God's War (45 page)

“Yeah. Been a little busy, thanks to
you.”

“It’s a long drive,” Nyx said.

“No problem, boss. Unlike you, I get
my buddies back over the border.”

“Right,” Nyx said. “Not like me.”
She looked back up the empty street. She felt as if something had been cut out
of her, an organ she would miss.

“Boss?”

“I’m fine,” Nyx said, and got into
the bakkie.

Rhys watched the second sun rise
while Mahrokh drove them out of Dadfar. Next to him, Inaya sat quietly, and her
son slept in her arms. Khos had the window down. Rhys heard the sounds of the
waking city: mothers calling their children from sleep, old men hacking out the
night’s dust, the faint buzzing of wasps and beetles and the chittering of
roaches as the sun warmed their lethargic bodies. He smelled curry and fried
protein cakes and the peculiar spicy jasmine scent of red dye, the sort used
for turbans. Rhys saw a woman step out onto her balcony and hang a prayer
wheel. Three young girls robed in yellow and red ran out ahead of the bakkie
and crossed the street to a bakery whose matron was just pushing open the door
for the day.

But inside the bakkie, the only
noise was the chitter of the bugs in the cistern. Rhys wanted to look back
toward the waterworks, but they had turned away from that district three
streets ago, and there was no one and nothing behind him.

Let me go back, he thought, and
squeezed his eyes shut. No. This was for the best. He had fled into Nasheen
because he didn’t want to fight Nasheen. Some part of him had believed that if
he ran to them unarmed, they would not harm him. He had been wrong.

As his father’s only son, Rhys had
grown up knowing he was immune from the draft. He would marry twenty or thirty
women and inherit his father’s estate, his father’s title.

But his father had been a mullah. A
powerful one. And unlike some of the more powerful, he had wanted his son to
perform the ultimate submission to God, the submission that he himself had
never had the courage to perform. He had wanted Rhys to atone for his own sins.

Rhys remembered the way the air
tasted that day: oranges and lavender. He remembered the sound of the cicadas.
The water bubbling in the fountain in the courtyard just inside the gate. He
remembered the sound of the servants and slaves outside, the intermittent cries
of the overseers in the fields.

“It’s time to speak of your future,
boy,” his father had said, and put his smooth hand on Rhys’s head. He had
smiled, his teeth so white, and sat across from him. His father was a tall man
with a short beard and broad, generous face. You could stand near him, listen
to him speak, and feel as if you were in the presence of some wiser man, a true
mullah. His uncles were the same. Rich, powerful men whose influence allowed
them to profit from the war, not fight in it.

“I have consulted with your uncles
and spoken with your mother,” his father had said. His birth mother, he meant.
The others, Rhys called “Aunt.” “We have prayed often to God so that we may
find the best path for you, the most humble. A boy of our house has not served
God at the front for three generations, and yet we sit on our hill and call
ourselves pious men. How can we be pious without sacrifice?”

Even now, huddled in the back of a
bakkie—a Chenjan deserter, dead if they found him—Rhys didn’t understand the
feeling that had overcome him at his father’s words. The mounting terror. The
knowing. War happened to other people. Other people died in God’s war. Poor
men. Nasheenian men. Godless women. Like Nyx.

Not Rakhshan Arjoomand.

He would no longer kneel and pray
with his father, no longer climb the crooked tree at the far end of his
father’s land and stare out over the city. In his mind, his whole life, he had
built up and planned out his path, worked out ways to manage a household,
playfully picked out wives from among the girls in the village below, and,
above all, he had studied the teachings of the Prophet and spent long days
trying to learn to submit his will to God’s.

He believed, until that day, that
he’d succeeded. If this was the life God wanted for him, submitting to that
will was not such a terrible thing. His will and God’s will were one.

The shock of this other life, this
other path—blood and death in a foreign country—was so horrifying, so
unexpected, that he did not have time to wonder at his own lack of humility. He
had explained the impossibility of that other life. He had cursed his father.
He threatened suicide. He sobbed. Seventeen years old, and he had sobbed in
front of his father like a child. He had watched his father’s generous face
harden like a cut gem.

“I am worth more than this!” Rhys
had cried.

“More?” his father had said, as if
Rhys had told him he needed water in order to breathe. “More than a sacrifice
to God? We must submit our desires to God’s will. We are fighting a holy war.
God’s war. Every one of us. We fight. We die. This is who we are.”

“It’s not who I am,” Rhys had said.

“Then you do not belong to God. You
do not belong to me.”

Rhys had summoned the bugs that
night. He showed more skill in that one night than he had during his entire
career as a middling magician in Nasheen. He confused and reprogrammed his
father’s security system and sent wasps ahead to sniff out his way. But his
father had sent the blood bugs after him. The chittering creatures, large as
dogs, caught him in their jaws and dragged him back, and it was as if the
talent bled out of him in the face of these impossible monsters. When Rhys returned,
his father had smashed Rhys’s hands with a metal pipe. Smashed them bloody.
Broken.

It was one of his sisters, Alys, who
helped Rhys escape the second time. She called her friends, members of Chenja’s
own underground, and they had gotten him as far as the border. At the border,
their vehicle hit a mine.

Bloodied faces. Body parts. He
remembered the smell of burning flesh. Not his own.

After that, he ran.

Ran and ran and ran, until his skin
peeled off and his lungs burned.

He had not gone to the front to
sacrifice himself to God. He had not gone there to save anyone. In the end, he
did not even believe he would save himself. He was just running, fueled by
terror, a man running from God, from His will.

But Nyx had not been afraid.

She had volunteered for the front to
protect her brothers. She’d protected the boys and women in her squad, until
the end, and when she’d failed at that, she burned herself. Carried out the
punishment she believed God would have meted out for her sin.

She drank too much, shot up and
swallowed drugs, had sex indiscriminately with both genders, did not bend her
knee to God, but which of them had been more pious? Which had been stronger
before God? The woman who had given her brothers and body to God and then
rejected Him, or the man who pretended godliness but could not perform the
ultimate act of submission?

Khos put his meaty arm up on the
seat and looked back at Rhys. “You sure you don’t want us to drop you off with
somebody in Chenja? Must be somebody doesn’t want you dead.”

“No,” Rhys said.

Khos nodded and turned again to the
road.

Rhys felt a knot of fear in his
stomach and reached instinctively for his copy of the Kitab, but it was not
there, of course. Raine had taken everything from him during the interrogation.

Rhys closed his eyes. He did not
think of Nyx’s offensive remarks, the heat of her next to him, the way she
looked at him when he read to her, her filthy fingernails and stained teeth and
the terrible way she mangled her Chenjan. Instead, he thought of her hair. Long
and braided, botched and unbound. Black glossy hair like the deepest part of
the sky where there were no stars, just darkness. Umayma, at the edge of
everything.

And he thought of Kine’s words
then—the voice that spoke with the same inflection as Nyx’s, the voice that
told him she had been making black market deals with Khairian nomads and
interstellar gene pirates who sold her the base ingredients for winning the
war.

“These are
old-world powers that must be controlled,”
Kine had said, her voice
even, a little distant.
“To take the red sand out of its
natural environment, to transport it out of the wastelands, could mean a
disaster beyond our imagining. But handled the right way, correctly understood,
it could win us the war without the need to alter our shifters. We could,
effectively, cure the war by wiping out its cause.”

But if she could not wipe out his
people, she would find a way to enslave and modify the shifters.

Rhys opened his eyes and looked over
at Inaya, her pale, dirt-smeared face, and tried, again, to see something of
the shifter in her. But there was nothing. The air did not bend or crackle
around her the way it did around Khos, as if he existed outside the world.

“I have wondered,” Rhys said, “how
you got Husayn’s bakkie over the border.”

Khos turned to look at them.

Inaya shifted her son in her arms.
“How do you compel bugs to send your messages? How do you use them to mend
flesh?”

“I could say it’s a matter of
examining the air, tasting it, and telling it what to do,” Rhys said. “You would
have to be a magician to understand.”

“It is like that, then,” Inaya said.
“There is some knowledge one just has. That just is. There are things the
people of this world can do that no one should know. Your bel dames know
something of that. Nasheen’s bel dames have existed in one form or another
since the birth of the world. Before they cut up boys, they were responsible
for killing rogue magicians and mutant shifters. Did you know that?”

“Yes,” Rhys said, “I’d heard of it.”

“It’s no secret.”

“How is it you know?” Rhys asked.

Inaya finally looked at him; her
eyes were gray. “When you’re born with a number of talents you do not
understand, you spend your life looking for others like you, to understand why
it is you’ve been cursed by God. You do this so you can receive forgiveness for
whatever it is you’ve done. You will go to great lengths to find the knowledge
you seek and will cross many borders.”

“So what are you?” Rhys asked.

“A mistake,” she said.

Khos said, “We’re all mistakes.
God’s or man’s.”

Rhys resisted the urge to say
something grimly optimistic in turn. The silence stretched, and he realized
that Nyx was no longer there to fill it with some sarcastic remark about blood
or sex or the inevitability of human failing.

“It’s so quiet,” Rhys said.

“Yeah,” Khos said. “It’s nice.”

“Yes,” Rhys said, but there was a
hollow place in his chest, a strange absence, as if some part of him were
missing, a piece he never knew he had, or needed, or even wanted. But he missed
it nonetheless.

The queen’s palace in Mushtallah was
about what Nyx remembered. Or, at least, she knew nothing had changed much,
even though it
felt
different. Maybe it was just
different because getting into it without a Chenjan man was a lot easier. Maybe
it was because people looked at how she was dressed and treated her
better—money and power and all that catshit.

She sat by a little fountain in yet
another reception area, gazing out at a mural of the veiled Prophet receiving
and reciting the words of God. The air was cool; the season had turned, though
it never stayed cool in Mushtallah for long. Cicadas sang from the trees lining
the interior of the courtyard, and three locusts rested on the lip of the
fountain.

Nyx wore a green organic silk
burnous over long black trousers, a white tunic stitched in silver, and a black
vest. The hilt of a new blade stuck up from a slit in the back of her burnous.
She wore Tej’s baldric, Nikodem’s pistols, and a new whip attached to her belt.
Her sandals laced up to her knees. Some lovely kid back in Punjai had done her
braids for a couple bits. Good thing, too, because her hair was longer now and
far better for having the ends razored.

She reached out and flicked one of
the locusts into the fountain with the ring finger of her right hand. The new
fingers were a good match. Most people didn’t even notice a difference. She
still woke up sometimes and clutched at them, expecting to find an absence.

A woman in yellow appeared from one
of the inner doors.

“She will see you now,” Kasbah said.

Nyx stood. “You going to disarm me
first?”

“I will take your things as you
pass, but let us excuse the formalities of the organics search.”

“Come, now, Kasbah, we’re already on
such intimate terms.”

“Are we, now?” Kasbah smiled thinly.
“We have a long path to tread to clean this house,” she said. “Come.”

Nyx left her pistols and her sword
with Kasbah and walked down a short hall, through a low curtain, and into a big
spherical room. Nyx stopped short as she entered. She looked up. The whole room
was glass. Above her, she saw that she was enclosed by or beneath some kind of
tank filled with water. Strange creatures, some kind of fish or animals or
something, swam lazily above her, around her. Rocks and seaweeds and odd
tentacled things covered the bottom of the pool. The water was so deep, the
tank went so far back, that she could not see past the first ten feet or so.
Nyx’s palms were suddenly damp, and she had to push herself to walk farther
into the room. All that water….

The queen sat on a bench at the
center of the room. When Nyx entered, the little woman turned and smiled at her
with her round, too-young face.

“Nyxnissa,” she said, and raised her
hand.

Nyx moved inside, and Kasbah entered
behind her.

“Queen Zaynab,” Nyx said, and came
around the other side of the bench.