The gun connected with the woman’s temple. Her head lolled to one side. She stumbled. Her hands sagged. Then she crumpled like a drunken kitten.
Nyx raised her head and looked back toward the deli. There had been two of them. Where was the other one?
She slipped just into the next alley and kept her sword out. Sweat trickled into her eyes. She wiped it away, blinked furiously. She heard a noise in the alley, and chanced a look.
The second woman was up on the roof, taking in the full measure of the alley. She had a scattergun drawn. Nyx made herself flat against the wall, waited.
Nyx was a terrible shot from any range.
“Suha,” she said softly. The name triggered the tailored red beetle in her ear. It opened the connection.
“What you got?”
“Two women. Possible assassins. Bagged one in the alley. I got another one on the roof of the deli behind me. You got my position?”
“Yeah.”
“You still on point?”
“I’m moving to intercept. Eshe says you’re in shit shape.”
“I’m fine. But I’ve got a second shooter. I need you to intercept.”
“On it. Got a description?”
Nyx gave her a description of the second shooter. When she looked back, the woman was no longer on the rooftop. “Lost visual on the roof of the deli,” Nyx said. “Check the street outside.”
“I’m six blocks away.”
“Watch your ass. They’re good. Young, but good.”
“So am I,” Suha said.
Nyx ducked back into the alley behind the deli and sheathed her sword. She crouched next to the woman and patted her down. The clothes were worn, dirty, but good quality. The burnous was organic, which wasn’t cheap. She found two more knives and about five bucks in loose change—not an insubstantial amount of cash.
“Who the fuck are you?” Nyx muttered. A wave of dizziness passed over her again. She breathed deeply through her nose.
The woman began to stir. Nyx pulled out some sticky bands from the pack at her hip and bound the woman’s hands behind her. As she pulled up the burnous, she saw a flash of red. She paused. Stared. A red letter was tucked into the back of the woman’s trousers.
Nyx went very still for the space of a breath.
Then she pulled out the red letter and yanked it open. It was a bel dame’s assassination note. The note wasn’t written up for Nyx or Mercia, but for some inland kid with a smoky face and big eyes. Only a bel dame would carry one of these notes. What the fuck was a bel dame doing hunting down the daughter to a diplomat without a red letter order to do it? Or was she running some kind of black work?
The woman was groaning now.
“Bel dame, huh?” Nyx said, and snorted. “Might be illegal to kill you… But a buck says you’re running a black note.”
Nyx shoved the note into her pocket. She stood and grabbed the bel dame by the hair.
“This’ll hurt,” Nyx said.
It took three whacks of Nyx’s sword to take off the bel dame’s head. Blood splattered her feet and swam in lazy rivulets down the alley. She tugged off the woman’s organic burnous and wrapped the head with it. The body shuddered.
Bloody fucking bel dames, Nyx thought, and stumbled out the alley and across the next street.
Dust quickly covered the blood that coated her from hip to feet, but she still got cautious looks on the street. She turned down another alley and tried to catch her breath. She set down the head. Fuck, she needed a drink.
Nyx fell against the alley wall. She turned and pressed her forehead to it. Her stomach heaved. She vomited, tasted acid. Blue beetles lit out from beneath the wall, swarmed toward the steaming bile and blood splattered across her sandals.
She moved away from the wall and staggered. She needed to move before somebody else showed up. She needed to take this head to the bel dame office. Might be they’d pay her to bring in a bel dame running black work. She needed to check her account. She needed to bring home a nice girl. She needed a drink. She needed to call Rhys, she….
Time stopped.
The world went dark.
“Nyx? Nyx?”
She was staring at the pale lavender sky from the floor of an alley. Eshe was staring down at her, a skinny little Ras Tiegan half-breed with a soft face and pouting mouth, too plain and unremarkable in looks for much of anything but disappearing into crowds.
He pressed a hand to her forehead, like he was trying to measure something.
“Whose head is that?” he asked.
Dark smears blotted out the boy’s face. “I don’t have time for this shit,” Nyx slurred. She tried moving her arms. Everything felt heavy. Something stank like vomit.
“I think you need a magician,” he said.
“What?” she said, but searching for the word took a long time, and even saying it seemed heavy, too difficult. “I think I’m a little tired,” she said.
“I’ll take you to Yahfia.”
“The kid…” Nyx said, and then stopped, unsure about what kid she meant. Some kid. Something important. Maybe it wasn’t so important. “I need to call Rhys,” she said.
“Who?” the kid said. “I’ll get Yahfia.”
“There was a little black dog,” Nyx said.
“A what?”
Eshe started to look like someone she didn’t know. What was a boy doing on the street unchaperoned? Shouldn’t he be at the front?
“I just need to sleep, Fouad,” Nyx murmured. “A little sleep, and maybe Kine can get me some whiskey…”
Something wasn’t right. She saw a body in a tub, bloody, no eyes… Yes, that’s right, Kine was dead. Her sister was dead. “Fouad,” she told her brother, “Kine is dead. I think you’re supposed to be at the front.”
“I’m getting Yahfia,” Fouad said. He stood, and that was fine, because she was tired of talking. She just wanted to lie there a little longer. Blackness clawed at her, but it felt good, like giving in to sleep after a long, hard day.
It didn’t feel like dying at all.
2.
Yahfia’s operating theater smelled of death and lavender, and there was something crawling up the far wall where Yahfia kept her jars of organs. The theater was a windowless room built into a storefront along one of the higher-end streets of Mushtallah. It had only been burned out once in four years. Most girls on this side of Mushtallah were training to be sappers and munitions experts. Nyx would have paid good money for a place that didn’t attract bored teenage girls with a passion for fire.
Nyx licked at her thumb where a hister beetle had harvested a blood sample. Her head felt heavy now, just like the rest of her. The giant insects and organs inside the jars along the theater wall were all the more expensive sort, the type Nyx saw when she used to work with proper magicians in Faleen and on Palace Hill. Yahfia had done well for herself during the years she’d been back in country—better than Nyx; maybe better than anyone on Nyx’s old crews.
“Sorry you had to wait so long,” Yahfia said. “I had a bel dame come in ahead of you. Injured very severely by a deserter she was trying to bring in. Whole face taken off, can you believe it? She couldn’t make it back to Bloodmount for care.” She wiped her hands on her apron. Her green silk robe was stitched in gold and silver. Magicians did all right in Mushtallah.
“I used to be a bel dame once,” Nyx said.
“So you’ve told me—many times,” Yahfia said, and sighed. “I don’t want trouble with bel dames, Nyx.”
“Yeah, nobody does. So what the hell’s wrong with me?” Nyx eased off the marble slab.
“Besides your deviant moral flexibility and severe phobia of emotional commitment?” Yahfia asked.
“I consider those virtues,” Nyx said. She fastened the stays on her breast binding and buckled on her baldric.
“What made you finally come in?”
“Passed out today on a job. Eshe found me crawling around the alley looking for water. Felt a lot better after I got some wat
er, but he started blubbering. Wanted me to come in. I humor him when I can.”
Yahfia moved a couple of empty jars into the bowl of the freestanding sink and pumped water over them. “I can’t blame him for being concerned. He’s grown into quite the young man since you took him in.”
“You say that like being a man’s a good thing,” Nyx said. “Men get carted off to the front to die. I’d rather he stayed eight forever, same as when I got him.” She folded her arms. “You think it’s cancer?” Getting cancer was like getting a cold. Everybody had a tumor or two taken out now and again. Most folks got malignant melanomas scraped off at least once a year.
She watched Yahfia. Yahfia was a head taller than Nyx, and that made her a tall woman, though she was slender in the hands and shoulders and thickening up in the hips. The age showed now in the set to her mouth, the spidery lines at the corners of her dark eyes. She had pretty eyes, big and long-lashed, like a girl dancer’s.
“When was the last time you had your breasts out?” Yahfia asked.
“Couple years ago. Wanted to take them out all together, but I like my profile.”
Yahfia smiled, but did not look at her. When a magician wouldn’t look at you, it meant there was something about you she didn’t like—or was afraid of. Never a good sign. Yahfia had never approved of her, certainly, but nobody did. Just because they didn’t approve didn’t mean they didn’t like her.
“How old are you now, forty-five?” Yahfia asked.
“Thirty-eight,” Nyx said. Saying it out loud made her feel even older.
A faint smile touched Yahfia’s face. “I’m curious, Nyx. When did you go to prison and become exiled from the bel dame order?”
“I don’t know. A while ago.”
“How old were you?”
Nyx frowned. “Twenty-four.”
“That was nearly fourteen years ago. Yet every time you come into my office, you introduce yourself to my staff as a bel dame.”
Nyx shrugged. “It gets me in. I’m more concerned about what’s wrong with me than about how I get an actual appointment.”
“I didn’t find any evidence of cancer,” Yahfia said. “But there’s certainly something wrong. I’m worried about the weight loss, and the dizziness.”
Nyx grunted. “I need to eat more and lay off the alcohol, that’s all.” But she hadn’t had a drink in two days, and she ate like a starving woman all the time now. Sometimes magicians weren’t good for anything but replacing something you already knew was missing.
Yahfia turned away from the sink and wiped her slender hands again. Nyx had always liked magicians’ hands. Yahfia did all of her body work for free in exchange for a little bit of paper forgery that Nyx had had the Queen take care of on Yahfia’s behalf. Yahfia had been born with some boy parts. She was content to head to the front until she hit puberty… and started menstruating. Things were a little more complicated after that, and she’d fought most of her life to get her status changed. A tough thing to do unless you knew the right people in Mushtallah—people who owed you favors. And they had owed Nyx plenty back then.
“I have another magician I’d like you to see,” Yahfia said. “She’s far better than I, and works near the Orrizo. She may find something I’ve missed.”
Nyx shrugged. “I got work.”
“I thought you wanted to get out of red work.”
Nyx shook out her dusty-red burnous and pulled it on. “If I’m not doing red work, I’m doing black work. We can’t all be magicians.”
“Or bel dames?”
Nyx grimaced.
“Is there something wrong with being respectably employed?” Yahfia asked.
Nyx walked over to the table at the end of the slab, took up and sheathed her sword. She lashed a dagger to her hip, holstered her scattergun, wound up and secured her whip, and stepped into and laced up her sandals, the ones with the razor blades hidden in the soles.
“Come on, you ever see me doing something respectable?” she said, and patted at the braids of her hair where she kept three poisoned needles.
“Might be an interesting career change. Rumor has it you’ve turned castration into an occupation.”
“You go cutting one guy’s cock off and you never hear the end of it,” Nyx said. “I killed Raine six years ago. Nobody in the border towns has spoken straight to me since.”
“Imagine that,” Yahfia said lightly. Nyx was reminded that Yahfia had had her own cock cut off not so long before. Helped add legitimacy to the paper forgery. Best to leave that one alone.
“Huh,” Nyx said.
Nyx walked to the door, said over her shoulder, “You need anything from Afifa Square? I got to return something to some folks there.”
“No. I’m going to Amtullah tonight for a few days,” she said. “Don’t get yourself into trouble, Nyxnissa. Few people have patience for your sort.”
“My coin’s still good,” Nyx said. “And I get people favors when they need them. You remember that.” She opened the door.
“I do remember,” Yahfia said. “It’s why I still permit you in my theater. I do wish you’d appreciate that, instead of trying to bully my staff.”
“I don’t bully.”
Yahfia waved a hand at her. “Go on. Get that magician’s name and pattern from my secretary!”
Nyx closed the door.
Eshe stood in the waiting room. It was an airy, maroon-colored office ringed in stained-glass windows. All those outward-facing windows always freaked Nyx out. Eshe was rocking back on his heels and surreptitiously eyeing one of Yahfia’s pretty little secretaries. The woman’s plump body was partially concealed by the lattice of the privacy screen at the front desk. His mouth was hard and his face looked drawn. When he saw Nyx enter, his expression didn’t improve.
“What did she say?” Eshe asked.
“Fit as a harem girl,” Nyx said.
“You’re a liar.”
“I used to be good at it.” Also a lie. She tousled his hair, though he was old for it. He ducked away from her, pursed his mouth, and looked out at the street. She didn’t think his pouty, petulant-looking mouth would get any more attractive with age.
“Let’s go,” she said. “Suha’s probably dropped Mercia off already and itching to get back to the keg.” She still used the same affectionate term for her storefront in Mushtallah that she’d used for her storefront in Punjai, though it’d been ten years since she stopped selling beer kegs out of the one in Punjai.
“She didn’t fix you up at all?” Eshe asked. He had big brown eyes, and when he looked at her, sometimes, she wondered what his mother had looked like. Nyx had caught Eshe trying to pick her pocket when he was eight years old. He’d run away from his state-sanctioned apprenticeship to a cat dealer when he was six and started dressing like a girl to avoid the patrols. Eshe was a breeder baby, one of a brood of eight or ten popped out by some career breeder. There were thousands of women in Nasheen who made a living breeding babies for the cause. Looking for her would have been pointless. Breeders didn’t want to raise children. They wanted the state to feed them to the front. Where his half-breed blood came from was a matter of some contention. Nobody raised Ras Tiegan babies at the compounds, but he had found some sanctuary in the Ras Tiegan slums, and could speak the language passably well now.
“She said there’s some other magician who could look me over.”
“What’s her name?”
Nyx shrugged. “Why don’t you talk to the secretary and set it up?” Fourteen was plenty old enough for a boy to get tangled up with girls. Not that he didn’t have any experience with that—he’d been a street kid, after all—but she was looking to find him somebody proper and half-virtuous before some bel dame came to collect him for the front, and there weren’t a lot of those sorts of young women around in her line of work.
Eshe shot a look at the secretary. He fidgeted a bit before finally going over to speak with her. The secretary was all smiles. Boys outside the schools or the coast were rare, a
nd though he was an obvious half-breed, most people fawned over him the way people fawned over babies—Nasheen’s most precious resource.
His voice was changing. She heard it while he spoke with the woman. He was dressing less often like a girl, too. No more headscarves or belled trousers. He wore vests and somber-colored burnouses now, the sort Nyx only saw on old men. She hated it when he wore those stupid burnouses. He was getting old enough now that order keepers on the street were going to start asking him for his papers, too. She should have registered him for the draft two years before, but he was still passing for a girl then, and no one had come knocking on her door to get her to comply with the paperwork. Not yet. But shifter boys were especially conspicuous, and it was only a matter of time. Even if she discouraged him from shifting in public, the bags of feathers they packed out into the alley every week and the vast amounts of protein he consumed were going to give him away eventually. The war wanted shifters as badly as it wanted magicians.
Eshe chatted with the secretary and then walked back over, his face flush. Nyx tucked another wad of sen under her tongue. They left Yahfia’s place together.
“Karida says the magician serves the noses up in the hills. She lives in a gated plaza near the Orrizo.”
“I’m tired of hemorrhaging money.”
“Karida says the magician works cheap for anybody Yahfia recommends.”
“You two already swapping first names?”
“She has a girlfriend,” he said.
“This is Nasheen. Everybody has a girlfriend.”
They met up with Suha in the street. She sat in the driver’s seat of their bakkie, smoking clove cigarettes.
Suha was a decade younger than Nyx, and still dressed like a woman at the front: long-sleeved, hip-hugging tunic bisected by a wide munitions utility belt; half-length trousers, dust-colored burnous, and standard-issue combat boots. She was a short, squat woman, more muscle than fat, with a protruding mouth, jutting chin, and mashed-up nose that had been broken more times than she could say. Eshe called her “the trout,” which might have been funny if Nyx had ever seen a fish. Eshe said he had some sort of hazy memory of fish farms on the coast. Nyx suspected he was just using the word to show off.
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