The Last Hour of Gann (133 page)

“You should know,” he murmured, stroking at her throat, “I find coyness deeply arousing. Come and greet your man, Eshiqi, before we share our meal.”

Amber stepped close, still staring at the table to keep her thoughts, her plan, away from his too-piercing stare. She pressed her cheek perfunctorily to his chest and her hand to his groin, thoughts racing. She loosened his belt to work her hand beneath his metal loin-plate and kneaded at him, seeking the hidden hardness of his cock beneath his skin.

“Enough of that,” said Zhuqa, chuckling as he patted her hip. “Food first. Then we play.”

“Believe me, I’m not playing,” said Amber, resisting his nudge toward the table and moving her hand instead to his slit.

He caught her wrist, the hard edges of his belly-scales flexing shut around her fingertip.
He didn’t look amused anymore. She glared, because she knew he expected to see it, even as she felt her heart pounding at her ribs…and her ribs pressed too goddamn close to his.

His eyes narrowed
. Deliberately, he cocked his head—a warning.

“
Please,” she said in lizardish. Nerves made her voice shake and that was good, as long as she sounded broken and not like her head was burning up with secrets.

“You want something?” Suspicion dimmed, but didn’t die. “What do you want?”

What, it wasn’t enough that she was trying to ingratiate herself? She had to have a reason?

“Take me out,” she said. “Just for a little while.”

“Eh?”

Fuck t
his stupid impossible goddamn tonal language. “Out,” she said, or tried to. “Grass. Trees. Sky.”

“You w
hat…?” His head slowly tipped back. “You want to see the sky.”

“That’s right
,” she said, gratefully falling into English again. She kneaded at his slit some more and gradually he relaxed enough to let her finger penetrate, although he kept his hold on her wrist. “I want to see the sky. You said Zhuqa’s woman doesn’t need to be locked up. I’ve been good, haven’t I? I want to see the sky.”

“What exactly do you think you have to barter with that I do not already own?” he inquired. His spines were coming up, away from flat suspicion to cautious enjoyment.

Amber found his sa’ad, gave it a stroke, then looked into his eyes and knelt.

He had to be able to see the plan in her eyes. He had to. Because she could see as clear as the sun back in Earth’s sky his memory of how she’d licked the meaty juices off his fingers the other night. His slit bulged with the sudden prodding of his erection; the scent of cloves and musk welled, cloying in its closeness.

Amber held the stare. Her lips parted, She breathed on the crown of his slit where her thumb pierced him, then looked at his hand on her wrist.

He grunted and tightened his grip. “The game is ‘Zhuqa’s House,’ woman,” he said. “Not ‘Eshiqi’s
bargain. I did not ask for this. Up.”

But his cock was a dark gleam between the widening folds of his slit, and she could feel the tension in his muscles as he fought to hold it in. He told her to get up, sure he did, but he didn’t pull her to her feet and he could have.

She rubbed the ball of her thumb over his sa’ad in two slow revolutions, then put her other hand up to pry the top of his slit open so she could see it—a dark, pointing gnarl that resembled either the world’s largest clitoris or the tiniest penis, visibly twitching in time with his pulse. ‘Meoraq has one of these and I never knew it,’ she thought suddenly and had to bite down on a giggle because it really was funny, wasn’t it, to think that she could be that unadventurous about having sex with her alien lizardman.

She caressed Zhuqa’s sa’ad, still in that light-headed, dangerously amused mood, now thinking of it less as a blowjob and more of a lesbian experience. Her very first. She leaned close, exhaled
.

His cock lurched out maybe halfway and pulled back out of sight.

“Please,” said Amber, in case he’d forgotten why she was doing this.

“I did not trust you before,” he said tight
ly. “I trust you damned less n—”

She licked his slit
.

His last word swept into a lizardish snarl and his hips jerked forward, impaling the air with the sudden stabbing bar of his fully extruded, cum-spitting cock. He jerked her trapped wrist up over her head even as his other hand came clawing down at her shoulder.

Amber pried his slit open (much easier to do with his cock out) and licked it again, sweeping her tongue back and forth like she was licking an ice-cream cone into shape. The taste was strong in ways she couldn’t identify (but not of cloves, oddly) and not as unpleasant as she’d been braced for, except for the little matter of whose clit she was licking at all. Each wet swirl of her tongue beat another convulsion of some sort out of Zhuqa—a cough, a curse, a staggering step or a clenching fist—until he let go of her hand and she was free to use it on his cock.

The instant she closed her fist around him, she pursed her lips around his clit and sucked it into her mouth. Sucked hard.

“Fuck Gann!” roared Zhuqa and then grey light burst over the left side of her head and suddenly Amber was sprawling over the floor.

He looked almost as surprised to see her there as she was.

Amber put a hand cautiously up to rub at the hot throb of her left ear, but it wasn’t bleeding, of course, just slapped really good. She looked at him, and then she bounded to her feet, shouting, “What was that for?”

He glared at her, breathing hard but silently, and then pointed at the ground between his feet.

“No!” she snapped, then said it again in his language.

He was fast. He was so scary fast. He had her by the neck while the word was still hot in her mouth and choked it off, half-spoken. He started to speak, then paused and looked away to take a few more silent breaths. His cock moved slowly up and down, keeping time. He looked at her again. His
grip eased, then opened.

“I did not mean to
hit you,” he said. “You startled me. I won’t do it again. Use your mouth on me, Eshiqi, and I will take you to see the sky.”

She gave her left ear a sullen rub, glaring at him, thinking, ‘There it is and that didn’t take long at all, did it? I can do this. I really think I can.’

Zhuqa nudged at her head, but gently now.

Amber shifted his breeches, glared some more, and then
knelt down again and stilled the flexing of his cock with her touch. She stroked the shaft, licked once at his sa’ad, and then turned her head and sucked lightly at the slick side of his cock.

“Fuck Gann,” he breathed, sagging back against the door.

Back and forth, from clit to cock, licking, sucking, squeezing, flicking. She rolled his sa’ad between her lips, bathed every side of his shaft, licked all the way up his slit and down again in one slow sweep, pursed her lips around the blunt hook at the tip of his cock and suckled it, then latched her mouth around the base and let the tip of her tongue trace the many valleys between the rubbery spikes that grew along the knot, feeling it fill with fresh cum as he hissed and groaned and screamed obscenities.

And with it all so close to her face, she could not help but
also see the thick, black vein pulsing just where the soft inner meat of his slit hardened into the base of his cock. Amber stared, feeling nothing, tasting nothing, seeing fish hooks in her mind.

His knot was swelling already. Time to bring the curtain down.

Amber took the full length of his cock in both her fists, working him in milking motions as she sucked at the hook and flicked the opening eye with her tongue to drink away the first drops. And when he started to cum, she was quick to suck the whole head into her mouth, bobbing as deep as she could manage, letting him feel her swallow each hot, oily stream that burst across her tongue.

She knew when he finally looked down and saw her doing it because both his hands came down to clench in her hair and he spent the last few seconds of his climax fucking furiously at her throat and calling out some of the most filthily creative things Amber had ever heard and never could have imagined, ending with, “Fuck Gann fucking God fucking
me
!” before he finally staggered back and slid down to join her on the floor.

Amber waited, just in case he had it in him to keep going, but once he had his breathing slowed, Zhuqa pulled his cock in and closed his breeches. He grimaced at her.

“You promised,” said Amber.

“I hear you.” He reached out and rubbed a finger along the corner of her lips, then showed her the smear of semen on his fingertip.

She thought about it, then licked it off.

He shuddered. “That is the most profane thing I have ever seen,” he told her. The front of his loin-plate was bulging.

“Please,” said Amber.

“You never should have bartered with me, little one.” Zhuqa got to his feet and pulled her up beside him, grimacing his lizard-grin at the world. “Because now you are going to have to buy everything.”

But he took her out, up ten flights of stairs, past dozens of saluting, well-armed guards. He did it without any suspicion. He did it with a smile on his face. He did it without ever thinking in any way that she could sense how vulnerable that one little vein might be and how readily he’d put her on her knees before it and then closed his eyes. He just took her out.

It was hard to be outside. She hadn’t thought about how it would be to actually see the sky again, feel the wind, taste the freshness after the deep, stale air of the underground ruins. It had just been something to ask for, something she’d known he would believe. She thought she’d be able to take a few deep breaths, maybe gaze intently into the clouds, and her only concern had been how she was going to make that look convincing when she didn’t really care.

But the wind was cool and wet with the promise of clean rain. There was a greenness to it, some springtime flavor that she caught on her tongue when she breathed, and for a while she forgot about Zhuqa entirely, even as he stood watching her.

She did all the same things she’d planned to do
after all, although she didn’t think about that until later. She took those deep, shaky breaths. She tipped her head back and stared at the grey smudge that marked a full moon’s light behind the ever-rolling clouds. She didn’t speak and didn’t move until Zhuqa put his hand on her shoulder and said, with that hateful gentleness he so often had, “Enough, little one. You’re shivering. Come inside.”

Then she began to cry, sort of. There were no sobs, no ugliness, no lump in her throat that needed choking out. There were just tears, pouring out of her one after another, so quiet and easy that if it weren’t for the heat of them, she might not have known she was making them. She looked at Zhuqa and he reached up to wipe at her cheek with the back of his hand. She realized that she’d made up her mind already, that the fish hook was not a possibility, but a plan. Tomorrow’s plan.

“Ah, Eshiqi, hush,” he said, brushing at her other cheek as the first trickled more tears. “Zhuqa’s woman does not stay forever in his lair. One day, all the world will be your House.”

“You
said the same thing to Zru’itak,” she said and turned toward the stair.

“And I would have kept my promise,” he said evenly, “if she had remained loyal to me.” He studied her as she stared at him, then
smiled very slightly. “That was a good guess, I think,” he remarked to himself. “But I’m not guessing at every word, believe that. You are losing your secrets, Eshiqi, a little more each day. One day very soon, you will have to be honest.”

She heard hers
elf laugh without feeling it. “Not today, I hope. And not tomorrow.”

He frowned, capturing each word as it left her mouth for further study. He waited a long time after her last word, as if to be sure she was done talking, but when her gaze wandered back to the sky, he grunted and took gentle hold of her arm. “We have a meal waiting for us,” he said, leading her in their descent. “It will be cold now, but you will sit on my knee and hold my cup and show me your gratitude, and tomorrow, perhaps, you will see the sky again.”

And the tears kept coming, because Amber knew she was never going to make it that far out, and she’d already had her last look at the sky.

11

S
ixteen spans, the boy had said. Meoraq had always felt he had a good grasp of distance, even in the wildlands. Years of travel and Master Darr’s notorious book of maps burned into his brain combined to keep a subconscious tally wherever he went. It was not infallible—all things mortal succumbed at times to deception or delusion—but it had served him well and he had every reason to put his faith in it as much as God. He began his hunt for ruins at an estimate of fourteen spans and when he reached eighteen without finding them, he stopped, turned back alongside his trail, and sought them further south.

Back and forth he went in this fashion, waking before dawn to make use of each second that God gave him light. He stopped at every stream to scout for boot-prints among the animal tracks. He knuckled through the gnawed leavings of each carcass for signs of butchery. He searched each promising thicket or valley deep enough to hide a nest, climbed each hill that might show him a better vantage.