Текст книги "The Last Hour of Gann"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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Текущая страница: 60 (всего у книги 80 страниц)

She supposed she could move it into the fold of her cheek…where, the way her luck was going, it would hook itself in and stay.

The image of half a fish hook protruding through the soft side of her face was pretty bad. The image that replaced it—same image, really, only with the addition of Zhuqa beating her to death—was worse.

Amber brought both her hands up, kneading firmly at his loins as she breathed over his slit, and watching through her hair for him to close his eyes.

He saw her watching. His head cocked.

Oh fuck Gann.

He reached out and brushed the hair out of her eyes, then gathered most of it up and held it for her, resting his hand comfortably atop her head. “Better?”

If her hands hadn’t been full of lizard-dick, she’d have hit herself on the forehead.

“So much better,” she muttered and stared without a lot of hope at his gleaming slit.

Well, what the hell. He could only kill her once.

‘Yeah, but I bet he can make it seem like more,’ she thought.

Never mind. Whatever happened, happened. It was all in God’s hands.

Amber slipped her thumb upwards along his slit and in, teasing at his sa’ad. The edges of his slit relaxed at once, letting his cock extrude. She gripped it in her fist—here goes nothing—and bent low, sweeping her free hand down over his belly as she opened her mouth—i’m actually going to die with a dick in my hand life is full of the weirdest surprises—and slipped the fish hook against the cup of her palm a fraction of a second before sucking the nub of his clit into her mouth.

She waited, tonguing the alphabet over and around the stiff little knot between her lips, but she didn’t die. The fish hook was a huge, obvious secret tucked between her thumb and her palm. She’d cut herself already. She was bleeding on him. He had to see the blood, even if he couldn’t smell it or feel it. Damn it, how long was he going to make her wait before he stabbed her in the ear?

She raised her head and looked.

His eyes snapped open at once, burning like two more points of lamplight, as he gave her hair a vicious yank. “Don’t you fucking dare stop!” he hissed, yellow popping out in vibrant stripes on both sides of his neck. In the next breath, he visibly fought himself to a calmer place, relaxing his hand and even brushing at her cheek. “I won’t hurt you, Eshiqi. I won’t hurt you. But be careful how you play with me.” His eyes, clearer now, shifted to the tip of his cock and back to her. He let go of her hair and gripped himself at the base of his shaft. “Do that again…with your mouth.”

She couldn’t believe she actually had the hook in her hand—

–and now he was covering the vein.

* * *

Meoraq circled the ruins several times, as much as the crumbling buildings and overgrowth allowed, trusting darkness for cover, the wind for sound, and Sheul for everything else. No raiders who lived in such a well-organized nest could be entirely careless and these had many sentries set high on the fallen walls and patrolling through the grass. The urge to stab himself into the heart of the camp and find his woman was a live coal in his gut, but he did not succumb. He was Sheulek, a master of his impulses, and so he circled as a Sheulek would do, killing them one by one where killing would go unnoticed, tightening his grip on an enemy that remained unaware of his predation even as his heart beat out the very throbs of Amber’s human name. But eventually he was there, one hand resting on the stone wall of the ruins themselves, his boots just at the golden line of light that came from the first of the hanging lamps, looking at six men and the end of silence.

No fear. No thought. No plan.

He leapt. The techniques he used had names. At another hour, he would have known them. For now, he had only the vaguest sense of balance and motion, obstruction and momentum, hot blood and cold wind. They shouted, some of them. Some fought. Some ran. He dared not stop to do real battle, but cut where the cutting was easy and ingloriously effective—opening bellies if they faced him and hamstringing from behind—until they were all down and the attention for a killing blow could be afforded. None of the six had escaped him, although one had managed to flee as far as one of the phesok fields and tried to hide there, holding his bowels in both hands, too dazed to scream even when Meoraq found and finished him. But they had made enough noise in their dying to stir up the nest and he could hear the rest of them through the dark openings of the ruins, calling up from the deep places, wary.

So. Meoraq—without thought, without design, but with the flames burning in his chest and his brain—cut the head from a dead man with five or six hard strokes and hurled it through an open door. He listened to it smack into a wall and tumble in its clumsy way down what sounded to be at least four flights of stairs. He lost count of the men who shouted out as it passed them, but there were many.

The first of them, the foolish ones, erupted from the dark in the next moment, stolen blades in hand and challenge in their throats. Meoraq met them, burning brighter at every jarring clash and spray of blood, reeling from one lamplit door to another in a storm of severed limbs and screams until his boots were skidding in mud gone black with gore and all he could smell was spilled shit and death.

It did not end with six men this time. It did not seem to have an end at all. Swords and fists and hissing faces, they came and kept coming. He clung to the discipline of his training, but he could feel his throat throbbing hotter and hotter with every passing moment, until the blood that splashed back into his face seemed cool. He fought and he killed them and it was carnage on every side as the skill and the finesse he had practiced all the years of his life first strained, then cracked, then crumbled. They kept coming and he finally knew—without fear but with a terrible swelling rage—that there were just too many. He was not his father and he could not win this fight.

They would kill him. They would keep his Amber, use her until her soft body broke, and then they would kill her too.

This echoed in him for the briefest moment, trapped in the stillness between one beat of his heart and the next. And suddenly the fires surged and took him.

There was a moment, endless, lost in the blackness of that inner space where Meoraq could still dimly hear his own breathing, deep and slow and even. Then he heard, even dimmer, a roar like something from a nightmare—a monstrous demon sound that surely could not issue from any dumaq throat, except that he could feel it humming somewhere in his clay, which meant that it was his roar, his own.

‘No,’ he thought, his last conscious thought. ‘It is Sheul’s. He has taken me.’

Then, nothing.

* * *

The hardest part of the fight to supplant Zhuqa’s hand with her own lay in not letting him know it was a fight. Which was not to say that everything else was easy—not even holding onto him was easy anymore—only that if there was an axis point to the battle, that was it.

For someone who’d never had a blowjob before yesterday, he was full of advice on how she should be doing it. Each time she tried to ease her hand around his shaft and bully his out of the way, he wanted it somewhere else. “My sa’ad!” he’d be panting, or, “Get underneath and push—harder!” or, “All along my slit, Eshiqi, fast now, faster,” and the whole time, his hand was working away, just like cock-rubber wasn’t a curse.

When he finally did relinquish his grip, it happened fast, as he rocked back onto his elbows looking for the necessary leverage to pump up into her mouth. He wasn’t sure how to do it and was too far gone to stop and puzzle it out, so he simply hooked his leg around her, dug his toes into her back, and lunged at her in a rapid-fire series of what she believed the yogas called the bridge pose. This had two results: the first and most obvious was that he came for, she thought, the sixth time, although by now this meant little more than an extra-hard jerk and a few bitter drops of whatever it was he had in him after his cum was gone. The second thing was that, between the abrupt kicking motion of his leg, his foot unexpectedly clutching at her, and having a hot, scaly bar suddenly banging away at the back of her throat, Amber dropped the fish hook.

She heard it hit the table with pindrop clarity in spite of Zhuqa’s draconian roars. Gagging, she slapped frantically at the tabletop, searching for the hook. She found it, or rather, felt it stab into the center of her palm, and choked out a howl around the enormous muzzle of his cock.

“Sorry,” groaned Zhuqa, letting up on her a little. “Don’t stop. Close your mouth again, just close your—yes! Ah, fuck Gann!”

Amber shrugged his leg off, tonguing madly at the hooked tip of his cock, and he dropped flat on the table, spreading his legs wide open around her—Zhuqa the dirty girl—grabbing her head between his hands like it was a zit he wanted to pop. And there it was and this was it and even he couldn’t go all night, so Amber reared back with a gasp, bit the hook from the meat of her hand, plucked it back from between her lips, and slashed.

If it took as much as one whole second, it would have surprised her.

He still almost kicked her away in time.

His feet were on her shoulders hard the same instant she had the hook in her hand and she went flying. Her cut went wild, but she got something because she felt him ripping all the way up her arm to her shoulder and the heat of the blood spraying over her hand. Then her back hit the wall and her ass hit the ground and Zhuqa was on his feet with one hand clapped to his gushing slit and a knife in the other. He took two running steps, roaring as he came, and went down on his face hard enough that she heard the crunch of his jaw breaking on the stone floor. Blood spat out between his teeth. He sucked in a breath, spat out some more, and lay writhing just a little.

She got up, staggering some on her bad hip, ready for him to leap up and take her down. He might have tried. His legs shifted, dragging through what she now saw was an amazing lake of blood for just a few seconds’ worth of bleeding, but that was it. His eyes alone moved, watching her inch closer so that she could first kick the knife out of his hand and then pick it up. He said something too mangled to make out when she did it, then spat out a bit of ropy blood and said, with startling clarity, “Fierce little thing.”

And then he was dead.

It wasn’t a big moment. There was no sudden sagging of his body, no death rattle at the end of some hoarse exhalation, no nothing. He was seeing her one second, and the next, he wasn’t.

“Yeah,” said Amber shakily, circling around him. “Yeah, I’ve seen this movie. Fuck you.”

She dropped onto his back—the death rattle finally came out with a gurgle between his broken teeth—yanked his chin up—it came easily—and cut his knife across his throat. She felt the knife’s blade scraping over his spine and his open eyes just kept staring. Amber scrambled back, rubbing at her mouth until she realized she was rubbing his blood onto her lips. She spit it out, gagged, then went ahead and threw up so she’d get it over and done with and could get on with the escaping.

“Okay,” she whispered once that was done. “It’s all over. Time to get up—”

The door banged open. “Get up!” bellowed Iziz. “Ghelip—ah,” he said with remarkable mildness as he skidded to a stop in Zhuqa’s blood. He looked down at his boots, his brow-ridges creased with confusion, and then over at Amber. At Zhuqa’s body. At the knife in Amber’s hand. At Zhuqa.

His spines flicked once and lay flat.

His throat filled in with color.

His chest began to heave.

And then he yanked out his hooked sword and came at her, screaming.

Amber threw herself back and rolled under the table. The sword hit the floor twice and then the table—chink chink chunk—before he came diving in after her. She kicked him in the face; he caught her by the ankle and yanked her out beside him—shhhhoop!—in a single pull, sliding easily over Zhuqa’s blood and her own puke. She still had Zhuqa’s knife in her hand. She realized that only after she saw her hand on the hilt that was buried in his back.

He let out a howl that was more angry than hurt, slapping at her in a storm of inarticulate snarls. She flung her arms up, but he knocked them aside without trying, maybe without even noticing. Through the dark blur of his hand hammering at her, she could see the colors at his throat actually shimmering with the force of his rage, but as soon as he remembered that he had a sword—

‘Sex and killing,’ she thought, as suddenly and as calmly as if it were a separate person whispering in her ear. With a cry, she abandoned her feeble efforts at defense and instead thrust her hands between them to loosen his loin-plate.

Iziz reared back without hesitation to battle it all the way open and let his cock out. It didn’t take long. Just long enough for her to yank the knife out of his back and slam it home in his head.

It hit hard, numbing her hand, and suddenly Iziz was two hundred pounds of lizard on top of her, oomphing his last breath into her face. She heaved him off without really being aware of doing so and then stood over him, brandishing her knife for maybe half a minute before realizing there was no blade in it anymore.

It had broken off.

In his head, she thought, looking down in horror at the remarkably small, bloody gash in the center of Iziz’s flat skull. There wasn’t anything sticking out. It must be all the way in there. In his brains.

g rey

‘You absolutely will not faint!’ she thundered at herself, and like thunder, it had to roll a long way to meet her. She climbed up onto the table and there she sat, her eyes going from one raider to the other, waiting for them to move…rise…maybe get their cocks out and come finish what they’d started…

The only thing moving was the blood out of Iziz’s head and it was a slow, small trickle at that.

“Okay,” said Amber.

No one answered.

“Okay,” she said again and slid off the table onto her aching hip.

Still no answer. The door still stood wide open. Zhuqa and Iziz were still dead.

Amber started to bend over, but it made that faint feeling come back, so she knelt instead, tugging the sword out of Iziz’s slack grip. His hand, emptied, curled slowly into a loose fist.

“Okay,” said Amber, and to her surprise, it came out almost exactly the way the old Amber would have said it: tough and strong and able to handle things. It didn’t even sound like the voice of a stranger. “Come on, little girl,” she said, liking that voice more and more. “They say it ain’t over ‘till the fat lady sings and I’ve lost too much weight for the bitch to be me. Let’s see how far we can get.”

There was no one in the corridor, no one on the stairs. This she found so unbelievable that her feet kept backing up on her, wanting to retreat to the false security of Zhuqa’s room where being ravished by two zombie-lizards was infinitely preferable to being ambushed and ravished by all the live ones. She had to keep reminding herself of the way that Iziz had torn into the room. Surely he’d been raising the alarm all the way down; anyone who had been here had simply gone up to fight. She could hear commotion of some kind on the surface—people running, screaming, fighting—and she had no idea how she was going to get past it, but never mind that for now. Xzem might know of a back door, but whether she did or not, Amber had to get the baby.

She knew the floor where the slaves were quartered, not because she’d been going there every day, but because there was a dead lizardlady lying on the landing, hacked almost in half.

Gripping her sword in both hands, fear churning like molten lead in her belly, Amber ran down the hall, opening every door she found.

Empty. Empty. All empty.

She could hear whatever was happening on the surface working its way down into the stairwell. When she cast a terrified glance over her shoulder, she was just in time to see a headless body drop down the shaft. ‘It’s a raid,’ she thought. ‘It’s a raid from this Ghelip person and they’ve already taken the girls. Run. Just run.’

She did run, but she kept stopping, cursing herself for the futility of it each time she flung a new door open on an empty room.

They were all empty. Every last one.

“Oh please, God, no,” she babbled, backing out of the last one—the one where Zru’itak had given birth—knowing there was nowhere else to look.

wait

A roar of rage and defiance on the stairs maybe only two or three flights up became a wet, gargling sound and a short, heavy tumble. Boots thundered down the corridor just over her head, running toward the stair.

Not away.

listen

Toward the stair…from the barracks?

Welcome to the next year of your life…Xzem lives with you now…

The baby wouldn’t be in the slave pens. It was living with Dkorm in the barracks.

Amber let out a scream of embarrassed frustration every bit as mindlessly as an angry lizard, slapping herself in the forehead. Then she turned around and ran for the stairs.

Three lizardmen came charging out of the corridor right as she reached the landing, but either didn’t see the sword in her hand or were too far gone to care. The one in the lead shoved her to one side and they all went furiously by, roaring as they threw themselves at the enemy bearing down on them. She was close enough now to hear the crash of their weapons.

Never mind. Get the baby. Get the baby, get Xzem, get out.

Amber started opening doors again.

Empty. Empty.

On the fifth try, a raider lunged out, knocking her to the ground as he sprinted down the hall, away from the stairs, and vanished around a corner, leaving a bloody trail behind him. Then empty. Empty.

She might have run right past the room where she finally found the baby if she’d stopped to think about it. From a purely logical frame of mind, the room wasn’t worth checking. The door hung open. It was quiet. Surely, it must be empty too.

But Amber was beyond reason by that time. She checked behind the door not because she hoped to find the baby anymore, but because she’d fallen into a routine of panic in which finding the next door and flinging it open was all she could do. So she opened that one.

And, looking right at the lizardlady kneeling beside the cupboard, turned around and bolted blindly for the next door. She made two running steps and staggered (just like Zhuqa, a part of her piped up) as what she’d seen belatedly processed. She turned around, uncertain, listening, and heard a very faint breathy sound—Xzem’s nearly silent tears.

The door was still open. A lamp inside was still burning, spilling a pleasant golden glow over Xzem’s thin, shaking frame as she curled herself around the limp body of the baby.

“Oh,” said Amber. (Ah, said Iziz.)

Xzem raised her head, still stroking and rubbing at the small dome of the baby’s head, its narrow chest. Tears continued to run out of her eyes even though her breaths were slow and deep and virtually soundless. She looked back down at the baby in her hands, rocked twice more, and finally sighed. She pointed.

Amber’s neck turned, turned, and ultimately dragged her eyes off Xzem. She stared instead at a thin, stained mat tossed up against the wall, a threadbare cushion, a rough blanket. And the leather-wrapped swaddle of Zhuqa’s baby, sleeping with its tiny fists tucked up by its snout.

Amber started forward, then stopped again and turned back to Xzem. To Rosek, who, so limp and quiet, had seemed as small in Amber’s eyes as a six-day old infant. She limped closer, touched Xzem’s shivering shoulder, and only then noticed the baby was still breathing. She opened her mouth—

–and closed it again. The baby’s head under Xzem’s gentle hand was round, much rounder than it should be. Amber looked at the room again and saw the rumpled bedding in the cupboard, the mat where Zhuqa’s baby slept, the open door. She looked and could almost imagine Dkorm drowsing in his bed with Rosek; someone, Iziz maybe, bursting in to raise the alarm; Dkorm dropping the baby to run. Not setting her aside, dropping her. Throwing her.

“I’m sorry,” said Amber.

Xzem rocked and stilled, rocked and stilled. The tears, soundless, kept falling. The crash and roar of combat got closer, not above them anymore, but right on the landing. Xzem showed no sign that she heard it. She held her baby and watched it breathe and sometimes tried to rock it.

Amber touched her arm. “We have to go,” she said, not knowing if Xzem would understand her clumsy lizardish or not.

Xzem sighed and looked at her.

“Please. We have to get out while we still can.”

“I wanted one,” said Xzem. Her voice was soft, but steady. “Just one to keep. After I have lost so many…” She looked down at Rosek and tried with trembling hands to arrange the baby’s arms over its chest, but the little limbs slipped off and dangled, lifeless. It breathed.

“Please!” Amber couldn’t bring herself to shake her, but she tightened her hand where it gripped Xzem’s arm. “We have to go now!”

Xzem looked at her. And then past her. Her expression did not change, but she brought the baby to her chest in a futile, shielding motion and closed her eyes.

Amber turned around.

For an instant, she thought it was Meoraq. From the moment that Iziz had burst in through Zhuqa’s door, that possibility, far-fetched as it was, had been shivering at the back of her mind. Even as she heard the carnage above her and knew it was more than one man, even her man, could make, she’d hoped…but it was still a shock to see him.

Except that the gore-splattered lizardman filling the doorway looked back at her without any recognition and she realized it was a stranger, this Ghelip person or some other raider like him. He roared, raised his swords, then focused in on Xzem. Something in his eyes sparked. He sprang at her, but it wasn’t until she saw the badly-braided loop of her own hair around his arm that Amber realized it was Meoraq after all.

And he was entirely out of his mind.

She screamed his name, flinging out her arms and legs like a screen in front of silent Xzem, but she couldn’t even begin to form the word ‘Stop’ before he hit her. His fist, wrapped around the hilt of his sword, hit her in the shoulder, spinning her hard and smacking her up against Dkorm’s cupboard door. She stumbled back, stunned, as Meoraq gave his hand an equally dazed glance and threw his sword aside. It hit the wall above Xzem’s mat, shocking Amber back to life. She leapt for the baby, but Meoraq snatched her out of the air and threw her. She crashed through a short stack of crates, her heels going madly up and dragging her over in a backwards somersault—ass over teakettle you know i’ve heard that all my life and never knew just what it meant—that ended with her sprawled, legs wide open, over a heap of dirty clothes, broken pottery, and the other detritus of Dkorm’s life.

Meoraq froze. His burning, blank gaze dropped.

“Oh God,” said Amber. She snapped her legs together. “Meoraq, it’s m—”

And he was on her.

The broken crates fell on top of him as he grappled with her. He stopped to beat them back, roaring and bashing indiscriminately with fists and sword, completely oblivious to her as she scrambled out from beneath him, but as soon as the crates were ‘dead’, he was looking for her again.

“Meoraq, it’s me! It’s Amb—”

He lunged, caught her by the same ankle Iziz had, and dragged her screaming back to him as he tore his loin-plate loose. He didn’t bother to fight with her. He didn’t have to. He was so much stronger that her struggles were completely beneath his notice as he alternately pulled and twisted at her legs, already pumping furiously at her hip and her stomach and her side until he found her opening and was in her.

She screamed his name, screamed her own, and then just screamed, groping behind her as best she could in the twisted position in which he’d bent her to slap and scratch and try in any way to make him see her. He came and just fucked harder, clawing at her stomach and kicking at the tiles to try and shove himself further and further inside her. His every breath was a snarling, hissing, slobbering grunt that spat hot, animal drool out in ropes over her skin. He didn’t know her, didn’t hear her, didn’t even want to fuck her. He was gone. And when he finally came out of it, he was going to find himself lying on top of a corpse, maybe still sunk in a hole in the back of her head like the mummies back at the ruined lab in Yroq.

Panic took her, and for however long it lasted, she was just as lost as he was, but hers at least faded out and left her rocking under the hammer of his body, her face rubbing painfully against the tiles in a slick of blood and tears. She reached back for him, groaning, but when her fingers met his scaled hide, he erupted in such a storm of slapping, punching, snarling fury that all she could do was cover her head and wait for the sex to eclipse the battery. It did, but the fucking was more violent and he stayed bent over her, his sharp teeth snarling too damned close to her naked neck.

“Meoraq,” she moaned. “Please! This isn’t you!”

He grabbed her shoulder and shoved her into the floor, grappling himself into a new position without ever breaking rhythm.

“You’re a Sword and a true son of God!” she cried in desperation. “A Sword of Sheul is a master of his clay!”

Frustrated with the obstacle of her legs, he reared back and pinned them together on one side before plunging back in. His hand on her bad hip was a brand of pure hell; it was only a matter of time before he broke it and she knew he still wouldn’t stop.

Somewhere in the room, Zhuqa’s baby woke up and started crying.

Meoraq stiffened, his head whipping around to aim at the sound. He hissed, let go of her—

Amber lunged and grabbed him. He fought until he remembered his cock was still inside her and then resumed fucking.

But he’d heard the baby. He’d heard the baby so he could hear her.

Amber put her arms around him. He spat like a cat and tried to thrash free of her, but she held on, hiding from his blows against his chest until he lost himself in the sex again.

“You are a master of your clay,” she told him.

He hissed at her.

“You are a faithful servant of God and you keep His laws! You—” She broke off with a wail of pain as he pitched himself savagely against her hip, and for the first time, that seemed to get through.

He looked directly at her, his eyes narrowed to slits of unfocused rage.

“You wouldn’t kill me,” whispered Amber.

He roared, hot breath blasting at her face.

And out of nowhere, she suddenly found herself remembering that day he’d first caught her with Scott’s stupid little space-scout knife. He’d been ready to kill her then and he was going to kill her now. The only difference was he wasn’t sorry about it anymore and he wasn’t going to give her any last words.

Do you wish to pray? She could still hear his voice and the terrible emotion that had hoarsened it. I have no mercy to give you…I am sorry…Do you wish to pray?

“Our Father who art in heaven,” said Amber. It was the only prayer she knew.

Meoraq’s head ticced, not quite tipping to one side. He flared his mouth open, displaying his teeth in the silent gape of a crocodile, then recoiled slightly, frowning. He looked at her, looked down, flared his teeth again and threw a few rapid, rough thrusts into her before faltering. He panted, glaring without focus at the knotted place their bodies met.

“Our Father who art…who lives in heaven,” Amber said again, louder. He’d heard her and some part of what he’d heard had reached him, but its hold was weak. She couldn’t afford to confuse him now with words he didn’t know. “Hallowed…or…Holy be your name.”

He reared back and grabbed her throat, hissing, but although his grip was painful, he didn’t crush her. And he could have.

“Your kingdom has come,” wheezed Amber. “Your kingdom…is here. You…You have built Your House so that we can live in it. Let…Let Your will be done…on Gann as it is in heaven!”

His hand, an iron collar at her neck, shook. He looked away again, his throat arching so that she could see the yellow streaks across those scales flash and throb.

“You feed us,” she said. “You have set our table and filled our cup—”

Meoraq’s spines flicked hard. He looked at her.

“And You forgive us our sins—”

He saw his sword, lunged out and snatched it up to raise over her, snarling.

“—as we forgive those who sin against us!” Amber shouted. “For Yours is the only vengeance!”

Meoraq recoiled again. He reared back, pulling free of her as painfully as he’d ever stabbed himself in, and stood over her with the sword high and an awful look of confusion bleeding into his crazed eyes.

“And that is the grace and the glory of God!” cried Amber, reaching out to catch at him. “And you know it, Meoraq! You are the master of your clay and you know I am not your enemy! I’m your wife! I’m the woman you were born into this world to find, remember?” She grabbed a handful of her own hair and shook it.

He hissed, but shakily, then turned his head and looked at the braid that wrapped his bicep. He flinched, spat dazedly in the direction of the crying baby, then looked at Amber again. One hand rose, hovered in the air, and dropped again. He rubbed distractedly at his cock, not masturbating, but only an exhausted man kneading at a deep, overused ache. She reached out to tug his loin-plate loose and he watched, frowning, as he retracted.

“You are not your clay,” she told him, lifting her hand toward his face. He flinched back twice before he let her touch him. “You are Uyane Meoraq and you would never hurt me.”

He opened his mouth and hissed silently through his teeth, through her fingers.

“Take six breaths,” she said. “Count them off with me. One. For the Prophet.”

He inhaled in hitches.

“Two for his brunt. Breathe with me, Meoraq. Three for Uyane.”

He grunted.

“Four for…for…” God, he’d been counting all winter long, why didn’t she know these? “Mykrm!” she blurted, praying she was right. “Five is for Oyan—”