“Fuck you.” She didn’t touch the ration, didn’t even look at it.

“That’s the idea. Listen, Bierce. Seriously. You’re a tough little cookie, but you are in no condition to take care of yourself. I can. I’m not such a bad guy.” He shrugged, ducking his head in a sheepish sort of smile without ever taking his eyes off her. The combination was unsettling. “I’m not looking for a girlfriend. I just want someone who can keep her mouth shut when I want it shut and open when I want it open.”

“Charming.”

“I ain’t a charming guy. I ain’t pretending to be. But I can take care of you. Come on, you’re smart enough to know that you’re not going to have a choice forever.”

The wind didn’t blow any harder, but it got colder.

“What are you talking about now?” Amber asked. She tried to say it hard, like a tough woman right at the end of her patience with little boys and their bullshit, but it didn’t come out that way and she knew it.

“Basic math.” He still wasn’t leering. “There’s eleven of you girls and thirty-seven of us guys.”

“So?”

He rolled his eyes. “Okay, whatever. Play dumb, get mad, do whatever you have to do. When you’re done, I’ll be waiting for that blowjob. Be discreet,” he said, heading back to camp. “I don’t want anybody thinking I’m a chubby-chaser.”

Amber snatched up the ration from the crate beside her and threw it. It whipped through the air, missed him entirely, and landed in the wet grass. He picked it up, laughing. Then he was gone and she was left shaking in the wind and trying to tell herself it was because she was angry.

Just angry.

4

Although the right to move freely between the cities of Gann had been a favorite dream as a boy, Meoraq the man did not enjoy travel. He didn’t hate it; travel was an inevitability of being Sheulek, which was so great a sign of his divine Father’s favor that he could hate nothing that came of it. But the distance between the cities of his circuit was vast and the land that separated them, gone ugly with the coming winter. The wind was always blowing—frequently in his face—and at this time of year, the steady rain necessitated the choice of walking on the road and miring himself in mud or cutting across the wildlands and soaking himself to the hips in wet brush. Meoraq had only one comfort as he walked and it was the knowledge that he was not going home to take possession of House Uyane. The extraordinary honor of entering Xi’Matezh and hearing the voice of God was shamefully secondary, but he was praying about that.

So he was deep in the wildlands and wet to the hips, comfortably numbed within his own mind but keeping an idle eye out for danger, alone and expecting nothing but to stay alone for all the days of his journey, when Meoraq saw what was probably the strangest thing he’d ever seen.

His circuit of service was a wide one, encompassing twenty-three of the fifty-one cities in Yroq, and he had been predisposed to wander in his first years of service. He had explored many ruins and seen many forbidden relics, but after close inspection of this new thing, Meoraq decided it wasn’t old. Many of the machines the Ancients left behind them still functioned, maintaining themselves with surprising success even after all this time, but all of them showed their age. No matter how clean a thing was or how often repaired, age got in. The air itself could corrode a thing, given enough time, but this looked new.

Of course, men did fall from Sheul’s laws. Those who lived in wretchedness and sin outside the city walls did occasionally try to remake the machines. Some even succeeded to a small degree. But this was no machine. He didn’t know what it was, but it was no machine.

What it looked like was a bedsheet, blown into a hsul tree where it had been so hopelessly tangled in its thorny branches that the wind could not carry it out again. It was not a bedsheet, however. It was metal. At least, it looked like metal, the shiny grey-white of purest silver, save that it was as pliant as fine cloth and thinner even than a sheet of paper. Although the thorns of the hsul had pierced it and the wind torn its unbound edge to streamers, Meoraq suspected it had begun as a single squarish piece.

He had no idea what it was supposed to be, but clearly he had been meant to find it. Meoraq made his camp there and sat in the open mouth of his tent most of the afternoon, watching the silvery ribbons of the windblown thing snap and flash. When he slept, he dreamed of the tower of fire rising in the night, beckoning.

The silver sheet remained unfathomable by morning’s light and so Meoraq left it. He considered cutting a piece to carry with him, but ultimately decided against it. The thing could not be a relic of the Ancients or the construct of men; therefore, it was a sign from Sheul and as such, it was probably a sin to cut it. It made him uneasy to think that there was nothing in the Word about such manifestations and whether it was safe to touch them, but this was a pilgrimage and tests were to be expected.

His journey continued. The land resumed its customary view of nothing, but his mind at least was occupied. He meditated as he walked, wondering what the silver sheet had been meant to represent to him and feeling more and more like he’d failed in his first ordeal, but he was not so distracted that he failed to see the footprints when he came to fill his travel-flasks at a stream.

So. The wildlands might appear lifeless, the same way they appeared barren, but even as the rolling sameness of the landscape was made up of grass and trees and beasts and a thousand living things, every shadowed dip or stand of trees could hide a raiding party. No, it was not curiosity that made Meoraq crouch down to read the marks better, but the alarm that came from seeing, not a ragged band of six or twelve or even twenty, but a well-shoed troop with numbers great enough to trample down the stream-bank four body-lengths to one side.

He thought of Szadt, the only raider he’d ever heard of that had commanded numbers such as these. He knew Szadt was dead and buried deep in Gann’s cold grip—another brick to add to Uyane Rasozul’s wall of legend—but the thought bit at him all the same. Sheul’s Word said that each generation was given one great plague, one scourge, and one blessing. Szadt had been the scourge of his father; perhaps this one was Meoraq’s own.

He filled only one flask, keeping his burden light, and followed the tracks upstream. He made no camp that night, set no fires. He ate bites of cuuvash when he required them and drank only what his body needed. He found the ash-pits of their many fires, the flattened fields of their many messy encampments, the rain-soaked and half-hidden piles of their stinking dung, and before the sun had reached its highest point on that next day, he had found them.

Soon after, Meoraq lay on his belly in the brush beneath a small stand of prairie trees, trusting to the tall grass to hide him as he watched them. He did not count them; he could see at a glance there were more than he could fight. He saw no sentries, which he did not trust given the size of this band, and so did not dare to approach closer than this ridge, but even at this distance he could see that there was something wrong with them.

They could not have been long in this camp, he decided. There were no hides hanging from the trees, no bone-midden, no sign of any shelter apart from a handful of flimsy, silvery tents. He could see crates, presumably for trade (for there would always be men wicked enough to develop that evil hunger for phesok and strong drink), but no sleds or carts. The mystery of the curious depth of the tracks he had followed seemed to be solved, but the mystery of why they were carrying their goods in arms only deepened. He supposed some of those he saw might be slaves, but all the prints he’d seen were those of very well-made boots and what raider would shoe a slave?