The bel dame holding his wife.
Rhys grabbed Souri with his free hand. She was screaming and screaming.
Something heavy thumped him from behind. A hand went over his mouth. He felt a bug in his mouth. Smelled bug-repelling unguent on his attacker’s fingers.
He elbowed his attacker, but there was someone else with her, and they were both on him now. They wrestled him to the ground. The swarm swam lazily away from him, misdirected, confused. He called them in to sting his attackers and asked for a beetle swarm. The nearest was in the garden. He felt them there, but could not call them. Oh, God, why give him any skill at all if it could not help him now?
He choked on the beetle. The poison began to work its way down his throat.
Screaming. His daughters were screaming. Elahyiah.
My wife. The bel dames and my wife.
Rhys tried to heave himself out of their grip. They held firm. The struggle was enough to make him gag on the bug. He swallowed, knowing as he did that he was half a minute away from losing the bugs completely.
“Out, all right? Bring them out!”
A long-legged woman stepped over Souri’s sobbing form and crouched next to Rhys. She cocked her head at him, leaned in close. A lovely, clear-skinned face, but something in her was lacking, some light behind her eyes.
“Missed me, black man?” Rasheeda said.
Rasheeda. The white raven had found him.
Rhys pulled against the bel dames again.
“Come now, I was always better at this than she was,” Rasheeda said.
They hauled him up and bound him. Elahyiah, too.
The girls they wrapped once with sticky bands and moved outside.
“Where are you taking them?” Rhys said, voice hoarse. The world was muted, dumb. It was like being blind, without the bugs.
“Leave my family inside. They’re nothing to you.”
“You forget, black man. None of you are anything to me.”
“Rasheeda—”
The women dragged him out to the back porch. He recognized one of them now. She was the tall bel dame who’d stood next to Shadha so Murshida in Beh Ayin, the one with the burn-scarred neck. What was her name? Dhiya.
“You’re making a mistake, Dhiya,” Rhys said.
She turned to him, coolly, said, “You have no idea.”
Outside, the bloody moons cast the whole yard in crimson shadows.
Elahyiah and the girls were huddled at the end of the porch. The girls were sobbing. Elahyiah looked over at him. He saw her breathing deep, but she did not cry. She did not tremble.
Two of the bel dames were uncovering the well. They must have broken the padlock.
Dhiya pushed him to his knees. He was just ten feet away from Elahyiah and the girls. He looked over at his wife again. She met his look for one long minute.
Neither said a word.
Rasheeda tossed a loop of something to one of the bel dames. “Rope them up in that,” she said. She strode over to Rhys.
“I have some questions for you, gravy eater.” She crouched again, cocked her head. “I heard you had a meet with an old friend of ours. I need to know what you gave her.”
“She came here for a recording,” Rhys said. “I don’t have it anymore. She has it.” Nyx could take care of herself. He and Elahyiah could not.
“So you gave her everything?”
“Yes. Search the house. There’s nothing. She wanted a voice reel we had back when we were hunting the alien, Nikodem Jordan. She needed to match it to the voice of a bel dame.”
“And did she match it?”
Rhys paused. Too long a pause. Dhiya hovered behind him. “I don’t know,” Rhys said. “The reel she got was out of date.”
“The reel?”
“She got a voice recognition reel.”
“From who?”
A thin line, here. He looked over at Elahyiah and the girls again. Then back at Rasheeda. Hadn’t he always been a good liar? “Another bel dame. She’s staying in the Ras Tiegan district. You can find her there.”
Rasheeda rose. She flicked a hand at the other women.
They rolled out the loop of wire and started winding it around Elahyiah and the children.
“Rhys?” Elahyiah said. Softly.
“I said to leave them alone! That’s all I know. I told you where they are. You go ask Nyx if you have any more questions!”
“I already know where Nyx is,” Rasheeda said. “There’s someone else I came for.”
“What are you doing? Rasheeda, that’s everything! I’ll answer anything! Rasheeda!”
She lolled toward his wife and children. “String them up,” she said.
“Rasheeda, Goddamn you!”
Dhiya and one of the other bel dames hauled his wife and children over to the well. They had wound them together tightly with jagged wire, the sort they used on the back fences in the rural areas to keep out stray dogs and giant stag beetles. Souri and Laleh continued to cry.
“Stop this! Rasheeda!” Rhys yelled. He looked up at the neighboring houses, all dark. He heard a soft
whizz-pop
, and a hazy blue glow momentarily lit the yard. Residue from the Martyr’s celebration at the waterfront.
The fireworks had started.
“Let’s give you a fighting chance,” Rasheeda said.
The other bel dames looped the wire through the old tripod bucket pull. Back before the row of houses had running water, the well had served as water source for the house and its nearest neighbors. Most houses in the district had them.
They’d knotted the girls into Elahyiah’s arms, wound tight against her body. She clutched them to her. He saw the wire digging into flesh. Saw her lips moving. The ninety-nine names of God.
Dhiya locked the wire into the bucket pull and pushed Elahyiah and the girls toward the well.
“Over you go,” Dhiya said, and shoved them over the lip of the well.
Screaming.
Rhys lunged forward. The bel dame behind him cuffed him.
His family hung over the black hole of the well, strung together with skin-biting jagged wire, screaming.
Screaming.
“Rasheeda!”
Rasheeda turned slowly on her heel. “Why don’t we play a game? If you can pull them up you can have them.”
“Don’t do this.”
“Who was the bel dame she got the reel from?”
“Alharazad,” Rhys said.
“And the woman Nyx identified? Who was she?”
Souri and Laleh were whimpering now. Voices hoarse. Elahyiah dangled over the well, like a strangled butterfly, wings mutilated.
“Shadha so Murshida,” Rhys said. “The woman I met with in Beh Ayin.”
“Who else knows?”
“No one. She and I heard it. I don’t know if she told her team or not. I’ve told no one.”
“Good,” Rasheeda said. She took him by the collar, helped him to his feet. His bisht was torn and dirty. “Now you have a chance to pull them back.” She pushed him toward Dhiya.
Dhiya held out the limp end of the wire. It fed up into the triangular pull. The wheel lock held it in place and kept his family suspended over the well.
“Hold on,” Dhiya said.
Rhys turned to Rasheeda. “You can’t expect-”
“Pull them up,” Rasheeda said. “Pull them up, and they’re yours.”
The thin strand of wire was hooked with barbs.
“Rasheeda…”
“You say my name like I don’t know it,” she said. “Come now, easy, isn’t it? Just pull them up and over. You’re a Tirhani man, hey, a boxer? You boxing magicians. Show us how men care for their families in Tirhan.” She reached into her coat and pulled out a gun. She aimed it at Elahyiah. “Or I could shoot them right now… the way you shot me and my sisters.”
Rhys reached for the wire.
Everything bled out of him. All thought. All reason. He watched his wife, his children, hanging above the well, slowly crushed by their own weight, winding them tighter and tighter in the wire.
Pull them up, and they were his again.
The world was quiet. No bugs. He couldn’t sense them or hear them or see them. The occasional orange or blue or lavender firework crested the rise of the buildings, splashed them in the ambient glow. There were no fireworks in the desert. All the light in the sky was there from bursts and munitions.
In Tirhan, all the light was beautiful.
He twisted the wire in his hands, until the barbs bit into his flesh. If he could not pull them up, he would hold them. Hold them until the end of the world.
Rasheeda was watching him. She gestured to Dhiya.
Dhiya walked over to the wheel lock.
Rhys grit his teeth. Dug in his heels.
Elahyiah lifted her head.
The world went blue, then pale lavender as the fireworks fell behind the horizon of the house behind them.
Dhiya released the lock.
Rhys jerked forward. The barbs cut into his hands. He hit the ground, held on. Pain. Just pain. Hold on. Pull.
The girls whimpered. They’d dipped beneath the lip of the well. Their voices were distant, muffled.
Rasheeda walked toward him.
Rhys found his feet. Dug in his heels again. Pulled. His hands had gone numb. He saw his hands, once, rapidly swelling, beaded in blood. Then his eyes were on the lip of the well. He began to recite the ninety-nine names of God.
“Pull,” Rasheeda said softly.
He did not look at her. Nothing but the wire connecting him to his wife and daughters. Such a thin wire. His body trembled. He couldn’t feel his hands. I can hold them, he thought. How long can I hold them? God, help me. Just for this. I need you, one last time.
But his body shook. His feet began to slip.
He heard something behind him, then. Someone yelling sharply. He saw Rasheeda turn, confused, mouth agape.
He saw her reach for her machete. Heard heavy footsteps. The creak and hiss of blades leaving sheaths.
There was a long, slow cry. A blade flashed. Rasheeda fell onto him. The blade flashed again. Everything moved like a dream. Some bloody nightmare.
He couldn’t see his wife.
God, Elahyiah.
The blade flashed again. Rasheeda tumbled into him and fell against his straining arms.
Someone’s blade clipped right through the soft fat of Rasheeda’s shoulder as she jerked away… and neatly severed Rhys’s arms at the wrist.
Tension released.
Elahyiah screamed.
Rhys watched, curious, as his still-grasping hands—tangled in the wire—were jerked sharply toward the bottomless mouth of the well.
Rhys fell back, hard, onto his ass. Great steams of blood pumped from his wrists. My blood, he thought, distantly. Beside him, Rasheeda hissed and spat and rolled to her feet, oblivious of the chunk taken out of her shoulder.
Rhys held up the bloody stumps of his arms.
Gaped. Dizzy.
Blood pumped across his bisht. He shoved his arms, reflexively, beneath his armpits and struggled toward the well on his knees. Blackness rode at the edges of his vision. Someone was laughing. His stomach heaved. Fireworks popped.
And the missing sound. The silence.
The staggering, crushing silence.
He staggered toward the well. Blackness ate at the edges of his vision as figures whirled around him. Blades. Blood. He looked up, and from the edge of the blackness he saw a tall, tangle-haired woman raise her machete and cut Rasheeda’s head off.
The head thumped onto the bloody ground, still sneering. The eyelids fluttered. Rasheeda’s coterie of bel dames began to scatter.
Rhys stared. The tangle-haired woman stood over Rasheeda’s cooling body, machete in hand. He knew her. It was not the woman he expected.