God's War (26 page)

Rhys looked away.

He had fled across the desert to
escape this fate. Some part of him wondered if it had all caught up with him at
last.

Damira dropped them off outside
Azam, a bleeding border city. A half-dozen anti-burst gun towers ringed the
swollen black sprawl of the city, half again as tall as its two minarets. Most
of the gun towers were charred husks. Heaps of debris littered the roadway.

Rhys and Nyx walked with their hoods
pulled up. Geckos skittered across their path. They passed a contagion sensor
along the road, tilted at a hard left angle. The light at the top flashed
yellow; the whole thing was covered in locusts.

The sun was low in the sky by the
time they made it past the burst guns and into the city. It was dead quiet,
like the streets around a magicians’ gym before a fight. Rhys saw some moths
under the eaves of the tenement buildings, blasted-out archways riddled with
bullet holes. The city was teeming with wild and tailored bugs; they made
Rhys’s blood sing. Swarms of flesh beetles darkened the sky. A few ragged
people stared out at them from the ruined buildings. Rhys saw a couple of
scabby kids digging in the sandy basin of what had once been the city’s central
fountain and asked them where everybody was.

The boy sneered at Nyx, but as he
turned to Rhys, his expression sobered and he pointed east, toward Nasheen.

“That fighting we passed was close,”
Rhys said.

He saw Nyx gaze down the deserted
street. A swarm of wasps hummed over the rooftops. In the west, the primary sun
was headed down, and the sky was starting to go the brilliant violet of dusk.

“We don’t have time to get to Dadfar
tonight,” Nyx said, in halting Chenjan, probably for the child’s benefit.
Speaking Nasheenian would draw even more attention than the color of her face.
“If Anneke’s in, we have to hole up.”

They walked past prayer wheels
hanging in broken lattice windows, cracked water troughs, and abandoned bug
cages. Rhys caught the distinctive smell of gravy over protein cakes, spinach
and garlic.

Nyx led him down a narrow,
refuse-strewn alleyway that smelled heavily of urine and dog shit. He had to
pick his way around heaping piles of garbage and feces and rubble. They stirred
up fist-size dung beetles and enormous biting flies. At the end of the alley,
in a cracked parking lot, Rhys saw Nyx’s familiar bakkie—new paint, new tags,
but her bakkie nonetheless—squatting underneath a spread of spindly palm trees.
One of the trees was splintered in half. The other bakkies he could see were
all sun-sick, rusted-out wrecks—Tirhani made, just like the ones in Nasheen. A
woman in a soiled burqua called to them from the scant shade of the palms. She
had something in her hands—tattered lengths of cloth for turbans.

“Here it is,” Nyx said, pointing to
the green awning at their left. The way house was a leaning, three-storied
façade of mud-brick and bug-eaten secretions. The tiled roof was coated in
flaking green paint. A battered poster under one of the reinforced windows bled
black organic ink all over the bricks, announcing the arrival of a carnival now
four years past.

“Nyx,” Rhys said, “we shouldn’t stay
in Azam.” He had his own reasons for that. He had family in Azam.

“We’ll be fine,” Nyx said, and
rapped on the heavy, bullet-pocked door of the way house.

A small peeping portal opened. Rhys
saw one misty eye look back out at them.

Nyx glanced at Rhys.

“We have reservations,” Rhys told
the misty eye. He had to stop again, work backward from the Nasheenian. It had
been too long since he spoke Chenjan at length. “My brother has preceded us.”

The door opened.

A haggard old man stood on the other
side, a long rifle in one of his bent, arthritic hands. “Anneke,” the old man
said.

Rhys looked at Nyx.

“Yeah,” Nyx said.

A slim figure stepped toward the
door from the dim of the reception area. Rhys recognized Anneke under the black
turban that wound about her head and covered her face. Khos-the-dog trotted
behind her, pausing in the light from the doorway to yawn and stretch.

“Any trouble?” Anneke asked in
Chenjan. Rhys was startled at how smoothly she spoke, with no hint of an
accent. Not for the first time, he wondered what she’d gone to prison for.

“I don’t think so,” Rhys said, also
in Chenjan.

“Huh,” Anneke said, and she pulled
down the cover over her face so she could spit sen. A couple of male voices
sounded from deeper inside the house, Chenjan voices. Rhys caught the smell of
marijuana and a whiff of curry.

Anneke grinned at him. “Good to be
home?”

“Under these circumstances? No. I
think we should stay on the road.”

The old man gestured with his rifle.
“Get in, get in!” he said.

The call of the muezzin sounded, low
but close, and Rhys looked out behind them. They were within a block of one of
the city’s two remaining minarets. The few speakers along the city street
belched a green haze, the exhaust generated by the door beetles translating the
call.

“That’s handy,” Anneke said, and
pulled her prayer rug from across her back. “I put yours behind the cab in the
bakkie,” she said, and rolled out the rug to pray. “Sorry, didn’t unpack all
the gear.”

“Do you have a fountain?” Rhys asked
the old man.

“The hell you bother washing? Use
sand. Don’t go out there!” the old man barked.

But Rhys turned away from them and
picked his way to the parking lot at the end of the alley. He passed near the
woman in the burqua. She thrust the dirty turban cloth toward him, babbling at
him so quickly, so desperately, that he could not understand her.

“Where is your husband?” he asked.

“Dead, all dead!” she said, and
thrust the cloth at him. “Please, I need bread. Bread and venom. Please.
Anything you like, anything.” She stepped toward him as she said it, and began
to clutch at her burqua.

“Stop,” Rhys said. “Stop. You are
not mine to look after.”

He retrieved his rug and called for
a wasp guard on the bakkie. It took a good minute to find a swarm. The
contagions in the air confused them and made his already tenuous communication
with them all the more difficult. He hoped they didn’t turn around and attack
him when he came back.

“Please, anything,” she said, but
Rhys pushed past her and walked quickly toward the way house as the amethyst
sky became the true blue dusk of early evening.

He pounded at the door until the man
with the rifle let him back in. Inside, he saw the cracked, patterned marble of
the floor, what had once been a beautiful black and white mosaic of intricate
script from the Kitab. The fountain at the center of the reception area was dry
and silent.

Anneke already had her prayer rug
out, facing north. It wasn’t until he looked down at Anneke’s bowed back that
he remembered it was a sin to pray among women. He hesitated, looked behind
him, but the old man was making his way up a worn set of steps, rifle in one
hand, the railing in the other. Nyx stood at the end of the stairway, watched
Khos shift. No one would see anything objectionable about kneeling next to any
of these people during prayer. Anneke didn’t look like a woman; here, she was
just another small Chenjan man, underfed. Rhys let out his breath and rolled
out his rug.

None would see but God.

But God had seen him commit this sin
every day for the last eight years. Prayer in Nasheen was mixed, even in a
magicians’ gym.

Rhys hesitated a moment longer, then
he knelt on the rug, and he surrendered. He took comfort in prayer, in
recitation, in submission. After so many years of working for a woman he found
it impossible to trust entirely, submission to God was a much welcome release.

When the prayer ended, Rhys raised
his head and gazed off past the dry fountain, where three dead cockroaches
rested beneath the broken head of a stone locust. Rhys saw political posters up
on the walls. The mullahs who ruled Azam were up for re-election, though Rhys
doubted any of them were out here tonight. Most local mullahs were related to
the holy men who sat up in the high courts at the capital. Like Nasheen’s
elections on domestic issues, elections in Chenja weren’t really elections. In
Nasheen, the queen did what she wanted. In Chenja, the mullahs in the capital
appointed all of the local officials, and the Imam, an orthodox, selected the
mullahs.

Rhys tugged his hood further down
over his face, to hide his eyes. There were other voices in the house. As
slight as the chance of being recognized was, he didn’t want to take it. The
penalty for his crimes was torture, evisceration, and quartering.

As he stood, Nyx said, “I need you
to put out a call to Taite. Think you can do that this close to the border?”

“Risky, but possible,” Rhys said.
“Do we have a room?”

“Up here,” Khos said. He wore a
dhoti and burnous now, nothing else. Rhys always marveled at the shape
shifter’s disregard for nudity. He was as bad as Nyx.

They walked up the dim stairwell to
the third floor. There were a couple of dying glow worms in glass, but most of
the ones they passed were already dead. Khos pushed open a battered door made
of knobs of metal and bug secretions.

Dirty pallets were lined up at the
center of the room. A dark gauze hung from one window; the other bled
unfiltered evening light across the center of the room. A swarm of mark flies
circled the center of the room.

Rhys waited for Nyx to come in and
shut the door, then he called up a little swarm of red beetles. It took him
three tries and nearly twenty minutes to get a link to Taite.

“Everything all right out there?”
Taite asked.

“About as expected,” Rhys said.

“That bad?”

Nyx cut in. She had pulled off the
hood of her burnous and found some sen. She spit at her feet, next to one of
the pallets, and Rhys grimaced. “Have you found out anything more in Kine’s
papers? Rhys wasn’t much help.”

“I’ve deciphered most of the pages.
I did some research work on the compounds too. I have some contacts who used to
work there doing recon and cleanup work.”

“Spies?” Nyx asked.

“We don’t call them that. Anyway, it
looks like she was selecting for traits and working with a lot of magicians.
You’ll never guess whose name came up in these records.”

“Yah Tayyib,” Nyx said.

“Great guess,” Taite said. “There’s
some information about attempts at breeding kids in vats—you know, artificial
womb tech—but they’re not getting far on that. That’s nothing new. The
interesting thing is some kind of project called Babylon, or a project being
done out in Babylon where they’re splicing human and bug genes… or doing some
weird stuff with viral contagions and genetics or something. They’ve got everything
in here: blood roaches, fire beetles, cicadas, locusts.”

“That’s fucked up,” Nyx said. “They
breeding some kind of bug army?”

“They’ve got a lot of notes in here
about shifters. Maybe trying to replicate a shifter’s blood code?”

“Breeding for magicians and
shifters,” Rhys muttered. “But have they gotten anywhere with it?”

“You think they’d be so stupid to
fuck with the world again?” Nyx said.

“It wouldn’t be the first time,”
Rhys said. “There were no shifters on the moons. Magicians, yes, but no shifters.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“Read a book sometime.”

Nyx hocked up a wad of sen and spit
it at his feet. This one hit the pallet. Rhys decided that was where she was
going to sleep.

“He’s right,” Taite said. “Nobody in
Ras Tieg could shift before they came here. We were all standards. It’s Umayma
that does it. In Ras Tieg, they say God cursed us.”

“You have a saint for it?” Nyx
asked, and Rhys suspected she was only half joking.

“We do, actually,” Taite said.
“Mhari, saint of women scorned and women’s wombs. A lot of our church leaders
blame women for all the shifters.”

“That’s the dumbest thing I ever
heard. Those men think babies come from women and dirt?”

“You don’t know much about Ras
Tieg,” Taite said. “From what my contacts say, this information would go for a
real high price in any market from Ras Tieg to Tirhan. Even a list of failures
gives them an idea of where not to go when they push forward.”

Rhys glanced over at Nyx. She
sighed. “All right. Anything else you can get out of it?” she asked.

“Maybe,” Taite said. “Later, though.
I have a limited window. They spray for foreign transmissions in that sector in
half an hour. You’re still too close to the front.”

“Taite,” Nyx said.

“Yeah?”

“I want you to burn all those
papers. I don’t want anybody using that against Nasheen. Have locusts eat
whatever won’t burn.”

“And the transcriptions?”

“Nyx—” Rhys said. He had taken some
of those papers with him for study. He hadn’t left them all with Taite, and he
certainly wasn’t going to burn what he had bundled up and had Anneke smuggle
in.

“See what you can do with them. If
it’s just a record of failure, again, get rid of it. But if they found anything
out, if she mentions any names—magicians, bel dames—you let me know before you
toast it. I want to know if they actually accomplished anything over there.”

“All right,” Taite said.

“Let’s end this transmission,” Nyx
said.

“Peace be to you, Taite,” Rhys said.

“And to you. I’ve been picking up a
lot of other transmissions coming out of there. Be careful. God bless.”

Rhys released the bugs. “Your bel
dames might have good reason to take Nikodem if she’s trying to pull
information about the compounds,” he said.

“I’m leaning toward the idea that
we’ll all be better off bringing back Nikodem dead,” Nyx said. “If they’re
breeding magicians, we could bury your country in viral bugs in twenty years
that’ll eat everything organic. Men, women, dogs, kids, shit, trees—the whole
fucking deal. We could fuck up the world with shit like this. No wonder the bel
dames are clawing at the queen for this tech. Whoever owns it owns the world.”