The Last Hour of Gann by Smith, R. Lee (12)

“I have been twelve years in God’s service. I have been His Sword in hundreds of trials and felt His hand upon my shoulder a thousand times more. Before that, I studied His laws and read His true Word and in every possible manner learned to see His mark where He left one. I have been my entire life in His sight, and even before, when He chose to have me born under the sign of the Blade. And yet you argue with me each time His name is invoked, when you know nothing.”

“What were you hoping for?” she asked. “What, if I tell you about my god and you tell me about yours, they’d pop up and fight it out?”

“Don’t be blasphemous.” He thought about it and snorted. “Sheul would win.”

“Your god could beat up my god. Seriously?”

“You have no confidence in him,” said Meoraq with a derisive flick of his spines, making sure she could hear his lower-case h. “Why should I?”

“I bet if I looked, I could find plenty of people on this planet who don’t care as much about your god as you do,” she countered. “Besides, it doesn’t matter how much you believe in something. Believing doesn’t make something true.”

Meoraq snorted again.

“Scott believes there’s a skyport at Xi’Matezh,” she snapped, and he frowned. “He got fifty other people to believe it with him. They all believe they’re going to hop on and fly home and, I don’t know, eat star farts and Hershey bars the whole way there. Nothing you ever said after twelve years as God’s foot made a damn bit of difference to any of them. That’s what belief does to people, Meoraq. Blind faith has got nothing to do with truth.”

He just sat there, frowning.

“I decided a long time ago that all religions are pretty much the same horseshit and I didn’t need it to feel better, so if you call that a win, you won.” She rolled over, yanking her blanket up around her ears.

The wind lapped at the side of the tent. Somewhere in the world, a lone corroki let out one of those moose-like bellows, but only one and it was very far away. Inside, it was quiet.

Amber took it for a long, long time. Then she peeked back over her shoulder.

Meoraq was still sitting there, frowning exactly the same way.

She pushed herself up on her elbows. “Why do you want me to talk about God?”

“I want to see if you can.”

She sat all the way up. “Or if I’ll what? Burst into flames?”

His red eyes narrowed. “I want to see if you can talk about your god in the rational way you claim I do not, or if you’ll just call it shit and stop talking for the night.”

“Okay,” she said. “There is no God.”

“Ha!” He thrust his hand at her, grimacing hugely in lizardish triumph. “And you can’t do it!”

“You can’t get more rational than that!”

“I asked you to tell me about your god,” he shot back. “And you gave me your opinion. And if that’s all you can do, I fail to see how that is so much more sensible than what you call my ‘blind’ faith.”

He had a point. Scaly son of a bitch.

“I can’t quote the Bible at you,” she said finally. “But I could maybe tell a story.”

“Do so.”

“Not a true story, just the sort of thing people say to make a point.”

“I will judge whether it is true or not,” he declared.

“Yeah, right.” She took another moment to collect her thoughts and began, “So…There once was a very religious man who considered himself very devoted to God and faithful and righteous and all that.”

“All that nonsense, you mean,” Meoraq muttered.

“You want to tell the story?”

He grunted and gestured for her to continue.

“One day, it began to storm really hard and someone came to this man’s house and warned him to leave because it was going to flood. But the man refused to leave his home, saying he had served God faithfully and felt certain God would protect him now. Kind of like saying that he walked in God’s sight so storms don’t matter,” she added.

“Is that part of the story?” asked Meoraq. “Or is it just your opinion?”

“It rained and rained and suddenly the river overflowed and the whole valley flooded, including this man’s yard. So he was inside praying and watching his basement fill up with water when another man came by in a boat and shouted for the man to come with him to high ground. But the man refused, saying God would save him.”

Meoraq snorted disdainfully, but that was all.

“And it rained and rained and finally the man was forced to climb up on his roof. But he wasn’t there long before a third man came by in a helicopter and shouted for him to climb aboard and he’d take him to the rescue station. But the man refused, saying he had chosen the righteous path all his life and now God would surely save him. And it rained and rained and the water came up over the roof and washed the man into the raging floodwaters. He knew he was going to die and with his last breath, he cried out to God, saying, ‘All these years I have served you! Why did you do nothing to save me?’ And God said—”

For the first time, the sneer left Meoraq’s face. “He spoke?”

“Yeah, in the story. Anyway, God said, ‘What do you mean I did nothing? I sent a warning, a boat and a helicopter! Why didn’t you listen?”

Meoraq leaned back, frowning.

“That’s it,” said Amber. “That’s the whole story. It isn’t true.”

“Perhaps not,” he said slowly. “But I will not be certain until I have meditated on its meaning.”

“Oh for…I can tell you right now that it never happened. Isn’t that enough?”

He focused sharply in on her, his spines flaring forward in surprise. “Just because a man saw the story in his mind instead of on the street doesn’t necessarily make it less true.”

“Um…yes, it does. In fact, seeing a story in your head instead of in real life makes it entirely less true. In further fact,” she said, trying to match his expression of severe gravity and failing with a short laugh, “it makes it a bald-faced lie.”

“If a blind man tells you the sky is grey, is it less true because he can’t see it for himself? And if someone told him the sky was some other color, some ridiculous color…”

“Blue,” Amber suggested dryly.

He pointed at her. “Blue,” he agreed. “And he tells you it is grey, is it still the lie he believes it to be? Truth is not always what someone says, Soft-Skin. Truth is what something is, what it means.”

“You can make a story mean anything, Meoraq. But that’s the thing with you religious people, isn’t it? God is this glorious intangibility, so no proof becomes proof just by how you spin it.”

His head tipped by degrees, like the ticking hand of a stopwatch, until it was all the way in humor and he could openly laugh at her. At her. Honestly. “You are going to have to tell me,” he said in that laughing way, as he swung out one arm to put the whole world on display for her, “what you see that constitutes no proof of God.”

She started to answer, but then just sighed. “I could point out that you’ve just made my case for me, but I doubt you’d see it that way. Why don’t we just agree to respect each other’s crazy ideas out loud, mock each other in private, and go to sleep?”

“That would be a lie, wouldn’t it?”

“Little white lies make the world go ‘round, Meoraq.”

“Your world, perhaps. Mine spins by its weight and magnetism, they tell me.”

“How shockingly scientific of you. I thought you’d tell me God spun it Himself.”

“Who do you think gave the world weight? Comfort yourself with your lack of faith if it pleases you,” he added, putting one hand on the floor of the tent and bending in his attitude of prayer, still smiling. “God does not require your permission to exist.”

“I don’t require His, either,” she countered, tucking herself in under the blanket. “Good night, lizardman.”

“Rest easy, Soft-Skin.” Meoraq’s mouth gaped in a brief grimace of fine-edged humor. “We are in His sight.”

She rolled her eyes, then closed them.

 

* * *

 

In the midst of that night, Meoraq spoke to God.

Amber’s tale of the human god had been, like the wind upon the prairie, an ever-present whisper in his mind throughout his meditations. It seemed to him that there was truth within it, truth far greater than the message it carried plain upon its face. He spoke it to himself as Amber slept, turning human speech into his own as much as words like helicopter allowed, but changing tongues did not remake the tale nor clarify the questioning itch that had lodged itself in his brain. So he meditated while Amber slept beside him and the wind blew endlessly across the empty plains.

He had never fallen asleep during meditations before. Therefore, he surely did not do so now.

The thought-space he inhabited did change, though, becoming a dreaming place he recognized as the antechamber of the temple of Xi’Tothax. As before, he stood before the holy forge, but the forge was lit now, melting the air around it with its heat and power, and the man who stood before him with the thigh-bone of Rasozul in his hands was not Exarch Ylsathoc. He kept his face deep in the shadows of his cowl.

“Your father is dead,” this man told him. “The House of Uyane stands without a lord. Will you come now to take up the stewardship of your bloodline?”

Meoraq could not speak, save for the words he had already spoken. They left his mouth in the way of dreams, separate of his will and emotion. “I have loyalty to more than one father. I cannot make this decision without knowing the will of Sheul.”

Eyes gleamed in the depths of the exarch’s hood, lit with accusation. He looked into Meoraq’s soul and saw the truth: not pious supplication before God’s will, but an unwillingness to be fettered to one woman, and worse, the sort of meek, milk-veined woman who would be no more than a breeding vessel with legs for all the sons he would be expected to sire and all the daughters he must raise in meek, milk-veined imitation of their mother.

He could not have said this to Ylsathoc and he could not say it now to a stranger. Ashamed, Meoraq turned away, from the exarch and his oaths of office, from his own father’s bone, and in that small movement somehow left the temple and arrived in the plains on a bright morning. He could see the humans walking away from him. He could see Amber lying at his feet, her face white and still.

Now he could speak, feel, act. He ran after the humans and caught furiously at Scott, shouting, “Damn you for a coward and a murderer! How can you leave her?”

But the man who turned to face him, human though He appeared to be, was not Scott. Meoraq stumbled back. He had never known fear, true fear, the kind that froze the fire in one’s veins. Therefore, he did not know it now. He was uncertain.

“Fathers, take caution of the women you wive, for they will raise the daughters who wear your name,” said the man wearing Scott’s form. He spoke in dumaqi, quoting the first line of the Admonition of Womanly Virtues, which was so unexpected that Meoraq backed away again. “See that every woman of your household is brought forth as a proper woman in the sight of Sheul, Father of us all. A woman wears modesty around her neck and keeps low her eyes when her man speaks. A woman’s trust lies below her man’s boot, as her open hand also, to take in with graciousness all that he places before her. In all ways does she acknowledge him as steward over her and nursing no bitterness in her throat to be brought forth as slight and slander. A woman keeps herself covered and away from all eyes, save when her man alone has will of her, and receives him gladly at his every command. A woman speaks not against her man’s ear, nor walks before him, nor shows her eyes, but in three things forever seeks: To obey his word, to lessen his burden, and above all, to bear his sons.”

Nicci, wet-eyed at Scott’s side, expressionlessly opened her mouth and emitted a ghastly mewling cry, like a chorus of hundreds of faceless women all at once.

Meoraq did not step back this time; he leapt back. And when he looked at Scott again, Lord Saluuk of Tothax stood in his place. He bent, pulling Amber up from the ground, which became the very edge of the high wall of the city in a moment. “If she will not behave herself as a proper woman,” he spat, “better she be dead.”

Meoraq snarled and lunged forward, but again, between one running step and another, he was suddenly in Master Tsazr’s room at Tilev. He staggered to a stop, then checked his body to see if he had become a brunt, but the hands he held before him were a man’s hands and the chest he saw below his chin was the scarred playing field of a Sheulek. He looked up again just in time to meet Master Tsazr’s hand slapping hard against his snout.

“I expected better of you,” he heard as he lay dazed on the floor. Master Tsazr’s mud-caked boots tromped around him and away to the window-ledge. “I knew for eighteen years that the doors of Xi’Matezh would open for me. For eighteen years, I prayed for a reason worthy enough to let me go. But you, ha! You make a holy pilgrimage just to avoid your responsibilities at home!”

Meoraq braced his hands on the floor and slowly pushed himself up. He kept his throbbing head bent, feeling his former master’s stare like coals on his scales.

“You stood here in this room and pretended to listen when I told you that being Sheulek meant more than seeing the world and fucking a different woman in every city.” Tsazr snorted contemptuously. “And here you are. Walking all the way to the end of the world and back so you can have just a little more time to do it.”

“No,” said Meoraq, but he could not raise his eyes.

“Lies! Go on then! Ask! If I choose to answer only one question, what will you make it? What have you been rehearsing for the day when you stand in the temple at the Heart of Gann? What will you ask when you have God’s own ear? Say it!”

He would have given every coin he had in the world to be the master of his own mouth in that moment, but the vision took his tongue and the words came out: “If I am to be the steward of my bloodline, where is the woman worthy to be bound to me? Set her down before me, O Father, or let it be Your will that I sire my sons as Sheulek.”

Tsazr let a full silence fall before he breathed out his sneering hiss. “And you are such a prize.”

Whatever had hold of him let go. Meoraq shoved himself to his feet. “It wasn’t supposed to sound like that!”

“How was it meant to sound? ‘O great Father, if You want the benefit of my superior seed, I command You to provide me a woman no more than twenty-two years in age, with black eyes and all her teeth, very pretty, who can cook, sing, dance, write poetry, and stay virgin-tight for all her life, or You can settle for those I sire by conquest’? How dare you make demands of Sheul! He is not some servant in your House, Uyane, you are a servant in His!”

“I can have any woman I want!” Meoraq shouted. “Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I don’t know there will be sixty of them waiting at my door when I get home? And every one of them, the same fucking woman!”

Tsazr’s eyes sparked. He leaned back, his arms folding under his sabks.

“I don’t want a pretty, black-eyed, cooking, singing, dancing, simpering, mewling, whining, empty-headed idiot!” he finished, now in full throat-throbbing rage. “Give the fucking House to Nduman! Give it to Salkith! I would rather die a Sheulek tomorrow than live fifty years with a wife like that!”

“A wife like what?” asked a new voice, one that severed his fury as easily as the stroke of a sword severs flesh.

In turning, Tsazr’s room at Tilev became his father’s House at Xeqor, and there stood Rasozul, beyond his prime but still powerful, showing his son only his broad, scarred back as he donned his armor.

Meoraq betrayed himself with a step backwards. “Father?”

The old warrior glanced around. “Are you ashamed of me?” he asked, in that same calm, reverberant voice Meoraq remembered of his father.

He recoiled, stricken to the very heart of him. “No! Never!”

“No? Not even in the disgrace of my retirement? Did I not accept the defeat of a woman bound to my bloodline? Is this not the fate that drove you out into the wildlands?”

Meoraq felt his soul wither. He knelt, palms open upon the tiles, but no hand came to him in a forgiving clasp. His father continued to gird himself—endless armored plates and sharpened edges went on, only to vanish into his skin, leaving nothing but another scar and a place to put another piece of armor, another weapon.

“Your mother was a responsibility of the office I accepted when I came to this House as its steward,” said Rasozul. “I did not want her. I chose her wristlet from a barrel of such trinkets and wed the woman to whom it belonged, so little did the matter mean to me. But when her breeding years were done and I had my sons by her, I did not turn her away. I did not begin nor end any day that I passed within these walls without sharing at least a warm drink and a private word in her company. My fires burned for her alone, all our years together. I gave her memory the only tears I shed in my life. This is the fate you despise, to have earned the true affection of a good and faithful woman. This was the woman you despised, who never heard a word from her eldest son that was not spoken with contempt. You were ashamed of her, my son. And it made me ashamed of you.”

Meoraq bent his back yet further, bent until his faithless head touched the floor, but no touch of forgiveness came and no more words. When he dared at last to look up, he was in his father’s House no longer.

He was nowhere at all.

But he was not alone.

Before him, his neck bent and palm to Gann, Meoraq saw Meoraq.

“No more of this, I beg you,” he said hoarsely.

The other Meoraq meditated and did not reply.

He staggered to his feet and saw blackness in all directions, devoid of life or light. His copy remained motionless, tranquil, as Meoraq ran first one way and another, exhausting his body only to find himself exactly where he had first stood. At last, he swung to face himself, shouting, “What do you want of me?”

“What,” the other Meoraq mused, “do you want of me?”

“Why am I here?”

“Why did you come?”

“Why do you torment me?”

“Why do you perceive it as torment?”

Meoraq managed not to swear, but could not stop the snarl. He stalked in a futile circle that led nowhere and turned back to find himself now standing and gazing at him with alien eyes, just waiting.

“I do not know what you want me to do,” Meoraq said at last. The words tore at him, a confession of the worst kind of failure.

“I want you to know what to do,” his copy replied, in the very faintest tones of exasperation. “How hard does it have to rain?”

Meoraq drew back, baffled.

His copy waited.

“I know who You are,” said Meoraq, and much as he fought to be master of himself, his voice shook.

His copy’s spines flexed in an amused fashion. Otherwise, he did not respond.

Meoraq gathered his nerve and took a step forward. “Why did You set the humans in my path? Was I meant to take them to Xi’Matezh? What else could I have done with them?”

“I sent you a warning,” his copy replied.

“What warning? I saw none!”

No reply. His copy stared him down.

“Why did You strike the woman ill and allow her people to abandon her? Where are they now? Is it Your will that I find them again?”

“And a boat.”

“A what?”

“And a helicopter.”

“What are You telling me?” Meoraq cried out in frustration.

His copy threw out his arms and cried back, “Why don’t you listen?”

And then the blackness shattered and Meoraq lay in his tent. After several stunned, stabilizing breaths, he found his lamp in the dark and struck a light. He could see Amber sleeping, curled small under her thin wrap, and at once the vision (no dream; a Sheulek does not fall asleep during meditation) coursed through his veins in a second, fiery pulse, growing hotter as he stared at her.

He knew. All at once, he knew.

Sheul’s fires burned in his belly, but that was nothing to the fire burning in his mind, taking away all thought and all but one: He had begun this journey to ask Sheul to guide him to a worthy woman. Well, here she was and if she did not have a dumaq woman’s looks, neither did she have one’s mewling mannerisms. She was not the woman he’d expected, but she was a good woman and God Himself had given her to him.

The light from the lamp had finally succeeded in rousing her from her sleep. Amber rolled toward him, holding up one hand to shade her blinking eyes. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Is it morning?”

“No.”

She got her elbows under her and pushed herself halfway up. “What do you want?” she asked crossly.

He knew what he wanted. The only question remaining was how to go about it and in the waking heat of his vision, there was only one answer. He drew his ancestral knife and showed it to her. “This is the knife of my fathers, the blade of conquest.”

She looked at it and then at him.

He waited.

So did she.

“This is the knife of my fathers,” he said again, a touch testily. “This is the blade of conquest.”

“Uh huh, I heard. And this is my mother’s honey-blonde hair,” she said, pointing at her head. “What do you want, lizardman?”

Her hair? He’d been expecting her wristlet, as dumaq women were themselves wont to offer. The intimacy of her choice briefly staggered him. He shook that off too, then gathered up a fistful of her mane as she began her formal protests, and cut it off. “You are permitted to fight,” he told her, but she was already slapping at him, so their mating rituals must not be too dissimilar.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Meoraq stabbed the blade deep into the ground, still piercing the hair—to hell with the tent; he could get another tent—and swept back the blanket. His belly was hot and every nerve felt new and alive in a way he had never known. He had never been so aware of his own body or of a woman’s. And she was still struggling, still pretending not to understand, but when he slipped his hand through her tangled hair and behind her head, her shouting, swearing protests stopped and she grew very quiet as he leaned close to scrape his chin along her throat, filling his senses with the fullness of her scent.

“What are you doing?” she whispered.

His throat was too tight to answer, but hers was soft. He nuzzled his way up to the underside of her jaw and scraped his chin slowly down again, breathing her in. The heat in his belly had become pain, a second pulse like a hammer from within. His hand dropped, feeling along the front of her shirt and plucking once at the alien fastens he found there. “Take this off,” he murmured. “I don’t want to rip it.”

Obedience was not immediate—it never was with Amber—but at last he felt her shift and heard the rustle of fabric as she opened her clothing. At once he put his bare hand between her breasts and, as he tasted his way from her throat to her naked shoulder, he moved that hand slowly up and down, up and down, a little further on each gentle stroke, until he had slipped beneath the loose waist of her breeches.

She grabbed at his wrist, her skin smacking audibly against his scales. The next sound he heard was the soft thump of her back hitting her bedroll and she was flat beneath him and he was above her and his hand was there, stroking hard up and down through the small patch of coarse hair that grew above her opening. Her shoulder was soft and warm and tasted of smoke and rain and Amber as he gently bit, not piercing, not yet, but wanting to, needing to. Was she fighting again? It was hard to tell. One of her hands was on his chest, pushing; the other, at his back with her blunt claws prying at his scales. When he looked at her, her eyes were shut and her neck irresistibly arched, so he bit it and then scraped his chin hard where he had bitten, until he could taste her in every breath.

He didn’t want to wait anymore and neither did she. The edges of her slit were oddly plump and human-soft, but already open to his lightest touch; she was very aroused. Careful exploration with his fingers (she clutched at his wrist again, but did not move him and did not really appear to be trying) proved she was deep and pliant and that was all he needed to know. He burrowed his free arm beneath her, pulling her up off the mat, and yanked her breeches down until they tangled with her boots. He unfastened his loin-plate eagerly and then, with the last of his reason, he paused and leaned back so that she could see him.

His cock had flexed free the instant it had liberty to do so and now stood primed and ready before him. Amber froze, as he had suspected she might, to stare at it. Her expression was strange, difficult to read.

“Don’t be afraid,” said Meoraq awkwardly. He hated to break the mood, but some surprises were pleasant while mating and some were not. Human males were small and limp and fleshy. This had to be a shock. Far better to break the mood than to stab her with what she might perceive as a weapon.

“This is my masculine member,” he explained, and pointed. “It will go here.” When she did not correct him, he gripped her thigh and said, “Open to me.”

She stiffened, staring intently and in tight-lipped silence into his eyes, but then she obeyed without allowing him even a token show of force, submitting as one already in his possession.

He resisted the urge that swept him then, instead touching the soft skin below her brilliant eyes. “You are mine,” he said. It was early for these words. They were meant to come after, when conquest was done, but conquest, it seemed, already was.

She put her hand on his cock—a hesitant touch at first, one that grew firm as she closed him in her fist. She looked down, watching with a faintly furrowed brow as her fingers moved over him, growing slick with the oils she brought from him so easily.

Few women had ever done this for him and no woman had ever looked as she did now, neither angry nor afraid but still fierce when she met his eyes. No woman had ever said the words she said next, in a voice like the prairie wind, that shook but still blew strong, “I want you.”

She frowned when she said it, as if confused by her own meaning. He understood very well how that could be. Sheul’s voice had not been clear to him in all this time, and he had been trained to hear it.

“I want you,” he told her. These words had no place in the ritual at all, but they felt right in the air. He said it again as she lay down before him and again as he rose over her. He entered with those words and the proof came at once with the first rush of Sheul’s blessing, filling her womb before a single stroke had been made.

He’d never mated this way before—lying down and belly-to-belly—but it felt new and exciting and perhaps just a bit deviant. Covering her in this fashion, he was all that she must feel. His flesh, his weight, were all her sensations. Looking down, he saw her looking up and knew he was all that she could see. This was the conquest all others had been imitating.

Hers was not a dumaq body. There was no resistance, no clenched sleeve of muscle to battle through, but only a soft, tight well that gripped the whole of his length at once. He was free to withdraw and stab again, thrusting with the whole of his body and crushing her possessively beneath him as he made himself drunk on this strange, enthralling sensation. He was vigorous in his passion, perhaps too much so, his weight driving her back and forth across the ground, but she did not protest. Indeed, she fell back, relinquishing all control to him with a hoarse, human cry. Her little claws gripped at his back, their points prying at his scales as she bucked up at him. Not so fragile, then.

“Sheul, O great Father, make this woman worthy,” he groaned. “Let her soul be pierced and made open. Let her womb be warmed to receive my spirit—” And never mind it would be for the second time. The important thing was that he’d remembered to say it at all. “—and Yours. If it be Your will, raise her up with Your blessing and give her the gift of new life.”

She cried out suddenly, and at the same time, he felt her body seize on him in the grip of her own blessing. In the next moment, he shared it.

The second explosion was greater, which was so seldom the case. He felt it pour out of him, unbearably bright and alive. He could not pray aloud in its grip, but the name of Sheul and all his ancestral fathers burned in his mind until it was done and he slumped heavily atop her. He felt he could keep going—he wanted to try, anyway—but three was the sacred number of creation and belonged to Sheul alone. He would not sour this gift with blasphemous lust.

“Now you have become completely mine,” he said. “Let Sheul who has made you for me witness as I take you from your father’s House and give you the headship of my own. I take you in, Soft-Skin, to be Uyane under me for all the days that remain to you. Hear me and know that you are mine.”

She spoke no word of submission, shyly or joyfully or any way at all, still lost in her own fires. He nuzzled at her, scraping the end of his snout hard across her skin to fill his senses with her scent and taste, and, every nerve alive with Amber, bit deeply into her shoulder. She yelped and struck him fetchingly as he drowsed, licking at the wound to stop it bleeding and thinking of what a fine scar it would make.

At last, Meoraq rose and retrieved his knife, careful to keep the hairs it pierced together. It wasn’t easy. After a moment’s thought, he held it out to her. “Plait this into a cord,” he ordered, “and I shall wear it.”

She looked at him for a long time before she took it. Perhaps among her people, a trophy of first conquest was burnt or buried.

Well, her people had turned her out. Now she belonged to him. He licked her shoulder once more and went, smiling broadly to himself, back to his mat and slept.

 

6

 

Dawn woke her, but he was already gone. His pack and hers were already bundled and good to go. A little more than half of last night’s horrible dinner had been tucked up beside her head next to his flask. Apart from the aching, scabby bite, a brand-new breeze on her ear and some dry threads of grass itching around inside her pants, she could almost believe she’d dreamed the whole thing.

She ate. Drank. Packed up the tent. Reached into her pocket and brought out what been covering most of the left half of her head the previous day. Her hair. He wanted to keep it. Like a trophy.

She honestly did not know how to feel about that. He’d taken her by surprise (so to speak), but in the cold light of day, she knew she hadn’t tried very hard to fight him off. Hell, if he’d chosen to wake her up with his hand between her legs instead of hacking at her hair, she probably wouldn’t have fought him at all. It had all happened so fast and felt so inevitable that she’d just…given in.

All the same, this didn’t feel like her usual morning-after regrets. Part of her wanted to braid this hair and see him wearing it; it brought to mind those story-book pictures—Amber as the damsel bestowing her favor and Meoraq playing a dual role of knight and dragon. But that was only part of her. The rest of her remembered only too well looking up through a haze of cramping pleasure to see him working at her in unhurried rhythm with his eyes fixed on the wall above her head and no expression on his face. Yes, he said he wanted her and yes, he told her to make his little keepsake, but all the rest of the pillow-talk had been between him and God. She was just “this woman” in that little chat, like it didn’t even matter if it was Amber, like any warm squeeze would do. And after the bite that had branded her, he’d put out the light and gone to sleep, leaving her to pull her pants up and button her shirt in the dark. She’d had to lie awake a long time while the ghost of her drunken mother talked to her about men and whores. She didn’t believe it, not really, but it was hard not to listen.

Amber braided the hair.

It wasn’t easy. She’d worn her hair in braids as a very little kid, but only when her mom did the braiding. Messing around with hair was a girly thing to do, a Nicci-thing, the sort of thing Amber rolled her eyes at with lofty disdain. Who’d have ever thought that was going to come bite her in the ass on an alien planet?

She had managed to produce a mangled-looking snake of snarls and was working to tie off the end when Meoraq came prowling back with the big waterskin. He grunted at her as he passed by. It sure didn’t sound like a good-morning-radiant-woman-of-my-fantasies greeting. He checked the weight of the wrappings containing last night’s leftovers, gave her a disapproving glance, then noticed the clumsy braid in her hands. He grunted again and beckoned to her. “Come. You may tie it around—” He eyed the length critically. “—my arm.”

Amber frowned up at him for a moment, then got to her feet and went to him. He offered his arm. His bicep bulged. She could still remember the strength in those arms as he grappled with her, the power evident even in his gentlest touch. And there had been a few of those too, even though he was not a gentle man.

She tied the braid on just under his shoulder, where the bulk of his muscle would keep it from slipping down around his wrist. It stood out surprisingly bright against his dark scales. Every loose strand and ugly knot showed clearly, but he seemed pleased with it. Proud of it, like the look in his eye when he shifted his gaze to the bite on her shoulder. He even gave her a deeply unsettling yet probably playful lizardish grimace before moving past her to collect their things.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?”

He straightened up, gave that some obvious thought, then cautiously said, “Good…morning?”

“Not that. About last night!”

His spines snapped irritably flat. “What am I supposed to say?”

“Why don’t you start with why, after all this time, when you’ve never so much as crossed your eyes at me, you suddenly decided we had to have sex?”

“I had a vision,” he replied. “A true vision of God.”

It was not a shocker, as revelations went. Amber covered her eyes with both hands solely to keep them from turning into fists. In the dark behind her palms, she said, “God told you to have sex with me? Seriously? That’s what you’re going with?”

“Yes.” He shrugged into his pack and secured the straps. “We need to get moving. I see a hard rain coming and I want to put the spans behind us before it reaches us. No more arguments, woman. Let’s go.”

There was that word again. All of a sudden, the whole issue with her hair seemed a lot less important as making love took an ugly turn into fucking. “Did you just call me ‘woman’?!”

He shouldered the filled waterskin and gestured at her pack. “Yes.”

Absurdly, her first impulse was to snatch her hair back from him. She restrained it. “And just what in the hell makes you think you get to do that?” she demanded.

He looked at her, his expression tipping back and forth between annoyed and confused. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because it’s rude! I don’t call you man!”

“Yes, you do. Lizardman, even,” he added with a glare.

“Not all the time. Only when we’re fighting.”

He threw out his arms, his head cocked hard and eyes snapping. “We appear to be fighting,” he told her, then pointed at her pack. “Get your things, woman, and let’s go.”

Her stomach clenched. “Stop calling me that.”

“You’re my woman now, I’ll call you whatever I want.”

“The hell you say! I’m not ‘your’ anything. Just because I slept with you once doesn’t mean I belong to you.”

“You slept in my camp. That means you belong to me. You have been mine from the day—” He stopped there, then rolled his eyes and heaved a hard sigh. “Fine. How many times do humans mate before the woman considers herself conquered?”

She stared at him for a long time before she was finally able to say, “That’s not how it works with us,” biting off each word and spitting it like a bullet.

“More pity for you,” he said with a careless shrug of his spines, “because that’s how it works with us. No more talk. We’re leaving.”

She put her pack on, snatched up her spear and started walking, too angry to even look at him anymore. “Well, clearly last night was a huge mistake.”

On the horizon, thunder muttered, attracting his immediate attention. “You don’t mean that,” he said, frowning back over his shoulder at the sky.

“Don’t tell me what I mean. I don’t care what God told you, I don’t belong to you.”

“Yes, you do,” he said, not in a romantic way, but just another argument in his favor. “You are mine as much as my own skin. God Himself has married you to me.”

“No, he didn’t,” she snapped, slapping at her forehead.

“Yes. He did.”

His matter-of-fact tone finally pierced all the way in and made everything else she was feeling fade to an uneasy black. She looked at him, feeling her brows draw in. “Yeah, but we’re not really married.”

His head tipped, as if he were very, very slightly puzzled. He caught her by the sleeve to make her stop walking, leaned close, and said, clearly and distinctly, “Married.”

“What, just because we had sex? That’s ridiculous!”

“It would be, if that were the only reason. We are bound by God’s will, Soft-Skin, and what He has joined, no force on Gann may sunder. You are mine. My woman.” He raised his hands and clasped them together with a sound of impressive finality. “My wife.”

The wind blew between them.

“You don’t mean that,” Amber said, but her voice rose at the end, making it almost a question.

“Don’t tell me what I mean.” But his spines lowered and he brushed his knuckles across her brow, then along the shorn half of her head. “How can you say you’re not mine when you gave everything you had to me? Everything you are…” His fingers scraped lightly down her cheek, along her throat and under the neck of her shirt, peeling it back from her skin so that he exposed her bitten shoulder.

And did she roll her eyes? Shrug off his hand? Take even one step  back out of his reach? No. She just stood there with her mouth slightly open and her girly heart fluttering and a hot glow way down deep in her belly and let him do it.

“God gave you to me,” he murmured, nuzzling under her jaw. “Even when I did not know how to ask. He found you anyway and put you in my path. You are the woman I was born into this world to find.”

“To own,” Amber whispered.

“Do I own my skin? My bones? I possess them.” He moved to the other side of her neck and roughly nuzzled her some more. “It’s not the same, when you think about it.”

“I don’t want to think about it.”

“Please yourself. Fortunately—” He straightened with an air of reluctance, checking the fit of his belt before adjusting her shirt and covering her up again. “—you don’t have to. We’ll walk now. We’ll talk later, if you still want to. All right?”

She looked at the sky, which dropped a blob of rain in her eye, then gave up and nodded. He turned around and started walking. She leaned on her spear for a moment, thumping her head on it until the urge to run after him and hold his stupid hand was gone. Then she shrugged her pack up higher, put her head down and followed.

 

* * *

 

They walked all day, like any other normal day. They stopped twice—once to ford a rain-swollen ravine and fill their flasks, and once just to stop—and they were normal rests. They made camp in the late afternoon on the top of a stony bluff next to a patch of champagne-colored berries which smelled light and sweet, but tasted so fantastically bitter that Meoraq had to threaten her in his normal way to eat them. He put up his tent, had a nice normal argument with her when she picked up her spear, then took her hunting. They killed a saoq together, and he stood over her with a critical but approving eye while she butchered it, and then they went back to his camp and cooked it up. They ate a normal dinner, having normal conversation, and when he’d finished wrapping up the leftover meat for tomorrow’s hike, he unbuckled all his buckles, shrugged out of his harness and zzzzzupped off his belt, tossed his metal panty-panel carelessly to one side, and said, “Do you want to lie on your belly or your back?” in a perfectly normal tone of voice.

“Uh…my back,” was her somewhat dumbfounded answer (but only somewhat), and with an approving grunt and a playful nip to her shoulder, he pushed her down and climbed on top of her.

The sex was much as she’d remembered it from the confusion of the previous night’s battle and as before, she could not summon any defense against that spined, hooked, alien weapon that he fought with. He stabbed her once and it might as well have been over.

There was no petting, no caresses, no pillow-talk. He stared straight ahead while she thrashed and clawed at his back, his neck arched so that all she could see when she tried to look at him was the yellow stripes glowing out from the black scales on his throat. He moved nothing but his hips the whole time, kept breathing in the same slow rhythm, and ignored every effort she made to pull him closer. Amber had never had the kind of flowery romantic sex that people had in movies, but it still bothered her. Even so she came first and came again and came until she was actually screaming with pleasure for the first time in her life, something she’d always thought only happened in the made-up letters in men’s magazines. By the time he trotted out the, “Make this woman worthy,” part of his prayer and came to his own hissing climax, she had begun to feel dangerously close to losing consciousness.

If he noticed, he didn’t think it necessary to remark. He merely licked again at his bite-mark on her shoulder and got off her. While she struggled to recover, he adjusted himself to let his penis retract, scooped up his harness and his panty-plate, and said, “I will have the first watch. You will sleep in my tent. Rest well.” And off he went. Just another normal night.

He was giving her permission to use his tent? Where the hell else did he think she was going to sleep after all that sex, curled up at his feet? And rest well? What the hell did that mean?

She put her clothes back—not back on, they’d never been all the way off, just back to where they were supposed to be—snatched her blanket out of her pack and her own bedroll, scooted over to a less sexed-up patch of grass, and shut her eyes in a haze of defiance and misery.

Footsteps woke her in the middle of the night. She raised her head and watched Meoraq drop an armload of grass-and-dung bundles by the fire. He simply tapped a knuckle to his brow when he saw that she was awake and went on in to his tent.

It was a long night. She ate a few more of the bitter berries, made herself some tea, and entertained herself by tying the bundles together into little lizardman shapes and burning them. She didn’t mean to stay up, but her stupid brain wouldn’t shut up and the more she listened to it, the more upset her stomach got, and before she knew it, the sky was turning grey.

She was still staring at it in the first blush of astonishment when Meoraq’s tent flaps jerked and opened. He emerged with a skyward glance and a scowl, his tunic hanging open and his half-fastened harness dangling at his knees, and stomped off into the underbrush.

Christ, she’d pulled an all-nighter. And now she had to walk all day and she was already exhausted. She could ask him for a little time to sleep before they set out, but she was pretty sure she’d just get another of his ‘let this be a lesson to you, insufferable human’ lectures instead. Or worse, he’d agree and be pissed off about it, and she’d know he was pissed off and be too upset to actually sleep, so she’d be even more tired when they finally left and they’d have to stop early as well as leave late.

He came back as Amber was sitting and rubbing her churning stomach, buckling the last buckle on his harness and muttering to himself. “Is there tea?” he asked.

“A little. It’s probably gone cold. I didn’t think it was this close to morning.”

He grunted and glanced at her. “Is that an apology or an excuse? I can’t tell.”

She’d been trying for an apology, but if that was how he was going to be… “Neither, it’s just me whining at you again, you jerk. I can stay up as long as I want.”

He didn’t rise for the bait, just took the stewing pouch off its tripod and dumped out the cold tea. “You look tired.”

Oh, he was good at fighting.

“I’m fine,” Amber said tightly.

He moved off into the berry bushes. “We could pass another day here.”

Amber scrambled to her feet, dismayed. “The whole day? Come on, can’t you just slap me?”

“This is not a punishment.”

“The hell it isn’t! We’ve got to catch up, Meoraq! I can walk!”

He eyed her as he steadily filled the pouch with berries. He didn’t say anything.

“You do what you want, then,” she told him, rolling up her blanket and stuffing it into her pack. “But I’m going, with or without you.”

He snorted, but put the last handful of berries in the pouch and came out of the bushes. “This is my camp, woman, and I decide when we leave it.”

“Have fun bossing yourself around all day, lizardman.” ‘And screwing yourself all night,’ she thought, but couldn’t bring herself to say that.

“I can’t deal with you before I’ve had something to drink,” Meoraq said, kneeling by the fire. “And there are days, woman, when tea is not enough. Go to sleep before I—”

He stopped. His spines flared all the way forward and slowly lowered again, not quite all the way flat. He put the berries down and picked up a dung-and-grass lizardman.

Amber smacked her palm into her face. She thought she’d burned them all.

He stared at it, very still, for a long time. Then he looked at her and while she was hunting for a way to simultaneously apologize and explain that she hadn’t really meant anything by it and not to get his metal panties in a bunch, he got up.

“Meoraq—” she began, holding her hands up in surrender.

He took them, pulled her to her feet, and put his arms around her.

“We will walk, Soft-Skin,” he said in an oddly-subdued voice. His hand moved from her back to cup her head, then her shoulder, then back to her head, as if he wasn’t sure what to touch. “Sleep a short time. I will wake you and we will walk.”

“I don’t need to sleep! I can go now, damn it! I’m fine!”

He drew back, frowning as he searched her eyes. He opened his mouth several times as if he wanted to argue, but in the end, he set the grass-and-dung lizardman gently in her hands. “Then we will go now.”

Amber stared at him while he started taking his tent down, then at the doll which had given her such an easy and baffling win. Not knowing what else to do with it, she put it on the fire. When she straightened up, Meoraq was watching her, his hands still gripping at the tent-poles but motionless. His eyes met hers briefly, troubled, and then he went back to dismantling his tent.

She supposed she could just ask him what he thought the stupid little doll meant, but it would inevitably lead to her telling him why she’d really made it and she couldn’t see how any conversation that included the words, “I was burning you in effigy all night,” could end well. And she didn’t want to fight.

Well, she kind of did. But she shouldn’t and she could admit that much at least.

Amber poked at the burning doll, breaking it back into the three bundles it had been before she’d tied them together. Flames leapt up at once and she watched them instead of Meoraq, knowing he’d be ready in just a few minutes more and then they’d be on the move again. And that was great.

The fire burned, strands of grass turning black and curling, one by one, before falling apart into white powder.

She wished she’d at least let him finish making his tea first.

 

* * *

 

They walked in silence most of the morning. Meoraq couldn’t be certain of Amber’s thoughts; whenever he glanced back at her, she always seemed to be wholly fixed on just not falling over. He wished she would say something, even if it was to call him an insensitive brunt (or more likely, a scaly son of a bitch), because his own thoughts were a torment. He carried them like stones in his belly, each one with the name and face of a human he had been ready to forget, and the largest and heaviest belonged to Nicci.

He hated Nicci. He’d hated her when he’d been forced to feed and tend her and he hated her ghost once she was gone, but no fire burns without fuel, and in her absence, hate had cooled to coals. In truth, he hadn’t spared her even an idle thought in days.

But she had never left Amber. She was there still, silent, invisible, clinging on to Amber’s hand and doubtless streaming water out of her empty eyes. Amber, who still spoke of ‘catching’ the others, just as though there were anything left of them to reach out and hold in her hand.

Because they were dead. He knew it and had known it ever since he had seen their broad trail end at a crumbling canal and realized that they had chosen to walk inside it. Why? Because it would be covered against the rain. Because it would be flat and easily traveled. Because no one was there to tell them not to walk in a storm canal in the rainy season and those idiots would need to be told. No, Meoraq could see it clearly: Scott had led them into the tunnel and some hours hence, some ancient reservoir had overfilled, prompting some unthinking machine to open a ventway and empty a few hundred thousand meti-weights of water into Scott’s safe, dry, level road. They were dead.

But even in death, their souls would never be freed from their clay unless they were burnt. Meoraq knew that. He knew it, but he’d never once thought of them and the hell their undying clay must be now enduring. If he felt anything at all, it was only a grim satisfaction that he would never have to see them again. He had his Amber, now his wife, without the thorn of her annoying kind and especially her whining little blood-kin, and he had been content.

And Amber had said nothing, because she, as his obedient wife, must be content also. Content with nothing to burn but dolls in the shape of the one she loved enough to call ‘sister’.

Self-disgust reached a sudden, jarring pinnacle throughout his mind and body, like Gann’s own orgasm. Meoraq halted—Amber bumped up hard against his back—and began yanking at his harness-fastens. “We are stopping,” he spat, throwing his tent to the ground. “I have to pray.”

Amber made a sound of spiritless assent and staggered a few steps away, dropping her pack and collapsing on top of it. Seeing that made him feel even worse, but it had been her insistence that they travel. He would have been happy to give her a day’s rest this morning if she had not been—

If she had not been burning Nicci.

Now he looked at her, even though he should be on his knees, palms to clay and deep in prayer. He looked at the woman Sheul had given him, married to him, and realized with a sinking belly that the dual burden of grief and illness were simply too much for even his stubborn Amber to carry.

He began to clear the earth and gather what tinder there was for a fire. She did not move to help him. A second glance showed him she was lost in sleep already, mired in it, despite the pain that yet twisted her soft features. He tried not to wake her, but she startled when he struck the fire, moaned, and finally dragged her eyes open. She stared without recognition at the growing flames for several seconds before her eyes went wide and filled with dismay.

She tried to sit up, fell, and tried again even as she protested, pleading with him not to make her stay, she could walk, she was fine.

He put his heat-stones in the fire and filled the stewing pouch with water.

She caught at his arm, cursing and apologizing, vowing that she would never stay up all night again, only please please not to do this. They had to catch up. They had to keep going.

He opened his pack and brought out his fine inlaid tea box. He put all he had left of the dawnslight blend in the steeper and dropped it in the water. He put away the tea box and brought out some of yesterday’s saoq, tepid and greasy in its wrappings. He held it out to her.

She glared at him, lightly trembling, then snatched up her spear. She had to climb it as a crutch to gain her feet, but once gained, she set off into the prairie, limping and swearing at him. She fought when he brought her bodily back, but she was too tired to fight for long. She collapsed again on top of her pack, weeping furiously behind her hands, and fell asleep as soon as the storm lagged, tears still wet on her skin.

Meoraq sat and watched his tea heat. He did not pray, exactly. Certainly, he did not pray as he probably should have done, back bent and with all the ritual words in place, but any man’s heart can be an altar if it is open and any man’s words can reach God’s ear if they are sincerely spoken.

“Father,” said Meoraq at last, and knew that he was heard. He looked up into the sky, not to see Sheul’s face among the rolling clouds but to show Him his own, naked and troubled, here on Gann. “Father, I cry out to You from the darkness. Lift up Your lamp and show me how to find them. Let me give them their last prayers and release them to Your judgment.”

Sheul listened, but did not speak.

“I do not ask for myself,” Meoraq admitted. “I should. They are Your children also and deserve the care all children of Sheul may expect in passing from this mortal life. I should love them, as the Word tells me to do, and seek them for myself, but I don’t. I can’t. Were it not for my woman’s pain, I know I would not be calling to You now. Forgive Your son his failings,” he said, touching his palm to Gann and taking away small daubs of mud to rub over his mortal heart. “But do not punish his wife because of them. I beseech You, Father, set me on their last path and let me find where they lie so I can give them true death.”

Sheul’s hand was heavy upon his shoulder, but His great voice still remained silent and Meoraq knew why. Finding where Scott and his humans had washed up would mean turning around. It would mean five days of walking back to the canal and who knew how many days more to search. The bodies might be spans and spans away; if he were lucky, the canal might have fallen in at some point, allowing the bodies to be vomited out on the street where they were visible, but if not, they had surely finished up in some ancient cistern. Or several cisterns, spans apart. Either way, a search could easily eat up the rest of the season, with no guarantee of ever finding even one body. And any body he did find…after so many days soaking in the stormways, he would never know which of them it had been.

Meoraq knew very little about women and even less about humans, but as much as he wished to make some grand romantic gesture to his grieving wife, the reality was that the other humans were gone. The clay of their flesh would crumble; the spark that had once warmed it, lost forever. This was truth, and as Master Tsazr had once said, truth does not care if it comforts you.

The fire was failing already. He would have to go find real fuel or let it die. The tea was not very dark yet, but drinkable and hot. Lost in his own brooding thoughts, torn between the realities of this camp and the intangibilities that lay beyond it, Meoraq reached into his pack and felt about for his cup.

His fingers touched something cup-like wrapped in his spare breeches, but with an odd protrusion he couldn’t quite—

Oh. Oh no.

But yes, and soon he was holding them—one garish human cup in each hand—and asking himself how by Gann’s wicked whim he had managed to forget the stupid things so completely? Damn him, all this time, Amber had thought them lost forever. All this time, he’d made her come to him in her embarrassed way to beg for his cup when he was done with it, and there were days when he had made damned sure she knew she was inconveniencing him. All this time, but like the humans themselves, as soon as they were out of sight, he’d simply never given them another thought.

“Great Sheul, take Your hand from my shoulder,” he groaned, dipping out some tea, “and send it against my stupid snout. Wake up, Soft-Skin. Come, wife. Wake and hear me.”

She muttered thickly and curled closer around herself, rolling away from him when he nudged the cup against her shoulder. “No. We’re fighting. That means I don’t have to deal with you if I don’t want to. Leave me alone.”

Sheul’s hand stayed gentle where it rested on him. Meoraq simply leaned further over and set the cup down in front of her.

She made him wait a very long time before she opened her eyes, but he knew when she’d done it by the stiffening of her turned back. After several shaking breaths, she pushed herself up and looked at him.

There were many things he wanted to say, and some he did not want to say but knew he had to, but when her green eyes came to him, it all fell away.

“We are done walking for the day,” he told her.

She picked up the cup and held it loosely between her hands, staring at the tea.

“Tomorrow, we will walk again, but we stop when I give that command and you will not defy me.”

She stirred at the tea with her finger, but did not drink.

“All things are possible with Sheul, but I cannot promise you that we will ever find them.”

Her eyes closed. “I know.”

“I will not allow you to kill yourself searching.”

“Meoraq—”

“No,” he said forcefully. “It is not your life to give. It is mine.”             

She said nothing. A single tear welled beneath the tightly-shut lid of her left eye, but it never grew fat enough to fall.

He hoped the matter was settled now because he really did not know what else to say. He took up her second human cup, filled it, and arranged himself beside her. After a moment, determined to prove that he was not a scaly son of a bitch, or at least, not always, he put his arm around her.

“I’m tired,” she said.

“I know. As soon as I have the tent together, I want you inside it. From now on, that is where you sleep.” He put the hammer to that with an authoritative grunt and drank some tea. It was cold and overwatered. He drank it anyway.

“Then what?”

“Eh?”

“What happens next?”

“We travel on to Xi’Matezh,” he said, surprised that she felt this had somehow changed.

“No, I meant tonight.”

“Tonight?” His mind, wonderfully blank, suddenly lit with Sheul’s own exasperated slap of illumination. He uttered a little laugh, surprised as much by her coyness as by this unexpected drift in the conversation. “You don’t have to wait up for me, Soft-Skin. If the fires come, I’ll wake you.”

Her brows drew together. Her eyes flicked in a bewildered way toward the coals where his tea had warmed.

“Sheul’s fires,” he amplified.

Her confusion did not appear to clear. A troubling thought occurred to him. “How much do you know about sex?”

She snorted. “I know God doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

“So you…don’t know anything.” He thought about that, a little stymied by the enormity of the task now before him, and decided that, just like trying to teach something new to his brother Salkith, it would be best to start with gentle compliments. He reached out to pat her thigh. “You did very well during first conquest.”

Her furry brows rose in peaks and then crashed thunderously down. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

It didn’t always work with Salkith either.

“I enjoyed your struggles. I would permit you to fight again, if you like.”

“Oh believe me, lizardman, I will.”

He smiled. “It pleases me that you want to be my well-mannered woman,” he said, peeling back the neck of her shirt. Ignoring her playful slaps, he licked at the mark he’d left in her soft skin. “But I would rather have the insufferable she-warrior I was given. So if you want me, put your hands on me and tell me so.”

“What if I don’t want you?”

“Ah, my wife, is that what’s bothering you?” He licked her again, slowly this time, tasting the strange, rich bitters of her blood, and felt it when she shivered. “We have only been married two days. Surely that is too early for you to start worrying that I might set you aside, especially since you have burned for me so readily thus far.”

“It wasn’t like that!” she said, fetchingly embarrassed, as women often were, by this public acknowledgement of her pleasure. “I was lonely and…and scared! That’s all!”

He could guess how much it cost his proud woman to make such an admission. He tipped his head to run the side of his snout gently along the curve of her shoulder, following it up to her slender neck in spite of her efforts to shrug him off. “And you needed me.”

She stiffened.

“You wanted me,” he murmured, and felt that same soul-deep thrill as when he had heard her say it.

“I didn’t mean it,” she whispered.

“Lies.”

“It was just sex. You didn’t even like it!” she said suddenly, renewing her shrugging shoves. “You acted like you were doing your damn taxes the whole time!”

He didn’t know every word she used, but he thought he caught her meaning. He grinned and nipped at her. “A Sheulek is the master of his clay, Soft-Skin, but mine wanted very much to finish too soon. Be reassured, I liked it.” He reached for his belt, nuzzling at her throat with long, slow strokes of his snout. Her scent filled his senses, became a taste, became a throb in his very heart. “Shall I prove it?”

“No,” she said, but she didn’t duck demurely away. She held onto her cup of tea as the color rose in her flat face and tried to pretend there was no hand kneading at her hip, no snout rubbing up and down the length of her throat. She even tried to drink.

“Your hand is shaking,” he observed, and moved his own under her shirt to lie upon her bare belly.

She thumped down her cup and tried to scoot away, but she didn’t have the leverage and fell back instead. He dropped comfortably atop her at once, nipping at her jaw and purring while he eased her stubborn legs slowly open around his. And they did open, but not without a lot of kneading and nibbling.

“Damn it!” she shouted, smacking her fist against his shoulder even as her thighs parted. “I asked you what you wanted, I asked you, and you said it wasn’t sex!”

“It wasn’t,” he grunted, bracing himself on one arm so that he could sweep his belt off and let his cock extrude in an immediate and insistent rush. “It was marriage. The sex would just be sex without it. Not that there’s anything wrong with the sex,” he added, now struggling with the loin-plate, which had caught in his straining breeches. “If you’re worried that you don’t please me, you can be easy, Soft-Skin. Your body was made to pleasure mine.”

“What a huge relief,” said Amber in a curiously flat voice, each word carved and set separate from the others.

She really had been worried. He paused to stroke his snout along her throat again, then resumed the battle with his loin-plate and won. “I will burn with you, my wife. And you will burn with me.”

“You’re driving me crazy,” she said, arching her hips to help him tug her breeches down. “You know we’re not really married.”

He stopped. It wasn’t easy. His man’s shaft pulsed in his fist where he gripped it for the guidance it needed to find its way inside her in this bizarre position, but he was the master of his clay and he ignored its urgings. “I didn’t mark that,” he said, a bit breathlessly, but with admirable self-control. “What did you say?”

She looked up at him, her brows furrowed, and bit at her lower lip with her small, blunt teeth. She was also breathless and flushed as well, and she looked down the hills and valleys of her body at the cock in his fist with an expression that was at once profoundly annoyed and entirely defeated.

“We’ll fight about it later,” she promised, reaching between them to take what he offered and guide him home.

A true master of his clay would have firmly removed himself and thrashed this out. Human speech did not change from one tone to another; he knew what she’d said and he knew he should not allow it to lie spoken.

But her body took him in, hot and wet and gently squeezing at the whole of his length in ways miraculous to feel, and he was no Sheulek then, only a man willing to trade every future argument in all the world just to stay right here right now. So he let it go, and whatever twinge of conscience he may have felt in that release was swiftly forgotten in the pursuit of the one that eventually followed. It was not his proudest moment, but he would just have to pray about that. Later.

 

7

 

Maybe it was true. Maybe they really were married. Amber had never actually befriended a married couple and didn’t have much personal experience with the married lifestyle, but Meoraq certainly seemed to fit the stereotype, even though he’d never been to the movies. He grunted when she talked to him, insisted he knew where they were going even after admitting he’d never been here before, coddled her unnecessarily when he decided her poor little girl-body couldn’t keep up, and then ignored her on the one occasion she asked to stop.

She asked for two reasons. First, the rain that had been drumming down on their heads for the better part of three days had undergone a series of disturbing changes in a short stretch of time. This morning, although drizzly, the wind had been relatively warm; next, it had stopped raining for maybe an hour, but gone very dark and very cold; about an hour ago, the sky had taken on a vaguely grainy appearance, almost like she was seeing an old movie, and it had started raining again, the drops like nails falling, not on her head, but straight into her face. Since then, it had been getting darker almost by the minute, even though she knew they had hours to go before nightfall. The lightning, which to be fair had never really stopped, picked up in frequency and intensity, until it began to feel like they were filming that grainy old movie in front of a huge crowd of paparazzi. And now there was thunder—not the low rolls and grumbles that had been following them for days from the distance, but the kind that she could feel shivering in her bones.

The second reason, the selling point as it were, was that quite unexpectedly, they were presented with a place to go. The hill they’d been climbing hadn’t been the latest in a series of suspiciously regular, short, steep hills. It was just a hill, like any of a number of hills that had been growing the closer they came to the mountains. It wasn’t particularly steep, but it was very slick and muddy, thanks to days of rain and the wind blowing directly in her eyes. The rocks that jutted out of its thorny, mud-slick sides weren’t the squarish chunks of eroded walls that had fallen in and been covered over; they were obviously just rocks. There had been, in short, no clues whatsoever that this was waiting on the other side.

They didn’t look like ruins. There were no skyscrapers, no buildings at all more than a few stories tall, just a few metal towers like antennae around the perimeter, and they were still standing. The roads were all flat—no overpasses pancaked to the ground—and they were all extremely well-lit. It didn’t appear to be the protruding tip of an overgrown metropolis, but something small and complete, built to fill exactly the place it occupied. From here, so far away, any damage that time and neglect had invariably caused was hidden. The rain gave the illusion of movement to the lights that burned in every building and along every street. The wind could have easily been the sound of all the traffic Amber couldn’t see. And looking at it, Amber suddenly understood how people could believe in Scott’s starship. Looking at it, even Amber had a moment, however dim and fleeting, when she wondered if one of their old ships might really be able to fly after all.

Of course, she didn’t say that. All she said was, “Let’s go down there and look around until this blows over, what do you say?” and he said, “No.”

And wasn’t that what marriage was all about? Communication and compromise. Jerk.

“Hey,” she said, and then had to shout it because of the wind and the fact that he was still walking. “Hey!”

She knew he heard her because his spines flattened, but he kept going.

“Hey!” That wasn’t working. Amber gave in and ran after him. “Can we please stop?”

“No,” said Meoraq.

The sky grew noticeably darker.

“Nicci and the others might be down there!”

“They aren’t.”

“You don’t know that!” She grabbed at his pack, since she knew he’d just shake her off his sleeve, with far more success than she’d expected. He skidded, arms flailing, but quickly recovered his balance and before Amber could think to let go of his pack, he’d shrugged out of it and swung around. Lightning snapped across the sky, throwing her shadow in stark relief over his chest.

“Woman!” he bellowed. “Don’t paw at me!”

“Then don’t walk away from me when I’m talking to you!”

He snatched his pack out of her hands and glared right back at her. “This is not a discussion. We do not stop until I give that order!”

“So what I want doesn’t matter?”

“Not in this instance.”

“That’s not fair!”

“Don’t whine at me. Start walking.”

Amber had often heard it said that after a while, married people achieved such a state of togetherness that they could finish one another’s sentences. Apparently, there was an intermediary step in which one could see how the sentence was supposed to go without actually finding it necessary to fill in the blanks.

“I haven’t asked for a damn thing in—”

“That doesn’t buy my assent for—”

“Give me one good reason why we shouldn’t—”

“God Himself commands—”

“I said a good reason, not more of your Bible-thumping bullshit! Why can’t you just admit—”

“Why can’t you?!”

They stopped as if by some prearranged signal to allow thunder to smash overhead and roll away behind them.

“You don’t want to go down there because you don’t want to find them,” Amber said at the end of it. She was shouting, she supposed, but only because the storm made it impossible to be heard any other way. The thunder was still rolling, no louder but no softer, like a distant train that just kept roaring by.

His eyes narrowed, sparking white with reflected lightning. “You don’t want to look for them down there,” he countered, also shouting. “You just want to hide from a little winter storm!”

“Little winter storm? Look at that!” She pointed back the way they’d come, and because she was pointing, she looked that way too.

The last time she’d seen it, the storm had stretched from one end of the horizon to the other, all churning wind and the flashpop of lightning, black as a solid wall above the barest stripe of sky that could be seen beneath it. Now it was a lot closer and Amber saw for the first time thin tendrils of black, dangling down from the storm above and groping at the ground below if it were pulling itself along in some lurching, predatory fashion.

Thin tendrils…dozens and dozens of them…

A wall of tornados, as far as the eye could see.

“Oh my God,” she said, except she might have only mouthed it. She couldn’t hear herself speak, couldn’t hear anything at all but the sudden pounding of her heart and the howling of the storm. Her pointing arm dropped slowly; her other arm came up like a counterweight to clutch at her throat, which had tightened painfully. All at once, she couldn’t catch her breath. “Oh my God,” she said again and she heard it this time, just barely. “Meoraq, look at that!”

He looked, but his annoyed expression never changed.

“We have to get inside!” she said (not shouting, not yet, or if she was, it was just because the wind and rain were so loud. She wasn’t panicking. Amber Bierce had never had one moment of panic in her whole life). “Right now!”

“Not here.”

“We’re going to die!”

He rolled his eyes, then took her arm and pointed to a rocky outcropping in the middle of the empty plains, so far distant that she could see nothing beyond its general shape and some shadows around its base that might be crevasses or maybe only dark brush. “Do you see the caves? We’ll weather down there.”

“We’ll never reach it! There’s shelter right here! Damn it, Meoraq, we have to get out of this now!”

As if God Himself agreed, lightning slammed into the ground not half a mile away—which still seemed like a long ways off, until it was lightning hitting there—shattering the skeletal finger of a lone tree down to the ground. The storm-monster in the sky picked up its splinters, tasting them as it scoured the earth and tossing away the bits it didn’t like.

Meoraq looked at that, too, but his expression hadn’t changed. “There is no shelter here,” he told her, raising his voice to a bellow in order to be heard, and turned around.

Amber stood with her mouth hanging dumbly open and the rain sluicing in, watching him walk away. Then she looked at the storm and the storm looked back at her. Never mind how that sounded, even in the privacy of her head, it looked and it saw. It hovered for a moment, drawing up all of its little grasping fingers, seeing her, seeing Amber alone and helpless, and then it opened the roaring funnel of its mouth and came right for her.

She panicked and ran.

Her boots skidded in the wet grass; twice, she tripped over juts of stone and went tumbling, but she was always up again at the end of it and if there was pain, she didn’t feel it. When something snagged at the back of her tunic, she tore it off without stopping, and ran half-naked in the bruising rain until she hit the wall that surrounded the ruins. The towers that were arranged at points around it lit up all kinds of yellow when she climbed over, but nothing shot her down. As soon as she fell into the street—the flat, solid street—she was off and running again.

She didn’t think about where she was going. The dumb animal directing her flight kept her going past this building or that one, dismissing them without explaining its reasons. Notsafe was the closest she came to a real thought. Those three long structures so much like airplane hangars, open at both ends and filled with half-glimpsed hunks of machinery, notsafe. That tall, three-story building with the windows all around it, mostly broken into jagged-glass smiles, notsafe. Those rows of solid-looking boxes at the other end of the ruins, they were all right, but the all the empty streets and slowing fences standing between her and them, notsafe.

But she had to go somewhere. She had to go somewhere or die here in the empty street. Amber staggered to a halt, gasping for breath and spitting out rainwater, but behind her eyelids, the world suddenly lit up red. Through the storm’s roar, she heard a popping sound, followed by an almighty crash of thunder that sent her screaming forward again. There was a light ahead of her, burning calmly above a door, and in the split-second before she crashed up against it in a panicked attempt to beat it down, the door just opened.

She hurtled over the top of the bot standing in the doorway, hit the polished floor boobs-first and went spinning wild across the room until she crashed into an extremely solid object.

“Please present—” the bot began, and then there was a shunk, a hot-smelling pop, and Meoraq kicking the husk out into the rain.

She opened her eyes and saw him with the storm howling at his back. He dropped her pack on the floor, then her spear (she couldn’t even remember losing them), and finally tossed her tunic—his tunic, really—down on top of them. He looked wet and muddy and pissed.

Things kind of greyed out for a moment, or perhaps she only thought they did because of the suddenly silencing effect when the door shut again. Amber tried to get up and fell uselessly onto her face. Nothing seemed to be broken, but the run, the rain and her disastrously comical fall had taken all the breath out of her. She listened numbly to Meoraq’s footsteps striding swift and heavy toward her (he didn’t slip; life was full of unfairness) without moving.

“Light,” he said, picking her up and thumping her unceremoniously on her feet.

A light came on overhead. It did not happen quickly, as of someone flipping a switch, but slowly, sickly, accompanied by an insectile whine of effort that grew until, just before Amber clapped her hands over her ears, it died away entirely and left the lights brightly burning.

Meoraq glared at her until her eyes started stinging and then he turned his back on her. She saw his hands draw into fists and slowly uncurl. He took six breaths and said, “I cry. We’ll stay here until the storm passes. Put your clothes on.”

She limped over to their packs and picked up his tunic.

“Put dry clothes on,” he snapped.

She dressed. Thunder rolled out in the plains, making the metal hum beneath Amber’s feet.

“Is there a basement?” she asked. “Something below this? Something…safe?”

“How is it safer to be buried under a fallen building than to simply be crushed by it?”

“Please, Meoraq!”

“There is no place safer than within the sight of Sheul, woman. It doesn’t matter how deep you burrow—”

“Can’t I hide my atheistic ass just once without a sermon?”

Meoraq hissed at her and stomped away, shoving at what little blockish furniture had survived the ages and slapping at the walls until he found a panel that opened into the next room. “Stay here,” he snarled when she started to limp after him, so she leaned carefully against the wall, rubbing at her aching hip, and waited for him.

The storm raged. She’d heard the cliché used before, had even believed she’d heard storms raging in the past, but never knew it could be like this. The walls had to be at least half a meter thick, all metal and concrete—or whatever they used for concrete on this planet—and the wind still shook it. She was alone with that, alone with the muted thunder and howl of a tornado that might be even now passing directly overhead, alone without even Meoraq’s high-handed religious fervor to comfort her. The lights blurred; she looked up fearfully, thinking they were going out and she’d be trapped in the dark, then realized she was crying. And once she realized that, it was as though something broke inside her and suddenly she was sobbing so hard, she could barely breathe.

Something huge hit the wall with a deafening bang. Amber screamed helplessly and sank down the wall, sobbing because she’d banged her hip at some point in her wild spin across the floor and now it hurt to stand and it hurt to kneel and it hurt worst of all to sit. She couldn’t remember the last time nothing had hurt; she didn’t think she was ever going to feel that way again. This was it. She was never going to feel better and she was going to die huddled in a corner and crying.

She didn’t know Meoraq had come back until his hands slipped under her arms and pulled her back up onto her feet. He didn’t let go of her right away.

She kept her hands over her face, trying to shut her stupid self up and be the person she’d been all her stupid life without any effort at all, but the tears kept coming. He didn’t say anything. She didn’t want to look at him, didn’t want to see him trying to think of something to say to this ridiculous, fretful, useless alien he’d been saddled with. She wanted to die.

Thunder savaged the walls. Amber wailed and then Meoraq’s arms were closed fast around her, locking her against his broad, scaly chest. She wished she were the old Amber, the Amber who would have smacked him away and been tough and just fine, the Amber who wouldn’t have been crying at all. Instead, she clung to him, weeping blindly, and grateful for every cautious touch as he kneaded her back.

“Come,” he said after a moment. “The storm will pass. We will wait below.”

She nodded, still weeping hard, painfully aware of tears and snot and even drool streaming down her damn face. Humans were disgusting.

He took her with him, his arm close around her, through a series of doors to a wide stairwell. He led her down several flights, leaving the sound of the storm behind them until all was silent except for her sniveling.

“I’m sorry,” she said at last. Her voice, weak as it was, echoed.

Meoraq stopped to muscle a door open. He must have done it before, because the lights were on in the hall beyond and he’d known to throw his weight at it from the start, but it still took a great deal of effort and his only answer was a grunt.

She knew she should keep quiet, but no sooner had Meoraq finally managed to shove the door-panels apart than it came bleating out of her again: “Please don’t be mad at me.”

He’d started to walk on through the doors, but just as suddenly stopped (she bumped hard into his back and had to stagger to catch herself). He stood there for a second or two, not moving, then swung around and hissed, “I am not S’kot, damn it! I won’t leave you!”

The words and the vehemence with which they were spoken might have each been sufficient on their own to take her aback. Together, they entirely overwhelmed her.

He resumed his prowling, pissed-off stride, leaving her there in the stairway to stay or to follow as she wanted.

She followed, but slowly, not daring yet to speak. The hallway they entered was wide but not tall, with a rounded ceiling and featureless metal walls that made it seem a lot like walking through a pipe. Here and there, other corridors intersected, but there were few doors and Meoraq did not stop to test any of them.

“They left you,” he was saying. “They left you and I have tried and tried for your sake to be sorry, but I’m not. You say I don’t want to find them and you say truth. I would go so far as to say I dread finding them, but I will take them back if I do. For God, yes, and for you, because you think you need them and you think it would make you happy if they liked you, but they never will!”

She flinched, surprised by how much it hurt to hear that out loud, even though it was hardly something she hadn’t thought herself. “I don’t care if they like me,” she mumbled. It used to be true.

“If they were right here in this room—” His fist lashed out and thumped a panel on the wall as he stormed by. The door beside it wheezed halfway open, showing her an empty room, small and stark as a prison cell, before groaning shut again. “—you would take them back. Not just your N’ki, but all of them! And you would be glad you found them, glad to take them in and let them piss on you all over again!”

“What do you want me to say?” she asked dully.

He stopped and swung on her again. The stripes were out on his throat and brilliantly yellow. “I want you to tell me why you want them back! I want you to tell me why I—” He smacked himself on the chest hard enough to make her jump. “—am not enough for you! I want you to tell me why you can’t just let S’kot go and be glad he’s gone!”

“Because everyone else is dead.”

He stared at her, breathing hard as the color on his neck faded. When it was almost gone, he looked away, then turned around and started walking again. She followed. Their footsteps echoed, making it seem like more than just the two of them, like Scott and all the others were walking invisibly right behind them.

“Say it,” Meoraq said abruptly, disgustedly.

“Say what?”

“What you always say when I act like this.”

She frowned, bewildered, and suddenly got it. “Scaly son of a bitch.”

“That’s it. I’m sorry,” he said, in the impatient manner of a man unused to making apologies. “I should not be so harsh with you. This place—and all places like it—just put poison in my mouth.”

“It’s all right.” Amber followed him around a corner, only to stop in her tracks almost immediately.

There was a corpse in the hallway.

Meoraq kept walking, talking back at her just as if he weren’t also stepping over the blackened, mummified arm of a lizardman as he went. “No, it isn’t. I don’t want to be here, but I know you only want to come in from the storm and look for your people, and you should not be ashamed to want either.”

“There’s a dead body here,” said Amber.

Meoraq looked at it, then at her. “Yes,” he said. He did not say, ‘And your point is…?’ but she heard it just the same.

“Is this place safe?”

Meoraq looked at the corpse again, a little longer this time, and at her, a little harder. “What exactly do you expect dead men to do to you?”

She had no ready answer for that, so she asked instead, “Do you know what this building used to be?”

Meoraq backed up into the room behind him and looked around at whatever there was in there to see. “It somewhat resembles a niyowah.” He glanced at her. “A place of display, such as one might exhibit trophies of battle or holy relics. Except that these were people,” he added as Amber moved past him to see.

A niyowah, he’d called it, which she’d taken to mean a museum or something. But the word that leapt at once to her shocked mind was laboratory.

It was a great round room, the surfaces all neutral and utilitarian in appearance and architecture. The door they had come through appeared to be the only exit. The rest of the outer wall was paneled in glass, or this world’s equivalent, and it would not surprise Amber to find it was one-way glass. On the other side were seven cells, each holding a small number of desiccated bodies gnarled together in a violent heap. At the center of these viewing chambers stood the room’s control center—a raised dais sporting a horseshoe-shaped console whose video screens were attempting to come on in spite of several cracked monitors. From that vantage, the scientists or guards assigned to watch the prisoners or patients could see into every cell. And as impossible as that seemed, they must have just stood there and watched as the inhabitants of those cells slaughtered each other.

Each chamber was its own vignette of horror and no one had died peacefully. In the first, setting the tone for all of them, one mummy lay with its belly ripped open and another sprawling face-down in the cavity, as a third and fourth (stained black from chin to chest, as if they had been…feeding) remained where they had fallen, hands still locked around one another’s throats. Not all the violence was reserved for murder alone; the male mummies were easily identified by the dried cobs of their genitalia, fully extruded at the time of their terrible deaths, and several had expired either in the act or as the victim of violent sodomy.

She didn’t want to look at any of it, but was powerless to look away. Amber moved slowly from cell to cell around the steadily rising walkway, oblivious to the rest of her surroundings until she stepped on something that crunched underfoot. She looked down, already knowing what she was going to see.

She’d stepped on someone’s toes, but of course, the someone was hundreds or even thousands of years beyond caring. He lay face-up and snarling against the console, his arms and legs sprawled as awkwardly as those of a rag doll carelessly thrown, his withered penis laying crookedly across one thigh, stained to his belly with old blood. Beside him, perhaps six other bodies knotted together. The body at the bottom was that of a woman, still pinned in place by three cocks that Amber could count—one in her vagina, one in her mouth (her snouted jaws snapped wide open so that her throat could be speared), and the last stabbed in just under her right rib—although it appeared that she had been dead for some time before the rest of her attackers expired. They had killed each other without bothering to stop the rape. Two were being themselves sodomized as they fucked her. The corpse crowning the heap, the last survivor one might assume, was fucking a hole in the back of someone’s skull, nearly castrating himself in the process. It may have been what killed him.

“What…” Amber’s whisper scraped across the dead air like a match. She tried to lick her lips, but had no moisture. “What happened here?”

“I don’t know.” And didn’t care, his tone said.

Amber’s hip shook; she put out her hand to steady herself and caught the console. As if drawing strength from her life-force, the monitor nearest her flashed an urgent yellow and played a few silent seconds of some lizardman’s face. His mouth opened and closed as if he were talking, but there was no sound, only a low hiss. It was perhaps even the same transmission she had first seen and heard in the ruins where Scott got the idea of a skyport, but the picture spat and died without ever quite coming into focus and she couldn’t be sure.

“What really happened?” Amber asked again, wrenching her gaze away to Meoraq. “What was the Fall? What the hell did God do to you people?”

“I don’t know,” he said again. But, with an air that suggested he was humoring her, he came to the console (nudging the rag-doll mummy aside with his foot), and examined each of the sputtering monitors in turn. “The Ancients used our letters, but made many senseless words. Something to do with safety,” he read. “And with locks. Report to your…I do not know that word. Your abbot, I suppose. Doors will unlock…I do not know those words. It is a warning, clearly,” he said, straightening. “The exact nature of the threat eludes me. I don’t know what they used to do here.”

“We call it biological warfare,” Amber said, looking past him at the cells.

“Eh? I don’t mark you.”

“They made weapons. Very small ones.” And it got out. Fear flared, but died away. Judging by the corpses, death may not have been immediate, but the bloodlust that had led to murder had been. If the germs were still alive and kicking, surely Meoraq would be raping her to death at the moment.

She eyed him warily.

He noticed and his head cocked. He was definitely annoyed, but certainly not consumed with murderous rage. He wasn’t even annoyed enough to tell her there was nothing worth looking at in this room.

And yet she kept staring, curiously frozen, not just in her body, but her mind also. Because there was something about him, something obvious. Like lyrics to a song she’d heard a hundred times and couldn’t quite sing along with; like getting the right word on the tip of her tongue, but no further; like those detective shows where the clues were right in front of her, but she never the saw the end coming until the TV-cop put it all together for her.

God’s wrath. She’d asked him what the Fall was and he’d called it God’s wrath, when the trees had bled red in the springtime because of all the blood soaked into the ground. War covered the world, he said, like skin covers a man.

She looked at the bodies on the floor again, the heap of them locked in dried-out death, and tried to imagine how it must have been, not just here in this room with the people you’d worked with for years, but everywhere. She could imagine the sound—alarms blaring, fire roaring, and everyone screaming—because she’d heard it once before, as she’d stumbled out of the wreck of the Pioneer, but even that was just one ship, just a few thousand people. This had been everywhere, everyone.

Meoraq’s head was creeping over a little deeper into that pissed-off angle. She was still staring at him. Something was still wrong, but all she could think when she tried to figure it out was those two words: everywhere, everyone.

It had gone on for years, he’d said. The war and the blight and the storms—years—until the Prophet came and started tossing Bibles around. Heck, if you wanted to look at it that way, the storms hadn’t even ended yet. It wasn’t always as bad as it was tonight, but the wind was always blowing and the sun was never more than a shiny smudge behind the clouds on even the best of days. In fact, if you really wanted to be bitchy, you could argue that the land still looked pretty damn blighted. Nothing but grass and thorns and the toe-catching rocks, which were themselves mostly the eroded rubble of collapsed buildings.

Because they fell. All of them. All over the world. And nothing was left except ruins like these, like the little patches of trees that you could sometimes find out in the wasteland of the plains. The cities fell, and whether it was the dust of their falling or the ashes from all the funeral fires, the wind buried them and the grass covered them up, and it was starting to grow up again, starting to, but not really, because—

Amber felt it start in her stomach, of all places, like a menstrual cramp more than anything else, or even like an orgasm, if an orgasm could be cold and awful.

—because nothing could start over until whatever happened first had ended—

She felt it crawling up her spine in prickles, catching the breath in her lungs and biting her nipples into painful points.

—and nothing had ended yet.

She stared at Meoraq, caught and held in the terrible grip of a moment no larger than a pinpoint, a silence with three words like a billion voices screaming together: He’s still sick.

Impossible. Viruses didn’t live that long, did they? It hadn’t just been years, but hundreds of years, maybe a thousand, and the whole planet couldn’t still be sick!

But…

She thought of Meoraq and the way his eyes glazed over whenever those yellow stripes started showing up on his throat, that hot/dead stare he got, and how his hand had a way of drifting down to tug at his belt. She thought of that story he’d told the night she’d gotten bit, how his father had single-handedly slaughtered over a hundred well-armed men and then not answered the door for a day or two. How he’d just left…just left. And all the women and children that the bad guys had tied up to take away with them, he’d left them too, left them butchered behind him, and maybe it really had been the raiders who did it like Meoraq said, but maybe—

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“About what?”

“Just…in general.”

“In my flesh, you mean?” He looked at the nearest withered corpse and rolled his eyes. “Well,” he said, enunciating in that testy way he had. “I feel very well.”

“Are you mad?”

He lost the irritated angle of his head almost at once, averting his eyes and scratching at the side of his snout. “I’m not angry, Soft-Skin. I only wish that you would understand that these ruins are meant as reminders of God’s wrath, not as shelter.”

“That isn’t what I meant. You don’t want to…I don’t know…shove me into a wall and have scary sex with me, do you?”

He leaned back and just looked at her for a moment, then twitched his spines cautiously forward. “Is that a request?”

“No, I just…” Her gaze strayed down to a dead man’s blood-stained dick, still half-sunk into that poor woman’s side. “Should we do something for them?”

“No.”

“But—”

“Let them lie.”

“How can this not bother you?”

He looked down at the mummies tangled around the console, then around at the cells. “Their punishment is well-earned and it is not for you or I to end it.”

“Can we at least go to another room?”

“This is the lowest level. Safest.”

“Yeah, and if God wants us, he’ll have us even if we’re ten miles underground. I believe you now. Please, Meoraq. I don’t want to stay here.”

He sighed, but led her back through the maze of corridors to the stairwell and up. He didn’t bother opening the doors on any other landing—marks in the dust indicated he had already done so once, so his unwillingness to do so now probably meant more bodies on the other side—and instead took her back up to the lobby on the ground floor. The storm was still roaring around them, but after the scene below ground, it was almost welcome.

“Define scary,” Meoraq said suddenly, watching her pace a small circle around the room.

“What?”

“As you seem to think it will frighten you to be leaned against the wall for sex, would you prefer to lie down?”

She stared at him and finally heard a short, humorless laugh puff out of her. “You don’t mean it.”

His spines flicked. “I find it curious that you always manage to sound so certain about the things I mean.”

“You can’t actually want sex after seeing all that.”

“They have been dead for ages,” he pointed out. “How long would you deem a respectful time of mourning for them?”

“Would it mean anything to you at all if I said I wasn’t in the mood?”

“It might. Would it be true?”

Her mouth opened and closed a few times. It seemed a straightforward enough answer. Baffled by her inability to give it some voice, Amber turned and paced away.

When she turned back, he was right behind her.

“You are an aggravating woman,” he told her, his hand slipping around to the small of her back. “You make me feel things there are no words for. You make me want to do things I do not know how to do. You also make me very angry. How fortunate that these are the times I most desire you.”

Cold fingers clenched in her stomach. She tried to back up out of his grip, but he flexed his hand once and brought her hard against him. Smiling. He was smiling. She tried to feel better about that…but the basement was full of bodies. She backed up again.

This time, he let her go, exposing his teeth in a playful grimace that suggested he was not much put off by the idea of chasing her down. For the moment, however, he just watched her retreat and pace around the room. “You want to be my woman. Do not pretend otherwise. I make you feel safe.”

She had no idea what she was going to say until her mouth opened and she heard it shiver out: “Nothing makes me feel safe anymore.”

“Lies.” He caught her by the belt and unfastened it. She didn’t stop him. “I am your shelter, and never more than when I do this.” He shucked her out of her breeches in two tugs, picked her up in the same movement, carried her two steps forward as he pulled her thighs around him, and shoved her hard into the wall. She gasped at the impact, but she bucked into him anyway. He nodded once, as if accepting an accolade. “Never more than when I do this,” he said again, loosening his loin-plate just enough to let his cock free. It pushed up between them, a brand against her belly for only a moment before he pulled it away and thrust it inside her.

Climax was immediate, unwanted, eruptive. Amber shook, digging her fingernails into his shoulders even as she tried to hide her face against his chest, but he wasn’t through making his point. He kept his hands kneading at her thighs, his hips scarcely moving at all, so that their joining was little more than the crush of his weight against her chest, the throb of his pulse in her womb.

“Look at me,” he commanded, scraping his scales lightly against her shoulder where his mark scarred her. “No, not so. Put your hands upon me. I am with you. Show me that you see me.”

Her hands rose, trembling, to cup his strange face between them. She looked at him and saw him looking back at her. Just Meoraq, who could be a scary son of a bitch when he wanted to be, but who, for the moment, just wanted to be with her. He was fine. Amber felt herself smile a little, relieved right to the edge of stupid, girly tears.

He showed his teeth, approximating a smile for her, pleased. “Are you frightened?”

“No,” she whispered.

“Not even here.” Thunder crashed; he did not flinch. “Not even now. You are for me, Soft-Skin, and I am with you. Let go to me, my wife. Let go.”

Amber dropped her brow to his shoulder, sobbed once, and did.

 

8

 

It was the last great storm of the season and even before he had pried the door open and seen the world for himself, Meoraq knew that winter had come. The previous day’s rain was still wet on the ground, but his breath misted in the air and when he looked beyond the ruins to the mountains, he saw a fine dusting of fresh snow on their tips.

“Oh wow.”

Amber crept out behind him, her soft hand catching at his. He squeezed absently, then released her and started walking, stepping over the remains of a metal tower, twisted together with a few trees and dropped here. Most of the ruins were gone, crushed into a single substance and spread over the streets like jelly over bread. Their shelter alone stood whole, although parts of several others protruded from the wreckage here and there. On the windward side of the remaining walls, debris sloped up like snowdrifts—omens of the weather to come.

“Why didn’t this place break apart too?” Amber asked in a small, shaky voice.

“Because we were in it.” He glanced behind him, only to see her still standing in the doorway. He sighed and reached out his hand. “We have never left His sight, Soft-Skin. We walk there still.”

She didn’t move.

“The under-levels are filled with dead people,” he reminded her.

She eased out half a step.

“And now the doors are broken open and they’re going to get wet.”

Her whole face puckered and she finished her approach in a clumsy leap. “I’m not scared of dead people!” she snapped, clutching at the back of his belt.

“I never said you were.”

“You implied it.”

“I did.”

They didn’t talk until they were out of the ruins, unless one counted Amber’s harried expletives as speech whenever her footing slipped on the loose rubble, but it was a comfortable quiet, comfortable cursing. Once back in the relative stability of the open plains, he had to stop and let her look back, which she seemed perfectly content to do all day. His pointed sighs had no effect on her. In the end, he just started walking and let her decide whether or not to follow. Of course she did, if not quietly. He could hear her back there, muttering in ways that suggested she wanted him to hear at least some of the unladylike things she said, but she didn’t let go of his belt. His Amber, fearless once more in the morning light.

“Do you think they’re okay?”

His smile slipped. He was glad she was behind him, where she couldn’t see it. “I think we survived the storm,” he said. “And so it follows that others could as well.”

“That isn’t exactly what I asked.”

“What you asked, only God could answer.”

“But if you had to answer—”

“If I could give them back to you, I would,” he said, honestly enough. If he could have cut them from her heart forever, he would have done that too, but he kept that to himself.

She let go of the back of his belt, which seemed bad until she took hold of his hand. When he looked at her, she stretched up and pressed her mouthparts briefly to the side of his snout.

“What does that mean?” he asked curiously.

“Just a human thing.”

“All right, hold a moment.” He leaned in and returned the gesture, taking the precaution of holding her face firmly between his hands. He had very little sensation around his mouth.

“Your first kiss?” she asked when he started walking again. “What did you think?”

“You smell nice.”

“Ooo, lies.”

“Under that,” he said with a flick of his spines. “The you-part smells nice.”

“Wow. You charmer, you.” She nudged her elbow into his side. Deliberately, to judge by her broad smile. “You need better compliments than that if you’re going to get lucky tonight.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Now you really do.”

“No,” he said with a snort. “I still don’t. I am Sheulek and all things within my camp are mine. Besides, you’re my wife and it is your divinely-ordained duty to serve my needs, whatever they may be. Besides that, you want me.”

“Not at the moment.”

“Always,” he said, but he stole a covert glance to make sure she didn’t mean it. She didn’t. He grinned and thumped a knuckle playfully on her scarred shoulder, saying, “I must be among the very best of men, eh? To possess so fine a wife.”

“Yeah, thanks, but we’re not really married.”

She was still smiling, but it wasn’t a joke. Meoraq thought about it, then stopped walking and turned on her. “That’s not the first time you’ve said that,” he said, then thrust his face very close to hers. “Why do you keep saying that?”

She seemed startled at first, inclined to laugh at him, but her eyes darted up to take in his low spines and she decided to become defensive instead. “Because we’re not! You can’t just say something and make it true!”

“Yes, I can.”

“No, you can’t!” she snapped. “Anyway, there weren’t any witnesses or anything to prove you even said it.”

He rocked back onto his heels and stared at her. “A witness?” he asked incredulously. “Woman, I will do many things to humor your human whims, but inviting in an audience while I am having sex will never be one of them!” He paused, then leaned in again. “You were there. Why didn’t you protest at the time if you had such objection?”

Pink color touched at her cheeks. “I wasn’t exactly paying attention to what you were saying at that point.”

He smiled.

“Oh shut up,” she snapped, ducking around him to keep walking. “We’re not married and I’m not arguing about it anymore. We’re just not.”

He snorted, but came after her, falling into step at her side instead of taking the lead. “This is not an argument,” he informed her. “There would have to be a dispute in order for there to be an argument and it is not possible to dispute the facts. But now I am curious. How do humans make a marriage bond?”

“With vows, I guess, but there has to be a priest there, or at the very least, a judge.”

Meoraq peered at her, then struck himself on the chest and flung both arms out, putting his whole body on display.

“Not you!” she yelled. The color in her cheeks was very bright now, a bold red that painted her all the way up to her eyes. “You don’t count! It has to be another priest or another judge!”

He flicked his spines, still grinning. “When we return to Xeqor, I will have our bond formally witnessed by the abbot and the high judge both if you like. Does that satisfy you?”

Amber walked a little faster. “You didn’t even ask me if I wanted to marry you.”

“Why would I do that?” he asked, amused. He didn’t have any trouble keeping pace at her side.

“Because you can’t marry someone against their will!”

“Yes, I can.”

“You can be a real prick sometimes.”

Meoraq snorted. “That is the sort of thing you say when you can’t think of anything else. If this is an argument, I think I have just won it.”

She threw him a glare and tried to walk even faster. He had only to wait. Eventually, his same even strides were enough to bring him up beside her. She glared straight ahead, her back stiff and her mouthparts pressed together.

“Well?” she said, after a few minutes of what had been for him a fairly comfortable silence. “Aren’t you going to tell me I’m beautiful when I’m angry?”

That was a trap if he’d ever heard one.

“No,” he said. But took the risk and bent in swiftly to sweep his scent-cavities along the side of her throat. “But you do smell nice.”

He gave that a moment more to settle, then put out his hand.

Her mouthparts twisted, but she took it.

 

* * *

 

The journey resumed. With the wind at their backs and the ground drying out and chilling hard beneath their feet, their speed greatly improved. The plains rose and became the foothills. Dead grass thinned over the stony soil. The earth took on the strange greenish-grey tint unique to the border between Yroq and Gedai. They made six spans that day at his estimate, six spans and still it was light when he called camp. And yet he lay awake that night with Amber tucked up against his side in a bed warmed by his fires, thinking.

Meoraq knew of no roads through the mountains, which was not to say there were none. From the moment the mountains were in sight, he had been looking for evidence of a pass. The relatively low peaks and shallow grades of this particular slope had brought him here, where he found the remnants of a road, but nothing that had been cleared or remade in years. Carving out a road, even in the plains of Yroq, was no casual undertaking and they were not abandoned on a whim. The inescapable conclusion was that there might be something wrong with this one and furthermore, that there must be a better crossing somewhere else, but he didn’t know where, didn’t even know whether to search for it north of their position or south.

In the morning, the mountains looked whiter. Meoraq prayed while Amber sat on a rock and pretended to be patient with him, but when he raised his head at the end of it, he still saw only the mountains…and the snow creeping down from its heights.

“Well?” said Amber, shouldering her pack and taking up her spear.

“This is where we cross,” he decided, but he was not at ease with the decision.

They began to climb, making their way steadily over the loose rock and deadfall that littered the base of the mountains. There was no sense of progress made. They seemed to struggle over the same hill again and again while the mountains themselves stayed just beyond it. Meoraq had to look back and see the plains below them—a rumpled brown blanket with patches of trees and the short, ugly scar left by the storm days ago—to feel for certain they were moving at all. Their distance halved and then halved again as the snowline began to drop.

It began as a few flakes, which Amber tried to tell him were just blowing down from the mountains. He didn’t bother to argue with her. In another hour, arguments were unnecessary. Their tracks were holes in dust at first, then depressions, then craters, and finally twin lines. By the time he called camp that night, they were in the white up to their knees and the snowline was lower than it had been even two days ago.

Amber held his pace without complaint, walking where he walked and taking no foolish chances over rough terrain. She learned quickly how to see softslides forming and where to put her feet on broken slopes, but he heard her fight for breath the higher they climbed. He felt the sharp tug of her hand on the back of his belt each time her footing slipped. He saw her cup shake when she drank her first swallows each time they stopped to rest. He felt the weakness in her arms when she put them around him at night.

The foothills could not go on forever. Already, the landscape was changing. The true mountains loomed over them: rock and ice and death in every misplaced step. The time was coming to make a decision. Meoraq put it off as long as he could, until at last, Sheul made it for him.

 

* * *

 

Meoraq crested a hill and when he saw what lay before him in the last valley before the mountains, he halted. Amber, bent nearly double to keep the stinging wind out of her fragile human face, promptly walked into him. She stumbled, her hunting spear at once tangled in his legs and hers, and probably would have fallen over if he hadn’t caught her by the arm.

“What is it?” she asked, squinting through the falling snow.

It was a cave, and if a cave had been all it was, it would not have drawn his eye for more than a moment. But it was a cave with a mouth large enough to allow a grown man to walk through and small enough for said man to easily craft a hide door to cover it. It was a cave positioned midway up a gentle slope, neither on the valley’s floor nor dangling unreachably over a sheer drop. The valley itself was wooded and well-traveled by mountain game, with a visible source of water and no evidence of past slides. Short of a second pillar of flame rising to heaven, the message could not have been more clear.

“Why are we just standing here?” Amber asked.

“We are done for now,” he told her as his gaze moved over her. She did not look well. Her skin had turned a bright pink wherever it was exposed to the air, all but her mouthparts and the thin flesh surrounding her sunken eyes, which had taken on a deep, bruised color. Part of it was surely the cold, which her human body could not seem to combat, but the endless days of walking had taken a heavy price as well. If she was not at her limits already, they were well within her sights.

“It’s hours until dark!” she argued, even as she weaved upon her feet.

“We are done.”

“The mountains are right there!”

“We are done.”

“Damn it, lizardman!”

“We—” He bent down to put their eyes directly on level, his face so near that he could taste her breath when he spoke. “—are done.”

“You don’t think I can do it, is that it?” she demanded.

Meoraq neither answered nor straightened up.

She swiped snow out of her face. “Fine. We’ll take a break, but—”

“That cave shall be our camp,” Meoraq said, pointing.

“That what?” She tracked the aim of his arm and scowled at the gift Sheul had given them. “A cave? I don’t want to stop for the whole night!”

“We will not stop for one night, woman,” he replied. “We stop for all of them.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sheul has provided our winter’s camp.”

She stared at him, water welling and steaming in her eyes. Then she snatched her spear back from him and yanked her arm from his grip. “Have fun, lizardman. I’m not tired and I’m not stopping!”

He watched her go, struggling against the wind at every stubborn step. If this were any other woman, her foolishness might carry her another hour before she came meekly back to him, assuming there were any dumaq woman who would refuse him. If she were a man, her pride might take her well into the night before reason brought her slinking back to his camp. But she was Amber, and so Meoraq went after her.

She tried to shake him off when he first took her arm, saying something about this not being a matter for discussion, which was very true. Meoraq did not bother to answer, however, electing instead to sling her over his shoulder with his travel-pack. He picked up her spear, gave her a whack with it to stop her drumming her fists on his back, then turned back along the path of his tracks, loudly praying for patience. He did not stop until he had marched himself into the cave Sheul had given him and could have this fight out of the weather.

“Where will you go?” he demanded, setting her on her feet and giving her a shove when she immediately attempted to storm out again. “How is it you think you will find Xi’Matezh without me?”

“Maybe God will take me there,” she said acidly.

“Sheul brought you here.”

“I…I…I don’t need to stop! I can keep going just fine!”

“Do you think I am making this camp for your sake?” he asked, incredulous. “I am a Sword and a true son of Sheul. I obey only His will. I do not ignore His direction for benefit of stubborn females without the sense to look after themselves. And if I did,” he went on, his temper fraying, “I would have halted this march long before now as you are plainly, plainly, killing yourself to make it!”

“I am not!”

He ripped his samr from its sheath and seized her. She fought him with embarrassing effectiveness, but in moments, he had roughly turned her and thrust its polished blade unavoidably before her face. He shook her once to stop her swearing and again to make her look at it instead of at him and then there was quiet.

“Leave me alone,” she said at last.

He snorted at the back of her stubborn head. “I am tempted to do just that altogether too often for a righteous man,” he told her and released her, unbuckling his harness rather than re-sheathe his samr. He strove for patience, found some, and turned his attention to his surroundings, where it should have been from the start. The cave was not as roomy as he would have liked, but had a natural bend to it which protected it nicely against the worst of the wind and would make it easy to hang doors. It had clearly been used by men in the past, to judge by a stone-ringed ashpit and a number of pots and basins too heavy or ungainly to carry over the mountains, even a small smoker and drying rack. Far more recently, it had sheltered animals; there was a scattering of small bones to tell him that a thuoch had been and gone at some point, but now it was a kipwe’s den. Perhaps even a mated pair of kipwe, to judge by the size of the nest of quills and shed fur before him. If they had not already descended to winter in the warmer climes of Yroq’s plains, their two hides would make fine doors to seal off the mouth of the cave and their meat would make a fair start on their winter stores…

Amber had not moved.

Meoraq pondered her for a moment more in silence, then heaved a mental sigh. He may as well get the whole of the fight out of the way now, rather than portion it out over the next several days and impede all the other work they could be doing. He said, “All things happen in Sheul’s time.”

“Bullshit. Lizard-shit.” She shot him a fierce, humiliated sort of stare and as quickly looked away. “Why don’t you ever just come out and say what you mean?”

“Great Sheul, O my Father, give me patience. What do I mean?”

“You think I’m weak!”

Of all the things she could have said, this was the one he was least prepared to hear. “In what sense?” he asked guardedly.

“In the sense that you think I’m weak!” she yelled back at him. “There aren’t a whole lot of different ways to say that, lizardman! You think I’m weak!”

“You are,” he said, baffled by this outburst.

She stepped back with her spear so tightly clenched in her fists that it shook. Her mouthparts, as tightly pressed together, shook also.

“Your skin is soft,” he told her, hardly able to believe he needed to make these arguments out loud. “It bruises at every touch. It tears. It can’t hold its heat. In that sense, you are weak. In the sense that you can’t carry the provisions you require to sustain you on this journey, you are also weak. You have suffered severe illness which makes you tire more easily. You may improve in that regard with rest and time, I don’t know, but for now, you do tire easily, which makes you weak. You don’t know how to survive in the wildlands. This is ignorance more than weakness,” he added thoughtfully, “but it bears mentioning.”

She turned around with curious difficulty, as if pulling against invisible hands.

“Your clay is much too frail,” he went on, watching her walk clumsily to the mouth of the cave, “for the soul it must house.”

She did not stop and he was obliged, not without a sigh, to follow after her for a second time.

“Sheul measures us all,” he said, taking his place at her side and resisting mightily the urge to pick her up and carry her off again. “His greatest trials are reserved for those He takes greatest pride in. You must please Him, Soft-Skin.”

“I don’t believe in your stupid god.”

He snorted. “It amazes me each time you say that, as if you truly believe it is necessary that you do.”

She rolled her eyes in their bruised sockets and tried to walk faster, skidding now and then in the wet snow, but soon enough her step began to slow. She struggled on for a time, following the path they had made in her first senseless flight, but when she reached the mangled place where he had seized and carried her away, she went no further. She glared at the ground between her feet, not moving. Meoraq waited, watching the snow catch in her hair.

“They could be just up ahead,” she said finally.

“All things are possible, but this is not likely.” And in answer to her glance, explained, “If they passed through this valley, surely they would have seen that cave and slept within at least one night, and if they had, I would know it. You would know it.”

Her shoulders fell. She stared at the mountains.

And because it needed saying, even as much as he hated to be the one saying it, he took grim hold of that spear and drove it all the way in. “I have not seen any sign of their passing in a long stretch of days.”

“They’re not dead. My sister—” She stabbed her eyes at him and looked away just as fiercely. “—is not dead. I’d know if she was.”

“I’m not saying she is,” said Meoraq, who nevertheless thought just that. “I say only that they have not come this way. Perhaps they crossed elsewhere. They may have made a camp to weather out the cold season or even abandoned their search for Xi’Matezh altogether. If it is Sheul’s will, we will meet them again. But for us, for now, we are done.”

Meoraq stood in the snow and let her think. She had begun to shiver by the time she was done, but he did not attempt to hurry her along.

Her breath heaved in and out of her. She turned around to face him. “If I go back with you tonight, I don’t want to hear you tell me not one more word about how this is God’s will.”

He opened his mouth to tell her that, whether she liked admitting it or not, she was his wife and as such, sworn to obey him in all things, but the words would not come. Instead, awkwardly, he opened his arms. Glaring, wordless, she shuffled closer and let him hold her.

“I still have the lichu,” he said at last, for want of something intelligent and comforting to say. “We’ll cure leathers and make clothes. The cold will pass. All things in…All things in time.”

“Thank you,” she mumbled.

They went together back to the cave as the snow fell and filled their bootprints.