Hruuzk did stagger. He also reached back and plucked her off him, swinging her on a short, violent arc over his shoulder to strike up against his chest with his sword suddenly at her throat. “Drop it or she dies!” he bellowed.

Meoraq lunged without expression, stabbing his samr under Amber’s arm and into the slave-master’s heart. She felt and heard the splintering of bone when Meoraq twisted and then wrenched the blade free. He knotted a fist in her shift and yanked her to him as the slave-master collapsed. She could feel the hot gush of his heart’s blood on her back, not quite shocking enough to distract her from the equally hot tickle of blood on her front, streaming from the little nick on her throat where Hruuzk’s sword had cut her.

She stared at him.

“Quiet that…Quiet the child.” He let go of her and moved on to the outer door, pulling Zhuqa’s keys from his belt.

The baby was screaming, tiny fists balled and hammering at the scaled arm that held it. Xzem gave it up wordlessly and stroked at Rosek’s swollen snout. She was still crying. Amber was dangerously close to joining her.

Meoraq cracked the door open and looked tensely out, threw the captive women an assessing stare, and finally gestured to Amber. She joined him at the door, not so numb that she failed to notice the perfectly chilling glance he sent at the baby now purring resentfully against her breast. But he moved aside, careful not to touch her, and let her look.

She didn’t try to count them. The distance and the dark would have made that difficult even if there weren’t so many or if they were holding still instead of prowling impatiently around the building where they thought Meoraq had to emerge. She could hear shouting, but couldn’t make out the words. Moving torches throughout the ruins told her they were making a search of the other structures, and sooner or later, they’d come here.

“For the moment, they still believe they are attacked by a band of men,” Meoraq told her, grimly watching the torches. “And they have not yet fully rallied. Once they do, or once they learn it is only one warrior who stands against them, it is done. Be silent, all of you!” Meoraq snapped, and the white-noise whimpering of the captives dialed itself down into sniffles. To Amber, brusquely, he said, “We will go out, that way, around the wall. When it is at our back, we run. Be aware, the wind will cover only so much sound.”

“It’ll be quiet now,” said Amber, holding the baby securely against her body.

He grunted, checked outside, and looked back at the women. “We will go as far as we can as fast as we are able, but it is three days running to Praxas.”

She didn’t think she had much of a run left in her, but didn’t dare to say so.

He grunted and moved away to unlock the women. Amber stayed at the door and watched the torches track slowly back and forth across the camp, listening to chains clink behind her as Meoraq gave everyone their orders. Amber’s hip ached. She shifted her weight onto her other leg and listened to the baby purr until Meoraq rejoined her at the door, brushing her aside to peer out. His body was hard as marble. He didn’t say anything to her. He waited, coiled and ready, then pushed the door open and moved out, sword in hand. The women followed, as tight in their formation as if they were still yoked together. Then Xzem, her head down and tears shimmering over her scales. Last of all, Amber, straining to limp at any kind of speed and praying the baby wouldn’t protest this treatment as long as it was her doing the jostling. By the time she got around the side of the stable, the only one she could see at all was Xzem, and only for a few more seconds.

She ran anyway, blind in the night, following the smudge of moonlight behind the churning clouds, even though it showed her nothing but the ghost of her own body. When Meoraq at last came lunging out of this impenetrable black, it was only her breathless exhaustion that kept her from screaming surprise.

He caught her arm as she staggered, and let her go again as soon as she had her feet solidly under her. He looked at the baby and his flat spines quivered against his skull.

“I’m not leaving it!” she hissed. “So don’t you even ask me!”

“You can barely carry yourself, woman!”

“Then leave me!” Tears of horror sparked, as if she somehow hadn’t known she was going to say it even with the words in her own mouth. She shook her head, her arms tightening around the baby until it squeaked in annoyance. “Leave us both!”

Meoraq looked at her for a long time.

And then he turned around.

As Amber pulled in the shaky breath that would have become her first wail of despair, he dropped to one knee and made a gesture like throwing something over his shoulder. He did not speak. His back was very stiff and straight.

“Are you…praying?” she ventured.

“No!” he snapped back, and made the gesture again. “Hold on to me. Hurry!”

She couldn’t wrap her legs around his hips without a moan, and that moan became a wrenching cry when he seized her thighs and hupped her up higher. She dug one arm around his neck, kept the other tight around the baby, now riding squeezed between them and not very happy about it, and Meoraq began to run.

Even burdened as he was with her weight, he caught up to the others in just a few minutes and soon was running at their head again. Amber bumped along in agony on his back, clenching her jaws to mute the screams she could not stop herself from making, and just waited for it to end.

12

He could not run them all night, although he tried. Their pace slowed and slowed and finally, he was forced to cast it all in Sheul’s hands and set them down in a camp. He allowed them no fire. They had no food. He gave Amber the swallows that were left in his waterskin and she annoyed him immediately by passing it off to the slave-mother, who drank it all without thanks and resumed her silent vigil over her dying child.

The wind gave way to rain. The women huddled together to defend against it as best they could, miserable and making little secret of it. Amber sat apart from the rest of them and held the infant close to her heart. Meoraq knew she was watching him, but he could not make himself go and sit beside her yet. He made endless patrols in the dark, waiting for an enemy that never showed itself, and caught himself several times rubbing restlessly at his loin-plate. He had burned longer and deeper this night than he had ever even imagined, but the flames were still close. He wanted to find raiders in pursuit of them, wanted to give that blessed heat possession of his hands and heart and mind. Failing that, he wanted to lie with his woman, but not in front of an audience of six witnessing slaves.

And their children.

The baby bothered him. Not the slave-mother’s yearling, which was already dead in every way save that of its clay, but the other baby. The one that Amber refused to leave behind even at the risk of her own life. He did not know precisely what she would say to him if he told her that the creature she was cuddling only looked like a baby with a soul, but was in truth no more than Gann’s clay given the seeming of life by the abominable sin of its conception…no, he didn’t know what she would say to that, but he was reasonably certain it would come in shouts and perhaps with her fist bouncing off his hide.

Meoraq grunted to himself, glancing back into the darkness where he knew his wife to be, even if he could not see her. Sheul’s urges again flared, but he walked on and gradually the fires became coals. Once he was rid of the slaves, he would show Sheul a proper thanks for the return of his Amber, but for now, the enemy was surely close.

And the enemy’s clay-born spawn, even closer.

It looked like a baby. It sounded like one. Its tiny fingers gripped at Amber’s soft breast like the fingers of any true baby he had seen. Not that his interest in watching such things had ever been strong, he had to admit that, which meant that if there were some subtle clue proving the child’s innate sin, he could only assume he’d missed it.