God's War (7 page)

“There was another complaint,”
Fatima said. “Not as potent as Yah Tayyib’s, but a formal complaint
nonetheless.”

“Raine,” Nyx said.

Fatima raised her brows. “You
expected it?”

“I’ve been expecting him to file a formal
complaint ever since I cut off his cock.”

“It was deserved,” Rasheeda said.

“Deserved or not, he’s filed a
formal complaint about a bel dame doing black work,” Fatima said.

“Lucky you left him his balls,”
Rasheeda said, “or you’d get a fine for reproductive terrorism.” She waggled
her index finger and snickered.

“So what happens now?” Nyx asked.
“You give me some kind of probation?”

“No,” Fatima said. “We terminate
your contract and send you to prison.”

“What?” Nyx said. Prison was for
draft dodgers and terrorists. Prison was for
men
.

“The sentence came from the queen.”

“I’m bored,” Rasheeda said. “Where’s
my soda?” She went naked into the hall, calling for Luce.

Nyx stared into her skinny, veined
hands again. It was like she’d woken up with someone else’s body.

“How long do I serve?” she asked.

“A year, maybe less. We could have
had you sent to the front.”

“How did you find me?”

“We had Rasheeda posted at Jaks’s
residence.”

Of course. She’d seen only three of
them at the fight. “So you knew about Jaks?”

“We looked up your note,” Fatima
said, then wrinkled her nose. “You look and smell like death. I’ll get you
something to eat.” She walked into the busy hall.

Prison, Nyx thought, with all the
criminals Raine and people like her had put there.

Nyx tried to pull her legs off the
bed. They were numb. How long had she been here? The window overlooking the
street was barred, and the walls were solid stone. How the hell could she get
bars out of stone?

But Fatima was coming back into the
room with a Plague Sister bearing a tray of something that smelled a lot like
food, and Rasheeda had her arms full of bottles of soda. If there was a way out
of this one, Nyx couldn’t think of it. Didn’t even know if she wanted it. Her
body was done.

“Here,” Rasheeda said, throwing her
a bottle. Nyx’s reflexes were off. She ducked instead of catching it. “You
won’t get any of those in the box.”

“When she’s done eating,” Fatima
told the Plague Sister, “I have a team coming to get her.”

Nyx didn’t finish eating, but they
still came for her.

And prison was pretty shitty.

“It’s time,” Yah Reza said.

Rhys entered the plague hall. Yah
Tayyib and two other magicians sat at a large circular stone table at the
center of the room. Three Plague Sisters, the hems of their white robes dripping
with spiders, sat across from them. Like Yah Tayyib’s operating theater, the
plague hall was a cavernous room lined with jars of mostly human organs. And
like the magicians’ quarters, the whole room hummed with the sound and feel of
bugs. Rhys’s skin prickled. He had waited some time for this.

Yah Reza followed Rhys inside and
bid him stand next to her within a pace of the table.

Three months after Rhys saw his
first alien, Yah Reza had deemed him ready for a magician’s trial. He had come
to the interior and been independently tested by the Plague Sisters. He had
read his performance in their faces, in the hard line the bugs themselves drew
against him. The Plague Sisters kept a diverse colony of insects within their
care, but he should have been able to manipulate them far more effectively than
he had. If the organs and entrails he’d mended on the slabs had been those
belonging to real human beings, he doubted his patients would have entirely
recovered. Some may not have lived. He knew the outcome of his evaluation even
before Yah Tayyib spoke.

“We have spent some time discussing
your evaluation,” Yah Tayyib said. “My fellow magicians and Plague Sisters
agree that you have some skill in the arts. No doubt Yah Reza would not have
undertaken your tutelage if she did not believe you were gifted.” He carefully
pressed the tips of his fingers together. “Unfortunately, we have not deemed
your talent sufficient to grant you a practicing government license.”

Rhys exhaled. What had he expected,
that a Chenjan man in his prime would be given leave to walk through a palace
filter and perform surgery on the Queen’s ministers? There would be no easy
road, no well-paying government job. But hearing it out loud felt better than
he thought it would. Something, some expectation, had been cut away. Hope,
maybe.

“However,” Yah Tayyib said, “we find
it acceptable to grant you a provisional license that allows you to practice so
long as you are employed. Yah Reza has expressed interest in keeping you on at
the magicians’ quarters as a teacher, if you wish it. Otherwise, you’re free to
take up gainful employment with whatever employer you see fit. Do you have any
questions?”

Rhys looked over at Yah Reza. She
smiled her sen-stained smile. She intended on keeping him prisoner for the rest
of his days, then.

“Yes,” Rhys said, turning back to
Yah Tayyib. “Is the denial of my government license based on my talent or my
race?”

The old magician shook his head.
“Rhys, if you were as talented as Yah Reza hoped, we would have no choice but
to grant you a government license. Nasheen could not turn away one with such
skill. But your talents are middling. We have no place among the palace
magicians or within the First Families for a mediocre Chenjan magician. You are
better suited for the private sector.”

Rhys swallowed his words. What was
there left to say? His father had cursed him the night he refused him. Cursed
and abandoned him.
This is my penance,
Rhys thought,
this time among godless Nasheenians.

“Thank you,” Rhys said finally.

Yah Reza led him out.

When the door closed behind them,
she said, “It is not such a terrible thing, to teach Nasheenian magicians. You
are capable with children and the teaching of standard arts.”

“I will not be staying long,” Rhys
said. “I’ll find employment elsewhere.”

“Of course,” Yah Reza said, and he
should have realized then that she knew something he did not.

The magicians did no end of business
with bel dames and bounty hunters. Both groups often came to the gym looking
for new recruits—petty magicians and women just back from the front. Government
officials frequented the fights as well, recruiting veterans and magicians as
order keepers. Rhys spent week after week at the gym acting the part of a cheap
harlot, trying to sell his services. But no bel dame would have him, and the
order keepers, of course, would not even speak to him. The magicians could
afford to pretend not to notice his accent and his coloring, but the rest of
Nasheen… the rest of Nasheen saw him for what he was—a Chenjan man, an infidel,
an enemy.

Yah Reza caught up with him one
afternoon in his chambers as he penned a response to an ad for a tissue
mechanic he had found in the morning’s newsroll. If they wouldn’t hire him on
as a magician, he would spend his days digging into the guts of bakkies in
Mushtallah. It was better than a lifetime of servitude to Nasheenian magicians.
Most tissue mechanics were just like him—failed magicians working for bread and
bugs.

“Why not give this up, baby doll?
Are things in my gym so bad?”

“A well-appointed prison is still a
prison,” Rhys said.

Yah Reza clucked her tongue. She
waved a hand toward his lamp and increased the light. Rhys felt the message she
sent the bugs, the chemical tingling in the air. Why did it take so much more
effort for him to produce the same reaction? Why gift this stubborn old woman
with enough skill to raise the dead but relegate him to the role of messenger,
with the occasional talent for staunching blood and fighting infection? God did
not grant talent indiscriminately.

Gift or curse, it was not enough.

“I keep you on for your protection,”
Yah Reza said. “Nasheen will eat you alive, boy. Even if you had the talent for
the real stuff, how long do you think you’d last in Mushtallah among the First
Families? How long before a gang of women cuts you up and feeds you to the
bugs? This isn’t Chenja, doll, where all you men get a free pass. Boys play by
rules here. Chenjan boys don’t play at all.”

“I’m going mad,” Rhys said.

“Weren’t you already? No sane man
would be sitting there in that chair—not unless I was interrogating him.”

Rhys met her look. Yah Reza was an
old woman, but how old? Always hard to tell in Nasheen. Sixty or more, surely.

“How long were you at the front?” he
asked. She had never spoken of it.

“Thirty years,” she said. “Give or
take. Intelligence, you know. Taught Yah Tayyib back when he was just Tayyib al
Amirah, eh? One of my best students.”

“You mean torture and
interrogation.”

“Oh, there was some of that,” Yah
Reza said absently. She sat across from him. Three cicadas leapt out of the
wide sleeves of her robe and crawled across Rhys’s letter. “Yah Tayyib lost
three wives to the war, you know it? And all of his children. You think he
would give
you
a license? If you were his charge,
he’d have turned you over to interrogation from the start. You’d be bleeding
out in the interior right now.”

“Why didn’t you do the same?”

“Me? Ah, doll.” Yah Reza spit on the
floor, and a dozen blue beetles scurried out from under the end table and
lapped at the crimson wad of spittle. “More death doesn’t cure the war, eh?
Just makes it drag on awhile longer. Yah Tayyib, yes, he would do whatever it
took to end the war. He would end it one Chenjan at a time. But then, so would
most men. Women too. That’s why this war never ends. Nobody lets go.”

“You’re letting go?”

“Completely? Ah, no. Maybe one
Chenjan at a time.”

He leaned toward her. “Then let me
go.”

She gave him a sloppy smile. “You
aren’t a prisoner.” She stood, and the cicadas flew back up into her sleeves.
“Go see Nasheen. But don’t expect it to love you.”

Yah Reza set him up with his
passbook and paid his train fare to Amtullah. The interior. He did not use the
space-twisting magicians’ gyms to travel. He had wanted to see the country, to
be on his own. If he’d made himself an exile, he needed to live as one.

When he arrived in the city, he set
up several interviews with merchants looking for magicians to accompany their
caravans north, through the wastelands.

During the day, Amtullah was a
raucous mass of humanity, full of half-breeds and chained cats and corrupt
order keepers and organ hawkers and gene pirates. He had trouble following the
accented Nasheenian of the interior, and the fees for everything—from food and
lodging to transit—were far higher than he’d anticipated. At night, the sky
above Amtullah lit up with the occasional violet or green burst, remnants of a
border barrage that managed to get through the anti-burst guns. The sound of
sirens sent him to bed most nights, as regular as evening prayer.

But when he went to his interviews,
he was cast off the porch or stoop or simply turned away at the gate more often
than not. His color was enough. They did not wait to hear his accent. A little
more talent, perhaps, and he could have perfected a version of Yah Reza’s
illusory eyes to mask the obvious physical evidence of his heritage. As it was,
he kept his burnous up and his hands covered when he traveled, and spoke only
when he had to. It saved him harassment on the street, but not from his
potential employers.

He spent many months in Amtullah
getting thrown off doorsteps and turned away from tissue mechanic shops. Hunger
made him take up employment as a dishwasher at a Heidian restaurant in one of
the seedier parts of Amtullah, the sort of place he did not like walking around
in at night and liked living in even less. He worked fourteen-hour days, six
days a week, and came back to the buggy room he rented smelling of sour cabbage
and vinegar. The other three days of the week he spent at the local boxing gym
looking for real work—magician’s work—something that made his blood sing.

And every day, six times a day, he
prayed. He submitted all that he was, this life, everything, to God.

He was pinched and spit on at work
and on the street. His overseers were Heidian women, mostly indifferent, but
the patrons were a mixed group, largely Nasheenian, and when he walked among
them uncovered he was jostled and cursed and jeered. Retaliation would have
meant the loss of his job. A few women, it was true, were disinterested—some
were even kind—but the daily indignities of being a Chenjan man in Nasheen
began to wear him down. He spent less time at the boxing gyms looking for work.
He spent most nights with his forehead and palms pressed to the floor,
wondering if his father had cursed him not to death but to hell.

One late night, he decided to walk
home from work down a street that would take him to the local mosque in time
for midnight prayer. The streets were quiet that night, and the air tasted
metallic, like rain. Or blood.

A group of four or five women walked
toward him on the other side of the street. He paid them no attention until
they crossed over to his side of the empty road and called out to him.

“You have the time?” one of them
asked, and as they neared he could smell the liquor on them. They were young
women.

“I’m sorry, I do not,” he said. “It
is near evening prayer.”

“The fuck’s that accent?” one of
them said.

Rhys picked up his pace.

“Hey, man, I said, what’s that
accent?”

The tallest girl pulled at his
burnous. She was stronger than she looked. The tattered clasp of his burnous
snapped, and it pulled his hood free. He staggered.