The Last Hour of Gann (126 page)

He and the boy stared at each other. He felt no need to speak. He had no questions, really.

The storm was moving on, lightning breaking into separate sparks, thunder growing distant. The rain fell even harder, but that was all right; the rain was cool on his scraped throat and bruised ribs.

Meoraq pushed himself awkwardly to his knees and then his feet, dragging the boy up with him. “The law,” he rasped, and had to stop and cough into his palm. There was no blood on his fingers and the pain of the effort was minimal. It took strength to break a man’s ribs, and everything this scrawny youth possessed had gone into the choke. Meoraq hurt, but he thought he was all right.

“The law requires me to ask,” he said again, adjusting his grip on the knife’s hilt. “Do you wish to pray?”

“This is not supposed to happen,” the boy whispered.

Meoraq pulled the knife across his throat slowly, bringing blood in a fall and not a spray, guiding the boy to his knees while he made his little struggles, and then letting him fall where Gann willed when it was over. He found his other honor-blade, cleaned them both, sheathed them. He took his belt back. He found the pitted toy of a knife stowed away in the dead boy’s boot and broke it. He stood and stared at the body until the rain had washed the blood away.

Sixteen spans. He didn’t think the boy had been lying about that. They had been traveling east, and he didn’t think the boy had been leading him false either. But crop? Canals? That was not a raider’s camp. That was a settlement, one that could not possibly have gone unnoticed for as many years as the boy claimed to be visiting it.

The sky flashed; a final stroke of lightning, a final snap and growl of thunder. In the back of his mind, Meoraq heard the phantom crash of shattered glass and felt Amber slamming up against his
back as she’d done that long-ago night in the ruins.

Ruins
. For as long as Sheul had forbidden his children to enter the ruins, those who had gone to Gann had nested in them. Yes, they might hide their crop in the roofless husks where the Ancients had made their homes and yes, they might even have canals worth restoring, but so what? Sixteen spans, generally eastward, look for ruins? Was that hope? There were ruins everywhere!

But ruins stand, he thought suddenly. After so many days, he would never catch
a moving pack, but ruins were a pin to hold his Amber in place. He could have her back.

If he could find her.

Meoraq looked wearily out across the world, his eyes sweeping dully across the whole of the horizon and up, up into heaven. The rain poured down his face and across his aching throat. “Mine is the same clay as any other’s,” he said. “I do not move at Your speed, Father, but at Your direction. I cry out to You from the darkness. I cry, Father. Please. I cry. Help me.”

The wind changed, just a little. He turned his face to keep the rain in his eyes. To the east.

He started walking.

* * *

Amber’s first full day as a slave passed because even the worst days do, hour by uncounted hour, undisturbed by rescue. There was no food in the workpit, only a barrel of stale water under a leaking faucet that served dually as drinking and wash-water. At some point, Hruuzk appeared and took the new slaves away. Dkorm left with Xzem and the babies soon afterwards. The work changed from doing things to cleaning up, so Amber rallied what was left her of her strength and cleaned alongside them, although she let them do the more vigorous sweeping and scrubbing while she put things away. After another stretch of time, Hruuzk returned and called the children to him in a noisy flock. He hunkered down to talk to them, tapping at this or that one to keep their attention, before he sent them out—chattering children in front, silent slave-women behind.

“Finish up,” he called to her, pointing at the small lump of clay left on the table. “No sense running that all the way down when you can put another three lamps on the shelf and be done. Do it well, but do it quick.” He pulled a piece of what sure appeared to be her last surviving Manifestor’s shirt and used it to wipe out the socket of his missing eye. “Been a long day and I want a piss and a poke before it’s over.”

Amber rolled out coils of clay and made the last lamps with hands that ached like rotten teeth and barbed wire where her spine used to be. She found herself wishing dully that Zhuqa would hurry up and get here. All he’d want from her was sex and she could do that lying down.

When she finished and turned around, there was Zhuqa in the doorway with Hruuzk, as if she’d summoned him with the thought. She was not glad to see him, but she was relieved and that was bad enough. She started toward him.

Hruuzk stopped her with an upraised hand and pointed back at the table. “I said, finish. Wipe it down.”

Amber looked at the slicks of wet and dried clay she’d been pressing into the rough planks all day, knowing there’d be no wiping that, it would have to be scrubbed. With her shoulders and her back. With her damned, aching hands.

She glanced at Zhuqa.

His spines came all the way forward; Hruuzk’s slapped flat. In two long strides, Zhuqa’s hulking slave-master was across the room with his huge hand on the back of Amber’s neck, shoving her flat against the table. He yanked her shift up, exposing her all the way to the back of her head. The sound of his belt coming off lit up Amber’s tired brain in every possible shade of panic, but before her fear had fully coalesced, it was dissipated with a crack like gunshot as he brought the belt down on her bare back.

She cawed, more from shock than pain, but the pain came with the second blow and then she was screaming. Amber had been slapped, shoved, punched, and hit with a car, but she had never been beaten like this. It wasn’t even like he was hitting her, but more like he was cutting belt-sized strips into her flesh and ripping them away. Three, four, five, and after that, she could not count, could only kick and slap in futility against the table as the world lit up red and black with every swing of Hruuzk’s arm.

Then he let go of her and she fell to the ground in a scrambling, sobbing heap. He picked her up by the hair, shook her until she found her feet, then smacked her on the underside of her chin with the folded loop of his belt to make her look at him. His neck was black. His eye was calm and alert. “In this room,” said Hruuzk, not unkindly, “I am master. And no matter how badly you think you have it, I can always make things worse.”

Amber nodded, trembling and slapping at the tears on her face. Her back was burning, as if she’d pressed it up against a hot furnace and just held it there. Every movement, even breathing, pulled the pain into new dimensions and blew it up hotter and hotter.

Hruuzk released his hold on her hair and patted her on the head. “Good girl. Go on then.”

She staggered away from him into the other room and found a shallow basin. She had to lean over the barrel to fill it with water. She had to reach up to get a rag. Her fumbling hand dropped the coarse brush and she had to bend all the way down to pick it up. She poured out the water to soften the dried clay and scrubbed, screaming behind her clamped jaws as the coarse fabric of her shift scratched at her back. Hruuzk stood behind her the whole time with his belt looped comfortably around his fist; she made sure she got every trace of clay.

By the time she finished, her back felt as though it had been whipped with a leather belt, instead of flayed open and set on fire. She was all right. There were still tears leaking out of her eyes, like the hurt little cries leaking out of her throat, but her head was working again and she thought she was all right.

Hruuzk grunted when she limped past him for the second time to give the table a last rinse and finally put his belt back on. “You’d be best served to give her over to me for proper training if you really want to keep her. She’s just clever enough to give you real trouble.”

“Is that what I need to do, Eshiqi?” Zhuqa inquired.

“No,” she said, tried to say, but there were so many variations of that word and she couldn’t be sure which she’d used. To make it clearer, she limped over to him and knelt to put her hand beside his boot.

Hruuzk uttered a low, whistling grunt through the crack in his snout. “I want one,” he muttered, eyeing her.

Zhuqa’s hand came down to rest on her bent head. “I have men out looking for more of them, now that I’ve tendered up apologies to Ghelip and can trust him not to hunt us down.”

“You can, eh?”

Amber’s arms began to shake, but Zhuqa hadn’t told her to stand or given her a tap or anything. She crouched lower, trying to take the strain off her shoulders only to put it on her knees, and all the while, her back was screaming. How long did he expect her to kneel here?

“Salahkthu’s enthusiasm aside,” Hruuzk was saying, “those three fools may not have been a raiding party, but it’s my belief they
were
scouts. I think Ghelip spied you on your way to Praxas and sent his men slinking in to see how weakened we might be by your absence.”

“I think you’re right,” Zhuqa said mildly.

“Do you? Then you’ve done Salahkthu a sorry turn, haven’t you?”

“Sheul instructs with a burning hand, they say, but there is no greater honor than to be the instrument of His teachings,” Zhuqa replied. “Today, Salahkthu teaches Ghelip the quality of my mercy and I am grateful to him for his service. If he had a son, I would honor him in his father’s memory.” He shrugged his spines, adding, “He doesn’t, so you can have his dips and whatever else he left behind.”

Hruuzk took the square key Zhuqa passed over with an expression of lizardish amusement. “Are you giving me gifts or ordering me to clean out his room?”

“The brightest light casts a shadow.” Zhuqa finally reached down and tapped Amber’s head, giving her permission to struggle to her feet. “God and Gann, Hruuzk. They come together out here. Hold, Eshiqi. Turn around and bend over.”

She obeyed, biting on a groan as she braced herself on her thighs and tried to hold still. Zhuqa held her shift up. The air was cool on her burning back for a moment before his hand came down to rake dull coals into fresh flame in one light caress. She managed not to cry out, but she knew she flinched and both of them laughed at her for it.

“I wasn’t half-swinging,” she heard Hruuzk say.

“I know. Your Sheulek has been too tender with you,” Zhuqa told her, letting the shift drop over her again. “There are children in this camp no higher than your hip who would have been embarrassed to make half the noise you made for that little whipping.”

Damn him, she blushed.

He touched her cheek curiously, then pinched her chin and put his face close to hers. He was still smiling, but now his humor had teeth. “You looked to me for help. You looked to your man—” He gave her a shake to make her meet his eyes again after she tried to drop them. “—to take you away from the workpit and let you rest. Yes, you did.”

“I was tired.”

He acknowledged her human words with a grunt as he nuzzled under her jaw, scraping the tip of his snout lightly up and down along the full length of her throat before nipping at her shoulder. “If Hruuzk had not,” he murmured, licking at her scars, “I would have whipped you for that devious little trick myself. And that would be a terrible hardship for us both to endure. In the future, you will do the work you are given and do it gladly, Eshiqi.”

She raised her fist in the kind of salute she had seen the other raiders show him.

“Apologize to Master Hruuzk for disrupting his workpit.”

Wanting nothing more than to just get out of here, Amber turned obediently
to Hruuzk and said, “Sorry.”

“You can do better than that,” Zhuqa said.

“Sorry I made you whip the shit out of me for looking sideways at Zhuqa when I should have been scrubbing your table, you giant whore-mongering dick,” she amended.

Hruuzk smiled at her. “I don’t know the words in your mouth,” he told her gently, “but I know the look in your eye. And if you were under my hand tonight, I’d whip you bloody from your neck to your knees.”

“Once more,” said Zhuqa.

She looked at him, then at Hruuzk. She couldn’t begin to perform the necessary vocal aerobics to apologize in dumaqi. What the hell did they want from her? “I’m sorry,” she said, feeling frustration in her stomach almost as hot as the throb and sting in her back. “Whatever you want me to say, I’ll say it. Just let me get out of here, for God’s sake. I’m sorry. I don’t care anymore. I’m sorry. Let me
go
!”

Her voice cracked.

Hruuzk and Zhuqa exchanged a maddeningly knowing glance.

“Very good,
” Zhuqa said. He tapped her shoulder with two knuckles and turned around. “Come, Eshiqi. I’ll take you home.”

They walked back to his room together. He kept silent, acknowledging neither her presence at his side nor the salutes of the many guards they passed in their descent through the ruins. When he unlocked his door, she saw a lamp already burning on the table, which had acquired a plain metal cup and, more importantly, a wide-mouthed clay bowl generously heaped with roasted meat and charred
roots.

The smell of the food struck her almost at the same instant as the
sight of it. Her mouth flooded even as her back continued to throb and sting. She knew better than to take even one step toward it, but could not help staring.