Текст книги "The Last Hour of Gann"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 75 (всего у книги 80 страниц)

“So you’re saying it doesn’t matter what we do?” Amber asked uncertainly.

“Of course it matters,” said her mother, now gazing at the big television monitors where the Director was giving his uplifting speeches over and over…like Nuu Sukaga inviting all the post-Wrath survivors to come to Matezh hundreds of years too late to matter anymore. “But you can’t always stop it.”

“Because…it’s supposed to happen?”

Her mother looked at her, still not in a mean way, but with such bizarre force that Amber had to drop her eyes and even squirm a little.

“Are you asking if this was God’s plan?” her mother asked quietly, and suddenly the skyport was gone, replaced by the screaming wind and wasteland of Meoraq’s world. She could see the Pioneer, there at the end of the long, black scar it had left in the crash. She could see thousands of moaning, weeping, terrified people staggering around in the wreckage, illuminated by a sky filled with fire. “Do you really think this was part of anyone’s plan?”

Amber couldn’t answer. She could see herself down there, dragging Nicci through the crowds with her duffel bag firmly over her shoulder, heading for Scott and that other man (he was going to need someone to roll around with he said and then he apologized but not because he didn’t mean it and his name was john something french i think and if he’d only come with us we’d have rolled around plenty and how different things could have been maybe better maybe worse but oh so different).

“People make their own choices,” said her mother, now walking away behind her. “And God has to let them live with the consequences.”

Amber turned around to follow and staggered in the sudden silence. The wreck of the Pioneer was gone; she was in the courtyard at Xi’Matezh. The cliff was cold and muddy. That crumbling wall surrounded her, blocking out all but a little piece of the ocean. Her mother was already leaning up against the broken wall, smoking and watching the tide come in. Amber hesitated, then turned away and tried to open the outer doors of the shrine. Meoraq was in there. He was watching the video without her and she had to get to him before he came out. But her hands slipped weirdly over their surface without finding a gripping place; the more she struggled with them, the taller and heavier they seemed to get, until they towered over the whole enclosure, threatening to fall.

She gave up, stumbling back in their shadow, and turning at last to discover a lizardman standing where her mother had been. He was strangely hard to see. The sun was coming up over the ocean, stinging at her eyes like tears, blurring him in and out of recognition. She thought it was Meoraq at first, then Zhuqa, then some stranger in a white hood, but when she got closer, he looked back at her and she realized he was Lashraq. He still had her mother’s cigarette in his hand. He waited for her to join him at the hole in the wall and then took an impossible drag through his inflexible lizard-lips and turned back to watch the ocean.

The Ruined Reach as she’d last seen it was gone. The flotsam of a million bloated bodies bobbed on the tide, stretching out north to south as far as she could see, interrupted only by the carnage of a ruined port the land hadn’t yet reclaimed. There were no seagulls to scream over this feast, no crabs or sharks to pick it over from below. Everything was dead: the people, the animals, the ocean. She couldn’t smell it, which was the first she knew—cigarette-smoking lizardman and all—that this wasn’t real.

“Am I dead?” she asked warily.

“Does it matter?”

“It matters to me!”

“Only if you’re not dead.”

That…made a certain amount of sense. If she was dead, she had a feeling not much would matter at all anymore. So since it did matter, was that proof she was alive? But if she was alive, she had to be dreaming, and if this was a dream, it wasn’t proof of anything.

“Are you supposed to be God?”

He snorted and glanced at her. “You sound skeptical.”

Amber groped for and found an irrefutable argument. “God doesn’t smoke!”

His spines shrugged. “You’d know, I guess.” Lashraq stubbed out his cigarette on the back of his hand and tossed it into the wind, leaning out over the broken bricks to watch it fall. “Want to know why I called it Gann?”

“Huh?”

“This world.” He gestured. “Clay. The evils of men. And all the other things it means. Want to know why I called it Gann? Would that prove something to you?”

“It’s the name of this planet, isn’t it?”

“Before the Fall, we called the planet I’az. It’s an old, old word that means, eh, foundation. The stuff beneath your feet.”

“Earth,” whispered Amber.

Lashraq shrugged again and turned back to the sea. “More or less. I called it Gann in the Word, though. That is, I said that Sheul called it Gann. I thought it sounded more otherworldly, you know, that God had a secret name for all things, that He had knowledge beyond ours. And I picked Gann specifically because my youngest brother was born with a mild deformation of the throat and until they fixed him, he couldn’t talk right. He couldn’t say Zhan.” He glanced at her, smiling. “He called me Gann.”

“You named the devil after you? As a joke?”

“Not the best joke in the world, but I laughed now and then.”

“This doesn’t prove anything,” Amber insisted. “This is nothing but…but subconscious crap! You’re not my mother! You’re not the ghost of Lashraq Zhan! And you’re for damn sure not…not…”

He waited.

Amber shook her head and went back to the doors of the shrine. They loomed, blacking out the sky, holding the whole world in its shadow, impossible to touch. The part of her that believed this was a dream insisted Meoraq was in there, that he needed her. But if it was a dream, she’d have to wake up. Meoraq needed her there, too.

“Can you help him?” she asked awkwardly. “If I…believe in you or…do things for you?”

“That isn’t how it works.”

“Well then how does it work, goddammit?!” She swung around, her hands in fists, but Lashraq didn’t flinch. “You don’t plan things, you don’t help people, you sure as fuck don’t care when people die, what do you do?”

“I talk,” Lashraq said quietly. “But I can’t make you listen.”

“All you’re telling me is you can’t help! What good are you? You…You son of a bitch, look at me!” she exploded. “Don’t you know what we’ve been through? And you just stand there and talk about fucking butterflies when we’ve come all this way and lived through so much and now this is how it ends? It’s not fair!”

“Suck it up,” he replied and lit another cigarette.

She cried until she could make herself stop and then she took a few deep breaths. Six of them. She looked at him. He watched the tide come in.

“Who are you?” she whispered. “Who are you, really?”

“Me?” Lashraq shrugged his spines and shoulders at the same time. “I’m the warning.”

And as she tried to wrap her head around that, he reached out and clasped her shoulder. His grip was strong; his eyes were kind.

“But there will be a boat,” he told her. “And a helicopter. So hold on, Amber. Watch for them. And take the chance when you see it, because I can only give you one.”

He tipped his head back, grunting thoughtfully in the back of his throat. “Looks like the storm is clearing,” he said.

She looked up. The sun behind the clouds turned the whole sky a blinding white. For a moment, she was back in the skyport again, and then she was nowhere at all.

* * *

Amber came around in a lamp-lit tent to the sound of lizardish laughter and the ocean. She was not alone. She rolled over with difficulty and at first tried to see Meoraq beside her, but the face was all wrong, and so were the scars and the clothes. It was Iziz, just sitting there with his knees drawn up and his hands clasped around them, staring at the side of the tent. He said, “You ever been to the mountains, Eshiqi?”

It wasn’t another dream. She didn’t wake up.

“We lived there a few years when I was very young. I spent a lot of time alone, up in the rocks. One day, I found a thuoch den with two pups and no parent. I tried to raise them, because I was a sprat and sprats are stupid like that.”

Nicci. Nicci was dead. They might all be dead by now, although it stood to reason that someone had to be alive to make the raiders all roar and laugh like that. It wasn’t any fun to torture someone who was already dead.

“I stole away every day to look in on them and fed them what I could of my own meals. God and Gann alone might know what I would have done with them if that had worked, but it didn’t. I crawled down into the den one morning to find the big one eating the little one while the little one whined and shivered in its own guts. I ran screaming down the side of the mountain until I fell and went the rest of the way down on my belly. My mother found me, fixed me up, and while she was doing that, someone tracked up the mountain to see what scared me. They brought me back the big pup, all warm and wriggling. I hugged it all night, crying while it licked my face and loved me in its dumb pup way. In the morning, I killed it with a rock.”

Amber turned back onto her side.

“My mother told me it was pointless to hate the pup. All animals kill each other when they have to, she said. We all eat each other to survive. Thuochs, dumaqs, humans. My mother was the worst fuck in that camp,” he added in a pensive tone, “but she had her moments.”

Amber did not answer. She tried to pretend she didn’t even hear.

“I don’t think I’ve ever told that story before,” said Iziz. “Unless I got drunk and maybe told Zhuqa and then forgot. Which is possible. But you remind me of that pup. The little one, I mean, getting your guts gnawed open by your littermate and just writhing while she did it. I wouldn’t have thought it of you.”

“What are you going to do with me?” Amber asked dully.

“Patience, Eshiqi. Patience is more than a word. Zhuqa used to say that. Made me just spitting mad, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to it. I’d never heard of this place,” he remarked, looking around at the walls of his tent as though he could see right through them to the shrine. “Doesn’t look like the sort of place God would spend much time. Kind of a piss-gully, if you ask me. Druud seemed to think there’d be something big here. If I understood him right, he thought there’d be some kind of flying machine. We’ve been here for days and we’ve been looking, but we couldn’t find it. Did you?”

“No.”

Iziz glanced at her, then grunted and shrugged his spines. “None of that old shit works right anyway. If it did, we wouldn’t be scratching out nests in the ground like beetles. Zhuqa gave us as much of a city as we’ll ever know.” He gave her a longer, more assessing stare. “You ever live in a city?”

“Yes.”

“A real one?”

“A human one.”

He grunted, looking thoughtful and curious. “Describe it.”

She closed her eyes, not to help her visualize, but just to shut the sight of him away. He let her and did not interrupt during the long silence she took to put her thoughts in some kind of order. Nicci was in every one of them. At last, she gave up and simply said, “Have you ever seen pictures of your Ancients in their cities?”

“Some, sure.”

“They looked like that. Tall, narrow buildings. No walls. Lots of machines.” She rolled onto her back and opened her eyes, staring at the ceiling of the tent and only vaguely aware of Iziz beside her. “It stank. Especially when it rained. Hot tar in the summer, wet gutters in the winter, just a constant nasty stink. Even the good smells, the food places and all that, reeked of hot grease and garbage if you went around the back. And our place, that was all rancid booze, pot and piss. And dead cats, that one summer.”

He put his hand on her stomach. It was neither a menacing touch nor a lascivious one, just the absent-minded touch of a man’s rough hand, there between her navel and her pubis. He gazed straight ahead at the wall. “Druud talks about your Earth-place a lot. We encourage it. We don’t have much to entertain ourselves with these days. You took all the fresh dips and Ghelip took the rest. What have I got, eh? Druud. Druud and his piss-talk of Earth. What color was the sky?”

“Blue.”

He grunted and rubbed at her belly. “That’s what Druud said. I cut off one of his toes for lying to me. Guess I owe the little piss-licker an apology.”

A gust of wordless hoots and laughter erupted outside. She thought she heard Eric in the middle of them, but couldn’t make out what he was saying, just that it was hoarse and hurt.

“You have me now,” said Amber, going through the motions without hope, without feeling of any kind. “You can let the others go.”

“I could,” Iziz agreed. “I certainly could.”

“Do you want me to beg?”

“For Druud?”

“For Scott,” she said. “For Eric. For anyone else that’s left.”

“There’s a few. Not many. Humans break easy.” He gazed at the tent wall, his spines flexing now and then as he thought, and finally he said, “All right. Beg and let’s see what happens.”

She started to roll over onto her knees, but his hand on his stomach turned hard and pressed her flat where she lay, so she just reached out her hands instead. She held them up, palms empty, but he wouldn’t look at them. She let them drop. They both stared, each into their own wall, and then she said, “Please.”

He grunted.

“Please let them go.”

“Go on. I’m listening.”

“I won’t fight you.”

“Mm.”

“I’ll do whatever you want.”

His fingers drummed over her stomach.

“I’ll be good.” It was the only thing she could think to say.

“What will you do for me, Eshiqi? Just for me.”

She thought.

“I’ll cry,” she said.

He looked at her.

Outside, raiders laughed and cursed, ate and drank. The waves rolled in and out, in and out. The wind blew.

“That was good,” said Iziz, and turned back to the wall. “I was tempted. I didn’t think I would be. I’m keeping them, Eshiqi. I’m keeping them and I will personally see to it that they are starved and worked and whipped and fucked right up to the last hour of their lives, and do you know why?”

“Because you can.”

“What a spiteful thing to say. I can do a lot of things that I don’t do, Eshiqi, and let me tell you, torturing humans without killing them means far, far more work for me than any fun I’ll ever get back out of them. A man has to have a reason to put up that kind of coin, so why don’t you think? Think hard and tell me why I’m doing it.”

“Because I killed Zhuqa.”

“No. That’s the reason I’m killing your man. Think harder.”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t?” Color grew along the side of his neck. “You don’t know. You can’t think of anything else you might have done.”

“I…” Her thoughts seemed to sink away from her grasp. She shook her head, but couldn’t shake them any clearer. “I took…your women.”

“You took his baby.” His spines lowered. His head cocked. He did not look at her. “Did you tell him what you were going to do before he died, Eshiqi? Is that how you twisted the knife?”

“No.”

“But you took it. Druud says you sent it on to Chalh with Xzem and the other dips, and since I don’t see any of them out there, I guess it’s true. Why did you do that? Why did you take his baby if you didn’t even want it?”

“I wanted it,” Amber said. Strange, how she couldn’t lie to him, almost as strange as him asking her these things in the first place. His pain and hers filled this small space, choking out all other feeling, even hate. “But it was more important that it have a real home, even if it wasn’t with me.”

“A home.” Yellow flared on the side of his throat. “It had a home, Eshiqi. It had a fine home.”

“It deserved a better life.”

“Shit on that. Do you really think that worn-out catch-cock cared about Zhuqa’s sprat as much as he did? Do you?”

“If Zhuqa could have given it a home inside the city walls, he would have.”

That, Iziz did not answer. She lay beside him, watching the color fade out of his scales without any sense of relief, sunk in grief. He watched the wall of his tent. Time passed, unnoticed, unfelt.

His hand moved suddenly. It slipped between the wrapped edges of her tunic to rest on her bare belly, just below her navel, just above the top of her breeches. Iziz turned his head toward her, but kept his eyes on the wall. “Is this what I think it is?”

Nicci’s voice, like a hook in the back of her mind, tearing open her heart and bleeding a memory: Want to see where they cut it out?

She couldn’t answer. Silence could be deadly here, but she simply couldn’t speak.

Now he looked at her. His hand flexed; the muscles of her stomach tightened.

“Is it his?” he asked. His voice was low, but strained.

It was Meoraq’s, it had to be. Too soon to show a bump if it was Zhuqa’s. Too soon to show Iziz anything that could have made him suspect this. No, she didn’t know that for a fact, but facts weren’t everything. For some things, faith was stronger.

“It’s mine,” said Amber. “That’s whose it is. Mine.”

“I guess that makes it mine, then,” Iziz mused. “Never had a sprat before, not that I knew of. Never even had a thuoch pup.”

“You did until you killed it.”

“At least mine died loving me.”

‘You getting out of this, little girl?’ Bo Peep wondered. Her mental voice was quiet but not slurred, not just doing the mommy-thing while she nodded off. ‘Seems like you came an awful long way just to give up now.’

“Fuck you,” said Amber.

Iziz’s spines flicked forward.

“Not you. I’m sitting up now.”

He took his hand off her. She pushed herself up, feeling the drag of her body in ways she never had even when she’d weighed two hundred pounds. She wiped at her eyes, but they were dry. She wasn’t crying. That didn’t seem fair.

“What did you do with my sister’s body?” she asked.

“Threw it off the edge,” he replied, without venom.

“Zhuqa would have made me eat her.”

“Maybe. He might have burned her. You never knew for certain. He had moods. But one thing I can promise you: He would have killed your Sheulek and he would have made you watch.”

She nodded listlessly. “Is that what you’re going to do?”

“Oh yes,” Iziz said. “And he’s going to die hard. Before I’m done, you won’t be able to put your hand on him without bloodying your fingers. He may not scream much,” he remarked, scratching restlessly at his throat, where the color was starting to come back. “I never saw Zhuqa give up better than a hiss in all the years I knew him. Made no difference how hard he was bleeding. Want to know what he used to say?”

“I am not my clay,” said Amber.

Iziz looked at her, head cocked and smiling, both at the same time. “Just so. But that’s fine. I don’t care how much he feels it. It’s really you I want to hurt.”

“For how long?”

“As long as I can. I’m going to make you live, Eshiqi. I’m going to kill your man and take your sprat and I’m going to make you live.”

“I’ll kill you if I can,” she said. It wasn’t a threat, wasn’t a warning. She didn’t know what she meant by it, only that it needed to be said.

“You killed Zhuqa,” he acknowledged. “He got careless. I won’t. He liked you.” Iziz looked at her, neither sneering nor smiling. “I don’t.”

12

He raped her three times in grim-faced silence, braced high above her on stiff arms, moving hard, scarcely touching her. She didn’t resist, didn’t cry, didn’t even close her eyes. She stared at the ceiling of the tent; he stared at the wall. When it was over, they put their clothes right and then he tied her comfortably yet securely at wrists and ankles and left her there.

Alone, with the rest of the world covered up, time had a way of melting into strange new shapes. She sat for a while, then lay down and rolled onto her side, then struggled until she could sit up again. Her mind worked, mechanically filling up the empty places where minutes ought to be. She thought of Nicci, just seven years old, holding her hand on the way to school, and Amber looking both ways all the way across the street because sometimes the cars didn’t stop. She thought of the boy Iziz had been growing up to become the man who had burned his only friend’s body. She thought of Nuu Sukaga, that poor son of a bitch, standing by the window in his underwear for a hundred and eighty-eight days, waiting for Saiakr to drive up. She thought of Meoraq, but no matter how she tried to think of him, it all faded into black.

The sun went down. The tent got dark, lit on one wall by the fire outside. Dumaq shadows, huge and indistinct, passed back and forth as raiders settled. It was a quiet night, peaceful in its way. The irony did not escape her.

When Iziz came back, he untied her ankles and took her out, but she couldn’t see anyone she knew—not Scott or Eric, and not Meoraq. He didn’t watch her pee, didn’t speak to her, didn’t offer her a bite of his stolen food when he took her back into the tent. He just tied her up again, lay down with his back to her and slept.

She slept too. She didn’t think she would, but she was just so tired and it was the only possible escape. She had no dreams.

In the morning, he raped her again. Only once this time, and she didn’t think he came. It wasn’t really sex for him, just another weapon. He knew he wasn’t killing her with it, but he wanted to keep it sharp. When he finished, he took her out for her morning pee, then brought her over to the fire and gave her a bit of cold meat and some tea in her own cup. She dropped them both on the ground and he threw her down beside them and made her pick them up and eat, mud and all.

“Don’t do that again, Eshiqi,” Iziz said, standing over her while she took the last shaky swallow from her cup. “You won’t make me mad enough to kill you, but I will trim you down some. Remember Zru’itak and mind your fucking manners. Geozh!”

“Sir?”

“Get the slaves in a line and load them up. The rest of you, break camp. We’re moving on.”

“No!”

Scott ran forward, caught a cuff from Geozh, and went sprawling on his face in the mud to the general amusement of the raiders. Undaunted, he got back on his feet, alternately wiping at his face and finger-combing through his hair. Now and then, his hand twitched down toward his hip, wanting to straighten a jacket he was no longer wearing. “Not yet. No. Absolutely unacceptable.”

“You have something to say, Druud?” Iziz asked, turning all the way around to look at him.

“We haven’t found it,” Scott said. “We had an agreement.”

Iziz leaned back a little, his spines flaring forward, but he raised his hand to stop Geozh when he cocked a fist.

“I brought you here,” Scott was saying. “I agreed to allow my people to…to serve in…in certain capacities and I brought you here and I said…I said you could have that bitch!” he shouted suddenly, pointing at Amber. “That lying bitch! This is all your fault! This is all your—” He stopped and smoothed down his hair some more. The mud was drying to his scalp like the plastic hair of a cheap doll. “But there is a transmission tower,” he said calmly. “And that proves there’s a ship. So. We need to find it.”

“Eshiqi says there is no ship,” Iziz said.

Scott laughed scornfully. “Of course she does! She wants us to be afraid! She came here,” he declared, coming at Amber with his hand raised, pointing, “for the sole purpose of undermining the colony’s efforts! Of course she says there’s no ship, but there is a transmission tower, we’re all looking right at it, Miss Bierce, so fuck you!” he screamed. “Fuck you! I was right and you were wrong! You threw away all the concrete and you stole my flashlight and broke it and you fucked the lizard and turned him against us but you’re not taking the ship so where is it? Where is it, huh? Where—”

Iziz reached out without hurry and gave Scott a tap on the underside of his chin. Scott’s jaws clopped shut. He grabbed at his face and looked at Iziz, all wounded eyes and stiff shoulders. Then he turned around and walked with silent dignity back to Geozh.

Iziz folded his arms, watching impassively as Scott directed his people out of their cluster and into a line. Through the wind and the tide, Amber could hear snatches of his speech: true pioneers rose above adversity, the good of the colony came before personal feeling, and Amber Bierce was a bitch.

“Sometimes I think he really believes that if we found a ship, I’d let him sail away on it,” Iziz remarked. “The first night we were here, picking the place over, he must have had a thousand chances to run, but he never did. Little piss-licker came to get me five times, trying to work the doors open. You believe that?”

“Yes.”

“Came to get me. But the doors wouldn’t open. Druud wanted me to pry them open. Old places like this… sometimes the doors burn you. I told him. He wouldn’t hear it. So I gave him a sword.” Iziz glanced at Amber. “You’d have stuck it in me. But Druud passed it off to one of his pokes and he stabbed it right in the door, just because Druud told him to, when he’d heard me say what could happen.”

Amber didn’t ask.

“There was a light,” said Iziz, as if she had. “And then there was a hole through him. I could have put my hand through it. Thirqa could have put his head through it. No smoke. No blood. The meat didn’t even look that burnt, but the fur on his chest was charred. He didn’t die right away. He looked down first and he let go of the sword. I was watching to see if he’d put his hand through the hole, and I really think he might have but he didn’t have time. He dropped. And Druud said, ‘Maybe he loosened it.’ I think he would have set another of his pokes on the door if I’d let him.” Iziz thought about it and snorted. “I think the poke would have done it if he’d asked.”

Raiders were breaking down the camp, stacking tents and packs indiscriminately on the sleds. She still couldn’t see Meoraq.

“But you got the doors open.” Iziz gave the domed shrine a meaningful glance. “What was in there?”

“Nothing you could steal.”

He looked at her, snorted. “I can steal anything, Eshiqi. If you haven’t swallowed that yet, I can serve up some more.”

Amber shut her stupid mouth and stood silent.

Iziz gave her a second, harder stare. “No apology?”

“I’m sorry.”

He slapped her, not hard, just enough to sting. “No, you’re not. Don’t lie to me again or I’ll carve your man, Eshiqi. I’ll carve him and make you eat the pieces I cut off.” He eyed her, his head cocked. “Beg me not to hurt him.”

Did that mean he was still alive? The words spilled out of her in a breathy rush: “Please don’t hurt him!”

He slapped her again, rocking her a little this time. “Slaves do not give orders in my camp! Beg my forgiveness!”

“Please—”

This slap smashed her lips into her teeth, filling her mouth with the taste of her own bitter blood. “Get on your knees and beg like a slave!”

Amber dropped to her hands and pushed them both palms up on either side of his boot. Somewhere in the world, Scott laughed.

Iziz twitched in his whole body at once. He looked around, blinking, color coming in strong at his throat. “Who was that?”

“Druud,” said Geozh, rolling his eyes. “Who is it always?”

Iziz cursed and turned, ready to walk away, to go deal with Scott and his petty nonsense until the day was gone and they were moving and where was Meoraq? Amber lunged out in a froggish hop to slap her hands down in the mud again, this time pressing her head to Iziz’s boot, just the way she’d seen Xzem do to Meoraq once.

He stopped. She could hear him breathing, feel him looking down at her.

The waves kept coming. The ocean never cares.

“Get up,” Iziz said finally. “I know what you want. Get up and we’ll go see your Sheulek. Druud, you’re coming too, but I hear one more sound out of you and I’ll sew your mouth shut. The rest of you, keep working.”

And with that, he started walking, leaving Amber and Scott to come together in his wake and follow.

Inside one of the many ruined structures of Matezh was Meoraq. Impossible to say just what it had been, once upon a time—a garage, maybe, a workshop, something that needed this wide open floor. If there had ever been anything inside, it had been picked clean over the years and now there was nothing left, nothing to distract her from the sight of Meoraq dangling from the rusted girders with his feet just off the floor. There was a crack in the ceiling where two panels had fallen away from each other enough to let in a little light and a steady trickle of windswept spray that had collected on the roof. Naturally, Meoraq was positioned just below this. He was naked. They’d wrapped a scrap of filthy cloth around his head to mask him and the cloth did not appear to be moving with his breath.

Iziz let her look as long as she wanted, but at her first step forward, his hand dropped over her shoulder and forced her back onto her knees. “He’s alive,” he said. His voice echoed; Meoraq did not move. “Say something, Sheulek. Your woman is here.”

Silence. The water dripped and spattered.

Iziz walked calmly over, drew Meoraq’s bone-handled knife from his belt and stuck it in Meoraq’s thigh. Meoraq jerked violently—a fish on a line—and hissed through his hood.

“See? He’s fine. We’re going to play a game,” said Iziz, coming back to Amber. “Zhuqa liked games. Most of us do. A raider’s life is more boring than people realize. My game is called, ‘God and Gann.’ Wait here and don’t move. You don’t get to speak to him, Eshiqi. Remember Druud is watching.”

Iziz left them.

After his last footstep faded, Scott whispered, “You may as well talk, Bierce, because I’m going to tell him you did anyway.” And grinned.

The hood shifted. Meoraq said, “S’kot.”

Scott flinched and stared around.

A second hiss, longer and quieter than before. “Bastard son of Gann and a she-ghet, so you have found your pack. Now hear the words of Uyane and mark well: I will not die here.”

“No. No, you probably won’t.” Scott backed up, trying to laugh, but it came out in such a high, unnatural patter that if Amber weren’t looking at him, she might not have recognized the sound. “They have plans for you, lizardman. You’re not going to die anywhere close to here, but they will kill you.”

“But they won’t,” said Meoraq, “burn me. And so I will be free to follow you all the days of your treacherous life. I will hold your face in my heart at the very moment of my murder and when I am made mad by unending death, I will still know you, human, and I will gnaw your living bones.”