said. “In my cellar. Before witnesses. It is the custom, and I do not give refunds.”

Fel took the mug.

“Plug your nose,” said Brek, beside him, in a thin, high voice, and Fel looked round, and saw that the boy, who was a head shorter than himself, and a good deal paler, had lifted his own mug in both hands, and had shut both eyes, and was holding the end of his nose between his finger and thumb with an expression of fearful resolve.

“On three,” said Torren. “One.”

“It can’t be that…”

“Two.”

Fel put his mug to his mouth.

“Three.”

He drank.

It would be a long time, afterward, before he could describe it. It was not the taste, though that was dreadful: a thick, sweet, bitter, burning, clotted, salt-and-ash thing, that coated his tongue like tar and slid down his throat like a cold slug and sat, on arrival, in the pit of his stomach, with a thud. It was the after. It was the second wave, which came a heartbeat later, up through his nose and the back of his head, a huge, dark, rotting, barnyard bloom, as though a hundred dead dragons had been exhumed in his skull. It was a flavor of age. It was the taste of a very long time. His eyes watered. His ears rang. His knees began, quite slowly, to give out, and the floor of the cellar tipped up and round in a gentle and sickly circle, and he clung to the empty mug and heard, as from a great way off, the thin sound of Brek, beside him, drinking his own, in four long steady gulps, and setting it down, and saying in a very small, clear, level voice:

“It’s fine.”

Then Brek went green, and was sick in the bucket.

Fel, who had been holding on with some difficulty, was sick directly afterward, in the same one, and the two of them knelt side by side on the damp cold flags, with their foreheads against the rim, in the rich yellow reek, and for some time neither said anything at all.

“There,” said Torren, in a rich, deep, quivering voice, with his hand on his heart. “It’s a beautiful thing. Isn’t it, Madam? It’s a beautiful thing to see. Two young men at the start of their lives.”

“It is disgusting,” said Madam Pennywhistle, with deep satisfaction. “It is always disgusting. That is how I know it is working. Keep it down. If it comes up, you drink another.”

“It’s true,” said Torren, to Fel. “Fifteen minutes. Sit still. Don’t talk. Think of a quiet place.”

He kept it down.

It was not much, but it was a beginning.

* * *

They walked back down the Weeping Stair in silence. The casks were to follow, said Madam Pennywhistle, in a cart, with a boy; the cat, regrettably, had also been sent.

The first cup began to work by noon. It began in the stomach, with a deep, slow, spreading warmth, like a banked fire, that crept outward into the long muscles of his back and left a tight, tingling stiffness behind it, as of a limb that has been slept on. It brought with it a savage, wolfish hunger. He ate, at the midday meal, a loaf, a pound of cheese, a whole roast fowl, the better part of a ham, and two bowls of porridge, and Thara, who had come home sullen from the second floor to find the guild’s whole supply of food rapidly disappearing, said she had never in her life been so insulted by a boy’s chewing.

He was told to rest. He did not. He went into the garden.

The Ladder, said Torren, was a very simple thing. It was a flight of rungs. Each rung was a task, and each task had a number, and you did not climb to the next until the last was done without fault, from the first stroke to the last, in a single day. At the foot of it stood the Hundred-Hundred, that old friend, which was a hundred of each of a hundred small things. Above it, the Goat Climb, with its ramp and its tea. Above that the Sleeping Bear, and the Dropping Bear, and a long steep set of others that Fel had so far only heard the names of, with a shudder, and that Torren described, with the loving relish of a man reading out a very fine menu, as the Anvil Carry, and the Rope, and the Long Stone, and the Hanging Man.

They began, as promised, at the bottom. It was not that it was easy. It was terrible. But when he came to the part that had always broken him, the last forty of the push-ups, where the arms shook and the great gray weight of the whole thing settled on him like a lid, he found it was not there. There was a wall that he had always met, and it had been moved. He went through it as a man goes through a door that he had been sure was a window. He did the hundred. He did, without quite knowing how, the second.

“Hundred and seven,” said Brek, in a small flat voice from the bucket, and notched his stick. “Hundred and eight. You can do it, Fel. You’re doing it.”

By the evening he had done the full Hundred-Hundred, the whole hill of the Goat, with tea, and thirty of the Dropping Bear.

By the second night he had done a hundred, and Torren, who had been sitting very still in the dusk with his pipe, took it out of his mouth and said in a rather odd voice:

“That’s the thing I did not expect.”

“What?”

“That you’d get past ninety-one in the first week.” The old man took a long, thoughtful draw. “It’s the juice. It’s the juice, and the sleep, and your age. I’ve seen the like twice. It isn’t common. A man doesn’t improve by a fifth in two days, not on this earth.” He rapped the pipe against his boot. “You’ll go on. You’ll go a good deal farther than I thought. I’d put it at… well. I’d not put it at anything. I’ll watch.”

On the third night, he did not wake up at all, but slept like a stone through the supper bell, and rose in the morning with the sun in his face, and a pair of sleeves a full inch too short.

* * *

It was in the garden at Ember Court, on the evening of the sixth day, that the boy came to ask.

Fel was in the lantern-light, at the foot of the nearest black tree, with his palm flat on the bark and his eyes shut, working at the lines, as he had worked at them every night, for the first hour of the evening. He did not hear Brek come in. He only felt, after a moment, that he was no longer alone, and he opened his eyes, and saw the boy standing in the ring of lamplight, with his hands behind his back, looking at the old man.

Torren was sitting on the cobbles with his flask. He had put it down, for once, a good way off, and he was cleaning his pipe with a straw.

“Pops,” said Brek.

“Hm.”

“I want to learn it.”

The straw stopped. Torren did not look up.

“The thing,” said Brek. His voice was perfectly level, and a little too careful. “Gravitas. The way you do it. The way you showed Fel with the stone. I’ve been watching, every night. I’ve been very quiet.” He swallowed. “I can hold the tree, too. I can stand still. I can stand a lot longer than Fel.”

“I know it, lad.”

“Then teach me.”

There was a very long silence. A CoalHeart creaked, high in the black. The old man put down his pipe, and the straw, and he held out a hand, a huge brown scarred one, and said very gently, “Come here.”

Brek came.

“Put your hand in mine. Close your eyes. Don’t do anything. Don’t try. Just stand.”

The boy shut his eyes. His small fist went into the great one, and the lantern light fell on the two hands, side by side, a small one and a large. And Torren Ballast shut his own eyes, and sat, quite still, with his head bent a little forward, for a long time.

Fel had never watched him do it. He had known, in some dim way, that the old man could feel, that he went out along the lines of a thing and read it, as a blind man reads a face. But he had not known how it looked. It looked like listening. It looked like the long, patient, loving attention of a man bending over a sleeping child, and a deep, slow gravity came down over his old face, and a line appeared between his brows, and stayed.

At last he opened his eyes.

“Ah, lad,” said Torren Ballast.

“What?”

“It isn’t there.”

“I haven’t started yet. I haven’t tried…”

“I know. That’s not it.” He did not let go of the hand. “There’s a thing in the world, Brek, that runs through everything. Through trees, through stones, through you, through me, through this old fool of a boy here, who’s been trying to find it for the best part of a month. Most folk have a little of it. A thread. A draught under a door. Some have a whole river. And some…” He stopped. His voice was very low, and very kind. “Some have none, to speak of. Not a drop. Not a hair. They’re like a house with no window, and no door, and the very thickest walls, that the weather can’t get in at.”

The boy said nothing.

“You’re a Raskian,” said Torren. “A pure one. You’ve got the blood of the whole Republic in you, from your mother and your father and the long line behind them, back to the first men who ever hauled a stone. And you’re a wall, lad. A beautiful, strong, solid wall. I felt it in your hand. There’s more body in you than I’ve ever felt in a child of your age, and not one thread of the other. It’s the way we’re made. I’m the oddity. I’m the one with the draught. A hundred Raskians, and ninety-nine are like you, and the one that isn’t is a poor weak thing in a forest with a book.”

Brek stood very still.

“I could try,” he said at last. His voice had gone small. “I could try for a year. You said that it takes a year. You said Fel might…”

“I did. And Fel will.” The old man took the small fist in both his big hands, and held it. “But he has the thing to find. He’s a hole in the wall, boy. A window. He’s had it all his life, and nobody told him. You’ve not got it. You could stand at that tree for a hundred years, and weep, and the lines would never come. I’d be a liar if I let you try. I’d be taking a year of your life, and handing you back nothing.” He drew a breath. “And I’ll not do it. Not to you.”

A tear ran down the side of Brek’s nose.

He did not cry out. He did not move. He stood there, with his fist in the old man’s hands, and his black hair in his eyes, and Fel, who had stopped breathing, saw the whole small flat face fold itself, very carefully, into the shape of a thing that wasn’t going to cry. It did not entirely succeed.

“So I’m just strong,” said Brek.

“No,” said Torren Ballast.

“That’s all. You said. That’s all there is. It’s what you said about you. About the village. We’ve never made anything in the world but muscle.” His voice cracked, right across the middle. “I’m just the muscle.”

“Hush.”

“I don’t want to be…”

“Hush, now. Listen.” The old man did something that Fel would remember for a long time. He got up on one knee, quite slowly, with a long creak of his old joints, on the hard cobbles, until his face was level with the boy’s, and held him by both his shoulders. “I’ll tell you what a wall is, lad. A wall is a thing that doesn’t move. It’s what’s left standing when everything else is gone. It’s what a house is built on. It’s the thing that a whole town hides behind, and doesn’t think of, and lives.” He gave him a small gentle shake. “I’ve known a lot of fine, clever, burning folk, in my time. Wizards. Singers. Folk who could fly, and talk to the dead, and call a fire out of the sky. And you know which of them I’d have next to me in the dark?”

Brek sniffed. “Who?”

“A wall,” said Torren. “Every time.”

The boy did not answer. But the very small corner of his mouth, the one that had been so tightly held, had begun to do a thing that was not quite a smile.

“You’ll grow,” said Torren. “I’ll tell you that for nothing. You’ve the best bones I’ve seen in a lad. You’ll drink your cup, and you’ll do your Ladder, and when you’re done, there’ll be nobody in Dun Vurrim who can stand up to you. I’ll teach you the Goat, and the Bear, and the Long Stone. I’ll teach you every trick I know that doesn’t need the thread. I’ll teach you to hold, and to hit, and to take a blow like a mountain. And you’ll be the finest guardian that was ever born.” He stood, with a grunt. “And you’ll never, ever be just anything. Is that understood?”

“Yes, Pops,” said Brek, in a thick voice.

“Wash your face. You’ll frighten the trees.”

Brek went off, rubbing his eyes with the back of his wrist, with his small round shoulders very square. And Fel, who had been standing quite still at the foot of the black tree with a lump in his throat, said when the boy had gone:

“Is it true?”

“Every word.” The old man sat down again. He picked up his pipe, and looked at it, and did not light it. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to say to a child. And I’ve said some hard ones.”

“I’ll tell him,” said Fel. “Everything I find. All of it. Every line. I won’t keep any of it back.”

“Aye,” said Torren, softly. “I thought you might.” He glanced up. “And that, lad, is the other half of the lesson. That a thing that you can’t give to a friend is only a trick. A thing you can, is art.”

The lanterns burned. A CoalHeart creaked. And Fel put his hand back on the warm black bark, and closed his eyes, and in the dark behind them, very far off, in the long slow river of the night, there was a thing, a faint far thread, as fine as a hair, that moved.

He did not say anything. He did not dare to. But he held it, for the space of three breaths, and then it was gone.

* * *

It was the sixteenth day when the old man said, over a bowl of porridge, “It’s time.”

“For what?” said Fel, through a mouthful.

“For a look,” said Torren. “They’ve been on the second floor for a fortnight, and a day. It’s a very fine floor, and I’m told it’s a very big one, and they’ve been up to the neck in it, and I think by now they’ll have a thing or two to say. We’ll go and see how they’re doing.” He wiped his beard. “And you’ll see what your fists are good for.”

They went down together, the three of them, at the noon bell, with a note in Veyra’s hand, from the evening before, that said only Come to the washhouse. We shall be there at the third bell. V.

It was a very different Pits.

It was no longer a hole. It was a road. He walked down the long grey stair, past the toll-house with its fallen gate, and through the Candle Gallery, where a few last wickmoths drifted high in the roof, and he did it, he found, without once being out of breath. There was a strength in his thighs that he had not owned a month before, and a lightness too, a quick bright readiness in the long bones of his legs, and he went along that grey road beside the old man, with Brek trotting at his heels, as lightly as a man walking through his own house.

Floor Two was a country of black water. The stair came out upon a low cold shore, in a hush of drip and echo. A river ran through it, wide and slow, with a skin of oil on its back, and on either bank rose the old shapes of the dwarven works, half-drowned slime-furred sluices, and iron gantries, and broken water-wheels as high as a house. There was a smell of wet iron and drowned lamp-oil, and somewhere ahead, on the left bank, a drift of white steam that stank, richly and unmistakably, of lye.

They found the first sign of the company a quarter-mile along the bank: the carcass of a drowned-looking eel as thick as a man’s waist, with a single neat arrow in each eye. Beyond that, a neat pile of sacks, and the long mark of Brannoch’s heels in the mud, and at last, through an archway in the rock, a pair of rusted iron doors, standing wide, and above them, cut into the lintel, the single word WASH.

They went in.

It was the biggest room that Fel had ever seen indoors. It was a vast vaulted hall, a hundred paces long, built by dwarves to launder the filthy clothes of ten thousand miners a day, and it was full, from end to end, in a thick hot white fog, with the ruin of a very great battle. Everything was wet. The long stone troughs along the walls had burst. The floor was a lake, ankle-deep, brown and foaming, over which the broken pieces of an enormous wooden machine, a mangle, with rollers as thick as a tree, lay strewn like the bones of a ship. A thousand lines hung overhead, in tangled loops, from rafter to rafter, and from every line a drift of sodden gray cloth hung down, in shirts and trousers and caps and long woolen drawers, in a vast, dripping, silent, ghostly wash. There were scorch-marks all up the walls. Half the lines were burnt, and a little thin smoke still rose from them, and in the very middle of the floor, in a huge round tub of stone as wide as a ferry, there lay, half in and half out, with her great gray arms flung out on either side, the most enormous woman that Fel had ever seen.

She was dead. He could tell it at once. She was twelve feet long from her crown to her sole. She was the color of an old bar of soap, a cold mottled bluish grey, and she was bloated, and soft, and wrinkled all over, like the hands of a child that has been too long in the bath. Her arms were as long as a rowing boat. Her hair was a great trailing mat of wet gray rope. And over the whole huge ruin of her face, in the open, pale, unseeing eyes, there lay a look of such enormous affront that Fel, in spite of everything, felt his mouth twitch.

“Dead,” said Brannoch.

He was sitting on an overturned trough, with his shield across his knees and a sack of ice against his ribs, and he said it with such calm, tranquil, patient satisfaction that Fel saw at once that it was the only word he intended to use all day. Nerissa sat beside him, binding his arm. Orrin lay on his back on a drift of wet sacking, with his staff on his chest and his arms spread, and his eyes shut, in the attitude of a man who has been hit, a good while before, by a small house. And in the middle of the floor, in a ring of scorched cloth, with a bit of soap in one hand and a bent hatchet in the other, Thara was standing on the dead woman’s chest, with one foot up, in a posture of exultant, unabashed, magnificent conquest.

“FEL!” screamed Thara.

She leaped down, and ran, and plowed into him at full speed through the sheet of foam, and he caught her, with an oof, and stood her back, and was astonished to find that she was a good deal lighter than he remembered.

“You missed it!” She was dripping. She had, among other things, a black eye, a purple bruise across one cheek, a patch of singed hair, a shirt that she had plainly put on over somebody else’s, and an air of such deep, triumphant, wild-eyed joy that it hurt to look at her. “You missed the whole thing! It was the best! It was the very best! She had a washboard! She was a laundress! She was the boss of the whole floor, and she had a mangle, and she kept saying, Mind the floor, dears, it’s wet, in this awful kind voice, and the washing came alive! Did you see the washing? It’s all the miners! It’s every one of them! It’s their shirts! It had them! It had them on the lines! And it came down off them, and it tried to wring us, and Brannoch got a pair of drawers round his neck…”

“Mm,” said Brannoch.

“… and Veyra shot the line, and I cut the other line, and the thing got up and it was twelve feet tall and it threw the tub at Orrin…”

“I would like it noted,” said Orrin faintly, from the floor, without opening his eyes, “that I was very nearly a stain.”

“… and Nerissa…” She drew breath. “Nerissa drank her.”

“Drank her?” said Fel.

“I drew the water,” said Nerissa, composedly. She did not look up from Brannoch’s arm. “It was a very simple matter. A creature of that kind lives in the wet. She is, I think, nine parts in ten wash. She had a vat of water that was fed by the river, and the river was mine, and I merely asked it, politely, to go somewhere else.” She tied off a knot, with a rather vicious tug. “I have never in my life been so offended by a person’s housekeeping.”

“It is true,” said Veyra.

She had come up behind Fel, without a sound, out of the fog, with her bow in her hand and her braid dark with wet. There was a long smear of soot along her jaw. She was very tired, and rather pale, and quite unmistakably glad, and her violet eyes went over him once, from head to foot, in a swift, level, searching look, and rested on his face. She did not say anything. But something in them changed.

“Her power was the water,” she said, at last, in her low even voice. “The tub fed her. As long as it was full she mended. We did a great deal of damage, and each time she mended, a little more. It was Nerissa who saw it.” She turned her head, briefly. “After that it was only a matter of arrows, and fire, and keeping her from the doors. It took nine hours. It was a good fight. I think, in the end, Thara very nearly pulled it off alone.”

“I did!”

“She did not,” said Veyra. “But she was brave, and I will say so.” She regarded him. “You have grown.”

“A bit,” said Fel, rather helplessly.

“Two inches.” She did not smile. It was entirely in the eyes. “I have measured it against the door.”

“Well,” boomed Torren Ballast.

He had come in last, slowly, with Maude on his shoulder, and Brek at his side, and he stood in the great drowned hall and looked about him at the wreck, the bones of the mangle, the scorched lines, the dead giant, and the five weary, soaked, bright-eyed children in the foam, and a vast, slow, tender look of pride went over his face.

“Well,” he said again, more quietly. “There it is. You did it without me.”

“Yes,” said Veyra.

“And you’ll have done it right.”

“We hope so.”

“Show me the loot.”

It was, as they had been told to expect, not a thing to cheer about.

It lay in a heap on a dry stone shelf at the end of the hall: a cake of grey lye-soap as big as a loaf; a dozen small copper pins; a washboard of black ironwood, hand-worn and warm, that gave a faint clear tone when struck; a coil of silvery rope; and a great pile of the sodden cloth. There was no weapon. There was no jewel. Orrin turned each piece over, with his long blue fingers, with a sad, patient attention, and set it down. Veyra read her list of them twice. And at the end she lowered the paper, and said, to nobody:

“Common.”

“All of it?”

“All of it. The soap is good. The board is good, I think. The rope may be worth a small sum.” She folded the paper. “But not what we hoped. Nothing here will mend a staff.”

There was a pause. Orrin opened his eyes. He did not say anything for a moment, and then he sat up, very slowly, among the wet sacks, and looked at the long pale shape in the tub, and then, for some time, at his own hands.

“It is quite all right,” he said. “I did not truly expect it of her. A washerwoman’s gift is not a thing that sings.” He smiled, the long, sweet, quiet, courteous smile of the Vessarine. “There will be other floors.”

“There will,” said Nerissa, and put a hand on his arm.

“There always are,” said Torren. He turned, with a great, unmistakable sniff. “And we’ve been down here since noon, and that smell would tan a boot. I vote that we go home.”

There was no dissent.

They rolled up the lye-soap and the sodden bundles, and strapped the washboard to the cart, and stood for a moment, in a tired little ring, around the bulk of the drowned woman in her tub. Nobody spoke. It was, for a long moment, very quiet, with the slow drip of water from a thousand lines, and Fel found, looking at the great gray ruined face, and at the clothes that hung up in the fog like a congregation, that he felt neither triumph nor pity but something that lay between them, a kind of quiet respect.

“She was only washing,” said Brek, in a very small voice.

“Aye,” said Torren, quietly. “That’s the way of it, down here. They never mean it. It’s what they were built for.” He put a heavy hand on the boy’s head. “Come along.”

They climbed back up the great stair with the cart creaking behind them and the first of the evening lights coming out in the Wards like a handful of coins, and the whole way, in the long gray hush, Fel walked in the middle, between Veyra and the old man, with the boy at his heels. And it was only when they came out onto the Iron Pass, in the huge red dusk, with the wind from the plain, and he stood for a moment with his hand on the cold rail and looked out at all of it, that he realized he had not once, the whole way up, looked at his own feet.

He was not tired. He was not even breathing hard.

He put his hand in his pocket, and found it was shaking, very slightly, and that he was smiling, and that he could not have said why.

Ninety-one, he thought. A hundred and thirty. A hundred and sixty, tomorrow.

And, very far down, in the deep, slow, secret place where the river ran, a thread of gold, fine as a hair, turned over in the dark, and began, with great care, to pull.