The Last Hour of Gann (151 page)

Amber
slowed her run to a stagger and then to a stop. The beast stayed down. It did not appear to be breathing. She stared at it for a while, still breathing hard, alert enough that she knew she was winded, not so much that she knew she was hurt, and finally took the last three steps and gave it a cautious kick.

It did not move.

“No way I killed it,” she said to herself in a remarkably calm and conversational tone.

The
kipwe did not reply. It was very dead.

Amber started to bend over for a better look, but pain washed out from her side enough to prevent that. She clapped a hand over the hurt (wet hurt, not a great indicator of things to come
) and knelt instead, prodding at the beast’s body.

She found fragments of
her spear imbedded harmlessly in its cheek, beneath the spiky tuft of its hilarious muttonchops where it had done no good at all. It took a little longer to find the kzung, buried to its hilt in the thick, prickly quills. Getting it out meant tugging, shaking, and finally planting a foot on its head and heaving back in spite of the hell in her side. The kipwe’s wound wheezed at her, blowing a foul slip of air in her face with a wet, farting sound. Swimmer’s air, they called that. She’d stabbed the kipwe through the lung.

And it had still taken it
that
long to die.

“Jesus,” said Crandall behind her.

She turned around, holding Meoraq’s sword limply in one hand, trying to think of what to do next. People saved, check. Dead kipwe, double check. Moving on.

“I’m going to need your help cutting it up,” she announced. “There’s no reason it should go to waste, you know? Oh. And I may have a few splinters.” She held a hand up and sure enough, there were half a dozen kipwe quills sticking out of her arm at various points. “So if you think you can grow up just long enough to take them out with
out masturbating all over me…”

The rest of that bitchy comment
lost itself in Crandall’s silence. He was still staring, not at the kipwe, but at her.

Amber looked down, past another half-dozen broken quills all down her side to her left hip. “Goodness, that’s a lot of blood,” she remarked, watching
it stream down over her thigh.

And then the world turned white.

* * *

She came around slowly, not to the pain, which was tremendous, but to the relatively
innocuous sound of laughter. She’d been tucked beneath a blanket, which was hot and scratchy and unbelievably heavy on her right side, where the pain lived. Her skin felt far too tight over the swollen, throbbing hell of her side, threatening to split whatever bandage had been tied over her. It hurt to breathe, it hurt not to breathe, and she was reasonably certain it would hurt to open her eyes, so she just lay there and concentrated on not embarrassing herself with a lot of loud moaning. The laughter came and went, curiously high-pitched for a camp mostly filled with men…and slightly crazed.

Actually, a lot crazed. Less laughter than full-on lunatic gibbering. She wasn’t the only one who seemed to be concerned; she could hear
Scott holding court close by in a tone of deep concern. He was using all his old familiar catch-phrases, too. Explore our options. Make decisions. Take command. The only thing he didn’t do was tell the people laughing at him to shut up and she kind of wished he would.

‘No one’s laughing, little girl,’ Bo Peep told her.

Beneath the heavy blanket and the heavier pain, Amber pulled the scattered pieces of her brain together and listened.

That sound…that high, chattering, lunatic sound.

Her eyes heaved themselves open. She tried to bolt upright and managed only a slightly deeper, choking breath. Her cry of, “Those are ghets!” came out as little more than a hoarse gasp and a rusty groan. The world went briefly grey on her and came very slowly back.

“She’s awake,” Crandall said in the distance.

A blurry shadow grew over her—Scott, looking down. “I don’t think so,” he said after a moment’s study.

Amber tried again to speak and again could only push air around.
She was beginning to think she might be seriously hurt this time.

A second blur appeared, bringing with it a cool hand that wiped the sweaty hair out of Amber’s face.
A woman’s hand, although not a soft one. Her mother’s hand, she thought, and it was her mother’s face leaning over her now, looking haggard and bitter and way too solid for a dead lady. “Amber?”

Nicci? Impossible. Nicci was half this woman’s age. But no, it was Nicci, and as soon as she realized it, much of the woman’s hard edges seemed to soften until she could see her baby sister above her instead of their mother’s ghost.

“You look like Mama,” Amber tried to say, but of course, all that made it into the world was a whispered, “…mama.”

“She’s delirious,”
Scott declared, sounding annoyed and she couldn’t really blame him. He hated it when his speeches were interrupted.

“Guys?” That was Dag, looking back over his shoulder at the leather walls that surrounded the camp, beyond which the ghet-song had suddenly degenerated into snarling and screaming.

“They’ll be back,” Scott said grimly as the sounds receded. He folded his arms. One of them was distorted, stretched long and broken at odd angles; he had Meoraq’s kzung in one hand like a scepter. “And they’re coming right in here…unless we can give them a reason not to.”

All around the camp,
Scott’s surviving Manifestors looked at Amber.

‘Oh please,’ she thought at them irritably. ‘What do you want me to do about it? I can’t even move!’

…oh.

Amber
put all her strength into sitting up and managed to lift her head a few trembling centimeters before it dropped meatily back onto her mat. Had she ever thought waking up from her snake-bite or whatever that had been was the weakest a living person could feel? At least she’d been able to hold her head up! This…This was really bad.

And Meoraq wasn’t here this time.

“You can’t, man,” said Eric, coming out of the shadows to stand between her and Scott. “Whatever you’re thinking, you just can’t.”

“
I’ll tell you what I’m thinking, Mr. Lassiter. Look at her! She’s dying! It’s a miracle she’s lasted this long, she can’t possibly live out the night! All she’s doing is stinking like blood and telling every predator in miles to come and get us! Now we can rally around her and get everyone killed or…”

“You’re not leaving her again!” Nicci leapt up to stand at Eric’s side, her hands balled into fists.

Scott stepped right up to meet her, putting his face too close to hers and cocking his head to one side. He’d picked up some dumaqi habits, it seemed, living in that cage. “I made a command decision,” he said tightly. “We couldn’t take her with us and we couldn’t wait around for her to get better or die, so yeah, I made that call. You want to stand here now and tell me I did the wrong thing, you go ahead because you are absolutely right. If I’d done what I
should
have done and she’d died like
she
should have done, we’d have had the lizard with us the whole time. How would that have changed things, huh?” Scott swung around, raising both arms over his head and shouting out to his Manifestors like they were a cheering throng that filled a stadium instead of a handful of men a few meters away. “He stayed with
her
when he should have been with
us
! Instead of blaming me for everything that went wrong, put the credit where it’s due! On Amber-fucking-Bierce!”

Murmurs.

Amber tried and again failed to make any kind of useful contribution to her own defense and the effort left her so wiped out that she had to close her eyes and rest.

“If we’d had a guide, we’d have reached the mountains long before the snow. We never would have gotten stuck up there for so long and we never would have come down so close to that city! We’d have had food the whole time! And water! And fire! No one would have gotten
hurt, no one would have gotten killed, and you, Nicci, you wouldn’t have spent so many nights with a scaly cock shoved up your trap, now would you?”

“
I wouldn’t have had yours either!” Nicci hissed. “And believe me, that’s the one I regret the most. This is not Amber’s fault! It never was and you know it, you and all your ignorant fucking sheep!”

Scott
slapped her. His Manifestors murmured some more, angry now, but they were angry at Nicci. On the ground, her eyes still too heavy to open, Amber made a loose fist and grunted.

“Come on, both of you.” And that was Eric, doing his let’s-be-reasonable thing. She couldn’t see him, but she could picture him clearly enough: both hands raised, eyes moving cautiously back and forth between the main opponents, and well out of range just in case the punches started flyin
g. “Nicci, just give us some space for a sec. And let’s think about what you’re saying here, okay? She saved our lives.”

“I had everything under control until she charged that giant porcupine and got herself torn open.
What she’s doing right now is
endangering
our lives, just like she did before. Don’t you see that? Don’t you realize? This is all about keeping us away from the skyport? If it hadn’t been for her, we’d be on the ship right now, all of us, and on our way home! The way I see it, Amber Bierce is directly responsible for the deaths of thirty-six people and that makes her an enemy of the state! Why are you defending her?”

That didn’t sound good. Amber pulled her eyelids up in time to see the blurry smudge that was
Scott raise Meoraq’s kzung—not in a menacing way, but more like a young Arthur who had just pulled it from the stone as proof of his right to rule. “What do we do with enemies?” he called to his Manifestors. “What do we do with tumors? Do we give them a comfortable place to sit and grow, to infect the rest of the body? Or do we cut them out?”

“I’ll kill you if you try it!” Nicci shouted. “Do you hear me? I’ll kill—”

Scott pointed Meoraq’s sword at her, silencing her so suddenly that Amber thought he’d stabbed her until she backed up. “I’m going to put it to a vote,” he announced, turning back to his Manifestors. “All in favor, say aye.”

A solid wall of ayes went up.

“In favor of what?” Crandall asked coolly. “If you’re so damn sure it’s the right thing to do, why don’t you want to say out loud what it is?”

“And if you’re so opposed to it, why don’t you say nay, Mr. Crandall?”
Scott countered. “Say it so we all know where you stand. Say it or shut the hell up.”

Amber sucked in a painfully deep breath and croaked, “…nay.”

One by one, they all looked at her.

Amber pressed her noodle-weak arms to the mat and forced herself up a mountainous few centimeters.
A light, chill sweat broke out all over her body, washing her briefly back into winter. She glared as best as she was able while gasping and shaking. “Nay,” she panted and for good measure, added, “Mother…fucker.”

Scott
cocked his head at her in that eerily lizardish way. “You don’t get a vote, Miss Bierce. You are not a member of this colony. Your rights as a colonist and a citizen are revoked.” He turned that same stare on Eric. “Get out of my way.”

Nicci clutched at Eric’s arm. “Don’t,” she begged.

Eric looked at her, then back at Dag and Crandall. Neither of them moved to join him. He looked at Scott again. The wind flapping lightly at the leather walls that surrounded the camp and the gentle crackling of the fire were the only sounds…until Meoraq’s, “What in Gann’s unholy name goes on here?”

People who had been sitting sprang up. People who had been standing jumped back.
Scott dropped the sword and hid his empty hands behind him, trying to look in all directions at once.

Meoraq came out from the shadowed opening between two overlapping walls
and stood over his kzung where it lay in the trampled grass. He looked at it without expression as his throat slowly lit up. He took six breaths in the absolute silence and then said, “You had my sword in your hand, S’kot. In your naked hand.”

Amber
licked her lips several times, braced herself for another deep breath, and rasped, “Meoraq, don’t.”

He pointed at her to shut her up without taking his eyes off
Scott. “Var’li S’kot,” he said, making each word distinct, “son of Var’li Reshar, you have broken the Third Law and taken up a bladed weapon. The law of my caste requires that I ask, but to say truth—” He bent down and plucked the kzung out of the grass, straightening up with a smile and a hiss. “—I don’t give a clay fuck if you pray or not.”

Amber gripped at the ground and tried to sit up
further, but her arms collapsed. She hit the mat and an elephant stomped on her stomach and she let out a scratchy scream that, weak as it was, finally got Meoraq’s full attention. He crossed the camp in just three long strides, shoving Eric and Nicci out of his way before he dropped to his knees at Amber’s side. He stabbed the kzung into the ground and put his hand roughly on her forehead, pressing her flat; the other carefully peeled back the bandage on her belly.