by R. Lee Smith
Something in him tore. It did not break, maybe, but it tore and it tore deep. Meoraq’s vision briefly clouded, as it sometimes did in the arena, before the fires took him. His flesh became a stranger’s, throbbing everywhere, every nerve and vein and scale. His thoughts were black.
With all that was left of Uyane Meoraq, he said, “Raise your hand right now and show me your fucking fist, or I swear here in the sight of Sheul that I will end you.”
Scott said nothing, did nothing. Sheul, whose name had been invoked to bear a witness, let neither His voice be heard nor His hand felt. The wind blew at the mganz trees, moving their soft branches in odd gusts, as if it were breathing; six breaths, deep and slow.
‘Amber is waiting,’ Meoraq thought, his first real thought in quite some time. He opened his hands—they ached—and let go his sword. “If you don’t want to tend the food I bring, I’ll stop bringing it.”
Scott mumbled at him, flushed and frowning.
“I did not mark that.”
“I said we’ll do it. I never said we wouldn’t, you know,” he added churlishly. “I was just—”
“I know what you said.”
They stood together, silent. The words they had spoken sat and soured. The words they did not say screamed between them. Meoraq watched the mganz branches blow. Scott watched the fire.
Meoraq said, “We will not walk today.” Amber’s boots—and Nicci’s—would need to dry. It should only take a few hours, but the damp in the air would slow the process and he wanted a good, strong seal.
Scott muttered some kind of acknowledgement Meoraq did not ask him to repeat.
“I am glad we had this talk,” he said instead and he thought he said it sincerely. Something he’d learned from his early days at Tilev and its public toilets: It was always better to open the doors and let the stink out than to try and close it in. “But you would be wise not to approach me again unless the need is very strong.”
“No, but I’m sure you’ll have plenty to talk about with Bierce, won’t you?” Scott snatched up the pair of sticks Amber used to manipulate his heating stones and began to fish savagely through the stew for the stone there. “I bet you just talk each other’s brains out, don’t you? All night, every night.”
There was an insult somewhere in those words, but the more Meoraq tried to puzzle it out, the more he found himself distracted by Amber’s tracks in the wet grass. She would have found the water by now, he knew, having found it himself the previous night. He could see her in his mind’s eye, sitting on the bank with her bare feet tucked up beneath her to keep warm, waiting for him.
“And as far as I’m concerned,” Scott was saying, now struggling to pick up the stone in the coals and move it into the stew, “you can have her.”
“I don’t need your permission,” said Meoraq, thinking of Amber sitting on that bank, Amber tumbling down a hill, Amber crawling into his tent in the dark and whispering his name. “I am Sheulek here and what I want, I take.”
And with that, he turned his back on Scott and the rest of his humans and went to find her.
BOOK V
SCOTT AND THE SHIP
It was raining the day that they came to the ruins, which was nothing really new. It had been raining off and on for several days, but this was a whole new kind of rain. Dawn came, nearly as dark as dusk, and the wind that came with it was almost a warm one. The rain alternated between tiny pellets as harsh as hail and fat blobs of icewater that plastered Amber’s hair to her scalp and wormed freezing trickles underneath her clothes.
Walking in the rain was bad enough, but on this day, there were also hills to contend with. Not tall ones, but very steep and rocky as hell beneath the tangle of creepers and thorns that covered them. All day long, they trudged up and down, hunched against the weather, stumbling and swearing but otherwise not speaking. Throughout the morning, the clouds pressed claustrophobically close, smothering them with wet slaps of wind to make their already uneven footing even more treacherous, but when the dim smudge of the sun reached its highest point, the clouds suddenly lifted, as if Meoraq’s God had chosen to maliciously swoop back a curtain and show them their options.
Door Number One was the southwest, the direction of the odd, warm wind and its icy rain, where they could all see the real storm not just growing on the horizon, but filling it, overfilling it, seemingly motionless but as solid a thing as the land it crawled upon. In the east, Door Number Two opened half a dozen needle-thin rays of light over a crumbling sprawl of what her eyes tried to see first as stones, then as giant trees, before finally showing her buildings.
The city had been huge in its day, straddling both sides of what might be a picturesque river, if all the rain hadn’t turned it into this swollen, frothing nightmare. Most of the bridges that had joined the city together had fallen in, but at least two appeared to be all right, from this distance anyway. As for the city itself, it too had mostly fallen in. Grass grew right over the crumbled remains, forming hundreds more of those steep hills they’d been climbing all day. Toward the middle of the ruins, these hills grew taller, sprouting eroded chunks of masonry and metal, and occasionally whole walls held together by the small prairie trees that had rooted themselves in windows and along broken ledges. And here and there among the centermost section of the ruins were pockets of shocking normalcy where the roads were not only cleared and the buildings sound, but the lights were on.
Bluish lights.
Electric lights.
Amber had stopped walking when these two tableaus revealed themselves, and she had been staring back and forth between them for some time before she realized that everyone else had stopped too. On every face, she saw the same bewildered apprehension, as if both choices were equally disturbing.
Even Meoraq had stopped, she saw. He stood motionless ahead of everyone else, his spines forward and one hand toying at the hilt of the knife that hung around his neck while his gaze moved from east to west and back again. One by one, all heads turned to watch him. They waited, some drawing up into familiar groups, to hold their own low conversations until he came to a decision.
At length, he raised his hand, beckoning without bothering to look at them, and started walking again. From that first step, it was obvious he had no intention of taking them to the ruins. He was instead turning them south, not quite straight at the storm but certainly not away from it.
The murmurs gusted at once into a wave of alarmed babble. Nicci clasped onto Amber’s hand. Scott gestured for everyone to stand still even though no one—not even Amber herself—had made any attempt to follow, and quickly caught up with Meoraq. Amber couldn’t hear what was said, but it didn’t appear to go the way either one of them wanted. When Meoraq started moving again—south—Scott turned around.
“Okay, people, listen up!” he shouted, clapping his hands a few times. “We’re going down into that town there.”
Meoraq stopped and looked back at him, his head cocked in what Amber was coming to understand more and more was never a gesture of curiosity on a lizardman. Sometimes there was amusement in that look and sometimes irritation, but regardless of what emotion accompanied it, it was always a warning, always the way he silently said, ‘Stop and think about what you’re doing,’ usually with some variation of ‘you insufferable human’ at the end. Amber gave Nicci’s hand a squeeze and got a little closer.
“We’ve got plenty of time before the storm gets here,” Scott was calling, oblivious to the stare at his back. “Everybody relax. Let’s just stay close and keep moving. The storm will be over before we know it, but there’s no reason—” He paused and amended, “No good reason we can’t wait it out where it’s dry. Let’s go.”
People murmured in a relieved way, not without a few nervous glances at the distant storm, and drew themselves back into their sprawling approximation of a marching line.
“He doesn’t look happy,” Nicci whispered.
Meoraq had moved exactly one muscle: the one it took to lower his
spines.
Scott waved at him gallantly. Lead on, O faithful native guide.
Meoraq’s head took on a distinctly deeper tilt. “God’s own Word forbids His children from dwelling again within the cities of the Ancients.”
“We’re not going to live there,” Scott said, rolling his eyes back at the others and letting everyone know how patient he was being. “We’re just going to hike through—”
“No.”
“—and wait out this storm where it’s dry—”
“You will obey the Word as it was given.”
“—and then we’ll use one of those perfectly good bridges—”
“You will obey me.”
“—to safely cross the river instead of swim it, which is what you apparently have in mind.”
“Watch your next words to me, S’kot, or I will show you exactly what I have in mind at this moment.”
Scott’s broad smile faltered. Meoraq’s stare did not.
Behind them, a low grumble of thunder reminded everyone of the storm slumping inevitably toward them. Scott took advantage of the distraction and deliberately started walking toward the ruins. A few people followed. Then a few more, breaking away in larger and larger groups until they were all trailing in Scott’s commanding wake. Nicci tugged at Amber’s hand once, then let go and walked quickly away to join the other women. Meoraq watched them go the way another man might watch a parade, but if Amber thought for even a moment that he was annoyed by this defection, that ended when he looked at her.
He was furious.
With a sigh, Amber trudged over to him. He took her arm and turned around, but that was as far as she was going and when he felt it, he stopped too.
He didn’t look at her again, didn’t speak, didn’t take his hand off her. She stood quietly behind him and watched the yellow come in on the side of his throat and fade slowly out again.
She said, “If it was you or Scott, you know it’d be you. You know that.”
His head turned, not enough to look at her.
“But you’re asking me to choose between you and my sister. And that’s not a choice.”
His head turned the other way, turned fully, staring after Nicci.
“Please don’t leave us here,” said Amber.
His hand on her arm tightened minutely, then let go. He started after Scott and the others, taking long strides but hardly moving, so that he seemed almost to be gliding through the grass like a hunting cat. She could not help tensing when he came up behind Scott, but he simply moved on ahead and took the lead.
Scott smirk was obvious even in his voice. “Glad you decided to join us.”
“Don’t talk to me,” said Meoraq curtly.
“You need to work on this attitude of yours. There’s no reason we—”
Meoraq swung around and slapped Scott clear off his feet, sending him crashing into Dag and Crandall. Then he drew his hooked sword. Without a word, he turned back around and kept walking.
After that, no one said anything. It made the mood, already low, that much worse, which in turn made the landscape around them seem even bleaker than it was. To Amber, the fallen towers looked like tombstones in some forgotten cemetery, and why shouldn’t they? She knew now that they had been walking across the burial mounds of this city all morning. For hours. And a city that size didn’t just curl up and die on its own. Something had killed it.
An unnecessarily theatrical turn of phrase, perhaps, especially considering the already bleak landscape, but no sooner had it taken its crawl through Amber’s brain than it was underlined by the first hint of rot in the air.
She wasn’t sure at first. No one else seemed to have noticed, or at least, no one else had reacted. The wind was at their backs (and pushing the storm steadily toward them) and the smell came and went with the force of its gusts. But the closer they got to the ruins, the stronger that smell became, until Amber finally turned to her sister in some desperation and asked if she could smell it too.
“It’s nothing,” said Nicci. And in a sudden, angry rush, “Stop trying to make trouble all the time! You always do this!”
Startled, Amber stopped walking. Nicci did not. If anything, she went faster. Even after Amber started moving again, the distance between them kept growing, until Nicci was up with the women from the Resource Tent and Amber was alone.
‘So let it go,’ she thought, watching some sympathetic Manifestor respond to whatever Nicci was saying with a sidelong, walking hug. ‘Let it go and she’ll come back. She always does.’
But something stank. Something was dead and rotting. Something big.
“Doesn’t anyone else smell that?” Amber called.
Immediately, half a dozen Manifestors groaned at her to shut up, but Maria turned around and called back, “God, yes! I feel like I’m going to puke!”
“It’s nothing,” said Scott.
Meoraq, his sword still drawn, threw a flat, unforgiving glance back at him.
Scott moved over to put a few more people between them. “Probably a dead deer,” he told Maria. “It won’t be as bad once we get into town.”
If Maria had a reply apart from the scornful look she gave him, Amber couldn’t hear it, but no one else said anything.
The grass began to thin. There was pavement beneath, so weathered that it looked more like gravel poured out and glued in place, but obviously pavement. A street. The hills to either side got steeper and lumpier as the grass receded, until suddenly they weren’t hills at all, but heaps of broken concrete, metal, glass, and all the wreckage one might reasonably expect to see when a city block has been demolished.
Except that the streets had been cleared. Had to have been. Buildings did not fall straight down and pile themselves up like that, leaving the weathered pavement beyond the curb largely uncluttered. And as they traveled deeper into the ruins, the streets not only got wider and cleaner, they also began to show signs of repair. Likewise, the devastation lining the streets gradually changed from piles of debris to hollow shells, missing one, two, or even three walls, but upright and recognizable buildings. And then even those were behind them, and they were there in one of those lamplit pockets which had looked so much like it might still be inhabited when viewed from a distance.
Scott stopped, so everyone stopped, bunching up there at the first intersection where things had gone from knocked down but cleaned up to empty but sort of functional. Meoraq alone moved on, a sword in each hand and eyes in constant motion, to check each of the crossing streets and peer through each broken window. He had almost made it back to them when Scott suddenly cupped his hands around his mouth and hollered out a hello. The wind, greatly deflected by the buildings now surrounding them, ate the echoes after one or two bounces, but that was enough.
No one came out to greet them and although the fine hairs on the back of Amber’s neck were standing straight up and prickling almost painfully, she got no real sense of being watched. There was movement—furry things scurried in the shadows, considerably smaller and less threatening than the rats Amber had grown up with—but no life. The city was dead; the last of its concrete bones, rotting; and whatever was keeping the power on and the streets swept probably did not want its rest disturbed.
Meoraq was staring at Scott, his head cocked, his throat striped with bright, bright yellow, silent.
“I think maybe we should move on.” Scott looked back at his loyal lieutenants. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s creepy as fuck,” Crandall replied with half a shrug, “but creepy won’t kill us.”
Eric seconded that with a firm nod. “That storm is going to hit us before we even get near one of those bridges, much less check it out and see if it’s safe to cross. Any salvage you expected to find here is long gone, but even if shelter is the only thing we get out of this place, that’s good enough for me. Having said that—” He glanced up, up, and up at the nearest tower. “—I am not comfortable bedding down right here.”
“Plus, it stinks,�
�� Maria announced.
“Miss Alverez, this is an official debriefing, so please be quiet,” Scott told her, and to the rest of them, announced, “For now, we’re going to keep heading for the bridges, but we’ll be keeping our eyes open for a good spot to take cover. Don’t worry, people. We’ll all stay dry tonight.”
Exclamations of relief met this rather lofty promise, but looking around, Amber could see doubt for the first time in a number of faces as they eyed the height of the broken towers enveloping them and perhaps reflected on the fact that rain was not necessarily the worst thing that could fall on a person’s head.
But Scott had decided and there was no point in arguing. He chose a street and headed out. Eric followed him and Maria followed Eric, and that started the first group, which started the next one, and pretty soon they were all walking. Even Amber, so what did that say?
* * *
After so many days struggling through hip-high grass, wading streams and climbing rocky slopes, a little stroll down the street should have been an easy feat. Distance, like time, could be subjective without a mechanical means of assessing it, but Amber knew they couldn’t be much more than a mile from the first of the bridges and it was taking all day to get there. The ground still rose and fell, but gently, in city-hills that had been smoothed and paved and was unquestionably easier on Amber’s feet than Meoraq’s wildlands. It wasn’t what they were walking on that slowed them now, but what they were walking through.
It wasn’t quite silent. Passing too close to the dark shops made the windows sputter and light up, playing out the corroded remains of advertisements for whatever products had once been on display, but few of those recordings played for more than a few seconds before dying out and one of the windows shattered from the effort. On another street, the remains of what had obviously been a restaurant groaned out some of the daily specials and wheezed its door open at them, showing anyone who looked in the desiccated carcass of a saoq who had apparently wandered in and been unable to get out. Several furry heads poked curiously out of the nest that had been built in its dried belly.