The Sheltered City

by John Tristan

  “All right,” Amon said, breathing heavily—strong and fast he might be, but the halfdeath took its toll on his lungs. Not to mention that the ache between his legs was still throbbing; that pain was going to last a long time. “You’re going to regret doing that.”

  The hooded man laughed—a strange, half-musical sound. “Believe me, I already am.”

  Amon snarled and drew himself back, then slammed his forehead hard against the hooded man’s nose. There was a satisfying crunch and then a wet copper smell; Amon stepped backward and the man fell, limp and unconscious, at his feet.

  Amon bent down to pick him up by the scruff of his neck. “Serves you right,” he muttered, and yanked the hood back from the man’s bleeding face.

  For a few long and horrible seconds Amon was frozen, staring down at the face of the man he’d just head-butted into unconsciousness. The man’s nose was knocked askew, blood leaking down his pointed chin, but the rest of him was beautiful.

  He was not handsome in the way of some well-made men, but flawless and symmetrical as a well-carved statue. His skin was a smooth, deep brown; his hair, loose around his shoulders, a blond so pale it was almost white. This was not the kind of man who spent his days pulling potatoes up from the farms in the Verdancy, even in the best of the family fields—certainly not the kind of man Amon rubbed shoulders with every morning, walking down the narrow streets and subways to his home. “Shit,” Amon said under his breath. “Shit. Please—”

  He pulled back the man’s hair in a clumsy fist. His ears had a leaflike tilt to them and were pierced with golden rings. Amon released the man’s hair and pulled his hood back over it with a hard yank. He wanted to swear again, but no sound came from his throat except for a kind of thin whistle.

  The man was no man at all. He was an elf-lord, down from the Tree.

  Chapter Three

  Amon stared at the elf for long, breathless seconds. Only the Great Mother knew what the hell he was doing on the Rim of Stone in a place like the House of Dust, but the why of it didn’t really matter. What did matter was the retribution he could bring down on them—on Amon, on Luba, on everyone who made their living at the House—with the least word, the mildest gesture. And Amon had just broken his nose, or worse.

  For a moment he considered leaving him there, under the lamp-tree, and simply running away. It was a second’s madness he allowed himself. Once the madness had passed, he scooped the elf up into his arms, as gently as he could, and walked back across the street to the House of Dust.

  Luba was waiting for him—she nearly elbowed half the crowd in the face making it to the door. “What do you think you’re doing?” she said through gritted teeth. “If you want to have your fun with that dreck, you go do it outside.”

  A tic pulled sharply at the corner of Amon’s eye. He lowered the man in his arms to Luba’s height. “Look at him.”

  “What—”

  “Look at him.”

  She did. A queasy horror settled on her face. Then she did a sharp turn away from Amon and marched up to the bar. “Get everyone out of here,” she said to Arbin. “Now. Quickly.”

  Arbin frowned. “Everyone? But—”

  “No arguments, Arbin.”

  He nodded. “All right.”

  “You.” She wheeled back toward Amon. “Come down. We’ll put him in one of the rose rooms.” She raised her hand to her mouth and bit down on a knuckle. “Yes. That will have to do.”

  Amon raised his eyebrows. “What about when he wakes up?”

  She dropped her hand. “Just get him down there, Amon.”

  He carried him down to the rose rooms. Luba’s boys and girls were lining the corridor, their curious eyes following Amon’s progress. Luba followed behind a few steps, after making sure Arbin and Banu were getting rid of the customers. “What the hell are you all looking at?” she snapped. “Get back in your rooms and close the doors behind you!”

  They did—they weren’t about to risk their own necks if they could avoid it. Tailan was still in the last room, pacing back and forth in front of the bed, but when he saw Amon carrying the unconscious elf, he dashed out without another word.

  Amon laid the elf down on the bed. The hood fell back again, exposing the sharp, smooth curve of his jaw. There wasn’t a shadow of stubble or blemish on him, except for the red stain leaking down from his broken nose.

  “Get—get the blood off him, Amon, please.” Luba’s voice was thin and fluting, nothing like her usual strident bark.

  It was easy enough to find a rag and some oil in one of the nightstands. He staunched the flowing blood, pressing the rag to the elf’s nose as firmly as he dared. After the bleeding stopped, he wiped away the crimson stain, leaving behind the faint, sweet odor of old flowers. When Amon was done, the elf looked almost as if he was sleeping. His nose still lay askew. It seemed to make him realer, in a strange way. Without that, he could have been painted on the world rather than part of it.

  Amon took a step back from the bed, twisting the oil-and-blood-soaked rag in his gray hands until it strained and tore at its seams. “What now?”

  Luba had lit up a pipe. Smoking inside the House of Dust, especially in the rose rooms, was a cardinal sin in her book, but it seemed that for now the rules had been suspended. She blew pale smoke rings toward the ceiling. “There’s nothing for it,” she said after a while. “I’ll have to get the constables. We’ll throw ourselves on their mercy.”

  Amon’s hands twitched. “Luba, please—”

  “Quiet.” Luba’s voice came out sharp as a whipcrack. “All right, I won’t call them yet. But you helped to make this mess, and you stay to make sure it’s cleaned up. Unless you want the constables to come looking for you themselves, when m’lord here wakes up and asks, ‘Where’s the man who broke my nose?’”

  Amon led out a long, shuddering breath. He could still feel the black pulse of the rage in his blood, somewhere below everything else, a nasty little reminder of how he’d almost lost control. And speaking of nasty reminders, his balls still ached with heartbeat-regular throbs of pain. Not that he had much cause to complain; without that kick to his crotch, he might have kept squeezing and squeezing until the rage had passed, and then they’d have had a dead elf on their hands. That would have meant a slow and unpleasant death for him and most likely everyone else in the House of Dust, as well.

  “Fine,” he said, trying to keep his voice flat and even.

  “Good.” The pipe had calmed her nerves, it seemed; the high whistle of her voice had dropped to something more like its regular timbre. “You’ll be keeping an eye on him until he wakes up and we can fall to our knees and beg forgiveness.”

  “What? I—”

  “There’s no one else that could handle him,” she said softly, “if he decided to get really nasty. You’re the only one strong enough to hold him back, Amon.”

  He considered putting up some token protest at that, but thought better of it. She was right, after all. Anyone else, an elf could break in half.

  She gave him a look and nodded. “Good. I’ll leave you to it.” She exhaled and wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. “Great Mother protect us. He’s not going to like this, is he?”

  * * *

  The elf lay on the bed, sleeping like a prince in a fairy tale. Half the day had gone now, and he’d still not woken.

  Amon had not had any sleep at all. He’d sat in a chair at the foot of the bed, watching. At some point he was sure he had nodded off; some dream-tendril had reached into the back of his mind and painted the candlelit dim with surreal, bright colors—the kind of colors he only saw in the moments when the sky turned and the early night outside it shone through, tinted with the last stains of the terrible sunset. Then his head had jerked up, and all he saw was the sleeping elf in front of him, his pale hair gleaming like freshly sp
illed blood in the red light.

  He kept being anxiously sure that the elf was awake. That he was listening to Amon’s every breath and movement, just waiting for him to come close enough to—

  He made a growling noise in the back of his throat. Close enough to what? He was an elf, not some monster from the dragonlands. He was more likely to have the constables haul him before a tribunal than to rear up and bite his throat out.

  The door into the room opened. It was Banu, with a plate of food. She looked drawn and spooked; Amon guessed nobody in the House had managed to get much sleep. Arbin had gotten rid of the patrons while Banu and Luba made sure all of the working boys and girls living at the House of Dust kept out of the way—not a few of them wanted to peek their heads in, curious as to what was going on.

  Banu set the plate down on his lap. “He wake up at all, yet?” Her voice was a hoarse whisper.

  Amon shook his head. He looked down at his food, a piece of yellow bread heaped with chickpea puree. His stomach gave an involuntary growl, but the appetite was all theoretical; he didn’t really want to eat. He didn’t really want to do anything.

  Banu put her hand on his shoulder. He had to stop himself from shrinking away. He knew she meant well, but still, being touched put him on alert. More so after a night and day awake and useless, watching a punch-drunk elf sleep the sleep of the dead on top of a whore’s bed.

  She drew back. “If he doesn’t wake soon, Luba will have to call the constables.”

  “I know.”

  “You’ll want to leave before they show their faces.”

  “I know,” he said. If the constables came it would be Amon they hauled away—to a cell or into exile, depending on the elf’s mood. Of course, if he did leave, it might be Banu and the rest of them who took the elf’s displeasure; he wasn’t sure he could leave them to that.

  Banu gestured at the elf in the bed sleeping in his black coat. “Did he speak to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it true?” She coughed and shuffled her feet. “Do they—do they sound like angels?”

  “No,” Amon said. He thought of the elf’s weird, musical laughter, and a ripple of gooseflesh traveled from the base of his spine to his neck. “Not like angels.” He scooped a glob of chickpea puree into his mouth then, chewing slowly, more to excuse his silence than out of any real hunger.

  He could not tell her what the elf sounded like, or looked like. He was singular. Even in the portraits of the elf-lords hung here and there in the older buildings of the Rim there were no resemblances. They stared down with wise, tilted eyes, dressed in the green-and-gold robes of emperors and priests, but whatever artist had painted them had captured nothing of the cutting, almost too-symmetrical beauty that marked this elf.

  Banu lingered for a moment longer then left, shutting the door behind her. Amon finished the food she’d brought him with a kind of dutiful sullenness, even cleaning the last remnants of the puree off the plate with a triangle of bread. When he’d stuffed the last bite into his mouth, he realized the elf was half sitting up on the bed, leaning on his elbows, watching him eat with curious eyes.

  He put the plate down on the floor with exaggerated care. Everything around him seemed to be moving very slowly. I should call for Luba, he thought, I should...

  “Where am I?”

  Amon’s movement—whatever it was—halted halfway, and he pulled himself back into a sitting position. “The House of Dust,” he said. “In one of the rose rooms.”

  The elf blinked. His eyes were clear and almond-shaped; Amon couldn’t tell what color they were in the candlelight. They looked almost orange, sucking in the fiery glow. “I’m still in the brothel?”

  “Yes.”

  His mouth twitched. “You’re the man who attacked me.”

  Amon said nothing. Any response would have been nothing save self-incrimination.

  “Well.” He pulled himself into a sitting position and gingerly felt his nose. It was still canted sideways; Amon wondered if it would always lie askew, an off-center flaw in a perfect face. “I don’t suppose the madam told you why you were instructed to stove my face in?”

  The madam. He must have meant Luba, Amon thought, but he said nothing.

  “You assumed—” He hissed with pain and withdrew his fingers from his nose. “You assumed that I was hurting the boy?”

  Amon hesitated. “Yes.”

  The elf shook his head slowly. “I never meant to frighten him. To frighten anyone. I’m—I’m looking for someone. A young man—he would seem to you little older than the courtesan.”

  Courtesan—that was a word for beyond the Verdancy, to be sure. Nobody called Luba’s boys and girls courtesans down here in the Rim.

  The elf swung his feet over the edge of the bed. “You would know him if you’d seen him. He looks much like I do. Pale hair, purple eyes.”

  Amon shook his head. “We don’t have anyone that looks like you here. You’ll want the fancy houses up on the—”

  “You misunderstand.” His voice had gone icy. “He is my brother.”

  A moment’s silence rippled between them. “An elf,” Amon said.

  The elf sighed and rubbed his forehead. “Of course. He is my twin.”

  Amon shook his head. “You’re the only elf I’ve ever seen in the Rim.”

  “How fortunate you are,” said a honey-dark voice from the doorway. “Today, you see two.”

  Amon stood up from his chair, accidentally kicking the empty plate across the room. It crashed against the wall and shattered. It remained there, completely ignored, while an elvish woman came in—trailed by Luba, her head bowed, subdued.

  She was near as tall as Amon, this woman, and her hair was whiter, her skin darker than the elf on the bed’s. She seemed almost an exaggerated version of him. Her sharp shoulders were draped with a cape that nearly reached the floor. She carried a staff of gleaming lightwood; the room filled with its gentle glow, blurring away the candlelight. Amon blinked, his eyes adjusting to the new, natural colors.

  “By the Great Mother’s angels, Caedian,” she said, in a half-amused tone, “what happened to you? You look...all askew.”

  “Lady Liléan.” He got up from the bed, his limbs still a little unsteady. Now that the staff of light lit the small room, Amon could see his eyes were indeed a deep purple. Liléan, on the other hand, had eyes of new-leaf green. “How did you find me?”

  “Someone had to.” She looked around, eyes passing over Amon almost without seeing him, as if he was part of the furniture. “Your servitors informed me where you had gone. I had hoped they had been somehow misinformed.”

  The elf—Caedian—stared daggers at her. “I’m looking for Seoras.”

  Liléan’s face remained fixed in an insouciant smile, but some other feeling flickered in her green eyes. “I doubt even your brother would be found in a place like this.”

  “Oh?” Caedian raised his sharp chin a fraction.

  “But you no doubt had your reasons to believe he could be found here.” She smiled, all patience and tolerance. “So, do you think he was?”

  Luba stepped forward. “M’lady, I swear to you, there was never an elf here that I—”

  Liléan raised her staff a fraction, and Luba went silent. “In a moment, madam. My son was going to speak.”

  “Was I?” He tugged his clothing back into place.

  “Did you find a sign of Seoras?”

  He glanced toward Amon a moment, his eyes unreadable—as if he had the answer to Liléan’s question. “No,” he said, with audible reluctance. “No, I haven’t. Not that I had much of a chance to ask my questions, since the madam called her brute on me.”

  Luba cringed, but Liléan favored her with an indulgent smile. “My dear, she has assured me she had no idea who you were. As for her ‘
brute’...”

  “You must mean me,” Amon said, stepping forward. Luba hissed between her teeth, but he ignored her.

  “You must mean me, m’lady,” Lady Liléan said, but she seemed more amused than offended. “You hired a halfdead as guard, Madam Luba? How absolutely inventive. I didn’t think there were any left alive.”

  “A hundred apologies, m’lady,” Luba muttered. “I will get rid of him, if—”

  She waved her free hand dismissively. “No, no, I quite commend you for it. He looks like he keeps the rabble in line admirably. It is too bad about my son’s nose though.”

  “He didn’t know either.”

  They all turned to look at Caedian.

  “He didn’t know I was an elf. None of them did. I was...hiding myself.”

  “Well, there you are then.” Liléan shrugged, her cape shifting over her shoulders, a waterfall of silk. “Unless you wish to take it further? It would be within your rights. Ignorance is no excuse, after all.”

  The elf hesitated a moment, glancing in Amon’s direction. Amon knew the protocol—he had been raised to it, after all. He should have had his head bowed, his eyes averted. Especially after breaking the elf’s nose. Some stubborn impulse kept his head up though. He wondered what Caedian was seeing in his black, blighted eyes.

  “An apology would suffice,” he said at last.

  Amon felt his hackles rise...but it wasn’t said in the same tone he’d heard from men drunk on love-in-darkness squaring up for a fight. Caedian’s voice had the unexpected harmonics of sincerity, as if an apology from Amon would actually mean something to him.

  “Well?” Liléan raised her pale eyebrows.

  “I am sorry, m’lord,” Amon said, still keeping his gaze locked to Caedian’s.

  “You had good intentions.” A corner of his mouth twitched, as if threatening to smile. “I think.”

  “That settles that.” Liléan swept her arm around Caedian’s shoulders. “Let’s get you out of here then. Mother above, you must be wanting a good bath by now.”