“Please, Meoraq,” she said. “I need your help. And you need mine.”

He did not remember getting up, but they were standing suddenly, the two of them together before a dark structure he somehow knew was Xi’Matezh. They were standing, yes, and his arms were going around her just as if that were not a perfectly appalling thing to do. He could feel her heat against his body and her horrible face was right before him and her name, ah, her name was like wine in his mouth. “Mmbr,” he said, bending close. “Mm—”

* * *

“…mbr,” he mumbled, and the sound of his own voice jolted him awake.

Meoraq opened his eyes and was, for one disorienting moment, shocked to see that Amber’s own were not before him. He found his lamp and lit it, but saw only the interior of his shelter.

What did he expect? Meoraq clapped a hand to his head and rubbed roughly at his scales, then rolled over and sat up. His cock was out, he noticed, pinched between his belly and his loin-plate and still dully throbbing with Gann’s lusts. He retracted it with great distaste and pressed a hand over his slit to hold it in while he tightened his belt, meditating on the dream. Already, it was so tangled in his mind that he could not say what the message had been.

Dreams. Only fools and priests believed they had messages.

He put on his breeches and opened his tent.

The creatures slept in heaps all around him, cocooned in more of those silvery bedsheets. They looked like fat, metal maggots. A deeply disturbing sight.

And there was Amber.

He could see the twin lump of herself and the other human that clung at her, together in the grass at the very edge of his camp. At the edge of Scott’s camp as well, far from any fire. The sight of her sleeping in the open air like an animal did something unpleasant to his emotions and gave him back disturbing fragments of his dream…particularly there at the end, when he’d been holding her.

Dream-nonsense, he told himself brutally. If he hadn’t awakened when he had, he probably would have bitten her or something.

The image his mind sent out at that thought was not that of a monstrous dumaq devouring Amber neck-first, however, but of a mark of conquest upon her naked shoulder. His cock, safely constrained behind his loin-plate, throbbed with Gann’s senseless need.

Meoraq shuddered, started to retreat within his tent, and then rose resolutely and tromped over to where Amber lay. She roused at the noise, pushing back her damp cover and squinting up at him through sleep-dazed eyes. “Get up,” he said, and beckoned, knowing she would not understand him. “To your feet, soft-skinned creature.”

More humans stirred. “Wzzee wnt?” someone called, and Amber answered, “Elleff’ai’no,” in a puzzled fashion, but she got up.

“I dreamed of you.” Meoraq led her to his firepit and pushed on her shoulder until she sat. He crouched to knuckle through the ash until he found a bit of branch only half-burnt, then woke the embers to a flame bright enough to see by. “And while dreams are largely foolish things, Sheul often hides some shard of insight there. So do I recall one thing I think to be His wisdom. Take this.”

She let him thrust the charred branch into her hands. She frowned at it, and then her brows raised and she gave him a startled sort of look. She dropped to her knees at once before him, intent and eager as she patted her hand across the ash to flatten it.

And she began to draw. Not the strange markings she had made across her lessons slate in his dream, but an image of some rounded shape (we built a ship), amplified by sweeping motions of her arm, which she made fall by drawing a line just beneath it (it broke open over Gann). She started drawing line-men to spill out of it, chattering explanations, and Meoraq leaned back on his heels to listen. He did not try to mimic her words, but he did interrupt now and then with questions of his own, raised with gestures and drawings in the ash.

The story he was able to glean through this crude communication was a confusing one. She seemed to be trying to tell him that the creatures he saw before him now were all there were, not just here, but in all of Gann. He tried many times to get her to tell him where the ship had sailed from and how they had come inland so far without being seen, but kept getting the same baffling response: The ship did not move on water, but through the sky. She seemed to want him to believe they had not come from Gann at all, but from some other world. She illustrated this by drawing two circles in the ash and the rounded shape of the ship between them, sketching the line of their travel over and over and jabbing at the sky above them with her stick.

She must think he was an idiot. That a ship had sailed, Meoraq did not doubt, and perhaps it had even come across the sky if it were some relic from the time of the Ancients or a machine made after that fashion. That it had come to some disaster seemed equally plausible. That they were all there were in the world, as helpless as newborns and meaning no harm to anyone, was patently absurd.

And yet…

And yet, there was Amber, grimacing at him happily as she told her tale. He liked to think that his years in service to Sheul had given him some power to see lies when they were told to his face, and even though hers was a strange one, it could still be read. When he gazed on Amber, when he looked past the cold and hunger and other hardships of travel in the wildlands, he saw no evil. He saw sorrow and he saw loss. He saw anger sometimes and sometimes guilt. He saw strength and determination and so much tenacity that he often questioned his odd certainty that she was female, but he had never seen deceit in her. Not when she looked at him. Not when she looked at anyone. There were things she did not say, perhaps, but what she said was honest.

We built a ship…and it flew through the sky…

Meoraq took the stick from her hands and swept the ash flat. He looked at her, frowned, then looked past her to the other creatures, all of whom had gathered by now and were watching him with unreadable emotion across their grotesque faces. He thought of the dream, but it was a glancing tap at best; dreams were of no value in the waking world. He was not easy about what he was about to propose, but he felt Sheul’s hand upon his shoulder and, although His ultimate plan was not clear, His immediate will seemed obvious.

Meoraq sketched out a few creatures—round heads atop line-bodies; he was not a great artist—and then, not without a moment’s misgiving, drew himself among them. He tapped the image, saying, “Sheul has put you in my path for a reason. I will stay until I know what it is.”

“Wutz’i sa’en?” Scott asked.

“Do’ispeeklzzrd?” Amber replied, tossing the words crossly over her shoulder before reaching out to try and take the stick from Meoraq.

He wasn’t done with it. He took her wrist with a stern look and moved her hand back to her knee. He captured his drawings within a circle, making it clear they were bound together, and then leaned out to sketch the shrine at Xi’Matezh. He’d never seen it, but he’d seen enough of them to know they all pretty much looked alike: a round, walled courtyard and tall, central tower. “But I see no reason to interrupt my journey,” he went on, tapping first the ash-creatures and then the ash-shrine. “So we will go together.”

“Wutztht?”

“Stldntno, Scott. Stldntspeeklzzrd.” Amber leaned forward, reaching across him to point at the ash-shrine. “Wutzthz Mee’orrak?”

“Meoraq,” he corrected, and then shook that away irritably. She was never going to say his name properly and it didn’t matter at the moment. He touched the ash-shrine and said, “This is Xi’Matezh, the holiest shrine remaining from the age of the Ancients. We will go there—” He emphasized this with several lines between ash-creatures and ash-shrine. “—and I will ask Sheul what is to be done with you.”