Rhys did not tell the old man that he had no intention of going through whatever the conference of birds turned out to be. Being ground into a pestle sounded far too much like what he’d been doing in Nasheen the last two years. Pounding things down, getting broken, well… that was Nyx’s job.
#
They loaded their gear into the bakkie and were on the road after morning prayer the next day. Nyx ensured they had a case of whisky, and Anneke took care of the guns and ammo.
She made Taite stay back at the hub, which he hated, but she needed someone to stay on coms duty in case something came over the streams.
Nyx pulled on her goggles and rolled down the windows and blew out of Punjai as if she were shaking off an old lover.
Rhys sat in the back, reading poetry. Anneke had shotgun, but spent the first few hours sleeping fitfully, head lolled back, face wrapped in a scarf to ward off the dust and blazing light.
“Ziggurat?” Nyx yelled back at Rhys as they crossed the city limits.
“That’s what he said.”
“Fuck me,” Nyx muttered. She took the dumbest jobs.
Rhys called directions as they drove. The bakkie broke down that night, and they had to walk to the nearest cantina and wait seven hours for a tissue mechanic. That messed up the directions that Rhys had gotten – shitty directions, Nyx thought – and ended up back tracking several times the next day, arguing about the relevance of a map Anneke had gotten at a local bug station that showed large sections of the area were contaminated no-go zones.
“That’s the likely story,” Rhys grumbled over spongy rotis and rice from a bent old woman who was selling them on the side of the road.
“Hey, who actually comes up this way?” Nyx asked the woman.
“Believers,” the woman said. Half her face was a mottled gray-blue mess of open sores and cancerous lesions. “Deserters, too.”
“We’re neither,” Nyx said. “What would somebody who’s neither be up here for?”
The woman’s one good eye lit up, literally, blinking blue-green behind the dark iris. “Oh. Have you brought a bird?”
“Sort of,” Nyx lied. She wished Khos the shapeshifter was with them. He would have given them some cred.
“Two more hours,” the woman said, pointing northwest.
“Won’t that take us over the border?” Rhys asked.
“It belongs to neither one side nor the other.”
“I’m sure both sides find that real binding,” Nyx muttered. “Ziggurat?”
The old woman nodded, then gave a shriek of a cackle that made Nyx start. “You won’t come back,” she said. “They never come back.”
“Yeah, well, I’m full of surprises,” Nyx contended. She rolled the window back up and hit the bug juice.
“We really shoulda brought a bird,” Anneke said.
Nyx shoved her goggles back over her eyes. “Oh, shut up.”
The road grew increasingly difficult to make out as the first sun set. They continued under the blue glow of the second sunset. Nyx navigated using the blue blinkering light of the contagion sensor as they wended up a series of low hills. The hills turned to rocky ruins, clearly unnatural, some broken mountainous city that had long ago succumbed to the desert.
As they came around a massive broken hillock, the road ended abruptly. At the end of the road was a massive stone lintel built into the mountain, or perhaps the old city wall? It was hard to tell.
“He said it would be open,” Rhys whispered.
Nyx got out of the bakkie and went up to the big gate. She thought about knocking, but that wasn’t her style. So she pushed against it. The gate swung inward, so smoothly she lost her balance as it careened inward. She tripped, rapped her knee, and sat back on her ass, trying to cushion her fall.
When she looked up, rubbing at her sore knee, the last of the little blue sun’s light fell below the horizon, casting all in darkness. But just before it slipped away, it was eclipsed by the towering form a stepped pyramid, its edges worn by wind, sand, and rain, all seeking to return it to the ground from whence it came. Or had it? There were any number of derelict craft from the stars that had been hallowed out and repurposed over the thousands of years people had lived on Umayma. This could very well be one of them.
Nyx turned around and made her way to the bakkie. Its headlamps were low, giving a dim orange light that barely pooled past the gate itself.
She got back in.
“Anyone?” Rhys asked.
“Not yet. But your fucking ziggurat made an appearance.”
They drove to the foundation of the pyramid and circled, looking for an entrance. As they came around the second time, Anneke spotted a dark opening.
“There, boss!”
Nyx braked. “Was that there last time?”
“No,” Rhys breathed.
“All right.” Nyx turned off the bug juice. “Let’s go.”
“I’m not going in,” Rhys said.
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
“I’m sorry, Nyx. I… it doesn’t feel right.”
“You fucking coward.”
“There’s… an energy here.”
“Probably because it’s full of bugs. You’re just picking up on all the fucking bugs.”
“No. Nyx, I can’t go in. I’m sorry. I’ll stay here with the bakkie and the gear.”
“What, so you can report my death?”
“All go with you, boss,” Anneke said. She kicked open her door and crunched across the gravel.
Nyx gazed into the back seat.
Rhys’s attention was fixed on the structure. She wasn’t sure she’d seen his expression so terrified in a good long while.
“I could use your sense for bugs,” she said. “You know that’ll be a big part of it.”
“I… can’t.”
She gritted her teeth. “You’ll take a cut in your share for this one, you know that?”
“I don’t care about the money.”
“How about starving?”
“Do what you like. I’m not going in.”
Nyx swore and got out of the bakkie. She slammed the door and opened the trunk. He acted like he’d seen a ghost or a fucking demon out there, instead of another fucking job.
She loaded up on ammo and fixed her scattergun into the holster at her back. She added her short sword, just in case there was something inside that fucked up the bugs in the guns. Goddamn coward magician. What the fuck was she paying him for?
Nyx met Anneke at the entrance. A staircase led down; it was lit by small, twinkling fireflies.
“She better be down there,” Nyx muttered, and started down the stairs,
Anneke took up the rear. The soft padding of her feet and puff of her breath gave Nyx some surety in the dim. It was easy to lose track of time and space in here. The winding stair went on and on for so long she thought she’d be sick.
Finally, they came to a broad landing where a beefy woman of medium height sat bunched up in a corner, the great black hem of her dress rucking up around her like a massive shroud. Nyx knew even before she heard the telltale click-click of the woman’s insectile legs that she was a Plague Sister.
The Plague Sister gazed up from a dusty little journal attached to her hip and nodded once. “Welcome to the Conclave of Ravens.”
“Where are the ravens?” Anneke asked, loudly. Her voice echoed.
“Yeah, great,” Nyx said. “I’m looking for a missing woman, Irina T’Gribova. You heard of her? Her family is worried. She said she was headed over here for your little… whatever this is. Is this a Plague Giver thing?”
“It is an experience which reveals to each of us who we are. Irina was indeed a seeker. She came here. You are welcome to seek her here as well. We accept seekers from around the world. Great leaders. Pillars of the community. First Families. All those who seek power come here. Knowing oneself is power”
“Uh, great. I can just… come
in and see her then?”
“Once you get through each of the gates, yes. If you pass the initiation, you, too, could join the leaders of –”
“The gates?”
“The stages one must pass through to achieve greater understanding of mortality and the divine.”
“I’m pretty in touch with my own mortality, thanks.”
“If you cannot walk through the gates, you will not find what you seek.”
“How, uh, complicated is this?”
“Only a handful of those who attempt it each year succeed. You will pass through seven gates. As you enter each gate, you will be asked to release your preconceptions.”
“Yeah, all right. Sure. Release away.
“Perhaps you do not understand –”
“No, I get it. Listen, this is a job, for me. You need me to take a hike through a creepy temple to finish the job, fine. That means I eat, my team eats, and we aren’t sleeping in the gutter tonight. You rich fucks and your pompous catshit. If you had any real problems you wouldn’t have the time to cook up worthless romps like this one.”
“Is this like a freaky funhouse?” Anneke asked. “You got roaches in there? Two-headed babies?”
“You are… unbelievers.”
“I’ve been called worse. You going to let me in?” She drew her scattergun. “Or am I going to shoot my way in?”
The Plague Sister curled her lip, more grimace than smile. “The ravens will have their way with you. I could, myself, if that was our way.”
“That would be a first. For both. We can fuck later, you me, and the ravens. She through here?”
The Plague Sister nodded, once.
Nyx pushed open the door, and passed through the first gate.
#
“I’ve come for my children,” the woman said, and Nyx thought something about her seemed familiar, perhaps the voice.
“You’re terribly early,” the clerk at the desk said. “We don’t release children from the compounds until –”
“My children.” She passed a paper over to the clerk. “Kinedajah, Nyxnissa, Amir, Faoud, and Ghazi. They are mine, and I’d like to take them home.”
Nyx felt an overwhelming sense of vertigo. Where was she? Had she been drugged? Was this some kind of radio recording spit back at her? She could sense that she still had a body, but it was as if she were frozen in time, her mind alive and interpreting the stimuli before it, but her body rigid and powerless. She tried to scream. Nothing.
Another clerk brought out the children. They were clearly five little strangers to the woman, who – now that she had what she wished for – seemed completely unsure about what to do with them.
“There is training,” the clerk said.
“In how to raise children?”
“Yes. Yes… that would be good.”
It was the farm that Nyxnissa recognized first, as her mind crawled across new images; a battered stone table, a vast expanse of unharvested sugar cane in one field, ripening red grass in another. A girl wearing a headscarf, studiously bent over the table, and Kine, six years old, cutting up yams, asking their mother, “Did you always want to be a farmer?”
Their mother stood on one foot, leaning against the kitchen sink, staring at the sky. She was always staring at the sky.
“No,” her mother said. “I wanted to be an astronaut.”
The studious girl looked up from her Kitab, and Nyx knew who it was, that foolish girl trying to keep her finger on the page to save her place, though she could hardly read a word of it. Nyx could spend an hour on a single page.
“What’s an astronaut?” the younger Nyx asked, and the Nyx here in this foolish menagerie, locked into this terrible funhouse of gates and ravens, snarled at her.
“I’m not sure anymore,” her mother said. “I can’t even remember why I came back to the compounds for any of you.”
Nyx shivered at the memory, one she had left to some other life, tucked back into those days before the military, before she knew who and whant she was. It had taken her a long time to shrug off trying to be who they all wanted her to be.
Older, now, the farm looking more worn. Her mother returning home, looking defeated, Kine off tumbling with some local girl. Her mother, walking in, alone.
Nyx, rising from the table, already taller than her mother, clutching her copy of the Kitab, yanking the scarf from her head.
“Where are they?” the younger Nyxnissa demanded.
Her mother did not look at her. Only collapsed into a chair beside her. “It’s so strange,” she said. “You all grew up. Became active agents in your own dreams and desires. And one morning, I looked up, and instead of dutiful children, I had all of these wild, angry, vexing adults.”
“Mother?”
“I kept them as long as I could.”
“You threw them away,” Nyxissa snarled, then and now.
The young Nyx lashed out at the first thing at hand, her copy of the Kitab, and threw it at her mother. It thumped on the far wall. She began to rage and weep, storming around the kitchen, throwing plates and bug bins, jars of preserves and pickled locusts.
“Why the fuck did you bother to come back for us if you were just going to abandon us? What are we to you, things? Don’t you feel anything for us? Anything at all?”
“I… don’t know. I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel. This wasn’t the life I wanted.”
“Nobody wants this fucking life!” Nyx cried.
“That’s enough.”
“Fuck you. If you won’t protect them, I will.”
“Why is it you feel everything?” her mother asked. “The only time I feel anything is when I star at the blackness of the stars.”
Nyx trembled again in her own body, screamed at her own mind to stop reliving these moments. It was catshit. Not worth seeing. She wanted to go forward, not back.
“Forward!” she screamed, and the whole vision blurred and burst like a thunderhead, leaving her in darkness.
Nyx gasped. She was on her hands and knees on a gritty floor. The fireflies flickered, giving her little glimpses of the utterly blank room; just a stone floor, plastered mud brick walls, all of it crumbling slowly to dust.
She coughed. “Anneke?” she barked. No one. She got to her feet and tried the door behind her, the one she had come from, but it was locked. She pounded on it. “Hey! Hey!” Nothing.
A raven cawed.
Nyx started. Turned slowly. On the other side of the room was a black banded door. Above it sat a black raven, its head cocked at her inquisitively.
“Fuck you!” Nyx said.
“First gate!” the raven crowed. “Let go of your dogma, your belief. Your disbelief. It cawed again.”
Nyx pressed her hands to the second door. It gave way. A burst of brilliant light assailed her.
Goddammit.
A bleary beach, perhaps. Cold, clear water. A lilting little laugh. Familiar.
Radeyah?
“No,” Nyx said. She heard it this time; she didn’t just think it. She said it aloud.
“What’s the second gate?” she yelled.
The raven cawed, though she could not see it, only the sandy beach, the wide, laughing mouth of Radeyah. “Reason must be abandoned. There is no room for reason in love.”
And there, behind Radeyah, his face and form exactly as she remembered the moment she saw him at the boxing gym in Faleen – Rhys.
“Fuck this!” Nyx screamed.
“You cannot leave!” The raven cawed. “You still have five more gates to walk through!”
“Fuck the gates,” Nyx said, and ripped herself out of the simulation. She aimed her scattergun at the ceiling just ahead of her. Pulled the trigger.
The crumbling ceiling came down. She shot twice more until she could get her hand into the opening. Nyx pulled away great hunks of mudbrick, then pulled herself into the floor above.
There were no fire flies up here, and she
cursed Rhys again. She could have used him up here for the light.
Five gates, huh? She scrambled forward in the darkness, skittering her way through doorway after doorway, each of them open arches. Her fingers pressed something smooth, here; the walls were pure metal, no doubt worth a small fortune. Some old ship, old tech, old trickery.
Nyx made out a small twinkle of light at the end of the long run of the corridor; it marked a stairway. She stumbled down to the next landing and pushed at the door there. It stuck hard.
“Fuck you!” she screamed at it, and kicked it once. Twice. A third time. Brought out her scattergun.
The door opened.
The Plague Sister stood there, silhouette framed by the burst of orange lights behind her.
“Don’t damage anymore!” the Plague Sister cried. “You are a brute!”
Nyx shoved her scattergun into the woman’s chest. “Where’s Anneke?”
“Here boss!” Anneke said. She sat over a table in the back laid with an enormous feast. The smell of roasted meat and mead was almost overpowering.
“Don’t eat or drink any of this shit,” Nyx said. “It probably isn’t real.”
“It’s quite real, I assure you,” the Plague Sister said.
“And why should I believe that?”
She sighed. “You wanted to find your friend. Well, she made it to the sixth gate.”
“What’s that one?”
“She became enamored of all the loved. Unfortunately, it did not lead her to the correct conclusion.”
“Which is?”
“I can’t spoil it for –”
Nyx prodded at her with the gun.
“One is supposed to realize that the sum of their knowledge is as nothing. All that they believe they know is false. She did not come to this conclusion. That was… unfortunate.”
“And?”
“And, well…” The Plague Sister went to a large gilded cabinet that took up the entire back wall. She pulled open the doors to reveal row upon row of metal urns, each inscribed with a name and date. “She perished, alas. We are the caretakers of those who did not achieve perfection.”
“What game are you playing here?”
“It’s no game, I assure you. I, myself, have been through all seven gates.”
“All seven tricks. Something from the stars.”
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