Xzem darted forward, pushing Zhuqa’s screaming infant into Dkorm’s hands and snatching her own away. Dkorm dropped with a mutter onto a bench, hooking the baby over his arm so that he could keep rubbing at the wet patches on his leathers. “Fucking sprat. I want you to know, Xzem, the very instant this thing dies, I’m pulling your little pisspot in half.”

Xzem shivered, but made no sound.

“Baby,” said Amber in lizardish, putting out her hands.

Dkorm glared at her. “What’s the matter, Eshiqi?” he asked blackly. “Think I’m going to drop it? Think I’m going to bash it’s screaming little face into the floor and stomp on the fucking thing until it shuts the fuck up at last? Huh? It’s fine. Leave it alone.”

His neck was lighting up brighter and brighter with every breath.

Amber dropped her hands, looked around, then dashed into the other room to dunk a rag in wash-water and bring it back to Dkorm.

He eyed her with an ominous lack of expression, but then leaned back and gestured at his leg. Amber knelt beside him and scrubbed carefully at his breeches, feeling his stare like a physical thing on the back of her neck. The baby, inelegantly folded over his arm, squirmed and cried.

“Fuck Gann, but you’re ugly,” Dkorm remarked, fingering a few handfuls of hair. “I don’t know why Zhuqa would want to dip it in you when he could have any other slave in this camp. Or all of them.” His gaze dropped to the baby in his arm. He shrugged it roughly into a new position and gave it a few equally rough pats in an unsuccessful effort to quiet it. “I don’t know why he wants this thing either. It doesn’t do anything but eat, make noise and stink the place up.”

“Why do you keep calling it ‘it’?” Amber asked, and when he only squinted at her in confusion, she tried again, supplementing her terrible lizard-speech with pantomime. “Is it a girl?” she asked, pinching her thumb and forefinger together to form a tear-drop shaped opening. “Or a boy?” Blushing, she pushed a finger through from the underside so that it thrust out like a painfully true-to-life lizardman penis.

The yellow stripes on Dkorm’s throat flashed a little brighter and began to fade. “You want to know the gender? Too soon to tell. Look.” He caught hold of the baby’s leg and moved it so that the baby’s naked loins were broadly displayed (and the baby itself was almost upside down). The baby’s slit was no more than a crease in its scales with a narrow hole at one end. Dkorm prodded this, saying, “It’s just a pisser right now. It won’t open for…” His spines snapped down and up again in a shrug. “…a year and some days. By dry season next, I should think. Some people say they can just tell, but some people piss out of their mouths.”

She couldn’t stand it anymore. She took the baby from him, righting it and drawing it in to lie against her breasts, where it quieted at once. He watched, folding his empty arms, in no hurry to take it back.

“Pointless,” he said, watching the baby begin its shivering song of sleep. “The first one always dies. I suppose Zhuqa thinks he can save it with a better mother, but it won’t work. Gann will have it. And once it’s gone—and I split your little dip, Xzem, don’t think I’ve forgotten—I’ll finally get some sleep.”

Xzem hunched a little further over Rosek as she wiped the baby clean.

“She was raider-got herself,” Dkorm confided, running his eyes lazily over Xzem’s huddled back. “How old were you when you had your first bastard?”

“I do not know,” Xzem whispered.

“Young, then. We’ll say too young and close the door. How many have you had?”

“I do not know.”

“No, I suppose they all blur together after a time. Do any of them still live? No, you wouldn’t know. She’s been sold to so many camps, she’s probably fucked half the sons she brought into this world. What say you, Xzem?” he asked, helping himself to a fresh cup of their foul drink. “They say a mother always knows her child, no matter the years or the distance. Have you ever wondered if those were your own eyes you saw in some stranger’s face before he bent you over?”

Xzem cupped the back of the baby’s head, nuzzling at it with her narrow snout, and stayed silent.

“She came to us so well-used, I was in her three shoves before I knew I was. Chuaan would never have paid for a woman like Xzem, but she had a sprat and Zhuqa’s stupid about sprats.” Dkorm rattled out a laugh and drank. “He actually wants one. Three of his play-women have squeezed one out for him, but they all died. And he burned them,” he added derisively. “Last time, it was raining and he made us all stand out in the fucking rain and watch him burn that noisy little shit-machine like it mattered.”

Dkorm punctuated this statement with a contemptuous glance at the baby in Amber’s arms, but soon his gaze shifted to her body and took on a speculative gleam. He stood and came over to get a better look at her.

Amber moved to put the worktable between them. He followed as unhurriedly as she’d done it, watched her struggle to roll out some clay with the baby tucked up in the crook of her arm, and said, “You could do that better with both hands, I think.”

Amber did not give him the baby.

He didn’t come right out and ask for it either. She felt him lift up a sizeable hank of her hair and drop it again. Then she felt him pressing at her arm. When she glanced tensely back, she found him with his spines all the way forward, watching his fingers dimple into her flesh. “Soft,” he said, almost to himself. “You soft like that all over, Eshiqi?”

She pulled out of his grip.

“Calm yourself. I don’t drink from Zhuqa’s cup,” he snorted. “Besides, I’ll find out soon enough. Zhuqa likes a little fighting spirit in his women, but only if he has the pleasure of breaking it quickly. When he decides you’re too distracting, he’ll put you up on the bidding block. Before long, you’ll be like Xzem here, nothing but a catch-cock with a little meat attached to keep it warm.”

She turned her back on him and went back to the lamps.

Immediately, his hand closed on her shoulder, yanking her roughly around before shoving her hard into the wall. The baby, jolted out of sleep, began to make its high, gaspy wails. Dkorm didn’t even look at it. The color was out on his neck again and visibly pulsing. “Don’t turn your back on me, you flat-faced dip,” he spat.

All around the room, new slaves cringed back and old ones made themselves motionless and invisible.

“You don’t show me your back unless I’m climbing it. I don’t care who you fuck, you’re still a slave in this camp. I can tell Zhuqa a thousand lies that will have that soft hide off you in strips.” He held her gaze a moment longer, then dropped his eyes deliberately to the baby in her protective arms and looked up again. “Shut it up.”

Amber moved warily over to Xzem, never taking her eyes from Dkorm, and passed the baby down. It refused the breast Xzem kept trying to coax on it, but did eventually exhaust itself into an unhappy sleep.

“Fucking sprats,” Dkorm muttered, turning away. He eyed Rosek, sleeping on the floor against her mother’s thigh, but moved on and found a crate against the far wall to sit on. In the other room, one of the children whispered; Dkorm’s neck lit briefly and darkened again. “Fucking sprats,” he said again, thicker. He dropped one hand to his groin and rubbed sullenly at himself, looking at all of them with a growing lack of emotion as his neck lit up brighter and brighter.

He wasn’t going to take six breaths and calm down.

Amber found his cup and filled it. He watched her do it with ominously blank eyes as he kneaded at himself, but when she brought it to him, he took it. After a moment, he took a drink. After another moment, he leaned back into the wall and tucked the hand that had been between his legs behind his head instead. He looked Amber up and down one last time, then grunted and shut his eyes. “Get back to work, all of you. Quietly. You wake those things and I’ll crack your bones.”