The Last Hour of Gann (136 page)

“Sorry
,” groaned Zhuqa, letting up on her a little. “Don’t stop. Close your mouth again, just close your—yes! Ah, fuck Gann!”

Amber shrugged his leg off, tonguing
madly at the hooked tip of his cock, and he dropped flat on the table, spreading his legs wide open around her—Zhuqa the dirty girl—grabbing her head between his hands like it was a zit he wanted to pop. And there it was and this was it and even he couldn’t go all night, so Amber reared back with a gasp, bit the hook from the meat of her hand, plucked it back from between her lips, and slashed.

If it took as much as one whole second, it would have surprised her.

He still almost kicked her away in time.

His feet were on her shoulders hard the same instant she had the hook in her hand and she
went flying. Her cut went wild, but she got something because she felt him ripping all the way up her arm to her shoulder and the heat of the blood spraying over her hand. Then her back hit the wall and her ass hit the ground and Zhuqa was on his feet with one hand clapped to his gushing slit and a knife in the other. He took two running steps, roaring as he came, and went down on his face hard enough that she heard the crunch of his jaw breaking on the stone floor. Blood spat out between his teeth. He sucked in a breath, spat out some more, and lay writhing just a little.

She got up, staggering some on her bad hip, ready for him to leap up and take her down. He might have tried. His legs shifted, dragging through what she now saw was an amazing lake of blood for just a few seconds’ worth of bleeding, but that was it. His eyes alone moved, watching her inch closer so that she could first kick the knife out of his hand and then pick it up. He said something too mangled to make out when she did it, then spat out a bit of ropy blood and said, with startling clarity, “Fierce little thing.”

And then he was dead.

It wasn’t a big moment. There was no sudden sagging of his body, no death rattle at the end of some hoarse exhalation, no nothing. He was seeing her one second, and the next, he wasn’t.

“Yeah,” said Amber shakily, circling around him. “Yeah, I’ve seen this movie. Fuck you.”

She dropped onto his back—
the death rattle finally came out with a gurgle between his broken teeth—yanked his chin up—it came easily—and cut his knife across his throat. She felt the knife’s blade scraping over his spine and his open eyes just kept staring. Amber scrambled back, rubbing at her mouth until she realized she was rubbing his blood onto her lips. She spit it out, gagged, then went ahead and threw up so she’d get it over and done with and could get on with the escaping.

“Okay,” she whispered
once that was done. “It’s all over. Time to get up—”

The door banged open. “
Get up
!” bellowed Iziz. “
Ghelip
—ah,” he said with remarkable mildness as he skidded to a stop in Zhuqa’s blood. He looked down at his boots, his brow-ridges creased with confusion, and then over at Amber. At Zhuqa’s body. At the knife in Amber’s hand. At Zhuqa.

His spines flicked once and lay flat
.

His throat filled in with color.

His chest began to heave.

And then he yanked out his hooked sword and came at her
, screaming.

Amber
threw herself back and rolled under the table. The sword hit the floor twice and then the table—
chink chink chunk
—before he came diving in after her. She kicked him in the face; he caught her by the ankle and yanked her out beside him—
shhhhoop
!—in a single pull, sliding easily over Zhuqa’s blood and her own puke. She still had Zhuqa’s knife in her hand. She realized that only after she saw her hand on the hilt that was buried in his back.

He let out a howl that was more angry than hurt, slapping at her in a storm of inarticulate
snarls. She flung her arms up, but he knocked them aside without trying, maybe without even noticing. Through the dark blur of his hand hammering at her, she could see the colors at his throat actually shimmering with the force of his rage, but as soon as he remembered that he had a sword—

‘Sex and killing,’ she thought, as suddenly and as calmly as if it were a separate person whispering in her ear. With a cry, she abandoned
her feeble efforts at defense and instead thrust her hands between them to loosen his loin-plate.

Iziz reared back without hesitation to battle it all the way open and let his cock out. It didn’t take long. Just long enough for her to yank the knife out of his back and slam it home in his head.

It hit hard, numbing her hand, and suddenly Iziz was two hundred pounds of lizard on top of her, oomphing his last breath into her face. She heaved him off without really being aware of doing so and then stood over him, brandishing her knife for maybe half a minute before realizing there was no blade in it anymore.

It had broken off.

In his head, she thought, looking down in horror at the remarkably small, bloody gash in the center of Iziz’s flat skull. There wasn’t anything sticking out. It must be all the way in there. In his brains.

g
rey

‘You absolutely will not faint!’ she thundered at herself, and like thunder, it had to roll a long way to meet her. She climbed up onto the table and there she sat, her eyes going from one raider to the other, waiting for them to move
…rise…maybe get their cocks out and come finish what they’d started…

The only thing moving was the blood out of Iziz’s head
and it was a slow, small trickle at that.

“Okay,” said Amber.

No one answered.

“Okay,” she said again and slid off the table onto her aching hip.

Still no answer. The door still stood wide open. Zhuqa and Iziz were still dead.

Amber started to bend over, but it made that faint feeling come back, so she knelt instead, tugging the sword out of Iziz’s slack grip. His hand, emptied, curled slowly into a loose fist.

“Okay,” said Amber, and to her surprise, it came out almost exactly the way the old Amber would have said it: tough and strong and able to handle things. It didn’t even sound like the voice of a stranger. “Come on, little girl,” she said, liking that voice more and more. “They say it ain’t over ‘till the fat lady sings and I’ve lost too much weight for the bitch to be me. Let’s see how far we can get.”

There was no one in the corridor, no one on the stairs. This she found so unbelievable that her feet kept backing up on her, wanting to retreat to the false security of Zhuqa’s room where being ravished by two zombie-lizards was infinitely preferable to being ambushed and ravished by all
the live ones. She had to keep reminding herself of the way that Iziz had torn into the room. Surely he’d been raising the alarm all the way down; anyone who had been here had simply gone up to fight. She could hear commotion of some kind on the surface—people running, screaming, fighting—and she had no idea how she was going to get past it, but never mind that for now. Xzem might know of a back door, but whether she did or not, Amber had to get the baby.

She knew the floor where the slaves were quartered, not because she
’d been going there every day, but because there was a dead lizardlady lying on the landing, hacked almost in half.

Gripping her sword in both hands, fear churning like molten lead in her belly, Amber ran down the hall, opening every door she found.

Empty. Empty. All empty.

She could hear whatever was happening on the surface working its way down into the stairwell. When she cast a terrified glance over her shoulder, she was just in time to see a headless body drop down the shaft. ‘It’s a raid,’ she thought. ‘It’s a raid from this Ghelip person and they’ve already taken the girls. Run. Just run.’

She did run, but she kept stopping, cursing herself for the futility of it each time she flung a new door open on an empty room.

They were all empty. Every last one.

“Oh please, God, no,” she babbled, backing out of the last one—the one where Zru’itak had given birth—knowing there was nowhere else to look.

wait

A roar of rage and defiance on the stairs maybe only two or three flights up became a wet, gargling sound and a short, heavy tumble. Boots thundered down the corridor just over her head, running toward the stair.

Not away.

listen

Toward the stair…from the barracks?

Welcome to the next year of your life…Xzem lives with you now
…

The baby wouldn’t be in the slave pens. It was living with Dkorm in the barracks.

Amber let out a scream of embarrassed frustration every bit as mindlessly as an angry lizard, slapping herself in the forehead. Then she turned around and ran for the stairs.

Three lizardmen came charging out of the corridor right as she reached the landing, but either didn’t see the sword in her hand or were too far gone to care. The one in the lead shoved her to one side and they all went furiously by, roaring as they threw themselves at the enemy bearing down on them. She was close enough now to hear the crash of their weapons.

Never mind. Get the baby. Get the baby, get Xzem, get out.

Amber started opening doors again.

Empty. Empty.

On the fifth try, a raider lunged out, knocking her to the ground as he sprinted down the hall, away from the stairs, and vanished around a corner, leaving a bloody trail behind him. Then empty. Empty.

She might have run right past the room where she finally found the baby if she’d stopped to think about it. From a purely logical frame of mind, the room wasn’t worth checking. The door hung open. It was quiet. Surely, it must be empty too.

But Amber was beyond reason by that time. She checked behind the door not because she hoped to find the baby anymore, but because she’d fallen into a routine of panic in which finding the next door and flinging it open was all she could do. So she opened that one.

And, looking right at the lizardlady kneeling beside the cupboard, turned around and bolted blindly for the next door. She made two running steps and staggered (just like Zhuqa, a part of her piped up) as what she’d seen belatedly processed. She turned around, uncertain, listening, and heard a very faint breathy sound—Xzem’s nearly silent tears.

The door was still open. A lamp inside was still burning, spilling a pleasant golden glow over Xzem’s thin, shaking frame as she curled herself around the limp body of the baby.

“Oh,” said Amber. (
Ah, said Iziz
.)

Xzem raised her head, still stroking and rubbing at the small dome of the baby’s head, its narrow chest. Tears continued to run out of her eyes even though her breaths were slow and deep and virtually soundless. She looked back down at the baby in her hands, rocked twice more, and finally sighed. She pointed.

Amber’s neck turned, turned, and ultimately dragged her eyes off Xzem. She stared instead at a thin, stained mat tossed up against the wall, a threadbare cushion, a rough blanket. And the leather-wrapped swaddle of Zhuqa’s baby, sleeping with its tiny fists tucked up by its snout.

Amber started forward, then stopped again and turned back to Xzem. To Rosek, who, so limp and quiet, had seemed as small in Amber’s eyes as a six-day old infant. She limped closer, touched Xzem’s shivering shoulder, and only then noticed the baby was still breathing. She opened her mouth—

—and closed it again. The baby’s head under Xzem’s gentle hand was round, much rounder than it should be. Amber looked at the room again and saw the rumpled bedding in the cupboard, the mat where Zhuqa’s baby slept, the open door. She looked and could almost imagine Dkorm drowsing in his bed with Rosek; someone, Iziz maybe, bursting in to raise the alarm; Dkorm dropping the baby to run. Not setting her aside, dropping her. Throwing her.

“I’m sorry,” said Amber.

Xzem rocked and stilled, rocked and stilled. The tears, soundless, kept falling. The crash and roar of combat got closer, not above them anymore, but right on the landing. Xzem showed no sign that she heard it. She held her baby and watched it breathe and sometimes tried to rock it.

Amber touched her arm. “We have to go,” she said
, not knowing if Xzem would understand her clumsy lizardish or not.

Xzem sighed and looked at her.

“Please. We have to get out while we still can.”

“I wanted one,” said Xzem. Her voice was soft, but steady. “Just one to keep. After I have lost so many…” She looked down at Rosek and tried with trembling hands to arrange the baby’s arms over its chest, but the little limbs slipped off and dangled, lifeless. It breathed.

“Please!” Amber couldn’t bring herself to shake her, but she tightened her hand where it gripped Xzem’s arm. “We have to go now!”

Xzem looked at her. And then past her. Her expression did not change, but she brought the baby to her chest in a futile, shielding motion and closed her eyes.

Amber turned around.

For an instant, she thought it was Meoraq. From the moment that Iziz had burst in through Zhuqa’s door, that possibility, far-fetched as it was, had been shivering at the back of her mind. Even as she heard the carnage above her and knew it was more than one man, even her man, could make, she’d hoped…but it was still a shock to see him.