The Sheltered City

by John Tristan

  A child, ten or younger, came running up toward Karenna, cheeks gone dark gray with excitement. When she saw Amon she came up short and made a kind of shuffling crabwise dodge toward the armored woman; Karenna shook her head, and the girl went to stand with the butcher’s boys. Emil watched it with a half smile.

  “So then what happened?”

  “What do you think, Amon Vraja? We went out into the mountains to seek our death. Instead, we found this place.” She looked around, and Amon followed her gaze across the carved ceiling and the cracked mirrors. “We didn’t build this place—I don’t know who did, whether elf or man or something different—but we knew what we had found. Somewhere secure, somewhere defensible. There are only a few ways in, none large enough for the bigger dragons, and the drakelings we can repel. We’ve not lost our dragonhunter skills.”

  “That doesn’t answer me at all,” Amon said. His voice was cracking, wavering; he hated the sound of it. “That doesn’t answer how you’re all alive. For the Great Mother’s sake, you have—you have children here.”

  She put her hand on his cheek. “Haven’t you figured it out, little brother? The elves tried to make warriors who could live in the dragonlands. They succeeded, that was the issue. They succeeded all too well.”

  He brushed her touch away. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “When I went out into the dragonlands, I was dying. Coughing out bits of my lungs. My Regiment thought I’d fall before I made it to the mountains...but when I reached them I stopped coughing blood, and by the time we found this place I was breathing clear as a child.”

  “Are you saying—” Amon shook his head. “Are you saying that the Last City poisoned us? The way that the dragonlands poison anyone else?”

  She held up the hand he had batted away, flexing arthritic fingers. The blackness of her veins stood out sharply against wrinkled gray skin. “What kind of blood do you think flows in these veins? What creature could have given us its strength and its rage?” She looked up, sharp-eyed. “What creature thrives in this place, where all others die or hide?”

  He took a step back. Despite the high arch of the stone ceiling above him he suddenly felt as if he was trapped in a very small space. “Dragons.”

  She nodded. “Dragonblooded: that is what we are. It burns through us, you know. Mortal veins aren’t meant to take it. That is why, I think, we age so fast—that we can’t escape.” She smiled a little, though it had a bitter edge to it. “I have an old woman’s body now, though I’m barely fifty. But the wasting illness, the quick decay? None of us have died of it here in Esper.”

  “I lived in the City all my life,” Amon said, almost in a whisper. “I’m still alive.”

  She nodded. “True enough. Perhaps it is different for the children, rather than those who were changed. I only know what happened to the first ones. We found a new store of life once we left the City.”

  He looked around the little stone square, with its quiet life and its burning braziers. “And then you had children.”

  “Not a wise choice, perhaps,” she said. “But love cannot be stopped.”

  “I didn’t have children,” he said, with a gall-bitter bite to his voice. Zoran, his mother—had they died pointlessly? Had all of Zoran’s advice been pointless, in the end? “Why didn’t you come back? Why didn’t you tell the rest of us?”

  “Because,” she said, suddenly sounding very tired, “we are deserters, Amon. Mutineers. We abandoned the elf-lords and all our oaths. Coming back would have meant death for us. More so if they knew that we had found a way of living beyond their borders—beyond their authority. Do you think they would let Esper remain if they knew it existed?”

  He thought of Lady Liléan, of Seoras locked in the wooden prison of the Tree. Of Zoran telling him the ways to best abase himself before the elf-lords of the Last City. “No,” he said after a while. “No, I don’t think they would.”

  “And now you’ve brought one of them here.”

  He shook his head. “Caedian isn’t one of them. He’s...a mutineer, just as much as you. He’s halfdead, as much as you are.”

  “Not quite.” She grimaced. “We thought it was impossible, you know, for an elf to take the dragonblood. Two near-immortalities, burning each other out. Otherwise, why would they not have tried?”

  “Maybe they didn’t know. Maybe they thought it would sully them.” Maybe he had sullied Caedian, he thought. Maybe he had broken something beautiful. At least he was alive...but would it have been better to be dead and whole? Something in Amon had always suspected it, down at his dark bedrock, but looking at Esper’s children he was no longer so sure.

  “Was it your blood that changed him?” Emil’s voice had an edge to it again, and Amon had the sense it was a dangerous question to answer, whether with the truth or with a lie.

  He squared his shoulders and looked down at her, seeing Zoran and his mother dance behind her features. “Yes,” he said. “I gave him some of my blood. I didn’t know if it would work or kill him, but it was that or watch him die. And I couldn’t do that.”

  A complex little flicker of expression passed over her face, but he kept fixed on her eyes. “You will have to tell me,” she said slowly, “how a young man of the dragonblood and an elf came to be exiled from the Last City.”

  “I’ll tell you everything,” he said, “just as soon as you let Caedian out of your prison.”

  “Hmm,” she said, and she turned away, going to inspect the work of a man on one of the looms.

  Amon trailed behind her, watching as she danced her cramped fingers over the weave. “Well?” he asked.

  She turned to face him again, but before she could reply hurried footsteps came up behind them; they turned as one to face little Anu. She was out of breath, her face twisted; sweat ran down her forehead despite the comfortable cool of the cavern.

  Emil frowned at her. “What’s the matter, Anu?”

  “The elf—the one Semon took down. He’s in a rage. He won’t...he won’t stop, Emil. Semon is worried he’ll hurt hi—”

  Before she had finished her sentence Amon had lifted her into the air, her face inches from his. “Where?” he roared at her. “Where is he?”

  There was a prick of cold steel at the back of his neck. Karenna had unsheathed her sword—her dragon-killing sword—and was pressing its point lightly into his skin. “Drop her,” she said. “Gently.”

  He did. The sword withdrew.

  Emil circled around to face him, and to put a heavy arm around Anu’s shaking shoulders. “We don’t need more than one rage in a day,” she said, with a kind of neutral disappointment.

  Shame twined through the dark roar of the rage, dragging him down from his teetering precipice. He blinked hard, trying not to look at the shimmer of angry tears in the girl’s eyes—trying not to see how she was biting her lip hard enough to draw blood and counting to fifty under her breath. It was not only him Emil had been talking to. “Please,” he said, “take me to him. I can help, I can bring him down.”

  “Do you think so?” It seemed an honest question.

  “I hope so,” he said, and he let out a shuddering sigh. “It’s my responsibility. I did this to him.”

  She gave a curt nod and let Anu go. “All right then. Come along.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  They had locked him in a cell in a hallway of red stone behind a heavy iron door. From outside, Amon heard the sound of a muffled bell. It took him a moment to realize it was Caedian, throwing himself over and over against the metal of the door.

  The armored man—Semon—stood at the door, an impassive look on his face. When he saw Amon his lip curled a little in an expression of contempt Amon could not decipher. Not that he cared much; he went to the door at once and laid his palms against it. “Open it.”

  Semon looked
toward Emil, who must have given some kind of approval. “Take care,” he said. “If he gets out and attacks, I will cut him down.”

  Amon said nothing—could say nothing that wasn’t a threat, and that would only make things worse. Instead he stood aside and let the armored dragonhunter draw back the bolts holding the door in place and turn a dark and intricate key in its lock.

  Amon slid the door aside and caught Caedian in his arms before he could rush out, pushing him back into the little cell with all his strength. The door slammed shut behind him and he heard the sound of bolts sliding home; they had locked him in here with Caedian. It was fair enough. He’d be the only victim of Caedian’s rage.

  The elf was kicking him and wriggling in his grip, nails raking wounds in his arms. If he truly wanted to he could do much worse, but his rage was wild, directionless—the tantrum of a child. A halfdead child, not understanding, not able to understand, the dark pulse in his veins. His hands and head were stained with clotted blood, and in the almost lightless little cell Amon could not tell if that blood was red or black.

  Amon sank to his knees, pulling Caedian down with him, pinning his arms to his sides in his embrace. Caedian bit his neck, and hot blood trickled down his chest; all the while Amon was murmuring, humming lullaby nonsense, rocking him to the rhythm of the counting song.

  “One, two two, three three three.” He was singing it now, low-voiced, the bass tones reverberating through his chest. “One, two two, three three three...”

  Caedian sagged against him and struggled, sagged against him and struggled. He hissed softly, mouth wet with Amon’s blood. Then, finally, with one great heave of breath, he went still, head lolling against Amon’s shoulder. Amon stroked him with a clumsy hand; there was the first prickle of new hair there, like rough velvet.

  After a while Caedian shifted against him. “Amon?”

  “I’m here,” he said, still stroking his head. “I’m here.”

  Caedian’s soft, sobbing laughter was muffled against his chest. “Still here. Why, for the Great Mother’s sake?”

  Amon grimaced. All the reasons he’d given Emil were incomplete, but he could not say the truth aloud. “You know why. Don’t you?”

  The elf looked up. In the dark his irises were colorless, shards of bright glass against the black of his sclera. “You’re a fool, Amon Vraja.”

  “Yes. Probably.”

  There was the sound of bolts sliding back, and the door to the little cell opened, letting in a golden glow of brazier light. Emil was outlined in its haze. “My lord of the Tree,” she said, in a stiff and formal tone. “Do you seek to do harm to us?”

  Caedian got up, using Amon’s shoulder to support himself. “No,” he said, and he wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. He looked down at it, seeming more vaguely embarrassed than anything else. That too was familiar to Amon—that blank aftermath. “No, my lady, I do not seek to do harm to you.”

  “What do you seek?”

  He smiled, and there was a ripple of the old Caedian below the crust of scars and blood. “To be honest, my lady, what I ‘seek’ at the moment is a bath and a place to sleep.”

  Her own smile flickered, near-invisible in the hazy light. “That, I think, can be arranged, my lord.”

  He shook his head. “No. Don’t call me that.”

  “Then what shall I call you?” There was an arch caution to her words; it reminded Amon of how he had sounded in his first conversations with Caedian.

  “Caedian.” He shrugged. “It is my name.”

  Behind Emil, the armored form of Semon stirred. His sword remained undrawn, but his hand was still on the hilt. Amon got to his feet, wincing; the wound in his neck would need seeing to. He pressed his hand against it, stopping the already-slowing flow of blood.

  “Semon,” Emil said, “please take...Caedian...to the warm pools. I will get some care for our other guest.”

  So they were being separated again. Amon thought to complain, but Caedian went with the dragonhunter docilely enough, without even a backward glance.

  He leaned against the red walls, his head spinning. He could still smell, sharp and strange, the aroma of their mingled blood. Emil’s hand on his arm felt as heavy as a slab of iron.

  “Come along,” she said softly. “Let’s get you cleaned and stitched up, eh?”

  Suddenly tired—beyond tired, truly, deep into the wild countries of exhaustion—he plodded after her with mechanical steps. How long had it been since he had slept? He couldn’t quite remember; sleep seemed as distant as the Last City, almost mythical under Esper’s stone roof.

  Emil took him to one of the small, cozy houses in the village square, where a brisk and gentle-handed man a little older than him went to work on cleaning his wounds, suturing closed the ragged edges of Caedian’s bite with two neat little stitches. If Amon had been told his name, it had flowed in and out of his mind in moments. Emil sat beside him, now and then speaking to the man, or patting Amon’s strangely boneless-feeling hands.

  Finally she left, disappearing in a rustle of dry fabric, and then the man—the healer—was steering him gently through a hazily outlined corridor. He opened a door for Amon and led him inside, into a generous room. A lamp was burning in a little alcove, and in its penumbra Amon saw a great stone bed, generously covered in blankets and pillows. A table next to it held a pitcher of water, also made of stone, and three brass cups.

  Somewhere along the way the man had left, and Amon had wriggled out of his dirty clothes. The room was cool, and he could feel the warmth radiating off his body. The blankets were clean and soft, and he didn’t want to soil them with his sweat; he washed himself with slow, sleepy movements, using the stone pitcher and a scrap of cloth. When he crawled into the soft nest of blankets, he was shivering, and the next moment he was asleep.

  A familiar sound woke him: metal bolts, sliding against stone. Did the door have bolts? He couldn’t remember. The stitches in his neck ached and pulled, and he knew they were ready to come out. The healer’s quick stitching might have saved him a ragged scar, but it was his own uncanny flesh that had done the work of healing.

  Again that sound—then the sense of someone else in the room, a warm and ghostly presence. The lamp had long burned out, and even Amon’s keen eyes could see no more than moving shadows. Still, he knew who it was by the rhythm of his breath, the scent of his skin.

  Caedian slid in beside him, warm and clean. He wore nothing save a light and insubstantial tunic; a moment later that too was gone. He pressed his entire body against Amon, as if he were trying to crawl inside his skin, then with surprising strength rolled him onto his back and crawled on top of him, resting in the curve of his hips.

  “Cae—”

  He bent down and stopped Amon’s mouth with a kiss. Something warm and wet slid onto Amon’s cheek, and he knew Caedian was crying. He held him close, opening his mouth to him, and his hands wove a trembling web of caresses from the small of his back to the tense knot of muscle at the back of his neck.

  He tasted the same, or Amon’s memory of the kisses that came before had been blurred. It didn’t matter; either way Amon was shivering and full of Caedian, of his tongue and his hot presence and the almost painful pressure of his hands digging into his shoulders. Then he leaned away from the kiss and arched his back, tossing his head as if there was still a fall of long hair to get out of the way.

  Amon was already naked, and their bodies slid together skin against skin, the rising heat between his legs something almost foreign to him. When he felt Caedian’s heartbeat throbbing against him though, his being came to a quivering point there. Caedian was murmuring under his breath, strange words, elf words, and wound between those melodious syllables was Amon’s name, over and over again.

  Caedian lifted himself up and came down on him, again and again. A wince crossed his f
ace; he arched his back. Somewhere in the tangle of skin and sweat and fire Amon realized he was inside him.

  Amon lay back, dumbstruck by the feel of it, and let Caedian ride him with an urgency that bordered on madness. The elf was making low, wordless sounds under his breath, between moans and whimpers; he took one of Amon’s big hands in his and pressed it to his face, licking and kissing the tips of his fingers, rubbing himself against the palm.

  The world was narrow and dark, and Amon’s skin felt like the haunted surface of the sun. Caedian sank down so he was flush with Amon’s hips, making slight, jumpy movements, his eyes rolling back in his head. Amon caressed his tearstained face and his narrow muscular chest, tracing the new calligraphy of dark veins there. “Caedian, Cae,” he said, his throat working, and then everything went iron-black and contracted before opening up into a final white starburst.

  Caedian stayed where he was for a long while, holding Amon inside him, his whimpers turning into soft, mellifluous whispers and finally to silence as he sank down to lie on Amon’s chest. Amon stroked the back of his neck, making soft shhing sounds, and traced his fingertips in the velvety fuzz of his new-growing hair. He wondered if it would be a different color when it grew out.

  “Cae,” he murmured again, pulling him closer.

  Caedian sighed softly. “I like it when you call me that,” he whispered. “It makes me feel like I belong. With you. To you.”

  He lay on top of Amon, limp and warm, as if he were a mattress. Amon reclined against the pillows, relishing the weight of Caedian atop him, the pressure that reminded him he held someone warm and alive—alive, he thought, with a grinning flash of triumph. Despite everything, he was alive and in his arms.

  * * *

  He woke to a low-burning light, and Caedian sitting cross-legged at the edge of the stone bed. He must have relit the lamp somehow—or perhaps someone had come in the darkness of Amon’s sleep to relight it. Propping himself up on one elbow, he watched Caedian; he was doing nothing, looking at nothing. He might almost have been sleeping with his eyes open.