“Um…yes, it does. In fact, seeing a story in your head instead of in real life makes it entirely less true. In further fact,” she said, trying to match his expression of severe gravity and failing with a short laugh, “it makes it a bald-faced lie.”

“If a blind man tells you the sky is grey, is it less true because he can’t see it for himself? And if someone told him the sky was some other color, some ridiculous color…”

“Blue,” Amber suggested dryly.

He pointed at her. “Blue,” he agreed. “And he tells you it is grey, is it still the lie he believes it to be? Truth is not always what someone says, Soft-Skin. Truth is what something is, what it means.”

“You can make a story mean anything, Meoraq. But that’s the thing with you religious people, isn’t it? God is this glorious intangibility, so no proof becomes proof just by how you spin it.”

His head tipped by degrees, like the ticking hand of a stopwatch, until it was all the way in humor and he could openly laugh at her. At her. Honestly. “You are going to have to tell me,” he said in that laughing way, as he swung out one arm to put the whole world on display for her, “what you see that constitutes no proof of God.”

She started to answer, but then just sighed. “I could point out that you’ve just made my case for me, but I doubt you’d see it that way. Why don’t we just agree to respect each other’s crazy ideas out loud, mock each other in private, and go to sleep?”

“That would be a lie, wouldn’t it?”

“Little white lies make the world go ‘round, Meoraq.”

“Your world, perhaps. Mine spins by its weight and magnetism, they tell me.”

“How shockingly scientific of you. I thought you’d tell me God spun it Himself.”

“Who do you think gave the world weight? Comfort yourself with your lack of faith if it pleases you,” he added, putting one hand on the floor of the tent and bending in his attitude of prayer, still smiling. “God does not require your permission to exist.”

“I don’t require His, either,” she countered, tucking herself in under the blanket. “Good night, lizardman.”

“Rest easy, Soft-Skin.” Meoraq’s mouth gaped in a brief grimace of fine-edged humor. “We are in His sight.”

She rolled her eyes, then closed them.

* * *

In the midst of that night, Meoraq spoke to God.

Amber’s tale of the human god had been, like the wind upon the prairie, an ever-present whisper in his mind throughout his meditations. It seemed to him that there was truth within it, truth far greater than the message it carried plain upon its face. He spoke it to himself as Amber slept, turning human speech into his own as much as words like helicopter allowed, but changing tongues did not remake the tale nor clarify the questioning itch that had lodged itself in his brain. So he meditated while Amber slept beside him and the wind blew endlessly across the empty plains.

He had never fallen asleep during meditations before. Therefore, he surely did not do so now.

The thought-space he inhabited did change, though, becoming a dreaming place he recognized as the antechamber of the temple of Xi’Tothax. As before, he stood before the holy forge, but the forge was lit now, melting the air around it with its heat and power, and the man who stood before him with the thigh-bone of Rasozul in his hands was not Exarch Ylsathoc. He kept his face deep in the shadows of his cowl.

“Your father is dead,” this man told him. “The House of Uyane stands without a lord. Will you come now to take up the stewardship of your bloodline?”

Meoraq could not speak, save for the words he had already spoken. They left his mouth in the way of dreams, separate of his will and emotion. “I have loyalty to more than one father. I cannot make this decision without knowing the will of Sheul.”

Eyes gleamed in the depths of the exarch’s hood, lit with accusation. He looked into Meoraq’s soul and saw the truth: not pious supplication before God’s will, but an unwillingness to be fettered to one woman, and worse, the sort of meek, milk-veined woman who would be no more than a breeding vessel with legs for all the sons he would be expected to sire and all the daughters he must raise in meek, milk-veined imitation of their mother.

He could not have said this to Ylsathoc and he could not say it now to a stranger. Ashamed, Meoraq turned away, from the exarch and his oaths of office, from his own father’s bone, and in that small movement somehow left the temple and arrived in the plains on a bright morning. He could see the humans walking away from him. He could see Amber lying at his feet, her face white and still.

Now he could speak, feel, act. He ran after the humans and caught furiously at Scott, shouting, “Damn you for a coward and a murderer! How can you leave her?”

But the man who turned to face him, human though He appeared to be, was not Scott. Meoraq stumbled back. He had never known fear, true fear, the kind that froze the fire in one’s veins. Therefore, he did not know it now. He was uncertain.

“Fathers, take caution of the women you wive, for they will raise the daughters who wear your name,” said the man wearing Scott’s form. He spoke in dumaqi, quoting the first line of the Admonition of Womanly Virtues, which was so unexpected that Meoraq backed away again. “See that every woman of your household is brought forth as a proper woman in the sight of Sheul, Father of us all. A woman wears modesty around her neck and keeps low her eyes when her man speaks. A woman’s trust lies below her man’s boot, as her open hand also, to take in with graciousness all that he places before her. In all ways does she acknowledge him as steward over her and nursing no bitterness in her throat to be brought forth as slight and slander. A woman keeps herself covered and away from all eyes, save when her man alone has will of her, and receives him gladly at his every command. A woman speaks not against her man’s ear, nor walks before him, nor shows her eyes, but in three things forever seeks: To obey his word, to lessen his burden, and above all, to bear his sons.”

Nicci, wet-eyed at Scott’s side, expressionlessly opened her mouth and emitted a ghastly mewling cry, like a chorus of hundreds of faceless women all at once.

Meoraq did not step back this time; he leapt back. And when he looked at Scott again, Lord Saluuk of Tothax stood in his place. He bent, pulling Amber up from the ground, which became the very edge of the high wall of the city in a moment. “If she will not behave herself as a proper woman,” he spat, “better she be dead.”

Meoraq snarled and lunged forward, but again, between one running step and another, he was suddenly in Master Tsazr’s room at Tilev. He staggered to a stop, then checked his body to see if he had become a brunt, but the hands he held before him were a man’s hands and the chest he saw below his chin was the scarred playing field of a Sheulek. He looked up again just in time to meet Master Tsazr’s hand slapping hard against his snout.

“I expected better of you,” he heard as he lay dazed on the floor. Master Tsazr’s mud-caked boots tromped around him and away to the window-ledge. “I knew for eighteen years that the doors of Xi’Matezh would open for me. For eighteen years, I prayed for a reason worthy enough to let me go. But you, ha! You make a holy pilgrimage just to avoid your responsibilities at home!”

Meoraq braced his hands on the floor and slowly pushed himself up. He kept his throbbing head bent, feeling his former master’s stare like coals on his scales.

“You stood here in this room and pretended to listen when I told you that being Sheulek meant more than seeing the world and fucking a different woman in every city.” Tsazr snorted contemptuously. “And here you are. Walking all the way to the end of the world and back so you can have just a little more time to do it.”