Rapture (13 page)

“Where you learn to shoot?” Nyx asked.

“Leaf bugs,” the girl said. “We have a lot of leaf bugs.” She began to pack up her gun, still expressionless.

Nyx had picked palm-sized leaf bugs out of her bed every night in Druce. “All right. What you want in exchange for service?”

“Room and board,” the girl said.

Nyx raised her brows. “That it?”

“I just need to... get away.”

They always needed to get away.

“What’s your name?”

“Isao Kage.”

“Kage, then,” Nyx said. Second name first, with Drucians. “It’s a deal.” Certainly the best deal she ever made for a sniper, but then, Drucians didn’t know how to deal properly. It put them at a disadvantage, one she was more than happy to exploit.

+

“You don’t know he was a threat,” Ahmed said.

Nyx stood with him at the window downstairs as the shadows lengthened in the street. “No? You see tomorrow. They’ll be another beggar out there. Another addict, or worse. Somebody so hungry they don’t care about the risk. Some dumb body. You wait,” she said.

But the next morning, there was no new beggar.

Not until dark.

Nyx called Ahmed over. She watched as the young beggar pulled at the sleeves of his tattered slick to hide the venom scars on his arms.

“Satisfied?” Nyx asked.

Ahmed’s eyes were half-lidded, his face—unreadable.

“You’re the boss,” he said.

“I am. Don’t forget it.”

She turned and went back into her office. Shut the door. Nyx sat behind the desk and took a deep breath. Loyalty was a tricky thing. Aside from Eshe, her team was brand new, and she needed to win their loyalty. This was always the hardest part, being right all the time. Not fucking up. Killing stuff had always been easy for her, but getting a bunch of vets and outcasts to fuck around with her to the ends of Umayma—that was tough, and she didn’t have a lot of time on her hands to make it all right.

Somebody was having her storefront scouted, somebody who thought they could follow her into the desert. If it was one of Fatima’s bel dames, Nyx decided then and there that she would burn Blood Hill to the ground.

If it was somebody else… well, then she was already way behind in this race, and her chances of catching up were getting slimmer by the day. I’m being played, she thought, but I have no idea by who, or what the fuck for.

T
he sky overhead was on fire.

Rhys stood just outside the circled carts and pitched tents of the caravan, smoking. It was the only way he could get warm. Above him, purple waves of mist billowed in the sky like a massive shroud. He had spent most nights out here at the edge of camp, watching the sky, since the lights started. The caravan was one of Payam’s, led by a caravan leader named Araok who told him that’s just what the sky did out here. During the day, the caravan was a sprawling, noisy affair—eighteen sand caterpillars, four sand cats, seven carts, and twenty-six people.

Rhys’s appeal to Elahyiah had won him her company on the journey, but she had not spoken to him since they began. She spent her time in their cart with the children. When he spoke to her, she didn’t look at him.

He believed all she needed was some new perspective. A fresh vista. Rhys rode along with the caravan, sitting on the back of a caterpillarpulled cart, while the heat soaked into his bones and water ruled his dreams.

At night, he sat with the other men at the fire and traded stories. When he bedded down with Elahyiah and the children, he began to take some joy in Rahim’s constant squalling. The crying meant Rahim was alive, they were all alive, even after all the grit and horror the world had thrown at them.

Rhys put out his cigarette and tucked the remainder into his pocket.

He walked back to the ring of firelight where the men spoke in low tones. There were two other families on this trek, one of them relocating to a settlement called Tejal and the other paying their way to join family in another Chenjan settlement just a few more days north.

Beyond the ring of firelight, Rhys could see the darkness around them writhe. He shuddered. There were more insects out there, and… other things. Larger, more fearsome, and more terrifying than what ended up in the pot every night. They had encountered one of the mauta kita the day before, a monstrous creature fifteen feet long, banded in purple scales, that had devoured one of the fat, slow-moving caterpillars that pulled the carts.

Rhys trudged into the warmth of the fire’s circle. He saw the men passing around a bottle. They drank a terrible concoction of fermented cats’ milk called ashora that turned Rhys’s stomach just to smell it.

“Would you like some ashora, Rhys?” one of them asked. He was a Tirhani man called Rafshan.

“He is Chenjan. He does not drink,” said one of the Khairians, Abhinava. “The atishi baluka may strike at any time,” Rafshan said. “You should enjoy the time you’re given.”

Atishi baluka was one of the first foreign terms Rhys had learned when coming to the north. It referred to the flesh-eating sand, the sand that burrowed into wounds to devour the blood within, leaving behind a gutted, deflated corpse. Rhys had yet to see any of it out here, but he had witnessed a variant of it in action at a church in Tirhan a long time ago. He had no interest in encountering it here.

Rhys sat with the men in the sand. Somewhere nearby, a caterpillar snuffled.

“That boy of yours is quiet tonight,” Abhinava said.

“God is good,” Rhys said.

“Watch your family as we go further north. Be sure your girls do not wander of,” Abhinava said. “It is easy to get lost here, and some of the nomads take slaves.”

In the morning, after prayer, the caravan was moving again. A ceaseless routine of packing, sweating, eating, unpacking, smoking, sleeping. Rhys found it comforting. The suns were high and hot, but inside, the cart was hung with an organic drape that kept the interior bearable.

At dusk, three weeks into their journey, they came to Tejal where one of the families, Rafshan’s, said goodbye to the caravan.

Rhys took the man by the elbow and wished him well.

“Luck to your family,” Rafshan said. “And God go with you.”

“And with you.”

That night, Rhys slept well. He woke before dawn to pray with the other Chenjan and Tirhani men in the party and prepared for another day on the road. The heat was not terrible, so he traveled much of the way by foot, and rode for a time with Abhinava on his cart, trading stories about bacterial remedies and the most useful type of flesh beetle to treat burns.

At dusk, the caravan camped, and Rhys prepared to spend another night telling stories on the sand. He walked back to his family’s cart. It was strange not to hear Rahim wailing this time of day.

He pulled back the organic sheet that protected his family from the worst of the heat… and froze.

The cart was empty. Not just empty of people, but empty. Their belongings were gone, everything but a single pack he had brought for himself. His heart thudded loudly. Some terrible sound filled his ears.

Rhys walked over to Abhinava’s cart. The man’s wife and Elahyiah had spoken often during their weeks of travel.

“Have you seen my wife?” he asked her.

Abhinava’s wife shrugged. “I have not seen her.”

Rhys moved into the opening of the cart. The woman shrank back. “I will ask again,” Rhys said. “Have you seen my wife and children?”

“They got off at Tejal, after the caravan got underway,” she said. “I’m sorry. It was her right.”

“Her right?” Rhys said. “I am her husband.”

“Among my people,” the woman said, “it was her right.”

Rhys’s hands itched for his pistols. He backed slowly away from the woman. Tejal. Less than a day behind them. He would go there and find her. Bring her back. What madness was this? What was Elahyiah thinking, to betray him like that?

He walked to the popping fire to beg a caterpillar from the caravan leader. But as he approached the fire, he saw there was no one standing near it.

Three figures spoke in low tones several paces distant. He searched for the others.

“Rhys!” Abhinava called. “Arm yourself!”

“What?”

The attack was sudden, and fierce.

It took Rhys several breaths to realize what was happening. He heard three shots. Abhinava ran past him, shouting for his wife.

Rhys pulled his pistols and darted behind the nearest cart.

Whirling figures moved into camp in groups of two and three. They had covered their faces with long red scarves. As he watched, they cut the harnesses off the sand caterpillars, and called to them in a language he did not recognize.

More shots. The figure nearest him collapsed onto the sand, clutching at his chest. Blood welled. The attacker wadded up the length of his turban—Rhys realized the scarves were simply the longer ends of their turbans, pulled over their faces—and tried to quell the blood.

With the face revealed, Rhys realized the attacker was a woman. Or perhaps a very young boy. Tall, dark haired, with reddish skin and broad features, she did not look Khairian at all.

“Rhys!” he looked up. Abhinava shot the struggling woman in the sand, this time in the head. She went still.

“Come!” Abhinava said, and held out his arm. “We need your pistols.”

Rhys ran after him.

More figures poured in from the desert. He had assumed the dozen were all they had, but a dozen more appeared every time their comrades were felled. Rhys took cover behind a cart with Abhinava and several other men. They had rounded up the others into just two carts.

“This is where we stand,” Abhinava said, as another wave came in from the desert.

Rhys aimed to incapacitate the women, taking them each in the legs, with a preference for the knee, when he could manage it. He had not killed a man in a long time, and he preferred to keep it that way.

“What are they coming for?” Rhys asked. He saw more sand caterpillars reticulating out across the desert.

“They want the goods,” Abhinava said, “and the caterpillars.”

“Let them have them!”

“Are you mad?”

Rhys wondered why these people objected to the caravans so strongly. Wouldn’t they appreciate trade and commerce in this blasted wasteland?

The smell of smoke pulled his attention from the raiders. He looked back and saw that the nearest cart was on fire.

Rhys broke away from the others, running across the sand. He saw more carts on fire, spewing smoke into the cool night air. He coughed and choked as he rolled down to the other side of camp. When he looked up, one of the desert women stood over him, serrated blade raised.

He fired.

She dropped.

Rhys scrambled to his feet. He saw a single sand caterpillar squirming at the edge of camp, its tawny, nearly hairless skin blending easily into sand. It was hitched to a small chariot used by the caravan leader.

He strode toward the abandoned chariot. His hands began to shake as he untangled the caterpillar’s lead from its hitch. He leapt into the cart and pushed out into the desert, beyond the circle of the caravan. He kicked at the supplies in the chariot, and noted that he did not have much water. He needed to go back the way they had come and tell someone what had happened. He needed to get back to Tejal, to find Elahyiah and his children. But the wind had started up, smearing the caravan’s tracks across the desert, blowing more smoke. He was bitterly cold. Above him, the sky was alive with purple fire.

He turned back once. The caravan was some ways distant. No one was following him. He heard screaming, then Khairian singing. The trembling got worse. He was tired of killing for lost causes. He closed his eyes, and tried to still his racing heart with the memory of why he had come to this Godforsaken place.

The night the bel dame assassins came for him and his family in Tirhan, they had taken his hands, nearly drowned his wife, and killed his daughters. They found Souri’s body that night, but not his elder daughter, Laleh. He had searched for her body, and had the well dredged, and put in a report with the Tirhani order police. Elahyiah told him he was obsessed about a ghost, and after two years he let it rest. He had tried to rebuild his life, his family, even though he had failed to protect them that night, when the bel dames burned the world down around them.

So many failures. He no longer wondered what God would say to him at his death. He no longer anticipated paradise. He was a deserter and a coward. And a killer. What was one more body now that he had failed at everything else?

He was already damned. But he could not fail his family again.

Rhys huddled in his burnous against the chill and prayed for a warm dawn. A new day. A clean beginning.

But as the caravan burned behind him, he admitted to himself that there was no starting over.

Just running. Endless, mindless running across the desert, into a future much bleaker than the past.

I
naya knelt at the foot of Saint Mhari, murmuring a prayer of safekeeping she had intoned since her childhood, long before she understood the words. It was an hour after midnight mass, when only the most desperate and downtrodden still walked the dim passages and knelt in the narrow prayer niches of the church, seeking solace from lesser saints whose concerns, they hoped, were easier to bear than God’s, and so could afford to pay them more attention. It was her mother who first took her here to these lesser spaces; the small, secret spaces.

“It is not the shouting that God cares for,” her mother told her. “He rewards the obedient, the pious, the meek. What meek woman has the pride to speak directly to God? That is not our place. It is Mhari who will carry our prayers to Him. Mhari who protects us.”

Inaya placed her fingers on the worn base of the idol, and peered into the inscrutable face. Her personal prayers were too private to say aloud, not here, not anywhere. But she knew Mhari would hear them. Knew they would find their way to God’s ear, even if He didn’t answer. He never answered.

Behind her, she heard Michel’s familiar shuffling walk. She rose, but did not turn. He moved within a pace of her, then stopped.