Текст книги "The Last Hour of Gann"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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She stabbed the samr down into the mud—not a calculated expression of defeat but only to brace herself against—and dropped beside it on her knees. She did not look at Iziz. She didn’t look at anyone, not even Meoraq. Now and then, she could feel her head shaking slowly back and forth, but she felt none of the disbelief the gesture confessed. She felt tired. Not angry, not defiant, not even grieving and sick and scared anymore, but just…just tired. God did not live at Xi’Matezh and He wasn’t sending a helicopter. There was only her and she’d tried and failed, so what else was there to say?

“I cry,” said Amber.

Iziz cocked his head and put one foot forward. He waited.

Amber bent over, palms up to either side of his scuffed boot, and the very instant that her sweaty brow touched leather, Scott’s ship in the garage exploded.

She was not immediately conscious of the noise—it hit her ears like a ton of cotton, deafening her before she knew what it meant—but only of an intense heat lashing up her back, so that her first thought, when she could think, was that someone in the crowd had whipped her.

She cried out and fell flat, twisting around to see her unwhipped back, and when that finished making no sense to her, she finally raised her eyes and saw three raiders lying dead in the mud. And not just dead, she realized, not just that, but decapitated. She saw the smoke next, the smoke that was not only pouring out through the open doorway of the garage in a greasy, black fog, but also sprouting straight up in the air through the much bigger hole in the roof and sort of…folding under. Roaring. She could hear almost nothing, but the smoke was roaring.

Amber looked up at Iziz. He did not look down at her. All his attention seemed fixed on his hand, which he had apparently been holding up, perhaps in some sign to his men that she hadn’t seen because she’d been bent over his boot, but anyway, he was looking at that hand with a deep, frowning confusion because it was now missing all its fingers. The strip of blackened, shiny-burnt metal that had sheared through three necks to cut them off was now lodged in another raider’s chest. That man was still standing. Except for the thing jutting out of his tunic, he didn’t even seem all that hurt.

She had enough time to see all this, not quite enough to know what it all meant, and then the ship blew up again. The ground heaved up beneath her, as impossible as that should be, actually seeming to smack her in the chest even as she had both hands in the mud. Then she and Iziz and Meoraq were all sprawled together and the ship just kept exploding, ripping the garage apart from the top down. In the curious quiet, she could see chunks of metal and broken bricks hurtling through the smoke, see them soundlessly punch through fleeing men, taking them apart piece by piece until there was nothing left to keep running. Through it all, the fire kept rising, vomiting up through the smoke, pushing a flat, burnt panel on the very top, tumbling it playfully over and over, like a paper sailboat caught in a fountain.

It couldn’t have lasted long and when it was over, the courtyard was empty except for the mud and the mess and the bodies, and there was a quiet like nothing Amber had ever known.

Then that piece of paneling which had ridden the explosion so high came down out of the black, blown into a shape something like a flower, a daisy, so that it spun as it fell, chopping at the air, whup-whup-whup…

‘Like a helicopter,’ thought Amber, watching it cut right through two legs of that long-suffering transmission tower before crashing into the outer doors of the shrine of Xi’Matezh.

Amber pushed herself up on her hands. Beneath her, Iziz also stirred and sat up on his elbows. They looked at each other. He opened his mouth and emitted a godawful yowling that seemed to shake at her very bones– but no, he did not do that at all. He opened his mouth and the yowling was all she could hear of the scream of tortured metal as the tower that had sent out uncounted years of unheard hope for Nuu Sukaga buckled slowly over and smashed down into the dome of the shrine. It collapsed and then the building beside it collapsed, along with a large chunk of the wall, and suddenly, the whole courtyard of Matezh shuddered and dropped about twenty centimeters.

Amber and Iziz looked at each other again. Then he grabbed for the sword on his belt and she grabbed for Meoraq’s knife tucked into his waist and he was still so much faster but he grabbed with the hand that had no fingers and while he was staring at that in astonishment, Amber’s fist closed tight around the bone hilt of Meoraq’s ancestral knife and yanked it free.

They stared at each other a third time, motionless, as mud began ominously to flow toward the fast-crumbling wall. Then Iziz closed his eyes.

“Do it right this time, you murdering cunt,” he said dully.

She stabbed him in the neck and cut, stopped to spit out his blood and rest her watery arms, then cut twice more just to be sure. He jerked under her a few times, but that was all. He was dead at the end of it, nothing but weight she had to shift to get at Meoraq, who had not moved once in all this time.

He groaned when she rolled him over, but it was hard to hear him. He may have told her to leave him. He may have told her to run. Amber paid him absolutely no attention. She sheathed his bone-handled knife, stuck it down the back of her breeches, and got a good grip on his harness. She pulled. She did not allow his screams or the limp silence that eventually followed them to slow her down. All that mattered right now was that they had to go. God had sent a boat and a helicopter; the rest was up to her, so Amber pulled. When she bumped into one of the sleds, she put him on it and kept going. The runners moved through the mud much easier than the drag of a body, and even with the extra weight, Amber was able to run the last length and out through the gateless archway just before the ground heaved up for the second time and threw her down. Her ears, still numbed, gave her nothing—it would be three days before she could hear anything that didn’t sound like it came from underwater and a room away—but she didn’t need them.

Matezh fell.

But when Amber raised her head in the stillness and looked, the sled was there and Meoraq was on it. She lifted her head a little higher and there was the archway, with just a few broken bricks on either side of it to prove there had ever been walls, framing a small portrait of a monstrous, green sea.

Meoraq’s hand brushed her arm. His mouth opened when she looked at him, but if he was talking, she couldn’t hear it. He made a few weak gestures, then groped until he got a hand behind her neck and pulled her close. His rough mouth scraped against hers and in that moment, she thought she could have carried him all the way back to the mountains and over them.

She didn’t, of course. But she made it as far as the underlodge where she had spent fifty-three days shut up in a cupboard to recuperate. She couldn’t lift Meoraq up into it, and he, weakened by days of fever, could do nothing to help her, so they were there on the floor—he, gasping and raving; she, rubbing palmfuls of water over him in a desperate effort to cool him down—when Uyane Jazuun, lord-steward of the bloodline in Chalh, stopped in on his yearly pilgrimage to escape the ever-ringing bells of the Festival of Fifth Light and found them.

14

They camped only once on a four-day journey, in another underlodge very much like the one they’d just left. They ran whenever they had strength to run. They walked the rest of the time, passing flasks between them and sharing cuuvash on their feet. Meoraq took nothing. Every few hours, Jazuun would stop and bend Meoraq forward, pounding on his back until Meoraq woke enough to cough. It helped, but not enough. His breath had taken on the soggy, snotty sound of someone trying to breathe through a bowl of soup. He was delirious by the end of the first night, silent by dawn on the third day.

Dying. He was dying.

She cried once, just once, the night they camped. Lying in the cupboard, trying not to touch the man Amber still sometimes feared might be the ghost of Meoraq’s dead father, listening to the gasp and burble of creeping death, she put both hands on her belly—on the only part of Meoraq she could reach—and cried. Jazuun didn’t budge until she was done, but as she drowsed unhappily toward sleep, he said, “He rests in God’s sight, woman, and if he sees our Father’s face tonight, know that he sees it with joy.”

He meant it well, she knew, but it only set her off again, weeping until she had no tears, only the stuffy ache of their lack. When she finished for the second time and lay shivering and wiping convulsively at her face, Jazuun rolled over with an air of grim determination and gave her shoulder a clumsy pat. “I know who you are,” he told her. “If he goes to the Halls, I will keep you as kin. You’ll have a good man to marry and I’ll see your sons raised under the Blade.”

She rolled onto her stomach and brayed into the musty bedding. He stopped trying to comfort her.

It was the last real rest they took. Shortly after dawn, they were moving again, and this time, Jazuun did not stop until they broke out of the woods into open plains. In the distance, the lone monument in this vast, green patch of nothing, stood the black walls of Chalh. Jazuun checked on Meoraq, took a long swig from his flask, then gave Amber a hard stare.

She knew what he was thinking. “Go,” she said in lizardish. “I’ll stay here.”

“Fuck that in the fist,” he replied, and then rather visibly recalled he was speaking to a woman. “You couldn’t hide anywhere in sight of Chalh that our sentries couldn’t find you, and if they do…I’m going to run you in,” he said decisively. “I don’t think they’ll challenge me if they don’t see you.”

“How the hell do you think you’re going to hide me?” Amber asked, stunned.

“You know I don’t speak that gabble!” he snapped back at her.

“How?” she asked, this time in his language.

“Well, we don’t have time to be clever, so we’ll have to be bold.” He loosened some of the belts holding Meoraq to the sled, pounded him distractedly on his back and then whisked the blanket covering him away. “Get on.”

“Can you pull us both? Damn it.” Amber concentrated and tried again in lizardish. “Can you carry us together? That far?”

“Great Sheul, O my Father…” Jazuun pounded Meoraq on the back some more. When he straightened up, he had his head cocked. “Do as I say. No, I don’t know it will work, but it’s the only plan we have time for, so just do it.”

She got on the sled, reluctantly straddling Meoraq and trying her best to keep her weight off him. To her utter astonishment, Meoraq raised one arm and placed it on her back—the first voluntary movement he’d made in two days. “You’re going to be fine,” she told him, just in case he could hear her. “We’re almost there. Hang on, okay? Just hang on.”

No response, but hope remained as long as he had his arm around her.

Jazuun threw the blanket over the top of her and cinched it down with belts. “Can you breathe?” he asked.

“Yes.” The air was stuffy and smelled of sweaty human and dying dumaq, but she could breathe it. “Go!”

The sled lurched. She had a certain amount of experience with riding on sleds, but there was a huge difference between lying on one and perching backwards like this, an even bigger difference between a walk and a run. Despite her best effort, Amber lost her balance immediately and fell into him. Meoraq’s groan of pain broke into racking coughs, then to a strengthless, “I see it. Like an arm rising…It’s mine, ‘Kosa. It’s for me,” and then his arm fell limply away from her.

She’d seen the walls. She knew how fast they were going, how long it would be before they reached the city. She knew everything and still it was endless, in the dark. She was lost until she heard Jazuun say, “Here they come. If it goes bad, I’ll kill them. I shouldn’t be challenged over it, but do not come out no matter what you hear.”

“Yes,” she told him, which was not quite the right answer, but which was all she could manage being bounced around like this.

“Stay low,” he hissed. “Stay quiet.”

Amber gripped the blanket tighter and pressed her cheek to Meoraq’s chest.

“Stand where you are!” someone called, someone new. “Stand and be—”

“I am Uyane Jazuun, steward of my House, named fourth of the governing Houses of Chalh. This man is Sheulek, kin to me and badly injured. You, run for a cart, and you, get healers and a surgeon to House Uyane! Go now!”

There was no answer. The sled rolled and bounced and jerked. The struggling of Meoraq’s lungs under the heavy blanket was so much louder than his heart beating.

“Open!” Jazuun shouted, and was answered by metallic clanks and groaning.

The sled heaved and suddenly the rear end was up in the air and the sound of boots drumming hard in a stone hall was all around her.

“Cart’s at the end of the gate, sir,” a new voice said. “Should have it emptied when we reach it. What is that?”

“It’s mine is what it is and I’ll kill the one who challenges me over it now, when this man lies in the shadow of Gann! Do you hear him, eh? Do you? This is Uyane Meoraq, son of Rasozul, who was champion of Xeqor in Yroq. That Rasozul, sprat, and his son is who this is, and if he dies, by God and Gann, so will every man I hold even a shard responsible!”

There were no other questions, nothing at all but running feet until Jazuun’s, “Easy with him now.”

They swooped up and then down, thumping into the bed of a cart on top of rough bags of seed or sand or God knew what. Meoraq groaned at the impact, then clutched at her through the blanket, and how blind could these people be? How could she help but look like a whole other person crouching in this litter with him?

“To Uyane!” Jazuun called, as boots leapt up into the cart and his heavy hand rested briefly on Amber’s head.

“Sir, the temple surgery—”

“I say Uyane! Mark me and pull, you gutter-sons!”

The cart lurched forward to the deafening hail of hooves on stone. Here, blinded, the speed felt dizzying, unreal, faster than a subway car, faster than the shuttle that had taken them into space. They did not drive out into the city, but were fired into it—a rabble of voices, a thousand smells, unseen people on every side, and Meoraq groaning beneath her.

In the dark, with the sound of his heartbeat obliterated by the chaos around her, it took hours. She knew they were there only when the cart stopped, pitching her off the litter so that she had to climb back on, and someone had to have seen that, surely, but Jazuun just bellowed for someone to open the gate and someone else to come and carry. Then it was running again, with her clinging to Meoraq like a baby monkey, until suddenly they were set down, the belts loosened and the blanket whisked away.

Light blinded her. She raised her hand against it, squinting, and heard a lizardish scream. Jazuun was an immediate blur, leaping across this wide, startlingly elegant room in an instant to swat the lizardlady responsible on the snout. “Keep your fucking head or I’ll spin it around for you,” he hissed.

The lizardlady, gripping her snout in both hands, bowed herself over at the waist and stayed that way. It wasn’t until she did it that Amber noticed the second lizardlady standing beside her. She didn’t scream. But of course, she’d seen Amber before.

“Xzem?” she stammered.

“Eshiqi!” Xzem set the armload of linens she’d been holding on the nearest surface and rushed forward to clasp Amber’s hands.

“Get her out of here,” Jazuun ordered, throwing the blanket back over her. “Take her to my wife’s chamber, and you, take this silly dip someplace with a lock on it. No one knows about this until I give the word.”

“I mark, sir.”

“Then go. All of you, go.”

“I’m not going anywhere!” Amber pushed the blanket back defiantly and grabbed Meoraq’s hand. His fingers clenched; he groaned.

Jazuun came back in just a few long strides, his hand darting out to grip her by the chin. Up close, the family resemblance was next to nothing. “The surgeon will be here any moment and if he sees you, he will lose his wit and his hands, and he needs them both to save your man.”

He released her and gestured. Xzem brought the blanket back and hooded her. This time, Amber bent, swearing, and made sure her face was covered.

“You’ll have the first word after me,” Jazuun said, but he was already moving away. “Go. Now.”

Xzem’s rough hand tapped at hers. She offered her sleeve and Amber took it. They left, keeping low and close to the wall, passing a small group of running lizardmen in the hall just outside. Meoraq’s doctors. Amber lingered until the door had shut them away, but then there was nothing else to wait for, nothing else to see. She let Xzem take her away.

She didn’t count the turns they made or the doors they passed. This wasn’t like Zhuqa’s camp; it wasn’t someplace to escape. It wasn’t home, either. It was a waiting room, that was all.

Xzem came to a door, guarded on either side by lizardmen in highly-polished boots, which were all that Amber could see with the blanket pulled so low. “The Sheulek-kin of my lord is returned,” Xzem said softly, bowing. “My lord commands his wife receive the wife of Uyane Meoraq.”

The boots moved aside. With a dull clank, the door opened to reveal another door right on the other side. One of the lizardmen, maybe Xzem herself, knocked twice, but the sound of running feet over tiles told her the knock was unnecessary. The second door rattled impatiently on its hinges and whooshed open.

“My lady, my lord commands—”

A kitten bawled. And even knowing she was untold lightyears away from all the kittens that ever were, that was still what Amber heard—the sickly, ear-piercing mew of a newborn cat. Before she could react, she felt herself seized by the shoulders and towed over the threshold.

Xzem followed, patiently continuing her introduction half-heard beneath an urgent chorus of kittens, and shut the door. The guards on the other side shut theirs, and whoever was impersonating the cat grabbed Amber’s blanket and pushed it back.

Maybe it was just because of the sounds she made, but she actually looked like a cat…at least as much as a lizard ever could. Her eyes were wide and curiously slanted. Her cheekbones were rather broad and her snout exceptionally pointed. But most of it was due to the odd ornament she wore over her hood, which capped her short spines and then arced off to either side of her head in twin points of glittering metal and beads. The edges of her hood were even trimmed in wispy bits of fringe like whiskers.

“Oh.” The lizardlady’s left hand rose to tap delicately at her breast. The right went even higher, cupping the end of her narrow snout. “Oh,” she said again, her dark eyes brimming with sympathy. “The poor deformed creature.”

“Lady, she knows our speech,” Xzem murmured respectfully.

“I don’t imagine it’s any secret to her that she’s deformed. It would be more impolite to pretend otherwise, I think. I am Nraqi, little creature.” Nraqi reached to take Amber’s hands and bring them to her heart. She made another weird animal sound, wordless and mushy, like a knife right to the ear, before adding, “Your mother in Chalh.”

“I don’t need a mother,” said Amber and pulled her hands back.

“Does it have a name?” Nraqi whispered.

“Eshiqi,” said Xzem, bowing.

“It’s Amber, actually.”

“Eshiqi.” Nraqi leaned back, cupping Amber’s face gently between her hands and smiling. “Such a pretty name for…well…such a pretty name!”

Amber detached herself as gently as she could and went back to the door, straining to hear through it—and the ten or twelve walls that stood between her and Meoraq. She couldn’t even hear the two guards she knew were just outside. She couldn’t hear anything except her own breath bouncing off the door into the suffocating echo-chamber of this stupid blanket.

Amber yanked it all the way down around her neck and then, in a sudden illogical fury, she took the whole damn thing off and threw it in a heap on the floor, going as far away as the room allowed, to the only window. The glass was stained a deep red and had a weirdly bubbled and streaked appearance. ‘Like blood,’ she thought.

Bo Peep’s reflection floated in the window, slack-faced, loveless. Then it was Nicci’s face, the eyes sunken and accusing. She didn’t see herself, and never would, she realized. The last time she’d seen a mirror had been in the Manifestor’s compound the day of the flight, just a sidelong glance as she climbed out of the shower, the memory stained with resentment because it would be right across from the shower and how many people really looked their best naked first thing in the morning? The old Amber. The tough Amber. The Amber who could be a bitch and a bully, but who by-God got the job done, who took care of things, who had been born old and was nobody’s little girl, where was she now? Who was this scrawny, useless person with her eyes brimming with blood? Who had God, ha, picked to be the last human left alive on this whole planet?

The last…

The thought had been creeping in on her for days, but with Meoraq to look after, she’d always been able to push it away. Now it crawled up her spine and bit in deep. Fifty thousand people, winnowed down just that easily to only one, only her.

She was alone. And if Meoraq…left her…she’d be lost.

“Eshiqi?” Nraqi’s reflection fretted with her sleeves and then said decisively, “Tea, I think. Tea and cakes. Poor thing hasn’t eaten and everything seems worse on an empty belly. Xzem!”

“Yes, my lady.”

Hungry? Tea and cakes? “No!” said Amber in choked lizardish. She wasn’t sure which ‘no’ she used, but she used it loud enough to halt Xzem in her tracks. Covering her stinging eyes, Amber turned back to the window.

“Just the tea, then,” Nraqi said after a moment.

“No.”

“Water.”

“Lady, I know you’re trying,” said Amber in dull English, “but if you don’t leave me alone, I think I’m going to lose my mind.”

Xzem slipped quietly out through a side-door. Gone to fetch drinks, no doubt. Which Amber would have to choke politely down while the friendliest cat-lizard in the universe chatted her up and Meoraq died somewhere in this God-forsaken house.

Amber squeezed her eyes shut until they quit leaking and opened them again to stare out the blood-red window at an empty world.

Quiet footsteps heralded Xzem’s return, but instead of the clinking glasses she expected, Amber heard a muffled purr—the sleeping song of Zhuqa’s baby. She turned around and there it was, wrapped in a clean, plush blanket. She supposed it had outgrown its need for smooth skin, but it woke when Xzem passed it into her arms and snuggled up to her the same as it had always done. Its tiny fist punched once at Amber’s breast, then found a gripping place on her tunic. It sang.

How long Amber stared into its tiny, pale face, she couldn’t know, but when she raised her eyes at last, there was Xzem.

“I never had the chance to thank you,” said Xzem, reaching out to brush her fingertips along the tiny ridge on the top of its skull where someday, spines would grow. “Or to show your lord my gratitude. Now that I have that chance, I cannot find the words. Your lord raised me out of darkness and put me in the sight of Sheul. He placed my Nali in God’s hands and placed this one in mine. He made me a mother, after all this time…after so many lost and left behind me. He made me a wife. He made me a good woman—” Her voice broke. After some short time, she went on. “—to a good man. This child, when it is grown, it will be a good woman or a good man, and it may never know there was another way to be.”

Amber could only look at her. A part of her knew what Xzem was saying and another part even vaguely knew what her own response should be, but both of these were only whispers beneath the silent screams of i don’t care lady i don’t care it isn’t equal it isn’t fair god gives and god takes and maybe he thinks that’s a fair trade but it‘s not! In the end, she only gave the baby back, her throat too tight to let her speak anyway, and turned back to the window. The baby woke and fussed a little, but its mother soothed it back to sleep and soon it had forgotten Amber again.

“It’s all right,” she heard Nraqi say behind her. She heard Xzem’s footfalls retreating. For a while, there was nothing, and then a soft, four-fingered hand brushed at her back. Amber tried to shrug it off, but the hand did not go.

“Come with me,” Nraqi said. She wasn’t a cat anymore.

Amber resisted, but the stiffness of her body beneath that gentle touch felt petty, a child’s tantrum. She turned around, away from the window and the lie of its reflection, and followed Nraqi through a heavy curtain, down a narrow, unlit hall, past banks of doors standing open on empty rooms, to a winding, rising stair.

It led up into the open air of a high-walled garden, long and oddly wedge-shaped, like a polite slice of cheesecake, with benches along the sides and a light at the pointy end. Two lights, really: a tall brazier of open coals below a hanging lamp with an opaque glass cover, both burning in full daylight. Over the walls, wisps of smoke and all the sounds and smells of the city reminded Amber of the world outside her own personal hell.

“This is my chapel,” said Nraqi. Her gaze trailed along the tops of the walls and all the way around. “The one below…a plaything for the House priests. I let them see me there at times, the way I let the linen girls see me at my wardrobe and the serving girls see me at tea. But I have worn the same three gowns every day for sixteen years and I hate the taste of frosted cakes. Here is my true chapel. Here is where I stand that I know…” Her head tipped back. The delicate fringe at the side of her hood fluttered in the breeze. “…I know God sees me.”

“I can’t,” said Amber, shaking her head in tight, hurtful jerks. “I’m sorry, lady. I know you mean well, but I can’t listen to that right now.”

“I had never felt His eye upon me before,” said Nraqi, still serenely watching the clouds roll by. “Not all my childhood years in my father’s House, not with all the prayers I learned to sing or in all the hours I learned to kneel so still and just…just think of nicer things. I never saw God when they took me out from Gelsik and across the mountains to this place. I did not see Him in my lord-husband’s face on the night I was given to him, conquered by him. I was, I think, eleven years gone in this House before I ever knew God as more than a word in the mouths of old men, and it was here. My little one, my Varis…three times, I carried her and three times, Gann snatched her back and those wicked old men wouldn’t even let me sit with her after she was gone, so I was here. And Jazuun brought her to me. And we sat together. It is such a quiet thing, Eshiqi—” Nraqi reached back and took Amber’s hand, lightly squeezing. “—when God speaks.”

“I don’t want to hear Him telling me there’s nothing He can do,” said Amber hoarsely. “I don’t want to hear Him tell me to suck it up! I don’t want to be saved if it means watching him die anyway!” She fought with it, lost, and burst out, “I can’t lose everything, damn it! He can’t do that to me! It isn’t right!”

There was more, but even that much was too garbled by tears to understand and no one up here spoke English except her anyway. Nraqi tried to put her arms around her. Amber stumbled back, but Nraqi wouldn’t let go and after the run she’d just had, Amber didn’t have it in her to struggle for long. At the end of it, exhausted, she simply slid down on her knees with her hands folded limply in her lap, leaned her forehead into Nraqi’s hip, and bawled.

“God does not always give us what we ask for,” Nraqi said, wrapping her in folds of her robe to shelter her from the wind. “But after all my years, I have come to believe He gives us what He can. So pray, even if all He can do is sit beside you. I know that doesn’t seem like much, but sometimes, I tell you, it is everything.”

* * *

Meoraq had not known he was dying, but he knew the very moment he was dead. He knew not because he was standing and not because he was no longer in pain, although both these things should have been clues, but because he was at home. He was in Xeqor, standing in his father’s rooftop garden, where the breeze was impossibly sweet and the sky, filled with lights. Stars, Amber had called them. The sky was filled with stars and so Meoraq knew he was dead.

He went to a bench. He would have liked to have at least staggered there, but this body was fit and strong, and his mind filled with rest. So he just walked. And sat.

Meoraq waited. He’d heard about things like this—for as long as there had been death, he supposed there had been men who had gone only to the threshold and come back to tell of it—and he already knew it wasn’t going right. There was no dark tunnel, no pure white light, no Sheul to reach out His arms in welcome, only this familiar and disturbingly silent setting and an alien, glittering sky.

He was not alone, although he appeared to be. He could feel eyes on him…but that wasn’t right. What he felt was not a sense of being watched as much as companionship. He found himself looking around quite often, trying to see whoever it was with him, but although the rooftop of the city burned with hundreds of fires, he saw no one. The world of the dead, it seemed, was as empty as the world of the living.

Perhaps this was Hell, he thought. And it was not the endless walk across the grey wastes of Gann after all, but only this glimpse of what might have been paradise, and himself, alone.

No sooner had this bleak thought occurred than it was disproven.

Rasozul appeared on the bench beside him—a much younger man than Meoraq had known, but it was Rasozul and not just a familiar face for someone else, some Other, to wear.

Meoraq leaned sidelong into him at once, not like a grown man at all, but like a boy. His chest ached, thick with unhappiness, but he could not cry here. It was impossible to cry here. Because he was dead.