Patreon Year 3 Collection REV

by Kameron Hurley

  “No one from your government or mine is looking for her.”

  “How you know? You ask the bel dames?”

  “They won’t help because she isn’t Nasheenian.”

  “Maybe she’s on a job.”

  “No, she’s dead.”

  “How you know that?”

  “She told me.”

  “Her corpse told you? That’s new.” Nyx checked her boot to see if there was any more rice. Nothing.

  “She sent me this. She left it with her secretary with strict instructions that I be given it in the event of her disappearance.” The woman pushed a note across the table, one made of green paper that had already bled its words onto the page. “That was coded for me,” the woman said.

  Nyx didn’t pick up the paper. “And what’s it say?”

  That further rattled the woman. Nyx wanted to give her some whisky to calm her down. Maybe something stronger.

  “I think bel dames were the ones that killed her,” the woman blurted.

  “Why? Because she was a spy?”

  “She wasn’t a spy! She mentioned… she was concerned about human rights abuses in Nasheen.”

  “I’m sorry, what now?”

  “Heidia is undergoing great changes. She wanted to improve relations with Nasheen. Heidia has been hesitant to open its borders and businesses due to your ongoing war with Chenja.”

  “Plenty of people get rich on war. Tirhani sure has.”

  “It isn’t like that in Heidia. We have a very different social and economic system based on cooperation and mutual respect. Our human rights charter came with us when we settled here. It’s quite robust, I assure you.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “I want her body. To bring home with me.”

  “I highly doubt there’s a body if she’s dead. Probably burned up in a cellar somewhere. You know what happens when you don’t burn a body.”

  “You come very highly recommended. If anyone can find her, you can.”

  “Not entirely sure if this job is even possible.”

  “I’ll pay for your time. Even if you don’t find her. You’ll be paid something. For your expertise.”

  Nyx snorted. “Expertise, huh?”

  “Please. No one else will help me.”

  “There’s probably a reason for that.” Nyx sighed and took up the paper. She wasn’t the best reader, but it was only a couple of lines. She read them twice though, just to be sure:

  If you have received this, I have perished in service to Heidia. I’m sorry, love, but there are sacrifices we each must make, and I have made mine.

  “Quite a breakup letter,” Nyx said.

  The woman’s eyes filled. “You have no manners. No class.”

  “No… what?”

  “You’re vulgar.”

  “And you’re Heidian. And no one else will help you.”

  “…you’re saying you’ll help?”

  “That change your mind about me?”

  “No.”

  “Fair.” Nyx examined the paper. Expensive stuff, indeed the type that diplomats would use. Or spies. “She didn’t talk about her work? About why Heidia would need her to die?”

  The woman shook her head.

  “What was her name?” Nyx asked. “This isn’t signed. You sure it’s her handwriting?”

  “Irina T’Gribova. And I’m Misha. And yes, that is absolutely her writing.”

  “Misha? Same surname?”

  “No, we keep ours. Misha Ustanosha.”

  “When you last see your wife, Misha?”

  “Eight days ago. She went to work at the embassy.” Misha still had not settled into a chair. She clung to the back of the one across form Nyx so tightly her knuckles had paled. “Her secretary said she left for a lunch appointment with her hair dresser.”

  “Hair dresser?”

  “Some of us rely on our appearance.”

  “You think I don’t?”

  “Anyhow, her hair dresser says she left after midday prayer. Said she was going to attend a ‘conference of birds.’ Do you know what that is?”

  “Not a clue.”

  “I was hoping it was something Nasheenian and I just didn’t understand the reference.”

  “And nobody else at the embassy knows about this conference?”

  Misha shook her head.

  Nyx turned over the case in her alcohol-addled brain. Her guts protested again, and she mourned the fact that she was out of whisky.

  “This is going to cost you,” Nyx said.

  “All right.”

  “Ten notes up front. Daily allowance of another five notes. Fifteen notes if we find the body. Twenty notes if we find her alive.”

  “That’s extortion!”

  “That’s what it costs. You have any idea how much my rent is? How much my team eats?” Nyx took her feet off the desk and best back to sharpening her sword. “There’s a good reason nobody else wants this case. It involves a foreigner, probably a spy –”

  “She’s not –”

  “— and you’ve got very little to go on. Take it or leave it. You’re the wife of a diplomat, this is petty change for you.”

  “I assure you it is not.”

  Nyx shrugged. “I’ve got a stack of other jobs I plan to start in on tomorrow. You can either get ahead of that line now, or not.” She loved running a good bluff.

  “All right,” Misha sputtered. “I… I can write you a bank note for the deposit now.”

  “I need cash.”

  “I don’t carry that amount of money.”

  “Great. I’ll start as soon as it clears.”

  “That could take a week! We’ve already lost so much time.”

  “Your call.”

  “I have three notes on me.” She carefully peeled them from an interior pocket and placed them in front of Nyx. “I can write a bank note for the rest.”

  “Done,” Nyx said.

  Misha didn’t even sit to write out the note, just signed it over and thumped it in front of Nyx with a flourish. “There!”

  “Pleasure doing business with you. The address and call pattern on here where I should reach you?”

  “Yes. And I expect regular updates.”

  “Sure. Anneke! Escort our new client out!”

  “Sure thing!” Anneke, muffled, from the back. Clanging and banging of weapons, tools, god alone knew what else.

  Anneke arrived, gun still in hand, the crimson from her still-damp hair making feathery marks against her neck and face. “Let’s go, client lady!”

  Misha hesitated. Finally met Nyx’s gaze. Her eyes were yellow-hazel, striking. “I just want to know, one way or another. You understand?”

  “Sure,” Nyx said.

  Anneke led Misha out. The door slammed behind her. Nyx heard the satisfying bolt of the lock and buzz of the triggered swarm.

  “We make rent?” Anneke yelled. “I want to order some rotis!”

  “No yet,” Nyx said, shuffling the three crisp notes. Not a hell of a lot to go on. But once she took a job, she always finished it.

  One way or another.

  #

  Nyx put her team to work sometime after morning prayer the next day. That was something she was good at: telling other people what to do.

  She rounded up whoever was in the hub – Taite, still asleep, Rhys sipping his tea after prayer, Anneke still coming down off whatever she’d taken the night before. The dye from her hair had leaked down her forehead and face, leaving spidery crimson rivulets. It was either ridiculous or fearsome. Nyx wasn’t sure which.

  Nyx called them into the office. “We’ve got a job. A good paying one. We do it right, or not at all, just like the rest.”

  “Taite, you heard about something called the conference of birds? That some diplomatic thing? Foreign thing?”

  Taite shrugged. “Nope. There aren’t that many embassies that still even operat
e in Punjai. Pretty sure the last Chenjan one got blown up ten years ago.”

  “It’s a poem,” Rhys said, tucking his prayer rug under his arm. “A very old poem, probably Tirhani in origin. The poet’s name, I don’t recall, but I remember studying it at some point.”

  “What’s the big deal about birds?” Taite scratched at his pockmarked face.

  “The conference of birds,” Rhys continued, “tells the tale of a time when all the birds of the world came together to decide who would lead them.”

  “All the birds?” Nyx said. “Parrots and ravens?”

  “It’s assumed that there were many other types of birds on these other worlds, just as there were many other types of animals. It’s a story about how one must shed a human fault in order to go forward and attain spiritual enlightenment. To be worthy of God.”

  “Enlightenment?” Nyx said. “That doesn’t sound very Chenjan.”

  “It’s held up in Tirhan as an important religious parable. Less so in Chenja, yes. There’s more to it, but that’s the… version that one of your particular… talents can process. I could read you the whole thing, if you like.”

  “No thanks,” Nyx grunted. “So this diplomat was being poetic? Not serious? That leaves us with nothing. She could have been walking away into the desert to die.”

  “Possibly,” Rhys said. His brow furrowed in thought. Nyx liked to watch him wrestling with a particularly interesting puzzle. “Let me dig into this further. I have some contacts at the magician’s gym, and the mosque. There may be something larger at play.”

  “Why you think that?” Nyx said.

  “Because it wasn’t just about enlightenment. The birds were coming together to try and find out a ruler. Those that survived the journey became the rulers. The idea, of course, is that they ruled themselves all along, but…”

  “You think it’s some kind of trial? An initiation?”

  “Let me ask.”

  “Fine,” Nyx said, waving him away. “Taite, you spend some time on the coms tapping into streams. See if anyone else is talking about this conference.”

  Taite rolled his eyes. “You know she probably just killed herself in the desert.”

  “Great, then find out where.”

  Taite headed back into the hub.

  “What about me, boss?”

  “Take the bakkie out and go hit up some of those fancy cantinas around the Heidian embassy.”

  “Wouldn’t call those fancy. I mean, this is still Punjai.”

  “Get cozy with the help. See if they have seen or heard anything. Even dips let shit slip in front of waitstaff sometimes.”

  “On it!”

  “Hey, where’s Khos?”

  “Out again, boss. Something to do with somebody at a brothel.”

  “Of course,” Nyx grumbled. “Fuck him anyway. He doesn’t work, he doesn’t get paid.”

  “More for me!” Anneke crowed, and hefted herself and her gun out the front door.

  Her team engaged in the task at hand, Nyx reserved the most important job for herself. She pocketed the three notes she’d gotten from Misha the night before and went out to buy some goddamn whisky.

  She was going to need it.

  #

  Rhys found the mottled old man half shrunken under the load of a what should have been a cat-pulled cart. Alas, with no cats in sight, the man was reduced to pulling it himself. He was just where the mullah had said he would be, ferrying loads of nothing to nowhere. How fitting.

  “Pardon, father,” Rhys said. The man could have passed for a Chenjan, but his jaunty hat and kameez marked him as Tirhani.

  The man winced. Turned his milky, nearly-blind gaze in Rhys’s direction. “What is it, boy? Boy? Shouldn’t you be at the front.”

  “Shouldn’t you, father?”

  “I have no part in this war.”

  “Nor do I.”

  “What do you want? Help carry this load for me, will you?”

  “How far are we going, father?”

  “Just the end of the street. There, you see that white raven?”

  Rhys peered down the alley, wondering how the old man saw the white raven over three hundred steps away. It must have been the contrast. The white raven against the shadowy roofline.

  “I’m happy to help, father. I do have some questions for you, thought.”

  “All right, all right, lift now.”

  Rhys shouldered the burden of the cart. The way was loosely paved with rough stones covered over in subsequent waves of sand. Little roaches scurried along the curbs, disappearing into the storm sewers.

  As he moved forward, he realized the man himself had let go of the cart, and was shuffling, unencumbered, beside him.

  Rhys gritted his teeth. The things he did for a little information. “I am looking for the conference of birds,” Rhys said.

  The man did not reply, just trundled beside him. Rhys tried again. “The mullah Abijid said you knew the way.”

  “That old broken mullah knows nothing,” the man cackled.

  Rhys peered at the raven ahead, certain it had flown further on down the street. The primary sun sat high in the sky, uncomfortably hot even for the winter season. “Can you tell me where to find it?”

  “You think you are ready for it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me something of yourself, boy. That is a Chenjan accent.”

  “It is. I deserted.”

  “To Nasheen? One is no worse than the other.”

  “That depends on who you are.”

  “The rich are rich everywhere. The poor are poor everywhere.”

  Sweat trickled down Rhys’s face. Began to bunch between his shoulder blades. The effort it took to move the cart made it difficult to speak. What was the old man hauling? Rocks?

  As the conversation petered out, the old man began to hum. Rhys kept his eye on the raven, ensuring it didn’t move again.

  Finally, slick with sweat and dust and desperate for cold tea, Rhys stopped beneath the watchful eye of the white raven. This close, Rhys realized the raven was not real, but a marble statue crudely affixed to the top of a courtyard wall with crumbling mortar.

  “Leave that here,” the man said. “Come in, come in. Let me show you my creations.”

  Rhys passed through the knotted old gate after him, and found himself in a sandy courtyard riddled with trash; the discarded ruins of an old bakkie, now filled with flowering aloe and yellow sage; an old rickshaw tied to a great tree-like sculpture made of bug secretions; tents created from discarded cart harnesses; and dozens of rocks, geodes, and chipped fossils lay loosely arranged on a table made from the bed of a bakkie even older than the planter.

  Beyond the strange garden was the man’s squat house, as wide as the lot but not more than fifteen paces deep. Made of mudbrick and painted over in bold, clashing colors; red, orange, dark green. A series of bullet holes in one wall seemed to make up the outlines of a cryptic face.

  “What is this?” Rhys asked.

  “My creations,” the man repeated, as if it were obvious. “Have a look around. Leave tips here.” He picked up a big red clay pot and shook it. It was mostly full of rocks.

  “Tips?”

  “For my art.”

  “Your… art? This is…” But Rhys stopped himself, remembering his manners. Nasheen had tried to strip him of manners, but he wasn’t going to let this dirty little country win. “It’s… unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”

  “You want a drink?”

  “Tea?”

  “I’ll get you a drink.”

  The man returned with two warm, stale beers. The smell alone nearly made Rhys pass out. “Thank you.”

  “You did not answer my question.”

  “About?”

  “Yourself. Why do you seek the conference of ravens?”

  “I… want to learn more about myself. Isn’t that why everyone goes?”

  “No, no.
Most don’t want to know who or what they truly are. We are all more petty, dirtier, than we like to believe.”

  “Then who goes?”

  The man leaned toward him conspiratorially. “Those who want power!”

  “We all want some measure of power,” Rhys said carefully. “Power over our own lives. Our fates. But the truth is that is up to God. All is as He wills it.”

  “A correct answer, but do you feel it, in your bones? Do you know what it means?”

  “I have had faith since I was a small child. I have felt the presence of God, honored Him, done as He willed –”

  “But what have you given up for Him, for His will?”

  “I… I act according to his will.”

  “Do you, deserter?”

  Heat moved up Rhys’s face. “I don’t believe the war is God’s will. That is the will of men, and women like these filthy Nasheenians.”

  “And how do you know? What have you given up? Your home, certainly. But how do you know it was His will?”

  “I… I don’t. But I pray directly to Him. He knows my heart.”

  “If you entered the conference of birds, and you discovered there was no God, how would that change your life?”

  “There is a God.”

  “Nothing could convince you otherwise?”

  “No.”

  The old man took Rhys’s hands into his. He hefted them, as if weighing the merit of each. “You will go, but you will not like what you see,” the man said.

  “Where is it?”

  The man dropped Rhys’s hands. Held up the tip jar again.

  Rhys sighed and dropped in a quarter note.

  “A day’s drive north,” the old man said, beaming. “You will come to a sagging old road that follows the border. Turn onto it and continue north another half day. You will see a winking contagion sensor to the northwest. You will come to a great sandy peak, but the way will be open for you. Follow that until you come to the ziggurat.”

  “The ziggurat?”

  “Can’t miss it.” The man cackled.

  “If this is a joke –”

  “Not at all.” The old man patted Rhys’s shoulder. “And you tell Mullah Abijad not to send any more nice young boys like you here. I don’t want to ruin any of your illusions, and that is what the conference of birds is truly for. Pounding you down, like cloves in a pestle.”

  “I will.”