God's War (13 page)

He wanted to take her hand. He shook
his head, sighed deeply through his nose, and followed after her.

They were given over to a woman in
yellow, who took them through yet another gate and into a massive courtyard.
The smells dissipated.

Spotted sand cats prowled the yard,
not one of them tended by a chain or a trainer. Women ran through military
drills along the far side of the square, dressed in the long, green, organic
trousers and gauzy sandals of the Queen’s guard.

They wound up a broad staircase
flanked by statues of some sort of muscular maned sand cat and into an airy
compound with a fountain at the center. Water ran out in four directions along
grooved channels carved into the brightly tiled floor. A couple of tall trees
with serrated leaves and giant orange blossoms filled the yard. The trees had
recently dropped some sort of fruit into the water channels. Rhys realized he
had no idea what kind of fruit it was.

“I’ll announce you,” the woman said.
“It may be some time. Tea?”

“Do you have whiskey?” Nyx asked.

“Tea will be fine,” Rhys said.

The woman called a servant, and left
them.

Nyx stood in front of a carved stone
bench. Rhys looked at the wall behind her. Tiled mosaics covered it: images of
the first of the Nasheenian monarchs speaking to a white-veiled figure that was
likely supposed to be the Prophet. Rhys found depictions of the Prophet
distasteful at best, even those that veiled his face. Finding the image of
any
living thing in Chenja was difficult. Most of the
books produced before the war had had the pictures cut out and the faces
blackened. Chenjans and Nasheenians should have followed the same rulings of
the same Prophet, but words, even the words of the prayer language, were open
to interpretation, and when Nasheen had disbanded the Caliphate and instituted
a monarchy, existing divisions in those interpretations had reached a violent
head.

We were always two people, Rhys
thought, gazing at the veiled face. It’s what his father had told him when Rhys
first questioned the war. Rhys had heard it said that Nasheenians and Chenjans
came from different moons, believers from different worlds, united in their
belief of God and the Prophet and the promise of Umayma. For a thousand years
they had carved out some kind of tentative peace, maneuvered their way around a
hundred holy wars. They had agreed to shoot colonial ships out of the sky, back
when that was still possible, but this? It was too much. Chenjans would submit
only to God, not His Prophet, let alone any monarch who wanted to sever God and
government. That final insult had resulted in an explosion of all the rest, and
the world had split in two.

The other walls presented the more
traditional forms of decoration—elaborate raised script, passages from the
Kitab carved into the walls and painted in bright colors. Through the airy
wooden grating of the windows lining the courtyard, Rhys saw other waiting
areas and long hallways. He heard the sounds of more water beyond them, hidden
gardens, perhaps. The smell of roses and lilac. Pervasive. It made his eyes
water.

“Not so bad a place, huh?” Nyx said.

Rhys sat on the bench. The air was
cool. The open center of the courtyard must have been filtered. He pulled back
the hood of his burnous.

“Nasheenians spend too much time
worshipping images,” he said.

“Yeah, well, I never read anything
in the Kitab about prayer wheels being the quickest way to get a response from
God either. I thought you’re supposed to submit, not ask Him for things.”

“We don’t all use prayer wheels,”
Rhys said, and grimaced. There was nothing worse than a Nasheenian mistaking
him for a Chenjan purist instead of an orthodox. At least no one asked if he
was a follower of Bahay anymore. The mullahs had wiped out that sect three
years before. “When did you ever read the Kitab?” Nyx looked away from him,
back toward where they’d come in. “Doesn’t everybody read it? Man, I could use
a whiskey.”

“How can you read such a beautiful
book and turn your back on it?”

“Never said it wasn’t a beautiful
book. I just don’t believe there’s some man up there in the black who gets off
on watching us pound our head on the pavement six times a day.”

Rhys watched her. “And yet you must
have believed there was a God, at some time. You did go to the front.”

“I went to the front for my
brothers,” she snapped, and the force of the response surprised him.

The servant returned with tea and a
decanter of whiskey for Nyx. Nyx walked over to the lip of the fountain and
sat, square in the sun, her burnous pushed back over her shoulders. Though Rhys
was reasonably certain of the filter, he guessed that Nyx would have sat there
uncovered regardless. He had never met anyone so casual with their life. Most
people that careless or arrogant were dead before thirty. How she continued to
elude a violent death while actively courting it still mystified him.

“You must have had a powerful belief
once, to take you out there,” he persisted. “If I’d ever been called, it would
have been difficult to answer.” Saying it that way, saying “if,” had become
such a natural thing, such a natural story, that it fell off his tongue without
a hitch. It was easier to say in Nasheenian.

Nyx barked out a little laugh. “Oh,
yeah? You saying that if your mullahs told you God wanted you to go, you
wouldn’t have? Don’t be an ass, Rhys. You would have gone. You would have
dressed up for it.”

He looked down into his lap so she
could not see his face. Sometimes he wondered how two people could work
together for so long and still know nothing about one another.

They sat waiting an hour more before
another yellow-clad woman summoned them. The woman was tall and lean, with a
blunt, bold face and keen stare. When she walked in, Rhys knew she was a
magician, though she dressed in the same uniform as the queen’s other
attendants. The look she gave him confirmed that she knew he was a magician
also, and they held each other’s attention for a brief moment. She turned to Nyx.

Nyx had finished most of the
whiskey.

“She will see you now,” the woman
said as four more women turned out from the arched doorways to join her. They
were a formidable bunch, dark-haired and dark-eyed, with the backs and
shoulders of women who could pull rickshaws and swing swords with equal ease.
They were very Nasheenian.

“I am Kasbah,” the woman said. “We
will, of course, need to search your persons for weapons and contaminants.
Weapons will be returned when you exit her presence.”

Rhys unbuckled his pistols. He
turned over the loop of ammunition he kept at his belt and the dagger at his
hip.

Watching Nyx disarm was a more
drawn-out affair. There was the sword she kept strapped to her back, her
pistol, her whip, the garroting wire she kept strung in her dhoti, the bullets
sewn into her burnous, the bullets strung around her neck. The dagger strapped
to her thigh, the pistol strapped to the opposite calf, the three poisoned
needles she kept in her hair. He noted she kept the garroting wire she used to tie
her sandals, but she pulled out the razor blades tucked into the soles.

The women must have been used to bel
dames and bounty hunters, because they did not blink at the pile of weaponry
she handed over. Though the filters had cleared them both of bugs, the women
searched their pockets. Kasbah neatly found and turned out Rhys’s hidden bug
pockets. She was, most certainly, a magician.

“We’ll also need to perform an
organics search,” Kasbah said. She did not look at him, but she had just pulled
her hands from his hidden pockets.

Rhys flinched. Nyx looked over at
him. “Can’t we skip that?” she asked.

“I’m sorry,” Kasbah said, “but
particularly when”—she gave Rhys another open look—“we have those trained in
the art of assassination within her presence, we must perform a search. If
you’ll come with me, Nyxnissa, I will have your companion searched separately.”

Rhys said, “No. I’ll stay here.” He
had been through many a Nasheenian organics search. The kind by women like the
ones on the train. He felt a sharp tightening in his chest. Sweat broke out
across his brow. I’ve been here too long, he thought.

Nyx was fiddling with her red
letter. “I’ll be in the next room,” she said, but from the tone of her voice,
even she knew that would not be enough.

“No.” He pulled his burnous more
tightly around him. The fear was in him now, the memories of half a hundred
organics searches during the years he’d lived in exile. They did not just use
their fingers to search every cavity, orifice, and wound on his body for hidden
organics, but far more invasive tools. They were never gentle. These cold women
on the interior knew little of the war and had seen few Chenjans. They would
enjoy venting their rage and frustration onto his black body.

“Can I go with him?” Nyx asked.
“What if I go with him?”

“These aren’t customs agents,” Rhys
snapped at her. She couldn’t flirt or fuck her way out of everything. He felt
the blood rush into his face. He began to recite the ninety-nine names of God,
silently. Stillness, he thought, silence. This is all temporary.

Nyx shot him a dark look.

Kasbah clapped her hands. “Come,
now. You wish to be searched together? This is acceptable. Many women worry
over their men. I understand.”

“That’s fine,” Nyx said.

“Nyx, I’m not—” Rhys began. He
tripped over the names of God, lost count. Started over.

Nyx stepped up and took his elbow.
The names of God fell away. She was about his height, but heavier, solid, and
when she took his arm, the fear, too, bled away. Her touch filled him with an
emotion so complex that he could not name it. The same woman who could cut the
head off a man with a dagger in sixty seconds could ease his mind in the face
of a thousand angry Nasheenian women. She could banish all thoughts of God, of
submission. Some days she made him feel like an insect, a roach, the worst
thing to crawl across the world. And then there were the times, like now, when
she brought him a stillness he had known only with his forehead pressed to a
prayer rug.

She said to him, “We’ll be all
right.” To Kasbah and her women, “We’ll be all right.”

Kasbah led them to the examination
room. Rhys’s pulse quickened. He would have bolted if not for Nyx’s hand on his
arm.

“You’ll be all right,” she said. She
would know the sorts of things Nasheenian women had done to him before. She had
likely done work like that herself.

What had this exile made him? What
was he becoming? He prayed; God, how he prayed. But he dreamed, often, in
Nasheenian now, and the memories of his father’s face had slipped away long
ago. How could one forget his father’s face? It was like forgetting the face of
God.

The women stripped Nyx first,
searched her, and when she was putting her clothes back on, told him to strip.
And he obeyed them, as he had before, as he would again.

When he had been in Rioja, he found
out what Nasheenians did to unescorted Chenjan men. He dreamed now, some
nights, of Nasheenian women and boys, bloody mouths, screaming.
His
blood.
His
screaming.

He turned his back to Nyx and stared
at the wall. When they bent him over the table, he felt Nyx’s hand on his back.

“You’ll be all right,” she said.
“I’m here.”

The ninety-nine names of God…

He gripped the table so hard his
hands hurt.

When he was clothed again, Kasbah
led them back to the courtyard. Nyx and Rhys stayed several feet behind her,
walking gingerly. As they walked, their hands touched. Rhys knew he should be
the one to step away an appropriate distance, to maintain a modicum of modesty
even after all that, but he didn’t have the energy to break away from her. It
was the history of their… partnership? Alliance? Contract? His inability to
pull away was all that kept him next to her. But what kept her here? Her
arrogance, her selfishness, her desperate need for a magician, even a poor one?
She hated him as much as any other Nasheenian did, but she had hired him and
kept him, long after his usefulness as a sly slap in the face to Yah Tayyib had
expired.

She strode next to him with her
usual confidence, a hard but neutral look on her face. She was impossible to
read.

“This way,” Kasbah said. She took
them back to the courtyard and through one of the archways. The air beneath it
shimmered as they passed, although, unlike the other two filters they’d walked
through, it was transparent when undisturbed. They moved into another courtyard
teeming with succulents, shielded from the suns by an opaque filter. Rhys took
a deep breath. The air was warm and humid. At the other end of the yard—along a
path that curved through the broad-leafed plants and heavy flower heads lining
the stone path—were two latticed doors.

Kasbah opened the doors onto a broad
terrace, also shielded by an opaque filter. Inside, a short, squat woman sat at
a table on the terrace.

Kasbah announced them.

“Nyxnissa so Dasheem, and her
companion, Rhys Dashasa.”

The woman on the terrace did not
stand. She turned a soft, slightly sagging face to them, her mouth a thin line.
She had the flat, broad nose of a Ras Tiegan and the strong jaw and deep brown
complexion of a Nasheenian. As she watched them, she turned up the corners of
her mouth. “Rhys Dashasa isn’t a Chenjan name,” she said. The voice made her
sound older than the look of her face.

“It’s not supposed to be,” Rhys
said.

Everyone on Nyx’s team had their
secrets. Nyx said nothing of her time at the front, though Rhys had seen a
public copy of her military records, which indicated she had been reconstituted
and honorably discharged. Her honor was not one she spoke of. Taite had never
told any of them why he’d run from Ras Tieg, and when his sister mysteriously
arrived in Nasheen eight months ago, pregnant, he simply said that he was her
only means of survival and refused to elaborate. Khos’s time at the brothels
was too extensive for traditional reasons, even if Mhorians were as sex-crazed
as they were purported to be. Anneke had blown up more things than even she
would admit to, and Rhys suspected she’d spent a lot of time in prison. She had
no public record at all. He knew. He had checked.