The Sheltered City

by John Tristan

  “Don’t,” Caedian said, in a kind of gulping sob. “Don’t kill me like that, not like that.”

  “It’s not meant for you.” He went to his purpose with methodical brutality—using the knife to hack at the hollow reeds that grew in the shadow of the rock slab, laying them out side by side, finding the longest and sturdiest among them. When a clump of them refused to budge, he thrust his fingers into the dry soil and dug for the roots, yanking them free of the ground with a hard grunt.

  There was a soft, rapid sound coming from behind him, and he turned—turned to see Caedian running away. He was stumbling as he did, his graceful limbs gone heavy and dragging, and every few steps he had to catch his breath in quick gasps.

  A bitter smile pulled at the corners of Amon’s mouth. He must have looked as if he’d gone mad, grunting and pulling at weeds with Caedian’s knife.

  He caught up with Caedian easily and reached out to grab his wrist. Caedian stumbled and slipped, legs newborn-clumsy beneath him—if Amon had not held on to him, he would have fallen. When he looked up at Amon, his eyes were wide with fear.

  Amon’s heart lurched; Caedian must have thought he was beyond words, beyond reason, that he had finally turned into the monster he had looked like all along.

  “Stop,” Amon said. It was the only word he could get out. “Stop.”

  Caedian went still. Amon released his wrist and looked at him—only looked. His hands were trembling, his eyes bloodshot, and the rhythm of his breath had taken on an awful wheeze. Amon gauged that he could last another few hours, perhaps—no more than that. If he hadn’t run, hadn’t strained himself...

  “If you’re going to kill me,” Caedian said, his voice near as hoarse as Amon’s, “by the Great Mother’s sake be quick.”

  “I’m not going to kill you. Not ever. Sit down.”

  Caedian lifted his chin, still sharp, still proud. “Are you giving me commands now?”

  He shook his head. “Advice.”

  Caedian followed the advice, perching on the edge of the black rock, watching Amon sort through the hollow reeds and sharpen the edges of some with his clever little knife. He said nothing, slowly catching his breath.

  “If I was going to kill you,” Amon said after a while, his voice strangled, “I would have done it quick and clean.”

  “I know,” Caedian said softly. It almost sounded like gratitude.

  “I want you to live.”

  He laughed a little. “But that isn’t possible, is it?”

  Amon looked down at his hands. Here it is, he thought—he had to lay out his impossible plan. “The halfdeath helps me survive out here, and halfdeath is in the blood,” he said. “It isn’t a plague—you wouldn’t catch it from a drop—but it’s in the blood nonetheless. And when it was called the gift, they gave it to the dragonhunters by taking out their blood and then putting it back in changed.”

  “No,” Caedian said, slowly shaking his head. “Oh, no. You can’t be thinking—”

  “I can. I can give you my blood, Caedian. You’ll be halfdead, like me...but you’ll have a chance to live.”

  The elf was shaking his head from side to side rapidly now. “You are completely mad. This is only a more elaborate way to kill me!”

  “If it is,” Amon whispered, “then you’ll have your wish, won’t you?”

  Caedian was silent for a moment, then stood up. “No. Fuck you, Amon Vraja. You aren’t doing this to me. You aren’t using my last hours on this world for this—this travesty.”

  “So you’d prefer to die?” He held Caedian’s wild eyes with his own level stare. “You’d prefer to die than take a chance on my blood, is that it?”

  “It isn’t a chance,” he shrilled. “You idiot, don’t you get it? It isn’t a chance, just the world’s most perverse double suicide! You’ll give me your blood, is that it? You bleed out into me, and if I don’t die instantly from getting your halfdead blood pumped in my veins I’ll die of infection, or...Great Mother knows what, or at the best die anyway when my heart and lungs give out. At least give me a clean death instead of filling me with poison.”

  The rage roiling quiet in Amon’s blood suddenly shrieked in his ears, and he stood up, taking Caedian by the throat. The elf closed his eyes and smiled, bleak and triumphant, and let himself go limp in Amon’s grip.

  Amon released him at once, as if he’d been burned by the touch of Caedian’s skin; the elf slithered to his knees. Amon looked down at his trembling hands with numb shame. “I’m sorry,” he said, his throat raw. “I can’t lose you. Not now.”

  Caedian’s breathing came slow and ragged. “It’s better to die here than in there, Amon. You saved me as best you could.” He looked up, eyes swimming. “From worse things than dying.”

  “I can’t lose you,” he repeated, slow and stubborn, but Caedian wasn’t listening anymore. His eyes rolled back, and he hit the hard ground of the dragonlands in slack unconsciousness.

  Amon went to the ground, cradling the elf in his arms. “Caedian?” He shook him softly, and Caedian lolled from side to side, a limp doll. Amon moaned, a sound of pain, and bent down to Caedian’s half-open mouth. There was the rhythm of breath still, and a heartbeat, but both were frighteningly faint.

  Caedian might have been right—his plan might kill them both—but doing nothing would kill Caedian for sure. If he let that happen, he might as well walk back to the City and throw himself on Lady Liléan’s cold mercy.

  Travesty or not, this was at least a chance.

  * * *

  He had laid Caedian out on the rock slab, arms and legs splayed out like a ragged cross, and stripped the shirt from him so he was naked from the waist up. His hair fell loose down to the middle of his chest, and his face had softened into the mask of sleep; he looked almost peaceful.

  He sat down on the slab beside Caedian, his makeshift needle in hand, and stared at the needle’s sharpened point for too long a while. He had cleaned it as best he could with the supplies they had, wiping it with old water and clean cloth, but he was no doctor. If this went wrong, it would go wrong in every way; he had to trust to his halfdead blood’s power to heal as well as its power to corrupt.

  With a torn piece of fabric he tied a tourniquet around his arm, tensing and releasing his fist until his black veins stood out like ropes. Then he plunged the wooden needle into the fattest vein, sliding deep inches of it into the meat of his arm. There was not as much pain as he had expected.

  Blood immediately gouted out the other end, deeper black splatters slicking the black rock. He leaned close over Caedian, as if he was about to kiss him, and with awkward fingers found the bulge of his vein at the juncture of his elbow. He shifted, grunted and drove the other point of the hollow reed deep into his arm. When Amon pressed it home, Caedian stirred, just a little, and a troubled expression crossed over his face...but he did not wake, at least.

  He remained there for what felt like hours, looming over Caedian in a mockery of an embrace, the pulse at the juncture of his arm a dim star of pain. When he could stand it no longer—when he was shaky and sickly and hollowed out with strain—he drew backward, sliding the wooden needle out with him. He yanked it from his arm and pressed down on the wound; the trickle of blood between his fingers was alarmingly sluggish.

  He got down on his side, lying beside Caedian. In the arm he had fed his blood into, Caedian’s veins had darkened from elbow to wrist, and they stood out in sharp relief on his long, elegant hands. Amon found that tears were trickling down his face, as hot as his blood had felt between his pressing fingers.

  When he next glanced over Caedian’s face, he saw the elf was awake. His eyes were open, though one was near swelled shut, and he was staring at Amon with a kind of quiet accusation all the more piercing for its calm silence.

  Amon turned away. “I’m sorry,” he said, speaking to
ward the horizon.

  “I bet you are.” The soft sarcasm in Caedian’s voice was like a slap.

  “I—I couldn’t think of anything else to do.”

  “Maybe you should have done nothing.” Caedian propped himself up on his elbows, wincing. “Did you ever think of that?”

  “Yes.” He still could not meet Caedian’s eyes. “But I couldn’t.”

  “Promise me one thing, Amon?”

  “Anything,” he whispered.

  “If this doesn’t work, if I start to suffer...end it for me.”

  Amon looked back toward him. “What if there’s some pain at first? What if the pain is needed for you to live?”

  Caedian laughed hollowly. “Damn you. You’re never going to let me die, are you?”

  “Not if I have a choice.”

  The clouds had thinned above them. Amon knew then hours truly had passed; night was falling. Soon the sky was a big black vault dotted with bone-pale light. It was the same night that had showed through the canopied sky of the City for Amon’s entire life, but somehow it seemed different, clearer and darker all at once.

  A sudden spasm seized Caedian. His every muscle tensed and trembled; he arched his back and barked odd, wordless cries into the air. Amon was at his side in an instant, hands on his shoulders; he thrust his fingers into Caedian’s mouth to make sure he wasn’t biting down on his tongue. His purple eyes, bloodshot and bleary, stared up unseeing into Amon’s face. A spiderweb of thin, broken veins showed across his cheekbones, like the map of a strange country.

  Amon swore under his breath. What could he do—put more of his blood into him? Try to stop the shaking? Instead he simply bowed low and laid his forehead against Caedian’s. The elf had gone still, his eyes blank and staring.

  This is the most foolish thing that I have ever done, he thought. What he knew about the strange mechanics of halfdead blood could be written on the back of his hand—and he’d thought he could somehow use it to save Caedian? By pumping it into his veins with nothing more than a wooden needle?

  Folly, nothing but folly...but what else could he have done? They had left the City behind them, and there was nowhere else with untainted air. If he had killed Caedian, at least he had done it trying to give him a chance, even if it was slim as a knife’s edge.

  “What will you do?”

  Caedian’s croak shocked him out of his reverie. He drew back from the clumsy embrace he had pressed upon him in his shivering fit.

  “What will you do,” Caedian repeated, “when I die?”

  “The same thing I plan to do when you recover,” Amon said. “Go south—toward the mountains.”

  “Well.” He managed a dry laugh. “Good luck, then.” He rolled on his side, another shudder passing through him, and hung his head off the edge of the rock slab. Amon could hear the sound of retching; a thin, sour smell rose into the air.

  Go south, he’d said. Amon sighed. After that, I don’t know. In every direction there was hostility and emptiness; still, there had to be a better place than this flat, scorched plain. If they were to find food, water, shelter, then it would have to be the mountains or the shore—and the sea was too strange and dangerous for Amon to contemplate, a bath for dragons matted with mutant weeds. The mountains at least had a bare familiarity; Zoran had told him there were ruins there, old places where men used to live before the dragons came...

  Of course, all those considerations would be moot if they didn’t manage to live past the next few hours.

  Amon’s stomach gave a sudden cramp. He put his hand on his belly and bent double for a moment, cradling his aching gut. His arms were trembling. The small dark wound where he had plunged the needle in throbbed, itching and aching and trying to close itself up. He’d save the food for Caedian, though; let his body consume itself for now. What they had would have to last until they could find more.

  He lay down on the rock beside Caedian. If food wasn’t in the offing, then sleep would have to do. Caedian was curled away from him, a shudder racking through him now and then like a soft earthquake, but soon even that faded away, and Amon felt himself slipping down into a welcoming abyss.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  He woke with the sun low in the sky and with a sudden horrid start realized that he had slept through the entire day. He sat up and saw the space on the rock beside him was empty.

  “Caedian?” The name echoed in the emptiness, hoarse and shrill. Amon struggled to his feet, jumping onto the dead, dry ground. “Caedian?” he called out again—but the elf was nowhere to be seen.

  Amon looked around, wild and shaky. A massive headache pounded at his temples and he was still swaying on his feet, but he was alive, and breathing, and thinking. There’s that much to be thankful for, at least.

  The hollow of his elbow where the needle had been had scabbed over, already half a scar. It was slower than it should have been, but his halfdead blood was still healing him. He hoped it had done the same to Caedian—but he would have to find him before he could know.

  “Caedian!” he shouted again, but there was no response.

  Amon rolled his shoulders and ran a hand through his hair. For a moment he felt frozen, almost paralyzed by the immensity of the landscape around him. He looked toward the setting sun. Shadows moved across it, blurred and sinister; a shudder went through him. He started walking toward those shadows—toward the western horizon, which the setting sun was staining red.

  Why he headed in that direction he could not say, only that he was following some internal instinct...or perhaps some subtle scent that Caedian’s passage had left behind. He took a canteen half-full of water; the other supplies he left behind on their hard bed.

  Every now and then the uniformity of the landscape was interrupted by a jagged rock or some kind of stunted tree. There was life here, even here in the most desolate part of the dragonlands; things were growing beneath his feet, and he could see scurrying creatures hide from the fall of his shadow on their dens.

  He wondered if he could catch one of them, could set a snare—he wondered if he could even digest their tough wasteland flesh. He would bet that he could; whether Caedian could, he wasn’t sure.

  Caedian. He imagined the elf splayed out somewhere, facedown on the hard ground, a trickle of Amon’s blighted blood hemorrhaging from his ears and nose. For a moment the image was so intense as to be almost hallucinatory, and a dry retch spasmed Amon’s stomach. I’ve killed him, he thought, Great Mother damn me, I’ve gone and I’ve killed him.

  But there was no corpse splayed in front of him—not that he had found yet, in any case. So he made his way westward through the waste, calling out for Caedian as he went.

  Darkness came stunningly quick. One moment the entire horizon was wrapped in a rusty glow, and the next the sky was the deep blue-black of night. The moon hadn’t quite risen yet, but the stars were very bright, and Amon’s eyes were still sharp enough to keep on searching.

  He came to a kind of border, then. The wasted desert had begun to shade into short, scruffy grass. He squatted down on it and felt it beneath his palm; the blades were oddly thick and woody, but other than that it seemed much like the grass that he had seen growing near Caedian’s hideaway in the Verdancy. Life, he thought.

  He glanced up—as if in response to his silent hope, he saw a familiar shape, a living shape. He was almost sure of it. He scrambled to his feet and took a few long clumsy steps across the scraggly grass, toward the place where a dark shape lay curled into itself on the verge between wasteland and tundra.

  He kneeled down beside the curled-up form and reached out with a trembling hand. He frowned and willed the hand to still, laying it on a sharp hillock of shoulder. A rush of relief went through him when he found the shoulder warm under his touch...though the relief quickly trickled away to be replaced with unease at the sheer, fev
erish heat of the elf’s skin. When Amon spoke, he kept his voice very soft. “Caedian?”

  With a low, bestial groan, the elf turned back toward Amon, and Amon felt the breath catch in his throat. Caedian was still alive, still breathing, but a terrible transformation had been worked upon his flesh.

  The soft corona of his hair had turned lusterless and brittle, falling out in patches and leaving him with a motley, piebald head. All living color in his skin had leeched away, and he seemed as gray as rock, with black spidery veins reaching tiny fingers across his neck and up toward his cheekbones. Half of his fingernails had fallen out, leaving his fingertips raw and scabbed; his mouth was cracked and dry, his tongue gray-scaly and protruding. His sclera had gone black, like Amon’s own. Against their depths his irises—strangely unchanged—seemed to be chips of purple glass.

  “Caedian,” Amon said again, in a low whisper. “Can you hear me?”

  “Go away,” he croaked in a dry, horrible voice. That corpsy whisper kindled more hope despite itself—there was life in him, and there was his mind, still ticking away behind newly blackened eyes. “I crawled away from you to die. Leave me...leave me that dignity at least, you bastard.”

  “I’m sorry,” Amon said wretchedly, and he reached toward Caedian again.

  Caedian tried to wrench away from Amon’s touch, but Amon ignored him. He scooped him up into the cradle of his arms—he was surprisingly heavy, for all the wiry compactness of his form—and carried him back toward their bed of rock.

  He laid him back down and poured careful sips of water into his mouth; despite Caedian’s insistence Amon leave him to die, he drank them down eagerly enough.

  “You’re breathing easier,” Amon said. He had barely noticed it before, but now it couldn’t be denied—the thin and wheezy quality had gone out of Caedian’s breaths, despite the hoarseness of his voice.