by John Tristan
“You would have, had you known the dragonhunters.” He huffed a half laugh. “My mother, at the least.”
“Most like I did,” she said. “I was here when this temple was full to bursting each turn of the sky, when the dragonhunters said their prayers to the Great Mother before going out under the poisoned sun. And when they came back to die, I listened to their last words.”
He didn’t rise to her bait. “We were speaking of Seoras, Mother.”
“Yes.” She put her hands on her hips and gazed at the domed stone of the ceiling.
“He has been here.”
“Yes.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“A few days before Dragonfall.”
Amon nodded to himself; this fit with what Una and Hana had told him, at least. “And he was hale when you saw him last, I suppose?”
“No,” she said, stopping him short. “He was troubled.”
“And what could trouble an elf-lord, Mother?”
She looked down now, toward the icon of her goddess. “I do not know,” she said; there was something mournful in her voice. “He did not share his troubles with me. He came here to pray, and to help where he could.”
Amon blinked. “Help? How?”
“The same way humans help: with time and care. And kings, where he thought we needed them.” The corner of her mouth lifted. “The elves are very...arbitrary with gold, you know. It means nothing to them, not even as a way of keeping score. They only dole it out to us as tokens, so we do not squabble in the dirt for every scrap of food. Or worse—share all we have without regard for profit!”
“Very funny, Mother.”
“Really? I don’t think so.”
“So he helped,” Amon prodded. “And he was troubled.”
“And now he is missing? Or...hiding?” She fixed him with her gaze. “Who is paying you to look for him?”
Amon hesitated. “His brother...” he said after a while. “...who loves him.” As far as he could judge such things, at least, it was true.
She sighed. “I do not know where he is. I might have told you, if I did, but I do not.”
“Might have?”
“You seem sincere enough, but...” A grimace passed over her face. “Whatever Seoras’s troubles were, I am fairly certain they involved his family.”
“His brother?”
“Who knows? It may be. This brother of his could be using you as a tool in some elvish family squabble.”
Amon shook his head. “I don’t think so, Mother. He—he does not seem that sort of man.”
There was something in the priest’s eyes that made him avert his, back toward the gleaming icon of the Great Mother in Her golden and bestial glory, with a yellow starburst crowning Her head.
Zoran had once had a small icon of Her, which Amon had sold for medicine when the end was coming fast and Zoran could no longer complain. She had been portrayed as an elf-lord in the mold of Lady Liléan: slender and elegant, with hair shining like a cold star. Amon liked this image of the goddess better, discomfiting as it might be.
The priest came up behind him, looking at the Great Mother over his shoulder. “Did you see Brother Marton—the young dedicant, down in our basement? He conceived quite a liking for Seoras in their short acquaintance. I could even say...an infatuation. I advised him against it, of course. Apart from his vows, it is foolish to trust your heart to an elf. Our souls might be equal before Her gaze, but our hearts do not beat the same rhythm. Our blood does not share the same flow.”
For an eyeblink’s worth of red time Amon wanted to scream at her, or worse. He took a few slow breaths, silencing the wordless hiss of rage at the back of his mind. “Very interesting, Mother.” He turned back to her. “Why are you telling me this?”
Her eyelashes fluttered, almost coyly. “Why indeed, my halfdead brother, do I share both wisdom and gossip with you when I do not even know your name?”
“You could have just asked. It’s Amon Vraja.” He put out his hand, almost in challenge.
She grasped it in her small strong fingers. “And I am Mother Yue.” She withdrew her hand. “You’re the son of Luziana Vraja?”
“You did know her, then.”
“Who did not, this side of the Rim? She never came to me though, if that’s what you mean. She seemed a woman with little time for the divine.”
“Something we have in common, that.”
“Well, never mind. The Great Mother has time enough for you.”
“What about your time, Mother? Will you tell me I’ve had enough of it today?”
“I think you have learned all you can from me concerning your errand.” Her face softened. “But the hour is late and the sky is dark, young Amon. Stay here until it turns, and sleep, and eat.” She motioned to the icon. “Give Her some of Her due time, if you will.”
He cleared his throat; there was a little lump there, hot and insidious. “If you don’t mind a halfdead soiling your blankets.”
“This was the temple of the dragonhunters, child. We loved them when they were heroes. To do any less when they—or their children—are outcast is to spit in the Great Mother’s face.”
* * *
The vaulted ceiling above Amon’s head was dim and faraway. He was tired—tired enough he’d thought he would fall asleep instantly once he’d crawled under the bedding of the stone pallet, still fully dressed; instead, he lay awake, one arm slung under his head.
There was a ghost in him, a flickering dream-image, dark and pale and purple: Seoras or Caedian or both of them, bleeding into each other. The mingled voices of Edina and Una, Hana and Mother Yue, echoed back and forth in his mind, until they seemed like one voice, telling a story he could not quite make sense of.
What his mind returned to, again and again, was what Hana had told him of the men who’d come to take Seoras away—back to the Tree, she’d thought, back to his family.
He rolled onto his side, stayed there a few moments, then rolled onto his back again. Men in white, taking Seoras and sidling away just at the turn of Dragonfall...and no sooner than the black sky had come, Caedian coming down to search for him. Wherever these men had taken Seoras, it had not been home to his brother.
I will see you when I see you, Caedian had told him. He’d pushed all the money he had into Amon’s slack fist, knowing Amon had absolutely no way to get in touch with him. All he could do, once this night in the temple was over, was return to his home and wait.
Or perhaps he could make his way to a constables’ station and demand a carriage ride up to the Tree. He turned onto his side again and shook his head; a lingering disquiet moved through him like blood through his veins, circulating all around him. He tried arguing a bit at first...
A sudden noise, jarring in the quiet of the temple, brought him out of sleep: an urgent knocking at the outer door. He held still, watching a priest light a lantern and carry it up the steps. He could not tell if it was Mother Yue—all the priests looked somewhat alike, with their shaved heads and bent backs. His sharp ears picked up the sound of scraping stone, and low serious voices, but what they were saying remained just barely out of reach, like a book read in a dream.
He was so intent on deciphering the voices that he barely noticed the shadow sidling up beside him. Then, half on instinct, his hand shot out soundlessly and gathered a fistful of fabric in a hard grasp. He pulled the shadow close—saw its wide, scared eyes, the yellow cravat at its throat. It was Brother Marton, the young dedicant he’d last seen feeding porridge to an infant.
“There’s not much time,” Marton said, in a whisper so quiet it almost forced Amon to lip-read.
“What?”
“There’s constables up there, and they’re looking for you.”
“For me? How do you know?”
&
nbsp; “There’s a spyhole in the priests’ quarters, where the voices carry. Mother Yue had me mind it tonight.”
He released his grip on Marton’s robes. “She was expecting trouble.”
Marton nodded; Amon felt more than saw the gesture. “She will have to show the constables we have no halfdead in our dormitory, and soon. You’ll want to leave.”
“How? Is there—”
“Another way out, yes. Follow me.”
Marton scrambled into the dark. Amon rolled out of his bed and followed, creeping as silently as he could between the unsleeping residents of the temple—each of them tracking his progress, eyes gleaming in the anemic light.
Behind him, he could hear footsteps, raised voices, the grinding sound of stone on stone. “Amon Vraja!” An unfamiliar voice called out his name. “By the Lords of the Tree, you are ordered to identify yourself.”
Constables. It had to be. The thought froze him in his tracks. All his instincts told him to obey—all of them except the dark whisper of his poisoned blood, the whisper that Zoran had taught him all his life to stifle. Marton turned back, grimacing, eyes flickering toward a door at the far end of the vaulted dormitory: a small, half-cracked metal exit through which a dim red light shone.
“Amon Vraja!” The same voice again, ringing with command. “If you do not surrender, we have leave to use force.”
There was a small, sharp sound—metal whispering against metal—and a gasp from one of the “sleepers.”
Amon’s heart was beating in his throat. Constables carried rods to chastise lawbreakers; if a Verdancy farmer used his sickle to wound, or cut down a plant not given to harvest, he would be exiled without recourse to mercy. Swords were elvish ornaments or artifacts in dusty collections.
If these constables had edged steel, they were here to kill him. If they unsheathed it without fear, they had been granted leave to.
There were perhaps six paces between him and the half-open door.
The paralysis—the bone-deep urge to obey—broke, and he leaped forward, shouldering Marton out of the way. Something whispered by his ear and clanged on the stone walls. He was almost amused. Swords and crossbows? They must have wanted him dead bad.
Two seconds later he was at the door. He did not bother to open it but simply barreled through, hitting the slab of metal at full tilt. It flew open, screaming on its hinges, and then he was half running, half shuffling down a low-ceilinged tunnel curving away from the temple dormitory.
There was a high twang and then a thick sound like ripping cloth. A bolt had struck home, high in his biceps, and pierced through to the bone. Twang-thuck! Another one hit his lower back, a heavy icicle shaft of pain lancing through him. It passed through muscle and fat and meat and departed, leaving a leaking hole in his gut. Amon grunted in pain, arms flailing, legs moving of their own accord, as if they knew that if he stopped running he’d be dead.
He heard echoing footsteps behind him, trying to match his rhythm. If he looked back, he’d lose his stride. He had to keep running, had to find his way out. Another bolt whizzed past him, far too close. Rage bubbled up like sour bile in his stomach, urging him to turn and fight. Instead, he used it as fuel to keep him running through the pain.
Black blood dripped on the black earth of the tunnel, leaving an invisible trail curling behind him. One, two two, three three three—the rhythm of the counting song became the rhythm of his run, faster and more urgent than the lullaby it should have been, matching the erratic leap of his heartbeat.
There was a red glow ahead, the source of the dim light. He loped toward it, shoulders tucked in—the tunnel was cramped around him, the walls dropping crumbs of earth onto his back. Behind him he could hear his pursuers catching up, their breath hitching, their boots thudding on the bloodstained ground.
The walls opened up into a rough cave of sorts. Above him loomed the source of the glow, shining through a thick ceiling of milky glass: it was the sun, a burning red eye in a sky of ceaseless crimson.
Chapter Eleven
For the span of a few heartbeats he was stunned, even his pain blotted out by wonder and terror. He had never seen the daylight sky before, save in paintings, and none of those had been able to capture the weird, hypnotic color of it: the terrible vividness of the red light, even diluted through the glass.
Then the pain brought him back to himself. He went to his knees. Shuffling, he crept into a patch of shadow and found it the mouth to another tunnel; the glass-roofed cave was the terminus of maybe five such dark mouths.
The footsteps came up close and then halted in a backward shuffle. Three constables—or men dressed like constables—skidded into the cave. Two of them carried crossbows fixed with repeating mechanisms; one brandished a narrow sword. Their faces, lit by the sun, were rictused in fear. Amon drew deeper into his shadowed tunnel. If they saw him, he couldn’t run. Not now. The most he could hope for was a few minutes’ worth of fight. He might take at least one of them down with him.
“Great Mother.” One of them, the youngest by the look of him, locked his eyes to the distant sky. Red light danced over his face, filtered through the thick glass. “The sun...”
“It can’t hurt you. Not through glass.” This said by the eldest, who carried the sword, a dark and compact man with a flash of white at his temples. “Take the left tunnel. I’ll take the right, Iden the middle. We’ll have to flush him out.”
The third—Iden—made a harsh sound in the back of his throat. “Alone? But—”
“Would you like to explain why we let him go unpursued?”
“Sir, some of these tunnels may be in disrepair.” This was the youngest again. “This is old territory. There might be dangers here we can’t foresee.”
The commander made a face—then tilted his head, listening. Amon held his breath and his body dead still. His heart seemed obscenely loud; he thought the commander might hear the blood spurting in black gouts from his wounds.
It wasn’t Amon he heard though. Something was moving in a tunnel on the far right. The commander gestured for silence then pointed down the darkness of the tunnel. They padded away, out of the sun’s glow into the shadows, footsteps tapering off after the distant skitter.
Was it some old dragonhunter machine, clattering back to life at a fortuitous moment? A beast escaped from the Verdancy? Or perhaps a drakeling, a new-hatched dragon who’d found a way to burrow into these ancient tunnels, lying in wait with gleaming eyes and serrated teeth?
Amon’s hand came away from the wound in his side thick with clotting blood. The hole in his flesh itched and pulled—it was starting to close. This was one of the halfdeath’s dubious gifts: it would keep him alive from wounds that might fell another man. Though, in the end, it would kill him nonetheless.
A shadow fell over him, blurring the red sunlight. He raised his head, ready to punch and bite, ready to let the rage take hold, then saw it was Marton.
“There’s not much time,” he said, low-voiced. “That tunnel they ran down is a dead end.”
He extended a hand to Amon. Amon grabbed it and hauled himself to his feet, almost pulling Marton off-balance, and they swayed together for a moment under the crimson light.
“I have to go back to the temple,” Marton said. “If they come back...when they come back...”
“I know.” A shiver went through Amon’s muscles. He bit his tongue against the pain and pull of flesh trying to knit itself back together.
Marton pointed to the far left tunnel. “That goes under the old armory. Follow it until it ends, and you’ll be back in the open air.”
“What is this place?”
Something like a smile passed over Marton’s face. “Older than elves. Go, now!”
Amon leaned against the wall a moment, gathering his breath. “Thank you.”
His smile fell a
way. “Thank me by doing your work. Thank me by finding him.”
“Seoras.” Amon stared down at the dedicant. “What is he to you?”
“Hope.” Marton cocked his head. “You best be quick now.”
Amon nodded. Without a backward glance, he launched himself into the darkness of the tunnel, running at full speed.
The red blur of sunlight faded behind him, and the cavernous stone walls narrowed to a funnel. It forced him to his hands and knees, shuffling into the downward-curving dark. For a moment he wondered if Marton had sent him to his death—down to some fetid pool to drown. It didn’t smell fetid here though, but old and strangely clean: the smell of dust mixed with clear, cold water.
He had stopped bleeding, stopped leaving little dark droplets behind in a curling trail. Now there was only the maddening itch of healing flesh and the first pangs of the hunger he knew would follow. He gritted his teeth and shouldered on through the narrowing tunnel, his own mind narrowed as well, thinking only of the next few feet.
His downward progress stopped, the tunnel leveling off. Its mouth was wider here, but the ceiling was so low that for one breath-stopping moment Amon was sure his oversize skull would be wedged in place. Then he pushed through, and the slope of the tunnel started to curve upward, toward a distant glimmer of bluish-green light.
He crawled toward it, dragging himself along the damp rock of the tunnel. As he inched closer, the source of the light came into sharper relief: thin slits in a metal square, blocking off the mouth of the tunnel. He swallowed hard and went on; the climb was nearly vertical now, and he wedged the toes of his boots into crumbling flaws in the rock to push himself upward.
His hands met smooth, ancient metal. He pushed. There was no give. A surge of anger went through him, like blood rushing through a narrow artery. He felt a moment of monstrous betrayal. There was no logic to it, only a flashing series of images, like painted icons lit by solar fire: Brother Marton crouching over him, Luba’s letter wedged in his doorframe, Liléan’s abstract smile, Caedian’s unexpected kiss.
Then the blood-rush of it was gone. Brother Marton had not sent him here to die—to wait for the constables to hunt him down. Marton might have been young, but the dedicant knew as well as the priest what he was.