It was one of his sisters, Alys, who helped Rhys escape the second time. She called her friends, members of Chenja’s own underground, and they had gotten him as far as the border. At the border, their vehicle hit a mine.
Bloodied faces. Body parts. He remembered the smell of burning flesh. Not his own.
After that, he ran.
Ran and ran and ran, until his skin peeled off and his lungs burned.
He had not gone to the front to sacrifice himself to God. He had not gone there to save anyone. In the end, he did not even believe he would save himself. He was just running, fueled by terror, a man running from God, from His will.
But Nyx had not been afraid.
She had volunteered for the front to protect her brothers. She’d protected the boys and women in her squad, until the end, and when she’d failed at that, she burned herself. Carried out the punishment she believed God would have meted out for her sin.
She drank too much, shot up and swallowed drugs, had sex indiscriminately with both genders, did not bend her knee to God, but which of them had been more pious? Which had been stronger before God? The woman who had given her brothers and body to God and then rejected Him, or the man who pretended godliness but could not perform the ultimate act of submission?
Khos put his meaty arm up on the seat and looked back at Rhys. “You sure you don’t want us to drop you off with somebody in Chenja? Must be somebody doesn’t want you dead.”
“No,” Rhys said.
Khos nodded and turned again to the road.
Rhys felt a knot of fear in his stomach and reached instinctively for his copy of the Kitab, but it was not there, of course. Raine had taken everything from him during the interrogation.
Rhys closed his eyes. He did not think of Nyx’s offensive remarks, the heat of her next to him, the way she looked at him when he read to her, her filthy fingernails and stained teeth and the terrible way she mangled her Chenjan. Instead, he thought of her hair. Long and braided, botched and unbound. Black glossy hair like the deepest part of the sky where there were no stars, just darkness. Umayma, at the edge of everything.
And he thought of Kine’s words then—the voice that spoke with the same inflection as Nyx’s, the voice that told him she had been making black market deals with Khairian nomads and interstellar gene pirates who sold her the base ingredients for winning the war.
“These are old-world powers that must be controlled,” Kine had said, her voice even, a little distant. “To take the red sand out of its natural environment, to transport it out of the wastelands, could mean a disaster beyond our imagining. But handled the right way, correctly understood, it could win us the war without the need to alter our shifters. We could, effectively, cure the war by wiping out its cause.”
But if she could not wipe out his people, she would find a way to enslave and modify the shifters.
Rhys opened his eyes and looked over at Inaya, her pale, dirt-smeared face, and tried, again, to see something of the shifter in her. But there was nothing. The air did not bend or crackle around her the way it did around Khos, as if he existed outside the world.
“I have wondered,” Rhys said, “how you got Husayn’s bakkie over the border.”
Khos turned to look at them.
Inaya shifted her son in her arms. “How do you compel bugs to send your messages? How do you use them to mend flesh?”
“I could say it’s a matter of examining the air, tasting it, and telling it what to do,” Rhys said. “You would have to be a magician to understand.”
“It is like that, then,” Inaya said. “There is some knowledge one just has. That just is. There are things the people of this world can do that no one should know. Your bel dames know something of that. Nasheen’s bel dames have existed in one form or another since the birth of the world. Before they cut up boys, they were responsible for killing rogue magicians and mutant shifters. Did you know that?”
“Yes,” Rhys said, “I’d heard of it.”
“It’s no secret.”
“How is it you know?” Rhys asked.
Inaya finally looked at him; her eyes were gray. “When you’re born with a number of talents you do not understand, you spend your life looking for others like you, to understand why it is you’ve been cursed by God. You do this so you can receive forgiveness for whatever it is you’ve done. You will go to great lengths to find the knowledge you seek and will cross many borders.”
“So what are you?” Rhys asked.
“A mistake,” she said.
Khos said, “We’re all mistakes. God’s or man’s.”
Rhys resisted the urge to say something grimly optimistic in turn. The silence stretched, and he realized that Nyx was no longer there to fill it with some sarcastic remark about blood or sex or the inevitability of human failing.
“It’s so quiet,” Rhys said.
“Yeah,” Khos said. “It’s nice.”
“Yes,” Rhys said, but there was a hollow place in his chest, a strange absence, as if some part of him were missing, a piece he never knew he had, or needed, or even wanted. But he missed it nonetheless.
39
The queen’s palace in Mushtallah was about what Nyx remembered. Or, at least, she knew nothing had changed much, even though it felt different. Maybe it was just different because getting into it without a Chenjan man was a lot easier. Maybe it was because people looked at how she was dressed and treated her better—money and power and all that catshit.
She sat by a little fountain in yet another reception area, gazing out at a mural of the veiled Prophet receiving and reciting the words of God. The air was cool; the season had turned, though it never stayed cool in Mushtallah for long. Cicadas sang from the trees lining the interior of the courtyard, and three locusts rested on the lip of the fountain.
Nyx wore a green organic silk burnous over long black trousers, a white tunic stitched in silver, and a black vest. The hilt of a new blade stuck up from a slit in the back of her burnous. She wore Tej’s baldric, Nikodem’s pistols, and a new whip attached to her belt. Her sandals laced up to her knees. Some lovely kid back in Punjai had done her braids for a couple bits. Good thing, too, because her hair was longer now and far better for having the ends razored.
She reached out and flicked one of the locusts into the fountain with the ring finger of her right hand. The new fingers were a good match. Most people didn’t even notice a difference. She still woke up sometimes and clutched at them, expecting to find an absence.
A woman in yellow appeared from one of the inner doors.
“She will see you now,” Kasbah said.
Nyx stood. “You going to disarm me first?”
“I will take your things as you pass, but let us excuse the formalities of the organics search.”
“Come, now, Kasbah, we’re already on such intimate terms.”
“Are we, now?” Kasbah smiled thinly. “We have a long path to tread to clean this house,” she said. “Come.”
Nyx left her pistols and her sword with Kasbah and walked down a short hall, through a low curtain, and into a big spherical room. Nyx stopped short as she entered. She looked up. The whole room was glass. Above her, she saw that she was enclosed by or beneath some kind of tank filled with water. Strange creatures, some kind of fish or animals or something, swam lazily above her, around her. Rocks and seaweeds and odd tentacled things covered the bottom of the pool. The water was so deep, the tank went so far back, that she could not see past the first ten feet or so. Nyx’s palms were suddenly damp, and she had to push herself to walk farther into the room. All that water….