“Yeah, all right. You got something for that doesn’t cost a cat’s ass?”
“When can we move him?” Suha asked.
“Not tonight,” the witch said, and mumbled something in… Drucian? Nyx didn’t hear that language a lot, and couldn’t be sure. “Foolish question. Come inside. There are more women in the street.”
Nyx looked into the street again, but didn’t see anything.
The hedge witch nodded. “There will be,” she said. “Come inside.”
“We’ve gotta keep watch,” Suha said.
“Only need one for that,” the witch said. “Come,” she said, motioning for Nyx. “Someone the boy knows must sit with him. Come.”
Nyx grit her teeth. “I should—”
“I got it,” Suha said. “Go sit with him.”
Nyx sighed.
The hedge witch ushered her into the cramped hovel. A stir of fire beetles chattered in an open brick stove at the center of the room. Jars of beetles and moths and cicadas were stacked all along one wall, so many that they’d collapsed under their own weight. Broken jars littered the hearth. The air carried the tangy stink of fire beetle offal, preservation alcohol, and unwashed hedge witch.
The witch had hung a curtain between the main room and her sleeping area, where Eshe was. She pulled the curtain back and motioned Nyx inside.
Nyx looked down at him. Pale, skinny little kid. He was naked save for his dhoti, and covered in a thin film of sweat. The witch had packed his wound full of flesh beetles, sewed it closed, and put layers of filmy gauze over the top to absorb the blood and bug excrement. Something in Nyx hurt so bad at the sight of him that she wanted to run back into the street.
Your fault, she thought. Just like all the others.
She knelt next to him, not sure what to do next. Just sit, the hedge witch had said.
So she sat.
The hedge witch brought some kind of foul-smelling tea and slathered Nyx’s bloody arms in a stinking unguent even ranker than the tea.
“Sit, that’s good,” the hedge witch said, and left her again—plastered in sticky unguent and reeking of the dead. She poured the tea out on the bare dirt floor and wiped dust over it.
Eshe stirred. “Nyx?” he murmured.
“Things got dicey back there,” Nyx said.
He gingerly touched his dressing and winced.
“You panicked a little,” she said.
“I thought I was going to die.”
“It’s a scary thing, sometimes,” Nyx said.
“Only sometimes?”
Nyx patted his thigh. “Someday you might not be so scared.” Someday you might even be happy about it, Nyx thought. Then everything would stop—pain, guilt, sorrow.
“I’ve never seen so much blood come out of me.”
“It was a lot,” Nyx agreed. She touched his face, then, hesitant. He’d come back in one piece.
And in two years you’ll feed him to the front, she thought, bitterly. You’ve saved a piece of meat for the grinder. She squeezed her eyes shut.
“What is it?” he asked. “You all right?” He took her fingers in his hand.
She pulled her hand away. “I’ll be outside. You sleep this off, you hear? I need you strong for what’s coming.”
She stood.
“I will,” he said.
She turned.
“Nyx?”
Looked back. He was still a little feverish. His face looked terribly plain, and terribly earnest. “I won’t panic like that again,” he said. “I promise.”
“I know,” she said, and ducked under the curtain into the main room. Her vision swam, and she wiped away the wet gathering in her eyes. Nothing to cry over, she thought. He’s just another body. Just another boy. Something caught in her throat.
She stood in the warm room as the hedge witch stirred her fire beetle stove. The witch clucked at her.
“It is difficult to have boys,” the witch said.
Nyx let herself sag onto the dirt floor across from the witch. Her eyes were still leaking. Wasn’t a good idea to go out and talk to Suha like that. She wiped her face with her burnous. Her skin throbbed.
“You ever raised any kids?” Nyx asked.
“Everyone in Nasheen has babies. Didn’t you?” The witch peered up at her. “Ah, but no, you did not, of course. You became a bel dame instead, yes?”
Nyx felt a moment of unease. Did she just look like a bel dame to everybody? “You can choose how you give yours up. I chose chopping off heads. Sounded a lot better than being a breeder.”
“I have seen how bel dames must twist themselves, to be with people. In a bel dame’s world, people are things. Meat.” She pointed at the stove. “It is not the perils that kill bel dames before their time. It is the despair.”
“Despair over what?”
“They have no one to live for,” the hedge witch said, and shrugged. “When they have nothing to live for, they let others kill them. I have seen it many times.”
Nyx frowned. “Some career breeder popped out kids from my stuff, probably. They’re around. Getting ground up somewhere. Like everybody else’s. Why get attached to somebody who’ll be dead tomorrow? That’s weakness.”
“Perhaps those babies are among the women you kill, yes?”
Nyx chewed on that for a while. She’d turned over her genetic stuff when she was seventeen or eighteen, when she went to the front. Those kids would be Mercia’s age by now, maybe older. Like the bel dame apprentices.
The witch looked on her with something like pity. It made her angry.
“What?” Nyx said.
“I patch up boys like yours all the time,” the hedge witch said. “We save moments. Not decades.”
“No use getting worked up over somebody that’s already dead.”
The witch shook her head. “No, no. When you dare to love, you dare to be free.”
“You really are Drucian, aren’t you? Syrupy loving-kindness, God-loves-everybody stuff. Catshit.”
The hedge witch smiled. It was like watching old leather wrinkle. “I am human. As are you. Though you may not like it.”
Nyx stood. “Thanks for looking after him,” she said.
She met Suha out front. Suha was tossing stones at a mutant carrion beetle—tall as Nyx’s knee—scavenging in the alley behind them.
“He all right?” Suha asked.
“You think there’s a hell?” Nyx asked.
“Yeah,” Suha said. “Why make up something so bad if life is already like this?”
Nyx grunted.
“Why?” Suha said.
“Because if there is, I’m going there,” Nyx said.
One of Suha’s stones connected with the carrion beetle. It screeched and skittered off into a nearby pile of refuse. Suha straightened and dusted her hands on her trousers. “Good thing,” she said. “They’ll be a lot of interesting folks there.”
17.
Rhys waited for the Tirhani Minister for over an hour. Some of that he spent washing up in the floor washroom, trying to sort out his muddled thoughts.
“Well,” the Tirhani Minister said, when he was finally summoned into her office. “Can I offer you some tea?”
“Certainly, yes,” Rhys said. She seemed a bit taken aback at his acceptance, but acquiesced.
“Are you well?” the Minister asked as he took his seat.
“Yes. The weather in Beh Ayin does not agree with me.”
“It is a cool… complex, place,” the Minister said.
“It is,” Rhys said.
Her assistant brought them tea. When she was gone again, the Minister said, “Your services were well thought of in Beh Ayin. I do thank you for your willingness to travel on such short notice, and for your discretion.”
Rhys sipped his tea. “May I ask, Minister, what happened to the other translator you chose for this job?”
The Minister’s face softened. “Is that all? It was thought his presence would be offensive to our proposed business partners.
There was some concern over you, as well, though we hoped they would mistake you for a Tirhani.”
“Pardon, Minister, but just because they are coarse does not mean that they are fools.”
“I understand that. But it was also my understanding that these female assassins of Nasheen’s spend most of their time cutting off the heads of their own people, not the heads of Chenjans.”
“That is true,” Rhys said. “It’s also true that they are all war veterans.”
“Ah, of course. Well. Can I offer you something to eat?”
“No,” Rhys said, suddenly weary. “I would request a favor, however.”
The Minister raised her brows.
“I have no further interest in negotiating contracts with Nasheenians. I am happy to serve you in the translation of Chenjan, Mhorian, even Ras Tiegan—but no more Nasheenian.”
“Of course,” the Minister said. “It was… imprudent of me. However, you must understand that time was short. And you did agree to the work. For a fairly sizable sum.”
She tapped her desk and pulled out her pay book. Rhys opened his mouth to begin negotiations, but she simply wrote out the amount he had requested in his formal acceptance and passed it to him.
As Rhys took the pay slip, he said, “You do understand that I appreciate the work I do here.”
“And I do appreciate having you,” the Minister said. She met his look.
“Thank you,” he said. He stood. “Peace be upon you.”
“And to you,” the Minister said. “That is all we seek, isn’t it? Peace. The work that we do ensures God’s peace in Tirhan. Do not forget that.”
“I don’t,” Rhys said.
He took the receipt down to the clerk and collected his pay. He stopped at the national bank to square a few accounts. On the way back, he paused outside the big central magicians’ boxing gym. Only the best practiced there—exiles from every country on the map. He had been inside a handful of times, but his magician’s skill was not up to the gym’s standards. They were nice enough to him there, of course—magicians in Tirhan were nothing if not courteous—and his acquaintance with some of the more notorious of the exiled magicians made him welcome, if not respected, among them.
When he wanted to practice his right hook, he had to travel further afield.
But instead of heading to the boxing gym or back to his translation office, he got into a taxi and went home.
It was still early morning, and traffic was light. He strolled through the park and went inside.
The housekeeper had arrived, and was dutifully cleaning up the kitchen. He walked upstairs to find both girls playing in their room.
Inaya was still lying in bed, tangled in the sheets. He undressed and crawled into bed with her. She reached out and ran her hands over his shaved head.
“No work today?”
“Not today,” he said.
“I’d love to spend the day abed, but I have lunch with my mother and sisters. Then my reading group. You don’t want me to sound like a refugee forever, do you?”
“I love the way you speak,” he said, and pressed his finger to her lips.
She laughed and pulled her lean, delicate body out of bed. He admired her as she dressed, carefully and fully concealing the body that belonged only to him and God. He watched as she finished covering her hair, sighed as she kissed him and went downstairs.
He rose and walked to the filtered window and gazed onto the quiet street. The sun was rising high and hot now, and he heard the call to mid-morning prayer. For a time, he watched those on the street below move toward the local mosque. He heard the housekeeper below, instructing the girls on the proper prayer form. They were too young to observe even the four daily prayers called out in Tirhan, let alone the six that Rhys had once followed. As the years passed, he found it was easier to adjust to the Tirhani prayer schedule, though there were still nights when he rose for midnight prayer. They were still some of the most peaceful hours of the night.
Though he had submitted to God from the time he was small, he had never thought that peace and God were synonymous until he came to this country. Until he saw how prosperous a country could be. Yes, his family did well in Chenja. His father was a powerful man, and his mothers came from good families—he had wanted for nothing. But the war had touched him, as it had touched all of them. It had eaten most of his uncles, and he had seen castrated Nasheenian men working in the fields his father owned on more than one occasion.
The war was everything even on the Chenjan interior, among the close-knit families of the mullahs who ruled the country. The war made a few men rich there, yes, but not the way it did in Tirhan. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that, some days.
But he was done with Chenja and Nasheen and their wars forever, now.
After a time, he realized that the call to prayer had died off, and he still had not prayed. He stood at the window a good while longer before finally pulling down his prayer rug and submitting his will to the one peaceful God he had found on this ravaged world.
+
When the housekeeper knocked at his door, Rhys was awake and freshly bathed. She handed him an organic paper note with the seal of the Tirhani Minister of Public Affairs. His stomach clenched.
He dismissed her and quickly tore open the note.
It was flowery, polite, and took nearly a full page to tell him that she would no longer be requiring his services.
Rhys sat down on the bed, stricken.
It was not the end of the world, but it was a lucrative contract. It meant spending more time at his storefront instead of lying around in bed with Elahyiah. He remembered the long hours he used to spend at his storefront, from before dawn to after dusk, sixteen or eighteen hours a day, just scraping along. It was the Minister’s regular use of his services that had made him financially solvent enough to marry.
When Elahyiah returned, he was sitting downstairs at his desk, staring into the living room as the housekeeper picked lemons with the girls in the yard.
“What is it, love?” Elahyiah asked. She sat next to his chair, placed one hand on his knee.
“The Minister told me that my services… are no longer required.”
“Forever? What happened?”
“I… don’t know. I’ll have to work on getting more contracts. I—”
“We have some savings, don’t we? It will be all right.”
“I’m afraid I’ve angered her.”
Elahyiah laughed. “Impossible. You could never anger anyone, Rhys. Not like that.” She touched his hand. “We’ll make our way. I can go back to working if you need me to—”
“No. I’m sure it will be fine. It’s just a shock,” he said.
Elahyiah slowly pulled the scarf from her hair and knotted it in her hands. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“We’ll be all right.”
She took his hand. He squeezed back. They sat together like that in silence for some time as the night deepened and the crickets began their slow song.
“Well,” Elahyiah said finally, standing. “If this is the worst that happens to us, we must consider ourselves lucky. Come, I told Ella to make that Ras Tiegan dish you like. The ratatouille.” She walked toward the kitchen.
But Rhys did not go after her. He continued to stare at his girls in the courtyard as they counted out lemons on the porch, laughing. He tried to remember a happy time like that from his own childhood. Something warm and tangible. He found very little. He had wanted peace. Just peace. And perhaps happy children. A good wife.
You still have all that, he thought, but there was something nagging at him now, some dull, but insistent urging.
Peace came with a price. Especially for men who had sinned as deeply as he had. He knew, in his bones, that this was not the price. And he lived in terror of what the final price would actually be.
18.
In Tirhan, Nyx could not smell the war. On the other side of the pass, the first thing she noticed was the absence of the tangy reek
of bug haze and burst residue. Tirhan was big and green and rolling, and as they descended into the grasses of the valley below, Nyx found herself suddenly claustrophobic, though the stands of twisty amber trees that clotted the landscape were huddled far off the roadway.
Eshe rode on her shoulder in raven form. He slept most of the way, so she kept her burnous up to protect him from the worst of the cold. The air was different here. Cleaner. Colder. Drier than she expected, too, for such a green country.
Suha’s gun-running sister, Azizah, had agreed to let them join her caravan. They stopped at a bustling road house at noon and waited out the heat. It wasn’t like the dry heat of the desert, but something mild and salty and altogether… different. Eshe and Suha prayed with the rest when the call came out from the muezzin on top of the flat tiled blue roof of the road house.
Inside, Nyx found that they didn’t serve anything harder than red wine. She bought a couple bottles for the road and pushed on.
“You’ll be on your own up here,” Azizah said as the hills turned to plots of square, flat-roofed houses set at the center of dirt lots, their gardens and vegetation carefully walled off or walled in.
“We’ll set you at the main way, but we head south after this. I don’t go through the city center if I can help it.”
And as they rounded the next hill, there it was. Nyx had heard all about Tirhan, all about rich, pretty cities. But she still caught her breath. Like choking.
Shirhazi rose from the spiraling plain of blue-tiled houses and outbuildings and warehouses and road houses. A dozen—maybe more—twisted buildings of glass and metal and bug secretions clawed up toward the sky at the edge of a flat, glassy inland sea. The reach of it touched the horizon. Nyx couldn’t see the other side. A lake? A sea. Vast, milky blue now in the pale violet sky of late afternoon. She had almost gotten used to the stink of it by then, but the wind hit her hard and hot. She got a choking slap of it. Death—rot from within. A beautiful city, growing fat on death.
Quiet as death, too. No bursts. No street music. No yammering vendors or crazy street trash. Just a low city hum, static.
Azizah dropped them at the crook in the road. Nyx stepped carefully onto the tiled street and pulled on a hat. She wanted back her burnous. It was easier to hide weapons. The long coat and hat she’d gotten from a Tirhani trading post were awkward. She was just starting to get used to the boots. She pulled out the cane and leaned on it a long moment. It was a long walk to the city center.
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