The Sheltered City

by John Tristan

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The bowmen marched them down into the shadow-cleft of a little valley, by a path so narrow Amon had to turn sideways against the cliffside to stop from slipping off. Their path, he guessed; perhaps the trails they had followed had not been so false, after all. Now and then he glanced back at them, at their featureless adamantine helmets, and saw only the reflection of his own broad, gray face.

  Caedian walked in front of him—an order fixed by their commands—and every other step Amon’s heart was in his mouth. The cliff was steep, and there was only darkness below; if he missed his footing he’d be a broken heap on the rocks within ten seconds. Something of his old grace seemed to be coming back to him though, or at least there was less newborn clumsiness in his gait. Still, Amon tried to stay close enough to grab him should he start slipping on the treacherous trail.

  It was hard to keep his eyes on him though. He kept wanting to look over his shoulder, at the adamantine-clad bowmen (or bow-women; the armor hid even their sex) with their blank, faceless helms.

  From stolen glimpses he could tell their armor was different from the hulking, clunky things the dragonhunters had once worn: lighter, more gracile, with exquisitely worked joints. The basic design was the same, though; it was what a talented armor smith might have made, had they been allowed to melt and reforge the old adamantine armors and remake them to fit the contours of a single wearer.

  One of them seemed to catch Amon’s stare—it was hard to tell, with the helm hiding their entire face. Amon cleared his throat. “Where are you taking us?”

  “Keep moving.” A masculine voice, Amon thought, though given strange harmonics by the helm. It sounded almost like a dragon’s scream, that voice, though made small and human. Or elvish—there was that possibility, though no elf Amon knew of since a time before the Tree had donned adamantine armor.

  He kept moving. One of them had an arrow nocked at all times, but there was a chance he could have moved fast enough to dodge it, and broken their bows before they could fire more. There was even a chance he could have snatched one of the short swords they wore on their hips. It was pointless though, just as it was pointless for them to keep the arrow trained on the back of his head. They were living, speaking beings in a world that he’d thought held little but red death; he would have followed them even if they’d tried to chase him off.

  “Halfdead.” The other had spoken; this one had a woman’s voice. She said it without malice, as if it was his name.

  Amon half turned toward her. “I am.”

  She jerked her helmeted head at Caedian, still clumsily making his way down the trail ahead of them. “What is he?”

  “He’s...” An elf, Amon started to say, but that was not quite right anymore, in the same sense than it wasn’t right to call him purely human. Mine, he wanted to say, claiming him before these people got their hands on him, but he knew he had no right of it. “He’s my friend,” he settled on at last, low and sheepish. “Don’t hurt him. Please.”

  “We’re not going to hurt anyone,” the man said, “unless you give us cause. But we will not suffer him to return to his elvish folk.”

  Amon almost laughed at that. “He won’t. Believe me there.”

  They were silent after that, with the only sound the scuffle of their feet on loose rocks. After a while though, Amon became aware of a new sound, a new texture in the air. He lifted his head and sniffed; there was a smell like clean metal, sharp and almost pleasant. It was the rush of water—the same as the smell in the air.

  “This way,” the armored woman said, and she squirmed ahead of them on the path. They were deep in the valley now, and the air was oddly cold. The man stayed behind them, his bow half-raised.

  Amon followed the woman and Caedian into a kind of high cavern, a gap between two cliff edges. A thin sliver of light showed at either end, brighter behind them than ahead; something before them was muting and blurring the last remnants of the daylight. The woman in adamantine armor had gotten ahead of Caedian. She had strapped her bow to her back, and she was navigating a wet, rocky ledge with both hands outstretched. The thing that blurred the sunset light beyond them was the thin trickle of a waterfall, cold and translucent, making a kind of curtain between them and the other end of the narrow cavern.

  “Wait here,” she told them, and she vanished into the water. Amon saw her shadow move and gleam and then disappear.

  They waited. Amon could hear his own breath, as well as Caedian’s, but the man sealed in his armor was silent as a ghost.

  An earsplitting roar came echoing from behind them. The man wheeled around, bow raised, and took a few steps backward until he was nearly pressing against Amon. “Quiet,” he said, voice tight and controlled. He sounded as if he had been through this a hundred times before.

  For a heart-stopping moment, the light at the other end of the cave was blotted out by a vast, dark shape. Amon’s fists clenched and unclenched. He held his breath, waiting.

  There was a great grinding sound. The image that flashed in Amon’s mind was an infinite row of metal teeth—he remembered the dragon’s fang in his mother’s treasure box, its wickedly serrated edge. What would it feel like to die in a mouth like that, boiling alive as the hot teeth penetrated skin and shattered bone? Whatever Caedian thought, it did not seem like a clean death to Amon.

  Then the sound stopped and the shadow moved away; the sudden return of wan, rusty light to the crevice was like the lighting of a thousand lamp-trees. Amon gasped in a breath. He glanced toward Caedian then, and his sweet relief soured: the elf had the same look of stricken wonder he had worn the day after Amon had changed him, when he had first felt the touch of rain. If the shadow—the dragon—had lingered any longer at the cave’s mouth, Amon was sure he would have rushed toward it, arms flung wide in welcome.

  A rustle of movement came behind them. The woman, or someone in identical armor, emerged from the curtain of falling water. “Dragon?” she asked.

  The man nodded. “I think it’s gone.”

  “Good.” She beckoned them onward with a sharp shake of her helmed head. “I’ve sent a message to Emil telling her we’re here and what we’ve found. She’ll be waiting for them.”

  Passing beneath the cold curtain of water felt like moving through some strange gate. The small crevice opened into a wide, high-ceilinged cavern; great teeth of wet rock dripped down from far above them, each the size of a man at least. Fixed to those teeth were the sources of the blurry red light that filled the cavern, as if it were open to the sky: great lens-shaped mirrors, scratched and pitted with age but still catching and reflecting from somewhere the last glow of sunset.

  “What is this place?” Amon had stopped, awestruck and uncomprehending. Half of the cavern looked hollowed out by the slow flow of ancient water, but half of it seemed carved from the rock: there were stairs and pathways, and little alcoves holding small statues or burned-out lamps.

  “Keep moving,” the man behind him said, but the woman in front turned back and raised the visor of her helmet, tilting it back to reveal a heartbreakingly familiar face.

  She had deep gray skin, the same color as the stone, and her dark eyes had the same black sclera as his. She seemed to be about his age; there was a whitish scar carved across her face, running from the top of one thick eyebrow to the corner of her wide, sensual mouth.

  “You’re halfdead,” Amon said, once he had gotten his voice back.

  She nodded, as if it should have been obvious all along. “This is Esper,” she said, “and it is our city.”

  “City?”

  “Come and follow, brother,” she said. “You will see.”

  * * *

  She led them farther downward into a kind of rounded corridor. It reminded Amon a little of the corridors below the edge of the Rim, where he had hidden from the “constables,” tho
ugh carved on a grander scale. The mirror light did not quite reach here, and every few dozen steps there was a pool of firelight cast by slim, guttering torches. There was an odd scent to their flames, subtly sweet and almost fungal; Amon wondered what they were burning.

  The light caught Caedian’s face—the wonder had gone out of it, as if the dragon’s shadow had taken it with him when it took flight. He walked along the impossible corridor as if he was walking in a dream, and nothing mattered.

  Still, even the look of that could not quite blunt Amon’s own wonder. Esper, the woman had said, our city. It was like being told there was another sun hiding behind the red dragon-star, waiting only for a clear enough day to be glimpsed. For all Amon’s life the city beneath the canopy had been the Last, the only, the final remnant of civilization in an empty world—just as he had been the last of his own kind. Now, a halfdead woman who had called him brother was leading him down a firelit hall of stone into a new world; how could he not be wonderstruck?

  “How long—” he started, and the woman shook her head.

  “Not here. Emil will explain it to you.” She looked back at Caedian, at his strange, dead-looking face.

  Amon frowned. She doesn’t trust him. She seemed to have some trust in Amon—perhaps it was just the shared heritage of halfdead blood, or that fact that he wasn’t an elf—but she was not about to volunteer anything to Caedian.

  There was a dip in their progress, a blind corner, and then the corridor opened up into what looked like a market square in the Rim. Amon gaped down at it, at the small collection of stone houses and hammered-steel shacks crowded into a great, round cavern. Lanterns hung from rings pounded into the stone walls, and here and there a brazier blazed with rosy fire.

  Men and women and children—children! Amon could not believe it—with shades of gray skin looked up at them with slack-jawed wonder as they descended into the stone village. The man had raised his own visor now. He was a little older than the woman, or perhaps just looked it: thin-lipped and dark, with a prominent scar twisting the lid of his left eye.

  “There’s Anu,” she said, gesturing toward a figure running at them at full speed, arms pumping. She reached them less than ten seconds later, breathing hard—a slim girl with wild black hair, her grayish skin near as dark as Caedian’s.

  “You’re here!” she said, her voice so loud it echoed.

  “Shh, Anu,” the woman said with familiar fondness.

  “Sorry! But you’re here.” She glanced between their faces with frantic eyes. “Emil wants to see the man right away.”

  “What about the elf?”

  Anu gave him a nervous look. “For now, he’s to be considered a prisoner.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “No,” Amon said. They all turned to look at him, even Caedian. He was shaking his head, his jaw set. “No,” he repeated. “I won’t let you.”

  Anu bit her lip and looked up at the woman in adamantine armor. “Emil said—”

  “It’s all right, Anu,” she said, and she waved a gauntleted hand. “Go now, we’ll take care of this.”

  Amon was rocking back and forward, fists balled. He recognized the first distant roars of the rage coming at him. He was not going to let them take Caedian, not after everything—not after bleeding into him and walking with him through the dragon-haunted waste. “You will have to go through me,” he said, near spitting out the last word through gritted teeth.

  The woman took a half step back—not afraid, but considering, weighing her options. There was something almost compassionate in her gaze. The surge of rage batted against the wall of his self-control and faded, but he held his ground. “I can’t let you,” he said.

  “Amon.” Caedian had stepped forward, almost smiling. “Please. Just let them take me.”

  “You wanted the dragons to take you,” Amon spat out.

  “Amon,” Caedian said again.

  Amon closed his eyes. He felt a light touch on his jawline, a mirror image of the way he’d touched Caedian on the ledge below the trees.

  “I promise to not try to die, all right? Don’t do this for my sake.”

  Amon opened his eyes, and Caedian drew back. He turned toward the armored man and gave a courtly bow. “Take me prisoner then, sir,” he said, one corner of his scarred mouth lifted in a smile. “I am at your disposal.”

  The man gave him an odd look and lowered the visor of his helm. He showed Caedian a reflection of his own face in the adamantine, and he seemed to wince at the sight: bare head, sunken eyes, scarred lips.

  “I won’t let them hurt you,” Amon called out to him as the helmed man led him away.

  Caedian did not respond—did not even turn his head. He let his captor lead him the way Amon had led him, whatever brief flash of volition he had shown blotted out.

  The woman let Amon watch them go for about ten seconds, then lightly touched his elbow. “Come on now,” she said. “I am sure you have many questions.”

  A last dark tendril of rage squeezed around his heart and he rolled back his lips, showing the woman his big, jagged teeth. “More than you know.”

  She raised her eyebrows, nonplussed. “Yes. We have a few for you, as well.”

  “Answer me this one. Who’s this Emil, who has people taken prisoner for no reason?”

  “Emil Tanu is our leader, of sorts,” she said. “She’s the eldest of us, and the wisest. And she does nothing without reason.”

  * * *

  The woman took him into a small stone house where a low, warm fire was burning. An old woman was sitting on a wide couch which had been carved right into the stone; it was upholstered in a smooth, dark material, and with nauseous wonder Amon realized it was dragon leather, made from a drakeling’s skin. Zoran had told him a story once of an ancient king with a dragon-leather cape...

  The old woman looked up, and for one long, dilating moment Amon thought she was Zoran, that Zoran had not died but had somehow been transmuted into a woman by the Great Mother’s grace. Then the resemblance faded into the fact of her being halfdead, and old. There was perhaps something in her of how Zoran had used to be, in the reaches of Amon’s youth, but though she was as old as he had been when the halfdeath had finally killed him, her eyes were alert and her breathing was clear.

  “Emil,” the woman said, and she went to one knee before her, laying an armored hand in her lap.

  Emil smiled at the armored woman. “Thank you for bringing him to me, Karenna.”

  “Semon has taken the elf to the red rooms,” she said.

  “Is that where you’re planning to torture him?” The words fell out of Amon’s mouth; he could feel his hands clenching again.

  Karenna turned around, on her feet in an instant, but Emil caught her eye and shook her head. She rose, slow and deliberate, and Amon heard the creaking of her knees. “Why do you think we would torture him, little brother?” She tilted her head and showed him a thin, considering smile. “Does he have important information hidden away? Hmm?”

  He opened and closed his mouth, unsure of what she was asking—there was an edge to her questions, honed as a blade. “He—we—know far less than you, my lady.”

  She laughed. “My lady? Do I look like an elf to you?”

  “No.” He cleared his throat. “You look like a dragonhunter.”

  “Yes.” She stepped closer and took his face in both her hands, tilting it downward to take a long look in his eyes. “We have the same blood in our veins, don’t we? Whose child are you, halfdead? Was it Marten Koina? Ardeth Grez?”

  “Luziana,” he said softly. “My mother was Luziana Vraja.”

  She released him. “Vraja, yes...I can see it.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “Not well, but we crossed paths. All dragonhunters did. She was in a different corps though.
I was in the Fifth.”

  “So it’s true.” His voice came out louder than he’d intended. “You are a dragonhunter—you’re from the City! I thought...I was told you were all dead. Zoran, Zoran Djorna of the Third Regiment, he told me I was the last of the halfdead!”

  The word echoed in the little house. Karenna kept a grip on the hilt of her sword.

  Emil took him by the hand very gently. “Come on, little brother. Walk with me awhile, and I’ll explain what I can.”

  Almost in a daze, he let her lead him, a soft tug on the edge of his fraying sleeve. Karenna followed them a few steps behind, a discreet bodyguard.

  They stepped out of the little stone house into the strange little square filled with its own quiet life. It was much less crowded, much less loud, than the packed edges of the Rim, but he saw all around him the business of living going on: a man working a makeshift loom, another sharpening a sword on a pedaled grindstone, a woman drying a square of fabric over one of the smaller braziers. Then there were two children helping a thickly muscled woman—their mother?—butcher a strange, stubby-legged animal. Amon’s eyes went wide at the sight. Were they going to eat it? How could they afford to let even one beast be eaten?

  Just as he watched them, in stunned silence, they watched him, as well. Most were discreet, but one of the butcher’s children elbowed the other and they stood slack-jawed and staring, with blood staining their arms up to the elbows.

  “This place is impossible,” Amon said after a while. He turned toward Emil. “How can you stand there and pretend this isn’t impossible?”

  “I’ve had a long time to get used to it. Longer than you’ve been alive.” She let out a long sigh. “When the first of us—the halfdead, as you know us—started dying, some of us among the Regiments made a vow. When we saw the first signs the end was coming, we would head out onto patrol for one last time and take down as many dragons as we could. Make that we were lost or dead, and hide out in the caves and make sorties until a dragon speared us on their teeth. It was a pointless exercise, of course, though not much more pointless than bringing home what scraps of salvage remained...”