The Last Hour of Gann by Smith, R. Lee (8)

“He’s not that kind of guy,” Amber whispered and laughed, a little hysterically.

But no, she was fine. A little roughed up, maybe. Her shirt was torn at the neck, deep enough to expose her left breast all the way to the nipple, but she could…she could tie it closed for now and…and she still had one more shirt and her sweaters and…and the bridge was still standing, right? Lightning struck…and struck and struck…but the bridge was still standing and Amber Bierce was fine.

 

* * *

 

Meoraq did make a patrol that night, all the way around the edge of the building to the front door, where he ducked beneath a sort of awning that had formed when whatever decorative steeple had once crowned this atrium had caved in. Here, mostly out of the weather and entirely alone, he knelt, slapped his hand to the ground with force enough to sting, and shut his eyes. “I am the clay upon Your wheel, my Father,” he said. Hissed, really. He hoped God could forgive that, because after the day he’d had, he didn’t think he could help it. A Sheulek was supposed to be the master of his emotions at all times, but it was all Meoraq could manage just to be master enough of his clay that he didn’t kill anyone.

But no…no. Feel the anger, Uyane. Acknowledge it. Own it. And set it aside. Even here, in the city of the Fallen Ancients, he was in his Father’s House.

“I am the new-poured sword beneath Your hammer,” Meoraq said, calmly this time. The calm was not honest yet, but it was closer than it had been. “I am the lamp You raise in the darkness. Shape me. Forge me. Illuminate me.”

He prayed for hours, unmoving, reciting the Word in the silence of his mind, beginning with the Book of Wrath, which seemed appropriate, and taking great comfort from the Prophet’s tales of his own wanderings in that first age after the Fall, and from the proof that he had found of Sheul’s dominion even over that shattered land. He meditated. He breathed. He was Uyane Meoraq in the House of his soul’s Father, and at last, his Father let him in.

By that hour, the storm had moved on. The lights still sparked in the distance and the grumble of thunder still sounded, but dully now and not often. “God’s wrath fell over every city,” Meoraq murmured. “And lo, towers did fall and walls did crumble, and the crying of all men in terror and despair did rise as flames to heaven, but even His wrath is not everlasting. Nothing there shall be in all His House that is everlasting save His judgment and His love. There is no night, however dark and filled with woe, that is not followed by dawn.”

Truth. And he would get through this, even this, somehow.

With regret, Meoraq rose off his aching knees and moved back around the side of the building to the hole that had been cut in its side. He entered past the killed machine and started down the long maze of halls that led to the foreroom, where he would make a count and where he fully expected to find that several had wandered off in direct defiance of him. He wasn’t going to lose his temper when he saw it, either. They wouldn’t have left the building, not in this weather. They had only wandered as far as necessary to annoy him because that was the ordeal which he had accepted in taking this pilgrimage. He would be calm. A Sheulek is the master of his clay and his emotions.

And no sooner had this resolution hammered itself into form in his mind than he heard the unmistakable sound of a muffled human moan behind a sealed door.

Meoraq stopped where he stood. His hands closed into fists. His head tipped back. He studied the ceiling and listened to the noises and thought a few black words to himself until he had more or less convinced himself not to be an insensitive brunt. They were probably mating and since they were people, their men had every right to use their wives when the urge took them. He had often wished they would be more careful in concealing themselves when they did so (it was a rare night that Meoraq did not have to suddenly alter the path of his patrol to avoid walking right out on top of a pair of mating humans), but tonight, keeping them under his eye was more important than their privacy.

Whoever was inside moaned again, more breathily than before. The tone was not urgent and he could hear no other sounds, no grunting, no chatter. Good. Either he had stumbled on them before they’d truly gotten started or they were right at the end.

Meoraq struck his fist on the door.

The sounds ceased at once.

“Get back to your bed,” he said bluntly.

There was no argument, no apology, no reply of any kind.

“Show me your obedience at once and I will forgive you this defiance,” he announced. “It is late. I am tired. I am in no mood for foolishness.”

The humans ignored him.

Meoraq hissed at the door, then slapped at the sealing pad and opened it.

The function of the room within was a mystery he did not care to explore at the moment, but he took idle note of its design anyway, since the humans were in no hurry to reveal themselves. It was a small chamber, not wide but rather long, separated into many walled spaces rather like stalls in a stable. Opposite them, before many mirrored panels, grew a pillar of sorts, with several fluted openings arranged over several cupped basins. The pipework and drains set in this structure made it obvious it was some kind of fountain, and it had been non-functional a very long time; one of the Ancients’ machines had died nearby, its metal face aimed at the pipework and its many arms extended in a final death-pose of silent frustration.

And of course, the humans were here. They weren’t sprawling out in the open for a change, but the lamps made by the Ancients would betray any living body no matter how well it hid from him. The humans breathed in soft, shallow breaths, believing themselves undetectable, yet their grubby little handprints were on the mirrors, on the fountain, even on the dead machine. The smell of smoke and an unwashed body was strong, very strong, but there was no sex-smell yet.

“I know you are here,” he said. “Put yourselves in order and get out.”

No response.

His patience slipped. He made no effort to regrip it.

“It would seem the room is empty,” he hissed. “I think I’ll just lock the door so that no other human wanders in.”

“Leave me alone.”

That was Amber’s voice. Meoraq took a step back, inexplicably embarrassed, and then lunged forward in an equally inexplicable fury. “Who the hell is with you?” he demanded, managing not to shout only by the aid of Sheul and half a night’s meditation.

“Nobody. Go away.”

Nobody? Meoraq took another look at the handprints marking up the mirrored walls and saw they were all the same size. But the moaning, the ragged breaths…?

“I told you to stay together,” he said at last, because he had to say something.

“You said to stay away from the windows. See any windows in here, lizardman? Go away!”

He did not see windows, only the smudgy image of himself in the ancient mirrors. His reflection—distorted by time in spite of, or because of, the ages of meticulous cleaning it had received—glowered back at him. It rendered his face unrecognizable as his own; the body, hulking and malformed.

Without warning, it occurred to him to wonder if the humans thought him ugly. If his face seemed lumpish and horrible compared to their smooth, flat ones. If he was, in fact, monstrous.

He looked at the closed doors of the many stalls. Behind one of them, Amber hid from him.

‘I hung her up like a cut of meat in a butcher’s window,’ he thought suddenly. And he’d done it in front of all her people. He’d done it with a smile. Meoraq scratched at the side of his snout, which did not itch. “What are you doing in there?”

“Nothing.”

And before he knew it, out came his father’s: “You can do that anywhere. Come out where I can see you.”

“No.”

He showed his teeth to the stalls and then rubbed hard at his brow-ridges. He had no experience with this sort of thing and, he suspected, no talent. “Is something wrong?”

She laughed, which was encouraging right up until she also said, “Why no! What the hell could possibly be wrong? Go away! I don’t want to talk! I put your stupid tent up, so go lie in it.”

Meoraq went to the first of the stalls and opened it. Apart from whatever incomprehensible device of the Ancients occupied it, it stood empty.

“I’m warning you!”

“Are you indeed?” he snorted, opening the next stall. Also empty. “It should be interesting to see how that plays out.” The next stall opened, and the one after that, but the fifth did not give to the pressure of his hand. “Because I rather suspect it will not go in your favor.” He tapped two fingers meaningfully on the lock-plate. “You have until the count of six,” he told her, “and then I knock this door in.”

“Just go away!” Her voice cracked on the last word. She was quiet a short time, and then calmly said, “I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

“One,” countered Meoraq.

“Just give me a few minutes, for God’s sake!”

“Two.”

“Goddamn alien prick!”

“Three, four, five—”

The door came open with a wheeze, its design preventing the violent bang she intended. Her first efforts to shove past him proved futile and somewhat laughable, so there she stood, furiously trying to meet his eyes while her own were wet. “What do you want?”

“Tell me what you are doing here.”

She snorted right to his face. “You couldn’t possibly understand, so no. You wanted me to go back to bed? Fine. Get out of my way and let me do it.”

“You have until the count of six—” he began.

“Oh for—I ripped my shirt! There, are you happy?”

He knew he’d heard her and yet that made no sense at all. She’d slunk off to cry over a tear in her clothes? He didn’t believe it. Maybe if it were Nicci, but not Amber.

He tipped his head to a cautious angle of inquiry. “I did not mark you.”

“I ripped my shirt,” she said again, her angry voice cracking a second time. “Now I’ve got this huge hole that I can’t fix.”

“You have no other shirts?”

“They all reek,” she said, refusing to look at him. “And they’re all full of holes too. I only have one new shirt left, but it’s the last one and if…” She pressed her shaking lips together and did not speak for a long time. “It got to me, okay? You can think it’s stupid all you want. I agree. You’re right. It’s stupid. Now leave me alone.”

Meoraq hunted for something to say while Amber stared at the wall beside his shoulder and kept her too-bright eyes dry. “You knew I have a mending kit,” he said finally. “You might ask to borrow it.”

Her mouth pressed tighter together. She did not reply.

Her clothing was worn thin. He’d marked it before this night. Long before. And the weather was only coming in colder. He couldn’t see the tear she spoke of, but by the stiff way she stood, hugging her arms to her chest, he could guess where it was. And he’d probably done it himself, binding her to her own spear. He tried to think back, but couldn’t truthfully say one way or another. It was likely, though.

He really was an insensitive brunt. Her clothes were falling off her. They hadn’t been designed for hard travel in the first place, much less this endless wear. He could order his replaced at the next city he passed by, but hers…hers were all she had.

Meoraq exhaled an uncomfortable hiss and made a half-gesture behind him at the door. “I have a spare tunic.”

Her eyes snapped to him and away, blazing. “I don’t want it.”

“Eh?”

“I said, no! Stop giving me things! Just stop! What do you think people are going to say when they see me wearing your shirt tomorrow?”

“What do you want from me then?” he exploded.

“I wanted you to leave me alone!”

“Well, you don’t get what you want!” he shouted, very dimly aware that what had begun as a poor imitation of a calm conversation had shattered beyond repair into splendidly irrational bickering. “I get what I want and I want you to shut up and wear my fucking tunic!”

She burst into tears.

“And if I tell you to wear the harness and the breeches that go with it,” Meoraq raged on, “that is what you’ll do! I’ll dress every Gann-damned sliver of you if it pleases me to do so and I will not hear another word about it!”

“You can’t make me, you scaly son of a bitch!”

“Ha!” And yes, he was entirely senseless now. “I don’t even know what that means so I can’t be offended by it!”

“It means your mother was a bitch!” she screamed at him.

“She could have been!” he roared back. “But my father was Uyane Rasozul in the sight of Sheul, twenty-six years a Sheulek, steward of his bloodline, lord over his House, and champion to all Xeqor, and it is his son who stands before you now! You see Meoraq, ha, here before God and Gann! Tell me again what I can and cannot make you do and just see what happens!”

He had to stop there for a breath, and it was there that Scott’s voice rang out with brilliant clarity: “Do you mind? Some of us are trying to sleep!”

Meoraq and Amber both stared at the door. He honestly wasn’t sure which of them moved first after that, but in another moment they were both storming back into the sleeping room, side at side, like an army of two.

Meoraq went straight to Scott, who sat up fast and scooted foolishly backwards while still wrapped in his bedding until he hit another human and had to stop.

“I have been listening to you talk all night!” Meoraq spat. “If you look into my face and tell me you were sleeping, I will stand you up and have judgment for the lie!”

“I wasn’t!” Scott said at once. “But other people were and—”

Meoraq swung around and raked his eyes over the whole of them. “Who dares order me to silence?”

“I do,” said Amber. “Shut up.”

“Oh my God,” said Eric, very quietly, almost respectfully.

Those were the words that hooked at him, not Amber’s. Which was not to say that Amber’s passed serenely through him, but it was Eric under his burning stare next. Meoraq could feel himself sway, as if his metaphorical precipice of control had caused him to physically teeter, but when he fell, it was on the side of seventeen years of training. Because God indeed was with him and His eyes were always open.

Meoraq closed his eyes. He took a breath, held it, then let it slowly out again. He looked at Amber and said, “Come here.”

Human heads turned all through the room. Human eyes watched, solemn and staring, as Amber stood alone among them.

She did not move for a long time.             

But when she did move, she came toward him.

Meoraq waited. She came within his easy reach and tipped her head back just a little, a combatant no longer but only an exhausted and unhappy human in torn clothes waiting to be struck so she could go to bed.

Meoraq left her standing there and went to his tent. He found the mending kit and brought it back, taking her firmly by the wrist and slapping the case with force into her limp hand. “When you are ready to apologize,” he said, releasing her, “I may be ready to forgive you. Until then, mend your shirt and keep your mouth shut.”

Her chin trembled, but in the end, she did not answer, only took the kit and left again. Back to her stall, perhaps, and this was just as well. He was willing to take the higher path, but he wasn’t ready to forgive, not quite yet.

The humans were watching, wary. He hissed at them and went into his tent as they scattered. He lay down, tight and angry and itching beneath his skin. He thought of Amber sitting alone in that empty room, mending that worn-out shirt just so it wouldn’t be the last one she had in the world. He thought of her calling him a son of a bitch too, but he tried not to let that be the master of him.

 

3

 

Morning came, but daylight did not lessen the storm that blew without the walls any better than sleep had eased the storm of Meoraq’s mood. He kept to himself in a foul humor, hiding in his tent until the humans woke and began to mill about, talking about the rain, talking about food, talking about the building itself and the Ancients who built it…and talking about the ship they imagined they saw in the tilework. As galling as the thought of that ship was, he was glad when Scott took the lot of them away to the other room to look at it, even if it was against his expressed order, because at least it gave him the opportunity to slip out without having to deal with any of them.

But when he opened the fastens and stepped out, there was Amber, leaned up against the wall in her useless human blanket, waiting for him.

He didn’t want to talk to her yet. He wasn’t sure he wanted to talk to her at all. He gave her a grunt of acknowledgement and left her.

Halfway down the first long hall that led to the rear of the building and the hole in the wall, Meoraq stopped and turned around. He folded his arms, hands flexing close to his honor knives, and waited. He wasn’t going to run away from a woman, by hell. If she wanted to thrash this out, they’d thrash. Ha! And she’d know how it felt to thrash with a Sheulek by the end of it.

Time, measured out by his own even breaths and the drumming of rain against the outer windows.

Meoraq waited. Waited. And finally let out a curse and stalked back up the hall and into the sleeping room.

Amber, still leaning against the wall, turned her head and looked at him.

Now he was really annoyed.

Perhaps she could tell. She looked away, fixing her eyes on her own knees without change to her expression. This act bent her neck, making her look very much like a dumaq woman, which did not mollify him in the slightest but was instead somehow grotesque. He felt himself cooling and had to stop and remind himself that she had started all the fighting and it wasn’t over until he said it was.

“I am not angry with you,” he announced, hoping to provoke her.

“Lies,” she muttered, but she looked at him. Glared at him. And that was better.

“A Sheulek is the master of his emotions,” he told her. “I have every right to be angry with you. I choose the higher path. I forgive you and we will say no more about it. Give me my mending kit.”

She reached it out from beneath her pack, but only held it for a while. “I should have thanked you for this last night,” she said finally. “I don’t know how it is with your people, lizardman, but when it comes to humans, you don’t interrupt a girl’s crying jag and then expect her to be grateful.”

He could not believe this.

“Are you criticizing my behavior?” he asked incredulously.

Her shoulders fell. “Sure sounds that way, doesn’t it? Damn it. Here.”

He did not move to take the kit and, after a few awkward moments, she let her offering arm drop again.

They looked at each other.

She said, without heat and without warning, “I’ve never needed anyone before. Never in my life. I hate that I need you.”

Meoraq cooled a little more and this time, let those fires burn out. He went over and took his mending kit from her. “I am not your enemy.”

She snorted without much humor. Without much feeling of any kind, it seemed. “No, you’re my babysitter. Or, what was it you called me? Your runaway sheep?”

“Something of the sort,” he mumbled, scratching at the side of his snout. He bared his teeth briefly, then irritably said, “You ran off, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, I did. So that I could have my useless goddamn girly moment in private. You were the last person I wanted to see that.”

The kit in his hands seemed suddenly to weigh ten times what it should. He looked at it foolishly, picked at a loose thread in its side-seam (it ought to be repaired and that was nearly ironic—to mend a mending kit), and put it away. “Why?”

She was quiet for a long time, long enough that he thought she did not intend to answer at all, and he was debating how to handle that when she suddenly, listlessly said, “Because I’m supposed to be the tough one. I’m supposed to be different. And I’m not.”

“You are.” He snorted and came over to give her a forgiving tap. “Hear the words of Uyane. You are without equal in the realm of the very different. I handle it…badly.”

“Maybe I wasn’t at my best last night. But you were pissed off all day—”

He grunted acknowledgement and did not point out that he had every reason to be angry when some cattle’s ass tried to take command of his camp, let alone when the one human he found tolerable turned her back on him and followed said ass into a city of the Fall against the will of Sheul and Meoraq both. He was being very patient.

“—and then you disappear all night, during the worst storm I’ve ever seen—”

“And what exactly did you expect me to do about the weather, woman?”

“Nothing! Just…and while we’re on the subject, what have you been telling Scott about me?”

His spines flared. “This is the subject?”

“It relates,” she said defensively.

“Apart from the usual death threats which he ignores, I try not to speak to S’kot at all. When circumstance forces me to do so, it certainly isn’t man-chat about you.”

She looked down at her empty lap and said nothing. It was not a look of relief. More of a flinch, if anything.

He studied her frowning face, seeing thoughts there he could not read. “Why? What does he claim I say?”

“I don’t know.”

He clapped one hand to his snout and physically pinched it shut, determined to be tactful. Then, because towering over her like this wasn’t helping even if it was entirely appropriate, he hunkered down and tapped her on the knee. “S’kot can’t open his mouth without piss falling out of it. If his people choose to believe his lies, that is their foolishness. It doesn’t have to be yours.”

“Meoraq, he’s telling them—”

He pinched her chin, silencing her. “I don’t care if he’s telling them he is Sheul Himself in human form. You know better. You know truth. How do you mark me?”

She stared at him in silence, at last waggling her head up and down in human acknowledgement.

He grunted and released her, looking broodingly around the empty room where the Fall of the Ancients went on and on in some other plane. “This land is poison. I allowed it to infect me last night, Soft-Skin, as perhaps it infected all of us. I should not have been so harsh with you. Will you take my spare tunic?”

“No.”

“Please yourself. I will not command it today. If you come to any sense, you know that I have it.” He stood. “Gather your things and pack my tent. I need to scout our path out of this God-accursed place and I want S’kot and his cattle to be ready to leave the very instant that I return for them. Tell him.”

“Okay.”

The door to the foreroom opened, drawing both their eyes. There stood Scott himself, chattering back over his shoulder at all the humans who had followed him into that room in defiance of Meoraq’s command.

He gripped his brow-ridges. He was not going to shout. He was going to be patient. He was.

“Oh good, you’re up,” said Scott. “I want to talk to you, Meoraq.”

“Sheul, O my Father, be with Your son.”

“Not a good time, Scott,” said Amber.

“Miss Bierce, this is none of your business. Be quiet. Meoraq.” Scott’s soft face became what he probably thought was very stern. “What can you tell us about the people who used to live here?”

“They’re all dead. What else do you need to know?”

Scott paused to roll his eyes at his watching people. When he continued, it was in the slow, smiling way that usually meant he thought he was talking to a fool. “Let’s start with this place. Where are we?”

“Eh? This very building?” Meoraq glanced at Amber, but she did not correct him. He flicked his spines. “I don’t know.”

“The room in back, the one with all the little metal creatures—”

“The machines,” said Meoraq, folding his arms. “What about them?”

“What are they doing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why?” asked Amber.

“Miss Bierce, this doesn’t concern you. Now, Meoraq, can you find out what the bots are doing? The lights are working,” he said, pointing up even though more than half of the lights in this particular room were dark. “And the doors have power, so maybe you could fire up one of the computers in the back and—”

“And what, S’kot?” Meoraq interrupted, snapping his spines audibly flat. “What would you have me do in defiance of Sheul’s holy law? What, when all men who are His children know it goes against the Word to take mastery over the machines of the Fallen Age or to dwell again in the cities of the Ancients? Speak your mind plainly to one who is the Sword of His judgment. What?”

Scott puckered his soft lips so that he appeared in every way to be the ass he was. After a long pause, he said, “Do you at least know how long this place has been empty?”

“In years?” Meoraq asked, baffled. “I have no idea. It comes from the age of the Ancients.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere. But you can’t tell us how long ago that was?”

“Since the Fall? No one can.”

“You don’t keep track of time on this planet?”

“It’s Year 33 of Advocate Y’zhare Selthut’s stewardship under Sheul.”

“So it’s been thirty-three years since…since whatever happened?”

“Eh?” Meoraq checked with Amber again, but she was only listening. “No, it’s been thirty-three years since the death of Advocate Falhiri. He held the advocacy, I think, seventeen years. Before that…I don’t remember, but if you want me to recite them all the way back, it won’t happen, human. I couldn’t even do that for my true training master.”

“So, what, they reset the calendar every time they elect a president?” Scott frowned over that a short while, then shook his head. “It doesn’t matter, I guess. How about this: What can you tell me about what happened here?”

“What do you mean?” asked Meoraq, and immediately cut his hand across those words, severing them. “There is no time for this nonsense. Gather your things.”

“Do you know what happened?”

That was Amber. Meoraq hesitated, looking down at her. “The Ancients turned from Sheul. They gave themselves over to Gann and were punished for their sins.”

“Right,” she said, still frowning. “But what killed them all?”

“Sheul’s wrath.”

“Was it a war?”

Meoraq sighed and rubbed at his brow-ridges. “It was Sheul’s wrath.”

“That doesn’t mean anything to us,” Amber said, but before he could reply, she added, “Will you tell me about it?”

Meoraq shot her a black glance, but there was no trace of the sarcasm with which she so often responded to his mention of Sheul. Instead, she seemed almost over-serious. Perhaps even apprehensive. Did she fear that Sheul’s wrath would fall again, simply for that they’d stayed one night within these crumbling walls? His arm twitched—a comforting tap, quickly suppressed. He said, “Mastery is more than the need of the moment. So long as we do not take the machines out of the city or seek to remake them, we do not threaten the Second Law.”

“It’s not that. I’m more worried about what happened here…and what happened in that pit outside. How did…How did everybody die? And are they…” Her troubled gaze broke from his as she looked back at her people. None of them spoke. It took several false starts before she could finish. “And are they still dying?”

The memory of a dream slipped like a phantom hand across his brow, chilling him. It is still among us…

He threw it off with a flick of his spines and smiled at her. “No, Soft-Skin. It was a long time ago. If you wish to hear the story of the Fall, I’ll tell you, but you needn’t fear it. The Hour of Wrath is ended.”

“Tell us all,” ordered Scott, gesturing to his people, all of whom gathered close in a broad ring around him.

Meoraq felt his spines flatten, but now it seemed he had been penned in. It would no longer be possible to extricate himself from their company without shoving one or more of them bodily out of his way.

And Amber was waiting, a kind of apology in her eyes for trapping him in the role of storyteller, but still listening, still wanting to hear. And he found he wanted to tell her, even if it wasn’t just the two of them anymore.

“Sit then, all of you,” said Meoraq, defeated. He hunkered down among them as they obeyed. “I will tell you a child’s lesson, in the manner that I was first taught, which is to say that if I am interrupted, I will slap you across the snout,” he finished with a glare at Scott.

Scott showed him empty hands. “We’re all listening.”

And they all proved it by agreeing and murmuring assent and generally raising the kind of noise that would have sent every one of them to the ground with their hands clapped to their stinging faces if he were a true training master. Meoraq rubbed at his brow-ridges some more and gradually, they quieted. When he looked up again, he looked only at Amber.

“We are all born of two fathers,” he told her. “The father of our mortal bodies, who joined with our mothers and set the features of our clay. And our true Father, great Sheul, who gives us life forever through the forging of our eternal souls.”

“Great,” said Crandall, crawling up to sit with Scott. “I fly clear across the galaxy to get stuck in bible camp again.”

Meoraq swung, the flat of his palm landing lightly but with a satisfying clap of sound across the human’s soft face. Crandall fell into Scott, who fell on the floor, and Meoraq waited, disguising the deep pleasure it gave him to watch the two of them untangle themselves. Judging from the faint curl at the corner of Amber’s mouth when he met her eyes again, it wasn’t as much of a disguise as he’d hoped for.

“These are the two natures of all men,” said Meoraq, continuing on as Crandall righted himself and rubbed his blunt human snout. “One part the clay of Gann and one part the fire of Sheul. And so we are meant to be in balance. You do not seem surprised to hear this,” he added.

Amber rolled her shoulders. “I’ve heard it before. Sort of.”

“Good. So then. The Ancients grew to believe themselves greater than God. They gave themselves to the comforts of their clay and then to its pleasures and finally to its excesses. They grew in greed and lust and violence until all the world groaned under the weight of their sin. These were the Ancients,” said Meoraq, glancing around the ruined room, “and Sheul’s wrath fell upon them.”

Amber lifted one hand and just held it there, in the air. Meoraq stopped and studied it for a moment, puzzled, then flared his spines at her. “Eh?”

She let her arm drop. “What were their sins, specifically? Do you know?”

“Now hit her,” said Crandall.

Scott leaned out of the way a spare instant before Meoraq slapped his servant down a second time. Then he also raised his hand in the air.

It must be a human thing.

“You may speak when I am finished,” Meoraq told him. And to Amber: “The exact deeds of the Ancients are not recorded. It is said only that they corrupted Gann, that they poisoned the world and their own bodies, and that they made trade of flesh.”

Amber frowned. “Made…? You mean they…they were selling people or—oh, I’m sorry,” she said, sitting up a little straighter. She indicated her face. “Go ahead.”

Inviting a blow, he realized after a confused moment. For interrupting him.

He snorted and slapped her, just a tap really, hardly enough to turn her head and they both knew it. “They made trade in every way that profit could be had,” he said while she rubbed at her cheek. “They engaged in sexual depravities for coin. They made wars just to sell weapons. They built machines to do all their labor, so that every man could have the pleasure of possessing slaves to his will. Sheul made them stewards of His House,” he said, “and they destroyed it.”

The humans looked at one another, every one of them showing some degree of discomfort.

“Sheul’s wrath fell over them,” said Meoraq. “The land they had poisoned became blighted, and a curse of barrenness fell over every womb. The waters turned to bile and the heavens to storms. In the first days, the fires that burned for the dead so filled the skies that it was impossible to know whether it was day or night, and blood ran so thick over the land that the trees put forth red-stained leaves and bled red sap when cut. War covered the land as skin covers a man, and for many years that followed, there was only death and rot and sickness. Then came the Prophet. But you don’t want to hear that,” he said. “You asked for the story of the Fall. So. You have heard it.”

“Who was he?” asked Amber. “The…whatever that word was. The holy man.”

“Was his name Jesus?” someone asked, and someone else laughed and said, “Wouldn’t that be hilarious if it was?”

“His name was Lashraq. He and his oracles served Sheul after the Fall, performing acts of penance for the sake of the dead and the dying.”

“He and his what?” asked Amber.

“Apostles, I think,” Scott answered with a crooked smile. “This is kind of funny, isn’t it? Where there twelve of them?”

“They were six altogether,” said Meoraq, knowing he was being baited in some way but unable to understand exactly how. “Prophet Lashraq and his brunt, and the four first oracles: Thaliszr, Oyan, Mykrm and Uyane.”

The furry stripes over Amber’s eyes rose. “Isn’t that your name?”

He smiled, his spines flaring with pride. “Yes. My House is the House Oracle Uyane founded in Xeqor, where my fathers have stood ever since as champions to all Yroq. There are names and Houses as great,” he admitted, “but none greater.”

“Wow.”

“But this is not my story. It is the tale of the Prophet in the first hour of the Fall. Such was his faith and humility that Sheul at last called the Six to Him.”

“What, he killed them?” Amber asked, and smacked herself in the forehead. “I did it again. I’m sorry.” She thrust her chin out for him.

“I forgive you this once. Sit quietly. And no. When I say Sheul called him, I mean only that. Lashraq heard the voice of God, which no man then living had heard, and it called him to the holy shrine of Xi’Matezh.”

“Fucking lizard’s pet,” muttered Crandall.

Meoraq looked at him.

“Dude, you just do not learn,” Eric remarked.

Meoraq pulled his arm back, but Amber caught it.

“Forget him. Please, I really want to hear this. Xi’Matezh…I know I’m saying that wrong, but that’s where you’re taking us, isn’t it?”

Meoraq looked at her hand. She let go of him at once, but he completely ruined the severity of the moment by reaching out to tap at the back of her hand in forgiveness. “Xi’Matezh,” he agreed. “The shrine that stands at the ruined reaches of Gedai, at the very edge of Gann. When all the world fell, Xi’Matezh stood and stands yet. Lashraq brought his oracles across the wildlands, just as I am bringing you, until he arrived at the shrine. There, the doors opened and Sheul Himself received them.”

Her furry brows rose again into arches. “For real?”

“Yes.”

“They actually met him?”

“Manifest as flesh,” said Meoraq.

“No way.”

“Truth. They heard His words and, at His command, wrote them into laws that could be carried to all men. These are the written teachings known as the Word.”

“Oh,” said Amber. Her brows lowered. “I get it. Okay.”

“Xi’Matezh is the holiest of the surviving shrines from the Age of the Ancients.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Because all who enter,” said Meoraq calmly, “hear the voice of Sheul.”

That made her look at him in a whole new way. Meoraq smiled.

“You mean that metaphorically, right?”

“I don’t know that word. I mean precisely what I say.”

“Everyone hears God?”

“All who enter. The doors of Xi’Matezh do not open for everyone.”

That knowing look came over her again. “Ah.”

“But they do open. They will open for me,” he added.

Her eyes narrowed. She leaned forward slightly. “Have you ever personally met anyone who’d been inside?”

Meoraq snorted and leaned forward to meet her. “Yes.”

Her brows rose yet again. Their pliancy was truly astounding to behold. “You have not!”

He took her chin in his hand and gave it a squeeze. “Do not question the word of a Sheulek. We are truth incarnate.”

“You really have?”

“Yes. One of my training masters.”

“What did God tell him?”

“That, he would not speak of.” Meoraq flexed his spines, then lowered them. “But he was changed by it. Changed to the very heart of him.”

Amber frowned, searching his eyes while her own remained troubled. Her flesh in his hand was very soft…very warm…

“I can’t believe that,” she said at last. It seemed to take her some effort. “I’m sorry. I just can’t.”

Meoraq smiled and released her.

“Now he’s going to hit her,” Crandall remarked, and quite a few humans leaned away from her.

“I don’t think you’re lying to me,” Amber went on, unafraid of him or his punishing hand. “And I don’t think your teacher was lying to you, exactly. I’m just saying—”

“That you do not believe in Sheul. And therefore, He cannot be truth because all the truth in the world is known to you.”

Amber cut her eyes away in a wince, but did not protest that. Instead, after several false starts to gather her nerve, she said, “I’m just saying that there’s a lot things your teacher could have seen or heard that maybe…you know…he didn’t understand.”

Meoraq’s spines twitched. Smiling, he gestured for her to continue.

She winced again, seeing his amusement but perhaps not knowing how to read it. Yet she did resume her argument, however uncomfortable it clearly made her. “People tend to find what they look for, Meoraq. That’s my point. And if your teacher went looking for God, he might have been willing to…to see God. In a lot of things. Especially things…” Her gaze wandered restlessly behind her, tapping at this device or that one as they sat surrounded by the trappings of the Ancients. “…that were unfamiliar to him.”

He waited, and when he was certain that she had no more to say, Meoraq leaned forward and gently said, “Do I really strike you as so superstitious a man?”

She started to protest, but this time, he interrupted.

“Do you see me cowering in fear beneath these ‘magical glowing crystals’ or cringing away from the ‘metal creatures’ that litter these ruins?”

Amber’s soft brow creased. She looked up at the lights and then away, at the door, and finally back at him.

“I know what machines are,” he said. “I know how they were used. And I know many of them yet function in some small, dying manner. I have seen the moving images left by the Ancients and heard the echoes of their words and never once been tempted to mistake it for the voice of my eternal Father. The idea is absurd.”

He could see that argument at war with the thoughts inside her and he saw the exact moment that it was defeated.

“Maybe it was someone else,” said Amber.

Meoraq huffed out a breath of exasperation. “A man, you mean.”

“Pretending to be God.”

“So you acknowledge I would not be fooled by a disembodied voice, but instead fall down in worship of a mere man. Your lack of faith in Sheul does not disturb me half as much as your lack of faith in me.”

Again, she failed to read his teasing tone. Dismay filled her ugly face and all the humans around them drew back to give him room to swing. He reached out to give her a playful tap—just the tip of his fingers to her forehead—and said, “Sheul does not require me to prove His existence. You and I will stand together in Xi’Matezh. You will hear His voice when He speaks to me. Perhaps He will even speak to you.”

She continued to gaze at him in the same searching way. “What if the doors don’t open?”

“They will.”

“What if…” A small crease appeared between her troubled brows. “What will you do if he’s not there?”

“A far better question is this.” He leaned forward very close. “What will you do if He is?”

She drew back, frowning.

Meoraq spared Scott a glance and his smile slipped. “Speak now, if you must.”

Scott leaned in at once, intent, to ask the most incongruous question Meoraq had heard out of him yet: “What does the temple look like?”

“Eh?”

“Is there a tower, maybe?”

Meoraq looked at Amber, only to see her looking at Scott, her human face puckered in confusion. “I’ve never seen the temple,” he admitted. “I don’t know.”

“But it’s old, right? Like this place. It’s from before your big war.”

“Dude,” said Dag. “What difference does it make if there’s a tower or not?”

“It makes a big difference, depending on whether it’s a bell tower, say…” Scott paused to eye his people with thinly restrained and completely inexplicable excitement. “Or a transmission tower.”

The words meant nothing to Meoraq, but the effect they had on the humans was clear enough to see. Most merely continued to show puzzlement, but some immediately captured and reflected Scott’s own excitement while others, like Amber, seemed stunned.

“Think about it,” Scott was saying. “The doors don’t open for everyone—there’s some sort of security system. People hear voices—a communications relay. Their Jesus guy called it God because that’s what he wanted to think, maybe what he needed to think after most of the world gets wiped out, but what if their temple is really a skyport?”

“A skyport?” Amber echoed. “Why the hell would you go there? Why not a radio station or a…a regular airport? No, you go straight to skyport?”

“Didn’t you see the picture?” Scott demanded. He climbed to his feet, standing over his people as color began to come into his face. “They had ships! Maybe starships!”

“What does it matter what they had a hundred or two hundred…” Amber trailed off, looking around the room with a strange, despairing sort of look. “…or a thousand years ago? It doesn’t mean anything to us now.”

“If this place he’s taking us to is a skyport, then they don’t just have any old transmission tower out there, it could be a deep-space relay! We could be saved!”

And then all the humans were talking at once, it seemed. Some to each other, some catching at Scott’s sleeve, but all together, louder and louder, using human words that could not be fathomed and making arguments that only grew more violent.

“Enough!” Meoraq shouted, and most of them drew back and quieted at once.

Most of them.

“You don’t know what’s out there!” Scott insisted. “They had the technology! They built all this, they had to have had some kind of global media system!”

“That’s not the goddamn point!” Amber shouted.

Meoraq got a hold on her and one on him and thrust them both back. “I said, enough!”

Amber leaned out around him to stab eyes at Scott, undaunted. “What are you doing? Why are you working people up like this? You wouldn’t know how to use anything we found anyway!”

“Don’t tell me what I know!”

Meoraq hissed and gave them each a crisp shake.

“It all makes perfect sense!” Scott insisted. “They hear voices, Bierce! From people who aren’t there! That’s a transmission tower and if it’s still working, we can use it! We can—”

“We can what? Phone home? We don’t know where we are!”

“It’s still a chance!”

“No it isn’t, God damn it! This is our chance, right here!” Amber shouted. “This is where we are and this is where we have to live!”

“Not necessarily!”

Meoraq surrendered the effort to quiet them, released his holds, and slapped them both—first Scott, then Amber, and then Scott again, because he was the most irritating. He hissed, “Are you children?”

Scott and Amber flushed together. He said nothing. She said, sullenly, “No.”

“Enough then,” he said curtly. “You have had your story. Now we are moving on. Gather your things.”

“We’re going to talk about this later,” Scott said.

It was not clear whether he were warning Amber or Meoraq, but in the event that it was him, Meoraq answered. “There will be time enough, I am certain, but if you cannot manage your words without lowing at one another like animals, I will drive you out into the wildlands where animals belong.”

Scott started to speak, but then obviously thought better of it. He shut his mouth and turned away.

The circle of humans began to break apart, withdrawing to their sleeping spaces to mutter amongst themselves as they packed. He could hear his name (or as close as they could manage to speak it) and he doubted it was spoken with favor or respect, but he would not be baited by that. He had promised Sheul patience and even now, when holding his temper felt so much like holding a knife in his chest and twisting, twisting, he would let his soul’s Father judge him honest.

Beside him, Amber was noisily punching her shiny blanket into her pack, the mark of his hand standing out brightly on her cheek, scraped raw and beaded on one edge with blood. He watched her for a time, wishing he had never begun the tale that had brought them to this moment, because although she certainly deserved a sounder cuffing than he’d given her for her outburst, it had utterly undone all the difficult mending of their first quiet talk this morning. He wanted that moment back, as clumsy as it had been.

He half-raised his hand twice, very much aware of the other humans, even though Amber herself did not appear to see them, or him for that matter, but in the end, he reached out and nudged at her with two knuckles.

She looked at him. In spite of her obvious anger, she kept her mouthparts pressed tight together, waiting on his word. So maybe it hadn’t all been undone.

“I forgive you,” he said.

She just looked at him for a while without any apparent change to her expression. Then her eyes shifted past him so that she could watch Scott.

“I don’t find you at fault,” he said after a moment. “This place is nothing but Gann’s poison. When we are away, things will be better.”

“Well, I’m glad you think so, lizardman,” Amber said, sounding anything but glad. “But I don’t. In fact, I’m pretty sure things are only going to get worse from now on. A fucking skyport.”

 

* * *

 

The walk out of the city went much quicker than the walk in. They no longer stopped each time a window lit up or a kiosk spoke to them. If a door opened, most of them passed it without even a curious glance at what might be inside. At one of the intersections, an insectoid bot replaced lamps that had been broken in the storm, and they all just strolled by like they’d seen giant metal centipedes doing linework all their lives.

It could have been because the ruins had lost the gothic oppressiveness they’d had in an impending thunderstorm. It could have been because they were hungry and wanted to be back in the prairie so Meoraq could hunt. It could have been because several towers had collapsed during the night and seeing them instilled everyone with a natural drive to get the hell out from under the rest of them. It could have been a lot of things, but Amber knew the real reason was Scott. Scott and the ship.

One night in a crumbling old ruin with a couple shiny tiles stuck to the wall had completely reinvented his sense of purpose. They were no longer pioneers fording their way across a desolate, alien landscape; now they were also castaways orchestrating their own rescue. Street after echoing street, it was Scott’s string of outrageous skyport promises and not Meoraq’s grim-faced guidance that kept them moving.

All the way down to the river, Scott talked. Each groaning, error-thick recording to issue from a corroded kiosk brought on a fresh promise of a working deep-space transmission tower. Every intact window or undamaged wall was greater evidence of a surviving skyport than all the rest of the broken ones. They passed a massive junklot where some unseen bot had towed thousands upon thousands of derelict vehicles, stacked into a single rusted brick filling the back of the lot end to end and easily a hundred meters high; the few vehicles which the tow-bot had missed remained where they had died in the street, most strip-salvaged and weathered away to nothing but a ring of rust and a few unusable parts, yet it was the bot who did it which Scott chose to point out as undeniable proof that a starship would still be able to launch itself and fly them home.

Amber heard all this and worse from her usual place at the tail of the marching line, and not just from Scott himself. He had shot the idea of a return to Earth into them like a drug and now they were all laughing and talking what-ifs and planning the first thing they were going to eat, the first place they were going to go, the first person they were going to sue. Humming, as the Candyman would say. Amber remembered what that felt like and she knew it wouldn’t last, although Scott managed to keep them going strong all the way through town and down to the river.

The waterfront district of the ruins was just like the waterfront district in any big city. The few surviving windows of the narrow storefronts they walked along promised all the same sleaze that Amber had seen peddled on her own street back home: Cheap rooms, knock-off brands, no-questions loans and quick cash for whatever you wanted to sell, booze and drugs and sex. Even worse were the commercial bots; unlike the maintenance units which were happy to ignore and be ignored by the aliens in their empty city, the commercial bots were drawn to them like missiles. They dragged themselves behind Scott and his group, croaking advertisements and error messages and occasionally sparking out or banging into debris. The most stubborn of these limped behind Amber for six blocks, plucking at her sleeve with a damaged tendril and offering up enticements such as, “Young ones, boy- and girl-meat. Be their first, safe and clean! We catch and release. They cry!”

At last, Amber swung on it and raised her spear, but either the bot recognized the threatening gesture or it had reached the end of its territory. Either way, it turned back and crawled away, its horrible litany of services and showtimes receding as the sound of water grew louder.

They crossed at one of the bridges soon afterward—the bridge that had been vomiting lightning all night long, in fact—and not only did Meoraq not try to stop them, he gave the order that marched them across.

“Please be kidding,” Amber had said, horrified. “Nicci, stay off that thing! What, was it some other lizardman telling us that these buildings could fall down any second and God alone was keeping them up?”

He threw her an impatient, annoyed glance as he pointed people onto the bridge. They went, not without hesitation, but they went. “God will hold the bridge if it is His will we move on,” he told her. “As I believe it is His will.”

“Well, I can’t say that’s the craziest thing I’ve heard today,” she countered, looking hard at Scott. “But only because I’ve heard so much crazy.”

Wasted. The only one close enough to hear her was Meoraq himself. Even Nicci was already heading out across the derelict suspension bridge of unknown age, spanning the freezing, storm-swollen river.

“This is such a bad idea,” said Amber, following.

Meoraq fell into step beside her. “We walk in God’s sight, Soft-Skin.”

“Yeah? Seems like he’s been doing a lot of blinking lately.”

“Do not be blasphemous.”

They walked. The sound of a hundred tromping boots on an otherwise empty bridge made an ugly sound that neither the perpetual wind nor the rushing water below could drown out. She imagined she could feel the bridge swaying in time with their steps, but she was not imagining the groaning, twanging, snapping sound above them as the ancient suspension cables had to carry them. Amber didn’t realize just how much she expected a collapse until she stepped off the bridge onto solid ground on the other side and felt, not relief, but the unmistakable rush of surprise.

She turned around to stare for a while, but the bridge stubbornly refused to fall down, even now at the most blackly appropriate time.

At length, Meoraq tapped at her shoulder. “We are not stopping here.”

“It’s not fair.”

He frowned, rubbing at the side of his scaly snout for a few seconds before gruffly saying, “We will rest a short time then.”

“That’s not what I meant. I don’t want to rest here. I don’t want to spend another damn minute here.”

“And yet here you stand.”

She threw him a scowl and started walking. Scott and the others were well ahead of her, beyond all hearing. She knew he was talking by the way he moved, gesturing at the windows as they lit up and at the commercial bots that came skulking in from the alleys. In his exuberance, he turned all the way around to make some point or another, walking backwards and pounding his fist into his open palm. She saw him see her, pause…and then wave her way and say something that made all the others look back.

“Deep breaths, Soft-Skin,” said Meoraq. “A count of six, deep and slow.”

“Don’t you even care what he’s telling them?”

His spines shrugged. “No.”

“It matters, you know.”

“Not to me.”

She didn’t argue the point, but she didn’t bother to hide her annoyance either and after several amused sidelong glances as she walked and fumed, Meoraq finally thumped her on the shoulder with two knuckles. “Hold a moment.”

“No. We’re not stopping until we’re out of the city, that’s what you said.”

He caught her by the wrist and stopped them both. Big scaly jerk. Far down the street, Scott apparently saw something interesting and led everyone around a corner and out of sight. All at once, they were alone—the last two people on the planet.

Meoraq too was watching as Scott and the others disappeared. Now he grunted, although he continued to gaze in that direction. “S’kot lies. Do you need me to tell you this?”

“No, of course not! But you’ve got this crazy idea that just because everyone knows that Scott talks out his ass, no one believes him!”

A snort of lizardish laughter. “Talks through his ass,” Meoraq murmured. “And farts from his face.”

“Focus, Meoraq. Our track record for disbelieving things just because they might seem stupid or dangerous is piss-poor. The only reason any of us are here is because we got on an untested ship and let them put us to sleep and shoot us into space.”

“No, you are here because it is where God willed you to be.”

The effort not to roll her eyes made her hand fly up and slap over her face. She rubbed her eyes wearily. “You’re killing me with that crap.”

“Truth does not care if it comforts you, Soft-Skin.”

They walked.

“Honestly,” said Amber. “It doesn’t bother you at all when Scott says your God’s voice is just a two-way radio?”

“Everything S’kot says annoys me,” Meoraq replied with a flick of his spines. “If he wished me fair weather and a warm bed, still it would be all my will to hold from slapping him to the ground.”

“He says there’s machines in Xi’Matezh,” said Amber, petty as that was.

If it was bait—and it was—Meoraq wouldn’t bite at it. “There may well be,” was his mild reply. “And if S’kot seeks to make himself their master, I will judge him for it. Until then, he can pour piss out of his flapping mouth all he pleases.”

“And you don’t even care who else he hurts with it.”

Meoraq glanced at her, then put his hand on her arm and stopped them again. “I don’t know humans, but I know fools. And I know the surest way to encourage fools to follow a wicked man is to tell them not to.”

Amber couldn’t argue.

“It is a long walk yet to Xi’Matezh,” said Meoraq, patting her on the head. “For now, his talk may be exciting, but it will pale with time. He will repeat himself and embellish on his lies, and doubts will grow. When we reach the temple and they see no reward for their wrong-placed faith, yes, it will be difficult, but they will come away stronger, for even the unkindest truth strengthens a man more than the prettiest lie.”

‘Says the man who thinks he’s going to find God there,’ thought Amber, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it, no matter how rotten she felt. He was trying to comfort her. It wasn’t his fault he was terrible at it. What she said, as neutrally as possible, was, “I think you’re seriously underestimating how pretty this lie is.”

“He can’t promise you anything better than God.”

“Of course he can. None of us have ever met God before and we’re just fine with that. We are!” she snapped when he rolled his eyes. “And for that matter, so are you! So you may want to see God when you get there, but you don’t need to. You can live without it if you have to.”

“Live without God?” he said with a lizardish smirk.

“Live without meeting God. Look, all I’m saying is, it’s impossible to miss what you’ve never had.”

“I’ll have to meditate on that, but in this moment, I do not agree. I know a man,” Meoraq mused. “Blood-kin of mine…a friend…who misses very much, or believes he misses, the birth-right that should have belonged to both of us, but which only I achieved. He stood some of the same training. He has at least some understanding of the struggle and pains which I endure, but he misses it anyway. Because it seems so much easier to him, I suppose.”

“I think you’re confusing missing something with wanting it.”

“Perhaps. So. Do you miss your old land—” He looked at her, head cocked, unsmiling. “—or do you just want it?”

To her profound irritation, she had no idea how to answer that.

Meoraq grunted and flicked his spines. “It doesn’t matter anyway. A man may want, or miss, many things in his life, but in the end, we all serve God.”

“Go ahead, lizardman. Pound it in with a hammer.”

“Eh?”

She was saved from having to explain that admittedly snotty remark by the sudden reappearance of Nicci, running down the street toward them, alone. Adrenaline filled her mouth with the taste of metal and she would have bolted forward to meet her except that Meoraq had better reflexes. He caught Amber at her first twitch forward and thrust her behind him, his hooked sword already in his other fist.

Nicci scraped to a stop immediately, her mouth open in a round hole of alarm, both hands flying up in a helpless gesture of surrender.

“What’s wrong?” Amber demanded, ducking under Meoraq’s sword-arm where he couldn’t snatch her back so easily. In theory. “Where is everyone? What happened?”

“Nothing,” Nicci stammered, still staring at the sword in the lizardman’s grip. “We found something, that’s all. Commander Scott wants you to see it.”

“I give no obedience to S’kot!” Meoraq hissed, advancing. “Before you carry his commands to me, you had best ask yourself if you are willing to stand in his place for my answer!”

Nicci backed up fast, stumbling over the broken curb and falling against the wall of a shop whose steadfast commercial bot immediately moved to open the door for her.

Amber gave Meoraq a sharp swat to the bicep, which had to have hurt her a lot more than him, but he actually staggered like she’d hit him with a truck. He turned all the way around to look at her, his spines fully forward and quivering, but she refused to be intimidated. “What’s the matter with you?” she snapped. “Don’t you threaten my sister!”

To her great surprise, Nicci chimed right in alongside her. “Why do you always have to push us around?”

Meoraq kept his eyes on Amber for as long as it took the insistent commercial bot to gronk politely for their attention three times. When he finally broke that stare, it was with a pensive upwards glance and a private word with his god. Then and only then, did he lean back and clip his sword back onto his belt. “So. We will see this machine you have found, but you can tell that cattle’s ass who pretends to lead you that we are not carrying it out of these ruins.”

“We couldn’t even if we wanted to,” Nicci said, her brows pinching together in a look of lofty scorn that Amber hadn’t seen to quite that degree since her teen years. “Why do you always have to be so negative about everything Commander Scott does? And after everything he does for you?”

Meoraq’s spines rose—not flicking forward, but coming up slow until they stood at full extension. “What a remarkable thing to say,” he said in a dangerously mild and distracted way.

“He found something amazing!” Nicci insisted, now openly glaring. “Something that he knew you were going to want to see most of all! And here you are, jumping to conclusions and…and…stabbing him in the back!”

Meoraq smiled. It was not an edgy, tooth-filled, predatory smile at all, but almost a dreamy one. His eyes unfocused briefly. The smile broadened.

“We’re coming,” said Amber.

Meoraq’s hand dropped over her shoulder and squeezed. “In a moment,” he told Nicci. “Leave us.”

“You don’t have to leave,” said Amber, but Nicci was already moving rapidly down the street.

Meoraq watched until she was good and gone, keeping his hand comfortably locked on her shoulder despite her efforts to shrug it off. It took several minutes, and each one stretched out thinner and longer, until the small greyish blob that was Nicci turned a corner and vanished. Immediately, Amber went on the defensive. “I’m sorry she said that, but what do you expect?”

“Cattle will bellow and beetles will bite,” he said scornfully. “S’kot will talk out of his ass and his fool people will repeat him. I don’t concern myself with N’ki’s behavior. I concern myself with yours. So.” Suddenly his scaly face was right in front of hers. “What am I about to say to you?”

Her mind went wonderfully blank. “How many guesses do I get?”

His face got even closer, as improbable as that was. “You,” he said, “hit me.”

She blinked and looked at her hand, which was still pink and stinging a little. “Are you going to tell me it hurt?” she asked incredulously.

His red eyes narrowed. “I did not mark that. And before you repeat yourself, know this: It is the law of all the city-states under Sheul that no man may lay naked hands upon a Sheulek, save at invitation, for his is the flesh of the Father and the punishment for such presumption is death. So. What did you say?”

“I’m not a man. I’m a woman.”

His head cocked. “I did not mark that either. What did you say?”

“Uh, I said I’m sorry and I won’t do it again?”

Meoraq straightened up with a grunt and resumed walking.

As she followed, Amber studied his raised spines, his black throat, and what few other minutia existed to help her gauge his mood, decided it was safe to be a little catty, and added, “I also said you were being kind of a baby for making a big deal out of it.”

He coughed up a dry laugh. “Did you indeed? You ought to know that it is as much a crime to insult one of God’s Swords as it is to lay naked hands upon one. If we were at home, you would be publically whipped for what you have just ‘said’, and I don’t believe I could stop it.”

Her feet rooted at once. “You’re not going to…I mean…Nicci…?”

He shrugged his spines. “I suppose I could make the effort to feel offense, but you would only insist on bearing her punishment.”

Would she? The doubt pricked at her just once before she crushed it in a kind of horror. Of course she would. They were family. They were all each other had. Amber would always stand up for Nicci, and Nicci…would always stand up for her.

“Have you ever seen it happen?” Amber asked. Blurted, really. Anything to keep from thinking.

“Eh? Of course.”

“I mean to you. Or over you, I guess I should say. Have you ever got someone hurt because they called you a…a scaly son of a bitch or gave you one of these?” She slapped lightly at his bicep.

He glanced at his arm where her hand had struck, smiling with his mouth even as his head cocked—not quite enough to really be a threat. “Yes.”

“Really?”

“Many times. I wasn’t always offended, to say truth,” he said in his careless I-have-people-whipped-every-day way. “But law is law. When I am at home in Xeqor, I have the authority to forgive, but when I travel, such forgiveness reflects poorly upon the leaders of that city. They must show mastery, especially in conquest.”

“Even if they were just kidding?” Images from old movies spun through her head—pilgrim ladies set in stocks in the town square, sailor guys tied to the mast while the bosun whipped his back bloody—but it wasn’t all the movies, was it? There were always stories in the news about some rich jackass partying a little too hard in some foreign country getting his ass caned and turning it into an international incident. She’d never had much sympathy for those people before, and yet the idea that she personally could be dragged away and beaten in front of a jeering crowd just because she’d called Meoraq a baby and swatted him on the arm boggled her mind.

“Intent is of no consequence to the law. Sheul’s Swords may suffer no abuse from lesser men. Only another Sheulek or a Sheulteb has the right to confront me. All others, even if born under the Blade, can be severely punished for a thoughtless word or an idle blow.” His spines twitched. His gaze grew distant. “Even…if they are kin.”

“And you’re okay with that?”

No answer, not even a grunt. They walked half a block in silence.

“I’m not trying to be rude,” said Amber finally.

He roused himself from wherever he had gone to give her a friendly nudge. “No one is here to see us, Soft-Skin. Say what you like. I’ll let you know if I’m offended. You won’t stop,” he added with a wry tilt to his head. “But I’ll let you know.”

Another half-block passed, with crippled bots making the only conversation. This time, the silence was Amber’s.

“I’m a bitch, aren’t I?” she said. It just fell out, landing heavily and dragging along behind her like one of those iron balls you saw chained to a prisoner’s ankle in the old-time cartoons.

“I don’t know what that means.”

She didn’t know how to explain and didn’t entirely want to, knowing that she’d called his mother one just last night. Instead, she nerved herself up for an honest answer and asked, “Do you think I’m hard to live with?”

“Eh.” He flicked his spines in a careless manner, not even bothering to shrug them all the way. “I’m the wrong man to ask. I’ve never had to live with anyone so long as I’ve lived with you humans. Even the Prophet himself would likely be in under my scales by now.”

“In other words, yes.” She tried to smile like it was a joke, but it wasn’t and she couldn’t, quite.

“No one speaks for a Sheulek. My words are my own. There are no others. You should—” But just then, they rounded the corner and saw the others, and whatever else Meoraq had been about to say ended seamlessly with, “Fuck Gann.”

It got a laugh out of her, the first real laugh since they’d stumbled into this god-awful place, the first laugh in what felt like lifetimes. “I should what?”

He glanced at her, still scowling over Scott, but a little sheepish, she thought. “That isn’t what I meant to say.”

“I thought God’s feet only told the truth. Your words are your own. There are no others.”

“Insufferable human,” he said. “Come. I need to see what this cattle’s ass is about now, and if God be merciful to me, it will end badly.”

The wind, which had been blowing more or less non-stop since Amber first crawled out of the wreck of the Pioneer and which had long ago become a kind of white-noise sensation she scarcely noticed, suddenly threw an extra-cold breeze their way, sending an honest-to-God chill up Amber’s spine. At the same time, the lit window they were standing beside flickered and died. She tried to laugh over that (sheesh all we need is some ominous music duh-duh-duh-DUMMMM the omen is officially here) but it wasn’t really funny. It was Scott. Of course it was going to end badly.

Scott and the others were standing in the middle of the street two blocks down, but even from here, Amber could see what they were looking at. It was another kiosk, but one of enormous size, planted in the middle of the intersection so that each side faced out into traffic. Centered in each wall of the kiosk was a video screen, and judging from the way everyone had ringed around it, all of them were working. Bands of static cut across the image, but the lizardman speaking there was still perfectly discernible, if muted. Amber had to be right up next to the group before she could hear anything at all. Only one of the speakers seemed to be working and the audio feed was in terrible condition, but a few words had survived.

“…won’t help anymore,” was the first phrase to fall out of hissing static into recognition. “It’s everywhere. It’s in everything. You can’t…” And back to static.

“What is this?” Amber asked, and was violently hushed by a dozen people.

The audio came back with “…still alive. I have to believe that,” the lizardman said, and no amount of static could dampen the feverish intensity with which he said it. “I have to. I do.”

Static.

“Just wait. It’s coming up next,” said Nicci, slipping into the small space between Amber and Meoraq. Amber thought she heard a hiss, but when she glanced over, Meoraq was walking away, looking down empty streets in his usual restless way.

Amber waited, and after a long stretch of damaged tape and gibberish without any context to draw from, a single word leapt out: “Matezh.”

She jumped a little, but there wasn’t time to look for reactions in anyone else. The lizardman on the feed was still talking, but the sound was terrible, requiring all her concentration and a lot of guesswork to translate.

“…look for lights…careful, because the roads are…locked, but I…”

And then something else, something Amber couldn’t begin to figure out, but which made Meoraq stop and look sharply around—two words: “Nuu Sukaga.”

“What does that mean?” she asked, once the feed had collapsed again into static.

“I don’t know,” Meoraq told her, but the kiosk had all his attention now.

“It will ask for your mnabed—”

Amber touched Meoraq’s arm and he said, frowning, “A key…I think. The base of the word is the same, but I’ve never heard this variation.”

“—but just say it again. Nuu Suk—” A sudden storm of static obscured the rest of it. The lizardman on the screen kept talking, just a ghost behind waves of distortion and TV snow. The sound was nothing but electronic pops and scratches for several minutes, but there had to be more coming because several people were fidgety, anxious.

And then it came. The tape clearly hit the end of its recording, blipped to black, and then came back, relatively clear. The lizardman tapped at something at a console out of sight, looked directly up into whatever camera was recording this, and said, “If you can hear this, you’re not alone. But if you’re still in the cities, you have to leave. I know the emergency channels are still transmitting orders to stay in your homes, but that isn’t safe. And as far as I can see, the aid stations have all been overrun. But listen, I’m sending this from my base in Matezh. It’s got plenty of food, plenty of water, and it’s absolutely impenetrable. It’s also got probably the best communications system in the world,” he added with a shaky smile. Or maybe it was just the recording that shook; it was getting hard to tell. “So I know you can hear me. And you need to know—” The tape blipped and rolled back a bit, the color skewed. “—need to know that as long as any one of us is left alive, there’s still hope. But we have to come together. We have to—” Static and squeals filled the speakers for a few seconds and came back at deafening volume with, “—come to Matezh,” before snapping back into normal range. “This is no world to be in alone,” the lizardman said on the monitors. “It’s not too late. I know it seems that way, but it’s really not. I’m still here and so are you. We can still—”

He kept talking, but the audio was gone, and the next thing that came in clearly was, “…won’t help anymore,” so she knew it had gone the full loop.

“So,” said Meoraq. He looked around, not as if hunting out dangers this time, but just looking. Seeing the ruins, perhaps for the first time. “This is what he heard.”

“Huh?”

“Master Tsazr. The man I knew who entered Xi’Matezh.” His eyes finished their slow crawl over the dead city and came back to her. “He was here.”

“Maybe.” Amber spared the kiosk a distracted glance. “He says he’s transmitting across every bandwidth, or at least, I’m guessing that’s what he’s saying. So your teacher might not have been here, exactly—”

“You’ve always got to poke holes, don’t you?” interrupted Scott.

“—but this is probably something he heard if spent any time in one of these cities where the TV was on,” Amber finished, ignoring him. “I’m a little surprised you’d never heard it before. I guess you’ve never been in any ruins, huh?”             

“Many times.” Meoraq tapped at the kiosk wall—the monitor nearest to his hand flickered—and shrugged his spines. “I’ve never listened to the things I’ve heard there before. Ha. I might have heard this a hundred times.” He paused and looked back over his shoulder at Scott. “I admit, you make me curious,” he said, and cocked his head (not, Amber recalled, a gesture of curiosity). “Why did you stop to listen? What is it that you believe it means?”

“Well, isn’t it obvious?” Scott waited until Meoraq deliberately flattened his spines before declaring, “It’s proof.”

Amber gave the lizard a few torturous seconds to jump on that, but he seemed content to just stand there and study Scott, so in the end, she broke. “Of what?”

Scott looked at her, smiling. “It’s a transmission, Miss Bierce. It’s coming from Matezh. And since you appear to be incapable or unwilling to add two and two, I’ll do it for you: There is a transmission tower at Matezh and,” he went on, raising his voice and one finger as Amber opened her mouth. “And it’s still working!”

Again Amber tried to talk, but this time it was Nicci who stopped her. Her color was high, but the shine in her eyes was too bright and brittle to be only excitement. It was a Bo Peep look, when the high was gone and she was trying to cozy just one more hit out of someone until tomorrow, just one more hit and everything was golden, just one more and it was all love.

“Listen,” Nicci pleaded in their mother’s voice, wearing their mother’s face. “Just listen to him, okay? He makes sense!”

Sense? Amber shook her head, looking back and forth from her baby sister/dead mother to the lunatic in a damned usher’s uniform, but it was Meoraq she kept coming back to. Meoraq, who merely watched it all play out with his head tipped up like that and his arms calmly folded.

“I’m aware of our situation here and I’m aware that we may all be living it with different goals,” Scott was saying, addressing all of them now. He talked fast and loud, making eye contact with everyone as he paced in front of the kiosk, and the choir was already clapping and swaying along. “I want to find a transmission tower at the end of this road. Hell, I want to find a skyport! Is that fantastic? Yes! But how fantastic, really? Meoraq—” He swung to point and Meoraq’s spines slapped flat. “—wants to find a temple where he can talk to God,” finished Scott, backing away. “And Amber Bierce wants us to find this!”

His voice bounced off the walls and down the lifeless street, making people look uneasily around them, reminded of the emptiness all over again.

“What are you doing, Scott?” Amber asked. She didn’t like the sound of her voice following those echoes. “How can you stand there and talk about skyports like it represents some sort of real chance?”

“Why not? Look around! All their stuff is still here! It still works!”

“Yeah, right. We don’t know what it’s doing, but it works. At least, the stuff that hasn’t crumbled literally to dust still works.”

“That was just the synthetic stuff.”

“And God knows there won’t be any of that on a starship!” Amber flung out her hands in a kind of furious surrender. “Okay, you know what? Fine. Let’s go to the magical land of Make Believe and pretend there is a ship somewhere in Xi’Matezh. What makes you think you could actually fly it? Piloting a starship isn’t something you just hope to figure out on the way. Do I seriously even have to point out that it’ll be an alien ship? With alien technology?”

“Technology follows logical rules, no matter who makes it,” Scott declared. “Look around you, Miss Bierce. The lights look like lights. The doors open like doors. Heck, even the bathrooms look like bathrooms.”

“And the giant fucking spiderweb in back of the building last night? What did that look like, genius?”

“I’m not going to continue this discussion if you can’t be reasonable.”

“I’m the only reasonable one in this discussion! We will not be able to fly an alien ship! Even if we found a manual, we couldn’t read it! This is craziness!”

They booed her. They actually booed her. She thought Crandall started it, maybe as a joke, but there couldn’t have been less than a dozen others who joined in. In the echoing street, it sounded like more. A lot more.

“See, that’s the difference between you and me,” Scott told her in his lofty Commander-on-Deck voice. “I don’t need to scare people to feel better about myself. I’m not afraid to give people hope.”

Amber stared at him, at all of them, speechless. Then, the explosion. She never felt it coming. One second, she was fine, if dumbstruck; the next, she was shouting up the whole world. “There is no fucking ship, you lying son of a bitch! We are never going home! This is it! This is what’s real! There is no fucking hope!”

Meoraq’s hand closed over her shoulder. Hard.

“You see? This is her reality,” Scott told the rest of the crowd while Amber tried unsuccessfully to shrug herself free. “The one where everything is pointless and we might as well give up and jump off the first cliff we come to.”

“No, Everly, it’s the reality where we’re starving to death on a fucking alien planet instead of making people think we don’t have to try anymore because we’ll all be saved by a magic ship! That’s giving up, jackass! That’s—Get your goddamn hand off me, Meoraq!”

“Hush,” he said.

“But—”

He looked down at her, his head cocked and red eyes burning.

She shut her mouth, breathing hard, fighting not to cry.

“Thank you, Meoraq,” Scott said, turning back to his Manifestors. “I never said we don’t have to try, now have I? The difference is, what I think we need to try to do is survive until we can find our way home, while Miss Bierce seems to think we need to survive until we die. She says there’s no future. She says there’s no hope.” He paused to send her a scornful glance. “I think we’re all pretty lucky you’re not in charge.”

“This isn’t about who’s in charge!” she insisted, and just as suddenly realized that, where that was concerned at least, she was dead wrong. Flustered, she looked around and saw a hundred accusing, angry eyes aimed back at her. Even Nicci’s. And she guessed that shouldn’t really surprise her, since Nicci had better reasons than anyone else here to think Amber was a bitch and a bully, but it still hurt. “You can’t…Come on,” she said, not shouting anymore but only trying to make them understand, to make Nicci understand at least. “Think what you want about me, but just…be sensible. Nothing we find out there could possibly be in better condition than this place, and just look at this place! It’s falling apart!”

“Stuff still works,” said Eric after a moment. “The doors open. Some of the lights come on. The bots look okay.”

“Okay?” Amber pointed accusingly at the straggling commercial units that had followed them—all spitting out damaged audio feed and error messages, their dented hulls and cracked face-plates showing countless years of erosion no matter how well they’d tried to maintain themselves. “That’s what you call okay? That’s what you’re using to prove we can power a ship up? Launch it? Navigate our way back to Earth?”

Meoraq’s hand on her shoulder tightened briefly, making her realize how her voice was climbing…and quavering. Again, she quieted without conscious effort, but her attempts to catch his eye were futile. He watched Scott, only Scott, with his head still on the tilt and now his mouth very slightly open to show the glinting tips of a few teeth, but he wasn’t saying anything. Why wasn’t he saying anything?!

“A ship would be in a hangar,” Eric said after an uneasy glance at the bots. “It’d be protected. Like the spider-things from last night. They were all okay, not even a little bit wonky. Even the bot that lived there was doing just fine.”

“One of them! All the others were dead! You can’t just ignore that! You can’t…” She trailed off, seeing nothing in Eric’s face but a flat disdain that she simply couldn’t understand. He wasn’t some crazy Manifestor, he was a Fleetman who’d called Scott an idiot a hundred times behind his back. He knew better than what he was saying. He knew better! “Look,” she said, abandoning Eric to try and appeal to the others. “I want to go home as bad as the rest of you—”

Scott laughed loudly and several others joined in with scorn.

“—but this isn’t going to happen,” Amber insisted. “It’s just not! It’s…It’s silly!”

“You’re right, Bierce,” Scott said, actually smiling at her. She was down, surely he had to see that, but he just couldn’t resist a parting kick. “Thinking we might find a starship is just silly. Why don’t you look Meoraq here in the face and tell him we’re on our way to meet God? Why don’t you ask Him to send us home? Hell, let’s ask Him for a brain and a heart and some courage while we’re at it, what do you say?”

Amber never had a chance to answer. The hand that gripped her shoulder with such strength now abruptly shoved her to one side so that Meoraq could stride furiously forward. Scott jumped back, but he wasn’t quick enough. In fairness, Amber really didn’t think anyone was quick enough. Meoraq snagged him by the shirtfront and yanked him close, holding him easily upright even when Scott’s feet went right out from under him.

And then he tipped his head back, studying the sky with a calm and thoughtful air while Scott struggled at the end of his arm. “I do not require your belief,” he said at length. “Not yours. Not hers. Not anyone’s. Sheul needs no standard carried before him into battle. His will permeates all things, human. All things. So. I do not require your belief,” he concluded, still speaking softly as he raised Scott up just a little higher, just a little closer to his furious dragon-like face. “But I will not tolerate your mockery. Perhaps it does not offend Sheul, but it fucking well offends me.”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Scott said hurriedly. “I was just trying to make a p—”

“Regardless of what you think you will find when we reach Xi’Matezh, that is where I am taking you. It is not a matter for discussion and it is certainly not a matter for you to argue over. ‘But the Second Law writ was this: Lo, the Age of the Ancients is ended. Let their cities fall to ruins. Let their time pass out of memory. Let no one seek to master or remake the machines with which they poisoned Gann, lest they be corrupted in return, for such corruption shall be deemed unforgiveable.’ So did God speak and so did the Prophet record and so am I, Uyane Meoraq, bound to enforce. Hear me and mark me well, S’kot, Xi’Matezh is the oldest of the shrines built at the hour of the Fall and there may well be machines even in that holy place, but if you seek to make yourself their master—” Meoraq brought Scott right up to his scaly face, lifting him until nothing but the very tips of his scrabbling toes touched the ground and doing it with just one hand and no suggestion of effort. “—I will draw His blade and cut you down and leave you to rot where you lie. How do you mark me?”

“Meoraq, you can’t arbitrarily—”

“How do you mark me?”

“How is it a sin to use a starship if God Himself put it there for us to—”

Meoraq drew his long sword and raised it slightly, just slightly. “How do you mark me?” he asked, no louder and with no greater menace. He didn’t really need it.

“I understand,” said Scott.

“Do I have your obedience?”

“You’ve always had my full support, Meoraq. You’re an invaluable resource and I’m confident we can come to some mutually respectful compromise before we reach your temple. In the meantime, you can rely upon me to direct my people to provide you with any assistance you feel you require in the course of your efforts.”

Amber could see that Meoraq knew that none of that had been an enthusiastic, ‘Yes, sir!’ He let that be fairly obvious; he probably wanted Scott to see it, too. But there were subtler signs that suggested Scott’s usual tactic of using big words in complicated ways had been once again successful and Meoraq had no clear idea of just what Scott had said at all. Amber waited tensely for the slap that precedent suggested was coming, the slap that would lead to the bellowing and apologizing, which would lead to the whispering and the dirty looks and everything that was bad already would only get worse and worse and why couldn’t Meoraq see that?

But maybe he did, because in the end, he grunted and set Scott on the ground. “So. I consider the matter closed, and I will hear no more about it,” he warned, sheathing his sword. “I will not allow you to preach at me all the way to Gedai. If I am present, you are silent.”

Scott straightened out his jacket (too briskly; one of the sleeves tore a bit up at the shoulder when he tugged at the cuff, exposing the slightly deeper crimson of the other jacket he wore beneath it) and nodded once, in a commanding way. “I have to admit that I am disappointed.”

“I am present,” Meoraq said curtly. “You are silent. And we are leaving.”

He proved it, walking away up the street without even a backwards glance to see if people obeyed them. They did, drawing off in little groups to whisper and giving him plenty of distance, but they did. Amber lingered, wanting to run after him, to walk beside him and soak in his confidence until she could wear it like a coat and let all these ugly stares just bounce off. She thought he might let her, even if he wasn’t too happy about it, but she also knew how it would look. Not just like she was running off to hide under Meoraq’s skirts after he’d gone waving his sword around again, but like she’d put him up to it in the first place. They might already think so—and if they didn’t, Scott would have them thinking it before long—but she wasn’t going to show them they were right.

“Come on, Nicci,” said Amber, reaching out her hand. “The sooner we get out of here, the better things will—”

“Leave me alone,” Nicci said, anger thinning her voice into a caricature of their mother’s. “Just leave me alone. I’ll talk to you later, but right now, I’m so sick of you that I can’t even look at you!”

“Nicci—”

“I’ll take care of you, Nicci!” Nicci spat, screwing up her face in a horrible sing-song sneer. “We don’t have a choice, Nicci! I know what I’m doing, Nicci!” Each name was another bullet and when the chamber was empty, Nicci threw the gun. “I wish Mama was here instead of you.”

And as Amber stood there, stupidly gaping, her baby sister deliberately raised her arm and slapped her in the face. The blow mostly caught her on the cheek, a little on the nose. Heat flooded her wind-chilled face. Amber didn’t move.

Nicci turned around and left her. She ran to catch up with Scott (i was going to do that wasn’t i but it was meoraq i wanted meoraq i want now O god to catch his arm the way she does and have someone to walk with) and they all walked away.

“She didn’t mean it,” said Amber, alone in the street. “She always comes back and we’ll say we’re sorry and it’ll be fine.”

“I have to believe that,” the recording in the kiosk hissed. “I have to. I do.”

Amber looked at him. The lizardman in the screen looked back at her through a haze of static. Then the image blipped once, hard, and the whole kiosk went black and silent. A thin plume of smoke rose out of the speakers and the wind took it away.

She started walking.

 

4

 

Meoraq viewed the time spent in the ruins as time lost and it took some hard driving over the next few days to make it up. Without the distraction of the ruins to stop and stare at, they moved themselves along much faster, faster even than they had moved before they had ever seen the damned place. Scott used his lies as a cattleman used a bait-stick and the humans were just as happy to trot in pursuit as any mindless beast. Truth, as long as it kept them moving at this pace and he didn’t have to listen to it himself, Meoraq was content to let Scott make all the promises he liked, although he knew it upset Amber.

As it should upset him. “To let a lie stand is to speak it with your own throat.” That was in the very first verse of the very first chapter in the Book of Admonitions. Meoraq could remember learning to make his letters by that self-same verse, and how his hand had cramped in the practice because he could not make them perfectly at first undertaking. And now he stood, twelve years gone in the service of Sheul, willing to close his eyes to the sin in his own camp for the false peace that masked it.

Meoraq meditated on this—once they were well-gone from the ruins and he had some leisure to do so—but an hour’s prayer at his fireside with all the humans milling nearby in their clumsy, complaining way proved too much a distraction. His thoughts kept turning from the failings of his character to places he had no desire to explore: the image of the ship set in tiles on the wall; House Uyane and whether Nduman had been called home from his own circuit (or from the woman and bastard children he covertly kept) to manage its households while Meoraq took this pilgrimage; Amber throwing herself against him, frightened by the storm.

That was the image that hooked on him and he found himself opening his eyes to study her where she sat now. He thought she looked thinner. He couldn’t be certain of it, but he thought so. He hadn’t really paid that much attention to her body until the night she’d bathed beside his tent and cast her shadow over it…and crawled in to him afterwards…and he knew that filthy, ragged clothing such as she wore had a way of making the body beneath seem smaller, but he didn’t think she looked right.

She’d had a pot of tea with him this morning before their travels, and a largish share of his cut of the gruu he’d found last night, but his share had been a spare one to begin with. Before that, there had been only bites of cuuvash for him and her both. The last real meal she’d taken had been days before coming across the ruins.

So. He would meditate later. His obligations came first.

Meoraq found his feet and beckoned to Amber. She looked at him, but did not move from her place at his fire. “Keep your people close until I return,” he ordered.

She didn’t ask where he was going. Neither did she take up her spear and try to join him. He wouldn’t have allowed it in any case, but she didn’t even try. She only bobbed her head in silence. She was watching Scott’s fire, so he watched it too, but saw nothing unusual about the throng of humans that surrounded it.

A thought struck.

“Where is your N’ki?” he asked.

“Over there, somewhere.” Amber turned away to prod listlessly at Meoraq’s fire with a bit of burnt stick. “She’s still mad at me.”

He couldn’t think of anything to say to that. Well, that wasn’t strictly truth: He could have easily told her that Nicci was a mewling little pest whose opinion ought to matter about as much as the mud on which Amber sat, but he knew it wouldn’t help. He often found it incomprehensible that the same Amber who dared to strike him with her naked hand and shout insult into his face could be so beaten down by a single scornful glance from the wretched sack of flesh that was her blood-kin. He didn’t say that either.

“Stay here,” he said instead and was further troubled when she gave that same silent acquiescence, enough to say against all wisdom: “Or come with me, if you wish.”