But he never had the chance. The spear was thrown. The saoq fled. And now here he stood with the creature’s eyes wide open and full upon him.

“Sheul, my Father, I feel Your hand,” mused Meoraq, studying the burnt point of the creature’s weapon. “But I do not hear Your voice. Speak, I pray, and tell me what I am to do.”

The creature spoke.

Meoraq looked at it. It was watching him closely, its hand still clutched around the torn edges of its caught clothing, yet it had ceased its attempts to free itself. Its eyes, so curiously like that of a dumaq, shone with intelligence in its flat, ugly face.

More than animal intelligence, perhaps.

Meoraq regarded it with growing unease as it became inescapably clear that he was not merely being seen by this creature, he was being measured.

The thought of killing it came back, stronger than before. Meoraq’s hand tightened on the creature’s spear—

‘If it is a man,’ thought Meoraq suddenly, ‘that would be murder.’

Ridiculous. A Sheulek, by very definition, could not commit a murder. A Sheulek was the Sword of God and the arbiter of His true Word. He could kill anyone or anything he wanted and he did not necessarily need a reason.

But he really ought to have one. Meoraq hissed, annoyed (the creature immediately renewed its struggles to escape the thorns), and looked again at the spear. Just a pointed stick, without an open blade to stand in defiance of Sheul’s laws.

Never mind, there had to be some other law it had broken.

There was a fine thought for a Sheulek to have. Just kill it; everyone is guilty of something. If that was what his years of service had done, perhaps it was time he retired.

Scowling, Meoraq picked his way forward out of the thicket. With every step, the creature fought the brambles harder, tearing its hands and arms and even its face, until Meoraq drew a sabk and knelt beside it.

Then, shockingly, it lunged and caught his wrist.

And Meoraq found himself trapped, not by its grip, which was a flimsy shackle indeed, but by its eyes. They were frightened but not wild, and in them was all the strength and fire its feeble hand could not possess.

‘This is a person,’ thought Meoraq, motionless as a man in thrall to phesok smoke. ‘This is a person with a soul hammered at Sheul’s forge just the same as mine.’

“Easy,” he heard himself say—speaking to it!—just before he did something even more incomprehensible.

He gave it its spear.

It looked at it, then released Meoraq’s arm to take it, but it did not raise it again as a weapon. It merely held the thing limply in its grasp, now staring at him with its queasily soft-looking fur-striped brows drawn together. It made sounds at him. Words.

“I do not know Your will, my Father,” said Meoraq, cutting the thorns that held the creature. “But as it seems You have gone to some effort to put us in one another’s path, I will walk with them awhile and see if I can learn what You wish for me to know.”

Freed, the creature gained its feet and immediately adjusted its torn clothing, as if Meoraq had any inclination to ogle its repulsive body. But it looked at him…studying him…and so, almost against his will, Meoraq examined it in return.

Being this close to one of them made him somehow stop seeing all the obvious differences there were between their kinds and see instead the very few similarities: not just its eyes (which were the green of new leaves), but the basic lines of its body, the shape of its slender arms and legs, and every subtle thing that marked it as a child of Sheul’s design. He had no idea what horrific sin of its bloodline could have bred such malformation into its face, its skin, its very bones, but when he stood this close and saw it looking back at him with such eyes, he could not be repulsed.

Like a man in a dream, Meoraq watched his hand rise and brush the backs of his curled fingers across its high, smooth brow. The creature flinched, tearing its eyes off his boots (which it had been staring at so raptly, one wouldn’t ever imagine the thing was wearing a pair of its own) to look at him. And Meoraq, who could hardly believe he’d done that much, now found himself stroking his fingertips along the flat plane of the creature’s cheek. The thing’s skin dimpled even at the lightest touch, like drawing his hand across water. Meoraq followed the curve of its face down its jaw to its pointed chin, and then, as if he hadn’t done enough, moved to touch the ridiculous nub of a nose it wore above its flat mouth.

Its brow furrowed, but it let him touch. And then it raised its own hand and touched his face in return.

Meoraq stiffened and withdrew his hand as a fist, fighting the urge to knock the creature back into the brambles only with the aid of many long years’ training. A Sheulek is the master of his impulses, always.

Truth, but then, no man may freely touch a Sheulek. If Meoraq sought just cause to cut his blades across the soft throat offered to him, there it was.

Meoraq did nothing. He stood, tense and oversensitive to the slight feel of weight and warmth as the creature rubbed its fingerpads along his snout, up to his brow-ridges and right to the base of his first spine (he felt it twitch, not slapping flatter to his skull but actually relaxing outward, pressing into the creature’s touch), before slipping down over the side of his face toward his neck.

That was too much. Meoraq swiftly stepped back, catching the creature by the wrist before it could touch the sensitive scales over his throat. He should have pushed it away; he should have, but instead he turned its hand over. His thumb moved, tracing a circle against its palm. He looked up and saw its eyes fixed on his hand and its own, joined.

Joined.

A bolt of something hot and bright and not as deeply unpleasant as it probably ought to be struck Meoraq right in the soul. He released the creature and took a step back for good measure.

“I know Your ways are many and mysterious,” said Meoraq to Sheul, his heart racing, “but that cannot be what You intended.”

Sheul gave him no answer.

But the creature did.

It spoke, waggling its mouthparts to make its sounds. Then it waited, watching him, and said the same sounds again, this time patting itself on the chest. Mmbr. Mmbrrrbrs.

It had a name.

Meoraq recoiled, but the creature was adamant. It came a half-step closer, canting its head to an angle Meoraq could not help but see as intrigued and tinged with humor, saying its sounds over again, but with such impossible variation that he could not begin to imitate them.

Instead, and not without a faint sense of surrender, he gave his chest a half-hearted knock and said his own name in return. Not the whole thing, of course. He may or may not be killing the creature later; he wasn’t getting too informal with it now. “Uyane Meoraq.”

The creature’s mouthparts flattened and opened around jaws tightly clenched, exposing its teeth, which were small and white and largely blunt, and which filled its mouth with no space at all between them. Yet it wasn’t snapping or growling or anything beast-like.

He thought it was smiling.

“Uyane Meoraq,” it said, or rather, those were the sounds it chewed up and regurgitated in ways that rendered the name itself only just discernible and deeply insulting. Oo’yanee, with no effort at all made to match the honorifics in pitch or tone. No, it was just Oo’yanee, meaningless sound, and Mee’orrak, which was actually worse because the creature put all the stress on the first syllable and bit off the rest in a such a way that it came uncomfortably close to making his name a derivative of male genitalia. He hadn’t heard his name spoken quite that way since he’d been twelve.

“Meoraq,” he said clearly, and knocked his chest again.

“Mee’orrak,” it babbled back. This time, it put the stress on the last syllable.