Shadow's Son by Shirley Meier, S.M. Stirling and Karen Wehrstein ...

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feather-stroking her. But soon enough he dropped the subject, and they lay silent in each other's warmth.
"Murder-joy," he said, after a while. "What an odd way of putting it. And so casual… A snake in the
grass."
"What, where? I know of only one around here." She gripped, drawing a pleasure-yelp out of him.
"Yeoli saying. For something's being hidden under something else. You only gave it up for your spouses'
sake, you say. Not your own—as if that were weakness. If the joy of the other's death comes of the
continuation of one's own life, I doubt there is a warrior alive who's never felt it. You talk most casually
speaking of the two most personal things there are between two people, did you know that?"
Shkai'ra shrugged. "Either casual or crying,nia ? Life's too short to bethat serious about anything,
especially sex and dying."
He chuckled. "O Aged One, who knows all. Sex and fighting, I meant; dying doesn't have to be
between two people. And there's the third one, I forgot, the mix of the first two, rape. Is there no way
somewhere between casual and crying? Or must you be casual not only about your own death, but all
others', to save yourself those tears?"
"Save myself tears? They're dead and I'm alive, and that's all that's important,nia ? Rape—it's like a
wound, you get over it." She laughed. "Alive, to dothis ."
Chevenga refused to be distracted.That's the trouble with these extraordinary people , she thought.
They're so damnably single-minded .
"Then you consider your own life precious, and spit on theirs?"
She shrugged. "Call me barbarian, if you want; many have. But I'm in of a kind with most of the world, I
think. Who doesn't care for their own life—or their love's— more than anyone else's?"
"Granted—though I've met some who don't. Haian healers spring to mind. Perhaps barbarism is a matter
of how muchless one cares about other lives than one's own, then. Shkai'ra, imagine this. You see a
rockslide starting, that will grow big enough, to crush the town below where live ten thousand
people—unless you throw yourself in its path and stop it now, at the cost of your own life. You have no
obligation elsewhere except what anyone has, to family, friends and so forth. No punishment will come
your way if you don't do it, nor accolades if you do, because no one will ever know. Those ten thousand
people are neither friends nor enemies to you, just strangers; you've never even walked through the town.
Would you do it?"
Shkai'ra propped herself up on both elbows, scratched between her breasts. "Do you lie awake at night
thinking these things up?"
He chuckled, stroking her shoulder. "Not anymore. Debate training. Now I lie awake at night thinking up
battle-plans." His eyes flicked up to hers, a single bright spot in each twinkling in the moonlight; the stroke
turned snake-curvy as it continued down her upper arm.
Shkai'ra shrugged. "No. I wouldn't. Zaik take them. Megan and the family need me."
"And you wouldn't regret afterwards?"