The Last Hour of Gann (59 page)

“Yeah.”
Without the business of sealing her boots to occupy herself, Amber returned her attention to the stew. It was bubbling constantly at the sides now, but it would need an hour at least before it stopped looking like chopped offal in water and became food instead, and it did not require constant tending in the meantime.

“For coin?”
Meoraq pressed.

“Yeah.”

“Someone gave her coin just to carry food?”

“Not a lot, but yeah.”

Meoraq leaned back to think about that. When he visited a public kitchen, which was often, the cook passed him his meals directly. He could not comprehend why anyone would pay a woman just to touch it for him, and he could tell by the small smile on Amber’s pliant face that his confusion was very evident.

“
And I built machines,” she reminded him. Her smile faded. “Do you have to kill me now?”

He thought about it, concerned, but ultimately determined that he did not. “The
Word forbids us to master or seek to remake the machines of the Ancients. Your machines were those of humans and not the Ancients. You offend none of His laws. Besides, you are here now.”

“Yeah.” She raised her head, searching the empty plains that surrounded them
. “My machine-making days are definitely over.”

“But you must not seek to master the machines you may encounter here or you will be subject to my judgment.”

She stirred the stew and didn’t look at him. “I’ll try to control myself. Making you kill me after you’ve gone through all the trouble of teaching me to light a fire would be pretty ungrateful.”

“It hasn’t been s
o much trouble,” he said, showing her a careless flick of his spines to hide his irritation. He picked up the nearest of her boots to prove it, inspecting the seal and grunting his approval. “You learn very quickly.” And before he knew it, certainly without planning, he said, “I like teaching you.”

“The hell you say.
You can barely stand to look at me.”

“I know.” He
shook his head with disgust and stood. “Come, human. Let’s go have a look at this land while your boots dry.”

“What, in my bare feet
?”

“
Don’t whine at me. We won’t go far and you won’t be walking much once we’re out in the open,” he added with a certain evil humor. “You’ll be crawling.”

She looked
down at herself, at her mostly clean clothes and fresh-washed skin. “Great. You’re sure I don’t need to stay here and cook?”

Meoraq glanced over to the far fire where
the skewers of saoq roasted, the first of which were already brown and spitting merrily. The scent of food had drawn a handful of humans from their nests. He raised his arm and when one of them raised an arm back at him, he beckoned it over. “Tend to those,” he ordered, pointing at the meat. “How do you mark me?”

The human gave Amber an uncomfortable glance. “Where are you going?”

“With him, apparently.”

“
For how long?”

“I don’t know.”

The human’s eyes narrowed, which gave it a distinctly suspicious look. “Why?”

Amber’s brows puckered, first in confusion, then in irritation. “I’m going hunting! Why the hell do you think?”

Meoraq raised his hand to catch the other human’s attention, then pointed down to his stewing pouch. “Keep it hot,” he ordered. “And don’t put it over the fire! I only have one water-tight pouch.”

“Then how am I supposed to—”

“Change out the stones,” said Amber, pointing at the one heating in the coals. “Just fish out the old one, drop in the hot one and try not to get too much ash in there.”

“Why c
an’t you do it?”

The question was directed at Amber, but Meoraq did not allow her to answer it. He snapped his spines flat and leaned in close enough to smell the unwashed, male stink of the human now trying to back away, and hissed, “Because it is not the task I set her. It is the task I set you!”

“Is there a problem over here?”

Meoraq leaned back, rubbing at his warming throat and allowing the human to escape so
Scott could take his place. He was calm. A Sheulek is always calm.

“It’s not worth it,” Amber murmured behind him.
“I’ll stay.”

“Get your spear and fill the flasks. I’ll find you at the water.”

“Meoraq—”

“Go.”

She went.

Meoraq folded his arms, resting the lengths of his first fingers along the hilts of his sabks, even though if it came to killing, he would never use an honor-
blade on the throat of the hateful human Scott.

Scott
smiled at him. Like all his smiles, it was a lie. “I’m glad we have this opportunity to speak privately.”

“So it seems,” said Meoraq after a moment’s
judgment. “I will hear you then.”

“You’ve been a tremendous help to us in these first difficult days.”

Meoraq snorted. A ‘help’.

“And I appreciate it. We all appreciate it. However…”
Scott’s face shaped itself into an expression of grotesque concern. “We are all increasingly uncomfortable with your attempts to assert control over us.”

Meoraq thought that over and took slow breaths and decided he’d better be sure he’d heard that before he lost his temper. “
I do not mark you.”

“Control,”
Scott said again. “Command might be a better word. Telling people what to do. And trying to intimidate us when you do it.”

“Ah.
Go on.”

“I just don’t want there to be any confusion over who’s really in charge here. Now, I’m happy to assign someone to take care of the cooking detail this morning,”
Scott said magnanimously. “And I’ll see to it that your…uh…whatever that is, is kept hot while you and Miss Bierce are…” Scott’s eyes rolled and his smile took on a crude sort of slant. “…doing whatever it is that you do, but I don’t want there to be any further incidents. In the future, if you have requests to make, you bring them to me and I’ll see what I can do about meeting them, but you need to stop just barking orders and slapping my people around.”

“I see.” Meoraq’s throat was very hot and tight-feeling now, but he made no attempt to hide its color or breathe it away. He did not draw; he remained calm. “Is that all you have to say?”

Scott considered. Meoraq’s throat throbbed painfully.

“I guess that’s it.
But I do want you to know that I don’t hold you responsible. Miss Bierce has always been a disruptive element. I realize now it was a mistake to let her act as my intermediary during our initial contact and I apologize for that.”

“I forgive you.”

The subtlety of dumaqi sarcasm was entirely lost on humans.

“Okay, then.”
Scott clapped his hands noisily together and rubbed them. “I’m glad we got that sorted out. Is there anything you’d like to share?”

“Oh y
es.”

The answer seemed to catch
Scott by surprise. His smile slipped; the one that replaced it had teeth. “Go ahead. I’m listening.”

“
Good. Because I am only going to say this once. I don’t know who you were in your homeland or what you think gives you the right to talk at me like an equal—”

“Now wait a minute
—”

“Do
not interrupt me,” said Meoraq, quietly and distinctly. “This is not your camp and these are not your people. Everything you think you had became mine the moment I set my tent among you and will remain mine until I choose to release you. I am not asking your obedience. I demand it. I have forgiven much and will forgive more, I am certain, but the one thing I will never do is make myself your servant in the camp I have conquered. So here we stand, human, and either you will do as I command and cook the fucking gift of food—” Oh, calmly now. Breathe. A Sheulek is the master of his clay and his emotions, always. “—that I have brought you, or you can let it burn, but you will have no more from me until I see the obedience I am owed.”

Scott
looked back over his shoulder at the far fire where the saoq roasted. More of his people had wakened and gathered there, but they stayed close to the food. These words were still private.

When
Scott turned back to Meoraq, he was not smiling. “I think there’s a lot of people over there who would object to being thought of as your property.”

“Is that a threat?” Meoraq demanded, more incredulous than angry, although he was very, very angry. “You and all your piss-
licking people together couldn’t take me if I were tethered to a tree!”

“It’s not a threat,”
Scott mumbled, but his face had gone dark and even uglier.

Meoraq clapped a cooling hand to his throat and rubbed, rubbed. It didn’t help much. He closed his eyes, tried to breathe, and for no reason at all, the memory of Amber crawling into his tent in the dark watches of the night leapt full to the front of his brain. Hissing, he opened his eyes and there was
Scott, brazenly scowling at him.

Something in him tore. It did
not break, maybe, but it tore and it tore deep. Meoraq’s vision briefly clouded, as it sometimes did in the arena, before the fires took him. His flesh became a stranger’s, throbbing everywhere, every nerve and vein and scale. His thoughts were black.

With all that was left of Uyane
Meoraq, he said, “Raise your hand right now and show me your fucking fist, or I swear here in the sight of Sheul that I will end you.”

Scott
said nothing, did nothing. Sheul, whose name had been invoked to bear a witness, let neither His voice be heard nor His hand felt. The wind blew at the mganz trees, moving their soft branches in odd gusts, as if it were breathing; six breaths, deep and slow.

‘
Amber is waiting,’ Meoraq thought, his first real thought in quite some time. He opened his hands—they ached—and let go his sword. “If you don’t want to tend the food I bring, I’ll stop bringing it.”

Scott
mumbled at him, flushed and frowning.

“I did not mark that.”

“I said we’ll do it. I never said we wouldn’t, you know,” he added churlishly. “I was just—”

“I know what you said.”

They stood together, silent. The words they had spoken sat and soured. The words they did not say screamed between them. Meoraq watched the mganz branches blow. Scott watched the fire.

M
eoraq said, “We will not walk today.” Amber’s boots—and Nicci’s—would need to dry. It should only take a few hours, but the damp in the air would slow the process and he wanted a good, strong seal.

Scott
muttered some kind of acknowledgement Meoraq did not ask him to repeat.

“I am glad we had this talk
,” he said instead and he thought he said it sincerely. Something he’d learned from his early days at Tilev and its public toilets: It was always better to open the doors and let the stink out than to try and close it in. “But you would be wise not to approach me again unless the need is very strong.”

“No, but I’m sure you’ll have plenty to talk about with Bierce, won’t you?”
Scott snatched up the pair of sticks Amber used to manipulate his heating stones and began to fish savagely through the stew for the stone there. “I bet you just talk each other’s brains out, don’t you? All night, every night.”

There was an insult somewhere in those words, but the more Meoraq tried to puzzle it out, the more he found himself distracted by Amber’s tracks in the wet grass. She would have found the water by now, he knew, having found it himself the previous night. He could see her in his mind’s eye, sitting on the bank with her bare feet tucked up beneath her to keep warm, waiting for him.

“And as far as I’m concerned,” Scott was saying, now struggling to pick up the stone in the coals and move it into the stew, “you can have her.”

“I don’t need your permission,” said Meoraq
, thinking of Amber sitting on that bank, Amber tumbling down a hill, Amber crawling into his tent in the dark and whispering his name. “I am Sheulek here and what I want, I take.”

And with that, h
e turned his back on Scott and the rest of his humans and went to find her.

BOOK
V

SCOTT AND THE SHIP

I
t was raining the day that they came to the ruins, which was nothing really new. It had been raining off and on for several days, but this was a whole new kind of rain. Dawn came, nearly as dark as dusk, and the wind that came with it was almost a warm one. The rain alternated between tiny pellets as harsh as hail and fat blobs of icewater that plastered Amber’s hair to her scalp and wormed freezing trickles underneath her clothes.

Walking in the rain was bad enough, but on this day, there were also hills to contend with. Not tall ones, but very steep and rocky as hell beneath the tangle of creepers and thorns that covered them. All day long, they trudged up and down, hunched against the weather, stumbling and swe
aring but otherwise not speaking. Throughout the morning, the clouds pressed claustrophobically close, smothering them with wet slaps of wind to make their already uneven footing even more treacherous, but when the dim smudge of the sun reached its highest point, the clouds suddenly lifted, as if Meoraq’s God had chosen to maliciously swoop back a curtain and show them their options.