come to the interior and been independently tested by the Plague Sisters. He had read his performance in their faces, in the hard line the bugs themselves drew against him. The Plague Sisters kept a diverse colony of insects within their care, but he should have been able to manipulate them far more effectively than he had. If the organs and entrails he’d mended on the slabs had been those belonging to real human beings, he doubted his patients would have entirely recovered. Some may not have lived. He knew the outcome of his evaluation even before Yah Tayyib spoke.
“We have spent some time discussing your evaluation,” Yah Tayyib said. “My fellow magicians and Plague Sisters agree that you have some skill in the arts. No doubt Yah Reza would not have undertaken your tutelage if she did not believe you were gifted.” He carefully pressed the tips of his fingers together. “Unfortunately, we have not deemed your talent sufficient to grant you a practicing government license.”
Rhys exhaled. What had he expected, that a Chenjan man in his prime would be given leave to walk through a palace filter and perform surgery on the Queen’s ministers? There would be no easy road, no well-paying government job. But hearing it out loud felt better than he thought it would. Something, some expectation, had been cut away. Hope, maybe.
“However,” Yah Tayyib said, “we find it acceptable to grant you a provisional license that allows you to practice so long as you are employed. Yah Reza has expressed interest in keeping you on at the magicians’ quarters as a teacher, if you wish it. Otherwise, you’re free to take up gainful employment with whatever employer you see fit. Do you have any questions?”
Rhys looked over at Yah Reza. She smiled her sen-stained smile. She intended on keeping him prisoner for the rest of his days, then.
“Yes,” Rhys said, turning back to Yah Tayyib. “Is the denial of my government license based on my talent or my race?”
The old magician shook his head. “Rhys, if you were as talented as Yah Reza hoped, we would have no choice but to grant you a government license. Nasheen could not turn away one with such skill. But your talents are middling. We have no place among the palace magicians or within the First Families for a mediocre Chenjan magician. You are better suited for the private sector.”
Rhys swallowed his words. What was there left to say? His father had cursed him the night he refused him. Cursed and abandoned him.
“Thank you,” Rhys said finally.
Yah Reza led him out.
When the door closed behind them, she said, “It is not such a terrible thing, to teach Nasheenian magicians. You are capable with children and the teaching of standard arts.”
“I will not be staying long,” Rhys said. “I’ll find employment elsewhere.”
“Of course,” Yah Reza said, and he should have realized then that she knew something he did not.
The magicians did no end of business with bel dames and bounty hunters. Both groups often came to the gym looking for new recruits—petty magicians and women just back from the front. Government officials frequented the fights as well, recruiting veterans and magicians as order keepers. Rhys spent week after week at the gym acting the part of a cheap harlot, trying to sell his services. But no bel dame would have him, and the order keepers, of course, would not even speak to him. The magicians could afford to pretend not to notice his accent and his coloring, but the rest of Nasheen… the rest of Nasheen saw him for what he was—a Chenjan man, an infidel, an enemy.
Yah Reza caught up with him one afternoon in his chambers as he penned a response to an ad for a tissue mechanic he had found in the morning’s newsroll. If they wouldn’t hire him on as a magician, he would spend his days digging into the guts of bakkies in Mushtallah. It was better than a lifetime of servitude to Nasheenian magicians. Most tissue mechanics were just like him—failed magicians working for bread and bugs.
“Why not give this up, baby doll? Are things in my gym so bad?”
“A well-appointed prison is still a prison,” Rhys said.
Yah Reza clucked her tongue. She waved a hand toward his lamp and increased the light. Rhys felt the message she sent the bugs, the chemical tingling in the air. Why did it take so much more effort for him to produce the same reaction? Why gift this stubborn old woman with enough skill to raise the dead but relegate him to the role of messenger, with the occasional talent for staunching blood and fighting infection? God did not grant talent indiscriminately.
Gift or curse, it was not enough.
“I keep you on for your protection,” Yah Reza said. “Nasheen will eat you alive, boy. Even if you had the talent for the real stuff, how long do you think you’d last in Mushtallah among the First Families? How long before a gang of women cuts you up and feeds you to the bugs? This isn’t Chenja, doll, where all you men get a free pass. Boys play by rules here. Chenjan boys don’t play at all.”
“I’m going mad,” Rhys said.
“Weren’t you already? No sane man would be sitting there in that chair—not unless I was interrogating him.”
Rhys met her look. Yah Reza was an old woman, but how old? Always hard to tell in Nasheen. Sixty or more, surely.
“How long were you at the front?” he asked. She had never spoken of it.
“Thirty years,” she said. “Give or take. Intelligence, you know. Taught Yah Tayyib back when he was just Tayyib al Amirah, eh? One of my best students.”
“You mean torture and interrogation.”
“Oh, there was some of that,” Yah Reza said absently. She sat across from him. Three cicadas leapt out of the wide sleeves of her robe and crawled across Rhys’s letter. “Yah Tayyib lost three wives to the war, you know it? And all of his children. You think he would give
“Why didn’t you do the same?”
“Me? Ah, doll.” Yah Reza spit on the floor, and a dozen blue beetles scurried out from under the end table and lapped at the crimson wad of spittle. “More death doesn’t cure the war, eh? Just makes it drag on awhile longer. Yah Tayyib, yes, he would do whatever it took to end the war. He would end it one Chenjan at a time. But then, so would most men. Women too. That’s why this war never ends. Nobody lets go.”
“You’re letting go?”
“Completely? Ah, no. Maybe one Chenjan at a time.”
He leaned toward her. “Then let me go.”
She gave him a sloppy smile. “You aren’t a prisoner.” She stood, and the cicadas flew back up into her sleeves. “Go see Nasheen. But don’t expect it to love you.”
Yah Reza set him up with his passbook and paid his train fare to Amtullah. The interior. He did not use the space-twisting magicians’ gyms to travel. He had wanted to see the country, to be on his own. If he’d made himself an exile, he needed to live as one.
When he arrived in the city, he set up several interviews with merchants looking for magicians to accompany their caravans north, through the wastelands.
During the day, Amtullah was a raucous mass of humanity, full of half-breeds and chained cats and corrupt order keepers and organ hawkers and gene pirates. He had trouble following the accented Nasheenian of the interior, and the fees for everything—from food and lodging to transit—were far higher than he’d anticipated. At night, the sky above Amtullah lit up with the occasional violet or green burst, remnants of a border barrage that managed to get through the anti-burst guns. The sound of sirens sent him to bed most nights, as regular as evening prayer.
But when he went to his interviews, he was cast off the porch or stoop or simply turned away at the gate more often than not. His color was enough. They did not wait to hear his accent. A little more talent, perhaps, and he could have perfected a version of Yah Reza’s illusory eyes to mask the obvious physical evidence of his heritage. As it was, he kept his burnous up and his hands covered when he traveled, and spoke only when he had to. It saved him harassment on the street, but not from his potential employers.
He spent many months in Amtullah getting thrown off doorsteps and turned away from tissue mechanic shops. Hunger made him take up employment as a dishwasher at a Heidian restaurant in one of the seedier parts of
