“Have you heard of Bomani?” Nyx asked Safiyah as they walked.
“Ah, yes. It’s one of the major congregations here. Something like a city.”
“You can get us as far as Bomani?”
“Am I being employed as guide now? I don’t believe we’ve negotiated for that additional service.”
Nyx sighed. “Never mind. You just seem to know your way around.”
“Indeed. Only not as keenly as perhaps you would hope.”
“Nyx?” said Khatijah.
Nyx turned. The wind wasn’t as strong today, but still persistent. The sand stung her eyes. She squinted.
“What?” she said.
“There’s movement back this way.”
“Eshe, see what she’s talking about,” Nyx said. He was closer than Kage, and to be honest, Nyx was too exhausted to haul herself all the way to the back of the line again.
Eshe sighed. “You’re welcome,” he said. He pulled out his specs and walked over to join Khatijah.
Khatijah pointed.
Eshe lit up like a burning bush.
Nyx didn’t even hear a shot or an explosion. One moment she was looking back the way they’d come, following Khatijah’s arm, and the next—a pillar of fire shot out of the ground where Eshe stood.
Nyx threw herself behind the nearest twisted white structure. She could feel the heat through her cover. She squeezed her eyes shut. Eshe’s keening cry was cut short.
Then someone else was screaming.
Isabet.
“Get to cover!” Nyx yelled.
Nyx let out a breath and looked for Ahmed. He might be able to call a swarm out here to shield them from view. From her position, she saw no one. They had scattered when the flame appeared.
Not one had knuckled forward to help Eshe. Not even her.
Her own fault. She had not hired heroes.
Nyx dove to the next mound. Ducked around a corner, searching for her fucking magician. Sand stuck to her where the mucus had adhered to her body.
“Ahmed!” she yelled.
She heard three shots.
Somebody squealed. Hers or theirs, she wasn’t certain.
“Ahmed!”
She ran for the next cover.
Halfway there, the sand around her erupted. She threw her arms up and leapt back, expecting shrapnel. Her whole body went taut as adrenaline rushed through her. Every instinct told her it was a mine.
But she was still whole, and there was a dusty woman swinging a sword at her from the newly blown crater.
Nyx backpedaled to her former cover, yanking at her own blade as she retreated. She was nearly out of bullets, and at close range, she was more comfortable with a blade.
Someone shouted behind her. The woman ahead of her stopped swinging. Nyx stabbed at her. The woman danced back.
“You are mine! I challenge you!”
Nyx turned. The oddly accented Nasheenian was familiar, though she could not place it.
Another woman strode toward her through the formations. Like the other, she was tall and red-brown, with a mane of dark hair. Nyx remembered her. The woman from the tea shop. The one insulted by Kage’s casual fuck.
Well, shit.
Nyx raised her blade.
The woman held up her serrated insect leg, but did not advance.
“I, Shani of Jithra’s Circle, challenge you.”
“And I don’t fucking accept.”
“You’re on Circle Jithra land now,” Shani said. “You accept or I kill you the way I did your boy.”
Nyx regarded the scorched sand where Eshe’s blackened husk lay smoldering. There were more women nearby. She saw a few glimpses among the formations.
“Where’s my team? You fry anyone else?”
“Not if you circle with me. Put away your blade. You’ll call the sand with blood out here.”
“But burning up a boy is fine, is it?” Nyx said. She could smell the burnt flesh. Her memory roiled, and then everything just tumbled apart. She swung.
The woman had the sense to look startled. The blade came down on her shoulder, drew blood before she could dance away.
“Hold your blade!” the woman yelled at her. “You’ll call the sand! You fool!” And then she was nattering off something in her language.
Nyx leapt forward. She felt a dart of flame shoot up behind her, right where she’d been the moment before. She swung again as the woman danced behind more cover. Nyx’s blade cracked against the white structure. It trembled. The tip of her blade whacked the desert woman again, this time in the face. It opened another wound. Blood spilled.
Nyx kept on, relentless, moving among the formations in time with the desert woman. She was aware, distantly, of something hissing around her. And voices. The Aadhya were calling to one another.
A gout of crimson sand burst from the ground ahead of her. Nyx stumbled back. Shani screamed. A twisted, spitting tornado of sand erupted from the ground around Shani. Nyx watched it tunnel into Shani’s open wounds and fill her skin to bursting. Shani’s body became a bloated sack. Her eyes bulged. Then her skin burst, and the sand spilled out, darker than the stuff that went in. The bloodless shell crumpled to the ground. The bloody sand joined the rest of the stuff at Nyx’s feet. She felt it ripple beneath her. This was not like the sand she encountered before in Nasheen. It was the wild variety, eating blood alone, leaving baggy skin and bone corpses behind.
Nyx turned away before she could retch, and ran back through the maze of structures. She found Eshe by following the smell of burnt flesh. When she reached him, she threw down her blade and pulled him into her arms. His skin was blackened; his face, unrecognizable. The clothes were burnt away or seared to the skin. His eyes had melted. In death, there was nothing that marked him as being any different than any other Nasheenian boy, burned up and left to die at the front.
“Eshe?” she said. But he was dead, of course. The same way her whole squad had died, melted up by some mine she had triggered instead of clearing.
She saw Ahmed a few steps away, and Kage just behind him. Ahmed didn’t hold a gun, but a long length of garroting wire. Isabet was crouched near Kage, behind one of the formations. Three dead Aadhya lay on the ground, with no visible open wounds. One’s head was cocked at an unnatural angle, and the other two looked like they had been garroted.
Surrounding them all were over a dozen living Aadhya. They said nothing. Did not move. Simply watched.
“Is this what you wanted, you bloody cats?” Nyx said.
She released Eshe’s body and drew her sword. She hadn’t seen Safiyah or Khatijah, which meant they were either dead or in hiding. She brought her sword to her own throat.
“Get the fuck out of here. I’ll call the sand myself, and my team will shoot each of you in turn. It’ll eat us all together. That’s a fine thing, isn’t it? All of us dead because Shani got jealous about who was fucking who? That what you want?”
It wasn’t until the silence stretched that she realized Shani may have been the only one among them who could speak Nasheenian.
The women stood in silence for some time. Nyx looked them all in the eye, but reading them was impossible. She didn’t know what lines had been crossed. Didn’t know what they respected, what they revered, only that this rogue woman had been insulted enough to want to fight her, and murder Eshe as an afterthought.
Sweat ran into Nyx’s eyes. The grit between her toes itched, and she wondered if she had bleeding blisters down there, wondered if the sand would slowly suck her dry—toes first.
Then the women began to turn away. First one, then another. They covered their faces with the ends of their turbans as they went. The women were so long-legged that they were lost among the formations within just a few strides.
It wasn’t until the last was clear that Nyx let her arm relax. The blade slipped from her fingers. She made herself look at Eshe.
Ahmed and Kage approached. She stared at Eshe’s melted eye sockets. Wondered if he’d ever convinced his wh
ite bitch to love him.
And that thought, oddly, was the one that cut her deepest.
She rounded on Kage. Took her by the collar. Smashed her up against one of the structures. It spurted a fresh gush of mucus.
“And you. You, you fucking maggoty cat in heat, you worthless fucking Drucian rag. This is your fucking fault. What the fuck were you doing fucking red women in the desert? This is what comes of it. This. This is your fucking doing,” Nyx spat.
Kage turned her cheek away. “It is private.”
“Private?” Nyx hauled her up again. She took Kage by the back of the neck and thrust her face down against Eshe’s charred body. “Private like death? Like my fucking kid’s death?”
“You don’t understand.”
“No, you don’t understand,” Nyx said. She pulled her scattergun.
Ahmed stepped forward, “Nyx—”
She swung the gun at him. “Can you fix him?”
Ahmed held up his hands. “He’s not a bel dame, Nyx.”
“Then shut the fuck up.”
“She wanted children,” Kage said. “I had to purge my debt. The debt for the lives I took. And the ones I’ve taken for you. There are just two ways to do that. Bearing children or saving a life. She asked for children.”
“What? You’re a woman, Kage. How the fuck did you give her children?”
Kage sucked in a long breath. “I am a woman, yes, but I can also give children. It’s… private.”
“Fucking what? Fucking Drucians.” Nyx shot off a round above Kage’s head. Kage flinched, at least. “I am so tired of your fucking secretive catshit. You’re barely fucking human.”
“We prefer to give life, not take it. Is that not human?”
“Fuck you,” Nyx said. “I need a minute.” She walked away a few paces. Isabet began to wail again. Nyx heard the Ras Tiegan run up behind her, to the body.
Nyx stumbled against one of the structures, far enough away that the smell of burnt flesh wasn’t as strong. Then she retched everything she’d eaten that morning, and dry heaved awhile longer after that, until tears came.
“You all right?”
Nyx raised her head. It was Khatijah. She must have run off in this direction, gotten clear of the women first thing.
“Yeah, cheery,” Nyx said.
Khatijah crouched next to her. She handed Nyx a water bulb. Nyx drank, not bothering to rinse the bile from her mouth. She valued the water too much.
“He was your kid?”
Nyx shook her head. “Took him on when he was eight. Street kid. Did a lot of work for me. Sent him off to Ras Tieg. It was safer. He bloody fucking hated me for it.”
“Shit happens.”
“I know that better than anybody.” She handed back the water.
Khatijah took it. “I’m a bel dame, Nyx. I may not have seen as much as you, but I had to give stuff up, too.”
Nyx wanted to shout at her, wanted to tell her nobody had given up more than she had. That was a lie, but it felt so true in that moment that keeping herself from screaming it at this young, stupid bel dame was physically painful.
“If Fatima is playing us with this, I’m going to fucking kill her,” Nyx said.
“Get in line,” Khatijah said. She stood and held out her hand to Nyx. “Ready?”
Nyx took Khatijah’s outstretched hand and stood. “Who was your first note?” Nyx asked.
“My brother,” Khatijah said.
“Ah,” Nyx said.
“Yeah.”
“Sorry, Khatijah.”
“Khat,” she said.
“Khat.”
“Yours?”
“Woman, actually. Sixteen-year-old signed on for two years of service. Deserted after a month. I was twenty.”
“How’d you get her?”
“Didn’t. Never brought her in.”
Khatijah looked genuinely shocked. “You brought in all your notes, though. All the bel dames talk about it. The woman too stupid to give up a note.”
“I gave up that one.”
“What happened?”
“She was infected. Some shit from the Chenjans. Forty people died, mostly her kin.”
“Oh.”
“That’s why I always brought in my notes, after.”
“They don’t teach anybody that.”
“The note was never registered to me. I had some people change it.”
“You ran black work from the beginning, didn’t you?”
“I never pretended to be a good woman, Khat.”
Together, they walked back to Eshe’s body. Isabet was kneeling over him, weeping.
Nyx took Isabet by her good arm and yanked her up. She didn’t mean it to be kind. Isabet cried out in pain.
“You listen here, kitten,” Nyx said. “I don’t have patience for weakness. You cry over him tonight. I need you focused for whatever the fuck this desert flings at us next, including more of your Ras Tiegan handmaidens. Understand?”
Isabet shook her head. No, of course she didn’t understand. Nearly eight weeks in camp and her Nasheenian was still fucked.
“Tell her, Ahmed.”
He did.
“How do you want to handle the body?” Ahmed asked.
“Need to cut off the head,” Nyx said. She had nothing to burn him with out here, and if they left the head intact, he was at risk for coming back as some lumbering beetle.
“You want me to do it?” Ahmed asked.
She gazed off toward the horizon. “I’d prefer that, yes,” she said. Because I have become a weak old woman, she thought, but she could feel something coming loose inside her. She was losing some vital piece of herself. It was all about to unravel, and she feared that prepping Eshe’s body would be the catalyst.
“Won’t that call that… sand?” Kage said.
“Fuck,” Nyx said.
Safiyah appeared, quite suddenly, from the structures ahead of them.
Nyx had her scattergun out and her finger on the trigger before she realized who it was.
“Took your time,” Nyx said.
Safiyah raised up something she held behind her. It was a woman’s head. “Found their pyromancing magician,” she said. “That’s a conjuring trick I haven’t seen in a very long time.”
“Magician?” Nyx said. “A magician can do that?”
“Not just any magician,” Safiyah said. She tossed the head into the forest of white. Nyx realized the head was bloodless. “That’s a woman with some very old skill, something you don’t even see in Nasheen anymore.”
“And they can just blow people up like that?”
“They can do more than just control bugs,” Safiyah said. “They can combine… let’s say, small particles, elements, to create new elements. It’s quite a trick.”
“This is getting worse and worse,” Ahmed said.
“How far to Bomani?” Nyx said.
“Funny you ask,” Safiyah said. “It’s just on the other side of this forest. One problem, of course. We never did consider how it was we were going to get in.”
35.
Hanife paid him often, and well, in Tirhani currency, all of which Rhys paid him back at the end of each week, to pay back the blood debt.
Rhys thought it funny. He had no use for Tirhani currency out here beyond the Wall anyhow. No one took it. So instead he gladly gave it back at the end of each week, and tried to figure out how he would escape from Hanife’s stranglehold.
The world beyond the Wall was worse than he anticipated. Hanife needed a translator for all sorts of business, most of it sordid. Interrogations, treaties, remediations. He had no idea there was this much politicking going on in the far north of the world. He thought the world ended at Khairi. He had been very wrong.
Rhys spent most evenings with some of the Aadhyan men, watching them sing to insects the way Khairians did. He tried to understand what they did beyond the song to call the insects.
“How’s it done?” he asked as one man called a small arthropod to him from
across the courtyard.
The man laughed. “It’s not something you teach. It’s something you do.”
“I have some talent with bugs, though,” Rhys said, and with some effort, called a small swarm of beetles.
The men regarded one another. One of them nodded.
“Come,” they said. “We’ll teach you to sing, but only if you teach us Yazdani.”
That was how Rhys came to learn why it was he only saw Aadhyan women in the desert, but only men out here.
“Hanife has asked us to join his army,” one man, Jahrin said. “We’re outcasts, mostly. That’s the Khairian word. Ours is… far worse than that. Women rule the sand, because it rarely eats them.”
“If they bleed with the moons, it won’t attack an entire party,” another man, Tarik, said. “That’s why only women can become Circle leaders. They become fighters. If we spill blood on the sand, we’re sure to be eaten.”
“I don’t understand,” Rhys said. “If you’ll die spilling blood out there, how is it any different than spilling it as part of Hanife’s army?”
Jahrin said, “You can’t come here for a few weeks and expect to understand everything. Think less of politics and more about singing. Foreign fools. Always thinking they’ll know a thing after a few questions. You won’t know the Aadhya.”
Tarik laughed. “Come. You have a terrible voice.”
Rhys spent most of his days trapped inside cold, moist rooms, longing for a window. Hanife had two brothers, and they enjoyed piling translation work onto Rhys’s desk. Once they found out he had a fine hand, he began learning the written version of Yazdani as well.
It was several weeks before Hanife finally asked him to come downstairs to do some “interrogation work.”
Rhys didn’t particularly like the sound of it. When he went down into the cells, he liked it even less.
A man was strung out on a stone slab. He seemed to be Ras Tiegan, or perhaps a mix of Ras Tiegan and Heidian.
“Tell him I want to know who else attacked my caravan,” Hanife said.
Rhys translated.
The man pressed his lips firmly together.
Hanife waved another man over. A man wielding some very sharp knives.
Rhys found himself staring at the ground while the man screamed. It was a very long day.
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