by John Tristan
Naked and washed clean, he was showing the rough shape of the not-quite-halfdead he was becoming, his wounds healing, showing pale scars against the dark gray of his skin. Along his arms his black veins were delicate spiderwebs, almost calligraphic in their twisting tracery; a thin layer of white fuzz was starting to grow on his bare and oddly elegant skull. The worst of the damage he still showed was his missing fingernails, growing back now as black stubs on the ends of his long fingers.
Amon rose to a sitting position and scooted closer to Caedian, wrapping him in a clumsy embrace. He did not pull away, but neither did he lean back into Amon’s arms.
“Did I hurt you?” Caedian asked after a while.
It would have almost been funny, if it hadn’t been like a spike to his heart. “No,” Amon said.
“I feel as if I did.” A shiver went through him, though he didn’t feel cold to Amon’s touch, not at all. “After the rage, everything was so...unmoored, so blurred. It was like I was floating, like I couldn’t come back to myself. You—touching you—it was the only thing that made me feel real again.”
“You don’t have to explain,” Amon said. “Don’t...don’t you know how much I wanted—” He swallowed back a sudden, wretched flood of tears. “How much I wanted you?”
“That,” Caedian said, in an awful, careful tone, “is why I feel I’ve hurt you. Used you.”
Amon drew back, left his arms holding cold air. His belly felt full of lead. This was a dream, he thought, some sort of jagged, nonsensical stutter of the mind before waking. Except he knew that it wasn’t. “So you’re saying you didn’t want me at all? Just something to hold on to?”
Caedian bent double, showing the sharp curve of his spine. “It isn’t that simple.”
“It is to me. I love you, Caedian.” He spat out the words like an insult.
“What you love,” he said, “is a dead man. I am just the corpse, still walking around.”
“That’s not true.” Amon’s mouth was dry; the words came out in a papery whisper.
He sat up, half turned toward him, showing one blank eye in sculptural profile. “Can I be selfish one last time, Amon? Can I stay here with you, just for the rest of the night?”
“Stay forever,” he said. “Cae...stay forever.”
Caedian crawled back into his arms but didn’t speak. It didn’t matter; Amon knew what his answer would have been in any case.
Chapter Twenty-Six
The room with the stone bed became Amon’s, and after the first night he spent there, no one fastened the outside bolts. Caedian was given his own, and though he was still locked in at night, he made not even a whisper of complaint. Amon did not make trouble on his behalf. He thought he had done enough of that.
The network of caverns that held Esper was far larger than was needed to hold the little village’s worth of halfdead—or dragonblooded, as Emil Tanu called them. All in all, there were about forty of them, with only ten of the first generation—the ones who had been within the Last City’s walls—remaining. The rest had been raised with only rumors of the Tree and the elf-lords, and it was they who were most curious about the elf now in their midst.
Caedian seemed not to notice their curiosity; it flowed over him like water over motionless rock. When he emerged from his room to fetch food or go to the warm underground pools where the Esperites went to bathe, he moved among them like a ghost, unaware he still had weight and influence in the living world.
At first Amon tried to approach him each day, to talk to him, but he could not take too long of Caedian’s flat black-and-purple regard moving over him as if he wasn’t there at all. Something in Caedian had broken or departed, leaving behind a shell that grew more whole and graceful by the day. His white hair was growing back swiftly, and his new fingernails were black and shiny as polished obsidian; even the way he moved had lost its stumbling clumsiness. It hurt to see, so more and more Amon found himself turning away. He no longer paced long nights outside Caedian’s door or haunted the warm pools waiting to see if he would come and bathe. He didn’t like that version of himself, looming in the shadows—he forced himself to turn toward whatever broken shards of light he could find.
During the days the little village square that formed the beating heart of Esper was bathed in the red glow of reflected sunlight, guided into the caves by its system of mirrors. In the brightest places, high containers filled with soil transplanted from the outer world sprouted pale mushrooms and dark-leafed tubers, a Verdancy in miniature. That was only one part of what fed Esper though; each day two or three of the armored hunters went out into the mountains and returned with sacks of sour little berries or twisted-limbed animals with dead, glossy eyes.
One day they came back with a decapitated drakeling. It was smaller than Amon had expected, though no less savage—the size of a child, with wicked claws and leathery wings. Everyone who had the skill helped in butchering it and salvaging as much as possible of its skin. Even the teeth were to be pried from its heavy skull—according to Karenna, they made excellent arrowheads.
Amon helped to fillet hunks of meat away from the dense bones, supervised by Adara—the butcher, whose twin sons had gaped at him on his entry into Esper. “Good,” she said, nodding at his work. “Careful with the tendons there, they’re tough as metal and you’ll break the knife if you’re not careful. Slide it alongside the bone—yes, just like that!”
The drakeling’s flesh was a deep, glossy gray, dripping with the last remnants of the creature’s black blood. It wasn’t quite the color of Amon’s own, but deeper and more iridescent, almost like oil. When it was mixed with careful quantities of ash and water it would burn almost like oil as well, and the Esperites decanted it into metal bottles, ready to be used as fuel. Not a scrap of the drakeling was wasted.
“You can eat this?” Amon asked, skeptically hefting a handful of the glossy meat. It looked like thin slices of wobbly stone more than something that had once been alive.
Adara nodded. “Once it’s been cured, yes. You wouldn’t want to try it raw—it’s edible, but not very tasty.”
“If you say so.”
He put it back down on her stone slab, and she sliced it even thinner into strips of dark meat. Then she set them to hang on a smoking-rack over one of the braziers; gray and glossy, they looked almost decorative. The smell of them—a deep, subtle tang of wet metal—wasn’t unpleasant, but Amon could not quite imagine having an appetite for it. Not after a lifetime of going without meat, at least.
“Dragons eat each other, you know,” Adara said, showing him a little smile. She was one of the first who had been born in Esper, a little older than Amon himself. Once, she’d been among the hunters, but a dragon’s bite had sheared off her left leg at the knee—she had an adamantine leg now, hammered out of surplus armor and hidden beneath her billowing trousers—and left her shy of the world outside the caverns. “That’s how they grow: the young fight, and eat their weakest siblings.”
It didn’t surprise him. “So we eat our...cousins?”
Adara laughed. “Close enough.”
The excitement of the drakeling’s arrival was abating as the work of skinning and butchering and cleaning the bones wound down; the light from the mirrors had faded from rosy to dusty brown and finally winked out, leaving Esper lit by lantern and brazier. It was almost cozy—so different from the liquid-green glow of the City’s canopy—but Amon found that he had come to miss the stars.
He wiped off his hands on a dirty rag. They were still stained with dragonblood; some of it had gotten under his nails, a slick, unpleasant feeling. “I’m going down to the pools,” he said. “I could use a bath.”
“Might join you in a while.” Adara stretched her shoulders and yawned. “There’s still the offal for me to deal with though. That’s liable to explode in your face if you’re not careful.” She laughed a
t Amon’s expression. “Don’t worry, it’s a bit beyond your knife-skill at the moment. But next time I’ll at least make you watch.”
“Next time,” he agreed, shaking his head. Exploding organs, blood that burned...and they were still expecting him to eat it.
He went down to the warm pools. They were in a low-ceilinged, steamy cavern, some natural bubble of hot water from deep in the earth guided up by carved pipes into a series of cascading pools. One, with a system of sluices and grilles, was the bathing pool, where the worst of the dirt was washed off and sent down an echoing drain; once Amon was done there, he went to the soaking pools and slid himself down into the warm, whitish water.
A few of Esper’s children were bathing, splashing each other and laughing two pools over, under the watchful eye of an older man. Children were never left alone in Esper—not because they feared for their safety, but because they were young and dragonblooded. Though they were drilled in self-control, a childish tantrum might still catapult unpredictably into killing rage. The man who watched them now, an old hunter named Brodan, was from Emil’s generation, but still doughty enough to pull raging children off each other if needed.
It wasn’t needed today; there was only laughter in the warm pools, and the sound of splashing water. Amon leaned his head back against the edge of the stone pool and let his limbs hang loose and floating in the water.
“Mind if I join you?”
He looked up; it was Emil. The children had gone now, and they were the only ones left in the pools.
“Of course,” he said, and he pulled in his legs. She could have chosen one of the empty pools, of course; that she had not meant she wanted to talk.
She was nude; Esperites were frank and unashamed about their bodies, all of them scrawled with black veins and more than half a mess of scars. Emil had so many scars that Amon would be hard-pressed to find a square inch of her sagging skin unmarred by claw or tooth. She lowered herself carefully into the pool and let out a long, groaning sigh of relief. “This is the only thing that helps my bones these days,” she said, and she chuckled. “Great Mother, how can I be so old?”
He said nothing—it seemed a rhetorical question.
She rolled her crabbed shoulders and leaned her head back, slicking her iron-gray hair in the water. She looked even older with it pulled back from her face, showing every wrinkle and line. “There’s been some talk about you, and your place here.”
“My place.” He looked down at his hands floating like thick fronds of some strange plant in the water. “Is this when you tell me I should leave?”
She reached for him under the water, taking one of his hands in both of her own. She was shaking her head, smiling. “No, no, Amon. Quite the opposite. You are our brother and our own, and you have shown yourself willing to help in any way you can. You will always be welcome here.”
He let her hold his hand for a moment before gently pulling it away. “What about Caedian?” His voice sounded very small in the echoing room. “Is he still welcome here?”
“Your elf,” she said, with a twisty grimace of a smile, “will stay here as long as you do. Call that a welcome, if you will.”
“So he’s a prisoner?”
She lifted a shoulder. “He cannot return to the City.”
“No,” he agreed, “he cannot. But not because you will not let him.”
“That elf is a rock you’ll dash yourself against, Amon,” she said, shaking her head.
“I’m afraid—” he began, but he could not complete the thought. It hung between them like poison in the air. He swallowed and tried again. “I’m afraid he will—”
“Elves have never been known to kill themselves,” Emil said bluntly. “Not even in the oldest stories, telling of the worst circumstances. They may not even be capable of it.”
“No elf has ever been halfdead—dragonblooded—before, either.”
Silence eddied between them; water sloshed between the steaming pools.
“What I meant when I spoke of your place,” she said, suddenly brisk and businesslike, “is what you can do for us, if you wish it. We are still few, and you are young and strong, if untrained. Let me take you down to the forges after we bathe, and we can look at having Taman hammer out some armor for you.”
“Armor?” He blinked at her. “You want—you want me to be a dragonhunter?”
“It’s not just dragons we hunt these days,” she said with a smile, “but yes. Why not? You were born to it, after all.”
* * *
The forges were lower in the strata of Esper’s caverns than Amon had ever gone before. Emil led the way down an endless-seeming set of spiraling stone stairs; the stairs opened into ancient chambers that might once have held feasts or temples. Many were lit only by the dimmest gleam of endlessly reflected sunlight; Emil carried a lamp to see them downward. It was like walking through a world of permanent night, dimmer and closer than the City under Dragonfall mourning, full of strange shadows.
“You’ve never seen a trace of the ones who built this place?” Amon asked. His voice echoed in the great empty chambers. As they descended, he caught glimpses of carvings on the walls, geometric shapes, stark and massive as dragons’ wings.
“Never,” Emil said. She paused. “None of the carvings here showed what they looked like either. We know they had beds and chairs, and houses, and used the pools for bathing. They cannot have been so different from us in that respect.”
“But there were no plants. No growing things.”
“We don’t know that.” She waved her free hand at the expansive dark. “We don’t know what they used half these places for.”
“What do you think happened to them?”
“I don’t know.” She paused. “But they were not killed, at least not here.”
“How do you know?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” She turned back, showing him a half-toothless smile in the glow of her lamp. “No corpses. Not a one. They might have abandoned this place, for whatever reason. They might have even been the elves that made the City and the Tree...though I doubt that. This is too much a place of stone and metal, not lightvine and lamp-tree.”
At last they reached the heat of the forges. It was a massive, living thing, that heat, and when they came into the forge room Amon thought for one insane moment that they had somehow reached the very surface of the sun.
Red, rolling waves of heat seethed in great pools. Amon was already sweating, and Emil had to stop and wipe her own brow—though the heat seemed to bother her less. Perhaps it soothed the ever-present ache in her bones, the way the warm pools did.
“What is this? Dragonfire?”
Emil shook her head. “It’s fire from the earth. Molten rock, so hot it does not become solid. We’ve learned to use it—come and see.”
The sound of hammering rose over the roar of the heat itself. In a kind of makeshift workshop Taman, the oldest of the smiths, was presiding over his apprentices; they were at work repairing a set of adamantine helms.
In their ancient designs, the helms used an interlocking set of thin adamantine filigrees to filter the poisons from the air. Those delicate grilles had long been removed and reshaped. The metal was not easy to work; even great heat would not melt it, only soften it, and that barely enough that rapid and repeated hammer blows were necessary to shape it. Taman directed his apprentices with a sharp shorthand of gestures and barked shouts, nodding now and then at a particularly well-struck blow.
Emil waited until they had finished with a helm, watching calmly with her arms folded in front of her. “Taman,” she said when they were done, breaking to wipe the sweat from their eyes, “may I borrow you for a moment?”
“To be sure,” he said, and he turned to his apprentices. “You two have got this, yes?”
“Yes, Taman,” they chorused.
/> “Good. I’ll be back to check the work.” He cleaned the soot and sweat from his face with a cloth and gave Amon a nod. “Are you here for a fitting then?”
“It looks that way,” he said.
Taman grinned. “Good. We can always use another hunter, especially Luziana Vraja’s son.”
“Zoran’s son,” he corrected softly. He hadn’t known he was going to say it until it was out of his mouth, but once it was, it felt right, so he kept going. “Luziana bore me, but I never knew her. It was Zoran Djorna who raised me. I’m his son, much more than I am hers.”
Taman leaned back, considering. “All right, fair enough. Blood isn’t everything, after all.”
“No,” he agreed. “It isn’t.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Taman led Emil and him to a cooler area of the forges, where armor and weapons were kept for adjustments and repairs; there was no armory as such, as all the hunters kept their own armor and weapons, lovingly maintained, in their own homes.
It would have been unthinkable, back in the City under the Tree. Dragonhunter armor as Amon knew it belonged to the City itself, not its wearers; it had one shape, and any given suit was identical to the others. They were elegant and overlarge, padded with vine-leather and thickly woven silk to fit the wearer.
Esperite armor was fitted to the hunter and thinly padded with dragonskin. Anything that didn’t fit just right was altered or discarded. There were weapons here as well, exotic extrapolations of the City’s unchanging designs, hooked swords and massive crossbows. Some were broken, and some had clearly been failed experiments—one massive recurved bow with two taut metal strings instead of one seemed one of those, as did a black sword long as Amon’s arm but near as narrow as a needle.
Amon ran his hand lightly along one rack of curved, lightweight adamantine swords; in the City no one would think to waste the sacred metal on weapons. A priest at a temple Zoran had taken him to had preached it was the Great Mother’s tears, the only thing that could still purify the broken world; she had said that was why it could nullify the poison that the dragonhunters breathed. If it was true, it did not seem to bother the Esperites; to them it was a tool, to be reshaped at need.