Текст книги "The Last Hour of Gann"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 29 (всего у книги 80 страниц)

And what did it matter now, really? Any ship back then would be no better than this place now—empty, dark and dead. With effort, she made herself look away, at Meoraq. He had tracked the line of her gaze and now he was looking at the ship. She could read nothing in his face. She seldom could, but she thought he was actually trying to be inscrutable now.

“What do you see?” she asked.

His spines twitched in some tell-tale gesture he wasn’t quite quick enough to stop entirely. “Nothing,” he said blackly, looking right at the ship.

“There’s always something to see,” she reminded him.

He slowly turned and fixed her with a stare as good as a smack to the side of the head, then went back to looking at the mosaic. His spines were flat against his scales.

‘I got a real talent for pissing people off,’ thought Amber. It was not a new thought and it frequently came with an underlining of secret pride, as if some part of her were trying to convince the rest of her that it didn’t matter if the world thought she was a bitch as long as she was good at it. But the world was one thing. Meoraq was another.

“What,” he said suddenly, angrily, “do you see?”

She looked at the ship again. Airship or starship, it was just a painted piece of tile in a room no one walked through anymore. “Do you want the truth?”

He was quiet for so long, she thought she’d finally made him angry enough that he was ignoring her. That made her feel a little sick to her stomach. She was on the verge of leaving when he said, “Yes.”

“I see us.”

He frowned, his eyes moving restlessly back and forth across the few tiled shards of the ship as if reading them.

“Not you and me. Me and…the rest of us. It’s not a good feeling.”

He glanced at her and stared at the ship some more.

“It’s everything we lost, too,” she said, wondering why she was still talking.

He didn’t answer, but she felt the rough slide of his scales as he brushed the back of his hand against the back of hers. Just once. Probably not deliberately. He stepped away.

“I told you I wanted you all together,” he said curtly. “I should not have to repeat myself. Go.”

She went, but he didn’t follow right away. When she reached the door and looked back, he was still standing there, once more glaring at the mosaic. His spines were flat again. His eyes were fixed on the ship.

2

The storm continued throughout the day, growing in strength with each unmarked hour that took them into night. It was difficult to resign himself to so foolhardy a thing as making camp in these ruins, but long before the darkness made further travel impossible, Meoraq knew he would never coax the humans out into the storm. They believed themselves safe here and since convincing them of the truth would only make them more nervous, Meoraq cried surrender and let them settle in.

He was not happy with the situation and as the night stormed on, his tension only increased. He put it to use with long patrols—pacing restlessly from the foreroom where he could watch the striking of Sheul’s hammer behind the clouds, along every empty hall and through every dark door, to the rearmost chamber that lay open to the weather and all those who might be seeking an escape from it.

Because they were out there. He had seen nothing living on his first patrol, except those few machines whose eternal task it was to tend the empty city, but there were signs these ruins had been used in the past to shelter travelers—the charred ring of a bygone fire, butchered bones, a discarded boot with a sizeable gash across the heel, the clay shards of several broken bowls or pots—but it was difficult to say just how recently these travelers may have passed.

The boot troubled him. It was city-made, embossed at the cuff and toe, and worn right through its heel by the travel it had seen. A careful search of the surrounding area had not turned up the boot’s mate either. He saw no toothmarks to suggest the boot had been carried off by some four-legged scavenger, but that remained far more likely to his mind than the thought of any man wealthy enough to buy this boot throwing out one but continuing to wear the other. That kind of thrift usually meant a man who did not buy boots at all, but acquired them only as the opportunity presented itself.

Or, to say a different way, a man who stole them.

Easy shelter and far more readily defended than any tent-camp, ruins such as these made powerful lures for the raiders who dwelled in the wildlands outside of Sheul’s grace. During the fair season, the migrations of the few travelers they preyed upon and the pursuit of Sheulek who preyed on them kept them moving, but when the weather turned cold, raiders, like all creeping beasts born of Gann, denned down.

So Meoraq was cautious and, as usual, he was the only one. The humans tried all night to sprawl themselves out where he could not keep an easy eye on them in direct defiance of his orders to stay together. Even Amber slipped away more than once to stand by herself in the foreroom, in full sight of the glass wall where any scouting eye might see her, staring at the tilework. She stopped once Scott found her there, but only because Scott then saw the tiles and began an infuriating campaign to call the others in to see it.

Meoraq knew what they were looking at and it was not the fertile land or sunbright skies that made up the Ancients’ world before the Fall. It was just five shards of metal, pressed together to make a single shape smaller than Meoraq’s hand. He did not know what the Ancients meant it to be, but he knew what the humans saw.

A ship. A ship that sailed through the sky. Like the ship they claimed had brought them to this world from some other. Meoraq stood alone before that shape for a long time himself, hating it.

He did not believe in the thing called Earth. Sheul’s Word spoke of all things and never mentioned it, and therefore even to consider that such a thing may exist seemed vaguely blasphemous to his mind. There were no ships that flew above the storm and there were no worlds beyond Gann.

Meoraq had seen many lies told to his face. The humans were not always honest in the things they said, but when it came to talk of their Earth, he could not see those lies. It bothered him. Most of the time, he was able to close his mind to this conflict, since the humans had little energy during their travels for Earth-talk and even less inclination to spend their resting hours in his company, but here in these ruins, with this damned image inescapably pressed into the wall, there was no avoiding it.

Either the humans had come in a ship from another world never mentioned in Sheul’s Word or they were lying to him. All of them. Even Amber. And he did not believe that, either.

The door hissed softly open.

“Get out,” said Meoraq without taking his eyes from the tiled wall.

Retreat.

He was going to be chasing them out of here all damned night, he just knew it. Because of the ship. He thought he could chip it free of the mortar that held it, but decided the satisfaction couldn’t be worth the damage to his blades and they’d all seen it already anyway. Nevertheless, the temptation remained.

The door hissed a second time. The light of a human’s lamp-machine fell in a pool across his back, throwing his shadow as tall as Sheul’s own across the mosaic. There, the ship was a blade aimed at his heart.

“O my Father,” said Meoraq loudly. “Give me Your arm, I pray, that I might beat this human so severely, none other will dare to defy me.”

“Bring it, lizardman,” said Amber.

He grunted and moved away from the tiles at once, before she could come any closer. Useless gesture. She had seen the ship, but he didn’t want her looking at it again. “And now it is you,” he said, advancing on her. She did not so much as lower her eyes, not even when he stood toe-at-toe with her. “I do not want anyone in this room. How is it that I am still not understood after all this time?”

“I understand you just fine.” She rolled her eyes a little. “Scott sent me to find out why not.”

Some hot, red emotion stabbed him, too deeply to be identified, too bright to be ignored. “And you do his bidding now, do you?” he snapped. “Even you?”

“I can’t justify being a bitch all night, every night, for no good reason. Unlike some lizards I could mention. What’s your problem?”

“I don’t want you in here! How many times do you need to be told?”

“I’m going to need a better reason than just because you said so,” she fired back, “or my answer is going to be a big fat I’ll go wherever I want to. And if you think you’re man enough to stop me—”

There, a spear of stormlight struck down, illuminating the whole of the room with its silvery flash and cutting Amber’s words away as neatly as if it had struck her dead. She shone her human lamp past him at the window.

“If I am man enough?” Meoraq echoed, but Amber did not re-engage him. Thunder broke and boomed across the plains, making her flinch back. The lightning came in sheets overhead, filling the night with a constant, flickering illumination that periodically let out a flash of white brilliance. It wasn’t enough to read the Word by, perhaps, but it was more than enough to see Amber’s round, staring eyes.

“Go back to the others,” Meoraq told her, once it became obvious she was content to stand there all night.

She stirred, like one waking from a sleep, and shone her light on the glass again. “You don’t have tornados here, do you?”

He took her wrist and forced the light down. “Mind where you aim that damned thing! Go, I say. Obey me!”

“Quit grabbing at me. I want to see—” And there she stopped, not for the storm this time, but to give him a sudden, startled look. “Oh shit. It’s not the ship, it’s the window.”

“Eh?”

“I thought you were just being a dick about—” She started to shine her light at the tilework on the wall, then stopped and forced the beam down. She looked at him, her brows creased in alarm. “We’re not alone out here, are we?”

Meoraq flexed his spines a few times (If he was man enough, she said. If.) and finally forced them to relax. “I haven’t seen anyone, but that is no reason to set a beacon at every window.”

She tipped the lamp upwards, so that it shone its light briefly across the underside of her face, then switched it off. The storm continued, pouring light in sheets across the churning skies, more than enough to let him see the furrow of a frown on Amber’s troubled face. “Maybe we shouldn’t stay here tonight.”

“Now?” he asked irritably. “You have to say that now? Human, it is hours too late to move on, even if your accursed people would condescend to be moved.”

“I would much rather get rained on than murdered in my sleep,” said Amber, but she jumped at the next clap of thunder all the same.

“You are under my watch. No one is going to murder you, except perhaps me if you insist on ignoring my commands. Go back to the other room and stay with your people.”

She did not react to the threat. Indeed, she gave no sign she’d even heard him. She was staring at the window again, clutching her human lamp, now dark and lifeless, in both hands. Both shaking hands.

“Calm yourself,” said Meoraq gruffly. “It’s only a storm.”

“I’m calm,” she said, but in a strained and distracted way. “Do you see me freaking out? No. I’m totally calm. I just…don’t feel very safe.”

“There is nothing to be gained by worrying over the weather. We are in Sheul’s care tonight.”

“I know you think that’s comforting, but it’s not.”

“So be it. Console yourself instead with the knowledge that you aren’t sleeping in the rain. And treasure it, human, because I promise you, that is a luxury.”

“But we’re completely boxed in. If anyone bad comes, the only way out—”

Meoraq unclipped his kzung and showed her the shine of its blade in the stormlight. “—is through them,” he finished, and flared his mouth to bare all his teeth. “Is that man enough for you?”

The flicker of the storm made it difficult to tell, but he thought she smiled. And then she screamed as lightning struck the ground directly outside the window, sending shards of stone into the glass. The thunder that followed shattered what the stones had cracked; the window blew inward and smashed itself across the floor. Meoraq turned his head away from the wall of freezing wind that blasted in at them and was nearly knocked from his feet when Amber slammed up against him.

Like a little fork of lightning inside his mind, Meoraq’s thoughts washed out to white. He could not hear the storm, feel the wind. For a moment—the very briefest moment, the very longest—he was aware of nothing but the press of her body to the whole of his, her hands digging at his back, the warmth that was her breath blowing against his heart. He could not feel himself at all, except where he was defined by her touch.

Her embrace.

Meoraq returned his sword to his belt and awkwardly hovered that arm over her, lowering it by hesitant degrees until his hand just touched her shoulder.

Amber pushed herself away quickly and no sooner had she done so than the door hissed open and they were joined by Scott and several of his men. In near-perfect synchrony, they threw up their arms against the driving rain that had found its way indoors, but Scott had enough voice to shout, “What the hell happened in here?”

“Out!” Meoraq ordered. He caught Amber by the wrist and headed through the door, pushing Scott and his men before him and towing Amber after.

“What did you do?” Scott demanded on the other side, and without waiting for an answer, thrust his arm at Amber and said, “She broke the window!”

“I did not!”

A crash of thunder like Sheul’s own hammer turned the rest of her words to a scream he could not hear. She ducked down, her hands at the sides of her head to cover her human ears, and she stayed that way even after the thunder rolled away.

And she wasn’t the only one, Meoraq saw. Many other humans had assumed protective positions or had at least cleaved on to some other human. Some of the females were actually crying.

“Okay,” said Scott, and said it several times in his attempt to restore order. “Okay, just calm down. It’s only wind.”

“Yeah, so is a tornado,” said Crandall, looking nervously up at the ceiling. “I’m from Kansas. I see this shit all the time. Hey, lizardman, is this place safe?”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean—”

Thunder. Screams. Meoraq waited.

“I mean, this is an old building, right?”

“Yes.”

“So is the roof going to fall in on us? It’s not, is it?”

Meoraq flicked his spines forward and back dismissively. “It might.”

Some of the humans screamed some more, but this time, there was no thunder to frighten them. Scott hastened to settle them with complicated hand gestures and soothing words, but the face he turned at last on Meoraq was pale and strained. “That’s not funny.”

Anger flared and his hand snapped up, but he caught the slap before he threw it. “I am not in a joking mood, S’kot,” he hissed. “The ruins are old. The wind is strong. The walls could fall. I advise you all to pray tonight, for it will be Sheul’s will alone if this place still stands at the end of the storm.”

Thunder again, shaking the very foundations of the building beneath their feet. Humans screamed, males and females together now. One of them groped at Meoraq’s own arm and he was compelled to slap the thing away. Immediately after he’d done it, the thought came to him that he had not slapped Amber away and she’d had both her arms around him. It did not make him feel badly for the human he’d struck, but it did make him look for Amber among her people.

He found her clinging to Nicci, the two of them huddled so tightly together that he could not quite be certain whose arm belonged to who or whose head was buried in whose hair. A spark of thought—Must it be both of them?—lit and faded in his mind, as bright and brief as lightning. He frowned and turned deliberately away. “We have more shelter here than out upon the open plains,” he said loudly, determined to cut through their chatter if he could not quell it. “That is what you wanted most, isn’t it? So. This will be our camp. Remove these things,” he ordered, pointing at the chairs.

“And put them where?” Eric asked.

Meoraq pointed again, at the foreroom. “With the rest of the trash,” he said. “After which, none of you are to enter that room. Mark me, all of you. If you need to use the necessary, exit through the room you entered by, but you are to be swift about it and return here immediately.”

The humans eyed one another as the rain drummed down and the thunder shook at the walls. At last, Eric uttered a grating sort of sound in the back of his throat and began, “That sounds like a lot of work. I mean, there’s a lot of empty rooms. I don’t see any reason why we can’t spread out.”

“Because I said so!” Meoraq hissed and grabbed onto his brow-ridges as if to hold them to his head. “I don’t have to give you reasons! I give commands! Where is your obedience?”

“Okay, okay!” Eric raised both hands and patted the air. “Here is good. Be cool. Bierce, you want to come deal with this?”

“Do we get a fire at least?” asked Maria, standing close to her man’s side. “Or do we have to be cool in the literal sense as well?”

Eric dropped his hands and looked at her, his face puckering as with pain. “Baby, you’re not helping.”

“Excuse me for being cold!”

Meoraq took two swift steps forward and put his face close to Maria’s even as she tried to hide behind her man. “Stop,” he said, very quietly. “Whining. At me.”

Maria did not answer. She clutched her Eric’s shirt and did not move.

Meoraq straightened up and gave Eric a dark stare, then turned around to address Scott. “This is not a discussion. I am giving you my orders. Clear the room, settle your nests, go to sleep. No fires,” he added, glancing back at Maria. “Most of these old buildings have fire dampening devices. Some of them still work. No fires. And no lights anywhere—anywhere—where they can be seen outside. How do you mark me?”

They didn’t answer, but they marked him well enough. Eric took his Maria firmly in grip and they began to move furniture into the foreroom, Eric hauling the larger pieces and Maria picking up the inevitable debris that broke off. Some others followed their example, but most just huddled up to mutter at each other and eye the ceiling whenever the storm hammered on it. Meoraq paced as far away from the lot of them as the dimensions of the room would allow before setting out the components of his tent. It was a shameful extravagance, and he knew he could be comfortable enough with just his mat, but the lights were going to burn for as long as the room sensed occupants and if he had to look at humans all night, he was going to kill one of them. This was no longer a facetious thought. Not tonight and not in this place.

“Meoraq?”

Amber.

“Leave me,” he ordered, looking at the pole he was assembling and not at her.

She stood there a moment more while the color throbbed in his throat, and then knelt down next to him. She picked up two pole-quarters and threaded them together. “I know you’re upset,” she said in a low voice. “I’m sorry.”

“Are you?”

She recoiled a little. “Yes!”

And she probably was, but he didn’t feel like forgiving her. He was, as she said, upset. He supposed he had been angrier than this several times in his life, but he didn’t think he’d ever been so angry for so long, and it was wearing on him. He needed to pray, but here in the ruins, surrounded by humans, that peace was well out of his reach. Even Amber (whose arms had been around him, wholly around him) put an itch under his scales—the kind that could not be unfelt once you were aware of it, the kind that just grew and grew until even the sanest, calmest man alive wanted to take a knife and cut it out.

Cursing under his breath, Meoraq put his hand to his throat and rubbed, trying to cool the hot throb there or at least cover the color he knew he was showing. A Sheulek must be the master of his clay, always.

Amber was watching, no longer even pretending to fuss with his tent-poles. “Are you okay?”

He didn’t answer.

He didn’t know.

He didn’t really care much.

That itch…

Meoraq leapt up and backed away from her, still glaring, still rubbing. “Assemble this,” he ordered curtly. “I need to make a patrol.”

“Are you crazy? No, Meoraq, it’s too da—”

He snapped his pointing finger around in front of her face; she recoiled as if she thought it were a knife. “You do not give me orders,” he said, and even though he said it quietly, all human chatter ceased at once. Amber’s eyes were huge and green and baffled; seeing them should have made him feel something other than this black itch, but it didn’t. It made it worse.

“You are in my camp,” he told her. He should have been telling all of them, but it was only her. She was, in that moment, the only thing in the world he was aware of. “You belong to me. You give me your obedience and you do not argue with me.”

Thunder crashed and groaned. She looked up fearfully until the reverberations faded, but as soon as Meoraq turned to go, she was on her feet and clutching at his arm with her naked hands.

“Please, don’t go! I know you’re pissed at all of us and I wouldn’t blame you for leaving, but please don’t, not tonight!”

He found himself staring at her hand—her soft, pink hand—where it lay in stripes across his black scales. His mind was moving. He could feel it move, even though he could not quite catch his own thoughts. His mind was moving, but he couldn’t hear it. Like the hand that touched him, the hand he could see but not…quite…feel.

Meoraq closed his eyes and took a breath. Just one, for now. One for the Prophet, the wide open eye.

“Please,” she was saying, still touching him. “Okay?”

He opened his eyes and studied her from the quiet of his moving, uncatchable thoughts. He leaned forward slightly and took another breath—two for his brunt—and held it. She smelled like smoke and unwashed skin. She smelled like mud and dead grass and the animal dung she bundled for burning. She smelled of Gann and those were good smells, but they were all on the surface. Beneath all that was something different, something shiny and strange, like tiles pressed into a wall, like lights in the sky at night.

‘I have to get away from you,’ he thought, and it was not until he saw her immediate flinch that he realized he’d said it out loud.

She let go of him and stepped away, anger rising up fast in her ugly face. “Fine. You do what you want to do, but let me tell you something, lizardman. You may think God will protect you out there, but when you jump off a cliff, God doesn’t catch you. His divine protection ends when people insist on doing stupid things they know better than to do!”

“Where was this insight when you followed S’kot into this place, eh?” he asked acidly. “Or do you think he will catch you when you all leap from his wall?”

“Hey!” said Scott.

Meoraq swung on him. Scott vanished behind his people like smoke in the wind and all at once, the urge to go after him, to hack his way through the whole, monstrous mess of them until the screaming had stopped…but the thought was wrapped in some unfathomable way with the memory of Amber’s body slapping up against his and her arms going around him. He began to feel distinctly indistinct…the way he felt in the arena…just before the blackness of Sheul took him.

He pulled himself away, turned his clay toward the door and started walking.

“Then I’m going with you,” Amber declared.

He swung back, but she was already leaving his unmade tent to collect her spear.

“You are not!” he said loudly.

“Give me a flashlight,” she told Scott.

“You are not leaving this room!”

“If you go, I go,” she said. “Fine, be a dick. Someone, give me a flashlight.”

Yao provided one. She thanked him. Everyone else was watching Meoraq.

“I have given you an order, human! You stay here!”

“I’m going with you,” she insisted, and struck the butt of her spear onto the floor for emphasis. “Someone has to be there to run for help after a building falls on you!”

He cocked his head, his spines flat to his skull, but she would not bend her neck. She trembled, but she stood and stared him down.

“So,” he said at last, when he was calm. Truly calm, as opposed to the burning, thoughtless unquiet which had been as close as he could come to it most of this miserable day. He even smiled. “Give me your hand,” he said, offering his.

She eyed it, the stubborn set of her human jaws easing, then slowly moved her spear from right to left and took it.

He had her spun, disarmed, and on her knees with both arms behind her before the first wail was out of her mouth. He unbuckled his belt one-handed, whipped it free of his waist, and bound her wrists together. He seized her spear—every human in the room took a long step back, but none interfered—stabbed it low into the nearest wall at a steep angle, then picked her up and threaded her over the pole, accepting her kicks in grim good humor. He thumped her down, gave her a tap for farewell, and left her there, screaming curses at his back.

* * *

Amber thought she knew storms. They were the occasional nuisances that knocked out the phones and TV for a few hours, made a little noise, and got the garbage wet. She had never lived through one like this, didn’t know they could be lived through: Thunder you could feel; lightning you could smell; rain that made the floor you slept on vibrate like an idling car. The thought that the roof might drop on top of them was not a fear, but an inescapable fact.

So she waited for it, leaning up against the wall with Nicci’s head in her lap, stroking her as she would an anxious cat, watching people sleep. That part was easy enough; the overhead lights were still burning. Lots of people had looked for a switch, but no one had found one yet, so either the lights were programmed to stay on as long as there were people in the room or only the bots could turn them on and off. A few people complained, but in the end, it didn’t stop anyone from sleeping. Amber understood that perfectly. She was exhausted, in spite of the lights and the thunder and the general creep-factor of the ruins, but she couldn’t sleep. She wished Meoraq was here, or failing that, that he’d let her go with him when he went out on his insane patrol, and failing that, that he hadn’t tied her up and hung her on her own spear before he’d left, thus subjecting her to a roomful of humiliation and snickering before Crandall and Mr. Yao finally dared the lizard’s wrath and set her loose.

She’d considered going after him even then, but two things stopped her. First and most sensibly, she knew she’d never find him. The quintessential dark and stormy night was raging on just outside and even though the lightning was coming in sheets, so was the rain, which made visibility a big fat zero. And secondly, more personally, she was afraid that he’d come back and find her gone, then have to go out and get her, and yell at her some more when he found her. So she’d stayed in. She’d finished setting his tent up, even put his pack inside without first opening it and flinging crap around at random.

It wasn’t really her he was mad at and she knew it. He just didn’t want to be here. She didn’t doubt that he’d search the area thoroughly for bandits or animals or whatever he was looking for, but mostly she thought Meoraq just wanted to be alone.

It was time to come to terms with the fact that he was not going to stay much longer. He may believe that God had given him this babysitting job, but she also knew that if he started looking for divine signs to quit, they were one funny-shaped cloud away from losing him. And when that happened, they were dead.

Another clap of thunder banged down on the roof, the first to do more than grumble in quite a long time. Immediately afterward, the muted falling-nails sound of the rain picked up and up until it drowned out all the sleeping sounds that nearly fifty people could make in one big, empty room. Nicci shifted beside her, then rolled over, shrugging off Amber’s hand. Amber let her. Nicci was putting her leg to sleep anyway.

She decided to take a walk. Not outside, but just around the building. Meoraq wouldn’t like it, but Meoraq wasn’t here, so there. She’d stay away from the windows, but she needed to stretch her legs.

Nicci raised her head when Amber stood up, but she didn’t say anything and after a few bleary-eyed seconds, she just lay back down. It gave her a twinge—not the usual feeling of helpless guilt as she watched over her baby sister, but something low and ugly and resentful. She swallowed it quickly, told herself she’d never felt it at all, and bent down to touch Nicci’s shoulder so she’d know that Amber was there and loved her. Nicci did not respond, but that was okay. She was sleeping.

The hall outside was dark and quiet. Only half the lights came on when Amber went through the doors, and most of those were slow and sputtery. She wandered from shadow to shadow, listening to the thunder, stopping to inspect each picture on the wall, each empty pot that used to hold a plant, each award for excellence in whatever the hell field this used to be. She wasn’t going anywhere in particular, so of course, she ended up at the closet full of bones. She didn’t want to open it, but she did. She didn’t need to look at it, but she did that too.

She had no idea how long she stood there, just staring into the closet. It was not until lights that had been dying further back in the hall suddenly struggled back to life that she really woke out of whatever hypnotic hold the sight of the bones had on her.

“Hey,” said Crandall, walking up behind her.

“Hey.” She closed the closet door.

“Can’t sleep?” he guessed, sympathetic.

Thunder boomed. She heard the muffled clatter as bones tumbled out of place.

“You’ll get used to it,” said Crandall. “Tell you the truth, this shit makes me feel more homesick than anything else.”

She didn’t want to talk, not at all and not with Crandall in any case, but she supposed she’d ought to make an effort. He’d already called her a bitch once tonight.