She heard a knock at the cabin door. She stood and slid it open, trying to come up with something that sounded nice but not like an apology.
But it was not Rhys at the door. A young woman wearing a blue Transit Authority uniform offered her a complimentary newsroll.
The scrolling text that slid across the translucent projection of the newsrolls was even tougher to read than static text, but Nyx figured Rhys would want to read it when he got back. An offering. She could look at the pictures. Her teachers at the state schools had called her dead dumb because she got all her letters backward. Some of the better newsreel companies had an audio option, but this wasn’t one of them.
“Thanks,” she said, taking the roll.
She sat back down, but before she twisted the news back into its thumbnail-size roll, she looked over the projection. Bundled between two articles about border skirmishes near Aludra was a picture of the gates of Faleen. The nose of a star carrier reared up behind them.
Nyx stared at the carrier a long time. She’d seen that carrier before. She tried to find an article with it, but all she noted was a short blurb before the picture scrolled over to the next image of three beaming young boys heading for the front.
Star carriers didn’t get lost in Faleen twice, and even if it was a different carrier than the one she’d seen the last time she was there, it was the same make as the last one. Aliens interested in boxers were back in Nasheen. What the hell was up with that?
Nyx spent a long while staring at the scrolling pictures, but the image of Faleen didn’t pop up again.
What did an off-world carrier want in Faleen? What did the queen want with her in Mushtallah? Being a bel dame had taught her that there were no coincidences, only cause and effect.
She was going to need another drink.
8
Rhys could recite the Kitab by heart, but he never quoted it at Nyx.
He sat in the dining car reading for hours, yet no one came to wait on him. He even stayed long enough for the wait staff changeover. Three women gave him openly hostile stares as they passed his table. A Transit Authority agent asked to see his papers. The few times he’d dared to go off on his own outside the Chenjan district since joining Nyx’s team, he’d been beaten up, cut, and much worse. He didn’t travel alone anymore. Much as he hated it, knowing Nyx was just two cars away was somewhat comforting, though her sharp tongue was not.
What finally drove him back to the cabin was the conductor’s announcement that they were nearing Mushtallah and were about to go through customs. Customs agents were as violent with Chenjan men as security agents and order keepers.
Rhys put his things away and passed between cars. The stricken Nasheenian landscape rolled by. The world outside did not look so different from Chenja here: There were fewer minarets, and some of the older, mostly untouched villages were tiled in ceramic and still bore huge gold-gilt inscriptions from the Kitab above the lintels to all of their village gates, groceries, and the wealthier houses. He saw old contagion sensors sticking up from the desert, half buried, some of them with the red lights at their bulbous tips still blinking. There were fewer old cities in the Chenjan interior. The oldest relics, Rhys supposed, would be farther north, in the Khairian wasteland, where the first world had been created and abandoned. Out here, though, was the most he had seen of old-world Nasheen. He had never been to Mushtallah.
Rhys knocked at the compartment door. As Nyx pulled it open, a passing member of the Transit Authority paused in the hall at the sight of him and asked Nyx if Rhys was bothering her.
“It’s all right,” Nyx said. “He’s mine.” The Transit Authority agent gave them both a good long look before moving on again.
Rhys shut the door.
“Here, I kept the news for you,” Nyx said. She tossed him a newsroll. He pocketed it. She had the red letter in her hands again. He pretended not to notice. He had spent six years with her—five and a half longer than he’d expected. She was supposed to be his way out of the boxing gym and on to more lucrative contracts with universities and First Families. But even with an employer on his résumé, his middling talent was not great enough to make up for his ethnicity.
Rhys glanced out the window and decided it was almost thirteen in the afternoon, about time for noon prayer. He rolled out his prayer rug. Nyx went off to find the bathroom.
Despite—or because of—her prison record, Nyx had a good reputation with just about every border agent inside Nasheen. Rhys had crossed into enough cities with her to know. During his more cynical moments, Rhys wondered if she got through customs so easily because she’d slept with all of the agents. It had taken him some time to realize just how terrible Nasheen’s problem with same-sex relations had become. Though sex between two men was not only discouraged, but illegal, what passed for sex between women was actively celebrated, and Nyx used sex as freely and easily as any other tool on her baldric. What women found appealing about her, he could not say. She was coarse and foul-mouthed and godless. She was also the only woman who would employ him.
The customs agents slid the door open. They both stared hard at him and told him to raise his arms.
Rhys felt a gut-churning moment of terror.
Nyx appeared just behind them and leaned against the doorway. She smirked. The fear bled out of him.
“Go easy on him,” she said. “He’s mine.”
She said it like he was her bakkie or a prized sand cat.
The bigger woman asked for Nyx’s passbook.
“I’m already coded for Mushtallah,” Nyx said. “I’m Nyxnissa so Dasheem.”
The woman clucked at her. “Who’d you kill to get you back in Mushtallah, Nyxnissa?”
“All the same sorts of people,” Nyx said.
“I haven’t seen you here since you went to prison.”
“For good reason, then,” Nyx said.
The matron laughed. “It’s not the prettiest city, but it’s still our best. Good women in prison, too.” She pulled up a sleeve and revealed a badly drawn tattoo of a sword and scattergun on a round shield.
Nyx snorted. “Gunrunning?”
“Good money,” the woman said. “Tirhanis don’t mind selling so long as we do all the work lugging it through the pass—and the time if we get caught.”
“So I hear,” Nyx said.
She would know, Rhys thought. How many gunrunners had Nyx slept with?
Both agents went through Rhys’s pockets. They didn’t find the pockets that kept his bugs, which improved his confidence in his ability to conceal items by altering the composition of the air around them. The skill had not been one of his best back in Faleen. Not that he was going to be able to keep the bugs on his person much longer. Mushtallah would take care of that.
One of the women, an ugly matron with a face the color and texture of boot leather, paged through his passbook. “You a resident alien?” she asked.
“I’m employed,” he said. “Everything is in order.”
She looked him up and down and made a moue of her mouth, as if contemplating whether or not to spit on him. Nyx pushed farther into the crowded room, arms crossed, and grinned at her.
The customs agent closed her mouth. “No doubt you are,” she said to Rhys, and dropped her eyes back to his passbook.
The one patting him down found his Kitab and laughed as she looked through it. “It’s the same damn book as ours. Same language and everything. You a convert?”
“No,” he said. “Chenjans have always had the same book. Unlike Nasheenians, however, we follow its teachings.”
“You speak the dead language?” the ugly one asked, ignoring the jibe.
“Only as much as you do.”
“Huh,” she said.
The language of the Kitab had been the same since the First Families brought it down from the moons. Even godless Nasheenians should have known that. Who taught the schools here? Atheists like Nyx? They killed atheists in Chenja.
The other one gave back his Kitab. Th
ey didn’t always. He’d lost a number of Kitabs going through customs.
The ugly one turned to Nyx. “You vouch for him, my woman?”
“You think I’d bring a terrorist into Mushtallah?”
“Only if you’re cutting off his head,” the ugly one said, and laughed again.
The matron finally pressed a thumb to the organic paper at the back of Rhys’s passbook.
“You keep hold of that,” she told him, “or the filter will eat you. No permanent residency, no permanent bio-pass into Mushtallah.” She flashed her teeth and gave Nyx a nod. “Good luck, my woman.”
The customs agents went back out into the hall. The door rolled shut behind them.
Rhys tugged at his coat, and returned his Kitab and passbook to his breast pocket.
Nyx sat at the window and put her feet up. “They were just flirting,” she said. “You don’t see a lot of men this far inland. And sure not Chenjan ones.”
“That’s not flirting.”
“You’ve seen worse.”
He turned away from her. “It doesn’t excuse them.”
“Stop mewling.” She paused, then relented. “You know I’ll do what I can to make it easy.”
“I know,” he said.
Rhys liked to think she defended him out of some kind of loyalty or affection, but most days he felt she guarded him the same way she did everything in her possession: He’s mine. He was just another thing to be owned and retained. Just another thing she could lose.
Once the customs agents were off-loaded, the train chugged into the station just outside Mushtallah. Rhys and Nyx gathered their things and then stepped onto the sandy platform overlooking the city.
“The most boring city in Nasheen,” Nyx declared, and trudged down the steps and onto the paved road.
Rhys had read that before Nasheen’s revolution two hundred fifty years ago, the gutters were full of dead babies and the mullahs wore vials of virgins’ blood toward off the draft. They’d bred sand cats for fights in the train workers’ ward, and the stink and smog of the city sent the First Families who lived up in the hills to the countryside every year during high summer.
The wealthy still fled the city in the summer—it looked deserted from the platform—but there weren’t any dead babies that he could see, and the last of the male mullahs had been drafted two centuries ago, right after the queen decreed that God had no place for men in mosques unless they had served at the front.
Mushtallah had been built on seven hills, but that was for beauty and breezes, not for defense. When Mushtallah was founded, there hadn’t been much to defend the city from but wild sand cats and some of the more virulent strains of bugs that had gotten away from their magicians or bled down from the twisted mess of the Khairian wasteland in the north. That had all changed, of course, when the war started.
The first wall that rose around the city was an organic filter that kept foreign bug tech out. Every ten yards, a hundred foot faux stone pillar jutted up from the packed, sandy soil. The bug filters that stretched from pillar to pillar made the air shimmer like a soap bubble. Organic filters were a necessity in a country bombarded by all manner of biological, half-living, semi-organic weaponry. Destruction entered cities as often through contaminated individuals as it did through munitions. Filters were magician-made and could be tailored to keep out anyone and anything organic. It was a matter of introducing the bugs powering the filter to the unwanted contagion or—in the case of Mushtallah—only coding the filter to allow in particular individuals. The fact that Rhys had gotten through customs unmolested was a testament to how highly regarded Nyx was by the customs agents.
As they approached the filter, Rhys called up a handful of flying red beetles. He held out his hand, and a dozen swarmed about his fingers.
“We’ll be out of contact, Taite,” he said. “We’re going into Mushtallah.”
“Sure thing.” Taite’s voice carried just over the singing of the beetles, a second song. “Tell me when you come back to civilization.” Rhys flicked his wrist, and the beetles dispersed. He dug through his pockets and released three locusts and a couple of screaming cockroaches he kept in magicians’ cages for emergencies. All the bugs had sense enough to head away from the filter. He would need to call or buy more when they got back to Punjai.
Nyx turned in time to see the swarm recede. “You clean?” she asked.
He showed her his empty pockets.
Nyx bled through the gate.
Rhys took a deep breath. Nyx stood on the other side, whole, and stopped to look back at him. He still wasn’t entirely convinced about the safety of entering Mushtallah. How far would those agents take their “flirting”? Far enough to tell him that the filter had been coded to let him through, then stand at the train windows and laugh as he stepped through the filter and disintegrated into gray ash?
There are worse ways to die, Rhys thought distantly, and stepped forward.
The filter clung to him, slightly sticky, until he pushed through. He came out the other side with a delicate pop. He reflexively patted at his arms and his hips—and smoothed the robe over his groin—to make sure everything was still blessedly intact.
The first twenty yards inside the filter was a stretch of bare soil that lapped against Mushtallah’s second wall. The second wall encircling the city, made of stone, had little practical value. It had no working gates anymore, just great gaps in the masonry where travelers passed through and locals kept tchotchke booths. The poor and underemployed spread out their wares on mass-produced blankets given out by the same wholesaler who doled out their identical figurines of Queen Zaynab, and their cheap model palaces and star carriers. The petty merchants and beggars were all women, which was not so different from Chenja, he supposed, but in Chenja all of these women would have had husbands and brothers or sons who were responsible for them, even if those husbands looked after forty or fifty wives. Instead, Nasheenian women all came to adulthood with the terrible knowledge that they had to fend for themselves in this terrible desert.
Ahead of him, Nyx pushed past the throng of traders clinging to the old stone wall, and he slipped through in her wake. The heart of the city spread before them in what had once been a neat grid. As the city grew, new buildings had moved out onto the streets, and finding a straight path to any address was like trekking through an unmapped jungle.
Nyx paid a rickshaw waiting outside a bookshop to take them to Palace Hill.
As they rode through the city, burnouses pulled up to ward against the suns, Rhys tried to call up a swarm. The magicians in Faleen had told him he’d be lucky to find anything living in a clean city. There should have been no bugs in Mushtallah except for the local colonies of flies sealed in when the filter first went up. But as Rhys tried to summon the bugs, he found various colonies at hand, isolated so long from those outside the filter that they must have been different species. He found no bugs suitable for transmissions. The filter would have kept them from broadcasting, anyway. Media had to come into the city via newsrolls or archaic forms of audio-only radio.
The rickshaw pulled them through the crowded street and under a renovated arch that nonetheless looked like it had seen better days. It was checkered with bullet holes. Two centuries before, the Chenjans had poured into the interior and nearly burned Mushtallah to the ground. In retaliation, the Nasheenians had razed a swath of Chenja’s agricultural cities, and a hundred and fifty thousand Chenjans died.
After about an hour, the rickshaw pulled them onto the busy main street that ran outside the palace.
Nyx alighted from the rickshaw and held out her hand to help him down. It was an odd gesture, and he gave her a look. She seemed startled, as if the move had been unconscious, and pulled her hand away, turning to face the palace compound on the other side of the street, her body suddenly rigid. He had seen Nasheenian women offer such courtesies to Nasheenian boys, but never to foreign ones. He wondered what her memories were of Mushtallah. Had she courted boys here? He couldn’
t picture Nyx as a young, bright-eyed girl opening doors for boys.
Rhys got down from the rickshaw and stood next to her. The palace walls were twelve feet high, spiked and filtered. Two women in red trousers stood outside a filtered gate that shimmered in the heat. He pulled again at the hood of his burnous to make sure it was all the way up. His dress was just as much an adherence to Chenjan modesty as it was a practical barrier against the violent suns. He had never been scraped for cancers. Chenjans still boasted the lowest rate of cancers of any people on Umayma.
Nyx crossed the street, striding ahead into the press of people and vehicles with the dumb confidence Rhys suspected would someday get her killed. He followed, stepping over a heap of refuse and ducking away from a sand cat pulling a rickshaw. The women around him turned to stare as he passed. There was not much of him visible outside the burnous, nothing but his hands. Perhaps they could peer into his cowl for a look at his face, but he suspected there was something else giving him away. Some kind of stance or Chenjan affectation that he had never been able to mask or alter. Or maybe he was just intensely paranoid. He had a right to be.
Nyx presented the women at the gate with her red letter. They pointed Nyx and Rhys in the direction of another, smaller, gate. The women posted there let them into an inner yard and through an organic filter. Inside the filter, the world suddenly smelled strongly of lavender and roses. Rhys had a startling memory of the front—of bright bursts in the sky, the smell of oranges and geranium, and this, somewhere, this smell of lavender. He trembled and stilled.
Nyx looked back at him. “Come, now,” she said softly. “It’s real lavender. It smells different. Come on, I bet they have a garden in here.” She, too, had been to the front.
He wanted to take her hand. He shook his head, sighed deeply through his nose, and followed after her.
They were given over to a woman in yellow, who took them through yet another gate and into a massive courtyard. The smells dissipated.
Spotted sand cats prowled the yard, not one of them tended by a chain or a trainer. Women ran through military drills along the far side of the square, dressed in the long, green, organic trousers and gauzy sandals of the Queen’s guard.
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