by John Tristan
“This one did—and you were happy enough to let it be whispered that he did.”
Her mouth clamped closed. She reached out for him, thought better of it, then beckoned him into her alcove with a sharp, abbreviated gesture. Once inside she yanked the curtain closed. “People should know how to keep their damned mouths shut.”
“So he was here.”
She gave him a flat, blank look, perfectly crafted.
He took a breath, and a chance. “Seoras.”
The flat facade cracked, just a little. “Who?”
“Seoras is his name.” He grabbed her arm in a meaty hand and loomed over her. “Your elf customer, with the taste for what you have on offer. Where is he?”
She shook off his touch with the slick expertise of someone too used to unwanted hands, and looked back at him. Her eyes were dark and unreadable.
He felt suddenly ashamed—his strength was all he had, a blunt instrument. He clumsily dug around in his pockets for more of Caedian’s money. “I can pay you.”
“Of course you can,” she snapped. Nevertheless, she took the money.
“Tell me.”
“Milord Seoras comes here, now and then, yes. He doesn’t mind if the rumor of him spreads, but he prefers I keep his presence secret—he doesn’t like to make a spectacle.”
“Doesn’t seem much like an elf-lord.”
“No,” she agreed.
“And it doesn’t sound like the rumors you let spread. That he had the kind of fun that would have the constables locking us up for a year.”
“If you want to be a legend, dearest, it behooves you to be a bit economical with the truth. I exaggerated his habits, just a little. Just to make this place seem more exotic.”
“It looks plenty exotic to me already.”
“That’s because you’ve never seen how they celebrate.”
“The elves?”
She nodded.
“And you have?”
“Milord Seoras told us some stories.”
“So.” He lowered his head. “So tell me stories about him, Una. Where can I find him?”
“Not here, if that’s what you’re meaning.” She lifted a shoulder. “I let an elf sample our wares, yes. Is that a crime?”
“It is if you’ve hurt him.”
Now she looked truly shocked. “Hurt him—why would I? Never mind that it would be my life if I did, Milord Seoras is always kind and troubles no one. That’s more than I can say for half my fellow humans down here.”
My fellow humans, Amon noted. Not our. “Do you have any idea where he can be found?”
She fluttered her eyes in blinking disbelief. “In the Tree, I’m guessing, where they all live. He went back home, a day before Dragonfall. Was damn near dragged home, the way Hana tells it.”
Dragged home? Before Dragonfall? That made no sense. Someone here was lying, Amon thought—and unless she was a very good liar indeed, it wasn’t Una the Ghost. “Did you speak to him, on the day he left?”
She shook her head. “No. He liked his quiet, and I give my customers what they want. Hana would have, I suppose, but I didn’t.”
“And I don’t suppose you can tell me where to find Hana either.”
Una looked up at him with a withering smile. “Hana’s out front, dearest. She’s the one who let you in.”
He blinked at her a moment. He hadn’t expected her to tell him anything. “Thank you,” he said at last, and he pushed the curtain aside.
For a moment he let himself linger in the smoking room, in its paradisiacal atmosphere of softly lit greenery. Gray mist lingered in the air, smelling of sweet ash. The patrons looked at him with bleared and cheery eyes. One of them, a slender young man with a shock of blond hair over honey-colored skin, lolled by the false fountain; he rolled on his back and looked up at Amon with big bright eyes.
Amon swallowed and took a half-conscious step backward. The young man looked almost familiar—it was the brightness of his eyes, the contrast of fair hair and dark olive skin. Caedian’s image seemed to swim in front of the young smoker’s like a heat haze. He kissed me, Amon thought, then slammed an iron door on that too-near memory.
He turned around and took the stairs three at once. When he was back in the dingy little antechamber, he let out a sigh that was almost relief, putting his palms flat on the tops of his thighs and leaning down a little, as if he had to catch his breath.
“What’s the matter?” the woman at the door asked. “Did the money run out, or—”
“Hana?” he interrupted. “Is that your name?”
She drew back. “So what if it is?”
He took out another handful of Caedian’s money and clumsily threw it at her feet. It rattled there, a gleaming bounty. “Tell me about Seoras.”
She looked down at the money, and for a moment doubt flickered in her eyes—but then she kneeled to pick it up, scooping the kings into her fists. “What do you want to know?”
Something like a smile twitched at the corners of his mouth, and he pointed at the coins clutched in her hands. “Everything that buys me.”
Chapter Nine
As it turned out, it bought him plenty.
Seoras was not unknown in the wilder reaches of the Rim, and where he went, a quiet murmur of gossip had followed him. All those streams of gossip had converged on Una’s paradise, where Hana heard them all.
A blurred picture of Caedian’s brother emerged from those murmurs, swimming indistinctly in his mind’s eye: a man—an elf, Amon corrected himself—who enjoyed life’s darker pleasures, sucking in dream-poppy smoke in a hidden alcove, and one who haunted the Rim’s temples, praying at each of the Great Mother’s many-faced idols. An elf who hid, as much as he could, the marks of his heritage. A patron known for openhanded generosity who would vanish and return at odd intervals with a story and a smile.
A hard person to find, in other words, should he want to hide.
“What about the last time you saw him?” Amon asked at last. “Una said he was...convinced to leave.”
She nodded. “They came to get him in a fancy carriage,” she said. “Three men in white, all alike. He tried arguing a bit at first, but in the end they whispered something in his ear, and he went quietly enough after that.”
“Men?” he asked. “Not elves.”
“Not elves, no. I know the difference, even if Milord Seoras liked to think he fooled me.”
Men in white, he thought, whose whispers could compel an elf’s obedience. Men in white who drove a fancy carriage into the farthest corners of the Rim...
He recalled Lady Liléan’s silent companions, standing at her side in their spotless finery.
“Well? Does that answer your questions to your liking?” There was irritated bravado in Hana’s voice, but something else too—some hint of fear. He did not think it was him that she feared, despite his halfdead countenance. Perhaps it was Seoras, or perhaps the men in white who had come for him and brought his celebrations to an end.
He raised his shoulders a little. “I would like it more if you knew where he was.”
She snorted. “If I did, you’d need more than you gave to buy that from me.”
“Oh? How much?”
“If I did, I said.” She grimaced. “Why are you looking for him, in any case? What business is an elf-lord to a halfdead?”
“Give me some of those kings back and I might just tell you.”
“Hah!” She shook her head. “Fair enough, I suppose.”
“There’s one more thing.”
“Your answers are running out—your answers and my patience. One more.” She held up a single finger. “That I’ll give you free.”
“You said he went to the temples here. Do you know where?”
“Why,
all of them, just like I told you. Any temple that would let him in was fair game. He sampled faith as much as he did dream-poppy. Even those scar-face Grievers got a look in.” She seemed to hesitate a moment. “But I hear he liked to stay at the temple under the broken crescent, just by the old armory. The place where the dragonhunters used to go and pray.”
Hot and cold shivers crawled down the small of Amon’s back. For a moment he seemed to hear a faraway echo of Zoran’s voice, Zoran’s prayers. “Thank you,” he said, his voice thick and hoarse.
“You want to thank me, halfdead?” Her eyes fixed on him, flat and unsympathetic. “Don’t come back here.”
“Believe me,” he said, “if I have a choice in the matter, I won’t.”
* * *
When he came back out under the dome of the sky from the tucked-away world of Una’s paradise, it was still night-black. Not much time had passed, in truth, but he felt battered by the hours. There was not a chance he could make it back to his bed before he fell asleep on his feet. Strange how he’d forgotten the true size of the Rim...or how his feet had forgotten it, at least. For the past ten—was it ten? or fifteen?—years his life had been compacted into a space he could traverse in less than an hour.
Something painful twisted in him at the level of his heart. His mother, and the man who’d been a father to him, had been among the last of those who walked the world outside of the Last City. They had seen the ocean and brought dragons down from the blood-red sky. How had his own life become so small?
He glanced toward the armory; the building loomed empty and massive. He wondered if his mother’s weapons were still stored there, rusting year by year, coated in ancient dust.
Beside the armory there was a glimmer of moonstone light: a dull silver sign, lit by a few intertwined lightvines glowing cornflower blue. A crescent moon, with one of the tips snapped off. The broken crescent, Amon thought. The old dragonhunters’ temple, where Zoran had never taken him.
He squared his shoulders and took a deep breath, like a man preparing to plunge into dark waters. Hana had said it had been one of Seoras’s favored haunts, that temple. Perhaps the priests who still dwelled there knew more about where he was now.
And perhaps they had a place for Amon to stay until the sky turned. Any temple that served the dragonhunters would not shrink at sheltering the halfdead...as long as the priests that had prayed with his mother and her companions still lived, that was. It had been over twenty years now.
On half-unsteady feet he closed the distance between him and the vine-lit sign. It was planted atop a low stone building, the stones scrubbed scrupulously clean—all the other buildings in the Rim tended to grow, after a while, a thin coat of moss, but this temple still stood as it would have before the leaves of the dome had enclosed the Last City. Amon lingered by the door, wondering, looking up at the crescent sign. How old was this temple? The stones, though clean, were pitted with long years.
The door to the temple opened. Amon took a startled step back. An old woman stood there, her back slightly bent, the mark of the Great Mother—the crescent moon within the full—tattooed on her dark forehead. Her gray hair was shorn almost to her skull, giving her a severe and sunken look; when she looked up at Amon, he saw one of her eyes was cataract-blind.
“Halfdead,” she said, in the clear, strong voice of a woman half her age. It was almost a question.
“Mother.” He bowed his head.
“I’ve not seen your kind at our door for a long while. Do you come seeking sanctuary?”
“Something of the sort.” He took another hesitant step forward. When she did not flinch, he cleared his throat. “Sanctuary for the night, if you will have me—and answers, if you have them to give.”
“Sanctuary we have, and plenty of it, though our food might leave you wanting.” She tilted her head, her clear eye taking him in. Her robes were old but beautiful, with faded golden thread weaving patterns in dusty green. She stepped aside and gestured toward the innards of the temple. Amon caught the reddish glow of firelight within. “Whether we can give you answers would depend on what your questions were.”
Amon bowed his head in thanks. “That I’ll take, Mother.”
“Come in then.”
He slid in beside her. The corridor was narrow and had a somehow old smell to it, not quite unpleasant—it was the smell of ancient rain, he thought, soaked into the stones. A rain from before the dragons came.
The priest led him deeper into the temple, and the corridor flared out into a round, low-ceilinged room lit by oil lamps in recessed sconces. Stone benches made for kneeling on were arranged in a half circle; some were covered in age-flattened pillows, but most were bare, their surfaces worn smooth as water by the prayers of uncounted penitents. In the open arms of the semicircle there stood an icon of the Great Mother painted on a curved sheet of hammered steel. She was portrayed not as an elf, as most temples showed her, nor quite as human, which would have been a sacrilege. There was something fierce and leonine in her aspect, her eyes yellow-bright, her hair an ebon mane.
The priest was looking at him, and for her benefit he performed a brief genuflection. His eyes met the gleam of the Great Mother’s painted stare, and for a moment he felt a faint prickle on the back of his neck: a half-sure sense that She was looking back at him.
The priest led him past the icon then, down a few steps to a massive stone door. The great slab must have weighed a ton or more, but it slid smooth and soundless in its hollowed groove, disclosing a narrow staircase. The old-stone smell was strong here, but mingled with others: sweat and breath, and the homely aroma of barley cooking over a low fire.
Below the small and solemn temple there was a subterranean dormitory of sorts, stone benches turned to beds and scavenged metal screens curtaining off a labyrinth of “rooms.” The priest led him to the cooking fire, where an ancient dedicant was stirring the pot. He retreated without a word at the priest’s approach and she took up the spoon, tasting the gray-brown stew of grains.
“Not bad,” she said, and she grinned at Amon. “You picked a good time to claim sanctuary—Brother Stefion managed to buy some honey from a passing greenman, and one of our templegoers left the Great Mother a gift of preserved figs.”
“Shouldn’t they be left for the Great Mother then?”
“To rot before her icon? There would be no greater blasphemy!”
“Mother...”
She held up her hand. “I know. You have questions. First you eat—indulge a priest’s whim, if you will.”
She dipped a clay bowl into the pot and handed it to Amon. The barley porridge was smooth enough to tip into his mouth without using a spoon, or his hands. Floating in it here and there were little dark gems of dried fig, sweet and plumped up in the warm broth.
As he ate, the priest watched him, head cocked so she could better see out of her good eye. He ignored her scrutiny as best he could and looked around between gulps of porridge.
The dormitory below the temple was near on empty, unless there were unseen shadows hiding behind the screens. If there were, though, they were too quiet for even Amon’s sensitive ears. Amon saw only a few old men and women, some of the latter priests with tight-cropped hair; one of them was helping a man with shaking sickness fix the beads on his nomad’s braids. A young man sat cradling a thin, quiet infant on his lap and feeding it fingerfuls of porridge. He wore the yellow cravat of a young dedicant, turned orange-red by the shadows of the fire.
Amon finished his porridge and showed the priest his empty bowl. “There, Mother. I’ve indulged your whim.”
She grinned again, shaving decades off her face, and took the bowl from Amon’s big gray hands. “Now you want me to indulge yours?”
He shook his head. “It’s not a whim. I’m looking for someone who’s gone missing.”
Her eyebrows rose; her grin di
d not fall as much as sour. “How can anyone go missing in a closed room?”
It took him a moment to understand that she meant the Last City, enclosed in its dome of massive leaves. “It is...a very large room, Mother.”
“Is it? I suppose so. Still, what makes you think I can help you find your missing waif? In case you haven’t noticed, I’m half-blind.”
“It’s not a waif I’m looking for, Mother. It’s an elf.”
The young dedicant dropped his bowl. It clattered on the stone floor, spilling the remnants of the porridge. The priest looked his way with a sort of long-suffering grimace. Amon could see him blush even in the indifferent light.
“I take it you know of whom I speak.”
She stood up, gathering her robe in one hand, as if she was about to run. “And if we say no, will you beat your answers from us?” Her words were bravado, with a quiver of true fear in them. For all her welcome, she still feared him—still thought a halfdead could only ask questions with his fists.
Amon remained very still, his hands palms up on his knees. He felt nothing save weariness; it would almost be a relief to summon up the blood-beat and sinister promises of the rage, to wash away the foggy gray blur of his exhaustion. Instead, he made himself smile up at her. “Mother, I really would rather not.”
Chapter Ten
She took him back upstairs, back into the temple proper—where he could do less damage, he surmised. “Seoras,” she said at last, when they had managed to shut the big stone door.
Amon nodded. “Seoras.”
“He is the only elf who has ever graced our temple. At least since I have been a priest here, and that’s been long enough to know near every halfdead in the City.” She peered at him. “In fact, I probably knew your parents.”