by John Tristan
Amon breathed deep, clenched his fists and punched hard against unyielding metal. It bulged. His knuckles bled and stung. He drew back and struck again, the sound like a muffled bell. Whatever ancient bolts held the metal in place gave way, and it flung open against the cobblestones of a Rim alleyway.
He climbed up into the street and flung the metal plate back into place—then stomped on it, hard. Anyone who wanted to open it from the inside and didn’t have a halfdead’s strength would need a crowbar.
Then he breathed and looked up. A whispered laugh escaped him. He was dirty and shaking, but mostly whole.
It was late morning by now; the canopy of the sky seemed disorientingly bright, and everything seemed to be thrown in sharp relief—every passerby, every house was terribly visible.
He would be the same, he knew, a gray blight on the land. If the people hunting for him were anywhere nearby they would have no trouble following him now. He could only hope they were still following a ghost of him deeper below, and try to melt into the labyrinth of the outer Rim as best he could.
He looked around him, getting his bearings. The alleyway led onto a larger road, which was bustling with people. The tunnel had led him a good way from the temple and the armory. Not far enough, but farther than he had feared. Market stalls crowded either edge of the road—it was one of the wider streets, here in the outer Rim—and a throng of men and women, some with children in tow, were going from stall to stall, haggling over household wares.
Amon turned up the collar of his dirty coat and tried to vanish inside of it, though he knew that was a futile effort. He towered over the crowd, a broad brute, and any glances he drew by his sheer size would soon confirm the fact he was halfdead, as well. A bubble of space cleared around him, as it always did, no matter how he tried to shrink himself down.
After making it halfway down the long market street, he had to duck into a narrow alley to catch his breath. His lungs burned; his legs couldn’t carry him much farther. His body had to stop, if only for a few moments.
A bushel of rotting fruit was waiting to be cleared away here; it was currently being picked over by a few fat-bellied flies. Amon watched them with a kind of helpless fascination. It was rare to see insects down in the Rim, no matter how much garbage might pile up in the alleys on market days. Flies and bees were jealously hoarded by the farmers of the Verdancy, and only a few escaped to the edges of the city.
He waved his hand across the fruit; the flies lifted off and dispersed, darting around him like black jewels. He took one of their abandoned spoils—a brown and sagging apple—in his hand, looked at it for a moment, then crammed it into his mouth.
It tasted awful, sweet and mushroomy with rot, with a heady chemical aftertaste, but his throat swallowed it without consulting his tongue. His stomach growled for more—he grabbed a limp pear and tore into it with mindless hunger. Only when his hands were sticky with juices and his stomach groaned against the very possibility of more fruit did he stop.
Afterward he was queasy and overfull, and his tongue was coated with the vile remnants of his rotting meal, but still he somehow felt better. The ache in his arm had quieted to a regular throb, and the cramping in his limbs had eased enough that he thought he could walk again. Perhaps even run.
Carefully, supporting himself against the moist stones of the alley, he rose to his feet. A single fly still remained, and it alighted on the back of his hand. He peered down at it, at its fastidious forelegs and compound eyes gleaming like oily opals. Then it lifted off and flew over the roofs of the alley. Back toward the Verdancy, perhaps, using the pale needle of the Tree as its lodestar.
Amon heaved a long, unsteady breath and leaned his head against the alley wall. As the itch and the hunger waned, the wheels of his mind had started turning again, and to no good place.
The constables had called for him by name. If they had known to look for him in the temple, then his house was no longer safe—too many people knew it to be his. He still had a few of Caedian’s kings secreted in the pockets of his coat, and one old promissory note sewn into the lining, but if he was to put them to use he’d have to decide where to go.
Return to the House of Dust? Luba would turn him over to the constables as quick as breathe. Throw himself on some Verdancy temple’s mercy? No...they saw the elves as the Great Mother’s favored children, with the constables as their Templars, near as good as priests.
There was one place he could go, though, one destination shining in his mind: the guest house where he had stayed with Caedian.
There were at least four or five guest houses and workers’ refuges on the long trek between here and there, but his instincts pulled him toward it nonetheless. There was a reasonless appeal to it—though perhaps not entirely reasonless. If he truly didn’t intend to return to his house or to the House of Dust, then it was the only place where Caedian might be able to find him.
If he can find me though, so could the others... But where else could he go? He could only hope that Caedian would find him first.
He shifted to the mouth of the alleyway and glanced left and right. The market crowds had thinned a little; enough, he hoped, for the empty space that formed around him to go mostly unnoticed, for the hulking figure in the dark coat to pass as a human citizen.
He dragged himself to his feet and wove into the streets of the Rim. The canopy of the sky was dimming softly, from watery green to velvet gray; soon it would turn to night, letting in the starlight of the empty world beyond the City.
Amon stopped for a moment near a bakery to catch his breath; a stomach full of soured fruit rebelled at the smell of fresh bread, and he swallowed down a throat full of sticky bile. All part of the gift, he thought, and grim amusement silently shook his shoulders. To heal, you needed to eat, and while it was healing a halfdead body didn’t care what it was fed. When he was knitting wounds together, even rot and mold could be turned to fuel in the furnace of his guts. He’d pay for it with cramps and nausea, to be sure, but at least he’d stay alive.
He forced down his gorge and kept walking. There was much ground to cover before he made it to the guest house.
If I make it, he thought, and he bared his teeth to the first flickers of starlight. It was a challenge, halfway between a snarl and a grin.
Chapter Twelve
When Amon reached the guest house, the sky was green again. At some point between half-recalled dreams in the shadows of abandoned doorsteps and food snatched and eaten on the move, the long walk from the temple had taken on the aspect of a doomed quest. Still, he kept moving; where else was there to go?
Now he looked up at the windows of the guest house, blinking slowly; doomed or not, he was here at last. A glowfruit was still lit in the wire basket beside the door, though its light was nearly fading—still, it was a sign of welcome, and Amon would take any welcome that he could.
He stumbled into the entry hall. The same woman who had been there when he had come with Caedian was sitting by a fireplant, reading an old scroll. “May I help you...sir?”
“I need—” He took a breath. “I need a room for the night. The day, I mean.”
She put her scroll down on the table and half rose from her chair. From the look on her face Amon knew she was about to refuse him on some thin pretext; before she had the chance, he took out the last of the money Caedian had given him. “I’ll pay in advance.”
She tilted her head. “That’s more than three days’ worth.”
“Then consider it three days’ payment.” He placed the money on the tabletop.
Her hand slid over it, soft and sinuous, and she curled her fingers around it. Then—only then—she nodded. “Let me get you the key.”
The room she put him in wasn’t the same room that he had stayed in with Caedian; he was oddly grateful for that. It was toward the back of the inn, up two flights of stai
rs, a small, cold room with a long, narrow bed. He took off his clothes in a kind of daze, too exhausted to care where they fell.
The bed loomed ahead of him, white and indistinct. He stumbled forward, almost dizzy, and folded up at the knees before falling face-first into bed. The sheets were cool and clean against his skin; now that he was this tired, they felt as welcome as water on a thirsty day, as satisfying as a good meal...
As sweet as a kiss, he thought, and he fell asleep.
When he woke up, he came to the gradual awareness he was moving.
The bed beneath him was gone, replaced by a blanketed bench. A silk pillow lay beneath his head; faint light came in through a window of smoked glass, showing a blur of starlit, swiftly moving landscape. He sat up and almost hit his head against a low ceiling. A moment later, when the fog of sleep cleared, he realized he was in a carriage.
Careful, he told himself. His veins felt as if they were swollen with boiling blood; rage and panic lay roiling beneath a thin, cold skin. Instead of breaking through the metal and old wood of the carriage, he banged his knuckles against the window that separated him from the driver.
It slid open. A thick grille of metal cast crisscrossed shadows over a woman’s face.
Amon took a breath. “What’s going on?”
“My apologies, sir.” The woman bowed her head. “Your presence is required by Lord Caedian.”
“So.” He ran through the counting song, reaching three before he spoke again. “So you stole me out of my bed?”
“Your presence is required immediately. We thought it better not to wake you.”
The window slid shut then, and Amon sat back hard, his heart still pounding. He wondered how they’d managed to put him in the carriage without waking him. He grimaced; half a bottle of blackblossom would have done it, and who knew what stranger infusions the elves brewed in their Tree?
On a whim, he tried the doors of the carriage. They were locked, of course. If he put all his strength into it, he might have been able to kick them open, but where would he go then? Back to the tunnels, to hide out for the rest of his life?
Instead he pressed his face close to the glass of the window, feeling the coolness of the air beyond it. He was too warm in here, in this small moving box. He wanted to get out, to stretch his limbs, but had the awful feeling that if he did manage to open the door he would leap out into nothing but empty air—as if the landscape passing by was painted on a shadowy, moving scroll.
The carriage shuddered to a halt. He heard the low whickering noise of horsephaunts; the woman driving the carriage shushed them gently. Footsteps crunched on gravelly rock, and the door opened.
A white-clad woman stood in front of him. She inclined her head and extended her hand. “Lord Caedian is waiting for you, sir.”
He got out of the carriage without touching her and stretched his neck. The open air had a sudden, surprising rush of light to it, oddly bright for the night. The starlight and the rising moon reflected off the pale smoothness of the Tree, casting a light on the land all around him.
His gaze was pulled helplessly upward to the top of the massive Tree along its great and flawless trunk. He had known the immensity of it—how not, when it was the fulcrum of the sky?—but standing underneath it, the size of it was so undeniable that it almost made him queasy.
“Sir? Are you all right?”
He shook himself and pulled back his shoulders, looking away from the dizzying height of the Tree. “Fine.”
An odd smile played about her mouth. “This way, sir.”
It was giving him a niggling little headache to be continually referred to as sir, as if he was a foreman on a farm or a young elf; there was something patronizing in her flawless politesse. He said nothing to her though—he guessed it would be like talking to a blank wall.
He followed her to the base of the Tree. It was not a massive knot of gnarled roots, as he’d half expected; whatever roots it had were thrust deeper into the ground. This was a great, curved wall of polished wood, so smooth it could almost be made of stone. She led him to a high, arched passage carved—or made to grow—into the Tree, wide and doorless, and bade him enter.
Una’s “paradise” had tried to ape the elvish aesthetic with its living light and greenery, but that had been a dark and cozy garden, redolent of smoke and sleepiness. This was glaring and massive, stabbing his eyes with its brightness. Amon felt dwarfed and almost mocked by its crawling largeness, by so much light growing in one place. A hundred houses or more in the Rim could have been comfortably lit by the vines the elves had strung across their entry hall.
The hallway bent into a kind of circle; the smoothness of the wood was transmuted here into a thick woven net of branches, as if the innards of the Tree were in fact made up not of one great trunk but of a thousand smaller trees cunningly woven together. On the inner wall of this woven circle there were doors—leading, he supposed, into the uncounted levels of the Tree above and below them. Some of them were richly decorated, inlaid with gold, swirls of lapis and shards of obsidian, and some were near as plain as the doors to his own quarters, though made of far better stuff.
The woman stopped before a small, plainer door, with a handle that seemed carved of ancient ivory. Immediately Amon’s heartbeat doubled in speed. The room she let him into was small and windowless; it contained nothing but a network of lightvines woven into a ceiling of thick white branches.
She closed the door behind her. There was a soft, shurring sound and a sense of dislocation. The room was moving—being pulled upward. His fists clenched and unclenched reflexively. Is this day never going to be done making me dizzy?
“Do not be afraid,” she said.
“I’m not afraid,” he said. Then, after a moment: “I feel like throwing up.”
“One gets used to it.”
He bared his teeth. “Does one?”
The room kept on its soft upward motion. It was as if they were being pulled by a great rope, with the same tugging sense. Amon thought that was exactly what it was: some great rope pulling them upward, though not by human hands. It seemed a kind of magnificent waste; the elves had grown a branch or vine so strong that it could lift entire rooms.
The moving room came to a gliding halt, and his stomach had another unpleasant lurch. At least it was empty now; if he’d still been full of his last meal, he wouldn’t have merely felt like throwing up. He took a step forward from the edge of the room, steadying himself.
“These are Lord Caedian’s rooms,” the woman said. “Please, enter.”
He grimaced at her. “Aren’t you coming?”
She shook her head. “I am not permitted within.” Her voice sounded almost mournful now. “He invited only you.”
A hard egg of nerves nestled in his throat. “So, what,” he said, trying for a kind of rough levity, “I’m supposed to just walk in the door?”
“These are Lord Caedian’s rooms, sir, and he invited you.” She spoke as if talking to a child. “You are supposed to walk in the door.”
For a moment he could not quite believe her. He almost thought she was jesting, but her face betrayed no hint of mockery. He took a half step toward the door and extended his hand. It hesitated in the space between him and the ivory doorknob.
She cleared her throat. He narrowed his eyes, then grabbed the doorknob, opened the door and stepped out.
The door whispered closed behind him, almost instantly. He whirled around, but the moving room was gone. Even the door was now gone; a curtain of leaves had closed in front of it with a gentle susurrus, hiding it from view.
He turned away from the wall of leaves. The chambers he found himself in were huge and nearly empty; his house might have fit inside them five times over. Here and there, there was a plant in a dish of stone, or a tall metal pole with blunt hooks on which loose, silken clothing h
ung, but mostly it was plain walls and floors of pale polished wood. The wood itself did not glow in these quarters; gentle light came from bunched glowfruits planted at regular intervals in the ceiling, and a subtle lunar glow colored tall, narrow windows.
Music was playing, somewhere in the distance. He followed the sound; it was a liquid, unfamiliar harmony, played on no instrument he could recognize. He knew he should call out, announce his presence, but interrupting the music felt almost like a sacrilege, more so than any of the blasphemies decried in the temples Zoran had used to take him to.
He moved like a ghost through a series of near-empty rooms, each of them large enough to suit a family. They connected through great hollow archways, some gauzed with white curtains and some empty as toothless mouths, forming a kind of loose labyrinth. One room held a single sofa, on which a white-fringed blanket had been carelessly thrown; another contained a tall glass case filled with books—real, leather-bound books, like wizards would read from in the stories Zoran had once told—and arcane lumps of rock in strange, geometric shapes.
The music seemed closer now, and counterpointed against it there was another sound: an irregular rhythm of metal on metal, the click and clank of knife against knife. Amon found himself holding his breath as he stalked nearer, matching the movements of his steps with the thud of his heartbeat. Shadows moved behind a final silvery curtain; he brushed it aside with the back of his hand and found it silky as cool water.
The music was coming from this room, from the very walls of it: one wall was emanating song, and as it pulsed with the melody it glowed—colors that Amon had never seen before, patterns of liquid blue and violent cherry red. Standing there in the glow of those strange colors, barefoot and stripped to the waist, was Caedian, a thin sword in his left hand. His hair was loose around his shoulders, and sweat trickled down the curve of his back as he lunged against his target: a metal plate fixed between two thin wooden poles carved to resemble tall and limbless trees.