Meoraq tried to shake the thought away, but it stayed, growing until he could see just how the fire would be laid. So now it was not a thought at all, but a plan. And perhaps a sin.

He reached out to tap the back of one finger against the misshapen head. It felt like skin, soft as only a yearling’s could be, sticky where its blood had dried and been wetted again by the rain. There was no avoiding it.

“Sheul, O my Father,” he said heavily. “See me now, I pray. Before me, there is one of Gann’s getting and I mean to give it Your final rites. I know it is a terrible thing I do and I must answer for it when I stand before You, but it is too much like a true child, Father, and that is surely how my woman sees it. I will not ask Your blessing, only Your forgiveness, and if there be a sin in what I am about to do, let it all be mine, great Sheul, because my woman knows no better, but I do.” He gathered up the limp body and held it. “And I mean to do it anyway.”

Sheul had no answer for him, which only seemed fitting as he’d asked no questions, but the rains slackened. By the time he’d returned to his camp with the child, it had stopped entirely. Amber watched him come from where she knelt on the ground with her arms around the slave-mother, comforting her. Xzem stared at the ground, her hands clutching at one another and every muscle tensed.

“There will be a fire,” Meoraq said, fully aware that those five words might well have damned him. “We will go to that thicket and there remain until—”

That touch on his boot again. Meoraq felt his spines twitch, but did not allow them to flatten. He looked down, ready to be as patient and sensitive as a man could be while ordering a slave to stop grabbing at him, and found her with both hands on either side of him, palms to heaven. The touch he felt was the top of her head as she pressed it to his mud-caked boot and silently wept.

“Thank you,” Amber said, hugging the other infant even closer. Her shift, overlarge, slipped down at the subtle movement to expose her bare shoulder and the mark of his teeth. Thoughts entirely inappropriate to this moment briefly clouded even the unpleasant sensation of the slave sobbing on his foot. His spines did flatten then, and there was nothing he could do about it. He turned his face away.

Xzem raised her head as Amber stepped back. “Her name was Nali,” she said tremulously. “But I never told her so. Will she…know it? When you pray for her, sir? Must you call her Rosek even then?”

The order to stop touching him burned hot in his throat, and his belly, but it did not touch his voice. “Sheul knows His children.”

The frantic light in her eyes did not dim. “But will He know mine?”

There were no magical answers to that and he could see his troubled silence crippling her with every passing moment, until finally, and for no reason at all, he looked at Amber.

Seeing her, the will of Sheul became vast beyond the imagining of any man. To say that it could be captured in anything so finite as written words suddenly seemed fantastically arrogant. Even the Prophet’s own great work must pale beside His will.

“We were all lost to Gann once,” he said. The words did not come easily, but they felt like truth. “What is lost can be found.”

She searched his eyes, her own bleeding despair and hope so long damaged she didn’t even seem to know it was there. “Swear it, sir,” she whispered finally. “Please, swear it and it is true.”

“No man speaks for Sheul,” said Meoraq. “But I will observe that the child lived through a long night to die here, where it…where Nali was not a slave.”

Xzem stared at him, trying to believe him as the tears spilled endlessly from her eyes, but he had no more comfort to give her and Amber was too close, so he turned away and walked fast into the cooling wind.

At the heart of the thicket where he took the baby was a clearing, abutted by a fallen tree, long dead and well-seasoned and protected enough by the living to be mostly dry. He built the pyre and lay her down. He still didn’t know what she was or how much sin adhered to him for the speaking of these rites, but when the hour came to make the prayers, he made them. And he made certain to call her by her name.

13

He took them to Praxas. He could have given a number of reasons if asked to do so (he was not). He had scant provisions and too many mouths. The raiders had every advantage in the wildlands if they ever decided to pursue. The…infant was far too young to travel indefinitely. And he had to take them somewhere, didn’t he? Surely Amber didn’t expect to keep them?

He would have liked to ask her, but he was afraid of starting a fight. Not because of her moods, but because of his. To say truth, he couldn’t even claim to know just what her moods were, his own were so demanding. Gann’s corruption emanated from the slaves like smoke—invisible, odorless, but choking in his throat whenever he was among them. He kept his distance as much as he could, patrolling while the women rested, but as soon as he was among them, the fires began to burn in his belly and the blackness came creeping in at his mind. And Amber was always there trying to talk to him, touch him, come and sit beside him, unaware that it was Gann’s animal lust that lived in him now, Gann’s honeyed words that whispered in his ear to take her, revel in her, rut with her.

When Amber tried to lie down with him at night, he got up and left. When he had to speak to her, he did it facing away, feeling her wounded eyes on his back like live coals. She was hurting and he did not dare embrace her. He could hear her crying softly at night, but the creeping blackness that took his words would not let him explain. She needed comfort, but until he was away from these women and cleansed of Gann’s taint, he could not give it.

So Meoraq went back to Praxas for the very simple reason that he wanted to be rid of the slaves as soon as possible. The little time he’d spent in that city (not even the city, but at most ten paces down its Southgate tunnel) had given him the impression of an evil place, largely inhabited by men he was ashamed to call brothers under the Blade, but that wasn’t his problem. His entire intent had been to find and reclaim his wife. He had surrendered to Amber’s insistence that the raiders’ slaves had also been set in his path to be rescued solely because there wasn’t time to argue with her. Perhaps it had been Sheul’s will and so perhaps the slaves could be redeemed and brought back into the light of His lamp, but that was for the priests of Praxas to decide. Meoraq’s interests began and ended with Amber.

At first light following the funeral for the…for Nali, Meoraq started them moving. It took too long, owing to the weakened and generally useless condition of the slaves, time which Meoraq spent as far away from them as possible while still keeping them in the shadow of his protection. With Sheul’s guidance, they reached their destination in four days and broke free of the woods surrounding the city close to dusk.

Again, he met no sentries, but this time, it was not for lack of them. He saw one almost immediately after leaving the treeline, but rather than come forward and challenge his party, or at least hide until he had reinforcements enough to make that seem like a good idea, the sentry took off at a run.

Well, all right. Not a commendable act, but perhaps an understandable one. Praxas had sent away a single man and now came eight figures. The obvious conclusion? A raiding party, coming to find out who they had to thank for the visit from a Sheulek.

Before long, the braziers were lit on the wall. In the growing dark, this sign of alarm only illuminated how much of the wall had been too heavily damaged to allow access to a brazier. Meoraq was not intimidated, but he was careful to begin hails at the soonest opportunity and to persist even when he was not answered. Their silence disturbed him far more than the lit braziers, yet they must have recognized him. No one fired upon them anyway, although he could see figures moving on the roof and behind the sealed gate. The Word forbade the use of all weapons which delivered death ‘not requiring the blow of a man’s hand,’ as the Prophet had written, but priests had ruled long ago that a man’s hand could deliver blows in a number of lawful ways—the cut of a sword, the throw of a spear…the tipping of a barrel. In defense of their cities, warriors of the walls kept flammable oils and acids or other volatile substances, not to mention hot coals in the braziers themselves, to repel attack. A city like Praxas, which commerced with raiders, might have anything…but they let him come.