God's War Part 2

They were going to truss her up and sell her.

Nyx stood in the back alley of Bashir's cantina. At the end of the alley she could clearly see the back entrance to the magicians' gym. Anneke was leaning against the wall now, rifle still in hand. Getting shot would hurt.

Getting trussed up and hauled into the Chenjan district, though... that would be the end of the job. And probably a lot more.

Nyx tensed. Taite pulled out the sticky bands from his gear bag and threw them to Raine.

Nyx twisted and swiveled in Raine's grip while he tried to catch the bands. She palmed him in the solar plexus. He grunted. His grip loosened. She pulled free and bolted.

Anneke jumped to attention. Nyx pushed past her.

The rifle popped.

Nyx felt a sharp, stabbing thump on her right hip, as if someone had set a sledge hammer on fire and hit her with it.

She staggered down the alley and clutched her hip. A burst of mud-brick exploded behind her. She heard two more rounds go off.

The red door of the magicians' gym appeared at her right. She stumbled and pounded on the door.

"Sanctuary!" she yelled. "Bel dame! My life for a thousand! Sanctuary!"

She heard Anneke yell, "f.u.c.k!"

The pack of them ran toward her. Raine's face was dark. Nyx screamed, "My life for a thousand!" and pounded on the door again. There was nothing easier to shoot than a stationary target.

Anneke was a hand breadth away. She reached for Nyx's hair.

The magicians' door opened. A waft of cold air billowed into the alley, bringing with it the stink of sweat and leather. Nyx fell inside, into darkness. She tucked her feet underneath her, pulling them across the threshold.

"f.u.c.k!" Anneke said again.

Nyx lay at a pair of bare feet cloaked by yellow trousers. She heard a low buzzing sound, and a soapy organic filter popped up over the doorway. Through the filmy gauze of the filter, Nyx saw Raine standing behind his crew, her burnous still in his hand.

She looked up the length of billowing yellow trousers and into the sapphire-eyed face of Yah Reza.

"You're bleeding all over my floor, baby doll," Yah Reza said, and shut the door.

2.

Rhys had never fought at the front. He'd been through it, yes. But he had never picked up a blade or a burst or dismembered a body. He had gone to great lengths to avoid doing so.

He had once walked across a rubbish-strewn street with his father, anxious to keep up with the long-legged man, and some piece of gla.s.s or serrated tin had lodged in his shoe. He had kicked free of it and limped on despite the pain. When he arrived home after morning prayer, he had pulled off his shoe and found it full of blood. It had taken his mother and sisters nearly a quarter of an hour to stir him from a dead faint, and by then they had cleaned and bandaged the wound. He did not look at it again until the skin had healed clean. He threw out the shoes.

When Rhys crossed the great churning waste of the desert, he'd been running not toward his father but away, across the disputed border between Chenja and Nasheen. The sky had lit up every night with deadly green and violet bursts. The world had smelled of yeast and mustard and geranium. He had stayed as far from the contagion clouds as possible, but when he stumbled through Chenja and into the nearest Nasheenian border town, he was hacking up his lungs in b.l.o.o.d.y clumps, and his skin burned and bubbled like tar.

What woman took him in then, he did not know, but he knew it was a woman. Everyone alive in Nasheen was a woman. They sent all their men out to die at the front. They had no family heads, no clans. They were G.o.dless women who murdered men and bred like flies. The Nasheenians took him for a deserter, but because they called in their magicians before they called in their order keepers, they had saved him from a cold, b.l.o.o.d.y death in an interrogation room somewhere in the Nasheenian interior.

The magicians had arrived with sleeves full of spotted fungus beetles and cicadas in their hair, and when Rhys next opened his eyes, he was in a bed at the center of a circular room deep in the magicians' quarters. A lightning bug lamp beside him brightened and dimmed, brightened and dimmed, until he thought his vision must have been lost somewhere in the desert along with his name. He moved his hands over the lamp, and the bugs ceased their intermittent dance and glowed steadily.

"Is it better or worse, in the light?" one of the magicians had asked, emerging from the darkness of the doorway. From the raised bed, he could see that the doorway opened into more blackness.

The woman magician spoke to Rhys in accented Chenjan, and she had brought him a strange still-wriggling stew of grubs and gravy. She was a tall, bony woman with eyes the color of sapphire flies; not their real color, she a.s.sured him.

"We know a thing or two about illusion in Nasheen," she had told him. He remembered how strange it was to see her eyes at all. He had heard that Nasheenian women did not wear veils, but he still found her vanity surprising, decadent. Chenjan women could submit to G.o.d and wield a rifle with equal ease, but Nasheenian women had allowed their propensity for violence to pollute their beliefs. Wielding a rifle, they believed, made them men in the eyes of G.o.d, and men did not have to practice modesty or submission to anyone but G.o.d. Nasheenian women had forgotten their place in the order of things.

The woman's mouth had worked constantly at the wad of sen she kept in it. Her teeth were stained a b.l.o.o.d.y crimson. She turned to the lightning bug lamp and laughed.

"You've figured it all out, haven't you, baby doll?" she had said, gesturing at the bugs. "We may find some use for you yet."

It was then that he realized he had asked the bugs to light the room, something only a magician could do. They knew what he was, then.

Her name, she said, was Yah Reza. She said she would help him work on his Nasheenian and that hiding his ability with bugs from another magician would have been like trying to pretend he wasn't Chenjan. She could see the difference. Now, she had said, he was hers, unless he wanted some other life-wanted to get sold off to gene pirates or the breeding compounds, or become a venom dealer or some mercenary's translator.

"There are worse fates," she had said, and something on the stuccoed wall behind her had shifted, and Rhys realized it was an enormous b.u.t.terfly, big as his hand. "But I can make you a magician."

A magician.

A Nasheenian Nasheenian magician. magician.

"One that can practice in Nasheen?" he had asked, because he could not go back to Chenja. Something in his chest ached at the thought of it.

He remembered rubbing at the backs of his hands where his father had beaten him with a metal rod when he had refused him. But the magicians had healed those wounds as well, and the skin and bones were mended now, erasing the physical history of that night, those words. But not the memory. His or G.o.d's.

"I can even get you a proper sponsor, once you're trained. Better, I won't ask what brought you across the border in the dead of night or how you did it. You get on with the magicians, you get immunity from the draft and the inquisition. What do you think of that?"

Rhys did not fear the Nasheenian draft-Nasheenians didn't draft foreign men-or the inquisition; he was too smart for them. But Yah Reza offered him magic. In Chenja, to reveal his skill would have meant immediate training for the front, no matter that he was his father's only son. As a standard, his father's lack of sons had given Rhys a place at home. Men still headed families in Chenja. They still owned companies, acted as mullahs, ran the government. But as a magician, he would have been forced to the front.

"I'll stay," he had told her.

He spent some months among the magicians, learning the intricacies of bug manipulation and organic tech. His Nasheenian improved. He learned to look away from the women in the hall as he pa.s.sed. They stared at him openly, like harlots. It was up to him to allow them to maintain some shred of honor. When he asked to leave the cavernous labyrinth of the magicians' quarters and boxing gym to go sightseeing in Faleen, Yah Reza told him he was not yet ready. She encouraged patience. But her words did nothing to distill the growing sense that he was a prisoner there, kept at the discretion of Nasheen's magicians until he proved worthless or useful. He did not know what they would do with him when they decided which he best embodied.

Yah Reza caught him by the elbow one afternoon as he hurried back to his rooms after another embarra.s.sing encounter with a magician teaching him transmission science. He was not used to a world where women put their hands on him without reservation and regarded him as if he were a young but dangerous insect. Chenja was full of women, of course, but no Chenjan woman had ever grabbed him in the street, not even the lowliest of prost.i.tutes. And no Chenjan woman had ever done the things to him that the women in the border towns had done before their magicians showed up. They would not have dreamed of it. They would have been killed for it.

He was still trembling when Yah Reza grabbed him.

"Come with me, baby doll," she said. She wore a billowing saffron robe and smelled of death and saffron. A furry spider the size of Rhys's thumb crawled along her sleeve, and a whirl of tiny blue moths circled her head.

He tried to quiet his trembling.

Yah Reza beckoned him. Rhys followed her through the long, twisting halls of the magicians' quarters-cool, windowless corridors that suddenly opened into niches and vaulted chambers filled with locusts and coc.o.o.ned creatures, lit sporadically by glow worms and fire beetles and the ever-present lightning bugs flaring and dying in the dark.

The preponderance of bugs in the magicians' quarters made his blood sing, as if he was attuned to a bit of everything, able to touch and manipulate pieces of the world. He felt more alive here than he had anywhere else in his life, among those who spent their days coming up with new and interesting ways to kill his people.

I'll take what I need from them and return, he thought. I'll make it right.

The boxers' locker rooms were three steps to the right of the transmission rooms, a corridor away from the internal betting booth, and three long bends of the hall from Yah Tayyib's operating theater, where magicians and bel dames came to receive treatment for cancer and contagion. The corridors within a magicians' gym were never the same length, never quite in the same location. Beneath each gym, the world was bent and twisted. The distance-bending corridors were relics from the times before Umayma was habitable, back when magicians lived belowground while they remade the world. This made it possible to step into a gym at the coast and emerge a few minutes later at a gym in Mushtallah or Faleen and Aludra. Practical for long distances, but dizzying over short ones.

As they approached the locker room for outriders, Husayn-the magicians' favorite boxing nag-pa.s.sed them in the hall, heading one twist of the hallway down to her own locker room. Husayn was a stocky woman with a face like a shovel. A novice magician scurried after her, carrying her gear.

"Hey, chimba!" Husayn called at Rhys. Too loud. The women in this country were all too loud.

Rhys did not look at her.

"Those magicians haven't been able to wash that gravy stink off you, you know it?" Husayn persisted.

"I am still perplexed as to why it is that Chenja retained the veil and Nasheen discarded it," Rhys said. "Perhaps Nasheen's women sought to frighten away G.o.d with their ugliness."

"Well now, if all your boys are as pretty as you, your boys boys best start covering up too," Husayn said. "Ah, the s.h.i.t I'd like to do to you." She laughed. best start covering up too," Husayn said. "Ah, the s.h.i.t I'd like to do to you." She laughed.

What a fool, Rhys thought. Chenjan mullahs taught that men's bodies were clean, as.e.xual. Closer to G.o.d. Women, real women, were not stirred to sin at the sight of men. If these G.o.dless Nasheenian women were stirred at the sight of anything, it was blood.

Yah Reza shooed her away. "Come, now, this isn't a wh.o.r.ehouse."

Husayn cackled and moved on.

Rhys ducked into the other locker room. Inside, the light was dim, and a lean woman sat hunched on one of the benches, staring into her hands.

When he stepped in, she looked up. She was long in the face, like a dog, and she had narrow, little eyes and a set to her mouth that reminded Rhys of one of his sisters, the look she got when she wanted something so badly she made herself sick. He hoped this woman didn't vomit. He knew who would have to clean it up.

Yah Reza moved past him and greeted the outrider.

The outrider stood. She looked uneasy, like a cornered animal-a dog-shifter in form, or maybe some scraggly adolescent sand cat. He might have guessed her for a shifter if he had seen only an image or picture of her, but in person he was able to see clearly that she was not. The air did not p.r.i.c.kle and bend around her as it did a shifter. She was just some kid, some standard-just another part of the world.

Yah Reza talked low to the girl and rubbed her shoulders. She spit sen on the floor. Rhys knew who would have to clean that up too.

"This is Rhys. Come here, boy," Yah Reza said, and Rhys walked close enough to see that he was a head and shoulders taller than the outrider.

"You bring your wraps?" Yah Reza asked the girl.

The outrider stabbed her fingers toward two long, dirty pieces of tattered muslin on the bench next to her.

Yah Reza spit more sen. "Rhys," she said.

Rhys went to the locker at the back of the room, where they kept the extra gear. He unraveled a couple of hand wraps. He grabbed some tape and took a seat on the bench and finished unraveling the wraps.

"He know how to box?" the outrider asked, and even Rhys, with his nonnative Nasheenian, noticed her mushy inland accent. Where had they picked her up? Working some border town? The magicians were notorious for pushing girls into the ring before they were ready. It made the fights bloodier.

"I don't believe in violence," Rhys said.

"A shame too," Yah Reza said. "He's a d.a.m.n fine shot with a pistol. But don't worry none about his technique. He's a magician, girl. He knows hands. You get on, and I'll meet you in a quarter-hour. We got some fancy visitors want to meet you and Husayn before the fight."

Yah Reza petted the outrider's cheek.

The outrider sat back on the bench and eyed Rhys like he was a beetle turned over on its back, not sure if it was harmless or just playing at docility until she got close.

Rhys asked for her right hand.

She hesitated, and he thought that was odd from a woman who was about to go toe to toe with a seasoned fighter in a magicians' gym. He realized then how young she was, maybe seventeen. It was hard to tell with Nasheenian women. They grew up fast, bore the marks of their short, brutal childhoods on their bodies and faces. Most of them were broken old crones at thirty.

He taped the wrap in place and began to loop it around her wrist and between her fingers. She had her palm flat and her fingers wide.

When he had first come to Nasheen, he'd thought he would hate all of its women for their ugliness, their vanity, but as he put the wraps on this little dog-faced girl, he found himself admiring her hands. She had strong, beautiful fingers, calloused knuckles and palms, and he saw her scars, and the dirt under her bitten nails. There was something splendid and tragic about her all at once.

He tied off her right hand and moved to the left. When he took her left hand in his, something about the way she held it, the way it felt beneath his fingers, made him hesitate. He pulled at her fingers.

She winced.

"You've done an injury to this hand?" he asked.

"Nothing," she said.

"An old injury," he amended as he pressed his thumb against the back of her hand, rubbed her knuckles, pushed in slow circles up to her wrist. She had hairline fractures in the small bones of her left hand. Some had healed, but badly. It was a brittle hand.

"You shouldn't be fighting with this," he said.

She pulled her hand from him, and her mouth got harder. Her shoulders stiffened. "I can wrap myself. They told me magicians used tricks."

"I didn't say I wouldn't finish." He took her hand in his again. His ability to diagnose illness and injury had been the first sign that he'd inherited his father's skill as a magician. A more talented magician might have been able to heal her hands, if the injuries weren't so old, but Rhys's skill was limited, his knowledge incomplete. The longer he stayed among the Nasheenian magicians, the more he worried things would stay that way.

"Does your family approve of you boxing?" he asked to fill the cool silence. Three locusts climbed up his pant leg. He moved his hand over them, and they dropped to the floor.

"Don't have much family," she said. "Where you learn to wrap hands? They teach you that in magic school?"

"My uncle took me to fights in Chenja," he said, "when I was too young to know better. I wrapped his hands."

"You got soft hands. You aren't a fighter. You never fought?"

"I don't believe in violence."

"You ain't answered the question."

He finished taping her bad hand. He squeezed her fist in his palm. "There, that good?"

She made fists with both hands. "I been taped worse."

"I'm sure," Rhys said. He hesitated. If she had had a proper husband, or a brother, or a son, that man would have told her not to fight. He would have taken care of her. "You shouldn't fight with that hand," he repeated.

"I been doing it a long time. It's fight or die where I'm from. Sometimes you have to run away just to live. I suppose you know something about that."

Rhys did not answer.

"I don't mind you're black," she said, magnanimously.