“I assure you, I had no knowledge of this!” Rsstha said, scrambling to his feet. He shoved his aide away and aimed an accusing hand at the guard standing silent by Nicci’s cage. “This…this…bestiality shall be punished!”

Meoraq’s head cocked at a dangerous angle. “It is no sin for Sheul to urge a man to lie with humans,” he said. “We are all His children.”

Rsstha blinked rapidly for several seconds before, perhaps, visibly recalling Amber and the scar on her shoulder.

“It is no sin to feel that urge. The sin,” said Meoraq, “lies with selling it.”

The watchman took a deep breath and did his best to let it out slow. He raised his chin and closed his eyes. “My name is Seelat Vin.”

“Seelat Vin, you have broken the Fifth Law. You have made trade of flesh and so acted against the Word of Sheul. You have broken your faith with Him and as His Sword, I deem you unforgiveable. Stand and be judged.”

The nerve which had steadied the watchman until this point crumbled. He cried out for his father, flinching back from the cut that swept across his throat, but it was already over by then and the flinch only opened the fresh gap between head and neck that much wider. He staggered as blood poured in a dark flood across his chest and then fell, his last breath turning to froth under his sagging chin.

The humans in their cage at last showed some reaction, recoiling with even more force than the governor and his aide, who found themselves splattered with blood. And then one of them—he really should know the name—surged forward to seize the bars, saying, “Holy shit, that’s Meoraq!”

Meoraq paid the death a proper witness and then, with great effort, turned away. “Get out,” he said to the other guard. The humans set up an immediate clamor, beating on the bars and calling his name in their mangled way, but he ignored them for now and turned to Governor Rsstha. “Release them. Do you have a tablet?” he asked the aide.

“Release…? What?”

“Yes, sir,” said the aide, producing one from his deep sleeve, along with a stylus.

“I require…” He eyed the humans, blackly considering. “Four tents. Each human is to have a pack, two sets of clothing and a blanket. I will also have four travel-flasks and four bricks of cuuvash. You will take everything to Southgate immediately.”

“Honored one, you cannot take these creatures!” the governor stammered. “Sheul gave them to Praxas for study. They are mine!”

Meoraq turned on him fast and hissed, “If you claim possession, then you have broken the Fifth Law yourself! All of you! All who have penned these people as cattle, who force bestial behavior upon them against the Word of Sheul, have broken faith with Him! Do you submit to my judgment then or do you release them?”

Rsstha rather visibly groped for his wits, ultimately falling back into the habits of his office. “I will call for a tribunal—”

“It will be your own!” Meoraq leveled his bloody samr at the guard, still standing silent beside the cage where Nicci huddled, looking back at him without expression. “Get out, I said!”

The guard still did not immediately move, which was understandable since there was no way out of the room save through the door where Meoraq was standing, but when Meoraq looked at him, he eased forward, hesitated again, and then fled.

Rsstha hissed to his aide, who sprinted down the hall, snatching up his robes around his knees. Then he turned a haughty eye on Meoraq and said, “Honored one, you overstep yourself.”

Fire burst in Meoraq’s brain and before he could stop himself, he’d seized a ruling governor by his fine robes and slapped him across the snout. And again. And again. “I hold this piss-gully in my fucking shadow!” he roared, still slapping. “I would not be overstepping by a fucking scale if I ran a sword up your slit and out your mouth! Open that fucking door!”

With that, he turned and hurled the man across the room and into the bars of the cage with force enough to bend them. Meoraq clapped both hands over his eyes and breathed in the dark, listening to Rsstha fumble with his keys and babble out all the ways in which it was obvious that humans were in no way people and that Sheul could not condemn their use in any fashion any more than he condemned the use of cattle for hides Meoraq himself wore. Then the door was open and Scott came spilling out to catch at Meoraq’s arm, saying, “Jesus Christ, am I glad to see you!”

Meoraq shook him off. “Gather your men. N’ki, come!”

Nicci rose, but slowly. Surely she knew him—by Scott’s words if by no other reason—but her gaze remained dull and lifeless. She moved out of the cage and toward him without making any effort to cover herself, and Meoraq sent a second prayer of thanks to Sheul that Amber was not here, but it was a heavy gratitude, for he knew his wife would have to see what her blood-kin had become soon enough.

“I told you he’d find us, didn’t I?” Scott was saying, standing tall at Meoraq’s side as Nicci hobbled her vacant way across the room. “I told you he wouldn’t stop looking!”

“I had not started looking, human,” Meoraq spat. “Nor was I inclined to start. It is Sheul who apparently wishes you spared and I can only think He does so to teach me humility.” And because no one was making a damned move in that direction, Meoraq stalked furiously over and picked Nicci up himself, tossing her across his shoulder where she hung like a sack of grain, half-emptied. “And I tell you right now that He had best make His will very damned clear if He wishes me to move you even one damned step away from this city, because I would just as soon see you all rot in its ruins!”

“Are you mad at us?” Scott asked. He sounded surprised.

Meoraq walked away, letting the humans scramble after and Governor Rsstha stand alone in the mouth of an empty cell. The feel of Nicci swaying with the force of his stride was extremely unpleasant; her hand smacked against his thigh now and then, lifeless as a corpse.

“You are mad,” said Scott, now angry as well as surprised. “Just what the hell do you have to be mad about? You abandoned us, remember?”

Meoraq swung around so fast that Nicci’s limp hand struck the wall behind him. “Lies! You did the leaving, human!”

“She was dying! What were we supposed to do, stand around and watch?”

Meoraq cocked his head warningly and took a few soul-soothing breaths. When he was calm once more, he said, “If you had, you would have been there to see that she did not die.”

They all stared at him, all these flat and ugly faces he had almost forgotten, simply amazed.

“She didn’t?” Scott said finally.

“No.”

“Not then or not ever?”

Meoraq leaned back a little and gave him a hard, dangerous stare.

“Well, I mean…where is she?”

“With me,” said Meoraq and started walking again, reminded by these words that she was not, for the moment.

The humans followed. He could hear them whispering amongst themselves. If any of them were pleased to learn that Amber lived, they showed no sign. He expected no better of them.

‘And so do I stand again among them, O my Father,’ he thought crossly, jogging Nicci’s dead weight higher up upon his shoulder. ‘If this is the price You would have me pay that I receive my woman once more, I will even thank You as I pay it, but of all humans You have chosen to spare, why Scott?’

Sheul had no answer.

The governor’s carriage was too small to fit all the humans. Meoraq ordered a cart and loaded them into the back like sacks of grain. The driver, who had obviously never seen or imagined anything like the humans he was now pulling, got them back to Southgate in half the time it had taken the carriage to make the same trip, a feat even more impressive considering how often he’d been staring back into the cart instead of directing his blindfolded bulls.