There were doors in the floor. The doors were opening. One, two, three—all empty holes with rising platforms that slowly sealed them off again.
Up through the fourth came a dust-dull wedge-shaped ship.
* * *
The swaddles of his crude hood kept air suffocatingly close. Meoraq could smell nothing but his own unwashed hide and blood-tinged breath. Before the beating, sounds had been muffled; afterwards, pain dulled everything to a grey groan. He was aware that something had happened, but didn’t care what, beyond the thought that the raiders might all be standing around Scott’s caved-in corpse and paying it an apprehensive witness.
That hope died with
Scott’s sudden, shrieking, “
Haaaaa
!”
“Leave it, Druud. You have work to do.”
‘Yes,’ thought Meoraq, flexing his bound hands. ‘Come and dress me, S’kot.’
He had no illusions. His blades were taken. He had been roughed some and hung for hours, denied food and water, and now whipped with his own belt. To judge by what speech he’d caught, the leader of the raiders meant to keep him alive as some torment to Amber, but raiders were not a patient breed. Meoraq thought it very likely he would be dead within three days.
For the first time in all his life, Meoraq did not know what that meant. Would he see the Halls of Sheul growing from the clear light of heaven, his father and mother come to meet him? Would he wander the lightless reaches of Gann forever, losing all his mind and memory until he had become as empty as the deadlands he traveled? Or would he simply end?
No matter. He would know the truth soon enough, but before then, he would kill
Scott.
But
Scott did not obey his master. Instead of coming to harness Meoraq, he ran to another part of the room and seemed to circle, calling to his men. And they came. Meoraq could hear them crying out like madmen, some laughing, some weeping—reactions the raiders found greatly entertaining.
Meoraq knew his best chance of killing even a man like
Scott depended on lying still and feigning helplessness (which did not require much feigning), but he simply had to see what was going on. With effort, he rolled onto his side and rubbed his snout on the floor until he’d pulled his hood loose enough to work it down over one eye.
He saw Amber first. She saw him. He didn’t know how he looked to her, but he thought she was beautiful. There in the open doorway with the light of day behind her, turning her hair to a haze of white and gold, wearing one of his tunics and the green girdle given by the lady of House Uyane. Frightened, but standing
, because she would know no other way than to survive for as long as she had breath. He looked at her and from where he lay with all this empty room between them, he could still feel her arms around him.
And then he noticed the ship.
Surprise took him, but not for long and what it left after its fading was the same sort of baffled exasperation he so often had when trying to understand human motives. What were they so excited about? If the thing were nothing but a husk, a crate in the shape of a ship, still it would be scarcely the height of a man, again as wide and perhaps twice that in length. Room enough for the humans—barely—but only if there were no mechanics to move the ship and no supplies necessary to sustain them on their journey. And that was assuming the ship could move. Dust, not even dust in so thick a coat as this, did not always mean a thing was broken, but the strange metal of its hide was obviously pitted with corrode and its windows remained dull even when Scott wiped at them. An idiot could see the ship was dead. But Scott had a long way to go before he could be considered so well as an idiot.
“Druud, leave it.
It’s old, but it can still bite if you tease it. Leave it alone. All of you, back to work.”
The humans stayed where they were, whining protests.
Scott actually put his arms around the ship, hugging it like a child with a toy that might at any moment be unfairly stripped away. Surprisingly, some of the raiders protested as well, more and more of them coming to watch Scott’s men make fools of themselves over a broken machine.
Meoraq lay quiet and counted them. Sixteen. There might be others out in the courtyard, but sixteen was not an insurmountable number
, if he had his swords.
Or if he could use them. Meoraq tested his clay and found it heavy, thick with hurt. A Sheulek could endure pain, but his flesh was swelled and he could feel blood pooling under his scales and those were simply facts. If he’d cracked a few bones, as seemed likely, six might well be beyond him, much less sixteen.
Yet he may only have to kill a few to make the rest run. If he could gain his feet, gain his weapon, seize just one short second of surprise, with God’s favor—
But he didn’t have God’s favor. He had the strength the sickness gave him…and that might not be enough.
Scott was still whining for his ship, so Meoraq looked that way, because if his journey was to end here, at least it would end with Scott dead and he meant to watch. If there was no God, there was no sin in spiteful pleasures. But the sword—Meoraq’s own sword—never left the belt where it hung.
“
Let them play,” a raider said, ducking his head deferentially as his leader threw a cold glance his way. “We take them away now, they’ll sour. Let them break their toy first. What’s another day?”
Their leader
hissed and rubbed at his throat, his head tipped back, eyes shut. “All right, all right. Fucking little pests. One more day. Druud, if you want to play with your toy, you do your work first. If I have to tell you to get away from it one more time, I’ll strap you to the top of it and set it on fire! Slaves, out! Eshiqi, go wait in my tent.”
She went. Meoraq watched her for as long as he could see her, then dropped his head back onto the ground and closed his eyes
. The hollow dark closed in around him once more. The cold took away his heart. He could hear the sound of boots, striding heavy and insolently slow, coming closer. He listened and did not count his breaths.
“Zhuqa had her,” the raider said finally, after he had stood over Meoraq for some time. “Did you know? Did she tell you she had been his slave?”
The words passed over and through him and were gone.
“I saw her once, sitting naked on his thigh with his fingers inside her
, holding his cup. She didn’t fight.”
Beyond this little room, the rain fell lightly on the roof. The trees of Gedai whispered in the wind. The ocean rolled and groaned.
“Do you know what he told me, Sheulek? Eh?” Leather creaked as the raider hunkered down, not quite within reach. “He told me she oils up when she cums.”
The rain. The wind. The sea.
“She hasn’t cum for me yet,” the raider said. “The day she does, I’ll let you know. But she’s not fighting me. That, you should know right now.”
Meoraq grunted and said, without opening his eyes, “All this time, I thought I killed your Zhuqa, but I didn’t, did I? She did.
You’ll have to tell me how she did that someday, eh? Tell me how bravely he died, your raider-lord. Did he piss himself and beg for his life like all the rest of your pack?”
A long silence, broken only by the weather and by
Scott, shifting on his feet nearby. Meoraq waited, bracing himself for the blow. The first kick caught him in the gut, turning his breath to bile and his belly to lead. The second and third hit wherever he could not defend against them, but he scarcely felt them against the backdrop of so much pain. He retched and had to lie in it, gasping and light-headed, feeling himself roughly jostled as he was dressed and bound and finally hoisted into the air again.
The raider’s leader hadn’t even stayed to watch him suffer. T
wo of his men lingered in the doorway, hands on weapons, but they were looking out into the courtyard, overseeing humans. The only one left to see him in defeat was Scott himself, standing before him now with a look of smirking satisfaction on his flat face. Meoraq hissed wetly through his teeth and let his heavy head drop to his chest.
“I’m going home,”
Scott whispered. “I’m going to save those people and I’m going to be a hero, and you and your fat whorebitch Bierce are going to die right here. Yeah. So there’s just one thing I want to say, lizard, and there’s one more thing I want to do and then I’ll leave you here to think about how it could have gone if you’d shown me some respect. Okay? Here it is.” Scott circled around to Meoraq’s back before easing closer, close enough that Meoraq could feel the heat of his breath. “I was right,” whispered Scott, “and you were wrong.”
Scott
patted his shoulder and crept the rest of the way around him until he was in front of him again. He grimaced hugely, showing all his teeth, and then he swung his arm with an animal howl and slapped Meoraq in the snout. Coming as it did from Scott, the blow hurt his straining shoulders more than his face. Meoraq dangled, silent, swaying gradually to a stop, his eyes fixed on the enemy and his throat throbbing.
“I was right,”
Scott said again, backing toward the door and the two sentries who were now watching him with amused contempt. “I found a transmission tower and a ship and a skyport and what did you find, lizardman? Huh? Nothing! There’s no God here! There never was!”
The words slapped harder than
Scott’s freakish little hand, but even so, it was a slap, not a stab. He looked at the machine and the machine was a dead thing, just another decaying piece of the past. Scott could call it what he wanted, but he was still only pissing out of his mouth. Perhaps Meoraq had not heard Sheul’s true voice, but Scott hadn’t found a ship either, so there was still justice in the world, even if there was no God.
No God. The slap of those words struck even harder and so Meoraq brought them back and stared them down. The holiest shrine of all the world was empty. The Prophet Lashraq had been the leader of a band of foul-mouthed raiders. The Great Word was a book of lies and the fires of Sheul were a symptom of sickness.
Truth. All truth.
But did it really mean there was no God? If a blind man says the sky is grey—
Except that the sky wasn’t grey. Meoraq raised his head and looked up through the hole in the warped panels of the roof, at the little piece of the world that existed for him beyond this room. The clouds were grey, but he had seen the clouds open, however briefly. The clouds were grey, but the sky was green, and all the blind men in the world did not change that.
Scott
left him, laughing, reveling in whatever suffering he imagined he had caused. Left alone, quietly and futilely hating him, Meoraq suddenly realized that somewhere along the winding road that had led to this moment, he had come to believe in Earth. He believed in this other world, this impossible blasphemous thing, and he believed that Scott and Amber and every other human, seen and unseen by him, had traveled through the sky between their two worlds in a ship. He believed the tower of fire he had mistaken for the very arm of Sheul was indeed the fire of that burning ship. He believed in all these things.
But he still could not believe that ship had come here by accident.
It was not the faith he’d had in his life before entering Xi’Matezh. It did not come with the name of Sheul or the certainty that he was seen by some greater eye as he hung here in Scott’s power, but it was still a comfort. His clay would perish, yet he had a soul and that, somehow, would go on.
Meoraq closed his eyes and stretched his toes toward the ground to take some of the weight off his screaming shoulders. He took deep breaths. He did not count them.
He waited in the dark to die.
13
T
hey passed the day at Xi’Matezh and it was, for many, a good day. Scott had his moment of triumph, complete with a ship to show to his surviving men as proof of his superior leadership. The raiders encouraged his speeches and even called for a few when things threatened to get quiet; the delirious joy of the humans for what must seem to them just another relic in the ruins made it a day of rare entertainment. For Amber, it was a day in Purgatory. Not Hell itself, but only its cold grey antechamber—the waiting room where there was no time and no relief from the awful weight of anticipation.
Iziz kept her close, kept her servile, but did not allow her to work. The other humans hauled wood and water, and answered whatever need any raider had, whether it was for tea or stew or sex, with plenty of time to stand around their ship and daydream. Amber could only kneel with her hands below Iziz’s boot, aching with the strain of staying small and quiet, feeling his stare cold on the back of her head. She had nothing to do except think and when she wasn’t relentlessly playing out every possibility that began with getting a weapon away from Iziz (and ended with going through the broken wall and over the cliff more often than not), her mind brought her back to the same questions:
What was that thing in the garage where Meoraq hung? What was that thing that Scott and his Manifestors were all but praying to? Was it a ship? Was it really?
Or was it a boat?
She thought it was. She really did. And worse, she sometimes found herself thinking of it as proof that the helicopter was coming too, a thought that grew less and less comforting the longer she had to listen to Scott. He still hadn’t figured out how to open the door (as far as Amber knew, he hadn’t even identified which panel was the door), but he was completely confident that he could fly it home. Funny, how faith could look like crazy when she saw it on someone else.