Nyx shifted pedals as the road straightened out. They hit gravel, and a couple of roach nymphs wiggled free from the leak in the hose by her feet and flitted through the open windows.
They came over the top of a low rise, and Punjai spread before them like a jagged wound, a seething black groove torn out of the red wash of the veldt. Three years before, the front had been closer, and all of the minarets outside the Chenjan quarter of the city had been bombed. Truckloads of dead and dying men were still carted into the city during the worst of the skirmishes, but for the most part, magicians liked to patch up their charges at the front. The more men that got away from the front, the more likely it was that somebody would figure a way to smuggle them out—and the greater the danger they posed to the city if they were contaminated. Bel dame business was brisk in Punjai. Not that Nyx was licensed to do that type of thing.
But it didn’t keep her from thinking about it.
At the edges of the city, the desert stirred, set free by centuries of bug storms and heavy warfare. Bursts had seared the veldt and carved deep pockets into mud-brick ruins and heaps of rock the color of old blood. At the center of the city rose the old onion-shaped spirals of the remaining minarets, long since converted to more practical watchtowers equipped with long-range anti-burst weapons and scatterguns. The only minaret that still called the faithful to prayer in Punjai was a crumbling black spiral in the Chenjan quarter.
“Taite briefed you on the file?” Rhys asked as he buckled on his dueling pistols and shrugged into his black burnous.
Nyx watched him fiddle with the frogged tie at his collar.
“Yeah,” she said, “I looked over the file. Some Chenjan terrorists. Expected to be armed. Good boxers. I sparred with one of them in Aludra a couple of years ago.”
“I expected they’d be friends of yours,” Rhys said.
“I run with a lot of questionable characters,” Nyx said, giving him a sidelong look. “We’re stopping at the storefront. I need to off-load your body.”
“It’s Khos’s body. Is Anneke in?”
“She’s already posted. Less picky about where she spends morning prayer.” Anneke had been one of the easier additions to her crew, once Nyx made up her mind to cannibalize Raine’s team. All Anneke had wanted was a bigger gun.
“I hate this city,” Rhys said.
Nyx nodded at the radio tube jutting out of the dash. “Find something useful on. You have some sen?”
He obediently switched on the tube. It vomited a misty blue-green wash. A cacophony of low voices muttered at them. Local politics. Queen Ayyad had abdicated to her daughter Zaynab four months before, and the talking heads were still preoccupied with what that meant for relations between Nasheen and Ras Tieg. Nyx was more interested in what Zaynab’s policies would be regarding the capture of terrorists. Queens and bel dames did not, traditionally, get along, and the livelihood of mercenaries and bounty hunters didn’t even show up as a line item during the low council meetings. The queen got on best with her decadent group of high-council nobles—representatives from the richest houses in Nasheen, descendants of the First Families. It was a hazy kind of history, and Nyx didn’t remember half of it. Most of her schooling consisted of adding and subtracting bullets and calculating the trajectory of burst guns, interspersed with some theology from the Kitab and exaltations about the power of submission to God—dead words from some other dead world. Actual Umayman history was usually just a nod to how everything that ever went wrong on Umayma was the fault of the Chenjans.
Nyx changed the station. The air tingled, and the voices were briefly garbled, but then cleared up. More news: local gossip. Talk about the upcoming vote on whether or not half-breeds should be drafted. A couple of serious-sounding women discussed the arrival of a ship that had put down in Faleen. Where were all these antiquated wrecks coming from? Nyx thought. When was the last time I saw one?
When you went to prison, she remembered. She grimaced and turned the radio off. It was a night she didn’t like to dwell on. The mist receded. Sound faded to silence.
“You know I don’t poison myself with narcotics and pollutants,” Rhys said, and she realized he was talking about the sen.
Nyx hoped he’d start ranting about submission and God and pollutants.
She could use the diversion.
He rarely disappointed her these days.
“I only drink the blood of my enemies,” Nyx said, “and may be some whiskey and water. Beer with a little lime.”
Rhys snorted.
She considered selling him to a mardana, a brothel populated entirely by men. It was one of her more frequent fantasies.
The hunched black smudge of the city grew closer. Umber-clad women moved along the side of the road, balancing baskets on their heads. Girls herded giant spiders and a couple of dogs along the drainage ditches flanking the road. Some creepers in blue and gold carried baskets of beetles and grasshoppers in tiny wooden cages. Giant drooping nets hung over their lean shoulders.
They passed under the burst-scarred main gate and into Punjai.
Nyx parked outside their storefront, badly, and pushed into the reception area they called the keg. Before Nyx sold bounty services out of the storefront, she had sold kegs of beer to wedding parties and war veterans. Taite started calling it the keg the fourth time a drunken government clerk came looking for cheap booze in the middle of the night.
Taite, another crew member scalped from Raine, was working her com now. Upon her arrival, the skinny pock-faced kid ducked his head out of the gear room in the back and widened his eyes. He was a crackerjack with the com, but he still cringed in the face of her moods, and there were days she wished he had a straighter spine. He must have been in his early twenties now, but in her head he was still just the fourteen-year-old refugee of Raine’s with the Ras Tiegan accent.
“Khos?” he said hopefully.
“Khos,” she said.
“He’s already posted at the location.”
“Fucker,” Nyx said. “Let Rhys know if that fucker calls off. If he gets tangled up with his whores before this job, I’m going to tear up his contract.”
She went back out to get Rhys to help her with the body. The two of them hauled it down into the freezer under the gear room.
When they came back up, Taite was looking jittery. He usually only looked that way after he’d talked to his sister, another refugee half-breed. Nyx had seen her once, looking down at the bakkie from a dirty window when Nyx dropped Taite off. She was prettier than Taite, though just as fine-boned and frail. Neither of them had been inoculated, and they were allergic to everything.
“There’s a problem, Nyx,” Taite said.
“I hate problems.”
“Anneke says Raine’s there trying to pick up our bounty. Khos moved without your leave. She thinks Khos lost the bounty.”
“Shit,” Nyx growled. “Get in the fucking bakkie, Rhys.”
She and Raine had been netting each other’s prime catches for years, ever since she stole Taite and, later, Anneke from him. Taite was the only com tech she knew who could keep a line secure without resorting to venom addiction, but whoever Raine was using now consistently hacked Taite’s com. She had lost her last two bounties to Raine, and now the cockless fuck was pushing for another one.
“Keep your ear to the com. I’m headed there now,” Nyx said.
Nyx hit the juice on the bakkie and plowed through the narrow streets of Punjai. Rhys had the sense to strap himself in and hang on tight. She figured he knew better than to push her when she was pissed off, because he was quiet the whole time.
She drove out to the bounty’s residence, a brick one-level squeezed between three-storied apartment buildings with more modern tiled facades.
The door was already bashed open. Nyx saw scattered parrot feathers all over the street.
She jumped out of the bakkie and ran across the busy street, dodging cat-pulled carts and sinewy rickshaw drivers. She half-reached for her sword but pulled her pistol inst
ead. In close quarters, sword fighting got tricky. She pushed inside.
Lithe little Anneke crouched next to the crumpled body of a blue-eyed boy still covered in feathers and mucus. Anneke jerked her head and rifle up when Nyx came in but relaxed when she saw who it was.
Nyx saw a dead dog with two naked human legs sprawled near the broken lattice of the window.
“Where’s Khos?” she asked.
She heard a stir outside the window, and a big blond dog leapt inside. In dog form, Khos was only about as tall as her hip. The dog shook off the dust and started to shed dog hair all over the floor. Watching shifters change generally put Nyx off lunch, so she looked away as Khos shifted. When she looked again, he was wiping mucus off his immense naked body. Khos was a head and shoulders taller than she was, broad in the face and chest, and when he shook his head, the last of the dog hair purled out around him in a cloud, leaving him with a head of thick blond dreadlocks.
“What the fuck happened?” Nyx asked.
“Raine’s team moved for the—” Anneke began.
“I don’t give a fuck what Raine did. Which of you moved off point first?”
Anneke spit on the floor and looked over at Khos.
Nyx regarded him. A fine webbing of spidery blue tattoos—the same color as his eyes—wound around Khos’s pale limbs and torso. Some kind of Mhorian thing. He was still wiping mucus from his face. In a quarter hour, he was going to be starving for protein. Shifters were fucking expensive.
“They were going to sweep that bounty right out from under us,” he said. “I moved because—”
“And did you get a transmission from Rhys or Taite telling you I wanted you off point?” she said.
She heard somebody come in behind her and turned, pistol in hand. But it was only Rhys, the hood of his burnous drawn up, a cloud of red beetles circling his head.
“Taite says Raine and his crew are already headed toward the Cage. With the bounty,” Rhys said.
Nyx grimaced and looked at the body on the floor. “Can we get anything for this one?”
“Yeah, boss,” Anneke said, “but he isn’t worth so much as the others.”
“He’ll have to do. Somebody’s gotta feed Taite’s sister this month. Bundle him up.”
“Boss?” Anneke said.
“We’re taking him to the Cage,” Nyx said. “Any more questions or suggestions? I don’t run a democracy here. This isn’t some Mhorian brothel, you get that, Khos?”
He made a face and looked down at the body. She had another body to talk to him about, later.
Nyx holstered the pistol.
Khos sighed over the body and muttered, “God be merciful.”
“You’ll find I’m bloodier than He is,” Nyx said.
“I don’t doubt that,” Khos said.
“Prove it,” she said, and walked outside to get the trunk ready for the next body.
6
Nyx dropped Rhys off at the keg and then followed the old elevated train tracks uptown to the Cage. Khos rode shotgun, but it was Anneke who rode armed. She sat up in the bowl of the roof, her feet dangling over the trunk, a shotgun over one of her lean shoulders.
Punjai’s border security office and bounty reclamation center—aptly known as “the Cage” by those in the business—was in the heart of upper Punjai, on the other side of the city from the Chenjan district.
They pulled up outside the Cage. Raine’s bakkie was already there, along with half a dozen others belonging to rival hunters.
As she waited for Khos and Anneke to unload the body, Nyx looked across the parking lot to the other reclamation office. The bel dame collection center was a tall four-storied building with a façade of painted mud-brick and amber. The motto above the lintel of the main entrance was in the raised script of the old prayer language: My life for a thousand.
She remembered swearing an oath with that at its core: My life for yours, for ours, for Nasheen. My life for a thousand.
“Boss?” Anneke said.
Nyx looked back at them. Khos had the bundled body in his arms—the body of some dumb half-breed kid who’d run with the wrong crowd—but he’d keep them in bread for another day.
My life for a thousand.
She didn’t risk her life for all that much, these days.
Nyx reached into the bakkie and palmed some sen from her stash, then squared herself in front of the low building. Hunters were slipping in and out, gutter feed in tow. Little operations like those had to take in half a dozen terrorists a week to make a profit. She’d gotten out of the small time years ago. She wanted to stay out of it.
Nyx spit red, and led her team in.
Shajin was working behind the lattice of the front desk. She was a squat, serious woman with flinty eyes and a bad complexion. She sat gazing stonily at a new hunter who sounded like she was having trouble understanding the monetary restrictions on her catch.
Shajin, unimpressed, replied in her booming monotone, “Read the fine print. Says here you only get sixty if this particular catch is live. They preferred him dead and would have paid you a hundred for it. I’m not killing him for you, so you take him out back and shoot him or take your sixty. If there’s something you don’t understand about that, you need to go back to state school. Get your skinny ass away from my desk. Move.”
The hunter pulled out her pistol and then dragged her catch out the door.
Nyx stepped up. Shajin relaxed in her seat.
“And what do you want, my wandering woman?” Shajin asked.
“How’s business?” Nyx said.
“Poor. Full of men and self-righteous mercenary runts. They upset my digestion.” She patted the great swell of her stomach.
“I’ve got a poor piece for today, then.”
“File number?”
Nyx told her.
Shajin grimaced. “You’re in the dregs again, my woman.”
Shajin passed the file number on to one of the little desk clerks—a betel-nut-colored, boyish girl named Juon who had a sassy walk.
Nyx leaned over the desk so her nose nearly touched the latticework. “When are you coming home with me, Juon?”
Juon marched into the back.
Shajin grinned. “She’ll have none of you, my woman. She just got a letter from that boy of hers at the front.”
Nyx snorted. “Probably six months dead. The flies have him.”
Amid the low murmur of exchange and the occasional outburst from an irate hunter or wheedling bounty came a deep, familiar voice.
“So the huntress returns,” Raine said.
Nyx took half a moment to loosen up her suddenly rigid body. She turned and showed her crimson teeth.
Raine stood near the main door with three of his crew. On a good day, he had a dozen veterans and half as many irregulars.
She saw Raine around the Cage a lot and more around the local pubs, but—not being half a fool—he avoided her personally. He usually sent out his veterans to harass her. She had sent the last one back without an ear.
“I see you’ve gotten better at eavesdropping on our com,” Nyx said.
“Taite’s security is terrible,” Raine said. “I taught him everything I know.”
“Which must not have been much,” Nyx said.
“There is much more I could teach you, Nyxnissa, if you could set aside your arrogance.”
“You’re the one who thinks he’s some fucking prophet ’cause he had a shitty time at the front. I heard you got arrested during a protest in Sahlah. I’m surprised nobody’s put you in prison yet for blasphemy. Why hasn’t your mother gutted you, the way she did the council?”
“I know faith and belief are concepts you have a difficult time understanding, Nyxnissa, but some of us have an interest in righting wrongs, not perpetuating them.”
“I believe in myself. That’s enough.”
“For you? And your crew?”
“Why don’t you go off and get married and settle down like a good little war vet, huh? I’m sure you
could find some dumb bitch to put you up.”
“We’re a sorry pair of veterans, aren’t we? I think you have as much interest in becoming a kept thing as I do.”
“Hey, hunters!” Shajin said. “You take your personal business outside.”
“I’ve got a file,” Nyx said.
“I have mine,” Raine said. He clapped his hands. His three regulars headed for the door.
“Watch yourself,” Raine said. He put his back to her and walked out.
“Watch your regulars,” Nyx said. “I may find a use for them.”
She wasn’t the only one Raine was stirring the pot with these days. It wasn’t just the protests in small cities like Sahlah. Rhys had word of Raine at rallies in Mushtallah and boys’ rights gatherings in Amtullah. Those were bad places to be seen protesting anything that had to do with God or the queen or the bel dames. It was like he was presenting himself to a butcher and asking them to chop something else off. But he had taught her how to drive, how to use a sword, and how to patch a bakkie—this old man with the dead eyes and bizarre family history who couldn’t leave the war alone.
She supposed there must be something redeemable about him.
Khos spit on the floor next to Nyx.
“Those three were ours,” Anneke said. “Honest, boss, I had them.”
“Well, you don’t have them now, do you?” Nyx said, too sharply. She turned back to the desk.
Juon handed Shajin the file.
“Says here you get thirty for a live catch,” Shajin said, “and twenty fora dead. Too bad.” She filled out the pay receipt. “You know the routine.”
Nyx handed the receipt to Anneke, who followed Khos through the throng to the body drop-off and cashier.
Juon leaned over and whispered into Shajin’s ear.
“What’s that? Ah, yes. You have a note,” Shajin said.
Juon went to the sorting cabinet behind Shajin and plucked out a red letter.
Nyx’s heart skipped. The old bullet wound in her hip throbbed.
Red letters were straight from the desk of the queen. The queen only sent red letters to nobles, ambassadors… and bel dames.
Juon handed the letter to Shajin.
God's War Page 7