Split-Hand glared at the leader, then at Amber, then stomped over to his dead friend and took that belt instead.

The leader accepted that (not without a dark and watchful stare), then made a loop of it, waited for Amber to stop coughing, then fit it over her tossing head. She clamped her teeth together. He pinched her nostrils shut. She bucked and flailed and finally had to breathe, whereupon he worked the belt between her screaming jaws and pulled it tight.

“Now we try this again, little one,” he said conversationally, sweeping her up and over his shoulder. “But you had ought to know that if I have to pull every fang out of your fierce little head to ensure your good behavior, that is exactly what I will do. Mind yourself. Let me see it, Vek.”

Amber could see nothing beyond the leader’s backside and the ground as Split-hand presumably presented his injury. She wriggled, chewing at the belt until her lips bled, and finally fell slack, gasping wetly around the leather. She was caught; she felt that she could keep fighting, at least for a few more minutes, but she knew she couldn’t break free. She wasn’t ready to give up yet, but she had to have a better goal than making him mad enough to kill her. She had to wait. Another chance to escape might come along, but until then, she just had to wait.

“No good,” someone was saying. “It has to come off.”

“I know it has to come off, cock-rubber! Fuck Gann!”

“Not here. I have no reason to think there is only one of these.” The shoulder she rode jostled with a meaningful shrug. “Get what there is and get away.”

The raiders got to work rifling through the packs around the fire. There wasn’t enough to occupy all of them. One of them came strolling around to look at her instead, fingering at her hair.

“This is easily the most bizarre thing I have ever seen,” he said.

The leader grunted—Meoraq’s grunt, the one that meant he acknowledged the comment but didn’t feel any strong need to converse.

“You mean to sell it?” the other man said once she was done. He was still touching her hair.

“Might.”

“To who?”

“To me!” Vek snapped. “Hear me, Zhuqa, if you put that thing on the block without telling me, I will put a hook on the wrist where my fucking hand used to be and put the hook in your fucking head!”

“If I sell it, I’ll give you due warning and a cut of credit besides. Now calm down and remember who you are speaking to.”

“It’s mine!” Vek spat, but he spat it without shouting. He came stomping around to the leader’s back to glare at her, holding the bandaged lump of his ruined hand. He flared his open mouth threateningly, then dove forward and cracked his forehead into hers. She heard him stalk off muttering as she swayed near the grey area of unconsciousness, and finally, with a mental sigh of defeat, she fell on through.

* * *

Just as the raiders had not been able to tell human from dumaq at any great distance by the full light of the fire, so Meoraq could not tell dumaq from human by moonlight at the hour of his return.

He had been in a fair mood most of the evening, wandering far and observing the animals of Gedai that were ostensibly his reason for this patrol with only half an eye. He prayed as he walked, silently at first, then aloud, and soon was singing some of his favorite hymns at full voice. Amber wasn’t there to mutter in her throat or heave her pained sighs or slap at her face. He loved his wife—more and more, that word felt true and right and real—but they had spent too many days this winter riding about in one another’s pockets. He liked her company, but he missed his solitude and he meant to enjoy it as much as possible while he could.

At length, even as he saw the sun low to the mountains and knew his time was ending, he found a friendly jut of stone and sat himself to meditate, but his first moments in that welcome stillness were unquiet. He could do this back at camp, couldn’t he? And truth, he supposed he could, albeit with Amber pacing restlessly somewhere at the outside edge of his perceptions. She’d want to talk at him or involve him in some way in the domestic things she did or maybe just pull him into the tent for sex. Meoraq was opposed to none of these things, but once in a while, a man just liked to meditate.

Still, that vague sense of unease persisted. A tickle of wind, the rough edge of the rock he sat on, the distant call of some unknown beast—every little distraction woke him wholly to his clay until he resorted to a child’s trick, lying flat on his back with an arm crooked over his eyes, chanting the Prophet’s Prayer over and over until meaning bled away and it was all just sound. Sound and blackness, yes, but still not peace. In its pursuit, he not only failed to truly meditate, but also entirely lost track of time. He believed that he spent perhaps an hour in that fruitless endeavor, but when he finally cried surrender and opened his eyes, it was full dark.

Amber must be terrified. No, strike that, she was furious. And in either case, she was just fool enough to come looking for him if she believed him lost or injured.

Cursing, he hurried back to camp, but ‘hurry’ was a relative term after dark. There was enough of a moon behind the clouds to show him his backtrail at first, but the wind which had been so calm all day now stirred itself up, soon erasing all sign of his passage until he followed nothing but a hope that this lesson in the cost of man’s pride would end at his camp and not in a nest of ravening tachuqis.

But it had been his own camp in the end, although he glimpsed it from well to the east of where he’d thought it was, and he thought it was Amber sleeping there when he finally came to it. There was no tent and no fire and this he at first presumed with a mixture of resignation and annoyance was her way of telling him he was a scaly son of a bitch for leaving her so long, which was spiteful and childish, yet he would apologize because he was Sheulek and a Sheulek took the higher path.

Then the clouds above him thinned so that the little light from the crescent moon grew stronger and all at once, what had been Amber became a dead man. It seemed Sheul gave him hours outside of Time to see this, to feel it, and only when he fully understood did the weight of the world crash back into his clay.

His feet took him forward without conscious thought. He reached only to stab the corpse—he had drawn his kzung, it seemed, how curious—then staggered away, staring wildly in all directions for Amber—where was Amber?—and seeing nothing, only the night—why had he left her so long?—and the wind whipping at Gann’s back.

He cupped his mouth and howled for her. Not with words, but just a cry, a dumb animal baying that he had never before imagined any dumaq could make. The wind alone answered, changing its course to drive him back. His boot struck the body. He looked at it and, with a sudden savagery he did not feel until it was upon him, he wrenched his kzung from the corpse and hacked at it again.

The head came free at his first blow. The chest cracked apart at his fourth. He took the left arm. Bisected the rib. The right arm. He struck until it was meat and bone and two legs. He struck until he had no wind and no moisture in his mouth but the clotted blood splashing up at him from the ground. He struck until he fell to his knees in splintery gore and leaned back, gasping.

He listened then, as he should have listened hours ago, but Sheul had nothing to say to him now.

Amber.

He dragged himself up, shaking on legs like water, and pulled his blade free of the mess on the ground. How long? The blood that touched his tongue had cooled, but was yet warm. The raiders might be close still. He looked and saw nothing, no sign but dumaq blood in spatters across the trampled grass. An hour ago, he would have seen their trail leading away, before the light failed and the wind grew strong.