The Sheltered City

by John Tristan

  Caedian ignored him and kept slurping at the bottle until Amon drew it away, then laid his head down on the rock with a heavy thud.

  “You should eat something.” Amon dug in the pack for their last bits of food. The bread was stale, near as hard as rock. He tore off a piece and put it to Caedian’s lips.

  “Stop!” He lashed out, hitting the bread out of Amon’s hand. “Stop it, for the Great Mother’s sake. I’m not...” He drew a heaving breath and coughed, hard, curling up into himself like a dead leaf for a moment. “I’m not an infant,” he said after a while.

  “You’re...” Hurt, he wanted to say, but that was the wrong word for it. There was no wound or bruise—nothing save the needle mark at the crook of his elbow. That—and the flesh in a palm-sized patch around it—had gone the crinkling, shiny black of tar.

  “You’re, you’re,” Caedian mimicked, his voice savagely mocking, and a stab of mingled pain and anger passed through Amon like a crossbow bolt. Its passing left a hollow place, an itching wound in his heart.

  “You’re not yourself,” he said.

  “And who’s to blame for that?”

  Amon clenched and unclenched his fists. One, two two... “Who’s the one who walked into the dragonlands, Caedian?”

  “You didn’t have to follow me, did you?”

  He grabbed the elf by the shoulders and dragged him upright, so he could look at him eye to eye. He felt his lips roll back from his teeth in a snarl, felt his fingers dig bruisingly hard into Caedian’s unresisting flesh. For the moment he did not care. He wanted to hurt him, to hold him, to press teeth to his mouth until he tasted blood.

  “Do you think I had anywhere to go? Do you think there was any place I could hide from the mess that you put me in?” He shook him, hard enough that his head snapped back and forth; a red-and-black haze was creeping in at the edges of his vision. His voice came out in a clipped growl. “And did you really think—you with all your fucking elvish wisdom—that I was capable of just leaving you to die?”

  Caedian head-butted him. The force of forehead colliding with forehead left Amon swaying like a tree about to be felled, and the elf took his advantage. He leaped on top of him, graceless and screaming, and pinned Amon to the rock. Amon heaved, trying to dislodge him; they tumbled together, rolling and wrestling, and fell from the edge of the rock onto the dry, hard ground.

  The clouds had covered the sky now, blotting out the stars, and the world was matte black as the mourning the Last City’s canopy wore when an elf died. Amon had gotten the upper hand for a moment, holding Caedian’s legs, but the elf wriggled snake-hipped and quick from his grasp and launched himself back at Amon with a tremendous uppercut punch.

  Amon fell backward. Caedian was on top of him again, punching and scratching and scrabbling with clawlike fingers as if he wanted to tear Amon apart limb by limb. Finally, with legs astride Amon’s broad chest, he closed his hands around his throat and squeezed.

  Amon’s rage was fading now, even under the assault. It was almost funny; a lifetime of restraint had left its mark. Your work, Zoran, he thought, seeing for a moment in his mind’s eye the old dragonhunter’s smile. Still, Caedian kept screaming, kept squeezing, black tears of blood leaking from his newly changed eyes. Whether it was halfdead rage coursing through him or just his unleashed elvish strength, Amon did not know. All he knew, somewhere in the back of his mind, was that it would be over soon. The bones of his throat would snap, the last breath would wheeze from his lungs, and it would be over.

  He went limp. The world was fading. Caedian’s eyes, purple on black, looked down on him from a great height. Then the pressure on his throat was gone. Caedian threw his head back and howled out a sound of distilled anguish. The world swam back to Amon in slow waves; he lay motionless beneath Caedian, catching his breath.

  “No,” Caedian said, shaking his head back and forth. “No. You don’t get to go that easily.” He leaned forward then, and for a moment Amon thought he was going to kiss him. Instead he pressed his forehead to Amon’s chest and stained his torn clothes with black tears.

  After a while, it began to rain.

  Caedian looked up at the sky, blinking. His cracked mouth worked with slack amazement. Hadn’t they told him about rain? Amon wondered. It was one of the wonders of the dragonlands, a cherished bit of dragonhunter folklore, along with the blighted western ocean and the cave-pocked mountains of the south.

  The rain was icy cold, falling in thick drops, and tasted like brine on Amon’s tongue. It soaked them both in moments. Caedian was still astride his chest, head leaned back, mouth open to drink in every drop of cold water. It would poison him, that rain, if he drank too much—or at least it would have, before he changed. Before Amon made him into whatever he was becoming now.

  Slowly the torrent slowed to a trickle. The clouds thinned just enough that the bone glow of the moon could be seen hiding behind them. Caedian climbed off of Amon’s chest and sat, cross-legged, on the muddied ground.

  “You don’t get to die,” he said again, in his new, hoarse voice, without meeting Amon’s eyes. “I don’t have—I can’t—you’re all I have!”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  They saw their first dragon two days after starting their journey toward the mountains.

  The dry and rock-studded wasteland was slowly sprouting more and more of the life Amon had spotted, empty ground turning to grassland, and then—a twisted wonder—to something like a forest.

  This was not the green and careful land of the Verdancy though; the leaves were the color of bleached bone, the trunks of the trees pockmarked and knobbed with odd growths. Still, it was life of a sort, in a world he had always assumed was dead. More life yet scurried in the undergrowth and peered out with beady eyes from the crabbed branches, and Amon knew he would soon be hunting some of those scurrying, dark-eyed creatures.

  For now though, he only wanted to think about going forward, driving them farther toward the distant mountains. That relentless forward motion was the only thing that seemed to keep Caedian from simply stopping, like a wound-down toy.

  As long as Amon kept walking, Caedian kept pace with him, moving like a jerky puppet. He had lost his effortless elvish grace and seemed not quite in control of his own limbs, stumbling over every outstretched root and clump of stones, like a child learning to walk. He made no sound when he fell though, no murmur of complaint. If he was in pain, he did not deign to show it to Amon. When they stopped to rest, or for Amon to try to gain his bearings, Caedian would collapse in a loose-limbed heap, chin resting against his chest. Every time, it made Amon’s heart crowd his throat and pound out a symphony of fear. Every time, he thought that Caedian was dying.

  He certainly looked as if he was dying; his face was the grim and half-mad mask of a man in the last days of a long and painful illness. His hair had all fallen out now; along with the hollowed contours of his face it gave him the cast of a corpse. His lips were cracked and scabbed, and brackish blood wept near-continually from the corners of his eyes. He had not spoken a word for days; though he took small bits of food and water from Amon when he proffered them, he would not ask for them, or could not.

  They were making their way through a patch of mud-streaked undergrowth when Caedian stopped in his tracks. Amon sensed it rather than heard it; when he turned around, the elf was standing stock-still, sinking slowly into the slick ground—looking up at the sky.

  “Caedian—” Amon started.

  He hissed for silence, holding up a hand. It was the first real sign of life he had seen in Caedian for days, and joy flooded over him like sweet water, but Caedian seemed in no mood to indulge it. His black-and-purple eyes were fixed on the sky above the tangled canopy of trees; he didn’t seem to care he was already calf-deep in the mud.

  Then Amon heard it: a sound like a blast furnace, like ripping steel, echoing far ab
ove them in the red vault of the sky. His mouth went dry and his balls crawled up between his legs. A huge shadow passed over them and was gone, so fast it seemed like the blink of a great eye.

  “That’s—” Caedian started, and now Amon was the one to quiet him with a swift, sharp gesture. The shadow was still there, far overheard, circling and screeching.

  Caedian took several struggling steps forward, out of the sucking mud and onto dry ground. His eyes were scanning the sky, flickering back and forth like flames. Despite the sick, sunken look of him there was a kind of awful beauty in his expression, his eyebrows tilted, his lips half-parted as though he was waiting for a lover’s kiss. “Dragon,” he whispered.

  Amon nodded and put a finger to his lips. The dragon was far enough from them it would not hear their breath or heartbeat—or so Amon hoped, in any case—but even a whisper might catch its attention.

  High up in the red sky the dragon-shadow loosed a red gout of flame. It was a purposeless flare, burning nothing but empty air. Caedian drew in a breath; Amon suddenly knew the beatific expression he wore as wonder.

  “They are creatures of pure destruction,” the elf said, in a low monotone. “They burn not because they have to, but because they find it pleasing.”

  He laughed, a mad and silvery sound that made Amon’s stomach flip inside him. He took Caedian by the shoulder and pressed a palm to his mouth. “It will hear us,” he whispered. “It’ll hear you.”

  Caedian’s gaze flickered downward to meet Amon’s eyes. He took a step back, away from his touch. “Your kind used to hunt them,” he said.

  It sounded like an accusation—of cowardice, perhaps? Amon didn’t know. He only shook his head. “Not the elder dragons.”

  How could they; how could anything? Even the newborns, the drakelings, were said to be more than a man’s size, and dragons never stopped growing. There were whispers, edging on the blasphemous, that the red sun itself was a dragon of incalculable age—that it had long ago eaten the golden star that had been their sun before.

  They stood in the shifting light, watching the sky for a long time. Now and then the sky-blurring shadow passed over them; now and then it let out a gout of flame so vast Amon thought he could feel the heat where they stood. Then, with a final, rending screech, it wheeled ever upward, dwindling to a dark pinpoint and vanishing. Going home, Amon thought.

  Caedian let out a shivering breath. “We should have screamed for it to come,” he said, in the same weird, wondering monotone. “We should have burned in its fire. Can you think of a cleaner death?”

  Amon stepped back from him, turning away. His big hands were shaking; he clenched them into fists. “We should keep moving,” he said, and he started walking again, out of the mud-clogged swamp.

  “Keep moving,” Caedian echoed, and he followed him. He said nothing more until they reached the mountains.

  * * *

  Dragons fought above the storm clouds as they climbed, near unseen save for their dueling flames. Now and then though, a flash like lightning outlined their great, slow-moving shadows—slow-moving only because of their impossible size—and Amon thought he saw a claw or wing. In their conflict, or perhaps their mating, their bodies clashed and ground out metallic thunder, echoing off the mountains beneath them.

  Amon had come to the conclusion they simply did not care about the small living things scurrying miles below their ponderous dance. Perhaps they were too old to bother; perhaps they had grown bored with carnage after leveling their fourth or fifth city long centuries ago. Either way, he supposed, two specks barely the size of a single claw would not have made much sport for them. If their great-grandspawn made an appearance, it might have been a different matter.

  He looked away from the spectacle, up toward their destination: a high point between two dead trees from which they could look down into the next valley. They had traced what seemed like a hundred winding, rocky trails already, between crevices and down into dim, lifeless valleys. So far they had found nothing but gray rock and dry grass, growing over the ancient paths...if they were in fact paths, and not false trails carved through the wild by wind and poison rain.

  Where were the caves Zoran had told him about, where were the traces of the old dragonhunters? In the darker hours, Amon wondered if it was all lies, if his mother and her kind had simply wandered the bare wastes, scavenged a few ancient pieces of metal and come back with a new load of tall tales.

  No. He shook his head, dislodging the thought; he knew it wasn’t true. There were still dragon skulls displayed in museums, far fresher than the preserved skeletons of long-extinct animals and the peeling portraits of long-dead human kings. In any case, they had not climbed near as high as this yet. He had feared to, feared the dragon shadows flashing in the clouds above them.

  He stopped on a kind of flat outcropping, breathing hard. The air was different here, thinner, and it tasted of oil and alcohol. He thought it was because they were closer to the scorched domain of the dragons. He looked back over his shoulder; Caedian crested the little outcropping and tried to pull himself up with trembling arms.

  Amon kneeled down beside him and pulled him the rest of the way. Caedian fell against him, breathless, then rolled away to lie on his side a moment. Amon swallowed hard and looked away, taking the moment to open his pack and go through the last remnants of their things.

  He had lost the knife the day before; it had fallen between two jagged rocks while he was cutting bunches of a fruit that looked like berries from a cliff-clinging vine. The fruit had turned out to be inedible, bitter as bile. The canteens he had refilled in a trickling, rust-colored stream that had cut through the white and muddy forest, but since they’d come into the mountains there had been no water to be found—not even rain. He thought they could last another day, perhaps, on what remained.

  Caedian rolled onto his back. Amon looked at him out of the corner of his eyes; he’d sensed the elf didn’t like it when it seemed as if he was staring. His wounded lips had healed over the last day or so, but the bleeding cracks had left scars on his mouth: it was halfdead healing he had to thank for that, quick and brutal and always leaving its mark. Brownish tears still trickled intermittently from his blackened eyes, and he had lost all of his fingernails.

  “The dragons are leaving,” Caedian said, in a dry whisper.

  Amon looked up. Caedian was right; the massive shadows were receding, and along with them the thunder. It had been the sound of their bodies, grinding and clashing in the atmospheric heights.

  The day seemed brighter now, red sun shining down through thin gray cloud. He pulled himself to his feet and leaned down to give Caedian a hand. The elf looked at it a moment, then took it, dragging himself upright. He kept a grip on Amon’s hand for longer than necessary, looking up at him with an expression that was almost quizzical.

  “How long will you keep going?” he asked. “How long until you let us give up?” He sounded less cynical than simply tired.

  Amon bit his lip. “I’ll keep going as long as it takes. As long as I can.”

  He shook his head, slowly. “I’m not as strong as you, Amon.”

  Amon reached for him then, gingerly tracing a clumsy finger underneath the curve of his jaw. He could feel the feverish warmth radiating off his skin, its softness unmarred by the halfdeath’s touch. “It’s not much farther to the trees. We can make it. You can make it. Just—just try.”

  Caedian took his wrist, not ungently, and removed his hand. He looked at it for a moment, at its black nails and thick knuckles, then let it drop. “For you?” he asked; Amon could not tell if it was meant as a cruel jest or as an honest question.

  Caedian did not wait for an answer, in any case. He turned his back on Amon and started back up on the climb. Amon followed behind him, keeping half an eye on the empty sky.

  When they reached the trees, Caedian stopped b
etween them. Amon looked back at him—for a moment he was perfectly framed, a dark figure against a bright red sky, caught between two petrified giants.

  Amon turned away, and looked down over a dark and silent world: shadowed valleys below them, and more blank rising peaks, higher than Amon thought they could climb. Some of them pierced the clouds.

  “There’s nothing,” Caedian said, and then walked past him, turning down a steep pathway that wound away from the petrified trees.

  “Caedian!” Amon went after him, pebbles skidding under his feet. “Caedian, wait!”

  “Why?” He did not bother to turn around. “Why wait, if you mean to keep us going forever?”

  “We should wait here until morning—get a better look—”

  “Stop where you are.”

  A slow sense of dislocation came over Amon, as if he was looking in a crooked mirror. It wasn’t Caedian’s voice he’d heard but something new, someone new, someone speaking and alive in the emptiness of the dragonlands. He stopped. Caedian had kept walking, a senseless automaton, until Amon grabbed him by the shoulder and turned him around. A flash of bright anger passed over the elf, but then his mouth went slack in surprise.

  Amon first saw them reflected in Caedian’s black-and-purple eyes: two figures, gleaming in the reddish light. They had come up from just below the trees, mere footsteps away from where they’d stood moments ago. How hadn’t he heard them? How quietly had they stalked them?

  Amon turned around very slowly, keeping his hands raised, palms outward, and faced them. They were in armor and full helms, holding clever little composite bows with thick arrows already nocked and trained on him and Caedian. Their armor was adamantine, the incorrupt metal shining as if new-forged. Amon had seen armor like this, in paintings and in his earliest memories, more dream than true recall—had seen Zoran raising the visor on one of those eyeless and featureless helms to smile down at him, impossibly tall.

  They had done more than find a trace of dragonhunters, it seemed: they had found the dragonhunters themselves.