Distant tales of the Dichotomy

Fel sat on the edge of the cliff for an hour before he admitted he was going to have to walk.

It was not a decision so much as arithmetic. The white-leafed city lay across a valley so wide that clouds drifted through it like lazy ships, and every honest part of his body told him it was farther than he could cross. He had two cracked ribs and a hole through his belly that had closed halfway and then decided to reopen. His thigh was a map of shallow punctures where mirror-shards had gone in. His back hurt in a way he did not want to think about. Whenever he coughed, something small and wet moved inside him that was probably not supposed to.

Sit still, said Gideon’s voice, dry as dust, from somewhere in the back of his skull. Let the river come to you.

“The river’s not bleeding,” Fel said out loud.

Nobody answered. The wind went on stirring the canopy a thousand feet below him. A flock of birds as big as wagons wheeled across the red rock and dropped away toward the mist.

He had told himself he would wait for help. Vili would come. Loria would come. Karmina, even, in a flash of silver and a lecture about empty cots. But he had been awake for hours now and the sky had stayed empty, and the longer he waited the more he understood the truth he had been avoiding since he opened his eyes in that moss: nobody was coming. Wherever he was, it was not a place a crow-arch could reach.

He stripped what remained of his shirt into bandages and bound his stomach as tight as he could stand, and then did it again, because the first layer was already dark. He rubbed a handful of broad green leaves between his palms until they gave off a sharp, resinous smell and packed them against the worst of the punctures. It was a trick of Mother Sable’s, or perhaps of Karmina’s. He could no longer remember. Everyone he had learned something from was somewhere else.

Then he stood, and the world lurched, and he planted Falling Star’s point in the red stone to keep from falling over.

“Right,” he said. “Down.”

There was a path, if you were generous with the word.

It began as a crack between two boulders, slid into a ribbon of loose scree, and then vanished entirely into a wall of ferns taller than a house. Fel followed it anyway. He used the black sword as a cane for the first hour and as a machete for the second, hacking at vines as thick as his wrist while the sun, which had burned his clothes to rags the previous morning, beat down through the gaps in the leaves and cooked the back of his neck.

The forest grew louder as he descended. Birds he had no names for shrieked from the high branches, and insects hummed in the dripping air with a drone so thick he could feel it in his teeth. Something in the undergrowth was clicking in a slow, patient rhythm, like an old man tapping a pipe against a table. Every time he stopped to listen, it stopped too.

He crossed a stream the color of tea. He climbed over a root the size of a barn. He passed a waterfall that fell from a ledge so high that most of it turned to mist before it reached the pool, and for a little while he stood in the spray with his eyes shut and let it cool his face, and tried not to think about how much of the water running off him was red.

By noon he was bleeding through the second bandage. By the middle of the afternoon he had stopped being able to feel his left foot.

Nobody tells you, he thought, that dying is boring.

It was a stupid thought, and it made him laugh, and the laughing hurt so much that he had to hold on to a tree until the black spots in his eyes cleared. When he opened them, the light had changed.

The gold had gone out of the sky. In its place hung a low, heavy, bruise-colored cloud that rolled in across the valley with a speed that made the hair rise on his arms. The birds fell silent. The clicking in the undergrowth stopped. The whole forest held its breath.

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The first drop landed on his forehead like a thrown pebble.

The storm came down on the mountain like a fist.

Within a minute he was soaked to the bone. Within five, the path under his boots had become a stream, and the stream had become a torrent, and every tree in the forest was thrashing in a wind that tore leaves the size of doors from the branches and flung them through the dark. Lightning split the sky, green-white and silent, followed a heartbeat later by a thunderclap that rattled the fillings in his teeth.