Infidel

by Kameron Hurley

  “She doesn’t have an heir.”

  “Ha!” Alharazad spit on the floor again. Nyx realized the rust-red color had accreted over time; ten years of spent sen and red dirt tracked in over the ancient floor of the derelict.

  “The Queen won’t give us a real successor,” Alharazad said. “She’s going to name her body guard.”

  Nyx started. “Kasbah?”

  “They’ve been lovers for years. Kasbah has daughters. Zaynab’s got none. That’s a regime change, right there. Three hundred years of royal blood, erased in a single lifetime. Might as well go back to the Caliphate days. Or further, to the bel dame days. Ask me who I side with—a washed up magician who can’t do her job keeping rogue magicians out of her Queen’s palace, or a council full of bloody bel dames who want to rule the world again. Either way you hack it, it turns out rotten.”

  “You think the bel dames could end the war if they dethroned the Queen? No. That’s like asking Chenja to set up camp in Mushtallah.”

  “I think the war’s going to end, one way or another.”

  “People have been saying that for three hundred years.”

  “Chances are, someday they’ll be right.”

  Nyx pushed back from the table, groped for her cane. Bloody fucking cane. “If that was true, then someday the Mhorians would get their prophet reborn and temple built.” A fine day it would be, if every Book got its End Days. “Thanks for the recording.”

  Alharazad spit and stood. The water sprayer above them went off again, dousing the marijuana plants. Little rainbows colored the wall above the door.

  “You be careful coming out here again,” Alharazad said. “We’ve got a lot of miasmas coming in from the north, shit I haven’t seen in fifty years.”

  “I’m hoping I won’t have to come out again.”

  “That’s what I keep saying, but here I am.”

  Nyx pulled up the hood of her burnous, turned to go.

  “Nyx,” Alharazad said.

  Nyx paused, glanced over her shoulder.

  Alharazad was pulling back on her goggles. “You think long and hard about why you’re doing this. Who you’re doing it for. You decide you want answers instead of playing fetch, you come back to me.”

  “There something you want to tell me?” Nyx said.

  Alharazad showed her teeth. “I been a bel dame long enough to see when somebody’s on a death march. You got that look. Nothing I can say’ll stop you from taking in your note. But if you decide different… Well, I got lots to do out here.”

  “Sure,” Nyx said. She walked back onto the porch, shut the door behind her.

  Suha and Eshe were standing under the scant shade beneath the twisted skeleton of a bulb tree, hoods up. Suha leaned against the tree. Eshe threw stones at the contagion sensor at the top of the house.

  “Cut that out,” Nyx yelled. “Let’s go.”

  Suha started the bakkie and Nyx and Eshe piled in.

  “She tell you anything useful?” Suha asked.

  “Nothing I wanted to hear,” Nyx said.

  “Where we headed?” Suha asked as she turned back down the sandy drive.

  “I don’t want to spend the night here at the edge. Head east. Get us back to civilization. I need to call an old friend. And you and Eshe need to do some research.”

  “Anything good?” Eshe asked.

  “Poke around the bounty boards again. Make sure we’re not on them. Keep an ear out for Yahfia, too.”

  “Magicians are like bel dames. They clean up everything among themselves. Ain’t none of it going to be public,” Suha said.

  “What’s on the recording?” Eshe asked.

  Nyx pressed her fingers to the canister tucked into her binding. “I know somebody who can tell us something about it. Somebody who’s got something that might be useful to pair up with it.”

  She thought about Alharazad’s offer. Wondered if it meant things were as bad as they looked. Decided they were probably worse.

  16.

  Nyx opened the parcel with stiff fingers. She peered inside. She had called up her old mercenary buddy, Anneke, and asked her for an address, not a novel. Yet here it was: a stack of letters from Rhys Dashasa, some of them dating back over five years. All addressed to Anneke. Not to Nyx. Not that she’d expected him to write, even if it was a far more secure way of transmitting messages across borders than calling. But why had he written to Anneke?

  She and Eshe and Suha were in Punjai, holed up in a little hotel room with a terrace at the edge of the Chenjan district. The call to evening prayer rolled over the city. It was taken up by half a hundred muezzins out on their mud-brick rooftops. The air vibrated with the sound of it; just another warm, close night in the desert.

  She sat on a rickety wicker chair on the terrace with a cup of buni in one hand and the letters in the other. There was a bottle of whiskey and a glass on the table, too, but she hadn’t had the strength to open the bottle, and every magician had warned her off the bottle after a stint in the recovery room. Bloody fucking bottle.

  Her burnous was wrapped snugly around her. Winter warmth was a different sort of warmth than the summer kind that drove rich First Families out into the surrounding hills and the poorer sort up onto their rooftops. Winter meant sleeping with your clothes on.

  She tugged a letter out of the bunch at random. Rhys’s neat, familiar script curled across the front of the pale beige paper. She flicked the letter open and found the return address there at the bottom, next to his signature. Rhys Dashasa, his old nom de guerre.

  Nyx didn’t know Tirhan very well, but she knew the city he’d listed: Shirhazi. The same one Alharazad pointed her to. Shirhazi was an inland city. That meant she needed to find some way to get across the border through one of the mountain passes. During winter. She’d heard about snow up in the mountains, and seen some images on the radio, but never experienced it. Frozen water, all around. It sounded bloody awful.

  “Bloody hell,” she muttered, and put the letter back with the rest on the stool next to her. She sipped at the buni. She didn’t like anything about this note.

  Suha came out onto the terrace. “You hear what’s on the radio?” she asked.

  Nyx shook her head. A few muezzin calls still sounded at the outer edges of the city, moving into the desert. Now, though, she could hear the low, tinny murmur of the radio inside.

  “They’re opening up Mushtallah tomorrow,” Suha said.

  “What’s the final count?

  “Eighty-four thousand dead. Already burned to stop the contagion spreading.”

  “Any First Families?”

  “Huh. Don’t know. I’ll look into it.”

  “Do that. I want to know who lost a first born and who didn’t.”

  “Sure.” Suha leaned against the railing, looked out over the narrow street below, the flat rooftops. The dark sky had a hazy orange glow, a perpetual haze created by dead and dying bugs of a hundred thousand kinds reflecting the ruddy light from glow globes and other forms of bug light. There were no gas lamps this far from the interior, just the constant piss and reek of the bugs.

  “Quiet,” Suha said.

  “Usually is, after the muezzin.”

  “Eshe’s asleep. Been throwing up since we got in,” Suha said. “Tried to wake him up for prayer.”

  “Fuck’s sake, don’t bother him with that catshit.”

  Suha’s mouth bunched up. “Don’t go mixing his head up with your ideas about God. Let him make up his own mind.”

  “Because those lies worked out so well for us?”

  “Not all of us left God, Nyx,” Suha said. She leaned over and neatly uncapped the whiskey bottle next to Nyx and poured herself a drink.

  Nyx gazed back out over the balcony rail. Suha’s maudlin moods always annoyed her.

  “You know I need to look up a guy in Tirhan?” Nyx said.

  “The magician? Yeah, I heard about him. You need me to look up a boat?”

  “Rather go overland.”

>   Suha gave a slow nod. “At least we’re not on the bounty boards yet.” She leaned against the rail and gazed over the rooftops, eyes glassy, big mouth set. She worked her jaw for a while. “One of my sisters is a gun-runner,” she said.

  “I remember,” Nyx said.

  Suha sighed. “They do a lot of work during the spring and summer running shit up through the mountains and into Tirhan, but I don’t know what they’re running this time of year. She can probably get us overland. Don’t know how long, though.”

  “I’ve heard it’s a six- or eight-day trip.”

  “I mean, how long till she can set us up.”

  “Tell her there’s money in it if she wants to play guide.”

  Suha clasped her hands. They were big hands, too, like her mouth—dark and bruised as wine-stained leather. “You want to take Eshe with us?

  “Where else he going to go?”

  “Dangerous crossing for a boy.”

  “He can shift it.”

  “Long way to go and stay in that form.”

  “Since when are you his mother?” Nyx said. “I’m not a fool.”

  “Just wanted to say it out loud.”

  “You think he’d stay behind if I asked?”

  “No.”

  “Then don’t nag at me. What the fuck do you think he’s going to be, Suha? A farmer? I’m teaching him how to survive the front. Boys don’t come home. Why don’t they come home? Because they learn shit ideas about honor and sacrifice.”

  “Just saying… I don’t know.”

  “He’s a Nasheenian boy. I’m not going to raise him like some useless Ras Tiegan noble. Whose fault is it then when he lasts half a day at the front before some Chenjan mashes his face in?”

  Suha shook her head. “It’s always one shitty thing or the other with you. Ain’t there ever a middle ground?”

  “No. It’s easier to make decisions that way.”

  Suha snorted.

  Nyx gazed at the street again. A group of women passed below, talking in loud, drunken voices. They wore crimson burnouses and had the confident swagger of university students. Smart, rich girls—the sort who would never know death or disfigurement at the front. If they had brothers, they had never met them, or they took the Kitab at its word and relinquished their boys to the front with a final thought: thank God I wasn’t born a man.

  Nyx let herself wish for a life like theirs; a young body, a future. Why not? She needed a drink.

  As the girls passed by the dark recesses of an arched doorway mounted with metal studs, Nyx saw a shadow there at the mouth of it, something more substantial than gaping blackness. The door was already cast half in shadow, lingering at the edge of the halo of light cast across the street from the bug lamps at the front of the hotel.

  Nyx turned her head away, but watched the doorway from the corner of her eye. The shadow moved; a figure pulled in the edge of a dark burnous that had a sheen of the organic about it—far too new and expensive for this part of town.

  Nyx set her empty cup on the stool.

  “We have spiders,” Nyx said.

  “I saw her,” Suha said. “The door? I wasn’t sure.”

  “Yeah, that’s the one.”

  “I have us set up with a back exit.”

  “If they wanted us, they would have moved already.” Why hadn’t they moved, then? It was a busy street this time of night, sure, but her place didn’t have great security; no filters and one lonely house guard who spent most of her time snickering in the kitchen with the cooks and some spindly Drucian runner.

  “We’ll need to get out discreet in the morning,” Nyx said. “They may be hanging out to see where we’re going.” Or to see how much we know, she amended. But know from who? Alharazad? Alharazad had told them next to nothing.

  “You think they’ll follow us into Tirhan?”

  “I’m not looking to find out.”

  Suha cocked her head. “You hear that?”

  “What?” Nyx twisted to look into the room behind them.

  Suha pulled one of her pistols. “Eshe?” She left her drink on the rail and moved into the room.

  Nyx heard a thump, then a bang. She pulled her scattergun and tried to get up, too fast. She stumbled as she came out of the chair. A gun went off. A blast of yellow smoke filled her vision. Chunks of the railing behind her pelted the floor.

  She ducked behind the door and brought up her gun. Blood ran freely down her palm and elbow where she’d caught her tender skin on the door. Her skin throbbed.

  Nyx chanced a look into the hotel room. The door was busted open. A woman crouched in the hall. Nyx fired. The woman fell back. Nyx twisted into the room. Suha grappled with a second woman near the double beds.

  A third came at Nyx from the left, hefting a skinny sniper rifle. Very bad for close combat, Nyx thought as she brought up the barrel of her scattergun and caught the woman in the gut. The woman screeched and fell back. Just a kid, really, soft-faced and clear-eyed and dangerous as fuck. Somebody fired another shot from the door. Nyx ducked and rolled behind the tatty divan at the far end of the room.

  Eshe leapt up from behind one of the beds and darted into the hall, knife out. It was already bloody.

  “Eshe!” Nyx yelled.

  The woman on the floor shot at her again. Nyx swore and aimed the scattergun at the woman’s face this time. The soft features shattered. Blood splattered across Nyx’s face. She heard more shots outside.

  Nyx ran into the hall. Her legs gave out halfway there, and she stumbled, skinned her hands again. She struggled up and burst into the hall, gun first.

  Eshe lay on the floor clutching at his gut. Dark blood drooled from a deep open wound. Nyx saw the tail end of a burnous disappearing down the steps. She leapt over Eshe and pulled one of the poisoned needles from her hair.

  She hurled herself at the fleeing figure. Her body connected. The assassin collapsed under Nyx’s weight and took the full force of the impact. Nyx jabbed her with the needle as they tumbled down the stairs. They came to a halt on the next landing, with Nyx squarely on top of the assassin.

  Nyx bunched up her other fist and pummeled the woman in the face. She went limp. Nyx hauled herself up. She saw raw, peeling skin on her forearms; felt blood dripping down her face.

  The woman she’d tackled lay still. Nyx pulled back the hood of the woman’s burnous. Another kid. Not much older than Eshe. Nyx hit her in the face again with the gun, for good measure, then hauled herself upstairs.

  “Eshe!” she called. Her knees trembled. Too much, too soon. Her skin felt like burnt paper.

  She crawled up the last couple of steps and dragged herself next to Eshe. She knelt in a pool of his blood and pressed her hands to his wound to stop the rising tide.

  “Eshe, c’mon,” she said. His face was alarmingly pale. He was conscious, though—glassy-eyed and squirming.

  “Fuck,” he murmured. “Fuck, fuck…”

  “Suha!” Nyx yelled. “Suha!”

  Suha stumbled into the hall. She was clutching at her hip. Nyx saw more blood.

  “They down?” Nyx said.

  Suha nodded.

  “Help me get him up,” Nyx said. “There’s a hedge witch across the way.”

  Suha tore off the end of her own burnous and knotted it around her waist.

  “Don’t let me die,” Eshe whispered. His voice broke.

  Nyx felt his warm blood pumping up through her fingers. She clenched her jaw, and refused to look at his twisted face. She stared at her bloody hands instead, trying to keep all that life inside such a little body.

  “Please don’t let me die.” He clawed at her burnous, left streaks of blood. “Please, please.”

  How many boys had she watched die like this? Please, please… Clawing at her, begging for life.

  “Get him up,” Nyx said. “Get moving.”

  Eshe started crying. “Don’t let me die…”

  “You’re fine,” Nyx said. “Everything’s fine.”

  +
r />   “We need to get out of Nasheen,” Suha said.

  They stood outside the hedge witch’s tin-roofed hovel three streets over, smoking clove cigarettes. Nyx had pulled out one of their organic carbine rifles. Suha kept her pistol out. They stayed in the shadows under the tin roof. The street smelled of dog shit and human piss and some rotting thing at least three days dead left among the heaps of refuse in the alley behind them.

  “You think your sister will take us into Shirhazi?”

  “You still want to run after those bel dames?”

  “Those weren’t bel dames back there. I searched them after you got Eshe inside. Forty notes each in their pockets, and one of them had an unlocked slide with her bel dame class schedule on it. They were apprentices. Not the real thing.”

  “Young and fast is what they were,” Suha said. “I put a trap on that door. That one Eshe killed took it out without a hitch. We’re lucky we got out alive.”

  Nyx heard the battered door behind her scrape open, and turned. The witch joined them outside. She was an impossibly tiny, stooped, scraggly-haired woman—not old, just filthy. Her pale arms bore the flowery scars of long years of venom use—one of the reasons she was out here and not treating wealthy patrons at some high-end hotel. Unlicensed hedge witches were a lot cheaper than magicians. Less skilled, sure, but easier to get to and easier to shut up. They couldn’t bring you back from the dead, but they could patch up most complaints.

  “He gonna live?” Nyx asked. Her voice was gruff. She cleared her throat and spit.

  “Looks like,” the witch said. She looked at Nyx’s scabby arms. “You need to wet that down.”

  “It’s fine,” Nyx said.

  “That’s a new skein,” the witch said. Her eyes were better than they looked, then, Nyx thought.

  “Yeah?”

  “Good chance of infection, you scrape up a new skein like this. Your friend got cleaned up,” she said, nodding at Suha. She’d taken a bullet to the hip that the witch had dug out. “Your turn now.”