The Sheltered City

by John Tristan

  Caedian slid out from under her touch with a kind of graceful twist, somehow making the gesture not seem like a rejection. His smile reminded Amon of Luba’s boys—he couldn’t quite tell why until he realized it was a cunning artifice, just as theirs were. “You are the soul of kindness, Mother, but I think I can make it back alone.”

  “Come now, Caedian. Let me at least take you back to the Tree. I have my carriage waiting outside.”

  Caedian hesitated, then gave her a curt nod. “All right. Thank you.”

  “Wave goodbye to your playmates then, and let’s get going.” She wrinkled her elegant nose. “Too much time in the Rim will make you ill. There isn’t enough living air.”

  “Again, m’lady, I apologize.” Luba was smiling desperately at the floor by Liléan’s feet. “A thousand thank-yous for your forbearance.”

  “Shush, madam. You did nothing wrong.” Her bright green gaze played over Amon for a moment. “As for you...try not to make a habit out of disfiguring the Great Mother’s beloved, will you?”

  Amon forced a smile. He wondered if it looked much like Caedian’s had. “I won’t, m’lady.”

  “Good boy.” With that, she swanned out of the door, taking the light of her staff with her—the room went candle-dim again.

  Before she followed him, Luba glanced back at Amon. She avoided his eyes, rushing away before he could speak. “I will get rid of him,” she had said, as easily as if he was a broken chair. Not that he could blame her. The elves’ whims were law. The fact they usually ruled with a light hand did not mean they could not make a fist.

  Caedian was the last to leave. He hesitated in the doorway; for a moment Amon was sure he would turn back. He didn’t though. He followed Liléan up the stairs and away. Out of the rose rooms, and soon out of the Rim of Stone.

  The last Amon saw of the elf was a halo of light surrounding Caedian’s retreating head. That’s that, he thought, and a shiver that was not quite relief passed through him. That’s the last time I’ll have to deal with him.

  Chapter Four

  On the holydays of Dragonfall the sky wore mourning; the canopy became a true matte black, darker than a cloudy midnight, and the only light came from the lamp-trees, giving the entire city the eerie air of an underground lake.

  For the past two days the sky hadn’t turned, and every tavern, temple and brothel from the edges of the Rim to the roots of the Tree was shut up. Amon turned up his collar and looked at the blackness, trying to find the lines of the branches, the veins of the vast leaves. It was a fool’s game, of course, but he couldn’t help it; he wanted to orient himself under the dome of the sky.

  When one of the elf-lords in the Tree died, once in a hundred years or so—they were not mortal in the same sense as humans, living or halfdead, but there was still occasional disease and misadventure—the sky was blackened for a day. Dragonfall was given three each year, but then it mourned an entire world: the world outside the living sky.

  That world had once been green and rich with life, its waters clear, its skies unblemished. Now the sun was a red nest of dragons, and they filled the air with poison flames. Nothing clean lived long outside the Last City; the old dragonhunters had shown that well enough, by now. Here, though, under the Tree’s sheltering canopy, they were safe, and healthy crops still grew in the soil of the Verdancy. It was easy to forget the world beyond, if you did not have it written into your blood as Amon did. So they mourned the last days of the world each year, and they gave their thanks to the Great Mother and the elves for preserving them.

  Today, if Amon counted his sleeps aright, was the last day of Dragonfall, when the lamp-trees glowed bright and the streets were crowded with celebrants. Children dashed back and forth in play, black ribbons tied around their arms and throats. Streetwalkers went with their hair loosed from their braids, while devout templegoers had shorn theirs in mourning. Weaving through the chattering crowds, a few Grieving Men made their procession, lamenting the nameless gods whom even the priests neglected, wailing for the forgotten fathers of humankind.

  Amon had almost stayed home from the celebration—he hated the noise and smell of crowds—but he’d run out of food yesterday, and with the stores and taverns closed, the only place to eat was on the street. In the Verdancy, they would have long tables set up at which every family within an estate would eat; perhaps the elf who served as their patron might even come join them, sitting at the high table’s head to portion out the festal meal while the mothers’ council mooned over their protector. Here in the Rim, there were the food carts.

  The one parked nearest his narrow street was an old favorite. The same family had owned it for three generations, and their recipes had the unbreaking solidity of the sky. The cart itself was less solid; once it might have been wooden, but now it was a hybrid cobbled together from ancient surplus. The steel that made its wheels might once have been dragonhunter swords.

  Zoran used to take him out on the holydays and buy him a massive, golden-crusted pastry, stuffed with spicy potato and bright red peppers. Today he bought two. He could afford it, and he was a little larger than the gangly twelve-year-old who’d first tasted them.

  The girl in the cart wore her hair in nomad style, beaded braids knocking together sonorously as she moved. “We pray that the dragons never come again,” she said as she handed him his pastry. She seemed to expect a response to her formula, so he grunted some sort of sympathetic noise.

  “I’ll pray for you too,” she said, with a tight smile.

  “That’s very generous of you.” He unwrapped one of his pastries and took a big bite, chewing noisily, showing her his black gums and tongue.

  She seemed to realize that he was playing with her; she must have seen him buy from her family’s cart too much to be shocked by the marks of halfdeath on him. “Well, you seem to need it.”

  He snorted and tossed the coins her way. She caught them with well-bred facility and thanked him with excessive effusiveness. There was something almost charming about it, about her banter and her promise to pray for him. Perhaps she really would carry a glowfruit down the altar aisle and whisper his name the next time the temples opened and her family went to ceremonies. That was if she even knew his name; he didn’t know hers.

  He wondered what sort of temple her family belonged to. The cart and the beads marked them as nomad kin; they had been the first to seek shelter in the City, but too proud of their wandering ways to take the elves’ offer of land to farm. There was nowhere for them to wander now, so they made endless rounds of the Rim, selling their food or blacksmiths’ skills. Still, the old rivalry between them and the latecomers who’d become Verdancy gentry remained, and it was the Verdancy where temples bloomed like mushrooms in damp rot. “Thank you,” he said, meaning it this time.

  She sobered. “It’s nothing,” she said with a wave. “We all need prayers from time to time.”

  With a shrug, he turned his back on the cart and walked down a quieter alleyway. He finished his pastry in three massive bites and started unwrapping his second one. Music hung in the air like warm fog; people had dragged old drums and flutes and squeeze-boxes out into the street. The black sky of mourning was starting to look down on a celebration.

  “Amon Vraja?”

  He turned toward the unfamiliar voice and stopped short. Two constables, a man and a woman, stood in front of him in formal armor; their faces were obscured by gleaming helmets that tilted forward in odd, beaklike shapes. He could only see their mouths, thin and set.

  “I’m Amon Vraja,” he said, carefully wrapping up the remnants of his second pastry. There was no use denying it—he was not inconspicuous, and all the other halfdead were twice his age, or dead, or both. “How can I help you?”

  The man raised a hand, and Amon saw he was holding a steel baton; he expected Amon to fight him. A smile tugged at the corner of Amon’s
mouth. A strike from that baton would lay the average man out well enough, but if Amon really wanted to fight the constable he could snap it in half. Or at least bend it.

  The woman saw his smile and put her hand on her companion’s wrist. “You need to come with us, Amon,” she said. She had a soft, low voice—she spoke the way someone might speak to a frightened child.

  Amon’s throat tightened, and his breathing shallowed out. He remembered an elvish face, its cutting beauty broken and bloodied by his handiwork. Caedian—the name swam back to him. The punishment for injuring an elf was at that elf’s discretion; had a month’s worth of time brooding on his injury made him call the constables in after all?

  “Am I being taken into custody, ma’am?”

  The woman cocked her helmeted head. “Yes. You are.”

  “For what?”

  They looked at each other. Amon wondered what they could see under those birdlike masks. “You just need to come with us,” she repeated, but there was a quaver of uncertainty in her tone now. Amon had a sudden instinct that they did not know why they were taking him in. Whatever it was he was supposed to have done, they hadn’t been told.

  He shifted from foot to foot. The man’s hand tightened on his baton, but Amon wasn’t paying attention to him.

  “And if I decline?”

  She shrugged. “We will need to use force. That would be unpleasant for everyone, don’t you think?”

  He nodded. He would be able to hurt them both very badly if he wanted, but in the end he’d be the one laid out on the ground while they called for their comrades-in-arms to stomp some vengeance into his skull with the business ends of their armored boots. The rage would pass, and then sheer numbers would win out.

  “You’ll need to follow us,” the man said, trying to slip back into the conversation.

  Amon ignored him. “Do I need to be restrained?”

  “Not if you come willingly,” she said.

  “Margo—” The man’s mouth twisted with distaste.

  “Not,” she said sharply, “if he comes willingly, Olem. There’s no need for it. Is there, Amon?”

  “No, ma’am,” he said. “I’ll come willingly.” After all, it was the only way of finding out why they wanted him, or what he had done. He chortled under his breath. For all he knew, the elf-lords in the Tree wanted to give him some special reward.

  “This way, please,” she said, indicating a small black carriage at the end of the alleyway. A dark little horsephaunt stood blinkered and barded, waiting for a pull on its reins. Amon almost felt honored. The constables of the Rim went on foot, like everyone else; they must have been given special dispensation for a carriage in order to bring him in.

  His eyes lingered on the horsephaunt, with its thick hooves and its gray, rough skin stretched over a well-fed belly. He could not see its eyes behind the blinders. It was strange, seeing it here in the Rim. Animals belonged to the carefully tended green world beyond the gates of the Verdancy, not in the rotting stone city at the edges of the sky.

  Olem gestured toward the carriage door. “Get in.”

  “My pleasure.” Amon gave him a wide, ingratiating smile and slid himself into the back of the carriage.

  “Fucking halfdead scum,” he growled, and he slammed the door.

  “Constable Olem.” Margo’s voice was calm and even.

  “I know,” he said, and he slid home the bolt, locking Amon inside.

  The carriage seemed suddenly too small. The constables rode up front, but he could still smell them: sweat and fear, pooling in their uniforms. The woman, Margo, kept a tight lid on her worries, and Olem had shown it only by threats, but they were afraid of him. Maybe they thought he would hurt them; maybe they were just scared he might bleed on them, covering them in his blight.

  He hunched his shoulders in tight, trying to make himself smaller, but his height and bulk weren’t made for the constables’ little black carriage. He felt packed tight, bursting at the seams—he felt as if he could barely breathe. His heart was beating too fast, and he could feel the dark haze behind his eyes begin to rise. Oh, no. Not now. If the rage blacked him out now it would be worse for him than when he’d punched the elf (Caedian, he remembered. His name was Caedian) in the nose. He closed his eyes and made himself breathe, slow and steady, remembering the counting song that Zoran had taught him for when the fear and the rage crept over him. “One, two two, three three three...”

  “Hey.” Olem pounded his fist on the metal grille that separated them. “Hey, stop that!”

  Amon opened his eyes. Olem cringed back. Amon could guess what he had seen: his eyes black and swimming with blood, his veins bulging on the side of his neck. The man was staring, staring at the halfdead. Amon could see the constable’s own veins palpitating hard on his throat. Do it, hurt him, do it, hurt him—the thought was dumb and insistent as a drum. He could put his finger and thumb right there and pull loose the rubbery veins, watching the blood spurt red and bright as firelight...

  Breathe, he told himself, forcing his eyes shut again, overriding the senseless drumbeat of his rage. Keep breathing.

  “Great Mother’s angels preserve us—Margo, what the hell is wrong with him?”

  “Halfdeath,” she said. She kept her eyes resolutely forward. “Just ignore him, Olem.”

  “Easier said than done, Margo.”

  “If he rips up the carriage we’ll stove his skull in. Otherwise, ignore him.”

  “Good advice,” Amon ground out, and he laughed. The breathing was helping—the desperate urge to fight, to kill if it meant escape, was flowing out of him, slowly but surely. Four, four, four, four. The counting song had been his lullaby from before he knew what it meant—from before he knew what numbers were. Zoran had drilled it into him early, so he would know how to use it before he even needed it.

  “Just keep it to yourself, halfdead,” Margo snapped.

  For the rest of the journey they didn’t speak to him. Now that the first spasm of fear and rage had faded, Amon felt himself grow calmer the farther they took him. He should have been worrying, he knew, but could not quite manage it—it was a strange feeling, though welcome enough.

  The carriage rolled down the roads of the Rim. Amon breathed and watched the buildings slide by him. They started to thin, then, and suddenly he knew they were not taking him to one of the jailhouses that dotted the Rim, holding its share of drunks and wife-beaters. They were taking him beyond the borders—into the Verdancy.

  The Last City was laid out in concentric circles. The outermost was the Rim of Stone, where Amon had been born and raised. It was the narrowest and most crowded—its buildings near scraping against the leaves of the sky, its roads labyrinthine—but also the most brightly lit, with lamp-trees on near every corner. The Rim was where they kept the ones who served no exalted purpose, the ones who worked in taverns and whorehouses and small workshops, or serving pastries in food carts, and it was never truly asleep.

  Heading farther in, they passed into the Verdancy. It was the largest of all the rings, though it housed far fewer than the Rim, a wide green-and-yellow space of linked fields, with low houses dotted here and there in small, gated neighborhoods. Verdancy gentry came from the same stock as the Rimdwellers, refugees of half a hundred forgotten kingdoms—but they had been the first who bowed their heads to elvish rule, and it had served them well.

  The Verdancy was farmland, green land, the breadbasket of the City, interrupted here and there with bright ribbons of blue water or emerald copses and with the discreet network of old stone roads that carried carriages and carts inward and outward in the circles. It was all in black shadow now, of course, its colors muted—only here and there he saw a spot of greenish light coming from a curtainless window. Under the black sky the Verdancy might as well have been a dark ocean; Amon only recalled its layout from old maps.

/>   They slid farther inward on a smooth, soundless ride. Constable Olem drummed his fingers on his knee; Margo stared straight ahead into the dark, her mirrored helmet reflecting the occasional bloom of greenish light.

  “Where are we going?” Amon asked.

  Neither of them answered.

  “Where—”

  “Shut up,” Olem said. The fire had gone out of his voice now; he sounded tired and harassed.

  Amon leaned back, stretching himself out as best he could on the cramped seat of the carriage. The road made a sharp turn then, and suddenly he could see the Tree looming above them. He’d never seen it from this close; from the Rim, it seemed a pale and distant column at the center of the world—only now, mere miles away, did he get a sense of its true scale.

  The Tree was the innermost structure of the city, the center of earth and sky: a massive white trunk woven round with enormous vines. Fruits the size of the carriage hung glowing with subtle light; leaves like green waterfalls draped themselves against the pale, smooth bark. On the highest levels, where the Tree nearly touched the dark sky, were the quarters of the elf-lords. Above that were the great branches from which grew the leaves of the canopy—each of those branches was big as a house, he knew, the overlapping leaves large enough to serve as a dragon’s blanket.

  Then the road took another sharp turn, away from the Tree and downward. They were near the edge of a small woodland, a piece of the Verdancy given over to wild growth. Amon peered out of the windows but saw nothing except dark greenery. Then Margo pulled hard on the horsephaunt’s reins and the carriage came to a sudden halt.

  “Get out.”

  “Excuse me?”

  She leaped down and unbolted the carriage door, then flung it open into darkness. “You heard me. Get out.”

  “There’s nothing out here.”

  “We were told to bring you here and drop you off. Now, am I going to have to ask you again?”