Kameron Hurley - God's War

“Here it is,” Nyx said, pointing to the green awning at their left. The way house was a leaning, three-storied façade of mud-brick and bug-eaten secretions. The tiled roof was coated in flaking green paint. A battered poster under one of the reinforced windows bled black organic ink all over the bricks, announcing the arrival of a carnival now four years past.

“Nyx,” Rhys said, “we shouldn’t stay in Azam.” He had his own reasons for that. He had family in Azam.

“We’ll be fine,” Nyx said, and rapped on the heavy, bullet-pocked door of the way house.

A small peeping portal opened. Rhys saw one misty eye look back out at them.

Nyx glanced at Rhys.

“We have reservations,” Rhys told the misty eye. He had to stop again, work backward from the Nasheenian. It had been too long since he spoke Chenjan at length. “My brother has preceded us.”

The door opened.

A haggard old man stood on the other side, a long rifle in one of his bent, arthritic hands. “Anneke,” the old man said.

Rhys looked at Nyx.

“Yeah,” Nyx said.

A slim figure stepped toward the door from the dim of the reception area. Rhys recognized Anneke under the black turban that wound about her head and covered her face. Khos-the-dog trotted behind her, pausing in the light from the doorway to yawn and stretch.

“Any trouble?” Anneke asked in Chenjan. Rhys was startled at how smoothly she spoke, with no hint of an accent. Not for the first time, he wondered what she’d gone to prison for.

“I don’t think so,” Rhys said, also in Chenjan.

“Huh,” Anneke said, and she pulled down the cover over her face so she could spit sen. A couple of male voices sounded from deeper inside the house, Chenjan voices. Rhys caught the smell of marijuana and a whiff of curry.

Anneke grinned at him. “Good to be home?”

“Under these circumstances? No. I think we should stay on the road.”

The old man gestured with his rifle. “Get in, get in!” he said.

The call of the muezzin sounded, low but close, and Rhys looked out behind them. They were within a block of one of the city’s two remaining minarets. The few speakers along the city street belched a green haze, the exhaust generated by the door beetles translating the call.

“That’s handy,” Anneke said, and pulled her prayer rug from across her back. “I put yours behind the cab in the bakkie,” she said, and rolled out the rug to pray. “Sorry, didn’t unpack all the gear.”

“Do you have a fountain?” Rhys asked the old man.

“The hell you bother washing? Use sand. Don’t go out there!” the old man barked.

But Rhys turned away from them and picked his way to the parking lot at the end of the alley. He passed near the woman in the burqua. She thrust the dirty turban cloth toward him, babbling at him so quickly, so desperately, that he could not understand her.

“Where is your husband?” he asked.

“Dead, all dead!” she said, and thrust the cloth at him. “Please, I need bread. Bread and venom. Please. Anything you like, anything.” She stepped toward him as she said it, and began to clutch at her burqua.

“Stop,” Rhys said. “Stop. You are not mine to look after.”

He retrieved his rug and called for a wasp guard on the bakkie. It took a good minute to find a swarm. The contagions in the air confused them and made his already tenuous communication with them all the more difficult. He hoped they didn’t turn around and attack him when he came back.

“Please, anything,” she said, but Rhys pushed past her and walked quickly toward the way house as the amethyst sky became the true blue dusk of early evening.

He pounded at the door until the man with the rifle let him back in. Inside, he saw the cracked, patterned marble of the floor, what had once been a beautiful black and white mosaic of intricate script from the Kitab. The fountain at the center of the reception area was dry and silent.

Anneke already had her prayer rug out, facing north. It wasn’t until he looked down at Anneke’s bowed back that he remembered it was a sin to pray among women. He hesitated, looked behind him, but the old man was making his way up a worn set of steps, rifle in one hand, the railing in the other. Nyx stood at the end of the stairway, watched Khos shift. No one would see anything objectionable about kneeling next to any of these people during prayer. Anneke didn’t look like a woman; here, she was just another small Chenjan man, underfed. Rhys let out his breath and rolled out his rug.

None would see but God.

But God had seen him commit this sin every day for the last eight years. Prayer in Nasheen was mixed, even in a magicians’ gym.

Rhys hesitated a moment longer, then he knelt on the rug, and he surrendered. He took comfort in prayer, in recitation, in submission. After so many years of working for a woman he found it impossible to trust entirely, submission to God was a much welcome release.

When the prayer ended, Rhys raised his head and gazed off past the dry fountain, where three dead cockroaches rested beneath the broken head of a stone locust. Rhys saw political posters up on the walls. The mullahs who ruled Azam were up for re-election, though Rhys doubted any of them were out here tonight. Most local mullahs were related to the holy men who sat up in the high courts at the capital. Like Nasheen’s elections on domestic issues, elections in Chenja weren’t really elections. In Nasheen, the queen did what she wanted. In Chenja, the mullahs in the capital appointed all of the local officials, and the Imam, an orthodox, selected the mullahs.

Rhys tugged his hood further down over his face, to hide his eyes. There were other voices in the house. As slight as the chance of being recognized was, he didn’t want to take it. The penalty for his crimes was torture, evisceration, and quartering.

As he stood, Nyx said, “I need you to put out a call to Taite. Think you can do that this close to the border?”

“Risky, but possible,” Rhys said. “Do we have a room?”

“Up here,” Khos said. He wore a dhoti and burnous now, nothing else. Rhys always marveled at the shape shifter’s disregard for nudity. He was as bad as Nyx.

They walked up the dim stairwell to the third floor. There were a couple of dying glow worms in glass, but most of the ones they passed were already dead. Khos pushed open a battered door made of knobs of metal and bug secretions.

Dirty pallets were lined up at the center of the room. A dark gauze hung from one window; the other bled unfiltered evening light across the center of the room. A swarm of mark flies circled the center of the room.

Rhys waited for Nyx to come in and shut the door, then he called up a little swarm of red beetles. It took him three tries and nearly twenty minutes to get a link to Taite.

“Everything all right out there?” Taite asked.

“About as expected,” Rhys said.

“That bad?”

Nyx cut in. She had pulled off the hood of her burnous and found some sen. She spit at her feet, next to one of the pallets, and Rhys grimaced. “Have you found out anything more in Kine’s papers? Rhys wasn’t much help.”

“I’ve deciphered most of the pages. I did some research work on the compounds too. I have some contacts who used to work there doing recon and cleanup work.”

“Spies?” Nyx asked.

“We don’t call them that. Anyway, it looks like she was selecting for traits and working with a lot of magicians. You’ll never guess whose name came up in these records.”

“Yah Tayyib,” Nyx said.

“Great guess,” Taite said. “There’s some information about attempts at breeding kids in vats—you know, artificial womb tech—but they’re not getting far on that. That’s nothing new. The interesting thing is some kind of project called Babylon, or a project being done out in Babylon where they’re splicing human and bug genes… or doing some weird stuff with viral contagions and genetics or something. They’ve got everything in here: blood roaches, fire beetles, cicadas, locusts.”