by R. Lee Smith
“Yes, sir.”
“He’ll be the first, Eshiqi, and once it starts, it will not stop. One,” said Zhuqa quietly. “Two.”
Amber rolled shakily onto her belly, choking on sobs that were still more shock than pain.
“Three. Four.”
She put her hand next to his foot.
Zhuqa looked at it. “Palm to heaven.”
She turned her wrist. Even that hurt.
Zhuqa grunted. He stood up. “Put your cock away, Uruul. Stand your watch.”
“Yes, sir.” Spoken with real relief. The second guard was staring at him with something like admiration as Uruul fastened his breeches.
“I’m a simple man,” said Zhuqa, looking only at Amber as she struggled to right herself. “And those are really the only two games I know. Which one are you going to play, Eshiqi?”
Another woman would have spit on him. Another woman would have made him slap her in chains just so she could use them to throttle him. Another woman would never have needed someone like Meoraq to save her.
Amber got up and followed him back to his room. Zhuqa held the door until she’d limped through it. He did not slam it. He was not, she saw, angry.
“Zhuqa has come home,” he said. “How do you greet me, woman?”
She wiped her face on her arms a few times, took a stabilizing breath, then faced him. Put her arms around him. Leaned her cheek against his chest.
“I can tell you have never played before, but you are trying and I appreciate your efforts. Tomorrow, I will put you to work with the other slaves so that you can see better how this game is played.”
She nodded listlessly. Maybe Meoraq would be here by then.
“Still, it pleases a man to see his woman try. Come here, Eshiqi.”
She went, not daring to look at him and not knowing whether it was to keep him from seeing the murder in her eyes…or the tears.
He took her hand, put it on his belt. He gave no orders.
“Grim as Gann Himself,” he murmured, fingering her hair as she undressed him. “You will have to work at that. I don’t mind if you hate me, as long as you hide it. Play the game, Eshiqi, and remember a woman’s greatest happiness is to serve her man.”
“I’ll be happy when you’re dead,” she said. Her voice broke on every goddamned word.
He bent to graze his teeth along her shoulder when she began her kneading motions. It was the only time she faltered, thinking he meant to bite her, and it wasn’t the pain she feared so much as the scar it would leave.
“Easy, little one,” he murmured, his voice thick and strained. “I take no pleasure from your pain. You will carry no more scars while you stand in my favor. And when you do not, scars will be the least of your concerns.” His next words became an inarticulate hiss as she found the slick nub of his clitoris-like sa’ad and they were his last effort at any kind of speech for a long time. He buried his brow against her shoulder, abandoning sight to only feel. He touched her when she touched him, his rough hands lightly scouring at her hip, her ribs, her thigh. He was gentle.
“I’m going to kill you,” she told him, stroking his cock until his oils coated her hand and every flexing of her fingers made him shudder with the effort not to cum. “I don’t know how yet, but I know I will. And someday, long after you’re dead—” She turned around, her hands braced on the table on either side of the waterskin, fingernails digging curt furrows only for that first moment. Once he was in her, the oiled ridges of his cock rubbing heat into her mindless body (Gann’s body, she thought, her godless clay), she was able to relax, separate from sensation, let it happen. “Long after you’re dead,” she went on calmly, her voice broken by his powerful thrusts and not by any of her own emotion, “I’m going to wake up in the night from a bad dream with your face in it, but I won’t remember your name. And I’ll go back to sleep. And I’ll sleep just fine.”
He groaned hoarsely against the nape of her neck, his hands digging painful grooves in her stomach. The first time never took him long, but that didn’t mean it was ending. He wasn’t human. He didn’t have to stop until he wanted to.
“I won’t remember you,” whispered Amber, gazing at the wall as Time once again stretched out and stopped. “I won’t.”
5
At first light, Meoraq rose. He had not slept, but he had rested as best he was able within his unquiet mind and it was with clarity of sight and purpose that he looked upon his camp. The raiders had taken both sleds and all that they had carried. His pack and Amber’s had been too worn to interest them, but their contents had been rummaged through and scattered. The clothes they had spent the winter making were gone, along with Meoraq’s mending kit and tent. His bedroll was missing; Amber’s remained. His tea box lay open on the ground, the more precious of its inlaid stones pried up and its many drawers knocked loose, spilling its remaining teas into the grass. Amber’s cups were nearby, one of them in pieces.
He ignored the dead man for now. There was evidence there, he knew, but whatever he had not scattered in faithless rage would keep. He searched the ground for the things which had been hidden from him in the darkness, now brought to light.
He saw blood. More than could be accounted for by the dead man, even taking into measure Meoraq’s fit of fury. Blood in a wide, dried pool, crushed into the grass by the trampling of many feet. Blood painting the tall stalks of wind-blown grasses. Blood that led into the plains.
Meoraq gazed into the north, the direction the blood had taken, then returned to the ashes of his fire and knelt to examine what was left of the body. The boots, worn and overlarge for the dead man’s feet; not bought or made, but stolen. His companions had relieved him of any coin or weapons, but overlooked one bauble—a woman’s wristlet, worn not upon his own wrist, but bent wide and hidden…treasured…around his ankle. He wore a battle harness of inexpensive make, patched with insignias taken from many different Houses—taken from those who had the birthright to wear them, no doubt—and breeches sewn of hides. He had little flesh left to inspect, but what there was had been heavily scarred, and the thicker scales along his back showed the buckling and discoloration of a diet with too much meat, too little crop. When he hunted out the head, he saw eyes yellowed by the overuse of phesok (smoked phesok, by the burnt pads of his fingers, once they were also located) and brown stumps of teeth that had never known cleaning.
Meoraq looked again at the metal-worked bit, turning it between his fingers until he found the jewelsmith’s stamp on the backing. Ulhrug, it said. Ulhrug of Praxas. The city was not familiar to him, but he supposed the city didn’t matter. This chain with its pretty ornament had likely come off the neck of some murdered traveller.
And yet…
He was well-fed, for a raider. Warmly dressed. He was a young man and not strongly-made; the burlier members of his pack should have stripped him of all his prizes and yet here he lay with his boots on and spoils intact. These were the wildlands at the very heel of winter. There were no travelling merchants to prey on and little enough game for an honest man to find, but he had certainly not suffered for their lack.
Whoever these raiders were…someone was trading with them.
Of course, it was both a crime against Man’s law and a sin before the eyes of Sheul to have dealings of any kind with those who had gone to Gann, but men were weak. Raiders had phesok and strong drink; the cities had sweets, medicines and women. There would always be places where those on both sides of the walls were willing to sheathe their blades and offer goods instead. So it seemed this Praxas was such a place.
He tucked the dead man’s trinket into his own boot and looked the body over one last time. He saw a hard life, begun and ended in violence outside the city walls. A boy born in the squalor of a raiding camp to become a man fallen from Sheul’s grace. And that camp would be where they had taken his Amber.
He bent his head, closed his eyes and breathed. Six breaths. Six again. The Prophet. His brunt. Uyane. Mykrm. Oyan. Thaliszar. He was a war
rior of his father’s House. He was a Sword and a true son of Sheul. He was God’s Striding Foot in the land and the hour of Gann. He was Uyane Meoraq.
Truth.
He listened to the wind brush across the plains, then opened his eyes.
On the blood-stained ground, he saw nothing new. In the blackened ring of his camp’s firepit were only ashes. In the plains, nothing moved that breathed.
And in the sky, the forever-clouds of Sheul’s storm lay open, showing a face of jewel-deep green and light in beams of gold pouring down all around it.
It closed and the wind blew on.
Meoraq passed a trembling hand briefly before his eyes, then closed it into a firm fist. He took up Amber’s travel-pack and set her surviving cup within, cushioned by his own rolled-up pack. After a moment’s dark non-thought, he bent and gathered the various pieces of his tea box, fit them back together and packed that away as well. As far as he cared (and he didn’t know why he cared even that much), everything else could go to Gann.
He began to run.
* * *
Zhuqa didn’t tie her up again. He didn’t need to. He pulled the knife from the sheath he kept strapped high on his arm, showed it to her, then stabbed it into the door of his cupboard. That was almost intimidating enough all on its own, but he hadn’t been trying to scare her with it. He just wanted a place to hang his bells.
He had to dig for them in a crate for some time before he found them, and the whole time he did that, Amber had to stand two running steps away from the cupboard and stare at the knife. They were jingle-bells, all wired together in a festive loop just like Christmas bells back on Earth, except they were made of some greenish metal. Not a minty Christmas-green either, but something ugly and snotty, the sort of color that made the whole thing look vaguely cancerous. He hung them over the hilt of his knife where the slightest movement of the door set them to shrill jingling, then put her in the cupboard to sleep with him, but he didn’t try to touch her. No, he just put her closest to the wall with himself on the outer side, so that escape would mean climbing over the top of him and opening a jingling door…in other words, impossible.
He fell asleep almost immediately—two marathon bouts of sex in one day were too much for even mighty Zhuqa the Warlord—but Amber did not. She lay there for a very long time, doing nothing, thinking nothing, only staring into the black above her bed. She would have liked to have been planning something. Escape. Murder. Hell, dinner. But thought was like hate tonight, too heavy for her little body to carry.
She still believed Meoraq was coming. This was so obvious that it didn’t even bear wondering about. He was coming and he’d find her. Meoraq could do anything. The question of whether he’d still want her after another man had been inside her had not yet occurred to her, but it would before morning. These were her last worry-free moments, but for now, no, she wasn’t worried.
Someone knocked.
Zhuqa woke. Only he didn’t just ‘wake’. Between his sleeping inhalation and the swift snort of his waking exhale, he managed to flip into a crouch and draw his other knife. She knew about the crouch because she could hear the pa-pad of his bare feet hitting the hard mat they slept on. She knew about the knife because it was under her jaw.
“That wasn’t me,” said Amber.
Zhuqa eased up on the knife with a low grunt.
The knock came again, even louder.
“Someone better be dead,” he called, and shoved the cupboard door open.
The bells were loud as sirens in the quiet, slow to leave the air. She heard his footsteps recede. A sliver of reddish light split the dark as he opened the door.
“Iziz,” said Zhuqa. “In light of our many years of friendship, I will give you one word before I disembowel you.”
“Zru’itak,” said Iziz, seemingly unconcerned.
Zhuqa sheathed his knife and came back into the room. He left the door open, so she thought he was coming for his clothes, but while he did dress and strap on his weapons, modesty was clearly his secondary concern. “Up, Eshiqi,” he called. “You are far too new to this game to be left to play alone.”
He didn’t offer her any clothes. Amber fumbled a blanket off the bed and wrapped herself in it as well as she could, running to make up what little time this cost.
He grunted, eyeing her as he cinched his belt tight, then gave the lizardman standing behind him a friendly slap to the stomach and said, “Say something to him.”
“Gee,” she said, in her most neutral voice. “I didn’t have a speech prepared, but choke on piss and die.”
Iziz snorted, his spines flaring in either amusement or surprise. “What the hell did that mean?”
“Nothing good, I should think.” Zhuqa gave Amber’s chin an affectionate pinch and went back out into the hall, trusting her to follow. Which she did. “Probably told you that your father was a ghet or a slave or a warm pile of shit.”
“Could have been Gann himself for all anyone knows,” Iziz said agreeably, walking backwards to watch Amber. “My mother isn’t much for names. Those eyes…Does that thing really understand you or is it just doing tricks?”
“It understands every word.”
“Eerie. Have you fucked it yet?”
“Yes.”
“How is it?”
“Better than your mother.”
“She could use some training up, couldn’t she?” Iziz agreed and turned around just in time to avoid tumbling backwards onto the stairs. “You feeling proprietary?”
“For now. But stop a moment. Eshiqi, come here.”
There on the stairs, with a guard on the lower landing looking up and two on the next floor looking down, Zhuqa beckoned.
She took a second or two to think about all the things he might want her to demonstrate with his friend and then she walked stiffly up to them and waited.
“Oh, that is snapping mad,” Iziz remarked in an admiring tone.
Zhuqa moved Amber’s hair to show off Meoraq’s scar.
The effect on his friend was something of a surprise. He looked at it politely for a heartbeat or two, and then actually leapt back, banging into the stairwell rail and nearly going right over and down to wherever the bottom was in this place. Zhuqa’s hand catching in his harness prevented that, but Iziz didn’t even thank him.
“That’s a fucking Sheulek bite!” he hissed, all his spines standing straight up.
“Yes.”
“That thing belongs to a Sheulek?!”
“Used to.” Zhuqa chucked Amber on the chin again and resumed climbing stairs. “She says she killed him.”
“Then she’s a fucking liar!” Iziz said, looking and sounding almost prissily outraged. “Where did you get that thing?”
“About three, maybe four spans off the old quarry road.”
“Off the road? Where off the road? And when were you going to tell us to make fast against a fucking Sword of fucking God? Shouldn’t that have been the first thing you did when you got back, instead of throwing a poke into that Gann-ugly thing for hours at a stretch?!”
“How long have we been here, Iziz? How many years?”
The second lizardman passed a hand over his eyes briefly and shook his head—not in negation, they didn’t do that, but in the same way an irritated dog throws off water. “More than a few,” he said, resigned. “Five? Six?”
“It is, in fact, eight. Eight years, settled. And wintering twelve years before that, under me or under Chuaan, and who knows how many years before that, for raiders like us if not this band exactly? These ruins have stood since the Fall and they may still be standing when men rise up to Fall again.” He glanced back at Amber, his eyes glinting red in the torchlight. “No one is coming.”
“You say that like no one ever has. I say to you, if little boys chasing after tachuqi talons can find this place, so can a Sheulek.”
“Then I’ll kill him.”
Iziz snorted. “Before or after you catch lightning in your fist and squeeze it into wine?”
“I have killed six Sheulek in my time, Iziz. Seven, if you count a certain way.” He gave Amber another glance, coughing amusement at what he saw in her face. “If he comes, he comes. And I will kill him and make a cup of his skull—” He reached back to pinch her chin. “—for my woman to hold for me when we share our meals.”
She twisted out of his grip and rubbed the back of her hand across her chin, erasing the hated heat of his touch. It wasn’t deliberate; she couldn’t have stopped herself if she’d tried. It was all she could do not to bare her teeth at him like an animal.
“Fierce little thing,” Zhuqa murmured and left the stairs for another hall.
There was more light here. And noise. Muted by distance and at least one other door, she could hear a lizardish screaming. Not high and frightened, not fresh. Whatever torture played out at the end of this hall, it had been some time in the act. Amber’s step slowed as the last cry tapered to an moan and then came a terrible silence that stopped her entirely. Even when Zhuqa noticed, even when he came back for her, she couldn’t move. She didn’t want to see what he’d done to someone to make them make a sound like that.
Or to make them stop.
“These are my slave pens,” Zhuqa said after a moment. “Zhuqa the Warlord has played many games in this hall I do not care to remember. Easy, my little one. This is not one of them. Come with me.”
He turned around again. She followed.
They had not quite reached the door he wanted when it opened and a raider came out. She recognized him, although the name didn’t come until she heard it in Zhuqa’s mouth.
“Geozh.” He folded his arms, an act that placed his hands very near to the sheathed blade strapped to his biceps. “You must be coming to fetch me.”
“I was, actually.” And, far from showing concern, Geozh gave his leader a clap to the shoulder. “You know what they say about the first one, but it’s a tough little sprat.”
He moved off down the hall, spines high but relaxed. Humming.