Kameron Hurley - God's War

The other walls presented the more traditional forms of decoration—elaborate raised script, passages from the Kitab carved into the walls and painted in bright colors. Through the airy wooden grating of the windows lining the courtyard, Rhys saw other waiting areas and long hallways. He heard the sounds of more water beyond them, hidden gardens, perhaps. The smell of roses and lilac. Pervasive. It made his eyes water.

“Not so bad a place, huh?” Nyx said.

Rhys sat on the bench. The air was cool. The open center of the courtyard must have been filtered. He pulled back the hood of his burnous.

“Nasheenians spend too much time worshipping images,” he said.

“Yeah, well, I never read anything in the Kitab about prayer wheels being the quickest way to get a response from God either. I thought you’re supposed to submit, not ask Him for things.”

“We don’t all use prayer wheels,” Rhys said, and grimaced. There was nothing worse than a Nasheenian mistaking him for a Chenjan purist instead of an orthodox. At least no one asked if he was a follower of Bahay anymore. The mullahs had wiped out that sect three years before. “When did you ever read the Kitab?” Nyx looked away from him, back toward where they’d come in. “Doesn’t everybody read it? Man, I could use a whiskey.”

“How can you read such a beautiful book and turn your back on it?”

“Never said it wasn’t a beautiful book. I just don’t believe there’s some man up there in the black who gets off on watching us pound our head on the pavement six times a day.”

Rhys watched her. “And yet you must have believed there was a God, at some time. You did go to the front.”

“I went to the front for my brothers,” she snapped, and the force of the response surprised him.

The servant returned with tea and a decanter of whiskey for Nyx. Nyx walked over to the lip of the fountain and sat, square in the sun, her burnous pushed back over her shoulders. Though Rhys was reasonably certain of the filter, he guessed that Nyx would have sat there uncovered regardless. He had never met anyone so casual with their life. Most people that careless or arrogant were dead before thirty. How she continued to elude a violent death while actively courting it still mystified him.

“You must have had a powerful belief once, to take you out there,” he persisted. “If I’d ever been called, it would have been difficult to answer.” Saying it that way, saying “if,” had become such a natural thing, such a natural story, that it fell off his tongue without a hitch. It was easier to say in Nasheenian.

Nyx barked out a little laugh. “Oh, yeah? You saying that if your mullahs told you God wanted you to go, you wouldn’t have? Don’t be an ass, Rhys. You would have gone. You would have dressed up for it.”

He looked down into his lap so she could not see his face. Sometimes he wondered how two people could work together for so long and still know nothing about one another.

They sat waiting an hour more before another yellow-clad woman summoned them. The woman was tall and lean, with a blunt, bold face and keen stare. When she walked in, Rhys knew she was a magician, though she dressed in the same uniform as the queen’s other attendants. The look she gave him confirmed that she knew he was a magician also, and they held each other’s attention for a brief moment. She turned to Nyx.

Nyx had finished most of the whiskey.

“She will see you now,” the woman said as four more women turned out from the arched doorways to join her. They were a formidable bunch, dark-haired and dark-eyed, with the backs and shoulders of women who could pull rickshaws and swing swords with equal ease. They were very Nasheenian.

“I am Kasbah,” the woman said. “We will, of course, need to search your persons for weapons and contaminants. Weapons will be returned when you exit her presence.”

Rhys unbuckled his pistols. He turned over the loop of ammunition he kept at his belt and the dagger at his hip.

Watching Nyx disarm was a more drawn-out affair. There was the sword she kept strapped to her back, her pistol, her whip, the garroting wire she kept strung in her dhoti, the bullets sewn into her burnous, the bullets strung around her neck. The dagger strapped to her thigh, the pistol strapped to the opposite calf, the three poisoned needles she kept in her hair. He noted she kept the garroting wire she used to tie her sandals, but she pulled out the razor blades tucked into the soles.

The women must have been used to bel dames and bounty hunters, because they did not blink at the pile of weaponry she handed over. Though the filters had cleared them both of bugs, the women searched their pockets. Kasbah neatly found and turned out Rhys’s hidden bug pockets. She was, most certainly, a magician.

“We’ll also need to perform an organics search,” Kasbah said. She did not look at him, but she had just pulled her hands from his hidden pockets.

Rhys flinched. Nyx looked over at him. “Can’t we skip that?” she asked.

“I’m sorry,” Kasbah said, “but particularly when”—she gave Rhys another open look—“we have those trained in the art of assassination within her presence, we must perform a search. If you’ll come with me, Nyxnissa, I will have your companion searched separately.”

Rhys said, “No. I’ll stay here.” He had been through many a Nasheenian organics search. The kind by women like the ones on the train. He felt a sharp tightening in his chest. Sweat broke out across his brow. I’ve been here too long, he thought.

Nyx was fiddling with her red letter. “I’ll be in the next room,” she said, but from the tone of her voice, even she knew that would not be enough.

“No.” He pulled his burnous more tightly around him. The fear was in him now, the memories of half a hundred organics searches during the years he’d lived in exile. They did not just use their fingers to search every cavity, orifice, and wound on his body for hidden organics, but far more invasive tools. They were never gentle. These cold women on the interior knew little of the war and had seen few Chenjans. They would enjoy venting their rage and frustration onto his black body.

“Can I go with him?” Nyx asked. “What if I go with him?”

“These aren’t customs agents,” Rhys snapped at her. She couldn’t flirt or fuck her way out of everything. He felt the blood rush into his face. He began to recite the ninety-nine names of God, silently. Stillness, he thought, silence. This is all temporary.

Nyx shot him a dark look.

Kasbah clapped her hands. “Come, now. You wish to be searched together? This is acceptable. Many women worry over their men. I understand.”

“That’s fine,” Nyx said.

“Nyx, I’m not—” Rhys began. He tripped over the names of God, lost count. Started over.

Nyx stepped up and took his elbow. The names of God fell away. She was about his height, but heavier, solid, and when she took his arm, the fear, too, bled away. Her touch filled him with an emotion so complex that he could not name it. The same woman who could cut the head off a man with a dagger in sixty seconds could ease his mind in the face of a thousand angry Nasheenian women. She could banish all thoughts of God, of submission. Some days she made him feel like an insect, a roach, the worst thing to crawl across the world. And then there were the times, like now, when she brought him a stillness he had known only with his forehead pressed to a prayer rug.

She said to him, “We’ll be all right.” To Kasbah and her women, “We’ll be all right.”

Kasbah led them to the examination room. Rhys’s pulse quickened. He would have bolted if not for Nyx’s hand on his arm.

“You’ll be all right,” she said. She would know the sorts of things Nasheenian women had done to him before. She had likely done work like that herself.