Rapture

by Kameron Hurley

  “I understand,” Rhys said. “But what about—”

  Hanife shook his head, and started talking to him in Yazdani.

  Rhys crawled into the back of the vehicle, and drank his water. When he was done, they gave him two more, as if water were not the most precious resource in the world. Compared to traveling with the austere desert women, his new companions were chatty and gregarious, especially Hanife.

  Among Rhys’s many concerns was Hanife’s epithet. He had said something about… gods. Rich men could be good allies, but rich men without a shared morality—infidels—were dangerous. He needed to tread even more carefully here. The desert women he could understand. They reminded him of bel dames, of Nasheenians, and he knew how to regard them. But these people, these Yazdanis, were something else entirely. Something unknown. He was reminded of a story about a beggar accepting water from a beautiful woman at a well, and how after offering water, she had offered her charms. The devout man in the story had refused her, but they were both eaten by djinn. She for harlotry, and he for accepting soiled water from a known harlot.

  But as the driver passed him yet another water pod and the world began to feel cooler, and not so disjointed, he remembered that it was actually a Ras Tiegan story.

  What was the Chenjan one? Why could he not remember? Or were they so much the same that he confused them?

  He drank.

  20.

  Eskander had them turned around again.

  Eshe watched her kick about in the loam like a lost dog. From a distance, the land here had looked like an oasis, but up close the tangled fingers of the structures that towered over them were spiny, lichen-covered ridges made of some bone or mineral. Bits of detritus had gotten caught up in the tops of them. He saw sage, desert grasses, and even the mangled body of some parrot or raven that must have died on impact. The air smelled of death here, though Eshe saw no other dead creature. It took him some time to realize the smell came from the loamy soil surrounding the lichen-trees.

  Eskander wandered about the maze of lichen-trees in slow circles, raising and lowering her hands.

  “Poor excuse for a magician,” Ahmed muttered beside him. “I can feel her tapping into swarms like she’s asking directions, but most of it’s just jumbled and confused.”

  Kage walked up to join them. She, too, gazed at the magician.

  “Are we lost?” she asked.

  “It appears so,” Ahmed said.

  “Fatima put her in charge,” Eshe said. “What did you expect? Shortest path?”

  Isabet chimed in, in Ras Tiegan. “This is a waste of time. You should shift and scout.”

  Eshe sighed and moved past her, toward Eskander. “You don’t want to see how much food I’d have to eat to come back after a shift out here,” he said.

  “You did it in Ras Tieg all the time.”

  “There were a lot of things I did in Ras Tieg,” he said. “Not all of them are a good idea here. Or did you not get that yet?”

  He glanced behind them. Khatijah was the problem. They had spent far too long waiting for her to recover, and her walk was much slower now. Painful. Ahmed said he did what he could for the pain, and Eshe knew that whatever drugs the bug in her head pumped out helped, but she and Nyx were supposed to be their strongest members. Now, with the missing hunk in her leg, and persistent limp, she wandered around like a shambling corpse. And then there was Isabet, of course, and her stump of an arm.

  “What are you looking for?” Ahmed called down at Eskander.

  She jerked her head up. “Eh?”

  “What bug are you trying to call?”

  “Oh, it’s a tricky one. Tricky, tricky,” she muttered. “A kind of sand worm. The larva sometimes has memory of its parent. Should be able to tell us where to go.”

  Kage said, “That does not sound—”

  Ahmed cursed softly. “She’s madder than a Tirhani martyr.”

  Eshe shook his head. Since Khatijah nearly got devoured by wild animals, Eskander had only gotten madder. He wasn’t even sure why Nyx pretended the “magician” knew where they were going. He slid down the dune and met Nyx as she was pulling up her trousers. Khatijah had already finished, and stood at the height of the rise, favoring her bad leg, watching them all like a disapproving squad commander.

  “She has no idea what she’s doing,” Eshe said.

  Nyx said, “That makes seven of us.” She moved past him.

  “I say bleed her out. Kage can eat her,” Eshe said. Khatijah was just out of ear shot.

  “We can ask somebody at the next settlement,” Nyx said. “There were nomads earlier. One of them will know the way.”

  Eshe snorted. “The way? The way to where?” He stepped forward, and—dropped.

  He felt the rush of grainy soil, darkness—

  Eshe landed with a painful thump on spongy ground. He heard voices coming from above him.

  “Fuck!” Nyx said.

  Then Ahmed: “Wait. I’m lighter. We have a rope?”

  Eshe shook his head, and tried to push himself up. The floor was sticky. Blood? God, he hoped he wasn’t bleeding. The darkness was absolute. His fingers touched something, the edge of some textile, non-organic. He yanked his hand away.

  “Go!” Nyx said—the voice sounded muffled, but still intelligible. “Khat, help me hold him!”

  Eshe reached into his pocket and pulled out a fire beetle carapace. He tore the frayed end of his burnous free, and lit it with the beetle.

  A flare of light hurt his eyes. He heard a sputtering above him, and a shower of soil.

  Just above him, twice as high as he was tall, he saw Ahmed’s torso burst through the grainy ceiling. Ahmed windmilled for a moment, his torso hanging suspended in the air.

  “Eshe? Are you hurt?”

  Eshe saw large, spiky protrusions all around him. Like teeth. It was a blessing he hadn’t hit one. He was becoming aware of a pain in his leg, though, the one he’d landed on. He moved the light toward the textile he had brushed in the dim, and caught his breath.

  “There’s something down here,” Eshe said.

  “Yeah. You’re down there. Stand up. I need to know how much rope we need. It looks like there was a glamour or organic skein or something over this pit.”

  “Where’s Nyx?”

  “Who do you think is holding me up?”

  “Tell them there’s a body down here.” Eshe waved his fiery rag over the wizened leg beside him, tangled with a very new-looking sandal. The body had begun to mummify, but Eshe still recognized the features, and the shiny token hanging from the corpse’s throat.

  “What does it matter?” Ahmed said. “Get up here.”

  “I know her,” Eshe said.

  It wasn’t the only body in the cavern.

  When Nyx crawled down into the abyss with Ahmed to see what Eshe was nattering about, she counted four bodies, all of them young Ras Tiegan women dressed in red Khairian burnouses.

  “Why didn’t the bugs eat them?” Nyx asked.

  Ahmed shrugged. “The smell alone should have drawn them. Maybe the floor eats the bugs?”

  The air down here still reeked of dead flesh, rot, though these bodies were mostly desiccated.

  “How did they die?” Nyx asked.

  “No sign of injury,” Ahmed said. “They could have just died of dehydration.”

  Eshe was standing next to a slim, dark-haired body, favoring his left leg. Nyx hoped she wasn’t going to have to hack it off. She had already reached her fill of amputations.

  “Who is she?” Nyx asked.

  “Her name was Corinne,” Eshe said. “I knew her in Ras Tieg. She was one of the living saint’s handmaidens.”

  “Living saint?” Nyx said.

  “What are Ras Tiegans doing out here?” Ahmed said.

  “It’s a sort of holy person,” Eshe said.

  Nyx held a portable glow globe aloft, giving them a full view of the cavern. It was a spherical room lined in thorny, calcified spikes. The floor was strangel
y pliant, like walking across a tongue.

  “Anybody else get the impression we’re in the gut of some beast?” Nyx said. The smell was stronger down here, but shouldn’t have been. The bodies were too dry for it.

  Eshe gazed up at the strange ceiling, and the knotted rope. “We should go,” he said.

  “You’re the one who asked me down here,” Nyx said. “Give me a minute.”

  She inspected each of the bodies. They were not bound, and carried no weapons. She did find several water bulbs stacked near the feet of one of them.

  “Nyx,” Eshe said, and pointed.

  She turned, raised her light. There was something scoured deeply in the cavern wall. It looked like writing. “Is that in Ras Tiegan?” she said. “It say anything useful?”

  When no one said anything, she glanced back. Eshe’s face was slack.

  Ahmed answered. “It says, ‘we were betrayed.’”

  There were ways to get under just about anybody’s skin, Ahmed knew. Eshe was an easy mark. Young, outwardly cocky, but unsure. Isabet was his female counterpart, only far less capable in a fight. It was easy enough to get an edge in under their insecurity. Khatijah had her pride. Eskander was… well, Eskander was many kinds of unstable. A poor wind would unsit her. Kage, he had already seen snap. But needling Nyx was like poking a hibernating cat. He was just never sure when she was going to turn around and claw his face off.

  “And she knows nothing about this?” Nyx said again, more loudly, as if that would get her another answer.

  Ahmed sighed. He looked over at Isabet, who was sitting in the soil, trembling, the stump of her arm pulled against her body. Eshe stood a few paces distant with Khatijah. Kage and Eskander were a more tactful distance away, breaking for midday prayer and a meal. He resented not praying. Even during interrogations at the front, they never required him to miss a prayer.

  “I can hack off some more limbs if you want,” Ahmed said, “but she says she doesn’t know anything about it. Inaya, this rebel leader, sent her after Eshe. She hasn’t heard from her mother, the saint, in over a year.”

  “And you believe that?”

  “No,” Ahmed said. He was good at what he did, but out here in the blasted desert wasn’t the place for it. “I think she had some other reason to come out here that she’s not telling me or even Eshe. But unless you want to beat it out of her, I’d leave it.”

  “Why the bloody fuck are Ras Tiegans out here?” Nyx muttered.

  “The Queen has always been friendly with Ras Tieg,” Eshe said.

  “So what’s the Queen doing with Ras Tiegans out here?” Nyx said. And then, to Khatijah, “I thought you said it was First Families that took Raine.”

  “We aren’t sure who took him,” Khatijah said. “That was a best guess. No one ever thought the Ras Tiegans would be interested.”

  “I feel like we’re all knotted up in one big game,” Nyx said, “and I don’t like playing games without knowing the rules.”

  “Why?” Eshe said. “It’s not like you’d follow them.”

  “Yeah, but everybody else would,” Nyx said. She made an impatient gesture at Ahmed. “Fine. Let’s keep moving. We can work this out while we go.”

  “After prayer,” Ahmed said.

  “I stutter?”

  “After prayer,” Ahmed insisted, again, because he knew if he didn’t push now, he was going to keep getting rolled over.

  “He’s right,” Eshe said.

  “You too?” Nyx said. “Fuck and fire we have more important things to worry about.” She stomped back toward camp, yelling, “Eskander! Stop fucking around and head north. North. No, the other way. Sun rises in the east, so what way is north? The fuck, woman, you act like you never prayed before.”

  Ahmed closed his eyes and thought of his farm. There was a real life at the end of all this. A better one. If he could outrun the war. When he opened his eyes, he saw the bristling lichen-tree forest ahead of him, a blasted wasteland where nothing of substance thrived. I should not have come, he thought. There would have been better paying positions. But all of those would have been in the city, and he couldn’t afford to be in the city right now among the bel dames and their red notes for criminals. There was little forgiveness for men like him, even after the end of war.

  He had left behind a lot of things in Nasheen, but not as much as he’d left at the front. He thought of the call he’d made in Amtullah. The familiar voice. At least not all of the men he cared for were burned up in Chenja.

  “Ahmed?” Eshe said.

  “Yeah?”

  “We’d best pray now, before she leaves us behind.”

  Nyx stood in the campsite as Kage and Eskander packed up. “Hate to break your fine meditation there,” Nyx called, “but we’ve still got those fucking Drucian mercenaries behind us. Unless they get caught in that kill hole, they’re coming for us next.”

  “This shit will be over soon,” Eshe said, and unrolled his prayer rug.

  Ahmed thought he meant it to be comforting, but it came out ominous. It was what he told every prisoner the night before they were gutted and burned by the cleanup crew. He remembered thinking it was a kindness, then, to promise and deliver release. But most were so far gone by then that he wasn’t sure how many understood what he was talking about.

  Ahmed knelt beside Eshe, and began the prayer.

  21.

  When Nyx went hunting, she needed to know a few things about her target. It was always good to know who they were, what they liked, sure. You wanted to know favorite hangouts and who they owed money to and who they’d done favors for. But more than that, you wanted to learn what was most important to them. For most people she hunted in all her years as a bel dame and a bounty hunter, the answer to that question was generally a person, or people.

  So whenever she caught sight of the Drucian mercenaries, trailing them just at the edge of the horizon, ever-present, seldom visible, she sat down and thought about what it was they thought was most important in life. What was worth coming out here to the edge of the known world for? Money just wasn’t enough. She still didn’t understand as much about Drucian culture as she probably should have after her years in exile. She hadn’t exactly had a lot of Drucian friends.

  She sat now on some tumbled fragment of stone among a heap of loose rubble and scrub brush. She chewed absently on a smaller stone she kept in her mouth to ward off thirst, and gazed into the dim horizon. Sometimes the Drucians were easiest to see in the violet dusk.

  Someone came up behind her. From the length of the stride, she guessed it was Ahmed. She turned.

  Ahmed hesitated, just an arm’s length away. He followed her former gaze, out at the horizon. “You thinking it’s time to take them out?”

  “Rather figure out what they want, first.”

  “I assume they want to kill us.”

  “Can’t go around thinking the whole world’s out for you. It’s a big place. Lots of people in it.”

  He, too, was sucking on a small stone. Eskander kept promising them that they were near a settlement, and kept them running along on a thin stream of drivel. Nyx wasn’t sure how much longer she could put up with it.

  Ahmed folded his arms. “We used to have Chenjan scouts follow us like that. They were usually doing it to make sure we ran right into some ambush.”

  “They aren’t Chenjans.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “It means not all of us think alike.” Nyx turned back to camp. They weren’t bedding down this time, they were just getting up. Being out in the desert this exposed meant it was time to start traveling exclusively at night, with a short break during the deepest part of it. Traveling at night meant they needed less water, but it didn’t mean they thought about it any less. She saw Kage sitting at the edge of camp. She, too, was staring out toward the eastern horizon. Nyx had caught her at it a few nights now. She suspected that putting Kage on watch for them would save her a lot of time. The girl was far more vigilant.
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  “Ask Kage to come over here,” Nyx said.

  Ahmed looked puzzled, but obeyed.

  A few moments later, Kage stood next to her, massive gun in hands, gaze on her feet.

  Nyx nodded to the figures on the horizon. “You know those folks?”

  “Not all Drucians know one another.”

  “You seem to take a special interest in these ones.”

  “I do not trust strangers.”

  Nyx wished she had some sen. She’d spit it on the girl’s sandaled toe. “Then maybe you can give me some insight. What you think folks like those are doing still trailing us after all this time?”

  Kage said nothing.

  “I remember I once got a visit from some Drucians,” Nyx said. She decided not to mention that she had still been in Druce at the time. “They were dour types. Dressed in formal robes, black. Funny hats and topknots. Strange guys. They told me they were searching for a criminal. If you exile all of your criminals, why would anybody go to the trouble of finding one?”

  “Criminals must be… tried. They must be formally removed from their households. If they leave without undergoing this ritual, they are never dead.”

  “What’s wrong with never being dead?”

  “They are ghosts.”

  “So?”

  “After they die, they can come back and haunt you.”

  Nyx sighed. It wasn’t any worse than believing in djinns or demons or a God that sent men to war, she supposed.

  “So it stands to reason that these guys are either criminals who took a tough job or they’re hunting criminals themselves?”

  Kage hesitated.

  “What did you do, Kage?” Nyx asked. “You fuck somebody you shouldn’t? Cut off somebody’s tail?”

  Kage’s grip on the gun tensed.

  “All right, let’s have this out now. We can take them out, Kage, but I need to know what they are. Drucian bounty hunters? I’m not going to turn you in. Whatever you did is done. You start with me, you start fresh.”

  Nyx waited. She was terrible at waiting, but she did it anyway while the wind purled across the desert and Kage drew soft breaths through her nose.