The Last Hour of Gann (176 page)

He was not alone, although he appeared to be. He could feel eyes on him…but that wasn’t right. What he felt was not a sense of being watched as much as companionship. He found himself looking around quite often, trying to see whoever it was with him, but although the rooftop of the city burned with hundreds of fires, he saw no one. The world of the dead, it seemed, was as empty as the world of the living.

Perhaps this was Hell, he thought. And it was not the endless walk across the grey wastes of Gann after all, but only this glimpse of what might have been paradise, and himself, alone.

No sooner had this bleak thought occurred than it was disproven.

Rasozul appeared on the bench beside him—a much younger man than Meoraq had known, but it
was
Rasozul and not just a familiar face for someone else, some Other, to wear.

Meoraq leaned sidelong into him at once, not like a grown man at all, but like a boy. His chest ached, thick with unhappiness, but he could not cry here. It was impossible to cry here. Because he was dead.

His father did not ask questions. Explanations were unnecessary. Understanding moved between them, unspoken, more complete than anything words could accomplish anyway. His father knew all about Amber, the way he heard and accepted Meoraq’s apology for all the years of thoughtless disdain he’d shown Yecidi, who had always loved him anyway.

“What happens now?” Meoraq asked at last, because that was the only thing unclear to him. It felt like forever in every second. Amber might have been alone out in the world for years already.

“I can’t answer that, son.”

“You mean you don’t know?”

Rasozul smiled and slipped his arm around him like he’d done it all his life and not for the first time. “I mean I can’t answer for you. If you wanted to know, you’d already be moving on.”

“Moving…? Isn’t this it?”

“Not quite.”

“I don’t understand,” said Meoraq.

Rasozul acknowledged this with a smile, but made no attempt to explain.

“There’s either more or there isn’t! How can this be ‘not quite’ all there is?”

“It would depend.”

“On what?” Meoraq demanded, as frustrated as he could bring himself to be in this perfect place.

But Rasozul’s smile was just the same. “On where it is you think we are now,” he said patiently. “And why you need to be there.”

Meoraq looked around at the rooftop, the stars, the empty wilds beyond Xeqor’s walls. “Am I making this up?” he asked uncertainly.

“Not exactly.”

“Are there…Halls? Is there…” Meoraq clapped a hand to his eyes, but there was no way to hide shame anymore. He wished there was, and that was shameful too. “Is there a God?” he whispered brokenly. “Are there Halls where He resides? I’m not asking for welcome, I just need to know!”

“Ah, my son…” Rasozul pulled Meoraq against his broad, unscarred chest and rubbed his back. “Why would you not be welcome?”

And he couldn’t cry in this place, not with these eyes, but there could still be pain and it came splintering out of him: years of murder, of death within the arena and without, from the very first—that brunt in Tilev and the feel of his bones breaking—to the last raider in the ruins; every theft taken as a Sheulek’s due from men who did not dare to refuse him; every woman
bent and used and mostly forgotten, and like the murders he had done, they were not uncounted anymore, not here. He saw them all, each one a stone in his heart until the weight was more than he could carry and he covered his face again and cried out, “
Father, I have done such terrible things
!”

Rasozul held him, rocked him. “No one is beyond forgiveness.”

“Whose forgiveness?” Meoraq asked, even as he pressed his eyes tighter into his shielding hands. “Is there a God? Does He know me?”

“I can’t answer, son.”

“Why not?”

Rasozul’s hand rubbed gently up and down over his bent back. “Because you have to ask. Ah, boy, look up. Look around you. Can’t you see?”

Meoraq slowly lowered his hands and raised his eyes. He saw the stars, shining out even brighter and more numerous than before. Their beauty had a sound, like a memory of music he could no longer hear with his ears but could still, however faintly, recall.

Meoraq looked away, at the braziers glittering over the rooftop of Xeqor. “It is nice,” he mumbled, rubbing at his snout.

Rasozul sighed. “It is,” he agreed.

They sat.

“How long do I have to wait here?” Meoraq asked.

“I can’t answer that, son.” Rasozul bent his neck and rubbed at his own snout. Patience colored all his thoughts and feelings. “We’ll move on when you’re ready.”

“Where are we going?” Meoraq looked out into the darkened wilds beyond Xeqor’s walls and, for a moment, thought he caught the suggestion of mountains to the east, the ghost-glow of golden light filling the barren washes between them, but then it was only blackness. “Is it far?” he asked uncertainly. He didn’t want to go any further from Amber than he had to.

Rasozul sighed again and patted Meoraq’s knee. “Only as far as you make it, son.” 

“Do I have to go right now?” Meoraq asked. “Can’t I wait for her? I want to be here when she comes. She’ll be frightened.”

The stars began to wink out, one by one. The breeze, so sweet and soft all this time, gusted suddenly. His chest cramped. Oddly, pain was something he could feel in death.

“What—” Meoraq bent, one hand scratching over his chest, dumbly seeking some physical cause for this sudden assault. “What’s happening?”

“Just look at me.” Rasozul cupped Meoraq’s face between his hands and leaned close. “Son, look at me. You’re all right.”

“Is this a punishment? I’m not leaving her!” he declared, shaking off his father’s touch to shout into the darkening sky. “You can take me this far, but no further! Do you hear me? I…am not going…anywhere!”

Pain slammed like a hammer right into his heart, knocking whatever air filled his dead lungs out of this body. Meoraq fell back into Rasozul’s gentle hands and writhed there as that hammer struck and struck and struck.

“Oh, my son,” Rasozul said somewhere above him. He sounded as if he might be smiling, in a weary and resigned sort of way. “You don’t have to fight.”

Meoraq roared, kicking and slapping at the wind as it gusted, battering its way inside him. “No!” he spat, twisting his head violently back and forth until the wind went away. “Not! Leaving!”

“Meoraq.”

It was a woman’s voice, a woman’s hands that brushed along the sides of his face, cupping him and making him quiet as the hammer rose and fell, rose and fell. He opened his eyes and saw his mother, fresh as on her wedding day, bending over him with loving exasperation shining down out of her eyes. Her eyes were golden brown and warm as tea; he’d forgotten.

The wind slackened. A few stars flickered and grew. In the east, the mountains he thought he saw flickered as well; Rasozul glanced that way and then at Yecidi.

“I know,” she said, as if he had spoken. Perhaps he had, in that way of silent understanding which Meoraq had so briefly shared and which the pain had utterly taken from him. “But he’s not ready. And he doesn’t have to be. Meoraq,” she said again, bending even lower to touch her brow to his. “Trust me. Do you trust me? I know you are very tired, but you must trust me.”

He groped for her hand and found it, weakly squeezing, trying to fill that touch with all the years’ worth of love he’d denied her for all his arrogant, stupid reasons, but he could feel her withdrawing from him. He could still see her and she was still smiling, but she was holding herself separate from him and she was doing it deliberately. It hurt and as he withdrew himself in confusion, that hammer suddenly smashed into him again.

“Breathe,” his mother said, stroking his face. “Don’t fight. Trust me, Meoraq, and relax.”

He tried, but at the slightest loosening of his will, the pain took his whole body, burrowing into his throat like a living thing and swelling through his chest.

“Breathe it in,” his mother said, and although she was still holding him, he could scarcely see her. The stars were going out in sheets now, all the world filling up with black, and ah, he hurt, he hurt, there was nothing left to feel but hurt.

“We’ll wait for you,” his father said. “Remember that and let go.”

Let go. He’d said that to Amber once, in the ruins the night of the storm, an
d although he couldn’t bring that night fully into focus through this terrible pain, he thought she’d done it. Because she’d trusted him to hold her. Meoraq battled his eyes open, but there was nothing of his mother left but her hands like shadows to either side of his face, nothing of his father but a voice beneath the killing wind telling him to breathe. The hammer struck; Meoraq opened his mouth to scream and the pain clawed at once down his throat.

He breathed it in.

* * *

Meoraq was awake long before he was able to do anything about it. Awareness was a live coal in his
chest, a thick pool of pain much wider than the dimensions of his body. His arms and legs, of no significance, floated elsewhere. He drowsed in the thoughtless black, listening to low speech and shuffling bodies without the ability to make words of what he heard. And that was fine.

G
radually, the pain grew sharper and as it sharpened, it shrank. With the shrinking came a better sense of the rest of his clay until, all at once, he had an arm with a hand attached at the end of it, and within that hand, another hand. A soft hand. With many slender fingers.

He knew it was Amber before he knew he was Meoraq. Smiling, he squeezed the hand that held him. She squeezed back.

“Where is the knife of my fathers?” he asked. His voice was a whisper, a ghost in his throat.

She lifted his hand and laid it over the smooth bone hilt.

He smiled in the darkness. “Draw it with me, wife.”

Someone coughed.
Not Amber. Someone else.

Meoraq opened his eyes. He lay in a sickbed—a raised mat, open all around to allow ease of tending—and
a rather large blurry man stood at the foot of it with a scattering of other blurs around him. People. Damn it. “Leave us,” said Meoraq.

“That’s not His fire in your belly, son,” said
a familiar voice, not moving. “That’s wetlung.”

Meoraq saw no reason it couldn’t be both, but the act of opening his eyes had forced daylight into the whole of his body. Now he could see that the sickbed in which he lay was in a room, which was in a House, which was in the city of Chalh. He started to sit up, but his
brain threatened to leave if he insisted, so he settled back into the bedding under Amber’s guiding hands. “It is Uyane before me,” he said, fitting a name to the man just now coming into focus at the heel of his sickbed. “Lord of his House under my descent and steward of his bloodline in Chalh.”

“Keeper of the armory keys, warden over the Holy
Fire of Gedai, guardian of the Oracle’s Fourth Order, and too damned old to care,” Uyane agreed. “But it’s just Jazuun when I stand with kin. Or are you holding my House in your shadow?”

“Not from your sickroom, I’m not.” He looked around again. “How did I get here? Wait…”

Meoraq thought.

He remembered.

He looked up at his wife. “You saved my life.”             

One corner of her mouth ticced up in her crooked, human smile. “Feels awful, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.” He thought some more—it was disturbingly difficult, a physical strain—and looked at Lord Uyane…Jazuun. “You found us? How?”

“Tripped over you on my way to
Xi’Matezh.”

“What were you doing there?”

Jazuun snorted and shrugged his spines. “Said I went there for Fifth Light, didn’t I? All those fucking bells…I think a better question is, what were
you
doing there? It’s been a brace and more! I thought you’d gone home.”

“We were delayed.” Meoraq tried again to sit up and again abandoned the effort. He put a hand on his
chest, feeling at the pains within as if it could tell him something. “I don’t remember this,” he muttered and looked up. “How do the surgeons say?”

“They
say rest for half a brace or so and if Sheul shows you favor, you’ll be whole as you ever were. You’ve lost some juice and cracked some bones, but none of that was too serious apart from the strain it put on you. It was the wetlung that nearly killed you, boy, so you’re to be resting on your feet as much as possible.” 

“And you?” Meoraq tried to raise the hand that did not grip Amber’s to touch her heart, but his clay was heavy. He could manage only to rest his palm on her belly, which he supposed was just as appropriate. “Were you injured?”

“No, for a change. I’m fine. Or…we’re fine, I guess.” She laughed a little. Her laughter, even self-conscious as it was, was beautiful. “I’m still getting used to that.”

“Then all is well.” Meoraq closed his eyes to think some more. The darkness helped. “Are they feeding you?” he mumbled. It seemed very important in that moment.