The Sheltered City

by John Tristan

  Gently, he turned the table so its underside faced upward and ran his fingers over the carvings. They were familiar but unreadable, like letters twisted backward and sideways. It was not written in the familiar alphabet Zoran had drilled him in, and certainly not in the sprawling pictograms of the elves, but it looked like words nonetheless.

  “Caedian.”

  The elf turned to him slowly, as if moving through water.

  “Look,” Amon said, gesturing at the carvings. “Does this mean anything to you?”

  Caedian kneeled beside him then and traced his own slender fingers over the crude carvings. They looked fresh, to Amon’s eye, at least in a relative sense; they had not yet been smoothed and worn away by time and the touch of many hands. Caedian looked at them for a long time, and Amon looked at him. Both rage and hopeless blankness drained out of his features, and what was left behind was carved and implacable: A warrior’s face, Amon thought.

  He knew then, with sudden surety, that if he ever truly had to fight Caedian the outcome would be up for grabs. It brought an odd smile to his lips; he’d never met someone before who could beat him, in a fair fight.

  “It’s a message,” he said. “A message from Seoras. It’s in an old script, from before the Tree sprouted.” He stood up and smoothed out the lines of his clothes. A faint smile played over his face. “Seoras always liked ancient history.”

  For a moment Amon wondered what ancient meant to an elf. “What does it say?”

  “It says ‘find me below’.” The smile vanished. “Come on. Your clothes will be clean by now. You’d best change back into them before we go and find him.”

  * * *

  Below meant down into the root system of the Tree: below the earth itself, down where even the Gardeners rarely ventured. According to Caedian, the Tree took care of itself to a great extent. Unlike the lightvines or lamp-trees, the great roots that supported the Last City’s pillar and shelter did not need much tending—they were too old and well entrenched, thick as houses and black with age.

  There were paths, though, tunnels dug with cunning precision between the snaking roots, so that once in a decade a Gardener might descend and check the health of the roots that sucked the City’s life out of the deep and uncorrupted places of the world. That was where Caedian meant to take him—that was where he thought Seoras had called him.

  “Are you sure,” Amon asked him while they made the slow descent in Caedian’s moving room, “that that is what he meant? ‘Below’ isn’t a very precise word.”

  He was thinking of the tunnels at the edge of the Rim, the strange glass gap that showed a stretch of crimson sky.

  “It is in the language Seoras used. In blunt translation, it means something like ‘the place where roots grow’.” Caedian made a half-shouldered shrug. “What else could he have meant?”

  Amon had no answer to that. He went silent, passing his hands over the familiar contours of his jacket. Just as Caedian had promised, his clothes had been waiting for him in the elf’s entry hall, washed and perfumed by silent, invisible hands. It discomfited him a bit, thinking of some white-clad servant fussing over his well-worn Rimdweller’s clothes, but he could not say he wasn’t grateful to be out of the slipsilk robe for this trek below.

  After a few more minutes of silent descent, he cleared his throat. “Are there guards down by the roots?”

  Caedian blinked at him. “Why would there be?”

  He shrugged and grimaced. “How should I know? For all I know, you keep prisoners there.”

  Caedian did not rise to the prickling sarcasm of Amon’s words. “We do not keep prisoners.”

  “No, I suppose not. Anyone who offends an elf is sent to exile, or the chopping block.”

  Now he turned to face him. “What’s the matter with you, Amon?” It was said gently, curiously—without the anger Amon had half hoped to provoke.

  He sighed; a shiver passed through him. “I am sorry,” he said. “I don’t know.” In truth he didn’t know why he wanted to provoke Caedian, to spur the same wildfire of rage that had sparked for a moment in his brother’s quarters. A distraction, perhaps—a distraction from the gnawing feeling of unease that had settled in his gut since Caedian had told him they were going below.

  He was afraid. That was the matter. He wouldn’t tell Caedian that though, not even under torture.

  Caedian sighed. “There are no guards because there is no need to guard it. No one would harm the Tree. No one could, not truly, even if they spent a day down there with ax and sword. It would be like...” He made a graceful gesture upward, toward the unseen sky. “Like setting a guard on the stars.”

  “Zoran—the man who raised me—told me once that the sun was a star,” Amon said. “Perhaps someone should have set a guard on it.”

  “Perhaps,” Caedian said. “But what kind of guard could have stopped the dragons hatching?”

  The room shuddered to a halt. Before Caedian opened the door, he turned toward Amon. Hesitation flickered in his eyes, and for a moment Amon wondered if he’d be dismissed, if Caedian would tell him that he’d changed his mind. That the sacred roots of the Tree were truly meant for elvish eyes alone.

  Instead, he stood on tiptoe and pressed a swift, warm kiss to Amon’s mouth.

  “Why...” Amon swallowed, tasting Caedian on his mouth. “What was that for?”

  “Because I wanted to,” Caedian said, wearing his charming, tilted smile.

  A shiver crawled its slow way down Amon’s spine, and he knew the words for a half truth. Beneath Caedian’s easy charm Amon sensed a trill of fear. Why Amon’s kisses would soothe that fear was beyond his knowledge; all he could do was cherish it while it lasted.

  They stepped out into the lower hallway of the Tree then, onto its curving wood and oddly level floor. As far as Amon could see, they were the only ones walking the halls, bathed in a thousand vines’ worth of extravagant light.

  “How do we get to the roots?”

  Amon’s voice echoed in the great space of the hallway, and Caedian made a quick motion for silence. “There is a way, outside the trunk of the Tree,” he said, in a near-whisper. “Just follow me. We’ll be there soon enough.”

  The sky had turned; the mourning time for Seoras was over now. The canopy shone a distant green. Somehow, standing by the Tree whose leaves made the sky, Amon was aware of the canopy as a thing, as something one could touch, in a way he had never been before, even at the edges of the Rim where the sky nearly reached the ground.

  He knew it was not the sheer fact of the canopy that kept the dragons out of the Last City. As strong as it was, dragon claws could have torn through the leaves, scored gouges in the wood of the Tree. Some other force, some elvish magic, averted their eyes. What would happen if some tear appeared in that canopy—in that magic?

  “Here,” Caedian said, and Amon followed his gaze.

  In the soft, unmoving grass at the foot of the Tree there was a hole. It was simply that: a hole, a dark, toothless mouth in the greenery.

  The crawling unease in his belly grew claws and dug in with a stab of fear that was almost a physical pain. Somewhere in the distance the rage roared in his blood. He clenched his fists. Something was wrong here.

  Caedian did not seem to think so though. He went down into the dark, fearless and untroubled. After a few paces he glanced back. His eyes caught the last gleams of the light in the dim entryway. He said nothing, but Amon could read his expression well enough. Are you a coward? it asked.

  After a heartbeat’s worth of hesitation, he sighed to himself, balled his fists and followed Caedian down.

  Chapter Eighteen

  It was not exactly lightless in the tunnels between the roots; after a while, Amon’s eyes picked up a subtle glow, too dim to come from even the most listless lightvine. It seemed to seep from
the earthen walls, a mossy gleam which made Caedian, three steps ahead in the dark, seem carved from ebony and silver.

  There were no steps leading down—there was no true floor at all, just black earth. The tunnels seemed less something dug by human or elvish hands and more the dwelling place of some fantastic worm, some limbless dragon. They were not as cramped as the stone tunnels of the Rim, but they had not been designed for a man of Amon’s height; he had to slump and shuffle in order not to scrape his head.

  Amon registered a sharp downward slope in the path, a tight curve—and then he saw it. The tunnel here followed the jagged path of a fat, living root, trailing below it so the damp black wood formed its ceiling.

  Caedian reached up and pressed his bare hand to the wood. A pulse of light seemed to run through it, like coldly burning blood through massive veins. There was a feeling like breath on his face, cool and loamy, a breath that almost whispered. Not words, not any he could make out at least, but whispers nonetheless.

  Amon staggered, bracing himself against the wall. “Great Mother. Is that the Tree? Is it speaking?”

  Caedian turned to him. The cold light faded and left his face in shadow. “I don’t know. I’ve never heard this before.”

  He turned away then and moved on, following the curves of the roots. Every now and then the mossy dark lit up with one of those cold-fire bursts of light like soundless storms, and Amon felt the crawling sense of whispers all around him—whispers that did not seem unfriendly as much as inhuman.

  “Caedian.”

  It came from nowhere, soft as a thought. Amon froze. He grabbed for Caedian’s wrist, held it in an iron grip. The elf twisted his arm, grimace lit by bluish light. “What—”

  “Did you hear that?”

  Silence. The breathing of wood. Then, whispers.

  “Cae. Diannn...”

  He heard. His tilted eyes went wide. He slipped Amon’s grip with a graceful, forceless twist and started running.

  Amon cursed loud enough to echo, and followed in a loping, awkward half run down the too-cramped tunnels. The roots loomed over him like carved dragons, flashing eyespots of cold color. Caedian’s footsteps seemed to be slipping farther and farther away, muffled by the damp earth.

  Then they stopped. The whispers stopped. Amon could hear nothing except the rush of his own heartbeat in his ears.

  Amon found Caedian standing in a dark hollow beneath a great bulge of a root, his hand on a strange knot in the rough wood. The roots flashed and skittered with light all around him, so it seemed he stood in the middle of a surge of lightning. Tears streamed down his face, glittering in the stormy light. His lips were moving, but Amon could not hear a sound.

  “Caedian—” He stumbled forward. Caedian withdrew his hand from the dark knot of wood and Amon saw it was a face.

  It had to be a carving—a ceremonial carving, some effigy of the Great Mother, written into the wood that gave them all life. But it wasn’t a carving; it was male, and it was known to him.

  Caedian’s face—no. Seoras’s face.

  Amon gasped a breath. The blood-deep unease that had ridden in his guts for the past hour roiled within him, and he vomited thin streaks of bile onto the dark earth.

  “Caedian.” The distant whispers had a voice now, a creaking, high-pitched voice without any breath. “You found me you followed me you found me you followed meeeee...”

  “Great Mother...” Caedian’s voice was broken, tears spilling around the edges of his words. “Seoras? What have they done to you?”

  The wooden face creaked into a kind of smile. “My life serves. My life becomes life becomes life becomes life—”

  The words turned from those Amon knew to elvish, then trailed into a language that he did not even recognize—a twisted tongue, mellifluous and not sane. Seoras’s eyes rolled, showing green striations of root where there had once been veins.

  Caedian’s hands were on either side of the wooden face, scrabbling at the bark. “We have to get him out. Amon, help me! We have to get him out!”

  “I—I don’t think we c-can—” The words came out clumsy and stuttering.

  “Please, Amon, help, give me a knife or—”

  “Oh, Caedian.”

  Both of them turned toward the new voice. It was Liléan. She stood, wearing black, the lightstaff she carried muted into cold gray. Her eyes were wet and shining. On either side of her stood men in white; Amon knew them. He recognized the flash of white at the temples of one, the narrow face of another. They were the “constables” who had chased him into the tunnels under the temple, and they were armed.

  Without thinking he stood in front of Caedian, a protective arm slung over his chest. The elf turned toward his mother, blinking slowly, like a man stuck in some terrible loop of a dream.

  “Mother,” he said, and then he lapsed into elvish. He asked her a question, his hands outstretched.

  She answered him in their shared tongue. “Yes, my heart. I knew.”

  “What is this?”

  “Something you were...” She paused. “Too young, to be told about. In time, you will—”

  “No, Mother. You will tell me now.”

  The steel in his voice startled her, and she drew back as if stung. The men at her sides remained immobile, statues waiting for her word to be brought to life. Her eyes flickered toward Amon, still blocking the path to her son, then back at Caedian. “The Tree can draw only so much life from the soil, my heart. This earth is old and parched, and it takes much to keep the City living. Now and then, it must be...fed.”

  “With my brother?”

  “With our lives.” She took a half step forward. Amon felt the muscles in his arms go tense as drawn ropes. “Your brother was chosen for a great honor.”

  “Chosen? By who? By you?”

  She winced, but recovered quickly. “Caedian...” She glanced toward Amon then, and spoke a word or two in elvish.

  “Then it is good he is not human!” He pushed Amon’s arm aside and took a step forward, as if he stood to protect Amon now. “We made the halfdead, didn’t we? They are as much elvish work as human flesh. So tell him—tell me!—what other wonders we have made here?”

  “Caedian, this is not the place.”

  “Tell me! Did he volunteer for this, Mother? For this...honor?”

  “No,” she said, and her voice was suddenly cold. “No, he tried to hide from it, like some human frightened of death. To tell the truth, I expected more from him—I expected more from both of my sons.”

  Caedian’s breathing was ragged. “Will you put me in the Tree as well, then? Put some other corpse in my place to hang on its branches, while its roots suck out my life?”

  She shook her head. “You should not have had to find out this way. But we all know it, Caedian, and while we all regret the sacrifice, you must know that it is necessary.” She took another step forward, looking past him now to where Seoras’s wooden face stared down at them, unseeing, babbling softly in a polyglot tongue. “The Tree lasted many years on what it drew from the soil, but it is not enough. Not if we want to stay safe! When it is needed, someone must give their life so that thousands may go on living. Or do you forget what is outside the shelter of the Tree?”

  “No, Mother.” He sagged; his voice sounded soft, defeated. “I do not forget.”

  “Good.” She swept toward him, the light of her staff casting shadows on his face. “Come now, and we will talk more. It is time that you know your own heritage, the heritage of the elves that grew this City and keep it safe from harm.”

  “And you’ll tell me everything, will you, Mother?” He stepped forward, haltingly, into the circle of her light.

  She nodded, half smiling. “I’ll tell you.”

  Amon remained unmoving, his eyes flickering from Caedian to Liléan to the const
able-servants keeping silent watch behind them. For a moment he was sure that Caedian would step into his mother’s arms—he might have, had he ever been granted such a chance.

  Caedian took another step. Then he stopped—looked backward over his shoulder.

  “And what of Amon?”

  Liléan tilted her head and blinked. She spoke an elvish phrase, easy and dismissive.

  Caedian was still for a moment, his hands clenching. Then he nodded, very slowly, and moved toward her. Something cold settled under Amon’s breastbone.

  Then Caedian moved with sudden, blurred quickness. He sidestepped his mother’s arms and lashed out toward one of her attendants, swiping up with his elbow to catch the man under the chin. Almost in midmotion he looked back over his shoulders, and his eyes caught Amon’s.

  “Run,” he said.

  Amon ran. He did not need to know the elvish tongue to know that it had been his death that Liléan had so easily mooted. After all, what else could she intend for him?

  Everything sped up around him then, with Amon as the still point. The beat of his blood seemed calm, as if he could measure the seconds with it. When he moved, it seemed a normal pace; it was everyone else who was slowed down to treacle. Later he would know this for an illusion, but caught up in the tide of it the belief was irresistible.

  Liléan brought up her lightstaff, swinging it with no small force. It was meant to hit him on the side of the head, where it would have shattered teeth, maybe even the bones of his jaw. Instead he caught it in his hand, and heard the crunch of wood. The light winked out; only the lightning-shadows of the great roots remained. Still, he could see everything as clear as if he was in bright starlight. With his other hand he made a fist and caught Liléan under the chin in a hard uppercut. Her eyes went horribly wide, and then the strength went out of her. She did not fall as much as crumble, like a statue with the foundations cut away.

  The other constable, the man with the silver-touched hair, let out a yell—the only sign of life he’d shown so far—and took a step forward. He did not see Caedian come up behind him, his hands linked together, and bring them down like a club on the back of his head. He fell on top of Liléan and was still.