The Last Hour of Gann by Smith, R. Lee (11)

 

 

BOOK VI

 

 

GANN

 

 

Thunder, falling like a hammer into her brain, knocking her out of her nice, safe sleep and into reality. She heard screaming, her own, and then felt hands, not her own. She fought them, but the hands were thunder, inescapable, pressing her down and holding her fast in this world of cold and fear and hunger.

It hurt. Amber tried to scream, but she couldn’t find her voice and didn’t have much breath anyway. She managed a hoarse groaning sound, utterly swallowed by the pound and roll of the thunder, and after that had to just lie there under the hands and feel her heart racing in terror because she didn’t know where she was or why or even who.

Flapping. The world was made of leather walls close around her and those walls were flapping. The wind had its jaws around the world and was shaking them, shaking them. The thunder was its voice and its fists. At each new crash and roar, she screamed and struggled, but the hands owned her. They pushed her down, they held her, and the thunder opened its throat and breathed her back inside it.

 

* * *

 

The second time Amber opened her eyes, it was calmer, both inside the tent, where the wind still steadily shook the walls, and in her mind, where the storm had mostly ended. She rolled and kicked her way onto her side, then lay weakly panting, wondering where in the hell she was.

She could see. The air in the tent was an unhealthy, mottled yellow—the color of daylight filtered first by clouds and then by skins—but she could see, and by an exhausting process of elimination, she eventually realized that the only reason she could possibly see Meoraq’s leather tent on every side of her was if she was in it. Why was she in the lizard’s tent again? Why did everything hurt? And why was she so dry?

The dryness was worse than the hurt, actually. Her tongue felt swollen and sandpapery and stung when she tried to lick moisture out of her mouth. Her lips were unfeeling things, cracked and scaled—Meoraq’s mouth. Even her eyes felt dry. All of that, and yet she was soaked in wetness. The leather mat she lay on squished at her every feeble movement; she could feel beads of moisture tickling over her belly, her breasts, the hollow of her throat, her thighs. Her hair was plastered against her cheeks and neck, ugly to feel and probably pretty damn rank. Rain? Sweat? Did it matter?

Amber found a gripping place on the itchy blanket lying like lead over her body and fought it off. It was not a fight of just one battle. This was ridiculous. She had not been that damn sick. No one could be that damn sick!

She sat up. Her head swam and then hit something. The mat. She’d fallen over? Yes, she had. She sat up again.

Light. She warded it off with one raised hand, then promptly hit her head on the ground again because she apparently needed both hands to hold herself up. Two sudden dives to the mat in as many minutes was too much for her; she dragged her fists up under her chin and lay shivering, wishing the light would go away.

It did, but suddenly Meoraq’s huge black body was coming at her, and even though she knew it was him, knew it, panic still rolled its own thunder over her and she wheezed out a little scream. That was stupid. She frowned, gasping in the aftershocks of that pointless terror, as Meoraq’s scaly hands dipped impersonally beneath her armpits and hauled her up.

She couldn’t remember ever being carried before. Ever. Not even as a little girl. It was an odd feeling. Her legs dragged bonelessly across the mat until he got an arm under her and she flopped against the plates of his chest and then she was up. Carried.

“Too heavy,” she mumbled, embarrassed. “Don’t.”

He grunted in the space above her head and shouldered the tent-flap open. Out they went into the unbelievably cold air, air so fresh and clear it seemed to cut her brain when she breathed it in. The light was blinding. She slapped some of it off and then just rested with her hands over her face, rocking limply back and forth as Meoraq walked, wishing he’d put her down. She didn’t want anyone to see her being carried like this. She especially didn’t want anyone to see it when Meoraq dropped her fat ass on the ground.

But no one was saying anything. It was pretty windy, but she still ought to be able to hear them murmuring and snickering at each other. If nothing else, Crandall should be making a few comments. Especially since…oh for Christ’s sake, she was completely naked.

“Put me back!” Amber wailed, pressing her hands even harder against her face because now it made perfect sense that no one was talking and if she had to see them struck speechless by the sight of her naked body, she was going to die right on the spot. “Damn it, lizardman, put me down!”

He did. She felt herself swoop downwards, bump up against his bent knee, and then finish out the slow fall in a heap over the hard, frozen ground. She curled miserably around herself, knowing she couldn’t cover everything, and finally made herself face the horror head-on.

Only no one was there.

She kept stupidly staring, right on over nothing, nothing, and more nothing all the way to the horizon. She could see the blackened rings where the campfires had been. She could certainly see the wide path where all their tromping feet had flattened the prairie grass. But the places where the bivies and tents should be poking up out of the ground were empty.

Meoraq’s leather teepee was the only one left.

Anywhere.

Something nudged her arm. She blinked around at the mouth of a small, shiny flask, then followed it up Meoraq’s arm to his face.

“What happened?” she croaked. “Where is everyone?”

He took her wrist, put the flask in her hand, and made her take it to her mouth. She needed his help to hold it while she drank. The warm water cut her mouth all to hell. She choked and he let her choke, but after she was done, he made her drink again. She had maybe half a dozen swallows before her stomach cramped, and then had just enough instinct to shove the flask back and bend forward before puking it up.

It came out as smooth and tasteless as it had gone in. That made her want to throw up again, but a froggy belch was all she could manage. She groaned and started to cup protectively at her stomach, but Meoraq took her wrist and put the flask back in her hand.

“I can’t,” she said, trying to push it away.

His spines flattened.

So she drank and even though he made her take twice as much, it stayed miraculously down. Her mouth, wet, throbbed with hurt, but she could feel the rest of her sucking the moisture in, and at the end of his third silent urging, the flask was dry.

He took it back with a grunt of satisfaction, then got up and left her there. She looked after him as he went back inside his tent, and kept right on looking because it was still the only one around.

Meoraq came back with his blanket and draped it around her shoulders, tying the corners together so the wind couldn’t blow it off. It was warm, but so heavy. So ridiculously heavy.

“I’m not supposed to get sick,” she told him. “I got the Vaccine. We all got it. I can’t get sick anymore, they said so. They promised. What happened to me?”

“What do you remember?”

“Everything!”

“Tell me.” He hesitated, then gestured toward her stomach. “Had you…been having pains? Were you hurting…all that time?”

“Huh? No, I was fine. We were talking. We…” She thought about it, reaching up to rub at her thick head as if she could comb out a clearer memory with her fingers. It seemed to help, actually. “You told that horrible story about your father.”

He drew back a little. “Horrible?”

“And then…and then I was banking the fires and packing the food. I don’t…I don’t remember going to bed. I don’t…” Something tugged at her, just a flutter of sound, an impression more than a real thought: Snakebite. “I think something bit me.”

He seemed to relax, just a little. “There was a mark,” he said, and looked away.

He watched the clouds roll by. She watched the empty camp. There was no time.

“Where’s my stuff?” she asked.

“In my tent. Do not trouble yourself for any of it now.”

Amber nodded and pulled the blanket closer around her body. “Where are my clothes?”

“Washed and in your pack. For now, you do not require them.”

Which was a nice way of saying he wanted to wait until he was sure she wouldn’t piss in them. As was only sensible.

She nodded again, rubbed at her mouth, sat there.

A few seconds passed.

“Where is my sister?”

Meoraq did not answer. He didn’t even look at her, just turned his eyes up in his restless way and watched the clouds churn by.

“How long have they been gone?”

“Five days.”

“Five days?” She brought her hand up, but didn’t touch her eyes. After a while, she just dropped it again. “Where…I mean, did they go someplace…to wait for us?”

He did not answer.

“They wouldn’t just leave us,” she argued, trying to stare him down, but he kept watching the sky. “They wouldn’t do that.”

No reply.

“Oh come on! My sister? Nicci? She wouldn’t…”

He watched the clouds.

She wanted to keep talking. God knew, there were arguments she could be making. It was absurd to think that they’d actually packed up and left her and no, she wasn’t the easiest person in the world to get along with and sure, Everly Scott hated her guts, but no sane person would ever go along with leaving someone behind like that. Just because they didn’t like her didn’t mean they didn’t need her. And if they needed her for nothing else, she was still one of Scott’s precious wombs, wasn’t she? He wouldn’t walk away from that. And no one would walk away from Meoraq, that was just insane! He was the only one who knew where to find this temple they all wanted so desperately to find, so obviously, they were waiting for them.

Just up ahead.

They’d left her.

Amber touched her fingertips to her lips, but they weren’t trembling. She felt at the thin skin beneath her eyes, but it was dry. Her heart felt cold, but it kept right on beating. She realized, impossible as it seemed, that this wasn’t going to kill her.

Meoraq hadn’t moved. He looked perfectly comfortable as he hunkered there against the wind and seemed content to read whatever epic novels were being printed for his viewing pleasure across the sky, and if he cared at all that he had been abandoned by Commander Scott and his brave pioneers, he showed no sign of it.

“Five days isn’t very long,” said Amber, and looked at the sky. “We could catch up.”

Meoraq grunted.

“When are we leaving?”

He rubbed at the ridges over his eyes. Then he looked at her, only this time, she was the one who didn’t look back. He hissed under his breath and looked back at the sky.

The way the clouds moved really was pretty hypnotic. She could understand why he did this so often.

“We will go when you can walk,” he said at last.

“Then we’re leaving tomorrow. I don’t care if we only make it to the top of that ridge,” she said, pointing. “But we’re going. They need to be able to look back and…and see us trying to catch up.”

He turned his head and spat, letting the wind take that little comment and carry it off. “So be it.”

“And we’re going to catch up.”

“If it is God’s will.”

“God has nothing to do with it. Nicci is waiting for me.”

That, he didn’t answer. Instead, he picked her up again and started walking. She put her arm around his neck in the hopes of better distributing her weight but thought she felt him stiffen, so she took her arm back and just hugged unhappily at herself until she was back inside the tent (which reeked humiliatingly of sweat and bile and oh what’s that gentle fragrance boys and girls that’s piss is what that is) and out of the wind. He set her on the mat (she turned her head so she wouldn’t have to see how badly she’d stained it), covered her over with the blanket and the leaden fur besides, and stood up again.

Just stood there. After a moment, he backed up. After a few moments more, he opened the tent-flap and put one foot outside, but he didn’t leave, he just looked at her. Or maybe he was only pretending to look at her while he aired the tent out. It needed it. How many times had she pissed the bed, his bed? How many times had she shit in it? And how could she even care about that when she knew that all the rest of them were out there right now, that some of them might even die because she’d made Meoraq choose her over the others? And would Nicci be one of them?

Her eyes stung; she was too dry to make tears, but her vision blurred anyway. She watched through this tearless haze as Meoraq let the hide-flap fall with him still on the inside. She scratched her eyes shut and turned her face away, but soon felt his scaly fingers on her chin. His strong hand stroked once across her matted hair and down to cup the back of her neck. He pulled her close and pressed his cool, unfeeling brow to hers. She could feel his bony ridges digging at her skull, feel each hot puff of breath against her throat. “Rest in His sight. He sees you well, Soft-Skin. He sees us both.”

“Tell him to watch out for Nicci. Because I’m not there, Meoraq. And neither are you.” She wiped at her eyes—still dry, still hurting—and pushed him away. “And until she’s back, don’t you dare tell me this is God’s will. If your god sent my baby sister out there to die, then I hate your fucking god. I hate him and I’ll tell him so to his face. I’ll tell him…”

She lost her breath and then the train of her thoughts and finally had to let him lay her gently down and cover her up again beneath the crushing weight of the blanket. “Tell her she can have the mat,” Amber whispered. She no longer knew precisely who she was talking to or why, but the words seemed very important. “Tell her I’m sorry and she can have it now. I’m so…” Her thoughts slipped again and she forgot how to end. Sorry? Thirsty? “Tired,” she finished.

She slept.

 

2

 

Meoraq sat up all night, watching Amber sleep by lamplight (and often resting his hand between her teats to feel the breaths he could plainly hear and see). Through every long hour, Gann rode his back and whispered in his ear that this was the last rally of a dying soul and that dawn would find her cold beneath his hand, but Sheul’s mercy prevailed. She lived. She drank—water at first, then tea, and finally broth made of boiled cuuvash. She mumbled in her restless dreams at times, but when her eyes opened, she always knew him. She had come out of the very shadow of death and she would be well.

And she did make it to the top of the ridge the next day, but only because Meoraq carried her. Six steps. That was all she could manage on her own. Six steps, and they left her so drained that she fell asleep soon after he set her down. Meoraq built her a fire and started the stones heating for tea, then ran on ahead along the wide trampled path left by the humans’ passage.

He didn’t go far, just up to the next rise. He could see perhaps a quarter-span from this vantage, and Scott’s trail cut through all of it, keeping steadily eastward until it vanished over the hills. He waited for some glimmer of the disappointment a righteous man would feel and felt none. If he’d found them, he would be honor-bound to go and fetch them back and he hated even the thought of that. He would do it if Sheul asked it of him, and for Amber’s sake he would even do it in good humor, but if he never saw them again, he would lose no sleep over it.

The next day, Amber managed a little better distance, but still needed Meoraq’s arm to lean on to get over the next rise, where she took one exhausted look at Scott’s trail winding away into nothing and began to cry. Meoraq kept his eyes fixed on the trail and pretended not to notice. This was ludicrous enough when she was only weeping, but when she reached the end of her tears, she just as suddenly fell to shouting.

She said things. Meoraq tried not to listen. Grief had made her half-sick and weariness took her the rest of the way. Once she’d rested, she might not even remember this…remarkably creative string of profanities…so it behooved him to just let her vomit it all out.

He stood while Amber cupped her flat face and screamed Nicci’s name until her voice roughened. He studied the rippling lines of shine in the wind-blown grass as Amber cursed Scott for a madman and a murderer. He watched the clouds when she turned on him, slapping and punching at his chest—the blows as weak as a child’s—and ordered him to go after them, find them, bring them back.

At last, the tears returned. Meoraq helped her collapse without hurting herself. He left her moaning into her hands and went out into the plains for water. There was ice along the bank of the creek where he drew it. The first ice of the season, thin and white as paper…but it would grow.

She refused to speak to him that night. When he tried to put her mat in his tent, she pulled it out and sat rebelliously with the fire between them and her spear over her lap, just like she thought she could hold a watch.

Meoraq went to his tent and meditated. When he emerged, she was soundly sleeping, still sitting up. He put her to bed; the Amber he had always been able to wake just by walking past her did not stir even when he carried her into his tent and took her boots off.

She slept through the night, past dawn, and deep into the day. When she finally emerged, Meoraq had just finished the last of the hot tea. He grunted a greeting and began to brew more.

Amber sat down there in the mouth of his tent and watched him change stones and meditate. Neither spoke as the water heated. Meoraq could only hope that was a good sign, because she wasn’t showing him any expression to gauge her mood by.

“When will you be ready to walk?” he asked finally.

She stared at him dully for a long time and then said, in a voice still rough from yesterday’s screaming, “Two or three days, I guess.”

Relief struck him like a slap—a short shock and a spreading glow. He grunted again and filled the steeper with some of the redsash leaves. She didn’t want to be told that was the right decision. A brace or two ago, Meoraq had known nothing at all about women, but he already knew that much.

“Where did you get that?”

The lifeless question held no clues. Meoraq followed Amber’s incurious gaze to the tea box in his hands. Odd…he’d never really looked at it before, beyond determining that it was sufficiently lavish to satisfy his spite. Now its inlay reminded him in an uncomfortable way of the mosaic on the wall in the ruins—a lost world, a flying ship.

He flicked his spines and tossed the steeper into the stewing pouch. “From a man in Tothax.”

“A man?” She took the box back and inspected it more closely. “Hunh. It doesn’t look like something a man would give.”

“He didn’t have a choice.”

Amber opened and closed a few drawers, sniffing disinterestedly at the various blends. “I guess you like tea a lot, huh?”

“Better than I like boiled water.”

“Please go after them.” The hoarseness of her damaged voice robbed it of all passion. Her face showed no more emotion than her voice, but her eyes saw him, he was sure. She was very close to death (he would never admit it, but Meoraq had begun to wonder if she might be dead already, her unburnt clay going through the motions of life and no more), but she was not speaking from grief now. She thought she was calm, reasonable. She thought she could convince him.

“I swore I would not leave you,” he said.

“I’m asking you to go.”

“I didn’t swear myself to you.”

Amber put his tea box back in his pack and his pack back in his tent. “It’s the same as killing them, you know.” Her voice was still calm, still reasonable. “Scott can say anything he wants about his imaginary skyport, but if you know they’ll die without you and you let them leave anyway, you killed them.”

The Sheulek in him judged that uncomfortably close to truth, but not entirely so. “I gave them a choice,” he told her, which was also not a whole truth.

“We aren’t leaving tracks.” Amber turned her head to look back the way they’d come, but there was nothing to show their passage. “Every day, the ground is getting harder and the wind is always blowing. When I woke up, we were five days behind them. Now we’re seven, because I can’t get myself together. And we’ll be ten days or more before I can make a real effort here, and by then, their trail will be gone.”

“They will go east,” he reminded her. “They will go on to Xi’Matezh the same as we do. He thinks his ship is there.”

“They’ll starve.”

“Starvation is not a quick death.” He hated to give the thought, plausible as it was, any more validation, but it was only truth. “Their strength will flag long before they fail. They will den down and we will find them.”

“Thirst, then. They don’t know how to look for water.”

“They won’t have to look too hard after all this season’s rains, and they have nearly all my flasks to help them carry it. Apart from which, even before I found you, S’kot had sense enough to make his camp by water.”

“They’ll freeze. Animals could eat them. The storms will come back. Another starship could crash on top of them! A thousand things could happen, damn it!”

“The tea is ready,” said Meoraq, dipping his cup. “Come and have some.”

She did not come, but she took the tea when he offered it. She drank, wiped her eyes, then drank the rest. He refilled the cup. She held it and stared at him.

“They made a choice,” he said again. “So did I.”

“And that’s it, huh?” She shook her head side-to-side, started to drink, then breathed out a harsh sigh and put the cup aside. “Do you have a family, Meoraq?”

The question took him aback. He could not imagine what had prompted it and dreaded where it would lead. He felt his spines lower and had to force them up again in feigned nonchalance. “Two brothers. Some blood-kin in other cities. Why?”

“How would you feel if they were out here? How easy would it be for you to just sit back and say God will keep them safe?”

“Nduman is out here,” he replied. “At least as often as I am. And Sheul keeps him safe. Salkith…You may have a point about Salkith, but I feel I ought to observe that not even he would be out here following S’kot.”

“All right, so she made a mistake. You don’t just give up on family!”

‘She did,’ Meoraq thought. To keep from saying it—and oh, but his whole heart and soul wanted to say it, even knowing how deeply it would stab her—he said instead, “Have you any other family but that…but N’ki?”

“No. It’s just me and her.” The words faltered as they left her mouth. She looked away. “I guess it’s just me now.”

“I am with you.”

“Yeah.” But she stayed quiet for a time, just staring into nothing. At last, while he struggled to find something to say to bring her back from wherever she had gone, she stirred and looked at him. “What about you? Where are your parents?”

“My mother died years ago. My father…very recently.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, just as N’kosa had done.

“Thank you.” He still wasn’t certain that was the right response. “He served well, died well, and dwells in our true Father’s Halls now.”

Her brows creased. “How do you have a good death?”

“He died in judgment and Sheul was with him.”

“That makes a difference, huh?”

“Yes.”

She fell into a silence, which should have been welcome enough, but oddly wasn’t. At length, unable to think of what else to say and loathe to let the conversation die, he said, “Your mother is dead also?” and wanted to hit himself for saying it almost immediately. When was that ever good conversation?

Yet Amber merely said, “Yeah. But I don’t think God was with her.”

It was a startling thing to say on its own merit, and doubly so for the dry way in which she said it. “Why not?”

She did not answer, only stared into the fire and was silent. The light had a way of playing about her face, making her seem a stranger—too hard-worn for his Amber.

“How did she die?” he asked.

She sighed and rubbed at her face. “Christ, I don’t even know how to answer that. I guess some people would say she was sick.”

“What do you say?” he asked cautiously.

“I try not to say anything. How did your mother die?”

He frowned, but answered readily enough. “She was probably childsick. I remember she complained of feeling overtired for a few days and that she felt heavy. My father offered to send for a surgeon, but she said she was sure it would pass. Then one night, she just started screaming.”

The walls of House Uyane were strong. It had not been Yecedi’s screams but that of her dressing-maid running to Rasozul’s chamber that woke Meoraq and his brothers in the room they shared when home from school. Too big to share a cupboard, too young to have earned a room of their own, they sat up in huddles on the floor, looking at each other in the light from the lamp that stupid Salkith couldn’t sleep without and listened to the thunder of their father’s feet racing to the other end of the house.

He was back again in mere moments, it seemed, bellowing for the carriage. Salkith, the only one of them senseless enough to act, opened the door just as Rasozul flew by with their mother thrashing and weeping in his arms. Salkith, naturally, dropped right there in the doorway and started crying, but their father hadn’t even seemed to see him. All the rest of that night and deep into the next day, they waited. When Rasozul finally opened their door, he had seemed a different man, or a dead one—cold clay in the shape of their father—the air around him choked with the stink of smoke more foul than anything he’d ever smelled in his life. Salkith took one look and started bawling again. And their father, who seldom had much patience for Salkith’s soft-headed moods, slid down the door’s frame to the floor, pulled Salkith onto his lap, and began to weep with him.

“Meoraq?”

He stirred and focused on Amber, on whose strange face his eyes had been resting all this time while he sat silent. He grunted an acknowledgement at her to disguise his embarrassment at losing himself that way, but her creased brows only creased that much further.

“I guess you were close, huh?”

“No,” he admitted. “I didn’t…know her very well.”

Now they were both quiet. Meoraq, determined not to fall back into that same pool of sucking mud, gazed into the fire instead and refused to think about Yecedi’s pyre and the stink that had clung to his father’s skin for days afterwards.

“My mother killed herself,” said Amber.

He looked at her. She looked at the fire.

“I don’t know if she meant to. I guess it could have been an accident. She was taking something that she thought would make her feel good, something she knew was poison. She took it anyway and she took too much. I came home and she was trashing the apartment, puking and pissing herself and smashing stuff on the walls. She was out of care credits, so they wouldn’t send a medi-bus. I had to drive her to the hospital with her screaming in my ear and Nicci crying in the back and me yelling at both of them to just shut up.” She was quiet for a moment. “Those were my last words to her. ‘Shut the fuck up.’” Another short silence. Amber shrugged and looked at the fire. “And they let her die. You know how it is. High risk, low insurance. I guess I should be mad at them…but I’m not. I’m mad at her.”

Meoraq looked lamely back into the fire. He wanted to say something, but he didn’t know what. He did not know what poison the woman had taken, but suspected it was something like phesok, which fools often chewed in defiance of the Word, breaking faith with Sheul for a handful of dreams. What could he tell her now to comfort her? Amber’s mother did not see their true Father’s face; she had masked herself forever.

“When they told us she was dead, do you know the first thing I felt? I mean, the very first thing.” Amber uttered a short flutter of humorless laughter. “I was relieved. Nice daughter, huh? I’d just lost my mother, not to mention our home, our insurance and our whole damn life, but for that first moment, the weight fell off, not on, you know?”

He grunted, uncomfortable but listening.

“She wasn’t a bad person, I guess.” Amber glanced at him. “She didn’t build machines or anything. And she had friends. Not many, but she had them. It was just me.”

“You?”

“Who didn’t like her.” Her eyes flinched even when no other part of her did. She looked away. “I didn’t like her,” she said again. “My own mother. She was just so…bitter and angry and so fucking eager to stick poison in her veins and trade everything she had—including us—for more. And I know that’s a pretty sick excuse, but I felt like I’d been watching her die for years. As bad as it was, having it over, finally over, felt good.”

Her voice cracked. Meoraq frowned and watched the coals.

“I wish I was the kind of person who could just…miss her! But I don’t. You have to understand, she was my mother and for the last three years of her life, all I wanted was to just grab Nicci and get away from her. And then she finally died and I don’t even think I waited a whole day before I started planning how I was going to make Nicci get on the ship that brought her here!” She flung out her hands to show him all the empty world, then slapped them down again on her thighs. “I appreciate that you saved my life. I’m grateful. It may not sound like it, but I am. I don’t want to die. But how could you? One person—and I don’t care who that person is—one person is not worth the lives of fifty other people, especially when that one person is me!”

“You?”

“I’m not…I’m not nice, damn it! You put everyone else in danger to save a horrible human being!”

“You are as our Father made you, Soft-Skin.” And as she slapped her hands over her face, he calmly went on, “He knew you would come here, where modesty and gentleness and womanly subservience could only get you killed. All things follow Sheul’s great design.”

“Bullshit. God has nothing to do with me.”

“Do not be blasphemous.” He reached out to gentle the chastisement with a tap to her knee, and another, for no real reason at all, to the soft blade of her cheek. “When you came upon your mother sick with poison, you tried to save her. You say you didn’t like her, but you tried.”

“Meoraq, you’re not listening.”

“And you forced Nicci on the ship, you say. I doubt you had her tied and dragging behind you, but even if so, you put her on the ship because you would not leave her behind. That is who you are, Soft-Skin. So say whatever you like about how evil you are and how poor a person and how small of worth, but even in the midst of all that, remember that you still took the time to thank me.”

She stared at him, her soft brow furrowed.

He picked up the now-cold tea, poured it back into the stewing pouch and dipped her out a fresh cup. She took it when he held it out, but she was still frowning, still trying to think of the right words that would move him on without her.

“I am a Sword and a true son of Sheul,” he told her. “I will not leave the one human He has returned to me to chase after those who have put their faith instead in S’kot. Make whatever argument you wish. Ask as often as pleases you. I will not go if it means leaving you behind.”

He could see the thought that came into her eyes then. See it and read it, as easily as words written on a page.

“And you will not go,” he said dryly, “if it means leaving me. Hear Uyane Meoraq and mark him well, human: Sheul has given me your life and I do not give it back to you. I have been lenient with your freedoms until now. No longer. Do not test me. I’m not very nice either.”

She started to speak, then abruptly raised the cup and drank tea instead.

He relented and gave her a tap, letting the touch linger somewhat longer than was appropriate. “Yet they will go on to Xi’Matezh, eh? Whether by Sheul’s guidance or by S’kot’s, they will go. And we will follow. If God gives them back to me, I will take them in.”

She shook her head again, up and down this time, but she didn’t seem much comforted. He didn’t know what else to tell her, and after the silence had stretched out long enough for her tea to cool again, he finally cried a mental surrender and said it: “What are you thinking?”

“Why?”

“Insufferable…This is my camp and I’ll ask whatever questions I please.”

She was already shaking her head, one hand back over her face. “No, I meant, that’s what I was thinking. I was thinking why? What you just said…” She uncovered her face to look at him, frowning. “You’re really not nice. Everyone knows it.”

He shrugged that off.

“So why did you stay with me? Five days…” Her eyes grew distant. She huffed out a laugh without a smile. “You did things for me my own mother never did. What…”

More silence. Meoraq took the cup, renewed its contents, and drank it himself.

“Look, I’ll just say it,” she said suddenly. The color was high in her cheeks, very bright against her sickbed pallor. “What do you want from me? Because I realize I’m in no position to bargain, but I need to know.”

He studied the question, knowing it was trapped, but unable to see the trigger. Cautiously, he said, “I want you to be well.”

“And after that?”

He did not know how to answer that. There were answers—I want things to be the way they were. I want to talk the way I talk when I’m with you. I want to stand at Xi’Matezh and see your face filled with wonder when our Father receives us. I want to take my pilgrimage and share it with you. I want you to want to share it with me—but nothing in Meoraq’s life had prepared him to speak any of them out loud. He hesitated, hunting for some true thing he knew how to say, and said, “I wait on Sheul’s will.”

She leaned slightly forward and searched his eyes while he held very still and kept them open for her. Wind shook the walls of the tent and carried smoke away. The tea, half-gone, cooled in his hand, but he didn’t notice. Her eyes were so green and all he could think as he stared into them was that moment when she had opened them from the thick of her dying sleep and seen him.

Amber drew back, frowning. “Okay. But I’m sleeping out here from now on.”

He grunted assent, still thinking of her eyes, then abruptly snapped his spines up in surprise. “Why?”

Her jaw clenched. “Because.”

“That’s a word, not a reason,” he said mechanically and smacked a hand over his snout. “I can’t listen to myself anymore. You’re turning me into my father.”

“Because I’m not your pack or your spare shirt or whatever it is that your god told you I was. I don’t belong in your tent!”

“You’re not two days yet out of a killing sleep, you lunatic! A strong rain would wash you away!”

“Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve slept in the rain.”

Meoraq rubbed his snout, his brow-ridges, his throat…but in the end, he had to laugh just a little. “I asked You to restore her,” he admitted. And to Amber: “I’m not going to sit here and argue with a sick woman. Drink. I have meat if you think you can eat. Rest as much as you can—wherever you like,” he added generously. “And we’ll talk again when it rains.”

He rose and took up his empty flask, already planning to turn the next pouch of heated water into a bath. They could both use one, although he already knew she wouldn’t want to share. He wasn’t sure he wanted to, either. Amber naked and white with fever at his side was one thing; Amber naked and rubbing soap into his scales was quite another.

Meoraq stopped at the edge of camp and looked back. Amber was still sitting in the mouth of his tent, holding his cup in both hands like a child. Her hair, like trampled grass, bent crazily in the wind. His shirt on her body was oversized, loose enough at the neck to show a dark, tapering line—like a guiding arrow, he thought vaguely—pointing down between her swelled teats to her belly.

The second thought that came to him was relief so profound as to be prayerful that she was here at all—awake, alive, and arguing with him. Weak yet, but with sleep and warmth and decent feeding, she would soon be strong, he was sure of it, and when he made his prayers tonight, he would make them upon his belly in humility before the merciful God who had lifted her out of the ashes and set her again in his hands.

But that was his second thought. His first made it plain that he was not ready to share her bath.

 

3

 

So she rested and even if it was the right thing to do, she still hated it. The days took forever with nothing to do except eat and sleep and watch Scott’s trail fade away. The nights were even longer, lying alone next to the fire, often with Meoraq on the other side of it, staring at her. Two days. Three. Four, just to pace around the camp and work the stiffness out of her joints. And on the fifth, after she woke up to a few drops of rain tapping on her blanket, she rolled up her mat and packed her pack.

Meoraq, already awake and drinking his morning tea with his back to her, sighed and poured what was left into the flask he carried around his neck. He gestured at the waterskin, lying empty next to the fire. She took it away to fill it, knowing he was watching her and looking for the slightest weakness—if she stumbled, if she panted, if she shivered a little in the rain that was already coming down like pellets—any excuse to make her stay another day. She didn’t give him one. He helped her take down his tent without speaking and they were on their way.

It rained all morning and they walked in it. Amber kept her head down, holding onto Meoraq’s pack like a baby elephant to its mama’s tail. She didn’t think. The cold had numbed her brain as much as her body, but her eyes were open and as long as she could see the trampled path left by Scott and his pioneers under her feet (only trampled, the panicky part of her would cry, not muddy or tore-up, but only trampled), she felt okay. The rain finally stopped, but the wind kept blowing, chapping her face and stinging her eyes, but drying her clothes, so that was all right. Meoraq kept trying to make her rest and she didn’t argue with him, but she made sure she was always the first one back on her feet again and when he started in with his passive-aggressive observations on where she thought would be a good place to make camp, she managed to put him off three times with a casual, “Let’s try over the next hill.”

The fourth time she said it, however, he stopped, turned her roughly around, took her pack and her spear, and dropped them both on the ground.

“I can keep going,” she said.

“Stubborn idiot!” he snapped, throwing his pack on top of hers. “This is not a contest to see who can go further!”

“Meoraq—”

“No! You will go over that hill and over the next and over the next until you can’t walk and can’t think and then the tachuqis will come or the ghets or a pack of raiders because there is always something to watch for, damn it! These are the wildlands and surviving here means stopping before you exhaust yourself!”

“Maybe you’re right, but—”

“Maybe?!”

“But we have to catch up!” she insisted. “We’re just getting further behind!”

“We will find them in God’s time, not yours. Now, you rest.”

“But—”

“Rest, I say! No one but you would argue with that!”

Amber bit at her lip and followed the trail the only way she could, with her eyes, through the plains and eastward out of sight. “Maybe—”

“No.”

“I didn’t even say anything!”

“And I am not going to hear anything! You are resting!”

“Maybe you should go without me.”

He threw down a half-assembled tent pole and leapt up.

“I’ll rest right here and you can go find them!” she said, trying very hard to sound reasonable while speaking loud and fast to stave off his inevitable interruption. “I’m just slowing you down and we both know it!”

“And we both know my answer, so stop asking!”

“You can find them and bring them b—”

He thumped her hard on the forehead with one knuckle and pointed severely at her trembling mouth to make her shut it. Those yellow stripes were coming out on his throat. “I am not leaving you,” he said, not shouting, not even hissing. Somehow, that was worse. “I am never leaving you. If it is our Father’s will that we take the hateful S’kot and his hateful servants back into my camp, so be it, I serve Him in faith. For now, it is my will, human, and I will have your obedience. How do you mark me?”

“My sister is out there,” she whispered.

He broke the hold his hot, red eyes had on hers and stared over her left shoulder for a long time. Then he stepped back, rubbing at his throat until it cooled to black again, and went back to assembling poles without speaking.

She stayed quiet and out of his way, knowing she could fight all night if she wanted and never change his mind. “Can I help?” she asked finally, defeated.

“No.”

She looked around at the wind-blown plains, but saw no game and no sign that anything had passed through recently. There were no streams, no green swath of promise where water might be hiding, not even a swampy piece of lowland, just more dead hills rolling away on every side of them. The closest tree was easily fifty meters away and all alone—a huge, cancerous-looking thing with a squat, lumpy body trailing parasitical vines like hair from its few remaining branches.

“I’ll get a fire going,” Amber offered, heading toward the tree. It had clearly been dead for some time, which she hoped meant she’d find some branches around the bottom. She could see some kind of spiky bush at the dead tree’s base, so if nothing else, she could always burn that.

“We don’t need one yet. Just rest.”

“You rest. I’m fine,” she said, still walking.

“Insufferable human.”

“Scaly son of a bitch.”

He grunted without looking at her and went on putting his tent together.

The gully was deeper than it looked. The grass was hip-high and hard to walk through, with plenty of creepers wound through to try and trip her up. Amber went slow, muttering and swearing, keeping her eyes on her feet and determined to go one day, just one, without falling on her stupid face and giving Meoraq yet another reason to think—

“Stop!” he shouted behind her. “Stop now! Here to me!”

Amber rolled her eyes and turned around to see him running down into the gully after her. “I feel fine, damn it, would you relax?”

Meoraq yanked the hooked sword from his belt and no matter how pissed off he was, he would never pull a sword on her.

‘Don’t turn around,’ Amber thought with such clarity and in such a reasonable inner voice that she nodded along in agreement. ‘If you don’t turn around, nothing will be there.’

Very true. Very good advice.

Amber turned around and watched the spiky bush at the base of the dead tree raise its head and turn magically into an enormous, quill-covered monster, oh, about a meter and a half away.

It saw Meoraq first. Its sleepy eyes squinted, assessing this danger, as it raised one massive, claw-tipped paw—it had no fingers or toes that she could see, just a leathery pad for a palm and four huge hooked claws—to scratch at its neck. The quills that covered its entire body turned to fine hair over its flat face and chin, but kept growing along its jawline in a dead-on evolutionary imitation of a muttonchop beard. That, combined with its severe frown as it watched the sword-swinging lizardman tear across the plains toward it, made it look hilariously like President Martin Van Buren. There had been a row of presidential portraits all around the tops of the walls in her seventh-grade world-history class. She had not realized until this moment that she knew any of them and that was kind of hilarious too.

“Ha,” said Amber. She didn’t mean to. It just came burping out of her.

The creature’s head swung left and right, then down. It saw her. It had eyebrows, of a sort. It raised them. Now he was a surprised Martin Van Buren. Mr. President, it appears William Harrison has just won the election. Pack up your shit and leave.

“Ha ha,” burped Amber.

The creature thumped its paw into the ground and stood up. And up. And up.

Even as a bush, it had been a pretty big bush, the kind that might burn maybe an hour. She had thought, following its magical transformation into an animal, that it was the size of a bear, because even though she’d never been to a zoo or seen a bear close-up, she’d seen them on TV and figured she knew how big they were, and yeah, big had a way of being subjective the closer a person came to a real live bear, but whatever this thing was, it was no more a bear than it had been a bush. It stood up on all fours and its ass was already taller than Amber, and then it stood up on its hind legs, doubling its height in a slow-motion second. It drew back its arm with a severe, presidential frown and swung.

Something hit her. It wasn’t Mr. President the Porcu-bear because she was looking at him. It wasn’t a car either because they had none on this planet, or at least, none that worked anymore. It felt a little like a car, though. She’d been hit once when she was little. Mama had gone running across the road so little Amber went running after and the cars had mostly stopped, but one of them hadn’t quite and although Amber didn’t remember it hurting, she remembered that whole-body double-WHUMP of the car hitting her and then her hitting the pavement. Then, she’d gotten herself a scraped elbow and maybe a bloody lip, she couldn’t recall exactly. Now, she tumbled over the grass and thorns and looked up dazedly to see grey skies and rolling clouds and Meoraq hacking at Mr. President’s neck. The porcu-bear turned away from Amber at once and slapped with his other paw, aiming at Meoraq this time.

It must have connected, because it seemed from Amber’s vantage that Meoraq flew back, but he landed and pivoted and lunged again with such effortless and brutal grace that it might have been choreographed. The sword went in, not bouncing off the quills this time but stabbing through them, slashing deep into the porcu-bear’s neck. It bellowed and dropped to all fours, shaking its head and slapping Meoraq away. Again, Meoraq rebounded, pulling his other sword from his back even before he hit the ground. His boots kicked a clod of grassy dirt onto Amber’s chest. She tried to pick it up, but it broke apart in her hand.

The porcu-bear stood up again, fanning its fingerless claws with both hands and bobbing its head as it roared, which made it sound a lot like Martin Van Buren during some fairly intense coitus, but when Meoraq came at it again, it dropped and tried to run.

It managed surprising speed for the first dozen steps and staggered for a dozen more before collapsing carefully onto its knees. Glaring at Amber, who it clearly blamed for its predicament, the porcu-bear rolled onto its side and lay panting.

“I didn’t see it,” someone said. It sounded like her, but she hadn’t felt her lips move. Her eyes were still fixed on the dying animal, and even though she could see it lying there, it was as if she could also see it rising up in front of her too—just rising and rising, a mountain of quills and hot breath and muscle—ready to kill. She hadn’t seen it? Really? How could anyone miss it?

“It was lying down,” someone explained in her voice. Even Amber thought it was a weak excuse. “I thought it was a bush.”

Meoraq grunted and stomped into view. The porcu-bear took a swipe at him which he easily stepped over. He planted one boot on the animal’s side, gripped the hilt of the sword jutting from Mr. President’s neck, and shoved. There was no last kick, no grunt, no slump, but Amber knew the difference immediately. It had been alive; now it was dead. That was how quick it could happen.

Meoraq yanked twice and finally got his sword back. Drops of blood fell like beads from a broken necklace, scattering prettily over the animal’s stiff quills and rolling out of sight. Meoraq wiped it off and hung it back on his belt. “Kipwe already. We must be nearer to the mountains than I—Are you all right?”

“You could have been killed.”

His spines flared and flattened. “By a kipwe?” he demanded, sounding pissed. He knelt down to carve some meat out of the quill-covered carcass, and maybe he was talking to her while he did it, but she couldn’t hear him. His back was to her and on his back was a ragged tear in his tunic with the wet gleam of blood beneath.

“Oh my God, you’re hurt!” she blurted.

“I realize that,” Meoraq said testily, prodding at another tear, this one on his side. And there was another on his arm. His stomach. His thigh.

“You’re bleeding everywhere!”

“Calm yourself. You see here—” He opened the neck of his tunic for her, showing off a smattering of dark, wet smears over his chest. “—only scratches.”

“These are not just scratches!” Amber seized his tunic and pulled it out from his body, exposing an uneven line of dashes across his side where the monster had slapped him. There was very little blood, but there were several jagged nubs sticking out through his scaly skin: the splintered tips of the creature’s spines, broken off and buried in Meoraq’s flesh.

He had not resisted her grip, but stood silent and very, very tense as she stared in dismay at the many points protruding from his chest, hip, back and thigh, and it wasn’t until she raised her eyes to ask how bad it was that she noticed he was looking at her and not the wounds at all. His head tipped slowly to one side. He stared at her some more, this time with his spines forward and a frown on his face. “Are you all right?”

The question made no sense to her. None. The words danced around in her head, distracting and unintelligible, and flew away again. She looked back at his chest, because that still mattered, that still made sense, that was still everything.

“You’re bleeding,” she said. “There’s blood everywhere.”

His frown deepened. He looked at the gory hunk of meat in his hand, then tossed it into the grass next to the dead porcu-bear and sheathed his knife. He took her firmly by the chin and tipped her head this way and that, checked her hair, turned her around, and finally took her arm and started walking back to camp.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He grunted.

“I didn’t see it.”

“I know.”

“You’re bleeding.”

“I want you to stop saying that.”

“It almost killed you.”

“I really want you to stop saying that.”

He brought her over to her pack and sat her down, checked her hair one more time, and walked away again. She sort of lost track of him for a while, as impossible as that should have been. He came in and out of her awareness and somewhere along the way, he must have gone back down to the gully because when she finally noticed the fire, there was a piece of Mr. President cooking on it.

Meoraq was on the other side of the fire, heating water in his stewing bag, watching her. “Are you here now?” he asked when their eyes met.

“You’ve still got blood all over you.”

“It isn’t serious.” He put a wet rock in the fire and a hot one in the bag. “You looked much, much worse than this the night you threw yourself at a tachuqi.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“No one argues with a Sheulek, human.”

“I had a few bruises. You’re covered in blood. It almost k—”

He cut his hand through the air and pointed it at her. “If you say that one more time, I’m going to muzzle you. No son of Uyane’s line has ever been killed by a kipwe.”

The porcu-bear sizzled enticingly while Amber’s stomach churned. Meoraq watched her and heated his water. The wind kept blowing and the world kept turning.

“Come here,” Meoraq said suddenly and stood up.

“Why?”

“Because I tell you to.”

She got up, not sure what to expect, and he began to unbuckle his harness. “It scarcely tapped me, Soft-Skin,” he grumbled. “I’m not hurt. But if it will bring you back from wherever you’ve gone, tonight you will be my woman and tend to me.”

“How?”

He shrugged out of his tunic, tossed it and his harness together to the ground and gestured vaguely at himself. “Find a wound and clean it. I may have overlooked some quills. If you find one, take it out.”

Ignoring the arm he offered, Amber immediately moved around behind him to what she considered the worst of the injuries, or least, the one that had bled most profusely. High on his back, from just under the blade of his left shoulder to the deep valley of his spine, were at least two dozen stuttering dashes where the porcu-bear had slapped him. One of its quills remained, its broken stump as thick as her pinky-finger, stuck at the end of the bloody groove it had carved. She put her hand beside it, stupidly splayed so as to catch it if it tried to dart away.

She realized only after she’d done it that it was the first time she’d touched him, really touched him. Not his sleeve or even his wrist, but the real, solid, flesh-and-bone him. The feel of his scaly skin was thick and abrasive—much more so than it looked even—yet flexible over the swells of his muscular body, the way she imagined a crocodile might feel, or a dragon. And he was warm, the way she remembered from that day when he’d taken the knife away from her throat and pulled her roughly against his body. So warm.

“Now what?” she stammered.

Silence.

“Meoraq?” Hesitantly, she touched the tip of one finger to the rough edge of the protruding quill. “Do I…Do I just pull it out?”

His neck turned, not quite enough to let him actually look at her. “As opposed to what?” he asked. “Hammering it further in?”

She pinched at it nervously and let go again almost at once. It felt very solidly caught. What if it was lodged in his bone? Or his lung? What if she made it worse by pulling it out? What if he started bleeding and she couldn’t stop it?

“Take firm hold,” he prompted. “And pull in the direction it points. They aren’t barbed. It should come out cleanly.”

Amber pinched at the quill again and this time, tugged it free. She was horrified by its size: not quite as long as her thumb, which did not seem impressive until she saw it coming out of a living body. Meoraq’s blood rolled down its sides onto her thumb. Warm blood. She dropped the quill, fighting the urge to stomp on it too, and wiped her hand on her shirt half a dozen times, succeeding only in smearing the blood around.

“How does it look?” Meoraq asked. He didn’t sound very concerned. “Is it still flowing?”

Amber tore her eyes off the stain on her shirt and looked at his back. His scales, wedged aside when the quill had pierced him, had merely slipped back into place, sealing the wound almost bloodlessly, but the scrape preceding it, and all the other lesser ones, were so smeared by blood that it was impossible to tell if they were still leaking or not.

“A little. Should I…What do I use for a bandage?”

“Bandage? Stop trying to paint it out worse than it is! Just lick it.”

“What?”

“Lick it. To help it heal cleanly.”

“That may work with you lizard-people, but I’m pretty sure I remember hearing that human mouths are dirty. Here, wait.” She dashed over to her pack for her last Manifestor’s shirt. It took a little effort to get it going, but she soon tore one of the sleeves off and came running back to him.

“That was your good shirt,” he said, watching her dunk it in the hot water.

“It’s the only thing I have that I’m sure is clean,” she told him. “Turn around.”

He didn’t, just stood there, so she went behind him and dabbed at the blood on his back.

He didn’t move, didn’t speak.

“God, there’s another one.” Amber pulled a second quill, buried so deeply that it had snagged her wash-rag before she’d seen it, and immediately began searching for a third by sweeping her bare hand back and forth across his skin.

He stiffened so dramatically that it was like feeling a man turn to stone, just like a troll in those story-books she could so vaguely recall from her state-care days. When she’d been six. She’d been six and Nicci was being taken care of in the baby-wing upstairs and Mama was gone. She’d been six and she got three meals every day plus snacks and the sheets were always clean and the dishes were always done and life was story-books and juice boxes and the hill in the yard that she rolled down just one time, just the once, tumbling fast and screaming and laughing and free past all the trees and broken bricks and trash that could have hit her but didn’t until she lay there at the bottom on her back thinking life was good, life was great, and it could never get any better. And it hadn’t. She’d been six.

Amber burst out crying, puking out tears fast and hard and very loud for the few mortifying seconds it took to swallow them down again. She took her hand off Meoraq’s unmoving back and stumbled away, swiping at her face.

The wind blew over them, stirring the grass and pushing smoke in a hot curtain between them. Meoraq’s eyes on her were unblinking, hot as live coals. She couldn’t look at them, had to look at his dark blood on the sleeve of her last clean shirt instead.

“I’m so sorry.”

He did not reply.

“I should have seen it.”

Still no answer.

“Please…” don’t leave me. Amber bit down on that until her lips stopped shaking, but as soon as she unlocked her jaws, it found another way out as a trembling, “Please don’t be mad at me.”

He broke his gaze at last, turning his terrible eyes and whatever furious emotion was in them on the sky. “I’m not.”

“I didn’t see that thing or I never would have gotten so close.”

“I know.” He glanced at her, scowled, and rubbed at his brow-ridges. “A sleeping kipwe is well-hidden in the wildlands. I didn’t see it either. And you…”

She waited, twisting her wet, bloody sleeve between her fingers.

Meoraq hissed something under his breath impossible to catch. He rubbed at his brows again, then at his throat, then dropped his hand to his side and yanked a quill out. He glared it down, tossed it away in the grass, and looked at her again.

Without speaking, he unbuckled his sword-belt. It and the hooked sword he carried landed on the discarded heap of his tunic.

“What are you doing?” Amber asked, and hated the little whisper in which she asked it.

“I, nothing,” he said brusquely, sitting down in the grass to unfasten his boots. “You are tending my wounds. And you can bathe me while you’re about it.”

“Oh.”

“Such wounds,” he grumbled. “There will be songs sung of it one day, surely. Meoraq and the Kipwe.” He lay down and bucked his hips up (Amber felt a blush like a physical slap to both cheeks) to push his breeches down. He kicked them off indifferently, still muttering, and unbuckled his metal panty-panel.

Then he was naked. Completely naked. Wearing nothing but his scaly skin and his favorite knife on a cord around his neck, he stood up again and beckoned her to him.

“I’ve never…bathed anyone before,” she stammered.

He stared at her like he thought she was kidding. “Well,” he said finally. “I think as long as you don’t use mud, you’ll make a good effort of it.”

She hesitated forward a step and he turned around, raising his arms like a scarecrow, muttering under his breath about the absurdity of a land where women got paid to carry food but didn’t know how to bathe a man.

Amber dipped the rag in warm water and dabbed at his back, just under the scored place where the porcu-bear had scratched him. “What was it? The thing you killed. You called it something.”

“Kipwe. They come over the mountains every year to winter in the plains. We must be close.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Eh?”

“I just stood there.” Amber looked at the torn scales under her hand and then at the dark blood staining her rag. “I just stood there and watched you get hurt.”

“I’m beginning to take that personally,” Meoraq said, tilting his head to a dangerous angle.

“What do you call it when you get stabbed with hundreds of bony spikes?”

“Shameless exaggeration.”

“So, what? You’re going to stand there and tell me that thing wasn’t dangerous?”

“Anything can be dangerous under the right conditions.” Meoraq held up his hand to stop the bath and went to move the roasting kipwe off the hottest part of the coals. When he came back, it was to lie down in the grass at her feet. He gestured vaguely at himself and tucked his arms up behind his head, closing his eyes. “You seem to think yourself a coward for not leaping at the thing with your naked hands. Whereas I would think you a fool if you had.” He snorted, then added, “For all the rest of your life.”

Slowly, Amber knelt down beside him and began to clean around one of the fresh scratches on his arm. Her fingers made a rasping sound as she moved over his scales, a sound that made the gooseflesh pop out on her arms and her stomach want to shiver. “Does this hurt?” she blurted. “When I touch you?”

He was quiet for so long, she thought he’d dozed off, but then he said, without opening his eyes, “My flesh is not fragile. A Sheulek feels no pain even when he is broken. When he is not, he feels nothing.”

He had more quills stuck in him. She could see two of them now, tucked up under his armpit—just two nubs, scarcely discernible against his uneven skin. They had been lodged deeper than the last one and both took some work to worry loose, but Meoraq neither moved nor made a sound when she told him they were out. She looked at him, but he ignored her, lying splayed and by all appearances asleep, and after a while, she put her hands on him again and began to sweep them in small circles over his body, washing with one hand while the other quested ahead for more lost quills. The shush-shush sound this action produced summoned a tangle of images too dim to grasp, but she didn’t try to alter her rhythm. Her hands kept moving—her hands on his body—over his shoulders, over his chest, up along his throat and down again.

The quiet was crushing her, filled with nothing but that sound and the reality of his flesh under hers. How could she be thinking like this? Now, of all times! Looking at him stretched over the ground so silent and still was like seeing him dead and it could have happened, regardless of what he thought, it could have happened just like that and then she’d be out here alone, which she deserved to be, because she just stood there and didn’t do anything.

A sob rose in her throat and she had to cough it out, but she swallowed the rest of them. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to breathe herself calm the way she’d seen him do so often, but it didn’t work for her. When she opened her eyes again, all she could see was Meoraq, sleeping.

There was another spine between two of the long plates of his abdomen, so tightly lodged that she had to bend over (please stop thinking please stop not here not now not me) and bite it out. His blood tasted bitter on her tongue and had a smell curiously like cloves. She had to fight not to bend down again, fight not to press her lips against those scales that couldn’t feel her anyway, fight not to lick the way he’d licked at her neck once. She wanted him to put his arms around her. She wanted to be all right, dammit, and to know she was all right just once more, just once!

“You saved my life,” she heard her voice say. It broke on the last word. “Again. I keep…making you…save me.”

She stopped, gulping air to keep herself from openly crying, but he did not reply. His breathing was deep and even; his body beneath her hand, perfectly relaxed.

“Are you asleep?” she asked, now in the plaintive, scratchy, sing-song way that said tears were coming no matter how hard she tried to breathe them back in. “Meoraq?”

Nothing.

She patted his stomach timidly, found a quill and pulled it out, then looked at the bloody sliver pinched between her fingers and that was it. Her mouth cramped. Her eyes swam. Her head began to pound and her chest began to heave. She folded over, choking on breaths that wanted to be sobs, until she was curled against Meoraq’s warm side in a small, shaking ball. She had become an expert in the fine art of quiet crying; the only sounds she made beyond a hoarse huh-huh-haaaaah were intermittent mousy squeaks and they weren’t enough to wake Meoraq.

At length, the storm passed, but she huddled there for some time anyway. Her eyes were open, but unfocused, processing nothing beyond light and shadow, grass and sky. When she finally raised her head and looked, Meoraq was still asleep.

Amber picked the cloth out of the grass and washed her face. It was cold. She dunked it in the stewing pouch, now the bathing pouch, and tried again, but the wind took away the heat before her skin had time to really feel it. She dabbed at Meoraq’s bloody scales some more; he couldn’t feel her or the wind or the cold.

She finished cleaning him up, then made one last pass for quills, not so much because she expected to find them, but just so she could keep touching him. The tough old Amber who didn’t need anybody was dead and buried; the weepy, useless Amber who was left needed to be touched tonight, even if all he did was wake up and grab her wrist and tell her to keep her hands to herself.

But she found one last quill buried in his hip. His blood had blackened it to the same color as his scales and it had broken off right at the surface of his skin, making it easy to miss and hard to get out. She spent several minutes trying unsuccessfully to pinch it between her fingernails before she had to give up. “I think I need to borrow your knife,” she said.

No answer. His chest rose and fell slowly. His eyes stayed shut.

“Meoraq?” She patted hesitantly at his stomach.

He did not respond.

Amber hesitated, then closed her hand around the bone-hilt of his favorite knife and pulled it from the sheath slung across his chest. He did not move. The tip slid in under the quill, slicing easily through even his tough scales. She sucked in a whispered curse, but Meoraq never flinched. Fresh blood welled up and trickled out around the quill; she eyed it and him uncertainly, then cut the wound a little wider, just enough to get her fingernails on it. She had to twist at it a long time before she had enough to bite, but she did eventually get it out and he slept through the whole thing.

Amber dabbed unnecessarily at the wound, which had already sealed itself. His blood was hot on her fingers, but cooled fast, darkening to black in the open air. The scent of cloves wafted up. Meoraq slept.

She watched him. After a while, she put her hands on him again, stained now with his blood and hers, and ran them gently back and forth as she stared into his face. She wondered if she would be able to tell him from other lizardmen, if she ever met one. She wondered if he were handsome, for a lizard. She looked at him, at her hands on his stomach, and then at the smooth place between his thighs.

Which was not entirely smooth.

She waited to feel something, some flare of guilt or shock or something, but didn’t, not even when she saw her hand travel down to the slight swell of his groin. She cupped him there, rolled her palm in just one gentle pass, then lightly squeezed. ‘Now his eyes will be open,’ she thought, and looked, but they weren’t. He slept.

She should have felt relief. She didn’t. If anything, she felt worse. Small and scared and lonely and…and human. The last human. The one human, and a weak, ridiculous one at that.

‘I’m useless,’ she thought. ‘I am a scared, weak, little human. I am a scared, weak, little girl.’

Tears stung. Of course. Girls were crybabies. Had she ever really thought she was tough? She would give anything, anything, to be held tonight.

Amber’s fingers flexed, kneading at his groin as if it were a woman’s breast, and discerning as she did so the solid press of something inside him. She could fathom little of its shape beneath his thick skin, only that it bulged out into a hard knot at one end. She moved her hand beneath this, exploring its dimensions, and when she squeezed him there, the scales of his groin suddenly split and extruded the blunt head of an organ.

She opened her hand. It slipped back inside him, leaving the wet shine of some clear, viscous, clove-smelling oil to show her where the opening had been. She looked at his eyes. They were shut.

You could press the mid-pad of a cat’s paw, she thought, and squeeze out its claws just like that. But he couldn’t feel it, not any of it. She rubbed low underneath that half-felt lump, then kneaded at him boldly in the same rhythm as her spike-finding caresses earlier until, with a heave, the whole of it came thrusting out.

It looked only just enough like a penis that she was sure that was what it was. Only just, and no more. It was scaled, like the rest of him, but the scales there were so fine that she could see the veins throbbing just below its thin surface and did not dare to touch it. At the base, just where the edges of his slit wrapped around it, she could see part of the hard lump she’d probably been squeezing: a thick knob of flesh, swollen to a high shine and covered in dozens of small, blunt barbs, all of them oozing more of that spicy-scented oil. The shaft that sprouted from this dubious bulb was not smooth, particularly along the underside, where it formed pronounced ridges, the very sight of which made her shiver. At the head of his cock, a short, stiff nub curled slightly back toward his body, and even seeing it for the first time, some instinctive animal part of her knew just where it would strike inside her and how it would feel.

Her hand, firmly gripping at his groin, shook. She stared into the slick eye of Meoraq’s cock and saw herself, how it would be to shift her clothes and straddle him, right here. She’d put that alien cock inside her and maybe it would fill everything that was empty and not just the useless woman-part. It probably wouldn’t take long. He might sleep through the whole thing.

Her hand opened. His cock jutted stubbornly another few seconds, and then his body took it grudgingly back again. Amber wiped at the streak of oil left on his scales, then stood up, away from him. Eyes burning, she staggered over to his tent and crawled inside, unrolling her bedroll and pulling his blanket over her head. Something big howled, not far from camp. Never far.

She began to cry without noise, without moving, like Meoraq when he slept. She slipped her hand down her pants and into urgent moisture. ‘Fear-sweat,’ she thought, rubbing. She came. She cried. She slept.

 

* * *

 

Meoraq waited until Amber was quiet before he sat up. He pulled in his legs, rested his elbows atop his knees, and stared at the tent. His flesh was not fragile; neither was it stone.

He was not fool enough to throw down his guard and sleep so soon, not with a dead kipwe in easy distance of his camp and hungry ghets prowling nearby, and he was genuinely surprised that Amber believed he would. She, who had seen death snap at her so many times, had seen it snap at him and it had made her…well, a woman. He had hoped giving her a domestic chore like bathing him would calm her down, but it hadn’t. Feigning sleep had seemed the polite thing to do, in part because it let her tears have some privacy, and in part because being bathed by a woman had a tendency to arouse him and those were Amber’s hands moving over his naked body and he was a horribly insensitive brunt who absolutely was not going to have sexual stirrings while Amber cried herself calm. So he’d shut his eyes and slowed his breath and meditated, trying to unhear her sobs with some success and unfeel her hands with somewhat less success, and he had just begun to wonder when he’d ought to ‘waken’ and maybe brew some tea when she put her hand boldly between his legs.

Of all the things she might do, that had never occurred to him. Not even in his darkest fantasies, on nights when Gann had given him a thousand burning thoughts, had he ever imagined she would put her hand on him. But she did and it was no accident. She wasn’t bathing him; she wasn’t searching for injury; she was cupping him just below his slit and gently kneading—so shocking an act that he could not at first move…and then did not want to. A Sheulek must be a master of his flesh in every situation, but her hand moved and moved and Sheul Himself could not have unfelt that. He felt himself extrude and still he did not open his eyes. He only breathed, waiting in a kind of paralytic fever for what came next.

‘It’s not a sin,’ he’d reasoned, if one could call that shiver-white throb of heat in his brain a reasoning thought. ‘It’s only a sin if I do it. There’s nothing in the Word that says she can’t do it for me.’

So he’d waited, but she hadn’t. He could hear her breathing above him, feel the tremble in her hand, and then, by all the names of God and Gann, she took her hand away. She’d left him there, stabbing foolishly out into nothing, and put herself to bed and the only thing that had stopped him from leaping on her like a raging beast had been the sound of her soft tears. That, and the thin hope that she might come back if he only lay still enough long enough.

But no. She fell asleep. She’d put her hand on him and brought out his cock and breathed on it and gone to sleep.

And she’d left his father’s knife uncovered in the dirt. Meoraq glared at it, but did not recover it, much as it infuriated him to see it neglected there. She might wake and remember it, and if so, she must see only what she had left behind her. A naked blade. A sleeping man. Both primed to enter flesh and abandoned.

He lay back down and shut his eyes, frustration like a forge in his belly.

Perhaps she didn’t know, he thought suddenly. Perhaps she did not recognize his cock because it was not limp and loose and generally disgusting. He supposed that humans did not mate as dumaqs, did not penetrate at all but only…what? By all the movement he had glimpsed on past encounters, he knew they had to be mashing themselves together somehow, but as horrible as that image was, Amber surely would think it just as wrong to have a dumaqi member stabbed into her.

And yet…

He’d seen her naked many times during the terrible days of her illness and so he couldn’t help but notice the slit at her loins. It meant nothing to him at the time, which was a better testament to his character than it was now, when he could think of nothing else. Regardless of how their males were formed, he knew that human females were similar to normal women, at least on the surface. He may not be able to sheathe himself entirely, but there was something and he could pierce it.

In a burst of determination, Meoraq flipped onto his feet and took two long strides toward the tent. He was done. He’d been patient. He’d tolerated every unintended offense and quite a few intended ones and, by Sheul, he was ready to be the man that proved she was a woman! If it meant getting creative about the method, so be it, Amber’s hand had put him in a damned creative mood, but he was waking her up right now!

The wind turned abruptly, stirring the grass with whispers in which Meoraq heard the ghost of his father’s voice: A Sheulek is the master of his clay, always.

Meoraq cursed silently, blasting his own thought-space with profanities he never would have dared to utter to the true ghost of his father. A Sheulek was a master of his emotions as well, but he would just have to work on that.

He went back to the fire and lay down beside his disgraced knife. He glared at the tent where the human slept on, oblivious to him. He closed his eyes, measured out his breath—

She’d put her damned hand right on him.

—and began to pray.

 

4

 

In another few days, Meoraq saw the mountains. They were just a smudge on the horizon now, a broken blue line he could see only from the highest point of one of the many steep hills they had to climb, but they were in sight. The borders of holy Gedai, birthplace of the Prophet and of the Word, a land Meoraq had heard of all his life but never expected to see, and now the mountains were before him. They had ceased to be a part of the myth of Xi’Matezh and had instead become inevitable.

He pointed them out to Amber with a broad smile, but regretted it immediately when she dropped her pack and lunged ahead. “Where are they?” she gasped, searching the empty wilds. “I don’t…I don’t see them.”

He could see it in her soft face, how she tried to be a little happy when he told her about the mountains, but she didn’t care. He had meant to show her how much closer they were to God’s true House, but without intending to, he had instead shown her Scott’s people, her people, and then removed them all over again. She said it didn’t matter. She kept walking. And she cried that night, when she thought he couldn’t hear her.

He wanted to give her back her people, as much as he hated the thought of having them back. He wanted to prove they were all dead so her grief would finally end, but he couldn’t do it without killing her blood-kin, her damned Nicci. He wanted Amber, the whole Amber, and he wanted her to want him the way she thought she wanted the cowardly, treacherous cattle who had left her in the grass to die. He wanted all these things, all at the same time, and the conflict left him in such a constant state of resentment and self-disgust and sympathy that he could hardly speak to her at all.

Sheul would make His will known in time. Meoraq believed that, even if Amber didn’t. Sheul would make His will known and until then, they walked.

The hills grew steeper, more compact and more orderly. Meoraq knew what that meant and he could have led Amber around easily enough—she had a tendency to fall into her own mind when she tired and she tired very easily these days—but he didn’t. Scott would have come this way, walking between the hills where it was relatively flat, as slopes gradually gave way to rubble and the rubble to ruins.

“I knew it,” said Amber behind him.

He grunted, his eyes moving restlessly from tower to archway to raised loop of road—all destroyed, all decayed, all fallen. Little remained that the land had not at least begun to swallow, and Meoraq could see several structures that would not be standing at all but for the years of dead thorns enwrapping them. No sane and reasonable man would ever get closer to those cracked towers than Meoraq stood now.

“Do you think they went in?” Amber asked.

“Yes,” said Meoraq. They were poor ruins, even as ruins could be reckoned, but Scott would have insisted on walking through them if he’d seen them.

And Meoraq thought he’d probably seen them. There was little left of the humans’ trail these past few days, but there was enough yet to catch a trained eye. Boot prints amid the animal tracks in the frozen mud at an icy stream. A tattered jacket, blown into a thorn break after its owner had no more use for it. The ash-heaps of their fires wherever they’d stopped to camp. No, they weren’t close, but the last sure sign of their passing had been only a quarter-span back, so they had seen these ruins.

Meoraq shrugged off his pack and handed it to Amber. “I’ll go. You rest.”

There wasn’t even time to take one step before his pack struck his back and her challenging, “You rest! I’m fine!” rang out.

He sighed and rubbed at his brow-ridges, reminding himself that he had begged for her restoration. “Must we do this every day?”

“Stop saying that like I’m the one doing it.”

“Put out your hand.”

“No! You’ll tie me up!”

“I’m tempted,” he admitted, “but no. Never again. Now put it out, Soft-Skin.”

She glared at him, her mouthparts pressed together into a hard, pale line, and then suddenly thrust out her arm like a spear.

He waited, watching her hand tremble until it became too heavy to hold and she dropped it back to her side. “I’ll go,” he said, turning around. “You rest.”

“Jerk.”

“Pest.”

“Be careful, then.”

“And you.”

He went alone into the ruins with his kzung in his hand, but he knew already that they were empty. No lights burned in these broken windows; no voices called out from the speaking-boxes. Scott had surely stopped to indulge his fascination with the machines that dwelled here and perhaps to shelter out some little fall of rain, but the ruins were no place to sustain a man. Eventually, Scott would want a fire, clean water, a chance at hunting. Meoraq would find nothing here worth stopping for and he knew it, but he would find whatever there was and he would make some report of it to Amber, easing her mind just enough to let her sleep tonight, and that alone made this inconvenience tolerable to him.

Meoraq’s eye wandered at that thought, drifting up over the broken walls where rooftops should be to look at the sky. High clouds, thin cover, fairly pale. He’d hoped for rain. He shouldn’t, as far as travel was concerned, but nights that it rained were the only nights Amber joined him in his tent. There was enough room for both their beds (with half an arm’s length between them, unless Meoraq arranged his bedroll just right, which he was very careful to do every night, just in case), and his blanket was wide enough to share, but she was being stubborn. Each night that the rains forced her inside, she’d perch on the very edge of her mat, wrapped in her silvery sheet, curled up small until sleep loosened her limbs. If she dreamed badly, she’d move around on her mat until some part of her found some part of him, and then the rest of her would creep in and cling.

So far, Amber’s hands (her freezing hands) had not slipped down over his belly to knead at him again, but they might. He told himself he had not decided how to handle it when that happened, but on rainy nights, Meoraq had taken to sleeping naked.

But he didn’t think it would rain tonight. He still had perhaps three hours of daylight left, and the weather could do almost anything in three hours’ time, but he thought tonight Amber would be out on her mat by the fire, stubbornly trying to hold a watch even though he’d told her not to bother anymore. They were in Sheul’s sight, just as he had been during all the years he had camped in the wildlands alone, and must trust to His watch. She did not agree.

Three hours until dark…

He supposed he could waste enough time here that they would have to camp nearby (not within the ruins, he would not allow that even for Amber’s ease of mind), but he didn’t see the need. Amber might not want to go, but if he phrased it right—We should stop here so that you can have a half-day’s rest—he was confident that she’d march herself on. They could put another span behind them in that time, even if she had to stop again.

So then. Meoraq returned his beast-killing blade to his belt and, just to be able to say honestly that he’d done all possible, cupped his hands around the end of his snout and bellowed Scott’s name. The call bounced away down the streets, unheard. Meoraq listened, waited, watched a machine wheeze out of one alley and into another, then cupped his snout and hollered again: “Humans! Come!”

A thin, metallic finger tapped at his leg. A machine coughed out some unintelligible inquiry, prying at its front panel.

“Get away,” Meoraq told it absently, and it coughed again and moved on. “Humans! Give cry if you hear me! It is Uyane!”

Still nothing. Meoraq allowed himself a smile, but only a short one. He turned around and headed back to Amber, his eyes sweeping from wall to broken wall only because that was how he’d been trained when traveling in the wildlands. He saw nothing, just stone and metal husks digesting in the open air. Time and raiders had picked the place over down to its rusted old bones, leaving nothing but wreckage and decaying relics for the machines to tend until their last spark of perverse life was spent and they died.

Or were killed.

Meoraq stopped walking and looked back over his shoulder at the dead machine that had inspired the last piece of this rambling (and somewhat smug) line of thought. A machine. A bot, as Amber would call it. It stood just inside a rather small, plain structure, whose only notable feature was that its roof had only partly fallen in. Through the broken wall, Meoraq could see it lying like a protective shield over what few furnishings had survived the years of exposure and salvage. Just a big, empty room and a dead machine…which had been smashed to death by a piece of stone broken off the wall. He had seen a machine killed that way once before.

Meoraq put his hand on the hilt of his kzung again, but didn’t unclip it from his belt. Amber was waiting. He could go. One dead machine meant nothing worth investigating further and there were only three hours, maybe less, before nightfall.

“Fuck,” said Meoraq. He climbed through the wall.

Past the worst of the debris, beneath the overhang of the surviving section of roof, he saw the char of their fire. The little that remained told him they’d burnt their sleds, and while Eric had built one of them, the other Meoraq considered his even after Scott stole it, and he was annoyed.

“Humans!” he called. “Come out, if you hear me! Uyane Meoraq stands before you! Come!”

Silence. The wind outside gusted, making a moaning sound as it blew through open windows and over roofless towers. Here, nothing stirred.

Two sleds could not have burned long, but the humans had stayed by their fire long after it had gone out. When they’d moved on, some had walked through the ashes. Smudgy bootprints led Meoraq out of this dubious shelter into an adjoining room, one with a window. There, the tracks suggested the humans had gathered, shifting aimlessly as humans did when Scott was speaking.

Meoraq frowned, looking through the window to try and see what Scott had seen, what Scott had wanted everyone to see.

He wished Amber were here. She’d see whatever it was at once, he was sure. All Meoraq saw was the wreckage of a city he shouldn’t even be in.

Had it been a machine? Decaying vehicles and other unwieldy devices littered the streets and infested the innards of the broken buildings. Any one of them might have inspired Scott to some new sermon, but he thought not. Maybe if one of them were working, but not these. Even the living machines, the bots, were so decrepit that they could only undermine Scott’s effort to convince them of a viable flying ship in Xi’Matezh. So what, then? What else was there?

Roads, walls, scrap, sky. He couldn’t even see the mountains from here because the window faced north. No, it was nothing but ruin as far as he could see, cut into slices by cross-streets, fallen poles, a canal, until the plains took it all away. Nothing.

And yet, when Scott had led his people onward, he had chosen to lead them out through this broken window.

Meoraq followed, his spines flat to his skull. The tracks quickly faded and were lost. He had to stop and search every alleyway, every open door and broken window, every small space a human might have squeezed through, but found no sign of them.

He ended at the canal, which was not a true canal after all, but some sort of stormway, collecting the rain as it ran off the roads and whisking it away through a tunnel. Stormways like these were used in modern cities to irrigate farmland or water cattle while reducing damage caused by seasonal floods. Perhaps the Ancients used them the same way. In any case, there were some machines alive to tend them, because the stormway had not filled in with the unavoidable detritus that even abandoned cities excreted in hard rains. There were some cracks in the wall, and the grate that had discouraged foolhardy children of the Ancients from exploring the tunnels had fallen, but otherwise, it seemed well-kept. The canal was quite wide and easily twice Meoraq’s height in depth, but there was only a little water in the bottom, standing clear on top of a thick layer of greenish-black sediment.

Clear enough for Scott to want to fill his stolen flasks here? Meoraq hunkered down on the edge of the canal and thought about that, trying to be objective.

He couldn’t see it. The first person who got sick drinking this piss would end Scott’s power over the rest of them.

Meoraq straightened up, scanning the ruins on the far side of the stormway, but he didn’t see anything and he saw no reason to keep looking. The slope of the canal’s sides were shallow enough that he’d ought to be able to simply walk across, but he hated to get his boots mucky and he could just imagine what that sediment smelled like when it was kicked up. Yes, Scott had been here, but even he’d had the sense to move on.

Meoraq turned away from the canal…and slowly turned back.

The storm grate lay in the bottom of the canal’s eastern end, staining the sludge around it rust-orange. The tunnel’s mouth yawned above it at roughly knee-height, tall enough for a machine to walk comfortably within if maintenance were called for. Or a man. Or many men, walking in a line.

His eyes shifted from the perfect black of the tunnel’s mouth to the sloping wall of the canal. The stormways were being maintained, but they weren’t scrubbed down often enough to prevent a thin veneer of scum from forming where water regularly flowed. A greenish-brown film skinned the lower half of both walls…but it had been scraped down on this side. Not cleanly, as a machine would do, but in clumsy stripes. Like skidding feet. Like boots, to be specific.

Meoraq walked along the edge of the stormway until he stood right above that scraped place. He hunkered down, peering into the tunnel as far as he could see. His arm could have reached further than his eyes, but his eyes reached far enough to show him all the scum-black tracks left by their human boots. All aimed inward.

“I am not going in there,” said Meoraq.

No one answered him.

“I say no. I say, in fact, fuck the fist of that very idea. I would not follow the Prophet himself into that hole and I for damned sure will not follow S’kot.”

Still no answer.

So. Decided, Meoraq stood and marched back up the narrow street, past the ruined building where Scott and his people had sheltered, and out into the broad travel lanes of this city. There he stopped and stood for some time, his head bent, meditating.

His prayers ended with a muttered curse. Then he raised his head and loudly said, “I require assistance.”

Three machines nosed out of their dens and crawled toward him. They all spoke, but only one of them was capable of making itself understood. “How may I direct you?” it croaked, opening its chest to display a glowing window where tiny images appeared in a neat row. “Error. Directory assistance not found. Error. Public communications channel not found. Error. Community calendar schedule not found. Error—”

“Come with me,” Meoraq said curtly. His meditations had left him with the strong conviction that mastery was more than the command of a moment’s need, but he knew he stood upon the very edge of breaking the Second Law. For now, Sheul was with him, but if he found Scott in that tunnel, he was going to kill him there.

“How may I direct you?” the bot asked, struggling along after him. It kept asking every few seconds all the way back to the stormway, where it tried to rattle out some complicated machine-reason why it couldn’t go any further. It made some equally obscure threats when Meoraq picked the fucking thing up and carried it with him to the bottom of the canal. His boots were swallowed at once in a shallow pool of stagnant slime, and it stank just as bad as he’d thought. Meoraq thumped the bot down in the mouth of the tunnel and stepped up onto the storm grate, doing his best to scrape his boots off.

“There has been an incident,” the machine observed, probing one of its feelers into the scum that covered the tunnel’s floor. “Maintenance has been notified. Error error. Channel not found. Error. No response, no arrival. How may I direct you?”

Meoraq aimed its glowing chest into the tunnel, where it shone every bit as bright as one of Scott’s human lamps. He could see now fifty paces, maybe more, but there was still nothing to see apart from their tracks. He listened. Deep in the darkness, water dripped onto wet stone. There were no breaths but his, no footsteps, no life. The smell was that of cold, moldering stone and black water—the very breath of Gann.

He was not going in there. It was madness to do even this much. And Scott was hardly the sort of man who would strike off boldly down an unlit, unmapped, unmaintained tunnel. That took more than just idiocy. That took a certain degree of idiotic courage as well.

“S’kot!” Meoraq called.

“How may I direct you? Error. Directory assistance—”

“What is this place?” Meoraq asked.

“Error. Directory assistance not found. Updates requested. Error error. Channel not—”

“Stop. These tunnels…Where do they lead?”

“Welcome to Citymap! Please wait. Error. Signal not found. Updates requested—”

“Stop! Enough. Let me think.”

So. Meoraq’s sense of direction was, like his sense of time, fairly well-tuned after a lifetime of travel. Although the tunnels might turn any number of ways after boring off into the blackness, right here, the stormway ran west to east. It could be fairly assumed that the tunnels stretched as far as the city, and if so, they might go on forever. The cities of the Ancients were the very flesh of this world in their age. A man could dig down anywhere and find their relics.

Did Scott really think he could travel through to Gedai in this tunnel, crossing not over the mountains, but under them? Or had he only intended to explore them a short way and lost himself? The human lamps were neither infinite nor infallible. They might well be just ahead, just outside of hearing, camped in blackness, waiting for rescue.

“You’d better be here,” Meoraq muttered, climbing up onto the tunnel’s lip. His first handhold broke off in his hand. Not an encouraging omen. And not the only missing handhold, he saw. Who could possibly pull a piece of the tunnel out and keep going?

“S’kot!” he shouted, and the tunnel shouted it onward for him.

“How may I—”

“Just follow me.” Meoraq started walking, his gaze shifting between the bot-lit black of the seemingly endless tunnel ahead of him and their tracks on the floor. He thought of rain while he walked—the rain that sent Amber crawling in to share his tent, the rain that had not quite fallen enough to spill into this tunnel and wash these tracks away. The rain could be fickle.

The sound of water dripping grew closer. The bot’s light caught the surface of a wide puddle ahead, casting water-shine over the walls and ceiling. Thinking of rain, Meoraq walked right through it.

His boots squelched down into what might as well have been a puddle of black oil and went wildly out from under him. Meoraq’s right hand flew out to anchor himself to the wall (his left slapped down over his groin in a futile effort to relieve some of the strain of having his legs skid out in opposite directions), but there was nothing to grip and he dropped smack on his ass in the same stuff. He felt the shock all the way up his spine. And then he felt the icy sludge seeping into his breeches.

“Why am I doing this?” he muttered.

“I’m sorry. Please rephrase your question.”

“Can you not shut up for one fucking minute?!”

“Would you like to contact an usher support technician? Error error. Channel not found. I’m sorry I could not assist you today.” The light glowing from the machine’s chest snapped off. “Goodbye.”

Meoraq clapped both hands to his face, then threw back his head and howled, “I require assistance!”

Light obediently bloomed. “How may I—”

“Just stand there and stay quiet!”

“Standing by.”

“Great Sheul, O my Father, I thank You for every pain I am alive to feel,” he spat, pulling himself out of the muck with a wet sucking sound that would have been hilarious under circumstances that did not include him. He got up carefully, straddling the puddle in an awkward crouch, and ventured deeper, feeling his way along the wall. “Humans, come! Give cry if you hear—”

He slipped again, just one boot this time, which had the effect of throwing him hard against the tunnel wall. He hit snout-first, which was bad enough, and then the wall collapsed, pitching him painfully through the rotten stone and into a series of equally rotten pipes. They burst, spraying out stormwater like needles in his eyes and breaking away even more of the crumbling wall. The flow quickly slackened, but the wall kept falling, opening a wider and wider gap below and above him until pieces of the tunnel’s ceiling were breaking off.

Meoraq scrambled back, his limbs skidding wildly through that damned puddle until he finally thrashed free of it. The bot pivoted to watch him go, lighting his graceless retreat until a crunch and a shower of sparks threw him into darkness. Meoraq bolted back up the tunnel, smashing from one wall to the other until he leapt out into open air.

He landed hard, skidded what felt like half a span, then hit a crack under the sediment and went right over on his belly in the bottom of the canal. Cold sludge sluiced up over his snout and poured itself in under his clothes, swallowing him in stink.

He lay there, dazed. He didn’t think he’d ever been dazed before. He could feel his brain still careening through its own black tunnel, seeking some gripping place, and what it eventually hooked onto was, ‘Salkith must feel like this all the time.’

He laughed, spewing bubbles up through the watery muck, then pushed himself out of it. Behind him, the tunnel was quiet. The mouth stayed open, round and innocent, silently asking if he’d like to try again.

Meoraq gained his feet, wiping compulsively at the end of his snout even though he knew he was only rubbing the taste deeper into his scent-cavities. He took a breath, coughed it out, took another, and decided he was all right. Bruised, reeking, and without a damned thing to show for it, but all right.             

He started to pray his thanks, stopped to climb out of the stormway, finished his prayer, and headed back to Amber.

She hadn’t put his tent together—it was still too early for that, in spite of the eons he’d spent in the tunnel—but she had lit a fire and was heating something in the stewing pouch while she waited for him. He had plenty of time to watch her watch his approach. Her face was as good as a mirror, but he didn’t need it. He couldn’t possibly look worse than he smelled.

“What the hell happened to you?” she asked as soon as he was close enough.

There were many things he could have told her, things she deserved to know, but he couldn’t think how to do it.

“I fell down,” he said. That was true enough.

“That’s tea,” she warned, watching him reach for the stewing pouch.

“As far as I care, human, it is now oddly-scented bathwater.” He splashed a little over his face, rinsed his mouth, then began to undress.

She pulled his pack over and found his soap, started to hold it out and then drew it back when he put out his hand. “Am I supposed to…? You want me to help?”

He laughed curtly. To have Amber bathe him again had been pressed into his imagination, his fantasies, ever since that night…but now, with this stink in his scales, he could not be less aroused. Sheul heard and answered every prayer. Ha.

“Yes,” he said, raising his arms.

She obeyed, wetting the bar and rubbing it between her hands before she gave it to him. While he attempted to clean his mouth, nose, and especially his scent-cavities, she moved behind him and started scrubbing at his back.

“See anything down there?”

He didn’t know what to tell her.

“There’s always something, Soft-Skin.”

“But no sign of them, huh?”

She thought she knew what he would say, and yet there was a hopeful tremor in her voice. She had contented herself all these days with footprints, with ashes, with dung. She could follow their shadow all the way to Xi’Matezh as long as she knew something was casting it. Take that away…

Uyane Meoraq, twelve years a Sword in Sheul’s service, with conscious thought and in full sight of God and Gann both, lied.

“None.”

Her hands on his flesh stilled. He felt, in exquisite detail, the fingers of one hand open and lie flat just under his shoulder. Her breath sighed onto his back, first warm from her body, then cold in the wind. “I thought…I was so sure…”

Meoraq said nothing.

She sighed again, but resumed bathing him. “Thanks for looking, anyway.”

‘Father, forgive me,’ he thought, staring into the sky where the light of the sun stared back at him behind the clouds. ‘Truth does not care if it comforts her. But I do.’

 

5

 

It started raining immediately after Amber tied up the last piece of laundry to dry. As if she needed more proof that this whole planet hated her.

“Meoraq?” she called. “What should I do? Take it down or leave it up?”

No answer. She leaned out around the tree that was serving as her laundry line, but he was still sitting there on the flattest and most hospitable rock in camp, naked, just staring into space.

He’d been very distant lately, ever since the ruins. He wouldn’t talk about it, not to her at least, but he sure prayed a lot, even for him. And when he did talk to her…

“Are we still going the right way?” she’d asked this morning, not whining or anything, just asking.

He’d rounded on her at once, flinging out one arm and shoving his face right in hers. “Do you see the mountains?”

“Yeah, but I haven’t seen any sign of Nicci and the others for—”

“And you think I have?”

“Maybe!” And because that did sound like whining, she added defensively, “If you stopped to tell me everything you saw, you’d be talking all the time! You haven’t said two words all morning, does that mean you haven’t seen anything?”

“I’ve said more than two words,” he’d said disgustedly and stomped off.

Some days, it wasn’t even worth trying. “Have you seen anything or not!” she exploded. “Jesus!”

“I see what God gives me to see.”

She’d stopped there before she started a real fight, but after she’d fumed long enough to make him happy, he’d said, without looking at her, “No.”

“See? That was all you had to say.”

Another long stretch of nothing but wind and the marching of their boots.

“The doors of Xi’Matezh may not open,” Meoraq had said suddenly. “I will have to live with that…if it happens.”

“I don’t think I want to hear where you’re going with this.”

“We may never find—”

“Shut up, lizardman.”

He did, and that was pretty much it for chit-chat until they set up camp for the night. They’d talked a little then—he at his end, bathing out of the stewing pouch, and her by the fire, trying to stretch out the saoq they had left with roasted roots. Although neither one had commented on the day’s chilly silence, his bad mood was never further than arm’s length and she’d left him alone after his bath.

And now he was getting another one, it seemed. Look at him. Just sitting there. In training all his life to be God’s foot and he still didn’t know to get out of the rain.

“Meoraq?” Tucking her hands under her arms to warm them, she headed over. How in the hell he could sit there without a stitch on in this weather (or any weather) amazed her. “Meoraq, wake up.”

His spines twitched. He looked up, looked down, looked at her. “It’s raining.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” she said, shivering. “I just got your clothes hung up, too.”

He shrugged his spines. “Leave them. They could use a soak.”

Right. He insisted they still smelled, even though she’d been washing them every night since they left the ruins.

Meoraq stood up and collected the clothes he hadn’t bothered to put on. He still didn’t bother. He pointed at her mat and went on into his tent without speaking.

It was going to be another fun night.

Amber dug their dinner out of the ashes before it completely turned to hot mud, packed it into her pack, rolled up her mat, and joined him.

He’d put on his panties at least and lit his lamp. He watched in his serious, distracted way as she arranged her bed, but closed his eyes when she asked so she could change into drier clothes. Rattier ones, but drier.

“I think I’ve reached the point where mending this is only going to make it worse,” she remarked, carefully shrugging into one of her old shirts.

He grunted.

“But I guess nothing lasts forever.”

“God’s will is infinite, His love, eternal.”

“Okay, but nothing real lasts forever.”

His eyes opened.

“Nothing physical,” she amended, holding up her hands in surrender.

He glanced at them, then ran his gaze thoughtfully across her well-worn shirt down to her bare thighs. He frowned and looked away. “Put your clothes on.”

She rolled her eyes, but found a huge pair of jeans to step into. Her skinny jeans. “Like you haven’t been sitting around bare-ass for hours. Like you’re not—” She eyed him. “—ninety-eight percent naked right now.”

He grunted.

And did it bother her? She wasn’t sure. She told herself it didn’t, but she told herself a lot of things these days—we’ll find them they’re fine they’re looking for us too—she didn’t entirely believe. It was his tent and the man had every right to sleep in the nude if he wanted to. Besides which, he was so perfectly casual about his body that she felt it might be…she wasn’t sure…impolite to say anything.

But it was his body and on nights like this one, when he made her sleep beside him under his blanket, bother didn’t even come close to what he did to her. She knew he knew it; he had to know it; there was no way she could look at him or not look at him or touch him or not touch him that didn’t scream everything that had happened that night, and everything she’d wanted to happen.

But he just fell asleep.

Amber spread out her wet things so they had a chance to dry and sat down. “I hope these are done,” she said, pulling dinner out of her pack.

Meoraq watched her unwrap the mixed mess of fatty saoq and sooty roots, but didn’t reach for any. She couldn’t blame him, but she took a big bite anyway.

“Well,” she said, after she simply couldn’t chew any longer and had to swallow it. “They’re cooked enough. But I wouldn’t call it a success.”

He did not comment.

“I was hoping the fat would help flavor these godawful roots,” she explained.

“Gruu.”

“This godawful gruu. But instead, the gruu made the saoq taste bitter. Now they’re both incredibly nasty. Have some.”

He pinched off part of one softened, fat-smeared root and ate it.

“It’s horrible, huh?”

“I thank You, O my Father, for food in the wildlands to sustain me when the world dies for winter.”

She rolled her eyes and took another bitter bite.

So did he. “And I thank You for the human who prepared it,” he said. “And for the life which sustains her also. Even here, in the very shadow of Gann, O Father, You have set our table and filled our cup.”

“Rub-a-dub-dub. Thanks for the grub. Yay, God.”

He looked at her.

“You pray in your way, I pray in mine.”

They ate, but not much. Prayer did not make the stuff taste any better and Meoraq’s heavy mood would have made even cheeseburgers and fries difficult to eat. Soon Amber was wrapping the remains back up in the hopes it would magically disappear before morning.

It wasn’t very late, but the rain made things darker, so Amber went ahead and put herself to bed. The sound of her blanket crinkling as she wound herself into it was all there was for several minutes. He waited until she was settled before dropping half his blanket over her. He didn’t offer first, he just did it. Like he always did.

And then he just sat there and watched her.

Well, okay. Might as well light it up, as Bo Peep would say, and see who inhaled.

“Something on your mind?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

He scowled and looked at the wall. “I know what you’ll say.”

Flat spines and a narrow stare warned her not to ask, unless she wanted to see his neck light up too. Amber rolled onto her stomach, idly flapping a shadow-bat across the tent wall with the help of the lamp. Meoraq had never seen shadow-puppets before; the last two times it had rained, she’d done dogs and ducks. She didn’t have a lot more to show him, but she was saving the elephant for a finale.

He watched for a while, but not with the same interest as he had on other nights. She wasn’t surprised at his abrupt, imperious, “Say something.”

“About what?” she asked, letting her hands drop.

“I don’t care. Talk to me.”

Amber had never been a social person, but she knew instinctively that ‘What the hell is going on with you lately?’ would have been the wrong way to begin. She said, “Is this the furthest you’ve ever been from home?”

The tense set of his shoulders relaxed slightly. His spines came up, just a little. “Yes. By far.”

“You ever think about what’s going on at home without you?”

“Sometimes.” He scratched at his snout. “I’m sure they’ve sent for my brother by now, but he might not attend until after the cold season. My father’s ministers can manage the House until I return and Nduman has…somewhere else he wants to be.”

“So if you go home—” The if was important. Home was a touchy subject for him. “—what’s the first thing you’re going to do?”

“Pray.”

“Well, duh. I meant after that.”

“Mm.” He leaned back to think about it. Slowly, his brooding scowl became a smile. “In the steward’s private chambers, there’s a full bath…You won’t know what that is, but it’s like a deep basin, twice the size of this tent, that can be filled with water and kept heated.”

“Imagine that.”

“My first meal will be held in the festival hall, or in the lord’s garden if the weather is fair. They’ll hang the lamps. My father’s ministers as well as the heads of the more important households will be there to give me their oaths, so I’ll be expected to provide entertainment. There will be music and singing and some sort of dramatics…I’ll have to find out whether or not Uyane has performers on staff, although I can’t really imagine that we don’t. I’ll have to attend as long as the guests do and they’ll be trying to impress me with their loyalty, which means we’ll all be there all night.” He thought about it, quietly laughed. “It’s going to be hell.”

“What will you eat?”

His smile became a smirk. “Calf’s head and marrow, probably.”

“Gross.”

“A feast for lords.”

“It’s still gross.”

“I’ll send down to the kitchen for something else later if you like.”

“What makes you think I’ll be there, lizardman?”

“You belong to me.”

“Think so, huh?” Her voice didn’t rise. Her smile wasn’t strained. They’d had this exchange often enough that she didn’t even consider it a fight anymore.

Amber rolled onto her back and brought out the shadow-bat again. His head turned to track its movements. On impulse, she made a tusked fist with a broad, cud-chewing thumb: a corroki.

“You want to know what I think is funny?” she asked, lumbering it across the tent wall. “You’ve never asked what it’s like where I’m from. Never once.”

He watched the corroki and said nothing.

“Don’t you think that’s odd?”

His spines flexed and flattened a few times.

She killed the shadow-corroki and sat up. “Really? You’re not even a little curious?”

Nothing from the lizardman. He kept staring at the wall as if it were still covered in shadow-puppets. His face had lost that easy smile and gone as grim as he could make it, which was pretty damned grim.

“Well,” she said, trying to pretend nothing was wrong, that this was still a cheerful way to pass a rainy night. “The sky is different. I mean, I’m from the city, so I never saw much but smog anyway, but it’s still different.”

Silence.

“How is it different, you ask? Well, to begin with, it’s—”

“No one speaks for a Sheulek.”

“I wouldn’t have to if you’d talk to me.”

He grunted, glaring at the wall above her head.

The rain pattered down.

Unexpectedly, almost angrily, he said, “Were there lights?”

“Sure, all the time.”

He gestured curtly upwards. “Were there lights in the sky at night?”

She started to answer, thinking in a confused way that he meant city lights, and realized all at once what he really meant. “Stars? Yeah, we had stars. But you couldn’t see them in the city even when the smog was down. The other lights were just too bright. I never saw them myself, except on TV. But they were there. Haven’t…” She hesitated, but he was finally looking at her, so she went ahead and asked. “Haven’t you ever seen the sky? The real sky, I mean.”

“The Age of the Ancients ended,” he said by way of answer. “For His wrath was great. And the blight covered every land, and poison bled into every cup, and madness into every heart, until the shadow of His wrath gloved all the world.”

Amber sighed and rubbed at her face. “That’s a direct quote, isn’t it? I asked you a question and you’re quoting your Bible at me.”

“The Age of the Warrior awakened, which the Prophet called the Hour of Gann’s Dominion, but there is nothing eternal, save His love and the promise of His forgiveness.”

“What a remarkably roundabout way of not answering me.”

“When God’s faith in His children is renewed at last, the Hour of Gann will end, and with it, the shadow of His wrath. We are in the last days, Soft-Skin.”

“Uh huh. And you know this because…?”

“Other men have seen the storms clearing.”

“But have you?”

“It was not my time to see.”

“Oh for Christ’s sake.”

He watched her rub her face (with both hands now; some nights he drove her crazy). His own expression was a lot like hers had to be: resigned and frustrated and amused all together.

“I have never seen the sun,” he said, “but I have seen its light. Is that what you want to hear?”

“Be nice if I could hear it without listening to Gospel Hour for Lizardfolk first,” Amber muttered.

“I didn’t mark that.”

“I’m not repeating it.”

“Ah.” Meoraq’s head cocked. “Tell me about your human god.”

Amber looked up, startled, to meet red eyes glinting with challenge. “Why?”

He snorted, as if his point had been made. “I have often thought that you argue with me solely because you enjoy argument. Now I know it.”

“I do not!”