He studied her frowning face, seeing thoughts there he could not read. “Why? What does he claim I say?”

“I don’t know.”

He clapped one hand to his snout and physically pinched it shut, determined to be tactful. Then, because towering over her like this wasn’t helping even if it was entirely appropriate, he hunkered down and tapped her on the knee. “S’kot can’t open his mouth without piss falling out of it. If his people choose to believe his lies, that is their foolishness. It doesn’t have to be yours.”

“Meoraq, he’s telling them—”

He pinched her chin, silencing her. “I don’t care if he’s telling them he is Sheul Himself in human form. You know better. You know truth. How do you mark me?”

She stared at him in silence, at last waggling her head up and down in human acknowledgement.

He grunted and released her, looking broodingly around the empty room where the Fall of the Ancients went on and on in some other plane. “This land is poison. I allowed it to infect me last night, Soft-Skin, as perhaps it infected all of us. I should not have been so harsh with you. Will you take my spare tunic?”

“No.”

“Please yourself. I will not command it today. If you come to any sense, you know that I have it.” He stood. “Gather your things and pack my tent. I need to scout our path out of this God-accursed place and I want S’kot and his cattle to be ready to leave the very instant that I return for them. Tell him.”

“Okay.”

The door to the foreroom opened, drawing both their eyes. There stood Scott himself, chattering back over his shoulder at all the humans who had followed him into that room in defiance of Meoraq’s command.

He gripped his brow-ridges. He was not going to shout. He was going to be patient. He was.

“Oh good, you’re up,” said Scott. “I want to talk to you, Meoraq.”

“Sheul, O my Father, be with Your son.”

“Not a good time, Scott,” said Amber.

“Miss Bierce, this is none of your business. Be quiet. Meoraq.” Scott’s soft face became what he probably thought was very stern. “What can you tell us about the people who used to live here?”

“They’re all dead. What else do you need to know?”

Scott paused to roll his eyes at his watching people. When he continued, it was in the slow, smiling way that usually meant he thought he was talking to a fool. “Let’s start with this place. Where are we?”

“Eh? This very building?” Meoraq glanced at Amber, but she did not correct him. He flicked his spines. “I don’t know.”

“The room in back, the one with all the little metal creatures—”

“The machines,” said Meoraq, folding his arms. “What about them?”

“What are they doing?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why?” asked Amber.

“Miss Bierce, this doesn’t concern you. Now, Meoraq, can you find out what the bots are doing? The lights are working,” he said, pointing up even though more than half of the lights in this particular room were dark. “And the doors have power, so maybe you could fire up one of the computers in the back and—”

“And what, S’kot?” Meoraq interrupted, snapping his spines audibly flat. “What would you have me do in defiance of Sheul’s holy law? What, when all men who are His children know it goes against the Word to take mastery over the machines of the Fallen Age or to dwell again in the cities of the Ancients? Speak your mind plainly to one who is the Sword of His judgment. What?”

Scott puckered his soft lips so that he appeared in every way to be the ass he was. After a long pause, he said, “Do you at least know how long this place has been empty?”

“In years?” Meoraq asked, baffled. “I have no idea. It comes from the age of the Ancients.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere. But you can’t tell us how long ago that was?”

“Since the Fall? No one can.”

“You don’t keep track of time on this planet?”

“It’s Year 33 of Advocate Y’zhare Selthut’s stewardship under Sheul.”

“So it’s been thirty-three years since…since whatever happened?”

“Eh?” Meoraq checked with Amber again, but she was only listening. “No, it’s been thirty-three years since the death of Advocate Falhiri. He held the advocacy, I think, seventeen years. Before that…I don’t remember, but if you want me to recite them all the way back, it won’t happen, human. I couldn’t even do that for my true training master.”

“So, what, they reset the calendar every time they elect a president?” Scott frowned over that a short while, then shook his head. “It doesn’t matter, I guess. How about this: What can you tell me about what happened here?”

“What do you mean?” asked Meoraq, and immediately cut his hand across those words, severing them. “There is no time for this nonsense. Gather your things.”

“Do you know what happened?”

That was Amber. Meoraq hesitated, looking down at her. “The Ancients turned from Sheul. They gave themselves over to Gann and were punished for their sins.”

“Right,” she said, still frowning. “But what killed them all?”

“Sheul’s wrath.”

“Was it a war?”

Meoraq sighed and rubbed at his brow-ridges. “It was Sheul’s wrath.”

“That doesn’t mean anything to us,” Amber said, but before he could reply, she added, “Will you tell me about it?”

Meoraq shot her a black glance, but there was no trace of the sarcasm with which she so often responded to his mention of Sheul. Instead, she seemed almost over-serious. Perhaps even apprehensive. Did she fear that Sheul’s wrath would fall again, simply for that they’d stayed one night within these crumbling walls? His arm twitched—a comforting tap, quickly suppressed. He said, “Mastery is more than the need of the moment. So long as we do not take the machines out of the city or seek to remake them, we do not threaten the Second Law.”

“It’s not that. I’m more worried about what happened here…and what happened in that pit outside. How did…How did everybody die? And are they…” Her troubled gaze broke from his as she looked back at her people. None of them spoke. It took several false starts before she could finish. “And are they still dying?”

The memory of a dream slipped like a phantom hand across his brow, chilling him. It is still among us…

He threw it off with a flick of his spines and smiled at her. “No, Soft-Skin. It was a long time ago. If you wish to hear the story of the Fall, I’ll tell you, but you needn’t fear it. The Hour of Wrath is ended.”

“Tell us all,” ordered Scott, gesturing to his people, all of whom gathered close in a broad ring around him.

Meoraq felt his spines flatten, but now it seemed he had been penned in. It would no longer be possible to extricate himself from their company without shoving one or more of them bodily out of his way.

And Amber was waiting, a kind of apology in her eyes for trapping him in the role of storyteller, but still listening, still wanting to hear. And he found he wanted to tell her, even if it wasn’t just the two of them anymore.

“Sit then, all of you,” said Meoraq, defeated. He hunkered down among them as they obeyed. “I will tell you a child’s lesson, in the manner that I was first taught, which is to say that if I am interrupted, I will slap you across the snout,” he finished with a glare at Scott.

Scott showed him empty hands. “We’re all listening.”

And they all proved it by agreeing and murmuring assent and generally raising the kind of noise that would have sent every one of them to the ground with their hands clapped to their stinging faces if he were a true training master. Meoraq rubbed at his brow-ridges some more and gradually, they quieted. When he looked up again, he looked only at Amber.

“We are all born of two fathers,” he told her. “The father of our mortal bodies, who joined with our mothers and set the features of our clay. And our true Father, great Sheul, who gives us life forever through the forging of our eternal souls.”