Rapture (8 page)

Eshe stood on a low rise well behind the funeral party with his reluctant partner, Isabet Softel. She was pensive in the gray morning. Some of her dark hair had escaped her white wimple. Her loose hair clung in delicate tendrils to her pale face—pale even for a Ras Tiegan. He once asked her if she was part Mhorian, and she’d been offended. Most things he did or said offended her. Why it was the Madame de Fourré kept pairing them together was beyond Eshe. He had caught her without her wimple once, and the spill of her hair reminded him so strongly of Corinne that his heart ached.

But Isabet was not Corinne. Isabet had a head full of honey and strong convictions, and where he was from, being pretty and haughty didn’t get you a promotion. It got you your head chopped off by some woman who was less pretty but had a better sense of humor.

Now, after half the night on watch, she appeared sodden and exhausted. Her dark eyes were shadowed.

Putting her on watch hadn’t been fair, he knew, but he had last night’s priest to take care of, and he didn’t want her there for that. Not like last time. So far as he knew, she wasn’t a shifter, just one of the handful of sympathizers who’d come over to their side. In some ways, it meant she was safer than any of them, no matter what task he gave her.

“Shouldn’t be much longer,” he said.

Isabet rubbed her eyes. “I’m fine. Did you learn anything last night?”

“It’s like I expected. It’s Jolique.”

“At least we can finish what we started now.”

“You mean what I started,” Eshe said. She was always trying to take credit.

“We had an assignment. One with clear goals. Those goals did not involve killing a priest. Or attending his wake. It would have gone more smoothly without you.”

“And you’d be dead,” he said. “Sounds like a success all around.”

Isabet pursed her mouth. Though he resented the soft, pale skin she presented to the world, he admitted that it gave her a striking appearance. Someone only got skin that soft by spending most of their life behind a filter, away from the harsh light of the suns. He hadn’t spent enough time around rich people to get used to it. Seeing her wealth in her face was… distracting.

As he gazed at Isabet now, Eshe wondered if anyone had ever forced her to do anything, or if she’d just run off to join the Madame’s little shape shifter rebellion to get back at her mother for refusing her some trinket. No one had asked her to join the war for God. Or farmed her out to strange women to raise. Or sold her body to war vets.

Memories of his less than pleasant Nasheenian childhood stirred. He tried hard to focus on the present. The present was always better than the past. He thought of Corinne again.

“Would you stop staring at me?” Isabet said. He saw her cheeks color.

Eshe turned away. “I can’t help it if you’re distracting,” he said. He would have never looked at a Nasheenian woman the way he often looked at Isabet. He would have gotten a fist in the face, or a lewd offer.

“Perhaps I should wear a burqua like some Chenjan. Would that dissuade you? No, I’m sure. You’d mishandle a Chenjan woman just the same. I know your type.”

“Don’t insult me.”

“It’s no matter. The half-formed opinions of half-breed boys do not concern me, no,” she said.

“You get that mouth in etiquette class?”

Her look was all oily fire. He wondered if that was the look he’d get for asking her to bed. He half-thought to find out, but saw movement from the corner of his eye.

A wave of black roaches burst from the lip of the grave and streamed into the crowd. Mourners clutched at one another. They joined the priests in a new prayer, one about being nearer to God. The priests took up positions around the grave and raised their hands. The sword-bearer jerked out of his doze and stepped forward.

An ear-piercing scream came from the grave—too high-pitched to be human. It was something bordering on the edge of a cicada’s whine.

The muslin-draped body shuddered and rolled up from the grave. Bloody muslin fell from the corpse, revealing a spiny, bloated torso clothed in a white habit. It flung out pale, meaty arms and shook away the flesh of the head, revealing a shiny carapace. Black roaches escaped the sleeves of the habit, spraying across the crowd. The body jerked and thrashed, sloughing off flesh. Long strings of mucus oozed from the gaping wounds in the chest—the ones Eshe had put there. One for each shape shifter the priest had killed.

Eshe took half a step forward, his whole body taut. He was more than ready to kill the priest again, even if this was just a bug clothed in a dead man’s skin.

As the sword-bearer swung, the giant beetle opened its gaping maw, and a cloud of flying black larvae escaped.

Isabet gasped.

The swordsman swung. The body juddered. A hunk of raw flesh and juicy white beetle ooze was exposed. It took three more swings to sever the beetle’s head from what remained of the priest’s body. The body dropped, and the beetle’s bloody, flesh-smeared head rolled neatly next to it. The cloud of larvae droned and circled the remains.

Eshe let out his breath. Moved his hand away from his knife.

The crowd broke into a hymn.

Eshe turned his back on the grave. “Let’s go,” he said. He started back to the church, pushing the weeping fingers of spiny widows’ tree branches away from his face.

Isabet hurried after him. “Is that all? That’s everything?”

“That’s all.”

“I—” She adjusted her wimple. In all the rain, the stiffness was beginning to give way, and the wings were starting to droop.

“I’ve heard about it, of course,” Isabet said. “But that was the first one I saw.”

“Sometimes they shamble on for a while longer. They only last three days like that before the body rots out, but its long enough to scare the hell out of people.”

“Why would God—”

“It’s the bugs,” Eshe said. “And stupid Ras Tiegan stubbornness. Not God.

But if that was so, bodies on a battlefield—”

“Bodies on battlefields aren’t buried. They’re carted home and burned. Because of… that. The bugs live in the dirt.”

He escorted Isabet as far as the edge of the graveyard where a long stand of incense burners flickered and sputtered in the heavy rain. From there, they were to take separate routes home. On the street, they were too obviously unmarried and unrelated to be seen together. It was another reason Eshe didn’t understand why she had been partnered with him.

“Well,” he said once they reached the tiled street, “you saw it through to the end. Satisfied?”

“I’m glad he’s dead,” she said. A rickshaw clattered past, draped in colors as somber as what Eshe was wearing. Outside a wedding or nonshifter birthing celebration, Inoublie was a colorless sort of place during the day. The buildings here were squeezed close together, bucking up against the massive grated storm drains that kept the streets clear during the rainy season. Tangles of trees lined the roads, many of them twice as tall as the buildings, their broad canopies bowing in the rain. Ancient root systems jutted from cracks in the tiled sidewalk. Mourners often draped wreaths of white and gold flowers over them during a funeral procession. The old, rotting flower chains had broken and tumbled to the sidewalk, forming a fine, slick skein of rot on the tile.

“Remember that next time you get the chance to kill somebody,” he said.

“You don’t have to kill everyone.” She enjoyed bickering for bickering’s sake, like a child. He was nearly twenty-one now, and her shrill, seventeen-year-old fury felt like something half-remembered from a lifetime ago.

“Yeah, next time we’ll try your way.”

“I know why you do it,” she said. “The Madame told me about your mother.”

“My… mother?”

“The bloody Nasheenian assassin.”

“She’s not… that’s a complicated story.”

“Did you hear they’re pardoning assassins now, in Nasheen?”

“Where did you learn that?”

“It was in the papers, of course.” The radios in Ras Tieg were all censored, so most people held up the less rigidly enforced papers as truth. Eshe knew better.

“Well, you’re wrong. They’d never do that.”

“I know what I heard.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said. He had no interest in discussing his… mother with her. Or Nasheenian politics. But he knew who he should talk to about it.

Isabet huffed off down the street, slipping and sliding on the rotten flowers. He paused a moment to watch her go. Her habit was mostly shapeless, but he had seen her in trousers before, the first few times he bumped into her at the Madame de Fourré’s place, and it was hard to get the shape of her legs and ass out of his mind now as he watched her slide along.

He shook his head and went off in the opposite direction, sticking to the center of the street where the way was less precarious. Some days the women here drove him to drink. But mostly, he just prayed harder that God would help him untangle what it was he really wanted from them.

+

“When were you going to tell me?” Eshe asked.

Inaya was never alone these days, and, it seemed, never free of Eshe’s sudden and dramatic entrances. She looked up from her glowing table slide, and quickly tapped out the obfuscation code that turned the correspondences and schematics into an imperceptible gray haze. In the hall beyond Eshe, she watched runners, agents, and two hooded bodyguards move through her headquarters with bug casings and supplies. Never alone, and never a quiet moment here.

Michel, her second, perched on her right shoulder in his blue-gray parrot form. She felt his one good claw tighten painfully on her shoulder at Eshe’s voice. The floor stirred with feathers and dog hair, and the air was heavy with the smell of cooking meat from the makeshift kitchen a level below. The stink of meat and feathers and damp dog hair turned her stomach, but this was the most secure room in the compound. For all the good it did at dissuading Eshe.

“I see someone finally told you,” Inaya said. She reached out and slid open a schematic of the district around the southern edge of Rue Rosalie, the city’s main thoroughfare. “Perhaps it will encourage you to read the papers more often.”

Eshe stepped further into the room and closed the door behind him. Michel squawked.

“Those rags are full of lies. Sorting out the half-truth from the catshit isn’t worth the time,” Eshe said.

“Then perhaps you will make time,” Inaya said.

Eshe put on his little pout, the one that made her want to smack him. She had never considered herself a violent person, and she had not raised her hand to even one cadre here, but the sight of this capable young man playing at being a child sometimes enraged her. Of all the people in her circle, she had come to rely on him the most, at least in the beginning. She expected more of him.

“If they’re pardoning political criminals,” Eshe said, “it means…” He shot a quick glance at Michel. “It means they’re pardoning us, too.”

Inaya waved her hand over the slide. The misty images flickered and dispersed, filling the room with the faint smell of burnt lemon. “It was my understanding that you came here to save Ras Tiegan shifters from genocide,” she said. “That’s what I came here to do.”

“I—” He hesitated. “I did. But it would be nice to know—”

“I have other responsibilities, Eshe. As do you. I’m far more concerned about you murdering priests in taverns. What would you think of it if I went around Nasheen murdering mullahs without cause?”

“That’s a different thing entirely.”

She had never been partial to these backwater priests, herself, but she had not liked his mullahs, either. She had sense enough to know that shooting a religious leader or teacher in the face would do the cause no favors.

“It’s not,” she said. “We worship the same God and we carry the same sins. Every time you walk into a tavern and kill one of our contacts without provocation, you soil that. Senseless death may be what she taught you in Nasheen, but that’s not how I do things here.”

“I forgot. You just let your priests fuck you and abort your babies.”

Inaya stiffened. She remembered young girls she had nurtured after they were cut open and their shifter children smashed. And the others, the terrified twelve-year-olds raped by priests and forced to bear non-shifter children. It was a helpless feeling, to know you could not protect the women you cared for. To know that women’s bodies here were co-opted so fully and completely that they had ceased to be fully human in the eyes of the priests.

“I had hoped that Isabet’s influence would soften you,” she said coolly.

“Soften me? That rich snot? It’s like trying to teach a tax clerk to be a bel dame. She isn’t meant for this work. You should have her doing intelligence.”

“I do,” Inaya said.

“On who?”

Inaya waved away Michel at her shoulder. He squawked and flapped away, settled onto a perch at the corner of the room.

“Come with me,” Inaya said.

She led him down another level into the cramped quarters she had called home the last six months. There was a single cot, two three-legged stools, some storage bins. She had hung a large red tapestry inscribed with the mark of the martyred messiah above the cot. Her quarters had gotten narrower and narrower over the years as God’s Angels and government enforcers had hounded them further and further outside the primary cities. Her nom de guerre, Madame de Fourré, was on the list, but her face wasn’t. Nor was her true name—Inaya il Parait. She had gone to elaborate lengths to change her blood code in every city they settled in, smoothly taking on a different pattern in each one. She supposed she could have changed her face as well, but there was only so much she was willing to give up. Eshe and the others in the Fourré had risked much to allow her to keep her face. And killed a lot of priests. She reminded herself of that as she prepared what she had to say.

“Please sit, Eshe,” she said.

He sighed and sat on the edge of the bed.

Inaya sat next to him. From this close, the smell of him was stronger— bitter red wine laced in milky hybrid oak and stale sweat. He wore a simple habit like hers, calf-length instead of ankle length, and he sported a spotty beard and long hair, as was the fashion in Ras Tieg.