“This makes you happy?”

“Yeah, a bit.”

Meoraq thought that over and shrugged his spines. “If it makes you any happier, I have at least one of those moments nearly every day.”

Her smile widened. “Guess that means we’re married, huh?”

The last of his dark mood blew away like smoke in Sheul’s good, cleansing wind. He put his arm around her. “I suppose it does.”

* * *

The land which would eventually be known as the Ruined Reach had once been among the greatest lands of Gann. Images preserved from that time showed its cities, like pools of glittering light, reaching north as far as the ice deserts and south into the Green Sea. The Prophet wrote much of life in that land, of its loss and of the sins which had made that loss so necessary, and of the poison that had so permeated its soil after the Fall that he warned no man should seek it. Long after the Prophet’s death, one of the Advocates had decreed that the land had healed enough that those seeking pilgrimage in that land had liberty to do so, but in keeping with the spirit of the Prophet’s warning, no road had ever been built that led into the Reach, not even to Xi’Matezh, mere days out of holy Chalh.

Yet with Lord Uyane’s directions and fair weather, the remainder of the journey passed without difficulty. Meoraq’s humans were inclined to be obedient, or at least unobtrusive, and easily managed. Nicci shared his tent and there was nothing he could do about that, but a tent wasn’t much privacy anyway. And it was only for a few more days. He had already decided to demand another tent on his return visit to Chalh and give it to Nicci. Also a bedroll, blanket and even a cushion. Anything to keep her from robbing Amber of her comforts.

Patience, Uyane. Patience for another day. The doors of Xi’Matezh would open and he must not pass them with anger in his heart.

Days passed. He did not count them, although he meditated each night on a new horizon and felt the soil softening beneath his boots. He tasted salt on the wind and felt the damp of the ocean long before he saw it. And when he saw it…

It had been there before him most of that last day, but the glimpses of greyish green he could see through the branches were not worth the inevitable stumble as his feet caught in the clutter of Gedai’s trees. He knew it was the ocean, the end of his journey. He knew it was a marvelous sight, utterly unknown in the city of his birth. He also knew it wasn’t going anywhere.

So when Nicci lost her footing and spilled herself down a sandy slope onto a fallen log, Meoraq called camp, meaning to stay through the night even though the afternoon had scarcely started. He felt no great sense of time lost in doing this—what was another day, more or less?—but considered it a test of his resolve to show patience. In that mind, he sent Amber away with the empty flask and knelt to inspect the injury, ha, of Nicci’s scuffed knee and bruised arm.

Amber returned in mere moments, the flask just as empty. She let it drop. “Come and see this.”

The three human males and Amber’s own Nicci sat around her, but Amber said this only to him.

Meoraq went and through the trees, not twenty paces from his camp, the forest broke and the ground dropped away. They stood at the top of a cliff, nearly sheer, six times the height of any city wall, plummeting down onto a deadly mash of rock and steel and ruin, sloping away over a wide swath of rust-colored sand, and there was the ocean at the end of it.

He had seen pictures. He had thought that would prepare him, that he could see the ocean and somehow still know how he fit beside it. But there it was and it was as deep as sight would go, so vast that it became the horizon, so entire that he could see the very curve of the world along its skin.

He did not think to look for the temple in that first moment. He did not think at all. Uyane Meoraq beheld the naked body of Gann—its breathing lung, its beating heart, its pregnant belly—and forgot his own entirely until Amber took his hand.

He looked at it, anchored suddenly into his own clay’s dimensions, and then at her. She did not meet his eye. She, too, was lost in the sea.

He looked back into the ocean and was at once dizzied. The way it moved restlessly toward him…it felt as though he were falling and there was nothing to grab at, no hope of rescue. He felt that he could fall along that undulating skin forever until he slipped up into the sky. He looked and saw Gann pressed to Sheul’s heaven with nothing between them, no difference at all.

“Is it…beautiful?” he asked uncertainly.

“I don’t know.” She hesitated and shifted a little closer. “I don’t like it. It’s too high. And everything down there…looks dead. I don’t know,” she said again. “I’ve never been to the beach before. This wasn’t what I imagined.”

“Hell, no,” Crandall announced.

They both turned, and just why he should be surprised to see the others, Meoraq truly did not know, but he was, as much as if he were seeing them for the first time.

Crandall crossed his arms back and forth in front of his chest, shaking his head for emphasis. “Hell, no,” he repeated. “The joy ride ends here. I am not climbing down that. Bull-shit.”

Meoraq looked again at the cliff, but not for long. The height, the eroded fingers of the ruins pointing out of the sand, the constant swallowing sound of the sea—the single glance that Meoraq took found its way to his belly and knotted there.

“You and the lizard can do what you want,” Crandall was saying. “I ain’t killing myself so he can plant a tree in Israel or whatever the fuck he thinks he’s doing.”

“Relax, man. There has to be another way down.”

“Says who? Don’t you ever watch the travel shows? Since when do they ever put temples where any old asshole can walk in?”

“Hey, Bierce.” Eric reached toward Amber, visibly thought better of it when Meoraq looked at him, then settled for pointing. “What’s that look like to you?”

Meoraq looked along the top of the cliff, since that was where Eric seemed to be pointing, but saw nothing except the same thick forest they had been struggling through for days. Yet Amber actually gasped, her hand clenching where she still held his. So Meoraq looked again, at the treeline this time and then the treetops and finally at Amber, who was looking back at him with wide, disbelieving eyes.

“You don’t see it, do you?” she said.

He looked a third time, squinting as if through smoke and darkness and driving rain, but saw only the same close growth of trees, too tall and thin for Meoraq’s comfort, almost black against the grey sky. With a little imagination, he could see a thousand, thousand crooked fingers, pointing in defiance at the God that had judged this land and found it wanting, but he could not see a temple.

Even when she pointed, he saw nothing but another tree, a little taller than the rest, but no more or less remarkable than any other. But where the others were wrapped in years of parasitic growth, dripping creepers and grasses that would have had no chance at life on the sunless forest floor, this tree stood naked, branchless, burnt black. A dead tree then, and yet he could see by Amber’s face that it was more.

“I cry,” he said. “What is it?”

“I…It…I don’t know.”

“Well, I don’t know either,” said Eric, shading his eyes in an effort to see the thing better. “But it sure looks like a transmission tower to me. Sheesh. Wouldn’t that just chap Scott’s ass?”

* * *

The walls that surrounded Xi’Matezh had been raised, it was said, by the Prophet’s own Oracle Mykrm, and his mark was said to have been carved on the very last stone to be set. Meoraq looked for it as they circled around in search of entry, but with only half an eye. There was so much else to see. The curious color of the stone—nearly black, mottled through with grey and green—made it all but impossible to see through the thick trees. Meoraq had never made a formal study of stone, but all the rock he saw beneath his feet was of that pale, flaking kind; this stone had been quarried elsewhere, brought for the singular purpose of enclosing this sacred place, and the sight of it did his weary clay great good.