Fucking sack-of-shit coward. Say it.
Say it.
“That you are, without question, the most stunningly beautiful woman it has ever been my privilege to meet.”
Got it out. And I didn’t even sound like an idiot. I hope.
“Do you really think so?” The hand at my face comes alive, warm, sliding behind my neck. Another hand finds my collarbone, then slowly traces my chest down to the ribs of muscle below my ribs of bone. It lingers briefly on the fresh young scar there. Then heads south.
I guess sometimes I say the right thing after all.
“You really think I’m beautiful?”
And her lips are close enough to mine that her breath warms my beard. Her fingers find my pubic hair and my hard-on is back like a hurricane and I don’t think I can talk right now.
Her hand closes around me like I’m the steel haft of her morningstar.
“I understand now. I finally understand. You’re trying to save me.”
All I have is a breathless stammer. “Marade-Marade, I can’t-I can’t-”
“Stars. That’s the answer. We can be stars-we can make them believe in us. Believe we’ll be profitable. Believe we’ll be big. Then they’ll bring us home. All we have to do is convince them.”
Never gonna happen. Not to us. I should tell her.
I should.
Instead I just find her lips with my own and let her tongue slide into my mouth and shut me right the fuck up. She shivers and pulls my hand to her, into the warm slick wet between her legs.
Maybe false hope is her only hope. Maybe she needs to believe it. One of my dad’s favorite writers said, We must grant each other the illusions we need to live.
Or maybe that’s grant ourselves.
“ou are not what you pretend, Caine. I know it. I can feel it.” She lowers herself to the hard stone floor supine and draws me down along her, my spring-steel cock against her iron-within-velvet thigh. “There is a hero inside you. A star. We can live, Caine.”
And I am shivering too hard to answer her, and she reaches around me and pulls me into her, and my shiver becomes a shudder. She locks her legs around my hips and gives a little cry, a tiny yip, and lifts me from the floor with a hungry surge of her hips-
“We will live, Caine. That’s our promise. To live. To be the stars we know we can be.”
“Yes,” I tell her. “Yes.”
What else can I say? What else do I want to say?
“And if they take me home-if they take me-”
Her voice gathers power in the rhythm of her hips.
“I will not leave you here. I will not leave you in their hands. I swear, I swear, I swear it. I will come for you.”
“I know. .” Breathless. Gasping. “I nnnn-nnnn-”
“And you will come for me.”
“Yes.”
“Say you will-”
“Yes-”
“Say it-”
“Yes, Marade, yes. Yes, I will come for you-”
“You will. You will come for me, Caine-you will-you will-”
She spasms around me and her legs clench, and she could crush my spine to powder and I don’t care now. It doesn’t matter and it will never, can never matter, for there is only her flesh and mine and the vast wave we make together that stretches forever toward a crest in an infinite white glare that dissolves away all the dread and hurt and regret and anger and everything that could ever be wrong with the world.
And-
››scanning fwd››
We lie in each other’s arms, tremulous and gasping.
After a time I pull out of her, and she gives a little moan, brief, fading, and she clutches me against her, and I hold her twice as hard.
So we’re the ones going out with a bang.
Yeah. Still not funny.
I give her a final kiss, one last lingering meeting of intimate flesh, trying to say with my lips and my arms what I don’t think I can say with my voice: that this wasn’t a mistake. That it wasn’t hormones and extremity. That we weren’t just fucking.
At least, I don’t think we were.
And sometime later we part, and begin to search out the tatters of our clothing.
Oddly shy now. .
I should say something.
I should say-“Marade. . Marade, I-”
“Don’t.”
“But-”
“Just don’t.”
So I don’t.
It’s a long dark silence.
My hand falls on my knife by instinct. A heavy metal-on-stone scrape tells me she’s found her morningstar.
I come to my feet in the black. “Must be getting light.”
Faint rustlings of cloth as she stands beside me. “Yes.”
“Are you ready for this?”
“Yes, Caine. Finally, yes.” Her voice is strong now. Solid and sure. “I am.”
“Then let’s go.”
Shoulder to shoulder, we walk from blind dark into rose-steel dawn.
They’re waiting for us outside.
EYES OF GOD
I must say, Freeman Shade, I am, ha-ha, hrm, favorably impressed by your piety-”
Ule-Tourann, the Family Bishop of Purthin’s Ford, moved up one of the sanctum’s ramped aisles in a loose-jointed shamble. From under the Bishop’s biretta straggled curls of oiled hair the same color as the grease spot on his surplice. He moved like a man who’d heard of exercise but had never actually seen it done. And he yapped. Ruthlessly. Yap yap yap yap: a stupefyingly endless river of content-free noise.
“. . if only more Beloved Children would make Atonement their first order of business when they arrive in a new city. If only. Though the final boat came in, er, well, I would suppose-that is to say, usually the last of the steamers arrives no later than the end of fourth watch-”
“I got held up in customs.”
“Ah.” He blinked and nodded like he actually understood. “Well then, it’s as it may be, eh? If it is Willed, it Shall be So. Ma’elKoth is Supreme, yes?”
“So they tell me.”
The sanctum resembled that of the Cathedral of the Assumption in Ankhana: a bowl of benches surrounding a walled expanse of floor, like stadium seating around an arena. But here the sanctum was floored with rose-veined marble, and lovely runners of scarlet and gold led from each radial aisle to the broad altar in the center. Astride the altar stood a colossal bronze nude of God Himself, resembling the one that stood in the Great Hall of the Colhari Palace-double-sided, so that the face of Ma’elKoth looked out before and behind, and bearing stylized representations of both male and female genitals-though where the original stood with arms akimbo, this Ma’elKoth had arms outstretched above, forming pillars that supported a domed ceiling of colored glass. All the dazzling blues of a clear noonday sky at its apex, the dome shaded into cloud-swirls of sunset reds and golds near its base.
The Bishop continued to chatter in an amiably mindless way as we threaded among the acolytes and underpriests who roamed the sanctum brushing carpets, polishing the altar, clambering up and down the cunning collapsible scaffold that let them burnish the bronze Ma’elKoth. The current of his yap-river carried us beyond the sanctum, through the administrative wing, and all the way to his office.