The Last Hour of Gann

by R. Lee Smith

  Rsstha rather visibly groped for his wits, ultimately falling back into the habits of his office. “I will call for a tribunal—”

  “It will be your own!” Meoraq leveled his bloody samr at the guard, still standing silent beside the cage where Nicci huddled, looking back at him without expression. “Get out, I said!”

  The guard still did not immediately move, which was understandable since there was no way out of the room save through the door where Meoraq was standing, but when Meoraq looked at him, he eased forward, hesitated again, and then fled.

  Rsstha hissed to his aide, who sprinted down the hall, snatching up his robes around his knees. Then he turned a haughty eye on Meoraq and said, “Honored one, you overstep yourself.”

  Fire burst in Meoraq’s brain and before he could stop himself, he’d seized a ruling governor by his fine robes and slapped him across the snout. And again. And again. “I hold this piss-gully in my fucking shadow!” he roared, still slapping. “I would not be overstepping by a fucking scale if I ran a sword up your slit and out your mouth! Open that fucking door!”

  With that, he turned and hurled the man across the room and into the bars of the cage with force enough to bend them. Meoraq clapped both hands over his eyes and breathed in the dark, listening to Rsstha fumble with his keys and babble out all the ways in which it was obvious that humans were in no way people and that Sheul could not condemn their use in any fashion any more than he condemned the use of cattle for hides Meoraq himself wore. Then the door was open and Scott came spilling out to catch at Meoraq’s arm, saying, “Jesus Christ, am I glad to see you!”

  Meoraq shook him off. “Gather your men. N’ki, come!”

  Nicci rose, but slowly. Surely she knew him—by Scott’s words if by no other reason—but her gaze remained dull and lifeless. She moved out of the cage and toward him without making any effort to cover herself, and Meoraq sent a second prayer of thanks to Sheul that Amber was not here, but it was a heavy gratitude, for he knew his wife would have to see what her blood-kin had become soon enough.

  “I told you he’d find us, didn’t I?” Scott was saying, standing tall at Meoraq’s side as Nicci hobbled her vacant way across the room. “I told you he wouldn’t stop looking!”

  “I had not started looking, human,” Meoraq spat. “Nor was I inclined to start. It is Sheul who apparently wishes you spared and I can only think He does so to teach me humility.” And because no one was making a damned move in that direction, Meoraq stalked furiously over and picked Nicci up himself, tossing her across his shoulder where she hung like a sack of grain, half-emptied. “And I tell you right now that He had best make His will very damned clear if He wishes me to move you even one damned step away from this city, because I would just as soon see you all rot in its ruins!”

  “Are you mad at us?” Scott asked. He sounded surprised.

  Meoraq walked away, letting the humans scramble after and Governor Rsstha stand alone in the mouth of an empty cell. The feel of Nicci swaying with the force of his stride was extremely unpleasant; her hand smacked against his thigh now and then, lifeless as a corpse.

  “You are mad,” said Scott, now angry as well as surprised. “Just what the hell do you have to be mad about? You abandoned us, remember?”

  Meoraq swung around so fast that Nicci’s limp hand struck the wall behind him. “Lies! You did the leaving, human!”

  “She was dying! What were we supposed to do, stand around and watch?”

  Meoraq cocked his head warningly and took a few soul-soothing breaths. When he was calm once more, he said, “If you had, you would have been there to see that she did not die.”

  They all stared at him, all these flat and ugly faces he had almost forgotten, simply amazed.

  “She didn’t?” Scott said finally.

  “No.”

  “Not then or not ever?”

  Meoraq leaned back a little and gave him a hard, dangerous stare.

  “Well, I mean…where is she?”

  “With me,” said Meoraq and started walking again, reminded by these words that she was not, for the moment.

  The humans followed. He could hear them whispering amongst themselves. If any of them were pleased to learn that Amber lived, they showed no sign. He expected no better of them.

  ‘And so do I stand again among them, O my Father,’ he thought crossly, jogging Nicci’s dead weight higher up upon his shoulder. ‘If this is the price You would have me pay that I receive my woman once more, I will even thank You as I pay it, but of all humans You have chosen to spare, why Scott?’

  Sheul had no answer.

  The governor’s carriage was too small to fit all the humans. Meoraq ordered a cart and loaded them into the back like sacks of grain. The driver, who had obviously never seen or imagined anything like the humans he was now pulling, got them back to Southgate in half the time it had taken the carriage to make the same trip, a feat even more impressive considering how often he’d been staring back into the cart instead of directing his blindfolded bulls.

  Meoraq did not speak to his humans. They did not speak to him.

  At the gate, Meoraq again hupped Nicci onto his shoulder and demanded to be taken to Onahi. He and his humans were led into the barracks, to a sealed door guarded by five watchmen and Onahi himself, armed and armored.

  “Is there something you require, honored one?” he asked respectfully. He did not so much as glance at the humans, not even the one on Meoraq’s shoulder.

  “I am leaving as soon as my provisions arrive. I am taking the women with me.”

  Onahi frowned. “The high judge would not receive them?”

  “I didn’t meet with him. It is my judgment that Gann holds this city in his shadow. I say the eye of Sheul is upon Praxas and His eye burns with wrath. I am certain He has not directed me to lead these people from death into damnation, therefore I…damn it, I must be meant to lead them on.”

  Onahi gazed at him for a short time in perfect stillness. Then he turned and made a gesture of his own, and while his men opened the door and passed out of sight, presumably to gather the refugees sequestered somewhere within, looked back at Meoraq and calmly said, “Is it for you to know if the wrath of Sheul is upon me as well, sir?”

  Meoraq gave him a second, more thoughtful stare. “And if it were?”

  “I serve Sheul in faith. If it is His will that I die here, I am ready and go to His judgment without fear. Yet if it is not, for my own will, I would live.”

  Meoraq listened past the chatter of his humans, and while he heard no specific word from Sheul to approve this suggestion, he heard no word against it either. He began to give a cautious assent and then said instead, for no reason he could fathom, “Have you a family?”

  “I am of the House Xaik, sir,” Onahi replied, showing no sign he thought the question an odd one. “Descended low by their champion, but born under his blade.”

  Which was to say, he was a bastard, the son of a Sheulteb and one of his House’s servants.

  “Have you a woman? Sons?”

  “No,” said the guard.

  Meoraq pondered the matter while Onahi patiently stood by, but could discern no reason for asking such things. And so perhaps Sheul had spoken after all.

  So be it.

  “Gather those of your men you trust and whatever gear you can readily manage. We leave as soon as my provisions arrive. Fuck,” he finished, glaring as Amber came through the door. He looked at Nicci’s upturned ass on his shoulder, fought and mastered the urge to hurl her violently to the floor, and instead shrugged her upright and set her carefully down.

  “Oh my God,” said Amber in a voice so unlike hers that if he were not looking at her, he never would have believed she’d said it, human words or no. She staggered forward, gripped the restraining arms of Onahi’s men and shoved them aside. “Oh my God. Nicci!”

  And then she was flying forward to seize her unmoving blood-kin and embrace her, and there were tears streaming from her eyes
and happy sounds like screams pouring from her throat, and it was joy and relief and wonder in volume too great for any mortal heart to bear, and so Meoraq turned his back on it and stared instead at Scott, whom he hated. He thought there must be a lesson in that somewhere, but his brain was full of that terrible, black fire and he couldn’t think past it to what it must be.

  BOOK VIII

  Xi’MATEZH

  They left the city. Amber couldn’t really say they were run out, since Meoraq was in charge of the leaving, and because of the way he was doing it, she couldn’t even say they were sneaking away, but she felt like they were doing both. Walking down that long, dark tunnel with dozens and dozens of lizardmen standing on either side watching them go was about the worst way to leave a place as anything Amber knew, and that included standing in the rain waiting to board the ship that was about to crash.

  She didn’t ask where they were going. She didn’t ask who all these lizardmen were who’d joined them. She stayed at the back of the line with Nicci and didn’t say a word. Even in the cloud-covered moonlight, Meoraq’s throat was bright, bright yellow.

  They didn’t go all night. After taking them back across the open grass and into the woods and hiking for maybe two hours up and down the hilly wilderness that was this part of the world, Meoraq brought them to a fairly level place and camped them. The lizardmen had some of the same sort of leather walls that Zhuqa had used, and after tying them up around the trees, they formed a pretty good shelter. It wasn’t as good as a tent, but it pushed back some of the wind and held in some of the heat and some, Amber was coming to find, was better than nothing.

  Tents went up. Packs were opened and cuuvash produced, but the guard took a long time looking it over…scraping at it with his fingers…sniffing…and finally calling Meoraq over to do the same thing. There was some low talk and at the end of it, all the cuuvash was pulled out and dropped in the fire. They sat in groups to watch it burn—lizardmen, lizardladies, and humans, with Amber and Meoraq forming the blurred place between the beginning and end of their circle.

  The baby cried. So did Nicci. Amber, torn, sat with her sister and watched Xzem stroke at the tiny back. After a while, one of the guards—Onahi—moved from where he sat with his men to the place right beside Xzem. He leaned in close as Xzem shrank fearfully back and ducked her head, then turned a grim eye on Meoraq. “It is hard travel for a fresh mother,” he said. “But with an empty belly besides is harder than it has to be. Have I your will to hunt, honored one?”

  Meoraq thought about it as he gazed over the leather walls at the sky. “If it is God’s will to provide game, I will not protest it, but we are very close to a city where evil men show no love for God’s laws. We may be followed even now. Those who hesitate to invade this camp surely will not when it comes to striking at a hunter upon the plains.”

  “I walk in God’s sight,” said Onahi, rising. “And if I meet Him before the night is ended, I will not be ashamed to tell Him the reason. Be easy, mother,” he added to Xzem, bending his neck politely and showing no sign that he saw the way she cringed around the baby. When he left, two of his men left with him.

  Meoraq watched them go, his restlessness betrayed by the tightening of his jaw and throat muscles. Amber reached out a hand, but he flinched away before she could touch him and stood up. “I will make a patrol,” he said to Onahi’s remaining guards, refusing to look at her. “Until I return, no one is to leave the camp.”

  They all saluted in near-perfect unison, all with the same troubled sidelong glance at the humans clustered at one side of the walls. Meoraq took that in, grunted, and said, “If you must force their obedience, do so carefully. These are people, not animals, and they are people under the protection of House Uyane. Mark me.”

  They saluted again, now sending their nervous eyes toward the lizardladies.

  Meoraq grunted again. “You may know these women as criminals and exiles, but I am Uyane Meoraq, a Sword and a true son of Sheul, and I judge them innocent of crime and innocent of corruption.”

  Some of the slaves looked up.

  “Hear me and mark well: I take them from their fathers. I take them from the city of Praxas under Gann. I take them into House Uyane and I forgive them all their past. I say they are daughters of Sheul and they stand in His sight.” Meoraq drew his samr and took one long step forward, standing between the lizardladies and the lizardmen, and cocked his head. “I say they stand under my protection. You watch them. You do not touch them. If you feel the fires in your belly, think of it as a test of your will…because I will think of it as an assault upon my House.”

  A clumsy scattering of salutes apparently satisfied Meoraq that he was still a menacing badass when he wanted to be. He turned around, and for a moment, he and Amber were unavoidably faced off.

  The color at his throat visibly brightened. He turned his head, stared at the wall beyond her for a long, long time in silence while his scales faded to black. Then he left.

  Only after he was gone, as the guards began to mutter and the humans whisper, did Amber realize what Meoraq had entirely forgotten.

  “Hey,” she said.

  The lizardmen all looked at her.

  “Do any of you understand English?” she asked.

  Three pairs of eyes stared blankly back at her. One of them looked at another. “Is that thing talking?” he asked.

  “What are you telling them?” Scott demanded.

  “Nothing. We’re going to be incommunicado for a while, that’s all.” Amber gestured at the lizards, all of whom looked alarmed to find themselves at the end of even a casual wave, all but Xzem, who actually eased a little closer to Amber’s arm. When Amber looked at her in surprise, Xzem ducked her head and offered up the crying baby.

  Scott recoiled violently when Amber took it. “Jesus Christ, is that thing yours?”

  Heat flared in her cheeks. She didn’t let that stop her from tucking the baby down into her wrap where it immediately quieted against her breasts. “No, of course not,” she snapped.

  “Where’d you get it, if it’s not yours?”

  “Stop saying ‘if’ like you think you’re going to catch me in a lie. It’s not mine!”

  “You’re being awfully sensitive about it,” Scott said and Crandall muttered, “Hormones, man. She just had a baby.”

  “Stop it!” Nicci hissed, so suddenly and with such violence that they all looked at her, even Amber. Nicci still had tears on her face, a firelit shine that made her anger look a lot like hate…and hate made her look like their mother. “We haven’t even been out of the cage one whole day and here you all are, cutting into her again!”

  Some of them looked away. Only some. Crandall just looked back at her and Scott’s eyes turned, if possible, even colder and more contemptuous.

  After a long, ugly silence during which Amber was only too aware of the watching lizardmen, she finally cleared her throat and said, “There were these people. Exiles. Bandits. That sort of thing. The baby was their leader’s. I couldn’t leave it.”

  “What were you doing there?” Scott asked.

  She stared at him for a moment, utterly dumbfounded by the tone of undisguised suspicion he was throwing at her. “I was captured,” she said slowly. “What the fuck do you think I was doing there? Selling Space-Scout cookies?”

  “I don’t know…maybe Meoraq sold you to them. He sure acts like a raider. For all I know, he’s one of them. Maybe even their king.”

  Amber had just enough time to think clearly (very clearly, that alone should have been a clue) that nothing Everly Scott said was ever worth a damn and she needed to be a big girl and let it go. Then she was on her feet with the baby pressed to her body with one arm, clocking Scott right in his big, fat mouth.

  Scott staggered. Crandall started to hop up only to sit down again very fast, so that his legs kicked comically out in front of him. No one else moved and the reason no one else moved, Amber discovered upon a backwards glance, was because the guards had all
drawn weapons. They might not speak English, but clearly they knew whose camp they were in and who put the scars on her shoulder.

  “Call them off,” said Eric at last, in a strained let’s-be-reasonable voice.

  Now Amber gaped at him. “Did I fall through a hole in time?” she demanded. “These are still not my trained alligators!” And just to make the moment complete, she turned to the guards and made settling motions with her hand, doing her best to say, “Easy…down…please,” in lizardish while pissed off right to the red line. As they slowly sheathed their swords, she swung back on Scott and said, “If you want to stay here, you better have a goddamn good apology for me in the next five seconds. One—”

  “Jesus fucking Christ, sorry!”

  “Two!” shouted Amber, and the baby added its own furious, if muffled, howl.

  Scott put his hands up like a man being mugged. “I’m sorry, Bierce! Goddamn! I just got out of a fucking cage! Pardon me all to hell if I’m not in love with the fucking lizards!”

  The word three hovered on her lips, but in the end, she swallowed it. “Fine,” she said, patting at the baby through her wrap until it settled. “You’re on edge. I’m on edge. We’ll put it behind us.”

  “Jesus!”

  “But you better believe that was your only free pass.” Amber glared at him. “Your days of throwing your attitude in my face are all over. You’re in my camp now and if I don’t like the way you talk, commander, I will leave your ass behind!”

  He opened his mouth angrily…worked it for a bit…and finally closed it again, brick-red and actually shaking a little. He got up and moved as far away from her as he could go while still being within the boundary of the leather walls. Crandall went with him. After a moment, Dag and Eric joined him. Then they were all over there, all but Nicci, muttering at each other under the wind and looking at her with mistrustful eyes.