Infidel

by Kameron Hurley

  Suha bent over, breathing heavy. “Fuck, woman, what did that magician do to you?”

  Sweat dripped from Nyx’s chin. She wiped her face with her discarded coat. She needed a wash. “Don’t know,” she said. “Still don’t have the power, though. No muscle behind it.”

  “It’ll get there,” Suha said.

  A black raven cawed and swooped in through the warehouse door. Suha straightened, and Nyx finished wiping herself down while Eshe shifted.

  She tossed him her coat to clean himself off.

  “They coming?” Nyx asked.

  Eshe shook his head. Long strings of mucus dripped from his arms. She wished he’d shifted downstairs. Raven feathers stuck to her sweaty legs.

  “Khos says he’s going home to his kids. Not like I begged him or nothing,” Eshe said.

  Nyx thumped him on the shoulder. “Come on and get something to eat, then. It’s just us.”

  “That white bitch says she trailed the bel dames to the train station,” Eshe said. He bent over the hoard of supplies they’d gotten from Behdis’s house and then pulled on a pair of dirty, too-big trousers. “They got tickets to Beh Ayin.”

  Beh Ayin again. But why?

  “Rhys still not back?”

  “No.”

  Suha stretched out on the floor. “He’s likely making up with his wife. Don’t expect him.”

  “We don’t need him,” Eshe said.

  “Don’t know if you knew, but I’m not good at pulling magicians out of my ass,” Nyx said, “and we’ll need one.”

  “He’s a shitty magician anyway,” Eshe said. “I don’t know why you ever signed with him.”

  “I do,” Suha said. She put her hands behind her head and grinned.

  “Thought your tastes ran different,” Nyx said.

  “Doesn’t mean I don’t know a pretty thing when I see it.”

  “Let’s eat,” Nyx said, searching for an easier subject.

  They ate on the floor.

  “You think you can open a line to Anneke?” Nyx asked Suha.

  “Anneke? That mercenary you used to run with back in Nasheen? The one with all the kids?”

  “The same.”

  Suha shook her head. “Can’t get you a secure line.”

  “Doesn’t need to be secure.”

  “What the hell you want to talk to some old mercenary in Nasheen for? Can’t help us out here,” Suha said.

  “Remember the guy who built the boat?”

  “The guy…?” Suha said.

  “You know, that story. With all the animals.”

  “Noah?” Eshe suggested, using the Ras Tiegan name.

  “Close enough. When did God tell him to build a boat?”

  “Um. Before the flood?” Eshe said.

  “Exactly,” Nyx said.

  +

  Nyx sat on the loading dock and watched the blue dawn come up. Somebody was playing a call to prayer on a radio, pumping it out over the sea. It carried with the wind. Nyx was finishing her second whiskey. Eshe had bought it from a Nasheenian merchant in the Ras Tiegan district. She watched the boats out on the sea, shuttling goods between Shirhazi and the southern cities. Suha came up, hollow-eyed and stiff in the shoulders.

  “She’s yelling,” Suha said.

  “Just yelling? Or asking to talk to me?”

  “Just yelling. Cursing Shadha so Murshida, mostly.”

  “Then let her be. Wait until she asks for me.”

  Suha sat down. Eshe slept inside, curled up on a dog-hair mattress they’d pulled out of a nearby trash heap. “What if she’s telling the truth? What if it’s just Shadha behind it? Just Shadha and those thugs?”

  “If it was just Shadha, she would have killed me. No, somebody else wanted me alive. The same person who’s been playing cat and roach with me from the beginning.”

  “Is that who Leveh is?”

  “No. It’s whoever Leveh and Shadha work for. I want the name. I think she has it.”

  “And if she doesn’t?”

  “Then we killed some old bitch for no reason,” Nyx said. “Wouldn’t be the first time. Want a drink?”

  Suha drank.

  Behdis started crying for Nyx ten hours later.

  Behdis was crammed into the far corner of the room, hugging herself with her skinny arms. A long trail of blood oozed from beneath her ass, pooled into the drain at the center of the floor.

  As Nyx stepped inside the old ice room, she saw the glistening stir of maggoty venom worms thrashing in the blood, fine as silver thread, drunk on their own death.

  Behdis was shivering so hard she knocked her head against the wall.

  Nyx crouched next to her. The old woman’s eyes were glazed over.

  “I want to know where they are.” Nyx held out a phial of venom. Just the phial. No needle.

  Behdis’s eyes focused. Her gaze rolled toward the phial. Hungry, terrified gaze.

  “Who’s leading this, Behdis? I know it’s not Shadha’s idea. Who got her started? Was it Fatima?”

  “Kill me,” Behdis said. “Kill me.”

  “You’re dying now. A lot slower than anything she’ll do to you. And a lot messier. You know how this works? That venom feeds the worms that keep you high, the buzz that burns out your senses. Now the worms are dying, bleeding black pus and shit into your body and starting to claw their way out your ass. Ten more hours and they’ll be crawling out your mouth and nose, too, pouring out every orifice looking for food. If you don’t bleed to death, you’ll die from the toxins they’re excreting in your blood. Good stuff, yeah? Is that how you wanna die?”

  “Please kill me,” Behdis sobbed.

  “I can do better. I can bring you back. But I want to know who wanted me alive.”

  “Shadha wanted you dead,” Behdis spat, and her eyes were wild and yellow. Nyx held her ground. “She should have killed you. I told them! I told them!”

  “Why didn’t she kill me, Behdis?”

  Behdis whimpered. “Please kill me.”

  Nyx stood, turned away. “Another ten hours,” she said.

  Suha looked away.

  “No!” Behdis shrieked. “No! She’ll kill me!”

  Nyx kept walking.

  And then:

  “Alharazad! Alharazad! She wants you alive! Oh God, kill me! Please kill me!”

  Nyx felt her gut go icy. She turned. Saw Behdis spitting and slobbering.

  “Kill me! Kill me!”

  Nyx walked back to her, crouched next to her.

  “Alharazad?” Nyx said.

  “She wants you alive. I don’t know! That’s what I heard. I heard it. I don’t know! Please kill me.”

  Nyx broke the cap on the phial. Pulled out the syringe.

  “Noooo!” Behdis shrieked.

  “Where are they in Beh Ayin?” Nyx asked.

  “I don’t… Beh Ayin? I don’t know! Please, I don’t know!”

  “Who’s protecting them? I need to know where they are, Behdis, or you’re going to die very badly.”

  “Please,” Behdis sobbed. “Please. Ask Alharazad. She knows. She knows everything. Kill me, please!”

  Nyx filled the syringe. She met Behdis’s eyes. “I am,” she said, and plunged the syringe into Behdis’s thigh.

  Nyx stood, tucked the syringe into the pocket of her tunic. “Cut her down,” she told Suha.

  Behdis’s head slumped. She started convulsing.

  “Where are we dumping her?” Suha asked.

  They loaded the body into the bakkie and dumped it on the far eastern side of the inland sea. The drive back was quiet. Suha drank whiskey straight from the bottle. Nyx concentrated on the road.

  They picked up Eshe at a boxing gym in the Ras Tiegan quarter. His face was still forgettable and Ras Tiegan enough to not get him much notice, and he was good with the handful of girls whose fathers allowed them to take up boxing, generally because they were showing some interest or affinity for working with bugs.

  Eshe slipped into the back seat.
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br />   “Nyx?” Eshe asked after a long minute.

  “Yeah?”

  “You think God wants me to go to war?”

  It was just after midday prayer. Suha had made her stop on the way there to pray. Nyx watched him in the rearview mirror. He was sitting up straight, hands in his lap, gazing at the window with brow furrowed.

  “I don’t know what God wants, Eshe.”

  “The mullahs say they know what God wants,” Eshe said. “You believe them?” He met her look in the rearview mirror.

  Nyx looked back at the road. “The mullahs can’t figure out what they want for dinner,” she said.

  “I’ve been thinking about the war. It’s not so different from what we do.”

  “It’s a lot different,” Nyx said.

  “How?”

  Suha snorted.

  “It just is,” Nyx said. “Who said what we do is like the war?”

  “I was just thinking it was.”

  “We kill a few people to stop a lot of people dying,” Nyx said. “Wars kill a lot of people to keep a few people rich.”

  “You think God likes what we do? You think that’s why God brought you back?”

  Nyx sighed. She wanted to say, I don’t give a fuck what God thinks, but snatched the whiskey bottle from Suha instead and took a long pull.

  “God didn’t bring me back,” she said. “Yah Tayyib did. There’s a big difference.”

  They drove to the edge of the quarter. Suha got her a line to Anneke.

  “The fuck you up to out the fuck there?” Anneke said over the hissing, spitting line.

  “Need a favor,” Nyx said.

  “Ohhhhh fuck,” Anneke said.

  Nyx returned the rented bakkie and bought a new one—new to Nyx, anyway—from an orange vendor in the Mhorian district. They picked up some supplies. A table slide, enough food to last a week, some household goods she and Suha could convert to explosives, deadtech bugging devices, and homemade security traps.

  They started cleaning up the top floor of the abandoned warehouse. The corner storage room had easy access to two fire escapes. Nyx found more mattresses in a dump heap in the Heidian district that still smelled of cabbage. She splurged on new sheets, a short sword, and a full-sized scattergun that she immediately converted to a portable sawed-off.

  Then she sat at her worktable with Suha and started putting together explosives.

  She was due to pay a visit to Yah Tayyib.

  +

  It was a gorgeous day in Shirhazi. Clear lavender sky. The air didn’t smell like rotting shit—a nice change. Nyx figured the place could almost be pleasant if the wind kept up.

  The magicians’ gym downtown was typical of Tirhan. She swore some of the inlay was real gold. A swarm of locusts blackened the dome. The whole gym was surrounded in a filter, a filter that wouldn’t take kindly to a Nasheenian woman’s blood code.

  The power supply wasn’t hard to find. Tirhan was a soft country, drunk on love of itself, and the power station was just a little one-room checkpoint tower near the entrance where the magician in charge of feeding and directing the bugs kept the primary bug nest pumping out bugs with the right instructions.

  She walked right up to the guard tower, and said she had a delivery in her broken Chenjan. She haggled with the actual guard on duty for a couple of minutes while she planted the mine.

  Nyx kept hold of her package, and found a good, unguarded entrance on the other side of the building to wait.

  The mine going off was a small sound, a muted boom. Then the filter popped and blinked out. She walked right in. She thought of babies and candy, and that made her think of Mercia with her sweet stick, running through the streets of Mushtallah.

  Babies, indeed.

  She walked into a broad reception area and asked the woman in Tirhani if she spoke Nasheenian.

  The woman said she did. Nyx said she had a delivery for Yah Tayyib. Behind the reception desk, Nyx saw the most amazing thing—a big shimmery display board with the names of magicians on it. And the call patterns for their offices.

  Sweet fuck, Nyx thought. Yah Tayyib was on the third floor, room 435.

  The receptionist told her to leave the package.

  “I’m sorry,” Nyx said, “it’s from another magician. Yah Rhys. I was given explicit instructions to deliver this to Yah Tayyib. I’ll either need to drop it in his rooms, or you’ll need to call him out.”

  “I’m sorry—” the receptionist began, and then seemed distracted. There would be some kind of emergency call on her console by now. Somebody had probably sent a swarm as well. It wouldn’t take long to get the filter back up. She didn’t have much time.

  “Listen, I can see you’re busy,” Nyx said.

  The receptionist’s brows were knit.

  “You’re new here, aren’t you?” Nyx said.

  The receptionist raised her eyes, gave a guilty smile.

  “It’s no problem,” Nyx said. “I’ll just take this to 435, all right? Third floor. I’ve visited him before. Old friend, you know? Nasheenian.” She winked. It felt totally unconvincing.

  You’re going to get your ass thrown out, she thought.

  But there were more people coming in now. Nyx could see sweat on the woman’s brow. She was reaching for her transceiver. “All right. Just hurry down, please,” she said.

  Nyx headed left.

  “Mother?” the receptionist said.

  Nyx felt her heart squeeze. Dammit. Did she look that old?

  “The lifts are the other way,” the receptionist said pleasantly.

  “Of course. Yeah,” Nyx said. She went to the lifts, but walked right past and went up the stairs. She had never used a lift before, and didn’t like the look of them.

  The room was easy to find, but when she knocked, no one answered. It was locked, but not filtered. Odd. She supposed the filter outside kept out most folks. She checked the hall, then jimmied open the door with a couple of hijab pins. Old Chenjan trick. Easy to crack a place with low security.

  The door opened. She stepped into a dimly lit room and shut the door.

  She noticed the sound first, the low hum.

  “Fucking shit,” she said, and grabbed for the door again.

  A wasp swarm engulfed her. She shut her mouth and covered her ears.

  “Nyx?”

  The swarm abated. When she looked up, Yah Tayyib was standing in a doorway leading into another room.

  She looked around. Stone slab for a desk, some antique books, a couple of bugs in jars.

  “Seems kind of a shitty time to decide to kill me,” Nyx said. She spit out a wasp.

  “They wouldn’t have killed you,” Yah Tayyib said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Alharazad,” Nyx said.

  Yah Tayyib drew himself up a little straighter, sighed through his nose. “Yes,” he said. “Come in. Rhys has been looking for you.”

  He motioned her into the next room.

  “Rhys?”

  It was his operating theater. At the center was a great stone slab. The walls were lined in jars of organs. Flesh beetles squirmed around in the bowl of the sink at the head of the slab. There was a dead boy on the slab, his chest pinned open. The head was in a jar of solution sitting on a counter at the back. Roaches busied themselves at something in the boy’s chest cavity.

  “I’m interrupting?” Nyx said.

  “Always.”

  Nyx sat on a stool on the other side of the body. She watched Yah Tayyib as he began to work again.

  “You said Rhys was looking for me?”

  “He left a call pattern. It’s on my desk.”

  “Why’d you bring me back?” she said.

  “I thought you knew.”

  “I’m too tired for games, Tayyib.”

  “You and I have a mutual enemy,” he said.

  “Alharazad.”

  “Just so.” He picked up a scalpel and cut something out of the boy, some fleshy bit, and placed it in a jar of solution.

&
nbsp; “When did she turn?”

  “Decades ago, when the first of the aliens visited. She saw them as a threat to Nasheen. Their meddling with the world, she believed, would ruin everything we created here. It is the world that makes us unique, and it is the world that keeps us bound here. Ships don’t stay long on Nasheen. When they do, the bugs of our world eat out their innards and leave them stranded. Just as they did to those who first fell from the sky. She approached a good many of us with her concerns. She even tried hijacking a vessel herself with several of us using tailored swarms.” He waved his hand over the body, and four roaches crawled out. He pulled a handful of flesh beetles from the sink and drove them deep down into the boy’s guts.

  “You were working with the aliens, though,” Nyx said.

  “I’ve worked for many sides, when I believed one was working harder than the other for what I wanted.”

  “And what did you want?”

  “What you want. An end to the war.”

  “Shitty way of going about it.”

  “You think so?” Yah Tayyib washed his hands in the sink. “Alharazad has moved many of us around on her chessboard for decades. I no longer wanted to be moved. I acted on my own. Perhaps my judgment was misguided-”

  “Misguided?” Nyx said, “You wanted to teach Chenja how to breed monsters to kill our boys.”

  “No.” He dried his hands on his apron. “I wanted an end to the war. That would only happen if both sides had the ability to annihilate each other. I realize you have no love of history, but we have warred a good deal longer than any realize. Disagreements between our people go back to the days before the beginning of the world.”

  “There was nothing before that.”

  “There was the moons.”

  Nyx waved a hand. “Old stories. You can’t expect to believe anything that old.”

  “We bickered on those moons a thousand years while the magicians worked to make this world habitable. Yes, a good deal was lost, and much that remains is myth, but there are seeds of truth to every myth.”

  “So what stopped the war? Coming down here?”