The Last Hour of Gann (20 page)

“I have been with no ma
n but you!” the girl blurted. “Please, you must believe me! I did not burn, I admit that, but even without His fires, I was blessed! Oh, hear me, honored one, will you not hear me? This is your child!”

Spectators exclaimed amongst themselves in gleeful shock at thi
s blasphemy. The high judge struck his hammer upon the wall, but silence was not forthcoming, and though Lord Saluuk seized hold of his daughter’s arm, she did not go quietly but instead increased her struggles, actually reaching out to try and catch at Meoraq’s arm.

“Everything you say is truth!” she cried. “My only lie was the mark that—”

Lord Saluuk’s arm swung and ended whatever she meant to say next, a slap no longer but a fist that broke the delicate upper bone of her narrow snout and sent her crashing to the floor. “Bridle her!” he roared, and no less than six of his servants leapt to obey. “I will hear no more lies spoken through that poison tongue! Remove her!”

Meoraq’s disapproving hiss
earned him half a pulled knife before Lord Saluuk shoved it back into its sheath.

“
Go on with you, sprat!” he spat. “Go back to Xeqor! I knew your father and don’t you
just
fill his fucking shadow! He’s bred his House nothing but lack-wits and bastard-makers since he took the blade! Be damned to him for pissing you out and be damned to you—”

The hand of Sheul touched his heart; Meoraq’s own flew out and caught Lord Saluuk by the wrist. In a moment, the warlord was on his knees with his face mashed against tiles still wet with his own daughter’s tears and Meoraq was on him, trying to think through the haze of Sheul’s fire and unsure, for an eternity of moments, whether it were an enemy beneath him or a woman.

The pounding of the judgment hammer cleared his head some. He shook himself, focused on the body twisting and hissing in his grip, then pulled his hooked kzung—a hunting blade, and still more than this particular animal deserved—and put it to Lord Saluuk’s vibrant throat.

“Hold, honored one.” The h
igh judge struck his hammer a final, deliberate time. “This tribunal has not been concluded. If you have offense, you have the right to seek redress, but only at the proper hour.”

Truth. Meoraq closed his eyes, breathed himself calm in the cooling grip of Sheul, and then released Saluuk with a contemptuous shove and stood away.

“How do you speak, lord?”

The steward of House Saluuk fought himself to his feet and turned a perfectly murderous glare on Meoraq. After several deep breaths of his own, he pressed his empty hands together and bent his stiff back in a bow. “I have offended,” he hissed. “My accusation stands false in the sight of Sheul. I will make whatever reparation this tribunal demands for bringing her lies to this hall. My daughter—” His flat spines made a dry, scraping sound as they tried to flatten further against his skull. “—has gone to Gann. Uyane Meoraq stands acquitted of her and her
bastard.”

The judge
raised his hammer, but Meoraq halted him with a raised hand. He cocked his head meaningfully, waiting.

Lord Saluuk glared at him, color throbbing in his throat. One moment be
came many, but it finally came: “Forgive me, honored one. I have offended you and your House.”

Meoraq’s head canted further. “And the father who pissed me out?” he prompted blackly.

Lord Saluuk’s spines ticced. Breathing hard, all but stinking of hate, Lord Saluuk knelt. One knee first, then both, and then he bent to touch his head to the floor and turn his naked palm up beside Meoraq’s boot. “Forgive.” He managed this time to say it without hissing, although the effort clearly came at a high price. “It is Saluuk Tzugul before you, son of Ulhathev, son of Shagoth, son of all my fathers before him. I am my House and the bloodline of my fathers and I have offended. I bend before you, Uyane. Forgive me.”

Meoraq grunted and stepped back. He did not make an answer, but then, the law demanded that pardon be asked of him, not that he give it.

“You are perhaps too quick to remove evidence from this tribunal, Lord Saluuk,” said one of the judges after a moment. “An impression could yet be made of the girl’s scar and compared to those men of your household whom you suspect—”

“She’s gone to Gann,” the steward spat
, already back on his feet and just as furious as he had been before his showing of humility, if not more so. “Why should I care who sired her bastard?”

“Forgive, lord, but it is the matter of who put a Sheulek’s mark upon her that concerns me.”

Saluuk continued to glare at Meoraq for a breath or two, but then slid his cold stare up at the tribune wall.

“The
girl’s corruption may be a sin,” said the judge, “but the forging of that mark is a crime. If these witnesses you bring before us can truly account for every hour of the girl’s life, then one of them surely aided in her deceit. She did not bite her own shoulder.”

The other tribune judges
grunted solemn agreement. The spectators eyed one another and whispered.

“I will
hold interrogations,” Saluuk said at last, visibly struggling with his temper. “I will find the man responsible and send him over the wall with his lying poke.”

Meoraq frowned. It was customary to exile those who had been corrupted
beyond redeeming—giving to Gann those who had given themselves to him—and only after they had served a certain time of imprisonment under the Temple’s watch. Only when the priests had declared her unforgiveable would she be sent out to wander in the wildlands until Gann took her into darkness. She would never be burnt, never truly die, and Meoraq supposed she would come to this fate whether she walked out the Temple gate or fell from her father’s rooftop, but still it troubled him.

And he was not alon
e, for one of the lesser judges hesitantly said, “Would it not be better to place the girl in Temple custody until her guilt is proved?”

“Her
guilt
,” Saluuk hissed, “is biting at her teat! I will
not
be dishonored in my own House!”

As all the judges bowed, Meoraq said,
“You have been too long within walls if you can think to preserve the honor of your bloodline only by exterminating it.”

Saluuk’s neck stiffened, the marks of his anger visibly throbbing in time with his heart. “If she cannot behave herself as
a proper woman of my House, better she be dead. Her and her bastard both.”

“Honored one
,” said the high judge reprovingly. “Your opinion is not asked. You stand acquitted and your part in this tribunal is done.”

Truth, and if he could not get clear of Lord Saluuk’s presence, he knew it would end in violence regardless of all the training in the world. Meoraq bent his neck briefly and received the bows and salutes of all those who shared the ha
ll with him. The high judge beckoned to an usher and Meoraq left, feeling Saluuk Tzugul’s eyes burning on his back all the way out into the hall.

* * *

The Halls of Judgment were empty enough to echo beneath Meoraq’s feet. The sound worked on him like the hammers of a headache, adding to his black mood instead of easing it. A bad business, Saluuk, and he could have handled it better but it should have waited until the morning. He had always been too eager to see blood spilled after a battle and he knew it.

‘I thank Y
ou, Father, for Your temperance and restraining hand,’ Meoraq thought sourly. ‘Without which, I would surely have slaughtered a man with much disgrace and deep satisfaction.’

Sheul did not receive his prayer.

“I do thank You,” Meoraq said again, aloud this time, and with the proper gravity. The usher did not look around; a Sheulek speaking to God could hardly be a singular occurrence. “O my Father, I am ashamed that I require Your hand upon my heart to hold me from brawling, even with so low a man as the steward of Saluuk. Gann’s touch stains more than the daughter, I think,” he added with a scowl. “It would not shock to me to learn he put the scar on her himself.”

It would shock him, actually, but it was also disturbingly easy to visualize. Lord Saluuk learning of his daughter’s pregnancy and, knowing Gann’s taint would soon be visible to all, making certain she carried an honorable scar. He had been a Sheulek once, and doubtless knew how the women of a Sheulek’s many conquests melted together over time. Perhaps another
Sheulek would have accepted his responsibilities without contest, and who knew? If the girl had not been so memorable in her tears, Meoraq might have been fooled. She was so very skilled an actress (
I have known no other man but you
) that a part of him was tempted (those pleading, tear-filled eyes) to believe her even now.

There were men in the world who actually envied a Sheulek the liberty to take whatever woman Sheul moved him to take, not realizing that so many of those women w
ere sired by men like Arug or Saluuk, that the women themselves were largely forgettable, and that years of exposure to all of Gann’s carnality and deceit made a man see it everywhere. In everyone.

Meoraq walked, lost in brooding thoughts of conniving fathers and flat-headed babies, as the usher escorted him to the outer courtyard of the shrine. The priest waiting to admit him offered prayers, which Meoraq, in his black mood, felt strongly compelled to accept. His meditations were lengthy and fruitless, scored thr
ough by disruptive visions of Saluuk’s Gann-lost girl and her baby, and he did not end them so much as abandon them for another night. He did not notice that they were not taking the right way to the garrison until he followed the usher through a door and found himself in the holy forge at the shrine’s heart.

A white-cowled priest
stood before the eternal fires, his hood pulled low over his eyes. His robes were richly trimmed, the hem weighted with gold plates and cut to glide just above the floor rather than pick up even a trace of dirt. Each finger was armored to the tip with delicate bands of fine metal. His color was so heavily crusted with jewels, it was a wonder he could breathe. He did not bother to acknowledge Meoraq, although he had surely heard him enter.

“You wished to speak with me?” said Meoraq after a few calming breaths. He would have liked to demand that he be shown a Sheulek’s proper respect and damn well be left alone, but he’d indulged in enough shameful behavior for one n
ight. He would show his divine Father repentance with patience and respect, even if it was a damned inconvenience.

The priest turned, pushing back his hood to get a better look at him.
“Sheulek,” he said, eyeing his sabks. “You are Uyane Meoraq of Xeqor?”

Obviously. How many other Sheuleks do you have in your damned city tonight?

‘Forgive me, O my Father, and give me patience,’ Meoraq thought. He said, politely, “I am.”

“I
am Exarch Ylsathoc Hirut.”

Meoraq waited.

The exarch frowned, clearly annoyed that he did not fall back cowering at the name. “Surely you were told that I wished to speak with you as soon as you arrived, as I was told the moment that you passed the gates of this city. But that was more than an hour ago. And here I have been. Waiting.”

I am a Sheulek and I go where I fucking well will.

‘Forgive me, O my Father, and give me patience.’ “It is my duty to attend Sheul’s judgments before attending to my own personal audiences,” Meoraq said.

“I see. So be it
. At least you are here now. I had begun to think you had forgotten this stop upon your circuit, although I can easily see why you would. Sheul the All-Father surely knows that it is only my love for Him that holds me in this pisspot, but then, I was born in Gedai and know better how a city ought to be. You, now…” The exarch cast a disapproving look back at him over his shoulder. “Where have you been?”

Engaged in the duties I am sworn to and the privileges I am owed, one of which may include putting a knife in that eye if you roll it at me again.

‘Forgive me, O my Father, and give me patience.’ “I was detained at Xheoth.”

Ylsathoc
grunted, then turned all the way around. He held out a long, pale object which Meoraq actually needed in his hands before he recognized it as a thigh bone.

Its meaning stabbed into him like a knife’s blade. And twisted.

“Your father is dead,” said the exarch without further preamble. “Sheul has named you steward of House Uyane. Xeqor awaits her champion.”

4

T
he exarch wanted to read him the oaths immediately, but Meoraq refused to hear them. He was given the use of the temple’s finest room for his bedchamber that night, but he didn’t use it save as a place to store his pack. He went instead to the innermost cloister and there knelt at a firelit shrine with the knife of his fathers heavy over his heart.

The holy smiths of Xi’Tothax executed their craft well; his father’s thigh bone had been expertly cut and carved to make the hilt which the reforged blade so perfectly fit. It was not quite the knife he remembered hanging from his father’s neck, but he was proud to carry it, as proud as he was reticent to claim it.