The Last Hour of Gann (150 page)

“It won’t be this easy when it’s your own House,” Uyane called as Meoraq boarded. “I hope you know that.”

“Then our Father has prepared me well,” Meoraq replied as the carriage lurched forward. “Nothing is ever easy with that woman, but the worst is behind us now.”

Rash words, but perhaps he could be forgiven for them. He was Sheulek. Not a prophet.

4

I
t was harder than she thought it would be, being left behind. Even at the worst of times, before they’d ever been physical, Meoraq had been an anchor to a sense of stability she found nowhere else on this world. Without him, weird noises in the night belonged to creatures without names and any plant she saw might be poisonous. Suddenly, Amber was lost again.

Sh
e wished Meoraq would get back or at least that she had some idea of when to expect him. She didn’t even have anything to do while she waited. Oh, there were always fires to tend and water to carry, but it still left her with a lot of time to sit with Nicci and pretend she didn’t care what Scott was muttering about on his side of the fire.

She let him talk. Not everyone was in his corner, but she was still outnumbered and Meoraq wasn’t here to scare them off. Basic mathematics, as Crandall would say. One loud-mouthed dick plus five or six true believers minus one badass lizardman equaled a very quiet Amber Bierce. She made some of Meoraq’s tea whenever anyone asked. She let them help themselves to the meat that was supposed to last until he got back. She shared everything except Meoraq’s tent and his sword, and because they were so obviously his, no one but
Scott even asked.

Too cold, not enough t
ents, Scott passing out the food. It was all the same old shit on a smaller scale, with the added fun of Praxas perched on the horizon like a tombstone and the threat of raiders in every shadow at night. And just to put the frosting on the shit-cake, Amber didn’t feel well—tired and oddly disoriented, as if she were running a low fever, heavy and achy and oh yes, nauseous.

She couldn’t be sick and she refused to be pregnant, but she felt like shit all the same. It was
purely psychological. She knew that. She’d undergone a traumatic event—hell, a whole chain of traumatic events—and the only thing she was suffering from was survivor’s shock. She’d suck it up, life would go on, and everyone would know Amber Bierce was the tough one.

So tough she threw up almost every morning. So tough she cried nearly every night after Meoraq didn’t come back. So tough she hid in
Meoraq’s tent whenever Scott started in with one of his speeches and sometimes fell asleep, taking naps in the middle of the day like an old lady.

Like now.

Amber woke up, thought about it for several minutes, and decided she had successfully slept away the vague nausea that had plagued her all morning only to replace it with a headache. She was probably dehydrated. As soon as she’d dredged up the energy, she’d go out there and make tea. Maybe even brew the stuff Meoraq called nai, just because he liked it, even though Amber herself thought it tasted exactly like burnt roots in a cup. And if today was the day he came back and he found a hot cup of nai waiting for him…

“Please come home,” she whispered. “Please.”

No answer, not even from her mother’s drunk ghost.

She got up, crawling stiffly out of the tent into the stark grey light of another alien afternoon. The first
thing she noticed, when she had it in her to notice anything, was the quiet. Nicci sat by the fire, drawing in the ashes with the blackened end of a stick. Crandall was stretched out nearby, one arm crooked over his eyes. Apart from them, the camp was clearly empty.

This was not alarming, not at first. Amber hadn’t been awake long enough to feel very strongly about anything, except maybe how much she wanted Meoraq back.

“Where is everyone?” she mumbled, trying to rub some life into her body face-first.

“Out,” Nicci replied.

“How helpful. Where’d they go? We’re really not supposed to wander around.”

“Doesn’t bother you when you want to sneak off for a skinny-dip in the middle of the night,” Crandall remarked without raising his arm.

Irritation woke her up a little more. “I forgot my swimsuit. And how the hell would you know what I was doing last night? Were you spying on me?”

“I was taking a piss when you barged in and got naked. So technically, you were the rude one.”

“Did you watch, you perv?”

“And whacked off,”
he agreed, raising his arm to give her a friendly leer. “Twice. You look pretty good, you know. In spite of…all that.”

Amber managed not to say anything for maybe a whole three seconds. Then, gritting her teeth in self-disgust, she said, “In spite of what?”

He shrugged and dropped his arm over his eyes again. “It ain’t an easy life, that’s all I’m saying. You’re a bit banged up.”

She looked away.

“But you still look pretty damn good to me. Toned, you know? I think muscles can look hot on a chick if she doesn’t overdo it. You’re walking that line, but you’re walking it well.”

“You have no idea how many nights I lay awake worrying about that.”

“Don’t be a bitch, Bierce. I’m trying to pay you a compliment. Like, you’ve always had pretty good tits, but now they really stand out. Best tits on the planet.”

“Fuck you,” said Nicci, scratching out her drawing and beginning a new one.

“Okay, look, I don’t even care. Back to the original question: Where is everyone?”

“Out,” said Nicci again.

“They went hunting. I’m protecting the women,” Crandall added.

“Hunting?” Amber looked over at the mound of
kipwe meat Meoraq had left them, but it didn’t appear to have gone anywhere. “What for? And with what?” she asked, ducking back into the tent to make sure Meoraq’s kzung was still where she’d left it. It wasn’t.

“That son of a bitch!” she exploded, and burst back out.

“Don’t get your panties in a knot. He’ll bring it right back.”

“What the hell does he think he’
s doing? He can’t walk up and stab something!”

“Chill out, would you? He made spears too.”
Crandall pointed without stirring himself, and sure enough, there was a spear stabbed ingloriously into the center of a pile of shavings over by the rock where Scott held court.

Amber
went over and pulled it out. It was light in her hand, way too light. “Out of
this
?”

“Oh let it go, Bierce,” sighed Crandall, at last sitting up. “He’s bored, that’s all. Let him break a couple
sticks and run off some steam so people see him being all commanding and forget what he looked like sitting naked in a cage.”

Amber
knocked the spear against the ground a few times, not trying to break it, but unable to help hearing the dull sound of dead, brittle wood. She shook her head and turned on Crandall. “How long do we wait?” she demanded.

“He’ll b
e back. I’m sure he hasn’t gone far. He’s not a complete idiot.”

“
Yes, he is! Damn it, does someone have to die before it’s enough to stop him? Is that what it’s going to take?”

“People already have died,” remarked Nicci, utterly absorbed in her drawings. “But they still follow him.”

“If they find anything out there, it’s going to go bad. And honestly, the very best scenario is them getting gored to death by an animal because the most likely thing to bump into is a raider or someone from Praxas. I had a spear,” Amber said furiously. “I had a damned good spear and I knew how to use it and they took me like
that
.”

“Nothing’s going to happen to them,” said Crandall, but he wasn’t smiling anymore.

“Because everything’s gone so well up till now,” murmured Nicci.

Crandall heaved a sigh and got to his feet. “If you’re going to freak out, let’
s just go find them. But I want it on record that you’re acting like a—”

And then, reedy as a birdcall behind the ever-present wind, the scream.

Amber froze. After all that tough talk, after all that stomping around and swearing and what Scott would surely call her Bierce-knows-best bullshit, Amber froze. It was Crandall who jumped up, Crandall who started running, and if that was all he’d done, things might have gone very differently, but Crandall was there to ‘protect the women’ and so his parting words as he bolted around the leather wall were, “Stay here.”

What toughness failed to pr
ovoke, defiance finally did: Clutching the spear, she ran after him, but Crandall ran ahead of her the whole way and he’d been in a cage all winter so what did that say? She’d recognized that it was a human scream, a man’s scream, even if she couldn’t tell who’d made it. The fact that it was not repeated only made things worse. Something had found them. Something had maybe taken them. And was she really going to let herself be taken too? For
Scott
?

‘Just go back,’ Bo Peep suggested. ‘Nicci needs you, right? Nicci always needs you. You can say it was for Nicci while you hide.’

Shame became anger and anger, as it so often did, became strength. “God damn it,” she snarled, running faster, passing Crandall at last. It became her mantra: “God damn it, God damn it, God fucking
damn
it!”

She reached the bottom of a rocky hill just as t
he first Manifestors spilled over the top. They didn’t see her, didn’t see each other, didn’t see the trees. When two of them inevitably collided and went sprawling, the others trampled right over them. It was Dag, badly out of breath, who lurched over to help them up.

“Run!” he shouted. Gasped, really. “It’s coming!”

Eric appeared, pulling Scott along with him. “I think we lost it,” Scott was babbling, hugging onto Meoraq’s sword with both hands. His eyes were eating up his face. “I really think we did. I don’t think it’s still—hey! That’s mine!”

Amber
had snatched the kzung out of his grip and now shook it at him. “It’s not yours, it’s Meoraq’s! And if he caught you with it, he’d kill you!” But the rest of that promising fight was forgotten when the kipwe came crashing through the trees.

It was a
big one, a male in its prime, and it was breathing almost as hard as Dag after its run. There were a few broken spears still stuck in its side, quivering along with the rest of its quills as it raked a paw over the ground, tearing up roots and winter-hard earth with ridiculous ease. It stared them down and in its eyes, she could see the ponderous weight of its animal thought: People running was one thing. People standing, challenging…that was something else.

Amber’s instinct was to run, but she made herself stand her ground. This wasn’t a hungry predator
, just a big, mean animal that handled being startled and stabbed at badly. It was dangerous, yes; it would chase whatever ran and kill whatever it could, but it wouldn’t die trying. If the odds weren’t in its favor, it would go.

“Get up,” said Amber, moving closer to Dag and the Manifestors. “Everybody, come together. Don’t r—”

“Run!” Scott shouted and the two Manifestors with Dag immediately bolted for camp.

The
kipwe roared and charged them.

There wasn’t time to think about it and if there had been time, she’d have only thought what a stupid thing she was about to do. She dropped the useless spear and ran to meet it, screaming in perfectly mingled fear and frustration as she swung the heavy kzung and
hit the kipwe square in the throat. Her moment of surprised triumph was damned short; the blade skated harmlessly over the creature’s quills and drove itself in somewhere in the chest. Suddenly the hilt in her hands was shoving back at her. Amber flew back, hit the ground, caught a glimpse of half a kzung with two tons of kipwe behind it coming right at her, and rolled. The hilt hit the ground where she’d been and the rest of the blade vanished into the beast’s body. The kipwe bellowed, backed up, then saw her on the ground. Amber lunged out to grab the spear, which she knew damned well was nothing but a pointed piece of dead wood. She scrambled up, turned around right as the kipwe stood up on its hind legs, and stabbed as it swung.

She missed its eye, missed its nose, even missed the gap
ing open target of its mouth, but the stick went in somewhere. She felt it puncture flesh in the split-second before its paw connected with her side. There was no sense of flying, only the second, immediate-seeming impact as she hit the ground and slid across it. Damp earth sluiced up over her arms and into her face, clogging her nose, filling her mouth with the taste of the grave she wouldn’t even get. She rolled over, spitting and swiping at herself with one hand and digging frantically for another weapon—a stick, a rock, one of the Ancients’ plasma cannons, anything!—before climbing to her feet again. She had nothing but her bare hands, but she ran at it again, because it was just a kipwe for God’s sake, and maybe it would turn around if she charged it, maybe it would run.

The
kipwe reared again…then listed, swatted drunkenly at its face. It bellowed, shook its head hard, grunted, and then toppled over.