The Last Hour of Gann (70 page)

“He and his what?” asked Amber.

“Apostles, I think,” Scott answered with a crooked smile. “This is kind of funny, isn’t it? Where there twelve of them?”

“They
were six altogether,” said Meoraq, knowing he was being baited in some way but unable to understand exactly how. “Prophet Lashraq and his brunt, and the four first oracles: Thaliszr, Oyan, Mykrm and Uyane.”

The furry stripes over Amber’s eyes rose. “Isn’t that your name?”

He smiled, his spines flaring with pride. “Yes. My House is the House Oracle Uyane founded in Xeqor, where my fathers have stood ever since as champions to all Yroq. There are names and Houses as great,” he admitted, “but none greater.”

“
Wow.”

“
But this is not my story. It is the tale of the Prophet in the first hour of the Fall. Such was his faith and humility that Sheul at last called the Six to Him.”

“What, he killed them?” Amber asked, and smacked herself in the forehead. “I did it again. I’m sorry.” She thrust her chin out for him.

“I forgive you this once. Sit quietly. And no. When I say Sheul called him, I mean only that. Lashraq heard the voice of God, which no man then living had heard, and it called him to the holy shrine of Xi’Matezh.”

“Fucking lizard’s pet,” muttered Crandall.

Meoraq looked at him.

“Dude, you just do not learn,”
Eric remarked.

Meoraq pulled his arm back, but Amber caught it.

“Forget him. Please, I really want to hear this. Xi’Matezh…I know I’m saying that wrong, but that’s where you’re taking us, isn’t it?”

Meoraq looked at her hand
. She let go of him at once, but he completely ruined the severity of the moment by reaching out to tap at the back of her hand in forgiveness. “Xi’Matezh,” he agreed. “The shrine that stands at the ruined reaches of Gedai, at the very edge of Gann. When all the world fell, Xi’Matezh stood and stands yet. Lashraq brought his oracles across the wildlands, just as I am bringing you, until he arrived at the shrine. There, the doors opened and Sheul Himself received them.”

Her furry brows rose again into arches. “For real?”

“Yes.”

“They a
ctually met him?”

“Manifest as flesh,” said Meoraq.

“No way.”

“Truth. T
hey heard His words and, at His command, wrote them into laws that could be carried to all men. These are the written teachings known as the Word.”

“Oh,” said Amber. Her brows lowered. “I get it. Okay.”

“Xi’Matezh is the holiest of the surviving shrines from the Age of the Ancients.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Because all who enter,” said Meoraq calmly, “hear the voice of Sheul.”

That made her look at him in a whole new way. Meoraq smiled.

“You mean that metaphorically, right?”

“I don’
t know that word. I mean precisely what I say.”

“Everyone hears God?”

“All who enter. The doors of Xi’Matezh do not open for everyone.”

That knowing look came over her again. “Ah.”

“But they do open. They will open for me,” he added.

Her eyes narrowed. She leaned forward slightly. “Have you ever personally met anyone w
ho’d been inside?”

Meoraq snorted and leaned forward to meet her. “Yes.”

Her brows rose yet again. Their pliancy was truly astounding to behold. “You have not!”

He took her chin in his hand and gave it a squeeze. “Do not
question the word of a Sheulek. We are truth incarnate.”

“You really have?”

“Yes. One of my training masters.”

“What did God tell him?”

“That, he would not speak of.” Meoraq flexed his spines, then lowered them. “But he was changed by it. Changed to the very heart of him.”

Amber frowned, searching his eyes while her own remained troubled. Her flesh in his hand was very soft…very warm…

“I can’t believe that,” she said at last. It seemed to take her some effort. “I’m sorry. I just can’t.”

Meoraq smiled and released her.

“Now he’s going to hit her,” Crandall remarked, and quite a few humans leaned away from her.

“I don’t think you’re lying to me,”
Amber went on, unafraid of him or his punishing hand. “And I don’t think your teacher was lying to you, exactly. I’m just saying—”

“That you do not believe in Sheul. And therefore, He cannot be truth
because all the truth in the world is known to you.”

Amber cut her eyes away in a wince, but did not protest that. Instead, after several false starts to gather her nerve, she said, “I’m just saying that there’s a lot things your teacher could have seen or heard that maybe…you know…he didn’t understand.”

Meoraq’s spines twitched. Smiling, he gestured for her to continue.

She winced again, seeing his amusement but perhaps not knowing how to read it. Yet she did resume her argument, however uncomfortable it clearly made her. “People tend to find what they look for, Meoraq. That’s my point. And if your teacher went looking for God, he might have been willing to…to see God. In a lot of things. Especially things…” Her gaze wandered restlessly behind her, tapping at this device or that one as they sat surrounded by the trappings of the Ancients. “…that were unfamiliar to him.”

He waited, and when he was certain that she had no more to say, Meoraq leaned forward and gently said, “Do I really strike you as so superstitious a man?”

She started to protest, but this time, he interrupted.

“Do you see me cowering in fear beneath these ‘magical glowing crystals’ or cringing away from the ‘metal creatures’ that litter these ruins?”

Amber’s soft brow creased. She looked up at the lights and then away, at the door, and finally back at him.

“I know what machines are,” he said. “I know how they were used. And I know many of them yet function in some small, dying manner. I have seen the moving images left by the Ancients and heard the echoes of their words and never once been tempted to mistake it for the voice of my eternal Father. The idea is absurd.”

He could see that argument at war with the thoughts inside her and he saw the exact moment that it was defeated.

“Maybe it was someone else,” said Amber.

Meoraq huffed out a breath of exasperation. “A man, you mean.”

“Pretending to be God.”

“So you acknowledge I would not be fooled by a disembodied voice, but instead fall down in wo
rship of a mere man. Your lack of faith in Sheul does not disturb me half as much as your lack of faith in me.”

Again, she fail
ed to read his teasing tone. Dismay filled her ugly face and all the humans around them drew back to give him room to swing. He reached out to give her a playful tap—just the tip of his fingers to her forehead—and said, “Sheul does not require me to prove His existence. You and I will stand together in Xi’Matezh. You will hear His voice when He speaks to me. Perhaps He will even speak to you.”

She continued to gaze at him in the same searching way. “What if the doors don’t open?”

“They will.”

“What if…” A small crease appeared between her troubled brows. “What
will you do if he’s not there?”

“
A far better question is this.” He leaned forward very close. “What will
you
do if He is?”

She drew back, frowning.

Meoraq spared Scott a glance and his smile slipped. “Speak now, if you must.”

Scott
leaned in at once, intent, to ask the most incongruous question Meoraq had heard out of him yet: “What does the temple look like?”

“Eh?”

“Is there a tower, maybe?”

Meoraq looked at Amber, only to see her looking at
Scott, her human face puckered in confusion. “I’ve never seen the temple,” he admitted. “I don’t know.”

“But it’s old, right? Like this place. It’s f
rom before your big war.”

“Dude,” said Dag. “What difference does it make if there’s a tower or not?”

“It makes a big difference, depending on whether it’s a bell tower, say…” Scott paused to eye his people with thinly restrained and completely inexplicable excitement. “Or a transmission tower.”

The words meant nothing to Meoraq, but the effect they had on the humans was clear enough to see. Most merely continued to show puzzlement, but some immediately captured and reflected
Scott’s own excitement while others, like Amber, seemed stunned.

“Think about it,”
Scott was saying. “The doors don’t open for everyone—there’s some sort of security system. People hear voices—a communications relay. Their Jesus guy called it God because that’s what he wanted to think, maybe what he needed to think after most of the world gets wiped out, but what if their temple is really a skyport?”

“A skyport?” Amber echoed. “Why the hell would you go there? Why not a rad
io station or a…a regular airport? No, you go straight to skyport?”

“Didn’t you see the picture?
” Scott demanded. He climbed to his feet, standing over his people as color began to come into his face. “They had ships! Maybe starships!”

“What does it matter what they had a hundred or two hundred…” Amber trailed off, looking around the room with a strange, despairing sort of look. “…or a
thousand years ago? It doesn’t mean anything to us now.”

“If this place he’s taking us to
is a skyport, then they don’t just have any old transmission tower out there, it could be a deep-space relay! We could be saved!”

And then all the humans were talking at once, it seemed. Some to each other,
some catching at Scott’s sleeve, but all together, louder and louder, using human words that could not be fathomed and making arguments that only grew more violent.

“Enough!” Meoraq shouted, and most of them drew back and quieted at once.

Most of them.

“You don’t know what’s out
there!” Scott insisted. “They had the technology! They built all this, they had to have had some kind of global media system!”

“That’s not the goddamn point!” Amber shouted.

Meoraq got a hold on her and one on him and thrust them both back. “I said, enough!”

Amber leaned out around him to stab eyes at
Scott, undaunted. “What are you doing? Why are you working people up like this? You wouldn’t know how to use anything we found anyway!”

“Don’t tell me what I know!”

Meoraq hissed and gave them each a crisp shake.

“It all makes perfect sense!”
Scott insisted. “They hear voices, Bierce! From people who aren’t there! That’s a transmission tower and if it’s still working, we can use it! We can—”

“We can what? Phone home? We don’t know where we are!”

“It’s still a chance!”

“No it isn’t, God damn
it!
This
is our chance, right here!” Amber shouted. “
This
is where we are and
this
is where we have to live!”

“Not necessarily!”

Meoraq surrendered the effort to quiet them, released his holds, and slapped them both—first Scott, then Amber, and then Scott again, because he was the most irritating. He hissed, “Are you children?”

Scott
and Amber flushed together. He said nothing. She said, sullenly, “No.”

“Enough then,” he said curtly. “
You have had your story. Now we are moving on. Gather your things.”

“We’re going to talk about this
later,” Scott said.

It was not clear whether he were warning Amber or Meoraq, but in the event that it was him, Meoraq answered. “There will be time enough, I am certain, but if you cannot manage your words without lowing at one another like animals, I will drive you out into the
wildlands where animals belong.”

Scott
started to speak, but then obviously thought better of it. He shut his mouth and turned away.

The circle of humans began to break apart, withdrawing to their sleeping spaces to mutter amongst themselves
as they packed. He could hear his name (or as close as they could manage to speak it) and he doubted it was spoken with favor or respect, but he would not be baited by that. He had promised Sheul patience and even now, when holding his temper felt so much like holding a knife in his chest and twisting, twisting, he would let his soul’s Father judge him honest.

Beside him, Amber was noisily punching her shiny blanket into her pack,
the mark of his hand standing out brightly on her cheek, scraped raw and beaded on one edge with blood. He watched her for a time, wishing he had never begun the tale that had brought them to this moment, because although she certainly deserved a sounder cuffing than he’d given her for her outburst, it had utterly undone all the difficult mending of their first quiet talk this morning. He wanted that moment back, as clumsy as it had been.