“We are not pleased with your actions since your release,” the woman said.
“I expect my family is not, either.”
“This is a delicate time. It will be known, soon, who it was who entombed your family. We cannot keep it secret with you provoking them.”
“You will give me the time I need,” she said. “You would not have woken me unless things were very dire. I think you will do what is necessary to help me achieve my goal.”
“I must issue you an ultimatum. You must be gone from Mushtallah by morning, or we will be forced to reinstate you in your former quarters.”
She snorted and pointed out the window, to the glaring light in the southern sky, just visible now in the dusk. She had spotted it the first night of her release, and had seen enough of them in her time to recognize it immediately. She knew, now, why they had really called her from slumber. “Why not just have me deal with the real reason I’m here? Why run me around in circles after this woman?”
Her handler followed her gesture, and stood a long time staring at the light. “She is the real reason you’re here. If you don’t eliminate her, we can’t eliminate that threat there. She’s working against us, in her way. I know what you can do, but you need access to the tools to do it. I can’t get you access until your target is dead. If you fail at this…”
“I never fail. Who are the aliens on that ship? More mealy-mouthed djinns, like the Dei Keiko?”
“The Drucians? God, no. They were the last of their kind. These are… something else entirely.”
“You’re afraid those aliens will send more ships if we destroy this one?”
“I know they will send more. But they will do so regardless. This shows our teeth, and buys us time. It’s many years to their planet and back. The Queen tried diplomacy for far too long. We simply did not have the resources to take out this threat. Now, with the boys home and our country united… perhaps we do. Perhaps we stand some chance of remaining autonomous. But it will require all of us working together, and that is something we have not done in a long, long time.”
“How long before another ship comes?”
“Eight years before they know the ship was destroyed. Some time for them to mobilize, then eight years to come back. We could have twenty years to sort out our differences before facing an interstellar war.”
“What do they want? To colonize us?”
“No. To conquer and strip us bare. There are very few habitable worlds left. It was only a matter of time before they extinguished theirs.”
“Twenty years of peace.”
“Yes. Have you ever been asked to deliver such a thing?”
“The war has been on and off only three hundred years. We had over two thousand years of peace before that. It was a very dull time.”
“Only because it did not need monsters.”
“Monsters like me?”
“As I said.”
Foolish child, she thought. It was monsters like me who ensured the peace. You all forget that now. She sighed.
“I will complete your little mission for you,” she said. “But you must promise me the ship is mine.”
“I can promise you nothing. It is not my decision to make. As yet, this is the only mission I have for you. If you fail, Umayma falls to outsiders for the first time in three thousand years.” She hesitated. “So don’t fail.”
“You pretend I care a great deal for Nasheen.”
“I know you care little for Nasheen. But you do value your freedom. If those aliens come here, you will be the first of our… old weapons… to be turned over to them. Why do you think I chose you for this mission?”
“You would rather I die spectacularly than get turned over to the enemy?”
“I would rather see this all go another way,” she said.
The prayer ended. Around them, women began rolling up their prayer rugs. People returned to the streets.
“Get out of Mushtallah,” the woman said.
She watched the woman step abruptly backward into the wall of the tavern, but instead of smacking hard into the wall, the woman simply passed through it, through the veil of some glamour that likely led below, into one of the magicians’ tunnels—the Abd-al-Karim—that linked key cities from the old world.
“I will leave Mushtallah in my own time,” she murmured into her tea, and turned her gaze once more to the sky.
The Families, too, had their own shortcuts to the other side of the world. She had only to choose her moment.
Above, the alien ship hung still and silent in the night.
23.
It did not take Rhys a week to become conversant in Yazdani. It took two.
By then, he had learned that Hanife was one of three brothers come down from Yazdani, a country far beyond the desert wall. Rhys had never heard of it—had never heard of anything beyond Khairi—not the desert wall, and not Yazdan.
“Of course not,” Hanife said. “Until we crossed the Wall and made peace… well, stopped making war with these damned unbelievers, we thought all their stories about a world beyond the Wall on our side was a myth. Ships never make it out of harbor up there. And going overland, well, that requires coming to this godsfucked place. You can understand.”
“How far are we from there?” Rhys asked one night as they camped under a black, cloudless sky. The only stars he saw were far to the south, ringing the horizon behind him. The further north they went, the blacker the sky. He wondered if he would see anything at all but the moons and the billowing purple curtains of light if they went any further.
Hanife was feeding some kind of dust into the fire. It popped and crackled, burning high and hot for hours. He and the driver and the charioteers slept near the fire, but the desert men slept beyond them, in the cool darkness. They drew a circle around themselves, and clustered at the center of it. One man remained on watch all night. It was a different man each night, but never in shifts—though it seemed the nights themselves had grown longer.
“From where, Yazdan? Oh, we aren’t even past the Wall yet. Don’t you know where that is? Ever seen it?”
Rhys shook his head. He had heard there was a wall, but he had seen many walls in his time.
“How many people go beyond the wall?”
“Not enough,” Hanife said. “Or maybe too many.”
“Is there a market for slaves there?”
“Slaves?” Hanife looked appalled. “That word. The gods frown on that type of thing. The Yazdani don’t take slaves.”
“Don’t you enslave the nomads?”
“Well, some, maybe. They are a godsless people. Worshipping sand and wind and all manner of nonsense.”
Rhys had certainly met nomads further south who worshipped gods of wind and sand, but his captors had not been among them. There were many who still followed the one God, even out here in all this blackness.
He thought of Elahyiah, and the children. Did she still live? Did she think of him, or was she so relieved to get away that she did not spare him a thought? He closed his eyes, and remembered the happy years of their marriage, before the bel dames came. Everything had been destroyed after that. It was foolish to think he could put anything back together. Wasn’t it? Who was he now, without Elahyiah? Without Mehry and Nasrin and Rahim? Was he a man at all?
After so many weeks of travel, one became used to shifting vistas, hard-packed beds, and picking mites and midges from the bedding.
When the bugs became especially virulent, Hanife shared his repellent, and Rhys slathered himself in it every night, but in the morning—inevitable as the blue dawn—cysts had formed in the warm, dry flesh between his toes. He spent many of his waking hours coaxing them out and stowing them in a pouch so he could burn them each night. The scents released when they burned tended to act as an additional repellent. Hanife thought him mad to cut them out, but Rhys knew it always hurt worse if you let the little ticks and midges grow and split open on their own in a rush of blood and pus.
He got so used
to traveling that it was not until the third day after Hanife told him they were nearing the end of the desert that he finally noted the thin black line on the horizon.
Rhys peered out past the group of desert men scouting ahead of them and said, “My God, what is that?”
“The end of the world,” Hanife said.
“My God,” Rhys said.
“Indeed,” Hanife said. “Now you are stuck with me, my friend. Now we are true partners.”
24.
Eshe threw three bandoliers of water bulbs onto the ground at the center of camp. He was wheezing. Blood oozed from three long slashes across his chest. Whatever thing they had battled out there while Kage shot at Ahmed and the assassins had lashed out with six sharp claws and then retreated into the darkness, yowling. He still trembled with the memory of that scream. It had sounded human.
Kage carried a second bandolier. She put it down next to his. He saw there were six or seven individual canisters missing from the bandolier, and wondered where she’d hid them. How many others had she smuggled away before he got over there to her and the assassins?
“So how many days is that?” he asked.
Nyx knelt next to Ahmed, digging Kage’s bullet out of his arm. At least Kage had used deadtech bullets. Nyx regarded the pile of water bulbs, blood streaming over her fingers.
“Depends,” she said. She glanced back at the hemorrhaging wound. “How many days to the next settlement, Eskander?”
“A few days, a few days,” Eskander said. But she wasn’t looking at any of them. Her tattered burnous was filthy, and she stank, like she had been messing herself in her clothes for days.
Khatijah stood next to Eskander, out of breath. The bel dame hadn’t taken the running and shooting well. He knew they had to keep at least one of them alive until the next settlement. They knew more about what waited up there than anyone else. After they met their contact there, though… well, he figured Nyx was already cooking up new and interesting ways that she could lose them after that.
Isabet sat on the other side of the banked fire, hugging her knees to her chest with her good arm. She stared at the pile of water like a starving dog presented with a corpse. It was time to call this bluff. He had seen Nyx do a lot of stupid things that ended up well, but more often than not, it meant a whole lot of people died to get to the end.
“I think there’s another question maybe we should ask,” Eshe said.
“There!” Nyx said. She popped out the bloody deadtech bullet from Ahmed’s arm. It was a black mass. Ahmed cursed at her.
“Nyx,” Eshe said, but the closer he got to saying it, the more nervous he got. “Nyx, what if… If we turned around now, would we have enough to get back?”
All heads turned. Even Eskander. Khatijah even laughed.
Nyx knotted a loop of gauze around Ahmed’s arm, using one hand to hold the bandage flush and tying it taut with the other end in her teeth. When she was done, she spit out the bandage and said, “How long it take us to get this far, Eshe?”
“I don’t know. Four, five weeks.”
“How much water is there, Eshe?”
“I don’t know.”
“There are seven of us,” Nyx said. “On a regular day, we’d all drink about four times what we’ve got. I can stretch it two days, maybe three, because of Kage. So with this? Five bandoliers, eight on each. Maybe another five, six days, at best.”
“No going back, then?” Eshe said.
“No going back,” Nyx said. She stood, smearing Ahmed’s blood on her trousers. Ahmed retched.
“Our best bet is heading north and hoping we run into some nomads or this mythical settlement. There are people who live out here. We just need to hang on long enough to find them.”
“Then what?” Ahmed said. He covered over the vomit with sand, using his good arm.
“Then we go north. That’s what you all signed on for, right?”
Eskander giggled.
Eshe glanced over at Isabet. She shook her head.
“Let’s get moving,” Nyx said.
“What direction?” Ahmed said.
“You miss me the first time?” Nyx pointed north.
Eskander babbled something.
“This is a foolish course,” Isabet said, in Ras Tiegan.
Eshe handed her a bandolier. “You heard Nyx. You can’t keep up, you can turn right around.”
“I can’t go without you.”
“So you keep saying.” He wondered just how thirsty and crazy she would have to get to turn back. He thought the loss of her arm would affect her more, thought Ahmed’s interrogation would intimidate her, but after some water and rest, she was as steely-eyed and determined as ever. He couldn’t help but admire her a little. For a rich girl, she had guts. And I haven’t exactly been nice to her, he thought, and cringed. If he acted like Nyx all the time, he really was going to end up just like her. He watched Isabet for a time, and his resolve softened. Don’t be a fool, he thought, remembering the words carved into the loamy cavern. There is something rotten going on out here, and she could very well be a part of it. Couldn’t she?
Nyx took the lead, and eventually, they all followed. An hour before dawn, Eshe was so tired he kept expecting someone would just run off into the desert with the water and take their own chances. If he thought Nyx would still speak to him if he ran off, he might do it himself. But out here in all this nothing, Nyx’s stubborn determination was comforting, like a stone pillar in a sandstorm.
Beside him, Isabet struggled to keep up. She had the long, dead-eyed expression of somebody about to pass out. The only person slower than them was Kage, who trailed after him and Isabet in a strange sort of half-crouch, arms splayed out like a spider. It was eerie, sometimes, to watch her move.
He reached for Isabet, and made her drink some of his water. She shook her head at first, and said some nonsense words, something like, “Kittens need cool coats,” and then she lapped the water from her lips and drank.
Eshe put his arm around her. She was so out of it she didn’t even push him away. He set his gaze on Ahmed’s back, and focused. Dug deep. If he had learned nothing else from Nyx, it was that he could always go on a lot longer than he thought he could.
At dawn, Nyx had them bed down in the long curve of a small crater. Eshe had seen a few others a long way back, much bigger than this one, and suggested that they stay in one, but it was always at the wrong time. Nyx wanted to get just a little bit further before they stopped.
The blue dawn had already warmed the sky, and the orange demon was blazing a new morning across the desert.
Eshe helped Isabet into the crater, then straightened and stared at the sunrise. For one awesome moment, he let himself just see that sunrise, really see it—a fiery crimson-gold hemorrhage across a deep purple sky, like a bloody wound at the center of a massive bruise. The flat of the desert was different now—ahead of them lay rolling amber dunes, or maybe foothills, and something else. Chalky white protrusions, like massive rock chimneys, grew from the distant desert, prickling across the dunes like the spines of a fish.
He decided to muse on what that meant for the next leg of the trip later, and slid into the crater with the others. The cold desert was beginning to warm. When he settled down in the crater, Isabet crawled next to him like a child and gripped him close with her remaining hand.
His whole body tensed. She murmured something he could not make out. He wasn’t entirely sure what to do with his own hands. This close, even after long, filthy days in the desert, the scent of her beneath the cloying stink of sweat was strangely alluring. It was her hair, he decided, that smelled so good. Even here.
He closed his eyes, and tried to relax.
“I’m sorry I came,” she said, in Ras Tiegan. For her, he knew, it was like their own private language. But Ahmed spoke it, and the way Kage sometimes watched them, he thought she might understand some of it, too. So he was careful about what he said.
“I still think Inaya was mad to send you.
”
“She worried about you.”
“She worries about a lot of people. That doesn’t mean she sends other people after them, especially not daughters to saints.”
“I’m… sorry. She’s in charge.”
He watched Nyx get up on the edge of the crater to take first watch. She dug into a small packet of dried meal worms. “I know what that can be like,” he said.
Isabet’s shoulders shook. After a time, he realized she was crying, only without any tears. She was too thirsty to cry properly. He gazed up at the bright lavender sky. He needed to sleep.
Isabet shuddered against him, squeezing him so hard it hurt. He wasn’t sure what to do. Should he tell her it would be all right? He couldn’t guarantee that.
“Here, drink,” he said, and passed her the last half of his water bulb.
She took it in her dirty fingers. Drank.
“I lied to you,” she said, and her face contorted again.
“Not the first time I’ve been lied to.”
“Inaya didn’t send me. Michel did.”
“That makes even less sense than Inaya sending you,” he said. “Why the fuck did Michel send you to Nasheen?”
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
Ahmed was on watch three days later when Eskander crawled out of her bedroll, stripped herself naked, and started doing a slow dance on the sand. She was remarkably flat-chested, and wore no breast binding. He expected her to at least keep on her dhoti, but that went too, and then she was just a whirling, stomping mad woman in the dark.
Ahmed woke Nyx. “I think Eskander finally lost it,” he said.
Nyx got up and they stood together at the edge of camp, watching Eskander flail.
Nyx’s expression was impossible to read. She looked at everything the same way now, like she was attending a particularly distasteful funeral.
“Let it go,” Nyx said.
“Are you sure?”
“It saves me a bullet.”
“You’re all so generous,” Khatijah said. She limped up behind them. The pain in her face was obvious. Ahmed wondered how much longer she was going to be able to push through it. “I’ll talk her down.”
Rapture Page 20
