Nyx presented the women at the gate with her red letter. They pointed Nyx and Rhys in the direction of another, smaller, gate. The women posted there let them into an inner yard and through an organic filter. Inside the filter, the world suddenly smelled strongly of lavender and roses. Rhys had a startling memory of the front—of bright bursts in the sky, the smell of oranges and geranium, and this, somewhere, this smell of lavender. He trembled and stilled.
Nyx looked back at him. “Come, now,” she said softly. “It’s real lavender. It smells different. Come on, I bet they have a garden in here.” She, too, had been to the front.
He wanted to take her hand. He shook his head, sighed deeply through his nose, and followed after her.
They were given over to a woman in yellow, who took them through yet another gate and into a massive courtyard. The smells dissipated.
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
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
