“I’m going to kill you,” she told him, stroking his cock until his oils coated her hand and every flexing of her fingers made him shudder with the effort not to cum. “I don’t know how yet, but I know I will. And someday, long after you’re dead—” She turned around, her hands braced on the table on either side of the waterskin, fingernails digging curt furrows only for that first moment. Once he was in her, the oiled ridges of his cock rubbing heat into her mindless body (Gann’s body, she thought, her godless clay), she was able to relax, separate from sensation, let it happen. “Long after you’re dead,” she went on calmly, her voice broken by his powerful thrusts and not by any of her own emotion, “I’m going to wake up in the night from a bad dream with your face in it, but I won’t remember your name. And I’ll go back to sleep. And I’ll sleep just fine.”

He groaned hoarsely against the nape of her neck, his hands digging painful grooves in her stomach. The first time never took him long, but that didn’t mean it was ending. He wasn’t human. He didn’t have to stop until he wanted to.

“I won’t remember you,” whispered Amber, gazing at the wall as Time once again stretched out and stopped. “I won’t.”

5

At first light, Meoraq rose. He had not slept, but he had rested as best he was able within his unquiet mind and it was with clarity of sight and purpose that he looked upon his camp. The raiders had taken both sleds and all that they had carried. His pack and Amber’s had been too worn to interest them, but their contents had been rummaged through and scattered. The clothes they had spent the winter making were gone, along with Meoraq’s mending kit and tent. His bedroll was missing; Amber’s remained. His tea box lay open on the ground, the more precious of its inlaid stones pried up and its many drawers knocked loose, spilling its remaining teas into the grass. Amber’s cups were nearby, one of them in pieces.

He ignored the dead man for now. There was evidence there, he knew, but whatever he had not scattered in faithless rage would keep. He searched the ground for the things which had been hidden from him in the darkness, now brought to light.

He saw blood. More than could be accounted for by the dead man, even taking into measure Meoraq’s fit of fury. Blood in a wide, dried pool, crushed into the grass by the trampling of many feet. Blood painting the tall stalks of wind-blown grasses. Blood that led into the plains.

Meoraq gazed into the north, the direction the blood had taken, then returned to the ashes of his fire and knelt to examine what was left of the body. The boots, worn and overlarge for the dead man’s feet; not bought or made, but stolen. His companions had relieved him of any coin or weapons, but overlooked one bauble—a woman’s wristlet, worn not upon his own wrist, but bent wide and hidden…treasured…around his ankle. He wore a battle harness of inexpensive make, patched with insignias taken from many different Houses—taken from those who had the birthright to wear them, no doubt—and breeches sewn of hides. He had little flesh left to inspect, but what there was had been heavily scarred, and the thicker scales along his back showed the buckling and discoloration of a diet with too much meat, too little crop. When he hunted out the head, he saw eyes yellowed by the overuse of phesok (smoked phesok, by the burnt pads of his fingers, once they were also located) and brown stumps of teeth that had never known cleaning.

Meoraq looked again at the metal-worked bit, turning it between his fingers until he found the jewelsmith’s stamp on the backing. Ulhrug, it said. Ulhrug of Praxas. The city was not familiar to him, but he supposed the city didn’t matter. This chain with its pretty ornament had likely come off the neck of some murdered traveller.

And yet…

He was well-fed, for a raider. Warmly dressed. He was a young man and not strongly-made; the burlier members of his pack should have stripped him of all his prizes and yet here he lay with his boots on and spoils intact. These were the wildlands at the very heel of winter. There were no travelling merchants to prey on and little enough game for an honest man to find, but he had certainly not suffered for their lack.

Whoever these raiders were…someone was trading with them.

Of course, it was both a crime against Man’s law and a sin before the eyes of Sheul to have dealings of any kind with those who had gone to Gann, but men were weak. Raiders had phesok and strong drink; the cities had sweets, medicines and women. There would always be places where those on both sides of the walls were willing to sheathe their blades and offer goods instead. So it seemed this Praxas was such a place.

He tucked the dead man’s trinket into his own boot and looked the body over one last time. He saw a hard life, begun and ended in violence outside the city walls. A boy born in the squalor of a raiding camp to become a man fallen from Sheul’s grace. And that camp would be where they had taken his Amber.

He bent his head, closed his eyes and breathed. Six breaths. Six again. The Prophet. His brunt. Uyane. Mykrm. Oyan. Thaliszar. He was a warrior of his father’s House. He was a Sword and a true son of Sheul. He was God’s Striding Foot in the land and the hour of Gann. He was Uyane Meoraq.

Truth.

He listened to the wind brush across the plains, then opened his eyes.

On the blood-stained ground, he saw nothing new. In the blackened ring of his camp’s firepit were only ashes. In the plains, nothing moved that breathed.

And in the sky, the forever-clouds of Sheul’s storm lay open, showing a face of jewel-deep green and light in beams of gold pouring down all around it.

It closed and the wind blew on.

Meoraq passed a trembling hand briefly before his eyes, then closed it into a firm fist. He took up Amber’s travel-pack and set her surviving cup within, cushioned by his own rolled-up pack. After a moment’s dark non-thought, he bent and gathered the various pieces of his tea box, fit them back together and packed that away as well. As far as he cared (and he didn’t know why he cared even that much), everything else could go to Gann.

He began to run.

* * *

Zhuqa didn’t tie her up again. He didn’t need to. He pulled the knife from the sheath he kept strapped high on his arm, showed it to her, then stabbed it into the door of his cupboard. That was almost intimidating enough all on its own, but he hadn’t been trying to scare her with it. He just wanted a place to hang his bells.

He had to dig for them in a crate for some time before he found them, and the whole time he did that, Amber had to stand two running steps away from the cupboard and stare at the knife. They were jingle-bells, all wired together in a festive loop just like Christmas bells back on Earth, except they were made of some greenish metal. Not a minty Christmas-green either, but something ugly and snotty, the sort of color that made the whole thing look vaguely cancerous. He hung them over the hilt of his knife where the slightest movement of the door set them to shrill jingling, then put her in the cupboard to sleep with him, but he didn’t try to touch her. No, he just put her closest to the wall with himself on the outer side, so that escape would mean climbing over the top of him and opening a jingling door…in other words, impossible.

He fell asleep almost immediately—two marathon bouts of sex in one day were too much for even mighty Zhuqa the Warlord—but Amber did not. She lay there for a very long time, doing nothing, thinking nothing, only staring into the black above her bed. She would have liked to have been planning something. Escape. Murder. Hell, dinner. But thought was like hate tonight, too heavy for her little body to carry.