Текст книги "The Last Hour of Gann"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 80 страниц)

Amber stood there.

The lizard knocked again, this time with a few words and a flick of his spines.

She sat down where he wanted her.

He grunted and looked away, watching all the people who were watching them. He muttered under his breath, glanced skyward, scratched his throat. If he had a reason for calling her over, he was in no hurry to tell her what it was.

“Meoraq,” said Amber.

He grunted, still without looking at her. Scott was at the head of the crowd now, just beyond the invisible boundary marked by the lizardman’s swords, listening to the complaints of the people who’d had their bags kicked.

“Meoraq,” said Amber again, reaching for his arm.

He caught her before she could touch him, but he looked at her.

Now what?

“Hand,” said Amber, feeling stupid and a little desperate. She pointed at her own, caught in his unbelievably strong, scaly grip. “Fingers.” She wiggled them.

Meoraq released her, frowning, and watched as she brought her arm up between them.

“Fingers. Look! One, two, three, four, five. Hand,” she said, now pointing at her other one. “And fingers. One, two, three, four, five.”

He said nothing.

“Head,” said Amber, pointing at herself. “Hair. Ear, see it? And this one. Ear. Two ears. Eyes. One, two. Two eyes. Nose. One nose. Mouth. All of it together? This is my face. My face is the front of my head. It…Damn it, will you say something?”

He did not, but after a long, frustrating silence, he slowly raised his hand.

“Hand,” said Amber, rubbing her eyes.

He splayed it.

She straightened up a little. “Fingers.”

He made a fist and brought them up one at a time, listening as she counted them off. He began to point—at the fire, his tent, the trees, the grass, the sky—stopping only once, when one of the Manifestors broke the boundary-line of his camp. Other than that warning hiss, he never made a sound. He made no attempt to repeat the words she said for him.

But this was progress. This could work. She would make it work.

Amber talked, breaking things down into smaller and smaller words, talking until her throat went dry. Meoraq watched, listened, and was silent.

7

The longer he listened, the more certain Meoraq became that the strange chatter of the creatures who called themselves humans was indeed a true language, entirely separate from his own. This troubled him. The Prophet’s Word is the only Word. This was the first law of Sheul, repeated no less than twenty-three times throughout the book of His Word, and apart from the obvious, it had been interpreted to mean that there must be a single language so that all men might hear and understand the wisdoms of Sheul. Where once there had been countless tongues spoken over Gann, there was now only one: Dumaqi, the speech of men.

So. That the humans neither spoke nor even seemed to understand dumaqi was therefore an ominous sign of their true nature, but Meoraq had to admit that he had not emerged from his mother’s womb speaking it either. He would have to meditate on the matter. In the meantime, this left him struggling to make sense of a creature who thought all she had to do to talk was move her mouthparts around. And really, what else could they do? A human’s flat face had no snout, which meant no resonance chamber, and Sheul alone knew how hard it must be to make those wriggly little mouthparts shape the sounds those deformed tongues could not. Given their limitations, their absurdly simplistic language was no more than sounds strung together, entirely lacking the subtle nuance and precision of dumaqi. By the end of that first day, Meoraq was already beginning to glean some understanding from the creatures’ jabber. Not much. A word here. A sound there. A name.

Amber. Her name was Amber.

She sat with him throughout the grey hours of the day when all the other creatures came, stared awhile, then left again. Her hands moved as she spoke, gesturing here or there to add emphasis to her simple sounds, often returning to indicate just her, just him. Her gaze remained disturbingly direct; her eyes were so damned green.

When darkness fell, they lit more fires—heaps of wood that gave out more smoke than heat—and sat around them to mutter and stare. They had no meat after their one failed hunt, but the one called Scott eventually brought out a satchel of something in small, wrapped portions for his people to eat. Meoraq was himself overlooked, but as the stuff appeared quite disgusting, he was happy to make do with cuuvash. And since Amber was sitting with him and had not been offered anything, he snapped her off a square too.

She took it. Not immediately and not without a glance back at her people, but she took it. And after watching him bite into his, she gnawed off a piece of hers and sat, frowning with her entire malleable face, chewing it like cattle.

Scott came back over, also frowning. He spoke at some short length, gesturing. Amber answered. Scott spoke again, louder. Amber took another bite of cuuvash and appeared to ignore him. Scott aimed his next roll of gibberish at Meoraq. Now Amber said something, but Meoraq pointed two fingers at her and she quieted. “No one speaks for a Sheulek,” he told her. To Scott, he said, “Go away,” making shooing sweeps of his arm so that his meaning could not be misinterpreted.

Scott talked, not louder but much, much longer, before finally pointing aggressively at Meoraq’s cuuvash.

“Get your own,” said Meoraq, contentedly grinding his cuuvash against the roof of his mouth until it was soft enough to swallow.

Scott waited, moving his angry eyes back and forth between him and Amber, but eventually walked away. Meoraq watched him at the largest fire, speaking tirelessly and looking like nothing so much as a city governor holding court. He could see that Amber was listening, although she did not watch, and she did not appear easy with what she heard. She looked at the remaining portion of cuuvash in her hand and, after only one small bite, tried to give it back to him.

Meoraq turned his head to watch the clouds roll over the moon and pretended not to see. Eventually, she put the cuuvash in a fold of her clothes and he looked at her again. That freakish little nub of a nose. Those fat, purplish folds around her mouth. The rounded shells of her ears.

And her eyes. The living green fire of her eyes.

“No one man can ever comprehend all the wonders of Sheul’s making,” he said, speaking to himself more than to her. “So it says in the Word and I always thought that I believed it. But how could I believe it when I never truly understood until now how much further the wonders of His making could surpass a man’s comprehension?”

“Mee’orakk,” she replied and reached to touch his chest.

This time, he allowed it, frowning down at her hand where it pressed on his bare flesh. “No man could have imagined a hand like that,” he mused. “Five fingers and those round, flat, useless little claws. Scaleless. Hairless. Soft. And yet what have you done with that hand but touch a Sheulek?”

“Amber.” She patted herself just above the twinned swellings of her chest.

“I hear you,” he said, studying them. “Are those really teats or do I just think so because I suspect you to be female and am looking for proof? If they are teats, where is the baby? It would have to be a suckling to swell you so. Or babies, I suppose; you have two teats, you must bear two babies.”

Amber said her name. Meoraq replied with his. He watched her slap her hands to her face and hide behind them, rubbing just as though she had brow-ridges to rub.

That was kind of cute.

“I have to pray,” Meoraq told her, told them both, really. He retreated to his tent to do it and meditated there for some time, fruitlessly, before commending himself to his Father’s divine hands, here in the camp of these creatures, and lying down upon his mat to sleep. He did not undress. He kept his kzung drawn beside him. He feared no creature-assassins but was ready for them. He breathed the way he had been taught, counting six steps over and over, and stopping to listen each time the creatures approached his tent.

As he waited for Sheul’s peace to overtake his restless mind, he found himself wondering what the young of these creatures might look like. He could almost imagine them—twin monsters in miniature—small hands and greedy mouths at work at the fullness of their mother’s teats (Amber’s, for no other reason than that she was the human he’d been sitting with all day), perhaps one at each.

Outside, the wind gusted, moaning like a woman lost to fire. Scott’s voice briefly overtook it and Amber answered, her tone as fearless as her hand had been upon his body. Meoraq listened, smiling, then rolled onto his side and closed his eyes to sleep.

* * *

He dreamt.

Dreams, by their very nature, frequently touched at strangeness and he was not a man who attached much importance to them, even when he recalled them upon waking, which was not often. But this…

When he became aware of it (he could not say ‘at its beginning’ for, like so many dreams, it seemed to have much more history than he could recall upon waking), he found himself seated in the lessons room at the training hall in Tilev. Many others were with him, paying rapt attention to Master Tsazr at the head of the hall, who was going on in his terse, impatient way about something. None of this yet seemed odd. It had been twelve years and some since his ascension, but Meoraq still dreamed of his training days upon occasion. At least he was wearing clothes in this one.

But when he turned his head, he saw that half the students around him were humans. Amber sat at his side, a lessons slate in her lap and a stylus in her five-fingered hand, scratching out notes in alien markings. At his other side sat a dumaq, a stranger, wearing the garments of an exarch with the hood pulled so low over his face that Meoraq could see nothing but his painted snout. His was rather a plain robe, sparsely trimmed and not entirely clean, nothing at all like the fine dress of Exarch Ylsathoc.

Without looking at him, this stranger said, “What is it you seek in Xi’Matezh?”

Wasn’t that just like an exarch, to involve himself in someone else’s personal business?

But Meoraq found himself answering, and answering with both honesty and respect: “I seek communion with Sheul.”

“A man need not travel to the end of the world to seek what can be found upon his knees in his own courtyard. Your House is empty,” the hooded figure said before Meoraq could reply, not that any reply came to his dreaming mind. “Should not a son see to the continuance of his physical father’s honor rather than undergoing lengthy journeys in his spiritual Father’s name?”

Meoraq rarely felt emotion in dreams, but shame stung at him now. Shame, oddly, and not annoyance at the presumption of this stranger. “I never said that I would not take stewardship of Uyane!”

“You certainly seem eager to postpone it.”

“No!”

“No? Then why—” The exarch’s head cocked, still revealing nothing but paint and shadow and now the pinpoint gleam of one eye. “—do you seek Xi’Matezh? What would you ask of Sheul that requires so arduous a journey?”

And rather than tell this man his prayers were for Sheul alone, Meoraq said, “If it is Sheul’s will that I am retired to Uyane, so I will serve Him.”

The exarch dipped his head once, acknowledging, expectant.

“But I do not wish to spend all the years of my remaining life bound to stewardship if it is not His will!”

“Is the House so hateful?”

“The House?” Meoraq looked over his shoulder where, as only seemed right and natural, the lessons room had opened into the rooftop courtyard at the fore of House Uyane. He could see the stone couch his father favored beneath the drooping branches of a ribbonleaf tree, and the wide steps where he himself used to sit when he was at lessons (or when he was hoping to steal a glance at the servant girl who scrubbed the courtyard tiles). “No,” he said now, puzzled. “It is my father’s House and has all my love.”

“Not all, it would seem, if you would travel to the end of the very world to escape it.”

“It is not the House I wish to escape.”

“No?”

Meoraq looked again, but now the courtyard had become his father’s innermost chamber, as seen through the eyes of the young boy he had been on the only occasion he had seen it. And just why he had gone to such a forbidden room, he could not recall, but he could perfectly remember how it had been: the light of lamps behind the screen casting shadows on every wall, the scent of some flowery incense heavy in the air, and the cupboard of his father’s bed standing open so that he could see the broad, scarred field of his father’s back as it bunched and heaved and arched.

Meoraq averted his eyes fast, but the sounds persisted. His father’s deep, steady breaths. His mother’s feeble, mewling cries. The stealthy rasp of scales moving together. The wet pull and suck of sex in its second round.

The stranger was watching, his long hands steepled beneath his chin. “This embarrassed you.”

Meoraq did not reply and did not look again.

“Is it not a lord’s responsibility to preserve his bloodline? To sire sons of his loyal woman?”

His loyal woman. Meoraq’s jaws clenched.

“Surely you do not question Yecedi’s loyalty?”

“I am sure she was ever faithful to my father,” Meoraq said curtly. And he was. Yecedi had passed directly from her father’s own House to Rasozul’s and did not leave it until the day she died.

“She was a good woman.”

“I suppose so.” Meoraq shrugged his spines, wishing the sounds of sex would stop or at least that his mother’s urgent moaning would. “She was a perfect high-born wife, obedient and invisible and able to produce three strong sons upon command.”

The exarch looked at him. “Do you think your father gave it as his command?”

The sounds died away suddenly, swallowed up by the lessons room wall. Meoraq glanced that way, saw dark stone and students, and shrugged again.

“Of course, when you bore that night your reluctant witness, your father had already done his siring,” the exarch mused. “What embarrasses you most, I wonder? That you saw your father in Sheul’s fires, or that you saw him with your pregnant mother instead of some pretty young servant?”

“My father had no business taking her to his bed!” Meoraq burst out.

“Is it not the duty of a loyal woman to answer all her man’s desires?” said the exarch with the faintest hint of sarcasm.

“No, it is the duty of a loyal woman to sit in her damned room and grow her son! What was she even doing in that part of the house that he saw her?”

“Perhaps she was invited,” the exarch murmured, steepling his fingers again.

“He could not have passed fewer than three other women if he went to fetch her out. Any one of whom would have been honored to receive his fires!”

“Do you think so?”

“But, no! He had to have gone all the way to her room and back and for what? Sheul does not give a man sexual urges so that he can spend them with a woman already carrying his child!”

“The bond between man and woman is sacred even in the eye of Sheul. Nothing they took as their pleasure together offended Him.”

Meoraq snorted.

“When you take up the stewardship of House Uyane, will you not want a woman such as Yecedi?”

Meoraq tried to snort again but it came out as a hiss. He rubbed at his snout, then his brow-ridges, and finally his throat, where he could feel anger throbbing.

“A good woman. A loyal woman.”

A mewling little breed-pot, forever shackled to Meoraq’s wrist. He would have to live with her each and every day, unless he were away defending his House or his city’s honor, and he would not be permitted to send her out until after he had at least two grown sons to guarantee his continuance. Or unless she were barren, in which case he would have to replace her immediately with an entirely new mewling little breed-pot.

“Is it so impossible to imagine you could be happy with a woman?”

“I am frequently happy with women,” Meoraq snapped.

“With one woman.”

He rubbed his brow-ridges. “If that is Sheul’s will.”

“And so you travel to Xi’Matezh.”

“Yes.”

“To pray for Sheul’s guidance.”

“Yes.”

“That He may lead you to a good woman to take into your House.”

Meoraq hissed again and shook his head. “Yes.”

“Perhaps you could find one here.”

“Here?” Meoraq looked around the lessons room, at dumaqs and humans side at side, all the way to Master Tsazr, indiscriminately lecturing all. “There are no women allowed in the training halls!”

It was a dream, and his voice, which had gone unnoticed all this time, suddenly rang out like tribunal bells. Every head turned.

“Uyane!”

He snapped to his feet at once, dream or no dream, and Master Tsazr came swiftly forward to slap him deservedly across his snout. It did not hurt in the dream, but it still staggered him some. Master Tsazr had a wicked hand.

“No women in the training halls, eh? Have you come to work your mind?” Tsazr inquired caustically. “Or your clay?”

“My mind, sir.”

“I have my doubts. Amber.” The human name fell perfectly from Tsazr’s mouth.

“Yes, sir.” The dumaqi words came perfectly from Amber’s.

“What is the day’s lesson? Remind Uyane.”

“We speak of the Ancients, sir.”

“Tell Uyane your lesson.”

Amber turned her soft, flat face toward him. The bad light of the lessons room made her pale skin seem wholly white, her dun-colored hair seem grey as ashes, and her nondescript training garments as black as the Abyss, but her eyes were still green as new leaves and deep as wells. She said, “Our numbers swelled until our cities covered all the earth. When we had no more land to cover, we built our cities on top of themselves and milled in them all together, like yifu. We took the holy gifts of medicine and science and used them in frivolous and dangerous ways. We made machines to give us comfort and used them until we poisoned all our earth and water and air. We made trade of sex and suffering and war. We mocked Sheul and we corrupted Gann.”

“The Ancients corrupted Gann,” agreed Master Tsazr, striding along the rows of silent students and pausing often to run a speculative (and largely dismissive) eye over each face. “And Gann in turn corrupted them. The Ancients turned from Sheul, devastating the land to fuel their wickedness and making constant war upon themselves until at last Sheul rose up and smote them with His judgment. Uyane!”

“Yes, sir!”

“Name the three acts of the Fall of the Ancients.”

Thank Sheul in His heaven for an easy question. “The first act was the punishment of wrath, when every man was consumed by rage and war enveloped all of Gann.”

“For how long?”

Meoraq stared for a moment, utterly thrown. Back came Master Tsazr’s hand, but it could not knock answers into him when there were none.

“Amber,” said Tsazr, turning around. “How long did the act of wrath last?”

“It is still among us,” she replied, which was the most nonsensical thing she could have said here, in Sheul’s world of peace.

But Master Tsazr grunted approvingly and walked away. “Speak on, Uyane. What was the second act?”

“The curse of blight,” he said at once, “when the land failed and the skies were filled with storms. The cities of the Ancients fell and famine and disease preyed upon the landless people.”

“For how long?” asked Tsazr, casting a cold eye back at Meoraq.

He looked at Amber, but she was bent over her slate, making human letters. In another moment, Meoraq was reeling from the dream-like painlessness of Master Tsazr’s blow. Amber’s voice drifted up from his side, the dumaqi words made haunting in her human mouth: “It is still among us.”

“Uyane.”

Meoraq straightened up and put his arms to his side, only to find that Master Tsazr had somehow been replaced by the strange exarch with the low hood.

“What was the third act of the Fall of the Ancients?” this figure asked in Tsazr’s voice.

He knew this one, thankfully. “It was the return of Sheul and the hope of His forgiveness. And it is still among us,” he added, anticipating the next question.

The stranger did not reply, but the silence that swept the lessons room proved more disconcerting than his hooded stare. Meoraq looked away and saw the prairie all around him; he looked back and there was Amber before him and they were sitting, face to face, in the dark of the humans’ camp.

“We built a ship,” said Amber. She raised her hand to make a wedged shape and passed it between them. “And it flew through the sky, beyond the clouds that covered our world, into the lights that shine forever.” Her arm arced up, graceful as the neck of a thuoch. Her eyes never left his and they were green, so green. “But the ship was hurt and it fell here, out of the storm. It broke open over Gann. It died and many died with it.” Her hand fell to earth and opened, her fingers flaring out and curling slowly back toward her palm. Her second hand lit upon this imagined carnage, made walking fingers, and stepped out onto the grass. “But some of us survived and now we’re here. We’re here and there’s no way home.” She looked back over her shoulder and let out a shaky breath, then turned back and caught his hand in both of hers. Her hands were soft and warm; her eyes were terrible in their beauty. “I need you.”

Something in him shivered right down to the core of his soul. He tried to say her name, but the magic of the dream ended, it seemed, with his mouth. “Mmbr,” he said, just as he always had, and shook his head with disgust. His next attempt was nothing but a hiss and a choke of meaningless sound.

“Please, Meoraq,” she said. “I need your help. And you need mine.”

He did not remember getting up, but they were standing suddenly, the two of them together before a dark structure he somehow knew was Xi’Matezh. They were standing, yes, and his arms were going around her just as if that were not a perfectly appalling thing to do. He could feel her heat against his body and her horrible face was right before him and her name, ah, her name was like wine in his mouth. “Mmbr,” he said, bending close. “Mm—”

* * *

“…mbr,” he mumbled, and the sound of his own voice jolted him awake.

Meoraq opened his eyes and was, for one disorienting moment, shocked to see that Amber’s own were not before him. He found his lamp and lit it, but saw only the interior of his shelter.

What did he expect? Meoraq clapped a hand to his head and rubbed roughly at his scales, then rolled over and sat up. His cock was out, he noticed, pinched between his belly and his loin-plate and still dully throbbing with Gann’s lusts. He retracted it with great distaste and pressed a hand over his slit to hold it in while he tightened his belt, meditating on the dream. Already, it was so tangled in his mind that he could not say what the message had been.

Dreams. Only fools and priests believed they had messages.

He put on his breeches and opened his tent.

The creatures slept in heaps all around him, cocooned in more of those silvery bedsheets. They looked like fat, metal maggots. A deeply disturbing sight.

And there was Amber.

He could see the twin lump of herself and the other human that clung at her, together in the grass at the very edge of his camp. At the edge of Scott’s camp as well, far from any fire. The sight of her sleeping in the open air like an animal did something unpleasant to his emotions and gave him back disturbing fragments of his dream…particularly there at the end, when he’d been holding her.

Dream-nonsense, he told himself brutally. If he hadn’t awakened when he had, he probably would have bitten her or something.

The image his mind sent out at that thought was not that of a monstrous dumaq devouring Amber neck-first, however, but of a mark of conquest upon her naked shoulder. His cock, safely constrained behind his loin-plate, throbbed with Gann’s senseless need.

Meoraq shuddered, started to retreat within his tent, and then rose resolutely and tromped over to where Amber lay. She roused at the noise, pushing back her damp cover and squinting up at him through sleep-dazed eyes. “Get up,” he said, and beckoned, knowing she would not understand him. “To your feet, soft-skinned creature.”

More humans stirred. “Wzzee wnt?” someone called, and Amber answered, “Elleff’ai’no,” in a puzzled fashion, but she got up.

“I dreamed of you.” Meoraq led her to his firepit and pushed on her shoulder until she sat. He crouched to knuckle through the ash until he found a bit of branch only half-burnt, then woke the embers to a flame bright enough to see by. “And while dreams are largely foolish things, Sheul often hides some shard of insight there. So do I recall one thing I think to be His wisdom. Take this.”

She let him thrust the charred branch into her hands. She frowned at it, and then her brows raised and she gave him a startled sort of look. She dropped to her knees at once before him, intent and eager as she patted her hand across the ash to flatten it.

And she began to draw. Not the strange markings she had made across her lessons slate in his dream, but an image of some rounded shape (we built a ship), amplified by sweeping motions of her arm, which she made fall by drawing a line just beneath it (it broke open over Gann). She started drawing line-men to spill out of it, chattering explanations, and Meoraq leaned back on his heels to listen. He did not try to mimic her words, but he did interrupt now and then with questions of his own, raised with gestures and drawings in the ash.

The story he was able to glean through this crude communication was a confusing one. She seemed to be trying to tell him that the creatures he saw before him now were all there were, not just here, but in all of Gann. He tried many times to get her to tell him where the ship had sailed from and how they had come inland so far without being seen, but kept getting the same baffling response: The ship did not move on water, but through the sky. She seemed to want him to believe they had not come from Gann at all, but from some other world. She illustrated this by drawing two circles in the ash and the rounded shape of the ship between them, sketching the line of their travel over and over and jabbing at the sky above them with her stick.

She must think he was an idiot. That a ship had sailed, Meoraq did not doubt, and perhaps it had even come across the sky if it were some relic from the time of the Ancients or a machine made after that fashion. That it had come to some disaster seemed equally plausible. That they were all there were in the world, as helpless as newborns and meaning no harm to anyone, was patently absurd.

And yet…

And yet, there was Amber, grimacing at him happily as she told her tale. He liked to think that his years in service to Sheul had given him some power to see lies when they were told to his face, and even though hers was a strange one, it could still be read. When he gazed on Amber, when he looked past the cold and hunger and other hardships of travel in the wildlands, he saw no evil. He saw sorrow and he saw loss. He saw anger sometimes and sometimes guilt. He saw strength and determination and so much tenacity that he often questioned his odd certainty that she was female, but he had never seen deceit in her. Not when she looked at him. Not when she looked at anyone. There were things she did not say, perhaps, but what she said was honest.

We built a ship…and it flew through the sky…

Meoraq took the stick from her hands and swept the ash flat. He looked at her, frowned, then looked past her to the other creatures, all of whom had gathered by now and were watching him with unreadable emotion across their grotesque faces. He thought of the dream, but it was a glancing tap at best; dreams were of no value in the waking world. He was not easy about what he was about to propose, but he felt Sheul’s hand upon his shoulder and, although His ultimate plan was not clear, His immediate will seemed obvious.

Meoraq sketched out a few creatures—round heads atop line-bodies; he was not a great artist—and then, not without a moment’s misgiving, drew himself among them. He tapped the image, saying, “Sheul has put you in my path for a reason. I will stay until I know what it is.”

“Wutz’i sa’en?” Scott asked.

“Do’ispeeklzzrd?” Amber replied, tossing the words crossly over her shoulder before reaching out to try and take the stick from Meoraq.

He wasn’t done with it. He took her wrist with a stern look and moved her hand back to her knee. He captured his drawings within a circle, making it clear they were bound together, and then leaned out to sketch the shrine at Xi’Matezh. He’d never seen it, but he’d seen enough of them to know they all pretty much looked alike: a round, walled courtyard and tall, central tower. “But I see no reason to interrupt my journey,” he went on, tapping first the ash-creatures and then the ash-shrine. “So we will go together.”

“Wutztht?”

“Stldntno, Scott. Stldntspeeklzzrd.” Amber leaned forward, reaching across him to point at the ash-shrine. “Wutzthz Mee’orrak?”

“Meoraq,” he corrected, and then shook that away irritably. She was never going to say his name properly and it didn’t matter at the moment. He touched the ash-shrine and said, “This is Xi’Matezh, the holiest shrine remaining from the age of the Ancients. We will go there—” He emphasized this with several lines between ash-creatures and ash-shrine. “—and I will ask Sheul what is to be done with you.”

“Ithnkeewntz t’tak’uzther.” Frowning, Amber patted her chest with one hand, gesturing at the other creatures as she did so, then pointed at Meoraq and made wiggling, walking movements with her fingers. “Wergo’in t’gthr? Yutu?”

“We all go together,” he told her, pointing at his drawings. “If His will is not made known to me upon the journey, Sheul shall surely tell me what to do in Xi’Matezh when I stand before Him.”

“Wut izthtpls?” Scott asked.

Amber threw up her hands, slapped her thighs, and swung around. “Frfkz’sk Scott i’dntno! I’dntspeek fkknlzzrd!”

Meoraq hissed at the creatures to silence them, then poked Amber irritably with his stick to take back her attention. When he had it, he swiftly made some sketched animals to fill the empty space between the ash-creatures and the ash-shrine. “The journey is long and dangerous. The prairie is filled with wild beasts and godless men and we are very near to winter. I will protect you—” Ash-Meoraq received a few ash-knives and the very badly-drawn ash-tachuqi nearest him was rubbed out. “—at least until I know whether or not I am meant to kill you. That you are to be a test of my faith is clear to me,” he mused, once more gazing into Amber’s unsettling eyes. “But I am Sheulek and my faith is as enduring as the wind. I shall not fail my Father.”