The Last Hour of Gann (125 page)

She turned her back on him and went back to the
lamps.

Immediately,
his hand closed on her shoulder, yanking her roughly around before shoving her hard into the wall. The baby, jolted out of sleep, began to make its high, gaspy wails. Dkorm didn’t even look at it. The color was out on his neck again and visibly pulsing. “Don’t turn your back on me, you flat-faced dip,” he spat.

All around the room, new slaves cringed back and old ones
made themselves motionless and invisible.

“You don’t show me your
back unless I’m climbing it. I don’t care who you fuck, you’re still a slave in this camp. I can tell Zhuqa a thousand lies that will have that soft hide off you in strips.” He held her gaze a moment longer, then dropped his eyes deliberately to the baby in her protective arms and looked up again. “Shut it up.”

Amber moved warily over to Xzem, never taking her eyes from Dkor
m, and passed the baby down. It refused the breast Xzem kept trying to coax on it, but did eventually exhaust itself into an unhappy sleep.

“Fucking sprats,” Dkorm muttered, turning away.
He eyed Rosek, sleeping on the floor against her mother’s thigh, but moved on and found a crate against the far wall to sit on. In the other room, one of the children whispered; Dkorm’s neck lit briefly and darkened again. “Fucking sprats,” he said again, thicker. He dropped one hand to his groin and rubbed sullenly at himself, looking at all of them with a growing lack of emotion as his neck lit up brighter and brighter.

He wasn’t going to take six breaths and calm down.

Amber found his cup and filled it. He watched her do it with ominously blank eyes as he kneaded at himself, but when she brought it to him, he took it. After a moment, he took a drink. After another moment, he leaned back into the wall and tucked the hand that had been between his legs behind his head instead. He looked Amber up and down one last time, then grunted and shut his eyes. “Get back to work, all of you. Quietly. You wake those things and I’ll crack your bones.”

There was an imm
ediate rustle of sound as the lizardladies resumed work.

Amber turned around. Xzem at once dropped her eyes. She kept her head bent as Amber went back to the worktable and
picked up her half-done lamp. Then Xzem reached out and tapped the back of her hand once on the top of Amber’s bare foot. Just once—a touch so light and swift that if Amber hadn’t seen her do it, she might not have noticed. Amber paused uncertainly, but Xzem did not look up and she was afraid of attracting Dkorm’s attention. She went back to work in silence, like all the other slaves.

8

T
he sun rose in Gedai the same as in Yroq and Meoraq was awake to see it. They had made camp atop a high, narrow ridge, which gave him an impressive view in any direction. He could have watched the sun rise if he wanted. Instead, he sat with his back to the morning and watched the light crawl over the broken walls of distant Praxas.

He had hoped for a full hour of travel before darkness shackled him. He received perhaps half of that, not at a run, but at a torturous stride that seemed to hurl him back in time to
that first day herding humans across the prairie.

The boy was not delicate. He did not run, but slipped through trees and thorn-breaks as easily as any saoq, and had a knack for finding pathways far superior to Meoraq’s own. Yet when the light was gone, the boy halted and would go no further. This was only common sense in the wildlands and Meoraq knew it. Still, he tried to coax the boy on and then order him and finally threaten.

The boy remained impervious, laughing as he invited Meoraq to beat him, “or whatever takes your pleasure, sir,” but the day was done and so was he.

So they camped. The boy started a fire and brewed nai. There was bread and cuuvash in the pack of provisions
Onahi had given them. There was no tent, but the boy was no stranger to sleeping wild. He lay down and was silent. Meoraq paced, drank hot nai, meditated, patrolled, drank cold nai, lay down, sat up, thought of Amber.

He did eventually sleep, but his sleep was thin and haunted. He woke uncounted times, only to stare in vain at the empty night, the faint coals, the boy.

A night’s broken rest only further frayed his senses. Long before dawn, he was aware of paranoia, like grains of sand, itching under his scales. He heard things out in the forest, went out to search for the source, and then heard things at his camp. Worse, he did not hear things, which unnerved him even more, as ridiculous as he knew that to be. He felt tense and frustrated and always at the knife’s edge of furious. He felt watched.

Now it was morn
ing and as God raised His lamp over the world, Meoraq could feel clarity like a cooling hand once more in his heart and mind.

He reached over and shook the boy, who rolled muttering onto his belly and glowered at him through a shield of his crossed arms.

“You never sleep,” said the boy.

Meoraq grunted and kicked dirt over the coals. “We’re moving now. Get up.”

“What did they take from you anyway?”

Meoraq caught the boy by the back of his ill-fitting tunic and hauled him to his feet. “We’re moving,” he said again. “Now.”

“The Sheulek who comes in the summer makes the governor give him anything he wants. I thought that was the whole point of being Sheulek.” The boy thought a moment, then shrugged and smiled. “That and getting dipped everywhere you go.”

“There’s a reason
you were never meant to be one.”

The boy’s smile did not diminish, but even so, it grew a thinned, painted-on appearance. “I’m sure there’s more than one.” He picked up his pack and rolled his blanket away. When he straightened up again, his smile had broadened into a disturbing grimace of good cheer. “Luckily, I have you. Let’s go.”

They went. The boy didn’t bother looking for a trail, but traveled vaguely eastward, veering toward landmarks as they came across them—this oddly shaped boulder, that great direthorn tree—and if reaching them meant wading a frigid stream or climbing a soft ravine, that was what they did. The sky took on the bruised color that came before a storm and within the hour, it had found them. The ground turned to clutching mud beneath their feet. The boy wasn’t slowed in the slightest. Meoraq considered himself an expert at wildlands travel, but it was difficult to keep pace.

And why, by Gann? Because he’d had a few nights’ bad sleep? Run all the way to Praxas without food? Had to walk now in a little hard rain? In his first striding days, he’d run three days and nights straight through on nothing but water for no better reason than to get someplace with a hot bath. And a bather.

‘I am not a young man anymore,’ he thought, and felt a pang of dismay stab all the way through him. Not for the careless youth now behind him, but for the future he could only pray he hadn’t lost. He would never be a young man again, but now, more than ever, he wanted to be an old one, in Xeqor, with his wife and children.

Lightning arced across the sky, close enough that he could smell it. Thunder came immediately after. The wind gusted, blowing stinging shards of rain directly into his eyes, so that for a moment, he seemed to be falling blindly forward.

“Hold!” ordered Meoraq, and threw down his pack. He hunkered beside it, breathing too hard, lost in thoughts of Amber, how she’d clung to him that night in the ruins…the little cries she made each time the thunder rolled.

“Are we stopping?” the boy asked, watching from a cautious distance.

“Resting.” Meoraq tipped his head back, let his mouth fill with water, and swallowed. It tasted of the storm and strange, green leaves.

“I thought you Sheulek didn’t need rest. I thought God moved you at His speed.”

“Only at His direction. Mine is the same clay as any other’s.” Meoraq cupped his hands and splashed rainwater over his face. “You don’t know much about Sheulek.”

“True enough, I suppose. The one that comes in the summer only stays a few days. He stays with the governor.” The boy moved from one tree to another, restlessly tapping at each trunk. “No one ever has a trial for him. He says Praxas is such a—”

Thunder cracked overhead, shaking the air over his scales and the bones in his breast as it rolled slowly away.

“—a peaceful place,” the boy finished, now from behind him. “Why do you keep looking up? It’s just rain.”

“I know.”

“You look nervous.”

“I’m not.”

But Amber…wherever she was…

‘Sheul, my Father, be with her tonight,’ he prayed, watching sparks sweep across the sky. ‘She is so frightened of the weath—’

He had his head back, his snout raised, his arms at rest on his knees. The boy’s looped belt dropped over his head and before Meoraq’s eyes could identify the danger, it had cinched tight.

No air. A perfect choke. He had less than a minute to break it. Meoraq’s sabks were already in his hands and stabbing backwards, but the boy skimmed around them with the same ease as he’d navigated thorns and gullies all day. Abandoning that, he slashed at the belt, but the boy wore a braid and the cheap leather was thick and stiff. He hadn’t made a single good cut before the boy bashed the rock into his hand. Once. Twice. Then the other. Disarmed.

Through a haze of smothering grey, Meoraq heaved himself backwards, groping blindly for an arm, a throat, his tunic, anything. The boy leapt out of the way, heaving with him, and then Meoraq was on his back on the ground, staring at the world through shades of grey that shook with his own pulse. In his last seconds, he tried to pull the belt out of the boy’s grip, but he had no leverage and no strength. He could feel the scratching of his scales on the taut leather vibrating through his skull, but even that felt distant, unimportant. He could see his mouth opening and closing; the world beyond was smoke and shadow and the white open eye of death.

Then, silence.

Rain fell into his open eyes. He could not blink. The boy’s face loomed over him, colorless, indistinct. Was he dead? He couldn’t move, not even when the boy shoved him over on his side. He could feel tugging, prodding—the boy, searching for treasure—and the final kick of frustration when he found none.

Stormlight flickered through the grey in a constant sheet. Meoraq could see the boy’s boots circling to stand before him. He could see the black shape of his father’s knife sprawled in the mud before his snout. He could see each dimpled knot in the cord of Amber’s hair tied at his arm where it sprawled unfelt over him. He saw these things, only these things, and he thought that must be important.

More silence. It had become heavy, a weight on his ears. He could not hear his pulse anymore, but he thought he could still feel it, in his fingers of all places. The grey was fading slowly to black. His chest hurt.

“That was so much easier than I have been led to believe,” the boy remarked. Even his voice was grey.

Meoraq’s head was lifted, the belt loosened and then yanked away. He heard it go, felt it striping his throat with pain as scales caught in that cheap braid were torn loose.

The boy had killed him. That was bad enough, but he knew the boy would never burn him. He would never be wholly dead, never see the House of his true Father, never know the eternal peace that comes after. He must lie here and die forever. Would he feel it when he rotted? Would he feel it when the ghets came? Did they even have ghets in Gedai? He took a breath. He tried to cough and couldn’t. Dead men couldn’t cough.

His father’s voice, pained:
Son, dead men don’t breathe, either
.

…
Truth.

The boy was unbuckling Meoraq’s belt, replacing his own
shoddy piece of leather.

‘I take back my thought about your perfect choke,’ he thought peevishly, and breathed again. ‘I should be unconscious now.’ He struggled to scrape up a better insult, but there was nothing in dumaqi good enough. ‘You suck,’ he thought finally, savagely. ‘Lizard.’

“How long have you been a Sheulek?” asked the boy, buckling on Meoraq’s belt. “I wish I’d asked…I’ve been doing this job for six years. Do you know what that means? Eh?” The boy’s boot nudged at Meoraq’s thigh, then drew back and slammed into his ribs. “It means they won’t let me do it much longer,” he said as Meoraq watched his fingers slowly grip the ground. “Too tall, they tell me. Too old. Soon it’ll be another boy out here, and what the hell am I supposed to do? They say Zhuqa won’t take me, not even to work their stupid crops or clear the canals. Zhuqa only takes real raiders.” Another kick, harder than the first. “I could be a raider. I killed you, didn’t I?”

In the midst of the grass before him, a single gray blade began to bleed in green. Color, coming back into the world. He breathed.

“I probably should have waited until we were closer,” the boy mused, circling again. “Not sure how I’m going to move your body sixteen spans to the camp, but I probably don’t need the whole thing. Nothing about the head proves you’re Sheulek…and the arm doesn’t prove you’re dead…” The boy hunkered down to pick up one of Meoraq’s sabks. He admired it in the stormlight, then struck it under Meoraq’s chin and rocked his head back and forth. “What would you do if you were me?”

Meoraq took the knife and slammed it into the side of the boy’s throat.