The Last Hour of Gann (120 page)

“The year is out,” said Zhuqa, dropping the
blanket indifferently on the floor. “And I keep my promises. Take her back to where we found her. Let her go.”

All the raiders but Iziz moved at once to pull the lizardlady from her bed. Her mouth opened for another of those terrible, quavering wails, but there were no words and no way to beg.
Amber didn’t know she was moving until her back hit the scaly wall of Iziz’s chest. He caught her, but she didn’t need catching. She might not be able to feel her legs at the moment, but they were holding her up just fine. She watched the raiders wrap the lady—
the moaning torso of the lady
—in the bloody sheets so that she made easier portage and then they took her away.

“
So our game ended,” Zhuqa said. He came to Amber, laid his hand upon the baby’s back—eclipsing it almost entirely—but his touch was gentle. “And so you see the man you’re playing with. Dkorm.”

“Sir.”

“Find Xzem and bring her here. My child will want feeding.”

“Yes, sir.”

Zhuqa’s gaze shifted to the lizardman behind Amber. “See to it that everyone understands that while Xzem has the care of my child, no one is to use her. I don’t care if Sheul Himself appears and puts His burning hand on your dick, no one touches Xzem.”

Iziz let go of Amber and walked away. No sooner had the door shut behind him than it opened again, readmitting
Dkorm with a lizardlady crouching nervously behind him, a much larger baby clutched to her chest. She looked at Zhuqa, visibly quailed, and then looked at the infant Amber held and staggered in horror to her knees.

Zhuqa turned away from Amber and reached down to
Xzem. He didn’t help her up. He plucked the baby out of her arms and held it over her head as she clasped both hands to her snout and shivered. He looked at it while it cried and kicked, then at its mother. “Do you love this child?”

“Please, I beg you! Please!”

“I take it you do. Then here is what I have to say to you. Mark me closely. If mine dies, so does yours. If mine lives out the next year, you and yours will go free.”

She reached up tentatively. Zhuqa held the
crying infant higher. Xzem hesitated, then cringed around him and held out her empty hands to Amber.

The baby’s tiny fists twisted in the
blanket. She could feel its pulse hammering at her even through the leather. It was still damp from its birthing and beginning to tremble in the draft.

Zhuqa looked back at her and looked for a long time. “Give it over, Eshiqi,” he said. “Unless
you can give it suck, give it up.”

She didn’t want to. T
hat was a disturbing thought. It was Zhuqa’s baby, for Christ’s sake! The man who’d spent the whole day raping her, not once or twice, but the whole damned
day
! The man who’d hacked the arms and legs of the baby’s mother and then thrown her out into the plains!
That
man’s baby! That man’s
spawn
!

Its head moved, prodding shakily until it found the valley between her soft breasts and there it rested. After a second or two, its heaving sides began to slow with sleep. It began to make a breathy rr-rr-rring sound on its exhales. Not snoring.
Purring, maybe. Almost singing.

Xzem
, increasingly nervous, finally reached up and took the baby, hissing frantically at Amber’s split-second resistance. The baby woke at once, let out a surprisingly loud yowl, and clung with considerable strength as Xzem broke its grip one hand and one foot at a time. It did not settle in its new mother’s arms, but struggled on, its head blindly tossing and all four limbs reaching out.

Zhuqa turned
to the raider who’d brought her. “Welcome to the next year of your life, Dkorm,” he said, dropping Xzem’s baby into his hands.

The raider’s spines drooped. “Thank you, sir,” he said sourly, eyeing the squirming thing he held.

“Xzem lives with you now. See to it she has a mat and a few cushions to sleep with.” Zhuqa tickled at the crying baby’s chin. “You’ll be sleeping in your cupboard, of course, with this little one. You might want a crate or something to keep it in. It’ll leak.”

The raider closed his eyes, heaved in a short sigh, and did his best to keep the acid out of his voice when he said, “Yes, sir.”

“A comfortable crate. Have you named her, Xzem?” Zhuqa asked.

Xzem shivered and did not answer. Her eyes were glassy and dull at the same time—terrified and already resigned to terror—eyes that had seen the worst outcome play out so many times, she no longer
expected to see anything else.

“Apparently not. So. You name it, Dkorm.” Zhuqa straightened up and looked expectant.

The raider stared at him, then down at the baby he was still dangling out at arm’s reach.

“We’ll wait,” said Zhuqa, and folded his arms.

“Sir, I—” The raider squeezed his eyes shut again, briefly flaring out his mouth to show his teeth. Color was starting to come in at his throat. “Rosek.”

Zhuqa echoed this thoughtfully. “Pretty. You must have had a sister. Rosek, it is. Now.
Xzem may hold Rosek while she feeds her. Otherwise, Xzem does not touch her and you do not touch Xzem. My child needs all of her attention.”

“
Understood, sir.”

Zhuqa glanced at the struggling baby
still hanging in the raider’s impersonal grip. His spines flattened and his stare went cold. “Play with the fucking thing, Dkorm. It’s a baby.”

“Yes, sir.” The raider hastily jostled
Rosek into the crook of his arm.

“Come, Eshiqi. It is late
. Your man is weary.”

They walked together and in silence all the way to his dark room. He held the door for her, shut it behind them. He put her back in the cupboard closest to the wall and joined her in the bed. He didn’t bother to undress.

Quiet. His breath came in faint puffs against her shoulder. They didn’t touch.

He said, softly, “It pleases me to see you so protective of my child.”

“You’re a sick, murdering bastard.”

“During the days, as you learn the proper ways to serve me as a loyal woman, I will allow you time with it.”

“I’m going to kill you.”

“
You have said that often enough that I think I can guess what it means, little one. You ought to remember that Zru’itak was a fierce little thing once, too.”

She had no reply to that.

He grunted, then rolled away from her and went back to sleep.

6

M
eoraq lost and found the raiders’ trail several times, but before the sun reached its highest point behind the clouds, he came to what had plainly been their camp. The scorched earth of their fire and a few holes where their walls had been told him it had been a lengthy stay. Amber’s wristlet, discarded in the grass, hinted at the reason.

‘But it is just her wristlet,’ he told himself brutally. ‘Not her body. Stop wasting time staring at it. Find her.’

Meoraq searched. They’d taken his sleds, but had carried them, rather than pull them over the ground and leave wounds for another man to follow. Nevertheless, the small band that had taken his camp had met with a larger one here and all those feet marching together left a path even Gann’s wind could not wholly erase. Seeing it gave Meoraq hope (a lie; the savage flare that briefly took him had too much murder in it to be called hope), but every trail runs in two directions: One led into the wooded hills toward the mountains; one, into the open wilds of Gedai.

He tried to pray, to see this camp with Sheul’s eyes, but he could not find his stillness. Amber needed him. Amber had been lost to him all night. For every breath he took seeking peace in this place, she migh
t be screaming hers.

It had to be the mountains, didn’t it? Having passed the winter quite comfortably in
a cave, it was all too easy to imagine another, perhaps a network of many caves, enough to house even a pack this size. In the mountains, there was shelter, game, and plenty of distance from any Sheulek who might be traveling through the holy land of the Prophet’s birth. It must be the mountains.

Yet he hesitated. How easy it would be to stand here and think of all the reasons why the wildlands might provide a better den. Who was to say they even had a den? They had walls, they had sleds, they had many men. They might be purely nomadic, making trade at whatever city would take them in, never in one camp longer than one night. Maybe they had burrowed down in the mountains for the winter, but winter was over.

‘If I’d left the first day she asked me,’ Meoraq thought, but the rest of the words would not come, even in the shelter of his own mind. It made no difference now. Nothing mattered but two trails in the grass and which one he meant to follow.

He had no time to meditate. He chose. He set himself on the path that led to the mountains and did not realize his mistake until hours later, when the woods he ran through thinned enough to show him the high wall of the city.

By that time, the sun was low, the winds were strong, and the clouds had thickened with the certainty of rain. He had been running the last hour without any trail at all to follow, only the faith that this was where the trail had been aimed and if there was a den, there would be proof eventually. And so there was, not of their den, but only their trading post.

Exhausted as he was, he found it in him to let out another of those wordless bays of rage, but he didn’t stop. He couldn’t. A full day’s run weighed on his body—breath was a sword in his side and he was so badly dehydrated that even his scream of a moment ago was only a scrape a
cross his throat—but that biting thing he called hope was still alive in him and he used it to keep running just a little further.

Because if this was their trading post, there was a chance that those who traded with them had some rumor of where they might be found. A pale chance, thin and fragile as a single hair from Amber’s head, but he clung to it.

The wood that surrounded the city had been allowed to grow close, leaving only the most minimal border bared for defensive vantage. There were no roads that Meoraq saw from his hurried approach, and the city itself was in shockingly poor repair. Years of damage by fire, erosion and violence had been sloppily patched if at all. He could actually see places where the roof had cracked wide open, the exposed interiors sealed off and left to sprout. Although the light was failing, there were no braziers burning, no lamps lit at the gate. Neither did he see watchmen on the wall or sentries on patrol outside. No one hailed him. He crossed the open wilds at a run with a naked sword in his hand, aimed at a gate where he could clearly see three men watching him, and not one of them cried challenge.

“Open to Uyane Meoraq!” he called, as soon as he was near enough to be heard. “I am a Sword and the Striding Foot of Sheul. Open and submit to my conquest!”

Spines that had been flared forward in casual greeting quivered and slapped flat. Watchmen shifted, eyeing one another and fingering at their own blades. No one answered him.

None of this should have been unexpected from a city that he knew to be at least occasionally in league with raiders, but in that first moment that he faced it, Meoraq’s temper took him. He took the last few strides at a sprint and bashed the sole of his boot explosively into the gate. “Get this fucking thing open now!” he bellowed.

One of the watchman bolted down the tunnel, escaping the grasping hand of one of his fellows by the barest margin. “Get Myselo!” this man shouted, and spun to grab the third man by the halter. “Get Myselo before that idiot brings back Onahi, now!” As the other watchman ran, he held up his open hands in a deferential salute, trying to smile and bow at the same time. “We’re fetching a key, honored one, just one minute now.”

Meoraq kicked the gate again and paced like a hungry ghet, back and forth, glowering in futility through the doors. Indeed, it could have been within one minute that he heard returning feet in the echoing tunnel, but his temper, if anything, tore further. He began to feel flame at the back of his skull and forced himself to stand still, to take deep breaths, to be the man who could save his Amber.

It was a young man that came to admit him, scarcely out of his ascension, unscarred, wearing no House’s colors and no great name’s standard, just a simple gatekeeper’s uniform. He took a set of keyplates from his belt, but drew the blade from his back with his strong hand and came no closer than two arms’ reach.

“Open at once,” o
rdered Meoraq. “I am Sheulek. I claim this city. Where am I?”

“Praxas,” said the
gatekeeper.

So. Meoraq bent and retrieved the wristlet from his boot, thrusting it between the bars for the
gatekeeper to see. “This Praxas?” he demanded.

The
gatekeeper studied the trinket and the metalsmith’s mark without reaching for it. “I know the shop. Does that satisfy you?”

“Then Praxas is mine. Submit and open to Uyane Meoraq of Xeqor. Give me your oath!”

“It is Chasa Onahi before you, sir,” the gatekeeper said calmly. “And if you are who you claim to be, you will understand why I will not open without proof.”