God's War (25 page)

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, the 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 sand 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.