They walked past prayer wheels hanging in broken lattice windows, cracked water troughs, and abandoned bug cages. Rhys caught the distinctive smell of gravy over protein cakes, spinach and garlic.
Nyx led him down a narrow, refuse-strewn alleyway that smelled heavily of urine and dog shit. He had to pick his way around heaping piles of garbage and feces and rubble. They stirred up fist-size dung beetles and enormous biting flies. At the end of the alley, in a cracked parking lot, Rhys saw Nyx’s familiar bakkie—new paint, new tags, but her bakkie nonetheless—squatting underneath a spread of spindly palm trees. One of the trees was splintered in half. The other bakkies he could see were all sun-sick, rusted-out wrecks—Tirhani made, just like the ones in Nasheen. A woman in a soiled burqua called to them from the scant shade of the palms. She had something in her hands—tattered lengths of cloth for turbans.
“Here it is,” Nyx said, pointing to the green awning at their left. The way house was a leaning, three-storied façade of mud-brick and bug-eaten secretions. The tiled roof was coated in flaking green paint. A battered poster under one of the reinforced windows bled black organic ink all over the bricks, announcing the arrival of a carnival now four years past.
“Nyx,” Rhys said, “we shouldn’t stay in Azam.” He had his own reasons for that. He had family in Azam.
“We’ll be fine,” Nyx said, and rapped on the heavy, bullet-pocked door of the way house.
A small peeping portal opened. Rhys saw one misty eye look back out at them.
Nyx glanced at Rhys.
“We have reservations,” Rhys told the misty eye. He had to stop again, work backward from the Nasheenian. It had been too long since he spoke Chenjan at length. “My brother has preceded us.”
The door opened.
A haggard old man stood on the other side, a long rifle in one of his bent, arthritic hands. “Anneke,” the old man said.
Rhys looked at Nyx.
“Yeah,” Nyx said.
A slim figure stepped toward the door from the dim of the reception area. Rhys recognized Anneke under the black turban that wound about her head and covered her face. Khos-the-dog trotted behind her, pausing in the light from the doorway to yawn and stretch.
“Any trouble?” Anneke asked in Chenjan. Rhys was startled at how smoothly she spoke, with no hint of an accent. Not for the first time, he wondered what she’d gone to prison for.
“I don’t think so,” Rhys said, also in Chenjan.
“Huh,” Anneke said, and she pulled down the cover over her face so she could spit sen. A couple of male voices sounded from deeper inside the house, Chenjan voices. Rhys caught the smell of marijuana and a whiff of curry.
Anneke grinned at him. “Good to be home?”
“Under these circumstances? No. I think we should stay on the road.”
The old man gestured with his rifle. “Get in, get in!” he said.
The call of the muezzin sounded, low but close, and Rhys looked out behind them. They were within a block of one of the city’s two remaining minarets. The few speakers along the city street belched a green haze, the exhaust generated by the door beetles translating the call.
“That’s handy,” Anneke said, and pulled her prayer rug from across her back. “I put yours behind the cab in the bakkie,” she said, and rolled out the rug to pray. “Sorry, didn’t unpack all the gear.”
“Do you have a fountain?” Rhys asked the old man.
“The hell you bother washing? Use sand. Don’t go out there!” the old man barked.
But Rhys turned away from them and picked his way to the parking lot at the end of the alley. He passed near the woman in the burqua. She thrust the dirty turban cloth toward him, babbling at him so quickly, so desperately, that he could not understand her.
“Where is your husband?” he asked.
“Dead, all dead!” she said, and thrust the cloth at him. “Please, I need bread. Bread and venom. Please. Anything you like, anything.” She stepped toward him as she said it, and began to clutch at her burqua.
“Stop,” Rhys said. “Stop. You are not mine to look after.”
He retrieved his rug and called for a wasp guard on the bakkie. It took a good minute to find a swarm. The contagions in the air confused them and made his already tenuous communication with them all the more difficult. He hoped they didn’t turn around and attack him when he came back.
“Please, anything,” she said, but Rhys pushed past her and walked quickly toward the way house as the amethyst sky became the true blue dusk of early evening.
He pounded at the door until the man with the rifle let him back in. Inside, he saw the cracked, patterned marble of the floor, what had once been a beautiful black and white mosaic of intricate script from the Kitab. The fountain at the center of the reception area was dry and silent.
Anneke already had her prayer rug out, facing north. It wasn’t until he looked down at Anneke’s bowed back that he remembered it was a sin to pray among women. He hesitated, looked behind him, but the old man was making his way up a worn set of steps, rifle in one hand, the railing in the other. Nyx stood at the end of the stairway, watched Khos shift. No one would see anything objectionable about kneeling next to any of these people during prayer. Anneke didn’t look like a woman; here, she was just another small Chenjan man, underfed. Rhys let out his breath and rolled out his rug.
None would see but God.
But God had seen him commit this sin every day for the last eight years. Prayer in Nasheen was mixed, even in a magicians’ gym.
Rhys hesitated a moment longer, then he knelt on the rug, and he surrendered. He took comfort in prayer, in recitation, in submission. After so many years of working for a woman he found it impossible to trust entirely, submission to God was a much welcome release.
When the prayer ended, Rhys raised his head and gazed off past the dry fountain, where three dead cockroaches rested beneath the broken head of a stone locust. Rhys saw political posters up on the walls. The mullahs who ruled Azam were up for re-election, though Rhys doubted any of them were out here tonight. Most local mullahs were related to the holy men who sat up in the high courts at the capital. Like Nasheen’s elections on domestic issues, elections in Chenja weren’t really elections. In Nasheen, the queen did what she wanted. In Chenja, the mullahs in the capital appointed all of the local officials, and the Imam, an orthodox, selected the mullahs.
Rhys tugged his hood further down over his face, to hide his eyes. There were other voices in the house. As slight as the chance of being recognized was, he didn’t want to take it. The penalty for his crimes was torture, evisceration, and quartering.
As he stood, Nyx said, “I need you to put out a call to Taite. Think you can do that this close to the border?”
“Risky, but possible,” Rhys said. “Do we have a room?”
“Up here,” Khos said. He wore a dhoti and burnous now, nothing else. Rhys always marveled at the shape shifter’s disregard for nudity. He was as bad as Nyx.
They walked up the dim stairwell to the third floor. There were a couple of dying glow worms in glass, but most of the ones they passed were already dead. Khos pushed open a battered door made of knobs of metal and bug secretions.
Dirty pallets were lined up at the center of the room. A dark gauze hung from one window; the other bled unfiltered evening light across the center of the room. A swarm of mark flies circled the center of the room.
Rhys waited for Nyx to come in and shut the door, then he called up a little swarm of red beetles. It took him three tries and nearly twenty minutes to get a link to Taite.
“Everything all right out there?” Taite asked.
“About as expected,” Rhys said.
“That bad?”
Nyx cut in. She had pulled off the hood of her burnous and found some sen. She spit at her feet, next to one of the pallets, and Rhys grimaced. “Have you found out anything more in Kine’s papers? Rhys wasn’t much help.”
“I’ve deciphered most
of the pages. I did some research work on the compounds too. I have some contacts who used to work there doing recon and cleanup work.”
“Spies?” Nyx asked.
“We don’t call them that. Anyway, it looks like she was selecting for traits and working with a lot of magicians. You’ll never guess whose name came up in these records.”
“Yah Tayyib,” Nyx said.
“Great guess,” Taite said. “There’s some information about attempts at breeding kids in vats—you know, artificial womb tech—but they’re not getting far on that. That’s nothing new. The interesting thing is some kind of project called Babylon, or a project being done out in Babylon where they’re splicing human and bug genes… or doing some weird stuff with viral contagions and genetics or something. They’ve got everything in here: blood roaches, fire beetles, cicadas, locusts.”
“That’s fucked up,” Nyx said. “They breeding some kind of bug army?”
“They’ve got a lot of notes in here about shifters. Maybe trying to replicate a shifter’s blood code?”
“Breeding for magicians and shifters,” Rhys muttered. “But have they gotten anywhere with it?”
“You think they’d be so stupid to fuck with the world again?” Nyx said.
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Rhys said. “There were no shifters on the moons. Magicians, yes, but no shifters.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“Read a book sometime.”
Nyx hocked up a wad of sen and spit it at his feet. This one hit the pallet. Rhys decided that was where she was going to sleep.
“He’s right,” Taite said. “Nobody in Ras Tieg could shift before they came here. We were all standards. It’s Umayma that does it. In Ras Tieg, they say God cursed us.”
“You have a saint for it?” Nyx asked, and Rhys suspected she was only half joking.
“We do, actually,” Taite said. “Mhari, saint of women scorned and women’s wombs. A lot of our church leaders blame women for all the shifters.”
“That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard. Those men think babies come from women and dirt?”
“You don’t know much about Ras Tieg,” Taite said. “From what my contacts say, this information would go for a real high price in any market from Ras Tieg to Tirhan. Even a list of failures gives them an idea of where not to go when they push forward.”
Rhys glanced over at Nyx. She sighed. “All right. Anything else you can get out of it?” she asked.
“Maybe,” Taite said. “Later, though. I have a limited window. They spray for foreign transmissions in that sector in half an hour. You’re still too close to the front.”
“Taite,” Nyx said.
“Yeah?”
“I want you to burn all those papers. I don’t want anybody using that against Nasheen. Have locusts eat whatever won’t burn.”
“And the transcriptions?”
“Nyx—” Rhys said. He had taken some of those papers with him for study. He hadn’t left them all with Taite, and he certainly wasn’t going to burn what he had bundled up and had Anneke smuggle in.
“See what you can do with them. If it’s just a record of failure, again, get rid of it. But if they found anything out, if she mentions any names—magicians, bel dames—you let me know before you toast it. I want to know if they actually accomplished anything over there.”
“All right,” Taite said.
“Let’s end this transmission,” Nyx said.
“Peace be to you, Taite,” Rhys said.
“And to you. I’ve been picking up a lot of other transmissions coming out of there. Be careful. God bless.”
Rhys released the bugs. “Your bel dames might have good reason to take Nikodem if she’s trying to pull information about the compounds,” he said.
“I’m leaning toward the idea that we’ll all be better off bringing back Nikodem dead,” Nyx said. “If they’re breeding magicians, we could bury your country in viral bugs in twenty years that’ll eat everything organic. Men, women, dogs, kids, shit, trees—the whole fucking deal. We could fuck up the world with shit like this. No wonder the bel dames are clawing at the queen for this tech. Whoever owns it owns the world.”
“I don’t like that idea.”
“It would end the war.”
“In your favor. And what then, when all your Nasheenian men come home to a blasted wasteland? I’m not convinced they’ll share power with you that easily,” Rhys said.
“You don’t have much faith in Nasheenian men,” she said. “Are you asking how long it’ll be until Nasheenian women all become slaves like the Ras Tiegan women and your Chenjan mothers?”
“It isn’t like that.” He hated it when she made her sweeping generalizations about foreign men. This, from a woman who had never known a father. That was the problem with Nasheenian women. They had all been raised without men.
“Why did you leave, again?” she said.
“That’s not fair.” And not, of course, true. If you wanted amnesty in Nasheen, you told them you were blacklisted for protecting a woman. You didn’t tell them the truth.
Anneke walked in from the hall. “Hungry?” she asked. “I got real tired of sitting around here watching Khos lick his ass all day.”
“Food sounds fine,” Nyx said. “The old man got anything?”
Rhys heard a low whine start up from outside, too high for the muezzin. He cocked his head. He knew the sound but couldn’t place it.
Anneke turned to look out the window, and Khos pushed himself away from the wall.
“Fucking incoming!” Nyx yelled, and before Rhys had time to realize what she was yelling about, he was on a pallet on the floor with Nyx on top of him.
A heavy thud and whump shook the whole house, and something rained against the unfiltered glass.
Anneke scrambled across the floor in front of him toward a gear bag stowed against the far wall. Nyx pulled herself off Rhys. His face was damp with her sweat. His whole body tingled. There was some bug in the air, something… He looked toward the window and saw centipedes crawling along the outside.
“Anneke!” Nyx said. She pulled off her burnous and grabbed adual-barreled acid rifle from one of the gear bags.
Anneke threw Rhys his pistols.
Rhys shook his head. “I don’t—”
“They’re coming over land!” Nyx said, her shoulder pressed against the gauzy window frame, one eye on the world outside.
“Overland?” Rhys said.
“Means Nasheenians are in the city,” Anneke said, scrambling past him, shotgun slung over her shoulder, sniper rifle in hand.
Khos said, “You see them?”
“I’ve got a scout in the alley,” Nyx said. “Cancel that. He’s waving his fucking squad through. Fuck.”
Khos pulled both pistols.
Rhys’s hands were shaking. He raised one arm, closed his eyes, and looked for a swarm. There were several, but his nerves made it hard to pinpoint them. Four wild, two locked and specialized. Whatever squad was coming down the alley, they had at least one magician with them carrying specialized swarms.
“Don’t fire unless I call it,” Nyx said.
“Boss?” Anneke said.
“They’re Nasheenians. Don’t fire without my call.”
“Nyx—” Khos said.
“Nyxnissa,” Rhys said, opening his eyes. He saw the sweat beading her forehead, her glistening bare arms. The gun was heavy, and as she stood against the window frame in her breast binding and knee-high trousers, baldric too tight, he saw the power in her arms, the muscle under her flesh. He had felt it when she pushed him to the floor, the weight of her.
She turned to them, outlined in the blue haze of the coming night, and in her face—the hard jaw and suddenly flat, fathomless eyes—he saw the woman who had burned at the front. He was breathless.
“I said you don’t fire without my call. Those are my boys,” Nyx said.
Anneke set up her sniper rifle at the window. She would have a clear
view of the alley.
Rhys stayed on the floor. He could track the progress of the squad by the position of their wasp swarms. The swarms were sniffing out bursts and traps in the alley.
“Nyx?” Rhys said.
All her attention was at the window.
“Nyx?” he repeated.
He heard a banging on the door below them. Heard raised voices in the house.
Nyx turned to him. “I know,” she said.
The other magician had sniffed him out.
Another high whine sounded, close. “Down!” Nyx yelled, and pushed herself away from the window.
Khos dove flat next to Rhys. Rhys covered his head with his hands.
The world trembled; the windows shuddered, and cracks appeared. When Rhys raised his head, he saw that full night had spread over the city. The room was dark.
“Got another squad,” Anneke said.
“Khos, check the other window,” Nyx said.
Khos got up and went to the gauzy window, looked out. “There’s another patrol over here too,” he said.
The voices downstairs rose in pitch. Rhys heard the sound of a rifle shot. Screaming. A woman’s scream.
He tried to see Nyx, but in the darkness she was only a dim outline. Outside, he saw the pale green and red streamers of bursts trailing out over the city. God help me, he thought, and began to recite the ninety-nine names of God. He drew his pistols.
“Khos, check the stairs,” Nyx said.
Khos picked his way toward the door and opened it. He crept into the hall.
“They’re coming up,” Khos said.
Nyx moved across the room, walked right past Rhys. “Get back in,” she said.
Rhys heard a pounding on the stairs.
“Get back in!” she hissed.
Khos stepped back inside. He stood a breath away from her in the dark and said, low, “Goddammit, Nyx, they’re fucking coming up. I’m not going to sit here like some martyr.”
“You fucking hold,” she said. “Move the fuck away from the door and listen the fuck up.”
“I’m not going to—”
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