"I haven't seen you here since you went to prison."

"For good reason, then," Nyx said.

The matron laughed. "It's not the prettiest city, but it's still our best. Good women in prison, too." She pulled up a sleeve and revealed a badly drawn tattoo of a sword and scattergun on a round shield.

Nyx snorted. "Gunrunning?"

"Good money," the woman said. "Tirhanis don't mind selling so long as we do all the work lugging it through the pa.s.s-and the time if we get caught."

"So I hear," Nyx said.

She would know, Rhys thought. How many gunrunners had Nyx slept with?

Both agents went through Rhys's pockets. They didn't find the pockets that kept his bugs, which improved his confidence in his ability to conceal items by altering the composition of the air around them. The skill had not been one of his best back in Faleen. Not that he was going to be able to keep the bugs on his person much longer. Mushtallah would take care of that.

One of the women, an ugly matron with a face the color and texture of boot leather, paged through his pa.s.sbook. "You a resident alien?" she asked.

"I'm employed," he said. "Everything is in order."

She looked him up and down and made a moue of her mouth, as if contemplating whether or not to spit on him. Nyx pushed farther into the crowded room, arms crossed, and grinned at her.

The customs agent closed her mouth. "No doubt you are," she said to Rhys, and dropped her eyes back to his pa.s.sbook.

The one patting him down found his Kitab and laughed as she looked through it. "It's the same d.a.m.n book as ours. Same language and everything. You a convert?"

"No," he said. "Chenjans have always had the same book. Unlike Nasheenians, however, we follow its teachings."

"You speak the dead language?" the ugly one asked, ignoring the jibe.

"Only as much as you do."

"Huh," she said.

The language of the Kitab had been the same since the First Families brought it down from the moons. Even G.o.dless Nasheenians should have known that. Who taught the schools here? Atheists like Nyx? They killed atheists in Chenja.

The other one gave back his Kitab. They didn't always. He'd lost a number of Kitabs going through customs.

The ugly one turned to Nyx. "You vouch for him, my woman?"

"You think I'd bring a terrorist into Mushtallah?"

"Only if you're cutting off his head," the ugly one said, and laughed again.

The matron finally pressed a thumb to the organic paper at the back of Rhys's pa.s.sbook.

"You keep hold of that," she told him, "or the filter will eat you. No permanent residency, no permanent bio-pa.s.s into Mushtallah." She flashed her teeth and gave Nyx a nod. "Good luck, my woman."

The customs agents went back out into the hall. The door rolled shut behind them.

Rhys tugged at his coat, and returned his Kitab and pa.s.sbook to his breast pocket.

Nyx sat at the window and put her feet up. "They were just flirting," she said. "You don't see a lot of men this far inland. And sure not Chenjan ones."

"That's not flirting."

"You've seen worse."

He turned away from her. "It doesn't excuse them."

"Stop mewling." She paused, then relented. "You know I'll do what I can to make it easy."

"I know," he said.

Rhys liked to think she defended him out of some kind of loyalty or affection, but most days he felt she guarded him the same way she did everything in her possession: He's mine. He's mine. He was just another thing to be owned and retained. Just another thing she could lose. He was just another thing to be owned and retained. Just another thing she could lose.

Once the customs agents were off-loaded, the train chugged into the station just outside Mushtallah. Rhys and Nyx gathered their things and then stepped onto the sandy platform overlooking the city.

"The most boring city in Nasheen," Nyx declared, and trudged down the steps and onto the paved road.

Rhys had read that before Nasheen's revolution two hundred fifty years ago, the gutters were full of dead babies and the mullahs wore vials of virgins' blood toward off the draft. They'd bred sand cats for fights in the train workers' ward, and the stink and smog of the city sent the First Families who lived up in the hills to the countryside every year during high summer.

The wealthy still fled the city in the summer-it looked deserted from the platform-but there weren't any dead babies that he could see, and the last of the male mullahs had been drafted two centuries ago, right after the queen decreed that G.o.d had no place for men in mosques unless they had served at the front.

Mushtallah had been built on seven hills, but that was for beauty and breezes, not for defense. When Mushtallah was founded, there hadn't been much to defend the city from but wild sand cats and some of the more virulent strains of bugs that had gotten away from their magicians or bled down from the twisted mess of the Khairian wasteland in the north. That had all changed, of course, when the war started.

The first wall that rose around the city was an organic filter that kept foreign bug tech out. Every ten yards, a hundred foot faux stone pillar jutted up from the packed, sandy soil. The bug filters that stretched from pillar to pillar made the air shimmer like a soap bubble. Organic filters were a necessity in a country bombarded by all manner of biological, half-living, semi-organic weaponry. Destruction entered cities as often through contaminated individuals as it did through munitions. Filters were magician-made and could be tailored to keep out anyone and anything organic. It was a matter of introducing the bugs powering the filter to the unwanted contagion or-in the case of Mushtallah-only coding the filter to allow in particular individuals. The fact that Rhys had gotten through customs unmolested was a testament to how highly regarded Nyx was by the customs agents.

As they approached the filter, Rhys called up a handful of flying red beetles. He held out his hand, and a dozen swarmed about his fingers.

"We'll be out of contact, Taite," he said. "We're going into Mushtallah."

"Sure thing." Taite's voice carried just over the singing of the beetles, a second song. "Tell me when you come back to civilization." Rhys flicked his wrist, and the beetles dispersed. He dug through his pockets and released three locusts and a couple of screaming c.o.c.kroaches he kept in magicians' cages for emergencies. All the bugs had sense enough to head away from the filter. He would need to call or buy more when they got back to Punjai.

Nyx turned in time to see the swarm recede. "You clean?" she asked.

He showed her his empty pockets.

Nyx bled through the gate.

Rhys took a deep breath. Nyx stood on the other side, whole, and stopped to look back at him. He still wasn't entirely convinced about the safety of entering Mushtallah. How far would those agents take their "flirting"? Far enough to tell him that the filter had been coded to let him through, then stand at the train windows and laugh as he stepped through the filter and disintegrated into gray ash?

There are worse ways to die, Rhys thought distantly, and stepped forward.

The filter clung to him, slightly sticky, until he pushed through. He came out the other side with a delicate pop pop. He reflexively patted at his arms and his hips-and smoothed the robe over his groin-to make sure everything was still blessedly intact.

The first twenty yards inside the filter was a stretch of bare soil that lapped against Mushtallah's second wall. The second wall encircling the city, made of stone, had little practical value. It had no working gates anymore, just great gaps in the masonry where travelers pa.s.sed through and locals kept tchotchke booths. The poor and underemployed spread out their wares on ma.s.s-produced blankets given out by the same wholesaler who doled out their identical figurines of Queen Zaynab, and their cheap model palaces and star carriers. The petty merchants and beggars were all women, which was not so different from Chenja, he supposed, but in Chenja all of these women would have had husbands and brothers or sons who were responsible for them, even if those husbands looked after forty or fifty wives. Instead, Nasheenian women all came to adulthood with the terrible knowledge that they had to fend for themselves in this terrible desert.

Ahead of him, Nyx pushed past the throng of traders clinging to the old stone wall, and he slipped through in her wake. The heart of the city spread before them in what had once been a neat grid. As the city grew, new buildings had moved out onto the streets, and finding a straight path to any address was like trekking through an unmapped jungle.

Nyx paid a rickshaw waiting outside a bookshop to take them to Palace Hill.

As they rode through the city, burnouses pulled up to ward against the suns, Rhys tried to call up a swarm. The magicians in Faleen had told him he'd be lucky to find anything living in a clean city. There should have been no bugs in Mushtallah except for the local colonies of flies sealed in when the filter first went up. But as Rhys tried to summon the bugs, he found various colonies at hand, isolated so long from those outside the filter that they must have been different species. He found no bugs suitable for transmissions. The filter would have kept them from broadcasting, anyway. Media had to come into the city via newsrolls or archaic forms of audio-only radio.

The rickshaw pulled them through the crowded street and under a renovated arch that nonetheless looked like it had seen better days. It was checkered with bullet holes. Two centuries before, the Chenjans had poured into the interior and nearly burned Mushtallah to the ground. In retaliation, the Nasheenians had razed a swath of Chenja's agricultural cities, and a hundred and fifty thousand Chenjans died.

After about an hour, the rickshaw pulled them onto the busy main street that ran outside the palace.

Nyx alighted from the rickshaw and held out her hand to help him down. It was an odd gesture, and he gave her a look. She seemed startled, as if the move had been unconscious, and pulled her hand away, turning to face the palace compound on the other side of the street, her body suddenly rigid. He had seen Nasheenian women offer such courtesies to Nasheenian boys, but never to foreign ones. He wondered what her memories were of Mushtallah. Had she courted boys here? He couldn't picture Nyx as a young, bright-eyed girl opening doors for boys.

Rhys got down from the rickshaw and stood next to her. The palace walls were twelve feet high, spiked and filtered. Two women in red trousers stood outside a filtered gate that shimmered in the heat. He pulled again at the hood of his burnous to make sure it was all the way up. His dress was just as much an adherence to Chenjan modesty as it was a practical barrier against the violent suns. He had never been sc.r.a.ped for cancers. Chenjans still boasted the lowest rate of cancers of any people on Umayma.

Nyx crossed the street, striding ahead into the press of people and vehicles with the dumb confidence Rhys suspected would someday get her killed. He followed, stepping over a heap of refuse and ducking away from a sand cat pulling a rickshaw. The women around him turned to stare as he pa.s.sed. There was not much of him visible outside the burnous, nothing but his hands. Perhaps they could peer into his cowl for a look at his face, but he suspected there was something else giving him away. Some kind of stance or Chenjan affectation that he had never been able to mask or alter. Or maybe he was just intensely paranoid. He had a right to be.

Nyx presented the women at the gate with her red letter. They pointed Nyx and Rhys in the direction of another, smaller, gate. The women posted there let them into an inner yard and through an organic filter. Inside the filter, the world suddenly smelled strongly of lavender and roses. Rhys had a startling memory of the front-of bright bursts in the sky, the smell of oranges and geranium, and this, somewhere, this smell of lavender. He trembled and stilled.

Nyx looked back at him. "Come, now," she said softly. "It's real lavender. It smells different. Come on, I bet they have a garden in here." She, too, had been to the front.

He wanted to take her hand. He shook his head, sighed deeply through his nose, and followed after her.

They were given over to a woman in yellow, who took them through yet another gate and into a ma.s.sive courtyard. The smells dissipated.

Spotted sand cats prowled the yard, not one of them tended by a chain or a trainer. Women ran through military drills along the far side of the square, dressed in the long, green, organic trousers and gauzy sandals of the Queen's guard.

They wound up a broad staircase flanked by statues of some sort of muscular maned sand cat and into an airy compound with a fountain at the center. Water ran out in four directions along grooved channels carved into the brightly tiled floor. A couple of tall trees with serrated leaves and giant orange blossoms filled the yard. The trees had recently dropped some sort of fruit into the water channels. Rhys realized he had no idea what kind of fruit it was.

"I'll announce you," the woman said. "It may be some time. Tea?"

"Do you have whiskey?" Nyx asked.

"Tea will be fine," Rhys said.

The woman called a servant, and left them.

Nyx stood in front of a carved stone bench. Rhys looked at the wall behind her. Tiled mosaics covered it: images of the first of the Nasheenian monarchs speaking to a white-veiled figure that was likely supposed to be the Prophet. Rhys found depictions of the Prophet distasteful at best, even those that veiled his face. Finding the image of any any living thing in Chenja was difficult. Most of the books produced before the war had had the pictures cut out and the faces blackened. Chenjans and Nasheenians should have followed the same rulings of the same Prophet, but words, even the words of the prayer language, were open to interpretation, and when Nasheen had disbanded the Caliphate and inst.i.tuted a monarchy, existing divisions in those interpretations had reached a violent head. living thing in Chenja was difficult. Most of the books produced before the war had had the pictures cut out and the faces blackened. Chenjans and Nasheenians should have followed the same rulings of the same Prophet, but words, even the words of the prayer language, were open to interpretation, and when Nasheen had disbanded the Caliphate and inst.i.tuted a monarchy, existing divisions in those interpretations had reached a violent head.

We were always two people, Rhys thought, gazing at the veiled face. It's what his father had told him when Rhys first questioned the war. Rhys had heard it said that Nasheenians and Chenjans came from different moons, believers from different worlds, united in their belief of G.o.d and the Prophet and the promise of Umayma. For a thousand years they had carved out some kind of tentative peace, maneuvered their way around a hundred holy wars. They had agreed to shoot colonial ships out of the sky, back when that was still possible, but this? It was too much. Chenjans would submit only to G.o.d, not His Prophet, let alone any monarch who wanted to sever G.o.d and government. That final insult had resulted in an explosion of all the rest, and the world had split in two.

The other walls presented the more traditional forms of decoration-elaborate raised script, pa.s.sages 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d wanted you to go, you wouldn't have? Don't be an a.s.s, 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 a.s.sa.s.sination 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 f.u.c.k her way out of everything. He felt the blood rush into his face. He began to recite the ninety-nine names of G.o.d, 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."