The Last Hour of Gann by Smith, R. Lee (13)

 

 

BOOK VII

 

 

 

ZHUQA

 

 

The worst winter of Amber’s life happened the year she turned five. These were among her earliest memories—freezing in the basement of the flophouse where Mama made them stay, hiding from the men with the big hands who stayed there too, Baby Nicci always crying and sometimes Amber crying with her because her stomach always hurt. The days of state-care with juice boxes and storybooks and all of life’s cares erased in one wonderful tumble down a hill was months away, a fairy-tale Amber didn’t even know to hope for.

The second-worst winter would probably have to be the one two years before her mother died. It had been Bo Peep’s last real effort to kick the drugs, and even though everyone knew how it would end (except maybe Nicci), they all went through the same tired motions. Every night, Amber had to walk home from the bus stop with filthy snow seeping in through her shoes and her back aching from a full shift at the factory, not knowing whether she’d find Bo Peep passed out on the floor or fixing dinner. The bad nights made the good ones impossible to enjoy; the good nights made the bad ones worse. Hope and cynicism fought a constant, gut-wrenching war which finally ended on Christmas morning, when Amber came out of her room to find that all the presents beneath the tree (their first tree in years and how much fun it had been, flinging tinsel over plastic branches like a bunch of kids and laughing) gone, along with the TV, the rent money, and the microwave, of all things. Nothing left but wads of wrapping paper and Nicci’s gift for their mom—a picture of the three of them together—tossed on the floor.

In fact, on the list of Bierce’s Bad Winters, the one Amber spent in a cave with an alien didn’t even make the Top Ten. If only she had enough good memories to make a Bierce’s Best Winters list, it might actually be there instead. The cave was warm and a little homey. The food was monotonous but plentiful. Meoraq helped her keep busy (one way or another). Some days, it was more than just killing time. Some days, she was happy.

So why had she hiked all the way out here again, across the whole valley and up the south side of the mountain, skirting ledges no wider than her boots and climbing over icy chasms and fallen trees, just so she could stand here and look at the pass? It looked exactly the way it looked three days ago. And two days before that. And six days before that. The snow that filled the sharp V between the slopes was maybe a little more compact, but even she didn’t try to kid herself that it was melting.

She couldn’t understand that. It had to be melting somewhere. The little fall where they drew their water every day had tripled in size and sprouted a dozen brothers and sisters. The trees were warming up, or at least, they gave off a greenish sort of scent if she broke off a branch. And the animals were coming back after a long, scary absence.

Well…not so scary. In the first days of her imprisonment (he hated it when she called it that), Meoraq had announced that they were each going to get two full wardrobes, which meant that not only did he want the two of them to pee in a bucket and keep it, but he also killed pretty much every animal he saw. She called it wasteful and kill-happy and bitched about it right up until the time they got snowed in for thirty-three days straight. They still had two whole xauts and half a kipwe packed in snow, and yet, when she’d left the cave this morning, she’d told him she was going hunting and he didn’t argue. He didn’t believe her—he’d made that plain with a hard stare and flat spines—but he didn’t argue.

They did a lot of not-arguing these days, which was not the same as not arguing, but it wasn’t arguing either, so that had to count for something. And arguing, she had discovered to her surprise, didn’t have to be the same as fighting. They hadn’t fought in forever, not even when they’d been snowed in for so long. This was due in large part to Secret Rule Number One: No matter what ass-headed thing he’s going on about, if his neck turns yellow, shut up and apologize. It worked, mostly. Oh, there were nights when they managed not to touch even in that narrow bed, but they always woke up tangled together. She wasn’t out here now because she was mad at him or felt like proving that he wasn’t the boss of her or anything like that. She just…wanted to see the road.

And now she wanted to climb down and stand in it.

So she did, creeping along with pained care. The wind had blown all the loose snow around, hiding all the nooks and juts where she needed a handhold, hiding deadly pockets of ice as well. She’d had a couple of bad falls just walking the well-traveled trail between the cave and their waterfall; she wasn’t getting stupid clear out here alone.

The snow at the bottom was hard and crusty on top, soft and slushy underneath. She balanced on its surface for only a second or two before punching through and sinking in past her knees. Undaunted, Amber pulled her snowshoes off her back and stepped into them. Now the snow held her.

She walked out a little ways, testing each and every step with her spear before she placed her snowshoe, but she didn’t go far. Snowshoes had been her idea and even her first clumsy pair had worked great, but they tricky to walk in and hell on her ankles. Looking at the pass, she tried to imagine using them not just for an hour or two—difficult enough—but for days on end.

She could do it, physically. She hated using the fucking things and she probably wouldn’t be able to stop bitching about them after the second day, but she could do it. What she wasn’t sure about was what would happen if they got two or three days out and then the snow started melting. Snowshoes did not work in slush.

Lost in thought, Amber did not see the thuoch until it was nearly on top of her, which could have been very bad except that it hadn’t seen her either. It trotted along the eastern slope in defiance of gravity, its long body rolling in its unnatural, humping gait. She watched it, admiring its effortless speed and slinky grace over the icy rock and snow.

When they’d first come to the mountains, the thuochs were still mostly brown, but now it was whiter than the old snow it walked on. Meoraq had killed two white thuochs for her, saving the pelts because he said he wanted to make her a ‘good’ coat. Better, presumably, than the overtunic she was wearing now, which she’d made from the kipwe hide. And which in all honesty looked like a total shit-cake after she’d scraped all the quills off, but it had been the first thing she’d ever made all by herself and she was proud of it, damn it. It didn’t need replacing, not even with a pretty, soft, white thuoch-fur coat. Although she could probably make a much better one now that she’d had some practice. And it would almost certainly be warmer.

No more than ten meters away, the thuoch finally saw her. It froze and immediately assumed a posture of defense and threat, all its fur spiking out to make it appear double in size. At the same time, its lower jaw dislocated and dropped open in an unnatural gape that had creeped her out tremendously the first time she’d seen it.

The thuoch shook its fur and yowled at her, but Amber didn’t move. She kept her spear in her hand and ready, in case the beast should decide to charge, but she didn’t think it would. She could see the two tiny black beads tucked away behind the thuoch’s bristling flank that were the eyes of its half-grown cub. Those eyes were the reason the thuoch wouldn’t charge across the treacherous ice. They were also the reason Amber wouldn’t take home her third winter-white thuoch pelt to finish her coat.

The two females stared each other down, but eventually the thuoch brought its jaws together. It slunk rapidly away to the western slope, snarling, keeping itself between Amber’s spear and its cub until they were out of sight.

The wind blew stale snow into their footprints. Amber watched until all hope of tracking them down was gone. At last, with a final wistful glance at the road, she turned around and headed home.

Home. She’d have to stop thinking of it like that. She wasn’t even sure when she’d started, but she had to admit that the little cave, with all its crude amenities, already felt more like home than her memories of any of the apartments she’d shared with Nicci and their mother. So far, she’d been able to stop herself from thinking too hard about what was going to be ‘home’ after this endless hike was over, but she could feel it creeping in a little more each day. Meoraq, of course, refused to speculate too wildly until God told him what He wanted them to do, but they’d had too many snowed-in days for her not to know about his home—his House—back in the west.

It unnerved her to think of it too deeply. Not just a city full of lizardmen, but just the house itself. The place he described…a wedge of the entire city from the outer wall to the inner ring, housing hundreds of families, thousands of people. There would be servants everywhere and so many rooms he couldn’t count them for her. And as much as she did not want to be wandering in this rainy wasteland full of man-eating porcupines forever, the idea of living in a place like that didn’t seem like much of an improvement. It was possible to avoid thinking about it for as long as they were stuck here, but once they were moving again…

Meoraq had admitted that he didn’t know precisely where the temple was, but he seemed to think it wasn’t far, once over the mountains. “Half a brace,” he kept saying, which meant eighteen days, give or take. Half a brace, unless something else happened, and he could finally stand there in his empty temple and meditate until he felt good about going home. Then she’d have to think about all those rooms and servants and lizardpeople everywhere she looked, but until then, she could still pretend she had options.

Until then, she could pretend they were leaving to look for Nicci.

The sun was getting low behind the clouds and the light was leaving at its usual alarming speed. Nocturnal mimuts were emerging from their craggy burrows, like furry footballs bouncing over the ice. Amber speared a few, drained them of the gross stuff, and tied them into a brace (half a brace and he’ll hear what he’s come to hear half a brace and i’ll have to give up on her forever half a brace) to carry them home.

Almost home.

Meoraq was by the fire when she came in, winding homemade sinew-thread onto a short length of stick. Restocking his mending kit, she was sure. Sometimes he went pretty far out of his way to keep busy, but this at least was something she could see the use of. Four sets of clothes made for a lot of sewing. There had been a good twenty-day stretch at the beginning when sewing, sex, and sleeping had been all they did. And fight, of course, but fighting had a way of turning into foreplay for Meoraq, which annoyed Amber no end if it was an argument she really cared about, so she’d learned to just let him be an arrogant ass…and he’d learned to let her be an unreasonable bitch, probably, but they made it work.

“Hey,” she said now, shrugging out of her furry swaddle.

He grunted a greeting and wound up some more sinew. “See anything?”

“There’s always something to see,” she replied, setting her brace of mimuts down on the hearth beside him. “I went out to the road.”

He grunted again, noncommittally. She knew he didn’t approve, he knew she knew, no more was said. They’d had that fight already.

“There was a thuoch there.”

“You should have brought it with you.”

“It had a baby.”

“Ah.” He wound more sinew. He was almost at the end of it.

“It also had brown coming in on its face.”

“It’s warming. We’ll have to finish your coat with turned fur.” He flicked his spines at her knowingly. “How was the road?”

“Still filled in pretty good.”

“Yes.”

“But I think we could climb over it if we wanted to. With the snowshoes.”

He nodded distractedly. Nodding was something he’d picked up from her over the winter and it still didn’t look quite normal on him. He finished with his sinews and set the finished spools aside so he could pull the mimuts toward him.

She watched him skin them, as easily as if they were wearing little fur jackets. Then she watched him finish the butchering she’d started. She handed him a skewer when he reached for one. She brought the pot over so he could stew the organs he liked, and the smaller pot for the brains to make the hide-cure. Mimuts didn’t have a lot of fur, but they’d be good to line her sleeves or something. She waited and he waited with her.

“You’re going to make me ask, aren’t you?” she said finally.

“Yes.”

“Big scaly jerk.”

He hissed through his teeth, but playfully. This wasn’t an argument, not yet.

“When are we leaving, Meoraq?”

“When leaving will not kill us, Soft-Skin.”

She sighed and sat down by the fire, pulling one of the fresh pelts over her knee so she could start scraping. Now it was his turn to watch her.

“Are you angry?” he asked after a few quiet minutes.

“Not really. But I’m not happy. Look,” she said, shoving the half-scraped pelt away and facing him. “I know you’ve given up on my sister. I know you don’t even consider her a factor when you think about us moving on. I can’t do that yet.”

He didn’t argue, didn’t say anything, just waited.

“I’m trying to trust you,” she told him. “I am trying. But one of these days, I’m going to leave without you.”

He took that well, although he couldn’t quite prevent himself from rolling his eyes a little. When he’d more or less controlled himself, he nodded again and even gave her a two-knuckle nudge to the shoulder.

“I’ll look at the road,” he said. “But if I say it isn’t safe, you will submit to my judgment. At least for a few days.”

“How many is a few?”

“Six.”

No surprise. It was his favorite number.

“All right,” she said, and resumed scraping. “But if the road does look good, we have to be out of here the next day, okay?”

“If possible. I think you underestimate how much time it takes to ready supplies, now that we have them.”

“I just don’t want you running up unnecessary delays, that’s all.”

“Mm. I do that,” he agreed mildly. “I’m always losing consciousness for days at a time and laming myself…or am I thinking of you?”

“I wasn’t lamed! I just limped for a few days! I don’t know if you’ve noticed, lizardman, but there’s ice everywhere!”

“I’m not the one who wants to walk in it.” He leaned toward her and rubbed his snout up and down along her throat, letting her know they could fight if she wanted to, but he was already winning.

“Maybe we should pack now so we’re always ready,” she suggested.

He glanced tolerantly around the cave. “Some things, I suppose. I’ll see what I can do about making another sled.”

“We can leave some stuff here, can’t we? I mean, we’ll have to come back this way, right?”

“I have not been curing hides all winter to leave them behind. Besides, the cold will last another brace of days at least in this corner of Gann’s world and you can’t hold your heat.”

“Yeah, yeah. So what do you need me to do?”

He moved her hair and nipped suggestively at the scar he’d given her for a wedding present.

Amber heaved a sigh at him, but she was grinning. Every night with this guy. Twice, most nights. The only times he’d ever let her alone were when she was on the rag and he’d made it clear even then that he was humoring his silly wife by doing so. “Are we really going to do this now?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, hang on.”

At her gentle insistence, he released her and stood back while she moved the fresh hides and turned the roasting mimuts over. “But seriously,” she said, untying her belt. “What can I do to speed things up?”

“Speed is not a virtue in this undertaking, Soft-Skin.” He pulled his belt off, looped it playfully around the back of her neck and pulled her close for a quick nuzzle. Then it was all business—loosening ties, unbuckling bootstraps, peeling off outer layers, exposing inner ones. People in the movies made this part look so spontaneous, but it was actually something of a process when you were dressed for winter in the mountains. “It is not the snow that lies on the road that concerns me as much as the snow that still lies on the mountain.”

“What about it?” asked Amber, hanging up his coat.

“Ice on the ground can melt from beneath,” he explained, sitting down to work his boots off. “When that happens, the weight of the snow on top can cause it to break off in large packs and fall.”

“Yeah, it’s already happening some places. So what are you saying? We wait until the snow falls onto the road and then we walk out over the top?”

He sighed, then beckoned to her and took off his tunic and dropped it on the floor. “This is a mountain thaw,” he told her, gesturing at it. “You see how it seems to lie flat, yet there are many folds and thin places over pockets of air that reach who knows how deep? Snow can smother a man quicker than you might think, or crush him, or cut him open.”

“We’re not waiting here until the snow completely melts, so forget it!”

“Calm yourself. What I propose,” he said, gathering her against his bare body, “is that we climb out a little higher along the southern face, where the snow has already broken free, and travel on the cleared slope. It is not so safe a crossing as I would like, so I must limit the time we would spend in the open pass.”

“Meaning?”

“Patience, Soft-Skin.” He nuzzled at her shoulder again. “Patience is more than a word. It means that we will walk for every moment there is light, with little or no rest. It means we will not stop to hunt, but must have provisions to see us entirely through.”

“We may also need to conserve our energy while we’re traveling and not waste it frivolously having sex.”

“We may,” he said gravely, backing her toward the cave wall which Amber had privately dubbed ‘Meoraq’s screwin’ place’. “We’ll have to store up some of that, too. Do you want to show me your belly or your back?”

“You hopeless romantic, you.”

“Back it is.” He nipped her on the jaw and turned her around.

“Oh fine, but I get the next round in bed.”

“I’ll consider it.”

“And take your panties all the way off this time. That thing is cold as hell on a lady’s ass.”

“Demanding creature.” But his loin-plate clanked to the floor and then his arms were a warm girdle around her middle. He nuzzled thoroughly at her neck, breathing deeply and managing not to catch too much of her hair in his teeth until he deemed she’d had enough foreplay (the concept was still fairly strange to him). Without further ceremony, he tugged her hips into position and pierced her, slipping at once into that detached trance he claimed was a tribute to her overwhelming sensuality.

Amber closed her eyes against the sight of her hands splayed over the rough rock wall, letting the moan that wanted to happen just happen—a tribute to his overwhelming sensuality. Hearing it, the steady rhythm of his breaths broke in a dry laugh. “Try not to move.”

“I won’t.”

“You always say that.”

“I always start out meaning it.”

But she tried. Taking a few stabilizing breaths of her own, she squared her shoulders and pushed her ass back at him, doing her best to pretend she was an inanimate object while he set her on fire one stroke at a time. She forgot all about the mountains and the road and Scott and Nicci and the mimuts on the fire and just fell deeper and deeper into that moment.

Concentrate. His breath tickling the fine hairs on the nape of her neck. The scour of his rough hands chafing steadily at her hips. The slow, insistent press of his flat stomach against her upturned buttocks. The cold rock under her hands and feet. She held onto these things as long as she could, because when they fell out of focus, it was over. Without these little discomforts, she was nothing but how he filled her, how he moved in her, how he made her part of him.

She could feel herself shivering with strain already, and much as she tried not to, the effort of holding so still and being so good was making her tighten up. Everywhere.

“Woman,” he warned her hoarsely.

“Don’t distract me, lizardman, I’m right on the edge.”

He burst out laughing against her back, which did such unexpected things that she broke and began bucking wildly on his impaling shaft. This was usually his cue to hold still and let her finish or hurry up and finish himself so they could both wind down together. Tonight, in his playful, unpredictable mood, the sex became war.

Meoraq’s fondness for rough play was no secret. It was one of those things—like sex standing up—that just felt more natural to him, but it wasn’t without its risks. Never let him fight when you can’t see him; that was Secret Rule Number Two, and Amber wasn’t so far gone that she didn’t remember why the rules were so important.

But it felt so good…and she was so close…and he was always careful with her, always. He’d never really hurt her.

Amber grappled with it as he encouraged her with hisses and nips, but in the end, it wasn’t a decision as much as surrender. She hissed back at him, scratching and slapping at his thighs in a sure signal that no in this case definitely meant go faster.

“Ha!” He seized her and the sex became fucking, driving her up onto her toes, crushing her against the wall, knocking her full-on into the orgasm she’d been a hair away from reaching anyway.

Amber rode it out, pushing at the wall, at him. He pinned her arms, battled her carefully to the floor (but not as carefully as he had the last time; she knocked her knee a pretty good one), and straddled her again, resuming his steady, forceful thrusts as she writhed and yowled like a common alley cat. Sometimes a little extra noise was enough to give him what he wanted without giving too much up herself.

Sometimes.

“Fight,” he panted and, perhaps sensing her misgivings, gave her a playful head-butt between her shoulderblades. “Like you fought the first time. So I feel it when you surrender.”

Climbing fast to her second climax was the very worst time to expect a girl to show some self-restraint. Amber managed a token hesitation and then gave up and fought. Bucking and thrashing, she broke free, forcing him to grapple her back into his embrace and under his control. She could hear him laughing as he struggled to hold her, but it was a struggle and she was proud of that. She knew she shouldn’t be. Secret Rule Number Two…

The change was subtle, at first. His laughter faded gradually to hisses. His grip tightened. His love-bites at her neck and shoulder began to sting. Just when he broke his hard yet steady rhythm, she wasn’t sure, but even through her body’s frenetic sensory overload, she could tell that what had once been purely pleasure was now shot through with silvery threads of pain.

Her first instinct was the very worst response: She stopped play-fighting and tried to really stop him, then to get away from him. Whatever thin restraint he’d held onto all this time snapped at once. His roar blasted hot on her back as he shoved her down and pinned her under his weight. She knew it when he came by the hard, coughing sound he made, but something was wrong. This was where he usually stopped moving (in spite of the fact that she sometimes actually begged him not to), but tonight he kept at her. Like the bawdy punchline to a bad joke—harder, faster, deeper—and Amber couldn’t do anything about it because she was cumming again. She managed only half his name before his powerful jaws clamped down on the back of her neck, actually shaking her like a dog with a doll to shut her up. He hissed into her hair like an animal and this was wrong, this was really, dangerously wrong.

Amber tensed, alarm putting real strength into her body, but that was the wrong way to win and she knew it. Every nerve was hot and alive, every sensation heightened. She used it as best she could—a moment’s clarity, there at the razor’s edge of yet another climax—and then she heaved herself, not backwards, but flat to the floor.

She lay limp and still, giving him nothing to fight against as she took deep breaths and tried to bring her racing heart under some kind of control. He’d never hurt her, no he never would, but he wasn’t always him, was he?

Meoraq stopped, but he did not immediately back off. If anything, he leaned on her a little harder. She felt, with the perfect awareness of her tingling skin, the minute flexing of his fingers. He uttered a hard, snuffling grunt, but only one. She felt him rear back, shake himself. A second pause, longer than the first, and then he finally spoke: “Are you awake?”

His voice wasn’t quite his own either. Breathless, which was to be expected, but also…thick. As if speech were something new to him and not particularly pleasant.

Amber waited, listening. ‘Breathe,’ she thought at him. ‘Six breaths, Meoraq. Count them off.’

He did breathe, but only once. She felt it, hot on her back; he was hissing through his teeth in that silent, pissed-off way he had. Suddenly he let go of her aching wrists and put his hand between her shoulderblades, leaning over to pry unexpectedly at her eyelid. She flinched back, blinking, and he hiss/grunted. “You are awake,” he said accusingly. “Why didn’t you answer me?”

“I need to stop.”

“Stop? Are you hurt?” he asked. It should have sounded concerned, but it didn’t and he might have realized it because his next attempt was better. “Are you all right?”

“Please.”

“Damn it, woman, I just…” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The hand resting on her back drummed once, then patted her. He was still hard; the sensation as he withdrew was enough to give her one final shivery, painful bloom, and then he was out. “A short rest,” he warned her. “I’m not finished.”

She rolled onto her side and put her hand behind her neck, feeling at the place where he’d bit her. Her fingers came away lightly smeared with blood. She glanced at him, watched him gaze at that blood with a shocking lack of expression, and said, carefully, “You were a little rough with me.”

He grunted and stood up. “Your flesh tears too easily.”

“I know you didn’t mean to hurt me.”

“If you know, why are you talking about it?” he snapped. His hand drifted down, paused, and rubbed in a brittle fashion at his stomach, which was clearly not what he wanted to rub. His cock still jutted, wet and urgent. This was the worst she’d ever seen him, the worst she’d ever let him get, but he was talking.

“I need a little time, okay?” Amber wiped her neck again—it had already stopped bleeding, but she made sure he saw the marks of his teeth there—and curled up a little, making herself look small. Helpless. Fragile. “Okay?”

Meoraq paced around the cave, watching her. He checked on dinner, picked up their discarded clothes, drank some of the lukewarm tea from the pot on the hearth, and finally went over to sit on the edge of their bed. “How much time do you need?”

“Feel free to start without me.”

“You know I can’t.”

Right. Because it was a sin for a guy to masturbate on this planet, while sexing a woman into a coma was apparently just fine. “I need a little more time,” she said.

He hissed at her, caught himself by the end of the snout, and then suddenly leapt up and came at her. “You do it,” he ordered, beckoning tersely at her with one hand and himself with the other. It wasn’t a sin if it was her hand, as he’d explained before. Ah, the fine points of Lizard Law. “Until you’re ready, eh?”

She closed her eyes, pretending to be a woman on the edge of exhaustion, like her heart wasn’t going like an engine and her stomach wasn’t tying itself in knots. ‘Breathe,’ she thought at him, so hard she was giving herself a headache. ‘Please, just start breathing.’ Aloud, she said, “I need another min—”

“Now!”

She dragged her eyes back open to see how serious this was.

It looked pretty serious. Those patches on his throat were still out and brilliantly yellow, his spines were flat and his eyes were glazed and staring. It made her think (as she had thought so often this long winter closed in with him) of the mummies at the bottom of that old laboratory, and those three terrible little words—he’s still sick—which had never quite left her mind.

She sat up and rubbed once more at her neck. His eyes tapped at her hand, lingered, and flicked away. He grimaced at her, badly disguising his impatience, and went back to sit on the bed. He fidgeted now and then, most often checking the tightness of a belt he wasn’t even wearing, but at last those yellow stripes began to darken.

They watched each other.

“I’m not hurting you, am I?” he asked suddenly.

“No, you’re fine.” She got up, stiff from huddling on the floor, and joined him.

“Fine, eh?” He grimaced again, trying to be playful, but his jaws were a little too wide. Like the thuoch, it was a see-how-hard-I-can-bite look, whether he knew it or not.

“Better than fine,” she amended, reaching up to rub briefly at his brow-ridges. He put his arm around her, pulling her onto his lap so he could scrape his chin along her neck. The danger appeared to be past, but she thought she’d better be sure.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

“Ready,” he replied at once, catching her hand and pulling it downwards.

She made a fist on the empty air before he had her where he wanted her. “Because I’m starving.”

“Oh.” He glanced over at the mimuts, which were nowhere near done cooking, then sighed and set her aside, reaching for his loin-plate. Putting himself away wasn’t easy for him, clearly, but he did it and he didn’t even look that upset anymore. His neck was black, his spines were up; he never had done his slow-count of six, but he seemed to be all the way back in his own head.

Relief hit her almost as hard as the fear she had refused to face all this while. She reached out impulsively and caught his wrist as he was tightening his belt. “Thank you,” she said. For letting himself be put off or just for being himself again, she didn’t know, but the gratitude was real.

He smiled and tapped his knuckles along her brow, then swept her hair away from the back of her neck and bent down to lick the place where he’d bit her. “I should have been gentler,” he murmured, nuzzling her. “I lose myself sometimes.”

She knew.

If he noticed the strain in her smile, he did not comment, but he did finish dressing. All the way. Right down to his boots.

“Are you going somewhere?” she asked tentatively, meaning, ‘Are you mad?’

“Just a short walk.”

It was a terrific way to get him completely cooled off, but it still unnerved her.

“Right now? It’s getting dark.”

“I’m restless.” He fetched his coat and shrugged into it. “While I’m gone, you can start to pack. We leave tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” She looked over at the fire, as if the Meoraq of ten minutes ago could still be found there, waiting to tell her how dangerous the road still was and how much safer it would be to hold off for a few more days, and then a few more and a few more. “Are you sure?”

“I’m very restless. Besides.” He came back to the bed and pulled her up (roughly, far too roughly) for one of his clumsy, unfeeling lizard-kisses. “I want to get you home before the baby comes.”

Of everything he’d said and done, ever, that was easily the most shocking.

“You what?” she stammered, following him stupidly to the mouth of the cave stone-naked. “The what?”

“It was different tonight,” he mused, looking her over. And grinned again, with predatory suddenness and unmistakable pride. “Maybe I felt it happen, eh? I need to pray…but yes. I think I just gave you my first son.”

He beamed while she gaped, incapable of speech, and then he was out through the flap and away.

 

* * *

 

It was a good night, dry and not too cold, with a smudge of moon to light his way and the scent of new growth in every breath—a perfect night for a man to be alone with thoughts of impending fatherhood.

He didn’t think about it often, but after twelve years as Sheulek, Meoraq knew he had sired children. Certainly, he had been summoned to acknowledge several over the years, but with the exception of that bad business with Lord Saluuk in Tothax, it had only been the last step before marrying off their mothers. Oh, there were Houses whose lords might be keeping their daughters free in the hopes of the highest possible marriage—Lord Arug came immediately to mind—yet there probably weren’t many. Proof of fertility was a far more valuable asset than pretty looks or even virginity, and there was never any guarantee that a Sheulek would live to retire and marry. With three Swords in active service (Salkith counted, even if he was only a Sheulteb), House Uyane might be supporting a hundred sons somewhere in the world, but if so, Rasozul had never deemed the matter important enough to mention. Meoraq had never put a bastard in the belly of some servant, which was more than Nduman could say (or Rasozul, come to think of it), so whatever children he’d sired, they were honorably got. If one of them were to come to his gate, Meoraq would welcome him as kin, but this was not the same as being a father.

Odd. He’d never given the idea of fatherhood much thought beyond the same vague sense of anchoring resentment that went with all a steward’s responsibilities, but being married was certainly turning out much better than he’d ever thought possible. Maybe having children would be the same way.

Such were his thoughts as he traveled the well-worn path between the cave and the fall where they drew their water, diverting now and then when the urge took him. There, the pock-marked tree that bordered the edge of their training grounds; Amber’s aim with the spear was as miserable as it had ever been, but she’d really taken to the sword. Here, the remains of the short wall she’d made, where she’d attempted to shield herself while pelting him with packed snow; she still insisted she’d won that battle. And there, the grass-cushioned patch where she’d coaxed him to lie with her on the first day after a long stretch snowed in. He lingered there, thinking how fresh and clean everything had smelled that day, how even the sounds seemed clearer, especially her ear-piercing yelp when that blot of snow slipped from the branches overhead and dropped down the back of her loosened britches.

He did not realize right away that what he was feeling was nostalgia. Strange feeling to have. But if he was nostalgic, that meant a part of him was already leaving and so he supposed it must be time, in spite of all his misgivings.

So be it. They could be in Xi’Matezh in half a brace and home by the turning of the year, and if he was right about putting his child in Amber’s belly tonight, and if humans carried the same as dumaqs, it would be born around the Day of Redemption.

To be in Xeqor in the greening of the springtime…

His mother’s rooftop garden would be in bloom. Amber could sit there, doing domestic things as she grew his son (he had only the vaguest notion of what these things might be). Some days, he would visit and prove he was not the mannerless brunt that life in the wildlands so often made him seem by reading with her or teaching her to play Towers or Crown-Me. And some days, he would visit and prove he was exactly that bruntish by having sex with her right there on the rooftop, spilling Crown-Me pieces simply everywhere.

It stabbed him, in some hot, unexpected way. Stabbed and twisted, not with lust, but with a kind of ferocious joy that lingered on in echoes after the vision itself faded away. Meoraq turned around and strode, not back along his wandering trail, but through stale snow and over iced rock directly to his cave. Amber tried to chat at him when he arrived, but the only thing Meoraq wanted to know was whether she’d eaten. As soon as he’d determined that she had, he took his wife to bed and it was there, after far too short a sleep, that Meoraq was awakened by Amber’s hand firmly gripping his shoulder.

“Start without me,” he mumbled.

“I think we need to talk.”

Nothing good ever came of a conversation that began that way.

“I am agreed that we shall begin our preparations to leave,” he told her, still not bothering to open his eyes. “But I am not doing anything more tonight.”

“No, we need to talk about…um…babies.”

“Oh.” With effort, Meoraq woke himself all the way and rolled onto his back so he could at least attempt to look at her. “As near as any man can make a promise in Gann’s land, I promise you we’ll be home before you carry heavy. Eh?” He patted her thigh. “Now go to sleep.”

“I really want to talk about this,” she said quietly.

He caught the sigh before it could get him into trouble and rolled his hand at her invitingly. “I’m listening.”

But she just lay there and frowned at him for several long moments. Meoraq waited her out in comfortable silence, moving his eyes sleepily over the mess of her hair and trying to imagine it in drapes over the cushions on the bed where he and his father and all the sons of Uyane were born.

“Do you…” she began at last, waking him from an open-eyed doze. “Do you really think…we’re going to have a baby?”

“Is that a serious question?” he asked, smiling.

“Do I look like I’m kidding around?”

“You look—” He pulled her close enough for a nibble at her scarred shoulder. “—like a woman who has been burning hot with her man.”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“I believe I just answered your question.”

“We had sex. That doesn’t mean we’re having a baby.”

Half-asleep and not thinking clearly, Meoraq was startled into laughter. He quickly cupped the end of his snout, but the damage was done.

“It. Doesn’t,” she said, with that icy enunciation that meant she was very annoyed with him. “I can’t have your baby, Meoraq.”

“Of course you can. Don’t worry, Soft-Skin. I suppose it’s the sort of thing women get nervous about the first time, but you’ll do fine.” He patted her thigh again.

“You’re not listening. I can’t be pregnant. You,” she said with curious emphasis, “can’t make me pregnant.”

“God would seem to disagree.”

She clapped her hands over her face and mumbled, “You’re giving me a brain tumor,” through them.

Watching her take deep, calming breaths, Meoraq decided it was just possible that, no matter how freely she said the word, she might not know what sex really meant. “Come, wife,” he said, reaching out to catch her wrist until she allowed him to unmask her. “I don’t pretend to understand what’s upsetting you, but I’m willing to thrash it out if you are. Tell me plainly what you are thinking.”

“You and I can’t make a baby.”

“All right.” He took a moment to collect his thoughts and conquer his discomfort, and then said, speaking slowly, “Sex…is the mechanical means by which a baby is created.”

Her mouth opened, just a little, but no sound came out.

Encouraged, he went on. “When Sheul wishes a man and woman to produce a child, He sets the spark of that life within the man’s, ah, fluid, which is called ‘semen’.”

Amber clapped her hand over her eyes, then splayed it so as to stare at him through her fingers.

“This spark burns in his belly, causing him to desire sex. With Sheul’s blessing, the man will release that spark with his, er, semen, and if the woman is also blessed, she will conceive by him. How do you mark me?”

She continued to stare, although she did drop her hand. “I know,” she said at long, long last, “where babies come from. But you can’t really think that’s the only reason people have sex! We’re just doing it because it’s fun!”

“Each man’s clay desires its own gratification,” Meoraq admitted. “To eat beyond its fill, to take strong drink, to pollute the mind with poisons, and yes, to take the lustful pleasure that comes from Gann. That may take the form of sex, but it is no more than animal mating and it will corrupt beyond forgiveness if indulged. What we have, Soft-Skin, we have with God’s blessing and with His holy fires comes the promise of new life.”

She only looked at him, her thoughts in motion and her face unsmiling. “I can’t have your babies, Meoraq,” she said at last. “I can never have your babies.”

“Why do you keep saying this?”

“We’re two completely different species.”

He waited, but that seemed to be all. “Are we not both children of Sheul?”

“That’s like saying that since God made both tachuqis and saoqs, they should be able to have children too!”

“They could,” he said, “if Sheul wished it.”

She put a hand over her eyes hard enough to make a slapping sound.

“You’re a good man,” she said finally, without uncovering her eyes. “Strong. Brave. Noble, in a weird, hyperviolent kind of way. And I know you can be a smart man if you really, really tried.”

He wasn’t sure, but he thought there might be an insult hidden in all that praise.

She lowered her hand and looked at him. “I can talk myself blue in the face and never convince you, so just think about it. Think hard. Don’t just throw it all up there in the name of God, look at the evidence. Think. Don’t pray. Think.”

“If it will put your mind at ease, I’ll meditate upon your words.”

“Meditate.” She covered her eyes with another slapping sound. “I don’t know why I bother. You see God in everything.”

“Sheul is in everything.” Meoraq sighed and rubbed at his brow-ridges. “You are so good at seeing evidence. How can you not see that?”

She dropped her hand to her thigh. That also made a slapping sound. “Because it’s ridiculous. People happen, Meoraq. People make babies. People make the rules. And then people make up gods so they have someone else to blame when things don’t go right.”

“No,” he said simply. “All things fall according to His ultimate plan.”

“Oh for…Listen to yourself! Listen to what you’re saying to me!”

“I hear it.”

“Do you? Do you really? So, according to you, God wanted you and me together. With the infinite power at his disposal, he made a planet clear across the fucking galaxy and then he allowed it to get completely trashed so that we would have a reason to leave it, and then, oh yeah, he killed my mother just when the technology to leave the planet came along, all so he could put me on that ship and then lob a meteor at it, so it would break just enough to go careening out of control through space but still stay together long enough to land, killing all the apparently superfluous people—Do you know who those people were?” she demanded suddenly. “Do you know who your killer God chose to wipe off on the surface of your fucking planet like a booger on a bathroom wall? They were the families, Meoraq! They were the children! They were the pregnant women who supposedly conceived with his very fucking temporary blessing. There were also thousands of them, but hey, at least I got to walk away and meet you and then lose all the distracting other people God had no use for, including my sister, and all this, Meoraq, all this so that you and I could make a baby?”

“Yes,” he said.

She stared at him for a moment and then flung out her arms, shouting, “There is no baby, lizardman! There’s never going to be a baby! There’s no baby and no God and the only reason we have sex—you might want to write this down—is because it feels good and we like it! You can call it God or Gann or the Great Gadzooks if you want to, but it’s just two people fucking!”

She sat glaring at him in the bed, her breath as hard in her chest as if she had just run to him across two spans of rough road.

Meoraq studied her at great length, but she seemed perfectly sincere. “I don’t understand you,” he said. “You escaped the fall of your family’s House by seeking passage on the first ship of its kind ever to sail in the sky…and this was not Sheul?”

She rolled her eyes. “No, it wasn’t. It was just me making a bad decision.”

“The ship was struck in the sky, yet sailed on…and this was not Sheul?”

She glared at him and got out of bed, snatching at her clothes as if she honestly meant to dress and go out at the mid-hour of night.

“The ship broke open over Gann, yet some survived its ruin…and this was not Sheul? At its ultimate burning, you and your fellows were yet spared and this—” He flipped onto his feet and caught her arm as she stalked past him for her boots. “This was not Sheul?”

“Let go of me!”

“What is it you think, woman, that all these things were an accident?”

“You’re a zealot!”

“And you’re a fool!” he countered, exasperated. “He has sent you a warning, a boat and a…a…I can’t say it, but you know damned well what He sent you! And were that not enough, He sent you me!”

She drew back and stared at him.

“You may not know to see His hand upon the hammer, but I do. It is not for me to question His reasoning and neither is it for me to deny Him when I hear His voice in my heart!” Meoraq paused, inviting the will of Sheul. His will was immediate and undeniable. “And He says there shall be sons. Get back in that bed.”

Her human brows descended fetchingly. “We’re still fighting, Meoraq.”

“No.” He began to undress what little she had managed to don. “We are not.”

She smacked at his hand. “I’m still fighting, with or without you!”

“I conquered you once.” He drew the knife of his fathers, cast about briefly for a place to stab it, then settled for tossing it back onto the bed. “I can easily do it again.”

She gave him a few token cuffs as he carried her to the furs, but by the time he lay her down, she was only glaring. When he nipped at her chin, she even put an arm around his neck, however grudgingly. “You really are a zealot,” she sighed, wrapping his hips in the welcome weight of her legs.

“And you,” he said, “truly are a fool.” He swept the hair away from her shoulder and bit lightly at his mark. “Burn with me now, my fool.”

“Your pillow-talk needs a lot of work,” she told him, but she burned and when she finally slept, it was smiling with his hand over her belly where his new-sparked son surely grew.

 

2

 

The mountains were not wide. Meoraq assured her the crossing should only take four days, six at the absolute most. Then it would be back on the road, one with a beach at the end of it, no less. It was too much to hope that it would be a warm, sunny beach, but still, Amber had never been to one (sleeper-dream of mama cigarette smoke screaming seagulls but o the sunset and the waves coming in) and when she had it in her to hope for things, she did hold out a little hope for one nice day at the beach.

She’d thought she was prepared. No matter how sedentary her winter routine had become, her memories of the endless march across the plains were never far. She knew it would be tough. She knew she’d be cold and hungry and exhausted all the time, but she knew she could take it and keep moving. She was ready. Four days.

Except that Amber had quite naturally twisted her ankle on those fucking snowshoes within the first stupid hour of the first day after leaving the cave.

Except that on the second day, she’d also tumbled a good fifty meters down an icy slope into a slushbank when the ledge that had supported a hulking lizardman’s weight and that of two sleds lashed together (Amber was no longer pulling hers because of her ankle) without any complaint whatsofreakingever gave way under her fat ass.

Except that on the third day, it had started snowing again that night for the first time in days and days and motherfucking days and now they were in it up to their knees again, which meant she was also back in the damn snowshoes.

Amber did not believe in God, but if ever there was some supernatural force trying to send a sign, Someone was screaming it. And Meoraq, who saw messages from God in plants, caves and even plops of animal poop, pretended to be oblivious. No matter what fresh slice of shit-cake got served, he just bandaged her up and kept going.

Amber could take all the punches the universe could throw, but waiting for the punch to hit was killing her. On the fourth day, the day they were supposed to be out and which found them camped in the middle of the same goddamn nowhere with the same goddamn ice storm crusting up the side of the tent, Amber gave up and said it for him: “You told me so.”

Meoraq raised his head out of the pillow of his pack and rubbed sleepily at his face. “Eh? Was I talking?”

“You told me it wasn’t time to leave and I made you.”

He looked at her, spines flexed all the way forward, then laughed and dropped back into his arm.

Now that stung.

“I did!” she insisted.

He made a very bad effort at smothering another laugh. “I forgive you,” he said gravely.

Amber took that for as long as she could and then she threw the blankets back and kicked free of them.

Meoraq groaned and rolled onto his side to watch her grab her mat and pull it to the other side of the tent in noisy heaves. “Please yourself. I don’t forgive you. Shall I have you whipped, woman? Would that make you happy?”

She dug down through the layers of their bedding for the xaut fur in the middle and yanked it free.

“Where do you think you’re going with that?” he asked, cocking his head.

“It’s mine!” she said, wrapping herself furiously in its itchy warmth. “I made it and it’s mine!”

He dropped onto his back and rubbed his brow-ridges. “Deep breaths, Uyane,” she heard him mutter. “Deep and slow. So.” He moved his hand and gestured to her. “What is it you want to say?”

“If you’re mad at me, get mad at me!”

“If I’m not mad, can I just go to sleep?”

“Stop making fun of me!”

The slap/rasp of his hand rubbing back on his brow-ridges. The steady rise and fall of his broad chest as he breathed six times. Then he threw back his blanket and before she could untangle herself from the xaut fur and get out of his reach, he’d gripped the edge of her mat and yanked her against him. He stripped the fur away and made the bed again: blanket, xaut fur, blanket.

She stopped fighting halfway through and just let him tuck her in, her eyes burning with humiliation, staring at the top of the tent until it blurred into new colors. When he was finished, he lay back down and snugged an arm around her, grunting comfortably against her shoulder. He seemed to fall asleep.

The storm blew and blew. It never stopped here. Never.

“Shall I guess?” Meoraq murmured against her ear.

Amber pressed her teeth tight together and did not answer.

“I say…” His hand slipped up to rest between her breasts. It was his favorite place to touch her. God alone knew why. “It’s just a little weather. And you say…it’s weather that could kill us.”

She shivered and tried to roll away from him. He waited until she was done and simply spooned up against her back.  “And I say we rest in God’s sight,” he continued. “And you say, stop acting like it doesn’t matter, lizardman.”

She felt the breath catch in her throat almost like a laugh, and gritted her teeth even harder because it wasn’t fucking funny, no matter how he said it.

“And I say, tell me what you want me to do about the weather. And you don’t say anything at first, but you get that look. And so I say, tell me plainly what the matter is. And you say something inexpressibly foolish, such as how this is all your fault. And so I tell you how foolish it is to say that, which is a reasonable thing to say, and you become impossible to deal with. So.” He nuzzled at the side of her neck. “I will say none of these things. It is absolutely no use trying to talk with women.”

“Sexist son of a bitch.”

“Ha.” He snuggled closer under the blankets. “I win. So just say it, Soft-Skin, before you choke on it.”

“We were supposed to be out of the mountains today.”

“Shit happens.” His language, her phrase. They were both doing a lot of that.

“And it is my fault. You can make all the smart-ass comments you want to.”

“Lo,” Meoraq intoned, “even his ass be wise.”

“Jerk.”

“Mm.”

Wind blew, cracking the ice forming on the side of the tent.

“When I was a boy,” Meoraq murmured, “and my training masters wished to give me the most severe punishments, they would set me to copying books. And the book that every boy most dreaded to see was Master Darr’s book of maps, because every line had to be perfect, you see. Every hill, named. Every bend of every river, just so. I must have copied that book ten times, end to end.”

Amber waited, gritting her teeth, but curiosity won out in the end. Meoraq could make the most random crap imaginable sound profound when he said it in that slow, meditative way. “And?” she said finally, surrendering.

“And when I first left Xeqor,” he went on, “I thought I knew the land, because I knew those maps so well. I had no hesitation when I set off, for I knew where I would find the range of Aqcha and I knew where to find the city of Fol Ganis on the other side. It came as a hell of a shock when I climbed that first peak and saw more mountains.”

“And the moral of this story is?” asked Amber, and immediately regretted it because it didn’t sound tough and bored at all, just snotty.

“That everything looks small on paper,” Meoraq replied. “But in Gann’s world, shit happens.”

The wind died down, making the relative quiet seem much louder and heavier than it should. Meoraq’s body beside hers remained perfectly relaxed.

“I’m sorry for being such a bitch,” Amber muttered finally.

He patted her breast companionably. “Forgiven.”

“I mean it.”

“I know.”

She didn’t feel much better. How the hell could he lie there so still? “Are you really this sleepy?”

“Yes. Wait.” He raised his head. “Why?”

“Well, it’s only the middle of the day.”

“There’s nothing else to do.” He flicked his spines at her. “Is there?”

“Jesus Christ, really? How did you ever survive living with me as long as you did without having sex every other hour?”

“With God’s aid alone,” he said seriously. “It was a terrible time.”

“Just talk to me, okay?”

“It is absolutely no use,” he reminded her, but rolled onto his back and pulled her halfway onto his chest. “It hasn’t been so bad, has it?”

She thought it was a joke and started to laugh at it, albeit in a bitchy way, but then got a better look at him and realized he was serious. “For you, maybe. I am a walking bruise, lizardman.”

“You bruise too easily. But do you hurt?”

Of course she hurt! She opened her mouth…and thought about it, damn him.

“Not like before,” she admitted. After all, she was just lying here, not sprawling in a gasping heap, half-conscious. If the weather wasn’t so piss-awful, she’d still be walking. She ached a little on her hip where she’d done some serious splits on her way down the slope the other day, but unless she actually poked at a bruise, even those didn’t bother her too much.

She didn’t hurt. She wasn’t tired. She wasn’t even all that cold, thanks to Meoraq’s tent, plenty of furs, and the clothes they’d spent all winter making. She hadn’t been hungry in more days than she could count.

“No,” she said, surprised. “I guess it’s not that bad.”

“And when it is over, it will be over forever. You will have a bed all the rest of your life, except on those nights when you have mine. You will have servants. You will sit at a table and eat from a plate.”

“You say the most romantic things. You sure you want to risk letting other guys see me?” Amber asked. “Apparently, I have this overwhelming sensuality.”

“Your servants will be women.”

It took a few seconds for that to register all the way.

“Hang on.” She pushed herself up a little so she could see his face. “I thought you said women didn’t work on this planet.”

“We don’t pay them,” he explained. “And most of them only care for their own households, so no one sees them. It’s only if a man has too many daughters or a barren wife set aside that they end up working in House Uyane.”

“What?”

“It’s a big House. It needs a lot of tending and my father never had daughters. I don’t think he even had sisters. It’s the lord’s responsibility to see that all those within his holdings are cared for, so why not put them to work? Besides, they’re rarely out where we can see them. It’s mostly the extra boys that do the running around and cleaning.”

“Extra?”

He rolled one hand idly through the air. “Orphans and bastards and such. If they weren’t born under the sign of the Blade, they’re the responsibility of the lord-steward.”

“What happens to them?”

“Farmers and cattlemen can always use more workers, but they have to be old enough to be useful. I’ve seen boys as young as six in the fields of other Houses, but my father waited until they were ten or so.”

“Practically grown,” said Amber sarcastically.

He grunted agreement. Several more minutes passed while Amber tried not to fidget as she thought about his place in Xeqor and whether or not she was supposed to help take care of all these extra kids. Meoraq just dozed. Suddenly, he tensed and roused himself, saying, “You will do no more work when we are home, woman. Swear your obedience!”

“Okay.”

He eyed her mistrustfully and settled back down.

“So what kind of work are we talking about, since the kids do all the cleaning?”

“Eh.” He yawned, rubbing at his eyes. “They cook and do the washing. In a House Uyane’s size, that’s a lot of work. I suppose they must do the heavy things a boy can’t, like haul water. I don’t know, really. Mostly, they stay below, out of sight.”

“Why?”

“It’s where the work is. Besides, if they come up, someone other than my father might see them.”

“And?”

He raised his head up to look at her, as if he thought she might be joking. When he saw she wasn’t, he laughed a little anyway, his spines flexed forward. “If a man saw them, he might want to have sex with them. Unless he were born under the Blade, that would be a crime. And even if he were, it’s still trouble.”

“But if your father saw them…?”

Meoraq shrugged and lay back down. “He was lord-steward.”

Something dark and cold and incredibly heavy shifted in her stomach, not quite waking up all the way. “How is that fair?”

“Eh?”

“When women sleep around, they’re possessed by the devil, but it’s okay for men to get with the help? What kind of half-assed laws are these?”

“Not men,” said Meoraq, in warning tones. “The lord-stewards, who are masters over all their households. And Uyane is not merely a House under the sign of the Blade, it is the Blade. Its stewards are highest in God’s eyes. He wants them to breed.”

‘Even you?’ She couldn’t say it, since the answer was so stupidly obvious. Why wouldn’t he sleep around with all the pretty little lizardladies that were sure to be cluttering up the house once they got back and she wasn’t the only woman on the planet anymore? But she had to say something, because the two words she couldn’t say were choking her, so instead, trying to pretend it was all still hypothetical, she said, “What about what the woman wants?”

“She is permitted to struggle,” he said off-handedly. “There is no sin in conquest.”

“Wow.” It was all she could think of. It wasn’t nearly enough. She said it again. “Wow. That’s easily the most sexist, pig-headed thing you’ve ever said, and I have to be honest, Meoraq, there’s a lot of competition on that list.”

He didn’t answer.

Amber listened to the silence, torn between her strong desire to apologize for what was admittedly a bitchy comment and her equally strong desire to provoke him with another one. She knew he’d been with other women before (and like the men she knew he’d killed, she suspected the number to be not merely high, but actually beyond counting), but the thought that he might go on being with them had never occurred to her. Funny, how she could laugh at his insistence that they were married right up until the prospect of adultery came up.

‘And this is how I deal with it,’ she thought disgustedly, rolling her eyes at the tent wall. ‘Calling him names. Yeah, that’ll encourage him to stay home with the wife.’ Aloud, she said, “Hey.”

He grunted.

“They say we’re not supposed to go to bed angry, so I’m sorry.”

“Eh? I’m not angry.” Meoraq shifted onto his back and tucked his arms behind his head. “I was thinking of my father.”

“Why?” And in spite of her determination to let this go, out it came: “Did he have a lot of sex-slaves?”

“Servants,” he said distractedly. “Yes, he did. But he never used them for sex.”

“How scandalous.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” he said after some reflection. He frequently had trouble telling when she was being sarcastic. “But it was odd enough that I noticed. There is nothing shameful in the fires given to a steward of the bloodline, and his bloodline is that of Uyane. The females of four hundred households bow under his protection and would be…would have been honored by his conquest.”

“There’s another one for that list…”

“But he reserved his fires for my mother. Even at inconvenience to himself.” Meoraq lapsed into quiet, but tucked his arm around her shoulders. “I think he loved her.”

“Oh. Well…that’s sweet.”

He didn’t answer. That dark thing in her stomach shifted again, lifting its head.

“Isn’t it?”

“There must have been a reason…something I never saw. Did she talk to him when they were alone together? Comfort him?” His fingers flexed lightly on her arm. “Argue with him?”

“Wouldn’t that be a weird world?”

‘Goddammit, Bierce, shut the fuck up.’

“She was special to him,” said Meoraq. “I could never understand why.”

“I’m sure she knew you loved her,” said Amber after an uncomfortable silence.

“No, she didn’t. Because it wouldn’t have been true. I saw every private touch they shared, touches no less than these—” Meoraq squeezed her shoulder, his thumb running lightly over her scars. “—as a personal affront to the dignity of our House. It embarrassed me to see them together and it embarrassed me even more after she died to see my father mourn her. I feel…”

She waited, but in the end, he only blew out a rude snort and said, “I don’t even know what I feel, Soft-Skin. It was his own House, and I made it impossible for my father to share an honest touch with his wife without fear of consequence. What an insufferable little prick I was.”

“Okay, what’s that mean?”

“What?”

“Prick. That wasn’t your language, that was mine. What’s it mean?”

“In dumaqi? Eh, it’s the thing…the two things that fit together that make it possible for a door to swing open and closed. Why? What does it mean in your speech? I’ve never been able to puzzle that out, exactly. I only know that it’s a curse.”

“It’s another word for this.” She gave the smooth mound between his legs a pat.

“Another one? How many words do you need for that?”

“This from the man who can say gann eight different ways,” Amber remarked, gently kneading.

“Twelve. You are amazing,” he said seriously.

“Hey, I’m just getting started, lizardman.” She rubbed her thumb along the moist edge of his slit, cupped the hard bulge she felt just below the surface, and squeezed. “But hold that thought, because I’ll want to hear you shout it a few times.”

Meoraq arched his neck and grunted. “Woman, I was just speaking of my father. This is hardly appropriate.”

It wasn’t, was it? But that thing was in her gut and if she didn’t do something to get back to normal, it was going to eat its way out of her right through her mouth. “A woman should always be ready to receive her man’s fires,” she reminded him.

“To receive, yes, but not kindle them.” He caught her wrist up and pinned it to the bed above her head, rolling atop her in the next moment to nuzzle aggressively at her neck. “And I’m not the one who does the shouting, am I?”

“You make your share of the noise.”

He hissed at her, but the teasing light of his eyes suddenly died, replaced by an unnerving somberness. He frowned at her, his face very close to hers, all that she could see. After a few false starts, he suddenly said, “I love you, you know.”

Her stomach clenched once, hard enough to hurt, and then slowly, finally, relaxed. She told herself it didn’t matter, she wasn’t one of those girls who needed to hear flowery shit like that, but…but he said it. He said it to her.

“I can’t believe I’m saying that to a woman,” he remarked, looking at the wall of the tent above her in an unfocused way, just like there was a window there to stare through. “But there it is, and it is the only word. I love you. Huh.”

She gave him a few uncomfortable moments to come to terms with that, and when he only continued to lie there on top of her, staring at the wall and keeping her wrists pinned above her head, she finally put on her best state-paid counselor’s voice and said, “And how do you feel about that?”

“Bitterly ashamed.”

She stared.

His spines flicked as he gave her a sheepish sort of look. “Not of you. Of myself. It can be nothing less than a gift of God to know love…and I made my parents hide it. I would give anything…” He thought, frowning. “Almost anything,” he amended, “to go back to just one day, one hour, and unmake the insufferable little prick that I was.”

“Almost anything, huh?”

He met her smile with another of his terribly serious looks and brushed his knuckle across her brow. “I would not give you. My blood. My blades. Even my name, but not you, Soft-Skin. You are mine. I will give you up to our Father and no one else.”

Amber sighed and patted the side of his snout. “Say that again, but try not to sound like such a stalker when you do it this time.”

He leaned in to nuzzle her, scraping the end of his snout forcefully and deliberately up one side of her neck and down the other, inhaling slowly the whole time. He finished with a hard bite to her scarred shoulder, not quite hard enough to break the skin. “You belong to me,” he murmured. “You will always be Soft-Skin under Uyane. In life, in death, and in the Halls where we reside after. You are mine.”

She couldn’t help smiling any more than she could help saying, “You don’t know what a stalker is, clearly.”

“You try so hard to convince me you are impossible to please, but I know better. Hold still.” He pressed his rough mouth carefully against hers, then withdrew and flicked his spines playfully forward. “Do you want to have sex yet?”

“Oh boy, do I.”

He grimaced and started undressing her.

“Wait. I…”

I what? I love you? Why? Just because he said it first? Sure, it seemed like the right thing to say, polite and expected and non-threatening, and who knew, maybe even a little bit true, although she refused to look at that too closely. Not right now. God, he was looking at her. Waiting, just like she’d asked him to. And she had no idea what she wanted to say, except that she knew it was still choking her out from the stomach on up.

And then she knew what she wanted to say, felt it whole and burning in her mind. It was just a question of whether she was too chickenshit to say it.

Amber Bierce had been a lot of things in her life. Chickenshit was never going to be one of them.

She reached up and caught Meoraq around his snout. He let her, although his spines came slowly all the way forward and just as slowly all the way back.

“When we get home,” said Amber, “you keep your hands off the servants, you hear me?”

His head cocked. She kept her grip on his snout and even squeezed a little.

“I’m your woman. That makes you my man. You better not make me fight for you unless you’re damn sure you want me fighting-mad.”

Balancing easily on one hand, he closed the other over her wrist and freed his snout. He studied her as she lay beneath him for several long, expressionless seconds. “I do,” he said at last. Then he grinned and dropped, rolling onto his back. He slapped his chest once. “You can even be on top.”

 

3

 

So in the end, it took six days to cross over into Gedai, which was, as Meoraq made a point of reminding her, exactly what he’d said it would be at the outside margin. She did not appreciate the observation.

There wasn’t much in the way of foothills on the other side, just a short series of long plateaus and steep slopes, almost like stairs. Meoraq took his time scouting each descent, which made them relatively painless once he’d finally settled on a path, although Amber still managed to go down two of the slopes on her ass. In spite of this (or maybe because of it), they went from the snowline to the ground in just one day.

When the sun came up the next morning, Amber and Meoraq were awake and watching from the top of the next hill over to see sunrise over Gedai for the first time. Holy Gedai, as Meoraq called it. Birthplace of the Prophet. The land where, in just a few more days, they would find the temple where Meoraq thought he was going to talk to God. Her first impression was that it looked a lot like the same brown grass, the same windy sky, the same open plains as they’d left on the other side of the mountain. Maybe a little more wooded, a little less flat, but that was all.

“What do you think?” she asked, studying Meoraq’s inscrutable face in the thin morning light.

“Looks like your hair first thing in the morning,” he replied. “Only it’s everywhere instead of just in my face.”

She didn’t appreciate that observation either.

They started walking again, but even though they were out of the mountains at last, their speed did not improve. The ground under their feet was hard, frozen, stone-riddled grass, which while indeed much easier to walk on than boot-deep snow and slush, made pulling sleds absolutely hellish. Meoraq took the heavy one with all the meat and he still went faster than Amber and the hides. He didn’t complain in so many words, but his spines got lower as the day wore on. When Amber inevitably hit the rock that tipped her sled and spilled all their gear to the bottom of the hill they’d spent easily twenty minutes climbing, he just patted her on the head and picked everything up.

“I think we’ll camp early,” was all he said, slipping back into his sled’s harness.

“Oh come on! I hit one rock! I missed a billion others, didn’t I?”

“I didn’t say we were camping now,” he countered. “I said it would be early.”

“Yeah, but you meant now.”

“I did not.”

“When then?”

“When I judge it necessary.”

“And why would it be necessary early?”.

His glance was cool and uncompromising. “Because you’re tired.”

She couldn’t argue, so she did what anyone would do. She switched targets. “You chew with your mouth open.”

“I’m allowed to breathe when I eat,” he replied, glaring. “And you growl in your sleep.”

“It’s called snoring and I do n—”

She hit another rock, tipped the sled, and spilled its contents down the other side of the hill. They stood together and watched until the last bundled hide had finished rolling. When she finally nerved herself up to look at him, he was already looking at her.

“In my defense,” she said, lifting her chin, “there are a lot of rocks.”

He sighed and untethered himself from his sled to start picking hers up. Again.

When he decided it was time to stop for the day (early) and set up camp, he left the actual setting-up for her. He needed to make a patrol, he said. A lengthy, far-reaching, thorough patrol. Alone.

She made a token protest, just to let him know she was tough enough to do it, but he pulled out his You’ll-do-as-I-say-woman act and she let herself be bullied. Her feet hurt and she was hungry. If he wanted to crawl around for another mile or two after hiking up and down hills all day, he was perfectly welcome to do it. Still…

“And you expect me to just do all the work while you’re taking it easy on your evening stroll?”

“It is a wife’s duty and pleasure to lessen her husband’s burdens.”

“Says who, lizardman?”

“Prophet Lashraq, as written in Sheul’s true Word.”

“You mean a man wrote it.”

“But God spoke it.” He came to stroke at her forehead and she turned her face away. Undaunted, he nuzzled at her throat instead and patted her on the head. “Have food ready when I return. Use lots of meat. It’s not as cold here as it was in the mountains.”

“Okay. Put up the tent, gather poop, start a fire, make dinner. Anything else?”

He caught the sarcasm and paused long enough to pick up his pack and toss it to her. “Wash my clothes,” he said and cocked his head, daring her to challenge him.

Amber cocked her head back at him. “How about I leave the laundry for tomorrow and wash you instead?”

He grunted smug assent and started walking. “I’ll be back before dark. Be ready for me. And be rested.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She waited until he’d put a little more distance between them before adding, “Sexist scaly jerk,” but she said it quietly. He didn’t hear her, which was good. She didn’t really mean it. Well, she sort of meant it, but not in a bitchy way. And she did like the idea of having the camp to herself while she took a bath. Privacy was something they’d had all too little of up in that cave.

So she put his tent together, started a fire and cut up some kipwe to warm on it, filled the flasks at the little stream nearby and put the heat-stones in the coals, then sat on the hide-cushioned sled to watch the clouds roll by while the water got hot. She had no itchy feeling between her shoulders or that prickly sensation at the back of her neck that people talked about when they said they ‘felt watched.’ And if she had, she would have only thought it was Meoraq, swinging by to look in on her before continuing on his patrol. After all this time, even hearing Meoraq talk of cities and other traveling Sheulek and even the various sinners who had been exiled to die in the wildlands, it simply never occurred to her think she was anything but alone.

She wasn’t.

It really wasn’t very windy today. The smoke from her fire made a strong, obvious arrow in the sky, pointing right at her camp. These raiders had come a long way from their usual route to investigate. There were only five of them now; the other six remained with the slaves they had acquired at the nearby city of Praxas, where they had traded bundles of dried phesok for the cast-off daughters of those who had them to spare. The raiders were certainly not above attacking Praxas (two of their number even now had been taken as young boys during such raids), but when trade was good, it behooved them all to use diplomatic measures.

Now they had spied a potential new target and so they came, crawling on their bellies as soon as they were near enough to see the lone silhouette at the glowing coals, blades out and ready. They had expected a warrior—it was always wisest to expect the worst, although far more common to find instead some fool youth who fancied himself a hunter or, ha, a raider—and they were ten body-lengths from the fire before they realized, almost in unison, that they had no idea what sat at camp before them.

They stopped, exchanging questioning glances in the silent way of pack predators. The man who was their leader considered for perhaps eight heartbeats. Then he gestured with his sword and the crawl resumed. The essential meat of the matter had not changed. Regardless of what form it took, this was prey. That it was also strange might or might not mean greater profit, but one could only know that once the prey was taken.

So they took it.

Amber didn’t hear them; the light breeze hissing across the grass covered what nominal sound they made on their approach. She didn’t see them; the fire before her occupied all her attention. She had no warning whatsoever…and yet, for no reason, she looked back over her shoulder.

Her eyes locked at once and without immediate comprehension on the eyes of the raider’s leader. Her first thought, after the eternity of the split-second that followed, was that he had all Meoraq’s same features and still really looked nothing like him.

Then she dove for her spear, snatched it and a handful of skin-slicing grass off the ground, and swung to face him.

Their need for stealth now moot, they rose and fanned out without speaking, flanking her, herding her from the fire so expertly that she didn’t even know they were doing it until they had her away and closed in a ring around her.

‘Woman, they’re going to have you dead in about three seconds,’ Amber thought, stunned and a little embarrassed by this development. She had to do something fast, something unpredictable.

She lunged forward with a howl, then spun around and blindly stabbed. Her first feint, she thought vaguely. A damned effective one. The raider before her—now behind her—had drawn up his arms and crossed his blades to block her strike; the raider behind her—now before her—had rushed right on to the point of her spear. A good thing, too. If it hadn’t been for his strength and the power of his swift attack, she never could impaled him so deeply.

They stared at each other with what was left of the spear between them for what felt like hours and could not have been more than a single second. He said something in a tight, confused voice, but even though they were words she surely knew, Amber’s shocked mind could make no sense of them. She twisted vainly on the spear to try and free it, but succeeded only in making him belch blood all down his chest and hers, so she snatched the short, hooked sword out of his hand instead and shoved him back.

He fell, but the others closed in even tighter, and she had been reduced to the reach of her own arm and the dying man’s sword.

They eyed her as the man on the ground groaned and kicked, and Amber stood with the point of the curved blade jerking from one target to another.

“Ease off,” one of them said, and that time her brain made the translation without effort. He sheathed his sword and unhooked a short length of cord from his belt, weighted at both ends with bell-shaped lumps of metal. He began to back up, swinging this fun new toy in tight circles at his side, watching her. “Weapons down. I want it alive. Aqizu, stay behind it.”

She snatched a glance behind her, slashing at the lizardman’s throat, but he was too fast for her.

“I think it heard you,” one of them remarked.

“I think it understood you,” another added, more meaningfully. “That’s no animal.”

“When was the last time you saw an animal in clothes?” their leader asked in his calm, intent way. Without taking his eyes off her, without even seeming to move, he suddenly interrupted the steady shush-shush of his weighted cord with a throw. Amber darted aside and back, slashing wildly, but she was not his target; the weighted bell on the cord’s end crunched into the groaning man’s forehead, leaving a sickeningly bloodless hollow where it had landed. He pulled the line back with a zip and a flick of his wrist, resuming its steady circles without any sign of effort or interest in the fate of the man he’d just killed. “Keep your guard up. Do not hurt it. Go, Vek.”

She sensed more than saw the attack and swung around to meet it, slicing at the grasping hands and the face behind them indiscriminately. The blade of her sword skidded along his scales, then came down just right between his two middle fingers and sliced his hand in half all the way to his wrist. He let out a shriek right about the same instant the weighted cord wrapped itself around her arm.

Amber grabbed the sword from her trapped hand and let his zip-flick-tug take her right to him, but he was as fast as Meoraq and caught her wrist with a good six centimeters between the quivering tip of the short blade and his throat.

“Easy,” he said, almost singing it, the way another man might try to calm a stray dog. One hand pushed her weapon aside; the other swiftly reeled in the slack on his weighted cord until the chance to break his hold was good and gone. “Easy, little one. No one here will hurt you.”

“I mean to fucking hurt it!” Mr. Split-Hand snarled, bent double over his gushing arm. “I mean to hurt the damn thing plenty!”

“Quiet, Vek. Don’t fight me, little one. Your tiny bones look easy to break. For the moment, I want you whole.”

She struggled anyway, fighting a losing battle for just one chance to stab…but with the first flagging of her strength, he suddenly swept her arm around and pulled, letting her momentum carry her stumbling forward into the space he had just been, and then she was on her knees with him swiftly tying her wrists to her elbows behind her back. So she screamed, as pointless as that was, but wherever Meoraq was, he wasn’t there to hear her.

Maybe they’d found him first.

“Fierce little thing,” the leader grunted, planting his knee in the small of her back for the necessary leverage to catch and hold her legs together. She heard the shu-u-up as he pulled his belt off one-handed, a sound that had always meant Meoraq in an amorous mood, and Amber screamed again, uselessly.

“What are you going to do with it?” someone asked, nudging at her with his boot.

“There has always been coin for oddities. This is odder than most. Up, little one.” He pulled; her shoulders creaked in their sockets and she arched instinctively backwards, helping him pull her to her bound feet. He bent, his grip firm and impersonal, and tipped her up and over his shoulder.

She bit him, her teeth grating over two or three scales before she found a gripping place and dug in, scissoring her jaws together with all the strength she had left in her. Hot blood gushed into her mouth. He barked and flung her forwards again, inadvertently helping her rip away a scale so that she could spit it defiantly at his knees when she landed at his feet.

“God’s teeth,” someone remarked.

“Sharp teeth, at any rate,” the leader answered dryly. He checked the damage, which was nominal but bled heavily without any scales to help seal it, and as soon as he was finished shrugging off his harness and cinching it tight again with a bandage beneath it, he hunkered down before her and smiled. It was a gentle smile, disturbingly sincere, and it stayed that way as he showed Amber his open palm, drew it deliberately back and then slapped her hard across the mouth.

She hit the ground, sucking dirt up her nose and into her throat, so that all the involuntary brays of pain she made after that were choked. Now she could taste her blood, too, and feel the great, spreading heat of hurt where her lips had been mashed. But when his hand came down to cup her chin and turn her toward him, Amber exposed her bloody teeth at him and hissed through them, just like Meoraq did whenever he was good and pissed.

Several lizardmen stepped back.

The leader glanced tolerantly down at his chest where her defiant hiss had sprayed him with blood. He touched a few droplets, rubbed his fingers, then put out his hand. “Give me your belt, Vek.”

Split-Hand glared at the leader, then at Amber, then stomped over to his dead friend and took that belt instead.

The leader accepted that (not without a dark and watchful stare), then made a loop of it, waited for Amber to stop coughing, then fit it over her tossing head. She clamped her teeth together. He pinched her nostrils shut. She bucked and flailed and finally had to breathe, whereupon he worked the belt between her screaming jaws and pulled it tight.

“Now we try this again, little one,” he said conversationally, sweeping her up and over his shoulder. “But you had ought to know that if I have to pull every fang out of your fierce little head to ensure your good behavior, that is exactly what I will do. Mind yourself. Let me see it, Vek.”

Amber could see nothing beyond the leader’s backside and the ground as Split-hand presumably presented his injury. She wriggled, chewing at the belt until her lips bled, and finally fell slack, gasping wetly around the leather. She was caught; she felt that she could keep fighting, at least for a few more minutes, but she knew she couldn’t break free. She wasn’t ready to give up yet, but she had to have a better goal than making him mad enough to kill her. She had to wait. Another chance to escape might come along, but until then, she just had to wait.

“No good,” someone was saying. “It has to come off.”

“I know it has to come off, cock-rubber! Fuck Gann!”

“Not here. I have no reason to think there is only one of these.” The shoulder she rode jostled with a meaningful shrug. “Get what there is and get away.”

The raiders got to work rifling through the packs around the fire. There wasn’t enough to occupy all of them. One of them came strolling around to look at her instead, fingering at her hair.

“This is easily the most bizarre thing I have ever seen,” he said.

The leader grunted—Meoraq’s grunt, the one that meant he acknowledged the comment but didn’t feel any strong need to converse.

“You mean to sell it?” the other man said once she was done. He was still touching her hair.

“Might.”

“To who?”

“To me!” Vek snapped. “Hear me, Zhuqa, if you put that thing on the block without telling me, I will put a hook on the wrist where my fucking hand used to be and put the hook in your fucking head!”

“If I sell it, I’ll give you due warning and a cut of credit besides. Now calm down and remember who you are speaking to.”

“It’s mine!” Vek spat, but he spat it without shouting. He came stomping around to the leader’s back to glare at her, holding the bandaged lump of his ruined hand. He flared his open mouth threateningly, then dove forward and cracked his forehead into hers. She heard him stalk off muttering as she swayed near the grey area of unconsciousness, and finally, with a mental sigh of defeat, she fell on through.

 

* * *

 

Just as the raiders had not been able to tell human from dumaq at any great distance by the full light of the fire, so Meoraq could not tell dumaq from human by moonlight at the hour of his return.

He had been in a fair mood most of the evening, wandering far and observing the animals of Gedai that were ostensibly his reason for this patrol with only half an eye. He prayed as he walked, silently at first, then aloud, and soon was singing some of his favorite hymns at full voice. Amber wasn’t there to mutter in her throat or heave her pained sighs or slap at her face. He loved his wife—more and more, that word felt true and right and real—but they had spent too many days this winter riding about in one another’s pockets. He liked her company, but he missed his solitude and he meant to enjoy it as much as possible while he could.

At length, even as he saw the sun low to the mountains and knew his time was ending, he found a friendly jut of stone and sat himself to meditate, but his first moments in that welcome stillness were unquiet. He could do this back at camp, couldn’t he? And truth, he supposed he could, albeit with Amber pacing restlessly somewhere at the outside edge of his perceptions. She’d want to talk at him or involve him in some way in the domestic things she did or maybe just pull him into the tent for sex. Meoraq was opposed to none of these things, but once in a while, a man just liked to meditate.

Still, that vague sense of unease persisted. A tickle of wind, the rough edge of the rock he sat on, the distant call of some unknown beast—every little distraction woke him wholly to his clay until he resorted to a child’s trick, lying flat on his back with an arm crooked over his eyes, chanting the Prophet’s Prayer over and over until meaning bled away and it was all just sound. Sound and blackness, yes, but still not peace. In its pursuit, he not only failed to truly meditate, but also entirely lost track of time. He believed that he spent perhaps an hour in that fruitless endeavor, but when he finally cried surrender and opened his eyes, it was full dark.

Amber must be terrified. No, strike that, she was furious. And in either case, she was just fool enough to come looking for him if she believed him lost or injured.

Cursing, he hurried back to camp, but ‘hurry’ was a relative term after dark. There was enough of a moon behind the clouds to show him his backtrail at first, but the wind which had been so calm all day now stirred itself up, soon erasing all sign of his passage until he followed nothing but a hope that this lesson in the cost of man’s pride would end at his camp and not in a nest of ravening tachuqis.

But it had been his own camp in the end, although he glimpsed it from well to the east of where he’d thought it was, and he thought it was Amber sleeping there when he finally came to it. There was no tent and no fire and this he at first presumed with a mixture of resignation and annoyance was her way of telling him he was a scaly son of a bitch for leaving her so long, which was spiteful and childish, yet he would apologize because he was Sheulek and a Sheulek took the higher path.

Then the clouds above him thinned so that the little light from the crescent moon grew stronger and all at once, what had been Amber became a dead man. It seemed Sheul gave him hours outside of Time to see this, to feel it, and only when he fully understood did the weight of the world crash back into his clay.

His feet took him forward without conscious thought. He reached only to stab the corpse—he had drawn his kzung, it seemed, how curious—then staggered away, staring wildly in all directions for Amber—where was Amber?—and seeing nothing, only the night—why had he left her so long?—and the wind whipping at Gann’s back.

He cupped his mouth and howled for her. Not with words, but just a cry, a dumb animal baying that he had never before imagined any dumaq could make. The wind alone answered, changing its course to drive him back. His boot struck the body. He looked at it and, with a sudden savagery he did not feel until it was upon him, he wrenched his kzung from the corpse and hacked at it again.

The head came free at his first blow. The chest cracked apart at his fourth. He took the left arm. Bisected the rib. The right arm. He struck until it was meat and bone and two legs. He struck until he had no wind and no moisture in his mouth but the clotted blood splashing up at him from the ground. He struck until he fell to his knees in splintery gore and leaned back, gasping.

He listened then, as he should have listened hours ago, but Sheul had nothing to say to him now.

Amber.

He dragged himself up, shaking on legs like water, and pulled his blade free of the mess on the ground. How long? The blood that touched his tongue had cooled, but was yet warm. The raiders might be close still. He looked and saw nothing, no sign but dumaq blood in spatters across the trampled grass. An hour ago, he would have seen their trail leading away, before the light failed and the wind grew strong.

An hour ago, he might have been here to stop it.

They had not left her body behind, only that of their companion. Perhaps she was alive still…or perhaps they had taken her corpse away as trophy. No, he must believe she lived! Lived and fought, as fiercely as the evidence here proclaimed, knowing he would follow.

“Sheul, O my Father, show me the way. Set me upon their path if she lives! Give me my right of vengeance if she does not!” He struggled with his fear and broke upon it, suddenly roaring, “How could You have sent her to me just to take her from me now?”

It was not for men to demand answers of God, no more than it was the recalcitrant son’s right to demand forgiveness of his father. Meoraq knew this. He bent his back beneath the weight of guilt and silence, one hand splayed open in cooling blood, and knew—for the first time in all his life—no love for God.

The moment passed away eventually, but the Meoraq who rose from his knees at the end of that bad time would forever be changed from the man he had been and he knew it. He collected his weapons, cleaned and sheathed them. He gave what fuel remained to the fire so that he could count his remaining provisions by its light and make them ready for the next day’s travel. Then he lay down and closed his eyes.

There was nothing he could do until morning.

 

4

 

Amber woke up to the sound of what she thought was an engine stuttering. In that moment, before she opened her eyes or even really had a chance to process sound or smell or anything lucid, she felt the overwhelming rush of relief that she had dreamed the whole damn thing. They’d said there would be no dreams in the Sleepers, but they’d been wrong, because she felt as though she’d been locked in that one for years. But she was awake now, which meant she was on Plymouth with Nicci right in the room beside her. There had been no crash. There were no lizardpeople. There was no Meoraq…

That hurt and it was the hurt that pierced her enough to drag her eyes open and see for herself what was real.

The first thing she saw was the wall. A leather wall, dyed black and stretched between some rough-cut poles, not so much to keep the weather out as to keep the light of their fire in. The crudity of this enclosure assured her at once that, for good or ill, she was still marooned on an alien planet with a race full of lizardmen.

Only after this fact sank in did she recognize that she was still bound—wrists to elbows, ankles to each other—and tethered to one of the poles holding the wall up. The belt that had gagged her had been loosened but not removed; it hung around her neck like a dog collar. The next thing she saw, what she probably should have seen first, was a small, slender lizardman—a lizardlady, maybe—hunched over with its wrists tied to a length of pole along with several other lizards, stuttering hoarsely without words.

Crying. All this time, she’d thought Meoraq had never seen anyone else cry but her. The sight of the lizard in a posture of such helpless, terrified surrender, coughing out its sobs as quietly as possible while the raiders (a lot more raiders, she noticed) talked around a campfire close by, pulled at Amber’s heart in a way only Nicci’s crying jags had ever been able to do before.

“Hey,” she said before she stopped to think that nothing she said was going to make any kind of sense to these people. “Hey, don’t cry. It’s…well, it’s not okay, but it will be. It might be.”

The lizardlady (she was positive now that was what the captives were. They had smoother, more delicate features and, more to the point, they appeared to have a breast. Only one. It wasn’t much—just a slight swelling in the center of each slender chest, more like a broad wedge than the round bubbles Amber had, but plainly a breast) gave her a fearful, shivering stare and began to stutter harder.

“What in the grip of God’s loving arms did I just hear?” The leader rose from his place at the fire, silencing his men with a wave of one hand before aiming it at Amber like a gun. “Did you just talk?”

She clamped her bloody lips together and said nothing. Her jaws still ached and the taste of blood was still bitter in her mouth. She could be as defiant as she wanted in her heart, but the rest of her didn’t want the gag again.

The raider’s leader was not deterred. He crossed the small camp in just a few steps to hunker beside her and prodded at her shoulder with one blunt finger. “Say something.”

“Fuck off,” she said. Stupid thing to say. She could have wished him a Merry Christmas for all the good it did her.

“God blows blessings up my ass,” someone else said, standing up. “It can talk!”

“You’re both imagining things,” said a third lizardman. “It’s just making sounds, those aren’t words.”

“Those aren’t dumaqi words,” the leader corrected. He drew a knife—he wore a pair high on his arms, like Meoraq—and showed it to her. “I think it’s time I had a better look at you, little one. Hold still and this won’t hurt. Toss around and I guarantee nothing.”

He did not untie her. He left her hands behind her back and her legs cinched together and simply cut along the seam of her tunic, severing each clumsy stitch she’d sewed on herself, until it just fell open. He grunted, flicking at strands of her hair with the tip of his knife, then stabbed it into the ground for safe-keeping and cupped her chin in his hand. He turned her head this way, then that, nudged at her lips, her ear, the ticklish flesh around some healing scratch on her cheek. Then he let go and dropped his gaze.

He touched her breast, then gripped it, kneaded it. His scales and the cold popped a nipple out for him; his thumb rolled over it thoughtfully, gave it a pluck, a careful pinch. He stopped when she winced, eyed her, then moved on to finger her bellybutton. He seemed to be trying to push his finger into it and when he finally decided that wasn’t going to happen, he leaned back on his heels and just grunted again.

“Where do you suppose it came from?” someone asked.

“Washed in on some storm.” He flexed the spines on the back of his head in a shrugging motion. “If you’d ever read the Prophet’s Word, you’d know that the first years after the Fall brought all manner of new and terrible life out of Gann.”

More than one raider cast his eyes skyward or hid them entirely behind a rubbing hand, but only the one called Vek, with a bandaged arm and a glazed look in his eye, was reckless enough to actually say, “Zhuqa, my missing hand is screaming at me in ways you can’t imagine. I can’t hear that piss-talk tonight and stay sane.”

“You go north far enough, you will find monsters. Hairy beasts as tall as three men standing on each other’s shoulders, swinging tails that can knock a man dead without even knowing he was there. Legless things in the rocky cracks that come up and bite, steal the feeling from a man’s body, and while he lies there unable to move, they crawl up into his slit and make a den in his guts. Even the trees have teeth there and will eat a man if he stumbles too close. I have been to the northlands,” he went on as his men murmured uneasily at each other. “I have seen all these things. This—” He gave Amber’s breast another rough, almost petting squeeze. “—is new to my eyes, but if they have monsters in the north, they must have them elsewhere as well.”

“This isn’t a monster.” Vek took a deep swallow from a small flask and came a little closer to them. “It’s a person.”

The leader grunted agreement.

“And I,” Vek went on, bending over to blow a particularly pungent and strangely sweet cloud of breath at her, “am going to kill it.”

“Ease off, Vek.”

“I mean to take a few days doing it, too,” he added, pointing at Amber. “I hope you understand me, you little smear of ghet-shit. I am going to cut off your hands and your feet and eat them in front of you.”

The leader reached up and caught Vek’s harness, gave him a small shake to make him look at him, and quietly said, “Ease off, I said. If I decide to sell it—if—I will give you the first offer. Until then, it belongs to me and you keep your distance. I’m feeling tenderly toward you at the moment, for the sake of all the years your two good arms have done me, but that doesn’t mean I won’t put you right into Gann’s open mouth if you keep giving me reasons.”

Vek moved off, grumbling and drinking, to collapse in a heap by the fire. He picked something up and looked at it—his hand, Amber realized—and threw it into the coals hard enough to send up a cloud of hot ash.

The leader picked up his knife again and resumed cutting. Her pants, as crudely made as her shirt, put up a little resistance at the waistband, and then he was able to put the knife away and just tear along the seams. Soon, she was lying there in her boots and the belts he’d used to tie her up and not a damn thing more. She tried to keep glaring, but the wind cut across her and the effect was completely spoiled by her sporadic shivers.

“What’s it doing?” someone asked.

“She’s cold,” the leader said after a moment’s silent contemplation.

All of them exchanged glances. It was some time before one of them said, “She? Are you sure?”

“No.” He thumbed at her nipple again. “But I believe these are teats of some kind. And this—” He started to move toward her pussy; she yanked her bound legs up. He dropped his hand back to his knee with a look of tolerant amusement and finished, “—looks open to me. That means female.”

“Oh that is disgusting,” one of them said, almost exactly at the same time as another said, “That is so much money…”

The leader grunted. Then he leaned in a little and tapped at his forehead with two fingers. “Zhuqa,” he said.

“What are you doing?”

“Say it,” said the leader. He tapped his brow again. “Zhuqa.”

Amber glared at him, shivering under her thuoch hide. She kept her mouth shut.

He flexed his spines again as he gently cupped her cheek. Then he lifted his hand, showed her his open palm, then slowly drew back his arm.

“Zhuqa,” she spat.

All the lizards but one recoiled.

“She said it,” one of them breathed.

“She tried.” Their leader dropped his hand to her forehead and gave her one of Meoraq’s friendly knuckle-taps. “Zhuqa means me. And Eshiqi…that means you. Say it.”

She didn’t think about it consciously, with words and arguments and a rational balance of pros and cons, but once again, that sense of helplessness welled up. It wasn’t despair, only a ruthless acknowledgment of her new situation and the very few options before her: Fight and be overwhelmed (and probably killed), or play along and hope for something better a little further down the road.

All this had time to sink in before Zhuqa ever had the chance to show her his slapping hand.

“Eshiqi,” said Amber.

“Good girl. Now look at me, Eshiqi. I want you to see this.”

He untied her left hand, just the one. She watched as he took her gently by that arm, holding it not quite straight out from the shoulder. He smiled, cupped her elbow, then slid that hand in an unmistakable caress down to her wrist, down to the Manifestor’s docking bracelet that she’d worn so long, she had forgotten it entirely.

“This,” he said, prying the thin metal off with his eyes locked on hers, “is over.”

He took it off, held it up briefly for his men to see, and then set it down. He drew a knife, the one he’d used to cut her clothes away, and as she struggled in vain to yank her hand out of his grip, suddenly stabbed it down. Into the bracelet.

Amber stopped fighting and looked at that. His men muttered and nudged each other. One of them rattled out a particularly nasty lizardish snicker. Zhuqa merely sheathed his knife again and tied her wrists back together, leaving the bracelet dead on the ground.

“Now you are mine,” he told her, and lifted her back onto his shoulder. The moment ended. He gestured to his men and they started taking down the walls and kicking the fire out. “Water for the slaves and get them moving,” he ordered, already walking. “I want to be home before dawn.”

 

* * *

 

When the sun came up, Amber raised herself up as best she could as she swung over Zhuqa’s back, searching for any dark speck that might be Meoraq, but she couldn’t see anything. Not saoqs, not corrokis, not any living thing. Just hills and trees…and ruins. And where Meoraq avoided the fallen cities of the ancients, the raiders headed right for them.

Headed home.

The ground beneath Zhuqa’s boots gave way to cracked pavement as the weathered framework and crumbling heaps of overgrown buildings slowly enclosed them. Ancient machines lay in rusty piles here and there along the streets, but their placement only seemed random at first glance. When she was behind them, looking out, Amber could see the sentries positioned behind them. One of them cupped his snout and let out a loud yodeling cry that Amber might have mistaken for a ghet’s howl if she hadn’t seen him do it. In the distance, someone else joined in and someone else beyond that, and then there were dozens of voices all raised together.

Soon, she could hear them coming, heavy boots tromping over the overgrown roads and speculative voices made indecipherable by the wind. The captives began to cry again, struggling in their bonds until the men walking at their sides were forced to cuff at them to keep them moving, but all Amber could do was hang there.

Trotting feet crunched up to them unseen and some new voice coughed out a laughing, “What is that?”

“The short answer is, ‘Mine’.” Zhuqa didn’t even slow down. He passed a raider who fell into step behind him, his head cocked and gaze traveling freely over Amber. “You didn’t want to come, remember, Iziz? All the way to Praxas, you said? In this cold? Fuck that, you said.”

“Is it the first time I’ve ever been wrong?” the other asked. “What is it?”

“I call her Eshiqi.”

“Her?” Iziz hooked a finger under Amber’s chin and tipped her head up. “Gann’s breath, that’s eerie. It looks almost like a person.”

Zhuqa laughed. “Almost,” he agreed.

“You selling it?”

“You buying?”

“I might toss a bid out. Can you fuck it?” he inquired, looking more and more interested.

“It’s got a slit in the right place. I haven’t tried yet. She killed Godeshuq and took a hand off Vek.”

Yet. He hadn’t tried yet.

“And gave you a good bite, it looks like.”

“Not half so good as she would have liked, eh, Eshiqi?” He shrugged to jostle her into a slightly different position as he ducked through a door into the ruined mouth of a building. More raiders lounged around in various stages of idleness, getting to their feet at the sight of her, only to be distracted by the captive lizardladies. Zhuqa showed no interest in any of them, only led the way through torchlit halls to a wide, echoing stair. He started down, bumping Amber hard against his shoulder on each step.

Iziz followed, toying with Amber’s hair. “You never said if you were selling.”

“If I do, I’ll see that you know before the open bidding. Here.” She felt him shift and saw a metal plate flicker as he tossed it over his shoulder for Iziz to catch. “Make yourself useful and take the new slaves to my pen. My men will want a wrestle; I ran them all night. Take one for yourself, since Godeshuq won’t be needing her, but be polite. Take the one the others leave. And give Vek first choice. His feelings are bruised.”

Iziz raised his fist and turned around to take charge of the slaves, herding them down another hall and out of Amber’s sight. Soon she had nothing to look at but torchlight on the walls, another stairwell, another corridor, and then—

“Home,” announced Zhuqa. bumping her in another good-natured shrug. She felt him shift again, heard the small scrape of a key turning in a lock, and then he took a few steps forward into darkness. “Not much, but better than wind and rain, even to fierce little snap-jaws like you. Did you note how many guards we passed on our journey to my chambers?”

Many. One at every landing. One or two at every crossways in the halls. Amber said nothing.

“I am going to put you down now and unbind you. Mark me, I don’t have to unbind you, but I choose to. You may get the idea to run. If you do, I swear before God the All-Father I will let you. You won’t get far and I will not come and get you for one full day and night because I will be rather cross with you. Do you hear me? Kick your legs twice if you do.”

She kicked sullenly. Once. Twice. And stopped.

“Good girl.”