Infidel

by Kameron Hurley

  “Yah Tayyib,” Rhys said again. “He’s in the magicians’ gym. City center.”

  “Yah Tayyib died in Chenja,” Khos said.

  “No.” Rhys pushed the stump of his arm toward Khos. “He’s here. We have tea on weekend prayer days.”

  “It’s true,” Elahyiah said, wiping at her eyes. “I have met this magician. What of him? Can he help Rhys? Our children?”

  Inaya pulled out the thorn juice she’d been keeping to drug her own children. If the bel dames started stalking the mausoleums, crying children would have been deadly. She never thought she would be thankful for Khos’s other wife.

  “Go to the magicians’ gym,” Rhys said. “He’ll remember you. Tell him what happened. He’ll come.”

  “He’ll give us up to them,” Khos said.

  “No. Go to him.”

  Inaya pulled the stopper on the thorn juice, brought it to Rhys’s lips. He shook his head, pursed his mouth.

  “Don’t,” Khos said.

  “He’s talking craziness.”

  She met Khos’s look. For a moment they regarded one another. His eyes were narrow slits, the mouth a thin line, and his skin all looked too tight. He was terrified, she realized. Though he did not tremble, and his voice remained steady, she could see the terror in him now. A terror that mirrored hers. God, she thought, dear God in heaven, how will we do this?

  “I’ll take the bakkie downtown and ask,” Khos said. “That may be the only hope we have for the fever.”

  “A regular surgeon or hedge witch could take down the fever,” Inaya said.

  “We need to do something about his hands.” Khos stood.

  “Khos—”

  He walked out into the front room. She followed, still carrying the thorn juice.

  “Leaving him here risks his death,” Khos said.

  As they came in, Suha stepped outside. Inaya had not seen the other one, the shifter boy. She wondered if he was dead too.

  “Nyx is dead,” Khos said. “She was a bel dame. Maybe not the best of them, but one of the toughest. Whoever she had after her is better than she is.”

  “Which means that if they wanted us dead, they would have done it,” Inaya said. Then, low, “I would be like Elahyiah, and you would have no children.”

  His face looked sad. Stricken. Something knifed through her, then, some sympathetic emotion. How many years had they stumbled through all this together? How much had he given up for this, just as she had? How much had he risked to keep them safe? She’d never considered it before.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You just don’t understand. You don’t know what it feels like to be—”

  “Someone who’s lost everything?” he said quietly.

  She caught herself, and remembered his other life. As dark as hers, truly? When they came to Tirhan, he had been looking for his son.

  “I have not thanked you for what you’ve done. Or… appreciated it. Your son… I’m sorry.”

  “He went to a good Tirhani family. I know I’m not much of a father.”

  “You’re a fine father,” she said, and caught herself, shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

  He reached out, tentatively, gently. “I came here to build my own family.”

  She flinched from his touch. He pulled his hand away.

  “You lied to me.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “That Mhorian woman—” Inaya caught her breath. It was only the second time she’d said it aloud. The first she’d done only to save her children. She wrung her hands.

  “I’m sorry. You don’t understand—”

  “I understand perfectly well. I understand that you despise me and fear me. That you—”

  “What?”

  She looked up at him.

  “Do you even know who she is to me?”

  “Your wife?”

  “No. Before that. You said nothing. I thought you knew.”

  “About what?”

  “Inaya, she’s the mother of my son, the half-breed boy the underground smuggled out of Nasheen. She isn’t Mhorian. She’s mostly Nasheenian, and she fled here after I did, to get away from the war. She would have lost her Tirhani visa if I hadn’t married her. It was my duty. Any man’s duty.”

  “I… why didn’t you tell me who she was?”

  “You never asked. With all the work that you do… I assumed you knew. You always know everything.”

  “You’re a bloody fool.”

  “I’m the fool?”

  “Hey!” Suha yelled.

  Inaya turned.

  “Get the fuck moving. Work out your shit later. Magicians first. Catshit later,” Suha said, moving back into the room from the yard.

  Inaya felt heat rise in her face. “What do you know about it?” Inaya said.

  Khos met her look. For a long moment, Inaya wondered if the last year had been some kind of bloody nightmare. She wondered if she would wake up tomorrow to a warm house, a content husband, children without a shifter’s burgeoning allergies, and an intact house.

  “Go,” she said.

  He did.

  Inaya bolted the mausoleum door and turned back inside where Suha sat in a far corner, taking apart her pistol.

  “God in heaven protect us,” Inaya murmured.

  “God ain’t got nothing to do with it,” Suha said, and spit a wad of sen on the floor at her feet. “Ain’t you learned that yet?”

  +

  Khos returned on Suha’s watch, just after dusk. Inaya heard them come in. Khos carried a red carpet bag in one hand and a black case in the other. The magician walked in behind him.

  “Yah Tayyib,” Inaya said.

  She had never seen Yah Tayyib, but she had heard that Nyx put a knife in him in Chenja. He was a rebel and a traitor to Nasheen, implicated in at least half a dozen deaths and the attempted murder of several of the Queen’s magicians. He was a war veteran, and the image of him she had conjured in her mind was one of a stocky, brutalized soldier, one arm the wrong color, an organic green plate in his head, one leaking eye.

  But the man in the door was tall and slender and intact. He carried himself aloof and erect, like a court magician. He wore his hair white and long. A beard the same color made a soft point from his chin to the center of his chest, hiding much of the severe expression on his deeply lined brown face. His eyes were two dark pools, the nose mashed, but his hands, his magician’s hands, were long-fingered, smooth, beautiful. He clasped them in front of him now as he walked toward her.

  Inaya shouldered her shotgun and gave Yah Tayyib a brief bow of the head, proper in Ras Tieg and Tirhan.

  “I am Inaya,” she said, in Tirhani.

  “I know who you are,” he said coolly—in Nasheenian.

  You have no idea, Inaya thought, with equal calm. “He’s this way,” she said. She took him to Rhys’s side. Elahyiah lay next to him, holding him.

  The magician stared down at Rhys and Elahyiah. Frowned.

  “We’ll need a table. A slab. Elevated. Are there pedestals in here?” he asked.

  “In the room in the back,” Inaya said. Someone had stolen the urns from the top of them long ago, and no one put bodies on them anymore. The Ras Tiegan mausoleums had been defiled and abandoned a hundred years before.

  “And light,” he said.

  “I can string the globes,” Inaya said.

  Suha and Khos moved Rhys into the back room. Elahyiah stayed behind, hugging her knees to her chest. Inaya dusted the old globes, smeared them in unguent, and placed them in sconces.

  Rhys twisted on the slab. Yah Tayyib put a hand to Rhys’s chest to still him, murmured something.

  Khos set Yah Tayyib’s case and carpet bag on the pedestal opposite.

  Suha drifted back toward the door.

  “How long has he had this fever?” Yah Tayyib asked.

  “Since he came in,” Inaya said.

  Yah Tayyib rolled up his sleeves and began to unpack his instruments from the carpet bag. “He would have died of infec
tion in another twelve hours.”

  “I don’t have flesh beetles here,” she said.

  “I did not have time to get a proper match, or a proper fit, but I can get him functional,” Yah Tayyib said. He wore a long yellow bisht with a white khameez beneath, and as he brought up his hands, she saw a cicada the color of jade scurry back into the protection of the sleeve now hanging about his elbow.

  “Yah Tayyib?” Rhys murmured. His eyelids flickered. He raised one of his stumps. The bandages were organic, but they were bloody. There was more blood than the bugs could eat.

  “You have to find them,” Rhys said. “Yah Tayyib, my children. My wife.”

  “Hush now,” Yah Tayyib said. Inaya was surprised at the tenderness in his voice.

  The magician slipped a dagger from beneath his khameez and cut through the sleeves of Rhys’s bisht and khameez, releasing his arms. “I’m going to get you out of immediate danger, do you understand?”

  “My children. My wife. There’s still time.”

  “You’re going to feel a little pinch now, Rhys. When you wake up, you will be out of danger.”

  Rhys. Inaya heard the strangeness of the name, then. Rhys wasn’t his real name, but some kind of Heidian moniker. It sounded somehow stronger in Yah Tayyib’s Nasheenian than it did with a Tirhani accent. Inaya had never thought to ask what it meant, or why he’d chosen it. If he was fleeing to Nasheen, why not choose a Nasheenian name?

  “Elahyiah.”

  “She’s fine, Rhys,” Inaya said. But as with all the other times she’d said it, he did not seem to hear it.

  Yah Tayyib pulled a bug box from his carpet bag. He released a large pincher beetle. The spotted bug crawled along Rhys’s bare arm.

  “I’ll need a basin of water,” Yah Tayyib said.

  “I can bring you a few bulbs. We have no basin here,” Inaya said.

  “That will suffice.”

  “Shouldn’t we bring him to the gym? To your work room?”

  “I don’t want to move him until he’s out of danger. And you’ll need him serviceable in the meantime. A magician with no hands is not a magician at all. What fool thing did she get you into now?”

  But the last was not a question for Inaya. He said it to Rhys, softly, as the pincher beetle bit his naked arm.

  “I have syringes,” Inaya said.

  “Far too primitive. Imprecise,” Yah Tayyib said. “And far less controllable.” He waved his hand over the beetle, and it obediently crawled back into its box.

  “Can I help?” Khos asked from the doorway.

  Yah Tayyib motioned him in. “Let the big man help now, child,” he told Inaya. “I need someone strong to hold him down.”

  “I’m—” she began.

  “Please,” he said. “You are not built like a Nasheenian. Come now, we have little time. Tend to Elahyiah’s hurts while I restore her husband.”

  Inaya went out to sit with Elahyiah.

  Elahyiah was feverish, moaning. The light was still bad. Inaya retrieved her water bulbs and began to clean Elahyiah up while she trembled.

  “My children,” Elahyiah murmured. “My children.”

  Inaya did not tell her, you are lucky to have your life. Don’t beg God for more than that.

  +

  It was four hours, and full dark, before Khos emerged from the back room. Inaya had heated up some broth—enough to warm everyone’s empty bellies.

  Suha slept in the main room, Eshe the raven tucked in the crook of her arm. He had returned after dark. Suha had cradled him and fallen immediately to sleep. He had not shifted. Shifting would mean a staggering desire for protein that they did not have, and a mess of mucus and feathers that would be difficult to clean up. Inaya was already worrying over the broth. They only had three days of supplies here now with so many to feed.

  It was Suha’s watch, but Inaya didn’t have the heart to wake her.

  Where would these two go now? Inaya thought. With Nyx dead, what would become of them? She imagined them walking the clean streets of Tirhan, Suha with her mashed-in face, Eshe picking up odd, dubious jobs as a messenger. They would not last long. How many notes could she and Khos spare?

  “Did he live?” Inaya asked.

  Khos was wiping his hands on an organic rag that ate the blood from his hands.

  “I don’t know if he has much feeling or coordination in his fingers, but he has fingers again,” Khos said. “Not his own. But something. Yah Tayyib did the best he could.”

  “At least it gives him a chance to rebuild.” Rebuild, she thought. Rebuild with nothing. We have nothing. The nothingness terrified her.

  “Yes.” Khos looked out into the main room where Suha and Eshe slept. “No one’s on watch?”

  “I was waiting for you.”

  He nodded slowly, his eyes fixed on some far point.

  “I don’t know where to go now,” she said. How much longer until it started to show? Until she was picking dog hair or feathers out of Tatie’s bed? “Not Ras Tieg.”

  “Let’s wait for him to come out of it. He’ll have his own ideas about what’s next.”

  “His grief should have killed him already,” she murmured. And what she didn’t say was, I don’t know if I can take care of him, too. I don’t know if we can survive that. I don’t know if we’ll survive this.

  Yah Tayyib stepped into the room. Under the dim light of the globes, he looked ancient, tired. He carried his carpet bag and case, and Inaya saw some kind of roach scuttle up underneath his long white hair. She shuddered.

  “There are no longer signs of infection,” Yah Tayyib said. “I’ve had them all eaten or burned out, and stuffed him with enough bugs to clean a corpse.”

  “Thank you,” Khos said.

  Yah Tayyib gazed about the little room. She saw him note Suha and Eshe, before asking, “Where’s Nyx?”

  “Dead,” Khos said.

  Yah Tayyib tilted his head. “When?”

  “Bel dames killed her last night,” Khos said. “When they did this to Rhys.”

  “You seem very certain of that,” Yah Tayyib said. “Was her head cut off?”

  There was a long, pregnant pause.

  Khos looked at Inaya.

  She didn’t want to say it, but it came out anyway: “No.”

  “That is… odd. Where is she?”

  “Where they left her. A ditch in the park,” Inaya said, and the image washed over her again: the broken bel dame, one leg twisted, face mashed in, the blood.

  “I didn’t want to move the body in case someone was watching it,” Khos said. “I’m sure a patrol’s picked it up by now.”

  “Bring her here.”

  “Yah Tayyib,” Khos said slowly, “she’s a day dead. This isn’t a child whose heart stopped on the table.”

  “She’s a bel dame,” Yah Tayyib said, and there was amusement in his haggard face. “They are difficult to kill for good reason.”

  “She’s dead,” Inaya said, and it came out colder than she meant it to. “There is nothing in this world for her anymore.”

  Yah Tayyib regarded her, but it was the same way he had looked at her when he came in, as if she were a particularly common insect, nothing more. “Isn’t there?” Then, to Khos. “Bring her here. I can’t be seen with you, but you can take that ugly woman out there, and the bird. Have him scout the body before you take it to make sure no one’s posted a watch. Bring her here.”

  “She’s dead,” Inaya repeated. “Like Rhys’s girls. He wanted us to drag up his family from the well…”

  “And if you had reached me twelve hours ago I may have been able to do something with them,” Yah Tayyib said sharply. “But what we have for Nyx is a sixty-hour window, and you have already wasted nearly fifty of those hours. If she died at thirteen the night before last, I have less than ten hours to get her heart beating.”

  “We don’t have the tools for that here,” Khos said. “I’ve seen a magician’s work room—”

  “You would be amazed what I ca
n do with a few bugs and a bel dame,” Yah Tayyib said. “Bring her. I will need supplies from my operating theater. It won’t take more than an hour. All we need is a beating heart. Her head will do the rest.”

  “We can’t afford—” Khos began.

  “No, you cannot. I said nothing of payment.”

  “But she tried to kill you,” Inaya said. That’s what they’d told her. This was the same man who tried to sell alien technology to the Chenjans and betray his own country. Who could trust this man?

  “She has tried to kill a good many people,” Yah Tayyib said, “and succeeded in killing many more. Nyx and I have mutual enemies, however. With the bel dames and the monarchy corrupt, there are few people whose motives I know, understand, or trust. She may not be a friend, but her motives are certainly… predictable.” He took them all in again, one long look. “And to be honest, I do not know how this bunch of misfits will make it without her.”

  “With her dead we have a chance,” Khos said softly. “You put her back together and you put us in danger. Our children—”

  “We’re going to get Nyx,” Inaya said, suddenly, absurdly. Khos and Suha both stared at her.

  Suha pushed herself to her feet and grabbed for her pistols. “Let’s get the fuck going then,” she said.

  “I may need another magician,” Yah Tayyib said. “Someone who won’t be noticed. It will be difficult enough to do it outside of a theater.”

  “You know anyone?” Suha asked.

  Yah Tayyib shook his head. “No one who is discreet. Not in Tirhan. You must know others. Others… like yourselves.”

  “I know somebody,” Suha said. Eshe perched on her shoulder. “She was a magician once. She’ll work cheap. And I know where to find her.”

  “Bring her,” Yah Tayyib said. “If you trust her.”

  “Never said I trusted her. But she’s what we’ve got.”

  Inaya knew who they faced. She knew what they could do. But she had also seen what Nyx could do, and it was far worse.

  “Inaya—” Khos began.

  “Don’t fight me,” she said.

  He grimaced and walked into the dark with Suha and the raven.

  Inaya watched after them. When they were well gone, she said, without turning, “Can you really bring her back?”