The Last Hour of Gann (122 page)

She must have tensed. Perhaps she made some sound. She did something, anyway, because Zhuqa’s sleep broke at once. He lifted his head, listening as she lay motionless, then grunted and push
ed the cupboard door open.

“Hold still,” he said, climbing out into the room. In another moment, he had a light struck and two lamps burning. He glanced her way, saw her staring back at him, and smiled. “Have you a kind word for your man this morning?”

Amber opened her mouth, closed it, took a few breaths (
six breaths just like meoraq always says six breaths and calm down
), then said simply, “Hi.”

“No.
Say, ‘I see my man, my Zhuqa, first. I pray, let him see me.’”

“All that, huh?”

“Say it, Eshiqi. Use my words. Say it as best you can.” Now he looked at her, just the shine from one eye. “To please me.”

She tried. He did not correct her, although she knew she couldn’t have possibly hit all the right tones and that every pause as she fought to fit her mouth around his stupid words changed its whole nuance. He let her wrestle it all out, and only after she was done did he look at her again.

He smiled. “I see you.”

“I’m thrilled.”

“Now come,” he said, beckoning. “Do you remember how to show your man a proper respect?”

Amber got out of the cupboard. She went to him,
fighting to keep her face a safe blank and hold all the hate on the inside where it couldn’t kill her, but still, when the time came to kneel in front of him, she slapped the back of her open hand on the ground next to his bare foot and let that flat, brittle sound be her ‘good morning.’

Zhuqa’s smile became a tolerant laugh. He patted her on the head and moved away to put his boots on. “I’m goi
ng to leave you now. Just for a short while. I hope you are not tempted to do anything foolish while I’m away. I would hate to lose you so early in this game.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Amber got up off her knees and went back to sit in the cupboard.

Zhuqa grunted, shrugged into his harness and strolled over to the door. He looked at it, at her. He waited, buckling buckles, smiling.

“Oh, you son of a whore.” Amber heaved herself up aga
in and opened the door that kept her his prisoner. “I really, really hate you.”

He nuzzled at her stiff neck before
he went out. She shut the door…but she didn’t slam it and she made sure she wouldn’t catch him on the ass. She couldn’t bring herself to be good, but she wasn’t dumb enough to be as bitchy as it was in her to be.

She waited in the cupboard, for no other reason than because she was naked and it had blankets. She didn’t know how long he was gone. Ten minutes or an hour felt like the same empty, elastic time. She tried to think of Meoraq, but it was hard to visualize him without seeing how big the world was. He was looking, she knew
he was looking, but he’d been looking for Scott and Nicci and the others too. And never found them.

The door opened. Zhuqa let himself in. He did not have the breakfast with him that she’d hoped for, although he popped the last bite of something into his mouth as he entered. He caught the look on her face as he chewed, or perhaps he heard the sullen rumble of her stomach. His spines flicked forward. “Hungry?”

She looked away.

His smile broadened just slightly. “Not hungry enough, I see. Come here, Eshiqi. I have something for you.”

“I’ll bet,” she muttered, but she went.

And it wasn’t what she’d thought. The bundle of something half-glimpsed in the crook of his arm turned out to be a woven garment, shapeless as a hospital-gown, stained so often and by so many substances that it was impossible to tell just what its original color had been.

Amber took it, shook it out, turned it over in her hands. She could count her fingers through the threadbare fabric and when she rubbed a fold, her skin pinked up like she’d taken a scouring pad to it.

She couldn’t help herself.

“Good enough,” she said, speaking lizardish with extreme difficulty, “for Zhuqa’s woman?”

His spines shrugged, amused. “At least I mean to dress you.”

“In crap,” she agreed, switching back to English. “And I happen to know you have plenty of good clothes, you thieving bastard.”

“My Eshiqi isn’t happy,” mused Zhuqa, leaning back to study her. After some thought, he rolled the shift back into a bundle and tossed it aside.

And then he just stood there.

It took a long time, fighting not to squirm under that stare, not to anticipate too obviously the blow that he never threw, before she suddenly got it.

And he knew she got it, because no sooner had the thought hit her brain then his eyes narrowed and his chin raised. So there was no point in faking ignorance, only the question of whether or not she’d rather go naked.

And no, she’d really rather not.

So, biting down on all the dangerous things she wanted to say, Amber knelt and smacked the back of her hand onto the floor again.

“That was cute the first time you did it,” Zhuqa remarked far above her. “Now do it right.”

She took her hand back, calmed herself with a few deep breaths, and quietly bent to lay it palm-up beside his boot.

“Very good.” Zhuqa tapped the top of her head and moved away to the cupboard. He opened a compartment above it, rummaged through its contents,
then tossed her a new bundle.

She put it on—a simple pullover in a pale beige color that hung to her knees. It smelled musty, unused, but she could already see that it was nicer than the first one.

“I’ll see if I can find better for you once the trade wagons start moving,” said Zhuqa, watching her. “But for now, you are pleased.”

It wasn’t a question as much as a warning. Amber smoothed down the wrinkled front of her new shift and nodded. The gesture couldn’t have meant much to him, but he accepted it.

“So today, you will make every effort to please me further,” he said, crossing back to open the door. “I am going to take you to the workpit, where you will learn to keep my House. How say you?”

“Yippee.”

He grunted and beckoned for her to follow him out into the hall.

She went.

The guards were positioned on the landings already, or maybe they were always there. Other men walked in the halls and passed them on the stair, more and more as they climbed toward the surface. Her clumsy estimate of their numbers kept stretching and stretching, until the word ‘dozens’ just wasn’t enough.

There were a hundred men here. There might even be two. Like roaches, the ones she saw were only indicators of the ones that scurried around in the greater darkness. They might as well be infinite.

Meoraq was coming. And for the first time, that thought brought horror, because he couldn’t possibly be prepared to find something like this, let alone fight it.

Zhuqa turned her aside while they were still two flights from the surface, leading her down a wide corridor past several sets of curious, disgusted, and fascinated eyes. Raiders were in constant movement here, hauling crates, waterskins and packs, while others just seemed to be lounging around, but all came to attention for Zhuqa and showed him their fists. He tapped a few, ignored most, and brought Amber without comment to a closed door at the far end of the hall.

“Do you know where you are?” he asked, bringing out his keys.

Startled, Amber looked back, wondering why he thought she should, and suddenly realized they were in what he’d called his slave quarters. They’d walked right past the door where Zru’itak had given birth.

“Do you know where you are?” he asked again, now with his hand on the open door and staring her down. He wasn’t smiling. He wanted her to know this door before she walked through it. He wanted her to think about where she was while she waited for him and wondered if she was ever coming back out.

Amber knew she was a bitch a lot more often than was smart, but that didn’t make her stupid. Where was she? Speaking lizardish, looking him straight in the eye, she said, “Zhuqa’s House.”

It wasn’t the response he expected (and judging from the twitching of his spines, it took him a second or two to work it out), but it was definitely the right one. He smiled and reached out to stroke the back of his hand across her brow. Meoraq’s touch. It was nauseating, but Amber would not allow herself to wipe this one away.

He opened the door on a huge room, maybe even several rooms, all connected. The stink was immediate: unwashed bodies and the green reek of compost. It was hot—she could see a huge fire burning in another room—but not stuffy. There were fans in the ceiling, big ones, locked
away behind metal bars that either drew up the heated air and carried it away or blew cooler air down at them. It gave her a hell of a jolt to see that and to realize that, just like all the other ruins she’d seen, some parts of this one were still working. That maybe Zhuqa was even fixing it up. The metal bars that kept desperate slaves from trying to crawl out through the air ducts weren’t that old.

Amber saw the fire and the fans because they were moving. The lizardladies that huddled around the walls, shelves and tables that cluttered these rooms were not. Her eye had taken them in only peripherally as lumps of laundry or stacked sacks right up until Zhuqa waved at them and they went back to work.

Now Amber flinched. Zhuqa gripped her shoulder, then patted it. “Easy, Eshiqi. Go on, then. You have work to do and so do I.”

And with that, he left her there.

Amber waited for a few seconds, but the frenetic hush of all this work made it impossible to just stand there. She began to walk around, randomly at first, glancing back at the door every few steps, and then with more of an eye for what she was seeing.

None of it was work she knew how to do. After spending the whole winter in a cave doing one menial thing after another, that surprised her. Amber could put a pretty good cure on a hide, render fat into soap, draw sinews and turn them into strong cord, and countless other useful things, but she didn’t know what half these women were doing.

Most of it was plant-related. Not cooking—that, at least, Amber could do—but other stuff. The plants in question were long, bulbous roots terminating in two wide, rubbery leaves with serrated edges as sharp as knives. Lizardladies with wrapped hands stripped these dangerous looking leaves; others split the stalks, pried them open, and scraped out the whitish meat; this was pounded into a flat, fibrous substance, which was in turn briskly combed out into fluff. Huge rough-woven bags of this fluff were positioned throughout the room, and when one got too full, someone took it into one of the adjoining chambers where more lizardladies and half a dozen pale-scaled children hip-high or smaller spun it into thick thread using nothing more than hooked sticks and spools. From there, the thread went on to be made into rope, cloth or who knew what in one of the other rooms.

It was a lot of work and should have made a lot of noise. Amber had worked line jobs of some
kind or another all her adult life, and the eerie silence with which all these people went about their various tasks put an honest-to-God chill in her spine. She found herself thinking of Zru’itak’s tongueless mouth more and more as she studied the faces around her, all of whom pointedly refused to study her in return. Only the children were at all animated—whispering and coughing quiet laughter, throwing fluff or spools at each other if they thought no one was looking, staring at Amber even as their little hands kept busy, and scuttling away if she got close enough for their courage to fail.

When Amber finally made her way back into the first room, Zhuqa was back, with a line of shivering, naked, dull-eyed lizardladies. His newest acquisitions.
Standing beside them was another raider, a big one. Easily a head taller than even Zhuqa and built as solid as a coffin, with stocky limbs that bulged with so much muscle, he surpassed mere strength and seemed grotesque. He was missing two fingers on one hand, as well as an eye and most of the knobby ridges that should be above it. Several of his spines were either broken short or missing entirely and his snout had a wedge-shaped hole through it that looked like it had been on the wrong end of an axe years ago.

Zhuqa and the stranger exchanged a few low words as they looked over the
women, then Zhuqa paused, noticing Amber’s stare. He gave the broad, scarred chest a slap and said, “This is Hruuzk, my slave-master.”

Hruuzk looked startled, then perplexed. He scanned the room as what remained of his
spines flexed. “Who are you talking to?”

“Eshiqi. Come here and give your man a greeting.”

Unsure how demonstrative he wanted her to be, she obeyed. Hruuzk grunted as he watched her ease up against Zhuqa’s side. His gaze held nothing but the purest academic interest. “I heard about that. What is it?”

“Something new.”

“Nothing new in Gann’s land,” the slave-master said. A philosopher. He bent his head in a distracted, deferential manner and held up his mutilated hand, scarred palm to heaven. When Zhuqa grunted approval, Hruuzk reached out and rubbed some of Amber’s hair between his two remaining fingers. “Can you fuck it?”

“Yes. Shift your skirts, Eshiqi.”

She looked at him, alarmed.