The Sheltered City

by John Tristan

  There was a man leaning up against the lamp-tree across the narrow road—not an unusual sight after the House of Dust and the places like it had shut up for the day. Still, something about him made Amon look twice. Some subtle sense tweaked at him; the man seemed out of place, in a way Amon could not quite put his finger on.

  The man was about a head shorter than him, but that was all that Amon could be sure of; he was wearing a long, hooded coat that blurred the outlines of his body. The leaves were on their last light, a glow faint as starlight, and the sky had not yet turned to the brightening green of day. All that Amon could see beneath the hood was a suggestion of dark skin and fair hair.

  “Hey, brother!”

  Someone collided hard against Amon’s chest; he took a reflexive step backward. A man of middle years, ragged clothes hanging off a too-thin frame, smiled up at him. His face was marked with the scars of the Grieving Men, who mutilated themselves in mourning for the Great Mother’s warrior consorts. They believed their gods had died in battle when the world fell to the dragons; for all its harsh rites, Amon thought it must be an easy faith to keep.

  “Hey, brother,” the man said again, in a lower voice, “do you have any—anything to spare?”

  His eyes weren’t quite pointed at Amon, as if he wasn’t really seeing him at all. A faint sour smell hung around him, the smell of stale fallingweed with an undertone of richer infusions, the kind he might need to beg in order to afford. “Just a few kings? So-something for an old dragonhunter, hey?”

  Amon had almost reached into his pockets for the man, but he stopped abruptly at that. “Fuck off,” he growled. “You never were.”

  The Grieving Man’s eyes seemed to settle on Amon for the first time, seeing the telltale marks: the black fingernails, the dark gray of his sclera. The man went taut, and his lips drew back from his teeth in a kind of half-conscious snarl. “Wh-who are you to say that, huh? I could have been out in the dragonlands long before your mother shat you out.”

  “You weren’t though.” Amon was sure of it, as sure as he was that water was wet. The last of the dragonhunters had died a decade ago, coughing out his lungs in black, cancerous chunks. The last of the dragonhunters had looked like Amon. This man wasn’t healthy, that was for sure, but his skin was brown, not corpse-gray, and though his eyes were bloodshot it was with red rather than black. “You weren’t a dragonhunter any more than I’m a fucking elf. So just go crawl back into your hole.”

  The man spat at his feet. “Fuck you, halfdead.”

  Amon’s eyebrows did a kind of complex dance. It was rare to hear it spat at him outright. “I was your brother just a moment ago.”

  The man was edging backward, sidling away from Amon, muscles jumping. He was getting ready to run. “Would have strangled you at birth if you’d been mine.”

  Amon parted his lips in a wide, toothy smile. “Good thing I wasn’t then,” he said, and then he barked out a sharp yell and jumped forward, just a little. It was enough to set the man running full tilt down the narrow street. When Amon straightened up and dusted himself off, the other man—the hooded man—was gone, and the leaves of the lamp-tree had lost the last of their gleam.

  Chapter Two

  When he awoke, the light through his narrow slit of window was fading to the color of dead leaves. He muttered a curse and threw back the covers—he’d overslept and missed all the green brightness of the day. It was a holyday tonight, and he was due back at the House of Dust to make sure the celebrants didn’t get too rowdy.

  He got up from his pallet and stretched cautiously. He’d lived in the same house since he was twelve years old—it had been Zoran’s last legacy to him, making sure he at least had a roof over his head. When he was twelve it had suited him fine, but the low ceilings weren’t built to accommodate his outsize frame, and he’d scraped his head on them more than once.

  He filled a dish with the grayish water he’d brought from the neighborhood pump the day before. He would have preferred to get it fresh, but the mothers of the neighborhood watched the pump with sharp and greedy eyes. Use too much, or what they called too much, and they’d complain to the constables; it was too much trouble for too little gain.

  He washed himself as best he could, scrubbing away the sweat of sleep with a ragged cloth. Afterward, he dressed and he breakfasted on two white-fleshed apples and a chunk of almond cheese studded with herbs. Before heading out into the alleyway he stopped, with his hand already half extended to the door.

  A corner of his mother’s trunk was peeking out from below his table.

  A memory from the morning before crawled back to him, dream-dim and somehow shameful. After coming home, he’d slid the trunk out from under the table and opened it, for the first time in perhaps a year. A jumble of junk had stared up at him: the battered box was filled with chips of strange stone; a massive, serrated tooth the color of tarnished silver, pitted with wear; a scrap of fabric that had once been bright as healthy blood.

  Zoran had fought hard for Amon to keep them, fought all the way up the chains of human command to the elf-lords in their Tree, even as the poison in him was eating away at his lungs. By rights, all booty from the dragonlands was forbidden within the Last City—even the smallest pebble might have some corrupting influence on the carefully tended life under the Tree’s sheltering canopy—but these things had long proved harmless, and Amon himself was already corrupted.

  What would the old dragonhunter have thought, Amon wondered, if he’d seen him keep his mother’s heirlooms hidden in a dusty trunk?

  Amon took two steps toward his table and kicked the trunk underneath it, sending it back into the dusty dark. It didn’t matter; whatever pride Zoran might have had in him would have been whittled to a sliver long before he’d hidden away his mother’s things. At least he had honest work now, of a sort, rather than thieving for scraps or shaking down drunkards for their coin. Still, what choice had he had? Other orphans might have gone begging in the Verdancy or found their way into the rose trade. Amon, gray and ugly with halfdeath, had not been able to do even that.

  He went outside and slammed the iron door to his tiny house so hard that the sound echoed for long moments in the silence of the alleyway. A door nearby opened, and one of his neighbors—a pale-skinned woman who had never introduced herself—poked her head out, then retreated the moment she saw Amon standing there. His shoulders tightened and his lips curled back from his teeth—what had he ever done to make her fear him?

  She’s right to fear you though. The inner voice that rose to whisper its entreaties was soft and vicious and mock-enticing. You could kill her without even trying. You could tear her head off with your bare hands if you wanted.

  He shivered and screwed his eyes shut, shaking off the images flashing behind his lids—images of blood and roaring one-sided battle that edged everything in red. When he opened his eyes, the world was clear again. He almost ran out of the alleyway, then, and started down his well-worn paths to the House of Dust.

  The place was already heaving when he arrived; tonight, he wasted no time loitering under the lamp-tree. The day guard, Kaspar, was standing in Amon’s spot beneath the lamp, playing with an ancient, verdigrised king. When he was bored, Kaspar perfected his coin tricks, making them dance from knuckle to knuckle on his scarred hands or vanish and reappear behind his ears.

  “Was wondering when you’d get here,” he said, pocketing the king.

  “Sorry,” Amon said, voice gruffer than he intended. He could still hear the echoes of his neighbor’s door slamming against the sight of him.

  Kaspar shrugged. “I owed Luba anyway, from last night.” He glanced over the sullen crowd. “They’ve been easy so far, but most of them just started drinking. Not sure what they’ll be like once they’ve sucked away their harvest gift.”

  “Any trouble in the rose rooms?”

 
He shook his head. “Been quiet down there. You know this crowd. They don’t tend to go down in groups.”

  Kaspar was right; these were Rim folk, more serious and sere in their habits than the farmers. They came to the House of Dust less for its flesh than because it served the hard stuff in generous portions; some even came with their wives and husbands in tow. Whatever exotic things tourists from the Verdancy got on with in the rose rooms wasn’t their business.

  That was what they would say, in any case, when they were clustered in their holyday groups. The man whose ribs Amon had broken for hurting Tailan had been a local man, a Rimdweller out on a solitary night.

  “My thanks, in any case,” Amon said, and he took up his vacated space beneath the lamp. Kaspar made a neutral gesture and went out the door without another word.

  Amon settled in, crossing his arms over his chest. The place was too crowded to drift off in, tonight. He had to keep his eyes open. With both Arbin and Banu kept busy, a few patrons took it on themselves to tinker with the harpsichord. Whatever discord they pounded out was near drowned by dozens of voices though, the low chatter mingling and amplifying until it was a grating din on Amon’s sensitive ears.

  More people entered, but few left; the Rimdwellers took to standing in tight clusters, hands clutching their mugs. A few who’d started early were sitting on the sticky floor, holding their heads in their hands. He couldn’t see Luba—the staircase to the rose rooms was blocked by a wall of milling drinkers—but he knew she was there from an occasional burst of familiar invective, or a rare bubble of harsh laughter.

  A lean, dark figure moved among the workers, alone in the crowd. Without thinking, Amon tracked the figure’s motions across the room. Anyone who stood alone drew his eye more than the tight-clustered groups. Those who drank or debauched together could be trusted to keep each other under control, more or less, but loners were wild cards. For a moment Amon couldn’t tell if the figure was a man or a woman, but then he half turned and Amon caught a glimpse of his profile shadowed under a black hood: a sharp jaw, and glittering bright eyes.

  It was the man from under the lamp-tree, the one he’d seen last night; he was sure of it. He was even wearing the same hooded coat. Had he been out there gathering courage the night before? It wasn’t quite forbidden to drink and whore in the House of Dust, but if you were a certain kind of person—a devout templegoer, or farmer gentry—it could wreak havoc to be seen there by the wrong eyes. This man didn’t look that sort though. Tension thrummed through his every movement, but Amon didn’t think it was the sweaty nervousness of someone having some forbidden fun.

  The man in the hood scanned the room for a long moment, then saw what he was looking for. The crowd had parted now; with long, sure strides, the man made his way to the staircase, heading down to the rose rooms. Luba wasn’t at her throne; she had recruited Kel, one of her older boys, to fill in for a while. The man in the hood threw his kings at Kel, barely even glancing his way.

  Amon snorted. Maybe he’d been wrong—maybe he was just farmer gentry sating his more exotic needs in the rose rooms so he could go back to the Verdancy and play the upstanding husband. It hadn’t been his first impression, but first impressions had been wrong before.

  “Hey, Amon!”

  His head whipped around. Banu was fending off a drunken young man who was trying to reach over the bar; his thin fingers were stretched out for the metal grille that held back the better infusions.

  Amon muscled his way through the crowd and picked the boy up by his neck. He wriggled in his grip like a forcegrown vine trying to find the light.

  “Hnn...” The boy was breathing heavy already, stinking of the cheapest fallingweed. “Get off me, damn you!”

  He turned the boy around and lifted him to eye height. Once the boy came face-to-face with Amon he went limp.

  “Causing trouble?” Amon’s voice rumbled low, but it cut through the noise of the crowd nonetheless.

  “N-ngh. No. No, sir.”

  “Good.” He set the boy down, a little harder than necessary. “Get the hell out of here.”

  The boy scurried away, frantically wiping at the places where Amon had touched him, chattering a child’s prayer: “Elf-lords protect me, Great Mother cleanse me, keep me safe from harm.”

  Banu snarled at his retreating back. “Ignorant little dreck.”

  Amon shrugged. He knew being halfdead was no small part of the reason Luba kept him on as a night guard; one look at his gray fists and the black veins bulging at the sides of his thick neck had taken the fight out of more than one cocky patron. They might try it on with Kaspar, no slouch himself when it came to muscle and glower, but even someone out-and-out looking for a fight might think twice before picking one with Amon. Not that they could catch the halfdeath—not without forcing his blood straight into their own veins, at least—but the fear of it kept them on their toes. “Forget it,” he said. “He’s not bothering you anymore.”

  “True enough.” She unlocked the metal grille in order to serve a few better-behaved patrons. “There’s that at least.”

  A scream cut through the murmurs of the crowd and the plinking harpsichord notes, and half the heads in the House turned to look in its direction. Amon was moving at once; the scream had come from the rose rooms. The harmonics of it sounded indignant—surprised, rather than in pain—but he wasn’t about to risk being wrong. Tailan’s face flashed before his eyes a moment, the way he’d looked after his patron had been through with him. He wasn’t going to let that happen again.

  He slid down the staircase into the dim hallway. Most of the doors were still closed, but one near the end stood ajar, and a burst of noise and chaos from inside told him the scream had come from there. He closed the distance between him and the door in a kind of half leap, his bulk blocking the doorway. “What’s going on?”

  He saw Luba inside, her face twisted in fury, and Tailan sitting stony-faced and silent on the edge of the bed. Standing in front of them was the man in black, his hood still shading his face.

  “Amon,” Luba said, lifting a claw to point at the hooded man. “Get him out of here. He’s not welcome anymore. And give him a gift to make sure he gets the message.”

  A gift from Luba was a nasty little accident; not too nasty—nothing that would bring the constables down on the House with a few pointed questions—but maybe a broken finger or nose and bruises that would last long enough to make anyone think twice about repeating what had led to it. Amon inclined his head to her and reached for the hooded man. The man didn’t struggle as Amon’s fist closed on his arm. He let himself be led along the corridor, going as limp as the drunken boy had when Amon had lifted him off his feet.

  The crowd ignored them; whatever was going on wasn’t their problem. Amon hustled the man through them and out the door onto the empty street. The lamp-tree was in full bloom, glowing like a bush full of stars. “You shouldn’t have hurt him,” Amon said, and he shoved the man down in front of the tree; he landed on his knees with a hard exhalation.

  Amon was about to kick him in the stomach when he looked up. For a moment he hesitated. This is wrong, he thought, this is all wrong. There was something in the man’s eyes, gleaming beneath his hood...

  “I didn’t,” the man said. He spun himself around in a complicated little whirl that raked his legs underneath Amon and brought him down hard on his rear end.

  Black light twisted behind Amon’s eyes, and the wind went out of him. When he’d struggled back to his feet, the hooded man was standing in front of him, gloved fists balled, legs apart in a fighter’s stance.

  Amon wiped his mouth. He felt a hard grin deform his lips. It had been a long time since anyone had managed to land any kind of solid hit on him, let alone one that had him on the floor. He hadn’t expected it from someone a head shorter than him and slim as one of Luba’s bedroom boys. “That’s how you wa
nt it, brother? All right. I’ll indulge you.”

  He lashed out with a meaty fist, aiming for the man’s solar plexus. The man twisted to the left; the blow still connected, but it was a glancing one across his ribs. The hooded man slipped beneath Amon’s guard and jabbed his fingers into his side, right in a cluster of nerves.

  Amon roared in unexpected pain. A dark haze was rising in front of his eyes, blotting out all of the world except for a narrow tunnel of pulsing red. No, damn it, no, not now, he thought, but the blood beating in his ears had its own inexorable logic.

  The hooded man took a half step back. “Listen,” he said, but before he spoke again Amon’s hand was around his throat, squeezing, lifting him off the ground.

  Amon felt the muscles of the man’s neck strain under his strangling fingers; if he squeezed just a little harder he might break the delicate hyoid bone, crushing his larynx. Amon’s grin was widening, showing more and more teeth. His face ached with it, but he was beyond caring, in the grip of his poison blood.

  A starburst of pain exploded between his legs. The hooded man had kicked up hard, foot hitting him square in the testicles. Amon moaned, and his fingers twitched just enough that the man could wrench out of his grip, landing on hands and knees beneath the lamp-tree. Amon was breathing hard, fists clenching and unclenching. The pain was just awful enough to clear away the dark haze of rage, leaving a kind of hollow nausea in its place—but a nausea that he could think through, at least.

  He still had to deal with the hooded man though, and giving him Luba’s gift was proving harder than he had expected.

  The man had scrambled to his feet. Before he could lash out again, Amon bulled forward and pinned him up against the tree, using his entire body to hold him in place. The man squirmed and tried to kick back, but Amon was leaning his entire weight against him; there was no way that he could move.