by R. Lee Smith
The boots moved aside. With a dull clank, the door opened to reveal another door right on the other side. One of the lizardmen, maybe Xzem herself, knocked twice, but the sound of running feet over tiles told her the knock was unnecessary. The second door rattled impatiently on its hinges and whooshed open.
“My lady, my lord commands—”
A kitten bawled. And even knowing she was untold lightyears away from all the kittens that ever were, that was still what Amber heard—the sickly, ear-piercing mew of a newborn cat. Before she could react, she felt herself seized by the shoulders and towed over the threshold.
Xzem followed, patiently continuing her introduction half-heard beneath an urgent chorus of kittens, and shut the door. The guards on the other side shut theirs, and whoever was impersonating the cat grabbed Amber’s blanket and pushed it back.
Maybe it was just because of the sounds she made, but she actually looked like a cat…at least as much as a lizard ever could. Her eyes were wide and curiously slanted. Her cheekbones were rather broad and her snout exceptionally pointed. But most of it was due to the odd ornament she wore over her hood, which capped her short spines and then arced off to either side of her head in twin points of glittering metal and beads. The edges of her hood were even trimmed in wispy bits of fringe like whiskers.
“Oh.” The lizardlady’s left hand rose to tap delicately at her breast. The right went even higher, cupping the end of her narrow snout. “Oh,” she said again, her dark eyes brimming with sympathy. “The poor deformed creature.”
“Lady, she knows our speech,” Xzem murmured respectfully.
“I don’t imagine it’s any secret to her that she’s deformed. It would be more impolite to pretend otherwise, I think. I am Nraqi, little creature.” Nraqi reached to take Amber’s hands and bring them to her heart. She made another weird animal sound, wordless and mushy, like a knife right to the ear, before adding, “Your mother in Chalh.”
“I don’t need a mother,” said Amber and pulled her hands back.
“Does it have a name?” Nraqi whispered.
“Eshiqi,” said Xzem, bowing.
“It’s Amber, actually.”
“Eshiqi.” Nraqi leaned back, cupping Amber’s face gently between her hands and smiling. “Such a pretty name for…well…such a pretty name!”
Amber detached herself as gently as she could and went back to the door, straining to hear through it—and the ten or twelve walls that stood between her and Meoraq. She couldn’t even hear the two guards she knew were just outside. She couldn’t hear anything except her own breath bouncing off the door into the suffocating echo-chamber of this stupid blanket.
Amber yanked it all the way down around her neck and then, in a sudden illogical fury, she took the whole damn thing off and threw it in a heap on the floor, going as far away as the room allowed, to the only window. The glass was stained a deep red and had a weirdly bubbled and streaked appearance. ‘Like blood,’ she thought.
Bo Peep’s reflection floated in the window, slack-faced, loveless. Then it was Nicci’s face, the eyes sunken and accusing. She didn’t see herself, and never would, she realized. The last time she’d seen a mirror had been in the Manifestor’s compound the day of the flight, just a sidelong glance as she climbed out of the shower, the memory stained with resentment because it would be right across from the shower and how many people really looked their best naked first thing in the morning? The old Amber. The tough Amber. The Amber who could be a bitch and a bully, but who by-God got the job done, who took care of things, who had been born old and was nobody’s little girl, where was she now? Who was this scrawny, useless person with her eyes brimming with blood? Who had God, ha, picked to be the last human left alive on this whole planet?
The last…
The thought had been creeping in on her for days, but with Meoraq to look after, she’d always been able to push it away. Now it crawled up her spine and bit in deep. Fifty thousand people, winnowed down just that easily to only one, only her.
She was alone. And if Meoraq…left her…she’d be lost.
“Eshiqi?” Nraqi’s reflection fretted with her sleeves and then said decisively, “Tea, I think. Tea and cakes. Poor thing hasn’t eaten and everything seems worse on an empty belly. Xzem!”
“Yes, my lady.”
Hungry? Tea and cakes? “No!” said Amber in choked lizardish. She wasn’t sure which ‘no’ she used, but she used it loud enough to halt Xzem in her tracks. Covering her stinging eyes, Amber turned back to the window.
“Just the tea, then,” Nraqi said after a moment.
“No.”
“Water.”
“Lady, I know you’re trying,” said Amber in dull English, “but if you don’t leave me alone, I think I’m going to lose my mind.”
Xzem slipped quietly out through a side-door. Gone to fetch drinks, no doubt. Which Amber would have to choke politely down while the friendliest cat-lizard in the universe chatted her up and Meoraq died somewhere in this God-forsaken house.
Amber squeezed her eyes shut until they quit leaking and opened them again to stare out the blood-red window at an empty world.
Quiet footsteps heralded Xzem’s return, but instead of the clinking glasses she expected, Amber heard a muffled purr—the sleeping song of Zhuqa’s baby. She turned around and there it was, wrapped in a clean, plush blanket. She supposed it had outgrown its need for smooth skin, but it woke when Xzem passed it into her arms and snuggled up to her the same as it had always done. Its tiny fist punched once at Amber’s breast, then found a gripping place on her tunic. It sang.
How long Amber stared into its tiny, pale face, she couldn’t know, but when she raised her eyes at last, there was Xzem.
“I never had the chance to thank you,” said Xzem, reaching out to brush her fingertips along the tiny ridge on the top of its skull where someday, spines would grow. “Or to show your lord my gratitude. Now that I have that chance, I cannot find the words. Your lord raised me out of darkness and put me in the sight of Sheul. He placed my Nali in God’s hands and placed this one in mine. He made me a mother, after all this time…after so many lost and left behind me. He made me a wife. He made me a good woman—” Her voice broke. After some short time, she went on. “—to a good man. This child, when it is grown, it will be a good woman or a good man, and it may never know there was another way to be.”
Amber could only look at her. A part of her knew what Xzem was saying and another part even vaguely knew what her own response should be, but both of these were only whispers beneath the silent screams of i don’t care lady i don’t care it isn’t equal it isn’t fair god gives and god takes and maybe he thinks that’s a fair trade but it‘s not! In the end, she only gave the baby back, her throat too tight to let her speak anyway, and turned back to the window. The baby woke and fussed a little, but its mother soothed it back to sleep and soon it had forgotten Amber again.
“It’s all right,” she heard Nraqi say behind her. She heard Xzem’s footfalls retreating. For a while, there was nothing, and then a soft, four-fingered hand brushed at her back. Amber tried to shrug it off, but the hand did not go.
“Come with me,” Nraqi said. She wasn’t a cat anymore.
Amber resisted, but the stiffness of her body beneath that gentle touch felt petty, a child’s tantrum. She turned around, away from the window and the lie of its reflection, and followed Nraqi through a heavy curtain, down a narrow, unlit hall, past banks of doors standing open on empty rooms, to a winding, rising stair.
It led up into the open air of a high-walled garden, long and oddly wedge-shaped, like a polite slice of cheesecake, with benches along the sides and a light at the pointy end. Two lights, really: a tall brazier of open coals below a hanging lamp with an opaque glass cover, both burning in full daylight. Over the walls, wisps of smoke and all the sounds and smells of the city reminded Amber of the world outside her own personal hell.
“This is my chapel,” said Nraqi. Her gaze t
railed along the tops of the walls and all the way around. “The one below…a plaything for the House priests. I let them see me there at times, the way I let the linen girls see me at my wardrobe and the serving girls see me at tea. But I have worn the same three gowns every day for sixteen years and I hate the taste of frosted cakes. Here is my true chapel. Here is where I stand that I know…” Her head tipped back. The delicate fringe at the side of her hood fluttered in the breeze. “…I know God sees me.”
“I can’t,” said Amber, shaking her head in tight, hurtful jerks. “I’m sorry, lady. I know you mean well, but I can’t listen to that right now.”
“I had never felt His eye upon me before,” said Nraqi, still serenely watching the clouds roll by. “Not all my childhood years in my father’s House, not with all the prayers I learned to sing or in all the hours I learned to kneel so still and just…just think of nicer things. I never saw God when they took me out from Gelsik and across the mountains to this place. I did not see Him in my lord-husband’s face on the night I was given to him, conquered by him. I was, I think, eleven years gone in this House before I ever knew God as more than a word in the mouths of old men, and it was here. My little one, my Varis…three times, I carried her and three times, Gann snatched her back and those wicked old men wouldn’t even let me sit with her after she was gone, so I was here. And Jazuun brought her to me. And we sat together. It is such a quiet thing, Eshiqi—” Nraqi reached back and took Amber’s hand, lightly squeezing. “—when God speaks.”
“I don’t want to hear Him telling me there’s nothing He can do,” said Amber hoarsely. “I don’t want to hear Him tell me to suck it up! I don’t want to be saved if it means watching him die anyway!” She fought with it, lost, and burst out, “I can’t lose everything, damn it! He can’t do that to me! It isn’t right!”
There was more, but even that much was too garbled by tears to understand and no one up here spoke English except her anyway. Nraqi tried to put her arms around her. Amber stumbled back, but Nraqi wouldn’t let go and after the run she’d just had, Amber didn’t have it in her to struggle for long. At the end of it, exhausted, she simply slid down on her knees with her hands folded limply in her lap, leaned her forehead into Nraqi’s hip, and bawled.
“God does not always give us what we ask for,” Nraqi said, wrapping her in folds of her robe to shelter her from the wind. “But after all my years, I have come to believe He gives us what He can. So pray, even if all He can do is sit beside you. I know that doesn’t seem like much, but sometimes, I tell you, it is everything.”
* * *
Meoraq had not known he was dying, but he knew the very moment he was dead. He knew not because he was standing and not because he was no longer in pain, although both these things should have been clues, but because he was at home. He was in Xeqor, standing in his father’s rooftop garden, where the breeze was impossibly sweet and the sky, filled with lights. Stars, Amber had called them. The sky was filled with stars and so Meoraq knew he was dead.
He went to a bench. He would have liked to have at least staggered there, but this body was fit and strong, and his mind filled with rest. So he just walked. And sat.
Meoraq waited. He’d heard about things like this—for as long as there had been death, he supposed there had been men who had gone only to the threshold and come back to tell of it—and he already knew it wasn’t going right. There was no dark tunnel, no pure white light, no Sheul to reach out His arms in welcome, only this familiar and disturbingly silent setting and an alien, glittering sky.
He was not alone, although he appeared to be. He could feel eyes on him…but that wasn’t right. What he felt was not a sense of being watched as much as companionship. He found himself looking around quite often, trying to see whoever it was with him, but although the rooftop of the city burned with hundreds of fires, he saw no one. The world of the dead, it seemed, was as empty as the world of the living.
Perhaps this was Hell, he thought. And it was not the endless walk across the grey wastes of Gann after all, but only this glimpse of what might have been paradise, and himself, alone.
No sooner had this bleak thought occurred than it was disproven.
Rasozul appeared on the bench beside him—a much younger man than Meoraq had known, but it was Rasozul and not just a familiar face for someone else, some Other, to wear.
Meoraq leaned sidelong into him at once, not like a grown man at all, but like a boy. His chest ached, thick with unhappiness, but he could not cry here. It was impossible to cry here. Because he was dead.
His father did not ask questions. Explanations were unnecessary. Understanding moved between them, unspoken, more complete than anything words could accomplish anyway. His father knew all about Amber, the way he heard and accepted Meoraq’s apology for all the years of thoughtless disdain he’d shown Yecidi, who had always loved him anyway.
“What happens now?” Meoraq asked at last, because that was the only thing unclear to him. It felt like forever in every second. Amber might have been alone out in the world for years already.
“I can’t answer that, son.”
“You mean you don’t know?”
Rasozul smiled and slipped his arm around him like he’d done it all his life and not for the first time. “I mean I can’t answer for you. If you wanted to know, you’d already be moving on.”
“Moving…? Isn’t this it?”
“Not quite.”
“I don’t understand,” said Meoraq.
Rasozul acknowledged this with a smile, but made no attempt to explain.
“There’s either more or there isn’t! How can this be ‘not quite’ all there is?”
“It would depend.”
“On what?” Meoraq demanded, as frustrated as he could bring himself to be in this perfect place.
But Rasozul’s smile was just the same. “On where it is you think we are now,” he said patiently. “And why you need to be there.”
Meoraq looked around at the rooftop, the stars, the empty wilds beyond Xeqor’s walls. “Am I making this up?” he asked uncertainly.
“Not exactly.”
“Are there…Halls? Is there…” Meoraq clapped a hand to his eyes, but there was no way to hide shame anymore. He wished there was, and that was shameful too. “Is there a God?” he whispered brokenly. “Are there Halls where He resides? I’m not asking for welcome, I just need to know!”
“Ah, my son…” Rasozul pulled Meoraq against his broad, unscarred chest and rubbed his back. “Why would you not be welcome?”
And he couldn’t cry in this place, not with these eyes, but there could still be pain and it came splintering out of him: years of murder, of death within the arena and without, from the very first—that brunt in Tilev and the feel of his bones breaking—to the last raider in the ruins; every theft taken as a Sheulek’s due from men who did not dare to refuse him; every woman bent and used and mostly forgotten, and like the murders he had done, they were not uncounted anymore, not here. He saw them all, each one a stone in his heart until the weight was more than he could carry and he covered his face again and cried out, “Father, I have done such terrible things!”
Rasozul held him, rocked him. “No one is beyond forgiveness.”
“Whose forgiveness?” Meoraq asked, even as he pressed his eyes tighter into his shielding hands. “Is there a God? Does He know me?”
“I can’t answer, son.”
“Why not?”
Rasozul’s hand rubbed gently up and down over his bent back. “Because you have to ask. Ah, boy, look up. Look around you. Can’t you see?”
Meoraq slowly lowered his hands and raised his eyes. He saw the stars, shining out even brighter and more numerous than before. Their beauty had a sound, like a memory of music he could no longer hear with his ears but could still, however faintly, recall.
Meoraq looked away, at the braziers glittering over the rooftop of Xeqor. “It is nice,” he mumbled, rubbing at his snout.
&
nbsp; Rasozul sighed. “It is,” he agreed.
They sat.
“How long do I have to wait here?” Meoraq asked.
“I can’t answer that, son.” Rasozul bent his neck and rubbed at his own snout. Patience colored all his thoughts and feelings. “We’ll move on when you’re ready.”
“Where are we going?” Meoraq looked out into the darkened wilds beyond Xeqor’s walls and, for a moment, thought he caught the suggestion of mountains to the east, the ghost-glow of golden light filling the barren washes between them, but then it was only blackness. “Is it far?” he asked uncertainly. He didn’t want to go any further from Amber than he had to.
Rasozul sighed again and patted Meoraq’s knee. “Only as far as you make it, son.”
“Do I have to go right now?” Meoraq asked. “Can’t I wait for her? I want to be here when she comes. She’ll be frightened.”
The stars began to wink out, one by one. The breeze, so sweet and soft all this time, gusted suddenly. His chest cramped. Oddly, pain was something he could feel in death.
“What—” Meoraq bent, one hand scratching over his chest, dumbly seeking some physical cause for this sudden assault. “What’s happening?”
“Just look at me.” Rasozul cupped Meoraq’s face between his hands and leaned close. “Son, look at me. You’re all right.”
“Is this a punishment? I’m not leaving her!” he declared, shaking off his father’s touch to shout into the darkening sky. “You can take me this far, but no further! Do you hear me? I…am not going…anywhere!”
Pain slammed like a hammer right into his heart, knocking whatever air filled his dead lungs out of this body. Meoraq fell back into Rasozul’s gentle hands and writhed there as that hammer struck and struck and struck.
“Oh, my son,” Rasozul said somewhere above him. He sounded as if he might be smiling, in a weary and resigned sort of way. “You don’t have to fight.”