He tried a third time, leaning forward to put his eyes on a level with its own, as if his stare alone could help the fool thing understand him: “Meoraq.”

“Mee’orrak!”

It had to be trying to mangle his name. How else could it manage to such a spectacular degree?

It was knocking its own chest again: “Mmbr! Thtzmi. Ef’uqantok yu’af t’bi’ablt’sa minam. Mmbrrr!”

“I do not mark,” said Meoraq, openly showing the thing his confusion with the flexing of his spines, even though he had no reason to think the spineless creature would know the gesture’s meaning. “Do you mark me at all? Eh? Do you know speech?”

“Mbr. Imambr! Dam’mt donjst’sterritmi sa’a somthn! Mmbrr!”

“Gtdon!”

Meoraq recoiled for a second time, looking past Mmbr to the second creature who had come boldly across the prairie without him noticing. This creature also had a stick, which it held as if it were nerving itself up to point it at someone and just hadn’t decided yet whether it should be Meoraq or Mmbr.

“Gtdon,” it said again, waving one arm. “Imgnna killit.”

“R’rufukkn ntz?” Mmbr demanded and after that, the words between them were too many and too heated to sort out.

Meoraq’s eyes darted from one to the other, but otherwise he did not move. He knew that he could kill two creatures as easily as one—for that matter, he knew that he could kill all of them, especially now that he had seen the way the creatures hunted—but something stayed his hand, something more than he could fathom. Sheul spoke into his heart…but like Mmbr’s words, it was sound without meaning. He knew only that his fate was tied to them.

The creatures were still barking at each other, neither one bending its neck to the other, and eventually the second creature abandoned words entirely. It shoved Mmbr aside, still barking, and raised its spear—not pointing it, but only wanting to make sure Meoraq saw it.

So Meoraq let him know he’d seen it by plucking it out of the creature’s pink little hand and snapping it over his knee. The creature let out a shrill sort of shout and leapt back, tangling its boots in the same thorns that had caught Mmbr, and fell over.

“Wut’thfuk,” said Mmbr, raising its arms to heaven and dropping them with a slap to its sides. “Skt wut’thfukz rong wth’u?”

The second creature pointed a shaking hand at Meoraq. “Tht’theng trid t’kilmi!”

Mmbr snorted. It was a perfectly recognizable sound, so much so that Meoraq had to look around and see the humor in its eyes for himself. And it was there, by Sheul, of a contemptuous sort, but there.

“F’thatwertru uudbi’ded,” said Mmbr. It looked up at Meoraq and its mouthparts curled, grotesquely pliant. It put its hand on his arm and took a step backwards, into the prairie. “Cm’n Meoraq. Donlzzn to’m. Eezadik.”

It wanted him to follow it, he realized.

And out of nowhere, for no reason whatsoever, thought, ‘She. She wants me to follow her.’

He looked from one creature to the other, stunned and not a little disgusted, and saw that Mmbr’s face indeed had more delicate features and although its clothes obscured much, its body as a whole was both smaller and rounder. Its chest in particular was as full as a milking mother’s, which it could very well be.

‘So then,’ he told himself brusquely. ‘It’s female. What of it?’

Her hand upon his arm felt warmer.

She grimaced at him, then turned around and started walking, picking her way back through the brambles past her sullen companion, trusting Meoraq to follow.

And he did.

6

Amber was never able to put into words just why she brought the lizard back to camp. When asked (and they asked, many times, for days afterwards), she was always able to come up with something plausible-sounding about how useful he might be, but that first impulse remained indefinable. She only knew that she wanted him with them.

So now he was here and he was staring at her. And that was okay, because honestly, she was staring back at him.

She should have been prepared to see something like this. An alien, that was. From the moment she’d first seen the scaly deer if not sooner. But there was a big difference between knowing intellectually that there were forms of animal life on this world and seeing a six-foot tall lizardman come at you out of the bushes with a knife in his hand.

Lizardman was perhaps a derogatory term. It was also the only one that fit. There was nothing wholly recognizable about his features, nothing she could point at and say with authority that looked like a crocodile or a komodo dragon or an iguana, but lizard summed it all up nicely. It was the ‘man’ bit that bothered her.

She was pretty sure he was a man, anyway, or at least a male. Masculinity was a stamp over the whole of his body: his lean and muscular build, the craggy scars cut into his scales, even the predatory way he had of crouching down and holding perfectly still while he stared at her—none of it was any guarantee of gender on an alien, but all of it screamed male to Amber’s eye.

So he—if he was a he—was a biped and essentially humanoid, with two legs and two arms and no tail. His was a gladiator’s body: a long, V-shaped chest, heavily scarred and ridiculously muscle-wrapped, that tapered into a flat stomach and narrow hips. His skin was the smooth, scaled hide of a snake rather that the rough one of an alligator, but however you looked at them, they were scales, black and shiny. But his hands had only three fingers, and they were fingers, not claws. His legs looked like normal legs, and although he had a habit of walking forward on the balls of his feet, they weren’t all bent backwards and bestial. He was even wearing boots.

The fact that he wore clothes had a way of wanting to boggle in Amber’s mind, as if the toughness of his scales rendered further covering superfluous and never mind the man’s modesty. He had pants stitched out of dun-brown hides with a wide leather belt to hold it on, and a harness over his largely-naked chest that seemed to serve mostly as an anchor for his hammered metal shoulder-guards. Apart from that, and the boots, he wore only weapons: a pair of short knives strapped to his bulging biceps, a hook-shaped sword clipped to his belt so it hung over one equally-bulging thigh, one broad, highly-polished sword carried in a sheath across his back, and a leather cord around his neck from which hung yet another knife, a small one this time, with an ivory handle. It appeared to be his favorite; his hand had a way of straying there when he muttered to himself. He did a lot of that, although he didn’t look crazy when he did it.

Not that she would know crazy when she saw it on a lizard, she supposed, but she was convinced there was a quietness to his expression. Not a calm, maybe, but a quietness. And she would be the first to admit that this was an unreasonable assumption because there was next to nothing that was readable about his face. He had two eyes aimed forward just like hers (except for being too big and for the color, which was a deep red, flecked with gold), under a heavy brow-ridge lined with pebbly scales that became a tight double-row of flexible spines that swept over the top of his skull to about halfway down his neck. His nose and mouth were combined into a dragonish snout, which was broad, lipless, and immoveable except at the corners; she could see the point of his thick, rigid tongue when he opened his mouth to speak, but couldn’t figure how he was shaping his words at all. Like a parrot, he just spilled out sound, then closed his mouth again and looked at her. It was easy to imagine she saw frustration mounting in those reptilian eyes as she tried to repeat him, and eventually he quit talking at all.

He just stared at her.

“I’m telling you for the last time, that thing is not sleeping in this camp tonight,” Scott announced.