God's War Read Online Free PDF Page B

the
Imams told them, that Nasheenians were godless infidels who worshipped women
and idols brought in from dead worlds, worlds blighted by God for their own
idolatry. But when the muezzin called the prayers here, those who were faithful
went to the same mosque he did with the other magicians, prayed in nearly the
same way, and spoke in the same language—God’s language—though his birth tongue
was Chenjan, and theirs, Nasheenian.
    They were all Umaymans, the people
from the moons who had waited up there a thousand years while magicians made
Umayma half-habitable—all but the Mhorians, Ras Tiegans, the Heidians, and the
two-hundred-odd Drucians, who had come later. Survivors of other dead worlds,
worlds out of the darkest parts of the sky.
    In the mosque, forehead pressed
against the floor, Rhys never understood the war. It was only when he raised
his head and saw the women praying among him, bareheaded, often bare-legged, shamelessly
displaying full heads of hair and ample flesh, that he questioned what these
women truly believed they were submitting to. Certainly not the will of God. On
the streets he saw widowed women reduced to begging, girls like this one
earning money with blood, and bloated women coming in from the coast after
giving birth to their unnatural broods of children. This was the life that
Chenja fought against. This godlessness.
    Whenever the bakkie got sick or the
milk soured, his mothers would blame “those godless Nasheenians, daughters of
demons.”
    “Rhys?”
    He looked up from the outrider’s
hands to see Yah Reza in the doorway. A dozen fungus beetles skittered past her
into the room. The outrider flinched.
    “Yah Tayyib needs you in surgery,”
Yah Reza said.
    Rhys squeezed the girl’s fist a
final time. “Luck to you,” he said.
    “We have some visitors come to see
you boxers,” Yah Reza said. “You up for it?” She was slipping further into
whatever vernacular the girl spoke.
    “What sort of visitors?” the girl
asked.
    Rhys stood, and put away the tape.
He walked toward the door.
    “The foreign kind. They don’t bite,
though, so far as I can tell.”
    “Yeah, that’s fine, then.”
    Yah Reza clapped her hands. “Come.”
    Rhys turned past the magician and
walked into the dim outer corridor. He saw a cluster of figures outside
Husayn’s locker room and paused to get a look at them.
    Two black women wearing oddly cut
hijabs spoke in low tones. Though the hijabs were black, their long robes were
white, and dusty along the hem. They wore no jewelry, and instead of sandals
they wore black boots without a heel.
    Despite their complexions, he knew
they were not Chenjan, or even Tirhani. They were too small, too thin,
fine-boned, and the way they held themselves—the way they spoke with heads
bent—was not Chenjan or Tirhani but something else.
    One of them looked out at him and
ceased speaking. From across the long hall, he saw a broad face with high
cheekbones, large eyes, and dark brows. It was a startlingly open face, as if
she was not used to keeping secrets. Her skin was bright and clear and smoother
than any he’d seen save for the face of a child. She was old, he knew, by her
posture and her height, but the clarity of her skin made him want to call her a
girl. It was not the face of a woman who had grown up in the desert or even a
world with two suns. Unless she was the daughter of a rich merchant who had
kept her locked in a tower in some salty country, hidden from the suns by dark
curtains and filters for a quarter century, she was not from anywhere on
Umayma.
    “You’re very young to be a man,” she
said, and laughed at him. Her accent was strange—a deep, throaty whir swallowed
all of her vowels, and when she laughed, she laughed from deep in her chest. It
was a boisterous sound, too loud to come from a woman with such a narrow chest.
    “You’re not from Nasheen,” he said.
    “Nor are you.”
    She was not from anywhere in the
world. But that was impossible.