by R. Lee Smith
She staggered, flailing wildly to keep her balance. She kept her feet, but lost her momentum. Panting, her arms like hot lead hanging off her shoulders, she could only look past him to Meoraq, but he gave her nothing to draw strength from. He lay in the mud without moving, unconscious or…no, he had to be unconscious.
“On your knees, Eshiqi,” Iziz warned her. “Cry to me.”
Everyone was watching, listening. Beneath their expectant silence, she could clearly hear Scott picking his stupid ship apart in the garage, actually bashing his way into it with the reassurance that they could fix that later, just keep going, keep at it, grab that panel there and pull. She could feel the waves hitting the cliffs, feel each wet slap vibrating up through her naked feet to shiver in her bones. The wind blew saltspray in her eyes like tears; Amber had none left of her own.
She stabbed the samr down into the mud—not a calculated expression of defeat but only to brace herself against—and dropped beside it on her knees. She did not look at Iziz. She didn’t look at anyone, not even Meoraq. Now and then, she could feel her head shaking slowly back and forth, but she felt none of the disbelief the gesture confessed. She felt tired. Not angry, not defiant, not even grieving and sick and scared anymore, but just…just tired. God did not live at Xi’Matezh and He wasn’t sending a helicopter. There was only her and she’d tried and failed, so what else was there to say?
“I cry,” said Amber.
Iziz cocked his head and put one foot forward. He waited.
Amber bent over, palms up to either side of his scuffed boot, and the very instant that her sweaty brow touched leather, Scott’s ship in the garage exploded.
She was not immediately conscious of the noise—it hit her ears like a ton of cotton, deafening her before she knew what it meant—but only of an intense heat lashing up her back, so that her first thought, when she could think, was that someone in the crowd had whipped her.
She cried out and fell flat, twisting around to see her unwhipped back, and when that finished making no sense to her, she finally raised her eyes and saw three raiders lying dead in the mud. And not just dead, she realized, not just that, but decapitated. She saw the smoke next, the smoke that was not only pouring out through the open doorway of the garage in a greasy, black fog, but also sprouting straight up in the air through the much bigger hole in the roof and sort of…folding under. Roaring. She could hear almost nothing, but the smoke was roaring.
Amber looked up at Iziz. He did not look down at her. All his attention seemed fixed on his hand, which he had apparently been holding up, perhaps in some sign to his men that she hadn’t seen because she’d been bent over his boot, but anyway, he was looking at that hand with a deep, frowning confusion because it was now missing all its fingers. The strip of blackened, shiny-burnt metal that had sheared through three necks to cut them off was now lodged in another raider’s chest. That man was still standing. Except for the thing jutting out of his tunic, he didn’t even seem all that hurt.
She had enough time to see all this, not quite enough to know what it all meant, and then the ship blew up again. The ground heaved up beneath her, as impossible as that should be, actually seeming to smack her in the chest even as she had both hands in the mud. Then she and Iziz and Meoraq were all sprawled together and the ship just kept exploding, ripping the garage apart from the top down. In the curious quiet, she could see chunks of metal and broken bricks hurtling through the smoke, see them soundlessly punch through fleeing men, taking them apart piece by piece until there was nothing left to keep running. Through it all, the fire kept rising, vomiting up through the smoke, pushing a flat, burnt panel on the very top, tumbling it playfully over and over, like a paper sailboat caught in a fountain.
It couldn’t have lasted long and when it was over, the courtyard was empty except for the mud and the mess and the bodies, and there was a quiet like nothing Amber had ever known.
Then that piece of paneling which had ridden the explosion so high came down out of the black, blown into a shape something like a flower, a daisy, so that it spun as it fell, chopping at the air, whup-whup-whup…
‘Like a helicopter,’ thought Amber, watching it cut right through two legs of that long-suffering transmission tower before crashing into the outer doors of the shrine of Xi’Matezh.
Amber pushed herself up on her hands. Beneath her, Iziz also stirred and sat up on his elbows. They looked at each other. He opened his mouth and emitted a godawful yowling that seemed to shake at her very bones— but no, he did not do that at all. He opened his mouth and the yowling was all she could hear of the scream of tortured metal as the tower that had sent out uncounted years of unheard hope for Nuu Sukaga buckled slowly over and smashed down into the dome of the shrine. It collapsed and then the building beside it collapsed, along with a large chunk of the wall, and suddenly, the whole courtyard of Matezh shuddered and dropped about twenty centimeters.
Amber and Iziz looked at each other again. Then he grabbed for the sword on his belt and she grabbed for Meoraq’s knife tucked into his waist and he was still so much faster but he grabbed with the hand that had no fingers and while he was staring at that in astonishment, Amber’s fist closed tight around the bone hilt of Meoraq’s ancestral knife and yanked it free.
They stared at each other a third time, motionless, as mud began ominously to flow toward the fast-crumbling wall. Then Iziz closed his eyes.
“Do it right this time, you murdering cunt,” he said dully.
She stabbed him in the neck and cut, stopped to spit out his blood and rest her watery arms, then cut twice more just to be sure. He jerked under her a few times, but that was all. He was dead at the end of it, nothing but weight she had to shift to get at Meoraq, who had not moved once in all this time.
He groaned when she rolled him over, but it was hard to hear him. He may have told her to leave him. He may have told her to run. Amber paid him absolutely no attention. She sheathed his bone-handled knife, stuck it down the back of her breeches, and got a good grip on his harness. She pulled. She did not allow his screams or the limp silence that eventually followed them to slow her down. All that mattered right now was that they had to go. God had sent a boat and a helicopter; the rest was up to her, so Amber pulled. When she bumped into one of the sleds, she put him on it and kept going. The runners moved through the mud much easier than the drag of a body, and even with the extra weight, Amber was able to run the last length and out through the gateless archway just before the ground heaved up for the second time and threw her down. Her ears, still numbed, gave her nothing—it would be three days before she could hear anything that didn’t sound like it came from underwater and a room away—but she didn’t need them.
Matezh fell.
But when Amber raised her head in the stillness and looked, the sled was there and Meoraq was on it. She lifted her head a little higher and there was the archway, with just a few broken bricks on either side of it to prove there had ever been walls, framing a small portrait of a monstrous, green sea.
Meoraq’s hand brushed her arm. His mouth opened when she looked at him, but if he was talking, she couldn’t hear it. He made a few weak gestures, then groped until he got a hand behind her neck and pulled her close. His rough mouth scraped against hers and in that moment, she thought she could have carried him all the way back to the mountains and over them.
She didn’t, of course. But she made it as far as the underlodge where she had spent fifty-three days shut up in a cupboard to recuperate. She couldn’t lift Meoraq up into it, and he, weakened by days of fever, could do nothing to help her, so they were there on the floor—he, gasping and raving; she, rubbing palmfuls of water over him in a desperate effort to cool him down—when Uyane Jazuun, lord-steward of the bloodline in Chalh, stopped in on his yearly pilgrimage to escape the ever-ringing bells of the Festival of Fifth Light and found them.
14
They camped only once on a four-day journey, in another underlodge very much like the one
they’d just left. They ran whenever they had strength to run. They walked the rest of the time, passing flasks between them and sharing cuuvash on their feet. Meoraq took nothing. Every few hours, Jazuun would stop and bend Meoraq forward, pounding on his back until Meoraq woke enough to cough. It helped, but not enough. His breath had taken on the soggy, snotty sound of someone trying to breathe through a bowl of soup. He was delirious by the end of the first night, silent by dawn on the third day.
Dying. He was dying.
She cried once, just once, the night they camped. Lying in the cupboard, trying not to touch the man Amber still sometimes feared might be the ghost of Meoraq’s dead father, listening to the gasp and burble of creeping death, she put both hands on her belly—on the only part of Meoraq she could reach—and cried. Jazuun didn’t budge until she was done, but as she drowsed unhappily toward sleep, he said, “He rests in God’s sight, woman, and if he sees our Father’s face tonight, know that he sees it with joy.”
He meant it well, she knew, but it only set her off again, weeping until she had no tears, only the stuffy ache of their lack. When she finished for the second time and lay shivering and wiping convulsively at her face, Jazuun rolled over with an air of grim determination and gave her shoulder a clumsy pat. “I know who you are,” he told her. “If he goes to the Halls, I will keep you as kin. You’ll have a good man to marry and I’ll see your sons raised under the Blade.”
She rolled onto her stomach and brayed into the musty bedding. He stopped trying to comfort her.
It was the last real rest they took. Shortly after dawn, they were moving again, and this time, Jazuun did not stop until they broke out of the woods into open plains. In the distance, the lone monument in this vast, green patch of nothing, stood the black walls of Chalh. Jazuun checked on Meoraq, took a long swig from his flask, then gave Amber a hard stare.
She knew what he was thinking. “Go,” she said in lizardish. “I’ll stay here.”
“Fuck that in the fist,” he replied, and then rather visibly recalled he was speaking to a woman. “You couldn’t hide anywhere in sight of Chalh that our sentries couldn’t find you, and if they do…I’m going to run you in,” he said decisively. “I don’t think they’ll challenge me if they don’t see you.”
“How the hell do you think you’re going to hide me?” Amber asked, stunned.
“You know I don’t speak that gabble!” he snapped back at her.
“How?” she asked, this time in his language.
“Well, we don’t have time to be clever, so we’ll have to be bold.” He loosened some of the belts holding Meoraq to the sled, pounded him distractedly on his back and then whisked the blanket covering him away. “Get on.”
“Can you pull us both? Damn it.” Amber concentrated and tried again in lizardish. “Can you carry us together? That far?”
“Great Sheul, O my Father…” Jazuun pounded Meoraq on the back some more. When he straightened up, he had his head cocked. “Do as I say. No, I don’t know it will work, but it’s the only plan we have time for, so just do it.”
She got on the sled, reluctantly straddling Meoraq and trying her best to keep her weight off him. To her utter astonishment, Meoraq raised one arm and placed it on her back—the first voluntary movement he’d made in two days. “You’re going to be fine,” she told him, just in case he could hear her. “We’re almost there. Hang on, okay? Just hang on.”
No response, but hope remained as long as he had his arm around her.
Jazuun threw the blanket over the top of her and cinched it down with belts. “Can you breathe?” he asked.
“Yes.” The air was stuffy and smelled of sweaty human and dying dumaq, but she could breathe it. “Go!”
The sled lurched. She had a certain amount of experience with riding on sleds, but there was a huge difference between lying on one and perching backwards like this, an even bigger difference between a walk and a run. Despite her best effort, Amber lost her balance immediately and fell into him. Meoraq’s groan of pain broke into racking coughs, then to a strengthless, “I see it. Like an arm rising…It’s mine, ‘Kosa. It’s for me,” and then his arm fell limply away from her.
She’d seen the walls. She knew how fast they were going, how long it would be before they reached the city. She knew everything and still it was endless, in the dark. She was lost until she heard Jazuun say, “Here they come. If it goes bad, I’ll kill them. I shouldn’t be challenged over it, but do not come out no matter what you hear.”
“Yes,” she told him, which was not quite the right answer, but which was all she could manage being bounced around like this.
“Stay low,” he hissed. “Stay quiet.”
Amber gripped the blanket tighter and pressed her cheek to Meoraq’s chest.
“Stand where you are!” someone called, someone new. “Stand and be—”
“I am Uyane Jazuun, steward of my House, named fourth of the governing Houses of Chalh. This man is Sheulek, kin to me and badly injured. You, run for a cart, and you, get healers and a surgeon to House Uyane! Go now!”
There was no answer. The sled rolled and bounced and jerked. The struggling of Meoraq’s lungs under the heavy blanket was so much louder than his heart beating.
“Open!” Jazuun shouted, and was answered by metallic clanks and groaning.
The sled heaved and suddenly the rear end was up in the air and the sound of boots drumming hard in a stone hall was all around her.
“Cart’s at the end of the gate, sir,” a new voice said. “Should have it emptied when we reach it. What is that?”
“It’s mine is what it is and I’ll kill the one who challenges me over it now, when this man lies in the shadow of Gann! Do you hear him, eh? Do you? This is Uyane Meoraq, son of Rasozul, who was champion of Xeqor in Yroq. That Rasozul, sprat, and his son is who this is, and if he dies, by God and Gann, so will every man I hold even a shard responsible!”
There were no other questions, nothing at all but running feet until Jazuun’s, “Easy with him now.”
They swooped up and then down, thumping into the bed of a cart on top of rough bags of seed or sand or God knew what. Meoraq groaned at the impact, then clutched at her through the blanket, and how blind could these people be? How could she help but look like a whole other person crouching in this litter with him?
“To Uyane!” Jazuun called, as boots leapt up into the cart and his heavy hand rested briefly on Amber’s head.
“Sir, the temple surgery—”
“I say Uyane! Mark me and pull, you gutter-sons!”
The cart lurched forward to the deafening hail of hooves on stone. Here, blinded, the speed felt dizzying, unreal, faster than a subway car, faster than the shuttle that had taken them into space. They did not drive out into the city, but were fired into it—a rabble of voices, a thousand smells, unseen people on every side, and Meoraq groaning beneath her.
In the dark, with the sound of his heartbeat obliterated by the chaos around her, it took hours. She knew they were there only when the cart stopped, pitching her off the litter so that she had to climb back on, and someone had to have seen that, surely, but Jazuun just bellowed for someone to open the gate and someone else to come and carry. Then it was running again, with her clinging to Meoraq like a baby monkey, until suddenly they were set down, the belts loosened and the blanket whisked away.
Light blinded her. She raised her hand against it, squinting, and heard a lizardish scream. Jazuun was an immediate blur, leaping across this wide, startlingly elegant room in an instant to swat the lizardlady responsible on the snout. “Keep your fucking head or I’ll spin it around for you,” he hissed.
The lizardlady, gripping her snout in both hands, bowed herself over at the waist and stayed that way. It wasn’t until she did it that Amber noticed the second lizardlady standing beside her. She didn’t scream. But of course, she’d seen Amber before.
“Xzem?” she stammered.
“Eshiqi!” Xzem set the armload
of linens she’d been holding on the nearest surface and rushed forward to clasp Amber’s hands.
“Get her out of here,” Jazuun ordered, throwing the blanket back over her. “Take her to my wife’s chamber, and you, take this silly dip someplace with a lock on it. No one knows about this until I give the word.”
“I mark, sir.”
“Then go. All of you, go.”
“I’m not going anywhere!” Amber pushed the blanket back defiantly and grabbed Meoraq’s hand. His fingers clenched; he groaned.
Jazuun came back in just a few long strides, his hand darting out to grip her by the chin. Up close, the family resemblance was next to nothing. “The surgeon will be here any moment and if he sees you, he will lose his wit and his hands, and he needs them both to save your man.”
He released her and gestured. Xzem brought the blanket back and hooded her. This time, Amber bent, swearing, and made sure her face was covered.
“You’ll have the first word after me,” Jazuun said, but he was already moving away. “Go. Now.”
Xzem’s rough hand tapped at hers. She offered her sleeve and Amber took it. They left, keeping low and close to the wall, passing a small group of running lizardmen in the hall just outside. Meoraq’s doctors. Amber lingered until the door had shut them away, but then there was nothing else to wait for, nothing else to see. She let Xzem take her away.
She didn’t count the turns they made or the doors they passed. This wasn’t like Zhuqa’s camp; it wasn’t someplace to escape. It wasn’t home, either. It was a waiting room, that was all.
Xzem came to a door, guarded on either side by lizardmen in highly-polished boots, which were all that Amber could see with the blanket pulled so low. “The Sheulek-kin of my lord is returned,” Xzem said softly, bowing. “My lord commands his wife receive the wife of Uyane Meoraq.”