Infidel

by Kameron Hurley

  It was a small but clean room, two single beds and a low couch, tea table, and the balcony. Nyx went right to the windowed doors leading out onto the balcony and pulled the curtains.

  “Where’s Khos?” she asked.

  “With his wife. And the children.”

  “His other wife?”

  Inaya nodded. “It’s a long story. I came here to help you.”

  “Why?”

  “I have some information you might need.”

  “And you needed to bring it to me in person?”

  “Yes. It’s the sort of information I’m not supposed to have.”

  “This should be good.” Nyx sat on the edge of the bed.

  Inaya sat across from her on the divan. “I work for the Ras Tiegan underground.”

  “A spy? Khos said as much.”

  Inaya looked surprised. “Did he?”

  “Close enough. What do you know?”

  “I found out our embassy is paying a significant amount of money to a local magistrate in Beh Ayin.”

  “Not so strange. Bribe?”

  “Yes.”

  “She harboring your rebels?”

  “It’s a he. And no, I don’t think so. The Ras Tiegan government doesn’t support the rebels.”

  “Not officially.”

  “No. Not ever. They’re the same group arguing for shifter rights within the country. The government would never support them.”

  “You think—”

  “Ras Tieg would be very interested in whatever weapon your bel dames have to offer, and they couldn’t parley officially with bel dames without angering the Queen. If there are as many as we suspect, they’d be expensive to house and feed, and even more expensive to keep the local government quiet about them.”

  “You have an address?”

  “Better.”

  “Better?”

  “It’s nearly Offsday, by the Ras Tiegan calendar.”

  “What the fuck is that?”

  “It’s our prayer day.” Inaya smiled, and Nyx understood her then. She remembered this little woman picking up a shotgun after Khos tried to hustle her to safety back in Chenja. “I know where he goes to church.”

  +

  “How are we running this?” Rhys asked.

  “Clean and neat,” Nyx said. “Like always.”

  She felt better leaning over a schematic, even if the best they could find was a dodgy little portable slide with a ripple in the organic screen. They had spent three days scouting out the church, and now they were running out of time. If they didn’t move now, the bel dames would. After three days of scouting, they would know Nyx was coming. Nyx had what she needed to put something together, but the others still balked.

  “I have been party to the end result of most of your plans, Nyx,” Yah Tayyib said. “Perhaps we should try something a bit more realistic.”

  “There’s very little chance he knows we’re here,” Inaya said. “And he certainly wouldn’t think we’re coming for him.”

  “He won’t. They will,” Suha said from her post at the window. She spit sen on the floor.

  “I’m counting on that,” Nyx said.

  Inaya wrinkled her nose and handed her a cup.

  Suha snorted.

  “Are we just going to blow up half the country?” Rhys said. He sat on the divan in their room eating curried rice from a take-out container.

  “You have a subtler way, Rhys?” Nyx said. “You told me they’re close to a deal. We don’t move now and we may not get another chance.”

  “Fool’s errands,” Yah Tayyib said.

  “You got a better idea?” Nyx said.

  “I don’t like shifting,” Inaya said. “Too much of this plan relies on that.”

  “I don’t like dying,” Nyx said. “Sometimes we do shit we don’t like.”

  “It’s a big building,” Eshe said. “If we had a week or two more to scout it out—”

  “We don’t,” Nyx said.

  “I say we just snipe the fucker and see who claims the body,” Suha said. “That’s clean and neat.”

  “Listen. He eats and sleeps and probably fucks in this church,” Nyx said. “And if we snipe him and leave him they’ll likely burn him inside it. It won’t draw them out. Only we can do that. Every day but prayer day, the place is a fucking fortress. We got one day. Tomorrow. Or we wait another nine days until it comes around again. We want to risk nine days? Anybody?” Nyx looked around at them all in turn.

  No answer. Blank faces.

  “We want to move,” Nyx said, “we move first. That train took out the tracks. It’s going to be days before anybody else comes into town. Or goes out of it.” She glanced at Inaya, realized she hadn’t bothered asking her how Inaya had gotten in without a train. She could do that, and a lot more, of course. Which was why they needed her for this. “They won’t be looking for or expecting visitors. We got lucky. They could have had a woman at the station waiting for us. Instead, we came around the back. We’re low and quiet now. We have the edge. It’s a slim edge, but an edge, and we won’t have it much longer.”

  “Let’s do it,” Eshe said.

  Suha threw up her hands. “I’m up half the night on gear grab and then you got me on a bug hunt? Shit, Nyx.”

  “You sleep in the morning before your hunt,” Nyx said.

  Yah Tayyib rubbed at his temples. “I find it difficult to believe I am going along with one of your schemes.”

  “Oh, come on, you’ve been wanting to fuck up all those big, bad bel dames a long time,” Nyx said.

  “I will not deny that.”

  “Let’s go, then.” Nyx slid the schematic closed.

  Suha gestured to Eshe, and the two slipped out to start pulling together gear. Nyx was on munitions duty, but that would wait until they had the raw materials.

  “I will retire for the night,” Yah Tayyib said.

  Inaya stayed to speak with Rhys for a time. Nyx drew out some simple explosive designs on the slide while they talked. It’d been a while since she put anything custom together like this, but even the simplest stuff could be effective. Especially when nobody was expecting it.

  She poured herself a finger’s length of whiskey. They may have been out of guns and ammo, but Eshe never failed to find some bootleg whiskey at every town they visited. Some days Nyx wondered if it was why she’d hired him in the first place.

  When she looked up, Inaya was closing the door, leaving her alone with Rhys.

  She got back to the whiskey.

  He stood. “I’m not a great sniper,” he said.

  “I know.” She raised her head. He had cleaned up some, and looked human again. “But they don’t. They’ll think that’s where I put you on purpose.”

  He turned toward the door. Paused. “Why did you agree to take this note?” he asked.

  “Just wanted to do it.”

  “You just got it into your head to go after rogue bel dames?”

  “So full of questions. Little late for that, you think?”

  “No,” he said. He sat across from her. Put his big ugly hands flat on the table, just like a polite Nasheenian. Some habits were hard to break, she supposed. “Eshe said you talked to the bel dame council.”

  “You two getting on real well, then, you and Eshe?”

  “Look at me.”

  “Fuck you,” Nyx said. “I’m not some fucking Chenjan harem girl. You want to issue commands like I’m some dog, I’ll cut your goddamn hands off again.” She finished the whiskey in the glass. It burned.

  He sat back. Pulled his hands off the table.

  “I forget, sometimes.”

  “That I’m not a dog?”

  She chanced a look up now, careful. She was always curious about what she’d see on his face. Always half-hoping he would look at her with something other than contempt and disgust. But his face was oddly taciturn now, resigned.

  “I forget you’re Nasheenian,” he said.

  “Your mistake,” she said. Angry, again. Wh
y was it that’s all she could say to him, ever? Angry, bitter words to a man who had followed her through hell for six years.

  “Yes.”

  They sat in silence for a while. Nyx figured he was trying to wait her out. Two could play that. And she was better at it.

  “What did they promise you, I wonder?” Rhys said. “What could they give you that would possibly bring you out all this way?”

  Nyx tapped her finger on the slide, chose a different trigger.

  “The Queen couldn’t make you a bel dame again, but the bel dame council can, can’t they? If you do them a large favor. Hunt down their rogues.”

  She stopped her tapping.

  “Don’t lie,” he said. “You bring them the rogues and they make you a bel dame, right? That’s it, then.” He let out a long breath. “We are so stupid. My God, you’re not doing this for Nasheen at all. Not for your brothers or any dead boys or that squad you burned yourself up for. You’re giving it all up. All of us up. To be a bel dame again. A government-sponsored murderer.”

  “Being a bel dame is an honorable thing,” Nyx said. She tossed the slide onto the table, met his look. His face was hard and bitter, like the flat silty beach surrounding the inland sea. “Isn’t that what you’re always going on about, how I’m so dishonorable?”

  “Ah, of course. Because what those bel dames did to my family was quite honorable.”

  “Those are rogues, not real bel dames.”

  “You did worse to other families when you were a bel dame.”

  “I never—”

  “I know what bel dames do, Nyx. Wrap it up with pretty words like honor and sacrifice and it’s still just hunting and killing children.” Rhys shook his head. “I should have listened to Khos.”

  “I’ve never lied to you about what I do.”

  “Catshit.”

  “You’ve gotten a dirty mouth since we got on that train.”

  “It is catshit, Nyx. You lie all the time.”

  “I got lots of reason to do what I do. Just ’cause I don’t tell you all of them doesn’t mean I’m a liar.”

  “So the bel dames did send you.”

  “You know,” Nyx said, “I thought fucking would loosen you up a little. But you just act more and more like a cat in heat—rubbing your ass up against everything until it gives.”

  “You didn’t get anything from that transmission you couldn’t have figured out on your own in the local gyms,” he said.

  “What happened to your family wasn’t my fault. Rasheeda would have found you regardless. You were the one who shot her.”

  “To save your life.”

  Nyx rubbed her face. The air around them was cool, but humid. She listened to the chittering bugs beyond the filter. Her skin prickled. She searched for some way around what he had said, found some words, half believed them:

  “You were saving your own ass,” she said. Even to her ears, it sounded lame.

  “Why would I save myself, Nyx? Do you know what my father called me when I… he called me infidel. When I refused…” He hesitated.

  “Refused what?” she said, low.

  “I didn’t get exiled for protecting a relative,” he said. “I got exiled because I refused to go to the front.”

  Nyx sat back in her seat. It was a little like being punched. “What are you talking about?”

  “God called me to the front. Like he called you. And your brothers. And every Chenjan man but the first born.”

  “You were first born—”

  “My father insisted I go.”

  “But disobeying your father, that’s—”

  “Disobeying God, yes.”

  “And… Wait. Hold on. You? But you’re… you’re…”

  “That’s what he called me. Does it make it so? I don’t know. But every day I spent in Nasheen I wondered if I would have the chance to make it right, somehow. I knew I didn’t deserve this life, even before Rasheeda took it.”

  Nyx shook her head. She heard the midnight call to prayer roll out over the city for the Chenjans and Nasheenians. Tirhanis didn’t have a midnight prayer. It sounded soft and low, muted. A flicker of a call, a whisper, then stillness. Those waiting for it would hear it. To the rest, it was just the background noise of a frontier city at the edge of the world.

  Rhys stood. “I should go.”

  “Yeah,” Nyx said. For a long moment, they faced one another across the table. Time stretched. She wanted to offer him a drink, but was afraid he would take it. She felt her heart beat just a little faster. Infidels did all sorts of… Oh, fucking stop it, she thought. This is Rhys. But then why was he still looking at her?

  “Good night,” he said.

  “Yeah, go,” Nyx said. “No, wait.”

  “Yes?” His gaze was comforting, still, even after all the blazing, angry words and blood.

  “If I wasn’t…” She stopped. Started over. “If I was something else… Not a monster. If I could be… something else…” She huffed in a long breath. “If I wasn’t… what I am…”

  Something softened in his face. Big, dark eyes, the ones she had wanted to look at her forever. The beautiful but unskilled magician she had hired and kept safe in Nasheen, only to smash apart his life when he no longer needed her.

  “If you weren’t what you are, and I wasn’t what I am, we’d both be dead,” Rhys said. “And we would have nothing to speak of.”

  “The good ones all die at the front,” Nyx said.

  “Yes. They submit to God. And they die for it. But after, they find a place at the feet of God in paradise. I suspect my wife and children will find that place also, but not me. Not after all I’ve done.”

  “I don’t believe in God, Rhys. When I died… everything just stopped. There was no hell. No God. Just… nothing.”

  Rhys shrugged. “Perhaps this is your hell then.”

  “I don’t want to be a monster anymore.”

  “I can’t help you with that, Nyx. That’s something you have to work out on your own.”

  “I was always better with you around,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “You are much worse.”

  He left her. When the door closed, she had trouble finding her seat. Her hands trembled. She poured herself another drink. Felt hollow, adrift.

  Being a bel dame had made her strong, honorable, powerful. Without it, she was nothing, wasn’t she? Just some monstrous bloodletter. A murderer.

  She didn’t know how to be anything else.

  39.

  When the great red stone Ras Tiegan church at the center of Beh Ayin was converted to a mosque, the remaining Ras Tiegans who did not convert to the Tirhani faith moved into the original stone church built along the edge of the filter back when Beh Ayin was a true colony. It was a squat little building with a standard ambulatory and radiating chapel on the east end, probably about a hundred feet from base to blue tiled roof, best Nyx could guess. She knew the parts and pieces only because the Ras Tiegan districts in Nasheen were generally dirty and poor enough that she frequented them. She’d killed some people in Ras Tiegan churches, and found the standard structure pretty useful for planning assassinations.

  The bell tower sounded just as she and Inaya crunched up the gravel walk onto the church grounds. Eshe was perched on a mossy standing-stone property marker nearby at the edge of the old graveyard. Like most folks on Umayma, it had taken the Ras Tiegans a while to figure out that burying their dead was a bad idea. The tumble of headstones and broken, X-shaped markers in the yard made it clear nothing had been buried in the contaminated dirt for several centuries.

  A few pale Ras Tiegans stood at the entrance to the church, greeting patrons as they arrived. It was still a little early in the day for Nyx, and she was nursing a slight hangover.

  “How much did you drink last night?”

  “Not enough.”

  As they approached, Nyx saw that everybody entering the church was pale as piss. The women wore standard Tirhani abayas and headscarves, but there we
re no multiple wives here.

  “Welcome, child,” one of the robed clerics—priests, Nyx amended—said in Tirhani as they walked up the broad stone steps. He held out his hands to Inaya.

  She took them both in hers and bowed her head. “God bless,” she said.

  “And God bless you. You are a visitor to Beh Ayin?”

  “My mistress permitted me to come and worship during our stay.”

  Nyx didn’t trust her Tirhani enough to say anything, which was probably best. She could follow along well enough to pass. “Indeed,” the priest said, and looked at Nyx. “All are welcome here, even unbelievers. Please let us know if you have questions about the faith. We encourage all God’s children to seek the True Path.” He looked Nyx over again. “She will need to cover her hair, however.”

  Nyx was already looking past him, into the nave. She wore long trousers, and had buttoned up the collar of her coat to hide the rusty scar on her neck. “I need to check my weapons?” she asked, in Nasheenian.

  Inaya began to translate

  The priest raised a brow. “Oh, I know Nasheenian,” he said. He switched to it and said, “We have seen a few of your kind come through over the years.”

  “Not for a good long time, I expect,” Nyx said.

  His eyes narrowed, and she wondered if she’d fucked it.

  But his expression cleared, and he smiled thinly. “No, not for some time. We are, indeed, at the edge of everything. But yes, we would appreciate it if you checked your weapons. The hair, first, however.”

  He walked inside and returned with a long scarf. Nyx wound it around her head.

  Satisfied, the priest said, “This way, please.”

  He took her inside to a small alcove while Inaya engaged the other priest. Nyx glanced over her shoulder and saw Eshe fly in through the unchecked door. He went straight into the rafters above the doorway and settled in the darkness.

  Nyx checked her scattergun. She pulled out the short knife at her hip, but the priest merely smiled and waved his hand. “No need,” he said. “Personal tools are allowed.”

  Nyx nodded. People who thought you couldn’t do much with a little knife deserved whatever was coming to them.

  Inaya met her in the nave. Men sat on the left side of the church, women and children on the right. Nyx hadn’t expected that. She needed to be on the left.