Spotted sand cats prowled the yard, not one of them tended by a chain or a trainer. Women ran through military drills along the far side of the square, dressed in the long, green, organic trousers and gauzy sandals of the Queen’s guard.
They wound up a broad staircase flanked by statues of some sort of muscular maned sand cat and into an airy compound with a fountain at the center. Water ran out in four directions along grooved channels carved into the brightly tiled floor. A couple of tall trees with serrated leaves and giant orange blossoms filled the yard. The trees had recently dropped some sort of fruit into the water channels. Rhys realized he had no idea what kind of fruit it was.
“I’ll announce you,” the woman said. “It may be some time. Tea?”
“Do you have whiskey?” Nyx asked.
“Tea will be fine,” Rhys said.
The woman called a servant, and left them.
Nyx stood in front of a carved stone bench. Rhys looked at the wall behind her. Tiled mosaics covered it: images of the first of the Nasheenian monarchs speaking to a white-veiled figure that was likely supposed to be the Prophet. Rhys found depictions of the Prophet distasteful at best, even those that veiled his face. Finding the image of any living thing in Chenja was difficult. Most of the books produced before the war had had the pictures cut out and the faces blackened. Chenjans and Nasheenians should have followed the same rulings of the same Prophet, but words, even the words of the prayer language, were open to interpretation, and when Nasheen had disbanded the Caliphate and instituted a monarchy, existing divisions in those interpretations had reached a violent head.
We were always two people, Rhys thought, gazing at the veiled face. It’s what his father had told him when Rhys first questioned the war. Rhys had heard it said that Nasheenians and Chenjans came from different moons, believers from different worlds, united in their belief of God and the Prophet and the promise of Umayma. For a thousand years they had carved out some kind of tentative peace, maneuvered their way around a hundred holy wars. They had agreed to shoot colonial ships out of the sky, back when that was still possible, but this? It was too much. Chenjans would submit only to God, not His Prophet, let alone any monarch who wanted to sever God and government. That final insult had resulted in an explosion of all the rest, and the world had split in two.
The other walls presented the more traditional forms of decoration—elaborate raised script, passages from the Kitab carved into the walls and painted in bright colors. Through the airy wooden grating of the windows lining the courtyard, Rhys saw other waiting areas and long hallways. He heard the sounds of more water beyond them, hidden gardens, perhaps. The smell of roses and lilac. Pervasive. It made his eyes water.
“Not so bad a place, huh?” Nyx said.
Rhys sat on the bench. The air was cool. The open center of the courtyard must have been filtered. He pulled back the hood of his burnous.
“Nasheenians spend too much time worshipping images,” he said.
“Yeah, well, I never read anything in the Kitab about prayer wheels being the quickest way to get a response from God either. I thought you’re supposed to submit, not ask Him for things.”
“We don’t all use prayer wheels,” Rhys said, and grimaced. There was nothing worse than a Nasheenian mistaking him for a Chenjan purist instead of an orthodox. At least no one asked if he was a follower of Bahay anymore. The mullahs had wiped out that sect three years before. “When did you ever read the Kitab?” Nyx looked away from him, back toward where they’d come in. “Doesn’t everybody read it? Man, I could use a whiskey.”
“How can you read such a beautiful book and turn your back on it?”
“Never said it wasn’t a beautiful book. I just don’t believe there’s some man up there in the black who gets off on watching us pound our head on the pavement six times a day.”
Rhys watched her. “And yet you must have believed there was a God, at some time. You did go to the front.”
“I went to the front for my brothers,” she snapped, and the force of the response surprised him.
The servant returned with tea and a decanter of whiskey for Nyx. Nyx walked over to the lip of the fountain and sat, square in the sun, her burnous pushed back over her shoulders. Though Rhys was reasonably certain of the filter, he guessed that Nyx would have sat there uncovered regardless. He had never met anyone so casual with their life. Most people that careless or arrogant were dead before thirty. How she continued to elude a violent death while actively courting it still mystified him.
“You must have had a powerful belief once, to take you out there,” he persisted. “If I’d ever been called, it would have been difficult to answer.” Saying it that way, saying “if,” had become such a natural thing, such a natural story, that it fell off his tongue without a hitch. It was easier to say in Nasheenian.
Nyx barked out a little laugh. “Oh, yeah? You saying that if your mullahs told you God wanted you to go, you wouldn’t have? Don’t be an ass, Rhys. You would have gone. You would have dressed up for it.”
He looked down into his lap so she could not see his face. Sometimes he wondered how two people could work together for so long and still know nothing about one another.
They sat waiting an hour more before another yellow-clad woman summoned them. The woman was tall and lean, with a blunt, bold face and keen stare. When she walked in, Rhys knew she was a magician, though she dressed in the same uniform as the queen’s other attendants. The look she gave him confirmed that she knew he was a magician also, and they held each other’s attention for a brief moment. She turned to Nyx.
Nyx had finished most of the whiskey.
“She will see you now,” the woman said as four more women turned out from the arched doorways to join her. They were a formidable bunch, dark-haired and dark-eyed, with the backs and shoulders of women who could pull rickshaws and swing swords with equal ease. They were very Nasheenian.
“I am Kasbah,” the woman said. “We will, of course, need to search your persons for weapons and contaminants. Weapons will be returned when you exit her presence.”
Rhys unbuckled his pistols. He turned over the loop of ammunition he kept at his belt and the dagger at his hip.
Watching Nyx disarm was a more drawn-out affair. There was the sword she kept strapped to her back, her pistol, her whip, the garroting wire she kept strung in her dhoti, the bullets sewn into her burnous, the bullets strung around her neck. The dagger strapped to her thigh, the pistol strapped to the opposite calf, the three poisoned needles she kept in her hair. He noted she kept the garroting wire she used to tie her sandals, but she pulled out the razor blades tucked into the soles.
The women must have been used to bel dames and bounty hunters, because they did not blink at the pile of weaponry she handed over. Though the filters had cleared them both of bugs, the women searched their pockets. Kasbah neatly found and turned out Rhys’s hidden bug pockets. She was, most certainly, a magician.
“We’ll also need to perform an organics search,” Kasbah said. She did not look at him, but she had just pulled her hands from his hidden pockets.
Rhys flinched. Nyx looked over at him. “Can’t we skip that?” she asked.
“I’m sorry,” Kasbah said, “but particularly when”—she gave Rhys another open look—“we have those trained in the art of assassination within her presence, we must perform a search. If you’ll come with me, Nyxnissa, I will have your companion searched separately.”
Rhys said, “No. I’ll stay here.” He had been through many a Nasheenian organics search. The kind by women like the ones on the train. He felt a sharp tightening in his chest. Sweat broke out across his brow. I’ve been here too long, he thought.
Nyx was fiddling with her red letter. “I’ll be in the next room,” she said, but from the tone of her voice, even she knew that would not be enough.
“No.” He pulled his burnous more tightly around him. The fear was in him now, the memories of half a hundred organics searc
hes during the years he’d lived in exile. They did not just use their fingers to search every cavity, orifice, and wound on his body for hidden organics, but far more invasive tools. They were never gentle. These cold women on the interior knew little of the war and had seen few Chenjans. They would enjoy venting their rage and frustration onto his black body.
“Can I go with him?” Nyx asked. “What if I go with him?”
“These aren’t customs agents,” Rhys snapped at her. She couldn’t flirt or fuck her way out of everything. He felt the blood rush into his face. He began to recite the ninety-nine names of God, silently. Stillness, he thought, silence. This is all temporary.
Nyx shot him a dark look.
Kasbah clapped her hands. “Come, now. You wish to be searched together? This is acceptable. Many women worry over their men. I understand.”
“That’s fine,” Nyx said.
“Nyx, I’m not—” Rhys began. He tripped over the names of God, lost count. Started over.
Nyx stepped up and took his elbow. The names of God fell away. She was about his height, but heavier, solid, and when she took his arm, the fear, too, bled away. Her touch filled him with an emotion so complex that he could not name it. The same woman who could cut the head off a man with a dagger in sixty seconds could ease his mind in the face of a thousand angry Nasheenian women. She could banish all thoughts of God, of submission. Some days she made him feel like an insect, a roach, the worst thing to crawl across the world. And then there were the times, like now, when she brought him a stillness he had known only with his forehead pressed to a prayer rug.
She said to him, “We’ll be all right.” To Kasbah and her women, “We’ll be all right.”
Kasbah led them to the examination room. Rhys’s pulse quickened. He would have bolted if not for Nyx’s hand on his arm.
“You’ll be all right,” she said. She would know the sorts of things Nasheenian women had done to him before. She had likely done work like that herself.
What had this exile made him? What was he becoming? He prayed; God, how he prayed. But he dreamed, often, in Nasheenian now, and the memories of his father’s face had slipped away long ago. How could one forget his father’s face? It was like forgetting the face of God.
The women stripped Nyx first, searched her, and when she was putting her clothes back on, told him to strip. And he obeyed them, as he had before, as he would again.
When he had been in Rioja, he found out what Nasheenians did to unescorted Chenjan men. He dreamed now, some nights, of Nasheenian women and boys, bloody mouths, screaming. His blood. His screaming.
He turned his back to Nyx and stared at the wall. When they bent him over the table, he felt Nyx’s hand on his back.
“You’ll be all right,” she said. “I’m here.”
The ninety-nine names of God…
He gripped the table so hard his hands hurt.
When he was clothed again, Kasbah led them back to the courtyard. Nyx and Rhys stayed several feet behind her, walking gingerly. As they walked, their hands touched. Rhys knew he should be the one to step away an appropriate distance, to maintain a modicum of modesty even after all that, but he didn’t have the energy to break away from her. It was the history of their… partnership? Alliance? Contract? His inability to pull away was all that kept him next to her. But what kept her here? Her arrogance, her selfishness, her desperate need for a magician, even a poor one? She hated him as much as any other Nasheenian did, but she had hired him and kept him, long after his usefulness as a sly slap in the face to Yah Tayyib had expired.
She strode next to him with her usual confidence, a hard but neutral look on her face. She was impossible to read.
“This way,” Kasbah said. She took them back to the courtyard and through one of the archways. The air beneath it shimmered as they passed, although, unlike the other two filters they’d walked through, it was transparent when undisturbed. They moved into another courtyard teeming with succulents, shielded from the suns by an opaque filter. Rhys took a deep breath. The air was warm and humid. At the other end of the yard—along a path that curved through the broad-leafed plants and heavy flower heads lining the stone path—were two latticed doors.
Kasbah opened the doors onto a broad terrace, also shielded by an opaque filter. Inside, a short, squat woman sat at a table on the terrace.
Kasbah announced them.
“Nyxnissa so Dasheem, and her companion, Rhys Dashasa.”
The woman on the terrace did not stand. She turned a soft, slightly sagging face to them, her mouth a thin line. She had the flat, broad nose of a Ras Tiegan and the strong jaw and deep brown complexion of a Nasheenian. As she watched them, she turned up the corners of her mouth. “Rhys Dashasa isn’t a Chenjan name,” she said. The voice made her sound older than the look of her face.
“It’s not supposed to be,” Rhys said.
Everyone on Nyx’s team had their secrets. Nyx said nothing of her time at the front, though Rhys had seen a public copy of her military records, which indicated she had been reconstituted and honorably discharged. Her honor was not one she spoke of. Taite had never told any of them why he’d run from Ras Tieg, and when his sister mysteriously arrived in Nasheen eight months ago, pregnant, he simply said that he was her only means of survival and refused to elaborate. Khos’s time at the brothels was too extensive for traditional reasons, even if Mhorians were as sex-crazed as they were purported to be. Anneke had blown up more things than even she would admit to, and Rhys suspected she’d spent a lot of time in prison. She had no public record at all. He knew. He had checked.
On Nyx’s team, the matter of Rhys’s real name was a small thing, hardly worth comment.
It was another reason he stayed.
9
Nyx had seen images of the queen before, of course—misty blue images from high council meetings and patriot-act ads on the radio—but most of those were doctored. As Nyx walked closer, the queen stood. She barely reached Nyx’s shoulder. She was a plump, matronly figure with a wispy cloud of graying hair. Her face was too young for the hair—she might have been forty. The desert and the suns sucked the youth from most women, but the queen had grown up rich, and the rich—the sort of people on the high council and of the First Families—didn’t get exposed to much sun. They didn’t age as quickly as everybody else, so it was worth her while to keep her hair white. Older women were well respected in Nasheen. If it didn’t show in her face, she’d need to show it somewhere. She was the fucking Queen, after all.
Nyx caught Rhys looking at her. She had the peculiar feeling he was reading her mind. One never knew with magicians, even bad ones. He still sometimes surprised her.
“May God bless you. Please, be comfortable,” the queen said, gesturing to the two seats on the other side of the polished white table. Nyx didn’t see the advantage of having a white table. She supposed it made sense if you had somebody around to clean up after you all the time. Back when she was growing up in Mushirah, her mother and aunts had employed a Ras Tiegan servant to help out with taking care of Nyx and her siblings and doing little stuff around the house. The woman had lived out back in the bug storage shed and taught Nyx how to swear in Ras Tiegan and beat her brothers at strategy games. Nyx wondered if the Queen remembered any of her servants’ names.
As she sat down across from the Queen, Nyx realized she had forgotten the Ras Tiegan servant’s name.
“I guess I should say I’m sorry about your mother,” Nyx said. “About her abdicating.”
Nyx hadn’t cared much for the old half-breed hag and the bureaucratic tape she wound around the apprehension of terrorists. It had cut into Nyx’s business in a bad way. The current queen being a half-breed hadn’t been terribly popular either.
“My mother realizes what is best for her health,” the queen said, “and the health of Nasheen.”
“That’s good to hear,” Nyx said, and wondered what she was trying to say with that. Rumor had it Zaynab was an enterprising sort o
f queen. She’d been running the country on her own for years while her mother dabbled in astrology and sand science.
“Nyxnissa so Dasheem,” the queen said.
“Nyx, yeah.”
“Nyx, a pleasure.”
“Uh, thanks.”
“Thank you for answering my summons,” the queen said. There was something on the table at her elbow, a transparent globe. An information globe. Nyx hadn’t seen one of those in more than a decade. “I was told that you served at the front.”
“A long time ago.” Nyx glanced over at Rhys and clenched her left hand, the one he’d brushed during their long walk from quarantine to the queen’s chambers. What little she knew about Rhys she hadn’t learned from him but rather from the magicians and boxers in Faleen. He was from some rich family, and he’d spent time at the Chenjan Imam’s court. He was used to dealing with mullahs and politicians and First Families. It explained his uptight dressing practices and strict manners. She hoped he was a lot more comfortable right now than she was, even if he was the Chenjan.
“Volunteered?” the queen said.
“Yeah.”
“Two years of service, honorably discharged at nineteen, so I’ve read.”
Nyx stiffened. It was a bit early in the interview to be bringing up her file. She had managed to keep a lot of things out of that file, and even more out of the public one—things she didn’t talk about with anybody, especially not her team. She didn’t look at Rhys.
“You came back with burns over eighty percent of your body,” the queen said.
Nyx opened her mouth to cut her off. The queen kept talking, minor details, and Nyx saw her looking at the globe, checking her notes.
“Your military file says you were put into the care of the magicians for reconstitution.” The queen paused to eye Nyx over, as if looking for evidence that Nyx had once been a charred, blackened husk of a woman. “Is that right?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
She remembered the mud between her toes, the taste of the rain in the yeasty air and the way the wet made the long grass shine. They had been in Chenia, in Bahreha, sweeping for mines. She went barefoot when she was doing sap-per work; she liked to feel the ground under her, the way it responded to her weight. She believed it gave her a better idea of where the Chenjans had set the mines. Her whole squad had been there, sweeping up from behind her. She led, pushing farther into the muddy grass, until she reached the end of the cleared field. That’s where she had gone down on her belly, a knife in one hand and her other palm flat on the ground, a mantis at work. She remembered finding the mine, a flat green disk the size of a bottle cap, the same as half a hundred others she’d cleared from the same field. Nothing special. Nothing different.
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