The Last Hour of Gann by Smith, R. Lee (20)

“So you’re saying it doesn’t matter what we do?” Amber asked uncertainly.

“Of course it matters,” said her mother, now gazing at the big television monitors where the Director was giving his uplifting speeches over and over…like Nuu Sukaga inviting all the post-Wrath survivors to come to Matezh hundreds of years too late to matter anymore. “But you can’t always stop it.”

“Because…it’s supposed to happen?”

Her mother looked at her, still not in a mean way, but with such bizarre force that Amber had to drop her eyes and even squirm a little.

“Are you asking if this was God’s plan?” her mother asked quietly, and suddenly the skyport was gone, replaced by the screaming wind and wasteland of Meoraq’s world. She could see the Pioneer, there at the end of the long, black scar it had left in the crash. She could see thousands of moaning, weeping, terrified people staggering around in the wreckage, illuminated by a sky filled with fire. “Do you really think this was part of anyone’s plan?”

Amber couldn’t answer. She could see herself down there, dragging Nicci through the crowds with her duffel bag firmly over her shoulder, heading for Scott and that other man (he was going to need someone to roll around with he said and then he apologized but not because he didn’t mean it and his name was john something french i think and if he’d only come with us we’d have rolled around plenty and how different things could have been maybe better maybe worse but oh so different).

“People make their own choices,” said her mother, now walking away behind her. “And God has to let them live with the consequences.”

Amber turned around to follow and staggered in the sudden silence. The wreck of the Pioneer was gone; she was in the courtyard at Xi’Matezh. The cliff was cold and muddy. That crumbling wall surrounded her, blocking out all but a little piece of the ocean. Her mother was already leaning up against the broken wall, smoking and watching the tide come in. Amber hesitated, then turned away and tried to open the outer doors of the shrine. Meoraq was in there. He was watching the video without her and she had to get to him before he came out. But her hands slipped weirdly over their surface without finding a gripping place; the more she struggled with them, the taller and heavier they seemed to get, until they towered over the whole enclosure, threatening to fall.

She gave up, stumbling back in their shadow, and turning at last to discover a lizardman standing where her mother had been. He was strangely hard to see. The sun was coming up over the ocean, stinging at her eyes like tears, blurring him in and out of recognition. She thought it was Meoraq at first, then Zhuqa, then some stranger in a white hood, but when she got closer, he looked back at her and she realized he was Lashraq. He still had her mother’s cigarette in his hand. He waited for her to join him at the hole in the wall and then took an impossible drag through his inflexible lizard-lips and turned back to watch the ocean.

The Ruined Reach as she’d last seen it was gone. The flotsam of a million bloated bodies bobbed on the tide, stretching out north to south as far as she could see, interrupted only by the carnage of a ruined port the land hadn’t yet reclaimed. There were no seagulls to scream over this feast, no crabs or sharks to pick it over from below. Everything was dead: the people, the animals, the ocean. She couldn’t smell it, which was the first she knew—cigarette-smoking lizardman and all—that this wasn’t real.

“Am I dead?” she asked warily.

“Does it matter?”

“It matters to me!”

“Only if you’re not dead.”

That…made a certain amount of sense. If she was dead, she had a feeling not much would matter at all anymore. So since it did matter, was that proof she was alive? But if she was alive, she had to be dreaming, and if this was a dream, it wasn’t proof of anything.

“Are you supposed to be God?”

He snorted and glanced at her. “You sound skeptical.”

Amber groped for and found an irrefutable argument. “God doesn’t smoke!”             

His spines shrugged. “You’d know, I guess.” Lashraq stubbed out his cigarette on the back of his hand and tossed it into the wind, leaning out over the broken bricks to watch it fall. “Want to know why I called it Gann?”

“Huh?”

“This world.” He gestured. “Clay. The evils of men. And all the other things it means. Want to know why I called it Gann? Would that prove something to you?”

“It’s the name of this planet, isn’t it?”

“Before the Fall, we called the planet I’az. It’s an old, old word that means, eh, foundation. The stuff beneath your feet.”

“Earth,” whispered Amber.

Lashraq shrugged again and turned back to the sea. “More or less. I called it Gann in the Word, though. That is, I said that Sheul called it Gann. I thought it sounded more otherworldly, you know, that God had a secret name for all things, that He had knowledge beyond ours. And I picked Gann specifically because my youngest brother was born with a mild deformation of the throat and until they fixed him, he couldn’t talk right. He couldn’t say Zhan.” He glanced at her, smiling. “He called me Gann.”

“You named the devil after you? As a joke?”

“Not the best joke in the world, but I laughed now and then.”

“This doesn’t prove anything,” Amber insisted. “This is nothing but…but subconscious crap! You’re not my mother! You’re not the ghost of Lashraq Zhan! And you’re for damn sure not…not…”

He waited.

Amber shook her head and went back to the doors of the shrine. They loomed, blacking out the sky, holding the whole world in its shadow, impossible to touch. The part of her that believed this was a dream insisted Meoraq was in there, that he needed her. But if it was a dream, she’d have to wake up. Meoraq needed her there, too.

“Can you help him?” she asked awkwardly. “If I…believe in you or…do things for you?”

“That isn’t how it works.”

“Well then how does it work, goddammit?!” She swung around, her hands in fists, but Lashraq didn’t flinch. “You don’t plan things, you don’t help people, you sure as fuck don’t care when people die, what do you do?”

“I talk,” Lashraq said quietly. “But I can’t make you listen.”

“All you’re telling me is you can’t help! What good are you? You…You son of a bitch, look at me!” she exploded. “Don’t you know what we’ve been through? And you just stand there and talk about fucking butterflies when we’ve come all this way and lived through so much and now this is how it ends? It’s not fair!”

“Suck it up,” he replied and lit another cigarette.

She cried until she could make herself stop and then she took a few deep breaths. Six of them. She looked at him. He watched the tide come in.

“Who are you?” she whispered. “Who are you, really?”

“Me?” Lashraq shrugged his spines and shoulders at the same time. “I’m the warning.”

And as she tried to wrap her head around that, he reached out and clasped her shoulder. His grip was strong; his eyes were kind.

“But there will be a boat,” he told her. “And a helicopter. So hold on, Amber. Watch for them. And take the chance when you see it, because I can only give you one.”

He tipped his head back, grunting thoughtfully in the back of his throat. “Looks like the storm is clearing,” he said.

She looked up. The sun behind the clouds turned the whole sky a blinding white. For a moment, she was back in the skyport again, and then she was nowhere at all.

 

* * *

 

Amber came around in a lamp-lit tent to the sound of lizardish laughter and the ocean. She was not alone. She rolled over with difficulty and at first tried to see Meoraq beside her, but the face was all wrong, and so were the scars and the clothes. It was Iziz, just sitting there with his knees drawn up and his hands clasped around them, staring at the side of the tent. He said, “You ever been to the mountains, Eshiqi?”

It wasn’t another dream. She didn’t wake up.

“We lived there a few years when I was very young. I spent a lot of time alone, up in the rocks. One day, I found a thuoch den with two pups and no parent. I tried to raise them, because I was a sprat and sprats are stupid like that.”

Nicci. Nicci was dead. They might all be dead by now, although it stood to reason that someone had to be alive to make the raiders all roar and laugh like that. It wasn’t any fun to torture someone who was already dead.

“I stole away every day to look in on them and fed them what I could of my own meals. God and Gann alone might know what I would have done with them if that had worked, but it didn’t. I crawled down into the den one morning to find the big one eating the little one while the little one whined and shivered in its own guts. I ran screaming down the side of the mountain until I fell and went the rest of the way down on my belly. My mother found me, fixed me up, and while she was doing that, someone tracked up the mountain to see what scared me. They brought me back the big pup, all warm and wriggling. I hugged it all night, crying while it licked my face and loved me in its dumb pup way. In the morning, I killed it with a rock.”

Amber turned back onto her side.

“My mother told me it was pointless to hate the pup. All animals kill each other when they have to, she said. We all eat each other to survive. Thuochs, dumaqs, humans. My mother was the worst fuck in that camp,” he added in a pensive tone, “but she had her moments.”

Amber did not answer. She tried to pretend she didn’t even hear.

“I don’t think I’ve ever told that story before,” said Iziz. “Unless I got drunk and maybe told Zhuqa and then forgot. Which is possible. But you remind me of that pup. The little one, I mean, getting your guts gnawed open by your littermate and just writhing while she did it. I wouldn’t have thought it of you.”

“What are you going to do with me?” Amber asked dully.

“Patience, Eshiqi. Patience is more than a word. Zhuqa used to say that. Made me just spitting mad, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to it. I’d never heard of this place,” he remarked, looking around at the walls of his tent as though he could see right through them to the shrine. “Doesn’t look like the sort of place God would spend much time. Kind of a piss-gully, if you ask me. Druud seemed to think there’d be something big here. If I understood him right, he thought there’d be some kind of flying machine. We’ve been here for days and we’ve been looking, but we couldn’t find it. Did you?”

“No.”

Iziz glanced at her, then grunted and shrugged his spines. “None of that old shit works right anyway. If it did, we wouldn’t be scratching out nests in the ground like beetles. Zhuqa gave us as much of a city as we’ll ever know.” He gave her a longer, more assessing stare. “You ever live in a city?”

“Yes.”

“A real one?”

“A human one.”

He grunted, looking thoughtful and curious. “Describe it.”

She closed her eyes, not to help her visualize, but just to shut the sight of him away. He let her and did not interrupt during the long silence she took to put her thoughts in some kind of order. Nicci was in every one of them. At last, she gave up and simply said, “Have you ever seen pictures of your Ancients in their cities?”

“Some, sure.”

“They looked like that. Tall, narrow buildings. No walls. Lots of machines.” She rolled onto her back and opened her eyes, staring at the ceiling of the tent and only vaguely aware of Iziz beside her. “It stank. Especially when it rained. Hot tar in the summer, wet gutters in the winter, just a constant nasty stink. Even the good smells, the food places and all that, reeked of hot grease and garbage if you went around the back. And our place, that was all rancid booze, pot and piss. And dead cats, that one summer.”

He put his hand on her stomach. It was neither a menacing touch nor a lascivious one, just the absent-minded touch of a man’s rough hand, there between her navel and her pubis. He gazed straight ahead at the wall. “Druud talks about your Earth-place a lot. We encourage it. We don’t have much to entertain ourselves with these days. You took all the fresh dips and Ghelip took the rest. What have I got, eh? Druud. Druud and his piss-talk of Earth. What color was the sky?”

“Blue.”

He grunted and rubbed at her belly. “That’s what Druud said. I cut off one of his toes for lying to me. Guess I owe the little piss-licker an apology.”

A gust of wordless hoots and laughter erupted outside. She thought she heard Eric in the middle of them, but couldn’t make out what he was saying, just that it was hoarse and hurt.

“You have me now,” said Amber, going through the motions without hope, without feeling of any kind. “You can let the others go.”

“I could,” Iziz agreed. “I certainly could.”

“Do you want me to beg?”

“For Druud?”

“For Scott,” she said. “For Eric. For anyone else that’s left.”

“There’s a few. Not many. Humans break easy.” He gazed at the tent wall, his spines flexing now and then as he thought, and finally he said, “All right. Beg and let’s see what happens.”

She started to roll over onto her knees, but his hand on his stomach turned hard and pressed her flat where she lay, so she just reached out her hands instead. She held them up, palms empty, but he wouldn’t look at them. She let them drop. They both stared, each into their own wall, and then she said, “Please.”

He grunted.

“Please let them go.”

“Go on. I’m listening.”

“I won’t fight you.”

“Mm.”

“I’ll do whatever you want.”

His fingers drummed over her stomach.

“I’ll be good.” It was the only thing she could think to say.

“What will you do for me, Eshiqi? Just for me.”

She thought.

“I’ll cry,” she said.

He looked at her.

Outside, raiders laughed and cursed, ate and drank. The waves rolled in and out, in and out. The wind blew.

“That was good,” said Iziz, and turned back to the wall. “I was tempted. I didn’t think I would be. I’m keeping them, Eshiqi. I’m keeping them and I will personally see to it that they are starved and worked and whipped and fucked right up to the last hour of their lives, and do you know why?”

“Because you can.”

“What a spiteful thing to say. I can do a lot of things that I don’t do, Eshiqi, and let me tell you, torturing humans without killing them means far, far more work for me than any fun I’ll ever get back out of them. A man has to have a reason to put up that kind of coin, so why don’t you think? Think hard and tell me why I’m doing it.”

“Because I killed Zhuqa.”

“No. That’s the reason I’m killing your man. Think harder.”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t?” Color grew along the side of his neck. “You don’t know. You can’t think of anything else you might have done.”

“I…” Her thoughts seemed to sink away from her grasp. She shook her head, but couldn’t shake them any clearer. “I took…your women.”

“You took his baby.” His spines lowered. His head cocked. He did not look at her. “Did you tell him what you were going to do before he died, Eshiqi? Is that how you twisted the knife?”

“No.”

“But you took it. Druud says you sent it on to Chalh with Xzem and the other dips, and since I don’t see any of them out there, I guess it’s true. Why did you do that? Why did you take his baby if you didn’t even want it?”

“I wanted it,” Amber said. Strange, how she couldn’t lie to him, almost as strange as him asking her these things in the first place. His pain and hers filled this small space, choking out all other feeling, even hate. “But it was more important that it have a real home, even if it wasn’t with me.”

“A home.” Yellow flared on the side of his throat. “It had a home, Eshiqi. It had a fine home.”

“It deserved a better life.”

“Shit on that. Do you really think that worn-out catch-cock cared about Zhuqa’s sprat as much as he did? Do you?”

“If Zhuqa could have given it a home inside the city walls, he would have.”

That, Iziz did not answer. She lay beside him, watching the color fade out of his scales without any sense of relief, sunk in grief. He watched the wall of his tent. Time passed, unnoticed, unfelt.

His hand moved suddenly. It slipped between the wrapped edges of her tunic to rest on her bare belly, just below her navel, just above the top of her breeches. Iziz turned his head toward her, but kept his eyes on the wall. “Is this what I think it is?”

Nicci’s voice, like a hook in the back of her mind, tearing open her heart and bleeding a memory: Want to see where they cut it out?

She couldn’t answer. Silence could be deadly here, but she simply couldn’t speak.

Now he looked at her. His hand flexed; the muscles of her stomach tightened.

“Is it his?” he asked. His voice was low, but strained.

It was Meoraq’s, it had to be. Too soon to show a bump if it was Zhuqa’s. Too soon to show Iziz anything that could have made him suspect this. No, she didn’t know that for a fact, but facts weren’t everything. For some things, faith was stronger.

“It’s mine,” said Amber. “That’s whose it is. Mine.”

“I guess that makes it mine, then,” Iziz mused. “Never had a sprat before, not that I knew of. Never even had a thuoch pup.”

“You did until you killed it.”

“At least mine died loving me.”

‘You getting out of this, little girl?’ Bo Peep wondered. Her mental voice was quiet but not slurred, not just doing the mommy-thing while she nodded off. ‘Seems like you came an awful long way just to give up now.’

“Fuck you,” said Amber.

Iziz’s spines flicked forward.

“Not you. I’m sitting up now.”

He took his hand off her. She pushed herself up, feeling the drag of her body in ways she never had even when she’d weighed two hundred pounds. She wiped at her eyes, but they were dry. She wasn’t crying. That didn’t seem fair.

“What did you do with my sister’s body?” she asked.

“Threw it off the edge,” he replied, without venom.

“Zhuqa would have made me eat her.”

“Maybe. He might have burned her. You never knew for certain. He had moods. But one thing I can promise you: He would have killed your Sheulek and he would have made you watch.”

She nodded listlessly. “Is that what you’re going to do?”

“Oh yes,” Iziz said. “And he’s going to die hard. Before I’m done, you won’t be able to put your hand on him without bloodying your fingers. He may not scream much,” he remarked, scratching restlessly at his throat, where the color was starting to come back. “I never saw Zhuqa give up better than a hiss in all the years I knew him. Made no difference how hard he was bleeding. Want to know what he used to say?”

“I am not my clay,” said Amber.

Iziz looked at her, head cocked and smiling, both at the same time. “Just so. But that’s fine. I don’t care how much he feels it. It’s really you I want to hurt.”

“For how long?”

“As long as I can. I’m going to make you live, Eshiqi. I’m going to kill your man and take your sprat and I’m going to make you live.”

“I’ll kill you if I can,” she said. It wasn’t a threat, wasn’t a warning. She didn’t know what she meant by it, only that it needed to be said.

“You killed Zhuqa,” he acknowledged. “He got careless. I won’t. He liked you.” Iziz looked at her, neither sneering nor smiling. “I don’t.”

 

12

 

He raped her three times in grim-faced silence, braced high above her on stiff arms, moving hard, scarcely touching her. She didn’t resist, didn’t cry, didn’t even close her eyes. She stared at the ceiling of the tent; he stared at the wall. When it was over, they put their clothes right and then he tied her comfortably yet securely at wrists and ankles and left her there.

Alone, with the rest of the world covered up, time had a way of melting into strange new shapes. She sat for a while, then lay down and rolled onto her side, then struggled until she could sit up again. Her mind worked, mechanically filling up the empty places where minutes ought to be. She thought of Nicci, just seven years old, holding her hand on the way to school, and Amber looking both ways all the way across the street because sometimes the cars didn’t stop. She thought of the boy Iziz had been growing up to become the man who had burned his only friend’s body. She thought of Nuu Sukaga, that poor son of a bitch, standing by the window in his underwear for a hundred and eighty-eight days, waiting for Saiakr to drive up. She thought of Meoraq, but no matter how she tried to think of him, it all faded into black.

The sun went down. The tent got dark, lit on one wall by the fire outside. Dumaq shadows, huge and indistinct, passed back and forth as raiders settled. It was a quiet night, peaceful in its way. The irony did not escape her.

When Iziz came back, he untied her ankles and took her out, but she couldn’t see anyone she knew—not Scott or Eric, and not Meoraq. He didn’t watch her pee, didn’t speak to her, didn’t offer her a bite of his stolen food when he took her back into the tent. He just tied her up again, lay down with his back to her and slept.

She slept too. She didn’t think she would, but she was just so tired and it was the only possible escape. She had no dreams.

In the morning, he raped her again. Only once this time, and she didn’t think he came. It wasn’t really sex for him, just another weapon. He knew he wasn’t killing her with it, but he wanted to keep it sharp. When he finished, he took her out for her morning pee, then brought her over to the fire and gave her a bit of cold meat and some tea in her own cup. She dropped them both on the ground and he threw her down beside them and made her pick them up and eat, mud and all.

“Don’t do that again, Eshiqi,” Iziz said, standing over her while she took the last shaky swallow from her cup. “You won’t make me mad enough to kill you, but I will trim you down some. Remember Zru’itak and mind your fucking manners. Geozh!”

“Sir?”

“Get the slaves in a line and load them up. The rest of you, break camp. We’re moving on.”

“No!”

Scott ran forward, caught a cuff from Geozh, and went sprawling on his face in the mud to the general amusement of the raiders. Undaunted, he got back on his feet, alternately wiping at his face and finger-combing through his hair. Now and then, his hand twitched down toward his hip, wanting to straighten a jacket he was no longer wearing. “Not yet. No. Absolutely unacceptable.”

“You have something to say, Druud?” Iziz asked, turning all the way around to look at him.

“We haven’t found it,” Scott said. “We had an agreement.”

Iziz leaned back a little, his spines flaring forward, but he raised his hand to stop Geozh when he cocked a fist.

“I brought you here,” Scott was saying. “I agreed to allow my people to…to serve in…in certain capacities and I brought you here and I said…I said you could have that bitch!” he shouted suddenly, pointing at Amber. “That lying bitch! This is all your fault! This is all your—” He stopped and smoothed down his hair some more. The mud was drying to his scalp like the plastic hair of a cheap doll. “But there is a transmission tower,” he said calmly. “And that proves there’s a ship. So. We need to find it.”

“Eshiqi says there is no ship,” Iziz said.

Scott laughed scornfully. “Of course she does! She wants us to be afraid! She came here,” he declared, coming at Amber with his hand raised, pointing, “for the sole purpose of undermining the colony’s efforts! Of course she says there’s no ship, but there is a transmission tower, we’re all looking right at it, Miss Bierce, so fuck you!” he screamed. “Fuck you! I was right and you were wrong! You threw away all the concrete and you stole my flashlight and broke it and you fucked the lizard and turned him against us but you’re not taking the ship so where is it? Where is it, huh? Where—”

Iziz reached out without hurry and gave Scott a tap on the underside of his chin. Scott’s jaws clopped shut. He grabbed at his face and looked at Iziz, all wounded eyes and stiff shoulders. Then he turned around and walked with silent dignity back to Geozh.

Iziz folded his arms, watching impassively as Scott directed his people out of their cluster and into a line. Through the wind and the tide, Amber could hear snatches of his speech: true pioneers rose above adversity, the good of the colony came before personal feeling, and Amber Bierce was a bitch.

“Sometimes I think he really believes that if we found a ship, I’d let him sail away on it,” Iziz remarked. “The first night we were here, picking the place over, he must have had a thousand chances to run, but he never did. Little piss-licker came to get me five times, trying to work the doors open. You believe that?”

“Yes.”

“Came to get me. But the doors wouldn’t open. Druud wanted me to pry them open. Old places like this… sometimes the doors burn you. I told him. He wouldn’t hear it. So I gave him a sword.” Iziz glanced at Amber. “You’d have stuck it in me. But Druud passed it off to one of his pokes and he stabbed it right in the door, just because Druud told him to, when he’d heard me say what could happen.”

Amber didn’t ask.

“There was a light,” said Iziz, as if she had. “And then there was a hole through him. I could have put my hand through it. Thirqa could have put his head through it. No smoke. No blood. The meat didn’t even look that burnt, but the fur on his chest was charred. He didn’t die right away. He looked down first and he let go of the sword. I was watching to see if he’d put his hand through the hole, and I really think he might have but he didn’t have time. He dropped. And Druud said, ‘Maybe he loosened it.’ I think he would have set another of his pokes on the door if I’d let him.” Iziz thought about it and snorted. “I think the poke would have done it if he’d asked.”

Raiders were breaking down the camp, stacking tents and packs indiscriminately on the sleds. She still couldn’t see Meoraq.

“But you got the doors open.” Iziz gave the domed shrine a meaningful glance. “What was in there?”

“Nothing you could steal.”

He looked at her, snorted. “I can steal anything, Eshiqi. If you haven’t swallowed that yet, I can serve up some more.”

Amber shut her stupid mouth and stood silent.

Iziz gave her a second, harder stare. “No apology?”

“I’m sorry.”

He slapped her, not hard, just enough to sting. “No, you’re not. Don’t lie to me again or I’ll carve your man, Eshiqi. I’ll carve him and make you eat the pieces I cut off.” He eyed her, his head cocked. “Beg me not to hurt him.”

Did that mean he was still alive? The words spilled out of her in a breathy rush: “Please don’t hurt him!”

He slapped her again, rocking her a little this time. “Slaves do not give orders in my camp! Beg my forgiveness!”

“Please—”

This slap smashed her lips into her teeth, filling her mouth with the taste of her own bitter blood. “Get on your knees and beg like a slave!”

Amber dropped to her hands and pushed them both palms up on either side of his boot. Somewhere in the world, Scott laughed.

Iziz twitched in his whole body at once. He looked around, blinking, color coming in strong at his throat. “Who was that?”

“Druud,” said Geozh, rolling his eyes. “Who is it always?”

Iziz cursed and turned, ready to walk away, to go deal with Scott and his petty nonsense until the day was gone and they were moving and where was Meoraq? Amber lunged out in a froggish hop to slap her hands down in the mud again, this time pressing her head to Iziz’s boot, just the way she’d seen Xzem do to Meoraq once.

He stopped. She could hear him breathing, feel him looking down at her.

The waves kept coming. The ocean never cares.

“Get up,” Iziz said finally. “I know what you want. Get up and we’ll go see your Sheulek. Druud, you’re coming too, but I hear one more sound out of you and I’ll sew your mouth shut. The rest of you, keep working.”

And with that, he started walking, leaving Amber and Scott to come together in his wake and follow.

Inside one of the many ruined structures of Matezh was Meoraq. Impossible to say just what it had been, once upon a time—a garage, maybe, a workshop, something that needed this wide open floor. If there had ever been anything inside, it had been picked clean over the years and now there was nothing left, nothing to distract her from the sight of Meoraq dangling from the rusted girders with his feet just off the floor. There was a crack in the ceiling where two panels had fallen away from each other enough to let in a little light and a steady trickle of windswept spray that had collected on the roof. Naturally, Meoraq was positioned just below this. He was naked. They’d wrapped a scrap of filthy cloth around his head to mask him and the cloth did not appear to be moving with his breath.

Iziz let her look as long as she wanted, but at her first step forward, his hand dropped over her shoulder and forced her back onto her knees. “He’s alive,” he said. His voice echoed; Meoraq did not move. “Say something, Sheulek. Your woman is here.”

Silence. The water dripped and spattered.

Iziz walked calmly over, drew Meoraq’s bone-handled knife from his belt and stuck it in Meoraq’s thigh. Meoraq jerked violently—a fish on a line—and hissed through his hood.

“See? He’s fine. We’re going to play a game,” said Iziz, coming back to Amber. “Zhuqa liked games. Most of us do. A raider’s life is more boring than people realize. My game is called, ‘God and Gann.’ Wait here and don’t move. You don’t get to speak to him, Eshiqi. Remember Druud is watching.”

Iziz left them.

After his last footstep faded, Scott whispered, “You may as well talk, Bierce, because I’m going to tell him you did anyway.” And grinned.

The hood shifted. Meoraq said, “S’kot.”

Scott flinched and stared around.

A second hiss, longer and quieter than before. “Bastard son of Gann and a she-ghet, so you have found your pack. Now hear the words of Uyane and mark well: I will not die here.”

“No. No, you probably won’t.” Scott backed up, trying to laugh, but it came out in such a high, unnatural patter that if Amber weren’t looking at him, she might not have recognized the sound. “They have plans for you, lizardman. You’re not going to die anywhere close to here, but they will kill you.”

“But they won’t,” said Meoraq, “burn me. And so I will be free to follow you all the days of your treacherous life. I will hold your face in my heart at the very moment of my murder and when I am made mad by unending death, I will still know you, human, and I will gnaw your living bones.”

“Is that a real threat?” Scott asked, but he kept backing up. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard!”

“You shouldn’t laugh, Druud. I’ve seen men die for no reason.” Iziz returned, his boots clomping heavily across the floor. He had one of the sleds, helping him to carry the odd assortment of things he brought with him. When he reached Amber, he began to unpack, laying everything out in a neat line. “I’ve heard things on the wind myself. My mother called them the howls of hungry ghosts, the voices of men who’d forgotten how to speak. So. Are you calling my mother stupid?”

Scott shot Amber several sidelong glances and suddenly pointed. “She talked.”

Iziz sent Amber a narrow stare, still arranging things, then straightened up, caught Scott by the hair and slapped him hard and fast, forwards and backhand, on his face, throat, chest and any other part of Scott’s screaming, struggling body he could reach. “Don’t you ever lie to me again,” he said at the end of it, dropping Scott carelessly on the floor and stepping over him. “Come here, Eshiqi. It’s time to play.”

Amber eased forward into striking range, but he merely folded his arms and watched as she examined the three distinct selections he’d set out for her. Meoraq’s clothes—his neatly folded tunic and breeches, his travel-harness, everything but his boots, which Iziz was wearing. One of the large travel-flasks, filled, by itself. Six or seven small vertebrae, cut from whatever animal the raiders had been roasting the night before, with shreds of greasy meat and stringy tendons still clinging to them.

“Choose,” said Iziz when she finally looked up. “Each one is a blessing. Each one brings pain. God and Gann. That’s the game and if you don’t play with me, he goes right over the edge.”

Amber looked at her choices with new eyes. The bones seemed the most ominous, although she couldn’t say exactly how. There wasn’t much meat on them, but what there was might be poisoned or maybe Iziz meant to force Meoraq to swallow them whole. That left his clothes or the flask. She couldn’t see how clothes could hurt, unless they were ratted up and used to throttle him. On the other hand, Meoraq wasn’t as susceptible to cold as Amber and walking naked might not be too hard on him. What about the flask? He might be able to live without clothes for a day, but not water. But she was assuming there was water in the flask, which was not at all certain. It could be poison. Acid. Anything.

“One,” said Iziz quietly. “Two. Three. Four—”

Her arm felt so much heavier than it should be. Raising it to point made her entire right side cramp.

Iziz grunted and picked up Meoraq’s tunic and breeches, revealing the coiled leather belt hiding beneath them. He handed her the clothes, wrapped the belt around his fist so that the buckle dangled, and walked forward.

“Oh no!” Amber dropped to her knees, palms up, crawling after him. “Please, no!”

The belt howled. It hit like a fist dead center of Meoraq’s back. He jerked, swinging wildly by his bonds, but Iziz had no trouble at all hitting him again. He swung the same way he’d slapped Scott: quick, brutal, roundhouse blows that hit anywhere, everywhere. He never spoke. His throat stayed black and cool. He ignored Amber until she grabbed at the belt, then stopped just long enough to push her to the ground and step on her before resuming the attack.

When it finally ended, Amber was crying too hard to tell. She knew only when he took his boot off her back and dropped the belt on the floor in front of her. Iziz, only slightly coarse of breath, crouched down beside her and knotted his fist in her hair, raising her head, forcing her to see the damage: what seemed to her eye hundreds of mottled, irregular blotches all over where his scales had been beaten out of pattern and a few bloody trickles making their way down his limp body to drip onto the wet floor.

Iziz stood up, dragging her with him, and held her on her feet until she steadied. “You can talk to him now if you want to,” he told her. “But for every word you say, he gets one more stroke.”

Amber’s hands rose in shaking flutters to press over her mouth.

“You sure? He’s Sheulek. I’m sure he could take it. And just imagine how much it would mean to him now to hear his woman’s words of comfort.”

She shook her head, too numb even to hate him while Meoraq hung there, silent.

“Please yourself. Bring him down and get him dressed, Druud,” Iziz ordered, and took a long drink from the flask. “Make sure you get his harness on tight. Doesn’t look like he’ll be walking much, so we’ll need to drag him. He slips his tether and I’ll whip you both together. Let’s go, Eshiqi.”

Iziz started for the door and Amber followed, walking backwards, unable to keep from staring at the horror she had helped to happen. Scott watched her for a second, then went ahead and untied one of Meoraq’s wrists. The sound of his body hitting the floor stung at Amber’s eyes, but she didn’t make a sound. “Looks bad,” Scott called after her, his brow furrowed with exaggerated concern. “You know, he probably has broken ribs. He could have a broken rib right now sticking into his l—”

Meoraq drew up one leg and slammed his foot square in Scott’s stomach. Scott flew back, hit the wall first and the floor second, bent over and threw up between his splayed legs.

Iziz paused in the doorway. “Druud, for fuck’s sake,” he began, and that was when the lights came on.

Iziz looked up, frowning, then down as the floor shuddered. The wall panel where Scott had impacted, now slightly bent, dropped away to reveal the ancient control panel beneath. It sparked twice and emitted a high-pitched whining sound, echoed as a bone-humming groan beneath them. Cracks appeared right down the center of the floor—four of them, exactly the same length with exactly the same space between them, in perfectly straight alignment. They widened as the wall squealed and the floor shook.

There were doors in the floor. The doors were opening. One, two, three—all empty holes with rising platforms that slowly sealed them off again.

Up through the fourth came a dust-dull wedge-shaped ship.

 

* * *

 

The swaddles of his crude hood kept air suffocatingly close. Meoraq could smell nothing but his own unwashed hide and blood-tinged breath. Before the beating, sounds had been muffled; afterwards, pain dulled everything to a grey groan. He was aware that something had happened, but didn’t care what, beyond the thought that the raiders might all be standing around Scott’s caved-in corpse and paying it an apprehensive witness.

That hope died with Scott’s sudden, shrieking, “Haaaaa!”

“Leave it, Druud. You have work to do.”

‘Yes,’ thought Meoraq, flexing his bound hands. ‘Come and dress me, S’kot.’

He had no illusions. His blades were taken. He had been roughed some and hung for hours, denied food and water, and now whipped with his own belt. To judge by what speech he’d caught, the leader of the raiders meant to keep him alive as some torment to Amber, but raiders were not a patient breed. Meoraq thought it very likely he would be dead within three days.

For the first time in all his life, Meoraq did not know what that meant. Would he see the Halls of Sheul growing from the clear light of heaven, his father and mother come to meet him? Would he wander the lightless reaches of Gann forever, losing all his mind and memory until he had become as empty as the deadlands he traveled? Or would he simply end?

No matter. He would know the truth soon enough, but before then, he would kill Scott.

But Scott did not obey his master. Instead of coming to harness Meoraq, he ran to another part of the room and seemed to circle, calling to his men. And they came. Meoraq could hear them crying out like madmen, some laughing, some weeping—reactions the raiders found greatly entertaining.

Meoraq knew his best chance of killing even a man like Scott depended on lying still and feigning helplessness (which did not require much feigning), but he simply had to see what was going on. With effort, he rolled onto his side and rubbed his snout on the floor until he’d pulled his hood loose enough to work it down over one eye.

He saw Amber first. She saw him. He didn’t know how he looked to her, but he thought she was beautiful. There in the open doorway with the light of day behind her, turning her hair to a haze of white and gold, wearing one of his tunics and the green girdle given by the lady of House Uyane. Frightened, but standing, because she would know no other way than to survive for as long as she had breath. He looked at her and from where he lay with all this empty room between them, he could still feel her arms around him.

And then he noticed the ship.

Surprise took him, but not for long and what it left after its fading was the same sort of baffled exasperation he so often had when trying to understand human motives. What were they so excited about? If the thing were nothing but a husk, a crate in the shape of a ship, still it would be scarcely the height of a man, again as wide and perhaps twice that in length. Room enough for the humans—barely—but only if there were no mechanics to move the ship and no supplies necessary to sustain them on their journey. And that was assuming the ship could move. Dust, not even dust in so thick a coat as this, did not always mean a thing was broken, but the strange metal of its hide was obviously pitted with corrode and its windows remained dull even when Scott wiped at them. An idiot could see the ship was dead. But Scott had a long way to go before he could be considered so well as an idiot.

“Druud, leave it. It’s old, but it can still bite if you tease it. Leave it alone. All of you, back to work.”

The humans stayed where they were, whining protests. Scott actually put his arms around the ship, hugging it like a child with a toy that might at any moment be unfairly stripped away. Surprisingly, some of the raiders protested as well, more and more of them coming to watch Scott’s men make fools of themselves over a broken machine.

Meoraq lay quiet and counted them. Sixteen. There might be others out in the courtyard, but sixteen was not an insurmountable number, if he had his swords.

Or if he could use them. Meoraq tested his clay and found it heavy, thick with hurt. A Sheulek could endure pain, but his flesh was swelled and he could feel blood pooling under his scales and those were simply facts. If he’d cracked a few bones, as seemed likely, six might well be beyond him, much less sixteen.

Yet he may only have to kill a few to make the rest run. If he could gain his feet, gain his weapon, seize just one short second of surprise, with God’s favor—

But he didn’t have God’s favor. He had the strength the sickness gave him…and that might not be enough.

Scott was still whining for his ship, so Meoraq looked that way, because if his journey was to end here, at least it would end with Scott dead and he meant to watch. If there was no God, there was no sin in spiteful pleasures. But the sword—Meoraq’s own sword—never left the belt where it hung.

“Let them play,” a raider said, ducking his head deferentially as his leader threw a cold glance his way. “We take them away now, they’ll sour. Let them break their toy first. What’s another day?”

Their leader hissed and rubbed at his throat, his head tipped back, eyes shut. “All right, all right. Fucking little pests. One more day. Druud, if you want to play with your toy, you do your work first. If I have to tell you to get away from it one more time, I’ll strap you to the top of it and set it on fire! Slaves, out! Eshiqi, go wait in my tent.”

She went. Meoraq watched her for as long as he could see her, then dropped his head back onto the ground and closed his eyes. The hollow dark closed in around him once more. The cold took away his heart. He could hear the sound of boots, striding heavy and insolently slow, coming closer. He listened and did not count his breaths.

“Zhuqa had her,” the raider said finally, after he had stood over Meoraq for some time. “Did you know? Did she tell you she had been his slave?”

The words passed over and through him and were gone.

“I saw her once, sitting naked on his thigh with his fingers inside her, holding his cup. She didn’t fight.”

Beyond this little room, the rain fell lightly on the roof. The trees of Gedai whispered in the wind. The ocean rolled and groaned.

“Do you know what he told me, Sheulek? Eh?” Leather creaked as the raider hunkered down, not quite within reach. “He told me she oils up when she cums.”

The rain. The wind. The sea.

“She hasn’t cum for me yet,” the raider said. “The day she does, I’ll let you know. But she’s not fighting me. That, you should know right now.”

Meoraq grunted and said, without opening his eyes, “All this time, I thought I killed your Zhuqa, but I didn’t, did I? She did. You’ll have to tell me how she did that someday, eh? Tell me how bravely he died, your raider-lord. Did he piss himself and beg for his life like all the rest of your pack?”

A long silence, broken only by the weather and by Scott, shifting on his feet nearby. Meoraq waited, bracing himself for the blow. The first kick caught him in the gut, turning his breath to bile and his belly to lead. The second and third hit wherever he could not defend against them, but he scarcely felt them against the backdrop of so much pain. He retched and had to lie in it, gasping and light-headed, feeling himself roughly jostled as he was dressed and bound and finally hoisted into the air again.

The raider’s leader hadn’t even stayed to watch him suffer. Two of his men lingered in the doorway, hands on weapons, but they were looking out into the courtyard, overseeing humans. The only one left to see him in defeat was Scott himself, standing before him now with a look of smirking satisfaction on his flat face. Meoraq hissed wetly through his teeth and let his heavy head drop to his chest.

“I’m going home,” Scott whispered. “I’m going to save those people and I’m going to be a hero, and you and your fat whorebitch Bierce are going to die right here. Yeah. So there’s just one thing I want to say, lizard, and there’s one more thing I want to do and then I’ll leave you here to think about how it could have gone if you’d shown me some respect. Okay? Here it is.” Scott circled around to Meoraq’s back before easing closer, close enough that Meoraq could feel the heat of his breath. “I was right,” whispered Scott, “and you were wrong.”

Scott patted his shoulder and crept the rest of the way around him until he was in front of him again. He grimaced hugely, showing all his teeth, and then he swung his arm with an animal howl and slapped Meoraq in the snout. Coming as it did from Scott, the blow hurt his straining shoulders more than his face. Meoraq dangled, silent, swaying gradually to a stop, his eyes fixed on the enemy and his throat throbbing.

“I was right,” Scott said again, backing toward the door and the two sentries who were now watching him with amused contempt. “I found a transmission tower and a ship and a skyport and what did you find, lizardman? Huh? Nothing! There’s no God here! There never was!”

The words slapped harder than Scott’s freakish little hand, but even so, it was a slap, not a stab. He looked at the machine and the machine was a dead thing, just another decaying piece of the past. Scott could call it what he wanted, but he was still only pissing out of his mouth. Perhaps Meoraq had not heard Sheul’s true voice, but Scott hadn’t found a ship either, so there was still justice in the world, even if there was no God.

No God. The slap of those words struck even harder and so Meoraq brought them back and stared them down. The holiest shrine of all the world was empty. The Prophet Lashraq had been the leader of a band of foul-mouthed raiders. The Great Word was a book of lies and the fires of Sheul were a symptom of sickness.

Truth. All truth.

But did it really mean there was no God? If a blind man says the sky is grey—

Except that the sky wasn’t grey. Meoraq raised his head and looked up through the hole in the warped panels of the roof, at the little piece of the world that existed for him beyond this room. The clouds were grey, but he had seen the clouds open, however briefly. The clouds were grey, but the sky was green, and all the blind men in the world did not change that.

Scott left him, laughing, reveling in whatever suffering he imagined he had caused. Left alone, quietly and futilely hating him, Meoraq suddenly realized that somewhere along the winding road that had led to this moment, he had come to believe in Earth. He believed in this other world, this impossible blasphemous thing, and he believed that Scott and Amber and every other human, seen and unseen by him, had traveled through the sky between their two worlds in a ship. He believed the tower of fire he had mistaken for the very arm of Sheul was indeed the fire of that burning ship. He believed in all these things.

But he still could not believe that ship had come here by accident.

It was not the faith he’d had in his life before entering Xi’Matezh. It did not come with the name of Sheul or the certainty that he was seen by some greater eye as he hung here in Scott’s power, but it was still a comfort. His clay would perish, yet he had a soul and that, somehow, would go on.

Meoraq closed his eyes and stretched his toes toward the ground to take some of the weight off his screaming shoulders. He took deep breaths. He did not count them.

He waited in the dark to die.

 

13

 

They passed the day at Xi’Matezh and it was, for many, a good day. Scott had his moment of triumph, complete with a ship to show to his surviving men as proof of his superior leadership. The raiders encouraged his speeches and even called for a few when things threatened to get quiet; the delirious joy of the humans for what must seem to them just another relic in the ruins made it a day of rare entertainment. For Amber, it was a day in Purgatory. Not Hell itself, but only its cold grey antechamber—the waiting room where there was no time and no relief from the awful weight of anticipation.

Iziz kept her close, kept her servile, but did not allow her to work. The other humans hauled wood and water, and answered whatever need any raider had, whether it was for tea or stew or sex, with plenty of time to stand around their ship and daydream. Amber could only kneel with her hands below Iziz’s boot, aching with the strain of staying small and quiet, feeling his stare cold on the back of her head. She had nothing to do except think and when she wasn’t relentlessly playing out every possibility that began with getting a weapon away from Iziz (and ended with going through the broken wall and over the cliff more often than not), her mind brought her back to the same questions:

What was that thing in the garage where Meoraq hung? What was that thing that Scott and his Manifestors were all but praying to? Was it a ship? Was it really?

Or was it a boat?

She thought it was. She really did. And worse, she sometimes found herself thinking of it as proof that the helicopter was coming too, a thought that grew less and less comforting the longer she had to listen to Scott. He still hadn’t figured out how to open the door (as far as Amber knew, he hadn’t even identified which panel was the door), but he was completely confident that he could fly it home. Funny, how faith could look like crazy when she saw it on someone else.

She could try to fight. Iziz had plenty of weapons on him. Unfortunately, the only one she had any hope of getting at down here was the dagger in his boot, whereas he was in the perfect position to lop her head off.

‘He won’t do it,’ Bo Peep said sleepily. ‘He wants the baby.’

But he could still kill Meoraq.

‘He’s going to do that anyway. If you make him mad, at least he’ll kill Meoraq quickly.’

Nicci had died quickly. That didn’t make it easy.

‘If you do nothing, he’ll definitely die hard.’

But if she waited, she’d have more time to plan and maybe stumble into a better opportunity to take one of his swords.

‘Or lose it,’ said Bo Peep’s ghost. ‘If you see the chance, little girl, you take it. Maybe there is a God and maybe there isn’t. Maybe He helped Scott cross the wires that raised that boat and maybe He didn’t. Maybe this and maybe that, but you know damn well He isn’t going to drop out of the sky and put a gun in your hand, so you forget all about good opportunities and better ones. If you see the chance, you take it.’

Fuck it. Amber made a grab for the dagger in Iziz’s boot.

Iziz yanked his foot up and then slammed it forward, catching her in the chest and sending her skidding backwards through the mud until she collided with one of the Manifestors. He kicked her too, and Iziz leapt up and slapped him. “You touch my Eshiqi again and I’ll whip you bloody! Geozh!”

“I’ve got him. Urgath, get over here, what’s wrong with you?”

Amber spat mud, raised her head to catch a glimpse of metal—the shine of a buckle on the side of Iziz’s boot—and dropped it again, knowing it was all over now. Meoraq was dead; she’d helped to kill him.

Iziz stood over her a long time without speaking. “Get up,” he said at last.

“Fuck you,” Amber replied. The enormity of her risk and the self-disgust behind her failure combined to make her feel a little drunk. “Kill me on the ground, motherfucker.”

Several raiders hooted, hearing this. Several more wandered over to watch.

“Get up,” said Iziz again. Over his shoulder, he added, “Bring me the Sheulek.”

It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him to fuck off again, but she knew this might be the last time she saw Meoraq, the last time he saw her. She didn’t want to be lying in the mud for that.

She climbed to her feet as they dragged Meoraq into the courtyard. He did not appear to be conscious, but they took no chances; his wrists were bound behind his back and then tied to his belt.

“That’s far enough,” said Iziz, and the raiders holding him let him drop. He collapsed face-down, but proved he was at least alive by rolling slowly onto his side and spitting out a mouthful of mud.

Iziz let her stare, but at her first hesitant step forward, he caught her by the arm and pulled her back. He studied the ground, gauging the distance between them and Meoraq, and took her with him all the way to the outer doors of the shrine. “He looks dry,” Iziz remarked, keeping his grip on her arm. “Lkonu, give the Sheulek a drink.”

With a snort, one of the raiders beckoned to the human acting as a serving slave.

“No,” said Iziz. “He looks very dry. Make sure he gets a long drink.”

Lkonu got up and took one of the big travel flasks from a sled. He needed the help of two others to stand Meoraq up to pry his mouth open. While they held him, Lkonu stuck the neck of the flask all the way into Meoraq’s mouth and began to pour.

The first few swallows must have been good, but they kept coming. Meoraq choked, tried to turn away; they held his head and kept pouring. He began to struggle, violently enough that they had to put him on the ground, but Lkonu stayed with him the whole time and kept pouring. How much did those flasks hold? Two gallons? Three? Amber saw his chest heave, water spewing from around the neck of the flask. She heard the sound that Nicci had spoken of—that bubbly shout that people make when they’re drowning.

At last, Lkonu came to the end of it, holding the flask up by its bottom and shaking to get the last drops. Then he took it away and the raiders pinning Meoraq to the ground let him go.

He kicked once, feebly. His mouth yawned. His head swiveled slowly side to side and then, in near-perfect silence, a great torrent of water erupted out of him. Most of it went spilling back into him and then came out again as foam. The raiders found this uproarious.

“God and Gann,” said Iziz, watching her, only her. “They come together out here. Understand that…and pick a sword.”

She looked at him, tears and mud drying stiff on her face, frozen to her heart. “Are you going to make me kill him?”

“I can’t make you do anything,” he replied evenly. “We all have a choice. My mother told me that. Didn’t yours?”

“No. Wasn’t really her style.” She looked at Meoraq again, lying on his back and choking on the froth of his own watery vomit, still too weak to roll over. “She was always a victim.”

“Sword, Eshiqi.” Iziz spread his arms, inviting her to take her choice—all of Meoraq’s and his own besides. “You wanted it enough to risk his life and yours, so don’t flinch now. Take it and swallow the consequences.”

Everyone was watching now. Raiders, Manifestors, even Eric, the newest slave of the bunch if you didn’t count Amber herself. Everyone except Meoraq, who didn’t do anything but breathe, and couldn’t do that very well.

The wind and the salt in the spray stung her eyes. She pointed at Meoraq’s samr, because she’d practiced with it before and because it was the heaviest and had the best chance of taking someone’s head off clean if…if that was where this was going.

Iziz drew it from the sheath strapped to his back and handed it to her. “All right,” he said, unclipping both kzungs and holding them, one in each hand, relaxed. “We’re going to play a game. You see your man there? If you can reach him—” The kzungs in his hands twirled in the careless manner of a trick played too many times to be considered showboating anymore. “—you can have him.”

“You lie.”

He shrugged. “I never said you could keep him, but I’ll give you one hour’s liberty. That’s fair, isn’t it?”

Raiders consulted one another and, after much serious talk and dramatic gestures, unanimously agreed. Very fair.

“One hour to do what you will with him. If you want to run or leap into the sea or just give him one last poke, that’s up to you. But you have to put your hand right on him, you mark?”

“And if you reach him first?”

“Probably won’t be pleasant. Just remember, it doesn’t end until you have him or until you cry surrender. If you cry, the game is over.” His head cocked. He smiled. “But if I reach him first, Eshiqi, you don’t get to cry anymore. You just get to watch. So really, the wisest thing for you to do is cry right now, before we get started.”

But she would never get another chance. Amber gripped her sword in both hands, holding it the way she’d trained during all those long, boring winter days.

Iziz snorted and slapped at his chest. “Let’s have it, then. Make me bleed.”

She stabbed. His sword smacked down on hers hard enough to sting her palms and numb her elbows. He could have disarmed her. He could have cut her throat on the backswing if he wanted to. He just stood there, his arms relaxed at his sides, his throat black and cool, waiting.

Amber stepped back, suddenly feinted left and swung from the right. He knocked her sword aside and slapped her with the flat of his blade.

The raiders cheered.

They stared at each other. Amber reached up shakily and rubbed at her cheek. She wasn’t even cut.

“Ease up,” suggested Iziz. “Your arms are too stiff and they’re telling me what you mean to do. A relaxed stance keeps secrets.”

She lunged, coming in low and slashing sharply up, but he was there to knock her sword uselessly aside and slap her other cheek. His men cheered again.

“You really are a fierce little thing, aren’t you?” Iziz murmured.

Amber feinted again, stabbing for his heart and then thrusting down with all her weight, hoping to nail his boot to the ground. His playful swat became a hasty leap backwards and she darted forward, slashing and stabbing and skidding in the mud. He let her come four, maybe five steps, and then he stopped parrying.

And started attacking.

Even as she scrambled to defend herself against the steady rain of blows, she knew he wasn’t trying to kill her. He was just thinning her nerves and wearing her out. And it was working. As she began to slow, so did he, until they were just standing and staring at each other once more.

“I can see your arms trembling,” said Iziz.

She stabbed. He knocked her sword aside and took a step forward. Amber backed away with her sword raised and yes, it was shaking. He took up every step she put between them until her back bumped against the outer doors of the shrine.

“So.” Iziz looked around, his spines relaxed and throat black, calm. “You began the game with fifty paces to claim and now have, what? Seventy-five? Do you cry, Eshiqi? You have to say the words.”

‘Say it,’ said Bo Peep. ‘You don’t have to mean it.’

True. She might even get that fabled better chance, but she had the sword in her hand right now and that might never happen again.

Amber screamed and lunged at him. All around them, raiders hissed and stomped, calling encouragement to her as she drove the smirking Iziz back. As he parried with one sword, the other played, flicking at her hair and cutting at the fastens of her girdle until it popped open and fell off. Her tunic gaped; the sight of her naked human breasts set the raiders to roaring, even louder after she shrugged out of the useless, flapping tunic and threw it to the ground. Bare-chested, she pressed the attack and Iziz agreeably backed up until he was maybe three meters from the place where Meoraq lay. There he stopped, content to parry her increasingly ragged thrusts and slashes until, with a snort of disdain, he clipped one of the kzungs back on his belt and gave her a shove.

She staggered, flailing wildly to keep her balance. She kept her feet, but lost her momentum. Panting, her arms like hot lead hanging off her shoulders, she could only look past him to Meoraq, but he gave her nothing to draw strength from. He lay in the mud without moving, unconscious or…no, he had to be unconscious.

“On your knees, Eshiqi,” Iziz warned her. “Cry to me.”

Everyone was watching, listening. Beneath their expectant silence, she could clearly hear Scott picking his stupid ship apart in the garage, actually bashing his way into it with the reassurance that they could fix that later, just keep going, keep at it, grab that panel there and pull. She could feel the waves hitting the cliffs, feel each wet slap vibrating up through her naked feet to shiver in her bones. The wind blew saltspray in her eyes like tears; Amber had none left of her own.

She stabbed the samr down into the mud—not a calculated expression of defeat but only to brace herself against—and dropped beside it on her knees. She did not look at Iziz. She didn’t look at anyone, not even Meoraq. Now and then, she could feel her head shaking slowly back and forth, but she felt none of the disbelief the gesture confessed. She felt tired. Not angry, not defiant, not even grieving and sick and scared anymore, but just…just tired. God did not live at Xi’Matezh and He wasn’t sending a helicopter. There was only her and she’d tried and failed, so what else was there to say?

“I cry,” said Amber.

Iziz cocked his head and put one foot forward. He waited.

Amber bent over, palms up to either side of his scuffed boot, and the very instant that her sweaty brow touched leather, Scott’s ship in the garage exploded.

She was not immediately conscious of the noise—it hit her ears like a ton of cotton, deafening her before she knew what it meant—but only of an intense heat lashing up her back, so that her first thought, when she could think, was that someone in the crowd had whipped her.

She cried out and fell flat, twisting around to see her unwhipped back, and when that finished making no sense to her, she finally raised her eyes and saw three raiders lying dead in the mud. And not just dead, she realized, not just that, but decapitated. She saw the smoke next, the smoke that was not only pouring out through the open doorway of the garage in a greasy, black fog, but also sprouting straight up in the air through the much bigger hole in the roof and sort of…folding under. Roaring. She could hear almost nothing, but the smoke was roaring.

Amber looked up at Iziz. He did not look down at her. All his attention seemed fixed on his hand, which he had apparently been holding up, perhaps in some sign to his men that she hadn’t seen because she’d been bent over his boot, but anyway, he was looking at that hand with a deep, frowning confusion because it was now missing all its fingers. The strip of blackened, shiny-burnt metal that had sheared through three necks to cut them off was now lodged in another raider’s chest. That man was still standing. Except for the thing jutting out of his tunic, he didn’t even seem all that hurt.

She had enough time to see all this, not quite enough to know what it all meant, and then the ship blew up again. The ground heaved up beneath her, as impossible as that should be, actually seeming to smack her in the chest even as she had both hands in the mud. Then she and Iziz and Meoraq were all sprawled together and the ship just kept exploding, ripping the garage apart from the top down. In the curious quiet, she could see chunks of metal and broken bricks hurtling through the smoke, see them soundlessly punch through fleeing men, taking them apart piece by piece until there was nothing left to keep running. Through it all, the fire kept rising, vomiting up through the smoke, pushing a flat, burnt panel on the very top, tumbling it playfully over and over, like a paper sailboat caught in a fountain.

It couldn’t have lasted long and when it was over, the courtyard was empty except for the mud and the mess and the bodies, and there was a quiet like nothing Amber had ever known.

Then that piece of paneling which had ridden the explosion so high came down out of the black, blown into a shape something like a flower, a daisy, so that it spun as it fell, chopping at the air, whup-whup-whup…

‘Like a helicopter,’ thought Amber, watching it cut right through two legs of that long-suffering transmission tower before crashing into the outer doors of the shrine of Xi’Matezh.

Amber pushed herself up on her hands. Beneath her, Iziz also stirred and sat up on his elbows. They looked at each other. He opened his mouth and emitted a godawful yowling that seemed to shake at her very bones— but no, he did not do that at all. He opened his mouth and the yowling was all she could hear of the scream of tortured metal as the tower that had sent out uncounted years of unheard hope for Nuu Sukaga buckled slowly over and smashed down into the dome of the shrine. It collapsed and then the building beside it collapsed, along with a large chunk of the wall, and suddenly, the whole courtyard of Matezh shuddered and dropped about twenty centimeters.

Amber and Iziz looked at each other again. Then he grabbed for the sword on his belt and she grabbed for Meoraq’s knife tucked into his waist and he was still so much faster but he grabbed with the hand that had no fingers and while he was staring at that in astonishment, Amber’s fist closed tight around the bone hilt of Meoraq’s ancestral knife and yanked it free.

They stared at each other a third time, motionless, as mud began ominously to flow toward the fast-crumbling wall. Then Iziz closed his eyes.

“Do it right this time, you murdering cunt,” he said dully.

She stabbed him in the neck and cut, stopped to spit out his blood and rest her watery arms, then cut twice more just to be sure. He jerked under her a few times, but that was all. He was dead at the end of it, nothing but weight she had to shift to get at Meoraq, who had not moved once in all this time.

He groaned when she rolled him over, but it was hard to hear him. He may have told her to leave him. He may have told her to run. Amber paid him absolutely no attention. She sheathed his bone-handled knife, stuck it down the back of her breeches, and got a good grip on his harness. She pulled. She did not allow his screams or the limp silence that eventually followed them to slow her down. All that mattered right now was that they had to go. God had sent a boat and a helicopter; the rest was up to her, so Amber pulled. When she bumped into one of the sleds, she put him on it and kept going. The runners moved through the mud much easier than the drag of a body, and even with the extra weight, Amber was able to run the last length and out through the gateless archway just before the ground heaved up for the second time and threw her down. Her ears, still numbed, gave her nothing—it would be three days before she could hear anything that didn’t sound like it came from underwater and a room away—but she didn’t need them.

Matezh fell.

But when Amber raised her head in the stillness and looked, the sled was there and Meoraq was on it. She lifted her head a little higher and there was the archway, with just a few broken bricks on either side of it to prove there had ever been walls, framing a small portrait of a monstrous, green sea.

Meoraq’s hand brushed her arm. His mouth opened when she looked at him, but if he was talking, she couldn’t hear it. He made a few weak gestures, then groped until he got a hand behind her neck and pulled her close. His rough mouth scraped against hers and in that moment, she thought she could have carried him all the way back to the mountains and over them.

She didn’t, of course. But she made it as far as the underlodge where she had spent fifty-three days shut up in a cupboard to recuperate. She couldn’t lift Meoraq up into it, and he, weakened by days of fever, could do nothing to help her, so they were there on the floor—he, gasping and raving; she, rubbing palmfuls of water over him in a desperate effort to cool him down—when Uyane Jazuun, lord-steward of the bloodline in Chalh, stopped in on his yearly pilgrimage to escape the ever-ringing bells of the Festival of Fifth Light and found them.

 

14

 

They camped only once on a four-day journey, in another underlodge very much like the one they’d just left. They ran whenever they had strength to run. They walked the rest of the time, passing flasks between them and sharing cuuvash on their feet. Meoraq took nothing. Every few hours, Jazuun would stop and bend Meoraq forward, pounding on his back until Meoraq woke enough to cough. It helped, but not enough. His breath had taken on the soggy, snotty sound of someone trying to breathe through a bowl of soup. He was delirious by the end of the first night, silent by dawn on the third day.

Dying. He was dying.

She cried once, just once, the night they camped. Lying in the cupboard, trying not to touch the man Amber still sometimes feared might be the ghost of Meoraq’s dead father, listening to the gasp and burble of creeping death, she put both hands on her belly—on the only part of Meoraq she could reach—and cried. Jazuun didn’t budge until she was done, but as she drowsed unhappily toward sleep, he said, “He rests in God’s sight, woman, and if he sees our Father’s face tonight, know that he sees it with joy.”

He meant it well, she knew, but it only set her off again, weeping until she had no tears, only the stuffy ache of their lack. When she finished for the second time and lay shivering and wiping convulsively at her face, Jazuun rolled over with an air of grim determination and gave her shoulder a clumsy pat. “I know who you are,” he told her. “If he goes to the Halls, I will keep you as kin. You’ll have a good man to marry and I’ll see your sons raised under the Blade.”

She rolled onto her stomach and brayed into the musty bedding. He stopped trying to comfort her.

It was the last real rest they took. Shortly after dawn, they were moving again, and this time, Jazuun did not stop until they broke out of the woods into open plains. In the distance, the lone monument in this vast, green patch of nothing, stood the black walls of Chalh. Jazuun checked on Meoraq, took a long swig from his flask, then gave Amber a hard stare.

She knew what he was thinking. “Go,” she said in lizardish. “I’ll stay here.”

“Fuck that in the fist,” he replied, and then rather visibly recalled he was speaking to a woman. “You couldn’t hide anywhere in sight of Chalh that our sentries couldn’t find you, and if they do…I’m going to run you in,” he said decisively. “I don’t think they’ll challenge me if they don’t see you.”

“How the hell do you think you’re going to hide me?” Amber asked, stunned.

“You know I don’t speak that gabble!” he snapped back at her.

“How?” she asked, this time in his language.

“Well, we don’t have time to be clever, so we’ll have to be bold.” He loosened some of the belts holding Meoraq to the sled, pounded him distractedly on his back and then whisked the blanket covering him away. “Get on.”

“Can you pull us both? Damn it.” Amber concentrated and tried again in lizardish. “Can you carry us together? That far?”

“Great Sheul, O my Father…” Jazuun pounded Meoraq on the back some more. When he straightened up, he had his head cocked. “Do as I say. No, I don’t know it will work, but it’s the only plan we have time for, so just do it.”

She got on the sled, reluctantly straddling Meoraq and trying her best to keep her weight off him. To her utter astonishment, Meoraq raised one arm and placed it on her back—the first voluntary movement he’d made in two days. “You’re going to be fine,” she told him, just in case he could hear her. “We’re almost there. Hang on, okay? Just hang on.”

No response, but hope remained as long as he had his arm around her.

Jazuun threw the blanket over the top of her and cinched it down with belts. “Can you breathe?” he asked.

“Yes.” The air was stuffy and smelled of sweaty human and dying dumaq, but she could breathe it. “Go!”

The sled lurched. She had a certain amount of experience with riding on sleds, but there was a huge difference between lying on one and perching backwards like this, an even bigger difference between a walk and a run. Despite her best effort, Amber lost her balance immediately and fell into him. Meoraq’s groan of pain broke into racking coughs, then to a strengthless, “I see it. Like an arm rising…It’s mine, ‘Kosa. It’s for me,” and then his arm fell limply away from her.

She’d seen the walls. She knew how fast they were going, how long it would be before they reached the city. She knew everything and still it was endless, in the dark. She was lost until she heard Jazuun say, “Here they come. If it goes bad, I’ll kill them. I shouldn’t be challenged over it, but do not come out no matter what you hear.”

“Yes,” she told him, which was not quite the right answer, but which was all she could manage being bounced around like this.             

“Stay low,” he hissed. “Stay quiet.”

Amber gripped the blanket tighter and pressed her cheek to Meoraq’s chest.

“Stand where you are!” someone called, someone new. “Stand and be—”

“I am Uyane Jazuun, steward of my House, named fourth of the governing Houses of Chalh. This man is Sheulek, kin to me and badly injured. You, run for a cart, and you, get healers and a surgeon to House Uyane! Go now!”

There was no answer. The sled rolled and bounced and jerked. The struggling of Meoraq’s lungs under the heavy blanket was so much louder than his heart beating.

“Open!” Jazuun shouted, and was answered by metallic clanks and groaning.

The sled heaved and suddenly the rear end was up in the air and the sound of boots drumming hard in a stone hall was all around her.

“Cart’s at the end of the gate, sir,” a new voice said. “Should have it emptied when we reach it. What is that?”

“It’s mine is what it is and I’ll kill the one who challenges me over it now, when this man lies in the shadow of Gann! Do you hear him, eh? Do you? This is Uyane Meoraq, son of Rasozul, who was champion of Xeqor in Yroq. That Rasozul, sprat, and his son is who this is, and if he dies, by God and Gann, so will every man I hold even a shard responsible!”

There were no other questions, nothing at all but running feet until Jazuun’s, “Easy with him now.”

They swooped up and then down, thumping into the bed of a cart on top of rough bags of seed or sand or God knew what. Meoraq groaned at the impact, then clutched at her through the blanket, and how blind could these people be? How could she help but look like a whole other person crouching in this litter with him?

“To Uyane!” Jazuun called, as boots leapt up into the cart and his heavy hand rested briefly on Amber’s head.

“Sir, the temple surgery—”

“I say Uyane! Mark me and pull, you gutter-sons!”

The cart lurched forward to the deafening hail of hooves on stone. Here, blinded, the speed felt dizzying, unreal, faster than a subway car, faster than the shuttle that had taken them into space. They did not drive out into the city, but were fired into it—a rabble of voices, a thousand smells, unseen people on every side, and Meoraq groaning beneath her.

In the dark, with the sound of his heartbeat obliterated by the chaos around her, it took hours. She knew they were there only when the cart stopped, pitching her off the litter so that she had to climb back on, and someone had to have seen that, surely, but Jazuun just bellowed for someone to open the gate and someone else to come and carry. Then it was running again, with her clinging to Meoraq like a baby monkey, until suddenly they were set down, the belts loosened and the blanket whisked away.

Light blinded her. She raised her hand against it, squinting, and heard a lizardish scream. Jazuun was an immediate blur, leaping across this wide, startlingly elegant room in an instant to swat the lizardlady responsible on the snout. “Keep your fucking head or I’ll spin it around for you,” he hissed.

The lizardlady, gripping her snout in both hands, bowed herself over at the waist and stayed that way. It wasn’t until she did it that Amber noticed the second lizardlady standing beside her. She didn’t scream. But of course, she’d seen Amber before.

“Xzem?” she stammered.

“Eshiqi!” Xzem set the armload of linens she’d been holding on the nearest surface and rushed forward to clasp Amber’s hands.

“Get her out of here,” Jazuun ordered, throwing the blanket back over her. “Take her to my wife’s chamber, and you, take this silly dip someplace with a lock on it. No one knows about this until I give the word.”

“I mark, sir.”

“Then go. All of you, go.”

“I’m not going anywhere!” Amber pushed the blanket back defiantly and grabbed Meoraq’s hand. His fingers clenched; he groaned.

Jazuun came back in just a few long strides, his hand darting out to grip her by the chin. Up close, the family resemblance was next to nothing. “The surgeon will be here any moment and if he sees you, he will lose his wit and his hands, and he needs them both to save your man.”

He released her and gestured. Xzem brought the blanket back and hooded her. This time, Amber bent, swearing, and made sure her face was covered.

“You’ll have the first word after me,” Jazuun said, but he was already moving away. “Go. Now.”

Xzem’s rough hand tapped at hers. She offered her sleeve and Amber took it. They left, keeping low and close to the wall, passing a small group of running lizardmen in the hall just outside. Meoraq’s doctors. Amber lingered until the door had shut them away, but then there was nothing else to wait for, nothing else to see. She let Xzem take her away.

She didn’t count the turns they made or the doors they passed. This wasn’t like Zhuqa’s camp; it wasn’t someplace to escape. It wasn’t home, either. It was a waiting room, that was all.

Xzem came to a door, guarded on either side by lizardmen in highly-polished boots, which were all that Amber could see with the blanket pulled so low. “The Sheulek-kin of my lord is returned,” Xzem said softly, bowing. “My lord commands his wife receive the wife of Uyane Meoraq.”

The boots moved aside. With a dull clank, the door opened to reveal another door right on the other side. One of the lizardmen, maybe Xzem herself, knocked twice, but the sound of running feet over tiles told her the knock was unnecessary. The second door rattled impatiently on its hinges and whooshed open.

“My lady, my lord commands—”

A kitten bawled. And even knowing she was untold lightyears away from all the kittens that ever were, that was still what Amber heard—the sickly, ear-piercing mew of a newborn cat. Before she could react, she felt herself seized by the shoulders and towed over the threshold.

Xzem followed, patiently continuing her introduction half-heard beneath an urgent chorus of kittens, and shut the door. The guards on the other side shut theirs, and whoever was impersonating the cat grabbed Amber’s blanket and pushed it back.

Maybe it was just because of the sounds she made, but she actually looked like a cat…at least as much as a lizard ever could. Her eyes were wide and curiously slanted. Her cheekbones were rather broad and her snout exceptionally pointed. But most of it was due to the odd ornament she wore over her hood, which capped her short spines and then arced off to either side of her head in twin points of glittering metal and beads. The edges of her hood were even trimmed in wispy bits of fringe like whiskers.

“Oh.” The lizardlady’s left hand rose to tap delicately at her breast. The right went even higher, cupping the end of her narrow snout. “Oh,” she said again, her dark eyes brimming with sympathy. “The poor deformed creature.”

“Lady, she knows our speech,” Xzem murmured respectfully.

“I don’t imagine it’s any secret to her that she’s deformed. It would be more impolite to pretend otherwise, I think. I am Nraqi, little creature.” Nraqi reached to take Amber’s hands and bring them to her heart. She made another weird animal sound, wordless and mushy, like a knife right to the ear, before adding, “Your mother in Chalh.”

“I don’t need a mother,” said Amber and pulled her hands back.

“Does it have a name?” Nraqi whispered.

“Eshiqi,” said Xzem, bowing.

“It’s Amber, actually.”

“Eshiqi.” Nraqi leaned back, cupping Amber’s face gently between her hands and smiling. “Such a pretty name for…well…such a pretty name!”

Amber detached herself as gently as she could and went back to the door, straining to hear through it—and the ten or twelve walls that stood between her and Meoraq. She couldn’t even hear the two guards she knew were just outside. She couldn’t hear anything except her own breath bouncing off the door into the suffocating echo-chamber of this stupid blanket.

Amber yanked it all the way down around her neck and then, in a sudden illogical fury, she took the whole damn thing off and threw it in a heap on the floor, going as far away as the room allowed, to the only window. The glass was stained a deep red and had a weirdly bubbled and streaked appearance. ‘Like blood,’ she thought.

Bo Peep’s reflection floated in the window, slack-faced, loveless. Then it was Nicci’s face, the eyes sunken and accusing. She didn’t see herself, and never would, she realized. The last time she’d seen a mirror had been in the Manifestor’s compound the day of the flight, just a sidelong glance as she climbed out of the shower, the memory stained with resentment because it would be right across from the shower and how many people really looked their best naked first thing in the morning? The old Amber. The tough Amber. The Amber who could be a bitch and a bully, but who by-God got the job done, who took care of things, who had been born old and was nobody’s little girl, where was she now? Who was this scrawny, useless person with her eyes brimming with blood? Who had God, ha, picked to be the last human left alive on this whole planet?

The last…

The thought had been creeping in on her for days, but with Meoraq to look after, she’d always been able to push it away. Now it crawled up her spine and bit in deep. Fifty thousand people, winnowed down just that easily to only one, only her.

She was alone. And if Meoraq…left her…she’d be lost.

“Eshiqi?” Nraqi’s reflection fretted with her sleeves and then said decisively, “Tea, I think. Tea and cakes. Poor thing hasn’t eaten and everything seems worse on an empty belly. Xzem!”

“Yes, my lady.”

Hungry? Tea and cakes? “No!” said Amber in choked lizardish. She wasn’t sure which ‘no’ she used, but she used it loud enough to halt Xzem in her tracks. Covering her stinging eyes, Amber turned back to the window.

“Just the tea, then,” Nraqi said after a moment.

“No.”

“Water.”

“Lady, I know you’re trying,” said Amber in dull English, “but if you don’t leave me alone, I think I’m going to lose my mind.”

Xzem slipped quietly out through a side-door. Gone to fetch drinks, no doubt. Which Amber would have to choke politely down while the friendliest cat-lizard in the universe chatted her up and Meoraq died somewhere in this God-forsaken house.

Amber squeezed her eyes shut until they quit leaking and opened them again to stare out the blood-red window at an empty world.

Quiet footsteps heralded Xzem’s return, but instead of the clinking glasses she expected, Amber heard a muffled purr—the sleeping song of Zhuqa’s baby. She turned around and there it was, wrapped in a clean, plush blanket. She supposed it had outgrown its need for smooth skin, but it woke when Xzem passed it into her arms and snuggled up to her the same as it had always done. Its tiny fist punched once at Amber’s breast, then found a gripping place on her tunic. It sang.

How long Amber stared into its tiny, pale face, she couldn’t know, but when she raised her eyes at last, there was Xzem.

“I never had the chance to thank you,” said Xzem, reaching out to brush her fingertips along the tiny ridge on the top of its skull where someday, spines would grow. “Or to show your lord my gratitude. Now that I have that chance, I cannot find the words. Your lord raised me out of darkness and put me in the sight of Sheul. He placed my Nali in God’s hands and placed this one in mine. He made me a mother, after all this time…after so many lost and left behind me. He made me a wife. He made me a good woman—” Her voice broke. After some short time, she went on. “—to a good man. This child, when it is grown, it will be a good woman or a good man, and it may never know there was another way to be.”

Amber could only look at her. A part of her knew what Xzem was saying and another part even vaguely knew what her own response should be, but both of these were only whispers beneath the silent screams of i don’t care lady i don’t care it isn’t equal it isn’t fair god gives and god takes and maybe he thinks that’s a fair trade but it‘s not! In the end, she only gave the baby back, her throat too tight to let her speak anyway, and turned back to the window. The baby woke and fussed a little, but its mother soothed it back to sleep and soon it had forgotten Amber again.

“It’s all right,” she heard Nraqi say behind her. She heard Xzem’s footfalls retreating. For a while, there was nothing, and then a soft, four-fingered hand brushed at her back. Amber tried to shrug it off, but the hand did not go.

“Come with me,” Nraqi said. She wasn’t a cat anymore.

Amber resisted, but the stiffness of her body beneath that gentle touch felt petty, a child’s tantrum. She turned around, away from the window and the lie of its reflection, and followed Nraqi through a heavy curtain, down a narrow, unlit hall, past banks of doors standing open on empty rooms, to a winding, rising stair.

It led up into the open air of a high-walled garden, long and oddly wedge-shaped, like a polite slice of cheesecake, with benches along the sides and a light at the pointy end. Two lights, really: a tall brazier of open coals below a hanging lamp with an opaque glass cover, both burning in full daylight. Over the walls, wisps of smoke and all the sounds and smells of the city reminded Amber of the world outside her own personal hell.

“This is my chapel,” said Nraqi. Her gaze trailed along the tops of the walls and all the way around. “The one below…a plaything for the House priests. I let them see me there at times, the way I let the linen girls see me at my wardrobe and the serving girls see me at tea. But I have worn the same three gowns every day for sixteen years and I hate the taste of frosted cakes. Here is my true chapel. Here is where I stand that I know…” Her head tipped back. The delicate fringe at the side of her hood fluttered in the breeze. “…I know God sees me.”

“I can’t,” said Amber, shaking her head in tight, hurtful jerks. “I’m sorry, lady. I know you mean well, but I can’t listen to that right now.”

“I had never felt His eye upon me before,” said Nraqi, still serenely watching the clouds roll by. “Not all my childhood years in my father’s House, not with all the prayers I learned to sing or in all the hours I learned to kneel so still and just…just think of nicer things. I never saw God when they took me out from Gelsik and across the mountains to this place. I did not see Him in my lord-husband’s face on the night I was given to him, conquered by him. I was, I think, eleven years gone in this House before I ever knew God as more than a word in the mouths of old men, and it was here. My little one, my Varis…three times, I carried her and three times, Gann snatched her back and those wicked old men wouldn’t even let me sit with her after she was gone, so I was here. And Jazuun brought her to me. And we sat together. It is such a quiet thing, Eshiqi—” Nraqi reached back and took Amber’s hand, lightly squeezing. “—when God speaks.”

“I don’t want to hear Him telling me there’s nothing He can do,” said Amber hoarsely. “I don’t want to hear Him tell me to suck it up! I don’t want to be saved if it means watching him die anyway!” She fought with it, lost, and burst out, “I can’t lose everything, damn it! He can’t do that to me! It isn’t right!”

There was more, but even that much was too garbled by tears to understand and no one up here spoke English except her anyway. Nraqi tried to put her arms around her. Amber stumbled back, but Nraqi wouldn’t let go and after the run she’d just had, Amber didn’t have it in her to struggle for long. At the end of it, exhausted, she simply slid down on her knees with her hands folded limply in her lap, leaned her forehead into Nraqi’s hip, and bawled.

“God does not always give us what we ask for,” Nraqi said, wrapping her in folds of her robe to shelter her from the wind. “But after all my years, I have come to believe He gives us what He can. So pray, even if all He can do is sit beside you. I know that doesn’t seem like much, but sometimes, I tell you, it is everything.”

 

* * *

 

Meoraq had not known he was dying, but he knew the very moment he was dead. He knew not because he was standing and not because he was no longer in pain, although both these things should have been clues, but because he was at home. He was in Xeqor, standing in his father’s rooftop garden, where the breeze was impossibly sweet and the sky, filled with lights. Stars, Amber had called them. The sky was filled with stars and so Meoraq knew he was dead.

He went to a bench. He would have liked to have at least staggered there, but this body was fit and strong, and his mind filled with rest. So he just walked. And sat.

Meoraq waited. He’d heard about things like this—for as long as there had been death, he supposed there had been men who had gone only to the threshold and come back to tell of it—and he already knew it wasn’t going right. There was no dark tunnel, no pure white light, no Sheul to reach out His arms in welcome, only this familiar and disturbingly silent setting and an alien, glittering sky.

He was not alone, although he appeared to be. He could feel eyes on him…but that wasn’t right. What he felt was not a sense of being watched as much as companionship. He found himself looking around quite often, trying to see whoever it was with him, but although the rooftop of the city burned with hundreds of fires, he saw no one. The world of the dead, it seemed, was as empty as the world of the living.

Perhaps this was Hell, he thought. And it was not the endless walk across the grey wastes of Gann after all, but only this glimpse of what might have been paradise, and himself, alone.

No sooner had this bleak thought occurred than it was disproven.

Rasozul appeared on the bench beside him—a much younger man than Meoraq had known, but it was Rasozul and not just a familiar face for someone else, some Other, to wear.

Meoraq leaned sidelong into him at once, not like a grown man at all, but like a boy. His chest ached, thick with unhappiness, but he could not cry here. It was impossible to cry here. Because he was dead.

His father did not ask questions. Explanations were unnecessary. Understanding moved between them, unspoken, more complete than anything words could accomplish anyway. His father knew all about Amber, the way he heard and accepted Meoraq’s apology for all the years of thoughtless disdain he’d shown Yecidi, who had always loved him anyway.

“What happens now?” Meoraq asked at last, because that was the only thing unclear to him. It felt like forever in every second. Amber might have been alone out in the world for years already.

“I can’t answer that, son.”

“You mean you don’t know?”

Rasozul smiled and slipped his arm around him like he’d done it all his life and not for the first time. “I mean I can’t answer for you. If you wanted to know, you’d already be moving on.”

“Moving…? Isn’t this it?”

“Not quite.”

“I don’t understand,” said Meoraq.

Rasozul acknowledged this with a smile, but made no attempt to explain.

“There’s either more or there isn’t! How can this be ‘not quite’ all there is?”

“It would depend.”

“On what?” Meoraq demanded, as frustrated as he could bring himself to be in this perfect place.

But Rasozul’s smile was just the same. “On where it is you think we are now,” he said patiently. “And why you need to be there.”

Meoraq looked around at the rooftop, the stars, the empty wilds beyond Xeqor’s walls. “Am I making this up?” he asked uncertainly.

“Not exactly.”

“Are there…Halls? Is there…” Meoraq clapped a hand to his eyes, but there was no way to hide shame anymore. He wished there was, and that was shameful too. “Is there a God?” he whispered brokenly. “Are there Halls where He resides? I’m not asking for welcome, I just need to know!”

“Ah, my son…” Rasozul pulled Meoraq against his broad, unscarred chest and rubbed his back. “Why would you not be welcome?”

And he couldn’t cry in this place, not with these eyes, but there could still be pain and it came splintering out of him: years of murder, of death within the arena and without, from the very first—that brunt in Tilev and the feel of his bones breaking—to the last raider in the ruins; every theft taken as a Sheulek’s due from men who did not dare to refuse him; every woman bent and used and mostly forgotten, and like the murders he had done, they were not uncounted anymore, not here. He saw them all, each one a stone in his heart until the weight was more than he could carry and he covered his face again and cried out, “Father, I have done such terrible things!”

Rasozul held him, rocked him. “No one is beyond forgiveness.”

“Whose forgiveness?” Meoraq asked, even as he pressed his eyes tighter into his shielding hands. “Is there a God? Does He know me?”

“I can’t answer, son.”

“Why not?”

Rasozul’s hand rubbed gently up and down over his bent back. “Because you have to ask. Ah, boy, look up. Look around you. Can’t you see?”

Meoraq slowly lowered his hands and raised his eyes. He saw the stars, shining out even brighter and more numerous than before. Their beauty had a sound, like a memory of music he could no longer hear with his ears but could still, however faintly, recall.

Meoraq looked away, at the braziers glittering over the rooftop of Xeqor. “It is nice,” he mumbled, rubbing at his snout.

Rasozul sighed. “It is,” he agreed.

They sat.

“How long do I have to wait here?” Meoraq asked.

“I can’t answer that, son.” Rasozul bent his neck and rubbed at his own snout. Patience colored all his thoughts and feelings. “We’ll move on when you’re ready.”

“Where are we going?” Meoraq looked out into the darkened wilds beyond Xeqor’s walls and, for a moment, thought he caught the suggestion of mountains to the east, the ghost-glow of golden light filling the barren washes between them, but then it was only blackness. “Is it far?” he asked uncertainly. He didn’t want to go any further from Amber than he had to.

Rasozul sighed again and patted Meoraq’s knee. “Only as far as you make it, son.” 

“Do I have to go right now?” Meoraq asked. “Can’t I wait for her? I want to be here when she comes. She’ll be frightened.”

The stars began to wink out, one by one. The breeze, so sweet and soft all this time, gusted suddenly. His chest cramped. Oddly, pain was something he could feel in death.

“What—” Meoraq bent, one hand scratching over his chest, dumbly seeking some physical cause for this sudden assault. “What’s happening?”

“Just look at me.” Rasozul cupped Meoraq’s face between his hands and leaned close. “Son, look at me. You’re all right.”

“Is this a punishment? I’m not leaving her!” he declared, shaking off his father’s touch to shout into the darkening sky. “You can take me this far, but no further! Do you hear me? I…am not going…anywhere!”

Pain slammed like a hammer right into his heart, knocking whatever air filled his dead lungs out of this body. Meoraq fell back into Rasozul’s gentle hands and writhed there as that hammer struck and struck and struck.

“Oh, my son,” Rasozul said somewhere above him. He sounded as if he might be smiling, in a weary and resigned sort of way. “You don’t have to fight.”

Meoraq roared, kicking and slapping at the wind as it gusted, battering its way inside him. “No!” he spat, twisting his head violently back and forth until the wind went away. “Not! Leaving!”

“Meoraq.”

It was a woman’s voice, a woman’s hands that brushed along the sides of his face, cupping him and making him quiet as the hammer rose and fell, rose and fell. He opened his eyes and saw his mother, fresh as on her wedding day, bending over him with loving exasperation shining down out of her eyes. Her eyes were golden brown and warm as tea; he’d forgotten.

The wind slackened. A few stars flickered and grew. In the east, the mountains he thought he saw flickered as well; Rasozul glanced that way and then at Yecidi.

“I know,” she said, as if he had spoken. Perhaps he had, in that way of silent understanding which Meoraq had so briefly shared and which the pain had utterly taken from him. “But he’s not ready. And he doesn’t have to be. Meoraq,” she said again, bending even lower to touch her brow to his. “Trust me. Do you trust me? I know you are very tired, but you must trust me.”

He groped for her hand and found it, weakly squeezing, trying to fill that touch with all the years’ worth of love he’d denied her for all his arrogant, stupid reasons, but he could feel her withdrawing from him. He could still see her and she was still smiling, but she was holding herself separate from him and she was doing it deliberately. It hurt and as he withdrew himself in confusion, that hammer suddenly smashed into him again.

“Breathe,” his mother said, stroking his face. “Don’t fight. Trust me, Meoraq, and relax.”

He tried, but at the slightest loosening of his will, the pain took his whole body, burrowing into his throat like a living thing and swelling through his chest.

“Breathe it in,” his mother said, and although she was still holding him, he could scarcely see her. The stars were going out in sheets now, all the world filling up with black, and ah, he hurt, he hurt, there was nothing left to feel but hurt.

“We’ll wait for you,” his father said. “Remember that and let go.”

Let go. He’d said that to Amber once, in the ruins the night of the storm, and although he couldn’t bring that night fully into focus through this terrible pain, he thought she’d done it. Because she’d trusted him to hold her. Meoraq battled his eyes open, but there was nothing of his mother left but her hands like shadows to either side of his face, nothing of his father but a voice beneath the killing wind telling him to breathe. The hammer struck; Meoraq opened his mouth to scream and the pain clawed at once down his throat.

He breathed it in.

 

* * *

 

Meoraq was awake long before he was able to do anything about it. Awareness was a live coal in his chest, a thick pool of pain much wider than the dimensions of his body. His arms and legs, of no significance, floated elsewhere. He drowsed in the thoughtless black, listening to low speech and shuffling bodies without the ability to make words of what he heard. And that was fine.

Gradually, the pain grew sharper and as it sharpened, it shrank. With the shrinking came a better sense of the rest of his clay until, all at once, he had an arm with a hand attached at the end of it, and within that hand, another hand. A soft hand. With many slender fingers.

He knew it was Amber before he knew he was Meoraq. Smiling, he squeezed the hand that held him. She squeezed back.

“Where is the knife of my fathers?” he asked. His voice was a whisper, a ghost in his throat.

She lifted his hand and laid it over the smooth bone hilt.

He smiled in the darkness. “Draw it with me, wife.”

Someone coughed. Not Amber. Someone else.

Meoraq opened his eyes. He lay in a sickbed—a raised mat, open all around to allow ease of tending—and a rather large blurry man stood at the foot of it with a scattering of other blurs around him. People. Damn it. “Leave us,” said Meoraq.

“That’s not His fire in your belly, son,” said a familiar voice, not moving. “That’s wetlung.”

Meoraq saw no reason it couldn’t be both, but the act of opening his eyes had forced daylight into the whole of his body. Now he could see that the sickbed in which he lay was in a room, which was in a House, which was in the city of Chalh. He started to sit up, but his brain threatened to leave if he insisted, so he settled back into the bedding under Amber’s guiding hands. “It is Uyane before me,” he said, fitting a name to the man just now coming into focus at the heel of his sickbed. “Lord of his House under my descent and steward of his bloodline in Chalh.”

“Keeper of the armory keys, warden over the Holy Fire of Gedai, guardian of the Oracle’s Fourth Order, and too damned old to care,” Uyane agreed. “But it’s just Jazuun when I stand with kin. Or are you holding my House in your shadow?”

“Not from your sickroom, I’m not.” He looked around again. “How did I get here? Wait…”

Meoraq thought.

He remembered.

He looked up at his wife. “You saved my life.”             

One corner of her mouth ticced up in her crooked, human smile. “Feels awful, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.” He thought some more—it was disturbingly difficult, a physical strain—and looked at Lord Uyane…Jazuun. “You found us? How?”

“Tripped over you on my way to Xi’Matezh.”

“What were you doing there?”

Jazuun snorted and shrugged his spines. “Said I went there for Fifth Light, didn’t I? All those fucking bells…I think a better question is, what were you doing there? It’s been a brace and more! I thought you’d gone home.”

“We were delayed.” Meoraq tried again to sit up and again abandoned the effort. He put a hand on his chest, feeling at the pains within as if it could tell him something. “I don’t remember this,” he muttered and looked up. “How do the surgeons say?”

“They say rest for half a brace or so and if Sheul shows you favor, you’ll be whole as you ever were. You’ve lost some juice and cracked some bones, but none of that was too serious apart from the strain it put on you. It was the wetlung that nearly killed you, boy, so you’re to be resting on your feet as much as possible.” 

“And you?” Meoraq tried to raise the hand that did not grip Amber’s to touch her heart, but his clay was heavy. He could manage only to rest his palm on her belly, which he supposed was just as appropriate. “Were you injured?”

“No, for a change. I’m fine. Or…we’re fine, I guess.” She laughed a little. Her laughter, even self-conscious as it was, was beautiful. “I’m still getting used to that.”

“Then all is well.” Meoraq closed his eyes to think some more. The darkness helped. “Are they feeding you?” he mumbled. It seemed very important in that moment.

“Oh boy, are they feeding me. The lady of the house here has been stuffing cake into me with both hands practically since I got here.”

“At least it isn’t marrow, eh?”

“Marrow would actually be a nice change. I could really go for a steaming heap of marrow right now.”

He smiled. “You don’t mean that.”

“Not yet, but I’m getting there.”

With effort, Meoraq turned his attention back to Lord Uyane, who had been watching this one-sided exchange with undisguised curiosity. “How long have I been here?”

“Six days, in and out. You’ve muttered some before this, but this is the first I’ve seen you give sensible speech. If you want to move to a decent bed, I’ll let you, but your woman stays with mine. No arguments,” he added, cocking his head at Amber, who did indeed have an argument gleaming in her eye. “You can see him in my company, but then you let him rest. How in the hell do you get this she-Sword to obey you, boy? It’s like putting a tether on the wind.”

“It is,” Meoraq agreed, petting Amber’s hand. “A fine, fierce wind.” He dozed, fitting himself back in his flesh as if his body were an old pair of refurbished boots—familiar, but stiff and a bit too tight.

Boots…

“Where are my boots?” he asked, rousing.

“Up Gann’s ass and around the kidney,” Lord Uyane replied with a snort.

“I didn’t have time to look for anything,” Amber added. “We only have what was already on the sled when I put you on it, and we left a lot of that behind so we could get here faster. We still have a few things, I guess. Mostly stupid little stuff…your tea box…my mug. But…” She took a deep, bracing breath, dropping her eyes. “But you lost your knives. Or I lost them. Iziz took them and I didn’t think…anyway, they’re gone.”

Meoraq glanced at the knife of his fathers resting on his chest, then at his arm, naked but for the cord of her hair. His sabks…? His sabks! Handed down from the firstborn son of Uyane Xaima himself, perhaps the oldest set of honor-knives in all the world, blades that had never known defeat, and now they were gone.

He pulled in breath and hissed it out, pulled in another and just let it go. He reached out and stroked once at his wife’s brow, doing what he could to wipe away the guilt and shame she carried there. “So they are gone,” he told her. “Uyane Xaima was only a man. His sabks were only metal. And what does it matter now, eh? The Age of the Warrior is ended. It is only right that they end with it, there…where it all began.”

He had managed somehow to forget they were not alone in this room until Lord Uyane said, “Ended.”

They both looked at him and then beyond him to all those other watching, listening, invisible servants. Alarm flared in Meoraq’s chest as hot as fever, but Jazuun didn’t seem all that upset. Or even surprised.

“I knew it just by looking at you. Even at your worst, I could see it on you…on both of you.” Jazuun looked them over—first Meoraq, then Amber—and raised his chin like a true Sword in judgment. “You opened the doors at Xi’Matezh, didn’t you? You entered before it fell.”

Alarm flared again, which was twice too often for his ill-used clay. Meoraq put a hand over his heart to steady it and kept his spines still. “You don’t blame me for that, surely.”

“Blame you?” Jazuun tipped his head back in mock puzzlement. “It was God who held the shrine up all these ages. How is it that you dropped it? Although if any man could…If you can walk,” he said suddenly, “there’s something I want to show you.”

A strange sort of knowing entered Amber’s face. She looked at Jazuun and then at Meoraq, biting at her soft lip, and finally shook her head. “Come and see,” she said, holding out her hand.

Meoraq consulted his clay, which had used the little time since his awakening to decide it was not dying after all, but which had not yet decided whether or not it was glad to hear that. He sat up, clasped Amber’s little wrist in one hand and Lord Uyane’s considerably more helpful one in the other, and heaved himself over the side of the sickbed and onto his feet. Standing was bad enough; walking, where every step jostled the broken shards of hell occupying his lungs, was worse; the worst, what Amber would call the frosting on the shit-cake, came when Lord Uyane opened the door and Meoraq found the hall simply choked with people, startling him into an unplanned, “Fuck Gann!” for all of them to witness.

His voice rolled out in a fine, firm thunder, silencing all the mutters, coughs and shuffling that large crowds produce, and as one body, all turned to stare at him.

And there he stood in nothing but a loin-plate—an adolescent nightmare come to horrifying life.

“Motherless pack of ghets,” Jazuun said, but he said it under his breath and when he stepped forward to clear a path, he did it without slapping or swearing. The crowd, a faceless mass of rich robes and garish jewelry, gave ground with great reluctance and no small amount of posturing. These were not servants, scribes, messengers or any other breed of man Meoraq was accustomed to see collected in another man’s halls. These were priests, landholders, judges, lords—the wealthiest and best-bred that Chalh had to offer. He saw, by God, the standard and flashes of the governor, jostling and being jostled by those of the Great Houses, the Temple, the Tribune and—

Meoraq cocked his head, then raised his arm off Amber’s shoulders and aimed it like a spear into the crowd, trapping one man in frozen horror at the end of his pointing hand. “Ylsathoc Hirut!”

Like the cursed virgin in that old knee-time tale, hearing his name freed Exarch Ylsathoc from his paralysis. “I knew I knew that name,” he whispered, backing clumsily away. “I knew I knew that name!”

Lord Uyane was waiting beside the open door to a stairwell, so Meoraq moved on, but he was loathe to let his prey escape unscathed. “Keep him close,” he told Jazuun at the door. “I’m going to need provisions.”

Jazuun eyed him curiously, then shrugged his spines and signaled a guard. The unfortunate exarch was escorted from the hall, gesticulating wildly and making vague, incoherent allusions to all the places and people who were at this moment expecting him, including his infirm father.

“You really are a scaly son of a bitch sometimes,” Amber said, leading him onto the stairs.

Meoraq grunted agreement, still smiling. His body ached in every bone, but he felt so much better just knowing that pompous little fool would be waiting in mortal terror of him the rest of the day. “It has its uses,” he told Amber. “Perhaps now the rest of them will leave.”

“You couldn’t disperse that lot with flaming oil, son,” Jazuun snorted. “There will be twice this number and twice again once word slips out that you’re awake.”

“Me?”

Jazuun gave him a dry sidelong glance. “Who else would they be here to see?”

Meoraq looked at Amber.

“Well, yeah,” she admitted. “I’ve had some of that, but believe me, it’s always as your little monster.”

“Why?” asked Meoraq, genuinely baffled. “What did I do?”

Lord Uyane laughed, clapped him once on the shoulder and bounded on ahead to open the rooftop door.

Light flooded the stair at once, blindingly bright. Meoraq’s vision swam. He raised a hand to shield his eyes and left it there, his neck bent, seeing nothing but the stairs under his bootless feet until he reached the top. And so he was looking down when he stepped out under the open sky and saw the shadow of the stairwell hatch sprout long beneath him, as stark and black as if it had been painted there. Then he stepped around the stairwell hatch and suddenly the sun was in his eyes—not the light of the sun, but the sun itself—dazzling white, burning ghosts of pink and yellow in his eyes. The clouds that had been endless all his life had swept themselves into no more than a handful of high, wispy smudges. The sky beneath was green, as it had always been green, whether anyone knew it or not.

He had no idea how long he stared. He did not notice whether he found the stairwell wall and let it guide him to the ground or whether he simply collapsed. He did not see the others who shared the rooftop with him, not even Amber, whose hand remained clasped with his the whole time. It was not Sheul’s lamp or the glow of His forgiveness, but it was the sun and the sun was still a miracle.

When at last Meoraq came back to himself, there was Amber, sitting beside him on the rooftop, her hair turned to white gold around her face. Her mouthparts were smiling, but her eyes were watchful and unsure.

“When?” he asked her.

“Same day we got here.” One corner of her mouth crooked up a little higher. “I saw it happen, actually. I was right here on the roof. Praying.”

Jazuun waited for her to stop talking and then gave Meoraq a light tap to catch his attention. “The Oracles have been in sequester for days, but the only thing they’ve decided is that you’ll be able to explain it.”

Meoraq could feel his throat working, but could not hear any words. Amber squeezed his hand. He looked at it, at her, at the sun, at Lord Uyane.

“I don’t envy you, son.” Jazuun braced a hand on Meoraq’s shoulder and eased himself down with a grimace and a curse. Then he leaned back, rubbing at his knee and watching the few clouds drift in the wind. “But it isn’t really you they care about. Oh, you’ll go home with the kind of fame fools dream of and twenty years from now, your sprat with be taking six breaths and counting them slow every time some piss-licking gatekeeper holds him out in the rain to say, ‘Uyane? A son of Meoraq?’”

Meoraq coughed out a laugh and clapped a hand to the end of his snout, rubbing hard.

“But that’s his problem,” Jazuun finished. “All you have to do tonight is tell them what happened in Xi’Matezh. Let them decide what it means.”

Gentle words. They pierced him like a sword, pierced and twisted.

Meoraq shut his eyes against the sun and let his head drop. Lord Uyane let him be. Perhaps he thought he was praying. He wasn’t. He was trying to think, just think, and the thought that kept coming back to him was that of Lashraq, no Prophet but only a man, who had nevertheless raised Sheul’s lamp for the whole world to see, and of Master Tsazr, who had once told his awe-struck brunt how he had passed the doors at the holiest shrine the world ever knew and heard the voice of God and how Meoraq had judged him honest.

He gave himself a slow-count of six, this time with faces to put to the names he had chanted since boyhood, and when he was done, when he was decided, for good or evil and for all time, he raised his head and said, “I stood before the doors in Xi’Matezh and Sheul our Father brought me in. He spoke to me.”

Amber reached up and stroked the back of her hand across his brow. He closed his eyes and felt her warmth, together with the warmth of the true sun.

“His words were not a comfort,” Meoraq said. He caught her hand, pressed it over his eyes and kept it there until he knew he would not show tears, then released her and stared boldly into the face of Lord Uyane Jazuun. “How do you judge me?”

Jazuun held his gaze a long, long time before it finally wavered. He looked at Amber, then at the sky and the other braziers lighting along the rooftop and finally back at Meoraq. He frowned. “Truth.”

“Truth,” Meoraq echoed. He nodded—a human gesture—and rubbed at his snout some more. “The Word which was given to Lashraq was for an age which has ended. Some things…must change. We must learn to judge with wisdom and not with blades. We have become too eager to see Gann’s taint where there is none. We must learn to show mercy. We must try to forgive.”

Jazuun breathed in deep and let it out slow, looking out over the city as if all the sins and wisdoms of its uncounted masses could be seen and weighed in a glance. “You have a great deal of faith in men,” he said at last.

“More than I had at the start of this journey, but it is Sheul whose faith in men burns brightest. We believe that only He can save us. He believes that we can save ourselves.”

“And do you?”

Meoraq watched the clouds drift.

“I don’t know,” he said at last. “But I hope so.”

Jazuun grunted and labored himself back onto his feet. “I’ll start arranging audiences, I suppose. I’ll hold as many of them off as long as I can, but you’ll be seeing the first of them tonight, that’s as good as a promise, and you may never see the last.”

“I mark. You may as well begin with the exarch I had you confine for me,” Meoraq added. “He and I have unfinished business.”

Jazuun acknowledged this and retreated, leaving them alone together on the rooftop.

“What are you going to do to him?” Amber asked.

“I’m going to demand my oaths of office,” he replied distractedly, still gazing at the sky. “And I’ll probably make him my personal scribe for all my future dealings with the Oracles, at least until I’ve finished rewriting the Word, which should keep me occupied while I finish coughing out my wetlung and you and Uyane’s wife have more gowning parties.”

She bore up under that news well. “And then?”

“Then we go home. Where we would have gone even if the doors had opened on God Himself…or if they had never opened at all. We will go home. With God’s…” He trailed off, waiting to feel that hollow loss and feeling instead the sun’s warmth on his face and Amber’s hand twining with his. “With God’s favor and fair weather, we will be in Xeqor before the hottest days of the season come.”

“Are you sure that’s what you want to do?”

“Yes,” he said. “Truth, all the reasons I had for coming here were answered long before now. I know I could stay here if I asked and I know the Oracles will probably push for it, but I want to go home. I want to see my child born behind the walls where I was born. I want to see my wife lying in my bed. I want to see my brothers again, even if it means I have to fight them a few times first. I want to go home, Amber, and I want to stay home when I get there.”

She leaned against his side in sympathy, then startled and gave him a sharp, wondering stare.

He noticed and shrugged his spines. “If there is no God, it doesn’t matter. If there is, surely He would want me to call my wife by her beautiful name. Amber.” He pinched her chin and leaned in to nuzzle at her. “My Amber. Come home with me.”

She cupped his face and kissed him back. “You know I will.”

“Do I?”

“Meoraq, if there had been a starship waiting there all fueled up and freshly-waxed just the way Scott wanted, I’d still be going home with you. Didn’t you know that by now?”

“Yes,” he said and nipped at her shoulder. “But I like to hear you say it.”

She stood up, hugging herself as she watched the sun sink over the mountains, setting the sky around it on fire. The first timekeepers began to ring the bells of tenth-hour and the rest quickly joined in. Kitchen smells began to ride the wisps of smoke leaking from the wind-ways. Somewhere on a neighboring section of the roof, music began to play: a celebration of life, a song of praise before God. “I really am sorry about your little knives,” Amber said.

“Eh, you saved me, didn’t you? Besides—” He patted her braid on his arm. “—I still have this to wear. And I have your cup.”

“And your tea box.”

“Then life is good. Help me.”

She took his arm and together they managed to get him on his feet. He took a moment to adjust to his weight and the way the world wanted to pull at it and then just looked at her.

“Life is good,” he said again, not without some weary surprise. “Isn’t it?”

She thought it over, her soft brow furrowed, frowning. “Yeah,” she said at last, and even huffed out a little laughter. “Yeah, I really think it is.”

He put out his hand. She took it and together, they left the roof. The sun slipped away, but the clouds kept burning, outlined in shocking shades of pink and blue. The clanging bells died and the music played on. The last hour of Gann ended, the hour of Uyane began, and in the east, the first star of evening came out.

 

 

 

THE END

 

September 2010 – September 2013