The Last Hour of Gann by Smith, R. Lee (17)

BOOK VIII

 

 

 

Xi’MATEZH

 

 

They left the city. Amber couldn’t really say they were run out, since Meoraq was in charge of the leaving, and because of the way he was doing it, she couldn’t even say they were sneaking away, but she felt like they were doing both. Walking down that long, dark tunnel with dozens and dozens of lizardmen standing on either side watching them go was about the worst way to leave a place as anything Amber knew, and that included standing in the rain waiting to board the ship that was about to crash.

She didn’t ask where they were going. She didn’t ask who all these lizardmen were who’d joined them. She stayed at the back of the line with Nicci and didn’t say a word. Even in the cloud-covered moonlight, Meoraq’s throat was bright, bright yellow.

They didn’t go all night. After taking them back across the open grass and into the woods and hiking for maybe two hours up and down the hilly wilderness that was this part of the world, Meoraq brought them to a fairly level place and camped them. The lizardmen had some of the same sort of leather walls that Zhuqa had used, and after tying them up around the trees, they formed a pretty good shelter. It wasn’t as good as a tent, but it pushed back some of the wind and held in some of the heat and some, Amber was coming to find, was better than nothing.

Tents went up. Packs were opened and cuuvash produced, but the guard took a long time looking it over…scraping at it with his fingers…sniffing…and finally calling Meoraq over to do the same thing. There was some low talk and at the end of it, all the cuuvash was pulled out and dropped in the fire. They sat in groups to watch it burn—lizardmen, lizardladies, and humans, with Amber and Meoraq forming the blurred place between the beginning and end of their circle.

The baby cried. So did Nicci. Amber, torn, sat with her sister and watched Xzem stroke at the tiny back. After a while, one of the guards—Onahi—moved from where he sat with his men to the place right beside Xzem. He leaned in close as Xzem shrank fearfully back and ducked her head, then turned a grim eye on Meoraq. “It is hard travel for a fresh mother,” he said. “But with an empty belly besides is harder than it has to be. Have I your will to hunt, honored one?”

Meoraq thought about it as he gazed over the leather walls at the sky. “If it is God’s will to provide game, I will not protest it, but we are very close to a city where evil men show no love for God’s laws. We may be followed even now. Those who hesitate to invade this camp surely will not when it comes to striking at a hunter upon the plains.”

“I walk in God’s sight,” said Onahi, rising. “And if I meet Him before the night is ended, I will not be ashamed to tell Him the reason. Be easy, mother,” he added to Xzem, bending his neck politely and showing no sign that he saw the way she cringed around the baby. When he left, two of his men left with him.

Meoraq watched them go, his restlessness betrayed by the tightening of his jaw and throat muscles. Amber reached out a hand, but he flinched away before she could touch him and stood up. “I will make a patrol,” he said to Onahi’s remaining guards, refusing to look at her. “Until I return, no one is to leave the camp.”

They all saluted in near-perfect unison, all with the same troubled sidelong glance at the humans clustered at one side of the walls. Meoraq took that in, grunted, and said, “If you must force their obedience, do so carefully. These are people, not animals, and they are people under the protection of House Uyane. Mark me.”

They saluted again, now sending their nervous eyes toward the lizardladies.

Meoraq grunted again. “You may know these women as criminals and exiles, but I am Uyane Meoraq, a Sword and a true son of Sheul, and I judge them innocent of crime and innocent of corruption.”

Some of the slaves looked up.

“Hear me and mark well: I take them from their fathers. I take them from the city of Praxas under Gann. I take them into House Uyane and I forgive them all their past. I say they are daughters of Sheul and they stand in His sight.” Meoraq drew his samr and took one long step forward, standing between the lizardladies and the lizardmen, and cocked his head. “I say they stand under my protection. You watch them. You do not touch them. If you feel the fires in your belly, think of it as a test of your will…because I will think of it as an assault upon my House.”

A clumsy scattering of salutes apparently satisfied Meoraq that he was still a menacing badass when he wanted to be. He turned around, and for a moment, he and Amber were unavoidably faced off.

The color at his throat visibly brightened. He turned his head, stared at the wall beyond her for a long, long time in silence while his scales faded to black. Then he left.

Only after he was gone, as the guards began to mutter and the humans whisper, did Amber realize what Meoraq had entirely forgotten.

“Hey,” she said.

The lizardmen all looked at her.

“Do any of you understand English?” she asked.

Three pairs of eyes stared blankly back at her. One of them looked at another. “Is that thing talking?” he asked.

“What are you telling them?” Scott demanded.

“Nothing. We’re going to be incommunicado for a while, that’s all.” Amber gestured at the lizards, all of whom looked alarmed to find themselves at the end of even a casual wave, all but Xzem, who actually eased a little closer to Amber’s arm. When Amber looked at her in surprise, Xzem ducked her head and offered up the crying baby.

Scott recoiled violently when Amber took it. “Jesus Christ, is that thing yours?”

Heat flared in her cheeks. She didn’t let that stop her from tucking the baby down into her wrap where it immediately quieted against her breasts. “No, of course not,” she snapped.

“Where’d you get it, if it’s not yours?”

“Stop saying ‘if’ like you think you’re going to catch me in a lie. It’s not mine!”

“You’re being awfully sensitive about it,” Scott said and Crandall muttered, “Hormones, man. She just had a baby.”

“Stop it!” Nicci hissed, so suddenly and with such violence that they all looked at her, even Amber. Nicci still had tears on her face, a firelit shine that made her anger look a lot like hate…and hate made her look like their mother. “We haven’t even been out of the cage one whole day and here you all are, cutting into her again!”

Some of them looked away. Only some. Crandall just looked back at her and Scott’s eyes turned, if possible, even colder and more contemptuous.

After a long, ugly silence during which Amber was only too aware of the watching lizardmen, she finally cleared her throat and said, “There were these people. Exiles. Bandits. That sort of thing. The baby was their leader’s. I couldn’t leave it.”

“What were you doing there?” Scott asked.

She stared at him for a moment, utterly dumbfounded by the tone of undisguised suspicion he was throwing at her. “I was captured,” she said slowly. “What the fuck do you think I was doing there? Selling Space-Scout cookies?”

“I don’t know…maybe Meoraq sold you to them. He sure acts like a raider. For all I know, he’s one of them. Maybe even their king.”

Amber had just enough time to think clearly (very clearly, that alone should have been a clue) that nothing Everly Scott said was ever worth a damn and she needed to be a big girl and let it go. Then she was on her feet with the baby pressed to her body with one arm, clocking Scott right in his big, fat mouth.

Scott staggered. Crandall started to hop up only to sit down again very fast, so that his legs kicked comically out in front of him. No one else moved and the reason no one else moved, Amber discovered upon a backwards glance, was because the guards had all drawn weapons. They might not speak English, but clearly they knew whose camp they were in and who put the scars on her shoulder.

“Call them off,” said Eric at last, in a strained let’s-be-reasonable voice.

Now Amber gaped at him. “Did I fall through a hole in time?” she demanded. “These are still not my trained alligators!” And just to make the moment complete, she turned to the guards and made settling motions with her hand, doing her best to say, “Easy…down…please,” in lizardish while pissed off right to the red line. As they slowly sheathed their swords, she swung back on Scott and said, “If you want to stay here, you better have a goddamn good apology for me in the next five seconds. One—”

“Jesus fucking Christ, sorry!”

“Two!” shouted Amber, and the baby added its own furious, if muffled, howl.

Scott put his hands up like a man being mugged. “I’m sorry, Bierce! Goddamn! I just got out of a fucking cage! Pardon me all to hell if I’m not in love with the fucking lizards!”

The word three hovered on her lips, but in the end, she swallowed it. “Fine,” she said, patting at the baby through her wrap until it settled. “You’re on edge. I’m on edge. We’ll put it behind us.”

“Jesus!”

“But you better believe that was your only free pass.” Amber glared at him. “Your days of throwing your attitude in my face are all over. You’re in my camp now and if I don’t like the way you talk, commander, I will leave your ass behind!”

He opened his mouth angrily…worked it for a bit…and finally closed it again, brick-red and actually shaking a little. He got up and moved as far away from her as he could go while still being within the boundary of the leather walls. Crandall went with him. After a moment, Dag and Eric joined him. Then they were all over there, all but Nicci, muttering at each other under the wind and looking at her with mistrustful eyes.

“What do you think that was about?” one of the guards asked quietly.

“I know it was bad,” another replied, letting his hand rest on the hilt of his sword. “And I know it’s getting worse by the moment.”

It was. And it was her fault as much as Scott’s. She only had to look at them, what was left of them, to know they’d been through hell and the first day out of it was way too soon to expect them to shake it off. Amber took a deep breath (one for the prophet) and let it out slow. She sat down.

Nicci came to sit with her, warm and alive and so much older than Amber remembered. It was like looking into her mother’s face, that last day, and knowing it was Death you were looking at. Knowing it was looking back at you.

“I’m sorry,” Amber said.

Nicci nodded without looking at her.

“This isn’t how I wanted this to go. You don’t know how I’ve dreamed of this moment…and I’ve already fucked it up.”

Nicci shrugged.

The baby in her arms began to purr.

“Was there…” Did she really want to know this? “Was there really a cage?”

“Yes.”

“How long…I mean…”

“I don’t know. You couldn’t count the days in there. Or maybe you could. I didn’t try.” Nicci stared at the fire some more, then shrugged again. “There was still snow on the ground, though. How long ago was that?”

“I don’t know,” Amber admitted. “Meoraq made us stop for the winter. We only just crossed the mountains when I got caught. That must be the official welcome in Gedai.”

“Must be.”

The quiet was not an easy one. The lizards watched them. So did Scott.

Nicci sighed. She bent her head—an eerily lizard-like gesture—and said, “We were walking along in this tunnel, you know? Only it wasn’t just a tunnel. It was a…like, a pipe. A sewer pipe. A storm drain, really. And I remember thinking how stupid that was, because of how much it had been raining. But it was mostly empty that day, and Commander Scott said it would be dry and there wouldn’t be any animals and it had to be safe because the bots were going in and out. We didn’t want to, but he kind of went off on it, you know how he does. So we went in anyway. And I knew it was stupid.”

The baby bit her, whimpered, and bit again. Amber brought it out, wrapped it regretfully in its smooth hide, and gave it back to Xzem. Nicci waited for the end of this process without watching it, then went on in the same dull, inflectionless voice.

“When it flooded, it happened all at once. And I know how that sounds, but it’s true. There wasn’t any warning. It wasn’t like it was raining and the water rose up. It had been raining for days and the water was still pretty much just around our feet, and then suddenly there was this wall of water coming at us. It hit and we all went away, all mashed together, and that was pretty bad,” said Nicci in a vague, thoughtful tone. “The lights all went out. It was pitch black and so loud. Everyone was grabbing at everyone else and all you could hear was the water and the bubbly sound people make…you know…when they drown.”

Amber didn’t want to hear any more, but she didn’t try to stop Nicci from talking. Sometimes you had to say the bad stuff. She put her arm around her sister’s shoulder and watched the baby nurse at Xzem’s breast.

“Then the tunnel dropped away and there was this grate or something across the whole floor. It was rusty and there was a big hole through it, but some of us managed to catch it and climb out to where there was a kind of ledge. Not all of us. Just…some. We all held hands on the ledge until the water went down and we could find our way out. I didn’t think we would, but we did. After that, we kind of camped there for a few days. I guess we were waiting, you know, for you and Meoraq. But it kept raining and there were these storms…storms like I never knew could happen. The buildings we were next to fell down and then the street dropped out from under it and all this water started bubbling up and it was still raining, so what were we supposed to do?”

The wind died down, as if in sympathy, and Scott’s voice was right there in an urgent whisper: “—need to think about what’s best for us!” Then silence and the weight of their stares.

“We turned south,” said Nicci, “because Commander Scott said it would be warmer.”

“Now wait just a goddamned minute!”

“That’s a logical assumption,” said Amber, as indifferently as she could.

“And we took a vote! We all agreed it was our best chance!”

“The men took a vote,” said Nicci. “You were right about that, too.”

Scott started forward. Lizards drew swords. Scott retreated to slap furiously at the leather wall, looking like nothing so much as an angry ape.

“That thing gets just one more of those,” said one of the guards, pointing his sword at Scott, “and then I kill it. I am not waiting for it to come at me.”

Scott hunkered down, muttering and swiping at his hair.

“So we turned south, but it didn’t get warmer. It started snowing. And then it started freezing. And it was so cold…” Nicci trailed off. Her head cocked—again, like a lizardman expressing interest and reluctant humor. “There wasn’t any water, unless it was coming down in sheets and freezing on our bodies, and there wasn’t any food, unless it was chasing us down and trying to eat us. And six more people died, and Commander Scott said we should cross the mountains after all—”

“Hey!”

“—because the skyport was our only hope.”

“We all agreed, goddammit!”

The lizardman who still had his sword drawn came suddenly, swiftly forward and dropped to one knee before Amber. He bent his head, clearly unsure of the protocol, then gave her a hard stare and said, “If you understand me, keep it quiet.”

“Scott…”

“She’s misrepresenting the facts!”

“Not by much,” said Eric quietly. “Sit down, man.” And to Nicci, just as quietly, he said, “You really are a two-faced little whore, you know that? Acting like it’s such a conspiracy that you girls didn’t get to vote. Did you even try? Hell, no. You just sat there like a bunch of dummies waiting for us to make the decisions. When it came right down to it, you wanted us to take care of you. We did, so shut up about it.”

The lizardman kneeling in the grass before Amber hadn’t moved, although he had shifted the focus of his uneasy stare.

“We went into the mountains,” said Nicci. “There wasn’t a road or anything, so we just went where Commander Scott said our chances were best. The snow was over our boots the first day and over our knees the second day and by the third day we were trying to walk on it because we couldn’t go through it anymore. We should have gone back,” she said, turning her dull eyes on the rest of them. “We all knew it. We should have gone back but we followed him anyway.”

“That’s enough,” said Eric, still without raising his voice.

“Sabrina froze to death,” said Nicci. “Only she didn’t just freeze. First, her fingers turned black. Commander Scott tried to rub them to warm them up and they broke off. Sabrina’s fingers broke off in his hand like…” Nicci’s head cocked the other way, thinking hard. “Like icicles breaking off the bannister back when we were kids, remember how we’d do that? Snap snap snap, all in a row. While Sabrina was watching. They fell into the snow at her own feet. And I remember how Commander Scott started to bend down, like he was going to pick them up, you know? Like he was going to hand them to her. And then he just walked away like he hadn’t seen it happen.”

Amber tried to say something. Anything. All she could do was breathe. She looked back at Scott and for once, for maybe even the first time since she’d met the prick, she looked at him without any anger in her at all, only a heartsick throb of horror that was, for a change, for him and not aimed against him.

She didn’t know what he read in her eyes, but it wasn’t sympathy. His face turned ugly. He looked at the lizardman kneeling before her and turned away.

“Then her feet turned black and she couldn’t walk anymore. We were all standing around waiting for her to die so we could keep moving. And she did, but by then, there were others. We had to keep walking, but everyone was dying. Mr. Yao—remember him?—fell down dead. I didn’t know people could really do that. We were walking and he just fell down dead. And we kept on walking. Like we didn’t even see it. But we all saw it. We all walked right by him.”

Amber couldn’t stop herself. She reached down and plucked the sleeping baby off Xzem’s breast, cuddling him back to her own. It woke up, bewildered, then recognized her and snuggled down, purring itself back to sleep. Xzem shifted her wrap up over her nipple and waited to be needed again, watching Amber’s face anxiously.

“Every day, there was someone else dead. Every single day. But we still followed him.”

“We made it out,” said one of the Manifestors and the others muttered agreement. “We didn’t lie down and die like you would have done, lizard-bait. We made it out because of him.”

“We did,” Nicci agreed. “All fifteen of us. But Lani died the next morning. I don’t know whether it was cold or hunger by that point. I guess it could have been either one. And Mr. Briggs died two days later. He just walked out into the snow to go to the bathroom and didn’t come back. We never found him. I don’t know whether he got lost or got eaten…or just kept walking. And then there was Maria.” Nicci looked at Eric, politely inquisitive. “Would you like to tell her about Maria, Mr. Lassiter?”

“Go to hell, you scalie-fucking cum dumpster,” said Eric gently.

“Maria got pregnant,” said Nicci, unmoved. She went back to staring into the fire. “Which was what I seem to recall our role was by that time. Their most precious resource, remember, Amber? We were their wombs. Only now that one of those wombs was full, suddenly our leader was saying…well, pretty much what you said when he called you a womb. Suddenly having babies was right down there with…what did you say? Building a community theater and casting for Miss Saigon?”

“I don’t remember,” said Amber numbly, thinking The King and I over and over, like the tolling of a funeral bell.

“So they took another vote. It was very democratic. And after the vote, they caught Maria and while she was screaming and pleading for them to stop, Mr. Lassiter and Commander Scott took turns punching her in the stomach.”

Silence. The fire hummed and the baby purred.

After a while, Nicci said, “It worked. Eventually.”

More silence. Scott swiped at his hair. The lizardmen watched him. The lizardladies huddled together and tried not to look at anybody.

“But she kept bleeding—”

“Oh, shut her up, for Christ’s sake!” Scott exploded.

The lizardman stood up. Amber touched his wrist. He shut his eyes and hissed, then shot her a very Meoraq-like look of annoyance and knelt down again.

“She kept bleeding—”

“It’s enough, Nicci,” said Amber. “Come on. Stop.”

Nicci considered, gazing into the fire. “She kept bleeding,” she said at last, decisively. “And she got really sick. And in the morning, Commander Scott and Mr. Lassiter said she was dead and we kept going, but we all knew she wasn’t dead—”

“Nicci.”

“We could all hear her under the wind—”

“Nicci, please.”

“—crying—”

Amber pressed her face to the baby, as if its sleeping purrs could drive every other sound away.

“—begging us to come back.” Nicci thought about it while Amber enveloped herself in the peaceful song of a small life that knew only how deeply it was loved. “And we left her there anyway,” said Nicci. “We all walked away and pretended we didn’t see those big weasel-things at all, didn’t we? We pretended we never heard her screaming.”

“I swear I’m going to hit her if she doesn’t shut up,” said Eric in his soft way.

“I’m not sure she can shut up,” Amber answered wearily. “Let her say it all. Who can it hurt now?”

“When we saw that place, Commander Scott said it was the temple, even though Meoraq told us to look for the ends of the world and we all knew we weren’t there. But we followed him. And the place got bigger and bigger and we knew it was wrong, but we all kept going. They sent someone out to look at us or something, and Commander Scott sent Abdullah to go meet him, only I guess it freaked him out to see Abdullah coming right at him like that because he…” Nicci shrugged again. “Commander Scott knelt down in the snow, so we all knelt down in the snow with him. So they took us away. And they cut us up and they did a lot of things…but they fed us and they kept us warm, so…and this is actually kind of ironic…being captured like that probably saved our lives.”

And that, mercifully, seemed to be the end. Nicci watched the baby doze against Amber’s chest, the scantest hint of emotion wrinkling at her brow, although Amber couldn’t say quite what that emotion was. She only knew that it was better—not much, maybe, but better—than the total lack of life that her sister had exhibited throughout her awful recital.

“So are you happy now?” Scott asked bitterly.

Amber looked at him, helpless to do anything but shake her head.

“You sure? Not even one I-told-you-so? One If-only? One steaming Bierce-knows-best pile of bullshit we can warm ourselves by as we gather around your campfire?”

“Go to sleep, Scott,” said Amber. “It’s over, all right?” She had to chew her next words a long time before she could keep them down, but in the end she was able to say, “You did the best you could,” and mean it.

Scott stared at her for a long time and then dropped his eyes. He looked at the fire and said, in a strained, distant sort of voice, “You know…that first night after we left…that very first night, when we were alone and we all thought, you know, that you were dead…”

The fire snapped. The baby shifted, purred for a few seconds, then slipped easily back into sleep. The lizardmen watched from the far wall, hands on swords, restless.

Scott looked up, his lips pulled back from his teeth in a hideous imitation of the charismatic smile she remembered. “That was the night I fucked your sister,” he said. “She said she didn’t want to, she even pretended to struggle, but she came. And she wasn’t even a virgin, so yeah, Bierce, you really dropped the ball somewhere along the line, but that’s okay. I’m sure you did the best you could. You want to know something? Huh? You ruined everything, Bierce.”

“Yeah, and I broke your flashlight, too.”

“Fuck you!” he spat, and didn’t flinch even when every lizardman in camp whipped out a sword. “You! Ruined! Everything! We’d have been just fine if you’d only died! We’d be home by now if it wasn’t for you! You!”

And then he lay down with his back to her and pretended to be asleep.

Amber closed her eyes and concentrated on the baby’s little purrs, its small hand so warm against her breast, its living, loving reality. Gradually, the hot knot in her stomach loosened, although the bitter taste in her mouth remained. When she finally opened her eyes, Nicci was looking at her with those dead eyes and Bo Peep’s own bitter smile. “Aren’t you glad you found us?” she asked.

 

* * *

 

Meoraq found the soldiers sent to assassinate him without difficulty. There were nine in all—two groups of four and a lone man wearing the governor’s colors. He killed them swiftly, tied the corpses to trees with their own belts, and left them to be found. Perhaps they were, for there were no more assassins that night. As his last empty patrol along their back-trail came to an end, Meoraq met with Onahi and his men, and with them took a rogue kipwe they found sleeping in the trees.

It was another hour before they returned to camp, bearing what they could upon two hastily constructed litters. Amber had a grimace of some unhappy sort for him, but did not stir herself from the fireside. The watchmen, however, came at once to make their unsettling report of angry words and blows struck and Meoraq knew even before they pointed him out who had been at the root of it all.

“Honored one, you have said these creatures dwell in the sight of Sheul,” Onahi murmured, frowning now at Scott. “And you have proven that it is His will you have their care, but it would seem a far simpler matter to care for them were they kept bound and hobbled.”

Meoraq flared his spines reprovingly, but spoke no censure. His heart was in the right place. And honestly, Onahi just wanted Scott hobbled. Meoraq wanted him dead. And buried.

He left the preparation of the first skewers to Onahi and made a quick count of his camp. All were present—watchmen, slaves, humans, and his Amber. She had the infant in her arms again, he saw. It slept too deeply to sing, even when she stroked a careful hand across its little back. ‘Someday it will be my child at that breast,’ Meoraq thought, but he did not disturb her or the child to say so.

The meat roasted and the humans clustered close to watch it. Meoraq tried not to resent this. They had endured a terrible captivity and they were doubtless hungry. All the same, his days of tending to them like cattle were done.

And so when Scott deemed the meat done enough for his taste and reached to have the first skewer out, Meoraq caught him unhurriedly by the wrist and pushed him back. “This is my camp,” he said. “And you are not my welcome guest. You have what I give you, human, when I choose to give it, and you will receive it gratefully or it will be the last thing you ever take from my hand.”

Scott’s face puckered and colored in that way Meoraq so well remembered. “We’re starving,” he insisted.

Meoraq flattened his spines in disgust. He let go of Scott’s wrist to seize the edge of his loose tunic and pull it up, revealing the man’s pink body, which was not an abundant one, but certainly was not emaciated. “No, you aren’t,” he said, and covered the man curtly up again. “Sit and wait for your share or go hungry.”

“Does it understand you?” Onahi asked, watching Scott limp sullenly away.

Meoraq grunted a caustic affirmation as he tested the skewers himself and decided one of them at least was indeed ready. He took a token piece for himself and gave the rest to Amber. She offered it at once to Nicci.

“She’ll have her own,” he said testily, very much aware of the men watching him. “That is yours.”

Amber’s little brows twitched together. She put her arm around Nicci’s shoulders and would not look at him. Nicci did, her eyes glinting like light on the edge of a blade as she ate his wife’s first meal in days.

The color throbbed in his throat. He turned his back on her and breathed.

The sun dropped further behind the clouds. On the distant walls of Praxas, the braziers were lit, tended by far more men than were needed for the chore. They were watching, Meoraq knew, but he did not think they would dare to come for him. Which was almost a pity, as he was right in the mood to deal with them.

What in Gann’s grey hell was he going to do with all these people? It was not a new thought, but it was one he hadn’t had to consider for some time and he’d never had an answer even when the matter had been pressing. Now here it was again, grossly compounded. There would always be room in the barracks for Onahi and his watchmen, as they were born under the Blade and shared some of the rights of entitlement all of Sheul’s favored had been blessed with, but what to do with these fatherless, mateless women? Meoraq could demand they be taken in, but he had no illusions; as soon as he had left again, some corruption would be found in them and they would be turned quietly back out into the wilds. So what was he supposed to do with them? Go on to Xi’Matezh with this…this caravan like nothing had happened? And after that, take them all back to Xeqor? His was the championing House of all that great city, its bloodline unstained and renown unspoiled back to the very day of its founding. He could not fill its halls with raider-slaves and remain its steward.

Meoraq hissed and rubbed at his throat, which felt disturbingly warm already. ‘Patience, Uyane. Patience is not a word to a warrior, but a way of life. Honor Him and show patience.’ “How well do you know this land?” he asked.

Onahi tipped his head toward him without taking his eye from Scott. “I have been all my life within those walls, sir, save for one summer spent with my mother’s people in Chalh.”

Meoraq grunted morosely, poked at the fire…and then looked around with a frown. “Chalh?”

“To the south, sir, and eastward. Just out of the shadow of the mountains, in the lie of the road that leads out of Yroq.”

There was a question, scarcely hinted at, in those last words. Meoraq supposed he had an accent. “We didn’t come by road,” he said. “You have kin in Chalh?”

“My mother’s kin. In service to House Ylsathoc.”

“Ylsathoc,” he echoed. The name was oddly familiar to him…and then he placed it. “I knew an exarch of that name. Exarch Ylsathoc…ah…Hi-something. Hilesh?”

The watchman of Praxas betrayed dumaq emotion at last with a snort, taking his eyes off Scott just long enough to roll them. “Hirut. Exarch, is he?”

“You know him?”

“I knew a swaggering little sprat who seemed to think the wind itself would stop blowing if he didn’t point it in the right direction. How did he turn out?”

“He’s taller.”

Onahi snorted again.

“Would you know the way to Chalh well enough to guide a man?” asked Meoraq.

“There’s little enough to know, sir. Three days of brisk travel would take us to the Prophet’s Crossways. From there, the southward road will lead us directly to the gate. It should be in fair repair,” he added. “There’s a shrine at the Crossways, popular with the priests and blade-born pilgrims.”

“But no road from Praxas.”

Onahi grunted and flexed his spines in a shrug. “The city of my father gave its love to Gann long ago. I always had a mind to make the journey to Chalh, but never won release from the warden.”

Small marvel, that. Warden Myselo would not be quick to let another man free to speak of what he may have seen, certainly not to the sort of city that birthed exarchs.

“You never stood a watch without the walls?”

“Many times.”

“You could have left.”

“I suppose so.”

“You never wished to?”

Onahi grunted and spared him half a glance before Scott redrew his attention. “It never felt like the right thing to do.”

“You left tonight.”

“Tonight, it did.”

“Sheul’s hand is ever upon the hammer,” Meoraq mused, looking around at his Amber, safe again within his keeping, and at her Nicci, safe again beneath her arm.

Onahi acknowledged this politely and quiet passed between them for a time. At length, it was the other man who broke it, raising a hand first in salute. “Forgive me, honored one, for my boldness. Is it your will to travel on to Chalh?”

“It would appear to be Sheul’s will,” Meoraq answered, taking another skewer off the coals. “How does that find you?”

“I obey Him in all things.” He paused. “It will be a relief to settle there, sir. Chalh is a good place.” He paused again, his eye drifting from Scott to the fire, and to the slave who crouched there at Amber’s side, suckling Gann’s child. “A good place for a family.”

“Perhaps you will have one someday,” Meoraq said, as if this were not an absurd suggestion to make of a Sheulteb’s bastard. He liked the man.

Meoraq took the skewers off the fire and, ignoring the immediate outstretched arms of Scott and his humans, gave them out to his brothers under the Blade.

Onahi watched Scott stomp and swear his way back over to the edge of camp while his skewer cooled, but when the human finally quieted, his attention drifted. He took a small bite, swallowed quickly, then stood up.

Meoraq prepared more kipwe to roast, watching without seeming to watch as Onahi crossed around the fire and went to one knee before Xzem. “Mother,” he said, respectful as a man at prayer. “It is Onahi Chasa before you.”

The slave ducked her head and rocked the child of Gann, giving Amber short sidelong glances until she realized who it was the man addressed. Her next wary glance was to Meoraq, but he kept his own eyes on the roasting meat and let whatever was happening here happen without him.

Onahi waited. Patience was not a word to him. Meoraq felt a little envy stinging through his grim amusement as he let this scene play itself out.              He did like the man. He was a bit of a fool, but a good man, and after the unpleasantness of this day, even a foolish sort of goodness was a soothing thing to see.

It was obvious Onahi had no experience with servants, let alone with slaves. One did not directly address them unless one were giving orders. The slave knew this even if Onahi did not. If he had simply dropped the skewer in her lap and walked on, she would be eating now, not cringing in confusion under the weight of his gentle gaze. But this was no proper household, no more than it was a raiding nest, and it seemed neither of them knew the rules of conduct.

The slave ultimately seemed to realize that the man before her would not leave until he had an answer of some sort. Short spines shivering, her neck bent so far that her chin touched her chest, Xzem finally managed a wordless mewl of feminine inquiry. The little sound cracked in her mouth, uncertain.             

“It is Onahi Chasa,” he said again. And when the slave continued to shrink away, he looked back at Meoraq.

‘O my Father, why are You including me in this?’ he thought. Aloud, he grunted only, “Xzem,” as he fussed determinedly with the meat.

“Xzem,” the slave whispered and rocked the baby a little faster, as if she feared a beating to go along with the introductions. Not an unreasonable fear, all things considered.

Onahi relaxed, believing himself to be on firmer ground, rather than further out in the mire. “Mother,” he said, offering the skewer of his hunter’s portion of kipwe to a Gann-born raider’s slave. “Take and be fed.”

Xzem hesitated, but only for a moment. She gave Amber the baby. Without a word, she rose and moved to the wall of the windbreak, gripped a post, and bent. She stood her legs well apart; the wind flattened the folds of her worn shift to her body so that she might as well be naked there, and every man’s eye was on her. She waited.

Onahi stared, as all the watchmen of Praxas stared, at the rounded curve of her hip and the shallow valley beneath her shift where her sex must be (and worn well open, all things considered). Meoraq had seen many women bend for him this way and even he stared for a short time before running his brooding and distracted eye over Amber. She still wouldn’t look at him. Which was just as well, he supposed. The fires of Sheul were burning—they had not cooled completely since he’d found and reclaimed his wife—but there were twenty other people in this camp now. Meoraq was not ashamed of Amber, but he hated the thought of other people listening in while he had sex.

‘Not tonight, Uyane,’ he thought bitterly, turning the skewers. ‘Not while she sits there with her damned Nicci under her arm. Not unless you want the whining little pest in the tent with you.’

Onahi stood. He went to Xzem and, just as Meoraq was reluctantly opening his mouth to order him back, he took her arm and stood her gently up. He placed the skewer in her puzzled hand and released her. “Take and be fed, mother,” he said.

The other watchmen of Praxas exchanged glances. One of them picked at the remaining portion of his own meal and looked at one of the slaves.

Onahi turned around and came back to the other side of the fire. He knelt. His fingers brushed at the buckle of his loin-plate, testing, before he set his hands on the ground. He closed his eyes and prayed in grim-faced silence.

One by one, the watchmen of Praxas offered food to the slaves. Thanks were spoken by some, softly, uncertain of propriety. Meoraq let them be, even when one of the watchmen sat boldly at a slave’s side and ate with her. He didn’t care if they ate together, scandalous as that was. He didn’t care if they spoke to one another. At the moment, he didn’t care if they all stripped to their scales and formed a dip-ring. His battle-wounds were a constant ache in every part of his body, like the anger and resentment throbbing in his throat or the heat of Sheul’s fires churning in his belly, and he cared about nothing and no one else.

And he was tired. All at once, the sleep he had not caught in the past several days seemed to drop into his bones. He doubted he had the strength to do what the fires demanded. He didn’t even have the strength to pray. So he gave the next set of skewers to the humans, including another for his wife and one for Nicci (who did not, he noticed, share it out with Amber), and ordered the rest cooked and held until morning. “I want to leave at dawn,” he said, addressing all of them together, but Onahi most of all. “Keep a strong watch and let no one enter or leave this camp unless they do so under my eye.”

“I hear you, sir,” Onahi said, his brow still pressed to the ground in prayer.

Meoraq grunted and stood up.

Amber lifted her arm from her blood-kin’s shoulders and began awkwardly to rise without disturbing the sleeping baby at her breast.

Meoraq’s selfishness let her gather her feet beneath her, but he was only so much a selfish man. She would be tired and sore as much as he. He knew he would not be able to lie beside her without taking her and he could not take her gently, not yet. So Meoraq stopped her with a raised hand before Amber could stand. “Not tonight,” he said sourly, and went into his tent before he could change his mind.

 

2

Amber slept on the ground by the fire. She didn’t have to and she knew it. They had plenty of tents—one for the lizardmen, one for the lizardladies, one for the humans…and the one where she knew she wasn’t welcome.

So after Xzem took the baby and went into her tent with the other ladies, she just lay down where she was. She felt awful. Not just sad, but sick, as if his rejection were a poison she could swallow over and over the longer she lay there. She didn’t think she’d sleep, but eventually she did, and dreamed of Zhuqa, who was sometimes with her on the Pioneer or in the ruins of that lizardman city with the metal spiders scuttling forever on their empty web, and even her mother’s squalid little apartment back on Earth. “This is Zhuqa’s House,” he kept telling her, through all the confusion of that nightmare. “And once you enter Zhuqa’s House, you never really leave.”

She woke up crying, which was bad enough, and rolled over to discover one of the strange lizardmen just staring at her, which made it humiliating as well. She sat up, using the excuse of looking for Nicci in the empty place beside her to wipe at her cheeks, and felt her stomach flip ominously over. It didn’t surprise her, as miserable as she’d been, but she’d only rolled onto her knees when that small warning became irrelevant and she puked right into the ashes of the fire. Her empty stomach had nothing to give up but a little bilious slime, but it kept trying until she could feel herself trying to pass out as well as throw up. Not her usual post-trauma puke-session, but it did ease up eventually, thank God. By then, she only had enough strength to heave herself onto her side instead of dropping face-down in the stinking mess of it.

The lizardman got up and walked away, leaving her to gasp and spit weakly where she was. After a moment, footsteps returned.

“Are you dying?” Nicci’s voice, not very interested.

“I kind of want to,” Amber muttered and then had to make her aching stomach force out a laugh because it sounded so true.

More footsteps, several sets. A scaly hand gripped her shoulder—Meoraq’s hand, she knew it even before he rolled her over and she could see his frowning face—as somewhere in the world, Scott said, “Do you have to do this now, Bierce?”

“Hit him,” said Meoraq curtly, and someone did. “Show me your eyes, woman.”

She looked at him and saw his spines flat with annoyance and not forward with concern. She scooted back out of his grip and sat up, fixing her burning eyes on her knees as she brushed them off. “I’m fine.”

“She’s fine,” said Nicci. “It’s just something she does when she gets upset.”

Meoraq looked back and forth between them, then at the other lizardmen, and then over the windbreak at the wall of the city. He stood up. “Break the camp.”

Lizardmen moved at once to obey. Meoraq took two steps toward his tent and paused. He looked back. Then he turned around and came back, passing Amber and Nicci without a glance to seize Scott by the hair. He dragged him over to the tent where the humans had slept (Eric and the others got out of his way and the lizardmen didn’t even look at them) and threw Scott into the side of it. “If you want to sleep in it,” Meoraq hissed, “you pick it up and carry it! No one in my camp serves you, S’kot!”

“Jesus, fine!”

Meoraq’s head tipped. “You speak to Uyane Meoraq, a Sword of Sheul, and you had better do it with more respect than that if you want to walk away from this.”

“He’s in a mood,” Nicci remarked.

Amber did not reply.

“Thanks for the tent,” said Scott, flushed and scowling.

Meoraq grunted and took Scott by the wrist. He lifted Scott’s hand, hissed to make him stop struggling, and forced it into a fist. “This is a salute,” he said, thumping that fist against Scott’s chest. “And when you speak to me, you salute.”

Scott was about as close to openly gaping as she thought he’d ever been.

Meoraq released his wrist and got a fisthold in his hair again, pushing Scott’s head down and holding it there. “When I speak to you,” he said, “you bend your neck in respect.”

Scott still said nothing, but he was breathing pretty hard.

Meoraq released him and stepped back. “We will practice once, because this is new to you. Break your tent and make the other humans ready to travel.”

Scott kept his head down and lifted his fist slowly to his chest.

“Fair for a first effort. Now hear me, S’kot. These men are born under the Blade as well and you owe them the same respect. You do not speak to them unless they address you first or unless you have something damned important to say. Am I heard?”

“Yes,” said Scott, glaring at the ground. He touched his chest again.

“You do not walk in the shadow of my House, human. You are a burden I endure. Do not interrupt me for any reason. Do not give orders in my camp to anyone. Do not take what you are not offered. Do not offend me, S’kot. You have none of my forgiveness. Do you mark?”

“Yes.”

“Good. So. To be clear. When you speak to me, you speak with respect. When you speak to my brothers under the Blade, you speak with respect. And when you speak to her—” Meoraq pointed at Amber without looking at her, shoving his snout kissing-close to Scott’s face. “—I cut your fucking head off.”

How horrible did a person have to be when hearing something like that made her feel a fluttering of hope? Amber rubbed her eyes and looked at her knees some more.

Scott must have saluted even though he didn’t say anything because Meoraq said, “Good. This is the last time we have this conversation, human. Get moving. We eat as we walk.”

And that was all. Meoraq crossed the camp and took his own tent down. Eric and Dag went over to help Scott, who didn’t seem to know what to do. Crandall took Nicci by the arm and led her a little ways off to whisper at her. The other humans huddled up and just tried to stay out of everyone’s way, the same as the lizardladies were doing on the other side of their dead fire.

Amber sat, alternately rubbing her stomach and her eyes, and finally got up. She headed for Xzem, because she couldn’t think of anyone but the baby who’d want to be with her after that, but she’d only taken a few steps when Nicci caught at her.

“Come on,” she said, turning Amber around and taking her by the hand. “Let’s go pee while we still can.”

Meoraq glared at them as he dismantled his tent poles, then used one of them to point. “No further than the ravine. Go and come back.”

Nicci showed him a salute. After a moment, so did Amber.

Meoraq, bending to pick up another pole, straightened up to give her a second look. “Don’t do that,” he said and went back to work.

They walked to the ravine, hand in hand. The wind was warm and light. It was about as sunny as it ever got on this planet, which meant that it was visible as a smudgy disc behind the clouds. A nice day.

They peed, then climbed back to the top of the ravine and sat down. “Funny how girls can never go to the bathroom alone,” said Nicci, plucking absently at blades of grass.

“What did Crandall want you to tell me?”

“He wanted to know if you were pregnant.”

“Oh for God’s sake.”

“Are you?”

“Is that supposed to be a joke?”

Nicci shrugged and tossed some grass away. There wasn’t enough wind to carry it far. Most of it landed on her leg.

“It isn’t funny,” said Amber.

“I told him you throw up a lot when you get upset. At least you used to.”

It was Amber’s turn to pick at the grass. “I didn’t know you knew that. Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

“You don’t like it when people think you have…you know.”

“Problems?” Amber offered with a listless smile.

“Feelings.”

That was ugly. The wind stayed warm.

“I used to figure that if you were bulimic, you’d be losing weight,” Nicci said after a little time had stretched itself out to the snapping point. “But you weren’t, so I figured you were fine. And then, at the end, when you were losing weight…I just didn’t care that much. Sorry.”

“It’s okay.” She wasn’t sure it was.

The walls of the windbreak were coming down. Nicci twisted around to watch, plucking more grass. “Mom used to get morning-sick,” she said.

“Yeah, I know.” Most of the time, it was how she knew to go to the aborters.

“So did I.”

Amber closed her eyes and pressed at them.

“Want to see where they took it out?”

She didn’t, but Nicci leaned back and opened up her tunic to show the raised pink dash of the scar over her belly. It was surprisingly neat.

“They had something so I didn’t feel it,” Nicci said, rubbing at it. “And it kept me pretty high afterwards, too. It was nice, while it lasted. I don’t know how they knew I was pregnant. I wasn’t showing. But I guess they were doing these exams almost every day…and they’re not, you know, cavemen. They know what they’re doing. It’s amazing, really, what they can do without a real hospital. But when you stop and think about it…scalpels and needles and things…none of those are machines. Anyway, I guess they might have heard the heartbeat or something. I don’t know.”

“I’m so sorry, Nicci.”

“I’m not. I didn’t want it. It was one of them.”

Amber watched her little sister close her tunic and tie up her belt again, trying to make that make some kind of sense. “What do you mean?” she asked at last. “That…That it would turn out like…like Scott?”

“That would be pretty bad, too,” Nicci agreed with another careless shrug. “But I mean it was one of them. One of the dumaqs.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Whatever. I saw it come out of me. I know what it was.”

“But…But they’re aliens!”

Nicci picked some more grass and dropped it.

“It’s not possible!” Amber said, louder.

“Commander Scott said it was probably the Vaccine.”

“What?”

“It mutates, remember? So that we don’t catch any alien viruses. We just sat there in the Sleeper for God knows how many years, soaking in that Vaccine, letting it change…whatever it felt like changing. You know the only thing that stops us from catching pregnant from any old…you know? Stuff? It’s that our bodies don’t know what it is, so it doesn’t take. Everything has to match up, you know? All these, I don’t know, millions and millions of connections.”

“But—”

“But we had the Vaccine,” said Nicci in a thoughtful way, “and here’s what I think. You know how regular vaccines work, right? They’re little teeny tiny pieces of the virus that makes you sick, just enough so that you make the, I don’t know, the anti-virus. But our Vaccine works on all of them. How is that possible, Amber? You went to the seminars. You remember all this. How can one shot be made up of billions and billions of different diseases, even alien ones?”

“Because it…it changes,” said Amber. “It finds the bug and it copies it so we can make our own cure before we ever get sick.”

“Right,” said Nicci, nodding. “It finds the bug. And it copies it. It takes our cells, with our DNA, and it changes them.”

Amber stared at her.

“Well…every new drug has unexpected side-effects, right? Headaches. Dizziness. Insomnia.” Nicci looked back into the sky to watch the sun climb higher. “Ours just may cause lizard-babies.”

Zhuqa. Zhuqa, over and over. It was impossible and she didn’t believe it and she didn’t care what Nicci thought or what she said she’d seen, but oh God, not with Zhuqa.

She looked back and saw Meoraq standing at the edge of camp with his arms folded, watching them while all the other lizardmen rolled the windbreak into bundles and shouldered supplies. Her heart ached once, as sharply as a stabbing, and then bled down into her belly.

‘He is never going to want to touch me again,’ thought Amber, almost calmly.

Then she bent over without warning and threw up again.

“Yeah,” said Nicci, watching her. “You’re just upset. That’s what I told Mr. Crandall. Come on. We’d better go.”             

 

* * *
 

They walked the day out undisturbed either by men from Praxas or from Gann, not that there was much of a distinction. They had a stream to keep their flasks filled and good stony ground that would not show their tracks and always the cover of trees around them, so if that made a day good, it was a good day, but they made miserable distance.

Onahi’s men marched in pairs around the rest, relieving Meoraq’s burden considerably as he watched for the ambush that never came. The women were slow, still fearful of the open wilds and unused to so much walking, but they were obedient and not difficult to manage even so. The humans, now. Oh, the humans…

They walked as if they had only just learned how that morning, constantly staggering and catching at one another, constantly out of breath, constantly whining at his back. Meoraq wasn’t completely insensitive to their condition. He knew they had been penned all winter, ill-fed and ill-used. He knew they were trying. He let them rest an hour for nearly every hour walked and never said a word against it. Some muttered thanks, but not many. Some clustered around Scott and whispered, but not all. It did his bitter heart good to see that the polish was finally dimming on that gilded lump of ghet-shit, but he could still feel color itching in his throat all that interminable day.

So he halted them in the early evening after traveling less than two spans—less a call for camp than a cry of surrender—with plenty of good hours left in the day to hunt or patrol or just pray before night truly fell. The walls went up. Fires were lit. The women went to work brewing tea and heating cold kipwe, all but Xzem, who knelt with Amber in the mouth of a tent with the infant singing in her arms and Nicci close by to watch. Most of the humans rested by their fool abbot, but Eric went out to gather deadfall for the fires and Dag actually helped the women with the cooking.

Around the small camp, Onahi’s men—now men under Uyane, he supposed—kept watch. Their quiet talk eased him; not their words, which were exactly the sort of low garrison-talk one would expect, but just their speech. Dumaqi in male voices, relaxed and uncomplicated, with meanings he didn’t have to guess at. He didn’t think he was lonely and wouldn’t have believed it if someone told him he was, but the pleasure that came just to listen was almost enough to take even the ugliness of Praxas from his heart. How much better would it be, he wondered, to be home again in Xeqor, to hear not only familiar words but familiar voices? See his brothers’ faces? Sleep in his own bed?

He was ready, he realized. The fate that had been so damning when he first confronted it now seemed to him as welcome as Sheul’s own Halls. Home. Family. Rest.

Amber.

And there his gaze lay for some time, upon his wife and the infant she held to her heart. She sensed it, looked up. Their eyes met and Sheul’s fires, cooled but never entirely gone, surged at once to greater life.

Meoraq turned away and beckoned Onahi to him. He had to do it twice; the other man’s attention had been fixed and somewhat glazed upon Xzem. “Call your sentries in,” he ordered. “I want a private hour with my woman. No one is to leave this camp for any reason until my return.”

“I mark.” Onahi’s eyes traveled the camp, counting his men…but came back to Xzem. And lingered.

“These are women of my House,” Meoraq reminded him, trying not to sound as if he were also warning him.

“I will not dishonor your camp, sir.”

Meoraq grunted, now studying Onahi instead of Amber. The fires were insistent, but a Sheulek was the master of every impulse, even that one. “Have you seen women before?” he asked bluntly.

“At a distance.” Onahi managed with effort to look at Meoraq. “But no mother…apart from my own.” He hesitated, clearly battling the urge to speak further, and ultimately defeated by it. “I have gone to Gann, sir. I submit myself to your judgment.”

Meoraq’s spines snapped up. “Eh?”

“I have gone to Gann,” Onahi said again, his words all but bleeding in the air. “I have tried to pray. I have begged our Father’s forgiveness all this day and all last night, but I…”

Meoraq waited, beginning to feel restless now that the first astonishment of this incredible confession was fading. The fires in his belly burned and Amber was watching him. “You?” he prompted impatiently.

“It is unforgiveable to lie with a milking mother,” Onahi said and seemed to break. Without moving, his strained body became soft as clay. “It is unforgiveable. The taint of my city is on me. I must submit to your sword.”

Meoraq took a moment to puzzle this out. “You want a woman,” he said at last.

Onahi closed his eyes.

So did Meoraq, before someone could see him rolling them. He rubbed at his brow-ridges, took six breaths (without sighing and that was nearly an ordeal in itself), and said, “I do not see Gann’s hand on you, watchman. It is the fires of our Father you feel. Take a woman.”

“It is unforgiveable—”

“Take another woman.” Meoraq beckoned to his own and started to turn away. Sheul’s hand fell on him at once; he turned back and yes, Onahi was staring at Xzem.

There was something in this, he was certain, something he was meant to see…but whatever it was, it would have to wait. Intellectually, he knew no man had ever died of lust, but his belly felt as if it were filled with molten lead and his thoughts had begun to slip toward the same killing black that took him in the arena. If he did not take his woman soon, he thought it very likely that Sheul would take her in his stead. As for Onahi—

“Go to my tent,” Meoraq ordered. “Make your prayers and be prepared to submit to my judgment upon my return.”

Onahi saluted and went without question as Amber came near, looking back over her shoulder either at the baby or at Nicci. “I’m really worried—” she began.

“Come with me,” he said and left the camp.

Onahi’s watchmen raised their fists as he passed by, but he was beyond acknowledging them. He strode swiftly out between the walls and as soon as Amber had joined him, he took her roughly by the arm and walked as far as he could stand to go. He refused to rut with his woman on the ground where anyone could hear them. He could see a sturdy-looking tree twenty paces away, maybe thirty; it may as well be a thousand.

“Wait,” said Amber, pulling at him.

He grunted and kept going, dragging her with him, seeing nothing but that tree.

“I have to talk to you! Damn it!” And with a mighty yank, her hand was gone from his grip. “This is important!”

He turned on her, hearing the hiss that spat out of his throat, but unable to feel even a spark of shame for it. She was his woman, his wife! Why could she not give him her obedience for one fucking day?

Blackness took him for a heartbeat, no longer, but when it faded, he had his hand on her throat and his face biting-close to hers. Confusion swelled, overshadowing rage but not killing it. He shut his mouth, leaned back, and finally released her.

She stared at him, trembling and furious even with tears welling in her eyes. It made him think of Nicci, which made him think of the watchman in Praxas fucking her through the cage, which made him think of the tree he may not reach tonight. He had to turn around, facing into the chill spring wind, and took several minutes to breathe himself calm. One for the Prophet…two for his Brunt…three for Uyane…

He was Uyane.

“Speak,” he said at last.

“Aren’t you going to look at me?”

“No.”

There was quiet at his back. He did not hear her crying, not until she spoke again. The tears were in her voice and they cut at him, but he did not look at her.

“You have to get the baby out of here. This is taking too long and it’s getting weaker.”

“The humans are at their limits. They can go no faster.”

“Then you have to leave us behind.”

Us, she said.

“It’s too cold,” Amber said. “We barely got anywhere today and I know it’s our fault—”

Our.

“—but I can’t make us go any faster and you can take that baby to Chalh.”

“No.”

“I heard those other guys talking. Even they know it’s going to die if…It’s just a baby!” she burst out. He could hear her slapping at her face, punishing the eyes that betrayed her with tears. “How can you not care about that? You said you forgave everyone! Didn’t you mean it?”

He glanced at her, but his troubled thoughts turned to flame and he faced back into the wind at once. “It is not for me to forgive the children born to Gann.”

“I don’t care whose it is!” she sobbed. “It’s just a baby! You can’t let it die because it’s Zhuqa’s! That’s not its fault! God, Meoraq, look around you! How can you even think of letting it die? In a world where so many of you have died, you should be doing everything you can to save it just because it’s alive!”

The words stabbed him twice—once for their edge alone and once because she believed them. It didn’t matter to her that the child was sired of her enemy by a slave. She saw only an innocent life, and where the right was hers to end it out of vengeance, she wept because she could not save it.

‘Yes, my Father,’ thought Meoraq, once more in the tribune hall at Tothax with the daughter of Lord Saluuk weeping at his feet. ‘I hear you.’

And he was ashamed.

“I will send it and the others on with Onahi in the morning,” he said at last, but the words were ash in his throat. Onahi may yet have kin in Chalh, but the gates would never open to a man who had ended his time at Praxas as barracks-ward, a man who came with a procession of fatherless women, unhooded, unveiled. It would be a Sheulek’s command alone that could open those gates and win welcome.

Her hand stole in to touch him—that fearless hand—weakly gripping at his arm just below his sabk. “Please look at me.”

He tried, but her tearful face inspired only greater heat and furious urgency in his belly, and that was obscene to feel when he knew a life waited on his judgment. He stepped away from her, clapping a hand to his throat to try and cool the color rising there. “I can’t,” he said. “Leave me. I have to pray.”

She did not. She stood silent at his back as he forced himself to kneel and, as he was taking only the second of his first six breaths, suddenly her hand came out of the wind and slapped him in the head.

“Are you breaking up with me?” she shouted, sobbing so explosively that she could hardly breathe. “Because if that’s wuh-what this is, I can tuh-take it! But don’t you may-ake me fucking wuh-wuh-wait for it!”

“What are you talking about? What’s broken? What—”

And then he thought he understood.

“Do you think I’m putting you aside?” he asked incredulously while his belly groaned and his loin-plate strained. “Why would you even think that, woman?”

“Gee, I don’t know,” she said, trying to sneer through her tears and succeeding only in sounding more pathetic. “You won’t touch me. You won’t look at me. You barely even talk to me and you’re always angry when you do!”

“I’m not angry.” His hand stole down to check the fit of his loin plate. He coughed out a bitter laugh, muttering, “I’m the furthest thing there is from angry,” but it didn’t feel true. The idea that Gann’s loathsome hand was on him came creeping in, as it had so often during these last days and burning nights—that he had breathed it in like a sickness somewhere in the raider’s camp or that it had rubbed off from the flesh of all these damned women…but not from Amber. Never from his Amber. Sheul could not give her back to him only to see her and him both tainted beyond redeeming.

“I’m not angry,” he said again, gazing into the darkening sky. “I just need time.”

“Time for what? Is it…Is it because I was one of them?”

That made no sense to him no matter how many times he turned over her odd human words. “One of what?” he asked cautiously.

She glared at him, flushed and trembling and miserable, and suddenly shouted, “A slave! Because I was their slave—his slave—and you’ve got a lot of goddamned nerve breaking up with me for that, you scaly son of a bitch!” The last words degenerated into fresh tears. She clapped her hands over her face and choked on them.

“You were never a slave. You were always mine! You are still mine!” He caught her wrists and forced them down, forced her to look at him through the wet shine of her tears. “Sheul Himself gave you to me and what He has bound, nothing breaks! How do you mark me, woman?”

She sobbed, if possible, harder.

“I will have an answer,” said Meoraq, beginning to be alarmed.

“You don’t mean it!”

“Stop telling me what I mean!” he snapped. “You’re always doing that and it’s infuriating!”

“You don’t!” she shouted. “You told everyone out there you forgave them! You told me there was no sin in conquest, but that’s still what you see when you look at them! That’s what you see when you look at me!”

He recoiled. “I do not,” he said, but it was only a half-truth and the Sheulek in him knew it.

“Then tell me that baby deserves to live! Tell me it doesn’t matter who its father was! Tell me you think Xzem is a good mother!”

He looked at her, and just as her eyes welled up with fresh anguish, he said, “Truth.”

She blinked, knocking tears loose, but not sobbing them out. “Huh?”

“Truth,” he said again, now frowning.

They stared at each other as the wind blew between them.

“You don’t believe it,” she said again, but timidly now.

“I don’t have to. I hear your words. I judge them truth. If I struggle with acceptance, that is my failing. I will have to pray about that.” He braced himself and gave her a tap, just the backs of his knuckles to the side of her arm, and still almost more than he could stand. “But you are still mine. I never questioned that.”

She looked away. “It won’t ever be the same.”

“As what?” Meoraq asked. “As life before my father’s death? Before you sailed your ship? I don’t want the same life, damn it, I want this one!”

She sniffled and rubbed her face. He couldn’t think of anything better to convince her and couldn’t keep looking at her, so he faced into the wind again.

“Are you mad at me?” she asked in a small voice.

“A little,” he admitted, and rubbed hard at the end of his snout. “Do you want to be broken from me? Is that what this is about? Because you don’t get that!”

“No!”

“Is it because I left you? Because I wasn’t there and you were…taken…”

“We can’t be together all the time. No, Meoraq, that was just…” She paused and uttered a short, tearful laugh. “I was going to say dumb luck, but you don’t believe in that. I guess you’d say it was God’s will.”

Meoraq thought about that.

“Perhaps it was,” he said slowly. “For Xzem’s sake. For Nali’s. For Onahi and his men. For N’ki. Even…for S’kot. I hadn’t thought of it that way…”

But he did now, thinking of all the wooded hills of Gedai and how easily he might have walked through them and on to Xi’Matezh, never suspecting the city of Praxas with its caged humans even existed. He had been meant to find them, to save them. No matter his personal feelings, God had given them a new chance at life.

Meoraq rubbed at his snout again. “Xzem…does seem to be a good mother.”

“She is. She really is.” Amber sighed. “And I want her to have the baby. I know she can take care of it better than me, okay, I know that. I just…worry about who’s going to take care of her, you know? But I’ve seen Onahi with her and if they’re not shacking up yet, they will be by the time you get to Chalh.”

Meoraq grunted, now thinking of Onahi meditating in his tent, patiently awaiting death at a Sheulek’s hand for his perceived corruption. And who was Meoraq to say it was not so? However good the man might seem, it was unforgiveable to lie with a milking mother. Was it a greater sin to end the man now, while he still had some chance of finding peace in Sheul’s Halls, or to wait until the unforgiveable act had occurred? The temptations of Gann were no easy ordeal (his constrained cock throbbed abysmally, sunk in fire, bruising the edges of his slit, and he was never going to have Amber against that fucking tree).

But wait…

It was unforgiveable to lie with a milking mother…unless the man had married her.

And suddenly Meoraq realized what had been before his damned eyes since leaving Praxas: There were six women in his care, five and Xzem, and six watchmen, five and Onahi.

“That’s it,” he said.

“Huh?”

“I’ll marry them.”

“Who?”

“Onahi and Xzem. I’ll marry them. I’ll marry all of them!”

Amber stared at him, not in awe, but in horror. “You can’t do that!”

“Of course I can. And why are you looking at me like that?” he asked testily. “If I presented them at the gates of Chalh as fatherless women, they’d never be admitted. I will give them husbands and I will name those men soldiers under Uyane. There has to be a House Uyane in Chalh and its steward will have to take them in when I command it as Uyane of Xeqor.”

“Meoraq, you can’t! You’re just…passing them out. You’re not even discussing it with them first. It’s like they’re not even people to you, just…”

“Problems,” said Meoraq.

“I was going to say ‘things’.” She looked at him and just as swiftly looked away. “Are we all that way to you? Just problems you need to solve?”

“In the wildlands,” said Meoraq bluntly. “Yes.”

“Even me?”

“You?” He snorted again and rubbed at his brow-ridges. “No. There is no solving you, Soft-Skin. You are my problem forever.” And before she could turn away, he said, “I am yours. And you will never solve me either, but at least you are trying. I will take the baby to Chalh.”

She scrubbed her arm across her face, erasing the last trace of her tears. “Tonight?”

The wind gusted. He looked up to watch the high branches come together and sway apart. “Yes. Come with me,” he said hopelessly.

“I can’t leave my sister,” she said. He could have said it with her if only his mouth could make the words. “And I can’t leave those idiots to fend for themselves. They’ve been prisoners so long…If anything happened, they’d be helpless.”

If anything happened…

She saw his face, read his eyes. “Yeah, I know. But I can take care of my people. And you can take care of yours.” She seemed to grope for something more comforting to tell him, but in the end, all she had was, “We’ll be waiting right here.”

“In easy distance of Praxas. And there are uncounted raiders left in the wildlands! How shall I stand before Sheul and tell Him I left you unguarded when He has only just given you back?”

“You can tell him I begged you. I’m begging you, Meoraq.”

He looked away.

“I’ll be all right,” said Amber.

“You cannot know that.”

“Some things you have to just take on faith.” She hesitated, then said, “Do you have to pray about it?”

He glanced up at the grey heavens where Sheul watched him, then bent his neck. “No. So be it. Don’t,” he said as she reached for him. “I can let you go, Soft-Skin, but only if I do not hold you first. Go. Please.”

She took one step away and there watched him while he took six breaths and six more. Then, finally, she left him.

Meoraq fought through three more slow-counts, keeping the Prophet’s name and Sheul’s holy Word close against his heart until the fires subsided. The rotten-tooth ache remained; he just knew he was bruising something down there. Cooled, if not at peace, he returned to his camp. He took Onahi, visibly braced for death, out of his tent and bound him to Xzem with a few terse words. He left the two of them staring at each other and went swiftly through the rest of them, matching man to wife without really looking at either of them and especially without looking at Amber. Then, before he could change his mind, he struck two of the tents, packed a portion of the kipwe, and loaded one of the litters. As the humans were beginning their first alarmed outcries, he gave the order that moved them on to Chalh.

Amber followed him as far as the walls, but no further. He left her there without a word (his throat was tight as Gann’s fist), but managed only six steps before he halted.

He turned around.

He walked back to her, seized her by the chin, pressed his unfeeling mouth to hers and then scraped the end of his snout hard along her throat, filling his aching head with her scent, her taste, her soul.

She unclipped the kzung from his belt and held it in her hand, searching his eyes. She didn’t speak either.

He stepped back, turned away. He took a breath (one for the Prophet) and walked on.

 

3

 

Unencumbered by humans, the journey to Chalh lasted only six days, the latter half on a good road. They were first hailed easily five spans from the city and escorted the rest of the way by three sentries in gilded uniforms. If that were not warning enough of Chalh’s nature, the walls of the city were trimmed in gold, or at least, gold paint, and a statue of the Prophet had been positioned over the gate, hands outstretched in benediction. The sleeves, Meoraq noted, were hollowed out, so as to pour hot oils or acids should any raider be fool enough to assault the first founding city of the Prophet.

“Where are the other five?” Meoraq asked, making half a joke in an attempt to appear patient while the gatekeeper meticulously checked his book of Houses.

The gatekeeper, having no sense of humor, replied, “Each has their own gate, sir. If you wish to be admitted through Gate Uyane, I can make those arrangements.”

Meoraq rolled his eyes discreetly. “That won’t be necessary.”

The gatekeeper continued his inspection with the same excruciating attention to detail, came to the conclusion that Meoraq was in truth who he claimed to be, and snapped his book shut. “It is Uyane before me,” he announced. “If it is your intention to seize the city of Chalh, you will have to wait in the arena hold for the Sheulek in residence to meet with you.”

“I am here to see my kin. My conquest shall be limited to that House.”

“Do you wish me to send for one of Uyane’s carriages?”

“Just a public carriage will do.” Meoraq tapped pointedly at the gate.

“Do you prefer to go under your House’s standard?”

“I would prefer to be behind walls before the damned year is out!”

The gatekeeper bowed and unlocked the gate. “If I can be of service—”

“Carriages for myself and my party, and an usher to take us immediately to House Uyane,” interrupted Meoraq, waving his people inside.

“It may take some time to locate a veiled carriage suitable to transport your, ah, women. Perhaps you would like to take the rooftop while you wait? The barracks of Lashraq’s Gate has an excellent meditation garden.”

“I must seem tense,” Meoraq remarked, but Amber wasn’t there to tell him he was, in fact, acting like a scaly son of a bitch and no one else was about to argue or, worse, agree. “Any carriage will do,” he said, looking back out into the open wilds, thinking of Amber. “Just fetch a few blankets and we’ll cover the windows.”

“My apologies, honored one, we have no blankets in Uyane’s colors.”

“Cover them in grain-sacks then! I don’t care! Great Sheul, O my Father, give me patience! And you, just give me a damned carriage!”

The gatekeeper bowed and locked the door before wandering unhurriedly away. And really, what could Meoraq do about it? It wasn’t as if he could just march all these unveiled women across the city on foot.

So he waited. The carriages eventually came, along with drivers and ushers and window covers emblazoned with the standard of the city. Meoraq put the women in one, the soldiers in the other, and himself alone in the last. The boy who held the carriage door passed him a bottle of cool tea before closing it. The driver leaned in through the window as Meoraq plucked idly at the cap and passed him a flask of hot nai.

“Keep it,” the driver grunted as Meoraq took his first swallow. “I see you’ve not got one, and it’s a hard lack on a long journey.”

Meoraq lowered the flask, staring.

The driver shut the window and snapped the tethers. Bulls bellowed. The carriage rolled on.

He knew what the days of hard travel had done to his appearance, let alone the battle at the raider’s nest, the mountain crossing, and all the days that had gone before. Meoraq had been fully prepared to recite his lineage, show his signet, and perhaps even battle their champion to prove his kinship, but he did not expect the gates of Uyane to open on the steward himself.

Meoraq knew at first sighting this was no toy-lord, no high-born diplomat with a stable of Sheulteb to do his fighting for him, but a Sheulek in his retirement. He dressed not in lordly robes, but in plain leather breeches with a warrior’s harness snug over his open tunic, displaying his scarred chest and hard belly with careless indifference. The bone hilt that cased the ancient blade hanging around his neck stood out like lightning over his scales, polished by use and yellowed with age.

They eyed each other, and then Meoraq took the first step forward and boldly raised his hand. “I come to you as kin and conqueror,” he began. “Your House stands in the shadow of—”

Lord Uyane let out a rude, barking laugh. “By Gann’s crooked cock, you even sound like him.”

And before Meoraq had could even think of how to react, the steward stood aside, already beckoning to a small crowd of sleepy-eyed boys. Onahi and the other men of Praxas, along with their nervous women, were led away to be billeted and Meoraq was taken to the warden’s office to sign them all over into Uyane-Chalh’s garrison. As swiftly as this was accomplished, however, an usher from the governor still managed to be waiting before they were through, and Meoraq spent the next two hours reporting to Chalh’s leaders.

It should not have taken so long, but Praxas had sent a messenger to warn against the ravings of the wildland-maddened Sheulek and even if they had not, Meoraq’s tale of men who sold their daughters to raiders and who kept scaleless people in cages was too fantastic to be believed. Meoraq answered their questions without embellishment, but when they began to repeat themselves, and worse, to ask if he were sure he had seen this or if he could clearly recall that, his temper began to fray. Ultimately, he was compelled to challenge them all for the truth, and after some muttered discussion, the governor sent down not one but all three of his Sheulteb to meet him. Meoraq was burning almost as soon as he crossed the threshold into the arena, and although he knew none of it, he supposed Sheul must have made an impressive showing in the battle that followed because the first thing he heard as he came slowly out of the black was the governor’s reedy voice ordering Praxas to be struck from the roster of cities under Sheul and all their people to be turned back from this hour onward as children of Gann. So that was done. Meoraq refused the girl the governor presented and left the arena hold at once, still spattered with the blood of three good men.

But it had been many days of travel, a battle, a mountain crossing, and it caught up to him at last. His desire to see Amber safely within his reach once more could not take the weight from his weary clay and when Uyane’s usher met him at the governor’s gates to escort him back to that House, he went.

The boy brought Meoraq to the vacant room of the steward’s own eldest son, where a warrior’s meal of cold meat and fat-toasted bread awaited him. As he struggled to stay awake long enough to eat it, a knock sounded.

It was Lord Uyane, accompanied by two servants, both carrying steaming ewers. Meoraq’s first impulse was to turn them all away, but remembering that he would be sleeping in another man’s cupboard and it might be a kind gesture not to cake it in the grime of an old trek through the wildlands and a fresh fight in the arena, Meoraq gave humble thanks and stood aside.

The servants brought a bath out from a closet and filled it, then bared their faces, demurely averting their eyes as they awaited his selection.

“Understand that I am not in the habit of offering mere servants to the Sheulek I am honored to receive,” Lord Uyane remarked, watching Meoraq pointedly resume his meal. “But as we share blood, any kin of mine is kin of yours.”

“Understood and forgiven.”

“I suppose I should offer my wife,” the steward continued, casually folding his arms and laying his fingertips across the hilts of his sabks. “But she’s not feeling well tonight.”

“My prayers for her recovery,” said Meoraq.

The steward watched him eat. The servants glanced at one another. One of them fidgeted briefly with her sleeve.

“How long have you been traveling?” the steward asked suddenly.

The question caught him by surprise. He had to think about it. “I left the walls of Tothax mid-autumn…after the gruu harvest,” he said, recalling the last judgment he’d made there. Lord Arug and his curse of daughters. And Shuiv, another good man with a blade broken under Meoraq’s heel. “Not long after the night of the burning tower, if you heard of that here.”

“We heard. I admit I heard it for a child’s knee-time tale, but I believe it better than I believe a man could walk away a quarter of the year and not want a woman.”

Meoraq glanced at the servants. They dipped their necks in unison and let out twin mewls. He had to suppress a shudder as he turned back to his meal. “I thank you for your consideration, steward, but I would make poor company tonight.”

Lord Uyane’s spines twitched forward. He looked at the servants and then at Meoraq again. “Company?” he echoed. “If it’s company you’d rather have, I could set out a game of Crown-Me or read the Word with you, but unless you make it a Sheulek’s command, I’ll be damned if I bathe you.”

It wasn’t worth the explanation. “You, then,” said Meoraq, waving at the girl on the left.

At Lord Uyane’s nod, the other girl hooded herself and took Meoraq’s boots away with her to be cleaned. The steward remained, unabashedly watching as Meoraq unbuckled his harness. “Have you any other requests of me, honored one?” he asked, and immediately snorted and muttered, “Honored one. To think I’ve lived so long as to give Razi’s sprat my obedience. You are the very image of him, you know.”

“How did you know him?” Meoraq asked, allowing the servant to finish undressing him.

“He came crawling over the mountains in his first striding years and stayed the winter with us. New Sheulek, eh? They want to see the sun rise over the edge of the world and drink the waters that come washing in from whatever lies beyond. Never understood that,” he added. “The sun is the sun no matter where it rises and that water tastes like fish fuck in it. You look a little old for that nonsense, yourself. Pilgrimage?”

“Yes.”

“To Xi’Matezh? What else is out here?” he asked wryly at Meoraq’s startled glance. “They tell me Gedai used to be the center of the world in the age before the Fall. Ha. Nothing out here now but rock and ruins. And the ocean, I suppose. Where the fish fuck. I could tell you the way to the temple easily enough,” he went on. “There’s no road as roads are reckoned, but there’s a broad enough footpath most of the way and a few underlodges for pilgrims to take a night’s ease. I try to make the walk myself once a year. Usually try to time it with the Festival of the Fifth Light so I don’t have to listen to all those fucking bells.”

“Have you ever seen the doors?”

“You mean, have I seen them open? Not for me and not for your father, but I know they do. Happened right in front of me once.”

Meoraq’s spines swept forward and he sat up fast, splashing water over the sides of the bath.

The steward glanced down, scratching his toes through the spreading puddle on his tiles. “I don’t like to think of it, but it’s truth. I’d been there most of the day and I’d have sworn to our true Father’s face that I was alone the whole time, for I never heard a sound inside, but then the doors opened. A man came out. Sheulek. I didn’t know him. He looked…” The steward’s gaze shifted to the servant, who was trying very hard to be invisible as she went about her duties despite what must be very exciting talk to one of her kind. “He looked like a dead man,” he said finally. “And he looked at me like I was a dead man.”

Meoraq felt the servant shiver a little as she scrubbed his back.

“I was burning a candle there. Nothing fancy, just a sign to the Six. Most do. He looked at it and he looked at me. Then he started walking. He took his blades off—his sabks, I mean—and he broke one and stabbed the other through the Prophet’s mark without ever breaking stride. He walked through the doors and out of the shrine and then he walked himself right off the edge of the world. There’s a drop, you know, and the rocks where the ocean rolls in. He never said a word, never took a breath to brace himself. He went over like it was what Sheul told him to do.”

Amber’s voice, like a chill breeze through a warm room: If you jump off a cliff, God doesn’t catch you.

“Never said a word,” the steward said again, rubbing at the side of his throat with one rough thumb. “To say truth, that was the last time I went in as far as God’s doors, but I keep going back. How long will you be staying with us, honored one?”

“Just the night.”

“I’ll freshen your pack then. Have you any special requests of my provisioner?”

“No…Wait. A set of women’s clothing. Her size is near enough,” he said, gesturing up at the servant.

Lord Uyane’s spines twitched again, but, “Have you a preference as to color?” was all he said.

Meoraq didn’t, but before he could say so, he found himself thinking of Amber’s eyes. “Something green. With slippers. Eh, best make it boots. And…” What else did women like? “A girdle. Something…pretty.”

“It shall be do—” He broke off with a sigh and rubbed his brow-ridges, then slapped his thigh and said, “I can’t pretend I’m not intrigued. You’ve got a woman with you? Ha! Wouldn’t that have made some long walks shorter back in my striding days?”

“My wife,” said Meoraq, feeling as though he’d ought to say something in Amber’s defense.

“Well send her in, for our Father’s sake! My Nraqi would love to see a fresh face, if only for the night. She’s not fevered or anything catching, just thin-blooded and slow to come out of winter’s grip.”

“She stayed behind with her people so that I could travel more quickly. There was an infant among my camp and she was concerned that it should come out of the wildlands as soon as possible.”

The steward’s spines flicked as he smiled. “Fine woman. I’ll let Nraqi pick a few things out for her. She knows more about pretty things than I do. Sylseth, make yourself available for sizing when the Sheulek is done with you.”

“Yes, lord.”

The steward left them alone at last and Meoraq leaned back and let the girl bathe him. It was his first real bath since Tothax, and he enjoyed it but did not prolong it even for his pleasure. The girl was pleasing also, but mewled and bowed and proved herself so, well, grotesquely feminine that what arousal she inspired in him soon withered. It was Amber he wanted…and Amber was worth waiting for. Cleaned, dried and oiled, he dismissed her untouched and put himself to bed.

 

* * *

 

He slept like a stone, yet woke far too early, so that when the boy came trotting in to ring the daylight bells in House Uyane’s foyer, Meoraq was there to see it. He had been waiting as deferentially as was possible when lurking in a relative’s foyer, but as soon as dawn’s hour had been rung, he put a blunt end to courtesy and sent the boy to find him an usher out of the city.

Shortly afterward, as Meoraq stared broodingly at the tilework on the ceiling in an effort not to pace, Lord Uyane himself arrived to see him off. He brought with him a few servants to manage Meoraq’s provisions and a veiled woman walking slow at his side. She averted her eyes and mewled as her husband made the necessary introductions, then raised her open hands and called him kin and made all the proper obedience a wife was expected to show to the conqueror of her husband’s holdings, and then she reached right out and caught at Meoraq’s sleeve. “My Lord says I mustn’t ask,” she began, dipping her head prettily even as Uyane rolled his eyes and strolled away to inspect the bell-house. “But if you have no will in the matter, perhaps your wife might stay with me a small time while you make what remains of your journey? It is not so very far to Xi’Matezh, I know, but women do not measure distance or hardship as men do. We are very weak and silly things, sir, and a small time here among her kin would be a pretty present to grant her before she makes the terrible journey to Xeqor.”

“Wife,” murmured Uyane.

“I do not say that Xeqor is terrible,” she hastened to assure Meoraq. “Even here in sacred Chalh, Xeqor is known as one of Sheul’s brightest lamps, but even one hour in the wildlands is a terrible thing to a woman. Oh, please send her to me, sir! She shall be my daughter while she is here and have a mother’s love once more, if only for a few days. How find you?”

Flustered, Meoraq looked at Lord Uyane, but he was no help at all, deep in the study of the bells so that he would not have to notice his wife’s scandalous behavior.

Which was certainly far less scandalous than spear-hunting or wearing pants or calling her man a scaly son of a bitch or any of the myriad scandalous things that Amber did. All at once, Meoraq felt a momentary divide of sight: he saw the woman clinging on his sleeve and looking at him with those shy, earnest eyes the way he would have seen her a year ago, as a grossly unmannered embarrassment, and he saw her as she surely was, a lonely woman bored with lying around and convalescing, who would risk even her husband’s displeasure for a chance to see a new face and hear talk of the greater world beyond these walls. Just a lonely woman, who didn’t mind mewling at a stranger or calling herself weak and silly if it meant that, believing it, he might grant her just a few short days of fresh company. Amber’s company, even.

‘Perhaps they could go hunting,’ Meoraq thought, and laughed aloud.

Lord Uyane’s eyes were on him at once, narrow as a knife’s edge.

Meoraq put his hand over hers until she, with a sigh of defeat, removed it from his sleeve. He said, still smiling, “I do have a will in this matter, kinswife, and it is my will that the fierce woman who has dared as much as I to make this journey stand at my side when the doors of Xi’Matezh open. Yours is a kind offer, but I do decline.”

The woman gave obedience and retreated a few steps, enough to pick at one of the bundles carried by a stone-faced servant. “I set some things aside for her, although I had to guess at the fit,” she said, not quite pouting but near enough to it that her man sent her a censuring glance. “They’re all my own and not new, but in very good repair. I haven’t fit in this in ages,” she sighed, lifting out a richly embroidered girdle for a last wistful look. “And this…this is the cloak I myself wore when I came to Chalh to be married…and the crownet that went with it!” she exclaimed, holding it up to be admired. It was an uncommonly fine thing—a long strip of golden mesh meant to fit around a woman’s spine-ridge, with a clip on the end to keep a hood in place—although he doubted Amber would ever have any use for it. He thanked her anyway.

“Perhaps you will stop again on your return,” she said hopefully. “I could have more garments set aside and even have them altered for a better—oh! Oh, we could order a tailor in! Jaza!” She clasped her hands and sent a wide-eyed stare at her husband, her short spines quivering at their highest point.

He went back to looking at the bells, the coward.

“I haven’t had a gowning party since my little Semrrqi was a child,” the woman told Meoraq.

“She was twenty-two,” Lord Uyane remarked, scratching at the top frame of the bell-house and examining his fingertip.

“And a child.”

“The gown in question was for the wedding feast.”

“It was deep red all over,” the woman sighed. “With a white underdress and blackweave girdle and sleeves, all gilt with gold, and a hood to match. It took all day to make and we sat by the window for hours and ate little blue cakes.” She was quiet for a moment, her gaze far-off even as it rested on the crownet in her hands. “They were horrible cakes,” she said at last, dreamily. “I should very much like to have a gowning party again.”

“Wife,” Lord Uyane murmured again, just as indulgently as he had before.

“It isn’t the same when it’s just for me!” she insisted, then gave Meoraq an imploring stare. “Won’t you come to stay on your return, sir?”

“We may,” Meoraq said, because he could see no other way out of this house within the hour save to appear to consider. And knowing that Amber may indeed be amenable to a night or three out of the wildlands, he grudgingly added, “She will not be what you expect.”

“Oh yes, someone told me she didn’t have a proper face,” she said, waving one hand dismissively. At a sharp glance from her husband, she vaguely added, “I don’t recall who. Certainly none of the servants of this House would ever engage in gossip, but one…one hears things, you know. Through the wind-ways. One hears such dreadful gossip through the wind-ways. They let anyone at all wander out in the streets.”

Lord Uyane grunted and glared at her while she packed Amber’s things fastidiously away again and pretended not to notice.

“We may stop in,” Meoraq said, and this time, he meant it. “But now I will demand the gates open to me.”

“I have a carriage to take you as far as the Prophet’s Gate,” Lord Uyane said, opening the inner doors himself. “I’ll make you the offer of my table before you go, but I know you’ll refuse so I put a hot bit of something in your pack, there.”

Meoraq acknowledged this with a grunt, taking his pack and the second, holding Amber’s things. “Thank you.”

“Never heard thanks from a Sheulek before,” Uyane remarked, nodding at the watchmen outside who ran ahead to open the gates. “I’ll tell you something, son, which you’d find out on your own soon enough anyway. Women are like handfuls of sand. They all rub up under your scales now and then, but the finest ones do put a polish on a man. That’s far enough,” he said once they’d reached the other gate, and to the watchmen posted there—one of them, none other than Onahi—he brusquely added, “Leave us.”

Meoraq waited restlessly by the gate as the reception courtyard was cleared. Lord Uyane shut the inner doors, held his open hand on the latchplate a moment more, then turned around and faced him.

“I don’t listen at wind-ways,” he said. “I went to the governor’s seat and asked my questions there. Am I to understand that your woman is one of these…humans?”

“Yes.”

Uyane grunted and rubbed at his throat, inspecting the lamp that hung over Meoraq’s shoulder. “I saw a lot of things in my striding years that no other man would believe, and I think that may be the only reason I can believe what they told me you said about the creatures you brought with you out of Praxas. And it is speaking to you as the Sheulek I was that I ask you now to tell me His truth.” Uyane looked directly at him and leaned close. “If you do not, I will judge you for it.”

“I hear you,” Meoraq said mildly.

Uyane sent a swift, brooding glance over his shoulder at the sealed doors of his House…and above it at the vented wind-way. He took Meoraq by the shoulder, moved him right up against the gate and leaned in so close it put Meoraq uncomfortably in mind of humans kissing. In a low voice, low enough that a man could not overhear it if he were hanging out the nearest wind-way by his ankles, Uyane calmly said, “Are there others?”

It was not the question he expected. With the word ‘creatures’ spoken and the city of Praxas named, Meoraq had been preparing himself to make a defense of the humans as a true race of people and as children of Sheul, not this.

“There are a few,” he said, shrugging. “I’ll not call them untroublesome, but I know them and they are, for the moment, grateful so I can keep them easily in hand.”

“You do not mark me. You told the tribunal that these creatures came on a ship from another land. You may be able to keep your handful penned up and well-behaved all the rest of their lives, but I ask again, will there be more?”

“They didn’t intend to come here. That was Sheul’s will and if it is His will, there will be other ships.”

The steward of Uyane-Chalh uttered a caustic laugh and leaned back. “You’d best pray there are not, son. By your account, there are twelve of these things, these humans, and still the tribunal set three Sheulteb against you. If there were a thousand—ha! If there were even only fifty, you would see no end to battle, and while our Father moved in you in the arena, I do believe the tribunal’s men would be putting their blades in human necks just as fast as they could.”

“You don’t believe this.”

“Don’t I, eh?” Uyane eyed him, thinly smiling. “When even the true and natural children of Sheul are capable of such evil as you and I have seen, you can’t present the world with a real, breathing monster and expect it to be embraced.”

“They are people.”

“They may well be, but with no face, no scales, fur in thatches all over and Gann alone knows what else, they are monstrous people.” Uyane looked at him, head canted but spines all the way forward. “And you married one. Why?”

“I had to,” Meoraq said.

Lord Uyane snorted. “There had to be other ways to prove these things were children of Sheul. You’re a young man. You have the fame of your bloodline, the favor of God and the face of your father. Why bind yourself to a…a creature?”

“I had to,” Meoraq said again. “We were married before I even met her. We were married before I was ever born.”

Uyane took the tilt out of his stare and leaned back a little. The sense of judgment was again very strong, stronger even than it had been in the arena.

At the end of it, Uyane reached out and pressed his palm to Meoraq’s chest. Meoraq returned the touch. Their hearts came into rhythm.

“You’re a bit of a fool, but I’m proud to call you kin,” said Uyane, dropping his arm. “Bring her by, son. My Nraqi will probably chatter a hole in her scale-less head, but love her all the same. She hasn’t had anyone to coddle over in eight years. So.” He opened the gate and stood aside. The carriage was just without, two masked bulls harnessed and pecking at the street, the young boy who drove them waiting by the open door. “Go in the sight of Sheul and serve him well.”

“I release you, steward. Await my return and be ready to receive my wife.”

“It won’t be this easy when it’s your own House,” Uyane called as Meoraq boarded. “I hope you know that.”

“Then our Father has prepared me well,” Meoraq replied as the carriage lurched forward. “Nothing is ever easy with that woman, but the worst is behind us now.”

Rash words, but perhaps he could be forgiven for them. He was Sheulek. Not a prophet.

 

4

 

It was harder than she thought it would be, being left behind. Even at the worst of times, before they’d ever been physical, Meoraq had been an anchor to a sense of stability she found nowhere else on this world. Without him, weird noises in the night belonged to creatures without names and any plant she saw might be poisonous. Suddenly, Amber was lost again.

She wished Meoraq would get back or at least that she had some idea of when to expect him. She didn’t even have anything to do while she waited. Oh, there were always fires to tend and water to carry, but it still left her with a lot of time to sit with Nicci and pretend she didn’t care what Scott was muttering about on his side of the fire.

She let him talk. Not everyone was in his corner, but she was still outnumbered and Meoraq wasn’t here to scare them off. Basic mathematics, as Crandall would say. One loud-mouthed dick plus five or six true believers minus one badass lizardman equaled a very quiet Amber Bierce. She made some of Meoraq’s tea whenever anyone asked. She let them help themselves to the meat that was supposed to last until he got back. She shared everything except Meoraq’s tent and his sword, and because they were so obviously his, no one but Scott even asked.

Too cold, not enough tents, Scott passing out the food. It was all the same old shit on a smaller scale, with the added fun of Praxas perched on the horizon like a tombstone and the threat of raiders in every shadow at night. And just to put the frosting on the shit-cake, Amber didn’t feel well—tired and oddly disoriented, as if she were running a low fever, heavy and achy and oh yes, nauseous.

She couldn’t be sick and she refused to be pregnant, but she felt like shit all the same. It was purely psychological. She knew that. She’d undergone a traumatic event—hell, a whole chain of traumatic events—and the only thing she was suffering from was survivor’s shock. She’d suck it up, life would go on, and everyone would know Amber Bierce was the tough one.

So tough she threw up almost every morning. So tough she cried nearly every night after Meoraq didn’t come back. So tough she hid in Meoraq’s tent whenever Scott started in with one of his speeches and sometimes fell asleep, taking naps in the middle of the day like an old lady.

Like now.

Amber woke up, thought about it for several minutes, and decided she had successfully slept away the vague nausea that had plagued her all morning only to replace it with a headache. She was probably dehydrated. As soon as she’d dredged up the energy, she’d go out there and make tea. Maybe even brew the stuff Meoraq called nai, just because he liked it, even though Amber herself thought it tasted exactly like burnt roots in a cup. And if today was the day he came back and he found a hot cup of nai waiting for him…

“Please come home,” she whispered. “Please.”

No answer, not even from her mother’s drunk ghost.

She got up, crawling stiffly out of the tent into the stark grey light of another alien afternoon. The first thing she noticed, when she had it in her to notice anything, was the quiet. Nicci sat by the fire, drawing in the ashes with the blackened end of a stick. Crandall was stretched out nearby, one arm crooked over his eyes. Apart from them, the camp was clearly empty.

This was not alarming, not at first. Amber hadn’t been awake long enough to feel very strongly about anything, except maybe how much she wanted Meoraq back.

“Where is everyone?” she mumbled, trying to rub some life into her body face-first.

“Out,” Nicci replied.

“How helpful. Where’d they go? We’re really not supposed to wander around.”

“Doesn’t bother you when you want to sneak off for a skinny-dip in the middle of the night,” Crandall remarked without raising his arm.

Irritation woke her up a little more. “I forgot my swimsuit. And how the hell would you know what I was doing last night? Were you spying on me?”

“I was taking a piss when you barged in and got naked. So technically, you were the rude one.”

“Did you watch, you perv?”

“And whacked off,” he agreed, raising his arm to give her a friendly leer. “Twice. You look pretty good, you know. In spite of…all that.”

Amber managed not to say anything for maybe a whole three seconds. Then, gritting her teeth in self-disgust, she said, “In spite of what?”

He shrugged and dropped his arm over his eyes again. “It ain’t an easy life, that’s all I’m saying. You’re a bit banged up.”

She looked away.

“But you still look pretty damn good to me. Toned, you know? I think muscles can look hot on a chick if she doesn’t overdo it. You’re walking that line, but you’re walking it well.”

“You have no idea how many nights I lay awake worrying about that.”

“Don’t be a bitch, Bierce. I’m trying to pay you a compliment. Like, you’ve always had pretty good tits, but now they really stand out. Best tits on the planet.”

“Fuck you,” said Nicci, scratching out her drawing and beginning a new one.

“Okay, look, I don’t even care. Back to the original question: Where is everyone?”

“Out,” said Nicci again.

“They went hunting. I’m protecting the women,” Crandall added.

“Hunting?” Amber looked over at the mound of kipwe meat Meoraq had left them, but it didn’t appear to have gone anywhere. “What for? And with what?” she asked, ducking back into the tent to make sure Meoraq’s kzung was still where she’d left it. It wasn’t.

“That son of a bitch!” she exploded, and burst back out.

“Don’t get your panties in a knot. He’ll bring it right back.”

“What the hell does he think he’s doing? He can’t walk up and stab something!”

“Chill out, would you? He made spears too.” Crandall pointed without stirring himself, and sure enough, there was a spear stabbed ingloriously into the center of a pile of shavings over by the rock where Scott held court.

Amber went over and pulled it out. It was light in her hand, way too light. “Out of this?”

“Oh let it go, Bierce,” sighed Crandall, at last sitting up. “He’s bored, that’s all. Let him break a couple sticks and run off some steam so people see him being all commanding and forget what he looked like sitting naked in a cage.”

Amber knocked the spear against the ground a few times, not trying to break it, but unable to help hearing the dull sound of dead, brittle wood. She shook her head and turned on Crandall. “How long do we wait?” she demanded.

“He’ll be back. I’m sure he hasn’t gone far. He’s not a complete idiot.”

“Yes, he is! Damn it, does someone have to die before it’s enough to stop him? Is that what it’s going to take?”

“People already have died,” remarked Nicci, utterly absorbed in her drawings. “But they still follow him.”

“If they find anything out there, it’s going to go bad. And honestly, the very best scenario is them getting gored to death by an animal because the most likely thing to bump into is a raider or someone from Praxas. I had a spear,” Amber said furiously. “I had a damned good spear and I knew how to use it and they took me like that.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to them,” said Crandall, but he wasn’t smiling anymore.

“Because everything’s gone so well up till now,” murmured Nicci.

Crandall heaved a sigh and got to his feet. “If you’re going to freak out, let’s just go find them. But I want it on record that you’re acting like a—”

And then, reedy as a birdcall behind the ever-present wind, the scream.

Amber froze. After all that tough talk, after all that stomping around and swearing and what Scott would surely call her Bierce-knows-best bullshit, Amber froze. It was Crandall who jumped up, Crandall who started running, and if that was all he’d done, things might have gone very differently, but Crandall was there to ‘protect the women’ and so his parting words as he bolted around the leather wall were, “Stay here.”

What toughness failed to provoke, defiance finally did: Clutching the spear, she ran after him, but Crandall ran ahead of her the whole way and he’d been in a cage all winter so what did that say? She’d recognized that it was a human scream, a man’s scream, even if she couldn’t tell who’d made it. The fact that it was not repeated only made things worse. Something had found them. Something had maybe taken them. And was she really going to let herself be taken too? For Scott?

‘Just go back,’ Bo Peep suggested. ‘Nicci needs you, right? Nicci always needs you. You can say it was for Nicci while you hide.’

Shame became anger and anger, as it so often did, became strength. “God damn it,” she snarled, running faster, passing Crandall at last. It became her mantra: “God damn it, God damn it, God fucking damn it!”

She reached the bottom of a rocky hill just as the first Manifestors spilled over the top. They didn’t see her, didn’t see each other, didn’t see the trees. When two of them inevitably collided and went sprawling, the others trampled right over them. It was Dag, badly out of breath, who lurched over to help them up.

“Run!” he shouted. Gasped, really. “It’s coming!”

Eric appeared, pulling Scott along with him. “I think we lost it,” Scott was babbling, hugging onto Meoraq’s sword with both hands. His eyes were eating up his face. “I really think we did. I don’t think it’s still—hey! That’s mine!”

Amber had snatched the kzung out of his grip and now shook it at him. “It’s not yours, it’s Meoraq’s! And if he caught you with it, he’d kill you!” But the rest of that promising fight was forgotten when the kipwe came crashing through the trees.

It was a big one, a male in its prime, and it was breathing almost as hard as Dag after its run. There were a few broken spears still stuck in its side, quivering along with the rest of its quills as it raked a paw over the ground, tearing up roots and winter-hard earth with ridiculous ease. It stared them down and in its eyes, she could see the ponderous weight of its animal thought: People running was one thing. People standing, challenging…that was something else.

Amber’s instinct was to run, but she made herself stand her ground. This wasn’t a hungry predator, just a big, mean animal that handled being startled and stabbed at badly. It was dangerous, yes; it would chase whatever ran and kill whatever it could, but it wouldn’t die trying. If the odds weren’t in its favor, it would go.

“Get up,” said Amber, moving closer to Dag and the Manifestors. “Everybody, come together. Don’t r—”

“Run!” Scott shouted and the two Manifestors with Dag immediately bolted for camp.

The kipwe roared and charged them.

There wasn’t time to think about it and if there had been time, she’d have only thought what a stupid thing she was about to do. She dropped the useless spear and ran to meet it, screaming in perfectly mingled fear and frustration as she swung the heavy kzung and hit the kipwe square in the throat. Her moment of surprised triumph was damned short; the blade skated harmlessly over the creature’s quills and drove itself in somewhere in the chest. Suddenly the hilt in her hands was shoving back at her. Amber flew back, hit the ground, caught a glimpse of half a kzung with two tons of kipwe behind it coming right at her, and rolled. The hilt hit the ground where she’d been and the rest of the blade vanished into the beast’s body. The kipwe bellowed, backed up, then saw her on the ground. Amber lunged out to grab the spear, which she knew damned well was nothing but a pointed piece of dead wood. She scrambled up, turned around right as the kipwe stood up on its hind legs, and stabbed as it swung.

She missed its eye, missed its nose, even missed the gaping open target of its mouth, but the stick went in somewhere. She felt it puncture flesh in the split-second before its paw connected with her side. There was no sense of flying, only the second, immediate-seeming impact as she hit the ground and slid across it. Damp earth sluiced up over her arms and into her face, clogging her nose, filling her mouth with the taste of the grave she wouldn’t even get. She rolled over, spitting and swiping at herself with one hand and digging frantically for another weapon—a stick, a rock, one of the Ancients’ plasma cannons, anything!—before climbing to her feet again. She had nothing but her bare hands, but she ran at it again, because it was just a kipwe for God’s sake, and maybe it would turn around if she charged it, maybe it would run.

The kipwe reared again…then listed, swatted drunkenly at its face. It bellowed, shook its head hard, grunted, and then toppled over.

Amber slowed her run to a stagger and then to a stop. The beast stayed down. It did not appear to be breathing. She stared at it for a while, still breathing hard, alert enough that she knew she was winded, not so much that she knew she was hurt, and finally took the last three steps and gave it a cautious kick.

It did not move.

“No way I killed it,” she said to herself in a remarkably calm and conversational tone.

The kipwe did not reply. It was very dead.

Amber started to bend over for a better look, but pain washed out from her side enough to prevent that. She clapped a hand over the hurt (wet hurt, not a great indicator of things to come) and knelt instead, prodding at the beast’s body.

She found fragments of her spear imbedded harmlessly in its cheek, beneath the spiky tuft of its hilarious muttonchops where it had done no good at all. It took a little longer to find the kzung, buried to its hilt in the thick, prickly quills. Getting it out meant tugging, shaking, and finally planting a foot on its head and heaving back in spite of the hell in her side. The kipwe’s wound wheezed at her, blowing a foul slip of air in her face with a wet, farting sound. Swimmer’s air, they called that. She’d stabbed the kipwe through the lung.

And it had still taken it that long to die.

“Jesus,” said Crandall behind her.

She turned around, holding Meoraq’s sword limply in one hand, trying to think of what to do next. People saved, check. Dead kipwe, double check. Moving on.

“I’m going to need your help cutting it up,” she announced. “There’s no reason it should go to waste, you know? Oh. And I may have a few splinters.” She held a hand up and sure enough, there were half a dozen kipwe quills sticking out of her arm at various points. “So if you think you can grow up just long enough to take them out without masturbating all over me…”

The rest of that bitchy comment lost itself in Crandall’s silence. He was still staring, not at the kipwe, but at her.

Amber looked down, past another half-dozen broken quills all down her side to her left hip. “Goodness, that’s a lot of blood,” she remarked, watching it stream down over her thigh.

And then the world turned white.

 

* * *

 

She came around slowly, not to the pain, which was tremendous, but to the relatively innocuous sound of laughter. She’d been tucked beneath a blanket, which was hot and scratchy and unbelievably heavy on her right side, where the pain lived. Her skin felt far too tight over the swollen, throbbing hell of her side, threatening to split whatever bandage had been tied over her. It hurt to breathe, it hurt not to breathe, and she was reasonably certain it would hurt to open her eyes, so she just lay there and concentrated on not embarrassing herself with a lot of loud moaning. The laughter came and went, curiously high-pitched for a camp mostly filled with men…and slightly crazed.