Why had he come here? Lubna was going to die and he wouldn’t even be there to hold her.
The Imam stared at Ali, still waiting for an explanation.
Ali swallowed, his cracked throat burning. “I…I…my OS. It—” his knees started to buckle and he nearly collapsed. “It told me to come here. From FreeBey. No money. Had to walk.” They were a madman’s words, and Ali hardly believed they were coming from his own mouth.
“Truly? You walked all that way? And lived to tell the tale? I didn’t know such a thing was possible.” The Imam looked at Ali with concerned distaste and put a hand on his shoulder. “Well…The charity-yard is closing tonight for cleaning, but I suppose one foreign beggar won’t get in the way too much. You can sleep in safety here, brother. And we can talk about your OS tomorrow.”
Ali felt himself fading. He needed rest. Food. Even a vet like him could only go so long.
He sank slowly to the ground and slept.
In his sleep he saw the bloody bodies of friends and children. He saw his squadmates slicing the ears off dead men. He heard a girl cry as soldiers closed in around her.
He woke screaming, as he had once done every night. His heart hammered. It had been a long time since he’d had dreams of the war. When they were first married, Lubna would soothe him and they would step into the cool night air and sit by the jade-and-grey marble fountain. Eventually, the nightmares had faded. Her slender hand on the small of his back, night after night—this had saved his life. And now he would never see her again. He had abandoned her because he thought God was talking to him. Thinking of it, his eyes began to burn with tears.
God willing, Faithful Soldier, you will deactivate the security scrambler on the wall before you. She will live.
Ali sucked in a shocked breath and forgot his self-pity. His pulse racing, he scrambled to his feet. He looked across the dark yard at the green-glowing instrument panel set in the mosque’s massive gate. But he did not move.
God willing, Faithful Soldier, you will deactivate the security scrambler on the wall before you. She will live.
The prompt flashed a second time across his retscreens. I’ve lost my mind. But even as he thought it, he walked toward the wall.
Screen-jacking had never been Ali’s specialty. But from the inside interface, the gate’s security scrambler was simple enough to shut down. Anyone who’d done an army hitch or a security detail could do it. Ali’s fingers danced over the screen, and a few seconds later it was done.
Then a chorus of angry shouts erupted and an alarm system began droning away. Two men in black dashed out of the mosque and past him, each carrying an ornate jewelry box.
Thieves.
By the time he decided to stop them, they had crossed the courtyard. He scrambled toward them, trying not to think about him being unarmed. Behind him, he heard the familiar clatter of weapons and body armor.
“Thanks for the help, cousin!” One of the thieves shouted at Ali. Ali was near enough to smell their sweat when they each tapped their h-belts and hover-jumped easily over the descrambled wall. Infiltrators waiting for their chance. They used me, somehow. He panicked. What have I done? His stomach sank. They’ve been using my OS all along! How and why did they call him all the way from FreeBey? He didn’t know and it didn’t matter.
I’m screwed. He had to get out of here. Somehow he had to get back to Lubna. He turned to look toward the mosque—
—And found himself staring down the barrel of the jowly Imam’s rifle. The holy man spat at Ali. “Motherless scum! Do you know how much they’ve stolen? You helped them get out, huh? And your pals left you behind to take their fall? Well, don’t worry. The police will catch them, too. You won’t face execution alone.” He kept the weapon trained on Ali’s head. Ali knew a shooter when he saw one. This was not good.
“I didn’t—” Ali started to say, but he knew it was useless.
A squad of mosque guardsmen trotted up. They scowled almost jovially as they closed in. Ali didn’t dare fight these men, who could call on more. He’d done enough security jobs himself to know they wouldn’t listen to him. At least not until after they’d beaten him. He tensed himself and took slaps and punches. He yelped, and they raked his eyes for it. He threw up and they punched him for it. His groin burned from kicks and he lost two teeth. Then he blacked out.
He woke in a cell with four men in uniforms different from the mosque guards’. Cairene police? They gave him water.
God willing, Faithful Soldier, you will report to queue B7.
Ali ignored the prompt. The men slapped him around half-heartedly and made jokes about his mother’s sexual tastes. Again, he pushed down the angry fighter within him. If he got himself killed by these men he would never see Lubna again.
They dragged him into the dingy office of their Shaykh-Captain. The old man was scraggly and fat, but hard. A vet, unless Ali missed his guess.
“Tell me about your friends.” the Shaykh-Captain said.
Ali started to explain about being framed but then found the words wouldn’t stop. Something had been knocked loose within him these past few days. He talked and talked and told the old man the truth. All of the truth. About Lubna and the messages, about leaving Free Beirut, about the toxighuls and the tiger, the Western Mosque and the thieves.
When he was done he lowered his eyes, but he felt the old man glare at him for a few long, silent moments. Ali raised his gaze slowly and saw a sardonic smile spread over the Shaykh-Captain’s face.
“A prompt? Half the guys with an OS still get ’em—what do they mean? Nothing. I got one that said I fucked your mother last night. Did she wake up pregnant?” The men behind Ali chuckled. In the army, Ali had hated the Cairenes and their moronic mother jokes. “Sometimes I don’t even know where the words come from,” the old man went on. “Random old satellites squawking? Some head-hacker having a laugh? Who knows? And who gives a shit? I got one a couple weeks back that told me to find some guy named Ali, who was supposed to tell me about ‘great riches lying buried beneath a jade-and-grey marble fountain.’”
For a moment, Ali listened uncomprehendingly. Then he thought his heart would stop. He did everything he could to keep his face straight as the Shaykh-Captain continued.
“Do you know how many fountains like that there are here in OC? And how many sons of bitches named Ali? What’s your name, anyway, fool?”
“My name? Uh, my name is F-fahrad, Shaykh-Captain, and I…”
“Shut up! I was saying—I told my wife about this prompt and she said I should go around the city digging up fountains. As if I don’t got enough to do here.” He gestured vaguely at a pile of textcards on his desk. “’In the army,’ I told her, ‘I got a prompt telling me about some pills that could make my dick twice as long. Did I waste my pay on them?’” The old man gave Ali an irritated look “Y’know, you and my wife—you two fucking mystics would like each other. Maybe you could go to her old broads’ tea hour and tell them about your prompts! Maybe she’d even believe your donkey-shit story about walking here from the north.”
The Shaykh-Captain stood slowly, walked over to the wall, and pulled down an old-fashioned truncheon. “But before the teahouse, we have to take you back downstairs for a little while.”
Ali felt big, hard hands take hold of him and he knew that this was it. He was half-dead already. He couldn’t survive an Old Cairo-style interrogation. He would never see Lubna again. He had failed her, and she would die a death as horrible as anything he’d seen in the war.
Faithful Soldier, she will live.
The prompt flashed past his retscreens and he thought again of the Shaykh Captain’s words about riches and the fountain.
This was no head-hacker’s trick. No thieves’ scheme. He did not understand it, but God had spoken to him. He could not dishonor that. He had once served murderers and madmen who claimed to act in God’s name. But Lubna—brilliant, loving Lubna—had shown him that this world could hold holiness. If Ali could not see her again,
if he could not save her, he could at least face his death with faith.
He made his voice as strong as he could, and he held his head high as he uttered words that would seal his fate with these men. “In the name of God, who needs no credit rating, Shaykh-Captain, do what you must. But I am not lying.”
The Shaykh-Captain’s eyes widened and a twisted smile came to his lips. “So that’s it! In the name of your mother’s pussy, you superstitious fool!” The big men behind Ali grumbled their southern disgust at the fact of Ali’s existence and started shoving him, but the old man cut them off with a hand gesture. He set down the truncheon, pulled at his dirty grey beard, assumed a mock gravity. “A genuine Free Shi’ah Anti-Crediteer. The scourge of the Global Credit Crusaders. Hard times for your kind these days, even up north, I hear.”
The Shaykh-Captain snorted, but there was something new in the man’s voice. Something almost human. “You think you’re a brave man—a martyr—to show your true colors down here, huh? Pfft. Well, you can stop stroking your own dick on that count. No one down here gives a damn about those days any more. Half this city was on your side of things once. Truth be told, my fuck-faced fool of a little brother was one of you. He kept fighting that war when everyone knew it was over. He’s dead now. A fool, like I say. Me? I faced reality. Now look at me.” The old man spread his arms as if his shabby office was a palace, his two goons gorgeous wives.
He sat on the edge of his desk and gave Ali another long look. “But you—you’re stuck in the fanatical past, huh? You know, I believe this story about following your OS is actually true. Not a robber. Just an idiot. You’re as pathetic as my brother was. A dream-chasing relic. You really walked down the OC Road?”
Ali nodded but said nothing.
A sympathetic flash lit the Shaykh-Captain’s eyes, but he quickly grimaced, as if the moment of fellow-feeling caused him physical pain. “Well, my men will call me soft, but what the fuck. You’ve had a rough enough trip down here, I suppose. Tell you what: We’ll get you a corner in steerage on a hover-cluster, okay? Those northbound flights are always half-empty anyway. Go be with your wife, asshole.”
Ali could not quite believe what he was hearing. “Thank you! Thank you, Shaykh-Captain! In the name of—”
“In the name of your mother’s hairy tits! Shut up and take your worn old expressions back to your falling-apart city. Boys, get this butt-fucked foreigner out of my office. Give him a medpatch, maybe. Some soup. And don’t mess him up too bad, huh?”
The big men gave him a low-grade medpatch, which helped. And they fed him lentil soup and pita. Then they shoved him around again, a bit, but not enough to matter.
When they were through they hurled him into the steerage line at the hover-docks. Ali was tired and hurt and thirsty. Both his lips were split and his guts felt like jelly. But war had taught him how to hang on when there was a real chance of getting home. Riches buried beneath the jade-and-grey-marble fountain. Cure-money. Despair had weakened him, but he would find the strength to make it back to Lubna. He would watch as she woke, finally free of the disease.
Faithful Soldier, you will
The prompt cut off abruptly. Ali boarded the hover-cluster and headed home to his beloved.
Iron Eyes and the Watered-Down World
Zok Ironeyes stared at the tilecard table before him and cursed softly as Hai Hai clacked down the Dragoness tile with a gloating grunt.
Hai Hai looked up from the table and locked her shiny black eyes on the innkeeper, her nose and whiskers twitching. The scraggle-haired, red faced fool avoided Hai Hai’s gaze with the shame of a man who’d been caught staring. Zok couldn’t fault the innkeeper’s curiosity. The man had probably seen only a handful of rabbitmen in his life, for few of Hai Hai’s people ever made it this far south. But if the proprietor of the preposterously-named King’s Crest Inn didn’t watch himself, he was like to get his nose broken at least. Hai Hai wasn’t one to indulge untraveled bumpkins’ gawking.
“This innkeeper ain’t more careful with his stares, he’s gonna find himself smiling that swindler’s smile with only half a face,” she said. Her furry, four-fingered paw drifted to the hilt of one of her twin sabers as she peered skeptically into the hammered-brass mug before her. “And if this is true Rubywine, then my father was a fucking fox-lord.” Her paw left her sword and pulled at the pink-tinged end of one white ear. “Thousand-gods-damned hicks and their thousand-gods-damned dyed wines,” she muttered before looking up to level a weary gaze at Zok. “We need to spend our spoils in a real city again, Zok. I’m sick to death of these pathetic little dust-bucket shithole towns. Not cozy enough to be a village, not busy enough to be a city. And where in the three hells is that priest of ours, anyway?”
Zok shrugged. “This is where the four fickle gods of the road have led us. And I’m sure Mylovic will be here soon,” he said, only half-listening. He eyed the tilecard table again and saw that he was screwed. Hai Hai had put the Dragoness into play as soon as Zok had used up all his Knight cards. A better player might have wormed his way out of such a corner, but Zok had played enough games against Hai Hai to know that wasn’t going to happen.
He sighed over his lost coins and studied the Dragoness tile. The inn’s tilecard set was an old one, painted in the ornate Emerald Empire style, with the Dragoness depicted not as a serpent, but as a beautiful green-eyed woman. A woman that looked enough like Fraja that it made Zok sigh a second time.
He reached into his purse to pluck out a forfeit-coin and paused, running a calloused finger over the thick gold hoop earring he’d carried for all these years. Sometimes he almost thought he could feel his wife Fraja call to him when he touched the earring. But of course Fraja was a decade dead and gone.
Zok’s withdrew his forfeit-coin, but he kept his hand closed around it and stared at the table for another long moment. Surely there was some opening left to him…
One of the inn’s serving boys came to the table and refilled Zok’s mug, the fourth time he’d done so in half as many hours. Hai Hai cursed the boy for the swill his master served and Zok looked up from his hopeless situation to stare at the lad. The witless little fool stumbled and bumped Zok, half tripping over his chair in fear and just barely managing not to spill black ale all over Zok.
Zok watched the mousy-haired boy scurry away and he snorted to himself in disgust. When had the world’s young men become so weak? Spineless sulkers or giggling idiots, all of them. Where were the fathers who ought to be molding them into true men? It was worst here in the south, but it was more or less the same everywhere these days.
Just another sign of a watered-down world. Every time Zok chanced upon his reflection in a gazing glass, he saw more and more grey hairs threaded amongst the red. Every day he felt more like Menace, the bespelled broadsword at his hip—a deadly, out-of-place relic from another era.
The women nowadays were no different than the boys. In the years since Fraja had died, Zok had hired whores in half the world’s cities and villages, for no matter how much he missed his wife he was still a man. A man ‘full of fuck and fight,’ as Fraja had used to say admiringly.
Hai Hai herself had said more than once that they only worked together so well because humans and rabbitmen couldn’t copulate. Zok had seen the savage vigor with which she pursued her own race’s males whenever they were in the north. Hai Hai claimed to have left seventy-four children scattered across the Amethyst Empire’s cities, and more than once she’d rode off with Zok, leaving some soft, pleading rabbitman and his litter of children with nothing but a handful of coins and hard words.
That was a wandering warrior’s way, though it wasn’t Zok’s. Since Fraja, he’d never bedded a woman without hearing her oath that she was a barren-tea drinker. For if Zok still had a man’s needs, he nonetheless knew he would never marry again, nor sire children. That he would never love again. Whoring was a different thing. The exchange of coin for cunny was a transaction, and thus not quite a betrayal of Fraja’s memory. Someho
w, it felt less disloyal to pay for what he needed. He told himself Fraja would understand this.
Hai Hai gestured to the board and bared her long front teeth in a sympathetic smile. “So, can we call this a made match? I mean, I’m willing to bury your ugly nose deeper into the shit-pile if you insist, but I think we both know where this is going.”
Zok grunted his surrender and threw down his forfeit-coin and his two useless tiles.
Hai Hai’s whiskers twitched as she scooped coins from the table into her purse. “Honestly, Zok, I don’t know why you keep playing me. Four out of five times, I drain you dry. I’m starting to think you like humiliation.” She stood and stretched, her long ears stiffening as she wiped wine from her white face-fur. “Speaking of draining, I got to piss.” She held the table and steadied herself. “Whoa! This dyed wine might taste like fox piss, but it did the trick! Twelve mugs usually doesn’t do shit for me!” She headed tipsily out the Inn’s back door to the privies.
Alone at the table, Zok looked around the inn again with beer-blurred contempt. The south. Fraja’s people were from somewhere near here, though she’d left her home as a girl. Her spirit had been too big to be bound or broken by dust-choked streets and backwater poverty.
If only her body had been so invulnerable. For the ten-thousandth time in his life, Zok saw in his mind’s eye the toad-headed demon that killed Fraja. The demon that had escaped his vengeance.
Hai Hai returned to the table and sat down. She picked up her mug, found it empty, and slammed it down again with an annoyed grunt just as their traveling trio’s last member walked through the inn’s open front doorway.
“What ho, boon companions?” Mylovic beamed as he approached their table, his thick rust-colored robes hanging heavily in the windless air. The squinty little red-headed priest ought to have been sweating his balls off, but his divine sorcery apparently kept him cool, just as it had kept him from shivering when Zok had met the man in the Witch’s Teat Tavern in the great northern city of Frostlock three…no, four years ago now.