Rapture (21 page)

Nyx saw Khatijah’s eyes going glassy. Cool, black fog. She knew that feeling. She had been there before. Something inside Nyx clenched hard. Her gut roiled.

“I’m not that kind of magician,” Ahmed said softly.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, is anybody going to try?” Nyx said.

Isabet ran up to them. She had what remained of her mangled arm tucked up against her body. She pulled the scarf from her neck with her good hand. With Ahmed’s help, she knotted it around Khatijah’s upper thigh, though Nyx knew it was far too late for that.

Nyx weighed her next words. Khatijah’s body was limp, but her blood had stopped pumping out. Nyx thought that was odd. Lot of blood, when you clipped that artery in the leg. Then she realized the bug in Khatijah’s head—the one that sustained every bel dame for a few hours after technical death—must have kicked in.

Eskander was sobbing so hard she was choking now. Nyx found it a little embarrassing.

Isabet told Ahmed something in Ras Tiegan.

Eshe yelled something at Isabet. She yelled back.

“What the fuck is going on?” Nyx said.

Ahmed said, “Isabet wants me to pass her blood into Khatijah.”

“We don’t have the bugs for that, do we?”

“No, but Khatijah has a bug in her head, like any bel dame. Her body just shut itself down. She’ll be in stasis for, what? A couple days?” Ahmed said.

“You ever brought a bel dame back before?” Nyx said. She wasn’t so sure she wanted to bring the bel dame back, even if he could.

Ahmed shook his head. “I’m a torturer, not a healer.”

Nyx appreciated the honesty. She watched Eskander holding the mangled body of her sister. It was like seeing something happen from a great height—something that happened to some alien thing outside herself. If she thought about it too hard, she would remember her own sister’s body, cold and lifeless in a tub full of blood.

“She can’t die!” Eskander said. “Please save my sister. She’s a bel dame. Bel dames don’t die. I know you can bring her back.”

“Then you fix her,” Nyx said.

“I told her,” Eskander wailed. “I told her to bring a real magician. I’m just a com tech. But she wanted to bring me. She said she needed someone she could trust. Now look where we are!”

Nyx holstered her scattergun. Yelled back at Kage, “You and Eshe do a perimeter sweep. Make sure there aren’t more of those fuckers out t here.”

Kage nodded and darted off.

Eshe said something to Isabet. She ignored him.

“Can you do it or not?” Nyx asked. Eskander cradled her sister’s head. Nyx’s chest hurt. She fucking hated feeling things. What the fuck did she care for one more dead bel dame?

“The Ras Tiegan says she knows how to do it,” Ahmed said.

“She a magician?”

“No,” Eshe said, finally, in Nasheenian. “She says she worked for someone with a bug, once, like a bel dame. She says she brought her back.”

“That makes no sense,” Nyx said.

“I’ve heard of it,” Eshe said. “Ras Tieg’s living saints use them.”

Nyx wondered just how much Eshe didn’t know about his little Ras Tiegan friend. But she had weighed her options, and made up her mind. “Do what you need to do, then. I’m running a sweep with Kage. Eshe, you too. Let them do what they can.”

Eshe yanked his knife back out and went after Kage to make sure there were no more beasts prowling in the dark.

Nyx watched as Ahmed called a swarm of flesh beetles. Khatijah’s body spasmed. Nyx had to turn away then. She considered saying something grimly optimistic, but then her gaze fell on Isabet’s ravaged arm, and she decided against it.

“When you’re done, see what you can do for that stupid white girl,” Nyx said. “I don’t mind if she loses the arm. If she’s got experience running around with minor Ras Tiegan gods, she might prove useful later.”

+

When the blue dawn came, Eshe was positioned on a squat pillar overlooking the camp, watching Isabet get her arm hacked off. Ahmed had the sense to drug her first, which Eshe appreciated, because he didn’t want to hold her down. She was screaming when they put her down, though. She knew what was coming. He tried not to care. He didn’t do a good job of it.

Eshe got up when they were through and squatted beside her. She was laid out on a burnous, her left arm taken off at the elbow. A swarm of flesh beetles busied themselves beneath the bandages on her stump. He wanted to tell Isabet to turn back now, and keep walking, alone. But now that Nyx saw something useful in her, changing his mind about Isabet would be a harder sell without telling Nyx a lot more about his business in Ras Tieg than he wanted.

Eskander and Ahmed argued a few paces away over Khatijah’s body. She had a pulse now, but not much else. Eshe half hoped she wouldn’t wake up either. Some part of him expected it would just be him and Nyx at the end.

It was about to get hot. He could already feel his flesh warming, recovering from the deep evening chill “Are you angry with me?” Isabet said.

He glanced down at her. Her eyes were gummy with sand and mucus. Her hair was tangled. He looked away and stared off into the distance, watching the second sun break over the horizon, turn the world bloody violet.

“You worked for Genevieve Leichner, didn’t you? The living saint in Inoublie,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s a little more complicated than that, but… yes.”

“You were one of the virgins tasked with keeping her alive. She lives on your blood, right?”

“She does live on blood, and… replacement organs. But I wasn’t exactly one of her servants.”

“We’ve saved a fair number of women from Genevieve. You know she wants to die, right? It’s the priests who keep sacrificing you all to her.”

“I know. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner, but Inaya didn’t want me to tell anyone who I was.”

“Why does it matter? Some organic fodder for one of the saints. There’s plenty more where that came from.”

“I’m… I’m a bit more than that, I’m afraid.”

“I’m sure this is good.”

“I’m her daughter. She’s paralyzed now, you know. She speaks directly to God, but since the stroke she speaks through me. She advises a good many people, Eshe. Priests, magistrates…. Even the Patron himself once came for advice.”

“If all that’s true, Inaya wouldn’t have sent you here. She’d have kept you under a rock in Ras Tieg.”

“I… It’s just all very complicated, Eshe.” She half-reached for her left arm with her right, then hesitated. Rested her fingers on her belly. Gazed long at them.

“Let me tell you about something complicated,” Eshe said. He had seen enough mangled people. Why should he have any sympathy for her? “My first partner was a woman named Corinne. She wasn’t a shifter, but her sister was. So she joined up with us. Thing was, she was pretty enough to catch a priest’s eye. One of the ones who worked for your mother. They took Corinne one day, at the market. I wasn’t even there. Heard about it later. I tracked her down. Killed a lot of people to do it. When I told Inaya where she was, Inaya sat on that information for three weeks. Why? Because she was with Genevieve Leichner, the living fucking saint. Your fucking mother.” Eshe snorted. “I can’t believe Inaya put me with you.”

“It’s not my fault that—”

“I’m not finished. Inaya never mounted any kind of raid. Never bothered to try and help her. The living saint was too important to piss off, she said. She said we needed her on our side.”

“My mother could be a powerful ally for the movement. I won’t pretend—”

“Can you shut up for five seconds?”

“S or r y.”

“Corinne is dead,” Eshe said.

“I don’t understand.”

“See, you Ras Tiegans have this thing about being a virgin. Especially women. And especially those serving a living saint.”

Isabet seemed uncomfortable, finally, with more than the passing haze of the drugs. “Eshe—”

“Corinne wasn’t a virgin. So they didn’t need her. And they killed her. I never saw the body, but I know.”

“Eshe, you have to understand—”

“I understand everything I need to,” Eshe said. “You thought it would be fun, running off into the desert, because you’re so bloody fucking special where you come from. Well, I have news for you, Isabet. Out here, you’re nobody special.”

“I know,” Isabet said, and now she raised the stump of her arm. Her breath caught, and she choked on a sob. Squeezed her eyes shut.

“You’ll live,” Eshe said. “Just like your bloody-minded mother.”

“You’re one to talk about bloody-minded mothers.”

Eshe stood. He saw Eskander slipping under Khatijah’s burnous, wrapping her arms around her sister, and felt some lingering moment of loss, or maybe regret. Was he broken the way Nyx was? Would he ever be able to trust anyone the way Eskander did?

“Eshe?”

He sighed. “What?”

“I’m sorry I disappointed you.”

“It’s just the way things are,” Eshe said, and went off to scour the blood from his hands.

R
hys woke to terrible heat. His throat was dusty, and his tongue felt swollen—three sizes too big. He tried to open his eyes, but the lids were caked in sand and mucus. Unfamiliar voices babbled around him. And there was some other sound droning on in the background—like the sigh of a ceaseless wind.

He tried to lift his hands to his face, and found that they were unbound for the first time in many days. He wiped the grit from his eyes and sat up in a pool of gray sand ringed in stone. He gazed beyond the ring and into a blinding, bustling desert city.

But it wasn’t a living city. Not one where humans lived, anyway. The rough and tumble ruins of the city were swarming with bugs. Bugs eating, nesting, excreting; rebuilding the city in their own image, for their own ends. Reclaiming it.

Octagonal towers of azure sand and rubble, thirty meters high, rose from the ruins and glittered like the backs of jeweled beetles. Any sane man would have guessed the towers were human made, but Rhys knew better. The flawless geometry of the towers had come from the insects. What kind of insect they were, he had no idea. They were massive, winged things, large as his head, with giant mandibles as long as his fingers. They swarmed the ruins like a pack of industrious dogs, occasionally hopping from the height of the towers and gliding to the ground on their broad, glossy wings.

His captors stood a few paces distant, at the edge of the gray stone circle. The women kept their heads and faces covered, more for protection for their lungs than modesty—he had seen more of their bodies during their trek across the blasted wasteland than he believed any but a Nasheenian would freely offer to a stranger’s eyes.

Now they spoke in low tones to a small caravan. The man at the front was young, the same color as the women, and tall as they were, with the same weathered skin and eroded features. It was as if the wind had worn away their very faces. Generally, these desert people had wide, flat noses like Ras Tiegans, and flat foreheads, teardrop-shaped mouths, and very narrow, almond-shaped eyes that reminded him of an alien he had seen once from New Kinaan. In his many days—weeks?—traveling with these women, he had also discovered that they prayed almost constantly. When they camped each night, the first on watch would take up the prayer, so there was always someone in the group muttering the litany. Most of it made little sense to him. He recognized traces of the prayer language. If he closed his eyes, he could pretend it was the true language of prayer—perhaps the way it first sounded in his youth, before he understood it—something he felt he should know intimately but couldn’t quite make out.

The man they spoke to wore a long red dhoti and leather baldric bristling with weapons. Behind him were two chariots that appeared to be harnessed to a dozen massive green beetles, their jeweled carapaces sparkling in the sun. The beetles’ humped backs were waist high, their mandibles tall as Rhys’s knee—the perfect height for cutting off a man’s leg. The chariots were manned by soldiers in expensive black organic slicks and frilled turbans that gave them another hand of height. These men were paler than the others, but only just. He supposed they could easily have been the richer strata of this society, kept paler and smooth behind filters, like the First Families of Nasheen, but he doubted it. They didn’t seem native to the desert.

The chariots flanked a more… unconventional craft. It was a little like an open-air bakkie hung with prayer wheels, only instead of tires, the frame was buoyed by what must have been several million ants, each as large as Rhys’s thumb. They had to have a nest within the vehicle’s primary cistern. Perhaps it bred its own replacements? Ants and bees were especially easy to tailor for conducting specific tasks. They lived and died according to the instructions they received from complex chemical compounds. Rhys supposed it wasn’t much of a stretch to replace a bakkie’s expensive semi-organic tire structure with a more durable, cheaper alternative that wouldn’t get buried in the sand. Still, the sheer skill it must have taken a magician to create these kinds of insects—strong and pliable enough to reliably carry a vehicle and its inhabitants across shifting sand—was extraordinary. He wanted to meet the magician who’d done it.

There were two men in the vehicle—the driver and the man who was obviously in charge. He was a pale man like the charioteers, and at that awkward age where the muscular build of his youth had begun to thicken as he entered his middling years. A wiry beard hid much of his expression.

Behind the caravan, another ten men in dhotis and baldrics stood stiffly in the sweltering heat. Rhys wondered why they hadn’t passed out yet. And why in the world his captors wanted anything to do with these people.

The man in the vehicle gestured at Rhys’s captors, motioning for them to come forward.

One of the women closest to Rhys bent over and took hold of the front of Rhys’s robe. Apparently it wasn’t the women the man wanted a closer look at. It was him.

Rhys did not have the strength to struggle. He had been thirsty so long he forgot what it was to live without dreaming of water. The rations the women kept him on were barely enough to sustain a colony of dragonfly nymphs.

The woman hauled him up to the side of the vehicle. This close, Rhys could sense the pheromones that directed the ants, and some underlying stink that told him the vehicle was even more fully organic than he suspected. Was it made entirely of bug secretions? Molded by what type of insect? It was a massive, specialized job that would have taken years back in Nasheen.