The Last Hour of Gann by Smith, R. Lee (10)

But no, he had reasons. She’d stood her watch, had carried back a timely warning, and had acted swiftly and well to preserve the lives of her people. All fair and good. And then she’d run off alone into the dark with her spear and stabbed it blindly into a damned tachuqi.

Except that she hadn’t been alone, truly. She’d begun, at least, with Scott.

And that made him…so angry.

That she had gone with Scott out after the tachuqi was bad enough, but he thought he could forgive it in time. What he could not—would never—forgive was the blood in Amber’s hair, the broken end of the human’s lamp, and Scott himself safely back at the fire telling him he did not know where Amber was. Even these thoughts in Meoraq’s mind put such heat in his throat that he could not swallow; he was actually drooling through his bared teeth like an animal. Again and again, he tried to count his breaths, but thoughts of Scott and blood broke every scrap of peace he found. The butchery of the tachuqi gave him only pale gratification, but at least it occupied his hands.

He brought the second beast’s bounty to the fire. Again, Amber took it without comment. The first tachuqi was roasting well, save for the salt-back, which she didn’t seem to know what to do with, and the marrow-rich bones, which she’d set aside as trash.

“Save those,” grunted Meoraq, pointing. He’d show her how to cook them when he was done with the butchering.

She nodded, silent.

He went to deal with the last tachuqi, musing as he went on her uncharacteristic quiet. Women should be quiet, of course. A good woman should be all but invisible in her man’s House. Or her father’s, rather. Then her man’s. It was unnerving to see Amber as well-behaved.

Then again, she had just faced down a hunting tachuqi. Courage and stupidity may have helped her wield the spear, but perhaps now that it was done, she was reflecting on her actions and how badly things might have gone.

Her shirt was torn. Had the spear been a hand’s width shorter…

“Idiot,” grumbled Meoraq, and began to cut the dead tachuqi out of its skin.

Midway through this difficult process, it occurred to him that he had called her an idiot to her face. She’d embraced him anyway (he was not going to think about that) but she still might have heard it. Perhaps he’d bruised her feelings.

Bruised. The image of Amber’s stomach behind the tatters of her shirt intruded, scratching across his mind and raising that fighting urge once more. It was light enough yet, but by dawn, her colors would be in as dark as thunderclouds. Fell on a rock, she said. Running in the dark after her tachuqi. And blissfully forgetful of all the fragile human organs she carried in that soft belly that could be split as easily as they could be bruised. She might have been seriously injured. She might have been killed.

Or she might not. He had to remind himself that a wound was not the same from human to dumaq. No creature he knew of showed injury so vibrantly or so easily as humans. Dumaqs bruised when they were young, before their skin thickened and scales grew in dark and hard. Meoraq could remember carrying the colors of his warriors’ training as proudly as if they were priestly medals, at least up to his fifteenth year and the beginning of his last growth. He’d come to it no earlier than the other boys in Tilev, but he’d had time since then to see boys outside the warrior’s caste. The sons of farmers and cattle-hands, the sons of craftsmen, the sons of priests—they were still grey and thin-scaled well into their seventeenth, even their twentieth years…

He thought about that in a distracted, brooding way as his hands went about their work uninterrupted, waking back to himself to find that he’d cut the tachuqi’s middle talon from its foot. He studied it there in his hand, his head cocked, curious and amused. He was still in his boyhood mind. Hunt-Master Takktha had taken his best students out into the wildlands occasionally to hunt tachuqi. If anyone managed to take one, it was his habit to award the boy the talon for a prize. It was not bladed and so stood fair in the sight of Sheul, but made a good knife for a boy, and a damned good story in the envious eyes of those who had to stay in Tilev. On the shelf below his sleeping cupboard at home, Meoraq probably still had the three talons awarded him over the years.

And was this Amber’s? Here she was behaving properly for the first time in all the days he’d known her, and he was making her a boy’s knife to go with her spear.

“I am a terrible influence,” Meoraq declared, tucking the talon through his belt. He could make her a hilt if they ever found decent wood to craft one from.

He went back to the humans’ camp in much smoother spirits than he had set out from it, hauling the last of the meat behind him and thinking ahead to the hilt he would make and the trick of sizing it for a human’s hand. Amber was still at the fire, alone. There were the tracks of tears on her face, although her eyes were presently dry. She did not seem to see his approach, although he made no secret of it. She saw him only when he flung his load of meat onto the heap, and it was with a start that she turned away to poke at the fire and the roasts and covertly rub at her cheeks.

He probably should not have called her an idiot.

‘Well, it was an idiotic thing to do!’ he thought defensively, and went over to have a better look at her. “Stand up.”

“Why?”

“Because I told you to.”

She huffed a breath out through her nose, not loudly enough to be a true snort, and looked away.

Meoraq caught her up by one arm and hauled her to her feet. She let out a hoarse cry and slapped at him, but he chose to overlook the blow and frowned instead at her flat, ugly face, which was now flat, ugly and horribly bruised. There was a scraped place along the plane of her left cheek, and a short gash at the tip of her ear which had bled enough to raise a few crusty spikes in her hair, but in spite of the swelling and the impressive color, he didn’t think the wounds were serious. Meoraq moved the shreds of her shirt (over her hissing and embarrassed protests) enough to see the bruise he remembered on her belly. It was huge, beginning just under the curve of her ribs and continuing on under the ties of her breeches, but it did not look swollen. He prodded at it cautiously and she smacked his hand. “Does this hurt?”

“Of course it hurts! Let go of me!”

He did, but he was frowning. “I want to see you urinate,” he told her.

She huffed again and sat down, returning her attention to the fire. “I wanted to see Midnight Eclipse when they played Madison Square, lizardman. Life is full of things we want and are never going to get.”

“Truth,” he muttered and rubbed hard at his brow-ridges. He was no surgeon, after all. If she had done herself an injury, Sheul alone could cure her.

The thought gave him surprisingly little comfort.

“These need to be cooked,” Meoraq said gruffly and hunkered down to make room on the coals for the fat and bones.

“I wasn’t sure that was food,” said Amber, not rude any longer, but only…dim.

He shouldn’t have called her an idiot.

‘Admitted, but I still would have thought of her as one,’ he thought. Aloud, he said, “When I bring it as food, you may be assured it is food.”

“Even the bones?”

“The bones especially.”

Her brow creased for a moment, then smoothed out in dismay. “Oh, is it more of that gross bone jelly stuff?”

“Yes. And stop making that face,” he added. “You need the marrow more than meat in these days.”

“I’m not having any.”

He snorted. “Yes. You are.”

“I don’t want it, Meoraq.”

“I don’t want to feed S’kot. Life is full of things we do not want to do and must do anyway.” He turned the strips of tachuqi fat, which were browning up nicely already. “Meat may keep the life in your body a little longer, but no one stays healthy on meat alone. The season for green leaves and grain is done. My cuuvash is spent. Marrow is what I have to give you and you will eat it.”

“I don’t see you forcing it on anyone else.”

“I don’t care about anyone else.”

It took a moment for him to realize what he’d just said.

Sheul brought His hammer down on Meoraq’s chest just once. He straightened up sharply to disguise his flinch and glared at her, thinking, ‘I said that. Why did I say that?’ and thinking fractured thoughts of her bruised stomach under her torn shirt, the clean streaks of tears under her dry eyes, and the little sound it had made—that muted, soft sound—when her body slapped up against his and she threw her arms around him.

She was staring back at him, but he didn’t know what she was thinking. Her eyes were too wide, too bright in the firelight. There was still blood on her cheek and in her hair; the urge to wet a cloth and wipe her face had barely formed before it had melted into the much less clear desire just to touch her. Not sexually (not at first), but just to touch. To feel her flesh, warm with life. To put his arm around her shoulders as he so often saw humans do with one another. To hold her and feel her holding him.

‘There is something wrong with me,’ he thought, and took the fat off the coals. He pulled his samr and served half the delicacy warrior-style, across the blade. She took it eventually and set it on her knees, staring at it instead of him. She shivered once.

“Eat it,” he grunted, and ate his off his kzung. It crackled open and melted in his mouth like a good custard, and he scarcely noticed. The rich, salty taste was a luxury in this world, prized by priests and lords and rarely savored even by Sheulek, but he could not enjoy it. He wished he knew what to say to take the heaviness out of the air.

Amber stirred herself at last and touched a fingertip to the roasted fat. It broke and oozed invitingly. “If I say something, are you going to call it whining?”

What a curious question. “I can’t answer that until I hear what you have to say.”

She rolled her eyes back and rubbed briefly at her face, then looked at him. “Fine. If I whine, will you shut up about it and just let me do it for once?”

“Probably not,” he admitted. “I have very little patience with whining, particularly when one is whining about the food.” He pointed.

She gave the fat a lackluster glance, but dipped her finger in the steaming inner jelly and put that in her mouth. Her mouthparts twisted into a grimace, not one of her smiling ones. “Why is everything you eat so damned gross?”

“Because these are the wildlands and here we eat for survival, not pleasure. Is this what you want to whine about? The food? When you should be thanking Sheul for His mercy that you are alive to eat at all?”

“No.” She took another taste of the fat and finally nerved herself to scoop up a quivering mouthful and eat it properly. Her eyes scrunched shut and stayed that way even after she’d swallowed. “This is indescribable.”

“Good, eh?” He took another salty bite of his own share. “Men pay high coin in the cities to eat salt-back roasted on real coals just this way. I prefer mine cooked with riak and czaa, when I have the chance. You might like yours better that way.”

“If it came baked in a bar of gold, I don’t think I could ever like this. It stings my mouth.”

He looked up sharply. “Are your teeth loose?”

“No, I’m just cut up some from when…” She didn’t finish. She looked away at the other fire, where humans huddled together to sleep or exchange low words. She watched them in silence for a long time and then rubbed at her face in a terrible, broken way. “I really screwed up with these people, Meoraq.”

That was a new turn of phrase and he wasn’t wholly certain of her meaning, so he said nothing.

“The worst part is, I don’t really know how. I don’t deserve this—I don’t think I do—but I don’t think I can stop it either. It’s not because I think I’m right all the time and it’s not because Scott’s a dick…or maybe it is. All I know is, I could walk over there right now with a spaceship in my arms and they’d probably club me to death with it before they thanked me for it.”

Meoraq leaned back in some surprise. “Do you want thanks?”

Now she looked at him, her brows furrowing. “Don’t you?”

“No. A Sheulek requires no man’s favor when he stands in God’s sight.”

“Oh come on. Don’t you think you deserve a ‘thank you’ after herding us across the wilderness and giving us food and water and then patrolling half the night to keep the man-eating chickens out of our camp while we sleep? Don’t you want just once for someone to appreciate it?”

He shrugged his spines. “Sometimes. I’m still a man and men can be petty, but I try to take the high path. Sheul may yet reward me for my efforts here; your people never will, I think. That cattle’s ass, S’kot, likes to keep them afraid of me.” He pointed yet again at her tachuqi fat and studied her face while she picked at it. “Did you think I hadn’t noticed?”

“He’s been pretty obvious, but you don’t act like you see it.”

“Because I don’t care. The world is filled with fools like S’kot, and worse, with the fools who let them act as wardens over them. They deserve each other. I don’t care what they think of me and neither should you.” He pointed at her tachuqi fat. She rolled her eyes again, but began at last to really eat it, and after she had taken several bites and he’d had time to think, he said, “I am Sheulek. Have I told you what that means?”

“It means you’re a foot.” She glanced at him. “A wandering soldier or something, right?”

“A Sheulek is more than a warrior. We are the instruments of God’s judgment.”

“I don’t think I got that.”

“Sheul’s will is not always manifest to those of us who dwell on Gann. When conflicts arise that cannot be settled by men, we Sheulek are called to mediate. Most of these matters can be settled with words,” he added, taking back his samr to clean and sheath it. “If you have conflict with S’kot, call him forth and I will mediate.”

“I don’t think that will go over too well.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, court will be in session all of three minutes before you bang the gavel down on Scott’s fat head. Admit it,” she said, giving him half a smile that did not much touch her eyes. “You’d love the excuse to take him out.”

“You think I have had no excuses before this?” He took a bite of his salt-back, swallowed, and added, “I don’t need one anyway. One of the privileges of carrying these blades is that I can use them against whoever I want. Yet for now, this moment, I must believe Sheul put him in my path for a reason.”

She snorted. “Maybe it’s to kill him.”

“Father, hear Your son’s desire, but in the meantime, I don’t require his good opinion of me,” said Meoraq with a dismissive flex of his spines. “It wouldn’t mean much, coming from him.”

“Easy for you to say. You don’t have to live with these people.”

“Neither do you.”

Her eyes rolled. She looked at the fire and moved roasts around.

“If you want his approval,” said Meoraq bluntly, hating even the taste of the words, “give him yours. Lay your open hand at his boot for all your people to see and his favor will fall like rain.”

“No. He’s an idiot. And I know you think I’m an idiot too—”

He never should have said that.

“—but if I just smile and let him do whatever he wants, he’ll kill us.”

“Do you believe that?”

“Yes!” She stopped and frowned into nothing for a few moments. “Yes,” she said again, with less heat but more feeling.

“So. Do what is right. Stop pursuing the gratitude of your pathologically ungrateful people.” Meoraq put a hand on her bent knee and leaned forward until his face and hers were a breath apart. “And stop whining.”

It seemed the right thing to say, for a change. She smiled a little anyway, and when she smiled, it was as though a cold hand reached directly through his flesh and squeezed at his stomach.

He had nearly lost her this night. A thumb’s width of bone at the end of her stupid spear had been all that made the difference between his Amber sitting at this fire…or burning on it.

Meoraq gave her a tap and stood up, looking away. “Mind the meat,” he said unnecessarily. Of course she’d mind it. “I need to do something with the carcasses before the ghets come.” He hesitated, then looked down—not directly at her, but close—and said, “You were very brave tonight.”

“And stupid.”

“But brave.” He reached…but closed his hand into a fist and walked away without touching her. He wanted to. And that was why he just didn’t dare.

 

7

 

Amber fell asleep while cooking, which, if someone had told her it had happened to them, she wouldn’t have believed was possible. In the aftermath of the tachuqi attack, she had thought she would be awake all night and so she’d busied herself with chores while the others gradually went back to sleep, ultimately ending up behind Meoraq’s tent with a small fire and the stewing pouch, washing up and crying some more. The next time she checked on the meat, Meoraq’s mending kit had been set out in a conspicuous spot, so she went back behind his tent to see what she could do with her shirt. The hanging shreds were beyond help; she ripped them off, then went ahead and ripped the whole shirt up to the neck and started sewing. The new seam was as ugly as a surgery scar, but the shirt fit a lot better, so she did them all the same way, even her sweaters from home, leaving only her last new Manifestor’s shirt still folded and untouched in the bottom of her pack.

She didn’t think she was tired, the same way she didn’t think she was too badly hurt, but with her adrenaline burned out and her emotions pulled thin, a full stomach and a dark night, it happened. One moment, she was leaning over a half-sewn shirt to turn slabs of meat on live coals, and in the next, it was day and Meoraq was shouting the place up: “I said, get back! That is for smoking, not for eating! You have had all that I mean to give you today!”

She woke up, but not fast. Her head felt cottony, thick with hurt, but her head wasn’t even half the problem. She’d never hurt so much in her life. Her stomach was a furnace of so much sick heat that it felt almost like a separate entity—a pregnancy of pain—with a weight and a pulse all its own. She had to touch it, thinking with half-asleep logic that she could measure the extent of her internal injuries by how much swelling she found, but decided she must still be dreaming once she had. ‘I am not this flat tummy,’ she thought decisively, and was comforted. She left her hand on the stranger’s stomach, though. It hurt to bear her hand’s weight, but it felt good to be cradled, and after she’d had a few minutes to brace herself, she sat up.

It wasn’t easy and it wasn’t quick, but she made it happen. Cold air hit her as gravity took her blanket away, forcing her to pull it back up. While it would have been exaggeration to say that the blanket felt like it weighed a hundred pounds, she could honestly say it felt like ten, and that was ten too many for the arms that had kept a giant man-eating ostrich at spear’s length the night before.

All these thoughts had time to pour themselves, thick as syrup, redly throbbing, through her head before Amber noticed it wasn’t her her blanket. Her Fleet-issue sheet of tinfoil was nowhere to be seen. In its place was a real blanket made of some heavy woven material, dark red in color, wonderfully warm. After that sank in came the real shock: she was in Meoraq’s tent, lying on his bedroll, which had her grass-bundle-and-waxed-saoq-hide one, great as it was, beat all to hell.

While she was staring at this in a stupefied kind of horror, a lizardman’s shadow grew suddenly huge and dark on the wall. “Be quiet!” Meoraq hissed. “If you say one more word, S’kot, even to beg my forgiveness, I will split you down to the ground! Great Sheul, O my Father,” he continued under his breath, “see Your son in his hour of trial and give me the strength to keep from killing that ass-headed fool just one more day.”

With that pious thought hanging in the air, the mouth of the tent rippled, bulged and finally opened. He stuck his head inside, moving carefully and making no sound, only to see her already sitting up.

His spines slapped flat. “Fuck,” he said, and withdrew. His silhouette twisted, his long head turning in profile, sparking some vague storybook memory—a dragon, a cave, a damsel in distress—before he shattered it by shouting, “Get back, you pack of ghets! You! If I see you reach your hand toward my fire again, I’ll cut it off! Back!” Then he looked in at her again.

“Hey,” she said.

He glowered and came all the way inside, flinging the flap shut behind him like it was a door he could slam. Muttering savagely under his breath, he dropped to one knee and began rummaging through his pack. His spines were still flat. Those yellow stripes were out and glaringly bright on his black throat. Amber re-thought her ‘What the hell am I doing in here, lizardman,’ approach and said instead, “I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”

He grunted, pulled a rolled-up mass of something from his pack, and tossed it at her. It fell open on impact and dropped into her lap. Some kind of leather shirt, long-sleeved, nicely-tailored. His spare tunic.

She hurriedly pushed his blanket down, exposing her mended shirt with the new black stitching staggering its way from neck to hem. It was still a little big on her and the cloth puckered and bunched all along the ugly seam, but it covered her. “I don’t need that. I fixed my shirts.”

“I decide what you need. Put it on.”

“Meoraq—”

“Put it on.”

“I can’t!”

“Don’t whine at me. Put it on.” He leaned back on his heels and looked at her, rubbed his throat, checked his belt buckle, and suddenly spat, “How do you feel?”

Amber plucked listlessly at one sleeve of the tunic. “About this?”

“I don’t care how you feel about that!” he snapped. “How badly are you hurt?”

She dropped her eyes to keep from looking at his, which were blazing, bright as fresh blood, furious. He wanted to get moving, of course. She’d slept half the day away already, and yeah, she hurt, there wasn’t a square inch on her that wasn’t reliving last night—worst of all her stomach, which felt like she’d swallowed a hot, jagged rock—but she for damn sure wasn’t going to whine at him about it.

“I’m okay,” she mumbled, looking at the tunic. His tunic. The tunic everyone was going to see her wearing.

Silence. He was staring at her. She could feel him staring, even though she didn’t dare look.

Outside the tent, people were talking, moving around. She found herself wondering who’d started the morning fire, who’d topped off the flasks. Her stomach hurt.

“I’ll be out in a minute, okay?” she said finally, desperately. “Just let me get myself together and I’ll be ready to go.”

“Take all the minutes you want,” he replied. “You’re not going anywhere today. Tell me where it hurts.”

“I’m fine.”

“You may not go anywhere tomorrow either,” said Meoraq, just as if she hadn’t said anything, as if she weren’t even there. His scaly fingers closed on her chin, forcing her head back. He glared at the side of her face, then pulled her chin down almost to her chest so he could see the top of her head. When he was satisfied with that, he nudged her shielding arm aside and pulled her shirt up to expose the plum-colored skin of her stomach. She sat there, clutching his tunic and waiting for it to be over.

“You’re very quiet,” he remarked, prodding inevitably right where it hurt the worst.

“Does anything I say matter?”

“What would you say if it did?”

“We have to keep moving.”

“Then, no, it does not.” He dropped her shirt and pinched her chin again, having another look at the side of her face. “We leave at my command, and I wait upon our Father’s. No more arguments.”

Amber shut her eyes and waited until he was done thumbing through her hair.

“I have tea and a little stew I want you to take,” he said at last, releasing her. “And then I want you to rest.”

The thought of having to eat anything put another hot, jagged rock in her stomach. They ground together, breaking off points that stabbed their way into her heart, her throat, her eyes.

Amber nodded.

He grunted and left, letting in a great gust of frigid air before the flap fell shut behind him.

Amber pushed his blanket back and moved off of his bedroll. She put his tunic on over her shirt so she wouldn’t have to feel it touching her skin. It was soft and warm and a bit stiff. It smelled faintly of smoke, but mostly of new shoes; it had never been worn. She cried a little, but only a little. Then she scrubbed her eyes dry on her sleeve, put her boots on, and crawled out of his tent.

The sun was even higher than she’d thought, almost directly overhead. Everyone was up, milling restlessly through the camp with nothing to do, nowhere to go. She saw Nicci first, because Nicci was there on Amber’s mat where she could dimly remember leaving it, although the memory felt days old, unreliable. Amber limped over, holding her stomach in the cradle of one arm, and bent laboriously to collect her spear.

Nicci watched solemnly until Amber had straightened herself out. Then she huddled up tighter under her blanket—hers and Amber’s both—and said, “Are you all right?”

All her life, no matter how she’d actually felt at the time, the answer to that question had been yes, usually in the kind of scornful, impatient tone that was meant to make the other person sorry they’d ever asked. Now, although she still could not bring herself to admit to the truth out loud, Amber shook her head.             

“You look pretty bad. Amber, I…about last night, I mean…” Nicci looked away, shivering under her blankets, toward Scott’s fire. Toward Scott himself, standing by his tent and watching them. She dropped her eyes, not looking at either of them anymore, but said, “Do you need help? To…you know…go?”

Amber considered it, which was depressing enough, but in the end, she knew that no matter how uncomfortable the short walk to the boulder designated as the bathroom might be, it wouldn’t hurt any less to hang off Nicci’s arm. She shook her head again and limped off alone.

By the time she managed to shift her clothes, squat without falling over, pee out the shrieking leaden hell in her guts, and put herself right again, she had begun to feel dizzy as well as tired and hurt. Feverish. Gripping her spear, she sat on the rock that had hidden her bathroom activities from camp and bent forward as much as her stomach would let her, letting her swimming head dangle over her knees.

“Here you are! And by Gann’s closed hand, here you are alone!”

She raised her head just enough to see Meoraq’s boots stomping toward her through the grass. “I had to pee,” she said dully. “I don’t do that in front of an audience.”

He kept coming, which she expected, and when he reached her, he took her by the chin and forced her to sit up straight. She more or less expected that, too. But the hand that wasn’t iron at her jaw was gentle as he stroked her hair back and peered into her eyes, and the yellow stripes at his throat had faded almost entirely to black. He was still glaring, but it was hard for lizards not to glare.

‘He said he liked me,’ she thought suddenly, which was not exactly true. What he’d said was, ‘I don’t care about anyone else,’ but the implication was there. He’d said that and then he put her in his tent to sleep and gave her his tunic in the morning and where was she supposed to go from there? She found herself wondering…if she put her arms around him right now, would he give her another of those stilted pats? Or would he hold her?

“I would be very clear now,” he murmured, rubbing his thumb lightly back and forth beneath her left eye. It hurt a little, like it had bruised up. She didn’t think she’d even been hit in the eye, just the ear. “You are not to leave my camp. Not alone. Not in company. Not at all. How do you mark me?”

“I’m still in camp. This counts as camp.” She watched his red eyes move, reading all the pain the old Amber could have kept hidden, thinking how easy it would be to just let go of her spear and hold on to him instead. “It isn’t your camp anyway.”

He snorted, but even that was gentle. “Whose then?”

“It belongs to all of us.”

“Ah.” He stepped back, gesturing for her to stand, which she eventually was able to do. He watched, spines forward, intent, as she took her first steps, then joined her at her side. He said, “I took a talon on my first tachuqi hunt.”

“Oh yeah?” She had no idea what that meant.

“Truth. And on my second, I took its foot to my chest. Why I wasn’t killed, only God could say. As it was, I was thrown some distance and briefly lost my reason, but I was able to walk back to the city and I slept in my own bed in the billets that night.”

“Wow,” said Amber, because she felt like she’d ought to be in the conversation. She hoped her noticeable lack of enthusiasm didn’t make it seem like she was being sarcastic, but she just hurt too much to care.

“I remember thinking that night how blessed I had been. A few shallow scratches, a knock on the head—hardly worth the mention.” His spines flicked. He glanced at her, smiling in that severe, lizardish way. “Come the morning bell, I felt as if I’d been nailed into a crate and thrown down the stairs.”

That was such an apt description of what she feeling that Amber managed a thin, strained smile.

“But the following day was tolerable, if not pleasant, and the day following that, I decided I would live after all. Every day, Soft-Skin.” He tapped her companionably on the shoulder. “A little better.”

“In the meantime, I’m making things worse.” She stopped walking while they still had some privacy, leaning heavily and with shaking hands on her spear. “Look at me. I’m not going anywhere today.”

“No.”

“You don’t get it.” Amber looked into camp, where more than a few faces were turned toward them, watching. “We’ve used up all our screwing-around time and they all know it. Now they all know I’m going to slow us down even more. Acting like it doesn’t matter doesn’t make me feel any better.”

“It matters,” he said mildly. “But if Sheul wills that we are on this side of the mountains when the snows come, so be it. Xi’Matezh will wait for us.”

“We’ll starve to death if that happens.”

He thumped her lightly on the forehead with one knuckle. “You forget that I have wintered in the wildlands before.”

“With fifty people to feed?”

His expression did not change in any way that she could see, but it became more thoughtful all the same. It was not, however, a good-gracious-I-hadn’t-thought-of-that kind of thoughtful, but more of a how-can-I-dumb-this-down-any-further? “God has set me on this road,” he told her. “And God will see me reach its end.”

“I’m sure he will,” said Amber, rubbing at her eyes. “But God has made it pretty fucking clear that he doesn’t care if the rest of us die.”

“Do not be blasphemous.”

“Don’t be a zealot,” she snapped back, and rubbed her eyes some more.

“Come.” Meoraq tapped at her carefully with his knuckles. “I have tea for you.”

“I don’t want it.”

“I know. Come anyway.”

Amber raised her head. One of the women was pointing at her, saying something unheard to the rest of them while they all stood outside the Resource Tent and shivered in their worn-out Manifestors’ uniforms. One of the others shrugged and, looking Amber right in the eye, made a crude circle of one fist and rammed her finger into it a few times. A riot of ewwws and Oh Gods drifted toward her on the wind as they laughed.

Nicci was with them. She didn’t laugh, but she didn’t walk away either.

Meoraq put his hand on her back and gave her a little nudge.

She looked at him, wishing she was the old Amber, the tough Amber, the Amber who could just walk away. She dropped her eyes back to the toes of her resoled boots and let him take her to his fire.

 

* * *

 

After his own encounter with the tachuqi that had kicked him to the ground, a young Meoraq had been on light detail a total of fourteen days. He wished he could give Amber the same, but he simply couldn’t.

On his frequent patrols, taking careful note of each fresh ghet-track and gnawed tachuqi bone, Meoraq found himself thinking of the road they had crossed outside of the ruins. The Gelsik road, he thought, although the particulars didn’t matter. It would lead to a city where Meoraq could declare conquest and demand enough cuuvash from its provisioners to make the rest of his pilgrimage without worry. He would have to demand a cart and a young bull to pull it, and since it seemed wasteful to haul two or three hundred bricks of cuuvash in an otherwise empty cart, he would demand enough tents and blankets to keep all the humans out of the weather. Warm clothes for Amber…and maybe even a new wristlet.

But as tempting as the thought was, he knew he would never do it. If pressed to give reasons, he could have said that this was a holy test set before him by Sheul Himself, and if the only way he could come through it was to cheat, he had already failed. That was a good reason, one that left unsaid the far more honest facts that if he took the humans with him to a city, his pilgrimage might well end there, and if he went alone, Scott would leave Amber to her own care, which was no care at all.

So Meoraq thinned the tachuqi meat as much as possible by stewing it with all the edible roots and leaves he could forage, and on the morning of the third day following the attack, when the last bitter drop was taken (given to Amber, fed to Nicci), he gave the order to strike camp and move on.

They walked, and if Meoraq had wagered his own left foot against the making of three spans distance in the course of that day, he would yet be walking. Even the humans complained it was not enough—there had to be some black joke in that—and Amber’s name was in all their mutterings.

She had begun well enough but soon flagged, dropping further and further behind until she and her Nicci were only two dark points on the very edge of the world. At first she carried her spear, then dragged it behind her, and finally began to lean on it. Meoraq spent much of the day looking back from some ridge or another, watching her struggle, thinking of himself limping along just that way, and the fourteen days he had been given for healing. But that was fourteen days within the walls of great Xeqor and this was the wildlands. He knew she was driving her exhausted body to the very edge of collapse so that she would not be a burden to them. He knew also that she was a burden anyway.

Meoraq had been the tool of Sheul’s judgment all his adult life. The unfairness gnawed at him.

That evening, after his camp was made (if it could be called evening while the sun was only half-fallen from its highest point), Meoraq went alone into the plains on the pretext of hunting. There, he removed his harness and his tunic, and bent his neck before Sheul. He prayed, reciting the Deliverance through all twelve invocations, and meditating until his heart was clear and all his clay was numb with cold.

When this was done, Meoraq bent yet further, gathering a palmful of wet earth to daub over his mortal heart. The wind dried it to a gritty shell against his bare skin in moments. He bowed low, shivering, to press his hands flat to Gann. His prayers were not ended, but only begun.

“O my Father,” he said, “hear Your son. I cry out to You from the darkness where I am in desperate need of succor. Great Father, the cold season is almost upon me and I can see no way for all the humans You have given me to survive such a wintering. I know that the lives of these few humans are a small measure of the hundreds of families who would depend upon me if I am called to be steward of Uyane’s line in Xeqor and I am ashamed to show my face to You and admit that even so, the burden is too great. I must cry out to You, merciful Sheul, for shelter in the wild places, for food in the hour of famine, and for strength in the bodies of the weak.”

Meoraq paused to reapply humility in the form of mud on his exposed chest. He could not feel it anymore. His shivering had become a constant tremor throughout his limbs. It took great effort to bend back to the ground without sprawling across it—effort that made him think of Amber fighting one foot down in front of the other, where his thoughts had been since this prayer began. Now he must come to it.

“Great Sheul, O my Father, You have called me to this pilgrimage and given me the honor of this ordeal. My heart is sick with shame that I cannot steward these humans without Your intervention, but I must be shamed, O Sheul, or I must see them die. We have been too long in the wildlands and with this new attack upon my camp, we will be there longer still. A woman was injured…” Meoraq trailed off, painted more mud onto his numb and aching chest, and said, “A good woman was injured, but by Your mercy, she lives. Now I bend on her behalf.”

Hearing those words spoken aloud, even before Sheul who surely knew all things, made Meoraq profoundly uncomfortable. He hesitated, then said the words which were soon to haunt him: “Her wounds slow us all and I cannot tend these humans in the wildlands indefinitely.” This was truth, but even truth could be molded into many shapes. “I ask You as Your true son who has served and loved You all my life, relieve her of her pains and so relieve me of this burden.”

Dead grass rattled in a slow gust of wind. Meoraq raised his head, but the plains were empty and the skies above were growing dark.

“I leave myself in Your hands, O my Father,” he said finally, decisively, “as You have left them in mine. Be with and watch over Your son as I tend them, and bring us safely to Xi’Matezh. I am ever grateful for Your blessings, for every breath is Yours, O Father, and I thank You humbly for each pain that I am alive to feel.”

He bent one last time, touching his brow to the muddy grass and holding it there while he took a slow count for the Six and spoke their names. Then he dressed again and went on his hunt while he still had light enough to see the ground.

He found a dead corroki calf lying close to a trampled tachuqi in the muddy path of its herd with an obvious story to tell: A tachuqi attack and a vengeful cow whose herd rallied around her. The tachuqis retreated when one of their half-grown chicks was killed, moving on after easier prey (Meoraq thought it very likely these were the self-same tachuqis who had come upon his own camp, now three days behind him). The corrokis lingered, waiting for their cow’s animal grief to dim, and finally traveled on this morning. The tachuqi’s carcass was too mangled to serve him, but the calf, well-preserved in the cold, would feed his hungry humans for many days.

Meoraq began cutting the calf out of its armored plates, grateful now that he had made his camp in the middle of the day. All things served according to Sheul’s design. He heard all prayers and answered.

That thought too would haunt him.

As the sun sank low behind the clouds, Meoraq returned to camp, dragging the first load of meat on a crude litter fashioned primarily from the calf’s own back-plate. He dropped it by the fire, heaved a great stack of human packs off the sled he had made, oh, a brace of days ago, then beckoned to Scott and his servants and went to cut some poles so he could make a second.

Eric alone came to him, but he listened to Meoraq’s commands and put together a fairly competent sled with a minimum of instruction. Meoraq, in a generous mood, gave him a tap on the shoulder and even refrained from pointing out the areas that could have used improvement. “It isn’t far,” he said, taking up the tether of his old sled while Eric manned the new. “But it will take more than one journey and I want to run if you can manage it.”

“Where do you think you’re going?”

Meoraq stopped and looked at the sky. ‘I am grateful,’ he thought. ‘For every pain that I am alive to feel, O my merciful Father, I am grateful.’

He turned around, but he was not the one under attack. Scott and his remaining two servants, Dag and Crandall, were on their feet before the fire (before the slab of meat Meoraq had brought them also, he noted), staring Eric down.

“I need my people here,” said Scott, furiously pointing at the ground beneath his boots. “If Meoraq wants help, he can use Bierce.”

“She’s hurt,” said Eric.

“I’m fine!” Amber called, struggling to rise from her mat.

“Sit down,” Meoraq said.

“But I can—”

“Sit.” He glanced at her, lowering his spines warningly, and she sat. When he turned back to Scott, the cattle’s ass was right in front of him.

“Stop giving my people orders,” said Scott. “If you want something, you respect the chain of command. You ask me and I’ll consider whatever it is, but stop giving my people orders.”

And while Meoraq was still reminding himself that he was the master of his clay and it would upset everyone if he cut Scott’s head off in front of them, however deservedly, Eric—of all people—suddenly said, “You gonna stand there with him and bitch about the chain of command or you wanna come pick up some food?”

It was unclear to Meoraq just which of them he addressed, but Dag and Crandall both pinked up in the face and dropped their eyes. After some uncomfortable moments, they shuffled away from Scott to stand with Eric. And it was Eric who looked his furious abbot in the face and said, quietly, “You need to get over this, man. You need to. Because this planet is not fucking around anymore. It’s going to kill us.”

“When we get to the skyport—”

“If there is one,” said Eric. “If.”

They locked eyes. All around them, watchful humans fidgeted and whispered. It was very strange to be one of the watchers instead of the one fending off Scott’s challenge, to feel none of the hot pleasure in seeing Scott skulk away, but only a growing unease. The storm had not passed, but was only darkening.

Like the sky, he thought with another upwards glance. What was coming with Scott…it would just have to come. Until then, he had work to do.

It took four trips and two sleds to strip the calf of all usable meat, and by the time they were finished, night was full upon them. The humans led the way with the light from their lamp-machines until they could see the fires that Amber had built. She was roasting the meat, stewing the organs, and hammering away at the marrow-bones with a rock when Meoraq came up beside her.

“This stupid fucking disgusting glop is not worth the effort it takes to get at it,” she snapped by way of greeting.

He grunted and handed her his samr, moving on with Scott’s servants to unload the sled. He listened to the chopping sounds as she broke into the bones, and since they didn’t come with shrieks as she dismembered herself, he allowed himself to become absorbed in portioning out the meat. For Eric in particular, he gave the tender neck flesh. With humans, as with any half-domesticated animal, good behavior should always be rewarded if one wished to see it repeated.

It was not until the sled was empty that Meoraq straightened up to discover that Eric had gone no further than Meoraq’s own fire. His Maria was there with him, not cooking, but only sitting and chatting with Nicci. Scott’s other servants, Dag and Crandall, seemed to be in no hurry to wander off either.

He looked at Amber, who was trading out heat-stones in the stew and sitting watch over the marrow. She looked at him, her mouthparts crooked up at one corner.

The words, “Get away from my fire,” rose to his throat, but no further. Amber wanted to be liked by these idiots. It cost him nothing to welcome them for one night.

Well…not welcome, but he could tolerate them.

So he simply walked over, set the last of the meat over the coals, and gave Crandall a hard rap on the top of his hairy head. Crandall scooted away from Amber and Meoraq hunkered down in his place. Amber was eating marrow, he saw. On the flat of his samr, warrior-fashion. “Do you like it any better than saoq or tachuqi?” he asked, gesturing at it.

“I can’t taste the difference,” she told him. “It’s all gross.”

“I can’t taste the difference either,” he confessed, taking some. “But they tell me there is one.”

Crandall was staring at him. After a while, Meoraq stopped politely ignoring him and stared back. Crandall got up and went to Scott’s fire instead. The few humans sitting up there made room for him and listened to whatever words went with his angry arm gestures. Some of them laughed. Scott himself was nowhere to be seen, which was odd. This was the time of night when he was usually pacing around the camp, hearing the many complaints of his people as they bedded down and telling them lies.

He watched for a time, making certain Scott was really gone and not just keeping himself uncharacteristically quiet and still. At last, he reached out and gave Eric a tap. “Where is your abbot?”

“In his tent,” Eric replied, and his woman added, “Sulking.”

“He’ll get over it,” said Dag, stealing a bit of heart-meat out of the stewing pouch.

Meoraq’s hand twitched, but he managed not to slap. Barely. “Get over what?”

Nicci rolled her eyes and made a chuffing noise.

“Same shit, different day,” said Amber. “You’re undermining his authority.”

“Would it kill you to be nice once in a while?” Nicci demanded, glaring at her. “He has so much to worry about right now and you just…you just push him around!”

“Scott does his share of the pushing.” Amber stirred the stew as all the humans found something else to look at.

Meoraq turned back toward Eric. “Does your abbot truly believe he will find a ship in Xi’Matezh capable of sailing him into the sky?”

“I don’t know,” said Eric after a moment. “Sometimes I think he does.”

Beside him, his Maria snorted. “If he didn’t, he couldn’t convince anyone else. He needs that too much, so yes, he believes it. And he’ll go on believing it until we get there and don’t find anything.”

“We might,” said Nicci, glaring at Eric’s woman, who snorted again.

“Meoraq…” Amber’s nerve appeared to fail her. She fussed with the heat-stones unnecessarily, and just when he thought she would wait until someone else changed the subject for her, she looked up again and said, “Why are you going to Xi’Matezh? Yeah, yeah, I know,” she said quickly, waving her hand. “You want to talk to God. But you talk to God all the time and I’m sure you think he answers—”

Meoraq sighed and patted her knee.

“—so why would you walk across the whole world to do it now? I mean, you’re tough, but this place could kill you.”

He acknowledged that with a flick of his spines. “I was called to find you. You were placed in my path.”

“Okay, whatever, but you were already on the road, is my point. Why?”

“The road…” mused Meoraq. He thought about it, beginning to smile. “So. I am on a sort of road. At one end, I am Sheulek, as I have been since my ascension. At the other, I am steward of my bloodline. House Uyane is the last of the great Houses in Xeqor to hold a direct line of descent. Whoever stands as steward stands in the sight of all men. Yet a Sheulek stands in the sight of God. It is too great a decision for a man to make.”

Maria leaned forward slightly to look at Amber. “What, is he the lizard-king?”

“Baby, be cool.”

“I’m just asking.”

“No,” said Amber, sounding annoyed. And to Meoraq, “Is it really worth all this walking just to ask God if you should quit your job?”

“It is a serious matter. I serve as His Sword and the tool of His judgment.”

“Can’t you serve him at home?”

“Of course,” Meoraq said uncomfortably.

“Just not the same way?”

Discomfort grew. Now it was Meoraq who leaned out to check on the stew. “In many of the same ways, actually. A steward must mediate conflicts in the households under him and may even be called to trial if one of those households falls under accusation.”

“But you have to stay home?” Amber guessed.

He looked at her.

Her arms raised, putting all the world on display. “Where you miss all this.”

“Ease off, Bierce,” Dag murmured.

“Don’t speak for me,” Meoraq told him irritably.

“Look, I’m sorry,” said Amber. “It’s your life. And I guess I can understand that running around out here is more exciting than staying home. The point is having an interesting story, right?”

Meoraq was startled into laughing out loud. “I don’t know any stories about Sheulek. Boys may think this life is exciting, but one city is the same as any other, walking means nothing but boredom and bad weather, and you can’t even remember the trials. No. The best stories, the legends, are told of stewards. They do the things that men see, after all.”

“Tell us one,” said Maria.

They all looked at her.

Eric leaned over to whisper, but she shook him off. “It has to be better than the bedtime stories the Commander tells. Come on, Meoraq, let’s hear it.”

It was right in the back of his throat to tell this woman that Uyane Meoraq, whether Sheulek or lord-steward, would never wallow so low as to put himself in competition with Scott for the favor of the fools who served him…but Amber was watching. These were her people and this was the first time he had ever seen them share her company at his fireside.

So he swallowed his first response and after some consideration, Meoraq said, “My father is…was steward of the bloodline and lord of House Uyane, which is the championing seat of Xeqor. As such, he was subject to be summoned to the city’s defense and his battles on those rare occasions earned him as much fame as honor. He was very well known, not only in Xeqor, but across all the world. Or as much of the world as is left under Sheul,” he amended. “Many years ago, when I was…six, I think. I suppose I could have been as much as seven, but I am certain it was winter because I was at home to see it. But however long ago it was, it happened that a band of raiders led by a man called Szadt attacked the neighboring city of Kuaq and took one of its gates.

“Here,” said Meoraq, waving them closer. He took up a burnt bit of stick from the fire and sketched in the soil as he spoke. “Here are our cities, entirely enclosed within walls, with our cattle-lands and fields protected at the open heart, you see?”

“Like a doughnut,” said Amber.

Nicci rolled her eyes. “The Commander’s right,” she muttered. “It’s always food with you.”

“Okay, it’s like a tire,” Amber said crossly. “Is that better?”

“There are four great gates at the cardinal points and often others in the various districts around the city, for ease of trade and the summering of cattle, but whether civil or private, each gate-house is fashioned with but one tunnelway that opens to the outside at one end and to the inward terrace here. No other door opens to the outside and no other door opens to the city. The many watchmen appointed at the gate-house are garrisoned along either side of a central stair with the private homes of the officers and their families above, arranged to rank, with the warden’s home topmost, encompassing the entire floor so as to be the only home with access to the roof. So it is,” Meoraq concluded, eyeing his poor drawing for faults, “that there are only three access points to the gate-house: the outer gate, the inner gate, and the rooftop stair. All three points were easily held by Szadt and his men. The gates were built to stand and Szadt had the whole of that armory at his disposal. Apart from that, he had somehow acquired certain machines—either from the stores of the Ancients or built after their fashion, I do not know—which could be tossed out through the inward windows. These burst and burned to terrible effect, capable of killing twenty men or more in an instant.”

The humans looked at each other, but didn’t seem much amazed.

“They still worked?” Nicci asked. “The grenades or whatever they were?”

“He said they were built by this other guy,” Amber said before Meoraq could answer. She was scowling.

“He said maybe they were. And maybe the other guy just found them.”

“Can you two fight about this later please?” asked Maria, ignoring the censuring mutters of Eric. “I want to hear the story. Go on, Meoraq.”

He paused, not to let Amber and her blood-kin settle, but to think about whether or not he really wanted to give the human Maria the idea that she could give him orders. In the end, he continued, but only because it was a good story and he liked telling it.

“Kuaq rallied its defenses immediately, of course, and if Szadt had advanced out into the streets, surely he and his men would have been taken, but instead Szadt sealed himself within the gate-house to plunder it at his leisure. All attempts to break through the inner gate met with burning death. So too ended the efforts to send warriors around the outer wall to that gate. And so ended the disastrous assault upon the rooftop, when two whole legions of warriors were dismembered alive by more of the Raider-Lord’s infernal machines. And in the lull that followed each onslaught, Szadt provided those encamped without the gate-house with the terrible sounds of his entertainments as he tortured those watchmen he had taken prisoner. At one point, he offered to release the families for certain goods, but when another attempt was made to break the gates, Szadt ended all negotiations. For hours, the cries of the women and children were heard as the Raider-Lord shared them out among his men and then threw them screaming over the inward wall at each tolling of the hour.”

“Jesus,” said Maria, and shivered. “Okay, you two can fight now. I don’t want to hear any more.”

“Kuaq fought tirelessly to remove the invaders, but in vain. Eventually, it was decided that they should send their plea for reinforcements to Xeqor. Our governors at once dispatched two forces: one, a legion of warriors capable of making the march to Kuaq in just six days, and the other, my father, who went alone and was there in three.

“He waited, hidden in the prairie, until night fell. And then he scaled the wall, here.” Meoraq tapped the burnt tip of his stick against his sketch. “Not to the rooftop, but to one of the outer wind-ways which Szadt had not thought to guard, it being set the height of ten men in a sheer wall and sized for the children whose task it was to keep them clear. How my father made that crawl must have been its own story, but he made it and once inside, my father hunted down every last raider of Szadt’s band and killed them all. One hundred and eleven men at final count,” Meoraq said proudly.

“No way,” said Eric, his brows rising. “That’s seriously bad ass, lizardman.”

Meoraq grunted, deciding to take that as praise, and went on. “My father’s attack must have begun soon after dark and was swiftly discovered. All of Kuaq saw the erupting fires of Szadt’s machines and heard the cries of battle, although the gates remained impervious to assault. At the striking of dawn’s hour, the Raider-Lord’s headless body fell from the rooftop where he had thrown so many others to their deaths. The fighting continued, but the core of Szadt’s band had broken and by nightfall, it was silent.

“The governors prudently waited some time to be certain of my father’s victory before they hailed the gate-house, but received no answer. No answer, but no killing machines from Szadt’s raiders, either. And as time passed and the silence continued, it was decided that my father had received some mortal wound and succumbed to it. Attempts were made to break the gates, but they held. A locksman was brought, but he hadn’t yet managed to craft a new key when the legion from Xeqor finally arrived and my father let them in.”

“Why didn’t he open the inner door?” Amber asked. “There had to have been enough noise…I mean, he had to know someone was out there.”

Meoraq shrugged his spines. “Perhaps he was at prayers. In any case, he opened the outer gate, gave the keeping of the gate-house to the legion’s commander and came home.”

Amber’s eyes narrowed slightly. Her head tipped, but he knew better than to think that meant the degree of sarcasm which it would mean on a dumaq. “He just left? He never opened the other door?”

“My father had little enough patience when dealing with the governors of his own city. As it was, the legion who’d had nothing to do with the retaking of the gate-house were detained three days by a grateful council. After killing a hundred men and bearing a witness to the remains of the women Szadt had given to his band, I doubt he was in any mood to celebrate.”

“The remains,” she echoed, frowning.

“My father never spoke of any of these things,” said Meoraq. “But I have heard from many of those who were part of the legion that went to Kuaq and saw the gate-house in those first hours. It has been supposed that Szadt meant to return to the wildlands that same night, as he had assembled certain supplies and bound what few of the women and children he had not already murdered for travel. But when he knew that it was over for him, it is said that he butchered them, even as they were tied and helpless at his feet. He left no survivors.”

He did not tell them all of what he had been told—that even with his men being cut down in the rooms above him, in the madness of his great evil, Szadt had not only hacked his bound victims to death, but had also engaged some of them sexually. Some before their murders and some clearly after. Bootmarks in blood proved that Rasozul had gone in and out of this room many times, and Meoraq knew that was where his father had been during those days that the governors of Kuaq had been bashing away on the inner-city gate, preparing the bodies for their pyres or searching in vain for life among the dead or perhaps only bearing that terrible scene his witness for however long he could manage. He’d asked once, years later, when he was Sheulek himself and his father had seemed in an open sort of mood, but Rasozul’s face had closed before the question had even come fully from his mouth. “I’ve told all there is in that tale once to your mother,” he’d said. “And I’ll tell it again to Sheul, but not to you, son. Not to anyone.”

“My father returned to Xeqor a hero. His name is known in every city I have ever passed through. His name is known,” he repeated meaningfully. “Mine is not.”

“Then why don’t you want to go home?” Amber asked.

“I go where Sheul sends me,” he said. “That is enough talk for tonight. Finish eating and bank the fire. I’m going on patrol.”

Amber stopped with her hand half-raised, a lump of marrow quivering on her fingertips. Her mouth opened.

“No,” said Meoraq.

Dag laughed. Waving off Amber’s glare, he excused himself, heading back across camp toward his little tent. No one hailed him. It was early as the bells would have rung it, but night in the wildlands kept its own hours. All the other humans were sleeping.

“You didn’t even let me say anything,” Amber said.

“You were going to ask if you could come with me.” Meoraq stood up, stretching the stiffness out of his limbs. “And the answer is no. You rest.”

“I’ve rested all frigging day!”

“You could barely walk a few hours ago,” Eric remarked, grinning.

His woman looked at him, at Amber, and then took his sleeve and towed him to his feet. They left, whispering and laughing.

“I get the first watch,” Amber insisted, reaching for her spear. “I always—”

She stopped there. Meoraq was smiling and holding out his open hand.

She looked at it while her blood-kin heaved a noisy sigh and tromped away, muttering something about being back in a few minutes to untie her. Amber closed her eyes and rubbed them, then crooked up the corner of her mouth and put her hand in his.

He pulled her to her feet and released her. “I found a dead tachuqi where I found our meat.”

Her gaze sharpened at once. “More of those things that attacked us?”

“Not more, but the same group, or so I believe. We are still in easy distance of our previous camp.”

She dropped her eyes. He waited until she dragged them up again.

“But if I am wrong, there are tachuqis very close to us tonight. If you come with me, if we find them, can you stand with me and fight?”

She did not answer.

“Rest,” he said. “Sleep, if you can. I’ll wake you for your watch.”

She looked away again, staring hard into the fire at their feet. She nodded once.

He gave her a pat on the shoulder and left her there, passing Nicci on his way out of camp. She tossed her hair at him and sniffed in answer to his (admittedly terse) grunt of acknowledgement, but that was fine. He’d rather she give him a brief rudeness and move on than stand around and chirp at him as she did with her human friends.

But there was another light ahead of him, which meant another human wandering in the wildlands. Scott, he soon saw, slouching by himself on a jut of stone beside the stream. He didn’t have time to slip away unnoticed; Scott shone his lamp right at him.

There was no one else around to see them, no one to intimidate or impress. Alone, they eyed one another with undisguised mutual dislike. Meoraq was first to speak. “What are you doing out of camp?”

He was so proud of his self-restraint.

“Thinking,” said Scott. “When you’re in charge, you have a lot to think about.”

There was a challenge in his words, naked as a sword’s edge.

“Truth,” said Meoraq. Such self-restraint. Surely Sheul was with him. “Now go back to your den. I want you all together.”

“Where are you going?”

“Patrolling. There is tachuqi-sign nearby.” Sheul’s hand slipped; Gann’s gripped him. “Join me, S’kot. We’ll hunt them down together.”

The human’s eyes narrowed. His smile was a cold gash across his face.

“No? Ah well. I suppose you are too important to your people to risk.”

“They need someone to be able to make decisions without waiting for a sign from God first.”

Meoraq laughed scornfully. “And you do that very well. In fact, I think that’s about all you do. But I note that even you don’t call them good decisions.”

And he walked on, taking a low pleasure in imagining the look on Scott’s ugly face as he was left behind to steep in hate. As he circled his camp, he warmed himself with thoughts of Scott sulking on his rock, maybe for an hour, maybe even all night. He supposed he’d ought to ask Sheul to heal him of his spite, which was a poison and a shameful thing to live in the heart of a Sheulek…but he’d already asked Sheul for so much tonight.

In reality, Everly Scott left right after Meoraq did, and while he did sit in his tent for about twenty minutes, he wasn’t sulking. He was thinking. And when he was decided, when everyone was sleeping, he slipped out again.

Amber was a light sleeper, but she didn’t hear him. It was the cold that woke her—the cold that blew down her back as a careful hand pulled her blanket away from her neck. Even then, there was no prescient leap of fear, only a sleepy annoyance. “I’m up, I’m up,” she mumbled, rolling over. “Back off, liz—”

She saw the medikit, oddly. Just the kit, which she had last seen the day Mr. Yao placed it in Scott’s hands. The medikit, open, and a blurry field of dirty crimson behind it that she never had time to recognize as the uniform jacket of a crewman for the Pioneer.

Then there was a hand in her hair, shoving her head back so that all she saw was night sky and a few sparks from the fire riding smoke out on the wind. She took a breath and something bit her on the neck. It was her last conscious thought: Snakebite. She heard it hissing again and again, hissing as it bit and bit, and she tried to scream, but her lungs were full of lead and the black got so much blacker and there wasn’t time to think Nicci’s name even once and that was it for Amber.

Elsewhere, not far, Meoraq walked, a bit too spiteful in his Sheulek’s heart, but ever vigilant against the beasts that hunt by night.

 

8

 

There were no tachuqis. Meoraq knew it before that first hour was out, but he made himself stand a full watch. When the night was half-gone, Meoraq returned to wake Amber so that he could have a few hours’ rest before moving on. He’d ought to meditate before he slept—he had indulged plenty of flaws to meditate over tonight—but he wasn’t used to staying up this late anymore and he was tired.

The fires had been banked, giving him little light, but the humans’ blankets caught all there was and reflected it back like mirrors. He picked his way carefully through them, searching for Amber and trying not to step on anyone. Ever since waking up in his tent, she had been fairly obnoxious about not bedding down too near him. No, it was always right in the thick of her people, where she was all but invisible, and he could do nothing but creep along and peer at each protruding head while praying for patience.

Patience had become little more than a word in prayer to him these days and it troubled him. Neither the late hour nor the cold wind was Amber’s fault, but she had made herself damned difficult to find tonight. Usually she slept as light as any true warrior, rousing at the slightest disturbance, and until this night, his tromping boots had always been enough to at least provoke a shift or a murmur. Ah, there. Two pale tufts of hair, like summer-thick fronds of hillgrass, sprouting out of two silvery lumps on the ground—Amber and her Nicci.

Meoraq stomped loudly over. Nicci slept on, as usual. So did Amber, which was not. Her sleeping breaths were equally uncharacteristic—wet and heavy, as if labored. He circled her uncertainly until he saw the pale stripe of her arm lying over the edge of her mat onto the trampled grass. It was surely Amber’s arm; that was her saoq-hide pack close to her hand, with his spare tunic stubbornly folded up inside so she could pretend she didn’t have to wear it in the morning.

“Up,” Meoraq said. “It is half-past late enough and well on to later still. Come stand your watch.”

Amber did not stir.

He’d started to walk away, so much did he expect her grumbling obedience, but at this…this nothing…he paused. She’d done this before, when they were at cross-wills, but they weren’t fighting tonight, or at least he didn’t know they were. Cautiously, he turned back. “Soft-skin? I say waken.”

Nicci muttered something and lifted her head out of her bedding, giving him a bleary and blameful look before shifting her eyes to Amber. “Get up,” she mumbled, prodding at the bulk of her blood-kin’s form.

Amber rocked without waking. Her wet breaths made a brief bubbling noise as she rolled onto her face and back again, but otherwise she made no sound. Her fingers twitched, but her hand wasn’t moving.

She…wasn’t moving.

Meoraq’s spines flexed forward and slapped back hard and fast enough to hurt. He was at her side in one step and ripping away the silver nothing-skin to expose her in a splay that might well have been only sleep…save that she did not waken. Her mouth yawned when he rolled her over (and oh great Father, it was like moving meat. Only her upper body twisted toward him until he pulled on her thigh as well) emitting the same laboring sucks and gusts of air as strings of drool hung from her slack lips. She’d been lying in a great pool of her own salivations, so that one half of her face was pink and wrinkled. The eye on that side had swelled and was partially opened, so bloodshot and so dilated that it seemed a black slick upon a red sea. She had urinated on herself some time ago; the stain covered her entire left side from the sleeve of her arm to the cuff of her breeches.

“What happened?” Nicci asked shrilly. She grabbed at him and he shook her off without thought, pressing his palm to Amber’s chest, first atop her shirt and then beneath it in an effort to catch the echoes of her life’s pulse. If she lived.

“My God!” said Scott, appearing out of the dark as white and welcome as a strike of lightning. “She’s dead!”

A great storm of shock followed as humans bolted out of their beds to either crowd around him or hover away.

“Be quiet!” Meoraq roared, and while they did not obey precisely, they quieted enough that he could detect Amber’s heart beating at last. The feel of it brought him no relief, only more dread. Too heavy and too slow. Far too slow. He tried to make a count between beats, but there was no rhythm, only torpid shudders and infrequent slams, as inconsistent as the kicking leg of a dying saoq.

He told himself the freezing hand that gripped his own chest was premature. Her heart might beat this way all the time. How would he know?

His eye flicked to Nicci. He lunged out and caught her, dragged her squealing to him, and put his hand roughly between her swelled teats. Her heart hammered, rapid and strong, until she yanked herself away. He let her go, searching again for Amber’s life-beat and finding it exactly as he’d left it, indisputably wrong.

“What happened?” someone asked.

“Is she dead?” Nicci cried, already in tears. She stumbled away and Scott took her in, clutching Nicci against his chest.

“It’s going to be all right, Miss Bierce,” he declared. “We’ll all miss Amber. She had so much of the pioneering spirit and I know we will never forget her.”

Meoraq gaped, then hissed at him with such violence that it was nearly a shriek.

“Back off, man,” Dag said in a low voice. “There goes his neck.”

“I think she’s breathing,” said another human. “I mean, she’s looking really bad, but she’s not dead yet.”

“When did this happen?” Meoraq demanded.

They all looked at each other. “She looked all right when she went to bed,” Eric said at length. “Maybe this is some kind of, I don’t know, infection or something. From when she got…uh, hurt.”

Scott flushed and glared at him.

Yao came to kneel beside Amber and Meoraq reluctantly gave her up to his inspection. The first thing he did was to take her wrist and just hold it for a short time, frowning. Then he pulled up Amber’s shirt and felt at her soft belly. The bruise, now several days old, had lost its glossy purple-black color, gained some greenish smudges, and separated into three distinct marks rather than one massive one. “I see no inflammation…no sign of internal bleeding…pulse is weak and thready…she’s extremely hypothermic. It could be sepsis, but she’s shown no symptoms until now and her breathing is very slow and arrhythmic. This looks pharmacological to me,” said Yao, prying open one of Amber’s slack, glazed eyes.

“It’s not drugs!” Scott interrupted. “Where would she get drugs?”

“I didn’t say…” Yao paused, his narrow eyes narrowing further as he gazed into nothing. “Drugs,” he murmured. He looked at Amber. “It could well be. Bring me the medical kit.”

Scott stared for a moment and then suddenly, forcefully said, “I lost it. Back when we had to leave our infrastructure behind to avoid upsetting God. What does it matter? You can’t fix this with aspirin and bandages! And you’re not a real doctor anyway! You don’t know anything!”

Yao merely nodded, unaffected by these insults. “Then it must be something else,” he said, looking around at the dark plains. “She might have exposed herself to any number of toxic plants.”

“You are a surgeon?” Meoraq asked, following what he could of this exchange. “You can heal her?”

Yao looked at him calmly. “As I see it, there are three possibilities. If this is sepsis, a worsening of her internal injuries, she will almost certainly die. If she’s exposed herself somehow to an alien toxin against which she has no immunity, she will likely die. If she’s ill—”

A wave of murmured alarm swept outward through the humans.

“—then she might pull through, but her injuries and this environment have surely weakened her body’s defenses. Her chances are not good,” Yao finished. “We can keep her warm and comfortable and hope for the best, but I must tell you, I see nothing hopeful about her condition.”

Meoraq looked from face to flat, ugly face, but no one else had anything more to say. He gathered Amber up and stood, resting the thin skin of his neck briefly over her brow to test for fever. That, he knew how to cure, although it was by no means a certainty that he would find the necessary herbs. In any case, she was not hot with fever, but cold, as cold as if her life were already lost.

“Take her to the fire and build it up,” he ordered, holding her out. His mind was racing ahead already, battering from one point of useless healing lore to another, trying to remember if he had seen anything, anything, on his watch that might help her. There was little enough to look at in the wildlands and medicinal herbs were so precious that his eye had a way of marking them whether he had immediate need of them or not. He knew he had seen no teaberries, no healershand, not even the dangerous comfort of phesok. There might have been gift-of-God and feverleaf by the bushel were this a warmer season, but the coming winter had turned it all to hidden roots. His memory showed him nothing but grass in all directions, dead thorns, and barren trees twisted out of shape by past storms. The only leaf he recalled with any medicine at all was deathweed, down by the stream, and if that was a sign from Sheul, Meoraq chose to ignore it. He…

He was still holding Amber.

No one had come to take her. By the looks of them, no one meant to.

Meoraq’s confusion erupted in an instant to rage. “What the hell is wrong with you people?” he roared. “She could be dying!”

They shuffled back, looking at their feet or their fellows or their leader, and did not answer him. Scott, who was always first to be the voice of his people in every situation, whether it warranted a voice or not, now patted sobbing Nicci and was himself very pale and silent.

“Yeah,” ventured Crandall when it became clear their appointed leader would not step forward this time. “But, I’m sorry, that’s just a really good reason to keep her away from us. Whatever this is, it’s bad.”

And Meoraq’s first impulse, self-defeating as it was, was to throw Amber down and hit him. Throw her.

Like meat.

Amber made a sudden weak gurgling noise. With her head tipped back in his arms, she was choking on her own saliva. Meoraq hurriedly shrugged her forward and drool spilled out in a fall over her lip and onto her chest. She did not seem to be able to close her mouth. A fool’s gape…or a corpse’s.

“Gross,” someone whispered.

His throat too tight for speech, Meoraq turned his back on all the shuffling, staring humans and carried Amber to his tent. She did not resist him when he propped her up on his knee to strip away her soiled garments. Apart from the intermittent twitching of her fingers, she did not move at all as he lay her down on his mat.

So limp. So cold. Pale as snow everywhere that lying in her own urine had not burnt her to a vivid shade of pink, everywhere she wasn’t bruised. So many bruises…

He passed his hand over them, gingerly probing for some sign of a greater injury, but her belly was cool and flat. Too flat. Sheul forgive His errant son, he could see the slats of her ribs and the nubs of her pelvic girdle. But no, he could not look at that now. Whatever this was that worked in her, it was not starvation any more than it was a belly-wound. But what was it? He could see a perfectly round inflammation at her throat, shot through with numerous tiny red dots, but he did not know what to make of it. He had never seen such a bite before, but human hide was thin, as Amber’s many bruises proved. It was entirely plausible that a beetle with jaws far too weak to penetrate dumaqi scales had bitten her. Could beetles be poisonous? Twelve years walking in Gann’s land and he simply did not know.

Meoraq lay down beside her, wrapped them both in his blanket and held her close, willing the warmth of his body into hers. She did not try to speak or move. She gave no sign that she knew who was with her or that anyone was at all. “Great Sheul, O my Father,” he whispered, searching her slack face for life. “Hear Your son’s prayer. You have passed these humans into my care for a reason and surely my ungrateful complaints have made this lesson necessary, but I am humble before You now. Only you can know the cause of this terrible sickness. Therefore, I place myself in Your hands, O Father. Show me the way to heal the woman.”

He shut his eyes and listened, but Sheul did not speak, or if He did, Amber’s wet breaths were louder. And if Sheul never spoke? If He left her life in mortal hands, as He so often did, what then? He needed a surgeon and never mind that no dumaq would have the slimmest idea how to heal a human. He could follow his backtrail to the road as soon as there was light enough to see by, and while he didn’t know exactly where he was along its track, he knew he would find Gelsik to the north and Fol Dzanya to the south, but there were ten days running between them, plus three each way to run between road and camp, and it would take twice as long with the humans dragging at his heels, even longer since Amber would have to be carried. He would have to leave the humans here, leave Amber in their care, and run…knowing she would surely be dead by the hour of his return.

Truth, but against all the truth in the world lay Amber and she needed him.

So. He needed the sun to find the road. And he would have to sleep until then, so that he could make his journey at a run. The knowledge that he might well wake holding a corpse sat in him like frozen clay, but he could do nothing for her here. He had to find a city. He would not bring Amber with him. He would simply describe her symptoms, demand medicines, and return as swiftly as he was able. He would have to trust the other humans to tend her until then, and oh but that thought was as chill in his heart as Amber’s limp body against his breast.

“Father, please,” he whispered, but said no more than that. He didn’t know what else to say. His earlier prayers hammered at him, hammered, with a weight and an impact that left a physical pain inside him: The burden is too great. Her wounds slow us all. Relieve her of her pains.

Relieve me of this burden.

He touched the back of his hand to her smooth brow. Amber did not know he was there.

Meoraq rose and left the tent. He would speak slowly, he decided. He would not be hostile. He would draw no blade. He would say only that he had done much for their (miserable worthless wretched cowardly) lives and he would ask one of them to tend to Amber in his absence. And if they refused, he would politely and without drawing weapons, observe that he could not look after them while tending to a sick woman himself. And if that failed to sway them—

Nicci’s tearful voice cut across his thoughts, bleeding meaning before he consciously translated the words: “We can’t just leave her!”

Meoraq stopped walking. His head cocked. He had not heard that, he decided. Or if he had, it held some other meaning.

Their backs were to him, black shapes in the night, flames making night-terrors of all their ugly faces, making them all strangers. All but Scott. Scott he knew at once.

“The fact that she’s sick at all, in spite of the Vaccine, means we can’t just assume what she’s got isn’t catching,” he was saying in that calm, urgent way he thought hid his mind so well.

“Then why aren’t we all sick?” someone asked. “If the Vaccine doesn’t work—”

“No one’s saying it doesn’t work,” Scott said quickly. “I’m just suggesting that maybe it only works up to a point. If someone keeps putting themselves in contact with a potential contagion…” Scott paused to let those words work on his murmuring people, then gravely said, “She spends a lot of time with the lizard.”

Meoraq’s head tipped further. He felt his spines flattening.

“Talking to him. Sharing his food. Touching him. Whether or not they’re doing anything…intimate,” said Scott, as his people’s low whispers grew louder, “my point is, they’re always together. Who knows what kind of germs he could be carrying? If she’s caught something from him and it jumps to the rest of us…” Scott paused yet again to survey the effect of his words. He liked what he saw enough to let his thought go unfinished. Instead, he said, “The safety of the colony matters more than any one individual. Miss Bierce and I may have had our differences, but I know she’d say the same thing no matter who was in her place.”

Nicci put her hands over her face and cried harder. She did not protest, not even when Scott came and put his arm around her shaking shoulders.

“I can’t agree to this,” said Dag suddenly.

Meoraq looked at him, curiously unrelieved, waiting.

Dag said, troubled, “How are we going to find this temple-place without the lizard? We need him.”

“We can keep the lizard,” Scott assured them as his humans murmured. “We just need to be more careful about coming into direct contact with him.”

“Hey, I’m all for that,” said Eric, shrugging his arm up around his woman’s shoulders. “Particularly when he gets into one of his slappy moods. But you need to consider the possibility that he might not want to keep tagging along after Amber dies.”

And that was too much.

“After?” said Meoraq with a furious hiss. “Not even if, but after?”

They turned with satisfying leaps and cries. Scott took his arm off wailing Nicci and put more of the fire between them. He was a coward, but not a fool. “This isn’t personal. Everyone here appreciates what you’ve done, uh, Meoraq.”

His spines flattened with a slapping sound. “I do not like the way you say my name,” he said. He did not raise his voice. He did not draw a weapon. He was a Sword of Sheul and he was his own master. “I don’t like much of anything I hear you saying.”

“How is she?” Scott asked, backing up again.

His spines began to hurt. His throat was already throbbing. “She rests in Sheul’s sight tonight. Tomorrow, I go to find a surgeon in the city.”

Surprise in every human face and then unease. “Is there one around here?” Dag asked.

“No,” Meoraq admitted. “I will be away many days. Twelve at the least. Perhaps more.” And as alarmed noise began to whisper through their mouths, he said, “You must tend the woman while I am gone. I will have your word on this!”

“Twelve days? You can’t leave us for twelve days!”

“Anything could happen!”

“What about those monsters? What if they come back?”

“She’s not going to make it anyway!”

Meoraq whipped around to aim his hand like a knife at that one, the female Maria, hissing, “You shut your poison mouth!”

She did, shrinking back while her man shielded her, and all the humans quieted for a time. Again the hateful Scott gauged his people’s mood. Then, with all apparent concern, he said, “Do you really think she’s going to last another twelve days? Really?”

“I think she’ll die if no one cares for her. Or is that your intent?” he hissed.

Scott’s ears pinked and his mouth tightened, but not for long. “Are you calling me a murderer?” he demanded in a very loud, fast, oddly-pitched way.

“Ease up, man,” said Eric, catching at his leader’s arm. “I’m sure he didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

“Do not tell me what my meaning is, human!” he snapped. “If she dies in spite of your care, that is Sheul’s will and I honor it, but if she ails and you let her die, that I call murder and I will see every Gann-damned one of you judged for it!”

“Easy,” said Eric, his eyes huge and orange in the firelight. “Easy, Meor—”

“Stop saying my fucking name like that!”

Humans scattered back all around him, some with their hands held up and empty, some darting behind others, all staring at him. Meoraq clapped his hands to his face and breathed, battling the killing rage that wanted so badly to take command of him. A Sword of Sheul is a master over his emotions. Six breaths, just as he had trained from boyhood, six breaths deep and slow, like winding steps to peace. Always, he had envisioned Sheul at the last riser, His arms outstretched in welcome. Now, he saw Amber, lying still as death at his feet.

He lowered his arms to his side, calm again, and looked at them. ‘I hate you all,’ he thought, but he thought it calmly.

Scott waited, letting the silence stir at fears, then said, “You’re right. Whatever happens to Amber is God’s will. None of us can change that. But regardless of what happens, the rest of us need to take care of ourselves. Sentimentality has no place in this decision. You knew that when you saw her holding that knife and you have to know it now. I know you don’t like me—”

Meoraq passed a hand over his eyes again, trying to shut out the human’s voice, to seek Sheul’s behind it.

“—but you must know I’m right. Say you do go off to the nearest doctor. Are we really supposed to just stay here and wait for you? We don’t have the resources to wait twelve days without you.”

“There is water at the stream and, if you are sparing, enough meat to last until my return.”

Scott glanced towards the sleds, where slabs of corrokis meat had been wrapped in some of the humans’ packs and stacked in anticipation of the next day’s journey. “I’m sure it would be, if we were moving. But if we’re just sitting here, that much meat in one place is nothing but an invitation to all this planet’s hungry animals to come get an easy meal. How are we supposed to defend ourselves?”

Several watching humans voiced uneasy agreement.

Scott nodded at them in encouragement before turning gravely back to Meoraq. “I have to weigh the risks here and the fact is, Amber Bierce is just one person. It’s difficult to admit this, of course.” He paused and, although his expression remained as grimly serious as ever, something about him smiled anyway, invisibly and fanged. “But a leader has to make difficult decisions.”

“You will not take her in,” Meoraq said. It was not a question. He could feel the color throbbing in his throat, but his thoughts were calm. Black, but calm. “You would let her die to stab at me.”

“She’s not dying!” Nicci shouted before Scott could answer. “Don’t you even say that, you…you…She’ll be fine in the morning! She’s always fine!”

“Will you look after her then?” Meoraq asked her.

Nicci fell at once to a sniffling silence.

Scott patted her shoulder. “If you were offering any kind of real solution, that would be one thing. But to be brutally honest, I’m not sure how we could take care of her for twelve days. She was choking on her own spit a few minutes ago. How are we supposed to give her food and water? I’m sorry, Nichole, I know this is difficult for you. It’s difficult for all of us, but I really think it would be best to let nature take its course. Or let God’s will be done, if you like that better.”

Meoraq’s hand came back to his brow-ridges, rubbing hard enough to hurt. Six breaths, he told himself, and counted them off with his eyes shut. Six breaths, deep and slow, six breaths to Amber.

“I’m not enjoying this—”

“Lies! You’d fuck this moment if you could!” he spat, and took several stabilizing breaths while Scott stood very quiet. At last, Meoraq raised his head and faced them. “I will meditate upon your words and give you my answer in the morning. I don’t want to see any of you until then.”

No one had any reply to that, which was just as well.

Meoraq turned around and went back to his tent, where Amber lay on her side on his mat, just as he had left her. He undressed, placing his clothing in a thin layer atop the blanket before joining her beneath it and pulling her unresisting body against his to warm.

“Father, this world itself moves as You command it,” Meoraq said, pressing his palm gently to her brow. The words were bitter in his mouth, bitter as the bile on Amber’s wet breath. “And whether You choose to heal her or take her into Your halls, I will thank You and love You no less. Only hear the prayer of Your son, I beg, and let Your will be done swiftly, whatever it must be. The hateful little Gann-bastard is right.”

 

* * *

 

It was a terrible night that followed. Amber lay silent and cold beside him through every endless hour. He was afraid to give her water, afraid to drown her right there in his arms, but as the day dawned, in a kind of desperation, he did attempt it. She only drooled it out. He tried to imitate the cattle-hands he had seen, who sometimes gave their livestock medicines by stroking their throats to make them swallow. Amber only lay there choking under the weight of his hand. Twice, he brought out the knife of his fathers and held it over her. Twice, he sheathed it again, but he didn’t know if that was the right thing to do. He had dealt deaths beyond counting in his life, but he had never had to wait this way, had never borne the silent struggles of some fragile life his witness and felt so damned helpless and useless and alone as he did now.

He prayed, because that he could do. He said the Healing Chant until the words became as mechanical as any construct of the Ancients. He said the Prayer of Appeal and all forty-three verses of the Bridge of Men. Mostly, he prayed in the words he might use with his father, speaking as thoughts came over him. Sheul might have heard him; Amber never did. He knew long before the dawn showed him her slack face that there would be no surgeon, no medicine, no run to the city. She did not have twelve days to wait for him. She would be dead in three, if she could not rouse to drink. The hope that she might awaken and be miraculously whole had brought him through the night, but when he could see her again and see what those long hours had done to her, he felt even that stubborn hope strain.

The sun rose and Meoraq did not stir. He watched Amber’s clay struggle to hold life within it and listened as the humans outside gathered their goods and made ready for the day’s journey. If they were quieter than usual as they went about these tasks, this was the only sign of their concern. It was as if she were already dead to them—dead and burnt, her memory so far distant that grief was just another word, if they had ever known it at all.

He could not be angry with them, although he wanted to be. Grief, like so many things, was a luxury in the wildlands. And as the first hour of the new day stretched into the second, Meoraq’s heart began to understand what his head had been telling him all night: It may be within his power to prolong Amber’s life, but he could not prevent her death. The longer he tried, the more she—and all the rest of her people—would suffer for it. Between the hated living and the beloved dead, said the Prophet, look to the living, for the dead have done their service and rejoice in Him, but the living may have long roads yet. How many loved ones had Lashraq burnt and left behind him before he came at last to Xi’Matezh and saw his Father’s face?

It was surprisingly little comfort to him, but still Meoraq knew what he had to do. “Take her then,” he said, stroking the smooth curve of Amber’s brow. “Take her, O Father, and receive her well. She is a good woman.”

Then he left her and went out into the bitter cold of Gann’s world.

The humans were waiting for him, all of them clustered around Scott’s fire to share its warmth and whatever was left of the previous night’s meal. They’d struck their tents and taken up their beds, filled the flasks and were even now loading their packs onto the sleds. Scott came to meet him, as he had known he would. “How is she?” he asked, pretending deep concern.

Meoraq looked past him to Nicci, standing small and pale at Scott’s side. “Do you wish to speak to her?”

“Is she talking?” Scott asked, looking so surprised as to seem alarmed.

“No. But perhaps she will hear you.”

“I…” Nicci looked at Scott. He put his arm around her. She bent her head and trembled. She did not go to Amber’s side.

So be it.

Meoraq drew the knife of his fathers from the sheath over his heart. It was the best he could offer her. “Gather fuel. As much as can be carried. The fire will have to burn all day.”

“What are you going to do with that?” Nicci asked, staring at his father’s knife.

He looked at her, knowing that even she couldn’t really be so ignorant as to ask that. And she was crying already, so yes, she knew. “It will be quick,” he promised. And, as much as he detested her, his heart thawed a little, enough to give her an honest tap at her smooth brow with the hand that did not hold a killing blade. “Don’t grieve. She will see her true Father’s face soon and I believe His arms will be open to her.”

“Don’t let him do it!” Nicci begged, clutching at Scott’s arm. Water ran out of her eyes in fresh streams. “Please, make him stop!”

Scott nodded, patting at her back. “You’re not going to kill her,” he told Meoraq.

The words should have carried some hope to him, but Scott’s look of somber joy never faltered. “I don’t mark you,” Meoraq said, sheathing his father’s knife.

“We’ve discussed it.” Scott put Nicci aside and, as she sought out another chest to support her, put his hand on Meoraq’s arm and led him a short distance from the others. A very short distance. He still wanted to be seen. He still meant to be heard. “We’ve decided to leave her here with a few supplies…some water…maybe a blanket…In case she wakes up.”

“I don’t…” Meoraq stared for several breaths, uncounted, then shook his head clear and tried again. “I don’t mark you, human.”

“She could still pull out of this,” Scott said, and actually patted Meoraq on the arm as if he were a damned child in need of comfort. “I wish we could wait for her, I truly do, but she could be contagious. I have to think of the greater good.”

“The good? How…How can it be good to leave her to die?”

“We don’t have a choice,” Scott said. “It’s not just about her slowing us down, although she would. Right now, the way she is, she’s a health hazard. You may not understand that, but you have to accept it.”

“I accept that I can do nothing for her but to send her to our Father gently and give her a decent funeral.” The terrible truth in that sank into him until it found something even more terrible and without thinking, he suddenly spat, “Isn’t that enough for you, S’kot? Can’t you just be happy she’s dead? Do you have to see her damned before you feel like you’ve won?”

His flat, ugly face first paled, then flushed a dull red. “This has nothing to do with me. This has to do with common human decency, something you clearly can’t comprehend. Because she is a person, like you said, she’s one of my people and I am not going to let you murder her when there’s a chance, however slim, that she could recover from whatever this is and rejoin us. No,” he said, turning his back on Meoraq to address the pack of animals that had made him their abbot, “we can’t afford to sit around and wait for her to die. I wish we could. I wish we had doctors and a hospital or even just a safe, dry place to hold our vigil over her, but the fact is that she’s sick and she’s potentially contagious. Nobody wants to leave her, but this is our reality.”

“Piss on your reality!” Meoraq said, loudly enough that many humans looked uncomfortable, but still none of them spoke. “I won’t expose her on the fucking plains like a…a runty calf! This is a person! This is one of your people! How can you even speak of leaving her body to…to rot like an animal’s! To be scavenged and…and lost to the grey hells of Gann? That is worse than murder! That is obscene!”

“If she wakes up, she can rejoin us and be perfectly welcome. If not, at least we’ll know we did our best by her, right?” Scott nodded at his people expectantly and they nodded back at him, even as they shuffled on their feet and cast Meoraq uncomfortable glances. Scott turned back to him and took Nicci again under his arm. “So we’ll leave her some supplies. A blanket, some food…I’m sure she’d appreciate it if you left one of your water flasks.”

“I want no part of this murder.”

“No, the murder you want is the one where you slit her throat. Or the one where you hold us here until we all become infected with whatever she’s got. I understand your feelings, Meoraq, but what it comes down to is, you can’t put her life above all of ours.”

The urge to stab him right through his profaning, poison-dripping mouth was strong, but on the slim chance that it came more from Meoraq’s clay than from his higher spirit, he restrained himself. He bent his head. He breathed. He cleared his mind of all emotion. He looked up and said, “I have seen many deaths, human. I can imagine none worse than to be torn open, alive and helpless, by wild beasts. I will pretend to believe you when you say you do not wish for her to suffer,” he added acidly, and Scott’s pink face flushed a darker red. “So I will give her an easy death and I will see her soul to Sheul’s halls with an honorable funeral. You need not witness it if you do not wish to show respect we all know you do not feel.”

“I have plenty of respect for her,” said Scott, staring him down. “Too much to stab her in her sleep and call it kindness. You talk like a religious man. Now act like one. If you really believed in God, you wouldn’t hesitate to leave her in His hands.”

Many humans had gathered by now. Meoraq looked at them, these people, these children of Sheul. He gave each face the weight of his stare. He watched each eye drop away from his. He gave each mouth a chance to speak. He listened to each silence. Last of all, he turned his head and looked at the sleds, stacked deep with the humans’ provisions. Amber’s distinctive saoq-hide pack was there, along with her bedroll and her spear.

“You will leave water,” Meoraq said, studying the sleds. All of his flasks were there, excepting only the small metal flask given to him by the gatekeeper of Tothax, which hung around his neck.

“Yes, of course.”

“And provisions.”

“Yes.”

Now Meoraq looked at Scott, although he had to clench his hands into fists to keep them from his swords. “Show them to me.”

Scott half-raised a hand to gesture vaguely at the empty ground around the ashes of Meoraq’s fire, where Amber had last been sleeping. His gaze wavered toward the sleds, but did not quite reach them. The pink tentacle of his tongue peeked out to slick his lips, but he said nothing.

“Tell me your name,” said Meoraq quietly, “and the name of your father.”

Scott blinked several times, glancing around at the others, but his people defended him no more than they defended Amber. “Uh…Everly Scott? My father’s name was Richard? Why?”

Meoraq closed his eyes and counted six breaths. He was calm. A Sheulek is always calm. He said, in the darkness, “Var’li S’kot, son of Var’li Reshar, you are a liar and a thief.”

“Hey!”

Meoraq opened his eyes, swung his arm and slapped Scott as hard as he could. As Scott sprawled in the mud with blood beading up over the side of his staring face, Meoraq walked through the silent crowd to the sled he had himself built and took back one of his flasks. Just the one. He slung it over his shoulder and moved to the other sled, where he tossed packs roughly aside until he had uncovered Amber’s things.

“Xi’Matezh lies to the east,” said Meoraq as he claimed them. “Hold to the path of the sun until you reach the mountains. Cross through and hold your course. You will come to the end of all the world. Go north along the Ruined Reach and you will find the temple. Go now and go with God, if He will have you. I will not.”

Now they protested, these creatures who would not even give her a gentle death but who would leave her to be savaged alive in this strange, cold fever by tachuqis, by ghets, by beetles! And when it was done, what next for her but to be left lying in the mud, screaming for all eternity unheard as she rotted back into the clay. Her own kind would do this, her own blood-kin!

“You can’t do this!” Nicci pushed through the crowd to catch at his arm. He slapped before he could stop himself, but she only fell at his feet and clutched his boot instead. “You promised to take us to the skyport! You can’t leave us here!”

“Take your hand off me, you clay-fucking monster! I am done with you! All of you! Go! And especially you!” He shook Nicci off his boot, but managed with Sheul’s aid not to raise Amber’s spear in his hand and drive it through her hateful, ice-filled heart. “Wailing, useless…she-bastard! You do not deserve her! And she did not deserve you!”

“Go ahead and kill her,” said Scott, scrambling to his feet and out of Meoraq’s easy reach. “I mean, if it’s that important to you. Shut up, Nichole. Go on. We’ll wait.”

“Start walking, human.”

“But you can kill her now!”

“Get out of my camp.”

Scott backed away, hands up, licking at his mouthparts. “Okay, but you’re going to catch up with us after she dies, right? We…Come on, you can’t do this! She’s already dying! If you leave us, you’re killing us!” He looked wildly around, his eyes coming at last to the tent where Amber lay, and Meoraq saw the very moment that Gann whispered. “At least pray about it first,” Scott said suddenly, pointing a shaking hand out into the wildlands. “You go pray and we’ll wait here and we’ll…we’ll just let God decide what to do.”

Meoraq studied him as the humans around them offered their own promises, bargains and pleas. Their voices meant nothing to him. There was a blackness inside him and he thought that if he closed his eyes and let it out, he might open them again to find an hour gone and every human dead, and that was, in this moment, a very fine thought. Instead, he took six breaths with his eyes open and Scott as full in his sight as Meoraq himself was in the sight of Sheul, and then said, calmly, “I should have killed you long before this.”

Scott said nothing. What was there to say?

“I’ll pray,” said Meoraq. “And so should you. Hear Uyane: If Sheul tells me to end her, I will build the pyre and see her to His eternal embrace.”

Scott nodded once, his face straining with the effort of showing so much concern.

“And then I will kill you,” Meoraq concluded thoughtfully, “and leave you to lie on the open ground with your blood rotting in your veins. But I will take your people on to Xi’Matezh. For her sake.”

Scott’s mouth worked, but no sound came out.

“However, if Sheul allows me the hope of her life, I will give you yours and let you lead your people out of my camp. And if she dies, so be it. I will not follow you. I will take no more vengeance. I will go to Xi’Matezh alone and if I see you there, I will not even draw this blade—” He patted the hilt of his beast-killing kzung. “—and gut you like the ghet you are. So. I will pray.”

He turned around and immediately Scott retreated, hissing at his people to get away from here before the crazy lizard started killing them. Some obeyed. Some protested. Some even followed Meoraq away, but he ignored them all. He entered his tent and knelt in the darkness there and picked up Amber’s limp, heavy hand. He shut his eyes on the sight of her white, waxen face. He counted off six breaths listening to the thick, laboring sound of her own. He prayed.

Between the hated living and the beloved dead…

But she wasn’t dead. She wasn’t dead!

Meoraq rubbed at his brow-ridges, but they hurt, so he stopped. He looked at Amber and then he reached down and pulled her up onto his knee, holding her to his chest and forward some, so that she couldn’t choke on her saliva. He fit his hand to the flat place between her soft, swollen teats and just stared at the top of his tent for a while, feeling her heart struggle at its work.

Amber needed him, of course she did, but so did all the rest of them, and while it was true that Amber might recover with his care, it was also true that the chance to spare one life did not and never could balance the risk to forty-seven other lives. If he did this solely because it was Amber, then he would carry every death of every other human as if it were murder. He would be Sheulek no longer. He would be damned in the eyes of God.

I do not want to leave her, Father.

He might have said it aloud. He might have only thought it. Sheul heard all prayers, no matter how they were spoken, and this was the most fervent prayer of all his life. He asked for nothing, sought nothing. He was scarcely aware of thought at all, but Sheul burned in his mind and Amber burned brightest of all against his heart. He sat and stared and held her and might have remained so for hours had not the flap of his tent lifted.

There stood Eric, with his woman cringing against his side. Seeing shame in their ugly faces did nothing at all to cool the fires charring at Meoraq’s heart.

“The thing is,” said Eric after a long silence, just as if he were continuing an argument and not beginning one, “this is it for us. We’re all there is. We need this stuff and she…doesn’t. So you can hate us if you want to, man…I kind of hate us too…but what else are we supposed to do?”

“You are supposed to be people!” snapped Meoraq. “How dare you crawl in here and whine at me because I will not allow you to pick carrion from one who isn’t even dead! Get out! Get out and go back to your murdering master!”

His woman retreated. Eric lingered,.

“It’s nothing personal,” he said finally.

Meoraq was on his feet and face to ugly face with the man in an instant. “It should be!” he hissed. “It should be very fucking personal when you leave someone to be torn apart by wild beasts…her bones…scattered!” Rage briefly blinded him. He fought it back, but his color was up and throbbing in his throat, and he knew the blackness would take him if he couldn’t calm down. “You don’t even have your own hate to spur you to murder her! You use his!”

“She started it,” said Eric.

Meoraq leaned back on his heels and just stared at him.

“She’s the one that made us pick sides. She’s the one who wouldn’t just let anything go!” Eric backed up a step, his neck bent and his eyes in constant motion, looking anywhere but at Meoraq. “She was always on us about how we had to do this and we had to learn that…It’s her own fault no one wants to be around her.”

“She wanted you to live,” spat Meoraq. “And you let him punish her for it, you bastard son of Gann. Damn you and damn all of you.”

Eric’s face darkened. He mumbled something more, but Meoraq could hear no words in the sound. Perhaps there were none. The human let the tent-flap drop between them and Meoraq returned to the watch he kept over Amber and her terrible sleep. She gasped when he brushed at her brow, but lay still as clay even when he lay down beside her and tried in vain to press his living warmth into her. Only the fluttery feel of her failing heart, throbbing from her flesh to his, told him she lived at all.

They were leaving now. He could hear their many feet drumming on the wet earth, moving away into the east. It was not too late. He could make it quick and easy. She would never waken. He could build the pyre, pray while she burned, and catch the rest of them before nightfall.

“Are you with me, Soft-Skin?” he murmured, stroking at her cold, damp brow. “Open your eyes. See me.”

They did open, and Meoraq let out an unmanning shout of relief, but they only rolled back and shut again. She had not seen him, did not know him.

But she had opened her eyes.

“Uyane Meoraq is with you,” he told her, and put his hand over her heart. “Hear me where you are and follow. Sheul, our Father, has set you in my path. So did you come to me and so you belong to me. Do you hear me, woman? You are mine! I found you, I own you, and I forbid you to die!”

His voice, risen to a shout, was a thunder in the tent, a whisper in the world. She did not answer. The heart that beat beneath his hand beat no stronger.

“I won’t leave you,” he said softly. “Please don’t leave me.”

Nothing. She did nothing.

Meoraq curled around her as close as his separate clay could press and closed his eyes. “O my Father, I cry out to You. You gave her to me and if I have not been as grateful as a son should be, I am sorry. But You gave her to me. Now…please…give her back.”