The Last Hour of Gann (134 page)

He found everything—muddy tracks, blade-marked bones, discarded scraps of cured leather, broken sleds, ashpits—but none of it was fresh and in finding everything, he found nothing. As for ruins, he knew the signs well enough in Yroq, but in this land of hills and valleys and chokes of trees, anywhere he aimed his eyes showed him signs. And yet he found no ruins.

He told himself he would finish out one more day southward and then turn around. He would run through the night back to his first trail, roughly, and begin a northerly search in the morning.

Good. Sound. Sensible.             

But when night fell on the fifth day of futility, Meoraq camped. He didn’t really know why. He hadn’t found anything (two separate heaps of half-burnt branches, a rotted harness, a dead man tied to a hsul tree and left to be eaten alive
a brace or so ago: nothing) and his last glimpse of the landscape before the sun fell showed him nothing worth exploring further, but he camped all the same. He lit no fire, just sat in the dark, trying to meditate while his nerves gnawed at him.

When he slept, he dreamed in confusing tangles of his father returning from Kuaq, of silver
shards in the shape of a ship flying through broken tiles, of thunder and rain and the stormway tunnel collapsing around him. He did not dream of Amber.

He woke just at dawn feeling that scant minutes had passed since he’d shut his eyes, and yet he felt…not invigorated, really, but awake. Like the stinging sensation that comes to a numbed arm or leg when it is first moved, it was not a pleasant feeling, but ominous, a sign of something greater still to come.

He prayed at least an hour, largely without words, as the morning moved on ahead of him. At the end of his prayers, he started walking south again.

He had always had a good sense of time as well as distance. Today, although painfully aware of direction (and
it was pain; he could feel Praxas like a fish hook in his flesh, tied to a line that threatened with every step to snap), he had no grip at all on the hour. The sun moved overhead and if it were not for the fact that he could see it (not the sun, but the light of the sun, and there was another fish hook), he would have no sense of time at all.  To judge by that light, it was near eighth-hour—almost the whole day walked away—when he came to the top of the hill that had the tree.

It was the only tree left on the hill, of some kind unknown to him. Its body was very tall and straight, burnt black by some misfortune in the far past. Its single surviving branch had broken close to the trunk, half-fallen, but sprouted new life at its tip, so that the whole thing took on the appearance of a fish hook, and why in the two names of God and Gann was he so obsessed with fish hooks? He didn’t think he’d ever in his life seen one except in shops or pictures. But there it was, this ruin of a tree, this monument to all fish hooks of the world, an obvious landmark for even a boy to find and follow, and so Meoraq put down his pack and climbed it.

At the top, just where the branch hung down, Meoraq looked out over the furthest ridge and saw dark shapes too perfectly squared to be natural, set in patterns only men could design.

Ruins.

‘And it’s nineteen spans from Praxas if it’s a damned step,’ he thought. The boy was no better at gauging distance than he was putting a choke on a man.

Not even for a moment did he question whether these were the ruins where his Amber had been taken. Neither did he stop to wonder how many raiders were nesting in its belly. Some things were manifestly obvious. Some things didn’t matter. He knew.

* * *

She stole the fish hook. She meant to wait until the end of the day, the last possible minute, so the chances of being caught with it were at their lowest, but as much sense as that made, she was only able to stand touching them, sewing with them, staring at them, for so long before she just had to take one.
And the opportunity, when it came, was too golden and glorious to overlook: Hruuzk, out of the room; all the slaves, occupied with work; the children, who were the most wildly unpredictable variable, up top with Hruuzk; and into this almost-perfect scenario, Rosek suddenly peed on Dkorm. Swearing, he scooped her up and stomped into the next room where there was water to get cleaned up.

Amber didn’t watch him go, didn’t hesitate, didn’t think. She stopped sewing on one hook, reached into the box, and hooked another
on the inside of her sleeve where it was out of sight and could still plausibly have gotten there by accident. Then she went back to sewing. She attempted a few deep breaths—a slow-count of six, as Meoraq would say—but only made it as far as three before her nerve buckled and she looked around to see if she’d been caught.

Dkorm was still in the other room, scrubbing at himself with a rag and hissing at the baby. The slaves were right where they ought to be, necks bent, silent. Xzem—

Xzem was looking at her. She ducked her head when their eyes met, rocking Zhuqa’s baby and trying to coax him back onto her breast, but she had definitely been looking. What had she seen? What would she say?

She didn’t have long to agonize over it. Dkorm came storming back into the room while Amber was still sewing on the same hook, her hands too weak and fluttery-feeling to manage the simple knots. He shoved Rosek roughly into a crate and threw himself down, still wiping at his chest and muttering. His mood infected the other lizardladies with enough anxiety that her own went unnoticed.

The fish hook pulled at her sleeve, a thousand-pound piece of metal smaller than her thumb. Everything was relative.

Somehow the day passed. She sewed mindlessly on the same net for most of it, forced to go back over the same places again and again when she consistently put hooks in upside down or sewed folds of the net together. When she was finally finished, it looked worse than the very first net she’d done, but at least it was finished and she could go clutch at Zhuqa’s baby and calm herself down.

Xzem sat very still beside her and did not look at her.

The baby purred, its tiny hand squeezing Amber’s goliath finger. It slept and Amber
cupped its small, warm head and stared into its snouted face and thought, ‘I’m going to get you out of this, baby. It’s you and me, all the way to the top.’

When it woke and began to bite sleepily at her breast, Amber gave it reluctantly back to Xzem and returned to her work-table. Ena had another net waiting, the last net. Amber got to work.

She had nearly finished when Hruuzk came at the end of the day to gather up his slaves. He took Meoraq’s mending kit and tucked it back into his belt. She protested. Stupid of her, but she wanted to finish the net and she was at least three lengths of sinew from done.

“Eh, it’s good enough,” Hruuzk told her, inspecting the net. “I’ll talk to Zhuqa about putting you in the kitchen. Shame to
waste your energy doing sprat-work like this.”

H
e patted her on the head and gave her his usual, “Good girl,” and ambled away with his ladies all in a slumped, silent line. Dkorm left, taking Xzem and the babies. Amber sat down with a pitcher of xuseth oil tightly gripped in both hands and waited for Zhuqa. If he found the hook caught in her sleeve here in the workpit, she might still be okay. Maybe.

Hours, each one ticking away at its own elastic pace.
She could hear herself breathing. She didn’t think she’d ever heard herself breathe in this room before.

Zhuqa came. He smiled at her
, filling the doorway. “Where is my greeting?”

Amber
took one step toward him and froze. The hand she usually put on his chest was attached to the arm wrapped in the sleeve
with a fish hook in it
. If she raised it up as high as his heart, he would be looking right down the fucking thing, wide as the Lincoln Tunnel, with the lamp on the table blasting light right on it. If she used her other hand, would he notice?

‘He’s noticing this pause, little girl,’ the ghost of Bo Peep drawled.
‘That’s what he’s noticing. Get the stick out and do something.’

Her next step was something of a lurch, but it was movement and it took her to him. She put her arms around him (the hookless arm considerably tighter than the other) and pressed her cheek to his chest instead.

“You must want something,” Zhuqa remarked, patting her back. “As it happens, so do I. Come, Eshiqi. We’ll take our game below.”

He took her o
ut into the hall, keeping her at his side all the way to the stair. Her arm, the one with the hook, hung between them, threatening at each step to snag on his scales when he brushed against her. Amber began to feel distinctly light-headed. Was she even breathing? No, she was not. God.

At the stair, he went ahead of her, but there were guards at every landing, their faces all pointed up at him, at her. When he stepped off into the hallway, he stayed ahead of her, but there were guards at every crossway, standing at attention, showing their salutes. When he came to his door, he stopped to take out his squarish keys, and it was there, in the two short seconds it took him to unlock the door, that Amber pulled the hook out of her sleeve and put it in her mouth. She heard fabric tear even over the sound of the key turning in its lock, but Zhuqa never glanced back. The
hook felt enormous clenched between her teeth, as if it were stretching out her whole face into a Halloween mask, but Zhuqa only smiled and beckoned for her to precede him.

“Zhuqa has come home,” he said.

She walked in and began undressing without waiting for his order. Surely it was her imagination that made her think he looked at her for a heartbeat longer than usual before he took her shift, her imagination that made her think he was more meticulous than usual when he felt his way through it. He tossed it aside the same as ever, that she was sure of, and then his hands were on her.

‘God, don’t let him feel my heart pounding,’ she thought. Prayed. No atheists in foxholes, wasn’t that the saying? Well, there were no atheists in Zhuqa’s room with fish hooks in their mouths, waiting for him to finish checking them for weapons either. In that moment, for as long as it lasted, Amber Bierce was a True Believer.

Zhuqa finished feeling between her thighs and stood up. He checked her armpits—
sweating so much he has to notice that why is he pretending not to goddamn sadistic lizard
—then moved on to lift her breasts in his hands, slipping his thumbs between them like always just in case she had a—
fish hook
—weapon stowed away beneath one of them.

And there he stopped.

For one illogical instant, Amber thought he’d found something. Her mouth tried to drop open in a gape; she clenched it shut and then had to relax her jaw so it didn’t look like she was clenching it. She stared at him, fighting not to stare, knowing she had to be either white as a sheet or blushing to the roots of her hair, or heck, both.

Still cupping her breasts, with absolutely no sign on his lizardish face that anything at all was amiss, Zhuqa bent down and nuzzled at her throat.

Oh Jesus, really? The giggles came streaming out of her around the fish hook. She pressed her lips tightly together and stared at the ceiling while Zhuqa finished that side and moved his snout tenderly to the other side of her throat. The hand covering her left breast lightly squeezed, experimenting with her.

“I guess you remember yesterday,” she said, because silence was never golden with this man for very long and if she had to talk, she wanted to do it when he had his
face buried in her hair and not when he was looking right at her. Hopefully—
please god no atheists here tonight nothing here but us chickens please god
—he didn’t know English so well that he could tell her teeth were clamped together.

He grunted softly against her skin, moved his hand from her right breast to her hip and tugged her lightly against him.
“You are a terrible distraction to me, Eshiqi,” he told her, and if there were more chilling words he could have said, she honestly didn’t know what they were. Zhuqa the Warlord could not afford distractions. “My mind has been with you all day. Tell me…” He caught her hand, licked the palm, and then put it on his loin-plate. “Would you like to see the sky tonight?”

She smiled and started to kneel.

He stopped her. “Not here,” he said, still apparently unaware of anything amiss as she struggled not to stare at him or show the racing of her heart. He pointed back at the table, where their meal had already been set aside in anticipation of the evening’s festivities. In its place, an extra lamp burned brightly. “This time, I want to watch you.”

* * *

In the first creeping hour after dark, when the last of the light was gone from the sky and any thinking man might know that it was time to seek shelter from the night’s preying beasts, Meoraq came at last to the ruins and found them lit in welcome. His first foolish urge was to draw his blades and charge ahead. He mastered it and instead hunkered low in the grass, watching and praying in silence.

He saw men—or what might be called men, if one knew no better—moving below the lamps that hung at the open doorways of the ruins. When the wind was with him, he could even hear them, however dimly, laughing and calling to one another as any men might do at the close of their day. There were not many, not at this first accounting, but even then Meoraq noted that the ruins were in a most carefully kept state of workable disrepair. The high towers had fallen in, yes, and the wildlands had reclaimed much, but here where the lamps were lit, the remnants of the Ancient roads were remarkably cleaned of loose debris.
Whole fields had been laid within the roofless shells of great buildings, ready for the season’s first crop. There were indeed canals, not dug in the age of the Ancients, but relatively fresh; brackish water ran in a swift current, caught from some unseen waterway and turned through these ruins as expertly as any irrigation system he had seen in the cities. He could see hooked nets at every landing, set to catch whatever swam in its muddy flow, but while the water was not clean, neither did it reek of waste. There was a hint of that on the wind when it turned, but only a hint; they kept their fleshing vats covered and regularly cleaned, and their compost freshly-turned.