The Last Hour of Gann (141 page)

Onahi
was back, waiting at the mouth of the tunnel with several armed watchmen. Meoraq put his women in a line with Amber at its tail and took them into Praxas. “To my word,” he reminded Onahi, “and no other.”

Onahi
saluted. His men echoed him. They closed their small ranks around the women and marched them into darkness. Meoraq watched the cracks in the ceiling of the tunnel until they were gone.

“Take me to them,” he said, and felt his heart begin again to burn in spite of all his deep, calming breaths.
“Now.”

* * *

Myselo lumbered off ahead of them, ostensibly to find a boy and a cart, but the governor’s carriage was waiting at the inner road, and over the governor’s outraged exclamations, Meoraq tore the standards off and took it for his own. Rsstha kept a bitter half-silence all the way to the Temple District, which was to say that he glared at Meoraq with his mouth shut tight while his aide made polite objections at regular intervals.

Meoraq ignored them both, meditating with his eyes
open and his arms folded. He was quiet, but he was not calm.

There was no one at the gate of Xi’Praxas when they reached it. Meoraq
had to bang on the bars with the hilt of his samr for several minutes before a swearing abbot finally let them in.

The inner halls were dark and empty. The abbot brought them a lamp and took himself back to his rooms, muttering
loudly and in no uncertain terms about his cold dinner and certain slit-lickers who abused their powers of authority. Meoraq amused himself during much of the next walk debating whether it were himself or Rsstha who had been the slit-licker in question. His tendency to toy with the hilt of one blade or another as he waged this mental argument kept Rsstha and his aide very quiet.

He was led to the Temple’s infirmary, past several unattended watch-points, and at the end of the hall in the wing
reserved for the needs of the oracles and the high judge, propped up against the wall with his arms folded and his chin tucked against his chest, was a watchman. He appeared to be asleep, but at least he was at his post. He roused himself at their footsteps to say, “Fifty rounds for a dip, five hundred goes an hour, next hour opens at—” He opened his eyes to check the time and saw them. His hands flinched to his sword-belt as his eyes darted to the door, but he drew nothing, and after a tense, considering silence, Meoraq saw him surrender.

Meoraq no longer knew what to expect behind the door, but he was suddenly intensely glad he had not brought Amber with him.

“What is the meaning of this?” Governor Rsstha demanded and his aide went scurrying forward, demanding that the door be opened and didn’t the watchman see that this was House Rsstha before him and who was his commander, what was his name, stand and answer.

The
watchman dropped his arms to his sides, away from the hilt of his sword. He didn’t answer, didn’t even salute. His eyes were for Meoraq alone. “I wish to pray,” he said simply.

Meoraq drew his
samr. “Do so.”

The watchman
bent his brow to the ground and made his prayers in silence while Rsstha tried to take control of what he obviously perceived as an embarrassing breach of security which Meoraq had no right to judge. He was ignored, and after several minutes, the watchman rose, took the key from his belt and walked to the door.

“Hold where you stand
! Honored one, I assure you, we will pursue this matter,” Rsstha said stiffly. “But I think it is not your place to—”

“My place,” said Meoraq c
almly, pensively, and the governor fell silent at once. “My place is to enforce the law of Sheul. That is my place and I know it well. Your place is to run this city in accordance with those laws, and if you believe that doing so allows you to challenge me—” Meoraq’s eye at last broke from that of the silent man before him to slide back and stab at Rsstha. “—judgment shall be passed.”

The governor
made a few flustered gestures, but couldn’t seem to think of anything to say.

Meoraq stared at him for a
while, then glanced at the watchman. “Open the door and await the will of Sheul.”

“Outrageous,”
the governor said again, but very quietly this time. He stalked away a short distance and came back, then had to do it again because the guard’s hands were shaking too much to work the key. For a time, the only sounds to be heard were the key rattling at the lock and the governor’s angry footsteps.

Until the door opened.

It was another guard, by the look of him, one still meant to be at his post somewhere in the city. The sound of his armored leg-plates striking against the bars of the cage rang out in discord against the weak cries of his prisoner.

This had not long been a prison. Meoraq could see that by the lightness of the mortar where the bars had been set, and the bars themselves were neither straight, nor smooth, but crude as it was, the cage was more than sufficient to hold the humans. The cage ran the length of the far wall, but was no deeper than a man’s arm could reach. There was nothing inside but the prisoners themselves, not even a pail to piss in or dried grass to soak it up. Grooves in the floor were clearly meant to carry wastes away, but they weren’t over-careful about using it; they were sitting in filth even now, just watching him. He saw recognition in no one’s eye, not even
Scott’s.

“What the hell is this?”
Rsstha demanded in a high, almost comical shriek.

The man at the cage bucked, startled into an early climax. He looked back at them, already furiously snarling out something about that not being anything like a full hour,
but then really saw them. He froze, panting, wide-eyed, then shoved himself away from the bars, letting the body he’d been deep inside fall carelessly to the ground as he buckled his loin-plate hurriedly back in place. The girl in the cage rolled onto her side, reaching down between her legs to wipe his semen away.

For one terrible moment,
even knowing she was safe under Onahi’s honest eye, he thought it was Amber. Then he saw it was Nicci, and he wondered if it made him an evil man that he felt even a moment’s relief. He would pray on that later. For now…

He counted
ten men, and though he should have known them all, Scott was the only one of them he recognized straight away and only because his face was so hateful to Meoraq’s eye, even now as it was, bruised and smeared with unmentionable grime. Ten men and Nicci. Of forty-seven human lives, ten men survived. And Nicci.

“Is this all there are?” Meoraq asked.

Rsstha stammered for a second or two, then swung on the watchman, screaming, “How long has this been going on? How dare you? How long have you been selling time to these…these deviants? Answer me at once, you—”

Without turning, Meoraq slapped him across the snout, knocking the
governor of Praxas sprawling across the floor. “Is this all of them?” he asked again, just as calmly.

“These are all that
remain,” said the watchman.

“I assure you, I had no knowledge of this!”
Rsstha said, scrambling to his feet. He shoved his aide away and aimed an accusing hand at the guard standing silent by Nicci’s cage. “This…this…bestiality shall be punished!”

Meoraq’s head cocked at a dangerous angle. “It is no sin for Sheul to urge a man to lie with humans,” he said
. “We are all His children.”

Rsstha
blinked rapidly for several seconds before, perhaps, visibly recalling Amber and the scar on her shoulder.

“It is no sin to feel that urge. The sin,” said Meoraq, “lies with selling it.”

The watchman took a deep breath and did his best to let it out slow. He raised his chin and closed his eyes. “My name is Seelat Vin.”

“Seelat Vin, you have broken the
Fifth Law. You have made trade of flesh and so acted against the Word of Sheul. You have broken your faith with Him and as His Sword, I deem you unforgiveable. Stand and be judged.”

The nerve which had steadied the
watchman until this point crumbled. He cried out for his father, flinching back from the cut that swept across his throat, but it was already over by then and the flinch only opened the fresh gap between head and neck that much wider. He staggered as blood poured in a dark flood across his chest and then fell, his last breath turning to froth under his sagging chin.

The humans in their cage at last showed some reaction, recoiling with even more force than the
governor and his aide, who found themselves splattered with blood. And then one of them—he really should know the name—surged forward to seize the bars, saying, “Holy shit, that’s Meoraq!”

Meoraq paid the death a proper witness and then, with great effort,
turned away. “Get out,” he said to the other guard. The humans set up an immediate clamor, beating on the bars and calling his name in their mangled way, but he ignored them for now and turned to Governor Rsstha. “Release them. Do you have a tablet?” he asked the aide.

“Release…? What?”

“Yes, sir,” said the aide, producing one from his deep sleeve, along with a stylus.

“
I require…” He eyed the humans, blackly considering. “Four tents. Each human is to have a pack, two sets of clothing and a blanket. I will also have four travel-flasks and four bricks of cuuvash. You will take everything to Southgate immediately.”

“Honored one,
you cannot take these creatures!” the governor stammered. “Sheul gave them to Praxas for study. They are mine!”

Meoraq turned on him fast and hissed, “
If you claim possession, then you have broken the Fifth Law yourself! All of you! All who have penned these people as cattle, who force bestial behavior upon them against the Word of Sheul, have broken faith with Him! Do you submit to my judgment then or do you release them?”

Rsstha rather visibly groped for his wits, ultimately falling back into the habits of his office
. “I will call for a tribunal—”

“
It will be your own!” Meoraq leveled his bloody samr at the guard, still standing silent beside the cage where Nicci huddled, looking back at him without expression. “Get out, I said!”

The guard still did not immediately move, which was understandable since there was no way out of the room save through the door where Meoraq was standing, but when Meoraq looked at him, he eased forward, hesitated again, and then fled.

Rsstha hissed to his aide, who sprinted down the hall, snatching up his robes around his knees. Then he turned a haughty eye on Meoraq and said, “Honored one, you overstep yourself.”

Fire burst in Meoraq’s brain and before he could stop himself, he’d seized a ruling governor by his fine robes and slapped him across the snout. And again. And again. “
I hold this piss-gully in my fucking shadow
!” he roared, still slapping. “I would not be overstepping by a fucking scale if I ran a sword up your slit and out your mouth!
Open that fucking door
!”

With that, he turned and hurled the man across the room and into the bars of the cage with force enough to bend them. Meoraq clapped both hands over his eyes and breathed in the dark, listening to Rsstha fumble with his keys and
babble out all the ways in which it was obvious that humans were in no way people and that Sheul could not condemn their use in any fashion any more than he condemned the use of cattle for hides Meoraq himself wore. Then the door was open and Scott came spilling out to catch at Meoraq’s arm, saying, “Jesus Christ, am I glad to see you!”

Meoraq shook him off. “Gather your men.
N’ki, come!”

Nicci rose, but slowly. Surely she knew him—by
Scott’s words if by no other reason—but her gaze remained dull and lifeless. She moved out of the cage and toward him without making any effort to cover herself, and Meoraq sent a second prayer of thanks to Sheul that Amber was not here, but it was a heavy gratitude, for he knew his wife would have to see what her blood-kin had become soon enough.

“I told you he’d find us, didn’t I?”
Scott was saying, standing tall at Meoraq’s side as Nicci hobbled her vacant way across the room. “I told you he wouldn’t stop looking!”

“I had not started looking, human,” Meoraq
spat. “Nor was I inclined to start. It is Sheul who apparently wishes you spared and I can only think He does so to teach me humility.” And because no one was making a damned move in that direction, Meoraq stalked furiously over and picked Nicci up himself, tossing her across his shoulder where she hung like a sack of grain, half-emptied. “And I tell you right now that He had best make His will very damned clear if He wishes me to move you even one damned step away from this city, because I would just as soon see you all rot in its ruins!”

“Are you mad
at us?” Scott asked. He sounded surprised.

Meoraq walked away, letting the humans scramble after and
Governor Rsstha stand alone in the mouth of an empty cell. The feel of Nicci swaying with the force of his stride was extremely unpleasant; her hand smacked against his thigh now and then, lifeless as a corpse.