Khatijah sighed. She, too, paused at the top of the hill. “Now that you’ve used up the bug, I’m going to die out here, right? So what’s the difference?” She grimaced. “He was marked as a terrorist. We had a note all written up for his head, but the Queen stayed our hand. She felt it was more dangerous to kill him. We didn’t know what the boys would do. So she put us on watch, just to make sure nobody else decided to kill him.”
“Like who?”
“Anyone. Chenjans. First Families. Rogue bel dames. The boys are a perfect munitions shell, primed to burst. All they need is a catalyst. His death would be it.”
“Then why’d they kidnap him? Why not kill him and set it off?”
“I don’t know. I wouldn’t have come out here if I knew that. All I know is, I got sent off on a fool’s errand with the most hated bel dame in the fucking country. You killed a lot of friends of mine in Tirhan.”
“Not so friendly, I think, if you weren’t there with them,” Nyx said. She folded her arms. “What the fuck is Fatima playing at?”
“There,” Khatijah said, and pointed to a small figure making its way into the valley from the opposite side.
Nyx and Khatijah walked down to meet it.
As Nyx got closer, she realized that the black robe the figure wore was actually made of ravens’ feathers. The figure appeared to be a woman; small, dark, with a pinched little face that appeared almost Drucian and hands knotted up like claws, as if she suffered from some terrible arthritis.
Khatijah nodded when she met her; the closest a Nasheenian ever got to bowing.
“I’m Khatijah Basima, sent by councilwoman Fatima Kosan of Nasheen.”
The woman held out her fingers, and Nyx realized she had some kind of insect affixed to the ends of her ring and index fingers. Their mouths covered the tips of her fingers completely. Stingers protruded from their ass-ends.
“I must taste you to verify,” the woman said.
Khatijah held out her hand. The woman pricked her with the insect stingers, then drew back. She pulled her hands into her robe, no, not a robe, some kind of cape or burnous, and began humming. She closed her eyes.
Above, the murder of crows over the settlement let off a cacophony of cawing that hurt Nyx’s ears.
“Good, good,” the woman said. She opened her eyes and smiled. Her teeth were rotten. Nyx didn’t see many rotten teeth in Nasheen unless somebody was using sen or had their teeth blown out in some accident. The water was treated to prevent it.
“Thank you for speaking with us,” Khatijah said.
“I am always thankful to speak with my ancestors,” the woman said.
Mad as a fucking magician, Nyx thought.
“You told us you saw Hamza Habib brought through here several months ago. Do you know where they were taking him?”
“And who was taking him?” Nyx asked.
“They are going beyond the Wall,” the woman said, and pointed her clawed hand north.
“How far is that?” Nyx said.
Khatijah glared at her. “I’ve got it, Nyx. Thanks,”
“A few more days,” the woman said.
“But where over the wall?” Khatijah asked.
“Bomani,” the woman said.
“What is that, exactly?” Nyx said.
“One of the old purifiers. They are going to remake him.”
“Into… what?” Nyx said.
Khatijah held up a hand to Nyx. “Can you give me a moment, please?”
“Can you hurry the fuck up, then?”
Khatijah said, “Who is going to remake him? And why? Is it the Chenjans? Bel dames like me?”
“Oh, it’s much worse than that,” the woman said.
“Who, then?”
“The First ones have taken him. They have a mind to retake Nasheen.”
“Wait,” Nyx said. “Retake Nasheen? Nasheen is already taken. They already run Nasheen.”
“Not your first ones,” the woman said. “Go beyond the Wall. To Bomani. You will find them. I spoke to them before they left. They drained our cairns dry, and remade many people before we stopped them.”
“Remaking into what?” Nyx asked.
The woman cocked her head at her. “Back to the beginning. Into the stuff that makes the world. The shape shifters know of it. It is the place we go, the place we put our bodies when we are in form. They wish to put us all back there. Start over. Jealous gods.”
“This make any sense to you?” Nyx asked Khatijah.
She shook her head.
The woman bowed her head. “Is there any other way I can assist?”
“No, thank you,” Khatijah said. “Unless you can convince the other people here to let us stay a few more days?”
“Oh, you don’t want to do that.” The woman stared at the cloud of ravens. “No, you don’t want to do that. Keep going north. It is much safer there than here.”
“Something tells me that’s not as comforting as it sounds,” Nyx said.
Khatijah reached into her burnous. She pulled something out and placed it into the woman’s outstretched hand.
“Thank you,” Khatijah said.
The woman nodded and turned away. She started back the way she had come.
“What did you give her?” Nyx asked.
“Nothing,” Khatijah said. “It’s an empty gesture. It’s just… what’s done out here.”
“You gave her nothing for that information?”
“You heard her. She has her own reasons for helping us.”
“This trip just went from fucked up to totally fucking crazy shit,” Nyx said.
“I expect it’s all about to get much worse,” Khatijah said, gazing north.
“What are we dealing with here?”
“I don’t know. Only Eskander’s been out any further than this.” She glanced back at Nyx. “But that doesn’t do us any good now, does it? You figured I was the real guide, didn’t you? That I was the only one you needed.”
“I figured your sister was insane. You were a safer bet.”
“You were wrong,” Khatijah said.
27.
Nyx had always wondered what lay at the end of the desert. Now she knew.
At the end of the desert was a wall.
She had never seen anything like it, not in half a hundred cities. The Wall was a black shadow. The sand pooled against it like weevils caught up in honey, the living crawling across the dying to the source of the desert’s darkness.
They entered the wall’s shadow sometime in the early afternoon, after two days’ walking from the as-yet-unnamed settlement. They had traded for what little food there was, and drank freely from the settlement’s water, but that was all.
Now they walked toward a massive red line that took up the horizon. They soon found that they could travel longer, though, because the suns tipped below the massive wall much sooner, and they could spend much of the afternoon plodding through artificial dusk.
Khatijah pulled out a glow globe an hour before the first sun set. “Looks like a fucking toilet hole out here,” she said.
And when the first sun set, it really did look like a hole. Sound was magnified. Every step across the sand sounded like walking over glass. The echoes got eerie. Nyx heard things beyond the circle of light. Bugs, beasts—not cats or dogs or ravens, parrots, no—but something more primitive; something made of the desert, as old as the world itself.
“Are we going to stop here tonight?” Eshe asked tentatively.
“Could be interesting,” Nyx said.
Ahmed snorted. Isabet said something mushy in Ras Tiegan and pulled closer to Eshe. Nyx rolled her eyes.
“The light might keep through the night,” Khatijah said.
“Light doesn’t always keep the dark things away,” Nyx said.
“It helps,” Khatijah said.
Nyx couldn’t argue that.
“They said there was a city near that Wall,” Ahmed said. “Maybe we just can’t see it yet. Further east, maybe?”
“We’ll get some sleep now,” Nyx said. “I got first watch.”
“I can go a little longer,” Eshe said.
“It’ll be just as bad another kilometer ahead. I can’t see any lights. We need to sleep.”
“God knows we are not waiting on the light,” Khatijah muttered.
As they bedded down, Ahmed began drawing a circle in the sand around them. It was something the woman in the settlement had told them to do, if they insisted on going further north. Nyx had a good idea of what the sand would do out here without a circle. She had seen what it did back in Tirhan, when it was unleashed on a bunch of bel dames. She wasn’t looking for a repeat.
Nyx took first watch. The night had fallen some time before, and she could hear the chittering and moaning of some foreign thing bawling across the desert. Out here, the desert was a chunky ruin of scattered stone croppings, some twice as tall as her, others just large enough to trip over. Kage had knocked one of the protuberances over, and it had vomited a sea of green chittering bugs with triangular heads and soft, luminescent bodies.
Ahmed joined Nyx on an overturned outcrop, some broken thing long ago sheared off and gone dormant.
“You have any sen?” she asked.
“Not for a long time,” he said.
They sat in silence for a while. Something hissed, far off. Nyx peered off in that direction, but the sound didn’t come again.
“We’ll lose everything to the bugs eventually,” Ahmed said.
“I’d rather we gave them a run for it,” Nyx said. She glanced at him sidelong, considering. He was pretty, she’d give him that. And tough, for all his prettiness. It’d been a long time since she could say a pretty man was tough.
Ahmed caught her looking. “I’m not that man.”
“What man?”
“The one you’re always thinking about when you look at me.”
Ahmed hugged his knees to his chest. The night was cool, but despite the necessity, the gesture was surprisingly boyish. In the dim light, he reminded her of her eldest brother, Amir.
He peered at her. “What?”
“You remind me of my brother. Dead a long time now, with all the rest.”
“You must have seen a good number of dead men.”
“As have you.”
“And a good many women who put them there.”
“Wars don’t keep on unless everybody’s behind them. Men just as much as women. Turn a dead eye to it, profit from it, roll over and accept it… if you’re not actively resisting it, you support it.”
“I’m not going to debate politics with you. Not now. Not out here.”
“I’ll accept that,” Nyx said. “If you answer a question for me.”
“What?”
“At the settlement, when that woman came in, you thought she was somebody else. Who did you think she was?”
Ahmed shrugged. “I was disoriented. I don’t know. You know how it is, after you come back. Every night’s a fucking war.”
The sound started out low, isolated. It came from just north of them, from the open desert.
Nyx thought at first that it might be some stray cicadas, maybe a small mutant swarm. But the sound, like all the others, simply flared and faded, like some gasping giant gone back to slumber.
“You have second watch,” Nyx said. “You should get some sleep.”
Ahmed stood. Gazed back into camp. “I’m worried about the girl.”
“Which one?”
“The Ras Tiegan. She blistered badly. And her arm isn’t pretty. I’m concerned about infection”
“Well, not everybody stays pretty forever. She’ll be fine. Gives her character.”
“She’s Ras Tiegan, not Nasheenian.”
“I like our way better.”
“Do you?” He sounded genuinely surprised.
The sound came again, the sighing chitter of some unknown mass. Nyx waved him off. “Go on.”
Ahmed gazed toward the sound, pensive. “I know you’re used to leading folks off to their deaths. So I’d like some of that false reassurance now. The kind I’m sure you’re good at.”
“It’ll be fine,” Nyx said. “It’ll all be fine.”
“That’s all you’ve got?”
“Sure you don’t have any sen? Some whiskey?”
He shook his head.
“Then that’s all I’ve got,” she said, and resumed her watch.
28.
“Sure is a wall,” Eshe said.
“Sure is,” Nyx said.
They had followed the red line of the Wall east for half a day along a track at the base of it. The Wall itself was so massive that, this close, it seemed to touch the sky.
Nyx told Eshe to take point. He was in the best shape. Kage had recovered more quickly than any of them expected, but Nyx put her at the back, with Isabet, whose blistered face and hands were still so painful that she wept at night.
Some part of Eshe felt Isabet’s pain was his fault. He knew it wasn’t true, but when she wept, it physically hurt him. He knew he was a fool. Felt like he was being played. When he flew into the settlement he hadn’t been in the best shape either, and he’d been worse after they sucked him nearly dry of blood. What they used all the blood for, he didn’t know. They stuck giant bugs on his arms and let them eat their fill until he passed out. Only then was he given water, and clothing, and enough food to bring him back from the edge of death after shifting.
Whoever those people were, he wanted nothing to do with them ever again. He’d been too weak to go after Isabet and the others, and he hated himself for it. Hated himself for no good reason. She was everything he hated about Ras Tieg. So why did he care so much about what happened to her? Why couldn’t he just turn it all off the way Nyx did?
The cat scat along the way got fresher, the path more solid, and by evening Eshe caught sight of their first fellow traveler, a tall, dark man wearing a purple turban and shiny robe whose surface seemed to move as he walked. Eshe assumed it was organic until he got up close, and saw that the bugs weren’t the usual tiny nits, bound together so small as to seem like one living skein, but thumbnail-sized roaches linked jaw-to-belly. The man led a small sand cat on a leash. The cat wasn’t more than knee high, but it hissed back at them as they approached.
Ahmed asked the man, in Khairian, how far the settlement was. The man glanced back once. He shouted something in some other language, then quickened his pace.
But it meant they were likely going the right way. By evening, there were others on the road, and Eshe began to hang back with Nyx and the team, less worried about desert creatures. Soon, he saw the first indications of the city. A dusty pall hung over the horizon, and as the suns set blue, green, and amber lights became visible.
Beside him, Isabet began to cry.
Eshe took her hand.
“I thought we would die out here,” she said.
He didn’t tell her he had thought the same.
As they walked, Eshe saw a mass of light and movement all along the Wall ahead of them. He saw the people climbing up and down it. There were residences up there, and intricately carved balconies. The Wall itself was made of red stone, he thought, but when they finally got close enough to touch it, he found that it more closely resembled bug secretions. When he stood at the base and stared up, he could see dozens of people milling about along carved outdoor walkways, leaning over balconies. One man, nearly the same color as the Wall, wrung out some garment, and a rain of green beetles cascaded over the side. Eshe shook out his hair and stepped away from the edge of the Wall.
“Food, a place to sleep,” Nyx said. “Let’s see if they’ll take Nasheenian currency.”
“They’ll take bugs,” Ahmed said. He, too, was looking up at the people milling within the Wall.
“Find out what goes
for a good price, and see what you can wrangle up.”
“There are tents ahead,” Khatijah said. “I think we should stick to what we know. The Wall… not sure we’re permitted there.”
“I’ll look too,” Nyx said. “We need to find something better for carrying the water we’ll need on the other side of it. We need another guide, too. Let’s avoid doing what we just did again.”
“Can we find something for Isabet?” Eshe asked. He didn’t mention his own busted nose. If he was unremarkable before, a bent nose wasn’t going to do him any favors. Nyx owed him.
“We’ll get there,” Nyx said.
“When?” Eshe said.
Nyx stopped. Turned. Her expression was hard. “I didn’t ask her to come after us, Eshe. That was her choice. We get to her when we get to her.”
“Nyx—”
“That’s all,” she said.
Morning was painful, but at least it wasn’t on the sand. Ahmed woke in a cool room plastered in red sand. Kage sat in the round doorway, gazing at the teeming street below. The windows were set with the glassy, semi-transparent wings of some giant dragonfly. Eshe and Isabet were still asleep, their bodies almost touching. Isabet’s blistered skin was slathered in a sticky unguent that had soothed her enough to keep her quiet for the night—for the first time since they stumbled away from the strange settlement on the edge of the desert. Nyx was gone, presumably already off to start haggling. The woman who rented them the room had taken Nasheenian currency, but far too much of it for Ahmed’s taste. He wasn’t sure how much Nyx had left, but at the prices being charged out here, it wouldn’t last long. He needed to call up some bugs to trade.
Kage glanced back at him. She had not blistered like Isabet had—she’d been better protected from the suns—but her face was still pinched and hollowed. None of them were eating well.
Ahmed wasn’t sure how long Kage was going to stick with them. He figured she would bleed off into the city once they reached it. She wasn’t built to come out here in the first place, and things were only getting worse. He wouldn’t blame her for telling Nyx to fuck off. He’d thought about it himself. Many times. He told himself he stayed because of what he had done back in Nasheen. But in truth, this was the perfect place to get lost.
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