by R. Lee Smith
“I guess you remember yesterday,” she said, because silence was never golden with this man for very long and if she had to talk, she wanted to do it when he had his face buried in her hair and not when he was looking right at her. Hopefully—please god no atheists here tonight nothing here but us chickens please god—he didn’t know English so well that he could tell her teeth were clamped together.
He grunted softly against her skin, moved his hand from her right breast to her hip and tugged her lightly against him. “You are a terrible distraction to me, Eshiqi,” he told her, and if there were more chilling words he could have said, she honestly didn’t know what they were. Zhuqa the Warlord could not afford distractions. “My mind has been with you all day. Tell me…” He caught her hand, licked the palm, and then put it on his loin-plate. “Would you like to see the sky tonight?”
She smiled and started to kneel.
He stopped her. “Not here,” he said, still apparently unaware of anything amiss as she struggled not to stare at him or show the racing of her heart. He pointed back at the table, where their meal had already been set aside in anticipation of the evening’s festivities. In its place, an extra lamp burned brightly. “This time, I want to watch you.”
* * *
In the first creeping hour after dark, when the last of the light was gone from the sky and any thinking man might know that it was time to seek shelter from the night’s preying beasts, Meoraq came at last to the ruins and found them lit in welcome. His first foolish urge was to draw his blades and charge ahead. He mastered it and instead hunkered low in the grass, watching and praying in silence.
He saw men—or what might be called men, if one knew no better—moving below the lamps that hung at the open doorways of the ruins. When the wind was with him, he could even hear them, however dimly, laughing and calling to one another as any men might do at the close of their day. There were not many, not at this first accounting, but even then Meoraq noted that the ruins were in a most carefully kept state of workable disrepair. The high towers had fallen in, yes, and the wildlands had reclaimed much, but here where the lamps were lit, the remnants of the Ancient roads were remarkably cleaned of loose debris. Whole fields had been laid within the roofless shells of great buildings, ready for the season’s first crop. There were indeed canals, not dug in the age of the Ancients, but relatively fresh; brackish water ran in a swift current, caught from some unseen waterway and turned through these ruins as expertly as any irrigation system he had seen in the cities. He could see hooked nets at every landing, set to catch whatever swam in its muddy flow, but while the water was not clean, neither did it reek of waste. There was a hint of that on the wind when it turned, but only a hint; they kept their fleshing vats covered and regularly cleaned, and their compost freshly-turned.
The more he saw, heard, smelled, the more Meoraq understood that this was not a den of raiders like any he had come across in the past. This was no winter-camp just waking from the cold. This was a settlement, with many years of success rooted beneath it. The eleven men he could see moving about in the lamplight could not possibly account for the work that had gone into making this camp, or sustaining it. There might be fifty men waiting in the foundations below. And whoever led them was not only strong enough to hold the loyalty of such deadly men, but clever enough to have built all this.
He thought of Szadt, the Raider-Lord, who had stabbed his way into Kuaq and held it for three days with the aid of Gann’s weapons. Whoever nested in these ruins might well have such weapons also. Explosive fires that burned the flesh off a man’s bones in moments. Lights that cut like swords. Thunder in a man’s hand that could crush another’s brain right there in his unbroken skull. All this, and Sheul alone knew what other forms of undefendable death were there to be found in Gann’s world.
But Szadt had been killed. Meoraq’s own father had climbed the bloodied wall of Kuaq and hurled the Raider-Lord’s headless body to the ground in spite of all the weapons Gann had given him. A man might armor himself in wickedness and arm himself with machines, but he would always be a man, born of clay, and all men trembled before Sheul’s might.
A ghost of memory in Amber’s voice, uninvited: If you’re stupid enough to jump off a cliff, God doesn’t catch you.
It pierced him, but not as the warning she had meant it to be on its first speaking. His Amber. His outrageously audacious and uncouth Amber. He could see no slave-pens, which only increased his surety that the true nest was below ground, out of sight and far better defended. His Amber was there, unseen, suffering as she had suffered every hour of these past seven days, and if Gann himself rose up, still Meoraq would have her back. His throat still ached where the boy had choked him and his body was worn to the very edge of exhaustion after this run, but Sheul was with him and that was all that mattered.
He could all but hear the smacking sound of her little hand against her smooth forehead, all but feel the puff of her breath as she sighed.
Meoraq drew the knife of his fathers from its sheath and touched the smooth knob of Rasozul’s thigh bone to his heart. “See me now, O father of my flesh,” he whispered, and glanced upwards. “See me always, O Father of my eternal soul. Be with me now, both of you, and be with my wife. If it is Your will, O Sheul, I will hold her in my living arms again. And if it is Your will, my beloved Father, I will hold her in Your halls. Wherever I do come to hold her, I thank You for bringing her once more within my reach.”
The wind blew, whispering its own refrain. Meoraq tapped the knife twice to his chest and sheathed it. He drew his kzung instead, the blade for the killing of beasts, and began to crawl. He felt no fear, but his heart still hammered. His limbs carried him without shaking. His mind was clear, painfully so, like the coldest winds of winter that seem to crush the throat that breathes them in. He crawled without questioning what might become of him when this hour ended. He was not Uyane Meoraq any longer, but the Sword in God’s hand, and when he reached the first of the raiders—a man strolling out alone into the grass, opening his breeches with one hand; the other was nothing but a raw-looking stump, fresh enough to show scabbing along the stitched end—he cut without hesitation, without emotion, without design.
There was no moon behind the clouds, no flash across his blade, only a hiss and a spray of heat and the wind blowing to hide the sound of a body falling in the grass. He did not stop to drag the corpse away or try in any way to hide it. His eyes, Sheul’s eyes now, were already moving on to the next man. He breathed deep and slow, a master of his clay and of his killing hand, and went with God’s blessing burning in his heart to get his wife back.
* * *
Zhuqa leaned back on the table, a lamp burning to either side of him, black scales flickering with reflected light—a demon in repose. He watched, hissing softly with pleasure, as she nuzzled at his slit and tried desperately to think of how the hell she was going to either take the fish hook out of her mouth without him seeing it or give him the blowjob with it in, options which sure as hell seemed to mark the opposite ends of a whole spectrum of failure. So far, he was showing phenomenal restraint and a willingness to let the moment draw itself out, as demonstrated by the fact that he was still tucked away despite the spicy-sweet oils bedewing his slit, but any second now, he was going to lose his patience with this kittenish crap and expect her to lick something. And one of the many sad realities of life was that it was impossible to lick while holding something clenched in your teeth.
She supposed she could move it into the fold of her cheek…where, the way her luck was going, it would hook itself in and stay.
The image of half a fish hook protruding through the soft side of her face was pretty bad. The image that replaced it—same image, really, only with the addition of Zhuqa beating her to death—was worse.
Amber brought both her hands up, kneading firmly at his loins as she breathed over his slit, and watching through her hair for him to close his eyes.
He saw her watching. His head coc
ked.
Oh fuck Gann.
He reached out and brushed the hair out of her eyes, then gathered most of it up and held it for her, resting his hand comfortably atop her head. “Better?”
If her hands hadn’t been full of lizard-dick, she’d have hit herself on the forehead.
“So much better,” she muttered and stared without a lot of hope at his gleaming slit.
Well, what the hell. He could only kill her once.
‘Yeah, but I bet he can make it seem like more,’ she thought.
Never mind. Whatever happened, happened. It was all in God’s hands.
Amber slipped her thumb upwards along his slit and in, teasing at his sa’ad. The edges of his slit relaxed at once, letting his cock extrude. She gripped it in her fist—here goes nothing—and bent low, sweeping her free hand down over his belly as she opened her mouth—i’m actually going to die with a dick in my hand life is full of the weirdest surprises—and slipped the fish hook against the cup of her palm a fraction of a second before sucking the nub of his clit into her mouth.
She waited, tonguing the alphabet over and around the stiff little knot between her lips, but she didn’t die. The fish hook was a huge, obvious secret tucked between her thumb and her palm. She’d cut herself already. She was bleeding on him. He had to see the blood, even if he couldn’t smell it or feel it. Damn it, how long was he going to make her wait before he stabbed her in the ear?
She raised her head and looked.
His eyes snapped open at once, burning like two more points of lamplight, as he gave her hair a vicious yank. “Don’t you fucking dare stop!” he hissed, yellow popping out in vibrant stripes on both sides of his neck. In the next breath, he visibly fought himself to a calmer place, relaxing his hand and even brushing at her cheek. “I won’t hurt you, Eshiqi. I won’t hurt you. But be careful how you play with me.” His eyes, clearer now, shifted to the tip of his cock and back to her. He let go of her hair and gripped himself at the base of his shaft. “Do that again…with your mouth.”
She couldn’t believe she actually had the hook in her hand—
—and now he was covering the vein.
* * *
Meoraq circled the ruins several times, as much as the crumbling buildings and overgrowth allowed, trusting darkness for cover, the wind for sound, and Sheul for everything else. No raiders who lived in such a well-organized nest could be entirely careless and these had many sentries set high on the fallen walls and patrolling through the grass. The urge to stab himself into the heart of the camp and find his woman was a live coal in his gut, but he did not succumb. He was Sheulek, a master of his impulses, and so he circled as a Sheulek would do, killing them one by one where killing would go unnoticed, tightening his grip on an enemy that remained unaware of his predation even as his heart beat out the very throbs of Amber’s human name. But eventually he was there, one hand resting on the stone wall of the ruins themselves, his boots just at the golden line of light that came from the first of the hanging lamps, looking at six men and the end of silence.
No fear. No thought. No plan.
He leapt. The techniques he used had names. At another hour, he would have known them. For now, he had only the vaguest sense of balance and motion, obstruction and momentum, hot blood and cold wind. They shouted, some of them. Some fought. Some ran. He dared not stop to do real battle, but cut where the cutting was easy and ingloriously effective—opening bellies if they faced him and hamstringing from behind—until they were all down and the attention for a killing blow could be afforded. None of the six had escaped him, although one had managed to flee as far as one of the phesok fields and tried to hide there, holding his bowels in both hands, too dazed to scream even when Meoraq found and finished him. But they had made enough noise in their dying to stir up the nest and he could hear the rest of them through the dark openings of the ruins, calling up from the deep places, wary.
So. Meoraq—without thought, without design, but with the flames burning in his chest and his brain—cut the head from a dead man with five or six hard strokes and hurled it through an open door. He listened to it smack into a wall and tumble in its clumsy way down what sounded to be at least four flights of stairs. He lost count of the men who shouted out as it passed them, but there were many.
The first of them, the foolish ones, erupted from the dark in the next moment, stolen blades in hand and challenge in their throats. Meoraq met them, burning brighter at every jarring clash and spray of blood, reeling from one lamplit door to another in a storm of severed limbs and screams until his boots were skidding in mud gone black with gore and all he could smell was spilled shit and death.
It did not end with six men this time. It did not seem to have an end at all. Swords and fists and hissing faces, they came and kept coming. He clung to the discipline of his training, but he could feel his throat throbbing hotter and hotter with every passing moment, until the blood that splashed back into his face seemed cool. He fought and he killed them and it was carnage on every side as the skill and the finesse he had practiced all the years of his life first strained, then cracked, then crumbled. They kept coming and he finally knew—without fear but with a terrible swelling rage—that there were just too many. He was not his father and he could not win this fight.
They would kill him. They would keep his Amber, use her until her soft body broke, and then they would kill her too.
This echoed in him for the briefest moment, trapped in the stillness between one beat of his heart and the next. And suddenly the fires surged and took him.
There was a moment, endless, lost in the blackness of that inner space where Meoraq could still dimly hear his own breathing, deep and slow and even. Then he heard, even dimmer, a roar like something from a nightmare—a monstrous demon sound that surely could not issue from any dumaq throat, except that he could feel it humming somewhere in his clay, which meant that it was his roar, his own.
‘No,’ he thought, his last conscious thought. ‘It is Sheul’s. He has taken me.’
Then, nothing.
* * *
The hardest part of the fight to supplant Zhuqa’s hand with her own lay in not letting him know it was a fight. Which was not to say that everything else was easy—not even holding onto him was easy anymore—only that if there was an axis point to the battle, that was it.
For someone who’d never had a blowjob before yesterday, he was full of advice on how she should be doing it. Each time she tried to ease her hand around his shaft and bully his out of the way, he wanted it somewhere else. “My sa’ad!” he’d be panting, or, “Get underneath and push—harder!” or, “All along my slit, Eshiqi, fast now, faster,” and the whole time, his hand was working away, just like cock-rubber wasn’t a curse.
When he finally did relinquish his grip, it happened fast, as he rocked back onto his elbows looking for the necessary leverage to pump up into her mouth. He wasn’t sure how to do it and was too far gone to stop and puzzle it out, so he simply hooked his leg around her, dug his toes into her back, and lunged at her in a rapid-fire series of what she believed the yogas called the bridge pose. This had two results: the first and most obvious was that he came for, she thought, the sixth time, although by now this meant little more than an extra-hard jerk and a few bitter drops of whatever it was he had in him after his cum was gone. The second thing was that, between the abrupt kicking motion of his leg, his foot unexpectedly clutching at her, and having a hot, scaly bar suddenly banging away at the back of her throat, Amber dropped the fish hook.
She heard it hit the table with pindrop clarity in spite of Zhuqa’s draconian roars. Gagging, she slapped frantically at the tabletop, searching for the hook. She found it, or rather, felt it stab into the center of her palm, and choked out a howl around the enormous muzzle of his cock.
“Sorry,” groaned Zhuqa, letting up on her a little. “Don’t stop. Close your mouth again, just close your—yes! Ah, fuck Gann!”
Amber shrugged his leg off, t
onguing madly at the hooked tip of his cock, and he dropped flat on the table, spreading his legs wide open around her—Zhuqa the dirty girl—grabbing her head between his hands like it was a zit he wanted to pop. And there it was and this was it and even he couldn’t go all night, so Amber reared back with a gasp, bit the hook from the meat of her hand, plucked it back from between her lips, and slashed.
If it took as much as one whole second, it would have surprised her.
He still almost kicked her away in time.
His feet were on her shoulders hard the same instant she had the hook in her hand and she went flying. Her cut went wild, but she got something because she felt him ripping all the way up her arm to her shoulder and the heat of the blood spraying over her hand. Then her back hit the wall and her ass hit the ground and Zhuqa was on his feet with one hand clapped to his gushing slit and a knife in the other. He took two running steps, roaring as he came, and went down on his face hard enough that she heard the crunch of his jaw breaking on the stone floor. Blood spat out between his teeth. He sucked in a breath, spat out some more, and lay writhing just a little.
She got up, staggering some on her bad hip, ready for him to leap up and take her down. He might have tried. His legs shifted, dragging through what she now saw was an amazing lake of blood for just a few seconds’ worth of bleeding, but that was it. His eyes alone moved, watching her inch closer so that she could first kick the knife out of his hand and then pick it up. He said something too mangled to make out when she did it, then spat out a bit of ropy blood and said, with startling clarity, “Fierce little thing.”
And then he was dead.
It wasn’t a big moment. There was no sudden sagging of his body, no death rattle at the end of some hoarse exhalation, no nothing. He was seeing her one second, and the next, he wasn’t.