Oh Jesus, really? The giggles came streaming out of her around the fish hook. She pressed her lips tightly together and stared at the ceiling while Zhuqa finished that side and moved his snout tenderly to the other side of her throat. The hand covering her left breast lightly squeezed, experimenting with her.
“I guess you remember yesterday,” she said, because silence was never golden with this man for very long and if she had to talk, she wanted to do it when he had his face buried in her hair and not when he was looking right at her. Hopefully—please god no atheists here tonight nothing here but us chickens please god—he didn’t know English so well that he could tell her teeth were clamped together.
He grunted softly against her skin, moved his hand from her right breast to her hip and tugged her lightly against him. “You are a terrible distraction to me, Eshiqi,” he told her, and if there were more chilling words he could have said, she honestly didn’t know what they were. Zhuqa the Warlord could not afford distractions. “My mind has been with you all day. Tell me…” He caught her hand, licked the palm, and then put it on his loin-plate. “Would you like to see the sky tonight?”
She smiled and started to kneel.
He stopped her. “Not here,” he said, still apparently unaware of anything amiss as she struggled not to stare at him or show the racing of her heart. He pointed back at the table, where their meal had already been set aside in anticipation of the evening’s festivities. In its place, an extra lamp burned brightly. “This time, I want to watch you.”
* * *
In the first creeping hour after dark, when the last of the light was gone from the sky and any thinking man might know that it was time to seek shelter from the night’s preying beasts, Meoraq came at last to the ruins and found them lit in welcome. His first foolish urge was to draw his blades and charge ahead. He mastered it and instead hunkered low in the grass, watching and praying in silence.
He saw men—or what might be called men, if one knew no better—moving below the lamps that hung at the open doorways of the ruins. When the wind was with him, he could even hear them, however dimly, laughing and calling to one another as any men might do at the close of their day. There were not many, not at this first accounting, but even then Meoraq noted that the ruins were in a most carefully kept state of workable disrepair. The high towers had fallen in, yes, and the wildlands had reclaimed much, but here where the lamps were lit, the remnants of the Ancient roads were remarkably cleaned of loose debris. Whole fields had been laid within the roofless shells of great buildings, ready for the season’s first crop. There were indeed canals, not dug in the age of the Ancients, but relatively fresh; brackish water ran in a swift current, caught from some unseen waterway and turned through these ruins as expertly as any irrigation system he had seen in the cities. He could see hooked nets at every landing, set to catch whatever swam in its muddy flow, but while the water was not clean, neither did it reek of waste. There was a hint of that on the wind when it turned, but only a hint; they kept their fleshing vats covered and regularly cleaned, and their compost freshly-turned.
The more he saw, heard, smelled, the more Meoraq understood that this was not a den of raiders like any he had come across in the past. This was no winter-camp just waking from the cold. This was a settlement, with many years of success rooted beneath it. The eleven men he could see moving about in the lamplight could not possibly account for the work that had gone into making this camp, or sustaining it. There might be fifty men waiting in the foundations below. And whoever led them was not only strong enough to hold the loyalty of such deadly men, but clever enough to have built all this.
He thought of Szadt, the Raider-Lord, who had stabbed his way into Kuaq and held it for three days with the aid of Gann’s weapons. Whoever nested in these ruins might well have such weapons also. Explosive fires that burned the flesh off a man’s bones in moments. Lights that cut like swords. Thunder in a man’s hand that could crush another’s brain right there in his unbroken skull. All this, and Sheul alone knew what other forms of undefendable death were there to be found in Gann’s world.
But Szadt had been killed. Meoraq’s own father had climbed the bloodied wall of Kuaq and hurled the Raider-Lord’s headless body to the ground in spite of all the weapons Gann had given him. A man might armor himself in wickedness and arm himself with machines, but he would always be a man, born of clay, and all men trembled before Sheul’s might.
A ghost of memory in Amber’s voice, uninvited: If you’re stupid enough to jump off a cliff, God doesn’t catch you.
It pierced him, but not as the warning she had meant it to be on its first speaking. His Amber. His outrageously audacious and uncouth Amber. He could see no slave-pens, which only increased his surety that the true nest was below ground, out of sight and far better defended. His Amber was there, unseen, suffering as she had suffered every hour of these past seven days, and if Gann himself rose up, still Meoraq would have her back. His throat still ached where the boy had choked him and his body was worn to the very edge of exhaustion after this run, but Sheul was with him and that was all that mattered.
He could all but hear the smacking sound of her little hand against her smooth forehead, all but feel the puff of her breath as she sighed.
Meoraq drew the knife of his fathers from its sheath and touched the smooth knob of Rasozul’s thigh bone to his heart. “See me now, O father of my flesh,” he whispered, and glanced upwards. “See me always, O Father of my eternal soul. Be with me now, both of you, and be with my wife. If it is Your will, O Sheul, I will hold her in my living arms again. And if it is Your will, my beloved Father, I will hold her in Your halls. Wherever I do come to hold her, I thank You for bringing her once more within my reach.”
The wind blew, whispering its own refrain. Meoraq tapped the knife twice to his chest and sheathed it. He drew his kzung instead, the blade for the killing of beasts, and began to crawl. He felt no fear, but his heart still hammered. His limbs carried him without shaking. His mind was clear, painfully so, like the coldest winds of winter that seem to crush the throat that breathes them in. He crawled without questioning what might become of him when this hour ended. He was not Uyane Meoraq any longer, but the Sword in God’s hand, and when he reached the first of the raiders—a man strolling out alone into the grass, opening his breeches with one hand; the other was nothing but a raw-looking stump, fresh enough to show scabbing along the stitched end—he cut without hesitation, without emotion, without design.
There was no moon behind the clouds, no flash across his blade, only a hiss and a spray of heat and the wind blowing to hide the sound of a body falling in the grass. He did not stop to drag the corpse away or try in any way to hide it. His eyes, Sheul’s eyes now, were already moving on to the next man. He breathed deep and slow, a master of his clay and of his killing hand, and went with God’s blessing burning in his heart to get his wife back.
* * *
Zhuqa leaned back on the table, a lamp burning to either side of him, black scales flickering with reflected light—a demon in repose. He watched, hissing softly with pleasure, as she nuzzled at his slit and tried desperately to think of how the hell she was going to either take the fish hook out of her mouth without him seeing it or give him the blowjob with it in, options which sure as hell seemed to mark the opposite ends of a whole spectrum of failure. So far, he was showing phenomenal restraint and a willingness to let the moment draw itself out, as demonstrated by the fact that he was still tucked away despite the spicy-sweet oils bedewing his slit, but any second now, he was going to lose his patience with this kittenish crap and expect her to lick something. And one of the many sad realities of life was that it was impossible to lick while holding something clenched in your teeth.
