It was easier to make the proper words this time, but it still felt grotesque, as if he were swallowing some live meal with every word.
The woman laughed. A big laugh, full and fearless, like the rest of her. “I have plenty of those offers, thanks.” She waved at the packed platform beyond the station, filled with boys and men, many of them still in their tattered standard-issue slicks, just as he was. “I work for currency. Blood, bugs, or notes. No exceptions.”
Ahmed considered that. “I can pay you a pint of blood and three locusts.”
“What kind of locusts?”
“Khairian.”
“Deal. Come here in the back and Samara will take care of you.”
He had no locusts, but it took him only a few minutes to call some. She was no magician. It wouldn’t be until she presented the locusts to a buyer that she would discover they were just some local variety. He had promised not to use his skill again after leaving the front, but it was like trying to put down any other weapon—once you became accustomed to it, you picked it up again, easy as breathing.
Samara, the woman waiting for him in the back, was a pleasant sort of woman, beefy and generous. A quick glance behind the ticket counter told him there were no magicians there either. Samara happily took his locusts, and more. Despite her colleague’s insistence that no other services were of value, her friend Samara had other ideas. Not even his wormy little tongue would dissuade her.
She seemed only mildly disappointed his cock wouldn’t cooperate, but did not ask why. He wondered how many others she had brought back here, and how many had been in any state to satisfy her with something other than a tongue or a hand.
She pushed his ticket at him when she was finished, and he gripped it closely and hurried away. Thrust it at the first platform manager he saw. She directed him to a waiting train. He stepped in, found a seat in the crowded third-class cabin, and wept for the first time since the end of the war.
Ahmed stepped out of the train ten hours later and into a hot, chalky evening. He was hungry and light-headed, but full of hope that the interior cities he remembered would be significantly more welcoming than the border towns.
He had bunched up his ticket and jammed it in one of his slick’s pockets. Now he fished his ticket out, but the drugs and exhaustion meant he had trouble reading it. When the morphine had worn off on the train, he switched to siva, the military-issued version of sen, but it still left him muzzy-headed and aching. He doubted the vet he got it from was entirely honest about what it was. Siva had never left him feeling this disoriented.
A few passengers disembarked around him, and he finally mustered up the gall to ask one of the nearby women, “Excuse me, matron, what city is this?”
She looked startled. Then something like disgust tore at her face. It was a reaction he was becoming accustomed to. But it still cut at his heart. He had hoped the interior was different.
She kept moving as she said, “You’re in Amtullah, boy.”
It was never anything but that—boy. Not sir, not patron, not “What’s your name?” Just… boy. As if he had walked off his house mother’s stoop just yesterday.
Ahmed had never heard of Amtullah. That in itself wasn’t odd, he supposed. He grew up in the southeast, near the Drucian border. There weren’t a lot of people there, or proper schools. His first squad thought his accent was a laugh, and it had taken him two years to suppress it.
He gazed over the stir of women, toward the city proper. In the south, there were still some green things, so he expected the rest of the interior would be like that too, but no—even on the train, all he saw of the interior was dry and desiccated, just like the front. Yet, unlike the border towns, this city was intact. He saw elegant minarets in the distance rising from a cluster of domed public buildings and upscale tenement houses, all of it surrounded in a massive filter that blanketed the stir of the city like some kind of membrane. It was the most massive filter he’d ever seen, and he spent a long time working out how to deal with it. Outside, the boys and men who had come with him were headed toward customs, already arguing with the armed women who he assumed would carry the city’s only passkeys.
He found a call box inside the station and dialed the only civilian pattern he still remembered.
After the line stirred and chittered and spat for some time, a thin voice rose from the darkness and rasped, “Who is this?”
“Amtullah. Filter. You done one before?”
“Who is this?”
“You said to call if I ever came home.”
He heard something clatter on the other side of the line. “Been a long time, friend.”
“Have you done that filter or not?”
“Call this pattern. Oval. Square. Circle. Circle. Triangle. Hex. Got that?”
He repeated it.
“Good. She’ll hook you up.” There was some noise in the background. Ahmed wondered if the man had a proper family now, someone he had to hide Ahmed from. “Don’t call again.”
“I won’t.”
“Ahmed?”
“Yes?”
The man’s voice broke. “Everyone has his fate, but I asked God, the compassionate, the merciful, at each prayer for your safe return. May God preserve you.”
Ahmed hung up. Stared at the filter. His commanding officer had told him once that fear in the ranks was rampant, yes, but it was fear that kept people in line. “They need to fear me more than the enemy,” she told him. “That’s the secret to any great command.”
He had put a knife through her three years later. But even in that instant, he wasn’t sure who was more terrified—him or her. Worse, he wasn’t sure what any of that proved.
Ahmed had worked for a lot of smart, sadistic fucks. They had hidden the sadism behind military intelligence badges and security protocols, but their arrogance and lack of compassion were harder to tuck up under a prayer rug. They had taught him everything they knew, and he had used it ruthlessly, relentlessly. It had kept him alive, yes. But his reward for fifteen years of service and putting a knife in the eye of every good soldier he knew was this.
Six weeks ago, he’d known very little about the world outside the military. Now he knew enough to be certain that the man he was at the front no longer existed. Assholes lived a long time, but if that was living, he wanted none of it. It was time to let go of all the catshit, and learn how to be a man on his own terms, in a new world that had no idea what to do with him.
6.
Eshe wore somber colors to the wake, darkened by the warm rain. He stood well back from the gravesite, now clogged with mourners and pall bearers and swordsmen. The whole steaming, chanting, incense-heavy affair reminded him of just how stubbornly conservative many parts of Ras Tieg still were. All the rest of the people on Umayma had learned not to bury their bodies three millennia ago, back at the beginning of the world. They cut off their heads and burned them, no matter the prescriptions set down in any holy book. Those instructions were for people on some other world.
But Ras Tiegans on the frontier thought differently. Cutting up a body and burning it was still sacrilege, desecration. It had something to do with ashes and dust and prophets who didn’t stay dead, and how that was holy. Eshe didn’t really follow it. But it meant that this crowd waited for something far more dramatic than just seeing a man’s body covered over in dirt.
The priest’s grave was about as deep as Eshe’s arm was long. The body was covered in a white muslin shroud that trembled and shook. Beetles and midges skittered along its surface. The trembling and writhing beneath the shroud was likely still just the bugs, doing what bugs on Umayma did—devouring, destroying—transforming.
Three priests walked around the edges of the fresh grave garbed all in their silver-and-gilt finery. The robes, by now, were soggy and just a little transparent. Many Ras Tiegan priests had some talent with bugs, having been conscripted as soon as their talent emerged. They also tended to be lean, muscular fighters in their youth. So even after an hour
walking around in the mud swinging pots of incense and flogging themselves with strings of holy beads while intoning the same monotonous prayer about resurrection, they were holding up pretty well. The little red dots drawn onto their foreheads with ink—the symbolic eye of god donned by this particular sect—had begun to tear and run, leaving crimson rivulets dripping into their faces like bloody tears. Only the very rich could afford this many priests for a wake. Most folks got an anonymous beheading by some underpaid graveyard swordsman. Eshe watched a man of just that sort trekking down the far side of the graveyard, long sword over one shoulder. A shimmering trail of bloody entrails sloughed off the sword as it bounced along.
Eshe stood on a low rise well behind the funeral party with his reluctant partner, Isabet Softel. She was pensive in the gray morning. Some of her dark hair had escaped her white wimple. Her loose hair clung in delicate tendrils to her pale face—pale even for a Ras Tiegan. He once asked her if she was part Mhorian, and she’d been offended. Most things he did or said offended her. Why it was the Madame de Fourré kept pairing them together was beyond Eshe. He had caught her without her wimple once, and the spill of her hair reminded him so strongly of Corinne that his heart ached.
But Isabet was not Corinne. Isabet had a head full of honey and strong convictions, and where he was from, being pretty and haughty didn’t get you a promotion. It got you your head chopped off by some woman who was less pretty but had a better sense of humor.
Now, after half the night on watch, she appeared sodden and exhausted. Her dark eyes were shadowed.
Putting her on watch hadn’t been fair, he knew, but he had last night’s priest to take care of, and he didn’t want her there for that. Not like last time. So far as he knew, she wasn’t a shifter, just one of the handful of sympathizers who’d come over to their side. In some ways, it meant she was safer than any of them, no matter what task he gave her.
“Shouldn’t be much longer,” he said.
Isabet rubbed her eyes. “I’m fine. Did you learn anything last night?”
“It’s like I expected. It’s Jolique.”
“At least we can finish what we started now.”
“You mean what I started,” Eshe said. She was always trying to take credit.
“We had an assignment. One with clear goals. Those goals did not involve killing a priest. Or attending his wake. It would have gone more smoothly without you.”
“And you’d be dead,” he said. “Sounds like a success all around.”
Isabet pursed her mouth. Though he resented the soft, pale skin she presented to the world, he admitted that it gave her a striking appearance. Someone only got skin that soft by spending most of their life behind a filter, away from the harsh light of the suns. He hadn’t spent enough time around rich people to get used to it. Seeing her wealth in her face was… distracting.
As he gazed at Isabet now, Eshe wondered if anyone had ever forced her to do anything, or if she’d just run off to join the Madame’s little shape shifter rebellion to get back at her mother for refusing her some trinket. No one had asked her to join the war for God. Or farmed her out to strange women to raise. Or sold her body to war vets.
Memories of his less than pleasant Nasheenian childhood stirred. He tried hard to focus on the present. The present was always better than the past. He thought of Corinne again.
“Would you stop staring at me?” Isabet said. He saw her cheeks color.
Eshe turned away. “I can’t help it if you’re distracting,” he said. He would have never looked at a Nasheenian woman the way he often looked at Isabet. He would have gotten a fist in the face, or a lewd offer.
“Perhaps I should wear a burqua like some Chenjan. Would that dissuade you? No, I’m sure. You’d mishandle a Chenjan woman just the same. I know your type.”
“Don’t insult me.”
“It’s no matter. The half-formed opinions of half-breed boys do not concern me, no,” she said.
“You get that mouth in etiquette class?”
Her look was all oily fire. He wondered if that was the look he’d get for asking her to bed. He half-thought to find out, but saw movement from the corner of his eye.
A wave of black roaches burst from the lip of the grave and streamed into the crowd. Mourners clutched at one another. They joined the priests in a new prayer, one about being nearer to God. The priests took up positions around the grave and raised their hands. The sword-bearer jerked out of his doze and stepped forward.
An ear-piercing scream came from the grave—too high-pitched to be human. It was something bordering on the edge of a cicada’s whine.
The muslin-draped body shuddered and rolled up from the grave. Bloody muslin fell from the corpse, revealing a spiny, bloated torso clothed in a white habit. It flung out pale, meaty arms and shook away the flesh of the head, revealing a shiny carapace. Black roaches escaped the sleeves of the habit, spraying across the crowd. The body jerked and thrashed, sloughing off flesh. Long strings of mucus oozed from the gaping wounds in the chest—the ones Eshe had put there. One for each shape shifter the priest had killed.
Eshe took half a step forward, his whole body taut. He was more than ready to kill the priest again, even if this was just a bug clothed in a dead man’s skin.
As the sword-bearer swung, the giant beetle opened its gaping maw, and a cloud of flying black larvae escaped.
Isabet gasped.
The swordsman swung. The body juddered. A hunk of raw flesh and juicy white beetle ooze was exposed. It took three more swings to sever the beetle’s head from what remained of the priest’s body. The body dropped, and the beetle’s bloody, flesh-smeared head rolled neatly next to it. The cloud of larvae droned and circled the remains.
Eshe let out his breath. Moved his hand away from his knife.
The crowd broke into a hymn.
Eshe turned his back on the grave. “Let’s go,” he said. He started back to the church, pushing the weeping fingers of spiny widows’ tree branches away from his face.
Isabet hurried after him. “Is that all? That’s everything?”
“That’s all.”
“I—” She adjusted her wimple. In all the rain, the stiffness was beginning to give way, and the wings were starting to droop.
“I’ve heard about it, of course,” Isabet said. “But that was the first one I saw.”
“Sometimes they shamble on for a while longer. They only last three days like that before the body rots out, but its long enough to scare the hell out of people.”
“Why would God—”
“It’s the bugs,” Eshe said. “And stupid Ras Tiegan stubbornness. Not God.”
“But if that was so, bodies on a battlefield—”
“Bodies on battlefields aren’t buried. They’re carted home and burned. Because of… that. The bugs live in the dirt.”
He escorted Isabet as far as the edge of the graveyard where a long stand of incense burners flickered and sputtered in the heavy rain. From there, they were to take separate routes home. On the street, they were too obviously unmarried and unrelated to be seen together. It was another reason Eshe didn’t understand why she had been partnered with him.
“Well,” he said once they reached the tiled street, “you saw it through to the end. Satisfied?”
“I’m glad he’s dead,” she said. A rickshaw clattered past, draped in colors as somber as what Eshe was wearing. Outside a wedding or non-shifter birthing celebration, Inoublie was a colorless sort of place during the day. The buildings here were squeezed close together, bucking up against the massive grated storm drains that kept the streets clear during the rainy season. Tangles of trees lined the roads, many of them twice as tall as the buildings, their broad canopies bowing in the rain. Ancient root systems jutted from cracks in the tiled sidewalk. Mourners often draped wreaths of white and gold flowers over them during a funeral procession. The old, rotting flower chains had broken and tumbled to the sidewalk, forming a fine, slick skein of rot on the tile.
“Remember that next time you get the chance to kill somebody,” he said.
“You don’t have to kill everyone.” She enjoyed bickering for bickering’s sake, like a child. He was nearly twenty-one now, and her shrill, seventeen-year-old fury felt like something half-remembered from a lifetime ago.
“Yeah, next time we’ll try your way.”
“I know why you do it,” she said. “The Madame told me about your mother.”
“My… mother?”
“The bloody Nasheenian assassin.”
“She’s not… that’s a complicated story.”
“Did you hear they’re pardoning assassins now, in Nasheen?”
“Where did you learn that?”
“It was in the papers, of course.” The radios in Ras Tieg were all censored, so most people held up the less rigidly enforced papers as truth. Eshe knew better.
“Well, you’re wrong. They’d never do that.”
“I know what I heard.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said. He had no interest in discussing his… mother with her. Or Nasheenian politics. But he knew who he should talk to about it.
Isabet huffed off down the street, slipping and sliding on the rotten flowers. He paused a moment to watch her go. Her habit was mostly shapeless, but he had seen her in trousers before, the first few times he bumped into her at the Madame de Fourré’s place, and it was hard to get the shape of her legs and ass out of his mind now as he watched her slide along.
He shook his head and went off in the opposite direction, sticking to the center of the street where the way was less precarious. Some days the women here drove him to drink. But mostly, he just prayed harder that God would help him untangle what it was he really wanted from them.
“When were you going to tell me?” Eshe asked.
Inaya was never alone these days, and, it seemed, never free of Eshe’s sudden and dramatic entrances. She looked up from her glowing table slide, and quickly tapped out the obfuscation code that turned the correspondences and schematics into an imperceptible gray haze. In the hall beyond Eshe, she watched runners, agents, and two hooded bodyguards move through her headquarters with bug casings and supplies. Never alone, and never a quiet moment here.
Rapture Page 6
