The Last Hour of Gann (162 page)

Meoraq halted. He turned, his head cocked, and thrust his snout into the human’s flat face. “You,” he hissed, raking his gaze across the rest of them as well. “All of you. You wait here. This place is sacred.”

“Oh what the hell, man!” Crandall looked back at his people, then at Meoraq, and finally at Amber. “What, we’re not good enough to see God?
We’ve come just as fucking far, haven’t we? Maybe I got some questions too!”

“Stay here,” Meoraq said again and snorted, blowing back the dirty hair from Crandall’s brow. “Look for your abbot’s ship.
Wife, come.”

Crandall faced him down for a second or two, but did turn away in the end, pucker-faced and full of color. “Fucki
ng lizard’s pet. Come on, guys. I ain’t standing out in the wind.”

Amber ha
d a special look for him when Meoraq turned back to her, but he didn’t care. He went on ahead to open the outer doors of Xi’Matezh. The hinges were stiff, but they opened, blowing the dank, waxy-scented breath of the temple back at him.

The doors were too heavy to hold indefinitely. Meoraq gave his wife a not-so-subtle nudge with the toe of his boot and let go of them. They immediately began to swing shut, ponderous as doors in
a dream, and closed with no more than a muffled whump, trapping them in black.

Meoraq took his pack off and found his lamp and strikers. He waited until his hands steadied before he made a light, and it was all there, just as he’d imagined: a thousand half-burnt candles like a second wall all around him, melted together, stacked one atop the other, like a city made of wax; the Prophet’s mark painted on the wall, renewed by countless pilgrims over the ye
ars; the building, not ruined but maintained, a relic outside of time, and the doors, marked with the names of those who had passed through. Meoraq raised the lamp and approached, his hand skimming the air just over the doors until he found one name he knew: Tsazr Dyuun.

“Your teacher?” Amber asked, watching him.

He grunted, his eyes tracing each line of each letter. They were not even, which surprised him some. He remembered Master Tsazr as such a meticulous man, but then making letters was a very different thing from teaching boys to beat one another senseless. Still…

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

He looked at her, his spines flexing forward. In the close air of this place, he could actually hear them flexing, which was so unnerving that he reached up to rub at them. “Why would you say that? I’ve walked across the world, woman!”

She averted her eyes, rolling her shoulders as she hugged herself. “This doesn’t look like much of a temple, is all. It kind of
looks like a bunker.”

“Whatever it may have been before the Fall, it became a temple when God entered.” His eye wandered back to Master Tsazr’s name on the wall. “All things change when He enters, Soft-Skin.”

“I don’t want you to be disappointed.”

“How can I be? Look there.” He nudged at her arm and pointed to the wall. “The mark of the Prophet. Prophet Lashraq made that mark.”

Amber studied it with a singularly dubious expression. “It looks awfully fresh.”

“It’s been repainted, I’m sure, but he made it first. He was here, Soft-Skin. Here, where I stand.”
He dropped his arm and turned to her, holding his lamp before him like a candle-ward. The flame underlit her odd face in unflattering ways; he leaned close and nuzzled at her chin. “Will you stand with me, wife? One more hour?”

“Meoraq…what if—
”

He pushed his mouthparts against hers and rubbed them lightly together until she pushed him away, laughing. “Will you stand with me?” he asked again.

“I think my lips are bleeding.”

“Will you?”

“Oh for Christ’s sake, I have to say it?” She sighed, wiped her mouth, then suddenly raised both arms and dropped them loudly to her side. “I’m with you,” she said. “I’m always with you. So…open up that door, Meoraq. Let’s do this.”

He smiled, nuzzling
her one more time, and put his palm to the lock-plate.

It warmed, clicked twice
and began to hum. Lights came slowly to life all around the door, soft white and palest blue. Another click, and then the voice, echoing off the rounded shell of the dome so that it seemed to be speaking directly in Meoraq’s head: “Warning. This is a secure area. All access restricted. Warning. Lethal force authorized.”

“Nuu Suka
ga.”

The humming changed pitch. Small vents opened to either side of the door. “
Defense imminent. Present mnabed. This is your final warning.”

Amber took a large step back, catching at his arm, but Meoraq was not moved. “Nuu Sukaga,” he said again.

The vents closed. The door opened.

Deep in the darkened room beyond, Sheul the All-Father stood
, the sword of war sheathed and the light of wisdom burning in His hand.

9

A
mber never doubted for a moment that she would see a big, empty room and that was just what she saw. But she knew what Meoraq was expecting too, and so she knew what was going to happen next. And oh God, it hurt to see it.

“Father,” he said, and
with a flicker and a whine, lights all around the room came wearily to life. As they strengthened, the huge monitor on the far wall lost some of its mirror-like shine, but still Meoraq took two steps toward it before he realized what it was. He stopped, blinking rapidly as he stared first at his reflection and then at hers and then at the rest of the room. There really wasn’t much to see. It was nothing but a reception area, reduced by military design to six angled walls, several banks of computer consoles, one horseshoe-shaped desk with a single chair aimed at the door they’d come in through, two other doors, and of course, the enormous display monitor behind the desk in which the yellow light of Meoraq’s lamp still sparked a ghost-like echo.

He took it all in, plainly puzzled but showing no doubt, no real concern. When Amber hesitated a touch on his arm, he gave her an inquiring glance, but shrugged off her silent sympathy and instead marched over to one of the other doors and nudged the lockplate. It blatted at him but didn’
t open. “Nuu Sukaga,” he said, and the door behind Amber hissed shut.

“Locks engaged. Timeout to systems restart. Doors will open in ten and ninety. Present mnabed to override.” The lockplates lit up helpfully, but no one had anything to offer any of them.

Meoraq backed away from the door, looking frustrated but not alarmed, not really. He turned around again, all the way in a circle, as if checking to make sure God hadn’t materialized behind him while he was distracted by the door. He ended up facing Amber and the two of them just looked at each other for a while.

“I don’t understand,” he said
.

“I know.”

“Everyone hears Him!” he insisted, just as if she’d argued. “Everyone! He has to be here! It has to be…some kind of test!” He swung away, holding up his lamp and searching each shadowed, empty corner. “Father?”

The lights pulsed as if in answer and grew that much stronger. The big monitor flickered. Smaller ones evenly spaced around the otherwise featureless walls snapped on, one after the other, showing first a clean black screen and slowly spilling out lines of silent code. Somewhere, speakers thumped on at an ear-splitting level and hummed their way down to something subaudible. “
Operational drive activated,” said a lizardish voice. “Systems override. Searching for file. Please wait.”

“There’s no one here,
” she said softly.

“He’s here! He has to be here! Maybe…” He turned back, still not panicked, still with that a
wful bafflement. “Will you pray with me? Maybe we have to pray.”

The big monitor flickered again and pulled up a very obvious load-bar. As it crept
toward completion, that cool, androgynous voice came back with, “File recovery in process. Please wait.”

“I’ll pray with you,” said Amber
. “Tell me how.”

But he didn’t, not right away. He just looked at her, standing alone in the center of that empty room with the big screen firing up behind him. The lamp in his hand trembled. He looked at her. He did not speak.

Amber gently took the lamp and set it down on the edge of the console nearest to her. He let it go, his eyes fixed to the little flame, but otherwise, he didn’t move, not even when she came back and tried to put her arms around him.

“He didn’t lie to me.”

“Who?”

“Master Tsazr.” Meoraq pulled out of her reach and paced back to the door, pushing at the lockplate twice before going on to the next door. “I saw him. I saw his face! He heard God’s voice! That is truth! It…” His long stride slowed. He looked at her again, lost between one door and the next. “It’s me.”

“No.”

Meoraq’s spines lowered until they were shivering close against his skull, but his back stayed straight and his shoulders squared. His eyes drifted from one computer to another, beginning and ending with the big screen and the nearly-there load-bar. “He doesn’t want to talk to me,” he said, and staggered without ever taking a step.

“Meoraq, don’t. Please, don’t.” She caught his face, made him look at her, but it was a long time before he saw her. “It’s not you, I swear it’s not.” And wildly, because anything was better than this…this awful dead confusion in his eyes, she said, “Maybe it’s me, okay? Maybe women aren’t supposed to come here. You did everything right, Meoraq, you know you did.”

His brows furrowed, the knobby ridges cutting shadows down his lizardish cheeks.
“I don’t…know what I did wrong…”

“Recovery complete,” said the voice. The monitor went black and then came to sudden life. It showed a room—this room, she realized. The camera
was aimed down at the desk, where a lizardman in a grey and black uniform crouched. He wasn’t sitting, wasn’t standing. There was a chair, but he wasn’t using it. He was just…hunched there, holding onto the desk like it was keeping him on the ground. There was no sound, but lights were going wild all around him in that/this room, making madhouse colors dance across his scales. His mouth was open; his eyes were hell. Slowly, his head turned until he was staring directly at the camera, directly at them.

Meoraq’s hand twitched
toward the hilt of his kzung, but he stood his ground. “This is a recording!” he said, and turned in a sudden, curt circle, shouting, “I know the difference! This is just an image! This is not Sheul!”

The picture on the monitor died
.

Meoraq glared at it, his mouth flared open, hissing through his teeth.
“I am not deceived! I am Uyane Meoraq, a Sword and a true son of—”

The picture came back. The same room. The same man. He was sitting now, his eyes staring and glazed.
“I want to say that I didn’t know,” he said, and it was the voice that did it. Recognition like a hammer slammed down into Amber’s brain and she suddenly knew him, knew this room, knew that voice. The kiosk in the ruins; Scott and Nicci and everyone standing around to listen while the man in the recording—this man—told them to come to Matezh, that they had to come together, that there was still hope.

Now that
man clapped a hand to his brows and clenched it there, shaking his head over and over before suddenly slapping at the desk. “How can I say that?” he cried. “How can any of us say that? After we spent years in development to make sure we got it as virulent and as violent as the science allowed, how can anyone pretend they didn’t know it would end the world?”

Something in the recording sounded a tone. The man looked around at the wall behind him as one of the green lights turned yellow. “
Ghedov is gone,” he said, running out to tap at that computer. “I guess Daophith and Jezaana will be next. Saiakr is still sending me the numbers—that’s Technician Raaq Saiakr at Culvsh—and everything is working just the way we planned. I can’t…” He trailed off, staring at the screens, then shook his head again. “I can’t,” he said simply, and switched the recording off.

Amber looked at Meoraq, but he was still frowning at the screen.
His spines were flat, but in spite of his obvious confusion and frustration, his neck was still dark.

The image flickered and came back. The same man at the same computer leaned back in the same chair. He was barefooted and naked to the waist, but was still wearing his uniform pants. Behind him, the wall of lights was entirely yellow.

“It’s all over,” he said. “So I guess I should talk about it. For posterity.” He snorted without much humor and bent out of frame, coming back with a bottle. He drank, then rubbed his brows and put the bottle on the desk next to his computer. “For all the people,” he said dryly, “who are going to see this and want to know what happened. So. What happened is, making war makes money. I wish we had a better reason. I wish we had enemies at least, a war that we were making the stuff for…but it was just something we were making. Just our job.”

He drank again, leaning back to put his feet up on the side of the desk, one leg crossed over the other. He looked at the camera, then at the bottle, then snorted again. “Water,” he said. “Enhanced, though. Something else we were working on. Everything the body needs in one bottle. We were all the way into development when that contract was canceled—feeding our soldiers just isn’t as profitable as killing them—so there’s a whole storage cell full of the stuff down below. It’s not bad. Tastes a little like ykara.” He drank some more, then set the bottle aside.