The Last Hour of Gann (119 page)

He fell asleep almost immediately—two marathon bouts of sex in one day
were too much for even mighty Zhuqa the Warlord—but Amber did not. She lay there for a very long time, doing nothing, thinking nothing, only staring into the black above her bed. She would have liked to have been planning something. Escape. Murder. Hell, dinner. But thought was like hate tonight, too heavy for her little body to carry.

She still believed Meoraq was coming. This was so obvious that it didn’t even bear wondering about. He was coming and he’d find her. Meoraq could do anything. The question of whether he’d still want her after another man had been inside her had not yet occurred to her
, but it would before morning. These were her last worry-free moments, but for now, no, she wasn’t worried.

Someone knocked.

Zhuqa woke. Only he didn’t just ‘wake’. Between his sleeping inhalation and the swift snort of his waking exhale, he managed to flip into a crouch and draw his other knife. She knew about the crouch because she could hear the
pa-pad
of his bare feet hitting the hard mat they slept on. She knew about the knife because it was under her jaw.

“That wasn’t me,” said Amber.

Zhuqa eased up on the knife with a low grunt.

The knock came again, even
louder.

“Someone better be dead,” he
called, and shoved the cupboard door open.

The bells were loud as sirens in the quiet, slow to leave the air.
She heard his footsteps recede. A sliver of reddish light split the dark as he opened the door.

“Iziz,” said Zhuqa. “In light of our many years of friendship, I will give you one word before I disembowel you.”

“Zru’itak,” said Iziz, seemingly unconcerned.

Zhuqa sheathed his knife and
came back into the room. He left the door open, so she thought he was coming for his clothes, but while he did dress and strap on his weapons, modesty was clearly his secondary concern. “Up, Eshiqi,” he called. “You are far too new to this game to be left to play alone.”

He didn’t offer her
any clothes. Amber fumbled a blanket off the bed and wrapped herself in it as well as she could, running to make up what little time this cost.

He grunted, ey
eing her as he cinched his belt tight, then gave the lizardman standing behind him a friendly slap to the stomach and said, “Say something to him.”

“Gee,
” she said, in her most neutral voice. “I didn’t have a speech prepared, but choke on piss and die.”

Iziz snorted, his spines flaring in either amusement or surprise. “What the hell did that mean?”

“Nothing good, I should think.” Zhuqa gave Amber’s chin an affectionate pinch and went back out into the hall, trusting her to follow. Which she did. “Probably told you that your father was a ghet or a slave or a warm pile of shit.”

“
Could have been Gann himself for all anyone knows,” Iziz said agreeably, walking backwards to watch Amber. “My mother isn’t much for names. Those eyes…Does that thing really understand you or is it just doing tricks?”

“It understands every word.”

“Eerie. Have you fucked it yet?”

“Yes.”

“How is it?”

“Better than your mother.”

“She could use some training up, couldn’t she?” Iziz agreed and turned around just in time to avoid tumbling backwards onto the stairs. “You feeling proprietary?”

“For now
. But stop a moment. Eshiqi, come here.”

There on the stairs, with a guard on the lower landing looking up and two on the next floor looking down, Zhuqa beckoned.

She took a second or two to think about all the things he might want her to demonstrate with his friend and then she walked stiffly up to them and waited.

“Oh, that is snapping mad,” Iziz remarked in an admiring tone.

Zhuqa moved Amber’s hair to show off Meoraq’s scar.

The effect on his friend was something of a surprise. He looked at it politely for a heartbeat or two, and then actually leapt back, banging into the stairwell rail and nearly going right over and down to wherever the bottom was in this place. Zhuqa’s hand catching in his harness prevented that, but Iziz didn’t even thank him.

“That’s a fucking Sheulek bite!” he hissed, all his spines standing straight up.

“Yes.”

“That thing belongs to a Sheulek?!”

“Used to.” Zhuqa chucked Amber on the chin again and resumed climbing stairs. “She says she killed him.”

“Then she’s a fucking liar!” Iziz said, looking and sounding almost prissily outraged. “Where did you get that thing?”

“About three, maybe four
spans off the old quarry road.”

“Off the road? Where off the road?
And when were you going to tell us to make fast against a fucking Sword of fucking
God
? Shouldn’t that have been the first thing you did when you got back, instead of throwing a poke into
that
Gann-ugly thing for hours at a stretch?!”

“How long have we be
en here, Iziz? How many years?”

The second lizardman passed a hand over his eyes briefly and shook his head—not in negation, they didn’t do that, but in the same way an irritated do
g throws off water. “More than a few,” he said, resigned. “Five? Six?”

“It
is, in fact, eight. Eight years, settled. And wintering twelve years before that, under me or under Chuaan, and who knows how many years before that, for raiders
like
us if not this band exactly? These ruins have stood since the Fall and they may still be standing when men rise up to Fall again.” He glanced back at Amber, his eyes glinting red in the torchlight. “No one is coming.”

“
You say that like no one ever has. I say to you, if little boys chasing after tachuqi talons can find this place, so can a Sheulek.”

“Then I’
ll kill him.”

Iziz snorted. “Before or after you catch lightning
in your fist and squeeze it into wine?”

“I have killed six Sheulek
in my time, Iziz. Seven, if you count a certain way.” He gave Amber another glance, coughing amusement at what he saw in her face. “If he comes, he comes. And I will kill him and make a cup of his skull—” He reached back to pinch her chin. “—for my woman to hold for me when we share our meals.”

She twisted out of his grip and rubbed the back of her hand across her chin, erasing the hated heat of his touch.
It wasn’t deliberate; she couldn’t have stopped herself if she’d tried. It was all she could do not to bare her teeth at him like an animal.

“Fierce little thing,” Zhuqa murmured and left the stairs for another hall.

There was more light here. And noise. Muted by distance and at least one other door, she could hear a lizardish screaming. Not high and frightened, not fresh. Whatever torture played out at the end of this hall, it had been some time in the act. Amber’s step slowed as the last cry tapered to an moan and then came a terrible silence that stopped her entirely. Even when Zhuqa noticed, even when he came back for her, she couldn’t move. She didn’t want to see what he’d done to someone to make them make a sound like that.

Or to make them stop.

“These are my slave pens,” Zhuqa said after a moment. “Zhuqa the Warlord has played many games in this hall I do not care to remember. Easy, my little one. This is not one of them. Come with me.”

He turned around again. She followed.

They had not quite reached the door he wanted when it opened and a raider came out. She recognized him, although the name didn’t come until she heard it in Zhuqa’s mouth.

“
Geozh.” He folded his arms, an act that placed his hands very near to the sheathed blade strapped to his biceps. “You must be coming to fetch me.”

“I was, actually.” And, far from showing concern,
Geozh gave his leader a clap to the shoulder. “You know what they say about the first one, but it’s a tough little sprat.”

He moved off down the hall, spines high but relaxed. Humming.

Amber frowned, watching him go. Zhuqa opened the door.

The clove-sweet smell of their blood struck her at once, followed by the gaspy rattle of someone’s dry, labored breath.
Amber stopped cold, but Zhuqa didn’t wait. He went to the cupboard where a few more raiders stood respectfully aside for him, and looked down at the lizardlady lying in the bed. She dragged her eyes open to look back at him, then turned her face away.

“Eshiqi, come here.”

She went, pulling unwillingly away from Iziz as Zhuqa bent over and picked something out of the bedding. She knew what she was looking at—she thought she knew—but she still shied squeamishly back when he turned around and placed the wet, blood-streaked baby in her reluctant arms.

The lizardlady in the bed made a single unhappy sound. Not a word. Not even truly a complaint. Just a sound, scarcely louder than a sigh.

“And there we are,” said Zhuqa. His eyes were on the baby, expressionless, watching its tiny hands and feet grip on to the blanket that wrapped Amber’s shoulders. Its scales were white and slightly translucent, which gave it almost a pearly look beneath the gore of its birthing. It pressed the top of its weirdly flattened head to her breast and did nothing, made no sound. Its ribs bulged rapidly in and out. It was impossibly thin to her eye; no fat and happy human baby, but something skeletal and drowned.

Long minutes passed. No one spoke. The raiders sharing this moment stood very still, facing away, invisible in their own skin. There were, Amber saw, three other lizardladies a short distance away, keeping very quiet as they gathered stained cloth and other less-identifiable devices into baskets to take away. They didn’t matter. Even Amber herself and the lady in the cupboard did not seem to truly manifest. This was all about Zhuqa and the baby. The silence stretched and stretched…and shattered with the scraping sound of a knife drawn from its sheath.

Amber flinched back with a wordless sound of her own, clutching the baby closer to her chest as if her arms were any shield against the killing blade.

Zhuqa paused, knife in hand, and gave her a long, thoughtful stare.

“Interesting response,” Iziz remarked.

Zhuqa
held the knife up in an elaborate display, turned it point-down, and pierced his forefinger. He sheathed the knife again as he pinched his knuckle to make blood well out past his scales, then closed what little distance Amber had put between them and drew a red-black line of his own blood down the baby’s naked back.

“Welcome to Gann’s world,” he murmured. “
Your blood is the blood of Zhuqa.”

The baby did not move, did not squirm, did not make a sound beyond its rapid panting.

At last Zhuqa looked up, far deeper into Amber’s eyes than she wanted to see him go. He read them without speaking. He did not step away. He said, “Zru’itak here was exiled from the city of Chalh for thievery. She would have died in the wildlands if my men had not found her. Is this not true?”

The lizardlady did not reply.

Zhuqa did not seem to expect her to. “They brought her to me and I gave her the gift of my protection. I fed her. I clothed her. I gave her every luxury this life allows. She was not grateful. I asked her to play a game with me. So. We played. I don’t care if my woman hates me, but if she’s going to play the game, she has to at least pretend. Zru’itak never had a kind word for her man, only insults.”

He gave the lizardlady in the bed a pointed stare. After a moment, Amber looked that way, too. The lizardlady continued to face the wall until Zhuqa’s
hand moved calmly to his knife and then she finally turned. Her mouth opened.

The tongueless, empty hole of her mouth.

“After that, things became…strained,” said Zhuqa. “I was willing to forgive, but she didn’t want to play anymore. I am not a cruel man. I told her if she would stay one year, just one, I would let her go her way in Gann’s world. For a time, she seemed content with that. Soon, I learned she was pregnant. I brought her out of my rooms and let her walk at my side. I made all the world our House and opened every door for her.” He glanced back. The lizardlady looked at the wall. “And how did you show me obedience, faithless one? How did you serve the man who took you in? Who cared for you? Who put the fire of new life in your wretched womb?”

His voice never rose, never showed the slightest strain of emotion.

The lizardlady did not—could not—reply.

“She ran away,” said Zhuqa. He gazed at Amber, his head cocked to show a faint degree of sarcasm. “She ran away, when all the
world
was my House, and she slapped my face when I went to fetch her back.”

No one spoke. No one made a sound. No one met his stare but Amber.

Suddenly, he turned around, seized the blanket that covered the lizardlady, and ripped it entirely off the bed.

She saw. The baby in her a
rms uttered a chick-like peep; she’d squeezed it.

Zru’itak
had no legs, no arms. He’d left her nothing, nothing but the delicate, polished bones of her toes and fingers, strung prettily together and hung around her neck.