God's War

“Only if you’re cutting off his head,” the ugly one said, and laughed again.

The matron finally pressed a thumb to the organic paper at the back of Rhys’s passbook.

“You keep hold of that,” she told him, “or the filter will eat you. No permanent residency, no permanent bio- pass into Mushtallah.” She flashed her teeth and gave Nyx a nod. “Good luck, my woman.”

The customs agents went back out into the hall. The door rolled shut behind them.

Rhys tugged at his coat, and returned his Kitab and passbook to his breast pocket.

Nyx sat at the window and put her feet up. “They were just flirting,” she said. “You don’t see a lot of men this far inland. And sure not Chenjan ones.”

“That’s not flirting.”

“You’ve seen worse.”

He turned away from her. “It doesn’t excuse them.”

“Stop mewling.” She paused, then relented. “You know I’ll do what I can to make it easy.”

“I know,” he said.

Rhys liked to think she defended him out of some kind of loyalty or affection, but most days he felt she guarded him the same way she did everything in her possession: He’s mine. He was just another thing to be owned and retained. Just another thing she could lose.

Once the customs agents were off-loaded, the train chugged into the station just outside Mushtallah. Rhys and Nyx gathered their things and then stepped onto the sandy platform overlooking the city.

“The most boring city in Nasheen,” Nyx declared, and trudged down the steps and onto the paved road.

Rhys had read that before Nasheen’s revolution two hundred fifty years ago, the gutters were full of dead babies and the mullahs wore vials of virgins’ blood toward off the draft. They’d bred sand cats for fights in the train workers’ ward, and the stink and smog of the city sent the First Families who lived up in the hills to the countryside every year during high summer.

The wealthy still fled the city in the summer—it looked deserted from the platform—but there weren’t any dead babies that he could see, and the last of the male mullahs had been drafted two centuries ago, right after the queen decreed that God had no place for men in mosques unless they had served at the front.

Mushtallah had been built on seven hills, but that was for beauty and breezes, not for defense. When Mushtallah was founded, there hadn’t been much to defend the city from but wild sand cats and some of the more virulent strains of bugs that had gotten away from their magicians or bled down from the twisted mess of the Khairian wasteland in the north. That had all changed, of course, when the war started.

The first wall that rose around the city was an organic filter that kept foreign bug tech out. Every ten yards, a hundred foot faux stone pillar jutted up from the packed, sandy soil. The bug filters that stretched from pillar to pillar made the air shimmer like a soap bubble. Organic filters were a necessity in a country bombarded by all manner of biological, half-living, semi-organic weaponry. Destruction entered cities as often through contaminated individuals as it did through munitions. Filters were magician-made and could be tailored to keep out anyone and anything organic. It was a matter of introducing the bugs powering the filter to the unwanted contagion or—in the case of Mushtallah—only coding the filter to allow in particular individuals. The fact that Rhys had gotten through customs unmolested was a testament to how highly regarded Nyx was by the customs agents.

As they approached the filter, Rhys called up a handful of flying red beetles. He held out his hand, and a dozen swarmed about his fingers.

“We’ll be out of contact, Taite,” he said. “We’re going into Mushtallah.”

“Sure thing.” Taite’s voice carried just over the singing of the beetles, a second song. “Tell me when you come back to civilization.” Rhys flicked his wrist, and the beetles dispersed. He dug through his pockets and released three locusts and a couple of screaming cockroaches he kept in magicians’ cages for emergencies. All the bugs had sense enough to head away from the filter. He would need to call or buy more when they got back to Punjai.

Nyx turned in time to see the swarm recede. “You clean?” she asked.

He showed her his empty pockets.

Nyx bled through the gate.

Rhys took a deep breath. Nyx stood on the other side, whole, and stopped to look back at him. He still wasn’t entirely convinced about the safety of entering Mushtallah. How far would those agents take their “flirting”? Far enough to tell him that the filter had been coded to let him through, then stand at the train windows and laugh as he stepped through the filter and disintegrated into gray ash?

There are worse ways to die, Rhys thought distantly, and stepped forward.

The filter clung to him, slightly sticky, until he pushed through. He came out the other side with a delicate pop. He reflexively patted at his arms and his hips—and smoothed the robe over his groin—to make sure everything was still blessedly intact.

The first twenty yards inside the filter was a stretch of bare soil that lapped against Mushtallah’s second wall. The second wall encircling the city, made of stone, had little practical value. It had no working gates anymore, just great gaps in the masonry where travelers passed through and locals kept tchotchke booths. The poor and underemployed spread out their wares on mass-produced blankets given out by the same wholesaler who doled out their identical figurines of Queen Zaynab, and their cheap model palaces and star carriers. The petty merchants and beggars were all women, which was not so different from Chenja, he supposed, but in Chenja all of these women would have had husbands and brothers or sons who were responsible for them, even if those husbands looked after forty or fifty wives. Instead, Nasheenian women all came to adulthood with the terrible knowledge that they had to fend for themselves in this terrible desert.

Ahead of him, Nyx pushed past the throng of traders clinging to the old stone wall, and he slipped through in her wake. The heart of the city spread before them in what had once been a neat grid. As the city grew, new buildings had moved out onto the streets, and finding a straight path to any address was like trekking through an unmapped jungle.

Nyx paid a rickshaw waiting outside a bookshop to take them to Palace Hill.

As they rode through the city, burnouses pulled up to ward against the suns, Rhys tried to call up a swarm. The magicians in Faleen had told him he’d be lucky to find anything living in a clean city. There should have been no bugs in Mushtallah except for the local colonies of flies sealed in when the filter first went up. But as Rhys tried to summon the bugs, he found various colonies at hand, isolated so long from those outside the filter that they must have been different species. He found no bugs suitable for transmissions. The filter would have kept them from broadcasting, anyway. Media had to come into the city via newsrolls or archaic forms of audio-only radio.

The rickshaw pulled them through the crowded street and under a renovated arch that nonetheless looked like it had seen better days. It was checkered with bullet holes. Two centuries before, the Chenjans had poured into the interior and nearly burned Mushtallah to the ground. In retaliation, the Nasheenians had razed a swath of Chenja’s agricultural cities, and a hundred and fifty thousand Chenjans died.

After about an hour, the rickshaw pulled them onto the busy main street that ran outside the palace.

Nyx alighted from the rickshaw and held out her hand to help him down. It was an odd gesture, and he gave her a look. She seemed startled, as if the move had been unconscious, and pulled her hand away, turning to face the palace compound on the other side of the street, her body suddenly rigid. He had seen Nasheenian women offer such courtesies to Nasheenian boys, but never to foreign ones. He wondered what her memories were of Mushtallah. Had she courted boys here? He couldn’t picture Nyx as a young, bright-eyed girl opening doors for boys.

Rhys got down from the rickshaw and stood next to her. The palace walls were twelve feet high, spiked and filtered. Two women in red trousers stood outside a filtered gate that shimmered in the heat. He pulled again at the hood of his burnous to make sure it was all the way up. His dress was just as much an adherence to Chenjan modesty as it was a practical barrier against the violent suns. He had never been scraped for cancers. Chenjans still boasted the lowest rate of cancers of any people on Umayma.

Nyx crossed the street, striding ahead into the press of people and vehicles with the dumb confidence Rhys suspected would someday get her killed. He followed, stepping over a heap of refuse and ducking away from a sand cat pulling a rickshaw. The women around him turned to stare as he passed. There was not much of him visible outside the burnous, nothing but his hands. Perhaps they could peer into his cowl for a look at his face, but he suspected there was something else giving him away. Some kind of stance or Chenjan affectation that he had never been able to mask or alter. Or maybe he was just intensely paranoid. He had a right to be.