When Meoraq raised his eyes from this enticing sight, he found Tsazr gazing back at him. He managed not to flinch, but it was a clumsy salute he finally gave and an even clumsier excuse for his presence: “I’ve come to clean your boots, sir.”
Tsazr’s spines flared. He shifted his legs slightly apart and leaned forward to look down at his feet. He seemed to stare for quite some time. When he looked up again, he was frowning. “I know you. You’re one of Razi’s sprats. Nduman, is it?”
That cut at him. Yes, it had been sixty days and some, but he had been in service to Tsazr half the year before that. “Meoraq,” he said, as neutrally as possible. “Your brunt.”
“Ah yes. So I recall. Well, I knew it wasn’t Salkith, so I think I can count that half a stroke in my favor.” Tsazr rubbed at the side of his snout, studying Meoraq’s face intently. “You look very much like your father. Have you ever been told?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’ll only hear it more as you get older. Striking man, your father.” Tsazr leaned back again into the curve of the window and looked out. “The stuff of bad poetry. Handsome as hell, but a hard-cut face and a stare like the edge of a knife.” He glanced idly back at Meoraq and grunted, then returned his gaze to the sky. “Pity there’s not a mark of your mother on you, boy. At least Salkith got her eyes.”
He didn’t know how to answer that, so he said nothing. Whatever first spark of pleasure there had been in receiving so direct a conversation from his normally-taciturn master was now entirely turned to ash. Even the compliment of this comparison to his father (even if it was only to his looks) added to Meoraq’s growing unease.
“I saw your mother once,” Tsazr was saying now. “Pretty eyes. They don’t do much for your brother, but you can’t blame Yecedi for that. The finest windows in the world can’t improve the view and Salkith’s brains are no stronger than his bones. I know what you want to ask me,” Tsazr said without pausing or changing his mild, musing tone.
“Sir?”
“And it ought to be something along the cut of, ‘Where the hell did you see my mother?’ but it isn’t.” Tsazr glanced back again, but his eyes stayed far away. “So cough it up. You’ve got me in a rare mood, boy, but I don’t mean to make it easy for you to take advantage of me.”
Meoraq’s breath caught in his throat, so that he very nearly did cough. His feet took him forward, however unwisely, until he was not merely intruding upon his master’s private room, he was actually in reach of him and the slap he probably deserved for this outrageous impropriety. Even knowing that, he couldn’t stop himself. “Did you reach the temple, sir? Did you stand at Xi’Matezh?”
Tsazr’s head tipped past humor to sarcasm, but his eyes stayed sharp. “If I choose to answer only one question tonight, is that really the one you want to ask? If I reached it? If I stood?”
“Did the doors open?” Meoraq asked. Demanded, almost. A part of him remained lucid enough to be appalled at the tone he took, but all the rest of him was lost to fever. A Sheulek must be the master of his impulses, but Meoraq was not Sheulek yet. “Did you enter?”
Tsazr gazed at him a long time without moving, without even blinking. “Yes,” he said at last and looked back out the window.
Meoraq’s hand twitched, but he kept them both at his sides. “Did you hear Him?” he asked hoarsely. “Did Sheul speak to you?”
Tsazr was quiet, but his eyes moved constantly, shifting from cloud to cloud as the skies rolled endlessly onward. When he finally spoke, it was not in answer. Or at least, not in any answer that made sense.
“There used to be lights in the sky at night.”
Meoraq drew back, slapped somewhat from the curiosity that had gripped him, although not so much that he made his proper apologies and left. “Sir?”
Tsazr gestured upwards. “Long before my time, of course, but it is truth. You can read it in books. You can even see pictures if you know where to look. They had a name, but I don’t remember what it is. You can’t see them anymore, but I suppose they’re still there. The only lights we have left…Here, what would you call that?” he asked suddenly, pointing out at the sky.
Meoraq looked, hesitated, and ventured, “The sun, sir.”
“Would you indeed?” Tsazr snorted, then laughed boldly. “Lies.”
The thought of retreat finally raised itself in Meoraq’s baffled mind. One foot even eased backwards, but that was all. Tsazr had never been a talkative man before this night and might never be again. “What is it then?” he asked uncertainly.
“It is the light,” said Tsazr, with startling force and venom, “of the sun. And you might think they are one and the same, but you’d be wrong, Uyane. It may be proof that the sun stands behind it, but it is not the sun and it is neither honest nor right to let others say that it is, and even less so to let them believe it when you know better. Having said that…” Tsazr paused and rubbed at his snout again, rubbed hard enough that Meoraq could actually hear the tendons in his master’s hands creaking. It had to hurt, but if anything, Tsazr only rubbed harder. “Having said that,” he said again, quietly but with the same force. “I must also tell you that the doors of Xi’Matezh did open and I did go inside and yes, Uyane, Sheul spoke to me. Why not? The light is not the sun, but it is proof undeniable that the sun stands behind it and so I say I heard the voice of Sheul. His words were not a comfort to me. Do you say truth or lie?”
Meoraq’s mouth dropped open for possibly the first time in his life, aghast at the notion of daring to pass judgment on his master at all.
Tsazr took his hand away from his face. “I said, what say you?” he hissed. “Don’t you stand there and gape at me like your idiot brother or I’ll knock the teeth right out of your head! Answer!”
“Truth!” he blurted.
Tsazr snorted again, but it was an angry sound and not a laughing one at all. “And why is that, brunt? Because I am Master Tsazr, once Tsazr Dyuun in the sight of Sheul, or because you suddenly realize you are in the easy striking reach of a madman?”
Meoraq answered without thinking, which was never a clever way to answer a training master, but all his training seemed to have left him. “You are not a madman, sir.”
“Ha! You sound pretty damned sure of yourself.”
“Yes, sir.”
Tsazr continued to glare at him for a time, but it ended with another snort of humor. He looked back at the sun. “I used to be pretty damned sure of myself once, too.”
That was all Tsazr seemed inclined to say and it would have been a good time to leave, but Meoraq stayed and eventually Tsazr heaved a sigh and looked at him again.
He wanted to ask. He even opened his mouth a few times, but he couldn’t quite dare to speak, not with the man looking at him this way. He wasn’t a madman, Meoraq was sure of that (however unreasonably), but he was still a dangerous one and Meoraq had done enough this night to earn six sound beatings. At last, in defeat, Meoraq bent his neck and made a salute.
“Fuck it,” Tsazr said, under his breath but quite distinctly. “Do you want to know what I heard in Xi’Matezh, boy?”
Meoraq shut his eyes. “Yes, sir.”
“Why? What could it possibly mean to you?”
“I don’t know,” Meoraq admitted.
“You want to come up with a better answer than that, Uyane. My patience is right at the last grains.”
“I have never heard His voice,” said Meoraq, again without thinking. A very bad way to answer, but so too would be any hesitation to think up something good. “I know only what I have read in the Word.”
“Isn’t that enough for you?” Tsazr asked, with surprising acid.
Meoraq resigned himself to the sure knowledge that he was not getting out of this room without a slap and there was no point in prolonging it. “Was it enough for you?”
Tsazr snapped himself to his feet so fast that Meoraq flinched, even though it had been better than three years since the last time he’d shied away from a punishing hand. But although Tsazr loomed over him with the yellow coming out strong on his throat—and he’d never seen that, not on Master Tsazr—the slap never came. Ultimately, Tsazr’s scales faded back to black and several minutes after, he uttered a low, sour grunt.
