The Last Hour of Gann by Smith, R. Lee (16)

“That’s right,” she said, gratefully falling into English again. She kneaded at his slit some more and gradually he relaxed enough to let her finger penetrate, although he kept his hold on her wrist. “I want to see the sky. You said Zhuqa’s woman doesn’t need to be locked up. I’ve been good, haven’t I? I want to see the sky.”

“What exactly do you think you have to barter with that I do not already own?” he inquired. His spines were coming up, away from flat suspicion to cautious enjoyment.

Amber found his sa’ad, gave it a stroke, then looked into his eyes and knelt.

He had to be able to see the plan in her eyes. He had to. Because she could see as clear as the sun back in Earth’s sky his memory of how she’d licked the meaty juices off his fingers the other night. His slit bulged with the sudden prodding of his erection; the scent of cloves and musk welled, cloying in its closeness.

Amber held the stare. Her lips parted, She breathed on the crown of his slit where her thumb pierced him, then looked at his hand on her wrist.

He grunted and tightened his grip. “The game is ‘Zhuqa’s House,’ woman,” he said. “Not ‘Eshiqi’s bargain. I did not ask for this. Up.”

But his cock was a dark gleam between the widening folds of his slit, and she could feel the tension in his muscles as he fought to hold it in. He told her to get up, sure he did, but he didn’t pull her to her feet and he could have.

She rubbed the ball of her thumb over his sa’ad in two slow revolutions, then put her other hand up to pry the top of his slit open so she could see it—a dark, pointing gnarl that resembled either the world’s largest clitoris or the tiniest penis, visibly twitching in time with his pulse. ‘Meoraq has one of these and I never knew it,’ she thought suddenly and had to bite down on a giggle because it really was funny, wasn’t it, to think that she could be that unadventurous about having sex with her alien lizardman.

She caressed Zhuqa’s sa’ad, still in that light-headed, dangerously amused mood, now thinking of it less as a blowjob and more of a lesbian experience. Her very first. She leaned close, exhaled.

His cock lurched out maybe halfway and pulled back out of sight.

“Please,” said Amber, in case he’d forgotten why she was doing this.

“I did not trust you before,” he said tightly. “I trust you damned less n—”

She licked his slit.

His last word swept into a lizardish snarl and his hips jerked forward, impaling the air with the sudden stabbing bar of his fully extruded, cum-spitting cock. He jerked her trapped wrist up over her head even as his other hand came clawing down at her shoulder.

Amber pried his slit open (much easier to do with his cock out) and licked it again, sweeping her tongue back and forth like she was licking an ice-cream cone into shape. The taste was strong in ways she couldn’t identify (but not of cloves, oddly) and not as unpleasant as she’d been braced for, except for the little matter of whose clit she was licking at all. Each wet swirl of her tongue beat another convulsion of some sort out of Zhuqa—a cough, a curse, a staggering step or a clenching fist—until he let go of her hand and she was free to use it on his cock.

The instant she closed her fist around him, she pursed her lips around his clit and sucked it into her mouth. Sucked hard.

“Fuck Gann!” roared Zhuqa and then grey light burst over the left side of her head and suddenly Amber was sprawling over the floor.

He looked almost as surprised to see her there as she was.

Amber put a hand cautiously up to rub at the hot throb of her left ear, but it wasn’t bleeding, of course, just slapped really good. She looked at him, and then she bounded to her feet, shouting, “What was that for?”

He glared at her, breathing hard but silently, and then pointed at the ground between his feet.

“No!” she snapped, then said it again in his language.

He was fast. He was so scary fast. He had her by the neck while the word was still hot in her mouth and choked it off, half-spoken. He started to speak, then paused and looked away to take a few more silent breaths. His cock moved slowly up and down, keeping time. He looked at her again. His grip eased, then opened.

“I did not mean to hit you,” he said. “You startled me. I won’t do it again. Use your mouth on me, Eshiqi, and I will take you to see the sky.”

She gave her left ear a sullen rub, glaring at him, thinking, ‘There it is and that didn’t take long at all, did it? I can do this. I really think I can.’

Zhuqa nudged at her head, but gently now.

Amber shifted his breeches, glared some more, and then knelt down again and stilled the flexing of his cock with her touch. She stroked the shaft, licked once at his sa’ad, and then turned her head and sucked lightly at the slick side of his cock.

“Fuck Gann,” he breathed, sagging back against the door.

Back and forth, from clit to cock, licking, sucking, squeezing, flicking. She rolled his sa’ad between her lips, bathed every side of his shaft, licked all the way up his slit and down again in one slow sweep, pursed her lips around the blunt hook at the tip of his cock and suckled it, then latched her mouth around the base and let the tip of her tongue trace the many valleys between the rubbery spikes that grew along the knot, feeling it fill with fresh cum as he hissed and groaned and screamed obscenities.

And with it all so close to her face, she could not help but also see the thick, black vein pulsing just where the soft inner meat of his slit hardened into the base of his cock. Amber stared, feeling nothing, tasting nothing, seeing fish hooks in her mind.

His knot was swelling already. Time to bring the curtain down.

Amber took the full length of his cock in both her fists, working him in milking motions as she sucked at the hook and flicked the opening eye with her tongue to drink away the first drops. And when he started to cum, she was quick to suck the whole head into her mouth, bobbing as deep as she could manage, letting him feel her swallow each hot, oily stream that burst across her tongue.

She knew when he finally looked down and saw her doing it because both his hands came down to clench in her hair and he spent the last few seconds of his climax fucking furiously at her throat and calling out some of the most filthily creative things Amber had ever heard and never could have imagined, ending with, “Fuck Gann fucking God fucking me!” before he finally staggered back and slid down to join her on the floor.

Amber waited, just in case he had it in him to keep going, but once he had his breathing slowed, Zhuqa pulled his cock in and closed his breeches. He grimaced at her.

“You promised,” said Amber.

“I hear you.” He reached out and rubbed a finger along the corner of her lips, then showed her the smear of semen on his fingertip.

She thought about it, then licked it off.

He shuddered. “That is the most profane thing I have ever seen,” he told her. The front of his loin-plate was bulging.

“Please,” said Amber.

“You never should have bartered with me, little one.” Zhuqa got to his feet and pulled her up beside him, grimacing his lizard-grin at the world. “Because now you are going to have to buy everything.”

But he took her out, up ten flights of stairs, past dozens of saluting, well-armed guards. He did it without any suspicion. He did it with a smile on his face. He did it without ever thinking in any way that she could sense how vulnerable that one little vein might be and how readily he’d put her on her knees before it and then closed his eyes. He just took her out.

It was hard to be outside. She hadn’t thought about how it would be to actually see the sky again, feel the wind, taste the freshness after the deep, stale air of the underground ruins. It had just been something to ask for, something she’d known he would believe. She thought she’d be able to take a few deep breaths, maybe gaze intently into the clouds, and her only concern had been how she was going to make that look convincing when she didn’t really care.

But the wind was cool and wet with the promise of clean rain. There was a greenness to it, some springtime flavor that she caught on her tongue when she breathed, and for a while she forgot about Zhuqa entirely, even as he stood watching her.

She did all the same things she’d planned to do after all, although she didn’t think about that until later. She took those deep, shaky breaths. She tipped her head back and stared at the grey smudge that marked a full moon’s light behind the ever-rolling clouds. She didn’t speak and didn’t move until Zhuqa put his hand on her shoulder and said, with that hateful gentleness he so often had, “Enough, little one. You’re shivering. Come inside.”

Then she began to cry, sort of. There were no sobs, no ugliness, no lump in her throat that needed choking out. There were just tears, pouring out of her one after another, so quiet and easy that if it weren’t for the heat of them, she might not have known she was making them. She looked at Zhuqa and he reached up to wipe at her cheek with the back of his hand. She realized that she’d made up her mind already, that the fish hook was not a possibility, but a plan. Tomorrow’s plan.

“Ah, Eshiqi, hush,” he said, brushing at her other cheek as the first trickled more tears. “Zhuqa’s woman does not stay forever in his lair. One day, all the world will be your House.”

“You said the same thing to Zru’itak,” she said and turned toward the stair.

“And I would have kept my promise,” he said evenly, “if she had remained loyal to me.” He studied her as she stared at him, then smiled very slightly. “That was a good guess, I think,” he remarked to himself. “But I’m not guessing at every word, believe that. You are losing your secrets, Eshiqi, a little more each day. One day very soon, you will have to be honest.”

She heard herself laugh without feeling it. “Not today, I hope. And not tomorrow.”

He frowned, capturing each word as it left her mouth for further study. He waited a long time after her last word, as if to be sure she was done talking, but when her gaze wandered back to the sky, he grunted and took gentle hold of her arm. “We have a meal waiting for us,” he said, leading her in their descent. “It will be cold now, but you will sit on my knee and hold my cup and show me your gratitude, and tomorrow, perhaps, you will see the sky again.”

And the tears kept coming, because Amber knew she was never going to make it that far out, and she’d already had her last look at the sky.

 

11

 

Sixteen spans, the boy had said. Meoraq had always felt he had a good grasp of distance, even in the wildlands. Years of travel and Master Darr’s notorious book of maps burned into his brain combined to keep a subconscious tally wherever he went. It was not infallible—all things mortal succumbed at times to deception or delusion—but it had served him well and he had every reason to put his faith in it as much as God. He began his hunt for ruins at an estimate of fourteen spans and when he reached eighteen without finding them, he stopped, turned back alongside his trail, and sought them further south.

Back and forth he went in this fashion, waking before dawn to make use of each second that God gave him light. He stopped at every stream to scout for boot-prints among the animal tracks. He knuckled through the gnawed leavings of each carcass for signs of butchery. He searched each promising thicket or valley deep enough to hide a nest, climbed each hill that might show him a better vantage.

He found everything—muddy tracks, blade-marked bones, discarded scraps of cured leather, broken sleds, ashpits—but none of it was fresh and in finding everything, he found nothing. As for ruins, he knew the signs well enough in Yroq, but in this land of hills and valleys and chokes of trees, anywhere he aimed his eyes showed him signs. And yet he found no ruins.

He told himself he would finish out one more day southward and then turn around. He would run through the night back to his first trail, roughly, and begin a northerly search in the morning.

Good. Sound. Sensible.             

But when night fell on the fifth day of futility, Meoraq camped. He didn’t really know why. He hadn’t found anything (two separate heaps of half-burnt branches, a rotted harness, a dead man tied to a hsul tree and left to be eaten alive a brace or so ago: nothing) and his last glimpse of the landscape before the sun fell showed him nothing worth exploring further, but he camped all the same. He lit no fire, just sat in the dark, trying to meditate while his nerves gnawed at him.

When he slept, he dreamed in confusing tangles of his father returning from Kuaq, of silver shards in the shape of a ship flying through broken tiles, of thunder and rain and the stormway tunnel collapsing around him. He did not dream of Amber.

He woke just at dawn feeling that scant minutes had passed since he’d shut his eyes, and yet he felt…not invigorated, really, but awake. Like the stinging sensation that comes to a numbed arm or leg when it is first moved, it was not a pleasant feeling, but ominous, a sign of something greater still to come.

He prayed at least an hour, largely without words, as the morning moved on ahead of him. At the end of his prayers, he started walking south again.

He had always had a good sense of time as well as distance. Today, although painfully aware of direction (and it was pain; he could feel Praxas like a fish hook in his flesh, tied to a line that threatened with every step to snap), he had no grip at all on the hour. The sun moved overhead and if it were not for the fact that he could see it (not the sun, but the light of the sun, and there was another fish hook), he would have no sense of time at all.  To judge by that light, it was near eighth-hour—almost the whole day walked away—when he came to the top of the hill that had the tree.

It was the only tree left on the hill, of some kind unknown to him. Its body was very tall and straight, burnt black by some misfortune in the far past. Its single surviving branch had broken close to the trunk, half-fallen, but sprouted new life at its tip, so that the whole thing took on the appearance of a fish hook, and why in the two names of God and Gann was he so obsessed with fish hooks? He didn’t think he’d ever in his life seen one except in shops or pictures. But there it was, this ruin of a tree, this monument to all fish hooks of the world, an obvious landmark for even a boy to find and follow, and so Meoraq put down his pack and climbed it.

At the top, just where the branch hung down, Meoraq looked out over the furthest ridge and saw dark shapes too perfectly squared to be natural, set in patterns only men could design.

Ruins.

‘And it’s nineteen spans from Praxas if it’s a damned step,’ he thought. The boy was no better at gauging distance than he was putting a choke on a man.

Not even for a moment did he question whether these were the ruins where his Amber had been taken. Neither did he stop to wonder how many raiders were nesting in its belly. Some things were manifestly obvious. Some things didn’t matter. He knew.

 

* * *

 

She stole the fish hook. She meant to wait until the end of the day, the last possible minute, so the chances of being caught with it were at their lowest, but as much sense as that made, she was only able to stand touching them, sewing with them, staring at them, for so long before she just had to take one. And the opportunity, when it came, was too golden and glorious to overlook: Hruuzk, out of the room; all the slaves, occupied with work; the children, who were the most wildly unpredictable variable, up top with Hruuzk; and into this almost-perfect scenario, Rosek suddenly peed on Dkorm. Swearing, he scooped her up and stomped into the next room where there was water to get cleaned up.

Amber didn’t watch him go, didn’t hesitate, didn’t think. She stopped sewing on one hook, reached into the box, and hooked another on the inside of her sleeve where it was out of sight and could still plausibly have gotten there by accident. Then she went back to sewing. She attempted a few deep breaths—a slow-count of six, as Meoraq would say—but only made it as far as three before her nerve buckled and she looked around to see if she’d been caught.

Dkorm was still in the other room, scrubbing at himself with a rag and hissing at the baby. The slaves were right where they ought to be, necks bent, silent. Xzem—

Xzem was looking at her. She ducked her head when their eyes met, rocking Zhuqa’s baby and trying to coax him back onto her breast, but she had definitely been looking. What had she seen? What would she say?

She didn’t have long to agonize over it. Dkorm came storming back into the room while Amber was still sewing on the same hook, her hands too weak and fluttery-feeling to manage the simple knots. He shoved Rosek roughly into a crate and threw himself down, still wiping at his chest and muttering. His mood infected the other lizardladies with enough anxiety that her own went unnoticed.

The fish hook pulled at her sleeve, a thousand-pound piece of metal smaller than her thumb. Everything was relative.

Somehow the day passed. She sewed mindlessly on the same net for most of it, forced to go back over the same places again and again when she consistently put hooks in upside down or sewed folds of the net together. When she was finally finished, it looked worse than the very first net she’d done, but at least it was finished and she could go clutch at Zhuqa’s baby and calm herself down.

Xzem sat very still beside her and did not look at her.

The baby purred, its tiny hand squeezing Amber’s goliath finger. It slept and Amber cupped its small, warm head and stared into its snouted face and thought, ‘I’m going to get you out of this, baby. It’s you and me, all the way to the top.’

When it woke and began to bite sleepily at her breast, Amber gave it reluctantly back to Xzem and returned to her work-table. Ena had another net waiting, the last net. Amber got to work.

She had nearly finished when Hruuzk came at the end of the day to gather up his slaves. He took Meoraq’s mending kit and tucked it back into his belt. She protested. Stupid of her, but she wanted to finish the net and she was at least three lengths of sinew from done.

“Eh, it’s good enough,” Hruuzk told her, inspecting the net. “I’ll talk to Zhuqa about putting you in the kitchen. Shame to waste your energy doing sprat-work like this.”

He patted her on the head and gave her his usual, “Good girl,” and ambled away with his ladies all in a slumped, silent line. Dkorm left, taking Xzem and the babies. Amber sat down with a pitcher of xuseth oil tightly gripped in both hands and waited for Zhuqa. If he found the hook caught in her sleeve here in the workpit, she might still be okay. Maybe.

Hours, each one ticking away at its own elastic pace. She could hear herself breathing. She didn’t think she’d ever heard herself breathe in this room before.

Zhuqa came. He smiled at her, filling the doorway. “Where is my greeting?”

Amber took one step toward him and froze. The hand she usually put on his chest was attached to the arm wrapped in the sleeve with a fish hook in it. If she raised it up as high as his heart, he would be looking right down the fucking thing, wide as the Lincoln Tunnel, with the lamp on the table blasting light right on it. If she used her other hand, would he notice?

‘He’s noticing this pause, little girl,’ the ghost of Bo Peep drawled. ‘That’s what he’s noticing. Get the stick out and do something.’

Her next step was something of a lurch, but it was movement and it took her to him. She put her arms around him (the hookless arm considerably tighter than the other) and pressed her cheek to his chest instead.

“You must want something,” Zhuqa remarked, patting her back. “As it happens, so do I. Come, Eshiqi. We’ll take our game below.”

He took her out into the hall, keeping her at his side all the way to the stair. Her arm, the one with the hook, hung between them, threatening at each step to snag on his scales when he brushed against her. Amber began to feel distinctly light-headed. Was she even breathing? No, she was not. God.

At the stair, he went ahead of her, but there were guards at every landing, their faces all pointed up at him, at her. When he stepped off into the hallway, he stayed ahead of her, but there were guards at every crossway, standing at attention, showing their salutes. When he came to his door, he stopped to take out his squarish keys, and it was there, in the two short seconds it took him to unlock the door, that Amber pulled the hook out of her sleeve and put it in her mouth. She heard fabric tear even over the sound of the key turning in its lock, but Zhuqa never glanced back. The hook felt enormous clenched between her teeth, as if it were stretching out her whole face into a Halloween mask, but Zhuqa only smiled and beckoned for her to precede him.

“Zhuqa has come home,” he said.

She walked in and began undressing without waiting for his order. Surely it was her imagination that made her think he looked at her for a heartbeat longer than usual before he took her shift, her imagination that made her think he was more meticulous than usual when he felt his way through it. He tossed it aside the same as ever, that she was sure of, and then his hands were on her.

‘God, don’t let him feel my heart pounding,’ she thought. Prayed. No atheists in foxholes, wasn’t that the saying? Well, there were no atheists in Zhuqa’s room with fish hooks in their mouths, waiting for him to finish checking them for weapons either. In that moment, for as long as it lasted, Amber Bierce was a True Believer.

Zhuqa finished feeling between her thighs and stood up. He checked her armpits—sweating so much he has to notice that why is he pretending not to goddamn sadistic lizard—then moved on to lift her breasts in his hands, slipping his thumbs between them like always just in case she had a—fish hook—weapon stowed away beneath one of them.

And there he stopped.

For one illogical instant, Amber thought he’d found something. Her mouth tried to drop open in a gape; she clenched it shut and then had to relax her jaw so it didn’t look like she was clenching it. She stared at him, fighting not to stare, knowing she had to be either white as a sheet or blushing to the roots of her hair, or heck, both.

Still cupping her breasts, with absolutely no sign on his lizardish face that anything at all was amiss, Zhuqa bent down and nuzzled at her throat.

Oh Jesus, really? The giggles came streaming out of her around the fish hook. She pressed her lips tightly together and stared at the ceiling while Zhuqa finished that side and moved his snout tenderly to the other side of her throat. The hand covering her left breast lightly squeezed, experimenting with her.

“I guess you remember yesterday,” she said, because silence was never golden with this man for very long and if she had to talk, she wanted to do it when he had his face buried in her hair and not when he was looking right at her. Hopefully—please god no atheists here tonight nothing here but us chickens please god—he didn’t know English so well that he could tell her teeth were clamped together.

He grunted softly against her skin, moved his hand from her right breast to her hip and tugged her lightly against him. “You are a terrible distraction to me, Eshiqi,” he told her, and if there were more chilling words he could have said, she honestly didn’t know what they were. Zhuqa the Warlord could not afford distractions. “My mind has been with you all day. Tell me…” He caught her hand, licked the palm, and then put it on his loin-plate. “Would you like to see the sky tonight?”

She smiled and started to kneel.

He stopped her. “Not here,” he said, still apparently unaware of anything amiss as she struggled not to stare at him or show the racing of her heart. He pointed back at the table, where their meal had already been set aside in anticipation of the evening’s festivities. In its place, an extra lamp burned brightly. “This time, I want to watch you.”

 

* * *

 

In the first creeping hour after dark, when the last of the light was gone from the sky and any thinking man might know that it was time to seek shelter from the night’s preying beasts, Meoraq came at last to the ruins and found them lit in welcome. His first foolish urge was to draw his blades and charge ahead. He mastered it and instead hunkered low in the grass, watching and praying in silence.

He saw men—or what might be called men, if one knew no better—moving below the lamps that hung at the open doorways of the ruins. When the wind was with him, he could even hear them, however dimly, laughing and calling to one another as any men might do at the close of their day. There were not many, not at this first accounting, but even then Meoraq noted that the ruins were in a most carefully kept state of workable disrepair. The high towers had fallen in, yes, and the wildlands had reclaimed much, but here where the lamps were lit, the remnants of the Ancient roads were remarkably cleaned of loose debris. Whole fields had been laid within the roofless shells of great buildings, ready for the season’s first crop. There were indeed canals, not dug in the age of the Ancients, but relatively fresh; brackish water ran in a swift current, caught from some unseen waterway and turned through these ruins as expertly as any irrigation system he had seen in the cities. He could see hooked nets at every landing, set to catch whatever swam in its muddy flow, but while the water was not clean, neither did it reek of waste. There was a hint of that on the wind when it turned, but only a hint; they kept their fleshing vats covered and regularly cleaned, and their compost freshly-turned.

The more he saw, heard, smelled, the more Meoraq understood that this was not a den of raiders like any he had come across in the past. This was no winter-camp just waking from the cold. This was a settlement, with many years of success rooted beneath it. The eleven men he could see moving about in the lamplight could not possibly account for the work that had gone into making this camp, or sustaining it. There might be fifty men waiting in the foundations below. And whoever led them was not only strong enough to hold the loyalty of such deadly men, but clever enough to have built all this.

He thought of Szadt, the Raider-Lord, who had stabbed his way into Kuaq and held it for three days with the aid of Gann’s weapons. Whoever nested in these ruins might well have such weapons also. Explosive fires that burned the flesh off a man’s bones in moments. Lights that cut like swords. Thunder in a man’s hand that could crush another’s brain right there in his unbroken skull. All this, and Sheul alone knew what other forms of undefendable death were there to be found in Gann’s world.

But Szadt had been killed. Meoraq’s own father had climbed the bloodied wall of Kuaq and hurled the Raider-Lord’s headless body to the ground in spite of all the weapons Gann had given him. A man might armor himself in wickedness and arm himself with machines, but he would always be a man, born of clay, and all men trembled before Sheul’s might.

A ghost of memory in Amber’s voice, uninvited: If you’re stupid enough to jump off a cliff, God doesn’t catch you.

It pierced him, but not as the warning she had meant it to be on its first speaking. His Amber. His outrageously audacious and uncouth Amber. He could see no slave-pens, which only increased his surety that the true nest was below ground, out of sight and far better defended. His Amber was there, unseen, suffering as she had suffered every hour of these past seven days, and if Gann himself rose up, still Meoraq would have her back. His throat still ached where the boy had choked him and his body was worn to the very edge of exhaustion after this run, but Sheul was with him and that was all that mattered.

He could all but hear the smacking sound of her little hand against her smooth forehead, all but feel the puff of her breath as she sighed.

Meoraq drew the knife of his fathers from its sheath and touched the smooth knob of Rasozul’s thigh bone to his heart. “See me now, O father of my flesh,” he whispered, and glanced upwards. “See me always, O Father of my eternal soul. Be with me now, both of you, and be with my wife. If it is Your will, O Sheul, I will hold her in my living arms again. And if it is Your will, my beloved Father, I will hold her in Your halls. Wherever I do come to hold her, I thank You for bringing her once more within my reach.”

The wind blew, whispering its own refrain. Meoraq tapped the knife twice to his chest and sheathed it. He drew his kzung instead, the blade for the killing of beasts, and began to crawl. He felt no fear, but his heart still hammered. His limbs carried him without shaking. His mind was clear, painfully so, like the coldest winds of winter that seem to crush the throat that breathes them in. He crawled without questioning what might become of him when this hour ended. He was not Uyane Meoraq any longer, but the Sword in God’s hand, and when he reached the first of the raiders—a man strolling out alone into the grass, opening his breeches with one hand; the other was nothing but a raw-looking stump, fresh enough to show scabbing along the stitched end—he cut without hesitation, without emotion, without design.

There was no moon behind the clouds, no flash across his blade, only a hiss and a spray of heat and the wind blowing to hide the sound of a body falling in the grass. He did not stop to drag the corpse away or try in any way to hide it. His eyes, Sheul’s eyes now, were already moving on to the next man. He breathed deep and slow, a master of his clay and of his killing hand, and went with God’s blessing burning in his heart to get his wife back.

 

* * *

 

Zhuqa leaned back on the table, a lamp burning to either side of him, black scales flickering with reflected light—a demon in repose. He watched, hissing softly with pleasure, as she nuzzled at his slit and tried desperately to think of how the hell she was going to either take the fish hook out of her mouth without him seeing it or give him the blowjob with it in, options which sure as hell seemed to mark the opposite ends of a whole spectrum of failure. So far, he was showing phenomenal restraint and a willingness to let the moment draw itself out, as demonstrated by the fact that he was still tucked away despite the spicy-sweet oils bedewing his slit, but any second now, he was going to lose his patience with this kittenish crap and expect her to lick something. And one of the many sad realities of life was that it was impossible to lick while holding something clenched in your teeth.

She supposed she could move it into the fold of her cheek…where, the way her luck was going, it would hook itself in and stay.

The image of half a fish hook protruding through the soft side of her face was pretty bad. The image that replaced it—same image, really, only with the addition of Zhuqa beating her to death—was worse.

Amber brought both her hands up, kneading firmly at his loins as she breathed over his slit, and watching through her hair for him to close his eyes.

He saw her watching. His head cocked.

Oh fuck Gann.

He reached out and brushed the hair out of her eyes, then gathered most of it up and held it for her, resting his hand comfortably atop her head. “Better?”

If her hands hadn’t been full of lizard-dick, she’d have hit herself on the forehead.

“So much better,” she muttered and stared without a lot of hope at his gleaming slit.

Well, what the hell. He could only kill her once.

‘Yeah, but I bet he can make it seem like more,’ she thought.

Never mind. Whatever happened, happened. It was all in God’s hands.

Amber slipped her thumb upwards along his slit and in, teasing at his sa’ad. The edges of his slit relaxed at once, letting his cock extrude. She gripped it in her fist—here goes nothing—and bent low, sweeping her free hand down over his belly as she opened her mouth—i’m actually going to die with a dick in my hand life is full of the weirdest surprises—and slipped the fish hook against the cup of her palm a fraction of a second before sucking the nub of his clit into her mouth.

She waited, tonguing the alphabet over and around the stiff little knot between her lips, but she didn’t die. The fish hook was a huge, obvious secret tucked between her thumb and her palm. She’d cut herself already. She was bleeding on him. He had to see the blood, even if he couldn’t smell it or feel it. Damn it, how long was he going to make her wait before he stabbed her in the ear?

She raised her head and looked.

His eyes snapped open at once, burning like two more points of lamplight, as he gave her hair a vicious yank. “Don’t you fucking dare stop!” he hissed, yellow popping out in vibrant stripes on both sides of his neck. In the next breath, he visibly fought himself to a calmer place, relaxing his hand and even brushing at her cheek. “I won’t hurt you, Eshiqi. I won’t hurt you. But be careful how you play with me.” His eyes, clearer now, shifted to the tip of his cock and back to her. He let go of her hair and gripped himself at the base of his shaft. “Do that again…with your mouth.”

She couldn’t believe she actually had the hook in her hand—

—and now he was covering the vein.

 

* * *

 

Meoraq circled the ruins several times, as much as the crumbling buildings and overgrowth allowed, trusting darkness for cover, the wind for sound, and Sheul for everything else. No raiders who lived in such a well-organized nest could be entirely careless and these had many sentries set high on the fallen walls and patrolling through the grass. The urge to stab himself into the heart of the camp and find his woman was a live coal in his gut, but he did not succumb. He was Sheulek, a master of his impulses, and so he circled as a Sheulek would do, killing them one by one where killing would go unnoticed, tightening his grip on an enemy that remained unaware of his predation even as his heart beat out the very throbs of Amber’s human name. But eventually he was there, one hand resting on the stone wall of the ruins themselves, his boots just at the golden line of light that came from the first of the hanging lamps, looking at six men and the end of silence.

No fear. No thought. No plan.

He leapt. The techniques he used had names. At another hour, he would have known them. For now, he had only the vaguest sense of balance and motion, obstruction and momentum, hot blood and cold wind. They shouted, some of them. Some fought. Some ran. He dared not stop to do real battle, but cut where the cutting was easy and ingloriously effective—opening bellies if they faced him and hamstringing from behind—until they were all down and the attention for a killing blow could be afforded. None of the six had escaped him, although one had managed to flee as far as one of the phesok fields and tried to hide there, holding his bowels in both hands, too dazed to scream even when Meoraq found and finished him. But they had made enough noise in their dying to stir up the nest and he could hear the rest of them through the dark openings of the ruins, calling up from the deep places, wary.

So. Meoraq—without thought, without design, but with the flames burning in his chest and his brain—cut the head from a dead man with five or six hard strokes and hurled it through an open door. He listened to it smack into a wall and tumble in its clumsy way down what sounded to be at least four flights of stairs. He lost count of the men who shouted out as it passed them, but there were many.

The first of them, the foolish ones, erupted from the dark in the next moment, stolen blades in hand and challenge in their throats. Meoraq met them, burning brighter at every jarring clash and spray of blood, reeling from one lamplit door to another in a storm of severed limbs and screams until his boots were skidding in mud gone black with gore and all he could smell was spilled shit and death.

It did not end with six men this time. It did not seem to have an end at all. Swords and fists and hissing faces, they came and kept coming. He clung to the discipline of his training, but he could feel his throat throbbing hotter and hotter with every passing moment, until the blood that splashed back into his face seemed cool. He fought and he killed them and it was carnage on every side as the skill and the finesse he had practiced all the years of his life first strained, then cracked, then crumbled. They kept coming and he finally knew—without fear but with a terrible swelling rage—that there were just too many. He was not his father and he could not win this fight.

They would kill him. They would keep his Amber, use her until her soft body broke, and then they would kill her too.

This echoed in him for the briefest moment, trapped in the stillness between one beat of his heart and the next. And suddenly the fires surged and took him.

There was a moment, endless, lost in the blackness of that inner space where Meoraq could still dimly hear his own breathing, deep and slow and even. Then he heard, even dimmer, a roar like something from a nightmare—a monstrous demon sound that surely could not issue from any dumaq throat, except that he could feel it humming somewhere in his clay, which meant that it was his roar, his own.

‘No,’ he thought, his last conscious thought. ‘It is Sheul’s. He has taken me.’

Then, nothing.

 

* * *

 

The hardest part of the fight to supplant Zhuqa’s hand with her own lay in not letting him know it was a fight. Which was not to say that everything else was easy—not even holding onto him was easy anymore—only that if there was an axis point to the battle, that was it.

For someone who’d never had a blowjob before yesterday, he was full of advice on how she should be doing it. Each time she tried to ease her hand around his shaft and bully his out of the way, he wanted it somewhere else. “My sa’ad!” he’d be panting, or, “Get underneath and push—harder!” or, “All along my slit, Eshiqi, fast now, faster,” and the whole time, his hand was working away, just like cock-rubber wasn’t a curse.

When he finally did relinquish his grip, it happened fast, as he rocked back onto his elbows looking for the necessary leverage to pump up into her mouth. He wasn’t sure how to do it and was too far gone to stop and puzzle it out, so he simply hooked his leg around her, dug his toes into her back, and lunged at her in a rapid-fire series of what she believed the yogas called the bridge pose. This had two results: the first and most obvious was that he came for, she thought, the sixth time, although by now this meant little more than an extra-hard jerk and a few bitter drops of whatever it was he had in him after his cum was gone. The second thing was that, between the abrupt kicking motion of his leg, his foot unexpectedly clutching at her, and having a hot, scaly bar suddenly banging away at the back of her throat, Amber dropped the fish hook.

She heard it hit the table with pindrop clarity in spite of Zhuqa’s draconian roars. Gagging, she slapped frantically at the tabletop, searching for the hook. She found it, or rather, felt it stab into the center of her palm, and choked out a howl around the enormous muzzle of his cock.

“Sorry,” groaned Zhuqa, letting up on her a little. “Don’t stop. Close your mouth again, just close your—yes! Ah, fuck Gann!”

Amber shrugged his leg off, tonguing madly at the hooked tip of his cock, and he dropped flat on the table, spreading his legs wide open around her—Zhuqa the dirty girl—grabbing her head between his hands like it was a zit he wanted to pop. And there it was and this was it and even he couldn’t go all night, so Amber reared back with a gasp, bit the hook from the meat of her hand, plucked it back from between her lips, and slashed.

If it took as much as one whole second, it would have surprised her.

He still almost kicked her away in time.

His feet were on her shoulders hard the same instant she had the hook in her hand and she went flying. Her cut went wild, but she got something because she felt him ripping all the way up her arm to her shoulder and the heat of the blood spraying over her hand. Then her back hit the wall and her ass hit the ground and Zhuqa was on his feet with one hand clapped to his gushing slit and a knife in the other. He took two running steps, roaring as he came, and went down on his face hard enough that she heard the crunch of his jaw breaking on the stone floor. Blood spat out between his teeth. He sucked in a breath, spat out some more, and lay writhing just a little.

She got up, staggering some on her bad hip, ready for him to leap up and take her down. He might have tried. His legs shifted, dragging through what she now saw was an amazing lake of blood for just a few seconds’ worth of bleeding, but that was it. His eyes alone moved, watching her inch closer so that she could first kick the knife out of his hand and then pick it up. He said something too mangled to make out when she did it, then spat out a bit of ropy blood and said, with startling clarity, “Fierce little thing.”

And then he was dead.

It wasn’t a big moment. There was no sudden sagging of his body, no death rattle at the end of some hoarse exhalation, no nothing. He was seeing her one second, and the next, he wasn’t.

“Yeah,” said Amber shakily, circling around him. “Yeah, I’ve seen this movie. Fuck you.”

She dropped onto his back—the death rattle finally came out with a gurgle between his broken teeth—yanked his chin up—it came easily—and cut his knife across his throat. She felt the knife’s blade scraping over his spine and his open eyes just kept staring. Amber scrambled back, rubbing at her mouth until she realized she was rubbing his blood onto her lips. She spit it out, gagged, then went ahead and threw up so she’d get it over and done with and could get on with the escaping.

“Okay,” she whispered once that was done. “It’s all over. Time to get up—”

The door banged open. “Get up!” bellowed Iziz. “Ghelip—ah,” he said with remarkable mildness as he skidded to a stop in Zhuqa’s blood. He looked down at his boots, his brow-ridges creased with confusion, and then over at Amber. At Zhuqa’s body. At the knife in Amber’s hand. At Zhuqa.

His spines flicked once and lay flat.

His throat filled in with color.

His chest began to heave.

And then he yanked out his hooked sword and came at her, screaming.

Amber threw herself back and rolled under the table. The sword hit the floor twice and then the table—chink chink chunk—before he came diving in after her. She kicked him in the face; he caught her by the ankle and yanked her out beside him—shhhhoop!—in a single pull, sliding easily over Zhuqa’s blood and her own puke. She still had Zhuqa’s knife in her hand. She realized that only after she saw her hand on the hilt that was buried in his back.

He let out a howl that was more angry than hurt, slapping at her in a storm of inarticulate snarls. She flung her arms up, but he knocked them aside without trying, maybe without even noticing. Through the dark blur of his hand hammering at her, she could see the colors at his throat actually shimmering with the force of his rage, but as soon as he remembered that he had a sword—

‘Sex and killing,’ she thought, as suddenly and as calmly as if it were a separate person whispering in her ear. With a cry, she abandoned her feeble efforts at defense and instead thrust her hands between them to loosen his loin-plate.

Iziz reared back without hesitation to battle it all the way open and let his cock out. It didn’t take long. Just long enough for her to yank the knife out of his back and slam it home in his head.

It hit hard, numbing her hand, and suddenly Iziz was two hundred pounds of lizard on top of her, oomphing his last breath into her face. She heaved him off without really being aware of doing so and then stood over him, brandishing her knife for maybe half a minute before realizing there was no blade in it anymore.

It had broken off.

In his head, she thought, looking down in horror at the remarkably small, bloody gash in the center of Iziz’s flat skull. There wasn’t anything sticking out. It must be all the way in there. In his brains.

grey

‘You absolutely will not faint!’ she thundered at herself, and like thunder, it had to roll a long way to meet her. She climbed up onto the table and there she sat, her eyes going from one raider to the other, waiting for them to move…rise…maybe get their cocks out and come finish what they’d started…

The only thing moving was the blood out of Iziz’s head and it was a slow, small trickle at that.

“Okay,” said Amber.

No one answered.

“Okay,” she said again and slid off the table onto her aching hip.

Still no answer. The door still stood wide open. Zhuqa and Iziz were still dead.

Amber started to bend over, but it made that faint feeling come back, so she knelt instead, tugging the sword out of Iziz’s slack grip. His hand, emptied, curled slowly into a loose fist.

“Okay,” said Amber, and to her surprise, it came out almost exactly the way the old Amber would have said it: tough and strong and able to handle things. It didn’t even sound like the voice of a stranger. “Come on, little girl,” she said, liking that voice more and more. “They say it ain’t over ‘till the fat lady sings and I’ve lost too much weight for the bitch to be me. Let’s see how far we can get.”

There was no one in the corridor, no one on the stairs. This she found so unbelievable that her feet kept backing up on her, wanting to retreat to the false security of Zhuqa’s room where being ravished by two zombie-lizards was infinitely preferable to being ambushed and ravished by all the live ones. She had to keep reminding herself of the way that Iziz had torn into the room. Surely he’d been raising the alarm all the way down; anyone who had been here had simply gone up to fight. She could hear commotion of some kind on the surface—people running, screaming, fighting—and she had no idea how she was going to get past it, but never mind that for now. Xzem might know of a back door, but whether she did or not, Amber had to get the baby.

She knew the floor where the slaves were quartered, not because she’d been going there every day, but because there was a dead lizardlady lying on the landing, hacked almost in half.

Gripping her sword in both hands, fear churning like molten lead in her belly, Amber ran down the hall, opening every door she found.

Empty. Empty. All empty.

She could hear whatever was happening on the surface working its way down into the stairwell. When she cast a terrified glance over her shoulder, she was just in time to see a headless body drop down the shaft. ‘It’s a raid,’ she thought. ‘It’s a raid from this Ghelip person and they’ve already taken the girls. Run. Just run.’

She did run, but she kept stopping, cursing herself for the futility of it each time she flung a new door open on an empty room.

They were all empty. Every last one.

“Oh please, God, no,” she babbled, backing out of the last one—the one where Zru’itak had given birth—knowing there was nowhere else to look.

wait

A roar of rage and defiance on the stairs maybe only two or three flights up became a wet, gargling sound and a short, heavy tumble. Boots thundered down the corridor just over her head, running toward the stair.

Not away.

listen

Toward the stair…from the barracks?

Welcome to the next year of your life…Xzem lives with you now…

The baby wouldn’t be in the slave pens. It was living with Dkorm in the barracks.

Amber let out a scream of embarrassed frustration every bit as mindlessly as an angry lizard, slapping herself in the forehead. Then she turned around and ran for the stairs.

Three lizardmen came charging out of the corridor right as she reached the landing, but either didn’t see the sword in her hand or were too far gone to care. The one in the lead shoved her to one side and they all went furiously by, roaring as they threw themselves at the enemy bearing down on them. She was close enough now to hear the crash of their weapons.

Never mind. Get the baby. Get the baby, get Xzem, get out.

Amber started opening doors again.

Empty. Empty.

On the fifth try, a raider lunged out, knocking her to the ground as he sprinted down the hall, away from the stairs, and vanished around a corner, leaving a bloody trail behind him. Then empty. Empty.

She might have run right past the room where she finally found the baby if she’d stopped to think about it. From a purely logical frame of mind, the room wasn’t worth checking. The door hung open. It was quiet. Surely, it must be empty too.

But Amber was beyond reason by that time. She checked behind the door not because she hoped to find the baby anymore, but because she’d fallen into a routine of panic in which finding the next door and flinging it open was all she could do. So she opened that one.

And, looking right at the lizardlady kneeling beside the cupboard, turned around and bolted blindly for the next door. She made two running steps and staggered (just like Zhuqa, a part of her piped up) as what she’d seen belatedly processed. She turned around, uncertain, listening, and heard a very faint breathy sound—Xzem’s nearly silent tears.

The door was still open. A lamp inside was still burning, spilling a pleasant golden glow over Xzem’s thin, shaking frame as she curled herself around the limp body of the baby.

“Oh,” said Amber. (Ah, said Iziz.)

Xzem raised her head, still stroking and rubbing at the small dome of the baby’s head, its narrow chest. Tears continued to run out of her eyes even though her breaths were slow and deep and virtually soundless. She looked back down at the baby in her hands, rocked twice more, and finally sighed. She pointed.

Amber’s neck turned, turned, and ultimately dragged her eyes off Xzem. She stared instead at a thin, stained mat tossed up against the wall, a threadbare cushion, a rough blanket. And the leather-wrapped swaddle of Zhuqa’s baby, sleeping with its tiny fists tucked up by its snout.

Amber started forward, then stopped again and turned back to Xzem. To Rosek, who, so limp and quiet, had seemed as small in Amber’s eyes as a six-day old infant. She limped closer, touched Xzem’s shivering shoulder, and only then noticed the baby was still breathing. She opened her mouth—

—and closed it again. The baby’s head under Xzem’s gentle hand was round, much rounder than it should be. Amber looked at the room again and saw the rumpled bedding in the cupboard, the mat where Zhuqa’s baby slept, the open door. She looked and could almost imagine Dkorm drowsing in his bed with Rosek; someone, Iziz maybe, bursting in to raise the alarm; Dkorm dropping the baby to run. Not setting her aside, dropping her. Throwing her.

“I’m sorry,” said Amber.

Xzem rocked and stilled, rocked and stilled. The tears, soundless, kept falling. The crash and roar of combat got closer, not above them anymore, but right on the landing. Xzem showed no sign that she heard it. She held her baby and watched it breathe and sometimes tried to rock it.

Amber touched her arm. “We have to go,” she said, not knowing if Xzem would understand her clumsy lizardish or not.

Xzem sighed and looked at her.

“Please. We have to get out while we still can.”

“I wanted one,” said Xzem. Her voice was soft, but steady. “Just one to keep. After I have lost so many…” She looked down at Rosek and tried with trembling hands to arrange the baby’s arms over its chest, but the little limbs slipped off and dangled, lifeless. It breathed.

“Please!” Amber couldn’t bring herself to shake her, but she tightened her hand where it gripped Xzem’s arm. “We have to go now!”

Xzem looked at her. And then past her. Her expression did not change, but she brought the baby to her chest in a futile, shielding motion and closed her eyes.

Amber turned around.

For an instant, she thought it was Meoraq. From the moment that Iziz had burst in through Zhuqa’s door, that possibility, far-fetched as it was, had been shivering at the back of her mind. Even as she heard the carnage above her and knew it was more than one man, even her man, could make, she’d hoped…but it was still a shock to see him.

Except that the gore-splattered lizardman filling the doorway looked back at her without any recognition and she realized it was a stranger, this Ghelip person or some other raider like him. He roared, raised his swords, then focused in on Xzem. Something in his eyes sparked. He sprang at her, but it wasn’t until she saw the badly-braided loop of her own hair around his arm that Amber realized it was Meoraq after all.

And he was entirely out of his mind.

She screamed his name, flinging out her arms and legs like a screen in front of silent Xzem, but she couldn’t even begin to form the word ‘Stop’ before he hit her. His fist, wrapped around the hilt of his sword, hit her in the shoulder, spinning her hard and smacking her up against Dkorm’s cupboard door. She stumbled back, stunned, as Meoraq gave his hand an equally dazed glance and threw his sword aside. It hit the wall above Xzem’s mat, shocking Amber back to life. She leapt for the baby, but Meoraq snatched her out of the air and threw her. She crashed through a short stack of crates, her heels going madly up and dragging her over in a backwards somersault—ass over teakettle you know i’ve heard that all my life and never knew just what it meant—that ended with her sprawled, legs wide open, over a heap of dirty clothes, broken pottery, and the other detritus of Dkorm’s life.

Meoraq froze. His burning, blank gaze dropped.

“Oh God,” said Amber. She snapped her legs together. “Meoraq, it’s m—”

And he was on her.

The broken crates fell on top of him as he grappled with her. He stopped to beat them back, roaring and bashing indiscriminately with fists and sword, completely oblivious to her as she scrambled out from beneath him, but as soon as the crates were ‘dead’, he was looking for her again.

“Meoraq, it’s me! It’s Amb—”

He lunged, caught her by the same ankle Iziz had, and dragged her screaming back to him as he tore his loin-plate loose. He didn’t bother to fight with her. He didn’t have to. He was so much stronger that her struggles were completely beneath his notice as he alternately pulled and twisted at her legs, already pumping furiously at her hip and her stomach and her side until he found her opening and was in her.

She screamed his name, screamed her own, and then just screamed, groping behind her as best she could in the twisted position in which he’d bent her to slap and scratch and try in any way to make him see her. He came and just fucked harder, clawing at her stomach and kicking at the tiles to try and shove himself further and further inside her. His every breath was a snarling, hissing, slobbering grunt that spat hot, animal drool out in ropes over her skin. He didn’t know her, didn’t hear her, didn’t even want to fuck her. He was gone. And when he finally came out of it, he was going to find himself lying on top of a corpse, maybe still sunk in a hole in the back of her head like the mummies back at the ruined lab in Yroq.

Panic took her, and for however long it lasted, she was just as lost as he was, but hers at least faded out and left her rocking under the hammer of his body, her face rubbing painfully against the tiles in a slick of blood and tears. She reached back for him, groaning, but when her fingers met his scaled hide, he erupted in such a storm of slapping, punching, snarling fury that all she could do was cover her head and wait for the sex to eclipse the battery. It did, but the fucking was more violent and he stayed bent over her, his sharp teeth snarling too damned close to her naked neck.

“Meoraq,” she moaned. “Please! This isn’t you!”

He grabbed her shoulder and shoved her into the floor, grappling himself into a new position without ever breaking rhythm.

“You’re a Sword and a true son of God!” she cried in desperation. “A Sword of Sheul is a master of his clay!”

Frustrated with the obstacle of her legs, he reared back and pinned them together on one side before plunging back in. His hand on her bad hip was a brand of pure hell; it was only a matter of time before he broke it and she knew he still wouldn’t stop.

Somewhere in the room, Zhuqa’s baby woke up and started crying.

Meoraq stiffened, his head whipping around to aim at the sound. He hissed, let go of her—

Amber lunged and grabbed him. He fought until he remembered his cock was still inside her and then resumed fucking.

But he’d heard the baby. He’d heard the baby so he could hear her.

Amber put her arms around him. He spat like a cat and tried to thrash free of her, but she held on, hiding from his blows against his chest until he lost himself in the sex again.

“You are a master of your clay,” she told him.

He hissed at her.

“You are a faithful servant of God and you keep His laws! You—” She broke off with a wail of pain as he pitched himself savagely against her hip, and for the first time, that seemed to get through.

He looked directly at her, his eyes narrowed to slits of unfocused rage.

“You wouldn’t kill me,” whispered Amber.

He roared, hot breath blasting at her face.

And out of nowhere, she suddenly found herself remembering that day he’d first caught her with Scott’s stupid little space-scout knife. He’d been ready to kill her then and he was going to kill her now. The only difference was he wasn’t sorry about it anymore and he wasn’t going to give her any last words.

Do you wish to pray? She could still hear his voice and the terrible emotion that had hoarsened it. I have no mercy to give you…I am sorry…Do you wish to pray?

“Our Father who art in heaven,” said Amber. It was the only prayer she knew.

Meoraq’s head ticced, not quite tipping to one side. He flared his mouth open, displaying his teeth in the silent gape of a crocodile, then recoiled slightly, frowning. He looked at her, looked down, flared his teeth again and threw a few rapid, rough thrusts into her before faltering. He panted, glaring without focus at the knotted place their bodies met.

“Our Father who art…who lives in heaven,” Amber said again, louder. He’d heard her and some part of what he’d heard had reached him, but its hold was weak. She couldn’t afford to confuse him now with words he didn’t know. “Hallowed…or…Holy be your name.”

He reared back and grabbed her throat, hissing, but although his grip was painful, he didn’t crush her. And he could have.

“Your kingdom has come,” wheezed Amber. “Your kingdom…is here. You…You have built Your House so that we can live in it. Let…Let Your will be done…on Gann as it is in heaven!”

His hand, an iron collar at her neck, shook. He looked away again, his throat arching so that she could see the yellow streaks across those scales flash and throb.

“You feed us,” she said. “You have set our table and filled our cup—”

Meoraq’s spines flicked hard. He looked at her.

“And You forgive us our sins—”

He saw his sword, lunged out and snatched it up to raise over her, snarling.

“—as we forgive those who sin against us!” Amber shouted. “For Yours is the only vengeance!”

Meoraq recoiled again. He reared back, pulling free of her as painfully as he’d ever stabbed himself in, and stood over her with the sword high and an awful look of confusion bleeding into his crazed eyes.

“And that is the grace and the glory of God!” cried Amber, reaching out to catch at him. “And you know it, Meoraq! You are the master of your clay and you know I am not your enemy! I’m your wife! I’m the woman you were born into this world to find, remember?” She grabbed a handful of her own hair and shook it.

He hissed, but shakily, then turned his head and looked at the braid that wrapped his bicep. He flinched, spat dazedly in the direction of the crying baby, then looked at Amber again. One hand rose, hovered in the air, and dropped again. He rubbed distractedly at his cock, not masturbating, but only an exhausted man kneading at a deep, overused ache. She reached out to tug his loin-plate loose and he watched, frowning, as he retracted.

“You are not your clay,” she told him, lifting her hand toward his face. He flinched back twice before he let her touch him. “You are Uyane Meoraq and you would never hurt me.”

He opened his mouth and hissed silently through his teeth, through her fingers.

“Take six breaths,” she said. “Count them off with me. One. For the Prophet.”

He inhaled in hitches.

“Two for his brunt. Breathe with me, Meoraq. Three for Uyane.”

He grunted.

“Four for…for…” God, he’d been counting all winter long, why didn’t she know these? “Mykrm!” she blurted, praying she was right. “Five is for Oyan—”

“Ash,” he said, in a voice like char itself. “Stained. Leaf.”

“Six is for…is for…”

“Thaliszr.”

Recognition came like dawn behind the clouds of this world: dim and colorless, but steadily growing until its light was complete. He stood up, and it was Meoraq who did it, the real Meoraq. He looked around, seeing this place, seeing her at his feet. The yellow stripes stayed high and bright on his throat, but he sheathed his sword and held out his hand.

“Please be okay now,” Amber whispered, and took it.

“I’m burning,” Meoraq said curtly, pulling her to her feet and releasing her at once. “But I see you. I think…I’m here.” He looked back at the baby again, then at Xzem, who had not moved in all this time, and finally at his other sword. It seemed to surprise him to see it lying on the floor. He had to check his belt and see that it wasn’t there before he went over to pick it up again. “Stay close behind me,” he ordered, and headed for the door.

“Wait!”

Meoraq watched her limp across the room with distracted concern, but it wasn’t until she bent down and picked up the baby that he seemed to realize what she was doing.

“No,” he said.

“I have to.” Amber hugged the baby closer and pointed at Xzem. “Tell her she can come with us!”

“I will not.” Meoraq glanced swiftly down both sides of the hall and came back in, reaching out his hand to her. “There is no time for this! The enemy is all around us! Now come!”

Amber bit back her first impulsive words on the subject of how much time he’d had on his hands when the issue at stake was sex. That wasn’t his fault and they sure didn’t have the time to fight about it. She said, “I’m not leaving without this baby.”

“I did not come here to liberate the whole of this camp!”

“Are you sure?”

His hand lowered.

“God doesn’t give you what you want,” said Amber. “You tell me that all the time. God sends you where you need to be.”

“If we try to save them all, we will surely be taken,” he said, not arguing, but only stating a fact. “We must leave them. Come. They will not harm their own.”

Amber stalked over to Xzem and put her hand on her shoulder. After a tense, shivering silence, Xzem sighed and loosened her shielding arms enough to show him Rosek.

Meoraq looked at that for a long time. Then he looked at her. And at the ceiling, not in his exasperated are-you-seeing-this-too way, but in an uncertain frown. He stayed that way for a while, probably praying. “So be it,” he said at the end. He beckoned to Xzem and she rose, her neck bent and silent tears still falling, to follow him.

“Wait,” Amber said. “I think there’s another way out.”

Meoraq glanced in the direction of the stairwell, which was suspiciously quiet, then followed her pointing finger to the ground, where dots of blood marked the path taken by the panicked raider she’d passed on the way in. He took a few steps in that direction, keeping his sword at the ready as he searched the darkness. “Do you know where it leads?”

“To the well-room,” Xzem said softly.

They both looked at her.

“There is a second stair,” she told them, stroking Rosek’s swollen head. “But the door is always locked and only Zhuqa and his most trusted hold the key.”

“I’ll go get it,” said Amber, and turned to flee.

Meoraq caught angrily at her arm, but looked at the baby and released her, unsure.

“I’ll be all right,” Amber promised, not at all certain this was true, but knowing she could get to Zhuqa’s room and back faster than grieving Xzem could be coaxed to follow. “Stay with her! I’ll be right back!”

His spines flattened. He took the baby and shifted it to one arm, gripping his kzung tightly. “Run, then.”

She tried, galloping through a haze of pain much faster than her hip wanted to hold her, and conscious of every second as it slipped by. There were two bodies on the landing, two more sprawled over the stairs, but no one was waiting there to cut her into pieces. They all knew better than to fight in the cramped, dark shaft, she supposed. And just the fact that it was this dark meant that they’d shut the access door. It couldn’t be blocked from the outside, so if they’d shut it, it was to keep Meoraq blind to how many men were waiting for him on the other side.

‘It could be worse,’ thought Amber, forcing herself down the stairs as noisily, in her own mind at least, as a rhinoceros. ‘They could be getting ready to drop a bomb down the shaft.’

She ran faster.

Zhuqa’s door was yawning open just as she’d left it. She bulled through and limped around him to the heap of his clothes, and thank God he’d actually undressed for his little game tonight, because he’d never done that before and she’d been so badly beaten up between one thing and another that she honestly didn’t think she could have rolled him over to get the keys. Amber got them, looked around, and then—what the hell—limped over to get her shift because it was bound to be cold and rainy outside and there was no point escaping from raiders just to freeze—

Amber froze.

She thought, ‘I didn’t see that.’

She thought, ‘No, I did see that and I just think I didn’t.’

She thought, ‘Please, let me have seen that.’

She turned around.

On the floor between her and the table, Zhuqa lay naked in a thick, black clot of blood with his eyes open and a few splinters of what were probably his teeth strewn loosely in front of his mouth.

The floor directly next to the table was empty.

Well, not entirely empty. She could see the hilt of Zhuqa’s knife lying where she’d dropped it. And she could see, a little ways away from it, the broken blade that she sure thought she’d left buried in Iziz’s head.

It wasn’t even all that bloody. Just a little smear at the very tip. There wasn’t anything at all on the flat end, where she reasoned he would have had to grab it to pull it out, if…if she’d really hit him.

“I hit him,” she whispered, staring wildly all around her at the stubbornly empty room. “I know I hit him.”

And she had hit him. She’d hit him so hard, her hand had gone numb. So hard, the blade had broken. So hard—

—she’d knocked him out.

Oh God.

She’d only stabbed him through the scales. She’d hit the bone of his skull and broke the knife. She hadn’t killed him. She might not have even hurt him all that much.

Iziz was still alive.

‘Well, by all means stand around,’ Bo Peep invited. ‘You can apologize when he comes back.’

She shuddered once, hugely, as if physically shaking free of the hold that empty patch of tiled floor had on her. The first step was still hard. After that, she turned and bolted down the hall like her hip had never been hurt at all. It had been and it let her know it, but by God it didn’t slow her down.

She tore up the stairs, her bare feet banging out echoes they must surely be able to hear wherever they were waiting to ambush them. Meoraq ran to meet her, hugging the baby under his arm like a football, so that her first words on reaching him weren’t anything to do with Iziz at all but a shrill, “Oh for Christ’s sake, lizardman, what’s wrong with you?!” She gave him the keys, took the baby, and smacked him in the side of the head, all in the same half-panicked movement.

His arm swung hard enough to make the air howl, but he caught the blow before it hit her. They both stared at his fist, cocked and shaking in the air—he, with glazed eyes and yellow flashes at his throat; she, in open-mouthed astonishment. He recovered first. Without a word, he turned around and ran the other way.

Xzem was waiting at the end of the long hall, next to the fresh body of a raider. It might have been the same one she’d passed earlier; she couldn’t tell when he was lying face-down like that and didn’t want to look. Meoraq worked the keys and tucked it into his belt immediately, freeing his hand for his samr. The stairwell on the other side of the door was dark and silent, catching every sound and throwing it back in echoes. Meoraq listened, then closed the door to hiss, “If it goes badly, run and I will find you. If I don’t find you…go on to Xi’Matezh. God will send you on.”

Knowing there wasn’t time for words of comfort, even if she could have thought of something to say, Amber reached out and touched his arm.

And felt him stiffen. Shudder. And pull out of her grip. He started up the stairs without looking at her.

Suddenly, Amber’s hip hurt more. She let Xzem go ahead of her, watching Meoraq climb around the corner and out of sight without ever once glancing her way. The baby snuffled against her chest and reached out its tiny hand to pinch at her. She hugged it closer, dragging herself up one stair at a time, thinking, ‘That shouldn’t be much of a shock either, little girl.’

And the worst of it was, it really wasn’t.

The stairwell was capped, like the other stair, with an access door that opened into a covered building. This one had the look of a stable, long and not too narrow, with stall-like partitions indicated by wooden poles and plenty of harnesses and lengths of chain hanging on the walls.

It was a stable, built for raiders’ cattle, the two-legged kind. The only other door was at the far wall, where Hruuzk was yoking slaves together in a double line. He didn’t bother to look around when he grunted, “This is all there were in the pens. I didn’t stop to hunt up the rest of them. Where do you want me?”

Meoraq attacked. He did it without asking for prayers, without any warning at all. His boots struck three times against the planks before he leapt, and by then Hruuzk had already shoved the team of slaves away and was turning to meet him.

They crashed together, four swords and two bodies in a terrible riot of screaming women and spraying blood. Amber thrust the baby into Xzem’s listless embrace and darted forward, snatching up the first thing she saw that even looked like a weapon: a short length of chain attached to a heavy collar. She didn’t try to swing it—couldn’t have, not without hitting Meoraq, a slave, or Xzem and the babies—but she jumped on Hruuzk’s mammoth back the very instant he offered it to her and bashed him on the head as hard as she could. If she could knock Iziz out with a knife-tip, she reasoned, she could surely take Hruuzk out with an iron ring, or whatever the metal was.

Hruuzk did stagger. He also reached back and plucked her off him, swinging her on a short, violent arc over his shoulder to strike up against his chest with his sword suddenly at her throat. “Drop it or she dies!” he bellowed.

Meoraq lunged without expression, stabbing his samr under Amber’s arm and into the slave-master’s heart. She felt and heard the splintering of bone when Meoraq twisted and then wrenched the blade free. He knotted a fist in her shift and yanked her to him as the slave-master collapsed. She could feel the hot gush of his heart’s blood on her back, not quite shocking enough to distract her from the equally hot tickle of blood on her front, streaming from the little nick on her throat where Hruuzk’s sword had cut her.

She stared at him.

“Quiet that…Quiet the child.” He let go of her and moved on to the outer door, pulling Zhuqa’s keys from his belt.

The baby was screaming, tiny fists balled and hammering at the scaled arm that held it. Xzem gave it up wordlessly and stroked at Rosek’s swollen snout. She was still crying. Amber was dangerously close to joining her.

Meoraq cracked the door open and looked tensely out, threw the captive women an assessing stare, and finally gestured to Amber. She joined him at the door, not so numb that she failed to notice the perfectly chilling glance he sent at the baby now purring resentfully against her breast. But he moved aside, careful not to touch her, and let her look.

She didn’t try to count them. The distance and the dark would have made that difficult even if there weren’t so many or if they were holding still instead of prowling impatiently around the building where they thought Meoraq had to emerge. She could hear shouting, but couldn’t make out the words. Moving torches throughout the ruins told her they were making a search of the other structures, and sooner or later, they’d come here.

“For the moment, they still believe they are attacked by a band of men,” Meoraq told her, grimly watching the torches. “And they have not yet fully rallied. Once they do, or once they learn it is only one warrior who stands against them, it is done. Be silent, all of you!” Meoraq snapped, and the white-noise whimpering of the captives dialed itself down into sniffles. To Amber, brusquely, he said, “We will go out, that way, around the wall. When it is at our back, we run. Be aware, the wind will cover only so much sound.”

“It’ll be quiet now,” said Amber, holding the baby securely against her body.

He grunted, checked outside, and looked back at the women. “We will go as far as we can as fast as we are able, but it is three days running to Praxas.”

She didn’t think she had much of a run left in her, but didn’t dare to say so.

He grunted and moved away to unlock the women. Amber stayed at the door and watched the torches track slowly back and forth across the camp, listening to chains clink behind her as Meoraq gave everyone their orders. Amber’s hip ached. She shifted her weight onto her other leg and listened to the baby purr until Meoraq rejoined her at the door, brushing her aside to peer out. His body was hard as marble. He didn’t say anything to her. He waited, coiled and ready, then pushed the door open and moved out, sword in hand. The women followed, as tight in their formation as if they were still yoked together. Then Xzem, her head down and tears shimmering over her scales. Last of all, Amber, straining to limp at any kind of speed and praying the baby wouldn’t protest this treatment as long as it was her doing the jostling. By the time she got around the side of the stable, the only one she could see at all was Xzem, and only for a few more seconds.

She ran anyway, blind in the night, following the smudge of moonlight behind the churning clouds, even though it showed her nothing but the ghost of her own body. When Meoraq at last came lunging out of this impenetrable black, it was only her breathless exhaustion that kept her from screaming surprise.

He caught her arm as she staggered, and let her go again as soon as she had her feet solidly under her. He looked at the baby and his flat spines quivered against his skull.

“I’m not leaving it!” she hissed. “So don’t you even ask me!”

“You can barely carry yourself, woman!”

“Then leave me!” Tears of horror sparked, as if she somehow hadn’t known she was going to say it even with the words in her own mouth. She shook her head, her arms tightening around the baby until it squeaked in annoyance. “Leave us both!”

Meoraq looked at her for a long time.

And then he turned around.

As Amber pulled in the shaky breath that would have become her first wail of despair, he dropped to one knee and made a gesture like throwing something over his shoulder. He did not speak. His back was very stiff and straight.

“Are you…praying?” she ventured.

“No!” he snapped back, and made the gesture again. “Hold on to me. Hurry!”

She couldn’t wrap her legs around his hips without a moan, and that moan became a wrenching cry when he seized her thighs and hupped her up higher. She dug one arm around his neck, kept the other tight around the baby, now riding squeezed between them and not very happy about it, and Meoraq began to run.

Even burdened as he was with her weight, he caught up to the others in just a few minutes and soon was running at their head again. Amber bumped along in agony on his back, clenching her jaws to mute the screams she could not stop herself from making, and just waited for it to end.

 

12

 

He could not run them all night, although he tried. Their pace slowed and slowed and finally, he was forced to cast it all in Sheul’s hands and set them down in a camp. He allowed them no fire. They had no food. He gave Amber the swallows that were left in his waterskin and she annoyed him immediately by passing it off to the slave-mother, who drank it all without thanks and resumed her silent vigil over her dying child.

The wind gave way to rain. The women huddled together to defend against it as best they could, miserable and making little secret of it. Amber sat apart from the rest of them and held the infant close to her heart. Meoraq knew she was watching him, but he could not make himself go and sit beside her yet. He made endless patrols in the dark, waiting for an enemy that never showed itself, and caught himself several times rubbing restlessly at his loin-plate. He had burned longer and deeper this night than he had ever even imagined, but the flames were still close. He wanted to find raiders in pursuit of them, wanted to give that blessed heat possession of his hands and heart and mind. Failing that, he wanted to lie with his woman, but not in front of an audience of six witnessing slaves.

And their children.

The baby bothered him. Not the slave-mother’s yearling, which was already dead in every way save that of its clay, but the other baby. The one that Amber refused to leave behind even at the risk of her own life. He did not know precisely what she would say to him if he told her that the creature she was cuddling only looked like a baby with a soul, but was in truth no more than Gann’s clay given the seeming of life by the abominable sin of its conception…no, he didn’t know what she would say to that, but he was reasonably certain it would come in shouts and perhaps with her fist bouncing off his hide.

Meoraq grunted to himself, glancing back into the darkness where he knew his wife to be, even if he could not see her. Sheul’s urges again flared, but he walked on and gradually the fires became coals. Once he was rid of the slaves, he would show Sheul a proper thanks for the return of his Amber, but for now, the enemy was surely close.

And the enemy’s clay-born spawn, even closer.

It looked like a baby. It sounded like one. Its tiny fingers gripped at Amber’s soft breast like the fingers of any true baby he had seen. Not that his interest in watching such things had ever been strong, he had to admit that, which meant that if there were some subtle clue proving the child’s innate sin, he could only assume he’d missed it.

The child’s sin needed no proving. All his life, the priests had made it clear that if the corruption of Gann was in either parent, the corruption was in the child. What was bred into the clay could not be smoothed out, even by the Father’s hands. This was truth.

And it was truth that the thing that looked like a baby had surely been sired by one of the raiders—men who freely indulged the urges of the clay until Sheul Himself closed His eyes to them. Men who poisoned their minds and bodies with strong drink and phesok. Men who carried bladed weapons and who used them to do wrongful murder upon other men. Men who made trade of female flesh for their sexual pleasure, and of male flesh also, if no females could be procured. The women who lay in union with such men had either been born to them, sired of their sin, or had been exiled from their cities for sins of their own. Either way, they were also lost to Sheul and therefore it followed that all children born to them—all, regardless of what innocent mask the offspring might don—belonged to Gann.

The sun was rising. Through the rain, he could see faint threads of grey in the east, a reminder of the pilgrimage he was supposed to be taking. How could he go there now, with Gann’s corrupted own in his keeping?

“Sheul, my Father, You have been with me and led me well to this moment,” Meoraq said, searching the skies through eye-stinging rain. “I pray You guide me now. What am I supposed to do? Where am I meant to be?”

“Meoraq?”

Amber’s voice, low and hesitant upon the wind. Truly, the sun was rising, because it only took a few moments of searching before he could make out the pale shape of her a short distance away. She could not see him as well, it seemed; she was not quite facing him and did not stop squinting into the black until he was nearly close enough to lay his hand on her.

She startled, but didn’t cry out. She knew the enemy might be close as well. Which meant she wouldn’t have risked calling out his name without a reason.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I…Can you come back to camp? Xzem’s baby is…I need you to talk to her.”

He could have nothing comforting to say to the mother of a clay-born child, but grief was raw in Amber’s voice and the other infant was there in her arms. With an uneasy glance heavenward, too aware of Sheul’s watching eye, Meoraq went back to camp with his woman silent at his side.

Gann’s child was dead. Its mother knelt, still holding it, still gazing into its empty face. Amber had called the slave a name, but in a human mouth, the sound could be anything. Meoraq paced unnecessarily around the other women, deeply uncomfortable with what he was about to do, but finally went to stand before and speak directly to a slave.

“How are you called?” he asked tersely.

Amber stared at him, her soft mouth opening a little.

“Xzem, sir.” The slave looked up at him, heaved a tearful sigh, and raised the dead clay in her hands for him to take.

Meoraq did not want to touch it, but Amber was watching, so he did.

It felt like a real baby, too.

“Can we…” Amber came a small step forward, interrupting his uneasy inspection of the thing. The infant-shaped creature she held yawned and scratched contentedly at its snout, too sleepy to open its eyes. The slave-woman at his feet shifted her eyes from her dead child to the living one and then looked down at her empty arms. “Is there any way at all to have a fire?”

“A fire?” Meoraq echoed, alarmed. “You mean…for a funeral?”

The slave looked up.

“Please,” said Amber softly.

He reached out and took her sleeve, meaning to pull her aside and explain that if Gann’s children received any funeral at all, it was to be returned to the clay that had spawned them, but as soon as he actually touched her and felt her warmth beneath his hand, all reason left him. His loin-plate restrained him, but if it weren’t for that, he would be extruded, he knew. He would be on her and she beneath him…and whether Gann’s or Sheul’s, he had a dead child in his arms.

In that moment of sickened confusion, a hand touched at his boot. Meoraq looked down, first at the body in his hands and then at the slave who had mothered it.

She did not ask. She shivered on her knees, her eyes like open wounds, and did not dare to ask.

The weight of the lifeless clay dragged at him, far heavier than it had been. ‘It only looks like a baby,’ he reminded himself and, as if in answer, suddenly found himself thinking that Amber looked nothing like a woman and yet he had believed that at once.

The children born of Gann’s corruption were soulless. They were abominations of living flesh. They were sins incarnate and Sheul did not see them. They were clay.

They were clay…and this one’s mother had carried it all through the night knowing it could only die in her arms.

“I…need to pray,” said Meoraq. He turned away and realized only after he had done so that he still held the child’s clay in his arms. He could not think of a good way to turn around and pass it back, so he carried it with him into the trees and set it before him where he ultimately knelt.

He was not quick to speak Sheul’s name or to invite His eye. Meoraq knew the word of Sheul and it was absolute. The child before him, however pitiable in its seeming, was a child born of Gann. To give it a funeral as if it were a true dumaq—

He would have given Amber one once, he recalled, again without conscious deliberation. When she lay in her stupor and her treacherous people could not be troubled to care for her, he had been ready to give her a gentle end and see her to Sheul’s halls. She had not been his woman then. She hadn’t even been dead. And if he would be honest, he would have to admit that when he thought of her fellow humans at all, he thought of them as animals. They might walk as dumaqs. They might have speech and wit and reason. They might have in every way the look of people, but they were no more than animals, and a venomous, brutal breed at that.

Yet Amber had a soul and her soul was hammered at Sheul’s forge just the same as Meoraq’s own. Her clay was Meoraq’s clay, shaped upon Sheul’s wheel. Her light was the light of any dumaq, shining from Sheul’s lamp. And where it was true of her, surely it must be—

Meoraq put a hand to his brows and rubbed the rest of that thought away before it could come to some sacrilegious ending. Sheul’s word was absolute. The children born of Gann’s corruption had no soul to find welcome in Sheul’s halls. A funeral would be blasphemous.

It looked like a baby.

Its looks were a lie.

The blood that stained its thin scales looked like the blood of any dumaq.

Its blood was the blood of Gann.

Its mother grieved for it.

The grief was a lie. Its mother was as soulless as her spawn and had no true heart.

Then why did she carry it so far?

Meoraq hissed as the futile circle closed itself around the same arguments. He didn’t know why he was tormenting himself like this in the first place. A funeral fire was out of the question. The raiders were surely in pursuit. He could give an honest answer to his wife that they could not risk such a thing being seen. He would offer to bury it, since he knew that what distressed Amber the most was the thought of abandoning it to be scavenged by beasts, and even that was surely more than its mother expected.

It occurred to him—not all at once, but slowly, like the light of dawn even now revealing the empty world to him—that there was nothing in the Word that expressly forbade funeral fires for Gann’s children. Priests had, yes, but not the Prophet.

It was an uneasy thought, but now his eye was moving over the newly-illuminated plains, seeing the thick copse close on his sunward side where a fire could be better hidden as well as fueled. The wind would thin the smoke and perhaps even carry it away from the raiders so that it could not be seen at all. It would mean holding to this camp all day, but he’d been considering that already, hadn’t he?

Meoraq tried to shake the thought away, but it stayed, growing until he could see just how the fire would be laid. So now it was not a thought at all, but a plan. And perhaps a sin.

He reached out to tap the back of one finger against the misshapen head. It felt like skin, soft as only a yearling’s could be, sticky where its blood had dried and been wetted again by the rain. There was no avoiding it.

“Sheul, O my Father,” he said heavily. “See me now, I pray. Before me, there is one of Gann’s getting and I mean to give it Your final rites. I know it is a terrible thing I do and I must answer for it when I stand before You, but it is too much like a true child, Father, and that is surely how my woman sees it. I will not ask Your blessing, only Your forgiveness, and if there be a sin in what I am about to do, let it all be mine, great Sheul, because my woman knows no better, but I do.” He gathered up the limp body and held it. “And I mean to do it anyway.”

Sheul had no answer for him, which only seemed fitting as he’d asked no questions, but the rains slackened. By the time he’d returned to his camp with the child, it had stopped entirely. Amber watched him come from where she knelt on the ground with her arms around the slave-mother, comforting her. Xzem stared at the ground, her hands clutching at one another and every muscle tensed.

“There will be a fire,” Meoraq said, fully aware that those five words might well have damned him. “We will go to that thicket and there remain until—”

That touch on his boot again. Meoraq felt his spines twitch, but did not allow them to flatten. He looked down, ready to be as patient and sensitive as a man could be while ordering a slave to stop grabbing at him, and found her with both hands on either side of him, palms to heaven. The touch he felt was the top of her head as she pressed it to his mud-caked boot and silently wept.

“Thank you,” Amber said, hugging the other infant even closer. Her shift, overlarge, slipped down at the subtle movement to expose her bare shoulder and the mark of his teeth. Thoughts entirely inappropriate to this moment briefly clouded even the unpleasant sensation of the slave sobbing on his foot. His spines did flatten then, and there was nothing he could do about it. He turned his face away.

Xzem raised her head as Amber stepped back. “Her name was Nali,” she said tremulously. “But I never told her so. Will she…know it? When you pray for her, sir? Must you call her Rosek even then?”

The order to stop touching him burned hot in his throat, and his belly, but it did not touch his voice. “Sheul knows His children.”

The frantic light in her eyes did not dim. “But will He know mine?”

There were no magical answers to that and he could see his troubled silence crippling her with every passing moment, until finally, and for no reason at all, he looked at Amber.

Seeing her, the will of Sheul became vast beyond the imagining of any man. To say that it could be captured in anything so finite as written words suddenly seemed fantastically arrogant. Even the Prophet’s own great work must pale beside His will.

“We were all lost to Gann once,” he said. The words did not come easily, but they felt like truth. “What is lost can be found.”

She searched his eyes, her own bleeding despair and hope so long damaged she didn’t even seem to know it was there. “Swear it, sir,” she whispered finally. “Please, swear it and it is true.”

“No man speaks for Sheul,” said Meoraq. “But I will observe that the child lived through a long night to die here, where it…where Nali was not a slave.”

Xzem stared at him, trying to believe him as the tears spilled endlessly from her eyes, but he had no more comfort to give her and Amber was too close, so he turned away and walked fast into the cooling wind.

At the heart of the thicket where he took the baby was a clearing, abutted by a fallen tree, long dead and well-seasoned and protected enough by the living to be mostly dry. He built the pyre and lay her down. He still didn’t know what she was or how much sin adhered to him for the speaking of these rites, but when the hour came to make the prayers, he made them. And he made certain to call her by her name.

 

13

 

He took them to Praxas. He could have given a number of reasons if asked to do so (he was not). He had scant provisions and too many mouths. The raiders had every advantage in the wildlands if they ever decided to pursue. The…infant was far too young to travel indefinitely. And he had to take them somewhere, didn’t he? Surely Amber didn’t expect to keep them?

He would have liked to ask her, but he was afraid of starting a fight. Not because of her moods, but because of his. To say truth, he couldn’t even claim to know just what her moods were, his own were so demanding. Gann’s corruption emanated from the slaves like smoke—invisible, odorless, but choking in his throat whenever he was among them. He kept his distance as much as he could, patrolling while the women rested, but as soon as he was among them, the fires began to burn in his belly and the blackness came creeping in at his mind. And Amber was always there trying to talk to him, touch him, come and sit beside him, unaware that it was Gann’s animal lust that lived in him now, Gann’s honeyed words that whispered in his ear to take her, revel in her, rut with her.

When Amber tried to lie down with him at night, he got up and left. When he had to speak to her, he did it facing away, feeling her wounded eyes on his back like live coals. She was hurting and he did not dare embrace her. He could hear her crying softly at night, but the creeping blackness that took his words would not let him explain. She needed comfort, but until he was away from these women and cleansed of Gann’s taint, he could not give it.

So Meoraq went back to Praxas for the very simple reason that he wanted to be rid of the slaves as soon as possible. The little time he’d spent in that city (not even the city, but at most ten paces down its Southgate tunnel) had given him the impression of an evil place, largely inhabited by men he was ashamed to call brothers under the Blade, but that wasn’t his problem. His entire intent had been to find and reclaim his wife. He had surrendered to Amber’s insistence that the raiders’ slaves had also been set in his path to be rescued solely because there wasn’t time to argue with her. Perhaps it had been Sheul’s will and so perhaps the slaves could be redeemed and brought back into the light of His lamp, but that was for the priests of Praxas to decide. Meoraq’s interests began and ended with Amber.

At first light following the funeral for the…for Nali, Meoraq started them moving. It took too long, owing to the weakened and generally useless condition of the slaves, time which Meoraq spent as far away from them as possible while still keeping them in the shadow of his protection. With Sheul’s guidance, they reached their destination in four days and broke free of the woods surrounding the city close to dusk.

Again, he met no sentries, but this time, it was not for lack of them. He saw one almost immediately after leaving the treeline, but rather than come forward and challenge his party, or at least hide until he had reinforcements enough to make that seem like a good idea, the sentry took off at a run.

Well, all right. Not a commendable act, but perhaps an understandable one. Praxas had sent away a single man and now came eight figures. The obvious conclusion? A raiding party, coming to find out who they had to thank for the visit from a Sheulek.

Before long, the braziers were lit on the wall. In the growing dark, this sign of alarm only illuminated how much of the wall had been too heavily damaged to allow access to a brazier. Meoraq was not intimidated, but he was careful to begin hails at the soonest opportunity and to persist even when he was not answered. Their silence disturbed him far more than the lit braziers, yet they must have recognized him. No one fired upon them anyway, although he could see figures moving on the roof and behind the sealed gate. The Word forbade the use of all weapons which delivered death ‘not requiring the blow of a man’s hand,’ as the Prophet had written, but priests had ruled long ago that a man’s hand could deliver blows in a number of lawful ways—the cut of a sword, the throw of a spear…the tipping of a barrel. In defense of their cities, warriors of the walls kept flammable oils and acids or other volatile substances, not to mention hot coals in the braziers themselves, to repel attack. A city like Praxas, which commerced with raiders, might have anything…but they let him come.

He continued to hail and they continued to ignore him. A body’s length from the gate, Meoraq halted his herd of women and went the last few steps alone. He would be calm. Threading his arms through the bars, Meoraq clasped his hands and leaned on the gate which Praxas boldly shut against him. He looked at each man who had perhaps come to fight him off. The only one who held his stare was Onahi.

“I have not released this city,” Meoraq said at length.

Onahi raised his spines slightly in acknowledgement. He did not answer.

“Praxas stands in the shadow of Uyane,” Meoraq said. “Open to me.”

“I am barracks-ward here, sir,” Onahi told him. “I no longer hold a key.”

Barracks…ward? Meoraq had never seen that title held by a boy older than sixteen. “What is happening here?” he asked bluntly.

“They’ve gone to fetch the governor. It won’t be long. He’s been boarding here since you left us, sir. I turn his sheets,” Onahi added caustically. He glanced behind his shoulder and stepped aside as Warden Myselo lumbered into sight.

“Open this gate,” ordered Meoraq in what he felt was an admirably patient voice.

Warden Myselo drew himself up importantly and raised a hand in salute, not to Meoraq, but to one of the two men coming up the tunnel behind him. “Governor Rsstha Tolmar of House Rsstha, a son of Lonagra, who was son of—”

“I’ve never heard of you,” interrupted Meoraq, and knew at once which was Rsstha by the flattening of his spines.

“—a son of Posh’ar, who—”

“I am Uyane Meoraq,” said Meoraq, lowering his own spines with deliberate insolence. “Son of Uyane Rasozul, steward of House Uyane which is champion to the city of Xeqor in Yroq. Have you heard of me?”

“—who is Praxas in the sight of Sheul,” Myselo finished, flustered.

Governor Rsstha gave the warden a tap of release that did not quite reach the man’s actual shoulder. “I have,” he said. His voice was ridiculously deep and full coming from such a reedy, workless body. “Praxas welcomes you, Sheulek.”

Meoraq leaned back to run his gaze over the bars of the gate. “Such is Praxas’ welcome, eh?”

“We are happy to make provision for you on your journey. House Rsstha itself shall board you for however long you desire to rest within my walls, but before I open to your conquest, I will hear your intentions.”

How easy it would be to argue. Meoraq had never once been given so audacious an order in all his years of service and he thought no tribunal in the world would so much as call him for query if he cut Rsstha down for making it. He yearned to say this aloud…

Ah, but even valid arguments turned easily to insults, which had a way of building to a surge of temper when Meoraq was tired, even when he hadn’t been four days keeping a herd of unwanted women ahead of the murderous raiders who may be in pursuit. So instead of parrying the governor’s demand, Meoraq simply said, “I do not intend to stay. I will speak with the high judge here. Afterwards, I have a short list of needs for your provisioner and as soon as they are met, I will release your city and go. Open the gate.”

“You will go,” the governor repeated. “You and your…party?”

Meoraq’s temper, none too secure already, slipped. “Take the sneer out of your tone when you speak of them,” he said, and Myselo took a broad step back, bumping into his watchmen. “These women come from this city, your city, and it was here just days ago that their own fathers conspired to place them in Gann’s hands for coin.”

“You have proof of this accusation?”

His temper slipped again. “I am proof!” he snapped. “Are you involved in this commerce?”

“Certainly not!” The governor’s indignation did not appear to be feigned. “Neither have I any reason to question the judgments executed at my tribunals! These women were exiled according to the laws we are all sworn before God to uphold!”

“These women were not exiled, they were sold! That crime is unforgiveable and will be rooted out at its source and if those roots go as deep as the Governor’s Seat, so be it!” Meoraq bared his samr and stabbed it suddenly through the bars, restraining himself with less than a finger’s breadth between his blade and Rsstha’s neck. “Open this gate or here do I swear in the sight of Sheul that I will come through it.”

The governor hissed at Myselo and retreated to an ignoble distance with his aide. The nervous jangling of the warden’s keys could not quite cover the sound of their voices, but Meoraq did not care enough to listen. He returned to his herd with an itch under his scales and paced among them, coming to stand at last beside his wife. Predictably, the women shrank away, leaving a wide space around him.

And Amber.

Activity at the gate ceased. Rsstha came a few steps forward, staring, then retreated again. More hissing.

Warden Myselo opened the gate and raised a salute. “Honored one, the governor wishes to speak.”

“Is everything okay?” Amber whispered.

He glanced at her, wondering blackly how close he’d come to being able to just do what he’d come to do and walk away. He shouldn’t have pulled a sword on the governor. A Sheulek was supposed to be the master of his emotions at all times and this was probably why. Fuck.

“Stay here,” he said and went to see what the piss-licker wanted.

“The barracks-ward here will take your list of needs to be filled,” Rsstha said with a wave at Onahi. “And to arrange your meeting with the high judge. Until that matter is settled, I must insist the women be confined under arms. Regardless of the sins of their fathers, they still stand convicted of criminal acts and have by your own acknowledgement been exposed to further corruption in the grip of Gann.”

“Insist,” Meoraq said. His hand flexed on the hilt of his samr. “Go on.”

“The human.” Rsstha tucked his hands into his sleeves, oblivious to all danger. “My guards will take it now, honored one.”

“I’ll split the man who so much as…” Meoraq’s hiss died in his throat. His head cocked. “What did you just call her?”

“Human.” Rsstha flared his mouth and hissed delicately through his teeth. “It is the word for their monstrous kind.”

“It is.” Meoraq tipped his head further. “How did you come to hear it?”

Rsstha’s answer took few words. Meoraq stared at him, at Myselo, at the ceiling of the tunnel (which had several disturbing cracks). He took six deep breaths and six again. At length, he released the grip on his sword. He brought his eyes down and his spines up. He looked at Onahi.

“Do you have a room where these women can be held?” he asked. Calmly.

“Yes, sir.”

“And defended, if need be?”

Governor Rsstha bristled. Meoraq ignored him.

“Yes, sir.”

“Gather your men, then. See that the women of my party are provided food and fresh clothing. A bath, if one can be managed. And hold that door until you are given my word to open, do you mark me?”

“Yes, sir.”

Meoraq released Onahi, who left the tunnel at a soldierly run, and turned to Myselo. He leaned in very close, taking up every step that the warden tried to put between them, until there was a wall at the man’s back and Meoraq full in his face. “You know my father,” he said.

“I, eh, I’ve heard of him, sir.”

“You’ve heard of how he climbed the wall at Kuaq.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Killed one hundred and eleven men, alone. Killed the Raider-Lord Szadt.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Who am I, warden?”

“Sheulek, sir.”

“Who am I?”

Myselo’s throat worked weakly as he cast his eyes about for aid. “Uyane?”

“I am Uyane. I am my father’s son. I am the Sword and the Striding Foot of Sheul. I am—” Meoraq caught the warden’s broad face and forced him to look at him. “—the man who comes to you now from the ruins where your Raider-Lord Zhuqa laired and who killed his way in and out to bring you these women. I did not count them,” he admitted. “I will not say that I have bettered my father’s tally at Kuaq, but I will tell you this, warden.” He yanked Myselo’s snout down so that he could lean even closer. “I can climb this wall.”

Myselo had no answer other than his rapid breath and the metallic stink of fear that rode it. Meoraq released him and went through the gate back to his women.

“A room is being prepared,” he told them. “You will rest there until permanent arrangements can be made. I want you with them for now,” he said to Amber.

“Where are you going?”

He didn’t know how to answer that. “Not far,” was the best he could think of.

She took a small step toward him. “I want to go with you.”

“No.”

“But—”

“No. Get back!” He held up his hand and looked aside until she stepped away again. His throat felt hot. He rubbed it, breathing until he had lost some of the blackness that clouded his brain. Some. Not all. Rsstha’s words—those few, simple words—scratched bloody furrows in his head. Damn him. Damn them.

Onahi was back, waiting at the mouth of the tunnel with several armed watchmen. Meoraq put his women in a line with Amber at its tail and took them into Praxas. “To my word,” he reminded Onahi, “and no other.”

Onahi saluted. His men echoed him. They closed their small ranks around the women and marched them into darkness. Meoraq watched the cracks in the ceiling of the tunnel until they were gone.

“Take me to them,” he said, and felt his heart begin again to burn in spite of all his deep, calming breaths. “Now.”

 

* * *

 

Myselo lumbered off ahead of them, ostensibly to find a boy and a cart, but the governor’s carriage was waiting at the inner road, and over the governor’s outraged exclamations, Meoraq tore the standards off and took it for his own. Rsstha kept a bitter half-silence all the way to the Temple District, which was to say that he glared at Meoraq with his mouth shut tight while his aide made polite objections at regular intervals.

Meoraq ignored them both, meditating with his eyes open and his arms folded. He was quiet, but he was not calm.

There was no one at the gate of Xi’Praxas when they reached it. Meoraq had to bang on the bars with the hilt of his samr for several minutes before a swearing abbot finally let them in.

The inner halls were dark and empty. The abbot brought them a lamp and took himself back to his rooms, muttering loudly and in no uncertain terms about his cold dinner and certain slit-lickers who abused their powers of authority. Meoraq amused himself during much of the next walk debating whether it were himself or Rsstha who had been the slit-licker in question. His tendency to toy with the hilt of one blade or another as he waged this mental argument kept Rsstha and his aide very quiet.

He was led to the Temple’s infirmary, past several unattended watch-points, and at the end of the hall in the wing reserved for the needs of the oracles and the high judge, propped up against the wall with his arms folded and his chin tucked against his chest, was a watchman. He appeared to be asleep, but at least he was at his post. He roused himself at their footsteps to say, “Fifty rounds for a dip, five hundred goes an hour, next hour opens at—” He opened his eyes to check the time and saw them. His hands flinched to his sword-belt as his eyes darted to the door, but he drew nothing, and after a tense, considering silence, Meoraq saw him surrender.

Meoraq no longer knew what to expect behind the door, but he was suddenly intensely glad he had not brought Amber with him.

“What is the meaning of this?” Governor Rsstha demanded and his aide went scurrying forward, demanding that the door be opened and didn’t the watchman see that this was House Rsstha before him and who was his commander, what was his name, stand and answer.

The watchman dropped his arms to his sides, away from the hilt of his sword. He didn’t answer, didn’t even salute. His eyes were for Meoraq alone. “I wish to pray,” he said simply.

Meoraq drew his samr. “Do so.”

The watchman bent his brow to the ground and made his prayers in silence while Rsstha tried to take control of what he obviously perceived as an embarrassing breach of security which Meoraq had no right to judge. He was ignored, and after several minutes, the watchman rose, took the key from his belt and walked to the door.

“Hold where you stand! Honored one, I assure you, we will pursue this matter,” Rsstha said stiffly. “But I think it is not your place to—”

“My place,” said Meoraq calmly, pensively, and the governor fell silent at once. “My place is to enforce the law of Sheul. That is my place and I know it well. Your place is to run this city in accordance with those laws, and if you believe that doing so allows you to challenge me—” Meoraq’s eye at last broke from that of the silent man before him to slide back and stab at Rsstha. “—judgment shall be passed.”

The governor made a few flustered gestures, but couldn’t seem to think of anything to say.

Meoraq stared at him for a while, then glanced at the watchman. “Open the door and await the will of Sheul.”

“Outrageous,” the governor said again, but very quietly this time. He stalked away a short distance and came back, then had to do it again because the guard’s hands were shaking too much to work the key. For a time, the only sounds to be heard were the key rattling at the lock and the governor’s angry footsteps.

Until the door opened.

It was another guard, by the look of him, one still meant to be at his post somewhere in the city. The sound of his armored leg-plates striking against the bars of the cage rang out in discord against the weak cries of his prisoner.

This had not long been a prison. Meoraq could see that by the lightness of the mortar where the bars had been set, and the bars themselves were neither straight, nor smooth, but crude as it was, the cage was more than sufficient to hold the humans. The cage ran the length of the far wall, but was no deeper than a man’s arm could reach. There was nothing inside but the prisoners themselves, not even a pail to piss in or dried grass to soak it up. Grooves in the floor were clearly meant to carry wastes away, but they weren’t over-careful about using it; they were sitting in filth even now, just watching him. He saw recognition in no one’s eye, not even Scott’s.

“What the hell is this?” Rsstha demanded in a high, almost comical shriek.

The man at the cage bucked, startled into an early climax. He looked back at them, already furiously snarling out something about that not being anything like a full hour, but then really saw them. He froze, panting, wide-eyed, then shoved himself away from the bars, letting the body he’d been deep inside fall carelessly to the ground as he buckled his loin-plate hurriedly back in place. The girl in the cage rolled onto her side, reaching down between her legs to wipe his semen away.

For one terrible moment, even knowing she was safe under Onahi’s honest eye, he thought it was Amber. Then he saw it was Nicci, and he wondered if it made him an evil man that he felt even a moment’s relief. He would pray on that later. For now…

He counted ten men, and though he should have known them all, Scott was the only one of them he recognized straight away and only because his face was so hateful to Meoraq’s eye, even now as it was, bruised and smeared with unmentionable grime. Ten men and Nicci. Of forty-seven human lives, ten men survived. And Nicci.

“Is this all there are?” Meoraq asked.

Rsstha stammered for a second or two, then swung on the watchman, screaming, “How long has this been going on? How dare you? How long have you been selling time to these…these deviants? Answer me at once, you—”

Without turning, Meoraq slapped him across the snout, knocking the governor of Praxas sprawling across the floor. “Is this all of them?” he asked again, just as calmly.

“These are all that remain,” said the watchman.

“I assure you, I had no knowledge of this!” Rsstha said, scrambling to his feet. He shoved his aide away and aimed an accusing hand at the guard standing silent by Nicci’s cage. “This…this…bestiality shall be punished!”

Meoraq’s head cocked at a dangerous angle. “It is no sin for Sheul to urge a man to lie with humans,” he said. “We are all His children.”

Rsstha blinked rapidly for several seconds before, perhaps, visibly recalling Amber and the scar on her shoulder.

“It is no sin to feel that urge. The sin,” said Meoraq, “lies with selling it.”

The watchman took a deep breath and did his best to let it out slow. He raised his chin and closed his eyes. “My name is Seelat Vin.”

“Seelat Vin, you have broken the Fifth Law. You have made trade of flesh and so acted against the Word of Sheul. You have broken your faith with Him and as His Sword, I deem you unforgiveable. Stand and be judged.”

The nerve which had steadied the watchman until this point crumbled. He cried out for his father, flinching back from the cut that swept across his throat, but it was already over by then and the flinch only opened the fresh gap between head and neck that much wider. He staggered as blood poured in a dark flood across his chest and then fell, his last breath turning to froth under his sagging chin.

The humans in their cage at last showed some reaction, recoiling with even more force than the governor and his aide, who found themselves splattered with blood. And then one of them—he really should know the name—surged forward to seize the bars, saying, “Holy shit, that’s Meoraq!”

Meoraq paid the death a proper witness and then, with great effort, turned away. “Get out,” he said to the other guard. The humans set up an immediate clamor, beating on the bars and calling his name in their mangled way, but he ignored them for now and turned to Governor Rsstha. “Release them. Do you have a tablet?” he asked the aide.

“Release…? What?”

“Yes, sir,” said the aide, producing one from his deep sleeve, along with a stylus.

“I require…” He eyed the humans, blackly considering. “Four tents. Each human is to have a pack, two sets of clothing and a blanket. I will also have four travel-flasks and four bricks of cuuvash. You will take everything to Southgate immediately.”

“Honored one, you cannot take these creatures!” the governor stammered. “Sheul gave them to Praxas for study. They are mine!”

Meoraq turned on him fast and hissed, “If you claim possession, then you have broken the Fifth Law yourself! All of you! All who have penned these people as cattle, who force bestial behavior upon them against the Word of Sheul, have broken faith with Him! Do you submit to my judgment then or do you release them?”

Rsstha rather visibly groped for his wits, ultimately falling back into the habits of his office. “I will call for a tribunal—”

“It will be your own!” Meoraq leveled his bloody samr at the guard, still standing silent beside the cage where Nicci huddled, looking back at him without expression. “Get out, I said!”

The guard still did not immediately move, which was understandable since there was no way out of the room save through the door where Meoraq was standing, but when Meoraq looked at him, he eased forward, hesitated again, and then fled.

Rsstha hissed to his aide, who sprinted down the hall, snatching up his robes around his knees. Then he turned a haughty eye on Meoraq and said, “Honored one, you overstep yourself.”

Fire burst in Meoraq’s brain and before he could stop himself, he’d seized a ruling governor by his fine robes and slapped him across the snout. And again. And again. “I hold this piss-gully in my fucking shadow!” he roared, still slapping. “I would not be overstepping by a fucking scale if I ran a sword up your slit and out your mouth! Open that fucking door!”

With that, he turned and hurled the man across the room and into the bars of the cage with force enough to bend them. Meoraq clapped both hands over his eyes and breathed in the dark, listening to Rsstha fumble with his keys and babble out all the ways in which it was obvious that humans were in no way people and that Sheul could not condemn their use in any fashion any more than he condemned the use of cattle for hides Meoraq himself wore. Then the door was open and Scott came spilling out to catch at Meoraq’s arm, saying, “Jesus Christ, am I glad to see you!”

Meoraq shook him off. “Gather your men. N’ki, come!”

Nicci rose, but slowly. Surely she knew him—by Scott’s words if by no other reason—but her gaze remained dull and lifeless. She moved out of the cage and toward him without making any effort to cover herself, and Meoraq sent a second prayer of thanks to Sheul that Amber was not here, but it was a heavy gratitude, for he knew his wife would have to see what her blood-kin had become soon enough.

“I told you he’d find us, didn’t I?” Scott was saying, standing tall at Meoraq’s side as Nicci hobbled her vacant way across the room. “I told you he wouldn’t stop looking!”

“I had not started looking, human,” Meoraq spat. “Nor was I inclined to start. It is Sheul who apparently wishes you spared and I can only think He does so to teach me humility.” And because no one was making a damned move in that direction, Meoraq stalked furiously over and picked Nicci up himself, tossing her across his shoulder where she hung like a sack of grain, half-emptied. “And I tell you right now that He had best make His will very damned clear if He wishes me to move you even one damned step away from this city, because I would just as soon see you all rot in its ruins!”

“Are you mad at us?” Scott asked. He sounded surprised.

Meoraq walked away, letting the humans scramble after and Governor Rsstha stand alone in the mouth of an empty cell. The feel of Nicci swaying with the force of his stride was extremely unpleasant; her hand smacked against his thigh now and then, lifeless as a corpse.

“You are mad,” said Scott, now angry as well as surprised. “Just what the hell do you have to be mad about? You abandoned us, remember?”

Meoraq swung around so fast that Nicci’s limp hand struck the wall behind him. “Lies! You did the leaving, human!”

“She was dying! What were we supposed to do, stand around and watch?”

Meoraq cocked his head warningly and took a few soul-soothing breaths. When he was calm once more, he said, “If you had, you would have been there to see that she did not die.”

They all stared at him, all these flat and ugly faces he had almost forgotten, simply amazed.

“She didn’t?” Scott said finally.

“No.”

“Not then or not ever?”

Meoraq leaned back a little and gave him a hard, dangerous stare.

“Well, I mean…where is she?”

“With me,” said Meoraq and started walking again, reminded by these words that she was not, for the moment.

The humans followed. He could hear them whispering amongst themselves. If any of them were pleased to learn that Amber lived, they showed no sign. He expected no better of them.

‘And so do I stand again among them, O my Father,’ he thought crossly, jogging Nicci’s dead weight higher up upon his shoulder. ‘If this is the price You would have me pay that I receive my woman once more, I will even thank You as I pay it, but of all humans You have chosen to spare, why Scott?’

Sheul had no answer.

The governor’s carriage was too small to fit all the humans. Meoraq ordered a cart and loaded them into the back like sacks of grain. The driver, who had obviously never seen or imagined anything like the humans he was now pulling, got them back to Southgate in half the time it had taken the carriage to make the same trip, a feat even more impressive considering how often he’d been staring back into the cart instead of directing his blindfolded bulls.

Meoraq did not speak to his humans. They did not speak to him.

At the gate, Meoraq again hupped Nicci onto his shoulder and demanded to be taken to Onahi. He and his humans were led into the barracks, to a sealed door guarded by five watchmen and Onahi himself, armed and armored.

“Is there something you require, honored one?” he asked respectfully. He did not so much as glance at the humans, not even the one on Meoraq’s shoulder.

“I am leaving as soon as my provisions arrive. I am taking the women with me.”

Onahi frowned. “The high judge would not receive them?”

“I didn’t meet with him. It is my judgment that Gann holds this city in his shadow. I say the eye of Sheul is upon Praxas and His eye burns with wrath. I am certain He has not directed me to lead these people from death into damnation, therefore I…damn it, I must be meant to lead them on.”

Onahi gazed at him for a short time in perfect stillness. Then he turned and made a gesture of his own, and while his men opened the door and passed out of sight, presumably to gather the refugees sequestered somewhere within, looked back at Meoraq and calmly said, “Is it for you to know if the wrath of Sheul is upon me as well, sir?”

Meoraq gave him a second, more thoughtful stare. “And if it were?”

“I serve Sheul in faith. If it is His will that I die here, I am ready and go to His judgment without fear. Yet if it is not, for my own will, I would live.”

Meoraq listened past the chatter of his humans, and while he heard no specific word from Sheul to approve this suggestion, he heard no word against it either. He began to give a cautious assent and then said instead, for no reason he could fathom, “Have you a family?”

“I am of the House Xaik, sir,” Onahi replied, showing no sign he thought the question an odd one. “Descended low by their champion, but born under his blade.”

Which was to say, he was a bastard, the son of a Sheulteb and one of his House’s servants.

“Have you a woman? Sons?”

“No,” said the guard.

Meoraq pondered the matter while Onahi patiently stood by, but could discern no reason for asking such things. And so perhaps Sheul had spoken after all.

So be it.

“Gather those of your men you trust and whatever gear you can readily manage. We leave as soon as my provisions arrive. Fuck,” he finished, glaring as Amber came through the door. He looked at Nicci’s upturned ass on his shoulder, fought and mastered the urge to hurl her violently to the floor, and instead shrugged her upright and set her carefully down.

“Oh my God,” said Amber in a voice so unlike hers that if he were not looking at her, he never would have believed she’d said it, human words or no. She staggered forward, gripped the restraining arms of Onahi’s men and shoved them aside. “Oh my God. Nicci!”

And then she was flying forward to seize her unmoving blood-kin and embrace her, and there were tears streaming from her eyes and happy sounds like screams pouring from her throat, and it was joy and relief and wonder in volume too great for any mortal heart to bear, and so Meoraq turned his back on it and stared instead at Scott, whom he hated. He thought there must be a lesson in that somewhere, but his brain was full of that terrible, black fire and he couldn’t think past it to what it must be.