Infidel

by Kameron Hurley

  “You get news from Nasheen?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “What have you heard?”

  “I don’t listen much, Nyx.”

  “My fuckups are so big now that I make all the swarms.”

  “Are they back?”

  “Who?”

  “The aliens.”

  Nyx shrugged. “Not that I heard. You’d have heard that, even you, if somebody had docked in Nasheen. No, this is old catshit. Bloody bel dames and arms deals.”

  “You don’t have bel dames after you, do you?”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  He pulled back into the doorway. He’d always been a bloody coward, when it suited him. “You should go.”

  “Yeah, I know. Don’t bust your big head. You’re not the one I’m here for.” She turned to start down the porch.

  “Nyx?”

  When she looked back, she saw that he was standing on the porch again, hand almost outstretched, as if he were thinking better of it.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “The bakkie. When I left you in the desert. In Chenja.”

  Nyx grinned, shook her head. “There’s always somebody on my team that betrays me. At least you came back when it counted. Even if it took Inaya to get you there.”

  She patted Eshe on the shoulder and descended the porch with her team. She remembered that blue-dawn morning back in Chenja when her team drove off and left her. Not one of them had looked back. Not one. Not even Rhys. She knew. She had watched them until their bakkie was swallowed by the dawn.

  And now, in Tirhan, she did not look back. She didn’t need them.

  This wasn’t their fight.

  20.

  “She’s got a face like a battlefield,” Suha said.

  The magician fighting in the ring was in fine form; her left hook was good, and the wasp swarm that shut up the shifter dog on the other side of the ring wasn’t half bad either.

  Problem was, that wasn’t the magician they’d come in here looking for. The one they wanted was emptying the spit buckets into a drain on the far side of the gym. Her eyes were gray and bloodshot. As she shuffled across the floor, Nyx noted the trembling in her right hand, the slack-eyed, slack-jawed look of her—clear signs of old and established venom addiction.

  And, like Suha said, she wasn’t much to look at.

  “Let’s talk with her, at least,” Nyx said. “Alharazad isn’t much to look at either, but she recommended her.” Nyx watched the puttering old woman, noted, again, the trembling hand. “I don’t like working with addicts.”

  “Might sell us out, sure,” Suha said. “But knowing we’re a sure source of a drip might keep her close. I ain’t got no advice on that.”

  “No advice for somebody on a drip? Really?”

  Suha pushed out her mouth into that trout-look that Eshe so loved to tease her about. Eshe looked up from halfway across the gym where he was practicing with some other kids on a speed bag, and snickered.

  “Giving up the drip is up to God and chance,” Suha said. “There’s no advice to run on about. You do or you don’t.”

  “I never did like the idea of luck,” Nyx said. Probably because it never favored her any.

  She crossed the dim floor and approached the stooped old woman. Not so old, she realized as they met under the cupped, hooded glow of a bug light. The magician’s hair was a ratty gray nest twisted back from her skinny little head. Her face was haggard, yes, but the hands that gripped the bucket were strong and smooth. Magicians’ hands. The flesh of her neck was loose, but not fleshy folded like an old woman’s. What was she, then, forty? Forty-five? Old for a bel dame, maybe, but not for a magician.

  “I’m looking for a half-gifted magician,” Nyx said.

  The woman peered up at her. “That so, eh? I want a good fuck. Get outta the way.” She pushed out her elbow and caught Nyx in the gut. The blow was enough to make Nyx unsteady on her feet. Damn, I’ve gotten soft, Nyx thought.

  “You Behdis ma Yasrah?” Suha asked.

  “Lot of old women’s names out here. I ain’t heard that one. Ain’t heard that one even longer without a yah-yah at the front of it.”

  She kept walking.

  “Alharazad said it’s been a long time since you heard anybody yah-yahing at you. Thought you’d be used to it,” Nyx said, watching her.

  Behdis paused. She turned, squinted at the two of them.

  “Who said that?”

  “You heard,” Nyx said. “I buy you a drink?”

  “Gotta warn you, woman. They don’t serve hard shit here.”

  “Yeah, I figured. I pay for drinks… and drips if the information’s right.”

  “I ain’t that hard up.”

  “Sure you ain’t.”

  Nyx told Eshe they’d be across the street and left him to flirt with the girls. At least they let the girls box here. Nyx had never seen so many Ras Tiegan half-breeds. Eshe fit right in. The three women walked over to a Ras Tiegan tea house on the other side of the bright, cracked surface of the road running along the ass-end of the gym. Turned out not every district in Tirhan was cleaner than a breeding compound, but it had taken them three magicians’ gyms to find one this shoddy. Magicians in Tirhan were a publicly groomed and traded lot, and the big magicians’ gyms downtown catered to an elite clientele. Finding the outcasts’ gym was a matter of smell and feel. Nyx had a way of finding herself in the worst parts of town with the least amount of effort.

  A couple of Ras Tiegan girls brought them tea, and hot buni for Nyx, who still couldn’t stomach the idea of drinking something that didn’t alter her blood chemistry.

  “I’m looking for a new magician for my team,” Nyx said right off. “Somebody with ties to Tirhan, maybe access to some back channels. I watched you around the gym, heard you speaking Tirhani. It’s not bad. You ain’t respected around there, but that suits me fine. You’re the sort nobody notices. I need somebody who doesn’t warrant notice.”

  Behdis snarled into her tea. “There was a time I danced that ring like a Chenjan harem girl at dusk during the fasting month. I’d have pounded those girls silly.” She reached for her tea with her left hand, but she wasn’t a south paw. The right hand stayed clutched in her lap, to hide the trembling.

  “How long you been on the drip?” Suha asked.

  Behdis cut a look at her, peered for a long moment. “How long you been off?”

  “Five years,” Suha said.

  “Eh, big girl then, aren’t you? Went to the front and they hooked you up.”

  Suha leaned back in her chair, frowned.

  The buni arrived in a clay jar. The Ras Tiegan girl holstered it on a rattan-wrapped ring at the center of the table and placed a tiny clay cup in front of Nyx. They never did anything to excess in Ras Tieg, not even sex, which probably explained something about Khos and Inaya’s uptight attitude.

  Nyx poured herself a drink.

  “I quit a couple times,” Behdis said, hedging. She sipped at her tea and scanned the empty tables, as if expecting one of the wanna-be magicians across the way would appear and recognize her. Recognize her as what? The janitor? Who noticed one more washed-up, underemployed foreign woman slumming around the seediest part of Shirhazi? Nyx had asked six people at the gym for Behdis by name, and not one of them knew who the hell she was talking about. It was the seventh—the delivery boy they bumped into out back—who knew that Behdis was “that old lady who mops up the blood and vomit.”

  “I don’t mind keeping an ear out. I gotta know payment, though. Know what I’m digging for.”

  “What’s your drip go for these days?” Nyx asked.

  “Depends on the day,” Behdis said.

  Nyx exchanged a look with Suha.

  Suha shrugged.

  “I’ll pay you based on what you dig up. You bring me something solid, I give you ten notes.”

  “Nasheenian or Tirhani?”

  “Nasheenian.”

  “Your
currency ain’t worth enough to wipe my ass,” Behdis said.

  “Unless you’re looking for venom,” Nyx said. “Last I checked, Nasheen supplied the cheapest. Where you going to find good venom in Tirhan that isn’t priced for those magicians at the city center?”

  “What you think I can get you, woman?”

  “Bel dames,” Nyx said. She watched the old woman’s face as she said it.

  Behdis sneered. “Alharazad sent you, you say?”

  “You check with her if you want. She said if anybody’d know anything about bel dames in Tirhan, it’d be you.”

  “You a little sticky about what your own government’s doing?”

  Nyx smiled thinly. She knocked back a cup of buni and pulled her hat on, then stood. “Who ever wanted to know what their government’s doing? You know that, and you have to take responsibility for it. I have a good idea you know where I can find some bel dames in Shirhazi. All I need is an address and names.”

  “I’ll… see what I can do. Where do I find you?”

  Nyx considered that for a minute. Then she pulled out Khos and Inaya’s address from her coat and slid it across the table. Suha eyed the map with some interest.

  “You have information, you tie a black string on the door of the gate here. I’ll come find you.”

  Behdis curled her lip. “A little out of my way. They’ll stop me, coming into that part of town. They got wasp swarms to keep folks like me out.”

  “Thought you were a magician?”

  “Better than a lot you’d know.”

  “Then I think you can handle a couple wasp swarms.” Nyx put a note down on the table, which covered the tea and buni four times over. “You let us know.”

  Nyx left the table, and Suha followed. Behdis immediately snatched up the note.

  “What’s that about?” Suha asked as they stepped onto the street. “You don’t want her knowing where we are?”

  “I like keeping folks guessing.”

  “And it gives you an excuse to stake out that shifter’s house?”

  Nyx snorted. “I just don’t trust addicts. No offense.”

  “We’d know more sooner if she could come to us.”

  “Would we?” Nyx stepped onto the sidewalk outside the gym. two kids with a mangy sand cat on a chain ran past them. Both boys. She didn’t see many women on the street in the Ras Tiegan district. Nyx heard the sound of noon prayer start at the big central city mosque, heard it roll over the city. They had passed a row of Chenjan prayer wheels at the edge of the district, but Tirhanis had their own martyr and their own additions to the Kitab. Their prayer times were off, too.

  “I didn’t like what I saw of her,” Nyx said.

  “What? So, she’s an addict. You knew she was an addict.”

  “It’s not that,” Nyx said. “Alharazad recommends her, sure, so I’m supposed to swallow that she’ll give us anything?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Nyx stared into the street, tried to work it out for Suha in words. “We all got morals, honor. Fucked up sorts, maybe, but we got them, even crazies. I don’t know hers.”

  “Addicts don’t have morals.”

  “Didn’t you? When you fucked up you still felt real bad, didn’t you?”

  “Sometimes,” Suha said. “When I could remember.” She folded her arms and rocked back on her heels. “Don’t know how much you care when you’re in it. You’re just hungry. You don’t think about much else.”

  “Cleaned up or not, I’d have taken you on.”

  “Catshit.”

  “Truth. Know why?”

  “Why?” Suha spit sen.

  “Cause some women you watch closer than others. And some you put on your team. I know the difference.”

  “That always worked out for you?”

  “No.” She thought of Khos.

  “No doubt.”

  “Come on,” Nyx said. She had a sudden, powerful need to get in a fight. “Let’s see who we’re pulling Eshe off tonight.”

  “Kid’s got more kick than a cat in heat,” Suha muttered as they pushed inside.

  “I was young once,” Nyx said.

  “I wasn’t,” Suha said.

  21.

  Rhys spent all day at his storefront, cleaning the windows and organizing the translation desks. He had spent several days open for business during regular hours instead of by appointment, and had been rewarded with a note fifty from a poor widow who wanted to send a non-bugged letter to her son in the south.

  Three days of work for a note fifty.

  He stopped for something to eat at a cheap food stall, made midday prayer at the mosque, and took the elevated train out to the eastern edge of the city. The color of the city changed from pale and sterile to muted, hazy hues of maroon and turquoise, and the landscape drew closer to the ground, hunkered. The smell, too, changed. When he stepped off the train platform the world smelled of fried dough and curry. Ras Tiegans fried everything, from grasshoppers to pickles to hunks of curried dog.

  Rhys had lived in the Ras Tiegan district when he first came to Tirhan, before he and Inaya and Khos moved into the suburbs. From the street outside the gym, he could see the roof of their old tenement building. Four blocks down, he and Khos used to drink honeyed tea and eat samosas by the handful while working on translations. Six streets over was the brothel where Khos’s contacts had gotten them all rooms for the first three weeks in Tirhan.

  Six years. It felt longer, Rhys thought as he stood outside the gym. Some Ras Tiegan kids passed him and pushed inside. He followed.

  The plump Ras Tiegan gym owner, Lisbel, waved at him from behind the lattice of her office window. She kept her hair covered. In all his years using this gym, he had never seen the flesh above her wrists or ankles, even when she boxed.

  “Been a while, Yah Rhys,” she said, with a wink and a smile.

  He walked across the gym floor, pulling off his bisht as he went. There was a small crowd around one of the rings at the back of the gym. Two brown Nasheenian fighters circled one other. He paused, and watched. One was nearly dark as a Tirhani, undeniably ugly, with a mashed in nose and protruding jaw. She had a stocky, powerful little body though. A woman who could square her body like that would keep her feet in the ring a lot longer than most.

  Rhys walked toward the ring to get a better look. The other fighter had her back to him. She was tall and dark, big in the hips and shoulders, but too skinny for her frame. As she turned under the ring lights Rhys saw that there was something familiar about her. Something in the way she stood, the set of her shoulders.

  They danced around a few minutes more until the ugly one knocked the other woman to the mat with a hard left uppercut. Her opponent didn’t have a chance, thumped onto the mat, sprawled back.

  And laughed.

  Recognition cut through Rhys like a knife; a sudden burst of knowing.

  The ugly one helped up the one on the floor. As the loser stood and turned to the crowd, Rhys knew her.

  She saw him looking. Her jaw worked.

  Rhys walked forward.

  Nyx jumped out of the ring.

  They stopped a pace from one another.

  She was older, thinner, and there was something wrong with her skin. It looked oddly mismatched, and darker than he remembered. Had he aged as much as she had? He saw it in her face the most, but also in the way she moved. A little slower, less swagger.

  Nyx put her hands on her wide hips. They’d been bigger hips, he remembered. She’d lost a staggering amount of weight. Loss of mass meant loss of leverage, loss of strength. Women like Nyx didn’t drop weight like that on purpose.

  Rhys wanted to say something smart and dry. He wanted something to cover that cold terror and burst of recognition. He wanted to say something about his life, about Tirhan, about how happy he was. He wanted to tell her she looked like death.

  But in the face of Nyxnissa so Dasheem, the words all left him in a rush.

  “I—” he started,
and stopped.

  “We’ve been hanging around here a couple days,” she said. “Magicians in this quarter remember you and the Mhorian. Figured you’d show up eventually. I need a favor.”

  Of course she wanted something. Why else cross half a continent? Certainly not for high tea.

  He’d spent years imagining what he would say to her in this moment—how he would rebuke her, belittle her, revile her. Two years he had waited, expecting her to knock on his door.

  Two years. Then he rebuilt his life.

  And now she was here.

  Of course she was here.

  “I see you still frequent the same high-quality establishments,” he said. Getting that out made him feel better.

  “I knew better than to look downtown. They only let real magicians in there.”

  “And real women.”

  “Which is why there were no Chenjan women there.”

  “Still Godless?”

  “Still Godful?”

  “You’re not drunk. I expected that.”

  “I’m a better shot when I’m sober.”

  “No you’re not.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  She grinned.

  He felt his resolve soften. This is the woman who’d sell you out as soon as look at you, he reminded himself.

  But she hadn’t, had she?

  And now she was here.

  Because she wanted something.

  “What are you looking for?” he asked.

  “Best we talk about that in private. You eat? I’m starving. Let me get my team and we’ll get out of here.” She turned away and called back at the ugly woman in the ring. “Suha! Clean up and get Eshe. We’re moving.”

  Another team? Of course. Only the most foolish hunters ran alone.

  “Come on,” Nyx said. She leaned toward him and put her hand on his shoulder. “I missed your catshit,” she said.

  He felt something then, when she touched him. Something missing was suddenly full to bursting. I’ll take care of you. I’ll protect you. I’ll always come for you.

  Six years missing—that feeling of absolute strength, safety, gone so long he’d forgotten to miss it at all. He had replaced it with something else, in Tirhan. His own strength, his own resolve. In a peaceful country, he did not need a woman like Nyx to protect him.