Rapture (43 page)

“I could have told you that back in Nasheen,” Nyx said. “Now shut up and move. Where’s Ahmed?”

“Guarding our way out.”

They moved down another series of sticky corridors. Safiyah led, and Nyx held the rear. After a few minutes, Safiyah stopped.

“What is it?” Nyx hissed.

“It’s been resealed,” Safiyah said. “A moment.”

Nyx gazed into the darkness behind them. The walls oozed and chittered. Beneath her, the floor itself felt unsteady. She hated this fucking place. Like being inside some half-eaten corpse being transformed by maggots.

“There. This way,” Safiyah said, and they were moving again.

They came back up in a dark hall. As Nyx stepped up, she didn’t recognize it.

“Where are we?”

“I’m not sure,” Safiyah said. “I had to carve out another path.” She murmured something else, and a small buzzing swarm of tiny mutant hornets appeared, as if from the walls themselves. The swarm buzzed off down an adjacent corridor.

“Come,” Safiyah said. “Our people are this way.”

Raine limped along, still too slow for Nyx’s taste. They needed to get him cleaned up and into some proper clothes. As it was, he stood out abominably here.

Safiyah turned the next corner. Nyx heard a shot. It was oddly muffled— a result of the spongy walls and floor. Safiyah’s arms windmilled back. She hit the floor like a tumbling mantis, all awkward limbs and angles.

Nyx swore and pulled her scattergun. She pushed Raine behind her and pressed close against the wall.

It was hard to gauge how many were waiting without taking a look herself. Safiyah was absolutely still—far too still for Nyx’s taste. Unless they’d gotten her directly in the heart or head, nobody was that still unless they were trying not to draw further attention to themselves. Nyx had seen stuff like that all the time with wounded soldiers on the field. Better to lie low and let the enemy walk all over you.

Nyx decided to just point and shoot. She shoved her scattergun around the corner and fired blindly. Heard a smattering of voices. Some squelching on the floor. Damn this place and its fucking acoustics. She could judge nothing by sound.

“Let them take me,” Raine said.

“Fuck you,” Nyx said.

“They won’t kill me. Just turn me over to them and run. Come another time.”

“You think this shit was easy the first time?”

“It will be more difficult the next time if you’re dead.”

“Fuck,” Nyx said. She fired again into the hall. Heard the steady squelch-squelch of approaching bad guys. Could she take them all by herself while keeping Raine intact? She decided to risk a peek. She fired again into the hall, then ducked her head out after it. One quick glance.

She pulled back behind the corner as six more guns went off. She heard the bullets sink into the soft walls. She had counted eight figures, with more behind them. Maybe a dozen total. She couldn’t fight a dozen, not even when she was twenty.

“Nyx,” Raine said softly.

“Shut the fuck up. I need to think.”

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She had been shot many times. It hurt. If she could just pass Raine off to one of her crew, she could take a few bullets—

“I’m here!”

Nyx opened her eyes.

Raine was on his feet and around the corner before she could grab him. She reached for his ankle, but he kicked away, surprisingly spry for a sick man.

He had his arms raised high over his head, little pot belly sticking out over his dhoti. He looked ridiculous. He would look more ridiculous riddled in bullets. But the shots didn’t come.

The people yelled something at him. He spoke back to them in whatever language they used.

Nyx wondered if she was being turned over.

Fuck this.

She chanced one last glance at Safiyah, decided the plucky magician could take care of herself, and then bolted down the corridor where they had come from. The place was a fucking labyrinth. She ran left, always left, hoping to loop back around to something familiar, preferably the corridor right behind where the men had caught them. That was the way the hornets were traveling.

Down a short flight of steps, up a steep ramp. And then she was well and truly lost. There were no windows. No sky. No open air. She turned down another corridor only to hit a dead end. What the fuck was the purpose of all these rooms? She turned back around and tried to retrace her steps. Her breath was coming hard and fast now. The halls were getting narrower. Where were the people? Was she lost in the guts of this great beast now? Another dead end.

She faced the blank, pulsing wall. Wiped sweaty hands on her trousers. Took long, deep breaths. I’m fine, she thought. Just fine.

But the narrow space was getting to her. I just need to rest. Just need to get my bearings….

She slumped to the floor. Curled up into a ball on the floor, hugging her knees to her chest. It was dark and damp and it wasn’t getting any better. She squeezed her eyes shut. Deep breaths. Calm. She needed to stay calm. “Nyx?”

She wasn’t sure how long it had been. Her heart thudded loudly in her chest. Her breath was coming shallow. The stink of the hold was overpowering.

“Nyx?”

She stared up. There, outlined in the darkness, was a slim little woman holding a rather large gun.

“Kage?” Nyx said.

“Get up,” Kage said. “I know the way out.”

Nyx rubbed her face. “I… I’m having some trouble, here.”

“It’s fine. Come. Stand up. Just take some deep breaths. Come on. I know the way out.”

Nyx managed to get up on all fours. She clawed her way to her feet, using the gooey wall as leverage. Kage turned, and Nyx grabbed the back of the girl’s tunic.

Kage walked through the twisting darkness like it was a bright day in the desert. Nyx stumbled along behind her.

“Here,” Kage said. She slipped through some crevice that Nyx hadn’t even noticed. They stepped out into the open.

Nyx gulped air.

Kage patted her back.

Nyx looked up. “Where are we?” She didn’t recognize the landscape.

“The camp is on the other side of Bomani.” Kage pointed. “Just go that way, back around the hold. They’re waiting. I told them I’d find you.”

Kage began walking, but not back around Bomani—she went north, into the desert.

“Where are you going?”

Kage glanced back. “I’m done now,” Kage said.

“What?”

“I came to help with this job. The job is over. You found your politician.”

“But… But I don’t have him yet!”

“You know where he is. My debt is paid.”

“Debt?”

“I have saved another life.”

“But… he’s not saved!”

“Not him,” she said. “You.”

“What?”

“They were not coming to get you,” Kage said. “They were going to leave you. Your team. But I couldn’t. You kept wanting me to kill things. But that wasn’t how I could discharge my debt. I had to save people. I don’t expect you to understand.”

“Kage, wait—”

Kage pressed her palms together and gave a little bow of her head. Nyx had seen Drucians greet one another that way. “I can’t say I like you very much,” Kage said, “but I hope you achieve an end most appropriate to the way you have lived.”

“Kage—”

“I must go,” Kage said, “before it ends for me, too.” She began to run. North. Into the desert.

The bloody fucking desert.

+

“They’ve taken him south,” Rhys said.

Ahmed sighed. He was getting really tired of listening to this Chenjan.

First, he wanted to go back into that hive for Nyx. Now he still wanted to push her to pursue the politician. Nyx had stumbled back into camp an hour before, much to everyone’s surprise. But Kage wasn’t with her.

Safiyah turned up a few minutes later, shaking flesh beetles from her robe and talking about how it’d been a decade since she’d last been shot. Ahmed had to admit he was disappointed that after all the death he’d seen out here, not one of them had keeled over. And he’d lost Kage. At least Kage had been good company.

“That’s all I could find out,” Rhys said.

“What does south mean? Back across the bloody desert? We came all this way just to run back after them the same way we came?” Ahmed said. “Is this a joke?”

Safiyah sat on a rocky wall above them. They had left the camp overlooking Bomani and retreated further south, to a tumbledown stir of ruins near one of the massive rock pillars that soared to the sky. “Do you know who took him?” Nyx asked.

“The same people that brought him,” Rhys said.

Nyx sighed. “Of course.”

Ahmed watched her stare off into the distance. She had not been the same since she limped back into camp without Kage. He had demanded to know what had become of the Drucian, but Nyx just waved him away and said she’d left of her own volition.

He half believed her. He’d been telling Kage to leave for weeks. Now every time he looked north, he wondered if he should have gone with her. Then he wondered if Nyx had actually just killed her. “The men said they were headed south,” Rhys said, “to the tunnels. I don’t know what that is. Some hiding place?”

Safiyah slid off the wall and landed neatly on her feet, like a cat. Ahmed shivered. Sometimes the way she spoke, and moved, troubled him. It put him in mind of someone else he’d known a long time ago, though he couldn’t say who.

“I know where they’re going,” Safiyah said.

“You’re kidding,” Nyx said.

“I wish I were,” Safiyah said. “But all together, I think the lot of you will much prefer this mode of travel to the one you used to come up here.

Oh, this’ll be good,” Nyx said.

+

It was good.

Safiyah handed Nyx the specs. “And that, my precious tidbit, is the closest inlet to the Abd-al-Karim. Better known to your colonial ears as the magicians’ tunnels.”

“Fuck me,” Nyx said.

“You’re not my type, darling,” Safiyah said.

“They don’t go this far up,” Rhys said. “They only connect key Nasheenian cities. How did you know about this?”

Safiyah wrinkled her nose. “Colonial magicians may use them to traverse cities. But First Families can use them to cross the world.”

Nyx looked at her sidelong. “You mean powerful First Families with powerful fucking magicians. Even if we’d known the tunnels came all the way up here, all the entrances in Nasheen are protected. There’s no way we’d get in.”

“So many words. Words, words, words. Come now, we’re losing the light.” Safiyah strode boldly toward the mound, three hundred paces distant. Clouds were rolling in, and the wind was picking up. Nyx admitted she wasn’t looking forward to the cool dark of the tunnels after Bomani.

Beside her, Isabet and Ahmed were talking in Ras Tiegan, presumably to clue Isabet into what was happening. Nyx secretly hoped she would die next, eaten by some bug or taken out by some bullet. Every time Isabet looked at Nyx, she thought of Eshe.

Safiyah stepped boldly into the mound—and disappeared. The same way Nyx had disappeared when she fell into the prayer niches at the settlement before Kiranmay.

“Gotta love a good glamour,” Nyx muttered. “C’mon, let’s keep up.”

Above her, the sky rumbled—so close that the ground itself seemed to shudder. A jolt of lightning lit up the sky.

“Fuck,” Ahmed said.

Nyx watched the desert where Safiyah had disappeared.

There was something moving near the mound.

Rhys came up short beside her.

A massive arthropod humped its way past the entrance to the tunnels.

The giant, undulating arthropod was bigger even than the one that made up the bar of the tea house back in Kiranmay. As Nyx watched, it surfaced just two hundred paces from them. Its massive head sprouted six nasty, needlelike protrusions. Then it dove back into the sand.

“Maybe we should wait this one out,” Nyx said. She could have really used a sniper. Goddammit. Not that I can blame her for going, Nyx thought.

“I can control it,” Rhys said.

“No you fucking can’t.”

He strode out across the crackling desert. The lightning storm sent jagged arcs of electricity over their heads. The whole sky was a wash of white and purple heat. And there, visible in the flickering light, was the massive segmented form of the… thing. It undulated just beneath the desert’s surface, pushing up crumbled heaps of clotted sand in its wake.

Nyx wondered what exactly Rhys wanted to do with the fucking thing—ride it? Or just get it out of the way? She was content to find a fucking rock to stand on and just wait it out, but there he went, forging down into the desert like some stupid kid. We are too fucking old to act like idiots, she thought. But she pulled her sword and went after him. Just like a fucking idiot.

“Rhys!”

There was a low rumble in the sky. Then another, so loud this time that the whole desert really did shake. He’s going down there to die, Nyx thought, suddenly. He can’t be this stupid. He just wants to fucking die out here, and this is a way to do it.

“Rhys!”

He came to the edge of the broken desert and raised his hands. His dark arms spilled free of the white burnous. He was terribly thin and wiry, and the ghastly light flickered across what was left of him.

Another dagger of light lit up the sky.

Nyx slowed her pace, just a hundred paces distant from him now. Already, she was out of breath. She heard a low buzzing above the din in the sky. Then the ground beneath her trembled so violently that it knocked her to her knees. She gazed up just as another dart of light arced across the sky. There, rearing above Rhys like some half-forgotten bedtime monster, was a scaly arthropod the color of the night, banded in violet. Each of its undulating segments was half as tall as Rhys. As it reared above him, she counted a full six segments. It totally dwarfed him, and that was just what was visible. She had a grinding moment of primordial terror. It was the same puking feeling that had overcome her when Anneke’s kids showed her the globular monsters they called fish. It was like looking at some alien thing that struck some deep note of dissonance within her.

She sucked in a breath and started to sprint toward Rhys. But the desert had other ideas, and her sprint became a slog as the crust of the desert broke beneath her. She waded forward. The arthropod wavered above Rhys for a few more moments. She made three-quarters of the distance to him, cursing and snarling the whole way. And then it struck.