by John Tristan
* * *
He picked up Caedian’s trail at the edge of the forest.
Caedian wasn’t making any effort to hide his tracks—why would he, after all? He didn’t think anyone was going to be following him. There were trees marked with his passage, fabric or strands of white hair caught on a high branch, and traces of flat ground where he had stopped to rest.
There were moments in the long, burning day where Amon thought he had been followed—that Emil had sent Esper’s hunters after him to drag him back, or at the least strip him of his weapons and armor. There were cries in the forest that seemed like human voices, until their echoes came back to him wordless and bestial; there were moments when everything went quiet around him and the slightest rustle on the dry ground sounded like footsteps.
He hunkered down in what shadows he could find then, eyes flashing left and right, hand on the hilt of his sword. Every time, the eerie, watched feeling passed and he was alone in the pathless forest.
When the first gleams of starlight showed in the darkening, dried-blood sky, a dragon flew overhead. It was heading toward the mountains, wings beating hard; it let out an earsplitting roar that seemed almost joyful. Amon’s blood beat hard in his ears, a rushing roar like Esper’s waterfall. Let it pass them by, he prayed, let it circle the world a thousand times before finding them.
As if his prayers had been heard, the dragon wheeled up from its mountain-bound course and wound with serpentine grace toward the thin, pale edge of the moon. Another fierce, roaring cry echoed through the forest, like a giant sawing at a lyre with iron teeth. The trees seemed to shiver in its violence. Amon put a hand over his heart, feeling it pound within his chest. Dragonblooded, he thought—he recognized the awful joy in that roar, with its lust that could eat the world.
Was that the song sounding in Caedian’s heart, the rhythm that drove him to revenge? Or was it something simple and older: the love between brothers, between twins, who shared more than blood. They had been within the same womb once, sleeping in the dark. How could the woman who gave birth to them lock one in the darkness below the Tree?
He remembered the priest at the old dragonhunters’ temple and her easy sureties: Our hearts do not beat the same rhythm. Our blood does not share the same flow. It wasn’t hard to believe that of the elves, if all you knew was their rulership—the way they looked down on the City from their perch in the Tree like little gods. Those elves he could see making blood sacrifice to the Tree. Not Caedian—and not Seoras either. Their blood, their heartbeats, did not drum out their destiny.
The dragon’s last shadow vanished into the sky. In the time between its first roar and the last visible beat of its great wings the dark had come, falling like a curtain; the sky was black and clear, and the moon was a knife’s edge, cutting through an endless field of stars. Amon kept moving through the silence of the night, every now and then finding another trace of Caedian...Caedian, or another man moving through the forest like a ghost. There was a perfect footstep in the sucking mud by the bed of a creek, a broken drakeling bone sucked empty of its preserved marrow, a smear of blood staining a thorny branch hiding in the dark at shin height.
A queasy flash of rage tinted Amon’s vision cloudy white for a moment. Caedian had no armor, not even piecemeal armor; even the branches could draw his blood. Emil had sent him out to die, nothing more or less, and considered it a worthy bargain to keep him by her side.
He isn’t helpless. Don’t think that. A soft, considered whisper inside him stilled the rage. He flexed his gauntleted hand, spikes jutting out between his knuckles. Caedian was the one who had shocked him out of his rage with a kick to the balls, who had defied his mother and the lords of the Tree to find his brother, who had walked into death only to come out scarred and alive. Just because Emil Tanu had sent him into the dragonlands without armor did not mean that he was unprotected. She had given him a weapon, after all.
He walked until dawn then made camp on the edge of the forest—he had to sleep, or he would fall while walking. He took off the armor strap by strap and leaned it against a tree, took off his thick undershirt and folded it into a pillow. The morning air was cool on his skin. There was a blanket in his pack and he spread it over himself. It was not quite long enough to cover his feet, so he left his shoes on.
His sleep was brief and dreamless; he woke with the sun still high. Its warmth wound through the trees, casting dappled red shadows all over him. He lifted his hand and watched its blurry-edged shadow move over him.
A screeching sound and the crack of fallen branches echoed from somewhere within the forest. Within seconds Amon was on his feet. He rolled up his blanket, strapped his armor on—Taman had designed it well for a man on his own—and took up his pack, moving out of the forest as quickly as he could. The trees shook with some unseen and monstrous movement, but he saw nothing emerge into the daylight.
The wasteland stretched out before him, vast and disconcertingly empty. Black juts of rock formed sculptures against the sky. He took a breath and started his long walk into nothingness.
Behind him the forest screamed. He wheeled around, hand on the hilt of his sword.
It was halfway out of its scabbard by the time the dragon broke through the tree line.
The dragon was bigger than a drakeling, though smaller than the one that had wriggled its way into Esper’s outer cavern—a juvenile, all sleek black muscle save for its rolling fireball eyes and a gray, almost-pearly streak that ran along its flank like a lightning bolt. It turned its head this way and that, peering at Amon with first one and then the other of its flaming eyes.
Amon swung his sword out. It was a plain, functional piece of adamantine, honed to a killing edge. If he could swing it just right, putting all his strength behind it, he might be able to lop off the young dragon’s sleek head at the neck. Unless it decides to roast me first, that is.
It opened and shut its mouth, almost lazily, showing off that ream of jagged teeth. Amon was backing away, step by careful step. Not that it would do him much good—one beat of those wings and it would be on him.
The dragon’s head slithered along the dry ground, nostrils flaring. Deep within the cavity of its skull Amon thought he saw a blue-white spark, like a tiny star. There was something stilted about its movements, as if it was a puppet with half-cut strings. The streak of gray along its scales was an old wound, Amon saw, and badly healed. Some other dragon’s claws had raked deep into its side, and though its inner heat had cauterized it the muscles were still stiff and torn.
The sword was between him and its tilted, almost-smiling reptile mouth. If it was alone, if he was lucky, he might be able to take it down. Caedian, he thought, and he smiled. We’ll both be dragon killers then.
The dragon opened its mouth again. From the hollow of its throat there came a sound like grinding stone. Amon took another step backward, almost stumbling. The sound wasn’t merely in the air but in his head, a pressure on the inside of his skull. It tasted like his rage, all black abandon, but sharper and colder and full of a terrible amusement.
The dragon was laughing.
Fool, it was saying inside his head. The sudden knowledge it could speak, that it could think, was less jarring than the fact it stole Caedian’s voice from his memories to do it.
Fool, it said again, stripping away all the fondness and pain in Caedian’s remembered voice and layering it with its own sniggering contempt. You are a fool, Amon Vraja.
“Maybe,” he said. The sound of his own voice surprised him—and the dragon. Its head shot up and its teeth clacked together like knives. A swiveling red eye held his reflection for a moment, growing larger. Gripping his sword in both hands, he rushed forward. The dragon tried to twist away, but its movements were too slow, too stiff. Amon closed the distance between them and drove his weapon down into the dragon’s jaw.
The adamantine sword sliced th
rough its tough flesh and pinned its head to the ground. With two swift strikes of the spiked gauntlet—pop, pop—he took out the dragon’s eyes. Suddenly its grinding, arrogant presence in his head winked out, like a snuffed flame; all that was left was animal pain.
It stole my mind to think with. It was a strange notion, but somehow it seemed entirely right. Those eyes had burrowed into his mind and used its tangle of memories to give the dragon a moment of human thought—a moment which it had used only to mock him.
No wonder Caedian had stabbed the dragon through the eye.
In one movement he pulled the sword from its pinioned jaw and brought it down in a heavy strike on its neck, for once using every ounce of his strength, for once not holding back. The adamantine sword sheared through muscle and slipped between the tough verterbrae as though it was slicing fabric. The dragon’s head fell to the ground, pumping dark blood onto the soil.
Without another look at it Amon wiped his sword clean and resheathed it, then headed out into the wastes. Clouds had covered the afternoon sun; soon they blossomed out over the entire sky, dark as dragonflesh. He would see no stars tonight.
The ground was too dry and hard for tracks to show easily; he had lost Caedian’s trail in the forest in any case. He stopped at an outcropping of rock and laid his gauntleted hand on it, as if he could squeeze some information from it. Had he seen these rocks on their trek away from the City? He didn’t remember—couldn’t remember. Thunderclouds were gathering above, thick and threatening, but at least there were no flashes of dragonfire behind them.
He ate a slice of drakeling meat and slept again under the open sky, from the darkest hour of night until the sun rose. When he woke, the sky was still dark and full, crackling with the foreknowledge of storms. He had dreamed of orange eyes and the rolling waves of liquid fire in the forges below Esper; only that told him he had managed to sleep at all. He packed up, put his armor back on and kept walking.
The dragon’s voice echoed in his head, aping Caedian: fool, fool. It spoke with the spitting contempt of despair. The Last City was protected under its canopy, near invisible. Caedian had his maps, but even he could have easily gotten lost; Amon might wander the wilderness for months and then stumble on his corpse...
Fool. He shook his head as if he was shaking water from his hair, spat on the ground and kept walking.
* * *
On the day he ran out of meat, it finally began to rain.
The clouds had moved over the dry waste for long days, parting and reforming in the whipping wind. Sometimes they had parted long enough for him to see the red sky, or a growing scimitar of moonlight in the night, but soon they would bunch into dark blossoms again and block even the sun from view.
The day before, he’d come to a slab of black stone that he was sure, for an hour, was the bed of Caedian’s becoming. He stayed there, circling it like a priest doing a walking prayer around an icon, until he was sure it was not. It had tilted differently, it was flatter, the needle grass around it had grown in smaller bunches...or was he wrong? He had laughed into the emptiness then, half-sure he was going mad.
Now the rain had come, washing long days’ worth of dust and sweat from his skin, making soft pinging sounds on the adamantine of his armor. He tilted his head to the sky, opening his mouth to the torrent. It tasted almost sweet, this killing rain, dripping down his parched throat.
He kept moving; leather creaked in the rain as he walked. Behind the downpour there was a gleam of light near the horizon’s edge—then it was gone. Amon stopped in his tracks and narrowed his eyes. Again, something flickered for a moment, like portable lightning—something massive and iridescent in the distance.
Well. He rolled his shoulders, wiped wet strands of hair away from his forehead, tested the heft of the broadsword on his back. It’s a direction.
After an hour’s walking he knew what the light was—could see it clearly, even in the harsh fall of the rain.
It was the Last City, winking in and out of sight.
Chapter Thirty-Five
As he drew closer to the flickering canopy, he came to understand what was happening to the City, though not why; the elvish magic that hid it from view was failing. Between the moments when it turned to an illusion of shadow and horizon, he could see the lightvines wound through the buildings of the Rim and the high column of the Tree. From where he stood, it all seemed strangely small, vulnerable as a seedling cupped in an open palm.
Thunder boomed above; he looked up, scanning the sky for dragons. There were none that he could see, though perhaps they were just skimming silently above the clouds.
Caedian. His hands prickled and he reached for his sword. Could he have done this somehow? Could he have found his way to the City with Emil’s maps and...what? How could a canopy that had lasted a thousand years without a flicker—as far as Amon knew, at least—fail because of one man?
He shaded his eyes and looked up; he was close enough now that the very top of the dome of the canopy had become invisible. Looking at the City made his eyes water, the way it flickered from there to not there, from solid to smoke. He could see the outlines of the great leaves that made up the canopy with a kind of hallucinatory clarity, every vein of them outlined in the dark, green light-blood pulsing through them like a heartbeat.
Somewhere on that great green-lit dome there was a dark spot moving.
He thought it was a trick of the eye, at first, a piece of shadow floating unmoored in his vision, the way that afterimages of firelight would flicker on the inside of his lids after he had stared at a flame for too long. Then, slowly, he realized that it was something real and moving—something alive—crawling like a tenacious fly on the outside of the dome, every now and then leaving a green-bleeding gouge in its wake.
It was Caedian, making slow and painful progress to the apex, dragging himself up by his borrowed sword.
Amon shook his head, a reflexive denial. It couldn’t be; it had to be. The smallness of the Last City was wiped away in an instant, seeing that tiny moving speck make its laborious climb to the top. His stomach lurched and leaped inside him. Caedian must have circled the City—who knew how many times?—and found no door to admit him. So now he was making his way to the Tree, to the center, the only way he could, carving a path to the top in the thundering rain.
“Caedian!” Amon screamed his name, his voice half-swallowed by the thunder. If the small speck heard him, it gave no sign. “Caedian! Cae!”
His voice broke on the last syllable. He screamed, wordless, then cursed Caedian and the City and Esper and the Great Mother, cursed everything from the stars down to his own blood. He started running toward the edge of the canopy, sword in one hand.
Soon enough he had to stop running, to save his strength—the City was farther away than it seemed. When he reached it at last, the wall of the canopy was nearly sheer at the edge, with only the faintest hint of a curve—it was easy to believe that it went straight up forever.
Amon pressed his hand against it, watching it flicker sickeningly under his touch. He had expected it to feel smooth and hard as polished stone, or fragile as leaves, but it was neither. It had a strange give to it, like living skin, but rubbery and thick. The leaves of the canopy had a knobby texture to them, though the rain slid off of them as if they were smooth as polished leather.
He looked up. He had lost track of the little moving speck, but he could still see the bleeding gouges of its trail, of Caedian’s trail, leading inevitably upward.
For a moment he hesitated. There had to be another way. He could find the tunnels beneath the armory and temple, he could dig his way in...and by the time he had, Caedian might be long dead. There was little chance he saw of catching that far-distant climbing speck, but it was a better chance than trying to find it again once he’d dug his way into the City.
“Damn it anyway,” h
e muttered, and he laughed. “A dragon will find us and eat us all up before either of us makes it to the top.”
He punched his spiked gauntlet into the canopy. The spikes slid into the leaves without great resistance, and little drops of green-glowing sap—Like blood, he thought, like the tears from Seoras’s wooden eyes—formed in the holes when he pulled his hand back. He punched it again and with his other hand drove the sword halfway into the thick cover of leaves.
Slowly, inexorably, he started his climb.
* * *
Somewhere, after reaching the first hint of true curve in the Last City’s dome, all thought had dropped away from Amon. Some distant, still-aware part of him knew it for a way to defend himself against the awareness that the slightest slip of his hands meant death.
Climbing the dome had been easier than he thought, in truth. The curved veins of the leaves gave ample hand—and footholds, and where he could not find a place to pull himself higher, he did it by main force, piercing the skin of the leaves with his sword or the spikes of his gauntlet and dragging himself up with his own strength.
He heard nothing except the rain, slicing down from the sky and soaking him to the bone. If there was movement up ahead of him, if there were wide dripping slices in the canopy—trails of a passing sword—these were only signs that he was still going in the right direction. He did not allow himself to think anything more.
Lightning crackled above him, a momentary counterpoint to the flickering world below. His view of the City was winking out less and less now, but when it did, it made everything below him dark and unreal and for a moment he would be suspended in trackless space, with only the feel of the leaves below him and the security of his sword sunk up to the hilt into the canopy reminding him there was something real he was hanging on to.
One, two two, three three three. The counting song was in his head, the first conscious thought he had seemed to have for hours. He realized he was singing it, not to fight against a coming rage but to put a rhythm to his climb. When the Last City became real again below him, he could see he had long left the Rim behind. Now the Verdancy was spread out below him.