The Last Hour of Gann (87 page)

Elsewhere, not far, Meoraq walked, a bit too spiteful in his Sheulek’s heart, but ever vigilant against the beasts that hunt by night.

8

T
here were no tachuqis. Meoraq knew it before that first hour was out, but he made himself stand a full watch. When the night was half-gone, Meoraq returned to wake Amber so that he could have a few hours’ rest before moving on. He’d ought to meditate before he slept—he had indulged plenty of flaws to meditate over tonight—but he wasn’t used to staying up this late anymore and he was tired.

The fires had been banked, giving him little light, but the humans’ blankets caught all there was and reflected it back like mirrors. He picked his way carefully through them, searching for Amber and trying not to step on anyone.
Ever since waking up in his tent, she had been fairly obnoxious about not bedding down too near him. No, it was always right in the thick of her people, where she was all but invisible, and he could do nothing but creep along and peer at each protruding head while praying for patience.

Patience had become little more than a w
ord in prayer to him these days and it troubled him. Neither the late hour nor the cold wind was Amber’s fault, but she had made herself damned difficult to find tonight. Usually she slept as light as any true warrior, rousing at the slightest disturbance, and until this night, his tromping boots had always been enough to at least provoke a shift or a murmur. Ah, there. Two pale tufts of hair, like summer-thick fronds of hillgrass, sprouting out of two silvery lumps on the ground—Amber and her Nicci.

Meoraq stomped loudly over. Nicci slept on, as usual. So did Amber, which was not. Her sleeping breaths were equally uncharacteristic—wet and heavy, as if labored. He circled her uncertainly until he saw the
pale stripe of her arm lying over the edge of her mat onto the trampled grass. It was surely Amber’s arm; that was her saoq-hide pack close to her hand, with his spare tunic stubbornly folded up inside so she could pretend she didn’t have to wear it in the morning.

“Up,” Meoraq said
. “It is half-past late enough and well on to later still. Come stand your watch.”

Amber did not stir.

He’d started to walk away, so much did he expect her grumbling obedience, but at this…this nothing…he paused. She’d done this before, when they were at cross-wills, but they weren’t fighting tonight, or at least he didn’t know they were. Cautiously, he turned back. “Soft-skin? I say waken.”

Nicci muttered something and lifted her head out of her bedding, giving him a bleary and blameful look before shifting her eyes to Amber. “Get up,”
she mumbled, prodding at the bulk of her blood-kin’s form.

Amber rocked without waking. Her wet breaths made a brief bubbling noise as she rolled onto her face and back again, but otherwise she made no sound.
Her fingers twitched, but her hand wasn’t moving.

She
…wasn’t moving.

Meoraq’s spines flexed forward and slapped back hard and fast enough to hurt. He was at her side in one step and ripping away the silver nothing-skin to expose her in a splay that might well have been only sleep…save that she
did not waken. Her mouth yawned when he rolled her over (and oh great Father, it was like moving meat. Only her upper body twisted toward him until he pulled on her thigh as well) emitting the same laboring sucks and gusts of air as strings of drool hung from her slack lips. She’d been lying in a great pool of her own salivations, so that one half of her face was pink and wrinkled. The eye on that side had swelled and was partially opened, so bloodshot and so dilated that it seemed a black slick upon a red sea. She had urinated on herself some time ago; the stain covered her entire left side from the sleeve of her arm to the cuff of her breeches.

“What happened?” Nicci asked shrilly. She grabbed at him and he shook her off without thought, pressing his palm to Amber’s chest
, first atop her shirt and then beneath it in an effort to catch the echoes of her life’s pulse. If she lived.

“My God!” said
Scott, appearing out of the dark as white and welcome as a strike of lightning. “She’s dead!”

A great storm of shock followed as humans bolted out of their beds to either crowd around him or hover away.

“Be quiet!” Meoraq roared, and while they did not obey precisely, they quieted enough that he could detect Amber’s heart beating at last. The feel of it brought him no relief, only more dread. Too heavy and too slow. Far too slow. He tried to make a count between beats, but there was no rhythm, only torpid shudders and infrequent slams, as inconsistent as the kicking leg of a dying saoq.

He told himself the freezing hand that gripped his own chest was premature. Her heart might beat this way all the time. How would he know?

His eye flicked to Nicci. He lunged out and caught her, dragged her squealing to him, and put his hand roughly between her swelled teats. Her heart hammered, rapid and strong, until she yanked herself away. He let her go, searching again for Amber’s life-beat and finding it exactly as he’d left it, indisputably
wrong
.

“What happened?” someone asked.

“Is she dead?” Nicci cried, already in tears. She stumbled away and Scott took her in, clutching Nicci against his chest.

“It’s going to be all right, Miss Bierce,” he declared. “We’ll all miss Amber. She had so mu
ch of the pioneering spirit and I know we will never forget her.”

Meoraq
gaped, then hissed at him with such violence that it was nearly a shriek.

“Back off, man,” Dag said in a low voice. “There goes his neck.”

“I think she’s breathing,” said another human. “I mean, she’s looking really bad, but she’s not dead yet.”

“When did this happen?” Meoraq demanded.

They all looked at each other. “She looked all right when she went to bed,” Eric said at length. “Maybe this is some kind of, I don’t know, infection or something. From when she got…uh, hurt.”

Scott
flushed and glared at him.

Yao came to kneel beside Amber and Meoraq reluctantly gave her up to his inspection. The first thing he did was to
take her wrist and just hold it for a short time, frowning. Then he pulled up Amber’s shirt and felt at her soft belly. The bruise, now several days old, had lost its glossy purple-black color, gained some greenish smudges, and separated into three distinct marks rather than one massive one. “I see no inflammation…no sign of internal bleeding…pulse is weak and thready…she’s extremely hypothermic. It could be sepsis, but she’s shown no symptoms until now and her breathing is very slow and arrhythmic. This looks pharmacological to me,” said Yao, prying open one of Amber’s slack, glazed eyes.

“It’s not drugs!”
Scott interrupted. “Where would she get drugs?”

“I didn’
t say…” Yao paused, his narrow eyes narrowing further as he gazed into nothing. “Drugs,” he murmured. He looked at Amber. “It could well be. Bring me the medical kit.”

Scott
stared for a moment and then suddenly, forcefully said, “I lost it. Back when we had to leave our infrastructure behind to avoid upsetting God. What does it matter? You can’t fix this with aspirin and bandages! And you’re not a real doctor anyway! You don’t know anything!”

Yao merely nodded, unaffected by these insults. “Then it must be something else,” he said, looking around at the dark plains. “She might have exposed herself to any number of toxic plants.”

“You are a surgeon?” Meoraq asked, following what he could of this exchange. “You can heal her?”

Yao looked at him calmly. “As I see it, there are three possibilities. If this is sepsis, a worsening of her internal inj
uries, she will almost certainly die. If she’s exposed herself somehow to an alien toxin against which she has no immunity, she will likely die. If she’s ill—”

A wave of murmured alarm swept outward through the humans.

“—then she might pull through, but her injuries and this environment have surely weakened her body’s defenses. Her chances are not good,” Yao finished. “We can keep her warm and comfortable and hope for the best, but I must tell you, I see nothing hopeful about her condition.”

Meoraq looked from face to flat, ugly fac
e, but no one else had anything more to say. He gathered Amber up and stood, resting the thin skin of his neck briefly over her brow to test for fever. That, he knew how to cure, although it was by no means a certainty that he would find the necessary herbs. In any case, she was not hot with fever, but cold, as cold as if her life were already lost.

“Take her to the fire and buil
d it up,” he ordered, holding her out. His mind was racing ahead already, battering from one point of useless healing lore to another, trying to remember if he had seen anything, anything, on his watch that might help her. There was little enough to look at in the wildlands and medicinal herbs were so precious that his eye had a way of marking them whether he had immediate need of them or not. He knew he had seen no teaberries, no healershand, not even the dangerous comfort of phesok. There might have been gift-of-God and feverleaf by the bushel were this a warmer season, but the coming winter had turned it all to hidden roots. His memory showed him nothing but grass in all directions, dead thorns, and barren trees twisted out of shape by past storms. The only leaf he recalled with any medicine at all was deathweed, down by the stream, and if that was a sign from Sheul, Meoraq chose to ignore it. He…

He was still holding Amber.

No one had come to take her. By the looks of them, no one meant to.

Meoraq’s confusion erupted in an instant to rage. “What the hell is wrong with you people?” he roared. “She could be dying!”

They shuffled back, looking at their feet or their fellows or their leader, and did not answer him. Scott, who was always first to be the voice of his people in every situation, whether it warranted a voice or not, now patted sobbing Nicci and was himself very pale and silent.

“Yeah,” ventured
Crandall when it became clear their appointed leader would not step forward this time. “But, I’m sorry, that’s just a really good reason to keep her away from us. Whatever this is, it’s bad.”

And Meoraq’s first impulse, self-defeating as it was, was to throw Amber down and hit him. Throw her.

Like meat.

Amber made a sudden weak gurgling noise. With her head tipped back in his arms, she was choking on her own saliva. Meoraq hurriedly shrugged her forward and drool spilled out in a fall over her lip and onto her chest. She did not seem to be able to close her mouth. A fool’s gape…or a corpse’s.

“Gross,” someone whispered.

His throat too tight for speech, Meoraq turned his back on all the shuffling, staring humans and carried Amber to his tent. She did not resist him when he propped her up on his knee to strip away her soiled garments. Apart from the intermittent twitching of her fingers, she did not move at all as he lay her down on his mat.

So limp. So cold. Pale as snow everywhere that lying in her own urine had not burnt her to a vivid shade of pink, everywhere she wasn’t bruised. So many bruises…

He passed his hand over them, gingerly probing for some sign of a greater injury, but her belly was cool and flat. Too flat. Sheul forgive His errant son, he could see the slats of her ribs and the nubs of her pelvic girdle. But no, he could not look at that now. Whatever this was that worked in her, it was not starvation any more than it was a belly-wound. But what was it?
He could see a perfectly round inflammation at her throat, shot through with numerous tiny red dots, but he did not know what to make of it. He had never seen such a bite before, but human hide was thin, as Amber’s many bruises proved. It was entirely plausible that a beetle with jaws far too weak to penetrate dumaqi scales had bitten her. Could beetles be poisonous? Twelve years walking in Gann’s land and he simply did not know.

Meoraq
lay down beside her, wrapped them both in his blanket and held her close, willing the warmth of his body into hers. She did not try to speak or move. She gave no sign that she knew who was with her or that anyone was at all. “Great Sheul, O my Father,” he whispered, searching her slack face for life. “Hear Your son’s prayer. You have passed these humans into my care for a reason and surely my ungrateful complaints have made this lesson necessary, but I am humble before You now. Only you can know the cause of this terrible sickness. Therefore, I place myself in Your hands, O Father. Show me the way to heal the woman.”

He shut his eyes and listened, but Sheul did not speak, or if He did, Amber’s wet breaths were louder. And if Sheul never spoke? If He left her life in mortal hands, as He so often did, what then?
He needed a surgeon and never mind that no dumaq would have the slimmest idea how to heal a human. He could follow his backtrail to the road as soon as there was light enough to see by, and while he didn’t know exactly where he was along its track, he knew he would find Gelsik to the north and Fol Dzanya to the south, but there were ten days running between them, plus three each way to run between road and camp, and it would take twice as long with the humans dragging at his heels, even longer since Amber would have to be carried. He would have to leave the humans here, leave Amber in their care, and run…knowing she would surely be dead by the hour of his return.