Amber could see that Meoraq knew that none of that had been an enthusiastic, ‘Yes, sir!’ He let that be fairly obvious; he probably wanted Scott to see it, too. But there were subtler signs that suggested Scott’s usual tactic of using big words in complicated ways had been once again successful and Meoraq had no clear idea of just what Scott had said at all. Amber waited tensely for the slap that precedent suggested was coming, the slap that would lead to the bellowing and apologizing, which would lead to the whispering and the dirty looks and everything that was bad already would only get worse and worse and why couldn’t Meoraq see that?

But maybe he did, because in the end, he grunted and set Scott on the ground. “So. I consider the matter closed, and I will hear no more about it,” he warned, sheathing his sword. “I will not allow you to preach at me all the way to Gedai. If I am present, you are silent.”

Scott straightened out his jacket (too briskly; one of the sleeves tore a bit up at the shoulder when he tugged at the cuff, exposing the slightly deeper crimson of the other jacket he wore beneath it) and nodded once, in a commanding way. “I have to admit that I am disappointed.”

“I am present,” Meoraq said curtly. “You are silent. And we are leaving.”

He proved it, walking away up the street without even a backwards glance to see if people obeyed them. They did, drawing off in little groups to whisper and giving him plenty of distance, but they did. Amber lingered, wanting to run after him, to walk beside him and soak in his confidence until she could wear it like a coat and let all these ugly stares just bounce off. She thought he might let her, even if he wasn’t too happy about it, but she also knew how it would look. Not just like she was running off to hide under Meoraq’s skirts after he’d gone waving his sword around again, but like she’d put him up to it in the first place. They might already think so—and if they didn’t, Scott would have them thinking it before long—but she wasn’t going to show them they were right.

“Come on, Nicci,” said Amber, reaching out her hand. “The sooner we get out of here, the better things will—”

“Leave me alone,” Nicci said, anger thinning her voice into a caricature of their mother’s. “Just leave me alone. I’ll talk to you later, but right now, I’m so sick of you that I can’t even look at you!”

“Nicci—”

“I’ll take care of you, Nicci!” Nicci spat, screwing up her face in a horrible sing-song sneer. “We don’t have a choice, Nicci! I know what I’m doing, Nicci!” Each name was another bullet and when the chamber was empty, Nicci threw the gun. “I wish Mama was here instead of you.”

And as Amber stood there, stupidly gaping, her baby sister deliberately raised her arm and slapped her in the face. The blow mostly caught her on the cheek, a little on the nose. Heat flooded her wind-chilled face. Amber didn’t move.

Nicci turned around and left her. She ran to catch up with Scott (i was going to do that wasn’t i but it was meoraq i wanted meoraq i want now O god to catch his arm the way she does and have someone to walk with) and they all walked away.

“She didn’t mean it,” said Amber, alone in the street. “She always comes back and we’ll say we’re sorry and it’ll be fine.”

“I have to believe that,” the recording in the kiosk hissed. “I have to. I do.”

Amber looked at him. The lizardman in the screen looked back at her through a haze of static. Then the image blipped once, hard, and the whole kiosk went black and silent. A thin plume of smoke rose out of the speakers and the wind took it away.

She started walking.

4

Meoraq viewed the time spent in the ruins as time lost and it took some hard driving over the next few days to make it up. Without the distraction of the ruins to stop and stare at, they moved themselves along much faster, faster even than they had moved before they had ever seen the damned place. Scott used his lies as a cattleman used a bait-stick and the humans were just as happy to trot in pursuit as any mindless beast. Truth, as long as it kept them moving at this pace and he didn’t have to listen to it himself, Meoraq was content to let Scott make all the promises he liked, although he knew it upset Amber.

As it should upset him. “To let a lie stand is to speak it with your own throat.” That was in the very first verse of the very first chapter in the Book of Admonitions. Meoraq could remember learning to make his letters by that self-same verse, and how his hand had cramped in the practice because he could not make them perfectly at first undertaking. And now he stood, twelve years gone in the service of Sheul, willing to close his eyes to the sin in his own camp for the false peace that masked it.

Meoraq meditated on this—once they were well-gone from the ruins and he had some leisure to do so—but an hour’s prayer at his fireside with all the humans milling nearby in their clumsy, complaining way proved too much a distraction. His thoughts kept turning from the failings of his character to places he had no desire to explore: the image of the ship set in tiles on the wall; House Uyane and whether Nduman had been called home from his own circuit (or from the woman and bastard children he covertly kept) to manage its households while Meoraq took this pilgrimage; Amber throwing herself against him, frightened by the storm.

That was the image that hooked on him and he found himself opening his eyes to study her where she sat now. He thought she looked thinner. He couldn’t be certain of it, but he thought so. He hadn’t really paid that much attention to her body until the night she’d bathed beside his tent and cast her shadow over it…and crawled in to him afterwards…and he knew that filthy, ragged clothing such as she wore had a way of making the body beneath seem smaller, but he didn’t think she looked right.

She’d had a pot of tea with him this morning before their travels, and a largish share of his cut of the gruu he’d found last night, but his share had been a spare one to begin with. Before that, there had been only bites of cuuvash for him and her both. The last real meal she’d taken had been days before coming across the ruins.

So. He would meditate later. His obligations came first.

Meoraq found his feet and beckoned to Amber. She looked at him, but did not move from her place at his fire. “Keep your people close until I return,” he ordered.

She didn’t ask where he was going. Neither did she take up her spear and try to join him. He wouldn’t have allowed it in any case, but she didn’t even try. She only bobbed her head in silence. She was watching Scott’s fire, so he watched it too, but saw nothing unusual about the throng of humans that surrounded it.

A thought struck.

“Where is your N’ki?” he asked.

“Over there, somewhere.” Amber turned away to prod listlessly at Meoraq’s fire with a bit of burnt stick. “She’s still mad at me.”

He couldn’t think of anything to say to that. Well, that wasn’t strictly truth: He could have easily told her that Nicci was a mewling little pest whose opinion ought to matter about as much as the mud on which Amber sat, but he knew it wouldn’t help. He often found it incomprehensible that the same Amber who dared to strike him with her naked hand and shout insult into his face could be so beaten down by a single scornful glance from the wretched sack of flesh that was her blood-kin. He didn’t say that either.

“Stay here,” he said instead and was further troubled when she gave that same silent acquiescence, enough to say against all wisdom: “Or come with me, if you wish.”

She glanced toward her spear, but touched it only with her eyes. Her head turned side to side, a human refusal, wordless. Spiritless. “I don’t want to leave her.”