God's War Part 22

"You can't be serious," Rhys said as he stared out at the neatly numbered bags of the Chenjan dead, the ones the Nasheenians had taken from the field and planted with viruses to be trucked back into Chenja. These bodies would be stacked up and mixed in with the rest of the Chenjan bodies pulled out of the field that day and then delivered back to Chenja, carrying tailored viruses and nests of bugs primed to burst after they reached a populated area.

Rhys, as a magician, would be immune to just about everything. It was why only he and she could get across this way.

Even so, Ashana held out a beetle whose clear sh.e.l.l was filled with an orange fluid.

"Eat it," Ashana said to him, in Chenjan.

Rhys replied in Nasheenian, "Nyx first."

"I was inoculated against everything they have to offer when I worked here," Nyx said.

"And you're a.s.suming they haven't come up with new viruses?" Rhys said. "I'm sure they have, but there's a base contagion Nasheenian magicians use in all of their concoctions, and, yes, I checked to make sure that's still their base. It's the base that they inoculate all of their workers against. My body recognizes the base and destroys anything attached to it." She winked at him.

"You aren't supposed to know that."

She supposed he could take a risk and try to save a few Chenjans by pa.s.sing someone his now inoculated blood sample, but then he'd have to let them know why he'd been in Nasheen and who he was, and one call to the local security forces would turn up his name on their wanted list. Even if he avoided the security forces, the Chenjan magicians he gave the sample to would lock him up for conspiring with the enemy and then put him in quarantine for fourteen months. He knew that as well as she did.

If all went well, one of Anneke's kindred-six of her sisters had converted and married Chenjan half-breeds over the years-would haul them out of the ma.s.s of others based on the numbered tags that Ashana put on the bags. The driver would then give Rhys and Nyx false security badges so they could ride up front with her as far as the Chenjan border city of Azam. Nyx could pa.s.s for a eunuch when she needed to; castrated Nasheenian captives were sometimes used as a form of slave labor in Chenja. Once they were off the truck, she could pa.s.s for Rhys's servant if the two of them had to wait around the pick up point for a while if Anneke was delayed.

The containment room smelled only faintly of death. The tiny bugs that had been released into the chamber ate up all the bacteria that broke down the bodies, at least until they left the holding room. The ride out across the desert among the bags would not be pleasant.

Nyx looked over at Rhys. In the cold light of the holding room, he looked slim and fragile and more than a little sick. He had followed her for a long time, through some s.h.i.+tty situations, but she knew this was a lot to ask. She was not yet so much of a monster that she did not realize that.

"You don't have to do it," Nyx said. "I can run this without a magician."

He turned to her. Ashana began unzipping their bags.

"Is this how you're getting me back out?" he asked.

"Sure," she lied. She hadn't sorted that part out yet. Getting a Chenjan body into a holding center for Nasheenian dead would be tougher than getting a Chenjan body into a holding center for Chenjan dead. She needed another way to get him back into Nasheen. Her conscience had picked a h.e.l.l of a time to nag at her.

"I hate it when you lie to me," he said.

"Sometimes I can get away with it."

"You won't be able to hold off bel dames without a magician, even a poor one," he said.

"No, probably not." That part wasn't a lie. He wasn't the most talented of magicians, no-but no standard could get her the communications and security he could. If somebody got poisoned or had a limb chopped off, well... he was less useful. That's what real magicians were for.

He waited. She waited. Ashana stood over the open body bags and waited.

"I need you to come with me," Nyx said, finally.

"Then I'll go," Rhys said.

"Good on you all, then," Ashana drawled. "Now get in the d.a.m.n bags."

From a small hole in the body bag, Rhys could see the double dawn turn the sky gray-blue, then violet, then b.l.o.o.d.y. Punjai was still quarantined, and the body bakkies circ.u.mvented the city. A couple of miles west of Punjai, the veldt turned to flat blinding-white desert. Rhys was pressed up against the slatted side of the bakkie flatbed, half a dozen bodies below him, a couple on top of him, and Nyx next to him, at her insistence.

"Best we keep close," she had told him.

They pa.s.sed signs warning travelers that they were on an unpatrolled road. The air started to turn sour. He could smell the yeasty stink of spent bursts, and he caught a faint whiff of geranium and lemon. There were no other vehicles on the road.

Rhys widened the slit that Ashana had cut for him to breathe through during the long ride. The bags were good at keeping their contents cool; they were all organic and fed off the body's secretions and the heat of the sun. Under the sun, the black bags turned green.

He saw a long column of smoke off to their left, too far away for him to see what was burning. Sometime later he saw the first burst, a green spray of light against the violet sky. He could feel the low thump of the bursts in his chest as the ground rumbled with the blast.

At the border station, the truck stopped for the drop-off, and Rhys held himself still and waited. He heard a couple of people speaking fluent Chenjan, and felt a swarm of wasps buzz by. Ashana helped with the transfer, and he felt the weight of the bodies above him ease as they were offloaded.

Someone grabbed hold of him by the hips and dragged him across the flatbed.

"Praise be to G.o.d," a male voice said from outside the flatbed, in Chenjan. Hearing the language spoken out loud so freely left Rhys with a feeling of half dread, half relief. "Where are you all headed?"

"Praise be to G.o.d," Ashana said. "I'm dropping this batch with your girl. Came straight from the front."

"Careful how you lift them, woman! Pay them some respect," the male voice said. The person holding Rhys let him go, and two big hands grabbed at him and pulled.

Rhys froze. He was lifted up and slipped carefully onto another flatbed. Another body was pushed on top of him.

He wondered what they would do to him if they found him out. Kill him quickly, he hoped. He closed his eyes. It must have been time for prayer. There was no call to prayer out here, no call that he could hear. Submit to G.o.d, he thought, and G.o.d will attend to the rest.

Ashana and the man began to bicker. He heard something thump on the ground.

"You tell me to show respect? I'm not the one dropping bodies, you fool," Ashana said.

"What are you packing these bodies with, woman?"

"Nothing you don't pack yours with. Cut it open if you want to find out. Half your bodies are contaminated with your own bursts."

Rhys felt something b.u.mp his feet again. He kept his eyes shut. Would they take him out and cut him open? He held his breath and sent out a call for bugs, but the tailored colonies inside the bodies were too complex for him. He could feel them but couldn't alter or direct them. Poor magician, indeed. He swore softly.

Ashana and the Chenjan spoke a few more heated words. Rhys heard the sound of a bag opening. More bickering. Then the sound of the body being dragged across the packed sand.

Then the bakkie started to move.

Rhys let out his breath.

They drove for what seemed like hours. They pa.s.sed a couple of burned-out farmsteads. Every few decades some hard-up family, a man and his ten or twenty wives, would move out close to the front and try to make something grow, but most of Chenja's agricultural land was still along the coast, like Nasheen's. It was safer there, and less toxic than the wasteland in the north or the spotty, poisonous swampland in the south inhabited by Heidians and Drucians and Ras Tiegans.

When the bakkie stopped again, someone grabbed him by the feet and pulled.

The bag came open, and Nyx's sweaty face blotted out the hot white sun. She was grinning. He had never been so relieved to see her.

"You still in one piece?" she asked.

Rhys sat up and eased out of the bakkie and onto the hot sand. A tall, skinny Chenjan woman stood next to him, wearing work trousers, sandals, and long sleeves. Her face was half-veiled, and her eyes were black. She wore a pistol on one hip and a machete on the other. Rhys felt suddenly vulnerable. He and Nyx had left their gear behind. Anneke was smuggling it over.

"This is Damira," Nyx said.

"Your clothes are in the back," Damira said in Chenjan, "and your badge. You'll need to wear it in case we're stopped along the road." She didn't meet his eyes. It was the drop of her gaze, more than the language, that convinced him he was back in Chenja. No Nasheenian woman would lower her eyes in his presence.

He and Nyx changed into long trousers and dark vests with red bands around their arms signifying their role as ferriers of the dead. Damira was a quiet woman, and she left the radio silent. The inside of the cab was strung with gold-painted beads, and a prayer wheel hung from the rearview mirror. Rhys had the sudden urge to open up the prayer wheel and see what prayer she kept there. One was not supposed to ask G.o.d for anything, only submit to His will, but there were sects in Chenja who believed that G.o.d enjoyed granting favors. Chenjans had divided themselves into roughly two sets of believers and perhaps a handful of minority sects. This woman with her prayer wheel was a purist, not an orthodox. She would have been cut and sewn at p.u.b.erty, bearing the marks of her faith and submission on her body while courting G.o.d for private favors during prayer. Rhys found the idea of female mutilation and begging favors from G.o.d distasteful, if not repulsive, but as an orthodox, he also believed in allowing others to wors.h.i.+p as they willed, so long as their people respected G.o.d and the Prophet, performed the salaat, and respected G.o.d's laws about marriage-seclusion, respect, and moral purity.

And so long as they weren't Nasheenian.

The desert was still flat and white, and they pa.s.sed burst craters and abandoned vehicles along the road. He expected the air to be different somehow, now that they'd crossed the border, but the air contained the same yeasty stink. Nyx sat near the window, a scarf pulled up over her face to keep away the dust and to obscure her appearance. She had cut her hair with Damira's machete when they changed clothes. It was a bit of a botched job, a ragged mop of thick, dark hair that did nothing to soften her face. She looked like a wild desert orphan, someone who'd grown up on an abandoned farm near the front after her family was slaughtered.

He sat in the middle, trying to give Damira some s.p.a.ce. It meant sitting closer to Nyx, but after spending the morning inside a body bag, the idea of pressing himself against someone alive didn't seem so indecent.

Too long in Nasheen, he thought, and watched the flat desert rolling out before him. How long until it looked different? Until it wasn't just some long stretch of Nasheenian desert but the land of his birth? His father's land, the land they bled and died and prayed for?

Rhys glanced over at Damira again, then at the prayer wheel. He had opened his mouth to form the question in Nasheenian when he realized he could speak Chenjan freely. The words came out a little stilted. "Can I ask what you pray for?" he asked.

She kept her eyes on the road. "I pray for an end to the war."

He could barely hear her over the sound of the tires on the gritty road and the chitter of the bugs.

They pa.s.sed a hastily erected road sign along the edge of the scarred highway, its base covered over in lizards. The original sign was a rusted-out hulk, mangled and broken and half-buried in the sand behind it. The new sign announced distances to the nearest Chenjan cities:

Azam, 40 km Bahreha, 86 km Dadfar, 120 km

"Where did you live?" Damira asked him.

"Here in Chenja?"

"Yes."

"A little town west of Bahreha called Chitra," he lied.

"My mother heard that Chitra was once a beautiful city."

"I don't remember it that way," he said. He had never been to Chitra.

"No one alive does," she said.

The desert stayed flat and white all day. Rhys saw more evidence of recent fighting as they drove-spent bursts and abandoned artillery, black-scarred rents in the desert, pools of dead bugs. He saw a heap of burning corpses in the distance. He knew there were corpses because the giant scavengers were circling, despite the smoke: couple of sand cats, black swarms that must have been palm-size carrion beetles, and some of the rarer flying scavenger beetles with hooked jaws, the kind that grew to over a meter long and had been known to devour children in their beds.

There were human scavengers as well, walking along the road as they pa.s.sed, asking for rides. One of them looked like a Chenjan deserter, his jacket torn from his body, long tears in his dark skin that looked like they'd been made by a sand cat. When the man turned, Rhys saw that half his skull was missing. He could see the gray-red wetness of his brains beneath the sand and dirt and cloud of flies. He wouldn't last long unless he found a magician. He must have dragged himself out from under the heap of corpses and was probably trying to walk home. They would patch him up and send him back.

Rhys looked away.

He had fled across the desert to escape this fate. Some part of him wondered if it had all caught up with him at last.

18.

Damira dropped them off outside Azam, a bleeding border city. A half-dozen anti-burst gun towers ringed the swollen black sprawl of the city, half again as tall as its two minarets. Most of the gun towers were charred husks. Heaps of debris littered the roadway.

Rhys and Nyx walked with their hoods pulled up. Geckos skittered across their path. They pa.s.sed a contagion sensor along the road, tilted at a hard left angle. The light at the top flashed yellow; the whole thing was covered in locusts.

The sun was low in the sky by the time they made it past the burst guns and into the city. It was dead quiet, like the streets around a magicians' gym before a fight. Rhys saw some moths under the eaves of the tenement buildings, blasted-out archways riddled with bullet holes. The city was teeming with wild and tailored bugs; they made Rhys's blood sing. Swarms of flesh beetles darkened the sky. A few ragged people stared out at them from the ruined buildings. Rhys saw a couple of scabby kids digging in the sandy basin of what had once been the city's central fountain and asked them where everybody was.

The boy sneered at Nyx, but as he turned to Rhys, his expression sobered and he pointed east, toward Nasheen.

"That fighting we pa.s.sed was close," Rhys said.

He saw Nyx gaze down the deserted street. A swarm of wasps hummed over the rooftops. In the west, the primary sun was headed down, and the sky was starting to go the brilliant violet of dusk.

"We don't have time to get to Dadfar tonight," Nyx said, in halting Chenjan, probably for the child's benefit. Speaking Nasheenian would draw even more attention than the color of her face. "If Anneke's in, we have to hole up."

They walked past prayer wheels hanging in broken lattice windows, cracked water troughs, and abandoned bug cages. Rhys caught the distinctive smell of gravy over protein cakes, spinach and garlic.

Nyx led him down a narrow, refuse-strewn alleyway that smelled heavily of urine and dog s.h.i.+t. He had to pick his way around heaping piles of garbage and feces and rubble. They stirred up fist-size dung beetles and enormous biting flies. At the end of the alley, in a cracked parking lot, Rhys saw Nyx's familiar bakkie-new paint, new tags, but her bakkie nonetheless-squatting underneath a spread of spindly palm trees. One of the trees was splintered in half. The other bakkies he could see were all sun-sick, rusted-out wrecks-Tirhani made, just like the ones in Nasheen. A woman in a soiled burqua called to them from the scant shade of the palms. She had something in her hands-tattered lengths of cloth for turbans.

"Here it is," Nyx said, pointing to the green awning at their left. The way house was a leaning, three-storied facade 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.