Rapture (3 page)

Radeyah ceased her sketching. “Tell them no,” she said. Nyx admired the nimble way she held her stylus. She imagined Radeyah would have been a fine swordswoman, if she ever had a mind to pick up a sword. But Radeyah had spent her entire life on a farmstead in Mushirah. After her family died, she said she came to Druce to paint the sea, but when Nyx saw her mothridden flat with the leaky tub, moldy ceiling and surplus of drugs in the bathroom, she suspected Radeyah had not come to Druce to retire. She had come here to end it all.

Nyx didn’t like that idea. When she was with Radeyah, she dreamed less of the ring.

“I have to go,” Nyx said.

Radeyah’s jaw tightened. “I suppose we’ve been playing at being lovers a year now. Like children. It was bound to end soon enough.”

“You know what I am. What I’ve done—”

“That was all a long time ago—”

“The Queen has a very long memory.”

“Just tell them—”

“They know I’m here now. They’ll come for you. All of you. They’ll burn it up and scatter your corpses. That’s who I deal with. That’s the kind of person I am. If I don’t go with them now, you’re dead.”

“How long?” Radeyah said.

“Could be two or three months. Could be a year. I don’t know.”

Radeyah wasn’t good at hiding her emotions. She never had to. The pain that blossomed on her face made Nyx’s gut clench. She had to look away. Had to start cutting out that part of herself again, the one that cared about a thing because somebody else did. I’ve gotten soft, she thought. This woman made me soft.

“I waited for a man most of my life, and when he returned, he was little more than a hunk of charred meat. Is that what you’ll come back as? Or something worse? I have spent my whole life waiting to live, Nyx. I’m too old to wait.”

“I’m not asking you to wait.”

Radeyah closed her slide and stood. “I should go.”

“Stay for dinner.”

“I should have known you would go.”

Nyx walked up to her. Took her by the arms, leaned in. “If I didn’t give a shit about you I’d tell them to fuck off. I’d wrap you up and cart you off to some other house and fuck you on the porch all day until they burned it around us. But I do give a shit. And I’m too fucking old to see everything me and you and Anneke and the kids built destroyed because I couldn’t do one last job.”

Radeyah wrapped her arms around Nyx. Nyx pulled her close. They made love there on the floor as the light purled through the billowing curtains. Nyx traced Radeyah’s scars from her two births, all dozen children lost to the war. When Radeyah came, she bucked beneath Nyx’s hand, revealing the twisted collection of scars on her backside where the magicians had pulled shrapnel from her after a commuter train accident north of Mushirah. There were more scars, more blemishes, a lifetime of Nasheenian living mapped out on her body. Nyx loved her for it, a little. And feared for her—far too much.

Radeyah stroked her hair, after. “I won’t wait for you,” she said.

“I know,” Nyx said.

Even as they lay together in the cool breeze, Radeyah soft and comforting next to her, Nyx felt herself pulling away, boxing herself back up, until soon she was nearly numb, and the spidery tattoo on Radeyah’s ankle that still bore Nyx’s name no longer gave Nyx the same flutter of affection. It was easy to become everything she hated again. Remarkably, maddeningly easy.

Nyx closed her eyes, and stepped into the ring.

E
she put his shotgun down on the battered table between him and the priest. The priest was a fastidious little man, clean and neat, with long limbs and balding head that put Eshe in mind of a dung beetle. He was Ras Tiegan, flat faced and broad nosed, with a pale as piss complexion that was a little ruddy in the nose and cheeks. He was already halfway through a pint of hard ale, and Eshe guessed he’d started drinking well before Eshe showed up.

The priest’s eyes bulged at the shotgun. Eshe figured the old guy had never seen a gun up close. Eshe was prepared to get him a good deal closer to it.

“You have a license for that?” the priest asked, hissing around his drink like there was anyone else in the tavern who cared about their business.

The sticky sweet smell of opium seeped in from the bunkhouses upstairs. A woman wearing a muslin habit with the back torn out slipped into the front door and scurried into the kitchen on bloody, swollen feet. Someone cried out from the gambling room in back. The distant gong of church bells called the faithful to midnight prayer. Just another dark Ras Tiegan night at the edge of the protected territories.

“You think I’d need a license here?” Eshe said.

The priest mopped his brow with a yellowed handkerchief. “There’s no need for that, boy. I came here, didn’t I? What kind of whore’s dog are you, to throw weapons around at a holy man? I need another drink.”

The priest had come wearing the long brown robe and tattered cowl of his order. His was one of the less popular sects, populated by cowardly little men instead of the more fit, robust types Eshe was used to. He had a golden cord looped about his waist and neck, fashioned into a crude X at his collar, but the garb didn’t mean much out here. In the larger cities, the less contaminated ones, maybe, a priest’s robe was enough to save a pious man’s life. But when bugs crawled through your filters every night to lay eggs in your flesh and noxious air killed off your babies if you kept them too close to the ground, there was less reverence for a man of God who did not also wear the bloody apron of a magician. Magicians saved lives. You only called on a priest when you knew your life was over.

Eshe leaned toward the priest. “Tell me what I need to know or your next drink will be leaking out a hole in your gut.”

“I only meant—”

“It’s my people in this place, old man. I could skin you alive right here and they’d help me chop you up and feed you to the flesh beetles.”

The priest swallowed. “They’re moving her next week, before the Feast of the Blood. I don’t know where they’re keeping her, but I know where she’s going.” His gaze lingered on the gun, darted away. “It’s Jolique so Romaud’s house. You know it? He has a… collection… of those like her. He felt that, with her mutation, she would be an excellent addition to his collection.”

Eshe should have known. Jolique was cousin to the Queen of Nasheen, and all but untouchable in Ras Tieg. No magistrate or God’s Angel would dare raid his house looking for captive shifters. Abuses committed by the rich and powerful were overlooked in Ras Tieg, just as they were in every country.

“What road?” Eshe asked.

“Rue Clery. She should arrive around fifteen in the morning.”

“Staff?”

“Four men and a wrangler.”

Eshe leaned back in the chair and lifted the gun off the table.

The priest sighed. The shadow of a smile tugged at his lips. He didn’t know that he’d been dead from the moment he sat down.

Eshe pointed the shotgun into the priest’s mealy little face and pulled the trigger.

The gun popped. The priest’s head caved in. Black, bloody brains splattered the wall behind the priest.

Eshe stood and wiped the blood from his face with his sleeve. The mostly headless torso of the dead priest slumped sideways. Eshe expected he’d feel happier about it, after all this man and his kind had done.

The bar matron, Angelique, tsked at him. “Did you need to do that?” she said. “That’s four priests in as many weeks.”

“That’ll keep them from coming around, then, won’t it?” Eshe pulled on his hat and pushed toward the door.

“Godless heathen,” Angelique muttered.

“I know all about God,” Eshe said. “These men don’t. Or did you forget what they did to Corinne?”

“It’s just… you Nasheenians—”

“Nasheenians don’t murder their own people for being born shifters. They don’t kill their own babies. And they sure as fuck don’t—”

“Shut it, Eshe,” a man at the end of the bar said. Eshe had seen him around, but couldn’t place him. Angelique’s hired muscle, ever since the Madame de Fourré started using the place for meetings for her rebel shape shifters. Angelique’s son was a member of the Fourré, but it didn’t mean they liked Eshe’s half-breed face. Sometimes he wondered if his heritage was more offensive to them than his ability to change into a raven.

Eshe bristled. “Sorry about the mess,” he said to Angelique. “It won’t happen here again.”

He would find a new tavern.

Outside, the Ras Tiegan night was cool. It was a rare clear night in the city of Inoublie during the rainy season. He could already smell the promise of more rain on the wind, mingling with the scent of curry and dog shit. As he hustled through the narrow streets, swarms of mayflies and cockroaches choked his path. A ragged, mewling desert cat in a cage whined at him from a high balcony.

Along the edges of the horizon, just visible through the occasional break in the buildings, was the swampy jungle—a dark, ragged stain. Odd hoots and cries and drones muttered at the edge of the city, barely muffled by the spotty filter that kept out the worst of it. What Ras Tieg had managed to build out here had been hacked out of contaminated jungle—a jungle that ate cities nearly as quickly as the Ras Tiegans could put them up. He passed the hulking wreck of a former church, now a recreation hall. Old, twisted slabs of metal protruded from the exterior—corroded, half-eaten. Metal was not known to last long on Umayma, but the Ras Tiegans had been entrenched there only twelve hundred years or so. Even their poorly put-together, non-organic ship skins took a while to break down.

He climbed up into the clotted, ramshackle district tenement he called home; swung down into the guts of his apartment. It was a tight little room: raised bed, mud-brick oven. Most of the important stuff he kept in the walls or in the pockets he’d burrowed out in the floor.

He took off his coat and stowed his gun. Then he unrolled his prayer mat, faced north, and went through the salaat for evening prayer. There was no call to prayer here, only the bells for midnight mass and the weekly call to services every ninth day. It was a lonely thing, to pray alone, to speak to God alone. Salaat always calmed his nerves, though, and when he finished the final recitation, he remained on his knees for some time, breathing deeply. If someone had asked him seven years before what he thought he would miss most about leaving Nasheen, he would not have thought about the call to prayer. Mostly, he missed the sense of being part of something larger than himself. Praying alone every day just reminded him of how different he was here.

As he settled into bed, he heard a soft whistle. He reached below the bed to where his shotgun lay, and waited. The whistle came again. Then a scrabbling on the roof. He remained still until he saw a familiar, scruffyheaded outline in the entry.

“Get in here before I shoot you on accident,” Eshe said.

Adeliz climbed down into the room, slender and quiet as a shadow in her baggy trousers and coat. The first time she’d come into his room, he hadn’t noticed her until she had her hands on his shotgun. Why they hadn’t killed each other then, he wasn’t so sure.

She crouched near the stove. “Cold in here,” she murmured. She talked softly, slip of a voice, just like she moved. “I think you should come to mass tonight,” she said “I thought I wasn’t invited anymore.”

The last time he went to midnight mass, he’d been roughed up and escorted out by three priests. Adeliz was one of the first members of the Fourré he had met, and it was she who led him to the first sorry cell of defeated shifter rebels. She was only seven or eight back then, but could pick a pocket like the most hard-assed kid in Mushtallah. Her fierce little face and fast fingers reminded him of himself, some days. That meant he liked her—but he knew better than to trust her.

“Sometimes they forget,” she said. “What about the puppets tomorrow?”

“No, I have a wake to go to.”

“Another priest? Not the one you killed tonight?”

“You heard about that?”

“I hear about everything.”

“Yes, it’s the wake for a different priest.”

“The Madame will not be pleased.”

“When was the last time she was pleased with me?”

“True, true.” Adeliz hopped from foot to foot. “Are you taking the girl with you? Your new partner? She was very angry you didn’t take her out tonight.”

“Isabet is always angry.”

“It’s why you get along so well,” Adeliz said, and beamed.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Eshe said.

“Language, language,” Adeliz said. “Did you find out where they took her? The Madame’s missing operative?”

“Jolique so Romaud’s house. They’ll be coming at fifteen in the morning, taking the Rue Clery. Four men and a wrangler.”

“Good news, good news,” Adeliz said. She hopped back up the ladder.

“Adeliz?”

“Yes?”

“Get her back. Don’t let them do to her what they did to Corinne.”

“The Madame will see to it.”

“That’s what she said about Corinne.”

Adeliz shrugged. “Just the messenger.”

And I’m just the pawn, Eshe thought. He thought of Corinne, and the way she laughed the first time he reached out to adjust the crumpled wimple that covered her tangle of curly black hair.

He could murder as many Ras Tiegan priests as he liked, but it was the Madame who decided what to do with the information he got from them. She decided who lived, and who died.

And he wasn’t sure how much longer he could put up with it before he took the Madame’s little rebellion into his own hands.

“Do you need anything for the wake?” Adeliz said. “Weapons? Explosives?”

“No,” Eshe said. “When the dead come back, I know exactly what to do with them.”

R
hys stood on the carved stone balcony of his tenement house in Khairi, smoking a sen cigarette and watching the blue dawn touch the desert. This far north, the desert moved at night, like maggots writhing on the surface of some rotten beast. In the garish red light of the moons, the desert was a bloody carcass shot through with splinters of wind-worn stone towers that predated the beginning of the world. Some natural configuration, maybe, or remnant of a civilization that had come before? It had been a long time since he questioned what had come before his people descended from the moons to remake the world. What had it been before? Barren and bloody, like this?