Текст книги "The Last Hour of Gann"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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When she was sitting up, Zhuqa went back for the bowl, then came and knelt beside her. He lifted the cover, releasing a small billow of steam, but no smell. What at first glance appeared to be stew or cereal proved in the next to be a rag floating in water. He took it, squeezed it in his fist and began to wash her face.

Not soup. Just hot water. Tears stung at her eyes. She refused to let them fall.

“How long will you be angry with me, little one?” he asked tolerantly. His hands were gentle as they daubed her cheek, her brow. There was blood on the rag when he rinsed it, and soot and sweat and all kinds of scum she’d picked up in her travels. “A day? A year? You can be angry all you like, of course, as long as you’re obedient, but you will find that hate is heavy. Too heavy, I think, for your little body to carry.”

“I’ll still give it the old college try, motherfucker.”

“I have received seventeen offers for you, fierce one,” he said, now wiping at her throat. Beads of water fell away, cutting an itchy path between her breasts to her belly. “More coin than I have ever been offered for any other prize. More coin, to say truth, than I knew some of these men even held. But for now, you remain my Eshiqi. So. What shall I do with you?” He swished the rag through the water, wrung it out, and put it between her thighs, gazing meditatively into her eyes as he scrubbed the raw well of hurt he’d used all morning. “Let us play a game.”

Amber looked away, staring into the wall until her eyes hurt. Meoraq was coming. He couldn’t be that far away now. He’d find her (and never mind that he’d never found nicci never mind that at all this was different he was coming and he’d find her) and all she had to do was live long enough for him to get her out of this. She could do anything for one day, right? Right. Suck it up, little girl.

She looked at him.

“I was not always the man I am now,” he told her. His hands were gentle, always gentle. “There was a time I too stood in the sight of God, a time when I sought nothing greater than to serve in His name. A moment’s doubt…” He withdrew, placed the rag in the bowl and the bowl to one side. “…and that life was ended. If it had not, I would be the steward of my father’s House. I would have a woman who was my own alone. I often wonder what that would be like. So let us play a game.”

He untied her ankles, turned her around and unfastened her wrists from her elbows. “We will play a game I like to call ‘Zhuqa’s House’,” he said, helping her to rub feeling into her numb, cramping limbs. “I admit that I have played before and have some advantage over you, but I trust you will learn quickly and make as formidable an opponent as you did in battle. I will come home to you, my Eshiqi, and you will play that you are my happy woman.”

She spat laughter at him, unwise as that might be. She wanted to live, she did, but her ability to suck it up had limits and that was well, well beyond them.

“The woman of my House, who kneels at my side in meek obedience, her outstretched hand open at my foot.”

“You can make me be here, you son of a bitch, but you will never make me like it. Fuck you.”

“Who opens herself to all the fires of lust Gann can give me and pretends a loyal woman’s pleasure in her man’s desire.”

She shook her head, tight-lipped.

“Who drinks from my cup when we share our meals and unfastens the armor I don with solemn duty each day. It’s a simple game,” he said with a careless flick of his spines. “And in the playing of it, you may note my obedient woman does not require binding.”

Amber turned her face away and stared into the far wall, ignoring him.

He waited.

So did she.

“It is not the only game I play,” he said at last. “Merely that which I have most fondness for. The other game—” He rose and casually knotted a hand in her hair, yanking her forward onto her knees and dragging her toward the door with her first startled screams of pain just whooping out of her. “—I call ‘Zhuqa the Warlord’. It, too, is a simple one. In it, I am master of a band of ruthless men, much like those above us even now.” He opened the door and flung her out into the hall. She banged into the wall and fell, but couldn’t right herself fast enough. He had her by her ankles next, pulling her over the filthy stone and speaking loudly, but still calm, always calm, to be heard over her howls. “In my game, I have a number of slaves who I provide to these men as whatever amusement they wish to take. For example.” He heaved her around, swinging her completely off the ground (used to do this with nicci didn’t i airplane we called it do me airplane amber) and letting go so that she crashed and slid into the first crossways, rolling and wailing to land at the feet of two curious guards.

“For example,” said Zhuqa, striding down the dark hall toward them. He ignored their salutes and hunkered down to catch Amber’s chin and force her eyes to his. “It might be the day in the game of Zhuqa the Warlord when I say, Uruul?”

“Sir,” said one of the guards immediately.

“Get your cock out.”

The second guard backed up a little, but whatever Uruul felt about this order did not make him hesitate. He shucked his breeches, slipped a finger into his slit and out came the dark thrust of his cock. He wasn’t ready, was dry as sunbaked brick, but it was there and it was hard.

“And then I would say,” said Zhuqa, not even looking to see if he had been obeyed, “Uruul?”

“Sir.” The word was a grunt of some effort. His finger was still in his slit.

“I am going to count to six, and when I say the number six, you are going to put your cock in that hole and fuck it until you cum three times.”

“Yes, sir.”

“He’ll be the first, Eshiqi, and once it starts, it will not stop. One,” said Zhuqa quietly. “Two.”

Amber rolled shakily onto her belly, choking on sobs that were still more shock than pain.

“Three. Four.”

She put her hand next to his foot.

Zhuqa looked at it. “Palm to heaven.”

She turned her wrist. Even that hurt.

Zhuqa grunted. He stood up. “Put your cock away, Uruul. Stand your watch.”

“Yes, sir.” Spoken with real relief. The second guard was staring at him with something like admiration as Uruul fastened his breeches.

“I’m a simple man,” said Zhuqa, looking only at Amber as she struggled to right herself. “And those are really the only two games I know. Which one are you going to play, Eshiqi?”

Another woman would have spit on him. Another woman would have made him slap her in chains just so she could use them to throttle him. Another woman would never have needed someone like Meoraq to save her.

Amber got up and followed him back to his room. Zhuqa held the door until she’d limped through it. He did not slam it. He was not, she saw, angry.

“Zhuqa has come home,” he said. “How do you greet me, woman?”

She wiped her face on her arms a few times, took a stabilizing breath, then faced him. Put her arms around him. Leaned her cheek against his chest.

“I can tell you have never played before, but you are trying and I appreciate your efforts. Tomorrow, I will put you to work with the other slaves so that you can see better how this game is played.”

She nodded listlessly. Maybe Meoraq would be here by then.

“Still, it pleases a man to see his woman try. Come here, Eshiqi.”

She went, not daring to look at him and not knowing whether it was to keep him from seeing the murder in her eyes…or the tears.

He took her hand, put it on his belt. He gave no orders.

“Grim as Gann Himself,” he murmured, fingering her hair as she undressed him. “You will have to work at that. I don’t mind if you hate me, as long as you hide it. Play the game, Eshiqi, and remember a woman’s greatest happiness is to serve her man.”

“I’ll be happy when you’re dead,” she said. Her voice broke on every goddamned word.

He bent to graze his teeth along her shoulder when she began her kneading motions. It was the only time she faltered, thinking he meant to bite her, and it wasn’t the pain she feared so much as the scar it would leave.

“Easy, little one,” he murmured, his voice thick and strained. “I take no pleasure from your pain. You will carry no more scars while you stand in my favor. And when you do not, scars will be the least of your concerns.” His next words became an inarticulate hiss as she found the slick nub of his clitoris-like sa’ad and they were his last effort at any kind of speech for a long time. He buried his brow against her shoulder, abandoning sight to only feel. He touched her when she touched him, his rough hands lightly scouring at her hip, her ribs, her thigh. He was gentle.

“I’m going to kill you,” she told him, stroking his cock until his oils coated her hand and every flexing of her fingers made him shudder with the effort not to cum. “I don’t know how yet, but I know I will. And someday, long after you’re dead—” She turned around, her hands braced on the table on either side of the waterskin, fingernails digging curt furrows only for that first moment. Once he was in her, the oiled ridges of his cock rubbing heat into her mindless body (Gann’s body, she thought, her godless clay), she was able to relax, separate from sensation, let it happen. “Long after you’re dead,” she went on calmly, her voice broken by his powerful thrusts and not by any of her own emotion, “I’m going to wake up in the night from a bad dream with your face in it, but I won’t remember your name. And I’ll go back to sleep. And I’ll sleep just fine.”

He groaned hoarsely against the nape of her neck, his hands digging painful grooves in her stomach. The first time never took him long, but that didn’t mean it was ending. He wasn’t human. He didn’t have to stop until he wanted to.

“I won’t remember you,” whispered Amber, gazing at the wall as Time once again stretched out and stopped. “I won’t.”

5

At first light, Meoraq rose. He had not slept, but he had rested as best he was able within his unquiet mind and it was with clarity of sight and purpose that he looked upon his camp. The raiders had taken both sleds and all that they had carried. His pack and Amber’s had been too worn to interest them, but their contents had been rummaged through and scattered. The clothes they had spent the winter making were gone, along with Meoraq’s mending kit and tent. His bedroll was missing; Amber’s remained. His tea box lay open on the ground, the more precious of its inlaid stones pried up and its many drawers knocked loose, spilling its remaining teas into the grass. Amber’s cups were nearby, one of them in pieces.

He ignored the dead man for now. There was evidence there, he knew, but whatever he had not scattered in faithless rage would keep. He searched the ground for the things which had been hidden from him in the darkness, now brought to light.

He saw blood. More than could be accounted for by the dead man, even taking into measure Meoraq’s fit of fury. Blood in a wide, dried pool, crushed into the grass by the trampling of many feet. Blood painting the tall stalks of wind-blown grasses. Blood that led into the plains.

Meoraq gazed into the north, the direction the blood had taken, then returned to the ashes of his fire and knelt to examine what was left of the body. The boots, worn and overlarge for the dead man’s feet; not bought or made, but stolen. His companions had relieved him of any coin or weapons, but overlooked one bauble—a woman’s wristlet, worn not upon his own wrist, but bent wide and hidden…treasured…around his ankle. He wore a battle harness of inexpensive make, patched with insignias taken from many different Houses—taken from those who had the birthright to wear them, no doubt—and breeches sewn of hides. He had little flesh left to inspect, but what there was had been heavily scarred, and the thicker scales along his back showed the buckling and discoloration of a diet with too much meat, too little crop. When he hunted out the head, he saw eyes yellowed by the overuse of phesok (smoked phesok, by the burnt pads of his fingers, once they were also located) and brown stumps of teeth that had never known cleaning.

Meoraq looked again at the metal-worked bit, turning it between his fingers until he found the jewelsmith’s stamp on the backing. Ulhrug, it said. Ulhrug of Praxas. The city was not familiar to him, but he supposed the city didn’t matter. This chain with its pretty ornament had likely come off the neck of some murdered traveller.

And yet…

He was well-fed, for a raider. Warmly dressed. He was a young man and not strongly-made; the burlier members of his pack should have stripped him of all his prizes and yet here he lay with his boots on and spoils intact. These were the wildlands at the very heel of winter. There were no travelling merchants to prey on and little enough game for an honest man to find, but he had certainly not suffered for their lack.

Whoever these raiders were…someone was trading with them.

Of course, it was both a crime against Man’s law and a sin before the eyes of Sheul to have dealings of any kind with those who had gone to Gann, but men were weak. Raiders had phesok and strong drink; the cities had sweets, medicines and women. There would always be places where those on both sides of the walls were willing to sheathe their blades and offer goods instead. So it seemed this Praxas was such a place.

He tucked the dead man’s trinket into his own boot and looked the body over one last time. He saw a hard life, begun and ended in violence outside the city walls. A boy born in the squalor of a raiding camp to become a man fallen from Sheul’s grace. And that camp would be where they had taken his Amber.

He bent his head, closed his eyes and breathed. Six breaths. Six again. The Prophet. His brunt. Uyane. Mykrm. Oyan. Thaliszar. He was a warrior of his father’s House. He was a Sword and a true son of Sheul. He was God’s Striding Foot in the land and the hour of Gann. He was Uyane Meoraq.

Truth.

He listened to the wind brush across the plains, then opened his eyes.

On the blood-stained ground, he saw nothing new. In the blackened ring of his camp’s firepit were only ashes. In the plains, nothing moved that breathed.

And in the sky, the forever-clouds of Sheul’s storm lay open, showing a face of jewel-deep green and light in beams of gold pouring down all around it.

It closed and the wind blew on.

Meoraq passed a trembling hand briefly before his eyes, then closed it into a firm fist. He took up Amber’s travel-pack and set her surviving cup within, cushioned by his own rolled-up pack. After a moment’s dark non-thought, he bent and gathered the various pieces of his tea box, fit them back together and packed that away as well. As far as he cared (and he didn’t know why he cared even that much), everything else could go to Gann.

He began to run.

* * *

Zhuqa didn’t tie her up again. He didn’t need to. He pulled the knife from the sheath he kept strapped high on his arm, showed it to her, then stabbed it into the door of his cupboard. That was almost intimidating enough all on its own, but he hadn’t been trying to scare her with it. He just wanted a place to hang his bells.

He had to dig for them in a crate for some time before he found them, and the whole time he did that, Amber had to stand two running steps away from the cupboard and stare at the knife. They were jingle-bells, all wired together in a festive loop just like Christmas bells back on Earth, except they were made of some greenish metal. Not a minty Christmas-green either, but something ugly and snotty, the sort of color that made the whole thing look vaguely cancerous. He hung them over the hilt of his knife where the slightest movement of the door set them to shrill jingling, then put her in the cupboard to sleep with him, but he didn’t try to touch her. No, he just put her closest to the wall with himself on the outer side, so that escape would mean climbing over the top of him and opening a jingling door…in other words, impossible.

He fell asleep almost immediately—two marathon bouts of sex in one day were too much for even mighty Zhuqa the Warlord—but Amber did not. She lay there for a very long time, doing nothing, thinking nothing, only staring into the black above her bed. She would have liked to have been planning something. Escape. Murder. Hell, dinner. But thought was like hate tonight, too heavy for her little body to carry.

She still believed Meoraq was coming. This was so obvious that it didn’t even bear wondering about. He was coming and he’d find her. Meoraq could do anything. The question of whether he’d still want her after another man had been inside her had not yet occurred to her, but it would before morning. These were her last worry-free moments, but for now, no, she wasn’t worried.

Someone knocked.

Zhuqa woke. Only he didn’t just ‘wake’. Between his sleeping inhalation and the swift snort of his waking exhale, he managed to flip into a crouch and draw his other knife. She knew about the crouch because she could hear the pa-pad of his bare feet hitting the hard mat they slept on. She knew about the knife because it was under her jaw.

“That wasn’t me,” said Amber.

Zhuqa eased up on the knife with a low grunt.

The knock came again, even louder.

“Someone better be dead,” he called, and shoved the cupboard door open.

The bells were loud as sirens in the quiet, slow to leave the air. She heard his footsteps recede. A sliver of reddish light split the dark as he opened the door.

“Iziz,” said Zhuqa. “In light of our many years of friendship, I will give you one word before I disembowel you.”

“Zru’itak,” said Iziz, seemingly unconcerned.

Zhuqa sheathed his knife and came back into the room. He left the door open, so she thought he was coming for his clothes, but while he did dress and strap on his weapons, modesty was clearly his secondary concern. “Up, Eshiqi,” he called. “You are far too new to this game to be left to play alone.”

He didn’t offer her any clothes. Amber fumbled a blanket off the bed and wrapped herself in it as well as she could, running to make up what little time this cost.

He grunted, eyeing her as he cinched his belt tight, then gave the lizardman standing behind him a friendly slap to the stomach and said, “Say something to him.”

“Gee,” she said, in her most neutral voice. “I didn’t have a speech prepared, but choke on piss and die.”

Iziz snorted, his spines flaring in either amusement or surprise. “What the hell did that mean?”

“Nothing good, I should think.” Zhuqa gave Amber’s chin an affectionate pinch and went back out into the hall, trusting her to follow. Which she did. “Probably told you that your father was a ghet or a slave or a warm pile of shit.”

“Could have been Gann himself for all anyone knows,” Iziz said agreeably, walking backwards to watch Amber. “My mother isn’t much for names. Those eyes…Does that thing really understand you or is it just doing tricks?”

“It understands every word.”

“Eerie. Have you fucked it yet?”

“Yes.”

“How is it?”

“Better than your mother.”

“She could use some training up, couldn’t she?” Iziz agreed and turned around just in time to avoid tumbling backwards onto the stairs. “You feeling proprietary?”

“For now. But stop a moment. Eshiqi, come here.”

There on the stairs, with a guard on the lower landing looking up and two on the next floor looking down, Zhuqa beckoned.

She took a second or two to think about all the things he might want her to demonstrate with his friend and then she walked stiffly up to them and waited.

“Oh, that is snapping mad,” Iziz remarked in an admiring tone.

Zhuqa moved Amber’s hair to show off Meoraq’s scar.

The effect on his friend was something of a surprise. He looked at it politely for a heartbeat or two, and then actually leapt back, banging into the stairwell rail and nearly going right over and down to wherever the bottom was in this place. Zhuqa’s hand catching in his harness prevented that, but Iziz didn’t even thank him.

“That’s a fucking Sheulek bite!” he hissed, all his spines standing straight up.

“Yes.”

“That thing belongs to a Sheulek?!”

“Used to.” Zhuqa chucked Amber on the chin again and resumed climbing stairs. “She says she killed him.”

“Then she’s a fucking liar!” Iziz said, looking and sounding almost prissily outraged. “Where did you get that thing?”

“About three, maybe four spans off the old quarry road.”

“Off the road? Where off the road? And when were you going to tell us to make fast against a fucking Sword of fucking God? Shouldn’t that have been the first thing you did when you got back, instead of throwing a poke into that Gann-ugly thing for hours at a stretch?!”

“How long have we been here, Iziz? How many years?”

The second lizardman passed a hand over his eyes briefly and shook his head—not in negation, they didn’t do that, but in the same way an irritated dog throws off water. “More than a few,” he said, resigned. “Five? Six?”

“It is, in fact, eight. Eight years, settled. And wintering twelve years before that, under me or under Chuaan, and who knows how many years before that, for raiders like us if not this band exactly? These ruins have stood since the Fall and they may still be standing when men rise up to Fall again.” He glanced back at Amber, his eyes glinting red in the torchlight. “No one is coming.”

“You say that like no one ever has. I say to you, if little boys chasing after tachuqi talons can find this place, so can a Sheulek.”

“Then I’ll kill him.”

Iziz snorted. “Before or after you catch lightning in your fist and squeeze it into wine?”

“I have killed six Sheulek in my time, Iziz. Seven, if you count a certain way.” He gave Amber another glance, coughing amusement at what he saw in her face. “If he comes, he comes. And I will kill him and make a cup of his skull—” He reached back to pinch her chin. “—for my woman to hold for me when we share our meals.”

She twisted out of his grip and rubbed the back of her hand across her chin, erasing the hated heat of his touch. It wasn’t deliberate; she couldn’t have stopped herself if she’d tried. It was all she could do not to bare her teeth at him like an animal.

“Fierce little thing,” Zhuqa murmured and left the stairs for another hall.

There was more light here. And noise. Muted by distance and at least one other door, she could hear a lizardish screaming. Not high and frightened, not fresh. Whatever torture played out at the end of this hall, it had been some time in the act. Amber’s step slowed as the last cry tapered to an moan and then came a terrible silence that stopped her entirely. Even when Zhuqa noticed, even when he came back for her, she couldn’t move. She didn’t want to see what he’d done to someone to make them make a sound like that.

Or to make them stop.

“These are my slave pens,” Zhuqa said after a moment. “Zhuqa the Warlord has played many games in this hall I do not care to remember. Easy, my little one. This is not one of them. Come with me.”

He turned around again. She followed.

They had not quite reached the door he wanted when it opened and a raider came out. She recognized him, although the name didn’t come until she heard it in Zhuqa’s mouth.

“Geozh.” He folded his arms, an act that placed his hands very near to the sheathed blade strapped to his biceps. “You must be coming to fetch me.”

“I was, actually.” And, far from showing concern, Geozh gave his leader a clap to the shoulder. “You know what they say about the first one, but it’s a tough little sprat.”

He moved off down the hall, spines high but relaxed. Humming.

Amber frowned, watching him go. Zhuqa opened the door.

The clove-sweet smell of their blood struck her at once, followed by the gaspy rattle of someone’s dry, labored breath. Amber stopped cold, but Zhuqa didn’t wait. He went to the cupboard where a few more raiders stood respectfully aside for him, and looked down at the lizardlady lying in the bed. She dragged her eyes open to look back at him, then turned her face away.

“Eshiqi, come here.”

She went, pulling unwillingly away from Iziz as Zhuqa bent over and picked something out of the bedding. She knew what she was looking at—she thought she knew—but she still shied squeamishly back when he turned around and placed the wet, blood-streaked baby in her reluctant arms.

The lizardlady in the bed made a single unhappy sound. Not a word. Not even truly a complaint. Just a sound, scarcely louder than a sigh.

“And there we are,” said Zhuqa. His eyes were on the baby, expressionless, watching its tiny hands and feet grip on to the blanket that wrapped Amber’s shoulders. Its scales were white and slightly translucent, which gave it almost a pearly look beneath the gore of its birthing. It pressed the top of its weirdly flattened head to her breast and did nothing, made no sound. Its ribs bulged rapidly in and out. It was impossibly thin to her eye; no fat and happy human baby, but something skeletal and drowned.

Long minutes passed. No one spoke. The raiders sharing this moment stood very still, facing away, invisible in their own skin. There were, Amber saw, three other lizardladies a short distance away, keeping very quiet as they gathered stained cloth and other less-identifiable devices into baskets to take away. They didn’t matter. Even Amber herself and the lady in the cupboard did not seem to truly manifest. This was all about Zhuqa and the baby. The silence stretched and stretched…and shattered with the scraping sound of a knife drawn from its sheath.

Amber flinched back with a wordless sound of her own, clutching the baby closer to her chest as if her arms were any shield against the killing blade.

Zhuqa paused, knife in hand, and gave her a long, thoughtful stare.

“Interesting response,” Iziz remarked.

Zhuqa held the knife up in an elaborate display, turned it point-down, and pierced his forefinger. He sheathed the knife again as he pinched his knuckle to make blood well out past his scales, then closed what little distance Amber had put between them and drew a red-black line of his own blood down the baby’s naked back.

“Welcome to Gann’s world,” he murmured. “Your blood is the blood of Zhuqa.”

The baby did not move, did not squirm, did not make a sound beyond its rapid panting.

At last Zhuqa looked up, far deeper into Amber’s eyes than she wanted to see him go. He read them without speaking. He did not step away. He said, “Zru’itak here was exiled from the city of Chalh for thievery. She would have died in the wildlands if my men had not found her. Is this not true?”

The lizardlady did not reply.

Zhuqa did not seem to expect her to. “They brought her to me and I gave her the gift of my protection. I fed her. I clothed her. I gave her every luxury this life allows. She was not grateful. I asked her to play a game with me. So. We played. I don’t care if my woman hates me, but if she’s going to play the game, she has to at least pretend. Zru’itak never had a kind word for her man, only insults.”

He gave the lizardlady in the bed a pointed stare. After a moment, Amber looked that way, too. The lizardlady continued to face the wall until Zhuqa’s hand moved calmly to his knife and then she finally turned. Her mouth opened.

The tongueless, empty hole of her mouth.

“After that, things became…strained,” said Zhuqa. “I was willing to forgive, but she didn’t want to play anymore. I am not a cruel man. I told her if she would stay one year, just one, I would let her go her way in Gann’s world. For a time, she seemed content with that. Soon, I learned she was pregnant. I brought her out of my rooms and let her walk at my side. I made all the world our House and opened every door for her.” He glanced back. The lizardlady looked at the wall. “And how did you show me obedience, faithless one? How did you serve the man who took you in? Who cared for you? Who put the fire of new life in your wretched womb?”

His voice never rose, never showed the slightest strain of emotion.

The lizardlady did not—could not—reply.

“She ran away,” said Zhuqa. He gazed at Amber, his head cocked to show a faint degree of sarcasm. “She ran away, when all the world was my House, and she slapped my face when I went to fetch her back.”

No one spoke. No one made a sound. No one met his stare but Amber.

Suddenly, he turned around, seized the blanket that covered the lizardlady, and ripped it entirely off the bed.

She saw. The baby in her arms uttered a chick-like peep; she’d squeezed it.

Zru’itak had no legs, no arms. He’d left her nothing, nothing but the delicate, polished bones of her toes and fingers, strung prettily together and hung around her neck.

“The year is out,” said Zhuqa, dropping the blanket indifferently on the floor. “And I keep my promises. Take her back to where we found her. Let her go.”

All the raiders but Iziz moved at once to pull the lizardlady from her bed. Her mouth opened for another of those terrible, quavering wails, but there were no words and no way to beg. Amber didn’t know she was moving until her back hit the scaly wall of Iziz’s chest. He caught her, but she didn’t need catching. She might not be able to feel her legs at the moment, but they were holding her up just fine. She watched the raiders wrap the lady—the moaning torso of the lady—in the bloody sheets so that she made easier portage and then they took her away.

“So our game ended,” Zhuqa said. He came to Amber, laid his hand upon the baby’s back—eclipsing it almost entirely—but his touch was gentle. “And so you see the man you’re playing with. Dkorm.”

“Sir.”

“Find Xzem and bring her here. My child will want feeding.”

“Yes, sir.”

Zhuqa’s gaze shifted to the lizardman behind Amber. “See to it that everyone understands that while Xzem has the care of my child, no one is to use her. I don’t care if Sheul Himself appears and puts His burning hand on your dick, no one touches Xzem.”

Iziz let go of Amber and walked away. No sooner had the door shut behind him than it opened again, readmitting Dkorm with a lizardlady crouching nervously behind him, a much larger baby clutched to her chest. She looked at Zhuqa, visibly quailed, and then looked at the infant Amber held and staggered in horror to her knees.