Текст книги "The Last Hour of Gann"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 58 (всего у книги 80 страниц)

“This man you hate so much,” said Amber. “You turned into him.”

She said it in English, but he said, “I know,” and turned his dead gaze on her with a smile. “Would you call that proof of God, eh? Is it keeping balance in the world, in His great, unknowable design?”

“I call it proof that people can be horrible without God’s help.”

She could tell he didn’t get much of that, if anything, but he didn’t let it bother him. He plucked at her arm, pulled her in with him and shut the cupboard door.

“I’m too drunk to fuck,” he muttered, rubbing at his face. “Use your hand.”

She did. It took longer than usual. She wiped him off with the edge of a blanket when it was over and lay down beside him.

“Your Sheulek,” he said, so thickly now that he could scarcely be understood. “The one you think is coming…if he really believes all the piss he was taught, he’ll never take you back. And if he doesn’t…he won’t come for you at all.” His hand brushed at her hair, then slipped down to cup her hip and pull her back against him. “You’ve gone to Gann, Eshiqi, just like me. If God Himself would not forgive you, why would he?”

She didn’t answer. Eventually, he fell asleep.

She lay awake.

10

Amber was surprised to see the new slaves back in the workpit the next day, although after some thought, she supposed it was as good a place as any to put them. Some of them were dressed now. Some of them had been given names. All of them had the same distant stare, even when they looked right at her. But when Hruuzk gave them instructions, they listened and did what they were told. Not as smoothly or as well as the long-time slaves who shared the workpit, but that would surely come in time.

After getting everyone started, Hruuzk gathered up the kids and a few of the women and took them away, saying something about work ‘up top’ that needed doing. He was gone a long time and came back alone, carrying a huge sack over his shoulder and a small chest under one arm.

“Here to me!” he called. “Yllgami! Ena! Eshiqi! The rest of you, keep on with what you’re about. All right.” He thumped sack and chest both on a table and opened them. The sack was stuffed with a confusing jumble of rope; the chest, with hundreds of small fish hooks.

“Mud’s thawing and snow on the mountain’s melting, so we’ll have aamyr washing in from the lake any day. Yllgami, you sort out the nets. Ena, you mend them. Eshiqi—” Hruuzk produced a mending kit that had been tucked into his belt and held it out to her. “—sew on the hooks. Yllgami will show you where and how.”

Amber slowly took the kit from him and turned it around. It was Meoraq’s.

“I want the first of them ready for the water this evening and the last of them in the water by tomorrow night. Show me those clever hands, eh? Good girl.”

Hruuzk gave her head a pat. She looked at him, thinking of the night she’d first held this kit, and Meoraq beside her as she made new soles for the boots Zhuqa had taken away. Someone else in this camp was wearing them. Someone else had the white thuoch hides which would never be her coat. Someone had stolen the clothes she’d spent all winter making.

Someone had stolen her.

“Get to it,” Hruuzk ordered, already on his way out. If he’d seen anything different in her eyes, he hadn’t thought it worth mentioning. And why should he? An unhappy slave in the workpit? No, really?

Yllgami was brushing at Amber’s sleeve with the very tip of her knuckles and making mewing sounds scarcely loud enough to hear. Reluctant to put Meoraq’s mending kit aside, Amber tucked it underneath her arm, but gave Yllgami her full attention. Life went on. Mothers died, ships crashed, people left you, people stole you…but life went on.

It helped to think of the nets like Christmas lights. First, they had to be untangled, and while it was obvious that whoever had packed them away had made an effort to bundle each one separately, they’d all knotted together. As soon as the first one was free, Ena had it and a spare coil of rope and was using what looked like a giant wooden barrette to patch holes in the loose weave. As Amber continued to help Yllgami, Dkorm and Xzem arrived.

He kicked some sacks into a heap and sat down, tucking Rosek under his arm with an expression of profound dislike. She was restless, wriggly, and already making those breathy barking noises that meant a crying fit wasn’t far off.

Amber hesitated, picking at her net, then pushed it back and headed over.

“Take the fucking thing,” Dkorm groaned, but instead, Amber rummaged in the crates and bags around him for the scraps of clothing left over from her mending of a few days’ ago. With rags in various colors and a little thread from Meoraq’s kit, Amber threw a crude doll together. She wasn’t good at domestic shit like this, but good enough for Rosek, who gawped at the gift like it was the first she’d ever seen…which it probably was. She took it, chewed it, shook it, and let out a shrill squeal and began to beat it vigorously against the side of a crate.

“How is that better?” Dkorm demanded, spines flat.

Amber went back to the nets. Ena had finished her repairs and Yllgami was waiting anxiously next to the box of hooks. Amber watched without interest while Yllgami deftly and wordlessly sewed about a dozen fish hooks into the weave, not too closely spaced and all pointed in the same direction, then took the needle when it was offered and got to work.

She immediately stabbed herself with a fish hook. The hooks were barbed; pulling it out tore the little wound even wider. It bled enough to draw a thin red line from the tip of her finger to the crease of her first knuckle, but that was all. ‘Just lick it,’ she thought in Meoraq’s terse, irritated voice, and did. It tasted bitter.

The fish hook was a swoop of metal lying in her palm, reflecting nothing but the lamp light. ‘Meoraq could kill a man with this stupid thing,’ she thought sourly. But what did that prove? Meoraq could kill a man with a beach ball.

Breath on her shoulder. She stiffened, but didn’t turn around. She didn’t try to hide the hook either, knowing it had already been seen. She simply picked up a needle and started tying it onto the net.

Dkorm snorted at her back. “It amazes me that you can work all those fingers without getting them confused,” he remarked and started to turn away. He paused. He turned back, jogging Rosek higher onto his shoulder so that he could reach out and play with Amber’s hair. “Does Zhuqa know how clever you are with your many fingers, Eshiqi?”

“Fuck off. I’m working.”

“Zhuqa told me I couldn’t have a poke.” He leaned in to lick at her. The waxy nub of his tongue, dry and repulsive, swept back and forth over her shoulder while she fought and failed not to squirm. “As far as I know, everything else is just fine.”

“If you believe that, you’re even dumber than you look.” Amber shrugged hard enough to hit him in the jaw and followed that glancing blow with a glare while he rubbed his snout and looked thinly amused. “And you’re not scaring me with any of this macho shit, so just back off and let me work.”

“You talk too much.” He moved to the other shoulder and licked it, too. Tiny hands caught at her wrap as he worked his way methodically to her neck; the baby, Rosek, trying to wriggle out from between them. “Fucking sprat,” she heard him mutter and he leaned away.

Her hand tightened on the needle before she could make herself relax. It wasn’t much of a gesture. He should have missed it if he’d been looking anywhere but right at her hand.

But he snorted again. “With that thing?” he asked derisively. “Go on, then.”

She made another knot, furious and silent.

“You don’t think I mean it.” He caught her wrist, turned her roughly around and shoved her against the table. Her ass hit the corner just right and she toppled back, catching herself in the split-second before she took a painful sprawl across the hook-studded net. She had the needle raised in a fist before she knew it.

Dkorm stepped up invitingly, the baby in one arm and the other open wide, displaying the whole of his scaly chest for her sliver of baked bone to pierce. “Go on. You killed a man, they say, so you must have some arm in you, no matter how you look. You could even hurt me if you sink it in my eye, but I warn you, you might hit the sprat.” He jogged Rosek again and she squealed happily and waved her new doll over her head.

Amber put the needle down and gave it a push out of her easy reach.

Dkorm grunted and fingered her hair, then wrapped a hank of it around his wrist and pried her head slowly back, further and further, until her shaking arm couldn’t brace her anymore. She fell with a weak, angry cry, anticipating a dozen barbed hooks in her back, but the hand that pulled her down also held her up. She waited, suspended over the net with her eyes squeezed shut, for him to work out what he wanted to do.

After an tense silence, Dkorm rasped out another lizard-laugh and backed up, tossing her by her hair to her knees on the floor. “You are the ugliest Gann-damned thing I have ever seen,” he announced, handing her the baby as he beckoned to Yllgami. “I honestly don’t know what it is about you that makes me want to fuck.”

“Of course you want to fuck, you’re nothing but a giant dick,” Amber said, and was glad he didn’t know English enough to know how shaky and frightened she sounded. Behind her, she could hear as Dkorm bent his slave over the table. He was loud—grunting, slapping, hissing; Yllgami never made a sound.

Rosek, larger and stronger than Zhuqa’s baby, struggled to get away from the smooth-skinned, hairy monster now enveloping her, and finally Xzem crept forward and snatched her away. Amber rubbed at her empty arms and watched Xzem nuzzle Rosek while nursing the smaller infant. Dkorm’s violent sex went on and on.

“Look at you…pretending…not to care,” he panted, finally shoving the lizardlady away and wiping his cock clean on her skirts. “Look at you staring me down like I couldn’t stand you up and put it to you so hard, you’d be coughing on my cum before the end.”

His boots tromped heavily around until he stood in front of her, over her. He didn’t move to take the baby back, either of them. He just stood there while Amber glared at the floor and made herself keep quiet. Then, with a curt laugh, he caught her by the hair and yanked her head up. Looking at him meant looking past the cudgel of his erection, already weeping fresh beads of oil in readiness. “I can see murder in your eyes. When are you going to learn that you are a slave now?” he wondered, giving her hair a shake. “You can be as fierce as you want, Eshiqi, but all it will get you is killed.”

He was right. Thoughts of the needle and the fish hooks taunted her, but the real bitterness was that she’d come to think of them as any kind of weapon at all. Even if she could get the needle through his thick hide, how much damage could she do? She remembered the kipwe all too well and how its quills—the smallest of them twice the size of her needle—hadn’t slowed Meoraq down in battle. He’d actually been able to sleep through their removal. She also remembered the way his scales had sealed up over the wounds as she pulled them out, so even if she got in a good hit, she’d never do any real damage. Maybe she could stab him in the slit, where his scales were thinnest and didn’t overlap, but if that was the best she could do, what was the point?

“Zhuqa seems to think that you’re smart,” Dkorm was saying, running his thumb idly up and down along his shaft as he toyed with her hair. “But you’re not smart enough to know that making me happy is much better for you in the long term than showing me how fierce you can be.”

All this with his dick right in front of her. Amber felt a moment’s nostalgia for the days of Crandall and subtle innuendo. She started to twist her face away from the hook-tipped thing Dkorm kept aimed at her, but then flinched a little and stared right at it.

“I wish you would take a stab at me, Eshiqi,” he said, and let her go again to grip his cock, squeezing once wistfully before pushing it back, grimacing with effort, into his slit. “There’s not a scale on me you could poke through with that toy you had, but if you at least tried, maybe Zhuqa would give me one hour to poke b—”

Amber reached out and caught him by the narrowing tip of his cock before he could force it all the way out of sight. He let go with a startled hiss and out it came, thrusting through her fist in oiled urgency until the knot at its base bumped her hand.

And there it was.

Meoraq could kill a man with this stupid thing, she’d thought, looking at the fish hook, but she hadn’t meant it, not really. Not even Meoraq could magically make that insignificant bit of metal into a murder weapon when every part of a lizardman’s body was armored and every vein protected.

Every vein…but this one. That thick, black, throbbing vein that crawled along the surface of the bulging knot at the base of his cock.

“Get off me,” Dkorm warned, glancing over his shoulder at the workpit door, but he didn’t try to pry her off. Zhuqa could walk in at any moment, and if he found her here with her hand on this man’s dick, he’d probably do all the killing she could ever want for her, but it wasn’t Dkorm she wanted dead.

‘I could do it,’ she thought, stunned. ‘Even with a fish hook.’

“Get off me, I said!”

Amber looked up past the slick head of his cock to his strained, somewhat dazed face. His spines were low, but not flat, and the color was coming in at his throat. If she gave him a stroke, she had no doubt that would be the end of his objections.

‘Because he’s sick,’ she thought, staring. ‘Once his neck lights up, it all about sex…or killing…and all they want to do is more of it. It’s only, what? Seventeen years of training that keeps Meoraq more or less under control—’

Training that Zhuqa shared. Training that just might give him that one moment’s pause to think, ‘Hang on, this is suspicious.’ And then he’d kill her.

And how was she going to smuggle a fish hook out of the workpit anyway? More importantly, how was she going to smuggle it into Zhuqa’s room? He’d strip her as soon as he got her home and as soon as he saw a weapon, even if it was a silly little finger-length fish hook, he’d kill her.

And even if he didn’t, even if by some miracle she killed him, there was no way out except up ten flights of stairs, past ten pairs of guards and then past all the rest of them living in the ruins on the surface before running out into the wildlands to get lost and die anyway.

‘So stay,’ she thought in the voice of her dead mother. She looked at her hand on Dkorm’s dick and it was Bo Peep’s hand. It was Bo Peep’s heart inside her feeling nothing but hopelessness and hate, feeling it so completely that it was almost comforting. ‘Stay and be Zhuqa’s Eshiqi. Be a mother to his kids. Help train the new slaves he brings home for his men to fuck. Suck it up or blow it out, little girl. There’s no such thing as a fate worse than death.’

In the stillness of that moment, she was tempted.

“Fuck you,” Amber whispered, appalled. She let go of Dkorm and wiped her hand on her shift.

He socked her in the ear. Probably not as hard as he could have, but hard enough. Whether he hit her for grabbing his cock or letting go, she didn’t know and he didn’t explain. He just knocked her aside and pulled Yllgami back to finish him off.  Less than a minute later, he was back on his throne of crates and sacks, swearing at Rosek and drinking.

Amber sat on the floor. The other women worked around her. She watched them; they did not watch her.

Meoraq was looking for her. She still believed that, but every time she woke up beside Zhuqa, it was getting harder to believe he’d find her. And if God told him to get on with his life—if he saw a funny shape in the clouds or if the fire burned a weird way or if any one of a thousand random things happened—he’d do it.

Maybe he’d already done it. With Bo Peep sitting so close beside her, it was easy to imagine him coming back to camp and praying instead of looking for her. She could see him kneeling beside the dead raider all night and then leaving him to rot on the ground in the morning. Why burn him? He’d gone to Gann. He was corrupted beyond all forgiveness. And so, perhaps, was she.

‘No one is going to save you, little girl.’

“Fuck you,” Amber said again.

Bo Peep shrugged inside her head, smiling her mean, drunken smile. ‘Sometimes you have to say the bad stuff. Hope is nothing but pretty lies, like those storybooks they gave you in state-care, where the dragon always dies in the end and the prince climbs the tower and carries the prisoner away to be a princess forever and forever. Bullshit, baby. In the real world, nobody saves you. In the real world, it’s live in Zhuqa’s House…or die there.’

Amber opened her mouth to tell her mother’s fake ghost to fuck herself for a third time, but couldn’t. Bo Peep was right. And since the only part of Bo Peep that was still around was a figment of Amber’s own imagination, she guessed she knew what she was going to do.

She was going to escape.

* * *

They finished three nets by the end of the day, with little enough for Amber to do that she also learned how to repair them. She needed the distraction, badly. With nothing to think about except the hook—not even the hook, but the possibility, the potential, of the hook—she had become tense enough to make her neck and back ache. Aching muscles needed to be stretched. Walking helped the stretching, but made the other lizardladies distinctly nervous. So she picked up a pair of the odd wooden tools Ena was using and watched until she figured out how to fix a hole in a fishing net.

She kept at it long after the rest of them were gone. Hook and pull, wrap and knot, wrap and hook. It made the time pass.

Zhuqa came. Amber put Meoraq’s needles back in Meoraq’s mending kit and set it carefully on the table where she had been working. Then she turned around to face him, tipping back her head in case he wanted a nuzzle. He did. She stood very still until it was over and then followed him out into the hall.

Alone in his room, Amber took the initiative, stripping away her clothes before he gave the order and standing patiently by while he searched her. She could feel the plan throbbing behind her eyes like a headache, until she could not bear to meet his gaze and had to look away.

“You should know,” he murmured, stroking at her throat, “I find coyness deeply arousing. Come and greet your man, Eshiqi, before we share our meal.”

Amber stepped close, still staring at the table to keep her thoughts, her plan, away from his too-piercing stare. She pressed her cheek perfunctorily to his chest and her hand to his groin, thoughts racing. She loosened his belt to work her hand beneath his metal loin-plate and kneaded at him, seeking the hidden hardness of his cock beneath his skin.

“Enough of that,” said Zhuqa, chuckling as he patted her hip. “Food first. Then we play.”

“Believe me, I’m not playing,” said Amber, resisting his nudge toward the table and moving her hand instead to his slit.

He caught her wrist, the hard edges of his belly-scales flexing shut around her fingertip. He didn’t look amused anymore. She glared, because she knew he expected to see it, even as she felt her heart pounding at her ribs…and her ribs pressed too goddamn close to his.

His eyes narrowed. Deliberately, he cocked his head—a warning.

“Please,” she said in lizardish. Nerves made her voice shake and that was good, as long as she sounded broken and not like her head was burning up with secrets.

“You want something?” Suspicion dimmed, but didn’t die. “What do you want?”

What, it wasn’t enough that she was trying to ingratiate herself? She had to have a reason?

“Take me out,” she said. “Just for a little while.”

“Eh?”

Fuck this stupid impossible goddamn tonal language. “Out,” she said, or tried to. “Grass. Trees. Sky.”

“You what…?” His head slowly tipped back. “You want to see the sky.”