“We’ll get there,” Nyx said.
“When?” Eshe said.
Nyx stopped. Turned. Her expression was hard. “I didn’t ask her to come after us, Eshe. That was her choice. We get to her when we get to her.”
“Nyx—”
“That’s all,” she said.
+
Morning was painful, but at least it wasn’t on the sand. Ahmed woke in a cool room plastered in red sand. Kage sat in the round doorway, gazing at the teeming street below. The windows were set with the glassy, semi-transparent wings of some giant dragonfly. Eshe and Isabet were still asleep, their bodies almost touching. Isabet’s blistered skin was slathered in a sticky unguent that had soothed her enough to keep her quiet for the night—for the first time since they stumbled away from the strange settlement on the edge of the desert. Nyx was gone, presumably already off to start haggling. The woman who rented them the room had taken Nasheenian currency, but far too much of it for Ahmed’s taste. He wasn’t sure how much Nyx had left, but at the prices being charged out here, it wouldn’t last long. He needed to call up some bugs to trade.
Kage glanced back at him. She had not blistered like Isabet had—she’d been better protected from the suns—but her face was still pinched and hollowed. None of them were eating well.
Ahmed wasn’t sure how long Kage was going to stick with them. He figured she would bleed off into the city once they reached it. She wasn’t built to come out here in the first place, and things were only getting worse. He wouldn’t blame her for telling Nyx to fuck off. He’d thought about it himself. Many times. He told himself he stayed because of what he had done back in Nasheen. But in truth, this was the perfect place to get lost. Kage called back down onto the street. “He’s awake!”
“Tell him to get down here!” Nyx’s voice.
“She wants you to help her,” Kage said.
Ahmed drank from one of his water bulbs, then moved past Kage and into the corridor set into the Wall. The room was three stories up, dug into the Wall with a score of others. He heard half a dozen languages he had no name for, men and women calling to one another, children playing, and a small group of people far down the Wall, singing.
He took a deep breath and swung over the side, gripping the handrails set alongside the deep grooves in the Wall.
Nyx waited for him below, arms crossed, impatient. As with any other weakness, she had shown no sympathy for his fear of heights.
“I found a place,” she said.
He didn’t ask for what. Asking her questions just made her more impatient these days.
He watched Nyx lurch ahead of him, and regarded her confident, bighipped walk, and the way she kept tabs on the movement around them. He knew that there was something else driving him north now besides fear of capture. He had served under a great many women like her—literally and figuratively—but some part of him felt that all of them were striving to be exactly who Nyx was—and Nyx had achieved what they were pining for without any effort whatsoever. All dozen of them insisted they were tough women with big appetites and no regrets, but at the end of the day, they wept over their dead and fought over their lovers, like real people. They couldn’t deny their humanity the way this woman had. They couldn’t truly become monsters.
It was the monster in her that fascinated and repulsed him. He wanted to know how she could live that long without giving a shit about anything but herself. When was the last time she had a lover? Did she call anyone friend? Or were they just all business partners, the way Eshe seemed to be? That relationship alone was bizarre enough. The way Eshe looked at Nyx reminded him of the way he gazed forlornly at his own mothers, desperate for love, acceptance. But no matter how hard he worked or what he accomplished, they never regarded him with any sense of pride. To them, he was like a beast already scheduled for slaughter. Why get attached to something that served only one purpose?
Nyx led him through a maze of tents and rocky protrusions that had been repurposed into food and drink stalls. She entered a great orange tent. It was held in place along the bottom by toothy worms, their pointy teeth affixed to the end of the tent, the rest of their bodies driven into the ground.
Inside, he expected to find a smattering of purely practical commodities, but the tent was packed from floor to big top with a dizzying array of goods, many of which he had no name or use for. The spills of round, spiky fruits and red, fleshy vegetables were unfamiliar, as were the hooked instruments hanging from a pole at the far side of the tent. There were piles of textiles, all of them smooth, supple, organic swatches fine emough for a First Family to wear. He saw massive beetle heads, as large as his own, and piles of jagged insect legs and incisors stiff enough to serve as weapons.
Nyx passed him a flat bladder, something that must have come from a long, serpentine creature.
“This is what I was talking about,” she said. “See, you carry it like the bandolier and bulbs, but it holds twice as much. Distributes it better, too.”
“Are you heading further north?” a man said in Khairian.
Ahmed had not noticed him amid the stir of goods. He was a slight man, no larger than Kage, with a knot of dark hair wound about his skull like a crown. Ahmed might have guessed he was Ras Tiegan, if not for his brown skin and bold nose.
Ahmed had found a few who spoke words of Nasheenian and Chenjan, but there were far more languages in the air, only a handful of them related to Khairian. It was strange, to find a world on the other side of the one you knew, something you never knew existed.
“We may be,” Ahmed said.
“You have a sponsor then, to get you over the Wall? Well, you must be careful. It’s cicada season.”
“I’m not sure what that means,” Ahmed said.
The trader must have thought he meant the cicadas, not the sponsor, because he rattled on. “Have you seen the cicadas out here?”
Of all the writhing, gliding, squirming, clacking, chittering things Ahmed had seen out here, cicadas weren’t one of them. “No. They mutants?”
Nyx set three of the water bladders in front of the trader. “Ask him if he has sen,” she said.
Ahmed shook his head.
“They come out every twenty years or so,” the trader said. “This is the season. I saw them when I was a kid. Big fuckers. Eat a caravan whole. Big teeth.”
“Cicadas don’t have teeth,” Ahmed said.
“Sen,” Nyx said.
“Do you have any sen?” Ahmed asked.
The trader shook his head. “Not sure what that is.”
“How much for this, then?” Ahmed asked. And then, to Nyx, “Is this all? There’s no sen.”
The trader preferred bugs, but they didn’t have any, so Ahmed served as middleman while they haggled in Nasheenian currency.
Once they were agreed, Ahmed loaded up their goods.
“What was he saying?” Nyx asked as they walked out.
He told her.
“Why’d you argue?”
Ahmed snorted. “I wasn’t arguing. I was educating.”
“Let me tell you. Best way to get yourself staked out on the sand and left for dead is to ignore the locals. You don’t know this place.”
“Teeth!” the trader called after them, making claws with his hands.
“Peace be,” Ahmed muttered.
“Let’s get breakfast and find a guide,” Nyx said. “I heard there’s a tea house where folks hire themselves out to caravans seeking to cross the Wall.”
“Can we afford a guide?”
“Of course not. But we can afford to feed and clothe somebody, now that the magician is dead. Here, the tea house is this way.”
Ahmed followed her through the riotous mass of colorful people. He wondered where all the people had come from. Weeks and weeks across this desert, and they hadn’t seen more than a handful of figures, most of them moving away from them.
“You don’t speak Khairian. How did you find out so much around here?”
“You don’t have to speak a language to pick up on things. People talk without speaking all the time. You should know that. You worked intel.”
“Did you pick up on why there are so many people out here?”
“It’s a trade city, intelligence boy.”
“Did you see a lot of people out there?”
“Not any people who wanted to be found,” Nyx said. “You forget we’re in somebody else’s country. They’ve got their ways of avoiding outsiders, don’t they?”
He thought of the raven-filled settlement, and the strange prayer niches. They could have come within three hundred paces of that settlement and not seen it. It took stumbling right into it to find it.
“Hurry up,” Nyx said. “It’s just here.”
Among the stir of semi-permanent tents and rocky structures was a globular, red-and-purple-streaked monolith. To Ahmed’s eyes, it was as if something had been shat out of a giant roach as tall as the sky-high Wall whose shadow protected the inhabitants of the city. Like the Wall itself, the monolith had been carved by many hands until its interior was mostly hollow. Nyx led him to the lip of the monolith and started inside the cool corridors. Bioluminescent insects pulsed across the arched ceiling and ran in neat horizontal lines where the floor and walls met. Ahmed paused to examine them, and saw that they were set behind a transparent skein that protected them from the foot traffic—something a lot like the lacquered dragonfly wings that made up the windows.
He ran to catch up with Nyx. She was stepping into a steamy doorway. As he rounded into the doorway, he collided with a tall, reddish woman with a sea of dark hair that nearly touched her ankles. She was arguing with Nyx, and acknowledged him only long enough to push him away.
Ahmed stumbled against the far wall. He reached for a gun, then hesitated. The argument had drawn a crowd in the already packed tea house. The woman herself bore no weapon. She spat at Nyx in surprisingly good Nasheenian.
“She says you own her,” the red woman said. “If you own her, you answer for her crimes.”
“In my country, fucking’s not a crime,” Nyx said.
“What’s going on?” Ahmed said, pushing his way back to them.
Nyx met his look. “It seems our little Drucian has a more active life than we thought. She apparently fucked this woman’s girlfriend.”
“I have been insulted,” the woman said, “I challenge you to a circle.”
“Sorry, I don’t accept.”
“That is not done.”
“Well, I’m doing it. You speak Nasheenian, you should know that we don’t have the same rules you do.”
The woman drew a weapon—a serrated insect leg like the ones Ahmed had seen in the trader’s shop. She was over a head taller than Nyx, thinner and fitter, and at least two decades her junior. But Nyx didn’t blink.
“You’re in my place. You obey my rules,” the woman said.
“They aren’t strictly your rules, though, are they?” said another woman, in Nasheenian. Ahmed recognized her accent immediately. It was Chenjan. She sat at the nearest window, by the door. As she spoke, she stood and walked next to Nyx. She was a small woman, compared to all the rest. Her hair was bound in a turquoise turban, and she wore an amber robe made of the same jawed insects that many of the others in the tea house wore. Her complexion was as Chenjan as her accent. He had never seen a Chenjan woman without a burqua before.
“We’re all visitors here, aren’t we?” the Chenjan said. “Beyond the Wall, your people have rules. In Nasheen, they have theirs. But here in Kiranmay there are different rules, aren’t there? Shall I call an enforcer and see what he has to say?”
The woman with the weapon frowned. She pointed the insect leg at Nyx. “Don’t think I’ll forget. When we meet next, we settle this.”
“Sounds bloody fucking wonderful,” Nyx said.
The woman sheathed her weapon and slid out the door. The crowd that had gathered around them began to dissipate.
Nyx raised her brows at Ahmed. “You’re even better at making friends than I am.”
“Your woman dishonored her,” the Chenjan woman said.
“And who are you?” Nyx asked.
“Afareen.”
“Just Afareen?”
“Out here? Yes. I belong to no one but myself out here.”
“Let me buy you some tea,” Nyx said.
Ahmed said, “Is that necessary?”
Nyx grinned. “You’ll excuse him. He’s just returned from the front.”
Afareen said, “I lost all my men to the front. Husband, brothers, sons and all. So perhaps I am not as threatening as you hoped.”
“That wasn’t what I meant,” Ahmed said.
“Wasn’t it?” Nyx said, and gestured for the Chenjan to join them at a table.
Tea with a Chenjan. What was next? Ahmed thought. Dinner with bel dames?
+
“If your intent is to get beyond the Wall, you best turn back now,” Afareen said.
“Not an option,” Nyx said.
The three of them sat at Nyx’s table at the back, propped up on low cushions. Nyx had listened to the tea shop owner smoothly transition between a dozen different languages in the quarter hour they’d been seated. She had never had much of a head for languages, and the idea of packing that many into her brain made her dizzy.
“Passing over the Wall requires a sponsor. One of those women must speak for you.”
“Like the one who threatened Nyx?” Ahmed said.
“The one you insulted, yes.”
“I can’t believe it was Kage,” Nyx said. “Maybe there’s some other Drucian running around.”
“Not out here,” Afareen said.
“Why one of these women?” Ahmed asked.
“They are the Aadhya. They rule the world beyond the Wall.”
“You ever been there? Beyond the Wall?” Nyx asked.
“No. I have been here some years. It was my intent to reach the other side of the continent, to discover what lay beyond the Wall. But the Aadhya are, as you saw, a prickly people. Unless you have something of great value to offer them, they will not permit you entry.”
“Hasn’t anyone just climbed the Wall?” Nyx asked.
“It’s two kilometers high, and the other side is sheer. The dangers are… many. Those who live stay on the caravan route. To stray means death.”
“So people do get across,” Nyx said.
“Of course. Traders are welcome. Some of the Aadhya even serve as guides. You may have a more positive experience with others.” She finished her tea and stood. “Now I must apologize for my own rudeness, but I am expected elsewhere. If you are seeking employment here while you wait to cross the Wall, I may have something for you. I live in the western quarter. Ask for Afareen of the red tent. Someone will direct you.”