2

The storm continued throughout the day, growing in strength with each unmarked hour that took them into night. It was difficult to resign himself to so foolhardy a thing as making camp in these ruins, but long before the darkness made further travel impossible, Meoraq knew he would never coax the humans out into the storm. They believed themselves safe here and since convincing them of the truth would only make them more nervous, Meoraq cried surrender and let them settle in.

He was not happy with the situation and as the night stormed on, his tension only increased. He put it to use with long patrols—pacing restlessly from the foreroom where he could watch the striking of Sheul’s hammer behind the clouds, along every empty hall and through every dark door, to the rearmost chamber that lay open to the weather and all those who might be seeking an escape from it.

Because they were out there. He had seen nothing living on his first patrol, except those few machines whose eternal task it was to tend the empty city, but there were signs these ruins had been used in the past to shelter travelers—the charred ring of a bygone fire, butchered bones, a discarded boot with a sizeable gash across the heel, the clay shards of several broken bowls or pots—but it was difficult to say just how recently these travelers may have passed.

The boot troubled him. It was city-made, embossed at the cuff and toe, and worn right through its heel by the travel it had seen. A careful search of the surrounding area had not turned up the boot’s mate either. He saw no toothmarks to suggest the boot had been carried off by some four-legged scavenger, but that remained far more likely to his mind than the thought of any man wealthy enough to buy this boot throwing out one but continuing to wear the other. That kind of thrift usually meant a man who did not buy boots at all, but acquired them only as the opportunity presented itself.

Or, to say a different way, a man who stole them.

Easy shelter and far more readily defended than any tent-camp, ruins such as these made powerful lures for the raiders who dwelled in the wildlands outside of Sheul’s grace. During the fair season, the migrations of the few travelers they preyed upon and the pursuit of Sheulek who preyed on them kept them moving, but when the weather turned cold, raiders, like all creeping beasts born of Gann, denned down.

So Meoraq was cautious and, as usual, he was the only one. The humans tried all night to sprawl themselves out where he could not keep an easy eye on them in direct defiance of his orders to stay together. Even Amber slipped away more than once to stand by herself in the foreroom, in full sight of the glass wall where any scouting eye might see her, staring at the tilework. She stopped once Scott found her there, but only because Scott then saw the tiles and began an infuriating campaign to call the others in to see it.

Meoraq knew what they were looking at and it was not the fertile land or sunbright skies that made up the Ancients’ world before the Fall. It was just five shards of metal, pressed together to make a single shape smaller than Meoraq’s hand. He did not know what the Ancients meant it to be, but he knew what the humans saw.

A ship. A ship that sailed through the sky. Like the ship they claimed had brought them to this world from some other. Meoraq stood alone before that shape for a long time himself, hating it.

He did not believe in the thing called Earth. Sheul’s Word spoke of all things and never mentioned it, and therefore even to consider that such a thing may exist seemed vaguely blasphemous to his mind. There were no ships that flew above the storm and there were no worlds beyond Gann.

Meoraq had seen many lies told to his face. The humans were not always honest in the things they said, but when it came to talk of their Earth, he could not see those lies. It bothered him. Most of the time, he was able to close his mind to this conflict, since the humans had little energy during their travels for Earth-talk and even less inclination to spend their resting hours in his company, but here in these ruins, with this damned image inescapably pressed into the wall, there was no avoiding it.

Either the humans had come in a ship from another world never mentioned in Sheul’s Word or they were lying to him. All of them. Even Amber. And he did not believe that, either.

The door hissed softly open.

“Get out,” said Meoraq without taking his eyes from the tiled wall.

Retreat.

He was going to be chasing them out of here all damned night, he just knew it. Because of the ship. He thought he could chip it free of the mortar that held it, but decided the satisfaction couldn’t be worth the damage to his blades and they’d all seen it already anyway. Nevertheless, the temptation remained.

The door hissed a second time. The light of a human’s lamp-machine fell in a pool across his back, throwing his shadow as tall as Sheul’s own across the mosaic. There, the ship was a blade aimed at his heart.

“O my Father,” said Meoraq loudly. “Give me Your arm, I pray, that I might beat this human so severely, none other will dare to defy me.”

“Bring it, lizardman,” said Amber.

He grunted and moved away from the tiles at once, before she could come any closer. Useless gesture. She had seen the ship, but he didn’t want her looking at it again. “And now it is you,” he said, advancing on her. She did not so much as lower her eyes, not even when he stood toe-at-toe with her. “I do not want anyone in this room. How is it that I am still not understood after all this time?”

“I understand you just fine.” She rolled her eyes a little. “Scott sent me to find out why not.”

Some hot, red emotion stabbed him, too deeply to be identified, too bright to be ignored. “And you do his bidding now, do you?” he snapped. “Even you?”

“I can’t justify being a bitch all night, every night, for no good reason. Unlike some lizards I could mention. What’s your problem?”

“I don’t want you in here! How many times do you need to be told?”

“I’m going to need a better reason than just because you said so,” she fired back, “or my answer is going to be a big fat I’ll go wherever I want to. And if you think you’re man enough to stop me—”

There, a spear of stormlight struck down, illuminating the whole of the room with its silvery flash and cutting Amber’s words away as neatly as if it had struck her dead. She shone her human lamp past him at the window.

“If I am man enough?” Meoraq echoed, but Amber did not re-engage him. Thunder broke and boomed across the plains, making her flinch back. The lightning came in sheets overhead, filling the night with a constant, flickering illumination that periodically let out a flash of white brilliance. It wasn’t enough to read the Word by, perhaps, but it was more than enough to see Amber’s round, staring eyes.

“Go back to the others,” Meoraq told her, once it became obvious she was content to stand there all night.

She stirred, like one waking from a sleep, and shone her light on the glass again. “You don’t have tornados here, do you?”

He took her wrist and forced the light down. “Mind where you aim that damned thing! Go, I say. Obey me!”

“Quit grabbing at me. I want to see—” And there she stopped, not for the storm this time, but to give him a sudden, startled look. “Oh shit. It’s not the ship, it’s the window.”

“Eh?”

“I thought you were just being a dick about—” She started to shine her light at the tilework on the wall, then stopped and forced the beam down. She looked at him, her brows creased in alarm. “We’re not alone out here, are we?”

Meoraq flexed his spines a few times (If he was man enough, she said. If.) and finally forced them to relax. “I haven’t seen anyone, but that is no reason to set a beacon at every window.”