The rustling noises inside the tent paused. After a long moment, the flap lifted again. He looked at her, the double-row of spines on his head and neck twitching first higher, then flatter.

She didn’t know what to say to him. He couldn’t understand anything anyway. Amber stared at him, feeling hot and angry and cold and useless all at the same time. At last, she reached out and patted the ground in front of her. “Please.”

He looked at the ground, then at her. He frowned.

She patted it again, trying to smile, although the effort felt ghastly and she couldn’t imagine it looked very convincing.

He dropped the flap. Amber’s shoulders sagged in defeat, but almost in the same instant, the tent opened and Meoraq came out. Ignoring her, he cleared a small area, gathered up enough rocks to form a ring, piled up some deadwood, and took a burning stick from one of the other fires to start his own, close to his tent and to her. When it was going strong, he broke down some fairly long branches and lashed them into a tripod-shape, then set this close to the fire and hung a smallish leather pouch from it. He filled it with water he poured from a huge leather flask almost as long as Amber’s arm, then ducked back into his tent, emerging with a few round, polished stones which he placed in the hottest part of the fire. Back he went into the tent, this time for his swords, which he stabbed into the ground after deliberately pacing off six long strides, kicking two stray duffel bags and a pair of boots ahead of him. When he came back, Amber was on her feet with her bag and her spear, ready to move on, but he plucked them both out of her hands and set them down again more or less where she’d already had them. Then he finally sat down.

Looking at her, he knocked on the ground in front of him like it was a door.

Amber stood there.

The lizard knocked again, this time with a few words and a flick of his spines.

She sat down where he wanted her.

He grunted and looked away, watching all the people who were watching them. He muttered under his breath, glanced skyward, scratched his throat. If he had a reason for calling her over, he was in no hurry to tell her what it was.

“Meoraq,” said Amber.

He grunted, still without looking at her. Scott was at the head of the crowd now, just beyond the invisible boundary marked by the lizardman’s swords, listening to the complaints of the people who’d had their bags kicked.

“Meoraq,” said Amber again, reaching for his arm.

He caught her before she could touch him, but he looked at her.

Now what?

“Hand,” said Amber, feeling stupid and a little desperate. She pointed at her own, caught in his unbelievably strong, scaly grip. “Fingers.” She wiggled them.

Meoraq released her, frowning, and watched as she brought her arm up between them.

“Fingers. Look! One, two, three, four, five. Hand,” she said, now pointing at her other one. “And fingers. One, two, three, four, five.”

He said nothing.

“Head,” said Amber, pointing at herself. “Hair. Ear, see it? And this one. Ear. Two ears. Eyes. One, two. Two eyes. Nose. One nose. Mouth. All of it together? This is my face. My face is the front of my head. It…Damn it, will you say something?”

He did not, but after a long, frustrating silence, he slowly raised his hand.

“Hand,” said Amber, rubbing her eyes.

He splayed it.

She straightened up a little. “Fingers.”

He made a fist and brought them up one at a time, listening as she counted them off. He began to point—at the fire, his tent, the trees, the grass, the sky—stopping only once, when one of the Manifestors broke the boundary-line of his camp. Other than that warning hiss, he never made a sound. He made no attempt to repeat the words she said for him.

But this was progress. This could work. She would make it work.

Amber talked, breaking things down into smaller and smaller words, talking until her throat went dry. Meoraq watched, listened, and was silent.

7

The longer he listened, the more certain Meoraq became that the strange chatter of the creatures who called themselves humans was indeed a true language, entirely separate from his own. This troubled him. The Prophet’s Word is the only Word. This was the first law of Sheul, repeated no less than twenty-three times throughout the book of His Word, and apart from the obvious, it had been interpreted to mean that there must be a single language so that all men might hear and understand the wisdoms of Sheul. Where once there had been countless tongues spoken over Gann, there was now only one: Dumaqi, the speech of men.

So. That the humans neither spoke nor even seemed to understand dumaqi was therefore an ominous sign of their true nature, but Meoraq had to admit that he had not emerged from his mother’s womb speaking it either. He would have to meditate on the matter. In the meantime, this left him struggling to make sense of a creature who thought all she had to do to talk was move her mouthparts around. And really, what else could they do? A human’s flat face had no snout, which meant no resonance chamber, and Sheul alone knew how hard it must be to make those wriggly little mouthparts shape the sounds those deformed tongues could not. Given their limitations, their absurdly simplistic language was no more than sounds strung together, entirely lacking the subtle nuance and precision of dumaqi. By the end of that first day, Meoraq was already beginning to glean some understanding from the creatures’ jabber. Not much. A word here. A sound there. A name.

Amber. Her name was Amber.

She sat with him throughout the grey hours of the day when all the other creatures came, stared awhile, then left again. Her hands moved as she spoke, gesturing here or there to add emphasis to her simple sounds, often returning to indicate just her, just him. Her gaze remained disturbingly direct; her eyes were so damned green.

When darkness fell, they lit more fires—heaps of wood that gave out more smoke than heat—and sat around them to mutter and stare. They had no meat after their one failed hunt, but the one called Scott eventually brought out a satchel of something in small, wrapped portions for his people to eat. Meoraq was himself overlooked, but as the stuff appeared quite disgusting, he was happy to make do with cuuvash. And since Amber was sitting with him and had not been offered anything, he snapped her off a square too.

She took it. Not immediately and not without a glance back at her people, but she took it. And after watching him bite into his, she gnawed off a piece of hers and sat, frowning with her entire malleable face, chewing it like cattle.

Scott came back over, also frowning. He spoke at some short length, gesturing. Amber answered. Scott spoke again, louder. Amber took another bite of cuuvash and appeared to ignore him. Scott aimed his next roll of gibberish at Meoraq. Now Amber said something, but Meoraq pointed two fingers at her and she quieted. “No one speaks for a Sheulek,” he told her. To Scott, he said, “Go away,” making shooing sweeps of his arm so that his meaning could not be misinterpreted.

Scott talked, not louder but much, much longer, before finally pointing aggressively at Meoraq’s cuuvash.

“Get your own,” said Meoraq, contentedly grinding his cuuvash against the roof of his mouth until it was soft enough to swallow.

Scott waited, moving his angry eyes back and forth between him and Amber, but eventually walked away. Meoraq watched him at the largest fire, speaking tirelessly and looking like nothing so much as a city governor holding court. He could see that Amber was listening, although she did not watch, and she did not appear easy with what she heard. She looked at the remaining portion of cuuvash in her hand and, after only one small bite, tried to give it back to him.