“There was no woman,” said Meoraq. He did not consider it a lie. The woman who had given herself to him for healing during his long stay at Xheoth was no pleasure but a compulsion of Sheul’s granting and never entered his mind.

“Was it two women?”

“No.”

“Ten?”

“No,” said Meoraq, grinning. “Although I appreciate your high opinion of me.”

“I would trade all the teeth out of my head to be you for one night,” sighed Nkosa, and turned his empty cup right-side up again.

“And it would be a fine night, I suppose, if you abused it right,” said Meoraq, flicking his spines dismissively, “but you would be toothless the rest of your life and I think you would remember that best.”

“I will eat soft bread and think of all the shoulders I have bitten.” Nkosa shivered elaborately, then sighed again and gave the wall a careful kick. “I suppose you heard I married.”

“No. It was only rumor when I was here last.”

“Omen, you mean. The ill-boding shadow of my inescapable future. I think her father owed my father some cattle or something,” he said vaguely, meaning, of course, the man his mother had married and not Rasozul. “It’s been a bad year for cattle, so we got the girl instead.”

Meoraq frowned.

Nkosa noticed and snorted. “It’s not like that, they tell me. The debt still stands, it’s just that her father has longer to pay us at a more forgiving price because, you see, we’re kin now. Her name is Serra. Serra! What kind of a name is that?”

Meoraq knew better than to ask if she was pretty, since that would have been the first thing his old friend would have mentioned, if true. Instead, he said merely, “How does she suit you?”

“Eh. She stays in the other side of the house most of the time, with my father’s wife and the servants. I hardly know her.”

“Your women share rooms with the servants?”

“We don’t all have Houses, Raq,” said Nkosa with a snort. “Some of us just have homes. But she’s all right, I suppose. I just wish I knew what to do with her.”

“Your father really should have explained that to you years ago,” Meoraq said with a concerned frown. He gave Nkosa a comradely tap and said, “Sometimes, when a man sees a woman, Sheul will give him certain urges—”

“You are such an idiot,” snapped Nkosa, shoving at him, and naturally that was what he was saying and doing when the door opened.

The man who had walked haplessly through that door frowned around at once, saw Meoraq, saw the honor-knives at his arms, and dropped the cup he had been idly stirring. It shattered on the tiles. Nai splashed over his feet, staining the hem of his neat, clerkish breeches, but it wasn’t hot enough to steam. “What did you say?”

Nkosa opened his mouth, but the other man gave him no time to answer.

“How could you—? Inexcusable! Representing this hall—!” Words briefly failed him. He floundered, then drew himself up and pointed two shaking fingers at Nkosa, saying, “This man will be punished, honored one, severely punished!”

Meoraq kept his hand on Nkosa’s shoulder and clenched it, preventing a repentant bow. He said, quietly, “You are intruding on a private conversation. If it is in me to take offense, it is far more likely to be with you. Remove yourself.”

He did, stammering apologies, but the mood was dead and there was no reviving it. Nkosa muttered something that might have been the other man’s name and some slur on his parentage, but he kept his head bent. They were almost brothers by blood, almost brothers under the Blade, almost friends just by nature…but only almost. Sometimes that was enough to bridge the gap between them. Sometimes it just wasn’t.

Meoraq released him. Nkosa went and started picking up shards of nai-damp clay. “I should tell someone you’re here,” he said, not looking up. “Some foreign official has been waiting on you for days.”

“Exarch Ylsathoc.” Meoraq flicked his spines dismissively. “So I hear. Do you know why?”

“You have to be better than a front-room watchman before they tell you things like that. I only see his name and yours on my duty sheet. It might be nice if someone here thought I could do my job,” he added at a mutter. “But if you want to hide from him, there’s a petition in the hall right now.”

“A Sheulek doesn’t have to hide from anyone,” said Meoraq. And frowned. “A dispute at this hour?”

“They’ve been here half the day. They brought their champion, so it must be serious. I didn’t hear the charges.”

Nor was there any reason he should. His sole responsibility was to this one gate in this one room. And assuming it was not ingloriously stripped from him for one moment’s thoughtless joking, it would be the most responsibility he ever had in all his service as a man of the warrior’s caste.

“I suppose I should put my name in,” said Meoraq, heading for the door. “It was good to see you, ‘Kosa.”

“Think of me tonight when you’re making free with all your conquered virgins,” Nkosa said morosely.

“I sincerely hope not. But think of me while you get dipped with your wife.”

“I always do.”

They both laughed, but it wasn’t quite the same laughter as it might have been.

The clerk, or whoever he was, was in the hall just outside, gesticulating wildly as he hissed to a whole crowd of solemn-faced men, some of them robed as judges. Civil judges, perhaps, but a very bad thing to see. They all looked at Meoraq.

Nothing he did now could possibly be the right thing to do. If he said nothing, Nkosa was sure to be punished, which could mean anything from the loss of his post to a public whipping. If they waited to bring their charge against him until Meoraq was gone and another Sheulek heard that he had put his naked hand on Meoraq, Nkosa could easily be exiled to the wildlands or even executed. But if Meoraq did speak in Nkosa’s defense, he would make a public issue out of what still might be a private one, humiliating not only his friend, but the man whose name he carried. The taint could reach as far as his household’s master, the steward-lord of House Kanko, who might take the view that House Uyane had dishonored him personally. For that matter, the governor of this piss-miserable little city might raise formal charges against the governor of Xeqor, since House Uyane was that city’s championing House.

The only reasonable response was silence.

Meoraq twitched his spines…then flattened them and strode purposefully over to the watchful crowd. “Twice a year,” he said over their bowing heads, “I have the pleasure to see my cousin.” It wasn’t entirely untrue. They were blood-kin, anyway. “We have precious few moments together and you—” He leaned close, staring furiously into the top of the clerk’s bent head. “—have robbed me of three of them. One for the interruption I might have forgiven. Two for the threat you had no right to make. And three that I find you so soon smearing the tale out into the hall. How say you, man?”

The man could not seem to say anything. Meoraq was not entirely certain he was breathing, although he did appear to be trembling very slightly.

Meoraq gave him a quick count of six to feel the weight of all these staring eyes and then he straightened up and drew his samr.

Everyone took a long step away, save the clerk, who dropped with a wheeze of terror to his knees. He stared up at him, his eyes in the lamp-light like daubs of jelly, like something already dead that only glistened.

“Uyane Meoraq stands before you,” spat Meoraq. He was calm, quite calm despite the venom in his tone and the shine of his naked blade. “And with the right to carry this weapon comes the right to use it however I will. You offend me.”

From the kneeling man’s motionless, open mouth came a series of soft, dry clicking sounds. After a moment, Meoraq decided he was trying to say, ‘I cry,’ but managing only the first glottal before his strength failed. His bladder, Meoraq noticed, already had. A twinge of disgust flexed through his spines, seeing that. He did not expect every man to face death as a warrior, but he should at least face it as a man.