“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.”