Rhys closed his eyes and prepared himself for horror. The last eight years had been an unending nightmare, starting with his flight across the desert. And it will end with my flight back into the desert, he thought. The globe the queen had given them had included a detailed summary of what she was willing to pay them in return for Nikodem—alive or dead. Nikodem, the alien with the big laugh. He had known her immediately upon seeing her stills but was uncertain about how he felt about hunting her. She was just an alien, and the sum to bring her in—even split five ways—was indeed enough for all of them to retire on. If they completed this note, he could leave Nyx, and this bloody business, forever.
He had no idea what he would do, after.
When he opened his eyes, Nyx had gone.
The dead that came back from the front were processed in filtered containment facilities expressly designed for the purpose. Chenja and Nasheen had signed and broken—and signed and broken and signed again—treaties requiring the return of the dead to the processing centers—the morgues—within thirty days of a soldier’s death. The morgues were run by magicians who identified, cataloged, decontaminated, and burned the dead. The sterile remains were placed in ceramic jars and shipped home to mothers or sisters or merely sent to the war memorials on the coast—vast, shining walls of smooth metal that faced the sea. The largest of them was the Orrizo in Mushtallah, a monument dedicated to unidentified soldiers—dead boys and patriotic women.
After being reconstituted, Nyx had worked at the containment center just west of Punjai. She had to pay back the magicians for putting her back together, and the dirty, dangerous work in the containment center was the only work they had for her at the time. She had spent her mornings loading bagged corpses onto carts and her afternoons sorting piles of body parts that the magicians insisted all went to the same body. More often than not, the magicians were wrong, and she’d have to take out an extra arm or leg or the remains of a foot and throw it into another pile made up entirely of “unidentified” parts that were later burned up and dumped in the Orrizo.
It had been shit work, and she’d been hosed down and swept for organics three times after magicians suspected her of being exposed to contaminated bodies. Chenjans and Nasheenians alike had been known to plant bug-borne viruses in the flesh of the dead before sending them back over the border.
Even the dead were participants in the war.
Nyx still had some contacts at the morgue, so she and Rhys hitched a ride with a caravan going to Punjai, waiting out the hottest part of the day at a little cantina before walking the rest of the way to the center. An old woman named Ashana met them at the gates at dusk, after Rhys had finished his prayers and Nyx had finished her sen. Ashana brought them in through the filter at the rear of the compound, where the bodies selected for contamination—as opposed to decontamination—resided.
She led them to the containment room.
“You can’t be serious,” Rhys said as he stared out at the neatly numbered bags of the Chenjan dead, the ones the Nasheenians had taken from the field and planted with viruses to be trucked back into Chenja. These bodies would be stacked up and mixed in with the rest of the Chenjan bodies pulled out of the field that day and then delivered back to Chenja, carrying tailored viruses and nests of bugs primed to burst after they reached a populated area.
Rhys, as a magician, would be immune to just about everything. It was why only he and she could get across this way.
Even so, Ashana held out a beetle whose clear shell was filled with an orange fluid.
“Eat it,” Ashana said to him, in Chenjan.
Rhys replied in Nasheenian, “Nyx first.”
“I was inoculated against everything they have to offer when I worked here,” Nyx said.
“And you’re assuming they haven’t come up with new viruses?” Rhys said. “I’m sure they have, but there’s a base contagion Nasheenian magicians use in all of their concoctions, and, yes, I checked to make sure that’s still their base. It’s the base that they inoculate all of their workers against. My body recognizes the base and destroys anything attached to it.” She winked at him.
“You aren’t supposed to know that.”
She supposed he could take a risk and try to save a few Chenjans by passing someone his now inoculated blood sample, but then he’d have to let them know why he’d been in Nasheen and who he was, and one call to the local security forces would turn up his name on their wanted list. Even if he avoided the security forces, the Chenjan magicians he gave the sample to would lock him up for conspiring with the enemy and then put him in quarantine for fourteen months. He knew that as well as she did.
If all went well, one of Anneke’s kindred—six of her sisters had converted and married Chenjan half-breeds over the years—would haul them out of the mass of others based on the numbered tags that Ashana put on the bags. The driver would then give Rhys and Nyx false security badges so they could ride up front with her as far as the Chenjan border city of Azam. Nyx could pass for a eunuch when she needed to; castrated Nasheenian captives were sometimes used as a form of slave labor in Chenja. Once they were off the truck, she could pass for Rhys’s servant if the two of them had to wait around the pick up point for a while if Anneke was delayed.
The containment room smelled only faintly of death. The tiny bugs that had been released into the chamber ate up all the bacteria that broke down the bodies, at least until they left the holding room. The ride out across the desert among the bags would not be pleasant.
Nyx looked over at Rhys. In the cold light of the holding room, he looked slim and fragile and more than a little sick. He had followed her for a long time, through some shitty situations, but she knew this was a lot to ask. She was not yet so much of a monster that she did not realize that.
“You don’t have to do it,” Nyx said. “I can run this without a magician.”
He turned to her. Ashana began unzipping their bags.
“Is this how you’re getting me back out?” he asked.
“Sure,” she lied. She hadn’t sorted that part out yet. Getting a Chenjan body into a holding center for Nasheenian dead would be tougher than getting a Chenjan body into a holding center for Chenjan dead. She needed another way to get him back into Nasheen. Her conscience had picked a hell of a time to nag at her.
“I hate it when you lie to me,” he said.
“Sometimes I can get away with it.”
“You won’t be able to hold off bel dames without a magician, even a poor one,” he said.
“No, probably not.” That part wasn’t a lie. He wasn’t the most talented of magicians, no—but no standard could get her the communications and security he could. If somebody got poisoned or had a limb chopped off, well… he was less useful. That’s what real magicians were for.
He waited. She waited. Ashana stood over the open body bags and waited.
“I need you to come with me,” Nyx said, finally.
“Then I’ll go,” Rhys said.
“Good on you all, then,” Ashana drawled. “Now get in the damn bags.”
From a small hole in the body bag, Rhys could see the double dawn turn the sky gray-blue, then violet, then bloody. Punjai was still quarantined, and the body bakkies circumvented the city. A couple of miles west of Punjai, the veldt turned to flat blinding-white desert. Rhys was pressed up against the slatted side of the bakkie flatbed, half a dozen bodies below him, a couple on top of him, and Nyx next to him, at her insistence.
“Best we keep close,” she had told him.
They passed signs warning travelers that they were on an unpatrolled road. The air started to turn sour. He could smell the yeasty stink of spent bursts, and he caught a faint whiff of geranium and lemon. There were no other vehicles on the road.
Rhys widened the slit that Ashana had cut for him to breathe through during the long ride. The bags were good at keeping their contents cool; they were all organic and fed off the body’s secretions and the heat of the sun. Under the sun, t
he black bags turned green.
He saw a long column of smoke off to their left, too far away for him to see what was burning. Sometime later he saw the first burst, a green spray of light against the violet sky. He could feel the low thump of the bursts in his chest as the ground rumbled with the blast.
At the border station, the truck stopped for the drop-off, and Rhys held himself still and waited. He heard a couple of people speaking fluent Chenjan, and felt a swarm of wasps buzz by. Ashana helped with the transfer, and he felt the weight of the bodies above him ease as they were offloaded.
Someone grabbed hold of him by the hips and dragged him across the flatbed.
“Praise be to God,” a male voice said from outside the flatbed, in Chenjan. Hearing the language spoken out loud so freely left Rhys with a feeling of half dread, half relief. “Where are you all headed?”
“Praise be to God,” Ashana said. “I’m dropping this batch with your girl. Came straight from the front.”
“Careful how you lift them, woman! Pay them some respect,” the male voice said. The person holding Rhys let him go, and two big hands grabbed at him and pulled.
Rhys froze. He was lifted up and slipped carefully onto another flatbed. Another body was pushed on top of him.
He wondered what they would do to him if they found him out. Kill him quickly, he hoped. He closed his eyes. It must have been time for prayer. There was no call to prayer out here, no call that he could hear. Submit to God, he thought, and God will attend to the rest.
Ashana and the man began to bicker. He heard something thump on the ground.
“You tell me to show respect? I’m not the one dropping bodies, you fool,” Ashana said.
“What are you packing these bodies with, woman?”
“Nothing you don’t pack yours with. Cut it open if you want to find out. Half your bodies are contaminated with your own bursts.”
Rhys felt something bump his feet again. He kept his eyes shut. Would they take him out and cut him open? He held his breath and sent out a call for bugs, but the tailored colonies inside the bodies were too complex for him. He could feel them but couldn’t alter or direct them. Poor magician, indeed. He swore softly.
Ashana and the Chenjan spoke a few more heated words. Rhys heard the sound of a bag opening. More bickering. Then the sound of the body being dragged across the packed sand.
Then the bakkie started to move.
Rhys let out his breath.
They drove for what seemed like hours. They passed a couple of burned-out farmsteads. Every few decades some hard-up family, a man and his ten or twenty wives, would move out close to the front and try to make something grow, but most of Chenja’s agricultural land was still along the coast, like Nasheen’s. It was safer there, and less toxic than the wasteland in the north or the spotty, poisonous swampland in the south inhabited by Heidians and Drucians and Ras Tiegans.
When the bakkie stopped again, someone grabbed him by the feet and pulled.
The bag came open, and Nyx’s sweaty face blotted out the hot white sun. She was grinning. He had never been so relieved to see her.
“You still in one piece?” she asked.
Rhys sat up and eased out of the bakkie and onto the hot sand. A tall, skinny Chenjan woman stood next to him, wearing work trousers, sandals, and long sleeves. Her face was half-veiled, and her eyes were black. She wore a pistol on one hip and a machete on the other. Rhys felt suddenly vulnerable. He and Nyx had left their gear behind. Anneke was smuggling it over.
“This is Damira,” Nyx said.
“Your clothes are in the back,” Damira said in Chenjan, “and your badge. You’ll need to wear it in case we’re stopped along the road.” She didn’t meet his eyes. It was the drop of her gaze, more than the language, that convinced him he was back in Chenja. No Nasheenian woman would lower her eyes in his presence.
He and Nyx changed into long trousers and dark vests with red bands around their arms signifying their role as ferriers of the dead. Damira was a quiet woman, and she left the radio silent. The inside of the cab was strung with gold-painted beads, and a prayer wheel hung from the rearview mirror. Rhys had the sudden urge to open up the prayer wheel and see what prayer she kept there. One was not supposed to ask God for anything, only submit to His will, but there were sects in Chenja who believed that God enjoyed granting favors. Chenjans had divided themselves into roughly two sets of believers and perhaps a handful of minority sects. This woman with her prayer wheel was a purist, not an orthodox. She would have been cut and sewn at puberty, bearing the marks of her faith and submission on her body while courting God for private favors during prayer. Rhys found the idea of female mutilation and begging favors from God distasteful, if not repulsive, but as an orthodox, he also believed in allowing others to worship as they willed, so long as their people respected God and the Prophet, performed the salaat, and respected God’s laws about marriage—seclusion, respect, and moral purity.
And so long as they weren’t Nasheenian.
The desert was still flat and white, and they passed burst craters and abandoned vehicles along the road. He expected the air to be different somehow, now that they’d crossed the border, but the air contained the same yeasty stink. Nyx sat near the window, a scarf pulled up over her face to keep away the dust and to obscure her appearance. She had cut her hair with Damira’s machete when they changed clothes. It was a bit of a botched job, a ragged mop of thick, dark hair that did nothing to soften her face. She looked like a wild desert orphan, someone who’d grown up on an abandoned farm near the front after her family was slaughtered.
He sat in the middle, trying to give Damira some space. It meant sitting closer to Nyx, but after spending the morning inside a body bag, the idea of pressing himself against someone alive didn’t seem so indecent.
Too long in Nasheen, he thought, and watched the flat desert rolling out before him. How long until it looked different? Until it wasn’t just some long stretch of Nasheenian desert but the land of his birth? His father’s land, the land they bled and died and prayed for?
Rhys glanced over at Damira again, then at the prayer wheel. He had opened his mouth to form the question in Nasheenian when he realized he could speak Chenjan freely. The words came out a little stilted. “Can I ask what you pray for?” he asked.
She kept her eyes on the road. “I pray for an end to the war.”
He could barely hear her over the sound of the tires on the gritty road and the chitter of the bugs.
They passed a hastily erected road sign along the edge of the scarred highway, its base covered over in lizards. The original sign was a rusted-out hulk, mangled and broken and half-buried in the sand behind it. The new sign announced distances to the nearest Chenjan cities:
Azam, 40 km
Bahreha, 86 km
Dadfar, 120 km
“Where did you live?” Damira asked him.
“Here in Chenja?”
“Yes.”
“A little town west of Bahreha called Chitra,” he lied.
“My mother heard that Chitra was once a beautiful city.”
“I don’t remember it that way,” he said. He had never been to Chitra.
“No one alive does,” she said.
The desert stayed flat and white all day. Rhys saw more evidence of recent fighting as they drove—spent bursts and abandoned artillery, black-scarred rents in the desert, pools of dead bugs. He saw a heap of burning corpses in the distance. He knew there were corpses because the giant scavengers were circling, despite the smoke: couple of sand cats, black swarms that must have been palm-size carrion beetles, and some of the rarer flying scavenger beetles with hooked jaws, the kind that grew to over a meter long and had been known to devour children in their beds.
There were human scavengers as well, walking along the road as they passed, asking for rides. One of them looked like a Chenjan deserter, his jacket torn from his body, long tears in his dark skin that looked like they’d been made by a san
d cat. When the man turned, Rhys saw that half his skull was missing. He could see the gray-red wetness of his brains beneath the sand and dirt and cloud of flies. He wouldn’t last long unless he found a magician. He must have dragged himself out from under the heap of corpses and was probably trying to walk home. They would patch him up and send him back.
Rhys looked away.
He had fled across the desert to escape this fate. Some part of him wondered if it had all caught up with him at last.
18
Damira dropped them off outside Azam, a bleeding border city. A half-dozen anti-burst gun towers ringed the swollen black sprawl of the city, half again as tall as its two minarets. Most of the gun towers were charred husks. Heaps of debris littered the roadway.
Rhys and Nyx walked with their hoods pulled up. Geckos skittered across their path. They passed a contagion sensor along the road, tilted at a hard left angle. The light at the top flashed yellow; the whole thing was covered in locusts.
The sun was low in the sky by the time they made it past the burst guns and into the city. It was dead quiet, like the streets around a magicians’ gym before a fight. Rhys saw some moths under the eaves of the tenement buildings, blasted-out archways riddled with bullet holes. The city was teeming with wild and tailored bugs; they made Rhys’s blood sing. Swarms of flesh beetles darkened the sky. A few ragged people stared out at them from the ruined buildings. Rhys saw a couple of scabby kids digging in the sandy basin of what had once been the city’s central fountain and asked them where everybody was.
The boy sneered at Nyx, but as he turned to Rhys, his expression sobered and he pointed east, toward Nasheen.
“That fighting we passed was close,” Rhys said.
He saw Nyx gaze down the deserted street. A swarm of wasps hummed over the rooftops. In the west, the primary sun was headed down, and the sky was starting to go the brilliant violet of dusk.
“We don’t have time to get to Dadfar tonight,” Nyx said, in halting Chenjan, probably for the child’s benefit. Speaking Nasheenian would draw even more attention than the color of her face. “If Anneke’s in, we have to hole up.”
God's War Page 19
