Текст книги "The Last Hour of Gann"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 71 (всего у книги 80 страниц)

Amber shivered. She wasn’t cold.

“Tell me why you want to do this,” Meoraq said without opening his eyes.

“God wants to know?”

“I suspect He already knows.” He sounded very faintly annoyed. “Yet I am compelled to ask anyway. Answer.”

“Because you’re mine and I want to make you happy in every possible way.”

“I have always been happy without this act,” he said, but it was a grudging admission.

“I still want to share it with you.”

“And if I say it is an offense?”

“Then I won’t ask you again.”

His brows knitted heavily over his closed eyes. “So you don’t really want to do it.”

“Right this instant, it’s probably the thing I want most to do in the world, but I’m not going to do it if it offends your god.”

His eyes slid open just to slits. “You don’t believe in God.”

“You do.”

“You have tried often enough to convince me otherwise, but you will not do so now with your human mating rituals?”

“Whether or not I believe in your god is irrelevant. I’m trying to make love with you. It can’t be making love if you think it’s corrupting you.”

Meoraq tipped his head back and gazed, not at the ceiling where human feet were once again loudly tromping, but through it and straight on to heaven. Looking God in the eye, perhaps.

And if so…she found herself wondering if this was the strangest prayer He’d ever been asked to mediate.

“Yes,” said Meoraq.

Amber started. “What?”

He looked at her, gestured at his cock. “The will I receive has not changed. No pleasure we find in one another offends the eye of God. You may do as you wish.”

She stared at him for a while, then up at the ceiling and back at him.

He grimaced at her, an expression which was never going to grace the covers of one of those sultry bodice-rippers her mom had like to read (and which was far more likely, come to think of it, to be found on the splash page of a horror comic), but something in it made that not-cold shiver come right back, even harder than before. Amber rolled onto her knees and arched up to kiss him, to feel his dry tongue prod at hers and his fingers comb carefully through her hair, and it was beautiful, like the heat and pulse of his cock when she gripped it, like the musky sweet taste that coated his sa’ad, like the orgasm that swept through her when she brushed her lips across the head of him and heard his rich, full groan. She did not drink him in with the pleasure she’d imagined, but with joy beyond all imagining, right up until he fell out of the chair.

Footsteps on the ceiling. Meoraq panting on the floor. Amber watched him, giggling now and then when the happiness threatened to split her in half, and finally draped herself across his chest and thighs where she could both snuggle platonically and fondle him at the same time.

“Say something,” she said at last.

“God is in His heaven,” said Meoraq in a distant voice. “And loves me.”

Zhuqa had said something like that once. This time, it was beautiful.

8

They were a frustrating six days that followed. Meoraq’s limited healing lore had always served him well in the past, or at least, that part of the past which did not include his Amber. It was not the alien workings of her body that concerned him now—that, he was content to leave to Sheul and He seemed to have mended it. No, what he did not know how to manage was his woman’s spirit, and in particular, her will to leap from her sickbed and be immediately whole.

Amber’s long lying-in had left her weakened and restless. Six days was not enough to restore her to her fullest, but it was all she would allow.

He had sympathy. Some. No one liked to lie around and be tended, and certainly no one enjoyed being reminded that they were any less than what they had been, what they should be. His Amber’s fierce will chafed at inactivity. It was no less than a punishment to her and Meoraq understood that feeling. He also understood, as his wife apparently did not, that overworking weakened flesh only slowed one’s recovery and that the mistakes made while in that state could cripple his woman for life.

He explained this. She claimed to accept it. And then she refused out of hand his suggestion of meditation and stretches, even for one day, and instead began a regime of climbing the stairs over and over. Before the day was out, she had set the goal of walking all the way to the stream and back, and achieved it despite his warnings. Was he surprised? He was not, not even the next morning, when she wanted to hunt.

Meoraq had only a few moments to think that over without arousing her suspicion, but the facts were simple enough. Point: If he denied her request and left without her, she would likely begin again with her own idea of how best to recover. Point the second: She was equally likely to go hunting without him. Point the third (and most significant): At least one and perhaps all three of the human males in his camp had eyes on her. Meoraq did not believe any of them would dare to attempt conquest and he did not doubt Amber’s ability, however weakened, to put a scar on them if they did, but it was a point and worth the consideration.

So he took her hunting. All that day and all the days that followed, he led his woman on long walks, well away from any game trails or spoor, and let her believe herself hunting. He lost hours to her stubbornness that could have been spent packing his lodge back onto the sled, but then again, even when there were no animals to track, there were plenty of trees to lean up against.

Exercise was exercise.

On the seventh morning following Amber’s emergence from her sickbed, Meoraq woke early with too much to do. He nuzzled his wife all the way awake, since there was no hope of escaping the cupboard without disturbing her anyway, and told her to be ready to leave within the hour.

“Got it,” she mumbled, rolling over to spread herself out over the bed as he left it. “Gonna sleep a little bit, be right up, okay?”

He grunted assent, patting her fluffy head, and shut the door quietly. After a few short stretches and his morning prayer—my thanks Sheul, O my Father, for the shelter of this lodge and its civilized cupboard which is half the size of mine at home, and my thanks Sheul, O my Father, for the woman who shares it with me and has not failed once in fifty-nine nights by her own reckoning to hup her bony knee into my groin—he went upstairs.

The foreroom of the underlodge was empty at the moment, although someone had moved the sled on which he had half-heartedly packed their provisions. Leaning close to straighten them, Meoraq smelled the unmistakable tang of sex. Damned humans. Now every time he put the walls up, he was going to think about that.

He opened the door and pulled the sled outside, facing into the wind to clear his scent cavities. It was not quite dawn, although the sky was greying in the east. A fine morning, dry and cool. A good day for travel.

He was not alone.

Meoraq stiffened, fighting the urge to hiss. He did not turn to look at her, did not hear her little footfall or catch more than the usual smoky scent in the breeze, but he knew who it was with him and he saw no reason to pretend otherwise. “What do you want, N’ki?”

“You told Amber you wanted to leave.”

“In an hour. Wait below.”

“Can’t I help?”

“Don’t insult me. You wouldn’t lift your hand to help if it were resting on live coals. What do you want? Speak plainly.”

“What are you going to do with me?”

“Nothing.” Meoraq busied himself with the sled, re-stacking things that did not require adjustment and tightening straps he was going to have to untie and fasten again when the rest of the gear was loaded. Anything to keep his hands busy so they would not be tempted to strike.

“When this is over, I mean. You can’t—” Her hand caught at his sleeve.

He slapped it off. Hard. But at least he only struck her hand.

“You can’t leave me,” she said in her shaking voice. Her eyes filled with water. “Please, Meoraq.”

“Don’t say my name like that and don’t you dare cry at me,” he added, pointing the whole of his hand right into her flat, ugly face. “I am not my wife, to be caught and reined by the little water you run out of your eyes.”

She did not answer, but her eyes dried in the wind and did not tear up again.

“You sicken me,” he spat, yanking at the sled’s ties. “But you are my wife’s blood-kin and so I will take you into my House.”

“Thank y—”

“Thank her, not that you ever would. I can only pray that one day she will see you for what you are, but until then, know that my eyes are open. You’ll come to my House, yes, and I’ll shut you behind as many doors as I can and if God shows favor, neither she nor I will ever see your face or hear your whining voice again!”

“Perhaps you can find a cage to put me in.”

“Don’t you dare hook that at me!” he hissed. “You’ll have a room, human. You’ll have your meals brought and baths at your pleasure and all manner of comforts, ha, and you won’t even have to ply a man’s slit to get them.”

It was, in truth, a low thing for any man to say, and despicable in the throat of a Sheulek. Still, he did not expect the slap. It caught him right across the snout with a flat, undramatic sound, and although it didn’t sting much, it briefly whitened his vision on that side.

He recoiled to stare at her. She neither excused herself nor asked forgiveness—would that have made a difference?—but just stared back at him, her chin raised, defiant. And why shouldn’t she be defiant? She knew he wouldn’t strike her back. Because of Amber.

“Go below,” he said at last. He could feel the color throbbing in his neck, but his voice was calm. “I am done with you.”

She made a sniffing sound, jerking her head as she turned so that her hair snapped a bit, as in a short gust of wind. The sight, the sound, sparked a flare of such rage that his hand went to his waist, gripping at the air where the hilt of his kzung should be, if only he were wearing it. His head cleared after a few slow breaths, but while it lasted, the killing urge was bitterly welcome.

‘Patience,’ he told himself, and made his empty hands go back to work. ‘Great Sheul, O my Father, help me to remember that my wife loves the useless little poke.’

And if she had the power to hear those thoughts, they would have been as good as a knife in her belly. He remembered only too well the look on Amber’s face when she had seen her Nicci again, and he knew he had done nothing since to keep the fire of that first joy lit. Even now, knowing all that his wife had suffered and all that it would mean to her to see him at least trying to show her blood-kin some small friendship, the only kindness he could muster was to stay where he was instead of chasing after her and slapping an apology out of her whining mouth.

He hated Nicci. Even before she’d put her hand on him in that evil way, he’d hated her. She was no worse than any other human he endured with far better grace. Indeed, she was quieter than most, which should have made her far more tolerable. She wasn’t. He hated her.

Footsteps on the stair, uneven in gait but familiar. Meoraq raised his head and flared his spines, grunting a wordless greeting. Amber yawned back at him and sat down on the sled. “Morning,” she said.

He glanced at the sun, still touching the horizon. “Almost.”

“You okay?”

“Yes.”

“You look pissed.”

He grunted.

“Hey. Come here.”

He eyed the bundled leather walls she patted so invitingly, leather that some other human had already perfumed with…fluids…and straightened up. “You come to me,” he ordered, slapping lightly at his chest.

She did, rolling her eyes but smiling as she slipped her arms around him. “It’s almost over,” she murmured.

He acknowledged this, rubbing at her back and gazing meditatively into the distance, into the east. The shrine was there, so close. He had more fingers than days left in this journey. Sheul awaited him. Sheul, manifest as flesh.

“I could hunt,” he said, already feeling the futility seep into the air. “One good hunt to leave here. You and I could go on together. The humans could wait here for us.”

Amber frowned, but did seem to think it over.

“If that’s what you want to do—” she began at last. Meoraq finished it with her, each in their own tongue, “—I’ll wait here with them. No,” he said at the end and hissed under his breath.

She said nothing for a time, only held him. At length, softly, she said, “Do you want me to talk to them about something?”

“No.”

“Do you want to put off leaving for another day?”

“No.”

He felt her fingers drumming against his scales as she thought.

“Want to fool around before we go?”

He drew back far enough to see if she was serious. She was. And even though that changed absolutely nothing, his mood immediately lightened from the choking black it had been to, oh, a dull sort of grey. “Yes,” he said, releasing her. “Go get the flask. We’ll fill it on the way back.”

“And they say men can’t multitask.” She stood up on her toe-tips and pressed her mouthparts to his snout. “It’s almost over,” she said again. “Try to remember that, okay?”

He grunted and watched her go back downstairs, trying for her sake to find some hidden reserve of patience and goodwill. It was almost over, that was truth, and he shared responsibility for how it ended. When he overheard Amber telling his children the tale of this pilgrimage, he did not want to hear the words, “…and your father acted like a bitch the whole way back.”

Someday, he really had to find out what that meant, exactly.

He could hear Amber coming back already, talking over her shoulder in a gratifyingly terse tone. He met her at the door of the underlodge, caught her by Lady Uyane’s fine green girdle and pulled her to him, pushing his snout hard against her skin all the way up her throat and down again. He kept her there, just for a moment, not thinking but only breathing her in. When he released her, it was with a hiss and a sigh of surrender.

“I am the master of this camp,” he told her. “And I could be a better one. We’ll move on, Soft-Skin. All of us.”

Her furry brows arched. “Does that mean we’re not fooling around?”

“It does not.” He took the flask away from her and started walking. “Come.”

“That’s the goal, lizardman.”

“Eh?”

“Nothing.” She caught his hand and held it as she walked beside him, inexplicably grinning. “It’s so nice to know that no matter what else happens, I’ll always have moments like this…when you don’t have the slightest idea what I’m saying.”

“This makes you happy?”

“Yeah, a bit.”

Meoraq thought that over and shrugged his spines. “If it makes you any happier, I have at least one of those moments nearly every day.”

Her smile widened. “Guess that means we’re married, huh?”

The last of his dark mood blew away like smoke in Sheul’s good, cleansing wind. He put his arm around her. “I suppose it does.”

* * *

The land which would eventually be known as the Ruined Reach had once been among the greatest lands of Gann. Images preserved from that time showed its cities, like pools of glittering light, reaching north as far as the ice deserts and south into the Green Sea. The Prophet wrote much of life in that land, of its loss and of the sins which had made that loss so necessary, and of the poison that had so permeated its soil after the Fall that he warned no man should seek it. Long after the Prophet’s death, one of the Advocates had decreed that the land had healed enough that those seeking pilgrimage in that land had liberty to do so, but in keeping with the spirit of the Prophet’s warning, no road had ever been built that led into the Reach, not even to Xi’Matezh, mere days out of holy Chalh.

Yet with Lord Uyane’s directions and fair weather, the remainder of the journey passed without difficulty. Meoraq’s humans were inclined to be obedient, or at least unobtrusive, and easily managed. Nicci shared his tent and there was nothing he could do about that, but a tent wasn’t much privacy anyway. And it was only for a few more days. He had already decided to demand another tent on his return visit to Chalh and give it to Nicci. Also a bedroll, blanket and even a cushion. Anything to keep her from robbing Amber of her comforts.

Patience, Uyane. Patience for another day. The doors of Xi’Matezh would open and he must not pass them with anger in his heart.

Days passed. He did not count them, although he meditated each night on a new horizon and felt the soil softening beneath his boots. He tasted salt on the wind and felt the damp of the ocean long before he saw it. And when he saw it…

It had been there before him most of that last day, but the glimpses of greyish green he could see through the branches were not worth the inevitable stumble as his feet caught in the clutter of Gedai’s trees. He knew it was the ocean, the end of his journey. He knew it was a marvelous sight, utterly unknown in the city of his birth. He also knew it wasn’t going anywhere.

So when Nicci lost her footing and spilled herself down a sandy slope onto a fallen log, Meoraq called camp, meaning to stay through the night even though the afternoon had scarcely started. He felt no great sense of time lost in doing this—what was another day, more or less?—but considered it a test of his resolve to show patience. In that mind, he sent Amber away with the empty flask and knelt to inspect the injury, ha, of Nicci’s scuffed knee and bruised arm.

Amber returned in mere moments, the flask just as empty. She let it drop. “Come and see this.”

The three human males and Amber’s own Nicci sat around her, but Amber said this only to him.

Meoraq went and through the trees, not twenty paces from his camp, the forest broke and the ground dropped away. They stood at the top of a cliff, nearly sheer, six times the height of any city wall, plummeting down onto a deadly mash of rock and steel and ruin, sloping away over a wide swath of rust-colored sand, and there was the ocean at the end of it.

He had seen pictures. He had thought that would prepare him, that he could see the ocean and somehow still know how he fit beside it. But there it was and it was as deep as sight would go, so vast that it became the horizon, so entire that he could see the very curve of the world along its skin.

He did not think to look for the temple in that first moment. He did not think at all. Uyane Meoraq beheld the naked body of Gann—its breathing lung, its beating heart, its pregnant belly—and forgot his own entirely until Amber took his hand.

He looked at it, anchored suddenly into his own clay’s dimensions, and then at her. She did not meet his eye. She, too, was lost in the sea.

He looked back into the ocean and was at once dizzied. The way it moved restlessly toward him…it felt as though he were falling and there was nothing to grab at, no hope of rescue. He felt that he could fall along that undulating skin forever until he slipped up into the sky. He looked and saw Gann pressed to Sheul’s heaven with nothing between them, no difference at all.

“Is it…beautiful?” he asked uncertainly.

“I don’t know.” She hesitated and shifted a little closer. “I don’t like it. It’s too high. And everything down there…looks dead. I don’t know,” she said again. “I’ve never been to the beach before. This wasn’t what I imagined.”

“Hell, no,” Crandall announced.

They both turned, and just why he should be surprised to see the others, Meoraq truly did not know, but he was, as much as if he were seeing them for the first time.

Crandall crossed his arms back and forth in front of his chest, shaking his head for emphasis. “Hell, no,” he repeated. “The joy ride ends here. I am not climbing down that. Bull-shit.”

Meoraq looked again at the cliff, but not for long. The height, the eroded fingers of the ruins pointing out of the sand, the constant swallowing sound of the sea—the single glance that Meoraq took found its way to his belly and knotted there.

“You and the lizard can do what you want,” Crandall was saying. “I ain’t killing myself so he can plant a tree in Israel or whatever the fuck he thinks he’s doing.”

“Relax, man. There has to be another way down.”

“Says who? Don’t you ever watch the travel shows? Since when do they ever put temples where any old asshole can walk in?”

“Hey, Bierce.” Eric reached toward Amber, visibly thought better of it when Meoraq looked at him, then settled for pointing. “What’s that look like to you?”

Meoraq looked along the top of the cliff, since that was where Eric seemed to be pointing, but saw nothing except the same thick forest they had been struggling through for days. Yet Amber actually gasped, her hand clenching where she still held his. So Meoraq looked again, at the treeline this time and then the treetops and finally at Amber, who was looking back at him with wide, disbelieving eyes.

“You don’t see it, do you?” she said.

He looked a third time, squinting as if through smoke and darkness and driving rain, but saw only the same close growth of trees, too tall and thin for Meoraq’s comfort, almost black against the grey sky. With a little imagination, he could see a thousand, thousand crooked fingers, pointing in defiance at the God that had judged this land and found it wanting, but he could not see a temple.

Even when she pointed, he saw nothing but another tree, a little taller than the rest, but no more or less remarkable than any other. But where the others were wrapped in years of parasitic growth, dripping creepers and grasses that would have had no chance at life on the sunless forest floor, this tree stood naked, branchless, burnt black. A dead tree then, and yet he could see by Amber’s face that it was more.

“I cry,” he said. “What is it?”

“I…It…I don’t know.”

“Well, I don’t know either,” said Eric, shading his eyes in an effort to see the thing better. “But it sure looks like a transmission tower to me. Sheesh. Wouldn’t that just chap Scott’s ass?”

* * *

The walls that surrounded Xi’Matezh had been raised, it was said, by the Prophet’s own Oracle Mykrm, and his mark was said to have been carved on the very last stone to be set. Meoraq looked for it as they circled around in search of entry, but with only half an eye. There was so much else to see. The curious color of the stone—nearly black, mottled through with grey and green—made it all but impossible to see through the thick trees. Meoraq had never made a formal study of stone, but all the rock he saw beneath his feet was of that pale, flaking kind; this stone had been quarried elsewhere, brought for the singular purpose of enclosing this sacred place, and the sight of it did his weary clay great good.

They were beautiful walls, deceptively plain, perfectly molded. At one time, there must have been gates, but the damp corrosive air had claimed them and they had not been replaced. It gave him a twinge of disappointment, seeing that anyone could walk in, and he had to stop there in the opening with his neck bent until he had reminded himself that Sheul’s house was open to all His children. The inner doors, those were the true test.

“Are we going in or are we standing here all day?”

“Dude, just give him his space. This is a big deal for him.”

“Yeah, yeah. Lizardman’s gotta get right with the Big Liz. Meanwhile, I’m freezing my nuts off.”

Six breaths, deep and slow. One for the Prophet, who had been the first to enter these ruins and hear the true voice of God within. Two for his Brunt, who had surrendered everything, even his own name, to serve others in faithfulness and humility. Three for Uyane, the first Sword, father of his own line. Four for Mykrm, the hammer, who had raised the first true cities under Sheul and taught men to rule them fairly. Five for Oyan, who carried seedlings across the ruin of the Fallen world and brought life out of the poisoned earth. Six for Thaliszr, priest and healer, who had brought the man Lashraq out of death and restored him as Sheul’s own Prophet.

Meoraq raised his head and crossed through the gateless portal into Xi’Matezh.

He saw the ruins at once, ruins he had every reason to expect to see, ruins he had no right to resent now that they were before him. There were several buildings within the walls, much eroded by the ocean air, windowless, doorless, lifeless. He saw the thing the humans called a transmission tower—weathered, but still standing, still humming beneath his hand when he reached out to touch it. He saw no machines, but the courtyard was too well-kept to think none were here, even here.

The next thing he saw was the ocean, which he could see only because of the huge, tumbled hole in that beautiful wall. Not just one or two missing bricks, but a whole length of them, loosened by the constant pounding of the waves on the cliffs or eroded by the wet wind that had pitted so many of these other buildings. If he and his humans all joined hands, they still couldn’t make a line long enough to touch both sides. This fine wall, the life’s work of who knew how many master masons, carried block by block to be raised here under Oracle Mykrm’s own living eye…This beautiful wall was falling.

But beside the hole, Meoraq saw the only thing that really mattered: a dark stone dome enclosing the true shrine and the heavy doors that sealed it. The doors were made of qil, the same as his sabks—a lost metal, from a lost age. Perhaps Oracle Uyane had made the knives from the scraps left after the doors were cast. Perhaps he had always carried a piece of Xi’Matezh with him and never knew it.

“Wife,” said Meoraq, and when she was with him, he began to walk.

“God, there better be wall-to-wall booze and burgers in there,” Crandall said, falling into step at his side.

Meoraq halted. He turned, his head cocked, and thrust his snout into the human’s flat face. “You,” he hissed, raking his gaze across the rest of them as well. “All of you. You wait here. This place is sacred.”

“Oh what the hell, man!” Crandall looked back at his people, then at Meoraq, and finally at Amber. “What, we’re not good enough to see God? We’ve come just as fucking far, haven’t we? Maybe I got some questions too!”

“Stay here,” Meoraq said again and snorted, blowing back the dirty hair from Crandall’s brow. “Look for your abbot’s ship. Wife, come.”

Crandall faced him down for a second or two, but did turn away in the end, pucker-faced and full of color. “Fucking lizard’s pet. Come on, guys. I ain’t standing out in the wind.”

Amber had a special look for him when Meoraq turned back to her, but he didn’t care. He went on ahead to open the outer doors of Xi’Matezh. The hinges were stiff, but they opened, blowing the dank, waxy-scented breath of the temple back at him.

The doors were too heavy to hold indefinitely. Meoraq gave his wife a not-so-subtle nudge with the toe of his boot and let go of them. They immediately began to swing shut, ponderous as doors in a dream, and closed with no more than a muffled whump, trapping them in black.

Meoraq took his pack off and found his lamp and strikers. He waited until his hands steadied before he made a light, and it was all there, just as he’d imagined: a thousand half-burnt candles like a second wall all around him, melted together, stacked one atop the other, like a city made of wax; the Prophet’s mark painted on the wall, renewed by countless pilgrims over the years; the building, not ruined but maintained, a relic outside of time, and the doors, marked with the names of those who had passed through. Meoraq raised the lamp and approached, his hand skimming the air just over the doors until he found one name he knew: Tsazr Dyuun.

“Your teacher?” Amber asked, watching him.

He grunted, his eyes tracing each line of each letter. They were not even, which surprised him some. He remembered Master Tsazr as such a meticulous man, but then making letters was a very different thing from teaching boys to beat one another senseless. Still…

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

He looked at her, his spines flexing forward. In the close air of this place, he could actually hear them flexing, which was so unnerving that he reached up to rub at them. “Why would you say that? I’ve walked across the world, woman!”

She averted her eyes, rolling her shoulders as she hugged herself. “This doesn’t look like much of a temple, is all. It kind of looks like a bunker.”

“Whatever it may have been before the Fall, it became a temple when God entered.” His eye wandered back to Master Tsazr’s name on the wall. “All things change when He enters, Soft-Skin.”

“I don’t want you to be disappointed.”

“How can I be? Look there.” He nudged at her arm and pointed to the wall. “The mark of the Prophet. Prophet Lashraq made that mark.”

Amber studied it with a singularly dubious expression. “It looks awfully fresh.”

“It’s been repainted, I’m sure, but he made it first. He was here, Soft-Skin. Here, where I stand.” He dropped his arm and turned to her, holding his lamp before him like a candle-ward. The flame underlit her odd face in unflattering ways; he leaned close and nuzzled at her chin. “Will you stand with me, wife? One more hour?”

“Meoraq…what if—”

He pushed his mouthparts against hers and rubbed them lightly together until she pushed him away, laughing. “Will you stand with me?” he asked again.

“I think my lips are bleeding.”

“Will you?”

“Oh for Christ’s sake, I have to say it?” She sighed, wiped her mouth, then suddenly raised both arms and dropped them loudly to her side. “I’m with you,” she said. “I’m always with you. So…open up that door, Meoraq. Let’s do this.”

He smiled, nuzzling her one more time, and put his palm to the lock-plate.

It warmed, clicked twice and began to hum. Lights came slowly to life all around the door, soft white and palest blue. Another click, and then the voice, echoing off the rounded shell of the dome so that it seemed to be speaking directly in Meoraq’s head: “Warning. This is a secure area. All access restricted. Warning. Lethal force authorized.”

“Nuu Sukaga.”

The humming changed pitch. Small vents opened to either side of the door. “Defense imminent. Present mnabed. This is your final warning.”

Amber took a large step back, catching at his arm, but Meoraq was not moved. “Nuu Sukaga,” he said again.