God's War (34 page)

Rhys was back a couple of hours
later. He carried a paper bag. He dumped four rotis on the table and pulled a
bulb of condensed milk from the paper bag.

“Anything?” Nyx asked.

“They gutted most everything,” he
said. “Except these.” He pulled two transmission rectangles from the paper bag.

“Can you read them?” Nyx asked.

“We don’t have the equipment for
it.”

“Who does?”

“I know a man in Bahreha who might
do me the favor. He’s a very old… friend.”

“You going?”

“If these can bring Taite back, I’ll
go.” He did not look pleased. Nyx knew what Chenjans did to criminals. If
Rhys’s man wasn’t as friendly as he hoped, Rhys would sit out his last days in
a hole in the floor before getting both his heads chopped off.

“Don’t be idle. A day there, a day
back. You need to take transit. We can’t spare the bakkie.”

“I know.”

“Then go. Do it.”

Rhys packed up. “I’m taking some
coin with me. We’re running low, but I’ll need to buy water.”

“Yeah,” Nyx said.

Khos watched Rhys walk out. “What’s
next?” Khos asked.

“Rhys gets us some information. I
recover. Then we go get Nikodem.”

“And Taite,” Khos said.

“And Taite,” Nyx said. Or whatever
was left of him.

Rhys wiped the dust from the window
inside the bus with the already dusty end of his burnous. The clasp mechanism
at the top of his window was broken, so hot air and red dust blew in from the
road and covered him in a fine mist. He pulled his burnous over his nose and
mouth. Red ants crawled along the floor. A man in a blue turban sat next to
him, clinging with arthritis-knotted hands to a carpetbag. Rhys wanted to take
the man’s hands in his and soothe them, but healing without provocation might
get a Chenjan magician killed, even if his poor skill had done any good.
Chador-clad women sat three to a seat in the back of the bus, juggling luggage
and children in their laps. The front was nearly empty. A few old men with
wisps of gray hair and a young man just old enough to enter combat training
took up a few seats.

He didn’t know why the man with the
turban sat next to him when there were so many empty seats, not until the man
started speaking.

“I don’t see many men on the roads,”
the old man said. “Not whole men, anyway. I sit alone in the teahouses. Most
are run by widows, did you know? Have you come from the fighting?”

“No,” Rhys said. “I keep a family in
Dadfar.”

It sounded like the truth.

“Is that so? How many sons do you
have?”

“Just the one,” Rhys said, and
thought of his father.

“Just one? Just one? A great
misfortune, many men would say. You must punish your wives or take another.”

“It is not their fault alone,” Rhys
said. Most rural men still believed that women had some control over the sex of
their children and bore girls for spite. It gave them someone to blame for
their misfortune. Someone besides God.

The turbaned man tapped his head and
pushed up the blue turban to reveal a bald head. One-half of the visible bald
skull was a pale green. His head must have been blown apart at the front.
Organic fixes often replaced missing or shattered skulls.

“You see this? Too many boys in my
family. I was first to the front,” the man said.

“And the rest of your brothers?”

The man dropped the turban, crinkled
his face. “Twenty brothers in all. Gone now. All gone. Gone to God.”

“Yes,” Rhys said. He thought of all
the men at the front. Thought of the genocide of a gender.

Bahreha lay in a wide river valley
about thirty-five kilometers west of Dadfar. The bus wound down a low rise of
mountains that looked out over the wasted river plain. Rhys’s father had shown
him pictures of Bahreha before the first wave of bombings. Bahreha had been a
desert oasis, one of the major trading centers along the border. What little
trade that came down the river from Nasheen now consisted of shipments of black
goods. They came in under the cover of darkness and departed in the same
manner. Bahreha sold more slaves and illegal organics than it did bread, or
silk, or lapis. The great palms that once shaded the river had been cut or
burned, and the tremendous tiled fountains of the market and government
districts were broken and dry. The green parks where children once played were
now sandy brown lots infested with small dogs, feral cats, and refugees.

The bus pulled into a busy transit
station packed with informal taxis, bakkies, and rickshaws. Vendors dressed in
colorful but tattered clothing swarmed the bus when it arrived and pushed fried
dog, hunks of bread, hard candies, and more useless items at the passengers as
they disembarked—shampoos, bath caps, costume jewelry, fake leather belts, and
cheap cloth for turbans. A couple of creepers lurked at the edges of the
crowds, carrying their drooping nets and collections of bugs in little wooden
cages.

Rhys pushed through the heaving tide
and started walking through the center of the ruined city toward the
riverfront. Ten years before, he would not have dreamed of walking through
these streets. His mother would have wailed at the thought. The city was full
of Chenjeens—Nasheenian and Chenjan halfbreeds—but also Nasheenian refugees and
Chenjan draft dodgers. They were a seething mass of the unemployed and the
unemployable. The few businesses still open had security guards with muzzled
cats on leashes posted out front. Those businesses that had retired from
service entirely had heavy grates over the windows and wasp swarms humming just
behind the barred doors. Rhys could feel them.

He walked the kilometer to the
riverfront high-rises. Two decades before, the buildings had been the most
sought-after property in Bahreha. Inside their now-barred courtyards, overgrown
thorn bushes hid the blasted patterns of old succulent gardens.

Rhys buzzed at the gate of a
wind-scoured building that needed a new coat of paint and a long visit from an
exterminator. Geckos skittered in and out of crevices along the outside of the
building, shielded by thorn bushes, and colonies of red ants pooled out all
along the foundation.

He buzzed twice more before a tinny
voice answered, “Who’s there?”

Rhys hesitated. “Am I speaking to
Abdul-Nasser?”

There was a long pause.

“You an order keeper?”

“No. Kin.”

Another pause. Then, “Come in
quickly.”

The gate swung open.

Rhys crossed the dead courtyard, and
went up a set of wooden steps. Someone had applied new paint to the center of
the steps, but neglected the edges. Under the awning at the corner of the
building, down a short open corridor, was door number 316. Rhys raised his hand
to the buzzer, but the door cracked open before he pressed it.

Rhys saw half a face; one dark
weeping eye peering out at him. The cloying, too-sweet stink of opium wafted
into the corridor, mixed with the old, heavy smell of tobacco.

“Rakhshan?” the old man said.

Rhys felt something stir at the
name. No one had called him that in a long time.

“Abdul-Nasser Arjoomand?”

“Hush. Peace be with you.”

“And with you,” Rhys said, his
response automatic, like breathing.

Abdul-Nasser opened the door just
enough for Rhys to squeeze past him. The room was dim, and Rhys paused a moment
in the door to wait for his pupils to dilate. Yellow gauze covered the windows.

He heard the door close behind him
and turned to see Abdul-Nasser bolting it with three heavy bars. After,
Abdul-Nasser swept his hands over the bars, and a stir of red beetles swarmed
the edges of the doorway.

“Now we can speak privately,”
Abdul-Nasser said, and offered his hands to Rhys. Rhys took them.

The sockets of Abdul-Nasser’s black
eyes seemed to sag in his lined face, like an old dog’s. The sleeves of his
threadbare tunic were pushed up, so when Rhys took his hands he saw old and new
bruises on the man’s wrists and forearms.

“You’re still taking venom,” Rhys
said.

Abdul-Nasser shrugged, but he pulled
away his hands and pushed down the sleeves of his tunic. “You know what I need
for my work,” Abdul-Nasser said.

“I do,” Rhys said.

The little one-room flat was a
ruckus of equipment: bits of old consoles and bug pans, piles of disintegrating
boxes and papers, worm-eaten books, tangles of leaking wires, and cracked
bottles of organic feed and roach fluid. Bug cages and aquariums took up one
wall. Dead locusts littered the floor. The dim lighting was in part due to the
strain on the room’s internal grid—most of the power was being rerouted to the
water pumps that fed the frogs, cicadas, mark flies, turtles, tadpoles, water
skimmers, and multitudes of fish in various states of living and dying that
clogged the aquariums.

“How have you faired? Let me get you
something,” Abdul-Nasser said. “Tea, something.”

“Thank you,” Rhys said.

Abdul-Nasser wended his way around
the cluttered room to the wall of the kitchen. Dishes overflowed the tiny sink.
Flies circled the dirty plates. When Rhys followed after him to help with the
tea, he saw something crawling in the sink—the damp, filthy plates bred
maggots.

“Maybe we can just sit and talk,”
Rhys said.

Abdul-Nasser shook his head. His
hair was tucked under a turban, so Rhys did not have to look at the state of
it, but Abdul-Nasser did stink, as if he did not wash even for the ablution.

“No,” Abdul-Nasser said. “I am still
civilized. We must have tea.”

He clattered around, rinsed out a
dirty teapot, and tried to get the fire bugs in his hot plate to stir.

In the end, the tea was lukewarm, in
dirty cups, set on a tea table that had once been a com counter. There were no
chairs. They sat on old cushions that stank of dogs.

“So you are a magician now,”
Abdul-Nasser said. “Those old women took you in?”

“They did.”

“No doubt they agreed with what you
did.”

Rhys sighed. “It was some time ago.”

“Yes. I have not seen your father
since.”

“Have you been home?”

“A time or two.”

“You’ve seen my sisters?”

“Yes, all married now.”

“To whom?”

“Best I can recall, a local
magistrate. The one who mooned over them.”

“Nikou Bahman. The one my father
hated.”

“Yes, that man.”

Rhys stared at the tea. He could not
bring himself to drink it. He kept thinking of the maggots in the sink.

“He already had eight wives,” Rhys
said.

“Did you expect it would go
differently? Your sisters, the household, were disgraced when you did not
follow your father’s will. God’s will. Your father thought no one would take
them, not even as a ninth or twelfth wife.”

Rhys took a deep breath. “But they
married.”

“Yes.”

“Good. Children?”

“All boys. You have four nephews.”
Abdul-Nasser picked up his tea but did not drink it. He peered at Rhys. “But
you did not come to me for news of your house. Not after eight years.”

“No,” Rhys said. He pulled the
transmission canisters from his tunic pocket and set them on the table. “I need
to read these. Our com man may have died for them.”

Abdul-Nasser set down his tea and
took one of the rectangles into his hand. He rubbed it between thumb and
forefinger, pressed it to his ear and shook it.

“Ah,” he said. “This is expensive.”
He bit it. “This is government. Nasheenian.”

“Can you read it?”

“Yes.” Abdul-Nasser stood, and went
to a tangle of equipment piled at the far end of the aquarium wall. He unpacked
some material, uncovered a com console, and inserted the rectangle into the
panel. He tapped out a signal to the chittering bugs in the console.

Rhys got up and stood next to him.

A strong female voice bled out from
the speakers; the cadence and inflection were like Nyx’s, only more stilted,
more educated.

“Don’t tell
anyone,”
she said,
“what I’m about to tell you…”

They only listened to half of the
first canister.

It was enough.

“Can you get me a transcription of
this?” Rhys asked with a growing sense of dread, as Nyx’s dead sister talked
about the end of the war, the end of Chenja. He thought of Khos and Inaya, and
the alien with the big laugh.

Abdul-Nasser pressed a button on the
console. “Put your hand here,” he told Rhys, and Rhys put his hand on the
faceplate next to the printer plate. He felt a soft prickling on his hand.

Blank organic paper began to roll
out of the console.

“It will respond only to your
touch,” Abdul-Nasser said. “I’ve locked it as well, for forty-eight hours from
now. It won’t open until then. Keep it close until you need it. I hope you have
a trustworthy employer.”

Rhys stared at the paper as it came
out of the machine, even as Kine’s voice continued to assault him from the speakers.

“What sort of trouble have you
gotten yourself into?” Abdul-Nasser asked, staring at the speakers as if the
voice would take on human form and step from the machine with a flaming sword.

“More than I know,” Rhys said.
“You’ll destroy these?”

“Oh, yes. The moment it’s done
transcribing. You best not stay long.”

“I’m sorry, Uncle,” Rhys said.

“You were bound for trouble. Born
under an inauspicious star, your mother said.”

The printer stopped. Abdul-Nasser
tucked the papers into an organic case and handed them to Rhys.

“This is important,” Rhys said. “I
need to get this back to my employer and decide what we’re going to do with
it.”

“Your employer is Nasheenian,”
Abdul-Nasser said.

“Think what you will,” Rhys said. He
tucked the organic case into his satchel. “I should go. I said I wouldn’t be
long.”