The Sheltered City

by John Tristan

  “I thought for a while I wouldn’t mind seeing that myself,” Taman said quietly. “I was so angry at what they had done to me—they live so long and still took half my life so we could better scavenge for them.”

  “Only for a while?”

  He chuffed a laugh. “Well, I kept remembering the others, you know? All those thousands and thousands you talked about.” He paused a moment, making some final adjustment to a strap at Amon’s side. “I only wish they were given a choice.”

  “A choice?”

  “You’ve seen yourself that it is possible to live outside of the City, given the right blood.”

  “Given half a human life. Given the rage.”

  He waved away Amon’s caveats with an impatient hand. “That’s not the point. They should know, and be given a choice. Maybe they would prefer to have a long life under the elves, trading worthless old kings and going to feasts on Dragonfall. More power to them then. I know what I would have chosen, were it given to me. I would have chosen Esper, and half a life that is my own.”

  “Do you give your own children that choice?”

  “Hah!” He grinned and shook his head. “Tough questions, Amon Vraja. Try asking Emil one of these days instead of an old smith like me.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  Taman stepped back. “You should. Oh, speaking of Emil, head down to hers after I’ve gotten this armor off you. She wanted to see you, last I heard. Now come on and help undo this. I still need to fiddle with the lining a little. I noticed it wasn’t fitting as well as I’d like around your sides.”

  They unbuckled the straps and Amon shrugged out of the armor. It sat comfortably enough, despite Taman’s perfectionistic attention to the lining, but it was still a relief once the weight was off of him—it felt for a moment that he was lighter and stronger than he truly was.

  “Come back tomorrow when the light’s good and we’ll do a final fitting. Then you can take it back to yours.” He smiled. “It’ll be yours then. And I’ll start work on the rest of your armor.” He slapped Amon on the back, still strong despite his age, making a hollow thudding sound.

  Amon bid Taman farewell and made his way down into the village square. The great dragon’s head had been stuffed and mounted there, hanging from the wall facing the entrance tunnel. Its eyes had been replaced with little lamps, so that some flickering semblance of their life still showed in hollow sockets. It was a mark of Esper’s victory and a kind of lurid guardian all at once. Amon liked it, oddly enough—liked its open mouth and the jagged show of teeth, made harmless decoration in death. Caedian brought that dragon down, he thought, and he felt a glow of smug pride. His Caedian had done it, making himself a dragonhunter in one sword stroke.

  He found the elf in question in Emil’s house, poring over a small trove of books. Neither of them seemed to notice when he entered, Emil carrying on her conversation in midstream. “These are ones in old elvish tongues, which we cannot read at all,” she said. “Look, this is an elf and a human, fighting a dragon side by side, and here is a table spread with the dragon’s flesh.”

  “Where did you find these?” Caedian asked.

  Emil’s smile had a slight shyness to it; it took years off her face. “I took them from the City when we left. There were more in the armory, books on ancient warfare, but none so beautiful. I couldn’t bear to leave them behind, even knowing—well. I ended up carrying them into Esper rather than having them decorate my grave, so it was all for the best in the end.”

  “Quite a risk you took,” Caedian said, with a sideways smile. “You want me to translate them?”

  She nodded. “If you will.”

  “It will take some time.” He brushed his fingers carefully over the delicate pages. “Much of this is poetry, not history.”

  “Perhaps it’s history as poetry.”

  He gave her a small smile and brushed his hair away from his face. It was near long enough to reach his shoulders now—Great Mother, but elf hair grew fast, Amon thought. His own stubbornly held the same length for years. “Perhaps you’re right. But it seems less like something that happened than something that was hoped for. The tense it’s written in is odd, like it is meant to be both past and future...”

  “As it once was, so it shall be,” she intoned.

  He looked up, surprised. “Something like that.”

  She nodded. “You should take it with you—as long as you treat it well. Tomorrow I’ll have to show you the maps.”

  “Maps?” His eyebrows raised.

  “We took some of the maps from the old armory with us when we went out into the dragonlands. Most are of elvish make, though we’ve annotated them rather a lot since—”

  Amon cleared his throat and they both looked up. The smiles they wore were oddly alike, the young elf and the old human. “Amon,” Emil said. “Have you finished with Taman then?”

  He nodded. “The armor will be ready for me in the morning, he said.”

  “Good. Soon enough, that...Karenna wants to take you out on a patrol as soon as possible. Tomorrow, if the weather holds.”

  The smile fell away from Caedian’s face. He closed the book carefully and put his hand palm-down on the cover. “Don’t bring any dragons back when you do,” he said, his voice falsely light. “I’m not sure if I’m up to killing another one just yet.”

  “Caedian—”

  “It’s all right,” he said, picking up the book and pressing it to his chest. “My lady...Emil...thank you for the book. I will see you when the night meal is served.”

  “You’re welcome...and I look forward to knowing what it says,” she said with a half smile, but there was a worried look in her heavy-lidded eyes. Once Caedian had gone, she sighed and sat down on one of her stone chairs. “Would he want to come out with you, you think?”

  “Would you let him?”

  She shrugged. “I do not think that he means to run to the City and tell his family about Esper. Not anymore. As far as I am concerned, he isn’t a prisoner here.”

  “Sometimes he still thinks he is.” Amon sat down on the chair opposite him. “No one has offered to make him armor either.”

  “Nor has he asked.”

  “No. It isn’t in his nature.”

  She put a hand on the table between them and spread her fingers, sweeping her hand across the surface as if clearing away unseen dust. “Until he feels himself a part of Esper he will never be one, you know that.”

  He was silent for a moment. “So. You wanted to see me?”

  “I did.” She peered at him. “There’s a question I wanted to ask you, and I’m afraid it’s going to sound rather blunt no matter how I come at it.”

  He spread his arms. “So come at it bluntly.”

  “First, let me pour you something.” She got up with a groan and a creak of joints and rummaged in a stone chest for a moment, coming up with an ancient bottle. She shook it at him and grinned. “Love-in-darkness,” she said. “My last bottle of it.”

  She broke the wax seal from the bottle and poured them each a thimbleful of the rich, dark blue liquor. The smell of it prickled at Amon’s nose; it reminded him of the House of Dust. “You kept this for...what, thirty years?”

  She winced. “Great Mother, has it been that long? At least it’s only gotten better over the years.” She took a slow, delicate sip. “Or maybe I’ve just started missing it more. It’s the one thing we’ve never been able to make in Esper, you know—drinks like this. I don’t often think about it, but every now and then I do have to have a small drop of this. It tastes like luxury, I think. That’s it. Like liquid luxury.”

  Amon took up his own tiny cup and dipped his tongue in the liquor. It was heady and sweet; he thought that Emil might have been right, and that the long years had improved the flavor. There was something of the Verdancy in it, o
f the rich green life in its earth, and the sparkle of lightvines. It tasted like the City, and that gave him an unexpected stab of homesickness. Not much surprise, he thought. Whatever else the Last City was, it was the place where he had been born and raised. “So what’s this question you have for me?” he asked, and he took another small sip of love-in-darkness.

  “Have you thought of having children?”

  The sip arrested in his throat and he coughed long and hard.

  Emil looked at him over the rim of her cup, eyes sparkling. “Was it that impertinent a question?”

  He recovered a little, pounding his chest. “Just...surprising.”

  “Well?”

  “No,” he said, and he drank the rest of the love-in-darkness in one gulp. “Not at all. Zoran—the man who raised me—told me it wouldn’t be fair on the mother or the child. That it would hurt them, the way it hurt my mother.”

  “Your mother was killed by breathing the wrong air,” Emil said.

  “Giving birth weakened her though. Giving birth to a halfdead.” He made a face. “I was not a small baby.”

  “No, I suppose not.” She quirked a smile. “Well, it is different here. The dragonblood runs in all our veins already, and the women of Esper are strong. If you did want to have a child, there are those who would love to be its mother.”

  “I—I didn’t think any of the women here felt that way about me.” He rubbed the back of his head. “I’m afraid I don’t feel that way about any of them.”

  “Oh, come on, Amon! I know, as everyone else does, that your heart belongs to Caedian. I’m not talking about vows of marriage, like you’re Verdancy gentry. But Esper could use an infusion of new blood.”

  He cleared his throat. It felt as if the love-in-darkness still burned within it. “Has anyone, uh, asked you to—”

  “Play matchmaker?” She shook her head. “I only wanted to see where you stood on the matter.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It is...it is too surprising a question to answer now. I never imagined...” He laughed, shrugging helplessly. “I never imagined any of this.”

  She nodded. “You’ve been honest, Amon, and that’s all I wanted.”

  “Have you—” He frowned. “Have you asked Caedian this, as well?”

  She hesitated, then made an equivocal gesture. “He may be dragonblooded, but he is still an elf. Their blood does not mix with ours.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It...” She hesitated. “It is just known. Hundreds of years in the City, and it never happened.”

  “Maybe so.” Amon stood up from his seat and slid the little stone cup over to Emil’s side of the table. “Or maybe no one ever sought to try. You said that he will never feel a part of Esper until he believes himself to be...but do you believe it yourself?”

  “Amon—”

  He shook his head, but smiled at her. “I’ll see you at the meal tonight, Emil. Drakeling meat again, I should think?”

  She leaned back and nodded, mirroring his wan smile. “I’m afraid so. But I hear that Adara has made a mushroom sauce.”

  He lightly squeezed her shoulder on his way out. “Sounds like something I wouldn’t want to miss.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  When Amon came back to their room, Caedian was sitting on the edge of the bed with the book open in his lap. He wasn’t reading it, though—he was staring off into some dark distance, one hand limp on top of the page.

  “Caedian?”

  The elf shook himself and the blank, distant look left his eyes. “What did Emil want?”

  Amon opened his mouth and then clicked it shut again. “I’m not entirely sure how to start.”

  “Anything to do with me?”

  He shook his head. “No. Not at all.” He grinned and rubbed the back of his head. “She asked if I wanted to have children.”

  “What, with her? Isn’t she a little old?”

  He sputtered laughter. “No, not with her!”

  “Karenna, then?”

  “No, no. It was just—just a question, I think.”

  “Well?” He looked up, eyebrows raised. “Do you?”

  “Great Mother, not you, as well.” He sat down beside him on the bed and took the book from his lap, carefully flipping through its pages. Most of it was dense with elvish script, but on a third of the pages there were delicate illuminations, outlined in ancient gold: snarling dragons, an elvish woman holding a garland of stars, a golden sun rising behind a grim moon the color of blood. “I wouldn’t want to leave a child to be raised alone, and I am not close enough friends to any of the women here to want to raise a child with them.”

  “I never knew my sire. Very few elves do. It isn’t our way.” He tilted his head, looking at Amon sideways. “And you yourself were raised by one man.”

  “Until he died,” Amon said, “and I had to raise myself.”

  “You should think about it.” Caedian’s voice was very soft. “Karenna likes you, I can tell that.”

  “As a friend, yes—as an ally. Not someone that she wants to have children with.”

  “Well.” He smiled. “I can’t have your children, can I?”

  “Would you want them? Children, I mean.”

  “Yours?”

  He laughed. “No, yours.”

  Caedian’s smile turned brittle and broke then. “I am not sure if it would be right,” he said, “bringing new life into this world. I don’t want to—there is nothing of this I want to pass on to a child.” When he said this he moved his hand up and down the length of his chest—it was himself that he meant.

  Amon had nothing to say to that. He gathered Caedian into his arms and they sat together in silence on the hard bed, books and blankets scattered around them. “Come on,” he said after a while, murmuring it into Caedian’s hair. “We should go to the night meal. I hear there’s a mushroom sauce in the offing.”

  “Oh, fantastic. That changes the world entire.”

  * * *

  Amon woke in the night and found the bed empty.

  It was not entirely a surprise. Caedian often could not sleep and ended up wandering the long hallways of the stone city by himself. Sometimes when Amon woke alone, he went and looked for Caedian, finding him in one of the great empty chambers, lantern raised so he could look at the strange carvings on the walls, or dangling his feet in the coolest of the bathing pools. Sometimes he simply waited, or went back to sleep. So far, Caedian had always come back to him.

  The night meal had not been as restful as they had hoped. One of Adara’s twins had not been pleased with another night of drakeling meat, despite the mushroom sauce, and his childish petulance had suddenly turned into roaring, senseless rage. It had taken two of the dragonhunters to wrestle him down from the table where he’d stomped, breaking plates and kicking cups into the faces of the diners.

  They had taken him to the red rooms and locked him in, though not before wrapping him in blankets and tying him up so he could not hurt himself; he was too getting strong now to be held in place by an adult until the rage passed. After that, no one quite wanted to stay for seconds.

  Amon tossed in the dark, hands fisted into the blankets. They still smelled of Caedian, were almost still warm with him. He couldn’t have gone far—it would have been easy enough to find him.

  He stayed where he was though, staring up at the ceiling. It was too dark for him to see more than outlines and shadows. He could almost imagine that he was looking up at countless miles of emptiness above him instead of a mountain’s worth of rock. Tomorrow, he would go on patrol with Karenna and see the sky for the first time in too long a while. He hoped they would stay outside long enough to see the stars.

  He drifted in and out of sleep, haunted by a series of dream images too fleeting and distor
ted to make sense of. Then there was a distant sensation of warmth, of soft skin sliding in against him. His eyes fluttered half-open and he looked up at Caedian.

  He reached up and Caedian leaned against his hand. “Where have you been tonight?” Amon asked, voice hoarse with sleep.

  “I was speaking with Emil. She...she couldn’t sleep either.” He straddled Amon’s hips, just below the belly, and traced his fingertips in the thatch of his chest hair. “Am I keeping you awake?”

  “I don’t mind,” he said, and he let out a sigh. Caedian was rocking back and forth on top of him, one gentle hand tracing spiraling patterns on his broad chest while he used the other to steady himself against Amon’s hip.

  “Amon...” Caedian bit his lip.

  “Yes?” Amon was holding him by the waist, almost lifting him up and down. The curve of his manhood was sliding against Caedian’s own, a sweet and slow friction building in the fulcrum between them.

  “Nothing, nothing.” His hands clamped on Amon’s shoulders and he was pulling at them, half lifting him off the bed while he made soft, whining sounds under his breath. Amon sat up; Caedian’s legs wrapped around his waist as he slid into his lap.

  They kissed, slow and somehow cautious. Then Caedian’s tongue flickered in and out of his mouth, and the warm wet feel of him made pleasure throb between Amon’s legs. “Cae,” he murmured into the kiss.

  Caedian pulled back a little, blinking. “I want you inside me, Amon.”

  There was an odd seriousness to his tone—they rarely spoke when they made love, letting instinct guide them rather than words. Hearing it put so baldly sent a shiver of hot delight down Amon’s spine. “Are you ready for me?”

  “Use your fingers. Get your fingers wet and...” His breath hitched in his throat and he buried his face in the crook of Amon’s shoulder. His cheeks were burning hot. “Get me ready, Amon,” he whispered.