“That is true,” Rhys said. “It’s also true that they are all war veterans.”
“Ah, of course. Well. Can I offer you something to eat?”
“No,” Rhys said, suddenly weary. “I would request a favor, however.”
The Minister raised her brows.
“I have no further interest in negotiating contracts with Nasheenians. I am happy to serve you in the translation of Chenjan, Mhorian, even Ras Tiegan—but no more Nasheenian.”
“Of course,” the Minister said. “It was… imprudent of me. However, you must understand that time was short. And you did agree to the work. For a fairly sizable sum.”
She tapped her desk and pulled out her pay book. Rhys opened his mouth to begin negotiations, but she simply wrote out the amount he had requested in his formal acceptance and passed it to him.
As Rhys took the pay slip, he said, “You do understand that I appreciate the work I do here.”
“And I do appreciate having you,” the Minister said. She met his look.
“Thank you,” he said. He stood. “Peace be upon you.”
“And to you,” the Minister said. “That is all we seek, isn’t it? Peace. The work that we do ensures God’s peace in Tirhan. Do not forget that.”
“I don’t,” Rhys said.
He took the receipt down to the clerk and collected his pay. He stopped at the national bank to square a few accounts. On the way back, he paused outside the big central magicians’ boxing gym. Only the best practiced there—exiles from every country on the map. He had been inside a handful of times, but his magician’s skill was not up to the gym’s standards. They were nice enough to him there, of course—magicians in Tirhan were nothing if not courteous—and his acquaintance with some of the more notorious of the exiled magicians made him welcome, if not respected, among them.
When he wanted to practice his right hook, he had to travel further afield.
But instead of heading to the boxing gym or back to his translation office, he got into a taxi and went home.
It was still early morning, and traffic was light. He strolled through the park and went inside.
The housekeeper had arrived, and was dutifully cleaning up the kitchen. He walked upstairs to find both girls playing in their room.
Inaya was still lying in bed, tangled in the sheets. He undressed and crawled into bed with her. She reached out and ran her hands over his shaved head.
“No work today?”
“Not today,” he said.
“I’d love to spend the day abed, but I have lunch with my mother and sisters. Then my reading group. You don’t want me to sound like a refugee forever, do you?”
“I love the way you speak,” he said, and pressed his finger to her lips.
She laughed and pulled her lean, delicate body out of bed. He admired her as she dressed, carefully and fully concealing the body that belonged only to him and God. He watched as she finished covering her hair, sighed as she kissed him and went downstairs.
He rose and walked to the filtered window and gazed onto the quiet street. The sun was rising high and hot now, and he heard the call to mid-morning prayer. For a time, he watched those on the street below move toward the local mosque. He heard the housekeeper below, instructing the girls on the proper prayer form. They were too young to observe even the four daily prayers called out in Tirhan, let alone the six that Rhys had once followed. As the years passed, he found it was easier to adjust to the Tirhani prayer schedule, though there were still nights when he rose for midnight prayer. They were still some of the most peaceful hours of the night.
Though he had submitted to God from the time he was small, he had never thought that peace and God were synonymous until he came to this country. Until he saw how prosperous a country could be. Yes, his family did well in Chenja. His father was a powerful man, and his mothers came from good families—he had wanted for nothing. But the war had touched him, as it had touched all of them. It had eaten most of his uncles, and he had seen castrated Nasheenian men working in the fields his father owned on more than one occasion.
The war was everything even on the Chenjan interior, among the close-knit families of the mullahs who ruled the country. The war made a few men rich there, yes, but not the way it did in Tirhan. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that, some days.
But he was done with Chenja and Nasheen and their wars forever, now.
After a time, he realized that the call to prayer had died off, and he still had not prayed. He stood at the window a good while longer before finally pulling down his prayer rug and submitting his will to the one peaceful God he had found on this ravaged world.
+
When the housekeeper knocked at his door, Rhys was awake and freshly bathed. She handed him an organic paper note with the seal of the Tirhani Minister of Public Affairs. His stomach clenched.
He dismissed her and quickly tore open the note.
It was flowery, polite, and took nearly a full page to tell him that she would no longer be requiring his services.
Rhys sat down on the bed, stricken.
It was not the end of the world, but it was a lucrative contract. It meant spending more time at his storefront instead of lying around in bed with Elahyiah. He remembered the long hours he used to spend at his storefront, from before dawn to after dusk, sixteen or eighteen hours a day, just scraping along. It was the Minister’s regular use of his services that had made him financially solvent enough to marry.
When Elahyiah returned, he was sitting downstairs at his desk, staring into the living room as the housekeeper picked lemons with the girls in the yard.
“What is it, love?” Elahyiah asked. She sat next to his chair, placed one hand on his knee.
“The Minister told me that my services… are no longer required.”
“Forever? What happened?”
“I… don’t know. I’ll have to work on getting more contracts. I—”
“We have some savings, don’t we? It will be all right.”
“I’m afraid I’ve angered her.”
Elahyiah laughed. “Impossible. You could never anger anyone, Rhys. Not like that.” She touched his hand. “We’ll make our way. I can go back to working if you need me to—”
“No. I’m sure it will be fine. It’s just a shock,” he said.
Elahyiah slowly pulled the scarf from her hair and knotted it in her hands. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“We’ll be all right.”
She took his hand. He squeezed back. They sat together like that in silence for some time as the night deepened and the crickets began their slow song.
“Well,” Elahyiah said finally, standing. “If this is the worst that happens to us, we must consider ourselves lucky. Come, I told Ella to make that Ras Tiegan dish you like. The ratatouille.” She walked toward the kitchen.
But Rhys did not go after her. He continued to stare at his girls in the courtyard as they counted out lemons on the porch, laughing. He tried to remember a happy time like that from his own childhood. Something warm and tangible. He found very little. He had wanted peace. Just peace. And perhaps happy children. A good wife.
You still have all that, he thought, but there was something nagging at him now, some dull, but insistent urging.
Peace came with a price. Especially for men who had sinned as deeply as he had. He knew, in his bones, that this was not the price. And he lived in terror of what the final price would actually be.
18.
I
n Tirhan, Nyx could not smell the war. On the other side of the pass, the first thing she noticed was the absence of the tangy reek of bug haze and burst residue. Tirhan was big and green and rolling, and as they descended into the grasses of the valley below, Nyx found herself suddenly claustrophobic, though the stands of twisty amber trees that clotted the landscape were huddled far off the roadway.
Eshe rode on her shoulder in raven form. He slept most of the way, so she kept her burnous up to protect him from the worst of the cold. The air was different here. Cleaner. Colder. Drier than she expected, too, for such a green country.
Suha’s gun-running sister, Azizah, had agreed to let them join her caravan. They stopped at a bustling road house at noon and waited out the heat. It wasn’t like the dry heat of the desert, but something mild and salty and altogether… different. Eshe and Suha prayed with the rest when the call came out from the muezzin on top of the flat tiled blue roof of the road house.
Inside, Nyx found that they didn’t serve anything harder than red wine. She bought a couple bottles for the road and pushed on.
“You’ll be on your own up here,” Azizah said as the hills turned to plots of square, flat-roofed houses set at the center of dirt lots, their gardens and vegetation carefully walled off or walled in.
“We’ll set you at the main way, but we head south after this. I don’t go through the city center if I can help it.”
And as they rounded the next hill, there it was. Nyx had heard all about Tirhan, all about rich, pretty cities. But she still caught her breath. Like choking.
Shirhazi rose from the spiraling plain of blue-tiled houses and outbuildings and warehouses and road houses. A dozen—maybe more—twisted buildings of glass and metal and bug secretions clawed up toward the sky at the edge of a flat, glassy inland sea. The reach of it touched the horizon. Nyx couldn’t see the other side. A lake? A sea. Vast, milky blue now in the pale violet sky of late afternoon. She had almost gotten used to the stink of it by then, but the wind hit her hard and hot. She got a choking slap of it. Death—rot from within. A beautiful city, growing fat on death.
Quiet as death, too. No bursts. No street music. No yammering vendors or crazy street trash. Just a low city hum, static.
Azizah dropped them at the crook in the road. Nyx stepped carefully onto the tiled street and pulled on a hat. She wanted back her burnous. It was easier to hide weapons. The long coat and hat she’d gotten from a Tirhani trading post were awkward. She was just starting to get used to the boots. She pulled out the cane and leaned on it a long moment. It was a long walk to the city center.
Suha bid her sister goodbye. Eshe stepped next to Nyx and folded his thin arms against his chest. He stooped a little now after a week in raven form, and his face still had a pinched, angular look to it. “Pretty,” he said.
“Alharazad used to be pretty too,” Nyx said. “Remember that.”
Nyx didn’t know Shirhazi, but she and Suha had asked around at the border and again at the road house. The address on Rhys’s letters was in a part of town that would have been on a hill back in Mushtallah. Suha spoke fluent Chenjan, and Tirhani was enough like Chenjan that they could all order food and ask for directions without much trouble. Even Nyx knew a little Chenjan, but deciphering some of the more rapid speech in the dialect and making sense of the slang on the street made Nyx’s head hurt. Not that Shirhazi seemed to have much in the way of a raucous crowd. The tall, neat figures of the Tirhanis downtown were as clean and unsullied as their streets.
Even the taxi ranks were clean, free of trash and clutter. Folks waited their turn. When Nyx stepped into a taxi downtown, a waft of lavender hit her in the face. She gagged. Only a Tirhani would scent a taxi in lavender, the taste of one of the deadliest bursts at the front.
They chose another taxi and piled in. The driver’s beard was neatly trimmed. He had all his limbs and facial bits; his eyes, too, were clear, as if both were originally his own. It took Nyx nearly a quarter hour to realize that what bugged her about their somber taxi ride was the eerie silence. None of them were hacking up bug contagions. She heard no bursts overhead. No burst sirens. She wondered how far she could see in the clear air from the top of one of the huge pillars of glass and metal and bug secretions that dwarfed the skyline. She wondered how anybody got up that many stairs in the first place.
The driver let them out next to a small green park.
When Nyx stepped out of the smoked-glass of the taxi, she was dazzled by the light. She tugged at the brim of her hat, and wished she’d brought her goggles.
She heard Suha get out behind her, ask the cabbie how much.
“Oh, it was my pleasure,” the cabbie said.
“Seriously,” Suha said.
“I could not accept coin from visitors to this district.”
Suha shrugged and stepped onto the smooth, tiled sidewalk with Nyx.