The Last Hour of Gann (118 page)

He untied her ankles, turned her around
and unfastened her wrists from her elbows. “We will play a game I like to call ‘Zhuqa’s House’,” he said, helping her to rub feeling into her numb, cramping limbs. “I admit that I have played before and have some advantage over you, but I trust you will learn quickly and make as formidable an opponent as you did in battle. I will come home to you, my Eshiqi, and you will play that you are my happy woman.”

She spat laughter at him
, unwise as that might be. She wanted to live, she did, but her ability to suck it up had limits and that was well,
well
beyond them.

“The woman of my H
ouse, who kneels at my side in meek obedience, her outstretched hand open at my foot.”

“You can make me be here, you son of a bitch, but you will never make me like it. Fuck you.”

“Who opens herself to all the fires of lust Gann can give me and pretends a loyal woman’s pleasure in her man’s desire.”

She shook her head, tight-lipped.

“Who drinks from my cup when we share our meals and unfastens the armor I don with solemn duty each day. It’s a simple game,” he said with a careless flick of his spines. “And in the playing of it, you may note my obedient woman does not require binding.”

Amber turned her face away and stared into the far wall, ignoring him.

He waited.

So did she.

“It is not the only game I play,” he said at last. “Merely that which I have most fondness for. The other game—” He rose and casually knotted a hand in her hair, yanking her forward onto her knees and dragging her toward the door with her first startled screams of pain just whooping out of her. “—I call ‘Zhuqa the Warlord’. It, too, is a simple one. In it, I am master of a band of ruthless men, much like those above us even now.” He opened the door and flung her out into the hall. She banged into the wall and fell, but couldn’t right herself fast enough. He had her by her ankles next, pulling her over the filthy stone and speaking loudly, but still calm, always calm, to be heard over her howls. “In my game, I have a number of slaves who I provide to these men as whatever amusement they wish to take. For example.” He heaved her around, swinging her completely off the ground (
used to do this with nicci didn’t i airplane we called it do me airplane amber
) and letting go so that she crashed and slid into the first crossways, rolling and wailing to land at the feet of two curious guards.

“For example,” said Zhuqa, striding down the dark hall toward them. He ignored the
ir salutes and hunkered down to catch Amber’s chin and force her eyes to his. “It might be the day in the game of Zhuqa the Warlord when I say, Uruul?”

“Sir,” said one of the guards immediately.

“Get your cock out.”

The second guard backed up a little, but whatever Uruul felt about this order did not make him hesitate. He shucked his breeches, slipped a finger into his slit and out came the dark thrust of his cock. He wasn’t ready, was dry as
sunbaked brick, but it was there and it was hard.

“And then I would say,” said Zhuqa, not even looking to see
if he had been obeyed, “Uruul?”

“Sir.” The word was a grunt of some effort. His finger was still in his slit.

“I am going to count to six, and when I say the number six, you are going to put your cock in that hole and fuck it until you cum three times.”

“Yes, sir.”

“He’ll be the first, Eshiqi, and once it starts, it will not stop. One,” said Zhuqa quietly. “Two.”

Amber rolled shakily onto her belly, choking on sobs that were still more shock than pain.

“Three. Four.”

She put her hand next to his foot.

Zhuqa looked at it. “Palm to heaven.”

She turned her wrist. Even that hurt.

Zhuqa grunted. He stood up. “Put your cock away, Uruul. Stand your watch.”

“Yes, sir.” Spoken with real relief. The second guard was staring at him with something like admiration as Uruul fastened his breeches.

“I’m a simple man,” said Zhuqa, looking only at Amber as she struggled to right herself. “And those are really the only two games I know. Which one are you going to play, Eshiqi?”

Another woman would have spit on him. Another woman would have made him slap her in chains just so she could use them to throttle him. Another woman would never have needed someone like Meoraq to save her.

Amber got up and followed him back to his room. Zhuqa held the door until she’d limped through it. He did not slam it. He was not, she saw, angry.

“Zhuqa has come home,” he
said. “How do you greet me, woman?”

She wiped her face on her arms a few times,
took a stabilizing breath, then faced him. Put her arms around him. Leaned her cheek against his chest.

“I can tell you have never played before
, but you are trying and I appreciate your efforts. Tomorrow, I will put you to work with the other slaves so that you can see better how this game is played.”

She nodded listlessly. Maybe Meoraq would be here by then.

“Still, it pleases a man to see his woman try. Come here, Eshiqi.”

She went, not daring to look at him and not knowing whether it was to keep him from seeing the murder in her eyes…or the tears.

He took her hand, put it on his belt. He gave no orders.

“Grim as Gann H
imself,” he murmured, fingering her hair as she undressed him. “You will have to work at that. I don’t mind if you hate me, as long as you hide it. Play the game, Eshiqi, and remember a woman’s greatest happiness is to serve her man.”

“I’ll be happy when you’re dead,” she said. Her voice broke on every goddamned word.

He bent to graze his teeth along her shoulder when she began her kneading motions. It was the only time she faltered, thinking he meant to bite her, and it wasn’t the pain she feared so much as the scar it would leave.

“Easy, little one,” he murmured, his voice thick and strained. “
I take no pleasure from your pain. You will carry no more scars while you stand in my favor. And when you do not, scars will be the least of your concerns.” His next words became an inarticulate hiss as she found the slick nub of his clitoris-like sa’ad and they were his last effort at any kind of speech for a long time. He buried his brow against her shoulder, abandoning sight to only feel. He touched her when she touched him, his rough hands lightly scouring at her hip, her ribs, her thigh. He was gentle.

“I’m going to kill you,” she told him, stroking his cock until his oils coated her hand and every flexing of her fingers made him shudder with the effort not to cum. “I don’t know how yet, but I know I will. And s
omeday, long after you’re dead—” She turned around, her hands braced on the table on either side of the waterskin, fingernails digging curt furrows only for that first moment. Once he was in her, the oiled ridges of his cock rubbing heat into her mindless body (Gann’s body, she thought, her godless clay), she was able to relax, separate from sensation, let it happen. “Long after you’re dead,” she went on calmly, her voice broken by his powerful thrusts and not by any of her own emotion, “I’m going to wake up in the night from a bad dream with your face in it, but I won’t remember your name. And I’ll go back to sleep. And I’ll sleep just fine.”

He groaned hoarsely against the nape of her neck, his hands digging painful grooves in her stomach. The first time never took
him long, but that didn’t mean it was ending. He wasn’t human. He didn’t have to stop until he wanted to.

“I won’t remember you,” whispered Amber, gazing at the wall
as Time once again stretched out and stopped. “I won’t.”

5

A
t first light, Meoraq rose. He had not slept, but he had rested as best he was able within his unquiet mind and it was with clarity of sight and purpose that he looked upon his camp. The raiders had taken both sleds and all that they had carried. His pack and Amber’s had been too worn to interest them, but their contents had been rummaged through and scattered. The clothes they had spent the winter making were gone, along with Meoraq’s mending kit and tent. His bedroll was missing; Amber’s remained. His tea box lay open on the ground, the more precious of its inlaid stones pried up and its many drawers knocked loose, spilling its remaining teas into the grass. Amber’s cups were nearby, one of them in pieces.

He ignored the dead man for now. There was evidence there, he knew, but whatever he had not scattered in faithless rage would keep. He searched the ground for the things which had been hidden from him in the darkness, now brought to light.

He saw blood. More than could be accounted for by the dead man, even taking into measure Meoraq’s fit of fury. Blood in a wide, dried pool, crushed into the grass by the trampling of many feet. Blood painting the tall stalks of wind-blown grasses. Blood that led into the plains.

Meoraq gazed into the north, the direction the blood had taken, then returned to the ashes of his fire and knelt to examine what was left of the body. The boots, worn and overlarge for the dead man’s feet;
not bought or made, but stolen. His companions had relieved him of any coin or weapons, but overlooked one bauble—a woman’s wristlet, worn not upon his own wrist, but bent wide and hidden…treasured…around his ankle. He wore a battle harness of inexpensive make, patched with insignias taken from many different Houses—taken from those who had the birthright to wear them, no doubt—and breeches sewn of hides. He had little flesh left to inspect, but what there was had been heavily scarred, and the thicker scales along his back showed the buckling and discoloration of a diet with too much meat, too little crop. When he hunted out the head, he saw eyes yellowed by the overuse of phesok (smoked phesok, by the burnt pads of his fingers, once they were also located) and brown stumps of teeth that had never known cleaning.

Meoraq
looked again at the metal-worked bit, turning it between his fingers until he found the jewelsmith’s stamp on the backing. Ulhrug, it said. Ulhrug of Praxas. The city was not familiar to him, but he supposed the city didn’t matter. This chain with its pretty ornament had likely come off the neck of some murdered traveller.

And yet…

He was well-fed, for a raider. Warmly dressed. He was a young man and not strongly-made; the burlier members of his pack should have stripped him of all his prizes and yet here he lay with his boots on and spoils intact. These were the wildlands at the very heel of winter. There were no travelling merchants to prey on and little enough game for an honest man to find, but he had certainly not suffered for their lack.

Whoever these raiders were…someone was trading with them.

Of course, it was both a crime against Man’s law and a sin before the eyes of Sheul to have dealings of any kind with those who had gone to Gann, but men were weak. Raiders had phesok and strong drink; the cities had sweets, medicines and women. There would always be places where those on both sides of the walls were willing to sheathe their blades and offer goods instead. So it seemed this Praxas was such a place.

He tucked the dead man’s trinket
into his own boot and looked the body over one last time. He saw a hard life, begun and ended in violence outside the city walls. A boy born in the squalor of a raiding camp to become a man fallen from Sheul’s grace. And that camp would be where they had taken his Amber.

He
bent his head, closed his eyes and breathed. Six breaths. Six again. The Prophet. His brunt. Uyane. Mykrm. Oyan. Thaliszar. He was a warrior of his father’s House. He was a Sword and a true son of Sheul. He was God’s Striding Foot in the land and the hour of Gann. He was Uyane Meoraq.

Truth.

He listened to the wind brush across the plains, then opened his eyes.

On the blood-stained ground, he saw nothing new. In the blackened ring of his camp’s firepit were only ashes. In the plains, nothing moved that breathed.

And in the sky, the forever-clouds of Sheul’s storm lay open, showing a face of jewel-deep green and light in beams of gold pouring down all around it.

It closed and the wind blew on.

Meoraq passed a trembling hand briefly before his eyes, then closed it into a firm fist. He took up Amber’s travel-pack and set her surviving cup within, cushioned by his own rolled-up pack. After a moment’s dark non-thought, he bent and gathered the various pieces of his tea box, fit them back together and packed that away as well. As far as he cared (and he didn’t know why he cared even that much), everything else could go to Gann.

He began to run.

* * *

Zhuqa
didn’t tie her up again. He didn’t need to. He pulled the knife from the sheath he kept strapped high on his arm, showed it to her, then stabbed it into the door of his cupboard. That was almost intimidating enough all on its own, but he hadn’t been trying to scare her with it. He just wanted a place to hang his bells.

He had to dig for them in a crate for some time before he found them, and the whole time he did that, Amber had to stand two running steps away from the cupboard and stare at the knife.
They were jingle-bells, all wired together in a festive loop just like Christmas bells back on Earth, except they were made of some greenish metal. Not a minty Christmas-green either, but something ugly and snotty, the sort of color that made the whole thing look vaguely cancerous. He hung them over the hilt of his knife where the slightest movement of the door set them to shrill jingling, then put her in the cupboard to sleep with him, but he didn’t try to touch her. No, he just put her closest to the wall with himself on the outer side, so that escape would mean climbing over the top of him and opening a jingling door…in other words, impossible.