by John Tristan
Amon took the purse from Caedian’s hand and stuffed it into his pocket. It sat there, an unfamiliar and unsettling weight. “I...will do what I can.”
Caedian nodded and let out a slow, sighing breath. When he looked up, his face had changed—the unbreakable confidence was back, the slanted smile. “Well then. I suppose I will see you when I see you, Amon Vraja.”
There was a knock on the door, and it opened. The two white-clad constables peered in. “Milord Caedian? Lady Liléan is waiting for you outside.”
“Give me a moment.” Suddenly Caedian was up against him, arms wrapped around his waist, and the elf tilted his face upward to press a kiss to Amon’s mouth.
Amon was stunned, his hands trembling useless at his side. Caedian didn’t seem to mind; his mouth was hot and soft on Amon’s lips. Then, standing on tiptoe, he leaned to whisper in Amon’s ear. “I’ll get a message to you, one way or another. Go to the black house, as soon as you can. Find this Una. Find Seoras.”
After that he withdrew, leaving Amon’s outstretched hands holding empty air. “Farewell, then!” Caedian sang out, in a new, false, bright tone. He waved to Amon, moving in between the two white-coated men, and then he was gone.
One of the men peered over his shoulder at Amon for a moment. “Some money has been left for you downstairs. The room is paid for, for another day,” he said, not quite looking Amon in the eye. “After that, you leave.”
“After that I’ll leave,” Amon said. They were trying to pay him off, like a...they would use the word courtesan, he supposed. It was almost enough to make him laugh.
The man nodded. “Lady Liléan would thank you not to come begging for more. Understand?”
“I understand...sir.”
“Very well.” He closed the door.
Amon let out a breath he’d only half been aware of holding. Without thinking he lifted his fingers to his mouth, brushing them against his lips as if to sweep away the kiss that lingered there like an aftertaste.
He went to the narrow window to watch them leave. A carriage was waiting out in front of the hotel—slim, pale as bone, drawn not by a horsephaunt but by a massive, wing-clipped griffin. Amon watched the two servitors accompany Caedian down to the car, waiting to see if he would look back up toward the window.
He did not. One of the servitors opened the door and Caedian got into the cab, where Liléan was no doubt already waiting. Then the white-coated men got in front, and in a moment they were gone, streaking away down the narrow streets in a pale blur.
Chapter Eight
The old armory was on the edge of the Rim, where the sky touched the earth and, for all intents and purposes, the world had its end. During a true night, when the leaves of the sky turned transparent and left only the shadowy branches supporting them visible, a keen-eyed watcher could still see where it jutted out into the blasted dark of the dragonlands outside the walls of the Last City, and the stones of ancient roads trailing off toward the ocean.
Despite what Liléan’s white-clad bodyguards had told him, Amon had left the little inn only a few moments after Caedian. He had to keep moving; he couldn’t stand to remain there, in all its low-lit luxury, with the ghost of the elf’s scent still clinging to the sheets.
He had made his way home first, a brief stop before starting his outward journey, to secrete half of the money that Caedian had given him in his mother’s old trunk.
There had been a message waiting for Amon, a folded scrap of leafpaper wedged into his doorframe. When he plucked it out to read it, he saw it had been written in Luba’s blocky hand. Don’t bother to come back was the last line and the gist of the message.
He had crumpled the note and let it fall to the ground. There had been no sense of surprise; he had missed several nights at the House of Dust already, and Luba’s eyes had been uneasy on him since he had come in carrying a wounded Caedian in his arms. There’d been little love between them in any case; in the handful of years he’d worked the door, Luba had always kept her distance from his gray and looming bulk. She might have come to respect him, but she’d never warmed to him. He thought that Banu might have, and some of House’s roses, but they did not decide who stayed on and who didn’t.
In a way, it made things easier for him. He had no responsibilities left to shirk now—no one to disappoint, save for Caedian.
Amon’s wanderings rarely took him to the outermost edge of the Rim, but the place had a strange familiarity despite that; Zoran had lived on the outer Rim, before he was born. Before Luziana Vraja had died. He had moved into Luziana’s old quarters soon afterward to take care of her son, and though he talked of it often he’d never returned to the outer Rim—had never shown Amon the armory and the old dragonhunter barracks. Those had been torn down now, but their legacy remained; half of the outer Rim was built from their leavings.
The remnants of the armory were still massive; it took Amon thirty paces to walk from edge to edge. There was still, in the tangle of metal and grass and faded lightvines, a single door: the grass was not allowed to grow on it, and the handle was still able to be turned.
It was one of the doors of exile, where lawbreakers and murderers were thrown out of the Last City “to live or die alone,” as the old formula had it. To live or die—it was ridiculous, of course. Anyone sent out into the dragonlands was sent there to die.
Houses clustered around the ruins of the armory, much lower than the other buildings of the Rim. With the arc of the sky so close, it was the highest they could build. If Amon stood on their rooftops, he might be able to reach up and brush his fingers against the leaves and branches of the sky.
Somewhere among these grim little buildings, the black house was hiding. How he was going to find it, he wasn’t sure. Near the armory. Una the Ghost. Edina’s drunken hints weren’t worth much as far as he was concerned.
He leaned against the wall of the armory and took out some scavenged smokeleaf, rolling it into a rough cigar. He struck a match against the old stones, and for a quiet minute he allowed himself to blow smoke-shapes into the green twilight. The sky was oppressively close here; he could feel it press down on him, as sure as stone. He felt more than usually ill-settled in his skin; the feel, the smell, of the inn’s too-soft sheets still seemed to ghost on him, even now—and Caedian’s kiss still lingered on his mouth.
He thought he knew why the elf had done it. Lady Liléan had no doubt assumed Amon was some exotic conquest Caedian had picked up, and he wanted to play into the assumption, to make a show for her servitors. Amon couldn’t blame him for it.
That was what his rational mind told him, in any case. Beneath the excuses there was a low-bubbling stew of raw desire and indignant anger.
Amon had never been kissed before. Few people were brave or perverse enough to woo the halfdead, and he had never wanted to pay for it. He had lived his life assuming he’d remain untouched, unkissed, until his early death. To have Caedian be the one to prove him wrong, and merely to fool his mother? No matter the sweetness of the kiss, it had felt almost like a kind of theft—if a theft could leave him hungry to be stolen from again.
Stop, he told himself. This is getting you nowhere. He ground the makeshift cigar out between his fingers and flicked the ashy remnant into the dirt. If he wanted this business done with, he had to find Una the Ghost.
A few Rimdwellers passed the armory now and then, on the way home, or to work, or perhaps to the very same black house he was looking for. After a while he spotted a fiftysomething woman in a long, dingy coat, moving with the almost unconscious ease of someone who knew a neighborhood in the same way they knew they own skin.
He stepped forward, not quite into her path, and inclined his head in a kind of bow. “Excuse me?”
She stopped and looked back at him. “Can I help?”
He took out a handful of kings and held them, stacked on
e atop the other, in his open palm. It was more than enough to get her attention. “I hope you can. I need some directions.”
She nodded to him, then took a coin between her two longest fingers and secreted it in her coat. “Where you need to go, sir?”
His lip twitched; if he had known passing out money would get people calling him sir, he might have tried it earlier. “I’m looking for a black house, somewhere near here. Someone called Una runs it.”
The woman gave him a long look, longer than most people were comfortable looking at Amon. There was no apprehension in her eyes, not even a flicker of it, as if she was used to meeting halfdead on the streets. But then, if anyone would be used to the look of the halfdead it would be someone who’d spent their life living near the old armory. “Sure,” she said slowly, taking the rest of the coins from his palm. “I know where it is.”
The silence coiled like invisible smoke. He took out another king and twirled it between his fingers.
She plucked it from his hand. “If you’re that flush, there are better things to do than smoke it away.”
“I don’t intend to.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Then you’ll have another king to buy my directions.”
“You don’t come cheap,” he said, and he threw another coin her way.
She caught it and nodded. “You’ll want to follow the old street until you see the sign for the refuge, then turn left. Follow that street until it narrows and go down the brown door on the right. There’s a mark on the door—a dragonhunter symbol.” She looked him up and down again. “You’ll know it, I think?”
He started. “I was never a dragonhunter.”
“You’re halfdead. That makes you one of them, or their child.” When he said nothing, she nodded. “A child, then. Great Mother have mercy on you.”
He snatched his hand back. “I don’t need mercy.”
“No? I think we all do.”
He shrugged and turned away from her. “Thank you for your help.”
“It’s nothing.”
Nothing, he thought. Doing nothing earned you a handful of kings. It takes Luba’s roses a lot more than nothing to earn that. But her words were just casual politesse, safely ignored; he did just that and followed the directions she had given him.
* * *
The brown door was near the end of a narrow alley. The building crowded up against the edges of the world; if he clambered up on the roofs here he would do more than brush the sky—he might hit his head on it. It was literally as far as anyone could go from the Tree, unless they were exiled.
He traced his fingers across the door. It was ancient metal, the brown patina the result of years of rust. Scratched into it, just as the woman had said, was a familiar symbol: three jagged, sideways claw marks above an upturned crescent moon. The sign of the Third Regiment of dragonhunters. Zoran and Luziana had been in the First; their uniforms had been marked with a single dagger above that same upturned moon.
Amon heard his blood rushing in his ears. Caedian’s face swam in his mind’s eye for some reason, with all its sharp beauty and contrasting colors. Seoras would be a mirror to his twin, he supposed, save the skewing flaw of Caedian’s broken nose. Amon felt a need to arm himself against that resemblance, in case he should see the elf hiding down here in Una’s black house.
He put his fist against the door and pushed; it creaked harshly, as if its hinges had been made to creak. Inside, it was strangely dark. A narrow staircase wound down into a small, dingy room. The walls and the floor were old earth, black and tightly packed. Wan, unhealthy lightvines trailed across the ceiling in a grid, showing a few ancient wooden chairs arranged in loose clusters and thin pallets slung into the corners. It didn’t look like a bar, or a place of business—it looked like someone’s half-inhabited basement, with dust in the corners and an old rug of woven scraps.
At the far end of the room, behind a dusty curtain, there was a heavy black door. A massive middle-aged woman—not round, but broad in shoulder and hip, with arms almost as big around as Amon’s—sat in front of it. She looked up at him, bored and slack-jawed, and then recognition sharpened her eyes. “Don’t get many of your kind down here anymore.”
“And a good evening to you,” he said, fighting down a snarl.
“Is it?” She peered at him sharply. “You’ll be wanting to come in?”
He’d almost thought the dingy little room had been the black house, still waiting for its first customers of the day, or night; it was only a little more dismal than the place where Zoran had died. But he thought that a slumming elf, even one who’d taken pains to go incognito, wouldn’t want to smoke or carouse in a place like that. The real black house was behind the door, and this muscle-bound woman was its guard. “Yes,” he said, after realizing he’d been quiet for a moment too long. “I want to come in.”
“You’ll have to pay the door fee.”
He slid a few kings out of his purse. “Will this do?”
She snorted again. “Who told you about this place? This isn’t a place to curl up and die in, you know.”
No. That would be your front parlor. He took five more kings from his diminishing stash. The other hand was clenched into a tight fist deep in his pocket, nails digging into the flesh. One, two two... “So I underestimated the price. Can I come in now?”
“I hope you’ve got more than what you’re showing, but all right. You can get in the front door at least. What happens after is up to you, and what you can afford.” She unlocked three separate bolts and drummed a quick sequence on the metal of the door. Then it opened, held by a wizened little man in a strangely fine suit. Wordless, he waved Amon inside.
The immediate, sweet scent of dream-poppy and heaven’s herb hit him, combined with something else, something green and unfamiliar. He had to put a hand to his nose to stop from sneezing.
The door guard grinned at him. “Welcome to paradise.”
Another staircase led down. It was warm here, warm and oddly well lit. Once his eyes adjusted to the new light, he stood in the stairwell for a moment, stunned by the strange, unearthly beauty before him. Paradise, the woman at the door had called it. He remembered Zoran telling him once that paradise was a garden. He didn’t believe in paradise, but whoever had built this place had taken the story to heart.
The walls were covered in creeping vines, some of them ripe with glowfruits. From the ceiling, vine-chandeliers provided most of the light. At the edges there were curtained-off alcoves. Brighter or dimmer lights shone from within them, playing through the thin curtains. The floor was grass, with the benches and tables forming miniature versions of hills and valleys. Water pipes were placed on the top of each little hill, made to seem as if they were growing out of the ground, their glass-and-metal curlicues created to feign the look of living things.
At most of the tables there were at least one or two patrons. Few of them looked much like the locals he had seen out by the armory. He guessed they had traveled about as far as he had to be here, or farther. They were gentlemen and women of fashion, or what passed for fashion in the Rim. This wasn’t some refuge for the desperate, seeking futilely for a deeper satisfaction than cheap blackblossom could provide; this was a playground.
Edina had told them Una’s business was booming. Here was the incontrovertible proof she had been telling the truth.
He felt out of place—he looked out of place, and knew it, just as much as he had in the music hall. This time though, he didn’t have Caedian by his side to smooth the way with his beauty and charm. This time he had only himself to count on.
“Excuse me,” he said, voice pitched slightly too loud for the convivial dim. Faces turned his way; most were made slack and friendly by the smoke, barely seeming to see him at all. There was that to be thankful for, at least.
“Excuse me,” he said again. “I am looking
for Una the Ghost.”
A breathy sigh sounded behind him. “Why, what do you want?”
He turned; a woman had come from one of the alcoves, pushing past the gauzy curtain. If this wasn’t Una the Ghost, he thought he’d eat the rest of Caedian’s kings; she was startlingly pale, the palest woman he had ever seen. The whiteness of her was highlighted by her mouth, painted a vivid dark red. Her hair was long and black, falling in a big dark cloud around her thin, bony shoulders. She wore a very white dress, which clung to her flat chest and flared out into a cloud of gauze past her narrow hips. She reminded Amon of nothing so much as the ancient skeletons of birds, preserved in crystal in dusty museums.
“Una,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
She leaned her head back, looking at him and showing him the underside of her bladelike nose. “I don’t recall ever meeting you, so I’m guessing you’ve heard my name from one of my many friends.” She lowered her head and smiled; it transformed her face, turning it from skeletal to almost charming. Her teeth were even and very white, the front teeth flat and prominent. “So...how can I help you, my dearest?”
“I’m looking for someone.”
Her smiled remained there, unmovable, but her eyes sharpened. “Do I seem like a likely finder of the lost?”
“Someone you spoke about to a—a mutual friend.” He took a step closer to her and lowered his voice. “An elf.”
Now her smile dropped. “Look, dearest,” she said. “Have a bit of a look around, if you’ve forgotten where you are. This is the Rim, if you haven’t noticed? There are no elves to be seen here.”
“I have looked around. This place is very nice, for the outer Rim. For a black house.”
“Is it a crime, to keep a fine house?”
“Do the elves own this place?”
She coughed an incredulous laugh. “Dearest, this may be my house, but all the Last City is owned by the elf-lords. They ration out the air we breathe and the light we exist by. They dole out our gold and our food. Every square inch of this place is owned by them, yes, if by owned you mean they can take it from us with a flick of their hands...but that doesn’t mean they come down from their holy of holies to mingle with the flock.”