Rapture (38 page)

“What? You’re a woman, Kage. How the fuck did you give her children?”

Kage sucked in a long breath. “I am a woman, yes, but I can also give children. It’s… private.”

“Fucking what? Fucking Drucians.” Nyx shot off a round above Kage’s head. Kage flinched, at least. “I am so tired of your fucking secretive catshit. You’re barely fucking human.”

“We prefer to give life, not take it. Is that not human?”

“Fuck you,” Nyx said. “I need a minute.” She walked away a few paces. Isabet began to wail again. Nyx heard the Ras Tiegan run up behind her, to the body.

Nyx stumbled against one of the structures, far enough away that the smell of burnt flesh wasn’t as strong. Then she retched everything she’d eaten that morning, and dry heaved awhile longer after that, until tears came.

“You all right?”

Nyx raised her head. It was Khatijah. She must have run off in this direction, gotten clear of the women first thing.

“Yeah, cheery,” Nyx said.

Khatijah crouched next to her. She handed Nyx a water bulb. Nyx drank, not bothering to rinse the bile from her mouth. She valued the water too much.

“He was your kid?”

Nyx shook her head. “Took him on when he was eight. Street kid. Did a lot of work for me. Sent him off to Ras Tieg. It was safer. He bloody fucking hated me for it.”

“Shit happens.”

“I know that better than anybody.” She handed back the water.

Khatijah took it. “I’m a bel dame, Nyx. I may not have seen as much as you, but I had to give stuff up, too.”

Nyx wanted to shout at her, wanted to tell her nobody had given up more than she had. That was a lie, but it felt so true in that moment that keeping herself from screaming it at this young, stupid bel dame was physically painful.

“If Fatima is playing us with this, I’m going to fucking kill her,” Nyx said.

“Get in line,” Khatijah said. She stood and held out her hand to Nyx. “Ready?”

Nyx took Khatijah’s outstretched hand and stood. “Who was your first note?” Nyx asked.

“My brother,” Khatijah said.

“Ah,” Nyx said.

“Ye ah.”

“Sorry, Khatijah.”

“Khat,” she said.

“Khat.”

“Yours?”

“Woman, actually. Sixteen-year-old signed on for two years of service. Deserted after a month. I was twenty.”

“How’d you get her?”

“Didn’t. Never brought her in.”

Khatijah looked genuinely shocked. “You brought in all your notes, though. All the bel dames talk about it. The woman too stupid to give up a note.”

“I gave up that one.”

“What happened?”

“She was infected. Some shit from the Chenjans. Forty people died, mostly her kin.”

“Oh.”

“That’s why I always brought in my notes, after.”

“They don’t teach anybody that.”

“The note was never registered to me. I had some people change it.”

“You ran black work from the beginning, didn’t you?”

“I never pretended to be a good woman, Khat.”

Together, they walked back to Eshe’s body. Isabet was kneeling over him, weeping.

Nyx took Isabet by her good arm and yanked her up. She didn’t mean it to be kind. Isabet cried out in pain.

“You listen here, kitten,” Nyx said. “I don’t have patience for weakness. You cry over him tonight. I need you focused for whatever the fuck this desert flings at us next, including more of your Ras Tiegan handmaidens. Understand?”

Isabet shook her head. No, of course she didn’t understand. Nearly eight weeks in camp and her Nasheenian was still fucked.

“Tell her, Ahmed.”

He did.

“How do you want to handle the body?” Ahmed asked.

“Need to cut off the head,” Nyx said. She had nothing to burn him with out here, and if they left the head intact, he was at risk for coming back as some lumbering beetle.

“You want me to do it?” Ahmed asked.

She gazed off toward the horizon. “I’d prefer that, yes,” she said. Because I have become a weak old woman, she thought, but she could feel something coming loose inside her. She was losing some vital piece of herself. It was all about to unravel, and she feared that prepping Eshe’s body would be the catalyst.

“Won’t that call that… sand?” Kage said.

“Fuck,” Nyx said.

Safiyah appeared, quite suddenly, from the structures ahead of them.

Nyx had her scattergun out and her finger on the trigger before she realized who it was.

“Took your time,” Nyx said.

Safiyah raised up something she held behind her. It was a woman’s head. “Found their pyromancing magician,” she said. “That’s a conjuring trick I haven’t seen in a very long time.”

“Magician?” Nyx said. “A magician can do that?”

“Not just any magician,” Safiyah said. She tossed the head into the forest of white. Nyx realized the head was bloodless. “That’s a woman with some very old skill, something you don’t even see in Nasheen anymore.”

“And they can just blow people up like that?”

“They can do more than just control bugs,” Safiyah said. “They can combine… let’s say, small particles, elements, to create new elements. It’s quite a trick.”

“This is getting worse and worse,” Ahmed said.

“How far to Bomani?” Nyx said.

“Funny you ask,” Safiyah said. “It’s just on the other side of this forest. One problem, of course. We never did consider how it was we were going to get in.”

H
anife paid him often, and well, in Tirhani currency, all of which Rhys paid him back at the end of each week, to pay back the blood debt. Rhys thought it funny. He had no use for Tirhani currency out here beyond the Wall anyhow. No one took it. So instead he gladly gave it back at the end of each week, and tried to figure out how he would escape from Hanife’s stranglehold.

The world beyond the Wall was worse than he anticipated. Hanife needed a translator for all sorts of business, most of it sordid. Interrogations, treaties, remediations. He had no idea there was this much politicking going on in the far north of the world. He thought the world ended at Khairi. He had been very wrong.

Rhys spent most evenings with some of the Aadhyan men, watching them sing to insects the way Khairians did. He tried to understand what they did beyond the song to call the insects.

“How’s it done?” he asked as one man called a small arthropod to him from across the courtyard.

The man laughed. “It’s not something you teach. It’s something you do.”

“I have some talent with bugs, though,” Rhys said, and with some effort, called a small swarm of beetles.

The men regarded one another. One of them nodded.

“Come,” they said. “We’ll teach you to sing, but only if you teach us Yazdani.”

That was how Rhys came to learn why it was he only saw Aadhyan women in the desert, but only men out here.

“Hanife has asked us to join his army,” one man, Jahrin said. “We’re outcasts, mostly. That’s the Khairian word. Ours is… far worse than that. Women rule the sand, because it rarely eats them.”

“If they bleed with the moons, it won’t attack an entire party,” another man, Tarik, said. “That’s why only women can become Circle leaders. They become fighters. If we spill blood on the sand, we’re sure to be eaten.”

“I don’t understand,” Rhys said. “If you’ll die spilling blood out there, how is it any different than spilling it as part of Hanife’s army?”

Jahrin said, “You can’t come here for a few weeks and expect to understand everything. Think less of politics and more about singing. Foreign fools. Always thinking they’ll know a thing after a few questions. You won’t know the Aadhya.”

Tarik laughed. “Come. You have a terrible voice.”

Rhys spent most of his days trapped inside cold, moist rooms, longing for a window. Hanife had two brothers, and they enjoyed piling translation work onto Rhys’s desk. Once they found out he had a fine hand, he began learning the written version of Yazdani as well.

It was several weeks before Hanife finally asked him to come downstairs to do some “interrogation work.”

Rhys didn’t particularly like the sound of it. When he went down into the cells, he liked it even less.

A man was strung out on a stone slab. He seemed to be Ras Tiegan, or perhaps a mix of Ras Tiegan and Heidian.

“Tell him I want to know who else attacked my caravan,” Hanife said.

Rhys translated.

The man pressed his lips firmly together.

Hanife waved another man over. A man wielding some very sharp knives.

Rhys found himself staring at the ground while the man screamed. It was a very long day.

After, Rhys went down to sit with Jahrin and Tarik for supper.

“You look like you have seen a bloody djinn,” Tarik said.

“I think I have,” Rhys said.

Jahrin sighed. He reached out and squeezed Rhys’s hand. “This is what happens when you run away, as we did. You try to find a free life, but instead you find you are just a weapon in someone else’s war.”

Tarik grumbled into his fried meal worms.

But Jahrin’s words touched something in Rhys that had lain dormant for some time. How often had he run from a bad situation into something even more terrible because he could not face the consequences of his actions? Because he was too scared to fix what was broken?

Rhys thought most often of escape when he counted out the money Hanife paid him. It all meant nothing out here. Just sorting bits of useless paper. But in his mind, every note was a way to ease Elahyiah’s burdens, and school his children, and build some future from the ashes of the present. Somehow. If he ever found them. If she ever forgave him. Was there forgiveness to be had, after all he’d done?

Three weeks after he arrived at Hanife’s hold, Hanife called him down again to the interrogation room. Rhys expected more horror, but instead, there were three Ras Tiegan men there, standing free and easy.

“Tell them I appreciate our friendship,” Hanife said, “and I will do all I can to ensure their man’s safety.”

Rhys translated.

“We are pleased to do business with such an honorable man. We look forward to sharing our discoveries with him as they progress,” said one of the Ras Tiegans.

Rhys relayed the information. Hanife looked pleased. “That is well. Very well! Tell them they are invited to have supper with me. They can marvel at this army I have carved out of the desert. Let me tell them of this hold and the four others I have conquered.”

Rhys watched the four men start back up into the main hold, leaving him and the jailer in the room. Rhys couldn’t help but glance into the only occupied cell in the block.

The light was dim. He squinted.

Recognition hit him like a fist to the kidney. He stumbled away from the door. Bit back an oath.

He knew that man.

N
yx had figured Bomani would just be some kind of rock and mudbrick construction. Maybe a collection of hovels arranged inside a stone circle. It’s not like she expected anything like civilization this far north, not behind a bloody-minded desert wall in the middle of some flesh-eating sea of sand. This place was nobody’s friend, least of all any collection of people.

As they came to the edge of the forest of formations and gazed out to the rising dawn, she went still. There was a massive black conurbation blotting out a portion of the horizon. She peered at it. It was no derelict. This was… something else. Something constructed here? Not fallen… placed or grown. Nyx tried not to stare at it. It made her skin crawl.

“That’s the place,” Safiyah said.

“What is it?”

“It is Bomani,” Safiyah said.

“No, really,” Nyx said. “What the fuck is that? All right, what was that thing? That was nothing made by humans. Is it some bug house or something?”

Khatijah shrugged. “The Aadhya would know better than me.”

But Nyx hadn’t battled giant beasts, fought off mercenaries, run from pyromancing magicians, or hauled bodies across the desert just to walk back up to the nomads who’d slaughtered Eshe and ask them about a bunch of stories.

Safiyah smirked. “It’s not so strange. Just something your droll little mind could never conceive of,” she said.

“You’ve seen one before?” Nyx asked Safiyah. She should have thought to ask Safiyah—the fount of useless knowledge.

“There’s still some record of the early days of the world that is taught.

I’ve seen illustrations, of course. A few tatty drawings re-created from old bug captures. The magicians who made the world habitable didn’t live in Nasheen, not the first magicians—the true conjurers. They lived up here in the beginning, long before the moons were even properly inhabited. For a thousand years they tended these great conflagrations.

These organic machines powered all of their conjurings, even helped filter the atmosphere. There were six or eight, as I recall. The nomads continue to put them to use.”

“That’s far too big to be a machine,” Ahmed said from behind them.

“Something with that many moving parts would have to be partially deadtech, like a bakkie. It would require constant maintenance.

What do you know about it?” Safiyah said. “Our people were greater than any alien, once. It was the catastrophe on the moons that sent us down here too early. Only a portion survived. Imagine how different things would be, if the world had been fully formed when we colonized it, and our people here in full strength? It would be us out there in the stars spreading our knowledge to those aliens. Not the other way around.”

“Sounds like an excuse to me,” Nyx said.

Safiyah narrowed her eyes. “What’s that?”

“Sounds like a pretty story lazy rich people tell themselves to justify not doing a goddamn thing to change the world.”

“And what exactly are you doing to change the world, little fly?” Safiyah said.

“I just cut off heads. Never pretended to be anything else.

Come,” Khatijah said. “Before they send out the dogs.”

“The dogs?” Ahmed said.

“I don’t get the impression the people here are going to be any more welcoming than their friends back there.”

“Blood and fucking,” Nyx said.

“I generally prefer it the other way round,” Safiyah said lightly. Nyx watched the structure. It pulsed slowly, as if it were breathing.