“So it was bel dames.” Nyx’s right hand began to tremble again. She stilled it with her left.
“Kasbah tells me you recently visited Bloodmount.”
“Had a rogue bel dame try to kill me. Turned in her head at the mount.”
The Queen and Kasbah exchanged another look.
“The bel dame council and the monarchy have a long history of… disagreement,” the Queen said. “As is well known. Over the last decade more than half of the members of the bel dame council have been killed or retired and been replaced. These new women are young radicals fresh from the front. One of them in particular has been sowing unrest for some time.
“Now the council is turning away notes that come from the palace and forcing me to rely more heavily on bounty hunters and my own private security forces. They have been recruiting bel dames at an accelerated rate.”
“You think the bel dames are putting together some kind of army?”
“Yes,” the Queen said.
“With who? They’re bloody women, but they can’t take over a whole country on their own.”
“Three members of the bel dame council are missing. They crossed the border into Tirhan six months ago. The government gave them asylum. Claimed neutrality.”
So Fatima hadn’t been blowing smoke. “Sorta ambitious, even for bel dames,” Nyx said.
“There have been many acts of terrorism this year. Not Chenjan in origin. Bel dame,” the Queen said. “Kasbah and her security team believe that some or all of the bel dame council have been conspiring to aid Chenja in overthrowing the monarchy.”
“Why? If Chenja wins the war, what does that leave for the bel dames?”
Kasbah stepped away from the door and walked to Nyx’s side. Nyx felt a sudden wave of dizziness. Her forehead prickled. When she wiped at it, her hand came away damp. Cold sweat.
“Simply put,” Kasbah said, “we don’t know.”
“But you’ve got somebody on the inside,” Nyx said. “That’s the one who got you all this information, right? Why not have her chop off some heads?”
“She was killed in the attack on Mushtallah,” the Queen said. “As was her sister, and two of our closest ancillary agents.”
“So they weren’t aiming for you. They wanted to kill their turncoats.”
“I’m sure the Queen would have been a pretty bonus,” Kasbah said. “Two decades ago, Alharazad cleansed the council of traitors to the monarchy. We need another Alharazad, and you all but volunteered. Why?”
“I’m no more Alharazad than the Prophet was a gene pirate,” Nyx said.
“I have fond memories of you delivering a note that no one else could bring to me,” the Queen said.
Nyx rubbed her eyes. “That was a long time ago. I have a price this time.”
“I paid your price last time. You squandered your advance on boys and drugs.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“I can feed you money until you burst, Nyxnissa, but I can’t invest it for you. Kasbah can give you all of the information she has.”
“My price,” Nyx said.
“Name it,” the Queen said.
“Make me a bel dame again.”
The Queen shook her head. “You know I can’t do that.”
“You can try.”
“I submitted a petition for your reinstatement six years ago,” she said. “There’s been no word.”
Fatima was telling the truth then, Nyx thought. That made a big difference. It had been worth the trip to Mushirah to find that out.
“So you can’t do it,” Nyx said.
The Queen’s eyes narrowed. “I can pay you whatever—”
“I don’t want money!” Nyx said. She slammed her fist on the Queen’s desk.
Kasbah jumped forward and put herself between Nyx and the Queen.
Nyx stood. “That’s all I needed from you,” she said, and turned.
“We are not done here,” the Queen said.
“Aren’t we?” Nyx said. “You not done using me yet? We all have a price. This is mine.”
“You bluff,” Kasbah said. She was within reach now. Nyx felt dizzy again, and sat back down. She was sweating heavily, but the room was cool. “You know what will happen to Nasheen if there’s civil war.”
“I know…” Nyx started, then shook her head. She couldn’t find the words. “I know everybody’s asking a lot from a washed up mercenary.”
“Desperate times,” the Queen said grimly.
Nyx laughed. She covered her mouth. Kasbah bent over her. “Are you mad?” Kasbah asked.
Nyx started to get up again. She needed to get out of there. She couldn’t breathe. She put a hand on the desk to steady herself, get some leverage. She stood, more or less. The world swayed.
“Are you all right?” Kasbah asked. She touched Nyx’s arm. Nyx’s skin prickled, a massive wave of pinpricks up her arm, across her chest, her neck.
“I’m fine,” Nyx said. A ripple of intense heat moved through her body. A breath of fire.
“There’s something wrong with her eyes,” the Queen said. She took a step back.
“No, really,” Nyx said. “I just need to take a piss.” She let go of the desk and turned abruptly, just to prove how well she was, how capable.
She tripped over her own feet and fell hard.
Kasbah and the Queen started yelling, but their voices were muted. Nyx felt like she was at the bottom of a deep well. Her head hurt. There was something wrong with her arm. Yes. She had fallen on it.
Nyx tried to push herself up. She saw blood on the floor. She wiped at her throbbing head. Her hand came away bloody.
“I’m just a little tired,” Nyx slurred.
Kasbah grabbed her by the braids and yanked her head back. Nyx was too tired to resist.
“Shit,” Kasbah said.
Then everything stopped.
9.
The night train to Beh Ayin took Rhys southeast, across some of the most contaminated wilderness in the world. Unlike the interior, much of Tirhan was vividly green and verdant, so full of color it hurt Rhys’s eyes. The abundance, however, was deceptive. The blue morning laid bare groves of giant, twisted mango trees draped in ropy clematis and pink-budded coral vine. Swarms of giant flying assassin bugs clotted the air above the groves, and though they were too small to see, Rhys could feel hordes of mites and scalebugs chewing at the mango grove, ladybugs and mantids eating at the pests, and more—mutant cicadas, wild locusts, giant hornets, pulsing wasp swarms with nests so big he felt their heartbeats from the train.
As the second dawn swallowed the first, the train passed through the mango groves and into the sprawl of the jungle. Rhys watched the tangle deepen, the wood darken, the light change as the train pushed on. The trees here were monstrous, three hundred feet high, and the world went dusky violet in their shadow. Giant orange fungus—bleeding yellow pus—cloaked the bases of the trees. He caught the smell of wet black soil and loam, sensed the stir of leaf beetles and mutant worms. The swarms here were vibrant, more alive than anything he’d felt outside of a magicians’ gym. It was a beautiful world, and dangerous. Nothing human lived out here. Not for long.
The train went on.
They emerged from the dense jungle sometime around mid-afternoon and ascended into the more habitable part of the southeast, up into mist-clouded hills shorn of their undergrowth. Rhys had never been to Beh Ayin, though he knew it was once a political and cultural center for the Ras Tiegans before the Tirhanis invaded and burned it out. The city walls were fitted stone draped in low-res filters. The flat black plain of Beh Ayin was not a plain at all but the top of a low mountain, cut smooth. The mountain was called Safid Ayin, after the Tirhani martyr who died there while trying to burn out the Ras Tiegans. In the end, the Ras Tiegans had thrown themselves from the sheer walls of the mountain rather than face death at the hands of infidels. Not so long ago, by Chenjan or Nasheenian standards—only a hundred and thirty years.
The
train moved into Beh Ayin from below, curving into the dark recesses of a smooth tunnel bored into the mountainside. They ascended into the belly of the train station—an airy, amber-colored way post made of delicate arches.
At the station, a thin Tirhani woman immediately approached Rhys as he stepped off the train. She introduced herself as Tasyin Akhshan, special consulate to the Minister of Public Affairs.
“And what exactly is it that a special consulate does?” Rhys asked as they walked along the platform.
Tasyin smiled. She was, perhaps, forty, maybe fifty, difficult to say this far from the filters and opaqued windows of the cities. She could have been far closer to his age, though by the look in her eyes and the set to her shoulders, he doubted it. She dressed in simple, professional Tirhani garb; long loose tunic and loose trousers, pale gray khameez. But out here in the jungle, she wore boots instead of sandals and a deep purple wrap around her dark head. It made her eyes stand out all the more; pale whites with dark centers.
“We spend too much time on mountaintop train platforms,” she said, “wondering why we’ve been sent a Chenjan for the translation of Nasheenian.”
“I spent seven years in Nasheen,” he said, and tried to keep his tone light. He was always a foreigner and a Chenjan, even—or perhaps especially—among the Tirhani. He’d spent his entire adult life proving that being foreign did not make him incompetent.
“Explain that to the Nasheenians,” Tasyin said. “Let’s get off this drafty platform. It’s warmer at the hotel.”
The hotel was a squat, white-washed, converted residence at the top of one of the city’s artificial hills. A rolling curtain of dark clouds obscured the sky, and the wind was high and cold. They passed through an old Ras Tiegan gate and up a cobbled way that dead-ended at the hotel.
Tasyin buzzed him through the gate and into the courtyard, a tangle-filled garden with broad palms and heart-vines dressed in leaves twice the size of his head. Giant yellow lizards scampered through the undergrowth. The house staff had prepared a late breakfast for them.
Rhys sat down with Tasyin and ate a light meal of lizards’ eggs, burnt toast, and cinnamon squash while she explained why she needed a Nasheenian translator at the edge of the civilized world.
“You’ve done work with the Minister before, so I trust you are discreet,” Tasyin said. She crossed her legs at the ankle and started stuffing a pipe full of sen. “I want you to convey my words exactly, and if that means it takes you extra time, so be it. The client is sensitive, but I need to be clear about their intentions. Do you know anything about Nasheenian culture?”
Rhys considered telling her that he’d once spoken to the Queen of Nasheen, but thought better of it. “I’m familiar with several levels of Nasheenian society, yes, and the social mores of each. Are they First Families? Magicians? Or a lower sort?” He was more comfortable with the lower sort. He’d been a member of the lower sort for six years.
Tasyin cracked the carapace of a fire beetle and lit her pipe. “What do you know about bel dames?” she said.
Rhys had trouble swallowing his toast. He covered his discomfort with a mouthful of juice, and took his time recovering. He thought he’d left all of those bloodletting lunatics back in Nasheen.
“You know something of bel dames, then?” she asked, amused.
“I’ve known a few, yes,” he said, and drank again. More than a few. What business did the Tirhani government have with bel dames?
“Excellent.”
“You do realize bel dames are not representative of the monarchy? Your negotiation with a bel dame won’t be honored by the Nasheenian government.”
“We’re well aware of how the Nasheenian government operates,” Tasyin said. “This is a personal negotiation of goods and services.”
“Of course,” Rhys said. “I meant no disrespect.” A personal transaction officiated by the Tirhani Minister of Public Affairs? Remember that you’re an employee, he thought. You’re not a consultant.
But there it was, tickling his mind, nonetheless: Tirhanis doing business with bel dames.
“They’ll meet with us here for high tea,” Tasyin said. High tea was a Ras Tiegan custom, taken up by Tirhanis after the colonization of this part of Ras Tieg. “If all goes well you should make the evening train back to Shirhazi. I’ll ask that you don’t make any calls or outgoing transmissions while you’re here. We’ll be filtering the hotel in an hour.”
They sat for a few minutes more while Tasyin finished her pipe and Rhys finished breakfast. Tasyin had one of the house staff, a veiled Ras Tiegan girl, show him to his room. He had at least four hours until high tea. If he could not contact Elahyiah and the children, his time would be best spent working on some of his side translations for local merchants and friends of Elahyiah’s family. But Tasyin’s invocation of Nasheenian bel dames had put him on edge, and there was an old Tirhani city to explore. He wanted a mosque. A cool, quiet mosque.
Rhys exchanged his sandals for sturdier shoes and asked to borrow a coat from one of the house staff. He pulled it on under his khameez and walked back through the old Ras Tiegan gate and into the city center. The red sandstone Ras Tiegan cathedral had been converted to a mosque, and much of its somber, image-heavy exterior had been defaced and resculpted into images of magicians and half-human shifters. There was talk that the Tirhani martyr had been a magician-shifter, an impossible combination that no one had heard of before or since, but that combined with the country’s lack of native shifters and magicians meant he saw their images far more often than he was comfortable with.
It was still some time before the next prayer—they only announced four here, not the six he was used to in Chenja and Nasheen—so he simply walked alone into the mosaic-tiled courtyard, across brilliant crimson and green figures of thorn bugs and fire beetles and glittering yellow farseblooms. He stepped into the covered promenade and then under the archway that led into the deep mouth of the mosque. Inside, the air was cool and dim. He waited just inside for his eyes to adjust. Before him stretched colonnade after colonnade, staggered like pawns across the sandy red floor. They supported a peaked ceiling so high and shadowed he could not see its end.
As his eyes adjusted, he walked further into the mosque. He saw light there, at the center of the forest of columns just ahead of him. He followed the column of light, drawn to it like a locust to a body. The light fell into a small round courtyard, by accident or design, he wasn’t certain. As he approached, he saw water bubbling up from the center of a smooth layer of red pebbles. A single thorn tree grew there, scraggly and thin, clawing toward the bruised sky.
He heard the far-off scrape of footsteps on sandstone, the low whisper of the wind outside. But as he stepped into the light he heard another sound: the rustle of wings; a bird taking flight. He raised his head, too late. He saw no bird. Instead, a feather floated down from the top of the tree, at the edge of the open roof.
Rhys watched the feather settle onto the crimson stones at his feet. A single white feather.
Something inside of him stirred. Old memories. And there, somewhere deep—an aching, missing piece.
He reached for a pistol at his hip that he no longer carried.
“Rasheeda,” he said aloud.
And suddenly the mosque was dead stone, cold and dark. No sanctuary.
God had warned him of what waited back at the hotel.
What he didn’t know was why it had taken them so long to find him.
+
Heavy rain burst from the darkening sky just in time for high tea. Rhys stood on the veranda with Tasyin as the three bel dames walked across the sodden courtyard and under the veranda awning. He noted as they crossed the yard that none of them were shifters. The air did not bend and move around them as it did shifters. That meant none of these three was Rasheeda, the white raven. But that knowledge did not put him at ease. He touched the feather deep in his pocket, and did not take his eyes from the women.
As the bel dames raised their hoods
, he peered into each face in turn, looking for some resemblance to women he once knew—heads he had seen beaten, bashed, broken in. Women he had shot or maimed or attacked with some swarm of hornets.
But none of the faces looked familiar. The lifespan of bel dames was notoriously short. He pulled his fingers away from the feather. He needed to step lightly, here. Bel dames were often solitary hunters. These were a pack. It made him uneasy.
When the women stepped onto the veranda, Rhys took an involuntary step back. They were big women—most bel dames were—and the one to his left was a hand taller and thirty kilos heavier than he was. The other two were about Rhys’s height, broad in the shoulders. Though they were all dark and wind-bitten, he knew right away who was in charge. She stood a step ahead of the other two, and when she pulled the hood from her mane of tangled dark hair, she assessed Rhys with the same steely gaze he gave her. An ingrained sense of politeness urged him to look away, but this was Tirhan, and in Tirhan, men still had some measure of power and influence. It was all very well to send women from good families into government work, but if their husbands or fathers or sons wished to keep them home, it was their right—a right not often exercised in Tirhan anymore, and seen as rather backward and gauche—but a right nonetheless. Men were still tasked with the care of women. Some days, he found that very comforting.
“Praise be to God,” the tallest of the women said, in the prayer language; the only tongue shared by Tirhan, Chenja, and Nasheen.
Rhys said, in Nasheenian, “Praise be to God. Please accept the welcome and hospitality of Tirhan. This is Tasyin Akhshan, special consulate to the Tirhani Minister of Public Affairs, and I am Rhys Shahkam, your translator.”
“You learned Nasheenian at the front,” the tall woman said. Not a question. She had a thick, burn-scarred neck. Her features were sharp, petite, and the way she pursed her mouth reminded Rhys of a smudged thumbprint.
“I learned Nasheenian in Nasheen,” Rhys said. He had hoped they’d mistake him for Tirhani, but his accent was still too noticeable. “Please, be comfortable. The consulate has had tea prepared.”
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