God's War

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 searches 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.”