Rapture (39 page)

“Can you cut us into that thing?” she asked Safiyah.

“Certainly. But there’s bound to be a guard. We’ll need a distraction.” Nyx glanced behind them, where they had left the intact bodies of the Aadhya… and Eshe.

“I can give them a fucking distraction,” she said.

+

Despite Ahmed’s protest, they went back to where they left the bodies and buried them. If Nyx couldn’t cut off their heads for fear of drawing the sand, she’d rather something else took care of them.

“You can control them?” she asked Safiyah. “When they come back up?”

“I cannot see all futures.”

“Can you or fucking can’t you?”

“It’s likely,” she said. “But you’ll need me to cut open Bomani to get inside. As soon as I do that, I’ll lose control of them. After that, Kage will need to bring them down, or they could turn on you.”

“Then let’s finish this shit,” Nyx said.

Once the bodies were buried, they walked back to the edge of the forest, and began the long hike toward Bomani. Nyx pointed them to a jagged rise overlooking the hold; a good vantage for a sniper.

As they got nearer, Nyx was able to make out more of it. The stronghold was like something out of a lurid historical radio show. A bulbous, burgeoning conflagration that pulsed like a living organ in the low light. There were several towerlike structures protruding from its compass points, like minarets. The outside appeared to be ringed in the windeffaced heads of some kind of twisted creatures for which Nyx had no name. They reminded her a bit of the beasts that attacked them early on. Monstrous, ravenous things with impenetrable skins.

Nyx noted that there didn’t seem to be much activity outside. No one was coming in or going out. She didn’t even see a door. It was just one long shimmering green skein, all the way around.

“Who runs this place?” Nyx asked. “The Aadhya?”

“They’re ruled by three brothers,” Khatijah said.

Nyx raised her brows. “And how is it you know this?”

“You think I was just sitting around in Kiranmay doing nothing?”

“It crossed my mind…”

“The men come from the other side of the Wall, many more weeks from here. It’s called Yazdan, and there’s some ocean over there, so they call them ocean people. The brothers buy and sell people out here, and a whole host of other things.”

“For what, labor?”

“Sex, I think.”

“I’m sorry,” Nyx said. “What?”

“People want to control things they’re afraid of,” Kage said. Nyx couldn’t argue with that. Still, most of the folks she kept around were good for more than just sex. Sex was a bonus, naturally, but not the main event. And people who were only useful for sex were a drain on resources. Wherever Yazdan was, it must be a rich sort of place.

“Maybe some of us could pass for them.” Khatijah peered over at Kage. “She could pass, maybe. And Isabet.”

“I’m not a fan of hiding out among loose skirts unless there’s no other way,” Nyx said. “Once we’re in, what’s our cover?”

“There is an easier way,” Safiyah said.

Nyx waited.

“I’m a magician,” Safiyah said. She sniffed. “And a far more skilled one than your torturer.”

“Yeah, but once we’re in, we need to find Raine. How’s that happen if we just suddenly appear?”

Khatijah sighed. “The people-selling angle is looking better.”

“Oh, everyone does that,” Safiyah said. She clapped her hands. “How about a glamour? I haven’t done a good glamour in… such a long time.”

Nyx said, “How many people can you realistically hold a glamour on?”

“You, the bel dame, and perhaps the Drucian. It will be very dark in there, after all, and they are better in tight spaces. We don’t need the curry eater or the torturer.”

“Kage needs to stay on the high ground and shoot the bugs. She’s not going with us.”

“You’re going to seriously leave me out here with the girl?” Ahmed said.

Safiyah shrugged. “I am being practical. But, of course, the final decision rests with Damira here.”

“Very funny,” Nyx said. She looked at what remained of her team. Her heart hurt at not finding Eshe there, knife at the ready. His sly walk, fast hands, and keen eyes were made for this part of the run. Instead, he’d be helping out as… something else. She grimaced. There was no way out of this hell for her.

You don’t go in with the team you dream about, Raine once told her, you go in with the team you’ve got.

Fuck you, Raine, she thought, but said aloud, “All right. Let’s camp out and wait for the bugs.” She pointed to a low ridge overlooking the hold. “No fires. Keep a low profile. We’ll scout it out once the bugs are up. Once we’re in, if we’re not back in two days, you head home.”

Ahmed snorted.

She held up a hand. “Come on. Let’s pretend we’re not all going to die out here, all right? I’m not living like a corpse. I don’t expect you to think like one. Got it?”

“Sure,” Ahmed said.

“Any other ideas?” Nyx said. “Because after the sun goes down, we’re going in.”

+

Ahmed had seen what men became when they were not beheaded or burned or shipped off to the containment centers for decontamination and deprocessing. He waited on the rise with a pair of specs, staring out into the white forest, waiting for the bodies to come back.

What Nyx proposed was dangerously haram—forbidden. It turned his stomach. He would have rather hacked them all apart and risked the wrath of that blood-sucking sand than see those people devoured from the inside and come back as lumbering, hulking wrecks.

Those people. One of whom was Eshe.

He gritted his teeth.

Nyx came up beside him, folded her arms. “Anything?”

“No,” he said.

“You’re not happy about it,” she said.

“It’s forbidden. It’s obscene.”

“I’ve done worse.”

“Not to your own kid.”

“Care that much, do you?”

“He was a good kid.”

“How good?”

Ahmed pulled the specs away, and glanced up at her. She kept her gaze on the long sweep of the forest.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Seems to me that all the fucking on this team has gotten us all into trouble.”

“That was Kage, not me.”

“Was it?”

He grunted. Fuck her. Fuck all the officers like her.

“You don’t have any respect for anything,” he said.

“What you did with Eshe was haram, too,” she said. “If you’re following the Kitab by rote.”

“Fuck you, Nyx.”

“I called it,” Khatijah said, walking up behind the two of them and holding out her hand to Nyx. “They totally fucked. You owe me a note. I won the bet.”

“Goddammit,” Nyx said, and pulled a note from her burnous.

“Is this all some kind of a fucking game to you?” Ahmed said. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Both of you? Bloody fucking bel dames. You make up all the fucking rules and then you break them like they’re nothing. Like it’s all so much catshit. Is life just catshit to you? Do you feel anything at all?”

Khatijah pointed toward the forest. “Check that movement. It’s them.”

Ahmed raised the specs to his eyes. Three dark shapes lumbered at the edge of the forest. He saw a fourth just beyond them, small and willowy. He had to look away.

“Safiyah,” Nyx said. “Your turn.”

+

Nyx thought she’d prefer approaching Bomani in the dark. She was wrong.

There were wispy green lights in the towers, speckled along what might have passed for a parapet of some kind that ringed the hold. But for the most part, the world was a wash of darkness, and Bomani was an inky blob of black against the night.

She and Khatijah waited until the lumbering bodies made contact with the far end of the hold. More lights flickered up top. She heard voices.

Then Nyx ran in the opposite direction, hoping to make it into the shadow of the building before anyone noticed.

Khatijah trailed her.

Nyx didn’t think about the bodies. Or the lights. Didn’t think about anything until she made it to the wall. She pushed herself against the wall, and her hands came away wet and sticky. She grimaced as she put her back to it and crouched low.

Khatijah caught up to her, and did the same.

They waited in the darkness, breathing heavily. Nyx listened to the spatter of voices above her. She couldn’t make out a damned word. Someone was shouting. At least the giant, flesh-sloughing beetles were making an impression.

Nyx glanced back to the front of the structure, where the beetle-bodies were clicking and slavering at the organic matting of the hold. She appreciated that they looked like beasts, in the dark. Just beasts. Shambling things.

Safiyah finally made her way toward them from the top of the rise. The hail of voices had gotten louder. Nyx heard shots. She wondered if dead beetles would draw the blood-thirsty sand. Probably. Probably time to go.

A fine skein of translucent mayflies surrounded Safiyah’s head. Her look was stern. “I must release them now,” she said. “Be ready to slip into the skin once it’s open.”

She flicked her hand, and the mayflies dispersed. Then she put her hands onto the squelchy wall and murmured something that sounded to Nyx a lot like a prayer. Not a good sign.

Nyx heard the chittering scuffle of the giant beetle-bodies. Shots rang out from above them. With Safiyah’s attention on getting them in, the beetles were free to shamble where they liked. The flesh-ragged beetles huffed closer, moving down the edge of the hold toward them.

Nyx drew her scattergun.

Safiyah let out a breath. There was a sucking sound. “In! In!” she whispered.

Khatijah pushed herself into the spongy rent in the wall.

Nyx kept her weapon out. Only two of the beetle-things were still alive. The other corpses thrashed at the base of the wall. She heard the hissing call of the hungry sand.

The lead beetle was hunched over, cloaked in a burnous and torn trousers. The face was split in two, revealing the shiny black beetle carapace beneath. The bugs grew faster out here, and bigger. She saw Eshe’s belt. Eshe’s dagger. What remained of Eshe’s dark hair, tangled with coagulated blood and sticky bug secretions that must have hidden the scent from the sand.

Nyx put her finger on the trigger. Above her, more voices were shouting. More shots.

“Sorry,” Nyx said.

She pulled the trigger.

The beetle’s craggy visage exploded. Wet bug guts and the remains of Eshe’s mangled face spattered her tunic.

A whirlwind of sand spat up at her feet.

Nyx vomited.

Someone grabbed her from behind.

She grunted.

They pulled her into Bomani, into darkness.

+

Bomani was a living, rotting thing. It was as if it were constantly sloughing off its old skin and regenerating new and more intricate parts all the time. Nyx stared up into the guts of the thing. It was, she decided, like some gigantic bakkie that had been left to grow out of control for millennia.

They had walked across sucking, pulsing tissue and into a long, low, empty hall that made Nyx suddenly claustrophobic. The walls were practically dripping. The only light came from a line of blue bioluminescent fungi that crept along the walls.

“Where is everyone?” Nyx asked, low.

Safiyah closed the new gap behind them. Every wall was easily breachable, with her in the lead. “This is an outer ward. Most activity will be further in. I told you there was no need for weapons yet.”

Nyx kept her scattergun out. She was down to a handful of shells. The pistol ammo wasn’t faring much better.

“Does anyone even know how to run this thing?” Khatijah asked.

“There are some conjurers who shape it,” Safiyah said. “They simply apply the whims of whatever party rules the holdfast, though. Inside and out, these places grow and change depending on the vision of the one who rules them.”

“Do they do anything anymore? Think they could get fixed or something?” Khatijah asked.

“Fixed? I don’t understand.”

“If they helped make the world, can’t they still do it? Help… I don’t know… make it better or something?”

Safiyah shrugged. “They have been rebuilt and repurposed and renewed so many times… What all these parts and pieces originally did, no one is certain. Even more important, it’s quite possible that none of the organic circuitry here is original. It’s all been changed many times. And unless someone has a record of what it was supposed to be like… well, we can all breathe well enough.”

Nyx stared up at the great guts of the beast.

“Come now,” Safiyah said. “Let’s build a proper glamour.” She raised her hands, and Nyx felt a wave of nausea. Next to her, she saw Khatijah’s image waver, then bleed into the long, leggy form of one of the Aadhya. Her features, coloring, clothing—it was all different, and so much like Shani that Nyx had to resist the urge to draw her blade again. She likely looked the same. When Nyx looked back at Safiyah, the magician, too, had taken on the guise of an Aadhya. She was, admittedly, more conservatively dressed than either of them, in a short red tunic and burnous in addition to her turban.

Safiyah smiled. “Must be a new thing for you two, running off into the desert to save men instead of kill him.”

“We have to find him first,” Nyx said. “Khat? Ideas?”

“I guess we go deeper into the hold, and find out how many people we’re dealing with here.”

“And hopefully who,” Nyx said. She glanced back at Safiyah. “You can really hold this glamour the whole time?”

“As long as you like.”

Khatijah led, and Nyx took the rear, protecting Safiyah’s back in case someone broke her calm. Though honestly, the way things were going Nyx was beginning to think that few things would do that.

Nyx heard voices ahead, and fought the urge to pull a weapon. She needed to walk carefully, here. Smoothly. Like she belonged.

Khatijah rounded a corner. The three of them passed into a massive room. It appeared to be an eating or gathering hall. There were over a hundred men there, eating and talking in loud voices.

Khatijah glanced back at Nyx. Nyx urged her on, gesturing to what looked like another door on the far side of the hall. The men here were all tall and lanky desert men, with the same reddish skin and dark hair as Shani and her sisters. As long as no one tried to have an extended conversation with them, they should be able to pass through.