God's War (12 page)

Rhys glanced out the window and
decided it was almost thirteen in the afternoon, about time for noon prayer. He
rolled out his prayer rug. Nyx went off to find the bathroom.

Despite—or because of—her prison
record, Nyx had a good reputation with just about every border agent inside
Nasheen. Rhys had crossed into enough cities with her to know. During his more
cynical moments, Rhys wondered if she got through customs so easily because
she’d slept with all of the agents. It had taken him some time to realize just
how terrible Nasheen’s problem with same-sex relations had become. Though sex
between two men was not only discouraged, but illegal, what passed for sex
between women was actively celebrated, and Nyx used sex as freely and easily as
any other tool on her baldric. What women found appealing about her, he could
not say. She was coarse and foul-mouthed and godless. She was also the only
woman who would employ him.

The customs agents slid the door open.
They both stared hard at him and told him to raise his arms.

Rhys felt a gut-churning moment of
terror.

Nyx appeared just behind them and
leaned against the doorway. She smirked. The fear bled out of him.

“Go easy on him,” she said. “He’s
mine.”

She said it like he was her bakkie
or a prized sand cat.

The bigger woman asked for Nyx’s
passbook.

“I’m already coded for Mushtallah,”
Nyx said. “I’m Nyxnissa so Dasheem.”

The woman clucked at her. “Who’d you
kill to get you back in Mushtallah, Nyxnissa?”

“All the same sorts of people,” Nyx
said.

“I haven’t seen you here since you
went to prison.”

“For good reason, then,” Nyx said.

The matron laughed. “It’s not the
prettiest city, but it’s still our best. Good women in prison, too.” She pulled
up a sleeve and revealed a badly drawn tattoo of a sword and scattergun on a
round shield.

Nyx snorted. “Gunrunning?”

“Good money,” the woman said.
“Tirhanis don’t mind selling so long as we do all the work lugging it through
the pass—and the time if we get caught.”

“So I hear,” Nyx said.

She would know, Rhys thought. How
many gunrunners had Nyx slept with?

Both agents went through Rhys’s
pockets. They didn’t find the pockets that kept his bugs, which improved his
confidence in his ability to conceal items by altering the composition of the
air around them. The skill had not been one of his best back in Faleen. Not
that he was going to be able to keep the bugs on his person much longer.
Mushtallah would take care of that.

One of the women, an ugly matron
with a face the color and texture of boot leather, paged through his passbook.
“You a resident alien?” she asked.

“I’m employed,” he said. “Everything
is in order.”

She looked him up and down and made
a moue of her mouth, as if contemplating whether or not to spit on him. Nyx
pushed farther into the crowded room, arms crossed, and grinned at her.

The customs agent closed her mouth.
“No doubt you are,” she said to Rhys, and dropped her eyes back to his
passbook.

The one patting him down found his
Kitab and laughed as she looked through it. “It’s the same damn book as ours.
Same language and everything. You a convert?”

“No,” he said. “Chenjans have always
had the same book. Unlike Nasheenians, however, we follow its teachings.”

“You speak the dead language?” the
ugly one asked, ignoring the jibe.

“Only as much as you do.”

“Huh,” she said.

The language of the Kitab had been
the same since the First Families brought it down from the moons. Even godless
Nasheenians should have known that. Who taught the schools here? Atheists like
Nyx? They killed atheists in Chenja.

The other one gave back his Kitab.
They didn’t always. He’d lost a number of Kitabs going through customs.

The ugly one turned to Nyx. “You
vouch for him, my woman?”

“You think I’d bring a terrorist
into Mushtallah?”

“Only if you’re cutting off his
head,” the ugly one said, and laughed again.

The matron finally pressed a thumb
to the organic paper at the back of Rhys’s passbook.

“You keep hold of that,” she told
him, “or the filter will eat you. No permanent residency, no permanent bio-pass
into Mushtallah.” She flashed her teeth and gave Nyx a nod. “Good luck, my
woman.”

The customs agents went back out
into the hall. The door rolled shut behind them.

Rhys tugged at his coat, and
returned his Kitab and passbook to his breast pocket.

Nyx sat at the window and put her
feet up. “They were just flirting,” she said. “You don’t see a lot of men this
far inland. And sure not Chenjan ones.”

“That’s not flirting.”

“You’ve seen worse.”

He turned away from her. “It doesn’t
excuse them.”

“Stop mewling.” She paused, then
relented. “You know I’ll do what I can to make it easy.”

“I know,” he said.

Rhys liked to think she defended him
out of some kind of loyalty or affection, but most days he felt she guarded him
the same way she did everything in her possession:
He’s
mine.
He was just another thing to be owned and retained. Just another
thing she could lose.

Once the customs agents were
off-loaded, the train chugged into the station just outside Mushtallah. Rhys
and Nyx gathered their things and then stepped onto the sandy platform
overlooking the city.

“The most boring city in Nasheen,”
Nyx declared, and trudged down the steps and onto the paved road.

Rhys had read that before Nasheen’s
revolution two hundred fifty years ago, the gutters were full of dead babies
and the mullahs wore vials of virgins’ blood toward off the draft. They’d bred
sand cats for fights in the train workers’ ward, and the stink and smog of the
city sent the First Families who lived up in the hills to the countryside every
year during high summer.

The wealthy still fled the city in
the summer—it looked deserted from the platform—but there weren’t any dead
babies that he could see, and the last of the male mullahs had been drafted two
centuries ago, right after the queen decreed that God had no place for men in
mosques unless they had served at the front.

Mushtallah had been built on seven
hills, but that was for beauty and breezes, not for defense. When Mushtallah
was founded, there hadn’t been much to defend the city from but wild sand cats
and some of the more virulent strains of bugs that had gotten away from their
magicians or bled down from the twisted mess of the Khairian wasteland in the
north. That had all changed, of course, when the war started.

The first wall that rose around the
city was an organic filter that kept foreign bug tech out. Every ten yards, a
hundred foot faux stone pillar jutted up from the packed, sandy soil. The bug
filters that stretched from pillar to pillar made the air shimmer like a soap
bubble. Organic filters were a necessity in a country bombarded by all manner
of biological, half-living, semi-organic weaponry. Destruction entered cities
as often through contaminated individuals as it did through munitions. Filters
were magician-made and could be tailored to keep out anyone and anything
organic. It was a matter of introducing the bugs powering the filter to the
unwanted contagion or—in the case of Mushtallah—only coding the filter to allow
in particular individuals. The fact that Rhys had gotten through customs
unmolested was a testament to how highly regarded Nyx was by the customs
agents.

As they approached the filter, Rhys
called up a handful of flying red beetles. He held out his hand, and a dozen
swarmed about his fingers.

“We’ll be out of contact, Taite,” he
said. “We’re going into Mushtallah.”

“Sure thing.” Taite’s voice carried
just over the singing of the beetles, a second song. “Tell me when you come
back to civilization.” Rhys flicked his wrist, and the beetles dispersed. He dug
through his pockets and released three locusts and a couple of screaming
cockroaches he kept in magicians’ cages for emergencies. All the bugs had sense
enough to head away from the filter. He would need to call or buy more when
they got back to Punjai.

Nyx turned in time to see the swarm
recede. “You clean?” she asked.

He showed her his empty pockets.

Nyx bled through the gate.

Rhys took a deep breath. Nyx stood
on the other side, whole, and stopped to look back at him. He still wasn’t
entirely convinced about the safety of entering Mushtallah. How far would those
agents take their “flirting”? Far enough to tell him that the filter had been
coded to let him through, then stand at the train windows and laugh as he
stepped through the filter and disintegrated into gray ash?

There are worse ways to die, Rhys
thought distantly, and stepped forward.

The filter clung to him, slightly
sticky, until he pushed through. He came out the other side with a delicate
pop
. He reflexively patted at his arms and his hips—and
smoothed the robe over his groin—to make sure everything was still blessedly
intact.

The first twenty yards inside the
filter was a stretch of bare soil that lapped against Mushtallah’s second wall.
The second wall encircling the city, made of stone, had little practical value.
It had no working gates anymore, just great gaps in the masonry where travelers
passed through and locals kept tchotchke booths. The poor and underemployed
spread out their wares on mass-produced blankets given out by the same
wholesaler who doled out their identical figurines of Queen Zaynab, and their
cheap model palaces and star carriers. The petty merchants and beggars were all
women, which was not so different from Chenja, he supposed, but in Chenja all
of these women would have had husbands and brothers or sons who were
responsible for them, even if those husbands looked after forty or fifty wives.
Instead, Nasheenian women all came to adulthood with the terrible knowledge
that they had to fend for themselves in this terrible desert.

Ahead of him, Nyx pushed past the
throng of traders clinging to the old stone wall, and he slipped through in her
wake. The heart of the city spread before them in what had once been a neat
grid. As the city grew, new buildings had moved out onto the streets, and
finding a straight path to any address was like trekking through an unmapped
jungle.

Nyx paid a rickshaw waiting outside
a bookshop to take them to Palace Hill.

As they rode through the city,
burnouses pulled up to ward against the suns, Rhys tried to call up a swarm.
The magicians in Faleen had told him he’d be lucky to find anything living in a
clean city. There should have been no bugs in Mushtallah except for the local
colonies of flies sealed in when the filter first went up. But as Rhys tried to
summon the bugs, he found various colonies at hand, isolated so long from those
outside the filter that they must have been different species. He found no bugs
suitable for transmissions. The filter would have kept them from broadcasting,
anyway. Media had to come into the city via newsrolls or archaic forms of
audio-only radio.

The rickshaw pulled them through the
crowded street and under a renovated arch that nonetheless looked like it had
seen better days. It was checkered with bullet holes. Two centuries before, the
Chenjans had poured into the interior and nearly burned Mushtallah to the
ground. In retaliation, the Nasheenians had razed a swath of Chenja’s
agricultural cities, and a hundred and fifty thousand Chenjans died.

After about an hour, the rickshaw
pulled them onto the busy main street that ran outside the palace.

Nyx alighted from the rickshaw and
held out her hand to help him down. It was an odd gesture, and he gave her a
look. She seemed startled, as if the move had been unconscious, and pulled her
hand away, turning to face the palace compound on the other side of the street,
her body suddenly rigid. He had seen Nasheenian women offer such courtesies to
Nasheenian boys, but never to foreign ones. He wondered what her memories were
of Mushtallah. Had she courted boys here? He couldn’t picture Nyx as a young,
bright-eyed girl opening doors for boys.

Rhys got down from the rickshaw and
stood next to her. The palace walls were twelve feet high, spiked and filtered.
Two women in red trousers stood outside a filtered gate that shimmered in the
heat. He pulled again at the hood of his burnous to make sure it was all the
way up. His dress was just as much an adherence to Chenjan modesty as it was a
practical barrier against the violent suns. He had never been scraped for
cancers. Chenjans still boasted the lowest rate of cancers of any people on
Umayma.

Nyx crossed the street, striding
ahead into the press of people and vehicles with the dumb confidence Rhys
suspected would someday get her killed. He followed, stepping over a heap of
refuse and ducking away from a sand cat pulling a rickshaw. The women around
him turned to stare as he passed. There was not much of him visible outside the
burnous, nothing but his hands. Perhaps they could peer into his cowl for a
look at his face, but he suspected there was something else giving him away.
Some kind of stance or Chenjan affectation that he had never been able to mask
or alter. Or maybe he was just intensely paranoid. He had a right to be.

Nyx presented the women at the gate
with her red letter. They pointed Nyx and Rhys in the direction of another,
smaller, gate. The women posted there let them into an inner yard and through
an organic filter. Inside the filter, the world suddenly smelled strongly of
lavender and roses. Rhys had a startling memory of the front—of bright bursts
in the sky, the smell of oranges and geranium, and this, somewhere, this smell
of lavender. He trembled and stilled.

Nyx looked back at him. “Come, now,”
she said softly. “It’s real lavender. It smells different. Come on, I bet they
have a garden in here.” She, too, had been to the front.