Meoraq looked at that for a long time. Then he looked at her. And at the ceiling, not in his exasperated are-you-seeing-this-too way, but in an uncertain frown. He stayed that way for a while, probably praying. “So be it,” he said at the end. He beckoned to Xzem and she rose, her neck bent and silent tears still falling, to follow him.

“Wait,” Amber said. “I think there’s another way out.”

Meoraq glanced in the direction of the stairwell, which was suspiciously quiet, then followed her pointing finger to the ground, where dots of blood marked the path taken by the panicked raider she’d passed on the way in. He took a few steps in that direction, keeping his sword at the ready as he searched the darkness. “Do you know where it leads?”

“To the well-room,” Xzem said softly.

They both looked at her.

“There is a second stair,” she told them, stroking Rosek’s swollen head. “But the door is always locked and only Zhuqa and his most trusted hold the key.”

“I’ll go get it,” said Amber, and turned to flee.

Meoraq caught angrily at her arm, but looked at the baby and released her, unsure.

“I’ll be all right,” Amber promised, not at all certain this was true, but knowing she could get to Zhuqa’s room and back faster than grieving Xzem could be coaxed to follow. “Stay with her! I’ll be right back!”

His spines flattened. He took the baby and shifted it to one arm, gripping his kzung tightly. “Run, then.”

She tried, galloping through a haze of pain much faster than her hip wanted to hold her, and conscious of every second as it slipped by. There were two bodies on the landing, two more sprawled over the stairs, but no one was waiting there to cut her into pieces. They all knew better than to fight in the cramped, dark shaft, she supposed. And just the fact that it was this dark meant that they’d shut the access door. It couldn’t be blocked from the outside, so if they’d shut it, it was to keep Meoraq blind to how many men were waiting for him on the other side.

‘It could be worse,’ thought Amber, forcing herself down the stairs as noisily, in her own mind at least, as a rhinoceros. ‘They could be getting ready to drop a bomb down the shaft.’

She ran faster.

Zhuqa’s door was yawning open just as she’d left it. She bulled through and limped around him to the heap of his clothes, and thank God he’d actually undressed for his little game tonight, because he’d never done that before and she’d been so badly beaten up between one thing and another that she honestly didn’t think she could have rolled him over to get the keys. Amber got them, looked around, and then—what the hell—limped over to get her shift because it was bound to be cold and rainy outside and there was no point escaping from raiders just to freeze—

Amber froze.

She thought, ‘I didn’t see that.’

She thought, ‘No, I did see that and I just think I didn’t.’

She thought, ‘Please, let me have seen that.’

She turned around.

On the floor between her and the table, Zhuqa lay naked in a thick, black clot of blood with his eyes open and a few splinters of what were probably his teeth strewn loosely in front of his mouth.

The floor directly next to the table was empty.

Well, not entirely empty. She could see the hilt of Zhuqa’s knife lying where she’d dropped it. And she could see, a little ways away from it, the broken blade that she sure thought she’d left buried in Iziz’s head.

It wasn’t even all that bloody. Just a little smear at the very tip. There wasn’t anything at all on the flat end, where she reasoned he would have had to grab it to pull it out, if…if she’d really hit him.

“I hit him,” she whispered, staring wildly all around her at the stubbornly empty room. “I know I hit him.”

And she had hit him. She’d hit him so hard, her hand had gone numb. So hard, the blade had broken. So hard—

—she’d knocked him out.

Oh God.

She’d only stabbed him through the scales. She’d hit the bone of his skull and broke the knife. She hadn’t killed him. She might not have even hurt him all that much.

Iziz was still alive.

‘Well, by all means stand around,’ Bo Peep invited. ‘You can apologize when he comes back.’

She shuddered once, hugely, as if physically shaking free of the hold that empty patch of tiled floor had on her. The first step was still hard. After that, she turned and bolted down the hall like her hip had never been hurt at all. It had been and it let her know it, but by God it didn’t slow her down.

She tore up the stairs, her bare feet banging out echoes they must surely be able to hear wherever they were waiting to ambush them. Meoraq ran to meet her, hugging the baby under his arm like a football, so that her first words on reaching him weren’t anything to do with Iziz at all but a shrill, “Oh for Christ’s sake, lizardman, what’s wrong with you?!” She gave him the keys, took the baby, and smacked him in the side of the head, all in the same half-panicked movement.

His arm swung hard enough to make the air howl, but he caught the blow before it hit her. They both stared at his fist, cocked and shaking in the air—he, with glazed eyes and yellow flashes at his throat; she, in open-mouthed astonishment. He recovered first. Without a word, he turned around and ran the other way.

Xzem was waiting at the end of the long hall, next to the fresh body of a raider. It might have been the same one she’d passed earlier; she couldn’t tell when he was lying face-down like that and didn’t want to look. Meoraq worked the keys and tucked it into his belt immediately, freeing his hand for his samr. The stairwell on the other side of the door was dark and silent, catching every sound and throwing it back in echoes. Meoraq listened, then closed the door to hiss, “If it goes badly, run and I will find you. If I don’t find you…go on to Xi’Matezh. God will send you on.”

Knowing there wasn’t time for words of comfort, even if she could have thought of something to say, Amber reached out and touched his arm.

And felt him stiffen. Shudder. And pull out of her grip. He started up the stairs without looking at her.

Suddenly, Amber’s hip hurt more. She let Xzem go ahead of her, watching Meoraq climb around the corner and out of sight without ever once glancing her way. The baby snuffled against her chest and reached out its tiny hand to pinch at her. She hugged it closer, dragging herself up one stair at a time, thinking, ‘That shouldn’t be much of a shock either, little girl.’

And the worst of it was, it really wasn’t.

The stairwell was capped, like the other stair, with an access door that opened into a covered building. This one had the look of a stable, long and not too narrow, with stall-like partitions indicated by wooden poles and plenty of harnesses and lengths of chain hanging on the walls.

It was a stable, built for raiders’ cattle, the two-legged kind. The only other door was at the far wall, where Hruuzk was yoking slaves together in a double line. He didn’t bother to look around when he grunted, “This is all there were in the pens. I didn’t stop to hunt up the rest of them. Where do you want me?”

Meoraq attacked. He did it without asking for prayers, without any warning at all. His boots struck three times against the planks before he leapt, and by then Hruuzk had already shoved the team of slaves away and was turning to meet him.

They crashed together, four swords and two bodies in a terrible riot of screaming women and spraying blood. Amber thrust the baby into Xzem’s listless embrace and darted forward, snatching up the first thing she saw that even looked like a weapon: a short length of chain attached to a heavy collar. She didn’t try to swing it—couldn’t have, not without hitting Meoraq, a slave, or Xzem and the babies—but she jumped on Hruuzk’s mammoth back the very instant he offered it to her and bashed him on the head as hard as she could. If she could knock Iziz out with a knife-tip, she reasoned, she could surely take Hruuzk out with an iron ring, or whatever the metal was.