Tasyin cracked the carapace of a fire beetle and lit her pipe. “What do you know about bel dames?” she said.
Rhys had trouble swallowing his toast. He covered his discomfort with a mouthful of juice, and took his time recovering. He thought he’d left all of those bloodletting lunatics back in Nasheen.
“You know something of bel dames, then?” she asked, amused.
“I’ve known a few, yes,” he said, and drank again. More than a few. What business did the Tirhani government have with bel dames?
“Excellent.”
“You do realize bel dames are not representative of the monarchy? Your negotiation with a bel dame won’t be honored by the Nasheenian government.”
“We’re well aware of how the Nasheenian government operates,” Tasyin said. “This is a personal negotiation of goods and services.”
“Of course,” Rhys said. “I meant no disrespect.” A personal transaction officiated by the Tirhani Minister of Public Affairs? Remember that you’re an employee, he thought. You’re not a consultant.
But there it was, tickling his mind, nonetheless: Tirhanis doing business with bel dames.
“They’ll meet with us here for high tea,” Tasyin said. High tea was a Ras Tiegan custom, taken up by Tirhanis after the colonization of this part of Ras Tieg. “If all goes well you should make the evening train back to Shirhazi. I’ll ask that you don’t make any calls or outgoing transmissions while you’re here. We’ll be filtering the hotel in an hour.”
They sat for a few minutes more while Tasyin finished her pipe and Rhys finished breakfast. Tasyin had one of the house staff, a veiled Ras Tiegan girl, show him to his room. He had at least four hours until high tea. If he could not contact Elahyiah and the children, his time would be best spent working on some of his side translations for local merchants and friends of Elahyiah’s family. But Tasyin’s invocation of Nasheenian bel dames had put him on edge, and there was an old Tirhani city to explore. He wanted a mosque. A cool, quiet mosque.
Rhys exchanged his sandals for sturdier shoes and asked to borrow a coat from one of the house staff. He pulled it on under his khameez and walked back through the old Ras Tiegan gate and into the city center. The red sandstone Ras Tiegan cathedral had been converted to a mosque, and much of its somber, image-heavy exterior had been defaced and resculpted into images of magicians and half-human shifters. There was talk that the Tirhani martyr had been a magician-shifter, an impossible combination that no one had heard of before or since, but that combined with the country’s lack of native shifters and magicians meant he saw their images far more often than he was comfortable with.
It was still some time before the next prayer—they only announced four here, not the six he was used to in Chenja and Nasheen—so he simply walked alone into the mosaic-tiled courtyard, across brilliant crimson and green figures of thorn bugs and fire beetles and glittering yellow farseblooms. He stepped into the covered promenade and then under the archway that led into the deep mouth of the mosque. Inside, the air was cool and dim. He waited just inside for his eyes to adjust. Before him stretched colonnade after colonnade, staggered like pawns across the sandy red floor. They supported a peaked ceiling so high and shadowed he could not see its end.
As his eyes adjusted, he walked further into the mosque. He saw light there, at the center of the forest of columns just ahead of him. He followed the column of light, drawn to it like a locust to a body. The light fell into a small round courtyard, by accident or design, he wasn’t certain. As he approached, he saw water bubbling up from the center of a smooth layer of red pebbles. A single thorn tree grew there, scraggly and thin, clawing toward the bruised sky.
He heard the far-off scrape of footsteps on sandstone, the low whisper of the wind outside. But as he stepped into the light he heard another sound: the rustle of wings; a bird taking flight. He raised his head, too late. He saw no bird. Instead, a feather floated down from the top of the tree, at the edge of the open roof.
Rhys watched the feather settle onto the crimson stones at his feet. A single white feather.
Something inside of him stirred. Old memories. And there, somewhere deep—an aching, missing piece.
He reached for a pistol at his hip that he no longer carried.
“Rasheeda,” he said aloud.
And suddenly the mosque was dead stone, cold and dark. No sanctuary.
God had warned him of what waited back at the hotel.
What he didn’t know was why it had taken them so long to find him.
+
Heavy rain burst from the darkening sky just in time for high tea. Rhys stood on the veranda with Tasyin as the three bel dames walked across the sodden courtyard and under the veranda awning. He noted as they crossed the yard that none of them were shifters. The air did not bend and move around them as it did shifters. That meant none of these three was Rasheeda, the white raven. But that knowledge did not put him at ease. He touched the feather deep in his pocket, and did not take his eyes from the women.
As the bel dames raised their hoods, he peered into each face in turn, looking for some resemblance to women he once knew—heads he had seen beaten, bashed, broken in. Women he had shot or maimed or attacked with some swarm of hornets.
But none of the faces looked familiar. The lifespan of bel dames was notoriously short. He pulled his fingers away from the feather. He needed to step lightly, here. Bel dames were often solitary hunters. These were a pack. It made him uneasy.
When the women stepped onto the veranda, Rhys took an involuntary step back. They were big women—most bel dames were—and the one to his left was a hand taller and thirty kilos heavier than he was. The other two were about Rhys’s height, broad in the shoulders. Though they were all dark and wind-bitten, he knew right away who was in charge. She stood a step ahead of the other two, and when she pulled the hood from her mane of tangled dark hair, she assessed Rhys with the same steely gaze he gave her. An ingrained sense of politeness urged him to look away, but this was Tirhan, and in Tirhan, men still had some measure of power and influence. It was all very well to send women from good families into government work, but if their husbands or fathers or sons wished to keep them home, it was their right—a right not often exercised in Tirhan anymore, and seen as rather backward and gauche—but a right nonetheless. Men were still tasked with the care of women. Some days, he found that very comforting.
“Praise be to God,” the tallest of the women said, in the prayer language; the only tongue shared by Tirhan, Chenja, and Nasheen.
Rhys said, in Nasheenian, “Praise be to God. Please accept the welcome and hospitality of Tirhan. This is Tasyin Akhshan, special consulate to the Tirhani Minister of Public Affairs, and I am Rhys Shahkam, your translator.”
“You learned Nasheenian at the front,” the tall woman said. Not a question. She had a thick, burn-scarred neck. Her features were sharp, petite, and the way she pursed her mouth reminded Rhys of a smudged thumbprint.
“I learned Nasheenian in Nasheen,” Rhys said. He had hoped they’d mistake him for Tirhani, but his accent was still too noticeable. “Please, be comfortable. The consulate has had tea prepared.”
“You have any whiskey?” this was their tangle-haired leader again. Her voice was smoky, with a hard edge, like burnt pepper. She suddenly reminded him of Nyx, his former employer, and he felt a dull ache in his chest, like the throbbing of an old wound. Why had these women come here?
“Beh Ayin is a dry town,” Rhys said.
“Ah,” she said. She made a gesture to the third one, youngest of them, and slimmer, though still heavier than Rhys. At the gesture, the younger one walked back out into the rainy courtyard and posted herself at the gate.
Tasyin asked for a translation.
“They wanted liquor,” Rhys said.
Tasyin showed her teeth. “Liquor before names?”
“Would you like to introduce yourselves?” Rhys asked the bel dames.
“Ah, yes,” the tangle-haired woman said. “I am Shadha so Murshida, lead councilwoman of the Muhajhadyn. This is Dhiya, my blooded right hand.”
“Dhiya,” the tall one said.
Rhys wasn’t sure how to translate “Muhajhadyn.” It wasn’t a term he was familiar with, so he left it out. In Tirhan, they used the term Muhajhadeen as the title of their Minister of War. This sounded similar, but that didn’t mean it was anything like its homonym. He’d learned that the hard way with many Chenjan and Nasheenian words.
Shadha paced around her chair, like a cat. It was a full minute before she sat.
Tasyin waited for her to sit, then followed suit.
Rhys and Dhiya remained standing.
Tasyin exchanged some pleasantries, through Rhys, to Shadha. They drank tea. Or, rather, Tasyin drank tea. Shadha fidgeted. She kept her hands on the table, as was polite among Nasheenians doing business—especially bel dames—but she was obviously uncomfortable with it. Keeping your hands on the table proved you weren’t holding a weapon. Holding a weapon while in negotiations was a foreign concept in Tirhan. Tasyin wouldn’t appreciate the gesture, but Rhys did. He didn’t like it when he couldn’t see a bel dame’s hands.
Shadha tired quickly of Tirhani politeness and said, “Are we going to talk about the shit I humped across the mountain, or fuck over tea for another hour?”
Rhys translated, “She’d like to know if you’re interested in beginning negotiations.”
“Of course,” Tasyin said, “if she’s brought me the item she promised.”
“She wants to see the goods,” Rhys said to Shadha.
Shadha gestured to Dhiya.
The tall bel dame shrugged out of a small pack set low on her back, hidden beneath her burnous.
Rhys watched her carefully untie the leather pack. She reached inside and unwrapped a clear cylinder half-filled with what looked like gray sand. She set the cylinder at the center of the table, next to the tea biscuits.
Tasyin peered through the opaque cylinder. Rhys knew it wasn’t glass; the composition of the material was all wrong for glass. Rhys guessed it was organic. His fingers tingled. Something whispered at the edge of his mind. If there was some kind of bug in the jar, or the sand was laced with something organic, it was nothing that would speak to him, nothing he could identify, not that that meant anything—he was a notoriously poor magician, which is why he’d never actually earned the title in Nasheen.
“I want a demonstration,” Tasyin said. “This is nothing but desert silt.” She reached out and tapped the container.
Rhys translated.
Shadha snorted. “Tell that soft bitch to get it to a magician and lock it down. She wants a demonstration? You tap that thing yourself. You watch.”
Tasyin waited.
Rhys translated.
“Well?” Tasyin said.
Rhys shook his head. “Special consulate, if this is an organic contagion that—”
“Do as she says,” Tasyin said, hard.
“Pardon, mother,” Rhys said, using the honorific given a Tirhani crone, one whose only children were those orphaned in the conflict between Tirhan and Ras Tieg. It had once been a polite term, he knew, but had since fallen into slang as a derogatory name for a bitter old woman who had given up prayer and never married. “I was hired as a translator, not a beast.”
Shadha, following their interaction with her eyes, said, “It won’t kill you. It’s sealed. Only a magician can open it.”
Rhys looked again at the cylinder. He did not volunteer his paltry magician’s skill.
“What does she say?” Tasyin asked.
“She says only a magician can open it.”
Rhys hesitated a moment more. Tirhanis bought, sold, and manufactured weapons. He was under no illusion that the contents of the cylinder were innocuous. But he still felt that itch in his mind, that desire to know, to understand, the presence he felt locked inside the container.
He reached toward the cylinder.
As he did, the whisper at the back of his mind intensified. Something hissed and spat. His fingers touched the container. The dead sand leapt toward him like something alive. He jerked his hand away. The container toppled onto its side.
Tasyin was stone-faced in her seat. Shadha’s smile was grim.
“It’s hungry,” Shadha said. “That’s why it’s gray. Up north, that stuff is red as fresh blood. I don’t know how long it lasts before it needs to eat. You’ll want to get it to your magicians soon. Get it fed.”