The Last Hour of Gann by Smith, R. Lee (15)

“Fuck Gann, but you’re ugly,” Dkorm remarked, fingering a few handfuls of hair. “I don’t know why Zhuqa would want to dip it in you when he could have any other slave in this camp. Or all of them.” His gaze dropped to the baby in his arm. He shrugged it roughly into a new position and gave it a few equally rough pats in an unsuccessful effort to quiet it. “I don’t know why he wants this thing either. It doesn’t do anything but eat, make noise and stink the place up.”

“Why do you keep calling it ‘it’?” Amber asked, and when he only squinted at her in confusion, she tried again, supplementing her terrible lizard-speech with pantomime. “Is it a girl?” she asked, pinching her thumb and forefinger together to form a tear-drop shaped opening. “Or a boy?” Blushing, she pushed a finger through from the underside so that it thrust out like a painfully true-to-life lizardman penis.

The yellow stripes on Dkorm’s throat flashed a little brighter and began to fade. “You want to know the gender? Too soon to tell. Look.” He caught hold of the baby’s leg and moved it so that the baby’s naked loins were broadly displayed (and the baby itself was almost upside down). The baby’s slit was no more than a crease in its scales with a narrow hole at one end. Dkorm prodded this, saying, “It’s just a pisser right now. It won’t open for…” His spines snapped down and up again in a shrug. “…a year and some days. By dry season next, I should think. Some people say they can just tell, but some people piss out of their mouths.”

She couldn’t stand it anymore. She took the baby from him, righting it and drawing it in to lie against her breasts, where it quieted at once. He watched, folding his empty arms, in no hurry to take it back.

“Pointless,” he said, watching the baby begin its shivering song of sleep. “The first one always dies. I suppose Zhuqa thinks he can save it with a better mother, but it won’t work. Gann will have it. And once it’s gone—and I split your little dip, Xzem, don’t think I’ve forgotten—I’ll finally get some sleep.”

Xzem hunched a little further over Rosek as she wiped the baby clean.

“She was raider-got herself,” Dkorm confided, running his eyes lazily over Xzem’s huddled back. “How old were you when you had your first bastard?”

“I do not know,” Xzem whispered.

“Young, then. We’ll say too young and close the door. How many have you had?”

“I do not know.”

“No, I suppose they all blur together after a time. Do any of them still live? No, you wouldn’t know. She’s been sold to so many camps, she’s probably fucked half the sons she brought into this world. What say you, Xzem?” he asked, helping himself to a fresh cup of their foul drink. “They say a mother always knows her child, no matter the years or the distance. Have you ever wondered if those were your own eyes you saw in some stranger’s face before he bent you over?”

Xzem cupped the back of the baby’s head, nuzzling at it with her narrow snout, and stayed silent.

“She came to us so well-used, I was in her three shoves before I knew I was. Chuaan would never have paid for a woman like Xzem, but she had a sprat and Zhuqa’s stupid about sprats.” Dkorm rattled out a laugh and drank. “He actually wants one. Three of his play-women have squeezed one out for him, but they all died. And he burned them,” he added derisively. “Last time, it was raining and he made us all stand out in the fucking rain and watch him burn that noisy little shit-machine like it mattered.”

Dkorm punctuated this statement with a contemptuous glance at the baby in Amber’s arms, but soon his gaze shifted to her body and took on a speculative gleam. He stood and came over to get a better look at her.

Amber moved to put the worktable between them. He followed as unhurriedly as she’d done it, watched her struggle to roll out some clay with the baby tucked up in the crook of her arm, and said, “You could do that better with both hands, I think.”

Amber did not give him the baby.

He didn’t come right out and ask for it either. She felt him lift up a sizeable hank of her hair and drop it again. Then she felt him pressing at her arm. When she glanced tensely back, she found him with his spines all the way forward, watching his fingers dimple into her flesh. “Soft,” he said, almost to himself. “You soft like that all over, Eshiqi?”

She pulled out of his grip.

“Calm yourself. I don’t drink from Zhuqa’s cup,” he snorted. “Besides, I’ll find out soon enough. Zhuqa likes a little fighting spirit in his women, but only if he has the pleasure of breaking it quickly. When he decides you’re too distracting, he’ll put you up on the bidding block. Before long, you’ll be like Xzem here, nothing but a catch-cock with a little meat attached to keep it warm.”

She turned her back on him and went back to the lamps.

Immediately, his hand closed on her shoulder, yanking her roughly around before shoving her hard into the wall. The baby, jolted out of sleep, began to make its high, gaspy wails. Dkorm didn’t even look at it. The color was out on his neck again and visibly pulsing. “Don’t turn your back on me, you flat-faced dip,” he spat.

All around the room, new slaves cringed back and old ones made themselves motionless and invisible.

“You don’t show me your back unless I’m climbing it. I don’t care who you fuck, you’re still a slave in this camp. I can tell Zhuqa a thousand lies that will have that soft hide off you in strips.” He held her gaze a moment longer, then dropped his eyes deliberately to the baby in her protective arms and looked up again. “Shut it up.”

Amber moved warily over to Xzem, never taking her eyes from Dkorm, and passed the baby down. It refused the breast Xzem kept trying to coax on it, but did eventually exhaust itself into an unhappy sleep.

“Fucking sprats,” Dkorm muttered, turning away. He eyed Rosek, sleeping on the floor against her mother’s thigh, but moved on and found a crate against the far wall to sit on. In the other room, one of the children whispered; Dkorm’s neck lit briefly and darkened again. “Fucking sprats,” he said again, thicker. He dropped one hand to his groin and rubbed sullenly at himself, looking at all of them with a growing lack of emotion as his neck lit up brighter and brighter.

He wasn’t going to take six breaths and calm down.

Amber found his cup and filled it. He watched her do it with ominously blank eyes as he kneaded at himself, but when she brought it to him, he took it. After a moment, he took a drink. After another moment, he leaned back into the wall and tucked the hand that had been between his legs behind his head instead. He looked Amber up and down one last time, then grunted and shut his eyes. “Get back to work, all of you. Quietly. You wake those things and I’ll crack your bones.”

There was an immediate rustle of sound as the lizardladies resumed work.

Amber turned around. Xzem at once dropped her eyes. She kept her head bent as Amber went back to the worktable and picked up her half-done lamp. Then Xzem reached out and tapped the back of her hand once on the top of Amber’s bare foot. Just once—a touch so light and swift that if Amber hadn’t seen her do it, she might not have noticed. Amber paused uncertainly, but Xzem did not look up and she was afraid of attracting Dkorm’s attention. She went back to work in silence, like all the other slaves.

 

8

 

The sun rose in Gedai the same as in Yroq and Meoraq was awake to see it. They had made camp atop a high, narrow ridge, which gave him an impressive view in any direction. He could have watched the sun rise if he wanted. Instead, he sat with his back to the morning and watched the light crawl over the broken walls of distant Praxas.

He had hoped for a full hour of travel before darkness shackled him. He received perhaps half of that, not at a run, but at a torturous stride that seemed to hurl him back in time to that first day herding humans across the prairie.

The boy was not delicate. He did not run, but slipped through trees and thorn-breaks as easily as any saoq, and had a knack for finding pathways far superior to Meoraq’s own. Yet when the light was gone, the boy halted and would go no further. This was only common sense in the wildlands and Meoraq knew it. Still, he tried to coax the boy on and then order him and finally threaten.

The boy remained impervious, laughing as he invited Meoraq to beat him, “or whatever takes your pleasure, sir,” but the day was done and so was he.

So they camped. The boy started a fire and brewed nai. There was bread and cuuvash in the pack of provisions Onahi had given them. There was no tent, but the boy was no stranger to sleeping wild. He lay down and was silent. Meoraq paced, drank hot nai, meditated, patrolled, drank cold nai, lay down, sat up, thought of Amber.

He did eventually sleep, but his sleep was thin and haunted. He woke uncounted times, only to stare in vain at the empty night, the faint coals, the boy.

A night’s broken rest only further frayed his senses. Long before dawn, he was aware of paranoia, like grains of sand, itching under his scales. He heard things out in the forest, went out to search for the source, and then heard things at his camp. Worse, he did not hear things, which unnerved him even more, as ridiculous as he knew that to be. He felt tense and frustrated and always at the knife’s edge of furious. He felt watched.

Now it was morning and as God raised His lamp over the world, Meoraq could feel clarity like a cooling hand once more in his heart and mind.

He reached over and shook the boy, who rolled muttering onto his belly and glowered at him through a shield of his crossed arms.

“You never sleep,” said the boy.

Meoraq grunted and kicked dirt over the coals. “We’re moving now. Get up.”

“What did they take from you anyway?”

Meoraq caught the boy by the back of his ill-fitting tunic and hauled him to his feet. “We’re moving,” he said again. “Now.”

“The Sheulek who comes in the summer makes the governor give him anything he wants. I thought that was the whole point of being Sheulek.” The boy thought a moment, then shrugged and smiled. “That and getting dipped everywhere you go.”

“There’s a reason you were never meant to be one.”

The boy’s smile did not diminish, but even so, it grew a thinned, painted-on appearance. “I’m sure there’s more than one.” He picked up his pack and rolled his blanket away. When he straightened up again, his smile had broadened into a disturbing grimace of good cheer. “Luckily, I have you. Let’s go.”

They went. The boy didn’t bother looking for a trail, but traveled vaguely eastward, veering toward landmarks as they came across them—this oddly shaped boulder, that great direthorn tree—and if reaching them meant wading a frigid stream or climbing a soft ravine, that was what they did. The sky took on the bruised color that came before a storm and within the hour, it had found them. The ground turned to clutching mud beneath their feet. The boy wasn’t slowed in the slightest. Meoraq considered himself an expert at wildlands travel, but it was difficult to keep pace.

And why, by Gann? Because he’d had a few nights’ bad sleep? Run all the way to Praxas without food? Had to walk now in a little hard rain? In his first striding days, he’d run three days and nights straight through on nothing but water for no better reason than to get someplace with a hot bath. And a bather.

‘I am not a young man anymore,’ he thought, and felt a pang of dismay stab all the way through him. Not for the careless youth now behind him, but for the future he could only pray he hadn’t lost. He would never be a young man again, but now, more than ever, he wanted to be an old one, in Xeqor, with his wife and children.

Lightning arced across the sky, close enough that he could smell it. Thunder came immediately after. The wind gusted, blowing stinging shards of rain directly into his eyes, so that for a moment, he seemed to be falling blindly forward.

“Hold!” ordered Meoraq, and threw down his pack. He hunkered beside it, breathing too hard, lost in thoughts of Amber, how she’d clung to him that night in the ruins…the little cries she made each time the thunder rolled.

“Are we stopping?” the boy asked, watching from a cautious distance.

“Resting.” Meoraq tipped his head back, let his mouth fill with water, and swallowed. It tasted of the storm and strange, green leaves.

“I thought you Sheulek didn’t need rest. I thought God moved you at His speed.”

“Only at His direction. Mine is the same clay as any other’s.” Meoraq cupped his hands and splashed rainwater over his face. “You don’t know much about Sheulek.”

“True enough, I suppose. The one that comes in the summer only stays a few days. He stays with the governor.” The boy moved from one tree to another, restlessly tapping at each trunk. “No one ever has a trial for him. He says Praxas is such a—”

Thunder cracked overhead, shaking the air over his scales and the bones in his breast as it rolled slowly away.

“—a peaceful place,” the boy finished, now from behind him. “Why do you keep looking up? It’s just rain.”

“I know.”

“You look nervous.”

“I’m not.”

But Amber…wherever she was…

‘Sheul, my Father, be with her tonight,’ he prayed, watching sparks sweep across the sky. ‘She is so frightened of the weath—’

He had his head back, his snout raised, his arms at rest on his knees. The boy’s looped belt dropped over his head and before Meoraq’s eyes could identify the danger, it had cinched tight.

No air. A perfect choke. He had less than a minute to break it. Meoraq’s sabks were already in his hands and stabbing backwards, but the boy skimmed around them with the same ease as he’d navigated thorns and gullies all day. Abandoning that, he slashed at the belt, but the boy wore a braid and the cheap leather was thick and stiff. He hadn’t made a single good cut before the boy bashed the rock into his hand. Once. Twice. Then the other. Disarmed.

Through a haze of smothering grey, Meoraq heaved himself backwards, groping blindly for an arm, a throat, his tunic, anything. The boy leapt out of the way, heaving with him, and then Meoraq was on his back on the ground, staring at the world through shades of grey that shook with his own pulse. In his last seconds, he tried to pull the belt out of the boy’s grip, but he had no leverage and no strength. He could feel the scratching of his scales on the taut leather vibrating through his skull, but even that felt distant, unimportant. He could see his mouth opening and closing; the world beyond was smoke and shadow and the white open eye of death.

Then, silence.

Rain fell into his open eyes. He could not blink. The boy’s face loomed over him, colorless, indistinct. Was he dead? He couldn’t move, not even when the boy shoved him over on his side. He could feel tugging, prodding—the boy, searching for treasure—and the final kick of frustration when he found none.

Stormlight flickered through the grey in a constant sheet. Meoraq could see the boy’s boots circling to stand before him. He could see the black shape of his father’s knife sprawled in the mud before his snout. He could see each dimpled knot in the cord of Amber’s hair tied at his arm where it sprawled unfelt over him. He saw these things, only these things, and he thought that must be important.

More silence. It had become heavy, a weight on his ears. He could not hear his pulse anymore, but he thought he could still feel it, in his fingers of all places. The grey was fading slowly to black. His chest hurt.

“That was so much easier than I have been led to believe,” the boy remarked. Even his voice was grey.

Meoraq’s head was lifted, the belt loosened and then yanked away. He heard it go, felt it striping his throat with pain as scales caught in that cheap braid were torn loose.

The boy had killed him. That was bad enough, but he knew the boy would never burn him. He would never be wholly dead, never see the House of his true Father, never know the eternal peace that comes after. He must lie here and die forever. Would he feel it when he rotted? Would he feel it when the ghets came? Did they even have ghets in Gedai? He took a breath. He tried to cough and couldn’t. Dead men couldn’t cough.

His father’s voice, pained: Son, dead men don’t breathe, either.

…Truth.

The boy was unbuckling Meoraq’s belt, replacing his own shoddy piece of leather.

‘I take back my thought about your perfect choke,’ he thought peevishly, and breathed again. ‘I should be unconscious now.’ He struggled to scrape up a better insult, but there was nothing in dumaqi good enough. ‘You suck,’ he thought finally, savagely. ‘Lizard.’

“How long have you been a Sheulek?” asked the boy, buckling on Meoraq’s belt. “I wish I’d asked…I’ve been doing this job for six years. Do you know what that means? Eh?” The boy’s boot nudged at Meoraq’s thigh, then drew back and slammed into his ribs. “It means they won’t let me do it much longer,” he said as Meoraq watched his fingers slowly grip the ground. “Too tall, they tell me. Too old. Soon it’ll be another boy out here, and what the hell am I supposed to do? They say Zhuqa won’t take me, not even to work their stupid crops or clear the canals. Zhuqa only takes real raiders.” Another kick, harder than the first. “I could be a raider. I killed you, didn’t I?”

In the midst of the grass before him, a single gray blade began to bleed in green. Color, coming back into the world. He breathed.

“I probably should have waited until we were closer,” the boy mused, circling again. “Not sure how I’m going to move your body sixteen spans to the camp, but I probably don’t need the whole thing. Nothing about the head proves you’re Sheulek…and the arm doesn’t prove you’re dead…” The boy hunkered down to pick up one of Meoraq’s sabks. He admired it in the stormlight, then struck it under Meoraq’s chin and rocked his head back and forth. “What would you do if you were me?”

Meoraq took the knife and slammed it into the side of the boy’s throat.

He and the boy stared at each other. He felt no need to speak. He had no questions, really.

The storm was moving on, lightning breaking into separate sparks, thunder growing distant. The rain fell even harder, but that was all right; the rain was cool on his scraped throat and bruised ribs.

Meoraq pushed himself awkwardly to his knees and then his feet, dragging the boy up with him. “The law,” he rasped, and had to stop and cough into his palm. There was no blood on his fingers and the pain of the effort was minimal. It took strength to break a man’s ribs, and everything this scrawny youth possessed had gone into the choke. Meoraq hurt, but he thought he was all right.

“The law requires me to ask,” he said again, adjusting his grip on the knife’s hilt. “Do you wish to pray?”

“This is not supposed to happen,” the boy whispered.

Meoraq pulled the knife across his throat slowly, bringing blood in a fall and not a spray, guiding the boy to his knees while he made his little struggles, and then letting him fall where Gann willed when it was over. He found his other honor-blade, cleaned them both, sheathed them. He took his belt back. He found the pitted toy of a knife stowed away in the dead boy’s boot and broke it. He stood and stared at the body until the rain had washed the blood away.

Sixteen spans. He didn’t think the boy had been lying about that. They had been traveling east, and he didn’t think the boy had been leading him false either. But crop? Canals? That was not a raider’s camp. That was a settlement, one that could not possibly have gone unnoticed for as many years as the boy claimed to be visiting it.

The sky flashed; a final stroke of lightning, a final snap and growl of thunder. In the back of his mind, Meoraq heard the phantom crash of shattered glass and felt Amber slamming up against his back as she’d done that long-ago night in the ruins.

Ruins. For as long as Sheul had forbidden his children to enter the ruins, those who had gone to Gann had nested in them. Yes, they might hide their crop in the roofless husks where the Ancients had made their homes and yes, they might even have canals worth restoring, but so what? Sixteen spans, generally eastward, look for ruins? Was that hope? There were ruins everywhere!

But ruins stand, he thought suddenly. After so many days, he would never catch a moving pack, but ruins were a pin to hold his Amber in place. He could have her back.

If he could find her.

Meoraq looked wearily out across the world, his eyes sweeping dully across the whole of the horizon and up, up into heaven. The rain poured down his face and across his aching throat. “Mine is the same clay as any other’s,” he said. “I do not move at Your speed, Father, but at Your direction. I cry out to You from the darkness. I cry, Father. Please. I cry. Help me.”

The wind changed, just a little. He turned his face to keep the rain in his eyes. To the east.

He started walking.

 

* * *

 

Amber’s first full day as a slave passed because even the worst days do, hour by uncounted hour, undisturbed by rescue. There was no food in the workpit, only a barrel of stale water under a leaking faucet that served dually as drinking and wash-water. At some point, Hruuzk appeared and took the new slaves away. Dkorm left with Xzem and the babies soon afterwards. The work changed from doing things to cleaning up, so Amber rallied what was left her of her strength and cleaned alongside them, although she let them do the more vigorous sweeping and scrubbing while she put things away. After another stretch of time, Hruuzk returned and called the children to him in a noisy flock. He hunkered down to talk to them, tapping at this or that one to keep their attention, before he sent them out—chattering children in front, silent slave-women behind.

“Finish up,” he called to her, pointing at the small lump of clay left on the table. “No sense running that all the way down when you can put another three lamps on the shelf and be done. Do it well, but do it quick.” He pulled a piece of what sure appeared to be her last surviving Manifestor’s shirt and used it to wipe out the socket of his missing eye. “Been a long day and I want a piss and a poke before it’s over.”

Amber rolled out coils of clay and made the last lamps with hands that ached like rotten teeth and barbed wire where her spine used to be. She found herself wishing dully that Zhuqa would hurry up and get here. All he’d want from her was sex and she could do that lying down.

When she finished and turned around, there was Zhuqa in the doorway with Hruuzk, as if she’d summoned him with the thought. She was not glad to see him, but she was relieved and that was bad enough. She started toward him.

Hruuzk stopped her with an upraised hand and pointed back at the table. “I said, finish. Wipe it down.”

Amber looked at the slicks of wet and dried clay she’d been pressing into the rough planks all day, knowing there’d be no wiping that, it would have to be scrubbed. With her shoulders and her back. With her damned, aching hands.

She glanced at Zhuqa.

His spines came all the way forward; Hruuzk’s slapped flat. In two long strides, Zhuqa’s hulking slave-master was across the room with his huge hand on the back of Amber’s neck, shoving her flat against the table. He yanked her shift up, exposing her all the way to the back of her head. The sound of his belt coming off lit up Amber’s tired brain in every possible shade of panic, but before her fear had fully coalesced, it was dissipated with a crack like gunshot as he brought the belt down on her bare back.

She cawed, more from shock than pain, but the pain came with the second blow and then she was screaming. Amber had been slapped, shoved, punched, and hit with a car, but she had never been beaten like this. It wasn’t even like he was hitting her, but more like he was cutting belt-sized strips into her flesh and ripping them away. Three, four, five, and after that, she could not count, could only kick and slap in futility against the table as the world lit up red and black with every swing of Hruuzk’s arm.

Then he let go of her and she fell to the ground in a scrambling, sobbing heap. He picked her up by the hair, shook her until she found her feet, then smacked her on the underside of her chin with the folded loop of his belt to make her look at him. His neck was black. His eye was calm and alert. “In this room,” said Hruuzk, not unkindly, “I am master. And no matter how badly you think you have it, I can always make things worse.”

Amber nodded, trembling and slapping at the tears on her face. Her back was burning, as if she’d pressed it up against a hot furnace and just held it there. Every movement, even breathing, pulled the pain into new dimensions and blew it up hotter and hotter.

Hruuzk released his hold on her hair and patted her on the head. “Good girl. Go on then.”

She staggered away from him into the other room and found a shallow basin. She had to lean over the barrel to fill it with water. She had to reach up to get a rag. Her fumbling hand dropped the coarse brush and she had to bend all the way down to pick it up. She poured out the water to soften the dried clay and scrubbed, screaming behind her clamped jaws as the coarse fabric of her shift scratched at her back. Hruuzk stood behind her the whole time with his belt looped comfortably around his fist; she made sure she got every trace of clay.

By the time she finished, her back felt as though it had been whipped with a leather belt, instead of flayed open and set on fire. She was all right. There were still tears leaking out of her eyes, like the hurt little cries leaking out of her throat, but her head was working again and she thought she was all right.

Hruuzk grunted when she limped past him for the second time to give the table a last rinse and finally put his belt back on. “You’d be best served to give her over to me for proper training if you really want to keep her. She’s just clever enough to give you real trouble.”

“Is that what I need to do, Eshiqi?” Zhuqa inquired.

“No,” she said, tried to say, but there were so many variations of that word and she couldn’t be sure which she’d used. To make it clearer, she limped over to him and knelt to put her hand beside his boot.

Hruuzk uttered a low, whistling grunt through the crack in his snout. “I want one,” he muttered, eyeing her.

Zhuqa’s hand came down to rest on her bent head. “I have men out looking for more of them, now that I’ve tendered up apologies to Ghelip and can trust him not to hunt us down.”

“You can, eh?”

Amber’s arms began to shake, but Zhuqa hadn’t told her to stand or given her a tap or anything. She crouched lower, trying to take the strain off her shoulders only to put it on her knees, and all the while, her back was screaming. How long did he expect her to kneel here?

“Salahkthu’s enthusiasm aside,” Hruuzk was saying, “those three fools may not have been a raiding party, but it’s my belief they were scouts. I think Ghelip spied you on your way to Praxas and sent his men slinking in to see how weakened we might be by your absence.”

“I think you’re right,” Zhuqa said mildly.

“Do you? Then you’ve done Salahkthu a sorry turn, haven’t you?”

“Sheul instructs with a burning hand, they say, but there is no greater honor than to be the instrument of His teachings,” Zhuqa replied. “Today, Salahkthu teaches Ghelip the quality of my mercy and I am grateful to him for his service. If he had a son, I would honor him in his father’s memory.” He shrugged his spines, adding, “He doesn’t, so you can have his dips and whatever else he left behind.”

Hruuzk took the square key Zhuqa passed over with an expression of lizardish amusement. “Are you giving me gifts or ordering me to clean out his room?”

“The brightest light casts a shadow.” Zhuqa finally reached down and tapped Amber’s head, giving her permission to struggle to her feet. “God and Gann, Hruuzk. They come together out here. Hold, Eshiqi. Turn around and bend over.”

She obeyed, biting on a groan as she braced herself on her thighs and tried to hold still. Zhuqa held her shift up. The air was cool on her burning back for a moment before his hand came down to rake dull coals into fresh flame in one light caress. She managed not to cry out, but she knew she flinched and both of them laughed at her for it.

“I wasn’t half-swinging,” she heard Hruuzk say.

“I know. Your Sheulek has been too tender with you,” Zhuqa told her, letting the shift drop over her again. “There are children in this camp no higher than your hip who would have been embarrassed to make half the noise you made for that little whipping.”

Damn him, she blushed.

He touched her cheek curiously, then pinched her chin and put his face close to hers. He was still smiling, but now his humor had teeth. “You looked to me for help. You looked to your man—” He gave her a shake to make her meet his eyes again after she tried to drop them. “—to take you away from the workpit and let you rest. Yes, you did.”

“I was tired.”

He acknowledged her human words with a grunt as he nuzzled under her jaw, scraping the tip of his snout lightly up and down along the full length of her throat before nipping at her shoulder. “If Hruuzk had not,” he murmured, licking at her scars, “I would have whipped you for that devious little trick myself. And that would be a terrible hardship for us both to endure. In the future, you will do the work you are given and do it gladly, Eshiqi.”

She raised her fist in the kind of salute she had seen the other raiders show him.

“Apologize to Master Hruuzk for disrupting his workpit.”

Wanting nothing more than to just get out of here, Amber turned obediently to Hruuzk and said, “Sorry.”

“You can do better than that,” Zhuqa said.

“Sorry I made you whip the shit out of me for looking sideways at Zhuqa when I should have been scrubbing your table, you giant whore-mongering dick,” she amended.

Hruuzk smiled at her. “I don’t know the words in your mouth,” he told her gently, “but I know the look in your eye. And if you were under my hand tonight, I’d whip you bloody from your neck to your knees.”

“Once more,” said Zhuqa.

She looked at him, then at Hruuzk. She couldn’t begin to perform the necessary vocal aerobics to apologize in dumaqi. What the hell did they want from her? “I’m sorry,” she said, feeling frustration in her stomach almost as hot as the throb and sting in her back. “Whatever you want me to say, I’ll say it. Just let me get out of here, for God’s sake. I’m sorry. I don’t care anymore. I’m sorry. Let me go!”

Her voice cracked.

Hruuzk and Zhuqa exchanged a maddeningly knowing glance.

“Very good,” Zhuqa said. He tapped her shoulder with two knuckles and turned around. “Come, Eshiqi. I’ll take you home.”

They walked back to his room together. He kept silent, acknowledging neither her presence at his side nor the salutes of the many guards they passed in their descent through the ruins. When he unlocked his door, she saw a lamp already burning on the table, which had acquired a plain metal cup and, more importantly, a wide-mouthed clay bowl generously heaped with roasted meat and charred roots.

The smell of the food struck her almost at the same instant as the sight of it. Her mouth flooded even as her back continued to throb and sting. She knew better than to take even one step toward it, but could not help staring.

Zhuqa followed the direction of her eyes as he unbuckled his harness. He did not remark, only smiled and undressed. When he was naked except for his loin-plate and the knives strapped to his biceps, he gestured at her.

She started to take her shift off, wincing as the coarse fabric pulled taut across her back, but he stopped her.

“In a moment. First, I want you to look there and see the plate I have set for us to share.”

She looked. Her stomach growled.

“I know that you are very hungry,” Zhuqa said behind her. “I see that you are tired. And hurt.” His hand slipped like slow hell down her spine. “But Hruuzk tells me you have been obedient and hard-working…most of the day. And I am inclined to forgive your foolishness there at the end, because it so warmed me to see my Eshiqi seeking her man’s aid. So. Are you hungry?”

“Yes,” she said, and said it again as best she could in dumaqi.

“I’m glad.” He took her arms and raised them over her head, taking the opportunity to nuzzle at her from behind. There, with his snout close to her ear and his hands like shackles around her wrists, he softly said, “Because if I find a weapon hidden on you, Eshiqi, I’m going to make you eat it.”

She started to look at him. He released one hand to catch a fisthold in her hair and yank her head back, so that she suddenly found herself looking into his face. Viewed this way, upside-down and from below, his eyes caught the light in a strange new way, almost seeming to glow.

“If you took something out of the workpit, bring it out. I’ll beat you,” he said calmly, “but I won’t kill you if you confess it now and beg my forgiveness.”

“I don’t have anything,” she said, truthfully enough. It wasn’t as if the thought had never crossed her mind, but the only knife she’d seen in the workpit had been strapped to the side of Dkorm’s left boot and he’d been staring at her most of the day anyway.

“Please yourself. But remember that I gave you this chance.” Zhuqa let go of her hair and pulled her shift off. He felt it out carefully, gave her a long appraising stare, then tossed it aside and resumed his impersonal search, this time on her body. He made thorough work of it: finger-combing through her hair, lifting her breasts, even thumbing at her belly-button. Unsatisfied, he then knelt to check between her toes, run his hands up her legs all the way to the crack of her ass, and once there of course, felt inside her pussy. “Take that look off your face, little liar,” he remarked. “You’ve opened for me.”

“Not open enough to hide a knife. Seriously, what are you thinking?”

He grunted and released her, his spines now flexed all the way forward, broadly smiling. “No weapons. Not even a splinter of wood to sharpen. Am I to believe my dangerous Eshiqi has been tamed?”

“Only long enough for Meoraq to get here.”

His spines came forward at once. “Was that a name?”

Amber shut her stupid mouth.

“No answer? So be it. You’re Zhuqa’s woman now.” He rose and walked over to seat himself at the table. “And Zhuqa feeds his loyal woman well.”

She didn’t let herself get carried away by relief at these words; he was altogether too pleased with himself. And sure enough, at her first cautious step forward, he patted his thigh.

She looked at his hand, then at his face.

He grimaced at her playfully (first saw that look on meoraq yeah the morning after we first made love he probably has no idea how freaky it makes him look but at least he tries o god where is he) and patted again. “I have only the one chair.”

“I don’t suppose sitting on the floor is an option.”

“You will sit to eat—” Pat pat. “—or you will not eat tonight, Eshiqi.”

She sat on his lap. He bumped his knee a few times, grimacing as she winced at the rough scour of his scales, then he pinched off a chunk of meat and held it up.

Her mouth snapped shut on a sudden river of saliva.

“This,” said Zhuqa, placing the morsel against her lips without any further torment, “is for sitting so immediately and so well upon your man’s knee.”

And oh but it tasted good. Tachuqi meat, she knew that at once, but the best damn tachuqi in the world. They’d actually braised it in something; the taste was richer and more tangy than mere hunger’s spicing. It was, in all honesty, the best thing she’d eaten since leaving Earth. Better than quite a few things she’d eaten on Earth.

He had a bite of his own while he enjoyed the sight of her trying (and failing) not to wolf it down in one swallow. Then it was gone and her hunger was fully awakened and clawing up her guts, and the real torture began.

“Put your hand on me, Eshiqi,” he said. “You know the way.”

Amber gave the bowl of food a pointed look and unbuckled his loin-plate. She cupped his groin impersonally and waited.

He tore off another chunk of meat. “That was neither immediate nor well done,” he said and ate it himself.

“Sadist.”

“Mm. It isn’t bad for camp food, is it?” He licked his fingers.

“Fucking sadist!” Her eyes fixed infuriatingly on his mouth.

He took more meat and must have felt her hand on him tense in expectation because he glanced down before snorting laughter at her. “No, Eshiqi. One bite for you, one for me. That is how we share our meals. And you forfeited your last bite. This one is mine. But keep moving your hand. When I give you an order, I mean you to go until I tell you to stop.”

She kneaded at him mechanically as he sucked the juice from the meat, pinched it off into smaller and smaller bites, and finally ate it. He started to reach for another, then paused, pretending not to notice her hungry stare, then held out his hand invitingly. “Taste?” he offered.

No way. No fucking way was she going to—

And then she grabbed his hand and sucked not just greedily, not just that…but gratefully.

Zhuqa rocked back hard, banging his head sharply against the back of his chair. Now his eyes were fixed and staring.

That’s right. They didn’t have lips. They could lick…they couldn’t suck.

“Well, damn,” mumbled Amber disgustedly, but she couldn’t let go of his hand.

And as long as she was sucking on it, he was in no hurry to take it back. But the taste of meat was finite, and the taste of lizard could not provoke the same gusto. “Enough,” he said, once her enthusiasm began to flag. He looked at his hand when she released it, flexing his wet fingers, and then at her.

“Yeah,” she said. “We’re going to be coming back to that, aren’t we?”

He picked up one of the roots—not a piece, but the whole thing—and held it up where she had to look at it. “I want your hand on my cock.”

His cock wasn’t out. Amber stroked his slit, which, despite his obvious effort to keep it tight against her, was already oozing beadlets of oil.

“You are such a slut,” said Amber, pushing her finger in to stroke his sa’ad. “Honest to God, that’s what you are. Big, tough Zhuqa. You’re just a dirty girl.”

He hissed through clenched teeth, then groaned, then finally gave up with a hoarse laugh and let himself extrude. As soon as she closed her fist on his shaft, he gave her the root. “Remember, you obey until I tell you to stop. Keep your hand busy.”

She did, although it wasn’t easy to fight open the thick, burnt husk of the root with one hand while gently rubbing a man’s dick with the other. Beneath the peel, the pulp of the root was grey and unappetizing, with a taste that was mostly that of the ashes it had been baked in. She ate it anyway, bolting it down in just a few half-chewed swallows, until she had nothing to do but work her fist and watch him slowly eat.

“You are good,” he remarked between lazy bites. “Your Sheulek trained you well, but this is Zhuqa’s House. Get up, Eshiqi. Put my cock inside you just how we are.”

He looked so sly and serious about it, like sex in a chair with the woman on top was the absolute limit of unthinkable depravity, that she laughed at him. Then she got up, still shaking her head (very much aware of how closely he was watching her now) and straddled him. “Such a dirty girl,” she said, milking at the base of his shaft until she’d worked the thick head of it inside her.

“Just so,” he murmured, reaching up to stroke his thumb along her throat.

She bore down, rocking a little to let his oils make the entry easier, and then sat, eye to eye, waiting for further instructions.

“Make me cum,” he said, not moving.

It took a few false starts; she didn’t want to put her arms around him for balance and she hated having his face right in front of her while she bounced on his cock, having to watch him study the juddering of her breasts and smirking. So she leaned back, bracing her hands behind her on his knees and raising herself up on her toes to pump her hips at him while she looked at the ceiling instead. It put a lot of strain on her aching shoulders, but it wouldn’t last long, she knew. It never did.

Or at least, it never had.

“It was a sick mind that taught you this,” said Zhuqa in a mildly marveling tone. Apart from a minute clenching of his thighs now and then, he managed not to move at all. His breath remained slow and even. His hands stayed at his sides. His cock, ticking hard inside of her with the urgent hammer of his pulse, gave neither of them release.

Her shoulders couldn’t take this much longer. “Hurry up and finish, motherfucker,” Amber muttered, bucking faster.

He only chuckled. “Fierce little thing. A Sheulek is a master of his flesh. Just because I choose so often to revel does not mean I do not know restraint.”

Which meant he was willing to go all night, for no other reason than to piss her off. Irritation became the spark of an idea. Amber caught his wrist, brought it to her mouth, and sucked at his finger, bobbing up and down its small length to the rhythm of her pumping hips.

“Fuck Gann!” he spat, yanking back his hand, but it was all over. His cock jerked; she felt the heat of his cum spitting over and over, like fireworks blooming in some internal sky, until he shuddered out the last of it.

He glared at her, close enough that she could feel the hot grunts of his breath puffing on her throat and stirring through her hair. His neck had lit up at some point during the sex, but the color wasn’t fading now that it was done. If anything, it was getting brighter.

All sense of victory slowly died, leaving her nothing but Zhuqa’s eyes burning into hers and the sting of the belt still crawling like coals over her back.

“That was stupid,” said Zhuqa, scarcely audible even with his face right in front of hers.

Should she agree? Apologize? Stay quiet? Amber hesitated and lost the choice.

“You want me to finish with you, is that it? You have somewhere else to be tonight? Eh?”

“No,” Amber said, tried to say.

“No! You don’t decide when I’m done!” Zhuqa picked her up only to thump her down with ass-bruising force on the table and shove her flat. Her head hit the bowl, upending it. He swiped burnt roots and greasy meat out of his way, hauled her hips to the table’s edge, and stabbed himself back inside her, snarling, “I’ll fuck you until you bleed if that’s my pleasure!” His empty hand splayed open and heavy across her chest, pinning her in place for his rapid, unfeeling thrusts. The table rubbing at her from behind might as well have been wrapped in razor wire. “I’ll fuck you until we both bleed and you…” His back arched, bucking almost in convulsions, every cord of his throat pushing out through vibrant shades of black and yellow. “…and you…fuck…” His eyes were glazing even as he glared at her. “You,” he said, but the rest was an animal hiss.

Amber didn’t move.

Zhuqa closed his eyes. He began to breathe. “One,” she heard him mutter. “One for the Prophet…”

Someone knocked at the door.

Zhuqa roared. Not like an angry man, or even an angry lizard. It was the roar of a dragon, wordless, tearing through the air and her bones together at decibels no mortal voice should even be capable of achieving. His hips pumped spastically, brutally, without seeming to be aware of her at all.

Amber did not fight him, did not cry out, did not even breathe.

Three more knocks, deliberate and loud.

Zhuqa stopped rock-rigid above her. His arms shook where he leaned on them, not (she was sure) from the strain and violence of his thrusts, as much as from the strain of not letting go to his killing rage. Amber, the only living thing in the room, held very still and watched him as he turned his head and looked at the door.

He breathed. Once. Twice.

“I,” he said in a rasping, hellish hiss, “do not care if the skies have split open and are shitting fire all over my camp! Move the fuck on!” he roared, once more in that dragon’s voice she felt even in her womb.

A moment’s stillness. Zhuqa’s heaving breath moved her minutely back and forth on the table. He didn’t look at her.

Tok. Tok. Tok.

He shoved himself back and out of her, snarling curses as he gripped his cock and wrenched it with difficulty and obvious pain back into his body, cinching his loin-plate on to keep it there. Metal flashed; knives flew to his hands as he crossed the room, flung the door open—

And stood there.

Meoraq’s name leapt like hope itself in her heart, but it died…because in that stillness, she heard what Zhuqa saw: the baby.

Amber sat up slowly, not daring yet to leave the table or even bring her legs together, but she had to at least look. Zhuqa’s friend Iziz stood on the other side of the door, Xzem huddled small at his side, and the baby thrust out as if in sacrifice before Zhuqa’s naked blades. She hadn’t been able to hear it crying through the door. She could barely hear it now. Its cries, little more than an endless, rusty “weh…weh…” breathed through a throat scraped raw by screams.

“It hasn’t eaten,” said Iziz.

Zhuqa sheathed his knives. “Since?”

After a moment, and a light cuff to the back of her head from Iziz, Xzem stammered, “Since third-hour last, my lord.”

“Since third-hour? You tell me this now?” Zhuqa looked at the baby, then at the woman who held it, incredulous. “Tell me why I should not go this instant and pull an arm off your shit-sired little poke!”

“Please, my lord! It is not my fault! It does not want me! I thought…it would suck when it became hungry enough, but…oh mercy, my lord!”

“Mercy?” Zhuqa snatched at the scruff of her filthy shift and yanked her off her knees. “I offered you mercy, woman! I offered you more than a used-up breed-pot like you deserves and you repay me by starving my child half the fucking day?!”

Xzem wailed.

“She says it quiets up in your creature’s arms,” Iziz put in. “She thought if the creature touched it…”

Zhuqa straightened up and glanced back at Amber. The yellow stripes at his throat throbbed, but they were fading. He released Xzem and stepped back.

Amber kicked down off the table and limped hurriedly over to take the baby from its weeping wetnurse. It hung against her breasts for perhaps half a minute more, and then suddenly brought both hands up to smack against her skin in a strong, pinching grip. It pulled in a deep, deep breath, and screamed it out—weak no longer, but full-lunged and furious. Fluid poured in an immediate, answering trickle from Xzem’s flaccid teat, but it was Amber’s breast it blindly gnawed, futile for them both.

The two men stood to one side while Amber and Xzem tried for several maddening minutes to fit the three of them together, offering no help and no encouragement. The baby cried louder, drawing strength from the touch it craved more than the milk it needed, until the flashings along its pale, scrawny throat began to turn yellow with rage.

Zhuqa and Iziz snorted in unison.

“It’s a son,” Iziz declared. “Only a boy could get that worked up over riding a woman.”

“In fairness, it is one damned fine ride,” Zhuqa replied.

“Better than a quick fuck into my mother?”

“Better than a slow fuck into God.”

Iziz looked at him, startled and trying to smile. “That’s a blasphemous lie.”

“No,” said Zhuqa seriously, watching Amber. “It isn’t.”

“You, sir, are a pervert. All that smooth skin. It must be like fucking a baby.”

Zhuqa said something in reply, but Amber didn’t hear. Smooth skin. Smooth and soft.

She looked around, then thrust the baby back into Xzem’s arms and ran to the table. “Do you have anything else like this?” she asked in lizardish, holding up the wineskin. “To wrap it in?”

They looked at her, both of them frowning, as she mimed putting on a shawl.

Damn it. She slowed down, trying to work her mouth around the alien words: “I need something with smooth skin.” Frustrated, she slapped her naked body a few times and then slapped the leather flask. “Like me!”

“What the hell is that thing barking on about?”

Zhuqa’s spines flared. He looked at the baby and then at the wineskin. He came over to the table and took it from her.

“No, you idiot!” Amber said, exasperated into English. “I don’t want a drink, I need—”

“I hear you, woman,” said Zhuqa. He uncapped the neck, righted the bowl that had once held their scattered dinner, and carefully poured the contents of the wineskin out. As he shook the last drops free, he drew his knife.

“What are you doing? Oh Zhuqa, no. Please, that’s a perfectly good—and there it is,” Iziz sighed, rubbing at his brow-ridges as Zhuqa sliced the skin open down its lengthy middle. After a short silence and a few meditative breaths, Iziz turned a glare on Amber and snapped, “Do you know how hard it is to make a watertight vessel out in the fucking wildlands? No, of course you don’t, you are a fucking watertight vessel!”

“Mind your manners,” Zhuqa said distractedly.

“That was a perfectly good corroki bladder! What the fuck does she want with it?!”

“She wants to put the baby in it.”

“Wants to…? Why by the names of Gann and God would she want to do that?”

“So it will think she’s holding it, you fool. Quiet down.” Zhuqa tossed the flap of the cut wineskin to Amber, who took it and folded the baby into its dry side until it was entirely cocooned but for its snouted face.

“Hush, baby,” she said. “I’m here. Amber’s here.” And with that, she placed the damp, wine-stinking bundle back in Xzem’s reluctant arms, its wailing mouth close to the leaking eye of Xzem’s teat. At its first accidental bite, the small head turned, shoving itself up so that most of the lizardlady’s single breast was swallowed into its stiff, lipless mouth. Its hungry cries turned at once to grunts of effort and then to soft, slurping sounds.

It drank.

“So,” Iziz said after a moment. “It wanted a blanket. Shows what I know about sprats. My apologies for disturbing you, Zhuqa.” He reached down to take Xzem’s arm.

“Let it eat.” Zhuqa sat down, picked up his cup and dunked it in the bowl. He gestured ruefully. “Have a drink. It’ll be full of dust and dead yifu by the morning.”

“Waste not the gifts of God,” said Iziz piously, picking up the whole bowl for a series of deep swallows.

Zhuqa sipped at his cup, picked splinters off the nearest chunk of roast, and tossed that at Amber. “A good thought, Eshiqi. Eat.”

She did, but without appetite, too much aware of Xzem’s hungry stare.

Iziz helped himself to a baked root, unzipped its skin, and swished it through the wine a few times before popping it whole into his mouth. He studied Amber while he chewed and swallowed, then said, “You know I have to ask…”

“Go on then.”

“What it is really like to dip it in that thing? Honestly.”

Zhuqa grunted, looking Amber over, then flexed his spines in a shrugging gesture. “Perverse. More than you can imagine.”

“With respect, sir, you have no idea the sorts of things I imagine.”

“She’s smooth, like baby-skin. Soft all over. Soft inside.” He took another sip of his drink and chuckled. “She cums like a man.”

“What do you mean?”

“She oils up when she cums. Like a man. She even has a little sa’ad.”

“What?!”

“And she’s so soft inside, softer than her outsides even. There’s nothing to catch on, nothing to push against, nothing but this soft, wet squeeze.”

Iziz drew back in a wince of queasily fascinated revulsion. “So it’s like fucking a sack of hot shit. Your pardon, a hot sack of male shit. There’s something wrong with you, Zhuqa.”

“I don’t describe it well. It’s nothing like a real woman’s sleeve. It’s like…like skin. A second skin over your cock. Every time you move, you can feel it gripping and pulling at you, all over, all the time. Just moving in her feels amazing. The only thing that compares is my first fuck—well, my first with a woman—and only because it was my first and has that same sort of revelation. Otherwise, there is no comparison, no more than you can liken a bite of this shit—” He picked up a root and tossed it back on the table. “—to fried bread and fancies. She’s hard to look at, but she’s like fucking God.”

Iziz studied him over the lip of the bowl. “Of all the sex you’ve had, you said. And then you said…with a woman.”

Zhuqa looked at him, then at his cup. He put the cup down a little harder than he had to and gave it a short push away. “Strong drink weakens the mouth and the mind, says the Prophet,” he muttered. “It was a long time ago, Iziz. The door is shut.”

Iziz put the bowl down. “You weren’t born out here, I know that much. You were a Sheulek!”

“In training.”

“Still…who the hell got you on the ground long enough to get a poke at you?”

Zhuqa glanced at Amber. She looked at the baby. He snorted laughter and looked back at Iziz. “You are the fatherless son of a wildland exile and the nameless catch-cock who served the whole of his camp. What could you possibly understand about anything I could tell you of that life?”

“She has a name, I just don’t remember what it is.” Iziz drank. “Why are we talking about me? I want to hear the story of mighty Zhuqa getting plugged.”

“That isn’t what happened.”

“It wasn’t even a man, was it? I knew it. You were ravished by a wild kipwe.”

“No.”

“Before I came here, I ran with a camp that used to hold kipwe shows,” recalled Iziz, his attention wandering to the bowl in his hands. “They’d strap a slave into a kind of harness. I don’t know…the kipwe had to be trained special, I guess…and every time I saw it, I had to wonder…How the hell do you train a kipwe to fuck something? How do you even start?”

“Do you want to hear this story?”

“Yes.” Iziz drank.

“In the cities, in the Houses, in the caste of the warrior, they take you away as soon as you can be trusted to walk without falling on your ass or piss without it running down your leg. They send you to a special place close to the innermost walls to train you. You live there with the other boys of your caste, all ages, all together, and you only go home for the cold season. You speak to no one but the men who train you and the boys who train beside you. You learn nothing but prayer and the laws of God.” Zhuqa paused to fill his cup again from the bowl in his friend’s hands.

“No women?” asked Iziz.

Zhuqa snorted. “The only time I ever saw women was when I was home for the cold season, and they were only servants. My mother had been turned out by then. I had no sisters. I think it’s possible I went the first ten years of my life without knowing there was such a thing as women. Truth. No idea.”

“Ten.” Now Iziz snorted. “I was fucking them before that.”

“It was a sheltered life.”

“It was a wasted one. No wonder you were all cock-rubbers and boy-pokes.”

“Never heard either word until I was sent out of the walls.”

“Lies.”

“God’s own truth. God’s and Gann’s.”

“Go on then. Your sick string of lies fascinates me.”

“There was a man in the training grounds. Eight years my elder. High-born, low-bred. A rough.”

“Used to crawl into other cupboards at night and poke the little boys,” Iziz guessed.

“Wouldn’t surprise me, but what he used to do to me was swagger around on the training field after the masters had left us to our targets and beat on whoever caught his eye. Just sneak up from behind with a practice staff and beat them down, calling out the techniques he used like he was a master at lessons, but really just beating on the boy. It wasn’t the first time I’d played his game—”

“But this time,” said Iziz dramatically, “you fought back.”

“I fought back every time, boy. I was a Sheulek in training, not a camp-born cock-rubber like you.”

They saluted one another, Iziz tapping his bowl respectfully at Zhuqa’s raised cup, and both drank.

“But it had been a bad run of days for me,” Zhuqa admitted after a swallow. “Angry days. Things I’d always been able to shake off were striking at me like lightning out of the sky, just—” Zhuqa brought his hands banging together, making Xzem jump and the baby let out one grunting wail before it resumed sucking. “—and I was burning,” Zhuqa finished, glancing their way. His eye lingered on Amber. “And I had been all day on that training field with Master Naxuuk chewing off my hide one scale at a time, and it was all I could do not to just let that lightning burn me up when that staff came swinging out of the black and caught me right here.” Zhuqa clapped a hand over his side, just below his ribs.

Iziz frowned. “God’s Hammer, Zhuqa.”

“Felt like it.”

“How old was this man?”

“He was three years after his ascension, they said, so he must have been at least twenty and two.”

“So you were fourteen?”

“Almost.”

“Fuck Gann.” Iziz put the bowl aside and eyed his leader with a disturbed expression. “What did you do?”

“You mean after I fell over pissing myself?” Zhuqa snorted. “He got in a few more good shots. I could hear him calling them out. Leaping Drop. Prayer Block. Radiant Twist. No matter what I covered up, there was something else for him to hit. And then he stepped back and let me get up. I could hear him talking, lecturing the other boys, and that lightning struck. And I went at him.”

“Like piss you did.”

Zhuqa drank, shrugging his spines. “He saw me coming and hit me again, ready with some technique or another. I don’t remember what it was. I do remember that he hit me…but hitting didn’t stop me. It was just more lightning. There must have been a time we were grappling because I remember climbing him…not on him, but climbing him, like a drop-stair. Then he went down and I began to beat on him the way I have never beaten anyone since. I have killed men, Iziz, and taken several days to do it that I did less damage. It wasn’t enough. It could never be enough. I hit him until I broke every bone in my right hand and even that couldn’t stop me hitting him. Have you ever been south as far as Kthuat?”

“Once or twice.”

“They have stands of trees around there. Dead trees, mostly. Full of beetles—”

“Oh, Gann’s fuck-stick, the yumont.” Iziz shuddered. “I heard about those. Saw scars men said came from them. Thought it was a lie to scare us boys from wandering.”

“They’re real. They live in the meat of those dead trees where it’s always warm and if a man should sleep up against one, they might come crawling out and bore in under his scales to live in his meat instead. Something in the bite keeps you from feeling it at first, but then they die. And they itch. If you’re quick about it, you can pry up your scales and dig the body out, but they melt away pretty fast and if that happens, that itch clings around for days upon days and there’s nothing anyone can do to help it. That’s what it was like for me. Hitting him was like scratching over my scales at the itch I could never reach under them. And when it was over, he was lying there on the ground, trying to crawl away. My whole body was on fire wanting to get at that goddamned itch…and my cock came out. Look at her.”

Iziz glanced around. Amber started to look at the baby, then gave up and looked back at them.

“Look at what? I can’t read that face,” Iziz said. “I don’t even know how you can look at it while you’re dipping in it.”

“Just the eyes, then.”

“I cry. What’s she thinking?”

“I don’t know,” said Zhuqa. “But there’s something in those eyes.”

Iziz looked back and forth between the two of them for a few seconds, then snorted and gave Zhuqa a sock to the chest. “Forget her. You’re just getting to the good part. Go on.”

“The good part.” Zhuqa checked his cup, but it was empty. He picked up a root and peeled it instead. “The only thing I knew about cocks at that time in my life was that I had one and I took that entirely on faith. Never seen it, mine or anyone else’s. I knew nothing about sex, other than Sheul gives a man the fire so that he could pass it into a woman and she could grow a baby. Go on and laugh, I know you want to.”

Iziz barked a few times, then rubbed at his eyes. “I was trying to hold it in.”

“You were never any good at that. So it came out for the first time in all my sheltered life and I felt air on it and the air was fire. There was this swaggering little shit of a boy, crawling on the ground in a puddle of his own piss and blood, more than half-naked because I had somehow torn most of his clothes away beating on him. At no time did I think it would feel good or that it would serve the slaveson right. I didn’t even hope it would hurt. I saw the pucker of Gann’s pipe and then I was in it.”

“Fourteen and didn’t know about fucking,” marveled Iziz. “How was it?”

“It didn’t feel right.”

“Noble Sheulek in training that you were.”

“Piss on that. It felt great, just didn’t feel right. It was that itch all over again, only six times worse. He was screaming and thrashing around worse than he’d done when I was beating on him, and all I could think was that this was close to whatever it was I needed and if I could just get there, everything would stop burning. Fucking helped, so fucking harder ought to help more, and that was what I did, without another thought in my head, until they pulled me off him. I don’t even know who. I fought, but whoever it was got me in a choke and when I woke up, the itch was gone and I was in the cell.”

“Cell? Did you kill him?”

“No. He was even at the tribunal, although he had to sit in a special litter and his face was mashed out of knowing.”

“Tribunal?” Iziz laughed, but quizzically, as if he suspected Zhuqa were having him on. “For throwing a poke into some bullying sprat?”

“No, for throwing a poke into some high-born bullying sprat after I’d beaten him into paste. They had it posted on the gate before the hour was out and they were ringing it to order at sunset.”

“Was that what you…?”

“No.” Zhuqa finished off the root and beckoned Amber back to him. Once she was again uncomfortably straddling his thigh, he went on. “No, that wasn’t what they had me for, although that might have been cause enough if they’d found anything in him. Fortunately, I hadn’t cum yet, so in the end, they let me go. I took a public whipping the next morning and I never heard another word about it, except I know they must have sent a message to my father because when I went home for the cold season, I found the little poke my father kept to scrub the floors waiting in my room without a stitch sewn on her.”

“Pretty?” asked Iziz, perking up.

“If you like the sort.” Zhuqa’s hand drifted over Amber’s belly and lightly rubbed. “A little too grey yet for my taste and her eyes were sloped funny, but Gann knows I could sell her here for more coin than I could easily hold. She put her hand on my slit and out came my cock and before the hour turned, I knew indisputably that God looked down from His heaven and loved me.”

“How many times?” asked Iziz. He was watching Zhuqa rub Amber’s stomach with sleepy, slightly glazed eyes.

“Twice.”

“Twice? You fucking waste of meat! Talk to me about God in His heaven when it’s ten times a poke! I fucked my mother more than twice a night!”

“Three is the sacred number of creation and belongs to God alone, you ignorant heathen.” Zhuqa’s hand dropped, pushing two fingers along her folds once or twice before crooking up inside her. Iziz watched that, too. “Piss like that used to matter to me,” he mused.

“Is that her making that sound?” Iziz asked abruptly. “Is she…oiling up at you?”

“No. I was in her once already tonight. Before you killed the mood and got me too drunk to care.” Zhuqa glanced over at the baby, which now lay quiet and perhaps sleeping at Xzem’s breast. “Got any teat-biters out there, Iziz?”

“Probably,” he said without much interest. “You want the rest of this?”

Zhuqa waved the hand that wasn’t working methodically at Amber’s pussy.

Iziz picked up the cup and drank it off. “I want to fuck now. I’m taking one of your slaves for the night.”

Zhuqa grunted and shut his eyes.

“Thought I’d mention. Manners are important to city-born scuff like you. Up, Xzem. Let Eshiqi give the sprat a tap and let’s go.”

Xzem crept forward and presented the wrapped baby from a servile crouch.

Amber looked at Zhuqa.

He grunted without opening his eyes or interrupting the rhythm of his fingers.

Amber reached out and brushed the back of her knuckles lightly across the baby’s snout. It roused at once, sucking sleepily, but began to drift away again almost immediately.

“And that was all it wanted, all this time,” said Iziz. “A smooth blanket.”

“Doesn’t care about the blanket.” Zhuqa fanned his spines forward with deep, drunken pleasure. “Wanted his mother’s touch. Something you would never understand.”

“Piss on that. My mother touched me plenty!” Iziz declared and, giving Xzem a light smack to the back of the head, herded her out and shut the door behind them.

“I’m sure she did,” Zhuqa murmured. “And I’m sure it felt like love. But you’ll never touch my child like that, will you, Eshiqi? Because you love it. And you just may be the only other person in this camp who knows that when you love someone, sometimes you don’t touch.” He pulled in a deep breath and let it out slow, patting Amber’s thigh. “Put yourself to bed,” he told her, and gave her a nudge off his lap. He made no effort to follow, only sat there with his eyes closed and one hand resting on the table near his empty cup.

He looked like he was sleeping already, but she thought that would change in a hurry if she so much as touched one of the knives he kept strapped to his arms or took even one step toward the door. Amber went over and climbed into the cupboard. Sliding the door shut made the bells jingle; she looked out to see if they’d disturbed him and found him already gazing back at her through slitted, cat-content eyes.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” he murmured. “The things you find to love in this life…so you don’t hate yourself so much for living it.”

She shut the door on him.

 

9

 

There was no real sense of time, but Amber thought three more days passed because she slept three times. Zhuqa fed her when they woke up—whatever they had left over from the night before, cold and greasy. He fed her when he brought her home from the workpit—mostly meat with baked roots, and once, some unknown animal’s head with roasted marrow bones. He had a bath brought on the second night and let her bathe herself, after she’d bathed him, of course. He made her talk to him, sometimes in her language, sometimes in his. He had sex with her every night. For hours.             

She worked. Busy hands make a light heart, as Hruuzk was fond of saying. She learned to make bowls, plates and pitchers as well as lamps. She mended shifts, shirts and breeches, using anything beyond repair as patches. She pounded thousands of xuseth stalks through a sieve with a heavy wooden mallet for hour after hour to get one lousy jar of oil. And of course, at the end of each back-breaking day, there was plenty of lifting, packing, sweeping and scrubbing.

Three days.

On the fourth, things changed.

It was subtle at first. Hruuzk had been coming at mid-morning to take the children and some of the older slaves off to work in the gardens, kitchens or canals, but not today. This was just unusual enough that Amber noticed, but she hadn’t been there long enough to know what was routine and what wasn’t, so she thought nothing of it except how much more crowded the workpit was. What she noticed next was activity out in the halls, not the crash and roar of a violent rescue, but merely a clamor of boots and voices that grew steadily louder and more raucous throughout the day—the sound of a stadium crowd…or a mob working up for a riot.

The veteran slaves simply kept their heads down and their hands busy, and if they were at all anxious about what was going on outside, they did not show it. Amber tried to follow their example, but when the unseen crowd began to clap, shout and stomp their feet in unison, she threw whatever wicks she’d cut in the oil to soak and retreated to the back room to sit with Xzem and hold the baby. They were making so much noise it was impossible to be sure, but she thought they were chanting, “Meat.”

She didn’t have long to wonder what it meant. The shouting came to a sudden swell of cheers and then Hruuzk opened the door. The children ran to him at once, infected by the unruly energy out in the halls, but he turned them back after just a few words and clapped his hands to stop work.

“The bidding is about to start,” he called. “All my unstabled ladies, line up. Everyone else, keep working. No fussing,” he added, pointing sternly at Shivers, who had begun to tear up. “Until I have coin in my hand, you all belong to me and my ladies do not what?”

“Piss out of their eyes,” Shivers whispered.

“My ladies do not piss out of their eyes.” He gave her a forgiving pat on the head, using the gesture to put her in the forming line. “Gold-Eyes, Crook-Toe, you go last. They want you, they’ll have to pay for the rest of this lot first.” He glanced through the open door, assessing something in the crowd outside, then beckoned to Amber. “Eshiqi, come.”

She heard her name, saw him looking at her when he said it, and still it made no immediate sense to her. He couldn’t sell her, she was Zhuqa’s!

‘Oh sure, now you’re Zhuqa’s,’ the ghost of her dead mother said with a caustic laugh. ‘If you wanted to hide behind his skirts, you should have played his game, little girl. You didn’t, so suck it up.’

But Meoraq was coming. He was supposed to find her, kill Zhuqa and get her out of here.

‘Well, he didn’t,’ Bo Peep said simply. ‘And this is exactly what you deserve for sitting on your ass and waiting for someone else to save you.’

Hruuzk, making a last inspection of his ladies before they passed out of his keeping, finally noticed she was still sitting next to Xzem. His head cocked. He turned around to fully face her and hooked his thumb behind the buckle of his belt.

Amber’s mind remained perfectly still, but her body did not want to be whipped before she was sold. She got up.

Watching her as he bounced Rosek roughly on his knee, Dkorm rattled out a laugh. “I believe that is surprise I see on that ugly face,” he remarked. “I told you it would happen, didn’t I? Although I confess I’m a bit surprised myself. Most of Zhuqa’s toy cunts last at least a year.”

“Did I hear my name?” Zhuqa asked, walking suddenly through the door with an expression of polite interest. “Was there something you wanted to say to me? Perhaps on the subject of my women?”

Dkorm snapped to attention, yanking Rosek into the crook of his arm and pinching her squalling snout shut with his hand. “No, sir! I was just…just…”

Zhuqa’s gaze dropped to Rosek and hardened. “What the fuck are you doing?”

Dkorm let go and actually swept his hand behind his back like a kid trying to hide a forbidden candy bar. Rosek gasped in air and shrieked it out. Xzem held Zhuqa’s baby and trembled. “Nothing, sir.”

“Eshiqi,” said Zhuqa. “Take Rosek.”

“Sir—”

Amber lifted the struggling baby and stepped back. In the next instant, Zhuqa was across the room with his hand around Dkorm’s snout, whose explanations became a choked wheeze.

“You,” said Zhuqa, very calmly, “are making me regret giving you this assignment. Do you think—”

Dkorm began to struggle.

“—I would give the care of my child to anyone? Eh? Answer me.”

Dkorm pitched himself back against the wall, slapping and scratching at Zhuqa’s restraining arm.

“I’m beginning to think you don’t want it in your care,” said Zhuqa. “And I’m beginning to feel offended.”

Amber could see Dkorm’s chest heaving, bulging outward with each whistling effort at breath like an alien parasite was about to burst free.

And then Zhuqa’s hand opened. With a howling gasp, Dkorm dropped flat over the crates, bags and barrels that had been his chair all day and just breathed for a while.

Zhuqa watched him until he’d lost the hoarse, shuddery quality on his inhales, and then he sat down beside him. “How are things with my child, Dkorm?”

“…fair…sir.”

“Good to hear. Good appetite, I trust?”

“…better.”

“Yes, it had some trouble early on.” Zhuqa glanced at Amber. “But we seem to have solved it. Cry much?”

“…some.”

“And Rosek, eh? Healthy?”

“…think so.”

“Healthy lungs, it would seem.” Zhuqa gave the baby in Amber’s arms a tolerant smile. “She’s quiet now, though. Do you know why she’s quiet now?”

And before Dkorm could suck in enough of a tortured breath to answer, Zhuqa the Warlord had seized him by the throat and yanked him up. “Because someone is comforting her,” he hissed. “Can you comfort a baby, Dkorm? Can you do that for me? Because babies cry, all babies cry, and when my baby cries, I want to know that the man I have honored with its care is not pinching its fucking mouth shut!” he roared, seizing Dkorm by the snout and shaking him hard.

Rosek, falling asleep in Amber’s arms, jerked and let out a wail. Amber rocked her, rubbing her little back as Xzem whispered and together, they quieted her to sniffles.

“Do you see that?” Zhuqa demanded, pointing. “Do you see how she did that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“There are a lot of restless men waiting for this sale,” Hruuzk called.

“One thing at a time,” Zhuqa told him, and put his face very close to Dkorm’s. “My patience with you is right down to its last grains. So. Get up. Fetch little Rosek and if she cries and you can’t comfort her, I’m going to kill you. Do you mark me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Go.” Zhuqa released him and unclipped the hooked sword from his belt.

Dkorm stood up, understandably shaky on his feet. He took a few steps toward Amber, hesitated when Rosek began to tear up, then very carefully took her and pressed her to his shoulder. He patted her back, mimicking Amber’s swaying motions, and did not appear to breathe at all until Rosek sniffled herself quiet.

“This has been,” said Zhuqa, “your final forgiveness.” He hung his sword back on his belt. “I suggest you go someplace private and meditate on that until you come to some lasting conclusion. Go.”

Dkorm went. Xzem twitched as if to rise and follow, but Zhuqa’s pointing hand defeated her. She settled back down, staring after Rosek with haunted eyes.

“Are you coming to watch the sale?” asked Hruuzk.

“No. My Eshiqi is upset and wants to go home.”

Hruuzk grunted and patted Amber on the head when she came close enough. “You know I’d never presume to give you advice—”

“Never,” Zhuqa agreed thinly, watching Dkorm disappear in the crowd.

“—but why haven’t you just given the sprat to Eshiqi to raise up?”

“For the same reason I haven’t given it to you.”

Hruuzk’s broken spines flared. “I could do it,” he said, sounding wounded. “Half the bodies under my hand are sprats, you think I don’t know how to raise one?”

“I think,” said Zhuqa, softening enough now that Dkorm was out of the room to give his slave-master a friendly tap to the arm. “I think you have enough to do. My Eshiqi has too much to learn right now. A child would be a distraction. Perhaps when it’s weaned and not so needful, eh?” He glanced back at Xzem, smiling. “It will need a mother when Xzem is gone.”

Xzem ducked her head and nuzzled at the infant that suckled her.

“I’ve never seen a slave so quick to take to a sprat,” Hruuzk agreed. “Must have lost one of her own. Sure you won’t come? I expect good coin for Gold-Eyes here.”

“I can trust you, can’t I?”

Hruuzk widened his good eye and pushed his broken spines forward. “Yes,” he said gravely. “Trustworthy as the wind and tides, sir. Why, my sire was turned out from Fol Mgesh for an excess of trustiness and to his great pride it was a trait I took on.”

“To it, then,” said Zhuqa, hunkering down to watch his child at Xzem’s breast. “We’ll settle tomorrow.”

“To his trust, men say of me,” Hruuzk loudly muttered, leading his slaves out into the packed hall. “And they’ll sing it at my pyre, I’m sure. All right then. Quiet up, you pack of animals! Quiet up and clear a path! If I can’t reach the bidding block, I’ll buy these dips myself and you can all poke each other!”

The door shut behind the last lizardlady, muting much of the noise, which then slowly receded as the men making it followed Hruuzk to wherever it was they went to auction slaves. At length, there was quiet. Even the children, as keyed up as they were, stayed in the back room and did their work without their usual chatter while Zhuqa was there.

“How is it, Xzem?” Zhuqa asked finally, gazing grimly down at the drowsing infant. “Say truth. Is it strong?”

Xzem hesitated.

“Truth,” he said again, his voice hard.

“It is not ill, my lord,” she told him.

“But…?”

“But it was a difficult birth and the mother…suffered. What weakens the womb, weakens the child.”

Zhuqa grunted, expressionless.

“It has a good appetite and a strong grip. If it can be kept warm and dry and allowed to rest, it can grow strong.”

“Do you say it will live?”

Xzem bent her head even lower. “I say it can live, my lord.”

Zhuqa grunted again and stood. “There is a difference, isn’t there? All right. I’m pleased. Is there anything you require?”

“No, my lord.”

“You have enough to eat? And Rosek? She’s comfortable?”

“We are both kept very well, my lord.”

“Good. Eshiqi, come.”

The hall outside the workpit was empty now, but Amber could still hear the crowd somewhere in the labyrinth of the ruins, jeering and hooting as Hruuzk called out bids. Zhuqa tipped his head to listen, but took her to the stair and down into the dark.

“You’re very quiet,” he said, when they’d passed the last set of guards and were alone in the long corridor leading to his private room.

“I don’t have anything to say to you.”

“Again?”

She glanced at him, but he just kept walking with the same distracted look about him. “I don’t have anything to say.”

He grunted thoughtfully.

They walked.

“You’re quiet too,” she said.

“I’m a quiet man.”

Her feet rooted so suddenly that she stumbled. He caught her—he was so damned fast—and waited for her to steady herself before he continued on. He was smiling, just a little.

Lucky guess. It had to be. Meoraq had picked up English fast, but not that fast. All the same, she was glad she’d kept the bitchy out of her mouth for a change.

He unlocked his door and held it for her. His lamp was already lit inside. There was food on the table—tachuqi and roots and what looked like a short stack of pancakes. Zhuqa had to tap her shoulder to get her attention again. “Take off your clothes.”

She did and he took them, feeling out every fold before tossing the robe carelessly over a crate.

“Now you,” he said, and put his hands on her.

She waited, staring fixedly at the wall while he satisfied himself that she had no weapons socketed away, and when he was done, before he could give an order, she moved in close and touched her cheek briefly to his chest.

His spines flared. “My Eshiqi,” he said, rubbing her back. “When Hruuzk called to you, you didn’t know he saw me coming, did you? You thought he meant to put you on the block with the other slaves.” And he smiled, like it was funny.

Amber didn’t smile. She didn’t swear at him either, or call him names or make any of the sarcastic comments she might have made if it wasn’t for the little matter of how much English he might or might not understand…and if he wasn’t right.

“Come to my table,” he ordered, moving ahead of her to take his seat—still the only seat—and giving his thigh an inviting pat. When she sat, he pinched off a large bite of tachuqi meat and offered it up. “Hruuzk tells me you’ve been a good worker. You may think Hruuzk praises all the women who have played Zhuqa’s House with me, but he doesn’t. You have been my loyal woman…and a good mother to my child.” He watched her eat. “Did you lose one?”

“No,” she said, but thought of Nicci. “Never had one.”

“I’ve lost five so far. I try not to see omens in piss anymore, but…this is my sixth.” He took a bite for himself and chewed, gazing up at the ceiling as if he could see through it to Xzem and the baby, far above them. When he swallowed, he looked at her again. “A child needs a mother.”

“A child needs not to grow up in a place like this even more.”

“As the Word says, a father is God upon the living world,” said Zhuqa, giving her another bite of meat. “The only God my son is likely to know. I can train a son. I can take him on hunts and raids. I can teach him blades and spears and grappling. I can be proud of him. I can even be fond of him, from a distance. But even a warlord’s son needs a mother to hold him.”

“I guess you’re not always a dirty girl, are you? Sometimes you’re a real sweetie. A prince among thieves. Or a princess.”

He grunted, rubbed her thigh, fed her another bite.

“What if it’s a girl?” asked Amber. “What happens to all your fatherly affection and pride then? Do you sell her?”

“Eh?”

She put her hands together in the teardrop-shape, but he continued to look blank. Amber made rocking motions with her arms, then realized she’d never seen Xzem rock a baby that way. For that matter, she’d never seen a human rock a baby that way, either. Awkwardly, she cupped her arms as if holding a baby upright at her breast and rocked back and forth instead. This put unpleasant pressure on her sex, but after she’d again made a teardrop-shape and repeated the baby-rocking, his light bulb finally came on.

“You think it will open up female?”

“You’ve got a fifty-fifty chance, don’t you?”

Zhuqa grunted and stroked his throat, studying her through narrow eyes. “Zhuqa the Warlord has only one use for daughters,” he said after a long silence. “But in Zhuqa’s House, all children are prized. If I gave her to you, would you be grateful?”

“That depends. So far, all of your promises have only been good for a year.”

He grunted, but in a thoughtful way that made her wonder again how much of what she said he was starting to understand. It didn’t help when he said, “This place will never be better than a raider’s nest to anyone who has ever known a true home, but you might be surprised how long a child can be happy here, if it’s cared for.”

“That’s a horrible thought,” said Amber, taking the piece of tachuqi he offered her.

“To a child who is not…well, you get Iziz.” Zhuqa gestured broadly and helped himself to a root. “Who, I think, would never imagine that he has been mistreated in his life, but who was surely bought and buggered six times for every finger and toe on his body before the last of his scales went black. Raider-sprats like Iziz or Xzem…they’re not unhappy just because they take a poke ten years too early. That’s only hell to people who know better. So I ask you again—” He held up another piece of meat and cocked his head. “If I gave her to you, if I let you be the God in her living world, if I let you decide how much hurt is normal and how much is never visited…will you be grateful?”

“How grateful do you need me to be?”

“I’m giving you a chance to have a family,” he said quietly. “But I won’t let you raise my child to hate me. If you want it, you will have to decide whether you want to be my loyal woman or my fierce little slave.”

She didn’t answer, not out of defiance, but simply because, for one terrible moment, she wasn’t entirely sure what her answer would be.

Zhuqa’s eyes stabbed into her, deeper and deeper. At last, he leaned back in his chair and gave her another bite of meat. “But I won’t ask you to choose tonight. For now, I am content as long as you play the game, Eshiqi. You don’t have to mean it, but you have to play the game.”

She closed her eyes, took a few breaths, then looked at him and forced a smile.

“I suppose you think it’s silly,” Zhuqa mused, tracing the shape of her lips with his fingertips. “And I suppose you would be right. But what else do I have here, eh? They taught us about evil when I was a boy, and about God’s love and the promise of His forgiveness. I believed it. I believed that I knew where I fit in the world. I believed that I would serve Him someday and if it was His will, I would return with honor to be steward of my father’s House. I believed I would have children in a place where it was not expected and acceptable for the first one to die. Now these things, the very idea of them, are nothing but pieces in a silly game.” His eyes sparked. “Why shouldn’t I want to play it?”

Amber did not answer. After a few seconds, he grunted and shifted her off his knee. “It’s dark in here,” he said.

Amber looked around, then went to the nearest lamp and pulled the wick up a little. The flame lengthened, but guttered. The pitcher of xuseth oil he kept in his room was nowhere obvious. While she looked for it, he went to the wall where he kept his awful drink in a new waterskin, poured himself half a cup, thought about it, then poured the other half. By the time she’d found the oil (on the shelf where it belonged, and God alone knew what it was doing there), he was back in his chair with his feet propped up on the table, drinking.

“Do you want to know what I did?” Zhuqa asked suddenly. His voice was mild; his scales, dark. His eyes, half in and out of shadow, had all the expression of cigarette burns. “Would you like to know what great unforgivable act cut me from my father’s name and put me here? Would you like to know why I am so unfit to keep his House, why my children, if any of them survive, will never have the name I was born under? Eh? Do you?”

She ducked her head and fussed with the lamp, hoping that if she stayed quiet, he’d change the subject.

He took his boots off the table and brought his chair crashing back onto all four feet. She jumped; he watched her, calmly picking through the bowl of roots for one to eat. “Two years before my ascension, the training master I was brunt to broke his leg. They replaced him with someone new, someone from outside. He took an interest in me. Used to keep me extra hours, teaching me advanced fighting forms, but didn’t work me too bad afterwards. We spent a lot of nights just sitting up together, chatting while I cleaned his boots or put an edge on his blades. I liked him,” Zhuqa said, twisting the words like a knife. He laughed once, shortly, and drank again.

“So. So one night, after hours, as we were chatting, he brought out a flask of wine and offered me a swallow. The Word forbids all things which cloud the mind and corrupt clay, but this man, my master, my friend, told me that only applied if you did it to excess. And he would know, wouldn’t he? He had been a Sheulteb once. He was a Sword and a true son of God. He gave me a swallow and he gave me a few more, and when I was warmed up nicely, he brought out a few leaves of phesok and gave me some of that. I don’t remember falling asleep. I just remember waking up…when he was in me.”

Amber ran out of things to do to the lamp. She got up, feeling his stare on her like a physical weight, and went over to the cupboard. She straightened the pillows, shook out the furs, brushed grit off the mattress.

“To this day, that baffles me,” said Zhuqa. “Just outside the masters’ gate, not a hundred walking strides from where he stood when he fucked me, slept one or two hundred women desperate for the healing fires of a son of Sheul. He didn’t need to make a boy drunk to get a poke in unless he wanted to. Suppose I should feel flattered.” He drank, eyed the empty cup, then got up to pour the last of the wine. “I don’t. Come and take this, Eshiqi.”

She went, but she took the empty flask, not the cup he tried to give her. There was a moment when he thought about forcing it on her—she could see it glittering in his eye as he watched her hang the flask upside down to dry—but in the end, he let it go and sipped at it himself.

“In the morning, I told my blademaster. They called a tribunal. I had to tell the story to a room filled with men and boys I knew. The man, my master, denied everything. He went on to say that he had caught me rubbing my cock and this was the act of a boy who feared to have it made known. And since neither of us would recant, it went to trial. He stood for himself. My father sent a Sheulteb. He wouldn’t…He wouldn’t stand for me himself. And this man, this lying man, this man who gave me drink and gave me phesok and bent my sleeping body over the back of a bench, this man won that trial.”

In spite of everything, Amber turned around. “And they threw you out?”

“No,” said Zhuqa. He was looking right at her with his face now full in the light, but his eyes were still cigarette burns. “It’s not unforgivable to fuck your fist or to tell lies to a tribunal. They held me in a cell and whipped me at fourth- and tenth-bell for a full brace in the public courtyard and then they gave me back to him. I went to lessons every morning. He had me every night. Without drink or phesok.” He shrugged his spines stiffly. “Too hard to come by in the city. Anyway, I managed with the help of the one boy I still trusted to send a message to my father. He came in person the next day.”

Zhuqa was quiet for a time, just holding his cup and staring at some point in space between the two of them. At last, he shrugged again and drank off the last of it. “He dragged me out of lessons to the first empty room and beat me until I went black. Then he went home. My master took me out of the infirmary a few days later and fucked me three times. Making up for time lost, he said. He couldn’t manage the last go, so he used the hilt of a practice sword. It was bigger than he was. I bled. He told me to clean it. I killed him with it,” said Zhuqa, tossing the empty cup on the table. “He wasn’t sleeping. His back wasn’t turned. I took him on in the full sight of the God that let him fuck me and let him lie about it and let me be whipped for the lie and I killed him with a wooden toy of a sword. Then I gave myself over and they turned me out. Not for the murder, although they did call it that. No, they turned me out for blasphemous and malicious lies, because I said that he had fucked me when God had proven that he had not. There I stood, with my own blood and his stinking grease still inside me…”

He trailed off, then gave the empty cup on the table a morose flick with two fingers and stood up. “A man named Chuaan hunted me down later that year and fed me to his men for a catch-cock. Shouldn’t have bothered me—not much did by that time—but I saw fire as soon as the first hand was on me. I killed six of them, they tell me, and so the legend of the mighty Zhuqa who has never been poked was born. I let them think so. I am—” He smiled, thin and hard as razors. “—such a liar. Come here, Eshiqi.”

She went. He slung his arm around her shoulders and she held him steady all the way to the cupboard. She took his boots off, helped him out of his harness and picked his legs up for him when he dropped back onto the mattress. “Say something,” he said, staring at the top of the cupboard.

“This man you hate so much,” said Amber. “You turned into him.”

She said it in English, but he said, “I know,” and turned his dead gaze on her with a smile. “Would you call that proof of God, eh? Is it keeping balance in the world, in His great, unknowable design?”

“I call it proof that people can be horrible without God’s help.”

She could tell he didn’t get much of that, if anything, but he didn’t let it bother him. He plucked at her arm, pulled her in with him and shut the cupboard door.

“I’m too drunk to fuck,” he muttered, rubbing at his face. “Use your hand.”

She did. It took longer than usual. She wiped him off with the edge of a blanket when it was over and lay down beside him.

“Your Sheulek,” he said, so thickly now that he could scarcely be understood. “The one you think is coming…if he really believes all the piss he was taught, he’ll never take you back. And if he doesn’t…he won’t come for you at all.” His hand brushed at her hair, then slipped down to cup her hip and pull her back against him. “You’ve gone to Gann, Eshiqi, just like me. If God Himself would not forgive you, why would he?”

She didn’t answer. Eventually, he fell asleep.

She lay awake.

 

10

 

Amber was surprised to see the new slaves back in the workpit the next day, although after some thought, she supposed it was as good a place as any to put them. Some of them were dressed now. Some of them had been given names. All of them had the same distant stare, even when they looked right at her. But when Hruuzk gave them instructions, they listened and did what they were told. Not as smoothly or as well as the long-time slaves who shared the workpit, but that would surely come in time.

After getting everyone started, Hruuzk gathered up the kids and a few of the women and took them away, saying something about work ‘up top’ that needed doing. He was gone a long time and came back alone, carrying a huge sack over his shoulder and a small chest under one arm.

“Here to me!” he called. “Yllgami! Ena! Eshiqi! The rest of you, keep on with what you’re about. All right.” He thumped sack and chest both on a table and opened them. The sack was stuffed with a confusing jumble of rope; the chest, with hundreds of small fish hooks.

“Mud’s thawing and snow on the mountain’s melting, so we’ll have aamyr washing in from the lake any day. Yllgami, you sort out the nets. Ena, you mend them. Eshiqi—” Hruuzk produced a mending kit that had been tucked into his belt and held it out to her. “—sew on the hooks. Yllgami will show you where and how.”

Amber slowly took the kit from him and turned it around. It was Meoraq’s.

“I want the first of them ready for the water this evening and the last of them in the water by tomorrow night. Show me those clever hands, eh? Good girl.”

Hruuzk gave her head a pat. She looked at him, thinking of the night she’d first held this kit, and Meoraq beside her as she made new soles for the boots Zhuqa had taken away. Someone else in this camp was wearing them. Someone else had the white thuoch hides which would never be her coat. Someone had stolen the clothes she’d spent all winter making.

Someone had stolen her.

“Get to it,” Hruuzk ordered, already on his way out. If he’d seen anything different in her eyes, he hadn’t thought it worth mentioning. And why should he? An unhappy slave in the workpit? No, really?

Yllgami was brushing at Amber’s sleeve with the very tip of her knuckles and making mewing sounds scarcely loud enough to hear. Reluctant to put Meoraq’s mending kit aside, Amber tucked it underneath her arm, but gave Yllgami her full attention. Life went on. Mothers died, ships crashed, people left you, people stole you…but life went on.

It helped to think of the nets like Christmas lights. First, they had to be untangled, and while it was obvious that whoever had packed them away had made an effort to bundle each one separately, they’d all knotted together. As soon as the first one was free, Ena had it and a spare coil of rope and was using what looked like a giant wooden barrette to patch holes in the loose weave. As Amber continued to help Yllgami, Dkorm and Xzem arrived.

He kicked some sacks into a heap and sat down, tucking Rosek under his arm with an expression of profound dislike. She was restless, wriggly, and already making those breathy barking noises that meant a crying fit wasn’t far off.

Amber hesitated, picking at her net, then pushed it back and headed over.

“Take the fucking thing,” Dkorm groaned, but instead, Amber rummaged in the crates and bags around him for the scraps of clothing left over from her mending of a few days’ ago. With rags in various colors and a little thread from Meoraq’s kit, Amber threw a crude doll together. She wasn’t good at domestic shit like this, but good enough for Rosek, who gawped at the gift like it was the first she’d ever seen…which it probably was. She took it, chewed it, shook it, and let out a shrill squeal and began to beat it vigorously against the side of a crate.

“How is that better?” Dkorm demanded, spines flat.

Amber went back to the nets. Ena had finished her repairs and Yllgami was waiting anxiously next to the box of hooks. Amber watched without interest while Yllgami deftly and wordlessly sewed about a dozen fish hooks into the weave, not too closely spaced and all pointed in the same direction, then took the needle when it was offered and got to work.

She immediately stabbed herself with a fish hook. The hooks were barbed; pulling it out tore the little wound even wider. It bled enough to draw a thin red line from the tip of her finger to the crease of her first knuckle, but that was all. ‘Just lick it,’ she thought in Meoraq’s terse, irritated voice, and did. It tasted bitter.

The fish hook was a swoop of metal lying in her palm, reflecting nothing but the lamp light. ‘Meoraq could kill a man with this stupid thing,’ she thought sourly. But what did that prove? Meoraq could kill a man with a beach ball.

Breath on her shoulder. She stiffened, but didn’t turn around. She didn’t try to hide the hook either, knowing it had already been seen. She simply picked up a needle and started tying it onto the net.

Dkorm snorted at her back. “It amazes me that you can work all those fingers without getting them confused,” he remarked and started to turn away. He paused. He turned back, jogging Rosek higher onto his shoulder so that he could reach out and play with Amber’s hair. “Does Zhuqa know how clever you are with your many fingers, Eshiqi?”

“Fuck off. I’m working.”

“Zhuqa told me I couldn’t have a poke.” He leaned in to lick at her. The waxy nub of his tongue, dry and repulsive, swept back and forth over her shoulder while she fought and failed not to squirm. “As far as I know, everything else is just fine.”

“If you believe that, you’re even dumber than you look.” Amber shrugged hard enough to hit him in the jaw and followed that glancing blow with a glare while he rubbed his snout and looked thinly amused. “And you’re not scaring me with any of this macho shit, so just back off and let me work.”

“You talk too much.” He moved to the other shoulder and licked it, too. Tiny hands caught at her wrap as he worked his way methodically to her neck; the baby, Rosek, trying to wriggle out from between them. “Fucking sprat,” she heard him mutter and he leaned away.

Her hand tightened on the needle before she could make herself relax. It wasn’t much of a gesture. He should have missed it if he’d been looking anywhere but right at her hand.

But he snorted again. “With that thing?” he asked derisively. “Go on, then.”

She made another knot, furious and silent.

“You don’t think I mean it.” He caught her wrist, turned her roughly around and shoved her against the table. Her ass hit the corner just right and she toppled back, catching herself in the split-second before she took a painful sprawl across the hook-studded net. She had the needle raised in a fist before she knew it.

Dkorm stepped up invitingly, the baby in one arm and the other open wide, displaying the whole of his scaly chest for her sliver of baked bone to pierce. “Go on. You killed a man, they say, so you must have some arm in you, no matter how you look. You could even hurt me if you sink it in my eye, but I warn you, you might hit the sprat.” He jogged Rosek again and she squealed happily and waved her new doll over her head.

Amber put the needle down and gave it a push out of her easy reach.

Dkorm grunted and fingered her hair, then wrapped a hank of it around his wrist and pried her head slowly back, further and further, until her shaking arm couldn’t brace her anymore. She fell with a weak, angry cry, anticipating a dozen barbed hooks in her back, but the hand that pulled her down also held her up. She waited, suspended over the net with her eyes squeezed shut, for him to work out what he wanted to do.

After an tense silence, Dkorm rasped out another lizard-laugh and backed up, tossing her by her hair to her knees on the floor. “You are the ugliest Gann-damned thing I have ever seen,” he announced, handing her the baby as he beckoned to Yllgami. “I honestly don’t know what it is about you that makes me want to fuck.”

“Of course you want to fuck, you’re nothing but a giant dick,” Amber said, and was glad he didn’t know English enough to know how shaky and frightened she sounded. Behind her, she could hear as Dkorm bent his slave over the table. He was loud—grunting, slapping, hissing; Yllgami never made a sound.

Rosek, larger and stronger than Zhuqa’s baby, struggled to get away from the smooth-skinned, hairy monster now enveloping her, and finally Xzem crept forward and snatched her away. Amber rubbed at her empty arms and watched Xzem nuzzle Rosek while nursing the smaller infant. Dkorm’s violent sex went on and on.

“Look at you…pretending…not to care,” he panted, finally shoving the lizardlady away and wiping his cock clean on her skirts. “Look at you staring me down like I couldn’t stand you up and put it to you so hard, you’d be coughing on my cum before the end.”

His boots tromped heavily around until he stood in front of her, over her. He didn’t move to take the baby back, either of them. He just stood there while Amber glared at the floor and made herself keep quiet. Then, with a curt laugh, he caught her by the hair and yanked her head up. Looking at him meant looking past the cudgel of his erection, already weeping fresh beads of oil in readiness. “I can see murder in your eyes. When are you going to learn that you are a slave now?” he wondered, giving her hair a shake. “You can be as fierce as you want, Eshiqi, but all it will get you is killed.”

He was right. Thoughts of the needle and the fish hooks taunted her, but the real bitterness was that she’d come to think of them as any kind of weapon at all. Even if she could get the needle through his thick hide, how much damage could she do? She remembered the kipwe all too well and how its quills—the smallest of them twice the size of her needle—hadn’t slowed Meoraq down in battle. He’d actually been able to sleep through their removal. She also remembered the way his scales had sealed up over the wounds as she pulled them out, so even if she got in a good hit, she’d never do any real damage. Maybe she could stab him in the slit, where his scales were thinnest and didn’t overlap, but if that was the best she could do, what was the point?

“Zhuqa seems to think that you’re smart,” Dkorm was saying, running his thumb idly up and down along his shaft as he toyed with her hair. “But you’re not smart enough to know that making me happy is much better for you in the long term than showing me how fierce you can be.”

All this with his dick right in front of her. Amber felt a moment’s nostalgia for the days of Crandall and subtle innuendo. She started to twist her face away from the hook-tipped thing Dkorm kept aimed at her, but then flinched a little and stared right at it.

“I wish you would take a stab at me, Eshiqi,” he said, and let her go again to grip his cock, squeezing once wistfully before pushing it back, grimacing with effort, into his slit. “There’s not a scale on me you could poke through with that toy you had, but if you at least tried, maybe Zhuqa would give me one hour to poke b—”

Amber reached out and caught him by the narrowing tip of his cock before he could force it all the way out of sight. He let go with a startled hiss and out it came, thrusting through her fist in oiled urgency until the knot at its base bumped her hand.

And there it was.

Meoraq could kill a man with this stupid thing, she’d thought, looking at the fish hook, but she hadn’t meant it, not really. Not even Meoraq could magically make that insignificant bit of metal into a murder weapon when every part of a lizardman’s body was armored and every vein protected.

Every vein…but this one. That thick, black, throbbing vein that crawled along the surface of the bulging knot at the base of his cock.

“Get off me,” Dkorm warned, glancing over his shoulder at the workpit door, but he didn’t try to pry her off. Zhuqa could walk in at any moment, and if he found her here with her hand on this man’s dick, he’d probably do all the killing she could ever want for her, but it wasn’t Dkorm she wanted dead.

‘I could do it,’ she thought, stunned. ‘Even with a fish hook.’

“Get off me, I said!”

Amber looked up past the slick head of his cock to his strained, somewhat dazed face. His spines were low, but not flat, and the color was coming in at his throat. If she gave him a stroke, she had no doubt that would be the end of his objections.

‘Because he’s sick,’ she thought, staring. ‘Once his neck lights up, it all about sex…or killing…and all they want to do is more of it. It’s only, what? Seventeen years of training that keeps Meoraq more or less under control—’

Training that Zhuqa shared. Training that just might give him that one moment’s pause to think, ‘Hang on, this is suspicious.’ And then he’d kill her.

And how was she going to smuggle a fish hook out of the workpit anyway? More importantly, how was she going to smuggle it into Zhuqa’s room? He’d strip her as soon as he got her home and as soon as he saw a weapon, even if it was a silly little finger-length fish hook, he’d kill her.

And even if he didn’t, even if by some miracle she killed him, there was no way out except up ten flights of stairs, past ten pairs of guards and then past all the rest of them living in the ruins on the surface before running out into the wildlands to get lost and die anyway.

‘So stay,’ she thought in the voice of her dead mother. She looked at her hand on Dkorm’s dick and it was Bo Peep’s hand. It was Bo Peep’s heart inside her feeling nothing but hopelessness and hate, feeling it so completely that it was almost comforting. ‘Stay and be Zhuqa’s Eshiqi. Be a mother to his kids. Help train the new slaves he brings home for his men to fuck. Suck it up or blow it out, little girl. There’s no such thing as a fate worse than death.’

In the stillness of that moment, she was tempted.

“Fuck you,” Amber whispered, appalled. She let go of Dkorm and wiped her hand on her shift.

He socked her in the ear. Probably not as hard as he could have, but hard enough. Whether he hit her for grabbing his cock or letting go, she didn’t know and he didn’t explain. He just knocked her aside and pulled Yllgami back to finish him off.  Less than a minute later, he was back on his throne of crates and sacks, swearing at Rosek and drinking.

Amber sat on the floor. The other women worked around her. She watched them; they did not watch her.

Meoraq was looking for her. She still believed that, but every time she woke up beside Zhuqa, it was getting harder to believe he’d find her. And if God told him to get on with his life—if he saw a funny shape in the clouds or if the fire burned a weird way or if any one of a thousand random things happened—he’d do it.

Maybe he’d already done it. With Bo Peep sitting so close beside her, it was easy to imagine him coming back to camp and praying instead of looking for her. She could see him kneeling beside the dead raider all night and then leaving him to rot on the ground in the morning. Why burn him? He’d gone to Gann. He was corrupted beyond all forgiveness. And so, perhaps, was she.

‘No one is going to save you, little girl.’

“Fuck you,” Amber said again.

Bo Peep shrugged inside her head, smiling her mean, drunken smile. ‘Sometimes you have to say the bad stuff. Hope is nothing but pretty lies, like those storybooks they gave you in state-care, where the dragon always dies in the end and the prince climbs the tower and carries the prisoner away to be a princess forever and forever. Bullshit, baby. In the real world, nobody saves you. In the real world, it’s live in Zhuqa’s House…or die there.’

Amber opened her mouth to tell her mother’s fake ghost to fuck herself for a third time, but couldn’t. Bo Peep was right. And since the only part of Bo Peep that was still around was a figment of Amber’s own imagination, she guessed she knew what she was going to do.

She was going to escape.

 

* * *

 

They finished three nets by the end of the day, with little enough for Amber to do that she also learned how to repair them. She needed the distraction, badly. With nothing to think about except the hook—not even the hook, but the possibility, the potential, of the hook—she had become tense enough to make her neck and back ache. Aching muscles needed to be stretched. Walking helped the stretching, but made the other lizardladies distinctly nervous. So she picked up a pair of the odd wooden tools Ena was using and watched until she figured out how to fix a hole in a fishing net.

She kept at it long after the rest of them were gone. Hook and pull, wrap and knot, wrap and hook. It made the time pass.

Zhuqa came. Amber put Meoraq’s needles back in Meoraq’s mending kit and set it carefully on the table where she had been working. Then she turned around to face him, tipping back her head in case he wanted a nuzzle. He did. She stood very still until it was over and then followed him out into the hall.

Alone in his room, Amber took the initiative, stripping away her clothes before he gave the order and standing patiently by while he searched her. She could feel the plan throbbing behind her eyes like a headache, until she could not bear to meet his gaze and had to look away.

“You should know,” he murmured, stroking at her throat, “I find coyness deeply arousing. Come and greet your man, Eshiqi, before we share our meal.”

Amber stepped close, still staring at the table to keep her thoughts, her plan, away from his too-piercing stare. She pressed her cheek perfunctorily to his chest and her hand to his groin, thoughts racing. She loosened his belt to work her hand beneath his metal loin-plate and kneaded at him, seeking the hidden hardness of his cock beneath his skin.

“Enough of that,” said Zhuqa, chuckling as he patted her hip. “Food first. Then we play.”

“Believe me, I’m not playing,” said Amber, resisting his nudge toward the table and moving her hand instead to his slit.

He caught her wrist, the hard edges of his belly-scales flexing shut around her fingertip. He didn’t look amused anymore. She glared, because she knew he expected to see it, even as she felt her heart pounding at her ribs…and her ribs pressed too goddamn close to his.

His eyes narrowed. Deliberately, he cocked his head—a warning.

“Please,” she said in lizardish. Nerves made her voice shake and that was good, as long as she sounded broken and not like her head was burning up with secrets.

“You want something?” Suspicion dimmed, but didn’t die. “What do you want?”

What, it wasn’t enough that she was trying to ingratiate herself? She had to have a reason?

“Take me out,” she said. “Just for a little while.”

“Eh?”

Fuck this stupid impossible goddamn tonal language. “Out,” she said, or tried to. “Grass. Trees. Sky.”

“You what…?” His head slowly tipped back. “You want to see the sky.”