by R. Lee Smith
She gave her left ear a sullen rub, glaring at him, thinking, ‘There it is and that didn’t take long at all, did it? I can do this. I really think I can.’
Zhuqa nudged at her head, but gently now.
Amber shifted his breeches, glared some more, and then knelt down again and stilled the flexing of his cock with her touch. She stroked the shaft, licked once at his sa’ad, and then turned her head and sucked lightly at the slick side of his cock.
“Fuck Gann,” he breathed, sagging back against the door.
Back and forth, from clit to cock, licking, sucking, squeezing, flicking. She rolled his sa’ad between her lips, bathed every side of his shaft, licked all the way up his slit and down again in one slow sweep, pursed her lips around the blunt hook at the tip of his cock and suckled it, then latched her mouth around the base and let the tip of her tongue trace the many valleys between the rubbery spikes that grew along the knot, feeling it fill with fresh cum as he hissed and groaned and screamed obscenities.
And with it all so close to her face, she could not help but also see the thick, black vein pulsing just where the soft inner meat of his slit hardened into the base of his cock. Amber stared, feeling nothing, tasting nothing, seeing fish hooks in her mind.
His knot was swelling already. Time to bring the curtain down.
Amber took the full length of his cock in both her fists, working him in milking motions as she sucked at the hook and flicked the opening eye with her tongue to drink away the first drops. And when he started to cum, she was quick to suck the whole head into her mouth, bobbing as deep as she could manage, letting him feel her swallow each hot, oily stream that burst across her tongue.
She knew when he finally looked down and saw her doing it because both his hands came down to clench in her hair and he spent the last few seconds of his climax fucking furiously at her throat and calling out some of the most filthily creative things Amber had ever heard and never could have imagined, ending with, “Fuck Gann fucking God fucking me!” before he finally staggered back and slid down to join her on the floor.
Amber waited, just in case he had it in him to keep going, but once he had his breathing slowed, Zhuqa pulled his cock in and closed his breeches. He grimaced at her.
“You promised,” said Amber.
“I hear you.” He reached out and rubbed a finger along the corner of her lips, then showed her the smear of semen on his fingertip.
She thought about it, then licked it off.
He shuddered. “That is the most profane thing I have ever seen,” he told her. The front of his loin-plate was bulging.
“Please,” said Amber.
“You never should have bartered with me, little one.” Zhuqa got to his feet and pulled her up beside him, grimacing his lizard-grin at the world. “Because now you are going to have to buy everything.”
But he took her out, up ten flights of stairs, past dozens of saluting, well-armed guards. He did it without any suspicion. He did it with a smile on his face. He did it without ever thinking in any way that she could sense how vulnerable that one little vein might be and how readily he’d put her on her knees before it and then closed his eyes. He just took her out.
It was hard to be outside. She hadn’t thought about how it would be to actually see the sky again, feel the wind, taste the freshness after the deep, stale air of the underground ruins. It had just been something to ask for, something she’d known he would believe. She thought she’d be able to take a few deep breaths, maybe gaze intently into the clouds, and her only concern had been how she was going to make that look convincing when she didn’t really care.
But the wind was cool and wet with the promise of clean rain. There was a greenness to it, some springtime flavor that she caught on her tongue when she breathed, and for a while she forgot about Zhuqa entirely, even as he stood watching her.
She did all the same things she’d planned to do after all, although she didn’t think about that until later. She took those deep, shaky breaths. She tipped her head back and stared at the grey smudge that marked a full moon’s light behind the ever-rolling clouds. She didn’t speak and didn’t move until Zhuqa put his hand on her shoulder and said, with that hateful gentleness he so often had, “Enough, little one. You’re shivering. Come inside.”
Then she began to cry, sort of. There were no sobs, no ugliness, no lump in her throat that needed choking out. There were just tears, pouring out of her one after another, so quiet and easy that if it weren’t for the heat of them, she might not have known she was making them. She looked at Zhuqa and he reached up to wipe at her cheek with the back of his hand. She realized that she’d made up her mind already, that the fish hook was not a possibility, but a plan. Tomorrow’s plan.
“Ah, Eshiqi, hush,” he said, brushing at her other cheek as the first trickled more tears. “Zhuqa’s woman does not stay forever in his lair. One day, all the world will be your House.”
“You said the same thing to Zru’itak,” she said and turned toward the stair.
“And I would have kept my promise,” he said evenly, “if she had remained loyal to me.” He studied her as she stared at him, then smiled very slightly. “That was a good guess, I think,” he remarked to himself. “But I’m not guessing at every word, believe that. You are losing your secrets, Eshiqi, a little more each day. One day very soon, you will have to be honest.”
She heard herself laugh without feeling it. “Not today, I hope. And not tomorrow.”
He frowned, capturing each word as it left her mouth for further study. He waited a long time after her last word, as if to be sure she was done talking, but when her gaze wandered back to the sky, he grunted and took gentle hold of her arm. “We have a meal waiting for us,” he said, leading her in their descent. “It will be cold now, but you will sit on my knee and hold my cup and show me your gratitude, and tomorrow, perhaps, you will see the sky again.”
And the tears kept coming, because Amber knew she was never going to make it that far out, and she’d already had her last look at the sky.
11
Sixteen spans, the boy had said. Meoraq had always felt he had a good grasp of distance, even in the wildlands. Years of travel and Master Darr’s notorious book of maps burned into his brain combined to keep a subconscious tally wherever he went. It was not infallible—all things mortal succumbed at times to deception or delusion—but it had served him well and he had every reason to put his faith in it as much as God. He began his hunt for ruins at an estimate of fourteen spans and when he reached eighteen without finding them, he stopped, turned back alongside his trail, and sought them further south.
Back and forth he went in this fashion, waking before dawn to make use of each second that God gave him light. He stopped at every stream to scout for boot-prints among the animal tracks. He knuckled through the gnawed leavings of each carcass for signs of butchery. He searched each promising thicket or valley deep enough to hide a nest, climbed each hill that might show him a better vantage.
He found everything—muddy tracks, blade-marked bones, discarded scraps of cured leather, broken sleds, ashpits—but none of it was fresh and in finding everything, he found nothing. As for ruins, he knew the signs well enough in Yroq, but in this land of hills and valleys and chokes of trees, anywhere he aimed his eyes showed him signs. And yet he found no ruins.
He told himself he would finish out one more day southward and then turn around. He would run through the night back to his first trail, roughly, and begin a northerly search in the morning.
Good. Sound. Sensible.
But when night fell on the fifth day of futility, Meoraq camped. He didn’t really know why. He hadn’t found anything (two separate heaps of half-burnt branches, a rotted harness, a dead man tied to a hsul tree and left to be eaten alive a brace or so ago: nothing) and his last glimpse of the landscape before the sun fell showed him nothing worth exploring further, but he camped all the same. He lit no fire, just sat in the dark, trying to medita
te while his nerves gnawed at him.
When he slept, he dreamed in confusing tangles of his father returning from Kuaq, of silver shards in the shape of a ship flying through broken tiles, of thunder and rain and the stormway tunnel collapsing around him. He did not dream of Amber.
He woke just at dawn feeling that scant minutes had passed since he’d shut his eyes, and yet he felt…not invigorated, really, but awake. Like the stinging sensation that comes to a numbed arm or leg when it is first moved, it was not a pleasant feeling, but ominous, a sign of something greater still to come.
He prayed at least an hour, largely without words, as the morning moved on ahead of him. At the end of his prayers, he started walking south again.
He had always had a good sense of time as well as distance. Today, although painfully aware of direction (and it was pain; he could feel Praxas like a fish hook in his flesh, tied to a line that threatened with every step to snap), he had no grip at all on the hour. The sun moved overhead and if it were not for the fact that he could see it (not the sun, but the light of the sun, and there was another fish hook), he would have no sense of time at all. To judge by that light, it was near eighth-hour—almost the whole day walked away—when he came to the top of the hill that had the tree.
It was the only tree left on the hill, of some kind unknown to him. Its body was very tall and straight, burnt black by some misfortune in the far past. Its single surviving branch had broken close to the trunk, half-fallen, but sprouted new life at its tip, so that the whole thing took on the appearance of a fish hook, and why in the two names of God and Gann was he so obsessed with fish hooks? He didn’t think he’d ever in his life seen one except in shops or pictures. But there it was, this ruin of a tree, this monument to all fish hooks of the world, an obvious landmark for even a boy to find and follow, and so Meoraq put down his pack and climbed it.
At the top, just where the branch hung down, Meoraq looked out over the furthest ridge and saw dark shapes too perfectly squared to be natural, set in patterns only men could design.
Ruins.
‘And it’s nineteen spans from Praxas if it’s a damned step,’ he thought. The boy was no better at gauging distance than he was putting a choke on a man.
Not even for a moment did he question whether these were the ruins where his Amber had been taken. Neither did he stop to wonder how many raiders were nesting in its belly. Some things were manifestly obvious. Some things didn’t matter. He knew.
* * *
She stole the fish hook. She meant to wait until the end of the day, the last possible minute, so the chances of being caught with it were at their lowest, but as much sense as that made, she was only able to stand touching them, sewing with them, staring at them, for so long before she just had to take one. And the opportunity, when it came, was too golden and glorious to overlook: Hruuzk, out of the room; all the slaves, occupied with work; the children, who were the most wildly unpredictable variable, up top with Hruuzk; and into this almost-perfect scenario, Rosek suddenly peed on Dkorm. Swearing, he scooped her up and stomped into the next room where there was water to get cleaned up.
Amber didn’t watch him go, didn’t hesitate, didn’t think. She stopped sewing on one hook, reached into the box, and hooked another on the inside of her sleeve where it was out of sight and could still plausibly have gotten there by accident. Then she went back to sewing. She attempted a few deep breaths—a slow-count of six, as Meoraq would say—but only made it as far as three before her nerve buckled and she looked around to see if she’d been caught.
Dkorm was still in the other room, scrubbing at himself with a rag and hissing at the baby. The slaves were right where they ought to be, necks bent, silent. Xzem—
Xzem was looking at her. She ducked her head when their eyes met, rocking Zhuqa’s baby and trying to coax him back onto her breast, but she had definitely been looking. What had she seen? What would she say?
She didn’t have long to agonize over it. Dkorm came storming back into the room while Amber was still sewing on the same hook, her hands too weak and fluttery-feeling to manage the simple knots. He shoved Rosek roughly into a crate and threw himself down, still wiping at his chest and muttering. His mood infected the other lizardladies with enough anxiety that her own went unnoticed.
The fish hook pulled at her sleeve, a thousand-pound piece of metal smaller than her thumb. Everything was relative.
Somehow the day passed. She sewed mindlessly on the same net for most of it, forced to go back over the same places again and again when she consistently put hooks in upside down or sewed folds of the net together. When she was finally finished, it looked worse than the very first net she’d done, but at least it was finished and she could go clutch at Zhuqa’s baby and calm herself down.
Xzem sat very still beside her and did not look at her.
The baby purred, its tiny hand squeezing Amber’s goliath finger. It slept and Amber cupped its small, warm head and stared into its snouted face and thought, ‘I’m going to get you out of this, baby. It’s you and me, all the way to the top.’
When it woke and began to bite sleepily at her breast, Amber gave it reluctantly back to Xzem and returned to her work-table. Ena had another net waiting, the last net. Amber got to work.
She had nearly finished when Hruuzk came at the end of the day to gather up his slaves. He took Meoraq’s mending kit and tucked it back into his belt. She protested. Stupid of her, but she wanted to finish the net and she was at least three lengths of sinew from done.
“Eh, it’s good enough,” Hruuzk told her, inspecting the net. “I’ll talk to Zhuqa about putting you in the kitchen. Shame to waste your energy doing sprat-work like this.”
He patted her on the head and gave her his usual, “Good girl,” and ambled away with his ladies all in a slumped, silent line. Dkorm left, taking Xzem and the babies. Amber sat down with a pitcher of xuseth oil tightly gripped in both hands and waited for Zhuqa. If he found the hook caught in her sleeve here in the workpit, she might still be okay. Maybe.
Hours, each one ticking away at its own elastic pace. She could hear herself breathing. She didn’t think she’d ever heard herself breathe in this room before.
Zhuqa came. He smiled at her, filling the doorway. “Where is my greeting?”
Amber took one step toward him and froze. The hand she usually put on his chest was attached to the arm wrapped in the sleeve with a fish hook in it. If she raised it up as high as his heart, he would be looking right down the fucking thing, wide as the Lincoln Tunnel, with the lamp on the table blasting light right on it. If she used her other hand, would he notice?
‘He’s noticing this pause, little girl,’ the ghost of Bo Peep drawled. ‘That’s what he’s noticing. Get the stick out and do something.’
Her next step was something of a lurch, but it was movement and it took her to him. She put her arms around him (the hookless arm considerably tighter than the other) and pressed her cheek to his chest instead.
“You must want something,” Zhuqa remarked, patting her back. “As it happens, so do I. Come, Eshiqi. We’ll take our game below.”
He took her out into the hall, keeping her at his side all the way to the stair. Her arm, the one with the hook, hung between them, threatening at each step to snag on his scales when he brushed against her. Amber began to feel distinctly light-headed. Was she even breathing? No, she was not. God.
At the stair, he went ahead of her, but there were guards at every landing, their faces all pointed up at him, at her. When he stepped off into the hallway, he stayed ahead of her, but there were guards at every crossway, standing at attention, showing their salutes. When he came to his door, he stopped to take out his squarish keys, and it was there, in the two short seconds it took him to unlock the door, that Amber pulled the hook out of her sleeve and put it in her mouth. She heard fabric tear even over the sound of the key turning in its lock, but Zhuqa never glanced back. The hook felt enormous clenched between her teeth, as
if it were stretching out her whole face into a Halloween mask, but Zhuqa only smiled and beckoned for her to precede him.
“Zhuqa has come home,” he said.
She walked in and began undressing without waiting for his order. Surely it was her imagination that made her think he looked at her for a heartbeat longer than usual before he took her shift, her imagination that made her think he was more meticulous than usual when he felt his way through it. He tossed it aside the same as ever, that she was sure of, and then his hands were on her.
‘God, don’t let him feel my heart pounding,’ she thought. Prayed. No atheists in foxholes, wasn’t that the saying? Well, there were no atheists in Zhuqa’s room with fish hooks in their mouths, waiting for him to finish checking them for weapons either. In that moment, for as long as it lasted, Amber Bierce was a True Believer.
Zhuqa finished feeling between her thighs and stood up. He checked her armpits—sweating so much he has to notice that why is he pretending not to goddamn sadistic lizard—then moved on to lift her breasts in his hands, slipping his thumbs between them like always just in case she had a—fish hook—weapon stowed away beneath one of them.
And there he stopped.
For one illogical instant, Amber thought he’d found something. Her mouth tried to drop open in a gape; she clenched it shut and then had to relax her jaw so it didn’t look like she was clenching it. She stared at him, fighting not to stare, knowing she had to be either white as a sheet or blushing to the roots of her hair, or heck, both.
Still cupping her breasts, with absolutely no sign on his lizardish face that anything at all was amiss, Zhuqa bent down and nuzzled at her throat.
Oh Jesus, really? The giggles came streaming out of her around the fish hook. She pressed her lips tightly together and stared at the ceiling while Zhuqa finished that side and moved his snout tenderly to the other side of her throat. The hand covering her left breast lightly squeezed, experimenting with her.