The Last Hour of Gann

by R. Lee Smith

  She laughed, which was encouraging right up until she also said, “Why no! What the hell could possibly be wrong? Go away! I don’t want to talk! I put your stupid tent up, so go lie in it.”

  Meoraq went to the first of the stalls and opened it. Apart from whatever incomprehensible device of the Ancients occupied it, it stood empty.

  “I’m warning you!”

  “Are you indeed?” he snorted, opening the next stall. Also empty. “It should be interesting to see how that plays out.” The next stall opened, and the one after that, but the fifth did not give to the pressure of his hand. “Because I rather suspect it will not go in your favor.” He tapped two fingers meaningfully on the lock-plate. “You have until the count of six,” he told her, “and then I knock this door in.”

  “Just go away!” Her voice cracked on the last word. She was quiet a short time, and then calmly said, “I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

  “One,” countered Meoraq.

  “Just give me a few minutes, for God’s sake!”

  “Two.”

  “Goddamn alien prick!”

  “Three, four, five—”

  The door came open with a wheeze, its design preventing the violent bang she intended. Her first efforts to shove past him proved futile and somewhat laughable, so there she stood, furiously trying to meet his eyes while her own were wet. “What do you want?”

  “Tell me what you are doing here.”

  She snorted right to his face. “You couldn’t possibly understand, so no. You wanted me to go back to bed? Fine. Get out of my way and let me do it.”

  “You have until the count of six—” he began.

  “Oh for—I ripped my shirt! There, are you happy?”

  He knew he’d heard her and yet that made no sense at all. She’d slunk off to cry over a tear in her clothes? He didn’t believe it. Maybe if it were Nicci, but not Amber.

  He tipped his head to a cautious angle of inquiry. “I did not mark you.”

  “I ripped my shirt,” she said again, her angry voice cracking a second time. “Now I’ve got this huge hole that I can’t fix.”

  “You have no other shirts?”

  “They all reek,” she said, refusing to look at him. “And they’re all full of holes too. I only have one new shirt left, but it’s the last one and if…” She pressed her shaking lips together and did not speak for a long time. “It got to me, okay? You can think it’s stupid all you want. I agree. You’re right. It’s stupid. Now leave me alone.”

  Meoraq hunted for something to say while Amber stared at the wall beside his shoulder and kept her too-bright eyes dry. “You knew I have a mending kit,” he said finally. “You might ask to borrow it.”

  Her mouth pressed tighter together. She did not reply.

  Her clothing was worn thin. He’d marked it before this night. Long before. And the weather was only coming in colder. He couldn’t see the tear she spoke of, but by the stiff way she stood, hugging her arms to her chest, he could guess where it was. And he’d probably done it himself, binding her to her own spear. He tried to think back, but couldn’t truthfully say one way or another. It was likely, though.

  He really was an insensitive brunt. Her clothes were falling off her. They hadn’t been designed for hard travel in the first place, much less this endless wear. He could order his replaced at the next city he passed by, but hers…hers were all she had.

  Meoraq exhaled an uncomfortable hiss and made a half-gesture behind him at the door. “I have a spare tunic.”

  Her eyes snapped to him and away, blazing. “I don’t want it.”

  “Eh?”

  “I said, no! Stop giving me things! Just stop! What do you think people are going to say when they see me wearing your shirt tomorrow?”

  “What do you want from me then?” he exploded.

  “I wanted you to leave me alone!”

  “Well, you don’t get what you want!” he shouted, very dimly aware that what had begun as a poor imitation of a calm conversation had shattered beyond repair into splendidly irrational bickering. “I get what I want and I want you to shut up and wear my fucking tunic!”

  She burst into tears.

  “And if I tell you to wear the harness and the breeches that go with it,” Meoraq raged on, “that is what you’ll do! I’ll dress every Gann-damned sliver of you if it pleases me to do so and I will not hear another word about it!”

  “You can’t make me, you scaly son of a bitch!”

  “Ha!” And yes, he was entirely senseless now. “I don’t even know what that means so I can’t be offended by it!”

  “It means your mother was a bitch!” she screamed at him.

  “She could have been!” he roared back. “But my father was Uyane Rasozul in the sight of Sheul, twenty-six years a Sheulek, steward of his bloodline, lord over his House, and champion to all Xeqor, and it is his son who stands before you now! You see Meoraq, ha, here before God and Gann! Tell me again what I can and cannot make you do and just see what happens!”

  He had to stop there for a breath, and it was there that Scott’s voice rang out with brilliant clarity: “Do you mind? Some of us are trying to sleep!”

  Meoraq and Amber both stared at the door. He honestly wasn’t sure which of them moved first after that, but in another moment they were both storming back into the sleeping room, side at side, like an army of two.

  Meoraq went straight to Scott, who sat up fast and scooted foolishly backwards while still wrapped in his bedding until he hit another human and had to stop.

  “I have been listening to you talk all night!” Meoraq spat. “If you look into my face and tell me you were sleeping, I will stand you up and have judgment for the lie!”

  “I wasn’t!” Scott said at once. “But other people were and—”

  Meoraq swung around and raked his eyes over the whole of them. “Who dares order me to silence?”

  “I do,” said Amber. “Shut up.”

  “Oh my God,” said Eric, very quietly, almost respectfully.

  Those were the words that hooked at him, not Amber’s. Which was not to say that Amber’s passed serenely through him, but it was Eric under his burning stare next. Meoraq could feel himself sway, as if his metaphorical precipice of control had caused him to physically teeter, but when he fell, it was on the side of seventeen years of training. Because God indeed was with him and His eyes were always open.

  Meoraq closed his eyes. He took a breath, held it, then let it slowly out again. He looked at Amber and said, “Come here.”

  Human heads turned all through the room. Human eyes watched, solemn and staring, as Amber stood alone among them.

  She did not move for a long time.

  But when she did move, she came toward him.

  Meoraq waited. She came within his easy reach and tipped her head back just a little, a combatant no longer but only an exhausted and unhappy human in torn clothes waiting to be struck so she could go to bed.

  Meoraq left her standing there and went to his tent. He found the mending kit and brought it back, taking her firmly by the wrist and slapping the case with force into her limp hand. “When you are ready to apologize,” he said, releasing her, “I may be ready to forgive you. Until then, mend your shirt and keep your mouth shut.”

  Her chin trembled, but in the end, she did not answer, only took the kit and left again. Back to her stall, perhaps, and this was just as well. He was willing to take the higher path, but he wasn’t ready to forgive, not quite yet.

  The humans were watching, wary. He hissed at them and went into his tent as they scattered. He lay down, tight and angry and itching beneath his skin. He thought of Amber sitting alone in that empty room, mending that worn-out shirt just so it wouldn’t be the last one she had in the world. He thought of her calling him a son of a bitch too, but he tried not to let that be the master of him.

  3

  Morning came, but daylight did not lessen the storm that blew without the walls any better than sl
eep had eased the storm of Meoraq’s mood. He kept to himself in a foul humor, hiding in his tent until the humans woke and began to mill about, talking about the rain, talking about food, talking about the building itself and the Ancients who built it…and talking about the ship they imagined they saw in the tilework. As galling as the thought of that ship was, he was glad when Scott took the lot of them away to the other room to look at it, even if it was against his expressed order, because at least it gave him the opportunity to slip out without having to deal with any of them.

  But when he opened the fastens and stepped out, there was Amber, leaned up against the wall in her useless human blanket, waiting for him.

  He didn’t want to talk to her yet. He wasn’t sure he wanted to talk to her at all. He gave her a grunt of acknowledgement and left her.

  Halfway down the first long hall that led to the rear of the building and the hole in the wall, Meoraq stopped and turned around. He folded his arms, hands flexing close to his honor knives, and waited. He wasn’t going to run away from a woman, by hell. If she wanted to thrash this out, they’d thrash. Ha! And she’d know how it felt to thrash with a Sheulek by the end of it.

  Time, measured out by his own even breaths and the drumming of rain against the outer windows.

  Meoraq waited. Waited. And finally let out a curse and stalked back up the hall and into the sleeping room.

  Amber, still leaning against the wall, turned her head and looked at him.

  Now he was really annoyed.

  Perhaps she could tell. She looked away, fixing her eyes on her own knees without change to her expression. This act bent her neck, making her look very much like a dumaq woman, which did not mollify him in the slightest but was instead somehow grotesque. He felt himself cooling and had to stop and remind himself that she had started all the fighting and it wasn’t over until he said it was.

  “I am not angry with you,” he announced, hoping to provoke her.

  “Lies,” she muttered, but she looked at him. Glared at him. And that was better.

  “A Sheulek is the master of his emotions,” he told her. “I have every right to be angry with you. I choose the higher path. I forgive you and we will say no more about it. Give me my mending kit.”

  She reached it out from beneath her pack, but only held it for a while. “I should have thanked you for this last night,” she said finally. “I don’t know how it is with your people, lizardman, but when it comes to humans, you don’t interrupt a girl’s crying jag and then expect her to be grateful.”

  He could not believe this.

  “Are you criticizing my behavior?” he asked incredulously.

  Her shoulders fell. “Sure sounds that way, doesn’t it? Damn it. Here.”

  He did not move to take the kit and, after a few awkward moments, she let her offering arm drop again.

  They looked at each other.

  She said, without heat and without warning, “I’ve never needed anyone before. Never in my life. I hate that I need you.”

  Meoraq cooled a little more and this time, let those fires burn out. He went over and took his mending kit from her. “I am not your enemy.”

  She snorted without much humor. Without much feeling of any kind, it seemed. “No, you’re my babysitter. Or, what was it you called me? Your runaway sheep?”

  “Something of the sort,” he mumbled, scratching at the side of his snout. He bared his teeth briefly, then irritably said, “You ran off, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, I did. So that I could have my useless goddamn girly moment in private. You were the last person I wanted to see that.”

  The kit in his hands seemed suddenly to weigh ten times what it should. He looked at it foolishly, picked at a loose thread in its side-seam (it ought to be repaired and that was nearly ironic—to mend a mending kit), and put it away. “Why?”

  She was quiet for a long time, long enough that he thought she did not intend to answer at all, and he was debating how to handle that when she suddenly, listlessly said, “Because I’m supposed to be the tough one. I’m supposed to be different. And I’m not.”

  “You are.” He snorted and came over to give her a forgiving tap. “Hear the words of Uyane. You are without equal in the realm of the very different. I handle it…badly.”

  “Maybe I wasn’t at my best last night. But you were pissed off all day—”

  He grunted acknowledgement and did not point out that he had every reason to be angry when some cattle’s ass tried to take command of his camp, let alone when the one human he found tolerable turned her back on him and followed said ass into a city of the Fall against the will of Sheul and Meoraq both. He was being very patient.

  “—and then you disappear all night, during the worst storm I’ve ever seen—”

  “And what exactly did you expect me to do about the weather, woman?”

  “Nothing! Just…and while we’re on the subject, what have you been telling Scott about me?”

  His spines flared. “This is the subject?”

  “It relates,” she said defensively.

  “Apart from the usual death threats which he ignores, I try not to speak to S’kot at all. When circumstance forces me to do so, it certainly isn’t man-chat about you.”

  She looked down at her empty lap and said nothing. It was not a look of relief. More of a flinch, if anything.

  He studied her frowning face, seeing thoughts there he could not read. “Why? What does he claim I say?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He clapped one hand to his snout and physically pinched it shut, determined to be tactful. Then, because towering over her like this wasn’t helping even if it was entirely appropriate, he hunkered down and tapped her on the knee. “S’kot can’t open his mouth without piss falling out of it. If his people choose to believe his lies, that is their foolishness. It doesn’t have to be yours.”

  “Meoraq, he’s telling them—”

  He pinched her chin, silencing her. “I don’t care if he’s telling them he is Sheul Himself in human form. You know better. You know truth. How do you mark me?”

  She stared at him in silence, at last waggling her head up and down in human acknowledgement.

  He grunted and released her, looking broodingly around the empty room where the Fall of the Ancients went on and on in some other plane. “This land is poison. I allowed it to infect me last night, Soft-Skin, as perhaps it infected all of us. I should not have been so harsh with you. Will you take my spare tunic?”

  “No.”

  “Please yourself. I will not command it today. If you come to any sense, you know that I have it.” He stood. “Gather your things and pack my tent. I need to scout our path out of this God-accursed place and I want S’kot and his cattle to be ready to leave the very instant that I return for them. Tell him.”

  “Okay.”

  The door to the foreroom opened, drawing both their eyes. There stood Scott himself, chattering back over his shoulder at all the humans who had followed him into that room in defiance of Meoraq’s command.

  He gripped his brow-ridges. He was not going to shout. He was going to be patient. He was.

  “Oh good, you’re up,” said Scott. “I want to talk to you, Meoraq.”

  “Sheul, O my Father, be with Your son.”

  “Not a good time, Scott,” said Amber.

  “Miss Bierce, this is none of your business. Be quiet. Meoraq.” Scott’s soft face became what he probably thought was very stern. “What can you tell us about the people who used to live here?”

  “They’re all dead. What else do you need to know?”

  Scott paused to roll his eyes at his watching people. When he continued, it was in the slow, smiling way that usually meant he thought he was talking to a fool. “Let’s start with this place. Where are we?”

  “Eh? This very building?” Meoraq glanced at Amber, but she did not correct him. He flicked his spines. “I don’t know.”

  “The room in back, the one with all t
he little metal creatures—”

  “The machines,” said Meoraq, folding his arms. “What about them?”

  “What are they doing?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why?” asked Amber.

  “Miss Bierce, this doesn’t concern you. Now, Meoraq, can you find out what the bots are doing? The lights are working,” he said, pointing up even though more than half of the lights in this particular room were dark. “And the doors have power, so maybe you could fire up one of the computers in the back and—”

  “And what, S’kot?” Meoraq interrupted, snapping his spines audibly flat. “What would you have me do in defiance of Sheul’s holy law? What, when all men who are His children know it goes against the Word to take mastery over the machines of the Fallen Age or to dwell again in the cities of the Ancients? Speak your mind plainly to one who is the Sword of His judgment. What?”

  Scott puckered his soft lips so that he appeared in every way to be the ass he was. After a long pause, he said, “Do you at least know how long this place has been empty?”

  “In years?” Meoraq asked, baffled. “I have no idea. It comes from the age of the Ancients.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere. But you can’t tell us how long ago that was?”

  “Since the Fall? No one can.”

  “You don’t keep track of time on this planet?”

  “It’s Year 33 of Advocate Y’zhare Selthut’s stewardship under Sheul.”

  “So it’s been thirty-three years since…since whatever happened?”

  “Eh?” Meoraq checked with Amber again, but she was only listening. “No, it’s been thirty-three years since the death of Advocate Falhiri. He held the advocacy, I think, seventeen years. Before that…I don’t remember, but if you want me to recite them all the way back, it won’t happen, human. I couldn’t even do that for my true training master.”

  “So, what, they reset the calendar every time they elect a president?” Scott frowned over that a short while, then shook his head. “It doesn’t matter, I guess. How about this: What can you tell me about what happened here?”