God's War

ahead of the military police. He remembered how black the night was; remembered the protestors on the streets, the pictures of mutilated babies, the men on their podiums shouting, telling the crowd that the women of Ras Tieg were murderers and adulterers. He remembered the children—boys and girls—handing out pamphlets of crushed fetuses and mangled children, remembered their innocent smiles, as if they were handing out hard candy.

When he decided there was no one following, Taite buzzed his sister’s place and waited some more.

Inaya was slow coming down the stairs. He had managed to get her passage into Nasheen eight months before by calling in a lot of favors and relying on some of Nyx’s friends in customs. Inaya had been roughed up at the border crossing but said she would never be able to recognize her attackers. There’d been too many. Whether her pregnancy was her former husband’s or some border tough’s, she never said. He had not asked. She was a woman of a hundred secrets—a Ras Tiegan woman—and he let her keep them. The last time they’d seen each other, they were ten years younger, and she, eight years his senior, was rushing through a hasty marriage of necessity while their friends’ houses burned.

They both knew she could have made an easier crossing into Nasheen, but she would have rather killed herself than given in to shifting. For any reason. No matter their parents’ politics, Inaya thought shifters were dirty and diseased. She thought their miscarriages of nonshifting children were murder. She thought her mother was a murderer for not getting Taite and her inoculated, for not somehow saving the five bloody fetuses that their mother had lost and mourned for five bloody years.

Taite hadn’t blamed their mother for shifting at night, going out to copulate with dogs, living some other life in some other form. He understood something of it, that need to escape one’s body.

He had never been able to shift, and a lack of shifting ability for many Ras Tiegans resulted in poor health. Nyx liked to tell him he was allergic to air, and she was only half joking. Much of his memory of Ras Tieg was of a dark room, breathlessness, and the smell of stale urine in a pot.

When Inaya had started to get sick, she told them all it was just allergies, like Taite’s. The headaches, the skin rashes, the nausea. She had nearly killed herself the day she realized her asthma was not from a lack of inoculants but one of the initial symptoms of a maturing shifter about to come into her ability. Taite had never seen her shift. The day she first shifted, he had been young and remembered only screaming, the smell of saffron. He learned later that magicians used saffron to discourage shifters from changing. It mangled their senses, the way the smell of oranges confused transmissions between bugs and magicians.

Inaya opened the door. The swell of her belly made it difficult to maneuver the narrow stairwell. In the dim light from the street, he saw how pale she was.

She’d gotten factory work in neighboring Basmah, but couldn’t afford to live there. She rode a bus an hour there and an hour back. She worked two split eight-hour shifts—eight hours, three hours off, then another eight hours—which meant she didn’t get much time to sleep during a twenty-seven hour day.

“What’s happening?” she asked.

He hadn’t been to see her in a week. “We’ll talk upstairs,” he said.

She nodded, a woman used to secrecy and discretion. Her black curls were tied up with a vermilion scarf, keeping her hair out of her face. Her enormous belly looked far too large for her little frame. He and Inaya were both built like their Ras Tiegan father—narrow in the hips and shoulders, fine-featured. Inaya, by all counts, was prettier and had been darker before she started the factory work that kept her out of the suns.

Inaya started back up the sandy stairs. She wore a long skirt and loose blouse and went barefoot. The building manager was usually gone for months at a time. Taite preferred it that way. She meddled less often.

“Things with Nyx are all right?” Inaya asked as they climbed. Three flights.

“I still have a job, but some things have come up.” Inaya always asked about Nyx first, the job second. Over the months Inaya had picked up Taite’s employer’s first rule: If Nyx was happy, everyone was happy.

Inaya pulled open the door of the little three-room flat. Kitchen, greeting area, bedroom. The toilet was down the hall. A palace, for most refugees. Nyx had found the place through a network of old bel dame contacts and offered it to Taite at a rate he could not refuse. The walls were hung in tapestries and bright bits of fabric Inaya had secreted home from the textile factory. She loved color. Her loom took up one corner of the greeting room. She made some extra money selling her brilliant woven tapestries of Ras Tiegan jungles to rich merchants in Basmah.

There were cushions on the floor and a pressboard box covered over in a sheet, which served as a table.

Inaya moved over to the radio and turned it off. She was breathing hard, and sweat beaded her upper lip. The windows were open, but the room was still too warm. Summer had breached the city a month before. Taite heard the steady whir of the bugs in the icebox.

“When will the results of the vote be in?” Taite asked.

“Soon,” Inaya said.

Taite sat on one of the cushions. Inaya waddled into the kitchen to make tea. She preferred that they keep their roles fixed. Her house, her kitchen. He was a guest.

“We’re working a pretty good bounty,” Taite said.

“But something’s wrong?”

“It has a lot of interested parties after it. Nyx thinks it’s safer if we move our families away from the city for a while.”

Inaya said nothing. She pulled a plate of something out of the icebox. Half a dozen ice flies fluttered out on gauzy wings, hit the warm air, and fell, dead, to the floor. They died more quickly in the summer.

“I was thinking it might be good for you to leave,” he said.

“Where am I supposed to go?”

“I’m asking a friend if you can rent out a room at a place he knows.”

Inaya made fists with her hands and turned to him. Her expression was grim. “Don’t you dare. I’m not staying anywhere you and Khos, that filthy—”

“It’s not like you’re working there,” Taite said hastily. “Where else was I supposed to find a cheap room? I —”

“I’m not staying in a brothel. Especially not one of his brothels.”

“It’s temporary.” He dared not tell her that it wasn’t Khos who recommended the room. Mahdesh had told him about the cheap rooms some months before when the rent on Inaya’s flat had gone up and Taite was looking for places to move her to. Mahdesh, with the warm eyes and rough hands and passion for astronomy…

He had never told Inaya about Mahdesh.

Inaya hated queer men nearly as much as she hated shifters.

Nearly as much as she hated herself.

“You know what they do to women in brothels?”

He shook his head. “This isn’t Ras Tieg.”

“It’s the same everywhere.”

She was deliberately wrong about that. How many men stood on the street here throwing rocks and broken bottles at her for being the daughter of shifter sympathizers? How many times had she been accused of being a murderer? “I’ve put some money away so you don’t have to work for a while. And your board is paid up for the next two months.”

“The baby will come.”

“What better place to be than a brothel? They’ll get you to the best midwife, maybe even a magician. They won’t care if you’re a half-breed… or anything else.”

She delivered a half-eaten tray of fried bread and grasshoppers to him and went back to the kitchen.

“No, of course not,” Inaya said, frowning. “I am worth very little.”

“You sound like Mother when you say that.”

She brought over the tea and hesitated. He half expected her to throw it at him and winced. Some days he felt he should have turned out more like his father, but his father’s arrogance and loud voice hadn’t saved their mother, or Inaya, or Taite. It hadn’t protected any of them.

Inaya firmed up her mouth and set the tray down neatly. She spent a good deal of time trying to sit comfortably. He had the urge to help her, but every time he had tried, she told him, “I’m not a whining Nasheenian woman.” The longer they lived in Nasheen, the more Ras Tiegan she had tried to become. The sister he had known back in Ras Tieg would have asked for his help when she was tired, helped him fix the com, and told dirty jokes